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high-reward career of airborne book piracy, precise planning is not the asset many think; the very nature of the world after the Time Crash makes timing fluid at best and physics a matter of debate. Rather, flexibility is paramount, the capacity to keep wits intact and paradigm-shifters ready for the inevitable moment when one's plan goes awry. Unfortunately, flexible thinking can create problems just as easily as it can escape them, which is how we ended up grappled to a ship that had just caught fire.\n\nThe trap should have been obvious. The capture of the airship Little Free Library was the most massive blow struck by the Reich Eternal since they burned the Elder Library; an entire ship dedicated to spreading the written word, taken out of the air by soldiers dedicated to its destruction. Not only that, I and the rest of the Logophile's crew were superstars of the Luftwaffe bounty rolls. Beth, our resident wizard, dared to be successful while Jewish; Ambrose, the undead dragon skull in the hold, lived on the very books the Literary Hygiene Division sought to purge; and the Nazis knew me as the Book Golem, the monster who refused to burn down with his library, a stone monster in a blurry video, decimating an LGA flamethrower team. The Nazis had been stamping out our legend everywhere we went, going so far as to bulldoze an entire print shop just because they printed a newspaper with us in it.\n\nThat the Nazis would go to great lengths to defend their prize was a given; that we were expected was a foregone conclusion; but we failed to consider book-burners would escalate to burning a whole ship just to catch us in the flames. And yet, within a few minutes of our grapple-lines dragging the Library out of their air fortress, when it was far too late to cut it loose, the Library ignited, with a whoosh of combusting air I could hear from belowdecks. I stopped setting up for my penmanship practice, my stomach sinking as I realized our flawless, daring rescue was to be far more of the latter than the former.\n\nBeth, ever the frontline leader, insisted she would handle the problem.; She accelerated, shouting the sea-shanties that powered the Logophile's engines, trying to combine escape and extinguishing by letting the wind douse the flames. But the wind only fed the conflagration, and with Ambrose's panicked shrieks of \"Save the books!\" commandeering our radios, I put aside my pencil\u2013\u2013why waste our scant paper when my cursive wasn't coming along anyway?\u2013\u2013and ran abovedecks, where Beth and I found ourselves clipping onto the grapple-lines and plunging toward the deck of the Library below, looting bags in hand.\n\nAs I slid down the cables toward a ship engulfed in brilliant emerald flames, the heat conjuring images of the Elder Library, I was sure I had reached the apex of my capacity for fear. But even my old trauma did not prepare me for what awaited us belowdecks. Everything about the Little Free Library, from the overstuffed chairs to the polish on the bookshelves, was dedicated to the love of books, and by the time I was seeing it, it was already beyond hope.\n\n\"Can you save the books?\" Ambrose shouted over the radio. The trouble with Ambrose is that the line between \"books for everybody\" and \"the hoard he needs to survive\" is malleable at best.\n\nBeth looked at our two simple oilskin bags and into one of the dozen cabins, every shelf laden with books. The grim set of her jaw said all that needed to be said.\n\n\"Cap,\" I grunted. When I had her attention, I signed \"I'll take the ones already on fire.\" Sign language worked far better than speech\u2013\u2013a mouth of clay leaves something to be desired when paired with a brain of sacred geometry.\n\nBeth pointed me to the most consumed of the cabins, produced a sphere of sapphire from her coat, and recited the opening verse to \"Hallelujah.\" The crystal glowed as her paradigm shifted to accommodate its workings.\n\n\"Stay cool, brother mine,\" she said as the crystal shielded her in glittering ice.\n\nThe flames didn't affect my body, but that didn't make them any less damaging; the first books I saw upon entering were already on their way to ashes. At first I grabbed any tome that remained unscathed, but before I even left the first room my bag was starting to bulge. I charged through the next door and stood, paralyzed, as I tried to decide which books most needed to be brought back to safety.\n\nBefore I took up piracy, my purpose was to guard the Elder Library at New Cambridge; I was quite literally built to believe in the inherent value of the book. I would not judge a copy of Superfudge any less worthy than Moby Dick, and neither would triumph over a Sedaris essay; every story is the key to a long-locked door for someone. So to pass wall after wall of books, weighing them not only by psychic impact but by mass and dimensions, was to take an entrenching tool to my soul. But listening to the roaring fire, thinking of my first home, I knew this was my burden to bear. I dove into the flames, and I saved what I could; and as my reward, my radio gave me news I didn't want to hear.\n\n\"Hello?\" asked a deep, feminine-sounding voice.\n\nI hesitated to respond, given my difficulties with speech.\n\nBeth took up the cause for me. \"This is Captain Beth Kaplan of the Logophile. Who is this?\"\n\nThe speaker responded with thanks to God in the language of my youth. \"This is Captain Sayyida al-Hurra of the Little Free Library. We're in danger.\"\n\n\"We're onboard your ship,\" Beth said. \"Have you been taken prisoner?\" In her voice I heard the same shameful hope I felt: that we might continue our plunder before devoting time to a rescue.\n\n\"We're in the hold!\" the woman cried. \"Please, the hatch is stuck\u2013\u2013we\u2013\u2013\" The punctuation to her plea was the crack of collapsing timber.\n\nI didn't need to see Beth to know her mind. We'd discussed this scenario many times; saving books was our calling, but books didn't matter if no people were around to read them.\n\n\"We're coming to get you,\" Beth said.\n\nAll around me I could hear the books burning, pages curling under the onslaught of the heat. Still, I met Beth in the passageway, and found us a ladder. Beth darted down and ran ahead of me, gasping words of reassurance into the radio when she had breath to spare.\n\nWe found the hold by following the black snakes of smoke curling along the orlop deck. The hatch was pinned in place by a stack of flaming timbers from the collapsed ceiling above, the epicenter of a spreading blaze. Beth kept me from charging forward while she whispered part of \"Wichita Vortex Sutra.\" As she spoke, the ice crystals surrounding her shot into the heart of the fire. The ice struggled at first, but a few more snatches of Ginsberg and the ice's paradigm won out over the fire's, leaving only a patch of scorched wood.\n\n\"You can come out now,\" Beth called as she opened the hatch.\n\nTwo people took tentative steps into our field of vision. One was human, feminine, a sunburnt face beneath a red silk hijab; the other looked feminine by human standards but was as much piscine as primate, with glittering silver skin and gills fluttering at their neck, dressed in a long blue tunic and a mantle that looked like an entire dire wolf hide. Both looked at us with understandable suspicion.\n\n\"Captain al-Hurra?\" Beth asked, saluting. \"Captain Kaplan. Call me Beth. She/her/hers.\"\n\nThe one in the hijab returned the salute with stiff, stilted movements. \"Sayyida. She/her/hers. This is\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"Sigrunn,\" the fish-person said, still uncertain. \"Same.\"\n\nBeth turned to me. \"And this is\u2013\u2013\"\n\nThere was a snap overhead, and the colossal whoosh of another flaming timber falling from above. I lunged forward and caught the beam before it could plunge through the hatch; Sayyida looked at me in amazement and gratitude, and I answered back with a smile.\n\n\"Cragg,\" Beth said. \"He/him/his.\"\n\nBeth beckoned them upward, watching the ceiling with great concern. Sayyida only made the ascent with help from Sigrunn.\n\n\"You're wounded,\" Beth said.\n\nSayyida flinched, ashamed. \"I am so sorry,\" she said. \"When the fascists captured us, we saw them start to bring the chemicals onboard\u2013\u2013we'd heard the stories, tried to\u2013\u2013\" Sayyida cut off with a hiss of pain.\n\nSigrunn spoke over the gap in the apology. \"We tried to fight. They cut Sayyida, took her hostage while they loaded in their Greek fire.\"\n\nBeth scowled. \"We'll do the best we can to save\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"Friends?\" said Ambrose over the radio, urgency galvanizing his words. \"We're about to be boarded!\"\n\nWe all buckled inside at the news. Beth gave me a bleak look as she answered. \"Sitrep, please.\"\n\n\"I have one Reich frigate inbound. They're carrying Untotsoldaten, but...I cannot tell how many. Let me see\u2013\u2013a frigate\u2013\u2013there could be as many as four hundred\u2013\u2013\"\n\nIf before we buckled, under this news we broke. Untotsoldaten, the Reich Eternal's jetpack zombies: quick, unfeeling, relentless. And as many as four hundred?\n\nBeth closed her eyes, lips moving in rapid-fire whispers as she tried to formulate a plan. Sayyida looked at Sigrunn, both despairing. I nudged Beth, and signed \"reassurance\" to her.\n\n\"We won't leave you behind,\" Beth declared to the two Library crew members. \"Everyone lives. Except Nazis.\"\n\nBurning wood popped somewhere above us, as if in defiance of Beth's resolve. Sayyida looked at Sigrunn; something passed between them that left Sayyida nodding insistently and Sigrunn shaking her head.\n\n\"Sayyida, no\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"I'm already too wounded to stand and fight, Sigrunn,\" Sayyida said. \"Plus, I have the better sense of self-preservation.\" She turned away as though the argument were settled. \"Captain Kaplan, I am going to stay behind. I want to do something rash.\"\n\nBeth smirked. \"Does this rash undertaking have the potential to ruin some Nazis' days?\"\n\n\"If it works,\" Sayyida replied with a similar expression.\n\nBeth nodded, and to my fright, unclipped the carabiner from her belt and handed it to Sigrunn. \"Rashness is easier with two pairs of hands.\"\n\nBefore I could ask a question, Beth turned and wrapped me in a tight hug. Her voice did not waver as she told me, \"Take care of the ship, brother. I'll be back soon.\"\n\nBehind us, Sayyida and Sigrunn shared a long, desperate kiss. Sigrunn was slow to let go of her captain, but Sayyida was patient, whispering reassurances and wiping away tears until she detached.\n\n\"I'm so angry at you,\" Sigrunn said.\n\n\"I love you, too,\" Sayyida replied.\n\nWe split up on the spot, Sayyida directing Beth toward the engine room, explaining her plan in wrathful tones.\n\n\"Do you ever feel like your captain's sidekick?\" Sigrunn asked me as we made our ascent.\n\nI was embarrassed at how I had to respond. \"Words...bad. Mouth...clay.\"\n\nWe climbed up onto the deck, Sigrunn in the lead. She craned her neck to gaze past the Library's masts, glowering at what she saw. \"Doesn't look like talking is the order of the day anyway.\"\n\nThe Reich frigate hovered in the air above us, a sleek, sharp thing made of pitch-black wood, throbbing with the sickly green light of the necromantic runes that kept it aloft. Leaping overboard and heading for the Logophile were scores of dark figures in brown uniforms, each one's path traced by a chemical blue blaze from the jetpack that bore them through the air.\n\nMy radio clicked to life\u2013\u2013Ambrose, declaring in a fragile calm, \"We're boarded. I'm guarding the deck with all the ectoplasm I can muster, but these abominations will overrun my defenses with great alacrity.\"\n\nSigrunn turned to me. \"Does your ship have any other defenses?\"\n\n\"Me,\" I said.\n\nSigrunn grinned, and said something melodious in a language that sounded like Old Norse. A sword appeared in her outstretched hand, a long, gray blade in the Viking style, lightning crackling along its edges.\n\n\"And me,\" she said, and clipped herself to one of the grapple-lines.\n\nI followed suit, and we ascended, the lines jiggling under our weight, the looting bag swaying heavily in my hand. I watched the Untotsoldaten leaping onto our ship, sabers at the ready, and felt rage boiling into my extremities.\n\n\"Shield...ship,\" I said to Sigrunn. \"Bring...here.\"\n\n\"I was thinking the same thing,\" declared Sigrunn, who brandished her sword and shouted what sounded like a prayer to Odin.\n\nIt had the desired effect; several zombies swung their decaying heads toward us and did an about-face, their hunger for the living overriding their master's commands. I clasped the line hard with my thighs and made my free hand into a fist as the jetpack zombies jetted toward us.\n\nUntotsoldaten are strong, enduring, and without mercy. But they are also incapable of more than the most basic, bloodlust-tinged thoughts; so when they tried to join us in combat, the first two broke their swords uselessly against my stone skin, only for their faces to meet my unrelenting stone fist. Black helmets tumbled down, followed by the rest of the now-inert corpses.\n\nNext to me, Sigrunn kept climbing, chanting her Old Norse paradigm-shifter, swinging her sword in great arcs that brought with them gale-force winds. Zombies scattered before her onslaught, spinning out of control in the tempest, and those that managed to engage her found a spirited combatant; limbs and helms sloughed off around her like waves breaking against a ship.\n\nSixty feet of open air remained between us and the Logophile; we ascended as fast as we could under the assault. Fifty-five feet from the deck, Sigrunn stopped to duel two zombies. At fifty feet, I dispatched one with an uppercut, another with a headbutt. At forty-five feet, one produced a pistol with enough paradigm to fire; I shielded Sigrunn from the bullets, and she summoned a biting wind that sent the monster skidding away. And all around us, zombies rained down from the Logophile, their jetpacks stripped away by Ambrose's powers. I felt exultant, alive, grateful for this new companion and this chance to bloody the Reich's nose, some small recompense for the books already destroyed.\n\nMy life has often turned on ironies.\n\nWe were halfway to the ship. I struck the latest zombie a glancing blow; it gripped my throat, smashing its saber against my shoulder, cracking and denting me even as it ruined its weapon. I gripped it with my free hand, and unthinking, gleeful at victory, I clouted the zombie across the head with my looting bag. The creature fell away from my grasp, and the tip of its saber came up with inexorable speed and dug deep into the bottom of my bag, ripping the oilskin wide open.\n\nBooks tumbled free of the bag, dropping out of reach before I could react: two, three, four of them, all lost to the sky. I lashed out an elbow to drive the zombie back, and squeezed the bag tight in both hands, clutching the remaining books to my chest. Sigrunn saw me defenseless and summoned another gale, sending the zombie spiraling away. Losing books again stung, but another peril loomed larger: the bag required two hands now. I had no way to climb, fight, and keep the books safe.\n\nI looked at the zombies swarming down at us, trying to think of a way to get a moment's respite, just a moment. I hit upon a plan, but enacting it would require...\n\n\"Fish!\" I yelled, already mortified.\n\nSigrunn glared at me.\n\n\"Ray...dee...talk box!\" I was grateful I could not blush.\n\nSigrunn, scribes be praised, understood. She reached out and pressed Send on my radio.\n\n\"Skull!\" I yelled at the device. \"Skull!\"\n\n\"Cragg!\" replied Ambrose. \"I'm here!\"\n\n\"Dan-ger!\" I shouted. \"Dan-ger! Need...dis...dis...\" I scowled.\n\nSigrunn gave me an apologetic frown, and pulled the radio closer to her. \"We need a distraction!\"\n\n\"Who is this?\" demanded Ambrose.\n\n\"Now!\" replied Sigrunn.\n\nAmbrose did not respond verbally; but after a moment, there came an unearthly wail from above us, and a wave of ghastly, green, ragged sheets of paper lashed out from the deck of the Logophile, cascading into the side of the black frigate. Ambrose's spectral assault dissipated against the runes warding the enemy ship, but it was enough to make a plurality of the zombies turn their attention to matters higher up than us.\n\nTwo stray zombies still scudded toward our position. I held onto my prize and the rope, letting Sigrunn take the initiative while I tried to solve our problem. There were too many books to carry by hand; the bag was too full and too damaged to tie off the bottom. The grapple-lines were already igniting below us, so simply hanging here and weathering the attack would be impossible even if the Logophile were not in danger. The zombies' jetpacks ran off who-knew-what paradigm, rendering them as useful as lead weights. The Elder Library flashed into my mind, its books disintegrating, my creators screaming...not again, no, not again...\n\n\"There's too many!\" Ambrose broadcast. \"I do not know how long I can hold them!\"\n\nAn idea took shape in my head and was banished three separate times before I let it gain purchase. I looked at the books I was clutching and took stock.\n\nAgain, the pain of trying to rank the value of books. But Ambrose was fifty feet above us, besieged; and Beth was below, risking life and limb on the plan of a total stranger. How could I do anything less?\n\nFate chose that moment to pile more straw atop our backs. Sigrunn swung into me, pushing off me to lunge out and skewer an oncoming zombie. She pendulumed back toward me, beheaded another rocketing in from port\u2013\u2013and as she recovered, a third zombie came in from above and caught her a vicious slash across her off-hand side. Blood streamed from the wound, and the moment of pain slowed Sigrunn's counterattack, allowing the creature to follow through with a left hook that stunned the fishwoman enough to send her skidding back down the grapple-line.\n\nThought and strategy gave way to haste. I struck the zombie a haymaker blow that sent its skull flying\u2013\u2013joined by two of the books. I let myself fall, my body pivoting about the point where my thighs clenched the line, and stretched my hand out to the falling Sigrunn. She caught my wrist, then gasped in horror as books came avalanching out of the torn bag; she reached out her sword hand to lend support, but by the time we had the bag stable, we were supporting all of a half-dozen volumes.\n\nWe hung there, spinning in space, me upside-down, Sigrunn hanging from one hand, the gashed bag of books from the other. I looked at Sigrunn, dangling a lethal distance above the burning Library; I looked at the books, the only survivors of that inferno, barely held in place by our two hands. Even if I did not have to help her, even if her wound did not diminish her mobility, I needed to turn myself right side up again...\n\n\"Need...grab...rope,\" I said.\n\nSigrunn's eyes were wild. \"If we don't save the books, they'll have taken everything from us.\"\n\nI hated myself as I answered. \"You...first.\" I closed my eyes, a moment of quiet before I had to say it. \"Will...take...one.\"\n\nSigrunn's black eyes bulged, but she set her lip and nodded.\n\nI looked inside the bag, at what remained of our ill-fated haul. We had a collection of horror stories by an award-winning author. We had a signed first edition of a seminal mystery novel. We had an atlas of Europe circa World War IV, a kraken-skin journal with a scant few entries, and a Congolese classic so old the binding had been replaced with everseal tape. I looked at each of them, mind spinning at the words I would never read. With my stomach in my throat, I made my choice.\n\nI brought the bag closer to my mouth and bit down as hard as I could manage on the kraken-skin journal. I shook my head, making sure a quick worrying did not loosen the book from my mouth. And then we let the rest fall.\n\nThey plummeted like stones. Their pages ripped free in the wind; their bindings collapsed as they lost their insides; their lavish covers flipped end over end, back toward the very place we'd tried to rescue them from. I closed my eyes, and I said goodbye.\n\nHer sword hand freed, Sigrunn gripped the line below me. I helped her climb up closer to me and wrapped my arm around her waist, supporting her weight in lieu of her damaged abdominal muscles. She smiled, grim but thankful, and brandished her sword.\n\n\"You climb. I'll kill.\"\n\nWe were a terror. The Nazis besieged us as we ascended those last thirty feet, but the pain of loss and the need to salvage victory proved more powerful than any necromancy. Sigrunn summoned wind and swung steel, scattering zombie parts in a gory hailstorm, while I climbed as promised, keeping my teeth bit deep into the journal. When we grabbed onto the rail of the Logophile, one zombie had the temerity to swing his saber at me, catching me a vicious dent across my wrist; I made sure Sigrunn had a tight grip on the rail, caught the zombie about the throat, and smashed him against the hull until his body went limp.\n\nAnd then we were climbing over the side, and I felt solid wood under my feet, and looked up to see two dozen zombies engaged in battle with the animated contents of our upper holds, desperately parrying and riposting against sacks and barrels and ropes.\n\nI grinned around the book, and made ready to do battle. But before we could raise our fists, there came a great, metallic screech from below us\u2013\u2013and the Little Free Library, so burned I could see clear through its hull, shot past us at full speed, careening like a cannonball straight into the underbelly of the Nazi frigate.\n\nThe frigate's hull shattered, the runes etched there winking out like a snuffed candle. The ship lost its eldritch buoyancy and plunged out of sight, trailing embers; the Library fared not much better, the aft falling away to join the Nazi craft, the fore spearing up toward the stratosphere before it, too, succumbed to inertia.\n\nOut of the smoke and chaos, gleaming in the emerald firelight, shot a familiar silver-feathered owl, which flew unerringly toward the Logophile's bowsprit before transforming into a gleaming grappling hook. And behind it, trailing on the end of a retracting line, came the flying forms of Sayyida and Beth, soot-streaked and flecked with burns, but alive.\n\nThe zombies collapsed, the frigate's shifters no longer around to power them. Beth and Sayyida landed sprawling on the deck, laughing and screaming obscenities at the fallen Nazis. But then Sayyida stood with haste, elation decayed to fear at the sight of Sigrunn's wound.\n\n\"Do not say a single thing about irony,\" Sigrunn warned her.\n\nSayyida answered with a laugh, a kiss, and grateful whispers I did them the courtesy of ignoring.\n\n\"Ambrose,\" Beth said as she rose. \"Our guests need medical assistance.\"\n\n\"It will be my utmost pleasure, Captain,\" Ambrose said, his ethereal voice vibrating the deck.\n\nBeth stopped in front of me. \"And how are you, Cragg?\"\n\nWhatever bulwark against emotion the danger afforded me was gone. It was all I could do to hand the journal to Beth and say three words.\n\n\"This is all.\"\n\n\"Oh, Cragg.\" Beth clutched the book to her chest. \"I know you did all you could. Sigrunn was wounded...I...\"\n\nMy hands finally free, I signed her my response. \"What good are books if no people are around to enjoy them?\"\n\nShe started nodding before I finished, smiling wistfully.\n\n\"I could only save one,\" I signed, any relief long gone. \"They were all so valuable, but that one\u2013\u2013\" \u2013\u2013I pointed to the journal\u2013\u2013 \"\u2013\u2013was a single person's story. I thought, we will probably find more King or Miller or M-E-L-V-I-L-L-E\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Beth said, nodding in comprehension. \"I like to think I'd have done the same.\" Beth looked at the journal's covers, riffled its pages. \"It's half blank\u2013\u2013more than half blank...\" She saw the shadow on my face and held up a hand. \"I actually think it's a good thing.\"\n\nI raised my clay eyebrows. \"What?\"\n\nShe handed the journal back to me with reverence. \"Once I make sure none of us bleed to death,\" she said, \"I'll see if I can find some ink. I think...\" She smiled at me. \"This could be good practice.\"\n\nHer implication was a starburst in my mind. I stood holding the journal, feeling the leather warming in my hands. I expected it to feel weighty, but actually, it felt quite light. It made sense; the Nazis wanted to stamp out our legend, so why not try to make it permanent?\n\nWe were a wounded crew of five, two of us unfamiliar with the paradigm running the ship. Sigrunn and Sayyida were likely to join us on the bounty rolls, and even if they didn't, we'd be pursued by the Luftwaffe as far as the biplanes' shifters would allow.\n\nBut all of that was distant birdsong in my mind; I was preparing to start our ship's log. I would write an entry for every one of our exploits here in the Broken Skies, and when the journal was full, I would seek a working press, that we might pass it on to others. Maybe I could inspire readers to see the world as we do: to value stories above riches and people above stories. Or perhaps one day time and space would heal again, and it could just be a way to pass the time.\n\nBeth's hand could do us more justice; even Ambrose's powers could produce cleaner prose. But I was unwilling to even loosen my grip on the journal. They already had ways to make themselves heard. This time, the Book Golem would write his own book. The writing itself, regardless of anything else, was victory.\n\nThe Nazis had already burned many stories in their quest to control the world's narrative...but maybe they wouldn't burn ours.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Always A Chance by Chelsea Counsell ]\n\nEverything was going smoothly until the pirates attacked.\n\nFor thirty-six hours, Amalie and Silver had taken turns navigating the Benbow from Florence to Peking, trading sleep shifts so that there was always someone at the helm. Her neck itched occasionally with worry, thinking of their cargo and Grandin, the dragon trainer, who had remained below deck for the entirety of the journey. But after a breakfast of cheese and figs around sunrise, a dot appeared just above the horizon, and then she had bigger things to worry about.\n\nKeeping her gloved hands on the steering, she leaned forward, eyeing the dot. They were passing through the Qing Empire's hinterlands. The ground below them was a speckled map of plains and ice-covered mountains. But that dot...\n\nIt was not uncommon to see other airships near industrial hubs. They'd had a near miss flying over the crowded airspace of Belgrade, and Amalie had expected the same the closer they got to Peking. But they weren't that close, and the dot kept getting bigger.\n\n\"Silver, can you make that out?\" she asked.\n\n\"You see it, too?\" From his long coat, Silver pulled a brass spyglass, which he held to one eye with his good hand. His other arm dropped off to nothing but a neatly pinned sleeve just above the elbow, above which sat Morpheus, a black dragon the size of a hound, its tail curled for balance around Silver's throat.\n\nSilver hissed a breath through his teeth that made Morpheus's dark plumage ruffle. \"Black flag,\" he said of the dot in the sky. \"They're illegal freighters. It's possible that they're not pirates, just bootleggers, but at this distance, in Qing hinterland airspace, with us carrying the cargo we are? Unlikely.\"\n\nAmalie clutched the helm. Her torc dragon, Ratha\u2014a gift from her father upon graduating from the Institute\u2014hissed and burrowed under the collar of her thick shearling coat. So much for being a guard dragon.\n\n\"What do you plan to do?\" Silver asked.\n\n\"Keep going,\" Amalie said with a hardness in her voice that could have rent steel.\n\n\"Not 'try to lose them in the mountains'? Not 'radio for help'?\"\n\n\"There will be no help out here,\" Amalie said, feeling irritation well inside her. Her first mission out of the Institute\u2014a mission her father was supposed to lead, had he not disappeared\u2014and she risked losing everything in a pirate attack. The odds had been unfairly stacked against her from the start. \"We're on our own,\" she said. \"Did you not realize that when they sent a child to do a man's job?\"\n\n\"You're not a child.\"\n\nAmalie's jaw tightened, and for a moment she looked only at the horizon, where Peking lay. Then she pulled a lever on the steering, releasing a hunk of meat or some other such morsel in the bowels of the ship to inspire the ship-dragon, Sparky, to light his chest fire, heat the water system, and speed up the ship\u2014depending on how serious his cold was.\n\n\"We'll fight them if they come,\" she said. \"I'm going to check on Grandin. Will you take the helm?\"\n\n\"Of course, m'lady.\"\n\nAmalie nodded and turned to duck down the ramp to the cargo hold. When she reached the hold, lit by golden lanterns on the walls, she froze as every tendon in her body locked.\n\nIn the center of the room, now free from its cage, stood a four-legged mass of sinew and muscle enameled in iridescent ivory. The mane was the most peculiar part\u2014like blue fire quickening from crest to tail. It sent flickers of opal firelight against the walls. The dragon's skin was tessellated\u2014dark blue ridges standing out against white shell. And two horns like crescent moons sprung from a brow over a long-whiskered snout, which puffed clouds of steam into the air.\n\nRegardless, the strangest thing in the room was not the dragon itself but Grandin, the dragon trainer\u2014a young woman of small, round stature with dark skin and curly hair. There was the dragon, looking like a majestic portent of death with its hand-long canines and fire-blue eyes. And there was Grandin...hugging it.\n\nGrandin noticed Amalie and pulled back slightly, stroking a small hand down one of the dragon's haunches. Her smile was tentative.\n\nAmalie's chest constricted painfully and her lips pulled back in a snarl. \"What are you doing?\" she snapped. \"What did I say about letting it out of its cage?\"\n\nGrandin flinched, as if Amalie scared her more than the horse-size beast in her arms. \"Tianfei doesn't like the cage,\" she said.\n\nAmalie's fists balled. \"You can't just give the dragon free rein of the ship because it doesn't like the cage!\" she said. \"There is a ship out there coming closer that is no doubt full of pirates drooling to steal that beast. Do you understand what will happen if we don't make it to Peking? Not to mention it's dangerous, just\u2014just look at it.\"\n\nIndeed, the dragon had begun to step back and forth in agitation, and the steam from its thumb-size nostrils had turned black as smoke.\n\n\"Pirates or no pirates, I have Tianfei under control,\" Grandin said stolidly. She patted the dragon right on the chest. \"Everything will be okay. But you're making her nervous. You should go above deck for a bit, so I can calm her down.\"\n\nRage blistered on Amalie's cheeks, and deep in her coat, Ratha squirmed. How dare Grandin give her orders? That she would tell Amalie what to do on her own mission made her so angry that her mind was like mortar smashing together\u2014she couldn't even speak. Pursing her lips, she turned and marched up the stairs, throwing the door of the hold shut behind her.\n\nThe slam shook her reverie, and she moved toward the helm a little less stormily. Silver stood there, tending the wheel. A lit pipe hung from his mouth.\n\n\"What happened?\" he asked easily.\n\nLike milk curdling in her stomach, Amalie felt a mix of anger and shame because she felt so angry. \"It's my first mission and I've got some lowborn simpleton reining my dragon,\" she bit off. She flushed at how petulant she sounded. Her father's reputation rested on her shoulders; the peace between countries depended on getting the dragon from Florence to Peking. How could she do that if she couldn't control her own emotions?\n\nSilver stepped away from the steering to let her regain control of the ship. With Morpheus crouched on his shoulder like a gargoyle, he moved to the banister and made himself comfortable, leaving Amalie to sulk in her thoughts at the wheel.\n\nThe dot on the northern horizon bloomed into a ship with two blade-like wings and a black-colored hull. To the east, the Great Wall snaked like a pale river through verdant trees\u2014just beyond that was the city Peking, and though Amalie could not make out the buildings yet, she could see it in her mind's eye as she had seen it in books, with the clay tile roofs, curved eaves, and Fu Lion statues sitting at magnanimous attention.\n\nWith Sparky's help, the pace of the Benbow quickened, sending the landscape by more quickly. But the pirate ship\u2014if it was a pirate ship\u2014nonetheless managed to gain.\n\nAs it came closer, Amalie saw that the ship's wings were biplanar, tapering to points, and the hull tapered at the bow to almost a harpoon. If the Benbow were a harbor seal, the black ship was an orca\u2014pointed and sharp, with a deadly bite.\n\nFor a moment, she fingered the handle of the saber at her hip. Silver reappeared from the cargo hold, and he stood tense near her, resting his hand on his cutlass.\n\nShe counted ten men on the black ship. Nine standing eagerly at its rails, and one necessarily on steering. Before she could even make out the color of their hair, she knew they were pirates, for the way they eyed her ship was nothing but predatory.\n\nThen the black ship was upon them, and all Amalie could do was spin her hands around and around, steering in a vain attempt to circumvent them. She could almost see the bricks of the Great Wall when the black ship harpooned her bow.\n\nIt was like running aground in air. The entire Benbow lurched, throwing Amalie against the wheel and jarring her arms in their sockets. Silver went floundering across the planks of the deck before rolling upright and drawing his sword. Morpheus scurried up after him.\n\nThe pirates, for they were pirates, jumped from the black ship onto the deck of the Benbow. Three of them went for Silver, attempting to down him with their cutlasses. The rest\u2014a half dozen\u2014ran below decks for the cargo.\n\nAmalie almost felt hurt that they didn't see her as a threat. Their loss.\n\nShe abandoned the helm. Caught by the black ship, the Benbow would keep aloft and steady so long as Sparky kept puffing. From her sheath Amalie pulled her glimmering saber, which she wielded almost as confidently as the wheel.\n\nSilver held his own against the three pirates. They were younger and perhaps stronger than he, but Silver's sword hand was steady and quick, like a dragon bite, and Morpheus was like a second sword, slashing out with claws and teeth against the pirates' vulnerable flesh.\n\nAmalie rushed, sword drawn, behind one of Silver's assailants, and struck the man's cutlass from his hand so that it soared over the side of the Benbow. As the man gaped at his empty hand, Silver used the man's shock to cut him down.\n\n\"Go!\" Silver shouted to her. \"The dragon!\"\n\nAmalie nodded, her heart quickening, and ran for the cargo hold, disappearing down the dark ramp. She leveled out to the sound of a wail, just as Grandin rushed the pirates, clawing at their burly arms like a wildcat.\n\n\"Get off me, girl,\" one of them growled, and thrust his elbow into her face, knocking her straight back to the floor.\n\nThe dragon pulled against the iron chains the pirates had swung around it, as if trying to get to Grandin's side. Dark smoke puffed from its nose.\n\n\"Alrighty, men, let's get this beast aloft,\" said a bald pirate with drooping earlobes. Then he noticed Amalie. They all noticed Amalie, for her sword glimmered in the dragon light.\n\n\"If you'll excuse us, miss,\" he said.\n\nAmalie made no move to abandon her guard on the exit. Keeping her eyes on the pirates, she held her sword steady.\n\n\"As you like it.\" The bald man smiled and drew his cutlass.\n\nAmalie backed up the ramp. She didn't want to give the man leeway, but the incline would give her the advantage, and the narrow passageway meant that she would stand between the pirates and their goal\u2014the dragon would not leave while she still stood.\n\nThe bald man engaged her, testing her sword as she parried. He seemed to take her more seriously than the man above decks had. Maybe it was that she stood between him and his goal. Maybe it was the firelight.\n\nShe lanced out, attempting to disarm him. He parried. A quick twist of his blade and he sent his cutlass shooting toward her like a saber strike. Amalie jumped back. He struck at her more quickly, his sword biting like a cobra. She managed to parry, but only just. His sword was heavy, and though she parried his strikes, each one jarred her arms until she grew tired. With each attack, she lost ground, until she had reached where the ramp opened onto the main deck.\n\n\"Amalie!\"\n\nShe turned, barely managing to parry the second blade that swooped in from behind\u2014one of the pirates had broken away from Silver and advanced on her. The bald man saw his chance and went for her throat.\n\nAmalie gasped as his sword\u2014not quite parried by her own blade\u2014pierced the thick shearling of her coat. The blade dug against her flesh, and she howled, a brutal sound that swept out of her like a whale cry.\n\nSilver re-engaged the man who had come at her back, pulling him away, but it was too late. Amalie gripped the cut on her shoulder and felt hot blood seep through her coat.\n\nWith a hiss, Ratha scampered out from the belly of her coat and back around her neck. When the bald man swung his sword at her again, the dragon jumped across their meeting blades, scurried up the man's arm, and burrowed into his garments.\n\nThe bald man's eyes went wide and he screamed high.\n\nAmalie stepped to the side, narrowly missing him as he danced past her, trying to get the tiny dragon out of his clothes. As he staggered, she ripped her sword through his calf, felling him to the wood floor.\n\n\"Who's next?\" she started to say, but then the three pirates leading the dragon shoved past her, and she had to move back just to avoid being trampled.\n\nThe dragon shrieked like grating metal, its nostril smoke turning black as ash as it reared against the men pulling it by the heavy shackles around its limbs. But six men's brute strength was too much for it, and it was losing ground toward the side of the Benbow.\n\nFear that they would escape crashed in Amalie's chest. She threw herself at them, her sword drawn like a bolt of thunder, but one of the pirates caught his cutlass against her saber and dragged her into a fight, where she had to parry or else be cut down\u2014she could only watch them take the dragon as she fended off his attacks.\n\n\"Let her go!\" a voice shouted, and Grandin appeared from the cargo bay, her nose flushed with blood that ran down over her lips. She ran straight for the pirates, seemingly oblivious to their weapons, and lunged at one at random, biting down on a scarred bicep.\n\nThe man gave a guttural shout and yanked Grandin off him by her short, curly hair, throwing her against the deck.\n\nAmalie's heart lodged in her throat as she thrust her sword first one way, then another, trying to shake off the man who had engaged her. The dragon's frantic blue mane danced against her eyes, and Amalie knew she was only moments from losing everything\u2014from irredeemably failing her father, the Institute, and herself.\n\nThe pirates threw a steel lasso around the dragon's neck, tightening it like a noose as they dragged it toward their ship.\n\nOn the deck, forgotten, Grandin crawled to her knees and raised her fingers, blowing a sharp, high-pitched whistle that broke over the noise of the fighting.\n\nAt once, the dragon's entire demeanor changed. If Amalie had thought it dangerous before, she had no idea what to think of it now, for it made the creature Grandin had hugged in the cargo bay look like a birth-wet kitten.\n\nWith a roar like an engine seizing, the dragon swept its muscular tail like an undertow at the knees of the men surrounding it, knocking them to the ground. The blue-white flames of its mane grew almost too bright to look at. Then it opened its mouth wide like the inhale of a bellows and fire erupted the deck, blue and liquid as lava.\n\nAmalie jumped back toward the steering, scared for her own skin, as grown men screamed wet, guttural screams. The air grew sharp with the stench of blackened wood and charred flesh. Not all of the pirates had been burned\u2014but the ones who hadn't jumped over the side of the Benbow onto the black ship, retreating, and dragged their burned counterparts with them.\n\nAmalie stood in shock, clutching a rail, as the black ship pulled away from the Benbow. Grandin clutched Tianfei with tears running down her cheeks. Amalie felt a pull of sorrow and shame in her chest, seeing her cry. Then a downward lurch awakened her to her senses\u2014Sparky was not lit. They were falling.\n\n\"Get ready to come down hard!\" she shouted, running to the steering. She took hold and hooked her feet under the crossbar. She pulled the lever that would feed Sparky, hoping that the many, many apparatuses that could fail would not.\n\nThe Benbow plunged toward the ground, which had cropped up in tidy squares of pavilions and terraces, flying by too quickly and too close.\n\nAmalie looked across the burning deck to where Grandin held on to the dragon, which clung to the wood of the deck by its claws. Silver and Morpheus were on the other side of the flames, holding tight to a guardrail.\n\nAmalie pushed another lever, pitching the ship forward. The wings needed to catch the wind\u2014they had to. Her heart hammered in her chest, knowing the ground was coming closer and closer to their hull. There was always the chance that the ship-dragon wouldn't light properly. Always a chance.\n\nAnd then she felt it, a lurch forward like the kick of an engine, and she pulled the lever to even them out as Sparky lit.\n\nAmalie stood in a courtyard just inside the Qing palace, waiting for the Qing ambassador to give them the exit documents for the mission.\n\nSilver was there, too, with lit pipe, watching Morpheus stalk blood-red koi at the edge of a pond. The Benbow had been damaged in the fight and the resulting rough landing, so he waited to hear whether they could repair it before they returned to Florence.\n\nAmalie strode nearer to where Grandin stood, speaking with the Qing dragon trainer\u2014a black-haired woman in a pale green dress, who gave an enthusiastic \"mmm\" to everything Grandin said about the dragon.\n\nAmalie watched Grandin speak about the dragon\u2014how her hands moved as she spoke, she was so passionate, and how the dragon would nuzzle her shoulders with its snout whenever it wasn't getting enough attention from her. Amalie tried to reconcile this gentle creature with the terror she had seen on the ship. Were they really the same?\n\nWhen the Qing trainer left to get the ambassador, Amalie approached Grandin, who was stroking the dragon's snout\u2014probably saying goodbye.\n\nFor a moment, Amalie was silent, watching, feeling something like an intruder on their intimate moment. But then she cleared her throat, and Grandin turned.\n\n\"Grandin, I wanted to say how sorry I am for the way I acted,\" Amalie said. \"I shouldn't have yelled at you. I didn't understand...but I should have trusted your expertise.\"\n\nShe tensed, expecting Grandin to bite in the same way she'd expected the dragon to.\n\n\"That's all right,\" Grandin said. \"You were just scared.\"\n\nAmalie nodded, impressed again with her ease. \"I hope that when we go back to Florence, I can explain to the Institute what a help you've been.\"\n\nGrandin started. \"I'm not going back to Florence,\" she said.\n\nAmalie thought for sure she had misheard her. \"What?\"\n\n\"I'm staying here. Wherever Tianfei goes, that's where I'm needed.\"\n\nAmalie felt herself deflate slightly. \"Oh. Oh, I had no idea.\" She couldn't imagine giving up Florence, her home, for a dragon. The bond between them must be even greater than she understood. \"Well. Perhaps I'll have another mission in Peking sometime. We could see each other again.\"\n\n\"I would like that,\" Grandin said. Then she smiled, in a way a mischievous cherub might, and gestured toward Tianfei's long-whiskered, ivory snout. \"Do you want to pet her?\" she asked.\n\nWith a smile, Amalie stepped forward and allowed herself to be guided toward new experience.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ What A Tea Witch Promises by C. C. S. Ryan ]\n\nJenoye padded through the quiet corridors of the leisure airship Starlight Spectacle. It was her fourth day on the ship. She had made it to the semifinal round of the competition to be the Spectacle's first resident tea witch, and she had things to do before everyone else woke up.\n\nAs she approached the topmost observation deck, over which the ship's silvery, almost entirely ornamental sail soared toward the fading stars, she narrowed her eyes. Someone was up on the mast, in the ropes, well past the reach of the muted lights on the deck. Jenoye had never gotten around to taking an airship cruise before, so maybe, she thought, that was normal.\n\nJenoye removed a roll of silk from her robes and pulled vials and bundles out of the many pockets of her apron. She spread the cloth on the deck and arranged her ingredients on it. The eight items she'd chosen would become more potent when they were touched by the first rays of the sun. None of the other competitors were in sight, but she supposed they each had their own ways of preparing. She sat back and waited for the sun to crest the vast horizon. A good time to meditate, maybe. Just cast back the stiff hood of her formal cloak, open her witch-eye and\u2014\n\nThe pain almost made her fall over. Distress, sharp and deep, came from the figure above her. Jenoye got to her feet and stared upwards as all three of her eyes filled with tears. Blinking them away, she tongued a bit of foxfire moss from a pocket and gently blew a puff of light from her mouth. She sent it spiraling up the mast.\n\n\"Good morning. Are you all right?\" Jenoye asked gently. The witch-light carried her voice and sight up with it. She could just make out a face\u2014vaguely familiar, maybe featured on one of the posters promoting the airship's attractions: a magical ice rink, a banquet hall with a starry sky, the tea witch competition, a pirate show... Yes, that was it. An actor.\n\n\"What? Who\u2014oh. One of the tea witches. I'm all right. How...?\"\n\n\"May I speak with you?\"\n\n\"I...\"\n\nIn the witch-light, Jenoye could just make out the rope that was loosely wrapped around the woman's hand. She didn't know what she would do if the actor's anguish caused her to...to do something rash.\n\nThe sharp pounding of the actor's heart layered on top of Jenoye's anxious pulse. She closed her witch-ears. \"You're not Endoan, right? Has a tea witch ever given you a service? If you come down, it would be my pleasure to offer you one. It\u2014it may suggest some solution to your dilemma. Please? At the very least, it should taste good!\" A bit undignified, but Jenoye hoped she'd covered her terror and sounded friendly and professional.\n\nThe woman sighed, tightened the rope, and slid-scrambled toward the deck. Jenoye felt a rush of relief, and closed her witch-eye tight\u2014it was rude to open witch-senses around others without permission.\n\nThe actor approached Jenoye, keeping plenty of space between them, and looked her up and down. \"I don't know that tea can help, uh...\"\n\nJenoye cleared her throat. \"I'm Jenoye. It's not simply tea\u2014although it's good tea! It's genuine magic. Sure, tea witches can't fly like wizards, but we have other talents, including the powers of insight.\" She touched her closed eyelid and her ears, and was gratified when the other woman looked curious. \"And you are?\"\n\n\"Lieute\u2014Andev, just Andev. I'm a...performer. I didn't think tea witches were quite real,\" Andev said. Her eyes drifted toward the graying sky. \"But my problems aren't something I can chat about with a stranger.\"\n\nJenoye didn't need her witch-senses to see the hollows in Andev's cheeks or the harsh dark circles under her eyes, interrupting the soft brown of her face. Jenoye was surprised, though, to see tangled scars that trailed across Andev's tight jaw and disappeared under a high collar. Maybe acting was a rougher trade than she knew.\n\nJenoye nodded. \"Well, sometimes the client doesn't have to tell me anything. Did you see the first round? That gentleman hardly had to speak at all.\"\n\nAndev cocked her head. \"I caught a little of it, and the second round yesterday. I didn't quite understand what was happening. Although they did seem happy afterwards, your clients.\"\n\n\"Well, a tea witch helps a client address something in their heart, slight or profound. These ingredients here are mostly simple herbs and dried tea leaves, right? That's where we start. We blend them with magic, and we conjure sweet fancies\u2014they may look like bonbons, but they also do a share of the work. That's how we reach a person's heart, to restore balance or name a hidden fear or rediscover joy.\" And then she was supposed to carry a bit of it with her, but for the past two days, Jenoye had been so focused on the competition that she'd only brought back tiny shards of openness and joy from those clients.\n\n\"But is it always so...public?\"\n\n\"Oh, no! Only for competitions. If you ask for a private tea service, I'm bound to help and to never tell anyone what happened. That's the promise. If I broke it, I wouldn't be a tea witch anymore.\"\n\nAndev gave Jenoye a hard stare, and she had to fight the urge to step back. Behind Andev, the golden edge of the sun spilled across the horizon.\n\nFinally, Andev nodded. \"I think you're telling the truth. Offering me a lifeline. But why? You don't know me, and I have no money. I have nothing.\"\n\nWisps of glowing sparks rose from the ingredients at their feet. Jenoye bent to gather them up and waved off Andev's hesitant gesture of assistance. \"Rules are rules. A tea witch is obligated to help someone in distress. Just like how Endoans always offer a cup of tea\u2014the regular kind, I mean\u2014to anyone who asks.\"\n\nAndev shook her head. \"Endoa. So strange. All right, I'll try your tea service.\"\n\n\"This way,\" said Jenoye. \"We can do it before the competition begins.\"\n\nAndev followed her. \"It's important to you, this competition.\"\n\nJenoye hugged her bundle to her chest. \"It's everything. After I graduated, I was itinerant. I like meeting new people. But for some, if you don't have your own appointed position or your own shop...\" She reminded herself that she was a professional, and hastily straightened and tucked the bundle under her arm. \"So, tell me about your show!\"\n\nAndev was silent and Jenoye had to glance back to see if she was still there. Then she shrugged and pointed at a poster on the wall ahead of them. \"Can't say much more than that.\" Andev couldn't seem to actually look at the poster herself.\n\nTwo fine portraits depicted Andev and a woman whose face was partly hidden by a cockaded captain's hat. Both wore uniforms that were surely sharper than any real pirate had ever worn. Beneath the portraits, multi-hued and gold-tinted calligraphy declared:\n\nThe days of piracy are long over in the skies of Endoa, but everyone loves a swashbuckler! For your delight, before the final round of the tea witchery competition, you may experience the thrill and frisson of a piratical boarding!\n\nDuels and derring-do? Yes! Risk to yourselves or your heirlooms? No!\n\nDon't miss this event in the banquet hall with our handsome band of privateers, led by Captain Toural and First Lieutenant Andev!\n\n\"I...see. Well, this way.\"\n\nJenoye sat facing andev at her cabin table. Tight quarters meant that scents would be more potent, for better or for worse, and she would need to be mindful.\n\nWith Andev's permission, Jenoye took her hands and recited the invocation and pledge for a private service. She opened her witch-eye, and her second pair of ears twitched out ever so slightly. A quiet moment passed while she set out three small pots and filled them with spring water from the mountains back home. Another bit of foxfire-moss and a whisper against each pot set a softly-colored flame around its base.\n\nThe first pot was to open the heart. Sometimes that was enough. The second pot, if needed, was to touch the heart, and the third pot was to change the heart. Jenoye had only used a third pot twice in her career so far. But she didn't know how well any of it would work on a foreigner.\n\n\"How...how much can you see?\" whispered Andev.\n\n\"Not specifics, usually,\" Jenoye said. \"And it's all confidential.\"\n\nAndev's panic had resurfaced and wasn't subsiding. How could Jenoye get this foreigner to trust her?\n\nSome of the fear and pain in Andev's heart flowed from the distant west. Between that and the way she spoke, Jenoye had a guess as to where she was from. What was it Jenoye had heard about people from there? They swore on blood, didn't they?\n\nBefore she could second-guess herself, Jenoye pushed back her hood and took out the tiny, sharp blade that she used for ingredients like citrus peels. A light prick of her finger, and a drop of blood welled out. \"I promise you my secrecy,\" she said.\n\nAndev's fear eased a little. But now what to do with this drop of blood?\n\nShe'd have to keep improvising. Jenoye put an orange leaf on a tray and let the blood fall onto it. Then she carefully released a drop of shimmering, hot water from the first pot onto it. Both liquids disappeared into a tiny scarlet puff.\n\nJenoye doubted that was what Westerners did. Still, it seemed good enough for Andev, who made a nod of satisfaction and held out her finger. Jenoye hadn't expected that, but now she had to go with it. She swallowed and repeated the steps.\n\nTime to begin the actual tea.\n\nThe first little cup was stoneware, rough and thick, like a child might use. The scents that rose from the tea came from as many Western fruits and spices as Jenoye could find in her collection. Scent was a direct route to a client's past. She took the first sip and passed it to Andev.\n\nAndev breathed in deeply\u2014just what she was supposed to do\u2014and then tossed it back in one gulp. Definitely not what she was supposed to do. But her eyes unfocused slightly, and after a moment, she spoke. \"When I was little, before...before things changed, if something scared me, I'd make a point of doing it anyway. But now, I'm afraid of...the performance.\" She shook her head. \"I don't have the words.\" She stared into the empty cup.\n\nJenoye waited for three breaths, then drew a second, stronger cup from the pot. She took her sip and passed it to Andev. \"Not stage fright?\"\n\n\"No.\" Andev swallowed the tea and closed her eyes. \"Have you ever experienced something you couldn't help but see over and over, where even thinking about it made you sick?\"\n\nJenoye knew of it: the injury to the heart that reopened itself. One of her teachers had decided to study tea witchery because of how tea services had stopped her from waking sobbing in the night. Jenoye conjured a small sphere of warm apple and molasses, and passed the fancy on a tiny tray to Andev.\n\n\"Never knew you could use magic to make sweets.\" Andev hesitantly tasted it, then ate it all. \"It's so warm.\" She put a hand on her chest.\n\nThe obvious problem was that Andev needed assistance in overcoming her hurt so that she could perform. But there was something else. The warmth of the sweet wasn't going to get Jenoye there, but at least it would make Andev feel a little better. Her witch-gaze roamed over Andev and settled on the recent past, trailing above her like an angry storm.\n\nJenoye took the cup back and looked at the traces. Some of the leaves were twisted in on themselves. Jenoye rolled them between her fingers. Andev, she thought, was not an actor.\n\nOn to the next course, then. Jenoye wrapped the second teapot in gentle spring rainclouds. The tea that she steeped now smelled of safety: toasted grains, warm cotton, the fur of a cat lazing by a fire. She warmed the cup with witch-fire before pouring. After her sip, she placed the cup and a tray with a silvery, sugar-frosted berry into Andev's hands. Jenoye had never seen the fruit before; she had conjured it from Andev's heart.\n\nAndev took a sip of tea and nibbled the berry. \"I was picking frostberries when they took me,\" she said, so quietly that Jenoye could hardly hear. Tears spilled down her cheeks, into her cup. Jenoye felt Andev's heart crack open.\n\n\"You don't have to say anything,\" Jenoye said quickly.\n\nAndev shook her head. \"I need to now,\" she whispered roughly. \"I\u2014I don't ever want to hold a sword again, even a toy sword. I got away! And I thought I was free, but Toural, first mate on the ship I escaped\u2014I might've set fire to it, a bit\u2014she's off raising havoc on her own now. It's all she knows how how to do. And she tracked me down for this scheme. I was...\" Andev flushed. She stared at her feet for a moment, then let out a short bark of bitter laughter. \"She used to call me her prot\u00e9g\u00e9, the one she'd been able to whip into exactly what she wanted. I'm the linchpin of this plan. She's had me training these poor actors. They don't know anything. I haven't been able to tell anyone! I\u2014I'm a fugitive. If Toural turns me in, I won't see the sky again for ten years, not till execution day. And so I can only do what Toural tells me to do. I'm useless. A coward.\"\n\nJenoye pulled threads of insight from Andev's heart and stitched them together. Andev was a real pirate. Well, not exactly\u2014as a young woman, really barely more than a child, she'd been pressed into a pirate crew. Just as rumors claimed could happen in the West. But she had managed to free herself. Not right away, not before maelstroms of blood and terror. Those memories were the wounds in her heart. Now Toural had essentially run a sword through Andev and twisted the blade.\n\nJenoye tried to keep the shock from her face while she conjured another fancy, this one a candied hazelnut, flecked with gold and wrapped in a cloud of autumn sweetgrass. She took a deep breath and put it directly into Andev's hands. \"No, Andev. You've been so brave.\"\n\nAndev ate it slowly, as though afraid of being overpowered by the flavor. \"Have I?\" She wiped at her face with a flaxen napkin. Her heart lightened and then sank again. \"It doesn't change anything. When the 'performance' begins, Toural will have the troupe gather everyone's valuables. She'll set off a flare, and a skycab she's stolen will come for her, or us.\" She made as though to spit, but stopped herself. \"No security on this ship! I didn't believe it'd be so, but you Endoans... You can't stop her.\"\n\nJenoye poured more tea into Andev's tear-stained cup, to ease her worry. \"Oh, yes we can,\" Jenoye said. She had a plan. \"Just come watch the competition. Bring Toural.\"\n\nAndev, clearly puzzled but also less tightly coiled than before, watched as Jenoye conducted the end of the service. \"I believe you, but I don't know why.\"\n\n\"Then I'll see you there,\" Jenoye said.\n\nAndev left. Jenoye gripped the edge of the table for a moment, pushing down a surge of nausea. She loved a challenge that played to her strengths, and she had promised to help, but had she made the right decision?\n\nJenoye shook her head and reorganized her ingredients. She had work to do, and midmorning was on its way.\n\nJenoye hardly noticed the bright blue of the sky or heard the drums and applause as she climbed to the competition platform. Was Andev there? She was, and so was Toural, smirking faintly. The other troupe members jostled behind them. Jenoye opened her witch-eye just a sliver and cast it over Toural. It was a tea witch competition, after all; no one could expect to be entirely shielded from witch-senses here.\n\nDespite Toural's sturdy exterior, she was shrouded in chaotic feelings. Not the thunderheads of greed and bloodlust that Jenoye might have expected from a pirate (though there was certainly some of that) but a persistent haze of resentment and bitterness.\n\nJenoye was third, and she wasn't sure that she would survive the wait. She made herself focus on developing and rehearsing her strategies. The first two witches did well; though Jenoye wasn't watching them, she felt the bright hearts of their clients as they stepped down.\n\nFinally, she was called. Jenoye arranged her ingredients and utensils on the table, working to look calm.\n\nThe host called for clients. It was time.\n\nJenoye pointed into the crowd of sunlit faces and waving hands. In the loudest voice she could manage, she called out, \"Captain Toural!\"\n\nToural took a step back. Andev glanced up at Jenoye, questioning, and then Jenoye's witch-ears heard her say to Toural, \"Go on, it's harmless.\" The rest of the troupe took up the cause, cheering for Toural, and soon enough, Toural put on a smile and took her seat.\n\nJenoye began the competition invocation and set out her teapots. Her hands were shaking as she chose her first ingredients. Toural would volunteer nothing, not like Andev had. And yet Jenoye's choices still had to be perfect. Her flavors had to be so enticing, so close to Toural's heart, that she would never think of leaving the stage.\n\nFor the entire first pot, neither of them uttered a word, but Jenoye strained to open her eyes and ears as widely as she could. Toural had her own wounds, but she also had thick scar tissue that prevented Jenoye from reaching her. Finally, at the end of the first pot, heavy with the nostalgia-inducing herbs from the West that had unlocked Andev's memories, Jenoye began to find her way in. Like Andev, everything had been taken from Toural. But Toural believed that she took only what she was owed, and over the years, this unreasoned belief, fed by greed, had only taken stronger root in her heart.\n\nToural was alarmed now, but Jenoye had made the heart-touch successfully. They were connected, however much Toural was fighting it. Jenoye searched for sources of joy and empathy in Toural's tangle of thoughts and memories.\n\nThe first fancy of the second pot was faceted like a gem, with the same green luster as the stones in Toural's ears and belt. It shattered between her teeth, releasing the sweet rush of victory inside. Jenoye watched Toural carefully, looking for the light of remembered triumph in her eyes.\n\nWhen Toural's jaw lifted, Jenoye poured tea into a little cup that was decorated with gold vines on the outside, but rough and unfinished inside. She wafted the scented steam toward Toural, who reflexively breathed in as she took the cup. This tea was as down-to-earth as the fancy had been heady, made with leaves from a deep valley, the humblest of toasted barley, and the clearest of snowmelt. This was to ground Toural in the present.\n\nJenoye spoke silently, directly to Toural's heart, weaving thin strands of joy and clarity into images and meaning for her alone. \"The passengers on this ship are not your Western tyrants, warlords, and aristocrats, Toural. They've taken nothing from you, neither gold nor blood. Their boots aren't the ones that have been on your neck.\" Another fancy, and another tiny cup. \"They're ordinary people, like you. Their losses will hurt them.\"\n\nJenoye suppressed a flinch at the spiky paths of Toural's heart. Thick, scarred briars twisted toward the west, marked by heartbreak and loss. To be sure, Toural hadn't been forced down her road. She'd made many terrible choices over the years and had rarely resisted her darker impulses. But her memories of oppression and brutality, which seeded her resentment, were also genuine.\n\nThe third pot.\n\nJenoye spoke aloud, softly enough that only Toural could hear. \"This third pot is to change the heart. But not for me to change you. It's for you to change yourself. I'm only here to open a way.\"\n\nShe felt Toural's heart shudder, but the captain didn't move.\n\nThis pot was black, cast iron with a pattern of waves and birds that held the viewer's eye. Jenoye silently asked for the grace of her mentors' mentors to make her blend potent. On an impulse, she slipped in the orange leaf from earlier.\n\nThis tea changed significantly as it brewed. First, she poured a smoky cup accompanied by a lozenge of layered memories that made Toural dwell anew within her own sense of loss, to remember how it felt when it was fresh. Secondly, a sharp cup, to which Jenoye added directly a handful of fancies composed of small silver pearls. They tasted of metal and tears.\n\nToural reached for the cup with shaking hands, as though daring herself to complete the ceremony. As each pearl burst in Toural's mouth, she was flooded with the full strength of the pain and fear a passenger would feel as they lost their heirlooms to her.\n\nToural's face became ashen as she swallowed the final mouthful. Her eyes were fixed on the iron pot. The connection between them choked as though Toural had caught it in her fist.\n\nCold sweat ran down Jenoye's spine and all three of her eyes ached. She glanced around for the first time since the service had begun. A heavy silence hung over the crowd, and the judges stared down at her.\n\nAndev, eyebrows knitted together, caught her gaze. \"What are you doing?\" Andev mouthed. But it was time for the final cup of this final pot, the real test of Jenoye's skills. The connection was still there. She needed to use it while she still could.\n\nJenoye had thought to give Toural a taste of peace and strength here, a glimpse of what could be hers if only she didn't carry out her plan. She listened more carefully to the thorns holding back Toural's quaking heart.\n\nThe last cup was tiny but profoundly bitter. The fancy that Jenoye gave Toural was both the most astringent and the sweetest she had ever made. She had taken a risk and made it from scratch that morning, out of real sugar and citron, but now she would change the magic that it would carry. Jenoye breathed on it and conjured a ray of sunlight, a soft taste of sky, and the freedom of the wind to accompany it into Toural's mouth. She wrapped the teacup in piercing starlight.\n\n\"Be free of all this,\" Jenoye whispered, and she felt Toural's heart clench.\n\nToural swallowed the fancy, drank down the tea, and began to sob. Not helpless tears like Andev had wept, but a wretched howl. The thicket around her heart tore itself apart. She swept her arm across the table and Jenoye tried not to flinch as her best cups and trays shattered on the stage. Toural buried her face in her hands, and then she stood, knocking over her chair.\n\n\"What's left of me now, then? What else do I know to do? What is to fill my life if not some small measure of payback? If I have to feel their pain and my own\u2014you may as well have murdered me,\" Toural said raggedly, and she stalked off the stage.\n\n\"You'll find a new heading,\" Jenoye said. Toural was already out of earshot, but maybe Jenoye's words would reach her anyway.\n\nThe judges spoke in strained, rapid whispers. Jenoye sat, frozen. It was done. She ought to feel either pride in her work or regret at her recklessness, probably, but instead she felt dizzy, as though she had just looked down before the last step on a rope bridge.\n\nIn the distance, a scarlet flare rose into the sky, calling Toural's skycab, but only Jenoye and Andev saw it.\n\nJenoye tried to breathe evenly. She quickly recited the closure and knelt to gather the shards of her things. The host rushed to announce an intermission and the muttering crowd dissolved.\n\nAndev crouched next to Jenoye, and this time, Jenoye let her help. \"I could probably fix this,\" Andev suggested, holding up two halves of a cup.\n\nJenoye forced a smile and felt it go askew on her lips. \"Don't know if I'll be needing it anytime soon.\"\n\n\"What? You were incredible. I\u2014\"\n\n\"You've got a job to do.\" Jenoye took out a stoppered bottle from a hip pocket. \"Here. A tea to steady you through the performance. You and the troupe need to get paid. Go on, you'd better help them get ready.\" She pressed the bottle on Andev and hurried away to her cabin.\n\nJenoye sorted through her damaged tools in a daze. She hadn't entirely thought through the consequences of success. Now, when she tried, her mind just turned away.\n\nWhen she was done salvaging what she could, it was nearly performance time. She might as well go and see if her tea had worked. Right? No one would recognize her in regular clothes with her hair curled over her witch-eye and ears. She took her cloak off and finally felt something: a strange sense of relief. For the first time in weeks, she wasn't fretting about the competition.\n\nThe first thing Jenoye saw in the banquet hall was a board with the names of the two finalists. Her name wasn't there. It hurt, but not as much as she'd expected it to.\n\nHalf of the troupe was present, dressed as archaic naval officers and mingling. Dancing had just begun when the faux pirates burst in, led by Andev in the captain's hat. Andev stood tall and delivered her lines boldly, and then there was a great deal of acrobatic fencing and dramatic fisticuffs between the \"pirates\" and the \"officers.\"\n\nFinally, with most of the pirates vanquished, Andev approached Jenoye, followed by a spotlight. In one hand, she gripped a rope that dropped from the ceiling, and in the other, a camellia.\n\nBemused, Jenoye felt Andev silently ask for her permission. Jenoye's witch-ears weren't open, but it seemed they still had some connection. Not sure what she was agreeing to, she nodded.\n\nAndev placed the flower in Jenoye's lapel, swept an arm around her, wrapped the rope around them both, shouted some ridiculous, defiant lines to the crowd, and then\u2014\n\nJenoye's feet left the ground. \"What\u2014!\" She gasped as they flew up toward the starry ceiling. They soared out of the light to a shadowed balcony where the troupe's waiting hands helped them land. Jenoye could barely hear the pleased roar of the crowd over the pounding of her own pulse.\n\nAndev released Jenoye and stood back. She rubbed the back of her neck. \"I do beg your pardon,; I know that was very silly. Toural hadn't written an ending, y'see. I had to do something. Now I hope I'm done with all of this forever.\" She returned the mostly empty bottle of nerve-steadying tea to Jenoye, and then Andev's face grew serious. \"But...your chance to be the tea witch of the Starlight Spectacle. Is it gone?\"\n\nJenoye tried to summon her professional face, but Andev seemed to read the answer anyway. \"Oh. No, no! I didn't\u2014I'll go tell the judges. I'll tell them everything. Surely they'll\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right,\" Jenoye said. And it was, but why? She uncorked the bottle and shook out the last few drops into her mouth. \"I\u2014I did what a tea witch promises. If I hadn't helped you, I wouldn't be a tea witch. And honestly? A tea witch is all I've ever wanted to be.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Most Worthy End by Timothy Shea ]\n\nThe ends don't justify the means.\n\nA short, simple turn of phrase, one that has served as a cornerstone of moral philosophy for pretty much as long as moral philosophizing has been a thing. Plato said it. Aquinas said it. Even thinkers with ostensibly nothing else in common\u2014Ayn Rand and Noam Chomsky, for instance\u2014had jumped on the anti-Consequentialist bandwagon at some point in their lives. The message those six words embody is the touchstone of mental juggernauts, tirelessly explored and expounded upon and explored again by some of the greatest minds humanity has ever known.\n\nAnd, to Abrams Miller, it was complete bunk.\n\nNow, it wasn't as if he suffered from a total lack of empathy, or that he held no appreciation of what it meant to follow a higher calling. He cared about other people. At least he thought he did. And he respected those that walked the path of righteousness for righteousness's sake, even if he didn't follow them. Blessed be the names of Plato and Aristotle and all that. Theirs was a noble calling, truly. It just wasn't for him.\n\nNo, as far as his own life was concerned, Abrams preferred a more Machiavellian approach. It was better to be successful than to be righteous. After all, Socrates had wound up sucking hemlock while the Athenian elders went on to die peacefully in their beds. So what if his name had lived on through the ages while those same elders had melted quickly into obscurity? That knowledge could hardly offer succor to a corpse.\n\nAnd as for the others, the Thomas Aquinas-types who had pinned their moral certitude on a belief in their God, Abrams felt nothing but utter contempt. Theirs were nothing but lives wasted on a lie.\n\nHow could he be so sure of himself? How could he be so certain in his condemnation of other's certainty? It was simple, really.\n\nWhen those men had lived, beating their chests and preaching their faith in the divine, God\u2014the real one\u2014hadn't even been born yet.\n\n\"Dad, i'm cold,\" Aizika muttered, miserable as a knife-like breeze cut through the dark ringlets of her hair.\n\nAbrams didn't answer at first. He let his gaze continue to wander across the Behemoth's open-air deck, taking everything in with the cold precision of a dispassionate fanatic; Captain Samson perched on the steering platform, the seedy-looking crew milling between cargo pallets, his own two portos and muledroid tucked safely away on the meager square of planking that his coin had purchased. Shrouding it all was the persistent, impermeable shadow of the vessel's helium bladder.\n\n\"Dad,\" Aizika whined again.\n\n\"Shh,\" Abrams chided as he looked down at his young daughter. Her face was turned up towards him, cherry-red cheeks shining out from the inadequate protection of her oversized hood. \"These are bad men, girl, and they have better things to do than listen to a ten-year-old's cries. If they hear you, they might just cut out your tongue.\"\n\n\"I can still cry without a tongue,\" she shrewdly pointed out. \"I just wouldn't be able to talk.\"\n\n\"Then you won't like what they cut next,\" he warned her. Sometimes the girl's precociousness still took him off-guard. And worried him. If she had any idea of why they were making the Pilgrimage...\n\n\"Why do we have to take a skyship?\" she asked. She still sounded unhappy, but her question was noticeably hushed. \"Why can't we sail on the water like we did before? It was never this cold down there.\"\n\n\"Because,\" he answered, \"you can't get to God from the ocean.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"You'll see, girl. You'll see.\"\n\nTaking a deep breath, Abrams stared forward along their path. The glaring light cascading down past the helium bladder was deceptive. In the distance, barely visible, the steel blue of the ocean met with the unrepentant darkness of a storm system. Their crossing of the Pacific would be neither peaceful nor pleasant.\n\nThe sight of the gathering clouds was enough to make him queasy with dread. And, for one brief moment of weakness, he longed for the days of his youth when the journey could be made in hours instead of weeks. What was it his mother had called them? Bow-wings and air busses? He looked back fondly on the memory, his legs dangling from a padded chair, a nice man bringing him peanuts and pop. How long had it been since he'd had a peanut?\n\nAs quickly as the thought came to him, he shook it away as the blasphemy it was. He couldn't claim understanding of God's Revolution. He didn't know why the old world had to be destroyed in favor of the new, but he knew it was good. No nations, no wars, no pollution. And soon, if he just kept his faith, he would be elevated to greatness. God had spoken to him.\n\nThat didn't make the coming storm any less daunting. But it was necessary, the first of many sacrifices demanded by humanity's only true higher power.\n\nThe storm lasted three days. Three days of rain, three days of darkness, three days of stomach-churning agony as the three-hundred-meter Behemoth was tossed through the skies like a dead leaf in an autumn gale. The engines screamed and the wind howled until the two noises merged into the incessant shriek of a nightmare's orchestra. Aizika endured all of it in a petrified silence.\n\nHer stomach heaved over and over again during those three days, and between each spasming wretch, she wondered over and over again why they were there; why her father insisted on suffering through a Pilgrimage. She told her herself that it was for her, that he was doing it to buy her a better life, but she knew it was a lie. The man never did anything if it wasn't for himself. He hadn't even been willing to move back to Washington City when Mother had gotten sick.\n\nShe shivered constantly as the days dragged on, the worn fabric of Mother's rain-soaked sweatshirt plastered to her skin. The last trace of the woman's scent had been swallowed by the storm. All Aizika could smell was the static-tinged downpour cut by the sweat and terror of the crew. All she could hear were their shouted curses as they trimmed flaps and adjusted ballast and fought desperately to keep the skyship upright. She'd watched as two of the men were dragged over the guardrails by the storm, their screams quickly lost as they plummeted to a fate far below.\n\nTheir deaths went un-mourned. The surviving crewmen scarcely had time to eat, let alone to commemorate their fallen comrades. Aizika clutched desperately to the unadorned, utilitarian bulk of the four-legged muledroid, praying to God for the storm to pass. Her father crouched alone on the opposite side of the deck. The Behemoth continued to sway, and the rain continued to lash. Aizika felt she was trapped inside a hellish eternity.\n\nAnd then, eventually, eternity passed. The skies cleared into a star-strewn black as the air quieted into an eerie chill. Aizika relinquished her grip on the muledroid and tried to stand, stumbling off-balance when the deck failed to shift beneath her feet. Her father was standing by one of the guard rails, peering at something below.\n\n\"Here, girl,\" he called softly to her.\n\nAizika hesitated. The illusion of safety created by the guardrails had been shattered by the storm, and her feet refused to carry her anywhere near the edge of the deck. But her father beckoned her again, and slowly, she moved to comply. The rhythmic squelch of her footfalls seemed to clash irreverently with the loud snoring of the Behemoth's exhausted crew. Coming within a few feet of the rail, she paused again.\n\n\"Come look,\" he told her, a crooked finger pointing down over the side.\n\nWary, she watched him for a moment, but saw no sign of the manic detachment that seemed to grip him at times. All she saw on his face was...awe. Her curiosity overcame her fear and she walked the final three steps to the edge.\n\nLeaning carefully over the guardrail, Aizika had expected to be met with the inky black of the ocean. Instead she was greeted by a milky gray extending as far as she could see. A gasp left her lips. The moon, just cresting the horizon, sent a brilliant sliver of light across the mysterious world below. She stared in silence for a long while, sharing in her father's mesmerized stupor.\n\n\"Is that...ice?\" she asked eventually. Her eyes were adjusting now. Shadows marring the brilliant facade became towering peaks or deep crevices that looked impassible to anything made for land or sea.\n\n\"Yes,\" her father said. \"The Hau Freeze.\"\n\n\"How...how did this happen?\"\n\n\"We don't know. It's a mystery. A miracle, really. God saw fit its creation, and the angels made it so.\"\n\nAizika watched the endless shield of ice drift below them, trying to find some meaning in the jagged shards reaching up into the night sky. It stared back, an enigmatic canvas, cold and menacing.\n\n\"Why?\" was all she could bring herself to say.\n\n\"Because God willed it,\" her father answered. \"To protect herself from those who would see the New Kingdom destroyed. And to keep away those who aren't worthy.\"\n\n\"And we're worthy?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" he answered, sounding torn between confidence and apprehension. \"I've been summoned in my dreams.\"\n\nAizika didn't know what to say to that. She turned her attention back to the Freeze, and her father placed a hand on her shoulder. She shivered.\n\nHis touch held neither warmth nor comfort.\n\nAbrams seethed, but kept his face neutral. He hoped he was misreading the situation, but knew he wasn't. Up on the steering platform, Captain Samson was engaged in a hushed but animated conversation with his first mate, both of their gazes flickering frequently towards the horizon. The rest of the crew was likewise arrayed at the front of the Behemoth, staring ahead. All of them were restless. All of them were riveted by what lay beyond, turning back only to cast brief, malicious glares towards Abrams.\n\nThe cause of the sailors' apprehension was obvious. Dominating the horizon, and growing larger by the minute, the dark, brooding mass of the Island towered. It had looked benign enough when they'd first spotted land, two dark smears rising up from the endless sheets of ice. The slope of the twin mountains had appeared so gentle that they looked little more than glorified hills.\n\nNow, an hour's journey had laid bare the mountains' deception. The skyship's altimeter read 2,500 meters, and though they were still several kilometers from where they broached the ice, both mountains clearly swelled to peaks high overhead. The sheer power of the landscape made Abrams feel like they were nearing the edge of the world. It was, he thought, a home worthy of a god.\n\n\"Mr. Miller,\" the captain summoned him, his voice harsh and uncompromising.\n\nSo that was it then. Abrams suppressed a grimace and made his way over to the captain's platform. \"Yes?\" he asked. It was a struggle to keep hostility from the simple question, but, biting his cheek, he managed.\n\n\"A situation has come up that necessitates a change to our agreement,\" the captain began stiffly. \"We'll no longer be able to traverse up to the 4,200 meters required to deposit you at the summit. Instead, we will maintain our present altitude. My first mate informs me there is a path on the southern slope of the mountain. You and your equipment will disembark there.\"\n\n\"A situation,\" Abrams repeated, letting a biting dose of sarcasm slip into the words. \"By which you of course you mean that your crew refuses to comply with our agreement. Shocking.\"\n\n\"If you're dissatisfied with our service,\" the other man countered drily, \"perhaps next time you should hire a courier service to provide you transport.\"\n\n\"I hired you and your crew,\" Abrams replied, scowling, \"precisely because you told me you would go where courier services wouldn't. And, I'll remind you, I paid a premium for this. You were supposed to be tough. Fearless! Clearly, those qualities fall considerably short of what was advertised.\"\n\n\"Watch yourself, Mr. Miller,\" Captain Samson warned.\n\n\"Or what?\" Abrams hissed before he could be stopped by his better judgement.\n\n\"Or you'll find I'll alter our agreement further,\" he answered, cryptic and menacing. \"I assure you, the new terms will be even less to your liking. You're leaving my ship with your lives and freedom intact. There are not many that can make that claim. Consider yourself lucky.\"\n\nLuck was the last thing Abrams felt, but he recognized a losing battle when faced with one. It was just a test. Another test to be passed, and when he'd earned God's favor, he'd have his revenge on these bastards. He swore it.\n\nTwenty minutes later, unceremoniously deposited onto a rutted dirt track with two portos, a muledroid, and one daughter, he made that promise overt. He screamed after the fleeing airship, his voice snatched by the wind so that he was certain they couldn't hear a word of it. He screamed anyway.\n\n\"You bastards! You miserable, treacherous cowards! I will earn God's blessing and then I will come and find you and pay you back what you deserve you...you...you pirates!\"\n\nAizika's legs ached. Her shoulders sagged. Her feet felt like they were weeping from a dozen sores and blisters, the wounds thankfully hidden from view by her thick boots. It was cold now, and it hurt to breathe. Her head swam deeper and darker with every step she took. But still they walked.\n\nWhen they'd been driven off the Behemoth, the sun had still been in its ascent, maybe two fists above the horizon. Now it was two fists above the opposite horizon and sinking fast. Darkness would come soon. Aizika summoned the strength to look ahead, hoping to see some sign of the end. All she saw was a road climbing higher and higher, back and forth up to nowhere. But still they walked.\n\n\"Dad, I can't,\" she gasped as the thin mountain air tore at her throat. \"I can't.\" The porto behind her seemed to voice its assent with a particularly grating whir as it cycled its gear housing.\n\nHer father stopped, glaring back at her with a blend of agitation and annoyance. It felt like he blamed her for everything. She squirmed from one painful foot back to the other, wishing again that it had been him that had gotten sick and not Mother. Eventually, with a withering look at the setting sun, he caved.\n\n\"Fine. We can stop for the night by that wreck up there.\" He nodded towards the next bend, where a rusting hulk was sinking into the cracked and broken road. It looked impossibly far. It also looked like heaven. Wincing through the pain, she trudged onwards.\n\nThey'd passed by many such wrecks early on in the march. Aizika, being scared and exhausted, had hardly taken notice. The metal ghosts were nothing but obstacles that forced her off the road, another struggle to overcome in a journey already rife with them.\n\nNow that they were stopping, though\u2014now that she could breathe without her stomach churning and her head swimming through a field of darkness\u2014she gaped in fascination. It was metal, so much metal, at least ten times as large as the portos and muledroid combined. The sight of it was both awe-inspiring and sickening, a testament to the opulence that had defined the previous age. She wondered what it had been used for. Why was it here at all? Her curiosity got the better of her, and she braved a question.\n\n\"Was it an angel?\" she asked her father as the portos set about unpacking the shelter from the mule droid.\n\n\"No,\" he answered sharply. \"At least not one of the true angels. They were sent here to destroy God.\"\n\n\"And they suffered?\" she asked, noting the jagged rents in the metal, as if something had stripped it back like an orange peel.\n\n\"Yes, they suffered. As they should.\"\n\nAizika didn't answer. She instead poked around the wreckage as her father assisted the portos in staking the shelter in place. Her eyes caught on a black metal plate with silver runes carved into it. She wasn't much for reading, and most of it was incomprehensible, but one word of the jumble stood out clearly to her.\n\n\"Look, Dad,\" she called out, \"Abrams. Just like you!\"\n\n\"What?\" he said, looking startled. She held out the plate for him to see. He walked over, taking it into his gloved hands. His surprise and worry melted into something even more disconcerting. \"Yes, girl,\" he said, \"just like me.\" He tossed the metal farther down the slope and went back to setting up the shelter.\n\nOnce securely inside, he warmed up food from their stores in the muledroid. He ate his fill and then offered her the rest. She refused. Her stomach felt sour, and her limbs hung uselessly at her side. She was asleep in minutes.\n\nIt was not a restful slumber.\n\n\"There, girl,\" Abrams said, unable to keep the excitement from his voice as he pointed a weary finger in front of them. \"There, it is them. The Silos!\"\n\nHe hadn't been sure at first, afraid that his tired eyes were mistaken in what they saw or that his oxygen-starved brain was inventing the vision out of whole cloth. But it was no mistake. There they stood, half a dozen or more structures strewn out along the path, giant spheres of white and metal gleaming in the later afternoon sun. The Enchanted Silos. The home of God. He'd been marching up the mountain for nearly two days straight now, and travelling for much longer, but Abrams's journey was finally at its end. Almost.\n\n\"Girl?\" he asked when she said nothing. He turned back to see her still clinging atop the muledroid, the cold gray of her eyes boring into him. Her stare was as blank as it was terrifying. Suppressing a shudder, he turned back ahead and marched farther up the cracked and brittle path.\n\n\"Where's our sacrifice?\" she called out to him.\n\nHe froze, his heart pounding in his chest. That question, her eyes.... She knew.\n\n\"What?\" he asked, feigning ignorance in a hope that it would buy him time.\n\n\"Where's our sacrifice?\" she pressed again, her voice quiet but strong. \"You said we were making the Pilgrimage so we could sacrifice to God and earn a blessing. That's why we loaded all this wood onto the muledroid, right? So where is it? What are we sacrificing?\"\n\n\"God will provide,\" he answered, not daring to look back as he resumed his walk. \"Up ahead, I'm certain.\"\n\n\"Something lives up this high?\"\n\n\"God will provide!\" he snapped at her, silently cursing his dead wife and the sharp intellect she had passed on to their daughter. \"And if not, then we'll scrap one of the portos as a sacrifice instead. Useless fucking things would be worth a damn for once.\"\n\nAizika said nothing, her return to silence only confirming that she knew. It was fine. Even if she did know what he planned for her at the summit, there was nothing she could do to stop him. The girl had been unable to walk for hours now, confined by weakness to the back of the muledroid. She couldn't overpower him. She couldn't escape, and even if she could, where would she go?\n\nNo, he told himself, her knowing didn't change his plan. If anything, it made it easier. Her caustic petulance, her constant needling, it helped him forget that he'd once held her in his arms or that he'd comforted her when she called out at night. It hardened his heart against what had to come next. The sacrifice would still be unpleasant, but it would be worth it.\n\nHe was nearing the summit, muledroid and portos groaning behind him, when he noticed a simple stone altar built into the center of the road. His pulse quickened, and his apprehension melted into excitement. He allowed himself to picture all that would soon be his. Fame, power, riches beyond his wildest dreams, his prize for hearing God's call and proving beyond question his devotion. All it would take was a simple sweep of a knife.\n\n\"Come here, girl,\" he said, greed quickly overcoming a final stab of reluctant regret. Hauling her off of the mule droid, he began dragging her towards the altar.\n\n\"What are you doing!\" she cried out, her limbs flailing weakly against his grasp.\n\nHe thought for a moment of binding her hands but decided against it. What could she do now? His lungs rasping from the effort, he set her down atop the altar, pinning her in place with one hand while the other reached for his knife.\n\n\"Sorry, girl,\" he gasped, forcing himself not to look at her. \"I really am. I'm just doing what God told me.\" The knife slid free of its sheath and he lifted it towards the sky. He'd expected the girl to scream, or to cry, but she did neither. A chill came over him. He finally looked down and saw not terror in her eyes, but defiance. She smiled darkly.\n\n\"Holy Gabriel, servant of God, protect me!\" she called out with a voice calm and confident.\n\nAbrams moved to plunge the knife into her throat. Before he could, a mighty rush of wind swept the mountaintop, and a steel grip clenched around his wrist. He turned to see a beast of metal had appeared beside him, its wings splaying wide from a glistening copper chest. An angel. Abrams felt his breath leave him.\n\nWith a single twitch of its claw-like hands, the angel broke Abrams's wrist. The knife fell. Another blow from the metal creature sent him to his knees.\n\nAizika freed herself from his grasp, her eyes never leaving his as she went to retrieve the blade. Weapon in hand, she walked back over, her face set in a look of grim determination he knew all too well. He tried to get away, but the angel was too strong.\n\n\"Aizika, don't,\" he pleaded. \"Please, I'm...I'm your father.\"\n\n\"You think you're the only one who dreams?\" was all she said in reply. The knife flashed briefly in the sunlight as she slammed it home.\n\nWatching through Gabriel's camera feed, Gloria Olive Durham smiled as the blood poured from Abram Miller's throat. The girl had done well. Understandably, she'd been terrified when Gloria had visited her in her dreams last night, but she'd listened carefully and spoken the instructed words at the appointed time. Even better, she'd generally kept her wits about her throughout. Perhaps she was finally the one, a worthy heir to a god's legacy.\n\nBecause Gloria was getting old. Her gene therapy nanos were still doing a commendable job, but there was no use denying it any longer. Master of the world or not, the one thing she couldn't conquer was her own humanity. She had a decade. Maybe two. She needed to find her replacement. Unfortunately, that task had proven stubbornly difficult. It wasn't enough for her would-be prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to match her unsurpassable intellect; they needed to see her vision. They needed to understand what the New Kingdom was, what the world could become when governed by a single, all-powerful force. And they needed the steel in their heart to destroy those who would oppose that future.\n\nThis one\u2014Aizika Anne Miller\u2014she had promise. The girl's initials might not be as fortuitously grandiose as Gloria's own, and they'd lose at least a year teaching her the basics. She couldn't even read! But Gloria had peered into the girl's soul, and it was a mirror of her own. This could finally be the one. And, if not, she could always be disposed like the others.\n\nAs for the father...Gloria smiled, taking a sip of wine. The look of shocked terror on his dying face delivered a thrill she so rarely got to enjoy these days. It was his bewilderment as much as his pain that set her tingling. That he'd ever believed he was worthy of her blessing! Absolutely delightful.\n\nWell, it was about what he deserved. He'd been willing to kill for her favor, so certainly he was willing to lay down his life for the same? Ha! Of course he wasn't. Too bad for him, that's not how deities worked.\n\nShe let out a small sigh of satisfaction as she watched the light fade from his eyes, indulging in a second glass of wine. It had been a good day's work. She had found a new prot\u00e9g\u00e9, and another martyr had died for his god.\n\nThat was, she decided, a most worthy end.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Step Out Into the Blue by Hilary B. Bisenieks ]\n\nElaine's stomach leaped into her throat as the airship dropped into the cloud tops, the sky outside going from blue to gray. Cargo in the hold crashed and scattered when the ship leveled out a moment later, making Elaine glad she'd secured her tool-roll when they'd scrambled to take off a minute before.\n\nNext to her, the little caged navigation demon took a break from its incessant nattering to whimper.\n\nElaine swore. She shouldn't be here. They should have given her a chance to disembark before leaving the maintenance yard, unfinished installation be damned. Stupid lowlander raiders. With luck, the ship's skeleton crew would be able to repel the barbarians. She muttered a charm to keep herself upright, one of the few pieces of magic her job had taught her, and held her breath.\n\nIt was thrilling to be skybound, though, despite the terror. This could be her chance. Once they were back in port, management would have to transfer her and give her more training. Right? She'd threaten to quit, but as far as management was concerned, she was replaceable. The city of Kingston on Cumulus was full of young women just like her: gifted with magical abilities and ready to be suckered into menial labor with the promise of future training.\n\nAny shred of hope of safe return was shattered as something thumped against the hull, making the ship lurch. Boarders. It couldn't be anything else. The airship pitched, like the pilot was trying to buck the lowlander flier off, like this was some sort of fast attack flier, not a hulking great transport still half-loaded with medical supplies.\n\nThe demon whimpered again.\n\nShe banged on its cage. \"Hush up! I don't like this any more than you do.\" If the little bastard hadn't been so hard to corral in the first place, maybe Elaine would've gotten to the job on time and finished installing the demon before the lowlanders showed up. She should be sneaking around the academy after skiving of work right now, trying to learn more magery rather than wondering if she'd make it home alive.\n\nStupid job. If they would just give her the training she'd been promised for months, Elaine could've quit and gotten a real mage's job instead. Something safe and away from the maintenance yard and its lax security.\n\nThe ship lurched with a second thump. In the distance, someone shouted. Then gunshots rang out.\n\nThe airship burst through the cloud-tops, sunlight lancing through the porthole above Elaine's head, then leveled out.\n\nMore shouting. More shooting.\n\nThere was no place for Elaine to hide in the relay room. The space was little more than a closet lined with a mess of pipes and crystals that shunted power and control signals between the bridge and the ship's engines and lift units. If she wanted to avoid being shot by a lowlander, she'd have to find somewhere else.\n\nThe narrow corridor outside was empty for the moment. Elaine didn't know much about the layout of the ship\u2014she'd mostly done installs on smaller, merchant-class vessels, not these military supply ships\u2014but she'd passed an entrance to the hold on her way aboard. The lowlanders would look there at some point, but hopefully they wouldn't do too thorough of a search until they'd set the ship down someplace. It wasn't a great idea, but it wasn't like she had a better plan.\n\nElaine grabbed her tool-roll and crept out of the relay room and down the corridor, shutting the door against the nav demon's protests as softly yet swiftly as she could. She stifled a yelp at a sudden noise behind her and dashed the rest of the way to the hold, expecting at any moment to hear a gunshot or a shout, but nothing happened.\n\nIn the hold, the cargo was scattered across the deck from their evasive maneuvers. The ship was supposed to stop over in the maintenance yard just long enough for Elaine to install the nav demon before moving on. It shouldn't have even been loaded to begin with. Nevertheless, the chaos of the hold was a godsend.\n\nElaine found a hiding spot among some pallets of bandages beneath a heavy tarp where she could still see the doorway. From there, she might be able to manage a stunning spell. She knew the words for one at any rate. If it came to a fight, her chances weren't good, but at least in the hold, she had some space to move and evade.\n\nShe hadn't been pursued into the hold, and the shooting had stopped. Maybe the lowlanders had been repelled? Elaine didn't know how large a crew had been aboard when they had taken off, nor how many lowlanders had been in pursuit.\n\nA shadow passed across the sliver of hallway outside, and a moment later, a woman stepped through the door. She had commanding bearing, definitely not one of the ship's original crew. So much for that hope.\n\nThe woman wore a motley but dashing ensemble that looked like it had been pillaged from half the sky's armies: her breeches, blouse, and vest a riot of contrasting colors, topped with a long, heavy coat that nearly brushed the floor. In one hand, she bore a carbine like those used by air crews around the maintenance yard, while her other hand gripped a tall staff that she seemed to lean on slightly.\n\nA mage's staff. Its power tingled at the edge of Elaine's perception.\n\nHad this lowlander stolen a mage's staff, or was she herself a mage? The woman stalked through the hold. She didn't carry herself like any of the mages Elaine had met\u2014no haughtiness in her dress or her step. But she didn't look like the pictures of barbaric lowlanders from the papers, either.\n\nThe woman passed within a few feet of Elaine's hiding spot, and Elaine prayed she could hold herself still enough. She could cast an illusion to hide further, but not without making a sound. The officer walked on, though, step, thump, her footfalls and the sound of the staff hitting the deck the only sounds in Elaine's world. Then, satisfied, the woman left, and Elaine could breathe again.\n\nElaine stayed put, wondering what she should do. It was a foolhardy thought, but if she could steal the staff, surely even her meager abilities would allow her to send some sort of distress signal. The chances of her being able to steal it, whether the lowlander was mage or simple pirate, were slim.\n\nIf she had the demon, though... Its abilities were limited, but with luck and maybe some coaxing, Elaine might be able to use it to get a message out.\n\nOne of the first spells that Elaine had taught herself was a silencing charm. It made it easier to sneak around the mage's academy and get bits and pieces of the training she'd otherwise been denied. It came in handy now, as she extricated herself from under the tarp and crossed the hold.\n\nThe ship had sunk back into the cloud layer, though the smoothness of its flight suggested they were yet near the top, and the shadows in the corridor outside had lost some of their definition.\n\nShe eased open the door to the relay room and peeked inside, the effort of maintaining her silencing charm for so long draining on her. Indeed, the room was quiet once Elaine entered and closed the door. She released her silencing charm, feeling the weight of maintaining it lift from her shoulders, and she breathed deeply for a few moments, her back against the door.\n\nIt wasn't until she took another look around the room after collecting herself that Elaine realized why the room was so quiet. The nav demon, who had nattered at her quietly in its own language nearly constantly since she'd collected it from the office on her way to this job, was gone. The lowlander officer. She must have taken it while she was searching the ship.\n\nThe demon wasn't smart, exactly\u2014it could replace a human navigator, and it knew how to keep altitude and heading for the ship if the pilot stepped away from the helm\u2014but Elaine didn't doubt for a moment that it would give her up, her presence if not her location, the moment it felt threatened. They already knew she was aboard, then.\n\nUsing the demon to send a distress signal had been her best plan, but another option remained. A desperate option, built on chance and hope, though little of either. The mage's staff.\n\nElaine didn't know if the lowlander captain used it for its magical power or just for the power that it implied, but if Elaine could get it, the power that it held would make up for her own lack of talent. With the staff, she could get home, and they'd have to train her. She'd make them do it.\n\nThe ship began to shake a little, buffeted by turbulent winds. They were sinking lower into the cloud layer.\n\nSlowly, Elaine got to her feet and listened at the door. If she could keep her balance, the creaking of wood around her should obviate her need to use the silencing charm again for a while, anyway. After a moment's consideration, she also got out the biggest of her wrenches. With the element of surprise, it might serve her better than trying to use an unfamiliar spell.\n\nOnce again Elaine stepped into the corridor, ears straining to hear footsteps over the sounds of wind and wood. She stayed low, each step careful as she headed towards the bridge. It had sounded like at least two flyers had landed on the airship, but who knew if either remained, or if they'd departed, leaving behind a prize crew?\n\nElaine saw the first bullet hole as she reached the end of the corridor\u2014a jagged, splintered scar in the wall. She peered around the corner but saw only more bullet holes, empty shell casings, and a splash of blood.\n\nThe air reeked of gunpowder, smoke still hanging in the air. Light lanced through a bullet hole in the far wall.\n\nElaine took shallow breaths as she moved down the corridor towards the door to the bridge, expecting at any moment to hear someone shouting at her from behind, or the crack of a gunshot.\n\nThe door to the bridge was closed, but over the sound of the wind outside, Elaine could hear a voice. She inched her way towards the door and put an eye up to a bullet hole in the wall by the doorframe.\n\nThe lowlander officer was inside, seated at the controls. Elaine's limited view, however, didn't show her anyone else. Or the nav demon or the staff.\n\nElaine pressed her ear to the hole just in time to hear a quick \"Yes, Captain Barton,\" then footsteps approaching. She dared a glance through the hole, just long enough to see that someone else, a young woman, on the bridge, was coming towards the door. Elaine looked left and right, and then moved to the other side of the door so that she would be between the door and the wall when it opened.\n\nWith a tremendous effort, she muttered the words for an illusion, followed by her silencing charm. A real mage would be able to weave a tapestry of light and dark to perfectly conceal anything they wished or simply turn themselves invisible.\n\nElaine turned the color of the wall behind her.\n\nA moment later, the door swung open, nearly slamming into Elaine's head, and the young woman walked out, passing down the corridor and around the corner without so much as a glance back.\n\nStill on silenced feet, Elaine exhaled and slipped around the door.\n\nThe bridge was clean, save for a few splinters of wood from the bullet hole in the wall behind her and some shards of glass where the bullet had come to rest in one of the gauges. The huge panoramic window that dominated the far side of the bridge was undamaged.\n\nAnd the captain's chair was empty.\n\nA tingle of power and the lightest touch of something cold accompanied a steely voice. \"Can I help you with something, little one?\"\n\nElaine shook her head, suddenly unable to find her words.\n\n\"Turn around nice and slow, and let's have a look at you,\" Captain Barton commanded.\n\nElaine complied. Her gaze skated around the wall as Barton looked her over, finally settling on the splintered bullet hole. What would it feel like to be shot, she wondered? Or would they even waste a bullet on her? They could just toss Elaine overboard and let gravity do the work.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Barton asked.\n\nElaine stammered, trying to come up with a convincing lie, wondering what it mattered if she was just going to be killed or sold into slavery.\n\n\"Speak.\" The captain didn't so much point her staff at Elaine as incline it with practiced confidence.\n\nCaptain Barton's command didn't feel harsh, for all that her words were cold. Elaine felt the magic course through her, a sort of warmth that brought the truth to her lips. \"I was aboard, installing a nav demon, when your flyers were spotted, and I wasn't given a chance to disembark before the ship took off.\"\n\n\"We found your nav demon. What I'm more interested in, though, is what you were doing right here.\"\n\nElaine paused for a moment. Again, Barton inclined her staff a fraction of an inch, and the warmth washed through Elaine. \"I saw you with your staff when I was hiding in the hold. I was going to use the demon to send a distress signal, but then I found it gone.\"\n\n\"You wanted to steal my staff, then?\"\n\nElaine nodded.\n\n\"Not the wisest plan, but you were clever enough to evade us for this long. And you've a bit of talent to you already.\" She nodded. \"You could be of use.\"\n\n\"Of use?\" Elaine blanched. She'd almost rather be killed. Better dead than enslaved to barbaric lowlanders.\n\n\"Sit.\" The power she put through Elaine wasn't violent, but it lacked the warmth of the earlier compulsion. \"And put that wrench away. We both know it wouldn't have done you any good.\"\n\nElaine's feet took her to one of the chairs beside the captain's, her knees bent, and she sat. She opened her tool-roll and replaced the wrench. When she'd only been compelled to speak, Barton's power had felt like a warm tingle, gently leading her to do the right thing. This, though\u2014Elaine felt cold, disconnected from her whole body.\n\n\"You'll stay there and not make trouble, I trust?\" Barton asked. \"I can make you comply, but I find that tiresome.\"\n\nElaine nodded. Anything to avoid that cold power that severed her from her own will.\n\nBarton seated herself at the ship's controls and pulled the speaking horn towards herself. \"Nell, you can come back now. I've found our stowaway.\"\n\nThey could be going anywhere, flying through the cloud layer, but Captain Barton, checking against the binnacle, seemed confident of their heading.\n\nNell appeared a few minutes later, scowling at Elaine. She and Barton had a quick whispered conversation in a Slavic-sounding language, which led to more scowling before Nell stalked off, muttering.\n\nThe ship dipped below the clouds, revealing a scorched landscape. Elaine hadn't realized that they'd flown far enough to reach one of the Exterminations. Nothing moved below them. Nothing lived. The whole of the earth's surface, for hundreds of miles, littered here and there with the hulking great bones of impossible beasts, was burned, salted, and poisoned so that nothing would grow.\n\nIn the distance, though, there seemed to be some variation, some patch of color breaking up the grays and blacks and browns.\n\n\"I won't be your slave,\" Elaine said, her eyes fixed on that patch of color on the horizon. \"I think I'd rather be left here to fend for myself.\"\n\nThe captain laughed. \"Slave? Really? Is that what people are saying about us nowadays?\"\n\n\"You said that I could be 'of use,'\" Elaine said, reddening at Barton's laughter. Did this lowlander take her for a fool? Well, if she did, that wasn't wholly unfair. Elaine had tried to steal a mage's staff.\n\n\"I did, and you can,\" Barton said. \"If you want to. You could be trained, work a job that you enjoy. Or you can be returned to your former life, if that's what you'd prefer. That's not what I would choose, though, if I were you.\"\n\n\"Really,\" Elaine said, feeling somehow safe to let sarcasm edge into her voice. \"Because from where I'm sitting, it still feels like I'm being kidnapped. Anyway, what do you know of my life?\"\n\nCaptain Barton turned and looked Elaine dead in the eyes. \"You've got talent that's going to waste. You work a dead-end job in the hopes that one day you'll get the chance to climb the ladder, get some training, and do something better. The rich are robbing you blind and telling you you're lucky to have as much as you do. I'd trade that away in an instant.\"\n\nElaine's eyes widened, then narrowed. \"And I suppose that I'd be better off among barbarians and pirates, scraping out a living on the surface, always on the lookout for some hulking great monster who could come along and eat me up like a snow pea?\"\n\n\"You really don't know anything about what it's like down on the surface, do you? Only the propaganda they've been feeding you since the day of your birth.\"\n\nThe patch of color on the horizon was somewhat larger than before, though without any sense of speed or scale, Elaine couldn't guess how long it would be until they reached it. \"I suppose that you're going to tell me that it's a fantasyland where nothing bad happens? You're going to say that nobody from the surface ever forms a raiding party, boards a cargo ship, kills her crew, and kidnaps a young woman who shouldn't even be aboard, for instance? Try the other one, it's got bells.\"\n\n\"Believe me or don't,\" Barton said, looking again at Elaine. \"We'll be landing in less than an hour's time. If you're convinced that you'd be better off back where you came from, I'll personally see to it that you're put on a flyer and left somewhere safe with a distress beacon and a week's worth of food. I was like you, once.\" She carefully pulled one sleeve up, revealing a mass of taut, scarred skin covering half of her forearm. Above it, there was part of a faded tattoo, its blue-black lines describing some sort of regimental insignia.\n\n\"Before I went to the surface, I served the Queen. I was a mage for the Fifth Heavy Dragoons, fighting for queen and country above the continent.\"\n\nThe captain fell silent, and for a minute, there was only the sound of engines and wind.\n\nElaine broke the silence at last. \"What happened to make you leave?\"\n\n\"My platoon's flyer was shot down near Zagreb. Nobody else survived. I barely did. Some civilians pulled me out of the fire, helped patch me up.\n\n\"I could have gone back. I could have laid a beacon on myself and brought my own rescue, gone home to medals. But I saw something. Those refugees, living on the surface? They had nothing. Nobody but themselves to rely on. Zagreb, high overhead, was not their home. The occupying forces had made certain of that. But they kept going. There was talk among them of a safe haven, so I decided that I'd help them get there.\"\n\nCaptain Barton lapsed into silence again. After a few minutes, Elaine felt compelled to ask, \"Then what happened?\"\n\n\"We got picked up by a crew out searching for refugees and taken to a camp. I stayed. Not there, ultimately. But the leaders of that camp had already scouted out several locations for us to move to. By the time that location was no longer tenable, everything was set for us to up and move to another place.\"\n\nSilence, again. \"So you're taking me to, what? A refugee camp?\"\n\n\"Yes. And no. Freiheit isn't just a camp, though we have people trying to find refugees, still. The war isn't just the glory you read about in the papers. Nobody talks about the human toll on those uninvolved citizens around whose ears the wars keep descending, I bet. I certainly didn't think about any of that until some of those very people saved me.\"\n\nA thought struck Elaine. \"What happened to the crew? The guys you stole this ship from?\"\n\n\"They're safe, I promise.\"\n\n\"Like hell they are! I saw bullet holes. I saw blood! I may have been a bit of a fool trying to get your staff, but I'm not stupid.\"\n\n\"Look,\" Barton said, pointing to a ragged, bloody hole in one leg of her trousers. No wonder she'd been leaning on her staff earlier. \"The only person shot was me. This ship's former crew were put on flyers, unconscious but unharmed, and left somewhere they'd be found. Just as you would have been, if we'd found you when we first boarded. That's as far as I can vouch for their safety.\"\n\nElaine gave her a skeptical look. This Captain Barton certainly wasn't like any of the lowlanders she'd ever heard about. Hell, she couldn't think of anyone who would make an effort not to harm people who were shooting at them.\n\n\"I didn't start my day looking to kidnap anyone,\" Barton said, seeming to read her mind. \"But here you are. Your being here is my mistake, and I've got to take some responsibility for that. We're not the bloodthirsty pirates that your serials and newspapers make us out to be. The women and men of Freiheit aren't anyway. We take what we need, as payment for the violence that's been done to our people by society and wars, but we don't take lives. Not if we can help it.\"\n\n\"Alright, say I come to Freiheit,\" Elaine said. \"And say I don't take you up on the offer of safe transport away. What did you mean about training?\"\n\n\"As a mage,\" the captain said. \"There are precious few of us around. Those charms to turn you colors and silence your footfalls were well done for someone with little training. Just think what you could do if you were apprenticed to an actual mage.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Elaine's heart leaped, then sank. Training, yes. That was what she had wanted, what she'd begged for, but like this? Leaving behind all that she knew up in the sky? The other girls from the boarding house would wonder what happened to her. Maybe some of them would miss her. \"What happens if I want to leave? Later, I mean?\"\n\n\"Anyone in Freiheit is free to leave, so long as they don't mean us harm. The council might decide to bind you to certain promises, if you did decide to leave. Many of us are thieves of a sort, after all. Anyhow, think it over. We arrive in half an hour.\"\n\n\"And if there are any affairs I need to wrap up, back where I'm from?\"\n\nBarton gave her a critical look. \"You resent your job, where they likely pay you pittance, so you live in a boarding house with other girls, sorry, women, like yourself. If you had any family attachments, you would have mentioned them already. How am I doing?\"\n\nElaine glared at her.\n\n\"The offer I make to you is sincere, but it's not the offer I would make to everybody. Living in Freiheit is an adjustment, and it's not one that everyone can make.\"\n\nThe patch of color in the distance had grown so that Elaine could now see it for what it was: a city, fortified and vibrant, in the midst of one of the Exterminations. There, below the cloud layer, there was life, greenery, even. It seemed such an unlikely sight, though she knew that people had lived on the surface for countless millennia.\n\n\"If I do stay, and I'm not saying that I will, but if I do, can I send word back, at least to let some of the others at the boarding house know I'm safe?\"\n\nBarton's face softened a touch, and she nodded. \"If you stay, of course. We have our ways.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nIf...\n\nIt would be a change, but wasn't that what Elaine had been wanting? And Captain Barton had said that she could always go home if she chose to.\n\nSomehow, Elaine knew that wasn't what her choice would be.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lips of Red, Lips of Black by A. J. Hackwith ]\n\nIt took three bone mages and a dreadnaught with a terrorsoul to capture the paper pirate Katha. A crown of stolen reliquary shards, worth half a ship each, still nettled her dark hair as she came, barefoot and snarling, before the Lady of Embers.\n\nThe dreadnaught was the Lady's, and she its captain. All of the Isles knew it. She'd given her own fear to fuel its skyheart, and now had none left of her own. Each ship required a sacrifice of its captain to fly, a desire, an emotion, a fate. Ships with terrorsouls were fast and feared, as were their captains.\n\nSo all Isles know the Lady's ways were not kind, especially to one of her own. But through coal and spike, the pirate Katha had one refrain: \"Just wait until my true love comes.\"\n\n\"Your crew is dead. Your friends have flown,\" the Lady said, as she split Katha's lip and placed a traitor's brand upon her skin. \"You'll die for what you've stolen from me.\"\n\nAnd Katha's smile was red touched with iron blood. \"Just wait until my true love comes.\"\n\n\"To the decks,\" the Lady instructed her women, and on an eight-armed skyhook beast they flew. Collared mages bound Katha to a pillar on the rusting deck, a pyre of cold straw to warm her toes. Smoke clogged the Isle of Embers in a sooty fog and stained her lips with ash. A taste before the flames.\n\nYet Katha said, \"Just wait until my true love comes.\"\n\n\"All you love is lost and so are you,\" said the Lady. \"I burned your ship, you foolish thing, and I'll do you just the same. Who dares to fly a paper ship in the realm of flames?\"\n\nKatha, bloodied, burned, and bound, laughed high and loud. The wind picked up, guttering torchfire. The flecks of black in the wind coalesced, a wing of ash pierced through the gloom. There rose a black cloud, a wyrm, a myth of ash and sail. Light speared the deck, wind swept the straw away. The dreadnaught swayed as cannons rose, under fire from a ship of shadow and lightning.\n\n\"She still flies.\" The paper pirate's hands were free, but the Lady of Embers wreathed herself in flame.\n\n\"I burned your ship and branded your skin, you have no way to fly,\" the Lady said. \"There's no sky for a branded soul.\"\n\n\"Aye, that might be, if it was me who captained her.\" The vessel was a blot of sky, ink and fury laced with bone-white fire. Soot settled on Katha's brow. She turned her face into it like a kiss as she mounted the railing. \"But even you should know, paper does not make a ship, as flesh doesn't make a soul. There's better fuel than fear.\"\n\nIron buckled and rust wept down. The Lady of Embers threw fire at a futile sky, and the ash prow embraced it whole. \"Impossible! No fool can sacrifice her heart to the sky and still live.\"\n\nAnd at that, Katha paused, one foot over open air. Flames licked her boot but were ignored. Flame and ash seemed nothing to one who grieved. \"That's what I told her,\" she said. \"That's the thing about love\u2014it doesn't care.\"\n\nStorm-wrought light lashed out from the ghost ship, piercing the dreadnaught's terrorsoul. An empire of fear returned to its captain like a flood in a dry creek bed. The Lady of Embers ignited the sky as she went down.\n\nAnd Katha leapt to a ship of paper ash. She stroked a charred railing, for there was no wheel to steer, and pressed her sooted fingertips to her mouth. The skyheart flew where it wanted, brittle and burning and bright.\n\n\"Burn that horizon, love,\" she whispered. The ship took the sky on ash-eaten hearts, and Katha's smile was black.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Every Subject's Soul Is Her Own by Kelly Rossmore ]\n\nAn American chica crooning about love filtered in from the radio in the corner as First Mate Maria Estrella Gutierrez slid into a rickety chair at one of the tables of the dingy bar. Across from her in a striped men's suit sat her former best friend, a former person, too, according to los locos. Some people believed that the gears and bolts they installed in place of eyes and bits she'd rather not think about meant that a Compass like Emilia was no longer a human being.\n\nAll the air pinched out of her chest as she forced herself to look at her friend. Gears turned under what remained of the dark skin at her neck as Emilia cocked her head at Maria, her mechanical eyes blinking slowly and with an audible click.\n\nDios, it was a blessing that the American music and the conversations from the half-filled Havana bar drowned out the rest of the sounds from Emilia's augmented Compass body. Metal replaced half the skin on her arms, glinting yellow under the cheap lights, and there were couplings on the palms of her unnaturally still brown hands, which rested on the beer-stained table.\n\nShe missed Emilia's dark eyes, the way the old lamps of the neglected streets they'd grown up on in Santiago had rendered them luminous, reflecting her friend's girlish dreams for a better life. A life where they'd still have each other, Cuba would be free, and they'd have a permanent roof above their heads.\n\n\"Maria,\" Emilia said, her head still cocked. The thick curls she'd once sported would've covered the gears in her neck, but had been replaced now by a short cap. \"You asked for me?\"\n\nIt was her voice, the medical mechanics of Guantanamo Bay hadn't changed that, but it was foreign in all other ways. Emilia spoke in the precise and emotionless English of Compasses instead of the rapid, fiery Spanish of their youth.\n\n\"I wanted to see you,\" Maria said, surprised to discover it was the simple truth.\n\nFor years she hadn't, paralyzed by her own guilt and afraid to see what her friend had become. But her life had become stacked with regrets, and she'd acquired a growing need to shorten that stack.\n\n\"You want me on your ship,\" Emilia said. \"They say your last job fue una tragedia.\"\n\nEmilia's voice was still flat, so Maria reined in her hope at the mixing of Spanish with English, something many of their Cuban people did these days en una rebeli\u00f3n peque\u00f1a against the American occupation.\n\n\"S\u00ed,\" Maria said, encouraging her as if they were young girls again. \"Te necesito. Por favor.\"\n\nEmilia frowned, though with those mechanical eyes Maria could no longer read how she really felt. Or if she felt the same about anything anymore, Maria thought, pain lurching in her chest again. Had it all been for nothing?\n\n\"Bueno,\" was all Emilia said, though. \"What do you need?\"\n\n\"I need you to remember,\" said Maria.\n\nFrom the deck of the American airship Justice, Maria gazed out across the dockyards of Havana Harbor. Far more crowded than even ten years ago, the harbor currently had a dozen airships of various sizes docked, while beyond them countless seagoing ships of every size bobbed in the water. The Justice was of average dimensions for an airship, lightly gunned but surprisingly swift and maneuverable;: an ideal scout ship. All the airships and the large military sea vessels before her were American, not Cuban, and more appeared each year.\n\nAfter helping Cuba finally oust Spain at the turn of the century, the United States had offered a big brotherly hand in setting up a new government on the island. Motivas ulteriores emerged in the years after, though, as the US expanded their airship construction operations at Guantanamo to assert control over the shipping lanes of the Americas and later in response to the first outbreak of world war in Europe.\n\nWith world war brewing there once again, America's demand for airships and the Compasses necessary to operate them had swelled even higher in the last few years.\n\nSo had its need to exert political influence over Cuba in the name of protecting its assets. Cuba's freedom had been a brief spark in a long history of occupation, extinguished once again.\n\n\"Gutierrez! Get over here,\" Captain Fred Connors said, his gringo accent butchering Maria's name again across the deck.\n\nShaped like the hull of an old European warship, the airship Justice was lighter, able to be lifted by the massive balloons above it and powered by an engine whose secrets the US kept under wraps from Cubans\u2014except for Compasses like Emilia. Whatever the engine did, a human had to be augmented to control it.\n\nThe captain held court above her at the ship's sterncastle, while Maria stood on the main deck helping the Cuban crew load wooden boxes of supplies onto the Justice. Maria threw down a rope with more force than needed and climbed up the stairs with what she hoped was a neutral expression.\n\nWomen weren't looked at favorably for crewing airships or becoming the Compasses that piloted them, but orphans like Maria and Emilia with neither family to care about them nor white enough beauty had been allowed to volunteer for the new and highly dangerous airship prototypes and Compass transformations. Maria knew lucky timing\u2014volunteering when so few would\u2014and persistence had been everything. And even so, within the American airship fleet, she knew she was fortunate to have risen to first mate; she could go no higher.\n\n\"Yes, Captain?\" she said once she'd joined him, unsurprised to see the captain's lapdog, one of the two American engineers, standing with Captain Connors on the sterncastle.\n\nThrough the closed doors behind them lay the navigation room, where Maria had left Emilia checking the equipment earlier. This included the strange machine Emilia would soon connect herself into that regulated the engine, a contraption with gears and pumps and mechanical slots to place her arms and her face, and viewing lenses that lined up with her artificial eyes.\n\n\"She couldn't have been the only Compass you could find,\" the captain said, staring her down. In his polished American uniform with his imposing height and receding sandy brown hair, it was a stern look bien practicada.\n\nMaria was also well-practiced in withstanding it. \"Compasses travel up into the sky, Captain. They do not fall from it.\"\n\n\"Sometimes they do, with the rest of us.\" The black humor triggered a boyish grin that softened his usually harsh demeanor. \"Since our last one vanished without a sign, I'd say we're due for one to tumble into our laps.\"\n\nMaria understood why the Americans had made him a captain. He wielded that infectious grin well, aware how a joke at the right moment and a determined attitude could inspire his subordinates. It didn't overcome the whole, however. \"I spoke to several Compasses,\" she replied, \"and there were reservations. What happened on our last voyage is known.\"\n\nHis frown intensified, as she'd expected it would, which helped cover up her lie. She'd approached only Emilia.\n\n\"I thought those automatons couldn't feel anything,\" he said, before turning to his lapdog engineer. \"I never understood why they weren't declared military assets. We'd be assigned one then as needed, without a damn hunt.\"\n\nShe imagined the Compasses she'd worked with, all Cuban citizens who'd allowed their bodies and minds to be fractured in a sacrifice of self, handed around like objects. Hatred burned hot inside her.\n\nOf course his perrito engineer was quick to agree in a meaningless pageant of words, but Captain Connors soon brought his attention back to Maria. With an air of granting her a favor when in reality there was no time to find another Compass before their scheduled patrol, he said, \"Fine, we'll see how she does. We depart in the morning. Get the crew ready.\"\n\nHe looked up and down Maria's thin, deeply suntanned body in the crew jumpsuit, topped by a short mop of wild dark hair. His lip curled. \"You would hire the Negro woman Compass though.\"\n\nShe said nothing, because there was nothing polite to say. Just another herida upon endless ones.\n\nAs they were the only two women on board, Maria was unsurprised when Captain Connors told her to share her quarters with Emilia. When her friend entered the tiny first-mate's cabin that night, Maria asked, \"We're set?\"\n\nEmilia leaned against the closed door, the gray jumpsuit she wore similar to Maria's blue one, except hers had zippered sleeves that allowed Compasses to swiftly conquer a wayward engine. Her mouth curved upwards to form the same shy smile present in so many of Maria's best memories. \"S\u00ed, todo es listo. Vive Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed.\"\n\nMaria grinned at her friend so wide her cheeks ached. They'd grown up near one of the many monuments to Cuba's fallen patriot. She'd feared that after years of working as a Compass, Emilia would've forgotten the plan or resented her for changing the script. They had vowed to do everything together, but at the last moment before undergoing the surgery to become a Compass, Maria had lost her courage. Ever since, she'd sworn never to let fear control her again.\n\n\"I've missed you.\" Maria closed most of the gap between them, but not all. She didn't know how her friend felt about her anymore.\n\n\"The surgery,\" Emilia said haltingly, her usually distant voice collecting more emotion as she spoke. \"You forget so much. Your memories, how to talk. Some of us forget how to walk, too. We always have to think carefully about how to form words right.\"\n\nMaria closed her eyes in pain for a moment. That explained why most Compasses she'd met spoke as they did.\n\n\"From before, I remember fragments,\" Emilia said. \"You were in most of them. Enough of the plan was there, too, so it was familiar. I just needed you to remind me.\"\n\n\"We've been apart so long.\" Maria pushed herself to say it. \"Do you hate me?\"\n\nEmilia cocked her head like she had back in the bar in Havana. \"Why would I?\" She gestured at Maria and then herself. \"Familia. Para siempre.\"\n\n\"Para siempre,\" Maria whispered in return as they always had, her vision blurring. She hugged her friend, ignoring the whirl of gears near her ear and a patch of cool metal against her cheek.\n\nStrong arms encircled her, and soft words sank deep into Maria's soul. \"I'm glad you didn't do it.\"\n\nMaria's next breath emerged ragged. The immense burden she'd grown so accustomed to carrying was crumbling away, a relief beyond words, and yet its loss also left her raw and exposed.\n\nWhen they pulled apart, Emilia seemed to pull back emotionally, too, her face more remote. \"The plan works like this anyway,\" she said. She sat down on the bed and encouraged Maria to join her with a stiff pat of her augmented hand. \"Let's review the details.\"\n\nSince the Americans prohibited Cuban crew from possessing any handheld firearms for \"safety,\" Maria's smuggler contact in Havana had marked the boxes carrying the hidden guns with a splash of red paint. Two days after liftoff, near dawn, Maria distributed the weapons to the Cuban crew members.\n\nOne engineer they cornered down in the engine room with the threat of knives and fists, because no one would risk firing a shot there. Once he was secured with rope in the cargo hold, Maria directed her men to round up the few American sympathizers among the crew and lock them up with the engineer.\n\nA pistol in her hand, she crept down the cramped hallway to the perrito engineer's room. His lapdog ways had granted him the second best cabin on the ship, directly below the captain's. She'd chosen dawn because it was a rare time of day when the two men were apart; they often drank and talked long into the night.\n\nTwo of the crew stood just behind her. While all were armed, she'd reminded them they needed the engineer alive. She knocked on the locked door, and curses and grumbling erupted from inside. \"It's not my shift!\"\n\n\"Open up. I need to talk to you.\"\n\nThe door opened, and the man's unshaven, bitter face changed to shock when he absorbed the sight of the three of them, guns in hand. She pushed inside before he could prevent it, her men following. Still in his rumpled clothes from the day before, the engineer backed away toward the bed, stumbling over the pants, shirts and utensils scattered across the floor of the cluttered cabin. He snatched up a broom from the corner as if to ward them off with it.\n\n\"Come quietly, perro,\" one of her men said. He held the rope to tie him with.\n\nThe engineer looked up. Catching his thought instantly, Maria rushed toward him. She was too late.\n\n\"Captain! Mutiny!\" he yelled, banging the top of the broom against the ceiling above him.\n\nWhen she closed in on him, he shoved the broom into her, wielding it like a staff. It sent her tumbling onto the basura-filled floor. She raised her pistol, intending only to threaten with it, but the crack of a shot sounded from behind her.\n\nBlood blossomed high up in the engineer's chest. He stumbled back into a chest of drawers, staring at the bloody hand he'd pressed to his wound. The forgotten broom slipped from his other hand.\n\n\"Idiota,\" she said, glaring at the pale face of the crewman who'd shot him. The plan was to not kill anyone, especially the engineers. She removed the gun from the crewman's limp hand and said, \"Get him downstairs. Have the medics look at him.\"\n\nThere were two medics among the crew. Her men carried the engineer out into the hallway, where they encountered Emilia. Maria handed her the gun she'd taken from the man who couldn't be trusted with it.\n\nHer friend grasped it awkwardly, and Maria wordlessly showed Emilia how she held her pistol. Emilia copied her, saying, \"The captain heard that. Does he have a radio in his cabin?\"\n\n\"A small one, perhaps. The communications room is still secure?\" It had been Emilia's task to take it over and guard it, with the help of some crew.\n\n\"S\u00ed. I left three men there.\"\n\n\"Bueno, we must go quickly then. Before he talks to anyone out there.\"\n\nThey hurried upstairs and then moved more quietly as they neared the captain's door. Listening, she heard him saying, \"This is Captain Connors of the airship Justice. Mutiny! We require assistance. Anyone there?\"\n\n\"Pretend you need help,\" Emilia whispered in her ear.\n\nNo, Maria hadn't completely hidden her dislike for him. He'd rightfully believe she was part of the mutiny. \"You just joined us. You do it,\" she whispered back.\n\nEmilia stuffed the gun into her waistband at her back, her untucked shirt covering it, then knocked on the locked door. \"Captain? The crew are acting strange. Should we change course?\"\n\nFootsteps thudded on wood as he moved close to the door. \"Tell me what they're doing.\"\n\n\"They carried one engineer away. Down the stairs. And they were looking for someone. Perhaps me?\" Emilia spoke in her flat Compass voice, as if it had little to do with her. \"I hear them now. Getting closer.\"\n\nMaria tightened her grip on the pistol, waiting. A moment passed in silence. Would the captain risk opening his door to secure the ship's Compass? He moved around the cabin, then returned to the door. \"Get in,\" he said, and it creaked open.\n\nFrom her hidden position beside the doorway, Maria couldn't see inside. She followed after Emilia almost blindly, only to see the captain grab her friend's arm and pull her aside, a gun to her head. \"Lock the door,\" he told Maria.\n\nHer pulse racing along with her mind, she obeyed him. Her palm was sweating, and it was harder to hang onto the pistol one-handed as she manipulated the door lock.\n\n\"Just as I thought,\" Captain Connors said once she faced him again. \"You two know each other.\"\n\nMaria's gaze met Emilia's artificial eyes, doing their slow blink. Her face was neutral, but her body was twisted away from his, resisting as he used her as a shield. So he wouldn't feel the gun at her waist, Maria realized. He'd had no chance to search her.\n\nHe pressed the gun barrel closer to Emilia, who leaned her head away from it as best she could. \"Drop the weapon, or I'll shoot her.\"\n\nShe couldn't lose Emilia. To avoid that, she had to use her mind.\n\n\"An airship needs its Compass,\" Maria pointed out. \"You can't shoot her.\"\n\n\"Yes, I can.\" He lowered the gun near Emilia's hip instead. \"We aren't too far out. One session, maybe two, should be enough to regulate the engine. We can fly the rest of the way on manual control.\"\n\nIt was true. He could maim Emilia and finish her off later without endangering the ship. If he had his engineers, which he didn't, and a way to send for emergency help in manually docking the ship, which he did.\n\nThe small radio he'd been using was on his neatly ordered desk, clear in her line of sight. She'd been pointing her gun at the floor while he had Emilia, but she raised it now, telegraphing how much she wanted to shoot him. He smirked, angling his body sideways to be a smaller target, with Emilia between them.\n\nShe shifted her aim slowly to the right, as if giving up the idea, then shot the radio.\n\n\"Son of a bitch,\" he swore, his face reddening when he realized what she'd done.\n\n\"We have the ship,\" she told him. \"We have the engineers, and any crew that supported you. There's no one left to help you.\"\n\nEmilia joined in. \"Surrender. You'll be kept alive and safe, then traded later and freed.\"\n\nA minute ticked by, a bead of sweat trickling down Maria's face as she wondered whether he'd lash out like a cornered rat or yield to reason. The delay also allowed doubts to surface. Her aim was mediocre, poor enough that she wouldn't risk hitting Emilia. If he didn't back down, she had no plan forward.\n\nThe captain finally made a decision, an unhappy one judging from the scowl on his face. \"All right,\" he said, releasing his grip on Emilia's arm, and Maria's shoulders loosened in relief.\n\nThen he shoved Emilia hard at Maria, knocking them both against the door. Her pistol wound up pinned between it and Emilia's body, useless as he raised his gun again. She turned to shield Emilia from him, only to feel and hear the jolt of a gun going off right next to her.\n\nEmilia had reached for her hidden weapon while falling onto Maria, turned, and fired, her arm braced against Maria's ribs. Three shots she fired, and only one hit the captain, but it was enough for his bullets to land high, buried in the door above Maria's head. He ducked behind a small table meant for dining and knocked it over for better cover. Blood droplets decorated his path.\n\nThe captain released a torrent of curses under his breath, at them and at himself for taking this job.\n\n\"There's nowhere to go,\" Maria said. \"Drop your weapon.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said, the word ground out as if through metal. He spat on the floor and hurled one last insult at her.\n\nHe'd be more useful to them alive, she reminded herself. After making them swear again that he would not be killed, the captain kicked his gun across the cabin floor. He ignored both them and his wounded shoulder, as if it were all beneath him, as she commanded some of her crew to transport him to the hold with the others. His injury was treated, but the engineer had not survived.\n\nMaria had thought of this day so many times. Un d\u00eda de triunfo y felicidad. Instead she was exhausted and hollow, and shaky with how narrowly they'd escaped death.\n\nUntil she looked at Emilia, who curved an arm around her and smiled, head cocked. \"Where shall we go, Captain?\"\n\nAnywhere, except there was a grander plan in motion. She'd already smuggled a Compass over to the Resistance, and now she had an airship.\n\n\"Wherever Cuba needs us,\" she told Emilia. \"So we can all be free.\"\n\nThe war was just beginning. Today was the birthday of Jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed, beloved poet and patriot, with the uprising on the Justice echoed by citizens all across Cuba. Unlike the revolutions before it, this one was taking place not only in the fields and mountains and cities, but across the skies above.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Thou Shalt Be Free As Mountain Winds by Jennifer Mace ]\n\nThe last time I saw aly, we were chasing a different sunset.\n\nI hadn't known it was the last, of course. We used to chase them all the time when we were young. Just me and her and the tearing wind beneath our feathers, land spilling out below us like a tipped jug of wine, all the doubts and hungers of dirtlife ripped out and abandoned in our wake.\n\nIt wasn't just the beauty of the sky that called us. There's a magic to dying things, from the snapped neck of a goose to first love's heartbreak, and a day's no different. Death's as sacred as any bloody birth or sticky act of conception, no matter what priests might say. And the violent prolonged death of the sun spews power into the air like a pyroclastic flow.\n\nWe'd get drunk on it, dizzy and over-full with magic. The slow sip of power it took to feed our wings was nothing next to the glut of orange and purple and gold, the hiccuping sweetness of the clouds, the last splash of colour as day succumbed to night.\n\nSometimes it would take us half the night to make it back up the mountain. Gibbous or crescent, a moon provides no thermals, sheds nothing but dead air and sickly light. We'd beat our muscles to ribbons clawing back up through the sky.\n\nIt was worth it.\n\nWorth it for the magic, of course. For me, though, it had always been about those other sticky, stolen moments, huddled close in the crooks of massive lowland ilma trees or tumbled onto the dry pebbled streambeds of the foothills. About laughter and touch and the flitting stroke of feathers.\n\nFor Aly, too. Or so I'd thought.\n\nMY PINIONS WERE SINGED.\n\nThe smell of ash and burning hair clung stubbornly between the barbs no matter how fast I flew. The ghost sensation of constructed wingbones pulsed threateningly through my magic, sending little fingers of pain through the muscles of my back. The healing incisions ached and tore again, seeping new blood onto old feathers.\n\nThat's the price of bonded feathercraft. The sky is yours\u2014\u2014but so are all its tiny agonies.\n\nMy wings beat. I wasn't the only featherwitch in Breywell Village, and certainly not the only one in the high valley towns that studded the Zephward mountains like sour cherries in a solstice cake. But their wings were knit from snow cock and partridge feather, rounded and multilayered for long, hovering cliff harvests.\n\nI had had a pair like that.\n\nI'd ripped them out my back nine days ago; they couldn't do what was needed. The wings I wore instead were vicious, sharp-tipped things, made for chewing through league after league, and cosmetic charring wouldn't hinder them. They tied deeper into the rings of my spine than any witch would dare to delve, devouring power and oxygen both. My chest burned and burned.\n\nFinally, eventually, I gave in, and touched witchcraft to the bubbling meat of my lungs, coaxing and molding it to fit my needs. It was dangerous, risky magic, as likely to warp flesh as to enhance it. But Aly and I'd paid that price a decade ago, needed it for our long, high flights where the air thinned like milk from an underfed goat. I'd all but forgotten the trick of the thing. The spells we'd built together had hurt too much to use.\n\nIf they'd bring me to her now, I'd use every one of them and more, even if it tore my rib cage open to do so.\n\nBy the time I found her, Aly and her crew were hunting once again.\n\nIt took me days to track them. Days of hijacking unfamiliar thermals, gliding down unknown trade winds, eking out every fragment of energy I could from storm clouds and starshine and, yes, the angry death of the sun. Days of sleeping hidden in forest canopies, drinking from streams, dodging suspicious lowlanders' arrows like a pheasant flushed from its nest. Days of skirting township walls and fountainmage barriers across a world cut to pieces like goat flesh carved for market.\n\nBut I knew how she thought, how she dreamt. And I was hunting, too.\n\nThe merchant ship was slow and fat against the setting sun, cargo hanging bulbous as a pelican's pouch beneath the silken carapace of her balloon. This one, at least, had armed herself. Clanking plates of mismatched metals rattled against her hull, the weight dragging awkwardly through the air. Even as I drew close, the flare of cannonfire echoed impotently from her gunports, their sound more like the barking of coyotes than rolling thunder.\n\nThey were mudborn, clay-toed ignorants, and they didn't stand a chance.\n\nThe Desperante wasn't an airship, not in any sense but the literal. I'd only seen her sketched, before; heard descriptions passed ear-to-mouth through the voices of those who'd never so much as glimpsed a Zephborn trader, let alone a featherwitch. She was both more glorious and more terrible than I had imagined.\n\nGlorious, the way her banks of wings flexed and pulled against the air. Glorious, the bend and weave of her bronze-and-canvas mechanical frame as she swooped around the lead shot and the roaring violence of flamecraft. Glorious, the entirety of her, five times the size of a full-grown drake, feathers brindled brown and gold in the fading sun.\n\nTerrible, the leather-clad featherwitch crew with pistols strung across their chests like garlands, the barely-human rictuses of their faces. Terrible, the crack and cry of birdbone when a wild shot hit home, painful in ways I couldn't fully comprehend.\n\nTerrible, to see the theory and engineering I'd crystallised from Aly's dreams made manifest for this use.\n\nThis was my fault as much as hers. I knew her, Alcyone of the West Wind, knew the way her heart burned, the way her temper fractured like splintering bone, knew the damage her kingfisher-swift mind could wreak when the last fragments bent and snapped. We'd grown up close as sisters, then closer still. If anyone could have seen it coming, could have stopped her, it would have been me.\n\nWell.\n\nBetter late than never.\n\nThe desperante. Scourge of the Zephward skies, phantom of the Tlelz Abyss, deepest terror of every forgewight merchant clan and sworn enemy of the Alaran Immolate.\n\nIt seemed ridiculous. A single feathercraft pirate ship could never materially damage an empire, could never loosen the firecrafters' stranglehold on the flow of goods, couldn't wrest our mountains free of the Immolate's tariffs and tithes.\n\nBut if one existed, then so could more. And that scared them.\n\nIt shouldn't. Only two people knew the skeleton of the thing, the siphoning of sun through mountain glass to spin the fragile bones, the force-feeding of energy into eagle and vulture quills until they grew and grew and grew. The gestalt feathercraft you needed to fly the thing. The grotesqueries you fed it to keep it hale.\n\nOnly two of us, and neither would teach another. She was too selfish. I was too afraid. The secret of the Desperante's construction would go down with the ship and her captain.\n\nHopefully very, very soon.\n\nThe desperante had posted no watch behind.\n\nAnd why should she? I counted no more than a score and a half aboard as I drew closer; she likely couldn't spare them. And the merchant dirigible\u2014the Carillion Ruby, from the gold-flecked paint on her stern\u2014could not possibly hope to circle her.\n\nI was no merchant dirigible.\n\nI looped above her once, twice, learning the pattern of the ship, when she dove and when she retreated. How she moved. I may have designed her, but we'd never built more than models. I'd never seen her fly.\n\nThe merchant ship was growing desperate. A cloud bank was forming from the roar of its cannon, acrid and bitter and reminiscent of things I was fighting to forget. Now. I had to act now.\n\nDiving felt like freedom. The wind pushed my cheeks back against my bones, clawed at my goggles, dug into the crevices between my knives and wrenched at my pistols. But I knew its strength. I pulled up before it could tear anything free, soaring forward like a raptor sighting prey, straight for the Desperante's tailfeathers.\n\nThey were vulture-like in shape, paler in colour, two times as long as I was tall, and stiff as ironwood. I flared my wings and matched speed, the creak and shout of battle settling across me like a smothering fog. I could hear Aly's voice in the chaos, screaming orders. I knew it instantly, intimately. She sounded so angry.\n\nGods. How dare she plant doubts and regrets in my heart, when she was the one who\u2014\n\nI dug my nails into my palms until they ached, joining the phantom burn of my wing muscles. The feathers. I was close, now. Close enough to touch.\n\nI stripped off my gloves. Bare flesh is a conduit, any child learns this at the knee of priests or storytellers. The barbs were oily beneath my fingers, smooth and alive and grotesquely large, like insect legs beneath a lens. They twitched and quivered with warmth.\n\nWith magic.\n\nI closed my eyes, and drank.\n\nIt is not drinking, not truly. Not as plants drink the sun. Flesh is a permeable receptacle for magic; you can glut yourself for hour upon hour and have nothing to show but lingering spasms and the memory of glory.\n\nThe trick, then, is to use flesh as a siphon to the soul.\n\nFirst, you suffuse yourself with witchcraft. Not just the shoulders and rib cage, the spine and neck and back muscles needed to graft the wings, but the whole of you\u2014kneecaps and fingers and the whorls of your feet, the strange pulsing gristle of the engine of you, the fibers that tie bone to bone. Then, at the very moment of repletion, you pause.\n\nImagine pouring ice wine into a goblet. You can pour until the liquor lies level with the lip of the glass. If you are careful, if the table is steady, the goblet well made, you can even pour a little longer. The wine will cling to itself as it rises, in a curve as subtle as the edge of the world seen from goose-height, above the rim.\n\nYou will want the magic to feel like that within you.\n\nStop. Hold steady. Balance on the precipice of excess, and open the well of your soul.\n\nThis is hard to describe.\n\nA priest will teach it as listening to the glory of their goddess. An aesthete hermit will speak of allowing beauty entry. Myself, I think of the wonder of frost patterns blooming over cedar twigs before dawn, when the skies are cloudless and the stars suck all warmth from the trees. You will find your own way, your own key to unlock the frozen quiet awe that lives inside each of us.\n\nMagic calls to magic; wonder to wonder. If you catch the trick of cracking open this door, it will drink eagerly of the sunset or the stormcloud or the stolen crumbs of feathercraft animating your enemy's pirate ship.\n\nIt will sip the ice wine from your goblet, and you need not spill a drop.\n\nI sank the teeth of my will into the witchcraft beneath my fingers, and I ripped.\n\nMetal groaned. Feather tore. Magic gushed away into the air. The hollow shafts of the quills I touched collapsed in on themselves like stream-banks swept away in a storm. The desert dregs of my reservoirs swelled under the deluge. I flapped harder, fighting to stay abreast of the tailfeathers as the Desperante yawed above me, unable to hold steady with half her tail falling away like ash in the wind.\n\nThe tone of the shouting had changed. Less bloodlust, more fear. Featherwitches came tumbling up from the ship's canvas like glassfoxes out a smoked burrow, their wings barely unfurled as they jumped. Fragile, makeshift things, fashioned for short bursts of extreme agility\u2014\u2014they'd not catch me.\n\n\"Lady Alcyone!\" came the shout from above, from the open-topped platform where the ship's wingbones socketed themselves to brass. \"Lady, they're getting away!\"\n\nThe pirate was right. The Desperante could barely hold a steady elevation, let alone give chase, and the Carillion Ruby was making for the horizon as fast as her propellers could spin. I felt a grim spark of triumph kindle in the back of my throat, and doubled my effort as the last great rectrix crumbled away to dust.\n\nFrom above came a terrible, high-pitched noise of fury, the cry of a hawk deprived of prey. As I fell back, the Desperante wallowing in the air, Aly appeared above me like a vengeful god.\n\nShe'd barely changed. Gods, with the sky behind her and her wings outstretched, it was like time itself had fallen away around us. She stole my breath.\n\nAnd then I folded my wings and dropped, sluggish and stupid as a fledge, as she dove towards me cutlass-first.\n\nSlow, I was too slow\u2014her blade caught my shoulder, tore across. Blood danced in the wind. My bandolier fell, spiraling away beneath us. I clamped one hand across the wound and wrenched back, boosting my wings with the magical remnants of the Desperante's tailfeathers.\n\n\"Have I changed that much?\" I didn't mean to say it, let alone boost my voice to slip it into her ears above the rush of the wind and the laboured clank of the Desperante.\n\nBut there was joy to this, to seeing her again, bubbling alongside the rage and utter resentment I'd been nursing for days\u2014no, years\u2014if I tore away the scab, forced my guilt into the light. Years of watching the mysterious coin and silk and linen, the forgecraft and foreign seeds, as they appeared in the houses of families who'd misplaced a young witch or two. Years of suspicion and gnawing anxiety every time the Immolate's officers tallied us at midsummer, at midwinter, wondering if this would be the time someone slipped. The time they noticed.\n\nNo. She wasn't my Aly anymore. I was facing Alcyone, Pirate Queen of the West.\n\nBut my voice had stopped her.\n\n\"Kes?\" she said, like a little girl, baffled and uncertain. Her wings beat, swiveling in place, leaving her bobbing in the air, and I realised she had changed. She'd adapted her wings. They were as long, and still primarily vulture-feathered, as the ones I now wore, but the joints were different, the musculature tweaked. Optimised for a different style of flight.\n\nOf course they were different. Alcyone of the West Wind didn't need to fly for leagues with nothing but travel bread and the strength of her back\u2014she had her ship for that.\n\nI turned into the wind, letting it pin me in place. \"Yeah,\" I said, throat sore. Had I spoken at all since I fled the ashes of Breywell? \"It's me.\"\n\n\"You\u2014you nest-wrecking piece of crowbait, do you know how long that's gonna take to repair?!\" Nose crooked and proud like a shrike's beak, cheekbones and brows and chin like the edges of cliffs gone round only grudgingly with age, hair shorn tight and curly against her scalp; her voice was high and taut with fury.\n\n\"A real long fucking time,\" I said, feeling my face crack open in a grin, and flicked my knives up out of their sheaths.\n\nShe had the upwind advantage and was unwounded, but I'd been preparing for this ever since the first lick of flame touched timber. I'd known exactly who I'd been facing.\n\nI closed with her before she could draw her cutlass back into a guard, my wings more powerful than hers\u2014I was half again her weight and stronger by far. She'd cut away my pistols but knives were more satisfying in the thick of it, more intimate. The heat of her gasp seared against my ear when I rammed the first blade home.\n\n\"Gods-dammit, Kes, why\u2014get off!\" The blade was too short, a tool more than a weapon. I'd barely pierced muscle beneath her leathers. I tried to wrench it back, bring my other knife around, but the first had snagged inside her armour and she'd grabbed my wrist before I could get the second in close.\n\nWe strained, legs tangled, wings beating, bobbing gracelessly through the sky like ducks swept over a waterfall. \"You know why,\" I said, my knife pushing closer, and closer still. \"You've known.\"\n\n\"Why\u2014why now,\" she panted, bewildered. Vulnerable.\n\nA trap.\n\nShe'd dropped the cutlass. Her hand was free. I realised it a second too late as the poison of her witchcraft stole into my secondaries, unraveling them where they lay.\n\nWith a shout, I let go of my knife in her vest and shoved.\n\nWe broke apart. Miles downwind of the foundering Desperante, hundreds of yards lower\u2014I couldn't see the billowing smoke of the Carillion Ruby at all anymore.\n\nShe was laughing. My knife still jammed into her ribs to its hilt, black blood slicking her leathers, and she was laughing.\n\n\"Kes, Kes,\" she said, voice cruel with affection. \"You never learn.\"\n\nI jammed my knife back in my belt, reached around behind me. I was listing. She'd destroyed feathers on the same side she'd sliced my shoulder. The arm was already stiffening. I could knit the cartilage together again, but it would take time. Time with land beneath my feet.\n\nBut she was wrong. I did learn. I patched the baldness in with pure magic, spun barbs from the brimming well within me. It would hold for now, but it was not strong or subtle. I wouldn't be able to turn as fast, dive as sharp. I wouldn't dodge her again.\n\n\"You can't fight me,\" she was saying, certain as a child. \"You won't fight me. I'll never believe you'll finish it.\" She had drawn a dirk from her belt while I fixed my wings, and now she caressed it, wight-forged steel shining like glacial ice. \"So why don't you tell your Aly why you're really here?\"\n\n\"To kill you,\" I said, hand going to the hilt of my knife.\n\n\"Steady,\" she said, pistol appearing suddenly from her belt, its silver barrel pointed square at my chest. \"Let's not be hasty. Why, love? You want my riches? My crew? My ship?\" She flew closer. I held still. \"You know I'd kill to have you by my side. It's only your stubbornness\u2014\"\n\n\"Never.\" My voice was shaking. \"I'm here to burn all that to the ground.\" Her dirk was almost gentle where she rested it against my breast. \"Like the Immolate did Breywell.\"\n\nShe flinched. Just for an instant, but I saw it. Horror. Guilt. Denial. \"They did what? When!\"\n\n\"A tenday ago.\" A little more. It had been late morning. They'd come at dawn.\n\n\"I'll kill them,\" she said, eyes hard like flint, dirk gone loose in her hand. \"By Vymis's teeth, I'll kill them all\u2014how many? The young ones, the elders\u2014did they escape?\"\n\n\"They let us go.\" Gave us two fingers of the sun to gather food and tools and the infirm, to huddle under blankets in the cold morning light as we watched them burn our homes. I'd been beyond lucky to find these wings intact in their chest. \"None dead.\"\n\nIt had been close. Mylz had almost thrown a punch when they'd refused to let him rescue his little one's cradle. Nilta had thrown a curse\u2014she'd survived only because the agents hadn't known enough to recognize it and because she'd missed. \"It was a warning.\"\n\n\"A warning?\"\n\n\"We featherwitches are to stop our raiding. Or they'll return.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"Ah,\" she said, soft as a snow owl's wingbeat. \"I see. And so you come to kill me.\"\n\n\"And so,\" I agreed.\n\n\"You're wrong,\" she said. \"They won't leave you alone if you hand them my head.\"\n\n\"Maybe so.\"\n\n\"They strangle us day after day. We die a little every time we bow. Kes, how can you ask me to live like that? How can you ask it of any of us?\"\n\n\"I don't.\"\n\nShe was expecting me to fight, I think. Expecting to retread the same familiar arguments we had woven again and again, blistering the air between us in those last months before\u2014before she'd left me.\n\n\"I'm not a child, Aly,\" I said, slowly brushing her blade aside. \"Just because a boulder allows the river to flow over it doesn't mean it can't eventually turn its path. And you haven't the saltpetere or the sulphur you would need to blow its banks. You're just an annoyance to them. A bad storm could take down as many ships as you do.\"\n\n\"Oh, shut up, Kes.\" She laughed. It was a wet, bitter sound. \"You always were a pompous ass.\"\n\nShe let me move the knife, slipped it back into its sheath. She pressed the pistol to my heart instead. \"I can't just do nothing. I won't. I never will.\"\n\n\"And I can't let you keep doing this.\" I couldn't. At any moment, the Immolate might decide we had gone too far, that feathercraft was toxic, the Zephward lands untameable. Anathema, like the fategilders and their crystal ruins, drawn out by superstitious envy and slaughtered by song. They would drive us from our homes and into the highest ice valleys, into our caves and mines. Into hiding. Into extinction.\n\nThe Desperante was just the excuse they needed.\n\n\"Stalemate,\" Aly said, and the click of her pistol was almost swallowed by the wind. \"Oh, wait. No, it isn't.\"\n\nBut I knew her. I'd known her. Her focus was sharp as obsidian. And yet she was here, with me, instead of up above, wrestling her beloved ship into working order, rescuing her tumbling crew.\n\nShe wouldn't believe I'd kill her. She couldn't. And until she did, she'd never bring herself to kill me first.\n\nShe still loved me.\n\nCould I kill her, knowing that?\n\nDid I have a choice?\n\n\"Perhaps,\" I said, instead softening my voice, my shoulders, the tilt of my wings. I had never been good at dissembling, as a girl. The years had taught me much. \"But you don't want to shoot, really. Do you?\"\n\nI reached out. We were close, now\u2014I didn't need to stretch. My fingers were resting on her skin. My smallest blade nestled half-forgotten in its wrist sheath.\n\nSoft. So soft, for such a harsh face. I rubbed a thumb along her cheekbone. Slid it down past her ear, felt the fluttering of her pulse. She bit her lip. Said nothing.\n\nMy wings beat. Hers, too. They fell into a rhythm. Drew us close, closer still, until the toes of her boots nudged against my shins. The barrel of her pistol pressed hard against my ribs.\n\nI kissed her.\n\nI shocked her, I think. I used to think I never would. But she hung there, lips slack, chapped from the wind.\n\nShe didn't taste of blood. Just chill skin, perhaps the scent of gunpowder, of grease. Her lips moved against mine. She began to raise her hand.\n\nAnd I tore the bottom out of the well of her magic.\n\nI hadn't known I was going to. Hadn't known it even to be possible. But if flesh is a conduit, and wonder a reservoir, then in the press and yield of lips, I discovered a further truth: love is the gateway, the sundering of self, against which all walls crumble.\n\nThrough the channel of our devotion, I stole it all\u2014her craft, her knowledge, her years of hoarded power like a wyrm hissing in the darkest deepest caverns of the mountains. And rather than swallowing it, I destroyed it.\n\nWhat else could I do? It was not enough to take. She could rebuild. Out of spite, out of hatred, she would rebuild, and turn her rage on those who had harmed her: the Immolate, who had despoiled her childhood, who ruined her people. And me.\n\nSo I reached, desperate and ignorant and filled with prayer, down the avenues and vessels of her power, and every path I traced I sealed behind me.\n\nShe screamed. I barely noticed\u2014the magic burned like I was the one destroyed\u2014even though her lips left mine, and her hands clawed at me like an animal, slipping away, pistol forgotten in her panic. Her wings disintegrated around us, feathers tumbling like debris from a kestrel's kill, and she tipped back out my grasp, arms wheeling. Falling.\n\nNo. No, it couldn't end like this. It couldn't. I'd found a way\u2014a way to win, a way to end her piracy, a way to save us from her short-sighted fury, a way where my quick-witted, jewel-bright Alcyone could survive. Seething, wounded, hating me with every shred of her soul\u2014but alive.\n\nLove, I discovered, was a weapon which cut its wielder just as deeply as its target.\n\nI folded my war wings like sleek daggers behind me, twisted in the air, and dove.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Birthday Heist by Fred Yost ]\n\nCaius's eyelids started to droop near the end of his first hour locked in the brig. Goddamned lulling motion of the goddamned airship.\n\nShould've been easy money. Save some people while collecting a nice bounty. That's how Ma'd sold the job to him. Couldn't blame her though. He'd fucked up, got snatched up by the first security patrol he'd run into after they stowed away on board. Splitting up had been a good idea. The rest of the team had avoided capture. At least, none of the rest were in the brig. Safe on board, or wounded in the sick bay, or killed and tossed over the side. Helluva way to kick off his birthday.\n\n\"Got any coffee?\" Caius asked the guard, a faunus named Halloway.\n\nHalloway shook his head. \"Wouldn't waste it on you if I did, werewolf. Zach says the Sapphire Order's gonna kill you as soon as we reach port.\"\n\nCaius blinked. \"What? Why?\"\n\n\"Zach said they'd kill you. That's all I know.\"\n\nMotherfucker.\n\n\"Shit. Got anything stronger than coffee?\"\n\nHalloway pulled a flask from his pocket. \"Yeah. But...\"\n\n\"But why waste it on a dead man.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Halloway looked back as he set the flask on his desk. \"I...can't.\"\n\nCaius leaned against the cell wall. So much for decency. \"Fuck you, too, buddy.\"\n\nHe tried to ignore the sudden wave of nausea rising inside him. Hell of a time to get motion sick, or have some weird reaction to the silver in his cuffs. He took a measured breath, practicing a deep-breathing technique Rei'd shown him. Calming shit. Break the situation into digestible chunks. He just needed to escape, find Pru, get her to break him out of these goddamned manacles unnoticed, lure away one of the heavily armed elite guards, knock them out, steal their armor, shift, not lose control, and take out all seven wizards before any one of them could cast the spells to kill almost everyone on board for some dumbass ritual. Easy fucking peasy.\n\nBut first he needed his stomach to settle. He'd close his eyes, just for a second.\n\nCaius sank into darkness. Fire. Blood and blades. Blue-robed figures dragging eldritch creatures from crystalline prisons with bloodstained ropes. Death heaped upon death.\n\nHe rolled to his knees, dry heaving. Visions were Rei's department. If he was seeing something like that, he knew for sure those damned mountains were the real deal, and the ship was too goddamned close. He spit a mouthful of what he hoped was blood.\n\n\"You okay in there?\" Halloway asked.\n\nCaius tilted his head. Something felt different in the air. Under the unpleasant scents of the brig, a new smell floated through the air ducts. Distant. Cucumbers with a hint of musk. Either Miche'd been nabbed or escape moved towards him.\n\nHe turned back to Halloway, surprised to see genuine concern on his face. \"Like you care. If you cared about anyone, you wouldn't be working for those murderers.\"\n\nHalloway moved closer to the cell. \"What do you mean, murderers? If you hadn't stowed away... It's harsh, but it's not technically murder. I'm sorry.\"\n\nCaius idly tugged at the bars. \"You don't get it, do you, kid? Would have been a helluova lot easier for me to hit the ship and grab the wizards on the way out, when it was almost empty, but that'd be a lot of folks dead when I could have stopped it. Ritual sacrifices to elder demons ain't my jam.\"\n\n\"What the fuck are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Like you really don't know? Don't bother bullshitting a dead man.\"\n\n\"I signed on two weeks ago. They put up a posting and hired a bunch of us, amazing pay. Too good to ask questions. And they made me a lieutenant right off the bat.\"\n\nCaius leaned against the bars. \"Never could figure how a death cult got an experienced crew to work for them. They didn't, did they?\"\n\n\"Post said they wanted fresh folks. Ones without bad habits they'd need to train out.\"\n\nCaius rubbed the bridge of his nose. \"That didn't set off some alarm bells?\"\n\nHalloway looked to the ground. \"I needed the work.\"\n\n\"Must have. This whole trip is full of red flags. None of the passengers look like the type to go on a luxury cruise. Damned few'd notice if they went missing. Fewer still would care.\"\n\nHalloway took a shaky sip from the flask. Caius heard the click of a lock somewhere down the hall.\n\n\"I'm dead, you're dead, life sucks. Sure you can't spare a drink?\"\n\n\"Promise you won't eat me?\"\n\n\"For fuck's sake,\" Caius said. He faintly heard mumbled words from the other room. A countdown in a sibilant tongue. Not much time at all. \"I don't fucking eat anything I can hold a conversation with.\"\n\nHalloway stumbled to the cell. Caius smelled the whiskey on his breath. A fuzzy hand reached through the cell sbars. The countdown stopped. Caius grabbed Halloway's wrist and pulled hard.\n\n\"Do me a favor and don't scream.\"\n\nHalloway screamed.\n\nWith a sigh, Caius bent the faunus's arm at an uncomfortable angle so he could cover Halloway's mouth without letting go of his wrist.\n\n\"Seriously, kid, I don't want to hurt you, but you gotta keep quiet and cooperate.\"\n\nHalloway quieted.\n\nThe door slid open, revealing a vaguely feminine silhouette. The smell of snakeskin intensified.\n\n\"Salutations, Bosswolf,\" the newcomer said.\n\n\"Hey, Miche. Kid here has the keys.\"\n\nHer flats tapped lightly on the metal floor as she moved closer, licking her lips. The dim light revealed a forked tongue dancing over bright white fangs.\n\n\"Venison? You spoil me.\"\n\nHalloway yelped into Caius's palm. Caius slammed the faunus's head against the bars.\n\n\"Quiet. Miche, just the keys, please.\"\n\nMiche grumbled, but he heard the jingle of keys freed from a pocket. Halloway mumbled something into Caius's hand. Caius relaxed his grip.\n\n\"Largest key opens the cells,\" Halloway said.\n\n\"And the shackles?\" Miche asked.\n\n\"No keyhole,\" Caius said. \"Should've tipped me off they never intended to open them.\"\n\nThe door popped open. Caius maneuvered Halloway into the cell as he stepped out.\n\n\"Good job, kid, almost done. Hold tight in there, and before you know it, we'll either let you out someplace safe or you'll be dead.\"\n\n\"You said you weren't going to hurt me,\" Halloway whimpered.\n\n\"We won't, but if we can't stop the blue robes in time...\"\n\n\"Bosswolf, time comes. Mountains grow near. Demons hunger.\"\n\nCaius slid the cell door shut and followed Miche through the rectangle of dim light at the end of the brig. He broke into a steady jog as soon as his eyes adjusted to the hall's lights.\n\n\"How long was I locked up?\"\n\n\"Too long. Paired hours? Maybe more.\"\n\n\"Shit. I should have figured a way out sooner. Or at all. Wait. Why did you come get me? Are they out of wine already?\"\n\nMiche glared. \"Wine was boring. Everyone else, occupied. Needed you out.\"\n\n\"Everyone is in place on the observation deck?\"\n\n\"Blue robes? Yes. Civilians? Yes. Our crew? Technically.\"\n\n\"Technically?\"\n\n\"The Lady grows anxious.\"\n\n\"Best not to keep her waiting.\" Caius lifted his cuffs. \"Speaking of easing her anxieties, anything you can do about these?\"\n\n\"Bosswolf.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Did not magically cure rage virus in lockup, yes? Without Lady's ice, you will lose self to blood.\"\n\n\"I won't shift. I just...I don't like being trapped like this.\"\n\n\"Poor Bosswolf, trapped as mere mortal.\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nMiche grabbed his wrists and muttered a few arcane words. She pulled back with a hiss.\n\n\"Alarms. Traps. No time to bypass.\"\n\n\"Alarms? Do they know you magicked them?\"\n\n\"Not likely, but possible.\"\n\nCaius picked up speed. They still had half a ship to cover.\n\n\"Halt!\" called a gravelly voice as he rounded a corner.\n\nCaius slid to a stop, bracing for Miche to slam into his back, but her tongue had always been better than his nose. Rock golems, even those in woolen guard uniforms, didn't smell like much.\n\n\"Evening, good sir,\" Caius said. \"Is there something I can do for you?\"\n\nThe mottled guard lifted his blaster and pointed it in Caius's general direction. \"Could pretend ya don't think I'm an idiot?\"\n\n\"Beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"You're the werewolf that was in the brig,\" the guard said, slurring. \"I remember the shirt. Distinctive.\"\n\n\"My fucking shirt? Really?\"\n\nThe guard belched, then chuckled. \"All right, the silver bracelets helped.\"\n\nCaius glanced at his wrists. The manacles definitely gave him that \"escaped prisoner\" look. \"Don't suppose you'll let me go so I can save everyone's lives?\"\n\nThe guard blearily studied Caius. \"Not likely. Gonna take you back to your cell and punch you until you tell me how you got out. After that? We'll play it by ear.\"\n\nCaius felt the hair on his arms stand on end as red pulsed in his vision. Calming breaths. He couldn't transform. The silver protected him. The virus couldn't take hold unless he transformed, right? \"Maybe you go upstairs, have a drink, and relax.\"\n\n\"Fuck no,\" the guard said with another belch. \"Awful party. Took forever to nick a little wine. S'okay though. Shit's strong. Now get moving so we can make with the hitting.\"\n\nCaius took a deep breath. \"Do they pay you enough for this? You saw the bounty. The rumor is they're going to kill me. I must be dangerous.\"\n\nThe guard shrugged. \"Danger's literally in the job description. Interrogating you is a fringe benefit.\"\n\nCaius heard the light tap of flats moving down the side hallway. \"Hate to disappoint, but you don't need to hit me. I'll tell you how I got out.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\nMiche stepped from around the corner and grabbed the guard by the back of his neck, pressing a small cylinder to his temple.\n\n\"I had help,\" Caius said.\n\n\"Drop your weapon,\" Miche said. \"Kick to Bosswolf.\"\n\nThe guard hesitated.\n\nMiche licked the side of his neck and grinned at Caius. \"Maybe inside taste like rock candy?\"\n\nCaius met the guard's wide eyes. \"I wouldn't test her.\"\n\nThe guard did as she asked. Caius turned the blaster on him. \"This thing have a stun setting?\"\n\nThe guard glared.\n\nCaius clicked the safety off. \"C'mon, buddy. Keep cooperating.\"\n\nMiche ran her hand over the guard's arm. \"Near four hundred pounds, yes? Mostly muscle, some rock?\"\n\nThe guard glanced at the blaster. \"Three fifty. Mostly muscle. Rock skin's lighter than people think.\"\n\nMiche twisted the tube a quarter turn. \"Wise to answer. Improper dosage could be dangerous.\"\n\n\"What?!\"\n\nThe tube sprayed a puff of powder in the guard's face. He blinked twice, dropped to his knees, then toppled forward.\n\nCaius frowned. \"Dead?\"\n\nMiche shook her head. \"Unconscious.\"\n\n\"Useful that. Something of theirs?\"\n\n\"Not quite. Made a new toy.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\nMiche shifted her weight, not meeting his eyes. \"Told you. Dosing wine was boring. Made something to react with our additive. Right dose means unconscious enemy.\"\n\n\"And the wrong dose?\"\n\nShe pocketed the tube. \"Important to get right dose.\"\n\nCaius didn't ask how she found that out. He turned his attention to the fallen golem, who'd stood just over five feet tall. \"Think you could do that with a guard closer to my height?\"\n\n\"Guards know each other.\" Miche tapped his wrists. \"And you stand out.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"Waiter?\"\n\n\"They're dressed like goddamned sailors. How would that stand out any less?\"\n\n\"Too obvious to be noticed. All they see is waiter.\"\n\nCaius sighed. \"That makes sense.\"\n\n\"Will take a moment to procure. Better to take time than get caught.\"\n\n\"Just be quick about it, please.\"\n\nMiche led Caius past the observation deck to a side room and told him to wait. He paced. Every second of delay meant more danger.\n\nJust stay calm. Time for more fancy breathing. Think about clear skies and happy things. Think about birthday dinner.\n\nAs he took another deep breath, the faint sounds of giggling and the sharp smell of arousal interrupted his thoughts. Miche stumbled into the room, arm in arm with a tall, bulky, human man. The man froze when he saw Caius.\n\n\"What's going on?\" he asked. \"I thought\u2014\"\n\nCaius tried not to notice the man's pants were unzipped. \"Look, I know you're a bit dazed right now, so I'll take this slow. Bad news is you're not getting laid right now.\"\n\nMiche glared.\n\n\"Good news is it's my birthday, so if you cooperate, I won't hurt you.\"\n\nThe waiter looked at him, obviously confused, but able to focus without effort.\n\n\"Fuck. You didn't drink any wine, did you?\"\n\n\"Can't. Allergic to grapes.\"\n\n\"No shit, really?\"\n\n\"Ever since I was a kid. Ended up in the hospital at my first communion.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" Caius said. \"Do the blue bastards pay you enough to get concussed for this gig?\"\n\n\"No.\" The waiter rapidly shook his head. \"Do you have any idea what kind of long-term damage a concussion can cause?\"\n\nCaius leaned against the door. \"Fair point. My scaled associate is going to take your clothes and tie you up. Don't make a scene and don't attract the attention of a guard and we should be fine.\"\n\nCaius could only describe the look on the man's face as a mix of fear and anticipation. \"Yeah, I'll do it. Whatever she says.\"\n\nMiche leaned close to the waiter. Caius turned his attention out the viewport. Clothes slowly landed at his feet. He struggled to change while manacled. Pants, he could manage. Shoes, too. Soon, all that was left in the pile was a pressed shirt and...\n\n\"Hey, uh, I don't need his underwear.\"\n\n\"Not everything is about your needs, Bosswolf.\"\n\nCaius tapped his wrists together, carefully keeping his gaze on Miche's face. \"Magic up a shirt switch for me, please.\"\n\nMiche distractedly waved her free hand and Caius's shirt peeled off his body in strips. A hissing chant sent the waiter's puffy white shirt crawling up Caius's torso, sliding in place over his manacles.\n\n\"Go now. Am not needed for fighting.\"\n\nCaius fought off a sigh. He hated to begrudge anyone their simple pleasures, but now was not the time for distractions. Or leaving the most volatile member of his team alone. \"Of course we need you. You're our problem solver.\"\n\nShe let out an exasperated sigh. \"Why do I listen to you?\"\n\n\"I'm your boss and our secret base has a sweet lab?\"\n\n\"No. Could eat you, become new boss, take lab.\"\n\n\"Because you're a wonderfully talented magical potions ninja and it's my birthday?\"\n\nMiche rolled her eyes. She looked back at the naked waiter and then glared at Caius. \"Fine, but do not blame me if I accidentally eat someone. And you, naked man. Give me your number. We'll finish this later.\"\n\nCaius tapped his foot impatiently while waiting for Miche to jot down the waiter's info. They had time, he kept telling himself. They'd be cutting it close, but by the gods they'd still have time, even if he had to will it into existence.\n\nOutside the observation deck, he grabbed a hand towel off a nearby table and used it to cover his wrists before stepping into the room.\n\nThe sight of the crowd poked at something in his heart. Every goddamned one of them in their threadbare Sunday best. Except for two assholes in Hawaiian shirts. Otherlanders of all kinds, the only unifying factor that they all looked tired and hungry, and except for a few huddled families, lonely. Reminded Caius of the foster families he'd bounced between before he fell in with the O'Sheas. With Mairead. Ma. He hadn't told her, but he'd have taken this job even without the payout for the wizards. But first, he had to do the job.\n\nEasy to spot his crew: Brayden standing near the plexiglass window, talking up a storm; Rei at the DJ booth, headphones around her neck, dancing to music not yet playing; Alex, hovering by the door marked PRIVATE, ready to slip onto the flight deck and hot-wire the airship's auto-pilot.\n\nEasy to spot the wizards in the blue robes, scattered throughout the room. Same for the seven-foot-tall, steel-plated elite guards watching over them.\n\nNot easy to spot Pru.\n\nShe couldn't afford to be seen with a bunch of thieves, so she'd come aboard in disguise. But he damn well knew what that disguise looked like and she wasn't anywhere he could see. Her smell lingered throughout the room, fire and ice and metal and flesh. Everywhere and nowhere, a bit of olfactory camouflage born of Miche's boredom on the East Bay job. Great when they needed her hidden from other shifters. Not so great when they needed to find her.\n\nExcept she'd left her body armor back at their apartment. So why metal? Unless...\n\n\"Fuck.\"\n\nMiche raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"She already took out an elite, didn't she?\"\n\nMiche shrugged. \"Not before I leave to get you. But she had concerns about time.\"\n\nCaius grumbled as he studied the room. So much for Pru not getting involved with an easy job. \"Double fuck. Blues're too far apart.\"\n\n\"Almost as if worried about attack from one person?\"\n\nCaius growled softly. Focus on the targets, find a solution. He smiled. Each one carried a mostly empty champagne flute. He tapped the tube in Miche's pocket. \"Think you could take out the Order of Murderous Fuckery if I make a big enough distraction?\"\n\nMiche surveyed the room. \"Very big distraction, perhaps.\"\n\nCaius whistled three short notes, barely audible over the ambient noise of the room. Brayden searched the crowd, his eyes widening momentarily when he spotted Caius. Caius nodded.\n\n\"Distinguished guests!\" Brayden's voice cut through the hushed conversations around the room. Melodic. Powerful. \"If you take a look out the observation window right now, you'll see we're approaching the Lightspire Mountains, quite possibly the oldest known formations in the entire Otherlands, according to this hastily constructed pamphlet they handed out as we boarded.\"\n\nAll seven blue-robed figures and all but two guards turned towards Brayden. Miche took a step back into the press of the crowd, blending in almost instantly. Caius grabbed a nearby tray of wine glasses and maneuvered to the nearest inattentive guard. He took a deep breath and fought off a flinch. Ogre skin and ball sweat. Definitely not Pru.\n\n\"What the brochure doesn't tell you,\" Brayden continued, \"is the Lightspires are home to Soultaker Ridge, the site of numerous sacrifices attempting to unleash an ancient evil.\"\n\nThe murmurs took on an unsettled edge. The blue robes exchanged confused looks. Without Miche's additive in the drinks, there might have been a full-blown panic.\n\nCaius sidled up to the other guard. This one, at least, smelled of nothing that might keep her from being Pru.\n\n\"Wine?\" he asked, doing his best to disguise his voice, just in case.\n\nThe guard backpedaled away, drawing a large falchion as she moved. \"Escape!\" the guard cried. \"The werewolf's escaped!\"\n\n\"Shit.\" Caius allowed that perhaps his British accent wasn't as good as he thought.\n\nCaius moved to the center of the room, studying the rest of the guards as they approached, trying not to let anyone get a clean shot at his back for any length of time. One of the elites didn't move a smoothly as the others. Caius could see their breath in the air, despite the heat from the bodies filling the room.\n\nOf course. She couldn't fit in the giant suit of armor without some kind of filler, and ice drew a helluva lot less attention that lava.\n\nHe charged the armored figure with the frosted breath, his arms stretched over his head. The guard grabbed the chain between the shackles and lifted him high in the air.\n\nMotherfucker. Wrong again? Pru'd give him so much shit for not being able to find her. Assuming they survived, of course, which... Well, odds weren't great, now that he'd been grabbed again. Hell, he already felt the creeping chill of death.\n\nWait, no. Not death. Just regular cold seeping into his arms through the manacles. Caius grinned.\n\n\"Hi, darlin',\" he said. \"Ready to cause a distraction?\"\n\n\"'bout damn time.\" Pru's voice, unmistakably hers, echoed in the large suit of armor.\n\nShe dropped him. Heavy boots pounded on the ground far behind him. She swung her hammer down and he caught the blow with the frosted silver manacles. The shockwave from the impact reverberated through the room as the hammer exploded and pain blossomed in his side.\n\nCaius blinked as silver shards rained down around him. Why would his side hurt?\n\nHe looked down to see the blade of a falchion protruding from the ruffles of the shirt he'd stolen from the waiter, blood pouring from a gaping wound. Ow. His own bitter laugh rang in his ears. Sonnuva bitch. On his birthday no less.\n\n\"No!\" Pru shouted.\n\nThe air went dry as the ambient moisture turned to flurries of snow. Frost cracked along the edges of her armor, branding the steel. Pru punched the falchion wielder hard enough to send the guard flying into a wall.\n\nCaius staggered forward, the bitter laugh turning into a chuckle. Heat poured through his body, radiating from the cut. A steel blade. Not enchanted. Not silvered. Just plain fucking steel. He shook the last silver shards from his shaggy hair. Nothing keeping him from shifting now.\n\nThe heat turned to burning. The chuckle turned to a howl. Heart pounding. Vision narrowed to blood-red pools. A clawed hand ripped the blade free from a furry side. Flesh knitting as the falchion pulled free. Thoughts of torn throats, shredded armor, and a feast of blood and ogrekin flesh.\n\nA metal gauntlet gripping a furry arm. A flood of cold magic pouring through the arm. No. Him. His arm. His heartbeat slowed. The red faded from his vision. One of the elite's dangled limply from his claws. He could taste blood on his canine teeth. Shit shit shit. He tossed the guard in Rei's general direction, hoping she'd be able to keep them alive.\n\n\"You okay, fuzzbutt?\" Pru asked.\n\nCaius nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Pru lifted her arm from his and formed a blue-and-white longsword in her hand. They stood back to back. The remaining five elites circled them slowly, less confident now the odds were a bit more even. Caius glanced at the wizards, worried they might take matters into their own hands, but only three remained standing. Two stared raptly out the window, no doubt counting down the time before one of them could start the ritual. The third watched the fight, hands waving in the air. Before Caius could say anything, Miche appeared next to the waving wizard, a tube at her lips. Then only two remained.\n\nA blade slashing past his face brought his attention back to the fight in front of him. Pru caught the sword in her free hand. A blast of frost shot from her gauntlet and engulfed the weapon. The elite pulled back and struck again. The blade shattered on Pru's armor. The answering swing of her sword sent her opponent flying to the ceiling, the icy shards of their weapon pinning them in place.\n\nCaius stepped up to another, dodging an ax swing. He fought with no fancy magic, nor practiced form, only a flurry of claws and teeth shredding armor, but that served well enough. He stared at the guard's throat. One bite could end it. Deep breath. A single punch knocked out the exposed ogrekin.\n\nHe looked up to see Pru slamming one guard into a wall. The elite collapsed and didn't get back up. One left. Caius checked the room. He looked up in time to see the last wizard open their mouth to begin the ritual, but Miche stepped up beside them. A single puff of powder sent them sprawling to the ground.\n\nThe last elite tossed their weapon to the ground and dropped to their knees. Caius picked up the oversize cutlass and planted his foot on their chest.\n\n\"You surrender?\" he growled.\n\nThe downed fighter choked out a desperate chuckle. \"Fuck yes, I surrender. The shit I've seen, man, I did not sign up for. And those assholes do not pay me enough to die for them.\"\n\nCaius started to let the guard up, but Pru signaled he should wait.\n\n\"Fellow travelers,\" Brayden said, his voice reverberating beyond the acoustics of the room. \"All unpleasantness is out of the way. Please calm down.\"\n\nThe crowd immediately settled. Brayden was a damned good siren.\n\n\"Please think of this as a rescue mission. We'll be taking a detour to the Lightbringer mountains, a real tourist destination. Emergency services will undoubtedly provide you passage home.\"\n\nTrusting the drugged wine and Brayden's spells to keep the passengers calm for the remainder of the journey, Caius turned to Pru.\n\n\"Can I let this guy up?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" she said. \"Miche?\"\n\nCaius turned to the click of a camera. Pru pulled a sailor's cap from the suit of armor and placed it on his head. Caius flushed.\n\n\"Just go with it,\" she whispered.\n\nHe struck a pose that wouldn't have been out of place on the logo of a rum bottle, a silly grin creeping on his face.\n\n\"Should I send Rei to the sick bay for an eyepatch?\"\n\nCaius coughed. \"Not necessary.\"\n\n\"A little ice parrot?\"\n\nCaius pointed the sword in Miche's direction. \"We done?\"\n\n\"You're the bosswolf, Bosswolf.\"\n\nCaius tossed the sword to Pru. She grabbed it midair and pulled the ogrekin guard to his feet. \"You seriously repent getting involved with these killers?\"\n\n\"Of course. Everything about them was horrific.\"\n\n\"Then come with me,\" Pru said. \"Let's talk about your redemption arc.\"\n\nThe small office in the hangar indirectly owned by the O'Shea Syndicate lacked any sign of a personal touch. But it served well enough as a front, if you didn't look too close.\n\nPrudence shook flecks of ice from her shirt while waiting for the prisoners to be pulled from the brig. Nephilim didn't need to worry about cold, but if her top got too wet she'd need to go back to the apartment to change. And she'd already told Caius she'd deliver the wizards so he could have time to make himself look less like he belonged on the cover of a particular brand of romance novel.\n\nShe watched a stately older woman walk down the gangplank of her airship.\n\n\"Evening, Ma,\" Prudence said.\n\n\"Lady Danakil, I do not care how close to the boy you are, if your mother heard you call me Caius's little nickname, I'd be in as much trouble as if she found out you accompanied those ruffians on their jobs,\" the woman said. \"Please. Call me Mairead, or Ms. O'Shea if ye must be formal.\"\n\n\"Fine, Mairead, but you need to call me Prudence. Or Pru. I'm no Lady Danakil. Not here.\"\n\n\"Of course, dear,\" Mairead said, thumbing through a stack of papers.\n\n\"I trust you found everything in order?\"\n\n\"Seven wizards, neatly bound. Seven matching bounties posted by the Danakil Corporation in the last hour. Big bounties. Big rewards.\"\n\n\"Then we're square?\"\n\n\"More than square. Your debt's paid on the bounties alone, even after cutting Caius and his crew their share. Add in the airship\u2014\"\n\n\"Apologies for any confusion, the airship is mine now. Just coincidence that happened to be the best way to apprehend them.\"\n\n\"Bullshit. Coincidence, dear? Just like it was coincidence a concerned guard called in a tip the same day your love took this job?\"\n\nPru stretched. \"Lucky break, that.\"\n\nMairead clicked her tongue. \"Lucky? Don't lie to me. Lie to Caius, if you must. Using insider information never sat well with the proud idiot.\"\n\n\"Danakil's enforcement division has been trying to get the Order of the Sapphire Revenant for years. Too long. But it only made it to my desk last week.\"\n\n\"So why today? The fools haven't succeeded in summoning an elder god yet.\"\n\n\"I didn't want anyone to die while waiting for a bureaucrat to authorize a strike. And if I'm being honest, the timing was too good to pass up.\"\n\n\"Timing?\"\n\n\"Don't tell me you've forgotten Caius's birthday. He'll be heartbroken.\"\n\nMairead rolled her eyes. \"You've got the best table in Shipwrecks, with dinner from a chef I flew in just for tonight. What does his birthday have to do with the fucking job?\"\n\n\"Two months ago, they picked up that guard thing on the East Bay. I tagged along. Easy money. Boring job. We talked. About the past, our dreams, and some silly things.\" Prudence tucked her hair behind her small horns. \"Caius told me he'd always wanted to be a pirate.\"\n\nShe showed Mairead on of the photos Miche'd taken.\n\nMairead smiled. \"I see. Get on out of here and give the birthday boy my best.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Prudence paused by the door. \"You can borrow my airship for now, but take good care of it. The worlds may need the Dread Pirate Caius to fly again.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Airships are Overrated (Always Insist on Taking the Kittens and Puppies Valley Route) by Laura Davy ]\n\nEvelyn had always thought an airship would be grand and awe-inspiring. With a gleaming deck, masts reaching the clouds, and sails glimmering with magic. Instead it was a box.\n\nNo deck, no portholes, no rails, and not even a hint of a sail. Just a wooden bottom with four short walls.\n\nDefinitely a box.\n\nSure, the magic to make a ship fly could be used on any object. But airbox didn't have the same ring as airship.\n\nA stranger who seemed more beard than man walked over and smiled at the structure with a manic gleam in his brown eyes. \"Stargazer's a beauty, isn't she?\"\n\nEvelyn glanced around to see if he was talking to her. Or maybe talking about a different secret ship hidden away. Though from the way he looked at the box this object had to have some redeeming quality. Perhaps she didn't know enough about air travel and the square design made it extra safe.\n\nHe slapped the side of the box, making the structure shudder as if it was on the verge of collapse.\n\nSo, not safe then.\n\nThe man asked, \"Are you interested in booking a ride?\"\n\nEvelyn glanced skeptically at what was probably a deathtrap, but it wasn't like she had many options. It would take her a month to walk to school and it would cost too much to rent a stagecoach.\n\n\"How much does it cost to go to Aveility City?\"\n\n\"Aveility, eh?\" He stroked his beard and looked at her, taking in her youth, secondhand robe, and the fact that her visible luggage was ninety percent books and ten percent tea. \"Isn't that where the wizard schools are? You know we offer a discount for wizards if they don't mind helping out a bit.\"\n\nEvelyn quickly decided he didn't need to know this would be her first year at school and so she wasn't actually a wizard yet.\n\n\"What's the discount?\" Evelyn asked, hoping she didn't sound too interested.\n\n\"Half price if you just help power up the flight spell every now and then.\"\n\n\"Deal.\"\n\n\"Good. Name's Conor and I'll be the one flying you and anyone else who wants to go. Now let's figure out what route we should take.\" Conor pulled a large map out of nowhere. Either he knew magic himself or the map had been hidden in his beard. \"Company doesn't send us enough wizards to fly everywhere we want, but Aveility is important enough that you have a few route options. Different stops along the way, but they all land at the city.\"\n\n\"Is there a difference in price?\"\n\n\"For you? No.\" He stretched out the hand-drawn map and pointed to the different colored lines, clearly routes or someone was really bad at drawing country boundaries. \"Let's see, you could take the Red Route, takes you across the Boiling Lake and the Give-Up-All-Hope Mountain. That's the quickest way and you'd reach Aveility in six hours.\"\n\n\"Boiling Lake and Give-Up-All-Hope Mountain,\" Evelyn repeated. \"Isn't that dangerous?\"\n\n\"Oh, I wouldn't think so.\"\n\nEvelyn eyed the skull and crossbones so cluttered on the map they left little room for landmarks. \"What are the other options?\"\n\n\"The Yellow Route takes you over Valley of the Tortured Souls and Forest of the Damned.\"\n\n\"Pleasant.\"\n\n\"Though for the best view I'd recommend the Blue Route over Annihilation Peak, Eternal Rest Mountain, and the Cliff of Ruin. Basically over the entire Death Mountain Range.\"\n\nWho came up with these names?\n\n\"Couldn't I go over the Kittens and Puppies Valley or something?\" Evelyn asked.\n\n\"Oh, God, do you have a death wish?!? Though speaking of death wishes, the Green Route over Death Wish Valley would get you there in two days.\"\n\n\"What's the safest route?\"\n\n\"Umm...\" Conor avoided meeting her eyes. \"They're all safe.\"\n\nEvelyn glanced over at the airbox/airship. The less time she had to spend in it the better. \"I guess the fastest route.\"\n\nEvelyn vowed never to take the fastest route again. And never ride an airship again.\n\nThe wind stung her eyes and it was so cold even layering on two of her winter coats didn't help. The box was crowded with at least a dozen passengers sitting side-by-side on the airbox's floor, most of whom looked either bored or terrified \u2013 which were the two feelings Evelyn herself fluctuated between.\n\nAnd then there was the nausea.\n\nNone of her books mentioned feeling ill while flying. Then again all of the books claimed airships were valid transportation options so nothing the authors wrote could be trusted anymore. Conor claimed Evelyn was feeling seasick, but how could she feel something that happened on the ocean when they were flying through the air? Evelyn would have pointed out the logical problem, if she wasn't afraid of what would happen if she opened her mouth.\n\nAt least the scenery was beautiful. Forests reduced to patchwork greens, snow-peaked mountains, and turquoise rivers cutting through it all. Give-Up-All-Hope Mountain really should be a vacation spot.\n\n\"Hey, wizard.\" Conor's voice cut through Evelyn's thoughts. He sat upfront, which really was just the side of the box facing the direction they were headed, with his hands on a steering wheel, which was really just a stick. \"Add some magic to the seal, would ya?\"\n\nEvelyn placed her hand on the magical seal that kept them all airborne. The spell looked like a small hand. Each time she refilled the magic it felt like that hand reached out and punched her in the gut. That probably didn't help with the nausea.\n\n\"How do you fly this thing without a wizard onboard?\" Evelyn asked, looking at the other passengers and wondering just how long they'd had to wait before a flight.\n\n\"We don't. But at least once a week some wizard wants a ride, or we temporarily hire one, then we fly. Worse comes to worse, we get one drunk enough to pass out and then wake them up about halfway in. At that point they have to power up the spell.\"\n\nKidnapping confession aside, Evelyn wondered if she could have gotten a better deal than half off. And the fact that not a single passenger seemed surprised by the unorthodox methods simply confirmed that anyone willing to fly was either foolish or fearless.\n\n\"You know,\" Conor continued, \"If schooling doesn't work out we could always use wizards around here. Travel, adventure, and maybe a little windburn, all yours for the taking.\"\n\nEvelyn vowed she'd never leave school.\n\n\"By the way, what happens if there's a storm or a dragon finds us?\"\n\n\"Dragons usually don't bother ships, something about us being beneath their dignity or whatnot. And our airships are made to handle even the toughest storms. But neither of those are usually the issue. What's the problem is pirates.\"\n\n\"Pirates?\" Evelyn repeated with an added amount of skepticism. \"But we're in the sky, how could pirates reach us?\"\n\nNow if pirates were to suddenly appear right after Evelyn asked the question, she would know never to tempt fate again. But naturally that didn't happen. Events don't occur just because someone spoke out loud. No, the pirates came ten minutes later.\n\n\"Incoming off the starboard side!\" Conor yelled out, pointing to the right.\n\nTwo small figures were speeding towards the airbox. Squinting, Evelyn could make out two people balancing on what looked like flying boards. Literal boards. A plank of wood that they balanced on without even a railing.\n\nDid no one understand the concept of the \"ship\" in airship?\n\nThe two pirates zoomed closer and a voice that was so loud it had to have been enchanted by magic called out, \"Stop flying and surrender!\"\n\n\"Never!\" Conor yelled out with such passion that Evelyn didn't have the heart to tell him there was no way the pirates would be able to hear him at such a distance without magic.\n\nBut given that the airbox wasn't slowing down, the pirates appeared to have figured out they weren't giving up. And with that, the pirates started throwing spears and the passengers started to scream.\n\nThis wasn't good.\n\n\"Quick,\" Conor yelled to Evelyn as a spear with a rope tied around it just missed the airbox's side. \"Power up that seal! We've had a lot of missing ships from this route so the pirates probably don't leave survivors. Our only hope is to outrun them!\"\n\nEvelyn slapped her hand against the magic seal and added power to it, realizing it didn't make her feel nearly as sick as the fear did.\n\n\"Do you know any attack or defense spells?\" Conor asked as he made them soar even higher.\n\n\"No! I haven't even taken a single class!\"\n\n\"Should have guessed you were new when you settled for working for just half off rather than money and a free ride.\"\n\nEvelyn quickly noted never to make that mistake again. Well, if she lived through this and could make more mistakes.\n\nAnother spear flew above them, barely missing Conor's head.\n\n\"We outnumber them,\" Evelyn shouted to Conor and the cowering passengers. \"Maybe we could beat them in a fight.\"\n\n\"They have magic and weapons, what do we have?\"\n\nOne of the passengers stood up and threw off his cloak. He was armed with more weapons than a standard army and it looked like even his muscles had muscles.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" he declared as the wind tussled his hair. \"I will protect you!\"\n\nA spear hit him in the head.\n\nThe would-be hero collapsed into a heap. As the other passengers screamed and cried - which seemed like a smart action given the circumstances - Evelyn crawled over and checked out the body.\n\nThe man groaned and clutched the spear attached to his head. Literally attached. It was a rounded spearhead with no point, but it must have had some magical spell to make it stick to whatever it hit. Plus there was a rope tied to the spear. But why?\n\nAs if to answer the question, the rope went taut. The man slid towards the side of the airbox, as if someone was trying to reel him in.\n\nEvelyn looked out at the pirates and saw they were moving hand-over-hand on the rope to close the distance between them and the airbox. Attached by rope, now even the best ship maneuvers wouldn't be able to lose them now. The pirates would be on them in a matter of seconds if this continued.\n\nEvelyn grabbed a knife from the unconscious man's belt and sawed off the rope. Maybe that would make the pirates fall. Evelyn gazed out, hoping to see nothing but sky. Instead, the pirates were getting closer.\n\nShe really should have insisted on traveling the route across the Kittens and Puppies Valley.\n\n\"What's happening back there?\" Conor called out.\n\n\"Nothing good!\"\n\n\"Are you sure you don't know any spells?\"\n\n\"I only know small spells, like warming up tea, finding lost sheep, and making my voice louder,\" Evelyn trailed off and then looked back at the pirates. \"Actually, should we try negotiating?\"\n\n\"Didn't you hear me?\" Conor asked as the airbox dived down, making Evelyn remember why she had felt nauseous for most of the flight. \"A lot of airships don't return from this route. These pirates don't just take your money. They take your life.\"\n\n\"It doesn't hurt to ask.\"\n\nIgnoring Conor's shouts of protest, Evelyn cast the spell to amplify her voice. Then, as another spear passed over her head, she called out, \"Will you stop chasing us?\n\nWell, at least it was worth asking.\n\n\"No,\" a pirate countered with a voice also magically louder. \"Surrender!\"\n\n\"No. We don't want to die!\"\n\n\"Who said anything about dying? We wouldn't kill anyone! Rough them up a bit, sure, but not kill!\"\n\nThe confusion in the voice was only amplified with how loud it was. Either the pirates were terrific actors or they really weren't murders.\n\n\"But we heard you don't leave survivors,\" Evelyn said with a meaningful look at Conor.\n\n\"That's just bad for business. Too many deaths mean people wouldn't fly here anymore, and then we'd have no one to steal from.\"\n\n\"Plus, killing is like, super bad,\" the other pirate called out with a magically enhanced voice. If they both had enchanted voices, that means they both could use magic. \"We'll steal, but we draw the line at murder.\"\n\nGreat, two wizard pirates and Evelyn could only magically make tea hotter. At least it looked like they weren't going to kill them all. Maybe.\n\n\"But airships have been disappearing on this route,\" Evelyn said.\n\n\"That's probably from the dragons and storms. Very dangerous.\"\n\nEvelyn sent another meaningful look at Conor, who studiously ignored her. They continued flying as quickly as they could. The wind was giving Evelyn a headache. And she still felt sick.\n\n\"Could we all just stop and talk this out?\" Evelyn cried out.\n\n\"A parlay?\" Conor and the pirates asked at the same time.\n\n\"Sure,\" Evelyn replied. Whatever a parlay was, it had to be better than this chase.\n\nThe airbox slowed down and the pirates slowed down as well. They were clearly experienced with flying since they wore multiple jackets, a number of scarves, and goggles. Oh yes, and at least a dozen gleaming weapons each looking scarier than the last.\n\nSoon everyone simply hovered in the sky and glared at each other. Off to a good start.\n\n\"Well,\" Evelyn said slowly as she rubbed her temples. \"If storms and dragons are so dangerous then why would you risk flying yourselves?\"\n\n\"Not a lot of ways to make money here. A few years back, we changed the area's name to Hope Mountain in the hopes of becoming a popular vacation spot, but somehow the name changed to Give-Up-All-Hope Mountain.\"\n\nEvelyn considered the name apt given the dragons, storms, and pirates, but wisely didn't comment.\n\nThe other pirate spoke up. \"We even went to a wizarding school so we could learn a new trade and were kicked out before the end of the year! Apparently they didn't like it when you prefer fighting to reading. We don't really want to be pirates, but we need to make money somehow.\"\n\nGood thing schools didn't teach lightning attack spells until the second year.\n\nBut even if the pirates didn't know attack spells, they were already so powerful. The spears, the speed, and the ability to balance on a board over a thousand feet off the ground and not freeze in terror. They had to be either fearless or foolish to be a pirate. Just like everyone else who liked airships.\n\n\"So,\" Evelyn said as an idea began to form, \"would you be willing to relocate if you could make money?\"\n\nThe two huddled together and silently chatted before one called out, \"Sure. I mean, as long as we could visit home every once in awhile.\"\n\n\"And could you endure travel, adventure, and maybe a little windburn?\"\n\n\"For money? Sounds like a dream!\"\n\nEvelyn looked towards Conor. He laughed and said, \"I think I know where you're going with this, little wizard. And I like it! Always preferred fighting over reading myself.\"\n\nWith a smile Evelyn turned back to the pirates. \"Have you ever considered becoming airship pilots?\"\n\nAfter that it was just down to negotiations.\n\nThe once-pirates and now-pilots left with company employment contracts and only a few stolen coins. They even healed the would-be hero's concussion without being asked.\n\nConor turned to Evelyn. \"Don't worry, the rest of the route should be just as easy. Probably. Maybe. With luck it will be just as easy!\"\n\nEvelyn vowed that next time she'd just walk.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Runaway by Joshua Curtis Kidd ]\n\n\"No one escapes the guild,\" Jacob Shelley said to himself as he chased a rebel up the side of a mountain. He hoped that he wouldn't allow the first exception today.\n\nJacob aimed the three-pronged claw of his sparking iron at a tree just beyond the rebel. He summoned his magical energy, and a bolt of electricity arced between his sparker and the tree. Its bark exploded in large chunks.\n\nThat ought to have been enough to convince the rebel to lay down her rifle and return quietly to the munitions factory with him. Instead, she turned and fired her rifle at Jacob.\n\nHis shield stone stopped the bullet in an explosion of blue light. Jacob stumbled, disoriented by the flash, and the rebel continued her run for the woods.\n\nJacob could have caught her already, if he had used his flash stone. He held back because he wanted her to give up and realize the futility of running from The Guild. His orders were to capture or kill. He wasn't ready to kill.\n\nThe rebels were idiots, persisting in a war that had ended more than a hundred years earlier when King George III had hired The Guild to crush their forces. They were an underground group now, and their methods included assassinating leaders and blowing up buildings. They no longer even had a clear cause. Queen Victoria ruled the American colonies in name only, and The Guild was paid by an American government to keep the peace.\n\nKeeping the peace sometimes meant meeting the rebels with lethal force. Jacob knew that such things were required to maintain the greater good, but it was a different thing to have to do them yourself.\n\nThe rebel turned to fire at Jacob again. Two other Guild members flashed up beside her. The hoods of their robes hid their faces. Lightning leaped from the ends of their sparkers at the rebel. Jacob turned away, but his shield shimmered blue as dust and heat pelted it.\n\nNo one escaped The Guild.\n\nJacob returned to the munitions factory, which was now engulfed in a magical green flame that would consume bricks, iron, steel, and everything else. Soon, only a pile of smoking ash would remain to show that any structure had ever been there.\n\nNestled in a valley in western Virginia, this factory had escaped the notice of The Guild for some time because the rebels hadn't constructed it along a major river. It ran on steam power, and nearby mines provided the coal it needed for fuel.\n\nJacob found his mentor, Benjamin, overseeing the building's destruction.\n\n\"We might never have found this place if we hadn't tracked that airship making a delivery of iron,\" Benjamin said. From up close, his long gray beard and sharp cheekbones were visible under his hood.\" They might have continued to manufacture rifles here for years. We're saving a lot of lives here today.\"\n\nJacob nodded. This was for the greater good.\n\n\"I heard that the rebel that I sent you after was dealt with,\" Benjamin said to Jacob. His voice and expression were full of disappointment. Benjamin knew who had dealt with the rebel.\n\n\"That's right,\" Jacob said.\n\n\"I need you to handle something else for me,\" Benjamin said.\n\n\"What is it, sir?\" Jacob asked.\n\n\"A few rebels escaped into the woods this way,\" Benjamin said. \"There should be three of them. I need you to find them and deal with them.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Jacob said. Benjamin was testing him, seeing how far he would go. He was giving Jacob another chance.\n\n\"I knew I could count on you,\" Benjamin said and put a hand on Jacob's shoulder.\n\nJacob had seen how The Guild dealt with failure. He still didn't know if he could summon his magic to kill another person, and he was afraid. He touched his belt and flashed into the forest.\n\nThe range of travel with a flash stone was a few hundred yards under normal conditions. In the forest, the density of trees shortened that range to only fifty yards or so. Jacob could use the stone to open temporary portals for quick travel, but only to locations within line of sight. He would have to progress more slowly here than he could out in the open, moving back and forth across the forest in an expanding pattern.\n\nWith each step through a portal, complete silence engulfed Jacob. On the other side, sound returned just as abruptly.\n\nJacob emerged from the silence to a man's scream, and he saw a figure dive behind a large boulder. In fear, Jacob's magical energy surged forward and out through his sparking iron. The rock exploded, and pieces flew in all directions.\n\nIt was getting dark, and the electric arc of the sparking iron had blinded Jacob. He stepped past what remained of the rock, squinting to see. Jacob hoped that the man was dead. He had fired without thinking much about it. He wasn't sure he could fire on the rebel again if he had to.\n\nJacob found the man lying face down, hunched over something else. He was bleeding from several wounds where he had been struck by flying rock fragments, and he was no longer breathing. Jacob rolled him onto his back.\n\nBeneath the man, Jacob found two other bodies. They were children, and they were also dead.\n\nJacob raged at the man's stupidity. He had not only run from The Guild, he had put his children in danger by taking them as well. Magic surged up within him and again he fired his sparker. The bolt struck a nearby tree, splitting it in two. The sudden destruction startled Jacob out of his rage, and guilt came forward to take its place.\n\nHe had been a fool to think that he could remain a part of The Guild and avoid complicity in its brutality. He had been trying to escape The Guild while still remaining a part of it. And Benjamin had sent him here, knowing that Jacob would have to murder children.\n\nJacob couldn't go back to the factory. He couldn't escape, but he had no other choice. He had to run. He touched his belt and flashed away.\n\nJacob flashed through the evening without stopping to eat or sleep. He found the North Star in the sky and he followed it. When morning came, he stopped to learn his location from some people he passed, but he refused to rest or look for food. Hunger and exhaustion soon caught up with him.\n\nWhen he arrived at his mother's boardinghouse in his home town of French Creek, Jacob felt like he was dreaming. His mother came out to welcome him home with tears in her eyes.\n\nHe had had many dreams like this since joining The Guild. He always woke from these dreams, lying on his cot in The Guild dormitory, knowing that his dreams were showing him something he wanted to be real.\n\nHis mother had been so angry when he left. She had told him that if he left for The Guild, then he wasn't any son of hers. He hoped that one day he would come back and show his mother all of the magic that he had learned and tell her of all the places he had been. She would understand why he had left French Creek to join The Guild, and she would forgive him.\n\nWhen Jacob woke in a soft bed rather than a Guild cot, he knew that his memories of the night before had been real. The room was the one he had grown up in. The quilt on the bed was one that his mother had made with fabric stitched together to show birds flying through the clouds.\n\nJacob's limbs were heavy, but he pulled himself up from the bed. His robes and everything he was carrying the night before were piled in the corner. He heard his mother talking beyond the door and went to find her.\n\n\"Mom,\" Jacob said, but his voice was weak.\n\nFrom the top of the stairs, Jacob could see his mother talking to a man who put on his coat and left the house.\n\n\"Mom,\" Jacob said again and nearly stumbled down the stairs.\n\nEva Shelley ran to her son's side to support him. \"I've got you,\" she said. \"You shouldn't be out of bed yet.\"\n\nJacob was surprised to see that he was taller than her now and that she had streaks of gray in her hair.\n\n\"Who was that, Mom?\" Jacob asked.\n\n\"It was just a boarder,\" Eva said. \"I've sent him away. It's just us in the house now.\" She put her shoulder under her son's arm and led him back to bed.\n\n\"I'm going to go out to get us something to eat for tonight,\" Eva said. \"But I need to know something first, Jacob. Are you back?\"\n\n\"I don't understand, Mom,\" Jacob said. \"You can see that I'm here.\"\n\n\"No,\" Eva said. \"I mean have you left The Guild?\"\n\nJacob had to think about the question for a moment before he could answer. \"Yes,\" he said at last. \"Yes, I have.\"\n\nEva smiled and hugged her son. Jacob could see tears welling up in her eyes. \"I thought I'd lost you forever,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm surprised you would take me back,\" Jacob said.\n\n\"I never felt as bad as when you told me you were leaving to join The Guild,\" Eva said. \"And things haven't gotten much better in the five years since then. If you're back, then maybe that can change. They say forgiveness is a virtue, but I'm just ready to not feel so terrible anymore. We can talk more about it later. You should try to get some more sleep.\"\n\nEva left the room, but Jacob couldn't fall asleep again. Saying aloud that he had left The Guild started something stirring in his mind.\n\nHe couldn't really have left The Guild. No one left The Guild, just like no one escaped The Guild. He might have run away, but they would come for him and they would kill him. And, if he was with his mother when they came, they would kill her, too.\n\nJacob got up and extinguished every lamp in the house. He grabbed his sparker and waited by the front door, watching through a window the dirt road that led into town.\n\nWhen Eva returned home, Jacob pulled her into the house.\n\n\"Jacob,\" she said. \"You should be in bed.\"\n\n\"Mom, I think I may have put you in danger,\" Jacob said.\n\n\"I know,\" Eva said. \"The grocer said that some men from out of town were asking about you.\"\n\n\"Then we need to leave now.\"\n\nA bright flash of light outside interrupted them.\n\nJacob used the iron-claw muzzle of his sparker to move the curtain on the window just enough to see the silhouettes of two robed figures.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said. \"We have to go out the back.\"\n\nJacob couldn't see anyone behind the house, but The Guild wouldn't give them an easy escape. He removed the chain that held his shield stone and put it around his mother's neck.\n\n\"When we go out, run for the woods,\" he said. \"We might be able to lose them in there.\"\n\nEva nodded and remained quiet.\n\nJacob pushed the door open slowly, taking two careful steps. A bolt of electricity struck the ground in front of him, sending up a spray of dirt and smoke.\n\n\"Run, Mom!\" Jacob shouted. He still couldn't see the Guild member, but he fired his own sparker in the direction from which the shot had come. He hit a tree, igniting a few dry autumn leaves that still clung to the branches.\n\nJacob fired a few more shots and then flashed into the woods, catching up with Eva in the cover of the trees.\n\n\"I need to tell you something,\" Eva said.\n\n\"No, Mom,\" Jacob said. \"We have to keep moving.\"\n\n\"Keep moving where?\" Eva asked. \"I appreciate your willingness to act quickly, but we also need a plan if we're going to escape. We need to get to the airship docks.\"\n\n\"What good will that do us?\"\n\n\"I never told you this, but your father and I were part of an airship crew before you were born. When you came back last night, I reached out to some old friends\u2014\"\n\n\"Mom, we can't outrun The Guild. Not even in an airship. They're going to catch us, one way or another.\"\n\n\"Jacob, I'm trying to tell you that the ship was our home, one that we took with us wherever we went. We weren't always safe, but it was our bubble of freedom in a world controlled by The Guild.\"\n\n\"Maybe it would be better for us to split up,\" Jacob said. The Guild was after him and not his mother. But if they found the two of them together, Eva's fate wouldn't be any different than his. \"You can go to the airship docks, and I can go draw them off.\"\n\n\"Jacob, that's not what I\u2014\"\n\nThe rest of Eva's words were cut off when Jacob flashed deeper into the woods.\n\nJacob stepped through a portal onto an empty baseball field. Eva was still in the woods, and he needed to draw The Guild's attention.\n\nHe fired his sparking iron at the wooden bleachers, which exploded into a hail of flaming splinters. The remaining boards continued to burn, illuminating the field with a flickering light. The Guild would see where he was, and he would see them coming. That was what he wanted.\n\nA flash of light just beyond home plate drew Jacob's attention, and three hooded figures emerged from the shadows. Each carried a sparking iron trained on him.\n\n\"I don't expect mercy,\" Jacob said. \"But you should expect a fight.\"\n\n\"And why wouldn't you expect mercy, Jacob?\" Benjamin pulled back his hood to reveal his face. \"Your mission was successful, and you haven't done anything wrong yet. Do you think that you're the first of our initiates to question his commitment to The Guild?\"\n\nJacob had expected The Guild to send men he didn't know, men who could kill him without hesitation. Benjamin's even voice disarmed him.\n\n\"I know what happens to members who try to leave The Guild,\" Jacob shouted.\n\n\"It's true,\" Benjamin said. \"We can't let anyone leave with our secrets. But I'm giving you the chance to tell me that you're not leaving. That you had a strong reaction to a bad situation and that was all.\"\n\n\"A bad situation? You sent me to kill children,\" Jacob said.\n\n\"I didn't know that there were children,\" Benjamin said as he walked slowly toward Jacob. \"If I had, I wouldn't have sent you. Not without help and without a plan to bring them back alive. That factory was producing more than fifty rifles a day. Think of all of the lives we've saved by destroying it. We work for the greater good, Jacob. You know that.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't have been sent to kill anyone,\" Jacob said. \"They just wanted to get away.\"\n\n\"Jacob, I truly regret the decision I made,\" Benjamin said, putting his hand on Jacob's sparker. \"And I would rather no one else die for my mistake. Let's go back to the Guild Hall in London and discuss this. We don't need any more violence.\"\n\nJacob wanted to make another argument, but that wouldn't be the end of it. Making arguments was just like running. He could do it until he was exhausted, and The Guild would keep coming.\n\nJacob let go of his sparker in resignation. \"All right,\" he said. \"I'll go.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Benjamin said. \"We'll get a portal set up to transport the two of us to London immediately.\"\n\nOne of the Guild members behind Benjamin pulled a keystone from his pack and set it on the ground. The other waved his hands over it and began muttering incantations.\n\n\"You're making the right decision, Jacob,\" Benjamin said. \"When we get back to London, you'll feel\u2014\"\n\nBenjamin's words were cut off by the sound of an engine starting above them. An airship was circling overhead to land in the field.\n\n\"Quickly, now,\" Benjamin said, pulling Jacob towards the keystone where the shimmering mist of a portal was forming. The keystone could open a portal to any other keystone in the world, but it required more time to work than the flash stones.\n\n\"We're losing the connection with London, sir,\" one of the Guild members shouted.\n\n\"It's the airship,\" Benjamin shouted. \"Fire on it.\"\n\nThe Guild members pointed their sparking irons towards the ship, but nothing happened. Rifle fire sounded from the direction of the airship, and one of the Guild members dropped his sparker to grab his arm. The mist above the stone was dissipating.\n\n\"Our sparking irons and shield stones aren't working, sir,\" shouted the Guild member who was hit. \"Neither are our flash stones.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Benjamin shouted. \"Back into the forest. Don't leave that sparking iron behind. Jacob, come with me.\"\n\nJacob stood still, transfixed by the sudden appearance of the airship.\n\nLarge sails protruded like ears from either side of the cigar-shaped gas envelope. Two long poles extended from each side of the gondola, and at the end of each pole, a spinning propeller pointed skyward, pushing the ship down toward the field for a landing. But why had The Guild's magic started to fail as soon as the ship appeared?\n\nJacob remembered what his mother had told him. The airship was her bubble of freedom in a world controlled by The Guild.\n\n\"No,\" Jacob said. \"I've left The Guild, Benjamin. I'm not going with you.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Jacob,\" Benjamin said. \"I can't let you stay.\"\n\nJacob felt a sharp pain in his abdomen and looked down to see a knife's hilt and a growing blood stain on his shirt.\n\n\"I'm truly sorry, Jacob,\" Benjamin said.\n\nJacob fell back onto the grass and lost consciousness.\n\nWhen jacob woke, he lay in bed. Eva sat in a chair beside him, holding his hand. Little else could fit in the room besides the two pieces of furniture, and Jacob thought he could feel a gentle swaying.\n\nHe tried to sit up, but his mother put a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"Easy now,\" Eva said. \"You almost died. It's a good thing for all of us that Dr. Plowright was aboard.\"\n\n\"Where am I?\" Jacob asked.\n\n\"This is Windchaser,\" his mother said. \"You were born on this ship, you know. I suppose it might have been poetic if you had died on it as well, but I've never much cared for poetry myself.\"\n\n\"Mom, what happened that night?\" Jacob asked. \"Why weren't The Guild members able to work their magic?\"\n\n\"Well, The Guild likes to shroud themselves in an air of mystery with their silly robes and complicated rituals, but their magic is really just another kind of technology. It can be studied and understood. And we've been studying it for decades now. The engineer on this ship came up with a machine he thought could disable magic at a short distance. He was eager to try it out, and Captain Merriwether owed me a favor.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"That's what I was trying to tell you that night. I've been a part of The Resistance for your entire life. After you were born, I had to leave this airship for a life that I thought would be safer, but I continued my work. The boarding house was a way station for Resistance members passing through. I'm sorry that I didn't tell you when you were younger, but the wrong word to the wrong person could have gotten us both killed. Then you were off to join The Guild, and there was nothing I could do.\"\n\nJacob had to look away from his mother. How could she be part of the rebels? Had some of her boarders been assassins? Had they blown up government buildings? He had wanted out of The Guild, but joining the rebels didn't sound much better to him.\n\n\"Mom, have you ever killed anyone?\" Jacob asked.\n\n\"I haven't,\" Eva said. \"We all resist in our own way. But I won't claim that I don't know plenty of people in The Resistance who have killed. And that includes some of the people on this airship.\"\n\n\"So, I've left The Guild only to join the rebels?\" Jacob asked. \"Why can't I just find a place to live in peace?\"\n\n\"Because peace in this world is the order maintained by The Guild,\" Eva said. \"Anyone who threatens The Guild's power to maintain order is dealt with violently, and they call it peace. You can't peaceably separate yourself from The Guild. To do so is to be part of The Resistance.\"\n\nJacob was too weak to think through his mother's words, but a phrase bubbled up through his consciousness.\n\n\"No one escapes The Guild,\" Jacob said.\n\n\"That's right,\" Eva said. \"No one. But if enough of us get together, maybe we can escape together.\"\n\nAll of those years, his mother had been part of The Resistance, and The Guild hadn't taken them. Jacob hadn't done nearly so well on his own. He might not ever escape The Guild, but he could run much farther with help.\n\n\"I don't know if that's true,\" Jacob said. \"But I'm willing to find out.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Clockwork & Consensus by Mary Alexandra Agner ]\n\nIfigenia glass adjusted the tiller and watched dawn come up through the clouds. She pulled her cloak tighter around her shoulders, but it wasn't the altitude that chilled her.\n\nBy now the wizard Ransaransa had probably noticed she'd escaped. The wizard would probably be tasting the wind, working out Ifigenia's direction and speed, debating which monster to command from the menagerie. Ifi flinched at the thought of claws closing around her.\n\nShe consulted the hypsometer and the azimuth-rose. She would make the floating city of Seffel by nightfall if the weather held. If the air currents didn't pull her off course into a cloud lagoon rife with sky sirens, who preyed on humans. If she avoided the pirates known to infest these skies. If she could stay awake to steer. If, if.\n\nShe had a contact in Seffel willing to sell her clockwork for a small cut, both her prototype worker and her airship. She ran her fingers slowly along the railing of the captain's hut. Her heart and sweat were in its copper and pine finish; already it was difficult to let it go. At least she was still tinkering with the autonomous clockworker.\n\nThe light level dropped. Ifi stepped onto the bow of the ship. Between her and the sun were two pirates, keeping time. Larger craft than hers, probably holding half a dozen people each, more than enough to take her and her ship.\n\nShe winced, imagining crushing grips and harsh voices. Her pistols? She'd meant them for intimidation. They'd do little against the metal hulls of the ships, but they could deter the pirates themselves\u2014if she could bring herself to use them. Panic jerked from her chest to her limbs like a coil spring released.\n\n\"Ehoy! Little craft! What have you got to pay our tax?\" The speaker leaned over the deck of the closer pirate. Brown hair cropped short yet rising and falling with the wind, brown skin nearly the color of his hair. \"I am Obrahom of the Cirrus Circle, and we claim this current.\"\n\n\"Ridiculous,\" Ifi muttered under her breath.\n\n\"Do you think so?\" Obrahom asked, laughing. He gestured with his hand, and the wind between them fell still.\n\nIn the silence, Ifi heard singing, a long chord held by multiple voices and then released. She could make out a handful of people now standing on the deck of each of the pirate ships.\n\nEncouraged by their small hands and Obrahom's cultured voice, Ifi repeated herself, louder. \"No one owns the air.\"\n\nObrahom nodded. \"Certainly, the air is its own. But we all have desires. And we all have to eat. The design of your ship is unique, so small a craft, run by a single person. We want the details. Schematics? You look like that type. Let us rummage about in your hold, and we'll let you go.\"\n\nIfi thought of her unfinished clockworker, of having to kick or punch the pirates or fire her pistols. \"No.\"\n\nObrahom shrugged. \"Thisle?\"\n\nA woman with blond braids leaned over the railing. Then she and Obrahom began to sing, and the others joined in, no words Ifi knew, but her vocabulary was full of cranks and gears and tolerances and the many ways people said five and ten and zero. Not magic. Definitely not magic.\n\nWhile they stayed at a distance, it was easy for Ifi to envy the way the pirates worked together. She understood harmonic oscillations better than harmonies but could read their body language: they received and listened and passed on like a water clock spilling liquid from one jar into another.\n\nAt one point a few of them linked hands, and Ifi shuddered. She recalled Ransaransa and other mages slashing their palms and clasping together bloody fingers to make a circle, how it was the last wizard standing who gained the others' power, how the static electricity raised Ransaransa's hair and clothes when the wizard turned to Ifi and made demands. Ifi had tried to make her insides as stiff and resilient as those of her clockworkers, but her heart had always skipped a gear tooth. She never wanted to make anyone feel that way. She had measured the amplitude of impending violence in the width of the wizard's smile, the diameter of the wizard's pupils.\n\nThe threat in the pirate's voice earlier was nothing like that. The pirates' song now was like oscillating clock pendulums of different lengths, surging in volume and congruence of pitch when the long rods swung in synchronicity. It felt magical but nothing like Ransaransa's magic.\n\nIfi shook off the thick memories as ropes descended from the pirates' ships and began to loop themselves into knots around her ship's railing. The first few missed\u2013\u2013the music swelled\u2013\u2013then grappled successfully, tightening.\n\nThisle, Obrahom, and another woman levitated over the side of the ship to land on Ifi's deck while they sang. The second woman was taller than the others, her skin less sun-kissed and more night-sky-dark.\n\nIfi turned to run, tripped over the side of the captain's hut, and threw her hands out in front of her to break her fall. She landed on her front, the pistols in her pantaloon pockets digging into her thighs.\n\nAs the music ended, Obrahom stepped over Ifi and grabbed her wrists.\n\nShe jerked away, but the other women stepped closer.\n\n\"Now,\" Obrahom said, pulling her upright and passing her wrists off like a parcel, \"why don't you stay here a moment with Thisle while I look in your hold?\"\n\nThisle began to hum. Ifi struggled in her grasp; Thisle's grip didn't shift. The second woman picked out a little harmony against Thisle's tune. But she made a face each time Thisle increased the pressure on Ifi's wrists, which Ifi appreciated.\n\nTheir music did nothing to cover the sounds of the other pirate on the ladder, then boxes and bins being shifted and metal levers being used to pick open Ifi's cargo. Her mouth was as dry as pig iron in a puddling furnace. Would he lift up the tarps?\n\n\"Ah! What a beauty!\" Obrahom's voice.\n\nListening hard for the shifting of her tarps, Ifi instead heard more singing, multiple voices, intricate harmonies, like interlocking gears supporting and winding each other. Crisp and cold, like the air about her, and most distinct from the pirates' song.\n\nIfi tore away harder, and Thisle let her go. Her muscles felt like lead, squishy and heavy. Thisle stood still, head cocked, listening. The second woman stood still, too, listening.\n\nA quick glance up showed her nothing, but Ifi tugged two grease rags from her belt and mashed them into her ears. She pushed herself through the muffled quiet toward the ladder, descended. Her special crate was safe in the corner, still disguised by paint-splattered tarps.\n\nObrahom was slumped next to the crate of weather balloons, his hands full of pry bar.\n\nShe felt bodies hit the deck above her. Sirens alighting? Humans dropping unconscious? She crawled to the crate of weather balloons, then looked back over her shoulder toward the ladder.\n\nRainbows fell through the hold. Ifi shivered, recalling that the patagia of sirens were magically-bound droplets of water. Jointed digits, longer than a human's, grasped the top rung, the lower rung, then suddenly disappeared. Ifi could imagine the shrieks, some so high no human could hear them, according to a professor at Kuntun University.\n\nHer eyes on the ladder, she reached into the crate and felt for a switch. Off to on. Second switch. Off to on. She could feel the metal vibrating, the crate vibrating. Off to on. Her weather balloons\u2013\u2013silver, spherical, propellers spinning, lighter-than-air gasbags hefting them upwards\u2013\u2013rose over her head, seeking the current.\n\nIfi climbed up to peek onto the deck. A cacophony of color blinded her, overlapping rainbows projected onto the ship, its gasbag, even her own skin. Enormous wings filled the air as the sirens swooped and dove, trying to outmaneuver the balloons. The flight of the sirens was the strongest local current so the balloons followed them.\n\nShe laughed at the sight, so hard that a rag fell from her ear. She clapped a hand to her head. In that brief moment of movement, she heard piercing clicks, not song.\n\nShe stuffed the rag back into her ear and climbed onto the deck. A siren swooped low over her head, its long canines yellowed and dull compared to the rainbows. Ifi fell to the deck to avoid the bits of sharp bone veining between its wing membranes.\n\nAs she watched, it banked and headed back for her. She scrabbled for her pistols. Could she fire at a living being?\n\nThe siren dove, opening its snout to aim its call at her; Ifi felt herself pinned to the deck\u2013\u2013except her heartbeat, which seemed to be pounding through her sternum.\n\nThe siren banked and began to descend toward her body. When she felt her hands shaking, she asked herself again, could she fire at a living being? She'd put herself back together after the wizard's beatings; she'd escaped the wizard's fortress. She would do what she had to to survive.\n\nIfi bit her lip\u2013\u2013then raised her arms and squeezed the pistol's trigger. The siren dropped\u2013\u2013Ifi saw blue sky through its torn wing\u2013\u2013and Ifi's heart dropped. The siren struggled to rise over the ship's railing, then fell again. The rest of the flock plunged afterward.\n\nIfi was as empty as the pistol's chamber. Her hands continued shaking even after she rolled over to pin them to the deck. She had hurt someone, she had bloodied them intentionally. Was she any different than the wizard? The flexing of the deck and the ship's balloon against the airstream gave her no answer.\n\nSlowly Ifi sat up, pulled the rags from her ears, pocketed them, and went to check on Thisle and the other woman. Pulses pounding but sleeping. She tied their wrists together behind them, but gently. Down in the hold, she did the same to Obrahom.\n\nShe counted the remaining weather balloons. More uses than she'd realized. If only she didn't have to climb down into the hold to turn them on. She hefted the spent pistol in her hand. She scrunched up her face as she thought. The pirates could be useful if she could manipulate them rather than fight. Ransaransa might still find her.\n\nShe picked out a sunny spot on the deck to convert her pistol into a device for calling the weather balloons. She breathed in the cold push of the wind, absent when she was trapped in the wizard's fortress.\n\nShe'd had to leave behind every flying being in the wizard's menagerie, their cages all locked by blood and magic. The carrier pigeons with their iridescent plumage and enormous tail feathers, whom she'd befriended to secretly transport her letters in and out with Ransaransa's mail. The mega-bees, soft like kittens and as playful, who'd kept her company with their antics. The red dragon, most fearsome of Ransaransa's prisoners until you got to know them, their insistence on bright yellow cheese for snacks, their love of pranks, the low note in their throat when they indicated to Ifi they were thinking of home.\n\nThe glint off her tools woke her from a nap. The sun had moved past its zenith. Ifi looked about frantically, but the pirates were still sleeping.\n\nNo. One of the pirates on the far ship stood. Ifi grabbed her remaining pistol and shot into the air.\n\n\"Wait!\" A woman's face looked down over the railing. \"Can we just talk?\"\n\n\"Speech but no song. I had a remedy for the sirens, I've got one for you, too.\" Ifi looked pointedly at the pistol in hope of confusing them. She hadn't managed to finish the control device. What other leverage did she have?\n\nThe woman paled. \"Of course.\" She called out loudly, \"Ekren! Wake up! You've got to open negotiations with the clockmistress.\" And insufficiently softer, \"Because I'm not going down there.\"\n\nThe dark woman struggled to sit up with her hands tied behind her. She smiled broadly at Ifi once she was upright. \"Hello, fair clockmistress! Perhaps we started on the wrong foot.\" Ekren's grin was infectious. \"Yes, see, wrong foot.\" She raised one leg into the air, nearly overbalancing herself.\n\nIfi heard pirates from the other ships laughing. \"Ey!\" Ekren called, \"Wrong foot!\" And suddenly Ifi saw pirate feet sticking over the railings of their ships. She couldn't help it, she burst out laughing.\n\n\"You are terrible pirates.\" Ifi curbed her laughter. \"And I don't mean that in a fearsome or efficient way.\"\n\n\"Well, we're new at this sort of thing.\" Ekren's smiled dimmed. \"It's not our long-term career choice. It's just been the best way to enable our traveling. We've been making our way to Seffel because, well, you see, in Rijk\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"Your home?\"\n\n\"Mine, yes, but not Obrahom's or Thisle's. They come from somewhere further west. And Seht and Nenet\u2013\u2013\" Ekren tilted her head up and behind at the woman Ifi had spoken with earlier\u2013\u2013\"they're from Kuntun. But we're a family, you see, that's how we make magic. And\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"No one approves?\" Ifi was startled by the sympathy in her own voice; she'd been holding on to it so tightly.\n\nEkren smiled. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Not in Rijk nor Kuntun nor somewhere further west,\" Ifi said quietly, not really a question. Ekren nodded. \"I had thought everyone, well, liked magic?\" Ransaransa's many rants on the importance of magic began to unspool through her memory, longer and louder and with more blows each time, as it became clearer Ifi had no magical abilities.\n\nEkren hesitated. \"Well, people like a wizard, you know? Heroic, or mysterious. We're\u2014\" she half-shrugged\u2014\"too big, too noisy. We have to practice together to make the magic come from the harmonies, okay? And we also have to be, well, harmonious together, or the magic doesn't happen. It takes consensus and music.\" Ekren looked over Ifi's head, clearly picturing something else. \"And it's beautiful when we do it.\"\n\nIfi considered that. \"It takes all of you to make magic?\"\n\nEkren nodded slowly. \"Well, most of us, at least. More than\u2013\u2013\" Ekren swallowed\u2013\u2013\"just Thisle and me.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Ifi said, voice turning brisk. \"Let's get your family back to your ships before they're conscious. That way I've nothing to fear from you, and you\u2013\u2013\" Ifi waggled the spent pistol in Ekren's direction\u2013\u2013\"aren't in a position to disagree that you're in my debt for saving you from the sirens.\" And, she said silently to herself, there's no chance I'll have to hurt you.\n\nEkren choked. Kept choking. Ifi grew alarmed, reached a hand out\u2013\u2013then realized the other woman was laughing. When she caught her breath, Ekren called, loud enough to be heard on the other ships, \"Well, family? I see the clockmistress' point as well as the point of her pistol. And she seems a jolly one. So how about we take that one step further? Band together to fly on to Seffel?\"\n\nNenet laughed, a dry sound. \"I'm not coming down there to check out either of those points. You can have my vote.\"\n\nEkren looked at Thisle, but she was still asleep. \"Obraham? Seht? Tahr? Ferna?\"\n\nNo response from Obrahom but a new voice, sharp, called out. \"I'm with Nenet. And here's my leg.\" Barefoot even at this altitude, Ifi saw. \"Now leave me alone while I check on Tahr. He was on the stairs when he fell asleep.\"\n\n\"Ekren, why don't we just wait for folks to wake up?\" A deeper voice also from the second pirate. \"Then we can just finish what we were doing when the sirens arrived. Maybe there are valuable schematics down in the hold? Like Obrahom said?\"\n\nNo, Ifi thought. Get off my ship. Her hands began to shake, and she forced them into her pockets.\n\nShe called up to Seht, \"Which do you want? Your family members back or some schematics you probably can't even read?\"\n\n\"Why do you think I can't?\"\n\n\"Seht!\" That sounded like Nenet. \"We need to get the others back.\"\n\n\"But they'll wake up soon\u2013\u2013\"\n\nIfi interrupted, \"But right now they are down here with me and my pistols.\" My empty pistols, she thought. And no heart to fire them.\n\n\"I'll come down and\u2013\u2013\"\n\nIfi pulled both pistols out and pivoted to point them at Ekren. \"I wouldn't do that if I were you.\"\n\n\"Nenet, what about that ship gun?\" Seht's voice muffled as he turned away from Ifi.\n\n\"No!\" Ifi cried. She advanced on Ekren. Ekren's glance darted between Ifi's shaking hands and eyes. Ifi squeezed the handles of her empty pistols, her empty heart squeezed back. Even if she had loaded bullets, could she fire at another singing, living being today? \"Please?\" Ifi whispered.\n\n\"Seht,\" Ekren called, eyes locked with Ifi's. \"Maybe we should try to trade for the schematics, if we really want them.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Ekren, we'll think of some way to save you and the others\u2013\u2013\"\n\nNenet interrupted him, \"Why not just use Ekren's suggestion?\"\n\nSeht sighed. \"Have you looked in the holds recently? We barely have enough to get us to Seffel. We have nothing to trade.\"\n\n\"Of course you do.\" Everyone looked at Ifi in surprise when she spoke. \"You can trade your promise not to hurt me. Or, your promise that I can join your band of pirates until Seffel, like Ekren said. In return, I'll send back your family.\"\n\n\"Why would you do that?\" Nenet was clearly universal in the application of her skepticism.\n\nIfi scuffed a boot toe against the ship's deck. \"There's a wizard. Probably chasing me.\" She cleared her throat. \"I escaped and\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"You'd do anything not to go back?\" Ekren wasn't smiling. \"Even become a pirate.\" An explanation, not a question.\n\nIfi nodded. \"Even an efficient terror of the skies.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Seht said, blowing out a bellyfull of air.\n\nEkren asked, \"Are only the four of us awake?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Seht called.\n\n\"Can you speak for the others?\" Ifi asked.\n\n\"You can only promise us, Ekren,\" Nenet pointed out.\n\nEkren nodded her head. \"We'll have to re-negotiate when the others wake up. Is it acceptable to make an agreement with just us for now?\"\n\nIfi didn't think she could do anything else. They were closer to Seffel, but there was still a lot of sky left. \"Yes.\" She lowered her arms, but they were still shaking. She pocketed the pistols.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Seht called down. \"We can't keep calling you the clockmistress.\" His blond head peered farther over the railing. \"Unless that's a title?\" He looked at Nenet. \"Is that a title? Like nobility? I thought it was a vocation?\"\n\nEkren rolled her eyes. \"You'll need to untie me,\" she said to Ifi. Freed, she turned to Ifi and held out her hand, palm up. \"Now, let's formalize this deal. Your name?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Ifi said. \"My name is\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"Ifigenia Glass, of the House of the Ransa.\" The voice was deep for a woman's and came from all around them. Ifi couldn't look up, as stiff with fear as a fully-wound mainspring, but Ekren did\u2013\u2013and blanched.\n\n\"Dragon!\" she screamed.\n\nA deep thunk sounded from the first pirate ship; Ifi expelled a breath and softened enough to see Nenet positioning a long gun atop the railing. Ifi shook her head slightly. Most guns were too slow or too small a gauge to hit or harm a dragon.\n\n\"Ifigenia.\" Ifi was pretty sure even the pirates recognized that parental tone of voice. She looked up at the wizard riding the red dragon.\n\nCloak cast back, her black hair, pinned at the nape, flowed behind her like streamers. Or eels. Or hungry lightning. Ransaransa's eyes were the same sky-blue as Ifi's. One hand was wound through the dragon's hackamore. In the other, she lifted a palm-sized glass ball, pink like watered blood, which she used to focus her power.\n\nIfi hated that ball. Her gorge rose in her throat, jammed cogs blocking her breath. Instead, she looked to the dragon, whose wingspan was thrice the length of her airship. She blushed with guilt. Slowly, the dragon closed all three of its left eyelids, winking at her. Not angry. Still an ally.\n\n\"Mother, leave.\" Ifi put everything sturdy she could think of into her voice: struts, stabilizers, even the materials that flex and reshape, like canvas or the softer metals. She wasn't going back to being trapped in her room, or beaten, or having her clockworkers stolen and reprogrammed to hurt people. But to do that, she'd have to hurt people. She bit her lip.\n\nRansaransa watched Ifi a moment but didn't respond to her. Instead, the wizard turned to the pirates, bringing the dragon closer to Nenet's ship.\n\nIfi cut her off, \"Don't bother. We've negotiated\u2013\u2013\"\n\n\"Then perhaps they will renegotiate.\" Her mother always sounded gracious. She looked over the pirates, widening her smile.\n\nThe dragon rose and fell with the current, its smallwings flitting, its whiskers waving to taste everything. Scales flashed crimson, carmine, and fired clay in the sun as its long body undulated.\n\nIfi wondered whether the pirates knew that the bright silver patterns along its throat and belly were scars. She curved her hand into a claw shape, the dragon's own tell for pulling a prank. The spiral of her fingers was neither as elegant nor as strong as a mainspring. And even the most well-tempered mainsprings shattered under constant stress.\n\nShattered. Ifi raised her curved hand, her fist, to show the dragon. Her movement caught Ransaransa's attention.\n\nMeeting her mother's eyes, Ifi threw a used pistol at the glass ball, shattering it in the wizard's grasp. Ransaransa screamed, long and agonizing like the screech of metal scraping against metal. Shards and pistol fell beneath the clouds.\n\nIfi startled as the dragon trumpeted, two pitches at once\u2013\u2013Ekren gasped, and Seht belted out a harmonizing note\u2013\u2013and then rolled to its side, sending Ransaransa down through the clouds after her magical ball.\n\nIfi bit her lip and closed her eyes.\n\nThe dragon's notes resolved from mournful to joyous. Ifi knew her own, un-silvered scars, would take longer to heal. Then a two-tone question. She opened her eyes.\n\nThe dragon watched her, a small thread of flame between their fangs. They curled their right claw, then wiggled their smallwings in farewell. They plunged below the cloud-line in the wizard's direction.\n\n\"Ifigenia?\" Ekren's voice was soft and tentative.\n\n\"Just Ifi, please.\"\n\nEkren nodded. \"Of course. Ifi. Do you\u2013\u2013do you need a moment?\"\n\nIfi swallowed. \"No. Here's my hand. Let's seal this agreement.\"\n\nEkren reached out and set her palm above Ifi's. \"To Seffel at least. We'll renegotiate there.\"\n\n\"Says who?\" Obrahom called from down in Ifi's hold, using the flinty pirate voice from their first talk. A number of pirates shushed him at once, their scolding causing Thisle to groan and sit up.\n\nNenet's voice carried. \"Didn't you see what she just did?\"\n\n\"You mean, be a fearsome, efficient pirate?\" Ifi asked, unable to meet Ekren's eyes. Ekren squeezed Ifi's hand gently.\n\nIn the distance, they heard the dragon sing out again. Seht responded, a long note that wound into a fast-moving sequence that to Ifi sounded like the changing pattern of pins on a rotating music box cylinder.\n\nThe rest of the pirates joined in: Obrahom with low, slow notes, Nenet and Thisle imitating the sharp strikes of a snare drum, Ekren slapping her hands together and ululating like a storm-cloud rumble, and Tahr, supported physically and vocally by Ferna, repeating Seht's melody at a pleasing interval.\n\nIfi breathed in time, holding tight to the image of her nearly-complete clockworker. She looked into the wind and blamed it for water in her eyes as she watched for Seffel to come into view.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Jack Among Wolves by Wren Wallis ]\n\nIt could not be said that Captain Jack Valiant objected to illicit custom; what she did object to, strenuously, was being entered into such an arrangement without her foreknowledge and consent.\n\n\"It is my most ardent desire,\" the Captain said sotto voce to the great blond bear of a man at her shoulder, \"that the portmaster should fling himself into the God-damned sea.\"\n\n\"He would have to go some way,\" her Chief Mate observed. \"Better to desire he fling himself into the river, no?\"\n\n\"Desire knows neither reason nor geography, Mr. Kuznetsov.\" The Captain stepped forward to address the trio waiting amongst their baggage on the gangway. \"I am sorry; you could have the sigil of Black Bess herself and I'd still tell you to sod off. The Blackbird is a cargo vessel, neither obliged nor licensed to ferry passengers anywhere, much less to the bloody Sebiran border. As Mr. Hewlett damned well knows.\"\n\nThe governess, a neat, prim-lipped woman, had gone salt-white at the Captain's language, and now throttled her folded parasol in gentle fury or mortification. The grave-eyed child beside her only stared from beneath the enormous halo of her sun-hat.\n\n\"It is,\" the governess managed stiffly, \"of direst urgency. This poor child's father lies upon death's threshold. She may never see him again. Yours is the only vessel at present liberty to enter Sebir\u2014\"\n\nThe Captain cut her off. \"You are mistaken, madame. I'm at liberty to do no such thing, no more than any Ardish ship. The Sebiran border is close guarded at the best of times; since the assassination of Empress Elena, it is sealed. Christ with all His sorcerers couldn't get an Ardish ship into a Sebiran port just now.\"\n\n\"But the portmaster\u2014\"\n\n\"Can bugger a dog for a tuppence.\" The Captain folded her arms and gave the governess such a black-eyed glare as had sent customs-men packing in the past.\n\nGovernesses, however, are made of sterner stuff than customs-men, and this one merely lifted her obstinate chin.\n\nThe heretofore-silent third member of the traveling party exhaled a weary cloud of tobacco smoke. Mr. Kuznetsov, the Chief Mate, took a pointed step back.\n\n\"How much do you want?\" the gentleman asked, and flicked the dog-end of his cigarette over the gangway rail, where the wind snatched and whisked it away.\n\n\"Mr. Black\u2014\" the governess protested.\n\nHe waved her off, his bespectacled gaze fixed on Jack.\n\n\"How much did you pay the portmaster for his seal on those passes?\" she asked.\n\n\"That is not\u2014\" the governess attempted.\n\n\"One hundred fifty,\" the gentleman said. He drew a calfskin billfold from within his coat.\n\n\"Two hundred,\" said Jack. \"Per person.\"\n\n\"Absurd!\" the governess cried. \"Six hundred! Better than the Bank Governor's salary! Who would carry\u2014?\"\n\nBut her traveling companion had already begun to count out that princely sum. He offered the notes crisply. \"Do we understand one another, Captain Valiant?\"\n\nShe plucked the notes from between his kid-gloved fingers and folded them into a pocket of her waistcoat. \"Sufficiently. Were you seen coming up the tower?\"\n\n\"By one or two early souls. We spoke of our impending departure for the Andalacian coast and asked at the platform below for directions to the mooring of the Star of Tehr\u00e2n.\"\n\n\"Come aboard then and look sharp about it. Mr. Kuznetsov will see to your baggage. We'll bring you as far as Temsk. Not even my contacts can permit us farther, in light of the current situation.\"\n\nAs the governess ushered the child past, she reproached Jack, \"Not even Christ with His sorcerers, is it?\"\n\nThe Captain shrugged. \"Christ didn't deal in cash.\"\n\nThe djinn-room, that octagonal chamber at the ship's heart, held a darkly resinous whisper of myrrh and a buzzing tension like the approach of lightning on the air. The djinn in its central brazier was smoke given form, veins of flame writhing within. Its eyes were pits of brilliant fire.\n\nJack bowed to it, and for a moment it contemplated her, its electric regard raising the fine hairs on her arms. Then the blaze of its attention drifted indifferently away.\n\nJack skirted the brazier. Behind it, the djinneer stood frowning at an array of equations freshly chalked on her soot-blacked cedar table. \"Donkeys within donkeys,\" she muttered in Atashi, and absently tucked a tendril of hair back beneath her headscarf, leaving a pale smudge of chalk on her smooth brown temple.\n\n\"Such vulgarity, Yasmin,\" Jack chided in the same tongue, and the djinneer looked up swiftly.\n\n\"Bah,\" she said, mingling relief and exasperation, and switched to Ardish. \"You goose. What?\"\n\n\"Are we ready to depart?\"\n\n\"Of course, yes.\" Yasmin stepped aside to indicate the chalk-and-salt sigils elaborately diagrammed on the cedar planks of the chamber's floor behind her.\n\n\"Very good. I'll have Mr. Kuznetsov cast us off directly.\"\n\nAs Jack made to leave, though, the djinn rustled like embers in its nest of flame. Yasmin touched the spherical glass pendant at her throat. \"Your new guests are liars,\" she translated.\n\n\"Of course they are,\" Jack agreed. \"Honest men don't pay.\"\n\n\"Jack,\" the djinneer warned. \"What if they're Melusian agents?\"\n\n\"To what end? Why would the Astrologer King smuggle agents into Sebir, of all places? Sebir has no native sorcery, so surely no sympathy for his puissantiste cause. His war's with Queen Bess.\"\n\n\"Smuggle agents into a closed Sebir, in the wake of Empress Elena's assassination, in an Ardish ship? Imagine the mischief they might work, and the blame they might direct.\"\n\nJack weighed this. \"It seems a great deal of trouble for Melusian agents to take.\" At the look on Yasmin's face, she relented. \"I shall keep a weather eye on them, cousin. But I tell you, I caught no whiff of sorcery, Melusian or otherwise, on any of them.\" Her uncanny nose for magic had never yet led her false.\n\nBut abruptly she recalled Mr. Kuznetsov stepping back in distaste from the pungent cloud of the gentleman passenger's tobacco smoke, and it prickled at her like the djinn's regard.\n\n\"I shall keep a weather eye,\" she repeated thoughtfully.\n\nBlackbird cast off from Aldwych Aero-Port Tower just as the bells of St. Margery's began to sing six o'clock. The city below was still an expanse of darkness scattered with streetlamp constellations, but night was lifting like a curtain over the eastern sky to reveal a radiant swathe of gold-and-crimson beneath.\n\nThe djinn-ship maneuvered with practiced precision away from the tower before unfolding gleaming brass-jointed wings and rudders and turning its eager prow toward the rising light.\n\nBelowdecks, a man dressed as an Ardish city gentleman smoked cigarettes and prowled his small cabin like a restless animal. A woman in the severe garb of a governess set aside on her narrow berth the elements of a lady's toilette and lifted out the false-bottom pouch from her carpetbag to check the documents within. And a white-faced child in an overlarge sun hat gazed out her porthole and gravely contemplated the coming dawn.\n\nAt midday, Jack yielded the quarterdeck to a helmsman and descended to the main platform. Her passengers had emerged some time since \u2014 the gentleman first and rather hastily. He stood now with one hand clutching the forward starboard rail but as far from it as his reach allowed, and pointedly did not take in the view sliding past below. With his other hand, he smoked.\n\n\"Do you require a handkerchief, Mr. Black?\" Jack enquired.\n\nHe turned to contemplate her approach above the wire rims of his spectacles. His eyes were a most extraordinary golden-amber hue, like whiskey held up to the light. \"I have my own,\" he informed her dryly, and drew on his cigarette again.\n\n\"Some people do not take to air travel,\" Jack confided, leaning on the rail. \"Even on a clear day, you know, a sudden wind may toss a vessel like thistledown.\"\n\nHis complexion took on a remarkable greenish cast, but he did not flinch and continued to weigh her in a steady gaze. At length he mused, \"Jack Valiant is a peculiar sort of name for a woman such as yourself, is it not? Like an Ardish folk hero. A penny-dreadful name.\"\n\n\"Well, Penny Dreadful itself seemed too on-the-button. Pray tell me what do you mean, a woman such as yourself?\"\n\n\"You are half-Atashi, are you not? Your father is \u2014\"\n\nJack drew herself upright; she was tall for a woman, and he not so for a man, and so they stood nearly nose to nose.\n\n\"I am half none of your damned business,\" Jack told him evenly, \"and the other half spite. You know a deal of information for an ordinary gentleman.\"\n\nBeneath the veiling tobacco, she noted, was no telltale whiff of enemy spellcraft. There was a distinctive scent, though, a familiar one\u2014an impression of ice and pine, and some pleasantly animal odor\u2014but it wasn't a magical smell, and she could not place its familiarity.\n\nMr. Black took a courteous step backward, his gaze untroubled. \"I have wagered seven hundred fifty crowns thus far on this voyage,\" he said in his easy city drawl. \"Do you not expect a financier to research his investments?\"\n\nJack surveyed the man. His clothing was expensive in both cloth and cut, but worn casually: the tie-knot looser than strictly respectable, the coat-collar turned up. He was of no great height or breadth, fair-skinned, neat-bearded. His dark hair was, again, somewhat longer than might be expected of a gentleman, but on the whole the effect was that of a man with a deal of money and little regard for public opinion.\n\n\"Your employer's investments,\" she corrected.\n\n\"Naturally,\" he agreed. \"My employer's investments. Though you will understand I have a personal stake\u2014if I manage to convey his daughter to him before he passes, my employer has bequeathed me a substantial additional sum for the service.\"\n\n\"Pray remind me \u2014 what did you say your employer's business was in Sebir?\"\n\n\"Chiefly in timber,\" Mr. Black answered, with an air of patient humor. \"He made this most recent journey in hopes of broadening his interests to include a certain nickel mine.\"\n\n\"I thought Sebirans were terribly resistant to foreign meddling in their Empire.\"\n\nThe gentleman made a deprecating gesture. \"The Empress\u2014 the late Empress, that is, Elena Verovna\u2014was something of a reformer and had encouraged new openness to the West. My employer was ever quick to seize an opportunity.\" He shook his head. \"God only knows what becomes of Western investment in the Empire now.\"\n\n\"It is odd about the timing. That he should be taken so ill on the heels of Empress Elena's assassination, as the borders closed.\"\n\nThe gentleman looked mildly taken aback. \"Do you suggest some connection? Surely not.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Jack, and clapped his shoulder heartily enough to give him a jolt. She took petty satisfaction in the panicked glance he threw at the rail. \"Do enjoy the view.\"\n\nAt the opposite rail, the child stood with one hand in her governess's and watched the scuffed-slate plain of the sea far below. She was a dark-eyed little creature, with a thin, sallow face and a great mass of frizzy hair under that enormous hat. Jack had intended to pass the pair by, but the forlorn small figure exerted a sorrowful magnetism, and so the Captain paused.\n\n\"I am sorry to hear of your father's illness,\" Jack told her.\n\nThe child nodded uncertainly and then, at a nudge from the governess, dropped a curtsy. \"Thank you,\" she said to her slippers.\n\nThere was some terrible misery writ plain on her, but it didn't to Jack much resemble grief. She stooped to the child's eye level. \"Miss,\" she said as kindly as she knew how, \"if you are in some other difficulty or danger\u2014\"\n\nThe governess made a startled sound and swept around, meaning to gather the girl back against her skirts.\n\nThe child did not yield, though; she stood steadfastly straight and lifted grave eyes to meet Jack's. \"No, Captain Valiant,\" she said in a clear, piping voice. \"But I am grateful for your concern.\" She hesitated and then added, more softly, \"I have never been to Sebir. I am anxious, is all.\"\n\nThe governess squeezed the girl's small shoulders, and now the child subsided back against her.\n\nJack straightened. \"Sebir has a peculiar reputation,\" she said, \"because it guards its borders and its secrets closely. But there's no cause to fear the place. The good Mr. Kuznetsov, my Chief Mate, is Sebiran himself.\"\n\nThe girl nodded.\n\n\"Thank you, Captain Valiant,\" the governess said, by way of stiff dismissal. Jack bowed with elaborate mock courtesy before turning away.\n\nThe strange ship appeared as afternoon faded toward dusk. The watchman sighted it first, and halloo'ed from the spy's nest; Jack stepped to the rail and snapped out her spyglass to consider the black fleck against tattered cloud and colored sky.\n\n\"A ship,\" she affirmed. \"Too distant for trouble, and it may yet alter course. But keep eyes on it.\"\n\nAs Jack turned away, the governess intercepted her. \"Could it not be a bird? A ballon?\"\n\n\"We'd have outpaced either swiftly, and neither holds so steady at apparent altitude. It is a ship.\"\n\nThe governess smoothed her skirts anxiously. \"Not a hostile one, surely.\"\n\n\"Are you sure of it, indeed? I am reassured, madame,\" Jack replied. \"For it is only that we fly a little-traversed route toward a destination no other ship should seek right now. The fact that there is another ship strikes me as peculiar indeed.\"\n\n\"Then what do you mean to do about it?\"\n\n\"At present, nothing. It will have to be a damned sight closer for us to do anything useful.\"\n\nWhen night fell, the strange vessel vanished. Jack returned to her cousin in the djinn-room.\n\n\"We're changing our bearing,\" she told Yasmin. \"Four points green. We'll come at the border more directly from the west and then bear straight north to Temsk. I need all the speed you can give me tonight.\"\n\n\"It's trouble, then,\" Yasmin said, already moving to stoke the brazier with charcoal.\n\n\"No sight of them. But I don't think they've changed course. I think they're flying dark.\"\n\n\"Bother,\" said Yasmin. She pushed up her sleeves. \"I daresay we might conjure a fog as well, so long as we're over the water. Let them try to pursue a quarry they can't see either.\"\n\nThe djinn in its brazier rustled like laughter and wavered, casting strange shadows.\n\nThe fog wouldn't hold. Three times the djinneer raised it, and the shroud gathered. Three times a new wind from the south chased it clear again.\n\nNor was the wind a kindly one; it buffeted the Blackbird about, trying her wings and rudders, and set her crew scrambling to secure flyaway rigging and loose-rattling panels. Jack stalked the quarterdeck barking orders until her voice was rusted. The passengers huddled in their cabins.\n\nToward dawn, Yasmin mounted the steps to where the Captain paced. The djinneer was ashen with weariness. The wind whipped the tails of her knotted headscarf impishly. \"They have a magician,\" she confirmed. \"A strong one. Whoever they are, their aim is serious.\"\n\nJack had tasted the stale cathedral odor of incense on the wind half the night. \"Melusian,\" she agreed.\n\nThe djinneer knit her brows. \"But why? What is a minor Ardish cargo vessel to them?\"\n\nJack stared into the blind, cloud-scudding black sky behind them. \"At the rate they pursue us,\" she said grimly, \"I would prefer to leave the why of it for another occasion.\"\n\nDawn's first glimmer revealed what Jack had dreaded. Not only was the strange ship still on a course to intercept, it had gained sky enough that even without her glass she could make out the stark outline of wings and rudders. \"A Melusian cr\u00e9cerelle,\" she informed Yasmin, who still stood shivering beside her. \"We're outgunned three to one.\"\n\nBeneath them, land flowed past once more, the deep greens and stark greys of forest and scree; they closed fast with the Sebiran border, the Blackbird flying with all her fire.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" the djinneer gritted through chattering teeth. \"Why such ardent pursuit?\"\n\n\"Madame,\" said Mr. Kuznetsov diffidently, stepping onto the quarterdeck behind them. He was already gallantly shedding his greatcoat. \"Please. It is quite a chill.\" He swept the coat over Yasmin, fairly swamping her in its expanse.\n\nThe djinneer nestled into its warmth and breathed a grateful sigh, as faint roses bloomed in her cheeks. \"Most kind, Mr. Kuznetsov,\" she murmured.\n\nJack stared at them both.\n\nMr. Kuznetsov noted her regard first, and now he flushed as well. \"Captain?\"\n\n\"Step here,\" Jack commanded, and pointed to the planks at her feet. \"Stand beside me.\"\n\nBemused and sheepish, he shuffled two steps to obey. Jack drew a deep breath of his presence.\n\nIce and distant pines. A warm, animal undertone.\n\nBut Sebirans have no native sorcery.\n\nShe turned her regard back toward the ship that trailed them like a carrion-crow. \"Remind me,\" she said. \"What was the name of your late Empress?\"\n\n\"Elena Verovna,\" Mr. Kuznetsov answered promptly.\n\nShe shook her head, affecting a frown. \"No, no. Yasmin, what was it?\"\n\n\"He's correct,\" Yasmin said, puzzled. \"It was Empress Elena.\"\n\n\"What did you call her, Mr. Kuznetsov?\"\n\n\"Elena Verovna,\" he repeated. \"But it is the same name, Captain. Sebirans use the matronym\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Jack turned on them triumphantly. \"Sebirans use the matronym. Yet when I spoke to Mr. Black yesterday afternoon, he called her 'Elena Verovna.'\"\n\n\"It could be,\" Yasmin offered, \"that he's become accustomed, in his Sebiran dealings\u2014\"\n\nJack shook her head. \"He smells like Mr. Kuznetsov. He smells like you.\"\n\nMr. Kuznetsov went chalk-white. \"Christ God,\" he swore.\n\n\"What does it mean?\" Yasmin demanded.\n\nJack folded her arms. \"That ship doesn't pursue merely because we fly an Ardish flag. They pursue because we're smuggling Sebiran nationals back into Sebir, and it appears someone means to disrupt that homecoming.\"\n\nWhen mr. Kuznetsov escorted Mr. Black to the quarterdeck, both men were set-jawed and silent. Mr. Kuznetsov was still pale and now perspiring, despite the other man's smaller size and genteel manner.\n\nMr. Black wore no spectacles now; the whiskey-bright eyes regarded Jack with sardonic amusement. \"A fine alias after all,\" he drawled. \"The Jacks of Ardish folktale are always clever.\"\n\n\"You will give me your identity. Bear in mind I'll put overboard a man who lies to me twice.\"\n\nHe lost a shade of color but held her gaze. \"I understand your anger, Captain, but bear in mind that whatever else I may be, I am certainly your present ally. I am aboard your ship and would be considerably inconvenienced by its sinking.\"\n\n\"We're not going to sink,\" Jack informed him. \"We're going to land. I'm going to run up the white and hand all three of you over, unless you explain.\"\n\nHe straightened and pressed his lips together but still made no answer.\n\nThere was a scuff on the stair. The girl ascended, her governess in tow.\n\n\"Captain Valiant,\" the child said in a thin, high, unsteady voice. \"I beg your pardon for the ruse, and that we have endangered your good crew by it. This man is Aszer Chernovich Niyazov, of the Imperatorskii Otdel' Volkov\u2014a captain of the Imperial Secret Police.\"\n\nThere was a moment's startled silence, and then Mr. Black\u2014Captain Niyazov\u2014sighed and reached into his waistcoat for a silver cigarette case. \"Has anyone got a match?\" he asked, dryly rhetorical.\n\n\"If he's a captain of the Imperial Secret Police,\" Jack said to the child, \"would that make you\u2014?\"\n\n\"Grand Duchess Anna Elenovna,\" the child admitted. \"Heir to the Imperial throne.\" Her small voice quivered as she said it, but her solemn gaze was steady.\n\n\"Well,\" Jack said, briefly rooted by revelation. She removed her hat and scrubbed a hand through her hair. \"Honored, Your Highness. Perhaps you might do me the further honor of explaining what in the hundred holy names you're doing aboard my ship?\"\n\n\"Her mother's antipathy for the puissantistes and her esteem for your Queen Elizabeth were no secret in the Imperial court,\" Captain Niyazov said. \"The Astrologer King, I believe, took steps to keep Sebir out of your war, to ensure the Empire would not align itself with your queen's cause.\" He gestured with an unlit cigarette at the ship in pursuit. \"Takes steps.\"\n\n\"I am a God-damned smuggler, begging Your Highness's pardon,\" Jack said. \"I am not an agent of the Crown. Royal intrigues are well outside my sphere.\"\n\n\"This is the point in an Ardish story,\" Captain Niyazov observed, \"when a Jack would do something clever.\"\n\n\"Can we be certain this will work?\" asked the anxious governess\u2014a genuine governess, to Jack's surprise, one Miss Orlova by name\u2014as Jack led them down the corridor.\n\n\"Certainty is for priests and mathematicians, madame, and I am neither.\" Jack glanced over her shoulder and saw the governess, white-faced and resolute, holding firmly to the little Grand Duchess's hand. It softened her somewhat. \"But my djinneer is a mathematician. The timing will cut very fine, but I promise you the Melusians know very little of djinn-ships, and will never expect us to take such a risk.\"\n\nThe sebiran wilderness at dawn was a place of secrets and shadows; small things rustled in the velvet darkness still gathered between ancient trees, and patient, predatory eyes kept watch from bough and burrow.\n\nIn the rose-streaked sky above, the tiny black silhouette of an airship appeared. A second, sleeker silhouette closed on it. From below, the pursuit was a dreamlike, silent shadow play.\n\nThe second ship gave a jolt that, from this vantage, looked like delicate hesitation. The ship in front bloomed a wreath of brilliant flame. A moment later, a distant thunder sounded.\n\nThe first ship hung for a breathless instant and then, trailing smoke, began to fall.\n\n\"What if it doesn't return?\" Captain Niyazov shouted above the whine-and-rattle of the falling ship. He and Miss Orlova had each braced themselves in a pair of the octagonal chamber's adjacent corners, the Grand Duchess wedged against the wall between them.\n\n\"It will!\" Yasmin cried, clutching her glass-bauble pendant.\n\nThey all watched the empty brazier in the chamber's center.\n\nSeconds rolled past. The ship's uncontrolled fall gathered momentum. Jack closed her eyes.\n\nThe whoosh was near-inaudible amid the racket of disaster, but it was followed by a bonfire roar and scorching heat on Jack's face. She opened her eyes.\n\nThe djinn flared like the rising sun in its brazier, too bright to look upon, and Jack flung up a hand to shield her eyes. She heard the governess cry out, and Yasmin's laughter.\n\n\"Ah, well done!\" the djinneer cried in Atashi. \"Well done, beloved!\"\n\nThe djinn blazed with laughter of its own, sated on enemy incendiaries. Around them the clatter of free fall died as their wild plummet became a gently spiraling downward glide.\n\nCaptain Niyazov, still braced in the corner, one arm stretched protectively across the child, shook disheveled dark locks back from his eyes and looked to Jack. \"And now?\"\n\n\"Now,\" said Jack, and straightened shakily, \"we lay the bait.\"\n\nThe ardish ship lay exposed on the clear slope of a rocky rise, just above the treeline. It listed gently to one side, and one of its fine brass-jointed wings had sheared off. Debris lay scattered in the grass.\n\nA Melusian cr\u00e9cerelle, the Demoiselle Victoire, set down cautiously on the clear slope a little distance from the fallen Blackbird.\n\nNothing stirred aboard the wreck, and an ozone stink of burning hung in the air. The forest that fringed the lower part of the slope held breathlessly silent.\n\nFor a time the Melusian ship was silent as well, but at last she opened hatches and dropped ladders, and her soldiers boiled out toward the Ardish wreck.\n\nThey had ventured only partway across the field when Hell rose up around them.\n\nUnder cover of the trees, Jack cried, \"Fire!\"\n\nThe Blackbird's crew ranged in shadow around her opened small-arms fire; hardly accurate at distance, but enough to sow panic. Enough to allow Mr. Kuznetsov and his comrades precious seconds to run out the Blackbird's starboard carronade and smash a jagged wound in the cr\u00e9cerelle's hull, whilst the two nine-pounders raked the approaching party with a brutal volley of grapeshot.\n\nIn the stunned, gun-muffled silence that followed, Jack screamed, \"Forward!\"\n\nShe and her party swarmed from the trees toward the bloodied Melusian survivors. Mr. Kuznetsov and his party spilled from the carefully staged wreck to close from the other side. Jack shot two men at pistol-range and paused to give a third, half-gutted by grapeshot, a mercy cut.\n\n\"Captain!\" Mr. Kuznetsov bellowed, and Jack whirled to see a stained, disheveled blonde in the silver-ornamented coat of a Melusian sorci\u00e8re raise a fistful of lightning, her expression dire.\n\nA black shadow flowed across the field and leaped, bearing the sorci\u00e8re down; when it lifted its head, Jack saw it was a great dark wolf, smoke-silver pelt shaded to black, jaws painted with blood. The sorci\u00e8re sprawled unmoving at its feet.\n\nThe wolf regarded Jack with sardonic amusement. Its eyes were the golden-amber hue of whiskey held up to light.\n\n\"Well,\" Jack said when she had found her voice. \"I am obliged, Captain.\"\n\nThe wolf grinned its canine grin and loped deeper into the fray.\n\nWhen it was done, Jack left her crew scavenging the field and the Melusian ship, and went to see to Yasmin and the Sebirans.\n\nThree of them waited in the clearing where she'd left them. Grand Duchess Anna Elenovna perched on a fallen log swinging her legs in the green cathedral forest light. Her governess stood with her. Yasmin stood some little distance away, clutching her glass pendant, which swirled with smoke and a glint of flame.\n\n\"It's done,\" Jack informed them, and looked about. \"Where is Captain Niyazov?\"\n\n\"I sent him to assist you,\" said the Grand Duchess, and stopped swinging her legs. \"He seemed better used there.\"\n\n\"He's a shapeshifter.\"\n\n\"An oboroten,\" the child agreed. \"All of the IOV are oborotnii. Everyone in the Imperial court is, really.\" She resumed swinging her legs. \"You might want a word with your Mr. Kuznetsov about that, in fact.\"\n\n\"I might, in fact. But you aren't one,\" Jack guessed.\n\nThe girl shook her head mutely.\n\n\"And therein lies the trouble.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Miss Orlova said quietly. \"Sebir has its own faction sympathetic to the puissantistes. They opposed most of Elena Verovna's reforms. When it was evident that her daughter was not oboroten herself, Elena Verovna knew what they would make of it and arranged for her to be raised abroad, out of the court's eye. We had anticipated some\u2014resistance to her investiture. Though I confess we had not thought our agitators would be so bold as to involve Melusin directly.\"\n\n\"And so now what happens?\" Jack enquired.\n\n\"There will be some interval to see Her Highness settled on the throne,\" Miss Orlova said. \"But I expect your queen will have her alliance with the Empire after all.\"\n\nThe Grand Duchess nodded.\n\n\"No,\" Jack said. \"What happens here? Among us?\"\n\n\"Captain Niyazov will have means of contacting some trustworthy IOV,\" said Miss Orlova. \"They will get us all from here to Kyiv.\"\n\n\"And?\" Jack prompted.\n\nThe governess knit her brows. \"You have secured an international alliance and been paid six hundred crowns.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\nMiss Orlova flushed indignantly. Beside her, the little Grand Duchess laughed. \"We shall make additional provision, Captain,\" she promised.\n\nThe underbrush rustled, and Captain Niyazov himself emerged in his shirtsleeves, shaking back his disarranged hair and buttoning a cuff. \"I did tell you, Miss Orlova,\" he chided. \"She is a Jack. In Ardish tales, you must always wager on a Jack, even among wolves.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Magebreakers 1) The Flaw in All Magic", + "author": "Ben S. Dobson", + "genres": [ + "fantasy" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Someone was in the room with her.\n\nAllaea Hesliar was digging through the endless shelves of the artifice workshop for an uninscribed copper sheet when she heard the footsteps. No one else should have been there. It was after midnight, and she was working long past her scheduled hours.\n\n\"Indree? Is that you?\" Of course it was. Who else would it have been? Indree's constable badge got her past the workshop wards, and lately she'd decided that Allaea was putting too many hours into the airship project. Come to drag me into the fresh air again, no doubt. \"I'm back here.\"\n\nNo answer, but the footsteps started in her direction. The funny thing was, they weren't coming from the entrance, but from further inside. Had Indree come in and headed for the worktables at the back without Allaea hearing? Unusual\u2014elven ears didn't miss much. But then, she had been absorbed in her work.\n\nAllaea sighed. The last thing she needed just then was Indree's mothering. The heating glyphs for the airship's envelope were still less efficient than she liked, and final inscription had to be done tomorrow in preparation for the launch, only two days away. She'd already submitted her spell diagram for the evening deadline, but a better solution had come to her that night as she'd lain awake in bed. If she could have it done by morning, she could still get Dean Brassforge to approve the change. All that was left was to test a working mock-up. What she really needed was a damned copper plate, and they were never where they were supposed to be.\n\n\"You don't have to keep checking on me, Indree.\" She extracted herself from the shelves, stowed several components in the pockets of her topcoat, and went to meet the approaching footsteps. \"You're my dearest friend, and I love you, so please don't take this the wrong way, but you're an insufferable nag and I wish we'd never met.\"\n\nIt wasn't Indree.\n\nAllaea turned the corner to see a man in dark clothes standing before her in the shadowy aisle between shelves. His face was covered by a dark cowl with holes for eyes, like an executioner's mask.\n\nShe let out a startled yelp and backed away a step. \"Who in the Astra are you? This place is off-limits. How did you get in?\" There were privileged projects being worked on in the University's primary artifice workshop, the airship chief among them. No one got by the wards without a properly glyphed badge.\n\n\"You weren't supposed to be here,\" was all the man said. At least, all he said in Audish. He raised a hand, and started to mutter a spell in the lingua magica.\n\nAllaea spoke the quickest barrier spell she could muster. A sheet of silver-blue energy shimmered into existence in front of her just as the man completed his own spell. Silver flame crashed towards her in a wave that broke against her shield.\n\nSpellfire. He was throwing spellfire. If it touched her, it would melt the flesh from her bones in an instant. He's actually trying to kill me.\n\nShe couldn't hold her hasty shield much longer under that kind of assault. It was already failing.\n\nAllaea turned, and ran.\n\n\"Help!\" she shouted, for the guards or for Indree\u2014and she wished more than anything that Indree had come, now. She would have known what to do. She was a constable, trained in combat magic. Allaea knew ancryst machines inside and out, but she'd been lucky to get that shield up at all, and any other spell that might help seemed to have deserted her. \"Help me! There's someone in here!\"\n\nShe raced down aisles of shelves, darting through whatever gap brought her closer to the exit. Her legs ached, and she was moving too fast for the tight corners\u2014she had to yank herself around by the edges of the shelves, dislodging gems and components. A trail of fallen artifice pieces littered the floor behind her.\n\nShe could hear him following, quick footsteps against the stone floor. He was chanting in the lingua again, readying a spell to burn her alive. From somewhere deep in the workshop behind came a distant howling, with an icy crackle behind it that sent a chill through her blood. What in the Astra was that? She didn't want to find out.\n\nHer lungs burned and her breath came in short, terrified gasps, but she was nearly at the door. Just around the next corner, and then\u2026\n\nShe put her foot down wrong; her ankle turned, and she stumbled sidelong against a shelf. She put her hand out to catch herself, and knocked over a collection of iron rods and copper plates\u2014there they were.\n\nNo, no, no. She had to keep moving, couldn't afford this. Panicked, she risked a look over her shoulder.\n\nHe rounded the corner behind her, still chanting. Lifted his hand.\n\nAllaea screamed as silver flame roared over her skin and dissolved her sight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Tane Carver knew something was wrong the moment the clock began to chime.\n\nIt was the students. There weren't enough of them. Normally the clock atop Thalen's Hall tolling the hour would have sent hundreds of young humans and elves and gnomes and more scurrying to their classes, but today the campus was nearly empty. A few dozen students scattered about, and that was all.\n\nThe University Guard were out in force, though, patrolling the cobbled paths in their silver-on-blue uniforms. Two stood at the entrance to every building, new and old\u2014from the functional brick of the artifice workshops to the ancient stonework of the cathedral-like invocation hall. At every door, guards were stopping what few students approached, making them display laurel wreath badges to identify themselves. Tane hadn't been back since he'd been expelled two years prior, but unless the University of Thaless had become a prison camp since then, he had to classify that as unusual.\n\nHe felt the familiar high-altitude pressure in his ears that always preceded a sending, and then a voice spoke in his head. \"Mister Carver, I'm reading you on campus. Don't dawdle. I'm waiting.\" Liana Greymond, Dean of Divination. Tane had come at her request, though he'd considered refusing\u2014he didn't much want to hear a lecture on how badly he'd embarrassed the University. Ultimately though, he'd been curious enough to chance it. After two years, she wouldn't have contacted him without reason.\n\n\"I know you're eager to see me, but try to contain yourself, Dean Greymond,\" Tane answered without speaking\u2014through her spell, not his own. She'd left the link open, an Astral channel that he had no way to replicate. \"You'll make me blush.\"\n\nA slight pop in his ears as the pressure abated, and Greymond's presence was gone. He'd been her favorite student once, but even then she'd never had much patience for his sense of humor.\n\nTane studied what few students he saw as he walked\u2014without hurrying\u2014toward the divination hall. They mirrored the population of the Audland Protectorate at large, half of them human like him, and half a diverse selection of the magical races: a dwarf here, an elf there, a doll-sized sprite fluttering down the path beside a nine-foot tall ogren. All wore the silver-on-blue laurel wreath badge of the University displayed proudly at the breast of their topcoats. And they all looked so young, though he was only a few years older now than they were.\n\nMost kept their heads down and walked quickly, avoiding eye-contact, but a small group had gathered on the open grass at the campus center, whispering in hushed tones. Tane didn't need divination to sense their unease. As he watched, a dwarven man in University Guard uniform approached the little congregation and hurried them on their way with a few words. They moved on without argument.\n\nWhat is going on? Tane regretted not asking Dean Greymond while he'd had the chance, but she wouldn't have answered in any case, not until he was sitting in front of her.\n\nHe was still watching the little group disperse when someone bumped into him.\n\n\"I'm sorry!\" A squeaky voice from somewhere near his waist. \"I wasn't watching\u2014Tane?\"\n\nTane looked down to see a dark-skinned gnomish woman with a broad face and large eyes, her hair arranged in a rather severe bun. For a moment, she flickered before him, her skin and clothes taking on the greens and greys of the grass and cobblestones behind her\u2014the natural gnomish ability to mask themselves with illusion when they didn't want to be seen.\n\n\"Roona,\" he greeted her. \"Just when I was beginning to worry they'd replaced everyone I used to know with children.\" He'd shared classes with Roona Nackle, though she'd concentrated in invocation and he\u2014ostensibly, at least\u2014in divination. She would have advanced to graduate studies by now. An opportunity he'd never gotten. \"You must know what all this is about. If the guards were wearing different colors I'd think the campus had been occupied by an invading army.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I'm not sure exactly. Something happened last night, but everyone's heard a different story. I haven't\u2026\" Roona trailed off and looked rather unsubtly over her shoulder, then fumbled her pocket watch from her waistcoat and gave it a cursory glance. \"Listen, Tane, I have to\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop talking to me before someone sees you?\"\n\nShe had the grace to look sheepish, at least. \"I'm sorry. It isn't personal, it's just that\u2026 people still talk about you, you know, and I'm on the list for a faculty position next year.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Tane forced a smile. \"The price of infamy. It's fine. Go.\"\n\nRoona went, a little bit more eagerly than he would have liked. It was hard not to take that personally.\n\nThe divination hall was at the far eastern end of the campus, but it didn't take him long to cover the rest of the distance. The oppressive mood in the air was making him nervous, not to mention curious, and either one was enough to overpower his admittedly petty desire to make Dean Greymond wait.\n\nA three-story marble building topped with a brass-domed observatory, the divination hall cast a long shadow across the grass in the pre-noon sun. Outside the main doors, two of the University Guard stood watch: a dark-bearded human man and a stout dwarven woman. Each of them wore a shortsword and a single-shot ancryst pistol at the waist, and a laurel wreath University badge at the breast\u2014though theirs would have different glyphs on the back than the students, allowing them to pass through more secure wards.\n\n\"Badge?\" the dwarf asked, eyeing Tane's frayed waistcoat and rumpled shirt with suspicion.\n\n\"Don't have one,\" said Tane. \"I'm Tane Carver. Dean Greymond asked me to come.\"\n\nThe human nodded. \"Carver, right.\" There might have been a flicker of disapproval in the man's eye, but he didn't let it enter his voice. \"She left word. Go on in. Straight to her office, please.\" They pushed open the doors and held them until Tane had passed.\n\nInside, the building was lit with globes of magelight hanging from the ceiling, glowing in the familiar silver-blue common to all Astral energy. Tane passed only a few students\u2014for the most part, he heard nothing but the echo of his own footsteps against marble floors.\n\nGreymond's office was on the third floor just below the observatory, and the hall leading up to it was empty, save for two guards outside a small study room. One was a short brown-scaled kobold, watching Tane with slitted reptilian eyes, but it was the larger woman who drew his attention\u2014grey-skinned, muscular, easily six and a half feet tall. An orc? They weren't entirely unheard of on the Audland Isle, but orcs were rare outside their homeland of Sverna at the far north of the Continent. He'd never seen one on campus\u2014they had no affinity for magic whatsoever.\n\nBut no, her features weren't quite right for an orc, either. She had the size, the greyish skin, the glinting yellow eyes and pointed ears, but her flat nose and protruding jaw weren't as pronounced as they might have been, and she lacked the short tusks sticking up from her lower lip. Grey-white hair that was almost like fur framed her face, but the similar fur on the back of her hands and arms wasn't near heavy enough, and while her fingernails were dark and thick, they were no orcish claws. She had to be a half-orc\u2014almost unheard of in the Protectorate, or anywhere else.\n\nThe woman caught him staring and grinned, exposing sharp lupine teeth. Embarrassed, Tane looked away, and walked faster. He heard her chuckling behind him as he moved down the hall.\n\nIt wasn't far to Dean Greymond's door. When he raised his hand to knock, it swung open before his knuckles touched wood, leaving him rapping on air.\n\n\"Tane Carver. It has been a long time. Come in.\" Liana Greymond was a human woman of a young-looking fifty years, her face only slightly lined beneath short dark hair. She sat behind a desk cluttered with papers, a silver-blue magelight lamp standing at one corner. She didn't appear to be looking at Tane, but rather somewhere through him. Those faraway eyes were customary for her, as if she was seeing things no one else could.\n\nShe usually was.\n\n\"I hate when you do that,\" said Tane. \"Let me\u2014\"\n\n\"Do something before I respond to it?\" Greymond finished. \"Why waste the time?\" That was a habit of hers. Sometimes she caught glimpses of things a half-second before they happened, and Tane was convinced she enjoyed using that foresight to put people off balance. \"Please, take a seat.\" She muttered a spell under her breath in the lingua magica and gestured to a chair in front of her desk. It pulled out for him to sit as if drawn by an invisible hand.\n\nTane sat, shifting uncomfortably under her appraising eyes. He was suddenly all too aware of what she was seeing: an unkempt, unshaven man of average height and build with untidy brown hair and shabby clothes. His appearance didn't say much for the life he'd been living since his expulsion, working odd jobs\u2014and not always entirely legal ones\u2014wherever he could peddle his education in magical matters. He hadn't cared with Roona or the guards, but Liana Greymond had been something of a mentor to him once. He ran two fingers along the watch chain attached to his waistcoat, and then dipped them into his pocket to rub the dented brass watch casing there\u2014a habit, when he was uneasy. It didn't tick beneath his fingers. There hadn't been clockwork inside for a long time.\n\n\"I assume this is about\u2026 whatever it is making everyone so nervous out there,\" he said by way of distraction. \"If you're looking for a good scapegoat, I'll take the fall, but know that my price isn't going to be cheap.\"\n\n\"This isn't a laughing matter, Mister Carver,\" Greymond said. \"I understand you are working as a consultant of sorts, now. On magical matters, proofing spell diagrams and the like. Is that correct?\"\n\nThat was a generous way of putting it, but Tane wasn't about to argue. \"You must\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, of course I looked into it before I summoned you. I was simply confirming. You aren't misrepresenting yourself to anyone as a graduate mage, I hope?\" She was peering through him again, a slight furrow of concentration at the corners of her eyes.\n\n\"Are you casting a truth-spell? I'm insulted, Dean Greymond.\" Tane smiled innocently. \"When have your divinations ever caught me in a lie?\"\n\nGreymond let out a short, sardonic laugh. \"I suppose that's true. Four years as my best student without an ounce of magic to your name, and I never guessed. You know how to evade a divination, I'll grant you that. But please, humor me.\"\n\n\"I haven't misrepresented anything,\" said Tane, and by the look on her face, it passed muster with her divination. It was the truth, this time. \"That's the point. I'm trying to show people that you don't need to be a mage to understand magic.\" It's usually better if you aren't, he thought but didn't say.\n\n\"Yes, I recall the nature of your final dissertation. That's why I asked you here, in fact. I wish to acquire your services. I'm loathe to say it, but the University has need of your\u2026 rather peculiar area of expertise.\"\n\n\"In other words, you need me to find a loophole in a spell that your mages can't.\" Tane leaned forward, intrigued. \"This is about whatever happened last night, isn't it?\"\n\nGreymond frowned, her eyes glazing for a brief instant as she searched the Astra for some answer or another, and then she nodded. \"What I am about to tell you is not to be shared until the chancellor makes it public. Do you swear to abide by that?\"\n\n\"I suppose I have to, don't I?\" said Tane, and he meant it\u2014at least for now. Anything else would have triggered her truth-spell. \"I'm not about to leave here without knowing now that you've made it so mysterious. And you know I can keep a secret.\"\n\nGreymond was silent for a moment\u2014confirming his sincerity with her divinations again, or perhaps just weighing the decision. But she would tell him. She wouldn't have asked him here otherwise. He expected it would be a poorly formulated spell for an artifice project or the like, something the University administration needed fixed quickly and quietly. Perhaps something for the airship in drydock at the waterfront\u2014it was meant to launch the day after next, the first ancryst-powered flying machine, and they wouldn't want word of any problems getting out now.\n\nBut what Greymond said next wasn't what he expected at all.\n\n\"A student was killed on campus last night, Mister Carver.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"What?\" Tane shook his head. I can't have heard that right. \"Are you telling me someone was murdered?\"\n\n\"I am,\" Greymond confirmed.\n\n\"And you sent for me? Why not bring in the bluecaps?\"\n\n\"Stooketon Yard is being notified, of course, but the chancellor wants to have this situation well in hand before we bring in the constabulary. The University's reputation must be considered, after all. To that end, there is a matter I believe you can help with. Let me explain.\"\n\n\"Please,\" said Tane. A murder, and they need me for some reason. This could be the chance I've been waiting for. It felt ghoulish to be excited about it, but helping here could get him a foot in the door with the University administration. They might actually listen to him this time.\n\n\"Shortly after midnight last night, someone accessed the primary artifice workshop. There were guards in the building, but they saw no one in the halls at any point. A\u2026 a student\"\u2014Greymond's eyes flicked away from his there, for an instant\u2014\"was using the workshop, considerably past the hours she was scheduled to be there. She was involved in the airship project, but those spell diagrams had already been submitted and approved. Still, she may have hoped to fit in some last-minute change before the final inscription of the glyphs this morning. The guards heard her screaming, but by the time they arrived, she was dead. Spellfire burns all across her face and chest.\"\n\nTane winced. \"That's awful.\" Spellfire burned hotter than molten metal. The only thing worse was the fire of a true dragon\u2014at least according to records from before the fall of the Estian Empire, when such creatures still lived.\n\n\"It was\u2026 difficult to look at,\" Greymond said, and by the look on her face, she was seeing it again now. She didn't say anything for a moment, and then, \"Nothing was stolen from the workshop, so we must assume murder was the intent. The building was quickly closed, and a second student was apprehended, hiding in the graduate workshop down the hall. Our only suspect, but a likely one. He was seen arguing with the victim earlier that day. He claims he was meeting someone in the building, but he won't provide a name, and my divinations say he is lying.\"\n\n\"Sounds like\u2014\"\n\n\"If the matter was already solved, Mister Carver, I would not have sent for you. Will you let me finish?\"\n\nTane almost laughed at that. When has she ever let anyone finish? But he leaned back in his seat and motioned for her to continue.\n\n\"The issue is this: our suspect should not have been able to enter the primary workshop at all, and certainly not without triggering an alarm. The wards and detection spells on that room should only allow University staff, faculty, and students with properly glyphed badges\u2014those involved with the rather privileged spellwork being done within. And the constabulary, of course.\" All campus wards had an exemption for the bluecaps, in case of emergency. \"As I said, the victim was one of Dean Brassforge's apprentices, assisting with the airship project. The suspect had no such access, nor did we find a stolen badge anywhere on him. We've accounted for all of the badges with access among faculty, students, and guard. None seem to be missing.\"\n\nThere it was. The reason she'd asked him here. Wards could be restricted in near limitless ways: by specific name or title or physical feature, by badge or passphrase, by any number of arbitrary criteria or simply by the caster's whim. But they all shared the same ultimate purpose, which was to keep people out. When they didn't, it was almost always because of careless magecraft.\n\nAnd finding careless magecraft was Tane's specialty. \"You want me to see if I can find a flaw that might have let him in.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Greymond. \"Either he found a way to exploit our wards, or someone else with access sneaked by the guards. We need to know which, at the very least. The wards have been recalibrated to allow only constables, high-level faculty, and University Guard for the time being. With the airship so close to completion\u2026 Lady Abena has invested a great deal into the project, and we cannot afford a lapse in security only days before the launch ceremony. Chancellor Nieris is eager to resolve the matter before then. He has charged me with overseeing the investigation.\"\n\nHoping she can divine an answer before they have bluecaps crawling over the campus, no doubt. Tane understood the stakes now. It was common knowledge that the Protector of the Realm had put much of her political capital into the airship project. She'd given a number of speeches in the Senate of Houses to that effect, touting the age of peace and prosperity that would result from improved trade and travel between the Audland Protectorate and the nations of continental Calene\u2014relations that had been strained since the Mage War had dissolved the Estian Empire into squabbling factions centuries ago. And the University couldn't afford to displease the Lady Protector if they wanted to maintain their operating budget.\n\nIf Tane proved himself useful here, it could change everything. It might get me out of double-checking the glyphs on fenced artifacts just to pay rent, at least.\n\nBut there was something else. Greymond wasn't using names, and the way she'd avoided his eyes for a moment there\u2026 \"Wait,\" he said. \"This woman, the victim\u2014if she was on the airship project, or any project in that room, for that matter, she must be a graduate student.\" Which meant she might have been a classmate of his. And one name came to mind above all others, one woman who would easily have qualified for such a prestigious apprenticeship. Not her. Please. \"Do I\u2026 did I know her?\"\n\nGreymond sighed, and Tane's heart fell into his feet. \"I should have known it wouldn't take you long. I'm afraid so.\"\n\nNo. He clutched the arms of his chair, and waited.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Tane. It was Allaea Hesliar.\"\n\nA wave of relief swept over him, and he felt awful for it. Allaea had been a friend, once\u2014an elven woman with a sharp tongue and a passion for ancryst machines. She deserved better. But it's not Indree.\n\nAnd then the full weight of it hit him. Memories of long nights spent studying, the three of them trading notes and ideas and stupid inside jokes. Allaea had been kind, and clever, and never shy about letting him know he was being an ass\u2014and now she was dead. Burned alive in the worst way imaginable. He hadn't seen her for two years, but it hurt, even so. Spellfire, Indree must be devastated. He'd only known Allaea through her, and those two had been inseparable friends long before he'd met them. He swallowed against the lump rising in his throat. \"Does Ree know?\"\n\n\"I can't say. Miss Lovial took her considerable talents elsewhere after graduation. But if this is too difficult for you\u2026\"\n\n\"No. I want to help.\" He didn't imagine Allaea had thought very highly of him after the way he'd left the University\u2014or the way he'd left things with Indree\u2014but he owed her this much.\n\n\"I hoped you would.\" Greymond shuffled through the papers on her desk and slid several towards him. \"These are the diagrams for the wards on the workshop, and the detection spells. I\u2026 when I learned who she was, I thought of you, and that dissertation of yours. You always were the best at finding the cracks in whatever spell I put in front of you.\"\n\nTane flipped the spell diagrams around to face him and looked them over. Glyphs detailing the exact nature of the spell, directions for placement. A few things stood out to him as worth checking into, but they might have been incidental. There were always flaws and oversights. Casting a spell meant making a request of the Astra, the plane of magical energy that stood behind the physical world. And that energy always did exactly what it was told, for better or worse. A misused word or careless sentence structure could have disastrous effect. It was very much like all the old stories of magical wish-granting spirits\u2014if there was the slightest way for the spirit to misinterpret the wish, it always did.\n\nThat was the essence of the dissertation he'd been expelled for: how dangerous spells could be when cast carelessly, especially when so many in the Protectorate relied on artifacts and machines created by mages. How even the non-magically gifted should be allowed to enroll at the University to learn how the magic they relied upon worked, how to check it for errors. How it was ludicrous to expect reliability from a spell that had only ever been proofed by the caster. And the centerpiece of the essay had been the fact that Tane had spent near four years as a student of magic at the University without any magic of his own, outsmarting every detection spell and excelling above the true mages in most of his classes.\n\nThe revelation had not been well received. Not even by the professor he'd most hoped would support him.\n\nThat still rankled, more than a bit. \"If I was the best, why\u2014\"\n\n\"You think I should have stood up for you with the chancellor? After what you did?\" Greymond narrowed her eyes, and a suggestion of anger heated her careful, professional tone. \"Never mind how much you humiliated the University, did you ever think for a moment how humiliating it was for me? The Dean of Divination fooled for four years by her favorite student? If you'd just come to me with the truth at any point, I might have\u2026\" She stopped herself, took a long breath. \"It doesn't matter now. We aren't going to do this. Just look at the spells.\"\n\nShe's right. Don't ruin this chance. \"It's going to take longer than a few minutes to study these,\" said Tane. \"I'll have to bring them back to my office.\" By which he meant the narrow brick-front single room he rented in Porthaven by the docks.\n\n\"Not the originals. I will have copies sent to your address.\"\n\n\"Fine. 17 Tilford Street, in Porthaven. I'll also need\u2014\"\n\n\"No. Under no circumstances may you enter the workshop. We can't have anyone interfering with evidence before the constabulary investigates, and your involvement is not something I want widely known. The spells were cast from those diagrams, and I promise you they match perfectly. That should be enough.\"\n\nDisappointing, but Tane had expected that. \"Fine. Then I need to know a few things. You've checked the glyphs for wear?\" Magic always needed specific instruction. Without a mage's active concentration, long term spells used engraved glyphs of the lingua magica to direct their energy.\n\n\"Of course. They were redrawn last month, and have been double and triple checked against the diagrams. A perfect match, as I said.\"\n\n\"No sign of Astral tampering?\" Tracing a spell's Astral link and deconstructing it was extremely difficult for even the most skilled diviners, and it took a great deal of time and effort, but it was possible.\n\n\"None. It would have set off a number of detections.\"\n\n\"Were the gems replaced recently?\" All spells needed a source of Astral energy. Absent a mage, most used gems or crystals charged in advance, linked to the spell glyphs with magically conductive copper. That was the other, slower way to beat a ward\u2014simply waiting for the power to fail.\n\n\"A week ago, and plenty of energy left in them. We hardly need you to point out the obvious, Mister Carver.\"\n\n\"And your divinations? Did you find anything I should know?\"\n\n\"Very little, sadly. I was able to witness Miss Hesliar's final moments through the Astra, but they didn't offer a great deal of guidance.\"\n\n\"Show me.\"\n\nGreymond frowned. \"Are you sure? It isn't a pleasant memory, and I know you were close.\"\n\nHe wasn't sure at all, but if there was any chance that he might see something she hadn't\u2026 \"Do it.\"\n\nGreymond's eyes focused somewhere behind his head, and pressure built in his ears for a moment before the sending came to him, halfway between a memory and a waking dream.\n\nFor some reason he'd expected to see Allaea, but instead he was looking through her eyes, at an aisle of shelves stacked with artifice tools and materials. The workshop. She was moving quickly, running from something. He could hear her breath, heavy and frightened. There were footsteps behind her, and a male voice, chanting in the lingua magica. She stumbled, put out a hand, knocked several bits of metal from a shelf. Until then there had been a part of Tane that didn't believe it, but he knew her by that hand\u2014long, delicate elven fingers callused and scarred from tinkering with ancryst machines. She looked over her shoulder, caught a brief, blurred glimpse of a dark figure rounding the corner, wearing a masked cowl like an executioner's hood. The figure reached out toward her.\n\nAllaea screamed as her vision dissolved into silver flame.\n\nTane's ears popped as the sending faded. He took a shaky breath, and tried to focus on the facts instead of the pain in that scream. \"Not\u2026 not much there, with the mask.\" That was unfortunate but not uncommon\u2014when a diviner could call up the last memories of the dead, smart murderers covered their faces.\n\n\"As I said.\"\n\n\"What about this suspect the guards found, then? He'd know better than anyone how he beat the wards. If he did. You say your spell caught him in a lie, but that could mean a lot of things. You know as well as anyone that truth-spells aren't perfect. They can be misled.\" Tane himself was living proof of that. All a truth-spell did was reach through the Astra to read a subject's mental and emotional state, both of which could be controlled. Or the opposite\u2014agitation could make true statements look false to a spell. \"If he'd really planned to kill someone, I'd expect him to have invented a better story.\"\n\n\"A fair point,\" said Greymond. \"But added to the rest of it, the lie certainly doesn't speak to his innocence.\"\n\n\"Who is he? Anyone I know?\"\n\n\"The same year as you, but beyond that, I'm not sure. Kivit Thrung.\"\n\n\"I've met him.\" A goblin student, concentrating in artifice like Allaea. He'd always been over-competitive in class. Goblins weren't exactly highly respected as mages\u2014he'd always had to prove he deserved to be there. Tane knew how that felt. \"Things can change in two years, but\u2026 he always seemed too nervous to hurt anyone. Could\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I thought you might want to talk to him.\" Greymond answered the unasked question with a nod. \"That I can arrange. He is just across the hall\u2014I was questioning him before you arrived. As I said, my divinations caught him in a lie, but he refuses to explain further. Given your history, you might get something out of him that I couldn't.\"\n\n\"As a fellow liar, you mean?\" Tane said, quirking an eyebrow.\n\n\"Essentially, yes. You mimicked divination in my class for years\u2014in the absence of magic, I must assume you did so by reading behavior. That may prove useful. Come.\" Greymond stood, and led him out of the office.\n\nAcross the hall and a short distance down, the two guards Tane had passed on the way were still standing at attention. Greymond approached them.\n\n\"Let us in,\" she said, and the half-orc woman pushed open the door, held it, and followed them in. Her partner remained outside to watch the hall.\n\nInside, a scrawny goblin man with grey-green skin sat hunched over the table, the tip of his long nose pressed flat against the wood. A pair of round spectacles sat low on his face, threatening to fall off at any moment. He didn't look up. \"I already told you I didn't do it!\" he said in a high, nasally voice.\n\nTane glanced at Dean Greymond, who gave him a slight shake of her head\u2014she was still detecting a lie. They sat down across from Thrung while the half-orc guard took her place in front of the door.\n\n\"Ask what you will,\" Greymond said.\n\nThrung finally raised his head then, and saw Tane. He pushed up his spectacles, and small black eyes narrowed beneath the lenses. Thick goblin eyebrows knit together to form a single line of bushy black hair. \"Carver?\" He looked to Greymond. \"What is he doing here?\"\n\n\"Helping,\" Tane said quickly. \"Can I ask you a few things?\"\n\nGreymond, for once, didn't interrupt\u2014she just sat silently, watching Thrung sweat. Apparently she was willing to let Tane take the lead on this.\n\nThrung's eyes moved wildly from side to side. \"I already told them, I was just meeting someone. I swear!\"\n\nIt was impossibly obvious that he was lying, divination or no. The real question was what about. By necessity, Tane had learned how to read people fairly well, and this didn't strike him as the manner of someone who had just burned a rival alive. \"Calm down, Kivit. I want to help, if you'll let me.\"\n\nHope brightened Thrung's face immediately. Predictable\u2014a drowning man would cling to whatever happened to float by. \"You understand what it's like, don't you, Carver? To have everyone distrust you? They just think I did it because I'm a goblin.\"\n\n\"And, to be fair, because you were the only one in the building, and you were seen arguing with Allaea earlier.\" Hope was important, but he couldn't let Thrung forget the stakes, either.\n\n\"I didn't kill her!\"\n\nTane held up a hand. \"Of course you didn't.\" He really did want to believe that, but if it was a lie, he meant to find out. For Allaea's sake. \"But it would help to know what you were arguing about.\"\n\n\"She took my spot on the airship project! My diagrams for the heating glyphs in the envelope were far more elegant, and we both knew it. But a goblin was never going to be picked over an elf. I just wanted her to admit it, that's all. I promise I didn't want her dead.\"\n\nTane could see why Greymond thought Thrung had done it. He wasn't exactly helping himself. \"And you were meeting someone in the artifice workshops that night? Who?\"\n\n\"Just\u2026 just a girl. I don't know her name. A\u2026 a friend thought we might enjoy each other's company, and set it up.\"\n\n\"Really? You couldn't come up with anything better than a nameless girl in the artifice workshops at midnight?\" Tane leaned forward over the table. \"You and I both know that isn't going to beat Dean Greymond's divinations.\" Someone else might have, but it would have taken a great deal of self-control, and Thrung clearly wasn't very much in control of anything just then. \"Let me tell you what they already believe, Kivit: that you were jealous of Allaea for taking your spot, so you waited in the workshops until late at night, snuck in, and burned her alive with spellfire. They're already at that point, so when you're caught in an obvious lie, it only makes you look worse.\"\n\nThrung's cheeks went an ashy shade of grey. He really was easy to lead. \"I would never\u2026 I couldn't\u2026 my badge doesn't even have access to that workshop!\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Tane. \"So whatever the truth is, it must be better than what they think. Just tell me, and we can get you out of here.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 They won't believe it. It\u2026 it sounds bad.\"\n\n\"It can't sound any worse, I promise you.\"\n\nThrung's shoulders slumped. \"I suppose you're right. I\u2026 look, you have to understand I wasn't going to hurt her. I just wanted her to admit my designs were better. I was\u2026 I was waiting for her, that's true. I was watching the door from the workshop down the hall. I meant to confront her when she left. Then I heard the scream, and the guards came, and\u2026 I panicked. I hid. And when they found me, I lied. If I'd admitted I was there for her\u2026 People always want to believe the worst of a goblin. But that's the truth, I swear it.\"\n\nAgain, Tane glanced at Greymond.\n\n\"That reads as true,\" she said. \"You would have saved us a great deal of time if you'd said so earlier, Mister Thrung.\"\n\nThrung just hung his head. \"I'm sorry, Dean Greymond. I just\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Tane. \"You were watching the door the whole time? You must have seen the real killer go in.\"\n\n\"That's the thing,\" said Thrung. \"That's why I didn't say anything. It\u2026 it doesn't sound very good for me.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Mister Thrung?\" Dean Greymond was staring slightly past Thrung now, with that faraway look that said she was concentrating on the Astra, not the physical world.\n\nThrung swallowed, his long neck convulsing nervously. \"What I mean is that I watched that door all night. No one went in.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"You have to let me look at the workshop!\"\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" said Dean Greymond. They were standing in the hall just outside the room where they'd questioned Kivit Thrung.\n\n\"If he didn't do it, and no one went in or out, it raises a thousand questions,\" said Tane. \"Even if someone had been waiting inside since before Kivit got there, how did they get out after the building was closed down? No illusion would have done it once the guards were on alert.\" True invisibility was impossible\u2014the closest thing was the instinctive gnomish ability to blend into their surroundings with illusion, which was extremely difficult for a mage to emulate consciously. And it didn't hold up well under scrutiny. \"That leaves, what\u2026 a portal? That's dangerous magic.\" An improperly stabilized portal could swallow whoever stepped through it into the Astra\u2014not to mention the things that could come out.\n\n\"You know we have very strict portal wards,\" Greymond said. \"Only the deans or the chancellor can make a portal into or out of University grounds, and it wasn't one of us\u2014we had a meeting in Chancellor Nieris' office that night that went very late, and no one was absent.\"\n\n\"That's exactly my point,\" said Tane. \"This looks impossible at a glance. Whoever did it might have left some sign, and just looking at diagrams isn't going to tell me\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all you're going to get, Mister Carver. You did well with Thrung, but I shouldn't have let you go that far. I have to admit, I was\u2026 curious. To see what you could do, now that I know you have no magic. But the constabulary will be arriving soon, and we can't have you running around the University where someone might get the wrong idea. Can you imagine how it would look if word reached the Gazette that you were assisting in the investigation?\"\n\n\"Dean Greymond, please.\" Tane needed this. His friend was dead, and he needed to know who had done it, and why\u2014and beyond that, solving an impossible crime where the mages of the University and Stooketon Yard couldn't would go a long way towards proving the point he'd been trying to prove for years. \"I just want to help.\"\n\n\"And you can. It will help us a great deal to have those diagrams proofed for errors, and you will be paid well for it. That is your role here. Nothing else.\"\n\nShe isn't going to listen. I'm wasting my breath. Tane nodded. \"Of course, Dean Greymond. I'm sorry, I'm just\u2026 invested in this. Allaea was my friend.\"\n\nGreymond's eyes narrowed and took on that faraway look. Looking for lies. \"Mister Carver, promise me you won't try to get into the workshop.\"\n\nCareful. Easy breaths. \"I won't.\"\n\nShe watched him a moment longer, pursed her lips, drummed a finger against her leg. Finally, she turned to the guards at the door. \"You,\" she said to the half-orc. \"Escort Mister Carver off campus. See that he goes nowhere but out through the gates.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the half-orc woman said, and took Tane's arm in a startlingly firm grip. \"Come.\" She had a strong Svernan accent\u2014the Audish words came out short and clipped.\n\nTane went along without a fuss. It didn't matter. He'd already made his choice, and Greymond's divinations had been easy enough to evade.\n\nHe was getting into that workshop, one way or another.\n\nOutside, on the front steps of the divination hall, the half-orc released his arm. \"Don't run,\" she said in her heavy accent. \"I am faster.\" She bared her teeth in a wide, unsettling grin.\n\n\"I don't doubt it,\" Tane said agreeably, matching step with her down the path toward the campus center. He was going to have to slip her guard before they reached the gates, or he'd never get back in, but for that he'd need to put her at ease first. \"Forgive me if this is nosy, but you must come from Sverna by your accent. We don't see very many orcs here who weren't born on the Isle.\" The orcish homeland was highly isolationist, and they had no magic there\u2014quite the opposite of the Protectorate. But then, Svernan orcs weren't supposed to approve of breeding with humans either, and here this woman was. \"It feels like there's a story there, if you don't mind telling it?\"\n\n\"Clever man,\" she said with another toothy grin. \"I was born in Sverna, yes. There, do what clan chief says, every day. Everything is\u2026 ordinary. Boring. I wanted to see things. See magic.\"\n\n\"Well you came to the right place,\" said Tane. \"There's nowhere more magical than the Protectorate, and most of it is here in Thaless.\" He stopped, and extended his hand. \"I'm Tane. Carver.\"\n\nShe squeezed his hand too tight and shook vigorously. \"Kadka, of Clan Nadivek. Or was. Now not so much.\"\n\n\"It's a pleasure, Kadka. Have you been here for very long?\"\n\n\"Only month, little more,\" she said. \"Is still new for me.\" That was good. She might not know the best paths across campus yet. \"But not new for you, yes? Sivisk\"\u2014that must have been the kobold guard\u2014\"tells me you were student in magic here with no magic. How do you fool so many mages for so long?\"\n\n\"Trickery and deceit, mostly,\" Tane said. \"I'm strong at magical theory, which made the practical parts easy to fake.\"\n\n\"Teachers never ask you to make spell?\"\n\n\"Of course, but that's not so hard. A little sleight of hand\u2014\" He reached behind Kadka's ear and produced a brass coin, to her obvious surprise, then flipped it into the air, caught it, and spun it across his knuckles. \"\u2014and you'd be surprised what you can do. An artifact up the sleeve to duplicate one spell or another, that sort of thing. With proper misdirection, they never notice a thing.\" She was still staring at the coin in his right hand when he opened the left one, revealing the silver-on-blue enameled badge he'd plucked from her coat.\n\nShe laughed, a too-loud cackle of delight. \"You are clever man. But why do they never make spell to catch lies, or see if magic is yours?\"\n\n\"Those can be fooled, but no one is casting them in the first place if they don't have reason to. I didn't give them a reason. It's like this: there are three schools of magic a student can concentrate in. Invocation and Artifice both require harnessing magical energy with showy words or glyphs, and you're expected to produce tangible, physical results. Divination is all about quietly searching the Astra for answers that you can usually get out of people without any magic at all, and if you get one wrong, well, it's known to be an unreliable art. I'll give you one guess where I declared my concentration.\"\n\n\"So you are like mage with no magic,\" said Kadka with an impressed nod. \"You must know much about spells, to do this for so long. This is why Greymond asks for your help?\"\n\nThey were nearing the narrow gap between the lecture theatre and Thalen's Hall\u2014the administrative center of the University. There were no guards in sight. And Kadka seemed charmed by his story, for the moment.\n\nHe wasn't going to get a better chance.\n\n\"Something like that,\" Tane said. \"And I want to help. The woman who died\u2026 I knew her.\"\n\nKadka frowned. \"I am sorry. There is no good way to lose friend, but that is bad one.\"\n\n\"That's why I wanted a closer look. I know you're supposed to bring me to the gates, but maybe we could stop by the artifice workshops? We don't have to go in, I just\u2026 I want to see for myself that they're taking the investigation seriously.\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"Greymond says\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. Look, though.\" He still had her badge in his hand, and he flipped it over to show the polished brass on the back where the glyphs were engraved. On this side, glinting in the light, it looked like nothing more than a strangely patterned coin. \"These glyphs are keyed to the campus wards. They determine who can go in and out. Without one of these, I can't get anywhere I'm not supposed to, so\u2026\" His foot caught on a cobblestone, and a glinting circle fell from his hand, rolling away into the grass. \"Well that was stupid. Can you see it?\"\n\nKadka stepped off the path, kneeling to look for her badge.\n\nThe moment her back was turned, Tane bolted.\n\nHe darted into the narrow alley between buildings just ahead and to his right. Kadka shouted what might have been a Svernan curse\u2014\"Deshka,\" it sounded like\u2014and then he heard her running. He took a left into the alley behind the dining hall, where a locked gate barred the way. With any luck, Kadka would see that and assume he'd gone the other way, which would cost her time heading back toward the lecture theatre before joining with the main footpath on the other side.\n\nBut Tane had cut through this gate many times when he'd been a student. The latch was easy to flip.\n\nHe rounded the next corner and froze, holding his breath and waiting for the patter of Kadka's feet passing by the little alley. And there it was\u2014she was going the wrong way. Thank the Astra.\n\nTane exited the alley onto the open grass of the campus center. From there it was a quick sprint across to the artifice workshops on the north side.\n\nHe was panting as he neared the broad brick building, but he couldn't see Kadka behind him yet. He forced himself to slow down and breathe through his nose. Don't want to look too suspicious to the guards.\n\nThere were two men at the door, a broad-shouldered human and a dwarf with thick mutton-chop sideburns. Spellfire, let them not recognize me.\n\n\"Gentlemen.\" Tane gave them a nod, and strode confidently for the door.\n\nThe dwarf moved to block his way. \"The building is closed, sir.\"\n\nTane flashed them Kadka's badge\u2014he'd palmed it up his sleeve and dropped the coin for her to chase. \"That's why I'm here,\" he said. \"Dean Greymond asked me to double check the wards, make sure no one has access who shouldn't. We don't want the scene tampered with before the constables get here.\" He shook his head sadly. \"That poor girl. I hope they catch the bastard who did this soon.\" Greymond had said they were still keeping the murder quiet\u2014just knowing about it would make his story credible.\n\n\"Damn right,\" said the big human. \"No one should die like that.\" He waved his partner aside. \"Go on in. It's the one at the far end of the hall.\"\n\nTane pushed through the doors, risking a quick glance over his shoulder. Still no sign of Kadka, but she wouldn't be long. It would take her a moment to explain why she didn't have her badge, and then they'd come after him.\n\nHe didn't have much time.\n\nTwo smaller workshops sat at either side of the mage-lit hall, but Tane hurried toward the far end. The primary workshop took up most of the back half of the building, an ample space for artificers to develop the magical devices and machines that made their small island nation a powerful force in the economy of the Continent.\n\nThe door wasn't locked. Tane was certain that the keys to most doors on campus had been misplaced long ago out of simple disuse\u2014the wards were meant to be an improvement over any mundane lock.\n\nBut they hadn't been enough to protect Allaea.\n\nI hope this works. If it didn't, it was going to be like walking into a wall. He took a deep breath, and stepped forward through the open doorway. He felt a familiar tingle on his skin, and the hair on the backs of his arms stood up as he met the wards.\n\nAnd then he was through.\n\nThere was no time for relief. The guards would be coming soon.\n\nThe workshop stretched open before him, a vast, warehouse-like space stacked with shelf after shelf of artifacts and components and ancryst machines in various states of disassembly. The metals common to artifice glittered in the dim magelight: copper for conductivity, brass for insulation, silver for amplification, gold for stability. Stacks of tubes and plates were interspersed with brass chests, carefully sealed to protect the magically reactive ancryst stone within. Gears and cogs and rods of iron and steel were strewn everywhere\u2014Astrally inactive metals that wouldn't interfere with the magic fields that drove ancryst machinery. High up on the walls, in the shadows near the ceiling, he could vaguely make out glyphs of the wards surrounding the room.\n\nAnd there was the body.\n\nTane hadn't seen her at first. She'd been left for the bluecaps to examine with their divinations, lying face-down on the floor some ten feet back, half-hidden between shelves. Devastatingly close to the door. If she'd just been a little bit faster\u2026\n\nHe knelt beside her. Her head lay on its side, staring back at him with scorched, empty eye-sockets. Thank the Astra Indree isn't here to see her like this. He wouldn't even have known it was Allaea if Greymond hadn't told him. Much of her skin had melted and sloughed from her skull, leaving exposed patches of blackened bone crumbling to powder in places. Only a few locks of blonde hair remained on her scalp, clinging to patches of flesh the spellfire hadn't touched. Tane's stomach lurched, and he had to look away.\n\nI'll help find whoever did this to you, Allaea. I promise you that.\n\nThere were no scorch-marks anywhere but on her flesh, no signs of fire behind her. Despite its great heat, spellfire went only where it was aimed by a mage, and burned only what it was permitted to burn\u2014assuming, of course, that the spell was worded properly. But scattered metal parts and stray gemstones marked the way she'd come, knocked from the shelves in her haste. The trail led deeper into the workshop. There was something strange about that. If he snuck up on her with the intent to kill, how did she get this far? He should have been between her and the door, but it looks like he was chasing her this way.\n\nA sudden thud came from the doorway, and a grunt of pain. Tane leapt to his feet and looked toward the sound.\n\nKadka was outside, rubbing her nose where it had struck the wards. She gave him a rueful grin. \"Forgot. No badge.\"\n\nShe was, as far as he could tell, alone. \"Where are the other guards?\"\n\n\"Outside. I tell them I have message for you from Dean Greymond.\"\n\n\"What? Why?\"\n\nKadka shrugged. \"Tell them you stole badge, maybe trouble for me. We leave quietly now, maybe not.\"\n\n\"You're not angry?\" Orcs had a reputation for ill temper, though Tane supposed that could easily be rumor and prejudice. There weren't many of them in the Protectorate to judge by.\n\n\"Why be angry? You wanted to help friend. And chase is more exciting than standing by door all day.\" She grinned again, and then cocked her head. \"How are you inside? Even with badge, should only let in deans and guard now, yes?\"\n\nTane's fists clenched with an anger he knew all too well. He forced one open, found the brass watch casing in his pocket, and touched the familiar dents and scrapes. \"I'll tell you how. Someone was careless. There are two wards on this room. The first is used in secure areas all across campus, a general purpose ward that keeps out anyone but registered faculty, staff, and students. Present and former students, so they can bring wealthy alumni through when they need donations. The second ward narrows access to anyone who can get through the first and has a properly glyphed badge. When they restricted the wards, they didn't change the first one, and I am in the registry as a former student. Expelled, but that's a kind of former. That phrasing was the first thing I noticed when Greymond showed me the ward diagrams. They did restrict the badges allowed through the second ward, but University Guard badges still have access.\" He flashed her badge. \"And I have this.\n\n\"Small oversights. Easy to correct. But nobody did, so here I am. They assumed no one would get by both wards, or maybe no one noticed the problem at all\u2014no mage is going to look very closely at some glyphs in the corner once the spell's been cast. Any of the staff who maintain those glyphs and the gems that power them might have caught it, but they don't know what they're looking for. Menial jobs like that are beneath a trained mage. People who can't cast spells don't get to understand them.\n\n\"You came here for the magic? Well, let me tell you the most important thing about magic, Kadka. There's a flaw in all of it, the same flaw in every spell: the mage. When they make a mistake, who's going to challenge them on it? That's why I'm standing here. That's why my friend is dead. Because there's always\u2014\"\n\nA distant howl cut off the end of Tane's diatribe, something like an animal's call with the low crack and groan of sudden frost behind it. It had to have come from deeper in the workshop, but it sounded somehow further away than the size of the room would allow. His heart thumped against his chest, and he half-turned toward the sound, then back toward Kadka.\n\nShe was staring past him, a focused glint in her eye. Drawing her shortsword with one hand, she beckoned to Tane with the other. \"My badge,\" she said in a low voice. \"Something is in there with you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Tane tossed Kadka her badge. She caught it in her outstretched hand and stepped freely through the wards.\n\n\"Stay,\" she whispered, and started down an aisle between shelves, toward the source of the sound. She moved with the easy, silent grace of a predator\u2014a wolf stalking prey.\n\nTane hesitated a moment, and then followed. Kadka just shrugged, and held a finger to her lips.\n\nThe noise had come from the back end of the shop, past the shelves, where the artificers' worktables stood cluttered with parts and spell diagrams. At the last row of shelves, Kadka halted Tane with a raised hand and peeked around the corner, then beckoned him closer. Tane crept toward her and stole a look.\n\nBetween the worktables, a shimmering silver-edged hole in reality split the air. Through it, Tane could see another room, but it was hard to discern any details\u2014the image rippled and distorted, like he was seeing it through a translucent silver-blue curtain shifting in the wind. It could have been anywhere.\n\n\"What is this?\" Kadka asked, barely loud enough to hear.\n\n\"A portal,\" Tane breathed. \"That's not supposed to be possible.\" He'd never even seen an open portal before\u2014he'd been taught the theory, but opening tears in the world through the Astra was the most dangerous kind of magic, and his teachers hadn't dared demonstrate. The strict portal wards on campus shouldn't have allowed anyone but the heads of the University to open one here. Tane had only ever heard of it being done once in recent memory, when an ancient sub-basement of the invocation hall had collapsed over a decade ago, and even then only after every other way of freeing the trapped students had been tried.\n\nThe sound came again, a distant, icy howl. Is that the portal? Are they supposed to make that noise? He'd read of portals making strange sounds, but he didn't have the experience to be certain.\n\nAnd a tear in the Astra doing anything unexpected was a very bad sign.\n\nHe was still watching the portal when Kadka tapped him on the shoulder. She gestured past the silver-blue rift, toward the back of the workshop where a bank of drawers ran along the wall\u2014storage for spell diagrams. A figure in black was bent over one of the drawers. By size and build, he was probably a human or half-elf. From behind, Tane couldn't tell what he was doing, and a dark cowl hid his face.\n\nExactly like the cowl Allaea had seen in her last moments.\n\n\"Have to stop him,\" Kadka whispered. \"This time, you stay.\" With a slight grin, she stepped around the corner.\n\nShe made no sound as she stalked across the floor toward the intruder. Tane watched, holding his breath, expecting the man to turn around with each step she took. But he didn't, and she was closing the distance rapidly.\n\nThis has to be the man who killed Allaea. The portal explains how he got by the guards, but why come back? Tane inched around the corner, straining for a better look. He had no intention of following Kadka\u2014he couldn't move anywhere near as quietly\u2014but if he could just get a glimpse of the drawer the man was looking at\u2026\n\nThe tip of Tane's foot slid beyond the front edge of the shelf.\n\nInstantly, the intruder spun on his heel. His cowl covered his face, but his head swiveled toward Tane's position among the shelves as if guided there by magic.\n\nHe must have had a detection spell up! But Kadka\u2026 And then Tane remembered: orcs were said to have a very weak Astral presence. He'd read of divinations struggling to detect them at all. Damn it! She would have had him if I'd just stayed still!\n\nIt was only then that the intruder noticed Kadka, not twenty feet away from him. He uttered a muffled curse under his mask. There was something in his hand, but Tane couldn't tell what it was before the man tucked it away behind his back.\n\nFor a moment, neither Kadka nor the intruder moved. Both glanced toward the open portal\u2014about halfway between them and several yards to the left, from Tane's vantage point.\n\nAnd then the man lunged into motion, sprinting for the rift at desperate speed.\n\nKadka was faster by far. She vaulted onto a nearby table, leapt across the next, and landed on her feet between the portal and the man in black. He skidded to a stop, spun, and ran for the shelves.\n\nHe can't get away. That was the only thought going through Tane's head as his feet carried him into the open. He leapt in front of the intruder, and they collided with jarring force. Tane fell back, and the other man landed hard on top of him, knocking the air from his lungs.\n\nThe man in black was on his feet in an instant. Kadka was already coming for him, her sword drawn. Tane heard the man utter a short spell in the lingua magica, and tried to warn her, but he couldn't get his breath.\n\nSilver-blue force rippled from the black-clad mage in all directions\u2014a precisely targeted spell would have taken too long to recite, with Kadka closing fast. A crushing pressure shoved Tane along the floor into a nearby shelf, and hurled Kadka against the worktable behind her. She grunted in pain as the edge of the table hit the small of her back.\n\nThe man bolted for the portal, half turned, and sent another wave of force crashing over them. Kadka ducked beneath one of the tables, gripping the anchored leg to weather the spell; Tane couldn't get on his feet in time to take cover. Silver magic pressed him hard against the shelf behind him.\n\nUnmoored by the spell, the shelf swayed dangerously, and started to topple.\n\nTane tried to scramble out of the way on his hands and knees. Heavy metal and gemstones clattered to the floor on all sides. The shadow of the falling shelf stretched across the floor in front of him.\n\nHe wasn't going to make it.\n\nA grey hand tufted with white fur gripped him by the wrist, and yanked him forward. The shelf struck the ground just behind him with a thunderous crash; on either side, several others swayed and fell just as loudly.\n\nKadka pulled him to his feet.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Tane gasped, but she was already whirling to chase the intruder.\n\nThe mage was nearly at the portal now. Kadka drew the brass-barrelled ancryst pistol from her belt and took aim. Spellfire, no. All ancryst machinery was based on one property\u2014that the translucent green stone reacted to the presence of magic by moving in the opposite direction, the way lodestones repelled one another from the wrong ends. When she pulled the trigger, the firing charm would be consumed in a burst of magical energy, propelling a lead ball with an ancryst core from the barrel of the weapon.\n\nToward a portal into the Astra\u2014the very essence of all magic.\n\n\"Kadka, wait!\" Tane shouted, already running toward her.\n\nHe was too late. She pulled the trigger, and the pistol discharged with a silver-blue flash.\n\nTane tackled Kadka to the ground as the ball ricocheted directly back from the portal. Splinters flew as it struck the table behind them, digging a long groove through the wood.\n\nWhen Tane looked up, the intruder was already through the portal. On the far side of that silvery curtain, the man extended his hand to touch something Tane couldn't make out. The portal bulged at the edges, twisting and writhing.\n\nKadka leapt to her feet and hurled herself forward.\n\nThe portal snapped closed in a blinding burst of silver.\n\nThe man was gone.\n\n\"Deshka!\" Kadka cursed at empty space, and then turned to Tane. \"Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"I've been better, but no permanent damage,\" said Tane.\n\n\"Captain will not like this. Let you steal badge, let this poska go.\" She gestured vaguely at where the portal had been.\n\n\"He didn't get away entirely clean,\" said Tane. \"I took this when he ran into me. He tried to hide it when he saw us.\" He reached behind his back and pulled a brass cylinder from his belt. It looked like a scroll case, capped at one end.\n\nKadka laughed. \"Clever man with clever hands. This is important?\" She peered at the tube as she stowed her sword and pistol.\n\nTane was about to answer when the lights began to flicker. Directly above, one of the magelight fixtures in the ceiling blinked out. Suddenly, the already dim workshop was a great deal dimmer.\n\n\"Oh no. No no no.\" Tane looked over Kadka's shoulder.\n\nThere, in the exact place the portal had been, a hazy figure drifted a foot above the floor, glowing a faint silver-blue. Another light flickered out overhead, and the shape became more defined, easier to see. It was humanoid but lacked any sort of detail, just an outline of Astral energy with two points of intense lightning-blue for eyes.\n\nA wraith.\n\nKadka turned to see what he was looking at, and her hand went back to her sword.\n\n\"Don't,\" said Tane, tucking the scroll case back into his belt and backing away from the hazy figure. \"You can't hurt it that way.\" It was beginning to move towards them now, drifting slowly, still gaining its bearings in the physical world.\n\n\"What is it?\" She copied his movement, backing away a step as the wraith drifted closer.\n\n\"A wraith. An Astral spirit.\" Some said wraiths were what remained of those lost in unstable portals, forced to wander the Astra until they found a way out. Others claimed that they were spirits of corrupted Astral energy, created by grievous abuses of magic. Tane didn't know what they were, just that they were extremely dangerous. \"Whoever that man was, he had to close his portal without proper precautions to keep us from following him. He must have destabilized it. That's why portal spells are so restricted\u2014make any mistakes, and these things get out.\"\n\n\"Dangerous?\"\n\n\"Very. They feast on Astral energy, and the link to the Astra is everything that makes us who we are, mage or no. What people called the soul, before they knew what it was. You won't die without it, but\u2026 The Astra-riven aren't themselves anymore. Just shells.\"\n\nAbruptly, the wraith blurred forward, moving toward Kadka with unsettling speed. The worktables did nothing to slow it\u2014its silvery form passed through them as if they weren't there. It made no sound as it moved.\n\n\"Watch out!\" Tane shouted.\n\nKadka leapt aside; the wraith passed silently by.\n\nAnd kept moving toward Tane.\n\nThat wasn't right. Wraiths were drawn to Astral energy, and she should have been the nearest source. Spellfire, her Astral signature is too weak! Just like with the detection spell!\n\nIt had never been moving toward her\u2014she'd just been standing between it and a much tastier meal.\n\nTane turned on his heel and ran.\n\nArtifice debris was scattered all across the floor from fallen shelves\u2014maybe some with enough magical charge to distract the wraith a moment, if he was lucky. As he moved he searched frantically through the mess for what he needed. I know I saw\u2026 there! Sticking up from between the slats of a fallen shelf was the brass casing of an ancryst engine, large enough that Tane could almost have fit inside if he curled into a ball. Brass was always used for an engine's outer shell, as an insulator\u2014it stopped Astral energy from passing through, so no external magical force could disrupt the movement of the ancryst pistons.\n\nTane hopped over the broken shelves that stood in his way and knelt beside the engine, then risked a look behind him. The wraith approached erratically, drifting for short stretches to drain this small artifact or that, and then advancing in blurs of sudden speed. As it moved, the magelights overhead flickered and failed.\n\nJust behind him, Kadka vaulted through the remains of the shelf to grab his shoulder. \"This is not time for playing with machine! Run!\"\n\nTane tugged at the engine casing's hatch, a twelve-inch square plate that provided access to the internal workings. It wouldn't open\u2014it must have been bent in the fall. \"We can't leave that thing free. They're only visible in the dark. If it gets out onto campus in the daylight\u2026\"\n\nKadka didn't hesitate, just gave a firm nod. \"What, then?\"\n\nThe wraith surged forward, and Tane threw himself out of the way just in time to avoid its touch. \"It doesn't seem to want you! I'll keep its attention, just get that hatch open!\"\n\nShe yanked it open in a single pull. \"What now?\"\n\n\"Give me a minute!\" Tane scrambled back as the wraith moved implacably toward him. Something rolled under his foot. He stumbled, and barely caught himself on the edge of a fallen shelf.\n\nThe wraith loomed over him. Hazy fingers reached out, grazed his chest. A terrible cold radiated through his body. He sagged back against the ground, felt his awareness fading\u2026\n\n\"Carver!\"\n\nKadka's voice pierced the fog, and Tane rolled desperately to the side, gasping. If it touches me again, I'm done. And it was still there above him, a ghost made of silver-blue light. An indistinct hand grasped for his heart.\n\nBeneath his foot, Tane saw what it was he'd tripped on: a copper rod some four feet long. Just what I was looking for.\n\nHe snatched the rod up, ducked beneath the wraith's reaching hand, and made for Kadka and the engine. \"Get ready to close the hatch, when I say!\" Rod in hand, he turned to face the wraith.\n\nIt was just behind him, moving fast.\n\nTane jammed one end of the rod into the hatch, braced it so that it pointed at the wraith, and let go. The wraith surged forward, crossing the last few feet almost faster than he could see.\n\nAnd impaled a body made of magic on a rod of magically conductive copper.\n\nThe wraith dissolved into silver-blue mist, drawn along the length of the rod, and pooled inside the brass engine casing. It only took an instant. With his sleeve over his hand, Tane grabbed the rod and pulled it free. Even that short moment of contact through the cloth of his shirt was enough to send cold racing up his arm to the elbow.\n\n\"Now!\"\n\nKadka slammed the hatch closed.\n\nFor a moment, they were both silent, watching the engine hatch. Nothing. No sign of movement. The seal was good, and the wraith was a creature of magic\u2014it couldn't pass through brass.\n\nFinally, Kadka looked up at him, grinning her sharp-toothed grin. \"Is like this every day for you, or just lucky today?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's all the time.\" Tane couldn't help but grin back. \"That's the third one I've trapped since breakfast.\"\n\nKadka cackled and clapped him on the shoulder, and then they were both laughing, out of giddy relief as much as anything.\n\n\"You two seem to be having fun. I hope we aren't interrupting.\" A woman's voice, from somewhere amid the shelves nearer the door. Tane instinctively slipped the brass scroll case from his belt and let it fall in with the scattered artifice parts littering the floor\u2014just another piece of debris.\n\nIn the space of a moment, a half-dozen constables of various races surrounded Tane and Kadka. All of them wore blue uniforms and distinctive brimmed caps, batons on one hip and ancryst pistols on the other. Constable's badges glinted at their breasts\u2014gold shields with the Protectorate's gryphon at the center. Most were men\u2014three humans, an elf, a kobold\u2014but standing head and shoulders above the others was a nine-foot tall ogren woman, striking and statuesque, as her people always were. Even if Tane had been so inclined, trying to flee would be pointless. No one joined the constabulary without some skill at magecraft, particularly spells to locate and subdue suspects quickly and efficiently.\n\nBehind them came another woman in the same uniform, but with the gold cord of a constable inspector at her shoulder. She held her cap clasped under one arm. It was too dim to see her face very well, but she was half-elven, with slightly pointed ears and a build somewhere between human and elf, solid but lean. \"Search them,\" she said.\n\nThe ogren bluecap grabbed Tane and Kadka and lifted them to their feet. The constables patted both of them down, taking Kadka's sword and pistol\u2014and several knives she'd apparently had hidden on her. Tane raised an eyebrow after the third; she just grinned back at him.\n\n\"Nothing stolen, Inspector,\" the elven bluecap said when he'd finally confiscated all of Kadka's blades.\n\nWhen the ogren woman released his arm, Tane let himself fall, feigning a loss of balance. He landed hard on his ass, and winced. \"Ouch.\" A quick grab behind his back and he had the scroll case again. He tucked it surreptitiously into his belt and pulled his waistcoat down to hide it.\n\n\"Get him up,\" said the half-elf, and the ogren did just that, hauling Tane roughly to his feet.\n\nThe half-elf approached, near enough that Tane could see her clearly even in the weak light. Her skin was a tawny brown, and her black hair was pinned up so that it would fit under her constable's cap. Her face was more elven than human, long and delicately featured with high cheekbones. When she reached Tane, amber eyes that he would have known anywhere widened in sudden recognition. \"Tane?\"\n\n\"Indree?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "The ogren bluecap had to duck her head to enter the waiting room outside the chancellor's office, escorting Tane and Kadka in behind Indree.\n\n\"You can go, Laertha,\" said Indree. \"See that no one else enters the workshops without permission. I don't want the scene contaminated any more than it already is.\" She threw Tane an annoyed glance, there.\n\nThe ogren woman nodded. \"Understood, Inspector,\" she said in a perfect, melodious voice, and then ducked back out the doors.\n\nTane rubbed his arm where the big hand had gripped it\u2014rather more tightly than he liked. \"Is all this really necessary, Ree? You know we aren't criminals.\"\n\n\"Constable Inspector Lovial,\" Indree corrected. She didn't bother to respond to the rest of it. \"My friends call me Ree. We aren't friends.\"\n\n\"Constable Inspector?\" Tane said. \"Already? Always the over-achiever.\" He hadn't expected to see her in a bluecap's uniform, but it was no shock at all that she'd risen quickly through the ranks. Indree had always excelled at anything she wanted to excel at.\n\nIndree didn't answer. Instead, she strode across the small waiting room and knocked firmly on the inner door.\n\n\"Enter,\" came a voice from the other side.\n\n\"Come on,\" Indree said, and beckoned to Tane and Kadka. \"Don't do anything else stupid, and maybe I won't be throwing you in a cell at the end of this.\" She pushed open the door and strode through.\n\nKadka leaned close to Tane, grinning. \"Think she likes you,\" she whispered.\n\n\"She used to,\" Tane answered quietly, and followed Indree in.\n\nTane had been in the chancellor's office only once before, after submitting his dissertation, and that meeting had ended in his expulsion. He very much hoped this one went better. The office was much as he remembered, huge and well-appointed, decorated with impressive artwork and artifacts of historical meaning to the University. One piece in particular drew his attention, one he didn't remember from the last time: a bronze sculpture against the northern wall depicting an archaic mage's staff extending upright through the center of a crown. The Mage Emperor's sigil. If the piece truly dated from the time of the Mage War, it was some six hundred years old.\n\nInside, the deans of the University waited on either side of the chancellor's desk: Dean Greymond, of course, frowning sternly at Tane; Sorn Brassforge, the dwarven Dean of Artifice, scratching his short auburn beard uncomfortably; and Valis Orthea, the Dean of Invocation, a massive, flaxen-haired ogren woman who could have been sculpted from marble.\n\nAnd sitting behind the desk was Chancellor Talain Nieris, a pale elven man with startlingly blue eyes and just a touch of grey in the black hair around his sharply pointed ears\u2014the only sign of his three hundred and more years, a long life even for an elf. One of the elder scions of House Nieris, a Great House of the Senate, he'd been named chancellor of the University near a hundred years ago. The latest in a long tradition of elves in the position. Where most of the so-called magical races had some innate magical quirk\u2014the instinctive illusory camouflage of the gnomish, or the stone-and metal-sense of the dwarven\u2014elves were, in the eyes of many, the living essence of magic. Almost none were born without the gift of magecraft, and their long lifespans allowed them to master it in ways few others could. When the Senate of Houses appointed a chancellor, it was almost always an elf, and almost never a surprise.\n\n\"Inspector Lovial. Thank you for dealing with this so promptly.\" Nieris stood and nodded a polite greeting. He was impeccably dressed, in a deep purple longcoat with a ruffled silvery cravat at his throat. \"And Mister Carver. How\u2026 unexpected, to see you here again.\" If he was surprised, though, it certainly didn't show on his face. He gestured to a number of chairs arrayed before his desk. \"All of you, please sit. I understand we have much to discuss.\"\n\nTane took his seat, the brass cylinder tucked in his belt pressing uncomfortably against his back. He gestured at the sculpture of the staff and crown. \"A bit of a controversial piece to have on display, isn't it?\" The Mage Emperor wasn't remembered very kindly by history. The last ruler of the Estian Empire, his war to subjugate the magicless had shattered a dominion that once stretched all across Calene and parts of the southern continent of Anjica. It was in the aftermath of the Mage War that the Audland Protectorate had been founded, an island haven for the mages and magical races who had found themselves feared and hated across the Continent\u2014whether they had sided with the Mage Emperor or not.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Nieris said mildly, settling back into his chair. \"They say that forgotten history is doomed to repeat. If that is the case, then the Mage War is worth remembering, is it not?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" said Tane. He still didn't like having to look at the thing. Easy to dismiss when you have magic. It was the ones who didn't that he enslaved and killed.\n\n\"In any event, we aren't here to talk about the past.\" Nieris looked to Indree. \"Constable Inspector, if you would?\"\n\nIndree was still standing behind Tane and Kadka, her cap under one arm. \"Of course, Chancellor Nieris. For the benefit of those of you who weren't there, Stooketon Yard sent me to meet with the chancellor about the murder. Shortly after I arrived he informed me of a triggered alarm spell in the primary artifice workshop. Considering that we had come to investigate the same location, I chose to respond in place of the University Guard. When we arrived, we found the scene in\u2026 considerable disarray. These two were alone inside. We searched them, but found no evidence of theft.\"\n\n\"The alarm was us,\" Tane offered. \"I'll admit that. It must have detected me when I gave Kadka back her badge. But there was already someone in there. The real question is, why didn't he trigger it?\" No apologies\u2014if he had any chance of not being thrown off campus, begging wouldn't do it. Confidence opened more doors than contrition.\n\nNieris frowned. \"Perhaps you should tell us this story from the beginning, Mister Carver.\"\n\nIt didn't take long for Tane to explain what had happened: the intruder, the portal, the wraith, and the smaller details in between. \"And that's about everything,\" he finished. \"Questions?\"\n\nGreymond was the first to speak, rubbing her fingers against her temples. \"You promised you wouldn't\u2026 Spellfire, Tane, I should have the Inspector throw you in a cell.\"\n\n\"Allaea was my friend. Are you really surprised that I lied?\"\n\nGreymond sighed. \"I shouldn't be, should I? But somehow I keep thinking better of you. I'm sorry, Chancellor Nieris. This is my fault. I never should have asked\u2014\"\n\n\"We can work out who is to blame later, Dean Greymond,\" said Chancellor Nieris. It was, Tane thought, more than a little bit satisfying to see Greymond interrupted for once. \"Right now I only want information.\" Nieris turned to Kadka. \"What about you, Miss\u2026 Kadka, was it? What do you have to say for yourself?\"\n\nMost University Guard would have been cowed under question from the chancellor, but not Kadka. She just stared back at him, her arms crossed. \"Is not so bad, is it? If we aren't there, no one knows this man comes back, or how. No one finds\u2014\"\n\n\"Any of the information we have now that we didn't before,\" Tane said, before she could mention the scroll case. Kadka gave him a questioning glance, but she didn't contradict him. \"We know he used a portal to get in, for one thing.\"\n\n\"So you said. That shouldn't be possible.\" Now Nieris looked to Indree. \"Inspector Lovial, you saw evidence of this wraith?\"\n\n\"I did. They trapped it in an engine casing.\"\n\n\"Then I suppose we must believe your tale, Mister Carver. Where there is a wraith, there must have been a portal. You say it made a noise?\"\n\nTane nodded. \"A howl, with a kind of crackling, groaning sound behind it. It made me think of ice.\"\n\n\"Like tunvok,\" said Kadka, and then, after confused glances from all sides, \"Animal. From Sverna.\"\n\n\"It might well have been,\" said Nieris. \"I can't imagine the portal came from there\u2014the distance is too great\u2014but such rifts are\u2026 deeply unstable. It isn't uncommon for random instabilities to draw sound through the Astra from places half the world away.\" He laid a finger against his chin. \"But I don't see how this man could have done it. I crafted the campus wards against such spells myself, and I daresay there is no mage alive with as much experience in portal magic.\" That was true\u2014Nieris had been university faculty for literal centuries, and experiments with portals had been much less restricted in his youth.\n\n\"What if there were no portal wards for him to bypass?\" Tane asked. \"Would anyone have noticed if they'd already failed somehow? Portals aren't exactly common. It might have been decades since anyone tried to open one on campus.\"\n\nIt was Indree who answered. \"We've already secured the workshop and begun testing the wards. I received a sending on the way here verifying that they are intact.\"\n\n\"Of course they are,\" Nieris said, rather haughtily. \"Our ward maintenance is very thorough.\"\n\n\"Well, then, there's another possibility no one is going to like very much,\" said Tane. \"Any of you four can cast portals on campus. I know you were together last night, but were all of you accounted for today?\"\n\nDean Orthea didn't look offended so much as absolutely horrified\u2014and her exquisitely sculpted ogren features made even that rather lovely. \"You aren't suggesting\u2026 It isn't possible that one of us could have done that to Miss Hesliar, is it?\" She was very much the clich\u00e9d representative of her people\u2014gentle, sensitive, appalled by senseless violence. Rather cruelly ironic, Tane had always thought, considering their great curse: one of every three was born a brutish, barely sentient ogre that had to be sequestered in a sanctuary at the far south of the Isle.\n\n\"Of course not, Valis,\" Nieris said, in the bland, placating tone of a man who had dealt with such sensitivity a thousand times before. \"Classes were in session during your\u2026 adventure, Mister Carver. Any number of students can account for the whereabouts of each of my deans. And I was meeting with Inspector Lovial.\"\n\n\"Then someone found another way through,\" said Tane. \"There must be a loophole, some way to make the wards see an intruder as one of you. I'd recommend changing the portal wards until we know more, at least for the workshops. No portals at all, in or out. The only perfect spell is one that deals in absolutes.\"\n\n\"As much as I appreciate your insights, Mister Carver,\" Nieris said dryly, \"keep in mind that you are here to be questioned, not to lead the investigation.\"\n\nTane seized the opening. \"Sir, at this point I know as much about what happened as anyone. More than most. I saw the man who did it. Even Ree\u2014er, Inspector Lovial can't say that. If you want this solved quickly, you need me.\"\n\nDean Greymond interjected almost before Tane had finished speaking. \"Chancellor, I don't think\u2014\"\n\nAt the same time, Indree said, \"Sir, I have to protest\u2014\"\n\nNieris silenced them both with a raised hand. \"Interesting. Perhaps 'need' is a strong word, but then\u2026 you have found several flaws in our wards already, and provided information we would not otherwise have, putting aside the issue of your rather questionable methods. And I will admit you showed considerable courage and ingenuity in dealing with the wraith.\"\n\nAgain, Greymond cut in. \"Chancellor Nieris, there is the University's reputation to consider. If Mister Carver is seen\u2026\"\n\n\"That ship is already well over the horizon, Dean Greymond,\" Tane said. \"If I wasn't noticed on campus before, I promise you nobody missed me being marched here by the constabulary. Better to claim that you asked me here to assist than admit you let an expelled student\u2014particularly this expelled student\u2014gain access to a murder scene without permission. Especially if the Lady Protector is watching closely.\" That was something of a guess, but Greymond had suggested it might be the case earlier\u2014and if it was, the University couldn't afford any embarrassing gaffes.\n\n\"You do make a compelling argument for yourself, Mister Carver.\" Nieris stroked his chin. \"It may be prudent to keep you on, if only for appearances.\"\n\nIndree shook her head. \"With respect, Chancellor Nieris, I won't allow this. Murder doesn't fall under campus autonomy. This is firmly within the purview of Stooketon Yard, and I can't have anyone interfering in my investigation.\"\n\n\"Normally you would be correct, Inspector,\" said Nieris, \"but the Lady Protector has taken an interest in this, as Mister Carver suggests. I spoke with her shortly before summoning you. She wants the matter resolved promptly, before anyone links it to the airship project. The launch is scheduled for the day after next, and it must not be delayed. I have been granted broad authority to speed the investigation along. Mister Carver, the University can offer you fifty staves a day\u2014will that suffice?\"\n\nIndree caught Tane's eye with a glare and shook her head, but he wasn't about to pass up an offer like that. All personal investment in the case aside, he was lucky to make fifty silver staves in a given month. \"That should be\u2026 adequate. I'll need a badge, though.\"\n\n\"And have you wandering the campus entirely unrestricted?\" Nieris chuckled in mild amusement. \"I admire the attempt, but I think not. It's one thing to hire you, and another to let you display University colors. Take what's offered, Mister Carver.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Tane said with a shrug. \"I had to try. We have a deal.\"\n\n\"Splendid.\"\n\nDean Brassforge had raised his head at the mention of the airship\u2014he'd always been reserved for a dwarf, unless he was talking about one of his projects. \"So you think they were after my airship spells?\" He scratched at his beard. \"I don't like that at all. She's supposed to fly in a few days.\"\n\n\"I imagine we'll find that it's unrelated, Sorn,\" said Nieris. \"Lady Abena simply wants us to be certain. But there are a hundred other projects being worked on in that shop, and we have no reason to believe this tragedy wasn't about some personal matter.\"\n\n\"Actually, sir,\" said Indree, \"if Tane's story is true, then we have to assume this man wasn't there to kill Allaea, or he wouldn't have had reason to come back. I don't think he was expecting her to be there. He must have been scared off when she screamed for the guards, and returned today to finish whatever he meant to do that night. That doesn't mean the airship project, necessarily, but those diagrams are kept in the section where Tane says he was looking.\"\n\nNieris didn't look greatly pleased, but he said, \"A point well taken, Inspector Lovial. I'll trust you and Mister Carver to look into that. Now, if you will all excuse me, I must see to the banishment of this wraith, and I don't want to hold you up any longer. If you need anything else, I have asked Dean Greymond to act as the University's liason in this matter\u2014her divinations should prove useful to you.\"\n\nThe deans were the first out the door, but Indree lingered as Tane and Kadka stood. It was only then that Nieris spoke again. \"Miss Kadka, if you would stay behind for one moment, please?\"\n\nTane exchanged a glance with Kadka as he left, but she only shrugged. Spellfire, I hope I haven't got her in too much trouble.\n\nAs soon as they left the chancellor's waiting room, Indree spun to face him. She didn't look happy.\n\n\"Indree, I know you don't want my\u2014\"\n\nIndree pressed a finger against his chest, backing him into the wall. \"I don't care what Nieris said in there. You aren't getting involved. I just saw my best friend with the skin burned off her face\"\u2014her voice quavered slightly there, but she didn't stop\u2014\"and I intend to find the man who did it. I don't know why you came back, but the last thing I need is you making a mess of things.\"\n\nIt was disorienting, having her so near. The last time her face had been this close to his, it had been for very different reasons. Or maybe not. We always did argue as often as the other thing. \"I'm so sorry, Indree. When I heard that it was Allaea\u2026 I just wanted to help.\"\n\nIndree's scowl softened, but only slightly. \"So you said before. I wish I could believe that you still care that much, Tane, I really do. But how am I supposed to trust anything you say? I'll make it simple for you: I don't care if you take the University's money. Just don't get in my way.\"\n\nThe door opened behind them, and Kadka emerged. Indree backed quickly away from Tane, flushing slightly.\n\nTane straightened his waistcoat and turned to Kadka, attempting to appear as collected as he could manage. \"What did he want?\"\n\n\"To tell me I am not guard anymore,\" she said. \"I let you steal badge and lied to hide it. Can't have that when security must be strongest, he says.\"\n\n\"That's hardly fair. I'll tell him it was my fault, he'll have to\u2014\" Tane moved toward the door.\n\nKadka blocked his way with one arm. \"No. Won't help. Is done.\"\n\n\"She's right,\" said Indree. \"The chancellor isn't going to overturn his decision for you, of all people.\" A short pause, and then, to Kadka, \"I'm sorry he got you into this.\"\n\n\"Got into it myself.\" The corner of Kadka's mouth quirked upward. \"Even if he starts it.\"\n\n\"Either way, take my advice: get away before he makes it any worse,\" said Indree. \"Oh, and I had your knives delivered to the guard barracks. You can retrieve them there. I don't know what you need so many of them for, but they're legal enough.\" She gave Tane one last look, as if she might say something more, and then shook her head and strode away down the hall.\n\nTane watched her go, until Kadka stole his attention back with a nudge in the ribs. \"Know she likes you now.\"\n\n\"How do you get that from what she said?\"\n\nKadka tapped the pointed tip of her ear with one finger. \"Orc ears. Hear what she says even before I come out. Too much feeling, for someone who doesn't care.\"\n\n\"Oh, she definitely cares, if you call wanting to break someone's teeth a kind of caring.\" Tane started toward the stairs, and Kadka kept pace beside him. \"Look, Kadka, I\u2026 I am sorry it happened like that. I didn't think they'd blame you.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" she said. \"Have new work now.\"\n\nTane raised an eyebrow. \"You literally just walked out of his office. What work did you find in the past minute?\"\n\n\"Helping you investigate.\" Kadka grinned. \"He pays you too much. We can share.\"\n\n\"What? No. Look, I'm sorry about what happened, but Indree wasn't wrong. Associating with me isn't good for the reputation. I'll only get you in more trouble.\"\n\n\"Trouble can be fun,\" Kadka said, still showing her teeth.\n\n\"Kadka, I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't tell them about case you found,\" she said. \"You think I don't notice? I say nothing then, but maybe now I tell someone.\"\n\n\"So that's how it's going to be? I pay you off or you tell Indree I'm hiding something?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Kadka, and she looked genuinely perplexed by the anger in his voice. \"You pay me to help you, and I don't tell. Don't want money for nothing. Why not? Without me, you would be crushed under shelf already.\"\n\nTane sighed and spread his hands. \"Fine. I suppose I don't have much choice.\"\n\nShe nodded, as if confirming something she'd known all along. \"So. Where is case?\"\n\nThey were in the stairwell now, hidden from sight on a landing between floors. Tane leaned out to check above and below, satisfying himself that no one was coming, and then he pulled the scroll case from his belt.\n\nIt was a brass tube about a foot long, with a cap at one end. Just below the cap were a series of five rotating copper bands, with a matching set at the far end of the tube. Both sets of bands were engraved with glyphs of the lingua magica, and a pair of small arrows showed where the glyphs were meant to line up. In the center of the tube, a green peridot gemstone was held in a copper setting, joined by inlaid copper lines to the bands on either side. Tane tested one band and it rotated with a click, putting a new symbol forward. He popped open the cap and looked inside. Empty.\n\n\"What is it?\" Kadka asked.\n\n\"It's called a scrollcaster, or sometimes a forger's case,\" said Tane. \"They're used to send or duplicate documents. You roll up some paper and put it inside, then turn these dials\"\u2014he indicated the glyphed copper bands near the cap\u2014\"to the glyphs of the caster you're sending to. Whatever is written on your papers is copied onto the ones at the other end. They're mostly owned by very important people sending things like state secrets\u2014it's illegal to own one without a license, and they all have a set receiving address.\" Now he tapped the bands at the opposite end. \"These bands mean it's black market. The glyphs at this end are meant to be engraved, impossible to alter without wrecking the caster. If you flip to a new set of glyphs after sending or receiving something, it breaks the Astral link. Makes it impossible for a diviner to trace.\"\n\nUnderstanding lit Kadka's eyes. \"You think he used this to copy some spell from workshop.\"\n\n\"Probably. It might be as simple as someone trying to steal privileged spell diagrams to sell on the black market. It's empty, which either means our mage had time to copy what he came to copy and put it back in the drawer, or we stopped him before he found what he was looking for.\"\n\n\"So what is plan? Can it tell us something?\"\n\n\"If he sent something, he'll have changed the glyphs, so we probably can't trace where it went. But if we find the maker, they might be able to tell us who bought it. And if we're very lucky, they might be able to divine what was sent, if not where. That's why I didn't tell Indree. She'd have taken it away, and no black market artificer is going to talk to a bluecap.\"\n\n\"But they will talk to you?\"\n\n\"I know someone I can ask. I don't know how much he'll want to say.\"\n\nA wide grin stretched across Kadka's jutting orcish jaw, and there was a rather menacing twinkle in her eye. \"Maybe I will find way to convince him.\" She nodded decisively. \"Come.\" She started down the stairs.\n\nTane hastily stowed the scroll case in his belt and hurried after her. \"Come where?\"\n\n\"I will get my things, give back uniform. Then, we find your criminal.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "It was strange, seeing Kadka out of her uniform.\n\nWhen she'd been wearing it, there had been a certain air of University prestige about her\u2014when Tane had taken her badge, he'd felt the little rush of satisfaction that always came with defying authority. Now, absent the sword and pistol and dressed in rough-spun trousers and a threadbare shirt with tattered suspenders over top, she looked like a girl from some country village visiting the capital for the first time.\n\nExcept that there weren't a great many orcs living in country villages in the Protectorate.\n\nHer wide-eyed awe didn't do anything to dispel the impression, either. As they descended from the street into the crowded disc-tunnels, she craned her neck eagerly to catch a glimpse of the floating ancryst platforms approaching the station.\n\n\"You must have ridden the discs before,\" Tane said, nudging his way through the current of departing passengers. \"Correct me if I'm wrong, but you've lived in Thaless for more than a day, haven't you?\" The question came out sharper than he'd intended. He was still annoyed at the way she'd forced his hand earlier, and the discs made him nervous at the best of times.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Kadka. \"But is always exciting, no? To ride floating stones in underground tunnels? This is kind of magic I come here to see.\"\n\nSpellfire, how am I supposed to stay angry if she's going to be so\u2026 enthusiastic? The discs probably were impressive, he had to admit, if one weren't accustomed to them: a series of linked ancryst platforms suspended in mid-air in a copper-lined tunnel, metal and translucent green stone glimmering under silver-blue magelight. Atop each disc was a wood-and-iron passenger carriage, large enough to hold perhaps thirty people if they were packed very closely together\u2014and they always were. Tane hated it, but he could see how it might appeal to someone else.\n\nThey squeezed into a carriage full of humans and elves and gnomes and kobolds and more: miners and dockworkers and laborers in clothes much like Kadka's, students in so-called \"scholar's uniforms\"\u2014topcoats of University silver-on-blue over much cheaper trousers and waistcoats\u2014and well-to-do merchants dressed in colored silks and velvets. There were no seats inside, just a number of metal poles to grip and a tight space filled with every sort of person that called Thaless home\u2014and in the Protectorate's capital, that meant every sort of person there was. Too many people, and not enough room. Tane shuffled aside as a foot-tall sprite fluttered by on iridescent butterfly wings to land on the narrow ledge along the wall where others of its kind perched.\n\nThe ancryst platform lurched into motion underfoot, and Tane's stomach lurched along a second behind. Sweat beaded on his brow, and his fingers compulsively rubbed the watch casing in his pocket. Magelights set into the tunnel flashed by outside the windows, making the shadows inside shift rapidly from front to back as if the passage of time had accelerated along with the discs.\n\nKadka was forced in close by the crowd, standing near enough that those sharp wolf-teeth could have easily taken off his nose if she'd felt the urge. She wasn't looking at him, though, electing instead to peer around with sheer wonder in her yellow-gold eyes. More than a few people looked back, suspicious or curious or both. For all the Protectorate's diversity, orcs and half-orcs were still a rarity. She didn't seem to notice the attention, though, or didn't show it if she did.\n\nAfter a short while, Kadka turned back to him. \"You know about magic,\" she said, loud enough to be heard over the surrounding chatter. Loud enough to be heard a disc down in either direction, by Tane's estimation. \"I wonder sometimes, how does this work? Is there spell to make it fly?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" said Tane, swallowing his nerves so that she wouldn't hear his voice shake. \"The discs are ancryst. I assume you've heard of it?\" She hadn't seemed well-versed in the stone's properties when she'd discharged her ancryst pistol at an open portal.\n\n\"It moves by magic, yes?\"\n\n\"It moves away from magic, more accurately. The tunnel is lined with copper conducting a magical field, which repels the ancryst from all sides. As long as the field is balanced, the discs hover in the middle.\" It made him feel a little bit better, somehow, to explain how the magic worked\u2014as if talking about it aloud could keep the spells from going wrong. \"There are artifacts in the front and back that project their own adjustable fields, pushing us in the direction we want to go or slowing us to a stop. It's more efficient than a levitation spell\u2014magic with a specific purpose takes far more power to maintain than a simple field that doesn't have to do anything but exist. I'd bet a mid-sized topaz array could power a section of tunnels for a year.\"\n\n\"Why only here? I travelled through other places to come here. They have nothing like this.\"\n\nTane shrugged. \"Practicality. It's expensive to dig tunnels all over a city and line them with copper. If it was done today, they'd probably use an ancryst-powered rail-car above ground instead. The discs were really just an experiment, from before we had ancryst engines. Actually, they were what inspired the development of the ancryst engine\u2014an ancryst piston moves in its cylinder in a very similar way to how the discs move through these tunnels.\"\n\nKadka nodded slowly. \"I can understand this, I think.\" She grinned, showing her teeth. An elven woman standing beside Tane flinched noticeably at the sight. \"But maybe more fun when I only think it is floating.\"\n\n\"Magic always seems less magical when you learn how it works,\" said Tane. \"Once you know how all the pieces fit together, it's easier to see where a little mistake could lead to disaster. But it's better to know. At least then you're ready for it when the worst happens.\"\n\n\"Makes you nervous, travelling this way?\"\n\n\"Like I said, there are a lot of things that could go wrong. But it takes hours to walk anywhere in Thaless, so\u2026 I've gotten used to it.\"\n\n\"Not so used to it.\" She eyed the sweat on his brow with a slight smirk.\n\n\"I manage,\" Tane said, a little defensively. \"Anyway, it's my turn for a question. There's something I wanted to ask you about.\"\n\n\"So you ask to ask?\" She laughed. \"Such manners in big city. Just ask. No danger in question.\"\n\n\"I've heard about orcs being hard to detect with divinations, but I'd never seen it before. I didn't think it would be so absolute. You didn't trigger that mage's detection spell, and the wraith didn't seem to care about you at all. Is that something you have to do, or is it just natural?\"\n\n\"I do nothing,\" said Kadka. \"In Sverna, we say orcs are too strong for magic to touch, but how can I know for myself when there is no magic there? And after I leave, mostly no one casts spells on me. At University when I talk to mages they say is hard to find me with some magic, but is all kind you call divination. I never see it. Wraith is first time I know there is truth there. But\u2026 I still hurt myself on ward.\" She rubbed the tip of her nose. \"And mage's spell still throws me. Why is this?\"\n\n\"I assumed you would know more than I do,\" said Tane. \"I can only tell you what I've read. I've seen it written in a few places that orcs have a faint link to the Astra. Every living thing has an Astral connection, but it's apparently weaker for the orcish, or maybe naturally masked somehow. That would make it hard for divinations to find you\u2014they seek people out through Astral channels. But it wouldn't stop anything physical. Like you say, we know that you can still be tossed around, or blocked by a ward.\"\n\n\"What if we find mage, then? Spells stopped me before. I want better fight next time.\"\n\n\"Good question.\" Tane hadn't ever had to fight a mage before, and neither he nor Kadka had any magic of their own. It was worth musing on. \"In our favor, it's hard to put together a spell quickly, and most mages are academics, not fighters. I don't think our man was combat trained, or he might have managed more than a simple force wave. That's the best you'll see from most mages in a fight. Things like spellfire take focus and power and precise wording\u2014harder to cast and easier to stop. The best way to fight him would be to silence him somehow. He can't cast if he can't speak, unless he's very quick at writing glyphs. Distraction works too. Get him to lose concentration and his entire spell could fail, or go off very differently than intended. Or\u2026 Orcs can see in the dark, can't they?\"\n\n\"Yes. Is this useful?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Tane said. \"If you can get him in the dark, or maybe blind him somehow\u2026 He could still cast, but every spell is a request of the Astra, and it needs instruction. Not being able to just point and say 'that person there' makes it much harder to specify a target. He'd have to aim by guessing a direction. It would make us harder to hit, at least.\"\n\n\"Useful, then,\" Kadka said with a grin that fell abruptly into a thoughtful frown. \"I am hard to see with spells, you say, but this mage is no orc. Why does the University not cast spell to find him?\"\n\n\"It isn't that easy. To cast any targeted divination you need to either know the target fairly well or have a divination focus\u2014something from their body, like blood or hair or a fingernail. Which there are laws about, for privacy's sake. We'd need a constable with a warrant. But we don't even have a face or a name, let alone a focus.\"\n\n\"What about case you found? That was his.\"\n\n\"A diviner might be able to get some impression of past owners off of it,\" Tane admitted, reaching back to touch the scroll case in his belt and reassure himself it was still there. Pickpockets weren't unheard of on the discs. \"But it's black market, so it will be masked\u2014purposely passed between enough people and magical signatures to throw off any object reading. And anyway, divining anything outside the present is unreliable. Most of the time it just gives some vague vision, and the interpretation is as much about the diviner's bias as any real information. It's an option if we run out of others, but I'd rather not rely on it.\"\n\nKadka cocked her head. \"For man who knows so much about magic, you don't like very much. Why?\"\n\n\"I don't dislike it. I just don't trust it. And neither should you. Magic can be useful, but don't forget to look for the flaws. Better to trust yourself than a spell.\"\n\n\"Is good to trust in self. But good to use what is useful, too.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind,\" said Tane. \"Right now, though, the most useful thing is going to be finding whoever made the scrollcaster.\" He staggered against Kadka as the discs began to slow. \"And on that note, it looks like we're here.\" Thank the Astra.\n\nThe familiar smells of salt and fish greeted Tane's nostrils as they climbed the stairs into daylight. The cawing of gulls rang from above. The disc-tunnels emerged near the Porthaven fish market, and the waters of the Audish Channel stretched out ahead, late afternoon sun shining off murky water between the hulls of dozens of anchored ancryst ships. It wasn't exactly beautiful, but it was always a welcome sight coming out of the tunnels.\n\nAcross the harbor, the towering scaffold around the airship's rigid envelope monopolized the shipyards, and the view. The outer skin\u2014some artificer-made cloth with a shimmering finish\u2014reflected the sunlight so that Tane had to squint to look at it. Over the months, he'd watched the envelope progress from a skeletal frame to a long, smooth ovoid, nearly finished now with only two days until its first flight. Below, the body of the ship rested in drydock, a lightweight wooden hull with a skeleton of steel, mounted with a pair of gleaming brass ancryst engines. Tiny figures crawled over the scaffolding and the body of the ship, making final adjustments, and Tane knew there were more that he couldn't see\u2014at this distance, the diminutive sprites were entirely invisible, but dozens of them would be flitting about the higher parts of the scaffolding, their wings allowing them to work in relative safety.\n\n\"Hard to believe it will fly.\" The awe was back in Kadka's voice. \"Something so big, how does even magic lift it?\"\n\nTane only vaguely understood himself\u2014the specifics were a fairly guarded secret. \"Not all of it is magic,\" he said. \"It's a little bit like a hot air balloon. They'll heat the air in the envelope with spell glyphs, but the lift that creates isn't magical. I'm not sure, but I'd guess there must be some levitation spells on the body too, or it would still be too heavy to fly\u2014but nothing too strong, or they'd take too much power. That's where ancryst engines are useful. If you had to steer a ship that big with spells, they'd be so complex it would drain the gemstones in a day. It's a balance artificers have been trying to solve for a long time. Whether they got it right remains to be seen.\"\n\n\"You think it won't work?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I haven't looked at the diagrams. It's going to be something to see if it does, but you won't catch me on board.\" Tane clasped Kadka's shoulder and steered her in the opposite direction, towards the fish market. \"It isn't going to fly today, in any case. Come on.\"\n\nStalls filled all four sides of the little square, and gulls wheeled overhead, descending now and again to fight over discarded guts and fish-heads. People of all kinds and all sizes\u2014save for a notable lack of elves, who for the most part kept to the better districts of the city\u2014wandered up and down the market looking over the day's catch and haggling with the fishmongers. Most wore plain clothes, not far different from Kadka's, and Tane's frayed waistcoat made him feel almost overdressed. These were the residents of the Porthaven district itself, or perhaps Greenstone near the southern ancryst quarries, shopping for their dinner. Tane's class of people. His own cramped home\u2014or rather the office that he happened to sleep in\u2014wasn't far away. The wealthy citizens of the Gryphon's Roost didn't come to places like this. They had servants for that.\n\n\"This is black market?\" Kadka asked, glancing over her shoulder one last time at the airship.\n\n\"This?\" Tane had to laugh, looking over the run-down stalls. \"No.\"\n\n\"What is funny?\" Kadka half-grinned at his laughter, a picture of amiable confusion.\n\nSuddenly, he could vividly imagine Allaea's voice\u2014she'd always been the one to call him out. You're being an ass, Tane. It was an honest question. \"Nothing,\" he said. \"Sorry. It just occurred to me that crime in Sverna must be very different than what we have here.\" Svernan orcs eschewed magic altogether, by all accounts\u2014they didn't have modernized magical cities like Thaless, or the thriving criminal enterprise that came with them.\n\nKadka shrugged, unperturbed as ever. \"True. At home when people break law, is all\u2026 smaller. Thieves, not whole market. But no need for sorry. Just explain.\"\n\n\"It's just\u2026 The black market isn't a place, if you're picturing something like the markets in Stooketon Circle. That would just draw the bluecaps right to them. It's more like a collection of people who know where to get things. Most of the illegal trade in Thaless is centered around the docks, though. Easier to smuggle goods in and out with access to the harbor, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Oh. So why here?\"\n\n\"I know someone who might be able to point us where we want to go. Essik Tisk. He has a stall here, but it's mostly a front for peddling black market charms and artifacts.\" Tane didn't trust any spells he hadn't written himself, but it was illegal to cast from a diagram drafted without a University degree. He'd used Tisk more than once to commission custom spellwork from less-than-reputable sources.\n\nLuckily enough, Tisk was working today\u2014Tane spotted his distinctive blue-green scales from across the market. He was perhaps five feet tall, with green ridges running from the back of his head down to the end of his short, pointed tail. A heavy apron covered his chest, but beyond that he wore only a light cloth around his hips. Outside of uniformed professions, kobolds didn't much care for clothing.\n\n\"That's him,\" said Tane, nodding toward the stall. \"Act like you're here for the fish. We'll work our way over.\"\n\nTane pretended to examine the wares at a few stalls, ambling gradually toward Tisk. Beside him, Kadka made a much less subtle show of it, loudly professing her admiration of the quality of the day's catch and drawing looks from everyone around them. Spellfire, how is she so bad at this when I've seen her move without making a sound?\n\n\"Carver.\" Tisk looked up as Tane and Kadka came near, and punctuated the greeting by chopping the head off a fish with his cleaver. \"I'll be with you in a moment.\" He wrapped the fish, wiped his hands on his apron, and handed it to an elderly goblin woman, who thanked him and went on her way.\n\n\"I need your help with something, Essik,\" Tane said when the woman was gone.\n\nTisk turned his attention toward them and blinked slitted reptilian eyes up at Kadka. \"Who's your friend? She's\u2026 loud.\" His tongue hissed on the 's' sounds. \"And orcish. You didn't really think you'd go unnoticed with her around, did you?\"\n\n\"I suppose not,' said Tane, \"but it was worth a try. Essik Tisk, this is Kadka. Kadka, Essik Tisk\"\n\nKadka clasped Tisk's hand, but she looked a little bit indignant. \"I can be very sneaky. Just\u2026 different kind. Not so good at pretending.\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" Tisk said, wincing at the strength of her grip. \"So, what is it you two need?\"\n\n\"I'd like to see what you have back there, if you don't mind,\" Tane said, nodding his head to the barrels of fish behind the stall.\n\nTisk beckoned them in. \"Come right back.\"\n\nOnce they were somewhat shielded from view, Tane pulled the scrollcaster from his belt, keeping it low\u2014out of sight of any wandering eyes. \"I hoped you could help us find whoever made this. I admire the craftsmanship, and there's some work I need done.\"\n\nTisk glanced down at the scrollcaster for a moment, and then up again, swiping his forked tongue along his teeth. \"Where did you get it?\"\n\n\"In trade for some consulting I did. You seem like you recognize the work.\"\n\n\"I do.\" Tisk hesitated a moment, then hastily moved to his stall-front and pulled closed the shutters. \"Come with me.\"\n\nThat was easier than it should have been. Essik was rarely so forthcoming\u2014the black market survived through secrecy. Tane had assumed that Kadka would need to show her teeth, at least. \"Right now? I didn't think\u2014\"\n\n\"Come on, Carver. I can't leave the stall closed for long.\"\n\nTane glanced at Kadka; she put one hand on her waist, where he knew she'd tucked one of her knives, and gave him a slight nod.\n\n\"Lead the way, then,\" said Tane.\n\nTisk led them into a shaded alley behind the fish market, surrounded on both sides by brick-walled warehouses. Tane felt his pulse throbbing in his neck. This was a bad idea. Alleys like this are where you get led right before you're murdered for asking the wrong questions. His fingers found his watch casing, and he rubbed it nervously.\n\n\"Just up here,\" Tisk said, pointing at a blind corner up ahead.\n\nKadka stepped in front of Tane, her head slightly cocked. \"Footsteps. Someone coming,\" she said.\n\nTane couldn't hear anything at all, but an instant later, three armed thugs rounded the corner to bar their way\u2014a stocky dwarf with a forked beard and two impressively muscled human men.\n\n\"What is this, Essik?\" Tane demanded. Kadka grabbed for the kobold, but he darted out of reach, toward the approaching men.\n\n\"Sorry, Carver,\" Tisk said over his shoulder. \"You're a good customer, but not that good.\" He sidestepped past the thugs and disappeared around the corner.\n\nTane whirled back the way they'd come, but there were already three more approaching from behind: a hook-nosed goblin, a pock-faced human, and a particularly mean-looking gnome. At Tane's side, Kadka tensed, shifting on the balls of her feet.\n\nAhead, the dwarf stepped ahead of the others, holding a short brass wand in one hand. A daze-wand, Tane guessed\u2014if he touched either of them with the end of it, an overwhelming surge of Astral energy would put them out of their senses for at least a minute or two. The two men flanking him both produced heavy cudgels.\n\n\"Easy now,\" the dwarf said, moving in close with his wand extended in front of him. \"Don't give us any trouble and maybe you don't get hurt.\"\n\nTane raised his hands and took a step back. \"We'll do whatever\u2014\"\n\nBefore he could finish, Kadka punched the dwarf in the throat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Tane watched in horror as the dwarven thug stumbled back, clutching his throat. \"Kadka, what are you doing?\"\n\nBut Kadka's knife was already in her hand. Grinning savagely, she slashed at the arm holding the brass wand, and drew a crimson line across the back of the dwarf's hand. The wand clattered to the ground. Then, with something between a roar and a battle-cry, she bent low and tackled the man at the midsection. With surprising strength, she lifted him from his feet and flipped him over her shoulder into the three approaching from behind. The goblin dodged to one side, but the dwarf hit the human and the gnome full on, and all three collapsed in a tangle.\n\nSpellfire, she might actually manage this. Tane snatched up the wand from where it had fallen\u2014if this was happening, better to have a weapon than not.\n\nThe three thugs still standing closed in from both sides. Kadka's eyes went to the wand in Tane's hand, and she grinned wider. \"Good! Get that one!\" She jabbed a finger at the goblin. Before he could answer, she drew a second knife and charged the two big cudgel-wielding men ahead.\n\nThe goblin had a knife of his own, and he tossed it from hand to hand as he approached, sneering at Tane under a long, hooked nose. They were of similar height, but those lanky goblin arms gave the other man the advantage of reach. This isn't good.\n\nTane jumped back as the goblin lunged. He managed to twist out of the way of the knife, and jabbed blindly with his wand. The uninsulated copper tip brushed the inside of the goblin's forearm.\n\nIt was enough.\n\nAt the wand's touch, the goblin stiffened convulsively, and his knife fell from his hand. He staggered sideways into the alley wall and slid down it, a glazed look in his eye.\n\nDefinitely a daze-wand, then. That should keep him for a moment or two. But the fallen human and gnome had already squirmed out from under the dwarf, who was still gasping for air. Tane glanced at the peridot inlaid in the pommel of the wand\u2014a very clouded, milky green. Not much power left. A daze-wand worked by pushing a powerful surge through the Astral connection of anyone it touched, which took a fair amount of power. He could daze one man before the gem crumbled, maybe, but not both. There was a way by, though, while they were still finding their feet.\n\nTane bolted past, looking back for Kadka. She was holding off both of the big humans; one clutched a deep slash across his bicep. \"Kadka! Come on! Before they\u2014\"\n\nAnd then he saw the others\u2014three more thugs coming around the corner behind her. He snapped his gaze to the opposite end of the alley, and sure enough, another three emerged to cut off the path. Another goblin, green-brown with broad shoulders, pointed an ancryst pistol at Tane's chest.\n\n\"Drop your weapons!\" the goblin ordered.\n\nWith his hand behind his back, Tane slipped the daze-wand up his sleeve and hoped it hadn't been noticed. He didn't want to get shot, but he wasn't about to throw away his only weapon. \"I'm unarmed!\"\n\nThe goblin jabbed the pistol's barrel toward Kadka. \"You too! I said drop them!\"\n\nTane looked over his shoulder; she was nearly beside him already, backing away from the advancing thugs with her knives still in hand. \"Kadka!\" he said sharply.\n\nShe glanced back, and saw the pistol. Her eyes narrowed.\n\n\"Boss wants to talk to you,\" the goblin said. \"Drop the weapons and we'll bring you in safe.\"\n\n\"Can't say same for you,\" Kadka growled, and raised one of her knives, looking very much like she meant to throw it.\n\nTane lunged for her and caught her arm. \"We'll come!\" he said, and then again, more firmly, \"We'll come with you.\" He gave Kadka what he hoped was a pointed look.\n\nShe stared back at him for a moment, and then sheathed her knives. \"Good blades. Won't drop them.\" She raised a challenging eyebrow at the goblin with the pistol. \"You want to take, come take.\"\n\nThe goblin frowned. \"\u2026Fine. Keep them. Boss wants you treated courteous-like. But reach for them again and we have a problem.\" He pointed further down the alley with his pistol. \"That way.\"\n\nThe newcomers were already helping their comrades up, and several closed in around Tane and Kadka, escorting them rather firmly in the direction the pistol-wielding goblin had indicated.\n\n\"When you said you'd help me investigate, you might have mentioned that you're insane,\" Tane hissed to Kadka as the thugs marched them down the alley. Most of them, he noticed, were still watching her with wary eyes.\n\nKadka didn't look very contrite. \"How do I know they don't want to hurt us? Maybe still do. Or do you know where we are going?\"\n\nHe didn't have an answer for that, so he said nothing at all.\n\nAfter a few twists and turns through the back alleys of Porthaven, they descended a staircase down from street-level to the faded basement door of an old brick building. One of the thugs knocked a particular pattern, and it swung open. As Tane passed through, he felt the hair-raising tingle of a ward sweep over him. Apparently they'd been granted access, because it didn't stop him, or Kadka.\n\nInside, the basement was considerably less run-down than it had looked from without. Warding glyphs were inscribed on copper plates in corners along the top of the wall, presumably linked to a power source somewhere out of sight. Near the door, elegantly set magelights illuminated a small library stocked with rather unusual magical texts: all of them were quarter-sized. Beside the shelves, two generously padded armchairs sat before a four-foot-high pillar furnished with a doll-sized chair and reading table. Atop the table, a tiny book had been left open\u2014still over-scaled even at quarter size, but ancryst presses didn't work much smaller. It was clear at a glance that the little dais had been designed for a sprite.\n\nFurther back, an assortment of workers bent over a series of worktables much like the ones in the University's artifice workshops. The tables were strewn with charms and artifacts in various states of completion, many being assembled even as Tane watched.\n\nA tiny figure hovered over the tables on iridescent wings, flitting from artifact to artifact. \"No, no. We'd have to charge too high a price for gold-infused ink. For a one-time charm, the stability will be more than\u2014\"\n\n\"Boss?\" The goblin put away his pistol with a sheepish look. \"We brought them.\"\n\nThe sprite looked up. Oddly enough, the upper half of his face was covered with a deep green masquerade mask worked in fine gold and silver filigree. \"Ah, welcome, welcome!\" he said with the delight of a man greeting long-awaited guests. \"Please, sit down! Make yourselves comfortable!\"\n\nTane and Kadka were escorted to the larger armchairs, and Tane obediently sat down\u2014they were still surrounded in armed men, and he didn't want to make anyone angry. Kadka was less willing, but when Tane glared at her, she took her place in the other chair.\n\nThe sprite fluttered toward them and landed on the dais, putting himself at close to eye-level. He looked nothing like the dangerous criminal Tane had expected. Quite the opposite, really: one tended to imagine sprites frolicking in glades with creatures of the forest, not selling illegal goods. And this one looked particularly ill-suited for it, with his exceptionally ample belly and that round-cheeked smile, so wide that it nearly split his face in half. Even his clothes weren't right. He was dressed like a gentleman of leisure, in a fine waistcoat and trousers of a deep green that matched his odd mask.\n\n\"Bastian Dewglen, at your service,\" the fat little sprite said, bowing enthusiastically. \"I do apologize for the inelegant means by which you were escorted here. My friends were meant to extend every courtesy, but it seems things became rather\u2026 muddled. You must understand, in my line of work I have to be careful of those who come asking questions. Hence the mask!\" He gestured to it and chuckled, as if quite taken with his clever disguise. \"And the false name, which I regret to say is not my own\u2014I've grown quite fond of it.\" He gestured to a gnome woman waiting nearby, a foot shorter standing up than Tane was sitting. She produced a small pair of scissors and started toward them.\n\nKadka was halfway out of her chair and reaching for her waist before the woman had taken her first step.\n\nBastian halted the gnome with a raised hand. \"Ah, I must apologize again! I can see how this would appear untoward. But I assure you, it is only a bit of insurance. It won't hurt at all!\"\n\n\"It's fine, Kadka.\" Tane offered his hand to the gnome woman. It wasn't hard to guess what she was looking for. \"They just want a divination focus. Like I was telling you about before.\" There was an implicit threat there\u2014tell anyone about me, and I'll find you\u2014but that was better than an explicit one. The little sprite's friendly enthusiasm wasn't enough to make Tane forget the dangerous men standing guard all around them. And if the scrollcaster is his work, he might have been the one behind Allaea's murder. More likely he'd only sold the caster to someone else, but more wasn't out of the question. A black market spellmonger might have buyers eager to obtain highly guarded spells.\n\n\"Very astute!\" Bastian said, clapping his hands in approval. \"But I would expect nothing less from Tane Carver\u2014the very man who bamboozled the University for years! You're right of course. I haven't much stomach for hurting people just to keep my little lair a secret, and I'm pleased to say no one has yet forced me to resort to anything so distasteful.\"\n\nThe gnome took a clipping from Tane's thumbnail and slipped it into a small glass vial, which she handed to Bastian as he spoke. Tane showed Kadka his hand to demonstrate the lack of injury, and she relaxed slightly into her chair.\n\n\"You know me?\" Tane asked Bastian as the gnome woman moved on to Kadka.\n\n\"Of course! I make a point of knowing all the most interesting characters in Porthaven, and you were rather prominent in the Gazette for a time after your grand reveal. I was able to procure a copy of your dissertation\u2014a very interesting read. I admire how far you went to prove your point. An honor to meet you at last, an absolute honor.\" Bastian turned to Kadka, and fluttered closer. \"But who is your lovely friend? I must say, my dear, you are absolutely intriguing.\"\n\nThe gnome woman was nervously clipping some fur from the back of Kadka's hand; Kadka bared her teeth in what could have been a grin or a snarl. The woman shrank away with a small lock of fur in hand, instinctively camouflaging herself to blend with the colors of the workshop behind.\n\nKadka watched the gnome's glamored retreat with some interest, and then glanced at Bastian as he drew near. \"I am Kadka.\" She cocked her head at his obvious fascination. \"Is something on my face?\"\n\n\"Not at all, except perhaps for a lovely smile.\" Bastian's round cheeks rose into a broad smile of his own beneath his mask. \"Forgive me for staring, but you are a wonder, my dear Kadka. I expected Mister Carver, but the warning charm I supplied Issik with failed to sense you at all. Even looking at you now, I can't sense so much as a hint of Astral presence! I have dealt with orcs who were hard to detect, but never quite so invisible. Something in the way orcish blood and human mix, perhaps? There are so few half-orcs, I can't imagine it's ever been researched.\" It was an interesting question. Tane had no way to check on his own, but Kadka's Astral masking did seem stronger than it ought to be.\n\nKadka shrugged. \"Don't know. You are mage, not me.\"\n\n\"Ah, a mystery then! What a delight!\" Bastian clapped his hands merrily. \"Needless to say, my friends were quite surprised to see you in that alley without warning, let alone to have you fight back so skillfully. I am deeply impressed, on both counts. You aren't looking for employment, perchance?\"\n\n\"Not now.\" Kadka glanced sidelong at Tane. \"Maybe soon.\"\n\n\"Then I shall not stop asking! Expect a sending\u2026 hmm, I wonder.\" He picked up the small vial the gnome had placed on his dais\u2014quite large in his little hand\u2014and squinted at the tuft of Kadka's fur.\n\nKadka started in her chair and jerked her head around as if she expected to see someone behind her. \"Who is there?\" She smacked her ear with one hand, and then looked back at Bastian, as nonplussed as Tane had yet seen her. \"Is\u2026 is your voice? In my head?\"\n\nBastian chuckled. \"Only a simple sending. I apologize, but I had to check.\" Sendings were a kind of divination, like any magic that sought a target through the Astra\u2014apparently a divination focus was enough to locate Kadka even through the masking of her half-orc blood.\n\nA brief silence, and then Kadka cackled aloud at something Tane couldn't hear. \"You are funny, little man. But for today, I need no work.\"\n\n\"A pity,\" Bastian said. \"But hope remains for another day! Now, if you won't accept my offer, I suppose it is time we discussed why the two of you are here. Something to do with the tragic events at the University last night, I expect?\"\n\n\"You're\u2026 well informed,\" said Tane. \"How do you know about that already?\"\n\n\"Sendings travel quickly, my friend! In this city, no secret lasts much longer than it takes for the bluecaps to arrive. And your own presence hardly went unnoticed, either. But I can't imagine what you think I had to do with it!\"\n\nTane produced the scrollcaster from behind his back. \"This is your work, isn't it? It was found at the scene.\"\n\nBastian flitted to the arm of Tane's chair and examined the brass case. \"Mine, certainly. Notice the peridot? Something of a signature. I find the balance of power and affordability quite ideal\u2014and I am somewhat fond of the color!\" He beamed broadly and patted his green waistcoat. \"Now, if I might surmise: you are wondering if I sent someone to relay certain highly valuable spells to me via this scrollcaster. Spells, perhaps, relating to the majestic airship being constructed across the harbor?\"\n\n\"It\u2026 has been suggested,\" Tane said cautiously.\n\n\"Well put your minds at ease! I may be a criminal, but I am also a patriot! Where else could I live as I do but in the Protectorate? In Rhien I would always be watched; in Belgrier my kind live in ghettos, hardly suited to free trade. And let us not forget Estia, where non-humans are stopped at the border. No, I support Lady Abena and her airship wholeheartedly. A more prosperous Audland benefits all of us!\" He laid a finger alongside his nose and gave an exaggerated wink under his mask. \"And of course, my business will hardly suffer from increased trade with the Continent. I may not wish to live there, but where magic is restricted, magical goods sell at\u2026 rather exorbitant prices.\"\n\nTane was inclined to believe him. There was no sign that the little man was lying\u2014whatever else he was, he genuinely considered himself a devoted citizen. \"Then I'm sure you'll be happy to help us. Can you tell us who bought this case?\"\n\nThere, Bastian hesitated. \"Now that is a delicate matter. I can hardly expect my business to prosper if it becomes known I am willing to reveal the names of my customers.\"\n\nTane leaned forward in his chair. \"Can you expect it to prosper if the bluecaps start looking into what your product was doing in the workshop?\" No need to mention that the bluecaps didn't actually know about the scrollcaster. \"And they certainly will. They are under some pressure to resolve this quickly.\"\n\nBastian wrung his hands and paced along the arm of the chair, fluttering his wings erratically. \"Oh dear. I was worried about that. I do want to help, of course, but\u2026\"\n\n\"Bastian, the Protectorate needs you. Lady Abena is very concerned about this\u2014I was brought in under her authority.\" That was stretching the truth more than a bit, but Tane thought he had the measure of the man now\u2014a representative of the Lady Protector could be just the person to convince him. \"I believe you when you say you're a patriot, and a patriot answers when his country calls. Do the right thing.\"\n\nBastian puffed out his chest and bobbed his head enthusiastically. \"You're right, Mister Carver! This is no time for selfishness! A girl has been killed, and the future of the Protectorate is at stake! Never let it be said that I quailed from my duty to my homeland!\" He rose into the air, and beckoned them to follow. \"Come, come! Bring the scrollcaster!\"\n\nTane and Kadka followed him across the workshop, and as they passed, both of them examined the various artifacts spread across the tables\u2014Tane with mild interest and Kadka with open curiosity. Charms, mostly: spells written on rolls of paper no bigger than Tane's little finger, wax-sealed and set with a small gem or crystal\u2014rarely more than a quartz shard. When the seal was broken, the gem was consumed to power a single-use magical effect. There were dozens of them, identified in plain Audish on their seals: darkness charms, flash charms, shield charms, repulsion charms, and more.\n\nBastian led them to a small pillar at the back, much like the one in the library area. Atop it sat a small worktable covered in sprite-sized tools. He landed behind the little table and gestured toward it. \"Place it here, if you will.\"\n\nTane laid the scrollcaster down on the table\u2014it was rather too long, extending over the edge on both sides. Too large for the little sprite's hands, too, but Bastian uttered a spell and the brass tube levitated into the air, moving as he directed. With various instruments, he began to probe the dials and gemstone. And as he worked, he talked. \"I remember the lad. He came in perhaps two weeks ago. I don't have much to tell you. He wore a\u2026 a kind of cowl that covered his face, and he gave no name. He paid a high price to waive the requirement of a divination focus, as well. I didn't think much of it, at the time\u2014customers often want to keep their identities hidden, and I am a businessman.\"\n\nThis can't be a dead end. It's all I've got. \"Is there anything you can tell us that might identify him?\"\n\n\"He may have been a student at the University. He was young, I think. He fidgeted a great deal. Educated in magical matters by the way he spoke, but he didn't give me the impression of great experience.\"\n\n\"That's useful. Anything else? Did he buy anything besides the scrollcaster?\" By way of example, Tane picked up a brass ball a little smaller than the palm of his hand from the table of charms. The clockwork key jutting from one side identified it as a charmglobe. A charm placed inside could be activated at a short delay set by winding the key. When it wound down, the ball would open and a brass lever within would break the charm's seal, activating it. And as an added benefit, the brass insulated whatever was inside against detection spells. Quite illegal, outside of the Protectorate's military\u2014they served little purpose besides weaponizing charms. He tossed it absently from hand to hand a few times.\n\n\"No devices or artifacts,\" said Bastian, \"but a number of components which might have been used for the construction of any long-term spell. Wards or the like.\" He set aside his tools with a sigh. \"I had hoped, but\u2026 there's no way to trace where the caster sent last, I'm afraid. The sending and receiving glyphs have been changed. But I may yet be able to recreate what was sent, if you leave it with me.\"\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"Two days, perhaps.\"\n\nKadka eyed Bastian with suspicion. \"How do we know you don't just keep, tell us nothing?\"\n\nBastian put a hand to his chest and fluttered his wings. \"My dear Kadka, you wound me to my core! I thought we had an understanding! How can you think I would lie to you?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Like you, little man. Doesn't mean I trust you.\"\n\n\"Beauty, strength, and wisdom,\" Bastian said wistfully. \"If only I could convince you to lend them to my service. But I'm afraid all I have to offer you is my word.\"\n\n\"Then it will have to be enough,\" said Tane. If Bastian was up to something, he was an extremely credible liar, and either way the scrollcaster wasn't much use without him. \"But as soon as you find anything, I want to know. You shouldn't have any trouble contacting us with a sending.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course!\" Bastian enthused, fluttering from his table. \"Is there anything else?\"\n\nTane glanced at the charmglobe in his hand, and then at the charms spread across the worktables. With one notable exception, he'd been in more danger today than ever before in his life. It wouldn't hurt to be better prepared next time. I'd rather not rely on someone else's spells, but\u2026 what did Kadka say? Good to use what is useful.\n\n\"I might need a few things,\" he said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "\"You could have gotten us killed,\" Tane insisted, walking beside Kadka down the darkened street.\n\n\"But if they come to kill us, maybe I stop them,\" she said. \"You would not be so angry then.\"\n\nTane sighed. It was pointless to argue with her. He hadn't known Kadka for long, but one thing was already clear: she didn't waste much time on doubt. \"Just\u2026 let me try to talk to the next people who attack us, maybe.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"We will see. Some things, talk does not change.\"\n\nThat was probably the best he was going to get, so he let it be.\n\nEvening had descended, and what sinking light remained in the sky couldn't force its way into the cracks of Porthaven's narrow streets and alleys. In the poorer districts, magelight had yet to replace the cheap oil-fuelled street lamps, dim and flickering and spaced so far apart that they served little purpose but to spoil Tane's night vision. And it didn't help that he was distracted, thinking about what Bastian had told them.\n\n\"Watch out,\" said Kadka, and nudged him around a pothole. She had no trouble with the dark\u2014orcish night vision was evidently quite strong. \"Thinking instead of looking, yes? About masked mage? Where to look next?\"\n\nTane nodded. \"It makes some sense if he's a student, like Bastian said. We know he can use magic, and he seemed to know what he was looking for and where to find it, which implies some knowledge of the University. It doesn't explain why he had a badge that got him into the room, though. A graduate student might have had access for a project, but that would only have worked the first time. When you and I caught him, the wards were set to keep student badges out. The only people who should have been able to get in were constables, heads of the University, and the Guard.\"\n\n\"But guard has no mages, and deans all have other stories.\"\n\n\"Right. And a constable would have been better trained in combat magic, among other things. Which doesn't get us anywhere. If we assume the badge was stolen by a student\u2014I got in with yours, after all\u2014it opens up possibilities. But even with a badge, if he somehow found a way to open a portal into the workshop, he'd need a place to cast it from. He couldn't do it anywhere on campus without being noticed. The components he bought must have been to cast new wards on a bolthole somewhere, and to prepare his portal.\"\n\n\"So maybe we look for student who is gone too much in last weeks. Warding lair, making plans.\"\n\nTane nodded. \"Exactly what I was thinking. They'll have attendance records at the University. It's a start, at least. But I still can't figure out how he opened the portal.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" she said. \"Very strange.\" There was something cursory to it, like she'd stopped listening. Her head was slightly cocked.\n\n\"Kadka, what\u2014\"\n\n\"Pretend nothing is wrong,\" she whispered. \"Hear someone following. On roof.\"\n\nTane forced himself to keep walking at the same pace. \"Could it be one of Bastian's?\" he asked under his breath. But he suspected they weren't so lucky. There was no one else in sight in either direction\u2014this would be the perfect time and place for an ambush.\n\n\"No. Would have heard sooner. Coming from other side.\"\n\nTane felt for the stolen daze-wand tucked into the back of his belt under his waistcoat, still probably good for one more charge. If he was lucky. His other hand slipped into his pocket, searching for the charms and charmglobe he'd bought from Bastian. All at a steep discount, of course, for a representative of Lady Abena, but still he'd only been able to afford three charms: shield, flash, and darkness. They all felt the same, just sealed rolls of paper. There was no way to identify them by touch. Surreptitiously, he drew one out and glanced at the writing on the seal, hoping for the shield charm. But it was too dark\u2014he couldn't read it.\n\nAnd then, suddenly, there was light, silver and blinding.\n\nBefore he understood what was happening, Kadka sprang into motion, pushing him to his knees behind her. Bright silver flames flared from the rooftop. She half-turned, leaning over Tane and shielding her face.\n\nA gout of spellfire roared across her back.\n\n\"Kadka!\" Tane shouted. He pulled out a charm, read the seal by the pulsing silver light. Shield. Thank the Astra. He crushed the seal in his fist, and a shimmering barrier of force surrounded them.\n\nSilver fire licked along the outside of the shield for an instant longer, and then blinked out as if it had never been there. Tane leapt to his feet and spun to face Kadka, expecting the worst. Blackened flesh melting from cracked, crumbling bone. Just like Allaea. Not that. Not again.\n\nShe was entirely untouched. The flames hadn't burned her at all. She looked as surprised as he was, probing her shoulder where the flesh should have been seared away.\n\nImpossible. Her masked Astral link might protect against divinations, but spellfire was physical. It should have killed her. Unless\u2026 he was aiming for me. Spellfire only burned what it was told to burn\u2014their attacker must have been too precise in naming his target. He hadn't predicted Kadka getting in the way. But she had no way of knowing that.\n\nAs soon as she realized she was unharmed, Kadka drew a knife from her sleeve with a flick of the wrist and hurled it through the darkness at the source of the spellfire. The blade passed silently through the shield\u2014the charm only kept things out, not in.\n\nNo sound, no scream. An instant later, the sound of the knife skipping across the rooftop.\n\n\"Come out!\" Kadka shouted. \"Poska! Fight me where I can see!\"\n\nNo answer.\n\nNot aloud, anyway.\n\nA sudden pressure in Tane's ears, and then a voice spoke in his head. \"Forget the scrollcaster. Leave this investigation alone.\" The mage had to be near, still\u2014without sufficient familiarity or a focus, finding an Astral signature to send to or divine from was only possible at close range. Tane swept his eyes over the rooftops, but he couldn't see anything in the dark. \"This is your only warning. The next time, you won't be so lucky.\" Clear as diamond, an image flashed across his mind: a door in a brick-front building, the same as any of the identical narrow single-room homes on either side, joined together in one long row. Only the number painted on the letter-box by the door distinguished it from the others." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "His number. The office he rented near the docks.\n\nThen, a burst of intense pain, like a spike driving through both temples. \"Ahh!\" Tane bent over, gripping his head in both hands.\n\n\"Carver?\" Kadka knelt in front of him. \"What is wrong?\"\n\nThe intensity faded as quickly as it had come, but it left a pulsing ache behind. \"N\u2014nothing. Just\u2026 a sending. Is he still\u2026\"\n\nKadka shook her head. \"Gone. Heard him running. Maybe wasn't expecting\u2026 this.\" She gestured at the shimmering barrier around them.\n\nTane straightened up and rolled his head from side to side. It didn't help the headache. \"Kadka, you\u2026 you jumped in front of spellfire for me.\" He paused, and then, \"Do you have any idea how stupid that was?\"\n\nKadka shrugged. \"Felt like thing to do. Why doesn't it burn?\"\n\n\"It would have, if he'd been any smarter about phrasing the spell! If he hadn't specified me as the target, you'd be dead!\"\n\n\"I should have let you try to talk to fire instead?\" She flashed her wide, toothy grin.\n\n\"No, that's not\u2026\" Tane let the sentence drift away unfinished. Just like before, there was no point in arguing with her. His head hurt and he could still feel his heart beating against his chest, but he had to laugh. \"I mean, thank you. Obviously. But please, in the future, try not to get yourself killed on my account.\"\n\n\"Don't stand in front of spell, then,\" Kadka said. \"What was sending? Way you shout, it sounds painful.\"\n\nTane frowned. \"He wants us to drop the investigation. Forget the scrollcaster, he said. Then there was an image of the place where I live, and\u2026 pain.\" Just thinking about it made him wince.\n\n\"Pain? This is possible? Why not do that when we fight him?\"\n\n\"He'd have to be focused on the Astra to send. When you see that distant look in a mage's eyes, that's what they're doing\u2014looking past the physical world. Not ideal in the middle of a fight. But outside of one, just about anything can be sent. Words, images, emotions, sensations. Some of it isn't legal, but I don't think our mage cares very much about that.\"\n\n\"Talking of mage, we should not stay here. Don't know how long\u2014\" Before Kadka could finish, the shield blinked out of existence. \"Ah. Not long. You have place to go?\"\n\n\"My office isn't far,\" said Tane. \"We'll be safe there.\"\n\n\"You mean place he showed you?\" She raised an eyebrow. \"One place where he knows to find you?\"\n\n\"If he tries anything, he'll be disappointed. I'd trust my wards against any mage in this city. I designed them myself.\" He didn't keep them up unless he needed them\u2014couldn't afford to replace the gems regularly\u2014but this definitely merited the cost.\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nTane didn't wait for her to finish. His head was still throbbing. \"Come on,\" he said, starting down the street. \"I need a drink.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "\"It doesn't make sense!\" Tane threw the spell diagram down on his desk and took another swig of whiskey\u2014no aged Belgrian, but the cheap local stuff dulled the pain in his temples just as well. \"I can't find the problem. He shouldn't have been able to open that portal.\"\n\nThe ward diagrams had been delivered to his letterbox while he and Kadka were out, as Dean Greymond had promised. Tane had been looking them over for the past quarter hour or so, but he couldn't see the answer he was looking for, and he was getting frustrated. Usually he could find the flaw in a spell at a glance.\n\n\"You are sure there is one?\" Kadka asked. She sat across from him in the flimsy chair he kept for clients\u2014not that he had many of those\u2014with her feet up on his desk. There wasn't much else in the room, just a few cabinets, a single magelight lamp casting silver light from the corner of the desk, and a folding screen at the back that hid his mattress from sight. Being a 'magical consultant' without any magic or University honors hadn't proven particularly profitable.\n\n\"Like I told you before: the flaw in all magic is the mage. They always miss something. Sometimes it's minor enough not to matter, or obscure enough that it will never come up, but it's always there. And there has to be a hole in these portal wards, or he couldn't have done it. I just can't find it.\"\n\nKadka pulled the diagram to the edge of the desk with one foot and blinked at the glyphs for a moment. \"Nonsense to me. Why not write with letters?\" Leaning back, she took far too large a swallow of her own whiskey, and didn't so much as flinch as it went down.\n\n\"To avoid the kind of problem I'm looking for. Most languages are a clumsy patchwork, thrown together by necessity. You could use them for spells\u2014the Astra doesn't care\u2014but you risk all manner of problems with connotations and identical spellings for entirely different things. The lingua magica was designed to be precise. A unique word for everything, a unique glyph for every word. Perfect for casting, in theory, except the person choosing the words can still be an idiot. Nothing can fix that. There's always a flaw.\"\n\n\"How do you find, usually?\"\n\n\"Most of the time it's easy. Find the flaw in the mage and you'll find the flaw in the spell. Are they lazy, arrogant, prejudiced? Figure that out and you know what mistakes they'll make. Those old folktales about some ward that 'no man shall pass' and then a woman does? In real life that's not some epic destiny. It's because someone with a low opinion of the opposite sex just entirely forgot to consider them. The thing is, though, as far as I can see, this ward is too simple to break.\" He traced a line under the glyphs with his finger. \"This essentially says 'no portals into or out of the University campus unless made by the chancellor or one of the deans'. That's fairly absolute.\" Tane took another sip and winced against the burning in his throat. \"But there has to be something. And I'm going to find it.\"\n\n\"You are so sure only you can? Why not your Inspector Indree? Or University mage? They must know magic same as you, yes? Could tell them what we find. Too late for them to take scrollcaster away now.\"\n\n\"No one born with magic is ever going to see through a spell like I can,\" Tane said. \"That kind of power, you start to forget it's not perfect. You stop seeing the flaws even when you're looking for them. Even Indree. She's always been brilliant, but she's not going to solve this. She's a mage. It has to be me.\"\n\nKadka cocked her head at him, curiosity glinting in her yellow eyes. \"And you don't think to quit? Some men would, after mage throws fire at them.\"\n\n\"If he wants to stop me, it just means I'm close to something. All the more reason to keep looking.\"\n\nKadka laughed. \"This is why I like you, Carver. But there is more, I think.\"\n\n\"Of course there is. Allaea was my\u2014\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Vengeance for friend I understand, but is not all. You spend four years lying to University to prove you are better than mages, and still you talk about spell like enemy to fight. Is personal for you. Why?\"\n\nThat was more insightful than he'd expected. Maybe it's the whiskey. Speaking of which\u2026 He took another gulp, and waggled a finger at her. \"No, no, no. Everyone we meet has had something to tell you about me, but all I get to know about you is 'came from Sverna for magic'? I know a dodge when I hear it. No one is that willing to jump in front of spellfire without some reason. You don't get my story until I get yours. Fair is fair.\"\n\nKadka shifted her heavy lower jaw from side to side for a moment, considering, and then nodded. \"Fine. I tell you, you tell me. But you try to get out of this, I find other way to make you pay. Yes?\"\n\nTane raised a solemn hand. \"I swear by the Astra, I'll keep my end.\" He probably owed her that much for saving his life, and at least this way he'd be considerably drunker when his turn came.\n\nKadka took her legs off the desk and sat forward in her chair. \"Is not such a long story. When she is young, my mother leaves Sverna, like I do. Goes to Rhien, Audland, Belgrier. Sees many things. In Belgrier, she meets my father. He makes her pregnant with me. But he is human from wealthy family, and this is not so good in Belgrier.\"\n\n\"I can imagine.\" None of the nations on the Continent allowed mages or non-humans to live entirely free. Belgrier was neither the best nor the worst, but they were strict about segregation. For a wealthy Belgrian family, a son having a child by an orc would be an enormous scandal.\n\n\"His family has my mother put out of country. Never sees my father again. She does not want to raise me alone, so she comes home to clan. I grow up in Sverna. Is law to serve as soldier there for time when young, so I learn to fight, and to hunt food for clan.\" That explained some things\u2014from what little information made it out of their borders, the Svernan army was said to train exceptionally skilled fighters. \"But they think human blood is weak. Is\u2026 not always good life for me.\" Kadka took another long swallow of whiskey to finish her glass, and slid it across the desk to Tane. He refilled it and pushed it back.\n\n\"When things are bad, my mother teaches me tongues she has learned, tells of all the things she sees when she travels. Boats and carriages that move by magic, people with wings and dragon scales, cities lit after dark by silver light. One day, she says, I will see all of this myself. For a long time, closest I get is when I am hunting by border of Rhien and one of your ancryst trains goes by, far away over plains. But always I dream of lands where magic is real.\n\n\"Then my mother gets sick. She does not get better.\" Kadka dipped her head between her shoulders.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Tane. \"I\u2026 know what that's like.\" Absently, he touched the watch casing in his pocket.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Her mouth turned up at one side, revealing her teeth. \"But is not your turn yet.\" She took another long drink, and then, \"Without her, nothing is left to keep me there. So I go, like she did. Think I will travel world, see magic everywhere. Get away from place where they look at me and only see human.\"\n\n\"Did you ever try to find your father?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said firmly. \"He had chance. Could have fought for us, left with my mother. He is nothing to me. I leave for me, not for him. But\u2026 is not like I dreamed. Not so magical. Everywhere I go, they look at me like I don't belong. People say Protectorate welcomes all kinds, so I come across channel. It is\u2026 better, but still I see how people look at me. Even at University, they only let me join guard because I fight better than the rest. Beat them all, sparring. There is law here, I think?\"\n\n\"There is,\" said Tane. \"If you beat the other applicants, they'd have to take you. Can't turn you down for race\u2014that's why the Protectorate exists. Although, ask any goblin, they'll tell you that people find ways around it.\"\n\nKadka nodded. \"They are not so sad to see me go, I think. But they do take me, first. Is good to have work, and some in guard are friendly enough. And there is magic here, but not like dreams when I was little. There are discs, and people like I never see before, but mostly I just stand outside doors while they do magic on other side. And then you come, and steal my badge.\" She smiled\u2014not her usual toothy grin, but something more wistful. \"Today, I see more real magic than my whole life before. Portals and spells and silver fire. Like my dreams.\"\n\n\"Mages throwing spellfire aren't exactly the stuff dreams are made of. Nightmares maybe. My friend is dead, Kadka.\"\n\n\"I know. And I am sorry. I don't mean that it is good this happens. But today I feel like I have\u2026 purpose. Like this is what I am looking for. I want to find this man who kills your friend. See what he can do, with all his magic. And maybe next fight, I win.\" She shrugged. \"Does this make sense?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Tane said. \"But\u2026 I suppose I understand. If I'm being honest, it's\u2026 not just about Allaea for me, either.\" He sighed and took a sip. It burned all the way down. \"I wish it was. She deserves that much. But it's not.\"\n\nKadka rolled her hand in the air. \"Keep going, Carver. I tell mine. Your turn.\"\n\n\"I suppose I have to now.\" Another long pull drained his drink, and he poured another. It was keeping his headache at bay, and he was going to need it for this. \"First thing, you need to know about my father. He's gone now, and my mother, but when I was younger, he was a conductor on the ancryst rail.\"\n\nKadka's eyes widened. \"This means he drives it, yes? He must have been great mage.\"\n\n\"He wasn't. Or my mother. No magic at all. Mages cast the spells that make the trains run\u2014other people do the everyday work of operating them. That's the problem. But that\u2026 that comes later.\" Tane reached into his pocket and took out his watch casing, a battered brass circle covered in old dents and scratches. \"This was his. My father's, I mean. It doesn't work now, but he used it to keep the time on his route. He'd let me play with it, pretend I was a conductor myself. Sometimes my mother would take me to the station when he was due home, and we'd watch the trains come in. I loved it.\" For a moment, the memory made him smile, but it curdled just as quickly. He took another drink.\n\n\"When I was thirteen, he took us on a trip. His route went north into the country, and we were going to stay out there for a few days. I'd been on his train before, but this was the first time I was old enough to really take an interest in how it all worked. So the day we left, he took me up to the engine while they were still checking all the parts.\n\n\"I still remember everything. An aquamarine array for power, brand new without a hint of clouding. Steel pistons with ancryst cores. Everything polished to a shine inside a brass engine casing. He showed me all of it, every rod and bolt. All those men working on it, and my father in charge of all of them. That stays with me, more than anything.\" Another drink, longer this time. \"He was looking right at it. All of them were. And they didn't see anything wrong.\n\n\"After, the artificers found that the spells pushing the pistons had been misaligned. Off balance. The train jumped the track at exactly the wrong place, crossing a ravine. Not many people came out alive.\" His hands shook as he pulled down the neck of his shirt, enough to show her the beginning of the scars that ran from his collarbone to his navel. \"I had to be put together again by mage-surgeons. My parents weren't so lucky.\"\n\nKadka took in the scars with a solemn frown. \"Awful. Carver, if telling is too hard\u2026\"\n\n\"No, we had a deal. And this was\u2026 a long time ago. It's fine.\" But he poured a third glass and took another long sip. The warm whiskey haze made it easier.\n\n\"This accident\u2026 this is why you don't like riding discs?\"\n\nTane gestured wide with one hand. \"It's why everything. My father and a dozen other men checked that engine piece by piece, and didn't see the problem. They knew everything about the mechanics of it. Nothing about the spells. And it was such a simple thing. There's nothing to it, just basic magic fields. The ancryst does all the work. I don't know if the mage was lazy, or stupid, or\u2026\" He sloshed the whiskey around in his cup. \"Or drunk. But if anyone else had known what to look for, it wouldn't have happened. My parents didn't have to die. And it didn't even change anything. They died, and all anyone did was put a new mage in charge of maintaining the engine spells.\" He drained half his new glass in a single gulp. It didn't seem to burn so much anymore.\n\n\"So you go to University. Try to show them this.\"\n\nHe bobbed his head emphatically. \"Except it wasn't that easy. I had no place to go, and no money to pay tuition. I was living in an orphan's home. Just fooling the University wasn't good enough\u2014I had to place high enough on the entrance exams to earn a scholarship with room and board. So I worked out every detail. Studied for years, figured out exactly how I would do it. Found ways to get my hands on the books and charms and artifacts I needed, legal or not. Practiced my sleight of hand until I knew every trick by heart. And as soon as I turned eighteen, I took the entrance exams.\n\n\"Before the written tests, they make you move a piece of ancryst, just to prove you can. I snuck in a charm to do it for me. Got it past all their detections. Not so hard\u2014they don't know mundane tricks as well as magical ones.\" Tane flipped open his father's watch case. A coin-sized piece of cloudy green ancryst was anchored inside. No longer shielded by brass, it slid very slowly away from the magelight in the corner. \"Palmed the stone as a momento. And it worked. I got the scholarship. Top marks on every test. I thought that would be enough. I was in, and when I graduated without magic, they'd have to listen. But you know how that ended.\" He snapped the watch case shut, shoved it back in his pocket, and took another drink.\n\n\"And this is why so many are angry with you? You lie about magic?\"\n\n\"Like Dean Greymond, you mean? Absolutely. And she's not alone. When word got out, it was an embarrassment to the University, and a lot of people think that was the point. But Indree?\" Tane rubbed the back of his neck. \"That's different. When I was expelled, I didn't exactly tell her about it. We were\u2026 close, and I more or less vanished on her. And on Allaea, too.\"\n\nKadka narrowed her eyes. \"This is poskan thing to do, Carver.\"\n\nHe didn't know exactly what that meant, but he knew it wasn't good. He raised his hands defensively. \"I know. But Greymond and the chancellor asked a lot of questions before they threw me out. About who else knew. Being close to me was going to be a liability, and I didn't want anyone else dragged down. Thought it would be best if I just\u2026 left. Went as far as using divination masking artifacts the first few weeks, in case anyone came looking. It wasn't my best moment.\"\n\n\"No,\" Kadka agreed, still scowling. He couldn't blame her\u2014she'd just explained how her father had abandoned his family.\n\nProbably shouldn't have told her that part. \"Indree really wasn't wrong when she told you I'm not the best person to be around.\" He sighed, took another drink. \"All of this, with Allaea\u2026 I want to find whoever killed her, I really do. To make some kind of amends, even if it's too late. But it's more than just that. If I can help solve it\u2026\"\n\n\"Maybe people see worth of mages with no magic.\"\n\n\"Yes. Something like that. Spellfire, that's miserable, isn't it? She's dead and I'm worried about proving a point.\"\n\nKadka's face softened. \"Not so bad. You still try to find her killer, just want to honor your mother and father at same time. Is not insult to your friend to want both.\" She smiled, surprisingly gentle. \"Tell me what she is like, this Allaea. Is good to remember, maybe.\"\n\nIt might have been the whiskey, but that felt right, just then. Tane didn't fight it. \"I met Indree first. We were fighting it out for top spot in most of our classes. At each other's throats most of the time, until\u2026 until we were at each other's throats in a different way, I suppose. Allaea was her closest friend. We spent a lot of time together, the three of us. Long nights studying, debating big ideas in their room in the dormitories. And it wasn't just 'any friend of hers' with us. Allaea and I got along right from the start. Which, if you knew her, didn't happen often.\n\n\"She could have been friends with anyone on campus, if she'd wanted. She was funny, pretty, an absolute genius at artifice. Elven, which\u2026 it shouldn't matter, but for some people it does. But she didn't have the patience. She expected the best from people and she wasn't shy about letting them know it. And she could be mean.\" He smiled fondly. \"You know that way that some people can say the worst things, but it feels like a compliment?\"\n\nKadka grinned. \"I know this, yes.\"\n\n\"She was like that. Except if you got on her bad side\u2026 it could be brutal. The funny thing is, she was also as soft-hearted as anyone I've ever known. The kind of person who couldn't turn a blind eye when someone needed help. Spellfire, the things she'd say to chase off a bully. You wouldn't believe it. I once heard her call someone a 'quivering mound of putrid kraken pus'.\"\n\nKadka cackled long and loud. \"I like her.\"\n\n\"So did I,\" said Tane. \"So did everyone, even with the sharp tongue. People were always making advances, trying to get her attention. She hated it. An elf who looked like she did, they assumed she came from money or power. She didn't. But if they were decent about it, she'd let them down easy. If they weren't\u2026\" He laughed, remembering. \"Well, you get the idea.\"\n\n\"Sends them away limping on broken pride?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Tane. \"And she was good at it. I was on the wrong side of it more than once. Maybe you've noticed, but I'm told I can be a tiny bit arrogant, sometimes.\"\n\n\"Man who thinks he can best any mage in city?\" Kadka put a hand to her chest in feigned shock. \"No.\"\n\n\"Well, she never let me get away with it. But when I needed help, she was always there, too. When me and Indree argued\u2014and we would argue\u2014Allaea would usually tell me how to fix it. She knew Indree long before I did, and she always had the answer. She liked us together. 'There are a lot of idiots she could be with, and you're probably not the worst,' was how she put it. From her, it meant a lot.\" Tane ducked his head to wipe away the sudden moisture in his eyes. \"I miss her. I\u2026 don't think I knew how much until\u2026\" He couldn't finish past the thickness in his throat.\n\nKadka raised her glass. \"To Allaea.\"\n\nTane just clinked his glass against hers, unable to speak. He drained the rest of his drink in a single pull, and Kadka did the same.\n\nTane looked at the bottle for a long time, and then put his glass down. \"I think I've had enough. If we're going to find who did this to her\u2026 I need to sleep. We can meet early\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, I am staying,\" Kadka said, utterly matter-of-fact.\n\nTane froze in his seat. \"Kadka, you don't think\u2026 This was nice enough, but we're not\u2026\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You have too much to drink, Carver. Not like that. In case mage comes looking.\"\n\nTane felt his cheeks flush. \"Oh. Right. Sorry.\"\n\n\"Is fine. I know is not me you want in bed.\" She raised an eyebrow suggestively. \"Maybe tomorrow we impress Indree for you, yes?\"\n\n\"That's\u2026 She's not\u2026\" But he couldn't come up with a convincing lie, so he didn't bother. \"You don't have to stay. No one is getting by my wards, and I don't really have anywhere for you to sleep.\"\n\nKadka shrugged and leaned back, putting her feet up on the desk again. \"Chair is fine.\" There was something about the way she said it that didn't leave room for argument. And it did make him feel a little bit safer, having her there.\n\n\"If you say so.\" He stood up, stumbled, and braced himself on the edge of the desk. The whiskey had hit him harder than he'd thought, and they'd been sitting a long time.\n\nKadka grinned. \"Humans. Can't hold drink.\"\n\n\"Shut up.\" He touched the glyph to turn off the magelight on his desk, and traced a slightly crooked path through the dark to the folding screen at the back of the office. But before he collapsed onto his mattress, he turned back. \"Kadka?\"\n\nShe was only a suggestion of a shape in the dark, leaning back in her chair. \"What?\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" And then he let himself fall into bed, and remembered nothing more." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"And just where are you getting this information?\" Indree demanded, glaring at Tane with her arms crossed. She wasn't wearing her constable's uniform today, just a charcoal topcoat over a white shirt and dark trousers, with her hair tied back behind her pointed ears instead of pinned up to fit under her cap. Plain enough that she could ask around campus without drawing too much attention.\n\n\"Yes, Mister Carver,\" said Dean Greymond. \"You'll have to explain how you arrived at the conclusion that our murderer is a student, after you defended Mister Thrung so effectively yesterday.\" She sat behind her desk, frowning heavily. Indree had already been there speaking with her about the investigation when Tane and Kadka had arrived. \"And while you're explaining, what is Miss Kadka doing here? I understood that she had been relieved of duty.\"\n\n\"She's not\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm aware she isn't here as a member of the Guard. What I am asking is, why is she with you?\"\n\nTane glanced at Kadka for a moment, and shrugged. \"Consider her\u2026 my partner, for now.\"\n\nKadka grinned at that. \"Needs someone to look after him.\"\n\n\"A fair assessment,\" Greymond said with a very mild smirk. \"Fine. What about the rest of it?\"\n\n\"A student just makes the most sense,\" said Tane. \"Before we even get to badges, the only people who could have gotten by the basic ward on that room are present and former students, faculty, staff, guard, and constabulary. We know it was a trained mage, so staff and guard are out\u2014even if one of them had some latent gift, they wouldn't know the lingua or how to use it. I'm certain the man we saw was younger, and his spells weren't particularly polished, so student fits better than faculty or constable. I asked around with certain\u2026 less-than-savory contacts, and they tell me a man in a mask like the one Kadka and I encountered was seen buying black market components very recently.\" Still best not to mention the scrollcaster, not until he heard back from Bastian. \"They got the same impression\u2014young, and probably a student, by the way he spoke.\"\n\n\"Certain contacts?\" Indree raised an eyebrow. \"I need names if I'm going to use this, Tane.\"\n\n\"If I gave their names to a bluecap, they wouldn't be much good as contacts anymore, would they?\"\n\n\"You expect me to just take your word?\" said Indree. \"Even if I was at all willing to do that, it isn't much to go on.\"\n\n\"Let me finish. We have to assume he wasn't buying those components to use on campus\u2014any new wards would have been noticed, let alone a portal opening in the dormitories. And I can't imagine he found a way past the portal wards without some experimentation. He must have set up some sort of workshop in the city, and spent considerable time there. What we need to do is look for students who have been absent from class over the last few weeks.\"\n\nShe didn't look very happy about it, but Indree had never been one to ignore a well-reasoned argument. \"So you suggest we go over the attendance records for everyone who missed a class or two? We can't question that many people without missing something important. One point of reference isn't enough.\"\n\nTane felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Despite everything, this felt like the way it used to be, sparring with her over magical theory or spell construction late into the night. The ideas on either side of those debates had always come out more refined than they had been going in. \"You're probably right. I can tell you I'm sure he was human or half-elf by build, and male.\"\n\n\"Better, but still too many. If you'd said gnome, or dwarf, maybe, but human men leaves us with a list of near a thousand across all years, and hundreds will have missed a class recently.\" Indree prodded the side of her cheek with her tongue, the way she did when she was thinking, and then, \"Dean Greymond, does the University\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, we keep a record of students who are related to members of the University Guard, at least for immediate family. There are tuition benefits involved. Shall I have them ready that along with the attendance logs?\"\n\nIndree nodded. \"And a full guard roster, so we can compare surnames. Whoever did this, they needed access to a guard's badge to get in, and they had to be able to get it back before anyone noticed it missing. That wouldn't be hard for a spouse or relative.\"\n\n\"Or a friend,\" Tane pointed out.\n\n\"True,\" said Indree. A pause, and then, \"But the first\u2026 incident\"\u2014she tensed visibly there, even without mentioning Allaea's name\u2014\"happened past midnight. Less likely for a friend to be in your home at that hour unobserved. And we don't have any way to check for friendship. If this doesn't turn anything up, then I'll worry about expanding the list.\" She was as competitive as ever\u2014couldn't let a point stand if she thought she knew better, which she usually did. There was something comforting about that.\n\n\"Fair enough,\" said Tane, and started for the door. \"Let's go.\"\n\n\"No.\" Indree's voice was firm, and when he looked back at her, she shook her head. \"You've been\u2026 more helpful than I expected, Tane, but I don't need you for this.\"\n\n\"The more help you have, the faster it will be to compare those records. And I can be useful when it comes to the questioning. You know I'm good at reading people. Please, Indree. I want to help. Allaea was important to me too.\"\n\nIndree's eyes narrowed. \"Don't you dare use her to\u2014\"\n\n\"Is not like that.\" Kadka didn't flinch when Indree's glare fell on her.\n\n\"You two met yesterday. What do you know about it?\"\n\n\"Only what he tells me,\" Kadka said gently. \"Your friend is woman I am sorry not to meet. I see his tears when he remembers her. Carver is good liar, but this was not lie.\"\n\nTane wasn't sure if he should be grateful or embarrassed. And Indree was staring at him again now. \"The thing is,\" he said, \"we'd been drinking\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, Tane,\" Indree snapped, and then shouldered past him to the door, yanked it open, and marched through. It had nearly swung closed when she stopped it with one hand and peered back in, scowling. \"Are you coming, or not?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Tane was beginning to worry.\n\nThey'd been at it for most of the day, and made little progress. Even the narrowed list left dozens of students to interview, and most could account for themselves during one of the intrusions or the other. The few who couldn't weren't strong suspects\u2014there was no reason to believe they'd been involved, other than that the timing worked. If we don't find something soon, Indree will never take me seriously again.\n\n\"Who's next?\" Indree asked, stretching as they emerged from the invocation hall into the fading sunlight. They'd pulled the last student they'd interviewed from class within.\n\nTane glanced at the list. \"Randolf Cranst. Not one of our better prospects.\" They'd gone through the most likely names hours ago. \"An average student, no standout subject that looks particularly suspicious. He missed two classes last week and was absent yesterday, but he's far from alone there. Not registered as immediate family of any members of the Guard, but he shares a surname with one. Dedric Cranst. Could be cousins, if we're lucky.\"\n\nKadka yawned wide. \"Maybe we break, yes? Eat something?\" She hadn't bothered to hide her boredom for the past few hours. Showing her teeth had helped get certain students talking a little bit faster, but otherwise there wasn't much for her to do\u2014especially not under the watchful eye of a bluecap.\n\n\"We're almost through the list,\" said Tane. \"Only a few names left.\"\n\n\"Then we keep at it,\" said Indree. \"Where do we find Cranst?\"\n\n\"No classes just now, it looks like,\" said Tane. \"He has a room in the dormitories.\"\n\n\"Come on, then.\" Indree headed across the campus center toward the northeast corner, where the dormitories were located.\n\nThe campus wasn't as quiet as it had been the day before, but it wasn't near as lively as Tane remembered either. The guards were still checking badges at doors, and beyond that, there was a new presence that he hadn't expected: the Mageblades, elite guardians of the Protectorate. A handful of them were scattered around campus at strategic points, imposing in brass cuirasses engraved with the Protectorate's gryphon over blue and white uniforms. Glyph-etched sabers and dual ancryst pistols hung at their sides.\n\nTrained to wield magic in combat in a way few mages could, the Mageblades were utterly loyal to the Protector of the Realm, and their abilities were legendary. By reputation, they could best anyone with spell or sword, and make impossible shots with their ancryst guns, guiding the ball's path with magical fields. Tane had known that Lady Abena was concerned about what had happened in the workshop, but even so he hadn't expected such a strong gesture. She hadn't sent many, but even one would have been a powerful deterrent against anyone looking to cause more trouble. Passing by a towering ogren in cuirass and uniform at the entrance to the dormitories, Tane felt oddly compelled to avoid eye-contact, as if the Mageblade might see everything he was hiding at a single glance.\n\nCranst shared a room on the third floor with another student\u2014a dwarf by the name of Heln Stonehand. It was Stonehand who answered the door when Indree knocked, and only by a crack, just enough to peek through. Tane could only tell it wasn't Cranst by height. \"Yes?\"\n\nIndree showed him her badge. \"Constable Inspector Indree Lovial. I'm looking for Randolf Cranst.\"\n\nStonehand sighed, and opened the door wider, revealing a wide-nosed dwarven face half-hidden by a bushy auburn beard. \"What did he do?\" His eyes fell on Kadka, and widened. \"Oh.\"\n\nTane raised an eyebrow. \"Oh what? You think he did something to Kadka?\"\n\n\"I thought\u2026 she's orcish, and Rand\u2026 he's been talking a lot about magical superiority lately. Some people, they take a first year magical history class and suddenly every conversation ends with 'maybe the Mage Emperor wasn't so wrong'.\" Stonehand turned to Kadka once more, obviously concerned. \"He didn't try to hurt you, did he?\"\n\n\"Don't know,\" said Kadka. \"That is why we come. To find out.\"\n\nIndree peered over Stonehand's head into the room. \"He's not here, I gather.\" It was fairly obvious: the room was just large enough to fit a bed and desk on each side, all of it visible from the door.\n\n\"No. He hasn't been sleeping here much the last few weeks.\" Stonehand stepped aside. \"You can look through his things if you want. Honestly, the way he's been talking, I've been wondering if I should tell someone.\"\n\nIndree was inside before he finished inviting her. \"Which side is his?\"\n\n\"There.\" Stonehand pointed to the right side of the room.\n\nIndree set to work immediately, opening the top drawer of Cranst's desk and sifting through papers and trinkets. Tane followed her in; Kadka closed the door behind and leaned back against it, guarding against interruption.\n\nTane picked up a small pamphlet from the top of the desk, clearly printed on some basement press. Magic for the Magical was the slogan stamped crookedly along the top, followed by a screed about the superiority of mages. The Mage Emperor's staff and crown was emblazoned in the middle of the page. \"Look at this.\" He showed it to Indree.\n\nHe recognized the glint in her eye\u2014the same one he'd seen there a hundred times before, when the solution to a problem was coming clear. But aloud, all she said was, \"It could be something. But not by itself.\" She started digging through the next drawer down.\n\nTane sat on the edge of the bed and looked up at Stonehand. \"Any idea where he's been, if not here?\"\n\nThe dwarf shrugged. \"He stays with his cousin sometimes. In Greenstone I think, not far from the Conservatory off Rosepetal Park.\" Rosepetal Park sat on the edge of the Citadel Court at the center of Thaless, but it was a large park, and the Conservatory of Magical Beasts was situated at the far southern end, bordering on a much less affluent district\u2014better for animal noises to wake some poor miner in the night than the Rhienni ambassador. \"If you want me to guess\u2026 what if he found some like-minded people? Maybe having some sort of meetings? That could get dangerous.\"\n\n\"His cousin,\" said Tane. \"Is that Dedric Cranst? From the University Guard?\"\n\n\"That's him.\"\n\nAgain Tane caught Indree's eye, and saw the same understanding there. This was easily the best lead they'd found all day.\n\nBut there was something strange about it, too. \"Would you call Randolf a gifted student?\" Tane asked. \"Did he have any particular insight into magical theory?\"\n\nStonehand looked at him incredulously. \"Rand? No, not at all. He's studying invocation, but he's average at best. I've had to help him with some pretty basic concepts.\"\n\nThe records said much the same\u2014sometimes tests and grades didn't tell the entire story, but in this case it seemed they did. So how did he find a loophole in the portal wards that I can't see?\n\nIndree was on the last desk drawer now, and she'd only had it open a moment when she frowned and drew out a crumpled piece of paper.\n\n\"Tane.\" She showed it to him.\n\nA schedule of student and faculty hours in the primary artifice workshop.\n\n\"Well that's definitely something,\" said Tane.\n\n\"The cousin,\" said Indree. \"Is he on campus now?\"\n\nTane looked over the guard roster. \"He should be on duty.\"\n\nIndree's eyes went unfocused a moment, and then, \"I've sent to Dean Greymond. She'll have him waiting for us in her office. Come on.\"\n\nWhen they were outside, away from Stonehand's ears, Kadka said, \"This is him, you think?\"\n\n\"It makes sense,\" said Tane. \"Lady Abena is supposed to share the airship designs with the Continent as a gesture of goodwill. That might look like a sign of weakness, if you were interested in magical superiority. He might have gone after the plans in the hopes of finding a way to sabotage tomorrow's launch.\"\n\nIndree was several steps ahead, and walking fast. \"He could also just be one of a hundred harmless idiots who thinks a first-year class was enough to show him how the whole world works. What we need to know is whether he could have taken his cousin's badge. Hurry up.\"\n\nGreymond's door, as usual, swung open before they knocked. She was waiting behind her desk. In a chair at the side of the room sat Dedric Cranst, a broad-shouldered human man with thinning brown hair, dressed in a University Guard uniform. He looked up nervously as they entered.\n\n\"Inspector Lovial,\" said Greymond, and gestured at the guardsman. \"As requested.\"\n\n\"What is all this?\" Cranst asked.\n\n\"Mister Cranst, I won't waste time,\" said Indree. \"Your cousin is Randolf Cranst, correct?\"\n\n\"Y\u2014yes, Inspector.\"\n\n\"Did he stay at your home the night before last?\" It was new, seeing Indree like this\u2014every inch the no-nonsense constable.\n\n\"Yes he did. He does sometimes, when his roommate is\u2026 you know, with someone. But what\u2014\"\n\n\"Would he have been able to take your badge between midnight and two o'clock the night before last, and again just after noon yesterday?\"\n\n\"What? No, he wouldn't do that.\" Dedric's eyes widened. \"Wait, those times\u2026 you don't think he\u2014\"\n\n\"Answer the question, Mister Cranst. Not whether you think he would or would not, but whether he had access to the badge.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I suppose while I was sleeping. And I wasn't on duty yesterday. I was out in the afternoon. Listen, Rand is a bit hot-headed, but he would never\u2026 what happened to that poor girl, that wasn't him.\"\n\n\"Do you know where your cousin is right now?\"\n\n\"I don't\u2026 I haven't seen him today.\"\n\nIndree was almost certainly using a truth-spell herself, but even so she glanced at Greymond, who gave her a slight nod. Tane didn't raise an objection\u2014it didn't sound to him like the man was lying, and two divinations were probably enough.\n\n\"Then we're done here,\" Indree said. \"Dean Greymond, please make certain that he is kept under watch until the constables arrive to take over. I don't want him getting word to his cousin.\" She didn't hesitate a moment before heading back out the door. Tane and Kadka hurried after.\n\n\"So this Cranst is mage we fought.\" Kadka easily matched Indree's pace, leaving Tane several steps behind.\n\n\"Looks like.\" Indree didn't break stride.\n\n\"How do we find him now?\" Kadka asked.\n\n\"We have cause to justify a divination focus,\" Indree said. \"We should be able to pull something from his room.\" She cursed under her breath. \"I've already sent to my superiors. They're arranging a warrant, but we can't afford to spend long digging around for hairs right now. If he tries to contact his cousin he'll realize something is wrong, and mask himself from seeking spells.\"\n\n\"Will these do?\" Tane asked. He fished around in his pocket and then thrust his hand between the two women. A few tangled strands of brown hair sat in his open palm.\n\nIndree stopped mid-stride to look down at the hairs, and then back to Tane, frowning. \"Where did you\u2026\"\n\n\"His pillow, when we were in his room. I had a feeling.\"\n\n\"Tane, that's against the law. We didn't have cause or warrant.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I'm no bluecap. You didn't break any rules.\"\n\n\"You're going to get yourself arrested one day. I hope you don't expect me to get you out of it.\" And then Indree's mouth tugged up at the corner, just a bit, and she snatched the hairs from his hand. \"Come on. We're wasting time.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "\"Any sign of Cranst?\" Dean greymond's voice, accompanied by a sudden pressure in his ears. She sounded nervous. As the University's liason to the investigation, she'd insisted Tane keep her informed\u2014she was more familiar with him than with Indree, which made the sending easier.\n\n\"We're just off the discs in Porthaven,\" Tane sent back through the open link. \"He's still masked, but Indree thinks we're getting closer.\"\n\nIndree's seeking spell had found a bearing on Cranst, but his Astral signature was blurred. A cursory masking\u2014probably not a sign that he knew they were coming\u2014but enough that even the divination focus couldn't give her more than a broad sense of his location until they were closer. She'd led them to Porthaven, and from there toward the north side of the harbor. Wherever they were going, it wasn't terribly far from the airship's drydock. The narrow streets were falling into shadow as the sun set overhead. It reminded Tane a little bit too much of the night before. He half-expected a burst of spellfire from the rooftops at any moment.\n\nIndree led them briskly through the streets and alleys, Cranst's hair clutched tight in one hand and her ancryst pistol in the other. He'd been taken aback when she'd drawn it from beneath her coat\u2014it was still hard to look at her and see a bluecap.\n\n\"How did you end up here, Ree?\"\n\n\"Indree,\" she corrected reflexively.\n\n\"Sorry. Indree. But really, why this? You were at the top of your class. You could be drafting spells for any of the manufacturing firms in Thaless for more money in a day than a constable makes in a month.\"\n\nIndree glanced over her shoulder, and something flickered across her eyes. \"Really? You're asking now?\"\n\nTane shrugged. \"It just\u2026 this isn't something you ever talked about.\" He didn't really expect an answer, but it was a distraction from his growing unease.\n\n\"You don't know me very well anymore, Tane.\" She was silent a moment, and then she surprised him. \"I wasn't angry when I learned the truth about you, you know. I already knew about your parents, and after I read your dissertation, I\u2026 well, I suppose I was angry. But not the way everyone else was. I just wanted to understand. I wanted you to explain.\n\nShe didn't look back again, just kept talking as she led the way. \"I didn't give up, after you disappeared. Everyone said you'd just run away. Even Allaea\u2026\" Her voice failed her, for just an instant. \"Even she said you weren't coming back. She always liked you, but she knew. Me, I didn't think you could do something like that. I thought something had happened to you. Someone had heard about the way you fooled the University and decided to punish you for it. It kept me awake at night.\n\n\"So I tried to find you. I cast seeking spells, but you were masked, which only scared me more. Someone was trying to keep you from me. I tried a focus, a hair you left in my bed, but even then you were too well hidden. The focus was just enough to get me a slight feeling every few days when the masking started to fade, before a new one went up. Not enough to find you. But I did my research. Looked into every seeking and masking spell I could find, tracked the times when the mask seemed to weaken. I kept trying. Every day, for weeks. And then one day there was a gap. I suppose they\u2014you\u2014thought no one would be looking by then. But I was.\n\n\"It didn't last very long, but it led me to Porthaven. I had an area. And every day I went back there, looking for some sign. Until one day I saw you, across the street, strolling through the fish market.\" Her fist clenched tighter around the strands of Cranst's hair. \"You weren't in trouble. No one had taken you away. You were just\u2026 there.\n\n\"It was just like Allaea said. She\u2026 she was always better at seeing things like that. I should have given up on you as soon as you left. And after that, I did.\" Still she didn't look at him, but she squared her shoulders and raised her chin a little higher. \"But I learned that I was good at that kind of divination. The kind the constabulary specializes in. And there are always people in this city in real trouble, people with families and friends who are just as scared and worried as I was. People who need help. So I decided to help.\"\n\nTane hung his head. \"I'm so sorry, Indree. I didn't mean to\u2026 I thought I was helping you. You would have been expelled too, if they'd thought you were part of it.\" I should have known she wouldn't quit. When has she ever?\n\n\"I don't care,\" Indree said flatly. \"I'm not looking for an apology, and I'm long past expecting to understand. I just wanted you to hear what it was like, not knowing. So if anyone else\"\u2014she glanced at Kadka, there\u2014\"is stupid enough to get close to you, maybe you don't put them through that.\"\n\nKadka didn't react at all to the rather pointed hint\u2014she appeared to be listening to something else entirely. And Tane recognized the look on her face.\n\n\"There's someone following us again, isn't there?\" He touched his watch case nervously, and then reached into his trouser pockets to check the charms there, better organized than the last time\u2014darkness on the right and charmglobe on the left, loaded and wound with a flash charm inside.\n\n\"Many someones,\" said Kadka. \"I think we are surrounded.\"\n\nIndree frowned. \"No, I\u2026\" Her eyes glazed a moment, and then, \"Spellfire, I was concentrating so much on Cranst, I didn't think\u2026 She's right. I can sense maybe a dozen, all around us. His cousin must have warned him. It's a trap, and I led us right into it.\"\n\nKadka had a knife in her hand now, and she bared her teeth. \"Not over yet.\"\n\n\"You're right.\" Indree raised her pistol and drew her baton from beneath her coat. Again, a cloud passed across her eyes. \"I've notified Stooketon Yard. They're tracking my location, and there were already men on the way to help take Cranst in. We only need to hold until they get here.\"\n\n\"Come then,\" said Kadka. \"Why wait to fight where they want?\" She sprinted ahead. Tane exchanged a look with Indree; she raised her shoulders slightly, and followed Kadka.\n\nA man in a black coat darted from an alley ahead to cut Kadka off. She didn't even slow, just lowered her shoulder and hit him full on. He went down. She didn't.\n\nTane heard the sound of the lingua coming from somewhere deeper in, and he recognized the words. Spellfire. \"Kadka!\" He lunged ahead, grabbed her arm, and pulled her back. A gout of silver flame poured from the shadowed mouth of the alley, barely missing her. Tane looked back, but there were already men emerging along the street behind.\n\n\"Stop!\" Indree pointed her pistol at a second black-clothed man emerging from the alley ahead\u2014the one who had cast the spellfire, Tane guessed. \"By the authority of Stooketon Yard, I demand you let us pass!\"\n\nMore came after him, from the side-streets ahead and behind, all dressed in black. Men and women, most human, but there were others too: a pair of dwarves, an elf, a kobold, a goblin, a gnome. Very soon the street was blocked by a half-dozen in either direction. A few of them brandished weapons, and one woman wore an ancryst pistol at her hip, but it was the unarmed ones Tane found most worrisome. By the extremist literature he'd found in Cranst's room, he had a feeling that most of them would be mages. Magic users tended to assume their spells were better than any weapon, and they rarely carried ancryst pistols or the like unless extensively trained\u2014their own magic would throw their shots off course.\n\nThe man Indree was aiming at laughed. \"Let you pass? You're in no position to make demands. Three of you, and two with no magic. You think an orc\"\u2014he spat the word with disgust\u2014\"can best a mage?\" He looked to Tane, ignoring Indree's pistol. \"You shouldn't have come after me, Carver. You're out of your depth.\"\n\n\"Cranst.\" It had to be. He was dressed in a black topcoat over dark clothes, but he hadn't bothered with the mask. There was a certain resemblance to Dedric, though Randolf was younger, with a stronger jaw and a full head of brown hair.\n\nPressure in his ears, and then Greymond's voice: \"Mister Carver, have you\u2014\"\n\n\"Not now!\"\n\nShe must have recognized the urgency in his words, because the pressure abated immediately.\n\n\"I told you to let the scrollcaster be,\" Cranst said. \"If you had, maybe less people would have gotten hurt. But I had to deal with it.\"\n\nBastian. Tane glanced at Kadka, and saw the same realization on her face. His fingers wrapped around the charm in his right pocket. It was the only one worth using at this close a range. Anything else would affect Indree and Kadka too.\n\nKadka snarled at Cranst. \"Enough talk. You want us dead, come try.\"\n\n\"Gladly,\" Cranst answered with a sour smile. \"One less orc in the world.\" He started to utter words in the lingua.\n\nOne advantage to pre-cast spells: they were much faster than speaking the words in the moment. \"Get ready to move,\" Tane whispered to Indree and Kadka. They were going to have to do the rest\u2014he wasn't going to be much use in a moment.\n\nHe drew his hand from his pocket, crushed the charm's seal, and threw the little roll of paper to the ground at his feet.\n\nThe street went black." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Kadka's eyes adjusted almost instantly to the sudden darkness, casting the world in washed-out shades of pale color. Amid cries of alarm and confusion, she threw herself to the side. Carver and Indree did the same.\n\nSilver spellfire roared across the space where they'd been standing.\n\nThe strange thing was, the flames didn't light the darkness at all. Kadka could see them clearly, but the light didn't go anywhere. The magelights along the side of the street were the same: globes of isolated silver-blue that illuminated only themselves. And yet the darkness wasn't absolute\u2014something filtered in from outside, like a sliver of starlight peeking through on a clouded night. Whatever charm Carver had worked, it seemed to stop magical illumination in its tracks, while allowing just enough natural light for those blessed with keen night eyes. Even under these circumstances, it was a wonder to see, like so many things in this city that so few seemed to notice.\n\nOther voices were already starting to chant in the strange language of magic that Carver called lingua. A quick sweep told Kadka that most of them were utterly blind in the dark, save for two dwarves, a goblin, and an elf\u2014those four moved like they could still see.\n\nKadka leapt for one of the dwarves, a woman chanting nonsense magical words. The ones who could see were the danger now, and spellcasters above the rest. A fist to the throat cut the spell off mid-cast, just like Carver had said. Blind them, distract them, shut them up. That was the gist of the advice he'd given her for fighting mages, and he'd provided the darkness already\u2014it was only fair she do her part.\n\nThe goblin came at her next, and to her disappointment he didn't try a spell, just swiped at her with a knife of his own. She grabbed his wrist, spun, and heaved, lifting him over her shoulder and slamming him down on the ground.\n\nIndree's half-elven eyes must have been keen enough to pierce the dark too, because she aimed her pistol at the second dwarf. But she didn't shoot. Instead, she spoke a sequence of magic words\u2014quick and practiced, unlike some of their attackers\u2014and from nowhere, bands of translucent silver-blue wrapped around the dwarf's mouth and wrists and ankles. Indree flicked the barrel of her pistol downward and spoke another word, and he was forced to his knees. One of the humans stumbled blindly at her, and she backhanded him across the face with the baton in her other hand. He went down, at least for the moment.\n\nKadka was impressed, and not just by the spell. The woman knew how to take care of herself.\n\nCarver, not so much. Unable to see in the dark, he'd pressed himself to the ground just ahead, trying to stay out of the way, but a kobold man was only a few steps from tripping over him. Kadka lifted the gasping dwarven woman by the collar and heaved her at the kobold. Both fell in a heap, and Carver scrambled away from the noise. Behind her, Kadka heard the elven man utter the first words of a spell; she whirled and threw her knife in the same motion. The blade bit deep into the elf's shoulder, and a scream of pain signalled his broken concentration.\n\nSomeone else was muttering the words of a spell, but before Kadka could find him by the sound, Carver's voice interrupted. \"Idiot! If you start throwing spellfire without a precise target, you're going to burn each other alive!\" The strange words ended abruptly.\n\nShe was starting to understand what he'd said about most mages not being trained for battle.\n\nA flicker of movement ahead. Kadka looked up to see Cranst sprinting away down the street. Apparently his confidence had only lasted as long as his advantage. She drew another knife and hurled it, but at the same moment a tall human finished speaking a spell, and a barrier of silver-blue energy blossomed from his hands to span the street. Kadka's blade rebounded from the shield, sending silver ripples over its surface. She had another knife in hand before it hit the ground, but the way forward was blocked. Cranst was out of reach.\n\nThe goblin was up again, and he'd given up on a fair fight\u2014he was sneaking up on Carver, who had crawled away to huddle against the wall. The goblin raised a blade. No time for Kadka to get there. \"Carver, watch out!\"\n\nIndree spun toward Carver and aimed her pistol at a spot on the left side of the silver shield, where no one was standing at all. There was a silvery flash from the barrel, and at almost the same moment the shield rippled bright where the ball neared it and banked away. An instant later the goblin man cried out and dropped.\n\n\"Not bad!\" Kadka said, grinning wide. She liked this woman.\n\nAnother man staggered past, blind in the dark. He flinched at the sound of her voice, but he couldn't avoid the hilt of her knife against his temple. He collapsed. Normally she might have killed him outright\u2014he'd attacked them first, after all\u2014but there were still questions to ask, and she suspected Indree would object to a slaughter. Better if they could be friends.\n\nBefore she could find another target, a wave of silver force struck her in the side, throwing her against hard brick. She hit the wall laughing, even as her arm twisted and her vision blurred. It hurt, but it was magic. Nothing she'd ever done before warmed her blood like this. She didn't think she'd ever get tired of it.\n\nShe landed on her feet, searching the direction the spell had come from. The dwarven woman had risen to her knees, and she was already casting another spell.\n\nKadka charged, snarling for effect\u2014people in the city didn't seem to like when she showed her teeth. The dwarf's eyes widened, and she fell back on her hands, scrambling to get out of the way.\n\nShe didn't get far.\n\nKadka's momentum carried her foot hard into the other woman's windpipe, and the dwarf went down, choking and grasping her throat. Won't be speaking again soon.\n\nShe glanced from side to side, looking for someone else to fight.\n\nAnd then, suddenly, she was standing in the dim light of the evening once more. Carver's charm was spent." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "The darkness was gone, but Tane didn't much like what there was to see.\n\nThere were still seven of them standing, one holding a shield-spell to cover Cranst's escape. Kadka closed with a gnome who was chanting a spell and backing away too swiftly for his illusory camouflage to keep pace. Indree had stowed her spent pistol; she was speaking in the lingua and fending off a big human man with her baton, all while maintaining her shackling spell on a dwarf nearby. That was impressive\u2014most mages couldn't hold more than one spell and still do much else. A wave of force erupted from her hand, hurling the man she'd been fighting against the magical shield blocking the street. The shield flickered under the force of her spell, but held; the man fell to the ground on his hands and knees.\n\nThe ladies were holding their own, but they couldn't last against so many. If just one mage gets a spell off\u2026 But it wasn't a spell that spurred Tane into motion. As Indree turned to face the other attackers, a human woman put her back against the shield and took aim with an ancryst pistol. From there, the magical force of the barrier wouldn't interfere with the shot\u2014it would send it right into Indree's back.\n\n\"Ree!\" Tane didn't have time to think, just threw himself forward, yanking the daze-wand from his belt as he moved.\n\nHe leapt at the woman with the pistol and jabbed toward her torso, hoping for the best. They collided hard; she caught the wand with one hand, holding the end inches from her chest. The pistol went off in a silver flash. The two of them pitched to the ground in a tangle of limbs.\n\nThe woman held the wand tight and battered Tane's head and shoulders with her expended pistol. He gritted his teeth and pushed, avoiding the blows as best he could. Then, all at once, he relaxed his arm. She wasn't expecting it. Her grip weakened for an instant, and he shoved again with all his strength. The copper tip of the wand touched her chest, and she went limp. The already cloudy peridot set above the grip was entirely consumed by opaque white, and a crack ran down the center as the last of its structural integrity was utterly consumed by magic.\n\nTane rolled off the woman, panting. His eyes found Indree. Still on her feet. \"Thank the Astra,\" he breathed.\n\n\"Stop where you are!\" A new voice from behind. Tane lifted his head to see a dozen uniformed bluecaps approaching from behind, pistols drawn.\n\nSome of the remaining attackers threw down their weapons; others tried to run, but the constables restrained them with shackling spells similar to the one Indree was maintaining on the dwarven man. The human holding the shield bolted down a side-alley, and the shimmering barrier flickered and vanished. Three constables were after him the instant the way was clear.\n\n\"About time,\" Indree said, but she was smiling, and the relief was clear on her face. \"Take them to the Yard. We'll want to question them.\" The constables closed in, binding the prisoners with shackles and brass muzzles to stop the mages from casting.\n\nKadka pulled Tane to his feet and clapped him on the back. \"Carver! Is clever thing, this darkness!\"\n\nIndree had released her spell on the dwarf now that he was bound, and she was tapping a small amount of silver powder into her pistol\u2014firing charms didn't carry much force unless enhanced with silver, but the powder was consumed along with the charm, requiring a new load for each shot. \"Don't give him all the credit. You must have dropped at least five yourself. That was\u2026 impressive.\"\n\nKadka bared her teeth in a wide grin. \"Is more they were not. And you are not so bad yourself.\"\n\n\"I had spells, and my pistol. You took more of them with a few knives.\" Indree finished tamping the ancryst ball and charm into the barrel of her gun, and looked up at Tane. \"And the charm helped. That was quick thinking, Tane. It probably saved our lives.\" She glanced at the woman he'd dazed, still limp on the ground. \"Thank y\u2014\" Her eyes widened and she broke off mid-word. One hand dipped into her pocket, and came out with a strand of brown hair. \"Cranst! We might still catch him!\" And then she was off down the street, with Tane and Kadka sprinting after.\n\nCranst hadn't gotten far, as it turned out. He was waiting at the end of the road where it met the harbor, just a few blocks south of the airship and its towering scaffolds. He must have known that his ambush had failed\u2014that there was no escape while Indree was alive and still had a focus on him. A forced rictus of a smile stretched across his face, but Tane saw fear in his eyes. The last faint light of the setting sun glinted off the long knife in his hand.\n\n\"Drop the weapon, Cranst.\" Indree levelled her pistol at him.\n\n\"They were supposed to stop you,\" Cranst said, his voice trembling. \"You weren't supposed to come after me.\"\n\n\"Did you kill Allaea?\" The pistol shook slightly in Indree's hands, but she kept her voice steady. \"Confess, and it will go toward a merciful sentence.\"\n\n\"She wasn't supposed to be there. Another failure. I\u2026 I made a mess of it.\"\n\n\"A mess of what?\" A raw edge crept into Indree's voice as her composure failed. \"What did she die for? What were you doing?\"\n\n\"You\u2026 you won't get anything from me!\" His voice broke, but he raised his knife in both hands. \"I may have failed, but the time of the magical will come again! You can't stop it!\"\n\nTane took a step toward him. \"Cranst, don't!\"\n\n\"For the Mage Emperor!\" Cranst screamed, and drove the knife into his chest with both hands.\n\nTane surged forward as Cranst collapsed to the ground, face first. \"Get help! He might\u2014\"\n\n\"There's no point.\" Indree approached slowly, staring at the crumpled body. \"The blade went through his heart. I can feel him fading from the Astra. He killed her, and he can't even tell me why.\" With a strangled cry of rage, she aimed a savage kick at Cranst's head. \"Why?\"\n\nCranst jerked limply at the impact, but he was beyond answering.\n\nTane wanted to say something, offer some comfort, but he didn't think she'd welcome that from him just then.\n\nInstead, it was Kadka who went to her. She placed a fur-tufted hand on Indree's shoulder. \"You found man who killed her. This is not nothing.\"\n\n\"It's not enough,\" said Indree. But she didn't pull away.\n\n\"He might have something that can tell us more,\" Tane said, and started to pat down the body, trying to avoid the spreading blood. \"Here.\" A small purse, tucked into an inner pocket of Cranst's coat. Tane emptied it into his palm. A plain iron key and\u2026 \"A badge?\" Not University Guard, though\u2014this wasn't what he'd used to get into the workshop.\n\nA gold crown and staff on a circle of deep purple. The Mage Emperor's sigil.\n\n\"Look at this,\" Tane said, holding it up. \"For the wards on his bolthole? Or maybe\u2026 all the magical extremist rhetoric, and those others with him\u2026 some sort of cult, like Stonehand thought?\"\n\nIndree leaned down to look. \"It could be. We'll question the others, they might\u2014\" She stopped, frowned. \"Tane?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"He said something about a scrollcaster.\" She was glaring at him now, in that terrifying way only she could. \"What. Scrollcaster.\"\n\n\"Spellfire, I nearly forgot!\" Tane locked eyes with Kadka over Indree's shoulder. \"We need to get to Bastian. Now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "At the bottom of the short stairway off the alley, the door to Bastian's workshop stood half-open.\n\nTane couldn't imagine that was a good sign.\n\nIndree stopped Tane and Kadka with a raised hand, and then waved the constables forward. Four bluecaps followed her in, pistols and batons at the ready\u2014she'd left the others to bring in the prisoners.\n\nTane glanced at Kadka, who tipped her head toward the door. He shrugged and nodded, and they stepped inside, disregarding Indree's signal.\n\nThe bodies were the first thing Tane noticed. Six of them, and none looked to have died very pleasantly. He recognized four as Bastian's \"friends\", three humans sprawled on the floor and a goblin bent over a worktable with terrible burns across his back. The last two must have been with the intruders, a human and an elf slumped against one another, both in black coats and trousers like Cranst and the rest had worn. At first glance, there was no sign of a little sprite in a green mask and waistcoat.\n\nThe room had been thoroughly ransacked. Dark scorch marks marred the walls at various points. Books littered the floor, and the dais beside Bastian's little library had been toppled, the tiny furniture left in pieces. Tables had been shifted and tipped over in what must have been a violent fight for the scrollcaster, and artifacts were scattered everywhere, most of them broken. The charms must have been incinerated with spellfire\u2014only a few remained intact amid drifts of ash and scraps.\n\nIndree gave the two of them an annoyed glance as they entered, but she didn't waste time on reprimands. \"We're looking for a brass scrollcaster set with a peridot,\" she instructed the bluecaps. \"It's possible they didn't find it. Cranst made implications, but he didn't say anything outright. Spread out and search.\" The constables did as she ordered, sifting through the mess. Tane had explained the situation to her on the way\u2014she hadn't been terribly pleased, but she'd been more concerned with retrieving the caster than scolding him, so far.\n\n\"How did they get in?\" Tane wondered aloud. \"There were wards when we came.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter now,\" said Indree. \"Do either of you have any idea where he might have put the scrollcaster?\"\n\nTane shook his head. \"No, I\u2014\"\n\nHe felt a pressure in his ears, and then Bastian appeared just in front of his face. One moment the space was empty, and the next, a fat little sprite in a masquerade mask hovered in front of him on iridescent wings. Tane took a startled step back. Beside him, Kadka did the same.\n\n\"Hello!\" Bastian said. \"Mister Carver and my dear Kadka, I'm so pleased to see you again. If only it were under better circumstances. I'd intended to contact you shortly, but my detections tell me you've already seen this unspeakable tragedy for yourselves.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Indree demanded. \"What are you two looking at?\" She waved a hand through the air in front of Tane's face; it passed through Bastian as if he wasn't there.\n\n\"You don't see?\" Kadka asked. She mimicked Indree's gesture, passing her hand through Bastian's belly. Her eyes widened.\n\nIndree raised an eyebrow. \"I don't see anything. A sending?\"\n\nTane nodded. \"The contact I told you about. This was his shop.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, I did detect a number of bluecaps with you,\" said the illusory Bastian. \"How strange this must look to them! I'm afraid they won't see or hear me, nor I them\u2014a shared sending seemed the most efficient way to contact you both, but I haven't any divination foci for your friends. Under any other circumstances I would be very cross with you for leading the authorities to my humble shop, but tonight I can hardly complain!\"\n\n\"Ask him what happened,\" Indree said urgently. \"We need to know where the scrollcaster is.\"\n\n\"I know. Let me talk to the man.\" Tane waved Indree away. She scowled at him, but moved to help her men search the wreckage. \"What happened here, Bastian?\"\n\n\"A young man came in with two others. He knew the proper procedures, my secret knock. A pity. I'll have to change it now, and I did rather like the rhythm. Suffice it to say, there was nothing overly suspicious about them, other than a certain nervousness. I suspect now that their leader must have been the masked student we discussed\u2014not masked this time, of course. He would have known how to get in the door.\"\n\n\"Dark hair and eyes, a sharpish jawline?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes that sounds like the man!\"\n\nCranst. He must have come straight from Bastian's shop to the street where they'd been ambushed. \"Go on,\" said Tane.\n\n\"My friends searched them for weapons and found nothing. The young men acted only after our guard was lowered. One of them raised a shield while the others cast spellfire at the warding glyphs around the room. It wasn't terribly swift or skillful, but I must admit, we were wholly unprepared for such a barbaric attack! There is a certain honor among my colleagues, criminal or no. A certain way of doing things. But this\u2026 It simply isn't done!\" Bastian fluttered his wings in obvious agitation. \"They were successful in damaging the wards, in any event, even with the redundancies I had in place. After that, more came. My friends were able to get me out through a passage in the back, at a\u2026 rather terrible cost.\" He hung his head. \"But I am afraid I have let you down rather gravely, Mister Carver. These\u2026 these savages destroyed the scrollcaster you entrusted to me.\"\n\n\"But you still have focus for us,\" said Kadka. \"Why take these when you go, and not caster?\"\n\n\"I had the scrollcaster on my desk, in plain sight. By the time I gathered my wits, it was already too late to save it. I fled with nothing but my life, I assure you! I have the foci only because I store my collection at a separate location. I do have resources beyond this shop, my dear! One must be ready to relocate quickly, in this business!\" Bastian puffed out his chest slightly, as if that was a matter of personal pride.\n\n\"There's nothing here,\" Indree said from across the room. \"What does this contact of yours have to say?\"\n\nTane didn't want to answer. She wasn't going to like this, and he couldn't blame her.\n\nKadka had no such hesitation. \"Was Cranst. Scrollcaster is gone. Destroyed.\"\n\n\"Damn it!\" Indree slammed a hand down on one of the tables. \"If you'd just told me about it sooner\u2014\"\n\n\"I know!\" Tane snapped, and then, after a breath, \"I'm not happy about this either. But\u2026 you would have taken it, and then we'd never have gotten anything out of Bastian. He was never going to talk to a bluecap.\"\n\n\"Oh dear,\" the Bastian figment said with a frown, and peered around as if searching for Indree and the others. His eyes passed over them, unseeing. \"I hope I haven't gotten you in trouble. It is true that I wouldn't have spoken to a constable, if that makes any difference at all.\"\n\nBut Indree couldn't hear him, and by the look on her face it wouldn't have mattered much if she could have. \"Maybe that's true,\" she said, \"but it wasn't your decision to make. I know you think you're the smartest man in every room, but\u2026 Spellfire, Tane, I should take you in for this. Obstructing my investigation.\"\n\n\"If that's what you want to do, I can't stop you,\" said Tane. \"But at least let me get what I can here first. Bastian might still have something we can use.\"\n\nIndree looked at him for a long moment, prodding her cheek with her tongue. Finally she nodded, and gestured for him to finish.\n\nTane looked back to Bastian. \"Were you able to get anything from the caster before they took it?\"\n\n\"Not as much as I would like,\" said Bastian. \"But I was able to discern what it was used for last. It may have sent any number of papers first, but the last thing it did was receive.\"\n\nTane narrowed his eyes. \"What would he have been receiving? Some sort of instructions? From where?\"\n\n\"If only I could say!\" Bastian's voice positively throbbed with lament. \"It was taken before I could find anything more!\"\n\n\"It's\u2026 fine, Bastian.\" He didn't want the little sprite to burst a blood vessel.\n\n\"You can be proud, little man,\" said Kadka. \"You try to help, even at high price. Is good thing.\"\n\n\"I did nothing more than my duty to Lady Abena and the Protectorate!\" Bastian said, though he looked rather pleased with himself beneath his mask. \"I'm only sorry I can't tell you more. But if there is nothing else you need, this attack has left me with a great deal of work to do.\"\n\n\"Go,\" said Tane. \"But if you remember anything else\u2026\"\n\n\"Of course, Mister Carver! I want nothing more than to see the man who did this brought to justice!\" The illusory sprite turned to Kadka. \"And my dearest Kadka, my offer is and shall always remain open. You need only contact my friend Issik.\"\n\n\"Need to finish this,\" Kadka said. \"But when is done, who knows?\"\n\n\"Ah, how you toy with my hopes. A delight, as ever!\" Bastian's sending bowed as deep as his round little body could manage. \"I wish you both the best of luck!\" And then he was gone.\n\nIndree noticed the change right away. \"Well?\" she said. \"You said something about receiving a message.\"\n\n\"He told me the case was last used to receive, not to send,\" said Tane\n\n\"To receive what?\"\n\n\"That's the question,\" Tane said. \"He didn't know. New instructions, maybe?\"\n\n\"Means he was working for someone, then, yes?\" Kadka said.\n\n\"It might,\" said Indree. \"But it could have come from a subordinate, too. One of the people with him tonight. Until we know what was sent, all we can say for certain is that someone sent it. It's something to ask our prisoners about, at least.\"\n\n\"So,\" said Tane, offering his hands for binding, \"are you going to throw me in a cell now?\"\n\n\"I should.\" Indree sighed and shook her head, and for a brief, startling moment, Tane could have sworn he saw a smile. \"You're an arrogant dunce, Tane Carver, but I do believe you meant well. And we still have something to work with. I suppose you can keep your freedom for now.\"\n\n\"That's what I hoped you'd say. Time to do some questioning, then?\"\n\n\"It's time for me to spend a long night questioning the prisoners,\" said Indree, \"and for you to go home. Without arguing. Because you understand that I'm already turning a blind eye to several misdemeanors, and there is no force in the Astra that would convince the Chief Constable to let you into the Yard unshackled.\"\n\nThere wasn't much room to fight her there. \"Fine. I suppose I could use some sleep.\"\n\n\"I'll send someone with you, in case Cranst laid any other traps.\" Indree turned to Kadka. \"I don't know that you're any better than Tane, but please, stop him if he tries to do something stupid like sneak into Stooketon Yard?\"\n\nKadka grinned. \"If plan is too bad\u2026 maybe I will stop. Could be fun to watch.\"\n\n\"I shudder to think what the two of you might consider a good plan, but I suppose that's the best I'm going to get. Now go. I have to get these bodies back to the Yard.\" Indree gestured to a pair of constables. \"See them home.\"\n\nTane turned to leave, hesitated, and looked back. \"Indree?\"\n\nShe raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"We'll be back tomorrow. I'm not giving up on this.\"\n\nAnother ghost of a smile. \"I didn't think for a moment that you would. Greymond's office, first bell. I'll expect you there.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Greymond scowled at Tane from behind her desk. \"Would you mind telling me why I am only hearing about this scrollcaster now? Is it physically possible for you to tell the truth, Mister Carver?\"\n\nIndree answered before Tane could. \"Some secrecy was necessary to appease his contacts in the black market. I agree that he went too far, but what's done is done.\"\n\nTane glanced at her, surprised. She looked all too much like an official representative of Stooketon Yard in her constable's uniform with her blue cap over pinned hair\u2014he hadn't expected her to defend his interference. She ignored him, her gaze fixed on Greymond, but Kadka caught Tane's eye and grinned knowingly.\n\nGreymond hardly looked satisfied, but she moved on. \"And the prisoners? Did they give you anything?\"\n\nIndree shook her head. \"Not very much. I questioned every one of them with truth-spells, and as far as I can tell, they don't know anything. A handful of overly suggestible students, and the rest pulled from various Halls of the Astra.\" That wasn't surprising. Astralites already worshipped the source of magic as a divine entity\u2014it wouldn't be a huge jump from there to magical superiority. \"They responded to pro-magical literature like the pamphlet we found in Cranst's room. Apparently he held regular meetings. Some of them are\u2026 rather fanatical, but they weren't told anything about his overarching plans. They didn't have badges like we found on him, either.\" She indicated Cranst's pouch, lying on Greymond's desk. \"Divinations on the badge and key confirmed that they belonged to Cranst, but nothing beyond that.\"\n\n\"Can we assume, then, that the matter is closed? Cranst all but admitted to the murder, by your account, and seems to have been the motivating force behind these lunatics.\"\n\nTane shook his head. \"I don't think it's that simp\u2014\"\n\nGreymond interrupted him with a short phrase in the lingua, and her office door swung open.\n\nChancellor Nieris strode into the room in an extravagant purple coat and frilled crimson cravat. \"Thank you, Liana,\" he said briskly, and held the door for the woman behind him.\n\nShe was human, perhaps a few years past forty, with deep brown skin\u2014darker than Indree's, who was of Anjican descent on her human mother's side. Her hair was short, dense black curls trimmed close to the scalp. She wore very fine clothes: a pale blue full-skirted longcoat buttoned in silver, with black boots beneath. Tane knew her instantly, even before Nieris introduced her. The air of authority she carried could only belong to a scion of one of the Great Houses, and only one human house traced its roots back to Estian-occupied Anjica before the Mage War.\n\n\"May I introduce Lady Abena Jasani, Protector of the Realm,\" Nieris said. \"Lady Abena, I know you are familiar with Dean Greymond.\"\n\nLady Abena nodded her head. \"It is always a pleasure, Liana. I appreciate\u2014\"\n\n\"I was glad to help, Your Ladyship, but the constabulary hasn't needed a great deal of assistance. I've done little enough.\" Greymond went pale then, realizing too late that she'd interrupted the Lady Protector. \"Oh I\u2026 I'm sorry, I\u2014\"\n\nLady Abena smiled. \"Great diviners are always ahead of their time, they say. I take no offense.\"\n\nNieris continued around the room. \"This is Constable Inspector Indree Lovial, and I imagine you've heard of Mister Tane Carver.\" He frowned when he got to Kadka. \"And Kadka, formerly of the University Guard. I confess, I'm not certain why she is here.\"\n\nKadka returned his gaze steadily. \"Helping.\"\n\n\"She has been a great help, Lady Abena,\" Indree said quickly, dipping her head respectfully to the Lady Protector. \"Without her, I think last night's ambush would have gone very differently.\"\n\n\"Then I thank you, Kadka,\" said Lady Abena. \"If you have been of use to the investigation, you are welcome here. Or is there a problem, Chancellor Nieris?\"\n\n\"Of course not. As I said before, Miss Kadka, I was very sorry that I had to\u2026\" Nieris trailed off under Kadka's yellow-eyed stare. \"Well, in any event, we have important things to discuss.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Lady Abena. \"I am very interested to hear about what you have found, Inspector Lovial. Chancellor Nieris assures me that your efforts have been most admirable.\" She turned to Tane, then; his instinct was to bow, but no one else was, so he just dipped his head low. \"And Tane Carver. I have long been interested in meeting you. I read your dissertation, years ago. You raised some very interesting points. Of course, my family saw that I was instructed in magical theory by the finest tutors, but not everyone has that privilege. I would not presume to question my predecessor's decisions, but had I been Protector of the Realm at that time\u2026 well, there is no use speculating, is there?\"\n\n\"No, Your Ladyship, I suppose there isn't.\" Tane swallowed nervously. Protectors of the Realm were elected in the Senate of Houses, and didn't demand the same subservience as born royalty like the Kaiser of Belgrier or theocrats like the Lord Provost of Estia, but still he felt extremely shabby standing before her in his frayed waistcoat. \"I'm\u2026 glad you found my work interesting, at least.\" That actually did mean something, coming from her. There were few in the Protectorate's upper ranks who would better understand what he'd been trying to say.\n\nAbena Jasani, like every Protector of the Realm before her, lacked any magic of her own.\n\nNo mage could hold Audland's highest office. It was one of the nation's founding principles, to signify that although the Protectorate was founded as a haven for the magical, they did not hold those born with magecraft to be superior to those without. And perhaps more importantly, to prove to the nations of the Continent that they didn't need to fear another Mage Emperor. It made for a strange political reality that in a country so reliant on magic, a senate of houses made wealthy and powerful by magecraft was forced to select a leader from those born without the gift. Less affluent families prayed to the Astra for their children to be mages; in the great houses, the magicless were groomed all their lives for the possibility that they might one day govern the nation. And unique among the highest positions in Audland, Lord and Lady Protectors were almost never elvish, because the elvish were almost never magicless.\n\nLady Abena smiled. \"Perhaps one day, after I have seen my airship into the sky, we can speak more about what you wrote.\" She looked back to Indree. \"But for now, I must know what your investigation has uncovered. Please, Constable Inspector.\"\n\nIndree summarized the investigation up to the events of the previous night, going so far as to credit Tane and Kadka's assistance as indispensable. Tane wasn't sure if she really meant it or if she was just trying to make the story sound better for Lady Abena, but it was nice to hear either way.\n\n\"You see, Lady Abena?\" Nieris said. \"The matter is dealt with, as I promised. Cranst was behind the murder, and his little cult won't be a problem any longer.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Chancellor Nieris, but I'm not so certain,\" said Indree. \"There are still things we don't know. Cranst shouldn't have been able to bypass the portal wards on campus to begin with.\"\n\nNieris waved a dismissive hand. \"We will look into that, of course, but for now the wards have been tightened and the threat is gone. What matters is that the airship launch can proceed safely.\"\n\nIndree frowned. \"I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"You understand, Inspector,\" Nieris said firmly, \"that it would not reflect well on anyone if the ceremony were to be put off now. You have done a great deal to assure that does not happen. On behalf of the University, I thank you. The Chief Constable will certainly be hearing from me about your work here.\"\n\n\"You\u2026 you have to be joking! Tane sputtered. \"You can't be that arrogant.\" He could have screamed. The same as it always goes. Reputations to uphold. It wouldn't do to announce that the University's mages can make mistakes.\n\nNieris gave Tane a look that could have frozen over the Audish Channel. \"You are out of line, Mister Carver.\"\n\n\"Out of line? A man opened a portal inside your supposedly unbreakable wards and murdered a student! My friend!\" Everyone was looking at him now, but he didn't stop. \"Cranst didn't break those wards alone. He wasn't close to capable of that. We know he was receiving messages from someone, and we don't know who.\" Tane snatched up the pouch from Greymond's desk, emptied the badge and key into his hand, and lifted them for all to see. \"A badge like this implies an organization, and we don't know that we've caught them all. There is still a very real chance someone out there has one like it, which means they have access to wherever Cranst was hiding. And probably to anything he sent out of the artifice workshop. If they're planning to sabotage the airship, they might well have the plans they need to do it. You're a fool if you ignore that!\"\n\n\"Tane!\" Dean Greymond looked absolutely mortified, and she glanced nervously at the Lady Protector.\n\nWhich reminded Tane where the true power lay here. He spun to face Lady Abena. \"Your Ladyship, please. You have to postpone this until we know more.\"\n\n\"I apologize for this inexcusable outburst, Lady Abena,\" Nieris said hastily. \"Mister Carver, that is more than enough. You will remove yourself immediately, or I will have you removed.\"\n\nKadka stepped in front of Tane, her thick jaw set stubbornly. \"No. We stay. Carver is right. You should listen.\"\n\nTane pushed past her. \"This is between me and the chancellor, Kadka.\" He gave her a pointed look, tried to tell her with his eyes what he couldn't say aloud. Stay out of this. You don't have to go down with me. But she only stared at the chancellor, unflinching.\n\nNieris rubbed his temples. \"Have you both taken leave of your senses? I can have the Guard\u2014\"\n\nLady Abena held up one hand. \"That will not be necessary, Talain,\" she said, and then to Tane, \"I admire your conviction, Mister Carver, and I share your concerns.\"\n\n\"Then you'll postpone?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I truly wish that I could, but the ceremony must go forward. Too much depends on it. You must understand: we are a small nation, and the larger ones across the Channel have no love of us or our magic. Smaller conflicts have been piling on one another for years, and I fear they will soon lead to a war we cannot afford. My airships and the promise they represent are, I believe, the best hope of a lasting peace. Perhaps even a chance to better the lives of our magical cousins on the Continent. But if the dignitaries attending tonight sense that something is awry with the launch, that opportunity could be lost. A hint of doubt is all it would take.\"\n\nThat was a hard thing to argue against. For centuries now, the Protectorate hadn't gone more than thirty years at a time absent some conflict with the nations that bordered the Audish Channel on the Calenean side. Each had reacted to the Mage War differently, but they were all wary of magic to some degree. In Estia, the remnant of the old empire had turned to a religious dogma that called magecraft a corruption of the soul\u2014though they somehow justified ancryst engines to keep their naval presence strong. In Belgrier, they saw the magical as a danger, segregating them into ghettos and workhouses. Even in Rhien, the least severe of the three, those with magic in their blood were allowed to live as citizens only under constant government oversight. Lady Abena had long preached improved ties of trade and travel and diplomacy as the most practical solution to the problem, even before she had been named Protector of the Realm.\n\n\"So what, then?\" Tane said. \"We just\u2026 close our eyes and hope nothing goes wrong?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Lady Abena. \"We ensure it does not. My Mageblades will secure the launch site itself, and there are few who would dare to stand against them, as I'm sure you know.\" She looked to Indree. \"But I would also ask that Stooketon Yard send men to patrol the whole of Porthaven, and conduct a full search of the area for any remaining saboteurs before the ceremony begins this evening. And during the event, perhaps a number of constables in dress attire among the guests?\"\n\nIndree nodded. \"Of course, Your Ladyship. I will see it done. Cranst ambushed us not far from the airship, and it seems likely he would have kept his hiding place near there. We may yet end this before the ceremony starts. If not, I will personally coordinate a covert detail.\"\n\n\"Your dedication speaks highly of you, Constable Inspector,\" said Lady Abena. \"And Mister Carver, Miss Kadka: whatever your reservations, I ask that you help however you can. I know you have both been invaluable to this investigation. The Protectorate needs you now.\"\n\nIt was almost exactly what Tane had told Bastian the day before, but it was hard to see it as the same sort of cheap trick when it came from the Protector of the Realm herself. \"I\u2026 I'll do my best, Your Ladyship.\"\n\nKadka inclined her head. \"Too far in to not go farther. I want to see what end looks like.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Lady Abena spread her hands in a wide gesture. \"All of you, for everything you have done and the work to come. Now, I believe it would be best not to delay any longer.\"\n\nTane left with Indree and Kadka, doing his best to pretend he didn't notice Greymond and Nieris watching him with disapproving eyes. I suppose this isn't going to leave me as well positioned with the University as I'd hoped. But it had needed saying, and no one else would have. The only thing he regretted was dragging Kadka into it.\n\nWhen they were outside, Indree turned to him. \"Tane? I'm going to need that badge and key.\"\n\nHe still had Cranst's empty pouch clutched in one hand, the key and badge in the other. He looked down at them, and hesitated. \"Doesn't it seem too easy to assume Cranst's bolthole was in Porthaven? They obviously knew we were coming. Why lead us right to the place they're trying to hide?\"\n\n\"Besides the fact that they thought we'd be dead?\" But Indree didn't sound very certain. \"I\u2026 don't entirely disagree, Tane. But I'm acting under request from the Lady Protector now. This is the best lead we have. We can't ignore it for a hunch. Even if we don't find anything, a heavy constabulary presence in Porthaven might discourage any attempts to sabotage the airship.\" She prodded her cheek with her tongue a moment, and then, \"But I don't need you two patrolling the docks. If you come up with something better and decide to follow it up, I don't see any harm in that. As long as you don't find some way to cause a diplomatic incident at the launch ceremony.\"\n\n\"No promises,\" said Tane with a slight smile.\n\n\"You were never much for keeping them anyway,\" Indree said. \"I do need the badge and key, though. I can't let you keep important evidence. We'll need them if we do find his hiding place.\"\n\nTane stowed the contents of his hand in Cranst's pouch, and handed it over.\n\n\"Good luck,\" said Indree. \"And Tane\u2026 be careful.\" She turned to Kadka. \"Don't let him get himself killed.\" Before either one of them could answer, she walked briskly away.\n\nAfter a moment, Kadka said, \"She will not be happy when she finds you kept key and badge.\"\n\nTane rubbed his neck sheepishly. \"You noticed?\"\n\n\"I guessed.\" Kadka grinned as he plucked the key and badge from his sleeve. \"What does she have?\"\n\n\"A silver stave and a spare key to my office.\"\n\n\"So she can unlock door when she comes later to put you in cell. This is thoughtful of you.\"\n\n\"I'm nothing if not considerate.\" Tane flipped the badge into the air and caught it, glancing at the glyphs on the back side. \"She's not going to find a place to use this in Porthaven. I still might.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nTane looked away. \"Kadka\u2026 maybe you shouldn't come. It's bad enough that I lost you your position with the Guard, but now Nieris is angry with me. With both of us, after you backed me in there. Which you shouldn't have done. Making an enemy of the chancellor could make things very difficult for you in Thaless. It's probably best if you aren't seen with me anymore.\"\n\nKadka laughed. \"I am not afraid of skinny elf man with all his frills. If you go alone, how do I earn my part of pay?\"\n\n\"You earned it three saving my lifes ago. I'll give you your share. You don't have to\u2014\"\n\n\"Carver. Stop. Like I say to your Lady Protector: I come too far now to not see end. Tell me where we go.\"\n\n\"Spellfire, don't be stubborn about this. I'm trying to help you!\"\n\n\"Want to help? Let me say what is best for me.\"\n\nTane threw up his hands. \"Fine! But when things get bad, don't say I didn't warn you.\"\n\nShe just grinned that sharp-toothed grin. \"Because is so good, this far?\"\n\nTane tried to hold his glare, but a snorted laugh forced its way out of his nose. \"Fair point.\"\n\n\"So. Where to look?\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026 still working on that part,\" he admitted grudgingly. \"We saw the room he came from through that portal in the workshop. There might have been some clue there.\"\n\n\"Was blurry. Couldn't see much.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Tane. \"But\u2026 there had to be something.\"\n\n\"There was sound,\" Kadka said.\n\n\"Probably just an instability in the portal.\" He frowned. \"Except\u2026 we heard it twice. If it was just random sounds pulled through the Astra, would we have heard the same noise twice?\"\n\n\"I still say it sounds like tunvok howling.\"\n\n\"Right.\" She'd mentioned that before, but he hadn't paid it much mind at the time. \"Some sort of animal, you said. What is it, exactly?\"\n\n\"Is like\u2026 wolf, you would say. But bigger. Howl brings cold. In Sverna, they are tamed sometimes, to ride.\"\n\n\"Wait\u2026 orcish wolf-riders are real? Spellfire, I thought that was a story.\"\n\nKadka shrugged. \"Is real. Tunvokovir, they are called.\"\n\n\"Still, that howl had to have come through an instability from Sverna. Where else would you be able to hear\u2026\" Tane's eyes widened, and he grabbed her by the shoulders. \"Kadka! That's it!\"\n\nShe grinned broadly, caught up in his enthusiasm. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Dedric Cranst said his house was near the Conservatory of Magical Beasts! If there are any of these tunvok in Thaless, that's exactly where they'd be!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "\"She's just down here,\" the sprite woman said, fluttering down the cobbled paths of the Conservatory. The Head Keeper on duty, Selene Meadowgrass had taken it upon herself to personally assist Tane and Kadka after he'd dropped the Lady Protector's name. She wore exactly the uniform Tane would have imagined an animal-keeper to wear, but in miniature: a khaki coat with a great many pockets, matching trousers, and a wide-brimmed hat over her brown hair. \"I should be able to get her to howl for you\u2014we're working on those commands. I'm surprised she hasn't started on her own, to be honest. Some days it seems like she'll never stop.\"\n\n\"Well, we appreciate the help,\" Tane said, but he was only half-listening. He hadn't visited the Conservatory since he was a boy, and the animals were both incredible and distracting.\n\nDozens of large fenced habitats lined the path, the smallest of them easily ten times the size of his little office in Porthaven. Magically warded and spelled to mimic environments from deserts to plains to frozen snowdrifts, each housed a beast directly out of ancient legend. To his left, in the forested unicorn habitat, one of the majestic equine creatures bent over a little stream, its spiral horn glimmering with a hundred colors in the afternoon sun. Tane found it hard to look away.\n\nKadka stared wide-eyed at the right-hand enclosure, a large desert-like environment with sandstone caves all along one side. Inside, a massive lion-headed manticore with bat-like wings and a scorpion tail padded back and forth over arid ground, watching them pass. The enclosure was fully caged, with iron bars overhead. \"All these animals live in wild? How do I not hear more of them?\"\n\n\"There aren't many left.\" There was just a hint of anger in Selene's voice. \"Hunted down for one magical property or another, or just out of fear. Driven from their natural habitats as cities expand here and on the Continent. No one wants a chimera for a neighbor, even if the chimera was there first. Most of the animals we keep here are nearly extinct. The Conservatory's primary purpose is to protect the ones that are left.\"\n\nThey'd moved past the manticore, but Kadka was still looking back, craning her head over her shoulder. \"Why do they stay? That one could break bars, if he tried.\"\n\n\"I've trained them too well for that,\" Selene said with a smile, and Tane believed her. Sprites had a natural affinity for animals. They couldn't actually control beasts, like some people believed, but they could commune with them. \"But you aren't wrong. A full-grown manticore could break out of just about any housing we could make. The fences and cages are for show, more than anything. They make people feel safer. It's the wards that really keep them from escaping.\"\n\n\"You have dragons?\" Kadka peered around with interest.\n\nSelene shook her head. \"Just a wyvern, but he's a bit of a runt. Not much larger than a big dog. True dragons\u2026 if they ever existed at all, no one has seen one for centuries.\"\n\nTane laughed at Kadka's disappointed pout. \"What, unicorns and manticores aren't good enough?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"They are good. Dragon would be better.\"\n\n\"Here we are,\" said Selene, pointing ahead to an enclosure on the left side of the path. \"Olka, our Svernan ice wolf. We've only had her two weeks or so. She's still learning not to keep people up at all hours, but her training is coming along.\"\n\n\"Can't use spell to keep her quiet?\" Kadka asked.\n\n\"The people who live nearby suggest it every time we get a new addition, but we need to be able to hear when the animals are in distress,\" said Selene. \"For the most part, our residents are trained well enough that it isn't a problem. It just takes time.\" She landed on an eye-level perch designed for people of her size along the side of the fence, and waved them closer.\n\nThe huge enclosure had been made to mimic the Svernan climate, all icy tundra and snowy crust. The ice wolf\u2014or tunvok, according to Kadka\u2014padded to the fence as they drew near, her paws crunching against the frozen ground. She looked much as Kadka had described: a massive wolf the size of a horse, with a strange undercoat of pale blue beneath white fur. Her hackles were raised, and her grey-blue eyes traced every movement. Where she breathed, a coat of frost formed on the iron fence.\n\nShe growled, and Tane retreated a step, keeping his distance.\n\n\"Don't take it personally,\" Selene said. \"She's not very friendly to anyone just yet.\"\n\n\"Maybe never,\" said Kadka. \"Is not easy, taming tunvok.\" She leaned close. The wolf snapped her teeth between the bars, then danced back, confused, when the wards repelled her muzzle. Kadka frowned, but didn't flinch. \"Has spirit. She will never be happy here. Is big enough, and looks like home, but still cage.\"\n\n\"It isn't ideal,\" admitted Selene. \"We usually only take animals in when they can't survive safely in their natural habitat, but Olka's situation was\u2026 complicated. She'd crossed into northern Rhien from the Svernan border, and she was causing problems for some of the smaller villages there. Killing livestock, freezing crops with her howl. They were scared to get close, so the Rhienni ambassador asked the Conservatory for help. We're still trying to make contact with someone in Sverna about sending her home, and the Rhienni would have killed her if she stayed near the border, so here she is. Where she ends up depends on the diplomats now, but I don't think she's a very high priority.\"\n\n\"Well, she might be the solution to a problem that the Lady Protector wants solved very badly,\" said Tane. \"That could help. Now, I hate to annoy your neighbors, but can we hear her?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Selene. \"Assuming she's in the mood to cooperate.\" She locked eyes with Olka, and the wolf tilted her head as if listening.\n\nAnd then Olka raised her muzzle to the sky and let out a long howl.\n\nThe sound of it sent a circle of frost racing across the enclosure, expanding rapidly until it reached the fence, coating black iron bars in white rime. The air crackled loudly with the sound of sudden, intense cold; the already frozen ground groaned and split open in places. Even outside the wards, protected from the immediate effect, Tane felt a chill raise gooseflesh across his body.\n\n\"That's it,\" he said. \"That's the sound.\" It was the same as what he'd heard in the workshop, there was no doubting that. \"You said you've had complaints. That must give you a sense of how far people can hear her from.\"\n\n\"Just the upper streets of Greenstone, south of here. It's all Rosepetal Park for a ways in the other directions. If anyone hears her from that far, they haven't complained.\"\n\n\"Good. That gives us a place to start looking. I just have one more favor to ask: can you have her howl one more time in about fifteen minutes?\"\n\nSelene raised an eyebrow. \"I suppose, but why?\"\n\n\"I want to get an idea of how it sounds from where we're looking,\" said Tane. \"That should give us enough time to get there.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't be a problem.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Selene. You've been a great help.\"\n\nSelene waved a dismissive hand. \"If it's for Lady Abena, I'm glad to do it. Whatever you're looking for, I hope you find it.\"\n\nNot quite fifteen minutes later, Tane and Kadka arrived at Dedric Cranst's house in northern Greenstone. The squat brick building was divided into four separate homes, and there were more just like it on both sides and on down the street. Each home had its own cramped yard at the back, fenced off from the others and accessible through narrow side alleys. This was the better end of Greenstone, though it was still a far sight from more affluent districts like the Gryphon's Roost. Further south, under the green-grey haze rising from quarries and ancryst processing facilities, the homes shrank and the buildings stretched into rows of unbroken brick with no yards or open space to speak of. Very much like Tane's neighborhood by the docks.\n\n\"This is the place,\" said Tane. He remembered the address from the records: 8 Thiel Street. The number was painted beside the door.\n\n\"You think Cranst hid portal here?\" Kadka looked suspiciously at the brick building.\n\n\"No, but I think he might have chosen a place reasonably near. If he stole the badge, he would have wanted to be able to get to his hiding spot and back before Dedric noticed.\"\n\n\"So how do we find?\"\n\n\"First, we wait for\u2014\"\n\nPerfectly timed, a distant howling rose from the north, toward the Conservatory. The groan and crackle of ice was faint from this distance, but still noticeable\u2014perhaps a little bit louder than what he'd heard through the portal, but he couldn't be certain.\n\n\"For that,\" Tane said. \"What do you think? You have good ears. Was that closer or farther than what we heard in the workshop?\"\n\n\"Closer, I think,\" said Kadka.\n\n\"Then we search southward, away from the park.\"\n\n\"What do we look for? Sound is not enough. Ears are not that good.\"\n\nTane pulled the watch case from his pocket and snapped it open to reveal the cloudy green ancryst held inside. \"We use this. Ancryst makes a good magic detector, and the place should be warded against intrusion. The badge we found on Cranst was probably what he used to get in. So we circle these buildings front and back until the ancryst tells me there's a ward nearby, and then we look closer.\"\n\n\"Other magic won't move it? Magelights?\"\n\n\"We'd have to be very close. It's going to react to a decent ward spell from much further away, and in a neighborhood like this, we're not likely to run into many of those. Too expensive to keep them up. Same reason I don't activate the ones on my office unless I know I'll need them. If the ancryst moves from the street or outside the yard, it's worth a closer look. There are going to be misleads, but I don't have a better way.\"\n\n\"Maybe Cranst is stupid, uses next house down.\"\n\n\"I don't think we're that lucky.\" Tane sighed. \"This is probably going to take a while. Let's get started.\"\n\nIt was even slower work than Tane had expected. They moved down one street and up the next, checking each building as thoroughly as possible, but more than once they were driven off by residents who valued their privacy, or occasionally ones who just didn't like the look of Kadka's orcish features. Even when they weren't being chased, it was difficult to avoid attention from people sitting on stoops or going for an afternoon stroll. Kadka was usually able to sneak around the back fences to check the yards without being seen, but there was nowhere to hide in the street.\n\nA few times the ancryst moved enough to be worth checking, but each time it was a false alarm: usually someone using some minor charm to banish a smell from their yard or clean their windows or the like, but once a gnomish child setting off colorful flash charms, all bright lights and loud popping sounds. That caught Tane by surprise, leaving him blinking away spots for several minutes.\n\nLate afternoon was quickly becoming evening when Kadka called Tane around to the back of a seemingly empty home on Bolane Street, in a low brick building just like all the rest.\n\n\"Here, Carver. Stone is moving.\"\n\nTane ducked into the alley and found Kadka standing outside the fence of the second yard down. She handed him his watch case; he could feel it pushing against his palm.\n\n\"Boost me over,\" he said.\n\nKadka ducked down; Tane stepped into her cupped hands and vaulted the fence, landing roughly on his hands and knees. He lost his grip on his watch case, and an invisible force pushed the ancryst a foot or more toward the fence as it fell. Definitely magic nearby.\n\nKadka pulled herself over and landed easily on her feet as he retrieved the watch case. She pointed across the yard. \"There, you think?\"\n\nTane followed her finger to a pair of cellar doors set against the base of the building. He moved the ancryst from side to side, testing the direction of the force. \"It's strongest in that direction.\" He stepped closer, and the force increased, until it threatened to push the case from his hand. When he snapped it closed, the pressure abated immediately, blocked by brass.\n\nA chain held the doors shut, with a heavy iron lock at the center. Tane drew the key they'd found on Cranst from his pocket. Black iron, like the lock. He tried it\u2014the key turned, and the lock opened.\n\n\"This is place, then,\" said Kadka.\n\nTane only nodded, his heart beating fast against his chest.\n\nKadka quickly pulled the chain free, and together they threw open the doors. A stone stair descended into the earth, with brick walls on either side. At the bottom, a hint of silver-blue magelight glimmered around the corner.\n\n\"Time to see what Cranst was hiding.\" Tane started forward.\n\n\"Wait,\" Kadka said, and caught him by the wrist. \"Should be me. Might be other spell to see you, and then someone knows you are here. Won't see me.\"\n\nPart of him wanted to argue\u2014it felt like he'd come a very long way to get to this place, and he wanted to see it for himself. But Kadka was right. If there were any detection spells, she could walk through them freely. \"Here,\" he said, and reluctantly handed her Cranst's crowned staff badge. \"This should get you past any wards.\"\n\nKadka took the badge, and grinned. \"Is good that I come now, yes?\"\n\n\"Don't rub it in,\" Tane said, smiling slightly. \"Just be careful, and tell me what you see as you see it.\"\n\nHer grin widened. \"If nothing kills me first.\"\n\nWith that, she started down the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "At the bottom of the stairs, Kadka turned the corner into a room that made no sense to her at all.\n\nThe cellar was awash in silver-blue magelight cast by a glass globe hanging from the ceiling. Most of the floor was taken up by a strip of copper inlaid in the stone in a large circle. Glyphs she couldn't understand were scribed in gold across the copper band. On the far side stood a stone pedestal, about waist height, and from the top of the pedestal a bird-like copper claw jutted upward, holding a fist-sized gemstone of an opaque milky white. The gem was riddled with tiny cracks and chipped where pieces had fallen away. Lines of inlaid copper radiated from the base of the claw, one striking straight down to meet the copper circle and two more running to the other side of the pedestal, out of sight. Against the wall near the entryway where Kadka was standing, a little desk held a few books and a half-rolled paper.\n\n\"Don't know what this is, Carver, but looks like magic.\"\n\nCarver's voice came from the top of the stairs. \"Describe it to me.\"\n\n\"Is\u2026 big circle. Copper. Gold glyphs.\"\n\n\"Gold? They were trying to stabilize an unreliable spell. What else?\"\n\n\"Pedestal at one side with white gem. Gem has little cracks, all over.\"\n\n\"The white is a sort of milky color?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How big?\"\n\n\"Like fist.\"\n\n\"Spellfire.\" Carver sounded surprised. \"A gem that size, and they used up all its power. How did Cranst pay for that?\"\n\n\"Is desk here, with books. Let me check.\" The books had long titles that were nonsense to her, mostly Audish words she didn't know. She took one and opened it, looking for anything of interest.\n\n\"I took a peek through the window up here,\" Carver said from above as she flipped through pages. \"There's nothing inside. Cranst must have rented this place just to use the cellar. Did you find anything else?\"\n\nThe books meant very little to Kadka, and she didn't understand much of what she saw inside, but one word stood out. \"Magic books, about portals.\"\n\n\"That makes sense, under the circumstances. Anything else?\"\n\n\"Paper here too.\"\n\n\"What kind of paper?\"\n\nAt one side of the desk was a large rectangular sheet, held in place in one corner with a brass paperweight. The other corners were free, and the sheet had been rolled closed to make room for the books. Kadka cleared the desk and flattened out the paper. It was covered in glyphs and complex instructions, but she recognized the diagram at the center easily enough. She'd seen it before, from across the Porthaven harbor.\n\n\"Plans for airship,\" she called to Carver.\n\n\"Really? I need to see that.\"\n\n\"Let me finish first. Might be more.\" She crossed the copper circle to the pedestal, tracing the copper lines inlaid in the marble. A glass-fronted cabinet was set into the far side. Inside was a scroll held between a pair of copper claws very much like the one holding the milky gem. The lines of copper from above each met a claw at its base.\n\nKadka knelt and opened the little glass door. \"Is scroll in pedestal.\"\n\n\"Kadka, don't\u2014\"\n\nShe grabbed the scroll and lifted it from its housing. \"Already took. Nothing happened.\"\n\n\"It might have been trapped!\"\n\n\"Why trap when they think no one can get in?\"\n\n\"I don't know, paranoia?\" She heard him sigh, even from down the stairs and around the corner. \"It doesn't matter now. I need a look at that scroll.\"\n\nThere didn't seem to be much else, which was disappointing. She'd been hoping for some magic she hadn't seen before. \"Coming now.\"\n\nCarver snatched the airship plans from her the moment she stepped out of the cellar.\n\n\"Now you say 'Thank you, Kadka,' yes?\" she said, grinning.\n\n\"Thank you, Kadka,\" he repeated absently, without looking up. \"These are for the envelope. The heating glyphs. That's what Thrung said Allaea was working on. This has to mean Cranst was planning to sabotage the launch.\" He beckoned for the other scroll. \"Let me see that one.\"\n\nKadka handed it over. \"Was in little copper hands. All joined up to circle.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"That's not uncommon for a pre-cast spell. Engraving the glyphs is more permanent, but overly complex spells can be too long for that.\" He unrolled the scroll and started reading.\n\nAll the color left his face at once.\n\n\"Carver?\"\n\n\"This is the flaw, Kadka. This is how they did it. Spellfire, I'm an idiot. What did I get us in to?\"\n\nAs usual, she wasn't going to get any useful answers if she didn't ask. Carver was smart enough\u2014when he wasn't being stupid, at least\u2014but he took for granted a great deal of knowledge that she didn't have. Making him talk it through aloud seemed to help him find his way to the important parts. \"Explain to me.\"\n\n\"This is a portal spell. It was all prepared in advance. The spell, the circle, that huge gem. Diamond, it says here, to provide the kind of power this would have taken. What we saw in the workshop wasn't a spell being cast in the moment. It was more like an artifact being activated.\" Carver touched the watch case in his pocket, the way she'd seen him do when he was agitated. \"I should have seen it! I just never thought\u2026 portals are unstable, always shifting and changing. I've never heard of one being cast without direct oversight. I didn't know it could be done.\"\n\nKadka furrowed her brow. \"So portal was made like artifact. This means something?\"\n\n\"It means I've been working under a false assumption. Only the University heads can make a portal on campus, and they were all accounted for both times, so I accepted that they couldn't have done it. But make is the key. I told you the lingua is literal, and the glyph used in the portal ward refers to the actual effort of constructing the spell. As long as the right person made it, scribed the glyphs, invested their power into the gem\u2026 anyone could activate the portal, and the ward would allow it.\"\n\nAnd now she understood. \"This means a University head\u2026\"\n\n\"Was behind this all along,\" said Carver. \"One of them put this portal together. And all four are going to have access to the airship tonight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"These are powerful people, Kadka,\" Tane said, weaving his way toward the lights of the ceremony through the crowd assembled along the harborfront. \"And we're about to accuse one of them of a serious crime. They can make my life harder, but my reputation doesn't have far left to fall, and at least I have the protection of being born a citizen. You don't have that. If it goes badly, staying in the Protectorate might not be an option for you.\" Short of wrestling her to the ground and tying her up, there was no way to stop her from following\u2014and he wouldn't win that contest. But at least he could warn her.\n\nShe wasn't ever going to listen, but he could warn her.\n\n\"You have bad memory, Carver. Same words, again and again.\" Kadka grinned. \"Have to come, or I don't see what spell they try next to kill us.\"\n\n\"We both know I can't do much to stop you. I just thought you should know it could go worse for you than for me.\"\n\n\"Still. I go where you go.\"\n\n\"Have it your way.\" Tane sidestepped around a kobold woman who had stopped in the street to gawk at the lights.\n\nThe sun had set by the time they'd gotten off the discs in Porthaven, and the launch ceremony was well under way. Ahead, at the edge of the water by the drydocked airship, the little park where launch ceremonies were traditionally held had been transformed for the occasion. Strings of hundreds of silver-blue magelights held back the dark, and the area had been fenced off from the surrounding harborfront and filled with silk-covered tables and elegant flower arrangements.\n\nVisible by its slight silver shimmer, a transparent barrier surrounded the entire affair to keep away any unexpected weather, or unexpected guests. Within, the city's elite mingled with foreign dignitaries, dancing and laughing and probably making expensive deals and alliances. And all along the waterfront outside, the less powerful gathered to watch the launch, waiting excitedly for the moment when the airship first took flight.\n\n\"Look, Carver.\" Kadka pointed upward, her eyes wide\u2014for a moment, orcish features or no, she fit perfectly with the rest of the awestruck crowd.\n\nThe airship itself didn't look much different from the last time Tane had seen it, but the scaffolding was gone. Now the great gleaming envelope loomed free over the ceremony, unfettered save for the rigging linking it to the hull. Several large magelights had been positioned beneath so that it shone majestically against the night like a strange, oblong moon, shedding reflected silver radiance across the water. Why Lady Abena had chosen an evening launch, Tane didn't know, but he supposed the airship would look impressive shining over the harbor, and the lights of Thaless equally so from above.\n\nHe kept moving. It was a lovely sight, but he didn't have time for it.\n\nMageblades stood all around the perimeter of the fence, holding back the crowd, and there was only one point of entry to the ceremony: a white tent positioned around the single gate, so that the unsightly business of checking invitations and searching for weapons and artifacts could be conducted without bothering those already inside. To one side of the entryway, dozens of guarded carriages sat waiting for their owners, most horse-drawn, but a few powered by ponderous, expensive ancryst engines. The wealthy didn't travel through Porthaven on foot, especially at night.\n\nTane strode directly to the tent, with Kadka just behind. Two Mageblades blocked his way, a handsome dark-haired elven man and a blonde human woman. Tane didn't let himself flinch. Any hesitation would only prove he didn't belong.\n\n\"Invitations?\" the elf asked, eyeing the frayed edges of Tane's waistcoat and Kadka's tattered suspenders.\n\n\"I'm not a guest,\" said Tane. \"But I am working at the request of Lady Abena. I have urgent information.\" By way of demonstration, he raised the portal scroll and airship plans rolled in his fist.\n\n\"No one gets in without an invitation. We're under strict orders.\"\n\n\"And you're doing a fine job. I know how important security is tonight, but this can't wait. Like I said, I'm working for the Lady Protector.\" Tane glanced theatrically to either side, leaned in, and lowered his voice. \"Send to your commander. Say I need to speak with Inspector Indree Lovial. She's in charge of the covert detail from Stooketon Yard. The fact that I know that should tell you I'm not wasting your time. She'll vouch for me.\" He hated to bring Indree into it\u2014she had more to lose than he did\u2014but there wasn't much choice. He could worry about evading her once he was inside.\n\nThe elf lifted the graceful sweep of his eyebrow. \"Sir, I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"It's about the airship launch,\" said Tane. \"If it goes wrong because I don't get in there, it's going to be on your heads. You don't want that. All you have to do is ask.\"\n\nThe two Mageblades shared a look, and then the blonde woman's eyes focused on a distant point. After a long silence, she nodded. \"You'll be escorted to the inspector, but we'll have to search you first.\"\n\n\"Fine, just hurry. This is urgent.\"\n\nThe human woman pushed open the tent flap and held it aside. \"In here.\" She glanced at Kadka with some distaste. \"Your friend will have to wait.\"\n\n\"No, she's\u2014\" Tane stopped himself short. He might have been able to persuade them, but he didn't have to. And if Kadka wasn't going to listen to reason\u2026 \"She's not part of this. Just an escort to see me safely through the crowd. You know how Porthaven can be at night.\"\n\nKadka's brow creased. \"Carver?\"\n\n\"Wait here, Kadka,\" he said, feigning an authoritarian tone. \"I won't need you inside.\"\n\nShe didn't argue. After everything they'd been through together in the past few days, it might have been easier if she had. Instead, she just looked at him. No sign of the toothy grin he'd become accustomed to, but it wasn't quite anger either. Just unblinking yellow eyes and a straight, tight line to her mouth.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he whispered. \"It's better this way.\"\n\nAnd then he stepped into the tent, and left Kadka behind.\n\nThe tent was lit inside by a single globe of magelight suspended overhead. A pair of copper posts stood at the mid-point of the space, one on the left and one on the right, each topped with an unlit glass globe. A band of glyphed copper ran across the ground between them, perhaps six inches wide and long enough to span the tent from side to side. Tane recognized the device at a glance: a detection band, with a standard selection of security divinations. When he stepped across the copper, the spells would detect any Astrally charged artifacts he was carrying and any brass that he might be using to hide them, as well as a number of metals commonly used to forge weapons. If he was carrying any of those things, the globes on either side would fill with magelight. Two Mageblades were waiting on the far side to step in if necessary\u2014a black-haired elven man and a red-scaled kobold.\n\n\"Please step through, sir,\" said the elf, and gestured at the detection band.\n\nTane did, and the magelights flared to life. No surprise, there. \"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"It must be this.\" He slipped the papers from Cranst's lair under his arm and took out his watch case, flipping it open to show the ancryst inside. It pulled against his grip, reacting to the presence of the detection spells behind him. At the same time, he slipped his left hand into his pocket and palmed the charmglobe within. \"Brass, you know. Only a keepsake. No danger. Surely I don't have to leave it?\"\n\n\"You can take it in with you, sir,\" said the kobold, hissing his 's' sounds. \"But I have to ask you to step through the detections again without it first. We'll hold on to it for you.\"\n\nThe kobold approached with his hand out, and Tane took a sudden step forward, just a little bit too fast, so that they nearly collided. Tane reached out with his left hand to stop himself, and his fingers slid down the Mageblade's brass cuirass to surreptitiously deposit the charmglobe in the other man's pocket.\n\nThe kobold grabbed Tane's shoulder to steady him. \"Careful.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Tane said, stepping back with a sheepish smile. \"You'd think I'd gotten a head start on the festivities, but it's just clumsiness.\" He flipped the watch case closed and detached the chain from his waistcoat, then handed it over.\n\n\"Not a problem, sir. Please, step back through.\"\n\nTane stepped back across the detection band, and then forward again. The glass globes remained unlit.\n\nIt was easy enough to retrieve the charmglobe after the kobold gave him a final cursory pat down\u2014pickpocketing was the most basic sleight of hand, and he'd used the same trick to get artifacts into exams a hundred times. He wasn't entirely certain why he'd done it this time, other than a strong feeling that he didn't want to go into this without any sort of defense. A simple flash charm wasn't much, but at least it was something.\n\nThe elven Mageblade escorted Tane across the ceremony grounds, keeping to the fence so as not to disturb the guests. Men and women in dress far finer than Tane's danced with one another further in, and others chatted at tables nearby. More than a few cast disparaging looks at his shabby clothes. He ignored the glances, and refastened his watch chain as he walked.\n\nHalfway between the entry tent and the harborfront, Indree was leaning against the fence with one hand and holding a handbag in the other, watching the crowd. She wore a dress with a wine-red bodice and a long black skirt, and her black hair was elegantly done, swept up above her pointed ears in an elaborate knot of waves and curls. He'd never seen her like this before\u2014at university, she'd stuck to the coats and trousers common among students.\n\nShe didn't turn as they approached, just waved off the Mageblade with a subtle gesture. \"I'll take him from here. Keep moving, like you were just patrolling the perimeter.\" The dwarven man continued on with hardly a pause in his step.\n\nTane leaned his back against the fence beside her, trying not to draw attention. She was meant to blend in with the guests\u2014best not to dispel the illusion. \"You look very nice tonight,\" he said in a low voice. \"Although I have to confess, I miss the badge and pistol.\"\n\nShe didn't look at him, but her cheeks flushed slightly. She pulled open the mouth of her handbag just enough that he could see the badge and ancryst pistol stowed inside. \"I don't go anywhere without them. And speaking of badges\"\u2014a flash of annoyance in her eyes, there\u2014\"I suspect you have one that you shouldn't.\"\n\n\"Kadka has it, actually.\"\n\n\"But you did take it. Damn it, Tane, you'd better have found something good, or I swear by the Astra\u2026\" She glanced in his direction, and frowned. \"Wait, where is Kadka? She's not with you?\"\n\n\"We\u2026 decided it was better to split up. Cover more ground.\"\n\nIndree rolled her eyes. \"Which means you did something to chase her away. On the slim chance that you might actually listen to someone besides yourself: fix it. I like Kadka, and you two make a better team than common sense would suggest.\"\n\nTane rubbed the back of his neck. \"It was the better plan. That's all.\"\n\n\"If you say so. Now, are you going to tell me why you're here?\" She swept her gaze over the ceremony grounds as she spoke. \"I have a job to do tonight. If you know something, get to it. Otherwise, let me work.\"\n\n\"It's nothing,\" Tane said, controlling his voice and his breath in case she tried a truth-spell. \"I just had to use your name to get in. I'm not exactly on the list.\" He pulled the rolled papers from under his arm. \"I got a sending from Dean Greymond. She wanted me to bring her some spell diagrams. Have you seen her?\"\n\nNow Indree turned fully toward him. \"What diagrams?\"\n\n\"Just some of the wards on the workshop. Maybe she's on to something for the investigation? I should probably go find her, in any case.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"Why are you lying to me, Tane?\"\n\n\"What? I'm not\u2026\" But when he saw the look in her eyes, he gave it up. \"How did you know? Truth-spell?\"\n\n\"You'd just have beaten it. But it doesn't take a spell to see the holes in that story. Why would Greymond ask you to bring her these diagrams? And if she did, why didn't she arrange a way to get them to her without giving my name at the gate? You usually manage a better lie.\"\n\n\"In my defense, I don't know if there was a good lie for this. I was hoping you wouldn't think too much about it.\"\n\n\"What's going on, Tane? The truth. Now. Or you go right back out the gate.\"\n\nHe'd had enough arguments with Indree to know she meant it, and if she threw him out, he wouldn't be getting back in. So he told her the truth. What he and Kadka had found in Cranst's bolthole and what it meant, with the spell diagram and the airship plans to support the story.\n\n\"Spellfire,\" Indree said softly. She'd turned away from the bulk of the crowd, hiding the spell scroll with her body as she looked it over. \"One of the University heads? I don't want to believe it, but this spell\u2026 nothing else makes sense.\" She gave him a sidelong glance. \"Why Greymond? You wanted to know where she was.\"\n\n\"Think about it. Cranst and his little cult were ready for us last night. There was only one person who knew where we were going.\" That had been on his mind since he and Kadka had found the portal diagram. He hated it, but it made sense.\n\n\"His cousin\u2014\"\n\nTane shook his head. \"They were waiting for us. They knew exactly who was coming and when. Dedric couldn't have told them that much. Greymond could have. And it's not just that. She was awfully eager to blame Kivit Thrung for the murder, that first day. She only brought me in to try and prove he could have done it, and when I didn't, she immediately wanted me gone.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026 compelling, but it isn't proof,\" said Indree. She rolled up the scroll and tucked it into her bag alongside the airship plans. \"If it's true, it means she's the one who sent Cranst. She's the reason Allaea's dead. I don't want to believe that. She was always so good to me. And she adored you, before\u2026 before everything.\"\n\n\"Do you think I want to believe it? I'm praying to the Astra that she has an explanation.\" However strained their relationship had become, it didn't change the fact that Liana Greymond had been an important part of his life once. He didn't want to believe she was capable of murder. \"But it has to be one of the four of them, and right now she's at the top of the list.\"\n\nIndree raised an eyebrow. \"And if you'd managed to lose me and confront her alone, how exactly did you see it going? She could have easily had you thrown out. Or much worse, if you're right about this. She's a powerful mage, and you\u2026 aren't.\"\n\n\"There are a lot of people here. I thought if I could goad her into saying something she shouldn't, in front of witnesses\u2026\" Tane shrugged. \"I would have had a plan by the time I found her.\"\n\n\"Here's one,\" said Indree. \"I'll question her. I'm here at Lady Abena's request. She can't throw me out. Come on.\" She gestured to the tables nearest the water, where the most important guests were seated. \"I don't think she's much of a dancer. She probably hasn't left the faculty table.\"\n\n\"Wait.\" Tane grabbed her arm. \"Accusing a dean of murder could get you demoted or worse. Please, just\u2026 let me do this. I don't have as much at stake.\"\n\nIndree jerked her arm away and rounded on him, anger flashing in her amber eyes. \"Hard as it may be for you to believe, not everything is a puzzle that only the brilliant Tane Carver can solve! I didn't join the constabulary just to have the shiniest badge, and you know that! Stop pretending\u2014\" She stopped herself, sucked in a breath through gritted teeth. \"If Greymond means to sabotage the airship, it's my duty to stop her. You can be part of it or not, but I don't have time to do this with you.\" And then she was pushing her way through the crowd, and he had no choice but to follow.\n\nGreymond was sitting with Dean Brassforge and Dean Orthea around a table near the water, leaning forward in animated discussion. As Tane and Indree approached, he became aware of a number of other guests moving in from all sides. None of them stood out particularly\u2014they were dressed in much the same evening finery as everyone else\u2014but several slipped hands into handbags or topcoats as they drew near. Reaching for badges, or perhaps pistols. Indree must have sent to the rest of her detail for support.\n\nIndree hadn't yet announced herself, and she was still ten steps back when Greymond stood bolt upright and whirled around, eyes wide.\n\nIt wasn't easy to take a diviner by surprise.\n\nBut Greymond didn't run. Her hands shook as she raised them. \"You think I\u2026 No! I would never!\"\n\n\"What is this, Liana?\" Dean Orthea asked, her perfect brow creasing slightly. She pushed back her chair and made to stand to her full eight foot height.\n\nIndree drew her badge from her purse and flashed it quickly before hiding it once more. The rest of her detail closed in to surround the table. \"I'm going to have to ask all three of you to stay where you are for a moment,\" she said. Orthea frowned, but took her seat once more. \"I'm sorry for the disturbance. Dean Greymond, I have to ask\u2014\"\n\n\"I wasn't part of this, Inspector Lovial, I promise you!\" Greymond's voice was high and the words came too fast. \"Ask whatever you need to ask to believe me, cast any spells you must. I would never put any of my students in danger!\"\n\nTane stepped forward. \"But you wanted me\u2014\"\n\n\"I only asked for your help with Mister Thrung because there were no other suspects, and I had to know if he could have bypassed the wards. I admit I\u2026 I didn't want you involved after that, but only because of our history. Tane, you must know I wouldn't do this!\" And she did seem genuinely panicked\u2014if it was an act, he couldn't see through it.\n\nIndree was watching her closely too, with that faraway diviner's look in her eye. \"And what about\u2014\"\n\n\"I swear by the Astra, I didn't warn Cranst you were coming!\"\n\n\"No one else knew, Liana,\" said Tane. \"How\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't know! I\u2026\" And then all the color fled her cheeks at once. \"I only told one person.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Indree demanded, but by the look on her face, she'd already guessed the answer, just as Tane had.\n\nFear dawning in her eyes, Greymond said the only name she could have said:\n\n\"Chancellor Nieris.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "For a moment, Tane didn't believe her. He wanted to, but it felt too easy. Greymond's only way out was to blame someone else, and Brassforge and Orthea were at the table, so it had to be Nieris. If there was a more transparent excuse, he couldn't think of it.\n\nExcept\u2026 there was something there, a hint of memory at the back of his mind.\n\nIndree raised an eyebrow, outwardly skeptical. \"You told\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course I did!\" Greymond exclaimed, drawing glances from the surrounding guests. \"He's the chancellor of the University! Why wouldn't I update him on the investigation?\"\n\nThe sculpture. That was it. The Mage Emperor's crowned staff, wrought in bronze, sitting in plain sight in the chancellor's office. The same symbol as the one on Cranst's badge.\n\nIf it was true, it would be almost unbelievably arrogant for Nieris to put his true allegiance on display like that, but it also made a strange kind of sense. He was three hundred years old, chancellor of the most prestigious university of magic in the world for more than a century, among the most experienced mages alive. He dressed in clothes that princes of Rhien might have found a bit much. If any man had ever had reason to believe himself untouchable, it was Talain Nieris. Of course he wouldn't hide who he was\u2014he would show the world, and laugh when no one noticed.\n\n\"There is no mage alive with as much experience in portal magic,\" Tane said softly.\n\nIndree glanced sidelong at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"That's what Nieris said about himself, that first day in his office. Spellfire, he might as well have been bragging about it.\"\n\n\"So you believe her?\"\n\n\"I think I do,\" said Tane. \"Nieris could have warned Cranst, if Greymond was reporting our movements to him. He's the one who said the howling Kadka and I heard was nothing, which is why we ignored it for so long\u2014he was the expert, after all. By his own admission, he knows portal magic better than anyone. Who better to come up with this particular plan? And he was so keen to blame Cranst and bury any problems with the wards, as long as the launch wasn't delayed. I thought it was just typical University arrogance and bureaucracy, but if he means to sabotage the airship\u2026\"\n\nIndree prodded her tongue with her cheek, thinking it over. \"But why bother sending Cranst through a portal at all? If the chancellor of the University wanted airship plans, he could have just walked in and looked at them.\"\n\n\"But he couldn't have done anything with them. The workshops were under guard. If he was seen coming and going, and then something went wrong with the airship, he'd be on the list of suspects. This way it could have been done without anyone noticing, and if someone did, he had an alibi. He made sure he and all the deans were accounted for, so we had to assume the portal wards had been beaten some other way.\" The last piece fell into place then, the one thing he hadn't been able to explain before. \"That's what Cranst was receiving. Not instructions\u2014new diagrams. He sent them out to Nieris the first time, when he killed Allaea. The second time, he wasn't taking anything. He was replacing the original plans with ones Nieris sent him.\"\n\n\"Then what are these?\" asked Indree, tapping a finger against the airship plans poking from her handbag.\n\n\"The originals,\" said Tane. \"They must be. Cranst couldn't leave them behind, or someone would have noticed there were duplicates. He must have taken them the day Kadka and I found him in the workshop.\"\n\n\"This is absurd,\" interrupted Dean Brassforge. \"You're saying my airship plans were replaced? By the chancellor? Which plans? Why?\"\n\n\"The heating glyphs for the envelope,\" said Tane. \"They wanted diagrams for vital airship spells, and Allaea would have had these ones out already. After she alerted the guard, there wasn't time to search for more.\" And then the full implication hit him. \"Spellfire, Nieris was never planning to sabotage the airship at the ceremony. He's already done it. If Cranst made the exchange, then the final heating glyphs came from their diagram, not Allaea's!\"\n\n\"Impossible!\" said Brassforge, his cheeks flushing beneath his auburn beard. \"We would have noticed\u2014\"\n\n\"Would you?\" Tane rounded on Brassforge, his voice rising. He'd seen this happen before\u2014it was the ancryst rail all over again. \"The spell diagrams were already finalized. That's why Cranst chose that evening\u2014no one should have been working on them by then. Tell me, Dean Brassforge, after you'd given your approval, would you have been the one looking at those plans? Do you and your mages tend to build your ancryst machines with your own hands?\"\n\nBrassforge\u2014never particularly verbose\u2014could only stammer under Tane's sudden anger. \"I\u2026 We don't\u2014\"\n\n\"No. You don't. Workers and engineers and mechanics do that part, and none of them have any magecraft. By now they'll have scribed the glyphs exactly as the diagram says, because how would they know not to? You say you would have noticed, but the truth is that if it wasn't for Allaea working too late that night, you'd never have known anything was wrong!\"\n\n\"I told her,\" Indree whispered. \"I told her she was giving too much time to those stupid glyphs.\" And then she set her jaw, slung her handbag over her shoulder, and drew her pistol from within. \"We need to find Nieris. He does not get away with this.\" Looking to the deans, she demanded, \"Where is he?\"\n\nDean Orthea looked entirely lost, her lovely lips hanging agape. \"He\u2026 He was here earlier, but we haven't seen him for\u2026 a quarter hour, perhaps. He was with Lady Abena.\"\n\n\"Let me,\" Greymond said. Her eyes clouded for a moment, and then she frowned. \"I\u2026 can't locate either of them. They're nearby, but their Astral signatures are clouded.\"\n\n\"Spellfire!\" Indree swore. \"He must have seen us already. And if the Lady Protector is masked too\u2026 damn it, he has her!\" She swept her eyes over the disguised constables surrounding the table. \"I want all eyes looking for the chancellor and Lady Abena. And tell any Mageblades you find to get word to their commander: we need them to ground that airship.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Tane said, and Indree looked at him, raising a hand to belay her order. \"That's it, Indree. The airship. If Nieris thinks we're coming for him, that's where he'll be. He knows he can't wait for the launch anymore\u2014he's going to have to do it himself!\"\n\n\"Come on!\" Indree was already moving, hitching up her dress and sprinting toward the drydock at the edge of the ceremony grounds, where the airship sat waiting. Tane and the rest of her detail followed behind.\n\nA pair of human Mageblades stood guard over the ramp leading to the steel entry hatch in the airship's side. It stood open, ready for boarding during the launch ceremony. The wood-and-steel hull towered overhead, braced in the drydock, and at this distance the light reflecting from the envelope cast everything in shimmering silver.\n\nThe Mageblades moved to block the ramp as they approached, and both put hands to their pistols when they saw Indree's already drawn.\n\n\"Stop!\" called the man on the left, bald and broad-shouldered. \"Drop your weapon!\"\n\nIndree held up her badge. \"Constable Inspector Indree Lovial. Have you seen the Lady Protector?\"\n\nThe second Mageblade, a sturdy brown-haired woman, nodded her head. \"She just came aboard, with Chancellor Nieris. What is this about?\"\n\n\"We have reason to believe the chancellor may mean her harm,\" said Indree. \"I'm going to need you to let us by. Send to your commander. Tell him to get everyone here, right now. We have to clear the airship and keep it grounded.\"\n\n\"Lady Abena didn't show any sign of distress,\" the bald man said. \"We were told the chancellor had something to show her before the launch. She left orders not to let anyone\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not just anyone,\" said Indree. \"The Lady Protector personally asked me to lead this detail. We don't have time for this!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, ma'am, but we need authorization from Commander Tavis to let you on board,\" the bald man said flatly.\n\n\"So get it! Isn't that what I just asked you to do?\" Exasperation colored Indree's voice. \"If he doesn't believe me, tell him to try and contact Lady Abena. He'll find someone is masking her.\"\n\nThe bald man nodded at his partner; she concentrated a moment, and then her eyes glazed with the sending.\n\nTane shifted his feet impatiently as the woman questioned Indree and relayed the answers to her commander. This was taking too long, and Nieris wasn't going to wait for their convenience. He'd been trying very hard not to think of Kadka\u2014of the way she'd looked at him when he left her behind\u2014but in that moment he couldn't help it. She wouldn't have any patience for this. And he could imagine very easily what she'd have done in his place. He glanced at the female Mageblade's clouded eyes, and then down to her waist, where a pair of ancryst pistols were slung over either hip.\n\nThere was one sure way to make the Mageblades seize the airship.\n\nThey just needed an obvious threat.\n\nThe woman was still distracted by her sending when Tane darted forward. He shouldered her to one side and lifted a pistol from her hip in a single motion. The bald Mageblade jabbed out a hand to grab him. Tane felt fingers brush his back, but they found no purchase, and then it was too late. He was already by, sprinting up the ramp.\n\n\"Stop!\" the Mageblade bellowed, and then a sound of metal on leather\u2014almost certainly an ancryst pistol being drawn. \"One more step and I'll shoot!\"\n\nTane ducked his head, and kept running.\n\n\"Wait!\" Indree's voice. A quick flurry of noise, and then a startled grunt. A pistol-ball threw splinters from the wooden hull ahead, significantly off-target.\n\nFootsteps behind, then, moving quickly. They were following. Good. Close at his back, someone was chanting words in the lingua, but spells took time, and it wasn't a terribly long ramp. He was nearly at the door.\n\nAstra, please just keep them from shooting me for a little bit longer.\n\nThis had to be the stupidest thing he'd ever done. Even if he didn't get himself killed, there would be consequences later. But if it got Indree and the Mageblades on board before Nieris launched the ship, it would be worth it. Sometimes talking worked, or knowledge, or clever tricks, but sometimes there was only Kadka's way: charge at the problem with your teeth bared and punch it in the throat.\n\nTane lunged through the door into the body of the airship. A short magelit hall led further in, with a brass railing running down both sides. It branched in three directions just ahead; he started toward the junction. He had to lead them to the bridge\u2014that was where Nieris would be, if he meant to launch the ship.\n\nA loud thud and clang from behind stopped him in his tracks. He knew what it was even before he turned. No. Not now.\n\nThe hatch was closed, slammed shut by some invisible force. He was alone.\n\nThe floor lurched beneath his feet.\n\nThe airship began to rise." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Kadka stalked along the fence just outside the perimeter established by the Mageblades.\n\nA crowd of onlookers milled about in her path, pointing and gawking up at the airship\u2014the first time she'd seen the people of Thaless react properly to an obvious wonder of magic. When they saw her coming, most took one look at her face and gave her ample room to pass. They saw an orc, and they moved in the other direction. Not very nice, but useful just then. If they didn't get out of the way, she pushed them aside herself, which did nothing to stop the nervous looks aimed at her.\n\nBut she was used to that. It wasn't resentment driving her forward, it was urgency. She needed to find a way into the ceremony, and there wasn't any time to waste. Carver was going to get himself in trouble, and if she wasn't there\u2026\n\nCarver. That vekad fool of an idiot. Too clever to realize how stupid he was. She'd never been quick to anger, but when she found him again, he'd be lucky if she didn't break his nose.\n\nHe didn't get to decide she wasn't a part of this anymore. She'd witnessed magic in these last few days she never would have seen standing watch over doors all day. People had tried to kill her, and that needed answering. She wasn't ready for it to be over. She wasn't done.\n\nShe'd circled almost all the way around the fence now, drawing near the drydock where the airship waited. She couldn't see any break in the security. For a moment, she considered diving into the harbor to approach from the water, where the Mageblades were fewer. But even if she wasn't seen, she would still have to contend with the dome of magical energy over the ceremony grounds.\n\nShe wasn't done, but she couldn't see any way forward, either.\n\nAs consolation, she allowed herself a brief glance up at the airship's shining envelope. At least she'd gotten to see it like this, illuminated by magelight, reflecting silver radiance all across the harborfront. It was beautiful against the starlit sky.\n\nAnd it was moving.\n\nKadka blinked, squinted her eyes. Had she imagined it? No, it was moving, lifting out of the drydock. The activity among the crowd intensified\u2014frantic gestures, cries and shouts of \"It's starting!\" and \"Look, son, this is it!\"\n\nThey thought this was the launch, happening as scheduled. But something was wrong.\n\nThe airship was still tethered.\n\nThe first line broke free on the corner of the drydock nearest Kadka, and then another followed, and another. The airship rose slowly, moving away from the harbor toward the city. The Mageblades were mobilizing now, pushing people out of the ship's path, but there was little they could do\u2014they were as helpless to stop it as everyone else.\n\nOne of the broken tether-lines drifted by over Kadka's head, and she followed without thinking. She only knew two things: first, that the airship wasn't supposed to be moving; second, that if it was, Carver was probably on board, and in some kind of danger.\n\nAnd as much as she wanted to kick him in the head just then, he was going to need her.\n\nThe tether-line was already a full body-length above her, but she sprinted after it anyway, picking up speed as she moved. A towering ogren in a gryphon-etched Mageblade cuirass was trying to clear the crowd; he saw her coming, and stepped into her path. Kadka didn't slow down.\n\n\"Stop, ma'am,\" the ogren ordered in a deep, harmonious voice. He bent to catch her, a nine-foot statue carved of flawless marble dropping to one knee. \"You need to clear\u2014\"\n\nKadka bared her teeth in a wide grin and jumped straight at him. The ogren's eyes widened in surprise. She kicked off his grasping arm\u2014startlingly firm and strong under her feet\u2014and bounded to the lowered shoulder of his brass cuirass like she was climbing a staircase. He straightened, lifting her higher still as he reached up to grab her.\n\nHe was too late.\n\nArms outstretched, Kadka leapt for the trailing tether-line." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Tane's stomach leapt into his throat as the floor swayed beneath him. His vision spun. He hated travelling by ancryst machine at the best of times; this might well have been the worst. He thrust the stolen ancryst pistol into his pocket and grasped the brass rail that ran along the hall to keep himself upright.\n\nPressure built in his ears, and then a voice from nowhere spoke in his head. \"Mister Carver. I hoped you would come.\"\n\nThe pressure didn't abate; the link was still open. \"Nieris.\" Tane clenched his eyes shut and touched the watch case in his waist pocket with two fingers, but the voice he sent was as calm as he could manage. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"For you to join me and the Lady Protector on the bridge. She would very much appreciate if you came quickly and agreeably.\"\n\n\"Because you'll hurt her if I don't, you mean?\" The pressure of the sending was making his nausea worse; sweat beaded on his forehead. But still, he didn't let Nieris hear it. \"Why mince words at this point?\"\n\n\"I am a civilized man, Mister Carver. I dislike making vulgar threats. Please, don't keep us waiting.\"\n\nTane's ears popped, and the presence in his head was gone. Gasping with relief, he slumped to the floor and put his back to the wall. His head dropped between his knees, and he held it there until his breathing slowed.\n\nCollect yourself, Carver. Lady Abena's life is at stake. He pushed himself upright and grabbed hold of the rail, gripping it with white-knuckled desperation. At least I won't fall on my ass if\u2014 Something shook the airship; the hall moved suddenly underfoot. He clutched tight to the rail and rode it out. I swear by the Astra, if I survive this, I'm never setting foot on an airship again.\n\nShuffling along the rail, he started down the hall that he guessed would bring him toward the bridge. A stairway at the far end led to an upper level.\n\nHe hadn't gone far when the pressure in his ears returned. Astra, not again.\n\n\"Tane!\" Indree's voice. That wasn't so bad. \"I couldn't reach you! I thought\u2026 Are you alright?\"\n\n\"I'm on the first flight of an untested, presumably sabotaged airship,\" he answered, continuing on past the heavy steel hatches that lined the hall on both sides. \"I wouldn't say I'm alright. But I'm not hurt.\"\n\n\"Good.\" A pause, and then, \"You Astra-riven idiot. What were you thinking?\"\n\n\"That we were taking too long to get aboard. Looks like I was right.\"\n\n\"Of course. Getting yourself locked in a stolen airship with the most powerful mage in Thaless was obviously the right decision.\" If she'd been there with him, she'd have been glaring in that way only she could. He could almost see it\u2014like she meant to flay the skin from his bones with her eyes alone. \"Have you heard from Nieris? Was it him blocking my sending before?\"\n\n\"He has Lady Abena. I'm supposed to come to him on the bridge.\" He reached the stairs and started up, taking great care with each step. His hands never left the rail.\n\n\"You have to stall him. We're still trying to find a way to board.\"\n\nHe didn't have high hopes. Mages could levitate, but not at speed, and a portal into a moving target was dangerous and impractical. \"I'll try,\" he said. \"What about the heating glyphs? Whatever Nieris did, it might be reversible. If you can get the altered plans from the shipyard\u2014\"\n\n\"Already done. Dean Brassforge is looking over the glyphs now.\"\n\n\"Tell me as soon as he finds something.\" Tane crested the stairway to find another four-way junction in the hall. \"I think\u2026 I think I see the bridge.\" Ahead, straight through the junction, the hall ended in a large steel hatch with a round window. In the room beyond, a huge half-circle of glass panes looked out onto the deck. A panel of levers and glyphed instruments sat below, with a large ship's wheel at its center.\n\nHe couldn't see anyone, but Nieris had to be inside somewhere. Tane reached into his pocket and wrapped his fingers around the ancryst pistol's grip.\n\n\"Just keep him talking while we figure out how to get to you, Tane,\" Indree sent, and in that moment he was all too aware of just how far away and below she was. \"Don't make him angry. As much frustration as it might save me, I don't want you getting yourself killed.\"\n\n\"I'll try not to\u2014\" He neared the hatch, and the sending-pressure abated before he could finish. Indree wouldn't have cut him off like that\u2014this was something else. He'd come within range of Nieris' masking spell.\n\nThe handle on the hatch turned itself, and the door opened. Nieris' voice came from over the threshold. \"Mister Carver. I'm so glad you've decided to join us. Please, come in.\"\n\nTane stepped through the hatch. The tingle of a ward raised the hair on his arms.\n\nTalain Nieris stood in front of the instrument panel a few feet to the right of the wheel. Through the half-circle of windows behind him, the lights of Thaless shone against the dark. He held his head high, his shoulders square, his hands clasped at his back\u2014the picture of elven refinement and poise. A perfectly pressed indigo topcoat with black lapels draped perfectly over his shoulders, with trousers to match, and a deep violet cravat at the neck, impeccably tied and ruffled. His short black hair was neatly parted, not a strand out of place; the hint of grey above his pointed ears only made him look more distinguished. He might have been a gentleman receiving an honored guest, rather than the dangerous criminal he was.\n\nThe Lady Protector wasn't with him.\n\n\"Nieris. Where\u2014\"\n\nWithout moving or even unclasping his hands, Nieris uttered a single word in the lingua. Before Tane could react, a band of silver-blue force wrapped around his midsection, binding his arms to his sides and lifting him from his feet. The spell pushed him hard against the back wall, and pinned him there, a foot above the floor. He struggled, but the Astral energy held him fast. This was too complex a spell for so few words\u2014it must have been spoken in advance and held for completion. One of the most difficult tricks of magecraft, especially while concentrating on other spells. Nieris looked like a bit of a dandy, but he had three hundred years of magical experience, and that made him exceptionally dangerous.\n\nAnd now Tane saw Lady Abena pinned to the same wall just to his right, her arms likewise constrained with silver-blue magic. Her ceremony attire was considerably less neat than Nieris', a rumpled white coat-dress accented with Audish blue, rucked up at the sleeves where the band of force held her arms.\n\nShe offered him a wan smile. \"Mister Carver. I don't suppose you brought any friends?\" Capture, it seemed, hadn't diminished her composure.\n\n\"It's just me, I'm afraid,\" said Tane. His fingers were still wrapped tight around the pistol in his pocket, but it wasn't going to do him much good with his arms bound below the elbow.\n\nNieris raised an eyebrow. \"Not even that\u2026 thing that has been following you all over the city?\" His lip twisted with distaste. \"There is no purpose in lying, Mister Carver. I may not be able to detect her, but she cannot pass through the ward I've cast on this room. She won't be coming to help you.\"\n\n\"I don't know where Kadka is. We\u2026 parted ways.\" Tane tried, without much success, to focus on Nieris rather than the nighttime glow of the city glimmering through the half-circle of the bridge windows. The lights were too small, too far below.\n\n\"An act of surprising good taste, if true,\" said Nieris. \"I don't know how you could stand to be near such an unnatural creature. It is one thing to be magicless, another to be absent from the Astra. I've never seen the like, and I have dealt with full-blooded orcs more than once. But I suppose as a non-magical yourself, you are blind to such things. I admit, it was a great relief when you supplied me with a reason to remove her from the Guard.\"\n\n\"So you owe me a favor,\" said Tane. \"Let us go and set down the airship, and we'll call it even.\" The airship shuddered, and a long groan sounded from somewhere above. He swallowed, and his fingers twitched instinctively toward his waist pocket, but he couldn't reach.\n\nNieris chuckled. \"Even now you insist upon your little jests. I must say, Mister Carver, you have impressed me. When I allowed you to work on the investigation, I believed that a man without magic could only get in the way of the constabulary. But you persevered, and here we are. Perhaps I should even thank you. You see, it occurred to me after you dealt with poor Randolf that I would need a new scapegoat. And you offered yourself up so nicely.\"\n\n\"It's too late to put the blame on me, Nieris. I've already told the constabulary everything.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you've told them quite a tale,\" said Nieris. \"A pity that in a short while you will not be available to argue your case.\" He smiled, a menacing glint in his sapphire-blue eyes. \"You see, Mister Carver, this airship is about to fall out of the sky. With you on board.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Kadka clung to the side of the rapidly ascending airship, clutching the tether-line tight in her fist as the ground dropped away beneath her. She had to be hundreds of feet up already, and still rising. The air was growing colder, and a rising wind whipped through the hair on her head and the backs of her hands, threatening to tug her away into open sky if she loosened her grip for even a moment.\n\nIt was incredible.\n\nShe could see all of Thaless spread across the coast below, a city mapped in landmarks of light and dark. Yellow-orange oil lamps at the outer edges transitioned to silver-blue magelight in the wealthier central districts. There in the middle of it all was the great dome of the Brass Citadel, the seat of the Protectorate's government, divided into pie-slice segments by a framework of silver lights embedded from tip to base. Just south of that was the great expanse of Rosepetal Park, a broad swath of untouched natural darkness. Further north, the illuminated face of the clock tower above Thalen's Hall marked the University campus. Craning her neck back, she could still see a dense collection of magelights at the edge of the harbor behind her\u2014the ceremony grounds, getting further and further away as the airship drifted inland over the city.\n\nShe climbed hand over hand up the rope, stopping to anchor herself on the sill of a porthole whenever the wind gusted too strong or the ship swayed too heavily. Now and again, a strange, straining groan came from the shimmering silver envelope overhead. It didn't sound very good, but then, she didn't know what sound an airship was supposed to make. It might have been the result of some kind of sabotage; it might have been nothing at all.\n\nEither way, it was enough to make her climb faster.\n\nThe tether-line was tied off to a heavy iron ring a few feet below the deck\u2014just far enough that she couldn't reach the edge to pull herself up. There were no handholds across that final gap, just the sealed wood of the hull.\n\nBut she wasn't about to stop here. There was still one way up.\n\nKadka took a final look down at the beautiful lightscape below, gripped the ring with both hands, tensed her arms, and hurled herself upward.\n\nFor a moment, she was suspended in open air, a thousand feet above the ground, at the mercy of wind and gravity. Flying, almost. She laughed aloud, terrified and exhilarated at once. With straining fingers she reached for the edge of the deck. The fingertips of her right hand grazed the edge, caught\u2026\n\nAnd slipped away.\n\n\"Deshka!\" she swore, and grasped wildly with her left hand. Two fingers hooked over the side, no further than the second joint. Not enough to support her weight, but in that brief moment of stability, she gathered her feet under her and kicked blindly for the iron ring below. Her right foot found purchase. She pushed off, just high enough to get her elbow over the edge above. With her right hand, she reached up again and gripped a brass support of the deck rail. A moment later she was pulling herself over to safety.\n\nShe collapsed on the deck, her heart pounding, and rolled onto her back. For a moment she just looked up at the great silver oval shining above and tried to catch her breath.\n\nAnd then that groan came again, louder and longer. Something wasn't right.\n\nKadka pushed herself up and looked along the deck. Just ahead, near the front of the ship, a half-circle of windows framed a room that had to be important. There were lights inside, casting moving shadows over the deck.\n\nSomeone was there.\n\nShe crept closer, staying low, until she was crouched beneath the nearest window. Showing as little of herself as she could manage, she peeked in the bottom corner.\n\nShe'd been right about Carver\u2014he'd gotten himself in trouble. He was pinned against the wall by some kind of spell, a band of silver-blue force around his torso and arms. Lady Abena was beside him, likewise trapped. And though the mage holding them in place had his back to her, Kadka knew him. Pointed elven ears, greying temples, expensive clothing with frills at the sleeve and neck\u2014he was hard to mistake.\n\nChancellor Nieris.\n\nKadka was less surprised than she should have been. For all his forced politeness, she'd seen the ugliness beneath when the chancellor had looked at her, the glint of pleasure in his eyes when he'd stripped her of her badge. He wasn't the first to look at her that way, and probably not the last, but she always noticed. She hadn't suspected him of worse only because he'd seemed too much the fancy bookish sort to get his hands dirty.\n\nApparently she'd misjudged him, there. But nowhere else.\n\nAnd now he had Carver, and the Protector of the Realm. She had to help them, but how? There was a door just to her right, but it was thick steel, and turning the wheel to open it would draw too much attention. Breaking a window would be no better. If Nieris heard her coming, she'd have to cross the room faster than he could cast a spell, and he had three hundred years of experience doing just that. And even if she could get in quietly, he might well already have wards in place to stop her. She'd learned some about magic over the last few days, but not enough to find the flaws the way Carver could.\n\nSo Carver would have to do it for her. If she was going to save him, he'd have to help her do it.\n\nShe just had to get his attention first." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "\"What did you do, Nieris?\" Tane demanded. His only chance now was to keep Nieris talking until help came\u2014if help was coming. \"It's the heating glyphs, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Astute, Mister Carver,\" Nieris said with a condescending smirk. \"A shame such a mind was wasted on a non-magical. Yes, I altered Miss Hesliar's work on the glyphs. A minor change to the limits on their power consumption. Or rather, a complete removal. But the engravers had no means to catch such a mistake, as you well know. And now the envelope is overheating above us, expanding beyond its capacity. The higher we go, the further it stretches. You've already heard it groaning under the strain, I expect. Very soon\u2026\" Nieris clasped his hands together and then parted them suddenly, pantomiming an explosion.\n\n\"This is madness, Talain!\" said Lady Abena, pulling against her magical bonds. \"If we crash over the city\u2026 there are people down there asleep in their homes! They'll be killed!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Nieris said. \"And then your airship will be nothing but a failed experiment. How could the project go on, after such tragedy?\"\n\nLady Abena ceased her struggles, and looked, aghast, to the chancellor. \"You'll die just as surely as anyone!\"\n\n\"You think so little of me, Your Ladyship?\" Nieris affected a tone of mild indignation. \"I assure you, I will survive. You forget: I am the most accomplished portal mage alive.\"\n\n\"You're going to portal out of a moving ship?\" Tane's incredulity was only partly feigned to keep Nieris talking. \"That is insane. There's no way to anchor it!\" A portal linked two fixed points in space\u2014it wouldn't be able to move with the ship.\n\n\"Ah, the limited vision of the magicless.\" The chancellor preened a bit, grasping his lapel with one hand. \"I only need to anchor this end at the moment of entry, Mister Carver. The casting can be done in motion, and the position fixed only at the last instant. Then I simply need to step through before the ship moves away. Perilous for the untrained, but for a master of the craft? Easily done.\"\n\nIt was theoretically possible, but it would make an already unstable spell even more unreliable. \"If you get it wrong and miss your jump, the portal will tear the hull apart as the ship moves by,\" Tane said. \"We all die, and who knows what comes out of the Astra. Directly over Thaless.\"\n\n\"True,\" Nieris said without apparent concern. \"But I have no intention of making such an amateur mistake.\" The arrogance of it was astounding, and Tane was no stranger to arrogance.\n\n\"Why, Talain?\" Lady Abena demanded. \"Why are you doing this? You've served the Protectorate faithfully for centuries!\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Nieris. \"Centuries, watching the nation I have devoted my life to make the same mistake, again and again. I am a scion of House Nieris and the greatest mage of our time, and yet I am forced to suborn myself to an endless parade of magicless fools calling themselves Protectors of the Realm. And all because I was born with a power that makes me their better!\" For a moment, his mannered veneer peeled aside; he spat the last word with a grimace of disgust. \"And now you would ally with the people of the Continent. With these barbarians who fear everything that magic can do, who have sought to destroy us for centuries. Your peace will not last. They will take these airships you mean to give them, and turn them against us. I will not allow that to happen. The time has come to make the Mage Emperor's dream a reality. Your demise with your airship will be a symbol: a new age is dawning, and the magical will rule!\" He raised his fist with all the zeal of a preacher in the Halls of the Astra, and looked to his captives as if expecting applause.\n\n\"You're mad,\" said Lady Abena. \"The moment they see a new Mage Emperor rising to power, every nation on the Continent will move against us. We can't fight them all, Talain. The Protectorate will be wiped from the map.\"\n\n\"Spoken like a non-magical. You haven't the faintest idea what a mage is truly capable of.\" Nieris looked at her for a long moment; his eyes clouded over slightly. \"Let me show you.\"\n\nAnd then Lady Abena screamed.\n\nShe writhed wildly against her bonds, her eyes rolling back in her head, her neck cording with the strength of her screams. Nieris had to be sending her pain\u2014or maybe that wasn't strong enough. This was more like agony, and not just a short burst of it like Tane had gotten from Cranst. No one could suffer like that for very long.\n\n\"Stop it!\" Tane shouted. \"You'll kill her!\"\n\nLady Abena gave a final heave against her bonds, and slumped limply forward. Nieris' eyes focused once more, and he released her, letting her fall to the ground.\n\nTane stared at her, wide-eyed. \"Is she\u2026\"\n\n\"She lives,\" said the chancellor, looking contemptuously at the Lady Protector. \"For now.\" His eyes moved to Tane, considering. Overhead, the envelope groaned once more, long and loud.\n\nSpellfire! If he's willing to do that to the most powerful woman in the Protectorate, he isn't going to balk at me. Tane blurted the first thing that came to mind as a distraction, hoping Nieris' pride would demand he answer. \"You must know you can't get away with this! You've already made too many mistakes. You trusted Cranst, and he let himself be seen. This won't look like an accident, now that everyone is looking for a crime.\"\n\nNieris took a long breath, visibly collecting his calm, and clasped his hands behind his back once more. \"Yes, poor Randolf did make rather a mess of things, didn't he? But don't confuse his mistakes for mine. You know, he didn't even tell me that you had taken the scrollcaster at first. I had to confront him after Dean Greymond told me about your 'black market contacts'. He wanted to fix his failure himself, I suppose. He was so eager to make it up to me\u2014how could I deny him the chance?\"\n\nIt wasn't hard to find the meaning in that. \"You told him to kill himself. He did it for you.\"\n\n\"I thought perhaps the investigation would end with him. And it might have, if not for you and that orcish aberration.\"\n\n\"But the bluecaps know about you now. Even if you portal away, they know you're behind this!\"\n\n\"No,\" said Nieris. \"They only know that you claim I am. They cannot catch us in time to stop me now, and afterward, all the witnesses will be dead\u2014who's to say I was ever aboard? I will claim that I slipped away in the confusion of a madman taking the ship. I have powerful friends who will vouch for me. And the infamous Tane Carver was seen wandering about the University shortly after the murder, and boarding this airship just before it took flight. Seeking vengeance for his expulsion, I shouldn't wonder. Given your reputation, who will believe your story against mine? Not many, I suspect, considering you will not be alive to argue the point.\"\n\n\"Indree will never accept that.\"\n\n\"Inspector Lovial will do what her superiors tell her, or surrender her badge. Enough of this, Mister Carver. I know you are trying to delay me. It is amusing that you think I can be so easily fooled. I didn't come this far only to leave you with enough time to ground the airship after I am gone. I have simply been waiting for the point of no return.\" Another great moan came from the envelope. Textile stretching, metal bending and buckling. \"I believe we are past that now.\" Nieris turned away to face the right wall, and began to chant under his breath. Tane recognized the words of the lingua\u2014he was casting his portal.\n\n\"Wait! I\u2014\"\n\nNieris didn't even look at him, just flicked his fingers and uttered a few short words. A muzzle of silver-blue force surrounded Tane's jaw, clamping it shut.\n\nAstra, what am I supposed to do now? The flash charm loaded in his charmglobe was a momentary distraction at best, and the stolen pistol in his pocket was useless. Even if he could fumble it out and shoot from the wrist with true enough aim to hit anything, casting a portal took more than enough Astral energy to turn an ancryst ball aside. And no aid was coming. Nieris had been right about that. There was no way for the bluecaps or Mageblades to get aboard. Casting a portal from the ship was one thing\u2014opening one into a moving target would be impossible.\n\nTane watched helplessly as the chancellor uttered his portal spell, bringing a silver-blue shimmer of magic into the world near the right wall. It shifted and grew from the size of his fist to the size of his head and then larger still. It wasn't a true portal yet\u2014nothing was visible on the other side\u2014but it wouldn't be long. I can't stop him. I'm going to die here.\n\nAnd then, behind Nieris' back on the left side of the bridge, he saw something. Movement. He couldn't turn his head far under the constraint of the muzzle, but he shifted his eyes.\n\nKadka stared back at him through the window, waving her arms over her head to get his attention." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "If Tane hadn't been muzzled, he might have cheered. He'd never been so happy to see anyone in his life.\n\nNieris' detections can't sense her. He doesn't know she's here.\n\nHe only looked at Kadka from the side of his eye so Nieris wouldn't notice, but he waggled the fingers of his left hand to show he'd seen her. She pointed at the window, gave an exaggerated shrug.\n\nShe can't get in without drawing attention to herself. And if she could, there are wards. And if there weren't, Nieris could shield himself, or\u2026 There were a dozen different problems to deal with before she could get to him, and none of them were particularly easy to fix while he was stuck to the wall.\n\nBut Kadka had come when he'd thought no one could. And if he didn't do something, they were both going to die.\n\nCalm down, Carver. Work this through. The flaw in the mage is the flaw in the magic. What's Nieris' flaw?\n\nThat was easy: arrogance.\n\nHe thinks he's the greatest mage alive. How does that affect his spells? He takes pride in the craft\u2014he'll have chosen his wording carefully. But\u2026 how many is he keeping up right now? The wards, the binding spell, the detection spell on the bridge, the Astral mask that blocked Indree's sending\u2026 and the portal. The most unstable and difficult of spells. More than any mage would risk.\n\nExcept maybe one who thought himself a true master.\n\nThat's where he's vulnerable. He's concentrating on too much at once. If I can distract him badly enough, he might drop something. It won't be the portal, and it won't be the binding\u2014he won't risk letting me free. But if he doesn't think anyone else is capable of getting on board, he has no reason to hold his ward.\n\nBut Kadka still had to get inside. Just breaking the spells would make little difference if Nieris could simply cast them again. Breaking a window or opening the door would draw attention, and that would give the chancellor more than enough time to stop her with a spell\u2014based on the efficiency of his binding, Tane had little doubt that the man knew his combat magic.\n\nThere wasn't much time left. The portal was large enough now to fit a man, a silver-blue hole in reality that only had to be anchored in place.\n\nKadka was still watching; Tane flicked his fingers at her, gesturing her away from the window, and she ducked aside. He tested the freedom of his wrists, gripped the pistol in his pocket, found the clasp on the charmglobe in the other.\n\nHe had a plan.\n\nIt wasn't easy with his limited range of motion, but Tane fumbled the pistol from his pocket, and aimed from the hip at Nieris. No shot would fly straight while the chancellor was channelling so much Astral power, but that wasn't the point. Unable to speak, Tane slammed the heel of his foot against the wall for attention.\n\nNieris halted his chanting with a frown, holding his nearly-complete portal in stasis, and glanced sidelong at Tane. His eyes fell on the pistol.\n\nTane pulled the trigger, and the firing charm consumed itself in a silver flash.\n\nAt the same time, Nieris shouted in the lingua, and a shield of shimmering silver burst to life around him. The ancryst ball had already banked away from the strength of his magic, shattering through the window at the far left of the bridge. The pane of glass fell from its frame in great shards, and the roar of passing wind filled the room.\n\nAnd for just a moment, Tane felt his bonds loosen as the shield drew some of Nieris' concentration. The ancryst would never have struck true, but throwing up a shield under threat was instinctive for any combat-trained mage. Which was exactly what he'd been counting on.\n\nNieris looked to the shattered window, and back to Tane. \"Mister Carver, if you insist on interrupting, I will have to punish you.\" He glared at Tane, and his eyes glazed.\n\nPain lanced through Tane's temples like a white-hot spike driven directly through his brain. It spread over his body, a thousand hot needles stabbed directly into every nerve. He screamed silently into his magical muzzle, writhed against his bonds.\n\nBut he didn't let it stop him. Forcing his fingers open through spasms of agony, Tane rolled the charmglobe along the floor.\n\nNieris' eyes widened as he recognized the brass ball for what it was. He uttered a spell, sealing the charmglobe in a dome of magical force, and threw an arm across his face to shield his eyes against the possibility of a flash charm.\n\nAnother spell cast, and again, the energy holding Tane faltered. The muzzle on his jaw faded away, and the pain dulled. His arms were still bound, but it didn't matter. It was working.\n\nThe charmglobe clicked open inside Nieris' seal.\n\nNothing happened. It was empty.\n\nThe chancellor uncovered his eyes at the sound, and scowled at the empty brass ball. \"I am losing my patience, Mister Carver!\" he snapped. Again, that distant look in his eye.\n\nThe pain returned, worse than before. It seared through Tane's bones, boiled the blood in his veins, filled his skull until it felt like it would burst. He screamed, aloud this time, as every muscle in his body tensed and strained under the assault. He squeezed his eyes shut.\n\nAnd in his clenched fist, he crushed the seal on the flash charm he'd palmed.\n\nA burst of blinding light filled the room, bright enough to blaze red even through the flesh of Tane's eyelids. Nieris cried out in surprise. The pain abated, and Tane sagged several inches from the wall in his bonds.\n\nHe opened his eyes. The portal was still there, a door-sized oval of silver-blue, but the shield around Nieris was gone, and the one around the charmglobe. Which meant the spells Tane couldn't see might have failed too.\n\nIf they hadn't, it was over. He didn't have any tricks left.\n\nNieris clutched a hand to his eyes, his face twisted with rage. \"Enough!\" he bellowed, all illusion of gentility long since vanished. \"You will not distract me with these petty\u2014\"\n\nA blur of grey skin and wild white hair struck the chancellor hard in the side, tackling him to the floor. The portal flared wide and blinked out of existence. At the same moment, Tane's bonds failed. He collapsed to the floor on his knees.\n\n\"What about her?\" he said, and lifted his head to look at Kadka.\n\nShe'd pushed Nieris up against the wall, pinning him there. The chancellor started to chant, but she clapped a hand over his mouth, and her knife was at his throat in an instant. \"Say magic words and you die.\"\n\nTane pushed himself to his feet. His head throbbed with residual agony, and he was unsteady on the shifting airship floor, but he made it to Kadka. \"You came,\" he said. \"I didn't think anyone would.\"\n\nShe glanced at him, frowning. \"Would be easier, if you don't leave me behind.\"\n\n\"I know. I'm sorry. I thought\u2026 I suppose I thought I could do it alone. I was wrong.\"\n\n\"Never again.\" A hint of that familiar grin, a flash of sharp teeth at one side of her mouth. \"Or maybe I don't save you next time.\"\n\n\"Never again,\" he agreed.\n\nAbove, a great wail and moan came from the envelope. Ah, yes. Imminent death. Tane had absolutely no interest in falling from the sky aboard a broken ancryst vehicle\u2014even his worst nightmares weren't as bad as that. There had to be some way to stop it.\n\nHe gestured at Nieris. \"Uncover his mouth, but be ready if he tries anything. We need answers and we don't have much time.\"\n\nKadka leaned close to Nieris' face. \"Remember. Faster to cut throat than say spell.\" Raw disgust and terror warred in the chancellor's eyes, but he nodded his head slightly. She removed her hand.\n\nAs soon as she did, Nieris spoke. \"Call off your beast, Mister Carver. We can still be civilized about this. None of us want to die here. I can portal all of us to safety before the envelope breaks. All I ask is that you let me go.\"\n\n\"Let you go?\" Tane felt his fist close, and before he knew what he was doing, he was swinging it at Nieris' jaw. His knuckles jarred painfully against bone, and pain shot up his arm; he'd never hit someone like that before.\n\nKadka gave him an impressed grin as he rubbed his hand. \"Not bad, Carver.\"\n\nNieris spat blood from his mouth, and glared at Tane. \"Are you quite satisfied? We haven't time to\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Tane said flatly. \"You do not go free, and this airship isn't going to hurt anyone. You killed my friend, and I'm not letting you turn the last project she worked on into your weapon. Or your symbol. You can tell me how to fix it, or you can die with us.\"\n\nNieris stared at him for a long moment, and then, \"You believe that would be the end of this, don't you? If you save the airship and turn me over to the bluecaps.\" He laughed, sharp and bitter. \"You truly don't understand what you've stumbled upon. The Knights of the Emperor are so much larger than one man. There are others, so many others, and they know that the time has come. They will carry on the work. If I\u2026 if I must die for the cause, so be it.\"\n\nKnights of the Emperor? Tane didn't like the sound of that, but there wasn't time to worry about it now. \"If you're so willing to die, why try to bargain to begin with? Come on, Nieris, you can still\u2014\"\n\nAnother moan from above, and then a loud snap. The airship listed sharply to one side.\n\nTane felt himself start to slide as the floor tipped upward, and then faster, and then he was hurtling toward the broken window. Lady Abena's unconscious body struck the wall before he did, and she was low enough that it stopped her.\n\nTane wasn't so lucky. The lip of the window took him in the thigh and swept his legs out beneath him. He tumbled out into the darkness, and his watch case slipped free of his pocket, swinging from his waistcoat at the end of its brass chain. Below, only the deck rail stood between him and an impossible drop to the city lights below.\n\nHis vision spun wildly as he fell. He couldn't tell which way was up\u2014the night-time lights of the city below looked very much like the stars above. Too disoriented to grab hold, he struck the railing with his shoulder and bounced over. The impact spun him around so that he was looking back in the direction he'd come from. Just above the bridge, a section of the rigging that bound the envelope to the hull flapped free\u2014it must have snapped as the envelope expanded. With one hand, Tane grasped wildly for the rail as he plummeted away from the ship.\n\nHe missed.\n\nSuddenly Kadka was there, holding the railing with one hand. Her fingers closed tight around his wrist.\n\nTane dangled wide-eyed, too terrified to speak or breathe for fear that the slightest movement might shake him free of her grip. The ship adjusted to the sudden shift and righted itself as well as it could, though the hull still swayed and the nearer side of the deck hung considerably lower than the farther. Kadka found her footing, let go of the rail, and reached for Tane's arm with her now-free hand.\n\n\"Such an unfortunate turn.\" Nieris' voice, wretchedly smug. He appeared out of the dark behind Kadka, looming above her as she bent over the rail. \"You did come very close to stopping me, I must admit.\" He started to chant a spell.\n\nKadka lashed her free hand behind her, but Nieris simply stepped out of reach. There was nothing she could do without letting Tane fall, and Tane was utterly helpless, hanging in the night sky. He's won.\n\nBehind Nieris, the light shining from the bridge windows flickered and dimmed. The chancellor's mouth gaped open. His eyes rolled back in his head.\n\nGlowing faintly against the night, a ghostly silver-blue hand thrust directly through his chest." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Kadka heaved Tane to safety as Nieris collapsed to the deck. The wraith bent over the chancellor, feasting hungrily. Still reeling, Tane could only watch, clinging to the rail to hold himself upright.\n\nNieris' pale elven skin went paler still, and his veins bulged out like dark worms burrowing beneath. He twitched and spasmed as the wraith siphoned away his Astral bond, but its grip was in him too deep now to pull away.\n\n\"Carver,\" Kadka said, gripping Tane's shoulder. \"The Lady Protector. Come.\"\n\nTane shook his head to clear it, and they skirted around the feeding wraith toward the hatch that led back into the bridge.\n\nIt was dim inside\u2014the wraith had drained most of the lights. Lady Abena lay unmoving against the left wall.\n\nKadka bent down beside the Lady Protector, and held a hand just above her nose and mouth. \"Still breathing,\" she said, and looked up at Tane. \"What now? We have to stop this, yes?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't know how. We need to stop the power going to the heating glyphs to save the envelope, but if we pull the gems, the lift spells lose power too, and the whole ship will fall out of the sky. If we even make it that long.\" Tane jabbed a finger toward the broken window, where the ghostly figure was still siphoning power from the chancellor. \"That thing is distracted for now, but Nieris won't last forever.\" Absently, he grabbed the watch case dangling from his waistcoat and clutched it tight. \"Astra, I can't see any way out, Kadka. I'm sorry I pulled you into this.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. I make you let me come, remember?\"\n\n\"At the beginning. But you came here to help me.\"\n\n\"Some. Also I want to ride airship.\" She grinned. \"But I can't let friend fight insane mage alone. My choice, not yours.\"\n\n\"Well I'm sorry anyway. For all the times you've saved me, I don't think I've been a very good friend in return. Not good enough to deserve this.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"In Sverna, everyone looks at me like human. Here, everyone sees orc. You look at me like Kadka, even if you are stupid sometimes. Show me magic like I have never seen. Is enough.\" With one white-furred hand, she clasped his shoulder. \"If I die flying on airship like no one ever has\u2026 is not such a bad death. But if anyone can stop it, I think you can. Fighting is done, Carver. Time for cleverness now.\"\n\nHe wanted more than anything to tell her he had something. Some solution to justify her faith. But he didn't. He had nothing. \"Kadka, I\u2014\"\n\nA long, screech cut him off, and the airship lurched again, this time directly downward.\n\nThe deck fell under their feet, and Tane's stomach rose into his throat. He lifted into the air as if he was entirely weightless; beside him Kadka did the same, and the limp figure of the Lady Protector.\n\nAnd then, just as suddenly, the ship caught itself, and he slammed down painfully on his hands and knees.\n\nKadka landed improbably on her feet, and caught Lady Abena before she struck the floor. \"What is this, Carver?\"\n\n\"The envelope wasn't made to expand this much,\" said Tane, rising shakily to his feet. \"One of the compartments must be losing air. The lift spells on the hull are trying to compensate, but with so much power going to the heating glyphs, they're failing. We don't have long left.\" He glanced out the window.\n\nThe sudden fall hadn't thrown Nieris overboard, but he'd been tossed limply against the railing. The wraith, unaffected by the movements of the ship, drifted easily back down to the deck. But it wasn't moving toward Nieris anymore. It was coming for the bridge. For them. And this time I don't have an engine case to trap it\u2026 wait.\n\nHe grabbed Kadka's arm and jabbed a finger toward the instruments at the front of the bridge. \"Take the wheel. Steer us out over the water if you can. If this works, it might be a rough landing. If it doesn't, we can still save the people below us.\"\n\nThe wraith passed through the window as if it wasn't there and drifted toward the nearest source of Astral energy: Lady Abena, in Kadka's arms.\n\nTane stepped around them to block the way.\n\n\"This way, you ugly wisp of mist.\" He didn't think the weak insult would do much to draw its attention, but saying it made him feel a little bit more confident.\n\nThe wraith turned lightning-blue eyes toward him, and reached out a hand. Tane leapt back, but not far enough to lose its attention. And just as he'd hoped, it followed, closing the space with increasing speed now that it had chosen its prey. With Nieris gone, Tane's was the strongest Astral signature in the room\u2014unconscious, Lady Abena's would be relatively dormant.\n\nKadka hadn't gone for the wheel yet. Instead, she lowered Lady Abena to the floor and took a step toward Tane. \"Carver, what\u2014\"\n\nHe waved her off, backing rapidly away from the wraith as it closed on him. \"Just take the wheel! It doesn't want you, and we have to get it away from the instruments. Trust me, Kadka. I'm doing something clever.\" I hope. The door to the lower decks was just behind him now, and he stepped backward over the threshold. \"Come on, fog-face. Follow me!\"\n\nIt did, blurring toward him with unnerving speed.\n\nTane turned and ran." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Kadka tied off the ropes, lashing Lady Abena's unconscious body to the wall beside Chancellor Nieris\u2014she'd dragged him in from the deck, in case they still needed him. He was conscious, but he didn't resist, just stared blankly and went where he was led. There were cords and fastenings all around the bridge; whatever they were supposed to be used for, they worked well enough for this. She couldn't look after the Lady Protector and do what she had to do at the same time. It was safer this way.\n\nShe strode to the wheel, took it in both hands, turned it just a bit to the right. There was resistance, but it moved slightly. A moment later, the airship began to turn. Kadka grinned. She didn't know if she'd get out of this alive, didn't know what Carver was doing, or even if he knew what he was doing. But for a moment, she didn't care.\n\nShe was flying.\n\nThe lights of the city spun slowly, far below, as she maneuvered the ship's nose toward the Audish Channel. There it was, coming into view through the right window pane, a dark expanse against a coast speckled with light.\n\nThey were still too high. If the ship fell from this height, it wouldn't matter if they were over water or earth. Kadka glanced at the instrument panel; there were two large wood-handled levers, one on either side of the wheel. Each was currently set at a different angle, with space to move forward or back. She had no idea what either of them did, but if one didn't control descent, this airship had been built very stupidly.\n\nGuessing at random, she grabbed the one on the right, and pushed.\n\nThe ship lunged ahead at speed. Kadka gripped the wheel to keep from stumbling back under the sudden acceleration, and her weight pushed it further right. Suddenly the airship was turning too hard and too fast.\n\n\"Deshka!\" She pulled the lever back down, and the ship began to slow. Grabbing the wheel in both hands once more, she levelled out the turn as gently as she could.\n\nIt had to be the other one, then. She took the left-hand lever and pushed it forward, slow and gradual. At first, it seemed as if nothing had happened, but after a moment, the coastline started to rise over the nose of the ship. With a satisfied nod, Kadka steered in the direction of the bay.\n\nA deafening screech from overhead, and the airship dropped again.\n\nKadka's feet lifted off the floor; she gripped the wheel tight to keep from being slammed against the ceiling. Against the wall, the ropes held Lady Abena and Nieris in place. The abrupt descent only jostled them slightly.\n\nOnce more, something arrested the fall\u2014the lift spells, Carver had said\u2014and Kadka slammed back to the deck, barely keeping her legs under her.\n\nThey'd dropped further this time. And they were still high enough that if the spells on the ship couldn't stop the next fall, everyone on board would be thoroughly crushed on impact.\n\nIt was up to Carver now. Whatever plan he had, she hoped it worked, because she didn't think they had long left." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Tane sprinted down the stairs from the bridge, and then along the hall toward the rear of the ship. He didn't know the layout, but it wasn't hard to guess the direction he needed to go. The floor trembled and moved underfoot, but he didn't have time for vertigo. Steel hatches flashed by on either side; he ignored them. Walls and doors wouldn't stop the wraith. His shadow on the walls shifted as lights flickered and died behind.\n\nIt was getting closer.\n\nPressure filled his ears, and then a voice. Ree. \"Tane! You're alive! I couldn't reach you!\"\n\n\"Nieris had a mask up. But I have bigger problems now.\"\n\nAhead, at the far end of the hall, he saw what he'd been hoping to see: a hatch, similar to the others, but made of brass. That had to be it. He glanced over his shoulder\u2014the wraith was no more than a few yards behind him, a silver-blue phantom with arms outstretched. Lightning-blue eyes fixed on Tane, unblinking.\n\nHe put his head down and ran with everything he had.\n\n\"Tane, what are you\u2014\"\n\nAll at once, the floor leapt under his feet. The ship accelerated, turning hard to the right, and he was thrown against the wall. \"Spellfire! Keep it steady, Kadka!\"\n\nHe didn't realize he'd sent the words to Indree, but she answered. \"Is she steering the ship? It's turning back toward the coast.\"\n\nHe didn't have time to send back. The wraith closed the distance as Tane tried to get his balance again. A ghostly hand reached for his chest. He threw himself back, and silver-blue fingers passed through the air inches short of contact. Tane grabbed the railing and launched himself forward once more into a stumbling run.\n\nHe reached the hatch, gripped the wheel, pulled it hard. It turned, but too slowly. Again, he looked back\u2014the wraith was nearly on him. He wasn't going to make it.\n\nThe wraith reached out. There was nowhere left to run.\n\nThe ship lurched downward into sudden freefall.\n\nTane held the hatch wheel as his body lifted into the air. The wraith, unanchored, rose sharply through the ceiling to the upper level.\n\nIt lasted longer than the first time, but just as Tane was certain he was plummeting to his death, the lift spells re-engaged and caught the ship. His weight returned, pulling him back to the deck.\n\nThe wraith was still somewhere above, but it could pass through the deck like air. It would be coming back. Tane wrenched hard at the brass wheel.\n\n\"Tane?\"\n\n\"Indree, I don't know if I'm going to get out of this alive.\" The wheel moved easier the further it turned. He spun it until he felt the latch give way, and pulled the door open. The room beyond was fully lined with brass, insulated against outside magic. \"If I don't see you again\u2026 I'm sorry. For everything.\"\n\nA ghostly silver-blue figure descended through the ceiling above, just a few feet behind him.\n\n\"Tane, I don't\u2014\"\n\nTane stepped through the door, and the pressure in his ears died, blocked by brass. Indree was gone.\n\nBut he'd made it. The engine room. Against the back wall, a glass-fronted hatch held an array of a half-dozen fist-sized diamonds. The first two were already entirely lost to milky white, cracked and lustreless, and the next two were heavily clouded over from the unchecked drain of the heating glyphs. The last pair, though, was still clear enough that Tane could see the brass of the wall behind them. All were grasped in claws of conductive copper, and all along the walls, brass tubes\u2014no doubt lined on the inside with copper as well\u2014ran from the sides of the power array to the left and right sides of the room. On both sides, large panels allowed access to the inner workings of the ancryst engines.\n\nThere was no way out. If this didn't work, he'd trapped himself with the wraith at a dead end.\n\nTane ignored the engines, and lunged for the hatch at the back wall. With both hands, he yanked it open. Even without looking, he could feel the wraith behind him, reaching. He ducked, threw himself to the right, scrambled away. Braced himself for that cold spectral touch.\n\nIt didn't come.\n\nHe turned to see the wraith's hands thrust into the power array.\n\nYes! The only source of Astral energy on the ship that had a chance of distracting a wraith from living prey was the gem array that powered the spells keeping them in the air. Tane hadn't been sure they'd have enough charge left, but it had worked.\n\nHe leapt through the door, slammed it shut behind him, turned the wheel hard. The latch clicked into place.\n\nThe wraith was trapped, sealed in brass.\n\nTrapped with the ship's power source. Which didn't give them much time.\n\nTane sprinted back down the hall, up the stairs, through the door to the bridge. It was dark inside\u2014the last of the magelights had given out.\n\n\"Kadka!\" She was at the wheel, a silhouette against the starlit sky. He closed the distance to her side. \"How long before we can land? We don't have much time.\" Against the left wall, he noticed Lady Abena and Nieris lashed tight beside one another. Good\u2014he didn't much care about the chancellor, but the sudden drop before might well have dashed the Lady Protector against the roof.\n\nKadka glanced at him as he drew alongside her. \"Don't know. Hard to tell, like this.\" She gestured at the windows. The lightless expanse of the bay was beneath them now, just like Indree had said, but it was difficult to judge their height in the dark. \"What did you do? Where is wraith?\"\n\n\"Locked in the engine room, siphoning the ship's gems. Which should drain the flow to the heating glyphs before the envelope bursts. Whatever air is left, it will help to slow our fall when the lift spells end. But it's not going to keep us aloft. If we're too high when the power runs out\u2026\"\n\nHe met her eyes, and saw that he didn't have to finish. She nodded her understanding, and smiled slightly, without showing her teeth.\n\n\"Is good we meet each other, Tane Carver. Has been\u2026 exciting.\" She offered him her hand.\n\nTane took it. He didn't know what else to say\u2014or maybe there was nothing left to say. Hand in hand and side by side, they waited silently as the ship descended over dark waters.\n\nIt wasn't long before the lift spells failed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "There was nothing else for Tane to grab, so he grabbed Kadka, throwing his arms around her. She gripped him tight with one hand, holding the wheel with the other as they rose into the air together.\n\nNothing stopped them, this time. The power was spent. For what felt like forever, they plummeted toward a black sea.\n\nAnd then, with a great splash, the airship hit water.\n\nThrough the window, the dark of the bay surged outward in a massive wave, just visible in the reflected moonlight. He and Kadka hit the floor with jarring force, still clinging to one another. Kadka landed atop him, crushing the breath from his lungs.\n\nBut they weren't dead.\n\nThank the Astra! Whether they'd been nearer to the water than he'd thought or sufficiently slowed by what was left of the envelope, he didn't know, and it didn't matter now. All that mattered was that he was still alive.\n\nAlive enough to feel the full weight of Kadka's knee digging into his ribs.\n\n\"Get off,\" he wheezed. \"Can't breathe.\"\n\nShe rolled off of him on to her back, laughing. \"That was\u2026 not so bad.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" Tane groaned, clutching his side.\n\nAcross the room, Lady Abena stirred against the ropes holding her. \"What\u2026 what happened? Nieris!\" She glanced to her side, saw the chancellor lashed beside her, and tried to recoil. Nieris only stared at her, his mouth gaping open. A string of drool fell from his lower lip.\n\n\"He's harmless, Your Ladyship,\" Tane said. \"Kadka, let her free.\" Painfully, he started to rise as Kadka bounded up and drew her knife. She'd freed Lady Abena before Tane had gotten himself to his feet.\n\nLady Abena let Kadka help her up and leaned against her, blinking in confusion. \"You\u2026 how did you do this, Mister Carver? Last I remember, you were in no position to stop Talain.\"\n\nHe glanced at Kadka, and smiled. \"I didn't do it alone. But it's a long story.\" A light drew his attention. More than one, actually, visible through the bridge windows. Boats, moving over the water. \"And it looks like help is coming. We wouldn't be very good hosts if we didn't greet them at the door.\"\n\nThe three of them made their way down to the side hatch Tane had entered by, and he threw it open. The boats were only a few yards out now. There were two of them, cutters powered by ancryst engines, both dwarfed by the airship. In the silver-blue of their magelights he could see the constabulary's golden shield on their prows, marking them as coastal patrol vessels.\n\n\"Tane?\" Indree's voice.\n\n\"I'm here,\" he said. \"We're alive.\"\n\nThe first boat raised a ramp to the hatch, and three human Mageblades were the first ones off the deck. One took Lady Abena from Kadka while the others fell in protectively on either side. Tane moved to follow as they took her back down the ramp, but one of them raised a hand to stop him.\n\n\"The next boat is yours. The Lady Protector's security can't be compromised.\"\n\nTane didn't argue, although it was tempting. Where was that security a half-hour ago?\n\nFrom the deck, Lady Abena turned back one last time. \"Thank you, Mister Carver, Miss Kadka. I will not forget this.\" And then her Mageblades led her into the cabin, and out of sight.\n\nThe next boat had barely raised its ramp before a figure was marching toward them, flanked by several bluecaps in full uniform.\n\n\"Not the most elegant landing,\" said Indree. Up close, he could see that her evening dress was soaking wet. The wave they'd raised when they hit water must have thrown up a powerful spray.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Kadka said, grinning. \"But is not bad for my first time, I think.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Indree. \"Not bad at all.\" She turned to Tane, then, and before he knew what was happening, she was throwing her arms around him. \"I'm glad you're alive.\"\n\nInstinctively, Tane folded his hands around her waist. \"I'm glad you're glad,\" he said. \"I\u2026 thought you'd be angrier.\"\n\nShe drew back, but didn't let go. \"Oh, I'm extremely angry.\" She smiled to take the bite from the words, but he could see the annoyance behind her eyes. \"You nearly got yourself shot, and it wasn't exactly easy to explain why I stopped the Mageblades from killing a man chasing after the Lady Protector with a stolen pistol. But you did it. Somehow. So this time, I'm going to skip the scolding.\"\n\nKadka leaned close to Tane's ear, and far too loudly, she whispered, \"Now you kiss.\"\n\nHe should have been embarrassed, but it was just too absurd, after everything. Instead, he quirked an eyebrow at Indree. \"I do hate to disappoint an audience\u2026\"\n\nIndree hesitated, just an instant, and then shook her head and pushed him away. \"In your dreams. I have work to do. Where's Nieris?\"\n\nTane pointed back through the hatch. \"Tied up on the bridge. He won't give you any trouble. He's been Astra-riven.\"\n\n\"What?\" Indree frowned. \"How did a wraith get on board?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you later,\" Tane said. \"When you're done working. It's trapped in the engine room. You'll need to have someone banish it.\"\n\nIndree took a pair of bluecaps in with her, and directed one\u2014a gnomish man she introduced as Constable Tobtock\u2014to bring Tane and Kadka aboard the smaller boat. He led them down the ramp and into the ship's cabin. There wasn't much to it, just a small enclosed space with a bench along one side and a small cot bolted to the floor.\n\n\"Sit where you like,\" Tobtock said. \"It will take some time to properly secure the airship. Can I get you something to drink?\"\n\n\"Whiskey,\" Kadka said quickly, before Tane could answer.\n\nTobtock smiled. \"I probably shouldn't, but after the night you've had\u2026 I might be able to find something. Wait here.\" He stepped out of the cabin and left them alone.\n\nTane sat down on the edge of the cot. Kadka lowered herself onto the bench and leaned against the wall. For a long time, they were both quiet, and then their eyes met across the room. That sharp-toothed grin spread across Kadka's face, and Tane couldn't help but match it.\n\nAnd then they were both laughing, letting the tension spill out of them in the only way that seemed to make sense just then. Just like in the workshop, the day they'd met.\n\nIt was a long time before they stopped." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "\"No one worked harder on the airship project than Allaea did. I always admired that about her, even while I was trying to get her to rest for a night or two.\"\n\nIndree stood behind a podium atop a dais erected on the grass at the campus center, before an audience of hundreds of students and citizens. She wore her full constable's uniform, with her cap held at her side. Her voice\u2014magically projected to reach the furthest corners of the crowd\u2014rang in Tane's ears as if he was standing right beside her, though he was actually sitting beside Kadka several rows back.\n\n\"She loved her work. She loved the University. But she was just as dedicated to her friends. Since we were children, she would drop everything to help me when I really needed her. She could be blunt, and sometimes it hurt to hear, but her advice always went straight to the heart of the problem. I wouldn't be who I am today without her.\" Indree stopped, there, and wiped a hand across her cheek. Tane couldn't see the tears, but he knew they were there.\n\n\"But even though she's gone, she'll be remembered. By the friends whose lives she touched, and by her family\"\u2014there, she gestured at Allaea's parents, an elven couple sitting on the dais behind her\u2014\"and by everyone who looks up to see an airship passing by overhead. Soon that will be a common sight, all across Audland and the Continent. She would say that she was only responsible for a small part of it, that there were hundreds of others who worked on the project. And as usual, she would be right. But even if it's only in part, our nation owes its mark on the sky to her.\n\nIndree looked up, then, at the clear blue afternoon sky. \"Thank you, Allaea. You won't be forgotten.\" And then she stepped away from the podium, and returned to her seat beside Allaea's parents and the University deans. The Hesliars stood to embrace her.\n\nLady Abena rose next, and stepped up to speak. \"Thank you for the beautiful words, Constable Inspector Lovial. Miss Hesliar was truly one of the University's best. And in honor of her great contribution to the project, I am proud to announce that a name has been chosen for our first airship: the Hesliar.\"\n\nCheers from the crowd, and applause like thunder. Allaea had been well known on campus, and well liked, despite her sharp tongue. Tane stood with a hundred others to clap for the friend he'd lost, and Kadka did the same beside him.\n\nLady Abena held up a hand as the applause died. \"Now, there is one more announcement to make. As some of you know, with the airship project completed, Chancellor Nieris has decided to take his retirement after more than a century of service.\"\n\nA few sounds of surprise, there.\n\n\"Should say he is drooling in his bed,\" Kadka grumbled. \"Is criminal and murderer. Should tell truth.\"\n\n\"You know they can't, Kadka,\" Tane said quietly. \"I don't love it, but if the full extent of what happened got out, the Continent would never trust our airships, and the treaty would fall apart. Lady Abena was lucky she was able to pass off last night as a final test flight.\" The full blame for Allaea's murder had been laid on Randolf Cranst. Who had been the one to actually kill her, but still, it felt like a lie. It wasn't as if Nieris had gotten off easily, though\u2014everything the man was had been stripped away, including the magic he'd been so proud of. He'd spend the rest of his life an Astra-riven invalid, being cared for by his family at some estate in the countryside. House Nieris had been as eager as anyone to keep his crimes quiet.\n\n\"As Protector of the Realm,\" Lady Abena continued, \"it falls to me to select a worthy individual to fill the rather large shoes Talain Nieris leaves behind. As such, it is my pleasure to present to you your new chancellor: Liana Greymond.\"\n\nThat wasn't entirely a surprise. There hadn't been a non-elven chancellor for a very long time, but there were no elven deans to raise up, and Dean Greymond was a well-respected mage. Tane applauded again as Greymond took the podium from the Lady Protector.\n\n\"Thank you, everyone,\" Greymond said. \"I will strive to live up to the legacy of my predecessors. And as my first act, Lady Abena has graciously given me permission to announce a new program, in honor of the many non-magical laborers and mechanical engineers who worked on the airship project.\"\n\nTane couldn't help but rise a little bit in his seat. She can't mean\u2026\n\n\"Beginning with the next term, we will be opening the University's schools of magic to the non-magical. All who pass the entrance exams will be welcome. The Protectorate's great strength is our magic, and the Lady Protector and I agree that all of our citizens deserve the opportunity to understand and work with it, whether they are born with magecraft or not.\"\n\nAs the crowd gasped and shouted and cheered, Tane's hand found his father's watch case. He held it tight as tears rolled down his cheeks. After all this time, all the years he'd worked for this, he couldn't believe it.\n\nKadka was looking at him. He swallowed, embarrassed, and moved to wipe his cheeks. But she only put a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"No shame, Carver. Is dream long time coming. Enjoy it.\"\n\nSo he did, until the noise of the crowd began to fade. It was only then that he found himself wondering, What am I supposed to do with myself now?\n\nGreymond dismissed the crowd, and the seats emptied quickly as people stood and filed down the aisles. But Tane didn't move, just sat where he was for a long time, gathering himself.\n\nKadka waited patiently beside him until she couldn't anymore, and then she nudged him and pointed to the dais. \"Come, or we miss them. You can talk to Indree.\" She waggled her eyebrows suggestively, and then started across the grass, not waiting to see if he was behind her.\n\nIndree was still with Allaea's parents, exchanging goodbyes, but Lady Abena and Dean Greymond\u2014Chancellor Greymond, Tane reminded himself\u2014were already climbing down the steps. Tane followed Kadka over to catch them before they left.\n\n\"Mister Carver, Miss Kadka,\" Lady Abena greeted them. \"I'm pleased you accepted the invitation. After hearing the story you told the constables, I may never be able to repay you. I wish that we could have given you the recognition you deserve. If there was any way to do it without revealing how close the airship came to disaster\u2026\" She looked to Tane. \"But Liana suggested that you might appreciate the validation of your thesis as some degree of compensation.\"\n\n\"It's more than enough,\" said Tane, and looked to Greymond. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You earned it,\" Greymond said. \"I wouldn't have thought even a trained mage could best Nieris, but you stopped him without any magic of your own. I was wrong about you, Tane, and you've more than proved it. If you'd like, we'll need lecturers who understand the viewpoint of our non-magical students. There could be a position for you here.\"\n\nIt was more than he'd ever expected. He didn't have an answer ready; the words came out in an embarrassing stammer. \"I\u2026 I'm not sure I'd know how to\u2026\"\n\n\"You don't have to decide now,\" said Greymond. \"Just think about it.\" And then, to Kadka, \"And Miss Kadka, needless to say, there is a position in the University Guard for you if you want it. We owe you just as much as Mister Carver.\"\n\n\"I will think too,\" Kadka said. \"Is good that you offer. Maybe you are better to work for than Nieris.\"\n\nGreymond arched an eyebrow, and smiled slightly. \"I hope I am, Miss Kadka. I truly do.\"\n\n\"Now,\" said Lady Abena,\" we must be going. There is a great deal of work to do getting the University and my airships back in working order. Come, Liana.\"\n\n\"What about\u2014\" Kadka began.\n\nGreymond, predictably, was already answering. \"Ah, yes. I nearly forgot. I've arranged for the bursar to release your pay. You can see him on your way off campus.\" With that, she and Lady Abena departed toward Thelan's Hall, surrounded by an escort of a half-dozen Mageblades.\n\nIndree approached then, holding her cap under her arm. \"Tane. Kadka. I'm glad you came.\" Her eyes were tired and sad, rimmed with red, but she offered them a shallow smile.\n\n\"Is good speech you give,\" said Kadka.\n\n\"It was.\" The corner of Tane's mouth quirked upward. \"Allaea would have hated it.\"\n\nIndree laughed, and it brought a hint of brightness to her eyes. \"She would have, wouldn't she? But I think she would want me to thank you. Both of you. Without your help, her killers would never have been brought to justice.\"\n\n\"There might still be others, if what Nieris said about the Knights of the Emperor was more than just an empty threat,\" said Tane. \"Have you found anything on them?\"\n\n\"Not yet. I think that might be a more long-term investigation. But we have Cranst's badge, and we'll be going through Nieris' home and office over the next few days. Speaking of which, Tane\u2026 if we do find something, I might be able to offer you some consulting work. We don't know how many of these people there are, or how high they go. If they exist, we're going to need help finding them. And you've proven to be good at that.\"\n\n\"I'll help however I can.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Indree. She paused for a long moment, as if unsure what else to say. \"Well. I should get back to the Yard. There's work to be done, like I said.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Tane. Another pause, broken by Kadka faking the most unsubtle cough he'd ever heard and prodding him sharply in the ribs. Spellfire, she's going to make me do it. \"Er, Indree\u2026 maybe you'd like to get dinner, some time? And talk about\u2026 things?\"\n\n\"I think I might like that,\" Indree said, with a slow smile. \"I'll let you know.\" She turned to go, and then looked back at him over her shoulder. \"And Tane? You can call me Ree.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "An unmarked envelope was waiting in Tane's letterbox when he and Kadka arrived back at his office. He sat behind his desk to examine it, and Kadka took the seat on the other side, putting up her legs.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked.\n\nTane broke the seal and pulled out a small sheet of folded paper. At the top, it was marked with the image of a green masquerade mask. \"I think it's from Bastian.\" He read it aloud. \"My friends. On behalf of all the Audish patriots who will never know the great service you have done our nation, let me thank you. Consider yourselves welcome guests in my establishment, and know that you will always merit a generous discount. Signed, an ardent admirer.\" He smiled as he read the next bit. \"Postscript: My dear Kadka, the offer always stands. If you are ever in need of work, please present yourself to our mutual friend the fishmonger.\"\n\nKadka laughed. \"Is him. No question.\"\n\n\"So,\" said Tane, \"are you going to take him up on it? For a criminal, he seems like a good sort. And it might be exciting. I know you like that. Or are you going back to the University Guard?\" Part of him dreaded her answer. Now that it was all over, he knew she'd have to find some sort of reliable work, but discussing it aloud felt more final than he liked.\n\n\"Don't know yet,\" Kadka said. She hesitated, and then, \"You have choice too. Teach at University, work with bluecaps. What will you do?\n\n\"I suppose I'll lecture,\" he said, without much enthusiasm. \"The pay is going to be better than anything I've made working on my own.\" It was strange\u2014he'd spent ten years of his life worrying about proving his worth to the University, and now that he'd done it, the prospect of returning was less exciting than he'd imagined. Indree had already forged her own path, and Allaea was gone. After all this time, it didn't feel like there was anything left for him there. \"Or\u2026 maybe the bluecaps would be better. Maybe both, if the timing works. It's\u2026 more options than I've had for a long time.\"\n\nKadka nodded, and after a moment, she said, \"Feels strange, not to work together. Is not many days since we meet, but\u2026 seems longer.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Tane. \"But this case was an anomaly. I've been calling myself a 'consultant' for years now, and even split between us I made more coin today than I have over the last two months. There isn't enough work for\u2014\"\n\nA knock at the door interrupted him. He shared a glance with Kadka\u2014he wasn't expecting anyone, but if Nieris could be believed, there might be other Knights of the Emperor, and they might know who he was. They both stood; her hand went to her hip, where he knew she had a knife hidden.\n\nTane made sure the door-chain was fastened tight, and Kadka put her back to the wall, knife in hand. Another shared glance, and at her nod, he opened the door a crack to peek through.\n\nThere was no one in sight.\n\n\"Hello,\" a voice said at waist-height. He looked down to see a matronly gnomish woman with dark hair standing just outside the threshold. \"My name is Telna Dookle. Are you the ones they're calling the Magebreakers?\"\n\nTane blinked. \"I don't\u2026 what? What in the Astra is a Magebreaker?\"\n\n\"The ones who stopped Chancellor Nieris,\" she said, looking up at him hopefully.\n\n\"I think you're mistaken,\" said Tane. \"The chancellor retired\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, I know.\" She wrung her hands, a worried frown on her face. \"But I've heard another story too. There are rumors, people who saw things last night, and I hoped\u2026 They say you can help people without magic deal with magical problems?\"\n\nTane closed the door just enough to slip the chain free, and then swung it fully open. If he was any judge of liars, this woman wasn't one. He beckoned to Kadka, and she moved into sight beside him. \"I'm Tane Carver, and this is Kadka. Exactly what kind of help are you looking for?\"\n\n\"It's my husband,\" she answered. \"About a week ago, he met an unlicensed mage at a tavern who offered to hire him for some sort of job. I didn't like the sound of it, but my husband\u2014Tonke is his name\u2014has always been stubborn. He wanted to give our family the things we couldn't afford, artifacts to make our lives easier. He engineers tunnels for the mines south of the city, and this man wanted his skills for\u2026 I don't know what. They were supposed to meet two days ago, and he hasn't come back!\" She wrung her hands again, tears building in her eyes. \"I can't go asking after a dangerous mage by myself, but if I tell the constables, they'll ask what my husband is involved in. I'm sure it's nothing legal. If they lock him up at Stooketon Yard\u2026 we have children, Mister Carver. They need their father. Can you help me?\"\n\nTane looked down at Telna Dookle for a moment, and then his eyes met Kadka's over the little woman's head.\n\nA sharp-toothed grin stretched across Kadka's face. \"Seems like job for Magebreakers.\"\n\n\"I suppose it does,\" said Tane, and found himself smiling back. \"Although I can't say I love that name.\"\n\nMrs. Dookle's eyes widened. \"Does that mean you'll help me?\"\n\nTane stepped aside, and ushered her toward his desk. \"Mrs. Dookle, you came to the right place.\"\n\nThank you for reading The Flaw in All Magic. I hope you enjoyed it! If you did, and you want learn more about my novels, have a look at my website at bensdobson.com, or join my Facebook page. If you just want to know when the next Magebreakers book is released, you can sign up for my mailing list here. And please, consider leaving a review of this book on Amazon. It's a great way to help me build an audience so I can keep writing!\n\nFinally, if you're interested in more of my work, flip to the end of the book for a free sample of my already released stand-alone novel, Scriber. Enjoy!" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Agatha H. and the Airship City", + "author": "Phil & Kaja Foglio", + "genres": [ + "Steampunk", + "Humor", + "Adventure" + ], + "tags": [ + "Girl Genius", + "steampunk", + "female proragonist", + "inventions" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Adventure! Romance! Mad Science!\n\nThe Industrial Revolution has escalated into all-out warfare. It has been eighteen years since the Heterodyne Boys, benevolent adventurers and inventors, disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Today, Europe is ruled by the Sparks, dynasties of mad scientists ruling over\u2014and terrorizing\u2014the hapless population with their bizarre inventions and unchecked power, while the downtrodden dream of the Hetrodynes' return.\n\nAt Transylvania Polygnostic University, a pretty, young student named Agatha Clay seems to have nothing but bad luck. Incapable of building anything that actually works, but dedicated to her studies, Agatha seems destined for a lackluster career as a minor lab assistant. But when the University is overthrown by the ruthless tyrant Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, Agatha finds herself a prisoner aboard his massive airship Castle Wulfenbach\u2014and it begins to look like she might carry a spark of Mad Science after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "A a small clearing, an intricate device of glass and metal tubes scanned the night skies. The stars glittered. Barry Heterodyne sat back and rubbed his eyes. Nothing. Around him the nighttime sounds of frogs and insects filled the marsh air. He glanced over at the campsite. Bill sat in front of the black flames, endlessly cleaning his weapons.\n\nBarry sighed. His worry about the state of his brother's mind was steadily increasing. It had been three years since the explosions had ripped through Castle Heterodyne, killing Bill's infant son and covering the escape of his wife's abductors. Three years without a clue to the identity of the perpetrators, a ransom note, or indeed, any information at all.\n\nBarry pulled out a pocket watch and flipped open the cover to check its glowing numerals. He then pulled out a pad of foolscap covered with equations and, for the hundredth time, checked his calculations. He sighed again. It all balanced out. If this was another blind alley\u2014\n\nThe device quietly chirped. Suddenly Bill was at his side. Barry swallowed. Whatever deterioration was taking place in his brother's head, there was no effect upon his abilities. If anything, Bill was getting faster.\n\nBarry fitted his eyes to the scopes. Yes! There was a new set of stars in the crosshairs. Two more flickered on as he watched.\n\nUnthinkingly, he gave his brother the old \"thumbs up\" signal, and then realized with a start that it was the first time he had done so since that terrible night in Mechanicsburg.\n\nThe destruction of their castle had only been the first such attack upon the Sparks of Europa. Six months later the attacks had begun in earnest, and in the subsequent two and a half years, thirty-eight of the most powerful Sparks of Europa had been snuffed out.\n\nThe most frustrating thing had been the lack of information. There had been no demands, no manifestos, no ultimatums. Just a single-minded effort to destroy as many Sparks as possible.\n\nOf course, in the beginning, accusations had flown between the Great Houses, usually accompanied by wind-up starfish ninjas or giant glass crabs. But as time went on, all the obvious suspects were wiped out in turn, and soon there were few left. Eventually they just started calling the mysterious antagonist \"The Other.\"\n\nBarry switched off the scope and stared up into the sky. The new stars could be seen with the naked eye now and rapidly were getting brighter. This attack looked like it was following the traditional pattern, but this time, they were ready. He handed Bill a pair of bulky goggles and donned a pair himself. Now when he looked, the objects hurtling towards the ground were greatly magnified. Then, they seemed to fall apart and vanished. Barry whipped a hand up to the goggles and flipped a switch. The quality of the light changed and the sky was now orange. He looked about frantically. His brother growled, \"Down. Left. At 7:37.\" It was the most Bill had spoken this week. Barry shifted his head as instructed and\u2014there! Three small shapes in freefall. There was a fourth and\u2014\n\nWithout warning the shapes seemed to burst apart yet again, and each one sprouted a huge mushroom-like growth\u2014Barry blinked. It was a da Vinci parachute. But it must be enormous. On the other hand, they certainly seemed to be working, as the objects, now clearly discernable as spheres, were noticeably slowing.\n\nBill tapped his shoulder, and the two dashed back to the swamp strider, which Barry had left ticking over. Bill maintained observation of the falling spheres, while Barry maneuvered the craft through the pools and bogs.\n\nAll too soon they broke through a wall of brush in time to see all ten spheres gently plow into the spongy ground and roll to a stop. The great parachutes fell to earth and were draped over the landscape.\n\nThe spheres themselves were six meters in diameter, constructed of glass and metal. As Barry watched, he saw the last of what looked for all the world like bread crust flaking off the spheres and falling to the ground. Possibly some sort of insulator, he mused.\n\nThe spheres were hot. They could feel the heat from where they were. Barry tugged his thick leather gloves out of his belt and pulled them on. Then he hopped down beside his brother who had already begun unloading the swamp strider's cargo pod, and the two of them got to work.\n\nBarely an hour later, as the sky was beginning to lighten, there was a sudden change. Lights began to bloom across the spheres, and machinery could be heard activating. Pumps began to whirr, and pipes sucked and gurgled.\n\nWhen a Spark was attacked, those that were not crushed by the initial bombardment suddenly found themselves attacked by large, insect-like creatures that would appear, seemingly from nowhere, and overrun the area. While people were battling them, smaller wasp-like creatures would also appear, burrowing into anyone they could find. Many died outright. Those that didn't were infected by parasitic organisms that forced them to obey the orders of the insect army, while physically distorting their bodies in unmentionable ways. These doomed souls came to be called \"Revenants.\" While they were slow and easy to spot, they were fearless and many a despairing band of fighters had been overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers. The transformation took place quickly enough that, often, newly infected revenants helped overrun their own towns, killing all non-human creatures and converting as many people as they could into monsters like themselves. Once they were finished, they lurched off, without a backward glance, led by their insect masters towards the next target. There was no cure.\n\nAgain and again this pattern repeated itself. The governments of Europa were powerless, and many quickly fell into ruin as the Sparks propping them up were exterminated.\n\nBoth varieties of Slaver Wasp, for so they were labeled, were examined, but even the greatest Sparks couldn't determine if these creatures were natural or constructs, let alone how to prevent their depredations.\n\nWith a hiss, the spheres began to split open. First to emerge were waves of the all-too-familiar soldier wasps; they tottered weakly out of the spheres, and immediately began to feed upon the remains of the parachutes. Barry nodded. No wonder they'd never seen any evidence of them.\n\nThen, from the heart of the burst spheres, reared enormous slug-like grubs, themselves laced with pipes and valves. They stretched upwards, opened their surprisingly small mouths and began droning an eerie call. When the soldiers had finished devouring the last remnants of the parachutes, they gathered around the base of the spheres and waved their claws in time to the song. More and more of the monstrous creatures began to sing in the predawn light. Barry had to fight the urge to clap his hands over his ears. In desperation, he began to hum the comforting atonal drone that helped him to think clearly. Beside him, Bill was already humming in familiar counterpoint.\n\nAll of the grubs were singing now. A ripple of color spread over the first, and it opened its mouth even wider and began to spit out a swarm of the feared Slaver wasps.\n\nThat was good enough for Bill; he twisted the control lever in his hand, igniting the string of phosphorus grenades that the boys had festooned the spheres with as they lay cooling.\n\nAlmost a hectare of swamp fiercely burned with a white-hot glare for several minutes. Within the inferno, Barry could hear the screaming of the great slug monsters and the crackling of the soldiers. Several of the latter attempted to break free of the conflagration, but they were easily cut down by the boys.\n\nHalf an hour later, Barry sat down, exhausted. The nature of the swamp had prevented the fire from spreading, but the great heat had ignited enough trees that they'd had to move quickly to escape. But the danger was behind them now, and the fire was already dying down.\n\nScarcely five kilometers away loomed the gutta-percha citadel of Lord Womak, \"The Lightning Eater.\" Barry had to admit that he felt a small, unworthy bit of satisfaction as the first of the flaming boulders smashed into His Lordship's castle. They had tried to warn Womak, but he had merely laughed and released a pack of flying badgers against them.\n\nA total of ten boulders impacted. Two of them directly upon the main castle. In Barry's opinion, the rest were quite superfluous, as the devastation caused by the first two left no doubt in his mind that the Lightning Eater was pulverized along with everything within the castle walls.\n\nThe remaining eight missiles were obviously meant to soften up the town and the surrounding countryside for the subsequent attack by the Slaver wasps.\n\nWomak had situated his castle on a crag outside the nearest town, so the town had only suffered minimally from the impacts that had destroyed the castle. The remaining boulders rained down in a precise geometric pattern surrounding the town, and culminated with the last falling directly into the town center.\n\nBarry forced himself to watch as each boulder impacted. It was as he'd suspected. When they had first viewed a bombarded town, the general consensus had been that the missiles must have contained explosives. But Bill had never been able to find any chemical residue for analysis. Watching now, Barry could see that there were no additional explosions, the devastation was caused by the terrible kinetic force of the impacts themselves. That was the final confirmation of his unthinkable hypothesis.\n\nThe Other had tipped his hand. Barry knew where to find him, and once there\u2014\n\nBut there was time enough to deal with that later. The townspeople would need help, but for the first time, one of the Other's attacks had been predicted and curtailed.\n\nHe could be beaten." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\u2002\"In conclusion, the evidence shows that there has not been a legitimate sighting of either William or Barry Heterodyne since they assisted in the cleanup of Woggleburg after the destruction of Lord Womak's castle sixteen years ago. All such reported sightings have proved to be either fraudulent Heterodynes or simple cases of mistaken identity. However, amongst the general populace, the belief that they are still 'out there' fighting the good fight remains unshakable, as is the conviction that someday, they will return. This belief remains despite the fact that their castle is in ruins, their lands are overrun, their servants are scattered and indeed nothing remains but their name.\" \u2014Summary of a report to the Baron on an upsurge in false Heterodyne sightings\n\nAgatha dreamed\u2026 Mathematical formulae and gear ratios wound through her head and took shape with a feeling of inevitability that terrified her as much as it excited her. With a groan, the vast machine lurched to life, gears meshing together in a jewel-toned mechanical ballet. As more and more of the machine coalesced, Agatha noticed that the great engine was pulsing at the same rate as her heart, sending waves of energy through her like waves being dashed upon a rocky shore.\n\nThis was the answer, ringing in Agatha's ears like a chorus of clockwork angels. Impatiently she reached forward, trying to grasp the shifting, glittering thing before her. Something clicked into place in her mind. She began to recognize the patterns forming before her. She realized that all of the surrounding space was beginning to react to the shining thing before her. Of course. The principals involved could be expanded infinitely outwards, therefore\u2014\n\nA vise slammed shut on her mind. A dark tunnel closed in on her perceptions and squeezed the glittering pattern down, down, down to a speck so small she couldn't see it except as a twinkling mote of light just out of reach. With a sob of desperation Agatha lunged forward to grab it, and\u2014\n\nWith a SMACK, her hand struck the wall.\n\nThe pain snapped her fully awake. She was gasping as if she had run all the way to the University and back, and covered in a sheen of sweat that had soaked her bedding. Her head was a throbbing ball of pain. Gamely she tried to swing out of bed, and almost crashed to the floor. Belatedly she noticed that her muscles were stiff and cramped, and that her blankets were knotted and wrapped around her in a way that told her she must have spun like a top in her sleep. As she began to unwind herself, the headache began to subside. Agatha was a connoisseur of headaches, and was relieved at the transitory nature of this one.\n\nOnce free of the bedclothes, Agatha snatched her spectacles from a small shelf and slipped the brass loops over her ears. The world clicked into focus and she was soon at her desk ripping bits off of a small machine, hastily adding others, bending wires and shuffling gears in a frantic attempt to capture the quickly fading memory within the structure of the device.\n\nOn an overloaded bookshelf in the corner, a painted metal woodsman struck a golden wolf repeatedly with a miniscule axe. First clock. An enameled couple wearing tiny crowns struck up a mazurka while a chime counted time to their bouncing feet. Second clock. Agatha began to work even more frantically. The beat of the mazurka insinuated itself into the last memories of the dream machine's song, tangling them up and then sweeping them away in three eighths time.\n\nAgatha growled in frustration and sat back onto her chair with a thump. She blew an errant lock of blonde hair out of her face. Gone. She touched the golden trilobite locket at her throat and sighed.\n\nGetting to her feet, she stripped off the damp nightshirt and stretched in the early morning light that came in through her attic window, past several plants and what appeared to be a small mechanical spider. A variety of prisms caught the light and scattered it throughout the small room. Flashes of bright color glowed against her hair.\n\nOn a shelf by the window crammed with devices constructed from wire and fish bones, a small brass mushroom chimed as a cheerful mechanical centipede clog danced around the stalk. That was the third clock, which meant that it really was time to go. She would have to skip breakfast again.\n\nShe poured a dollop of water out of the blue ceramic pitcher into her washbowl and quickly washed up. Her skin pebbled in the cold air as she considered the meager contents of her closet. A white linen shirt, and her green tweed skirt and vest. These last had been a birthday present from her parents, and were Agatha's current favorites. Long striped woolen stockings and a stout pair of boots completed her outfit. Quickly she stripped the sheets from her bed and hung them from the pole that held the bed drape. Then it was down the stairs, grab the large military greatcoat and cap that hung from her hook in the boot room, and through the door of the smithy to the outside world. The device she had cobbled together banging against her thigh through the pocket as she ran down the steps to the street.\n\nShe breathed deeply of the crisp cold air and blew out a great cloud of vapor. The sun had barely cleared the city walls and the lamplighters could be seen striding above the cobblestoned street, their stilt suits clacking as they hurried to douse the last few streetlights. It was evident that the city gates had been opened for the day, as the streets of Beetleburg were already full. Carts piled high with everything from produce to machine parts were pulled by horses, oxen and the occasional mechanical construct as they rumbled through the center of the street. On either side, the shops had opened and exposed their wares. The small fried pastries of several different cultures were hawked next to dried fruits and vegetables. Ovens unloaded aromatic platters of fresh bread. Several hundred different types of sausage and an equal number of cheeses were grabbed from hooks and shelves and consumed before the purchaser had gone three meters. Schools of smoked fish and eels hung next to sellers of hot beverages, and everywhere there was a bewildering variety of unclassifiable foodstuffs that were served on sticks.\n\nThe people consuming this bounty were a varied group. The great university drew students from all over the known world. Most were garbed against the March cold in what were obviously scrounged military uniforms. The garish colors added a festive note to the cold gray streets. Many were workers, trudging to or from the Tyrant's factories. Occasionally men from different shifts would meet and stop briefly to pass along news or laugh at a humorous incident. Clumps of students headed towards the great gates of the University. Some groups were engaged in serious debate, others looked like they'd had a bit too much to drink last night.\n\nAgatha was surprised to see a lone J\u00e4germonster strolling casually down the street. People looked at it nervously out of the corner of their eyes, but were determined to act casual\u2026 which the monster soldier seemed to find quite amusing, but then, apparently, J\u00e4germonsters found everything amusing. Except when people tried to beg for mercy. That they found downright hilarious.\n\nThis one still retained most of its humanity, as far as Agatha could see. Its frame still fit into an obviously scrounged uniform, although its arms were disturbingly long. The face was covered in what appeared to be small spikes, but that didn't keep it from sporting a large, disturbing grin.\n\nThese days the J\u00e4germonsters served Baron Wulfenbach, whose rule currently stretched across most of Europa, but it was unusual to see any forces of the Empire here. Relations between the Tyrant of Beetleburg and the House of Wulfenbach had been cordial ever since the city had been peacefully annexed into the Pax Transylvania over a decade ago. In spite of this, Beetleburg continued to be patrolled by the Tyrant's own mechanical forces. Even now, one quick-stepped around the corner, jogged to the center of the block, stopped, and swiveled twice around its axis, looking for trouble. It registered the J\u00e4ger, and with a snap, extruded a pair of guns as it skipped towards it. Agatha always thought the watchmen clanks looked like indignant wind-up toys. Everyone did, really, until they started shooting.\n\nThe J\u00e4ger went still. The clank stopped three meters away from the monster soldier. There was a hiss, and then a scratchy voice asked the J\u00e4ger to slowly and clearly state its business. This should be amusing, thought Agatha. The J\u00e4germonsters carefully cultivated and maintained their original Mechanicsburg accent. There had been numerous instances where clanks or other devices that relied on verbal instructions had, upon hearing it, simply opened fire. This was especially disconcerting when said devices were otherwise harmless household appliances.\n\nAgatha was again surprised, as the soldier fumbled at its belt, and pulled out a crumpled bit of paper. It nervously scrutinized it for a minute, turned it upside down, checked it again and then laboriously stated, \"I am coming to\u2026 the mar-ket to\u2026\" The J\u00e4ger was visibly sweating now. \"To buy, not schteal\u2026 a piece of\u2026 ham.\" He looked up expectantly. The entire street had gone still, and Agatha could hear the clacking as wax disks shuffled about inside the steel watchman.\n\nThe voicebox crackled to life. \"Please move this horse. I believe it is dead.\" With that the mechanical soldier swiveled about, and continued on down the street and bobbled around the next corner.\n\nThe J\u00e4ger blew out a huge sigh of relief, saw Agatha looking at him and gave her a cocky \"thumbs up,\" before tucking the paper back into the pouch at his belt and strolling on.\n\nAs the J\u00e4ger passed, the rumble and buzz of the town resumed. Housefraus resumed their dickering over soup bones, peddlers hawked candied fruits and insects, and swarms of children flowed through the crowds shrieking and looking for dropped treasures.\n\nAgatha frowned. It wasn't the first time that the Tyrant's clockwork soldiers had made a harmless error, but she had been noticing them more often. Discussing it with the Tyrant, however, had proved fruitless. He frequently avowed that the Clockwork Army that had successfully defended Beetleburg for over thirty years had been declared the finest fighting force in Europa by the Baron himself, and thus wasting time and resources on them was unnecessary. Still, Agatha had heard stories about the battle clanks that the Baron's armies used, and more and more she had found herself thinking about ways Beetleburg's defenders could be improved\u2014until a quick, sharp blossom of pain behind her eyes ended the chain of thought. It never failed.\n\nMassaging her brow, Agatha found her progress was suddenly slowed by a crowd of people clustered in front of her. Focusing, she saw that she was in front of the familiar windows of the local booksellers. The display inside explained the crowd, a new Heterodyne Boys novel had arrived, and people were in line waiting for the shop to open. A card in the window displayed the title: The Heterodyne Boys and the Mystery of the Cast Iron Glacier. That sounded promising. Agatha made a mental note to put her name down on the request list at the university library. Agatha's parents disliked the Heterodyne Boys novels, and refused to permit them in the house.\n\nPeople in the bookstore line were eagerly discussing the book, analyzing the cover art, or just reminiscing about the actual Heterodyne Boys themselves.\n\nPassions were easily aroused by this, even though the Heterodyne Boys had vanished over fifteen years ago. Things were a lot quieter now, the older people constantly reminded the younger generation, but before the Baron had imposed the Pax Transylvania, all of Europa had been a crazy quilt of kingdoms ruled by Sparks, embattled royalty, or any number of improbable and unstable combinations thereof. If a mad scientist wasn't at war with at least two of his neighbors, it was because he had his back to the sea, and even then he had to watch out for an invasion of intelligent sea urchins. The populace at large was used mostly as soldiers, laborers, bargaining chips, or in some of the worst cases, monster chow. Into this nightmare world had come the Heterodynes, a pair of Sparks who had taken on the Sisyphean task of stopping the more malignant despots, a task which seemed to involve battling an endless stream of monsters, clanks, armies of various species, and the insane madmen who'd created them.\n\nNow there was a legitimate school of thought that held that the Heterodynes did not actually accomplish all that much. They were, when all was said and done, just two men, two incredibly gifted Sparks accompanied by an ever-changing coterie of friends, assistants and fellow adventurers to be sure, but they could only do so much. The world produced a never-ending supply of dangerous creatures, as well as the scientists who had spawned them. But the point wasn't that they had taken down the diabolical Doctor Doomfrenzy and his giant moss-bees, it was that there was someone actively out there, in the world, trying to make said world a better place, and in some small, measurable way, succeeding. They gave people hope, when hope was in desperately short supply.\n\nAnd because of this, people remembered them as heroes. Almost everyone over a certain age could recite an incident that had, in some way, touched them personally. As she moved through the crowd, Agatha heard the old arguments about how the world would be better if the Heterodyne Boys were still around, as well as the fervent assurances that one day, Bill and Barry would return and make everything better, starting with the price of oats.\n\nBy the time Agatha cleared the crowd and hit the Street of the Cheesemongers, she had slowed to a walk and was once again deep in the mists of her own thoughts. Her feet followed the route to the University automatically, which brought her near the institution's great bronze gates.\n\nThe answer she'd glimpsed in her dream was still there, somewhere in her head. If she concentrated, she could almost visualize the correct assembly that would make her little machine actually work. Almost\u2026 and then the order of the parts would muddle and blur, the formulae would lose themselves in the murk of her mind and her head would feel as though it were filled with honey\u2014thick and comforting, but impossible to work through. If she could just filter out all of the distractions\u2026 She unconsciously hummed a few notes\u2026 trying to sharpen her mental sight and cut through the sticky thoughts\u2026\n\nShe was so busy chasing ideas around her own head that she didn't notice the cries of surprise from the people around her, or the electrical smell on the air. A small arc of blue electricity leaping from the metal rims of her glasses to her nose brought her back to the present and she gave a small yelp.\n\nAnd then a hole in the sky opened up. A huge silver figure pointed the accusation at her as an unearthly voice rang out: \"\u2014LIKE THAT?\"\n\nIn his long military career, Machinist Second Class Moloch von Zinzer had sampled quite a wide variety of alcoholic concoctions. In good times they were made from potatoes, grapes, or sometimes barley. However, in his experience, decent brews could be wrung from wheat, oats, rye, honey, pears, melons, corn, apples, berries, turnips, seaweed, sorghum, sugar beets, buckwheat, zucchini, rice, yams, sunflowers, artichokes, cattails or giant mushrooms. It was sort of a hobby, and one that made him popular with his fellows.\n\nOne used what one was able to scrounge, which meant that the drinks were usually brewed up on spare bits of madboy equipment, so occasionally the stuff was blue, or caused you to grow an extra set of ears, but it usually got the job done. But this\u2014this was a new low. He looked at the crudely printed label on the bottle in his hand. \"Beetle Beer\" it proclaimed. Fair enough, he thought, I can believe that.\n\nMoloch sighed and took another pull. What made it even worse were the smells that even the dank air of the little back alley couldn't hide. Shops selling all kinds of foodstuffs lined the streets, the rich aromas of cheese, sausages and pastries filled his head. To a soldier who'd seen the outside world, a world filled with shattered towns and endless kilometers of abandoned farms, the sight of shops piled high with food that could be bought directly off the street by anyone with a little money was astonishing. It was like stepping into a world he'd thought lost forever. The bread was the worst. He'd have killed for any one of the fresh loaves he could smell baking.\n\nSo what had Omar spent the last of their money on? Beetle Beer. Well, it was sort of like bread, and it was all the breakfast he was going to get. When money failed, philosophy would have to do.\n\nMoloch took a long look at his brother. Of all of the companions that he could have been left with, lost in strange territory, his brother Omar was surely at the bottom of his list. He stood in the middle of the alley, despite his wounded leg, swilling his beer with characteristic nervous energy. Moloch wished that Omar would pull up a crate, relax, and for just once, not be poised to fight. Moloch was well-and-truly tired of fighting. Omar would never get enough. He had laughed off Moloch's protests over the lack of breakfast. He'd find money enough, somewhere. Moloch didn't like to think where.\n\nOut in the street, shouts erupted. A bright electrical light flared, the shouts turned into screams and a girl wearing an overlarge officer's coat ran down the alley toward them. In her panic she tripped on a box and landed sprawling at their feet. Her glasses flew off her nose and skittered out of arm's reach.\n\nAgatha blinked. There were muddy boots a few inches from her nose, and she realized that she had just missed plowing into their owner. She looked up. The uniform proclaimed a soldier, its condition implied hard use. Although his face was blurred, she could see that he was smiling, and that it wasn't a nice smile. A bottle dangled from one hand.\n\nAgatha had led a fairly sheltered life, but even she could tell that this person was bad news. Her eyes never left Omar's as her hands franticly patted the ground about her, unsuccessfully searching for her glasses.\n\n\"Well! What have we here?\" Omar eyed her speculatively. \"Obviously our very own angel of mercy, here to help out a couple of poor lost soldiers who are down on their luck.\"\n\nMoloch could see his brother's habitual nastiness gearing up. His heart sank. Begging and intimidation. So they were reduced to that. He shifted in his seat on a stack of crates. The girl started, she hadn't seen him right away. \"Ha. She must know that you just spent our last groat on this swill you call booze. Well, help her up, Omar. Show her we can be friendly.\" Moloch tried to keep his tone happy. Maybe she wouldn't notice the edge to Omar's voice. Maybe she could be convinced to give them a handout quickly, and go away, before Omar had a chance to get them into trouble. Ho ho, look at us, two jolly soldier boys, just like in the music halls. Except one of us is a murderous bastard who couldn't keep out of trouble in a locked duffel\u2026 He smiled at Agatha. \"Spare some change, Miss?\"\n\nOmar stepped toward Agatha. He had got round her as she stumbled to her feet, and was now between her and the alley mouth. \"Oh, no, she can spare more than that, look at that fine locket!\"\n\nAgatha abandoned the search for her glasses and backed up, eyes huge. Beetleburg was a safe town, but mothers still passed down stories about what soldiers did to girls who didn't take care. Being mugged was a new experience, and her head was still humming from the shock of the apparition in the street, but Agatha still knew she was in trouble.\n\n\"A pretty little townie like this, she'll have a whole box of the stuff at home. She'll never miss a couple of small gifts to the deserving. And then\u2014\" Omar's grin grew even larger. \"Maybe she'll let us show her just how nice we can be.\"\n\nWhile a lot of the advice and instruction that Agatha's parents had passed down had been either tantalizingly vague or dryly academic, certain situations had been discussed in detail, as well as their possible consequences. This was one of them.\n\nAs Omar reached out towards her chest, Agatha sidestepped him neatly, grabbed Moloch's bottle and in one fluid motion swung it round to connect with Omar's face. Moloch had to admit that it was a superb shot, but with nowhere near enough force to do anything useful. Agatha looked a bit surprised at what she had done, but gamely swung again, and this time Omar was ready. He stepped within her swing, grabbed her lapel, jerked her off balance and delivered two quick slaps that set Agatha's head ringing. As she slumped, Omar's eyes narrowed and a grin of anticipation crossed his face as he slowly drew his fist back.\n\nSuddenly Moloch's hand gripped his upper arm. \"That's enough, Sergeant,\" he roared in his best military voice. As he'd hoped, the reference to rank checked Omar's swing.\n\nOmar had endured enough punishment duty that its memory could stop him when appeals to reason failed. \"She hit me,\" he hissed petulantly. \"I am not taking that from a lousy civilian!\" He tried to shake off Moloch's restraining arm.\n\n\"Stop it, you fool! Don't you remember what they do to people in this town? Do you want to wind up in one of those damned jars?\"\n\nThat stopped Omar, as it stopped a lot of people. The Tyrant of Beetleburg had little patience for those who broke his laws. A popular punishment consisted of simply placing wrongdoers inside large glass jars in the public squares. There they eventually died of thirst or hunger. Their bodies lay undisturbed until a new lawbreaker was put in. Consequently, the locals rarely broke the law.\n\nOmar nodded to his brother, but a smirk twisted his face as he drew a dazed Agatha toward him. \"Okay, doll, it's been fun, but we have to leave. To remember these happy times\u2014\" with a flick of his wrist, he gripped, twisted, and snapped off the large golden trilobite locket at Agatha's throat, \"\u2014I'll just take a little souvenir.\"\n\nAgatha's eyes bugged, but before she could yell, Omar swung his foot and swept her feet out from under her. She collapsed in a heap on the ground as he took off down the alley with a laugh and a wave. \"Thanks for the souvenir!\"\n\nMoloch trotted along after him, with both of their duffels under his arm. \"You are such an asshole,\" he hissed. Omar grinned.\n\nAgatha scrambled to get up. She spotted a glint upon the ground, which proved to be her glasses, thankfully undamaged. Her anger finally roared up and gave voice. \"BRING BACK MY LOCKET!\" she screamed, as she went pounding up the alley in pursuit. She burst out onto the street and was confronted by a milling crowd of soldiers and ordinary citizens. Of the great hole in the sky, there was no sign, as there was no sign of the two thieves.\n\nAgatha felt tears well up in her eyes. \"You miserable wretched knaves,\" she fumed. \"I'll inform the Watch on you!\" Her voice started to climb in volume, and a wild note entered her voice. People in the vicinity began to regard her with suspicion and then fear, as her voice entered registers that set off alarm bells in their heads. \"They'll comb the city, and they'll find you, and when they do, they'll put you in the jars, and I'll come down every day and watch you beg and scream and claw at the glass as you die slowly\u2014like the miserable rats you are!\"\n\nShe took another deep breath and then to the onlookers it seemed as if an invisible bolt of lightning had struck her in the head. Agatha clutched at her temples and screamed in pain as she collapsed to her knees. Another headache. She always got them when she got worked up, and this one reflected her rage with skull-splitting force. A small crowd formed, but no one approached. When people acted strange, anything could happen. In addition to the pain, Agatha felt a wave of embarrassment flow over her.\n\nSuddenly there was a flurry of activity over to one side, and a tall figure loomed over her. A greenish, hirsute hand offered her a canteen. Agatha looked up into the interested face of a J\u00e4germonster. A different one than the one she'd spotted before. \"Hey dere, gorgeous.\" He smiled a smile with way too many teeth. \"Iz you okeh, or iz you gonna change into sum kinda giant ting mit no clothes on?\"\n\nThe concept caused Agatha to blink in surprise, and wonderfully, her headache began to recede, almost as quickly as it had arrived. That was a rare and welcome occurrence. She climbed unsteadily to her feet while trying desperately to look like she wasn't avoiding the monster's proffered hand. \"Um\u2026 not this time.\"\n\n\"Oh vell, ken't vin dem all.\" The canteen disappeared with a gurgle. The main clock in the Market Square began to toll. Agatha's head whipped around. The hands stood at seven. \"Oh no! Oh NO! I'm LATE!\"\n\nTaking off like a shot, Agatha pelted off down the street. The crowd dispersed and yet another J\u00e4gersoldier joined his companion. \"So vot hyu say to her, eh? Not de old fang polish line again?\"\n\n\"I din say notting!\" He looked after the retreating girl and a quick smile twisted his upper lip. \"Pity doh, she smelt verra nize.\"\n\nLate! Late! Late! Dr. Merlot would have her boil every bottle in the building before she could go home tonight, and little he'd care for her stolen locket. He was Dr. Beetle's second in command, and while not a Spark himself, was as ruthlessly despotic as one. He drove everyone around him as hard as he drove himself, seemingly trying for a breakthrough by the sheer amount of misery he caused his subordinates. He had been with Dr. Beetle for the last twenty years, and had resented Agatha's presence almost from the moment she had been brought into the lab as an assistant, but Dr. Beetle was The Tyrant, and one did not argue with The Tyrant. There were times Agatha wished that she had been assigned to another lab, but she had to admit that the most interesting work was being done by the Doctor himself.\n\nThe thought processes of a major Spark were difficult to follow most of the time, especially with her limited understanding. But Agatha found the work exhilarating in a way she couldn't explain. After a heartbreaking series of setbacks in her own fumbling experiments, it only took a few minutes in the presence of the man to fire her up full of enthusiasm all over again. Indeed, part of Merlot's annoyance with her could be explained by Dr. Beetle's insistence on spending as much time with her as he did. She was to be present for every major experiment, and he always asked her opinion, even when the subject was one that had Merlot or Merlot's Chief Assistant, Dr. Glassvich, thoroughly muddled.\n\nAgatha cleared the last of the shops and angled across the greensward that circled the walls of Transylvania Polygnostic University, and towards the great front gates and the cyclopean figure that guarded them.\n\nMr. Tock was the largest mechanical construct anyone had ever seen, and was still considered the Tyrant's greatest feat of engineering to date. It towered almost twenty meters high. The great clock in his chest was the timepiece the town set its watches by. As intricately decorated as the smaller clanks that comprised the city Watch, but infinitely deadlier. It appeared to move slowly, but this was an illusion brought about by its great size. Those who had underestimated its fighting ability had done so to their regret. Tock had been known to single-handedly quash several small rebellions, one (admittedly poorly organized) army, and an invasion of giant slugs, an event nobody ever wanted to talk about, especially over dinner.\n\nEach year the various schools within the University vied for the honor of polishing the behemoth for its quarterly parade through and around the town, and as a result, his brass exterior gleamed in the morning sun.\n\nAs Agatha approached, the glowing blue eyes swiveled down at her, and a plume of steam puffed out from his upper lip, much like an old man puffing out his moustache before speaking. Its great metallic voice tolled out across the grounds: \"IDENTIFY YOURSELF.\" Agatha groaned. Students were expected to be within the gates by a certain time.\n\n\"Mr. Tock, it's me! You've seen me every day for eleven years! I'm late and\u2014\"\n\n\"IDENTIFY OR BE\u2014\"\n\n\"Agatha Clay! Student 8734195!\"\n\n\"WORKING\u2026\"\n\n\"Come on.\"\n\n\"WORKING\u2026\"\n\n\"Come ON!\"\n\n\"WORKING\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh please come on!\"\n\n\"ACCEPTED. ENTER STUDENT.\" The great feet began to shuffle aside, and then, maddeningly, paused. \"YOU ARE\u2026 LATE.\"\n\n\"I KNOW!\" Agatha screamed and darted past the giant.\n\nThe T.P.U. campus was a large complex, and the building Agatha was aiming for was near its center. Clusters of students talked together, many of them discussing the electrical phenomenon of that morning. Several groups were disrupted by Agatha cannoning through them at full speed, leaving nothing but a barely heard \"Late!\" fading behind her.\n\nAgatha was a familiar figure on the campus, and many of the students simply rolled their eyes at her retreating back. Agatha would have been astonished, and rather appalled, to know that she was the subject of many a speculation. Most of those who tried to strike up a conversation with her were put off by her odd behavior, the more persistent or outspoken found themselves hauled in and given a quiet talk by university officials. Agatha Clay was the Tyrant's assistant and thus Off Limits. This, of course, only added fuel to the speculative fires.\n\nAs she approached the massive stone edifice that was Laboratory Number One, the door-clank swung the great bronze portal open in time for her to dart through. Helpfully, it informed her that she was late, eliciting a howl of despair.\n\nFinally she slammed through the blast doors into the Central Laboratory and clung to a railing and gasped as she caught her breath. Below her, on the main floor, Dr. Hugo Glassvitch turned away from a humming device and mildly remarked, \"Mademoiselle Clay? You're late.\"\n\n\"I KNOOOOOWW!\"\n\nThe doctor picked himself up off the floor in time to find his arms full of a sobbing Agatha. \"You're only a little late,\" he said comfortingly.\n\n\"My locket! Oh, Doctor, they stole my locket!\" Quickly she filled him in on what had happened that morning. \"It had the only pictures I have of my parents and it belonged to my mother and now it's gone!\"\n\nDr. Glassvitch looked surprised. \"I didn't know that. You never showed\u2014\"\n\nAgatha interrupted. \"My uncle gave it to me before he went away. He made me promise to never take it off and now it's gone and he'll be disappointed in me again and he'll\u2026 he'll never come back because I'm\u2026 I'm stupid and damaged!\" To Glassvitch's horror, she slid to her knees and began to sob even louder. \"Why? Why can't I do anything right? What's wrong with meeeee?\"\n\n\"Agatha! Mon Dieu!\" Agatha only sobbed louder. Glassvitch's specialty was chemical engineering, which minimized his experience with hysterically sobbing young ladies. Up until now, that had seemed like a perk, but now he realized he had no idea what to do. He cast about desperately and his eye fell upon a bulge in Agatha's greatcoat pocket. \"Agatha!\" He gently shook her shoulder. \"Show me your latest machine!\"\n\nAgatha's cries stopped as if a switch had been thrown. She blinked up at Glassvitch through her tears. \"My machine?\"\n\n\"Oui!\" Glassvitch patted her pocket. \"Your petite clank? Does it work?\"\n\nAgatha got to her feet and smoothed down her skirt. \"I\u2026 I don't know.\" She pulled the little device out of the pocket. It looked like an excessively large brass pocket watch. She wound the stem at the top as she talked. \"I\u2026 I wanted to show it to you before I showed it to the Master.\"\n\nGlassvitch nodded encouragingly. \"Ah. Good idea. We don't want to waste his time, eh? Let's see it.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Agatha smiled nervously at him and placed the device on a lab bench. Her index finger hovered for an instant, and then pushed down the stem with a sudden click. Immediately, the sound of gears grinding emanated from within. The device shuddered and a small dome on the face snapped up, revealing a crude eye that jerkily surveyed its surroundings. With a lurch, a pair of legs unfolded from the bottom and it shakily stood, then took an uncertain step forward. Suddenly, the ticking of the gears ended with a Poink! A horrible grinding rattle came from the little device and it began to shake uncontrollably. Its single eye rolled up out of sight, the body twisted violently and exploded in a shower of tiny gears and springs that sent half of the body casing shooting past a startled Agatha and Glassvitch and out through a window pane. The remaining small bits showered down throughout the room.\n\nAgatha looked at her shoes and whispered, \"Sorry. I\u2026 I was so sure\u2026\"\n\nGlassvitch shrugged and patted her shoulder. \"Well, at least this one actually moved before it blew up. That is improvement, no?\"\n\nAgatha looked up at him in surprise. She opened her mouth\u2014\n\n\"I should have guessed.\"\n\nThe two flinched and turned. At the door stood the Tyrant's second in command, Dr. Silas Merlot. A small, thin, elderly man who owed his current position not to the Spark, but to procedural brilliance and a dogged perseverance in his work. He was rubbing his head and clutching the piece of Agatha's device that had shot out the window. Agatha groaned mentally. Dr. Merlot hardly needed this additional excuse to cause her trouble.\n\nDr. Glassvitch smiled. He was one of the few friends the cranky scientist had, and often interceded on Agatha's behalf. \"Good Morning, Dr.\u2014\"\n\nMerlot interrupted him. \"I don't know why you encourage her, Glassvitch, we have enough problems today.\"\n\n\"Problems?\"\n\n\"Baron Wulfenbach is here.\"\n\nThe smile drained from Glassvitch's face. \"WHAT? He's early! Weeks early! We're not ready!\"\n\n\"He's with the Master, if you'd care to complain.\"\n\n\"No! I meant\u2026 What do we do?\"\n\n\"We've got to remove all traces of the Master's project from the secondary labs. Miss Clay, get this lab cleaned up. You've got half an hour.\"\n\nAgatha started and looked wildly around the lab. It was a rat's nest of equipment and papers strewn about the room. The Master always demanded that it remain untouched during an ongoing project. \"Cleaned up? By myself? In half an hour? This room is a disaster area!\"\n\nMerlot narrowed his eyes. \"Don't be impertinent with me, Miss Clay. The Master may derive some twisted amusement from your pathetic antics, but if this lab is anything less than spotless, you'll see how patient Baron Wulfenbach is with incompetents. Now move!\"\n\nAs the two scientists hurried to the secondary lab, Glassvitch frowned. \"Silas\u2026 there's no need to frighten the girl\u2014\"\n\nMerlot cut him off. \"Listen. The Master's little pet may actually prove useful for once. With her crashing around, perhaps the Baron will not look too closely at the rest of us, understand?\" Glassvitch frowned, but after a moment, reluctantly nodded.\n\nMeanwhile a stunned Agatha surveyed the mountains of equipment. \"Half an hour?\" she whispered to herself. \"How can I possibly\u2014\" Her eye was caught by a storage closet. Her jaw firmed, she nodded to herself and rolled up her sleeves.\n\nTwenty-nine minutes later, Merlot and Glassvitch were striding back to the lab, muttering to each other.\n\n\"Have we forgotten anything?\"\n\n\"Ssh. Hugo, we have done the best we can. This whole project was a mistake just waiting to destroy everything we've\u2014\"\n\nThey turned the final corner and stopped dead in their tracks. Before them was the main lab. Every surface was cleared. Every shelf was tidy. The floor was swept and the instruments had been neatly laid out in geometrically perfect rows. In the exact center of the room, a deeply breathing Agatha stood with her hands clasped behind her back.\n\nDr. Merlot blinked, opened his mouth once or twice and in a dazed voice said, \"Well\u2026\" It almost choked him to say it. \"Well done, Miss Clay.\" And, because he was an honest man, \"I'm\u2026 impressed.\"\n\nDr. Glassvitch nonchalantly slid his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels with an enormous grin lighting up his face. \"Not quite so incompetent after all, hm?\"\n\nAgatha smiled demurely, \"Thank you, doctors.\"\n\nSuddenly the main door slammed open and a harsh voice commanded, \"No von move! Dis is you only varning!\"\n\nThe hairy face of a J\u00e4germonster quickly surveyed them and as quickly dismissed them, although his weapon never left them. He made a quick motion with his free hand and, with a crash and a hiss, two large Wulfenbach trooper clanks lumbered into the room. The tops of their shakos barely cleared the doorway and their gigantic machine cannons never stopped moving. Agatha saw at once that everything she'd heard about them was correct.\n\nUnlike the Clockwork Army, these clanks moved as smoothly as animals. You knew these machines were dangerous.\n\nBehind them came a group of four people. At the center was Baron Klaus Wulfenbach, the man who currently controlled a significant part of Europe. He loomed above the rest of the group, and his movements were those of a jungle cat kept in check. No one knew how old he truly was, the only sign of age was the silver color of his hair. Klaus had been an adventurer in his youth, and indeed had traveled with the Heterodyne Boys. It was known that Klaus and Bill Heterodyne had both vied for the favors of the beautiful but villainous Lucrezia Mongfish, with Klaus finally losing out to his more heroic rival, who had managed to win her over to the side of the angels when he took her as his bride.\n\nKlaus had vanished before the wedding, off to nurse a broken heart it was said. He reappeared six years later, when Europa was deep in chaos and ruin with the Heterodynes, as well as most of the other Great Sparks, gone. The final blow came when he found his ancestral castle, as well as the town around it, completely destroyed.\n\nHe had reestablished the town, and declared that anyone who attacked it would be mercilessly wiped out and their lands absorbed.\n\nUp until that point Baron Klaus Wulfenbach had been considered a minor Spark adventurer, who had never been taken very seriously, as he had always allowed himself to be overshadowed by his more charismatic companions. His proclamation was considered mere bravado. Nearly fifteen years later, thanks to this simple policy, the Wulfenbach Empire stretched from the great bronze gates of Istanbul almost to the Atlantic Ocean.\n\nNext to him was his son, Gilgamesh, who, though fully grown, had only recently been revealed to the world.\n\nPhysically, he resembled his sire. Not quite as tall, nor as broad at the shoulder, perhaps, but impressive none the less. His face was set in lines that seemed too grim for one his age. This was no doubt brought about by the numerous attempts on his life that had occurred since his identity had become known. There were many who had reluctantly knuckled under to the Empire, telling themselves that Klaus was but one man, and thus could be endured. These arguments went out the window with the appearance of an heir. The additional knowledge that he was supposedly possessed of a Spark nearly as strong as his father's, just made things worse.\n\nQuietly standing at the Baron's right hand was his secretary, Boris Vasily Konstantin Andrei Myshkin Dolokhov, a man feared throughout the Empire almost as much as the Baron himself. He had started out in life with two arms and an eidetic memory, which had brought him to the attention of the Spark who ruled his homeland. Said Spark had given him enhanced speed, strength, balance, and an additional two arms in an attempt to build the ultimate juggler. Sadly, for Boris, he succeeded.\n\nBoris spent several miserable years as court jester before his master had sent an ill-conceived army of land squids against the Baron. This had resulted in the area quickly being absorbed into the Wulfenbach Empire.\n\nKlaus has a sharp eye for talent, and quickly realized that Boris was not born to the stage. However he was a natural secretary, and had quickly risen to become Klaus' second in command.\n\nBuzzing angrily around the Baron was the Tyrant of Beetleburg, the Master of the Unstoppable Army, Owner and Headmaster of Transylvania Polygnostic University, Dr. Tarsus Beetle.\n\nDr. Beetle was a third-generation Spark whose family had established and run the university and its environs for the last hundred and twenty years, maintaining and defending it against other Sparks and their armies. Like the great city-state of Paris, Beetleburg was considered neutral ground. Thus many of the Great Houses of Europa, and elsewhere, had T.P.U. alumnae on staff. About ten years ago, after a particularly hard winter had strained the resources of the area, Klaus, a former student of the University, had offered to absorb both the University and the surrounding town into his expanding empire and extend it his protection, while the Tyrant retained control. Dr. Beetle accepted. This arrangement had worked out well for all concerned, which was why the apparent anger of the Tyrant toward the Baron was so surprising. Indeed he was yelling nonstop as the group entered the room.\n\nThe Baron interrupted him in mid-shout and addressed the J\u00e4germonster: \"Thank you, Unit-Commander, stand at ease.\"\n\n\"Jah, Herr Baron.\" The soldier's weapon never faltered, but he allowed himself to slouch a bit. This, for some reason, merely made him look more dangerous.\n\nBeetle resumed his diatribe. \"Blast it, Klaus, you're too early! I told you\u2014\"\n\nThe Baron effortlessly cut him off and strode over to the group in the middle of the floor. \"You've had plenty of time, Doctor. Now who are these people?\"\n\nDr. Beetle swallowed his annoyance, and brusquely nodded to each of the staffers as he introduced them. \"Dr. Silas Merlot, my second in command.\"\n\nAs he paused, the Baron broke in, \"Ah. I read your latest report with great interest.\"\n\nMerlot bowed and clicked his heels together. \"I am honored, Herr Baron.\"\n\n\"Dr. Hugo Glassvitch, my Chief of Research.\"\n\n\"Welcome, Herr Baron.\"\n\n\"And this is our lab assistant, Miss Clay.\" As he said this, he turned away dismissively. \"Now the machine\u2014\" Suddenly he stopped, and with a snap, turned to stare at Agatha. \"Miss Clay!\" He barked, \"Where is your locket?\"\n\nAgatha blinked. \"It\u2026 it was stolen, sir. There was an electrical anomaly of some sort and I was accosted by some soldiers while trying to get away.\"\n\nThe Baron's eyebrows rose at this. Beetle looked shaken. \"Accosted? Stolen?\" His voice rose, \"In my city?\" He clutched at his forehead. \"Oh no! This is terrible! Terrible!\"\n\nAgatha tried to address his obvious distress. \"I'm feeling better, sir, I\u2014\"\n\nAt this Dr. Beetle snapped out of his distracted state and grabbed Agatha by the elbow and began to hustle her towards the door. \"Sh! No! You're obviously distraught, my dear. I want you to go home. Yes! Go home and have a nice lie down and I'll have the Watch find your locket as quickly as possible!\"\n\n\"Wait.\" The force of the Baron's voice arrested Beetle's movement as if he'd been grasped physically. Agatha looked up to see the Baron studying her with interest. \"You actually saw the event in the town?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, Herr Baron, I was right in the middle of it.\"\n\nThe Baron nodded. \"Stay. I would like your observations of the event when I am done here.\"\n\nBeetle went pale. \"Klaus, the poor girl has had a terrible shock! You must let her go home!\"\n\nAgatha tried to calm the distraught scientist. \"Master, please! I'm all right. Really.\"\n\nKlaus nodded to signal that the affair was closed. \"I'm impressed by your concern for your people, Beetle, but the young lady appears stable. Let us get down to business.\"\n\nHe turned to Merlot and Glassvitch. He gestured towards a large, obviously half-finished device that sat in the center of the room. It was a bizarre collection of tubes and coils that bent and twisted back on themselves in a most peculiar manner. \"Doctors. My Dihoxulator. Why is it not finished? I'd thought I'd explained the underlying theory rather succinctly.\"\n\nMerlot took a deep breath. \"We do not know, Herr Baron. We were able to construct the machine up to a point, but then we hit a block.\" Beside him, Glassvitch nodded vigorously. \"We cannot reconcile the final linkages with the rest of the assembly,\" he added. \"We just don't know what to do to make it work.\"\n\nThe Baron stared at him steadily for moment. \"I see.\" He raised his voice. \"Gilgamesh?\"\n\nThe young man looked up from the device he was examining. \"Yes, Father?\"\n\n\"These fellows seem to be having some problems. Can you assist them?\"\n\n\"I can try, Father. If you'd explain the theory?\"\n\nThe Baron nodded, placed a hand on his shoulder and drew him over toward the device. Beetle followed. \"The basic idea is to promote secondary oxidation\u2026\"\n\nRelieved that they were no longer under the Baron's direct scrutiny, Glassvitch turned to his companion and whispered. \"Silas, we're doomed! We've accomplished nothing! They'll ship us to the Waxworks!\"\n\nMerlot however, ignored him. He was staring at the Baron as a suspicion was growing in his mind. A very nasty suspicion. \"\u2026Of course.\" He muttered, \"The Baron knows we don't have the Spark. We weren't expected to finish this. It's a test!\"\n\nGlassvitch looked even more distressed. \"Then we're failing!\"\n\nMerlot shook his head impatiently. \"Not us, Hugo, his son! Gilgamesh Wulfenbach is the Baron's only heir. I've heard rumors that the Baron is testing him, trying to determine if the Spark burns as brightly in him as it does in his sire.\"\n\n\"And if it does not?\"\n\nSuddenly the J\u00e4germonster loomed up behind them. \"Dis is Baron Wulfenbach, sveethot! He vill break him down for parts and try again!\" Having divulged this information, he gave them a sharp-toothed grin and sauntered off.\n\n\"Mon Dieu!\" A shaken Glassvitch breathed.\n\nMerlot shook himself. \"Yes. Rather comforting to know there's someone whose life is more wretched than our own, eh?\" It was then that he noticed a peculiar buzzing hum that rose and fell in pitch. A scowl flashed across his features and he whirled around to face a distracted Agatha. \"Miss Clay!\" he shouted . \"For the last time, stop that infernal humming!\"\n\nAgatha snapped back to the present and blinked wildly. \"Hah? I\u2026 I'm sorry, Herr Doctor, but I was listening to the Baron, and something he said isn't right, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Silence!\"\n\nMeanwhile Klaus had finished his explanation. Gilgamesh studied the half-finished device and slowly a frown creased his face. \"Well?\" Klaus prompted.\n\n\"Interesting, Father\u2026\" His voice trailed off as he scratched his head. \"Hmm, I see what they were trying to do\u2026 but that won't work\u2026 no\u2026 wait\u2026 hum\u2026 this makes no sense!\" Gilgamesh stared at the device as if it had personally offended him. \"No\u2026 this is all\u2026 wrong!\" His voice began to rise. \"This would work at cross purposes!\" He wrenched off an armature and threw it across the room. \"This is absurd! What are you fools trying to do? Can't you see what you've done?\" He began to rip apart the machine. \"This is all wrong! I would expect a first-year student to do better! You have forces canceling each other out throughout the entire structure! Where are your plans?\"\n\nMerlot looked around, then quickly turned to Agatha. \"The plans, Miss Clay! They were on the main board. Where did you put them?\"\n\nAgatha looked surprised. \"Oh.\" She said, \"They're in with\u2014\" She swung her attention to the storage room door in time to see a rivet pop out of one of the door's straining cross bracers. She swung back and smeared a grin across her face. \"A-heh. They're in the files in the storage room, doctors. How about everybody goes and has a nice cup of tea while I dig them out?\"\n\nGil strode forward and pushed her aside. \"Bah! I'll get them myself! I'm sure your pitiful filing system will be simple\u2014\" He turned the handle of the storage room door and yanked just as Agatha shouted \"NOOOOOO!\" and with a bang, the door flew open and a tidal wave of lab equipment roared out and over the young man's head, smashing him to the ground and carrying him several meters back.\n\nAfter the shower of material finished falling, Gil could be seen lying on his back, covered in debris. Clutched in his outstretched hands was a small goldfish bowl along with its grateful occupant.\n\nBoris and the J\u00e4germonster quickly clambered over the pile of equipment and began to dig him out and help him up. Agatha, Merlot and Glassvitch began to rush forward as well, and found themselves looking down the giant two-meter-long barrels of the clank's guns, a steely \"HOLD\" their only warning. They skidded to a halt.\n\nGilgamesh slowly clambered to his feet. \"That's the worst filing system I've ever seen.\"\n\nKlaus rounded upon the huddled scientists. His voice was cold. \"Beetle, this sloppiness is intolerable. Have these people\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Father, wait.\" He was interrupted by a smiling Gilgamesh, \"The thump to my head has cleared it, I think. I believe your theory is\u2026 incorrect.\"\n\nKlaus looked surprised. \"What?\"\n\nGil nodded. \"Yes, what you want is possible, but your theoretical structure is flawed. There's no way this machine could ever work.\"\n\nKlaus' face darkened and he drew himself up. When he spoke his voice was glacial, and his words were measured. \"Think carefully, boy. You're saying that I am wrong?\"\n\nGil paused, took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. He clutched the fishbowl to his chest protectively, but his voice was firm. \"Yes.\"\n\nKlaus slowly relaxed and looked at him carefully before he swung his arm onto Gil's shoulder and patted it twice. He smiled. \"You are quite correct, my son.\"\n\nAs one Merlot, Glassvitch and Agatha burst out with a loud \"WHAT?\"\n\nGil frowned in annoyance. \"Another test, Father? I am beginning to find them tiresome.\"\n\nKlaus twitched an eyebrow. \"Ah, it is much like raising children then. But I persevere for the moment.\" He turned to the three shocked researchers. \"Thank you, doctors. You will receive new assignments tomorrow.\"\n\nAt this Agatha could no longer contain herself. \"This was all for nothing? But they worked so hard!\"\n\nGlassvitch began to nod furiously in assent. \"For three months we have toiled on this monstrosity!\"\n\nMerlot, who had seemed the most stunned, began to show signs of a growing annoyance. \"We were simply\u2026 window dressing.\" His voice gained energy. \"I see. I understand.\"\n\nGlassvitch looked at him in surprise. \"What? Silas, you're the one who's always going on about how little time we have for our own work.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes\u2014but now I understand why the great Dr. Beetle couldn't be bothered to work on this oh-so-important assignment.\" His voice began to break with emotion. \"Unlike we mere mortals, he had real work to do.\"\n\nDr. Beetle frowned and stepped up to the distraught scientist. \"Merlot! I don't like your attitude\u2014\"\n\n\"Then how do you like this?\" With viper-like speed, Merlot spun, and his hand cracked across Beetle's face, spinning the older man halfway around and sending his spectacles flying through the air.\n\nThe J\u00e4germonster's machine pistol lazily swung towards Merlot. \"Ho!\" He grunted, \"I tink I bettah\u2014\"\n\nA hand dropped onto his arm and Klaus shook his head. \"Hold. Gil? You are about to receive an important lesson in employee relations.\"\n\nMeanwhile Beetle and Merlot had squared off, the aging scientist vibrating with rage. \"How dare you! I'll\u2014\"\n\nMerlot interrupted him. \"Shut up! Shut up! My attitude? How dare you treat us like this? Just because you have the gift you think we're simpletons? I have faithfully served you for twenty years and you waste my time with this garbage? I thought you had finally given us something worthwhile! I am not a student! I am not a construct! I haven't got The Spark, but I am not a fool and I do not have to take this from an arrogant has-been like you! Does the Baron know that his trusted old mentor has defied his strictest orders with his latest experiments? Experiments conducted in the middle of a civilian town?\"\n\nWith a snarl he strode over to an unobtrusive wall panel, jerked it open and threw the switch inside. \"Perhaps he would like to see the important work that has been keeping the Beloved Tyrant of Beetleburg so busy!\"\n\nDr. Beetle screamed, \"Merlot! Silas! For the love of God! NO!\"\n\nHowever, this came too late, as the back wall of the lab folded back into itself, revealing a hidden laboratory. Dominating the center of the hidden room was a massive glass and metal sphere, festooned with gauges and pipes. Within its depths swirled a thick roiling fluid. Within the fluid, shapes could only vaguely be seen, but when one slowly drifted close to the glass, what could be seen was extremely disturbing. After one look, the J\u00e4germonster and the clanks independently swung their weapons towards the panicked Dr. Beetle. Dr. Glassvitch pulled Agatha back. The expression on Klaus' face would have frozen nitrogen.\n\nA triumphant Merlot gestured at the sphere. \"Slaver wasps, Herr Baron! I wish to report that two weeks ago we found a fully functional, unhatched Hive Engine, which Dr. Beetle insisted upon bringing into the heart of this University!\" He turned with a vinegary smirk towards Dr. Beetle. \"Now\u2014Master\u2014show me how fast that superior mind of yours works! I want to see you talk your way out of this!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\u2002\"When a monster flattens your home, it doesn't matter who built it.\" \u2014Peasant saying\n\nThe room froze for a timeless moment. Finally Klaus slowly shook his head, his great hands balled into tight fists. His eyes gleamed with controlled fury. \"One rule, Beetle. I made one rule when I left you in charge of this city. 'Report all unusual discoveries. Devices of the Other are to be turned over to me immediately.' You agreed.\"\n\nThe smaller man shook with rage. \"A pledge made under duress is worthless, Wulfenbach! You threatened my city, my university\u2014 I'd have agreed to anything! You were in control then.\"\n\nKlaus raised an eyebrow in inquiry. \"And now?\"\n\nSuddenly from above came a CRACK\u2014that shook the building. A white line appeared near the ceiling and spread, revealing itself to be the open sky, as with a thunderous groan, the roof was lifted open upon monstrous hinges by the towering figure of Mr. Tock. His eyes glowed and steam poured from his moustache as a vast hand reached in and aimed an array of fingertip nozzles at the Baron and his son. A voice like a pipe-organ boomed, \"DO NOT MOVE.\"\n\nBeetle drew himself up and a triumphant grin crossed his features. \"Now I am in control!\" He followed this statement with a burst of laughter that showed that the owner had done a fair share of gloating in his time, and had the basics down pat. \"What do you think of that?\"\n\nThe Baron and his son stared up at the colossus for a moment, then eyed each other, as if each were embarrassed at the thought of speaking first. Finally the Baron cleared his throat and said, \"Yes, Gil, what do you think of that?\"\n\nGilgamesh looked furiously at his sire. \"Are you joking? This is another test?\"\n\nKlaus shook his head. \"No, no\u2014He's quite serious. But I am interested in your analysis.\"\n\nAt this Dr. Beetle burst out with a startled \"Hey!\" which the two politely ignored.\n\nGil rolled his eyes and shifted the fishbowl to his other hand. The fish grinned. Gil sighed. \"Oh very well. If we directly attack him, the clank kills us. But if he kills us, our clanks will finish him. An apparent standoff.\"\n\nThe Tyrant cackled. \"Correct! Now\u2014\"\n\nGil wheeled on him in annoyance. \"Oh shut up before you embarrass yourself any further!\" Beetle sputtered in shock as Gil continued. \"Being a short man,\" he gestured significantly at the looming clank, \"he places too much importance on size.\"\n\n\"I'M NOT THAT SHORT,\" Beetle screamed and futilely attempted to kick Gil in the ankle.\n\nGil ignored him and continued. \"Thus the use of the one, slow, unwieldy, but impressively large clank, instead of surprising us with a squad of the faster but smaller units that are no doubt surrounding the building.\"\n\n\"And excuse me, but I do still have the drop on you.\" This contribution was also ignored.\n\n\"He has thus 'Put all his eggs in one basket,' confident that he could contain our group.\"\n\n\"As I have!\" the Tyrant screamed.\n\nGil looked pityingly at the smaller man. \"A viable strategy perhaps. If we had come alone.\"\n\nAn explosion rocked the building and all heads whipped upward in time to see half of Mr. Tock's face explode in a cloud of smoke and metal shards. The giant automaton wobbled slightly, then, like a great brass tree, slowly fell over sideways out of sight, though the sound of his hitting the ground left nothing to the imagination, and the entire building shuddered from the impact. A few seconds later, a rain of metal shards pattered to the floor. In the sky overhead floated a fleet of military airships, all sporting the Wulfenbach crest on their sides.\n\n\"Tock!\" cried Beetle in an agonized voice.\n\nKlaus outlined the size of the forces overhead: \"The Third Airborne, the Seventh Groundnaut Mechanical, and the J\u00e4germonsters. Can we end this now?\"\n\n\"Guards!\" Beetle yelled. The Baron's party rolled their eyes.\n\nThe J\u00e4germonster sneered. \"Now he calls for de guards?\"\n\nGilgamesh shrugged. \"Yes, well\u2026 make it quick.\"\n\nThe main doors to the labs crashed open as a squad of Beetleburg's feared Watch marched into the room in perfect step. Each unit raised its left gun arm in perfect unison and they all chanted \"Stand!\" in four part harmony. They were instantly mowed down by the hail of armor-piercing bullets from the machine cannons of the two Wulfenbach clanks.\n\nAs the last bits of metal rained down, the J\u00e4germonster gave the order to cease fire. \"Dem,\" he remarked, \"dat vas easy.\"\n\nKlaus looked disgusted. \"They were the best self-contained fighting machines on the planet\u2014When they were new!\"\n\nBeetle looked stunned. \"My\u2026 my Watch!\"\n\n\"Time marches on, Beetle; you remained behind. Well, by now the city should be secure\u2014\"\n\nBeetle snapped back into the present. \"This is an invasion? Blast it, Klaus, this is my city!\"\n\nThe Baron looked contemptuous. \"Wrong. It became my city ten years ago. I merely let you administer it.\"\n\n\"But\u2026 but\u2026\" Beetle gestured, \"But why?\"\n\nKlaus' eyes narrowed. \"Withholding a Hive Engine isn't enough?\"\n\n\"But that would mean\u2026\" Beetle stared at Klaus. \"Before Merlot\u2026 You already knew!\"\n\nKlaus idly looked out the window. Screams and explosions could be heard faintly through the glass. \"A field team has a sudden 'communications breakdown' followed by several 'accidents.' The river is cordoned off for a night, the laboratory schedules are suddenly rearranged. If you analyze the last week's chemical requisitions, as well as the dramatic increase of the price of honey in this sector\u2026\"He slammed his fist down on the window sill. \"Of course I knew!\" For the first time an expression of regret crossed his features. \"I had hoped I was wrong, old friend, but\u2026\" He sighed, \"Ah, well.\"\n\nSuddenly Agatha appeared at the Baron's elbow. \"Please, Herr Baron, don't kill him! We need him!\"\n\nKlaus closed his eyes. \"Where do they get these ideas?\" he muttered. \"Beetle, the loyalty of the rest of your people does you credit. They can rest assured that I have no intention of killing you. Indeed, I have use for you.\"\n\nIf this was meant to be reassuring to the smaller man, it had the opposite effect. His eyes went wide and his face paled. \"No!\" His initial strangled whisper changed to a scream: \"I'll never submit to being one of your experimental subjects! Never!\" As he said this, his hand grabbed one of the stylized, beetle-shaped cloak clasps on his chest and ripped it off. As it came free, it snapped open into the deadly shape of one of the Tyrant's feared seeker drones. It still resembled a beetle, but this one was sleek, armored, and its' brass needles gleamed. The J\u00e4germonster snarled and tried to bring his weapon up, but before he could, Beetle launched the device towards Gil, Klaus and Agatha, shouting, \"You won't get me! You won't get any of us!\"\n\nCalmly, Gilgamesh tossed the goldfish bowl up high into the air. Pivoting in place he swept a large wrench off a nearby bench and, continuing the motion, smashed the flying device in midair. Clattering and sparking, it pinwheeled back into Beetle's face.\n\nGil then dropped the wrench, caught the falling fishbowl, grabbed a startled Agatha and pulled her to the ground while yelling, \"Down!\"\n\nAn explosion rocked the lab and blew those remaining upright to the ground. Agatha felt herself encircled by strong arms. A tiny part of her mind had time to notice the warm, spicy scent of Gil's hair and to identify an odd sensation as that of a goldfish bowl pressing into her back.\n\nThe echoes of the explosion died down amidst the clatter of falling machinery and the tinkling of glass.\n\nFirst on his feet was the J\u00e4germonster. \"Herr Baron?\"\n\nThe Baron rose and dusted himself off. \"Relax, Unit Commander.\"\n\nHe knelt beside the swaying figure of Boris, who was trying to raise himself up and dust himself off simultaneously. \"Ah\u2014 wha\u2014sir?\" the secretary muttered.\n\nKlaus helped him to his feet. \"Pull yourself together, Boris, you're fine.\" He nonchalantly looked over toward his son. \"Gil?\"\n\n\"I'm all right, Father.\" He looked down at the girl in his arms. \"And you, Miss Clay?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I think so. Where\u2014?\" It was then that she saw Dr. Beetle's shattered and smoking spectacles upon the floor. \"NO,\" she shouted, \"Dr. Beetle!\"\n\nDr. Glassvitch was already kneeling over a small smoldering corpse. \"Dead. He's\u2014\"\n\nThe Baron interrupted him. \"His head! How's his head?\"\n\nGlassvitch swallowed. \"T\u2014totally destroyed, Herr Baron.\" Klaus swore.\n\nGil looked contrite. \"I'm sorry\u2026\"\n\nAgatha twisted away from him. \"Don't touch me! You killed him!\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"Permanently. A pity, that.\"\n\nGil looked stunned. \"What? He threw a bomb at me.\"\n\nKlaus cocked an eyebrow. \"A poor excuse.\"\n\n\"Poor excuse?\" A look of annoyance crossed Gil's face. \"He threw a bomb at me!\"\n\nThe J\u00e4germonster wandered up holding an unidentifiable organ in its hand. \"Hey, I von't say he vas shtupid, but I hain't findin' a lot uf brains around here!\"\n\nBoris gave the monster soldier a look of disgust, but merely added, \"Can we leave, Herr Baron? My boots are sticking to the floor.\"\n\nNone of them noticed Agatha bristling in the background until she snarled at them. \"How dare you!\" The three backed into each other before the furious girl. \"How dare you? You murder one of the greatest scientists in Europe and you're treating it like a kitchen accident?\"\n\nGil attempted to explain, \"But he threw a bomb\u2014\"\n\nBut a glare from Agatha shut him up. She went on, her voice beginning to take on the power of conviction. \"The people of this city loved him! When they find out how you\u2014\"\n\nThe headache lanced through her skull like a white-hot bar of iron, causing her to scream and drop to her knees. The listeners blinked and looked towards the Baron, who shrugged.\n\nDr. Glassvitch hurried over to Agatha's side and helped the quivering girl to her feet. \"Forgive her, Herr Baron,\" he pleaded. \"She has these attacks when she gets upset.\"\n\nThe Baron's lip curled. \"Pathetic.\"\n\nGilgamesh stepped close and quietly murmured, \"That doesn't make her wrong, Father.\"\n\nKlaus looked at him, then at Agatha, then slowly rubbed his great jaw. \"Hmm\u2026\" he conceded. \"The populace is sometimes a problem\u2026\"\n\n\"Possibly not, Herr Baron.\" Klaus wheeled about to face Dr. Merlot, who quickly realized that drawing attention to himself at this time was not the wisest of decisions, but having committed to it, chose to push on. \"Very few people actually saw Dr. Beetle on a regular\u2014hurk!\"\n\nThis last sound was caused by the Baron grasping the front of Merlot's labcoat and effortlessly hauling him up before his face. \"I despise traitors.\" Klaus informed him. \"I consider Dr. Beetle's death to be your fault. Without your theatrics I might have salvaged him. I am very annoyed. So now, I'm going to put you in charge.\"\n\nMerlot squirmed futilely in the Baron's iron grasp. \"I\u2026 I don't understand, Herr Baron.\"\n\n\"You'll oversee everything. The city, the college, the lands\u2014 everything.\"\n\n\"But\u2026\" Klaus shook him once. Merlot's teeth shut with a snap.\n\n\"And the first time you make a mistake, I'm shipping you to Castle Heterodyne.\"\n\nMerlot's face went white. \"No! All I wanted\u2014\"\n\nKlaus released him and turned away dismissively.\n\n\"What you wanted is irrelevant. I want Dr. Beetle lying in state\u2014for viewing\u2014by midnight, with a hero's funeral to be held the day after tomorrow.\"\n\nMerlot stared at the charred corpse on the floor. \"But\u2026 my work\u2026 I just wanted to\u2026 do something important\u2026\"\n\nAgatha muttered an aside to the J\u00e4germonster. \"He was trying to turn chalk into cheese.\" The soldier guffawed.\n\nMerlot's head whipped around and found a focus for his displeasure. \"Right! At least I shall get to do one useful thing today. Miss Clay\u2014get out! Henceforth you are banned from this university. Forever!\"\n\nAgatha looked stunned. \"You\u2026 you can't do that! I'm a student and\u2014\"\n\nMerlot drew himself up. \"Of course I can do it! Haven't you heard? I'm in charge now!\"\n\nAgatha felt her world collapsing around her. She barely registered Dr. Glassvitch's hand on her shoulder. \"It may be for the best, Agatha,\" he murmured. \"Without Dr. Beetle's protection, I doubt you would like it here.\"\n\n\"No!\" Agatha shook her head. \"How will I\u2026?\"\n\nGlassvitch cut her off gently, and began to escort her to the door. \"I'll come and see you, I promise. But now, I think, you had better leave.\"\n\nKlaus watched the two leave. His mouth twitched. \"Petty,\" he muttered.\n\nGlassvitch returned and approached him with a worried look on his face. \"Herr Baron, the girl is quite distraught\u2026 Are the streets safe?\"\n\nKlaus sighed. He turned toward the J\u00e4germonster. \"Unit Commander! See the girl home.\"\n\nThe soldier grinned. \"Hokay!\"\n\nKlaus plowed on, \"Then come right back!\"\n\nThe soldier shrugged. \"Oh. Hokay.\"\n\nOnce out on the campus, Agatha could see that things were in disarray. There were few students in evidence, though she could see that almost every window was crowded with anxious observers. Several airships had landed in the quad, and J\u00e4germonsters and the Baron's clanks were everywhere. As Agatha watched, one of the late Tyrant's own clanks rounded the corner and advanced. Agatha had time to directly compare its jerky motion to the deadly fluid movements of the Wulfenbach clanks who spun and mowed it down. Other smoking piles of parts revealed the fate of the \"Unstoppable Army.\" The Baron had been right. Beetle's clanks had become quite obsolete. As Agatha turned the corner, she stopped dead in her tracks. There, looming before her was the burning hulk that had been Mr. Tock. A crew of the Baron's mechanics was already swarming over it, and as Agatha watched, a group of hovering airships began to lower cables to their waiting hands. Agatha suspected that the giant clank would be quickly rebuilt. But it wouldn't be the same. Nothing would.\n\nAgatha skirted the vast remains and felt tears well up as she passed between the vast gateway for the last time. \"Goodbye, Mr. Tock,\" she whispered.\n\nHer mood was shattered by the business end of a machine cannon dropping towards her face, and the amplified voice of the clank behind it roaring, \"HALT. ALL CITIZENS ARE TO STAY OFF THE STREETS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.\"\n\nAgatha stepped backwards and bumped into someone. Turning around, she found herself face to face with the grinning J\u00e4gersoldier she'd last seen in Dr. Beetle's lab. \"Hoy,\" he called out to the clank, \"she's vit me!\"\n\nThe clank paused. \"YES SIR,\" and with a hiss it resumed its watch position.\n\nThe soldier then looked back at Agatha and was nonplussed to see her crying. \"Vot's de matta, gurl?\"\n\nAgatha stared at him through her tears. \"They sent you out to eat me!\"\n\nThe monster soldier actually looked embarrassed. You could also tell that this was an unfamiliar emotion. \"Hy em not gun eatchu.\" This did nothing to stop the flow of tears, and after several minutes, the exasperated soldier roared, \"Onless dats de only vay to shot hyu op!\" Agatha's sobbing stopped instantly, and she stared at him with wide eyes. The J\u00e4gersoldier nodded. \"Now. Vere hyu liff? Let's get hyu home,\" and when Agatha continued to stare at him blankly: \"MOOF!\"\n\nThe walk back through the town was markedly different from the one she'd taken this morning. The number of citizens on the street was greatly reduced, and the few left were obviously determined to get home as quickly as possible. Shopkeepers were closing up, frantically pulling stock in off the sidewalks or, when they saw Agatha and her escort, abandoning it altogether and slamming shut doors and window shutters.\n\nThe only sign of fighting that Agatha saw was a shattered member of the Watch, which still twitched and feebly ticked against a wall as they passed by. More and more of the giant Wulfenbach clanks and soldiers wearing the Wulfenbach crest were to be seen assuming positions on various street corners, and with chilling silence, a small troop of J\u00e4germonsters swarmed across the rooftops of the buildings across the street and disappeared. Shadows from the overhead fleet glided across the streets, causing the townspeople to involuntarily duck their heads and move even more quickly.\n\nSoon enough they turned on to Forge Street, and the large former stables that housed Clay Mechanical came into sight.\n\nAgatha turned to her companion. For the last several blocks, the J\u00e4ger had abandoned its attempts at conversation, and had been sniffing repeatedly, while a look of distracted concentration flowed across its face. \"That's it. That's my house. Um\u2026 thanks.\" With that she bolted for the main door. The J\u00e4germonster lazily leaned against the nearest wall and watched her scurry inside. With a sigh, he shook his head and muttered, \"Tch. Poor little ting.\" Again he sniffed deeply, then shrugged irritably and loped off.\n\nInside the shop, machinist and master blacksmith Adam Clay grasped a thick chain in his massive fists and pulled. The ceiling beam that held the combined pulley system groaned, and the front of the steam tractor the chain was attached to began to slowly rise upwards.\n\nHerr Ketter's tractor had some leaks. Adam was pretty sure he knew where. A small collection of probable replacement parts were neatly laid out on a small bench by his side.\n\nAdam liked this sort of job, as it didn't involve dealing with madboy technology. Whereas Sparks were able to design and construct bizarre, physics-skirting machinery, their devices were never really able to be mass produced or even reliably duplicated by regular people. Even trained machinists eventually suffered nervous breakdowns if they were forced to try.\n\nOne of the Wulfenbach Empire's groundbreaking ideas had been that instead of exterminating rival Sparks after defeating them, Klaus hired them. He kept them happy by keeping them supplied with materials, tools, and food, and a dedicated staff that made sure they ate it. They found themselves free of the petty concerns that had plagued their lives, such as what to actually do with that small country once they had proved that they could conquer it with nothing more than a navy composed of intelligent lobsters. He also gave them challenges, adoring minions, and on a regular basis, a large dinner celebrating their accomplishments along with a beautiful calligraphed award expressing the sincere thanks of the Empire in general and Klaus in particular.\n\nAs a result, almost any one of the Sparks Klaus had defeated over the years would have disintegrated you if you had seriously attempted to offer them their freedom, and they gleefully built and repaired the airships and the armies of clanks as well as the other terrifying monstrosities that supported the Pax Transylvania. This easily made up for the tightly guarded warehouses full of devices that made ants run backwards or could remove the rings from Saturn that they occasionally delivered in their free time.\n\nAnd of course, regular science marched on, if only in self-defense.\n\nThe pulley caught. Adam grimaced and gave the chain a sharp tug, and links snapped with a sound like a gunshot, the tractor slamming back to the ground, shaking the entire building.\n\nAdam looked at the broken chain as if it had personally betrayed him, and then he dropped it to the ground. He walked over to the tractor and quickly inspected it to make sure there was no additional damage. Seeing none, he glanced around and, reassured that he was alone, grabbed the front of the tractor in one large hand, and slowly lifted it above his head. Satisfied, he hooked a foot around the bench that contained the spare parts, slid it over to his side, selected a wrench from a loop on his belt, and began working on the undercarriage.\n\nAdam was a construct. Whereas the term \"construct\" encompassed any and all biological creatures created by Sparks, Adam was an example of a \"traditional old-school\" construct, i.e., a patchwork collection of body parts that had been revivified by a massive dose of electricity. They were the simplest form of construct to make, and the vast majority of Sparks had started their careers by assembling one. Unfortunately, while reviving the corpus was simple enough, the brain remained a tricky thing, and most Patchworks, as they were called, were either dull-witted or homicidally deranged, which meant that a significant number of Sparks had their careers ended surprisingly soon after they started.\n\nAs a result, there was a well-established tradition of such constructs being viewed with suspicion at best, discriminated against with impunity, and made the butt of jokes in sensationalist novels, such as those chronicling the adventures of the Heterodyne Boys. Their loyal construct companions, Punch and Judy, were portrayed as oafish clowns. Music halls and traveling shows across Europa also embraced this interpretation, and the two were solidly established as the personification of low humor. Constructs tended to avoid popular entertainments.\n\nRefreshingly, the Baron had long let it be known that blatant discrimination against constructs was officially frowned upon within the Empire, and he backed this policy up with force.\n\nBut this was a rule that was often ignored in the small towns and rural villages that rarely saw the Baron's forces or polysyllabic words. As a result, constructs moved into the larger, more cosmopolitan towns and cities. There they were reluctantly embraced. Those like Adam and his wife, who, with a bit of effort, could pass as human, tried to do so.\n\nAnd thus Adam and Lilith lived happily amongst the general populace of Beetleburg, and were respected members of the community. Adam impressed many with his ability to repair the simpler Spark creations, and did regular piece-work for the Tyrant. Lilith played the piano, giving lessons in music and dance, and provided entertainment at various functions. There were those in town who knew what they were, but usually they were constructs themselves.\n\nSuddenly the door slammed open behind Adam, and before he could react, he found a sobbing Agatha clutching at his chest. \"Oh, Adam,\" she cried, \"I've had the most awful day in existence! Dr. Beetle is dead! And I was robbed! And I'm not allowed back in the University! Ever!\"\n\nAdam strained to keep his balance, and the arm holding up the tractor began to shake. Agatha continued, \"I can't think of anything that could make it worse!\" Sweat began to form on Adam's brow as he tried to gently disengage Agatha from his shirt with one hand.\n\nThe door to the inner house opened, and Agatha's mother appeared. \"What is all the noise out here?\" She blinked at the scene before her. \"Agatha? You're back? What's wrong child? Come here.\"\n\nTo Adam's great relief, Agatha turned to his wife. \"Oh, Lilith, Dr. Beetle is dead!\"\n\nShock crossed Lilith's face. \"What? How?\"\n\n\"He was killed in his lab by Baron Wulfenbach!\"\n\nAt the sound of Wulfenbach's name, Adam gave a start, dropping the tractor, again shaking the building.\n\nLilith's eyes widened. \"Baron Wulfenbach! Here?\"\n\nAgatha looked at her in surprise. \"Yes. He's taken the town. You didn't notice?\"\n\nLilith looked embarrassed. \"I've been canning all morning\u2014\" she looked at Agatha again, \"Klaus Wulfenbach. Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Lilith, I work in the main lab. I was right there. I saw the whole thing!\"\n\nLilith only looked more worried. \"Did he see you?\"\n\n\"Dr. Beetle introduced all of us.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course he did. Why shouldn't he? How did\u2014?\" Suddenly a look of horror crossed Lilith's face and she grabbed Agatha and lifted her up before her eyes. \"Your locket!\" she exclaimed. \"Where's your locket?\"\n\nAgatha looked surprised at the turn of the conversation. \"I was robbed. By two soldiers.\"\n\n\"Wulfenbach soldiers?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't think so. They looked too shabby.\"\n\nLilith set Agatha back down and turned to Adam. \"We've got to find it!\" Adam nodded.\n\nAgatha interrupted. \"With everything else that's happened\u2014 that's what you think is important?\" Adam and Lilith looked at each other, unspoken communication passed between them.\n\nLilith's face took on an expression that Agatha knew as \"I'll explain this when you're older,\" a look that at eighteen, she no longer had any patience for. \"Your uncle was very clear. You must always wear\u2014\"\n\n\"Dr. Beetle is dead! Don't you understand?\"\n\n\"Agatha, when your uncle left you with us, he told us things we'd need to know if\u2014\"\n\n\"If he didn't come back! Things I needed to know! Well what are you waiting for? It's been eleven years! Maybe\u2026 maybe he never meant to come back at all and\u2014\"\n\nAdam's vast hand dropped gently onto her shoulder, cutting her off in mid-word. The look in his eyes as he slowly and deliberately shook his head conveyed the message that whatever else, her uncle had never intended to leave for good.\n\nLilith nodded in agreement. \"Agatha, your uncle loves you very much. Almost as much as we do.\" With a sigh, Agatha allowed herself to be enfolded by the arms of the two constructs. The quiet minute that followed would be one of Agatha's most poignant memories.\n\nIt was ended by Lilith straightening up and assuming her no-nonsense voice. \"Now. Agatha, Adam and I are going out. There are a few things you must do. We're leaving Beetleburg. Pack everything of importance to you, but it must fit into your green rucksack. No more than two sets of clothes, but take two extra sets of stockings, the thick wool ones, and linens.\"\n\nAgatha blinked in surprise. \"Leaving town? But the shop! Our house! Your canning!\"\n\nLilith nodded. \"It can't be helped. If Baron Wulfenbach has taken the town then we have got to leave.\" Agatha opened her mouth, but Lilith cut her off. \"Once we are on the road, I'll answer everything, but now there is no time. Prepare similar packs for Adam and myself, as well as the blue shouldersack that is already packed in our closet and\u2014\" she paused, and seemed embarrassed, \"Our generator.\"\n\nAgatha looked somber. \"We really are leaving.\"\n\nLilith nodded and looked around the cozy room. \"Yes. I'm afraid so.\" While they were talking, Adam strode over to the fireplace. Lifting aside the rag rug, he exposed a stone tile over a meter square set into the floor. In the center was an indentation that was revealed to be a handle, as Adam grasped it and effortlessly lifted. The tile was revealed to be a cube that easily slid from the hole with the sound of stone on stone. Depositing it to the side, he leaned in and lifted out a thick money belt, as well as several small canvas bundles, before smoothly sliding the block back into place.\n\nLilith continued. \"Then you must clean the house.\" Agatha opened her mouth, but Lilith raised her hand. \"Start a fire in the fireplace. Burn everything in the red cabinet. This is very important, Agatha. When you're done with that, I want you to disassemble our two spare generators and scatter the parts around the shop. Then go through the house and if you find anything that you think would tell someone that the people living here were constructs, get rid of it.\"\n\n\"You're terrified of Baron Wulfenbach finding you.\"\n\n\"Yes. And you should be too.\" She forestalled Agatha's next outburst. \"Tomorrow. Now Adam and I will go and check the pawnshops and jewelers for your locket. If it's not there, we'll talk to Master Vulpen and see if it has made its way onto the Thieves' Market. In any case, if we're not back, make sure all the doors are locked, be in bed by eight o'clock and ready to leave by dawn.\"\n\n\"The Baron has established a curfew,\" Agatha warned her. \"He's using clanks and those creepy J\u00e4germonster things.\"\n\nAdam and Lilith looked at each other. To her surprise, Agatha saw that they were more relaxed than she had seen them in quite a while. \"Really? It'll be like old times then. Now get to work, lock the door, put up the 'Away' sign, and don't let anyone in while we're gone.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Agatha headed up the stairs. \"Be careful.\"\n\nAdam and Lilith watched her go. Lilith allowed herself a brief fierce hug with Adam. \"Confound the master,\" she muttered into his vast chest, as he tenderly patted her head. \"We're not equipped to deal with this. Eleven years! Where can he be?\"\n\nThree hours later, Agatha sat wearily on her bed. She had tackled the cleaning of the house first, then the dismantling of the generators. Although she knew that Adam and Lilith were constructs, her parents had never talked about who had created them. Agatha suspected the reason had something to do with the competence of that unknown Spark or, rather, the lack thereof. There were numerous flaws with the pair, such as Adam's inability to speak. The most painful to them was their inability to have children. The most embarrassing was the lack of care that had been taken when assembling them regarding things like uniformity of skin tone, and Lilith's left eye, which was noticeably larger than her right. When she was younger, Agatha had pointed out that the variegated skin revealed that at least their creators had been equal opportunity exhumers, while her mismatched eyes were a flaw shared by the famous Heterodyne construct, Judy, and thus no detriment. Lilith's reaction to this statement had always puzzled the youngster. It was only as she got older that she realized that the Heterodyne plays that were performed at fairs and circuses by traveling players consistently portrayed the Heterodyne Boys' construct servants as buffoons, and that none of the constructs that her family knew enjoyed these plays. Agatha had thus realized that constructs were considered second-class citizens, and explained her parents' efforts to keep their status as such hidden.\n\nBut the most annoying flaw in their construction was that they were unable to maintain the charge that gave them life. Periodically, they had to hook each other up to a small hand-cranked generator and re-vitalize themselves. At a young age Agatha had once stumbled upon them during this process and had suffered nightmares for several weeks as a result. The generator was never talked about except when absolutely necessary.\n\nAgatha looked around her room now, and mentally packed the large rucksack at her feet. No matter how she did it, there were things she loved that were going to have to be left behind.\n\nBefore Adam and Lilith, she had lived with her Uncle Barry. All she could remember about him was that he was a large, good-natured man who was very good at repairing things, seemed very worried about things he couldn't talk about, and who would, without warning, periodically uproot them from whatever town they had established themselves in and have them travel for days, sometimes for weeks, to another town.\n\nIn the beginning Agatha had thought it was fun. But as she got older, she realized that she had no friends. Partially this was caused by their constant travel, and partially by the fuzzyheadedness that began to increase its hold upon her thinking around that time. Upon their arrival in a new location, children could tell that there was something not quite right about the newcomer, and with the casual sadism of the young, proceeded to give her a hard time. After an especially cruel series of pranks, which even her perennially preoccupied uncle had noticed, they had come to Beetleburg, and the Clays, where she had found the loving stability she had so desperately needed.\n\nShe remembered the guarded joy she had felt when the Clays had told her that this was her room. For quite a while, she tried to do as little to it as possible, convinced that they would soon leave. It had started out as a simple, bare attic, but as time passed, Agatha had begun to devote a great deal of time to it, and now it was a thing of beauty.\n\nAt a young age, Adam had shown her how to carve wood, a skill many machinists honed, as they often had to design and forge their own parts. Her early efforts defaced the bottoms of newel posts and cabinet doors, but eventually she began to develop a grace and geometric precision that allowed a profusion of cunningly interlaced designs to cover many of the wooden surfaces. The ceiling had been painted a dark blue and covered with bright yellow, white and orange stars. Hanging from the ceiling were various objects that Agatha found interesting: a gigantic dried sunflower (which she had been convinced was the result of some Spark's biological tinkering), a stuffed iguana she had discovered in a musty old junk shop, an airship kite that her uncle had built for her long ago, and a Roman sword that Dr. Beetle had discovered while digging the foundation for a new building. Crammed on shelves were her precious books, fossils, unusual bits of madboy tech, clocks, and a small misshapen clay dog that a boy had given her when she was eight.\n\nOn the shelf in front of her single window were racks containing pots of plants, some common herbs, some exotic and strange things that she had collected from the spice shops or the Tyrant's Botanical Gardens.\n\nIt would all have to be left behind.\n\nEven, and the thought filled her eyes with tears, her work table, a vast swivel-topped affair that Adam had constructed in secret for her one Yuletide several years ago. All that remained on it were her drafting tools, her notebooks, and the remains of the few, painfully few, devices she had constructed that actually worked: the butter clock, the air-driven quill sharpener, the hooting machine, and the wind-up hammer. They had already been dismantled, and that had been the hardest thing to do. With a groan she allowed herself to fall back onto the bed in despair.\n\nThey had all lived together happily for several months, and Uncle Barry had made the occasional trip while leaving Agatha in the care of the Clays. Agatha had vague memories of a growing tension amongst the grownups, which culminated in a late night argument she could dimly hear from her bedroom. The next morning, the tension appeared to have cleared and Barry announced that he was going on another trip. A lengthy one, that might take as long as two months. He had written three times: once from Mechanicsburg, the home of the fabled Heterodyne Boys; once from Paris; and over a year later, a much travel-stained letter, full of disquieting and vague ramblings, that was found to have been slid under the Clays' front door while they had been outside the city picking apples.\n\nIt was the last they had heard from or of him.\n\nThe thought of returning to that wandering lifestyle filled her with apprehension and she felt her head begin to throb in a peculiar way that left her feeling dizzy.\n\n\"Maybe a short nap,\" she muttered, and stripped down to her camisole and pantalets before burrowing under the covers. A thought eased its way to the forefront of her mind even as she felt herself begin to slide into sleep: her whole day had started going wrong when that electrical phenomenon had appeared. But bizarre things occurred all the time, such as last week's sudden mimmoth infestation. The tiny pachyderms had been discovered living in the sewers, and an ill-thought-out poisoning scheme had seen the creatures emerging from drains in alarming numbers and establishing themselves in houses all over town.\n\nNo, the problems had really begun when those two soldiers had stolen her locket. Agatha's last coherent thought as she succumbed to sleep was \"I wish I could get my hands on them.\"\n\nIn a small, cheap rooming house, the objects of Agatha's thoughts were reaping the results of that morning's encounter. Moloch paced back and forth in the tiny room, as a lean man wearing a long white apron over his suit examined Omar. Moloch's brother was stretched out unconscious upon the room's single bed. The doctor removed his stethoscope and leaned back with a hiss of annoyance.\n\nMoloch turned towards him. \"Please, Herr Doctor, can't you help him? What's wrong with him?\"\n\nThe doctor tugged at his small beard in frustration. \"I don't know. I've never seen anything like this. This man should be in a hospital.\"\n\nMoloch shuddered. \"Oh no, I saw enough of them in the war.\"\n\n\"I don't mean one of those butcher shop field hospitals. Ours is fully equipped and your brother needs\u2014\"\n\n\"What? What does he need? What could they do? You don't even know what's wrong with him!\"\n\nThe doctor opened his mouth, hesitated, and then nodded reluctantly. \"Yes. No fever, no chills. No respiratory problems, no sweating, no convulsions\u2014But\u2026 it's like he's\u2026 shutting down, like\u2026\"\n\n\"Like a boiler when you've blocked the air intakes.\"\n\nThe doctor looked at him with mild surprise and nodded. \"Yes. Well put, young man.\"\n\nMoloch ignored the compliment and leaned over the unconscious man. \"Ach, Omar,\" he muttered, \"you're a jerk, but you're all I have left. Fight it!\" He slapped his brother's face but got no response.\n\nBehind his back, the doctor's look of worry increased. \"How long has he been like this? Days? Weeks?\"\n\nMoloch shook his head. \"He started to feel dizzy, um\u2026 a little before twelve hundred. He got more and more disorientated and collapsed around fifteen. Towards the end he had trouble talking, and I\u2026 I don't even think he knew who I was. He passed out around sundown.\"\n\nThe doctor looked shaken. \"That quickly? Dios,\" he muttered. \"How do you feel?\"\n\nMoloch looked surprised at the question. \"Me? Okay, I guess, why?\"\n\n\"I'm trying to decide if I should have you moved to the hospital along with your brother.\"\n\n\"What? But I'm not\u2014\"\n\nThe doctor was paging through a book he had removed from his medical bag. He stopped and looked Moloch in the eye. \"Listen, von Zinzer, was it? This could be some sort of plague.\"\n\nMoloch went white. \"Plague?\"\n\nThe doctor nodded. \"The big question is how contagious it is. Aside from hospitalization, my other option is to quarantine the pair of you in this inn. You talk to anyone other than the innkeeper?\"\n\n\"No, there weren't any customers when we\u2014\"\n\n\"Praise be for that. Where do you work?\"\n\n\"Nowhere. I mean, we just hit town this morning.\"\n\nThe doctor made a small grunt of satisfaction at this news and made another checkmark in his book. \"Mm. Probably something you picked up outside then. Eat anything unusual? Find anything odd?\"\n\n\"Odder than Beetle Beer? No, we\u2014\"Suddenly Omar convulsed upon the bed. A strangled groan came from his mouth. Moloch and the doctor were at his side instantly.\n\n\"Omar?\" Omar's head whipped from side to side twice, froze in position, and a deep final breath rattled from him as he sagged back into stillness. Moloch knew he was dead even before the doctor checked his brother's pulse and then drew the sheet over his head. In the silence, the sound of something hitting the floor echoed through the small room with unnatural loudness. In death, Omar's hands, which had been clutched for hours, had relaxed, and Agatha's locket had dropped to the floor.\n\nThe doctor reached down, examined it briefly, and handed it over to Moloch. \"I'm sure it gave him some comfort.\" Moloch looked at him blankly, the locket clutched in his hand. The doctor continued, \"I myself don't know whether the Heterodyne Boys will actually come back someday, but I do believe that we should live our lives as if they were. People like your brother, who try to make the world a better place, do so by the very act of trying. I'm sure the Heterodynes would have been proud of him.\"\n\nMoloch looked woodenly at the locket and then back at the doctor, who changed the subject as he donned his hat and greatcoat. \"I'm afraid I must be going. Now listen up, soldier. I'm confining you to this room. I'll have a medical disposal team up here before dawn for your brother. You can relax, our Dr. Beetle doesn't permit unauthorized resurrectionists in this town. You'll be fed and examined for the next week and after that you'll be free to go. So sit tight soldier, and we'll do our best.\" And with that he slipped out and shut the door behind him.\n\nMoloch grimaced. \"Reckon Omar and me have seen your 'best.'\" He turned to glare at the sheet-covered form. \"You idiot!\n\nYour last act on earth is to steal from a townie and leave me stuck holding the evidence waiting for her to report me. That's making the world a better place, huh? Leaving me stuck like a sitting duck!\" In his fury he threw the locket against the wall where it smashed open with a bright blue flare and the sounds of gears scattering. A smell of ozone filled the room and brought Moloch up short. \"What the\u2026?\"\n\nHe bent down and gingerly picked up a few bits of the locket. It had contained a pair of portraits, a handsome-looking man and woman. But hidden behind the portraits were the smashed remains of delicate machinery. Machinery that Moloch was totally unfamiliar with.\n\nHe muttered as he gathered together the bits from the floor. \"Too complicated to be a watch. Not a music box. I've never seen anything like this\u2026\" A chill swept over him. \"This is madboy stuff.\" He examined it again. \"But what did it do?\" He raised his eyes and found himself looking at Omar's body.\n\nWith a cry he leapt back, scattering bits of locket across the floor. After a moment, he gingerly picked up the larger pieces and examined them again, to ascertain that it was indeed broken. Of this there could be no doubt.\n\n\"This is what killed Omar,\" he muttered. \"He started acting strange right after he stole it from that girl\u2026\" A new thought emerged. \"The girl! She was wearing it and it wasn't killing her. She must have\u2026 turned it on, somehow. She knew it'd do him, the black-hearted\u2014wait! Wasn't there a note?\"\n\nHe turned the locket over and indeed there was lettering engraved upon the back:\n\n\u2002If found, please return to Agatha Clay Clay Mechanical Forge Street, Beetleburg. REWARD\n\nMoloch grabbed his greatcoat and slung it on as he left the room. \"A reward, huh? I'll give her a reward a'right, and she'll be making no reports when I'm done with her either.\"\n\nAgatha was very small. She ran into a large room filled with tools and machines and things that she didn't understand, but knew were full of magic, mystery and excitement. At the center of this collection sat the master of the magic, her uncle Barry. He was a large shadowy figure hunched over a workbench, where something full of gears and springs grew under his tools. \"Hey, Uncle Barry,\" Agatha cried as she entered. \"I learned a trick!\"\n\nThe large man paused and slowly turned to look at her. Even now his face was in shadow. A small set of spectacles glinted in the light from his bench. \"A trick?\" he enquired.\n\nAgatha nodded, and jumped up and down in place with excitement. \"Yeah! You know how when you' retryin' to think and there's noise and stuff botherin' you? Well I found out I can make other noises in my head and it makes the botherin' noise stop! And then I can think real good! Listen!\" With that she stopped jumping, serenely folded her hands and began to hum, no, to whistle? To buzz? No\u2026 It was all of these and yet none of them, a soft melodic sound that you couldn't call music, but\u2026\n\nThe effect of this performance upon Uncle Barry was electric. He stiffened in shock and the handle of the screwdriver clutched in his hand cracked. His voice was strained. \"You\u2026 no! It can't be!\" Agatha hummed on obliviously. \"You're only five years old! You're too young! You've got to stop!\" His large hands shot out and grabbed her shoulders and began to shake her. Agatha kept on humming. She could no longer stop, even as her uncle cried, \"I don't know what to do! I don't know what to do! I don't\u2014\"\n\nA particularly violent jerk snapped Agatha awake. She was slumped over a table\u2014another jerk\u2014someone was grabbing her hair!\n\nShe twisted around enough to see that her assailant was one of the soldiers who had accosted her this morning! Without thinking she swung her left hand and the large spanner she was grasping connected with Moloch's jaw and sent him crashing to the ground.\n\nAgatha blinked in surprise and examined the tool in her hand. \"Where did this come from?\" she muttered, and then noticed that the hand holding it was black with grease and dirt. With a cry, she saw that both of her hands were dirty up to the elbow, as was her underwear\u2014\n\nHer underwear? But she was in the middle of Adam's shop floor! A wild look around showed her that tools were scattered and parts were littered across the floor. Heat still radiated from the great welding torch and, most astonishing, the tall double doors to the street were wide open.\n\nAs Agatha hurried to close them, she saw that outside, in the first light of dawn, a small crowd had gathered to help the ironmonger across the way right his wagon, which appeared to have been overturned in the night.\n\nSlamming the doors closed and surveying the disheveled workshop and the unconscious soldier, Agatha could only mutter to herself, \"What's happened?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\u2002\"When lightning hits the keep the wise man does not sleep.\" \u2014Traditional folk saying\n\nIn the early dawn light, the streets of Beetleburg were quiet. Most of the populace peered out through shuttered windows or from behind curtains. Beetleburg was a town under occupation, the Tyrant was dead, and no one was sure what the future held.\n\nA few brave shops were open, carters still moved necessary supplies through the streets under the watchful eyes of Wulfenbach forces, but the heart of the town, the University, was closed. Crowds of students and teachers filled coffee shops and taverns discussing the events of the previous day. These conversations fell silent whenever the tall brass clanks of Baron Wulfenbach passed by outside. Their machine cannons constantly moved from side to side as they slowly strode down the center of the streets.\n\nHuman officers patrolled the area as well, identifiable by the flying castle badge they wore. They regulated traffic, politely answered questions and put a human face upon the occupation.\n\nThe inhuman face was supplied by the J\u00e4germonsters, who had, during the night, stopped several bands of looters, seized fourteen people who had attempted to leave the city under cover of darkness, and apparently captured a large saurian that had been prowling through the city's sewers for some time. Several of these (including the saurian) were on display in the Square of the Tyrant.\n\nThe most talked about incident had occurred when a small band of J\u00e4gers had blithely walked into the Thieves' Market. Instead of closing it down, they wound up dickering furiously with Blind Otto for some hats. After they left, it was discovered that they had managed to steal the boots off of Otto's feet. Blind Otto was said to be, grudgingly, impressed.\n\nThe death of the Tyrant had stunned the populace. There was a great deal of confusion as to which event, the Master's death or the town's occupation, had come first. So far there was little anger. Dr. Merlot had been correct in his assessment that for the populace at large, the presence of the Master had been more of a reassuring concept than a day-to-day experience. The actual takeover of the town had been quick, and the hand of its new master lay lightly so far. Civic leaders had been honored with an audience with the Baron himself, and the ones who survived the experience moved with a new purpose.\n\nThe greatest disturbance had appeared, unexpectedly, in the western part of town. The Baron, his son Gil, Boris, several clanks, a very brave and opportunistic doughnut seller, and a squad of J\u00e4germonsters stood in the center of the street and watched with interest as a large, crude clank, belching black smoke and moving with a ponderous slow step, lurched around the corner. To the trained eye, it was obvious that the device had been built out of a large steam tractor, with the addition of a pair of large solid legs. A single manipulator claw was folded up beneath the prow. At each step, the device paused and swung its front end from side to side.\n\nThe Baron, his hands clasped behind him, observed the device with genuine pleasure. \"Well well well.\" He murmured, \"This is interesting. Boris?\"\n\nHis secretary, who was munching on a doughnut, took a sip of coffee, delicately wiped his lips and gestured in the direction of the machine simultaneously. \"Not one of ours, Herr Baron. Nor is it from outside the town. It has caused some minor damage, but I believe that to be unintentional.\" The Baron nodded.\n\nThe clank was now halfway down the street, and appeared to register their presence. The whistle perched upon its top gave a brief hoot, and it began to advance steadily towards them.\n\n\"Purpose?\"\n\n\"It appears to be looking for someone.\"\n\n\"Indeed?\"\n\n\"Allow me to demonstrate.\" Boris turned to a J\u00e4germonster standing nearby who was gnawing on a sausage. \"Sergeant? Go up to it.\"\n\nThe soldier spit out a chunk of sausage in surprise. \"Vat? Me?\"\n\nBoris nodded. \"Yes, you. Go up to it.\"\n\nThe soldier glowered at the shorter man. \"I don' take schtupid orders from you.\"\n\n\"I don't give them. Now go do something useful.\"\n\nThe J\u00e4ger grinned. \"Ho! So I can sqvish you den, hey, bugman?\"\n\nBoris and the J\u00e4germonsters despised each other. Boris, a naturally fussy man, found their permanently disheveled lifestyles an affront to everything he believed in. The J\u00e4gers thought him a self-important, officious prat. Boris had yet to give any J\u00e4ger an order that was not automatically questioned. This had escalated until the famous incident where a J\u00e4germonster who was on fire had to be ordered several times, in writing, to put himself out, after which Klaus had stepped in. There were still arguments, but now there was a time limit.\n\nThis morning Klaus intervened early. \"Boris, is it safe?\"\n\n\"I honestly believe so, Herr Baron.\"\n\n\"Good. Sergeant? Carry on.\"\n\n\"Jah, Herr Baron.\" With a theatrical sigh, the soldier tossed his weapon to Boris, who managed to catch it without spilling his coffee, and stomped over to the machine, which had advanced to meet him in the middle of the street. When he was within range, the arm quickly unfolded from underneath and grabbed him.\n\n\"Oh, help,\" he muttered in a disgusted tone of voice, \"I hef been captured by a clenk. Help. Help.\"\n\nThe machine raised him up to what appeared to be an array of crude sensors on its front. \"Hokay,\" the J\u00e4ger muttered, \"get on vit it.\"\n\nSeveral of the sensor lens flared into blue-white brightness and swept over the captive soldier, who flinched at the glare. After several seconds of stillness, the device casually tossed the J\u00e4gersoldier onto the ground and again began to advance.\n\nBoris smiled serenely and bit into a fresh doughnut. \"You see, Herr Baron, entertaining, but harmless.\"\n\nThe furious sergeant strode up, while brushing off his hat. \"You is schtupid! Dat ting could be lookink for hennybody! And ven it finds dem, den you gots trouble!\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"You are correct, Sergeant, but this is also a priceless opportunity.\"\n\nBoris looked stricken. \"I don't understand, Herr Baron.\"\n\nThe now grinning J\u00e4germonster poked him in the back of the head. \"Dots because hyu ain't the schmot guy.\"\n\nThe Baron turned to his son, who quickly finished his own doughnut. \"Gil?\"\n\n\"Well, Father, I've thought of four ways to stop it, depending on whether you want it destroyed, shut down, contained, or immobilized.\"\n\nThe Baron sighed. \"Actually, I want it distracted.\"\n\nA look of annoyance flashed across Gilgamesh's face. \"Of course you do.\" It was replaced by a mischievous look and with a \"Consider it done!\" he bounded forward, ignoring his father's cry of alarm.\n\nStriding up to the machine he jauntily addressed it. \"Hullo, Herr Clank! Are you looking for me?\"\n\nAgain the metal arm whipped out and grabbed, but all it brought up to its sensors was an empty greatcoat. Several yards away, from atop a stack of barrels, Gilgamesh gaily called out, \"Ho! You'll have to do better than that!\"\n\nInstantly the giant device launched itself towards him, displaying an unsuspected turn of speed. The ground shook under the impacts of its massive feet. Gil stood, apparently unconcerned as the device thundered towards him, until the last second, when as the great hand smashed into the barrel where he'd been, he leapt onto the shaft of the arm, and with a bounce, latched onto the case containing the sensor array, blocking it with his body.\n\nThe device stopped dead for several seconds. Its arm swung up, but could not reach Gil. It then began a twisting, gyrating series of movements to try and throw him off. Clinging grimly, Gil called out, \"Any time, Father!\"\n\nKlaus, after his first display of agitation, had gone still, as he intensely studied the movements of the control unit at the rear of the clank. It was a small bullet-shaped mechanism equipped with several flexible arms which furiously operated the levers and wheels that actually drove the main engine. After a minute or so, a grim smile crossed his features and he reached into his coat, pulling out a small grappling gun. In a single motion he aimed and fired, and the automatic grapple closed upon the lever he desired. A sharp tug, and the switch was thrown. With a massive hiss of escaping steam, the clank pitched forward onto its knees, inert. Gil released himself at the last moment and landed lightly upon his feet. Nonchalantly dusting himself off, Gil remarked, \"Well done, Father.\"\n\nKlaus wheeled at him and roared, \"LACKWIT! How dare you put yourself at risk! You or I may very well be this device's quarry! I needed a distraction, not a sacrifice! That is what the J\u00e4germonsters are for!\"\n\nBoris looked askance at the sergeant. \"A pity we can't use them all.\"\n\nThe J\u00e4ger dismissed him with a good-natured wave of his hand. \"Ah\u2014go kees an hoctopoos. Oh vait, you mama already did!\"\n\nHis point made, Klaus began to examine the motionless device. The monster soldier sidled up to a silently fuming Gil and murmured. \"Hey, keed.\" Gil blinked as a large hairy hand descended on his shoulder. \"Hyu deed pritty goot dere, hen don be fooled. You papa doz crazy schtupid stoff like dot hall de time. Hokay?\"\n\nGill nodded. \"Hokay. Ah\u2014I mean okay. Thanks.\"\n\nAt that moment the Baron yelled, \"Everybody back!\" as he leapt from the rear of the clank, which, with much hissing and squealing, was pulling itself back up onto its feet. Once there, it spun around several times, and whistle blowing, strode off down the street by which it had come. Klaus nodded in satisfaction. \"Sergeant,\" he roared, \"prepare some 'C' bombs! First patrol\u2014 Follow that clank!\"\n\nSix J\u00e4gers roared, \"Jah! Herr Baron, ve hunt!\" and pelted off down the street.\n\nGil turned to his father who was shrugging off his greatcoat. Even beneath his shirt and vest, muscles could be discerned, shifting and moving. \"What did you do, Father?\"\n\n\"The device was programmed to find someone and then bring them 'home.' I simply reversed the device's task order.\" He flung his coat at a startled Boris. \"Now let's run!\"\n\nAs one, the two men sped off down the road, to the astonishment of the observing townspeople. As they ran, Klaus called out, \"Tell me what we'll find!\"\n\nA look of exasperation crossed Gil's face. \"Everything does not have to be a test!\"\n\nKlaus laughed and effortlessly cleared a cartload of barrels that had been knocked down by the passing clank. \"Life is a test! Now answer!\"\n\nGil concentrated for a moment as he ran, then spoke as they leapt down a set of stone steps. \"It's not one of Beetle's\u2014it's too crude. Maybe a student, or a younger professor.\"\n\nThe streets were beginning to fill now, people were staring after the clank that had rumbled through the streets and the J\u00e4germonsters that had pursued it, but the way was still clear enough that the two men were able to run unhindered.\n\nKlaus shook his head. \"No. Anyone at the University would have had access to better materials. The construction screams inexperience, and since there have been no new Sparks in this area for several years, I believe this to be a breakthrough! A new Spark, and I want him!\"\n\n\"Maybe Beetle was hiding him?\"\n\n\"No. The preliminary stages of a breakthrough are extremely difficult to disguise. Remember?\" Gil nodded. His own breakthrough had had to be explained as a venting explosion in the main labs, and everyone else had just assumed that the pools of raspberry jelly were a bizarre side effect. Klaus continued, \"Beetle couldn't even hide a Hive Engine. A new Spark would have been impossible.\"\n\nGil looked and saw that the street up ahead had completely filled with curious bystanders. Without a word the two men swerved, and leapt atop a wall that ran along the street, upon which they dashed past the astonished crowd. \"Unless, Father, he'd known that this particular person would break through, and had isolated them beforehand.\"\n\nKlaus frowned. \"Unlikely. We keep records on the families of all established Sparks, and there are none unaccounted for. As for detecting a potential breakthrough amongst the general populace, even I have yet to develop a sure test for that. What else can you tell me?\"\n\nGil thought for a moment while leaping from the wall. \"It wasn't constructed at the University. So a foundry or a machine shop off-campus. Only they'd have the necessary tools. But if he's a newcomer to town\u2014\"\n\nKlaus interrupted: \"Shops can be rented. What about the man himself?\"\n\nA series of overturned carts, shouting peddlers, and items strewn about the streets indicated they were entering a market district. Gil vaulted over a load of spring onions. \"He's been wronged by someone. Someone he can't touch through normal channels.\" He grimaced. \"Most likely us.\"\n\nKlaus nodded grimly. \"Yes, the timing is perfect. Beetle is dead at our hands\u2014\"\n\n\"He threw a bomb at me.\"\n\n\"Someone here is very upset.\" They raced through Beetle Fountain Square, with its spitting statues. Pigeons clattered upwards around them, their clockwork mechanisms almost inaudible over the sound of their wings. Suddenly one of the birds froze and dropped to the ground, where, Gil suddenly noted, dozens more lay. Obviously the events of the last day had interfered with the pensioners whose daily job it was to wind them. \"Many people are going to be upset, Father.\"\n\n\"Beetle was loved by the populace,\" Klaus admitted. \"But more in the abstract. He did not interact with the general populace on a day-to-day basis. Therefore our question is who would be so upset that it would trigger a breakthrough?\" He grinned wolfishly. \"That is the mystery, and soon enough we shall know the answer!\"\n\nAdam and Lilith hurried through the meager crowd in front of the shops along Market Street. Their dark clothing, while a bit somber, did not stand out as much as their size. However people in the district were used to the oversized couple, and no longer gave them much thought. Adam looked glum. Lilith, being able to give voice to her annoyance, was more animated in her displeasure. \"Fruitless!\" she grumbled. \"We've wasted a good part of yesterday and an entire night thanks to those stupid J\u00e4gerkin and no one knew anything about the locket or the thieves.\" She looked at the dawn sky with trepidation. \"We must leave the city at once and get as far away as possible. I'm guessing that we have a week at best before\u2026\"\n\nA subtle change of the pressure on her arm caused her to look at her husband in annoyance. \"Adam, you're not listening to a word I'm\u2014\"\n\nThis was all too true, as Adam's head had snapped back at a booming noise that was getting closer. Effortlessly he swept up the startled Lilith and hurled them both to one side just as the clank, its smokestack pouring forth clouds of black smoke thundered past them. Raising themselves up, they were just in time to see a squad of J\u00e4germonsters fly past, howling. Purely by chance, Adam's eyes locked with that of an older J\u00e4ger, who grinned widely at them before running on.\n\nSweat started out on Adam's forehead. Lilith pulled herself up, her eyes wide with realization. \"Was that\u2026 That was Herr Ketter's tractor!\" The full ramifications of what they had seen caused her face to go white. \"Agatha!\" she cried.\n\nAgatha was furiously scrubbing her hands in the big zinc tub when a pained groan came from the figure on the floor. She was a bit unsure about what she should do. Normally, of course, she'd have summoned the Watch, but as the only law enforcement lay in the hands of the Wulfenbachs, she'd decided that it would be easiest to wait for Adam and Lilith to return. She had hoped they would do so before the man had revived, but obviously it was not to be. She decided to go on the offensive. \"Finally waking up, eh?\"\n\nMoloch rolled over and tried to move his arms, but found them tied behind him. He sagged in despair. \"Ow. My face. Ow.\"\n\nAgatha came over and grasped his chin and examined the lump there. \"It's not broken. You'll live.\" She hefted the wrench she held in her other hand menacingly. \"But I'll smack you again unless you tell me what you did here.\"\n\nMoloch looked at her ruefully. \"I woke you up. Not really a morning person, are you?\"\n\n\"No, I mean, why did you bring me down to the shop? Why did you trash the place?\"\n\nMoloch looked genuinely surprised. \"I did not! You were already here asleep on that bench and the place looked like this when I got here. Even the door was open.\"\n\nAgatha frowned. \"Then who\u2014?\"At that moment the great doors swung open and the doorway was filled by an enormous clank that stepped within the forge and paused. Agatha dropped her wrench. Moloch tried to scramble away, but got tangled in the coil of rope, and he tumbled backwards. A small part of Agatha's brain noted with alarm that Moloch had managed to surreptitiously slip his bonds.\n\nBefore he could disentangle himself, the clank's arm snapped out and the metal hand snatched the soldier up, kicking and squealing. It swung him up towards its sensors and a bright flash filled the gloomy shop accompanied by Moloch's scream of terror. Several seconds of whirring and clicking within the depths of the machine suddenly resulted in an array of green lights blooming across its front. A small bell rang and the arm gently swung Moloch down and offered him to a bewildered Agatha, who backed away. As she did so, the machine followed her, jogging its hand encouragingly. Agatha shook her head. \"What? What do you want?\"\n\nMoloch caught her attention. It was obvious that he was being squeezed rather tightly, if the way his eyes were bugging out was any indication. \"Help,\" he whispered.\n\nAgatha blinked. \"I\u2026 ah\u2026 down! Put him down.\"\n\nGently the device deposited a shaken Moloch onto the floor of the shop, dinged twice, and ceased all movement. Agatha and Moloch stared at it for a moment, but it did nothing else. Moloch turned towards Agatha. \"What is this thing?\"\n\nAgatha shrugged. \"I don't know.\" Suddenly her eyes narrowed as she examined the device. The core was certainly familiar though, wasn't that Herr Ketter's\u2014?\n\nThe sound of breaking glass caused both of them to turn. Agatha saw the small hole in the west window. Moloch saw the small metal container that landed on the floor and spun about on its weighted base, a small windup key ticking gently. As Agatha murmured \"What in the world\u2014\" Moloch yelled in his loudest battlefield voice, \"C-GAS!\"\n\nAgatha just had time to look up and ask, \"What's\u2014\" Before a cloud of gas exploded upwards, filling the room and enveloping them both.\n\nFive minutes later, a J\u00e4germonster stuck a furry face around the open front door and sniffed the air. Satisfied, he stepped forward. \"C-Gas has dispersed, Herr Baron. C'mon in.\"\n\nSeveral J\u00e4germonsters and the Wulfenbachs entered the shop. Outside, two of the tall brass clanks flanked the doorway. At a silent signal from the elder soldier, a runner was sent off to check on the J\u00e4gers that had encircled the building.\n\nThe Baron and his son moved towards the two crumpled figures on the floor. Klaus turned towards the senior J\u00e4gersoldier. \"Check the rest of the building. Bring anyone you find. Unharmed.\"\n\n\"Jah, Herr Baron.\" With quick motions of his hands, he sent half of the squad into the main house.\n\nGil turned about and examined the layout of the shop. His brows rose at several of the heavier pieces of machinery. \"Nice set up.\" He gestured at the quiescent clank. \"This could easily have been built here.\"\n\nKlaus had knelt down and turned Moloch over onto his back. He smiled in satisfaction. \"So this is our new Spark.\"\n\n\"It could be the girl, Father.\"\n\nKlaus sniffed. \"Hmf. Don't you recognize her?\"\n\nWith a feeling of embarrassment, Gil glanced at the scantily clad girl. She was tall, and full-figured, and her long reddish-blonde hair covered her face. Suddenly his eyes narrowed and he knelt by her side. He gently brushed the hair from her face. There was a smear of grease across her small nose. \"The student assistant in Beetle's lab! Miss\u2026 Clay.\" He glanced at a delivery wagon which had \"CLAY MECHANICAL\" neatly painted along the side. \"I see.\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"Yes, decorative, but evidently damaged. Held in contempt by those she worked with. Obviously not what we are looking for.\" An unexpected movement caught Klaus attention. Gil was removing his waistcoat. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nGil nodded towards the unconscious girl. \"I was just going to cover her up.\"\n\nKlaus nodded approvingly. \"Commendable, but your waistcoat will do little. Here.\" Effortlessly he lifted Moloch, stripped off his greatcoat and handed it over. \"I'm sure they'll not mind.\"\n\nGil looked up as he tucked the coat over Agatha. \"Oh?\"\n\nKlaus stood up. \"Yes, it all falls into place. The girl was truly upset at Beetle's death. Her soldier lover had recently returned home and her agitation was enough to trigger a breakthrough, and he built this clank for her.\"\n\nGil arched an eyebrow. \"Lover?\"\n\nKlaus frowned at Gil. \"You don't find the fact that the girl is running about in a machine shop in her underwear to be unusual? Red Fire, boy, what sort of laboratory did you maintain at school?\"\n\nGil blushed. The J\u00e4gersoldiers guffawed. \"Father! Please!\"\n\nThe faintest hint of a smile twitched at the edge of Klaus' mouth. \"Very well. What would you do now?\"\n\nGil gratefully turned to the question. He gestured to the two figures on the floor. \"Ideally? Talk to them, but what with the C-Gas, we must assume that they'll be out for at least thirty-six hours. So\u2026\" He thought for a second and then wheeled about to face the silent clank. \"Examine the device?\"\n\nKlaus sighed. \"No, no no! You must get your priorities straight. Examining the clank is important, but it can wait.\" He gestured to the room at large. \"What is missing here?\" He pointed to Moloch. \"This fellow is still travel-stained. The shop is not run by the girl\u2026\"\n\nGil nodded. \"The owner! Her parents, the Clays. Where are they?\"\n\nOne of the J\u00e4germonsters who had been sent to search the house stepped forward. \"Dere ain't nobody else in de house, Herr Baron.\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"They'll tell you much, when you find them.\" Klaus had turned away and was examining the workbench with professional interest.\n\nGil frowned. \"Well that should be easy enough.\"\n\nKlaus had found a set of micrometers and was evidently impressed by the workmanship. \"Yes, no doubt,\" he said absently, he found the case and turned it over until he found the maker's mark, and Gil knew that he was memorizing the information.\n\nThe Empire always needed good toolmakers. If he was any judge of workmanship, the Clays would find themselves hired as well. Gil sensed there was something different about his father now, but was unsure as to what it was. One would never use the word \"slumped\" when thinking about Klaus Wulfenbach, but the energy he had exhibited earlier in the morning seemed diminished.\n\nGil continued. \"The clank will be transported to the University and your new Spark\u2014\"\n\nKlaus had carefully replaced the tools on the workbench and turned back to his son. \"Both of them will return with us to Castle Wulfenbach.\"\n\nGil blinked. \"The girl as well?\"\n\n\"Yes. If they are indeed lovers, she'll be an additional lever. If she is merely an exhibitionist, we'll send her back.\"\n\n\"Her parents might not like that.\"\n\nKlaus walked outside and surveyed the neighborhood. \"They'll take her back anyway.\"\n\nGil followed him outside. \"That's not what I meant. Father, what's wrong? You seem\u2026 disappointed.\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"I am. I was hoping for something\u2026 interesting. All we have here is a sordid little tale of revenge and manipulation, set up and solved.\" He took a deep breath and stretched, then clapped his son on the back, to the surprise of all present. \"But it was a good bit of morning exercise and he is a new Spark, and those are always useful. However, while it is fortuitous, it is hardly urgent.\" He then dropped his hand and began to stride down the street. He called back over his shoulder, \"I must finish consolidating our takeover of the town. I'm sure you can finish up here on your own.\"\n\nCaught by surprise, several of the J\u00e4gers who had been stationed outside pelted up alongside the Baron, the eldest said, \"I vill assign you two\u2014\"\n\nKlaus waved him off. \"I will go by myself. Let the people see that I can.\"\n\nThe J\u00e4gers stopped and watched as the Baron strode around the corner and out of sight. The senior J\u00e4ger muttered, \"Hokey, fine, diz iz vun a dose moods, izit?\" He turned to two of the soldiers with him. \"Dey make great coffee back vhere der Baron is going. Go get me some. Und dun let him see hyu.\"\n\nThe two monstermen looked offended, slung their weapons over their shoulders and, faster then one would think possible, scaled the building across the street and were silently leaping across the rooftops. Shaking his head, the officer returned to a fuming Gilgamesh.\n\n\"Oh thank you, sir. Yes I'm sure that even I can deal with this.\" Gil sighed. \"Well, let's get started.\"\n\nGil and the senior J\u00e4ger entered the building. As the elder soldier got his first whiff of the interior, he started, and looked around in surprise. Gil noticed. \"Something wrong, G\u00fcnther?\"\n\nThe J\u00e4germonster looked at him blankly. One of the younger soldiers piped up. \"D'pipple who liff here. Dey schmell fonny.\"\n\nAlmost faster than Gil could follow, G\u00fcnther scooped up a chunk of lead pipe and threw it at the younger soldier, catching him between the eyes. He blinked. \"Ow. Vat for hyu\u2014?\"\n\nG\u00fcnther roared at him, stunning him into silence. \"Hey! Hyu iz in schombodies howz! Iz not goot manners to say dey schmells fonny!\" The rest of the J\u00e4gersoldiers gawped at the elder monster in astonishment. This was a new one.\n\nGil bore down on the younger soldier. \"'Funny'? Like how?\"\n\nG\u00fcnther glared at the younger monster over Gil's shoulder. The recipient of this glare was nonplussed. Lying was easy, but it was always good to know what you were lying about. \"Um\u2026 ahh\u2026 like\u2026 like machines or someting?\"\n\nG\u00fcnther nodded in satisfaction and spoke up. \"Vell, dey iz mechanics, you dumbkoff!\"\n\nGil looked unconvinced. He pointed to Agatha. \"Does she smell 'funny'?\"\n\nThe J\u00e4gers clustered around and leaned forward. \"She schmells goot.\"\n\nGil nodded. \"All right, I\u2014\"\n\nAnother J\u00e4ger interrupted him. \"She schmells really goot.\" The others joined in. \"Really really goot.\"\n\nGil flushed and turned away. \"Yes, yes, that's quite enough! Now get that wagon ready.\"\n\nReluctantly the soldiers began unloading machinery from the Clays' wagon. Gil failed to notice G\u00fcnther still kneeling by Agatha's side, a stunned look on his hirsute face as he remembered a large familiar face he had seen on his way here. Absently, his hand clutched at a small object on a chain around his neck\u2026\n\nQuickly he snapped back to attention and approached Gil. \"Hey. Hyu vants me to get schome of her clothing und schtuff? Or ve gun let her run around the kessel in her undervear?\" The accompanying leer suggested that this last would be a fine idea.\n\nAgain Gil reddened and turned away. \"Yes. I mean, yes, as in go get her some clothing.\" He looked over at Moloch. \"And see if there's anything of his lying around as well.\"\n\nTurned away, he missed the look of satisfaction that crossed G\u00fcnther's face. \"Hokay, your loss, boss.\"\n\nMeanwhile others were preparing to load Agatha and Moloch into the wagon. \"Don't drop him on his head, he's a schmott guy.\" A loud thump followed. \"Vell, at least dat vasn't his head.\"\n\nAn argument broke out over Agatha. \"I vant to pick op de gurl.\"\n\n\"No! Hyu vay too clumsy. I peek op de gurl.\"\n\n\"Me!\"\n\n\"Me!\"\n\n\"Me!\"\n\n\"ME!\"\n\nGil stepped into the middle and roared. \"Shut up! I'll do it!\"\n\nThe J\u00e4germonsters looked abashed. \"Vell hyu dun gotta get cranky over it,\" one muttered. Gil knelt down and gently picked Agatha up.\n\nInstantly the tractor clank lurched to life and the great metal hand flashed out towards an astonished Gil, who felt himself jerked backwards as a J\u00e4gersoldier swept him away. The hand plowed into the monster soldier, throwing him back against the far wall, where he slumped to the floor. Gil managed to keep both his balance and Agatha in his arms as he hit the floor. The smoking device wheeled towards him. \"Clanks!\" He yelled, \"Contain it!\"\n\nThe two tall Wulfenbach clanks rushed in through the doorway and plowed into the side of the engine, slamming it against the wall. But after a second the greater weight of the more primitive engine allowed it to gain better traction, and it slowly began to force itself back up despite the best efforts of the two other machines. Gil circled around, heading for the rear of the rogue engine. \"If I can get to the control unit\u2014\"\n\nThen one of the J\u00e4gers yelled, \"Stend beck!\" Gil glanced back and froze in horror. Three of the J\u00e4germonsters had manhandled one of the Wulfenbach clank's massive three-meter machine cannons into firing position. \"I alvays vanted to try dis,\" one shouted.\n\n\"NOOOO!!\" screamed Gil, even as he dived for the floor, desperately trying to shield Agatha.\" With a roar that was only magnified by the enclosed space, a stream of shells poured forth, the first few indeed hit the struggling clank, but the rest sprayed wildly around the room. The stream of fire stabilized only long enough to completely demolish one of the Wulfenbach clanks before the shooting stopped.\n\nGil dared to look up and saw that the recoil of the cannon had smashed the J\u00e4ger manning the trigger, as well as the last quarter of the gun itself, into the wall. The other two, their clothing on fire and their hats in tatters, looked sheepish. \"Ho! Leedle recoil problem dere, sir.\" One of the standing soldiers grinned. \"Pretty neat though, jah?\"\n\nMeanwhile the iron clank had thrown its lighter opponent into a pile of debris, and as the Wulfenbach clank struggled to regain its feet, swiveled about and, despite a shattered leg joint, again headed for the two humans. \"The control unit on the back,\" Gil yelled, \"you must be sure to\u2014\"\n\nThe other remaining J\u00e4ger grabbed his gun. \"Hoy! Got'cha!\"\n\nCircling around behind the crippled machine, he scrambled atop some boxes and launched himself over the stumbling clank. The zenith of his arc carried him over the bullet-shaped control mechanism and as he passed he pointed his weapon downward and fired a charge into it at point blank range. The resulting explosion completely obliterated Gil's plaintive, \"\u2014Not destroy it\u2026 never mind.\"\n\nThe clank and the soldier hit the ground at the same moment, the one to twitch and vent gouts of steam, the other to pose dramatically, to the approbation of his fellows.\n\nThe lone note of disapproval came from Gil, but this was turned upon himself. \"Stupid. Stupid. Stupid! My father is going to\u2014\"\n\nThe leaping J\u00e4germonster looked offended. \"Vot did ve do now?\"\n\n\"Not you, me!\"\n\n\"Hah?\"\n\nGil kicked at the cooling clank at his feet. \"The clank activated to protect its master! Why wasn't I ready\u2014\"\n\nThe J\u00e4gersoldier interrupted. \"But ve got him into de vagon mit no problem. It didn't move until\u2014ow!\" The \"ow\" was caused by a flying wrench smashing into his nose, thrown by G\u00fcnther, who had re-entered the room, clutching a large valise.\n\n\"What for you hit me in the nose?\"\n\n\"Cause you all de time yakking like an eediot!\" G\u00fcnther pointed towards the corner, where the Wulfenbach clank was still foundering awkwardly amidst the debris. \"Get dat clenk op, hyu fools, or do hyu vanna pull de vagon tro de strits?\" That caused the rest of the monsters to quickly begin hauling the great clank back to its feet.\n\nGil ignored this interplay, as he was struck motionless by the thoughts triggered by the logic of the J\u00e4germonster's words. With a quick shake of his head, he dismissed the idea. His father had said\u2014\n\n\"Hey, hyu gun carry dat gurl all day?\"\n\nWith a start Gil realized that he was clutching the unconscious girl tightly in his arms. He looked up into the leering face of G\u00fcnther. Awkwardly he handed her over and, lost in his thoughts, failed to notice the excessive care with which the old soldier placed her in the wagon and covered her up with Moloch's coat. \"Ve's ready to go, sir,\" he announced.\n\nGil looked up. \"Pick one of you to wait here for the owners and the crews to collect the clanks.\" He glanced over at the steaming ruin. \"We might still be able to learn something. When the owners get here, have them lock the place up and bring them to me. Assure them we'll pay for any damages.\"\n\nAfter the inevitable game of sock-paper-scissors, the J\u00e4ger who had allowed himself to be socked slouched against the doorway rubbing his nose as the wagon began to roll out.\n\nGil suddenly yelled, \"Stop!\" The J\u00e4gers looked at him in surprise as he scrambled aboard the wagon and bent over the two unconscious figures. Gently he lifted Agatha's hands and examined them closely. Though she had scrubbed them, there were still ample amounts of grease and oil under her fingernails and embedded within the lines of her palms.\n\nA similar inspection of Moloch's hands revealed grime, yes, but no evidence that the owner had recently worked with heavy machinery.\n\nThoughtfully, Gil climbed back out of the wagon. After a moment he indicated that it was to move on without him. G\u00fcnther protested, \"Hyu poppa vould skeen us alife! Und I dun meen dat in a goot vay.\"\n\n\"What would he do if he found out you'd assigned him guards after he told you not to?\" The two appraised each other. Gil waved his hand. \"I'm just going to walk a bit behind. You can keep an eye on me.\" G\u00fcnther nodded reluctantly and the wagon started off.\n\nAs they pulled ahead of Gil, G\u00fcnther whispered fiercely to the others, \"Dun mention notting about dis mawnink. Not de fonny schmells, not the clenk schtarting op, notting! Dis iz schtoff for de generals.\"\n\nThe others looked surprised. \"Hokay.\" they agreed. G\u00fcnther nodded in satisfaction and looked at the young man following the wagon, a look of concentration on his features. The young master was going to be trouble enough." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "\u2003Hide the women! Hide the beer!\n\n\u2003The Baron's great big thing is here!\n\n\u2003It's huge and fat and long and round\n\n\u2003And you can see it from the ground.\n\n\u2003It flies way high up in the air\n\n\u2003He rides it here, he rides it there.\n\n\u2003And every mad boy lives in fear\n\n\u2003That Klaus will stick it in his ear.\n\n\u2014Popular tavern song\n\nAgatha blinked and stretched. Her mouth tasted metallic. She opened her eyes fully and stared at the ceiling, something was different. The light\u2014\n\nSuddenly a hand roughly clasped itself over her mouth. Her eyes jerked around and saw that the hand belonged to the soldier who had appeared in her father's shop. A sudden surge of memories, as well as the current situation made her twist and flail about.\n\nMoloch dropped forward, pinning her arms to the bed. \"Quiet!\" he hissed. \"Quiet! I'm not gonna hurt you unless I gotta\u2014but I will if you act stupid!\" With this he tightened his grip upon Agatha's face. Having little choice, she froze, and then sagged. Her eyes stared at Moloch like those of a frightened animal. The hand relaxed slightly. He continued. \"Now I'm gonna take my hand away. I'm giving you one chance. Don't Blow It.\"\n\nAfter a second, he released her face. Agatha licked her lips, but said nothing. Moloch relaxed slightly, but still pinned her arms. Agatha noted that he had been cleaned up, his beard trimmed, and an attempt had been made on his hair, but it was the sort of hair that defeated anything but an all out tonsorial assault.\n\nHe was dressed in a large sturdy labcoat, which Agatha realized she had seen on Wulfenbach staffers that had visited the late Dr. Beetle's lab.\n\nWhen she still did nothing, Moloch continued. \"Good. Now listen. We've been taken prisoner by Baron Wulfenbach.\"\n\nAgatha frowned. \"Why?\"\n\nEncouraged by this response, Moloch sat back, allowing Agatha to sit up on the bed and rub her arms. \"Because of that clank I'm supposed to have built back in Beetleburg.\"\n\n\"You built that clank?\"\n\nMoloch snorted. \"Of course not! But the Baron thinks I did, and I'm not going to tell Baron Wulfenbach that he made a mistake. So I'm his madboy until I can make a break for it.\"\n\nAgatha saw the wisdom in this, but\u2014\"What does he want you to do?\"\n\nMoloch looked up at her with grim humor in his eyes. \"He wants me to build him some more clanks. He wants to see what I can do in a real lab with proper materials.\"\n\nAgatha cocked an eyebrow and her mouth twitched upwards. \"Ho. You do have a problem.\"\n\nMoloch observed the smirk and he leaned forward in satisfaction. \"We have a problem, sweetheart. He also thinks you're my little assistant.\"\n\n\"What!\" There was no way Agatha wanted to get involved in anything like this. She leapt up and threw open the door. \"Forget it! You can just get out and\u2014\"\n\nIt was a soft \"woo!\" from the outer room that brought her up short. Turning her head, she saw that the door opened out into a large common room. Easily two dozen people, mostly children, along with a sprinkling of young adults, were casually gathered around several long tables which were set for a meal. All eyes were riveted upon Agatha. A sudden cool breeze dragged her eyes downward to reveal to her that she was dressed in naught but her underclothes. With a squeak she slammed the door closed and, blushing furiously, turned upon a grinning Moloch.\n\nGrabbing a blanket off of the bed she fumbled with it awkwardly. \"Do\u2026 do those people know you're in here alone with me in my underwear?\"\n\nMoloch made soothing motions with his hands. \"Don't worry about your reputation.\"\n\nAgatha drew herself up. \"I most certainly will. I have never\u2014\"\n\nMoloch cut her off. \"They already think we're lovers.\" The blanket dropped from Agatha's hands as she swayed in shock. Moloch took the opportunity to survey her critically. \"You're not really my type\u2026\" he sighed. \"But I guess I'll just have to fake it.\"\n\n\"Why should I let anyone think\u2014\"\n\n\"Because I didn't build that clank!\" Moloch leaned in and whispered triumphantly, \"Your father did, didn't he?\"\n\nAgatha rocked back. \"My father?\"\n\nMoloch nodded. \"That was his shop, wasn't it? Before I woke you up I saw the wheels he'd taken off the tractor, and when you told it to put me down, it did it. It followed your orders.\" He paused for a second as an idea hit him: \"Did you build it?\"\n\nAutomatically Agatha answered honestly, \"No, but, Adam\u2014\"\n\n\"No buts. Unless you want me to inform the Baron where he can get a real madboy to take my place\u2026?\"\n\nAgatha looked into his face. \"You wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I will. Unless we got a deal.\"\n\nAgatha stared at him with loathing in her face, but could see no way out. It explained so much. Adam and Lilith had been scared to death of encountering the Baron. Everyone knew that Klaus collected Sparks, when he wasn't defeating them. The longer she gave them to get away from Beetleburg\u2026 \"Yes.\"\n\nMoloch closed his eyes and took a deep breath. \"Good.\" At that moment Agatha realized how tightly he'd been keeping his fear in check. She felt a flash of sympathy for him. There were numerous stories of innocent people who had come to the attention of those with the Spark. None of them ended well.\n\nMoloch continued, \"So, the way the Baron figures it, I'm your boyfriend and I built you that clank because you were mad about the Baron killing this Dr. Beetle guy. You see any loose ends?\"\n\nAgatha slipped her glasses on. \"Hm. Yes. You had a friend.\" The reaction this statement got astonished her.\n\nMoloch wheeled furiously and looked as if he would strike her, but with great effort he held himself in check. \"My brother,\" he said menacingly. \"And we don't have to worry about him, you saw to that!\"\n\nAgatha found herself pressing up against the wall as Moloch advanced towards her. As he talked, he fished around in his pocket. \"And if you've got any hopes about me going the same way, you can just forget it.\" Triumphantly he pulled forth Agatha's battered locket. \"It's been deactivated!\"\n\n\"My locket!\" Agatha reached for the locket, only to have it snatched away and stuffed back inside Moloch's coat. \"Give it back, you thief!\"\n\nMoloch smiled coldly. \"Oh no, sister, that's my ace. You'll get it back when I leave here safely.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, it's been\u2014\"\n\nMoloch interrupted her. \"Omar was my brother, but he did steal from you and hit you. I'll admit that. You help me get outta here and we're square. Mess with me and I'll have company at the Waxworks, I promise you.\" He turned towards the door. \"I gotta get going. I'm not even supposed to be here, so\u2026\" He thought for a second with his hand on the door handle. He glanced at Agatha and a mischievous smile came to his face. He opened the door and spoke loudly. \"Okay, that's enough kissing for now, doll. I'm glad you're okay, but give me a chance to rest up and we'll celebrate properly later!\"\n\nWith eel-like swiftness he was out of the room and had the door shut before Agatha could reach him. Furious, she yanked open the door and almost collided with a tall reserved-looking man who had obviously been just about to knock. A raised eyebrow was his only comment as to her attire. Quickly she scooted back behind the door and peeked out.\n\n\"Miss Agatha Clay?\" he enquired with an upper-class British accent. Agatha nodded.\n\n\"Good morning. My name is Ardsley Wooster. I have the honor of being Master Gilgamesh Wulfenbach's man. Now that you are awake, he requests your presence in his laboratory immediately.\"\n\nAgatha looked at him with trepidation. \"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach? Wants to see me?\"\n\n\"Yes, Miss. Immediately.\"\n\nAgatha looked back into the room and then down at her outfit. \"I'm not going out like this. I'm not\u2026 not dressed.\"\n\nWooster smiled. \"Of course not, Miss. There should be a package containing clothing and toilet articles from your home on the dresser. I shall wait until you are ready.\"\n\nAgatha glanced at the dresser. There was nothing there. She quickly surveyed the room. It was about six meters square, and contained two beds, separated by a nightstand, two tall armoires and two dressers. The side she had awoken in was bare, but the other had obvious signs of an occupant. Portraits of aristocratic-looking people and an impressive castle adorned one wall. A rack of fencing foils were hung with a display of awards. An ornate family crest was displayed over the bed, which was covered with a sumptuous quilt. The other dresser was covered with a tasteful array of books and knickknacks.\n\nShe turned back towards Wooster. \"There's no package there. I don't see it anywhere.\"\n\nA mild look of consternation flitted across Ardsley's face. \"If I may, Miss?\"\n\nAgatha pulled back the door and hid behind it as the man stepped into the room. He quickly scanned the room, stepped around the bed, and opened the armoire. Empty. He bent down and looked under the beds. Nothing. With obvious reluctance he opened the other armoire. It was neatly stacked with clothing and other items, but nothing that could be called a package, and he closed the door without disturbing anything within.\n\n\"My apologies, Miss Clay, it appears that your clothing has been\u2026 temporarily misplaced. If you will excuse me.\" With that he backed out, closing the door as he went.\n\nLess then a minute later there was a soft knock and a redheaded girl poked her head in. She spoke with a faint Irish accent. \"Hello. I'm Sleipnir O'Hara. Mr. Wooster here says that you be needing some clothes.\"\n\nShe stepped into the room. She was wearing a mechanic's work suit, with a toolbelt around her waist; kneepads, wristbands and a pair of goggles pulled up onto her head completed her outfit. She had an embroidered Chinese robe over her arm. \"Your Mr. Wooster reckons that we're about the same size, so you can borrow something of mine.\"\n\nAgatha smiled. \"That would be very kind. I'm Agatha Clay.\"\n\nAs Sleipnir and Agatha shook hands, Sleipnir's nose wrinkled. \"Hm. I'm thinking before we get you dressed, a trip to the showers.\"\n\nAgatha looked blank. \"What's a 'showers'?\"\n\n\"It's a kind of bathing system, but without a tub.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Agatha looked down at herself and flushed with embarrassment. \"Need one, do I?\"\n\nSleipnir waved her hand before her nose. \"Oh yes.\" She handed Agatha the robe. \"Here. We're not all as relaxed about being in our unmentionables as you are. Are you from England, then?\"\n\nAgatha reddened down to her chest. \"No! I\u2014\"\n\nSleipnir interrupted her. \"Whatever you do, don't let the Von Pinn see you like that.\"\n\n\"The who?\" The two headed out the door, and Agatha's question went unanswered as a swarm of young children, ranging in age from six to twelve swarmed around her.\n\n\"Hey! It's the new girl! She's awake!\"\n\n\"Hello, new girl!\"\n\n\"She's stinky.\"\n\n\"She's the one who came out naked and you missed it!\"\n\n\"You're lying!\"\n\nThe room itself was long, lined with doors leading to, Agatha assumed, apartments similar to the one she had awoken in. The walls between the rooms were covered in bulletin boards filled with drawings, letters, strange looking objects such as leaves, insects or bizarre tribal masks.\n\nDividing the room was a large sunken area, which contained the long tables she had seen earlier. Several dark-clothed servants were quietly clearing the plates, aided by what appeared to be older children.\n\nSleipnir made shooing motions. \"Oy! Clear off, you rigger rats! And I'd better not see any of you hanging around the showers or I'll\u2014\"The threat was left unsaid, but the smaller children nodded seriously, except for a slightly older boy who spoke up defiantly. \"Or you'll what? Feed us to the gargoyles?\"\n\nSleipnir leaned in close to him. \"Or I'll tell the Von Pinn that you were peeking into the showers, you dirty little sod.\"\n\nInstantly the boy went pale and bolted from the room. Agatha and Sleipnir went down the hall and into a locker room.\n\n\"What's with all the kids?\" Agatha asked as she undressed.\n\nSleipnir leaned against a locker. \"They're students.\" Agatha raised an eyebrow. \"Hostages, really. You're one too, you know. We're mostly the children of the various Great Houses in the Baron's territory. We're all supposed to be learning about science and how to administer properly and such. Of course we all know we're really here to keep our folks in line. So your fella won't be doing anything stupid because himself's got you safe and snug.\"\n\nAgatha paused and considered how much concerns for her safety would be likely to check\u2026 at this point Agatha realized that she didn't even know the man's name. \"That's a great comfort.\" She reached for the robe, but Sleipnir stopped her. \"You'll not be needing that yet. Now come on.\"\n\nSleipnir ushered Agatha into a large, tiled room. A complex brass boiler system hissed quietly in the corner. Agatha felt exposed, and vainly tried to cover herself with her hands while Sleipnir threw a switch and turned a large wheel valve. She then gently pushed Agatha under a large sunflower-shaped nozzle in the ceiling. \"Brace yourself,\" she warned, and pulled a hanging cord. A cascade of water poured from the nozzle. Agatha screamed in shock as the water hit her, then realized, to her amazement, that the water was warm! To a person who had lived her whole life boiling bathwater on the kitchen stove, this was luxury indeed.\n\nSleipnir chuckled at her reaction. \"When you're done, I should have some clothing for you,\" and she exited.\n\nFor several minutes Agatha forgot her predicament and just let the water cascade over her. After a moment she noticed a small metal table in the middle of the room. On it were racks containing bottles, which were labeled as containing shampoo and various hair oils, as well as bars of soap. Agatha selected one and examined it. Even the soap here was different, transparent, and it smelled like oranges. A far cry indeed from the stuff that Agatha helped Lilith boil up out of ashes, lye and lard from the rendering plant. The very oddity of the mundane object in her hand helped Agatha begin to think clearly. She began to lather up her hair.\n\nWhen Agatha emerged, her skin glowing red, vigorously toweling herself off, Sleipnir was rummaging around inside a locker. Turning around with a few outfits hung over her arm, she critically eyed Agatha and frowned.\n\n\"I was afraid of that. I may be the closest match to you sizewise, but you're a bit larger than me, especially in the chest.\"\n\nAgatha sighed. Sleipnir's next words surprised her. \"I wish I looked as good as you.\" She turned back and rooted deeper within the locker and turned back while holding up a red leather overall. \"There's a few things we can adjust a bit when we've got the time, but for now, it's this or nothing.\" She shook out the outfit. \"Luckily this has always been a bit loose on me.\"\n\nIt was not loose on Agatha. Indeed in several places it took a bit of shoehorning to get all of her inside it, but eventually they got the final buttons buttoned.\n\n\"It's\u2026 tight.\"\n\nSleipnir nodded. \"It most certainly is that. The good news is that as it's leather, it'll stretch out a bit once you get moving.\"\n\n\"At the moment, I'm more worried about breathing.\"\n\n\"Overrated.\"\n\nAgatha caught sight of herself in a large mirror. Her face went as red as her outfit. \"I can't wear this!\" She turned and looked at her backside, which the outfit revealed all too well. \"I mean\u2014look at this!\"\n\nSleipnir shrugged. \"it's a bit tight, but I said it'll stretch\u2014\" A realization struck her. \"Have you ever worn trousers before?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 no.\"\n\nSleipnir nodded. \"You'll get used to it. Here no one expects you to be daft enough to work inside the big engines in a dress, that's a good way to get yourself mangled. The Baron scandalized everyone when he said women wouldn't wear them. The boys'll stare a bit, but they stare at everything. Call 'em on it and they'll go red as a brick. You'll see. It's fun.\"\n\nAgatha took another look at herself in the mirror. The outfit looked like it had been sprayed on. \"Fun.\"\n\nSleipnir grinned. \"Oh, yeah. Now c'mon, if you're done admiring yourself, there's people waiting for you. Who is this Mister Wooster anyway? He's a bit of a codfish, isn't he?\"\n\nAgatha was taken aback at Sleipnir's language, but gamely ignored it. \"All I know is that his name is Ardsley Wooster. He's come to take me to Gilgamesh Wulfenbach.\"\n\nSleipnir stopped dead. \"Gil? He's here?\"\n\n\"I guess. Why? Do you know him?\"\n\nSleipnir looked sad. \"Sure, and I used to. I thought I did. He was raised here with us, but no one knew who he was, of course. Once he left for school in Paris, he never even answered our letters, and no one has seen him since he got back.\" They walked for a moment. \"I really miss him, he told the funniest stories.\"\n\n[ Agatha tried to reconcile this image with the serious young man she had seen in Beetle's lab \"Funny stories. Gilgamesh ]\n\nWulfenbach.\"\n\nSleipnir sighed. \"I expect he's changed quite a bit. We've read\u2014\" She shook her head, cutting herself off, and looked to Agatha. \"When you see him, tell him I said 'welcome back.' At least I can say I did the right thing there.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nAs they exited the shower room, Ardsley Wooster glided up from where he'd been standing. Sleipnir waved goodbye, and the two of them exited into the bustling corridor. \"So what does Master Wulfenbach want to see me for?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that is not my place to say, Miss Clay.\"\n\nThis seemed to shut down any hope of conversation, so Agatha took the opportunity to look around. The corridor she found herself in was quite large, easily ten meters wide and the ceiling was almost as high. The only unusual thing was that instead of wood or stone, it appeared to be constructed of metal. This oddity extended right down to the floor, which Agatha noted, wasn't solid but was some sort of grate. To Agatha's disappointment, there didn't seem to be any windows, but the view before her was fascinating enough without one.\n\nGrowing up in Beetleburg, Agatha had considered herself to be fairly cosmopolitan, but the crowd here made her feel like a small-town girl on her first trip to the big city. A surprisingly large number of the people moving purposefully along seemed to be Wulfenbach airship personnel, but perhaps that was because their bright red-and-white-striped shirts caused them to stand out. The other armed forces were certainly represented, their brightly colored uniforms, in every possible variation, were a treat for the eyes. Black clad domestics kept to the sides of the large paneled corridors, carrying bundles and pushing carts. People from all over the Baron's wide-flung empire could be seen, as well as visitors from outside its borders. Fairly regularly, there would be a goose-like honking, and a young child in a blue uniform, astride a tall golden unicycle, would expertly weave through the crowd like it was standing still, leather messenger bags slung over the cyclist's shoulders. A procession of silk-garbed Chinese moved sedately down the center of the corridor. The procession was proceeded and followed by a squad of sleek, ornately coated footmen, whose gait caused Agatha to study them intently. There was something not quite right\u2026 One of the footmen looked directly at her. Large, luminous green eyes with thin, vertical pupils examined her and then swung away. Agatha shuddered and moved a bit closer to Mr. Wooster, allowing the procession ample space in which to pass. She noticed that hers was not an unusual reaction, as everyone seemed eager to give the inhuman footmen plenty of space. As the Chinese passed, Agatha noticed that they all held themselves quite rigid, their faces expressionless, except for one of the junior clerks bringing up the rear. He was obviously terrified of the creatures escorting him. A faint odor of lilac reached her as they passed. A quick glance at her companion revealed that he observed the procession until it was out of sight before continuing on their way.\n\nHe noticed Agatha's look. \"The creatures in the purple coats are known as the Lackya. The Baron employees them for many tasks, but it is wise to steer clear of them.\" With that he turned about and moved on.\n\nThere were other non-human creatures in the crowd. A squad of huge bulky men passed by in single file. Perched upon each of their shoulders was a small woman who appeared to have a glass dome set upon her head. As Agatha looked closer, she saw, with a shudder, that the men had no heads, but instead, similar, larger glass domes where a head should be, and within their crystalline depths, machinery gleamed with an odd purple light.\n\nClanks there were in abundance, not just the now-familiar soldiers who, Agatha noted, carried much smaller weapons than the immense machine cannons she had seen in Beetleburg, but others in a bewildering variety of shapes that lurched or rolled along on mysterious errands.\n\nAnd sprinkled throughout the throng were odd, unclassifiable creatures whose differences ranged from the blatantly obvious, such as the octopus with spectacles who operated its own rolling aquarium, to the disquietingly subtle, such as the charming young lady who, only as she was walking away from Agatha, revealed a cow-like tail that swayed in mesmerizing counterpoint to her hips.\n\nEventually, after a bewildering maze of such passages, and several sets of metal stairs, they found themselves in front of a massive steel blast door. Ardsley broke the silence. \"We have arrived, Miss.\" With that he discretely knocked twice, spun the large metal wheel in the center of the door, pushed, and it slowly swung inwards.\n\nThey entered atop a metal catwalk that surrounded a large open workshop. Agatha's practiced eye saw an impressive array of lathes, mills, disintegrators, presses and shapers. An efficient-looking forge took up one wall, and tables and benches were covered with racks of tools, vats of chemicals, piles of humming, crackling electrical devices, or often some intriguing combination of all three. Clouds of steam arose from several large boilers, and the smell of machine oil and ozone filled the air. Overhead, a bank of arc lamps lit the scene with a harsh blue light.\n\nIn the center of the room was a large sunken bay, which was filled with a sleek green machine. To Agatha it appeared to be some sort of motorized carriage, although the aerodynamic effect was spoiled by some sort of large, multi-layer fender attached to each side. Bent over a large motor located amidships was Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, clad in a blue work shirt and a leather work apron. Agatha's eye was caught by a sudden movement. From under the machine came a bizarre little creature. She couldn't really tell what it was, as it was concealed within a large greatcoat several sizes too large, and an enormous felt hat. The only clues as to its species were the bright blue claws that extended from the sleeves as it dragged a large mallet along the ground, and a pair of long, blue, articulated antenna that poked out through two holes that had been cut into its hat. It moved with a manic energy that belied its diminutive size.\n\nWooster coughed. \"Miss Agatha Clay, sir.\"\n\nBoth the man and the creature looked upwards. Agatha noticed that the creature possessed but a single eye.\n\nYoung Wulfenbach smiled and tossed the wrench he was holding into a bin resting on the cowl of the machine. \"Ah, Miss Clay. Glad to see you on your feet.\" He waved his hand towards one of the benches on the side of the room. \"If you would be so kind as to bring me a left-leaning Lurning wrench on your way over? Wooster? You may go.\"\n\nThe butler paused slightly, but bowed and silently backed out of the room, shutting the great door as he did so. Gil turned to the creature who continued to stare at Agatha. \"Zoing? Bring Miss Clay some tea, please.\" The creature dropped the mallet and scuttled off to another bench while making high-pitched squealing noises. Gilgamesh turned back to his engine.\n\nAfter several seconds, Agatha swallowed and climbed down the metal ladder and went to the indicated bench. Seeing the young man had sent a peculiar feeling through her, one she attributed to her conviction that he was responsible for Dr. Beetle's death. She reflected upon this while searching through the tools. To her immense surprise, she saw the goldfish that had been kept by Dr. Beetle. For some reason this upset her more than ever, and by the time she had located the correct wrench and climbed down into the work pit, she was building up to a fine temper. There was a small step-ladder leaning against the machine, and Agatha climbed up to the cockpit with a murderous gleam in her eye.\n\nGilgamesh was now elbow deep in the motor cavity, and with a grunt of satisfaction, pulled out a small hairy mimmoth. These pests, the result of some unknown madboy's tampering, had infested most of the known world, and frequently fouled machinery. It honked at him. He spoke without looking at her. \"I hope you found your quarters comfortable, I\u2014\"\n\nA wrench was thrust into his face with a commanding \"Here.\"\n\nStartled, he turned and saw a sullen Agatha regarding him, the wrench in one hand, the other hand upon her hip. A look of annoyance settled upon his face. He briskly tossed the mimmoth into a container and stripped off his work gloves. \"Right. So much for small talk. Let us have this out right now. Sit down.\"\n\n\"There's nothing\u2014\"\n\nGil's head swiveled towards her and he fixed her with an icy stare. \"Sit. Down,\" he commanded.\n\nWith a thump, Agatha found herself sitting upon a small bench seat.\n\nGil regarded her warily. For the first time, he seemed to notice her outfit. Agatha saw the direction of his gaze and squirmed in embarrassment. Her outfit creaked in protest.\n\nGil realized his mouth was open slightly and shut it with a snap, then shook his head and spoke calmly. \"Miss Clay, I'm really sorry about Dr. Beetle. I know he was important to you, and I agree that his death was a complete waste, but\u2014\"\n\nAgatha looked away and interrupted coldly, \"But he threw a bomb at you. Yes, you've said.\"\n\n\"NO!\" Gil's fist crashed down and a startled Agatha saw him staring at her intently. \"I think he threw a bomb at you!\"\n\nAfter the first shock, Agatha felt herself getting angry. \"Dr. Beetle loved me! He wouldn't\u2014\"\n\nGil ignored her. \"He wanted you out of that lab. In retrospect I can see that he was terrified of you being there. Why? What is it about you that could have gotten him in even more trouble with my father than his hiding a Hive Engine?\"\n\n\"Nothing! There's nothing about me!\"\n\nGil leaned back and regarded her seriously. \"Then what about your parents, the Clays?\"\n\nAgatha's sudden start caused a tight smile of satisfaction to flash across his face. \"Yes, that hit a nerve.\"\n\nAgatha rallied. \"Wrong. My parents are simple, normal people.\"\n\nGil nodded agreeably. \"Did you know that you have been asleep for around thirty-six hours?\"\n\nAgatha felt off-balance at the change in conversation. \"What does that have to do with\u2014?\"\n\n\"I can't find these 'simple, normal people' of yours.\"\n\nA small smile curved Agatha's lips. \"Oh, really?\"\n\nGil leaned forward. \"And that doesn't surprise you. It certainly surprises me. We had the town sealed and they still got out. How did they do that? More important, why did they do that? At the very least, one would think that they would inquire about you, their only daughter, but they never even returned to their home. Should we be worried about them?\"\n\nAgatha bit her lip. These were legitimate questions. The idea that Adam and Lilith could actually be in a situation where they needed assistance was a foreign one, but there was always the possibility. \"I don't know.\"\n\nGil studied her for a moment longer and nodded. \"I see.\" He smiled. \"Now let's talk about Herr von Zinzer.\"\n\nAgatha looked blankly at him. \"Who?\"\n\nGil's smile widened. \"Moloch von Zinzer?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I don't\u2014\"\n\nGil continued, \"The man you help build clanks with? While in your underwear? Your boyfriend? Your lover? The reason you're here? Ring a bell?\" he asked innocently.\n\nAgatha flushed. \"I never! He's n\u2014\" Too late she caught Gil's look of satisfaction. She quickly shifted mental gears. \"He's\u2026 nnnice!\"\n\nGil looked at her askance. \"Nice?\"\n\nAgatha nodded inanely, scarcely believing the drivel pouring out of her mouth. \"That's what I call him. Herr Nice. I don't even think of him as\u2026 as\u2026\"\n\n\"Von Zinzer.\"\n\n\"Von Zinzer. Yes.\"\n\nGil raised an eyebrow. \"Ah. Well then, you'll both be happy to know that you'll be assisting\u2026 Herr\u2026 Nice, with his next clank.\"\n\n\"Oh. But\u2026 Good,\" she finished weakly.\n\nGil smiled. \"And I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that we have a very relaxed dress code in the labs.\"\n\nAgatha stiffened. \"You know, as much as I'd miss Mowgli\u2014\"\n\n\"Moloch?\"\n\n\"Herr Nice, I'd rather just go home and help look for my parents.\"\n\nGil got serious. \"I assure you, Miss Clay, we're doing everything we can to find them. Unless you can think of somewhere in particular we should look?\"\n\nReluctantly, Agatha shook her head. A sudden clink made her look around. A small blue claw appeared over the side of the machine, holding a delicate delftware teacup. Agatha reached out and took it. The tea within smelled delicious. \"Thank you,\" she murmured.\n\nThe claw then grabbed onto a protruding grommet and Zoing hauled himself upwards. Up close, Agatha still couldn't penetrate the gloom under the little creature's hat. Feeling her eyes upon it, Zoing looked back briefly, then reached inside a wide sleeve and pulled out a sugar bowl, which it offered graciously. Agatha declined. Zoing shrugged, and deftly extracted several sugar cubes and popped them inside its coat. Satisfied crunching noises followed.\n\nGil's voice brought her back to the conversation. \"Anyway, I'm afraid my father won't allow you to leave just yet, he considers you his guarantee to Herr von Zinzer's good behavior.\"\n\nAgatha felt an uncharacteristic flare of temper. \"You can't just keep me here.\"\n\nGil had the grace to look slightly embarrassed, but he shrugged. \"We can actually. It's not like you could walk out the front door, you know.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"We don't have one.\" His face brightened. \"You don't know where you are, do you?\"\n\nAgatha blinked. Gil grabbed a control box that was attached to a long cable that went up into the ceiling. He grinned and stabbed at a button. \"Let me show you!\"\n\nAgatha heard a squeal of alarm from Zoing, and then with a great CLANG! the floor split into two massive panels that swung downward, and the machine they were sitting in dropped. A quick look over the side caused Agatha to think she'd gone mad, as the ground was easily several thousand meters under them. A few farms nestled beside a river, and a vast forest covered much of the land. \"What have you done?\" she screamed against the uprushing wind.\n\nGil was busily manipulating the controls of the machine. He grinned again. \"Ha! Watch this!\"\n\nHe threw a large switch, and the motor behind them coughed twice and then stopped. Silence surrounded them as they fell. Agatha crossed her arms. \"Oh. It's a Falling Machine. I'm so impressed.\"\n\nGil looked annoyed. \"Weird. It worked perfectly on paper\u2026\" Simultaneously the both of them swarmed over the engine.\n\n\"How's it work?\"\n\n\"Fuel here. Spark here. Main shaft. Boosters.\"\n\n\"Interesting. Should this be loose?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's a balance arm.\"\n\nAgatha glared at him. \"A balance arm? You're wasting space in a flying machine with a balance arm?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 yes, you still need\u2014\"\n\nAgatha pushed him aside and reached into the engine compartment. A quick wrench and the small device was flung out into space, where it hung in front of Gil's face.\n\n\"And this!\" Another part was ripped loose. \"This is a heat pump! Superfluous!\"\n\nGil eyed the slowly spinning device with regret. \"Nicely designed though, eh?\"\n\nAgatha reached back, grabbed his shirt front and hauled him beside her. \"Look\u2014\"she commanded. \"With more room you can enlarge this flywheel and it will act as a balance! Add coolant lines here and here and then it will also act as a heat dump!\"\n\nThe light dawned on Gil's face. \"I see! Then we can also get rid of these here if we add more vents!\"\n\nThe two of them grinned in accord and began ripping various pieces of engine out and tossing the mover the side. A gleam came into Gil's eye, and his voice began to match Agatha's in intensity. \"That'll fix our heat problem and tighten up these linkages! I see! Yes! There's a whole bunch of stuff we can get rid of!\" He grabbed a large wrench. \"Help me unbolt the engine!\"\n\nAt this Agatha heard a strangled noise from behind, and felt an urgent tapping on her shoulder. Turning, she saw Zoing hanging upside down from the steering wheel. The small creature looked at her beseechingly and pointed over the side. A glance downward revealed the ground rushing upwards at an alarming rate. She in turn tapped Gil on the shoulder. \"Um\u2026 of course, we are still falling.\"\n\nGil looked at her blankly for a second. Then he rolled his eyes. \"Oh, that.\" He reached into the engine compartment. \"This wire was loose. Let's try it now.\"\n\nSo saying, he turned to the controls, and threw a lever. Instantly the engine caught with a roar. The odd fenders unfolded with a snap to reveal themselves as a pair of large green wings, and with a massive jolt, the machine's fall turned into a graceful dive that swung forward and the machine gently began to climb back up into the sky, barely clearing several of the taller treetops.\n\nWith a squeak, Zoing toppled forward onto the floor and twitched. Agatha decided not to disturb him. She looked around, but failed to see any buildings at all, let alone one tall enough to have fallen from.\n\n\"So,\" she asked, \"How did we get so high in the first place?\"\n\nGil grinned. \"We started higher. Look up.\"\n\nAgatha did so and gasped.\n\n\"We started from Castle Wulfenbach.\"\n\nAnd indeed, above them loomed the greatest symbol of the Baron's authority. Castle Wulfenbach was a vast dirigible, almost a kilometer in length. The surface was encrusted with engines, viewpoints, and complex structures that would have dwarfed entire earthbound castles. Massive gun turrets bristled along its length. A row of windmills turned slowly along its keel. Perched atop its spine, minarets, domes and towers filled every square foot. Gardens were visible, as were the three great smokestacks venting steam.\n\nSurrounding it on every side, above and below, was an armada of hundreds of smaller airships, although, Agatha realized with a shock, that several of these \"smaller\" ships were themselves dreadnoughts in the Baron's fleet, made small only by the presence of the larger ship they escorted. Even at a glance one could see an order in the seeming chaos, as ships arrived and departed to and from the wide-spread empire.\n\nThe Baron had begun construction of the giant airship almost sixteen years ago, and had continually enlarged it until it had reached its current size. As his base of operations, it was unique as the only capital that was able to patrol its own empire. Onboard was the bureaucracy that allowed the Baron's Empire to function, and many a local warlord had awoken to discover that the master's crack teams of accountants and inspectors had landed in the night and were anxious to question him about irregularities in the books or that peculiar smell coming from the hidden laboratory. Its support crew numbered in the thousands, and rumor had it that vast numbers of them had not touched the earth in years. Many things were whispered about what went on aboard the gigantic airship, but surprisingly few townsfolk had been there. Sightings always caused the local population to pour out into the streets to stare until it had passed by. The panic started when it stopped overhead.\n\nAgatha sat down as she stared upwards. She had traveled with Dr. Beetle several times on airships. They had been cramped, utilitarian vehicles. \"I didn't know\u2026 it didn't feel like we were aboard a\u2026\"\n\n\"Really? I wouldn't know. I grew up there.\"\n\nThis brought Agatha back. \"Oh yes. Sleipnir O'Hara said to say 'Welcome back.'\"\n\nGil's face hardened. \"Oh, she did, did she? Nice of her to remember me.\"\n\nAgatha was surprised at his reaction. \"She seemed very fond of you, actually.\"\n\n\"She has a funny way of showing it. I never heard from her, or any of the others once I left for Paris.\" It was obvious despite his light tone, that this was something that bothered Gil quite a bit.\n\nAgatha frowned. \"Now wait a minute. She said that you never responded to any of their letters.\"\n\n\"I never got any letters, and they never bothered to come see me when I returned.\"\n\n\"Did you try to see them?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gil said coldly, \"I thought they'd made their feelings clear enough\u2014\"\n\n\"Guess they felt the same way.\"\n\n\"But I didn't\u2014\" Gil paused. His eyes narrowed. He continued slowly, \"Or rather, I had been led to believe\u2026\"\n\nThe engine gave a sudden cough and both of them looked at it. It hiccoughed and then roared back to full power. Gil nodded. \"You had some interesting ideas regarding the engine.\" He paused. \"Build many?\"\n\nAgatha slumped down into her seat. \"None that work. I can't concentrate. Nothing I do ever works. It's so frustrating! I can see it in my head, but everything I build explodes or falls apart.\"\n\nThe engine burped again. A worried look flitted across Gil's face. \"Um\u2026 Maybe I'd better check that engine again\u2026\"\n\nAgatha ignored him. \"And when I do try to concentrate, I get these terrible headaches that prevent me from doing anything! It's so\u2014\"\n\nGil broke in. \"You were working pretty intensely a minute ago and you didn't get a headache then.\"\n\nAgatha looked at him owlishly. \"Why, you're right.\" She thought, \"Maybe it was because I was interrupted by your\u2026\" She looked at the little construct who had been waving at her frantically, but gave up, \"Zoing?\"\n\nGil studied her. \"But if you've never been able to concentrate, how could you have\u2014?\" At this point Zoing grabbed the front of Gil's coverall and began to furiously shake it. Annoyed, Gil turned. \"What is it, Zoing? I\u2014\"\n\nIt was then that they saw the enormous gallery of windows set into the side of Castle Wulfenbach looming scant yards before them. All three had time to see the reflection of their stricken faces before they plowed straight through them in an explosion of glass and metal. Agatha found herself clutching Gil for dear life as the flyer burst into a causeway and continued through the walls on the opposite side. Wood paneling and various weapons flew about. The machine crashed to the ground and began to skid upon an ornate oriental carpet as debris bounced through the room, smashing furniture and knocking what appeared to be hunting trophies to the floor. In an enormous chair in the center of the room, a large creature looked up, startled at the intrusion. He had a large ornate teacup halfway to his mouth, and a book clumsily held in his oversized hand. They were heading straight for him when the creature calmly dropped his book, stuck out his arm, and with no apparent effort, halted the skidding machine dead.\n\nAgatha, Gil and Zoing were thrown forward. Agatha flew through the air and suddenly found herself gently cradled in the crook of an enormous arm, while a pair of curious eyes beneath furry white eyebrows peered down at her. A wreath of white hair encircled the monster's brow, and a fearsome set of tusks protruded from its mouth. The lower set had been elegantly capped in gold. The rest of the creature was dressed in an elaborate red military uniform, encrusted with medals and festooned with gold lace and buttons. The sharp-toothed mouth gaped wide. \"Iz hyu hokay dere, sveethot?\"\n\nAgatha blinked. The dialect was unmistakable. This was a J\u00e4germonster, but unlike any she had ever seen or heard of. \"I\u2026\n\nI think so,\" she said.\n\n\"Goot!\" He turned to Gil, who clambered out from behind the remains of the steering wheel. \"Howzabout hyu, kiddo?\"\n\nGil tried to stand, and wound up sitting instead. He looked at the enormous creature sitting calmly before him, and looked at the front of the little flyer. The image of a gigantic clawed hand was deeply imprinted in the machine's nose. \"General Khrizhan! Are you all right?\"\n\nThe J\u00e4gergeneral snorted in amusement. \"Ho! Uv caurze, a leedle machine like dot? Pliz!\"\n\nAt this point Agatha realized that the monster soldier had not put her down. \"Excuse me?\" she ventured. The general looked at her with surprise, and with evident reluctance, gently set her to her feet.\n\nHe looked at the damage to his room, and seemed to find it genuinely amusing. He turned to Gil. \"If hyu vaz tryin kto zuprize hyu poppa, hyu vaz a leedle off. He iz not due for hour meetink for anodder\u2014\" he twisted his head to look at the face of an ornate clock that was smashed onto its side \"\u2014fife meenutes.\"\n\nGil went pale. \"My father? My father is coming here?\"\n\n\"Ho yez.\"\n\nGil clutched at his head. \"Was I just thinking that this day couldn't get any worse?\"\n\nAgatha spoke up from next to the mangled flyer. \"I think the engine is still salvageable. We could\u2014\"\n\nThe change that came over Gilgamesh was astonishing. Instantly he became the grim, efficient creature that Agatha had seen in Dr. Beetle's lab. He pointed towards the door. \"GO!\" he barked.\n\nAgatha looked stunned. \"What?\"\n\n\"Go! I've got to deal with my father and I do not want him to\u2014\" He seemed at a loss. \"Just go!\"\n\nGeneral Khrizhan broke in. \"Ho dun be like dat. Hyu poppa vould understend. Vy the tings hive dun to impress a pretty gorl make dis luke like nodding! Some tea end\u2014\"\n\nGil forcibly picked Agatha up, carried her to the door and thrust her outside. \"Zoing!\" he yelled.\n\nThe little creature scuttled out from under the general's chair clutching a tea biscuit. \"Take her back to the dorm level. Now!\" And with that he slammed the door behind them.\n\nThe general shrugged and raised a hand to his face to hide a grin, and totally failed to do so. \"A peety.\" He rumbled, \"She seemed verra\u2014\" He stopped suddenly. He sniffed at his hand deeply. He paused. \"Master Wulfenbach,\" he asked casually, \"who vas dot gorl?\"\n\nGil kicked a flyer part off of the remains of the carpet. \"She's just a lab assistant.\" He looked closely at the J\u00e4gergeneral. \"Why?\"\n\nKhrizhan grinned toothily. \"She smells\u2026 verra nize.\"\n\nEmbarrassed, Gil turned away. \"Oh, please, what is it with you people? She does not smell 'nice'!\"\n\nUnfortunately, this last statement was delivered with enough force that it was clearly audible to the people standing outside the door. In addition to Agatha and Zoing, there was a crowd of J\u00e4germonsters as well as a growing number of airship personnel, many of them obviously prepared to deal with fire or some other disaster.\n\nAs Gil's pronouncement rang through the air, everyone turned to Agatha, who reddened, and radiating fury, stalked off with Zoing scrabbling to keep up. One of the J\u00e4germonsters called out to her. \"He dun know vat hees talkink about, sveethot! Hyu schmell vunderful!\"\n\nAt this point it was hard to tell where Agatha's skin began, and the red coverall ended, but she managed to turn the corner with her head held high. Her attitude was evident enough that the onrushing crowd parted around her, until the familiar figure of Ardsley Wooster rushed up. \"Miss Clay,\" he cried. \"Where is Master Gilgamesh?\"\n\nAgatha glared at him icily. \"Your swinish employer is in with a General Khrizhan. He's better than he deserves to be.\"\n\nArdsley blinked, but wisely realized that these were waters best avoided. \"Ah\u2014thank you,\" he said, and dashed off.\n\nAgatha watched him go. She looked down at Zoing. \"Are you okay?\"\n\nZoing bobbled affirmatively and offered her a nibbled tea biscuit.\n\nAgatha suddenly realized that she was starving. Enough so that she seriously considered the offered biscuit. \"No thank you. Let's go.\"\n\nAlmost half an hour later, the enormity of Castle Wulfenbach had been firmly established, and Agatha was feeling a bit overwhelmed.\n\nEventually they reached a set of doors labeled \"Student Dormitory,\" which were guarded by a pair of bored-looking soldiers. They asked Agatha her name, checked her off against a list, and waved her through. Once they stepped over the sill, Zoing stopped, tipped his hat and skittered back the way they'd come. Agatha sighed and pushed open the inner door and found herself in the long common room. Cries erupted from the apparently ever-present swarm of children.\n\n\"There she is!\"\n\n\"Master Gilgamesh really took you on a flying machine?\"\n\n\"We saw you out the windows!\"\n\n\"You were flyin'!\"\n\n\"Were you in your underwear?\"\n\n\"Did you really crash into the Castle?\"\n\n\"We all felt it!\"\n\nSleipnir pushed through the crowd of chattering children. Agatha was surprised at how happy she was to see a friendly face, and impulsively hugged the redhead, who smiled, and hugged her tightly in return.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Sleipnir asked. \"You were really flying with Gil?\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"I'm okay. No one was hurt, but it was a real mess.\"\n\nOne of the little boys piped up in a singsong voice, \"Your boyfriend is gonna be jealous.\"\n\nA hissing voice filled the room, freezing all the children into immobility. \"No, he won't\u2014\"\n\nAgatha started to turn, but a sudden blur turned into a black claw that grabbed the front of her outfit and swung her around as it hoisted her into the air. Agatha found herself staring into the face of a furious woman, her blonde hair pulled back into a painfully tight bun, a ruby-red monocle was screwed into her left eye and her mouth was filled with sharp, pointy teeth. Her tight black leather outfit was fastened with a variety of buckles and straps that creaked and clinked whenever she moved, which she did with an inhuman quickness. Effortlessly she brought Agatha up to her face with one hand and snarled, \"He will be in mourning!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "\u2003Monsters and machines blotting out the sun\n\n\u2003Fighting in a war that never can be won.\n\n\u2003The men in the castles are having lots of fun\n\n\u2003And all we can do is run, run, run.\n\n\u2014Traditional children's song\n\n\"I am Von Pinn,\" the ominous figure continued, \"I am in charge here. You\u2014\" she gave the dangling Agatha a sharp shake, \"are Agatha Clay. I have not heard good things about you.\" She indicated the children who were frozen into immobility around the room. \"I take the safety of these children very seriously, and I have just witnessed an example of your reckless behavior.\"\n\nAgatha tried to break in. \"The flying machine? But I didn't\u2014 urk\"\n\nVon Pinn loosened the grip that had cut Agatha off. \"Understand that you are here to keep a minor Spark in line. Nothing more. I will not permit you to place any of my charges in danger.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't\u2014gurk!\"\n\nVon Pinn's voice became even more ominous. \"I have also heard reports of your tendency towards indecency. Your upbringing has obviously been shockingly lax. This is no doubt the fault of your parents.\"\n\nA small switch in Agatha's head clicked over from \"scared\" to \"angry.\" \"Oh, now hold on! My parents\u2014\" She was jerked to within inches of Von Pinn's face. \"Silence! I am aware of the swinish behavior of the lower classes.\" Agatha's eyes bulged. \"You\u2026 I\u2026 If\u2026\"\n\n\"While you are in my care you will conduct yourself in a more seemly fashion. And despite any pathetic dreams you may have about 'bettering your position'\u2014I assure you that Master Gilgamesh, in particular, will not be taken by your slatternly ways.\"\n\nAgatha grasped Von Pinn's arm and glared at her in fury. \"I wouldn't have your Master Gilgamesh if you stripped him naked and dipped him in cheese!\"\n\nEveryone watching, gasped. Von Pinn's face froze. Slowly she brought Agatha's face to within an inch of her own. \"And what,\" she asked dangerously, \"is wrong with Master Gilgamesh?\"\n\nRage filled Agatha and exploded outwards. \"PUT ME DOWN YOU WRETCHED CONSTRUCT!\"\n\nInstantly Von Pinn's hand snapped open and Agatha fell to the floor. A look of shock and horror crossed Von Pinn's face as she stared at her open hand. That look changed to fury and she turned to face a dazed Agatha, her hands forming into claws, when suddenly, a soft chiming sound came from her waist. Faster then the eye could follow, a hand dipped into a hidden pocket and extracted a small gold pocket watch. Von Pinn glanced at it and snapped the cover shut. When she looked at Agatha, she was once again in control.\n\n\"I have a class in three minutes. I am never late. I will deal with you later.\"\n\nAgatha stood up. \"Deal with me by listening to me. I\u2014\"A puff of displaced air and the slamming of the door at the end of the room announced Von Pinn's departure.\n\nAgatha blinked. \"Wow. That was fast. How does she\u2014?\" It was then that she noticed the circle of open-mouthed faces staring at her in astonishment. The tableaux continued for several seconds before Agatha broke it with a sharp \"What?\" This was the signal for all of the children under six to begin crying at the top of their lungs.\n\n\"What did I do?\" Agatha asked Sleipnir as she held a sobbing four-year-old.\n\n\"You got Von Pinn riled up.\" A boy who appeared to be about twelve, with a small silver clock imbedded in his forehead, started tossing a little girl up into the air. \"Sleipnir said you were friendly. She neglected to mention that you were suicidal.\"\n\nA tall, dark skinned, young man with sleek black hair pulled back into a short ponytail emerged from one of the apartments. He took in the situation and then stepped up to the railing and his voice boomed out. \"Hey! Who wants to hear a Heterodyne story?\"\n\nStartled, the children stared at him and then began clamoring in assent, their fear forgotten. The young man settled down at the top of the steps and made a great show of scratching his chin in thought. \"Well now, what's a good one?\" The children clustered about his feet and made suggestions.\n\nOne boy stood slightly apart from the rest and crossed his arms defiantly. \"Aw, the Heterodyne Boys weren't real people.\" This caused the children to gasp in surprise.\n\nThe young man turned to him. \"Of course they were, Olaf. The Baron used to work with them. My Aunt Lucrezia married one of them. They're real people all right.\"\n\n\"Then where are they?\"\n\n\"Ah, now that's a good story! It's called The Heterodyne Boys and the Dragon From Mars!\" All of the children, even Olaf, leaned forward in expectation.\n\nOff to the side, the older children relaxed. Agatha nudged Sleipnir and indicated the storyteller. \"Who's that?\"\n\n\"Theopholus DuMedd. He's head boy.\"\n\n\"Head boy?\"\n\nSleipnir looked slightly embarrassed. \"There's a\u2026 pecking order here. There's some that take it more seriously than others. It factors in family lineage, Sparkiness and some other nonsense. Theo's related to the Heterodynes by marriage, and he's got a touch of the Spark to him.\"\n\n\"Really? Wow.\"\n\nSuddenly Theo jumped up and stretched out his arms and intoned, \"And the revenants saw them and they RAN!\" Which was apparently the signal for all of the young children to run squealing about the room, a lumbering Theo in pursuit.\n\nSleipnir smiled. \"He's a great storyteller.\"\n\nThey paused as a swarm of children fled past. Theo followed stiff leggedly. He nodded to the girls as he passed. \"RHaah,\" he said conversationally.\n\n\"And he knows how to talk to a lady, he does.\" Sleipnir looked over at Agatha and \"tsked.\" \"I see you'll be needing a change of clothes. The Von Pinn's a rough one.\" Agatha glanced down and saw that where the construct had grasped her, her outfit was sliced and torn. \"Come on, I got you some stuff from crew supplies. It'll probably fit you a bit better too.\"\n\nInside Sleipnir's room, Agatha tried on several outfits. They did fit better, and Agatha felt more herself once she was back in a proper, ankle-length skirt. But Sleipnir did insist on including a few pairs of mechanics trousers in the wardrobe they assembled. \"You'll get used to 'em,\" she promised. Agatha doubted it.\n\n\"So, this Von Pinn. What is she?\"\n\n\"She's the nanny. She's in charge of the children.\" Agatha stopped and looked at Sleipnir closely, but as far as she could tell, the redhead was serious.\n\n\"You've got to be kidding. That vicious lunatic is in charge of children?\"\n\n\"Oh, aye. I've been raised by her for the last ten years. It's very comforting, really. She's never hurt any of the children, and you know that nothing could get past her to hurt you.\" Sleipnir looked Agatha in the eye, \"And on this ship, this close to the Baron, that's worth knowing.\" Her voice dropped conspiratorially, \"They say that she was once Lucrezia Heterodyne.\"\n\nAgatha was surprised. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Oh, aye. The Baron found her in the ruins of Castle Heterodyne after the Other destroyed it and brought her back here.\"\n\n\"That would be a heck of a case of P.R.T.\"\n\nP.R.T, or Post-Revivification Trauma, was a frequent result when people were brought back from death as constructs. The chief symptom was memory failure, which could range from the temporary blanking of a few hours, up to and including total, permanent identity loss. This latter was the more common result, and was the main reason why more madboys didn't transform themselves into constructs in the first place. It was still tempting, as the basics of construct technology were fairly well understood, as were the steps required to give the standard improvements to speed, strength and lifespan. Many a madboy, impatient with the limitations imposed upon their body by nature, had succumbed to temptation only to awaken with no knowledge of their previous life. Most of these creatures were subsequently destroyed by vengeful citizens or were now working for the Baron. This was because another frequent result was a shift in personality, and many a fulminating madboy now found simple contentment as a researcher or lab assistant. Theoretically it could also go the other way around, but as the supply of meek, quiet, sensible Sparks was vanishingly low to start with, it had, so far, remained merely a tricky essay question on the \"Ethics of Revivification\" final exam at Paris' Institut de L'Extraordinaire. These revived Sparks were so useful that the Baron actively encouraged his more hysterical fellow Sparks to \"give themselves a makeover.\"\n\n\"That's as may be,\" said Sleipnir, \"though I've heard it whispered that the Lady Heterodyne had quite a temper in her before.\"\n\nThey emerged just at the climax of Theo's story. Agatha was sorry she'd missed the rest, as it apparently involved a gigantic mechanical dragon that was currently being dragged off to Mars via some sort of water portal, pulling the Heterodynes in behind it aboard a rowboat. Suddenly the portal shut with the SMACK of Theopholus' hands coming together, causing his rapt audience to jump and then squeal in appreciation.\n\nThen one of the boys announced that he was hungry and the others joined in. At this the dark-clad servants swooped in and began seating the children at the table.\n\nAgatha was forcibly reminded of how hungry she was at this point by her stomach growling loud enough to be heard by Sleipnir, who laughed and showed her where to sit at one of the long tables.\n\nThere was a quick round of introductions, but Agatha found herself distracted by a flurry of activity from a small group of children who had not sat down, but had, to Agatha's surprise, produced several odd-looking devices. These proved to be controllers of some sort, as with a crash, several primitive clanks rolled, or in one notable case lurched, into the room from what was obviously an attached kitchen.\n\nFirst came a tall, spindly device that made sure everyone had knives, forks and spoons. Unfortunately, it delivered them with such speed, that as it swept past, it left a small forest of utensils imbedded into the wooden tabletop, still vibrating. Agatha couldn't help but notice that the tabletops looked brand new, and were held in place by spring-locked brackets for easy replacement. Suddenly, this made a lot of sense.\n\nNext came the lurching clank, which was loaded with a precarious tower of ever shifting china soup bowls. To everyone's astonishment, it stepped up onto the tabletop itself, and proceeded to spill bowls onto the table in an endless cascade. After the first panic, everyone realized that the bowls wound up undamaged, upright, and perfectly positioned upon the table. Agatha stared at the wildly flailing mechanism and saw how the \"falling\" bowls were actually skillfully guided down by a series of well-coordinated taps. Everyone understood now, and the table spontaneously erupted in applause right up until the clank strode over the edge of the table and crashed to the floor, sending shattered bowls across half the room. An eight-year-old girl with bluish-black hair and prominent eyebrows dropped her controller and began to cry. A servant knelt to comfort her while several of the others quickly swept up the mess.\n\nThe third clank looked like a small tanker car on treads. It lumbered up and a pipe swiveled out. The pipe gurgled and Theo, with a lightning fast move, twitched his bowl under the pipe in time for a stream of hot soup to pour forth. The bowl filled perfectly, and Theo closed his eye and sniffed appreciably, which is why he failed to see the pipe swing towards his head with a dull BONK. A small child with a swarthy complexion swore in Greek and made an adjustment on the controller. The pipe elevated, the clank advanced, and the process repeated. By the time the device had swung around the table and got to Agatha, a fourth clank, held aloft by an ingenious collection of balloons and propellers had made several trips back and forth delivering baskets of fresh hot bread, racks of condiments and ramekins of fresh butter.\n\nAgatha ducked under the pipe and examined the soup, which smelled incredible. It was a rich chicken soup, filled with an array of finely sliced vegetables, several of which Agatha was unfamiliar with. A bowl of thick yellow sp\u00e4tzle noodles was handed to her by Sleipnir. Agatha took her cue from the others and spooned a ladle full into her soup.\n\nThe children were wiping down their clanks and congratulating each other. The girl with the bowl-dispenser clank was still snuffling a bit, but had rallied.\n\n\"That was pretty amazing,\" Agatha said. \"Does that sort of thing happen at every meal?\"\n\n\"Are you joking?\" DuMedd muttered sottovoce, \"We'd be dead in a week.\" He twitched a thumb and Agatha noticed several small holes in one of the walls. \"You're lucky you missed last Monday's Swedish meatballs.\"\n\nAgatha thoughtfully turned back to her meal. The soup itself was tangy and delicious and Agatha found that she had emptied half her bowl before she looked up. \"You were hungry,\" Sleipnir allowed, and poured Agatha a large glass of a thick, white liquid from a broad-based pitcher. Agatha sniffed it and a brief taste confirmed that it was tangy, like buttermilk, but sweet.\n\n\"That's called lassi,\" Sleipnir said as she lowered her own half-emptied glass. \"It's a fermented milk drink that Theo brought.\"\n\nFurther down the table, DuMedd waved a hand in acknowledgement. \"Everyone's expected to provide a few dishes from their homeland. Makes for a nice bit of variety,\" he explained.\n\nAgatha found herself chewing a spicy vegetable that required the rest of her lassi to quench. She demurely wiped her lips with the heavy linen napkin from her lap. \"You know, I'm quite fond of the Heterodyne Boys stories, but I've never heard that one with the dragon before.\"\n\nTheo grinned and pushed his spectacles up his nose. \"I just made it up. You liked it?\" He had a deep voice that made Agatha's ears tingle.\n\nAgatha nodded. \"My favorite story is The Heterodyne Boys and the Race to the West Pole.\"\n\nA short young man with a noble prow of a nose spoke up. \"You have an ear for the truth. That one really happened.\" He became aware of the rest of the group looking at him. \"Well, mostly,\" he added defensively.\n\nAgatha cocked an eyebrow at him. \"Right.\"\n\n\"No, no! It is true! My father built the Mechanical Camel!\"\n\nAgatha blinked. \"Your father is\u2014?\"\n\nThe young man drew himself up proudly. \"The Iron Sheik. Yes. And I am his son, Z\u00e2m\u00ee Yahy\u00e2 Ahmad ibn Sulim\u00e2n al-Sin\u00e2j\u00ee.\" He smiled. \"But you may call me 'Z.'\"\n\nAgatha sat back in her chair and regarded him with wide eyes. \"Golly. I'm not used to thinking of the Heterodyne Boys and the people in the stories as\u2026 as real people.\"\n\nZ\u00e2m\u00ee shrugged. \"As real as you or I.\"\n\nAt this point, a large dish of various cheeses began to make the rounds. None of them looked familiar, and Sleipnir made a few helpful suggestions. Most of them were delicious, but one of them caused Agatha to choke, as she was convinced that she was eating someone's unwashed foot. The others at the table, who had been watching her surreptitiously, snorted in laughter at her expression. \"Give it up, O'Hara,\" said Sun Ming, a slim Asian girl seated next to DuMedd. \"No one else but you likes that stuff.\"\n\nSleipnir morosely took the remaining chunk of the offending cheese off of Agatha's plate. \"You are all heathens, who wouldn't know the ambrosia of the gods from a cod's head and I pity you all, sure enough.\" She popped it in her mouth and chewed.\n\nAgatha found herself laughing with the rest. While the circumstances behind her being here were alarming, she found that she enjoyed the company of these people more than she had ever enjoyed the company of the students at the college.\n\nA thought struck her and she looked around. Between the older and younger children, they occupied just two of the vast tables in the common area. There were easily another twenty of these, all unoccupied, except for a cluster of the servants who sat near the younger children, keeping an eye on them while they supped on their own bowls of soup. \"I can't help but notice that there aren't a lot of students here,\" Agatha observed. A few of the others nodded.\n\n\"You came at a quiet time,\" DuMedd explained. \"The Baron insists that those with lands that need planting in the spring should help oversee the process personally, and actually assist if they're old enough.\"\n\nA tall young man with wildly disheveled hair who'd been introduced as Nicodeamus Yurkofsky chimed in. \"He says that it gives them a better appreciation of where their power comes from and who's actually keeping them fed.\"\n\nAgatha thought about some of the members of Royalty that she had seen come through the Tyrant's labs throughout the years. \"I'll bet they love that,\" she said carefully.\n\n\"It's the older generation that gets all horrified,\" DuMedd said with a laugh. \"The kids look forward to it all year long. That and the harvest. The fact that it scandalizes their parents? That's usually seen as a bonus.\"\n\nAgatha looked around at them. \"So what about your families?\"\n\nDuMedd's face got sober. \"I don't have any family.\" Agatha started to stammer an apology, but he waved it aside. \"You couldn't know. My parents died fighting air pirates about twelve years ago.\"\n\n\"Really? Were they Sparks?\"\n\n\"Yes. My father was more into the theoretical stuff, but my mother was Demonica Mongfish.\"\n\nThe Mongfish name was one that was mentioned prominently in any history of the Spark. From their citadel in Novaya Zemlya, they had periodically terrorized the surrounding area. The latest, Lucifer Mongfish had been a perennial opponent to the Heterodyne Boys, so much so that, eventually, one of his three daughters, Lucrezia Mongfish, actually married Bill Heterodyne. After that, everyone pretty much agreed that fighting in public would be unseemly. Holiday get-togethers, however, were a different matter, and by mutual agreement, every event was held at a different location to reduce the collateral damage.\n\nMost of the others had similar stories. Sleipnir concluded, \"There's also a few of the others who are still here, but they're on duty, like your roommate, Zulenna. You'll meet her later.\"\n\n\"Zulenna. That's a pretty name. Is she nice?\" The others looked at each other.\n\n\"Um\u2026 no, not really,\" Sleipnir admitted. \"There's a reason why she's without a roommate at the moment.\"\n\nSuddenly they became aware of raised voices from the children's table. \"No\u2014that's not how they worked!\"\n\n\"Oh, like you'd know!\"\n\n\"I know enough to do basic research on biomechanics!\"\n\n\"The only thing that's basic around here is your grasp of the theories behind mechanical forces!\"\n\n\"Oooh! You take that back!\"\n\nAgatha found this discussion a bit disconcerting, partly because it was delivered by a pair of twelve-year-olds, and partly because it sounded exactly like an argument she'd heard last week in the teacher's lounge at the University.\n\n\"Make me, stupid head!\"\n\n\"Ooh! I'm telling!\"\n\nYep. Exactly.\n\nTheo reached in and pulled the two apart. \"Now what is this all about?\"\n\nA small, wiry boy sporting a large pair of goggles spoke up. \"The bugs\u2014\"\n\nThe other boy, the freckled redhead with a small silver clock set into his forehead, interrupted. \"Duh\u2014Slaver wasps.\"\n\n\"Get wound. You can't just suck them out of people like in Theo's story, can you?\"\n\nTheo nodded somberly. \"That's correct, Itto. Nothing can cure a revenant.\"\n\n\"But the story said\u2014\"\n\n\"Stories are for fun. Do not mistake them for facts.\"\n\nAnother child spoke up. \"My father said that the wasps came out of machines.\"\n\n\"That is correct. They're called Hive Engines.\"\n\nA little girl piped up. \"Oh that. We saw one of those.\"\n\n\"What?\" Sleipnir exclaimed. \"Where?\"\n\n\"We were playing on the dirigible deck and the footmen said we had to go. But we hid and we saw them unloading this big thing they called a Hive Engine.\" She pointed towards Agatha. \"They unloaded her too. She and her booooyyfriend were on stretchers.\"\n\nEveryone looked at Agatha expectantly. She nodded. \"There was a Hive Engine in Dr. Beetle's lab. I guess they brought it here.\"\n\nZ\u00e2m\u00ee looked upset. \"A Hive Engine? In the middle of a town? What was this Dr. Beetle thinking?\"\n\nOne of the black-clad servants suddenly appeared at his elbow. \"Such talk is not for younger ears. Off with you.\" To the obvious disappointment of the younger children, the older group moved off down the hall.\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't know what he was thinking,\" Agatha admitted. \"About anything.\"\n\nSleipnir broke in, \"What is the Baron thinking bringing it here?\"\n\nNicodeamus proclaimed, \"The Baron can handle anything.\"\n\nThe others looked at him. He shrugged. \"Mostly.\"\n\nMeanwhile Theo had gotten a faraway look in his eyes. \"So\u2014 Where would this Hive Engine be, do you think?\"\n\nSleipnir looked at him askance. \"The Large Dangerous Mechanical Lab would be my guess. Why?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 I've never seen a Hive Engine, now have I?\"\n\nSleipnir wheeled around and prodded his chest with a finger. \"You want to go sneaking into one of the Baron's labs? Even after what happened to you the last time?\"\n\nTheo looked at her blankly. \"Well\u2026 Yeah.\"\n\nSleipnir did a quick jig. \"Sweet! Let's go!\"\n\n\"What exactly did happen to you the last time?\" Agatha asked.\n\n\"Oh never you mind that, Agatha,\" said Sleipnir. \"Come on, it'll be fun!\"\n\n\"Plus,\" pointed out Nicodeamus, \"she's the only one who knows what this thing looks like.\"\n\nAgatha felt a sudden tug at her skirt. Looking down, she saw Itto standing defiantly. \"I want to come too,\" he announced.\n\nTheo shook his head. \"Forget it, Itto. You're too young. Von Pinn would kill me.\"\n\n\"I won't tell her!\"\n\n\"No! You stay here.\"\n\nWith that the group moved off. Agatha's last view of Itto was of the youngster sullenly kicking a table leg. Once around the corner, she hurried to catch up to Sleipnir. \"You can't tell me that we can just waltz into one of the Baron's labs.\"\n\nSleipnir winked. \"You'd be surprised. Most of the labs aren't that well guarded.\"\n\nZ\u00e2m\u00ee nodded. \"The Baron is most careful about who gets onto the Castle in the first place.\"\n\n\"And getting off is even harder,\" Nicodeamus added.\n\n\"Besides,\" Theo pointed out, \"we're not going to walk in through the front door. There's lots of ways\u2014\" He was interrupted by Agatha, who had stopped dead and put a finger to her lips. The others stopped and, a second later, a small figure slipped around the corner they had just turned and ran straight into Agatha's waiting hands.\n\n\"ITTO!\" Frantically the boy tried to break free from Agatha. Theo's hand descended onto his shoulder. \"You were told not to come.\"\n\nAgatha looked slightly relieved. \"I'll just take him back\u2014\"\n\nSleipnir shook her head. \"Oh no, he's coming with us now.\"\n\nItto punched the air. \"Yes!\"\n\n\"BUT\u2014\"Sleipnir continued to the boy, \"if you get infected by a Slaver wasp, we'll have to kill you.\"\n\nItto's eyes got huge behind his goggles. \"What?\"\n\nSleipnir looked sad. \"Sure, and I'd hate to do it. So whatever you do, don't open your mouth. Understand?\"\n\nItto nodded frantically and clapped a hand over his mouth.\n\nThey moved off in silence, twisting and turning through corridors until Theo stopped before an unobtrusive door. Reaching into his vest, he pulled out a large bunch of keys. He flipped through them, selected one and delicately probed the lock. A quick twist, a muffled thunk, and the door swung open. With a flourish, he bowed them into a small antechamber lined with maintenance lockers. Against the far wall was a metal ladder that ascended into the darkness. He lightly grasped the ladder to feel for the vibrations that would indicate that it was in use, and felt nothing. He nodded in satisfaction and turned to the others, his face serious. \"This is an access ladder to one of the lighting maintenance platforms. Once we get up there, move slowly and gently, they're not made to take a lot of extra weight.\" He looked directly at Itto. \"And above all, keep quiet.\"\n\nFrom behind his hand, Itto grunted an acknowledgement.\n\nWhen Agatha's turn came, she stepped onto the ladder, and with a sigh of resignation, began climbing. Eventually she joined the others on a small metal platform dominated by an enormous arc-light. The air was sweltering, as the great light put out heat like a furnace, and the platform shivered unnervingly whenever anyone stepped too heavily. It looked out upon a large cavernous room, lined with workbenches and machinery. Agatha noticed however that there were also racks of weapons to hand, as well as excessive amounts of fire fighting equipment, medical supplies and large mobile barriers. Also standing about the room were some of the large creatures that Agatha had seen in the corridor. The domes that occupied the place where their heads should have been gleamed under the arc-lights.\n\nSleipnir noticed the direction of Agatha's gaze. \"Those are Radioheads,\" she whispered. \"The Baron acquired them from some madlad he had to put down in Albania a few years ago. He figured if he could build fighters without brains, they wouldn't get scared or feel pain or worry about dyin'. The Baron doesn't use them off the Castle, because they creep people out too much.\"\n\n\"But\u2026 If they don't have a brain, how can they do anything?\" Sleipnir directed Agatha's attention to a group of uniformed women that were on a small balcony on another wall of the vast chamber. All of the women were lined up, peering at the room below them. They seemed relaxed, and Agatha could hear their voices as they idly chatted amongst themselves. A flash of reflection made Agatha realize that each of them was wearing a small glass dome atop their heads as well.\n\nSleipnir continued, \"Each one of them controls a Radiohead. Like a puppeteer, except it's permanent.\"\n\nAgatha shivered. \"Those poor girls.\"\n\n\"Don't feel sorry for them. The Baron's offered to free them from the connection, but not one of them took him up on it. They're happy the way things are.\"\n\nAgatha blinked. She was spared having to reply by Theo touching her arm. \"Agatha, is that the Hive Engine?\" He whispered. She followed his finger and was startled to see that the device was almost directly below them. Within its thick glass shell, the now familiar disturbing shapes slowly roiled in the thick green liquid.\n\n\"Yes, that's it.\" A trio of figures emerged from a doorway and approached the sphere. \"Isn't that the Baron?\"\n\nEveryone else froze. \"Yes it is,\" whispered Theo in a strangled voice. \"Now shhhh!\"\n\nOn the floor below, the Baron walked around the vast sphere, examining it closely. Following him were two of his oldest assistants, Dr. Vg and Mr. Rovainen. Vg was a tall, whipcord-sleek Asian of indeterminate sex. Mr. Rovainen was a short, shambling figure who was swathed in thick bandages, goggles and a voluminous coat. The bits of him that were exposed, glistened with a soft nacreous sheen. Mr. Rovainen had not shaken hands with anyone in years.\n\nKlaus stopped and faced them. \"So. Your preliminary analysis?\"\n\nMr. Rovainen spoke in a wet, buzzing voice. \"It is definitely the work of the Other, Herr Baron.\" He slowly rubbed his bandaged hands together. \"A viable Hive Engine\u2014after all this time. Fascinating.\"\n\nVg broke in angrily. \"No, terrifying! I strongly recommend we put it on a fast ship and drop it into the nearest volcano. There is nothing we can learn that is worth the risk presented by having this thing aboard the Castle.\"\n\nKlaus raised an eyebrow. \"Really. Then you can already tell me whether this device is indeed eighteen years old or brand new.\"\n\nShocked, the two scientists glanced at each other and then wheeled about to stare anew at the slumbering engine. Mr. Rovainen coughed wetly. \"My apologies, Herr Baron. Not yet.\"\n\nOn the platform, the students were straining to hear what was being said. \"It's smaller than I thought,\" Theo murmured.\n\n\"What are they saying?\" Nicodeamus muttered.\n\n\"What if the Slaver wasps escape?\" whimpered Itto.\n\n\"Then all we have to do is run faster than you,\" Sleipnir replied.\n\nLooking slightly ill, Itto backed away from the edge of the platform. Suddenly he noticed a pale lump on an adjoining ledge. The lump rippled. Itto felt his throat close in terror. The lump moaned softly and extended a pale protuberance. Itto backed up until he ran into Sleipnir.\n\n\"Wa\u2026 wa\u2026\" he moaned.\n\n\"Itto? What is it?\" The lump reared itself upwards and a pair of gleaming eyes opened.\n\n\"WHAAAAASSSPP!\" Itto screamed and scrambled over the others, throwing them into confusion. The large white cat that had been slumbering on the platform bolted off into the darkness. Suddenly there was a loud CRACK! and the platform began to move. It tipped forward sharply. Agatha grabbed for the wall and snagged an exposed ring bolt. Her arms twinged as the platform stopped with a jerk, but suddenly everyone screamed as they felt the floor begin to buckle. With a groan, and a snapping of restraining bolts, the great arc-light swayed forward, flared, went out, and with a slow twist, pulled free from its restraints and fell over the side.\n\nAgatha and the others watched in horror as the plummeting light smashed into the Hive Engine, knocking it off of its pedestal. The massive sphere hit the ground and began to roll directly towards the three startled scientists. Dr. Vg and Mr. Rovainen stared at the looming engine, spun and ran shrieking. Klaus sighed and sidestepped the great sphere while scanning the upper reaches of the room.\n\n\"Who's up there?\" he yelled. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nAbove him, Theo pulled Sleipnir off of the swaying platform. \"We are so dead,\" the girl moaned.\n\n\"Only if they catch us,\" Theo reminded her. \"Now come on!\" All of the others were already scrambling down the ladder.\n\nThe door to the lab burst open and a group of Lackya flowed in and surveyed the situation.\n\nOn the floor, a squad of Radioheads had rushed forward and brought the great sphere to a stop. A swath of crushed lab equipment showed its path through the room. In the corner where they'd trapped themselves, Vg and Rovainen realized that they were clutching at each other and hastily disengaged.\n\nOne of the footmen appeared next to the Baron. \"Is it an emergency, Herr Baron?\"\n\n\"No, no, the engine hadn't been activated.\" He pointed upwards. \"There are some students on that light platform. Bring them to me.\"\n\nIn another corridor, the students were moving as quickly as they could without attracting suspicion. Theo was in the lead. \"If we can just get out of this sector\u2014\"\n\n\"WAIT!\" Agatha's shout brought them all up short. She pointed at a small figure running back the way they'd come. \"It's Itto! He's running the wrong way! We've got to get him!\"\n\nSleipnir caught hold of Agatha's sleeve. \"Not to worry! The footmen will catch him and they'll bring him back to the dorm unharmed. Von Pinn would destroy anyone who hurt him.\"\n\nAgatha looked confused. \"Then\u2026 why are we running?\"\n\nTheo put a hand on both girls' shoulders and pushed them along. \"Itto is too young. We, on the other hand, will be put on grease trap duty for life. Again.\"\n\n\"That's bad, is it?\"\n\n\"RUN!\"\n\nBack in the lab, the Baron looked up from a pile of debris to see a squad of footmen approaching. They stepped aside to reveal the terrified figure of Itto in their midst. The Baron looked askance at the leader. \"This is all you caught?\"\n\n\"So far, Herr Baron. Though he does say that he was alone.\"\n\nKlaus scowled. \"Yes, that's what I would expect the son of Jurgen Wheelwright to say.\"\n\nThe boy spoke up. \"It\u2026 It was all my fault, Herr Baron.\"\n\n\"I expect it was. Why were you here?\"\n\n\"I wanted to see a Hive Engine, sir. Everyone knows the story about how you defeated a dragon from Mars that captured Lucrezia Mongfish and spit out Slaver wasps and turned her into Von Pinn and I wanted to see what could do that.\"\n\nKlaus' jaw snapped shut. A massive hand thoughtfully rubbed his nose, incidentally concealing a smile. \"I'd have given a lot to see that myself,\" he conceded. He turned serious and leaned down until his face was inches from Itto's. \"You will never mention to Mistress Von Pinn how she used to be Lucrezia Mongfish. She wouldn't like it. She wouldn't like it at all. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, Herr Baron,\" the boy whispered.\n\n\"Good.\" The Baron straightened up. \"You will now assist me in sorting out this mess.\" Itto looked astonished, then quickly snapped to attention. \"Yes sir, Herr Baron!\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"And while you're working, tell me this story.\" Itto took a deep breath, but Klaus held up his hand and turned to the waiting footmen. \"Katz? Tell the Blue Level Kitchen Master that young DuMedd is on grease trap duty until further notice.\"\n\nThe footman smirked and bowed slightly. \"Yes, Herr Baron.\" Klaus' voice caught him broadside as he straightened up. \"As is your entire squad if you fail to catch him and his companions!\"\n\nKatz gave a strangled \"glurk!\" and he and his squad swirled out of the room and were gone.\n\n\"Theo? I hear people running.\"\n\nSleipnir slumped against a wall, panting. \"I think we're goin' down, boyo.\"\n\n\"What we need is a place to hide.\" They rounded a corner. Theo brightened. \"Wait! I know where we are! That's an empty lab! Come on!\"\n\n\"What if someone is in it?\" Agatha asked.\n\n\"Relax!\" Theo said as he pulled out his keys. \"We'll use the old 'Mimmoth Catcher' routine. It works every time!\"\n\nThe keys proved unnecessary, as the door was unlocked. Theo straightened his outfit, ran a hand through his hair, and briskly knocked three times before quickly opening the door. \"Excuse us,\" he sang out, \"mimmoth exterminators. Don't let us disturb\u2014\" He stopped dead.\n\nGilgamesh Wulfenbach, who had been hauling the twisted remains of his flying machine up onto a massive workbench, paused, hanging onto the pulley chain with a nostalgic look upon his face. \"Wow. Does that ever take me back.\" He eyed the frozen Theo. \"You're in trouble. You need a place to hide. Probably from my father.\" His lip curled. \"I should have known none of you would talk to me unless you needed something.\"\n\nTheo glared. \"Well if you hadn't told Von Pinn that you were too busy to see anyone\u2014\"\n\nGil looked surprised. \"What?\"\n\nTheo plowed on: \"You're obviously far too important to associate with us anymore, so we'll just\u2014\" As he turned away, Gil grabbed Theo's arm. Theo tried to shrug him off and found instead that he couldn't move his arm at all. A startled glance at Gil's facade showed the faraway look that meant his brain was racing.\n\nHe focused on Theo. \"Did you get any of my letters?\"\n\nTheo blinked. \"No,\" he said slowly. \"Did you get any of ours?\"\n\nHe then hissed in pain at the viselike grip on his arm as a look of fury filled Gil's face. \"Someone was intercepting them\" he growled. \"I don't know who, or how, but I will!\" Suddenly his face cleared and he noticed Theo's distress. He released his arm. \"How many of you are there?\"\n\n\"Um, five.\"\n\n\"Right! Into the cracking vat, I'll get the rest!\"\n\nHe swung open the door to reveal the astonished face of Sleipnir. \"Gil!\"\n\n\"Sleipnir! We'll talk later! Everybody into the vat!\"\n\nSleipnir took a step into the lab and then stopped dead. \"Whoof! What is that smell?\"\n\n\"Ah! There's this girl, a Miss Clay\u2014\"\n\nHe turned and found himself face to face with a furious Agatha who grabbed his shirtfront and shook him like a terrier shaking a rat. \"I have had quite enough of your public opinions about how I smell, Herr Wulfenbach!\" She snarled, and so saying, she hauled off and smacked him across the face. \"I'll face that Von Pinn again before I take any help from you!\"\n\nBefore the stunned young man could say anything, she was off down the corridor at a dead run.\n\n\"No! Wait!\" Gil pulled himself to the doorway. \"Because of your redesign of the engine\u2014\" She was gone. He turned to Theo, who had an amused look on his face. \"Because of her redesign, I can use this great new fuel additive, but it really stinks and I\u2014\"\n\nTheo patted him on the shoulder. \"You still have that fine touch with the ladies, I see.\" The others grinned.\n\n\"GET IN THE VAT!\" Gil snapped.\n\nAgatha stomped along muttering to herself. \"\u2014and then we'll see how he likes smelling that! Get me to a chemical lab and I'll brew up something that will make that pompous jerk wish he'd never been born!\"\n\nHaving got that off of her chest, Agatha surfaced from her thoughts, took note of her surroundings and stopped dead. She was in a dimly lit side corridor. A part of her brain had noted that there had been fewer and fewer people in the corridors she had passed through, and for some time now, she had traveled alone. She briefly considered turning around, but rationalized that as she had no idea where she was, retracing her steps could only aid any lingering pursuers.\n\nShe pushed on, through long winding corridors lined with sealed and locked hatchways, and the occasional large space filled with enigmatic machinery, which hissed and gurgled as she passed. There were no signs, no labels, and nobody else. Initially she would have avoided another person, but now she was actively calling out, trying to find anyone at all. At yet another unlabeled crossways, she stopped and glared at where, logically, a sign should have been.\n\n\"This is ridiculous. Somebody must come through here.\" No one, however, conveniently did so.\n\nShe passed a series of open store-rooms. Dimly lit vaults full of drums and bales. She turned a corner and saw a light wink out from a doorway halfway down the long corridor. Someone was here! Agatha broke into a run and called out, \"Hello? Please wait, I'm lost. Hello?\" But there was no answer, and indeed, no sign of anyone when she reached the doorway in question.\n\n\"I know I saw a light,\" Agatha muttered to herself. She reached around and found the power switch in the usual place and threw it. There was a snap, and the room filled with the harsh white glare of the overhead lamps. Agatha was taken aback. This light was different from the dimmer, more golden light she'd seen. The room was filled with giant spools containing bolts of the crusty, metallic fabric that sheathed Castle Wulfenbach. There was no sound. Agatha felt herself beginning to get annoyed. She stepped in and looked around. The idea that she had been mistaken never entered her head. She came to the end of an aisle of spools, turned, and stared.\n\nLaid out on the floor of the aisle was a collection of debris that was obviously out of place. Such untidiness was doubly shocking after the neatness and order that was rigorously maintained everywhere else aboard the great airship. Agatha was about to go when she noticed that in the middle of the pile was a large ship's lamp. On a hunch, she went over to it and gently touched the metal hood, snatching her hand back at the heat. There was someone here!\n\nQuickly she stood and looked about. She took a step and noticed the ringing sound her foot made upon the deck. She'd heard nothing like that as she approached, so unless the mysterious garbage collector was wearing naught but socks upon their feet, there was nowhere else to go but\u2014\n\nAgatha whipped her head upwards, causing the large white cat that was watching her to jump upwards in surprise.\n\nShe puffed a lock of hair out of her face in annoyance, and looked back at the objects at her feet. She looked again. Odd, from here, it was obvious that the objects were not haphazardly strewn about. They had been laid out quite deliberately. A book caught her eye. It was an open comb-bound manual. Upon examination, Agatha realized that it was an instruction manual for flying one of Castle Wulfenbach's small inspection airships. Excitement seized her. This was exactly what Agatha needed! She examined the line drawings that showed the airship controls. They looked fairly simple and\u2014\n\nAgatha paused, looked again at the debris on the floor, and then re-examined the drawing in the book. There was no mistake. Someone had meticulously re-created the control panels out of various found objects. The inference was obvious. Someone else was surreptitiously trying to learn how to fly one of the small airships.\n\nNow Agatha felt conflicted. Yes, she desperately needed to get off of the airship, but here was evidence that someone else had the same need. Who knew what their reasons were. She thought fiercely for a moment, hugging the book to her chest. Then she spoke up. \"I need to get off of this airship,\" she said loudly. Her voice echoed through the vast room. She listened intently, but heard nothing. \"My parents need me, and the Baron won't let me help find them. This book, the airship instruction manual, will help me get off of this ship, so I'm taking it.\"\n\nSilence. Agatha noticed that the cat, which had been watching her all this time, was lashing its tail in an agitated manner. \"Sorry, kitty,\" she said, \"I'll be out of here shortly.\" The cat hissed at her.\n\nAgatha again called out, \"If you still need this book, speak up now, and we can work together. My companion and I just need to get down to the ground safely. Your reasons are your own.\"\n\nAgain there was nothing.\n\n\"Okay. I've done my best.\" However she still had a twinge of guilt as she tucked the book within her jacket. Looking around, half expecting someone to appear at any moment, she exited the room, switching off the light as she did so, and continued down the hallway. Atop the stack of fabric, the cat stared balefully at the doorway and, with a savage swipe of its claws, tore a great rent in the fabric at its feet.\n\nBuoyed by her discovery, Agatha quickly realized that her immediate situation hadn't really improved. This was driven home by her arrival at yet another desolate, uninformative intersection. She sighed. \"I guess I'll just keep going until I meet somebody or run out of dirigible.\"\n\nThis decision made, she squared her shoulders, picked a corridor at random and strode off, turned a corner, and came to a blank wall.\n\nShe regarded it with disapproval, turned about and marched off, stopping after she had taken two steps. She turned back. \"That's stupid. Why put in a corridor that leads up to a dead end? There must be something here\u2026\"\n\nAs she glared at the wall, one of the rivets surrounding the edge caught her eye. It looked\u2026 different. Experimentally she pushed it, and was rewarded with a dull CHONK noise, and the wall swung open with a faint squeeee.\n\nAgatha grinned, stepped through, and found herself at the lip of a vast pit. She windmilled her arms, barely keeping her balance upon the small ledge that surrounded it.\n\nThe room itself was lit by the lights of some odd-looking machinery that lined the far wall. Agatha noted that there was a much larger floor, as well as another door, on the other side, so she was preparing to inch her way around the pit, when a deep booming voice addressed her from the darkness.\n\n\"Ah! You must be the Villain's Beautiful But Misguided Daughter!\" She almost lost her balance again.\n\nWhen she had stabilized herself, she looked up. Agatha saw a large burly man suspended over the pit by an excessive number of chains. A vast complex of devices were attached to various points on his head, and an obvious bomb had been attached to his feet. He smiled at Agatha engagingly. \"You're just in time!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\u2003\"J\u00e4germonsters are hard to kill, because the devil don't want them in Hell.\" \u2014Peasant saying\n\n\"I'm the what?\"\n\n\"You're the Baron's beautiful daughter, surely.\"\n\n\"I am not the Baron's daughter.\"\n\nThe hanging man looked nonplused for a moment. His brow furrowed around the visor that hid his eyes. \"Are you sure? I'm usually very good at spotting the offspring of evil geniuses\u2026\" Then his face cleared. \"Ah! Then you must be the plucky lab assistant here to set me free!\"\n\nAgatha began to feel like she was on stage and didn't know her lines. \"I'm sorry, who are you?\"\n\nThe man grinned and, astonishingly, managed to make himself look imposing, even restrained as he was. \"Ah, allow me to introduce myself. I am Othar Tryggvassen\u2014Gentleman Adventurer!\" He smiled modestly. \"Perhaps you've heard of me. I'm told the stories are getting around.\"\n\nAgatha felt her feeling of unreality increase. \"Othar. The Othar. The man who defeated the wooden warriors of Dr. Krause.\"\n\n\"That would be me, yes.\"\n\n\"The hero who saved the hamlet of Lunkhauser from the ever-widening moat.\"\n\n\"The very same.\"\n\n\"The savior of the town of Mount Horeb from the rain of mustard.\"\n\nOthar's grin slid off his face. He chewed his lip. \"I\u2026 uh\u2026 I'm afraid you have me on that one.\"\n\nAgatha nodded approvingly. \"I made it up.\" She peered down the shaft below. Much to her surprise, the bottom was quite visible, as were the gigantic gears that would swiftly grind anything that fell into them into a fine lubricating paste. She looked back at the again grinning Othar. \"You don't seem too worried about\u2026\" She gestured downwards.\n\n\"About being a prisoner in a seemingly hopeless predicament? Well I'd be lying if I said it wasn't inconvenient, but I'll escape eventually. I am the hero, after all, and you are just what I need!\"\n\n\"An audience?\"\n\n\"Ye\u2014no! You can be my spunky girl sidekick. I'm fresh out at the moment. Release me and we'll blow up the Baron's Dirigible of Doom, escape by the skin of our teeth, and then it's cocoa and schnapps all around!\"\n\nAgatha folded her arms. \"'Spunky girl sidekick.'\"\n\n\"Sure! It'll be fun!\"\n\nAgatha nodded and began to resume her edging around the pit towards the far door. \"Look, no offense,\" she said, \"but I've been around Sparks and their labs most of my life.\"\n\nOthar's grin faltered. \"Oh?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh, and I'd rather not end up being the Easily Duped Minion Who Sets the Insanely Dangerous Experiment free. Or the Hostage Who Ensures the Smooth-Talking Villain's escape.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026\"\n\n\"I don't have any proof that you really are Othar Tryggvassen, or even that you're really human.\"\n\n\"Er\u2026\"\n\nAgatha reached the far side and dusted herself off. \"This Girl Sidekick job doesn't call for a lot of smarts, does it?\"\n\nThe hanging man had the grace to look embarrassed. \"Um\u2026 Not as such, no, but no matter who or what I am, is it right to leave a fellow sentient strung up like this?\"\n\nAgatha considered this. \"That depends on the nature of the experiment.\"\n\nOthar frowned. \"I think you spent a little too much time in those labs.\"\n\nAgatha looked surprised. \"Really? Why?\"\n\nThe door behind her slammed open. \"Vot is all dis yakkink\u2014\"A J\u00e4germonster shambled through the door and stopped dead upon seeing Agatha. \"GOTT'S LEEDLE FEESH IN TROUSERS!\"\n\nHe rushed over to Agatha as another monster soldier entered and surveyed the prisoner. \"Anodder shtupid easily duped minion!\" He waved at Othar. \"Don't you know dis iz an insanely dangerous guy?\"\n\n\"I knew that!\" Agatha responded defensively.\n\nThe other J\u00e4ger turned towards them. \"He's shtill secure.\" He jerked a large thumb over to the other side of the pit, where the door that Agatha had used to enter still swung open. \"She came in throo dot idiotic secret door. Dey gots to get rid of dot ting. Vell, let's just keel her.\" He turned towards Agatha. \"Ve ain't suppozed to let anybody in here,\" he said apologetically.\n\n\"Fiends!\" roared Othar. \"Kill her and I'll tell the Baron!\"\n\n\"Vell mebbe ve keel you too, schmot guy.\"\n\nThe other J\u00e4germonster began to look troubled. \"Gorb\u2026\"\n\n\"Vat?\"\n\n\"Gorb, dis iz turnink into von of dose plenz\u2026 The kind vere ve keel efferbody dot notices dot ve's keelink pipple?\"\n\nGorb deflated slightly. \"It is?\"\n\nThe other J\u00e4ger nodded and slung a friendly paw over Gorb's shoulders. \"Uh-huh. Und how do dose alvays end?\"\n\nGorb muttered, \"The dirigible is in flames, everybody's dead, an' I've lost my hat.\"\n\nHis friend smiled. \"Dot's right! Und any plan vere you lose your hat iz\u2014?\"\n\nGorb struggled for a second. \"A bad plan?\" he ventured.\n\nThat earned him a slap on the back. \"Right again!\"\n\n\"Look\u2014\" Agatha broke in impatiently, \"How about you don't kill me, and I won't mention that you let me get in.\"\n\nGorb looked troubled. \"But\u2026\"\n\nHis companion beamed. \"Hoy! Excellent! Vut a schmot gurl!\"\n\nGorb spoke up. \"Stosh, you mean dis iz vun of dose plenz vere ve dun keel hennybody?\"\n\nStosh nodded glumly. \"Yop. 'Fraid so.\" He turned to Agatha and leered. \"Zo, howzabout I ezcort hyu beck to you qvarters, Meez\u2014?\"\n\n\"Clay,\" she responded automatically. \"Agatha Clay.\"\n\nThe J\u00e4germonsters stared at each other in astonishment. Gorb looked sheepish. Stosh smacked him in the head. \"See? See?\" he roared. \"Dis iz vhy dot 'keelink evverbody' plan iz no goot! Hyu never know, now do hyu?\" Another smack on the head.\n\n\"Know what?\" asked Agatha.\n\nStosh and Gorb spun to face her. \"Ve has orders regadink a meez 'Agatha Clay.'\"\n\nThere was something different about him. About them both. With a chill she realized what it was. Nothing she could actually point a finger to, but they weren't\u2026 funny anymore.\n\n\"O\u2026 orders? What orders?\" she asked. A tiny analytical part of her brain wondered how much of their daily behavior was an act put on to put those around them at ease.\n\nStosh shattered the mood by whooping and sweeping Agatha up over his head. \"I gots to take hyu to a party!\" And with a loud \"Wheeeee!\" scurried off with her down the hall.\n\nOthar and Gorb stared after them for a moment until Othar sighed and remarked conversationally, \"No one ever takes me to parties.\"\n\nGorb looked at him and smiled. \"Ve haff our own party. Hyu ken be da pi\u00f1ata!\"\n\nAfter being rushed along several halls, Agatha realized exactly where the J\u00e4germonster was holding her and demanded loudly to be put down. He did so with a laugh and they proceeded onwards.\n\n\"Zo. Agatha Clay, hyu iz da gurl who helped Master Gilgamesh fly smek into General Khrizhan's qvarters?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 I\u2026\" she saw the look of amusement in the soldier's eyes and gave up any thought of pretense. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Heh heh. I bet he vas sooprized. So vat heppened?\"\n\n\"Your Master Gilgamesh was doing the steering, and he\u2026\" she paused, and grudgingly amended her narrative, \"we didn't look where we were going and plowed right into the Castle. We smashed through the wall into your general's room. He was sitting in a chair reading a book and we skidded right into him and he reached out with one hand and WHAP\u2014\"she clapped her hands, \"we stopped dead. Can you believe that?\"\n\nStosh's face was filled with wonder. \"You saw him do dat?\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Amazing, huh?\"\n\nThe J\u00e4germonster just shook his head. \"Reading a book. Da tings hyu gots to do ven yous a general.\"\n\n\"HALT!\" The order came from behind them. They turned to see a Lackya hurrying up to them.\n\nAgatha turned to look at her companion and saw that he looked\u2026 stupider. It was something about the face\u2026\n\n\"Vot hyu vant?\" he asked the footman. The newcomer drew himself up and sniffed disapprovingly at the soldier.\n\n\"There was an intrusion in one of the Baron's labs. Equipment was damaged. I am to bring in all personnel that I find in this sector.\"\n\nThe J\u00e4germonster slowly scratched his jaw while glancing at Agatha. She realized that she was acting nervous and forced herself to relax. \"Vos de Baron hurt?\"\n\n\"No one was hurt, but valuable equipment was damaged, and we were ordered to find the culprits.\" Unseen by the footman, the J\u00e4ger's mouth twitched upwards approvingly.\n\nHe slowly turned back. \"Hovell, den itz not impawtent. Schtuff break all de time. Goot luck.\" He turned to Agatha. \"Letz go.\"\n\nThe footman darted forward, reaching for Agatha. \"You will both come with me now!\"\n\nAgatha did not see the J\u00e4ger move, but suddenly the footman's hand was grasped within the soldier's paw. The footman hissed, exposing fangs that caused Agatha to take a step back in surprise.\n\n\"I dun gotta answer to hyu,\" the J\u00e4ger said lazily, \"and dis gurl iz vit me, so hyu dun gotta vorry about her needer.\"\n\nThe footman's arm suddenly twisted and his hand was free. The J\u00e4ger was surprised, but covered it instantly. The footman smirked. \"All personnel in this sector includes\u2014\"\n\nThe J\u00e4ger interrupted him. \"To be 'personnel,' hyu gots to be 'person.' I is J\u00e4gerkin, vitch is better. Vere as hyu is jumped-up lackey boy mit delusions of authority.\"\n\nThe footman began to vibrate and started hissing. His eyes swiveled towards Agatha. \"You will come with me\u2014\"\n\nAgatha took a step backwards, and felt her hand deftly tucked into the crook of the J\u00e4germonster's arm. \"De lady has chosen. Now ve gots to be goink.\"\n\nThe footman stood and stared at them until they turned the corner. Agatha looked at the J\u00e4ger beside her. He was obviously thinking hard. \"You won't get in trouble, will you?\"\n\nStosh looked at her in surprise and grinned. \"Trouble?\" His tongue shot out for a quick raspberry. \"The Lackya are veak.\" He glanced back at Agatha. A troubled look crossed his features. \"But dey is vindictive. Vatch out for dem. Ve do not know how dangerous dey is yet.\"\n\n\"You don't?\"\n\n\"Mm. De Baron inherited dem ven ve smacked down de Gilded Duke last year. Dey is zuper-engineered sqvirrels or zumting. Dey gots to serve somebody, so de Baron has dem delivering messages and annoying pipple. He keeps dem busy.\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Ah, like he took in the J\u00e4gerkin after the Heterodynes disappeared.\"\n\nStosh grabbed her and swung her about until they were faceto-face. \"Iz not like dot at ALL!\" he roared.\n\nHe would obviously have said more, but a large door next to them opened, and the massive form of General Khrizhan filled the doorway. \"Vot iz dis shoutink?\" he rumbled.\n\nStosh snapped to attention. \"Dis iz Mizz Agatha Clay, who smells verra nize, but tinks der Baron iz kippink uz like dose poncy useless Lackya.\" He thought for a moment. \"Sir,\" he added.\n\nThe general stared at Agatha through narrowed eyes. \"She sees dot, does she?\" He stared for another moment and then closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. \"Thank you, Stosh, I vill talk to her. Beck to hyu post.\"\n\nStosh grinned triumphantly at Agatha. \"Hah! Hyu tell her, sir!\" With that he wheeled about and strode off.\n\nAgatha and the general looked at each other for a moment, then the J\u00e4gergeneral pushed the door open further. \"I tink dat der are tings ve should tell each odder, Meez Agatha Clay. Pliz to com inside.\"\n\nIt was a different room from the one that Agatha and Gil had crashed through earlier. It was smaller and cozier, with a large ceramic stove warming the room. An enormous brass samovar hissed upon a table. Agatha glanced at it and saw, to her shock, that it was decorated with naked female demons. Trying to find someplace else to set her eyes, she discovered that all of the walls were filled with paintings and drawings of a similar nature. She settled for staring at her shoes, realizing belatedly that she did not want to examine the pattern on the rug underneath them too closely.\n\nGeneral Khrizhan coughed, and Agatha thought he sounded embarrassed. \"Hy must apologize for the decor. General Zog does not belief dot age, or de dignity of his office, should interfere vit a rich fantasy life.\"\n\n\"Dose are memories, Alexi, un don hyu forget it!\"\n\nStartled, Agatha's head snapped up and saw two other creatures entering the room. The one that had spoken was shorter than General Khrizhan, but was obviously older. The fur that covered his body was snow white, and his teeth were yellow and uneven in his mouth. His clothing looked like it belonged, not to a soldier, but some sort of barbarian warlord. Despite his evident age, however, he moved with a fluidity that Agatha found hard to follow. The effect was startling.\n\nThe last creature was the oddest of all. For one thing, he was gigantic, even next to General Khrizhan, towering a full four meters tall. His mouth was easily a meter wide and filled with what appeared to be hundreds of small sharp teeth. Thick brass goggles hid his eyes, and a small brass dome, scratched and battered by the passage of the years, appeared to be screwed directly onto his skull. His large hands ended in small, delicately clawed fingers. General Khrizhan gestured towards them.\n\n\"Dis iz General Zog\u2014\" The ancient J\u00e4gergeneral nodded his head while keeping his eyes locked on Agatha.\n\n\"And dis iz General Goomblast.\" The tall monster executed a perfect courtier's bow that he had evidently been practicing for the last three hundred years.\n\nHis voice was a surprisingly pleasant contralto. \"And dis must be de Meez Agatha Clay dot made such an impression on our compatriot. Velcome.\"\n\nGeneral Zog spoke up. His voice rasped and buzzed like his voicebox was constructed from shoe leather and horn. \"Vas hyu involved in dis trouble in der Baron's lab?\" he asked.\n\nAgatha looked at the three creatures. Would they know if she lied? Agatha didn't lie, as a rule. If for no other reason than she had discovered that she wasn't very good at it. \"Well\u2026 it was an accident,\" she confessed. All three of the generals broke into huge grins.\n\n\"Ho!\" Zog slapped her on the back, almost sending Agatha into a wall. \"En exident!\" He leaned in and spoke confidentially. \"Vun ting de J\u00e4gerkin understand is dat krezy exidents heppen, right, boyz?\"\n\n\"Hoo boy, yaz\"\n\n\"Dot's de trooth.\"\n\nAgatha could well imagine. \"Yes, that's all very good, but why am I here?\"\n\nGeneral Khrizhan opened a large cabinet and pulled out a small chest that Agatha recognized with a start as one from the Clays' home in Beetleburg. Opening it up she discovered\u2014\"My clothes! My stuff!\"\n\nGeneral Goomblast nodded. \"It vas collected ven you vas taken from Beetleburg. Somehow, it vas mizplaced, und ve just discovered it. Ve thought hyu vould vant it as soon as possible.\"\n\nAgatha nodded happily, but as she repacked the outfits, her movement slowed and her brow furrowed. \"Yes\u2026 but you could have just sent them to the dormitory.\"\n\nGeneral Khrizhan shrugged as he fiddled with the controls on the samovar. \"Oh. Yaz, I suppose hyu is right. Oh vell. Vould hyu like sum tea? To make op for de inconvenience?\"\n\nAgatha realized that she was hungry again. How could that be? \"Oh, I\u2026\"\n\n\"Ve effen t'row in sopper.\"\n\n\"But I\u2026\" Agatha's stomach growled. \"Supper?\"\n\nGeneral Goomblast offered her a silver platter piled high with warm tea cakes. Agatha could see that some were stuffed with custard and jelly, sprinkled with nuts and topped with a thick sugary glaze. Some appeared to be covered in thick chocolate, and a few were evidently stuffed with fruit. A second plate appeared, covered with warm pastries that Agatha could smell were stuffed with savory meats and baked cheeses. \"Iz goot! Ve not eat bugs. I svear!\"\n\nGeneral Zog looked at his plate disappointedly. \"No bugs?\" General Khrizhan shushed him with a glare.\n\nAgatha smiled nervously and graciously plucked a small meat pastry from the tray and gingerly nibbled at it. Onions and spices she was unfamiliar with suffused her mouth and she let out a muffled, happy squeak. It was delicious. Intensely so. In three bites it was gone.\n\nGeneral Goomblast was obviously pleased. He poured her a cup of tea and gestured towards the platter. \"Hyu like? Take anodder.\"\n\nAgatha looked longingly at the platter, but the manners that Lilith had drilled into her stayed her hand. \"Oh, I couldn't\u2014\" she began, but was stopped by General Zog's reaching forward, tilting the platter, and dumping half of the cakes upon Agatha's plate.\n\n\"Degorl is starffing,\" he said conversationally as he put the tray back down. Turning to Agatha he said, \"In enemy territory hyu neffer know ven you is gonna eat. Don't pass up an opportunity.\" With that he scooped up the remaining cakes in one hand and dumped them into his mouth.\n\nGeneral Khrizhan took a deep breath and smiled alarmingly at Agatha. \"General Zog has been a varrior longer dan any uf us. He see sefferyting in terms of\u2026practicality.\" He gestured at Agatha's plate. \"Dis doz not mean dot he iz wrong. Please eat up.\"\n\nGeneral Goomblast had stared at the empty platter for a second, sighed in disappointment, and from a sideboard produced an enormous cake pan. Lifting the lid allowed the spicy odor of gingerbread to begin filling the room. A crock on the table was opened, revealing its contents to be thick yellow whipped cream. The large creature showed Agatha how to stir a spoonful into her tea, which, he informed her, came from a friend of the Baron's in China.\n\nAfter some steady eating, Agatha felt herself starting to relax, a fact the three J\u00e4gers noted.\n\n\"Zo, my dear Meez Clay,\" Goomblast began while refilling her cup, \"vere iz hyu family from?\"\n\nAgatha looked at him warily. \"Beetleburg?\"\n\n\"Iz dot so? Mine people still liff in Mechanicsburg.\"\n\n\"Ah. The Heterodynes' home. Of course. I've never been there, but I always wanted to go.\" Despite her reservations, the very inanity of the topic was reassuring, Agatha found herself relaxing and discussing the various merits of different towns. Off to one side, the other two generals quietly sipped their tea and observed.\n\nGeneral Khrizhan leaned closer to the older J\u00e4ger and muttered behind his hand. \"Vot you tink?\"\n\nGeneral Zog glanced at him and snorted. \"Hy don gotta tink.\n\nHy knew ven hy smelt her clothing.\" He considered Agatha with a scowl. \"Could be a forgotten second cousin, or a by-blow\u2026\"\n\n\"A by-blow? Dem?\"\n\nZog smiled at his colleagues' astonishment. \"Dey vas hooman.\"\n\nKhrizhan nodded reluctantly. \"De kestle vould know,\" he said quietly.\n\nZog shook his head. \"De kestle iz mad. Dyink. Useless.\"\n\nKhrizhan's shoulders slumped. \"Den it iz op to us.\" He leaned into the conversation, which had come to a lull. \"Tell us about you parents.\"\n\nInstantly a wall of suspicion slammed down behind Agatha's eyes. \"My father's a blacksmith, and my mother gives piano lessons. I'm worried about them,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Yez. Dey haff disappeared und ve cannot find dem. Dey obviously do not vant to be found, but dey vould vant to know dot hyu vas safe, jah?\" Khrizhan shook his massive head. \"Iz qvite puzzling.\"\n\n\"They're probably hiding,\" Agatha admitted. \"They don't\u2026 trust the Baron.\"\n\nGoomblast waved a hand dismissively. \"Who does? Ve's used to pipple hidink. Vat's strenge iz dot we cannot find dem.\"\n\nAgatha absorbed this information and deliberately reached for another tea cake. There were few left. \"These are very good,\" she said, and smiled at Goomblast, who frowned at her in annoyance.\n\nGeneral Zog, who had been pacing around the room, dropped into the chair next to Agatha. He smelled like ancient leather boiled in vinegar.\n\n\"Zo,\" he said brusquely, \"hyu vent flyink mit der young master.\" He leaned closer. \"Vot hyu tink of him?\"\n\nAgatha flushed. \"Well\u2026\" she struggled for words. As she did so, the general's nostrils flared, and a smile crossed his features. General Khrizhan's hand smacked the back of his head, sending Zog's fez flying.\n\n\"Vot kind of schtupid qvestion is dot?\" Khrizhan roared.\n\n\"Vell it vould make tings really simple if\u2014\"\n\n\"I know vat hyu is tinking! Bot hyu ain't tinking tinking!\"\n\n\"Tinking iz overrated!\" Zog roared, and tapped his nose. \"Dis tells me\u2014\"\n\nKhrizhan grabbed Zog's vest and shook him violently. \"Be qviet you idiot!\"\n\nAgatha scrunched down in her seat as the generals roared about her. Two delicate furry hands effortlessly scooped her up and deposited her before the door. \"I tink hyu better go,\" General Goomblast muttered.\n\nAgatha picked up the box with her belongings. \"Did I say something wrong?\"\n\nGoomblast smiled at her in what he thought was a reassuring manner. \"No, no, madam waz qvite charmink. But ve gonna haf a leedle discussion now, and dey can get kind ov loud.\" He opened the door and called out, \"Minsc!\"\n\nA tall J\u00e4gersoldier with a particularly toothy grin appeared and snapped to attention. \"Yezzir?\"\n\nGoomblast pushed Agatha forward. \"Dis iz Meez Clay. See dot she's get beck safely to\u2014\"\n\nA scream of rage from within the room was all the warning they got as the samovar caromed off of the back of the general's head. Spinning about, Goomblast's head appeared to split in half as his mouth opened wider than Agatha would have thought possible. A scream like tearing metal filled the hallway and the J\u00e4gergeneral leapt back into the room, slamming the door behind him. Minsc grabbed Agatha's arm and dragged her down the hall. \"Ve go now,\" he advised.\n\nThe sound of breaking furniture followed them down the hall, until there was a sudden final shattering of glass and then silence. Minsc turned to Agatha and grinned. \"Zo. Vere to, dollink?\"\n\n\"Um\u2026 the student dormitories?\"\n\nMinsc brightened. \"Ho! Excellent!\" He licked his hand with a purple tongue and slicked back his hair. \"Mebbe I see my sveetie.\"\n\nAgatha stopped dead. \"Your\u2014who?\"\n\n\"De gorgeous Von Pinn.\"\n\n\"Your sweetheart is Von Pinn? The Von Pinn is your sweetheart.\" No matter how many times she said it, it still sounded wrong.\n\nMinsc shrugged slightly. \"Vell, if youz gonnaget technical about it, not yet. But I am confident dot she vill pick me!\"\n\n\"Pick you out of what?\"\n\n\"All of der J\u00e4germonstern iz desirous of her,\" he confided. \"She iz zo sharp\u2026 zo dangerous, like a pudding bag full uf knives!\" He growled at the thought.\n\nAgatha swallowed. \"Ah. And that's good is it?\"\n\nMinsc's eyes went misty and a beatific smile played across his face. He sighed. \"Tvice I haff felt de touch uf her hand as it caressed my face.\" He pointed proudly. \"See der scars? Vunce her elbow lingered as it vas buried in mine kidney. And vunce, ven her teeth seek mine throat, I gaze into her eyes und\u2014\"\n\n\"You're crazy!\" Agatha screamed, \"She was trying to kill you!\"\n\nMinsc stared at her and then his face slid into a sly, knowing grin. \"Ho, ho, ho. Hyu iz still a leedle gurl in der vays of luff.\" He patted her shoulder. \"Hyu vill learn.\"\n\nAgatha swallowed. \"I sure hope not.\" She looked up. To her surprise, they had already arrived at the dormitory door. \"Thanks. I guess\u2014\"\n\n\"Miss Clay! Don't move!\"\n\nAgatha and Minsc whirled and saw Von Pinn racing towards them, her hands outstretched, a look of fury on her face.\n\nAgatha squeaked in alarm and froze. Minsc grinned and stepped forward while pushing Agatha through the doorway. \"Hyu moof along now, kiddo.\"\n\n\"But she's after me.\"\n\n\"Hee heh,\" Minsc smirked as he straightened his hat. \"I guarantee dot a kees from me vill make her forgets all about hyu!\"\n\nVon Pinn was almost on them and Minsc stepped forward into the crazed construct's outstretched arms. \"Hey beautiful, it's me, you Minsc!\"\n\n\"MOVE OR DIE!\"\n\n\"Whoo! Already mit der sveet tok!\"\n\nAt this point the massive door closed behind Agatha and all she heard was a sound that reminded her of a fight she'd witnessed in the biological oddities lab when a soon-to-be-deceased lab assistant had neglected to lock a number of cage doors. A large object slammed into the door, shaking Agatha out of her shock. She raced into the main room and saw a plump young man sporting a yarmulke coming out of the kitchen clutching a large number of bottles. She ran up to him. \"Von Pinn is killing one of the J\u00e4germonsters!\"\n\nThe young man raised an eyebrow. \"Oh. So?\"\n\n\"So we've got to help!\"\n\nHe considered this for a second, then shook his head. \"I think Von Pinn can handle them by herself.\"\n\nAgatha thought she was going mad. \"No,\" she explained through clenched teeth, \"we've got to help him.\"\n\nThe light dawned. \"Oh!\" He then turned back to the stairway. \"No, I don't think so.\"\n\nAgatha raced around him and pointed at the door, where the noise had grown even more frenzied. \"Can't you hear that?\"\n\nThe young man looked at her patiently. \"That's what I mean,\" he explained. \"It's taking much too long. If she really wanted to kill him, it would be over very quickly. She's just warning him off.\" A pained squeal rose through the air and was cut off with a sharp wet sound. \"Ah, Minsc. I should've guessed.\"\n\nAgatha stared at him. \"Oh.\" She leaned wearily against the wall. \"This is a very strange place,\" she observed.\n\nThe young man considered this. \"You think so? I don't get out much.\" He awkwardly shifted his load of bottles so that he could stick out a hand. \"I'm Hezekiah Donewitz.\" Agatha gingerly shook his hand. \"You must be Agatha,\" he continued. \"You should come to Theo's room. Gil is here! He's telling us about Paris.\"\n\nAgatha scowled. \"I wouldn't\u2014\"\n\nHezekiah interrupted her. \"Aw, come on!\" He jiggled the load of bottles. \"We're going to reinvent the corkscrew. You can help! I hear you're brilliant at systems analysis.\"\n\nAgatha blinked. \"What?\"\n\n\"Sure. Gilgamesh said you really improved his flying machine.\"\n\n\"He did?\"\n\n\"Yeah. He says you're really smart.\" He leaned forward: \"I think he really likes you.\"\n\nAgatha looked closely at Hezekiah's face, but could detect no trace of irony. Her head felt funny and she desperately wanted to sit down, and the last thing she wanted to do was face Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. \"I'm afraid I'm so tired that I don't think I could stay awake if he was telling you about his trip to\u2026 to America by way of the moon. I'm sure I'll hear all about it tomorrow.\"\n\nHezekiah shrugged with a clink. \"Fair enough, from what I'd heard, you've had a busy day. Good night.\"\n\nAgatha realized that it had been a busy day, and as she climbed the short stairway to her room, felt weariness drop onto her like a blanket.\n\nOn the wall next to each of the bedroom doors, Agatha had noticed a set of thin metal pockets mounted to the wall, labeled with the occupant's name. As she approached her door, she saw that the second pocket had been labeled with her name, and that there was an envelope within. She unfolded it and found a notification that in the morning, she was to report to Minor Mechanical Workshop Number 311. There was a map showing the way from the dormitory. She studied it a moment and then realized that she was swaying slightly.\n\nShe pushed open the door and was startled to see a large white cat eating off of a tray of food that had been left on the desk of the room's other occupant. In a flurry of white, the cat leapt down and vanished under the other bed.\n\nAgatha got down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed. Two large glowing green eyes stared back. \"Hiya, cat,\" she said. The cat scrunched itself further back into the corner.\n\nAgatha sat back on her knees. \"How many cats do they have running around here anyway? Well, you don't want to come out? Suit yourself.\"\n\nThe door opened and a tall, aristocratic-looking young lady walked in. She had a long, thin face, pale skin, and an elegant mass of long auburn curls. Her outfit was a standard Wulfenbach overall, but it had been tailored to fit, and shiny brass buttons replaced the regular issue. From the state of her outfit, it was apparent that she had been engaged in heavy labor. Upon seeing Agatha, she stopped dead. In an eyeblink her tiredness had vanished and was replaced by an air of graciousness. \"Ah, you are awake. You may rise.\"\n\nAgatha realized that she was still on her knees and hastily scrambled to her feet.\n\n\"I am Her Highness, Zulenna Luzhakna, a princess of HofnungBorzoi. We are to be roommates, it appears.\" She extended a hand. \"And you are?\"\n\n\"Agatha Clay.\"\n\nA faint frown flitted across Zulenna's face and the hand was smoothly withdrawn. \"Clay,\" she mused. \"Not a\u2026 noble house. Which member of your family possesses the Spark?\"\n\n\"Ah, none of them. My father's a blacksmith,\" she offered hopefully.\n\n\"A blacksmith. How utilitarian.\" Zulenna sat down on her bed and surveyed Agatha. \"So, why are you here?\"\n\n\"Baron Wulfenbach captured my\u2026 my boyfriend. He's a Spark.\"\n\n\"A captured\u2026\" Zulenna's eyes narrowed. \"Do you mean Moloch von Zinzer?\"\n\n\"You've heard of him?\"\n\n\"I keep tabs on all of the Sparks aboard Castle Wulfenbach. So you are Herr von Zinzer's bed warmer.\" She jumped up, obviously greatly annoyed, and leaned into Agatha. \"I have heard about you, and I trust there will be no nonsense within this room.\"\n\nAgatha found that she was so tired that her outrage barely flickered. \"Look,\" she said evenly, \"there seems to be a mistaken impression that I'm some sort of\u2014\"\n\n\"How dare you!\" Zulenna interrupted furiously. Startled, Agatha saw that she was holding the tray she'd seen the cat eating from. \"This was my dinner. I work the late shift. The kitchen is closed! It was on my desk! How dare you touch it! And how dare you make such a mess!\" Indeed, food was scattered across the desktop.\n\n\"Oh, now wait a minute!\" Agatha objected hotly, \"I didn't touch your stuff. The cat was up on the desk eating it when I came in!\"\n\nZulenna cocked an eyebrow. \"What cat?\"\n\n\"I thought it was yours. It's a big white cat. It's under your bed.\"\n\nZulenna looked at Agatha for a moment, a look of uncertainty passed over her face, and she gracefully dropped to her knees and raised the coverlet to peer under the bed. When her head came back up, she was glaring furiously. \"You can't even lie competently.\"\n\n\"What?\" Agatha looked under the bed. No cat. Hurriedly she looked under her bed. No cat. A quick look around the small room showed that there was certainly no place a cat could hide, and she knew it hadn't left when Zulenna opened the door\u2026\n\n\"But it was there!\" Agatha looked under Zulenna's bed again. A small, flat underbed chest, which would have to be removed to be opened, and a ventilation grate were all that were to be seen.\n\n\"There's a ventilation grate here, maybe it\u2014\"\n\nZulenna's hand snapped down and whipped the coverlet out of Agatha's hand. Her voice was icy with disdain. \"That vent cover is held in place with two snaps. I doubt that any cat, even one as fabulous as the one you saw, could open them. Therefore I must conclude that in addition to being a person of low moral character, you are a liar as well as a thief. I expect nothing less from the lower classes, but I'll be damned if I will sleep in the same room with you. I imagine your parents expected you to sleep in the foundry; I suggest\u2014\"\n\nThe smack to her face caught Zulenna by surprise. The force of it spun her around causing her to slam into the wall. Before she could recover, she found herself hoisted up off the floor by an Agatha who was radiating rage.\n\nAgatha felt the fury roaring through her body like a lightning storm. A part of her realized that she had never been allowed to be this angry before. Whenever she got mad, a headache seemed to come along to snuff out the rage. But not this time. For the first time in her life, Agatha could vent all the fury that she was capable of feeling, and a part of her reveled in it. She screamed as years of pent-up emotions found voice.\n\nZulenna had been about to deliver a solid kick to Agatha's stomach, but an older part of her brain looked into Agatha's face, overrode her conscious mind, and she stopped struggling and went limp.\n\n\"One thing my parents taught me,\" Agatha said in a voice that set off fresh alarms, \"was that nobody gets to badmouth my family. I will tell you this one last time. I didn't eat your dinner. There was a cat. I have had a very long day. And I am not\u2014\" this was emphasized with another slam into the wall\u2014\"von Zinzer's\u2026 like that.\" The embarrassment she felt over this last admission seemed to sap her strength. Zulenna felt her feet touch the ground. She eyed Agatha warily.\n\nAgatha was fading fast now. She felt a great weariness roaring over her, and merely stood there, her hands still grasping Zulenna's clothes.\n\nZulenna gingerly reached up, and found that she could remove Agatha's hands without effort. She stepped sideways. Agatha didn't move.\n\nZulenna considered slamming Agatha face first into the wall, but at that moment, Agatha's face turned towards her, and the thought fled. She stepped back and tried to project self-assurance. She jerked her clothes straight.\n\n\"Never touch me again.\" She braced herself for another attack, but Agatha ignored her and simply shuffled past her to drop onto her bed. \"And I want you out of my room.\"\n\nAgatha looked at her, and then closed her eyes. As\u2026 exhilarating as the rage had been while she was experiencing it, now that it was gone, she felt sick, exhausted and ashamed. \"Nothing would please me more,\" she whispered, \"but tonight I'm sleeping here.\"\n\nZulenna glared at her and stepped forward, then hesitated. With a disdainful sniff, she turned, disrobed and got into her own bed. She reached out to extinguish the light and stopped. Agatha was already asleep. Zulenna began to ease out of her bed, then reached up and touched the tender spot on her face. Agatha made an odd humming noise in her sleep, then began to breathe deeply. Zulenna crept out of bed, selected one of the fencing foils that was on the rack, and carefully climbed back into bed with it placed between her and Agatha. She left the light on. It was quite a while before she slept.\n\nIn Agatha's dreams, the great celestial machine warped itself slightly. The teeth of the gears grew longer and sharper, and began to fly off and chase Von Pinn, and Zulenna, and Gilgamesh Wulfenbach, and as they ran squealing in terror, Agatha found herself enjoying the show until she realized that the largest and sharpest gear was bearing down upon herself.\n\nShe came awake with a jerk, dropping a jeweler's wrench upon a benchtop which was littered with parts. She looked around in surprise. She was in an empty machine shop. But it wasn't Adam's. Where was she? A voice behind her\u2014\n\n\"Miss Clay? Good heavens.\"\n\nSwinging about, Agatha saw the Baron's secretary Boris, and Moloch, both looking rather dumbfounded.\n\nYears of training as Dr. Beetle's assistant kicked in and she leapt to her feet, smoothed back her hair and stood at attention. \"Good morning, sir. I\u2026 I was asleep, but I am ready to begin.\"\n\nThis only seemed to make Boris even more uncomfortable. He glared at Moloch. \"I dare say she is.\"\n\nMoloch tried to control a grin. \"Um\u2026 Didn't you forget something\u2014er\u2014darling?\"\n\nAgatha looked at them blankly. \"What do you\u2014\" belatedly she noticed the direction of Moloch's gaze. Looking downward she saw that she was dressed in naught but her camisole and pantalets. With a shriek she barreled between the two men and dashed from the room.\n\nOnce she had vanished around the corner, Boris rounded on Moloch and shook several fingers at him reprovingly. \"You are expected to get work done, Herr von Zinzer. Perhaps a different assistant\u2026\"\n\n\"No!\" The last thing Moloch wanted was someone who could tell he knew nothing. \"Um\u2026 she's\u2026 it's just\u2014the science stuff, it\u2026 um\u2026 it really gets her\u2026 excited.\"\n\nBoris rolled his eyes. \"Ah. One of those.\" He shrugged. \"Well, as long as you're discreet and it does not interfere with your work. But\u2014\" he warned. \"Tell Miss Clay not to flaunt herself in front of the Baron or his son. They have no tolerance for such things.\" Satisfied that he had cleared up the matter, he steered Moloch deeper into the lab. \"Now the one example we saw of your work was rather crude, but the Baron found aspects of the design quite remarkable. He believes that with access to proper materials, your work might be well worth his full attention.\"\n\nMoloch smiled weakly. \"Great.\"\n\nBoris nodded. \"If this is so, you will subsequently report to the Baron directly. For now, however he is interested in seeing what you can produce independently.\"\n\n\"I'll bet.\"\n\nThere followed a quick tour of the lab, ending with Boris indicating a small electric bell. \"And finally, whatever you need, be it supplies, assistants or food, simply ring this and it will be provided. We look forward to seeing what you will do.\" As he left, he passed a fully dressed Agatha coming the other way. Tactfully, neither said anything.\n\nAgatha entered the lab to find a despondent Moloch rummaging about in the chemical locker. With a grunt of satisfaction, he pulled out a large carboy of clear liquid and filled a beaker. He swigged fully a third of it down before he sat on the nearest stool.\n\nAgatha examined the label. \"That's supposed to be used for cleaning machine tools,\" she pointed out.\n\n\"So I'll die clean.\" Moloch saluted her with his glass and polished off another third. \"Now what the heck were you doing? Do you always work in your underclothes?\"\n\n\"No!\" Agatha began to pace back and forth in agitation. \"I don't know! I never used to walk in my sleep!\"\n\n\"Well you sure made a mess of the workbench.\" The two of them examined the bench, which did show all the signs of heavy use. \"But I don't see what you were working on.\" It was true. Tools and parts littered the area, but there was no device anywhere in sight.\n\nAgatha slumped against the bench. \"Probably nothing,\" she admitted. She straightened up and turned away. \"Well, at least I don't have another failure staring at me.\"\n\nFrom an upper shelf, a small device paused in its labors. A small lens focused on her, ascertained that she did not require its assistance, and resumed its task.\n\nMoloch finished off his drink just as the beaker began to dissolve. He tossed it into the trash. \"So now what?\"\n\nAgatha grinned. \"Take a look at this!\" She turned away and reached into her shirt and hauled out the airship manual and handed it to him.\n\nMoloch looked surprised. \"Where'd you get this?\"\n\nAgatha shrugged. \"Just found it.\"\n\nMoloch paged through it, then handed it back. \"This has possibilities. There's a lot of traffic, there's supply balloons coming and going all day long. Unfortunately, stuff like this will be guarded all the time. But look over here\u2014\" He took Agatha's arm and brought her over to a rack of packages mounted on the wall near the main exit to the lab. A small sign explained how to prepare the devices for use. \"This might be easier. These are personal balloon gliders for if they have to abandon the dirigible. You can use these to just glide down to earth, and they're located throughout the Castle. The problem with these, is that people would see you jumping off the Castle. At night the damn things glow.\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Hmm. Modifying one of them might be our best bet. It glows? We could paint it with tar or something.\"\n\nMoloch looked surprised. \"That's a good idea.\"\n\n\"I want to get out of here too.\" She thought for a minute. \"I'll bet they notice if we start messing about with one of these things, in fact, I wouldn't be surprised\u2014\" She stepped over to the rack and examined it closely. She gave a grunt of satisfaction and motioned Moloch over. \"Look. See this? There's a wire running through these rings. Probably some sort of tripwire, I'll bet. When one of these things is pulled off the rack, it sounds an alarm somewhere. Makes sense, really, even if it's a genuine emergency.\" She studied the wire closely. \"This is going to be tricky.\" She looked at Moloch. \"We can't afford to do it wrong the first time.\"\n\nMoloch sat down heavily. \"I wouldn't even have looked for something like that,\" he admitted. He brightened up. \"On the other hand, I got to be pretty good at disarming booby traps.\"\n\n\"How good?\"\n\n\"I'm still here, ain't I?\"\n\n\"Fair enough. I think I might be able to build some stuff that could help.\"\n\nMoloch looked at her askance. \"You said you couldn't build anything.\"\n\nAgatha paused. \"Yes, but I\u2026 I think I know what I did wrong. I have some ideas\u2026\" She shook herself. \"But whatever we do, it's going to take some time, and we've got to make it look like you're doing something.\" She looked around. \"An inventory.\"\n\nMoloch looked up. \"That's always a good one. Place like this, we could kill a day or two at least before they expect us to produce anything.\"\n\n\"It'll work better if you can fake it a bit.\" She snatched up a tool from the nearest bench. \"Now this, is a wrench.\"\n\nMoloch glared at her. \"I know it's a wrench.\"\n\n\"Ah, but what kind of wrench?\n\n\"A 3/17 Occipital Left-Leaning Heterodyne wrench.\"\n\nAgatha whipped the wrench up to her face and stared at it. It was. She glared at Moloch. \"How did you know that?\" she demanded.\n\nMoloch smiled bitterly at her from his chair. \"These days, machines are more important than soldiers. If you know how to fix machines, it makes you more valuable.\" He stared off into the distance. \"My brothers and I, there were nine of us, we crewed this walking gunboat for the Duke D'Omas. Mad as a bag of clams, of course, but it was a good berth. Snappy uniforms, fresh food, and plenty of it, and he paid in gold.\" Moloch sighed. \"Then it all turned to dung. Wulfenbach blew up the Duke's mountain and we had to start raiding the countryside to keep the gunship repaired.\"\n\n\"But why would you do that?\"\n\n\"Ah, well, you see, the peasants didn't like the Duke. Which meant they didn't like us. After the Baron took him down, the gun was the only thing keeping us alive. We figured our best bet was to get out of there, so we headed for Paris. We had to go through Wulfenbach land, sure, but if you keep to the Wastelands and the dead towns, you can travel for days without seeing a soul, which was the plan. But just our luck, we ran into one of the Baron's patrols, led by this\u2026 this crazy woman! We'd have surrendered if she'd asked.\" Moloch's eyes showed that he was far away. \"I think Bruno and the kid made it, but I don't know about anyone else. Nobody but Omar and me. And now it's just me.\"\n\nAgatha placed her hand on his shoulder. \"That's\u2026 that's really rough. I didn't know.\"\n\nMoloch jerked his shoulder away. \"Of course you didn't know.\n\nYou're just a spoiled townie. The big towns are important. They get cleaned up, repaired, disinfected. Not like the rest of the world.\" He stalked over to the carboy of cleaning solution and hunted about for another beaker.\n\nAgatha stood behind him. \"Oh, that will help.\"\n\nMoloch furiously turned upon her. \"Get out!\"\n\n\"But\u2026 but the inventory\u2014\"\n\n\"Screw it. I want to be alone.\" He pulled out a beaker and discarded it for being too small. \"I'm expected to act like a brooding unstable psychopath? Great. Here's a chance for me to rack up some extra credit.\"\n\nAgatha turned to go, took two steps and then wheeled about. \"Now you're just being stupid.\"\n\nMoloch didn't even look up from his pouring. She continued: \"A brooding, unstable psychopath? Fine. But you've got to convince the Baron that you're a brooding unstable psychopath who's having way too much fun to ever want to leave. They've got to see you eager to get to work in this beautiful lab they've given you!\"\n\nMoloch looked at her and frowned. He harrumphed. \"That does make sense,\" he admitted. With a sigh, he poured his drink back into the carboy and tossed the beaker into the trash. \"Okay. Inventory it is, then.\"\n\nThey turned and looked at the room. It was a large space, twenty meters square. The main central area was clear, surrounded by benches and work tables. Overhead were lights and a set of winches on motorized tracks. Lining the walls were cabinets and bins filled with various parts, chemicals, tools. The shelves were easily four meters tall. They looked around, but failed to find a ladder.\n\n\"Guess we use this a little sooner than I'd thought,\" said Moloch as he pressed the bell button.\n\nLess then a minute later, the door opened and an immense man entered. He was over two meters tall and everything about him was proportioned to fit. He wore a gray overall covered in pockets. His head was the thing you looked at, however. His face was open and friendly, but above it was a bald pate that showed the obvious signs of multiple, extensive surgery.\n\n\"Hello!\" he said in a booming, cheerful voice. \"I\u2026\" He suddenly appeared to be having trouble remembering something. \"I am Dr. Dimitri.\"\n\nMoloch and Agatha were surprised. \"Doctor?\" Moloch exclaimed.\n\nDimitri nodded enthusiastically. \"Yes! I am a doctor! Yes I am!\"\n\nMoloch smiled apologetically. \"I'm sorry we disturbed you, Herr Doctor, I thought we were ringing for an assistant.\"\n\nDimitri beamed and slapped his chest. \"Yes! Yes! I am assistant! Yes!\"\n\nMoloch and Agatha glanced at each other. Right.\n\nMoloch spoke slowly. \"We need a ladder.\"\n\nDimitri brightened. \"I will get a ladder! Yes! I could make you a ladder! A giant ladder that will go up to the sky!\"\n\nMoloch blinked. \"No thanks. Just a regular ladder.\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes! A ladder that will carry you up and down by itself! I could make that! I could! Up and down and up and down and up and\u2014\"\n\n\"No, just a regular ladder.\"\n\n\"Ah! Yes! Yes! I understand! You want it to look like a regular ladder, and when you are at the tippy top, the blades come out and\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough!\" Moloch shouted. Dimitri looked hurt. Moloch turned to Agatha. \"Miss Clay, you'd better go with him.\" He thought for a moment. \"Get us something without blades.\"\n\n\"I'll try.\" At this Dimitri began to look worried. Agatha looked at him. He reminded her of some of the faculty back at the University. She gently took him by the arm and pulled him out into the corridor. \"Okay, Herr Doctor, where do we keep the ladders?\"\n\n\"But I go! Yes, me!\"\n\n\"Well I'll just go with you.\" Dimitri looked very worried now, but he reluctantly began to move down the hall. \"I don't understand what the problem is,\" said Agatha. \"All we want is a ladder.\"\n\nDimitri looked slightly reassured. \"Yes, ladder. We just go to get ladder.\"\n\nThey quickly came to a large door labeled \"LABORATORY SUPPLIES.\" Dimitri spun the locking wheel and the door eased open, revealing a large dimly lit store-room, neatly crammed with crates and barrels, cans, jars and tools. Agatha quickly spotted a rack of ladders and moved toward it.\n\n\"This looks like what we need\u2014\" She paused. Hidden behind the ladders, she saw a small, neat cot.\n\nShe turned back to Dimitri. \"Oh, do you sleep here?\" She stopped because the giant's face was now set in a rictus of fear. She looked back at the bed. There was nothing there, except\u2026\n\nA closer examination revealed a number of small objects. Agatha picked one up\u2026 \"Why they're bears!\" she exclaimed in delight. \"Made from rags! They're adorable! Did you make these?\" So saying she turned back to Dimitri, only to find him huddled upon the floor at her feet, his tear-stained face raised in supplication.\n\n\"Please,\" he whispered, \"please don't give them to the Baron.\"\n\nAgatha looked at the rag doll in her hand. \"What, these?\"\n\nDimitri nodded frantically. \"Yes, please\u2026\"\n\nAgatha gently placed the bear into Dimitri's trembling hands. \"Why would I give them to the Baron? They're yours.\"\n\nThe large man clasped the toy to his chest. \"Yes! Mine! I made them! Me!\"\n\n\"But\u2026 if the Baron really wanted them, he'd just take them\u2026 wouldn't he?\"\n\nAt this, Dimitri's face underwent a startling change. A look of pure determination crept into it, although it obviously took a great deal of effort. \"He doesn't know!\" His voice, too, was different. It was a voice that was used to wielding power, but it was obvious that it was power long gone. He jerkily turned towards Agatha. The look he gave her was of someone who was unaccustomed to asking for help, but who had no choice, and had known it for a long, long time. \"It's my last secret. He's taken all the others, but not them! I've kept them safe!\"\n\nAwkwardly Agatha patted his massive shoulder. \"Well\u2026 I won't tell anyone.\"\n\nSudden hope flared within the kneeling man's eyes. \"You\u2026 help keep my bears\u2026 secret? Keep them safe from the Baron?\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Of course. I won't even tell that man I'm working with, von Zinzer.\"\n\nSoftly, silently, the large man began to cry. \"Thank you! Thank you!\" he blubbered. \"I've been so worried about them.\"\n\nAn embarrassed Agatha looked about and grabbed a large rag, which she handed to Dimitri, who gratefully used it to scrub away at his face. \"They'll be okay, I promise. Now let's get that ladder.\"\n\nOnce again beaming widely, Dimitri climbed to his feet. He wheeled about and addressed the row of bears lined up on the shelf. \"Did you hear? She has promised to help take care of you. You will be safe!\"\n\nThe watcher nodded. He'd heard.\n\nSeveral hours later, after von Zinzer had dismissed her for the day, Agatha found herself swept up by Sleipnir and several other girls and dragged off to their fencing practice. Agatha had never held a sword, but she had always admired the way actors had flailed about with them onstage. Much to her surprise, the people she watched didn't seem to do any flailing at all. Indeed, the object appeared to be to hit your opponent while moving as little as possible. The analytical part of her mind found this intriguing, though she did miss the singing.\n\nThe girls warmed up fencing with each other in various combinations, but after a while, Sleipnir went off and returned pushing a large cart which was topped by a vaguely humanoid figure possessed of a single arm, holding a fencing foil. Once activated, it turned out to be a fencing clank, and the girls took turns battling it while the others rested.\n\nIt took little encouragement to get Agatha to suit up in a padded outfit, and the girls looked on with interest while Sleipnir began to teach her the basics. A stream of humorous comments at her expense were made, but to Agatha's surprise, instead of feeling hurt, she found herself laughing along with them.\n\nRelinquishing the sword, she sat and tried to ignore how the other girls now attacked each other while singing. It had seemed like an interesting idea at the time.\n\nOne of the girls, Sun Ming, handed her a cup of water, and asked her about her first day at the lab. Eventually the conversation got around to Dr. Dimitri, though Agatha omitted any mention of his stuffed bears. \"We call him Dr. Dim.\" Sun Ming admitted. \"I believe him to be some sort of construct that didn't work out.\"\n\n\"He's been here for years,\" Sleipnir chimed in. \"He seems to be harmless.\"\n\nThe door to the changing rooms swung open and Zulenna strode towards them. She carried a gold foil over her shoulder. She nodded to several of the other girls, but a frown creased her face at the sight of Agatha. \"Miss Clay. I didn't know you fenced.\"\n\nAgatha experienced another wave of embarrassment at her actions last night. She resolved to try and be civil. \"I don't, but Sleipnir said I should try it.\"\n\nSleipnir nodded. \"Agatha has pretty good reflexes. I think that with some training\u2026\"\n\nZulenna interrupted, waving dismissively. \"Really, Sleipnir. Taking a plow horse to the races?\" Whereas Agatha had felt distress at last night's incident, Zulenna had been replaying it over and over again and getting more and more annoyed. She wanted a rematch. With a sword. And witnesses. Sleipnir blinked. Zulenna continued, \"I would like to see these fabulous reflexes.\" She turned to Agatha. \"If you're not afraid to face me when I'm armed.\"\n\nSleipnir looked back and forth between Agatha and Zulenna and tried to avert certain calamity. \"No, I don't think that would be a good idea. Why don't we\u2014\"\n\nAgatha interrupted. \"Sleipnir, would fencing give me a chance to hit her with this sword in a civilized manner?\"\n\n\"Well\u2026\" Sleipnir hesitated, \"theoretically, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's do it.\"\n\nSleipnir closed her mouth and shrugged. Some things just had to be worked out.\n\nZulenna chuckled as Agatha's outfit was checked by Sleipnir. \"Oh, this will be amusing.\"\n\nSleipnir muttered to Agatha as she finished up. \"She's very good.\"\n\n\"Indeed I am,\" Zulenna confirmed brightly. \"So just try to hit me.\"\n\nAgatha and Zulenna moved into position. Tentatively Agatha reached forward with her sword, and, languidly, Zulenna flicked it aside.\n\nAgatha frowned and whipped her sword around from the other direction, and again, Zulenna deflected it with ease. She had watched the other girls and the fencing clank, but even her untrained eye could tell that Zulenna was superior to them all. Fascinated, Agatha executed a series of attacks from any direction she could think of. The smirking girl easily batted them all away while moving nothing but her arm.\n\nAgatha stepped back and wiped a trickle of perspiration from her brow. This was developing into a very interesting problem, and Agatha's anger at Zulenna began to fade as she considered it.\n\nThis detachment disappeared when Zulenna reached out with her sword and smacked the side of Agatha's head. Agatha whipped her foil upwards, but hit nothing. There followed a series of strikes by Zulenna, which Agatha found herself helpless to prevent. The few times she actually managed to hit Zulenna's sword, it simply slid off and connected with Agatha anyway. Her anger building, she decided to ignore the attacks and concentrate on striking back. There followed a series of attacks and feints delivered at blinding speed, which had absolutely no effect. Zulenna raised an eyebrow, and with an enormous grin, continued to strike Agatha at will while she deftly parried Zulenna's furious attacks.\n\n\"As you can see, Miss Clay,\" she said with a smirk, \"fencing is the sport of the highborn. There is far more to it than hacking and slashing.\" This was punctuated with a sharp poke to Agatha's stomach. \"And while I'm sure you'd do very well with a sledge hammer, which is probably all you need for tavern brawling, fencing is all about finesse, the art of exploiting your opponents' weaknesses.\" A move too fast to see and Zulenna's sword cracked against Agatha's hand, causing her to drop her sword. Zulenna smiled and turned away. \"This was entertaining.\" She glanced back over her shoulder. \"Those are good reflexes, by the way.\"\n\nA panting Agatha reached down and picked up her sword. Blowing a lock of hair from her face, she turned to a watching Sleipnir. \"Hey\u2026\" she said between breaths, \"I just figured out the difference between Dr. Dim and royalty. Dr. Dim is still doing something useful.\"\n\nZulenna froze, and then spun about, sword upraised to strike. \"How dare you\u2014Oof!\"\n\nThis last sound was caused by Zulenna slamming herself directly onto the point of Agatha's foil, which had been aimed at her solar plexus. Zulenna dropped to her knees and tried to gasp in a lungful of air. Agatha leaned over her. \"Your reflexes, on the other hand, could get you into trouble, your highness.\"\n\nZulenna shot Agatha a look of pure hate as two of the other girls helped Zulenna to her feet. When she could stand, she shook them off, wheeled about and stalked off. Sleipnir looked after her and shook her head. \"You fight nasty.\"\n\nAgatha slid the foil back into the rack. She didn't feel good about her win. \"Back in Beetleburg, we didn't care much about royalty as such, what was important was if you had the Spark or not.\"\n\nSleipnir nodded. \"Yes, we've been seeing that trend spreading out from the larger towns for some time. It's been giving Zulenna's family some real problems, apparently.\"\n\n\"Aren't most of you from noble families?\"\n\nMing grinned. \"Some of us, but the important thing here is your position vis-\u00e0-vis those who possess the Spark. Baron Wulfenbach needs to control those who can disrupt things, the few royal families that still rule are desperately eager for things to remain calm. Zulenna's family is a case in point. They rule a small nation in the Germanies. Useful because it controls a pass that at least three major trade routes use. Their defenses were built by the Heterodynes, and thus they'd stood off a number of attacks by madboys until they were annexed by the Baron.\"\n\nAgatha frowned. \"I would think that would make her a little more willing to get along, not less.\"\n\nSleipnir sighed. \"Yes, you would, wouldn't you? But Zulenna is determined to keep her position.\"\n\n\"What position?\"\n\nThe other girls looked embarrassed. A dark-haired girl named Yvette explained. \"Most of us came here as children, non? So there was established a pecking order.\"\n\n\"Sleipnir explained a bit about that,\" Agatha said.\n\nA quiet blonde named Gunload spoke up. \"When she first got here, Zulenna ranked pretty high, if only because she was used to bossing people around. But as we all got older, things changed. Zulenna's family is just royalty. She's not here as a hostage, but because they're genuinely loyal to the Baron.\"\n\nSleipnir nodded. \"Her being royalty is all that Zulenna has, so she tries to make the most of it.\" She looked Agatha in the eye. \"Be careful. She'll not forgive you for this.\"\n\nAgatha frowned. \"Oh, come on. Surely, over time some of you have made similar comments, or worse. You grew up together.\"\n\n\"True enough,\" Sleipnir admitted, \"but there is this pecking order thing\u2026\"\n\n\"Meaning?\"\n\nMing gently patted her shoulder. \"Welcome to the bottom of the heap.\"\n\nThe next few days were quiet ones.\n\nVon Pinn gave Agatha a wide berth.\n\nAgatha returned to her room one evening to discover that Zulenna had moved out.\n\nThe biggest change was in Agatha's sensations. Every day brought new smells, tastes and nuances of sounds that occasionally threatened to overwhelm her. Foods that she had grown up with revealed startling new flavors. For a few days, Agatha felt like she was starving. At meal times she ate until she felt ready to burst, but within the space of two hours, she would be prowling the kitchens looking for more. She worried about her clothes, but over the course of several days, they seemed to get looser, despite everything she was eating. Sleipnir actually got annoyed over this, until she confirmed Agatha's claims with a tape measure.\n\nA noisy room became a rich aural tapestry of underlying rhythms. The most distracting was her sense of touch. She was aware of the textures of the clothing she wore, the surfaces of the tools in the lab. A prolonged shower left her gasping on her knees.\n\nIt was a difficult few days. Sleipnir was concerned. Agatha saw a medic, who examined her and found nothing wrong, and suggested that she was simply over-stimulated by being in a new, exciting situation. Agatha certainly had to admit that was a plausible possibility.\n\nAnd, most glorious of all, Agatha's headaches, the Damoclean sword that had always checked her emotions, had stopped.\n\nShe noticed it the second day. By the third, she had actually tried to induce one and failed. That night, Sleipnir had found her in her room weeping. She'd never been able to have a good, solid cry, and by the time she was done, she felt wrung out like a rag and slept for twelve hours. After that, while her sensations and emotions remained much sharper than before, everything began to become much more manageable. Thankfully, Agatha found her appetite beginning to diminish.\n\nThe crises had passed.\n\nMoloch proved to be adept at finding his way around a lab. The inventory was completed. Agatha tried to create something that would interest the Baron, but these attempts always ended in failure. The biggest problem was caused by Agatha herself, who continued to sleepwalk each night, ending up in the lab, sprawled over one of the workbenches.\n\nOn this particular morning, she was awakened by Moloch tossing his coat on top of her. \"I wish you'd build something we could use instead of just messing up the place.\"\n\nStartled, Agatha thrashed around a bit scattering tools and machine parts to the floor as she pulled the coat on. She glanced at a clock. \"You're late. Did you oversleep?\"\n\nMoloch shook his head. \"I wish. I got summoned before the Baron. He's getting impatient. He wants to see something.\"\n\n\"But what about those plans we've been working on the last couple of days?\"\n\n\"He took one look at them and told me to stop cribbing D'Omas' designs. It's like I told you, every madboy has a style like\u2026 like a painter\u2014and the Baron can recognize them.\"\n\nAgatha drummed her fingers on the bench. \"Well\u2026 I do have some ideas of my own\u2026\"\n\nMoloch waved his hand in dismissal. \"Those tiddly little clockwork things that don't work? Forget it. I'm supposed to be a Spark, not an idiot toymaker. I hand him plans for something like that and I'll be shipped off to Castle Heterodyne within the hour. We need something Big. Impressive.\"\n\n\"Well\u2026 Maybe stylistic similarities run in families. We could say that you're D'Omas' natural son.\"\n\nMoloch grinned ruefully. \"Not a bad idea, but D'Omas' taste in women was\u2026 well\u2026 let's just say it was lucky for him he could build his own. A lot of people knew it too. There were reasons why the public didn't like him. No, there'll be no D'Omas heirs showing up, except preserved in glass jars.\"\n\n\"Yech. Any ideas on escaping?\"\n\n\"Only if I want to throw myself out a window, which I'm not ruling out, by the way. But for the moment, the plan is to get out alive.\"\n\nMoloch paced back and forth several times and then whirled to face Agatha again. \"You were there when that clank in Beetleburg was built. That's what we need. You must remember something!\"\n\nAgatha shrugged apologetically. This was an old subject. \"No. I woke up after it was gone. I don't know anything. I could do some research\u2014\"\n\nMoloch slammed his fist down onto the bench hard enough to send several tools flying. \"Stuff that!\" he screamed. \"You didn't see the Baron's face this morning! I need something now!\" He loomed menacingly over Agatha. \"I don't think you're really trying.\"\n\nApprehensive, Agatha tried to back up, and found herself bumping into another bench. \"You said yourself that I'm no Spark! What do you expect me to\u2014\"\n\nMoloch gripped her shoulders. \"Think, you stupid cow! You have as much to lose as I do!\"\n\nAgatha shook herself free and glared at Moloch. \"Wrong! My parents are long gone and in hiding. Even the J\u00e4germonsters can't find them. You no longer have a hold on me, so if you want my co-operation, I suggest you change your attitude, or\u2026 or\u2026\"\n\nA change had come over Moloch's face. His eyes looked dead. He reached out and, grabbing the lapels of the coat Agatha was wearing, hauled her forward. \"Or what? You'll kill me too? Wrong. You're gonna help me out one more time. A lab accident, I think. That should buy me some more time\u2026\"\n\nHorrified, Agatha watched as he raised his fist, and suddenly Moloch's eyes widened and he screamed and dropped her. A quick glance down revealed the white cat biting and clawing at the inside of one of Moloch's legs. As he danced away, trying to dislodge it, Agatha regained her balance, reached behind her and felt her fingers close around the handle of a large mallet.\n\nGilgamesh Wulfenbach strolled down the corridor, his brow furrowed in thought. Eventually he nodded. \"Oh very well, I'll concede the point, it does appear alarming, but you shouldn't be afraid of it, I'm rather sure it's just a goldfish.\"\n\nBeside him Zoing frantically waved his claws and discoursed at length in high-pitched squeals.\n\nCRASH! A lab door slammed open beside them and the inert form of Moloch von Zinzer was booted out into the corridor. A second later his labcoat was flung over him. Gil and Zoing turned to see a furious Agatha standing in the doorway, clutching a broken mallet. \"You pathetic thug! Don't you dare threaten me again! Come near me and I'll put you in a glass jar!\" It was now that she noticed Gil and his companion for the first time.\n\n\"Lover's spat?\" Gil inquired.\n\n\"I quit!\" Agatha snarled. \"I don't care if you put his brain into a jellyfish!\"\n\nGil frowned. \"But you made such a cute couple\u2014\" Without visible effort he dodged the mallet handle that sailed past his head.\n\n\"You know perfectly well he is not my lover! Now send me home! I have to find my parents!\"\n\nGil looked serious. \"Yes, your parents. I can certainly understand your concern. We still haven't been able to find them. The J\u00e4germonsters haven't been able to find them, none of your neighbors has seen them. According to the University records you don't have any other family in Beetleburg. Do you have any other family anywhere?\"\n\n\"I have an uncle, but he\u2026 he disappeared over ten years ago.\"\n\n\"Not much help then. Did they have any enemies?\"\n\n\"Enemies?\" Agatha looked shocked. \"No!\" Then certain things she had seen and heard over the years assumed a possible new significance. \"At least, I don't know of any. Why?\"\n\nGil sighed. \"It is not uncommon, when my father takes over new territory, that during the confusion, some people take the opportunity to\u2026 settle old grudges.\"\n\n\"That's\u2026 that's terrible.\"\n\n\"Foolish, certainly. My father prides himself on maintaining law and order within the Empire, it's kind of the whole point really, and we come down very hard on things like this. Up until now, we've been assuming that your parents were hiding from us, but now we also have to consider the possibility that something has happened to them.\"\n\n\"Why? What's changed?\"\n\n\"One of the things I did was place public notices throughout Beetleburg advising the Clays that we had you in our possession and providing an address where they could anonymously send you a message to at least let you know that they were safe. So far there's been nothing.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I have to go back! I\u2014\"\n\nGil interrupted. \"And do what? My worry now is that if someone is responsible for your parents' disappearance, they might be after you as well. Until we find your parents, I'm afraid my father will insist on you being kept here under protective custody.\"\n\n\"That's outrageous! He can't\u2014\" Agatha suddenly stopped as she realized who she was talking about.\n\nGil nodded grimly. \"He most certainly can. Now I can understand you not wanting to work with Herr von Zinzer\u2014\" Gil nudged the prone mechanic with the toe of his boot\u2014\"But I'm afraid everyone aboard the Castle is expected to justify their weight\u2014\" Agatha opened her mouth\u2014\"Would you consider working with me?\"\n\nAgatha's mouth hung open for a second, then closed with a snap. Her eyes narrowed. \"\u2026Why?\" she finally asked.\n\nGil ticked off points on his fingers. \"I found your daily reports to be concise and well-written, you very efficiently re-organized the parts warehouse, and, most important, your suggestions regarding my flyer's engine increased its efficiency by seventeen percent.\"\n\nAgatha looked pleased. \"Seventeen percent? Really?\"\n\nGil nodded. \"Really. And I believe that by working together, we could do even better. Interested?\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes I am!\"\n\nGil smiled. \"Good.\" He casually reached down and with one hand hauled Moloch up by the collar. \"I shall deal with Herr von Zinzer here. Be at my lab this afternoon.\"\n\nAgatha drew herself up and performed the traditional bow. \"Yes, Herr\u2026\" she paused.\n\n\"Doctor,\" Gil supplied.\n\n\"Herr Doctor Wulfenbach.\"\n\nGil coughed discretely. \"Ah, there is one thing, Miss Clay\u2026 If you're going to be working with me, I'd appreciate it if you wore more clothes.\"\n\nFor the first time Agatha became aware of her appearance and with a strangled \"Eep!\" vanished inside the lab.\n\nGil puffed out his breath and grinned. A slight movement at the end of his arm caused him to set his face in sterner lines, and he briskly slapped Moloch's face several times until the man began to thrash feebly. \"All right you, let's go.\"\n\nMoloch's eyes opened, rotated in different directions, focused upon Gil and then snapped open in terror. His feet began to move, but as they weren't touching the ground, nothing happened. When he became aware of this, he seemed to give up, and with a sigh, went limp. Gil cocked an eyebrow. \"You're not a very good soldier, are you?\"\n\nMoloch shrugged. \"That's why I became a mechanic, sir.\"\n\nGil nodded. \"Now I believe this little charade has played itself out, hm? You are not a Spark.\"\n\nAgain Moloch spasmed within Gil's grasp. \"No! Sir! I\u2026 I can explain!\"\n\n\"Sh\u2014sh\u2014shhh! Relax.\" With an alarming smile Gil gently lowered Moloch to the floor, and reached around to drape a friendly arm over Moloch's shoulders. Another smile and Gil had gently propelled him down the hallway. \"I want to help you.\" Zoing gathered up Moloch's coat and scuttled along behind.\n\nInside the lab, Agatha leaned against the door, her head swimming. She looked over and saw the large white cat, which had bitten Moloch, sitting on the nearest bench glowering at her. \"He listened to my suggestions! He actually tried out my ideas\u2014and they worked! Nobody has ever listened to me!\"\n\nShe hugged herself and did a quick jig over to the bench. The cat continued to stare. \"And he asked me to work with him! Do you understand what that means, you beautiful leg-biting cat? Everybody knows that the labs on Castle Wulfenbach do the real, cutting-edge science! The stuff the universities only dream about doing! And I'll be working with the Baron's son! Doing real science, in a real lab, with someone who actually listens to me!\" Overcome with emotion she scooped the surprised animal up and swung him around. \"What do you think of that?\"\n\nThe cat frowned and leaned into her and pointed at her with an oddly shaped paw. \"I think,\" he said clearly, \"that you'd better be very, very careful.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "\u2003\"With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. But wait, I thought, why not give it the ability to spit acid? Or a few extra claws? Or, yes! A total disregard for the sanctity of human life! That will show them!\" \u2014A typical last entry from the journal of an emergent Spark\n\nAgatha stared at the cat. \"Oh,\" she said carefully, \"I'm dreaming again. How disappointing.\" The cat rolled its eyes. \"You work with mad scientists and you're surprised at a talking cat? I'm the one who's disappointed.\"\n\nAgatha gently placed the cat back onto the lab bench. Instead of dropping to all fours, it remained on its hind legs, which Agatha now saw didn't look like normal cat legs at all.\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"Okay, I'm sorry. You really talk. You just startled me.\" The cat nodded briskly. \"Right. Now that we've got that settled, I'm here to help you.\" Agatha nodded back. \"Help me. Okay.\" She paused. \"Do I need to get you some boots?\"\n\nThe cat glowered at her and his tail lashed back and forth in annoyance. \"I don't do the boot thing, so knock it off. I'm serious. We can't talk now.\" His ears flicked towards the door. \"Someone will be here soon.\"\n\nAgatha opened her mouth\u2014the cat raised his hand peremptorily.\n\n\"Tonight. Your room. Bring something to eat.\" He leaned forward. Agatha found herself doing the same. \"And be careful around young Wulfenbach. He's up to something. He knows that you're a Spark and\u2014\"\n\n\"WHAT?\" The cat looked surprised at Agatha's outburst. \"I am not a Spark,\" she said.\n\nThe cat frowned. \"What? Of course you are!\"\n\nYears of worrying about the state of her mental health found voice and Agatha slammed her hand down on the bench, hissing: \"Don't you make fun of me, cat. I\u2014\"\n\nThe cat swiftly but gently smacked her nose with his paw. Agatha's mouth snapped shut in surprise. \"Shhh,\" the cat said, and gestured her closer. Gingerly Agatha leaned in and the cat put its muzzle up to her ear. \"You talk in your sleep,\" he whispered. Agatha reared back.\n\nSuddenly there was a clack and the door to the corridor swung open. With a fluid motion, the cat flowed off the bench and under a stack of gears leaving Agatha alone. She whirled to face the door and saw Ardsley Wooster, his head discreetly averted, holding forth his large coat. \"Good morning, Miss Clay. Master Gilgamesh informed me that you would require a cover-up as well as an escort back to your quarters. This afternoon I am to show you the way to the location of your new duties.\"\n\nKlaus Wulfenbach was in a genial mood. He strode down the center of the corridor, marginally aware of the crowd that carefully broke before him and stood aside as he passed. Coming up to a large, reinforced door, he nodded to the J\u00e4germonsters that were lounging before it. The nearest picked up a small book and leafed through it at random, then looked up. \"Vat is de sqvare root uf 78675?\"\n\nKlaus nodded in approval, thought for a moment, and then replied: \"345.\"\n\nThe J\u00e4ger carefully checked the book before him and then grinned. \"Dot is correctly incorrect. In hyu go.\" The other J\u00e4ger moved and spun the locking wheel on the door until it opened with a chunk.\n\nKlaus stepped inside and waited until the door was shut behind him. He unlocked another door and then entered a small laboratory lit only with red lights. Humming a tune, he removed his greatcoat and began donning protective equipment. A small sound caused him to look over his shoulder and smile genially. \"Ah, good afternoon.\"\n\nIn the center of the room, strapped down to a massive examination table, lay Othar Tryggvassen. His muscles strained against the bonds holding him. When this proved to be useless, his head thumped back against the neckrest and he settled for glaring at the Baron.\n\nKlaus scanned a report in his hands. \"Didn't sleep well? Quite understandable. Today is going to be a very exciting day.\"\n\n\"You'll excuse me if I don't share your enthusiasm, you twisted fiend!\"\n\nKlaus shrugged good naturedly. \"Quite all right. I'm used to it.\" Silence descended, broken only by Klaus quietly humming a waltz as he began to check a row of surgical instruments.\n\n\"No matter how you torture me,\" Othar declared, \"I won't talk.\"\n\n\"If only that were true,\" Klaus muttered.\n\nOthar stared at his back for several minutes. \"So. What is it you want to know?\"\n\nKlaus turned, holding a small bone saw. \"Why you're a Spark. What is it that makes you different from other people.\"\n\nOthar chewed on his lower lip. \"But I\u2026 I don't actually know that.\"\n\nKlaus smiled and patted him on the shoulder. \"Of course you don't. Neither do I. But I intend to find out.\"\n\nDespite himself, Othar looked interested. \"How?\"\n\nKlaus began holding up a series of drill bits against Othar's skull. Othar couldn't help but notice that they were getting progressively larger. \"I will destroy selected parts of your brain,\" Klaus explained, \"until you no longer are a Spark.\"\n\n\"You ah\u2014\" Othar tried to maintain an even tone to his voice. \"You can do that?\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"Oh yes. Eventually.\"\n\nOthar considered this for a moment. \"And afterwards?\"\n\nKlaus sighed. \"Ah. That whole 'quality of life' question.\" He ran a hand through his mop of hair. \"I'm working very hard on that.\" He smiled ruefully. \"And I'm getting much better.\"\n\nOthar strained against his bonds. \"But my work!\" he shouted. \"My mission!\"\n\nKlaus activated a device attached to a swing arm that descended from the ceiling. With a whine, a number of blades began spinning. \"Yes, a bonus, that.\"\n\n\"You villain!\"\n\n\"Yes, yes.\" Klaus muttered as he began to position the device above Othar's head. \"Normally, there would be a lot more tests. You'd have a long, productive career working for me while I studied your habits and patterns.\"\n\n\"But?\"\n\n\"But I'm afraid that you are far too dangerous.\" The device's whine took on a higher pitch. \"Now look up\u2026\"\n\nWith a clack, the lighting changed from red to white. With a sigh, Klaus moved the device back up and turned it off. He turned towards the door with a frown. \"Yes, Boris?\"\n\nThe Baron's secretary nodded apologetically. \"I'm sorry to disturb you, Herr Baron, but you did tell me to tell you the moment Herr von Zinzer said he had something.\"\n\n\"Indeed I did.\" He looked down at the smaller man who had been cowering behind Boris, his eyes taking in the scene before him. When he realized that the Baron was staring at him, he jerkily brought forth a sheet of paper and extended it before him.\n\n\"It's\u2026 um\u2026 it's all here!\" The Baron made no move to take the paper, but continued to look at Moloch. The shaking of his hand increased so much that the paper itself rattled. \"I\u2026 I know what I want to do, but I don't know where to get some of these materials.\" He extended the paper upwards. \"It's all here,\" he repeated.\n\nThe Baron plucked the paper from Moloch's hand and studied it. A frown crossed his features and he studied it again. After several seconds he pursed his lips and his massive eyebrows rose and all but disappeared beneath his hair. \"Interesting,\" he said, like a man bestowing a great compliment. \"Very interesting indeed. Yes, some of this will be quite tricky.\" He looked down at Moloch with new eyes. \"This will take some time to assemble, but I look forward to the results.\"\n\nMoloch blinked. \"Really?\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"Yes. Boris? See that these items are secured, and make sure that I am informed when Herr von Zinzer is ready for the initial test run. I wish to attend.\"\n\nBoris looked surprised. \"Yes, Herr Baron.\"\n\nKlaus handed the paper back to Moloch. \"I must say that I was beginning to have my doubts about you, but this\u2026 this justifies my original estimates and then some. What was holding you back?\"\n\nMoloch started and then shrugged. \"Oh, er\u2026 it\u2026 it was that assistant of mine. I\u2026 fired her this morning. She was very distracting.\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"I see.\" He turned away dismissively. \"And now I must\u2014\"\n\nBoris cleared his throat apologetically. The Baron's shoulders slumped slightly. \"Yes, Boris?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Herr Baron, but as long as I have your attention\u2026 The city council of Hufftberg is still unhappy about the glassworks. They're really just feeling slighted because Tarschloss got the new university.\"\n\nKlaus drummed his fingers on a nearby bench. \"Tell them that I will cover the cost of a Corbettite rail terminal if they will supply the labor.\"\n\n\"But didn't the Corbettites petition us to place a terminal there already?\" Klaus merely looked at him, and the secretary looked embarrassed. \"Ah. Yes, I understand. No doubt they'll see it as very generous. But if they continue to be difficult?\"\n\nKlaus whirled. \"Then tell them I'll have the J\u00e4germonsters there in two days and the city council will be the labor!\"\n\nBoris smiled. \"Yes, that should do it. Good day, Herr Baron.\"\n\nAs the Baron's secretary and a relieved von Zinzer left, Klaus leaned against a bank of controls and sighed. To Othar he remarked, \"I swear, it is like running a kindergarten.\"\n\n\"What is that, Tyrant?\" Othar asked snidely, \"Does your precious Empire give you no pleasure?\"\n\nKlaus frowned, and he straightened up. \"No,\" he admitted, \"it gives me no pleasure. Politics always annoyed me, and now I have to play it every day. I despise the whole business. I haven't seen my wife in years\u2014\"\n\nOthar started violently. \"Your who?\"\n\nKlaus ignored him. \"I haven't traveled or explored\u2014\"\n\n\"Who exactly is this wife you mentioned?\"\n\n\"At least with the Heterodynes we had the adventures. The occasional fight. We expected people to at least be able to govern themselves after we cleaned the monsters out for them. Well I won't make that mistake again. Now I just send in the armies, then the bureaucrats with mops. Same old formula, over and over again.\" He stared darkly at something only he could see, then shook himself free of his reverie and turned back to Othar. \"Well, we do what we must. But I will confess that one of my few pleasures is in these rare moments of research.\" He patted Othar on the head as he started up the drills again. \"So hold still, and rest assured that I am going to enjoy this very much.\"\n\nOthar braced himself as the device began to descend, when a fussy voice from the doorway broke in. \"Your pardon, Herr Baron?\"\n\nKlaus froze. Then slowly and deliberately stopped the drills, removed his goggles and then turned towards the door. \"Yes?\" he asked politely.\n\nAt the door stood one of the Lackya in a state of high indignation. Standing beside him was a sullen Theopholus DuMedd.\n\n\"Sorry to disturb you, Herr Baron,\" the servant said in a voice that clearly didn't realize how annoying it was, \"but young DuMedd here refused to report for grease trap duty this morning. He had hidden himself in one of the smaller machine shops.\"\n\n\"I wasn't hiding,\" DuMedd said testily, \"I was working.\"\n\nKlaus looked interested. \"Working? On what?\"\n\n\"On an automatic grease-trap cleaner, Herr Baron.\"\n\nA large hand came up to try and hide a small smile that vanished instantly from the Baron's face. \"Ah\u2014hmm. Potentially useful, certainly, Herr DuMedd, but I must insist that such things be pursued in your free time. Think of this duty as inspiration.\"\n\nDuMedd rolled his eyes. \"I have a surfeit of inspiration, sir.\"\n\nKlaus turned away. \"Well, if that is all\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly Othar shouted out, \"Don't be too clever, lad, or you'll be on this slab next!\"\n\n\"Silence!\" Klaus roared. He swung back to Theo and fixed him with a piercing glare. \"Master DuMedd is aware that he is under my protection.\"\n\nDuMedd nodded vigorously. \"Of course, Herr Baron.\" He said cheerfully, \"Very much aware!\" With a large grin on his face he moved towards the door. \"I apologize for causing you any annoyance, Herr Baron. I'll just be getting back to those grease traps. In fact, I'll put in a little overtime! Yes sir!\" And then he was gone, the sound of his running boots echoing down the corridor was cut off by the closing of the inner door.\n\nThe Lackya did not see Klaus move, but suddenly found the lapels of his greatcoat clasped within an immense fist and a furious Klaus inches from his face.\n\n\"Idiot!\" He said through clenched teeth, \"You were told to never bring any of the students into this lab!\"\n\n\"But, Herr Baron, the guards outside said\u2014\"\n\n\"You like to listen to them? Done! You are now a J\u00e4ger orderly until further notice!\"\n\nThe Lackya went white. \"No, Herr Baron! Please, I\u2014\"\n\n\"I could have you shipped to Castle Heterodyne?\"\n\nThe terrified construct visibly considered this option, then sagged in the Baron's grasp. \"Yes, Herr Baron.\"\n\nKlaus flung him away. \"Get out.\" The Lackya spun about and silently vanished.\n\n\"Confound that idiot!\" Klaus muttered, \"To jeopardize all my work with DuMedd\u2014\"\n\n\"That boy is not stupid,\" Othar said. \"A web of lies can unravel at the lightest touch of the truth!\"\n\nKlaus whirled, smacked aside the massive drill, snatched up a scalpel, and grasped Othar's face in his other hand. He grinned fiercely. \"This will hurt slightly less if you don't move.\"\n\nA voice sang out from the doorway. \"Ta-daaa! I am here!\"\n\n\"GIVE ME STRENGTH!\" Klaus screamed as he drove the scalpel into the table scant centimeters from Othar's face. Composing himself, he turned about. \"Bangladesh DuPree,\" he acknowledged.\n\n\"That's right! It's me!\" A tall, shapely young woman sashayed into the room. Her dark east Indian complexion was complimented by the crisp, white airship captain's uniform she wore. Her long black hair cascaded down her back until it was gathered in a series of small tufts. Ornamenting her forehead, a small skull-shaped bindi glittered.\n\nBangladesh was one of Klaus' freelance agents. She patrolled the wilder parts of the Wastelands, and was occasionally dispatched when circumstances warranted the use of a barely controlled homicidal maniac.\n\nBangladesh's mother had been a pirate queen, ruling one of the small remote islands of the North Sea. The princess Bangladesh had been away when the island populace had revolted and her mother was slain. Determined to avenge her, Bangladesh had taken up the family business, and ruthlessly built up her own organization of air pirates, which had quickly earned a fearsome reputation throughout Scandinavia and northwest Europa. Preparations for the assault to reclaim the family island were almost complete when she had returned from an expedition only to find her fortress a burnt-out hulk, her fleet in ruins, and her crew dead or vanished. There was no clue as to who had destroyed them.\n\nThen and there, she took a bloody oath upon her family's malevolent god to avenge them, but until she could discover who was responsible, she needed a job.\n\nTo her surprise, she was recruited by Klaus Wulfenbach. Klaus had followed her career from a distance, and realized that having Bangladesh working for him would be preferable to eventually having to fight her.\n\nBangladesh had accepted his offer on the condition that the Baron's intelligence gatherers seek out those who had destroyed her base. Klaus had agreed. However there were no other similar incidents, and in the subsequent three years, Klaus had successfully found useful avenues in which to channel DuPree's murderous tendencies for his own ends. When correctly applied, she was terrifyingly efficient.\n\nThere was also, he had to admit, something fascinating about her. DuPree was disarmingly open about her thirst for blood and destruction, and Klaus found that he enjoyed the challenge of keeping her in check. She was also one of the very few people who displayed absolutely no fear of the Baron whatsoever. She treated him like an equal in all things, which made for a refreshing change in some respects, though her familiarity sometimes caused him great annoyance.\n\nShe was also one of the nastiest fighters Klaus had ever seen. With some trepidation, he had asked that she instruct his son in combat techniques while he was in Paris. To her surprise, Gilgamesh had survived her instruction, and proved an apt pupil, though he had acquired several scars, some of which were physical.\n\nKlaus was positive that he could take DuPree in a fair fight, but was equally positive that he'd never have a chance to prove it.\n\n\"I heard that you wanted to see me, and I knew you wouldn't want to wait.\" She got about halfway into the room when she saw Othar. A look of concern crossed her face. \"Say, what are you up to here?\" She looked at Klaus suspiciously. \"Klaus, are you torturing this man?\"\n\nKlaus looked embarrassed. \"No\u2014\"\n\n\"YES!\" Othar shouted. \"Help!\"\n\nBangladesh blinked in surprise. \"He asked me to help!\" She grinned and a blackened stiletto materialized in her hand. \"A wise choice! Nobody knows more about torture then me!\"\n\n\"I believe,\" Klaus murmured, \"he expected you to rescue him.\"\n\nBangladesh pouted and the knife vanished. \"What\u2014Is he stupid?\"\n\n\"A bit.\" Klaus opened a slim leather volume that had been crudely adorned with hand-drawn skulls, scenes of decapitation, flogging and other acts of violence that Klaus carefully did not look at too closely. \"I noticed something interesting in your latest log book\u2026\" He looked up. \"A pity about that walking gunboat, by the way.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that was over way too quick.\"\n\nKlaus opened his mouth, and then just sighed and shook his head. \"What caught my eye was this note in your Phenomena Log.\"\n\n\"The rain of marzipan?\"\n\n\"No\u2014though that is intriguing. I meant the apparitions.\"\n\nBangladesh grew serious. \"Yeah, those were weird.\" She thought back. All trace of frivolousness was gone now. \"The first time was when I was watching that gunboat burn. There was this\u2026 crackling in the air, a kind of hole in the sky opened up, and there were these people\u2026 it was like they were right next to me. One of them looked like Gilgamesh, but\u2014\" She thought. \"But older than he is now. Not a lot older, but\u2014\" She patted Klaus' great shoulders. \"Bigger. Tougher. He'd been working out. And you could tell from his face that this guy didn't go around moaning about how miserable his life was; he made life miserable for other people,\" she said approvingly. \"He looked right at me, like he could see me. And then he said 'maniac.' You know, I think maybe it was Gil, because he's always saying pointless stuff like that.\" Klaus forced himself to nod sympathetically.\n\n\"The second person was a girl. Light hair, fair complexion, a little shorter that Gil, big hips, but in good shape, not fat. Big glasses. She was running some sort of mechanism. When they appear she's in mid-sentence and she says, '\u2014A little earlier. How's this?'\n\n\"A third guy, he's shorter, darker, trim beard and moustache, kind of rumpled. Looks like a minion. He's looking at the burning gunboat and he starts jumping up and down and shouting, 'Yes! There they go! They made it!'\n\n\"At this point a Geister enters from the right. The others don't even blink. She seems to be addressing the girl, and she says, 'Mistress\u2014you are needed.'\n\n\"The short guy says 'Thanks.' and the girl smiles and does something to the controls and the hole in the sky kind of collapses in on itself.\" Bangladesh paused. \"I just remembered. Gil was dressed like one of the Geisterdamen. It didn't really suit him. Does any of that make sense to you?\"\n\nKlaus shook his head.\n\nBangladesh shrugged and continued. \"Then, two weeks later, I'm investigating this burnt-out town, Furstenburg, which I did not do, when\u2014ZAP! There's another hole in the air. Same group of people, same situation. The girl says, 'Okay, there's Bang.' Like she knows me, you know? Then she says, 'You see your friends?'\n\n\"The little guy looks around and says, 'Um\u2026 no, this isn't the right place.'\n\n\"Gil notices that I've pulled my shooter and he says, 'Hey mistress\u2014'\"\n\n\"Mistress?\" Klaus asked sharply.\n\n\"That's what he said. For what it's worth, he looked kind of annoyed, and he's saying it like he's saying something stupid. So he says, 'Hey mistress, she's getting ready to shoot you.'\n\n\"The girl looks at me and says, 'Don't worry. I'm going to try\u2014' And then it was gone. Say, are you okay?\"\n\nThis question was asked because Klaus was staring grimly at nothing, and his hands had crushed a metal canister without his knowledge. When he spoke, it was obvious that he was trying to project a calm demeanor. \"This is very important news, DuPree. Thank you.\"\n\nTo her astonishment, Bangladesh found that she was upset at Klaus' obvious inner turmoil. She realized that she relied on Klaus' imperturbability as a sign that all was well. Awkwardly she reached out and patted him on the shoulder. \"Hey. Don't worry. What do I know? It couldn't really have been Gil. You've had him caged up here for the last couple of months, haven't you?\"\n\nKlaus went still, and the air of worry vanished. He turned to Bangladesh and nodded. \"You are correct, of course. Thank you, DuPree.\"\n\nBangladesh relaxed. \"Always am. So. Any news about my problem?\"\n\nKlaus shook his head. \"No. I told you I'd let you know.\"\n\n\"It's been three years.\"\n\n\"And I've heard nothing.\"\n\nBangladesh sighed, then shrugged. \"Well, a group that tough can't hide forever. I'll be in dock for the next three days if you need me to burn down Sevastopol or something.\"\n\nKlaus waved his hand in dismissal. His brow furrowed in thought as DuPree strode out. \"This is very bad,\" he said conversationally. He turned towards Othar. \"Surely even you realize\u2014\"\n\nThe examination table was empty. The restraints cut cleanly, as if by a scalpel. From behind, Klaus heard Othar's triumphant voice, \"Ha, villain! Realize that your reign of evil is at an end!\"\n\nKlaus sighed.\n\nAgatha and Wooster stepped through a giant set of metal doors, and Agatha stopped in confusion. This was yet a different lab, still filled with a bewildering array of machines and benches, but the ceiling was easily thirty meters high. Almost one entire wall was covered in glass revealing a magnificent cloudscape, as well as several dozen of the Wulfenbach support fleet. On an outside ledge along the bottom, several gargoyle clanks squatted motionless. The center space was dominated, and almost filled, by pieces of a gigantic clank. With a shock, Agatha recognized a section of the exterior carapace, which was hanging from a set of enormous chains.\n\n\"It\u2026 that's Mr. Tock!\"\n\nHigh above, Gilgamesh's head and shoulders popped out from inside a cavernous hole in the massive chest plate. Agatha saw a large clock mechanism hanging beside it, waiting to be placed within. \"Ah, Miss Clay! Wooster, do show her in!\"\n\nTossing aside a large wrench, Gil clambered out onto a precariously balanced ladder, which began to fall backward. Agatha gasped, then blinked as Gil calmly stood on the falling ladder until it passed a hanging chain, which he snagged with one hand, as he kicked at the ladder with one foot. The ladder swung back into place with a thunk, just as Gil touched the ground next to Agatha and Wooster. \"Today I'll just show you around the lab and let you settle in.\"\n\n\"Shall I fetch some tea, sir?\"\n\nGil looked around and, not finding what he was looking for, shrugged and nodded. \"That would be excellent, Wooster, thank you.\" With a short bow, Wooster glided away. Agatha looked up at the immense clank.\n\n\"What are you doing with Mr. Tock?\"\n\nGil blinked. \"I'm fixing him, of course.\" He patted a gigantic toe affectionately. \"He's too much a part of Transylvania Polygnostic's history and tradition.\" He then turned serious. \"Dr. Beetle may be dead, but the University his family built will continue as he wanted it to.\"\n\nAgatha smiled. \"That's good.\" They stood looking at each other awkwardly for a minute. Agatha looked around. \"So how many labs do you have?\"\n\nGil smiled. \"Four. You've seen the flight lab, and you\u2014\" he coughed discretely\u2014\"saw the entrance to the chemical lab. This is the large mechanical lab, and my private lab and library are through those doors.\"\n\n\"You really need four different labs?\"\n\nGil snorted. \"My father has forty-three onboard the airship, plus two ground-based complexes. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a model of efficiency.\"\n\nAgatha felt a light tug on her skirt and, looking down, saw a single eye staring at her from under an oversized hat. \"Hello again.\" Agatha smiled.\n\n\"Ah. You haven't been properly introduced.\" Gil reached down, lifted the small creature up and deposited him on a nearby bench. Try as she might, Agatha could only see the tips of large blue claws peeking out of fleece-lined cuffs and two long-jointed antenna. Everything else that might have given a clue as to the little creature's nature was hidden beneath layers of clothing.\n\n\"This is Zoing.\" The little creature clicked its heels and bowed slightly. Gil continued, \"Zoing, this is Miss Agatha Clay. She will be helping us now.\"\n\nZoing studied Agatha for a moment and then turned back to Gil. \"Schmeka tee?\"\n\nGil shook his head. \"No, that's still your job.\" He paused, then looked guilty. \"Although, I couldn't find you a moment ago, and I believe Mr. Wooster is fixing us some now.\"\n\nZoing squealed like a penny whistle and, faster than Agatha would have believed, leapt off the bench and scuttled away, furiously waving its claws.\n\nGil rubbed the back of his neck. \"I'll hear about that,\" he sighed. A crash of crockery from the next room seemed to verify this.\n\n\"What is it?\" Agatha asked.\n\n\"My friend,\" Gil replied tersely as Wooster gave a yelp of pain.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I meant\u2014\"\n\nAn entire china cabinet collapsed now. Gil held up a hand and, closing his eyes, took a deep breath. He opened his eyes. What sounded like a fire alarm went off, and then was silenced, if the noises were any indication, by being pummeled with a live animal. Gil resolutely ignored it. \"It's understandable. He's a construct. I made him when I was younger.\"\n\n\"He was eight,\" Wooster informed Agatha. Unruffled and impeccable, he set a laden tea tray down upon a bench. From the next room could be heard a frantic hammering, as if from inside an overturned cauldron.\n\n\"Eight?\"\n\nGil shrugged. \"Even my father was surprised.\"\n\nWooster handed Agatha a sturdy triangular mug. She tasted it and realized that the mixture was exactly as she preferred it. Wooster hadn't bothered to check her response, but was pouring another mug.\n\n\"As well he should have been. Eight is very young. Most of the gifted break through in their teens\u2014or even later. Master Gilgamesh is a very strong Spark indeed.\"\n\nGil accepted his mug with a shrug. \"This is Ardsley Wooster. He does my bragging for me.\"\n\nWooster smiled. \"I had the pleasure of meeting Master Gilgamesh while we were both students in Paris. After graduation, he kindly arranged for me to be his assistant here. This was before I knew who he was, of course.\" Wooster looked down in surprise. A third mug of tea had apparently materialized in his hand. He shot Gil an exasperated look.\n\nGil smirked and raised his mug. \"You should have seen his face!\"\n\nWooster raised his mug in return, and took a sip. \"Very sneaky, sir. Most amusing.\"\n\nGilgamesh took Agatha's elbow and steered her towards a series of work stations. \"To start with, you'll be giving me general assistance when I require it. When it isn't required\u2026\" They stopped before a small bench that was littered with old tools and scraps from other projects. \"You have permission to work on your own projects here, as long as they don't interfere with your other duties.\"\n\nAgatha looked at Gil, the hand holding her tea mug frozen midway to her mouth. \"My own\u2026 I can work on my own projects?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"This is my space?\"\n\n\"Yours and yours alone, as long as it doesn't interfere with your other work. Later today you can clear it off and set it up for your requirements.\"\n\nAgatha turned towards the bench and slowly ran her hand along it. She put her tea down, quickly picked it back up, found a large gear and used it as a coaster. She turned back to Gil. \"Thank you. I've never had\u2026 I mean, at the University I couldn't\u2026 they\u2026\"\n\nGil awkwardly patted her on the arm. Their eyes met and locked. Gil felt his breath stop as he realized that Agatha's eyes were the largest and deepest he'd ever seen.\n\nAgatha saw eyes that regarded her as someone with thoughts and ideas that were worthwhile. Eyes that saw her as she had hardly dared to see herself. The moment seemed to last forever until a small gasp of pain broke the spell. Whirling about, the two saw Wooster trying to maintain a semblance of dignity, while attempting to dislodge one of Zoing's claws from his foot. Gil opened his mouth to say something, looked at Agatha, and instead, gently pulled her away from the gyrating figures, over to a large series of bookshelves. \"You will also be in charge of my library.\"\n\nScores of books filled the racks, books of every type. Large leather tomes framed and braced with metal clasps, scrolls in intricately decorated bamboo cases, roughly bound manuscripts and notebooks were mixed in with scores of the cheaply printed textbooks that were emblematic of university students. Agatha noted that while the sciences predominated, books on an astonishing range of subjects were present, many showed signs of use, such as cracked spines or thickets of bookmarks sticking up from the pages. One rack in particular caught Agatha's eye. These books, cheap though they were, obviously were part of a set, and a familiar set at that. \"You collect the Heterodyne Boys books?\"\n\nGil looked embarrassed. Agatha pulled down The Heterodyne Boys and Their Pneumatic Oyster. \"These are so much fun!\" A thought struck her. \"Oh, of course! Your father is in these, isn't he?\"\n\nGil mumbled, \"I\u2026 uh\u2026 I don't really remember\u2026\"\n\n\"Of course he is! Here we go\u2026\n\n'Hey Klaus, what are you doing in that vat?'\n\n'You put it under the hatch you great idiot! Help me out!'\n\nPunch scratched at his massive head. \"Wull, iffen you hadn't been running away\u2026'\"\n\nAgatha stopped. \"Oh. Oh dear.\"\n\nGil gently took the book from her and tucked it back onto the shelf. \"Yes, well\u2026 I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention these.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Another set of books caught Agatha's eye. They were gaudily bound in red, white and blue, and looked quite new. \"What are these?\" She read a title: Trelawney Thorpe, Spark of the Realm?\n\nGil's face lit up. \"Ah, these are terrific! Total British propaganda, of course, but really good!\"\n\nThis last comment was clearly heard by Wooster, who paused while carrying a large, thrashing sack over his shoulder. He frowned. \"Oh, I say sir\u2014as I have told you before, Miss Thorpe is a real person.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, and I'm sure that these stories are just as accurate as the Heterodyne series.\"\n\nWooster wagged his finger. \"Ah, but these publishers are British.\"\n\nGil gave up. \"Of course.\" He turned back to Agatha, who was sliding several of the volumes around on the shelf. \"Feel free to borrow any you like,\"\n\nAgatha pulled a book out from behind the others. \"This one must've slipped back\u2014\" The title caught her eye: \"\u2014In the Seraglio of the Iron Sheik?\"\n\nWooster waggled his eyebrows. \"A favorite, I believe.\"\n\nAgatha did not actually see Gil move, but suddenly there was a different book in her hand. \"I'd recommend that you start with this one.\"\n\n\"The Glass Dirigible? Sounds interesting.\"\n\nGil glared at his servant. \"Wooster, take Zoing and help him clean the flight lab.\" A blue claw punched through the sacking and missed closing on Wooster's ear by several millimeters. Wooster sighed. \"Very good sir.\"\n\nAgatha looked up. \"But about that seraglio one\u2014\"\n\nQuickly Gil reached up and pulled a large lever. \"Oh, Hey! What do you think of this?\"\n\nWith a hiss, part of the wall folded back to reveal a series of figures. They were animals, dressed in formal evening wear, arranged as an orchestra, equipped with instruments. From the center, a small figure, which looked disturbingly like the Baron, rose from a hidden cavity with a pneumatic hiss, and raised a slim baton. After a brief pause, the tip of the baton glowed, and the orchestra began to play a light waltz. Small statues that Agatha had thought were merely there to hold lighting fixtures began to sing a melodic counterpoint. Agatha began to notice the little details, how the rabbit playing the piccolo managed to twitch aside its ears every time the trombone slide approached from behind, the small mice with penny whistles that occasionally popped out of the bells of various horns. She was entranced until she felt a light tap upon her shoulder. Gil bowed. \"Would milady care to dance?\"\n\nAgatha shyly curtsied. \"I would.\" She felt Gil's strong hands grasp her hand and shoulder, but resisted slightly. He looked at her enquiringly. \"But later, I want to see how it works.\"\n\nGil smiled. \"I expected nothing less,\" and with that she allowed him to swirl her around in time to the music. Never had Agatha felt so grateful to Lilith as she did then, for the endless dance lessons that she had endured, acting as a prop for Lilith's male students. Seeing that she was no novice, Gil nodded in appreciation, and increased the complexity of the steps. With a gleam in her eye, Agatha returned the favor, catching Gil off guard, but with a delighted laugh, he carried through on the change, and, locked together, they swirled around the floor in a graceful arabesque that, when the music ended, deposited them exactly where they had started. But now they were closer to each other, their eyes again locked, their hands grasping the other's, and their breathing slightly faster than even the exertions they had completed would account for.\n\nWith a hiss, the orchestra bowed in unison and went still. After a moment, they both, reluctantly, released each other's hands. \"That\u2026\" Agatha ventured, \"that was wonderful dance music. Who wrote that?\"\n\nGil smiled modestly. \"I did. When I was a student in Paris.\"\n\n\"If that's any indication, you really liked Paris.\"\n\nGil nodded. \"I loved it. It's beautiful. You can be anything you want there.\" He glanced at Agatha and visibly pulled himself back from the past. A calculating look flashed across his face. He crossed over to a large wall cabinet and, reaching inside, pulled out a large globe of blue glass which was mounted upon a small brass figure of a man holding it, Atlas fashion, upon his shoulders. Several nozzles and connectors were placed upon the exterior, and a small brass trilobite was mounted upon a band that ran down the center. \"This is a genuine Heterodyne artifact I found at a curiosity shop. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to figure out what it is yet. What do you think?\"\n\nAgatha looked at the device for a moment and then looked at Gil over her glasses. \"It looks like a lamp.\"\n\nGil frowned and pulled it back. \"It is not a lamp. I've been fiddling with it a bit. But nothing I run through it seems to do much. Unless it just takes an enormous amount of power, I must be doing something wrong.\" He displayed several sides of the object to Agatha. \"I'd like to open it up, but as you can see, there's no visible screws, hinges or access plates. I'd hate to take a chance on breaking it just to find out what it does.\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Your father knew the Heterodynes. Maybe he would know what it is.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he would, but where's the fun in that? I'll get it eventually.\"\n\nAs Gil was placing the globe back in the cabinet, Agatha's eye was caught by a large ceramic tube festooned with cables that seemed to be surrounded by charred equipment. \"What's this?\"\n\nGil's eyes lit up. \"Lightning generator. Watch.\" So saying, he activated a small control unit and instantly a bolt of electricity crackled through the air and a copper globe vaporized into molten fragments.\n\nAgatha whistled in admiration, but Gil was shaking his head in annoyance. He held up his hand with the control unit and clicked it a few times, but nothing happened. \"It still needs work. At the moment it takes way too long to recharge.\"\n\nAgatha took the control unit and peered up at the glowing tip of the generator while flicking the switch a few times herself.\n\nOver the next half hour, Gil showed Agatha the layout of the labs and explained the procedures she'd need to know. Eventually they came to a large room that looked to Agatha like a gymnasium, complete with several racks of fencing swords. There, the battered, spider-like clank that dominated the middle of the room looked even more out of place than it ordinarily might have. It had a large humanoid torso, with a single left arm, which clutched a dueling saber. Its lower half consisted of four triple jointed legs, which were crouched down, bringing the torso almost to the floor. The only ornamentation that Agatha could see was a small, cherry-red heart, which was located in the center of the clank's chest.\n\n\"That looks nasty,\" She remarked.\n\nGil nodded. \"It is. I wanted a more\u2026 realistic fencing clank to practice with. The ones the students use are kind of tame, don't you think?\"\n\nAgatha frowned. \"I don't fence, actually.\"\n\nGil looked at her speculatively. \"You should. It comes in useful.\" He picked up a foil and tossed it to Agatha, and nodded in satisfaction at the way she snagged it out of the air. \"Plus it's fun. You should ask Zulenna to teach you. She's really good.\"\n\n\"Zulenna doesn't like me.\"\n\nGil grimaced. \"Ah. That stupid ranking game of hers. That girl needs a good smack upside the head.\"\n\n\"I tried that. It didn't work.\"\n\nGil stared at her. Agatha's face reddened, and she concentrated on swinging her sword about. \"I'm not proud of it, but she was asking for it. She was insulting my parents.\"\n\nGil nodded. \"That sounds like Zulenna, all right. Well, she's going to do some occasional work for me here, so I'll expect you to be civil to her, and I'll expect the same of her. Is that clear?\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Yes, Master Wulfenbach.\"\n\nGil rolled his eyes. \"Please, call me Gilgamesh.\"\n\n\"Yes, Master Gilgamesh.\"\n\n\"Miss Clay\u2014\"\n\nAt that moment, Agatha's sword tip smacked into the small red heart of the fencing clank. With a burst of steam, the device reared up on its multijointed legs. Three slots irised open, and an additional three arms sprang forth. One was equipped with a Japanese sai, one carried a small but lethal-looking hand axe, and the last terminated in a circular sawblade, which began to spin faster and faster until the gleaming teeth faded into invisibility.\n\nAgatha stared entranced until Gil pulled her aside as the axe swept through where she had been standing. \"Amusing,\" she commented. \"How do you shut it off?\"\n\nMeanwhile Gil had grabbed a sword and was blocking the clank as it lashed out again with its own weapons. \"You hit the heart again!\"\n\n\"Oh. Well that seems pretty straight forward.\"\n\nGil moved to block the clank's sawblade and found his sword trapped within the sai. With a quick twist, the blade was snapped. He dropped the weapon and found Agatha ready with another. He swept it up and deflected the other three arms in a flurry of motion. \"Straight forward, yes, but it's a really good fencing clank.\"\n\nA small oilcan flew through the air and smacked onto the heart. The clank froze, and with a hiss, began to relax. Gil turned in surprise and looked at Agatha. \"I don't fence,\" she explained. \"So how is this thing more realistic?\"\n\n\"Ever traveled the Wastelands?\"\n\n\"No, but I've heard\u2026 oh.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. But there are still some problems\u2026\"\n\nWith a roar, the fencing clank snapped back into action. Gil pushed Agatha back as the sawblade swung through the air in front of them. \"There's a forty-three percent chance of spontaneous restart within thirty seconds,\" Gil shouted.\n\n\"Okay,\" Agatha acknowledged. \"That's a problem.\" She scooped up a small wrench and fired it at the heart. Casually, the clank brought up its axe and deflected the missile before it could hit.\n\n\"That's not the problem,\" corrected Gil, \"that's a design feature. The problem is that it learns from its previous encounters.\"\n\nAgatha looked impressed. \"But that's great.\"\n\nGil pushed her aside and a sword blade ripped through his sleeve. \"Thanks. But I'm afraid that with all the test fighting I've been doing, I've been reaching the limits of my ability.\" He leaped back as a pointed leg slammed into the ground where he'd been standing. Agatha studied the fight for a moment and then stepped forward.\n\n\"Miss Clay? What are you doing?\" Gil lunged towards her, but was beaten back by a flurry of steel. Meanwhile Agatha calmly walked up towards the clank, and gently tapped the device's heart.\n\nAgain it froze and began to power down.\n\nAgatha blew out her breath in relief and turned towards Gil. \"No attack, no response,\" she explained.\n\nHer grin faltered when she saw the look of fury upon Gil's face. \"You could have been killed!\"\n\n\"I\u2026 It was an experiment\u2014\"\n\n\"I will not tolerate lax procedures in this lab!\"\n\nAgatha flushed. \"You're just mad because I beat it twice.\"\n\n\"I AM NOT!\" Gil froze, and took a deep breath. He held up a hand to forestall any further conversation and looked up at a large clock. Agatha joined him in watching the ticking progression of the second hand. After thirty seconds had passed without any movement from the clank, they both relaxed.\n\nIt was then that Othar Tryggvassen crashed backwards through one of the doors in a shower of fragments. Looming within the doorway was Klaus Wulfenbach. His shirt and vest were in tatters, and it was obvious that Othar had managed to get in a few good punches of his own. What struck Agatha was that the expression on the Baron's face was the closest she'd ever seen to something approaching enjoyment. \"Sorry, son. I got a bit carried away.\"\n\nOthar slammed into the floor and bounced back up. He looked remarkably unharmed. Taking in his surroundings, he snarled, \"Gilgamesh! So\u2014ALL the vipers are now in residence!\"\n\nGil's shoulder's slumped. \"Get wound, Tryggvassen. I can't believe you still talk like that.\" He turned to Klaus, who was leaning nonchalantly against the doorway. \"Father, why is he here?\"\n\nKlaus shrugged. \"I don't think we can do any more damage to my labs.\"\n\n\"No, I mean why is he still on his feet? I know you could\u2014\" He stopped and a look of fury crossed his face. \"You've been sizing him up as a fighter.\" He glanced at Othar. \"There isn't a real mark on him. This is another stupid test! I'll bet you let him loose on purpose!\"\n\nKlaus examined his fingernails.\n\n\"Nonsense!\" Othar boomed. \"I escaped using naught but my wits!\"\n\n\"And a knife or a key or coat hanger my father left within your reach, right?\"\n\n\"Um\u2026\" A brief moue of uncertainty crossed Othar's face.\n\nGil nodded. \"That's what I thought. Well, I can't have you running around.\" So saying he jumped and spun in midair, lashing out with his foot so that the heel solidly caught Othar's jaw. The big man dropped to the ground.\n\nHe pushed himself up and found himself looking up at Agatha. \"Why, 'tis the fair maiden! Have no fear! I shall rescue you from this den of evil and\u2014\"\n\nGil stepped up and brutally smacked the back of Othar's head with a large wrench, sending him face forward to the floor. \"In your dreams,\" he muttered as he tossed the wrench aside.\n\nKlaus clicked the stem of his stopwatch and looked pleased. \"Well done, son.\"\n\nGil visibly kept himself under control as he spoke. \"Father, this was very irresponsible. He should be kept locked up. You know what he could do!\"\n\nKlaus prodded Othar's inert form with a booted toe. \"And he isn't even damaged.\"\n\n\"Believe me, if I had my way, but I don't want a repeat of that business with Beetle.\" As he said this, he seemed to remember Agatha. And glanced towards her. Agatha was in shock. Her face was white at the casual brutality with which Gil had taken Othar down. She had seen numerous fights in Heterodyne Boys shows, and read about them in novels. This had been nothing like that at all.\n\nKlaus nodded at Gil's words and his face went somber. \"Yes, that was a pity.\"\n\nGill appealed to the heavens. \"Not that anybody cares, but he did throw a bomb at me.\"\n\n\"Hold on.\" Agatha stepped forward. \"Is this really the Othar Tryggvassen?\"\n\nGil nodded. \"I'm afraid so.\"\n\n\"But isn't he a hero? You know\u2026 one of the good guys? How could you\u2014\"\n\nGil stepped up to her and cut her off. \"Miss Clay, a good assistant is one who trusts her employer. A healthy assistant is one who doesn't meddle in things she doesn't understand. Now please go fetch the maintenance staff.\"\n\nAgatha looked at him for a moment, and then wordlessly whirled about and dashed off. Gil turned back towards Klaus, but the old man peremptorily held up a hand until the lab door closed behind Agatha. Then he scowled at his son. \"Assistant?\"\n\nGil scowled. \"She's a good assistant, Father!\"\n\n\"Even Glassvitch's assessment said otherwise, and he liked her.\"\n\n\"Her work with von Zinzer\u2014\" Klaus cut him off.\n\n\"Von Zinzer fired her! And she was his\u2014\" Klaus stopped. He blinked a few times, and looked at Gil in a peculiar way that made the young man nervous. \"Ah.\" Klaus nodded. \"Of course. I see.\"\n\nGil looked blank. \"You do?\"\n\nKlaus looked over towards the door. Conflicting emotions flickered behind his eyes. A grudging resignation won. He sighed. \"You're young, and she is quite comely\u2026\"\n\nGil's face went scarlet. \"Father!\" he gasped.\n\nKlaus awkwardly tousled his son's hair. An act so rare that it shut Gil up as his father continued. \"These things must run their course.\" He caught Gil's eye. \"Discreetly, I trust.\" Gil sucked in an outraged lungful of air\u2014\n\n\"Obviously,\" Klaus mused, \"it is time we found you a suitable bride.\"\n\n\"A what?\" Gil squeaked.\n\n\"Someone from one of the Great Houses preferably, though we are having some problems with the Southern border states\u2026\"\n\n\"But\u2026 but\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes. I shall see to it.\" He turned towards Gil and spoke seriously. \"These sort of negotiations take some time, so I expect you'll be able to keep her through the summer, which\u2014\" a flicker of memory softened Klaus' features for a moment\u2014\"is the best season for that sort of thing.\" His usual sternness returned. \"But I want her set aside come mid-September at the latest. We can get her a job in a library or some such in one of the northern towns easily enough, and a harsh winter will help persuade her to find someone else to keep her warm, I expect.\" Klaus nodded in satisfaction and strode out of the room. Gil realized that his mouth was hanging open and shut it with a snap. He felt a slight tug on his pant leg, and looked down to see Zoing staring at him with concern.\n\n\"Ugettagurl?\" Zoing inquired.\n\n\"You heard that! He thinks I hired Miss Clay because I'm\u2026 because she\u2026\" Words failed him and he flailed his arms wildly until another memory surfaced. \"AND he's talking about marrying me off! Most of those stupid princesses have trouble remembering their own name!\" He slumped in place. \"This couldn't get any worse.\"\n\nA brawny arm snaked around Gil's neck and jerked him back. \"Nonsense!\" Othar chuckled. \"The Baron could find out about your actual taste in women. Now if I were to suggest a side trip to the Island of the Monkey Girls\u2014\"\n\nEffortlessly, Gil reached back and Othar found himself being slammed to the floor. Gil stood over him and said conversationally, \"I really hate you.\" With that he aimed a vicious kick that drove Othar's head into the floor hard enough to cause the giant man to go limp. A gasp from the doorway caused Gil to spin about. Agatha, flanked by a couple of the Lackya and Mr. Rovainen, stared back at him.\n\nShe nervously licked her lips. \"They\u2026 they're here for Othar,\" she whispered.\n\nGil felt his rage dissipate. He glanced down at the unconscious man at his feet, noted the bruise which was already coloring the side of his face, and a feeling of embarrassment swept over him. He stepped forward. \"Miss Clay, I should\u2014\"\n\nAgatha's expression was wooden, but she flinched slightly as his hand approached. Gil froze. His face darkened and he turned away, gesturing dismissively at Othar. \"Clean this up.\"\n\n\"Yes, 'Master.'\" Agatha intoned.\n\nAgain Gil froze, but it was only momentary. Without looking back, he strode from the room and pulled the great metal door closed behind him.\n\nThe others released a gust of breath. Wordlessly, the Lackya bent down and seemingly without effort, hoisted the unconscious Othar up and began to haul him away. Agatha stood and stared at the door through which Gil had departed. Mr. Rovainen, having directed the Lackya where to take their charge, turned to the troubled girl.\n\n\"He just struck him. Kicked him when he was down,\" she whispered. Mr. Rovainen nodded approvingly, but Agatha failed to notice. \"I was just starting to like him. But he\u2026 he can be so horrible.\"\n\nMr. Rovainen's voice rasped from beneath the bandages on his face, \"Will you\u2026 leave his employ?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Confusion crossed Agatha's face. \"I mean\u2014No. I\u2026 I don't\u2026\"A bizarre sound that Agatha realized was Mr. Rovainen's attempt at a chuckle, filled the air.\n\nThe smaller man shook his head. \"It is part of the power of the gifted. Those around them wish to aid them. To\u2026 serve them. Even when we know them to be monsters.\" Within his enormous coat, he suddenly shivered, stopping himself with a jerk.\n\nAgatha nodded slowly. \"Must he be a\u2026 monster?\"\n\nMr. Rovainen shrugged. \"With that one, it is too soon to tell. The best thing we can do is advise them. Try to influence them.\" He glanced down and casually patted Agatha's rump. \"You, at least, have methods of persuasion at your disposal that I do not.\" Again he chuckled, but it was cut off sharply by Agatha grabbing a fistful of his shirt and hauling him forward.\n\n\"You disgusting little man,\" she snarled. \"Don't you have something you should be doing? Somewhere else?\"\n\nThe harmonics in Agatha's voice caused Mr. Rovainen to flinch, and he gasped out a feeble, \"Yes.\"\n\nWith that, Agatha flung him against the nearest wall and said through clenched teeth, \"Then go do it!\"\n\nFor a moment, Rovainen resisted, then caught Agatha's eye, and with a whimper, he spun and loped off with a muttered, \"Yes, Mistress.\"\n\nAgatha stood until he was out of sight, and then stalked back to the dorm to take a shower.\n\nLater, around the dinner table, Agatha regaled the others with the events of the day.\n\nAfter she was finished, Sleipnir added a few castle-grown strawberries to her dish of rommegrot, and frowned. \"Othar Tryggvassen. Are you sure you got the name right?\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"I heard both the Baron and Gil say it.\"\n\nSleipnir looked pensive. \"I can't believe it's the same person. Othar Tryggvassen is a hero. We've all heard of him. Theo even has some of the new books about him. He hides them under his bed.\"\n\nTheo choked on a cup of tea. \"How did you\u2014?\"\n\n\"I found them when I was looking for my shoes.\" Theo blushed. The others looked interested.\n\nThe mood was altered by Zulenna standing and declaring, \"If the Baron has confined him, he must have just cause, books or no. You shouldn't believe everything you read. Anyone can say they're a 'hero.'\"\n\nNicodeamus raised an eyebrow. \"I'd say it has to do with how a person acts, wouldn't you?\"\n\nZulenna shrugged dismissively. \"I suppose some people would allow themselves to be rescued by just anybody.\" Nicodeamus rolled his eyes. Agatha also stood up.\n\n\"Where are you off to?\" Sleipnir asked.\n\n\"I have some letters to write. There are people in Beetleburg who might have news of my parents.\"\n\nSleipnir noticed the dish that Agatha was loading up. Agatha shrugged. \"Writing letters. Hard work.\"\n\n\"For some of us,\" Zulenna said to no one in particular. Without a word, Agatha straightened up and walked back to her room and very carefully closed the door. She then leaned back against it, closed her eyes, and took a deep, slow breath. \"Cat?\" she whispered.\n\n\"My name is Krosp,\" said a voice from atop an armoire. Gracefully, the cat leapt to the floor where Agatha had placed the dish. \"What's for dinner?\"\n\n\"Fish.\"\n\nKrosp sat on his haunches and gave her a thumbs up. He then reached out for the linen napkin, and tied it around his neck. Satisfied it was in place, he buried his nose in the food and began devouring it. Agatha watched this all with fascination.\n\n\"So, what are you?\" she inquired when Krosp came up for air.\n\n\"I'm a construct. A cat with human intelligence. No milk?\"\n\nAgatha shook her head. \"I didn't think of it. Sorry.\"\n\nKrosp shrugged and again attacked his plate. Within minutes it was clean. He sighed, sat back, and daintily dabbed at his mouth with the napkin. \"Anyway, I was declared a failure and was 'scheduled to be terminated,' but I escaped.\"\n\n\"A failure? But you sound pretty intelligent to me.\"\n\n\"I hid that. Which, in retrospect, might have been a mistake. But the intelligence wasn't the point.\"\n\nAgatha looked confused. \"Then what\u2014?\"\n\nKrosp held up a paw. \"I'm the Emperor of all cats. Think about it. Cats can go anywhere. They're invisible. Nobody looks at them twice. Imagine if you could order them around. If you could use them as spies, messengers, saboteurs. Well, you tell me what to have them do, and I can give them their orders.\"\n\nAgatha nodded, impressed, then she saw Krosp's slumped shoulders. \"It didn't work,\" she guessed.\n\n\"Oh, it worked perfectly. I'm the highest-ranking cat there is. They all listen to me.\"\n\n\"Then why\u2014?\"\n\nKrosp whirled, his fur a-bristle, \"Because they're cats! They're animals! They can't grasp complex concepts! Their attention span can be measured in microseconds! Even if I can get them to understand what I want, they're only under my command until they fall asleep, or see something move, or blink! It was a moronic idea!\" He collapsed into a small, dejected shape on the bed. \"Sometimes I think I was supposed to be killed because I was too embarrassing to live.\"\n\nAgatha sat down next to him. \"I understand. I feel like that a lot.\"\n\nKrosp looked up. \"You do?\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"I\u2026 I want to make things. I see them in my head\u2014but they never work! I got headaches! I can't concentrate! I feel so useless sometimes. Why am I like this? I must be good for something, but I feel like my head is full of junk! I can't do anything useful!\"\n\nKrosp blinked. \"You got me something to eat.\"\n\nAgatha looked at him for a moment and then slumped over onto her side. \"Oh of course. I see. My destiny is to serve the King of the cats.\"\n\nThe effect of these words upon Krosp were electric. Thoughts raced through his head, and then a grim resolution filled his face and he nodded once. With great gravitas, he stood and placed his right paw upon Agatha's forehead. \"I accept your fealty,\" he said. \"Next time, don't forget the milk.\" He straightened and looked at her seriously. \"Now we have to figure out how to escape.\"\n\nAgatha sat up. \"Escape? From what?\"\n\n\"From the Baron. I can live here, but you couldn't. Not safely.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\nKrosp looked at her. \"You placed yourself in my service. You're my responsibility now. I can't guarantee your safety here, so we have to leave.\"\n\n\"Why would the Baron care about me?\"\n\n\"The Baron studies the Spark. One of the ways he studies it is by destroying it. He 'studied' my creator, Dr. Vapnoople.\" Krosp looked away. \"I couldn't save him, but I have vowed to help save his work, and\u2026\"Krosp sighed, \"and what's left of him.\" He gave Agatha a look she couldn't interpret. \"And now I must try to save you.\"\n\n\"But I don't have the Spark. I seem to have the opposite. Nothing I build even works.\"\n\nKrosp signed in exasperation. \"What do you think you DO at night?\"\n\nAgatha looked wary. \"I don't know. I'm asleep. What do I do at night?\"\n\n\"You build things.\"\n\n\"But there's never anything there when I wake up.\"\n\nKrosp folded his arms. \"They always run away.\"\n\nGirl and cat stared at each other for a minute. Finally Agatha said carefully, \"Why?\" Krosp shifted uncomfortably and looked away. Agatha folded her hands and continued to look at him.\n\nKrosp hunched his shoulders. \"I chase them,\" he whispered. He looked up at Agatha with lowered ears. \"I can't help it.\" Now he looked annoyed. \"And I can't catch them.\"\n\nAgatha took a deep breath and a new thought struck her. \"Othar Tryggvassen, he's a Spark. Would the Baron really hurt him?\"\n\nKrosp considered this. \"He'll destroy his mind, certainly. It might kill him eventually, but I don't think he'll go out of his way to hurt him\u2014\"\n\n\"But Othar, he's supposed to be a good person. He's helped people. Why would the Baron do that?\"\n\n\"The Baron sees a bigger picture.\" With that, Krosp leapt with surprising grace back atop the armoire. \"I've got to go.\" With a deft motion, he hooked the ventilator grill with a claw and popped it from the wall. Agatha snapped her fingers.\n\n\"There's another one of those under the bed.\"\n\nKrosp nodded. \"Think about what you want to take, if anything, and keep it with you. Opportunity will dictate our schedule.\"\n\n\"Wait. If you're going to rescue someone, rescue Othar. I'll be fine.\"\n\nKrosp's head looked out at her from the depths of the airshaft. \"Othar isn't my responsibility.\" With a muffled click, he pulled the cover back into place, and was gone.\n\nAgatha stared at the vent for a moment and then nodded to herself. \"Well. Then I guess he's mine.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\u2003\"It is a terrible thing, to see your loved ones moving, and yet know they are dead.\" \u2014Survivor's report, after the destruction of the town of Berne\n\nMr. Rovainen froze halfway through the door. In a dim pool of light, a familiar figure was hunched over a series of microscopes. \"Dr. Vg,\" he said. \"Why are you still here? It is very late.\"\n\nVg nodded without turning to face him. \"I couldn't sleep.\" He delicately placed a pipette on a dish, and sat back with a sigh. \"I think I have found a way to determine the age of the Hive Engine.\"\n\nRovainen scuttled forward. \"Really?\"\n\nVg removed his pince-nez and buffed them on his sleeve, always a sign that he was pleased with himself. \"Yes. It will involve disassembling part of the control unit, but once we have, we can compare the crystallization rates of the brines.\"\n\nRovainen peered up at the massive Hive Engine that dominated the room. He nodded. \"That would work.\" He hesitated, then awkwardly placed a hand on Vg's shoulder. \"I have\u2026 always admired your brilliance, Doctor.\" Vg was so surprised by this statement, that the shock of the blade passing through his chest was almost an afterthought. \"I am so sorry,\" Mr. Rovainen whispered as he gently lowered the stricken Vg to the floor.\n\nVg felt the life draining from him. \"You\u2026 you have killed me!\"\n\nMr. Rovainen stood over him and deftly reinserted the long steel blade into the spring device in his coat sleeve. \"No, old friend. I have spared you.\" He stepped up to the Hive Engine, and with three sure motions, activated it. \"Spared you from that which is to come.\"\n\nVg struggled, but only felt himself grow weaker. \"You've activated it! Are you insane?\"\n\nRovainen looked at him askance. \"Alas, that comfort is denied me.\"\n\nVg's brain made one final leap of logic. \"You're a servant of the Other. You're a revenant!\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Fight it! Don't do this! The Other is dead! Gone!\" The effort caused a gout of blood to cover his lips and he fell back.\n\nMr. Rovainen turned back to the now-glowing Engine. \"Oh no. The Other lives\u2014and I have seen her.\"\n\nAgatha floated in the middle of the universe and saw that it was an engine, endlessly ticking. She saw how it was put together. She reached out and grasped a tiny part which was, as she saw, connected to everything else, and twisted\u2014\"Yes. Now I see. Wrench.\"\n\nA small silver wrench was delicately placed into her outstretched hand. A final twist and she stepped back from the large cylinder before her. A movement to her side caught her eye and she realized that the wrench had been handed to her by a small brass clank that was the size and shape of a large pocket watch. It had diminutive arms and legs, and the single great eye set in the center of its face watched her intently. Agatha gave a small gasp of delight and leaned forward to study it. \"What are you?\" she breathed.\n\n\"You should know,\" a voice remarked from behind her. Agatha whirled in surprise. There, perched upon a lab stool looking tired but exultant, was Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. He waved a hand. \"You built them.\"\n\nIt was only then that Agatha realized that the lab they were in, Gilgamesh's she realized, was literally crawling with hundreds of small clanks, no two of them alike and all of them small enough to fit in her hand. Half of them seemed to be disassembling parts of the lab and its equipment, while the other half were reassembling said parts into new, unfamiliar shapes.\n\nAgatha shook her head. \"No, I couldn't have built all these. There are too many of them.\"\n\nGil shrugged. \"I think you started a few nights ago\u2014in your sleep.\"\n\n\"But still\u2014all of these\u2026\"\n\n\"That's the best part. They're self-replicating.\" He snagged a small, domed clank that was moving across the floor by fits and starts. \"I watched as this one was built by three others tonight.\" Agatha peered at it and noticed that the rivets were misaligned along half of the little clank's carapace. Its single eyed rolled towards her slowly. \"It doesn't seem to be as well made as the others,\" Gil remarked.\n\nAgatha stared at him. \"But they work. I built something that works.\"\n\nGil shrugged. \"You'll have to get used to that\u2014being a Spark and all.\"\n\nAgatha felt like she was watching the conversation happen to someone else far away. \"I built something that works,\" the faraway girl said. She turned and looked Gil in the eye, to see if he was making fun of her. \"A Spark,\" she said.\n\nGil grinned. \"I certainly hope so.\" He gently took hold of her shoulder and swung her around. \"Because if you're not, then I'm never going to figure out what this is about.\"\n\n\"This\" was a tall, barrel-shaped clank standing motionless upon a pair of powerful, jacked legs. Attached to its back was a tapering, green metal pod that looked vaguely insectoid. The whole thing was startlingly familiar, and it suddenly dawned on Agatha where she'd seen it. \"Is\u2026 is that your fencing clank?\"\n\nGil nodded. \"The fencing clank, part of the wrecked flying machine, bits of the furnace and the mechanical orchestra, my good lathe\u2014\" he looked at her quizzically \"\u2014and a pneumatic nutcracker.\"\n\nAgatha looked embarrassed. \"I really like nuts.\"\n\nGil nodded. For a Spark, this was solid stuff. Any number of devices had been built because \"The cats on the moon told me to.\"\n\nAgatha frowned. \"Wait. You don't know what this is? But if you saw me put it together\u2014\"\n\nGil shrugged. \"Oh, I know most of how you did it\u2014You had me playing assistant half the night. But that's a lot different from actually firing it up and seeing what it does. Maybe I'll get Wooster to do it.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Just kidding.\" Gil grinned. A part of Agatha noted with a touch of embarrassment how much she enjoyed seeing his smile. He pulled a bizarre pocket watch out of his waistcoat and clasping her wrist, began to check her pulse. His hand was warm and comfortably strong. \"Hmm. Accelerated pulse. So, how are you feeling?\"\n\nAgatha thought about it. \"Good,\" she realized, with a touch of surprise. \"A little tired. Hungry.\"\n\nGil snapped the watch lid shut and gestured towards a long table along the wall. \"Hardly surprising, you've been working all night. I had the kitchens bring up some food. Help yourself.\"\n\nA large covered basket revealed a stack of warm crusty loaves of French-style bread. A block of sweet Irish butter was surrounded by several different types of cheese, including a sharp orange cheddar webbed with fiery spices, a buttery gouda baked into a flaky crust and a pungent bleu which contained small salt crystals that crunched between your teeth. Platters of cold meats, an astonishing selection of various puddings and sausages and smoked fish from all over the Empire. Several small crocks contained pickled vegetables.\n\nHungry as she was, Agatha swiftly constructed a massive sandwich and was in the process of topping it off with a potent garlic mustard that was a Beetleburg favorite, when she realized that the young man was observing her closely. He nodded when he saw that she had noticed. \"You seem very\u2026\" He considered his words carefully. \"Together.\"\n\nAgatha quickly checked her attire and then hefted the finished sandwich self-consciously. \"Yes\u2014I'm all dressed and everything.\"\n\nGil waved that aside. \"No, no. When a Spark breaks through, it's usually very traumatic. A fair number go mad. Since they're made during these periods of great emotional pain and confusion, breakthrough devices usually cause a lot of destruction. It's how a lot of Sparks get killed. But you\u2014even your first clank in Beetleburg was fairly benign. You haven't broken through so much as eased through. My father will find this very interesting.\"\n\nAgatha swallowed. \"You're telling your father?\"\n\nGil nodded. \"Oh yes! He was totally wrong about you! He still thinks von Zinzer is the Spark! Hee!\" It was obvious that catching his father in a mistake was the best thing to happen to Gil in quite some time.\n\n\"But I don't want to be 'studied,'\" Agatha objected. \"What if I end up like\u2026 like Dr. Vapnoople?\"\n\nGilgamesh was instantly serious. \"What makes you think you'll end up like Dr. Vapnoople?\"\n\nAgatha blinked. \"Oh. Ah\u2026\"\n\nGil's eyes narrowed. \"How do you even know who he is?\"\n\n\"I don't really, but his cat warned me.\" The sentence actually formed in Agatha's head, but common sense kept it from being spoken. Luckily, she was spared further interrogation by a blast of sound that came from a set of whistles set into the wall. Both Agatha and Gilgamesh clapped their hands to their ears. \"What is that?\" Agatha shouted.\n\nGil leaned close to her and shouted back. \"Evacuation alarm! There isn't a drill scheduled, so let's move!\" With that he grabbed her hand and took off for the exit. Pipes were whistling all through the section, and Agatha saw people emerging from various doorways, some of them frantically clutching armloads of papers or equipment.\n\n\"Evacuation?\" she yelled over the din, \"You mean off the Castle?\"\n\nGil shrugged. He seemed remarkably unconcerned. \"Probably not,\" he shouted back. \"Just out of the labs. If it's really bad, we'll head to one of the support dirigibles.\"\n\nAgatha stopped suddenly, almost jerking Gil off his feet. \"Wait! My little clanks!\"\n\nGil frowned. \"You don't have time to collect them!\"\n\nIgnoring him, Agatha cupped her hands and roared down the hallway, \"FOLLOW ME!\"\n\nFrom the doorway of the lab, a glittering carpet of tiny devices poured out into the hall. Suddenly the flood paused, and the giant mystery clank smashed through the doorframe. It moved quickly, but with a delicate mincing step that managed to avoid crushing any of the smaller machines that swarmed around its feet.\n\n\"But what are they even good for?\" Gil yelled.\n\n\"If I leave them behind, we'll never know!\"\n\nWith that the two again headed towards the exit. Agatha noticed that the hall was now empty, except for them. Gil explained, \"We're experimenting with dangerous stuff here. Once the alarm goes off, we have two minutes to get out of the labs before they're sealed off.\"\n\n\"Does this happen a lot?\"\n\nGil shrugged. \"Every couple of weeks. You'll get used to it.\" They turned the corner and saw the exit doorway. Beyond it an anxious crowd was gathered, arms loaded with items. At the sight of Gil and Agatha, they raised a cheer and called encouragement. On the doorframe itself, lights were blinking, and a digital display across the top was counting down the seconds. As Agatha watched, it clicked to 21. With a gasp, they crossed the threshold. Agatha felt embarrassed at how out of shape she was, and with a guilty start, realized that she was leaning on Gil's arm. She jerked herself off just as Gil's hand was about to delicately ease itself onto her shoulder. With only a slight hesitation, said hand smoothly fished out his watch instead. He nodded.\n\n\"That's cutting it a bit fine. But now we should find my father and help\u2014\"\n\n\"WAIT!\" Agatha had screeched to a halt. \"The prisoner!\"\n\nGil looked at her blankly, then he frowned. \"Othar? What about him?\"\n\n\"He's still locked up in your father's lab. If it's something dangerous, he'll be helpless!\"\n\n\"Your point being\u2026?\" Agatha frowned. Gil lowered his eyes. \"Look, you've got to understand. I've known Othar a long time. He's completely insane. He's probably the cause of this alarm. He's very dangerous, especially to you\u2014because\u2014\"\n\nA collective gasp from the crowd caused him to look up in time to see Agatha darting back down the corridor just as the counter clicked to \"0,\" and the great metal doors clanged! shut. Instantly a shrill metallic keening arose from the floor. Everyone looked down and saw the swarm of little clanks frantically scrabbling at the closed door. The crowd shrieked and scuttled away, anxiously checking skirt hems and pant cuffs. Gil sighed and rolled his eyes, then squatted down and addressed them. \"If you want me to go in after her, you'll have to help me open that door!\" The array of little machines stared back at him. He sat back upon his heels and felt slightly foolish. Why had he allowed himself to succumb to the impulse to talk to them like they could do could actually do anything\u2014\n\nWith the sound of a thousand tiny relays flipping to a new setting, the little clanks pulled out, re-arranged themselves into, or simply grabbed a neighbor who was thus revealed to be part of, a vast set of miniature tools, with which they instantly attacked the great metal doorway that stood between them and their mistress.\n\nOn the other side of said door, Agatha was having second thoughts as she raced back down the corridor. Turning the bend, she almost plowed into the large mystery clank, which was jogging towards her. She swerved to the left, caromed off the corridor wall and kept on going. The clank jabbed a leg forward, pivoted around it with a screech until it was facing the way it had come, and then clanked off after her.\n\n\"What am I doing?\" she muttered. \"The Baron's labs are probably even bigger than Gilgamesh's. How can I find Othar quickly?\"\n\n\"A-ha!\" a voice rang out from an open doorway. \"The reticent damsel answers the call of adventure!\"\n\nAgatha skidded to a halt and looked in. For a fellow who was chained upside down surrounded by an array of spring-loaded weapons all aimed at him, Othar looked remarkably cheerful, not to mention a bit smug. Agatha took a deep breath and went up to him. Behind her, the great metal clank tried, with qualified success, to ease itself through the doorway without causing too much damage.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asked.\n\n\"Ha! Othar Tryggvassen laughs at such a question!\"\n\n\"Probably because all the blood's in your head.\"\n\n\"That's certainly part of it,\" Othar cheerfully conceded.\n\nSuddenly the great clank stepped forward. With a hisss, the four great fencing arms, topped with their various weapons, unfolded. \"Subject Othar\u2014\"Its voice was an astonishingly melodious three-part chorus \"\u2014I am here to rescue you!\"\n\nWith a scream, the great circular sawblade on its lower right arm roared into life and, with a flourish, cut through the chains holding Othar aloft, centimeters away from his fingers. Instantly, the spring-loaded weapons released, and were deftly deflected by the remaining arms quickly enough that the machine was able to grab Othar by the leg before he had time to crash onto the floor. Triumphant music erupted from the device and it waved Othar about like a baton as it lumbered back through the doorway, all consideration for the doorframe's integrity forgotten.\n\nAgatha raced after it, opened her mouth, and ran straight into a billowing expanse of ribbed fabric. Backing up, she saw that the pod upon the clank's back had opened, and a vast set of green, bat-like wings, supported by an intricate cluster of rods and levers, was unfolding and snapping into position. \"Fear not!\" The clank sang joyously, \"Soon you will be safe!\"\n\n\"Wait!\" Agatha screamed. \"We're inside! You can't fly in here!\"\n\nFor a split-second, the device paused, and then spun about and lumbered forward, gaining speed as it headed for a vast bank of windows. Seeing this, Othar frantically doubled his efforts to escape the device's clutches, but to no avail, as without hesitation, the clank, and its unwilling passenger, smashed through the tempered glass and plunged into the empty sky. Agatha dashed to the gaping hole, and clutched the edge, fighting against the great winds that tore at her long enough to hear a final triumphant \"Be free!\" along with Othar's fading scream as they dropped out of sight.\n\n\"Well,\" she said distantly to no one in particular, \"at least now I know what it was for.\"\n\nA sudden silence caused her to look around. \"The alarm is off. Now what was that for?\"\n\nAt the far end of the gallery, a door creaked open. A large insectoid head poked through, along with several long multi-jointed arms. Agatha froze. Everyone was trained to know what a Slaver wasp looked like.\n\nKlaus' quarters were large and opulent, in a restrained and tasteful way. Many of the quarters aboard the Castle were snug at best. Here, there was space, despite the great canopied bed and the large solid items of furniture that occupied the area. At the moment, it was filled with people, many of whom were in the process of coming or going, while a core group collected reports and sent messengers out anew. In the center of it all was the master of Castle Wulfenbach, who was finishing off a goblet of warm wine while his valet finished buckling on a great bandoleer fully loaded with immense shells. The gun that used these shells was strapped into a large holster on his hip. The other hip was taken up with a scabbard holding a villainous-looking greatsword almost two meters long.\n\nThe main doorway was filled by the large, bulky form of J\u00e4gergeneral Goomblast. \"Herr Baron\u2014der outfliers report Slaver warriors all over your main labs.\"\n\nBoris nodded. \"Yes, the Hive Engine has been activated. Do you have any new information for us?\" Goomblast shook his head.\n\n\"A revenant onboard,\" Klaus muttered. \"How many were in the labs?\"\n\nMr. Rovainen hunched his shoulders. \"We're not sure. A few technicians cleaning, Dr. Kirstein's team was running their lizard-candy experiment\u2026 oh, and the prisoner, of course.\"\n\nKlaus rolled his eyes. \"Of course. Where is Dr. Vg?\"\n\nMr. Rovainen polished his left lens with a bandage-wrapped finger. \"Ah. No one has seen Dr. Vg since last night,\" he admitted.\n\nGoomblast broke in. \"Dere iz some goot news\u2014All der bogs dey haff seen so far iz varriors!\"\n\nKlaus perked up. \"So there's a chance that the actual swarm is still gestating? That is good news! How soon before we're ready to go in?\"\n\n\"Hyu giff der order undvego. Vehaff a mixed team of J\u00e4gerkin, Lackya, clenks und crew at each entry.\"\n\n\"Excellent. I am pleased at the lack of rivalry.\"\n\nGoomblast drew himself up. \"Sir\u2014dere iz a time to twit nancyboy feets men and a time to crush bogs.\" The head Lacky a bristled while Boris rolled his eyes. Klaus blinked.\n\nHe was saved from any comment by the arrival of Von Pinn, who entered through the door with a creak of leather and an expressive leer from the J\u00e4ger on the door. \"The children's ship is away,\" she rasped. \"The older ones were not happy.\"\n\nA pair of booted feet sticking out from a shadowed chair uncrossed themselves and Bangladesh DuPree leaned forward. \"Well of course. They're kids. They want to fight! It's fun!\"\n\nVon Pinn swiveled and glared at the seated woman. \"I teach restraint.\"\n\nDuPree eyed the leather-clad form and grinned. \"So your dressmaker's an 'A' student then?\"\n\nVon Pinn hissed and DuPree slowly began to rise from her chair, her grin even wider. \"You're losing air, sweetheart,\" she crooned.\n\nThe two jerked upright as Klaus' voice snapped out. \"Enough!\" Crisply Klaus gave orders and assigned positions. With a rush, the soldiers left to implement his orders. Klaus turned to an airman who had been patiently waiting off to the side.\n\n\"Present Captain Patel with my compliments and tell him to continue the evacuation. If he does not hear from myself or my son in two hours, or if the wheelhouse is about to fall, he is to scuttle the Castle.\" The airman looked nervous, but his voice was steady as he repeated back the orders, saluted and left.\n\nKlaus turned back. His group consisted of General Goomblast, Bangladesh, Boris, and a squad equally composed of J\u00e4gers, Lackya and Castle Wulfenbach's own marines. He patted his greatsword and for the first time, grinned. \"Let us take some exercise.\"\n\nAgatha was running flat out down the hallway. She was glancing behind her when she took a corner and smacked into Gilgamesh Wulfenbach. \"Miss Clay! Are you all right? Ow.\"\n\nGil was the first one to move, but it was Agatha who hauled him to his feet. \"No! Slaver wasps! Coming fast!\"\n\nA look of loathing crossed Gil's face. \"That cursed Hive Engine! What was Beetle thinking?\"\n\nUnsteadily, they broke into a trot towards the exit. \"What were you thinking?\" snapped Agatha. \"How did you get in here?\"\n\nThey turned the corner and skidded to a stop. Before them a tide of small machines ran to meet them, swarming around Agatha's feet, producing a noise that sounded suspiciously like small, tinny cheers. \"Your little clanks,\" Gil explained. \"They opened the door. They're amazing.\"\n\nAgatha felt a surge of hope. \"That's great! Then we can leave!\"\n\nShe turned to run, but Gil grabbed her arm and hauled her in a different direction. \"No,\" he explained, \"I had them seal the door behind us. I didn't know what was in here.\"\n\n\"Then\u2026 then we're trapped!\" She glanced back and slowed at what she saw. \"Wait\u2014my little clanks can't keep up.\"\n\nAgain Gil jerked her forward. \"They'll catch up, and they're in no danger. It's us the wasps want. Now hurry! My main lab is just ahead. If I can seal it off, we can wait for my father.\"\n\nThey turned another corner, but outside the lab doors, they saw several of the insect creatures freeze briefly, and then scuttle rapidly towards them.\n\nWith an oath, Gilgamesh steered them into the first room they found and slammed the door behind them. They looked around, panting. The room was bare of furniture, but was lined with shelves, cabinets and bins filled with racks of various devices.\n\n\"This is your electrical parts storage locker,\" Agatha noted.\n\nGil finished securing the door to a sturdy rack of shelves with a coil of heavy-duty cable. As he stepped back, the door shuddered as something slammed into it from the other side. \"That might do,\" he muttered. \"But we've no time to waste.\"\n\n\"But we should be okay now, right?\" Agatha looked around with interest. \"Once we equip ourselves from your arsenal, those things shouldn't stand a chance.\"\n\nGil looked blank. \"My what?\"\n\n\"Your weapons. The stuff you've built.\" Agatha rubbed her hands together in gleeful anticipation. \"I wondered where they were. So any chance of a good Death Ray? That'd be perfect!\"\n\nGil looked appalled. \"I don't have a Death Ray!\"\n\nAgatha blinked. \"What, it's an early prototype or something?\"\n\n\"I don't have a Death Ray.\"\n\nA sudden realization filled Agatha. She blushed in sympathy and with a gentle smile she placed a hand on his arm. \"I'm sure that next time you'll build a much bigger one, but trust me, right now any Death Ray, will do, no matter how\u2014\"\n\n\"I. DO. NOT. HAVE. A. DEATH. RAY!\" Gil shouted.\n\nAgatha stared at him in disbelief, and with an exasperated puff blew a lock of hair out of her face. \"Don't be ridiculous. Dr. Beetle had stuff like that all over the place. You must have something.\" She scratched her nose. \"Sonic Cannon?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Disintegration Beam?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You must have some sort of Doomsday Device. We can modify it. Come on, it'll be fun.\"\n\n\"I don't have anything like that!\"\n\nThey stared at each other.\n\n\"Fine. So what you're telling me is that you\u2014Gilgamesh Wulfenbach\u2014the person next in line to the despotic, iron-fisted rule of the Wulfenbach Empire\u2014have no deadly, powerful weapons lying around whatsoever! That's just great! What kind of an Evil Overlord are you going to be, anyway?\"\n\n\"Apparently a better one than I'd thought,\" Gil said, suddenly thoughtful.\n\nSuddenly, with a series of sharp thuds, a swordlike arm punched its way through the door. It was joined by several others, and using the opening, rapidly expanded it.\n\nA canister of old fencing swords was next to a cupboard. Gil grabbed two and faced off against the wasps struggling to get at them. \"Build something!\" he ordered Agatha.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I'll hold them off, you build your own damn Death Ray!\"\n\n\"But I don't know how! You should\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't fight\u2014but you're a Spark!\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Or we'll die\u2014or worse!\" With that he turned away from her and sliced away at a wasp that had managed to cram itself through the door.\n\nAgatha backed into a corner. \"Got to think.\" She gasped as a razor-edged claw sliced through Gil's boot. Deliberately she turned away. \"Got to think!\" The noise was becoming overwhelming. It sounded like dozens of creatures hammering and tearing away at the metal door. Sounds became magnified. The sound of sword striking chitin, the smashing of equipment, the slow rending of the metal door, even the slow steady breathing of Gil as he wove a curtain of death before him.\n\n\"Too much noise,\" Agatha whispered. \"I have to think.\" And softly at first, then quickly gaining strength, a complicated atonal humming filled the room. Agatha stood stock still for several seconds, and then her head snapped forward, her eyes filled with a furious purpose.\n\nMeanwhile Gil found himself being slowly pushed back by the sheer weight of numbers. It didn't help that the wasps seemed capable of taking an extraordinary amount of damage before their brain admitted that they were dead, and even in death, they tended to lash out, as the numerous tears ands gashes covering his arms and legs attested to. \"I'd better be right about you,\" he muttered. One of the swords bent as it hit an internal structure. He was only barely able to wrench it out in time to parry a darting bladelike arm. A wrenching groan was his only warning, but he was able to leap backwards as a section of the ceiling collapsed, raining a fresh wave of Slaver wasps across the floor. Another step backwards and he found himself surrounded by empty canisters, which were just tall enough to hamper his movement. Suddenly his swords were occupied and another bug flashed towards him, its saberlike arms upraised.\n\nA pair of copper rods drove into the wasp's eye. And a cascade of sparks erupted. The creature jerked frantically and then collapsed. The other wasps froze in surprise. Gil looked behind him.\n\nThere stood Agatha, a fierce grin on her face. In one hand she had the mysterious Heterodyne sphere. Connected to it was a supple cable, which ended at a bizarre-looking swordlike object, which crackled and continually threw off great arcing Jacobs ladders. \"HA!\" she cried. \"It works!\"\n\nGilgamesh scrambled to his feet. \"You did it!\"\n\n\"Sure did.\" Agatha tossed him a large rubberized gauntlet, identical to the one she was wearing on her right hand. He quickly slid it on as she tossed him another sword, which was also attached to the glowing blue orb. \"Here. You're the fencer.\"\n\nTogether they returned their attention to the again advancing bugs. Whenever they touched the wasps, the insects jerked and died instantly. \"You used part of my lightning generator,\" Gil observed.\n\n\"Yes, the Heterodyne device can recharge it instantly.\"\n\n\"Good job. I never thought to test it as a power source, but I'd really thought there was more to it.\" As he said this, both he and Agatha smacked the same bug at the same time. It jerked once, crackling, and when they swung their swords away, it clattered to the ground like a collection of scrap iron.\n\nThey pushed out into the hallway, effortlessly scything down wasps. Gil nodded approvingly as Agatha swept her sword in an arc that took out three wasps at one swipe. \"I thought you didn't fence,\" he remarked.\n\n\"This isn't fencing!\" she retorted. \"This is swinging wildly!\" A frantic series of such swings on both of their parts brought them almost face to face, slightly tangled in the cords. Gil's face was glistening with sweat and a small cut oozed on his cheek. Agatha was breathing heavily and grimly determined. Their eyes locked. They froze and swayed fractionally closer\u2014and then whirled away as an attacking arm slashed through the place they'd been.\n\n\"Couldn't you have used a longer cable?\" Gil groused.\n\n\"It's what was there,\" Agatha snarled.\n\nGil shrugged. \"Okay. So now what do we do?\"\n\nAgatha looked at him askance as she fried an unwary wasp. \"Um\u2026 we should try to get out of here?\"\n\n\"We could head for the exit,\" Gil conceded, \"but that won't solve the problem.\"\n\n\"You're saying we have to stop them at the source. We've got to destroy the Hive Engine.\"\n\n\"As long as we're here.\"\n\nAgatha drove her sword up into a wasp's mouth causing its head to explode. \"Then we'd better get going.\"\n\nAround Castle Wulfenbach, the ever-present cloud of attendant airships began to shift. Ships carrying emergency crew and marines began to head towards loading docks, while shuttle and passenger ships removed non-essential personnel.\n\nOne such ship was carrying away the students and other children. On one of the observation decks, Theo had commandeered the largest of the great brass telescopes and was training it upon the laboratory decks. \"Well,\" he reported to the others, \"there's wasps all over the place. But I still don't see any resistance.\"\n\n\"Let me look,\" said Sleipnir. Theo yielded the telescope.\n\n\"At least I couldn't see any outside the lab area,\" he said, \"so I guess the doors\u2014\"\n\n\"Omigosh!\" Sleipnir yelled. \"It's Gil and Agatha! They're in the labs! They're fighting wasps!\"\n\n\"Let me see!\"\n\nSleipnir defended her position with a deft kick to Theo's knee. \"They're using swords and\u2014wait. They just vanished!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"No\u2014There they are. I must've\u2014no, they're gone\u2014they're back\u2014\" Sleipnir furiously knuckled her eyes. \"What the heck is wrong with my eyes?\"\n\nSun Ming pushed her aside and peered through the eyepiece. \"No, I see it too. They're vanishing,\" she announced. \"I wonder how they're doing that?\"\n\nTheo scribbled a quick note and handed it to Von Tock, the boy with the clock in his head. \"Have the message light send this to the Baron right away. He's got to know.\" The boy nodded and dashed off. \"I hope the Baron can get to them in time.\"\n\nSleipnir grinned. \"Why wait?\"\n\nTheo's eyebrows perked upwards. \"Go rescue them ourselves? Intriguing\u2026\" His eyes slid over towards Zulenna. \"But the life gliders will be guarded.\"\n\nZulenna tossed her head. \"Probably by a man.\" With that she gave her torso a supple little twitch that caused Theo to blink and swallow. \"And there's no male guard on this ship that can resist a beautiful and oh-so-lonely princess.\"\n\nTheo nodded as he picked up a large spanner and cheerfully smacked it into his palm. \"That's the truth.\"\n\nBehind them Sleipnir rolled her eyes. \"I cannot believe that works every time.\"\n\nHezekiah shrugged. \"It always works on me.\"\n\nLeaving the younger children in the care of the governesses, the students slipped out into the main hallway. Moving through the ship proved to be almost disappointingly easy, as things were so confused that their passage went unnoticed. The bay they had chosen for their departure was indeed guarded by a lone soldier. He was young and good looking, and was lounging against the entrance, quietly eating an apple while gazing at the panorama of ships spread out before him.\n\nZulenna looked him over, gave Theo a silent thumbs up, and then wandered into the bay.\n\nInstantly the apple disappeared and the soldier snapped to attention. \"This area is off limits, Miss.\"\n\nZulenna appeared startled. \"Oh, I'm sorry, I was just\u2026\" She shuddered. \"It's all so horrible. I was just looking for something\u2026 someone to take my mind off what's happening.\" She looked up at him with large luminous eyes, which blinked in surprise as she saw the guard's weapon pointing at her chest.\n\n\"It is very horrible, Miss. I remember when wasps wiped out my village. It started with people acting all odd.\"\n\nZulenna faltered, then gamely rallied with a shy smile. \"Really?\"\n\nThe guard's weapon didn't move a millimeter. \"Oh yes. For instance, if a snooty little princess who had, just last week, upbraided a hard-working member of the ship's guard because he'd neglected to do up a collar button even though he was off duty, suddenly came slinking in like a Parisian streetwalker, just waiting for the proper moment to burst into soppy crocodile tears\u2014why that'd be suspicious enough that any experienced soldier'd haul her off to the brig.\" He prodded the now scarlet-faced Zulenna in the stomach with the end of his rifle. \"Now let's move along, eh?\"\n\nMechanically Zulenna wheeled about and strode off, causing her captor to hurry after her, which helped explain why he didn't see Theo step out from behind a duct and smack him smartly across the back of the head. He collapsed forward onto the deck.\n\nZulenna saw Sleipnir valiantly trying to keep from laughing. \"Very well, I will concede that there's one who can resist.\"\n\nSleipnir shrugged. \"Personally, I'm rather glad the Baron's troops are so well trained. I feel so much safer, don't you?\" Zulenna deigned to reply, but carefully placed the soldier comfortably against a bulkhead, and then delicately arranged his arms so that one thumb was in his mouth while the forefinger of the other hand was lodged deeply within his nose.\n\n\"Now you're just being petty,\" Sleipnir observed.\n\nZulenna rose and dusted her hands together before smiling beatifically. \"Quite.\"\n\nMeanwhile the others had found the personal flyers. These were small dirigible shaped balloons attached to harnesses, fitted with large bat-like wings, which the user could control with long rods. For emergency use only, the flyers were capable of slowing a person's fall enough that they would have an excellent chance of surviving should they have to abandon one of the great airships in mid-flight. The students had long ago discovered that the flyers also be used to glide from ship to ship, providing that the ship you started from was sufficiently higher than your destination. This was, of course, strictly forbidden, and it had been weeks since they'd done it last.\n\nZulenna and Sleipnir entered just as Theo finished circumventing the tripwire alarm. Nicodeamus was using the gas tanks to inflate a pair of flyers for the girls. \"You know, this is really stupid,\" he cheerfully informed them.\n\nSleipnir buckled herself into her rig while Zulenna checked her connections. \"Oh. You just noticed?\"\n\nZulenna patted his shoulder, then began to pull her own flyer on. \"You can stay here.\"\n\nNicodeamus waved. \"Nah. Just making conversation.\" He snuck a quick look at Zulenna, who pretended not to notice, but once Sleipnir had patted her shoulder and turned away, she leaned in and placed a quick kiss on his cheek.\n\nThey joined the others lined up at the opening. Before them was the crenellated wall that was Castle Wulfenbach, stretching away in all directions. Scale was provided by the support ships that were moving to and fro between them. Theo pointed out the nearest windsock, and then to a landing deck several hundred feet below them on the Castle. \"We'll aim for Docking Bay 451. That's closest to an armory.\" Nicodeamus tossed out a scrap of paper. With an aeronaut's experienced eye, they all watched it flutter away in the wind and plotted their trajectories accordingly.\n\nTheo moved up to the lip and grinned. \"Okay, you brats, let's go!\" Without pause, he launched himself over the edge, and with a whoop, the others followed.\n\nA troop of J\u00e4gers sloped down the hallway, looking like a parade sergeant's personal vision of Hell. Sloping was a combination of loping and slouching developed by the J\u00e4gerkin. To the untrained eye, it looked like they were ambling along in a disorganized fashion. A closer look and you saw that they were traveling at a respectable clip, and prolonged observation revealed that they could do it for a very long time over a wide variety of terrain. As with many J\u00e4ger practices, it had been developed to annoy other people. Particularly Boris.\n\nDespite the haste, great care was taken to keep their uniforms straight, and several were brushing their hats and buffing their braid even as they moved forward. There was a palatable excitement amongst them, and much boasting and declarations regarding the number of wasps that were about to be killed, stomped, and (possibly) eaten.\n\nThe other Castle personnel hastily hugged the side of the corridor as they approached, and only dared to breathe again when they had passed. With each yard they covered, they became more and more excited, until they poured around a corner into a large intersection and stopped dead, the ones in the back flowing forward until the entire corridor was a solid sea of J\u00e4gerkin.\n\nBefore them, in the center of the intersection, stood Von Pinn. Still as a statue. As soon as they stopped moving, she slowly moved with a leathery creak. Wordlessly she approached them and glided from one end of the crowd to the other. As her gaze swept them, each J\u00e4germonster felt themselves snapping to attention, some of them for the first time in years. Without a word she spun away and headed off down the hallway ahead of them. Three meters away, she stopped, twisting about, gave them a toothy come-hither look over her shoulder, and whispered, \"Well? What are you waiting for? Let's go squash some bugs.\"\n\nWith a roar that was heard throughout half of the Castle, the J\u00e4gers leapt forward and headed for battle.\n\nThe Baron's squad moved into position. It moved slowly because of the constant stream of unicycle messengers that darted in and out with reports from other parts of the vast dirigible.\n\nBoris scanned the latest missive. \"The main troop of J\u00e4germonsters have engaged the bugs in Docking Bay 422.\" He waved the note. \"They seem especially enthusiastic.\"\n\nKlaus nodded. \"It's been a while since they really fought.\"\n\nFrom the corridor behind, a young voice rang out. \"Personal message for the Baron! Clear the way! Stand aside!\" Noiselessly, a tall brass unicycle wove through the crowd and the rider slid from the seat in front of the Baron. From a large pouch on the front of her uniform, she pulled out a note, which the bright yellow paper identified as being from the Heliography Corps. Klaus unfolded it, scanned it quickly, and went pale.\n\nConcerned, Boris leaned in. \"Are you all right, Herr Baron?\"\n\n\"Gilgamesh has been spotted within the laboratory section. He is fighting wasps.\" Klaus' voice was rock steady, but Boris noticed that the note had been crushed. Klaus took a deep breath, and continued. \"He is my son. He will survive.\" He looked around at the retainers gathered around him. \"But he still needs a talking to. Let's go get him, shall we?\" With a shout of affirmation, the group broke into a trot and headed off down the hallway.\n\nAgatha gasped and dropped to her knees. By a supreme effort of will she kept the point of her sword up, but nothing impacted upon it. She looked up. Gil stood over her, a light sweat covering his face. His left sleeve was in tatters from where an extremely agile wasp had managed to get a bit too close. Blood oozed from several lacerations, but he breathed easily, his head and sword gliding easily back and forth keeping the wasps that surrounded them at bay.\n\nThey had entered a larger room, Agatha noticed. It was filled with crates and large barrels. The wasps, while certainly visible, had pulled back, and were circling them warily. \"But they've stopped attacking.\"\n\nGil nodded. \"Yes, of course. We're already heading towards the Slaver Engine.\"\n\n\"But I thought they were defending it.\"\n\n\"To a degree, but once they've established a perimeter, they'll begin to herd everyone inside it towards the Engine at the center. Once the actual Slavers hatch, then we'll be taken over and it will be our job to defend the Engine.\"\n\nAgatha looked ill. Everyone knew what happened to people who were taken over by Slaver wasps. She looked up at Gil. \"Kill me first,\" she whispered.\n\nGil nodded slowly. \"I will.\" That said, he offered her his hand and helped her to her feet. As they moved deeper into the room, the wasps began to scuttle backwards, losing themselves within the dimly lit stacks. By the time they came to the next hallway, the bugs had all vanished.\n\nThe hallway was dark and low ceilinged. The few lighting fixtures they could see had been smashed. They turned a bend and the next room came into view. It was one of the experimental bays in the Baron's section of the lab. The ceiling faded into the distance, and the metal walls were dimly lit by a collection of glowing machinery. Suddenly a massive form in the center shifted and Agatha realized that it was the activated Hive Engine.\n\nThe great sphere had split, and the creature within had uncoiled itself. A messy collection of things that might have been tentacles, or simply entwined pipes and cables, had spilled out around it. A pool of thick liquid collected around the base. Rising upward was a horrible amalgamation of flesh and machinery. Two glowing red eyes blinked myopically while it snorted and gasped like a broken steam radiator. It shook itself and rose higher, not stopping until it was almost four meters tall.\n\nGil looked sick. \"How do we kill that?\" he mumbled.\n\nAgatha dug her fingers into his arm. \"Quickly,\" she whispered back.\n\nSuddenly, on the various bits of machinery adorning the creature's head, a series of lights flicked on. Its eyes rolled up into its head, its great lantern-fish jaw dropped open and a long low note boomed out. Gil stiffened.\n\n\"What was that?\" Agatha asked.\n\n\"Bad news,\" Gil replied. \"The Slaver swarm is about to hatch. If we're going to attack it, we have to do it now!\"\n\nJust as Agatha nodded and tensed, the walls around them unfolded to reveal dozens of Slaver wasps, which had been hiding in the darkness. Moving almost too fast to see, they reached out and grabbed Agatha and Gil and held them steady. The swords were knocked from their grasps and clattered to the floor, sparking uselessly.\n\nAbove them, the Slaver Queen shuddered, opened its maw even wider, and a single insect-like creature darted out. It zipped upward and then paused.\n\nAgatha felt her arms pulled tight and her head tipped backwards, forcing her mouth open. From the corner of her eye, she saw Gil suffer through the same procedure.\n\nThen the tiny Slaver wasp twitched its body, folded its wings and dove straight towards her open mouth." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "\u2003Little Mary has bugs inside her head\u2014\n\n\u2003Inside her head, inside her head.\n\n\u2003Now The Baron's gonna come and make her dead\u2014\n\n\u2003Make her dead, make her dead.\n\n\u2003But Mary puts bugs in little Karl instead\u2014\n\n\u2003In Karl instead, in Karl instead.\n\n\u2003So little Karl has bugs inside his head\u2014\n\n\u2003Inside his head, inside his head.\n\n\u2003Now The Baron's gonna come and make him dead\u2014\n\n\u2003Make him dead, make him dead\u2026\n\n\u2014Children's naming game\n\nAgatha struggled, but it was hopeless. Every limb was secured by several of the Slaver warriors. Before her, Gilgamesh thrashed wildly, but to no avail. Two of the creatures delicately inserted their barbed spear-like forearms into his mouth and slowly forced it open. Gil's eyes rolled frantically, but his head was held tight. Agatha realized that despite the fact that they were being clasped tightly by a multitude of the sharp-edged creatures, they were not being harmed. \"They want us healthy enough to defend the Queen,\" she realized with a sick feeling.\n\nAbove their heads, the first of the mind-controlling drones swooped downwards towards Gil's open gullet. With a final futile shudder, Agatha felt herself begin to panic. \"Let us GO!\" she screamed.\n\nSeveral things happened at once. The assembled slavers froze, and Agatha felt the pressure upon her arms and legs begin to relax, when a glittering orb darted through the air and, with a small electrical burst, fried the small flying Slaver just as it was about to dive into Gil's mouth. The orb hovered, revealing itself as one of Agatha's small clanks, held aloft by a furiously spinning propeller. Suddenly a carpet of the diminutive clanks poured into the room and began attacking the remaining Slaver wasps, who seemed nonplussed at the nature of this new enemy, and began to skitter away in confusion, releasing their captives.\n\nGil scooped up his sword and began laying about with it, dropping every insect within reach. He noticed Agatha standing with a perplexed look on her face. \"Come on,\" he yelled as he plucked up her sword and put it into her hand. \"We're lucky those little clanks of yours showed up to distract them. This must be an old engine. That's a bit of luck! The Slaver swarm should have been huge\u2014and fast! We've got to try to destroy the Queen before she can generate any more of them!\"\n\nWith that he swung away and fried another dozen warriors, who having a more traditional enemy in front of them, were once more beginning to attack, but, Agatha noticed, in a hesitant, half-hearted manner.\n\n\"They let us go\u2026 when I told them to,\" she whispered. The idea was patently absurd, but\u2026\n\n\"You!\" Agatha directly addressed a group of wasps that were drawn up before the massive Queen. \"Stand aside.\"\n\nGil had his back to her, and was engaged by several foes, so he merely obeyed her and stepped aside. Thus he didn't see the group that Agatha addressed dipping their heads and reluctantly drawing back, until they had opened an empty corridor between Agatha and the Queen.\n\nAgatha stared blankly for a second, shook herself, grabbed Gil by the upper arm and yelled, \"It's clear!\"\n\nGil spun about and, although he was clearly taken aback by the sight before him, responded to Agatha's tug on his arm. The two of them leapt forward, reached the base of the Queen, and as she swung her massive head towards them, sank both of their swords deep within the pulsating flesh.\n\nAs they pulled their hands back, the flesh quivered and smoked and the entire creature began to squeal and jerk spasmodically, ripping loose cable and smashing bits of imbedded machinery until, with a final snap, it crashed to the floor, flattening a phalanx of soldier wasps and buckling the deck beneath it.\n\nAgatha and Gil stared at the dead behemoth. It began to slowly deflate. The warrior insects were frozen in place, not even defending themselves against the continued attacks of the small clanks.\n\nAgatha felt an upwelling of emotion unlike any she'd ever felt. A great wave of exultation flooded through her and it felt like every part of her body was electrified. She realized that Gil still had his arm around her shoulders, and with a growl she pulled him towards her and fiercely kissed him. Gil's initial astonishment caused him to hesitate, but the urgency of her lips upon his quickly caused him to wrap his arms around her in a crushing embrace and return the kiss with interest. Agatha felt as if a ball of fire was expanding outwards from her chest. The sensations coming from her lips, chest and head almost caused her to pass out from excitement. They broke, panting and wild-eyed, still clutching each other. They looked questioningly at one another for several seconds, then Agatha closed her eyes and pulled him back towards her\u2014\n\nA liquid noise caused them to freeze, lips scant millimeters apart. They swiveled their heads in time to see a section of the Queen's corpse beginning to swell alarmingly. With a sound like bubbling oatmeal, the large swelling burst, releasing a swarm of angrily buzzing Slaver wasps.\n\n\"Run!\" They yelled in unison and pelted off down the hallway.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Agatha asked.\n\n\"What DO we do now?\" Gil panted, \"What was my father thinking? What would he\u2014\" He grabbed Agatha and dragged her off in another direction. \"Of course!\"\n\n\"Of course\u2026?\" she prompted. They entered another short corridor off the main room. It was lined with small, identical metal panels. Gil handed Agatha his sword.\n\n\"My father would have a fail-safe here. It'll be disguised but\u2026\" He began counting off squares. Several wasps buzzed around the corner and accelerated when they saw the two Sparks. Behind them Agatha could hear the clattering rustle of the warrior wasps approaching. By frantically waving her sword back and forth, Agatha caught the two wasps in midair, and they exploded and dropped, smoking, to the deck.\n\nAs they hit, Gil finished his calculations, and snapped off a metal panel that appeared no different from its neighbors. Beneath it was a control panel with several levers and the legend \"VESPIARY CONTROL.\"\n\nHitting the first switch caused a steel door to roll down into place. Unfortunately, two of the warriors scuttled under the descending door and approached, saberlike arms at the ready.\n\nGil assayed them coolly. \"The entirety of the lab should be sealed,\" he told Agatha as he reached for the second switch. \"And this one will flood it with gas.\" Just as he was about to hit the switch, Agatha's hand stopped him. \"Wait! Somebody activated that Engine on purpose.\" She tossed Gil the swords. \"Let me look at this first.\"\n\nGil made a moue of annoyance, but quickly turned to dispose of the warrior bugs. As the swords connected, Agatha was astonished to see Gil apparently blink out of existence. She was only slightly less astonished when it happened again.\n\nShe was about to speak when something caught her eye in the machinery before her. By the time Gil appeared at her side, she was halfway into the opening.\n\n\"Anything?\" he ventured.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Agatha's voice came from within the depths of the wall. \"This gas line has been rerouted, to what I think must be the main ventilator for this area.\" With a delightful wiggle she extricated herself, and held up a small valve in a grimy hand. \"Everything on this level except the hive's lab would have got the poison.\" She dropped the valve into Gil's hand. \"It should be okay now.\"\n\nGil nodded and threw the second switch. Within the walls, pipes boomed and a great roaring was heard.\n\n\"He didn't even check my work,\" Agatha thought to herself, and a warm feeling filled her that was almost entirely unconnected to the sight of white gas gushing from vents in the room outside, and the subsequent death throes of the assembled bugs.\n\nGil moved up behind Agatha. She felt the heat that rolled off him, and smelled his sweat. She was very much aware of his hand gingerly hovering above her shoulder. She knew that all she had to do was lean into it, and he'd never remove it. She shivered in anticipation, swayed gently\u2014and they both jumped as a warrior slammed into the window before crashing to the deck.\n\nAgatha looked at Gil, but the moment was gone. \"Looks like it worked,\" she said lamely.\n\nGil cleared his throat and nodded. \"Yes\u2026\" A puzzled look eased its way onto his face. \"You know, from everything I've learned about Slaver wasps\u2014I would have thought defeating them would have been more difficult.\"\n\nAgatha considered this. \"Maybe because it was an old engine.\"\n\nGil frowned and then reluctantly nodded. \"Makes sense.\" His face brightened. \"At least my father will have an easy time mopping up.\"\n\nThe hanger bay was a charnel house. The Wulfenbach forces laid about with a desperate ferocity, but the wasps were quicker and more ferocious than any they had ever encountered. Klaus stepped back from a smoking wasp to access the situation as he levered a fresh round of radium bullets into the chambers of his ancient pistol.\n\nTo his right, Boris kept any wasps from approaching, his four swords weaving an impassable wall of glittering death. To his left General Zog was using the mangled form of a warrior wasp as a flail to beat back others, while roaring orders to the hoard of J\u00e4germonsters that fought before them. Those with weapons used them with a deadly precision that, to someone who had only seen the monster soldiers clowning around, would have been terrifying. Those without weapons used their teeth and claws so effectively that one questioned why they bothered to use weapons at all. Beside them fought the Lackya, still adorned in their long, elegant coats, but they moved like lightning, and dealt death with an elegant precision. Standing like pillars amidst the swarms of insects were a row of the great mechanical soldiers, wielding giant claymores almost three meters long that swept back and forth, destroying dozens of wasps with each swipe. Striding amongst the bugs were an eclectic sampling of the Spark-spawned creations that Klaus had collected and sworn into the service of the House of Wulfenbach over the years. Rumbletoys spun and smashed bugs wherever they moved, Radioheads crushed and pounded wherever their diminutive masters directed them, and deep within the enemies midst moved the Dreen, two unearthly, terrifying creatures garbed in dark, wide-brimmed conical hats and long, obscuring veils. They killed with but a touch, and they alone seemed to scare the Slaver wasps. Everywhere they drifted, a circle of emptiness opened around them as wasps desperately tried to escape.\n\nThe destruction the Wulfenbach forces were dealing was horrific, but to Klaus' eye the story of the battle was inescapable. He glanced at General Zog with a look of inquiry. The general bared his teeth in a fierce grimace and growled. \"Dis iz not goink vell.\"\n\n\"FALL BACK!\" Klaus roared.\n\nGil touched a switch and the metal door rolled back into the ceiling. \"I suppose my father will be sorry that he missed all the excitement,\" he sighed. A glint caught his eye, and he stepped behind Agatha. \"Wait. You have something in your hair.\" His fingers ran through her tresses and he briefly marveled at its delicate smoothness before he encountered the object he sought. He dropped it into Agatha's hand.\n\nIt was a small circular piece of shiny silver metal. Agatha looked at it blankly, then her face cleared. \"Ah. It's some sort of connector from the gas system. It's kind of pretty.\"\n\nGil nodded as he plucked it from her hand. \"Yes. It's perfect.\" With that he gently but firmly took Agatha's left hand and slid the connector over her ring finger. \"Here. A little souvenir.\"\n\nAgatha felt herself flushing as she took her hand back. Selfconsciously she re-examined her hand. The connector was stamped with a tiny little Wulfenbach House sigil. She felt a wave of joy beginning to fizzle upwards through her body. She was so happy that she almost missed that Gil was talking.\n\n\"Now come on. As pitiful as they are, the rest of the wasps should keep my father busy for a while.\" He slipped her arm through his, and turned towards the exit. \"We can grab one of the support gigs, sail down to the nearest town and be married before he even knows that we're gone.\"\n\nAgatha stopped so suddenly that Gil, still hooked through her arm, found himself spun around to face her. Agatha's face was blank. \"Married?\"\n\nGil patted her shoulder. \"Don't worry. He won't be mad once he finds out that you're a Spark! He's talking about marrying me off anyway\u2014it'll serve him right when I run off and do it on my own.\"\n\nAgatha gazed upwards into Gil's excited face. Her lips parted and she burst out laughing. This was not the reaction Gil had expected and he looked surprised. \"What?\"\n\nAgatha took a moment to wipe the tears off the inside of her glasses as she continued to giggle. Finally she took a deep breath, and smiled. \"That's the worst marriage proposal I have ever heard.\"\n\nGil swallowed. \"You\u2026 get a lot of them?\"\n\nAgatha crossed her arms. \"You want to marry me to annoy your father?\" She sighed dramatically and theatrically raised her hand to her brow. \"How romantic.\"\n\nThese were unknown waters for Gil, but he was smart enough to realize that by flailing desperately enough, he might still come through.\n\n\"NO! No! No!\" He waved his hands frantically. Agatha cocked an eyebrow. Still interested. Good.\n\n\"I\u2026 I know we haven't known each other long. But I really think we'd be very well suited\u2026 for each other.\"\n\nGlance. Eyebrow down. Not good. Panic.\n\n\"Look\u2014I've known a lot of girls and they were\u2014\" At this point Gil could feel hereto for unused parts of his brain screaming at him to shut up. He didn't even bother to look at her now. \"No. Wait! That's unimportant!\" What is important?\n\nHe looked at Agatha. She stood there, outlined in early morning light coming in through the window. Her hair was the most magnificent reddish gold he had ever seen. He took in the entirety of her and realized that he wanted to hold her in his arms and never ever let her go, and then he looked once again into those dazzling green eyes and knew that if he could spend the rest of his life watching them experience the things he could show them, then his life would be complete, and more importantly, that without her, his life would be forever empty and bereft of purpose. For the rest of Gilgamesh's life, whenever he thought of Agatha, the first and most enduring image, the one that was burned into his heart, was this one, where she stood and looked at him and listened to him babble and tried to decide whether he would live or die.\n\nWith this realization, a great clarity washed through him and he realized that if he wanted her, all he had to do was tell her why. His mouth finally got the message and snapped shut in mid-burble.\n\nHe straightened up and looked Agatha full in the face. Agatha blinked and uncrossed her arms. Gil stepped closer.\n\n\"Agatha, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Ha-HA!\" There was a swoosh, a blur of gold, and a \"Gloof!\" from Agatha. And she was gone.\n\nGil spun around and saw Agatha being carried off by Othar Tryggvassen, who was effortlessly swinging through the air on a long cable. \"HEY!\" he yelled.\n\nOthar gracefully turned, and he and Agatha landed atop a ceiling girder. She twisted out of his grasp. \"Do you mind?\" She hissed, \"I was busy here!\"\n\nFrom the floor Gil called up frantically. \"Agatha! Get away from him!\"\n\n\"What's the matter, Wulfenbach?\" Othar called back jovially. \"Didn't expect a hero to rescue the damsel from your unwelcome advances?\"\n\nGil shook his fist. \"They weren't unwelcome, you idiot!\"\n\nAgatha shoved forward. \"Just a minute! I'm not done yelling at you yet!\"\n\nOthar gently pulled her back from the edge. \"Well, yes you are.\" He reached into his side holster and pulled forth a bizarre little steam pistol. \"We've got to go.\" He aimed the gun at Gil: \"And he's got to die.\"\n\nJust as he fired, Agatha grabbed his arm and yanked with all her might. This threw Othar off balance and he swayed precipitously on the edge of the girder. Below, the bullet smacked into the wall centimeters from Gil's head. With a grimace, Gilgamesh ducked down into the maze of machinery and was lost to sight.\n\nOthar sighed. \"Drat.\" He turned to Agatha. \"He got away\u2026 for the moment.\"\n\nAgatha stood braced for Othar's fury. \"I won't let you\u2014\"\n\nHe wagged a gently admonishing finger in her face. \"You should be more careful. You could have fallen. You're lucky I caught you.\"\n\nThe events of the last twenty seconds replayed in Agatha's mind. \"But you didn't\u2014\"\n\n\"I hope you're not going to be one of those clumsy girl sidekicks who always need rescuing during my final showdown with the villain,\" Othar remarked.\n\n\"I AM NOT YOUR SIDEKICK!\"\n\nOthar laughed. \"Of course you are! You came to rescue me!\"\n\n\"If I'd known you were going to run around trying to shoot people who were proposing to me\u2014!\"\n\n\"Oh that was just the once.\" The sheer number of things that Agatha wanted to say to this, temporarily overwhelmed her ability to speak. Othar, unfortunately, did not have this problem. \"Now, your innocence does you credit, but you'll soon learn that Evil deserves no pity! And young Wulfenbach is certainly evil.\"\n\nAgatha rolled her eyes. \"Clueless I'll give you, but\u2014\"\n\nHer words were left behind as Agatha herself was swept off the girder by Gilgamesh swinging through on his own cable. They lightly touched down on an adjoining girder. \"If being like you is the alternative,\" Gil remarked to Othar, as he relinquished his grip on the cable, \"then I'll gladly take being evil.\"\n\nThe released cable vanished into the dimness of the ceiling, followed by several squeaks and a faint fwap. This caused Othar to pause and peer upwards into the darkness, which may have been why he missed seeing the beam which swung down from the side, caught him square in the ribs and smashed him through the plate glass wall and into open space. As he arced downwards, they heard him admonish them with a final declaration of \"Foul!\" before he vanished into the cloudscape below.\n\nAgatha rushed over to the window and stared down in shock. \"You threw him out of the airship,\" she cried. \"I went to all that trouble to rescue him and you've killed him!\"\n\n\"But he was shooting\u2014\" Gil realized this was a futile line of argument and switched tactics. \"He'll be fine. I've seen him survive worse.\" Agatha looked at him incredulously. \"Trust me. When you get to know him better, you'll want to throw him out a window yourself.\"\n\nAs he spoke Gil casually slipped off a shoe and with a moment's calculation tossed it down into the machinery below. It hit a lever and a winch began to creak, lowering a hook on a large chain past their girder. Gil casually looped his arm around Agatha's waist, snagged the chain and they held each other tightly as they headed for the distant deck below.\n\n\"I occasionally want to throw any number of people out a window\u2014\" Agatha said looking significantly at Gil\u2014\"But I control myself.\"\n\nBut Gil wasn't listening. \"Uh-huh. Forget eloping.\"\n\nAgatha blinked. \"Oh. But\u2014\"\n\n\"We're going straight to my father. I'll have him announce that you are, in effect, married to me already.\"\n\nThe thudding of their feet upon the deck broke Agatha's shocked silence. She ripped herself free of Gil's arm. \"How dare you? What do you think\u2014?\"\n\n\"Any number of people are going to try to grab you. So the sooner the world sees that you are mine, the safer you'll be.\" Gil calmly retrieved his shoe and slipped it back on. He turned back to Agatha and froze. Agatha's fury poured off of her like a physical force, and it took all of his strength not to step back. Every instinct he possessed warned him that he was close to death and he frantically tried to figure out why.\n\n\"I am not your personal property, or Othar's!\"\n\n\"I know that! But you're going to wind up someone's personal property unless we act now!\"\n\n\"I thought the Baron outlawed slavery.\"\n\nGil rolled his eyes. \"You've never been outside Beetleburg. You couldn't understand\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't assume I'm too stupid to understand\u2014explain it to me!\"\n\nGil reeled as if he'd been struck. His shoulders slumped. \"You're right.\"\n\nAgatha had been prepared for more arguing. She paused, and released the lungful of air she'd gathered. Encouraged by her silence. Gil continued: \"The reason I\u2026 I like you is because you're smart. I should treat you that way. Explain why I think this is in your best interest, as well as my own.\" Agatha raised her eyebrows encouragingly.\n\nA small explosion shuddered somewhere in the distance. Gil's eyes hardened. \"But I'm afraid I simply don't have the time.\" Agatha's eyes widened in shock as Gil took her wrist in a grip like iron. \"You'll come with me now, and I'll explain\u2014\"\n\nA massive fist came down and connected to the top of Gil's head with a meaty BONK, and he collapsed to the deck.\n\n\"Was this boy bothering you, dear?\"\n\n\"Lilith!\" Agatha shouted. \"Adam!\" For it was indeed her parents standing before her. To her surprise she saw that they were garbed in coveralls, peppered with small pockets carrying tools and useful bits of gear. The outfits appeared to be rather old and well-used, though Agatha was sure that she'd never seen them before. She looked down at Gilgamesh sprawled out at her feet. \"You hit him.\"\n\nThe burly construct allowed himself a self-satisfied smile. But Lilith noticed the concern in Agatha's voice. \"He'll be fine, dear.\" A touch of concern appeared on her face. \"Who is he?\"\n\nAgatha leaned down and shifted Gil slightly so that his head was at a less awkward angle. \"Gilgamesh Wulfenbach,\" she informed them. \"He\u2026 um\u2026 wants me to marry him.\" A look of shock passed between the two constructs. Agatha continued, \"In fact, he kind of insists.\"\n\nSeconds later Agatha found herself tucked under Adam's massive arm while her step-parents were running down a corridor. \"So you don't think I should then?\"\n\n\"We're leaving,\" Lilith informed her. \"Right now!\"\n\nAgatha looked out the window at the flotilla of airships that attended the Castle. \"How?\" She thought for a second. \"And how did you get here?\"\n\n\"We've been following the Castle from the ground. We were planning on hijacking one of the regular supply ships, but today there was a flurry of activity, with dozens of ships bringing people to the ground.\" They came to a massive bulkhead door which had been sealed. Lilith began spinning dials.\n\n\"There was an evacuation of the labs,\" Agatha explained. \"There was an accident with a Slaver Engine.\"\n\nLilith froze on hearing this and then, without further ado, simply ripped the massive door out of its frame. \"We commandeered a pinnace and we'll leave the same way.\"\n\nThey found themselves in an enormous, dimly lit chamber lined with pumps slowly thumping away on either side. \"But this place is huge,\" Agatha observed. \"How did you manage to find me?\"\n\nLilith shrugged. \"We have done this sort of thing before, dear. We just looked for the center of chaos and there you were.\" She shook her head. \"We knew something like this would happen if your locket was removed.\"\n\nAgatha's hand automatically went to the empty place near her throat. \"My locket?\"\n\nAdam and Lilith looked at each other. Adam shrugged, and Lilith nodded. \"You started to break through at a very early age\u2014\"\n\n\"You knew I was a Spark?\"\n\nLilith nodded. \"Your uncle made the locket specifically to keep you from breaking through completely.\"\n\n\"But I was so stupid! How could you let me live like that?\"\n\n\"We were hiding you!\" Lilith answered hotly. \"Young Sparks never survive without powerful protection! If they don't blow themselves up or get killed by their creations, they're likely to go mad and kill everyone around them.\"\n\nThey turned a corner and Agatha began to note signs of the fighting. Smoke drifted through the air, and a single dead wasp warrior lay crushed beneath a gas cylinder that had obviously been taken from a stack of same that lined the wall. Lilith grimaced, and continued: \"Your uncle was gone. Beetle wasn't strong enough, and the Baron would have taken you instantly.\" She broke off and caught Agatha's eye. \"And you don't ever want that.\"\n\nAgatha opened her mouth to question, but Lilith plowed on. \"In the country you would have been killed by the peasantry. Even burned as a Witch. Plus you're a girl. Girls with the Spark, they usually just disappear. Even the Baron's people have noticed that there's a disproportionately low number of them, but they don't know why. Every power in Europe is going to try to kill you or control you. You've already seen that with young Wulfenbach.\"\n\n\"But I don't understand,\" Agatha cried. \"There are a lot of Sparks wandering about. Why would I be in so much danger?\"\n\nLilith stopped dead in front of the door. Her head briefly slumped forward enough that it rested on the cool metal surface.\n\n\"I suppose there'll never be a good time\u2026\" she muttered. She looked at Agatha. \"Your family. We never told you.\" She leaned on the door, which, surprisingly, was unlocked, and began to creak open. \"You're the daughter of\u2014\"\n\nThe opening door revealed a large room lined with galleries extending several stories upwards. The room was filled with people, constructs and clanks. They all turned towards the opening door, revealing, at the center of the crowd, none other than the Baron himself.\n\nSilence spread, until Klaus, his eyes wide in surprise at the figure in the doorway, stepped forward. \"Judy?\" he whispered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\u2003Go to sleep, lay down your head,\n\n\u2003The Heterodynes, they are not dead.\n\n\u2003They will return to us someday,\n\n\u2003And send the monsters far away.\n\n\u2014Child's lullaby\n\nLilith went white. \"Klaus!\" Adam set Agatha down and moved forward. Klaus saw him and his brows lowered. \"Punch?\" Without taking his eyes off of the little group he snapped out orders. \"Contain them, and find my son!\" Several of the guards began to spread out, and a small squad raced off, no doubt to try to encircle the three. The others began to move forward, but the Baron checked them with an upraised hand. Agatha noticed that he was dirty, and that his clothes were torn; with surprise, she saw that his left hand was bandaged. Another part of her mind took note of the fact that she was shocked that he could be injured. The rest of the group had obviously been through a tough ordeal. Many were injured, and all looked weary.\n\n\"Something very odd is going on here,\" Klaus muttered.\n\nLilith swallowed. \"Klaus, we\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly a lone J\u00e4germonster pushed its way forward until it was right behind the Baron. A distant memory was obviously fighting its way to the surface of its mind. \"Vait! Meester Ponch?\"\n\nWithout hesitation, Klaus backfisted the J\u00e4ger in the face and it dropped to the ground unconscious. \"Damn! He'll be a problem.\" To the others he said, \"Seal the area, and keep the J\u00e4gers out of here.\"\n\nAt this point Agatha didn't know what was happening, but thought to correct things before they got further out of hand. \"Herr Baron,\" she piped up, \"there's been some sort of a mistake. These are my parents: Adam and Lilith Clay.\"\n\nKlaus nodded slowly. \"Punch and Judy. So you're the unfindable Clays. This explains so much. But the girl\u2014she's not your real daughter.\"\n\n\"She's just an orphan we took in,\" Lilith interjected.\n\n\"I'm sure she is. Lucrezia and Bill's, I imagine. Or is she a surprise from Barry's past?\"\n\nAgatha blinked. It almost sounded like the Baron knew her parents. He must be confused. They'd had many a laugh around the dinner table about the coincidence of the names\u2014\n\nA shriek caught them all by surprise. A wild-eyed Von Pinn pushed her way to the fore. Klaus put up a hand to check her progress, and she glared at him while she panted in short, excited bursts. \"Yes!\" She spoke in a strained voice. Gone now was the controlled fury that Agatha had seen before. \"She is the daughter of Lucrezia Mongfish! When first she came, she gave to me an order, which I obeyed without thinking!\" She whipped her head around and glared at Agatha with unreadable emotions distorting her face. \"That will not work again, Girl Agatha. Now you are mine!\" She clutched at Klaus' hand and, shockingly, pleaded with him. \"She\u2014Klaus, she is mine! Nothing have I ever asked, but now\u2014!\"\n\n\"Hold.\" Klaus did not speak loudly, but Von Pinn instantly went silent, and returned to staring, quivering, at Agatha. The Baron closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.\n\n\"Yesss\u2026 so she was the Spark in Beetleburg. It's so obvious now.\" He sighed. \"I must be getting old.\"\n\nLilith took a small step backward. \"Klaus, we're going to leave now.\"\n\nThe Baron's eyes snapped open. \"Oh no. Not this time. Not without an explanation. I was gone for less than four years, and I came back to a world in ruins! Death, destruction, chaos\u2014the endless fighting\u2014it was like the Heterodyne Boys had never existed. Things were worse than ever.\n\n\"So I stopped it. And I did it my way this time. No more negotiating, no more promises, no more second chances. Rule by conquest and peace by intimidation because that was all the geniuses I dealt with could understand. And I did it alone because I had to. All my friends and companions were gone, gone without a trace! I thought them all dead and gone and no one even knew what happened to them\u2014and now here you are, the Heterodyne Boys' steadfast companions. I had considered us mutual friends; I had always thought of you as people, decent people, and yet you've obviously been hiding from me for all these years.\n\n\"Well, I will find out why you were hiding from me. I will find out where the Heterodyne Boys went and I will find out what else you have been hiding from me, because I assure you, you will tell me.\"\n\nLilith glowered. \"You always could play to the gallery, Klaus, but Barry came back.\"\n\nKlaus sighed. \"Wonderful. More puzzles. Apparently that's supposed to worry me?\" He waved a hand dismissively. \"Soon enough. Katz!\" A Lackya stepped forward. \"Have these people locked up\u2014In separate quarters. I want them guarded by at least two guards each around the clock.\" Klaus frowned. \"And not by the J\u00e4gers; in fact they're not to know of this until I've sorted this mess out.\"\n\nKatz nodded. The door swung open. Everyone tensed, but the only one there was Bangladesh DuPree. She was obviously trying to keep herself from laughing about something. \"Hey, Klaus,\" she announced, \"we found your boy! Babbling a bit, but that's pretty normal. Get this\u2014Says his fianc\u00e9e knocked him out.\"\n\nFew announcements could have broken Klaus' concentration, but this certainly appeared to be one of them. \"His what?\"\n\nHe spun about in time to see Agatha wearily rest her face in her hands. He went white. \"Ah,\" he said a trifle unsteadily. \"I see that history repeats itself. That will stop\u2014\"\n\nAgain DuPree interrupted. \"Hey! That's her!\"\n\nKlaus tensed. \"Explain.\"\n\nBangladesh waved towards Agatha. \"That girl I told you about. The one in my Phenomena Log, the one with Gil and the Geisterdamen. That's her!\"\n\n\"Worse and worse! All right, in addition to being confined, this girl is to be kept sedated\u2014\"\n\nWith a hollow sound, the head of the Lackya standing next to Klaus snapped back and the guard dropped to the deck.\n\nIn the next second, a small object tore through the Baron's leg. He roared with pain and dropped to one knee. Almost simultaneously, another object glanced off of Boris' skull and knocked the wind out of Bangladesh, sending them down.\n\nA brief pause as Adam poured another handful of rivets into his immense hand. Lilith touched his arm. \"I'll get Agatha out of here. Meet us at the dock.\" Adam absentmindedly blew her a small kiss as, in the space of half a second, six more rivets flew to their targets, taking out one of the giant battle clanks, a Radiohead, and three crewmen. The only surprise was Von Pinn, who coolly plucked the rivet out of the air and dropped it to her feet. Before it hit the deck, Adam had sent another dozen at her. She darted forward, her arms blurring into invisibility as she successfully deflected them all, but this did prevent her from being able to stop Adam himself, who, moving like a juggernaut, caught her with a roundhouse blow to the jaw that snapped her head to one side. But even as her ruby-red monocle flew back, her arms whipped upwards and grasped Adam's arm. Adam tried to recoil and he blinked as his arm remained where it was. With that, Von Pinn flashed him a toothy grin of triumph, and effortlessly tore his arm free from its socket.\n\nAdam stared in shock as a gout of purplish fluid pulsed from his shoulder, then he gasped as Von Pinn tossed his arm aside and then swung back and punched her hand through his chest, crushing his spasming heart in her grasp before tossing it to the deck.\n\nAdam blinked, then his eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched forward. Agatha found herself screaming until a hand grabbed her arm and brutally dragged her up to Lilith's terrifyingly calm face. \"Go.\" Her voice was as calm as her face. \"Get to Castle Heterodyne. It will help you.\"\n\nBefore Agatha could respond, she felt herself flung upwards. She caught a brief glimpse of Von Pinn centimeters away from Lilith, who was smiling calmly. \"We love you!\" She called out, \"Now run!\"\n\nAgatha arced upwards and sailed over the railing of the balcony that circled the room. To her astonishment, she saw a huddled mass of wide-eyed figures, onto which she landed. Desperately she clawed her way back to the railing, in time to see Von Pinn finish ripping Lilith to bloody bits. Just as Agatha realized what she was seeing, Von Pinn's head snapped towards her with a glare that burned its way into her memory, where it resurfaced in nightmares for several years to come. Upon seeing Agatha, Von Pinn shrieked, \"MINE!\" and darted out of the room.\n\nA hand dropped onto Agatha's shoulder, causing her to scream in terror, but it was only Theo DuMedd. She realized that the figures were, in fact, the other students who were staring at her. It was Hezekiah who broke the silence. \"We'd better get out of here!\" He glanced back over the balcony at the mess below, and took Agatha's other arm. \"Now!\"\n\nAgatha shook herself free. \"But I have to\u2014\"\n\nA number of the others began to speak up, when a commanding voice cut through the babble. \"Move! Or their deaths will be wasted!\"\n\nEveryone turned in surprise, and there, poised regally before them atop a canister, was Krosp. \"Follow me,\" he ordered. \"I can take you to the airship that the constructs used to get here. Now hurry!\" With that he leapt to the ground and strode off. Unhesitatingly, Agatha moved, and with the briefest of pauses, the rest quickly followed.\n\nIt was Z who felt he had to state the obvious. \"It's a talking cat.\"\n\nTheo shrugged. \"Well, we're in a Heterodyne story now. These things happen.\" The others nodded.\n\n\"Hey, Theo,\" Nicodeamus realized, \"she's your cousin!\"\n\nTheo stumbled. \"Wow. I never had any family before.\" He considered this briefly. \"I mean that wasn't dead, or missing, or a head in a jar or something.\"\n\nMeanwhile at the front of the crowd, Agatha was trying to cope with the events of the last few minutes. \"Lilith! She\u2014\"\n\n\"Focus!\" Krosp roared over his shoulder.\n\nAgatha swallowed and nodded. \"I\u2026 I don't know how to fly an airship.\"\n\n\"Well, you're in luck. I do.\" He frowned. \"I'll need something to stand on, though.\"\n\nAgatha's brain gratefully seized the memory that bubbled up. \"The airship manual\u2014and the controls laid out on the floor. Those were yours?\"\n\n\"Yes. I think I have everything memorized, so it wasn't that big a setback.\"\n\nAgatha glanced back over her shoulder at the crowd following. Hezekiah puffed along behind her, a disbelieving grin on his face. Agatha dropped back slightly so she was running alongside him. \"So what are you guys doing here?\"\n\n\"We came to help you and Gil. We sure didn't expect this,\" he admitted. \"You're a Heterodyne heir. Wow!\"\n\nAgatha shrugged. \"Even if it's true, it doesn't change\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't be even more absurd,\" Zulenna interrupted. It was obvious from her face that the girl was almost as upset by the day's events as Agatha. \"It changes everything. The Heterodynes saved my family's lands. Designed our defenses. When he incorporated our lands into the Empire, the Baron had to treat us with respect. We would have been another backwater former monarchy without their help.\" Zulenna sighed. \"Whereas you yourself have done nothing; many of those who owe your family will feel obligated to support you. This could be a problem if you are not under the Baron's direct control. Arguably, to best preserve the stability of the Pax Transylvania, perhaps you should\u2014\"\n\n\"Naughty children!\" The voice sent chills down their spines, and without conscious volition, the group stumbled to a halt. Filling the corridor behind them was the figure of Von Pinn, who glided forward. \"Stop this at once,\" she hissed. \"Bring me the Agatha girl.\"\n\nThe group was frozen until Zulenna suddenly stepped forward and, with a whisper, drew the rapier from the scabbard at her waist. Without looking back at the group she ordered them, \"Go! I'll hold her off!\"\n\nTheo blinked. \"Zulenna, what are you--\"\n\n\"My family owes her family. Everything that I am dictates that I do this. Now GO!\"\n\n\"Good luck,\" Krosp offered. \"Now move!\" With that the group reluctantly ran off. Seeing this, Von Pinn flowed forward impossibly fast, but found herself blocked in the narrow corridor by Zulenna's sword. She reared up. \"Get out of my way, child.\"\n\nZulenna's hand shook slightly, but her voice remained firm. \"You talk a good game, Madam, but you've never actually hurt any of us. Don't make me hurt you.\"\n\nVonn Pinn made a few lightning fast swipes at Zulenna's sword, but was unable to grab it. \"You cannot hurt me, but I will hurt you in order to pass.\"\n\n\"Then that is what you will have to do.\"\n\nVon Pinn screamed and lunged forward. Zulenna retreated slightly and slashed at Von Pinn's face. The construct flinched. \"I am charged with your safety. I do not want to hurt you!\" she muttered.\n\nA friendly hand dropped onto her shoulder. Von Pinn spun and found Bangladesh at her side with a sympathetic look sitting incongruously on her face. \"Kids, huh? What are you gonna do?\" She patted the construct's leather-clad shoulder. \"Let me take care of this.\"\n\n\"You must not\u2014\"\n\nBangladesh raised a hand in reassurance. \"Relax. I ain't gonna hurt her. I'll just get her out of the way.\" With that she strode forward, a gleaming cutlass weaving idle figures in the air. \"Hi, girlie, let's play!\"\n\nZulenna brought her sword up, but clearly was unsure how to handle DuPree's casual advance. \"I'm warning you\u2014\"\n\nBangladesh smiled. \"Say, that's mighty nice of you.\" Her cutlass flicked out and Zulenna barely intercepted it in time. Bangladesh continued to walk forward, casually engaging the girl in a lightning fast series of moves. She spoke conversationally. \"And really, a lot of people would consider you pretty good.\" With that, she brought her sword down from above. Zulenna raised her arm to block it, allowing Bangladesh to step forward and deftly sink a slim dagger into the girl's breast with her other hand.\n\nZulenna froze and stared at the spreading patch of red on her shirt. DuPree sighed and patted her shoulder. \"But you know, I'm a Pirate Queen. I do this for a living. Adios, kid.\" With that, Zulenna's eyes rolled up into her head and she slumped to the ground. Bangladesh pirouetted around her as she fell, and grinned back at Von Pinn. \"See? She never felt a thing. Now let's get the rest of them. This is fun!\"\n\nVon Pinn screamed and launched herself forward, claws extended.\n\nFor a fraction of a second, a look of surprise crossed Bangladesh's face, then she fell back laughing. \"Oh yeah! Better and better!\" Moving like a dancer, she swiveled and cut at the enraged construct as Von Pinn roared past her. The sword cut through the leather and a deep gash appeared. \"So big and scary,\" DuPree taunted. \"But you've got no teeth when it comes to the kids, hey? Well that'll make it even more fun when I catch 'em.\"\n\nVon Pinn snarled in pain, spun to a halt and examined the wound. A tiny part of DuPree's brain offered up the observation that Von Pinn seemed more annoyed about the damage to her outfit than the large cut into her flesh. \"Aw, does that hurt?\"\n\nVon Pinn swiveled her head towards Bangladesh, and the captain felt her smile falter. \"Pain does not bother me.\" She slowly swayed forward and extended a hand toward Bangladesh. \"I live with it.\"\n\nBangladesh raised her cutlass. Von Pinn continued to reach forward. She jabbed towards the construct's hand. With a sudden move, Von Pinn impaled her own hand upon the sword. DuPree was shocked and froze as Von Pinn drove her hand down the length of the sword until she could grasp the guard. \"I use pain. Cultivate it.\" Effortlessly she squeezed and the sword guard crumpled, trapping DuPree's hand within. \"Shape it.\" Delicate bones snapped within DuPree's hand and she screamed. A leather-clad claw slapped over her nose and mouth, cutting off her breathing. She found herself face to face with a toothily grinning Von Pinn, who drew her close. \"Ah-ah-ah\u2014\" she whispered. \"Time for a lesson. A final lesson.\" She began to tighten the hand covering the struggling captain's face, and suddenly became aware of the slim dagger that DuPree was desperately trying to slide past the belts and buckles of her outfit and between her ribs. She grinned, but then both women were distracted by a small object arcing through the air and landing at their feet. They just had time to recognize the C-Gas canister for what it was when it went off, belching forth a cloud of thick gas that caused the two combatants to fall over unconscious.\n\nThe gas cleared quickly, and a shape loomed in the corridor. It was a combat clank. Its eyes broken by Adam's rivet attack. In its arms it carried Baron Wulfenbach. Leg bandaged, and wearing a small facemask. A lapful of similar canisters clunked whenever the big clank moved. Klaus looked down at the three women and sighed in exasperation. \"I'll deal with you idiots later.\" He addressed the clank carrying him. \"Continue forward.\"\n\nThe machine continued down the corridor. Behind the Baron, he heard running footsteps and a Lackya appeared at his elbow. \"Herr Baron!\" he inquired. \"Are you\u2014\"\n\nKlaus interrupted him. \"I am fine. Scout ahead and\u2014\" A thought struck him. \"No\u2014wait. Back there with Von Pinn and DuPree\u2014There was someone else.\"\n\nThe Lackya nodded. \"Ah. The Princess Zulenna. I checked them all, Herr Baron, and I regret to say that the princess appears to be dead.\"\n\nKlaus pounded his fist on his leg. \"Damnation!\" he snarled. \"You will take the princess to my medical lab and place her in the cold room.\"\n\nThe Lackya looked distressed. \"You\u2014The Baron would revive her? But she is\u2014was a Royal. The Fifty Families expressly forbid\u2014\"\n\nKlaus cut him off furiously. \"The Fifty Families haven't got the authority or the power to forbid me from doing anything. Zulenna was under my protection, and I don't give a damn about their ridiculous games of succession.\"\n\n\"But Herr Baron\u2014The princess will.\"\n\n\"That is her privilege. But she is the one who will choose her fate.\"\n\nThe Lackya opened his mouth, and Klaus roared, \"GO! You're wasting time!\"\n\nThe Lackya bowed, but could not resist adding, \"I go, Herr Baron, but while the Royals have little obvious power, that which they do have, they use with deadly finesse. Beware.\" With that, he swiveled about and set off at great speed.\n\nThe Baron frowned. \"The Lackya are getting\u2026 argumentative.\" He sighed and settled back into the arms of the clank. \"It's always something.\"\n\n\"Herr Baron.\" Klaus raised his eyebrows in surprise as a group of students appeared from around the edge of a doorway where they had been hiding. Sleipnir stepped forward. \"Thank you for taking care of Zulenna, sir.\"\n\nKlaus looked uncomfortable. \"Not a word about her revivification. We shall talk about this later. Now stand aside. I have\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Herr Baron.\" It was Hezekiah who spoke up. He was sweating profusely, but stood tall. \"You're trying to capture Agatha, yes?\"\n\nSun Ming chimed in. \"Please, just let her go.\"\n\nHezekiah nodded. \"She's a good person, sir. She won't cause trouble.\"\n\n\"She didn't even know she was a Spark.\"\n\n\"Or a Heterodyne.\"\n\nZ looked at the Baron's face. \"But you aren't going to let her go. Why?\"\n\nKlaus sighed. \"Because you hardly know her and still you rally to her side, even in defiance of me. If all of you\u2014who have studied under me for so long, and have the best chance of understanding what it is that I have built and how terribly fragile it is\u2014will do so, imagine what the populace at large will do?\"\n\nThe group of students looked at each other uncertainly, which was when Klaus slipped the mask over his face and activated a new canister of C-Gas. They dropped to the floor and the great clank delicately stepped over them.\n\n\"I think it time you all returned home,\" he sighed. \"Your use to me is ended. I can only hope you've learned your lessons.\"\n\nAgatha and Theo followed Krosp. Theo suddenly called out, \"This isn't the way to the docking bays! We've gotten turned around!\"\n\nKrosp paused. \"No. I know where we are, but there's someone we have to bring with us!\" Again he took off, leaving Agatha and Theo no choice but to follow. Everywhere there were signs that things were not going well aboard the great airship. In every corridor, lights were flashing orange, and swarms of people were rushing about in a surprisingly orderly fashion.\n\n\"Krosp,\" Agatha called out, \"where are we going?\"\n\n\"It's Monday! He'll be in the chemical locker,\" Krosp replied unhelpfully. They reached a large door marked \"CHEMICAL STORAGE & DISPOSAL LOCKER 55.\" Krosp motioned to Theo. \"Open it.\"\n\nTheo did. Inside were racks and racks of metal shelves, holding endless canisters and glass tubes. Halfway down the second aisle, the large, hulking figure of Dr. Dim pushed a small cart and delicately wielded a feather duster.\n\n\"Papa!\" Krosp cried as he ran up and leapt up onto Dim's cart. The man smiled at the sight of him, and patted his head.\n\n\"Hello, Krosp. Are you hungry?\" He saw Agatha and DuMedd, and a guilty look crossed his face. \"This is a good cat,\" he said defensively.\n\nKrosp patted his hand. \"It's all right, Papa. They're friends. They are here to help us. It's time for us to leave Castle Wulfenbach.\"\n\nDimitri looked confused. \"Leave? I don't think we can do that.\"\n\n\"Yes we can. I have a ship, I have a crew, and the Baron is distracted. We have to take this opportunity to escape.\"\n\nDimitri took a step away from his cart and then stopped. Conflicting emotions played across his face. \"But, I haven't finished dusting.\"\n\nKrosp stared at him. \"Forget the dusting, Papa. It's not important. We've got to\u2014\"\n\nThe man slammed a hand down on the cart. \"You forget yourself, cat.\" His face was filled with a cold arrogance that Agatha had seen on any number of Sparks when their knowledge or competence had been questioned. \"I am Dr. Dimitri Vapnoople!\"\n\nAt this declaration, DuMedd started, and looked from the large man to Krosp, and Agatha could see connections being made.\n\nVapnoople continued: \"The Baron assured me that I would continue to do important work. Work worthy of my genius! And I have done my work and I have heard no complaint! The Baron's secretary saw me in the corridor last week, and do you know what he said to me? Do you? He said, 'You are doing a good job.' That's what he said! To me!\" At this, Vapnoople hunched over, grinned, and whispered, \"And he still does not know that I continue my real work! Here! In the very heart of his own castle!\"\n\nKrosp glanced at Agatha and DuMedd and looked distressed.\n\n\"Yes, Papa, we know. But now we have to\u2014\"\n\n\"I have been constructing my armies! Here! Out of sight! And I have learned! I have learned from the Baron's own books and laboratories! I have improved my work! Each creature I build is better! Much better than the last!\"\n\nThroughout this tirade, DuMedd had gotten more and more nervous. \"Dr. Vapnoople was famous for creating intelligent animals,\" he whispered to Agatha. \"His armies of wolf/men controlled hundreds of square kilometers. It took the Baron almost three years to defeat him and capture them all.\"\n\n\"And Wulfenbach killed them!\" Vapnoople roared. \"He absorbs all sorts of half-finished trash into his service, but my creations he said weren't good enough! They had to die!\"\n\n\"I believe, Herr Doctor,\" Theo said carefully, \"that the Baron judged them as being\u2026 too good at what they did. Plus he was unable to break their loyalty to you. They couldn't accept a place in the Baron's forces.\"\n\nA tear ran down Vapnoople's face. \"Yes. I always did know how to build in the loyalty, eh Krosp?\" He ruffled the top of Krosp's head. The cat's ears were flattened, but he still leaned into the big man's hand. \"But I learned. Even at the beginning, when Wulfenbach was first engaging my glorious creations, I saw how it would go. I saw that I would have to do better the next time, and I have! BEHOLD!\" With that he whipped open a small door in the cart and displayed a small patchwork bear made from rags. \"My beautiful bears,\" he crooned. He picked it up, and holding its little paws, made slashing and growling noises before putting it back in the cart. \"They will overrun Wulfenbach and send his oversized castle crashing to the ground! And you\u2014\" He patted a slumped Krosp on the head. \"You will lead them to glory!\" He pointed to Agatha. \"I remember her. She said she would help.\"\n\nKrosp and Agatha looked at each other.\n\nVapnoople picked up his duster. \"And so you see why I cannot leave. Now, I must get back to my important work, so that the Baron does not suspect.\" So saying, he turned away and, cackling occasionally, returned to cleaning.\n\nAgatha gently put a hand on Krosp's shoulder and whispered, \"We have to go.\"\n\nKrosp addressed Vapnoople's broad back. \"I'll come back for you, Papa. I'll take you and\u2026 your bears and we'll go somewhere safe. I promise you.\"\n\nDr. Dimitri waved a hand without looking around. \"I'll save you a fish.\"\n\nKrosp was quiet. Several times DuMedd had to prod him to get him to tell them the correct turn to take, but quickly enough they opened a large door and found themselves in one of the hundreds of airship docks that peppered the sides of the vast dirigible. This one had bays for over a dozen mid-size ships, and from the debris that littered the deck, it was obvious that there had been a great deal of activity a short time ago. The only ship in evidence was a tiny two-engine pinnace. The three headed towards it, but stopped dead when they found a half-dozen Wulfenbach crewmen, unconscious and neatly lined up next to a fuel barrel. A faint whistling was heard, and to Agatha's amazement, a cheerful Othar straightened up from behind the ship where he was coiling some rope. He spotted them and his face broke into an easy grin. \"Ah! Excellent! You made it!\"\n\n\"Othar!\" Agatha exclaimed. \"You're alive!\"\n\n\"As always!\" he replied.\n\nTheo's eyes widened. \"That's really him? You know a talking cat AND Othar Tryggvassen?\"\n\n\"But\u2026 he\u2026 Gilgamesh\u2026\"\n\nOthar waved this off with obvious disdain. \"I knew you'd choose the side of good in the end.\"\n\nThis snapped Agatha out of her confusion. \"I'm not here for you\u2014!\"\n\nShe was cut short by Krosp shoving her towards Othar. \"No time! Come on!\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Othar agreed. \"Come on! It's time for adventure!\"\n\nAgatha looked at him levelly. \"Get on the airship.\"\n\nOthar looked surprised. \"Don't you want to hear the exciting tale of my escape?\"\n\nAgatha was now on the ship and at Krosp's direction was untying ropes. Othar quickly clambered aboard. \"Casting off!\" she called out.\n\nTheo came up. \"Good luck.\"\n\nAgatha looked surprised. \"You're not coming?\"\n\nTheo shook his head. \"I was, but now that I know you'll be traveling with Herr Tryggvassen, I know you'll be safe. I've got to see how the others are doing, I'll bet some of them will want to come along. We'll catch up to you in Mechanicsburg!\"\n\nAgatha looked panicked. \"But\u2014\"\n\n\"That is where you'll be going, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I don't want to travel alone.\"\n\nOthar clapped her on the shoulder. \"Silly girl, didn't you hear? You'll be under the protection of Othar Tryggvassen, Gentleman Adventurer!\"\n\nKrosp pulled her skirt. \"And don't forget me.\"\n\nAgatha looked at them and turned back to Theo. \"No, really. You sure you don't want to come? There's room. Or I could stay with you.\"\n\nTheo laughed. \"Don't be silly.\"\n\nAgatha sighed, \"Well, you should know that Gil's got some kind of invisibility device.\"\n\nTheo's eyes lit up. \"Is that what that was? Interesting.\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"It might help.\" With that, she reached out, drew his head towards her and placed a kiss upon his forehead. \"Thank you for everything. And take care of yourself, cousin.\"\n\nTheo grinned. \"You too, cousin.\" With that he stepped back and helped shove the airship out of the docking cradle. It floated beside the hanger bay until Krosp, standing atop a crate, activated the engines, and the tiny craft warped away from the side of the great airship. Suddenly Theo heard a rhythmic thudding from the corridor leading to the hanger. He ducked behind a gas tank just as Klaus' transport clanked through the doorway.\n\nKlaus saw the airship pulling away and swore. He then directed the clank to the nearest signaling station. He picked up the handset and cranked the handle to activate the system. Suddenly an explosion gently rocked the deck, almost causing the clank carrying the Baron to fall. A cloud of smoke rolled out of one of the hanger doorways, and several coughing figures stumbled from it. They were revealed to be some of Castle Wulfenbach's fire-fighters. Most of them quickly recovered and rushed over to a water cistern and began refilling the pumper tanks they wore strapped to their backs. One of them saw the Baron and ran to him. \"Herr Baron! You should get out of here! All of the experiments in the lower labs have either been let loose or activated, and three of the compartments are on fire.\"\n\nKlaus stared at him, and with another oath, slammed the speaker phone back into place. \"Assemble your men,\" he told the fire-fighter. \"Have each of them grab one of those cylinders of Carbonic Acid Gas and then follow me!\" He grabbed a cylinder himself, urged his clank forward, and the group ran back into the smoking doorway.\n\nAgatha lowered the telescope she had been using. \"And now they've gone back to fight the fire, I guess. The Baron looked pretty mad.\"\n\nOthar laughed. \"I imagine so. The little diversions I arranged before we left should keep him too busy to worry about us for a while.\"\n\nKrosp nodded. \"There's a lot of smoke, but I don't think the envelope is going to catch. But it's looking bad enough that the support fleet is moving in to assist. They're not going to waste time on us. We need to put as much distance behind us as we can.\" He turned back and spun the ship's wheel so that they were traveling in the opposite direction as the Castle.\n\n\"Normally I don't work with children or animals,\" Othar murmured, \"but that is one amazing cat.\"\n\nAgatha nodded. \"Yes. I guess I'll have to get used to things like this now.\"\n\nOthar grinned and clasped her shoulder. \"Ah! So you're taking the sidekick job! Now it's strictly a profit-sharing situation, so\u2014\"\n\nAgatha shrugged his hand off. \"No. I'm not. I'm my own Spark, thank you. I'm going to have to get my own sidekicks.\"\n\nOthar went still. \"What?\"\n\nAgatha nodded and leaned on the railing. Below her the countryside sailed serenely past. \"I'm a Spark. I'm afraid it's true, it explains so much.\"\n\nOthar came up behind her. \"I'm\u2026 very sorry to hear that.\"\n\nAgatha rolled her eyes. \"Yes, well, you don't have to make it sound like a death sentence.\"\n\n\"But it is.\"\n\nThe tone of Othar's voice brought Agatha around quickly. Othar's face was different. It was set in a grimace, and a small pistol was pointed unwaveringly at Agatha. \"I'm really sorry about this,\" he muttered. \"But you have to die.\"\n\nAgatha realized that the comically jovial Othar she thought she knew had vanished entirely. \"Why?\" she asked.\n\nFor a terrible moment she thought he wasn't going to answer. When he did, his voice was strained and intense. \"What is the cause of everything wrong in the world today? Madboys. The Spark. They create monsters. Rip apart the cities with their constant fighting and terrorize the countryside\u2026 They can't help it. They're like mad dogs. They've almost completely destroyed civilization. Surely you can see that. For the good of the world, all Sparks have to die, and since you are one of them\u2014\"\n\n\"But you\u2014You have the Spark.\"\n\nOthar grimaced. \"Yes! But I alone have the resolve to do what must be done! I must hunt down and destroy every Spark in existence! And then\u2014\" He threw his head up and screamed to the heavens, \"And then I can finally kill myself! And rid the world of this scourge once and for all!\"\n\nHe stood there panting and trembling while Agatha stared at him. \"Well, why didn't you say so?\" she exclaimed.\n\nOthar paused. \"I\u2014what?\"\n\nAgatha nodded furiously. \"Being a Spark has ruined my life! My parents were killed by some insane construct! I spent most of my life crippled by some mind-altering device! Everyone wants me dead or on an examining table!\"\n\nOthar raised his pistol. \"You do understand.\"\n\nAgatha stepped up to him and grabbed his sweater in both hands. \"Of course! And now you say that I can work with you to destroy them all? Count me in!\"\n\nOthar's jaw dropped. Slowly a tentative smile, not the forced jocularity of his public face, but a genuine smile, blossomed upon his face. \"At last.\" He whispered, \"Do you really mean it?\"\n\nAgatha rolled her eyes and puffed out her cheeks in dismissal. \"No.\" And she shoved Othar over the side of the airship.\n\nAs he plummeted from sight, he called out, \"Foul!\" and snapped off a single shot from his pistol before he vanished into a cloud below.\n\nAgatha and Krosp peered over the side for a moment. When nothing happened, Agatha slumped down and cupped her head in her hands. \"I really owe Gil an apology,\" she muttered.\n\nA faint sound caused Krosp to peer upwards. He frowned. \"The idiot hit the envelope. But we should still be able to stay up for a few hours.\"\n\nAgatha roused herself. \"Perhaps they have a patch kit.\"\n\nKrosp shrugged as he hauled himself back onto his crate. \"Doubt it. Ship like this, they judge every gram. A minor repair like this would get fixed at a dock before it was a problem. Won't hurt to check though,\" he conceded. \"We'll need to see what we have available anyway.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"We've got to steer clear of civilization. Our best bet is the Wastelands.\"\n\nAgatha shivered. She had heard stories about the Wastelands. Although the Empire of the Baron was extensive, there were large tracts of land that were still uncontrolled, wild expanses where entire towns had disappeared overnight. It was the perfect place to hide, but there was a distinct possibility that once in, they'd never return. Agatha felt a sense of desolation filling her. The future looked bleak.\n\nMad, Othar may have been, but he certainly had a point. The last several hundred years had been filled with a distressingly long list of catastrophes, disasters, blights, monstrosities and terror directly attributable to a small handful of crazed geniuses.\n\n\"Why am I bothering?\" she whispered.\n\nKrosp shrugged. \"What?\"\n\n\"Why shouldn't I just turn myself over to the Baron? Why shouldn't I just throw myself over the side right now?\"\n\nKrosp scratched his chin and then jerked the steering wheel. The little airship lurched to the side. Agatha grabbed onto the railing and held on tightly. Krosp pointed to her hands. \"Because you don't want to die.\"\n\n\"But Othar had a point. Sparks\u2014\"\n\n\"Not all Sparks,\" Krosp interrupted. \"Most of them are dangerous,\" he conceded. \"But what about the ones who fight the monsters, save the towns, build the machines that help people. It's not what you are, it's what you do with it.\"\n\n\"But so many of them are monsters!\"\n\nKrosp grinned. \"That's because being a monster is easy. Doing good, making a positive difference. That's hard. But that's what your parents did.\" He considered her. \"Unless you think the construct was lying about the Heterodynes being your parents.\"\n\nAgatha didn't even have to think about that. \"Lilith wouldn't lie to me. Not about that. Not then.\"\n\nKrosp nodded. \"I have to agree. It's not like she did you any favors acknowledging it.\"\n\n\"And everybody is making such a big deal about it. The Baron must discover new Sparks all the time.\"\n\nKrosp glared at her. \"Because you're not just a Spark. You're the last of the Heterodyne family. Surely you must understand how momentous that is. As long as you're around, the Baron and every other major power in Europe will want to control you, and everyone else will either want to follow you or kill you. You've got to understand that.\"\n\n\"But that's all\u2026 politics. I don't care about any of that.\"\n\n\"Well you'd better start to care. Because everyone's going to care about you.\"\n\n\"You mean they're all going to want something from me.\"\n\nKrosp nodded. \"That's right, and like it or not, you'll cause a lot of trouble just by existing.\"\n\nAgatha thought about this and had to admit the logic of it. Her jaw tightened and she straightened up. \"All right then,\" she declared. \"Let's go cause some trouble.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Lost Regiment 8) Men of War", + "author": "William R. Forstchen", + "genres": [ + "scifi", + "military" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "For the men of all the Lost Regiments of the American Civil War, North and South, who gave the last full \"measure of devotion and, in so doing, set an undying example of dedication and valor.\n\nThis series has spun its web around me for more than a decade and it is now difficult to part from it. The desire to write a story in this genre with a Civil War theme formed over fifteen years ago, and I am eternally grateful to John Silbersack, my first editor with Penguin, for embracing an idea that other editors thought a bit mad. My sincere thanks must go as well to my agent, Eleanor Wood. When I became her client twelve years ago the Lost Regiment was the first thing I dropped on her desk, and it was she who saved it and moved it forward.\n\nThis series started just as I entered graduate school and is now finished after obtaining tenure at Montreat College, so it has been a constant companion through a lot of changes in my life. My most humble thanks must go to Professor Gunther Rothenberg. Gunther was, and still is, my mentor, and it was an honor to study under him. Dennis Showalter, President of the Society of Military Historians, was a hero of mine years ago, and thus my shock when he called me one day, me a lowly graduate student, to express his delight in Rally Cry. Dennis's input ever since has been invaluable and his studies of technology, logistics, and wdt are an inspiration. Mention must be made of Professor David Flory as well, a professor second to none. Another inspiration was the role model of L. Sprague de Camp when it came to combining history with science fiction and fantasy.\n\nNumerous friends were advisors and of tremendous help on this project and others, and are deserving of thanks, especially John Mina, Kevin Malady, Maury Hurt, Bill Fawcett, Elizabeth Kitsteiner, Monica Walker, Donn Wright, Tom Sesy, Tim Kindred, Dr. David Delle-croce for discussions on the finer points of the \"Moon Fest,\" Newt Gingrich, and Jeff Ethell. Any relation to those who served in the 35th is purely coincidence. The community of Montreat College, students, faculty, and administration has been remarkably tolerant of my idiosyncrasies and story writing. It is a rare college today that indulges its professors thus, and I am thankful for their understanding and support.\n\nOf course there is my family, who had to live through all of this, Sharon, Meghan (who learned to sing the \"Battle Cry of Freedom\" before she was three), and lay parents, who encouraged my interest in history from the start.\n\nThere are numerous other names to mention, but publishers are not into acknowledgments that run for pages, nor as a reader do I often take the time to check them out, so we shall close it here. So if you are reading this, my thanks, but it is time to move on with the tale!\n\n\u2014William R. Forstchen Montreat, NC June 1999" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Colonel Andrew Lawrence Keane reached up and reverently touched the silken folds of the flag of the 35th Maine. Aged and bloodstained, the fabric was as fragile as the wings of a dying butterfly.\n\nA hundred nameless fields of strife, he thought wistfully. My own blood on that standard, my brother's, all my comrades. How many of us left? Less than a hundred now. He slowly let his hand drop.\n\nIt was early morning, the air heady with the scent of late spring. The grass was up, thick, a lush green, sprinkled with a riot of flowers\u2014blue, yellow, and strange purple orchids unique to this alien world that was now home.\n\nNature was already hard at work covering over the scars of the bitter winter battle. The deep trenches cut by the besieging Bantag were beginning to erode away, collapsing in on themselves under the incessant drumbeat of the heavy spring rains. Scattered wreckage of battle, discarded cartridge boxes, broken caissons, shell casings, tattered bits of uniform, and even the bones of the fallen were returning to the soil.\n\nHis gaze swept across the field, fingering for a moment at the great city of the Roum, looking like a vision of an empire lost to his own world far more than a millennium ago. Pillared temples adorned the hills, the new triumphal arch commemorating the great victory already half-raised in the center of the old forum. Even in the city the scars of the bitter winter battle were beginning to disappear, new buildings rising up out of the wreckage, the distant sound of sawing, hammering; a city being reborn echoed across the fields.\n\nHe turned his mount, nudging Mercury with his knees, shifting his gaze to the long lines deployed out behind him, a full corps drawn up for review before heading to the front. It was the glorious old 9th Corps, so badly mauled in the siege. The corps was deployed in battle formation, three divisions, with brigades in column, colors to the fore, occupying a front of more than half a mile. The formation was obsolete for battle use; in an open field it would be torn to shreds by modern firepower. But old traditions died hard, and such a formation could still inspire the ranks, giving them a sense of their strength and numbers.\n\n\"They're starting to look better,\" Hans Schuder announced. Andrew looked over to his old friend and nodded, urging Mercury to a slow canter, the flag bearer of the 35th following, as he paraded down the length of the line, saluting the shot-torn standards of the regiments, carefully eyeing the men.\n\nMost of the wear and tear of the winter fight, at least on the exterior, had been repaired \u2026 new uniforms to replace the rags that had covered the men by the end of the winter, rifles repaired and well polished, cartridge boxes and haversacks bulging with eighty rounds per man, and five days' rations.\n\nHere and there the ranks had been replenished with new recruits, but most of the men were veterans: rawboned, tough, lean, eyes dark and hollow. Far too many of the regiments were pitifully small, sometimes down to fewer than a hundred men. Andrew had considered combining units and cutting the corps down to two divisions, but there had been a howl of protest. Regimental pride was as strong on this world as with any army back on the old world, so he had let the formation stand.\n\nReining in occasionally, he paused to chat, making it a point to single out men who wore the coveted Medals of Honor. Eighteen had been awarded for the siege of Roum, and another five for the units that had flanked the Bantags with Hans Schuder. Self-consciously he looked down at his own medal, given to him personally by President Abraham Lincoln. It still made him feel somewhat guilty that he had thus been singled out. Taking command of the old 35th at Gettysburg after the death of Colonel Estes, he had simply held the line, refusing to budge, the same way the other regiments deployed along Seminary Ridge had fought on that terrible first day of the battle. He had bled the 35th white, lost his only brother, and awakened in the hospital minus an arm. And for that they gave me a medal. He looked over at Hans riding beside him. It wasn't fair, he thought again. If anyone deserved the medal for that day, it was Hans.\n\nHis gaze shifted to a color sergeant from the 14th Roum who had won his medal the hard way, killing over a dozen Bantags in hand-to-hand fighting. Andrew nodded to the sergeant and, as tradition demanded, saluted first in recognition of the medal. The sergeant, really not much more than a boy, grinned with delight and snapped off a salute in return.\n\n\"Sergeant, ready to go back up to the front?\" Andrew asked, still stumbling over the Latin.\n\n\"I think we're ready, sir.\"\n\nAndrew smiled and continued on.\n\n\"I think we're ready,\" Andrew said in English, looking over at Hans. \"They'll fight, but they're worn out.\"\n\n\"Who isn't, Andrew?\" Hans replied laconically. \"The years pass, the fighting continues, the faces keep changing in the ranks. They just keep seem to be getting younger; that boy with the Medal of Honor couldn't be nineteen.\"\n\n\"Actually just turned eighteen,\" Andrew replied. He looked back again at the boy with the old eyes, and saw the looks of admiration from the others in his company, for Keane had singled him out.\n\nThe old game, Andrew thought, \"with such baubles armies are led,\" Napoleon had once said. Two new awards had been created at the end of the Battle of Roum, and many of the men now wore them, a dark purple stripe on the left sleeve denoting a battle wound, and a silver stripe, also on the same sleeve, for having killed a Bantag in hand-to-hand combat or for a conspicuous display of gallantry. A good third of the corps wore the purple stripe, and several hundred the silver. It just might motivate a frightened boy to stand while others ran.\n\nComing to the head of the formation Andrew reined in and returned the salute of Stan Bamberg, commander of the 9th Corps and an old gunner of the 44th New York Light Artillery, who today was relinquishing command to head south and take over the 3rd Corps in front at Tyre. Jeff Frady, a redheaded gunner from the 44th had been promoted to take command, and in part this ceremony was the pomp and circumstance for a change of leaders.\n\n\"Nice day to be heading up to the front,\" Stan announced, looking at the pale blue morning sky. \"This is a good corps, Andrew.\"\n\nAndrew caught the undercurrent of concern in Stan's voice. The 9th had been shredded at Roum, and some said the unit had simply broken. The survivors, including Stan, felt that something had to be proven.\n\n\"How's the arm?\" Andrew inquired. Stan smiled, flexing it with barely a grimace, a souvenir of the last minutes of the battle for Roum, when the corps commander had gotten a little too enthusiastic, ridden to the front lines, and received a Bantag bullet as a result.\n\n\"Ready to head south?\"\n\nStan smiled. \"I'll miss these boys.\" He was staring at Jeff, who had been his second for well over a year. \"Take good care of them.\"\n\nJeff nodded, not replying.\n\nA steam whistle echoed in the distance, interrupting their thoughts. Looking past Stan, Andrew saw a train coming down the broad open slope, its flatcars empty after delivering half a dozen land ironclads to the front. The corps would need thirty trains to take the ten thousand men and their equipment up to the front lines. Once they were in position everything would be in place for what he prayed would be the blow that cracked the Bantag position wide-open.\n\nHe had taken the trip up there only a week before, to see the situation in front of Capua and arrange the final plans for the next offensive. The Bantag withdrawal back to the destroyed town, ninety miles east of Roum, had been thorough and brutal, not a single building, barn, hovel, bridge, or foot of track had been left intact by the retreating Horde. Over the last four months his railroaders had worked themselves to exhaustion, repairing, as well, the damage done by the two umens that had raided between Hispania and Kev.\n\nEven with the reconnected line, Pat O'Donald, up at the front, could barely keep five corps supplied, and though he was screaming for the 9th to move up as quickly as possible, Andrew half wondered if their arrival would be more of a burden than a help.\n\nThey were at a stalemate, and he feared that this was a stalemate the Human forces would eventually lose. Though the Battle of Roum, in a tactical sense, had been a victory, in an overall strategic sense he feared it might very well have proven to be a dark turning point of the war.\n\nHe remembered his old war back home, the summer and autumn of 1864, when Sherman and Sheridan had laid waste to Georgia and the Shenandoah Valley, crippling the breadbasket of the Confederacy. That, perhaps far more than the bitter siege in the trenches around Petersburg and Richmond, had truly broken the back of the Rebel cause.\n\nHere, in the present, the Bantag ravagings were a blow so severe that he had been forced temporarily to demobilize nearly twenty thousand Roum infantry who had been farmers. If they didn't get some kind of crops in, the Republic would starve the following winter.\n\nBeyond the physical devastation of the Bantag winter offensive there was the human toll as well. Another forty thousand casualties for the army, more than a hundred thousand civilians lost and a million more homeless. The war was wearing them down, even as they continued to win on the battlefield.\n\nHe sensed this new Bantag leader understood that far better than any foe he had ever faced across all the wars with the three hordes. The others had always perceived victory as a prize to be won on the battlefield. Yet in the reality of war that was only one component.\n\nWhat was needed now was not just a victory but a shattering and overwhelming triumph, an annihilating blow on the battlefield that broke the back of the Bantag Horde. He hoped that the forthcoming offensive would be that blow.\n\n\"Sir, are you all right?\" Jeff asked.\n\nAndrew stirred, realizing he had been gazing off in silence.\n\nHe smiled, saying nothing for a moment. He was still weak, a hollow fluttery feeling inside, as if his heart, his body had gone as brittle as glass. The pain, thank God, was gone, though the dark craving for that terrible elixir, morphine, still lingered, the memory of its soothing touch drifting like a fantasy for a forbidden lover.\n\n\"Just fine, Jeff, let's not keep the boys standing hefe. Reviews might be grand fun for generals, but they can be a hell of a bore for privates.\"\n\n\"Yes sir. I'll see you up at the front, sir.\"\n\nJeff snapped off another salute and turned his mount, barking out a command. The fifers and drummers deployed behind him started in, commands echoing across the field as the densely packed columns wheeled about to pass in review and from there deploy out to the depot where the trains waited.\n\nThe \"Battle Hymn of the Republic\" echoed across the open fields as the long sinuous columns marched past, the bayonet-tipped rifles gleaming in the morning sun.\n\nStan, obviously moved by sentiment for his old command, cantered back and forth along the ranks, reaching down to shake hands and wish the boys well.\n\n\"This has got to be the last campaign,\" Hans announced. Andrew shifted in his saddle, looking over at his old friend.\n\n\"Another battle like the last and it's over with; either they will break us, or Roum will crack, or maybe even our own government. Andrew, you've got to find a way to end -it now.\"\n\nAndrew looked away, watching as the ranks passed. There had been a time when this army, his army, so reminded him of the old Army of the Potomac. No longer. It had the look, the feel of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. The men were lean, too lean. His army was beginning to unravel from having fought one too many battles and knowing it would be forced to continue to fight, the only escape being dismemberment or death.\n\nIt was evident all across the Republic, not just here, or at the front, but back in Suzdal, and to the smallest village hamlet. The vast infrastructure he had attempted to build to support this war was stretched like a bowstring and beginning to fray.\n\n\"You see it, too?\" Andrew asked.\n\nThe columns swayed past, dust swirling up so that they looked like shadows passing even though it was noon. He could sense the lack of enthusiasm, the almost boyish excitement that went through an army when it finally broke camp and headed back up. No, these were grim veterans who would fight like hell, but the enthusiasm was dampened by the knowledge of reality.\n\n\"I see it in you as well, Andrew Keane. You're still not over your wound.\"\n\nAndrew chuckled dismissively. \"Breath comes a bit short, but other than that I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nHe looked over at his old friend and smiled.\n\n\"You should talk. How many wounds is it, five now? And that heart of yours. Emil keeps telling you to slow down a bit and to cut out chewing tobacco.\"\n\nAs if in response Hans fished into his haversack, pulled out a plug, bit off a chew, and, playing out their old ceremony, offered the plug to Andrew. He took it and bit a chew as well, and Hans smiled.\n\n\"We're two worn-out old warhorses Andrew. But hell, what's the alternative, go to the old soldiers' home and sit in a rocking chair on the porch? Not I. Down deep, I kind of hope I get shot by the last bullet of the last war.\"\n\n\"Don't even joke about that.\"\n\n\"Superstitious?\" Hans chuckled.\n\n\"No, it's just something you don't joke about. But you're right, we're both wearing down. Everyone is.\"\n\nIn the dust-choked column a passing regiment raised their caps in salute. Andrew let go of Mercury's reins and took off his hat to return the gesture.\n\n\"You know, there is part of me that would actually miss this,\" Hans drawled as he leaded over and spat. \"Nothing in peacetime can equal this, full corps of infantry drawn up to march off to war.\"\n\nAndrew nodded. It wasn't just the sight of them, it was the sounds, the smells \u2026 the rhythmic clatter of tin cups banging on canteens, the tramping of feet on the dusty road, the snatches of conversations wafting past, the scent of leather, sweat, horses, oil, even the staticlike feel of the powdery dust. It was something eternal, and it was one of the few things the gods of war gave back in exchange for all the blood offered up on their altars.\n\nAfter so many years he could close his eyes, and it could be anywhere, here on this mad world, or back in Virginia. And he could sense as well the differences, the grimness of purpose, the quiet resignation, the feeling that this was some sort of final effort. He wondered, if, at this very moment, his rival less than a hundred miles away was engaging in the same exercise, towering eight-foot Bantag warriors marching past. Was he judging his troops as well, knowing that a final cataclysmic battle was coming?\n\n\"And what about them? What does he have? What is he feeling at this moment?\" Andrew whispered.\n\n\"Who, this Jurak?\"\n\nAndrew nodded again.\n\n\"I rarely saw him, can't recall if I ever even talked to him. He's changed the war though, that's certain. Almost makes me wish we still had Ha'ark.\"\n\nEscaped Chin slaves confirmed the rumors that Ha'ark had died in front of Roum, most likely murdered by his own followers. For a brief moment Andrew had hoped beyond hope that with the death of the so-called Redeemer, the war would be over, and the Bantags would simply retreat. They had indeed retreated, but it had been to dig in and go on the defensive throughout the waning days of winter and into the spring.\n\nFor the first month he was glad of the breathing space, giving them a chance to do repairs, especially to the railroads, evacuate Roum civilians westward to Suzdal, bring up supplies, and get ready.\n\nBy the second month he was actually hoping they'd come out of their defensive positions at Capua \u2026 and by the third month he knew this new leader, Jurak, had changed the nature of the war.\n\nHe could sense a difference, a more methodical mind, calculating, not given to rash moves.\n\n\"I hate the fact we have to dig him out,\" Andrew said, Hans nodding in agreement. \"It's as if the bastard is sitting there, just begging us to come in.\"\n\n\"Could always count on them attacking up till now,\" Hans replied, \"but you're right, he's waiting for us to kick off the ball.\"\n\nAndrew grunted. Though Hans had taught him how to chew, he had never really mastered it and was embarrassed as he tried to spit and half choked instead.\n\nDamn, the hordes could always be counted on to attack. The trick then was to find a narrow front, dig in, and tear them up. Jurak had reversed the tables. Capua was a damn fine defensive position, flanked by marshes and heavy forests to the north, more marshes and sharp jagged hills to the south. It was a front fifteen miles wide and fortified to the teeth.\n\nYet it seemed there was no other way. All indicators were that during the spring Jurak had invested a massive effort on building up his infrastructure, and his factories were churning out guns, ammunition, and supplies most likely at a faster pace than that of the Republic. If Andrew let this pace go on for another six months to a year, Jurak could swarm them under. He had to strike, like it or not.\n\nThe last of the swaying columns of infantry drifted past, blue uniforms already turning dirty gray-brown from the dust, men covering their faces with bandannas soaked in water. Jeff emerged out of the dust, cantering back down the line, followed by his guidon bearer. They reined in and saluted.\n\n\"I'll see you up at the front, Jeff. Tell Pat not to get overanxious and start the show without me.\"\n\n\"Yes sir. And sir, please do all of us a favor.\"\n\n\"What's that, Jeff?\"\n\n\"Don't push yourself too hard.\"\n\nAndrew smiled. How strange the role reversal of late. Prior to the wound he had been the father; now he was feeling like the aging parent whose children were increasingly solicitous about his well-being.\n\nOffering a casual salute, Jeff spurred his mount, shouting for the column to increase its pace. Fifers squealed, picking up the \"Battle Cry of Freedom,\" the song rippling down the ranks, a strange mix as some sang the words in Latin, others in Rus. The column wound past, rank after endless rank, the strange rhythm of rattling canteens and tin cups, the squeaking of leather, the scrape of hobnailed shoes on the hard-packed ground all blending together. More dust swirled up as a battery of three-inch rifles clattered past, the air thick with the smell of horse sweat, leather, tar, and grease, the men riding the caissons waving cheerily.\n\nThe dust thickened, obscuring the view. Andrew reached up to wipe his eyes. But it wasn't just the dust; to his surprise he was in tears. It was as if he was watching an ageless ritual for one last time, a sense that here was a final moment, the army going forth one last time, hopefully to victory. But the pageantry, the flags snapping in the rising breeze, the dark columns of infantry, rifles glinting, all of it was the passing of the armies into a dark and unknown land. It was an army of ghostly apparitions, and again he thought of the dream that had consumed him while he had lain in the twilight world that bordered on death, the tens of thousands who had gone ahead, sent there by his orders. How many of these boys were now marching to that destiny? When, dear God, would it ever end?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Jurak Qar Qarth of the Bantag Horde walked along the battlements lining the east bank of the river just above Capua. The midsummer twilight cast long shadows across the river, silhouetting the human fortifications on the opposite side of the river. He peered intently, raising his field glasses to scan the lines, oblivious to the warnings about snipers. An occasional shot fluttered overhead, a round smacking into the embankment above the firing slit, sending down a shower of powdery dirt.\n\nAn enemy flyer lazily circled above the lines, waiting in challenge for any of his own airships to come over, an offer he would not take since airships were far too precious to waste in foolish dueling that served no strategic purpose.\n\nHe slid back down from the firing slit and looked back at the gathering of umen Qarths, the commanders of his twenty-five divisions committed to this front.\n\nIn the hours after his killing of Ha'ark he had assumed that he, too, would die. But led by Zartak, the oldest of the clan Qarths, the council had declared him as the rightful successor, the one of legend sent to redeem the world, while Ha'ark had been a false usurper.\n\nIt was a position he had never desired, but the simple fact of the matter was that he either take it or die. He knew that if there had actually been a blood challenge, he would have been lost, but there was still enough of the superstitious fear of him and the others who had come through the Portal of Light, to ensure his acceptance as a demigod sent to save the hordes.\n\nBeing stuck on this world, fighting this war, none of it was what he desired, but saddled with the responsibility, he would see it through to its conclusion. Ha'ark had been far more the adventurer, the seeker of glory and power, while he had stayed in the background.\n\nEven on the old world he had not sought the shock of battle. Drafted to serve in the War of the False Pretender, he had spent eight years in the ranks, never rising because such power was not what he wanted. Solitude, a good book, a conversation with some depth to it were far more to his liking, and the others of his unit, though they knew he was dependable in a fight, found little else in common with him.\n\nRegarding the humans of this world he felt no real hatred; the visceral loathing and dread shared by all of the hordes for this hairless race since the start of the rebellion of the cattle was beyond him in any true emotional sense. On an intellectual level he fully understood the fundamental core of this war; it was a fight for racial survival. After all that had happened only one race could expect to survive, while the other would have to be destroyed. That is what he now fought for, survival. He was of the race of the hordes, they had made him their leader, and he had to ensure that this world would be safe for them.\n\nHe smiled, remembering, a refrain from a poem from his old world:\n\n\"Those I fight I do not hate, those I defend I do not love.\"\n\nHis gaze scanned the umen chieftains. Barbarians, all of them barbarians, clad in black leather, human finger bones strung as necklaces, one of them casually drinking fermented horse milk from a gold-encrusted human skull. Yet they were now his, perhaps the most capable warriors he had ever seen, razor-sharp scimitars that could cut a human in two dangling from waist belts, more than one of them carrying revolving pistols, a few with carbine rifles casually slung over their shoulders.\n\nAll of them were scarred, most sporting old saber slashes across cheeks, brow, and forearms, reminders of a simpler and happier age when the enemy were the other hordes and war was the sport of warriors and not a question of survival or total annihilation. Many bore the ritual cuts on forearms or across foreheads, slashes that were self-inflicted at the start of a battle in order to lend a more fearsome appearance. Several were missing limbs, hands, arms blown off or amputated.\n\nZartak, the eldest, was legendary throughout the Horde, a rider of four circlings of the planet, eighty years or more of age. At Rocky Hill, it was said that his left leg had been blown off just below the knee and he had not even flinched. After,wrapping a tourniquet around his thigh he continued \"to lead his umen on the last desperate charge to take the hill, and then, in spite of the injury that normally would have killed someone half his age, he actually survived.\n\nThe ancient warrior looked straight at him then, and nodded. Strange, Jurak thought, he had often heard of the ability some claimed to be able to sense and probe the thoughts of others. Ha'ark had claimed the skill, but lied. Zartak had it, though, and in the months since becoming Qar Qarth Jurak had felt an increasing bond with this ancient one who had seen the world from one end to the other four times over.\n\nThat must indeed have been a dreamworld, the endless ride eastward toward the rising sun. The daily cycle of rising, mounting, following the slow pace of the wheeled yurts, herding the millions of horses that were the wealth of the clans, the arrival at yet another city of the cattle, there to exact tribute of gold, silver, cunningly wrought weapons, and the flesh of four-legged cattle and the delicacy of the two-legged variety as well. Then moving on the next day, riding forever, breaking the tedium by raiding northward into the realm of the Merki Horde, or to the far north and the domains of the dead Tugars.\n\nBut Keane had changed all that. Keane and his Yankees from another world.\n\nThose changes were spreading like a plague around the world faster than a Horde could ride, and if he, his race were to survive, there was but one answer now: total annihilation. This was a war of no quarter. Either the rebellion and this human dream died, or within a generation not a single rider of the hordes would still be alive. They would be hunted by the victors, with machines ever more cunning and complex. The memory of the thousands of years of the Endless Ride, of the joy of the Riders, of the misery of the cattle, could be forgotten by neither side, and the time of reckoning had come.\n\nJurak had promised them that when victory was complete, when the last of the Rus and Roum were dead, and for good measure the Cartha, Chin, and Nippon were systematically slaughtered as well, so that there was no living memory of what happened, then the Golden Age would return. The machines would be destroyed. Bow, lance, and scimitar would again rule, and again they would ride eastward, resuming the endless journey of their ancestors.\n\nHe knew the promise was a lie. Such knowledge once released could not be returned. As he gazed silently at those gathered around him, he could sense that change already. Many of the Qarths, the clan and umen commanders, had already started to adapt themselves, speaking of enfilading fire, advancing by fire and cover, the use of artillery for suppressive fire. They understood how one locomotive could move in a single day what once required ten thousand horses, and the advantages of that. No, the machines would triumph in the end, and in a way the thought pleased him, for he knew it was a vital necessity.\n\nFor if Keane and his Yankees had come to this world via the Portals of Light bearing the knowledge that they did, it meant that somewhere in this universe there was a world of cattle who had mastered steam. The natural progression of such things would lead them forward to more, and greater, discoveries. Eventually, as well, they would discover that their world was studded with the lost Portals of Light left behind by his own fallen race, and how such gates could be used to span the universe.\n\nNo, there would come a day when more humans might very well arrive with yet more advanced weapons, and on that day his own race must be ready or, better still, rediscover the portals for themselves and use them.\n\nThat was but part of the reason why he had moved so aggressively throughout the last of winter and the spring to stop offensive action, to build up reserves, to spend more on the making of more factories and newer weapons. With the millions of slaves at his disposal, as distasteful as that was, he would outproduce the Yankees and then destroy them.\n\nBut such musings were not for now. There was still this war to be won. It was fitting that the Qar Qarth, the new Redeemer, have moments of silence, as if praying to the ancestors, but they waited for his pronouncements.\n\n\"You are right, Zartak,\" he said, finally breaking the silence, \"they are building up for .an attack. New gun emplacements, more sniper fire, the report of troop trains carrying ironclads.\"\n\nZartak, who would be known as a chief of staff on his old,world, grunted an acknowledgment. Jurak looked at the old one, mane nearly gone to white, balanced precariously on his peg leg, and felt a bond of affection. Here was one who during the long months after the defeat before Roum had educated the new Qar Qarth as to the ways of the world, the history of the Bantag clan and of all the hordes that rode the world in the north, or who sailed the great seas of the southern hemisphere.\n\n\"I know the inactivity of the past months has weighed heavily upon all of you,\" Jurak continued, \"as it has weighed upon me. Victory was within our grasp before Roum and lost in the blinking of an eye for but one foolish mistake, the failure to protect our transport for supplies.\n\n\"That is why we have waited for so long. We have built those supplies back, but we have done more, occupying half of the lands that were once of the cattle of Roum. This is causing them to starve, and sooner or later they will be forced to attack, and it will be here.\"\n\n. \"Directly across the river?\" Tukkanger, commander of the elite umen of the white horse, asked. \"Even we have learned the folly of that.\"\n\n\"Yet they will come. The river is low, fordable now for much of its length.\" And he pointed back west. The river, the only barrier separating the two lines dug in on opposite banks six hundred yards apart, was reduced to a muddy trickle.\n\n\"Keane must attack; it is the only front available. Their southern pocket leads but to open steppe, and, without a rail line advancing behind them, they cannot support an operation. We, in turn, are building a rail line across the narrows between the two seas to support our efforts against Tyre. That city has become a trap for them, one which they now cannot abandon for fear that we will use it as a base once our rail line is completed. Yet for them to attack us there would be a useless thrust into empty land.\n\n\"The path up through the mountains where they flanked us last time is now secured and heavily fortified by us. No, they must cross the river here. He will seek a battle of annihilation, a final desperate lunge to break our strength and our morale.\"\n\nThere was no sense in explaining the political pressure to these warriors, though he and Zartak had spoken of it often enough. Part of his strategy, in fact the major part, was to try and drive a wedge between the alliances of Roum and the Rus, to emphasize their military helplessness.\n\n\"They must take back this land which belonged to the Roum or lose face. So we will let him attack; he will fail. Then, when the time is right, we shall attack in turn. And this time, I promise you, we will not stop until Roum, and beyond that Suzdal and all of Rus, are in flames.\"\n\nHe said the words not as some grandiose vision or prophecy, but rather as a simple statement of the campaign to come, and those around him nodded one by one in agreement.\n\nThis would be a new kind of war for them, he realized. They had been bloodied in the long campaign all the way from the Great Sea to the gates of Roum, learning how all things had changed. Now they would see it in action. All he needed was for Keane to step into the trap, and in his heart he knew that Keane was about to take that step." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Varinna Ferguson, widow of the famed inventor who had done so much to ensure the survival of the Republic, walked through the vast hangar, gazing up in wonder at the air machine that filled the cavernous hall. This machine was special, with the name Ferguson painted on the port side, just behind the pilot's cabin. Work crews were busy putting the final coat of lacquer on the double-weaved canvas of the wings. Tomorrow the machine would be ready for its first rollout.\n\n\"You checking this one off, too?\"\n\nShe looked over at Vincent Hawthorne, chief of staff of the Army of the Republic, and smiled. He was directly responsible for all ordnance development, and thus her boss. But the relationship of Ferguson's widow to the Republic was a strange one. She held no official rank or title. As she was heir to the memory of the great inventor, all showed her deference, for in the final months of his life she was the one who increasingly served as his eyes, his ears, and finally even his voice. It was as if some part of him still survived through her.\n\nWhat few had grasped was just how unique their pairing had been. The attraction wasn't just that of a shy eccentric inventor for a beautiful slave in the house of Marcus, former Proconsul of Roum and now the vice president of the Republic. The beauty was long gone, and she was no longer even conscious of the frozen scar tissue that made her face a mask, or the twisted hands that still cracked open and bled after hours of writing. It had always been something more than the simple attraction, as if Chuck had sensed the brilliant light of the mind within. When he had first started to share his drawings, his plans, his daydreams with her, she found she could strangely visualize them in their entirety, the parts on the sheets of paper springing into three-dimensional form, fitting together, interlocking, working or not working.\n\nThough she might not have the leaps of imagination he did, there was within her the concrete ability to carry out what he had visualized, to sense when to reject the impractical and when to mold the practical into life. Only a few, the inner circle of Chuck's young apprentices and assistants, fully realized just how much it was Varinna running things toward the end. She had the natural mind of an administrator who should be paired with a dreamer. Her dreamer was dead, but his notes, his sketchbooks, his frantic last months of scribblings were still alive, lovingly stored away, and she would make their contents real.\n\nHe had recognized that in her, and in so doing had not just been her lover but her liberator as well. In any other world she would have lived her life out as a servant in a house of nobility, a mistress most likely in her youth, as she had in fact been to Marcus, and then married off to another slave or underling when the prime of beauty began to fade. That, indeed, had been her fate, but instead she married a free man, a Yankee who had loved her for what she was, and she knew there would never be another like him in her life.\n\nShe looked over at Vincent and smiled, suddenly aware that she had allowed her thoughts to drift again. Even after all these years, he was still slightly embarrassed around her, unable to forget the day they had first met, when a very young Colonel Vincent Hawthorne had come to Roum as a military attache and Marcus had casually suggested that she make sure that the guest was comfortable in every way that a guest of a Proconsul should be.\n\nThe young Quaker had been in a panic over her advances and now, with the memory of Chuck, she was glad it had turned out as it did, for though Chuck was able to deal with her relationship to Marcus, there was something about the way the Yankees thought about sex that might have made difficulties between her husband and Vincent if anything had indeed finally happened.\n\n\"What did you say?\" she asked.\n\n\"This machine. Is it getting checked off for the-front?\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\nVincent looked around for a moment at the vast hangar. Over a hundred feet long and forty feet high it was like a cathedral for the new age of air, high timber-vaulted ceiling, skylights open to admit as much light as possible for dozens of workers lining the scaffolding, carefully inspecting every double-stitched seam, searching for the slightest leak of hydrogen from the four gasbags inside the hull. It had been Varinna's idea to mix in a small amount of pungent coal gas with the hydrogen for this test so that the smell would be a tip off of a leak. She watched as one of the inspectors called over a crew master who leaned over, sniffed a seam, and then gave the go-ahead to lacquer on a patch.\n\n\"Let's step outside where we can talk,\" Vincent suggested, and she nodded an agreement.\n\nThe evening was fair, the first hint of a cooling breeze coming up from the Inland Sea to the south, rippling the tops of the trees, and with the sleeve of her white-linen dress, she wiped the sweat from her brow.\n\nThe crew down at number seven hangar was carefully guiding its machine, E class, ship number forty-two, out of its hangar, a crew chief swearing profusely as a dozen boys worked the guidelines attached to the starboard side, keeping the ship steady against the faint southerly breeze. As the tail cleared the hangar they cast off, letting the 110-foot-long airship pivot around, pointing its nose into the breeze. Carefully they guided the ship over to a mooring post, in the open field where ships number thirty-five, through forty-one were anchored as well. The production run of the last four weeks, all of them going through the final fitting out, engine checks, test flights, and crew training before being sent up to the front.\n\nShe had nearly ten thousand people working for her. An entire mill had been set up just for the weaving of silk and canvas, then stitching the panels together on the new trea-cile sewing machines. Hundreds more worked in the bamboo groves, selecting, harvesting, and splitting the wood that would serve as the wicker frames for the airships.\n\nCanvas, silk, and framing came together in the cavernous sheds to make the 110-foot-long ships, while in other workshops the bi-level wings were fashioned. From the engine works the lightweight caloric steam engines were produced, brought to the airfield, mounted to the wings, hooked into the fiiel lines for kerosene, and mounted with propellers.\n\nOnly within the last six months had one of her young apprentices, after examining the remains of a captured Ban-tag ship, announced that the propellers should not be made like ship's propellers, but would work far better if shaped like the airfoils Chuck had designed for the wings. The new designs, though difficult to make, had resulted in a significant increase in performance.\n\nFinally, with framework completed, wings mounted and folded up against the side of the ship, forward cab, bomber's position underneath, and topside gunner positions mounted, tail and elevators added on, and all the controls and cables correctly mounted, it was time to gas up the ship.\n\nThe center bag was hot air, hooked into the exhaust from the four caloric engines mounted on the wings. Forward and aft were the hydrogen gasbags, filled from the dangerous mix of sulfuric acid and zinc shavings, cooked in a lead-lined vat, mixed with a bit of coal gas for scent.\n\nTen thousand laborers produced eight Eagles and four of the smaller Hornets per month. And the average life expectancy was but ten missions. She wondered, given the current state of affairs, how much longer she'd be allowed such resources, yet in her heart she sensed that it was there, not with the vast arrays of army corps and artillery, that the fate of the Republic would be decided.\n\nAll of this from my husband's mind, she thought with a wistful smile. Ten years ago I would have thought it mad wizardry, or the product of gods to fly thus.\n\nOf all of Chuck's projects it was flight that had captivated him the most, inspiring his greatest leaps of creative talent and research. The Eagle class airships were the culmination of that effort. With a crew of four and three Gatling guns, it could range over nearly five hundred miles and go nearly forty miles in an hour.\n\nA low humming caught her attention, and she looked up to see a Hornet single-engine ship diving in at a sharp angle, leveling out at less than fifty feet and winging across the field, the evening ship returning from patrol of the western steppes on the far side of the Neiper, keeping a watch over the wandering bands from the old Merki Horde. They weren't enough to pose a truly serious threat, but they were sufficient in number to tie down a corps of infantry and a brigade of cavalry to make sure they didn't raid across the river.\n\nThe Hornet banked up sharply, the pilot showing off for the audience on the ground, and Varinna winced slightly at the boyish display. The fault with the rear-mounted engine had killed half a dozen pilots before it was figured out, and though the problem had been solved, she wished the pilots were a little less reckless.\n\nOut in the field where the seven new Eagles were moored, ground crews were double-checking the tie-downs for the evening and getting ready to settle in for the night in their camp, each crew of twenty-five sleeping in tents arranged around the mooring poles. They had to be ready to react instantly, day or night, to any shift in the wind or weather. Far more ships had been lost to thunderstorms than had ever been shot down by the Bantags.\n\nAnother airship, a somewhat battered Eagle\u2014number twelve, a veteran of the winter campaign and sent back for refitting\u2014came in, banking erratically, a cadet pilot most likely at the controls. She watched anxiously as it turned to line up on the vast open landing field of several dozen acres.\n\n\"The boy's crabbing, not watching the wind vane,\" Vincent announced.\n\nVarinna nodded, saying nothing, as one wing dipped, almost scraped, then straightened back up, the boy touching down hard, bouncing twice, then finally holding the ground. She could well imagine the chewing out he'd get from Feyodor, her assistant now in command of the pilot-training school, made worse by the withering sarcasm of the crew chief for the machine, who would make it a point of stalking along with the pilot for the postflight checkoff, blaming the novice for every crack and dent the machine had ever suffered since the day it had first emerged from a hangar.\n\n\"How many more machines can you have up within the next five days?\" Vincent asked.\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Varinna, you know it really isn't your place to ask. I'm ordered to send up every available machine, and that's what I'm out here to check on.\"\n\n\"I know the plan as well as you do,\" she replied sharply. Vincent started to sputter and, quickly smiling, she held up an appeasing hand.\n\n\"Colonel Keane shared it with me when he was here in the city last week. But even before then I knew about it.\"\n\n\"I don't even want to ask.\" Vincent sighed, gesturing back to the west, where the distant spires of the cathedral in Suzdal stood out sharply against the late-aftemoon sky. \"That damn city is a sieve when it comes to keeping a secret.\"\n\n\"And that's just one of the reasons I don't think the attack should be launched in front of Capua.\"\n\nShe could see her statement had caught his attention, and he had learned long ago not to dismissively wave off her opinions. That was another thing Chuck had taught her. When you prove yourself right on the big issues, you can get away with one hell of a lot. It was Chuck's insistence on continuing the rocket-launcher program that had saved everyone's hide at Hispania, and that little feat had been performed in direct contradiction to orders.\n\n\"So go on, madam general, explain,\" Vincent pressed. She bristled for a second, then realized that he wasn't being sarcastic and was in fact listening respectfully.\n\n\"Capua is so damn obvious that this new chief of theirs must know it as well. For that reason alone I think we should avoid it.\"\n\n\"Don't you think Andrew and I have argued out that point a dozen times in the last three months?\" Vincent replied, a slight flash of temper in his voice.\n\n\"Ah, so you don't agree either then?\"\n\nHe flushed, his eyes turning away for a moment, and she nodded slowly. Vincent always had been too transparent. But now she knew she was in.\n\n\"I've talked with every pilot who's come back here throughout the spring. One of them, Stasha Igorovich, told me that he flew a reconnaissance flight just two weeks ago and reported signs of numerous land ironclads having been moved into the forests north of town.\"\n\n\"I read that report, and you know then as well as I do that when Andrew sent up two Hornets the following mnming to check on these tracks this eagle-eyed pilot claimed he saw, there was no sign of them.\"\n\n\"The Bantag are learning concealment, Vincent. The same as we have.\" She pointed back up toward the all-important offices and machine shops for the Ordnance Department. The once attractive whitewashed buildings had been covered with a coating of dirty brown paint. Netting with woven strips of green-and-brown cloth had been draped over the buildings so that from the air they were all but invisible.\n\n\"Need I remind you that we got the idea for that netting from the Bantag? Yet another thing this Ha'ark and his companions most likely brought over from their own world. In fact, I suspect that from the air we are far more visible than they are. And if so, the Bantag must be blind not to have noticed the buildup along the Capua front, the number of guns moved up, the dozen pontoon bridges and hundreds of canvas boats, rocket launchers, all of the equipment needed for a direct assault across a river. They're waiting for us.\"\n\n\"Maybe they are, but the war has to be decided, and decided now If we can only come to grips with them, beat them on their own field, we'll turn the tide. Damn it all, woman, they're still parked less than one hundred miles from Roum. We have to get them out of there now.\"\n\n\"Or if we don't Roum leaves the Republic? Is that the sole motivation now for this attack?\"\n\n\"Or the Republic, or what we want to call the Republic, will leave Roum.\" Vincent sighed, wearily shaking his head. \"Varinna, you know as well as I do this country's finished. One more winter of war, and we fall apart. Even if we win now, it'll be a near-run thing at best.\"\n\nVincent looked away again, watching for a moment as the pilot who had so clumsily landed endured a good chewing out from Feyodor while the crew chief pointed at what was most likely a broken wheel strut and exploded into a torrent of swearing.\n\n\"Tell me where we have shortages right now,\" Vincent snapped, looking back at her.\n\nShe said nothing.\n\n\"Where do I start then? Fulminate of mercury for percussion caps? Our source of quicksilver is playing out, six more months and we might have to start rationing cartridges, or go all the way back to flintlock guns. How about silk for these airships? We're out. Oil for kerosene, the Bantags overran the last oil well eleven days ago. Sure we can substitute coal oil, but that's just one more example. And men \u2026 .\"\n\nHis voice trailed off for a moment.\n\n\"How many hundred thousands dead? If we had five corps more, even three corps, I'd break the back of this war in a month. But even if I did have the extra men, where the hell would I get fifty thousand more uniforms, cartridge boxes, tents, smallpox inoculations, and rations for a summer's campaign, let alone the rifles and eighty cartridges per man for one afternoon's good fight?\"\n\nAgain he sighed, extending his hands in a gesture of infinite weariness.\n\n\"One of the things I'm supposed to order is the reduction of the workforce for the airships.\"\n\n\"What?\".\n\n\"You heard me right. You and I played a good litde game of doctoring the books, but some of our congressmen finally figured it out and hit the ceiling. They want the resources put into artillery or land ironclads.\"\n\nShe waved her hand dismissively.\n\n\"Taking one for the other is illogical. Those people are trained for this job. We'll lose production on both ends if we switch them off.\"\n\n\"Well, they want five thousand of them transferred before the month is out. Sent to the fields if need be to try and harvest more food. Lord knows we're falling short of that as well.\"\n\nShe wearily shook her head.\n\n\"Varinna, we can't keep what we have in the field much longer. That's why Andrew's making this lunge.\"\n\n\"They must be in the same boat as we are,\" she replied.\n\n\"Maybe so, but then again maybe not. Remember, they have slaves, millions, tens of millions if need be, spread all across this world. I think the newcomers, Ha'ark and the others, brought with them the understanding of how to harness that labor to their own ends. So they outproduce us, and in the end they overwhelm us. Our only hope was to kill so damn many of the Bantag warriors that they'd finally turn aside. We destroyed a good third of their army during the campaign of last autumn and winter, but it wasn't enough.\"\n\n\"So destroy their supplies.\"\n\nVincent smiled, and for an instant he caused her temper to flare, the dismissive look reminiscent of ones far too many men would show when she first stepped forward to make a suggestion. The smile finally disappeared.\n\n\"Sorry, Varinna, it's just that every damn senator and member of the cabinet, and even the president comes at me with their war-winning suggestion.\"\n\n\"I'm not one of them. I was Ferguson's wife first, then I was his assistant, then his partner, and finally in the end I did it myself, including holding him while he died.\"\n\n\"I know. I'm sorry.\"\n\nShe lowered her head. She didn't let it show much anymore, the memory of the pain. With an effort, she forced it aside.\n\n\"To go all the way back to your original question, I could force ten more ships into the air and have them up at the front for the offensive.\"\n\n\"But you don't want to.\"\n\n\"They'll most likely all get shot down the first day. You saw the way that boy just landed. I agree with Jack Petracci that these ships need to be used en masse. We saw that last month when forty of the Bantag machines bombed Roum and sank three supply transports in the harbor.\"\n\nAnd they lost half their machines in the process,\" Vincent replied. \"Not much of a trade-off in my book.\"\n\n\"Still, it showed what could be done. But there's no sense in having the mass if the poor dumb fools fly straight into enemy fire. After all the work it takes to build one of these, sending it up with a boy who's got twenty, maybe twenty-five hours of flying time is suicide. Hold these machines back from this fight. Give us time to train more pilots. Twenty more Eagles and Hornets won't make a difference.\"\n\n\"I have my orders.\"\n\n\"For flightworthy machines. Listen to me in this, and while you're at it keep those bastards from Congress and their investigating committees out of my way. I'm tiling you, my friend, after the attack on Capua, these ships might be the deciding factor for this war.\"\n\n\"After Capua?\"\n\n\"You'll see, Vincent. You'll see.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Pulling aside the blanket that served as a door, Andrew stepped down into the dank confines of the bombproof that doubled as headquarters for the Capua Front.\n\nA smoky coal oil lamp suspended over the map table by a piece of telegraph wire tied to an overhead beam provided the only illumination. He looked over at the pendulum clock tacked to the broken lid of a caisson and leaned against the opposite wall \u2026 3:10 in the morning.\n\nThe long twilight of dawn was just beginning, and through one of the view slits he could see a tinge of scarlet to the northeast, silhouetting the Bantag earthworks on the opposite bank of the river. The fact that he had managed to get any sleep at all surprised him, but ever since the wounding near this very same spot six months ago, he found that he tired easily and needed far more rest. The ability to get through a sleepless night and then fight a daylong pitched battle was gone for him.\n\nGoing over to a smoking kettle resting atop a leaky woodstove, he poured a cup of tea and sipped the scalding drink. He looked over at Pat, Hans, and Marcus, who were huddled over the map debating some minor detail.\n\nThe fact that the three were thus engaged was a clear indicator that they were nervous. The plan had been laid over two months ago. Everyone was in place; there was no changing it now. All that was left was the one word of command that would set the complex assault into motion. He had learned ages ago that there came a point in an operation where it was best to step back and let those farther down the chain take over. A nervous commander, at such a moment, was much more a burden than a help.\n\nAndrew put down his cup and moved to join his friends. \"Anything new?\"\n\n\"There was a skirmish down by the river a half hour ago, a Bantag patrol trying to slip across,\" Pat announced.\n\n\"And I think they're on to it,\" Hans replied. \"Not just this patrol, the whole thing; they're on to it, they want us to try this crossing.\"\n\n\"And you want me to call it all off?\"\n\nHans said nothing.\n\n\"Damn it, Hans,\" Pat replied, \"we've been stuck on this line all spring. My God, man, if we don't break this stalemate, we'll be here till Judgment Day. We break his back here, today, and we end this standoff and end this damn war.\"\n\nHans wearily shook his head and looked up at Andrew with bloodshot eyes.\n\n\"Son, you're making this decision out of political concerns rather than for military objectives.\"\n\n\"The president ordered it,\" Andrew replied, his gaze fixed on Marcus.\n\nMarcus stared straight at him and was silent. Andrew knew the Roum vice president was fully committed to this assault. The Bantag were still in possession of some of the most fertile lands of Roum, a million of his people were displaced, and he wanted the land back.\n\nMarcus's gaze shifted toward Hans.\n\n\"I remember Andrew once saying that war was an extension of politics.\"\n\n\"My God, I've got a Roum proconsul quoting Clausewitz to me,\" Hans groaned.\n\n\"Who the hell is Clausewitz?\" Pat asked. \"Does he live here?\"\n\nAndrew could not help but chuckle, then, more soberly, \"This war transcends politics.\"\n\n\"Maybe externally,\" Marcus replied, \"as far as the Bantags go. But internally, for the Republic, it has become an ever-present concern: Which one of the two states will abandon the other first?\"\n\n\"Not while I'm alive,\" Andrew replied, jaw firmly set, his voice gone quiet.\n\n\"Nor I, my friend, you know better than that. But the people of Roum want their land back, and this morning we're going to get it, and drive those bastards from the field. You, I, all of us here have planned this battle for months, down to the finest detail. I fear the only thing we might be lacking here is the nerve to see it through.\"\n\nHans stiffened and leaned forward over the table.\n\n\"I can't believe you would think that of me,\" Hans snapped.\n\nMarcus extended his hand in a conciliatory gesture.\n\n\"I'm not doubting your courage, old friend. We've planned our best, now let us trust in the gods and in the courage of our men.\"\n\nAndrew swept the group with his gaze.\n\n\"It goes as planned,\" he announced, and without waiting for comment he left the underground room, finding it far too claustophobic.\n\nAscending the steps of the bunker, he stepped onto the grassy knoll under which the headquarters was concealed. A faint breeze was stirring from the north, cool air coming down out of the hills and distant forests. Sighing, he sat down, kicking up the scent of sage with his boots. Strange smell; never knew it up in Maine, he thought. Hans had mentioned it, though, saying it reminded him of his days out on the prairie before the Civil War.\n\nHe plucked up a handful of the thick coarse grass, crushing it in his hand, letting the pungent smell fill his lungs. Leaning back, he looked up at the stars, the Great Wheel, wondering as he always did if one of the specks of light might be that of home.\n\nSo strange, home. Maine, the Republic, the memory of peace. Even in the midst of a civil war, everyone knew that there would be a day when it would come to an end, when both sides, North and South, would go home to their farms, villages, towns, and pick up the threads of their lives. Perhaps that was some of the uniqueness of America, the sense that war was an anomaly, an interruption of what was normal, a tragic third act of a play that had to be waded through so there could be the final resolution and running down of the curtain. Then the audience could get up, go home, and resume their lives.\n\nHe knew so much of the old world was not that way. Strange, though he had never been there, this place made him think of Russia. It wasn't just the Rus, descendants of early medieval Russians, that he had found here and forged a nation out of. No, it was the land itself, the impenetrable northern forests, and out here the vast open steppes, the endless dome of the sky, the scent of sage and dried grass, or the cold driving wind of winter. This is what Russia must be like, he thought. The history, the same as well. A land of ceaseless bloodletting, of vast armies sweeping across the dusty ocean of land. War, when fought, was with implacable fury, no quarter asked or expected! Here it was the norm, the ever-present reality.\n\nHe wondered yet again if his dream of the Republic could ever take root in this land. The necessity of war and survival had united Yankee, Rus, and Roum together, at least for the moment, but would that hold if they ever won and drove the barbarians back? Could the Republic survive peace?\n\nHe heard someone approaching, but didn't bother to turn. The limping stride and smell of tobacco indicator enough of who it was. Hans settled down by his side with a groaning sigh, reached over, and, like Andrew, plucked up a handful of sage, rubbing it between his hands, inhaling the scent.\n\n\"Long way from Kansas to here,\" Hans announced.\n\nAndrew said nothing, knees drawn up under his chin as he looked off to the east. The light was slowly rising, only a matter of minutes now. He heard the clatter of a rifle dropping, a muffled curse, and looked to his left; down in the ravine below a column of troops waited, more felt than seen, the hissed warning of a sergeant barely audible as he tore into the fumble-fingered soldier. At the head of the ravine engineering troops had positioned bridging pontoons and dozens of the flimsy canvas assault rafts. He couldn't see them, but he knew they were there; the men of the 9th Corps had rehearsed this assault a score of times along the Tiber over the last two months.\n\nTo the right he heard the hissing of a steam engine, one of the land ironclads, Timokin's regiment, deployed in the next ravine. He wondered if the sound carried across the river, so still was the air. We should have gone yesterday, he thought. The fog cloaking the river was thicker then. There's still time to call it off, wait for fog, rain \u2026 maybe we should go an hour earlier, in the complete dark.\n\n\"Nervous, son?\"\n\n\"Huh?\" Andrew looked over at his old friend.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nStartled, Andrew said nothing. Hans was always the rock, the pillar; not once had he ever expressed fear when battle was nigh. Andrew remembered Antietam, his first fight, waiting in the predawn darkness of the East Woods. He had been so frightened that after trying to choke down a breakfast of hardtack and coffee, he had crept off to vomit. But until five minutes before the assault went in, Hans had made a great display of sitting with his back to an elm tree, fast asleep. The old sergeant latter confided that it had all been an act, he had been wide-awake, heart racing like a trip-hammer, but figured that such studied indifference was a better tonic to the boys than going around whispering nervous encouragements.\n\n\"You don't think it will work?\" Andrew asked.\n\nHans looked over at him. \"We did plan it together, but a frontal assault across a river, Andrew? Risky business. I fear at best it's an even chance. From what little we've figured of Jurak we know he's damn smart. He must have figured this one out as well, knew we'd finally have to come in frontally.\"\n\n\"And you have another suggestion,\" Andrew asked, trying to mask the note of testiness in his voice.\n\nHans put his hand out, letting it rest on Andrew's shoulder.\n\n\"Responsibility of command, Andrew. At Gettysburg you held when I would have pulled out. It shattered the regiment but saved the old First Corps. You led the assault at Cold Harbor when I would have told Grant to go to hell and ordered the boys to lie down. Maybe you've got more nerve than me.\"\n\nStartled, Andrew said nothing.\n\n\"I'm getting far too old for this.\" Hans sighed, taking off his hat to run his fingers through his sweat-soaked wisps of gray. \"There always seems to be one more campaign, though, always another campaign.\"\n\n\"But there are times we do love it,\" Andrew whispered. \"Not the killing, not the moments like this one with the doubt and fear. But there are moments, the quiet nights, the army encamped around you, the moment of relief when you know you've won, the pride in the eyes of those around you.\"\n\nSurprised Hans looked over at him and nodded. \"If this is the last campaign, what becomes of us then?\"\n\nAndrew chuckled softly. \"I wish.\"\n\n\"Your instinct is telling you don't attack this morning, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then listen to it.\"\n\nAndrew sighed, \"We've been over it before, Hans. We can't flank, we can't break out from the southern pocket, they won't attack. We have to end the stalemate. The president ordered this assault. And remember, we planned this one, and all the time we planned it we figured we could pull it off.\"\n\n\"So why the cold feet at this last minute?\" Hans asked. Andrew looked at his friend.\n\n\"You first. Why you?\"\n\nHans sighed. \"Gut feeling that they're on to us over there. That this is what they want us to do and fully expect us to do.\"\n\nAndrew plucked up another twist of grass, taking pleasure in the scent of sage.\n\n\"There are no alternatives now,\" Andrew said.\n\n\"What Vincent suggested, it is a thought.\"\n\nAndrew shook his head.\n\n\"Maybe six months from now, with four times the amount of equipment to even hope that it'd work. Right now it would be nothing more than a mad suicidal gesture. Vincent's dreaming if he thinks we could deliver the killing blow that way. There simply isn't enough to do it.\"\n\n\"It's because you know I would do it\u2014that I'd have to go. That's what's stopping you from considering it.\" Andrew looked over at his friend in the shadows. \"Hans,\" and he hesitated for a moment, \"if I thought that sacrificing you would end this war, would save your child, my children, I'd have to order it.\"\n\nHans laughed softly.\n\n\"I'm not sure if you're just a damn good liar or you really mean that. Strange though, I do hope you're not lying. We're soldiers, Andrew, we all know what the job means, and I hope that from the beginning I taught you the sacrifice required of command, even when it comes to your closest friend.\"\n\n\"I sacrificed my brother, didn't I?\"\n\nHans said nothing in reply.\n\nAndrew dropped the fistful of grass, reached out, and let his hand rest on Hans's shoulder for a moment, then shyly let it fall away.\n\n\"So why the butterflies in your stomach now?\" Hans asked, shifting the subject.\n\n\"I'm not sure, and that's what troubles me. At Cold Harbor I knew it was suicide but I went in because it was an order. I knew if I refused they'd take the Thirty-Fifth from me and the boys would have to go anyhow. I saw Chamberlain do the same damn thing two weeks later at Petersburg. He knew it was senseless, but he led his brigade in anyhow.\"\n\n\"And he damn near got killed doing it if I remember correct.\"\n\nAndrew nodded. \"It's just that this battle is different. Most all of them were either meeting engagements like Rocky Hill, or we were on the defensive and well dug in, like Hispania or Suzdal. Now they're the ones dug in, and you're right, I have to assume that Jurak has this one figured.\n\n\"It's more than that though. We both know we're all but finished. Its becoming evident that Jurak is outproducing us. You saw those reports Bill Webster sent us from the Treasury and Vincent from the Ordnance Department.\"\n\nHans spat a stream of tobacco juice and grunted.\n\n\"They'd change their song if the Bantag were at the gate.\"\n\nAndrew shook his head.\n\n\"We're running out, Hans. The pace of production, it's exhausted the nation. The same thing we saw with the rebs by the autumn of '64. There are too many supply bottlenecks, too many men in the army, too many people making weapons, not enough making the basics for living, and a millton people from Roum driven off the land. In short, we're collapsing.\"\n\n\"And that's your reason for attacking here and now?\"\n\nAndrew leaned forward, resting his chin on his drawn-up knees.\n\n\"No, Hans. I think I'd have enough sense to stop it if I understood that was the only reason for attacking. But Marcus is right, we have to do something. The people of Roum have to know that the Rus will fight to help them take back their land. So there is the politics. We have to find a way, as well, to end this war before we either collapse or Kal succumbs to the pressure that's growing in the Senate to accept Jurak's offer for a negotiated settlement.\"\n\n\"If Kal accepts that, he deserves to be shot,\" Hans snapped.\n\n\"He's the president,\" Andrew replied, a sharp edge to his voice.\n\n\"And you wrote the bloody Constitution. So change it. I tell you I smell something in this.\"\n\n\"Are you accusing Kal?\"\n\n\"No, damn it, of course not. If anything he's a rotten president because he's too damned honest and simple.\"\n\n\"We used to say that about Lincoln, but under that prairie-lawyer exterior there was a damn shrewd politician.\"\n\nHans nodded, spitting a stream of tobacco juice and wiping the bottom of his chin with the back of his hand.\n\n\"We have to end this war now,\" Andrew announced, shifting the topic away from matters that he felt bordered on treason. Hans was right; he had indeed written the Constitution for the Republic. But once that Constitution had been accepted by the people of Rus and Roum, it had gone out of his grasp, and it now must bind him as it bound any other citizen who swore his allegiance to it, and thereby accepted its protection.\n\nHe stood up. Raising the field glasses that hung from his neck, he turned his attention to the opposite shore. The eastern bank was lower than the western, the terrain flat, not cut by the ravines of the western bank. Jurak should have drawn his line farther back, not here. It was almost as if he chose a weaker position to tempt them in. Andrew could see the outlines of the fortifications lining the opposite bank.\n\nWisps of smoke, morning cook fires, rose straight up in the still air. Again the shiver of a thought. The monthly moon feast had been two days ago, the cries of the victims echoing across the river throughout the night. He wondered if what was left was now roasting on those fires.\n\nOriginally he had planned the attack to go in then, but it was too obvious a night for them to strike, and, besides, the bastards usually stayed awake throughout the feast night and might sense something.\n\nThere's still time to stop, the inner voice whispered. The battlements along the eastern bank were clearly silhouetted. This was the precious moment, the west bank draped in darkness, the east bank highlighted. He heard footsteps behind him \u2026 it was Pat, followed by Marcus.\n\n\"Andrew, it's three-thirty.\"\n\nAndrew looked at Hans, almost wishing he could defer the decision. Hans was staring at him.\n\nAndrew lowered his head, whispering a silent prayer. Finally he raised his gaze again.\n\n\"Do it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Jack Petracci, circling five miles back from the front, took a deep breath, not sure if he was glad that the moment had finally come, or dreaded the fact that the show was really on.\n\n\"There's the signal flare,\" he announced to Theodor, his copilot. \"Make sure the others follow.\"\n\nBanking his aerosteamer over to a due easterly heading, he scanned to port and starboard. The formation appeared to be following. Leaning over, he blew into the speaker tubes.\n\n\"Romulus, Boris, report.\"\n\n\"One airship, turning back,\" Romulus announced, \"think it's number twenty-two. Rest are forming up.\"\n\nBetter than expected, Jack thought; forty heavy aerosteamers and thirty of the new Hornet single-engine escorts, it would be the largest air strike ever launched, the dream of more than five months of planning. Not exactly the way he wanted it done, but it would prove once and for all that the tremendous investment in airpower was worth it.\n\nMore flares were soaring up along the front line, marking the beginning of the assault, slowly rising heavenward in the still morning, catching the scarlet light of dawn. Seconds later sheets of fire erupted, climbing rapidly and filling the sky with curtains of flame and smoke as more than three thousand rockets thundered across the river, smothering the Bantag in an inferno of explosions. Long seconds later the dull concussion washed over him, clearly audible above the howl of his ship's engines and the wind racing through the rigging.\n\nAnother volley rose up, several errant rockets twisting, corkscrewing back toward his formation, which was now less than two miles from the front. The shells detonated in the air, leaving white puffs of smoke drifting.\n\nHe was now over the rear lines of the fight.\n\nLong snakelike columns of troops were below, black against the landscape, waiting to head down into the ravines lacing the riverbank, which were the assault paths to the front. Pontoon crews were already out into the river, floating their barges into place, dropping anchor lines, while hundreds of assault craft, water foaming about them as the men paddled furiously, were already approaching the far shore.\n\nIt looked like the first wave was making it, men swarming out of the boats, struggling up the muddy embankments. Mortar shells were impacting on the river, foaming geysers erupting.\n\n\"Colonel, sir?\" It was Romulus, his top gunner.\n\n\"Go ahead.\"\n\n\"Formation is spreading out as planned, sir.\"\n\n\"Fine, now keep a sharp eye for their ships up there, son.\"\n\nHe caught a glimpse of half a dozen of his airships breaking formation, turning to the northeast, and was startled as four Hornets passed directly overhead, moving fast, forging straight ahead to penetrate deep into the rear, ready to interdict any Bantag airships that dared to venture up.\n\nThey were over the river, thickening clouds of dirty yellow-gray smoke obscuring the view.\n\n\"There's our target!\" Theodor shouted, pointing off to starboard. Jack picked it out, an earthen fort on a low rise that jutted out into the river. It looked just like the sand table model of the front that he and his force had spent days studying and planning over. Smoke was rising up from the position; the rocket barrage had hit it hard, but he could see where dark-clad Bantags were pouring into the position from a trench connecting the battery position to the rear. Two fieldpieces were already at work, spraying the river with bursts of canister.\n\n\"Hang on, boys. Here we go!\" Jack shouted, as he pushed the stick forward, the heavy four-engine craft rapidly picking up speed. Slipping out of his seat, Theodor dropped down below Jack's legs, fumbling to open the steam cock to the forward Gatling gun.\n\nA dark shadow slipped overhead, and, cursing, Jack jammed the throttles to his four engines back as he stared up at the underbelly of an aerosteamer slipping across the top of his ship, the bottom gunner and bomb dropper gazing down at him in wide-eyed fear. Jack pushed the nose down, praying his tail wouldn't slam into the ship above. Romulus, in the top gunner position, cursed wildly in Latin.\n\nFor an instant he forgot the fight below until a rifle ball slammed up between his legs in a shower of splinters. Looking down, he saw the ground racing up and pulled back hard on the stick. The aerosteamer nosed up, swinging in almost directly astern the ship that had almost collided with him. The Bantag trenches raced by, several hundred feet below, and Theodor opened up, .58 caliber Gatling bullets stitching the earthworks.\n\nHe felt his ship surge up and at almost the same instant Boris, his bomb dropper in the cabin slung below, cried that their load had been dropped. Ten canisters, each weighing a hundred pounds, tumbled into the fort. Jack violently swung his craft over into a sharp banking turn. He caught a glimpse of his bomb load slamming in; the first two tins burst open but the percussion fuses which studded them failed to ignite. The third one, however, blew, sparking the load of benzene to life. The fort disappeared in an incandescent fireball as nearly two hundred gallons of benzene exploded, the concussion rocking his ship.\n\nBright orange-red flares of fire ignited along the entire front as one after another the aerosteamers unleashed their new weapon. He caught a brief glimpse of one ship, folding in on itself. Too low, damn it, you bloody fools! he silently cried as the ship's hydrogen air bags, ignited by the burst of flame from below, flared with a pale blue flame, the wings folding in, flaring as well, the wreck spiraling down and disappearing into the inferno.\n\nThe heavy airships turned, racing back to the west, heading for the airfields twenty miles behind the front to reload and rearm. Jack swept low over the river, passing over the second wave of assault boats and pulled back hard, going into a spiraling climb, turning to head back over the front for a closer look at the action.\n\nHe watched as the squadrons of Hornets swept in, dodging around the fires, raking the enemy positions with their Gatling guns. On the river he could see several land ironclads, loaded onto rafts pushing off into the river, dozens of men slowly poling the ungainly cargos across, geysers of water erupting around them. Blue-clad bodies bobbed in the swirling confusion.\n\nOn the eastern shore, the lead regiments of the 9th Corps were up into the wire entanglements, cutting their way through. He caught a glimpse of a regimental standard going up the embankment of the fort he had just bombed. Other flags were going forward, men spreading out around the fires ignited by his aerosteamers. Damn it, it looked as if they were actually making it!\n\nA Hornet passing below him suddenly went into a tight spiraling climb, seemed to hang motionless, then started a slow sickening backwards slide, crashing tail first into the ground next to an ironclad, rupturing into a fireball as its gasbag ignited.\n\nAnother rifle ball cracked through the cabin, showering Theodor in splinters.\n\n\"Damn it, Jack, if you're going to float about up here, at least go higher.\"\n\nEmbarrassed, he realized his copilot was right. He had allowed the spectacle below to capture his attention. Pulling over into a tight corkscrew turn, he started upward, looking down at the ironclad as it churned past the flaming Hornet. The top of the machine's turret had a white cross painted on, signifying that it was a regimental commander's machine, most likely Timokin's. At least the kid was safe for the moment, he thought grimly, turning back to survey the layers of defense still to be penetrated. They had breached the first line, but there were still three more lines to go before they would be across the rail line to the rear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "\"Put that next shot through the embrasure damn it!\" Brigadier General Gregory Timokin, commander of the First Brigade of Land Ironclads roared, looking down from his perch in the top turret to his gunnery crew below.\n\nWithout waiting for a response he turned his attention back forward, then slowly rotated his turret aft, sweeping the shoreline with his gaze. The first wave of assault boats was ashore, at least what was left of them, men hunkered down low on the riverbank, most of them still half in the water, hugging the protection of the low rise. He could see columns of fire rising up from Jack's firebomb strike, but directly in front the enemy were still holding. Half a dozen ironclads to his right were up over the bank, crushing down the wire entanglements, the lead ironclad already into the first line of bunkers and entrenchments, its Gatling gun shredding the Bantags who panicked and climbed into the open to run. Back across the river everything seemed an insane confusion. Dozens of broken canvas boats littered the muddy waters that were still churning up from mortar rounds and shells detonating. Men floundered about in the chest-deep water, some struggling forward, others flaying about in panic, trying to head back to the west shore, while others bobbed facedown, no longer moving.\n\nIt looked like a disaster but experience told him that at least the first stage of the assault, the gaining of a foothold on the eastern shore, was apparently succeeding. When first approached by Pat O'Donald with the proposal that he and his ironclads would attempt to ford the river in a frontal assault he had thought the scheme insane.\n\n\"Damn it all, even if we don't sink, we'll get hammered by their artillery before we're halfway across,\" he had argued. \"Make the shore, and their rocket crews will slaughter us on the muddy banks as we wallow about.\"\n\nWell, he had made it across. As for incoming fire, precious little had hit yet, the human's barrage of weaponry all but incapacitating or panicking the Bantag forward defense.\n\nAnother wave of boats came out of the swirling smoke, men paddling hard. He turned his turret forward again as the crew below shouted with triumph, their next round having torn straight into the Bantag bunker.\n\n\"Take us forward,\" Gregory shouted. \"Everyone look sharp, gunner load with canister.\"\n\nHe slowly pivoted his turret back and forth, scanning the ground ahead as they inched up over the river embankment. Crushing down the wire, he caught glimpses of blue-clad infantry surging forward to either side of his machine, leaping into the trenches. Cresting up over the top of a bunker, he saw a mob of Bantag running along a communications trench, heading back toward the second line. A well-placed burst from his Gatling dropped half of them before the survivors disappeared around a cutback in the trench.\n\nThe ground ahead was open and flat, the second enemy line now clearly visible as a rough slash in the ground a quarter mile ahead. The plan called for the ironclads to lead a direct assault and overrun the position, supported by Hornets and ground troops armed with rocket launchers. By the time they approached the strongest defenses, the third line a. mile farther back, Jack's airships were to have landed, rearmed, and returned to plaster a mile-long stretch of trenches with over four thousand gallons of flaming benzene. But at this moment the key to the plan was to keep moving, to keep the Bantag off-balance and running until their supply depots to the rear were overrun and destroyed.\n\nFlashes of light were igniting from the second trench line, and bullets and mortar fragments started to ping against the armor. Cracking open the top hatch, he stuck his flare pistol out and fired, sending up the green signal indicating he was across the Bantag riverfront position. A second, then a third ironclad crept into view on his right, the turret of one turning, the machine's commander sticking a hand out of the firing slit to wave.\n\nTimokin grinned. Mad fool, I'll put you on report for that once we get this over with, he thought, trying to remember the name of the young lieutenant aboard the St. Galvino. The lead company started to form around him, deploying out to either side. A rocket slashed past his turret, startling him. He caught a glimpse of a Bantag launcher team falling back into a trench, torn apart by the fire of the ironclad to his left.\n\nCautiously he reopened the hatch and stuck his head out for a quick look around. Nearly a dozen machines were up, hundreds of infantry deployed into the trenches behind him. There was no telling what the hell was going on to either flank, but straight ahead the way looked clear. He saw a regimental standard, a brigadier's guidon beside it. Catching the general's eye, he motioned forward; the brigadier waved in agreement. Back on the shoreline he saw more waves of the flimsy canvas boats coming in, some of them bearing mortar and rocket-launching crews. A Hornet flashed overhead, Gatling gun roaring, tracers tearing into the position forward. The sun broke the horizon straight ahead, silhouetting the enemy line.\n\nJuly Fourth, he thought. The Yankees put great store in that day; Independence Day they called it. It was also the anniversary of the Battle of Hispania. He had been too young to fight in that one. Will this day be as glorious? he wondered. He felt a moment's hesitation. Somehow the shoreline felt secure, a haven to pull back to, where you couldn't be flanked, but he knew the thought was senseless. The whole plan, a plan which he had helped to design, was predicated on speed. Cut through the lines of defense, get into the open country, and slash down to their major rail depot and destroy it. Victory was five miles ahead, and the longer he waited, the more remote the chance of grasping it.\n\nReloading his flare pistol, he fired it again, rapidly reloading and firing off yet another shell, the signal that he was moving on the second line.\n\nHe slipped back down into his turret, slamming the hatch shut.\n\n\"Engineer, full power; driver, straight ahead!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\"I'm going over,\" Pat announced.\n\nAndrew stood silent for a moment, leaning over, eye glued to the tripod-mounted telescope staring intently toward the ruins to Capua on the east bank and several miles downstream.\n\n\"The message dropped from Petracci was on the mark,\" Andrew announced. \"There're definitely plumes of smoke over there.\"\n\n\"Well, we did expect some sort of countermove,\" Pat replied. \"It's less than two dozen ironclads. Timokin can handle that.\"\n\nAndrew stood back up, stretching, trying to ignore the occasional shell that hummed overhead. In the two hours since the beginning of the attack they had forced a lodgment nearly two miles across and in some sectors were already through the third line. Considering the nature of the assault, casualties had been light, so far twenty-five hundred. Marcus had already gone forward, insisting over Andrew's objections that he should be up forward with his boys from 9th Corps.\n\nThe first of the pontoon bridges was nearly completed, and he watched for a moment as his engineer troops, laboring like a swarm of ants, anchored the last boat in place, while half a regiment of men armed with picks and shovels worked to cut down the low embankment on the east side and fill in the labyrinth of trenches just beyond. A column of infantry, rifles and cartridge boxes held high overhead, slowly wended their way across the river at a ford, a long serpentine column of blue standing out boldly against the muddy brown river.\n\nThe surviving canvas boats were now being used to ferry boxes of ammunition, mortar and rocket-launching crews, medical supplies, and even barrels of fresh water since the day promised to be hot and with all the dead and refuse littering the river Emil had issued the strictest of orders against using it. Andrew looked over his shoulder to where a casualty-clearing station was already at work. Those who could survive the trip were loaded into ambulances for the hospital train that would have them back to Roum before noon.\n\nCasualties had been heavy in the first two waves, nearly fifty percent of the 1st Brigade, 1st Division, 9th Corps had gone down. He kept trying to console himself that the losses had just about been what was expected, but it was small solace for the nearly twenty-five hundred dead and wounded. He thought of the review held just a week ago, remembering faces, wondering which of them had been part of the sacrificial offering.\n\nAndrew looked over at Pat. \"I'm going with you. Hans, you stay here at headquarters.\"\n\n\"Now, Andrew, we agreed on this,\" Pat protested.\n\nAndrew nodded, forcing a smile. It was more than just being at the front, getting close to get a feel for what was going on, and to inspire the troops. Ever since his wounding, only a few miles from this place, he had not been under heavy fire. Inwardly he was terrified; it was hard not to jump every time a mortar shell slipped overhead or a bullet snapped past, and this was the rear line. He had to see for himself if he could take it.\n\nHe looked over at Hans. His friend was staring at him appraisingly. Pat had turned as well, arguing his point to Hans, trying to get the old sergeant major to agree that Andrew had to stay back from the fighting. Andrew knew that Hans understood the real reason he had to cross over that river. Hans wordlessly nodded an agreement.\n\n\"Well damn all,\" Pat growled. \"Don't blame me if you get your fool head blown off.\"\n\n\"What about you then?\" Andrew asked. \"What about your fool head?\"\n\n\"Bullet hasn't been cast yet,\" Pat replied with a twinkle in his eyes, backing down front the argument.\n\nLeaving the top of the bunker, Andrew motioned to his orderly, who was holding the bridle of his favorite old mount, Mercury. He rubbed the horse's nose, then shook his head. No, it would be hot up there, and Mercury was getting on in years. Besides, after all the campaigns together he wanted him to survive this one.\n\n\"Bring up another mount,\" Andrew said.\n\n\"Can't risk your old horse but it's all right to risk you, is that it?\" Pat asked peevishly.\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\nAndrew swung up awkwardly into the saddle of a massive mare, a mount bred from the horses captured in the Tugar Wars. It was nearly the size of a Clydesdale, typical of nearly all the mounts in this army\u2014and damned uncomfortable, he thought as he picked up the reins and nudged the horse down toward the nearest ravine.\n\nReaching the edge of the shallow gorge, he hesitated for a second. Even though the engineering troops had cut a road into the side of it, it was still a steep descent. Then he urged the horse forward, falling in with a column of infantry, noticing by the red Maltese Cross on their slouch caps that they were men of the 1st Division, 5th Corps.\n\n\"Hot up there, sir?\" one of the sergeants asked, looking up nervously at Andrew.\n\n\"We got a firm foothold, Sergeant. Ninth Corps is driving them.\"\n\n\"Well that's a switch,\" came a comment from the ranks.\n\nAndrew continued forward, ignoring the insult, even though Pat turned, ready to offer a good chewing out. There was still some bad blood between the Rus and the Roum Corps, especially toward the 9th and 11th, which had broken during the siege. It was part of his reasoning for giving the assault job to the 9th, a chance to clear their reputation and break the jinx.\n\nStrange, he thought; back with the old Army of the Potomac the 9th had been jinxed there as well, damn good fighting men but something always seemed to go wrong for them.\n\nReaching the bottom of the ravine he followed the contours of the twisting washout. Wreckage littered the rocky sides, broken equipment, empty ammunition boxes, a scattering of dead who had been caught by the Bantag counterbarrage. The last turn in the ravine revealed the river straight ahead.\n\nIt was said that whether you were winning or losing, the rear area of a battle always looked like a disaster, and he hesitated for a moment, steeling himself while taking it all in.\n\nShattered canvas boats littered the shoreline, dozens of bodies, and parts of bodies lay along the beach or floated in the muddy water, washed back up to shore by the slow-moving current. Fragments of bodies, blackened by fire, were plastered against the side of a ravine, most likely what was left from a caisson igniting. The air was thick with the stench of muddy water, powder smoke, and that unforgettable clinging smell of death, a mixture of excrement, vomit, and raw open flesh. In another few hours the cloying stench of decay would be added until finally one would feel as if he could actually see the hazy green smell of death.\n\nHe straightened in the saddle, moving his mount out of the way as the infantry column, without hesitating, splashed into the river by columns of fours, holding rifles and ammunition pouches, haversacks filled with rations over their heads. A line of cavalry were deployed downstream, ready to fish out any man who might lose his footing and go under.\n\nAndrew rode along the edge of the water, heading up to the next ravine, where the pontoon bridge was going in. A mortar shell whistled overhead, impacting against the top of the cliffs that rose up on his left, sending down a shower of rock fragments and dirt. He tried not to flinch, and then looked over sheepishly at Pat.\n\n\"You'll get the nerve back,\" Pat said softly, \"I was the same way after I took that ball in the stomach.\"\n\nAndrew nodded, saying nothing. Straight ahead, the bridge was rapidly taking shape. The last boat had already been anchored, and stringers between the boats were nearly halfway across the river, the crews working feverishly to anchor the heavy timbers to the reinforced gunwales of the pontoon boats. Dozens of men, most of them stripped to the waist, were hauling up the four-by-ten planks, which were laid across the stringers and serve as the roadbed. Once completed, the heavy artillery, a second regiment of ironclads, and hundreds of tons of supplies could be rushed forward.\n\nTurning his mount, Andrew splashed into the river, the water surprisingly cool as it spilled into his boots. The mare surged forward, stepping nervously for footing as they reached the middle of the river, Pat at his side.\n\nFifty yards downstream an artillery shell slapped into the water, raising a geyser. He studiously ignored it, keeping his eyes on the far shore. His mount shied nervously, nearly throwing him as it quickly sidestepped. A body, which the horse had trod on, tumbled up out of the murky water, then sank, dragged back down by the weight of the pack harness that had three close-support rockets strapped to it.\n\nHe said nothing, wondering about the human packhorse who had drowned thus. He tried to make a mental note, to balm his soul, that if there was another river assault, the first waves were to go in with rifles and personal ammunition only. But then how many die because of no close-in rocket support \u2026 again the equations of death.\n\nThey finally gained the shore. The litter there was far worse than the west bank. Dozens of waterlogged assault craft, which had barely made it across, lay abandoned, many of them bloodstained, bodies still inside. Scores of dead littered the embankment, dead twisted into every impossible angle the living could never assume, bodies torn by rifle shot, shells, fire, tangled in with the Bantag who had defended this position. Casualty-clearing stations, marked with green banners, were packed, the seriously injured men being sorted out for the trip back across the river by boat, the less seriously injured and those who were doomed being detailed off to wait until the pontoon bridge was finished.\n\nAs he rode up over the embankment the roar of battle seemed to double. Straight ahead was obscured in yellow-gray clouds of powder smoke and dust, the front line dully illuminated by flashes of gunfire and the sudden flare of another load of benzene dropped by an Eagle.\n\nGhastly weapon, he thought as he rode up over the forward line of Bantag trenches and saw where such a strike had incinerated dozens, their giant bodies curled into fetal balls, a few outstretched, blackened clawed hands raised to the heavens in a final gesture of agony. The stench was horrific, and he struggled not to gag.\n\n\"Bloody bastards, good to see 'em like this,\" Pat snapped. Andrew looked over at his old friend and said nothing. No, the hatred was far too deep to express pity, to wonder if there was any sense of humanity in these creatures. Interesting that he had chosen that word in his thoughts \u2026 humanity. Does it mean I consider them to be human? Strange, old Muzta of the Tugars, I had shown him pity, spared his son, and he in turn spared Hawthorne and Kathleen, even went over to our side in the Battle of Hispania and turned the tide of battle. He's most likely a thousand miles east of here by now, but if I saw him, I would offer him a drink from my canteen. Yet still I hate his kind in general.\n\nDon't think about this now, he thought. There's a war to be fought.\n\nHe turned away from the trench, dropped the reins of his mount, and awkwardly scanned the action with his field glasses. The ground was too bloody flat, hard to get above the fight and get a feel for it. It seemed to be spread out in a vast arc sweeping a mile or more to the north, then several miles in from the river, and then arcing back around into the ruins of Capua.\n\nSpent rounds slapped past him, kicking up plumes of dirt like the first heavy drops of rain from a summer storm. From out of the smoke ahead two aerosteamers appeared, both of them Eagles, one with two engines shut down, broken fabric and spars trailing from its starboard wing. The second Eagle was above and behind it, protecting it; as they reached the river the second steamer turned, started back to the front, then turned yet again and began to circle above Andrew, a blue-and-gold streamer fluttering from its tail marking it as Petracci's command ship.\n\nA message fluttered down, marked by a long red strip of cloth. An errant breeze had picked up, and the streamer fluttered down into the edge of the river behind them. One of Andrew's staff who had been trailing behind him urged his mount back to retrieve it from a soldier who had already picked it up.\n\nThe orderly who had retrieved the message reined in, holding the leather cylinder, the muddy ribbon dragging on the ground. Andrew motioned for him to unstrap it and open it up, a task impossible for him to do with but one hand.\n\nThe orderly popped the lid, unfolded the sheet of paper, and handed it over. Andrew's glasses were splattered with water and mud, and it was difficult to focus as he carefully read the note, written in English in Jack's clumsy printed hand.\n\nCount twenty plus ironclads coming up from Capua. Three to four divisions, half mounted, deploying out from reserve depot on rail line. Watch your left, numerous plumes of smoke at point F=7. Going back for closer look\u2026 . J.P.\n\nAndrew handed the message over to Pat while calling for another orderly to unroll a map. The young Rus lieutenant pulled the map out and held it open for Andrew.\n\nHe cross-referenced the coordinates. F-7, a ruined plantation, a square-shaped forest at the north end, a woodlot of maybe forty to fifty acres. The heavy belt of forest marking the edge of the open steppes several miles beyond. Could they? His aerosteamers had carefully swept the front line for weeks, looking for buildups, concealed positions, wheel marks.\n\nWell there were bound to be surprises, but Jack had a good nose for spotting trouble. Is the plan too obvious, he wondered. Too obvious that we break through here, then pivot in a right hook, sweeping down behind Capua and their rail line. Might the counterpunch be concealed to the north of us?\n\nEven as he wondered, the sound of battle started to pick up from the north, and, reining his mount around, Andrew rode toward the roar of the guns." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Bent over the map table Jurak watched as one of the Chin scribes leaned forward, having taken the message from a telegrapher who was also a Chin and traced a blue line onto the map, marking where the Yankees had broken through his third line and were now driving straight toward this position.\n\nStepping out of the camouflaged bunker, which was concealed in a grove of peach trees and covered with netting, he turned and looked to the northwest. Mounted riders were coming back, many of them wounded. Straight ahead he could hear the staccato bursts of Gatling-gun fire and the whistle of a steam engine. The enemy column of steam ironclads was approaching.\n\nHow damn primitive, he thought. Most likely can't make three leagues in an hour. Hell, on the old world there'd be hundreds of them, thousands, breaking through at ten, twenty leagues to the hour, jets by the hundreds blasting the way clear.\n\nYet this is my war now. Ha'ark never understood the nuances of tactics, how to adapt to what was here, how to lay the trap, and then have the patience to let it spring shut. It was always the attack, the offensive. He was right in that these primitives have no concept of defensive warfare but let them see victory today and it will all change.\n\nHe raised his field glasses, scanning the line, catching glimpses of dark black masses, the Yankee ironclads, advancing slowly, methodically, brief glimpses of blue, the infantry deployed behind them.\n\nA stream of tracers snapped overhead, one of the ironclads firing at long range. He ignored it, looking across the grove and back toward the rail line behind him. A single train was on the track, one of the heavily armored units. On the siding were dozens of cars, some of them burning from the air attacks, but most still intact, their deadly cargo concealed within. The trenches weaving through the grove, and around the rail track were a masterpiece of concealment, the raw earth carted off at night, the deep bunkers cunningly placed, everything covered with camouflage netting, something that his warriors had first thought was some sort of bizarre joke.\n\nHe could clearly see them now, range less than a league away, the thin line of troops he had deployed were just enough to let the enemy think that there was resistance and that it was now breaking up. \"The best time to strike is when your opponent is flush with victory for then the collapse of his morale shall be complete. \" Master Gavagar made that pronouncement three thousand years ago, Jurak thought. Ha'ark had never had the subtlety to think of that, to think of the best way to break their will \u2026 now we shall see." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\"Jack, to the north, where we were looking earlier.\"\n\nPetracci turned his attention to port, to where Theodor was pointing. The same spot as before, F-7, the plantation near the northern rim of forest. Vertical plumes of smoke, a few before, but now dozens of them. The smudges of smoke were puffing \u2026 damn, machines.\n\n\"Take the controls,\" Jack shouted. Letting go of the stick he raised his field glasses, braced them, finding it hard to focus in as the machine surged up on an early-morning thermal, then leveled back out. He caught it for a second, lost it, then caught it again\u2026.\n\n\"Damnation, ironclads, fifty \u2026 a hundred of them!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "General Gregory Timokin never even saw the shot that took him out of the fight. One second he had been watching the retreat of the Bantag infantry and mounted units, eager finally to get in range of the rail line, the next instant an explosion of steam blew up into his turret. He could hear the screams of his crew down below, men being scalded alive from the burst boiler.\n\nClawing at the turret hatch, he pulled himself up and out, gasping for breath. Just as he rolled clear of the turret and hit the ground his ironclad blowtorched as nearly a hundred gallons of kerosene poured from the ruptured fuel tanks into the boiler and ignited. Horrified, he could hear the dying screams of his men inside, one of them fumbling at the latch on the starboard entry port.\n\nHe stood up, staggering to the machine. Grabbed the handle to try to turn it, screaming with pain\u2014it was already scalding hot. He felt someone jiggling the handle spasmodically, but the door wouldn't give. Damn, they were turning the latch but hadn't unbolted the locks inside.\n\n\"Open the locks, God damn it, open the locks!\" he screamed.\n\nHe felt as if he was trapped in a cursed nightmare, the door wouldn't open, the screaming inside wouldn't stop \u2026 and he was terrified of what he would see if the door did open.\n\nHe heard the screams inside and then he was down, someone pushing him to the ground.\n\n\"Stay down, you damn fool!\"\n\nBullets snapped past, machine-gun fire, slower than a Gatling but a machine gun nevertheless, the bullets tattooing against the side of his ironclad where he had been standing only seconds before.\n\nA rocket snapped overhead. Turning, he saw it slam into another ironclad, the St. Yuri, which had been on his right flank. The round struck a glancing blow and detonated, scoring the armor.\n\n\"My men!\" Gregory screamed. \"I've got to get 'em out!\"\n\n\"They're dead already.\" Then he was being dragged back, another soldier coming up out of a shallow ditch behind the burning machine to help pull him in.\n\nAs the three rolled into the ditch the ammunition in the St. Malady burned off, ten-pound shells bursting, the top turret tearing loose, tumbling skyward and then crashing down, a pile of twisted wreckage. Tracer rounds soared upward, oily black smoke blowing out from the turret mount as if the ironclad had been turned into a blast furnace.\n\nNumbed, he stared at his beloved machine, still not believing that his comrades inside were dead.\n\n\"What hit us?\" he asked vacantly.\n\nEven as he asked the question he saw a flash of light straight ahead, the muzzle blast of a gun, and a split second later the St. Yuri went up, the turret blowing clear off from the shot.\n\nStunned, ignoring the danger, he stood up. Only seconds before he had been leading nearly forty ironclads, advancing in line abreast, supporting a full division of infantry. Half of them were now burning. Impossible; the ground ahead, all the way to the railroad track, was open, the enemy on the run. He saw more flashes, as if the guns were firing from out of the ground \u2026 a concealed line, camouflaged, invisible from the ground and from the air. God damn, how did they do this? How did they learn it?\n\n\"Sir, if you want to get killed, damn it, do it someplace else. I'm not going to risk my ass again to save you.\"\n\nHe turned and saw a colonel by his side, crouching low. At nearly the same instant something plucked at his shoulder, his epaulette snapping off, tearing his uniform. He squatted back down and stared at the officer, saying nothing.\n\nThe colonel uncorked his canteen and offered it over. Gregory took a drink, grimacing. It was vodka laced with just a hint of muddy water.\n\n\"Your hands; you better get back to the aid station; I'll send a man with you.\"\n\nHe saw that his hands were already puffy, bright pink. The flesh of his right hand was blistering, and the sight of it made him realize just how damn much it hurt. Looking down he noticed that his trousers were scorched black, the leather cf his boots burned. Not as much pain there at least. \"In a minute,\" he gasped, handing the canteen back. \"Out of nowhere,\" the colonel announced, obviously shaken. \"Thought we had a clear run, then the ground ahead just exploded.\"\n\nHe paused, looking back over the edge of the ditch. Timokin followed his gaze and saw dozens of men down on the ground, in a line so neat it was as if they had been ordered to drop together. Some of them were still alive, trying to crawl back, puffs of dirt kicking up around them, and above the roar of battle he could hear the barking laughter of the Bantags who were picking them off. A desire to do something, anything, urged him to climb out and try to help, but instinct told him it was now a deadly killing ground, and he was amazed that someone would be so insane as to pull him away from the St. Malady, which was a dozen yards forward and still burning.\n\n\"It just exploded with fire,\" the colonel continued. \"It looked like your ironclad rolled over some sort of infernal machine, the back end just lifted right up from the blast. Then you got hit from the front a second later.\"\n\nThe dirt on the lip of the ditch sprayed up as machine-gun fire swept them. Seconds later the mortar rounds started, whistling in, bracketing the depression that was rapidly filling with men who were crawling back from the inferno ahead. He caught a glimpse of a lone ironclad driving back in reverse, a rocket flaring up from ahead, streaking past the machine's turret.\n\nPuffs of smoke were igniting along the Bantag train track which was so tantalizingly close, less than a quarter mile ahead. Motioning for the colonel's field glasses, Gregory took them, grimacing with pain as he cupped them in his hands and clumsily focused them on the rail line. Rhythmic lights were snapping from the armored cars, the rate of fire was slow, maybe a hundred rounds a minute, but it was a machine gun, and he cursed silently.\n\nWhat was far more startling, though, was the sight of ironclads emerging, as if rising up from out of the ground on the far side of the track and from a peach-orchard-covered knoll. The bastards had dug them in, the saints only knew how long ago, and covered them over and waited. Now they were stirring to life, rising up out of concealment. They looked heavier, a newer model, with turrets just like his own machine. Along the rail track, farther back, he could see several dozen small specks, apparently hovering in the air, but gradually taking form. Bantag airships, coming in to support. Several Hornets harried the edge of the formation; a Bantag machine went down in flames, but a Hornet plunged to earth as well.\n\n\"My God,\" he whispered. \"We're losing.\"\n\n\"Andrew, I think we better get the hell out of here!\" Pat roared, leaning over to grab the reins of Andrew's horse.\n\nAndrew shook his head, motioning for Pat to let go, but his friend refused.\n\nSitting upright in the saddle, Andrew raised his field glasses, fixing his attention to the north. Less than a quarter mile away he could see them coming, a wall of Bantag ironclads, forty or more advancing nearly side to side.\n\nJack, who only minutes before had dropped a message warning of the breakthrough was circling above them, oblivious of the ground fire, all three of his gunners firing their Gatlings.\n\nSurviving ironclads that had been supporting the left flank of 9th Corps were backing up, engaging the enemy machines, but it was apparent the armor on the Bantag machines had been reinforced, bolts that had once so easily sliced through at two hundred yards were now careening off the enemy machines in a shower of sparks.\n\nFour ironclads stopped after backing into a shallow depression, and Andrew watched intently as they waited for the Bantag to close in. Knots of infantry fell in around the ironclad behemoths, and Andrew nudged his mount, wanting to ride up to join them.\n\n\"Are you crazy!\" Pat roared. \"A mounted man won't last three seconds up there.\"\n\n\"Well, damn it. I've got to do something!\" Andrew shouted.\n\nPat looked over at the half dozen staff and couriers who still trailed them. Most of them were wide-eyed with fright, ' but they knew what to do, moving up to surround Andrew and shield him.\n\n\"Back away, damn you!\" Andrew shouted, but they ignored his protests.\n\nThe battle erupted straight ahead as the four ironclads opened up at less than a hundred yards. Two of the enemy machines exploded. A hail of fire slashed back. Deployed as they were directly behind the action, solid shot bolts, machine-gun fire, and shell fragments screamed past Andrew and his companions. Pat visibly flinched as a solid bolt sucked the air between them, the round screaming past like a demented banshee.\n\nThe turret was torn off one of the ironclads, steam and flame blew out the back of another. The two survivors fired back, destroying two more of the enemy machines. The Bantag continued to press in, yet another machine exploding as a rocket crew fired into its flank at point-blank range. And then they were through the line, followed by hundreds of Bantag infantry swarming forward. Several of the enemy machines were towing wagons, which were now unhitched. Mortars were already set up inside the wagons and within seconds their crews were sending dozens of shells aloft.\n\n\"We've got to get back!\" Pat shouted, and he pointed to the left.\n\nDown by the riverbank a solid wall of Bantag infantry were racing forward at the double, oblivious of losses; the thin line of blue trying to contain them cracking apart.\n\n\"They must have had five umens or more concealed on our flank,\" Pat shouted. \"They're going to cut the pontoons and our crossing point. Andrew, you're getting out of here now.\"\n\nAndrew wanted to knock Pat's hand away, as his friend again grasped the reins of his horse, turned, and broke into a canter, dragging Andrew along.\n\n\"Give me the reins, damn it,\" Andrew shouted.\n\nPat looked back at him.\n\n\"I'm not doing anything stupid.\"\n\nPat nodded and finally let go.\n\nAndrew gathered up the reins and followed as Pat weaved his way down a farm lane, that in a different age had connected a villa to the road running parallel to the river. As they reached the river road Andrew was stunned by the chaos.\n\nSome officers still had control of their units, ordering men to dig in. A battery of ten-pounders was pushing its way up through the ever-increasing mob of refugees heading to the rear. Pat broke away, rode over, and ordered them to unlimber alongside the ruins of a small temple, the toppled-over columns of limestone offering some protection.\n\nAndrew turned to watch, surveying the ground, wondering if this could be a breakwater to stop the unrelenting assault. A regiment, still in semblance of order and falling back down the road, slowed as Pat galloped up to them, ordering the men to fall in on the flanks of the guns.\n\nThe enemy ironclad assault was clearly visible, less than a quarter mile away, coming across the open plain, hundreds of men running in front of it, trying to escape.\n\nTerrified soldiers crashed through the line Pat was trying to form up. With drawn sword Pat rode back and forth, screaming for the men to rally. Some slowed, falling in; others dodged around and kept on going, crying that it was impossible.\n\nThe advancing line of Bantag ironclads slowed and ground to a halt two hundred yards away.\n\n\"God damn them,\" Pat cried. \"They know the range we can kill them at and are sitting just beyond it!\"\n\nAndrew nodded, saying nothing.\n\nA ragged volley erupted from the line of enemy machines, and a gale of canister swept the position. Gunners dropped at their pieces, two of Andrew's staff collapsed, one of them shrieking in agony, clutching a shattered arm.\n\nThe gunners opened up, six pieces recoiling back with sharp cracks, but the bolts simply ricocheted off the front armor of the enemy machines.\n\nThe one-sided duel lasted for several minutes, the slowfiring machine guns of the enemy ironclads stitching back and forth along the line.\n\nConceding that a suicidal gesture was meaningless, Andrew urged his mount behind the wall of the temple, Pat and the surviving staff joining him.\n\nMortar rounds began to rain down, bracketing the position, and Andrew struggled to control his own fear as the deadly messengers whispered overhead and detonated with loud cracks.\n\n\"Why don't they charge, damn it?\" one of the staff cried. \"They don't have to,\" Pat snarled. \"Not until they're damn good and ready.\"\n\nA ragged cheer erupted from the battery, and, looking up over the wall, Andrew saw a lone enemy machine exploding, most likely a lucky shot through an open gun port. Three of the six guns of his battery were out of action, and more than half the crew was down.\n\nAndrew was startled as a flyer, skimming overhead, engines roaring, blocked out the sun for an instant.\n\nA message streamer dropped less than a dozen feet away. He looked up, saw smoke pouring from one of the Eagle's engines\u2014another engine had been shut down.\n\nAn orderly handed the message up.\n\nSir, get the hell out! Entire front collapsing. Ten umens and hundred ironclads attacking you. South flank gone, Bantag about to take pontoon bridge. Must pull out. My ship is finished\u2026 . Jack.\n\n\"Here they come!\"\n\nAndrew nudged his mount around and came out from behind the temple. The enemy ironclads were advancing - again. Their tactics were changing; they smelled victory. Bantag infantry, thousands of them, were swarming forward, all of them heavily armed with rifles, rocket launchers, mortars. Ignoring the losses, they broke into a swarming charge. The regiment Pat had deployed fired a single ragged volley, then simply melted away, officers shouting for the men to fall back. There was no semblance of order to the pullout; men simply turned and started to run.\n\nAndrew rode up to the battery commander, who had miraculously survived the enemy barrage.\n\n\"Major, abandon your guns, get your men the hell out of here!\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"You heard me, son. Get your wounded on the limber wagons and save yourself. Now move!\"\n\nThe gunners, hearing Andrew's command, needed no persuasion. Turning, they started to run, though discipline held long enough for them to help the wounded onto the limber wagons. Drivers lashed their teams, swinging the wagons out onto the road.\n\nA blast of canister dropped the entire lead team of six horses into a tangled heap, blocking the road. Chaos erupted as the other limber teams tried to maneuver around the pileup.\n\nPat, hat gone, saber dropped, was waving a pistol, standing in his stirrups, bawling orders. Andrew looked back, saw Bantag infantry less than a dozen yards away, piling up over the guns, catching those who had not moved quickly enough, bayoneting the wounded on the ground.\n\nAndrew rode up to Pat.\n\n\"Come on!\"\n\n\"The guns. God damn them, I've never lost a gun!\"\n\n\"Come on!\"\n\nPat suddenly turned, lowering his pistol, apparently aiming it right at Andrew. He fired, dropping a Bantag who was between them, clubbed rifle poised to knock Andrew from the saddle.\n\nPat spurred his mount forward, Andrew following, his mount staggering, nearly falling, as it was shot in the haunch. It regained its footing and in a panic broke into a lopsided gallop.\n\nAndrew looked back, horrified. The Bantag were into the traffic jam of limber wagons, tearing the wounded down off of the caissons, bayoneting drivers. He saw a man being flung into the air, shrieking, falling back down on upturned bayonets. The Bantags seemed to have reverted, caught up in the blood frenzy, some of them literally tearing men apart with their bare hands.\n\nBehind the insane swarm the ironclads pressed in, not hesitating, one of them rising up and over a twisted tangle of men and horses, crushing them under.\n\nAhead the road was packed with thousands heading to the rear. And there was nothing for Andrew to now do but ride with them into defeat.\n\nGregory could sense the rising panic in the troops packed in around him. Minutes before the men had advanced jauntily, feeling the worst of the assault was over, the trench lines cleared, and they were into the open ground beyond. ' He was beginning to feel the panic in his own heart as well, the easterly breeze blowing back into his face the stench of his machine burning, a mixture of kerosene, hot iron, and human flesh.\n\nHe started to shake. He had seen it often in others, after getting hit, no pain at first, then the shaking, the feeling that all the blood had drained out of you. Suddenly, with no warning, he leaned over and vomited, \"Sergeant, get the general the hell out of here.\"\n\nHe didn't want to accept the offer of help but was grateful when he felt strong hands grabbing him by the shoulder.\n\n\"This way, sir.\"\n\nHe looked into the eyes of the infantryman. About his own age, early twenties, but harder, muscles like whipcords, a scar creasing his jaw, an ugly red slash that seemed to double the size of his mouth lopsidedly to one side.\n\nThe sergeant led him down along the ditch, head bobbing up occasionally, scanning the land.\n\n\"Defile there, sir, about a hundred yards farther back. We'll have to move quick to get to it \u2026 Ready?\"\n\nHe found he couldn't speak, his entire body was trembling. Fear, exhaustion, the pain, he wasn't sure which. Another convulsion hit him, and he vomited again. The sergeant held him by the shoulders until the spasm passed.\n\n\"Ready to make a run for it?\"\n\nGregory nodded weakly.\n\n\"Now sir!\"\n\nTogether they went up out of the ditch, Gregory still gagging, the sergeant half-dragging him along. Bullets whip-cracked overhead, they reached the next ditch, rolling in amongst the packed tangle of men who were cowering there for cover, several of them cursing the pair, ignoring the star that was still on one epaulette.\n\nA mortar round thudded into the packed crowd less than twenty feet away, and Gregory winced as a fine mist of blood sprayed into his face. He started to cry, not exactly sure why, sick with himself that he was breaking down in front of the men, but the sight of a lieutenant who the shell had landed on caused him to think of his crew. By now, they were blackened charred bits of greasy dirt, not blown apart like the body in front of him.\n\n\"It's all right, sir, let's keep going.\"\n\nThe sergeant fell in with a carrying party using the shallow ravine to move the wounded back. It was a procession of tears, some of the men moved along easily on their own, clutching a blood-soaked arm, obviously glad to be out of it with, at worst, the loss of an arm. Others moved along silently, features a ghastly green-tinged pale. No stretcher party would carry them\u2014they were the dying and time could not be wasted\u2014but by some herculean effort they dragged themselves back, believing that by doing so, by staying with this river of half-torn bodies that they could somehow remain in the ranks of the living.\n\nMedical orderlies with green armbands to identify them to the provost guards, struggled to carry the rest, some on stretchers, others bundled into a ground cloth or blanket.\n\nHe was a veteran of half a dozen hard-fought engagements, but until this moment, locked up in his iron machine, he had never really looked closely at what could be done to men, or to himself. Some were burned, faces, hands blackened, others parboiled by steam like him, features puffing up, eyes swelling shut. Others clutched at holes torn in the chest, mangled faces, or shattered limbs.\n\nThe procession was strangely silent, and he staggered along with it, feeling as if he was a fraud, not really wounded, a coward who was allowing himself to be led away, hiding under the protection of a sergeant ordered to take him to the rear.\n\nHe would rise from his inner woe occasionally to realize that there was a mad battle swirling about him. Hundreds of shells were arcing overhead, the worst mortar barrage he had seen, far worse than the Battle of Rocky Hill. Nothing was moving forward. Men were bunched up in ditches, sprawled flat behind the ruins of abandoned villas, barns, sheds, or behind burning ironclads, some digging frantically with bayonets, scratching holes to hide in. The rifle and machine-gun fire was continuous, but increasingly he noticed the men were not firing back, but instead were hunkering down, unable to go forward and too frightened to get up and sprint for the rear.\n\nHe looked back toward the front and gasped. A dozen enemy ironclads were moving up, the lead one within spitting distance of his own destroyed machine. Machine-gun fire erupted, stitching the shallow ravine he had been dragged into. Men were bursting out of the cover, running, collapsing. A rocket crew to one flank stood up, fired off a round. It slammed into the side of the enemy machine and skidded off. Seconds later the men were dead.\n\nHe spotted one of his machines pivoting, a lone David fighting a dozen Goliaths. It slammed a shot into the rear of a Bantag machine, blowing it apart, and then was torn to shreds in turn, half a dozen bolts slicing it apart. The entire front was breaking apart, falling back. Dark forms were emerging out of the ground, Bantag infantry, bent double, moving quickly, sprinting forward, dropping, then rising and racing forward again. Their movements were different, not the upright charges of the past. He sensed that these warriors were different, trained in a different type of combat, and the sight of them was terrifying.\n\nHis sergeant pulled him away and pushed on down the ravine, heading back to the rear. Several times officers started to close in on the sergeant, but when they saw he was helping a general to the rear they backed off, yet again redoubling Gregory's shame. Without the star on his shoulder he would have had to make it back on his own, and at the moment the terror was so great that he knew he couldn't walk, let alone crawl, without the strong arms of the sergeant around him.\n\nThe ravine finally played out, but they were now a good six hundred yards from the front and the sergeant ventured up the side and out onto the open ground. Gregory looked around and saw a green flag fluttering behind the ruins of a plantation house with a white rectangle in the middle, the insignia of the field hospital for 2nd Division, 11th Corps. The low stone walls provided some protection from the incoming fire, and several times the sergeant pulled him down as mortar rounds crumped in the open field they were traversing, their progress hindered by the torn-up tangle of untended grapevines and arbors.\n\nWell over a hundred men were lying behind the building, most of them from 11th Corps but a sprinkling of 9th Corps and even a few wearing the distinctive black jackets of the ironclad Corps, the men looking up at him expectantly as he came in.\n\nThe sergeant eased him down, announcing that he was going to fetch the doctor. The soldier to his right was unconscious, a bandage covering most of his face, blood seeping out; to his left was one of his ironclad men, hands and face blackened, the flesh cracked and peeling. He could see the boy was blinded and didn't have the heart, or the courage, to speak to him.\n\nA hospital orderly came up, led by the sergeant, and squatted down.\n\n\"How you doing, sir?\"\n\nGregory looked at him, unable to form the words, to tell him to go away and tend someone else who needed him more.\n\nThe orderly held up his hand moving it slowly back and forth in front of Gregory's face, watching intently.\n\n\"Can you see my hand, sir?\"\n\nNext he took Gregory's hands, turning them over, pressing gently, watching Gregory's reaction.\n\n\"You'll do all right, sir. You got scalded. From the sound of your voice you might have taken some steam in. I'll get some ointment, then the sergeant here can take you back to the river.\"\n\nEven as he spoke a courier came galloping up, crouched low in the saddle, reining in hard, a bloodstained doctor turning to face him. Words were exchanged. The courier saluted, reined about, then started forward, heading up to the front.\n\nThe doctor stepped back, shouting for his staff to form up. Gregory watched silently, sensing something as orders were given with hushed voices. The orderly never came back with the ointment as the men raced off. The doctor seemed to shrink visibly as he looked at his charges.\n\n\"Everyone listen up,\" he shouted in Latin, trying to be heard above the incessant roar of battle. Gregory listened intently, unsure if he was hearing the words correctly. The doctor paused, crouching low as a flyer passed low overhead, smoke trailing from an engine, then stood back up.\n\n\"We have to evacuate this position now! Anyone who can move on his own, start heading for the rear immediately. If you have the strength to help a comrade do so. Let's get going.\"\n\nHe turned away. Gregory struggled to his feet, looking around. Men staggered up, others tried, then slipped back down. Far too many didn't move at all and he could see there were nowhere near enough orderlies to move them all. He looked over at his sergeant.\n\n\"Give a hand with someone else; I can make it from here.\"\n\n\"You certain, sir?\" and he could sense a genuine concern that touched him deeply.\n\n\"Certain, Sergeant. Kesus be with you.\"\n\n\"And the gods with you too, sir,\" the sergeant hesitated, then looked back. \"Sir, I'm sorry about your crew. My younger brother's on one of them machines. Do you think he's all right?\"\n\n\"I pray so.\"\n\nThe sergeant nodded, looked down at an unconscious man with a bandaged face, and, reaching down, he hoisted him, cradling him in his arms like a child, and started for the rear. Gregory went up to the doctor. At his approach the doctor's eyes shifted to the star on his shoulder.\n\n\"Why are you pulling out?\" Gregory asked.\n\n\"Didn't you hear?\"\n\n\"Hear what?\"\n\n\"We're being flanked, cut off.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nThe doctor pointed to the north, and for the first time Gregory was aware of the roiling columns of smoke, punctuated by fires, and dull flashes of light. It was like a curtain stretching from horizon to horizon. He caught a momentary glimpse of a dark machine slowly moving up over a distant hill, dozens of dark towering forms behind it \u2026 Bantag; above them an aerosteamer was spiraling down in flames. The image reminded Gregory of a painting that terrified him as a child, in the great cathedral of Suzdal, The Day of Judgment, the world was in flames, the damned consigned into the hands of demons, who, of course, were of the Horde. It looked the same now. Turning to look back from where he had come, he could see the survivors of the assault pulling back, some of the men running headlong for the rear, others turning, trying to fight, going down under the hail of fire.\n\n\"Better get the hell out of here now,\" the doctor said, turning to the operating table to scoop his instruments into a carrying bag. A lone ambulance was being loaded up with wounded.\n\n\"These men?\" Gregory asked.\n\n\"Those who can't walk are left,\" the doctor announced grimly, and to his horror he saw an orderly drawing out a revolver. It was never spoken of, but all knew that orders were never to leave wounded behind for the Bantag if they couldn't be evacuated.\n\nHorrified Gregory stepped around the doctor and struggled to pull a man up.\n\n\"Leave him, he's dying anyhow,\" the doctor announced calmly.\n\n\"Like hell.\"\n\nTears of pain and frustration streaming down his face Gregory grabbed a corporal who had lost a leg and was still unconscious, hoisted him, and started for the rear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Brakes squealing, the train glided to a halt. Wearily, Andrew stood up, looking down at his dress uniform, nervously brushing at a stain just below his breast.\n\n\"Long ride,\" Hans groaned, sitting up from the narrow bunk where he had slept for the last hundred miles of the grueling seven-hundred-mile transit.\n\nAndrew nodded, vainly trying to stretch the kinks out of his back.\n\n\"Ready for this?\" Hans asked, standing up and, with an almost fatherly gesture, brushing some soot off Andrew's shoulder.\n\n\"Not sure. Almost feels like going into a battle.\"\n\n\"It is, and maybe just as dangerous.\"\n\nThere was a final lurch of the cars, then a blast of the whistle. Looking out the window, he saw an expectant crowd waiting in the hot early-morning sunlight. A military band, sounding tinny, struck up \"Battle Cry of Freedom.\" He stepped out onto the back platform, looking around. A small delegation was waiting, but his eyes were focused on but one group, Kathleen and the four children. Madison, his oldest, broke free and rushed forward with delighted cries, the twins following. Kathleen, dressed for once in a civilian dress, the traditional Rus smock and blouse, with her red hair tucked under a kerchief, looked absolutely delightful, their youngest son in her arms, looking at him wide-eyed. It had been over half a year since he had last seen him, and the boy had obviously forgotten though he did smile tentatively as Andrew stepped off the back of the car, Madison tugging at his pants leg, Jefferson and Abraham grabbing the other. She came forward, leaning up to kiss him.\n\n\"You look exhausted.\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nLooking down the length of the platform, he saw anxious families swarming around the three hospital cars that made up the rest of his express train, the first casualties back from the front since the disaster in front of Capua.\n\n\"There's no one here,\" she whispered. \"He didn't come down.\"\n\nThough he was not one for pomp and ritual, the fact that the president had not come to meet him, or at least have an honor guard, was a clear enough indication of the mood. It was also a very public and visible statement by his old friend that there was serious trouble ahead.\n\n\"Colonel. How was it?\"\n\nHe turned to see Gates, editor of Gates's Illustrated Weekly, standing expectantly, pad of paper in hand, pencil poised.\n\n\"No comment for now, Tom.\"\n\n\"Come on, Colonel. I'm running an extra on the battle, and there's precious little information out other than a partial casualty list and rumor that it was bad.\"\n\n\"You'll have to wait.\"\n\n\"Is it true you've been summoned back by Congress to report before the Committee on the Conduct of the War?\"\n\n\"Tom, why don't you just back the hell off,\" Hans snarled.\n\n\"I need something, anything,\" Tom pressed, ignoring Hans.\n\n\"Gates,\" Hans snapped, \"I remember how you peed your pants at Gettysburg, you were so damn scared, and hid behind the Seminary building till I dragged you back out. Why don't you print that.\"\n\nAndrew shook his head at Hans, feeling sorry for Gates, who stood abashed, face turning red.\n\n\"Your first fight, Tom. We all peed ourselves at one time or another,\" Andrew said reassuringly, patting him on the shoulder. \"It's all right.\"\n\nHe guided the editor off to one side.\n\n\"Look, Tom, it was bad, very bad. In short, they tore us apart, but for the moment you can't publish that.\"\n\nTom looked at him, obviously torn between his old loyalty to his colonel and the demands of his new profession.\n\n\"Let me report to the president first. Come over to my place later in the day, and I'll tell you everything I can. Is that fair?\"\n\nTom nodded. \"I'm sorry, sir. It's just that this place is going wild with rumors. There's talk that if it's true we lost at Capua, that Congress will vote that the Chin ambassadors sent by Jurak are to be formally received and given the offer of ceasefire.\"\n\nAndrew sighed and lowered his head.\n\n\"Andrew, be careful going in there. That's not the only rumor floating around town this morning.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"Senator Bugarin is calling for Rus formally to secede from the Republic, establish its own state again, and make peace with the Bantags.\"\n\n\"Damn all,\" Andrew hissed.\n\nIt was, of course, illegal according to the Constitution. Given the experience back on his home world, he had written a clause into the document strictly forbidding secession unless three-quarters of Congress, and all the voting citizens, agreed to a new Constitutional convention.\n\n\"I told you before we should have hung every last boyar after the revolution before the Merki War,\" Hans announced, having come up to join the conversation. \"Bugarin was in with that crowd then.\"\n\n\"He was formally absolved,\" Andrew replied sharply, \"and remember, he is a senator of the Republic.\"\n\n\"Yeah, sure,\" Hans snarled, letting fly with a stream of tobacco juice.\n\n\"Flavius, the Speaker of the House, is hopping mad, too,\" Gates continued. \"With word that Marcus is missing and presumed dead, a hell of a lot of pressure is on him now to stop trying to be even-handed and think more like the senior representative from Roum.\"\n\n\"He's also now the next in line to the presidency,\" Hans announced.\n\nAndrew found himself wishing he could block this all out. He had left the battlefield less than a day ago; too much was flooding in too quickly.\n\n\"I've got a carriage waiting for us,\" Kathleen announced, breaking in. \"Tom, let Andrew meet with the president, then they'll most likely make a joint statement. Why don't you come over after dinner.\"\n\nAndrew could not help but smile at the way she could switch on the charm when needed, and the publisher finally relented, backing away and darting off to catch a lieutenant who was being carried off the hospital car on a stretcher.\n\nKathleen led the way, Madison grabbing her father's hand and chattering away, Andrew replying absently to her conversation. Reaching the carriage, she pried the children loose from their father and handed the baby over to a nurse, who led them away, Andrew waving good-bye as the carriage lurched forward, feeling guilty about his role as a father who was never home and was now too preoccupied to offer them any attention.\n\nThey drove past the long row of ambulances drawn up by the station. There was a time when he would have insisted upon stopping, getting out to talk to the men and their families, but he could so clearly sense the mood. In spite of the brilliant sunshine it felt as if there was a dark shadow over the city. Official censorship or not, news was clearly out that the offensive had turned into a bloody disaster.\n\nReaching the inner gate, they passed into the old city of Suzdal, and for a brief instant he relaxed, enjoying yet again the exotic medieval flavor of the city. Though this section had been twice destroyed in the wars, each time the residents had built it back as it was, though somehow the woodwork now seemed more crudely done and hurried, as if the pace of the new world he had created would not allow time for the ancient Rus art of woodcarving as it was once done. The old gaily painted window frames and decorative designs were gone as well since the lime for whitewash and the lead for paint were both designated as precious war materials.\n\nThe carriage finally reached the great square of the city, going past the cathedral, Kathleen making the sign of the cross as they did so. He was tempted to stop, to go in and see if Casmir, the Holy Metropolitan and head of the Rus Orthodox Church, was there, for he knew that the priest would be his staunchest supporter to the bitter end, and at this moment he needed to hear some form of encouragement. But the white banner was not flying over the central onion dome, meaning that the holy father was elsewhere, most likely at the military hospital to help as the first wounded came in.\n\nThe carriage turned across the square, the scene of so many triumphal parades, and the place where twice he led the old 35th into battle, first against the Boyar Ivor, and then in the final charge against the Tugars. Memories rushed back of so many who had marched or fought across this square and were now but dust, and Kathleen, as if sensing his mood, reached over and squeezed his hand again.\n\n\"Remember the first time we went for a walk here?\" she said, as if trying to divert his thoughts from more melancholy contemplations.\n\nHe smiled, looking into her eyes, remembering that first wondrous day together, when they had visited the court of Ivor then roamed the city till dusk, having no idea, as yet, of the terror of the hordes.\n\nStraight ahead was the White House. A strange blending of the old and the new, the former palace of a boyar, with all its ornate and intricate stone carvings, high narrow windows, and fairy-tale domes, whitewashed by order of the president in imitation of the legendary place where Lincoln had once resided. He could see a crowd gathered near the steps, a twin line of infantry drawn up to clear the way. A color guard was waiting, bearing the flag of the Republic, and as the carriage stopped at the base of the steps they came to attention. Andrew and Hans stood up, each of them saluting the colors as they stepped down to the cobblestone pavement. A small band of half a dozen drummers and fifers now sounded ruffles and flourishes and then went into \"Hail to the Chief.\" At the top of the steps the president, Andrew's old friend Kal, appeared, wearing his traditional black frock coat and stovepipe hat, beard cut like Lincoln's, always a slightly absurd sight since he stood barely five and a half feet tall, yet touching nevertheless in its respectful imitation of a legend from another world.\n\nKal slowly came down the steps, the small crowd of bystanders respectfully silent, the few soldiers in the group coming to attention and saluting, civilian men and boys removing their hats and one old woman making the sign of the cross.\n\nAndrew, curious, watched, knowing that protocol demanded that he ascend the steps, not forcing the president to come down to greet him. But Kal had never stood on such foolish protocol, and normally would have been at the station, eager to embrace his friend in a traditional Rus bear hug and kiss. The fact that he had not done so indicated so much to Andrew, and it was such a strange paradox for Andrew had so often lectured the old peasant on the dignity of office and the precedents that needed to be set. Now they were caught in that very game.\n\nKal stopped midway down the twenty steps, hat still on, and there was a long pregnant pause.\n\n\"Don't push it,\" Kathleen whispered.\n\nFinally, Andrew climbed the steps, trying not to let his fatigue and stiffness show. He came to attention and saluted, Kal nodding a reply but no embrace or even a slap on the shoulder. The effect was immediate, whispers running through the crowd of onlookers. Behind the president Andrew caught a glimpse of several senators, all from Rus, one of them Vasily Bugarin.\n\n\"Let's go inside to talk,\" Kal finally announced.\n\nAndrew nodded in agreement, saying nothing. There was a moment's hesitation as Kal looked over at Hans.\n\n\"I want my second-in-command with me,\" Andrew said, and Kal turned without comment, leading the way up the stairs.\n\nAndrew looked back at Kathleen, who flashed a smile and turned without comment, getting back into the carriage. He felt guilty, not having said more, not feeling more, and that realization was troubling. His feelings were almost an abstraction, a memory, as if he had become so brittle inside that there was no room at the moment for the love and devotion he knew he should feel for his family.\n\nThough it was still early morning, he was glad to step through the ornately carved doors and into the cool dark interior of the executive mansion. Once out of sight of the crowd he hoped that Kal would drop the role and show some warmth, but there was no relenting as the president led the way down the corridor, past the old audience chamber of the boyar and into a side room which served the president as his office.\n\nThe room was simply appointed, as was typical of the old Kal. Icons of Perm and Kesus, the half-pagan manifestation of Orthodoxy which had been transplanted to this world dominated the far wall, with smaller icons of a variety of saints, some of them men of the old 35th and 44th New York, surrounding the centerpiece. The other walls were covered with maps studded with red and blue pins marking the situation on the western front, where remnants of the Merki were raiding, the coasts of the Inland Sea and the shadowy war which had resumed against Cartha, and the Eastern Front from which he had just come. In the center of the room was a battered oak table around which a dozen straight-backed chairs were set. Andrew was delighted to see the Holy Prelate Casmir sitting at the far corner, the priest coming to his feet as Andrew came in.\n\n\"Good day to you, Andrew,\" he said in fairly good English, and Andrew smiled, taking off his old kepi hat with a show of genuine respect. Across from him was Vincent Hawthorne, a mere shadow of a ghost, his uniform hanging loosely on his narrow frame, still sporting the Phil Sheridan look of pointed goatee and mustache.\n\nWithout comment Bugarin took a chair next to Casmir, and Kal beckoned for Andrew to sit next to Vincent, Hans taking the chair to Andrew's right while Kal sat down next to Bugarin.\n\nAndrew was tempted to voice a protest, to ask to be allowed at least to freshen up and get a bite to eat before going into this meeting and then somehow get a few minutes alone with Kal to probe out what was going on, but a cold look from Kal stilled his protest, and as he sat down he made do with a cup of tea that Casmir made a point of pouring for the two new arrivals. The prelate then insisted upon a prayer which ran on for five minutes and which placed a heavy emphasis on his thankfulness for the safe return of Andrew and Hans, the need for divine guidance and strength in the trials to come.\n\nAs the three Rus made the sign of the cross Andrew raised his head and stared straight at Kal.\n\n\"Andrew, we need an honest report of what happened out there and why,\" Kal said, opening the meeting without comment or one of his usual witticisms designed to break the tension.\n\n\"I've never been anything but honest with you, Mr. President,\" Andrew replied coolly, deciding to be formal and avoid the use of the informal nickname of Kal.\n\nStrange, he thought, you were once a peasant, a storyteller and jester for the Boyar Ivor, hiding your cunning behind the mask of a fool in order to protect your family and yourself when the Tugars came, hoping against hope to thus spare your daughter from being sent to the slaughter pits. Hawthorne, who is now your son-in-law, taught you about the ideals of a Republic, it was you who triggered the rebellion, and for years afterward I taught you all I know about how to rule and wrote the very Constitution which put you in power.\n\nAndrew could not help but feel a flicker of resentment now, the mentor who found himself outranked by a student, but was this not as it should be, he told himself. Across all these years I kept demanding that the military must answer to the civilian, and here now are the results.\n\n\"Andrew, please tell us what happened,\" Casmir interjected. \"The entire city is in turmoil with fear, some are even claiming the front has collapsed and the Bantags will be at the gates.\"\n\n\"No, they haven't broken through, the front is the same is it was before the attack.\"\n\n\"In other words you did not gain a single inch of ground,\" Bugarin interjected.\n\nAndrew shifted his gaze to study the senator. It was rumored that he had tuberculosis; his skin was almost china white, laid flat against the bones of his face. Dark eyes seemed to burn like coals as he returned Andrew's look. In spite of the senator's current stance Andrew found he did have a certain amount of respect for the man. He had avoided the infamous \"Boyars' Plot\" to overthrow the government before the Merki War and had briefly commanded a regiment and then a brigade before Rus was evacuated. Stricken with illness he left the army and was immediately elected senator.\n\nYet, in the last year protest against the war had increasingly centered around him, first as a general concern about the progress of the fight, and then increasingly as a voice of separatism and mistrust of the Roum and their ability to fight. That was the one thing Andrew could not comprehend, this damnable wedge being driven between Rus and Roum. If it succeeded in splitting them apart, the Republic would fracture, and they would all die. How men with the intelligence of Bugarin could not see that was a mystery.\n\n\"If you are asking if we held the opposite bank of the river,\" Andrew replied. \"No.\"\n\n\"What are the total losses?\" Casmir asked. \"I want to know the human cost first.\"\n\nAndrew sighed, looking up for a moment at the ceiling.\n\n\"At least twenty-seven thousand five hundred men killed, wounded or captured out of the forty thousand who crossed the river. Just over nine thousand wounded made it back; all the rest of the casualties were lost.\"\n\n\"Merciful Perm bless them,\" Casmir intoned, making the sign of the cross.\n\n\"And equipment?\" Kal asked.\n\n\"Every ironclad engaged was lost, that's fifty-three machines. Nineteen light aerosteamers and eleven heavy machines lost as well. Eight field batteries lost, and almost all the equipment for three corps along with two regiments of engineering and pontoon equipment, three corps field hospitals, and somewhere around fifty regimental stands of colors.\"\n\nKal blew out noisily and leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"How, damn it?\" Bugarin cried. \"What did you do wrong?\"\n\n\"Just tell us,\" Kal said, cutting Bugarin off.\n\n\"It was a trap,\" Andrew said. \"Plain and simple. This new leader, Jurak, is different. I fear that the world he came from is far more advanced than mine. He has a better grasp of how to use the new weapons being created, his army is transforming itself into something far different that what we faced with the Tugars and Merki.\"\n\nAndrew drew in a breath; the room was silent except for the ticking of a small wooden clock on the wall near Kal's desk. He remembered that the clock was the same one Vincent had carved for him long ago before even the Tugars had come.\n\n\"They had a new model of land ironclad. Heavier armor and with that the knowledge to keep back out of range of our own ironclads and rocket launchers. There was a new airship, twin engine, faster than our Eagles and almost as fast as the Hornets. Also, they have a new type of gun, like our Gatling, slower firing but still deadly.\"\n\n\"Didn't you anticipate any of this?\" Bugarin asked.\n\n\"Not directly,\" Andrew had to admit.\n\n\"What do you mean 'not directly'?\"\n\n\"As commander I had to assume that things would change with their new leader. Also, that they undoubtedly would have new weapons. Jurak, however, was shrewd enough to keep all his cards hidden until we were fully committed, then he unleashed them all in one killing blow.\n\n\"Tactically, as well, he presented a new front. I would estimate that at least five of his umens were armed with better rifles, but beyond that they had obviously trained as much as we had. These were not Horde warriors charging blindly\u2014they came on with a skill and purpose we haven't seen before.\"\n\n\"What actually happened,\" Kal interrupted. \"Tell me that.\"\n\n\"We launched the assault following the plans I reviewed with you the week before the attack. Losses in the first stage were less than anticipated, just over two thousand killed and wounded. Six hours into the assault our advanced column was within striking distance of their main depot, five miles east of Capua, when the counterattack struck.\"\n\n\"And you did not anticipate that they would counterattack?\" Bugarin asked sharply.\n\n\"Of course we expected a counterattack,\" Andrew replied, trying to keep the weariness and frustration out of his voice. \"All of the hordes were masters of mobile warfare and knew enough to keep a mobile reserve positioned behind their lines, either as a force to seal a break or as reserve to deliver the final blow.\"\n\n\"So why were you not prepared?\" Kal asked.\n\nAndrew hesitated for a moment, surprised by the coldness in Kal's voice.\n\n\"We were prepared. Ninth Corps led the breakthrough supported by the First Ironclad Regiment. Eleventh Corps followed next, anchoring the left flank, while elements of two other corps crossed to anchor the right flank and provide reserves. The Second Ironclad Regiment was held in reserve for the follow-up advance once the pontoon bridges were laid and we felt we had achieved a breakthrough.\n\n\"What surprised us was the sheer number of ironclads in their reserves, reports estimate there were upward of two hundred compared to fewer than a hundred of ours, of which we committed only fifty in the first wave, the number of new aerosteamers, their introduction of a machine gun, and finally the tactics of concealment and concentration of ironclads in large striking columns.\"\n\n\"In other words, you were caught unprepared,\" Bugarin pressed.\n\nAndrew said nothing, and Hans finally interrupted.\n\n\"No plan ever fully survives first contact with the enemy, and in war no one can ever prepare for all eventualities.\"\n\n\"You were against this offensive, weren't you, Hans?\" Kal asked.\n\nNow it was Hans's turn to hesitate.\n\n\"Yes, he was,\" Andrew said. \"The responsibility is mine.\"\n\nThere was a long silence again, and Andrew half wondered if Kal, for a variety of reasons, would ask for his resignation and turn command over to Hans. That was indeed part of the reason he had insisted that Hans leave the front and return to Suzdal with him. There was even a bit of a wish that indeed such a decision would be made, relieving him of all that was pressing in.\n\n\"The retreat, I heard it was a rout,\" Bugarin said, breaking the silent tension.\n\n\"Yes, there is no denying that. The river was at our backs, the men quickly realized that the enemy was breaking through on both flanks and rolling the line up with the intent of creating a pocket. Yes, they ran, ran for their lives as even the best troops will.\"\n\n\"So they ran,\" Bugarin continued. \"Ninth and Eleventh Corps ran, troops primarily made up of men from Roum.\" So that was it, Andrew now realized, and he felt a flicker of anger. No senator from Roum was present.\n\n\"I don't see Tiberius Flavius, Speaker of the House, present here,\" Andrew replied coolly. \"As Speaker, isn't he entitled to be here as well, Mr. President?\"\n\n\"This is an informal discussion,\" Kal replied.\n\n\"It seems more like an inquiry by the Committee on the Conduct of the War,\" Hans snapped.\n\n\"I wasn't asking you for comment, Sergeant,\" Bugarin growled.\n\nHans started to stand up, but a look from Andrew stilled him.\n\n\"I will accept no aspersions on the gallant soldiers who crossed that river, whether they were Rus or Roum,\" Andrew said, his voice cutting through the tension.\n\nIt was impossible for him to try and explain now all that had happened. Though he would not admit it here, the army had indeed broken, the worst rout he had seen since the disaster along the Potomac.\n\nIt was almost like Hispania in reverse, his army disintegrating, falling back to the river a disorganized rabble. But in this room, under the cool gaze of Bugarin and Kal, that was impossible to explain. How to explain the exhaustion, the fighting out of the army as an offensive weapon? He knew that to try and explain that now would be an admission of defeat.\n\nYet was this not defeat? He could admit to the loss of the battle at Capua and take responsibility for it. Yet was this the beginning of the end he wondered? Would the army continue to disintegrate and fall back, or was there some desperate way to wring one last victory out of the situation and save what was left?\n\n\"Why did you let the vice president go into the attack against my orders?\" Kal asked.\n\nAndrew was silent. The memory of the broken body of his old friend, carried back across the river by men from the 11th, was still too fresh.\n\n\"I could not stop him,\" Andrew replied sadly. \"He insisted that he go forward with 'his boys,' as he called them. I understand that was part of the reason for the rout. When the counterattack was launched he was caught by the opening barrage of rockets and killed instantly. Word quickly spread through the ranks \u2026\"\n\nHis voice trailed off. Still hard to believe that Marcus was dead. Yet another part of the political equation he had not anticipated.\n\n\"And your own actions?\" Bugarin asked. \"Did you personally try to rally the men?\"\n\nHans bristled yet again; there was a certain tone to the statement, an implication. Andrew did not respond for a moment, never dreaming that someone might actually question his own behavior under fire.\n\nKal was the first to react. With an angry gesture he cut Bugarin off.\n\n\"This is an inquiry,\" Kal snapped, \"not an inquisition.\" There was a flicker of eye contact, and Andrew felt at least a small sense of relief. Some of the old Kal was still there and was not comfortable with the way things were going.\n\n\"I'm willing to answer,\" Andrew said, breaking the silence. He looked past Kal, staring at the ceiling.\n\n\"I'll admit here that going under fire again left me nervous, though it did not affect my judgment. I crossed to the east shore and stayed there until it was evident that the north flank had completely caved in.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you call up reinforcements?\" Bugarin asked. \"Always reinforce victory, never reinforce defeat,\" Andrew shot back.\n\n\"Wasn't the defeat perhaps in your own mind?\"\n\n\"I think that after more than a decade of campaigning I know the difference,\" Andrew replied sharply. \"Any unit, even First Corps, would have broken under the pounding inflicted on the left and center. As to a counterstrike, I have to ask with what?\n\n\"Three corps went into that assault. I have a total of three left to cover all the rest of that front from the tangles of the Northern Forest down into the mountains of the south. That was our total offensive striking power. If that was blunted, there was nothing left.\"\n\n\"In other words, as an offensive force in this war, the Army of the Republic is finished,\" Bugarin replied sharply, staring straight at Kal.\n\nAndrew inwardly cursed. It was exactly what he did not want to admit to but had now been maneuvered into saying.\n\n\"And if the Bantag now launch a counterattack?\" Bugarin pressed. \"Can you stop it?\"\n\n\"We have to stop it.\"\n\n\"You didn't answer my question.\"\n\n\"There is no alternative,\" Andrew snapped.\n\n\"Perhaps there is.\"\n\n\"There is no alternative,\" Andrew repeated, his voice sharp with anger. \"We cannot make a deal with the Bantag; that will divide us and in the end kill all of us. We must fight if need be to the bitter end.\"\n\nBugarin stood up and leaned over the table, staring directly at Andrew.\n\n\"You have been nothing but a disaster to us, Keane. We have fought three wars, hundreds of thousands have died, and now we are trapped in a war that we are losing. Beyond that we are trapped in an alliance with an alien people who can't even defend their own land. As chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, I hereby summon you to give a full accounting of this disaster.\"\n\nWith barely a nod of acknowledgment to Kal, the senator stalked out of the room. Casmir, rising from his chair, motioned for Kal to stay and hurried out after Bugarin.\n\nAndrew sat back down, realizing that Kal was staring at him coldly.\n\n\"Now you see what I am dealing with here,\" Kal announced. \"You'd better prepare yourself for what you'll have to face over the next couple of days.\"\n\nAndrew nodded. \"Kal, you at least know the boys out there tried their damnedest to win.\"\n\n\"I know that, Andrew, but it doesn't change the fact that nearly twenty thousand more families lost a son, or father, or husband. How much longer do you think we as a people can take this?\"\n\n\"Until we win,\" Hans replied coolly.\n\n\"Define victory to me when we are all dead,\" Kal whispered. \"Andrew, we have to find a way out of this war.\"\n\n\"Kal, there's only one way,\" Hans inteijected.\n\n\"You, old friend, are a soldier, and that is the path you must see to victory,\" Kal replied, his voice filled with infinite weariness. \"I, as president, am forced to consider alternate means. I might not like them, I might not even trust them, but I do have to consider them, especially when Bugarin has rallied a majority of senators.\"\n\nAndrew looked over at Vincent, who nodded. That bit of news was a shock. If Bugarin held the majority, the Senate could force the issue to a vote at any time.\n\n\"Kal, we can't surrender. Nor can we allow the Republic to split. Jurak is obviously outproducing us. Any agreement, even a temporary ceasefire, will play to his hand.\"\n\n\"I hear that from you, Andrew. From Bugarin I hear threats of breaking the Republic apart if need be to end the war. From the Roum representatives I hear complaints about our supposed suspicions regarding them. From Webster I hear that the economy is tottering into collapse. Tonight, as the casualty lists come in, I will sit and write letters until dawn, sending my regrets to old friends who've lost a loved one.\"\n\nHis voice seemed near to breaking.\n\nHe lowered his head, put on his stovepipe hat, and slowly walked out the room, moving as if the entire weight of the world was upon him.\n\nAndrew, Hans, and Vincent stood respectfully as he left. Andrew sighed, settling back in his chair and looking over at Vincent, who smiled weakly.\n\n\"Hawthorne, just what the hell is going on back here?\" Hans asked, going around to the side table and taking the pot of tea from which Casmir had poured earlier and refilling his own cup. Taking a fruit vaguely resembling an apple but closer in size to a grapefruit, he settled into the chair Kal had occupied, pulled a paring knife from his haversack, and began to peel off the thick skin from the fruit.\n\n\"It's madness here,\" Vincent began. \"Kal is losing control of Congress, which is fracturing between representatives of Rus and Roum. The Roum bloc is claiming the war is not being pressed hard enough to expel the invader from their soil. Beyond that there are some who are claiming it is deliberate in order to cut down the population and thus establish an equal balance in the House.\"\n\n\"That's insane.\" Andrew sighed. \"Damn all, who the hell could even think that?\"\n\n\"And the\u2014Rus side?\" Hans asked.\n\n\"Well, you heard it straight from Bugarin. The Roum can't fight and the burden is resting on the old army of Rus. We lost tens of thousands pulling their chestnuts out of the fire last winter and now, in this last battle, they panic again.\"\n\n\"Never should have named them the Ninth and Eleventh Corps,\" Hans said. \"It was unlucky with the Army of the Potomac, and the same here.\"\n\n\"Funny, even that legend is spreading around,\" Vincent said, \"some of the Roum claiming it's a jinx we deliberately set on them.\"\n\nAndrew could only shake his head in disbelief.\n\n\"So the bottom line?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"Word is the Senate will vote a resolution today asking for your removal from command.\"\n\nThere was a quick exchange of looks between Andrew and Hans as the sergeant cut off a piece of peeled fruit and passed it over to Andrew.\n\n\"It won't happen of course. You'll stay, and there'll be a staged show of support for you, but the mere fact that it happens will weaken your position.\"\n\n\"Figured that, but what's the real game?\"\n\n\"Far worse. With Crassus dead, and no vice president, the Roum representatives are increasingly nervous. Speaker Flavius is next in line but remember he isn't of the old aristocracy of Roum. He was once a servant in the house of Marcus who rose through the ranks, was disabled after Hispania, and found himself in Congress.\"\n\nAndrew nodded. He had tremendous admiration for Flavius. A true natural soldier. If he had not been so severely wounded, he undoubtedly would have risen to command a division, or even a corps. His selection as Speaker had been something of a surprise, but then the House was dominated by old veterans, both Roum and Rus from the lower classes. But he didn't have the blind support and instant obedience Marcus could command. Marcus could merely snap his fingers, and all would listen. Flavius lacked that, and though he was now but a heartbeat away from the presidency, Andrew knew he could not stem the growing friction between the two states of the Republic.\n\n\"Bugarin will hold hearings about the battle at Capua. He'll declare the war lost and push for a ceasefire.\"\n\n\"An agreement with the Bantag?\" Hans asked. \"Damn all to hell I keep telling you, Andrew, we should be shooting those Chin envoys they keep sending through.\"\n\n\"I can't. Congress specifically ordered that we receive them and pass them along.\"\n\n\"And they're nothing but damned spies.\"\n\n\"Don't you think I know that?\" Andrew snapped hotly.\n\nHans settled back in his chair, saying nothing at the tone of rebuke and frustration.\n\n\"Are there the votes for a ceasefire?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"No, not yet, but the real maneuver is to break the Republic. Reestablish an independent state of Rus, cut Roum off, and pull the army out.\"\n\n\"And after the Bantag crush Roum they'll be at our gates.\"\n\n\"You know that, I know that,\" Hawthorne replied, \"but for a lot of folks here, any offer of peace, even if but for six months or a year, with the boys back home, and the crushing work in the factories eased off \u2026 well that seems all right with them.\n\n\"Bugarin's already floating around a plan to build a fortified line at Kev, claiming that even if the Bantag did betray the agreement, without having to worry about Roum or holding Tyre, we'd have more than enough to stop them.\"\n\n\"They're fools,\" Hans cried, his anger ready to explode as he glared at Vincent.\n\n\"Yes, but remember I've been stuck back here since last year being your liaison, so don't blame me for the bad news.\"\n\nAndrew could see that being cut out of the action was still wearing on Vincent but on the other side his exposure to all the administrative work as chief of staff was seasoning Hawthorne, training him for a day when, if they survived, he would take the mantle of control.\n\n\"You should go into the factories,\" Vincent said. \"I'm in there damn near every day now, trying to keep production up. They're hellholes, old men, women, children as young as eight working twelve-hour shifts six days a week. Emil is pitching a fit, about conditions. Tuberculosis is up, and a lot of the women working in the factory making percussion caps are getting this strange sickness; Emil says it has something to do with mercury, the same as with hatters.\n\n\"There's shortages of everything, especially since we're feeding nearly a million Roum refugees who lost their land. A lot of folks are getting by on gruel and watery soup with a hint of meat dipped into it. The prosperity we saw building two years ago is completely out of balance now. A few folks, mostly old boyars and merchants are getting filthy rich on the war industries, but the ordinary workers are slipping behind.\"\n\n\"So get Webster in, have them figure out some new kind of tax. Hell, he's the financial wizard who figured it all out in the first place,\" Andrew said, always at a loss when it came to the finances of running a war.\n\n\"He's trying, Andrew, but these same people have the ears of Congress and block any changes in the taxes. We cobbled together an industrial war society. The Union could take it back home; we had two generations of change to get used to it. The Confederacy didn't, and remember how they were falling apart. Well, it's the same here. We're producing the goods but barely hanging on, in fact it's slipping apart. Rebuilding the railroads after last winter's campaign, and the buildup for this last offensive meant too many other things were not done. Webster said it's like pouring all the oil we have on only half the machine. Well, the other half, the installations, morale, political support, they're all seizing up and falling apart.\"\n\nAndrew did not know how to reply. During the early spring, after his recovery from the wound, he had tried to understand just how complex it had all become, attending meetings with Webster that would go half the night. He'd demand more ironclads, locomotives, better breechloaders and flyers, and ammunition, always more ammunition, and Webster would repeat endlessly that it meant scrimping on something else equally important if they were to keep the machine of war running.\n\n\"You want to understand disenchantment with this war, go into the factories at two in the morning and you'll see. There have even been rumors about strikes to protest the war and conditions.\"\n\n\"It's that or the slaughter pit,\" Hans growled, cutting another piece of fruit and this time tossing it to Vincent.\n\n\"It's been what, more than six years since this city was the front line,\" Andrew said wearily. \"We've taken well over a hundred thousand more casualties in this war. I can understand people back here grasping at any straw that's offered.\"\n\n\"In fact even the good news from the western front seems to be hurting us,\" Vincent said.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Sorry, I guess you didn't hear. We got reliable intelligence that Tamuka was kicked out by what was left of the Merki Horde following him.\"\n\n\"That bastard,\" Hans growled. \"I hope they made him a eunuch or better yet killed the scum.\"\n\nIt was rare that Andrew heard a truly murderous tone in Hans's voice, but it flared out now. It was Tamuka who first held Hans prisoner. He could see his friend actually trembling with pent-up rage at the mere mention of the name.\n\n\"What happened?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"You know that the skirmishing has died off on the western frontier. So much so that I'm recommending relieving a division posted out there and shifting it over to the eastern front. A couple of weeks back a small band of people came into our lines, refugees from what apparently are folks descended from Byzantine Greeks living to the southwest. They said that a umen of the Merki came to their town, killed most of them, but the survivors witnessed a big blowup, the bastards were killing each other and a one-handed Merki who was the leader was driven out of the band.\"\n\n\"That's got to be him,\" Hans snarled. \"Even his own kind hated him. And he wouldn't have the guts to die with some honor rather than run.\"\n\n\"The rest of them took off, riding west; the one hand, with maybe a score of followers, rode east.\"\n\n\"I wonder where to?\" Andrew mused.\n\n\"Straight to hell I hope,\" Hans inteijected.\n\n\"Word got back here, and Bugarin said it shows that we will now have more than enough troops to defend ourselves.\"\n\nThere was a long moment of silence, and yet again he was troubled by all the changes he and his men had created here. Industrialization was the only hope for survival in their war against the hordes, to stay ahead of them in technology and use that to offset their skill and numbers. But ever since the arrival of Ha'ark and Jurak, their hope for that edge was disappearing, and in many ways had clearly been lost in front of Capua. Though on his old world, America had embraced technology and what industrialization could provide, he knew there was a dark side to it, the teeming noisome hellholes around the factories, children laboring in smoky gloom, the mind-numbing dullness of a life of labor. He could balm his conscience with what the alternative was, but for most peasants what had happened in their lives?\n\nTen years ago they waited in dread for the arrival of the Tugars but resigned themselves to that fate, knowing that but one in ten went to the slaughter and then the Horde rode on and the cycle of life continued the dread of the return twenty years\u2014a lifetime, away. Though he could not truly comprehend it, he could indeed see where some might say the old ways were preferable to what they had now.\n\nThrough the high window he could hear a stirring outside, distant shouting, and he froze for an instant, wondering if indeed there was already rioting in the streets over the defeat at Capua. He stared off, unsure of what to do next.\n\n\"Andrew, we have to end this war,\" Vincent announced.\n\n\"You talking surrender, too, boy?\" Hans asked, his voice icy.\n\n\"No, hell no,\" Vincent replied. \"But it's my job to tell Andrew and you what is going on at the capital. Hell, I'd rather be at the front than here. I know what you two saw at Capua. The difference here is that since this campaign started no one in Rus, except for the soldiers, has seen a Bantag, except for those raiders around Kev. All they know is the hardship and shortages without seeing the enemy face-to-face. Those damn Chin ambassadors are talking sweet words, and some are listening, and then the rumors get spread out.\"\n\n\"My people, are they working on the ambassadors?\"\n\nAndrew found it interesting how Hans referred to the three hundred Chin whom he had led out of captivity from Xi'an as \"my people.\" In a way they had become his own personal guard. There was even a Chin brigade now, made up of those who had escaped during the winter breakthrough into Ha'ark's rear lines, and shortly they would go to the front. In a way they were Hans's personal bodyguard, his status with them as liberator raising him to a godlike position in their eyes. It was his idea to make sure they were put in contact with the human ambassadors representing the Horde.\n\n\"I have their reports waiting for you,\" Vincent said. \"Sure, they admit that if they fail to return with a peace agreement their entire families will be sent to the slaughter pits. Some have even whispered it's all a crock what they're saying but none will do so publicly out of fear that word will get back to Jurak. But this Jurak is shrewd, damn shrewd. His last messenger said they would offer to stop the slaughter pits, the same as the Tugars did.\"\n\n\"Damnable lie,\" Hans cried. \"I was there; I saw what they did.\"\n\n\"The Tugars stopped,\" Andrew said.\n\n\"We haven't heard from them in years; they might very well be back at it,\" Hans replied.\n\n\"I'm not sure. They learned our humanity\u2014that changed it.\"\n\n\"And you believe this Jurak?\" Hans asked heatedly. \"Of course not. He and I both know one clear point. This is a war of annihilation. After all that has happened, it is impossible for this world to contain both of us. Anything he offers is the convenience of the moment to buy breathing time, to split us apart.\"\n\n\"I wish we did have a year's breathing time,\" Vincent interjected.\n\n\"It'd be a year's breathing time for him, too, and never at the price of losing the Roum.\"\n\n\"Andrew!\"\n\nSurprised he looked up to see Kathleen standing in the doorway, face red, breathing hard, as if she had been running.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" and for an instant he thought it was something with the children.\n\n\"You're all right, thank God.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Someone just tried to assassinate Kal!\"\n\nAndrew was out of his chair, followed by Hans and Vincent. He suddenly realized that the clamor outside the building had risen in volume, and with the door open, the shouting in the corridors was audible as well.\n\n\"Where is he? Is he all right?\"\n\n\"In his quarters; Emil was sent for and I followed.\" Furious that he hadn't been told immediately Andrew pushed through the growing turmoil in the hallways, shoving his way past the crowd in the old audience chamber and back around to the rear of the building and the private apartments. Andrew caught a glimpse of Tanya, Kal's daughter and Vincent's wife. Crying she ran up to Vincent, who swept her up under his arm, shouting questions.\n\nAndrew forced his way through the troops assigned as the presidential guard and into the bedroom. Emil looked up angrily from the side of the bed and for a moment Andrew froze at the sight of the black frock coat, covered with blood, lying crumpled on the floor, the battered stovepipe hat beside it, just above the brim an ugly blood-soaked gash cut along the side. Kal, eyes closed, features pale, was lying on the bed, the pillow beneath him stained with blood, his wife kneeling on the other side, crying hysterically, Casmir behind her, hands resting on her shoulders.\n\nFor a flash instant he remembered a nightmare dream of years ago in which he had seen his hero, Abraham Lincoln, in the same pose, dead from an assassin's bullet.\n\n\"Out, all of you out!\" Emil shouted.\n\nAndrew did not move.\n\nEmil rose from the side of the bed and came up to him.\n\n\"Please, Andrew, I need his wife out of here; if you go, she'll follow with the others.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I don't know, I wasn't there,\" Emil said wearily. \"Casmir said they were walking across the plaza when a shot was fired from atop the church. Thank God at the same instant someone called his name and he started to turn. The ball creased his head. He might have a fractured skull, I'm not sure, but I've seen worse who lived.\"\n\n\"But he's unconscious,\" Vincent said nervously.\n\n\"Hell, you'd be, too, if someone cracked the side of your head like that. Like I said, I'm not sure if it's fractured. I just want quiet in here, so please leave.\"\n\nAndrew nodded, withdrawing, motioning for Casmir to follow. The priest gently guided Tanya out with him, her cries echoing in the hallway, creating a dark tension that was ready to boil over as everyone was asking who and why.\n\nAndrew caught the eye of the captain of the guard and motioned him over.\n\n\"Secure this building, Captain. Six guards on this door, then sweep the building, everyone outside, send them home or, if they live here, they're to go to their rooms and stay. Send a messenger over to the barracks of the Thirty-Fifth, mobilize them out, secure a perimeter around this building and Congress.\"\n\n\"There's no need to surround Congress.\"\n\nIt was Bugarin, features flushed with excitement. \"Senator, as commander of the military I am responsible for security, and I ask you not to interfere.\"\n\n\"And it sounds like it could be the start of a coup to me, Colonel.\"\n\n\"Follow your orders, Captain,\" Andrew snapped. \"Report back to me within a half hour.\"\n\n\"I said there is no need for this now.\"\n\nAndrew finally turned back to face Bugarin.\n\n\"I'll be the judge of that, sir.\"\n\n\"The culprit has already been caught.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"And hung by the crowd outside; it was a Roum soldier.\"\n\n\"Merciful God,\" Andrew whispered in English.\n\nThough all urged him to launch the attack, still he refused, counseling calm, the gathering of strength before the final unleashing of the storm." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "\"As your own ancestor Vigarka once declared, 'When the portal of victory appears open, gaze twice before entering.'\"\n\nJurak saw several of the clan leaders nodding in agreement, chant singers who stood at the back of the golden yurt exchanging glances of pleasure that their new Qar Qarth could so easily quote from the great history of the ancestors.\n\n\"We know we have destroyed three of their umens,\" and as he spoke, he pointed to the Corps commanders' guidons hanging from the ceiling of the great yurt, shot-torn and stained regimental flags by the dozens clustered around them.\n\n\"That leaves but three on this front; surely our twenty-five umens can overwhelm that,\" Cavgayya of the 3rd umen of the black horse replied.\n\n\"Yes, we can overwhelm that, but why spend so needlessly of our sacred blood. More than fifty thousand yurts mourn their sons and fathers from the war before the great city of the cattle. Though we won this battle, still another fifteen thousand mourn. Our seed is not limitless like that of the cattle; each of your lives is precious to me.\"\n\nAgain he could see the nods of agreement. Ha'ark had been a profligate with the lives of the Bantag. It wasn t just the fifty thousand before Roum, it was another seventy thousand casualties to bring the army to Roum, nearly a third of their total strength of warriors lost. Yes, he suspected he could break through even this evening, but let it simmer just a bit longer, he reasoned. Keep the pressure on with raids, shows of strength. And most of all let the dozens of new ironclads, that even now were being sent to Xi'an and from there shipped across the Great Sea, come up to the front. Then he would launch the final push.\n\nBut perhaps that might not even be necessary, he thought with a smile. Their will is cracking.\n\n\"There shall be time to finish this war forever and with but a few more drops of blood compared to the buckets spent already.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Suzdal was seething with rumors of plots and counterplots as Andrew stepped out of his simple clapboard house on the village square, the guards standing to either side of his porch snapping to attention.\n\nAfter the battle against the Tugars, and the destruction of the lower quarter of the city, the men of the 35th had been given this section of the city as a place to live, and there they had built a fair replica of a New England town square, complete with Presbyterian and Methodist churches, a monument in the center of the square to the men who had come to this world, and a bandstand, where in the brief periods of peace, evening concerts had been held.\n\nAndrew allowed himself the indulgence of a cigar while Hans, hands in his pocket, leaned against a pillar of the porch, anxiously looking around for a place to spit before settling on a bare spot of ground next to a bush covered with exotic yellow flowers. Emil came out a moment later, slapping his stomach.\n\n\"First halfway decent meal I've had in days,\" Emil announced.\n\nAndrew smiled. How Kathleen had managed to scrounge up a piece of corned beef and what passed for cabbages on this world was beyond him. Upstairs he could hear the children settling into bed, and again he felt guilt for not going upstairs to spend a little time, to play with them and forget, but too much had happened today, and there was still more to be done.\n\n\"You can almost sense it in the air,\" Emil said. \"This place is ready to explode.\"\n\nIt had come close to a riot in the hours after the assassination attempt. Emil declared that Kal stood a chance of making it even though his skull had indeed been fractured by the glancing blow of the bullet. Most of the citizens of the city, though, were convinced that Kal was already dead no matter what Emil or anyone else said. It had almost come to a fight when Andrew personally led a detachment to cut down the broken body of the Roum soldier who had been dragged out of the cathedral and strung up from a tavern sign. It took the intervention of Casmir to still the mob, and the body was taken by a detachment of soldiers to the Roum temple for burial in the catacombs. A guard was now on that temple, and orders passed that any Roum citizens in the city were to remain inside for the time being.\n\nThe only good thing to come out of it all was the cancellation of the meeting with the Committee, but that ordeal would come later in the week.\n\n\"Here comes Hawthorne,\" Hans announced, and Andrew saw Vincent come around the corner of the square, limping slowly, still using a cane, accompanied by the rest of the men Andrew had summoned, Bill Webster, who was secretary of the treasury, Tom Gates from the newspaper, Varinna Ferguson, and Ketswana, who was Hans's closest friend from their days of captivity and now served on his staff.\n\nAs the group came up the steps Andrew motioned for them to stand at ease and led the way into the small dining room, which had already been cleared of the evening meal. The group settled around the table, Andrew playing the role of host and passing around tea and, for those who wanted something stiffer, a bottle of vodka.\n\n\"All right, we've got to have it out,\" Andrew said. \"Perhaps I've been out of touch,\" and he hesitated, \"what with getting wounded and staying up at the front. I need to know just what the hell is going on back here.\"\n\nNo one wanted to open, and finally his gaze fixed on Webster. Years behind the desk had added a bit to his waistline, and his face was rounder, but the flag bearer who had won a Medal of Honor leading a charge still had the old courage in his eyes and the ability to talk straight when needed.\n\n\"The economy is in a shambles, sir.\"\n\n\"You were responsible to make sure it kept running,\" Hans interjected.\n\n\"Yes sir, I was. Now I could go into some long-winded lecture on this, but the plain and simple fact is we've tried ever since we've arrived here to pull these people across a hundred years of development in less than a generation. We've created a top-heavy system here, and the strain is now showing.\"\n\n\"Top-heavy? What do you mean?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"Well sir. Back when this all started all we needed to build was a factory, actually several factories, that could turn out lightweight rails, steam engines, and a few small locomotives, and works to make powder, smoothbore muskets, light four-pound cannons, and shot. That didn't take much doing once we got the idea rolling. Primitive as we thought them to be, the Rus can be master craftsmen, and they quickly adapted.\"\n\n\"And the Tugars were breathing down our necks to spur us along,\" Hawthorne interjected.\n\nWebster nodded in agreement and pushed on.\n\n\"We had a couple of years of peace after that to consolidate. In fact that was our boom period thanks to the building of railroad installations and the mechanization of farming with McCormick reapers, horse-drawn plows and planters. We produced surpluses that weren't going into a war, but rather were going to generate yet more production. We even had enough surplus that it started to improve people's lives as well, things like additional food, clothing, and tools. We started schools, literacy went up, and with it even more productivity.\"\n\n\"Don't forget medicine and sanitation,\" Emil interjected, and Webster nodded.\n\n\"Right there for example, sir. We had close to a thousand people working in Suzdal alone to install sewers and pipes for water. The same in Roum and every other city. We had thousands more building hospitals, training as nurses, midwives, and doctors. They were taken out of the traditional labor force, but the economy could afford that and in fact benefited directly by it. People had immediate benefits with lower mortality, particularly with children. Such things had a major impact on people's morale and willingness to work.\n\n\"Then the Merki War comes along. Sir, as we all know, Rus was devastated from one end to the other in that fight.\n\nWe scorched earth like the Russians did against Napoleon; the only thing we evacuated were the machines to make weapons and tools. After the end of that war the rebuilding normally would have taken a generation. Barely a home, other than in Suzdal, was left standing, and in addition we had to help Roum with the building of their railroads.\n\n\"Beyond all that we had to change our industry completely to outfit a new kind of army. Now it was rifles, breechloading guns, more powerful locomotives, aerosteamers, ironclads, new ships for the navy, heavier rail for the track. Tolerances on all machinery had to be improved a full magnitude or more.\n\n\"For example our old muzzle-loading flintlocks were nothing more than pipes mounted on wooden stocks; if they were off a hundredth of an inch in the barrel no big deal. The caliber of the ball was three-hundredths of an inch smaller than the barrel anyhow.\n\n\"When it comes to our new Sharps model breechloaders, however, we're talking thousandths of an inch tolerances on each part. It took tremendous effort, precision, and training to reach that. We had to take thousands of men and women and train them from scratch, and that took time, surplus, and money. Remember, they still have to eat, have housing, and the basics of life, even though while they are learning new skills they aren't directly contributing anything to the economy.\"\n\nAndrew nodded, trying to stay focused on what was being said but already feeling frustrated. His point of attention had always been the battlefield, and the politics of shaping a republic, having to deal with this aspect, was troubling to him.\n\n\"All our production energy went into improving our military,\" Webster continued without pause, \"rather than things directly needed to build a broader base of wealth for everybody. Even though we were at peace, we were still running a wartime economy. Living standards, both here and in Roum, actually started to drop as a result even though people were working harder.\n\n\"If we had had five years, better yet ten, we could have adjusted, eased off, produced things like housing, schools, churches, hospitals other than for the military, improved roads, made better farm tools, laid track for the transport of goods rather than for items of military priority, trained doctors for the villages-rather than the army, and for that matter had hundreds of thousands of young men building these things rather than carrying rifles. So when this new war started the strain redoubled.\n\n\"Add into that the fact that more than half of Roum is occupied territory. Some of our richest land is in the hands of the Horde, with more than a million refugees having to be provided for.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Hans interjected. \"I keep hearing about how nearly half the Rus have died as a result of the wars.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Webster replied quietly.\n\n\"Then give that land to the Roum refugees.\"\n\n\"They still have to have places to live, seeds for crops. Some of the fields have been fallow for five years or more and are overgrown. We're trying that, but still, what they're producing is maybe one-tenth of what they grew a year ago.\"\n\nHans grunted, looked around, and finally spat out the open window. Andrew could not help but grin and made certain not to make eye contact with Kathleen.\n\n\"The point is,\" Webster pressed, \"the economy is brittle. The best analogy I can give is that we're like the Confederacy in late 1864. Sherman is cutting the heart out of Georgia, Sheridan has burned the valley, the rail lines have been pounded to pieces by overuse and undermaintenance. I remember Sherman saying that war was not just the armies that fought, it was the entire nation, and he was taking the war into the heart of the enemy nation.\n\n\"That's what the Bantag have done, though I don't know if they're actually aware of it or not.\"\n\n\"From what I suspect of Jurak he's aware of it,\" Andrew replied.\n\n\"I hate to say this, sir,\" Webster replied, \"but no matter how gallant our army the folks back home are just plumb worn-out. People no longer trust the paper money we introduced. The women that make fuses for shells, we were paying them five dollars a week a year ago, now it's fifty. I'm printing money twenty-four hours a day, and no one wants it anymore. Andrew, the tens of thousands who work in the factories have to eat since they're no longer growing their own food. We have no gold or silver reserves, so what do we pay them with?\"\n\nHe fell silent looking around guiltily as if he had created the bad tidings. Everyone knew he had wrought a miracle just managing to build the system up, and for Andrew it was frightful to hear that it was on the point of collapsing.\n\n\"And the Bantag, isn't that reason enough to work?\" Hans replied. \"Damn it all, their sons and husbands are dying up at the front. Isn't that reason to go and work?\"\n\n\"A growling stomach, your children crying because they're hungry can blunt the argument,\" Gates replied. \"I'm out there every day talking to people, getting news.\"\n\n\"And what are they saying?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"Maybe if the Bantag were pouring over the White Mountains by Kev, maybe that would rouse them up again. But then again, Andrew, how many times have they already endured that since we got here? It's these damn Chin ambassadors talking peace and the word going straight from the floor of Congress to the streets that's helping to undermine it.\"\n\n\"And can't they see it's a damned lie?\" Hans cried. \"I was there, damn it. The Bantag are no different than the Merki, or even the Tugars for that matter.\"\n\n\"We have to talk not about what we wish or desire, but rather what is,\" Hawthorne replied.\n\nAndrew looked over at his young chief of staff.\n\n\"Go on, Vincent.\"\n\n\"I think Webster and Gates are right. War weariness is eroding our ability to fight. All these people went into this war with little if any concept of what freedom was, other than a vague ideal. Next they expected that it would be one short hard fight and decided. No one, not even us, anticipated a series of wars that would drag on for close to a decade.\"\n\nAndrew found that idea alone to be troubling. The question had been raised more than once during his old war back home as to whether a republic had the ability to maintain a long-term conflict. It was through the personal strength of George Washington alone that the Revolution had not finally degenerated into a military dictatorship.\n\nIn the war with the Confederacy if victory had not been so evidently close in 1864, the Democrats most likely would have won the elections and accepted a divided country, thus squandering the blood of more than a quarter million Union men who had died to hold the United States together. Given that knowledge he wondered if a republic could endure this continual battering?\n\n\"Politics in Congress,\" Vincent continued, \"is dividing the Republic not just between Roum and Rus, but also between those who are accepting the bait of terms and those who are not. Finally, there is the simple military question we must all face.\"\n\n\"And that is?\"\n\n\"Can we still win in the field?\"\n\nAndrew looked around the room. Kathleen stood in the doorway, hands tucked into her apron pockets. Upstairs he could hear one of the children engaged in some mischief, their nanny trying to shush him to silence. All eyes were upon him, forcing the question that had burdened his soul long before the start of the doomed offensive.\n\n\"It's not a question of can we win,\" Andrew offered, \"rather it's a statement that there is no alternative to victory. Even if we had lost the war back home, we would have gone on living. Sure, we all remember the stories about Andersonville and Libby Prison, but even then we knew that if cornered, surrender was still an option, and most Rebs would share their canteen with you and bandage your wounds. We were fighting a war where surrender for either side was an option. If we had lost that war, we would not have liked the results, but we would have gone home and continued to live.\n\n\"We'll most likely never know if indeed we did win the war back on Earth. I think it was evident that we would. As for the Confederates, defeat did not mean annihilation or even enslavement, so we were all seeing that many of them were willing finally to have peace and to accept the consequences. Here there is no such luxury.\"\n\n\"You haven't answered the question, sir,\" Vincent pressed.\n\nAndrew bristled slightly at the cold, almost accusing tone in Vincent's voice but knew that the boy was doing his job, and besides, he would be forced to answer the same question before Congress.\n\n\"If it continues as it is,\" he hesitated, looking down at his clenched fist, \"no, we will lose the war.\"\n\nThere was a stirring in the room, looks of fear, shock. All except Hans who didn't stir, his jaw continuing to move mechanically as he worked his chew of tobacco.\n\n\"Why?\" Gates asked.\n\n\"It was always the edge of superior technology that offset their numbers. We had barely a corps of men armed with smoothbores when the Tugars came. We were outnumbered ten to one. but it was enough to stop them. Against the Merki we fielded six corps, about the same size army that fought at Gettysburg. We were outnumbered six to one there, and that was a damn close run for they had smoothbores and artillery the same as we did, but we had moved on to rifles, rockets, and better airships.\n\n\"Even last fall we had an edge. They had the land ironclads, but we quickly made one that was better and armed with Gatling guns. But in one short year they've caught up with some sort of rapid-fire gun, their airships are as good as ours, and their new ironclads heavier than ours and able to outgun us.\n\n\"As to the numbers. One corps is wasted guarding the frontier to the west. Two more corps are ringing the territory to the southeast of Roum. We have three corps in the pocket down on the eastern coast of the Inland Sea, and\u2014until three days ago\u2014we had eight corps on the main front. Now we have little more than five corps on that front.\"\n\nHe hesitated for a moment.\n\n\"So we've lost the edge. They're outproducing us. They outnumber us six to one on the Capua Front. We can assume that within a fortnight they will force a crossing the same as we tried, the difference being that they will succeed. At that moment, in a tactical sense, we will be exactly where we were back at midwinter. Strategically, however, the difference will be that their weapons are better, their commander more prudent, and we will be down well over fifty thousand men compared to what we had the last time.\"\n\n\"And so that's it?\" Gates asked.\n\n\"I think the political ramifications are clear enough,\" Andrew continued. \"Marcus, God rest him, is dead. Though he was bloody difficult at times, he was a friend I could trust. That strong leadership from Roum is now a vacuum.\n\nFlavius is good as Speaker of the House but doesn't have the following Marcus did. I fear that once the line is broken, Jurak will shrewdly offer terms yet again, the fears between the two states of the Republic will explode, the Republic will fracture, and then we shall be destroyed.\" Andrew stopped talking. As he reached over to his glass of tea he realized his hand was trembling.\n\n\"Are you suggesting that we stage a coup d'etat?\" Gates asked.\n\n\"I didn't say that,\" Andrew replied sharply.\n\n\"It has to be considered,\" Hawthorne replied forcefully. Startled, Andrew looked over at him.\n\n\"Sir, the army knows what it is fighting for. They see what the enemy can do. For that matter damn near every veteran who is no longer in the service because of disabilities understands it as well. Yes, they're war weary, we all are, but they'll be damned if they'll ever bare their throats to the Bantags' butchering knives.\n\n\"And as for Congress. If those bastards are willing to sell us down the river, if they're maneuvering to splinter the Republic, then they deserve to be hung as traitors, every one of them.\"\n\n\"What you're saying is treasonous,\" Andrew snapped. \"If this be treason, make the most of it,\" Hawthorne cried.\n\nVincent looked over at Hans. \"Ask Ketswana to tell us what he learned.\"\n\nHans nodded and quickly spoke to Ketswana in the dialect of Chin which the captives had used while in slavery. Ketswana replied in broken Rus.\n\n\"Roum soldier, one who hung. Was in tavern five minutes before shot fired.\"\n\nSurprised, Andrew looked at Hans.\n\n\"I have my own intelligence net here; they answer to Vincent when I'm not around.\"\n\n\"This was never authorized by me.\"\n\n\"It was by me. The Chin and Zulus were neutral; they could talk to both sides, Rus and Roum. With the stress developing between the two sides I thought it best to act, so I got this going last autumn.\"\n\n\"Something about that shooting didn't sit right from the start,\" Vincent replied. \"I checked that poor boy's record.\n\nPromoted to corporal for heroism at Rocky Hill. Invalid due to dysentery and the last nine months in hospital. But everyone said he was a good soldier, eager to get back. Not the assassin type.\"\n\n\"But he was found in the church?\" Kathleen asked.\n\n\"Yes, he went running in to try and catch who did it. Then a mob grabbed him, claimed he had a gun, and he was dragged out and hung.\"\n\n\"According to who?\"\n\nHans looked over at Ketswana.\n\n\"One of my men drink with him, follow, see all, get away before he hung, too.\"\n\n\"So who was leading this mob?\"\n\n\"It might have been a crowd carried away with frenzy. It might have been more, though,\" Hans said.\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"Kill the president. There's no vice president; therefore, the Speaker of the House, Tiberius Flavius, becomes president. Either he was plotting to do it or someone else.\"\n\n\"Flavius is an honorable man,\" Andrew replied sharply. \"I knew him as a damn good officer who came up through the ranks, and he's a wounded veteran of Hispania. He's not the type.\"\n\n\"Or then a countercoup,\" Hawthorne replied. \"Blame Flavius for the death of Kal, claim it's a plot by Roum to seize the government, and break the Republic in the process.\"\n\n\"Bugarin?\"\n\n\"My likely candidate,\" Hawthorne snapped bitterly.\n\n\"Damn all.\" Andrew sighed. So that's why Hawthorne is thinking coup, strike first in order to prevent one.\n\nThere was too much to assimilate. He had been far too preoccupied with the preparations for the offensive and the dealing with the results to give serious consideration as to what was going on seven hundred miles away in the capital. He knew there were tensions but prayed that a successful attack, even one that was just a partial success, would quiet the differences and create the resolve to push the war through to its conclusion. He wondered self-critically if that concern had clouded his decision-making to go ahead with the offensive.\n\nHe suddenly felt exhausted, unable to decide what to do next. He knew that a mere nod of his head would mean that Vincent would get up, walk out of the room, and within the hour Congress would be arrested. Besides the training school of cadets who were now the 35th Maine and 44th New York, there was a sprinkling of forty or fifty men from the original units in the city, holding various key positions. There was a brigade of troops garrisoned there and thousands of discharged vets in the factories who could be called out in an emergency. He'd have the government by morning, straighten out the mess, then go from there.\n\nAnd, damn it, destroy forever what I wanted to create here. Of that he was certain. Once the precedent had been set, it would be forever embedded in the heart of the Republic. Washington had resisted the temptation knowing the history of Rome and Greece when it came to coups. He would rather have seen the Revolution go down to bloody defeat than betray it. Napoleon, rather than Lincoln and Washington, would then be the model for this Republic, this entire world. The concept of a republic which he had so carefully nurtured since first setting foot upon this world would be lost forever.\n\nYet even if I did seize control, then what? The war is still being lost. We might hold on for a while, maybe even create a stalemate on the Capua Front, but still Jurak will wear us down, for he has the labor of millions of slaves to support him, and if need be feed him with their own flesh. Either way we lose.\n\nHe looked at his friends. How to admit it, that after ten years of valiant effort, they were losing. Have we been losing all along, he wondered, and were just not willing to admit it? If that's true, then is the dream of a republic one that is ultimately doomed to failure? Though he wanted to believe in Kal, he sensed that his old friend was weakening under the stress, and for the time being he was out of the picture. The other side promised peace. And the greater complexities of the issues\u2014well, tragically, the average person just didn't seem to grasp them.\n\nHe had been in the army too long, he realized. In the military issues were far clearer\u2014there was survival or death, that was drilled in from day one. You did the right thing, you survived, make a mistake \u2026 you died, or worse yet, good men died because of you.\n\nA hell of a lot of good men had just died because of his mistake, his not realizing that the very nature of the war was changing yet again.\n\nIt's changed again, so we have to find a way to change it back in our favor. He looked over at Emil.\n\n\"I want the truth from you, my friend.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"Since I got wounded, I mean since I came back to command,\" he hesitated.\n\nEmil leaned forward in his chair. He sensed Kathleen's watchful gaze on him.\n\n\"I'm not the same. Something's changed in me.\"\n\n\"We're all changed,\" Emil started soothingly, but an angry wave from Andrew silenced him.\n\n\"No, I don't mean that. It's deeper than that. I feel like I've lost something. Not just my edge, far deeper, the very mettle of my soul. All along I sensed a problem with our assault at Capua, I sensed it but failed to clearly get ahead of the problem and reason it out before it happened.\"\n\n\"No one could have anticipated the response from their new leader,\" Emil replied.\n\n\"But I should have. There's no damn room for a mistake in my position.\"\n\nHe looked around the room at his old friends, wondering for a moment if he was about to dissolve into tears. Do that, though, and we've all lost. In the end, he realized, all of it, from the moment they had come through the Portal of Light, back so many years, so many ages ago, all rested upon him.\n\nDamn, I never wanted this, and then he hesitated with his inner remorse as the truth surged up from within. The self-humility was a lie, a damnable lie. He had indeed wanted it.\n\nHe had wanted command of the regiment, Hans knew that as far back as Fredericksburg. He loved his old commander, Colonel Estes as a father, but like any son of ability, inwardly he longed to transcend what his father was and could be. And when Estes fell at Gettysburg he had mourned him, yet he had sprung to take his place.\n\nHe had wanted a brigade, knowing he could do better than far too many of the damned fools Meade and Grant allowed to command. Here was a harsh realization. One is taught to have humility, to admire one's elders and emulate them, and a display of raw ambition is somehow immoral.\n\nYet he knew in the core of his soul that he was blessed with something, and that something was the ability to lead \u2026 and to dream of all the greatness that a republic could be. Yet so unfortunately a republic, and a volunteer army of a republic, far too often drew into its folds the weak, the venal, those who were ambitious for their own sakes.\n\nHe looked around at his friends.\n\n\"I fomented a rebellion against the natural order of this world,\" he said slowly. \"When we realized what the hordes were, the men actually voted to take ship, to find some safe haven and sit it out, but I talked them into fighting and convinced the Rus they could fight.\n\n\"And now it is all crashing down around me.\n\n\"Emil, I think I've been sick. Sick within my soul. Ever since this winter the stress of it has paralyzed me. I feel like a puppet. The strings are moved, I woodenly follow into the next step, and thus I've numbly wandered to this point. The government is collapsing, I allowed an offensive to be launched that my inner heart told me not to allow, and now I sit here numbly as the end closes in around us.\"\n\nEmil said nothing, staring straight into his eyes. The moment seemed to stretch out.\n\n\"I believe there are two paths to this world, to any world,\" Andrew said slowly, his voice thick with emotion. \"The one is to believe what the masses believe. To make yourself part of them, and to follow, to follow even as you claim to lead.\"\n\n\"And the other path?\" Emil asked.\n\n\"If God gave you the ability, even if everyone else thinks you are mad, then use it.\"\n\nEmil chuckled softly.\n\n\"We shall either meanly lose or nobly save the last best hope of mankind,\" Emil finally offered.\n\n\"I'm taking control of this situation,\" Andrew said. \"We're all frightened right now, me most of all. Either we become mad and fight back, or we die. But if we are doomed to die, let's die as free men.\"\n\n\"The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.\"\n\nSurprised, he looked up at Kathleen, who had just spoken. She smiled knowingly, as if having sensed every thought that had crossed his mind.\n\n\"And as our case is new,\" Gates continued, \"we must act anew and think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.\"\n\nAndrew smiled at the recitation of Lincoln's famous words. The room was hot, silent except for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the comer of the room, the only other sound the laughter of one of the children upstairs.\n\nWe must disenthrall ourselves \u2026 but how damn it, how?\n\n\"We have to end the war now,\" Kathleen said. Her voice was hard, cold. It wasn't a statement of speculation or hope, it was merely hard honest fact.\n\nHe looked up at her.\n\n\"You mean negotiate?\"\n\n\"No, damn it. No! We all know where that will lead. It will merely postpone our deaths. If you do that, I'll go upstairs and poison our children rather than have them live with the death we all know will come. Jurak cannot rest until all in this room, and all touched by you, are dead. He understands us too well, and thus understands the threat that we are.\"\n\n\"So what is the alternative then?\" Andrew sighed. \"Another offensive? The government will block it. For that matter I wonder if we'll even have a government or a united effort in another few days.\"\n\n\"Exodus, go north,\" Webster ventured quietly.\n\n\"You mean just leave?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"Exactly. We did it before, we evacuated all of Rus against the Merki. Well, maybe the mistake was we tried to hold on to the steppe region. Lord knows how far north the forest belt extends. Pack it up, and go into the forest until we find a place where they won't follow.\"\n\n\"We've talked about that before,\" Vincent replied. \"It's impossible. First off, the government will break apart on that one. Second, they'll follow us, and we'll be burdened down with hundreds of thousands of civilians, children, old people. It will turn into a slaughter.\"\n\n\"Well if the government does surrender, that's where I think we should all head,\" Webster replied. \"I'll be damned if I stay here and wait to have my throat slit. At least there's some hope in that.\"\n\n\"If I were Jurak,\" Andrew replied, \"I wouldn't care if it took twenty years. I'd hunt down the survivors. There is no way they can ever dream of continuing their ride until they know we are all dead, for once they turn their backs upon us we'll rebuild. The fundamental issue, besides the moon feast, the enslavement, is that they are nomadic. They cannot leave a cancer behind that will spread in their wake.\"\n\n\"He'll kill everyone once we're dead or fled,\" Hans said. \"You people seem to have forgotten something in all this. Andrew, I remember the dream was there for you at the start, but it seems to have blurred. This is not just about us. We started a revolution on this world. The only way it will survive is if we spread the revolution around the entire planet. We must free everyone or no one. I left millions of comrades in slavery when I escaped, and I vowed upon my soul to help set them free and if need be to die doing it.\"\n\nAndrew was surprised by the passion of Hans's words. He was normally so reticent, and so rarely was an idealism allowed to creep out from behind the gruff Germanic exterior of the old sergeant major. He could not help but smile at the revolutionary passion that moved his oldest friend.\n\n\"Then free them,\" Varinna Ferguson said in flawless English.\n\nFor the first time since the meeting had started Andrew took serious notice of the woman sitting on the chair by the doorway. Kathleen's hands slipped down to rest on the woman's slender shoulders. As she spoke it seemed that the voice almost came from somewhere else, so horribly scarred were her features, the skin that had grown over the burns a taut expressionless mask. And yet he could still sense the graceful beauty that was locked within, that had caused Chuck Ferguson to see beyond the torn exterior to the beauty and strength of the soul.\n\n\"I didn't know you could speak English,\" Gates exclaimed, looking over at her in surprise.\n\n\"You never asked,\" she replied, her words causing a round of chuckles from the others. \"You were always too busy talking to my husband to notice me.\"\n\n\"My apologies, madam,\" Gates quickly said, his features turning red, \"my most humble apologies.\"\n\n\"You said 'free them,' \" Hans said, the slightest tone of eagerness in his voice. \"How, may I ask?\"\n\n\"How did we first know that you were alive?\" she replied.\n\n\"Jack Petracci flew over us.\"\n\nShe looked inquiringly at Andrew, who nodded. She slowly stood up. In her hands was a battered notebook.\n\n\"These are some of my husband's writings. How do you say \u2026 ideas, dreams. That is why he taught me English, so I could read them after he was gone.\"\n\nShe put the book upon the table and all looked at it with a bit of reverence, for without the mind of Chuck Ferguson they knew they would have died long ago.\n\n\"Right after you were rescued, before the war started on the eastern front, he made some notes here.\" And she opened the book, skimming through the pages until she finally came to the place she wanted. \"Just a few pages, but on the night before he died he pointed them out to me, told me to work upon them.\"\n\nShe passed the book over to Andrew. He carefully took the bound volume, scanning the page, wondering how she had managed to master Chuck's infamous scrawled crablike writings.\n\nShe reached into her apron pocket, pulled out a sheaf of papers, carefully unfolded them, and laid them out on the table. It wasn't a bundle of papers but rather a large single sheet of drafting paper, half a dozen feet across and several feet wide, taking up most of the table. Andrew noticed just how badly her hands had been burned as well\u2014two of the fingers on her left hand were little more than stumps. As he scanned the paper he saw that half of it was a detailed map, the other half covered with a different kind of handwriting than Chuck's, simple block lettering, some of it calculations, the rest commentary with lines drawn to the map while the far right side of the sheet had sketches of airships.\n\n\"I did,\" she hesitated, \"calculations. I think it is possible to do, but the chances? It is win all or lose all.\"\n\nAndrew stood up and went over to her side, the others gathering around him. He stood silent, scanning the map, then the plan written out, and finally the calculations. It was the details of the plan Vincent had forwarded to him just prior to the assault. He looked over at Vincent; there was the slightest flicker of a smile tracing the corners of his mouth.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Webster announced sharply, breaking the silence.\n\nAndrew looked over at Hans and saw the eyes of his comrade shining brightly, and he felt a stab of fear, knowing what it undoubtedly meant.\n\n\"I rejected this idea out of hand less than a week ago,\" he finally announced.\n\n\"That was a week ago,\" Varinna replied. \"Today is today, the day after a defeat. Just minutes ago I heard you admit that we shall lose the war. If we are to lose the war, then this plan should go forward.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Emil asked, leaning over the table to study the lines on the map. \"I think anyone who goes on this, particularly the airship operation is doomed to die.\"\n\n\"Because it won't matter then,\" she announced smoothly. \"The men who go would die anyhow if they stay home. If they go and die, and lose, then it is the same. If they go, and die, but change the path of the war to victory, then it is a sacrifice that is worth it.\"\n\nAndrew marveled at her cold precise logic, which cut straight to the heart of the matter.\n\nAs if from a great distance he could hear the grandfather clock chiming the hour\u2014it was midnight.\n\nAll waited for him to speak. He was torn. He so desperately wanted to grab this, to cling to it, to see it bring them to a change in fate. Yet he feared it as well and all that it suggested and held, especially for Hans.\n\n\"This is what I've dreamed of all along. I say go,\" Hans finally said, breaking the silence. Andrew turned, looking into his eyes again.\n\nAndrew finally nodded.\n\n\"We do it. Start preparations at once.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Who was it? Kal stirred uncomfortably, the pain was numbing but he had known worse, losing an arm, the beatings old Boyar Ivor, might his soul burn in hell, had administered.\n\nYet who did it?\n\nHe opened his eyes. His wife, sitting at the foot of the bed, roused from her sleep and started to get out of the chair. Her features were pale, heavy cheeks looking.pasty in the candlelight.\n\nHe motioned for her to sit back down, but she was already at the side of the bed.\n\n\"Water, my husband?\" she whispered.\n\nHe started to shake his head, but the pain was too much.\n\n\"No, nothing.\"\n\n\"I made some broth, beef, your favorite.\"\n\n\"No, please.\"\n\nHe looked around the room.\n\n\"Emil?\"\n\n\"He left. Said I was to fetch him if you wanted.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"He's at the colonel's home.\"\n\n\"Ah, I see.\"\n\nHe knew she would not relent with her attentions until she could do something, so he finally let her pull the blankets up, even though the night was so hot. He remained quiet, staring at the candle as she finally settled back into her chair and picked up her knitting which had fallen to the floor when she had dozed off.\n\nWhy would Emil be at Andrew's? Were they planning something?\n\nNot Andrew. Never Andrew. In the beginning he could have so easily become boyar himself. No one would have objected, least of all me, he reasoned. I was just peasant, he was already officer, like a noble and he was the liberator. Instead he propped me up, trained me, made me the president.\n\nBut was that so I could always follow what he desired. Bugarin said as much, that a Yankee could never rule for long, so he had chosen a dumb peasant to be his shield. He wondered on that thought for a moment. There was a certain wisdom to it, for in the end never did I go against what Andrew desired; therefore, in a way he did rule without all the bother of it.\n\n\"Not Andrew,\" he whispered.\n\nShe stirred, ready to get up again and he allowed his eyes to flutter shut. She settled back down in her chair.\n\nBugarin? Logical. Blame it on Flavius. I'm dead, Flavius is killed by the mob, Bugarin becomes president and then boyar again. So guard against Bugarin. But it just might have been Flavius after all. Yet if I had died, we would not have lived an hour in the city of Suzdal.\n\nWho then?\n\nI have lost Congress. Bugarin has the votes of those who want an end to it. The Roum congressmen are in terror, lost with the news of Marcus's death. If I continue the war as Andrew wants, then they will block it, splitting the Republic. If I try to stop it, what will Andrew do?\n\nAn inch to the right Emil said. But one inch, and I would not have to worry about this. I would be standing before Perm and his glorious son Kesus, all cares forgotten. Yet Tanya would still be here, the grandchildren, their half-mad father Vincent.\n\nAh, now there is a thought. Vincent is the warhawk. Could he be the mask behind the mask? Andrew would never do it, but Vincent was capable. If Bugarin tried a coup, Andrew would block it but might fall as well. Then it would be Vincent.\n\nNo. What was it Emil called it? A word for too much fear. But it was troubling, and he could not go to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "The fact that he had asked for the meeting had caught him by surprise. Walking into the main hall of the Capitol Building he stopped, looking to his right toward his own chambers. The building was empty except for the lone military guard posted under the open rotunda. It had been started in the year before the start of the Bantag War. Though Keane insisted that construction must go forward in spite of the war, the less than half-completed dome was now covered with canvas.\n\nHe turned to his left and walked into the meeting chamber of the House of Representatives. Often he had heard the shouted debates coming from this room, and he found it distasteful, a rowdy mix of foreigners and lowborn peasants. At least the fifteen members of the Senate were, except for one or two, of the proper blood, even those from Roum, in spite of their being cursed pagans.\n\n\"Senator Bugarin. Thank you for coming.\"\n\nThe chair behind the desk turned and the diminutive Flavius was staring at him. He was lean and wiry, a mere servant in the house of Marcus and now the Speaker.\n\nThough he loathed the type, Bugarin could sense that Flavius was a soldier's soldier, one whom the veterans who predominated in Congress could trust whether they were of Rus or Roum. And since the pagans were the majority, of course their man would control this half of Congress.\n\nBugarin said nothing. He simply approached the chair, waiting for this one to rise in front of a better. Flavius, as if sensing the game, waited, and then slowly stood, favoring his right leg, giving a bare nod of the head in acknowledgment of the man who controlled the other half of the legislators.\n\n\"I'll come straight to the issue,\" Flavius said in Rus, his accent atrocious to Bugarin's ears. \"We both know that poor soldier who was murdered today had nothing to do with the assassination attempt.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Bugarin asked politely.\n\nFlavius extended his hands in a gesture of exasperation. \"We might disagree on a great many things, but to assassinate the president. Never.\"\n\n\"Are you saying he acted alone then?\"\n\n\"You know precisely what I am saying. The boy was innocent. He should have been standing in these chambers receiving a medal rather than being hung by a Rus mob.\"\n\n\"So you are saying we murdered him?\"\n\n\"Damn you,\" Flavius muttered in Latin, but Bugarin could sense what was said and bristled.\n\n\"The Republic is dying; we can still save it,\" Flavius continued, gaining control of his temper.\n\n\"Republic? It is already dead,\" Bugarin snapped. \"It died when your soldiers ran at Capua, unable even to retake their own territory.\"\n\n\"I had a brother with Eleventh Corps,\" Flavius announced coldly. \"If he is dead, he died fighting, not running. I've been a soldier most of my life, and I know my people. They are as good in battle as those from Rus. I wish I could strangle with my own hands whoever started these rumors, these lies about my people.\"\n\n\"Understandable you would react that way.\"\n\nFlavius stopped for a moment, not sure of what to say next.\n\n\"If that is all you wish to discuss?\" Bugarin asked haughtily.\n\n\"No, of course not.\"\n\n\"Then out with it. It's late, and I have other concerns.\"\n\n\"Will you pull Rus out of the war?\"\n\n\"My position is well-known.\"\n\n\"And that is?\"\n\n\"The war is unwinnable now. We must seek a way out.\"\n\n\"And that means selling Roum to the Bantag?\"\n\n\"Are you not contemplating the same deal with Jurak?\" Flavius said nothing for a moment.\n\n\"You have spies as do I. I know that Marcus, before his death, was secretly meeting with the ambassadors before they were forwarded to the Senate. And remember, Flavius, the issues of war and peace rest with the Senate. The great colonel designed it that way, did he not?\"\n\n\"There is nothing more to be said,\" Flavius replied coldly.\n\nBugarin smiled.\n\n\"It was a feeble attempt,\" Bugarin ventured just as he was starting to turn to leave.\n\n\"What?\" And there was a cold note of challenge in Flavius's voice.\n\n\"Just that. Too bad you missed.\"\n\nAs Bugarin turned the sound of a dagger being drawn hissed in the assembly hall. Bugarin turned, dagger drawn as well.\n\n\"Come on you lowborn bastard,\" Bugarin snarled. \"Spill blood here and show what a lie this place is.\"\n\nFlavius was as still as statue, dagger poised low. Finally, he relaxed, letting the blade slip back into its sheath.\n\n\"Yes, it's true I know not who my father is. My bastardy is of birth, not of behavior.\"\n\nBugarin tensed, ready to spring, but knew that before he even crossed the few feet that separated them the old veteran would have his blade back out and buried to the hilt. Forcing a smile, Bugarin stepped back several feet.\n\n\"It will be settled soon enough. I think the question is now, who will betray whom first.\"\n\n\"As I assumed, Senator,\" Flavius said with a smile." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Andrew slowed as they rode past the station, reining in his horse for a moment to let the long string of ambulances pass. The hospital trains had been coming in throughout the night, more than three thousand men over the last week, and with each casualty unloaded a new story was blurted out about the disaster at Capua.\n\nIn the predawn darkness he knew no one would recognize him. In the past he would have stopped to talk with the wounded as they were off-loaded, offer encouragement, but not this morning. On this of all mornings there were other things to be done before the sun rose.\n\nHans, riding beside him, bit off a chew and passed the plug over to Andrew, who nodded his thanks and took a bite of the bitter tobacco.\n\nThey rode in silence. Hans, slumped comfortably in the saddle, carbine cradled in one arm. Andrew looked over at him, wondering, wanting to say so much but not sure how to say it.\n\n\"Hans?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nHe sounded so relaxed.\n\n\"Are you afraid?\" Andrew whispered.\n\nHans smiled.\n\n\"A slave doesn't have the luxury to be afraid. Remember, I was a slave, and then I was freed, at least in body. I wonder if this is how Lazarus felt, having seen what was beyond and then returning.\"\n\nHe shook his head, as if the dark thoughts of the years of imprisonment weighed him down.\n\n\"Every day I've had since has been a gift. Now it's time to pay for the gift.\"\n\n\"I wish it was different.\"\n\n\"I know, son. It's all right, though,\" Hans said soothingly. \"You were the one that had to make the decision to do this and now bear the responsibility for our lives. This might very well be the hardest command decision you've ever made.\"\n\nAndrew nodded.\n\n\"Once we take off, the commotion will certainly be noticed. and you'll have to tell Congress. If we lose\"\u2014and he chuckled\u2014\"well, there goes the last hope I guess.\" Andrew didn't want to think of that alternative yet. It would mean every single airship and ironclad was gone. Without them, Jurak would slice through the Capua line like a hot knife through butter. As it stood now, if he second-guessed what was truly up, he might do it anyhow.\n\n\"Damn tough decision,\" Hans said, \"and here you were worried if you'd lost your nerve.\"\n\n\"Just before we went in at Capua, I lied to you, Hans.\"\n\nHans chuckled and spat. \"You mean about willingly sacrificing me if it meant victory.\"\n\n\"Yes, I've sacrificed too many. I still think I should go on this one, not you.\"\n\n\"Can you speak Chin?\" Hans asked. \"How about the Bantag slave dialect, or even Bantag for that matter?\" Andrew sighed and shook his head.\n\n\"Well that kind of settles it, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Andrew. Sometimes it's the staying behind and doing nothing that's the hardest thing of all.\"\n\nThey stopped as a diminutive switching engine, one of the old 4-4-0 models wheezed past them, pushing a flatcar loaded with two freshly made ten-pound breechloaders. \"I've been thinking on that, too,\" Andrew said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The doing nothing.\"\n\nHans chuckled. \"Actually, my friend, given my choice, I'm glad I'm going rather than staying here and dealing with this snake pit of politics.\"\n\nAndrew could not help but smile as they urged their mounts forward after the train passed.\n\nOnce clear of the yard they rode up through the rows of roughly made brick homes that housed the thousands of workers who labored down in the valley of the Vina River.\n\nPast one of the burial mounds of the Tugars they continued their climb up the hill, Hans stopping for a moment to watch the inferno of steam and smoke cascading up from the foundry as a new batch of molten iron was released from its cauldron.\n\n\"It's almost beautiful,\" Hans exclaimed, pointing to the towering clouds of smoke caught and illuminated by the first light of early dawn. Andrew found himself in agreement. It made him think of the school of artists back on the old world, who worshiped the beauty of nature and painted the scenery of the Hudson River valley.\n\nThe smoke and steam had the same quality as the billowing afternoon cumulus, cloaking a mountaintop, but this mountain was man-made, the clouds man-made as well. The lighting, however, was unworldly, the deep morning reds unique to this world.\n\nHe smiled at the thought of the word unworldly, unworldly for home, but then this was home now, after all these years the sunlight normal, the twin moons normal, the lighter feel when one walked normal as well.\n\n\"I take it yesterday's session with the Senate was bad?\" Hans asked.\n\nAndrew nodded. \"It's deadlock. Kal is nowhere out of the woods yet. Flavius refuses to step in as acting president since it would mean that a pro-peace man would take his place, and Bugarin is badgering to sign the agreement presented by the Chin ambassadors.\"\n\n\"Well, in an hour I'll be beyond it all,\" Hans announced.\n\n\"I know,\" Andrew whispered.\n\n\"Maybe by doing nothing at all you might be doing the best thing possible,\" Hans said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You'll figure it out.\"\n\nHans chuckled, and Andrew knew his friend had presented him with a little something to dwell on and was not about to say anything more on the subject.\n\nTheir path led them through what had once been the grove where he had first admitted to Kathleen that he loved her, long since gone and replaced with warehouses and yet more brick homes. Finally, they crested the road leading along the banks of the reservoir and were out of the new city of Suzdal. The waters of the lake were still, a mirror surface reflecting the morning sky, a soft welcome relief.\n\nDirectly ahead were several low clapboard buildings covered with camouflage netting and painted a dark green and brown. Lights still glowed in the windows and there was a bustle of activity inside. Out around the building dozens were racing back and forth.\n\nRiding up, the two dismounted and hitched their horses. Varinna stood in the open doorway, and it was obvious she had been up all night, as she wearily came down to greet the two.\n\nSince the decision to launch the mission all of her people had worked at a frenzied pace, made more difficult because of Andrew's decision to clamp down a tight lid of security on the whole operation. It was a near-impossible thing to contain, with the city only a couple of miles away but by some miracle no one in Congress had found out, most likely because they were too preoccupied with their own squabbles to notice the round-the-clock insanity up at the aerosteamer field.\n\nAs for the dozens of messages sent to the front and to Roum, ordering the redeployment of aerosteamers and the remaining regiment of land ironclads, that had all been done using a book code. Admiral Bullfinch had personally overseen loading the ironclads during the night. The two ships carrying the machines and a transport hauling hydrogen vats, ammunition, and ground crews had all sailed under cover of night. If everything was going according to plan, they should have arrived during the night at Tyre and also alerted Stan Bamberg that things were suddenly going to get very hot.\n\nVarinna smiled and extended her hand.\n\n\"Everything's ready,\" she announced. \"Any word from Roum?\"\n\n\"Nothing. The front's quiet.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nAndrew took her hand and squeezed it, pleased by the light that seemed to sparkle in her eyes. This effort had triggered something within her, and he felt a surge of confidence that she was the mastermind who had conceived so many of the details. The death of Chuck had deeply shaken him, so much so that he had failed to realize the capabilities that were alive in her.\n\n\"Let's go to the field.\" And leading the way, she walked down the slope and out onto the flat open landing field. Crews were dragging out the last of the airships from the hangars, and engines were beginning to turn over.\n\nHe was awed by the panoramic sight laid out before him. Sixteen Eagle airships were lined up wingtip to wingtip. Twelve of them brand-new, four having come back from the front for repairs and engine replacements. In the shadowy light they looked ghostly, giants out of some forgotten age of the past, or a foretaste of the world to come.\n\nThe men chosen for the mission were already lining up beside their machines, ten to each airship in addition to the crews. Nearly all of them were Hans's old companions, survivors of his liberation last year, or the winter flanking assault down into the valley of the Ebro.\n\nThree hundred of their comrades from the Chin brigade had been loaded on trains the morning after the decision was made to launch the assault and sent by express to Roum, there to take transports to Tyre. With them went equipment to refit the twenty-eight Eagles and thirty Hornets that would fly from Capua to Roum, and from there down to Tyre as well. If all went according to plan there, those airships would lift off shortly before midday.\n\n\"You know, Varinna, you were holding out on me,\" Andrew said, looking over at her and trying to appear cross.\n\n\"The airships? Some needed repairs, the rest, well there were problems, adjustments, and several were finished ahead of schedule.\"\n\n\"They could have made a difference at Capua.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. If Chuck had been alive, he would have told you not to do it and then done the same thing I did.\"\n\n\"So that justified holding back on these Eagles?\"\n\n\"No sir, but you are glad now that I did.\"\n\nAndrew could not argue with her on that point. And he knew eight, twenty, fifty airships would not have made a difference that day.\n\nThe morning silence was shattered as more engines turned over, stuttering up to a humming throb.\n\nHe saw Jack Petracci slowly walking toward them, moving stiffly. Andrew motioned for him to stand at ease.\n\n\"Everything ready?\"\n\nJack laughed softly.\n\n\"I guess so, sir.\"\n\nAndrew said nothing. With most men he would have torn into them over such a lackadaisical air, but there were some, especially those like Jack, who danced so closely with death for so long, that one had to understand their fey attitude, especially at a moment like this.\n\n\"Numbers forty-seven and fifty-two, we should check them both off the list. I think forty-seven is leaking too much gas; the inboard starboard engine on fifty-two is shot.\"\n\nJack looked over at Varinna, who shook her head.\n\n\"Everyone goes,\" Andrew said. \"Order those two to hug the coast as long as possible but everyone goes.\"\n\n\"What I figured, sir. I already told them that.\"\n\n\"These new pilots, you think they have the ability?\" Andrew asked.\n\nJack again chuckled softly. \"Well, sir, as long as there's no storms, the sky is clear, we don't get jumped by any of the Bantag aerosteamers. I sort of figure half of them will be dead within the week anyhow, even if this doesn't work, but that goes with the job.\"\n\n\"All right, Jack,\" Andrew said quietly, but his tone conveyed that Jack's fatalism shouldn't be pushed too far.\n\nAndrew looked around at the assembled group, then put his hand on Jack's shoulder and led him off so the two could talk alone.\n\n\"I haven't had a chance to talk with you about this plan.\"\n\nJack said nothing, leaving no opening.\n\n\"You don't like the plan.\"\n\nAgain the laugh. \"Don't like it. Well, I always figured I'd die ever since I got myself drafted into this damn fool air corps. You see, sir, I was just thinking yesterday that if I had kept my mouth shut about having flown in a balloon back on the old world, none of this would have happened.\" And he waved vaguely toward the assembled ships.\n\n\"And we would have lost the war long ago. The missions you flew made the difference.\"\n\n\"Sir. We're going to die. I mean all of us. I saw the fight at Capua from a mile up. The reserves they have, the numbers. They just keep coming and coming. And I thought about all that we were taught when we were young. Remember the poems, 'Old Ironsides,' even that Tennyson fellow and the 'Charge of the Light Brigade.' We believed it was good to die the heroes' death. But I wonder now, maybe it's all meaningless. You die, and that's it. So you lose.\"\n\nAndrew said nothing. Anyone with a mind had dwelled on this idea, just that it was poison when it took hold on the eve of battle.\n\n\"You ever have the feeling they had just made the bullet with your name on it?\"\n\nAndrew nodded. \"Sure, plenty of times. Remember Cold Harbor. We wrote our names and pinned them on our backs before we went in? At Hispania, the morning of the third day, I knew I was going to die.\"\n\n\"And the winter, at Capua?\"\n\nAndrew felt a cold shiver. No, no real premonition then, and yet it had all but killed him. Yet far too often he had seen men like Jack, the darting eyes, the inner agony, made worse by the sense of futility that seized some.\n\nAs he looked at Jack the thought came yet again about the nature of courage. Some men, those like Vincent, for some strange reason truly lacked the imagination to contemplate just how agonizing a wound or death could be. They simply went about their duty, mind at ease. Vincent had suffered a horrifying wound, yet it seemed not to have scarred his soul. The scar in that boy was different, an inner woe triggered long ago because of the conflict over his Quaker upbringing and his innate talent for leading men in battle. Vincent's answer was to let his soul sink into a cold indifference to all suffering, his or anyone else's.\n\nThere were others though, like Jack, who were continually tormented by their imaginations, inwardly flinching as each bullet flickered past, who awoke in the middle of the night, sheets sweat-soaked, the nightmare of what could be twisting into their fluttering hearts. As he looked at Jack he felt a surge of admiration, knowing that Jack's type of courage was far more difficult to grasp and maintain. Every day he had to mask that terror and go out to face death yet again.\n\nJack, his hand trembling, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper.\n\n\"I was never much of one for being a gentleman with the girls. Remember the Oneida Society back before the war? Actually tried to join it. I did, but they said I was too young then.\"\n\nHe laughed softly, and Andrew smiled.\n\n\"She's a girl in Roum, works in Ninth Corps main hospital. Took care of me right after I crashed back in the spring. Funny, she's suddenly very important to me now, so see that she gets this.\"\n\nAndrew solemnly took the letter, knowing it was senseless to try and talk differently at a time like this.\n\n\"Jack, I wish I could let you stand down from this one. But you're the only one who can lead it. That's why I asked you to fly back here. These boys are so green I was afraid they couldn't find Tyre unless you were there to shepherd them along.\"\n\nJack smiled weakly. \"I know, and believe me, I'd take the offer if I thought I could.\"\n\n\"Jack, in all honesty, is there a chance for this one? I mean Vincent seems to believe in it. Hans, well of course he'd do it. We've done desperate things in the past, but this is a throw in the dark.\"\n\nJack looked at him silently, and Andrew regretted his few seconds of weakness. He had pulled Jack aside to gently tell him to brace up in front of the others, and he was asking for reassurance instead.\n\n\"As long as we limit it to what we agreed on. I know Hans wants to push it all the way, but sir, the ships simply don't have the range. I can't ask the boys flying the ships to go on a one-way trip with no hope of survival. Stick to the original idea, and there just might be a chance. If we had three or four times as many airships, a real fleet of a couple of hundred of them, I'd guarantee we'd do it. That'd mean we'd have a full brigade of troops rather than barely a regiment. At the very least, though, it will throw one hell of a punch into their supplies and might take the pressure off at the front.\"\n\nAndrew nodded. That had been the big fight argued out all week. Varinna's plan called for a two-step approach, the second phase not being launched unless the first half went flawlessly and a truly secure base was seized to operate out of. The morning after the decision was made to go Hans started the argument that it had to be done all at once. Andrew could understand the argument about surprising Jurak and not giving him time to react, but he knew as Hans most certainly knew that it was suicide to try.\n\nAnd yet he could sense what Hans would indeed do once he was out there. The first phase was, at best, a spoiling raid, to swoop down on the Bantag port city of Xi'an, smash things up, sink ships, and destroy supplies. Vincent's mission was to act as bait to draw troops and better yet ironclads out of Xi'an before the air attack hit. The goal, if it could be achieved, was for Vincent to cut all the way to the Great Sea and secure a base for airships and perhaps even for oceangoing ships captured at Xi'an.\n\nBut it was still only half a victory. If they could actually hold Xi'an, transferring troops by sea from Vincent's force to reinforce the captured city, Jurak would be cut off from his supplies and forced to abandon all of the Roum territory all the way back to the Great Sea. He'd have to pull back all the way to Nippon. It would be a tremendous victory \u2026 but the Bantag army would still be intact, the war machine still working and ready to come back yet again. What Hans wanted was to take it all the way, but he felt he could never order that, for such an action would surely result in the death of all those who attempted it. It could mean, as well, that in attempting to reach for everything, Jurak could counterstrike and smash the plan apart.\n\nAndrew took Jack's hand and grasped it tightly.\n\n\"Fly carefully.\"\n\n\"The soul of caution I've always been. It's how I've made it to twenty-eight very old years.\"\n\nComing stiffly to attention Jack saluted. \"Sir, I think it's about time we got the show moving, so if you'll excuse me.\n\nAndrew returned to his small group. While he had been talking with Jack, Vincent rode in. As usual he was dressed in his \"Phil Sheridan\" uniform, oversize riding boots, snowy white gauntlets, uniform with a bit too much gold braiding, rakish kepi, and still the ridiculous pointed goatee and mustache.\n\nAndrew could see the boy was eager to be returning to the front. He would have preferred that Vincent stay in Suzdal, but given the assassination attempt on his father-in-law Andrew now felt that it was best to get him out of town for a while. If not the target of an assassin's bullet, Vincent could, on the other hand, do something rash. And besides, given what he was contemplating doing, Vincent's presence in the city simply wouldn't fit into the plan.\n\nIt was indeed getting to the time for departure. For days he had agonized about this moment.\n\nThe engines on most of the airships were now turning over, shattering the predawn quiet as pilots revved each one up in turn, let them run full out for several minutes, then throttled them back down to idle.\n\nVincent was eager to be off. He had already said his good-byes to his family; it was part of his nature never to let that side of his life show anymore. There was no sense in going over the plan one more time. Vincent had conceived part of it, especially the land ironclad assault out of Tyre. He knew it far better than Andrew.\n\nThe salute was casual, as if he was leaving for morning inspection of a company.\n\n\"It'll work, sir,\" Vincent said. \"I promise you that.\"\n\nAndrew nodded, and the boy was off, heading to his airship, his chosen staff following. He had abandoned his cane and walked slowly, with a pronounced limp. Now it was just Hans and Varinna and she mumbled something about going to check one of the ships and left the two alone.\n\nHans sighed and slowly sat down on the grass, motioning for Andrew to join him.\n\nHans smiled and Andrew suddenly felt a terrible longing, somehow to turn the clock back, to make it all as it once was so many years before, and to hide from the knowledge of all that would be. Hans had aged, his hair going to white, his teeth crooked, stained dark yellow, several of them gone or turned to black, his skin no longer tanned and leathery but now waxy. He had never really admitted to himself just how much the years of prison had changed Hans. In so many ways they had softened him, made him more open to saying what was in his heart, but be had lost pis tireless vitality as well. Yet, at this moment he felt as if Hans was summoning back that strength for one more effort.\n\n\"The war's lost, Andrew. We've fought the good fight for God knows how many years. We've held three empires at bay, but now they're closing in. But in order for them to do that they had to change, too, and that is where they are vulnerable.\n\n\"Before, it was like striking at a nest of bees. We had to cut them down one at a time until there were none left. Andrew, we've forced them in a way to become like us, and in so doing we now have the opening. We can reach into the nest, crush the queen, and the eggs and the nest dies.\"\n\nHans became animated as he spoke, his eyes locked on Andrew's.\n\n\"Don't you think he's figured that,\" Andrew replied, \"and taken the necessary precautions?\"\n\n\"Surprise will be on our side. We maintain that element, and we win. The part of the plan involving Vincent seems like folly, but it will be the focus for just long enough that it will keep them off-balance. Then the rest of it goes in. He'll suspect the air support is for Vincent. By the time he realizes, we'll be on him.\n\n\"We've got to do this, Andrew; otherwise, it isn't just us who lose, it's the Chin, it's the entire world. Now that's something I'm willing to risk my life for. The question is, now do you have the guts to risk it as well.\"\n\nAndrew looked over angrily at Hans.\n\n\"It isn't a question of my courage.\"\n\n\"Yes it is. The courage to let go. If it wasn't me going, maybe it'd be easier somehow.\"\n\nHe wanted to deny it. Lord knows how many he had sent to certain death going all the way back to his own brother. But Hans was different.\n\nAndrew lowered his head.\n\n\"Yes, damn it. I think when that aerosteamer takes off that is it, I never see you again. I can deny it, say it's the committing of our remaining air fleet to a mad venture. But it's really you.\"\n\n\"And I am the only one that can lead it.\"\n\nAndrew finally nodded.\n\n\"Go.\" He whispered.\n\nHans leaned out, his hand tentatively taking Andrew's, and then he grasped it tight.\n\nAndrew looked up to see tears in his friend's eyes.\n\n\"You'll do fine, son, just fine.\"\n\nAndrew started to break. What could he say, how could he say it? The words finally spilled out of him, contained for so long.\n\n\"I love you, Hans, as I loved my own father.\"\n\nHans smiled.\n\n\"I know. We've always loved each other, you as the son I never had; it's just that the way we both are, who we are, makes it impossible to say what we feel.\"\n\nThe two sat in silence for a moment, eyes locked. There was such a flood of memories for Andrew, of Antietam, the lonely nights on picket, the cold winter mornings sharing a cup of coffee, the dusty marches, the moments of fear and of triumph, the pain of losing him and the indescribable joy of finding him again.\n\n\"And Hans.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\nHe had not breathed a word of it to anybody over the last week, but now was the true moment of letting go, of turning back the lie he had whispered at Capua. He knew what had to be done \u2026 and both of them were soldiers who understood that.\n\nHe unbuttoned the top of his uniform, reached into his breast pocket, and pulled out an envelope, handing it to Hans.\n\n\"I want you to go all the way,\" Andrew whispered.\n\nHans, looking straight into his eyes, understanding what Andrew was asking, simply nodded.\n\n\"This is my written authorization in case Jack or anyone else disagrees. Hans, you've got to go all the way with this one, no half measures.\"\n\nHans smiled. \"You know I would have done it anyway.\"\n\n\"I know that.\" Andrew sighed.\n\n\"It's just you wanted me to know you were behind my decision.\"\n\nAndrew nodded, unable to speak.\n\nHans patted Andrew on the shoulder.\n\n/ \"Like I've always said, I'm proud of you, son,\" he said, hesitating, \"and thank you. Ever since the day I escaped, leaving my comrades behind, it has haunted me. I have to do this.\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence between the two, both lost in their memories.\n\n\"I think they're waiting,\" Hans said gruffly, trying to hide the emotion that threatened to overwhelm him.\n\nAndrew finally looked over his shoulder and saw all who were waiting, standing respectfully, some with heads lowered. All was silent except for the aerosteamer engines powering up, propellers cutting the still morning air.\n\nAndrew nodded and ever so slowly let go of Hans's hand. Andrew tried to smile, fighting to hold on to what little control he had left.\n\nHe stood up shakily, Hans grunting as he stood as well.\n\n\"Well, they sure as hell haven't gotten us yet. You lose an arm at Gettysburg, get your lung shot out at Roum. Hell, the Comanche couldn't get me, a Reb sniper tries to take my leg off and a Merki arrow in the chest and then shot up again escaping. Shit, we'll get through this one, son; there ain't nothing left to shoot up.\"\n\nAndrew chuckled as Hans put his arm around Andrew's side as if helping him along, two old battle-scarred warriors, hobbling along. The others waited, and Andrew felt as if all of them could sense what was exchanged between the two.\n\nAndrew was surprised to see that Father Casmir had just ridden up and was dismounting. How the priest found out was beyond him, but then he always seemed to know everything.\n\nHe came up to Andrew and Hans, shaking their hands.\n\n\"Hawthorne told me about the plan.\"\n\nAndrew shifted silently, angry that Vincent could be so loose-tongued.\n\n\"Don't worry, I haven't breathed a word of it. Brilliant, it's absolutely brilliant.\"\n\nHe looked over at Varinna.\n\n\"Perhaps you should be a permanent part of our war councils.\"\n\n\"Chuck would like that,\" she said with a smile.\n\n\"No, you're your own person now. Let the dead sleep, my daughter. You have a mind and a heart of your own.\"\n\n\"Your Holiness, a good blessing sure would help,\" Hans said, and Andrew looked over at his friend in surprise.\n\nHans reddened slightly. \"Well, it's never too late to get a bit of religion.\"\n\nCasmir chuckled and, reaching into his robes, pulled out a small vial filled with holy water. Uncorking it, he motioned for Hans to kneel and sprinkled a few drops over his head while softly chanting a prayer in the ancient language of the Rus, unchanged across a thousand years of exile.\n\nThe deep melodious chant rose in volume, all who were gathered around falling to their knees, even the Chin and Ketswana. Though of old Presbyterian stock, Andrew felt overwhelmed by the moment and fell to his knees as well, head lowered in prayer for his friend, for the mission, for all who were fighting or longing to be free.\n\nCasmir turned away from Hans, holding the vial up, sprinkling the holy water over the assembly, the chant continuing, Andrew managing to understand a few words \u2026 \"and for those of the old world and all those of the Diaspora in exile upon this world we beg your mercy and protection \u2026\"\n\nThe Diaspora, an ancient Greek word carried to this world. We of the Diaspora, he thought, but if we win this fight it shall no longer be thus. We will have finished our wanderings, our enslavement, our exile, and this shall forever be our home.\n\nHe looked over at Hans again, and it was as if a strange light was gathered about him, about all those who were leaving. He remembered now and understood, that if ever there was a cause worth dying for, this was it. It wasn't a war to take something, or even to defend the property or country one had. Hans was right. It had been, it always would be, a war to set men free, the most noble of all causes that one could ever sacrifice oneself for. That was why Hans had to go, and that was why Andrew had to let him go.\n\nThe chant died away and there was a long drawn-out moment of silence. Andrew looked up and saw Casmir staring straight at him, smiling. The priest offered his hand, and Andrew took it, coming to his feet.\n\n\"Load 'em up!\" Andrew shouted, surprised by the power of his own voice.\n\nHans went up to Ketswana, the two exchanged a few words, slapped each other on the back, and Ketswana started to detail off the Chin in groups of ten, pointing each group in turn to one of the machines.\n\nWith a grin Ketswana started for the machine directly behind Flying Cloud, then angled over to Andrew.\n\n\"Don't worry, sir, I bring him back for you,\" Ketswana announced. Andrew took the Zulu's hand with a firm grasp.\n\n\"Godspeed and good luck, my friend.\"\n\nKetswana, obviously delighted with the mission, slapped Hans on the shoulder, turned, and sprinted off.\n\n\"Other than you the closest friend I have,\" Hans said.\n\nThe two went over to Jack, who was briefing the pilots gathered round, with Varinna and her assistants standing to one side.\n\n\"Remember, you have no bottom gunner now. If we do get jumped, you head right to the deck and hug it. The fake stinger might throw them off for a while, but if they ever figure it out, that's the spot they'll go for.\"\n\nAndrew looked over at one of the ships. The compartment which had once held the bottom gunner and bomb dropper had been removed, replaced with a wicker basket affair fifteen feet long and six feet wide. What was nothing more than half a dozen broom handles, bundled together and painted black now extended from the back of the basket. The squads of Chin soldiers were lining up by the doorway into the baskets, most of them obviously unnerved by the size of the airships, the noise of the engines, and the prospect of what they were about to do.\n\nThere had been no time, or surplus fuel to give any of them even the briefest of orientation flights; this would be their first time aloft. They chattered nervously amongst themselves, waiting their turn as the first man climbed the rope ladder into the wickerwork compartment. By the time the sixth to seventh man had climbed aboard, the airships had settled down onto their wheels and now it was not much more than a high step to board.\n\nAfter the last man was aboard the ground crews passed in their carbines, which had been thoroughly checked to make sure they were empty, cartridge boxes, two blankets per man, tins filled with rations, and two five-gallon barrels of water. Slung along either side of the compartment were four boxes roped in place carrying the additional gear.\n\n\"All you have to do is stay behind me,\" Jack announced, continuing his briefing. \"If I should fall out, well you'll have to navigate yourselves in. You're divided into squadrons of four ships, so squadron leaders, it'll be up to you. The navy's given us good maps of the coast with all prominent landmarks, so once you hit the coast again fix your position and either head north or south into Tyre.\"\n\nHe looked around at the group.\n\n\"I'll see all of you this evening.\"\n\n, The pilots, nearly all of them not much more than twenty, grinned nervously. There was a scattering of laughter, some gallows humor, and the group stood up.\n\n\"Hold it!\"\n\nIt was Gates. Andrew felt a flash of annoyance when he saw what the newspaperman wanted, but then the historian inside took hold and he nodded approval.\n\nGates already had the camera out of the wagon and up on its tripod. The sun was just breaking the horizon, casting long shadows.\n\n\"You'll all have to stand very still, there's not much light.\"\n\nGates moved the camera slightly so that he could get part of an airship in the background, then motioned for Andrew to join the group. He felt a presence to his side and saw that Hans had come back from his ship to join in the moment, followed by Ketswana and several of the Chin. Vincent strolled over and stood beside Varinna, who had a chart rolled up under her arm, with Casmir on her other side.\n\n\"Hold it now.\" Gates took the cap off the lens and started to count down the seconds.\n\nAll stood silent, striking their most formal pose, Andrew realizing that as always he had turned slightly to hide the empty sleeve. From the corner of his eye he saw Hawthorne, always the young Sheridan with right hand slipped into his open jacket. Pilots stood casually in their baggy coverall pants, wool jackets open, several with their hands in their pockets. Then there was Hans, slouch cap pulled low, shading his eyes, jaw working a plug of tobacco so that his face would look blurred.\n\nAgain the moment of crystal clarity came, the realization of just how precious this all was, how this was a moment as fragile as a glass figurine.\n\n\"'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,' \" he whispered, his voice carrying.\n\n\"That's it,\" Gates announced, replacing the lens cap.\n\nJack broke the tableau, stepping in front of the group, turning, and facing Andrew.\n\n\"With your permission, sir. Air's heavy and still. All machines are loaded. It's time to go.\"\n\nAndrew returned the salute.\n\n\"Good luck, son.\"\n\nJack smiled wanly and without another word started for his machine. The group broke up, the men setting off at the run, and suddenly he was alone.\n\nHe turned to say a final farewell to Hans, but his friend had already set off, falling in alongside Jack. Andrew felt a shudder of disappointment but knew instantly that Hans was right.\n\nHans climbed up the ladder into the forward crew compartment without looking back, followed by Jack, who pulled the rope ladder up behind him and closed the door. He could see Hans climb into the seat normally occupied by the copilot but Theodor was now the backup commander of the air corps and so was flying in the second airship.\n\nGround crews stepped back from their airships, crew chiefs each standing in front of his machine, right hand raised, red flag held aloft. The chief in front of Jack's machine twirled the flag overhead in a tight circle. One after another each of the engines revved up, propellers turning to a blur, then idled back down. Stepping away to the port side of the aerosteamer, the chief waved the flag again and pointed it forward.\n\nAll engines revved, and the machine slowly lurched forward. The bi-level wings on the port side passed within a few feet of Andrew, and as it passed the twin engines kicked up a swirl of dust around him, the air heavy with the smell of burning kerosene. The second and third aerosteamers followed, engines roaring. The column, looking like ungainly birds, taxied down to the eastern end of the grass airstrip, a line of slender hydrogen-filled ships, wings seemingly added on as an afterthought.\n\nThe lead ship turned, facing into the gentle breeze stirring out of the west. The heads-on silhouette, illuminated from behind by the rising sun, caught Andrew as a stunningly beautiful sight, wings mere slivers of reflected light. The machine lurched forward, seconds later the sound of the engines coming to him.\n\nHe tensed, watching as the airship lumbered down the runway, not seeming to move at first, then ever so slowly picking up speed. Gently, gracefully, it lifted off while still a hundred yards away.\n\nJack expertly leveled off not a dozen feet off the ground, letting his machine build up speed before climbing. It came straight on, some of the crowd around Andrew ducking. He came to attention, saluting as the machine soared overhead, engines roaring, wind strumming the wires sounding like a harp floating in the heavens. He caught a brief glimpse of Hans, perched in the copilot's seat, a childlike grin lighting his features. Their eyes held for a second, and in that instant it was as if all the years had stripped away and he was now the old man and Hans was the boy, embarking on some grand and glorious adventure, and then he was gone.\n\nNose rising up, Flying Cloud started to climb, followed by Heaven's Fire, and Bantag's Curse. One after another they passed, some wagging their wings in salute, others coming straight on, their pilots too nervous to try anything other than getting off the ground.\n\nJack led the way, spiraling heavenward, waiting for the last ship to form into a long, straggling column. Finally, he turned due east, rising up through a thousand feet, and sped off, catching the breeze aloft.\n\nAndrew watched as their shape changed from that of slender crosses to a round indistinct blur and then a mere dot of light that finally winked from view. Around him the ground crews finally began to break up, talking softly among themselves, walking back to their hangars, some looking back longingly to the east as if wishing they could go.\n\n\"I think that was one of the hardest decisions you've ever made.\"\n\nAndrew turned to see Casmir by his side.\n\n\"Yes, Your Holiness, it was,\" he whispered.\n\n\"I remember you once saying that in order to be a good commander you must love the army with all your soul. The paradox is that there will come a time when you must then order the very destruction of the thing that you love.\"\n\n\"Yes, I said that a long time ago.\"\n\n\"Do you think it will work?\"\n\n\"Hans believes in it.\"\n\n\"But do you?\"\n\n\"I don't know. There are too many variables. The weather turns bad. The Bantag have warning and send airships up to meet them. As it is there's barely enough fuel, if they don't capture additional stores, or the advance position for the second wave ..His voice trailed off. \"Far too many things can go wrong.\"\n\n\"Life is a process of things going wrong. That is how Perm made the universe. It is our challenge then to find the faith to remake them into what is right and pleasing to His eye.\"\n\nCasmir smiled and put his hand on Andrew's shoulder. \"I wish I had your faith.\"\n\n\"You do, it's just hidden at the moment. Best we head back to the city. Who knows, by the time we get back there might not even be a government.\"\n\nHe said it so casually but Andrew felt all the worry of that other problem returning.\n\nVarinna, who had launched this entire effort, stood wistfully, crippled hand cupped over her brow to shade the sunlight as she continued to gaze eastward, tears streaming down her face. She sensed him looking at her, and, turning, she faced Andrew, and he knew he had to resume his strength. He forced a smile.\n\n\"Chuck dreamed it, you made it possible. It will work.\"\n\n\"You think so?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't have ordered it,\" Andrew said. He looked around at those gathered around him, Casmir, Varinna, Gates, the technicians and ground crews, all of them wanting to believe, and he knew that he had lost his own faith ever since the moment he had been cut down by the mortar shell. It was needed now, needed for all of them.\n\nHe smiled.\n\n\"I have faith,\" he whispered. \"It will work.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "\"My Qarth.\"\n\nJurak stirred, looking up at the entry to his yurt. Zartak stood in the open doorway, silhouetted by the dawning light.\n\n\"The time?\" Jurak asked, embarrassed that he had slept past sunrise.\n\n\"No matter, you were up half the night. I ordered the guards not to disturb you. but this cannot wait.\"\n\n\"The Yankees, they're moving,\" Jurak said even as he stretched and came to his feet.\n\n\"How did you know?\" Zartak asked cautiously.\n\nJurak shook his head. \"Don't go running off proclaiming I have the ability of far seeing. It's just that I had a dream. I saw Yankee airships. My back was turned, and they fell upon me by surprise.\"\n\nZartak stared at him intently until Jurak nodded toward what he was holding. The old warrior stirred and handed him two telegrams, and Jurak scanned the contents.\n\n\"Three Yankee ships carrying land ironclads spotted late yesterday by a flyer out of Tyre patrolling the Inland Sea between Tyre and Roum. First light this morning ships seen in harbor at Tyre. New airships at Tyre already behind our lines and attacking.\"\n\n\"When did this come in?\"\n\n\"The second report just minutes ago. The first report the middle of the night.\"\n\n\"Why the delay?\" he asked angrily.\n\n\"Apparently a problem with a relay station. Then when it arrived here the Chin who transcribed it simply put it in with the other reports on train movements and supply shipments.\"\n\n\"Damn all.\"\n\n\"Should I have an example made of him?\" Zartak asked.\n\nJurak thought on it for a moment, then shook his head.\n\n\"If I killed every telegrapher who made a mistake, the line would be down in a day.\"\n\n\"He might have done it deliberately,\" Zartak pressed.\n\n\"Tell him another such mistake and it won't be the moon feast, it will be slow impaling,\" Jurak replied.\n\nZartak gave a noncommittal grunt in reply.\n\nJurak looked around the yurt. Though it was the yurt of a Qar Qarth, piled with gold and every luxury known to this world, he still would have traded it all for running hot water, privacy when relieving himself, and music, music that could be heard at the touch of a button rather than the wailings of the chant singers and the nerve-tearing screeches of the single-string basha.\n\nZartak offered to help him dress, but he waved the old warrior aside as he slipped into leather trousers that felt cold and clammy, riding boots, a leather jacket, and a lightweight shirt of chain mail, nothing that would be much good in a battle but here in the rear lines was worn as a matter of course to protect against an assassin's blade in the back.\n\nAs he did so he continued to think about the two telegrams.\n\n\"Moving their ironclads down to Tyre,\" he said. \"I wonder if they stripped everything off this front.\"\n\n\"We could send up our airships to look behind their lines here.\"\n\nHe nodded in agreement.\n\nWhy Tyre though? He walked over to a map drawn on the tanned hide of one of the great woolly giants that wandered the steppes. The map was stretched out on a wooden frame, showing the entire world from Nippon to Suzdal.\n\nThe mapmaking of the Bantag had intrigued him as soon as he had come to this world. With the endless circlings they had drawn out every step of their march, every watering hole, river ford, cattle settlement, place of good grazing, and places where the land was barren. The great scroll, when stretched end to end, measured well over two hundred paces. What hung before him was but one small part of the great fabric of this strange world that was now his home.\n\nHe stared at the map.\n\n\"From Tyre, two days of hard marching could bring them up to the head of the rail line we are running from this small port here.\" He pointed at the map. Zartak nodded.\n\n\"Camagan the cattle call it,\" Zartak replied.\n\n\"Our warriors at Tyre, except for a few regiments, have yet to be armed with rifles. If he flings his ironclads into them, there will be no stopping such an advance. Take our rail line, push to the Great Sea, and establish there a base to harry our supply shipments.\"\n\n\"Audacious. Typical of Keane.\"\n\nKeane. Did Keane dream of this he wondered. If so, it was a desperate bid. Most likely he had stripped all his ironclads and his surviving airships for this attack. He just couldn't send the ironclads. It would have to have infantry support, at least a umen of their troops as well.\n\nHe traced the route out on the map. Send an order to Xi'an, have them divert the next shipment of ironclads, rush the machines to Camagan. Though the distance was long, move up some airships as well, and also some airships from Capua. There were eight umens surrounding Tyre. Even with just bows that should be enough once the ironclads and airships were moved into place.\n\n\"We let them get their heads well into the trap,\" Jurak announced, \"make sure we don't attack too soon. Then snap it shut and annihilate what is left of his advanced weapons.\"\n\n\"Suppose that isn't the true goal?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Suppose it is something else.\"\n\nJurak turned back to the map. The ironclads were too far south even to think of attempting a march to the northeast. From there it was nearly 150 leagues to his main supply depot at what the Yankees once called Fort Hancock.\n\nXi'an? Two hundred leagues southward and then east to the narrows of the Great Sea, and even there it was a mile-wide channel to cross to the eastern shore and then another hundred leagues back up to the northeast.\n\nNo. Not Xi'an.\n\n\"You dreamed of airships, my Qarth,\" Zartak said, his voice barely a whisper, \"not ironclads.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHe continued to stare at the map.\n\n\"Well, it was only a dream, my friend.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "\"There's the coast,\" Jack shouted, trying to be heard above the roar of the engines. \"That looks like Tigranus Point, means we're about twenty miles north of Tyre.\"\n\nJack lowered his field glasses and passed them to Hans, but at the moment Hans really didn't care. For the last hour he had been far to busy suffering from an acute bout of airsickness.\n\n\"I can still see the Hornets, though.\" He pointed down and to the right. Hans vaguely looked in the direction Jack was pointing and nodded bleakly, though he saw nothing.\n\n\"We'll have to wait out here another ten minutes or so, give them a little more time to cut up the Bantag telegraph lines just to make sure.\" Even as he spoke he turned the wheel hard over to the right.\n\nHans grasped the edge of the forward panel, sparing a quick glance to his right as the aerosteamer went into a sharp banking turn. A mile or more below the ocean sparkled, catching the light of the late-afternoon sun. He tried not to contemplate just how far down it was, how long the fall would take.\n\nJack grabbed the speaking tube to his topside gunner and blew through it.\n\n\"You still with me up there? Tell me if everyone turns on me, and I want a count off.\"\n\nHans uncorked his own speaking tube to listen in as the Roum gunner counted off the ships, still holding at eleven Eagles, and all were turning.\n\nAs Jack had predicted the one with the leaking hydrogen bag had turned back after only an hour. After leaving the coast of Rus behind and crossing out over the Inland Sea for the run to Tyre the topside gunner had excitedly reported that one of the ships had burst into flames and gone down. Two more just seemed to have wandered off.\n\nThe ship bumped through another bubble of air, and Hans was again leaning out the side window, gagging.\n\nThey spiraled through half a dozen banking turns. Hans looked around bleakly. He guessed it should be a beautiful sight. Puffy clouds seemed to dance and bob around them, the aerosteamers pirouetting in circles like butterflies in a field of white flowers. They slipped through the edge of a cloud, the world going white, the air colder, the ship bobbing up and down. Suddenly the world exploded back into blue, the turquoise blue of the ocean below, the crystal blue of the horizon, the darker sky above.\n\nHe could hear a moaning curse echoing through the speaking tube connected to the compartment holding their passengers. A small hole had been left in the floor for the men to relieve themselves but from the shouts and curses only minutes after they had taken off he could figure easily enough that it didn't work thanks to the forty-mile-an-hour breeze whistling through the compartment. Someone apparently had missed the target yet again. Jack chuckled at their distress.\n\n\"We should have papered over the compartment at least. Those boys must be freezing back there.\"\n\nJack pushed his ship through one more slow banking turn, gaze fixed on the eastern horizon.\n\n\"They must have cut the telegraph lines by now; we gotta head in if we want all these ships down by dark.\"\n\nHans sighed with relief as they leveled out, again picking up a southeasterly heading.\n\nAfter several minutes he could finally distinguish the eastern shore of the Inland Sea, recognizing the point north of Tyre and the gentle curving coast of shallows and mud flats that finally led down to the rise of ground and narrow harbor. Jack edged the elevator stick forward, easing back slightly on the four throttles. They thumped through another small cloud, which was beginning to glow with a pale yellow-pink light. The summits of the Green Mountains, fifty miles to the north and east, were cloaked in the clouds and what appeared to be a dark thunderhead.\n\nJack pointed out the storm.\n\n\"Get caught in one of those, and you're dead,\" he shouted.\n\nHans nodded, breathing deeply, struggling against the urge to get sick yet again.\n\nScanning eastward, he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks or could he actually see the distant shore of the Great Sea nearly a hundred miles farther east. The two oceans, back on the old world they'd more likely be called great lakes, were closest together at this point. Long before the wars there was even a trade route going overland from Tyre eastward to the small fishing village of Camagan.\n\nBack in the old days of the Great Ride, the eternal circling of the world by the hordes, this region between the two seas was usually disputed by the Tugars to the north and the Merki, making their long ride farther south through Tyre and from there around the southern end of the Great Sea and then up into Nippon and the edge of the vast populous lands of the Chin.\n\nHe took the field glasses, which rested in a box between his seat and Jack's, checked the map, then raised the glasses to scan the coast. After months in the siege lines of Tyre he knew it all by heart, the outer circle of the Bantag lines, half a dozen miles from the city, the inner line of his own works, the ancient whitewashed walls of the town clustered around the harbor. He caught a glint of sunlight reflecting off the wings of a Hornet out beyond the enemy line, held it for a second, then lost it, wondering how Jack could so easily spot such things from ten, even twenty miles away. He again looked eastward with the glasses, but they were lower now. It was hard to tell just how far he could see out across the open brown-green prairie.\n\nHe studied the harbor again, bracing his elbows on the forward panel containing the pressure and temperature gauges for the four engines. The machine was bobbing up and down too much, though, for him to keep a steady lock, and another wave of nausea started to take hold. Taking a deep breath, he settled back in his chair.\n\nThe air was getting warmer, humid.\n\n\"I see transports in the harbor. Hope they're the right ones, or we're finished.\"\n\nHans nodded, closing his eyes for a moment, breathing deeply, wishing they were higher up again, where the air was cooler. The minutes slowly passed. He finally got his stomach back under control. He opened his eyes again. They were just a couple of miles out from the harbor, flying parallel to the coast.\n\nHe spotted the aerosteamer landing field, south of town, right on the coast. There was already one airship down.\n\n\"We got more ships to the north.\" It was the top gunner.\n\nHans looked over anxiously at Jack. Several seconds passed.\n\n'\"Four engines, must be the ones from Roum.\" Both breathed a sigh of relief. The Bantag had committed only a couple of ships to that front, and both had been aggressively hunted down over the last week and destroyed, but there was always the prospect that Jurak had moved reinforcements down there.\n\nFrom due east he could see two Hornets coming in as well, one of them trailing a thin wisp of smoke. They passed directly west of the harbor, and Hans saw half a dozen ships tied off at the docks. Several land ironclads were on the dock, puffs of smoke rising as they slowly chugged along, joining a long column of machines weaving up through the narrow streets of the town. At least that phase of this mad plan seems to have gone off, he thought.\n\nThey passed the airfield on their left and a quarter mile in from the coast, Jack looking over at it, then at the ocean below.\n\n\"Bit tricky, crosswind coming off the sea, about ten knots or so. Keep both your hands on the throttles. Remember the two to the left are for port engines, the two on the right for the starboard. It takes several seconds for them actually to change anything, so be damn quick.\"\n\nHans shifted uncomfortably, doing as ordered. Jack started into a shallow banking turn to port, altitude still dropping. As they got halfway through Hans looked up through the topside windows, which were now angled down toward the horizon, and saw the other aerosteamers bobbing along like moths, following in a ragged line stretching ba\u00a3kT half a dozen miles or more.\n\nJack gradually started to straighten out, having drifted past the airfield, turning slightly to port to compensate for the crosswind. Hundreds of antlike figures ran about along either side of the field\u2014the ground crews. It was going to be a tricky balancing act.\n\nThey had started out heavy, but after close to fifteen hours of flying they had burned off hundreds of gallons of fuel. They could have dumped some of their hydrogen to compensate, but orders were not to do that since it would be impossible to cap off all the hydrogen needed if the ships were to be turned around quickly. The center air bag was filled with hot air, drawn off the exhaust of the four engines. On the way down Jack had dumped all of it. In the fine balancing act between hydrogen bags, hot air, and the lift provided by the bi-level wings, the ship should have a stall speed of only ten knots or so, about the same as the crosswind. That meant they would touch down almost standing still, then ground crews would have to snag lines and secure tie-downs. If not, the ship would start drifting backwards, drag a wing, and within seconds be destroyed.\n\nJack kept the ship nose low, coming in over the edge of the field, then continuing down most of its length to leave plenty of room behind for all the other airships to touch down. Hans, nervous, kept both hands tight on the throttles, never quite matching up to what Jack wanted as he shouted commands to throttle up on one side, then the other, ease back, then throttle up again.\n\nThe airship bounced down once, gently, soared back up, Jack cursing sharply, quickly slapping Hans's death grip on the throttles, knocking all four of them back. The ship hung in the air for a moment, then settled back down, harder this time, as Jack spun the crank to his left, which opened and closed the vent to the top of the hot-air bag.\n\nHans saw someone darting up toward their cab, disappearing underneath to grab the forward hold-down line; a dozen others swarmed in to either side. Jack seemed to have three arms and four hands all at once, making sure the throttles were back, but not all the way, so that if the ground crew lost grip, he could slap them forward and try to claw back up into the sky. The hot-air vent was opened again. The machine lurched, ground crew under them becoming visible again as they spliced on a long pull line and a dozen men took hold, allowing the ship to weather-vane into the wind, and then pulled it off the field.\n\nA pop that sounded more like a dull whoosh than an explosion startled Hans. Jack looking back out the port-side window, cursed softly, then settled back into his seat.\n\n\"Looks like number twenty-eight; I knew the boy was too green.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Burning, what's left of it. Most likely jammed a wing into the ground, snapped it, fuel line sprays, then the fire hits the hydrogen bags.\"\n\nHe said it matter-of-factly, but there was a deep, infinite weariness in the tone.\n\nThe crew chief in front of their machine held up a red flag, spun it in a tight circle several times, then slapped it down to his side.\n\n\"Throttles off,\" Jack announced even as he pushed them all the way back. \"Fuel valves off, controls neutral ..\n\nHe continued down the list, announcing each step as he did it, leaning over to Hans's side to perform several of the tasks.\n\n\"Fine, that's it. Open the hatch.\"\n\nHans opened the bottom hatch, dropped the ladder, and, feeling very stiff and old, slowly went down the dozen feet to the ground. The air felt different, the memory of the long months in Tyre triggered by the scent of the ocean mingling with the dry musky sage. As he stepped away from under the ship he looked back and saw the flaming wreck of one of the airships. A wagon was drawn up, a crew working the pumps, laying down a feeble spray of water. More airships came in, pilots wisely swinging to windward so no errant sparks caught them.\n\nSome of the ships came in easily, touched down as gently as hummingbirds; others plodded in, slamming down hard, bouncing. A few came in without enough speed, hung motionless, and started to drift backwards, one of them digging its tail in. Jack cursed soundly as the machine just hung there, ground crews frantically jumping up and down, trying to grab the hold-down lines. The pilot threw on full throttles, the machine started back up, hung in the air, finally stalled, and this time the nose dropped, most likely from his having opened the forward hydrogen bag. The machine slammed down hard, undercarriage wheels snapping, driving up into the wings, while the cargo compartment seemed to disappear. Even though they were upwind, Hans could hear the screams of the men trapped within.\n\nAs the ground crew around him secured the tie-down ropes to bolts fastened into heavy concrete blocks, the crew chief finally gave permission for the top gunner and the men in the cargo compartment to dismount. One by one they came down the ladder and were a pitiful sight, obviously half-frozen, covered in vomit, disgusted with themselves and the world in general. The last two had to be helped down and laid out on the grass. Hans realized he most likely didn't smell too good himself.\n\nHe was relieved to see Ketswana coming up with Vincent right behind him, and together, as the shadows lengthened, the last of the airships from Suzdal landed. Then several minutes later the first of twenty-eight more ships, Eagles all of them veterans from the Roum Front, came in, the more experienced pilots having no problems with the crosswind landing. Several of them simply bypassed the landing strip and, ignoring the shouted protests of ground crews, picked out a tie-down location, slowed to a hover, then gently floated in to a touchdown.\n\nLast of all were the twenty-five Hornets from Suzdal and Roum, buzzing in like tiny insects after the heavy cumbersome four-engine machines. Mingled in were half a dozen more Hornets that had been fighting throughout the day in front of Tyre. Powder-smoke stains from the forward Gatling gun blackened the undersides. One of the ships was badly shot up, streamers of fabric fluttering from a starboard wing.\n\nThe display made Hans's pulse quicken. Here, obviously, was one of the most remarkable sights in history. Over seventy flying machines, all of them gathered together in this one place. And though it was a wild, mad scheme, it gave him hope for the moment. Nature seemed to be adding to the display, the long shadows of late afternoon lengthened, exaggerating the size of the machines so that they looked like giants skimming over the ground. The bloodred sun hung heavy in the western sky, while to the north the towering thunderstorm, which everyone had been eyeing nervously, marched on in stately pageantry to the east.\n\nThe last of the Hornets, stripped-down versions with no forward gun, replaced by a small compartment underneath which could hold one man, came in and landed. There was barely any room left on the open field as the last ship rolled to a stop.\n\nA young major came up to the group, and in the shadows Hans recognized the sky-blue jacket and silver trim of an officer in the air corps.\n\n\"Welcome sirs. Sorry I couldn't come over earlier but I was kind of busy,\" the boy announced, obviously from Roum and struggling to speak in Rus.\n\nJack clapped him pn the shoulder.\n\n\"Varro. Good job, son, your people did a damn fine job.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir. It helped to have those extra ground crews brought down by transport from Roum but still all the hold-down crews were infantrymen yesterday. I'll pass the word along.\"\n\n\"The Hornets that flew down from Roum yesterday\"\u2014 he nodded to the half dozen machines that had the unusual baskets underneath\u2014\"started out this morning as ordered. Two haven't come back, but the first reports are that they've cut the telegraph lines at twenty or more places from here all the way up to the Green Mountains.\"\n\n\"Damn good news,\" Vincent announced.\n\nHans nodded in agreement. Yet another idea of Varinna's. One of the first objections he had raised when the plan was presented was that the moment they touched down with so many airships in Tyre, Jurak might surmise the real target. She immediately countered with the sketch of how to convert the light fighting airships into a two-man unit. Strip out the Gatling gun, put in a small crew compartment. The ship touches down along some isolated stretch of the telegraph line, the crew member hops out, climbs the pole, cuts the line, and if there's enough time rolls up jLCouple of hundred feet of wire and takes it with them while a second Hornet, this one fully armed, circles to keep back any riders posted to patrol the wire.\n\nHans was delighted with the simple ingenuity of the proposal. Telegraph lines had always been so damn vulnerable. Back in the old war on Earth a couple of dozen cavalry men could play hell with a line, and it took regiments of men, posted damn near at every pole to keep a crucial line up and running. The Bantag umens at Tyre were now completely out of touch with Jurak, and it'd take at least a couple of days for word to be carried by horse. The trick, of course, was in the timing. To let Jurak get word of the ironclads' landing in order to draw his attention to Tyre, but not the entire air fleet.\n\n\"Are General Timokin and Stan Bamberg here?\" Vincent asked.\n\n\"Follow me, sirs; they're waiting over at headquarters.\"\n\nHans fell in with the group as they strode across the field. The passengers from the airships were out, nearly all of them a sorry-looking lot.\n\n\"Major, are copies of Gates's Weekly making it down here?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes sir, we just got the issue about what happened up at Capua. They came in on the transport carrying the ironclads.\"\n\n\"Well detail off some men. I want every copy you can find rounded up. Then find some glue, if need be take some flour and mix it into a paste. Then paper it on the outside of those wicker troop carriers.\"\n\nThe major looked at him confused, then called to a sergeant who had been tailing along and detailed him off.\n\n\"In all the rush we never thought of it,\" Jack said. \"Damn foolish mistake, type of thing that can lose a war.\"\n\nAs they passed the line of Hornets Hans slowed to inspect the machines. More than one was holed, a couple had hydrogen bags that were completely deflated, a patching crew was working by feel since no lighting of any kind was allowed near a ship that could be leaking hydrogen.\n\nSeveral of the Hornet pilots came up to Jack, saluting.\n\n\"We really grabbed their tails out there,\" one of them announced excitedly. \"I came over a low rise, must have caught a hundred of them camped out in the open, about fifty miles back from the front. Damn did I tear them up.\"\n\n\"The landings, did they work?\" Vincent asked.\n\nThe pilot was startled to see the chief of staff of the army standing in the shadows and snapped to attention and saluted.\n\n\"Ah, yes sir. The Hornet I was escorting, he landed three times along a ten-mile stretch of the wire and tore out a good long piece at each.\" The pilot nodded to a slight boy standing beside him.\n\n\"Tell him, Nicholas.\"\n\n\"Like he said, sir. We took down wire between two poles at three different places.\"\n\nHans could see that the boy was shaken, left hand clasping his right arm in the evening twilight, the black stain on the arm obviously blood.\n\n\"Your crewman?\" Jack asked.\n\nThe boy shook his head.\n\n\"I lost him on the third landing. Some of them bastards were hiding in a gully, no horses. They shot Petra as he was up on a pole, then came rushing out. I got hit, too, but managed to get off.\"\n\nHe lowered his head.\n\n\"I think Petra was still alive when I left him,\" the boy whispered.\n\nJack patted him lightly on his left shoulder.\n\n\"You did the right thing. You had to save your Hornet.\"\n\n\"No sir, I was scared. I might have been able to get him in.\"\n\n\"No you couldn't,\" the other pilot interjected. \"I had no more ammunition, so all I could do was try and scare them by flying low. That's when they shot up my ship as well.\"\n\n\"I was scared and ran.\"\n\n\"We're all scared,\" Jack replied softly. \"Now get some rest. I want both of you back up tomorrow at first light, wounded or not. Anyone who can fly has to be in the air tomorrow. You saved your ship, so don't think about anything else now.\"\n\nThey continued on, Hans catching a glimpse of a bottle being passed around as soon as they had passed.\n\nThe headquarters hut for the airfield was nothing more than a-hrown-walled adobe shack, typical of Tyre, where lumber was in such short supply. It was the only light on the field as the men labored under the glow of the twin moons that were breaking the eastern horizon.\n\nAs they stepped in Hans was startled to see Gregory Timokin. His face was still puffy, pink, blistered. Hands were wrapped in bandages, and it reinforced yet again just how desperate this venture was. Stan stood beside him, grinning, obviously eager for the operation to begin.\n\nThough his stomach was still in rebellion over the flight he quickly took up the bottle of vodka sitting on a rough-hewn table, uncorked it, and took a long drink.\n\n\"All right. What's the bad news first?\"\n\nGregory snickered.\n\n\"You want the long or the short version?\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"Fuel first of all. If we were burning coal, there'd be more than enough. Fifty-two ironclads. I'll need twenty-five thousand gallons if you want them to get to Carnagan.\"\n\n\"I have first priority,\" Jack interjected.\n\n\"And that's at least another forty thousand gallons for one way.\"\n\n\"We supposedly had it stockpiled,\" Hans said, rubbing his forehead as the vodka hit him.\n\n\"The oil field is lost. We had enough stockpiled through our coking of coal and getting the coal oil,\" Vincent said. \"What's the problem? And what do you mean 'fifty-two ironclads'?\"\n\nGregory sighed, staring at the ceiling. \"One of the ships carrying more coal oil and ten land ironclads hasn't docked.\"\n\n\"What the hell? There was supposed to be a monitor escort for you people.\"\n\n\"Fog. Yesterday and the day before. We came out of it, near Tigranus Point, and the ship was missing. I asked a Hornet to go up the coast, and the pilot thinks he found the wreck. It went straight into a shoal and foundered.\"\n\n\"Damn all,\" Hans snapped. \"So we're short how much?\"\n\n\"Fifteen thousand gallons.\"\n\nHans looked over at Vincent, who shook his head.\n\n\"We could make that up in a week from the coking plants at Roum and Suzdal. It's getting it here, though.\" An argument broke out between Jack and Gregory over who got priority on the fuel; Hans just sat woodenly, staring at the bottle for a moment, while meditatively munching on a piece of hardtack to put something back into his stomach.\n\n\"Ground the Hornets that got shot up. Pull off the Eagle that cracked its undercarriage, then detail off four more Eagles to stay behind.\"\n\n\"What?\" Jack snapped. \"That's ten percent of my remaining force.\"\n\n\"Our force, Jack, our force. We need fuel for the ironclads. The Eagles can be used locally for support. Once more fuel comes in they can be used to haul what, a couple of hundred gallons each out to the column to keep it supplied. Gregory, I'm taking five thousand gallons from you for our remaining airships.\"\n\nNow both Gregory and Jack were on him, but he sat silent, his icy stare finally causing them to fall silent.\n\n\"I know that won't give you enough fuel to reach your objective with any margin to spare. Figure this though. Half your machines will break down before you even get there. Do like we did on the Ebro. Drain off the remaining fuel, load it into the ironclads still running, then move on.\"\n\nThe two started to object again, and Vincent slammed the table with his fist.\n\n\"Damn all. There's no time to argue now. This operation is supposed to kick off tomorrow morning. The argument's over. Gregory, your machines, are they ready?\"\n\n\"If you mean off-loaded, yes sir. Like I said, we're down to fifty-two.\"\n\n\"And did the Bantag see them before the lines got cut?\"\n\n\"Certain of it.\"\n\nHans smiled. \"Good. That's what we wanted.\"\n\n\"I don't get it,\" Gregory replied sharply. \"Why didn't you cut the telegraph wires first before we brought the ironclads down here. Now they'll know and be on us.\"\n\n\"That's what I wanted,\" Vincent replied. \"We're the bait.\"\n\n\"The what?\" Stan asked. \"And what do you mean 'we'?\"\n\n\"Because I'm going with you, Stan.\"\n\n\"Fine, but what the hell is this about bait?\"\n\n\"We had to cut the lines before we flew all the airships in here to Tyre. The moment we did I assumed Jurak would figure what the real target is. I didn't want him to guess the true intent, so I wanted him to get word that all our ironclads had been moved down here. He'll assume that we are trying to break out of Tyre and take Camagan. After all, it is a logical move. We take Carnagan even briefly and we could threaten his supplies moving over the Great Sea. Beyond that we could tear up that rail line they're building from there over to here. I want him to focus on here while Hans presses the main attack.\"\n\nBoth Stan and Gregory nodded, but it was obvious that they were less pleased with this role, and the definition that they were to be a diversion rather than the main attack.\n\n\"So it's Third Corps and nothing else?\" Stan asked.\n\n\"Yes. We have to keep a minimum of two corps here in Tyre to hold this base. I think one corps is more than enough.\"\n\n\"You ready?\" Hans asked.\n\nStan smiled, shifting the plug of tobacco in his cheek, looking a bit like a younger version of Hans.\n\n\"We scraped up ten days of rations per man, one hundred rounds of ammunition with an additional hundred in the supply wagons. New shoes have been issued. We're ready.\"\n\n\"And your feelings on this one?\" Timokin asked.\n\nStan smiled. \"Oh, about the same as everyone else, I guess. But what the hell. Kinda figured we all should have drowned off the coast of Carolina ten years ago. Every day since has been a bonus. If we're going to go down, let me do it out in the open fighting. Tell me where to go, Hans, we'll get there.\"\n\nHans smiled and looked over at Vincent. The three corps cut off in Tyre had developed a unique spirit. In the one sense they felt abandoned, cut off on a useless front while the big actions were fought up around Roum. But on the other side they had a blind faith in Hans and any sense of difference between Rus and Roum had been burned out of them during the harrowing retreat from the Green Mountains down to this coastal port and the long months in the trenches afterward. These men were battle-hardened but not battle-exhausted as were the survivors of Roum and the nightmare assault at Capua.\n\n\"Effectives?\"\n\n\"Ten thousand two hundred men with the corps ready to march. Six batteries of breechloading three-inchers, and one mounted regiment.\"\n\n\"What about supply wagons?\" Gregory asked. \"That's the crucial thing. We need healthy horses and good strong wagons that can keep up.\"\n\n\"About a hundred,\" came the reply, and again there was the look of exasperation from Gregory.\n\n\"Hell, four hundred wounded in a fight, and we're in trouble.\" He looked over at Hans.\n\nAfter the horror of leaving over a thousand wounded behind during the retreat of last year, Hans had made a firm statement that never again would wounded by abandoned. He shifted uncomfortably.\n\n\"Ammunition and coal oil have to come first. With luck we'll capture a lot of horses at the start. That'll alleviate food and transport for lightly wounded. Wounded that can be saved get wagon space; those who can't make it \u2026\" He lowered his head, leaving the rest unsaid, that the man would be left behind with a few rounds of ammunition.\n\n\"What I figured,\" Stan replied. \"Just I think of old Jack Whatley at times \u2026\" His voice trailed off.\n\n\"Anything else?\" Hans asked.\n\nThe group was silent, looking one to the other.\n\n\"Fine, we start up in six hours. Try and get some sleep.\" One by one the group headed out. He knew Jack and Gregory would be up all night, double-checking on each machine. Finally, only Vincent was left. He settled down in a chair across the table from Hans, eyed the bottle, and finally uncorked it and took a drink. Hans said nothing.\n\n\"War's changed too much.\" Hans sighed, stretching out his stiff leg. \"I miss the old ways. God, there was something about a division, an entire corps on the volley line. It was hell, but I'll never forget Fredericksburg, watching the Irish brigade going up the hill. Damn what a sight.\"\n\n\"Even Hispania,\" Vincent replied. \"When we pivoted an entire division, closing off the flank, the men cheering, shoulder to shoulder, perfect alignment, over four thousand men. Wonder if we'll ever see the likes of that again.\"\n\n\"Not with these new machines. Changed everything. Guess it's inevitable. Back on the old world, bet they have 'em as well by now.\"\n\nVincent took another drink and passed the bottle to Hans, who nodded his thanks, shifted his chew, and enjoyed another gulp.\n\n\"Don't go getting yourself killed out there,\" Hans said.\n\n\"Goes with the job.\"\n\n\"No, there's more to it.\"\n\nHe leaned forward, staring into Vincent's eyes.\n\n\"Son, my generation, Andrew, Pat, Emil, we've played out our part. A chapter's closing with this war. If we win.\" He shook his head. \"No, when we win, I pray that will be the end of it for us. But that doesn't end it on this world. You and I, perhaps even more than Andrew and Pat, are the real revolutionaries. I was their prisoner. You, well you had your own torment from them.\"\n\nVincent said nothing.\n\n\"We both know this war will have to sweep the entire world. The Bantag are of the great northern hordes, but there must be more out there. We only know of one small part of this world. We have no idea of what is southward beyond the realm of the Bantag, what's on the other side, what threats there still are. The only hope is to free all of humanity on this world, then build from there. It will be your war then.\"\n\n\"So stay alive, is that it?\"\n\nHans smiled. \"After this is over you'll have Andrew as your mentor. He thinks he wants to let go of the reins, but knowing Andrew that will change. There's supposed to be an election at the end of the year. Who knows, he might even run if we still have a country and are still alive. If he does, well you'd be the choice for who would run the army.\"\n\n\"What about you, or Pat?\"\n\nHans smiled and waved aside the question.\n\n\"You can't have a better model than him to follow. And watch out for him, too. It will be tough at times.\"\n\n\"As he followed you,\" Vincent said, and Hans was surprised to see a softening, something so rare in this boy who had come of age too early in the crucible of war.\n\nHans cleared his throat nervously.\n\n\"You talk like you don't expect to come back,\" Vincent said.\n\n\"Well, when you planned this mad operation, what chance did you give to the air operation?\"\n\nVincent said nothing for a moment.\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Varinna was a bit more optimistic than I.\"\n\n\"I see. But you know, it's what I wanted, what I said from the very beginning. That's why Andrew decided it was me who should lead it rather than you.\"\n\n\"I know that now.\"\n\n\"And Vincent.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I'm going all the way with this one.\"\n\nHe didn't mention Andrew's authorization; he'd only play that if he had to.\n\n\"Kind of figured you would,\" Vincent replied calmly. Hans looked up at the simple wooden clock hanging over a tattered picture from Gates's Illustrated, a full-page print of Jack Petracci with four smaller images, one in each corner of the illustration, showing airships fighting.\n\n\"Well past ten,\" Hans announced. \"We're up at three, so let's get some sleep.\"\n\nVincent nodded. He was never one to be able to hold his liquor, and the three shots of vodka had made him noddy. Within minutes he was snoring peacefully. Hans stepped outside. By the light of the twin moons he could see the shadowy forms of the airships lined up, men laboring about them in the dark. A wagon clattered past him, trailing a heavy scent of kerosene. He heard muttered snatches of conversation in Rus, Latin, Chin, even a few choice expletives in English. Overhead the Great Wheel filled the sky. It was a comforting sight. A good world this. Maybe we can go beyond the mistakes of the old one, build something better. But first we have to survive, he thought.\n\nHe went back into the hut and quietly lay down on the other cot. Strange memories floated for a moment, not of the war, even of the prairie, but long before, Prussia, the scent of the forest wafting through the open window at night when he was a boy. The shadow of his mother coming in to check on him, then drifting away.\n\nWhy that? he wondered. His hand rested on his chest, feeling the quiet beat. Steady now, not the hollow drifting sense that came too often. Emil kept talking about the need to take it easy. Old Emil, God just how old was he? Must be well over seventy. Hard to keep track of the years, real years as counted back home.\n\nThe clock quietly ticked, his thoughts drifted, and he knew there would be no sleep tonight. Far too much to think of, not of what would come \u2026 but rather of what had once been." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Jurak sifted through the reports, carefully reading the roughly printed Rus letters taken down by the Chinese telegraphers. All lines south of the Green Mountains had been cut by airship attacks.\n\nThat was not the concern of the moment, though. It was the airships that were troubling him. Along the entire Capua Front there was only one airship.\n\nIt was supposed to represent ten ships, and it was the clumsy deception that gave it away. The humans had taken to the use of symbols which were known to be numbers in their English language. Observers along the front were given the strictest of orders to note down such symbols when they reported sightings. The same ten numbers kept appearing for the last seven days but it was only this afternoon that one of his warriors, a lowly commander of ten, had been allowed into his presence, claiming that he was convinced there were not ten ships but only one. When questioned he said he remembered the one particular ship since it had almost killed him during the river battle and that it had a slight stain along the underside of its left wing and a triangle-shaped patch not much more than a hand-span across on the right wing. All of the supposed ten ships now had the identical stain and patch.\n\nWith that Jurak had made it a point to observe the ship as it flew over twice during the day and the commander of ten (who was now commander of a hundred) was right. They were pasting different numbers on the ship. It was an old trick, and the fact that the humans resorted to it must mean that their airships were all somewhere else.\n\nHe had already sent faster riders southwest from the nearest garrison to the breaks in the line, demanding a full report. News, though, would be a day old.\n\nIn the morning he thought he had a clear grasp of the plan. Now he wasn't sure. Such an operation would not require every airship of the Yankee fleet. There were several scenarios possible, a couple within the capability of what the humans knew of war. There were several beyond them, or had they realized that airships could be used for more than just reconnaissance and bombing?\n\nHe felt a cold shiver at that thought and called for a guard to summon Zartak." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"Hans, time we got moving.\"\n\nIt was Ketswana, his towering bulk filling the doorframe. First light was tracing the horizon, dawn still more than an hour off. Engines were already warming up on the airstrip, distant voices echoing.\n\n\"Come on, Vincent, let's roll.\"\n\nThe boy was fast asleep, curled up on the coat, his oversize riding boots still on, making him look even more like a child who had insisted upon falling asleep in his play uniform. Vincent stirred, and then was bolt upright, a brief instant of panic until he realized where he was. Hans said nothing, understanding. Old instincts from the field. \"Everything all right?\" Vincent asked a bit too loudly.\n\n\"Just that it's time.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nKetswana came back into the room carrying a wooden plank. Two steaming tins of tea were on it, along with pieces of hardtack topped off with slabs of cold salt pork. Hans blew on the rim of the cup between gulps of the scalding brew, then quickly consumed the cold breakfast.\n\nVincent was up, eating a bit more slowly. Gregory Timokin came in.\n\n\"Everything's ready, sir,\" he announced to Vincent. \"We better get up to the front.\"\n\nVincent nodded and started for the door, taking his cup of tea with him. He stopped by Hans's side.\n\n\"Not much at sentimental good-byes, Hans.\"\n\n\"Nor I.\"\n\nVincent chuckled. \"Sure, Hans. See you in a week.\"\n\n\"You too, son. Gregory, don't let him bang his head.\" Gregory smiled and offered Hans his hand. Hans took it gently, and even then Gregory grimaced from the pain.\n\n\"Wish you were coming along, too. It'd be like the Ebro all over again,\" he said, forcing a smile.\n\n\"Once was enough,\" Hans lied. \"Besides, I like flying.\"\n\nVincent started out the door, then stopped.\n\n\"Save a little glory for me, will you?\" he asked lightheartedly.\n\nHans laughed softly.\n\n\"And for God's sake please come back.\" And now there was a note of concern in his voice. Before Hans could reply, he was gone.\n\n\"Everyone seems to think we're going to get killed, my friend,\" Hans said to Ketswana.\n\n\"Not us, we're immortal. As long as I'm with you, you're safe.\"\n\nFinishing his tea, Hans left the cup in the hut, stepped outside to relieve himself, then started for the flight line. More and yet more engines were turning over, warming up. Crews were loading into the cargo compartments, and Ketswana mentioned that nine men, after the flight over from Suzdal, absolutely refused to get back in. Volunteers from the ground crews had replaced them.\n\nAll around them was a bustle of activity. They passed several Hornets revving up their engines, a crew chief shouting obscenities in Rus. A wagon clattered past, again the smell of kerosene. With a thousand men working as ground crews, most of them pressed into service and only given a couple of days training, it was a near miracle, Hans realized, that the entire place hadn't exploded with some darn fool having smuggled in a box of matches for a smoke, or from the accidental discharge of a gun.\n\nThey passed an Eagle, the ten Chin gathered in front of it, squatting around a bucket of steaming grits and a smaller bucket of tea. They didn't even notice their commander passing, and continued to chatter in their singsong voices. A ground crew trotted past, carrying coils of ropes, and then several boys darted around Hans, lugging skins filled with water to be loaded on board a ship.\n\n\"The training pays off here,\" Hans said. \"There was part of me thought Varinna mad to think it could be pulled off, but here it is. Men, equipment, fuel, food, ammunition, all of it coming together in this place.\"\n\n\"They know it's this or defeat,\" Ketswana replied. \"We know as well that this is something special, a new thing, something we will always remember.\"\n\nIt was hard to sort out which flier was which in the darkness, and finally they had to grab one of the ground crews to guide them to Jack's ship. As they approached the aerosteamer, Hans was glad to see that Gates's Illustrated had finally been put to a good use, enough copies had indeed been found to paper over the front and sides of the cargo compartments to block out the wind.\n\nKetswana started for the crew compartment under Jack's ship.\n\n\"I thought you were on number thirty-nine,\" Jack observed.\n\n\"Didn't like the pilot.\"\n\n\"Suppose something happens to me,\" Hans interjected. \"You're to take over, remember?\"\n\nKetswana laughed.\n\n\"And suppose something happened to me on the other ship. Where would you be? No, I stay with you, my friend.\"\n\nHans wanted to argue but he could see Jack standing by the ladder to the forward compartment, arms folded, grinning.\n\n\"Kinda logical actually,\" Jack announced. \"I'll get you in. Besides, the boys know what to do; the company commanders are all briefed.\"\n\n\"All right, go on, get in,\" Hans said, and Ketswana gave a final wave before ducking under the airship and climbing aboard.\n\n\"How is everything?\" Hans asked.\n\n\"One more machine down. Engine caught fire about an hour ago when they started it up, and part of the wing burned. This takeoff in the dark, a bit tricky.\"\n\n\"I know. It's a balance. Would have preferred to come in at dawn, but that meant night flying, and most of these boys would have gotten lost or wound up in Cartha or back in Suzdal. We've got to get down with enough daylight to get the job done.\"\n\n\"Then we better get moving.\"\n\nJack climbed the ladder first and a moment later one of the ground crew, who had been sitting in the forward cab watching while the engines ran on idle, scrambled down the ladder. Hans ascended into the cab and climbed into the copilot's seat, suddenly aware again of the lingering stench from the previous day's bout with airsickness. He wondered if there was something perverse about pilots, and they took a secret delight in the smell. For a moment he was worried that his stomach would rebel, leaving him without a breakfast. Opening the side window he stuck his head out and took a gulp of air.\n\n\"Let's hope everyone's on his toes,\" Jack shouted. \"I taxi out first, then each airship down the line follows. We circle out to sea and form up, then head out from there.\" Opening up both speaking tubes, he blew into them. \"Topside. Bottom side, hang on, we're heading out.\" Hans caught some moans and a burst of laughter from below. Ketswana actually was enjoying himself. Any chance to get into battle, in a land ironclad, aerosteamer, if need be crawling through a cesspool, it didn't matter to him, as long as he could kill Bantag.\n\nJack took hold of the throttles, edging them up until all four engines were howling. Finally, the ship lurched forward.\n\n\"We're heavy, damn heavy, and no wind to help us lift off.\"\n\nHe spun the wheel, closing the hot-air-bag vent atop the center air bag. They reached the center of the landing strip, following a ground crewman holding a white flag aloft, which stood out like a pale shimmer in the early-morning light. Hans felt as if somehow the machine was beginning to feel lighter, and he mentioned it to Jack.\n\n\"The center bag, depending on outside temperature, provides several hundred pounds of lift. Hell, I'll make an airman of you yet. You seem to have the feel for it. Starboard throttles idle, keep port side at full.\"\n\nHans put his hands on the throttles, Jack quickly guiding him, then letting go as he turned the wheel for the rudder. With ground crew helping, the airship slowly pivoted and lined up on a faint glimmer of light, three lanterns at the end of the field marking the takeoff path. The crew chief held his flag aloft, twirled it overhead, and let it drop while running to the port side to get out of the way.\n\n\"Here goes, full throttles, not too fast now \u2026 that's it.\" Hans fed the fuel in, the caloric engines slowly speeding up. They held still for what seemed an eternity, then started forward again. The takeoff seemed longer than the day before, the ship slowly lurching and bouncing, bobbing up once, settling, then finally clawing into the air. The three lanterns whisked by underneath, Jack holding the ship low to gain speed, the hot exhaust going into the center air bag, heating it up even more, lift increasing. He banked gently to starboard, and in the darkness Hans sensed more than felt the ocean open out beneath them. Jack continued his slow climbing turn, the top gunner reporting a second, third, and fourth ship lining up behind them. As they spiraled upward Hans wondered how anyone could see where the other ships were, but as they completed one full circle and the eastern horizon came back around he saw several airships clearly silhouetted against the red-purple horizon.\n\nThe air was gloriously still, reminding Hans of the sensation of sliding with skates on the first black ice of winter when he was a boy. They went through another circle and another, the ships spiraling up like hawks, slowly climbing on a summer thermal, soaring into the dark heavens.\n\nThe vast world spread out below them, faint wisps of ground fog now showing dark gray, the second of the two moons slipping below the western horizon, to the east the sky getting brighter. Each turn took them farther out to sea, the coast receding, part of the plan in case watchful eyes on the ground had somehow reestablished communications during the night.\n\n\"Losing another one,\" Jack announced, breaking the silence, and he pointed to where a ship, streaming smoke from one of its engines, was breaking away, heading straight back to the airfield.\n\nTwo Hornets came up, climbing far more steeply than the Eagles, soaring upward, their escort but also a signal that the last of the Eagles was off the ground.\n\n\"Any count?\" Jack asked, calling up to the top gunner, whom Hans truly pitied, stuck atop a flammable bag of hydrogen in an exposed Gatling mount. It was also his job to crawl around atop the bag and plug any holes shot through it in a fight. No silk umbrellas had been issued to the crews for this flight\u2014the weight considerations had ruled it out\u2014but even with such a device for jumping the top gunner rarely made it, since as soon as a ship caught on fire the heavy weight of the gun plunged the man straight down into the burning bag.\n\n\"Hard to count. I figure at least thirty ships are up, sir.\"\n\n\"Well try and get me the right number,\" Jack snapped. \"Damn. If we only got thirty up, we'll be slaughtered.\" Jack sighed, looking over at Hans.\n\n\"We go with what we got even if it's only one at this point,\" Hans replied absently, straining to catch a glimpse of the ground east of Tyre. Dawn was just breaking down there; Vincent would most likely be kicking off his move. Hans thought he could catch glimpses of smoke, a flash of light.\n\nThey continued through their final turn, the aerosteamer coming out of its gentle banking climb. Jack leveled them off, commenting that they were up over three thousand feet and climbing. The air was noticeably cooler, still calm and smooth. There was a glimpse of an airship several hundred feet lower, passing directly beneath them, the gunner looking up and waving. Jack lined up the compass on a southeasterly heading, pulled the elevator back slightly higher, pitching the nose upward. Tyre was now off the port side, a dozen miles away, impossible for Hans to see in his starboard seat.\n\n\"We level out at nine thousand, should be able to catch the current coming out of the west. That'll help us along a bit. Now remember, Hans, this is all from memory. I've only been there twice, so the charts aren't good.\"\n\n\"I trust you.\"\n\n\"You've got to; there's no one else.\"\n\nThe climb continued and gradually, through the glass view port between their feet, down in the position of the forward Gatling mount, Hans spotted the coast as they headed back to shore.\n\n\"Take the wheel, hold it steady for me on this heading,\" Jack ordered. \"Watch the compass, but also line up on some feature on the horizon. Also you can use the sun, but remember it keeps shifting, so don't follow it around.\" Hans tentatively put his hands on the wheel.\n\n\"That's it, just hold it steady. Let me ease back a bit on the throttles\u2014we need to conserve fuel.\"\n\nThe steady thump of the engines, the vibrations running through the ship, changed pitch, and though still loud, the change was a blessed relief. Still, there was the sensation of gliding on ice. The beautiful light of the dawning sun suddenly exploded across the horizon, flooding the cabin with a deep golden glow.\n\nWith the plane's nose pitched high, he felt as if he were climbing to the heavens and was filled with a deep abiding peace. The moment was worth holding on to and savoring. He looked sideways, Jack had settled back in his chair, eyes half-closed, and his hands were off the controls, arms folded across his chest. There was a momentary fear, and Jack smiled.\n\n'\"Hans, actually it's not all that hard. Just keep the heading, as we clear through nine thousand feet, the mercury in that gauge in the middle will tell you when, ease the nose down slightly. That's a while off, just relax and hold course.\" And he closed his eyes.\n\nHe felt suddenly as if he was alone in the ship, a joyous sensation, piloting it through the upper reaches of the sky. What waited ahead was forgotten for the moment, all of it washed away \u2026 and he was content." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "\"Andrew.\"\n\nThe dream had been of long before, of Mary. Long before her betrayal, long before all the pain when it had all been so innocent, so fresh and alive, walking hand in hand along the shore. Even in the dream he had been cognizant of the fact that he had one day found Mary with another man while he was still in Maine, that Kathleen was the center of his life now, but still there was such a pleasure in seeing his first true love again in spite of all the pain she had given him. Kathleen's gentle touch stirred him from the memory, and he felt a pang of guilt as he looked up into her worried eyes, as if afraid she could somehow sense what he had been dreaming.\n\n\"What time is it?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Just before dawn.\"\n\nHe heard a distant rattle of musketry and was instantly awake.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"I was at the hospital in the church when it started, and came back here. I don't know.\"\n\nEven as she helped him to get his trousers and jacket on he heard the hard clatter of hooves on the cobblestone pavement below his window, a rider reining in, the horse blowing hard, the messenger shouting to the guards at his door. He looked out the window and saw one of his staff, a young Roum lieutenant, another one of old Marcus's innumerable \"nephews,\" leaping from the saddle and running up the steps of the front porch, to pound on the door below.\n\nFrom the next room one of the twins stirred, crying softly, and Kathleen looked to Andrew. He nodded, and she left as he stepped out into the dim hallway and went down the stairs. He could see the shadow of the messenger beyond the glass panes of the door and called for him to enter. The boy came in, stiffly snapped to attention, and saluted, speaking so rapidly in Latin that Andrew had to motion for him to slow down.\n\n\"Sir. There's gunfire in the Congress halls. It's reported that the Speaker is dead and Bugarin has declared himself to be acting president.\"\n\nAndrew sighed wearily, leaning against the wall. Poor Flavius. Most likely went to meet Bugarin alone and died for it, he thought.\n\n\"Andrew!\"\n\nEmil came through the door, breathing hard.\n\n\"Andrew, they've taken the White House!\"\n\n\"What? I was just there.\" He paused, trying to remember. He had sat up with Kal till after midnight. The president was still drifting in and out of consciousness but apparently on the mend. But that was four hours ago.\n\n\"Well it was just stormed by some of the old boyars,\" Emil gasped. \"Bugarin's proclaiming that he is president.\"\n\n\"If Flavius is dead, then he is,\" Andrew said quietly, staring off, eyes no longer focused on the messenger or Emil.\n\n\"What the hell do you mean?\"\n\n\"Just that. The Constitution places Bugarin fourth in line of succession. The president is still incapacitated. Flavius wanted to avoid the crisis but not be declared acting president. Bugarin wants it, and with Flavius dead he has it.\"\n\n\"And you'll let him take it?\"\n\nAndrew said nothing.\n\n\"Andrew, at this very moment, that bastard's most likely proclaiming an armistice, passing the order for the armies to stand down.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"And what are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Do? My God, Emil, what the hell have I been doing here for the last ten years? We didn't want to be here. We didn't want to get dragged into this war. Damn near all the men of our lost regiment have died in this godforsaken hellhole.\"\n\nHe turned away and backed up to the staircase. \"Kathleen, get the children up.\"\n\n\"Why, Andrew?\"\n\n\"We're getting them out of here for the moment.\"\n\nHe looked back at the young Roum staff officer.\n\n\"Get down to the office of Gates's Weekly. Find Gates, let them know what's happening, round up some men if you can to hold that position, and don't let anyone you don't know into this part of the city.\"\n\nHe looked up to the top of the stairs where Kathleen was standing, ushering the children out of the bedroom.\n\n\"Take the children over to the armory of the Thirty-fifth. They'll be safer there.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\nHe reached over to the stand by the door and, taking his sword, clumsily snapped it on, reluctantly allowing Emil to help.\n\n\"I'm going to the White House.\"\n\n\"Why, for God's sake? Bugarin will kill you.\"\n\nAndrew shook his head.\n\n\"No. There's too many old veterans still with him to allow that. We're going to have a talk.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe paused, looking into his office, where framed over his desk were his two most prized possessions, his commissioning papers as colonel of volunteers, signed by Lincoln, and his Medal of Honor won at Gettysburg, presented by Lincoln as well. Going over to the display case he tore it open, taking out the medal, holding it reverently in his hands for a moment before clumsily pinning it on and heading out the door.\n\nSeveral more men had come on horse, others were gathering in the town square that looked so strangely like a small piece of New England transported to this alien world.\n\nOne of his orderlies, as if reading Andrew's mind, was leading Mercury out from the stable behind the house. Andrew mounted, Mercury moving easily beneath him, two old companions who had been together for over a decade. Word was spreading rapidly, and from the clapboard houses lining the square he could see the last few of his old companions who were in Suzdal coming out, Webster fumbling to button a uniform that was far too tight among them. From the northeast corner of the square a small detachment came into view, moving at the double \u2026 they were boys, cadets serving in the 35th Maine, which was now a training regiment, the West Point of the Republic, the boys too young to be pressed into action at the front. One of them proudly carried the regimental standard. Emil came up by Andrew's side, having taken a horse from one of the couriers.\n\n\"Going to the White House now is madness, Andrew. If Bugarin has indeed seized the government, he'll kill you on sight.\"\n\nAndrew felt a building rage.\n\nWebster came running up, breathing hard.\n\n\"Is Kal all right?\"\n\n\"We're not sure,\" Emil replied.\n\n\"Damn all, Andrew, this has gone too far. Seize control of the government now. The men will follow you!\"\n\nHe delivered the last words with a rhetorical flourish that echoed across the plaza, and a cheer went up in response.\n\nAndrew reined Mercury around hard, his steely gaze silencing the group. Turning, he headed toward the southeast corner of the square, saying nothing as Emil urged his Clydesdale-sized mount up beside him.\n\nAs Andrew rounded the corner onto the main street to the great plaza and the White House beyond, he saw that the street was already filling. He rode past the boarded-up theater, a tattered post hanging from the side billboard announcing a performance of King Lear. It caught his attention for a moment, the strangeness of watching Shakespeare performed in Russian on this alien world. The Roum soldiers stationed in Suzdal had been fascinated by Julius Caesar, since the real Caesar was from a time on Earth long after their ancestors had been swept to this world. He remembered as well a final night just before the start of the Merki War and the performance of Henry V.\n\nHe rode past, following the broad open boulevard flanked on both sides by ornately carved log buildings three and four stories high, the few older ones that had survived the fires and wars still adorned with gargoylelike images of Tugars. The crowd moved uneasily as he passed; there were no cheers today. Nor was there anger \u2026 rather it seemed to be an exhaustion of spirit and soul. It was easy to spot veterans, for nearly everyone was very old, very young, or female, veterans standing out as men on crutches or with empty sleeves. Those that could came to attention and saluted as he passed, but he kept his eyes fixed straight ahead.\n\n\"Are you going to fight them?\" Emil finally asked, and Andrew said nothing.\n\n\"The men are with you. You know that?\" Emil nodded behind them. He didn't need to turn; he could hear the steady tramping of the cadets, the voice of Webster shouting out orders, urging even the veterans by the side of the road to fall in and \"support their colonel.\"\n\nThey passed the office of Gates's Illustrated Weekly. The publisher was in the street, mounted, waiting, apprentices, printers, the rest of his staff pouring out, some of them carrying rifles or pistols. Gates fell in on Andrew's flank.\n\n\"I thought the press was supposed to be neutral,\" Andrew quipped. \"What ever happened to the pen being mightier than the sword?\"\n\n\"Like hell we're neutral,\" the publisher snapped angrily. \"He has some senators with him, all of them armed.\"\n\n\"Any troops?\"\n\n\"No organized units. But there are some men, a few old boyars and former men-at-arms mostly. I knew we should have killed all of them after that last rebellion.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"Flavius is dead. I know that for a fact; one of my reporters was in the building when it happened. Bugarin didn't do it, though, at least not by his own hand. Again, it was like the shot at Kal. We don't know. But once it happened Bugarin rounded up some followers and made straight for the White House. Apparently a few shots were fired there.\"\n\n\"Kal?\"\n\n\"No idea. But word is Bugarin dragged in one of the justices and Casmir.\"\n\n\"So he's getting himself sworn in,\" Emil replied. \"If he's president, we've got to fight them, Andrew.\"\n\n\"I realize that,\" Andrew said quietly.\n\nSometimes the hardest thing was to do nothing, Hans had told him, and he smiled at the thought.\n\nThe great central plaza of the city of Suzdal was directly ahead, already filling with the citizens of the city. As he rode to the edge of the square a buzzing hum rose up from the crowd. Behind him Andrew heard Webster shouting for the company of cadets to move forward at the double and clear a path.\n\nAndrew reined in sharply, then turned Mercury sideways. He looked back down the street and saw that several hundred men were now with him. Behind them a crowd was pressing up the street to watch the drama.\n\nDrama, so much history and drama in this square, he thought. The first time we marched in. The day the envoy of the Tugars arrived. The charge against the boyars' army and then the stand against the Tugars in their final assault. Grand moments, too, the victory parades, the first reading of the Constitution I penned myself, its public ratification and the declaration of the Republic and the inauguration of President Kalenka.\n\nNow this.\n\nHe held his hand up, motioning for Webster to stop.\n\n\"I want this formation to halt and ground arms,\" Andrew said. He spoke softly but firmly.\n\nWebster looked up at him, confused.\n\n\"Mr. Webster, you are secretary of the treasury and no longer a soldier of rank with the Thirty-fifth, but I expect you to obey my orders nevertheless. Halt and stand at ease.\"\n\nWebster still did not react.\n\n\"William. Do you understand me?\"\n\n\"Yes sir.\"\n\nReluctantly Webster turned and shouted the order. There was a tense moment, several of the men shouting their refusal, but the order was finally carried out. He caught a glimpse of Kathleen in the crowd and forced a smile to try and calm her fears.\n\n\"Mr. Gates, you might as well come along as a member of the fourth estate. Emil, well I just want you along as well. Once you get the chance, go inside to check on Kal.\"\n\nHe saw the colors of the 35th Maine hanging limp in the still morning air. A gentle nudge with his heels, and Mercury edged forward to the head of the column, where the color-bearer stood. The boy came to rigid attention at Andrew's approach. He looked down and smiled at him.\n\n\"Son. do you know the responsibility you have?\"\n\n\"Yes sir, the souls of the men who died beneath these colors\"\u2014he nodded up at the blood-soaked folds\u2014\"they float about us now. Their spirits live in the flag.\"\n\nThe answer caught Andrew off guard and he stiffened. Of course the boy would believe that, he was from Roum. Two thousand years ago their soldiers believed their dead gathered about the standard of the legion.\n\nWas Johnnie now here, Ferguson, Mina, Malady, Whatley, and Kindred, so many others?\n\nSlowly he raised his right hand, eyes focused on the flag, his mind filled with all that it represented. He saluted the colors.\n\nQuickly, before the men could see the emotion that was about to flood out, he turned Mercury about with a nudge of his heels and a whispered command, picked the reins up, and quickly urged the horse to a slow canter. Emil fell in behind him, the doctor cursing under his breath since he hated to ride.\n\nThe crowd gathered in the great plaza parted at Andrew's approach; he could hear his name echoing across the square. As he passed they closed in behind him, surging forward toward the White House.\n\nIt was really nothing more than an oversize log structure, typical of ancient Rus, window shutters painted with gay designs, wildly fantastic ornamentation adorning the corners and steeply pitched tile roof. At Kal's insistence the entire thing had been whitewashed, since after all that was the house a president lived in, a house painted white.\n\nHe wondered if poor Kal was still alive in there. His old friend, his first real friend on this world, had changed so much in the last year. It was almost as if a dementia, an exhaustion, had broken him. He at times wondered if Kal had simply been too gentle, too filled with compassion to be a president. Every single death at the front told on him. Barely a day went by when he was not in the cathedral at noonday, attending yet another memorial service for the boy of a friend, an old drinking comrade, or simply because he felt that a president should be there when someone mourned a life given for the Republic.\n\nAndrew remembered how shocked he had been the last time he saw Lincoln, face deeply etched, eyes dark and sunken. When Lincoln noticed the empty sleeve, just a quick sidelong glance, then looked back into his eyes, he felt as if the president was filled with a fatherly desire and prayer that Andrew would be spared from any more agony in service to his country. That was Kal, even more so, and all the man wanted now was for the killing to stop.\n\nAnd there was the paradox of war, that there were times that in order to save lives the killing must go on.\n\nHe reined in by the steps of the executive mansion. A cordon of troops ringed the last few steps into the building, the crowd nervously edging up on the lower level. Emil suddenly blocked his view, swinging his mount in front of Andrew'.\n\n\"Doctor, just what the hell are you doing?\" Andrew whispered.\n\n\"Damn all, Andrew, there could be a sniper in any of those windows up there.\"\n\n\"I know that, Doctor; now kindly move. The last thing I want at this moment is to see you get hurt.\"\n\nEmil reluctantly drew his mount around beside Andrew, but he continued to look up at the building, squinting.\n\nAndrew was motionless, and the seconds dragged out.\n\n\"Andrew?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"What the hell are you doing?\"\n\n\"Waiting.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Just waiting,\" Andrew snapped, his tone making it clear that he didn't want to talk.\n\nThe crowd was pressing around him, an old woman tugged at his leg, he looked down, she spoke too rapidly in Rus for him to understand, her voice drowned out by the rising clamor of the anxious crowd.\n\nFinally, a captain came out the front door, leaving it open, stepped through the cordon of guards, walked down the steps, smartly snapped to attention, and saluted. Andrew recognized him as the officer in charge of Kal's personal guard.\n\n\"Colonel, sir?\"\n\n\"Good morning. Captain.\"\n\nThe soldier looked up at him, obviously a bit confused. \"Captain, President Kalenka, how is he?\"\n\n\"Sir, he is still alive. I have placed a double detachment of guards at his door, two officers in his room armed as well.\"\n\n\"And they're good men?\"\n\n\"Sir, I picked them,\" the captain announced, hurt by the implication.\n\nAndrew stared at the young officer, gauging him, then nodded.\n\n\"And his condition?\"\n\nThe captain drew closer, coming up to Andrew's side, the crowd drawing back slightly.\n\n\"Not good I'm afraid, sir; the fever's coming back, his wife says.\"\n\n\"Damn all,\" Emil mumbled.\n\nAndrew nodded, lifted his gaze, staring again at the building.\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Sir, is there anything else?\"\n\n\"Has Bugarin been sworn in as acting president?\"\n\n\"Yes sir. Sir, I was ordered by one of his people to remove the guard from President Kalenka and place them around the room Bugarin is in.\"\n\n\"And you refused?\"\n\n\"Yes sir, I most certainly did.\"\n\n\"As colonel in command of the army, I am giving you a personal order, Captain. You are to guard Kalenka with your life.\"\n\n\"I would do it anyhow, sir.\"\n\n\"No matter what orders you receive afterward my order to you right now comes first. President Kalenka is to be protected at all cost.\"\n\n\"I will die before anyone harms him, sir,\" the young captain replied fiercely.\n\n\"Good, son. Now please go inside and announce to Mr. Bugarin and Metropolitan Casmir that I request to see them, out here.\"\n\nThis order he announced with raised voice, the command echoing out over the crowd. The square grew hushed.\n\nThe captain saluted, hurried inside, and long minutes passed. Finally he returned, alone.\n\n\"Colonel Keane, Mr.,\" and he hesitated for a second, \"Acting President Bugarin says that you are to report to him inside.\"\n\nAndrew stiffened.\n\n\"As commander of the army I request a public meeting, here in front of the citizens of Suzdal, and tell him I will wait here all damn day if necessary.\"\n\nThe captain scurried back, and Andrew pitied him, caught between two fires.\n\n\"Andrew, are you going to do what I think you're doing?\"\n\nAndrew looked over at Emil and smiled.\n\nThe bell in the church tower tolled, marking the passage of time, and finally someone appeared in the door. It was Metropolitan Casmir. He turned, looking back into the White House, obviously shouting something that was unintelligible, then turned and strode down the steps, black robes billowing. He stopped several steps above Andrew, raised his staff, and looked out at the crowd, then made the sign of blessing. Instantly there was silence, everyone going to their knees, blessing themselves. Remaining mounted, Andrew was at eye level with him.\n\n\"Has Bugarin been sworn in as acting president?\" Andrew asked.\n\n\"Yes, Andrew.\" His voice was low, barely a whisper. \"It was your own Constitution that forced me to do it. Kal, I'm not sure if he will survive. Marcus is dead, Flavius is dead. Bugarin is next in line. The Constitution requires it; I had to bless the ceremony.\"\n\nAndrew knew instantly from his tone that Casmir loathed what he had to do.\n\n\"Since you are the chief justice, I request that you initiate an investigation into the attempted assassination of the president and the assassination of the Speaker. I doubt seriously if the executive branch will do so. I doubt as well if you could muster the votes in the Senate to remove Bugarin.\"\n\n\"I will do everything I can, both as a justice and as a priest.\"\n\nThere was a stir in the crowd. Casmir looked back over his shoulder. Half a dozen guards were in the doorway.\n\n\"I told Bugarin I would denounce him as a coward if he didn't come out to meet you,\" Casmir whispered.\n\nAndrew could not help but chuckle.\n\n\"Are you going to overthrow him?\" Casmir asked, and Andrew sensed the conflict in his friend's voice.\n\nHe said nothing, watching intently as Bugarin appeared in the doorway, strangely wearing the stovepipe hat of Kal, which to this world had become the ceremonial symbol of the president. The guards, all of them older senators, came down the steps, Bugarin in the middle of the group.\n\nThey stopped behind Casmir.\n\nAndrew stared at him intently. There was a defiance, but he could sense the fear as well. Was this the man who could engineer not just the assassination of the Speaker but the attempt on the president as well? Did he believe so passionately that the war must end that he would kill, or was he just a pawn as well?\n\nRegardless of what Andrew suspected about how Bugarin had come to power, he was at least for this moment the president of the Republic.\n\nWith deliberate slowness Andrew raised his hand and saluted. A hushed whisper ran through the crowd. It was an acknowledgment, they all knew that. He could sense the tension easing out of Bugarin, but there was still a wariness. He heard a mumbled curse; it was Emil who remained defiant, unable to bring himself to salute.\n\n\"I wish to see President Kalenka now,\" Emil announced, addressing his statement to Casmir and emphasizing the word president.\n\n\"I'll see to it, Emil,\" the prelate replied, \"and you are under my personal protection.\"\n\nEmil looked over at Andrew.\n\n\"Just a second,\" Andrew whispered.\n\n\"For what? To see you kiss his bloody boot?\"\n\nAndrew ignored his friend's defiance.\n\n\"May I inquire of the acting president if there are any orders for the army in regards to operations both offensive and defensive.\"\n\nHe said the words slowly, deliberately, so that all could hear.\n\n\"All offensive operations are to cease. I am asking for a ceasefire immediately. We will end this senseless war.\"\n\nAgain the ripple of voices erupted in the square. This was the moment. The crowd was confused. There was a ripple of cheers, but it lacked depth and enthusiasm. He could hear the rustling of arms back across the square, a muffled order, most likely Webster telling the men there to get ready.\n\n\"Sir, if you are ordering me to have the army stand down, I cannot obey that order.\"\n\nThere was an expectant hush.\n\nAndrew slowly reached down to his side, placing his hand on the hilt of his sword. One of the senators started to raise a pistol, cocking it. Casmir turned to face the senators, shouting for them to remain still.\n\nAndrew carefully drew out his sword, a ceremonial blade given to him by Kal and the Congress in recognition of their victory over the Tugars. He made it a point of now saluting with the blade, hilt drawn up before his face, blade vertical, but as he did so he looked up toward the flag gently fluttering atop the White House.\n\nHe took a deep breath, steadying himself for what would come next.\n\nQuickly he inverted the blade in his grasp, fumbling slightly with his one hand since he was nervous.\n\nWith hilt pointed toward Bugarin he tossed the sword onto the steps so that it clattered by Casmir's feet.\n\n\"I hereby resign my commission with the Army of the Republic,\" he cried, voice carrying to the farthest corners of the plaza. \"I retire to private life and shall leave this city and the Republic.\"\n\nThe crowd fell as silent as the grave. Bugarin looked at him startled, unable to react.\n\nAndrew took a deep breath; to his surprise, he felt as if a horrible burden had been lifted.\n\nHe half turned his horse away from Bugarin. In his mind the man simply no longer existed.\n\nAndrew looked at the crowd, the upturned faces.\n\n\"I gave ten years to this country,\" he shouted, his voice echoing. \"We came to this world, more than five hundred of us. Over four hundred of them are dead, dying to give you freedom. In those ten years of service and sacrifice, I have learned something.\"\n\nHe waited a moment, the crowd in the square as silent as the tomb.\n\n\"You cannot give freedom to anyone. Each man, each woman must earn it themselves, and then guard it from others who would take it away. Guard it from the hordes, guard it from those who would bow again to the hordes.\" As he said the last words, he nodded toward the White House.\n\nHe looked straight back at Bugarin.\n\n\"I am now a private citizen and as a private citizen I say this to you. I expect the health of our beloved President Kalenka to be guarded at all cost. If he should die, for whatever reason, you will have to answer to me personally.\"\n\nBugarin blanched at the direct threat but said nothing. With a deliberate show of contempt, Andrew turned his back without waiting for a reply and again faced the crowd.\n\n\"To those who were my friends, who fought for freedom, I thank you. As for the rest.\" He hesitated remembering Davy Crockett's famous farewell statement. \"Well, I pity you, for if you surrender, you will surely die. Farewell.\"\n\nWith head held high he started to ride back toward his home and felt a lightness within he had not known in years. He had done his duty, he had wrestled with the desire to take it all, an act he knew he could have done. He had not stained himself, and he had not destroyed the Republic. If the Republic was doomed to die, it would be other hands that destroyed his dream and not his own. By doing nothing more at this moment he felt that he had performed one of the most important duties of his career.\n\nAs he passed the spell around him broke, voices erupting, some shouting for him to stay, others calling to fight, others shouting that the war was over. Gates, riding by his side, looked at him, gape-mouthed.\n\n\"What about the war?\" Gates finally asked.\n\nAndrew smiled.\n\n\"They have three days down in Tyre before word can ever get to them. It's beyond my control now.\"\n\n\"God protect Hans and Vincent.\" Gates sighed.\n\n\"Yes,\" Andrew replied, lowering his head. \"God protect us all.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"North; I'll leave the city tomorrow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Hans had told him he would enjoy it, and he was right. He had never liked horses all that much. An officer was expected to ride, and so he did, but trying to keep a comfortable seat aboard a monster the size of a Clydesdale was impossible, especially after the wound to his hip.\n\nRiding an ironclad was different. It bounced the guts out of him as they rumbled up and down over the vast undulating plains, but at the moment he didn't care \u2026 he was back in action, and that's what counted.\n\nCresting a low bluff the driver down below halted their machine. To Vincent's left, sprawled on the ground, were half a dozen Bantag, torn apart by Gatling fire, their mounts dead as well. The Hornet that had done the job came sweeping back from the east, wagging its wings as it passed overhead, most likely returning back to base, its ammunition spent.\n\nMoving stiffly, Vincent turned, holding the side of the turret, letting his legs dangle over the side of the machine, and he dropped clumsily to the ground. It was good to be out of the machine. The open hatch atop the turret tended to act as a chimney, drawing heat up from the main deck below, where the boiler was. The dry sage crackled beneath his feet, the pungent smell clearing away the stench of hot oil and kerosene.\n\nHe raised his field glasses. Far ahead, several miles away, he could see them, six umens identified so far, sixty thousand mounted warriors of the Horde \u2026 and all of them confused as hell.\n\nThe breakout had started at dawn. A rocket barrage of five hundred rounds had preceded the attack, and then fifty-two ironclads led the way. They'd lost six in that opening assault, but within minutes their firepower, combined with the support of twenty Hornets, had torn a gaping hole in the Bantag lines a mile wide, the enemy fleeing in disorganized panic.\n\nFollowing them had come the entire 3rd Corps, moving by regiments in a huge block formation, the same system Hans had used the year before during the withdrawal from the Green Mountains. But this time they had additional artillery with them, wagons for supplies, in addition to the Gatlings aboard the ironclads and in the air.\n\nIt was a different kind of warfare for a different age, Vincent realized. Varinna had grasped that, and it was beginning to crystallize in his own mind. This was more like ships maneuvering at sea than the old style of battles on land. Keep the ironclads together except for a dozen scattered around the square of 3rd Corps to provide fire support and to act as rally points.\n\nAn ironclad ground up the slope beside him and came to a stop, steam hissing from the safety valve, the top door open, a head sticking out.\n\n\"Bastards don't know what to do!\" Timokin grinned, sitting up in the turret of his machine and wiping his face with a sweat-stained rag. He climbed out and dropped to the ground next to Vincent. Other machines were climbing the slope behind them, moving in a giant V formation a half mile wide. It was a grand sight, smoke billowing, cleated wheels cutting into the dry turf, gun ports open, three-inch rifles and Gatlings protruding and ready for action.\n\nBehind them all of 3rd Corps was marching in open block formation. Just inside the giant square six batteries moved at an easy pace, ready to swing out and deploy if needed, while in the center of the vast square were the wagons loaded down with extra fuel, ammunition, and medical supplies. The lone regiment of mounted troopers weaved back and forth outside the square along the flanks and rear, troopers occasionally reining in to trade a couple of shots with Bantag riders who ventured too close to the formation. Overhead four Hornets circled lazily, ready to swoop down if the Bantag should try to venture a charge.\n\nHe could sense the exhilaration in the ranks. Third Corps had stayed in Tyre throughout the winter, avoiding the gutting of the army at Roum and the disaster at Capua. If anything, the men had felt abandoned, forgotten on a secondary front, and after nine months in the siege lines were glorying in a chance to prove something.\n\nGregory offered Vincent his canteen, and he gladly took it. He had drained his own canteen hours ago and pride had kept him from asking for more water from his crew below, who were suffering in far worse heat. Too many months behind a desk he realized.\n\nThe water was hot, but he didn't care, rinsing the oily taste out of his mouth and then taking a long gulp.\n\n\"This is a damn sight better than Capua,\" Gregory said, wincing slightly when Vincent tossed the canteen back. \"Type of country these machines were made for. not the tangle of trenches and traps up north.\"\n\nVincent nodded in agreement.\n\nHe continued to scan the enemy. Plumes of dust were rising from the west several miles behind the column. They are most likely detaching more troops away from Tyre to follow, he thought. Maybe even abandoning the siege completely except for a small covering force, figure to pin us out here with everything they have and wipe us out.\n\nIn spite of Gregory's enthusiasm and the fact that he had planned this operation himself, Vincent did feel a shiver of nervousness. It was one thing to calculate all this out on paper and maps; it was another thing to be out here now. Hans had been right, it was different down here. North, in Roum, the land was settled: There were roads, villas, towns, the typical orderliness of the Roum, everything squared off and proper. This was vast unsettled land, undulating prairie as far as the eye could see, like what he imagined Kansas or the Nebraska Territory to be. A place for the ironclads, but not for a column of infantry on foot.\n\nIt was a strange balance. The Bantag did not have a single ironclad on this front. The few rocket launchers they had were expended, and none of their artillery could stand in the open against the attack. Yet once mounted they could ride rings around the machines and the marching column of 3rd Corps. He looked back to the west, where 3rd Corps, nearly eleven thousand men, were moving through the dry knee-high grass, looking like an undulating blue wave traversing a green-brown sea.\n\nNeither side could now come to grips with the other.\n\nThe Bantags did have one serious advantage, though\u2014they could chose the place to stand and fight. He could not. They had mobility both tactically and strategically, his side had the firepower. If they could bring up firepower as well, it could turn deadly. And that was part of the plan as well.\n\nHe walked in front of his machine, surveying the ground, remembering the maps he had studied so intently that they were' etched clearly in his mind. They were just under twenty miles out from Tyre, a damn good march for the first day. A shallow stream was directly ahead, several hundred yards down the slope, its water dark and muddied by the passing of the Horde riders.\n\n\"We camp here,\" Vincent announced.\n\n\"We've still got four hours or more of daylight, we could make another eight to ten miles.\"\n\nVincent shook his head.\n\n\"No. This is far enough. Besides, I want the men dug in, stockade with sod walls, and we've got water down there for the night. The next stream is six miles farther on, and if the Bantags have any sense, they'll fight us for it.\"\n\n\"Grand, and we chew them apart.\"\n\n\"There's time for that, plenty of time,\" Vincent said absently. \"Let the pressure build some more first. Besides, we're not the main show, that's Hans's job. Remember, we're the diversion, the bait. We bed down early tonight, do a hard march tomorrow, and should nearly reach the head of the rail line they're driving west from the Great Sea. Jurak has undoubtedly figured by now that we are attacking here. He might already have dispatched troops and ironclads from Xi'an and Fort Hancock to converge and meet us in defense of that rail line. Let's give him time to get there and make the show easier for Hans.\"\n\nHans. He pulled out his watch. He should be hitting just about now, he thought. God help him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "It wasn't the time to vomit but the last two hours had been pure hell. Leaning over weakly, he retched, but there was nothing left to give. The ship bucked and surged, rising up on another thermal of hot air, then plunging back down.\n\n\"Is that Xi'an?\" Jack shouted.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Damn it, Hans, pull yourself together.\"\n\nHe nodded bleakly, looking forward. They'd been over land for the last hour, bisecting the arcing curve of the river up to Xi'an. The cloud cover had been building since early afternoon, forcing them to drop lower, Jack expressing increasing anxiety about the prospect of a thunderstorm. If a storm did come up, it could wipe out the entire mission.\n\nHans raised his field glasses, bracing his elbows on the forward panel, trying to compensate for the unceasing motion of the airship, which was bobbing like a cork on a windswept sea.\n\nIt had to be it. In spite of the surging motion of the ship he caught glimpses of a vast walled compound, ships anchored, and for a brief instant a place that looked all too chillingly familiar, the small fortress village half a dozen miles below Xi'an, where he had holed up after escaping from the slave camps. The aerosteamer steadied for a moment, and the world beneath him seemed to come into sharp focus. The city was spread out along the east bank of the river, ancient brick walls glowing red in the late-afternoon sun.\n\nDozens of ships lined the docks below the bluffs, most of them galleys, several steamers, the rest traditional Chin junks. A dark seething mass swarmed the docks, looking like a stirred-up nest of ants \u2026 Chin slaves. From the air the city had a fairy-tale quality to it, a towering pagoda in the center, buildings with steeply pitched red-tile roofs, dozens of small temples dotting the skyline. Yet as he steadied his field glasses he could sense, more than actually see, that a fair part of the city was abandoned, derelict homes, weed-choked streets, collapsed roofs. Even as they labored for their masters the pathetic residents of Xi'an were dying, chosen for the moon feast, transported to work on the railroads, factories, and supply lines, or simply worked to death.\n\nChecking again on the village where he had fought off the Bantag till help arrived, he gauged the distance up the river. There was no doubt about it: They were approaching Xi'an, main supply base for the Bantag Horde, the transition point for supplies coming from the heart' of the Chin realm.\n\nTwo hundred miles eastward was that black heart of the Bantag Empire, the vast prison camps and factories where millions of Chin slaves labored to support the war. That heart was his ultimate goal, but first he had to seize this city. Everything the Bantag made to support their war effort had to come through here, off-loading from the trains to be loaded on ships that would transport it across the Great Sea, five hundred miles northward to be off-loaded yet again for the final run to Capua. This was the weak link in that vast chain.\n\nThis was the linchpin of Varinna's plan. A raid deep into the realm of the Bantag to seize the docks, sink the ships, burn the supplies\u2014to cut the precious lifeline. Vincent was the diversion, to present Jurak with two threats, the prospect of their seizing a base on the Great Sea and with luck draw off some forces before his own raid struck. If Vincent was successful, all the better.\n\n\"Where do we land?\" Jack cried.\n\n\"Damned if I know,\" Hans replied. \"Can't you remember?\"\n\n\"I only flew over the damned place once, and that was a year ago. The second time I flew to where you were, then got the hell out. Damn it, Hans, we should have sent in at least one reconnaissance flight before doing this.\"\n\nHans shook his head. One such flight might have tipped their hand. This one was going to be blind.\n\n\"Think they're on to us?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"Have to be by now; they must have coast watchers reporting us coming in.\"\n\nThe city was just several miles out. Hans anxiously scanned the riverbanks, looking for a place to touch down that was close enough that they could directly storm the harbor area.\n\nNothing.\n\n\"We're losing another ship.\"\n\nIt was their top gunner calling in.\n\n\"She's going down. Damn, it's a Bantag flyer!\"\n\nHis voice was drowned out by the staccato roar of a Gatling, the vibration of the topside gun firing shaking the cabin.\n\nJack held the ship steady, still aimed straight at the city, while anxiously scanning the sky above, looking for the enemy ship.\n\n\"There, north of the city wall, looks like an airfield!\" Hans cried.\n\n\"That's it then! We're going in!\" Jack shouted. He nosed the ship down, picking up speed.\n\n\"Got him! He's breaking to starboard. He's burning!\"\n\nHans leaned forward, looking out the side window and caught a glimpse of a twin-engine airship, trailing fire, going down.\n\n\"Topside, how many still with us?\"\n\n\"Somewhere around thirty-five I think.\"\n\nHans said nothing. Better than he hoped but still only 350 men.\n\nThey dropped through two thousand feet, the wires on the wings singing.\n\nHans cleared the speaker tube to the cargo department.\n\n\"Ketswana, get ready!\"\n\n\"About time.\"\n\nEngines howling, the airship leveled out a hundred feet above the marshy western shore, then turned as they reached the river just south of the city and started to race straight in. Straight ahead he could see startled faces looking up, Chin slaves on the docks and around the warehouses, hands raised, pointing at the incoming assault. A scattering of Bantag were running along the walls. A stream of tracers snapped past the open window, startling Hans, it was one of the gunners flying behind them sweeping the walls.\n\n\"Fly us over the ships, then bank around into the airfield,\" Hans shouted.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I want the Chin on the docks to see our insignia so they know what the hell is happening.\"\n\nJack banked the ship, turning more easterly, heading straight in toward the city, then banked over sharply, port-side wing dropping down. They were directly above the docks lining the river below the city walls, white stars of the Republic exposed on the bottom side of the wings, an insignia clearly different than the human skulls of the Bantag. In spite of the howling of the engines and the shriek of the wind, he distinctly heard thousands of voices rising up, excited cries of hope.\n\nThe nausea was gone, he hung on, watching as land, river, city, and sky wheeled in front of him. A bullet snapped through the cabin, shattering a window, glass flying.\n\nThey leveled out, heading straight toward a row of galleys berthed side by side, each of them loaded down with two land ironclads. A steamer, looking vaguely like an old-style Mississippi riverboat, towing two barges was out in the middle of the river, barges loaded down with crates behind it, heading downstream. Again the staccato roar of the Gatling from above; tracers tore into the first barge. It ignited in a towering fireball, debris soaring hundreds of feet heavenward.\n\n\"God damn that idiot!\" Jack screamed, banking away from the explosion. \"Cease fire up there!\"\n\nThe boy was shouting with joy, tracers sweeping into the second barge, igniting the ammunition aboard that one as well. It looked like a vast fireworks show gone berserk. Jack continued to turn away, flying up over the top of the city wall, gape-mouthed Bantag looking straight up. Swarms of Chin on the docks were running, panic-stricken.\n\nHans was filled with a mad exhilaration, holding on to the side railing as Jack banked sharply in the opposite direction, leveling out, sweeping along the city wall, Bantag so close below that Hans could not resist the urge to stick his hand out the side window and offer a universal rude gesture. He was tempted to man the forward gun but knew he had to stay focused on the battle. Down in the narrow twisting lanes of the tightly packed city he could see hundreds pouring out of buildings into the streets, pointing.\n\nThey reached the northwest corner of the wall. The airfield was less than a quarter mile ahead, but now they were coming in at a right angle to the long axis. A Bantag air machine was starting to lift off, crawling into the sky, turning toward them.\n\nJack slammed the throttles back, banked to the west out over the river again until they reached the opposite shore. He then slapped the wheel in the opposite direction. The airship seemed to stand on its starboard wing as it pivoted, turning to line up on an easterly heading, aiming straight at the airfield. Jack eased the throttles back even farther.\n\nHans lost sight of the Bantag airship, felt a shudder, and caught a glimpse of a tracer snapping past, return fire from above. As they turned, he saw one of their aerosteamers going down, port wing folding up, caught in the fireball explosion of the barges, the machine falling like a moth with a wing torn off. The ship crashed into the river, the blue glow of a hydrogen fire soaring up, consuming the canvas and wicker framework.\n\nThe sky was filled with airships, flying about like a swarm of confused and angry bees, heading in every possible direction. The Bantag airship flew right through the middle, tracers streaking in from all points of the compass as a score or more gunners fired on it. The Bantag machine exploded and crashed into the dock, striking down dozens of Chin. Another ball snapped through the cabin past Hans's head, fired from one of their own ships in all the confusion.\n\n\"This is gonna be tight!\" Jack shouted, as they lined up on the airfield.\n\nIt wasn't much, Hans realized, nothing more than a narrow swath of grass, the west side ending at the bluffs of the river, the other three sides surrounded by a jumbled sprawl of warehouses, slave encampments, and round wooden buildings that looked like oversize Bantag yurts.\n\nThe airship bobbed down, dropping below the rim of the bluff, Jack slammed in throttles, nosed up, cursing. They seemed to hang in midair, drifting in toward the bluff. Hans caught a glimpse of a red streamer fluttering in the wind at the end of the strip. They were coming in to land with the wind at their backs.\n\nThe ship barely climbed over the rim of the bluff and there was a sharp blow. They were down!\n\nThe ship bounced, rolled down the length of the airfield. Hans saw several dozen Bantag standing to one side, all of them motionless, completely surprised.\n\nJack let his ship roll out to the very end of the airstrip, clearing the way for the rest to come in, turning at the last second, slamming the throttles down.\n\n\"Everyone out! Get out, damn it!\"\n\nHans unstrapped from his seat, stepped down, pulled open the bottom hatch, grabbed his carbine out from under his chair. It was a drop of a dozen feet, and he suddenly realized he couldn't negotiate the ladder while holding on to his gun.\n\n\"Move, damn it. move!\" Jack was crying.\n\nHans dropped his weapon through the hatch and slid down the rope ladder, holding on to either side, burning his hands. Hitting'the ground hard he clutched at his carbine, came up to his knees and levered it opened, pulled a cartridge from his pocket, and slammed it in. Some of the Bantag were still standing along the edge of the strip, watching. He stood up and came out from under the machine, moving along the wing, almost stepping into a propeller that was still spinning.\n\nKetswana was by his side, carbine raised. At a walk Hans started toward the Bantag, for a moment not really sure of what to do. They were mostly gray pelts and young. Another airship skidded past him, turning, spinning about as it ground to a halt. He looked down the airstrip. Airships were lining up, coming in, one after the other, one of them trailing smoke from a burning wing. It never made it, slamming into the bluff just below the airstrip, exploding. The ship behind it rose up, banking hard, nearly clipping the city wall with its wing, leveled out, then flew down the length of the field to come around again for another try.\n\nHe continued to walk toward the Bantag. They stood frozen like statues, most likely not even comprehending what was happening. Their inactivity told him volumes \u2026 the attack was a complete and total surprise, the arrival of the air fleet a complete shock. He was so close he could almost talk to them in a normal voice. He paused, and in spite of his hatred he couldn't bring himself to raise his gun; it was too much like murder.\n\nSuddenly they came to life. One of them fumbled at his belt, pulled out a pistol, and raised it. Others started to draw their weapons as well. Ketswana leveled his weapon, fired, pitching one of them over backwards. Shots erupted, Hans continued forward, a bullet snipping past his face. He took steady aim on the forehead of a gray pelt and dropped him clean. Levering open his carbine he reloaded, looked up, and saw the last of them running toward the wall.\n\nHans looked back over his shoulder. More men were swarming out from under the grounded airships. Eight were already down, two more came in, landing almost wingtip to wingtip, one of them coming straight at him. He sprinted to get out of the way, dropping to the ground as the ship veered, its starboard wing clipping the side of a shack, a propeller popping off, spinning across the field like a berserk toy of a giant child, tearing up great gouts of dirt, then disintegrating into splinters. The ship lurched to a stop, port-side wing pivoting over Hans's head. The crew compartment underneath was already open, Chin soldiers spilling out, jabbering, cursing.\n\nOne of Ketswana's men raised a bugle, sounding the rally call, and men came sprinting from all directions. An airship screamed past overhead, coming from the opposite direction of the landing traffic, its topside and forward gun firing upward. He caught a glimpse of a Bantag machine turning away, fire billowing from its hydrogen bag, pilot tumbling out of the forward cab, a silk umbrella opening. The Bantag pilot drifted toward the airstrip. Before Hans could say anything, guns were raised, riddling the warrior, who hung limp in his harness.\n\nMore men were falling in around Hans. Someone had his guidon. He had completely forgotten about bringing that along.\n\nHe scanned the wall facing the airstrip. There was a gate, but it was already closed. No, get lost in the warren of streets. It was the docks, get the docks, round up the Chin out there, then take the city from that side.\n\nHe looked back over at the airstrip. More ships were still coming in. What's on the other side, those wooden yurtlike buildings? Barracks for the Bantag. If so we could lose our ships.\n\n\"Jack?\"\n\n\"Right here.\"\n\n\"Round up fifty men or so; I want a defensive perimeter on the other side of the field. Once the last airship lands and off-loads, start turning them around, get them back up in the air again to provide support.\"\n\nHe started off without even waiting for a reply, racing down the length of the airfield. More ships were landing; one was on its side, burning fiercely, survivors hanging out of the side of the cargo compartment, dropping to the ground and crawling away.\n\nA rattle of shots erupted from along the wall. He looked up, saw more Bantag up there, firing at the aerosteamers on the field.\n\nHe detailed off a dozen men, shouting for them to suppress the fire,.and at the same instant an airship, banking sharply, winged overhead, its topside and nose gunners pouring a stream of Gatling fire down on the wall. Good, someone up there was thinking.\n\nHe pushed on, breathing hard, not used to the running, feeling his heart pounding, fluttering. He slowed for an instant urging Ketswana to push forward. There was a brief slap of pain in his chest that almost stole his breath away.\n\nDamn, not now. He bent over, a Chin soldier slowing, coming up face filled with fear.\n\n\"Hans shot?\"\n\n\"No. No, I'm fine.\"\n\nHe stood back up, placing his hand on the young soldier's arm to steady himself. The shiver of pain passed.\n\nHe started forward again, rounding the northwest corner of the wall. The shipyard and docks were far bigger than he had realized from the air. To his right, on the north side of the landing strip, were a row of boat sheds, bows of what looked to be seagoing ironclads sticking out. If any of those ships could get up steam and make it out into the river, they were finished. If we could capture them, though, he thought with a grin, Bullfinch could play hell with Bantag shipping. Catching the eye of a Chin sergeant leading a detachment, he pointed toward the boat sheds. The sergeant didn't need to be told. He saluted, shouted for his men to follow, and ran off. Directly below his feet, less than a hundred feet away, was the burning wreckage of an aerosteamer sticking out of the river. He saw several survivors crawling up onto the muddy bank.\n\nDown the length of the city were dozens of piers, anchored ships, several of them burning like torches. Ammunition from the burning barges in the middle of the river was still igniting, showering the dockside with flaming embers.\n\nThe river was low, nearly twenty feet below the level of the wall. The bluff that the city was built on extended about forty feet out from the wall, then sloped off sharply down to the docks twenty feet below the level of the bluff. A steeply sloping walkway, emerging from the main city gate a couple of hundred yards away, connected the upper and lower levels. Just south of the gate he noticed for the first time that a railroad track ran between the wall and the 178 William R. Forstchen edge of the bluff, boxcars and flatcars lining the track, all of them swarming with Chin. Atop several of the boxcars Bantag were already in position, crouching low, firing in his direction.\n\nThe wide pier along the riverbank was a scene of absolute chaos. Thousands of Chin swarmed back and forth, Bantag visible in the crush, towering above their slaves. Ketswana had deployed a heavy skirmish fine from the wall to the edge of the bluff. Hans came up to join him.\n\n\"We can't get separated!\" Hans shouted, trying to be heard above the cacophonous roar. \"I'll advance along the top of the bluff. Keep pace with me down on the docks. As you pass each ship anchored to the pier, sweep the Bantag off but don't get tangled up in them. We advance to the gate, then try and gain a foothold in the town. Now move!\"\n\nHe started forward at a slow walk, followed by several dozen men, moving along the lip of the bluff, looking up warily at the wall above. Ketswana, leading several dozen more, slid down the clay embankment, alighting on the pier. The seething chaos of Chin and Bantag was backing up in confusion at the sight of this blue-clad line sweeping around from the side of the city. Puffs of smoke ignited from Bantag on the pier, along the embankment, from ships, and atop the parked train.\n\n\"Aim carefully!\" Hans shouted.\n\nThe skirmish line fired back, trying to avoid hitting the frightened slaves caught in the middle of the chaos. They pushed forward, passing the first dead, tragically too many of them human. A scathing volley erupted from a galley tied to the pier, several dozen Bantag lining the side of the ship. A man next to Hans dropped without uttering a sound, face a bloody mass.\n\nHans knelt, aimed carefully, fired. The battle stalled for several minutes as they struggled to suppress the Bantag defending the anchored ship, the men around Hans kneeling and lying down to return fire. He lost two more in quick succession. It was taking too long. Ketswana, leading the way, scrambled over the bow of the ship, disappearing in the confusion. Seconds later he reappeared, swinging a heavy Bantag scimitar two-handed, cutting down a black-clad warrior. Screaming a wild battle cry, holding the scimitar aloft, he jumped back onto the dock and charged forward.\n\nThe next ship downstream was in flames, bundled-up sails burning like torches. Hans pushed his line forward; they had to gain the gate. He saw a dark column coming out of that gate, Bantag infantry, and his heart sank.\n\nAnd then it happened. The Bantag infantry, hemmed in on all sides by thousands of terrified slaves trying to get away from the fighting slashed out, clubbing, bayoneting their way through the press.\n\nCaught between two fires, the Chin finally exploded. The terrified mob turned on their tormentors and within seconds the entire dockside from one end to the other had dissolved into a frightful, bitter riot, a revolution of tormented slaves turning on their implacable, fearsome masters.\n\nBantag were dragged down, disappearing under the swarm.\n\n\"Keep together!\" Hans roared to his men. \"Don't get lost in this! Take the gate and hold there!\"\n\nHe pushed the line forward, advancing slowly, keeping the pressure on, coldly and logically realizing that if he could push the Chin back, drive them together, panic would seize them and they'd turn on their foes. The ground was slick with blood, footing nearly impossible with the mass of bodies. His line finally broke in two between the embankment along the wall and the lower dock, Chin by the hundreds swarming through on the steep-sloping ground separating the two.\n\nAs he advanced he looked down on the ships to his right. More of them were burning, one of them flaring like a furnace, Bantag in flames plunging off the side. Damn, loaded with kerosene most likely, he thought.\n\nSuddenly they were at the gates \u2026 which hung wide-open, bodies littering the entryway, most of them Chin, but there were a half dozen Bantag as well. The boxcars, which he feared might serve as a barrier to his advance, were in flames. He almost felt pity for a lone warrior running back and forth, obviously terrified, weapon gone, the surging mob of Chin below taunting and screaming at him. He suddenly crumpled and fell off the side, into the waiting arms of the mob. The fighting was exploding through the streets of the city, the venting of long-suppressed rage.\n\nHe turned, looking down at the docks. If it was possible to pity the Bantag, he did so at this moment. No longer were they the feared masters. Some still fought, several dozen of them forming a square, bayonets poised outward. Most were simply being swarmed under. He saw one rising up into the air, held aloft by a dozen Chin, kicking feebly while the mob tore at him, beating him with clubs, slashing with knives; one, holding a Bantag rifle, plunged the bayonet in the warrior's side, pulled it out, then plunged it in again.\n\nThe flames continued to sweep along the docks, jumping from ship to ship, feeding hungrily on canvas sails, tarred ropes and decks, stores of kerosene, crates of ammunition.\n\nHe leaned against the walls of the city, resting for a moment to catch his breath.\n\n\"Hans, you all right?\"\n\nIt was Ketswana, obviously delighted with the slaughter, carbine slung over his shoulder, sword still in his hands and dripping with blood and matted hair.\n\nHe nodded. It was too damned hot, made worse by the fires and the press of the mob.\n\nA flyer streaked overhead, skimming down the river, forward gunner firing at a lone junk that had managed to push off from the dock. Water foamed around the ship, tracer rounds walking onto the deck, dropping the Bantag crew, sails sparking into flames, a wild hysterical cheer rising from the thousands of Chin along the riverfront.\n\nHans watched it soar past, the thought forming, wishing he was on it, above all of this madness, blood, and chaos where he could still his pounding heart and breathe cool air.\n\n\"Easy, so damned easy!\" Ketswana exalted.\n\n\"Not yet, damn it,\" Hans snapped, refocusing his attention.\n\n\"First. Detail off some of our Chin sergeants. Get the people down there on the docks organized and put out those fires. We want those ships and the supplies on board.\"\n\nKetswana looked at him.\n\n\"This is no longer a raid; we're going to hold this place.\"\n\nHis companion broke into a grin. He pointed to the south end of the dock, where he had first spotted two land ironclads. The ship was still there, fire licking along its bow.\n\n\"I want those ironclads saved. We can use them. Next, detail off a company, get into the city, find out if there are any pockets of resistance. Try and find the human chieftain or ruler in there. I'm heading back to the airfield; we've got to organize the flyers, and find out if anything's coming at us from outside the city.\"\n\nHe broke away from the press around the gate, motioning for his guidon bearer and bugler to follow. Moving back along the wall, he was horrified by the extent of the slaughter left in their wake. He had seen far too many a battlefield, but there was nothing worse than the wake of a bloody murderous riot. The dead were not simply shot, they were torn apart, humans and Bantags locked in deadly embrace, hands about each other's throats, clawing at each other's eyes; blood, brains, looping entrails covered the embankment. Hundreds of Chin wandered about aimlessly, many of them seriously injured, but still capable of falling on a Bantag if they saw the slightest sign of life.\n\nHe reached the northwest corner of the wall. The airfield was again in view. Burning airships littered the ground, patches of dried grass burning as well, thick white smoke swirling up. He could hear a scattering of shots in the distance. He caught a glimpse of the ironclad boat sheds; the buildings were in flames. He moved slowly, winded from the battle, reaching the shed which must have been the headquarters for the airfield. Jack was out front shouting orders and threw his hands wide in exasperation at Hans's approach.\n\n\"Damn all! Where the hell have you been?\"\n\n\"Fighting a battle.\"\n\n\"It's your job to stay in one damn place and give orders. I'm not a ground commander, and that's what you've got me doing here.\"\n\nHans smiled at Jack's exasperation.\n\n\"One of my men who just landed said he flew several miles to the northeast. Do you know there must be several regiments of Bantag camped up there, and they're already forming up?\"\n\n\"We had to expect that,\" Hans said, forcing himself to conceal his surprise.\n\n\"We did our job here, Hans. Let's get the hell out while we can.\"\n\n\"How many airships left?\"\n\nJack looked around at the packed confusion of the airfield.\n\n\"We lost nine coming in, at least I think that's the count. Another half dozen got lost or turned back. We're down to twenty-five, with just barely enough fuel to get home. Let's off-load the weapons, hand them out to the Chin, so I can get our airships out of here.\"\n\nHans shook his head.\n\n\"The air fleet stays here.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Just what I said. Pick out one ship with a good crew that won't get lost, and send them back to Tyre with word that we're in. I'll write out the message before they leave.\" Jack drew closer.\n\n\"Hans, you know and I know that wasn't the plan I agreed to fly. This was a raid to smash up Xi'an and, hopefully, trigger a revolt to tie Jurak down and cut his supplies. If you and your men were going to stay, I was to turn my fleet around and get back to Tyre. We've done that. I want my airships out of here now.\"\n\nBoth ducked as a bullet whined past. Turning, Hans saw a couple of Bantag on the wall. A volley of shots erupted from the Chin soldiers standing around the two, driving the Bantag down.\n\n\"Damn all, Hans, a dozen Bantags with rifles could riddle the rest of my ships. I've got to get them up and out of here. This place is just too hot.\"\n\n\"I know that. Get airborne, we still got a couple hours of daylight. Range east, up the track, get some other ships over that camp where their troops are forming and shoot it up. Let's get some panic going out there. If you can, have someone land twenty or thirty miles up the track and tear up some telegraph lines. Once dusk settles come back in and land here. We should have this place secured by then.\" Again another shot snapped past them. Cursing, Hans raised his carbine, took careful aim at a Bantag on the wall, and dropped him.\n\n\"If I do that, we won't have enough fuel to g\u00a3t everyone back,\" Jack cried even while Hans was shooting.\n\n\"I know that,\" Hans said.\n\n\"Hans?\"\n\nThe sergeant major stared at him, saying nothing.\n\n\"Damn it, Hans, you won. Jurak will choke up there at Capua. It'll take him weeks to get any supplies after this. If you want to stay here, well that was part of the plan if you thought you could hold. I can be back from Tyre by tomorrow evening with two hundred more men and supplies.\"\n\n\"No.\" He shook his head violently.\n\nJack stared at him, and their eyes locked.\n\n\"I knew you would do this,\" Jack finally whispered. \"Damn you. I didn't think we'd even make it this far. Hans, I'm still alive. Do you understand that? I thought I was dead, and I'm still alive. For God's sake, all I want to do now is live out a few more days without being terrified.\"\n\nAs he said the last words his voice started to break.\n\n\"And you knew as well as I did what we have to do out here.\"\n\n\"You're talking bloody suicide for all of us,\" Jack cried.\n\nHe backed away from Hans, cursing violently.\n\n\"I'll not order my men to die. God damn you, Hans, I've lost nearly half of them already.\" He pointed toward the flaming wrecks littering the field.\n\n\"You're not ordering them,\" Hans whispered. \"I'm ordering them.\"\n\n\"Andrew said nothing of this to me,\" Jack shouted.\n\nHans started to reach for the letter of authorization tucked into his breast pocket and hesitated. No, that wasn't the way, he realized. He stepped up to Jack, putting his hand on the pilot's shoulder. Jack tried to shake it off, but Hans grasped him tight, forcing him to look into his eyes again.\n\n\"Jack, I'm going to end this war the only way it can be ended,\" he announced slowly. \"We're going straight into the heart of this bloody empire and tear it out. We're not stopping with Xi'an. We're going to liberate all the Chin.\"\n\nJack said nothing.\n\n\"I can't order men to near-certain death, Jack. But you know this is the only way left, and someone has to do it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\"So, they found the weak spot.\"\n\nJurak turned away from the map in the center of the yurt illuminated by oil lamps looted from a nearby Roum villa.\n\nHe motioned for his aging friend to have a seat. Taking down a wineskin, he tossed it over. Zartak grunted his thanks, uncorking the skin and draining half of it off in long, thirsty gulps.\n\n\"This Roum wine, far better than the brew the Chin make. About the only thing I like in this damnable country is the wine.\"\n\nJurak said nothing, turning back to study the map and calculate his next move.\n\n\"There's a wine from the south, a land out across the great encompassing ocean,\" Zartak said. \"Our cousins who live there make it themselves, delicious as nectar.\"\n\n\"Make it themselves?\" Jurak asked.\n\nZartak nodded, motioning for Jurak to sit down. The - expression on Jurak's face made it obvious that he did not want to be diverted at the moment, but Zartak simply chuckled and patted the camp chair.\n\n\"You already know what needs to be done, and so do I. Now relax for a few minutes before you go off.\"\n\nJurak grudgingly gave in and sat down, taking the wineskin.\n\n\"None of these humans down there,\" Zartak continued. \"Oh, a few slaves are traded as we ride past. Five hundred leagues or more south of Cartha. The two oceans here are mere lakes to the Great Sea.\"\n\n\"Have you ever seen it?\"\n\n\"I've ridden nearly four circlings,\" Zartak cackled. \"I've seen everything of this world. Not like the stories you tell me of your world, my Qar Qarth.\"\n\nJurak looked up, annoyed at the honorific title. Zartak smiled as if joking.\n\n\"Cities that glow at night, flying machines that are as fast as sound. Now you are my Qar Qarth, but I must confess I find it hard to believe, for nothing can outrace the voice of thunder. So many strange things you've seen Jurak.\"\n\nZartak sighed wearily, shaking his head, running long, knurled fingers through his thinning mane.\n\n\"You're different, too,\" Jurak replied. \"Not like the other clan chiefs.\"\n\nZartak laughed.\n\n\"The Merki had a position within their Horde, the Shield Bearer, believed to be the spiritual advisor, the other half of the soul of the Qar Qarth. The fallen Tugars as well had an elder general. I fought him once, the last one that is. He was good, very good.\"\n\n\"And you were thus to the last leader of the Bantag, before we, Ha'ark, the rest of my squad came here?\" Jurak asked.\n\nZartak nodded.\n\n\"We're not all as primitive as Ha'ark believed, or wanted to believe. We were here long before the first humans trod this world. I, for one, believe this was the home world, the birthplace of the first ancestors who grasped the stars and then fell from greatness. How else is it explained that you came from another world through the Portal of Light.\"\n\nJurak nodded. The history of his own world taught that they were descendants of the first elders, godlike travelers who stepped through space and then became stranded upon his world. If so, they had to have come from somewhere. This world might very well indeed be the ancestor world of all of his race.\n\n\"The portals, I've wondered about that since we came here,\" Jurak said, staring up through the open flaps of his yurt, the Great Wheel overhead.\n\n\"Gates, I think,\" Zartak replied. \"And may the gods and all the ancestors curse the day the gates into the world of the humans were created. The fools who built them, then left them unattended, were mad.\"\n\n\"Yet it brought you the horse, even the great woolly beasts, and of course the cattle?\" Jurak said cautiously.\n\nZartak looked at him carefully and leaned forward. He picked the wineskin up, realized it was empty, and tossed it aside.\n\nJurak reached under a table and pulled out another sack, handing it over. The old warrior nodded his thanks.\n\n\"The air up in this region is chilled at night; this will warm my bones and help me to sleep.\"\n\nHe smacked his lips, sighing as he recorked the skin, which was now half-empty. Picking up the folding stool he had been sitting on, he moved it over to the open doorway of the yurt, motioning for Jurak to join him. They sat in silence for several minutes, gazing out at the steppes and the Great Wheel rising in the eastern heavens.\n\n\"The Endless Ride,\" Zartak whispered, gaze fixed on the heavens.\n\n\"Oh how glorious it was in my youth. You came long after these troubles had started, and all was changing. I think you would have liked it then, even though you are civilized.\"\n\nJurak looked over and saw that Zartak was smiling slyly.\n\n\"At dawn to see the vast multitude arise, facing to the east, chanting our greetings to the morning sky. The yurts, a hundred thousand of them, and that of the great Qar Qarth drawn by a hundred oxen with room for a hundred within. Our encampments blanketed the steppe for as far as the eye could see.\n\n\"And then we would ride, the wind in our hair, the thunder of a million hooves causing the earth to shake. Hunters sweeping far forward, bringing in game, the great wool-clad giants with tusks that could feed a thousand for a day.\"\n\nHe smiled, taking another drink.\n\n\"I remember my first hunting eagle. I named him Bakgar after the God of the Westerly Wind. His cry would reach to the heavens. We'd range far ahead, he and I. Have you ever truly been alone on the steppes, my son?\"\n\nJurak shook his head, inwardly pleased that the wine had loosened the old one's tongue, causing him to drop the deference, the titles, to call him son. He realized that Zartak was not even aware of the slip.\n\n\"To be truly alone, the bowl of the blue heavens overhead, the great green sea beneath you, spring grass as high as your stirrups. When the god Bakgar sighed, the green sea shifted, rocking, the wind taking form as it touched the land. And the air. the smell, you know you were breathing the sweet breath of heaven.\n\n\"And I'd raise my wrist, setting my own Bakgar loose, and with a great cry he'd circle upward, bright golden feathers rippling. Alone, so truly alone, and it was worth everything to be alive and to know that, to know the joy of a fleet horse, an eagle on your wrist, and the wind in your hair.\"\n\nHe lowered his head for a moment, lost in his dreams.\n\n\"And you never knew the joy only the young can feel when they ride to war for the first time. Our umens would fill that green sea, ten thousand riding as one, turning as one, pennants snapping overhead, the great nargas sounding the charge.\n\n\"My first charge, ah there was a moment. It was the year before I completed my first circling, not far from here in the land of the Nippon. We and the Merki. When we loosed our shafts ten thousand arrows blotted out the sun, the dark shadow of them racing like a storm cloud.\"\n\nHe shook his head and sighed.\n\n\"Madness really. But we fought for different things then. The world was big enough for all of us to ride, to hunt, to have pasture. It was simply to match steel against steel and prove that we were still worthy of the blood of our ancestors and unafraid. It was not to the final death, to the slaughter of the young, the old, the bearers of young. No, just steel against steel. Not like this.\" And he vaguely waved back toward the west and the front lines.\n\n\"If you bested a champion, you took his faka, his glory, but would suffer him to live, even to feast him before sending him back to his yurt. That was as war should be.\"\n\nHe took another drink of wine.\n\n\"But always there were the humans.\"\n\n\"You don't call them cattle anymore,\" Jurak said.\n\nZartak laughed sadly.\n\n\"You know I once had a pet. It was when I was a child, a female. In those days, among those of the blood of the royal lines it was common to give to a youth a human pet to serve as companion, a teacher of their languages, a slave to do the menial tasks.\"\n\nHe was silent for a moment.\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"Some, as they came to their first passions of youth, would become besotted by such a cattle female.\"\n\nJurak could not hide his disgust at the mere thought of it. It was a subject not spoken of, a dark infamy only whispered of, and punished brutally.\n\n\"No, not in that sense did I care for her,\" Zartak added, not even aware of his friend's reaction.\n\n\"Not in that sense?\" Jurak asked cautiously.\n\n\"Her name was Helena. She was of the tribe called the Greek Byzantens, a thousand or more leagues to the west. But I did love her.\"\n\nZartak shifted uncomfortably.\n\n\"I think she genuinely cared for me, almost like a mother to a child. She was a gentle creature. I remember when I was not more than five years or so I was stricken with a fever that all but killed me. She sat by me day and night for nearly the passing of an entire moon.\"\n\n\"What of your mother?\"\n\n\"I never knew her. She died giving me life. My father never took another to his bed and died mourning her. Thus there was only Helena to tend to me.\n\n\"She would tell me stories of her people, of human kings and princes of their old world, of a poet called Homer. She knew much of his great ballad by heart.\"\n\nAnd for a moment Zartak drifted, speaking in an unknown tongue of House Atreides and black-hulled ships. The ancient song died away, and he took another drink.\n\n\"You know the ritual of the naming day, the day a warrior is accepted into his unit of ten and finally takes the name he will carry for the rest of his life?\"\n\nJurak nodded, having seen it often enough since coming to this world.\n\n\"One is expected to make a sacrifice, usually a horse\"\u2014 he paused for a moment\u2014\"but also a cattle. My cousins had taunted me that I was too attached to my cattle pet. My father was dead by then, so it was my eldest uncle who on that morning decreed that Helena was to be the sacrifice.\"\n\nHe stopped again, finishing the rest of the wine sack. With a low grunt he threw it out of the yurt, reached back under the table without bothering to ask, drew out another sack and opened it.\n\n\"Strange how this brew loosens the tongue to such foolishness.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Jurak said softly. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"So 1 went to my yurt. She had laid out my warrior's garb, my first shirt of chain mail, the scimitar and bow of my father. I knew she was proud of me, even though I was of the Horde and she was merely a cattle. And she was wearing a plain white robe, as white as a morning cloud, the robe of a cattle sacrifice. She already knew.\n\n\"I could not speak. She'smiled and said that today she would join her parents. We had slaughtered them years before, and yet she loved me. She went unafraid. I was the one who was afraid, as we walked to the circle where my family awaited.\n\n\"We entered the circle. She hesitated at the sight of the stake she was supposed to be tied to. My uncle, a cruel one he was, had wood piled about it. He wanted the old forms to be observed, so she was to be burned alive and then devoured.\"\n\nZartak hesitated and looked away.\n\n\"She turned and looked at me and whispered in her language. 'If you loved me as I loved you, do it now. Please don't let me burn.'\"\n\nHe stopped again.\n\nJurak waited in silence.\n\n\"'He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside still waters.'\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The last words she said,\" Zartak whispered. \"It was a prayer of her people. She taught me to say it. She said her god taught it to her people, and my gods would hear it, too. When I was a cub we would say it together every night.\n\n\"She began that prayer. I stepped behind her so she could not see the blade.\"\n\nHe paused again.\n\n\"No. That's a lie. Because I could not bear to look into her eyes. I killed her with a single blow before she finished the prayer. I did that so it would catch her unaware and those were her last words.\n\n\"And so the feast of my naming day began. My cousins fell upon her body. I had lost face for my weakness, killing her thus, and I was taunted for years after that. I didn't care. I knew what was in my heart even if they did not.\"\n\nZartak's voice broke, and Jurak was unable to contain his surprise. Such a display of emotion before one not of your own blood was all but unknown.\n\nAfter several minutes Zartak regained his composure.\n\n\"The drunken ramblings of a decrepit warrior,\" Zartak announced self-consciously.\n\n\"No, not at all.\"\n\n\"I knew then they had souls. That they were as good as us. Yes, I joined in the moon feasts and felt the passion of the slaughter when after a long and hungry ride we fell upon a great city of theirs and one out of ten were culled out to feed us. I remember three circlings back when one of the cities on the far side of this world rebelled. It was somewhat the same as here; some humans had come through a portal in a ship. They had weapons of powder, men with black beards, blue uniforms, and a great ship flying a flag of red and blue and white. They did not have the skill of these Yankees, though, in the making of machines. But they did field a great army of humans armed with pikes and bows, following those flags and golden eagles as standards. We slaughtered all of them, millions, the feasting lasted for weeks before we rode on, and I did love it.\n\n\"Yet always I was haunted by her.\"\n\n\"Your love of her?\" Jurak asked, uncomfortable associating the word love with a human.\n\n\"No. That was inside here.\" He pointed to his stomach, the liver, where all feelings rested.\n\n\"No. It was the knowledge of what they truly are. When the first humans came here our ancestors slaughtered them out of hand.\"\n\nHe hesitated for a moment. \"And that was good.\"\n\n\"Why?\"'\n\n\"Our ancestors had reverted to barbarism, becoming little better than the cattle they slaughtered. And then came the horse and we\u2014bred it to our size and the tribes started the Great Ride about the world. If only it had stayed thus, I would say that was good, too. But somewhere back then our ancestors decided not to slaughter all the humans, but to spread them out about the world instead. To place one of each of their tribes as a chief or king. Then, when we circled the world and returned in twenty years, there would be more of them.\n\n\"We thought ourselves so wise, for we reasoned, let the humans do the labor. Let them raise food for us, let them fashion saddles, lay down vineyards, make the boats, rafts, and bridges so that we might cross the great rivers in our path. Let the humans do all things and in addition offer up their flesh as food.\n\n\"We thought that would control their numbers, to harvest them as one harvests the great tusked beasts or the vast herds of the hump-backed bisons. So in that first circling of long ago there might be a village of a hundred humans by a river. Twenty years later two hundred and then by my time a city of a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand.\n\n\"They are fertile, and we are not. Perhaps our blood is old, and theirs is young. I don't know. But our numbers never seemed to increase; theirs did. Some in their wisdom urged that we harvest half, and at times we did, but then we would ride on and upon our return a generation later there'd be yet more.\n\n\"They spilled out of the Portals of Light. Oh, never many, perhaps in an entire ride we'd discover one new tribe. Sometimes they were but a few dozen, more often a ship or two. I suspect that upon their world the old portals are lost beneath several different seas. We'd scatter them about or settle them in one place, tell them to labor, and move on. Of late, though, in the last ten or so circlings we should have realized that something was happening on their world that was not happening here.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Their cunning, their skill with machines. That ship I told you of. I spoke once with the elder warrior of the Tugars who told me of a similar ship, filled with men wearing jackets of polished steel. The Tugars slaughtered them, of course, but we should have realized the threat and acted before it was too late. The Tugar elder also told me that near here there was a similar ship whose crew actually escaped and sailed south toward the ocean that circles the southern half of this world.\n\n\"We should have realized then that we had to somehow change the balance between us.\"\n\n\"And do what?\"\n\n\"Either come to terms with them or slaughter them all.\"\n\n\"Terms? How?\"\n\n\"I know. I think it is impossible now. My cousins, all my people, not one in a thousand do I think contemplated who these humans truly were. They were cattle, they were food, they were slaves. None heard the beauty of their languages, their poetry, their songs.\" Again his words lapsed into the ancient human tongue, speaking of the numbering of ships and the names of captains dead across three thousand years and the infinity of the universe.\n\n\"It was far more, though. We have become\"\u2014he hesitated for a moment and then spat out the word\u2014\"parasites upon the flesh and minds of the humans.\"\n\nJurak stirred uncomfortably, started to voice an objection but Zartak waved his hand, motioning him to silence.\n\n\"Think of it. Every weapon we carry, the clothing we wear, the food we eat, all of the new tools of war, none of it has been shaped by our hands. We do nothing but exist; it is they who have fashioned the world.\n\n\"It has gone to the very soul.\" Zartak sighed. \"The division between us now. Imagine if the world was reversed, imagine if it was the humans who rode and who feasted upon our blood, who cracked our bones open to draw out the very marrow while we were still alive.\"\n\nJurak shivered at the thought. Impossible. The primal dread of being consumed, eaten alive, the fear that was even more dreadful than the fear of death filled him with darkness.\n\n\"No, it could never be. Could it?\" Jurak laughed coldly. \"That gulf can never be crossed now,\" Zartak continued. \"Too much blood has been drawn for them ever to forgive us. For that matter our own people cannot imagine it any other way as well. Oh, I have whispered at times and been rebuffed when I suggested such thoughts when I was young. My cousins taunted me, accused me of an obscene love for my dead pet, so I learned to be silent. I learned to hide such thoughts and thus did I rise through command of ten, to a hundred, to a thousand, to ten thousand, to eldest of the clan of the white horse. Now as an ancient one though I find I am as free as a youth to speak again.\"\n\n\"And that is why I value you,\" Jurak replied. He hesitated, looking at the Great Wheel, visible outside the open flaps of the yurt, wondering which out of all the millions of stars was his home world. He felt a cold shiver, a loneliness, and infinite sadness.\n\n\"So you see no chance then of a change?\" he finally whispered.\n\n\"Go outside this yurt and shout for the west wind to go away.\"\n\nZartak sighed, then chuckled softly, the laughter sad, lonely.\n\n\"No, we are both trapped in this war. The Yankees freed these humans and with that freedom the inner dread, the paralyzing fear of being eaten alive was replaced with a blind all-consuming rage. You saw with your own eyes what they can now do, even with their bare hands if they have the chance.\"\n\nJurak nodded, remembering the carnage of Roum, and along the Ebro, where the slaves had rebelled and escaped, literally tearing warriors limb from limb in their frenzy.\n\n\"And now what?\"\n\nZartak looked up at him and smiled.\n\n\"I'll be gone before it is decided. Perhaps the last of you will come early to join me above, where again there will be the Endless Ride. I fear, son, that either you must kill all of them or they will kill all of us. It is that simple.\"\n\n\"Even though you loved one of them?\"\n\nZartak flinched.\n\n\"A weakness of youth,\" he fumbled.\n\n\"No. Perhaps an insight?\"\n\nZartak sadly shook his head.\n\n\"Don't let it weaken you. This is not a time for weakness. Do you honestly think that after all we have done to them there could ever be peace, a place in this world for us and a place for them?\"\n\nJurak found that he was again wrestling with that thought. If this campaign was lost, as he feared more than once it would be, then what?\n\n\"You're wondering what will happen if we lose this war,\" Zartak said. \"This attack at Xi'an caught you completely off guard.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It surprised me, too. I did not understand these flying machines. I did not ever think they could be used to transport hundreds of warriors across hundreds of leagues to fall upon our center of supply. Tell me, were such things done on your world?\"\n\nJurak sensed the slightest tone of rebuke in Zartak's question.\n\n\"Yes! But the airships there could carry a hundred in their bellies. And there would be hundreds of such ships in the sky at once, warriors leaping from them, floating to the ground under the umbrellas made of silk.\"\n\n\"Such a sight it must have been.\"\n\nJurak nodded.\n\n\"The ships here, so primitive in comparison, I never considered that they would risk all of them. There cannot be more than three hundred of them in this attack.\"\n\n\"Joined by how many tens of thousands of Chin?\"\n\nJurak was silent. Damnation.\n\n\"If you do not suppress this rebellion within the next day, two days at most, all is lost. You will have to flee east or south, south across the seas, for they will come after you.\"\n\n\"From all that I've heard of Keane, I wonder if he would if we did leave.\"\n\nZartak grunted.\n\n\"I wonder about him as well. I do have the sense you know. And of Keane I sense much. But consider the rest of the world. Let word come to all the other humans of this world that we have been beaten, and they will rise up, remembering their dead across all these thousands of years. There is no compromise with that I fear.\"\n\nJurak slowly nodded in agreement.\n\n\"I know. Perhaps we are alike in that, for I know if it was as you said, if it was they who rode and we who bowed, I would die to kill but one.\"\n\n\"See what we've created here?\" Zartak laughed sadly. \"I know.\"\n\n\"And now?\"\n\n\"They found the weak link. They've used their air machines to fly several hundred soldiers to Xi'an. The city is in chaos, rebellion, the last telegram before the line was cut said hundreds are being slaughtered, including females and cubs.\"\n\nZartak nodded.\n\n\"A brilliant move,\" Jurak whispered. \"Damn all. I tried to consider every potential, every move and countermove. I knew if we went to the defensive and waited, we could build our forces up, train our troops, and even outproduce the Yankees. I knew if we held most of the territory of the Roum we could perhaps even drive a political wedge between the two states of their Republic, maybe even get them to mistrust and turn on each other.\"\n\n\"The humans you sent in secret to kill their president and Keane, a masterful move,\" Zartak said.\n\nEven now that might be working, Jurak thought. A few additional refugees slipped across the line, trained and conditioned, knowing that if they did not come back within three moon feasts their entire families would die in the next one.\n\n\"Yet never did I see this coming.\"\n\n\"Your dream of last night,\" Zartak said, \"it was a portent. You have the power, you know.\"\n\nIf I have the power, he wondered, then why do all the paths ahead now seem equally dark.\n\n\"You told me that you have a weapon that can burn entire cities in one blinding flash. Could you make one now? That would end this.\"\n\nJurak was surprised at the casual mention of such a fearsome weapon.\n\n\"No, that is the work of thousands, tens of thousands,\" Jurak replied, his voice distant.\n\nTo get these primitives to the point where they could make a magnetic separator, let alone a breeder reactor, maybe in a thousand years perhaps. As for the science? I can figure out how to make explosives, even a lathe to turn out guns, but that?\n\nAnd even if I did, he thought, would I unleash such a horror on this world?\n\n\"The Yankees will make one someday,\" Zartak announced.\n\nThat thought had never crossed his mind. Yes, they most likely would. They were makers of machines, and machines begot more machines.\n\n\"And this attack from Tyre?\" Zartak asked, suddenly shifting the conversation back to more immediate concerns.\n\n\"It might be a diversion, but if they gain the western shore of the Great Sea, create a base, combine that with ships captured from Xi'an, we are finished on this front. That was masterful as well. Letting us see it coming. The ironclads we sent from Xi'an, if they were there now, tonight, we would crush the rebellion.\"\n\n\"But the new railroad coming up from Nippon and connecting across the north of the Great Sea is finished. We won't need the Sea.\"\n\nJurak shook his head. Here it was obvious that Zartak was thinking only as a warrior who fought on land and had never before faced a naval force.\n\n\"We must hold the Sea. If they take the rail line we were building toward Tyre and combine that with holding Xi'an, they can move reinforcements up. I suspect that is why they are moving one of their corps overland along with the ironclads. If they've captured ships at Xi'an, they could have that equipment in Camagan within three days. Or they could strike us from behind, or even range northward, landing'troops to cut the new rail line along the northern shore. We have to crush the rebellion in Xi'an and at the same time beat back this attacking force.\"\n\nZartak slowly nodded in agreement.\n\n\"Or send it straight into the heart of the Chin realm, toward Huan.\"\n\nJurak sighed, looking back at the map in the middle of the yurt.\n\n\"What will they do next?\" Jurak whispered, more to himself than his companion.\n\nZartak stood up and looked at the map.\n\n\"I think the one they call Hans is leading this,\" Zartak said.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Call it that sense we believe in.\"\n\nHans. The thought chilled Jurak as he stared at the map. \"If it is Hans, what do you think he'll do next?\" Jurak finally asked, looking back at his old friend.\n\nZartak walked up to the map and jabbed at it with a bony finger.\n\n\"He'll go here. Straight for the heart. Why they did not do that in their first strike is beyond me.\"\n\n\"Most likely their flying machines could not range that far and carry enough men.\"\n\n\"If that is so, then by flying out of Xi'an such a move would now be possible. He will do this come first light tomorrow. What you saw at Roum, what is happening today at Xi'an. Tomorrow it will erupt there.\"\n\nJurak felt a cold chill.\n\n\"We still have the railroad back to Nippon and from there back into the land of the Chin,\" Zartak said, tracing the route out on the map. \"The humans most likely don't even know we completed that. Supplies can be shifted that way. Order every train on that line to reverse itself, to go back. There are two umens in Nippon with modern arms; send them down at once.\"\n\nJurak worked out the mental calculations, the number of trains that were moving those two umens up to the front. \"They could be back in Huan by tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"Alert the commander of the city. Have him round up the human leaders. Have him make it clear that if the Yankees land and the local population does not join in the rebellion, they will all be spared. If they do join, all will die.\"\n\nJurak was surprised by the forcefulness of his voice. He nodded in agreement.\n\n\"I'm going back there. I wanted to check with you first, but just in case I already ordered the track to be cleared and a train prepared.\"\n\nThe pieces seemed to be falling into place. He looked at his desk piled high with the messages of the day, and his thoughts focused on one in particular.\n\n\"Did you know that Tamuka rode into Huan this morning?\" Jurak asked.\n\nZartak stiffened.\n\n\"The usurper. The old Qar Qarth of the Merki?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"He is a mad beast. Why did he go there?\"\n\n\"I had a report that the Merki who were following him finally rebelled and drove him out. I assumed he had been killed or taken the honorable path and fallen upon his sword.\"\n\n\"You should have told me of this, my friend. Tamuka has not the courage to rid the world of his presence.\"\n\n\"When I heard that he was seen this morning I assumed he was riding east, perhaps even to join the Tugars in the empty lands to the east.\"\n\n\"Or to make problems for you. That is the more likely path.\"\n\n\"And he has wandered straight to where the fight will be tomorrow,\" Jurak replied. \"Are the gods of our fate spinning a thread here?\"\n\n\"I hope not. Order the commander there to seize him, kill him if need be.\"\n\nJurak nodded. He heard a train whistle sounding from the rail yard. Seconds later there was a clatter of hooves, his escort guards coming to tell him that the track ahead was clear and it was time to leave.\n\n\"I'd best be leaving, old friend.\"\n\n\"By train, it will take days.\"\n\n\"Only till dawn. I've ordered a flyer to be waiting for me 150 leagues east of here. The train will reach there by dawn, and I'll fly the rest of the way.\"\n\nZartak chuckled.\n\n\"Better you than me. The only time I intend to fly is when my ancestors summon me home.\"\n\nHe scratched his balding mane.\n\n\"Soon enough it will be, but not too soon. I wish to see how this all will end.\"\n\n\"I want you to command here, to press an attack.\"\n\n\"We're not ready.\"\n\n\"Get ready, and press it. I would prefer this morning if possible.\"\n\nZartak shook his head.\n\n\"The ironclads we diverted to Carnagan. We'll need those. You'll remember they started landing this afternoon.\"\n\nJurak sighed.\n\n\"I don't have time now for the details. Have the messages I've left on my desk sent. Send instructions to Huan as we discussed and one to Carnagan that they must press the attack there tomorrow and finish it. At least we can smash that army, then we launch the attack here. Win or lose at Huan, we smash their armies before they realize what they've accomplished and we can still win in spite of this setback.\"\n\nZartak formally bowed, and again the old roles were assumed.\n\n\"My Qar Qarth. The machine of steam awaits you.\" It was one of his guards, waiting respectfully outside the yurt. \"So you see no alternatives other than this,\" Jurak asked, dropping his voice, gaze locked on Zartak. \"A war of total annihilation of one or the other.\"\n\n\"For the sake of an old friend of my youth, I wish I could,\" Zartak whispered. \"No. And I think she knew that, too. We and they are bound together in this world, and only one shall emerge triumphant.\"\n\n\"Then let it be us,\" Jurak said coldly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Though numbed with exhaustion Hans still felt a fierce exultation. Grim though war was, there were indeed moments, that in spite of the tragedy, nevertheless held a soul-stirring drama to them.\n\nDuring the night the Bantag had tried three assaults to break into the liberated city of Xi'an. The third assault had actually gotten over the walls until it was finally cut off by a reserve of several hundred Chin armed with revolvers hauled in by the airships. Most of them barely knew how to shoot their weapons, most of them died, but the Bantag died with them.\n\nStanding outside the wall, he looked back at the city. It was burning out of control, a vast pillar of light, like out of some biblical story, marking a place of vengeance and liberation, the flames a holy purging that would wipe away the stain of bondage.\n\nHe felt strangely different this morning. It wasn't just the exhaustion, or the gnawing pain in his chest. It was the fact that with his decision to press the attack the very nature of the war had changed within him and within his men. It was no longer a desperate defensive lunge to hold on to what they held. It was now truly a war of liberation, an all-or-nothing throw of the dice. He was never one for the false heroics of battle\u2014he had always felt himself to be beyond such idiotic notions\u2014but at that moment, as he watched the city burn, he felt a strange exultation, as if his small army was an avenging host going forth to purge this world of its sin.\n\nHe nudged the flanks of his mount, a Bantag warhorse, the saddle far too big, the animal as exhausted as he was, and therefore docile. They slowly weaved their way through the wreckage of the rail yard east of the city. A string of boxcars still burned fiercely, thick oily smoke tumbling skyward, the air heavy with the smell of burning meat. Bantag rations. He preferred to think that it was salted beef, taken from the bisonlike herds that roamed the steppes in this part of the world, or even salted horse. The idea that they might actually slaughter humans, salt them down, and package them the same way his own army prepared rations was too horrid to contemplate.\n\nThe wind shifted, the black cloud enveloping him for a moment, and he gagged on the smell. He nudged his mount again, cleared the smoke, and reined in for a moment. A knot of Chin were gathered around a shed by the side of the track. They were shouting, cursing. He drew closer. Three Bantag had been cornered inside, all of them wounded. They were dying slowly under the kicks and blows.\n\nHans spotted one of his own men, a Chin in uniform, and roared at him to finish the wounded off. The soldier saluted, drew his revolver, and pushed his way through the crowd. Hans rode on, barely noticing the crack of the pistol behind him.\n\nDiscarded equipment littered the rail yard, broken rifles, an upended box of cartridges, an overturned caisson, shells lying on the ground, a fieldpiece on its side, a stack of saddles smoldering, bundles of arrows, smashed-open barrels leaking oil, kerosene, flour, what even smelled like the rice wine of the Chin, and everywhere bodies, Bantag and human. All of it was illuminated by the lurid red glare of the city burning, a glow so bright he could have easily read one of Gates's papers, reminding him of the night Fredericksburg burned just prior to the assault.\n\nThe troops he had brought in were hard at work. Each man was now in charge of a unit of ten, sheperding them along, organizing details to pick up discarded equipment that might be useful, a group of them on their hands and knees picking up cartridges spilled from an ammunition box. One sergeant, a survivor of the escape from the factory prison the year before, had his men broken into two-man teams. One man was supposed to stand stock-still while the second man rested the barrel of a Bantag rifle on his shoulder, aimed, and shot. It looked ludicrous but the damn idea actually worked, enabling the diminutive and emaciated Chin actually to use the enemy weapons. They gleefully fired away, sniping at a scattering of Bantag who still lingered on the far side of the rail yard.\n\nIf he had the time there was enough captured artillery here to field several batteries, but the thought was absurd. They might get one or two shots off, but anything beyond point-blank range was hopeless. Down deep he knew the entire idea was next to hopeless. It was one thing to come swooping in as they did, trigger a rebellion, and overwhelm the local garrison. If they ever had to face a disciplined umen of Bantag warriors, it would be a massacre.\n\nThe trick was to keep moving, to roll them up before they had time to react. He had to keep moving in spite of his exhaustion.\n\nHe rode around a line of half a dozen flatcars on a siding A couple of hundred Chin were piled on board, half of them armed with the precious revolvers carried in on the airships, others simply carrying makeshift spears, poles with a knife strapped to the end. As he rode past the engine he recognized one of his comrades, yet another survivor of the prison.\n\n\"Ready to go back?\" Hans asked.\n\nThe old man flashed a grin.\n\n\"I know this machine. Remember ride to there.\" He gestured off to the south, where half a dozen miles away they had holed up after the escape. \"I run it good.\"\n\nHans leaned up, shook the man's hand, and rode on.\n\nFour trains were lined up, four engines pulling a total of thirty flatcars and boxcars, all of them crammed with over fifteen hundred Chin. The vast majority knew damn little of what they were doing. A day ago they were slaves, knowing that they'd live only as long as they could work. Now they were loaded aboard trains heading east, straight into the heart of the Bantag realm. If they had any sense about it at all, they undoubtedly knew they were going to die. He could see the fear and resignation with many, torn away from a numbed life, but a life nevertheless. A few were afire with the desire for revenge, clutching the pistols given out, holding them up as Hans passed, making him nervous. Several men had already been killed by accident.\n\nReaching the forward engine, he returned the salute of Seetu, one of Ketswana's men, who overnight had been promoted from sergeant to commander of an expedition. \"Ready?\" Hans asked.\n\nSeetu nodded eagerly.\n\n\"All the engines are fired up. A couple of these Chin worked the rail line, so they know how to run the engines and what's ahead.\"\n\n\"Remember. Until it's full light, take it slow. If anyone up there's thinking, they'll have broken the track. At each junction or station you pass, make sure you cut the telegraph line. Round up any Chin you meet; if you capture any more trains, take them along.\"\n\n\"We'll go all the way to Huan.\"\n\nHans said nothing.\n\n\"This is gonna be the hard part, Seetu. I want you to get as far forward as you can. But remember, they might cut you off from behind once you pass. If you can get thirty or forty miles up that track and start tearing things up, it'll buy a couple of days for the men here to get organized.\" Seetu said nothing.\n\n\"Son, I won't lie. There isn't much hope you'll get through this one. They'll most likely lay a trap, let you pass, cut the rail ahead and behind, then box you in and finish you. Try and spot that, stop, then slowly pull back, tearing up track, burning bridges as you go. If they do trap you,\" he hesitated, \"well, take as many of the bastards with you as you can and smash everything up good and proper.\"\n\n\"I was dead anyhow a year ago,\" Seetu replied. \"Every day you gave me since is extra gift from the gods. Hans, I'm not stopping. Expect to see me in Huan tomorrow.\" Hans leaned up and shook his hand.\n\nHe rode on. Strange how we all feel that way, he thought. You come back from the grave and after that, well it's a gift. Hans turned his mount back and slowly trotted out of the rail yard, weaving his way past a skirmish line of Chin moving through the still-burning ruins of a Bantag encampment of wooden barracks.\n\nSo they were even giving up their yurts. Strange, the vast circular buildings were wooden replicas of their tents. Yet another changing over to human ways. The Chin were little better than a swarming mob, led by half a dozen of his soldiers, who were desperately shouting orders, trying to create some semblance of organization.\n\nIt was the shock of the air assault, the riot of the tens of thousands in Xi'an, that had won this fight, Hans realized. Sheer numbers had dragged the Bantag down. He wondered how many were still lurking out beyond the city and the surrounding warehouses and encampments.\n\nAs if in answer to his question a rifle ball slapped past. There were shouts ahead, a flurry of pistol shots. He rode on.\n\nReaching the base of the eastern wall, he gingerly rode around mounds of Bantag killed trying to retake the city. A damned stupid assault. They should have just sat back, waited for reinforcements, then shelled the place until the defenders panicked. Stupid arrogance to attack like that.\n\nRiding along the wall, he reached the northern side of the city. In the glare of the inferno the airfield was clearly silhouetted. The machines were lined up, engines turning over. Jack, spotting his approach, slowly walked up.\n\n\"I'm going to make this formal,\" Jack announced, while reaching up to help Hans get off his horse.\n\n\"I know, I know.\" Hans sighed.\n\n\"My crews and machines are finished. We were circling this damned town half the night while the fighting was going on down here.\" He gestured to the bodies that littered the perimeter of the airstrip.\n\n\"Then we come back in and land again, losing three more ships. Hans, I'm down to twenty-two aerosteamers, an average of two hundred Gatling rounds per gun.\"\n\n\"At least you got fuel,\" Hans replied, nodding toward the empty barrels that had been saved from a burning train.\n\n\"Yeah, great.\"\n\nHans wearily sat down on the grass, lowering his head for a moment. Again, the shortness of breath, the flutter of pain.\n\nJack knelt by his side.\n\n\"Hans? You all right?\"\n\nHe looked up bleakly.\n\n\"No. I don't think so, to tell you the truth.\"\n\n\"Hans, you need some rest. Everyone here needs rest. The men are staggering around like the walking dead. I'm going to ask this one last time. We've got Xi'an. Hole up here. I'll take the airships back to Tyre. We'll refit, load up on hydrogen we desperately need, and be back in two days with reinforcements.\"\n\n\"Two hundred more men now won't make a difference here.\"\n\nHe was simply too numb to order, to roar out the order to go. He looked up, half-broken inside, appealing to Jack to understand.\n\n\"We'll all die doing this, Hans.\"\n\nHans chuckled in spite of his pain.\n\n\"Jack, don't you get it?\" he whispered. \"That day on the Ogunquit, the day we left Earth forever and came here. We died. You know, I bet back home, somewhere up there on the coast of Maine, they've got a statue with all our names on it. We died. We died but then the good Lord caught us as we fell and dropped us here. Maybe this is purgatory, maybe this is the punishment for our sins. I don't know anymore. But I was in their prisons; you weren't. I know that there is the key to our victory.\"\n\n\"They're ready for us by now.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't. But we'll never have a better chance than at this moment. Tomorrow will be too late. Jurak will react, and it will be too late. Jack, today we can either win or lose this war.\"\n\nHe paused for a moment.\n\n\"It's up to you. Yesterday evening I ordered you to do it.\" He paused, struggling to catch his breath. \"I don't have the strength to order you. I'm simply asking you.\"\n\nJack stood up.\n\n\"Oh, God damn it all, thank you very much, Sergeant Schuder, for the guilt.\"\n\nHans looked up and couldn't help but smile.\n\n\"One more push,\" Hans whispered. \"That's all I ask, and then you can call it quits. Then we can rest.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "It was surprisingly quiet. Standing atop the low ridge, Vincent Hawthorne shaded his eyes, looking to the rising sun. He knew they were out there, the haze of dust rimming the horizon in a vast arc to the north, around to the east and south showed that they were out there.\n\nIt had been a sleepless night, curled up by the side of his ironclad, waiting for an attack that never came. They had the advantage on that score. The bastards could decide if and when to attack; they'd most likely pulled back and slept the night through while he and his men had stayed alert throughout the hours of darkness.\n\nStretching, he scratched the back of his neck. Two days down here and I'm lousy, he thought with disgust. Forgotten just how lousy the army could get, and he wondered which of his crewmates in the ironclad had passed the damned little critters over to him.\n\n\"Your honor, some tea?\"\n\nIt was Stanislaw, driver of his ironclad, who in spite of his years in the army still hadn't shaken the honorific given to boyars. The man was easily twice his age, drafted out of the locomotive engineers to serve on the front line.\n\nVincent gingerly took the tin cup, holding it by the edges, blowing on the rim, took a sip. One of the true advantages of serving with the ironclads, he realized, hot tea, drawn off from the boiler water at any time, even though it tended to have an oily taste, plus plenty of rations since the men always seemed to manage to \"borrow\" a few extra boxes of salt pork, hardtack, and for this expedition some precious jam, butter, and even a few loaves of bread that were almost fresh.\n\nStanislaw produced a great hunk of the bread, slathered with jam and butter, and Vincent eagerly wolfed it down, squatting in the grass while he ate.\n\nAll around him, farther down the slope of the knoll, the army was coming awake, bugles sounding, men milling about, gathering around smoking fires made with twisted-up bundles of dried grass and the ubiquitous dried chips from the bisonlike creatures and woolly elephants that wandered the plains.\n\nMounted pickets had pushed out from the earthen wall fortress encircling the camp, making sure no Bantag skirmishers had crept up during the night, and men were wandering outside the fortified position to relieve themselves. Vincent wrinkled his nose. Whenever you had ten thousand men camped in one place, it didn't take long truly to stink the place up.\n\n\"Think we'll fight today, your honor?\"\n\n\"Don't know, Stanislaw. It's their choice. They're mounted, we're not. They'll pick the time and place.\"\n\nStanislaw reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of dried applies, offering one to Vincent, who nodded his thanks.\n\n\"As long as we got St. Katrina with us\"\u2014he reached back and affectionately patted their ironclad\u2014\"we'll give them a hell of a fight.\"\n\n\"You like your ironclad?\"\n\n\"Oh, at first no, your honor. I remember when you Yankees first came.\" He chuckled softly. \"I thought you were devils the first time I saw the steam makers, the locomotive you made that went from your fort up to Suzdal.\"\n\n\"Seems like an eternity ago.\" Vincent smiled.\n\n\"Then I was drafted to work laying track to Kev, and from there on to Roum. That was work.\"\n\n\"What did you do before we came?\"\n\n\"I was gardener for the wife of my boyar Garvilla.\"\n\nThe name somehow registered. One of the boyars who had tried to overthrow the government before the Merki came, Vincent realized.\n\n\"Oh, he was a devil he was, but his lady wasn't. She liked the flowers I grew.\"\n\nHe sighed, and Vincent realized that yesterday he had noticed fresh wildflowers tied in a bundle next to where Stanislaw sat down below.\n\n\"Well, there was no room for flower growers and gardeners in this new world you Yankees made. Machines and more machines. So I realized that I, Stanislaw, could either lay rails or drive the machine that rode them. I had a nephew who was the driver of one of your new locomotives, and I got him to let me be his fireman. I learned and soon had my own machine to drive.\"\n\nHe sighed.\n\n\"I named her St. Katrina, same as our big machine of war here. She is the patron saint of gardens. She protected me.\" He shook his head.\n\n\"Though I wish she'd protected me more and kept me with my steam engine on rails rather than this black thing on wheels that crawls around on the ground.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you stay with the locomotives?\"\n\n\"Ah, my nephew. He went with these machines and said I was lucky and wanted me with him. He said it would be glorious and perhaps some woman would look upon me with favor in my new black uniform, and I'd finally have a wife. Foolish me, I went.\"\n\nVincent tried not to smile for Stanislaw was decidedly ugly\u2014head far too big for his body, a vast misshapen lump for a nose, and he was completely bald. And yet, there was a gentleness to his smile, a certain quiet sparkle in his eyes that was touching.\n\n\"I was at Rocky Hill, you know,\" Stanislaw announced proudly, \"in one of the older machines that ate coal rather than the burning oil. That was a good fight.\"\n\nVincent said nothing. There was the flash memory of the charge, falling, falling away, seeing the flag bearer staggering past, all of it lost in smoke and fire.\n\n\"You were brave beyond the brave there, your honor.\" Vincent, embarrassed, said nothing.\n\n\"Were you at Capua?\" Vincent finally asked.\n\n'\"No, your honor. Well yes, but I was in the second regiment, the one that didn't go in. Bless Saint Katrina for protecting me,\" and as he spoke he grasped a small icon which dangled from a chain around his neck, and holding the image of the saint, he crossed himself three times. \"And how do you feel about this?\" Vincent asked.\n\n\"I go where ordered, your honor.\"\n\n\"No. We're in this together. How do you feel?\"\n\n\"You Yankees.\" Stanislaw chuckled. \"Asking a peasant like me.\"\n\n\"You are a citizen of the Republic,\" Vincent said slowly. \"You have a right to your opinion.\"\n\nStanislaw smiled. \"When this war is over, then I will be a citizen, but now I am a soldier who follows orders. That is what my nephew says.\"\n\n\"You're not happy with it?\" Vincent pressed.\n\n\"Well, your honor. We seem to be driving around to nowhere. The Bantag, the Tugars, all the riders. They own the steppes. They are of the horse, we are not. I wish we could just let them have the steppes and they agree to leave us alone.\"\n\n\"We know that can't be,\" Vincent replied.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I know. If wishes came true, mice would ride on cats.\"\n\nStanislaw picked up Vincent's empty tin cup, retreated through the open door of his ironclad. The encampment was now swarming with activity, the buzz of ten thousand men echoing, sergeants barking orders, snatches of conversation drifting; someone was even playing a fife, another an instrument that sounded hauntingly like a banjo. He was glad he had ordered that the march would start late, an hour after sunrise. It gave the men time to relax just a bit longer and have a solid breakfast before moving on.\n\nStanislaw came out a minute later with the cup refilled, carrying a second cup for himself and sat back down.\n\n\"You didn't answer my question,\" Vincent pressed while nodding his thanks for the refill and a second helping of bread and jam.\n\n\"Your honor, if we do make it to their rail line and from there to the Great Sea, then what?\"\n\n\"Once there we set up a base for any ships that Hans and his men capture at Xi'an.\"\n\n\"I heard the Horde riders have iron ships on that sea.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Won't the iron ships sink what we capture?\"\n\n\"Maybe we'll capture some of the iron ships at Xi'an.\"\n\n\"And if we don't?\"\n\n\"We can still raise hell.\"\n\n\"Suppose the Bantag bring up their own land ironclads to fight us. We shall have only what we carry with us.\"\n\n\"It's what we want,\" Vincent replied. \"If they bring their own ironclads in, we can fight them out in the open. We can have the battle to decide this. Defeat their ironclads, shatter their army here in the south, and keep their leader guessing, that is what we are doing. We want that fight, Stanislaw.\"\n\n\"Then why do I feel like the mouse who is sent to pull the whiskers of the cat so that the old cat will chase him outside and then the others can eat. I wish right now I was one of the mice that was going to eat rather than the one that has to run.\"\n\nVincent laughed.\n\n\"Back in Suzdal. Suppose they make peace. We heard the rumors of that, you know, just before we sailed. Poor Kal, we had many a drink we did in the old days, trading stories about our boyars.\"\n\n\"We'll win this fight before they can do anything that stupid.\"\n\nStanislaw said nothing, then, looking beyond Vincent, he came to his feet and saluted.\n\nVincent looked over his shoulder and saw Gregory walking up the slope.\n\n\"Good morning, sir,\" Gregory announced, coming to attention and saluting.\n\n\"Morning, Gregory. Everything in order?\"\n\n\"All machines are warmed up except one. We're going to have to leave it behind.\" He nodded downslope to where a swarm of men were clustered around an ironclad, some of them arguing while others were lugging out shells. Several had torn open the hinges on the top turret and were starting to remove the steam Gatling gun.\n\n\"Cracked boiler, can't be fixed out here. I've ordered it stripped.\"\n\nVincent nodded. \"Not bad so far, only two machines broken down.\"\n\n\"That was yesterday. As we add up the leagues today, more will fail as I warned.\"\n\n\"We'll have enough when the time comes.\"\n\nGregory said nothing for a moment, obviously disagreeing with Vincent's assessment.\n\n\"Sir, my machines will be ready to roll in fifteen minutes. I think Third Corps is ready to move as well.\"\n\nVincent smiled. He was being gently chided for taking the extra few minutes to talk with Stanislaw.\n\n\"Fine. Pass the word\u2014fifteen minutes.\"\n\nGregory saluted and started back down the slope to where his machine was parked.\n\n\"Ah, my nephew, such an officer.\"\n\n\"That's your nephew?\"\n\n\"Couldn't you tell?\" Stanislaw laughed. \"Someone had to come along to keep an eye on him.\"\n\nVincent finished his cup of tea while Stanislaw disappeared back into his ironclad, shouting orders to the crew to get ready. Exhaust from the kerosene burners plumed from the smokestack, the safety valves for the steam lines popped several times, venting. The engine was hot and ready. A courier came up informing Vincent that the corps was formed. Looking round from his high vantage point, he saw the regiments forming into their loose block formations. Cavalry was already ranging outward in a vast circle a mile across, a few pops of carbine fire forward marking where a minor altercation was going on between outriders of the Horde and the advance pickets. Teams were hitched to the wagons, caissons, and limbers. Bugle calls signaled the call to form ranks, and drummers began to pick up the beat.\n\nVincent emptied the rest of his cup and climbed through the hatch into the already stifling heat of the lower deck of the ironclad. Slipping around the boiler and its attending fireman, he moved behind the gunner and assistant gunner, who, in the informality aboard ironclads, nodded their greetings since there was little room for anyone to snap to attention.\n\nStanislaw looked up from his driver's seat and smiled, Vincent noticing a fresh bunch of wild prairie flowers bunched up and dangling by a string from the bulkhead, the brilliant reds and blues adding a gentle touch.\n\nGoing up the ladder into the upper turret, he squeezed past the breech of his steam Gatling gun, popped open the upper hatch, climbed half-out, and sat on the rim. Gregory, who was already in position, caught Vincent's eye, and Vincent raised a clenched fist, pointing it forward.\n\nA bugler, riding mounted beside Vincent's machine, sounded the advance. The machine beneath him lurched, great iron wheels churning up clods of dirt and crushed grass as they started down the hill, moving to the fore, passing through the lines of infantry. Fording the shallow stream, they started up the next slope, moving past a lone cavalry trooper coming back, clutching a wounded arm, but still looking game, a cigar clenched between his teeth.\n\nVincent looked back, watching him ride through the blocks of infantry toward the medical wagons marked with their big green circles. The ten thousand men of the corps were all on the march, regimental columns deployed in a vast hole-square formation, rifle barrels catching the reflected glint of the morning sun so that the army looked as if fire was dancing across the ranks.\n\n\"Rows of burnished steel,\" the words of the \"Battle Hymn\" came to him.\n\nThere are still moments, he realized, still moments when one can again glimpse the chimera dream of glory." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "He didn't even look back as he rode through the gate. Forgetting himself for an instant, for old habits die hard, he snapped off a salute to the guards standing to either side who had come to attention.\n\nThe suit felt uncomfortable, the only civilian suit he had, stitched together by Kathleen, a black coat typical of what was worn back on Earth, at least what had been in style when they left, an unbleached cotton shirt of standard army issue, and black trousers. There was no longer a sword dangling from his belt, though he still had a pistol in a saddle holster. Behind him, in a wagon owned by Gates, rode his wife and the children, following them rode Webster, who had resigned from the government as well, and his young family.\n\nIn a way this whole thing felt so damnably foolish, a show play of bluff. The resignation had actually caught Bugarin and his followers off guard; they had expected a coup attempt. He had to go all the way. If he had stayed in the city, it would have somehow conveyed that he was still in the game, waiting down the street for the delegation to come and beg for his return.\n\nHe knew that would not happen. Even as he rode out of town the Republic was disintegrating into chaos. The Roum senators and congressmen were packing up to head for home, furious over the murder of Flavius and loudly announcing that they were going to seek a separate peace. It was as if a race was on, for Bugarin was announcing the same intention as well, and the Chin ambassadors sent by Jurak were even then receiving the offer of terms to take back to their master.\n\nHe, in turn, had presented them with a dilemma. Vincent was now supposed to be in command, but he was beyond reach. Next after him was Pat, but Pat had apparently cut the telegraph lines to the front, or something was blocking the line just out of Roum. What if they announced a ceasefire but nobody listened?\n\nMercury stepped onto the bridge over the Vina River, and he looked to his right and the valley choked thick with factories, rows of brick houses. The dam farther up the river was barely visible in the smoky haze. Strange how after ten years it looked far more like Waterville, Lewiston, or Lowell than the medieval city of the ancient Rus. The city he was riding out of was already a memory of an age passed. This was the new Suzdal, if it should survive the madness of its frightened leaders.\n\nWord must have passed that he was leaving. From out of the foundries, rail works, boiler works, gun factories, construction yards, he could see thousands of workers filling the streets, looking his way.\n\nHe wondered sadly what it was he had actually tried to create for them. A generation ago they were born, lived, and died on the estates of the boyars, their lives short and brutish, ignorant and filled with fear.\n\nWhat did they now have? Sons, fathers, brothers, husbands dead or at the front. Twelve hours of laboring in the heat, smoke, and grime of the war factories pouring iron, making steel, casting guns, making machines of war and yet more machines of war. Endless labor and still early deaths but now from consumption or accidents or simple exhaustion.\n\nHe wondered if Rousseau was right, and the thought made him smile for an instant, the mind of the professor still there, ready with the random thought of philosophy even in the darkest moments. Yet he had hoped that they would see, that all would see that this was a generation called to the highest sacrifice, that it had to bear the horrible burden so that someday their children, their grandchildren would never know the fear, the filth, the degradation, not just of the hordes, but of slavery and the horror of war.\n\nHe realized that he had slackened the reins on Mercury and his horse, as if reading his thoughts, had stopped so that he might look from the bridge and contemplate what he had tried to accomplish and where he had failed.\n\n\"Keane \u2026\"\n\nIt was a distant cry, a lone voice, sending a shiver down his spine, reminding him of the moment of triumph at Hispania, his name a cry of victory.\n\nSomeone else picked it up, a woman, closer, standing in the open doorway into the rifle-barrel works. She took the kerchief off her head and waved it. The women around her joined in, the name echoing across the valley, accompanied by the cry of a modern age, a locomotive whistle, then another, then the whistles of the factories.\n\nEmbarrassed by the outpouring, he did not know what to do. There was the temptation, to be sure, and he sensed that at this instant it would be all so easy.\n\nWashington at Newburgh, he thought. But that was easier\u2014the stakes were not the choice between life or annihilation\u2014it was an abstract, an ideal that Washington preserved. Or was it?\n\nThe thoughts raced through his mind. How easy it would be even now to turn Mercury about, point toward the city, and surely they would follow. And then what?\n\nHe could sense Kathleen, and looking over his shoulder, he saw her gazing at him, eyes filled with pride.\n\n\"Don't you think it's time we pushed on?\" she asked softly.\n\nHe smiled. Her words were enough.\n\nWithout saluting, without looking back, he rode out of Suzdal and headed north toward the great woods." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Stretching wearily Jurak stepped down from the car, taking the dispatches that a courier pressed into his hand. He scanned through them, taking particular note of the last one that had just been relayed up all the way from Huan.\n\nYankee aerosteamers report, leaving Xi'an. Sighted by station at Chu-lin. Heading east.\n\nChu-lin? It was the town where Ha'ark had staged maneuvers last year to show the superiority of the new weapons to the clan chieftains. Nearly a third of the way between Xi'an and Huan.\n\nIt had to be Hans. So he was going all the way. The airships most likely could get to Huan, but it was doubtful if any would ever be able to get back. This was the desperate bid, not just to disrupt his supplies but to destroy everything.\n\nBrilliant \u2026 and insane madness.\n\nHe skimmed through the other dispatches. The transport carrying thirty new land ironclads was at Camagan and was off-loading already.\n\nHe jotted down two quick notes in the clumsy block print of the Rus and handed them to the telegrapher. Parked a hundred yards north of the track, three aerosteamers were waiting, the fastest of the new twin-engine designs, propellers spinning lazily. At his approach the pilots came stiffly to attention.\n\n\"Which one do I fly in?\"\n\n\"Mine, my Qar Qarth.\"\n\nHe nodded, walking up to the pilot. Strange, most likely five years ago this warrior was horse-mounted, illiterate, never dreaming of what would be.\n\nJurak slowly walked around the machine, inspecting it. He felt a slight knot in his stomach. He had never much cared for flying, but on the old world it was in vast cavernous six-engine transports, capable of spanning continents to disgorge hundreds of assault troops. Now it was a flimsy hybrid, a sausagelike hydrogen airship with wings tacked on for lift and wheezing steam engines for power. The only factor that even allowed this damn thing to fly was the lighter gravity of this world, and even with that it could barely stagger aloft.\n\nTaking a deep breath, he reached up and pulled himself into the cockpit and strapped into the narrow forward seat, the pilot climbing up to sit behind him.\n\n\"My Qar Qarth, the umbrella pack is what you are sitting on. Hook the harnesses over your shoulder. If I tell you to get out, do it quick. You then pull the rope on your left side.\"\n\nJurak nodded as he followed the pilot's orders.\n\n\"The gun between your feet, my Qarth. You are responsible for shooting that. The hand crank on your right side fires it.\"\n\nJurak knew a bit more about this, having sketched out the designs of it more than a year ago, a primitive crank-powered machine gun.\n\n\"Are you ready, sire?\"\n\n\"Ready.\"\n\nWithin seconds both engines were at full power, and the machine slowly lurched forward, bouncing and rolling over the rough grassy field, and finally lifted, heading due west into the morning breeze.\n\nThe pilot banked the machine, passing over the locomotive that had carried him two hundred miles back from Capua during the night. As they leveled out, flying low, less than a hundred feet off the ground, he caught a glimpse of one of his two escorts turning sharply, cutting in to come up on their left side. Below, hundreds of Chin slaves stopped their labors for a moment, faces upturned to watch.\n\nHe saw the flashing of whips, dark towering forms gesturing, urging the humans back to their tasks. With the wind at their backs, they quickly picked up speed, racing eastward, the single line of track their guide.\n\nThey passed a locomotive stopped on the main line, most likely waiting for the train that had carried him to this rendezvous with the air machines to back up onto a siding. The vast open plains were dotted with villas, small villages, all of this once part of the Roum lands, ruled over by the Tugars. The wreckage of war was complete. Not a building was intact. They skimmed over a river, the ruins of a bridge still blackened, a fresh span built by Chin slaves looking dangerously weak. As they slowly continued to climb he could discern the Great Forest to the north and far to the south the rising of the ground into hills and distant mountains beyond.\n\nHe settled back. It would be a long day. First to their base at the northern edge of the ocean to refuel. Then the flight across it to a base on the eastern shore to refuel again, and from there by the middle of the night to Huan, where he suspected the true battle was about to be fought.\n\nThis day and the next might very well decide everything, all of it. He knew that in his heart. And in anticipation of what was to come he settled back in his chair and let the hum of the engines lull him to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "\"Damn!\"\n\nHans snapped his hand back from the shattered throttle controls. His fingers stung, blood seeping out from the wood splinters studding his palm.\n\n\"The throttles!\" Jack shouted.\n\nA forward windowpane exploded, showering them with glass.\n\n\"I knew this place would be hot!\" Jack cried. \"Under your seat. The master fuel valve, shut it down!\"\n\nHans spared a quick glance up. The place they had chosen to land was an open field adjoining the factory where he had once labored as a slave. So much had changed though over the last year. A new factory, plumes of black smoke pouring out of half a dozen smokestacks occupied the adjoining ground to the west. From the open doors of the compound he could see dozens of Bantag pouring out. Shots were punching into the gasbags behind him, a loud twang announcing that a support wire for the starboard wing had separated.\n\nGrimacing with pain, Hans reached under the seat, fumbling about, his hands coming to rest on a cold brass valve. Hoping it was the right one he turned it, and at the same instant all four engines throttled back.\n\n\"Don't shut it completely.\"\n\nHans looked up. The open field they had chosen for landing was directly ahead, just to the north of the rail yard where he and his escaping slaves had hijacked a train for their run back to the outskirts of Xi'an.\n\nA thin skirmish line of Bantag ran out into the field, several of them already kneeling, firing, levering breeches open to slam in fresh cartridges.\n\nAn aerosteamer passed over Hans, momentarily casting a shadow. The machine was flying full out, banking over sharply, a stream of fire pouring down from the topside gunner, rounds stitching the field, breaking up the skirmish line, scattering them.\n\n\"Fire!\"\n\nThe scream came from the lower cargo compartment's speaking tube. Hans craned forward, looking out at the starboard wing. A flicker of orange-blue flame trailed from the outboard engine. The fabric around the engine was burning as well, fire tracing with red-hot fingers along the trailing edges of the upper and lower wings.\n\n\"Full off!\" Jack shouted.\n\nHans turned the master valve the rest of the way, shutting down all four fuel lines. The machine simply dropped. Jack nosed it down, heading straight for a drainage ditch bordering the west end of the field, pulled up at the last second, bobbled up a dozen feet, then slammed down hard.\n\nThe upper wing on the starboard side ignited, fire leaping inward toward the volatile hydrogen gasbags.\n\n\"Out, everyone out!\" Jack cried.\n\nHans fumbled with his harness, unbuckling, cursing from the pain as he snatched up his carbine, tossed it out the bottom hatch. Without waiting to unroll the ladder, he dropped his legs through the bottom opening, took a deep breath, then lifted his arms over his head, falling the dozen feet to the ground, knocking the wind out of his lungs.\n\nStunned, he couldn't move. Jack crashed down beside him. He felt Jack grabbing him under the shoulders, dragging him clear even as he continued to clutch his carbine.\n\nA long staccato burst of fire roared. As they cleared the side of the ship he saw that their top gunner was still firing. Pouring a continual stream of Gatling rounds into a column of Bantag storming out from the two compounds, he dropped dozens of them.\n\n\"Get out!\" Jack screamed, as the flame from the starboard wing hit the side of the forward gasbag. Within seconds the fire bored a hole through, hitting the hydrogen that spilled out, combining with the surrounding oxygen and flaring into a dull ghostly blue light. The entire side of the airship peeled open.\n\nThe boy topside continued to fire, sweeping his Gatling around, pouring fire across the rail yard, tearing apart the small warehouse that had served as the exit for the escape tunnel Hans and his men had dug. As the rounds punched through the flimsy wooden structure Hans could hear the Bantag screaming inside.\n\nThe gun fell silent, the steam line hooked to the inboard starboard engine having burned through. The boy stood up to jump clear even as his cockpit collapsed into the burning bag.\n\nA round exploded out the back of his chest. He tried to stagger clear, the cockpit disappearing, falling into the roaring inferno, and the boy disappeared. Cursing, Hans looked away.\n\nHe heard Ketswana shouting and caught a glimpse of the enraged Zulu, followed by his men, pouring out from under the burning airship, one of the men somehow dragging clear a precious crate loaded with revolvers and extra ammunition.\n\nA second airship skidded to a stop behind Jack's burning machine, disgorging its assault team, the top gunner emptying his Gatling in support fire as well. A third machine crashed into the left of Jack's machine, pivoting about as its forward wheel collapsed from the hard landing. A fourth airship, coming in too low, crashed on the top of the third machine, crushing the topside gunner, nosed over the bow of the third ship, and slammed into the ground, forward cockpit disappearing, wings snapping off and pivoting into the gasbags, which exploded. Half a dozen men tumbled out of the cargo compartment.\n\nAnother airship, abandoning the approach, soared overhead, banking sharply, starboard wing almost clipping the warehouse, which had been shredded by Gatling fire. The topside and forward gunners let loose a stream of fire as they pivoted over the landing site. Another airship, clearing the pileup of the first four, touched down smoothly, followed seconds later by another and yet another.\n\nKetswana and his skirmish line were already past the warehouse, which was beginning to burn, screams of dying Bantag echoing from within. The building suddenly detonated with a thunderclap roar, bits of lumber, bodies, and kegs of powder soaring up, bursting like shells at a Fourth of July celebration, the explosion enveloping an airship overhead and knocking down several of Ketswana's men.\n\nDebris rained down; Hans crouched into a tight ball, and Jack threw himself over the old sergeant. Peeking out, Hans saw a burning barrel plunge down next to the airship that had landed behind Jack's machine, blowing a few seconds later, destroying that ship as well, catching the pilot and copilot as they tried to scramble away.\n\n\"We've landed in a madhouse!\" Jack roared. \"I'll handle the landings! Secure this area, otherwise, we'll all be slaughtered.\"\n\nLetting go of Hans he came to his feet, ignoring the debris still tumbling from the heavens, and raced out into the field, waving his arms, trying to flag the other airships off from their landing approaches. Hans saw two machines banking hard to the north, turning away, but another one came straight in through the spreading plumes of smoke, clearing the confusion, touching down, men from the cargo hold tumbling out before the ship had even stopped.\n\nNumbed, Hans slowly came to his feet, his mind a mad jumble of confusion. A squad of troops, Chin dressed in uniform, sprinted past, their lieutenant shouting for them to press into the first factory. He fell out, coming up to Hans.\n\n\"Sit down, sir.\"\n\nHans looked at him, confused.\n\nThe Chin officer gently helped Hans down to the grass, undoing a red bandanna tied around his throat and started to wipe Hans's face. Hans flinched. Shards of glass from the exploding window, he vaguely realized. The officer talked softly, as if soothing a child, falling into the dialect of the camps, the strange combination of Chin, Rus, Zulu, a polyglot language of the slaves.\n\n\"We're back now, now we're back with guns. Listen, listen.\"\n\nThe blood cleared from his eyes, Hans looked up to the smoke-shrouded gate. Ketswana stood silhouetted in the gateway into the factory where they had once been slaves, carbine held overhead, his battle chant serving as a rally cry. There was something else as well, though, a loud roaring cry, the screams of thousands of men and women.\n\nLegs shaky, Hans got to his feet, the Chin lieutenant, who was nearly his own age, helping him along.\n\n\"We free our brothers here, then we rest, old friend. We drink cha, and then we watch the Bantag slave.\" He chuckled.\n\nHe stepped around the bodies of two of the men caught when the warehouse blew, both of them torn and horribly burned. On the main rail line the wreckage of the aerosteamer destroyed in the explosion was a piled-up ruin, burning fiercely. Miraculously, most of the men in the cargo compartment apparently had survived, though badly shaken, and were huddled to the side, staring blankly at the inferno.\n\n\"Get in, get in!\" the lieutenant cried, pointing toward the gate. Several still had their carbines; the others drew pistols and woodenly shuffled off.\n\nAs Hans reached the gate he recoiled in horror. First there was the stench, the sickening cloying stench of the camps, the unwashed bodies, the steamy heat of the foundry, the musky smell of Bantag, and the deeper underlayer of rotting food, human waste, death, and a strange surreal sense that one could also smell terror.\n\nThe camp inside the compound was a scene of murderous chaos. Ketswana had wisely stopped his men just inside the barrier, drawing them up into a volley line. Occasionally one of the men raised a carbine to fire, but it was the thousands of slaves inside the compound who were doing the job. The prisoners were in full riot, swarming like a writhing host of maddened insects, tearing apart the remaining Bantag in the main courtyard. They had charged across the dead space that separated the perimeter wall from the barracks and were now up on the battlements. Frantic Bantag backed up along the upper walkway, furiously trying to keep the enraged host back. From down inside the camp, prisoners were pelting the trapped Bantag with lumps of coal and hunks of twisted rocks from the slag heaps until their comrades moving along the battlement walkways closed in. Four, six, sometimes a dozen died, until finally one overpowered a Bantag and knocked him off his perch to fall screaming into the waiting grasp of the mob below.\n\nHans spotted a knot of several dozen Bantag cutting their way through the compound, fighting to gain the doorway into the vast cavernous foundry building that dominated the center of the compound. Hans shouted for Ketswana to cut them off. Together Hans, Ketswana, and several squads of his troops pushed their way through the surging crowd.\n\nThe Bantag gained the door just ahead of them, his own men unable to fire owing to the press of Chin slaves between the two groups. The first couple of men to gain the entryway were dropped by fire from within the building. Hans pressed against the warm brick wall of the building, edged up to the huge open doors, which were wide enough that a railroad boxcar could be rolled in, and peeked around the corner. The Bantag were inside, deploying into a line not a dozen feet away. One raised a rifle, and Hans jerked his head back, a spray of brick fragment snapping out as the Bantag fired.\n\nThe Chin swarming around the door backed away as a concentrated volley tore into them. Hans looked over at Ketswana, who nodded without having to be told. A second volley slashed out; more Chin dropped. Ketswana seemed to be counting, he held his carbine up. Another volley flared.\n\n\"Charge!\"\n\nKetswana leapt from the side of the building, carbine leveled, firing from the waist. Others charged after him, firing as they came around the side of the building. Hans tried to follow, but the Chin lieutenant pushed him back, stepped around the corner, fired, and was knocked backwards by a ball that caught him squarely in the face.\n\nHans stepped over the body, firing blindly, and caught a glimpse of a Bantag crumpling only feet away. The Chin mob, which had been recoiling from the hammerblows, now turned in a mad frenzy and charged into the warehouse, knocking Hans up against the wall, Ketswana and the men who had followed him disappearing in the crush.\n\nThe thin Bantag line collapsed, the warriors breaking, running in panic, some turning to go up the north wing of the foundry, others running to the south. Hundreds of Chin pushed in. Hans dodged around the side of the first furnace just inside the door. Looking up at the wall he saw that the damnable treadmills were still there, their human occupants still locked inside, bony hands clutching the side, all of them shrieking in rage.\n\nA Bantag dodged past Hans, running blindly, stumbling straight into a stoking crew. Long iron stoking rods were now weapons. The Chin slaves fell upon the Bantag, the first one dying from the Bantag's bayonet thrust. One of the Chin, grasping the rod like a club, caught the Bantag across the knee, breaking his leg. The Bantag went down like a felled tree, then tried to scramble back up on his one good leg. Another one caught him across the back, and he collapsed, rolling over. Screaming with insane rage, one of the Chin straddled the Bantag, held his iron rod up like a spear, and drove it down straight into the Bantag's face. Then all of them started to beat the still-trembling corpse.\n\nIt was madness, and in that place, with all that he remembered, he felt the madness take hold of his own soul as well. Ignoring the pain of the splinters in his hand, he cocked open his carbine, chambered another round, and pushed forward, moving along the wall, dodging around the backs of the furnaces.\n\nIt was all so chillingly familiar, furnace number eleven. He wondered if it still drew poorly. He stepped wide of a fresh pour from number eight, several tons of molten iron still boiling hot, slowly congealing in the channels cut into the floor, a dead Chin lying half in the pour, clothes and hair smoldering. As always the windowless foundry was a stygian realm, illuminated only by the flare from the open hearths and the glow of hot iron, echoing with screams, gunshots, the hissing of hot metal, cloaked in a dark gloom so that all seemed ghostlike in the shadows.\n\nHe pushed down toward the end of the corridor, stepping out from behind a furnace, dropping a Bantag in the back as the warrior was backing up. Chin ran past, eyes wide with terror and rage, screaming incoherently.\n\nHe caught a glimpse of a ragged Chin, a skeletal form, naked except for a filthy rag tied around his waist, pointing. Hans spun around and catlike jumped backwards just as a heavy cauldron of molten iron upended, the glowing silvery cascade exploding into steam as it vomited out onto the pouring floor. Half a dozen Chin who had been next to Hans were caught in the boiling river, the men stumbling, falling, flames exploding as the liquid splashed onto their clothes, hair, and skin.\n\nThe two Bantag behind the upended cauldron ran out from behind the overturned vat. The charging mob skirted around the spreading pool and fell upon the two. The fight was horrifying. Hans watched, torn between rage at his old tormentors and pity for two living beings about to die agonizing deaths. The crowd simply beat the one half to death, then pushed him out onto the slowly congealing pool of molten iron. The second one was hoisted up by a dozen Chin, who carried him, kicking and flailing, to the open door of a glowing hearth.\n\nOften enough Hans had seen a Bantag pick up a slave with a single hand and toss him into a furnace over some minor infraction, or simply for no reason at all other than to serve as a minor amusement. The half-conscious Bantag, realizing his fate, started to kick and scream as they tried to plunge him headfirst into the flames. His arms snapped out, trying to block the entry. Blows from stirring rods broke his limbs.\n\nScreaming, he was thrown in, and, to Hans's terrified amazement, the Bantag, wreathed in flames, stood up inside the inferno, bellowing in agony. A single shot from Hans's carbine ended the agony, the explosive shot ending the horrific nightmare.\n\nThe shot reverberated through the cavernous room, and there was a strange silence for a moment. The mob, stunned by what it had done, seemed to collectively pause for breath.\n\n\"Hans.\"\n\nStartled, he turned. It was the Bantag dying in the molten pool of iron still slowly spreading out on the floor of the foundry.\n\nThe Bantag, kicking weakly, was looking straight at him.\n\nMy God, was this one of my captors from so long ago? Hans wondered. What torments did he inflict upon me, upon my comrades?\n\n\"Hans.\" It was a rattling gasp of agony, and he could sense the pleading supplication in the alien guttural voice.\n\nHands shaking, he ejected the spent round. He couldn't stop the shaking as he fumbled to pull another round out of his cartridge box, dropped it, and, cursing, tried to retrieve it from the blood-soaked floor. The Chin surrounding the still slowly spreading puddle gazed in mute silence at the agony of the Bantag and the apparently vain attempt of Hans to end it.\n\nAt last he chambered the round, cocked the hammer, and raised his carbine, aiming straight at the head.\n\n\"No, no!\" It was several of the Chin, gesturing angrily, motioning for him not to shoot.\n\n\"Hans \u2026\"\n\nTears filled his eyes. Snarling, he raised his carbine, aiming straight at the forehead. The Bantag, twitching spasmodically, appeared to dip his head in acknowledgment.\n\nHe squeezed the trigger.\n\nLowering his gun, he looked at the mob.\n\n\"We are men, damn it,\" he cried. \"Not like them. We are men.\"\n\nHe felt an infinite exhaustion, a wish simply to crawl away to a dark corner, to collapse into oblivion. His gaze swept the mob, eyes lingering on the very spot where only a year ago he had cowered in fear as a Bantag, perhaps the very one he had just shot, had almost uncovered the secret tunnel that had led him back to freedom.\n\n\"We are not like them,\" he cried, again his voice breaking. \"Fight to be free, not for revenge, not to be like them!\"\n\nAnd yet he knew the rage, the horror of slavery, the secret wish, buried in one's heart, to if nothing else kill one of them, to kill one of them in the most frightful and agonizing way possible, willing to trade one's own life for that terrible instant of freedom, the freedom to kill before dying yourself.\n\n\"We're here to win freedom for all the Chin,\" Hans said, his voice now not much more than a whisper, speech beginning to slur from exhaustion, his heart feeling heavy and leaden, again the spasm of pain. He took a deep breath trying to will the pain away, still it lingered.\n\n\"We are from the Republic. I was a slave here as you are now.\"\n\nSeveral of the Chin nodded, and he heard them whispering his name in their lilting singsong voices.\n\nHe took another breath.\n\n\"Furnace captains and barracks leaders. Organize your people. Round up all weapons taken from the Bantag. Find the camp leader and his assistants, I want them out by the gate in ten minutes.\"\n\nThe group seemed to freeze.\n\n\"Smash this whole damn place,\" he cried, \"smash it all, burn the barracks. We leave here, forever, within the hour.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Vincent watched in glum silence as flames blowtorched out of the turret of the abandoned ironclad, its crew standing sadly to one side. A medical orderly was by the side of the boiler operator, smearing ointment on his scalded hands and face. It was the fifth ironclad to break down that day, a steam line splitting wide-open. Two or three hours' work, and they could have torn out the line, replacing it with a spare, but there was no time for that. The rear of the vast marching column had already passed and was a quarter mile to the east. He could see that the cavalry pickets bringing up the rear were getting nervous, wanting to push on.\n\nThe injured driver was loaded into a two-wheel ambulance wagon, the driver snapping the reins, urging the horse into a slow trot. A second wagon, loaded with the salvaged ammunition and Gatling gun, fell in behind the ambulance. The crew stood silent, not sure what to do, and Vincent motioned for them to get moving. They would be walking, and he could sense their unhappiness over the demotion back to the infantry.\n\nA rifle ball fluttered past his face, another one pinged against the rear of his turret. He looked back to the west. A heavy skirmish line of mounted Bantag, several of them armed with rifles, was less than four hundred yards away.\n\nThroughout the day the pressure on all sides had been slowly building. Most of the Bantag were still older formations, armed with traditional bows, but apparently several regiments, perhaps a full umen, armed with rifles had shown up. They had brought up two batteries of rifled pieces and several batteries of mortars as well, which were becoming something of an annoyance.\n\nA mortar round arced overhead, bursting near the ambulance, the startled driver urging his draft horse into a plodding gallop to regain the protection of the square formed by 3rd Corps. A captain from the trailing cavalry unit rode up beside Vincent's ironclad and saluted.\n\n\"Ah sir, they're starting to press a little close.\"\n\nVincent nodded, and shouted down to his driver to get moving.\n\nHe spotted the puff of smoke as the mortar fired again, back and just behind the cover of the Bantag skirmish line sweeping in behind them. Though it was against orders to fire at long range, he pivoted his turret around, slipped back inside, raised the elevation on the gun, opened the steam cock, and fired several long bursts. Several mounted riders dropped.\n\nStanislaw engaged the engine and the ironclad lurched forward, wheels cutting into the dry turf. Standing up in the turret he watched as the cavalry skillfully pulled back, one troop reining about, covering, as a second troop a hundred yards farther back broke off, rode through their covering line, then came about in turn to cover. The men were good, skillful, always keeping the Bantag at bay. Twice during the long day of marching the Bantag had attempted to mount a serious charge. The cavalry then pulled in, letting the ironclads cut them apart.\n\nThey crested a low rise. Again the vast panorama ahead \u2026 3rd Corps in a huge block formation, a thousand yards to a side, inside the hollow square the supply wagons, ambulances, a reserve brigade to plug any hole, and a dozen ironclads. Spread in a vast circle several hundred yards out around the square were mounted units and five ironclads per flank, the forward V formation of the previous day abandoned as the Bantag increased the pressure.\n\nA Hornet came sweeping in, strafing the mortar crew that had been harassing them, the tracer rounds igniting the crew's limber wagon. The mushrooming fireball triggered a ragged cheer from the men at the rear of the square. The Hornet pulled up sharply and continued west, heading back to Tyre to reload and refuel.\n\nThe farther east they traveled, the more difficult it was maintaining air cover since the airships now had to fly nearly a hundred-mile round-trip before getting into action. The continual flying and fighting of the, last three days was undoubtedly taking a toll on maintenance as well; there were long stretches of time now when no airships were overhead.\n\nHe thought about school, so many years ago, at the old Oak Grove in Vassalboro. Memory of Plutarch and the last campaign of Crassus against the Parthians. Much the same, the circling riders. Only two differences, though. The first, his force had gunpowder. But the disturbing second one, unlike Crassus, who actually outnumbered the Parthians, he was facing odds of maybe six to one, the only thing holding them back the ironclads and the Hornets circling overhead.\n\nHis driver below turned slightly, and Vincent looked forward again, where several men, dead infantry, lay twisted in the high grass. He hated leaving them to the bastards. A scattering of dead Bantag and horses were in the grass as well, having tried to dispute the possession of the ridge when the head of the column had swept it half an hour ago.\n\nThey pushed on, a gust of dry wind from the west blanketing him in a choking cloud of smoke from the ironclad's exhaust stack. Coughing, he waited for it to clear. A courier came out of the smoke, reined in beside his machine, and rode at a slow canter, keeping pace.\n\nVincent returned the salute and took the note. Still perched atop the turret he unfolded the paper, ignoring the occasional hum of a bullet snapping past.\n\nIt was from Gregory, riding at the head of the column, announcing that water had been sighted. He shaded his eyes and looked back to the west. Still a couple of hours of sunlight. There was no need to look at the map, another watercourse was still five or six miles beyond. According to the map that was also the head of the Bantag rail line, which was being constructed from the Great Sea. A Hornet had flown all the way east earlier in the day and dropped a message that two Bantag transports were off-loading land ironclads and additional troops. Two Hornets had been lost trying to strafe the ships and locomotives, and the equipment was being loaded onto several trains, but had yet to move out.\n\nWell, that is what we wanted, he realized. But still it was a chilling thought that somewhere up ahead a warm reception was being planned.\n\nHe knew the men were getting tired, they'd been on the march for nearly fourteen hours, a hard thirty miles that day, a little more than halfway to the coast. They'd still have to dig in once stopped for the night. The enemy would come to them. It was best to have the boys as rested as possible for the next day.\n\n\"Tell General Timokin to hold at the stream. Tell Stan to halt the corps as well and dig in. Whether we take the railhead today or not doesn't really matter; they'll just simply off-load farther back.\"\n\nHe could sense the boy's disappointment as he shifted uncomfortably in the saddle, then saluted and spurred his mount forward.\n\nHe looked out at the circling host. After months in the siege lines they had to be exhausted as well. No, they won't press it yet, they'll wait for ironclads to come up. Then there'll be hell to pay." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "The aerosteamer touched down lightly, bounced once, then settled back down, quickly rumbling to a halt.\n\nJurak pulled open the hatch and swung down, barely acknowledging the bows of the aerosteamer ground crew. It was an out-of-the-way position on the northeast shore of the Great Sea, near the realm of Nippon, a little more than halfway to his destination. The only purpose for the station was to act as a refueling depot for the occasional aerosteamer flying the great route from the realm of the Chin, northward to Nippon, then northwest, skirting the flank of the Sea, then finally to turn straight west to the front, now three hundred leagues away. He regretted not setting up stations on the western and eastern shore of the Sea, so one could simply fly across the water, but after too many of the precious ships had disappeared making the transit, Ha'ark had forbidden such overflights, and he had never bothered to rescind the ban.\n\nAs it was he had witnessed firsthand the wisdom of that choice. Thirty leagues back one of his two escorts had simply quit, an engine shutting down, the aerosteamer spiraling down to a semi-crash landing along the rail line that ran the length of the northern shore.\n\n\"Any messages?\" he shouted, looking over at the station commander, who stared at him as if he was a god who had tumbled from the sky.\n\nA sheaf of papers was pressed into his hand, and he scanned them, yet again cursing the fact that the script of his own world had not been introduced rather than the damnable writing of the Rus.\n\nSo it was Huan after all. He had at least guessed right on that; otherwise, this trip would be a foolish waste. He jotted down half a dozen messages on a pad of rice paper, tore them off, and handed them back to the station commander. Without a word, he looked back at his pilot.\n\n\"How are the engines?\"\n\n\"My Qar Qarth, they need work.\"\n\n\"Can they take us to the next stop?\"\n\n\"Tonight?\"\n\n\"Yes, damn all, tonight. We'll have moonlight, just follow the damned rail line. We're almost around the Sea. The rail line will turn southeast down toward Nippon. It'll be open steppe soon.\"\n\nThe pilot said nothing.\n\n\"Shouldn't we wait for our escort?\" He nodded toward the small dot that was now winging in from the west.\n\n\"He can catch up. Let's be off.\"\n\nGrabbing a waterskin and satchel of dried meat offered by a trembling cattle slave, Jurak returned to the air machine and climbed in, impatiently waiting for the pilot, who checked as the last of the tins of kerosene was loaded into the fuel tank.\n\nThe pilot finally climbed back through the hatch and before it was even closed Jurak leaned over and pushed in the throttle lever, propellers stuttering up to a blur. Turning back out onto the grassy strip, they took off, clearing the towering trees at the far end of the field, heading back for a moment toward the setting sun. Banking hard over, they continued to climb, Jurak catching a glimpse of the Sea off the starboard side. Straight ahead he could see where a shallow arm of the ocean finally played out into a bay ringed with low hills, a place where a year ago the first actions of the campaign had been fought in a vain attempt to lure the Yankees eastward before the attack across the ocean came two hundred leagues to the west.\n\nHuan. The war had leapt all the way back to there. Chaos all the way from Xi'an to Huan, half a dozen factories in enemy hands. A mob though. A disorganized mob led at best by two or three hundred trained troops. They still most likely thought that there was only one rail line. The one that ran from Huan to Xi'an. With luck they didn't know that throughout the winter and into early summer he had pressed the completion of the second line, the one that ran northward out of Huan, up to Nippon, and then finally connected to the route the Yankees had been cutting along the northern shore of the Great Sea. And on that road, even now, he had reversed every train, over thirty of them carrying two entire umens of troops who had been sent back after the siege of Roum to refit and train with the newest weapons.\n\nIt had been his plan to keep them in reserve at Huan, an inner warning perhaps that the vast encampment areas for the old, the young, and the females, more than three hundred thousand yurts spread in a vast arc across hundreds of leagues between Huan and Nippon, were too vulnerable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Pat O'Donald furiously shredded the paper, tearing it in half, then again, and yet again until it was nothing more than confetti. Rick Schneid, his second-in-command for the Capua Front, said nothing, having read the note over Pat's shoulder.\n\nPat looked down at the telegrapher who had transcribed the note.\n\n\"That thing still operating?\" Pat asked.\n\nThe boy nodded, wide-eyed and uncomprehending of the long stream of English and Gaelic imprecations that had poured out of Pat while reading the note.\n\nPat looked around the room; half a dozen men of the signal corps were at their telegraphs, which connected to the various commands along the river, and the main line back to Roum and Suzdal beyond.\n\nUnholstering his revolver he grabbed the weapon by the barrel, and slammed the butt down on the receiver, smashing it to pieces.\n\n\"Well, now the son of a bitch is broken,\" he snarled.\n\nThe room was silent.\n\nReversing the revolver he held it casually in his hand, not pointing it at the telegrapher but not quite turning it away from him either.\n\n\"If a word, if a single word of that message slips out of this room, I'm going to blame you personally,\" he paused, his gaze sweeping the others, who stared at him nervously. \"I'll blame all of you. Do we understand each other?\"\n\nNo one answered; there was simply nodding all around.\n\n\"I expect it'll be at least a day before you can find a replacement for that machine.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes sir, days more likely.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"Sir, I have to enter something into the official logbook.\"\n\n\"Damn the logbook to hell,\" he shouted, as he reached over, tore out several pages, and shredded them as well.\n\n\"A shell hit this place, damn lucky anyone got out alive, damn lucky. Do we understand each other?\"\n\n\"Sir, you're right.\"\n\n\"What the hell do you mean I'm right?\"\n\n\"Just that, sir.\"\n\n\"Don't ever say that, boy, or you'll hang with me. The rest of you keep me posted. We can maybe expect action by dawn. I want to know.\"\n\nTossing the pieces of paper on the packed-dirt floor he stalked out, tearing aside the blanket that acted as a curtain. Climbing out of the command bunker, he walked up onto the battlement and with a sigh leaned against the earthen embankment, gazing blankly at the rising moons. \"You can't keep it back forever.\"\n\nIt was Schneid, coming up to join him, proffering a lit cigar, which Pat gladly accepted.\n\n\"I want good troops, old veterans we can trust,\" Pat said. \"Make it the First Suzdal. Be honest and tell them what's going on. Get 'em on a train and head back up the line toward Roum. Turn command of your corps over to your second and go with them.\"\n\n\"Me? Pat, we both know those bastards over there are fixing to attack, maybe as early as tomorrow. I'm needed here.\"\n\n\"No, you're needed more back there. Pick a good spot, say the bridge crossing that marshy creek about thirty miles back. That's a good enough spot. Block the track, tear the bridge up a bit, then stop anyone who comes up that line. If the Chin ambassadors should happen to show up, arrest them or shoot them, I don't care which it is at the moment.\"\n\n\"You sure you know what you're doing?\"\n\n\"Look, Rick. The government might not send anybody up at first, other than a couple of mealymouthed senators. If they do, arrest them as well.\"\n\n\"On what charge?\"\n\n\"Damn all, Schneid, I don't care. Littering, soliciting for immoral purposes, public drunkenness, I don't give a damn.\"\n\nLeaning over, he rubbed his temples.\n\n\"Sorry, I don't mean to blow on you.\"\n\n\"It's all right.\"\n\n\"I just can't believe that after everything we've been through it's come down to this.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"They might send troops, then.\"\n\n\"I know that, too. I'll leave it up to you at that point. I don't want our people killing each other, I'm not ordering you to do that.\"\n\n\"Pat, you can only keep this under wraps a day, two days at most. The army's bound to find out. You can't tie up every damn supply train coming this way. Word will finally get through.\"\n\n\"Two days, make it three, that's all.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"If need be, I'm going to try one more time.\"\n\n\"Try what?\"\n\nPat nodded toward the east.\n\n\"To get across that damned river.\"\n\n\"Don't even think it, Pat. You have no orders.\"\n\n\"Rick, everything's breaking apart. The Republic, Andrew resigning, that last damned telegram telling us to inform the bastards on the other side of the river that we want a ceasefire. It's all breaking apart. Well maybe it's breaking apart over there, too. I'm willing to make one more try at it. I think they'll hit first, then I plan to hit back with everything I have.\"\n\n\"Pat, give it another day. We still don't know what's happening with Vincent or Hans. Maybe they've succeeded. If so, the bastards here will have to pull back, and that could reverse the whole political situation at home.\"\n\nPat said nothing, staring at the rising moons.\n\n\"All right then, one more day, but then, by God, I plan to go down fighting.\"\n\n\"With an army that's no longer supposed to fight?\"\n\nPat smiled.\n\n\"They don't know that yet now, do they?\"\n\n\"You're talking rebellion.\"\n\n\"Only you and I know that, my friend, and maybe a bit of rebellion is exactly what this country needs at this moment.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "He had seen cities burn before, Fredericksburg, Suzdal, Kev, Roum, and only this morning it had been Xi'an. None of his nightmares, however, had prepared Hans for the apocalypse spreading from horizon to horizon. Huan, the great city of the Chin, was dying.\n\nIt had started at dusk, a column of smoke to the east, a beacon, a warning, the column of smoke by day, and now the pillar of fire by night, and it seemed as if the world, the entire world, was doomed to a purging by flame for its sins.\n\nEven before nightfall the first refugees had come into his advancing lines seeking refuge. No one could explain how or why they knew to head west, it was as if a primal force of nature, chained for ten thousand years had been unleashed.\n\nWhile a slave he had learned something of the mystery, the Chin called it \"wind words,\" the strange almost supernatural way that news flowed through the slave camps, leaping like the chimera wind, bearing with it tiding of death, the choosing of who shall be next for the moon feasts, the distant whispers of wars. Before the Bantag even came to a barracks to lead someone away, already the news had arrived as \"wind words.\"\n\nHans knew that in the world of master and slave, the slave was always present, standing by every table, every entryway to a yurt, always there were slaves, mute, dumb-looking, but always listening, and from mouth to mouth the word would spread of what had been decided. That was the only explanation he now could find. \"Wind words\" had floated into the city of Huan, miles away from where he had landed, bearing with it news of the spreading rebellion.\n\nSome of the refugees claimed that the Bantag garrison of Huan had started it, rounding up the appointed leaders of the city, taking them out beyond the walls to slaughter them all, that one of the leaders slew a Bantag, and thus the killing frenzy had started in the streets of the city. Others, that the Bantag were in a panic, fleeing the city, setting it aflame and sealing the gates with the intent of murdering the hundreds of thousands within. And yet others said that Cu-Han, the great ancestor god, had ridden into the city upon a winged horse and struck down Ugark, the Bantag Qarth of the city, the flaming light of his sword blinding the Bantag, and then proclaimed that the hour of liberation had come.\n\nHe suspected he knew the truth. That all the stories were true. When word arrived of the air assault on Xi'an, and the following day the strike on the factories west of Huan, the garrison commander had panicked and ordered the roundup of all the Chin who were collaborators and managed the daily running of the millions of Chin who labored as slaves. Perhaps it was merely to interrogate, maybe even to take hostages to ensure that the people did not rebel, or stupidly it was with the intent to kill them all in retaliation. As for the god, that was a fascinating irony, the similarity in names, and if at the moment it helped to feed the rebellion, so be it. But as he looked at the thousands staggering past he could see the panic as well.\n\nPanic would feed on panic, the Bantag beginning the slaughter, and the population, after years of occupation, slavery, and terror, sensing that liberation was at hand, but now confronted by the death they had sought so long to avoid, would then turn like cornered rats, believing that the gods themselves would now come to their aid.\n\nSitting on the side of the wood tender of a Bantag locomotive, which was slowly pushing up the main line toward the city, he nursed the cup of tea given to him by the locomotive engineer, a Chin slave freed when they had seized the engine works adjoining the foundry where they had landed.\n\nThe tea and a dirty chunk of hard bread were reviving him, and to his amazement he had actually managed to snatch a few hours' sleep, the first in two days. Seeing that the cup was empty, the engineer gently took it from Hans, opened a hot water vent, filled the cup, then, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a dirty rag, scooped out a precious handful of leaves, and threw them in, swishing the contents around.\n\nHans nodded his thanks. Setting the cup down on the floor of the tender to let it cool a bit, Hans leaned out of the cab. A firefight was flaring up ahead, yet another walled-in compound; one of the men reported that it was a powder works. The complex stood out sharply, the burning city, still several miles off, illuminating the world. His skirmish line, deployed a half mile to either side of the tracks, was hotly engaged, beefed up now by thousands of Chin, some armed with cumbersome Bantag rifles, others with the precious pistols carried in on the aerosteamers and not left behind at Xi'an. Most were just a surging, milling horde carrying clubs, pitchforks, stoking rods, knives, heavy Bantag swords, and spears.\n\nRight through the middle of the fighting an endless column staggered to either side of the track, women clinging to screaming infants, frightened children clutching their mothers' skirts, old men, women, lost children, all of them confused, terrified, moving west, trying to get out of the madness.\n\nHe had detailed off a few precious troops to cull out anyone, man or woman, who seemed capable of fighting. In any other setting the gesture would be obscene, for all of them were little more than emaciated skeletons, the final dregs of the pit after years of existence in hell and the death of millions in the monthly feasts or dying to prop up the empire of the hordes.\n\nHe tried to ignore them, to let his gaze linger for even a second on a lost child, or an exhausted mother lying in the mud and surrounded by screaming children would sap his will to continue the madness. He had come to try and free them, for they had become his brothers and sisters, yet now to free them he could do nothing but watch them die, and it was destroying him.\n\nThey were all dead anyhow, he had to remind himself of that. For surely, once the Republic was destroyed, the Bantag would annihilate everyone here and then move on. Yet rather than feeling like a liberator he felt as if he was the angel of death, realizing that as he looked at the inferno enveloping the world, a hundred thousand or more must be dying this night.\n\nA blinding light ignited. Where the powder works had been a harsh white glare, brighter than a hundred suns, erupted, rising heavenward, the flash brilliance of it seeming to freeze everyone. By the light of the explosion the entire world came into a sharp-etched reality. Far to his left he could see the end of his battle line, a milling confusion, mounted Bantag swirling into a tangled mass of humanity. Straight ahead the track was clogged with people, all of them frozen, then falling, their cries drowned out by the earth-splitting thunderclap. The ragged line of infantry circling about the walled compound were turning, running back, flinging themselves to the ground.\n\nThe fireball soared thousands of feet heavenward, the brilliant glare darkening into a sullen red hell, spreading out. The concussion stunned him. He staggered, leaning forward into the gale, the air hot and dry. More explosions ignited, crates of ammunition thrown heavenward, bursting asunder, millions of cartridges flaring, sparkling, streaks of fire plunging back to earth.\n\nThe compound walls were down, blown asunder, providing a glimpse into the inferno. Bantag, looking like flaming demons, staggered out, flaying wildly at the agony that was consuming them, humans, dwarflike beside them, burning as well. A box of rifle cartridges crashed down beside the engine, exploding like a bundle of firecrackers, rounds pinging against the side of the tender.\n\n\"Hans!\"\n\nIt was Ketswana, dragging several Chin behind him, all three dressed in the loose black coveralls marking them as men who worked aboard the locomotives. They were the precious few, allowed extra rations, exemption of their families from the feasting pit, and in the madness of the last few hours more than one had been beaten to death by those lower on the order of survival in this mad world and thus the special order to round them up not only for intelligence but also for their own protection.\n\nKetswana climbed into the locomotive cab and, exhausted, slumped down to the floor, back against the pile of wood in the tender. Hans offered his cup of tea, and Ketswana greedily gulped it down, nodding his thanks when Hans offered a piece of hardtack. The three Chin rail workers he had dragged along were in the cab as well, talking excitedly to the engineer piloting Hans's train, their words flowing so fast Hans could barely decipher what was being said.\n\n\"They're from the northern line,\" Ketswana announced, still chewing on the dry bread.\n\n\"Northern line?\"\n\n\"Remember, we knew they were laying a line up toward Nippon.\"\n\n\"And?\" He felt a flash of fear.\n\n\"We should have flown a few reconnaissance flights that way, Hans, before ordering Jack to take the remaining ships back to Xi'an.\"\n\nIt was a stupid mistake, damn stupid, Hans realized. He should have ordered Jack to circle out for a quick look around, but had yielded to the argument that if any of the aerosteamers were to survive, they had to get back to Xi'an before dark, refuel, patch up, and hopefully find a hydrogen-gas generator at the Bantag airfield. From there they could get back to Tyre the next morning. But now this.\n\nHe knew that his releasing of Jack was also motivated by guilt. Jack had finally agreed to the attack, though he had insisted that the other pilots had to volunteer as well and could not be ordered. Of course all of them did volunteer, they were far too green to know when to say no, and none would ever allow himself to be called the coward.\n\nOnly nine airships survived the assault intact and in some semblance of flying order. Close to five out of every six Eagle crews alive just two weeks ago were now dead. Jack and his boys were beyond the breaking point, and thus Hans had sent them home. His sentimentality might just have cost him the fight. He had had no idea of the completion of the rail line to the north.\n\n\"The bastards didn't just run the line up to Nippon,\" Ketswana continued, \"they hooked it all the way up to the line we were running along the north shore of the Sea!\"\n\nHans lowered his head, saying nothing. Damn! Six, eight hundred miles of track in a year. He didn't think the Bantag were capable of it. Wearily, he looked down at Ketswana.\n\n\"They have another route, Hans. Even though we cut the sea-lane, they can still move supplies by rail! Taking Xi'an means nothing; they can still keep the war going!\"\n\n\"We should have heard something,\" Hans replied, his voice thick with exhaustion, his mind refusing to believe the dark reality this intelligence presented. \"Prisoners, escaped slaves during the winter, something.\"\n\n\"The slaves working it were kept separate. They only finished it within the last month. Nearly all the supplies were still going down to Xi'an and moving by boat\u2014it was easier. Now for the bad news.\"\n\nHe could already sense what it would be.\n\n\"First off, they built some more factories up in Nippon and put the people to work. Hans, even if we smash this place up, they'll still be able to produce weapons.\"\n\n\"We had to figure on that.\" Hans sighed, trying to hide his bitter disappointment. So this would not be the crippling blow. The thought sank in with a brutal clarity that the war was indeed lost. Jurak would annihilate the Chin, perhaps stop for a while to regroup, then simply press on with the fight. He was afraid that in his exhaustion his despair would show. He lowered his head in order to hide his face.\n\n\"And Hans. Those three Chin I rounded up,\" Ketswana continued, \"were supposed to run a trainload of rails north this morning. They told me that even then word was already in the city that we had taken Xi'an. The Bantag were getting nervous, rounding up the families of the Chin rulers as hostages when we hit the factories west of here. That's when all hell broke loose, and the city rioted.\"\n\n\"Kind of what we figured.\"\n\n\"That's not the main point, though. These three were supposed to pull out with that load of rails when suddenly they got orders to wait in the rail yard. One of them, his brother worked on the telegraph line, said that messages were flying north, up toward Nippon, calling back two umens of troops.\"\n\nHans tried not to react.\n\n\"We had to figure on resistance. If they only had two umens here covering their rear, we should be able to handle it.\"\n\n\"Hans, two umens of troops with modern weapons. They were sent back here after the Battle of Roum to refit. These Bantag are veterans. They're deploying north of the city right now.\"\n\nHans looked back toward Huan. Damn all, it would have been the perfect place for a defensive fight. Like most Chin cities, it was a rabbit warren of narrow streets, laid out with no rhyme or reason. It had once housed over a million people. There was no telling how many were left after the years of occupation and slavery, but even with several hundred thousand he could have consumed half a dozen umens in a street-to-street fight.\n\nThe pillar of fire filled the night sky, a vast inferno, a city thousands of years old dying in one final cataclysm. There was a flash of guilt. He knew that everyone who had lived in that city was doomed to die. Once the war a thousand miles to the north and west was finished, everyone here would have been massacred before the Bantag moved on. Yet still, as a slave he remembered far too well the clinging to life in spite of the doom. If one more day of survival could be wrung out of existence, that was all that counted, a day of numbing agony ameliorated by a warm bowl of millet at sundown, the gentle touch of a loved one sought in the middle of the night, the prayer that the night would last forever, the dawn and the agony that came with it banished by a dream.\n\nHis coming had shattered that dream, for everyone here this was the last night, and they knew it. Come dawn two umens of the Horde's finest warriors, battle-hardened from bitter campaigning, would be unleashed, and in their frenzy all would die.\n\nHe turned to look west, the twin rails glimmering by the firelight. He could back the train down that track right then. Fighting against despair, he tried to reason that at least they had accomplished something. It was a blow that would take months to recover from. Jurak would undoubtedly have to retreat to the Sea, perhaps even as far back as the Shennadoah or Nippon if Vincent's mad thrust won through and thus threatened the southern flank of the Horde armies.\n\nAnd then what? Ultimately nothing would change, nothing. Jurak would simply build a new war machine.\n\nHans squatted next to his friend, sighing with the pain as his knees creaked in protest. He looked at the three railroad men who sat hunched up in the far corner of the cab, talking in whispers with the driver of the locomotive. He caught words here and there, whispers about slaughter, death, families lost, fear.\n\nOutside, to either side of the stalled engine, the columns of frightened refugees continued to pass, fleeing they knew not where, but trying to get out nevertheless. Again another short stab of pain.\n\n\"Hans?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"You all right?\"\n\n\"Just tired, so damned tired.\"\n\n\"We've got to do something, you know.\"\n\n\"What?\" He could sense his voice breaking. His mind was clouded, and it was becoming too hard to focus.\n\n\"Come dawn they'll attack; they're reorganizing not five miles from here.\"\n\n\"I know that.\"\n\nKetswana spoke quickly to the locomotive engineer, motioning with his tin cup. The engineer took it, vented some more hot water, and threw some leaves in. Ketswana took the cup and pressed it into Hans's hands, which were trembling.\n\nHans took a sip, set the cup down, and leaned his head back against the woodpile.\n\n\"We've got six hours or so till dawn,\" Ketswana announced. \"We have to dig in and get ready. Build a fortified line anchored on this rail line, use the factory compounds we've taken as bastions.\"\n\n\"I know, I know,\" he whispered.\n\nSo many years of struggle, so many long hard years, and now it seems to all end here. His mind drifted, the prairie, the starlit nights: Antietam, the road to Antietam, cresting South Mountain, looking back across the valley, the blue serpentine columns stretching to the horizon, afternoon sun glinting on fifty thousand rifle barrels; Gettysburg, when the sun seemed to stand still in the heavens; and these strange heavens. He looked up, the Great Wheel overhead, again wondering which star was home. To have run the race so far, so far, and now to fall at the last step and see it all washed away.\n\nHe closed his eyes, a prayer drifting through his heart, God, let this all be for something.\n\n\"Hans?\"\n\nKetswana leaned over, a moment of fright, his hand gently touching his friend's forehead, drifting down to his throat, feeling for a pulse.\n\nHe sighed and leaned back. Let him sleep, he needed sleep. Always trying to carry all the burden, forgetting just how many he had inspired and trained. No, let him sleep.\n\nThe engineer was looking over, and Ketswana motioned that Hans was not to be disturbed.\n\n\"Ketswana?\"\n\nHe looked down from the cab. Through the confused press milling about he saw Fen Chu, one of the old guard, a survivor of the Escape.\n\n\"There's not much left of the powder mill,\" Fen reported. \"All blown to hell it is.\"\n\n\"The next compound?\" He motioned up the tracks toward Huan.\n\n\"Told by some of the slaves that escaped that the guards started to shoot everyone, then fled. It was a cartridge factory for their rifles.\"\n\nKetswana looked back to the west. The factory compounds were strung like beads along the track for miles, most of them basically laid out the same, brick buildings housing foundries, mills, works for cartridges, shells, bullets, rifles, artillery barrels, land ironclads \u2026 the brick building surrounded by wooden barracks for the slaves, and those in turn surrounded by a palisades, usually of logs or rough-cut planking.\n\nMost of them were burning.\n\nHe looked back toward the city. No, that hope was finished.\n\nSouth? He knew next to nothing of the land, just rumors. From his days of slavery he occasionally was allowed outside the compound on some errand, southward was nothing but open farmlands, vast rice paddies and pastures before the coming of the Bantag. Most of the farms were abandoned now. He remembered that on a clear day, from the roof of the factory one could see hills rising up, the distant hint of cloud-capped mountains beyond.\n\n\"Can't go south,\" Fen announced, as if reading Ketswana's thoughts.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"People are fleeing from that way as well. They said most of the Horde's encampments are down that way, hundreds of thousands of them, their old ones, women and cubs, yurts as far as you can see. That's their summer pasturing grounds on what had once been farms before everyone was herded into the compounds or slaughtered.\"\n\nThat was out then.\n\nNo. The anchor was the railroad. We try to flee south, this mob will spread out run, in panic, and it will turn into a hunt.\n\n\"All right, pull our men together; we start retreating back along the tracks. We'll push the trains back up the line three or four miles. We string the trains along the tracks between three or four of the compounds and upend them. Loot out what weapons we can. Get into the cartridge works, for example, and drag out as much ammunition as you can. Start culling out this mob, tell them reinforcements are coming up the rail line but we have to hold out.\"\n\n\"Are they?\"\n\n\"We both know the answer to that, but we got to give these people some hope, some reason to turn and fight like men, rather than be hunted down like the cattle they were. If we can get ten hours, even eight, we should be able to fortify a good position, and then let's see what those bastards will do.\"\n\n\"You're talking about hundreds of thousands of people out here,\" Fen cried. \"They'll all die once the Horde recovers and attacks.\"\n\n\"Fen, a year ago we all figured we'd die anyhow. All I asked then was to die killing the bastards. I still feel that way; how about you?\"\n\nA grin creased Fen's weary face, he came to attention, and saluted.\n\n\"Fine, let's get to work.\"\n\nFen raced off, disappearing into the mob, shouting orders. Ketswana looked over at the engineer and motioned for him to start backing the train up. As the machine slowly lurched into reverse, he looked down at Hans. Picking up a dirty blanket from the comer of the locomotive cab he gently draped it around his friend's shoulders.\n\n\"My friend, today will be a good day to die,\" he whispered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "It felt like the old days, the assault on Caradoga, the fifth year of the War of the False Pretender. The city had been hit by the third atomic to be used in the war, the air assault was dropped upwind to seal off the retreat of the refugees and drive them back in to the inferno, since Caradoga had been a center of stiff resistance. That was the battle where he had lost faith in the cause. Ha'ark had joined the unit shortly after that fight. Perhaps it would have tempered him more to have seen it, Jurak thought.\n\nThe Chin city of Huan looked the same now. It had been their beacon for the last fifty leagues of the flight, first a glow on the horizon, then a soaring pillar of light, so bright that it filled the cockpit of the aerosteamer with a hellish red glare. It reminded him as well of the Sacred Texts, the destruction of the city of Jakavu for its sinful ways.\n\nExplosions ignited in the city, entire blocks of cramped derelict homes, abandoned as the population had been driven to work in the factories, rail lines, or to the feasting pits, were now consumed, flaring to explosive incandescence. From the north to southern wall the entire city was burning. By the glow he could make out snakelike columns moving out of the gates to the west of the city, where more fires burned.\n\nEven as his attention turned to that direction a glaring white-hot explosion ignited, soaring heavenward in a giant fireball. It was the powder mill. Damn all, so they were into the factories. A dozen plants or more, foundries, cannon works, powder mill, cartridge works, rifle works, all of them burning.\n\nIt was hard to see the works to the east and south. He never should have left old Ugark as umen commander. He was far too much of the old ways, and bitter as well for not having command at the front. For that matter those who were there were, in general, warriors not fit for the front anymore, or those who were never fit, willing enough to torture a defenseless cattle, but not so willing to face one that just might be armed.\n\nIt was always the same mistake, to group together the less competent, then send them off to some forgotten front.\n\nAnd yet the war was so damn close to victory, he could feel it within his grasp. The raids, both here and across from Tyre, though brilliant, were indicators of a final desperation. All that was needed now was to hang on, to contain this madness, save the factories that were left. Once that was done, return to the front and make a final push as if nothing had happened at all. That would shatter their morale once and for all, and they would give in.\n\nThe wind was building; the column of smoke ahead rose ten thousand feet or more to the heavens, then spread out in a dark mushroom cloud that blotted out the Great Wheel. Even from two leagues out bits of ash and smoldering embers were raining down. The machine lurched, bounced.\n\nFirestorm, the outer edge of the winds being sucked into the heart of the inferno, he realized, and ordered the weary pilot to turn about and find a spot to land along the railroad tracks north of the city.\n\nHe could see the troop trains lined up, over two dozen of them. In the distance the headlight of another one came down from Nippon, winked, and shimmered. The pilot spiraled down, deciding to alight on what appeared to be open land parallel to the track where the long line of trains were parked.\n\nA volley of bullets slashed through the cabin. A red mist sprayed into Jurak's eyes as the machine lurched over. Wiping his eyes clear he saw the pilot, the side of his head a shattered pulp, slumped over the controls.\n\nMore bullets slammed into the cabin as Jurak leaned over, trying to push the pilot to one side and free the wheel.\n\nHe caught a glimpse of a locomotive, sparks soaring up from the stack, winks of light flashing behind it, rifle fire, and for an instant he wondered how the damned humans had gotten this far, then realized his own men were shooting at him in blind panic.\n\nJerking the wheel back he banked sharply, closing his eyes for a moment and turning his head away as the forward glass panes exploded, showering him with fragments.\n\nDamn, after all this, to be killed by your own warriors, he thought grimly as he opened his eyes, caught a glimpse of several yurts straight ahead, pulled back up to go over them and felt the shudder of a stall shaking his machine. The controls were mushy, and the machine started to settle, tail first, then slapped down hard.\n\nThe forward cabin snapped off from the front of the machine, and, covering his face, he fell.\n\nThere was a moment of stunned silence, and then he felt the heat. The hydrogen bags were burning.\n\nKicking, clawing, he tore himself free of the tangled wickerwork of the cab and crawled out onto the grass. A clump of dirt sprayed up into his face, the crack of another bullet whined overhead.\n\n\"You damned fools, it is your Qar Qarth!\" he roared.\n\nAnother bullet snicked past so close that he felt the hollow sucking pop of it as it brushed his face and then the shouts of a commander echoed, screaming to the warriors to cease fire.\n\nHesitantly, he came to his knees, knowing that to cower on the ground would be a loss of face. He stood up, brushing himself off. A commander of ten raced up, slowed, turned to shout for everyone to ground arms, then fell to his knees.\n\n\"Forgive us, my Qarth.\" His voice was trembling.\n\n\"We thought ..\n\n\"I know, that it was a Yankee airship.\"\n\n\"Yes, my Qarth. Take my life in atonement.\"\n\nJurak reached down and grabbed the commander by the shoulder, pulling him up to his feet.\n\n\"If I killed everyone who made a mistake, I don't think I would have much of an army left.\"\n\nThe commander looked at him wide-eyed, and nodded.\n\n\"Your umen commander, where is he?\"\n\nThe trembling leader of ten pointed to the train. He could see that hundreds were coming over out of curiosity. In the long history of the hordes, he realized, never had a Qar Qarth arrived in such a manner.\n\n\"Take me to him.\"\n\nJurak followed as he was led to the long line of trains. Word had already spread of what had happened and all were on their knees, heads lowered in atonement and fear.\n\nBokara, the commander of the umen of the white-legged horse, came forward at the run, stopped, and went to his knees.\n\nJurak motioned for him to stand.\n\nHe started to sputter an apology, and Jurak cut him off. \"Will your warriors be ready by dawn?\"\n\n\"Yes, my Qarth. The last of the trains is coming in even now.\"\n\n\"The situation?\"\n\nBokara looked south toward the flaring inferno.\n\n\"The truth, my Qar Qarth?\"\n\n\"What I would expect and nothing less.\"\n\n\"Ugark panicked, my lord. When he heard the Yankees had landed at Xi'an he ordered all the cattle leaders of the city to be rounded up and slaughtered. I am told rioting was already breaking out even before the Yankees landed here early in the afternoon. Rumors had swept through the Chin that their liberator, the god Hans, was coming to free them.\"\n\n\"Slaughter the leaders? I didn't order that.\"\n\n\"I know that, my Qar Qarth.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"I am told that last night the Chin telegraph operators in the city received your message. I know that it was correctly relayed through Nippon, for I was there and received it, making sure it was passed on.\"\n\nJurak nodded, sensing that Bokara was also being careful to wash his hands of this mistake.\n\n\"It is apparent the cattle operators did not give the messages to Ugark but did spread the word among their own kind. Thus the riot which actually started before the Yankees even landed here.\"\n\nJurak nodded. Again it shows our weakness, he thought. Our very messages carried by our enemies. He should have realized that given what his message to Ugark contained, of course the cattle operators would hide it and use it against him. And the way Bokara said the word rioted carried with it a certain disbelief, that the Chin slaves, dumber than the dumbest beast, were incapable of such rebellion.\n\n\"My train arrived here just before dusk. I heard Ugark was already dead and that Tamuka had seized command.\"\n\n\"The Merki?\"\n\n\"Yes, my Qar Qarth.\"\n\n\"How, damn it? I wanted him detained.\"\n\n\"Sire. He wears the crest of a Qar Qarth and said that you had given him authority.\"\n\n\"Where is he now?\"\n\n\"I don't know, my Qar Qarth. Reports are he is west of the city, fighting, rallying the warriors that survived. They say he fought well.\"\n\nJurak caught the note of admiration in Bokara's voice. Was this also a subtle way of conveying his disagreement. Far too many of his own Horde actually admired Tamuka's fanatical manner and hatred of the cattle.\n\n\"Then let him fight there for the night,\" Jurak finally announced, deciding that dealing with Tamuka could wait.\n\n\"I arrived here just as the cattle started to swarm out of the burning city. It was like waves upon a great ocean, my Qar Qarth, no one could stop them, driven in panic as they were by the flames behind them. I abandoned my attempt to try and link up with those rallying to Tamuka, thinking it best to pull back, form my umens here, to the north of the city, and wait till dawn to move in strength.\"\n\nJurak nodded in agreement.\n\n\"The second umen?\"\n\n\"Already forming as well. We'll have twenty thousand warriors well armed, with artillery support and half a dozen land ironclads I managed to get out of one of the factories before it was taken.\"\n\n\"Very good.\"\n\n\"My lord.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"The encampments of the clans of the black horses and of the gray-tailed horses. Our people are in the summer encampments to the south in the hills.\"\n\nJurak did not quite grasp for a moment what he was driving at.\n\n\"The cattle, my Qar Qarth. They are between us and a hundred thousand yurts of my own clan. The cubs of my own young, all that is left of my blood, are but a day's ride south of here.\"\n\nHe caught the edge of fear in the old warrior's voice. \"They are armed,\" Jurak replied, trying to reassure. \"Only with bows, my lord. Many of the Yankees and the cattle they've freed now have guns.\"\n\n\"We defeat the Yankees tomorrow morning, then that fear will be put to rest.\"\n\n\"Yes, my Qarth.\"\n\n\"I'm exhausted; I need some food and a place to rest.\"\n\n\"This way, my Qarth.\" Bokara started to lead him toward the train.\n\nHe stopped for a moment and saw a dark form lying on the ground, then another and another. Ten of them in all. Other warriors stood in silence. It was the commander of ten and his warriors, all of them dead, having performed the ackba, the ritual of forming a circle and simultaneously slitting the throat of the comrade to their right in atonement for a failure by the unit.\n\nHe wanted to denounce such madness; it had been a mistake, but ritual had to be obeyed. He said nothing, the ten were fallen, it would not be seemly for him to comment upon those who should be beneath his notice. His gaze swept the circle, warriors carrying rifles, yet still wearing the horned and human-skull-adorned ceremonial war helmets of old, the train venting steam while Chin slaves, moving furtively so as not to draw notice, tended to it, feeding wood into the firebox, while another was oiling the driveshaft. What acts of destruction might they be secretly planning at that very moment, he wondered.\n\nAhead the city still burned, silhouetting the spreading encampment of his army, fieldpieces lined up next to felt-and-hide yurts, a dozen warriors gathered round a fire, roasting what appeared to be the legs and arms of a human while another casually cracked open the severed skull to scoop out the brains.\n\nTo make them modern, he now realized with grim certainty, was impossible; one could not expect them, in the span of a few short years, to leap generations. Somehow the humans were more adaptable, or was it simply more desperate. Did his own people truly realize just how desperate they were at this moment?\n\nHe felt a twinge of fear. No, not now, I can't lose my nerve now though the dark foreboding is ready to consume me. Victory first, then let the rest fall where it may." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Sitting atop his ironclad, Vincent Hawthorne raised his field glasses, scanning the horizon to the east, which was silhouetted by the dawning light.\n\n\"See them?\" Gregory asked. \"I count at least twenty-five plumes. They must have brought them up by rail during the night. And there, see it, four, make that five flyers are up as well.\"\n\nVincent said nothing, slowly sweeping the line of the horizon. Gregory's eyes were undoubtedly far better, and he was trained for this through a year's hard experience.\n\n\"Fine then. They're going to make a fight of it,\" Vincent announced, lowering his glasses.\n\nA sharp rattle of rifle fire, sounding sharp and clear in the early-morning air, ignited. Directly ahead a line of cavalry skirmishers was drawing back from the opposite ridge. Ever since the men had dug into camp just after sundown, the ridge had been a source of contention throughout the night. If the bastards were allowed to deploy artillery up there, they could fire right down into the fortified camp of 3rd Corps.\n\nStanding up, he slowly turned. The dawning light was starting to reveal the encircling host. It was hard to tell, but he sensed that more Bantag had come up during the night. The odds were running steep, at least six to one, perhaps even seven to one, the advantage held by having thirty-eight ironclads offset by the arrival of the enemy machines.\n\nThis day would be the day, then, and for all he knew, in the greater world beyond, the war might already be over. There was no word from Hans, not a single flyer had come back from Xi'an with a report. He was beginning to suspect that it would prove to be a very bad day.\n\n\"Should we move up to meet them?\" Gregory asked.\n\nVincent shook his head.\n\n\"Get the men digging in. We've got fresh water here.\" He nodded to the oasis-like spring that was in the center of the camp. \"Even if the water is somewhat bitter, they can't block it off. We dig in and let them come at us. As for our ironclads, we move up onto the ridge east of here to keep their artillery back. That's where we'll meet their ironclads coming in.\"\n\n\"They could wait us out, you know. We're down to five days' rations.\"\n\n\"They don't know that. No, I think their pride is hurt, us getting this far through territory they felt was theirs. No, once those ironclads come up the fight will be on.\"\n\n\"Wonder if this is all futile anyhow.\" Gregory sighed.\n\nVincent looked over at him.\n\n\"Sorry, but word is getting around with the boys. Somehow rumors are floating about a coup back in Suzdal, that the war might already be over, and we've surrendered, that Hans and even Andrew are dead.\"\n\n\"And what do you think?\"\n\n\"If we surrendered, how long do you think those hairy bastards would let someone like you or me live. We know too much.\"\n\nHe laughed, shook his head, and slapped the ironclad they were sitting on.\n\n\"We're all doomed to die anyhow; if given the choice, I want to go down fighting in one of these. I was nothing before you Yankees came. You trained me, gave me a chance to command, gave me a machine I could master and even learn to love. That's a pretty good life, I think, and something worth dying for today.\"\n\n\"I wish we had another corps though,\" Vincent whispered.\n\n\"Air cover, that's what I want. What the hell do you think the Hornets were doing last night?\"\n\nVincent shook his head. At least twenty machines had flown directly overhead in the middle of the night. One of them had circled several times and then pressed on. He had hoped that someone would have found a dropped message streamer, but so far nothing. Perhaps they were attempting a moonlit strike on the enemy ships off-loading the ironclads. If that was their mission, the smoke just over the next hill was indicator enough that the mad scheme had been a failure.\n\n\"Anyhow, the fewer men, the greater share of honor,\" Gregory continued with a smile, and the two chuckled softly.\n\n\"Well, I guess we're the bait. We wanted a stand-up fight, and we're going to get one. Let's make the most of it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "\"Hans.\"\n\nThe voice was gentle but insistent, waking him from a soft floating dream. It was Maine. Funny, he had actually spent very little time there, but even after all these years it still haunted his memory and dreams. Pulled from the Regulars, he'd been sent to Augusta to help form up a volunteer regiment, 1030-odd farm boys, lumbermen, clerks, students, fishermen, boat builders, craftsmen, railroad men, factory hands, and a lone history professor who would become the 35th Maine. He'd arrived early in July. By the end of August they were already heading south to join the Army of the Potomac in Maryland. Less than two months, and yet somehow it had made its stamp upon his heart. He remembered the day he and a nervous and still-young lieutenant hiked their company from the parade field below the Capitol to the village of Belgrade. The lieutenant allowed the boys to strip down for a swim in Snow Pond while the two sat on a grass-covered hill and first questions were asked. \"What's the war like \u2026 how good are the Rebs\" and the startling admission \u2026 \"I hope I don't fail these boys.\"\n\nHe had grown, sick of officers who only seemed concerned with rank, privilege, clawing to promotion and this shy volunteer, voice near breaking, wondering aloud if he would \"fail his boys.\"\n\nHe'd been dreaming of that, but it was different. His own wife, Tamira, their baby Andrew, and with them Andrew, Kathleen, and their children. It was like a dream of heaven. No fear, a soft lazy summer day in Maine where, though the sun was warm in July, there was always a cool breeze stirring off the lake.\n\nEven in the dream he wondered if he was wandering in Andrew's dream realm, for the colonel had told him of his feverish morphine-twisted visions of death, of lingering by a lakeshore with all the dead who had gone before.\n\nNo. This was different, and he wondered if it was a foreshadowing, a dream of heaven.\n\n\"Hans.\"\n\nIt was Ketswana, hand lightly on the shoulder, shaking insistently.\n\nHans opened his eyes and saw the dark features, the shaved head, eyes that were so transparent, like windows into the soul, and the look of concern.\n\nHans sat up, disoriented. He had sat down on the woodpile, the city was burning, the powder works had blown.\n\nHe sat up, feeling light-headed, unsure of where he was. The air was heavy with the smell of burned wood, rubbish, and the ever-present clinging smell of the camps. He looked around. He was off the train, inside a brick building, roof burned off and collapsed. There was a chill; it was all so familiar in a distorted way, the foundry where he had once slaved.\n\nEverything was a mad scurry of confusion, men using stoking rods were cutting into the brick wall, chiseling out firing ports through the heavy wall. He was near the main doorway, dead Bantag from storming the building were dragged to one side and piled up, and had been half-con-sumed in the fire.\n\nHe stood up. \"How did I get here?\"\n\n\"You don't remember?\"\n\nHans shook his head.\n\nKetswana looked at him closely.\n\n\"You all right?\"\n\n\"Sure. Now tell me what's going on.\"\n\nKetswana motioned for him to follow as he climbed up a ramp that had once been used by labor crews pushing wheelbarrows of crushed ore, coke, and flux up to the tops of the furnaces. Most of the heavy-beamed walkway had survived the fire but was badly charred.\n\nThe walkway rimmed the inside of the factory walls just below the roofline and men and women were working feverishly, clearing away rubble from the collapsed roof, and to his amazement a couple of dozen were slowly dragging a Bantag light fieldpiece, a breechloader, to the northeast corner.\n\n\"Where the hell did you get that thing?\"\n\n\"At the cannon works. A dozen of them brand-spanking-new. We even found some shells. I got one posted down by the gate, the rest of the guns are in the other compounds.\" A couple of Chin, a single rifle between them, looked up as they passed, one of them holding up a half-charred piece of flesh and, grinning, nodded his thanks. Directly below, on the floor of the factory compound, Hans could see the burned remains of the Bantag he had shot yesterday, baked into the frozen pool of iron.\n\nKetswana, knowing what he was thinking, shook his head and laughed.\n\n\"I've had crews working all night. We found a herd of horses. I ordered them slaughtered and, using the wreckage of a barracks compound, we roasted tons of the stuff.\"\n\nHe grimaced.\n\n\"Well, most of it was damn near raw, but I remember a time when you and I wouldn't have turned down raw meat, as long as we knew what it was. That was the lure, word spread, and we must of had them coming in by the tens of thousands. Anyone who could do anything we organized off with their compound leaders, village elders, even some of their princes.\n\n\"We fed them and made it clear, if they ran off, everyone would be slaughtered come dawn. Hans, they all know that. Did you hear who's here?\"\n\n\"No, who?\"\n\n\"Tamuka.\"\n\nHans said nothing.\n\n\"Word is he's the one that fired the city. They went crazy yesterday, started murdering everyone, as word spread that we had taken Xi'an and were coming this way.\"\n\nHans nodded, but said nothing. There was no hope of trying to turn these people into a trained cadre, that'd take weeks, months, and months of simply feeding them right as well. Though it was hard to believe he felt they actually looked worse than what he had experienced a year ago. The simple knowledge of what was coming that day would give them the courage to go down in a final mad frenzy.\n\n\"Hans, they were organizing for this day, did you know that?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You think we were the only ones?\" Ketswana chuckled, as he reached out and moved Hans aside as a work crew, carrying a crate of ammunition for Bantag rifles, slowly moved past, pausing by the pair consuming their meal so that they could grab several dozen cartridges before moving on.\n\n\"Hans, they had a whole network put together. Word of our breakout a year ago spread from one end of the Chin realm to the other. They say even the people up in the Nippon lands knew about it. The 'wind words' are that rioting is erupting in Nippon as well. The Bantag couldn't stamp it out. Hans, you're something of a god around here.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Legends that we would return, that we wouldn't let them be massacred. They're right, you know.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He sadly gazed at the skeletal crew laboring to roll the fieldpiece into position so that it wouldn't recoil right off the platform the first time it was fired.\n\n\"So they had a network, every compound linked together by the railroad crews and track laborers. Telegraphers kept the leaders informed of everything the Bantag did. With rumors that the Republic had surrendered sweeping the city, they were actually going to try and stage a mass rebellion even before we flew in to Xi'an.\"\n\n\"Madness.\"\n\n\"Well, what else could they do? Even if they traded lives a hundred to one, it would have stirred things up at the end. They knew just as well as we did that once the war was over they'd all be slaughtered. Some were talking about moving on the encampment areas south of here.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The old ones, their women and children.\"\n\nHe said nothing, the dark thought repulsive.\n\n\"They say there's a hundred thousand yurts less than thirty miles from here.\"\n\nThe way Ketswana spoke chilled Hans, and he shook his head, silencing him.\n\nKetswana motioned Hans forward as the last of the ammunition carriers hauling up shells for the fieldpiece passed. Gaining the corner of the foundry building, Hans stepped up onto a raised observation platform and sucked in his breath.\n\nThe enemy host was coming. They were still several miles off, but in the cool morning air they stood out sharply. These were not mounted archers, aging guards, cruel slave drivers who could whip a terrified Chin to death but might step back from one armed with a stoking rod or pick. They were coming on slowly, deliberately, open skirmish line to the fore. Somehow Ketswana still had a pair of field glasses, and Hans took them, fumbling with the focus. One of the twin barrels had been knocked out of kilter, so he closed one eye.\n\nThese were good troops, Hans could see that, black-uniformed, rifles held at the ready. A scattering of Chin were drawing back, refugees who had wandered out into the fields northwest of the burning city. The Bantag were not even bothering to waste a shot on such prey. If their steady advance overtook one, the victim was simply bayoneted and left. There was no looting, tearing apart of bodies, just a cold dispatching and then continuing on.\n\nBehind the double rank of skirmishers he could see the main body of troops, advancing in open order of columns, well spread out, half a dozen paces between warriors so that each regiment of a thousand occupied a front a half mile across and a hundred yards deep. Gatlings had finished the days of shoulder-to-shoulder ranks, and Jurak knew that, as he seemed to know far too many things.\n\nSweeping the advancing columns he could see their left flank, his right, reaching all the way to the walls of the still-burning city, while their right flank overlapped his left by at least a mile or more. Several thousand Bantag were mounted, ranging farther out into the open steppes. These troops were not black-uniformed, many wearing older style jerkits of brown leather. He caught a glimpse of a standard adorned with human skulls.\n\nIt was a Merki standard.\n\nHe lowered the field glasses, looking over at Ketswana, who nodded.\n\n\"The bastard is here, Hans. During the night he pulled to the west, organizing the survivors of yesterday's fight.\"\n\nHans raised the glasses again, but the standard had disappeared in a swirling cloud of dust.\n\nThere was nothing to anchor his own left flank on; it simply ended at this factory compound. It was obvious that within minutes after the start of the fight the mounted Bantag would be around his left and into the rear.\n\nMoving with the advancing host he picked out half a dozen batteries of fieldpieces, and several dozen wagons, which were undoubtedly carrying mortars. Except for a few pathetic guns such as the one mounted next to where he stood, they had nothing to counter that. Worse yet, though, in the middle of the advancing line half a dozen land ironclads were approaching as well, while overhead several Bantag aerosteamers were climbing, passing over the infantry and coming straight for him.\n\nAs for his own aerosteamers, there was nothing left. The wreckage of his air fleet cluttered the field, bits of wicker framing, scorched canvas, and dark lumps of what had once been engines all that was left of the air corps of the Republic. He spared a quick thought for Jack, wondering if any of them had even made it back to Xi'an.\n\nTurning his field glasses away, he scanned the position Ketswana, his few veterans, and the Chin had attempted to prepare during the night, and he struggled not to weep. The rail line, cutting straight as an arrow from west to east, heading toward the burning city, was the rally point. During the night track had been torn up, crossties and ballast piled up to form a rough palisades.\n\nThe dozen compounds that were strung along the track were the strong points; unfortunately, most of them had been severely damaged in the fighting. The powder works, several miles to his right, was still smoldering.\n\nWhat made his heart freeze, though, was the humanity huddled and waiting. Along the palisades he could see the occasional glint of a rifle barrel or someone holding a precious revolver, but most were armed with nothing more than spears, clubs, pickaxes, iron poles, a few knives, or rocks. And there were hundreds of thousands of them.\n\nTerrified children wailed, old men and women squatted on the ground, huddled in fear, their voices commingling into a mournful wail of forlorn terror. Looking to the south, he saw tens of thousands who, with the coming of dawn, were already quitting the fight, heading out across the open fields, moving through what had once been prosperous villages and hamlets but had long ago been abandoned as the Bantag drew off the populace for labor and for the pits. They were heading God knew where, for there was no place to hide, and once the mounted riders were into the rear they would be hunted down like frightened rabbits.\n\nHe knew with a sick heart that his coming had triggered the final apocalypse. After what had happened the day before, Jurak would not suffer a single person to live. They had killed Bantag, they had destroyed the factories that were the sole remaining reason for their existence. They would all have to die.\n\nOne of the Bantag aerosteamers lazily passed overhead, the pilot staying high enough to keep out of range of rifle fire. He banked over, making several tight turns. Hans looked back over the wall and saw a sea of upturned faces, hands pointing heavenward.\n\nNow it was not the ships of the Yankees, coming like gods from the heavens, bringing a dream of freedom. It was the dreaded Horde, and as if to add emphasis, the bottom side of the machine was painted with the human-skull standard and there were cries of fear. Yet more Chin started to break away. There was a scattering of rifle shots, a few of his men posted to the rear, holding their weapons overhead, firing not at the ship but to scare the refugees back into the line. Some turned about, but he knew that once the real fighting started, there would most likely be a panic.\n\nThe machine turned one more time, nosed over, a puff of smoke ignited. A second later there was the almost lazy pop, pop, pop, of the slowfiring Bantag machine gun. Between his compound and the next one up the line the rounds hit, half a dozen Chin falling, panic beginning to break out. The machine finally leveled out and flew on toward the city.\n\nHans looked over at Ketswana.\n\n\"My God, this will be a massacre,\" Hans whispered.\n\nKetswana looked at him, eyes narrowed.\n\n\"If they realize they're all going to die anyhow, they'll fight. They have to.\"\n\n\"Fight? With what.\"\n\n\"Their bare hands if need be.\"\n\n\"Against rifles and artillery.\"\n\n\"Hans, they only have so many bullets, so many shells. They can kill a hundred thousand and still we'll outnumber them.\"\n\n\"My God, what have we become to talk like this?\" Hans sighed.\n\n\"What they have made us become in order to survive.\"\n\nA whispering flutter interrupted them. Hans crouched instinctively as the mortar round arced over head, crashed down in the middle of the foundry compound, and detonated, the explosion instantly followed by screams of pain.\n\nLooking back over the wall he saw where several dozen mortars had been set up on a low rise, a thousand yards ahead. The advancing skirmishers were already past that position, still relentlessly advancing.\n\nPuffs of smoke ignited all along the low ridge.\n\n\"Here it comes,\" Hans announced, his voice filled with resignation.\n\nSeconds later the factory compound was blanketed with explosions.\n\nJurak, sitting uneasily astride his mount, said nothing to the subordinates around him. He could sense their blood-lust. This was no longer war; it was an act of extermination. The advance to the jump-off point had carried them across fields where the previous day pathetic bands of guards, fleeing the rioting, had been swept up and torn apart by the Chin mob. It had stirred him as well, and that thought troubled him. He had almost grown immune to the sight of the humans being slaughtered, devoured, but it was now evident that more than one of the Bantag dead had been mutilated after death, or, perhaps, while still alive. He wondered if the cattle had sunk to eating Bantag flesh, and the thought chilled him. Looking down at three aging guards who were sprawled in a ditch, he saw that the arms had been hacked off one, the limbs missing, and the sight of it set the hair on his back to bristling.\n\nHe wondered if this was indeed what the humans felt at the sight of the slaughter pits. Did it create that same visceral fear? Was that not as well, then, the reason for their fanatical resistance? He suddenly remembered how during the War of the False Pretender he had learned that the two most influential factors in a soldier's morale had nothing to do with generals, causes, and leadership. The first one was knowledge of how well you would be tended to if wounded. Second, what would happen if you were taken prisoner. On this world there was no such thing as prisoners, and, therefore, though the humans facing him were a disorganized rabble, still each of them might very well fight with the fury of despair.\n\nHe rode forward to join the mortar batteries deployed on the low ridge, their steady coughing thumps echoing across the battlefield. The factory compound on the left flank of the human line was smothered under a steady hail of exploding shells. Far to his own right he could see mounted units swinging wide, advance elements already across the tracks moving to get into the rear.\n\nHe had sent a courier over ordering them to hold and stand in place. The humans had to believe there was an escape route so that the panic might set in. If their line was flanked too soon, it might hem them in and cause further resistance.\n\nThere was a puff of smoke from atop the compound wall and seconds later a hissing roar as an artillery shell streaked past, the round startling him and causing his mount to rear.\n\n\"Disgusting way to die, Jurak.\"\n\nHe looked over his shoulder and saw Tamuka behind him, trailed by his small retinue.\n\nJurak said nothing. Tamuka reined in beside him, slumping forward, hand resting on the pommel of his mount.\n\nHe knew the Merki was watching, judging, figuring he could do better. Though enraged at him, now was not the time to express it.\n\n\"That is Hans over there,\" Tamuka finally announced.\n\n\"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"I can sense it. It would be like him to come back. The greatest mistake I made was turning him over to your Ha'ark. I should have kept him for my own pleasures. I could have made of him a moon feast that would have lasted for days.\"\n\n\"No. Your greatest folly was in losing as you did,\" Jurak snapped.\n\nTamuka turned, eyes filled with cold fury.\n\n\"Repeat that.\"\n\n\"You heard it right the first time. If you had done your job correctly as Qar Qarth, you would still have your Horde.\"\n\n\"I weakened them for you.\"\n\nAnother round screamed past, but they both ignored it. \"Weakened them? You aroused them. You murdered the rightful Qar Qarth and seized power for yourself and used the war as an excuse. You let your hate blind you. Now it is my people who must pay for this, perhaps all those of our race.\"\n\nTamuka reached to his side, scimitar flashing out. The gesture was met with the clicks of half a dozen rifles being raised, cocked, and pointed straight at him by Jurak's personal guards.\n\n\"You are not of this world,\" Tamuka hissed.\n\n\"Exactly! That is why I see more clearly than you. They\"\u2014and he pointed to the compound disappearing under the rain of artillery fire\u2014\"they are not of this world either. They brought change. Now I must, too. The old ways are dead forever, Tamuka. Even if we win this day, we lose. Can I rebuild all this in a month, even a year?\n\n\"No. I must slaughter every human here for their own folly of believing in freedom. With luck, back at the front their political will shall collapse and we can attack, finishing it. But if so, I fear this is nothing more than a pyre for both our races.\"\n\nEven as he spoke the advancing phalanx of infantry started to pass, breaking formation to maneuver around the wagons and caissons of the mortar batteries.\n\nThe warriors were well-trained veterans, moving with casual ease, rifles poised, bayonet-tipped, but most still carried their traditional scimitars strapped to their hips. When the real killing started that would be the weapon of choice. They seemed lighthearted, eager for the fray, unlike the weary, exhausted warriors he had watched being shoved into the inferno at Roum. This was sport to them, almost like the field exercises Ha'ark would hold when a Chin town would be singled out and stormed just to give the warriors a taste of modern combat.\n\nThe skirmishers far ahead were already engaged, firing, advancing slowly. Several of them were down, a spattering of fire opening from the Chin position. To his left the traditional. signalers of the hordes, the giant nargas trumpets and kettledrums were coming up, the deep rumble of the horns and heartbeat thump of the drums setting his hair on end.\n\nHe looked back over at Tamuka.\n\n\"If you are so eager for the kill, why not ride forward and join in?\" Jurak asked.\n\nTamuka looked at him angrily.\n\n\"And you shall stay here?\"\n\n\"I am the Qar Qarth. This is a modern battle.\"\n\nTamuka snarled. Nodding to his renegade followers, he viciously spurred his mount and galloped off.\n\nJurak, glad to be rid of his presence, dismounted, tossing the reins of his horse to one of his guards. The day was already hot, made worse by the grass fires ignited by bursting shells, the pall of smoke hanging over the entire front.\n\nAfter I win here, then what? he wondered.\n\nThe advancing column slowed, reaching the skirmish lines forward. Tearing volleys started to ripple up and down the length of the front as twenty thousand warriors, the elite of two umens, began to fire into the hundreds of thousands of Chin huddled behind the railroad embankment. The day was turning into a slaughter." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "\"You've got your mission,\" Vincent shouted. \"I want their ironclads kept back from this square. If they can bring us under fire, they'll break us up.\"\n\nGregory, sitting atop his machine, grinned and nodded.\n\nSaluting, he raised a clenched fist, waved it over his head, and pointed due east, toward the advancing column of Bantag ironclads.\n\nSlipping down inside the turret, he buttoned the hatch shut, machines lined up to either side of him already lurching forward. Vincent, trying to ignore the pain, mounted a horse held by an orderly and swung it around, galloped back down the sloping hill and into the fortified camp of 3rd Corps.\n\nThe battle was about to explode. After years of fighting the hordes he could sense the building tension. They were the bait, the focal point to divert Jurak. And now the bill was coming due.\n\nThe Horde completely encircled their position, but it was easy enough to see that most of their strength, at least four umens, were poised to the north, though there were more than enough of them ringing the other three sides of the square to keep his forces pinned down. The ironclads held the rise to the east, but he still had to keep troops along that side, in case their infantry or mounted units swarmed in behind Gregory and attacked.\n\nWhen it finally hit there were no preliminaries, no softening-up bombardment. They knew that if the ironclad battle should go against them, any hope of exacting vengeance was lost. Even if they did win the ironclad fight, the artillery well dug in at the four comers of the square, and in reserve at the center, would chew the precious machines apart. They were going to try it in one sharp push.\n\nFrom a mile out he saw them emerging out of the cloud of dust kicked up by the tens of thousands of horses. It was a solid wall of Bantag, dismounted, advancing with long-legged strides.\n\nHis heart swelled at the sight of them. It was like the old days once again, and to his own amazement he felt a surge of emotion. This is the way they looked before Suzdal, on the Potomac Front, and at Hispania. From all that the older veterans told him, it was the same at Cold Harbor, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and Antietam. A full frontal assault, thrown in regardless of loss.\n\nA murmur swept through the men along the northern flank of the square. Some of them stood up, ignoring the bursting of mortar shells raining down. A ripple of excitement swept up and down the line. Young captains scurried back and forth, carrying teams hurried back to supply wagons, bringing up extra boxes of ammunition. Sergeants paced behind the firing line, a division commander, swept up by the moment, jumped his horse over the sod earthwork embankment and galloped down his line, waving his hat, men breaking into cheers at his display of foolish bravado.\n\n\"Damn if it isn't like Pickett's Charge!\"\n\nIt was Stan, reining up beside him, his voice shrill with excitement.\n\nVincent said nothing, raising his field glasses, studying the enemy advance. Red umen standards were at the fore, a few of their commanders mounted. At regular intervals down the line human-skull totems for regiments of a thousand'were held aloft, surrounded by towering bulky warriors armed with rifles. The rest carried the powerful war bows of two hundred pounds pull, arrows already notched.\n\nBatteries at the northeastern and northwestern flanks opened up on the advancing enemy, case shot burst over the lines, but that was merely an annoyance. A standard of a thousand went down, caught by a direct burst, then came up again. The range was down to less than a thousand yards, then nine hundred, then eight hundred.\n\nSergeants along his own lines were shouting orders, telling the men to lever their sights up to full elevation. There was a scattering of shots, the sniper company armed with Whitworths and the new long-barreled Sharps heavy rifles. Some of the men armed with lighter guns opened and were soundly cursed by their officers.\n\nGood. Wait until four hundred yards. It was a still morning, the smoke would cling, killing visibility. Better to wait.\n\nThe range was at six hundred, and then they stopped.\n\nThere was an eerie moment of silence, and then he heard the chanting, the weird spine-chilling cries. Harsh, guttural words. He had seen it before, Horde riders who knew they were going to their deaths, and before the charge made this final gesture to their enemies and their gods \u2026 the chanting of the names of their clans, their ancestors, and their own names and battle honors.\n\nThe strange rumbling cries rolled across the steppes, joined by the nargas and war drums, a thunderous roar. Bantag stamped their feet to the rhythm of the chant, the ground shaking. The effect was hypnotic, the chant rising to a crescendo, dropping off, rising even higher.\n\nAgain men were standing up, watching, awestruck. For a brief moment all hatred died in Vincent's heart. There was almost an admiration for such insane raw courage. Individual Bantag began to step out of the line, unsheathing scimitars, many of them drawing the razor-sharp blades across their own forearms, then holding the blood-soaked steel up again, their individual chants drowned out by the thunderous roar.\n\nAlong his own line he could hear the men mustering a response, the surreal sound of the \"Battle Hymn of the Republic\" sung in Rus. All this was counterpointed by the continual crump of mortar shells exploding, artillery thundering out case shot, and then, off to his right, a mile to the east of the square, the ever-increasing roar of the ironclad battle.\n\nHe looked heavenward. The air machines were up, nearly twenty of them. They were holding back, flying high, waiting most likely for the square to break apart before swooping in. He caught a glimpse of just two Hornets dropping like stooping falcons, tearing into the enemy machines. He wondered where the hell the rest of the Hornets were.\n\nThe roaring chant dropped down to a deep growling bass, and then in a matter of seconds swirled up to a high shrieking crescendo \u2026 \"Bantag hus!, Bantag hus! Bantag hus!\"\n\nUmen standards held aloft twirled about in tight circles. Mounted commanders rode out ahead of the line, urging their horses into a slow canter, drawing scimitars. As if controlled by a single hand twenty thousand bows were slung over the shoulder, then twenty thousand scimitars were drawn and held heavenward, catching the morning sun. A collective gasp went through his lines.\n\n\"My God, they're going to charge straight in!\" Stan cried.\n\nVincent turned to a courier.\n\n\"I want the reserve brigade in the center deployed out now!\" Vincent shouted.\n\nThe boy saluted and galloped off. Vincent grabbed another messenger and sent him to the commander on the east flank of the square, telling him to get ready to shift half his men to the north and sent yet another galloping with the same order to the west side.\n\nEven as the three couriers raced off, the red banners fluttered down, pointing straight at the center of his line. A mad, howling roar erupted. There was no stepping off at a slow steady march, no subtle maneuvering.\n\nWith a mad passionate scream twenty thousand Bantag flung themselves forward at the run, their giant strides consuming the distance between the opposing lines at a frightening pace.\n\n\"At four hundred yards volley fire present!\" the cry echoed along his own line.\n\nMen hunkered down behind the sod breastworks, hammers clicking back, fingers curling around triggers.\n\nThe charge swept across the first hundred yards in less than twenty seconds, Vincent estimated, and they were still picking up speed, the bravest and fleetest moving to the fore. Mounted commanders, carried away by the mad frenzy, were far ahead, some nearly half the distance to the line.\n\n\"Glorious!\" Stan cried.\n\nStartled, Vincent looked over at his old comrade, but something was stirring in him as well. He remembered many a night so long ago back on Earth, hearing the old veterans speak with awe, describing the rebel charges sweeping toward Seminary Ridge and across the Cornfield at Antietam. My God, this is what it must have looked like, sheer insane courage unleashed in a wild, all-consuming explosion.\n\n\"Take aim.\" The cry echoed up and down the line from a hundred sergeants and officers. \"Aim low, boys, aim low!\"\n\nVincent held his breath.\n\n\"Fire!\"\n\nThe volley ignited in the center of the line and within a couple of seconds swept down the flanks.\n\nA billowing white cloud exploded, temporarily blinding Vincent. There was the collective metallic ring of thousands of breeches levering open, shell casings ejecting, fresh rounds sliding in, breeches slamming shut, officers and sergeants roaring to lever sights down to three hundred yards.\n\nVincent felt a swelling of pride. These were veterans. There was no panic, just a steady professional pace.\n\nThose who were quickest waited, bracing their barrels on the embankment.\n\n\"Take aim!\"\n\nIndividual companies and regiments fired, sheets of flame swirling out. Already the dry grass in front of the works was igniting, puffs of thick white flames clinging to the ground. In the brief instant before the smoke from the second volley shut down all vision forward he saw the deadly effect of the volley, scores of Bantag going down, yet it barely stilled the pace of the mad charge, as the wave leapt over the fallen and pressed in.\n\nA jarring concussion swept the square, a caisson exploding in the center of the position, the mortar round detonating several hundred pounds of shot and shell, sending a fireball a hundred feet into the air.\n\nHe caught a glimpse of the battery anchoring the corner to his right, the crew feverishly cranking 'the elevation screw, even as their companions tore breeches open, swabbed out bores, and slammed in loads of canister.\n\n\"Independent fire at will!\"\n\nThe command echoed above the cacophonous thunder, men cheering as they were released from the constraints of waiting and within seconds the measured heavy volleys were replaced by a continual rattle.\n\nThere was just enough of a breeze that the curtains of smoke lifted so that the shadowy wall of the advancing charge was visible. They were down to less than two hundred yards and still coming at a terrifying pace.\n\nThey were going to come straight in.\n\nStan broke away from Vincent, spurring his mount forward, drawing his revolver.\n\nVincent felt pulled in as well.\n\nNo, here, stay here. He looked to his left, his guidon bearer was stock-still, sitting tall in the saddle, but the boy's jaw was actually hanging open in shocked amazement.\n\nSuddenly from out of the smoke a lone rider emerged, blood streaming from half a dozen wounds, his face a pulp, dead but still charging, the horse in its mad frenzy actually leaping the earthen stockade before going down under a hail of bullets. Another rider shot out of the smoke, this one still alive. With his hands off the reins, both arms extended wide, a scimitar in his right hand, his horse leapt over the barricade. The rider's wild shriek of battle frenzy sounded above the roar of battle. He seemed to hang in midair, men recoiling back as if he was a mad god.\n\nThe horse touched down, the rider coming straight for Vincent. He drew his own revolver, started to raise it, and then a volley riddled the berserker. He tumbled from his horse, sprawled faceup on the ground, the horse going down beside him.\n\nMagnificent courage, Vincent thought.\n\nThen he noticed it, a dark cloud rising up from beyond the pall of smoke. An arrow volley. It was the old Horde tactic of bringing up mounted fire support behind a charging line. In the smoke and confusion forward he could barely see them, towering high above the line that was still charging forward and now less than a hundred yards away.\n\nFew of the men actually saw, so intent were they on pouring in the fire. Thousands of arrows arced down, so that in an instant it looked as if thousands of young feathered saplings had sprouted from the earth. The volley was short, but enough arrows slammed into the lines to cause a startled cry to go up as men fell, clutching pierced arms, legs, or simply collapsed.\n\nVincent turned to yet another messenger, shouting for him to find the commander for the four batteries of mortars and tell him to set the range at two hundred yards and pour it on.\n\nAnother volley rose up and then another, this one longer. The bastards were sweeping high, sending the deadly shafts into the center of the square. At nearly the same instant the charge emerged out of the billowing smoke, a solid wall of Bantag, running straight in.\n\nWild cries went up, commanders urging their men to stand. Directly in front of Vincent, a regimental commander holding the flag of the 15th Suzdal and showing remarkable poise, had firm control of his unit, having ordered his men to cease fire and wait. With the wall of Bantag less than thirty yards away the command was given to present and take aim.\n\nThe Bantag charge barely hesitated. At ten yards the volley of four hundred rifles erupted. It struck with such force that the front ranks of the Bantag seemed to have run into a wall, collapsing, thrashing, some picked up bodily and flung backwards into those behind them.\n\nHe could actually hear the volley hit, bullets smacking into bodies, swords, accoutrements, helmets, bows \u2026 equipment, parts of bodies, and blood actually showered up and backwards. As one the regiment slammed open breeches, slapping cartridges in. A few Bantag struggled through the confusion and flung themselves up and over the battlement, swords flashing. Vincent saw a human head tumbling into the air. Another soldier was lifted into the air, scimitar driven through his body to the hilt, the Bantag shrieking in triumph. A lieutenant leapt forward, driving his own blade up into the throat of the warrior.\n\nMore Bantag surged forward, the next volley cutting them down at ten paces. The flanks of the 15th started to cave in as the regiments to either side were pushed back from the embankment, curving inward like a drawn bow. A dark wall of Bantag surged over the top of the battlement, swords flashing. Men still down behind the embankment slashed upward with their bayonets, stabbing their towering opponents in the legs, groin, and stomach. Scimitars rose and fell, blood splashing.\n\nA reserve regiment to Vincent's left stormed forward, dozens of men falling as hundreds of arrows soared down from straight overhead.\n\nThe batteries in the corners and dug in at the middle of the line were anchor points, the gunners all having gone over to double canister, each gun discharging a hundred iron balls at waist-high level every twenty seconds.\n\nTo the left of the 15th and the center battery the entire line started to peel back, men stumbling out of the fight, the insane charge pushing in.\n\nVincent caught a glimpse of Stan in the middle of the fray, still mounted, revolver out, firing into the host as reserves from the west flank stormed in, counterattacking. Toward the center of the square, men were upending empty supply wagons to form a barricade while the battery in the center, now unlimbered, wheeled about in preparation to fire, but so thick was the tangled press of Bantag and humans that they didn't dare shoot.\n\nA tearing volley erupted behind Vincent, and, looking over his shoulder, he saw that they were charging against the south side of the square as well, this one a combined mounted and dismounted assault. An orderly to Vincent's right was lifted out of his saddle and collapsed, caught in the back by a rifle ball. Vincent could see puffs of smoke from the south \u2026 so that's where they are committing their rifle-armed troops.\n\nBantag skirmishers by the hundreds were pressing in on the south side, and though his own men had the advantage of earthworks, they advanced relentlessly, falling down into the knee-high grass, popping up to shoot, then disappearing again.\n\nThen the final blow came in. Overhead the first of the Bantag air machines started into a steep dive, the slowfiring machine gun thumping, bullets stitching into the center of the encampment.\n\nIt was now time to unleash his one reserve for this, and the two specially equipped ironclads parked in the center of the square went into action. The canvas tops of the converted machines were pulled back, revealing the open center and the twin Gatling guns positioned to fire straight up. The gunners inside the two machines waited, letting the Bantag machines get well in range, then opened up.\n\nTracer rounds soared heavenward from the center of the beleaguered square. Within seconds both gunners had the range, rounds tearing into the first of the machines, which instantly ignited. The gunners shifted targets to the second machine, then the third and fourth in line.\n\nOne after another Bantag airships exploded, the pilots of the other airships breaking off the attack in sharp, banking turns. One of them banked over so sharply that the machine hung vertical on its side, seemed to hover, then slowly rolled over on its back and went straight in.\n\nWreckage rained down on the square, parts of burning ships, wings, howling engines, causing dozens of casualties, but the sight of the feared Bantag air fleet shattered so completely in a matter of seconds heartened the beleaguered defenders, a ragged cheer erupting from the square.\n\nBut the position was starting to collapse in spite of the victory overhead. The 15th Suzdal was all but surrounded, forming its own small square, men backing up, rear ranks firing, front ranks standing with poised bayonets to impale any who broke through. Hundreds of Bantag were swarming in on Vincent's right, a wild confused melee swirling about not fifty yards away. Arrows by the thousands continued to rain down, now catching as many Bantag as humans, sowing confusion on both sides.\n\nAs for the ironclad battle to the east, it was impossible to see anything because of the confusion and smoke.\n\nVincent heard a shouted warning. It was his guidon bearer, arrow buried in his leg, but still astride his horse, screaming, pointing, with his free hand.\n\nAround the edge of the 15th Suzdal several score of Bantag, led by what he assumed to be a umen commander, who miraculously was still mounted, were coming straight at them.\n\nVincent leveled his revolver and deliberately fired. Still they came on.\n\nHe turned his mount; the charge pressed in. A Bantag, scimitar held high overhead with both hands, charged straight at him. He caught the warrior in the face with his next to last round. Letting go of the blade it tumbled end over head, flashing past Vincent's face. Another Bantag, this one on foot, came in low, aiming to hamstring Vincent's horse. He dropped that one, raised his revolver to fire at the umen commander, and clicked on an empty cylinder.\n\nThe commander, roaring in wild triumph, blood streaming from wounds to the face and chest, slashed viciously, Vincent ducked low, the blade whistling past his ears. Their mounts collided, nearly unhorsing Vincent. He reeled back, throwing his revolver aside, clumsily trying to draw his own sword but barely getting it out in time to parry the next blow, which sent a numbing shock through his arm.\n\nHe caught a glimpse of his guidon bearer, sword plunged through his chest, reeling in the saddle, vainly clutching the guidon as dark eager hands reached up to grab it.\n\nThe umen commander easily recovered from the parry and started a backhanded swipe. Vincent tried to turn, awkwardly raising his numbed arm and blade to block the blow.\n\nA staccato roar ignited, sweeping past Vincent, hot tracers stitching into the commander. There was a moment when they gazed into each other's eyes, the Bantag suddenly looking infinitely old and weary, cheated at the last second of the prize he had so bravely and now so vainly sought. He tumbled over backwards and a loud cry rose up from those around him, a cry of anguish and of fear as one of the two land ironclads that had so completely devastated the air attack now clattered forward, twin Gatlings depressed to fire into the charge.\n\nTracer rounds tore across the flank of the 15th, two, three, four heavy .58 caliber bullets striking each warrior. Within seconds the breakthrough disintegrated and receded over the wall.\n\nThe machine, wheels churning up the thick sod, creaked past Vincent, still firing. He tried to block out the guttural screams of the Bantag wounded as the heavy iron wheels rolled over them, crushing their still-twitching bodies into the ground.\n\nA long burst of fire swept along the battlement, dropping the charge that was still breaking in. A cheer went up from the 15th, and the counterattack was on as men turned and pushed forward with the bayonet. Again it was the old trade-off, the massive size and strength of the Bantag, offset by the smaller but far more nimble humans, who could dodge the heavy blows, rush in, and slash upward with the bayonet.\n\nGradually the embankment was regained, the ground for a hundred yards inside the square paved with the dead, wounded, and dying. As the ironclad gained the embankment it turned its fire outward, slashing into the mounted archers providing fire support, and within seconds created havoc.\n\nBantag were fleeing, stumbling back out of the square; knots of defiant survivors trapped inside grimly traded their lives. Those who were wounded in a final gesture of contempt struggled to cut their own throats rather than suffer the agony of death at the hands of the humans.\n\nVincent, still numbed from the brief sword fight, rode up to the embankment. The attack was breaking apart, broken fragments falling back like a wave shattered by a rock-bound coast.\n\n\"Did you see 'em, did you see 'em!\"\n\nIt was Stan, blood streaming from a saber slash to his left cheek. He was shouting hysterically, aiming his revolver, squeezing the trigger. Its hammer fell on empty cylinders and yet he was still trying to shoot.\n\nRifle fire struck into the mounted units as the last of the dismounted assault fell back. Horses reared up, falling, the volume of arrow fire dwindled, then they reined about, retreating, joined by the surviving infantry.\n\nVincent gazed about in numbed awe. The ground was carpeted black with Bantags. The charge had been an annihilation. Yet as he surveyed his own line he saw that he had received a terrible blow as well. Well over a thousand, maybe two thousand or more of his own men were down, their bodies tangled in with the Bantag along the battlement line and far into the center of the square.\n\nThe center battery had been completely overrun, its entire crew annihilated in hand-to-hand fighting, an infantry officer was already at work, shouting for his men to stack their rifles and clear the guns. Walking wounded were heading back into the center of the square, stretcher-bearers were already at work, and the cries and shrieks from the hospital area could be heard throughout the square.\n\n\"Damn. We beat 'em, we beat 'em,\" Stan cried in English. \"Like Fredericksburg, except it was us behind the wall this time.\"\n\nVincent said nothing, his gaze turning back to the east, where the roar of the ironclad battle rumbled. A machine, one of Gregory's, ignited in a fireball, turret blowing off and rising straight up as the kerosene and ammunition inside blew.\n\nBurning machines, both human and Bantag, littered the next ridge as both sides fought for possession of the high ground. Hundreds of Bantag infantry were filtering into the flanks of the battle outside the square. He saw several Bantag rocket teams maneuvering, running through the grass, trying to get close enough for a kill.\n\n\"We got 'em by the tail and really twisted it,\" Stan gasped.\n\nVincent wearily shook his head. Raising his field glasses, he looked straight ahead. The broken charge was falling back to get out of range, but there were still thousands of them. If they had sent three umens instead of two into the infantry assault, he suspected they most likely would have broken clean through.\n\nLooking to the west and around to the south, he could see signal pennants flying, dust swirling up, mounted warriors by the thousands moving. They could harass from the south, but the steep bluff along that side was too good a position to take by storm. No, they were shifting around.\n\n\"Stan,\" Vincent snapped, \"get your division commanders here now. They're coming back, and we don't have much time.\"\n\nStan, calming at last from his battle frenzy, looked around at the wreckage of his corps and finally nodded toward the west.\n\n\"That way, the ground is still clear.\"\n\n\"We don't have much time.\"\n\nTime. He looked back to the east at the ironclad fight. It was slowly dragging out. The Bantag not closing for the kill, Gregory wisely not going too far in for fear of being overwhelmed by the infantry. If this kept up, the infantry would be annihilated and then the ironclad battle would no longer matter.\n\nHe gazed at the sun, which was now bloodred from the battle smoke. It seemed as if it hung motionless in the morning sky." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Hans looked overhead to the red sun that seemed to hang motionless in the noonday sky.\n\nThe compound below him was a shambles, packed wall to wall with the wounded and terrified refugees. Mortar shells fell inside with terrifying regularity, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The one artillery piece had fallen silent, shells exhausted, the survivors of its crew reduced to prying loose bricks from the wall and hurling them as the Bantag surged outside the wall. All along the railroad embankment the Chin, after hours of insane resistance, were falling back, retreating into the ruins of the factory compounds lining the rail line. In the fields to the south, tens of thousands of refugees were stumbling away, desperately trying to escape. Mounted units of Bantag rode back and forth, cornering and slaying them.\n\nHans knew it was hopeless. The compound could not hold much longer. The only thing that was slowing the Bantag was the sheer number of people they had to slay. Yet they were paying as well. Their first assault, which had come on with such self-assured cockiness, had stormed up over the embankment and then been swarmed under as tens of thousands of terrified Chin, desperate when they realized they were cornered by cavalry closing in from behind, turned and in a spontaneous surge rushed forward, crushing the Bantag by sheer weight of numbers.\n\nThat had given him several thousand more rifles and ammunition, enough that when the second charge came, the single volley at a range of less than a dozen paces so that his inexperienced riflemen couldn't miss, dropped hundreds more.\n\nJurak had then pulled back. Letting firepower, his unrelenting artillery and aimed rifle from several hundred yards out, do the deed. The Chin, defenseless against such an onslaught, had held through midmorning, but now were finally beginning to melt away.\n\nRisking the enemy fire, Hans looked up over the east wall back toward Huan. Rumors had come that tens of thousands of survivors, still huddled in the south end of the burning city, were pouring out, enveloping the flank of the enemy, but it was impossible to see what was occurring there.\n\nNargas sounded, and seconds later there was a ragged cheer. Leaning over the wall he saw the Bantag infantry pulling back.\n\nKetswana, eyes wide with battle frenzy, trailed by his two surviving Zulus, came up to Hans's side and pulled him back down from the exposed position.\n\n\"They're retreating!\" Ketswana cried.\n\nHans, exhausted, absently rubbed his left arm and nodded.\n\n\"You know why?\"\n\n\"Artillery; he's shifting his artillery over here, the same treatment as the rifle works.\"\n\nThe next compound up the line had been swarmed under after the Bantag rolled a dozen guns up to within a hundred yards and blasted a hole through the wall.\n\nHans stood back up and saw the two batteries riding into position out in the middle of the field where the airships had landed. Even as he watched, the first of the guns unlimbered, its crew swinging it about, aiming it straight at him. Other guns fell into position.\n\nThey were so close he could see the gunners opening their caissons, pulling out shot and powder bags. Hans rested his carbine on the battlement wall, took careful aim, and squeezed, dropping what he suspected was the battery commander. It barely slowed the crew.\n\nHe fumbled in his cartridge box. Only one round left.\n\nOne final round, and as he chambered it he knew what that had to be saved for.\n\nThe first gun fired, the shock of the solid bolt hitting the wall beneath his feet nearly knocking him off-balance. The other guns opened, bolt after bolt slamming into the wall beneath them. In less than five minutes the first round cracked clean through the brick barrier, the spent bolt careening into the foundry. The platform they were on swayed, a huge crack in the wall opening up from the ground all the way to the top.\n\n\"Down!\"\n\nHans followed the rush as they abandoned their position, swarming down the ramp. More bolts slammed into the building, the vast room echoing with shrieks of terror as thousands of Chin, with no place to hide, huddled on the ground; the few with weapons clustered behind furnaces, upended cauldrons, piles of coke, slag, and iron ore.\n\n\"They'll charge as soon as the artillery stops firing! So get ready,\" Ketswana roared, trying desperately to be heard. Few paid attention.\n\nKetswana unholstered a revolver, opened the barrel, dropped the empty cylinder, and, reaching into his haversack, pulled out a loaded cylinder and clicked it in. He looked over at Hans.\n\n\"Figured to save the last six rounds.\"\n\n\"Got one for myself,\" Hans said, trying to smile as he patted his carbine.\n\n\"So we have come full circle.\" Ketswana sighed. \"Until you gave me hope I always figured I'd die here.\"\n\nHans looked around at the terrified mob, remembering all too painfully the same sight of not much more than a year ago, when he had fought his way through this same building to gain the tunnel and escape, leaving thousands of others to die. Perhaps this was atonement.\n\n\"At least we smashed this place,\" Hans announced grimly. \"Smashed the whole damn place from here to Huan and beyond. Took their port of Xi'an as well and smashed that up good and proper. It'll be months, a year or more, before they can even think of recovering.\"\n\nThe artillery fire slackened and stopped. The cries from within the building hushed. Horrified, Hans saw that some of the Chin were already making their final choice, more than one turning a blade upon themselves or loved ones rather than endure the horror of the final butchering.\n\nThe nargas sounded the charge." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "\"Damn Tamuka,\" Jurak roared. \"Damn him. I wanted the flank kept back, give them room to run, let them break.\"\n\nJurak stalked back and forth, angrily shouting at no one in particular. He knew he should have slain Tamuka. It was undoubtedly he who urged the charge forward that had cornered the Chin into a fight. He wondered if Zartak had somehow foreseen this, and wished that his old friend was here now.\n\nThe losses had been appalling. Nearly half his warriors were down, most of them dead, swarmed under in the slaughter. Now word had come that Chin by the tens of thousands were coming up from beyond Huan and out of what was left of the burning city. In another hour they'd be into his flank, forcing him to disengage. He had already passed a signal all the way up to Nippon to bring down yet another two umens. But every train available had been used to bring the forces he now had. It would take at least two days, perhaps three, to bring up the reserves. As for the vast encampments to the south, he had dispatched a flyer to them. The females, cubs, and old ones had to be prepared to defend themselves, and that was his true concern. A hundred thousand yurts with nowhere to go farther south because of the mountains and jungles. If he broke off the fight, if he allowed those still dug in along the line a breathing space, they'd rally the hundreds of thousands of Chin still alive and it would be massacre if they turned south. He had to kill the core of resistance now \u2026 or lose the war.\n\nThe wall of the factory finally collapsed under the incessant pounding. That, at least, was a relief. His battery commander before being killed by a sniper had already informed him that they were digging dangerously into their reserves of ammunition. A ragged cheer erupted from the warriors who had been ordered back, and they surged forward again, closing in for the kill. Soon it would be finished.\n\nSomehow word had spread into his army that it was the legendary Hans who was leading this fight. A Chin demigod, a legend returned to liberate. And something now told him that directly ahead was where Hans was cornered. He had already passed the word to his warriors that if Hans could indeed be captured and brought to him alive, the warrior would be promoted to command of a thousand.\n\nIt wasn't that he wanted Hans to die in agony as Tamuka muttered about. True, Hans would have to die, and the Chin had to see him die to crush their hope of resistance forever. And then the Chin would have to die as well.\n\nHans would have to die, but first he wished to speak to him. Ha'ark had had that privilege a number of times. He had but observed him from a distance. If one was to understand Keane, Hans was the teacher. He was, as well, a consummate foe, a warrior worthy of respect for what he had accomplished, escaping, leading the flanking attack that finished the campaign in front of Roum, and now this.\n\nSo he would feast him once and talk long into the night. Perhaps he would learn something from him, perhaps not, but still he wanted that moment, and then with the coming of the following dawn he would offer him the knife or the gun so that he could finish it with his own hand. Then, after the Chin were brought forth to see the body, he would bum and scatter his ashes to the wind out of respect.\n\nThe charge reached the wall and within seconds gained the entryway, a desperate hand-to-hand struggle erupting in the piled-up rubble.\n\nAnd then he saw them.\n\nA commander of a thousand had just ridden up to ask for orders and his gaze, locked on Jurak, drifted, looking past him, eyes going wide. Raising a hand, he pointed.\n\nJurak turned and looked. For a moment he refused to believe, and then the enemy aerosteamers began to fire.\n\nHans, standing by Ketswana's side, waited just inside the shattered wall. The first of the Bantag were up and over the barrier, crouched low against a hail of thrown bricks and chunks of iron ore. They slashed into the defenders, the killing frenzy upon them. Several, looking in his direction, shouted to each other and came on, as if recognizing him.\n\nInstinct took hold and he raised his carbine, aiming straight at the chest of the nearest one, and fired, dropping him. He heard a revolver let go, several rounds, dropping the next two.\n\nKetswana was by his side.\n\n\"Two rounds left,\" his friend cried, looking at him questioningly.\n\nHans smiled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Skimming the ground, Jack Petracci bore straight in, aiming directly at the tall standard adorned with horse tails and human skulls. An umen commander at least, perhaps even Jurak, he thought grimly.\n\nThere was no need to tell his copilot to open fire. Crouched behind the steam-powered Gatling in the nose, his copilot fired the forward weapon. A steady stream of bullets stitched into the low ridge, slicing through a mortar battery, walking up along the hillside, the standard-bearer collapsing.\n\nContinuing to fire, the gunner shifted aim, slashing into the open-order columns of Bantag infantry. As they raced past the first compound, which was blanketed with smoke and fire, he saw a charging column gaining a shattered wall. Looking down from above, he saw the thousands huddled inside and knew what was about to happen.\n\nHoping that the other aerosteamers were not following too closely and would continue to press toward Huan, he banked his Eagle hard over, shouting to his top gunner to bring the column under fire as they turned.\n\nSwinging about to the south, he spared a quick glance back to the west. Twenty Hornets, flying nearly wingtip to wingtip, were coming straight in, joined as well by the four surviving Eagles. The arrival of the Hornets in Xi'an just before dawn had left him stunned. The Eagle he had sent back to Tyre had actually survived and touched down. The pilots of the Hornets clamored to be released, to go up and save Jack and Hans. The fact that they had actually made the audacious jump from Vincent's position all the way to Xi'an, burning nearly every ounce of fuel they had to make it, had filed him with awe. As it was, nearly half of them had been lost in transit. Never had he known such pride in his command as he did at that moment.\n\nThe twenty Hornets and four Eagles were all that was left of a force of over eighty that existed but a week before. From the looks of what was going on below, once they expended their ammunition there would be no place left to land. He might be able to get back to Xi'an, but with the increasing wind out of the west the Hornets were doomed. Yet still they came on, sweeping low over the ground.\n\nBehind them, half a dozen miles back, he could still see the eight trains. He had almost strafed them coming in until he spotted a makeshift flag of the Republic fluttering from each of the locomotives, and then realized that the thousands packed aboard the flatcars were in fact Chin. What they proposed to do was beyond him.\n\nHe bore straight in at the compound, top and forward gunners both firing continual blasts of Gatling rounds into the attacking column. Within seconds the enemy began to dissolve, looking up in panic, turning aside, and running.\n\nAs he winged up over the compound he wagged his wings, hoping all below would see the stars of the Republic painted on the bottom of his ship. And in spite of the noise of battle, he could hear the cheers.\n\nBanking hard up to the left, he winged over sharply, turning to head straight toward the artillery batteries that had been pounding the makeshift fortress only minutes before. Gatling fire from a Hornet flying across his own path at a right angle slashed into the position, decimating the crews. As the Hornet passed he added his own fire into the balance. A caisson blew, and he winged over yet again to avoid the exploding mushroom cloud.\n\nHe was behind the advance line of Hornets, who now that they were into the fight had poured on full throttle and were quickly surging ahead at nearly a mile a minute.\n\nSmoke poured out from underneath as twenty Gatlings fired, sweeping the Bantag lines, tearing them to shreds. The enemy quite simply broke apart from this unexpected pounding from above. Chin started to pour out from the beleaguered compounds, racing forward, a human wave of tens of thousands, moving like a swarm of locusts.\n\nHe circled back around once more to check on the first compound. But the countercharge was already up and over the broken wall, some of the Chin were nearly into the Bantag artillery positions.\n\nAnd then he spotted him, a ragged guidon, several Zulus around him standing out in dark contrast to the surrounding Chin.\n\nAnd then he saw him fall.\n\nJurak stood motionless as the burst of fire swept past him, knocking over his standard-bearer, and he wished at that instant that it would take him as well, ending this horrible burden forever.\n\nThe rounds stitched past, clumps of sod kicked up in his face, then the machine passed. Another one soared by, skimming the ground so close he could look straight into the cab and see the human pilot.\n\nAround him was chaos. A mortar battery annihilated, a caisson erupting in a fireball. He could see his warriors falling back, not giving ground doggedly but running, frightened of the mob, the tens of thousands of Chin pouring out from their beleaguered positions sweeping all before them.\n\nLooking back to the west he saw the plumes of smoke, and for a brief instant there was a renewed flash of hope, but he knew in his heart that it had to be Chin coming up from Xi'an. If it had been his own warriors, the Yankee aerosteamers would have strafed them.\n\nAt that instant he knew that he had lost a war.\n\nWarriors raced past him in panic, and press of the crowd forced his horse to turn. Suddenly his mount reared, screaming in pain. Never a trained horseman, he panicked, sawing on the reins rather than letting go and jumping off. The horse went down heavily on its side, pinning him.\n\nCursing, he gasped for breath, trying to pull himself free and then was shocked by the explosion of pain from his broken ankle, which was twisted in the stirrup.\n\nWarriors continued to run past, not noticing him. Suddenly there was a shadow, and looking up he saw an emaciated Chin standing above him, holding a broken rifle tipped with a bayonet. The Chin gazed down at him, eyes wide with lust and hate. He raised the weapon up. Jurak looked straight at him, not resisting, at the moment not caring.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nA man, a black man, grabbed the Chin by the shoulder, pulling him back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Jack's aerosteamer had barely rolled to a stop next to the wreckage of the factory compound when he was already out. He had passed over once more to check, and what he had seen convinced him something was wrong and caused him to venture the landing. Running across the field he made his way through the press of advancing Chin.\n\nHe spotted Ketswana, kneeling by the side of an artillery piece, and he pushed his way forward.\n\nThey had Hans sitting up, jacket torn open. No blood, but his features were deathly pale, beads of cold sweat on his forehead. Ketswana, obviously frightened, was holding his hands.\n\nJack burst through the crowd, cursing at them to move aside. He knelt by Ketswana's side and to his relief saw that Hans's eyes were open, though dull.\n\n\"What happened?\" Jack cried.\n\n\"We thought it was finished,\" Ketswana whispered, \"I had two rounds left, I was saving one for him, one for me, and then you soared over us. Never have I seen him smile like that, and laugh, the first time in so long he laughed from the depths of his soul.\n\n\"We followed the charge out. He had just spotted Jurak, pointing him out, when suddenly he stopped, grasping his chest and fell.\"\n\nKetswana lowered his head, a sob wracking him.\n\n\"Still here, my friend,\" Hans whispered.\n\nHans stirred, life coming back into his eyes.\n\n\"Jack, that you?\" he spoke in English, the words slightly slurred.\n\n\"Here, Hans. I couldn't leave you out here. A lot's happened, Hans. Word reached Tyre last night that the government wanted an armistice. The damn stupid Hornet pilots decided on their own to fuel up and see if they could reach Xi'an. They touched down just after dawn. I was getting set to come back here anyhow, and they wanted to come along.\"\n\n\"You broke them with that.\"\n\n\"No, you did. We just mopped up.\"\n\nHans chuckled softly, then was silent for a moment, obviously wracked by another seizure of pain.\n\n\"Damn, hurts worse than getting shot.\"\n\n\"What's wrong, Hans?\"\n\n\"I think the old heart finally decided to give it up.\"\n\nJack tried to force a smile.\n\n\"Hell, if that's all it is, we'll have you up and around in no time.\"\n\nHans looked up at him, his silent gaze frightening Jack.\n\nThere was a stir behind Jack, a confusion of angry voices.\n\nKetswana stood up to see what was going on, then barked out a sharp command. Jack saw several of Ketswana's men dragging a Bantag toward them. He instantly suspected who he was, the gold trim to the uniform, the gilting on the bent horns of the war helmet.\n\n\"Hans, is that him?\"\n\nHans stirred again.\n\n\"You got him?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"Help me up. Don't let him see me like this.\"\n\nKetswana grabbed several Chin, placing them around Hans, blocking the view.\n\nJack was down by his side.\n\n\"You need rest. Don't move.\"\n\nHans smiled.\n\n\"Son, I've been in this war for how long now? I'm not going to miss the final act. Now button up my jacket for me.\"\n\nJack didn't move for a moment.\n\n\"Do it now, son,\" he gasped through clenched teeth.\n\nJack let his hand rest on the narrow chest. It was the chest of an old man who had been filled with unstoppable strength in his youth but was now sunken, flesh sagging, as if ready to begin the final breaking away. The skin felt cold, clammy, and though not a doctor, he could tell there was something wrong with the heart fluttering beneath the ribs.\n\n\"All right,\" he finally whispered, and he buttoned the jacket, the buttons still the old eagles from his Union Army uniform, the gilding long since polished off.\n\nHans nodded his thanks.\n\n\"Now help me up.\"\n\nJack took him by the arm and there was a gasp of pain as Hans stood. He swayed uneasily for a moment, took a deep breath, and it seemed as if by sheer strength of will the heart continued to beat.\n\nHe slowly brushed the dirt off his jacket and stepped out of the surrounding circle. Jack wanted to stay by his side, to help him walk, but Ketswana held him back.\n\nHe fought to block out the pain, the strange, empty sensation that part of him was floating away. He focused on the warrior before him, leaning awkwardly against the wheel of an artillery caisson. Though he had only seen him from a distance, Sergeant Major Hans Schuder knew he was facing Jurak, Qar Qarth of the Bantag Horde.\n\nHe approached slowly, warily. Except in the heat of combat, the last time he had been this close to a horde rider he had still been a slave, and he was ashamed that the old instinct almost took hold, to lower his head and avert his eyes until directly spoken to.\n\nHe maintained eye contact. Jurak shifted slightly, and there was a slight grimace of pain.\n\n\"Are you wounded?\" Hans asked, speaking again in the tongue of the Bantag, the mere act of it sending a chill through him as he carefully sorted out the words.\n\nJurak said something in reply, a bit too quickly, and Hans shook his head, a gesture they used as well.\n\nJurak spoke again, more slowly.\n\n\"The ankle is broken; it is nothing. You look wounded as well.\"\n\nHans paused for a moment on the mental translation, startled to realize that in the language of the Horde, Jurak had used the personal form of you, used only when addressing another of the same race, rather than the contemptible kagsa, their form of the word you for speaking to cattle.\n\nIt took him a moment to regain his poise from that. The pain in his chest was still there, coursing down his arms; he forced the recognition of it away.\n\n\"Knocked down by an explosion. It is nothing,\" he lied.\n\nJurak stared at him and Hans wondered if the ability to see into the thoughts of others was with this one. He realized he had to be careful, to stay focused.\n\n\"Though enemies, we must talk,\" Hans announced.\n\nHe felt light-headed, knew that Jurak was in pain as well. Finally, he motioned to the ground. Jurak nodded and, with leg extended, sat down, Hans making it a point of not waiting to be invited to sit as well.\n\n\"You've lost,\" Hans said.\n\n\"Today yes, but not tomorrow. I have two more umens arriving by train even now.\"\n\nHe waited, forming his words carefully so as to not imply that Jurak was lying and therefore automatically dishonorable.\n\n\"My eyes see differently,\" he finally said.\n\n\"And what is it that your eyes see that mine do not?\"\n\nHans looked straight at him. Less than an hour ago he assumed it was lost. They had damaged the Horde, perhaps fatally, but it would still be lost for him and his comrades. Now there was a glimmer of light.\n\nAgain the flutter of pain, but he ignored it. Even if I don't survive this day, those whom I love will.\n\nHe tried to pierce into the mind, the heart of Jurak. The Horde believed their shamans could read into the souls of others. Andrew claimed it was true as well, having resisted the leaders of the Tugar and Merki Hordes. He, in turn, had been in the presence of Tamuka and Ha'ark. There was something about Tamuka that had been coldly troubling, a sense that he could indeed see.\n\nAs for Ha'ark, he was simply a warrior. A shrewd one at times but nevertheless easy to pierce. There was something about this one, though, that was different yet again.\n\nHans reached into his haversack, Jurak's gaze fluttering down. Hans slowly withdrew the small piece of tobacco and bit off a chew. There was a soft grumbling chuckle from Jurak.\n\n\"Now I remember,\" Jurak said. \"You chewed that dried weed. Disgusting.\"\n\nHans could not help but laugh softly as well.\n\nHe continued to stare at Jurak. As with most of the Horde there was no discomfort in silence, the feeling that one needed to fill the emptiness. As horse nomads they were a race long accustomed to silence, to days of endless riding alone.\n\nThe air reverberated around them, distant explosions, the chatter of a Gatling. From the west the shriek of an approaching steam train, the neighing of horses, guttural cries of mounted warriors. Hans looked up. Less than half a mile away he could see a knot of them forming up, the fallen standard of the Horde held aloft again as a rally point. They most likely knew that their Qar Qarth was fallen; he wondered if they knew that he was still alive and a prisoner.\n\nA Hornet circled in on the forming ranks, opening fire, scattering them.\n\nHans looked over his shoulder. Several hundred men were gathered behind him, watching in open awe and curiosity.\n\n\"Jack, do you have some sort of signal to tell those flyers to cease fire? And Ketswana, I think they understand a white flag. Get some men out there, men who can speak Bantag. We're not surrendering, but we are offering a ceasefire. Tell them we have their Qar Qarth.\"\n\nHe looked back at Jurak who sat, features unreadable. That has always been one of the damned problems with dealing with them, he thought. Can't read their faces, their subtle gestures; it's like dealing with a statue of stone.\n\n\"I am telling my men to stop firing while we talk,\" Hans said.\n\nJurak nodded, then looked around. Groups of Chin were wandering about the battlefield. Whenever they spotted a wounded Bantag they closed in with shouts of rage, and of glee and fell to tormenting him before finishing it with a bayonet thrust or a crushing blow to the head.\n\n\"And Ketswana!\"\n\nHis comrade came up to his side, looking down at him, eyes still filled with concern.\n\n\"I'm doing fine now. But tell our people to stop that,\" Hans said in the language of the Bantag. He nodded to where, less than fifty yards away, a mob of Chin had fallen on a Bantag warrior. \"It's despicable. This is a ceasefire, damn it, not an opportunity for a massacre. I want our people to halt where they are and hold. The wounded are to be left alone; if they can get out on their own, let them pass.\"\n\n\"Their blood's up,\" Ketswana replied in the same language, his voice filled with bitterness. \"It's time to remember and take vengeance. They wouldn't offer us mercy if it was you who were now prisoner.\"\n\n\"And that's what's different between us,\" Hans shouted, the effort of it leaving him dizzy and out of breath.\n\nKetswana's gaze locked on Jurak. He finally nodded, formally saluted Hans, and ran off, shouting orders.\n\n\"Are we really so different?\" Jurak asked.\n\n\"I would like to think we are, at least when it comes to how we wage war.\"\n\n\"And tell me, Hans. After all this, after all the thousands of years of this, if your race gains the upper hand, can we expect any different?\"\n\n\"I can't promise anything,\" Hans replied. \"For myself, yes. For those who've lived here all their lives, who know nothing different. I don't know.\"\n\n\"So we shall continue to fight. Kill me if you wish. But I was always an outsider. Few will truly miss me. I was Qar Qarth because they were afraid of you and believed in Ha'ark, who claimed we were sent by the gods. They will select one of their own blood to continue the fight.\"\n\n\"What I assumed,\" Hans replied wearily.\n\nThere was a long blast of a steam whistle. Looking over his shoulder, he saw a train easing to a stop. Shocked, he saw that Seetu, one of Ketswana's men was leading them. They had actually made it all the way from Xi'an. Dismounting from the locomotive, hundreds of Chin, all of them armed with Bantag rifles, jumped down from the string of flatcars and formed up.\n\n\"They're from Xi'an,\" Hans announced proudly, \"and there will be thousands more.\"\n\nJurak said nothing.\n\nIf what Jurak said was true, Hans realized, it would simply go on. He might have saved the Chin, but who would be next after that? And so the war would continue.\n\n\"You said your eyes did not see-my new umens,\" Jurak said, interrupting Hans's thoughts.\n\nHans looked back at him absently rubbing his left shoulder.\n\n\"I know enough of cat \u2026\" Jurak quickly stopped, \"of humans to know you are ill.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"It is your heart, isn't it?\"\n\nSurprised, Hans nodded.\n\n\"You are very ill, Hans Schuder.\"\n\n\"Not too sick to see this through to the end.\"\n\nJurak laughed softly.\n\n\"Ha'ark once told me you were indomitable. I remember once telling him that if he sensed that in you, perhaps it was best to kill you before you created trouble.\"\n\n\"One of his many mistakes,\" Hans said with a soft laugh.\n\n\"Yes. I know.\"\n\n\"What do I see that your eyes do not?\" Hans replied.\n\n\"I know two umens were brought up by rail last night from Nippon. It must have taken near to every locomotive and piece of rolling stock within three hundred leagues to do that. Even if you had half a dozen umens in Nippon, it will still take you two days to turn those trains around, run them north, load them up, then another two days to bring them all back.\n\n\"As you can see, I now control the rail line between here and Xi'an.\"\n\nJurak looked past Hans and nodded.\n\n\"I will not speak an untruth. I don't know how they got through. Perhaps they control the line. Perhaps you had few if any warriors between here and Xi'an to stop them.\" Jurak was silent for a moment.\n\n\"Obviously not enough to stop them.\"\n\n\"We captured supplies in Xi'an. Powder, artillery, guns.\" He hesitated, remembering the barges of ammunition exploding. \"Millions of cartridges, thousands of shells, even some of your steamships and land ironclads.\n\n\"By the time you are reinforced, I can arm fifty thousand Chin.\"\n\n\"Then it will be a mutual slaughter.\"\n\n\"I could also pull back, tearing up track. Burn the factories that are left before leaving. Then you will have yet another front and hundreds of thousands of Chin armed and eager for blood by the time your umens reach Xi'an.\" Jurak shook his head wearily.\n\n\"Then we are doomed to fight. You and I will not be here to see it, but it will continue.\"\n\nHans sighed and lowered his head.\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nThere was a long moment of silence. He looked back up at Jurak. Here was a warrior of the Horde. Eight feet or more in height, black-and-brown mane matted, dirty, the same as the black uniform. Visage that for a decade had filled him with horror. There was the memory of slavery, the terror, the brutality, the moon feasts and slaughter pits. And all so many comrades of the 35th and 44th New York. Men of Rus, his friend Marcus, those whom he had suffered bondage with. All caused by this race.\n\nHe fought down the urge to find a weapon, a knife, anything, to gut Jurak right there, to make it a signal for the slaughter to continue to the death. For he did indeed have the upper hand at the moment.\n\nHe looked to his left and saw Ketswana standing over a wounded Bantag, ordering the Chin back. They were ready to fall on him with drawn knives.\n\nHe thought of the rumors of yesterday, that in the frenzy of killing, Bantag had been mutilated beyond recognition; and some were even whispering that a few had even taken their flesh and consumed it.\n\nHe looked closely at the wounded Bantag and realized that it was barely more than a cub, about the same height as the Zulu standing over him. He was on his side, gutshot. Looking up at Ketswana.\n\nThe Chin fell back. Ketswana started to turn away, and the wounded Bantag said something. Ketswana hesitated, then unslung his canteen, pulled the cork, knelt, and offered the Bantag a drink.\n\nJurak was watching as well.\n\n\"In spite of what my race did, still one of yours will offer a drink to a dying child.\"\n\nHans said nothing for a moment. He was ready to shoot back with a sarcasm, an enraged comment about how many human children had died in agony, watching parents murdered before they themselves were slaughtered. He sensed, as well, that Jurak had an inner revulsion for what this world was. And the thought formed as he continued to watch Ketswana, holding the canteen to the cub's lips.\n\n\"Jurak.\"\n\nHe was looking straight into his opponent's eyes.\n\n\"Yes, Hans.\"\n\n\"Your tribal camping areas. Your old ones, your children, your women. Do you know where they are camped now?\"\n\nJurak seemed to stiffen slightly, the first true gesture Hans felt he could read accurately.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Many are south of here, toward the Shin-Tu Mountains.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause.\n\n\"Yes, some are there. Others to the north and east.\"\n\n\"But many are there. A hundred thousand yurts, two hundred thousand perhaps.\"\n\n\"I cannot count them all.\"\n\nHans smiled. Jurak could try to bluff, but somehow he wasn't.\n\n\"My forces here are between them and you. Troops moving along this rail line are between them and you. For that matter, I have a score of airships that could be over them within the hour.\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\"\n\nHans made it a point of dropping eye contact for a moment. He slowly stood up. Jurak remained seated, but now it was he looking down on Jurak rather than the other way around.\n\n\"I am ordering that all of them are to be put to death.\"\n\nJurak said nothing, gaze becoming icy.\n\n\"The umens you see that I do not can come up if you want. But in two days' time I will have a ring closed in around a hundred thousand yurts. The flyers will be over them ceaselessly from dawn to dusk. Arrows fired by women and old ones will fall back to the ground. Bullets and firebombs slashing down from the skies will slaughter by the tens of thousands.\n\n\"And once armed Chin are amongst them, once I tell the Chin that this is their destiny, that the gods seek revenge, the slaughter will continue until even the ground can no longer drink all the blood, and the rivers will turn red.\n\n\"You might bring up two umens, a dozen umens, but they will find themselves to be childless, fatherless, for their seed will be extinguished from this world forever.\n\n\"This is the war your race started and I shall now finish.\"\n\nAs he spoke he was aware that Ketswana had come back and was standing by his side.\n\n\"When do we begin?\" Ketswana asked, his voice a guttural challenge.\n\nJurak looked at the two of them and wearily shook his head.\n\n\"Am I to believe you, a warrior I had come to respect, would do this thing?\"\n\n\"You did it to us first.\"\n\nJurak visibly flinched and lowered his head.\n\nHe was again silent, and then ever so slowly he grabbed hold of the wheel of the caisson he had been sitting against and pulled himself up, flinching as he gingerly tried to put weight on his broken ankle.\n\n\"It is over,\" he finally whispered. \"I would like to believe that you do not wish this murder to continue. I am asking you to spare them.\"\n\nHans said nothing, keeping his features hard.\n\n\"Your terms?\"\n\nThis was a leap ahead for Hans which momentarily caught him off guard. Two hours earlier he was hoping Ketswana had saved one final round to prevent the agony of capture, now he was negotiating the end of a war. He wished Andrew was here; his friend would be far better at this than he.\n\n\"Immediate ceasefire on all fronts. Immediate withdrawal from the territory of Roum, Nippon, and the Chin.\"\n\n\"To go where?\"\n\n\"East if you want, south. I've been told that there's a thousand leagues east of here with barely a human on it. That is range enough for your people to live upon.\"\n\n\"You'd suffer us to live?\"\n\n\"It's either that or kill all of you.\" He held back for a second then let it spill out. \"And if I did that, if we did that, in the end we would become you.\"\n\nJurak stood with lowered head and finally nodded.\n\n\"I offer no apologies for what this world became.\"\n\n\"Then change it, damn it. Change it.\"\n\n\"And what is to prevent war from starting again?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Hans said, his voice weary. \"I promise you this, though, if you go beyond that thousand leagues of open prairie, if word should ever come back of but one more person dying, of being slaughtered for food, or put into bondage, then I, or Andrew, or those who come after us will hunt your people without mercy.\"\n\n\"You will have the factories, the flyers, the machines. We will not,\" Jurak replied. \"I know what the result of that would be.\"\n\n\"Fine. I will keep the Chin back from your encampments. I will order the release of ten thousand yurts immediately to start moving east. Once I have word that the last of your troops are out of Roum territory, twenty thousand more. Once out of the realm of Nippon and the Chin, fifty thousand more, and a year from today the remainder. Any violation of what we agree upon here and all of them will die without mercy.\"\n\n\"Would you really do that?\" Jurak asked.\n\nHans stared straight at him.\n\nHe knew there was no sense in bluffing, but he could not betray his own doubts either.\n\n\"I don't think either one of us wants to find out what we are capable of doing.\"\n\nJurak nodded.\n\n\"Perhaps someday we can talk more, Hans Schuder. You might not believe this, but I sense your Andrew and I are more alike than each of us realizes, the same as Andrew has you, there is an elder for me.\"\n\nHans did not know what to say.\n\nIn a way it had all been so simple, and yet all the years of agony and suffering to reach this moment, and all the millions of dead.\n\nStrange, he suddenly thought of Andrew, and knew that what had happened here Andrew would have agreed to.\n\n\"I will signal that the attack is off at Capua.\"\n\nHans looked at him quizzically.\n\n\"There were rumors that your government had collapsed, that Andrew was going into exile. We were to start the attack this evening, just before sundown.\"\n\nHans tried to quickly digest all that he had just learned. Andrew in exile? Suppose the government had already thrown in the towel. Then what? If this fighting was to end, he had better move quickly. He had already decided to let Jurak go, but he had to get him back to where he could telegraph out orders of a ceasefire before the government back home surrendered first. If they did that, some other Bantag leader might be tempted to press the attack anyhow.\n\n\"Ketswana, bring up a couple of mounts.\"\n\nThe two stood in silence, waiting as Ketswana left them to find horses.\n\n\"Twenty years from now I wonder,\" Jurak said.\n\n\"Wonder what?\"\n\nJurak fell silent again as Ketswana came up, leading two horses, one of them sightly wounded and limping.\n\nHans motioned for Jurak to take the better horse. He hobbled over. Grimacing, he grabbed hold of the pommel, swung his injured leg up and over, then slipped his good foot into the stirrup.\n\nHans, still feeling light-headed, though the pain had subsided somewhat, struggled to mount and was embarrassed when Ketswana and several others came to his side to help.\n\n\"Hans, where the hell are you going?\" Ketswana asked.\n\nHans looked down at his old comrade.\n\n\"lust for a little ride, that's all.\"\n\n\"Wait for me.\"\n\n\"I can't wait for you, my friend.\"\n\nHans suddenly reached down and took Ketswana's hand.\n\n\"Thank you. I don't know how many times over I owe you my life.\"\n\n\"I owe you my freedom,\" Ketswana replied, his voice suddenly choked.\n\n\"No man owes another man his freedom,\" Hans replied softly. \"That was, and always will be, your right. Remember that.\"\n\nHe nudged his mount gently, not wanting to hurt it.\n\n\"Wait here; I'll be back soon enough.\"\n\n. The two rode off, side by side, heading to where Bantag survivors of the bloody fight were rallying. Overhead a flyer circled as if keeping watch. Chin infantry, coming off of the trains, was fanning out to envelop the flank of the Bantag. Eastward, toward the still-burning city, the sound of battle continued to thunder, though it seemed to be dying away, falling into a final spasm of slaughter.\n\nThe pain had abated; he wondered for a moment if that meant that he would survive the day after all, or was it the final ringing down of the curtain and that soon he would slip away.\n\nAt the moment it really didn't seem to matter. He felt a sudden lightness, a gentle floating, a sense of peace. Back home, back in Suzdal, for that now was home, Tamira would most likely be out with his young Andrew, the boy leading his mother on their daily walk through the meadows to the east and south of town. The thought of it made him smile. In the last year he had shared not more than half a dozen days with them, but each moment had been a blessed treasure, each night a reawakened dream.\n\nThey would be safe, and ultimately he knew that a man could not ask for anything beyond that, to know that those whom he loved were safe.\n\n\"What are you thinking about?\" Jurak asked.\n\nHans stirred.\n\n\"My family.\"\n\n\"You had a child, I remember that.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And they are safe?\"\n\n\"You mean did they escape safely with me?\" Hans asked, a touch of anger flaring into his voice.\n\n\"No. I know that. I was there, I saw her lead the escape carrying your child. She was brave. To be proud of.\"\n\nSurprised, Hans nodded his thanks.\n\n\"They are safe now?\"\n\n\"Yes, as far as I know.\"\n\n\"You are lucky.\"\n\n\"Why so?\" Surprised he turned to look at Jurak. Strange, for a brief instant he had almost forgotten who he was talking to.\n\n\"My home world. My family, parents, the one that I \u2026 what you called married.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"They all died. A type of bomb I pray to the gods is never known on this world. They all died. That was just before I came here.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\nJurak looked over at him, surprised. Hans as well felt a mild shock. The two words had slipped out of him so easily. Never did he dream he could feel sorrow for a Bantag. Yet in Jurak's voice he had sensed the pain.\n\nThere was an awkward moment of silence.\n\n\"Do you have a family here?\" Hans asked.\n\nJurak shook his head.\n\n\"No. They cannot replace her.\"\n\n\"Perhaps someday. I lived alone nearly all the days of my life and did not find her until \u2026\" He let the subject drop, given how he and Tamira had met.\n\n\"Perhaps someday.\"\n\nThey were approaching the Bantag formation. Hans could see them stirring as they recognized that their Qar Qarth was still alive. Jurak reined in, gaze sweeping the battered ranks.\n\n\"The war is finished,\" he shouted. \"We withdraw.\"\n\nExcited murmuring erupted. Hans could sense rage on the part of many, but there were others who seemed relieved, nodding, grounding clenched rifles.\n\nJurak looked over at Hans.\n\n\"I will order my troops pulled back north of the city at once. Tomorrow, at noonday, let us meet on the rail tracks going north out of Huan. We both have to assume that there will still be fighting until word reaches all, and we can separate from each other.\"\n\nHans nodded.\n\n\"Noon then.\"\n\nTo his surprise, Jurak extended his arm in the gesture of clasping. Hans reached out tentatively, then grasped Jurak's wrist, and felt the tight grip on his own forearm.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nHans looked up. A rider, followed by half a dozen, broke out of the ranks and approached. There was something darkly familiar about him, and then the recognition hit, the scarred disfigured face. It was Tamuka.\n\n\"No! That is the path of a coward. Press the fight now and slaughter them all.\"\n\nJurak drew himself up stiffly.\n\n\"They are between us and the yurts of our clans. In agreement for our ending the war and withdrawing, they will harm no one and let our families live. If this madness continues half a million or more of our sires, females, and cubs will die.\"\n\nWith the announcement of that Hans could see that yet more were now glad that it was ended. He suddenly realized that the Bantag had been terrified that over the last day the Chin would even now be swarming southward to initiate a massacre.\n\n\"They have made the gesture of letting our old ones and young live, even though they now have the power to kill them all. We all know that we are powerless to stop them. There is not one more warrior between Xi'an and Nippon capable of resisting them. It will take days to bring down what we have left in Nippon. By then, all our families will have been slaughtered.\"\n\nThat admission startled Hans. So it was a bluff. They had stripped themselves bare.\n\nThere was a sidelong glance from Jurak and Hans felt he could almost smile, as if Jurak had finally revealed that he didn't have a pair of deuces, let alone a full house.\n\nTamuka turned to face the Bantags.\n\n\"Fight! Kill them all while there is still time! One more charge, and we break through and slaughter them all!\"\n\nHis screams were met with a stirring. More than one again gave himself over to the lust for battle, some raising their rifles in response, shouting agreement.\n\nHans could not understand all that was being said, the words were spilling out of Tamuka so quickly, yet he could sense the rage that was out of control. He looked over again at Jurak, who sat motionless. This wasn't a leader who could win by overpowering. It had to be a display of calm in the face of madness.\n\nHe knew that if Tamuka should somehow win the argument, then it was over. Jurak would die, they would attack in a mad frenzy, and the Chin would unleash a massacre against hundreds of thousands in a final orgy of mutual destruction. Madness, to be so close and then have it all plunged back into madness.\n\n\"Kill them all!\"\n\nThe world seemed to be shifting like sand swept away by a tidal wave. The lust was coming back. Jurak sat impassive, undoubtedly knowing he could not shout down the mad leader of the once great Merki.\n\n\"And kill this traitor from another world first!\" Tamuka cried.\n\nHans barely understood the words, but he recognized the gesture as Tamuka dropped his reins and reached for a saddle-mounted holster. Like a snake striking, the revolver flashed out.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nHans kicked his own mount forward. He saw the revolver going up, thumb cocking the trigger back. He fumbled with his own holster \u2026 and grabbed nothing but thin air. There was a flash memory of throwing it away after firing the last round. Time seemed to distort, he felt his heart thumping over, wondering if it was finally shattering. Or was it fear.\n\nHe saw the gun coming down, Tamuka squinting, one eye half-closed, the other sighting down the barrel, aiming it straight at Jurak. He caught a final glimpse of Jurak, knew the Bantag, at heart, was not a true combat soldier. He was reacting far too slowly, just then recognizing the danger, starting to recoil in anticipation of the crashing blow.\n\nThere was a final instant, a wondering, a sense that somehow this was a vast cosmic joke. This wasn't Andrew, or Pat, or Emil, or even a simple Chin that he was trying to save. It wasn't anyone, yet it was, as well, a warrior whom he had learned in the last few minutes to respect. He was someone who had offered an ending to the madness, a way out, a way for Tamira and the baby to live in peace \u2026 and that peace was about to die if Jurak died.\n\nTime distorted, and he knew there was but one last thing he could do. Without hesitating Hans lunged forward across the neck of his horse. He saw the gaping maw of the revolver, the eye behind the barrel, face contorted in a mad scream \u2026 and then the flash.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nIt was Jurak screaming, as Hans, lifted out of his saddle, tumbled over backwards and crashed to the ground. The dirty yellow-white smoke swirled in a cloud, and through the cloud he saw Tamuka. There was a momentary look of surprise that he had shot Hans, and then, even more enraging, a barking roar of delight.\n\nJurak drew his scimitar, blade flashing out, catching the light. He caught a momentary glance of those watching. This was now a blood challenge for control of the Bantag Horde. He raked his spurs, the pain in his leg forgotten. His mount leapt forward.\n\nTamuka, thumb on the hammer of his revolver, cocked the weapon and started to shift aim.\n\nScreaming with a mad fury Jurak charged his mount straight into the flank of Tamuka's horse. The revolver swung past his face, going off, the explosion deafening him, the flash of it burning his cheek.\n\nTheir eyes locked for a second. Even as he started his swing, there was a final instant, a flash of recognition. His rage, a rage which surprised him, for it was a mad fury over what had been done to a human, added strength to his blow.\n\nThe look in Tamuka's eyes turned in that instant to disbelief as the blade sliced into his throat, driven with such force that it slashed clear through flesh, muscle, and bone.\n\nTamuka's horse, terrified as a shower of hot blood cascaded over its back, reared and galloped off, ridden by a headless corpse still showering blood.\n\nJurak was blinded for an instant, not sure if he had somehow been wounded after all by the pistol shot. Then the mist started to clear as he blinked Tamuka's blood out of his eyes.\n\nHe viciously swung his mount around, gaze sweeping the assembly, wanting to shout his rage at them, at all their insanity and bestiality. And in their eyes he saw something that had never quite been there before. It wasn't just that he was their Qar Qarth. It was that he was their leader. Some went down on their knees, heads lowered.\n\nSomething snapped inside and he screamed incoherently at them, holding his bloody scimitar aloft. More went down on their knees; within seconds all were down, heads bowed.\n\nHe reined his horse around and looked down. Cursing wildly, he swung off his mount. As he hit the ground his broken ankle gave way and with a gasp of pain he went down on his knees. None dared to rise to help him.\n\nHe slowly stood back up and limped the half dozen paces over to where Hans lay. Looking up he saw humans, hundreds of them, running up, led by the dark Zulu. He held up his sword so they could see it, then threw it down by the severed head of Tamuka. The humans slowed, the Zulu turning, shouting a command. They stopped, and, alone, Ketswana came forward.\n\nJurak knelt down by Hans's side, Ketswana joining him.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Jurak gasped. \"And thank you for my life.\"\n\nHans looked up. Strange, no pain. The dark specter who had trailed his every step across all the years, and all the worlds, had him in hand at last, and, surprisingly, there was no pain.\n\nStill he wondered why he had done it. Was it because I knew I was dying anyhow?\n\nNo.\n\nA gallant gesture then? And he wanted to laugh over the irony of it, but no laughter came.\n\nHe saw them gazing down. Jurak was saying something, but he couldn't hear him. He saw Ketswana, tears streaming down his face. He tried to reach up, to wipe them away, as if soothing a child, but for some strange reason his arm, his hands would no longer obey.\n\nThey were kneeling side by side, and he fully understood what it was he had been fighting for all along, and what he was now dying for. And he was content.\n\nThen they slipped away \u2026 and Hans Schuder smiled as they disappeared into a glorious light." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Exhausted, he stood alone, watching as the sun touched the horizon.\n\nThe last of the gunfire died away and he felt cold, alone, empty. Throughout the long day the square had slowly contracted inward, drawing closer and yet closer after each successive charge until the backs of the surviving men were almost touching.\n\nThe ground was carpeted with the dead and dying, tens of thousands of Bantag and humans tangled together.\n\nIf ever there was a killing ground of madness, this was it. He stood atop the low rise of ground, watching as half a dozen ironclads, the survivors of the daylong fight wove their way up the hill, maneuvering slowly, looking for an open path through the carnage.\n\nThe lead machine ground to a halt fifty yards short of the square, the turret popped open, and he saw Gregory stiffly climb out then half slide, half fall to the ground. He looked at the other machines. St. Katrina? No, he had seen that one blow up \u2026 the gentle gardener was dead, and Vincent blinked back the tears.\n\nWalking like a marionette with tangled strings, Gregory slowly made his way up the hill. The men around Vincent parted at his approach.\n\nComing to attention he saluted. Vincent, exhausted beyond words, merely nodded in reply.\n\n\"They're leaving,\" Gregory announced, his voice slurring.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"What's left of them, the poor damned bastards. They're mounting up now, heading north.\"\n\nEven as he spoke there was a ripple of comments along the battered line. Vincent looked past Gregory and saw a lone rider appear on the next rise half a mile away. The Bantag rider stood out sharply against the horizon. He held a horse tail standard aloft.\n\nHe waved it back and forth and Vincent watched, mesmerized. The Horde rider slammed it down, the shaft sinking into the earth. The rider held a clenched fist aloft and he could hear a distant cry, desolate, mournful. Vincent stepped out from the battered square, removed his kepi, and held it aloft.\n\nThe Bantag rider turned and disappeared, leaving the standard behind.\n\nGregory came to his side, and Vincent turned to face him.\n\n\"I hope this was worth it,\" Gregory whispered.\n\nVincent's gaze swept the wreckage, the tangled mounds of dead. All he could do was lower his head and cry." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\"Pat!\"\n\n\"It's started?\"\n\nInstantly, he was awake, sitting up in his cot. All day long he had been anticipating the attack. Praying in fact that it would come, come before someone finally got through from the west with the orders to stand down or he finally made the suicidal gesture and attacked instead. Rumors had been floating through the army ever since Pat had dropped the telegraph lines and all trains from the west had ceased to arrive.\n\nOnly that morning Schneid had come back up to the front, personally bearing a report that rioting had erupted in Suzdal and Roum.\n\nRick stood in the doorway of the bunker, the sky behind him glowing with the colors of sunset.\n\n\"Where are they hitting?\" Pat cried, stumbling up from the steps and out onto the battlement.\n\nHe was stunned by the silence. There were no guns firing, not even the usual scattering of shots between snipers. Then he heard it, a strange distant keening.\n\nHe stepped up onto a firing step and cautiously peered over. He saw though that men were now standing up, some atop the earthworks, fully exposed, and not a shot was coming from the other side.\n\n\"What the hell is going on?\"\n\n\"I'm damned if I know. It started an hour or so ago. This weird chanting. I thought they were getting themselves built up for the assault. I figured to let you sleep as long as possible, though, and waited. Well, this chanting kept on going and going and then about five minutes ago I saw the damnedest thing.\"\n\nHe suddenly pointed across the river.\n\n\"There, another one!\"\n\nPat looked, not sure for a moment what he was seeing. It was darker on the far shore, and then he saw where Rick was pointing. Two Bantag were standing, fully exposed. They were holding something. It was a mortar \u2026 and they flung it over the side of their fort and down into the mud of the riverbank. And then, without any ceremony they turned and simply walked away.\n\nAll along the riverbank he could now see them, not just a few, but hundreds upon hundreds, climbing up out of the trenches, still chanting, then walking off into the darkness.\n\nSuddenly a flare ignited on the far shore and in the flickering light he saw a mounted Bantag, war helmet off, white mane catching the light. The Bantag was holding the flare and Pat looked at him mesmerized.\n\nHe felt a strange stirring within, as if this one could somehow reach into his soul and touch his heart. There was no hatred, only an infinite sadness.\n\n\"It's over,\" a voice seemed to whisper inside.\n\nBy the light of the flare he saw a rider moving down into the river, holding a white flag aloft, in his other hand waving what appeared to be a piece of paper.\n\n\"Send someone down to get that,\" Pat shouted.\n\nThe rider reached midstream and waited, and a minute later a mounted artilleryman galloped into the shallow river, approached the messenger, and took the paper.\n\nAt the same instant the flare was thrown heavenward. He traced its flight as it bisected the Great Wheel, which even then was rising in the east. It fell into the water, and all was darkness.\n\nPat, unable to speak, simply looked over at Rick and smiled, though in his heart he sensed, at that same moment, that something was lost forever as well." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Andrew Lawrence Keane, his wife riding beside him, rode into the Great Square of the city. The entire populace was out cheering his arrival, chanting his name, but he ignored the tribute.\n\nHe saw Father Casmir standing on the steps of the White House, and as Andrew reined in his mount, Casmir made the gesture of taking off his skullcap and offering the traditional Rus bow, right hand sweeping to the ground.\n\nAndrew smiled and dismounted. He started to raise his hand in a formal salute, then remembered he was no longer in the army and instead he simply held it out. Casmir took it.\n\n\"Welcome home, Colonel Keane.\"\n\nAndrew did not know what to say. The courier, a young priest, had arrived at his retreat, a country house on the edge of the Great Forest, near the old Tugar Ford, only that morning. Breathless, he had announced that Father Casmir insisted that he return to the city immediately.\n\nAll Andrew's questioning would not budge the youth, who insisted he was sworn to a vow of silence. The only news he would divulge was that Kal had emerged from his coma and asked for him as well.\n\nLeaving the children under the protection of several young men from the 35th who had gone with him into exile, he rode south, back to the city along the old ford road, Kathleen insisting that she come along, too. The ride with the silent priest and Kathleen was a flood of memories \u2026 the battles around the Tugar Ford, the first skirmish in the woods against a raid by boyars, the ambush of the Tugar column just north of the city. As they cleared the lower pass he was stunned to see thousands outside the gates, lining the road.\n\nThere had been no cheering, only an awed and respectful silence. As he passed, all offered the old traditional bow of the Rus, bent at the waist, right hand sweeping to the ground. He wanted to ask but sensed all had been told to wait, to let Casmir explain.\n\nHe looked into the eyes of the Metropolitan of the Rus.\n\n\"I will never forget the night that I, a young priest, ran barefoot through the snow to where you and your men were camped below this city,\" Casmir began, his voice echoing across the plaza, and Andrew realized that this was all part of some elaborate ceremony.\n\n\"I knew you Yankees were voting that night whether to stay and fight the Tugars or to take ship and leave and seek safety. I came bearing the news that we, the people of Suzdal, had rebelled against the boyars and wished to fight the Tugars as well.\n\n\"Colonel Keane, you could have turned your back upon me at that moment. You could have left, but you decided to stay and to fight for our freedom.\n\n\"Those men that were with you that night,\" and his voice faltered, \"how few now remain.\"\n\nCasmir paused, and Andrew saw the emotions and felt a knot in his own throat.\n\n\"You did not leave us, Andrew Keane. It was we who left you.\"\n\nAndrew wanted to say something, embarrassed. He felt the touch of Kathleen's hand on his shoulder, stilling him.\n\n\"We left you. You tried to teach us that though you fought to give us freedom, we ourselves must have the strength to defend it. When you rode out of the city, alone, we finally learned that.\n\n\"My friend, I now beg you. Pick up your sword again. Take command of the armies. Be Colonel Andrew Lawrence Keane once more.\"\n\nAs he spoke the last words the chanting resumed, \"Keane, Keane, Keane.\"\n\nStunned, Andrew was unable to respond for a moment.\n\n\"What about Bugarin, the vote for an armistice?\" Kathleen asked.\n\n\"Those buggers. We loaded them onto a ferry across the river. They're packing it on the road west of here,\" Emil announced, coming down the steps to join them.\n\nAt the sight of him Andrew brightened, reached out, and grasped his hand.\n\n\"It started down at the factories,\" Emil continued. \"Oh this priest might deny it, but his monks were organizing it. By yesterday evening the entire city was on strike. They cut the telegraph lines repeatedly, blockaded the Capitol and the White House. The poor damned Chin representatives didn't dare set foot outside for fear of getting torn apart.\"\n\n\"They didn't overthrow the government, did they?\" Andrew asked.\n\nEmil smiled.\n\n\"Let's call it vox populi. Some of the senators got a bit roughed up, maybe a couple of them were told that if they voted the wrong way, they might not get reelected because they wouldn't live long enough to make reelection. But the people of Suzdal made it clear they would fight to the end rather than go down, and communicated that real clear to the Roum as well.\"\n\n\"What did Bugarin do?\"\n\n\"It came to a head last night. He tried to order some ruffians he had rounded up to fire into the crowd gathered right here. They lined the steps, and then Casmir here steps out, arms extended, and tells them to aim at him first.\" Andrew looked at the priest, unable to speak.\n\n\"That finished it. There was a bit of roughness, a few black eyes, busted ribs, broken arms, and a few lads singing soprano, but the people of this city took the White House. I declared Kal competent to resume office. There was talk of a treason trial and that was it, ten senators and a couple of congressmen quickly resigned and got the hell out of town.\"\n\n\"My role is somewhat exaggerated,\" Casmir intervened. A wild cheer rose up in the square, laughing, belying Casmir's statement.\n\n\"I doubt that,\" Andrew cried, trying to be heard above the roaring of the crowd.\n\n\"You know, Andrew. Maybe it's a good thing for a Republic to clean house occasionally and throw out a few cowardly senators now and then.\"\n\nAndrew said nothing, shaking his head with disbelief. \"Flavius, and the shot at Kal. Who did it?\"\n\n\"I don't think we'll ever really know, but if my sacred vows did not prevent it, I'd bet on Bugarin even though he vehemently denied it.\"\n\n\"I'd like to see Kal,\" Andrew said. \"He is the president, and he alone can appoint the commander of the army.\"\n\n\"I told you he would say that,\" Emil interjected as he led the way up the steps and into the White House.\n\nFollowing Emil, he could not contain himself any longer and asked the question that had been tearing his soul apart ever since he had let go of the mantle of command.\n\n\"Any news from the front?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Emil replied. \"I think Pat cut the lines, though we've been trying to reach him all day. Of course, nothing from Tyre, though we have to assume a courier boat from Roum carrying the ceasefire order reached there last night.\"\n\n\"Not even a flyer?\"\n\n\"No, nothing.\"\n\n\"I hope these people realize that by doing this they've most likely condemned themselves to death.\"\n\n\"Andrew, they know that. They know as well that what Bugarin offered was death as well. A coward's death. It might have given them an extra month, maybe a year, maybe even five years, but in the end, without freedom, it would be death anyhow. At least now, if we're doomed, we go down with heads held high. I think that alone is worth fighting for.\"\n\nThey reached the door to Kal's sickroom. He stepped in, following Emil's lead. Kal was propped up in bed, features pale and drawn. The Lincolnesque beard was still there, and the unofficial symbol of his office, the stovepipe hat, was back by his side on the nightstand.\n\nAndrew approached the bed, and Kal, smiling weakly, patted the covers.\n\n\"Sit down, my old friend.\"\n\nJust the tone in his voice broke away all the tension of the last months. Andrew sat down and took his friend's hand.\n\n\"Once I'm out of this damned bed we should go off together, have a drink, and perhaps buy that pair of gloves we're always talking about.\"\n\nAndrew chuckled at the clumsy joke, for Kal had lost his right arm and Andrew his left.\n\n\"How are you, Kal?\"\n\n\"Better than I've ever been. Perhaps that bullet knocked some sense into my thick skull.\"\n\n\"You know what you are letting yourself in for?\"\n\n\"I know. Most likely a bloody end. But then again, my boyar often told me that would be how I finished.\"\n\n\"For everyone,\" Andrew whispered.\n\n\"That was our difference, my friend. I wanted a way out, any way out to stop the slaughter. You saw that the only way out was to endure it, to have the courage to fight your way through it. When I thought of Bugarin crawling before them, again offering us up, something finally changed in my heart, as if I was throwing off a sickness. Oh, he would be spared, perhaps even I would be spared, but I swore an oath to myself, long before the Republic, long before I was president, that never again would I see a child go into the slaughter pits. That I would die first, that I would rather see us all die than endure that again.\n\n\"You knew that all along. I had to relearn it. So if we are doomed to die, we'll die as free men. And as long as you are by my side, Colonel Andrew Keane, I will be content.\"\n\n\"Fine then,\" Andrew whispered, squeezing his friend's hand. \"Together, and perhaps we can still win.\"\n\nKal smiled.\n\n\"Actually, I think we shall. This afternoon I had a dream. You often told me that Lincoln was famous for such things.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"Strange. It was even like his dream. A ship, far out to sea, coming toward me. It sailed past, and I felt a strange wonderful peace.\"\n\n\"Good. Perhaps it will come true.\"\n\n\"There was something else, though. Someone was standing on the deck. I couldn't tell who. He was alone, but then he wasn't. The deck was crowded, so very crowded. I felt that it was the Ogunquit, the ship that bore you to this world, sailing one last time, perhaps back to where it came from, bearing with it all those who gave the final sacrifice. The lone man raised his hand, and then the ship disappeared into the mist.\"\n\nAndrew said nothing.\n\n\"Sleep, my friend. Perhaps you'll have another dream.\"\n\n\"I think I will. Knowing you're back, I feel safe again.\"\n\n\"I never really left.\"\n\nKal winked. \"I know that, too.\"\n\nAndrew looked up at Emil, who nodded, and with Kathleen quietly withdrew. Andrew sat by Kal's side, watching as his old friend drifted off.\n\nIt was a peaceful moment. A strange mix of feelings. On the one side an infinite sadness, knowing what was still to come, the sacrifice still to be made. On the other side, though, there was a tremendous swelling of pride. Win or lose, the people of Rus, of Roum had come together, mingled their blood, and out of that mingling a republic was born. And now, even if they should lose, they would not crawl basely into the night but would go with heads held high. The legend of it would then live on as well, and in the turning of years be remembered, be reborn, and finally triumph.\n\nHis thoughts drifted to Hans, wishing he was there to share the moment. As Hans had taught him, he had passed that strength and vision on to others. Everyone pointed to him, and yet actually it had been Hans all along who had shaped and guided him, and, in turn, he had created the Republic.\n\nHe heard renewed cheering outside, a wild tumultuous roaring that thundered up. Embarrassed, he stood up, gently releasing Kal's hand. They were most likely cheering the news that he had accepted reappointment; he would have to go out and give yet another speech, something he did not want to do just now.\n\nAnd then he saw Kathleen in the door, tears streaming down her cheeks.\n\n\"It's over,\" she gasped.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The war Andrew! It's over.\"\n\nHe couldn't speak, and then he sensed something else.\n\n\"The telegraph line just went back up to the front. Pat reports a message from the Bantag side. They are withdrawing. The Chin have revolted.\"\n\n\"Glory Hallelujah,\" Andrew gasped.\n\n\"Andrew.\"\n\nAnd then he knew, even before she whispered the words and fell into his arms crying.\n\n\"Andrew, darling. Hans is dead.\"\n\nHe couldn't speak. He held her tight, trying not to break.\n\nHe saw Emil and Casmir in the doorway.\n\nSo strange, such joy, and yet such pain in their eyes.\n\n\"Emil, stay with Kal. Let him sleep; if he wakes up, tell him, but don't say anything yet about Hans.\"\n\n\"That dream\u2014I think he already knew.\" Emil sighed.\n\nHe tried to step past Emil. The doctor touched him on the shoulder.\n\n\"The year, this year was a gift, Andrew. He came back to lead us one last time. Now the job is finished.\"\n\nAndrew nodded, unable to speak.\n\nHe stepped out of the room, and Kathleen stopped him.\n\n\"Andrew.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nShe nodded to Casmir, who was holding a package.\n\n\"I brought this with me; I thought you might want it.\"\n\nCasmir opened the package. Inside was Andrew's weather-stained uniform jacket, his Medal of Honor still pinned to the breast.\n\nHe nodded in agreement, and Casmir and Kathleen helped him remove his simple brown coat. The feel of the tight uniform somehow reassured him, and he wordlessly nodded his thanks.\n\nHolding Kathleen's hand, he walked down the corridor, passing the reception room where he and Hans had first stood before the Boyar Ivor, and at last gained the steps to the White House.\n\nOut in the square there was wild rejoicing, and though he was filled with grief, he could feel their joy as well. They had made the decision to stand and fight, redeeming their souls at that moment, and now they had discovered that it was not just their souls that had been redeemed, but their lives as well.\n\nAt the sight of him the cheering redoubled into a thunderous tumult, so that it seemed as if the very heavens would be torn asunder.\n\nHe stood silent, and then gradually the wild celebration died away. As if sensing his thoughts and his pain, a new chant emerged, \"Hans, Hans, Hans.\"\n\nThere was no rejoicing in it, only a deep and reverent respect.\n\nAlone he stood, eyes turned heavenward, imagining the ship Kal had dreamed of.\n\n\"Good-bye, Hans,\" he whispered. \"Good-bye and thank you, my comrade, my friend.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "\"As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free ..\n\nThe final refrain of the song echoed across the open steppes.\n\nColonel Andrew Lawrence Keane, commander of the Army of the Republic, stood stiffly at attention as the last chorus drifted away.\n\nThe ceremony was nearly done. All the dignitaries had spoken, as had he. Now there was only the final ritual.\n\nA company of soldiers, cadets of the 35th Maine, came to attention, the first rank making a sharp half turn.\n\n\"Present \u2026 fire!\"\n\nThe volley made him start. There was a momentary flash of memory, the first volley crashing into his line at Antietam.\n\n\"Present \u2026 fire!\"\n\nHe lifted his gaze. The ruins of what was now simply called the Foundry were before him. In front of it was the cemetery, neat orderly rows with simple stone slabs, thousands of them. Some were for single bodies, most marked mass graves, the thousands upon thousands who had died in the final battle of the war.\n\n\"Present \u2026 fire!\"\n\nIn the middle of the vast graveyard there was a lone cross. Some had wanted a towering monument, others a vast mausoleum, but his quiet insistence on what he knew his friend would have wanted had swept away all the grandiose proposals. Hans Schuder had tasted slavery, rose up, and cut free the chains, and then died coming back to liberate not just the people he called his comrades, but the world. To rest among those who had died with him that day was all the tribute he would want.\n\nAs the last volley died away, a lone bugler, concealed inside the ruins of the Foundry, blew the first notes of taps.\n\nIt was yet another ritual from the old world. It was a tune born of the Army of the Potomac, written by Dan Butterfield as nothing more than a signal for lights-out. Butterfield's lullaby many had come to call it. Hans had once said he was partial to it, and Andrew now thought it would be a fitting gesture.\n\nAs the bugler hit the final high note, a shiver seemed to go through those assembled. He could hear President Kal choking back tears. The note echoed and died away.\n\n\"Stand, at ease!\"\n\nThe order, given by a young Rus colonel who now commanded the 35th Maine, cut through the air. Andrew lowered his hand from the salute, the boys of the 35th slapping rifles from the present salute down to at ease.\n\nAndrew swept the assembly with his gaze. They were all here, having made the journey by rail from Suzdal to Roum, where the delegation of Roum senators and congressmen joined them. Then by rail all the way to Nippon, where yet more newly elected senators and congressmen joined in, and then finally to Chin.\n\nIt had been a year to the day since the ending of the war, and at last he had come to visit his friend and say a final farewell.\n\nThey had passed through the Roum lands devastated by the wars, and he was pleased to see new homes going up, tangled vineyards being cleared and replanted.\n\nThey had passed through the battlefields around Junction City, Rocky Hill, and the Shennadoah, and already monuments were going up to honor the regiments that had fought and died there. He had seen as well the orderly cemeteries at each place of battle and had stopped at each of them to offer his salute and his prayers.\n\nThere would still be four more. Tomorrow they would complete the long train ride and go to Xi'an, and from there take a boat to Carnagan, to visit the battlefield that still haunted Vincent, and from there to where Hans had made a stand in the retreat to Tyre, and, finally, a last stop at Tyre.\n\nBut this was the place that had been central to his tour of the battlefields of the war and the dedication of the cemeteries. The week before the Chin had held their first election, and Kal had made it a point to come to this place to witness the swearing in of the new senators and congressmen and congresswomen. Politics was even returning to normal, he realized. Kal had been up for reelection, and somehow it seemed like the admission of Nippon and Chin into the Republic didn't quite come until after the votes had been counted and the Republican Party had swept back in. Though the way feelings were at this moment in the first heady days of peace, Kal had nothing to fear; every last citizen, Chin, Roum, Rus, and Nippon would have voted for another term.\n\nThe amusing part of the admission of the Chin though was that they had indeed elected several women to office. It was an action which delighted him, though the election had scandalized some of the more straitlaced from Roum and Rus. He had pointed out that in the Constitution there was nothing that said a woman could not serve thus, and it was Kathleen who triggered even more of an uproar with a statement in Gates's Illustrated Weekly that there should be an amendment to the Constitution granting women the right to vote, and she planned to organize a movement to see that it was done.\n\nSo much in a year, he thought. Only this month the last of the Horde had been released by the terms of the treaty with Jurak and escorted to the border. A report had just come in as well that the remnants of the old Tugar Horde were joining them. So far there had been an uneasy peace, but he would feel far better when the expedition dispatched to make contact with those living a thousand leagues to the east returned with a report that the depredations of the Horde had indeed stopped along that distant border as well. Of the last of the horde clans, those who rode south and east of the Bantag and passed through the region half a dozen years ago there was no news; apparently they had simply ridden on, ignoring the conflict to the north. He sensed that someday they might have to be dealt with, but that was years, maybe even decades, off.\n\nHe had come to trust Jurak, having met with him twice in the months after the war, but unfortunately Jurak was a lone individual moving to break thousands of years of tradition. All reports indicated, though, that at least for now the moon feasts were finished, the riders of the Horde turning instead to hunting of the bison and the wool-clad elephants of the steppes.\n\nThere had come other reports, these from the south, beyond the realm of the Cartha, who only now were beginning to make the first overtures of peace. A Cartha merchant reported that there was a vast ocean in the southern half of the world, a realm few humans had seen. Andrew wondered what was out there, but for the moment that could wait.\n\nHe suddenly realized that he had been daydreaming again. Kathleen jokingly said that he was already beginning to slip into the mode of being a professor, a career he still promised he would return to once the demands of running the army diminished and he finally felt comfortable with letting go.\n\nHe stepped forward, his gaze sweeping the dignitaries gathered on the dais, the indomitable Father Casmir, Kal, Emil, Pat, Vincent, the other corps commanders, senators, and congressmen. As far as he could see, completely encompassing the Foundry and the graveyard stood hundreds of thousands of Chin, all of them silent, filled with reverent respect for this ceremony dedicated to their departed ancestors and to the one they now considered to be their eternal guardian in the spirit world above.\n\nHe waited. There was one final touch, and it was running a bit late. Finally, he heard them. The crowd shifted, looking to the west.\n\nA squadron of aerosteamers, half a dozen Eagles, followed by half a dozen Hornets winged straight in and a loud roaring cheer erupted, for these were the fulfillment of prophecy, the coming of the gods, the Yankee gods coming from the sky bringing redemption.\n\nThe aerosteamers soared overhead, and he caught a glimpse of Jack Petracci leaning out of the cab, snapping off a sharp salute. They continued on eastward.\n\nAndrew returned the salute. The cheering was deafening, and there was no sense in announcing that the ceremony was ended. His voice would never carry. He simply saluted the crowd, the gesture causing the wild cheering to redouble.\n\nThe fireworks, which had been carefully saved until after the aerosteamers were well out of range, started soaring heavenward, and even though it was the middle of the day, the crowd still clapped and cheered. Andrew turned to salute Kal, who, grinning, lifted his stovepipe hat in reply.\n\nAndrew looked over at Kathleen and nodded.\n\nSmiling, she came forward and took his hand. Together they stepped off the dais and carefully walked out into the graveyard. The band picked up a patriotic air, the marching song of the army, \"The Battle Cry of Freedom,\" and the music cut into his soul.\n\nSo many times I heard that, he thought wistfully, on the parade ground in Maine, on the road to Antietam as we crossed South Mountain, again on the road to Gettysburg, in the camps around Petersburg, then through so many hard-fought victories on this world. And now yet again here.\n\n\"Mind if we join you?\"\n\nIt was Pat, Vincent, and Emil trailing behind.\n\nAndrew smiled.\n\nTogether they walked to the middle of the cemetery. They stopped together before his grave. Andrew looked down at the mounded earth, finding it hard to believe that here was the final resting place of his oldest friend. No, not here, he tried to reason, and he thought again of Kal's dream. Kathleen let go of his hand, and he looked back and saw that Tamira, leading her son, was quietly approaching.\n\nKathleen put her arm around her shoulder. Andrew and the others respectfully drew back.\n\nShe knelt by the grave, placing a flower upon it, the boy doing the same.\n\n\"Papa here?\" the boy lisped.\n\n\"No,\" she replied softly, \"Papa in heaven.\"\n\nThe boy smiled and, as two-year-olds will, started to wander off.\n\nKathleen looked over at Andrew, eyes bright with tears, and again there was the deep unspoken understanding of love.\n\nHe nodded, and she turned, putting her arm around Tamira's shoulder, and led her away.\n\n\"You old Dutchman. Damn how I miss you.\" Pat sighed as he stepped forward, looked around awkwardly, wiping the tears from his eyes, and saluted. A bit self-consciously he reached into his pocket, pulled out a flask, raised it in salute, and took a drink. Recorking the flask, he laid it on the grave.\n\n\"Farewell, sir, and thank you.\" Vincent stepped forward and saluted. Gone were the rakish kepi and the Sheridan whiskers. The boy was clean-shaven, wearing a standard-issue slouch cap. Andrew studied him carefully and smiled inwardly. Hans always liked the lad, and he sensed that in Vincent he saw the same things Hans once saw in him. The icy fury of war had been purged out of the boy. He had seasoned into a commander who could lead, earn respect, and show compassion. Vincent shyly laid a single flower on the grave.\n\nEmil stepped up to join his friends. He started to say something, but couldn't. Lowering his head, he gently reached out and touched the headstone.\n\nAndrew caught a whisper of an ancient prayer in Hebrew. \"Yisgadahl, v'yiskadash \u2026\" With head still lowered, he finally stepped back.\n\nAs if by unspoken agreement, the three looked back at Andrew and nodded. They turned, Pat in the middle, the other two with hands on either shoulder, and walked off, leaving Andrew alone.\n\nThere was nothing more to be said, Andrew realized. The tears were all but gone, replaced with a sad yet happy memory of all that had been, of all they had done and all the dreams still to come.\n\nHere at last the Lost Regiment had found a home and a country. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a precious keepsake of the other world.\n\n\"It was always yours, Hans,\" he whispered through his tears. \"I just hung on to it for a little while.\"\n\nHe placed the object on the grave, stepped back, and saluted.\n\n\"Good-bye my old friend.\"\n\nAs he started to turn he saw the colors passing by the edge of the cemetery, the regiment following in close order, accompanied by the band still playing the \"Battle Cry of Freedom.\"\n\nComing to attention he saluted the passing of the colors of the 35th Maine, the 44th New York Light Artillery, and the flag of the Republic.\n\nColonel Andrew Lawrence Keane, commander of the Army of the Republic, quietly left the cemetery to rejoin his friends \u2026 leaving behind, on the grave of Sergeant Major Hans Schuder \u2026 the Medal of Honor given for heroism above and beyond the call of duty." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Leviathan 3) Goliath", + "author": "Scott Westerfeld", + "genres": [ + "alternate history", + "steampunk" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "\"Siberia,\" Alek said. The word slipped cold and hard from his tongue, as forbidding as the landscape passing below.\n\n\"We won't be over Siberia till tomorrow.\" Dylan sat at the table, still attacking his breakfast. \"And it'll take almost a week to cross it. Russia is barking big.\"\n\n\"And cold,\" Newkirk added. He stood next to Alek at the window of the middies' mess, both hands wrapped around a cup of tea.\n\n\"Cold,\" repeated Bovril. The creature clutched Alek's shoulder a little tighter, and a shiver went through its body.\n\nIn early October no snow lay on the ground below. But the sky was an icy, cloudless blue. The window had a lace of frost around its edges, left over from a frigid night.\n\nAnother week of flying across this wasteland, Alek thought. Farther from Europe and the war, and from his destiny. The Leviathan was still headed east, probably toward the empire of Japan, though no one would confirm their destination. Even though he'd helped the British cause back in Istanbul, the airship's officers still saw Alek and his men as little better than prisoners. He was a Clanker prince and they were Darwinists, and the Great War between the two technologies was spreading faster every day.\n\n\"It'll get much colder as we angle north,\" Dylan said around a mouthful of his breakfast. \"You should both finish your potatoes. They'll keep you warm.\"\n\nAlek turned. \"But we're already north of Tokyo. Why go out of our way?\"\n\n\"We're dead on course,\" Dylan said. \"Mr. Rigby made us plot a great circle route last week, and it took us all the way up to Omsk.\"\n\n\"A great circle route?\"\n\n\"It's a navigator's trick,\" Newkirk explained. He breathed on the window glass before him, then drew an upside-down smile with one fingertip. \"The earth is round, but paper is flat, right? So a straight course looks curved when you draw it on a map. You always wind up going farther north than you'd think.\"\n\n\"Except below the equator,\" Dylan added. \"Then it's the other way round.\"\n\nBovril chuckled, as if great circle routes were quite amusing. But Alek hadn't followed a word of it\u2014not that he'd expected to.\n\nIt was maddening. Two weeks ago he'd helped lead a revolution against the Ottoman sultan, ruler of an ancient empire. The rebels had welcomed Alek's counsel, his piloting skills, and his gold. And together they'd won.\n\nBut here aboard the Leviathan he was deadweight\u2014a waste of hydrogen, as the crew called anything useless. He might spend his days beside Dylan and Newkirk, but he was no midshipman. He couldn't take a sextant reading, tie a decent knot, or estimate the ship's altitude.\n\nWorst of all, Alek was no longer needed in the engine pods. In the month he'd been plotting revolution in Istanbul, the Darwinist engineers had learned a lot about Clanker mechaniks. Hoffman and Klopp were no longer called up to help with the engines, so there was hardly any need for a translator.\n\nSince the first time he'd come aboard, Alek had dreamed of somehow serving on the Leviathan. But everything he could offer\u2014walker piloting, fencing, speaking six languages, and being a grandnephew of an emperor\u2014seemed to be worthless on an airship. He was no doubt more valuable as a young prince who had famously switched sides than as an airman.\n\nIt was as if everyone were trying to make him a waste of hydrogen.\n\nThen Alek remembered a saying of his father's: The only way to remedy ignorance is to admit it.\n\nHe took a slow breath. \"I'm aware that the earth is round, Mr. Newkirk. But I still don't understand this 'great circle route' business.\"\n\n\"It's dead easy to see if you've got a globe in front of you,\" Dylan said, pushing away his plate. \"There's one in the navigation room. We'll sneak in sometime when the officers aren't there.\"\n\n\"That would be most agreeable.\" Alek turned back to the window and clasped his hands behind his back.\n\n\"It's nothing to be ashamed of, Prince Aleksandar,\" Newkirk said. \"Still takes me ages to plot a proper course. Not like Mr. Sharp here, knowing all about sextants before he even joined the Service.\"\n\n\"Not all of us are lucky enough to have an airman for a father,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Father?\" Newkirk turned from the window, frowning. \"Wasn't that your uncle, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\nBovril made a soft noise, sinking its tiny claws into Alek's shoulder. Dylan said nothing, though. He seldom spoke of his father, who had burned to death in front of the boy's eyes. The accident still haunted Dylan, and fire was the only thing that frightened him.\n\nAlek cursed himself as a Dummkopf, wondering why he'd mentioned the man. Was he angry at Dylan for always being so good at everything?\n\nHe was about to apologize when Bovril shifted again, leaning forward to stare out the window.\n\n\"Beastie,\" the perspicacious loris said.\n\nA black fleck had glided into view, wheeling across the empty blue sky. It was a huge bird, much bigger than the falcons that had circled the airship in the mountains a few days before. It had the size and claws of a predator, but its shape was unlike any Alek had seen before.\n\nIt was headed straight for the ship.\n\n\"Does that bird look odd to you, Mr. Newkirk?\"\n\nNewkirk turned back to the window and raised his field glasses, which were still around his neck from the morning watch.\n\n\"Aye,\" he said a moment later. \"I think it's an imperial eagle!\"\n\nThere was a hasty scrape of chair legs from behind them. Dylan appeared at the window, shielding his eyes with both hands.\n\n\"Blisters, you're right\u2014two heads! But imperials only carry messages from the czar himself. . . .\"\n\nAlek glanced at Dylan, wondering if he'd heard right. Two heads?\n\nThe eagle soared closer, flashing past the window in a blur of black feathers, a glint of gold from its harness catching the morning sun. Bovril broke into maniacal laughter at its passage.\n\n\"It's headed for the bridge, right?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Aye.\" Newkirk lowered his field glasses. \"Important messages go straight to the captain.\"\n\nA bit of hope pried its way into Alek's dark mood. The Russians were allies of the British, fellow Darwinists who fabricated mammothines and giant fighting bears. What if the czar needed help against the Clanker armies and this was a summons to turn the ship around? Even fighting on the icy Russian front would be better than wasting time in this wilderness.\n\n\"I need to know what that message says.\"\n\nNewkirk snorted. \"Why don't you go and ask the captain, then?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Dylan said. \"And while you're at it, ask him to give me a warmer cabin.\"\n\n\"What can it hurt?\" Alek said. \"He hasn't thrown me into the brig yet.\"\n\nWhen Alek had returned to the Leviathan two weeks ago, he'd half expected to be put in chains for escaping from the ship. But the ship's officers had treated him with respect.\n\nPerhaps it wasn't so bad, everyone finally knowing he was the son of the late Archduke Ferdinand, and not just some Austrian noble trying to escape the war.\n\n\"What's a good excuse to pay the bridge a visit?\" he asked.\n\n\"No need for excuses,\" Newkirk said. \"That bird's flown all the way from Saint Petersburg. They'll call us to come and fetch it for a rest and a feeding.\"\n\n\"And you've never seen the rookery, your princeliness,\" Dylan added. \"Might as well tag along.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Sharp,\" Alek said, smiling. \"I would like that.\"\n\nDylan returned to the table and his precious potatoes, perhaps grateful that the talk of his father had been interrupted. Alek decided he would apologize before the day was out.\n\nTen minutes later a message lizard popped its head from a tube on the ceiling in the middies' mess. It said in the master coxswain's voice, \"Mr. Sharp, please come to the bridge. Mr. Newkirk, report to the cargo deck.\"\n\nThe three of them scrambled for the door.\n\n\"Cargo deck?\" Newkirk said. \"What in blazes is that about?\"\n\n\"Maybe they want you to inventory the stocks again,\" Dylan said. \"This trip might have just got longer.\"\n\nAlek frowned. Would \"longer\" mean turning back toward Europe, or heading still farther away?\n\nAs the three made their way toward the bridge, he sensed the ship stirring around them. No alert had sounded, but the crew was bustling. When Newkirk peeled off to descend the central stairway, a squad of riggers in flight suits went storming past, also headed down.\n\n\"Where in blazes are they going?\" Alek asked. Riggers always worked topside, in the ropes that held the ship's huge hydrogen membrane.\n\n\"A dead good question,\" Dylan said. \"The czar's message seems to have turned us upside down.\"\n\nThe bridge had a guard posted at the door, and a dozen message lizards clung to the ceiling, waiting for orders to be dispatched. There was a sharp edge to the usual thrum of men and creatures and machines. Bovril shifted on Alek's shoulder, and he felt the engines change pitch through the soles of his boots\u2014the ship was coming to full-ahead.\n\nUp at the ship's master wheel, the officers were huddled around the captain, who held an ornate scroll. Dr. Barlow was among the group, her own loris on her shoulder, her pet thylacine, Tazza, sitting at her side.\n\nA squawk came from Alek's right, and he turned to find himself face-to-face with the most astonishing creature. . . .\n\nThe imperial eagle was too large to fit into the bridge's messenger cage, and it perched instead on the signals table. It shifted from one taloned claw to the other, glossy black wings fluttering.\n\nAnd what Dylan had said was true. The creature had two heads, and two necks, of course, coiled around each other like a pair of black feathered snakes. As Alek watched in horror, one head snapped at the other, a bright red tongue slithering from its mouth.\n\n\"God's wounds,\" he breathed.\n\n\"Like we told you,\" Dylan said. \"It's an imperial eagle.\"\n\n\"It's an abomination, you mean.\" Sometimes the Darwinists' creatures seemed to have been fabricated not for their usefulness, but simply to be horrific.\n\nDylan shrugged. \"It's just a two-headed bird, like on the czar's crest.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Alek sputtered. \"But that's meant to be symbolic.\"\n\n\"Aye, this beastie's symbolic. It's just breathing as well.\"\n\n\"Prince Aleksandar, good morning.\" Dr. Barlow had left the group of officers and crossed the bridge, the czar's scroll in her hand. \"I see you've met our visitor. Quite a fine example of Russian fabrication, is it not?\"\n\n\"Good morning, madam.\" Alek bowed. \"I'm not sure what this creature is a fine example of, only that I find it a bit . . .\" He swallowed, watching Dylan slip on a pair of thick falconer's gloves.\n\n\"TWO-HEADED MESSENGER.\"\n\n\"Literal-minded?\" Dr. Barlow chuckled softly. \"I suppose, but Czar Nicholas does enjoy his pets.\"\n\n\"Pets, fah!\" her loris repeated from its new perch on the messenger tern cages, and Bovril giggled. The two creatures began to whisper nonsense to each other, as they always did when they met.\n\nAlek pulled his gaze from the eagle. \"In fact, I'm more interested in the message it was carrying.\"\n\n\"Ah . . .\" Her hands began to roll up the scroll. \"I'm afraid that is a military secret, for the moment.\"\n\nAlek scowled. His allies in Istanbul had never kept secrets from him.\n\nIf only he could have stayed there somehow. According to the newspapers, the rebels had control of the capital now, and the rest of the Ottoman Empire was falling under their sway. He would have been respected there\u2014useful, instead of a waste of hydrogen. Indeed, helping the rebels overthrow the sultan had been the most useful thing he'd ever done. It had robbed the Germans of a Clanker ally and had proven that he, Prince Aleksandar of Hohenburg, could make a difference in this war.\n\nWhy had he listened to Dylan and come back to this abomination of an airship?\n\n\"Are you quite all right, Prince?\" Dr. Barlow asked.\n\n\"I just wish I knew what you Darwinists were up to,\" Alek said, a sudden quiver of anger in his voice. \"At least if you were taking me and my men to London in chains, it would make sense. What's the point of lugging us halfway around the world?\"\n\nDr. Barlow spoke soothingly. \"We all go where the war takes us, Prince Aleksandar. You haven't had such bad luck on this ship, have you?\"\n\nAlek scowled but couldn't argue. The Leviathan had saved him from spending the war hiding out in a freezing castle in the Alps, after all. And it had taken him to Istanbul, where he'd struck his first blow against the Germans.\n\nHe gathered himself. \"Perhaps not, Dr. Barlow. But I prefer to choose my own course.\"\n\n\"That time may come sooner than you think.\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow, wondering what she meant.\n\n\"Come on, your princeliness,\" Dylan said. The eagle was now hooded and perching quietly on his arm. \"It's useless arguing with boffins. And we've got a bird to feed.\"\n\nThe eagle turned out to be quite peaceable, once Deryn had stuffed a pair of hoods over its cantankerous heads.\n\nIt sat heavy on her gloved arm, a good ten pounds of muscle and guts. As she and Alek walked aft, Deryn soon found herself thankful that birds had hollow bones.\n\nThe rookery was separate from the main gondola, halfway back to the ventral fin. The walkway leading there was warmed by the gastric channel's heat, but the freezing wind of the airship's passage sent ripples through the membrane walls on either side. Considering the fact that they were inside a thousand-foot-long airship made from the life threads of a whale and a hundred other species, it hardly smelled at all. The scent was like a mix of animal sweat and clart, like a stable in summer.\n\nBeside her, Alek kept a wary eye on the imperial eagle.\n\n\"Do you suppose it has two brains?\"\n\n\"Of course it does,\" Deryn said. \"What use is a head without a brain?\"\n\nBovril chuckled at this, as if it knew that Deryn had almost made a joke about Clankers in this regard. Alek had been in a touchy mood all morning, so she hadn't.\n\n\"What if they have a disagreement about which way to fly?\"\n\nDeryn laughed. \"They settle it with a fight, I suppose, same as anyone. But I doubt they argue that much. A bird's attic is mostly optic nerve\u2014more eyesight than brainpower.\"\n\n\"So at least it doesn't know how horrid it looks.\"\n\nA squawk came from beneath one of the hoods, and Bovril imitated the sound.\n\nDeryn frowned. \"If two-headed beasties are so horrible, how come you had one painted on your Stormwalker?\"\n\n\"That was the Hapsburg crest. The symbol of my family.\"\n\n\"What's it symbolic of? Squeamishness?\"\n\nAlek rolled his eyes, then launched into a lecture. \"The two-headed eagle was first used by the Byzantines, to show that their empire ruled both east and west. But when a modern royal house uses the symbol, one of the heads symbolizes earthly power, the other divine right.\"\n\n\"Divine right?\"\n\n\"The principle that a king's power is bestowed by God.\"\n\nDeryn let out a snort. \"Let me guess who came up with that one. Was it a king, maybe?\"\n\n\"It's a bit old-fashioned, I suppose,\" Alek said, but Deryn wondered if he believed it anyway. His attic was full of all kinds of old yackum, and he was always talking about how providence had guided him since he'd left home. How it was his destiny to stop this war.\n\nAs far as she could tell, the war was too big for any one person to stop, prince or commoner, and fate didn't care a squick about what anybody was meant to do. It was Deryn's destiny to be a girl, after all, stuffed into skirts and stuck with squalling brats somewhere. But she'd avoided that fate well enough, with a little help from her tailoring.\n\nOf course, there were other fates she hadn't escaped, like falling for a daft prince in a way that filled her head with unsoldierly nonsense. Like being his best friend, his ally, while a steady, hopeless longing pulled at her heart.\n\nIt was just lucky that Alek was too wrapped up in his own troubles, and the troubles of the whole barking world, to notice. Of course, hiding her feelings was made a bit easier by the fact that he didn't know she was a girl. No one aboard did except Count Volger, who, despite being a bumrag, at least had a knack for keeping secrets.\n\nThey arrived at the hatch to the rookery, and Deryn reached for the pressure lock. But with only one free hand, the mechanism was a fiddle in the darkness.\n\n\"Give us some light, your divine princeliness?\"\n\n\"Certainly, Mr. Sharp,\" Alek said, pulling out his command whistle. He gave it a studious look, then played the tune.\n\nThe glowworms behind the airship's skin began to flicker, and a soft green light suffused the corridor. Then Bovril joined in with the whistle, its voice as shimmery as a box of silver bells. The light grew sharp and bright.\n\n\"Good job, beastie,\" Deryn said. \"We'll make a middy of you yet.\"\n\nAlek sighed. \"Which is more than you can say for me.\"\n\nDeryn ignored his moping and opened the rookery door. As the ruckus of squawks and shrieks spilled out, the imperial clutched her arm tighter, its talons sharp even through the leather of the falconer's glove.\n\nShe led Alek along the raised walkway, looking for an empty space below. There were nine cages altogether, three underneath her and three on either side, each twice as tall as a man. The smaller raptors and messengers were a blur of fluttering wings, while the strafing hawks sat regally on their perches, ignoring the lesser birds around them.\n\n\"God's wounds!\" Alek said from behind her. \"It's a madhouse in here.\"\n\n\"Madhouse,\" Bovril said, and leapt from Alek's shoulder to the handrail.\n\nDeryn shook her head. Alek and his men often found the airship too messy for their liking. Life was a tumultuous and muddled thing, compared with the tidy clockwork of Clanker contraptions. The ecosystem of the Leviathan, with its hundred interlocking species, was far more complex than any lifeless machine, and thus a bit less orderly. But that was what kept the world interesting, Deryn reckoned; reality had no gears, and you never knew what surprises would come spinning out of its chaos.\n\n\"SECRETS IN THE ROOKERY.\"\n\nShe'd certainly never expected to help lead a Clanker revolution one day, or be kissed by a girl, or fall for a prince. But that had all happened in the last month, and the war was just getting started.\n\nDeryn spotted the cage that the rook tenders had emptied, and pulled the loading chute into place above it. It wouldn't do to put the imperial in with other birds\u2014not while it was hungry.\n\nIn one swift motion she snatched the hoods off and pushed the beastie into the chute. It fluttered down into the cage, spinning in the air like a windblown leaf for a moment. Then it came to rest on the largest perch.\n\nFrom there the imperial eyed its fellow creatures through the bars, shifting from foot to foot unhappily. Deryn wondered what sort of cage it lived in back at the czar's palace. Probably one with gleaming bars, with fat mice served up on silver platters, and no smell of other birds' clart thickening the air.\n\n\"Dylan,\" Alek said. \"While we have a moment alone . . .\"\n\nShe turned to face him. He was standing close, his green eyes glinting in the darkness. It was always hardest meeting Alek's gaze when he was dead serious like this, but she managed.\n\n\"I'm sorry about bringing up your father earlier,\" he said. \"I know how that still haunts you.\"\n\nDeryn sighed, wondering if she should simply tell him not to worry. But it had been a bit tricky, what with Newkirk mentioning her uncle. It might be safer to tell Alek the truth\u2014at least, as much of it as she possibly could.\n\n\"No need to apologize,\" she said. \"But there's something you should know. That night I told you about my da's accident, I didn't quite explain everything.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"Well, Artemis Sharp really was my da, just like I said.\" Deryn took a slow breath. \"But everyone in the Air Service thinks he was my uncle.\"\n\nShe could see from Alek's expression that it made no sense at all, and without her even trying, lies began to spin from her tongue.\n\n\"When I signed up, my older brother Jaspert was already in the Service. So we couldn't say we were brothers.\"\n\nThat was blether, of course. The real reason was that Jaspert had already told his crewmates about his only sibling, a younger sister. A brother popping out of thin air might have been a squick confusing.\n\n\"We pretended to be cousins. You see?\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"Brothers don't serve together in your military?\"\n\n\"Not when their father's dead. You see, we're his only children. And so if we both . . .\" She shrugged, hoping he'd believe it.\n\n\"Ah, to keep the family name alive. Very sensible. And that's why your mother didn't want you signing up?\"\n\nDeryn nodded glumly, wondering how her lies always got so barking complicated. \"I didn't mean to mix you up in a deception. But that night I thought you were leaving the ship for good. So I told you the truth, instead of what I tell everyone else.\"\n\n\"The truth,\" Bovril repeated. \"Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nAlek reached up and touched his jacket pocket. Deryn knew that was where he kept his letter from the pope, the one that could make him emperor one day. \"Don't worry, Dylan. I'll keep all your secrets, as you've kept mine.\"\n\nDeryn groaned. She hated it when Alek said that. Because he couldn't keep all her secrets, could he? He didn't know the biggest of them.\n\nAll of sudden she didn't want to lie anymore. Not this much, anyway.\n\n\"Wait,\" she said. \"I just told you a load of yackum. Brothers can serve together. It's something else.\"\n\n\"Yackum,\" Bovril repeated. Alek just stood there, concern on his face.\n\n\"But I can't tell you the real reason,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because . . .\" she was a commoner, and he was a prince. Because he'd run a mile if he knew. \"You'd think less of me.\"\n\nHe stared at Deryn a moment, then reached out and took her shoulder. \"You're the best soldier I've ever met, Dylan. The boy I'd have wanted to be, if I hadn't wound up such a useless prince. I could never think badly of you.\"\n\nShe groaned, turning away and wishing an alert would sound, an attack of zeppelins or a lightning storm. Anything to extract her from this conversation.\n\n\"Listen,\" Alek said, dropping his hand. \"Even if your family has some deep, dark secret, who am I to judge? My granduncle conspired with the men who killed my parents, for heaven's sake!\"\n\nDeryn had no idea what to say to that. Alek had got it all wrong, of course. It wasn't some musty family secret; it was hers alone. He would always get it all wrong, until she told him the truth.\n\nAnd that, she could never do.\n\n\"Please, Alek. I can't. And . . . I've got a fencing lesson.\"\n\nAlek smiled, the perfect picture of a patient friend. \"Anytime you want to tell me, Dylan. Until then, I won't ask again.\"\n\nShe nodded silently, and walked ahead of him the whole way back.\n\n\"Rather late with my breakfast, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Sorry about that, your countship,\" Deryn said, plunking the tray down on Count Volger's desk. A splash of coffee sloshed out of the pot and onto the toast. \"But here it is.\"\n\nThe wildcount raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"And your newspapers as well,\" she said, pulling them from beneath her arm. \"Dr. Barlow saved them especially for you. Though I don't know why she bothers.\"\n\nVolger took the papers, then picked up the soggy piece of toast and shook it. \"You seem to be in rather a lively mood this morning, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Aye, well, I've been busy.\" Deryn frowned at the man. It was lying to Alek that had put her in a huff, of course, but she felt like blaming Count Volger. \"I won't have time for a fencing lesson.\"\n\n\"Pity. You're coming along so well,\" he said. \"For a girl.\"\n\nDeryn scowled at the man. Guards were no longer posted outside the Clankers' staterooms, but someone passing in the corridor might have heard. She crossed to shut the cabin door, then turned back to the wildcount.\n\nHe was the only person on the airship who knew what she really was, and he generally took care not to mention it aloud.\n\n\"What do you want?\" she said quietly.\n\nHe didn't look up at her, but instead fussed with his breakfast as if this were a friendly chat. \"I've noticed the crew seems to be preparing for something.\"\n\n\"Aye, we got a message this morning. From the czar.\"\n\nVolger looked up. \"The czar? Are we changing course?\"\n\n\"That's a military secret, I'm afraid. No one knows except the officers.\" Deryn frowned. \"And the lady boffin, I suppose. Alek asked her, but she wouldn't say.\"\n\nThe wildcount scraped butter onto his half soggy toast, giving this a think.\n\nDuring the month Deryn had been hiding in Istanbul, the wildcount and Dr. Barlow had entered into some sort of alliance. Dr. Barlow made sure he was kept up with news about the war, and Volger gave her his opinions on Clanker politics and strategy. But Deryn doubted the lady boffin would answer this question for him. Newspapers and rumors were one thing, sealed orders quite another.\n\n\"Perhaps you could find out for me.\"\n\n\"No, I couldn't,\" Deryn said. \"It's a military secret.\"\n\nVolger poured coffee. \"And yet secrets can be so difficult to keep sometimes. Don't you think?\"\n\nDeryn felt a cold dizziness rising up inside, as it always did when Count Volger threatened her. There was something unthinkable about everyone finding out what she was. She wouldn't be an airman anymore, and Alek would never speak to her again.\n\nBut this morning she was not in the mood for blackmail.\n\n\"I can't help you, Count. Only the senior officers know.\"\n\n\"But I'm sure a girl as resourceful as you, so obviously adept at subterfuge, could find out. One secret unraveled to keep another safe?\"\n\nThe fear burned cold now in Deryn's belly, and she almost gave in. But then something Alek had said popped into her head.\n\n\"You can't let Alek find out about me.\"\n\n\"And why not?\" Volger asked, pouring himself tea.\n\n\"He and I were just in the rookery together, and I almost told him. That happens sometimes.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it does. But you didn't tell him, did you?\" Volger tutted. \"Because you know how he would react. However fond you two are of each other, you are a commoner.\"\n\n\"Aye, I know that. But I'm also a soldier, a barking good one.\" She took a step closer, trying to keep any quaver out of her voice. \"I'm the very soldier Alek might have been, if he hadn't been raised by a pack of fancy-boots like you. I've got the life he missed by being an archduke's son.\"\n\nVolger frowned, not understanding yet, but it was all coming clear in Deryn's mind.\n\n\"I'm the boy Alek wants to be, more than anything. And you want to tell him that I'm really a girl? On top of losing his parents and his home, how do you think he'll take that news, your countship?\"\n\nThe man stared at her for another moment, then went back to stirring his tea. \"It might be rather . . . unsettling for him.\"\n\n\"Aye, it might. Enjoy your breakfast, Count.\"\n\nDeryn found herself smiling as she turned and left the room.\n\nAs the great jaw of the cargo door opened, a freezing whirlwind spilled inside and leapt about the cargo bay, setting the leather straps of Deryn's flight suit snapping and fluttering. She pulled on her goggles and leaned out, peering at the terrain rushing past below.\n\nThe ground was patched with snow and dotted with pine trees. The Leviathan had passed over the Siberian city of Omsk that morning, not pausing to resupply, still veering northward toward some secret destination. But Deryn hadn't found time to wonder where they were heading; in the thirty hours since the imperial eagle had arrived, she'd been busy training for this cargo snatch-up.\n\n\"Where's the bear?\" Newkirk asked. He leaned out past her, dangling from his safety line over thin air.\n\n\"Ahead of us, saving its strength.\" Deryn pulled her gloves tighter, then tested her weight against the heavy cable on the cargo winch. It was as thick as her wrist\u2014rated to lift a two-ton pallet of supplies. The riggers had been fiddling with the apparatus all day, but this was its first real test. This particular maneuver wasn't even in the Manual of Aeronautics.\n\n\"Don't like bears,\" Newkirk muttered. \"Some beasties are too barking huge.\"\n\nDeryn gestured at the grappling hook at the end of the cable, as big as a ballroom chandelier. \"Then you'd best make sure not to stick that up the beastie's nose by accident. It might take exception.\"\n\nThrough the lenses of his goggles, Newkirk's eyes went wide.\n\nDeryn gave him a punch on the shoulder, envying him for his station at the business end of the cable. It wasn't fair that Newkirk had been gaining airmanship skills while she and Alek had been plotting rebellion in Istanbul.\n\n\"Thanks for making me even more nervous, Mr. Sharp!\"\n\n\"I thought you'd done this before.\"\n\n\"We did a few snatch-ups in Greece. But those were just mailbags, not heavy cargo. And from horse-drawn carriages instead of off the back of a barking great bear!\"\n\n\"That does sound a bit different,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"Same principle, lads, and it'll work the same way,\" came Mr. Rigby from behind them. His eyes were on his pocket watch, but his ears never missed a thing, even in the howling Siberian wind. \"Your wings, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir. Like a good guardian angel.\" Deryn hoisted the gliding wings onto her shoulders. She would be carrying Newkirk, using the wings to guide him over the fighting bear.\n\nMr. Rigby signaled to the winch men. \"Good luck, lads.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir!\" the two middies said together.\n\nThe winch began to turn, and the grappling hook slid down toward the open cargo bay door. Newkirk took hold of it and clipped himself onto a smaller cable, which would hold their combined weight as they flew.\n\nDeryn let her gliding wings spread out. As she stepped toward the cargo door, the wind grew stronger and colder. Even through amber goggles the sunlight made her squint. She grasped the harness straps that connected her to Newkirk.\n\n\"Ready?\" she shouted.\n\nHe nodded, and together they stepped off into roaring emptiness. . . .\n\nThe freezing airstream yanked Deryn sternward, and the world spun around once, sky and earth gyrating wildly. But then her gliding wings caught the air, stabilized by the dangling Newkirk, like a kite held steady by its string.\n\nThe Leviathan was beginning its descent. Its shadow grew below them, rippling in a furious black surge across the ground. Newkirk still grasped the grappling hook, his arms wrapped around the cable against the onrush of air.\n\nDeryn flexed her gliding wings. They were the same kind she'd worn a dozen times on Huxley descents, but free-ballooning was nothing compared to being dragged behind an airship at top speed. The wings strained to pull her to starboard, and Newkirk followed, swinging slowly across the blur of terrain below. When Deryn centered her course again, she and Newkirk swung back and forth beneath the airship, like a giant pendulum coming to rest.\n\nThe fragile wings were barely strong enough to steer the weight of two middies. The Leviathan's pilots would have to put them dead on target, leaving only the fine adjustments for Deryn.\n\nThe airship continued its descent, until she and Newkirk were no more than twenty yards above the ground. He yelped as his boots skimmed the top of a tall pine tree, sending off a burst of needles shiny with ice.\n\nDeryn looked ahead . . . and saw the fighting bear.\n\nShe and Alek had spotted a few that morning, their dark shapes winding along the Trans-Siberian Trailway. They'd looked impressive enough from a thousand feet, but from this altitude the beast was truly monstrous. Its shoulders stood as tall as a house, and its hot breath coiled up into the freezing air like chimney smoke.\n\nA large cargo platform was strapped to its back. A pallet waited there, a flattened loop of metal ready for Newkirk's grappling hook. Four crewmen in Russian uniforms scampered about the bear, checking the straps and netting that held the secret cargo.\n\nThe driver's long whip flicked into the air and fell, and the bear began to lumber away. It was headed down a long, straight section of the trailway aligned with the Leviathan's course.\n\nThe beastie's gait gradually lengthened into a run. According to Dr. Busk, the bear could match the airship's speed only for a short time. If Newkirk didn't get the hook right on the first pass, they'd have to swing around in a slow circle, letting the creature rest. The hours saved by not landing and loading in the normal way would be half lost.\n\nAnd the czar, it seemed, wanted this cargo at its destination barking fast.\n\nAs the airship drew closer to the bear, Deryn felt its thundering tread bruising the air. Puffs of dirt drifted up from the cold, hard-packed ground in its wake. She tried to imagine a squadron of such monsters charging into battle, glittering with fighting spurs and carrying a score of riflemen each. The Germans must have been mad to provoke this war, pitting their machines not only against the airships and kraken of Britain, but also the huge land beasts of Russia and France.\n\nShe and Newkirk were over the straightaway now, safe from treetops. The Trans-Siberian Trailway was one of the wonders of the world, even Alek had admitted. Stamped flat by mammothines, it stretched from Moscow to the Sea of Japan and was as wide as a cricket oval\u2014room enough for two bears to pass in opposite directions without annoying each other.\n\nTricky beasties, ursines. All last night Mr. Rigby had regaled Newkirk with tales of them eating their handlers.\n\nThe Leviathan soon caught up to the bear, and Newkirk signaled for Deryn to pull him to port. She angled her wings, feeling the tug of airflow surround her body, and she briefly thought of Lilit in her body kite. Deryn wondered how the girl was doing in the new Ottoman Republic. Then shook the thought from her head.\n\nThe pallet was drawing near, but the loop Newkirk was preparing to grab rose and fell with the bounding gait of the giant bear. Newkirk began to lower the grappling hook, trying to swing it a little nearer to its target. One of the Russians climbed higher on the cargo pallet, reaching up to help.\n\nDeryn angled her wings a squick, drawing Newkirk still farther to port.\n\n\"HOOKING THE PACKAGE.\"\n\nHe thrust out the grappling hook, and metal struck metal, the rasp and clink of contact sharp in the cold wind\u2014the hook snapped into the loop!\n\nThe Russians shouted and began to loosen the straps that held the pallet to the platform. The bear's driver waved his whip back and forth, the signal for the Leviathan's pilots to ascend.\n\nThe airship angled its nose up, and the grappling hook tightened its grip on the loop, the thick cable going taut beside Deryn. Of course, the pallet didn't lift from the fighting bear's back\u2014not yet. You couldn't add two tons to an airship's weight and expect it to climb right away.\n\nBallast began to spill from the Leviathan's ports. Pumped straight from the gastric channel, the brackish water hit the air as warm as piss. But in the Siberian wind it froze instantly, a spray of glittering ice halos in the air.\n\nA moment later the ice stung Deryn's face in a driving hail, pinging against her goggles. She gritted her teeth, but a laugh spilled out of her. They'd hit on the first pass, and soon the cargo would be airborne. And she was flying!\n\nBut as her laughter faded, a low growl came rumbling through the air, a sovereign and angry sound that chilled Deryn's bones worse than any Siberian wind.\n\nThe fighting bear was getting twitchy.\n\nAnd it stood to reason. The frozen clart of a thousand beasties was raining down onto its head, carrying the scents of message lizards and glowworms, Huxleys and hydrogen sniffers, bats and bees and birds and the great whale itself\u2014a hundred species that the fighting bear had never smelled before.\n\nIts head reared up and let out another roar, and the great brown shoulders rippled with annoyance, tossing the Russian crewmen into the air. They landed safely, as surefooted as airmen in a storm.\n\nThe grappling hook clanked in its loop as the bear jerked about, and the cargo line snapped and quivered beside Deryn. She threw her weight to the left, trying to pull herself and Newkirk to safety.\n\nThe driver's whip rose and fell a few times, and the bear settled a little. As more ballast glittered in the air above, the cargo finally began to lift.\n\nThe last one of the fighting bear's crewmen leapt from the pallet, then turned to wave. Deryn saluted him back as the bear slowed to a halt. The cargo spun in the air now, skimming just above the ground.\n\nDeryn frowned. Why wasn't the Leviathan climbing faster? They didn't have much time before the next bend in the trailway, and she, Newkirk, and the cargo were still below treetop level.\n\nShe looked up. The spray of water had stopped. The ballast tanks were empty. The Clanker engines were roaring and belching smoke, trying to create aerodynamic lift. But the airship was climbing too slowly.\n\nDeryn frowned. Dr. Busk, the head boffin himself, had done the calculations for this snatch-up. He'd cut it close, to be sure, with a long trip still ahead of them. But Deryn and Mr. Rigby had supervised the ejecting of supplies over the tundra, bringing the ship to exactly the right weight. . . .\n\nUnless the cargo pallet was heavier than the czar's letter had promised.\n\n\"Barking kings!\" Deryn shouted. Divine right didn't change the laws of gravity and hydrogen, that was for certain.\n\nShe heard the shriek of a ballast alert above, and swore. If anything tumbled from the bay doors now, she and Newkirk would be plumb in its path.\n\n\"We're too heavy!\" she shouted down.\n\n\"Aye, I noticed!\" the boy cried back, just as the trailway veered to the right beneath him.\n\nInstantly the pallet clipped the top of an evergreen, and Newkirk was swallowed by an explosion of pine needles and snow.\n\n\"We need to toss some of that cargo!\" Deryn cried, and angled her wings to the right. When she and Newkirk were over the pallet, she snapped a safety clip onto the cargo line, then shrugged out of the gliding harness.\n\nShe and Newkirk slid down, screaming, their boots thudding against the cargo as they landed.\n\n\"Blisters, Mr. Sharp! Are you trying to kill us?\"\n\n\"I'm saving us, Mr. Newkirk, as usual.\" She unclipped herself and rolled onto the pallet. \"We have to throw something off!\"\n\n\"Full marks for stating the obvious!\" Newkirk shouted, just as the pallet smashed into another treetop. The collision sent the world spinning, and Deryn fell flat, grasping for handholds.\n\nPressed against the cargo, her nose caught a whiff of something meaty. Deryn frowned. Was this pallet full of dried beef?\n\nShe raised her head and looked about. There was nothing obvious to toss overboard, no boxes to cut free. Just heavy netting covering the shapeless brown mass. It would take long minutes to cut into it with a couple of rigging knives.\n\n\"Blisters,\" Newkirk cried.\n\nDeryn followed his gaze upward, and swore again. The ballast alert was in full swing. Fl\u00e9chette bats were taking to the air, and dishwater was being flung from the galley windows. A barrel emerged from the cargo bay door and came tumbling down at them.\n\nDeryn tightened her grip in case the barrel hit and sent them spinning\u2014or would the whole pallet simply break apart?\n\nBut the barrel flashed past a few yards away, exploding into a white cloud of flour against the hard-packed tundra.\n\n\"Over here, Mr. Sharp!\" Newkirk called. He had scrambled to the far side of the pallet, one foot dangling off the edge.\n\n\"What've you found?\"\n\n\"Nothing!\" he shouted. When Deryn hesitated, he added, \"Just come here, you blithering idiot!\"\n\nAs she headed toward Newkirk, the pallet began to tip beneath her weight. Her grasp on the netting slipped for a moment, and she skidded toward the edge.\n\nNewkirk's hand shot out and stopped her.\n\n\"Grab hold!\" he shouted as the pallet tipped farther.\n\nFinally Deryn understood his plan\u2014their weight was pulling the carefully balanced pallet sideways, turning it into a knife blade skimming through the trees. It was a much smaller target for the debris raining down, and the bulk of the cargo was above the two middies, protecting them from any direct hits.\n\nAnother barrel went by, barely missing, shattering in the airship's wake. A few ice-laden treetops shot past, but the Leviathan was finally climbing, lightened enough to pull them a few crucial yards higher.\n\nNewkirk grinned. \"Don't mind being saved, do you, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"No, that's quite all right, Mr. Newkirk,\" she said, shifting her hands for a better grip. \"You owed me one, after all.\"\n\n\"RETURNING WITH THE GOODS.\"\n\nAs the treetops slowly dropped away, Deryn climbed back up, leveling the pallet again. As they were winched higher, she took a closer look at what was beneath the cargo netting. It appeared to be nothing but dried beef, slabs and slabs of it all crushed together.\n\n\"What does this smell like to you?\" she asked Newkirk.\n\nHe took a sniff. \"Breakfast.\"\n\nShe nodded. It did smell just like bacon waiting to be tossed into a pan.\n\n\"Aye,\" she said softly. \"But breakfast for what?\"\n\n\"We're still traveling west-northwest.\" Alek looked at his notes. \"On a heading of fifty-five degrees, if my readings can be trusted.\"\n\nVolger scowled at the map on his desk. \"You must be mistaken, Alek. There's nothing along that course. No cities or ports, just wilderness.\"\n\n\"Well . . .\" Alek tried to remember how Newkirk had put it. \"It might have to do with the earth being round, and this map being flat.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. I've already plotted a great circle route.\" Volger's index finger swept along a line that curved from the Black Sea to Tokyo. \"But we left that behind when we veered north over Omsk.\"\n\nAlek sighed. Did everyone but him understand this \"great circle\" business? Before the Great War had changed everything, Wildcount Volger had been a cavalry officer in the service of Alek's father. How did he know so much about navigation?\n\nThrough the window of Volger's stateroom, the shadows were stretching out ahead of the Leviathan. The setting sun, at least, agreed that the airship was still angling northward.\n\n\"If anything,\" Volger said, \"we should be headed southwest by now, toward Tsingtao.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"The German port in China?\"\n\n\"Indeed. There are half a dozen Clanker ironclads based there. They threaten Darwinist shipping all across the Pacific, from Australia to the Kingdom of Hawaii. According to the newspapers that Dr. Barlow has so kindly provided me, the Japanese are preparing to lay siege to the city.\"\n\n\"And they need the Leviathan's help?\"\n\n\"Hardly. But Lord Churchill won't let the Japanese be victorious without British assistance. It wouldn't be seemly for Asians to defeat a European power all alone.\"\n\nAlek groaned. \"What a colossal exercise in idiocy. You mean we've come all this way just to wave the Union Jack?\"\n\n\"That was the intent, I'm certain of it. But since the czar's message arrived, our course has changed.\" Volger drummed his fingers on the map. \"There must be a clue in that cargo we picked up from the Russians. Has Dylan told you anything about it?\"\n\n\"I haven't been able to ask him. He's still taking the pallet apart, because of the ballast alert.\"\n\n\"Because of the what?\" the wildcount asked, and Alek found himself smiling. At least he understood something that Volger didn't.\n\n\"Just after we picked up the cargo, an alert sounded\u2014two short rings of the Klaxon. You may remember that happening in the Alps, when we had to throw my father's gold away.\"\n\n\"Don't remind me.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't have to,\" Alek said. Volger had almost doomed them all by smuggling a quarter ton of gold aboard. \"A ballast alert means the ship is overweight, and Dylan has been in the cargo bay with Dr. Barlow all afternoon. They must be taking apart the cargo, to find out why it's heavier than expected.\"\n\n\"All very logical,\" Volger said, then shook his head. \"But I still don't see how one cargo pallet can matter to a ship three hundred meters long. It seems absurd.\"\n\n\"It isn't absurd at all. The Leviathan is aerostatic, which means it's perfectly balanced with the density of the\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Serene Highness.\" Volger held up one hand. \"But perhaps you could recount your aeronautics lessons another time.\"\n\n\"You might take an interest, Count,\" Alek said stiffly. \"Seeing as how aeronautics is keeping you from crashing into the ground at this very moment.\"\n\n\"Indeed it is. So perhaps we'd best leave it to the experts, eh, Prince?\"\n\nSeveral sharp retorts came to mind, but Alek held his tongue. Why was Volger in such a foul mood? When the Leviathan had first turned east two weeks ago, he'd seemed pleased not to be headed toward Britain and certain imprisonment. The man had gradually adapted to life aboard the Leviathan, exchanging information with Dr. Barlow, even taking a liking to Dylan. But for the last day Volger had seemed cross with everyone.\n\nFor that matter, Dylan had stopped delivering breakfast to the wildcount. Had the two of them had a falling-out?\n\nVolger rolled up his map and shoved it into a desk drawer. \"Find out what was in the Russian cargo, even if you have to beat it out of that boy.\"\n\n\"By 'that boy' I assume you mean my good friend, Dylan?\"\n\n\"He's hardly your friend. You'd be free now if it weren't for him.\"\n\n\"That was my choice,\" Alek said firmly. Dylan might have argued for Alek to return to the ship, but it was no use blaming anyone. Alek had made the decision himself. \"But I'll ask him what they found. Perhaps you could inquire with Dr. Barlow, since you two are on such good terms.\"\n\nVolger shook his head. \"That woman tells me only what she finds it convenient for us to know.\"\n\n\"Then, I don't suppose there are any clues in your newspapers. Anything about the Russians needing help in northern Siberia?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" Volger pulled a penny paper from the open desk drawer and shoved it at Alek. \"But at least that American reporter has stopped writing about you.\"\n\nAlek picked up the paper\u2014the New York World. On its front page was a story by Eddie Malone, an American reporter that he and Dylan had met in Istanbul. Malone had learned certain secrets of the revolution, so Alek had traded his life story for the man's silence. The result was a stream of articles about Alek's parents' assassination and his escape from home.\n\nIt had all been most distasteful.\n\nBut this story wasn't about Alek. The headline read A DIPLOMATIC DISASTER ABOARD THE DAUNTLESS!\n\nBelow those words was a photograph of the Dauntless, the elephant-shaped walker used by the British ambassador in Istanbul. German undercover agents had taken it on a rampage during the Leviathan's stay there, causing a near-riot for which the British had been blamed. Only Dylan's quick thinking had saved the situation from total calamity.\n\n\"PONDERING.\"\n\n\"But that was, what, seven weeks ago? Is this what they call news in America?\"\n\n\"This paper took its time getting to me, but yes, it was old news from the start. Apparently this man Malone has run out of your secrets to spill.\"\n\n\"Thank heavens,\" Alek murmured, following the story to a page inside. Another photograph was printed there: Dylan swinging from the metal trunk of the elephant, flailing at one of the Germans.\n\n\"'A Daring Midshipman Handles the Situation,'\" he read aloud, smirking. For once it was Dylan in the limelight instead of him. \"May I keep this?\"\n\nThe wildcount didn't answer\u2014he was glaring at the ceiling, where a message lizard had appeared.\n\n\"Prince Aleksandar,\" the creature said in Dr. Barlow's voice. \"Mr. Sharp and I would like the pleasure of your company in the cargo bay, if possible.\"\n\n\"The cargo bay?\" Alek said. \"Of course, Dr. Barlow. I'll join you shortly. End message.\"\n\nVolger waved his hand to shoo the lizard away, but it had already scuttled off into a message tube. \"Excellent. Maybe now we'll get some answers.\"\n\nAlek folded up the newspaper and slipped it into a pocket. \"But why would they need me?\"\n\n\"For the pleasure of your company, of course.\" The wildcount shrugged. \"Surely a lizard wouldn't lie.\"\n\nThe cargo bay smelled like a tannery, a mix of old meat and leather. Long strips of dark brown were piled everywhere, along with a few wooden crates.\n\n\"Is this your precious cargo?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"It's two tons of dried beef, a hundredweight of tranquilizers, and a thousand rounds of machine-gun ammunition,\" said Dylan, reading from a list. \"And a few boxes of something else.\"\n\n\"Something unexpected,\" Dr. Barlow said. She and Tazza were in the far corner of the bay, staring down into an open crate. \"And quite heavy.\"\n\n\"Quite,\" the loris on her shoulder said, eyeing the crate with displeasure.\n\nAlek looked around for Bovril. It was hanging from the ceiling above Dylan's head. He held his hand up, and the creature crawled down onto his shoulder. Count Volger, of course, did not permit abominations in his presence.\n\n\"Guten Tag,\" the creature said.\n\n\"Guten Abend,\" Alek corrected, then turned to Dr. Barlow. \"May I ask why the czar wanted us to pick up a load of dried beef?\"\n\n\"You may not,\" she said. \"But please take a look at this unexpected cargo. We need your Clanker expertise.\"\n\n\"My Clanker expertise?\" Alek joined the boffin beside the crate. Nestled in the packing straw was a jumble of metal parts, shiny and glinting in the darkness. He knelt, reached inside, and pulled one of the parts out. Tazza gave it a sniff and made a whining noise.\n\nIt was some kind of electrikal part, about as long as a forearm and topped with two bare wires.\n\n\"The czar didn't tell you how to put this all together?\"\n\n\"There wasn't meant to be any machinery at all,\" Dylan said. \"But there's almost half a ton of parts and tools in here. Enough to drag poor Mr. Newkirk into a pine tree!\"\n\n\"And all of it Clanker-made,\" Alek murmured. He stared at another part, a sphere of handblown glass. It fit atop the first part with a satisfying click.\n\n\"This looks like an ignition capacitor, like the one aboard my Stormwalker.\"\n\n\"Ignition,\" Bovril repeated softly.\n\n\"So you can tell us the purpose of this device?\" Dr. Barlow asked.\n\n\"Perhaps.\" Alek peered down into the crate. There were dozens more parts there, and two more boxes to come. \"But I'll need Klopp's help.\"\n\n\"Well, that is a bother.\" Dr. Barlow sighed. \"But I suppose the captain can be convinced. Just see that you're quick about it. We reach our destination tomorrow.\"\n\n\"That soon? Interesting.\" Alek smiled as he spoke\u2014he'd just seen another part that would fit onto the other two. It was tightly wound with copper wire, at least a thousand turns, like a voltage multiplier. He whistled for a message lizard, then sent it to fetch his men, but didn't wait for them.\n\nIn a way it was easy, guessing how the pieces fit together. He'd spent a month helping to keep his Stormwalker running in the wilderness with repaired, stolen, and improvised parts. And the metal and glass pieces before him were hardly improvised\u2014they were elegant, with lines as sinuous as the Leviathan's fabricated wood furniture. As Alek worked, his fingers seemed to grasp the pieces' connections, even though he didn't know the purpose of the whole yet. By the time Klopp and Hoffman had arrived, he'd made a fair start of it.\n\nPerhaps His Serene Highness Aleksandar Prince of Hohenberg wasn't such a waste of hydrogen after all.\n\nBy early the next morning the device was nearly done. The few remaining parts\u2014the knobs and levers of the control panel\u2014were spread across the floor. The dried beef had been removed from the cargo bay to make room, but the scent of new leather remained.\n\nAlek, Dylan, Bauer, and Hoffman had worked without sleep, but Master Klopp had spent most of the night snoozing in a chair, awakening only to shout orders and curse whoever had designed the device. He had declared its graceful lines too fancy, an affront to Clanker principles. Bovril sat on his shoulder, memorizing new German obscenities with glee.\n\nSince the night of the Ottoman Revolution, Klopp had used a cane, grimacing whenever he had to stand up. His battle-walker had fallen during the attack on the sultan's Tesla cannon, struck by the Orient-Express itself.\n\n\"ASSEMBLAGE OF THE DEVICE.\"\n\nDr. Busk, the Leviathan's surgeon, had said it was lucky the man could walk at all.\n\nThe revolution had lasted only one night, but the cost had been high. Lilit's father had been killed, along with a thousand rebel soldiers and countless Ottomans. Whole neighborhoods of the ancient city of Istanbul lay in ashes.\n\nOf course, the battles going on in Europe were ten times worse, especially those between Alek's countrymen and the Russians. In Galicia a horde of fighting bears had met hundreds of machines, a vast collision of flesh and metal that had left Austria reeling. And, as Dylan kept saying, the war was only just beginning.\n\nNewkirk brought them breakfast just as sunlight began to trickle in around the edges of the cargo door.\n\n\"What in blazes is that contraption?\" he asked.\n\nAlek took the coffeepot from Newkirk's tray and poured a cup.\n\n\"A good question.\" He handed the coffee to Klopp, switching to German. \"Any fresh ideas?\"\n\n\"Well, it's meant to be carried about,\" Klopp said, poking at its long side handles with his cane. \"Probably by two men, perhaps a third to operate it.\"\n\nAlek nodded. Most of the crates had been full of spare parts and special tools; the device itself wasn't so heavy.\n\n\"But why not mount it on a vehicle?\" Hoffman asked. \"You could use the engine's power and save fiddling about with batteries.\"\n\n\"So it's designed for rough terrain,\" Klopp said.\n\n\"Lots of that in Siberia,\" Dylan spoke up. After a month among Clankers in Istanbul, the boy's German was good enough to follow most conversations now. \"And Russia is Darwinist, so vehicles have no engines.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"A Clanker machine designed for use by Darwinists?\"\n\n\"Custom made for wherever we're headed, then.\" Klopp gently tapped the three glass spheres at its top. \"These will react to magnetic fields.\"\n\n\"Magnetic,\" Bovril said from Klopp's shoulder, rolling the word around in its mouth.\n\nIgnoring the engine grease under his fingernails, Alek took a piece of bacon from Newkirk's tray. The night's work had left him ravenous. \"Meaning what, Master Klopp?\"\n\n\"I still don't know, young master. Perhaps it's some kind of navigating machine.\"\n\n\"Awfully big for a compass,\" Alek said. And far too beautiful for anything so mundane. Most of the pieces had been milled by hand, as if its inventor hadn't wanted mass-produced parts to sully his vision.\n\n\"If I may ask something, sir?\" Bauer asked.\n\nAlek nodded. \"Of course, Hans.\"\n\nBauer turned to Dylan. \"We might understand this machine better if we knew why the czar tried to sneak it past you.\"\n\n\"Dr. Barlow reckons the czar doesn't know about this machine,\" Dylan said. \"You see, the man we're headed toward has a reputation. He's a bit mad. The sort of fellow who might bribe a Russian officer to smuggle something for him, without thinking of the consequences. The lady boffin never liked the fellow, she says, and this just confirms that he's a . . .\" He shrugged and switched to English, \"A bum-rag.\"\n\n\"Bum-rag,\" Bovril said, and giggled.\n\n\"But who is he?\" Alek asked in English.\n\nDylan shrugged again. \"A Clanker boffin of some kind. That's all Dr. Barlow will say.\"\n\nAlek finished his bacon, then looked at the parts scattered all around them and sighed. \"Well, let's finish and see what happens when we turn it on.\"\n\n\"Is that a good idea?\" Dylan looked down at the batteries, which Hoffman was charging with the power lines for the airship's searchlights. \"It's stored enough electricity to throw sparks, or even explode. And we're hanging from a million cubic feet of hydrogen!\"\n\nAlek turned to Klopp and said in German, \"Dylan thinks this could be dangerous.\"\n\n\"Nonsense.\" Klopp prodded the battery case with his cane. \"It's designed to run for a long time at low voltage.\"\n\n\"Or designed to look that way,\" Dylan said, then switched to English. \"Newkirk, fetch Dr. Barlow, would you?\"\n\nThe other middy nodded and scampered off, looking happy to leave the Clanker device behind.\n\nAs they waited, Alek put together the control panel, polishing every piece with his sleeve. It was good to feel useful again, to have built something, even if he had no idea what it was.\n\nWhen Dr. Barlow arrived, she walked once around the machine, both she and the creature on her shoulder inspecting it closely. The two lorises jabbered to each other, Bovril repeating the names of electrikal parts that it had learned during the night.\n\n\"Well done, all of you,\" Dr. Barlow said in her flawless German. \"I take it this is a magnetic device of some kind?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\" Klopp glanced at Dylan. \"And I'm certain it won't explode.\"\n\n\"I should hope not.\" Dr. Barlow took a step back. \"Well, we haven't much time. If you please, Alek, let's find out what it does.\"\n\n\"If you please,\" her loris added imperiously, which made Bovril giggle.\n\nAlek took a slow breath, his hand pausing over the power switch. For a moment he wondered if Dylan might be right. They had no idea what this machine was.\n\nBut they'd spent all night putting the device together. There was no point in letting it sit here. He turned the power switch. . . .\n\nFor a moment nothing happened, but then a flickering glow appeared in each of the three glass spheres on the machine's top. In the drafty cargo bay Alek felt heat emanating from the machine, and a soft whine built in his ears.\n\nThe two lorises began to imitate the sound, and then Tazza joined in, until the cargo bay was humming. A sliver of light came into being inside each of the glass spheres, an electrikal disturbance, like a tiny, trapped bolt of lightning.\n\n\"Most intriguing,\" Dr. Barlow said.\n\n\"Aye, but what is it?\" Dylan asked.\n\n\"As a biologist, I'm sure I don't know.\" The lady boffin lifted Bovril from Klopp's shoulder. \"But our perspicacious friend has been watching and listening all night.\"\n\nShe placed the loris on the floor. It immediately clambered onto the machine, sniffing the batteries, the control panel, and finally the three glass spheres. While it moved, it kept up a steady nonsense conversation with Dr. Barlow's loris, the two beasts repeating the names of electrikal parts and concepts to each other.\n\nAlek watched with bemusement. He'd always wondered how Dr. Barlow had expected these creatures to keep the Ottomans out of the war. They were charming enough but hardly likely to sway an entire empire toward Darwinism. He half suspected they had been only a ruse, an excuse to take the Leviathan to Istanbul, and that the real plan had always been to force the strait with the behemoth.\n\nBut was there more to these lorises than met the eye?\n\nFinally Bovril reached out a hand toward Dr. Barlow, who only frowned. But the beast on her shoulder seemed to understand. It slipped its tiny hands behind the woman's head and unclasped her necklace.\n\nDr. Barlow raised an eyebrow as the creature handed her jewelry over to Bovril.\n\n\"What in blazes\u2014,\" Dylan began, but the lady boffin waved him silent.\n\nBovril held the necklace close to one of the glass spheres, and a trickle of lightning leapt out, creating a shivering connection between the pendant and the glass sphere.\n\n\"Magnetic,\" Bovril said.\n\nThe creature swung the pendant, and the tiny finger of light followed it back and forth. When Bovril pulled the necklace away, the lightning seemed to lose interest, retreating back into its glass sphere.\n\n\"God's wounds,\" Alek said softly. \"That's quite odd.\"\n\n\"What's that necklace made of, madam?\" asked Klopp.\n\n\"The pendant is steel.\" Dr. Barlow nodded. \"Quite ferrous, I should think.\"\n\n\"So it's for detecting metal.\" Klopp pushed himself to his feet, then brought his cane up. As its steel tip drew close to one of the spheres, another trickle of lightning leapt out to meet it.\n\n\"Why would you need such a thing?\" Dylan asked.\n\nKlopp fell back into his chair. \"You might use it to discover land mines. Though it's quite sensitive, so perhaps you could find a buried telegraph line. Or a buried treasure! Who knows?\"\n\n\"Treasure!\" Bovril declared.\n\n\"Telegraph lines? Pirate treasure?\" Dylan shook his head. \"Those hardly sound like things you'd find in Siberia.\"\n\nAlek took a cautious step closer, squinting at the machine. The three glass spheres had settled into a jittering pattern, each tiny finger of lightning pointing in a different direction. \"What's it detecting now?\"\n\n\"One's aimed straight back at the stern,\" Dylan said. \"And the other two are pointed up and toward the bow.\"\n\nThe two lorises made a rumbling sound.\n\n\"Of course,\" Hoffman said. \"Most of the Leviathan is wood and flesh. But the engines are full of metal.\"\n\nDylan whistled. \"They must be two hundred yards away.\"\n\n\"Yes, it's a clever machine,\" Klopp said. \"Even if it was designed by a madman.\"\n\n\"I just wonder what he's looking for.\" The lady boffin stroked Tazza's fur as she contemplated the device, then turned and walked toward the door. \"Well, I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. Mr. Sharp, see that all this is hidden away in a locked storeroom. And please don't mention it to the crew, any of you.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"But won't this . . . boffin fellow be wondering where it is?\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Dr. Barlow gave him a smile as she slipped through the door. \"And watching him squirm with curiosity should prove most interesting.\"\n\nAlek headed back toward his stateroom soon after, wanting to get an hour's sleep before they arrived at their destination. He should have gone straight to Count Volger, he supposed, but he was too exhausted to endure a barrage of questions from the man. So instead Alek whistled for a message lizard when he reached his room.\n\nWhen the creature appeared, Alek said, \"Count Volger, we shall arrive at our destination within the hour. But I still have no idea where that is. The cargo contained a Clanker machine of some kind. More later, when I've had some sleep. End message.\"\n\nAlek smiled as the creature scuttled away into its tube. He'd never sent Volger a message lizard before, but it was high time the man accepted that the beasts were part of life here aboard the Leviathan.\n\nNot bothering to remove his boots, Alek stretched out on his bunk. His eyes closed, but he could still see the glass tubes and shining metal parts of the mysterious device. His exhausted mind began to play a game of putting together its pieces, counting screws and measuring with calipers.\n\nHe groaned, wishing the thoughts would let him sleep. But mechanikal puzzles had taken over his brain. Perhaps this proved he was a Clanker at heart and there would never be a place for him aboard a Darwinist ship.\n\nAlek sat up to pull off his jacket. There was something large in the pocket. Of course. The newspaper he'd borrowed from Volger.\n\nHe pulled it out; it was folded open to the photograph of Dylan. In all the excitement about the strange device, he'd forgotten to show it to the boy. Alek lay back down, his bleary eyes skimming across the text.\n\nIt really was the most atrocious writing, as breathless and overblown as the articles Malone had written about Alek. But it was a relief to see someone else's virtues extolled in the reporter's purple prose.\n\nWho knows what rampant destruction might have been visited upon the crowd had the valiant midshipman not acted so quickly? He surely has bravery running in his veins, being the nephew of an intrepid airman, one Artemis Sharp, who perished in a calamitous ballooning fire only a few years ago.\n\nA little shudder went through Alek at the words\u2014Dylan's father again. It was strange how the man kept coming up. Was there some clue about the family secret here?\n\nAlek shook his head, dropping the newspaper to the floor. Dylan would tell him the family secret when he was ready.\n\nMore important, Alek hadn't slept a wink all night. He lay back down, forcing his eyes closed again. The airship would reach its destination soon.\n\nBut as Alek lay there, his mind would not stop spinning.\n\nSo many times Dylan would come close to telling him something momentous. But each time he pulled away. No matter what promises Alek made, however many secrets of his own he told Dylan, the boy didn't trust him completely.\n\nPerhaps he never would, because he simply couldn't bring himself to confide in a prince, an imperial heir, a waste of hydrogen like Alek. No doubt that was it.\n\nIt was a long, restless time before he finally fell asleep.\n\nIt was Newkirk who spotted them first.\n\nHe was up in a Huxley ascender, a thousand feet above the Leviathan in the cold white sky. His flight suit was stuffed with old rags to keep him from freezing, making his arms and legs bulge, like a tattie bogle waving semaphore flags. . . .\n\nT-R-E-E-S\u2014A-L-L\u2014D-O-W-N\u2014A-H-E-A-D.\n\nDeryn lowered her field glasses. \"Did you get that, Mr. Rigby?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" the bosun said. \"But I've no idea what it means.\"\n\n\"T-R-E-E-S,\" Bovril added helpfully from Deryn's shoulder. The beastie could read semaphore as fast as any of the crew, but couldn't turn letters into words. Not yet, anyway.\n\n\"Perhaps he's seen a clearing. Shall I go up to the bow for a look, sir?\"\n\nMr. Rigby nodded, then signaled to the winch man to give Newkirk more altitude. Deryn headed forward, making her way through the colony of fl\u00e9chette bats scattered across the great airbeast's head.\n\n\"D-O-W-N,\" Bovril said.\n\n\"Aye, beastie, that spells 'down.'\"\n\nBovril repeated the word, then shivered in the cold.\n\nDeryn was feeling the cold too, on top of her night of missing sleep. Barking Alek and his love of contraptions. Sixteen long hours putting the mysterious machine together, and they still had no idea what its purpose was! An utter waste of time, and yet it was the happiest she'd seen Alek since the two of them had returned to the Leviathan.\n\nGears and electricals were all the boy really cared about, however much he claimed to love the airship. Just like Deryn, who'd spent a whole month in Istanbul without ever feeling at home among walkers and steam pipes. Perhaps Clankers and Darwinists would always be at war, if only in their hearts.\n\nWhen she reached the prow of the ship, Deryn raised her field glasses to scan the horizon. A moment later she saw the trees.\n\n\"Barking spiders.\" The words coiled like smoke in the freezing air.\n\n\"Down,\" Bovril said.\n\nAhead of the airship was an endless fallen forest. Countless trees lay on their sides, plucked clean, as if a huge wind had blown them over and stripped their branches and leaves. Strangest of all, every stripped-bare trunk was pointed in the same direction: southwest. At the moment, straight at Deryn.\n\nShe'd heard of hurricanes strong enough to yank trees up from the ground, but no hurricane could make landfall here, thousands of miles from any ocean. Was there some manner of Siberian storm she'd never heard of, with icicles flying like scythes through the forest?\n\nShe whistled for a message lizard, staring uneasily at the fallen trees while she waited. When the lizard appeared, Deryn made her report, trying to keep the fear from her voice. Whatever had cut down these full-grown evergreens, which had been as hard as nails and sunk deep into the frozen tundra, would tear an airship to bits in seconds.\n\nShe made her way back to the winch, where Mr. Rigby was still taking signals from Newkirk. The Huxley was almost a mile above the ship now, its swollen hydrogen sack a dark squick upon the sky.\n\nThe bosun dropped his glasses. \"At least thirty miles across, he says.\"\n\n\"Blisters,\" Deryn swore. \"Might an earthquake have done this, sir?\"\n\nMr. Rigby gave this a think, then shook his head. \"Mr. Newkirk says all the fallen trees point outward, toward the edges of the destruction. No earthquake would've been that neat. Nor would a storm.\"\n\nDeryn imagined a great force spreading out in all directions from a central point, knocking down trees and stripping them as clean as matchsticks as it passed.\n\nAn explosion . . .\n\n\"But we can't stand here theorizing.\" Mr. Rigby raised his field glasses again. \"The captain has ordered us to prepare for a rescue. There are people down there, it seems.\"\n\nA quarter hour later Newkirk's flags began to wave again.\n\n\"B . . . O . . . N . . . E . . . S,\" Bovril announced, its sharp eyes needing no field glasses to read the distant signals.\n\n\"God in heaven,\" Mr. Rigby breathed.\n\n\"But he can't mean 'bones,' sir,\" Deryn said. \"He's too high up to see anything as small as that!\"\n\nShe stared ahead, trying to think what letters poor shivering Newkirk might have sent wrong. Domes? Homes? Was he was begging for some hot scones to be sent up?\n\nDeryn wished she could be aloft herself, and not stuck down here wondering. But the captain wanted her standing by for a gliding descent, to prepare for a landing in rough terrain.\n\n\"Did you feel that shudder, lad?\" Mr. Rigby pulled off a glove, kneeling to place his bare hand on the ship's skin. \"The airbeast is unhappy.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\" Another shiver passed along the cilia on the membrane, like a gust of wind through grass. Deryn smelled something in the air, the scent of corrupted meat.\n\n\"Bones,\" Bovril said, staring straight ahead.\n\nAs Deryn raised her field glasses, she felt a trickle of cold sweat inside her flight suit. There they were on the horizon, a dozen huge columns arcing into the air. . . .\n\nIt was the rib cage of a dead airbeast, half the size of the Leviathan and gleaming white in the sun. The ribs looked like the skeletal fingers of two giant hands, clutching the wreck of a gondola between them.\n\nNo wonder the giant creature beneath her feet was twitchy.\n\n\"Mr. Rigby, sir, there's an airship wreck ahead.\"\n\nThe bosun dropped his gaze to the horizon, then let out a whistle.\n\n\"Do you think it got caught in the explosion, sir?\" she asked. \"Or whatever it was?\"\n\n\"No, lad. Airbeast bones are hollow. The force that snapped all these trees would've shattered them. The poor beastie must have come along afterward.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir. Shall I whistle for another lizard and inform the bridge?\"\n\nIn answer the engines slowed to quarter speed. After two days at full-ahead, the great forest around them seemed to echo with the sudden quiet.\n\nMr. Rigby spoke softly. \"They know, lad.\"\n\nAs the Leviathan drew closer to the dead airbeast, Deryn spotted more bones among the fallen trees below. The skeletons of mammothines, horses, and smaller creatures were scattered like tenpins across the forest floor.\n\nA growling chorus rolled up through the freezing air. Deryn recognized the sound at once, from during the cargo snatch-up, when the ballast had put too many smells into the wind.\n\n\"Fighting bears ahead, sir. Angry ones.\"\n\n\"Angry's not the word, Mr. Sharp. Have you noticed that we haven't spotted any caribou or reindeer herds since we reached this place? With the forest fallen, there isn't much hunting hereabouts.\"\n\n\"Oh, aye.\" Deryn looked closer at the bones of the smaller beasties. They'd all been gnawed clean, and when the distant roars came again, she heard the hunger in them.\n\nThe bears came into sight soon, a dozen at least. They were skinny and hollow-eyed, their fur matted and their faces scarred, as if they'd been fighting among themselves. A few of them stared up at the Leviathan, scenting the air.\n\nThe Klaxon began to sound, the long-short ring of an upcoming ground attack.\n\n\"That's a bit odd,\" Mr. Rigby said. \"Do the officers think aerial bombs can hit those beasties?\"\n\n\"We're not dropping bombs, sir. That secret Russian cargo was mostly dried beef.\"\n\n\"Ah, for a distraction. Nice of the czar to provide a bit of help.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" Deryn said, though she wondered how long two tons of beef would distract a dozen starving bears the size of houses.\n\n\"There we are, lad,\" Mr. Rigby said with satisfaction. \"An encampment.\"\n\nShe raised her field glasses again.\n\nHere, deep in the devastated area, a large circle of trees remained standing. They were stripped bare like the others, as if the blast had come from directly above. In a clearing among them was a handful of simple timber buildings, surrounded by barbed wire. Wispy columns of smoke rose from their chimneys, and small forms were spilling out, waving at the airship overhead.\n\n\"But how are these people still alive, sir?\"\n\n\"I've no idea, Mr. Sharp. That wire wouldn't hold back a single bear, much less a dozen.\" The bosun lifted Bovril from her shoulder. \"I'll have this beastie taken down to the lady boffin. Go prepare your Huxley for descent.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"Get those men set for a rope-and-winch landing, and be quick about it. If we come about and you're not ready, we'll have to leave you all behind.\"\n\nAs she glided toward the ground, Deryn took a closer look at the fallen forest.\n\nLichen was growing over the snapped-off tree stumps, so the destruction had happened months ago, perhaps years. That was comforting, she supposed.\n\nBut this was no time for pondering. The Leviathan was already headed back, preparing to scatter the dried beef a few miles away. Hopefully searching through the broken trees for food would keep the beasties busy for a while.\n\nDeryn landed the Huxley softly, just inside the ring of barbed wire. About thirty men had come out to greet her, hungry-and astonished-looking, as if they couldn't quite believe that rescue had arrived. But a half dozen of them took hold of the Huxley's tentacles with the efficiency of experienced airmen.\n\nAmong those watching was a tall, slender man with dark hair, a mustache, and piercing blue eyes. The others' furs were threadbare, but he wore a fine traveling coat and carried a peculiar walking stick. He watched as the Huxley was secured, then he addressed Deryn in an unfamiliar accent.\n\n\"You are British?\"\n\nShe struggled out of the piloting harness and made a bow. \"Aye, sir. Midshipman Dylan Sharp, at your service.\"\n\n\"How annoying.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"I specifically requested that no powers other than Russia be involved in this expedition.\"\n\nDeryn blinked. \"I don't know about that, sir. But you do seem to be in a spot of bother.\"\n\n\"I will grant you that.\" The man pointed his walking stick at the airship overhead. \"But what on earth is a British airship doing in deepest Siberia?\"\n\n\"We're barking rescuing you!\" Deryn cried. \"And we haven't any time to debate the matter. The ship will be dropping food for those beasties a few miles from here, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading away from us. But it won't keep them busy for long.\"\n\n\"There is no need for haste, young man. This compound is quite secure.\"\n\nDeryn looked at the coils of barbed wire a few yards away. \"I doubt that, sir. Those bears have already eaten one airbeast. If they get wind of another on the ground, that wire won't stop them!\"\n\n\"It will stop any living creature. Observe.\" The man strode toward the fence, extending his walking stick before him. When he prodded the wire with the stick's metal tip, a flurry of sparks shot into the air.\n\n\"What in blazes?\" Deryn cried.\n\n\"An invention of mine, a crude improvisation with many defects in its current form. But necessary under the circumstances.\"\n\nDeryn looked up at her Huxley in horror, but the other men had already pulled it a fair distance from the wire. At least they weren't all barking mad down here.\n\n\"I shall call it the 'electrical fence,' I think.\" The man smiled. \"The bears are quite wary of it.\"\n\n\"Aye, I'm sure they are!\" Deryn said. \"But my airship's a hydrogen breather. You'll have to turn that electricity off, or you'll blow us all to bits!\"\n\n\"Well, obviously. But the bears won't know that the fence has been disarmed. The work of Dr. Pavlov is quite instructive in this case.\"\n\nDeryn ignored his blether. \"This clearing's too small for my airship, anyway. We'll have to get out of these trees and into the fallen area.\" She turned in a slow circle, counting the men around her. There were twenty-eight in all, perhaps a thousand pounds heavier than the cargo the airship had just dropped. \"Is this everyone? It'll be tricky, making a quick ascent with this much weight.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of the difficulties. I arrived here by airship.\"\n\n\"You mean that dead airbeast we saw? What on earth happened to it?\"\n\n\"We fed it to the bears, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn took a step back. \"You what?\"\n\n\"In outfitting my expedition, the czar's advisers didn't take into account the desolation of this region. We were undersupplied, and the bears of my cargo train began to lack for hunting. I was too close to a breakthrough to abandon the project.\" He twirled his walking stick. \"Though, if I'd known a British ship would come meddling as a result, I might have chosen otherwise.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head, still not believing. How could he have done such a thing to a poor innocent beastie? And how had the czar dared to send a British airship to rescue this madman, after he'd fed his own ship to the bears?\n\n\"Pardon me for asking, sir, but who in blazes are you?\"\n\nThe man stood straighter, extending his hand with a courtly bow.\n\n\"I am Nikola Tesla. Pleased to meet you, I suppose.\"\n\nThe Leviathan was a few miles distant when its bomb bay doors opened. Bales of dried beef fell in ten-second intervals. As each one dropped, the airship rose a little higher in the air.\n\n\"An ingenious distraction, I'll admit,\" Mr. Tesla said. \"Of course, if you'd brought this food earlier, I'd still have an airship.\"\n\nDeryn gave him a hard look. He'd spoken so lightly of what he'd done, feeding not only his airbeast, she realized now, but also the horses and mammothines of his cargo train to the fighting bears. And all to stay a few more weeks in this blighted place.\n\n\"What were you doing here, anyway, Mr. Tesla?\"\n\n\"I should think that would be obvious, boy. I am studying the phenomenon around us.\"\n\n\"Did you find out what caused it?\"\n\n\"I have always known the cause. I was only curious about the results.\" The man raised a hand. \"I must remain secretive at the moment, but soon the world will know.\"\n\nHe had a mad gleam in his eye, and as Deryn turned away toward the Leviathan, a twitchy feeling came over her.\n\nThis was, of course, the same Mr. Tesla who'd invented the Tesla cannon, a lightning weapon that had twice almost destroyed the Leviathan. He was a Clanker boffin, a maker of German secret weapons, and yet the czar had given him free run of Darwinist Russia.\n\nNone of it made sense.\n\nShe thought of the mysterious device hidden belowdecks back on the Leviathan, and wondered why this man had wanted it smuggled here. It certainly wouldn't have been much use for fending off bears.\n\nThe airship's engines changed pitch. The bomb run was finished.\n\n\"They'll be coming about now,\" Deryn said. \"We should head for the clearing.\"\n\nMr. Tesla waved his walking stick in the air, calling out in what Deryn reckoned was Russian. A group of the men ran into one of the buildings and came back with large packs on their shoulders.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir, but you can't bring all that gear. We're too barking heavy as it is!\"\n\n\"I am hardly going to abandon my photographs and samples, young man. This expedition took years to prepare!\"\n\n\"But if the ship can't take off, it's all lost anyway. Along with us!\"\n\n\"You shall have to make room, then. Or leave my men behind.\"\n\n\"Are you mad?\" Deryn cried, then shook her head. \"Listen, sir, if you want to stay here with your samples until the bears eat you, that's fine. But these men are coming with me, without any of that extra weight!\"\n\nMr. Tesla laughed. \"You'll have to explain that to them, I'm afraid. How good is your Russian, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"It's barking fluent,\" she lied, then turned to the men. \"Do any of you speak English?\"\n\nThey stared back at her, looking a bit confused. One offered up a choice curse in English, but then shrugged, apparently having exhausted his vocabulary.\n\nDeryn clenched her teeth, wishing Alek were here. For all his useless knowledge, he could speak a fair number of languages. And this mad boffin might listen to another Clanker.\n\nShe looked at the men again. Some of them must have crewed the dead airship, so they would have to understand weight limits. . . .\n\nBut there wasn't time to put on a pantomime. The howls of the bears were echoing through the still, stripped trees. They'd already found the first of the food, and had fallen to fighting over it.\n\n\"Just get your men moving, sir,\" she said. \"We'll discuss this at the ship.\"\n\nIt took a few minutes to reach the edge of the standing trees, and another ten to find a level field large enough for the Leviathan to land upon. \"Level\" was hardly the word for it, though. Here near the center of the destruction, the fallen trees weren't laid out so neatly. They were jumbled together like in a game of Spellican sticks, with jagged splinters thrusting up from their stumps.\n\nDeryn scrambled across the fallen trunks, hoping she could estimate distances properly in all this muddle. She pointed and waved at the Russians, like a cricket captain setting a field, and she soon had them arranged in a long oval a little larger than the Leviathan's gondola.\n\n\"The ship's light after dropping all that beef,\" she explained to Tesla. \"Normally the captain would vent hydrogen to land, but not if he wants to get back up quickly. We'll have to use ropes to drag it down.\"\n\nThe man lifted an eyebrow. \"Are there enough of us?\"\n\n\"Not a chance. If a gust of wind came along, we'd all be yanked into the air. So when the ropes fall, have your men tie them to the trees.\" She pointed at a fallen pine as big around as a rum barrel. \"The bigger the better.\"\n\n\"But we won't be strong enough to pull the ship down.\"\n\n\"Aye, the ship pulls itself down, with winches inside the gondola. Once it's low enough, we'll go aboard and cut the ropes, and the ship pops back up like a cork in water.\"\n\nDeryn paused, listening. Low growls rolled through the forest, setting her small hairs on end. The bears sounded a squick closer now, or maybe it was just her nerves.\n\n\"If you hear a Klaxon ringing in pairs, tell your men to throw anything they can out the windows\u2014including your precious samples\u2014or the bears will be having us all for dinner!\"\n\nThe man nodded and began to instruct his men in Russian, waving his walking stick as he called to them. Deryn guessed he was leaving out the part about the ballast alert, but there was nothing she could do about that. She pulled out a short length of line and began to tie herself a friction hitch, in case she needed to climb.\n\nSoon the airship was overhead, its engines rumbling as the crew pulled it to a halt. Heavy cables fell from the cargo deck portholes, a swaying forest of rope tumbling into place around them.\n\nThe Russians began to scramble about, gathering the cables and tying them onto the trees. Deryn could tell the airmen among them by their knots\u2014at least a dozen of the men had been in the fallen airship's crew. Surely they would understand that if the bears were on their way and the ship wasn't rising, the boffin's precious baggage would have to go overboard. And no decent airman would hesitate to disobey Mr. Tesla, after what he'd done to that airbeast.\n\nWhen the last man had stepped back from his knots, Deryn pulled out her semaphore flags and sent the ready signal. The ropes went taut, shuddering and creaking as the winches started to turn.\n\nAt first the airship didn't seem to move at all. But a few of the smaller trees began to stir, shifting along the ground. Deryn ran toward the nearest and jumped on to add her weight to it. The Russians understood, and soon all the nervously stirring trees had men standing on them. Mr. Tesla watched impassively, as if the operation were some sort of physics experiment and not a rescue mission.\n\nIt was almost noon, and the Leviathan's shadow lay over them all, slowly widening as the airship descended.\n\nDeryn listened again, and frowned. The sounds of bears in the distance had faded. Were they so far away she couldn't hear them anymore? Or had the last scrap of beef been found and eaten, and now the creatures were charging toward the scent of airbeast?\n\n\"Quite large, your hydrogen breather,\" Mr. Tesla said, then frowned. \"Does that say 'Leviathan'?\"\n\n\"Aye, so you've heard of us.\"\n\n\"Indeed. You've been in the\u2014\" The wind gave a violent start, and the tree Deryn was standing on was pulled into the air, knocking Mr. Tesla to the ground. The Leviathan drifted twenty feet or so, dragging along a small host of Russians on their fallen logs.\n\nThey clung on gamely, though. Soon the wind died, the airship settling earthward again.\n\n\"Are you all right, sir?\" Deryn called.\n\n\"I'm fine.\" Mr. Tesla stood, dusting off his traveling coat. \"But if your ship can lift these trees, then why complain about a bit of extra luggage?\"\n\n\"That was a gust of wind. Do you want to bet your life on getting another one!\"\n\nDeryn looked up. The Leviathan was close enough for her to see one of the officers leaning out of the front bridge window. There were semaphore flags fluttering in his hands. . . .\n\nB-E-A-R-S\u2014H-E-A-D-E-D\u2014T-H-I-S\u2014W-A-Y\u2014F-I-V-E\u2014M-I-N-U-T-E-S.\n\n\"Blisters,\" Deryn said.\n\nThe airship was still a dozen yards up when Deryn spotted the first fighting bear.\n\nIt was loping through the area of standing trees, huffing coils of condensation into the freezing air. The bear was a small one, its shoulders barely ten feet high. Perhaps the others had kept it away from the spoils of dried beef.\n\nIt certainly didn't look like a beastie that had already eaten lunch.\n\n\"Climb!\" Deryn shouted, pointing up her own rope. \"Tell them to climb!\"\n\nMr. Tesla didn't say a word, but his men needed no translation. They began to pull their way up toward the portholes, hand over hand on the thick mooring ropes. None of them thought to drop his pack, or perhaps they were too scared of the Clanker boffin to leave anything behind.\n\nBut there was nothing Deryn could do for them now. She scampered up her own line, glad for the friction hitch she'd tied earlier.\n\nAs the men's weight was added to the ropes, the lines began to slacken, the airship settling closer to the ground. This was the situation Deryn had wanted to avoid\u2014another gust of wind would pop the ropes taut again, flinging off the men holding them.\n\nShe looked over her shoulder. The small bear had broken into the open, and larger shapes loomed behind it.\n\n\"Sharp!\" Mr. Rigby's voice called from the porthole above her head. \"Get those men to drop their packs!\"\n\n\"I've tried, sir. They don't speak English!\"\n\n\"But can't they see the bears coming! Are they mad?\"\n\n\"No, just afraid of that fellow there.\" She jerked her chin toward Mr. Tesla, who still stood on the ground, impassively regarding the approaching bear. \"He's the mad one!\"\n\nThe whoosh of a compressed air gun split the air, and Deryn heard a howl. The anti-aeroplane bolts had hit the closest bear and sent it tumbling among the fallen trees.\n\nA moment later it stood again and shook its head. A fresh mark gleamed on the beastie's scarred and patchy fur, but it let out a defiant roar.\n\n\"I think you've just made it angry, sir!\"\n\n\"Not to worry, Mr. Sharp. We're putting that tranquilizer to good use.\"\n\nDeryn glanced backward as she climbed, and saw that the bear looked unsteady on its feet now, ambling across the fallen trees like an airman full of too much drink.\n\nWhen Deryn reached the porthole, Mr. Rigby stuck out a hand and pulled her in.\n\n\"The spare cargo's ready to drop,\" the bosun said, \"so we've plenty of lift. But with bears closing in, the captain won't take us any closer to the ground. Can the rest of those men climb?\"\n\n\"Aye, sir. About half of them are airmen, so they should\u2014\"\n\n\"Good heavens,\" Mr. Rigby interrupted, peering out the porthole. \"What in blazes is that man doing?\"\n\nDeryn crowded in beside the bosun. Mr. Tesla was still on the ground, facing three more bears that had broken from the trees.\n\n\"Barking spiders!\" Deryn breathed. \"I didn't think he was this mad.\"\n\nThe largest of the creatures was hardly twenty yards from Tesla, leaping across the fallen trees in huge bounds. The man calmly raised his walking stick. . . .\n\nA bolt of lightning leapt from its tip, with a sound like the air itself tearing. The beast reared onto its hind legs and howled, trapped for a split second in a jagged cage of light. The brilliance faded instantly, but the bear howled and turned to flee, the other beasties following in its wake.\n\nMr. Tesla inspected the end of his walking stick, which was black and smoking, then turned toward the airship.\n\n\"You may land your ship properly now,\" he called up. \"Those beasts will be wary for an hour or so.\"\n\nThe bosun nodded dumbly, and before he could call for a message lizard, the winches started up, inching the ship lower again. The officers were in agreement.\n\n\"REPULSION OF THE STARVING WAR BEASTS.\"\n\nMr. Rigby found his voice a moment later. \"It's not just the bears that should be wary, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nShe nodded slowly. \"Aye, sir. We'll have to keep an eye on that fellow.\"\n\nAlek awoke to a thunderclap, a buzzing sound, and then a monstrous roar.\n\nHe sat up and blinked his eyes, convinced for a moment that some awful dream had shaken him from sleep. But the sounds kept coming\u2014shouting, the creak of ropes, and beastly growls. The air smelled of lightning.\n\nAlek swung his boots to the floor and ran to his stateroom window. He'd only meant to doze for an hour, but the sun was high and the Leviathan had arrived at its destination. Dozens of mooring lines stretched to the earth below. The figures manning them were dressed in furs instead of airmen's uniforms, all of them shouting in . . . Russian?\n\nThe ground was littered with fallen trees\u2014hundreds of them, maybe thousands. Chimney smoke rose from a distant cluster of buildings. Was this some sort of logging camp?\n\nThen Alek heard another roar, and saw fighting bears among the fallen trees. They had no riders, not even harnesses, and their matted fur looked wild. He took an involuntary step back from the window. The ship was low enough for the giant beasts to reach it!\n\nBut they seemed to be running away.\n\nAlek remembered the thunderclap that had woken him. The ship's crew must have scared the creatures off somehow.\n\nHe leaned out the window as the Leviathan settled to the ground. Gangways were dropped, and the Russians, at least two dozen of them, climbed aboard. Soon a wailing siren swept through the ship, warning of a fast ascent.\n\nAlek pulled himself back inside just in time. The air crackled with the sound of ropes being cut, and the airship shot straight up, rising as fast as the steam elevators he'd ridden in Istanbul.\n\nWhat was this place? The jumble of fallen trees stretched as far as the horizon, the area far more vast than any logging camp could be. Even as the Leviathan climbed into the sky, no end to the destruction came into sight.\n\nAlek turned toward his cabin door, wondering where to go for answers. The Darwinists might involve him when they needed his Clanker expertise, but they wouldn't be calling for him now.\n\nWhere would Dylan be at a time like this? In the cargo bay?\n\nAt the thought of the boy, Alek remembered the newspaper lying by his bed. The questions he'd fallen asleep asking welled up again. But this was hardly the time to wonder about the mysterious Dylan Sharp.\n\nThe corridors of the ship were teaming with the Russians who'd come aboard. They were unshaven and haggard, half starved beneath their thick furs. The Leviathan's crew was trying to relieve them of their heavy packs, but the men were resisting, English and Russian colliding with little effect.\n\nAlek looked about, wondering how the ship could lift them all. The crew must have dumped every last bit of spare supplies.\n\nA gloved hand landed on his shoulder. \"It's you, Alek. Perfect!\"\n\nHe turned to find Dylan before him. The boy was wearing a flight suit, his boots muddy.\n\n\"You were out there?\" Alek asked. \"With those bears?\"\n\n\"Aye, but they're not so bad. Can you speak any Russian?\"\n\n\"All the Russians I've met have spoken French.\" Alek looked at the starving, unkempt men around him and shrugged. \"And I think they were a different class of Russian.\"\n\n\"Well, ask them anyway, you ninny!\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alek began to push his way through the corridor, repeating, \"Parlez-vous fran\u00e7ais?\"\n\nA moment later Dylan was imitating him, calling out the phrase with a distinctly Scottish lilt. One of the Russians looked up with a spark of recognition, and led them both to a small man wearing pince-nez glasses and a blue uniform beneath his furs.\n\nAlek bowed. \"Je suis Aleksandar, Prince de Hohenberg.\"\n\nThe man bowed in return and said in perfect French, \"I am Viktor Yegorov, captain of the Czar's Airship Empress Maria. Are you in charge here?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I'm only a guest on this ship. You're the captain of these men?\"\n\n\"The captain of a dead airship, you mean!\" The man glared over Alek's shoulder. \"That fool is in charge.\"\n\nAmong the crowd was a tall man dressed in civilian clothes, being led away by two of the ship's officers.\n\nAlek turned to Dylan. \"This man is Yegorov, an airship captain.\" He pointed. \"But he says that fellow is in charge.\"\n\nDylan snorted. \"Aye, him I've met already. That's Mr. Tesla, the Clanker boffin, and he's barking mad!\"\n\n\"Tesla the inventor?\" Alek asked. \"You must be mistaken.\"\n\nCaptain Yegorov heard the name and spat on the floor. \"He cost me my ship, and almost got us all killed! An utter fool, with the czar's men behind him.\"\n\nAlek said in careful French. \"It isn't Nikola Tesla, is it? I thought he was working for the Clankers.\"\n\n\"Of course he was!\" the captain said. \"The Germans funded his experiments when no one else would, and he designed plenty of weapons for them. But now that war is here, he's seen what they've done to his motherland! He's a Serb.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Alek said softly. \"Of course.\"\n\nThis Great War might have stretched across the world, but it had all started with the invasion of Serbia, for which Alek's family was to blame. His father\u2014heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne\u2014and mother had been killed by a group of Serbian revolutionaries, or so everyone thought. In reality the murders had been plotted by Alek's own granduncle and the Germans. But tiny Serbia had been the first victim of Austria's revenge.\n\nCaptain Yegorov's eyes narrowed. \"Wait. Is that . . . an Austrian uniform?\"\n\nAlek looked down at himself, and realized he was wearing his piloting jacket thrown over grease-stained mechanik's overalls.\n\n\"Yes. Hapsburg Guards, to be precise.\"\n\n\"And you're the prince of Hohenberg, you said?\" Captain Yegorov shook his head. \"The archduke's son, on a British airship? So the newspapers were telling the truth.\"\n\nAlek wondered how Eddie Malone's ridiculous articles had made it to Siberia. \"Some measure of it, anyway. I am Aleksandar.\"\n\nThe man let out a dry laugh. \"Well, I suppose if a Clanker inventor can switch sides, why not an Austrian prince?\"\n\nAlek nodded, the words finally sinking in. Nikola Tesla\u2014inventor of wireless transmission, the Tesla cannon, and countless other devices\u2014had joined the Darwinists. Count Volger would be fascinated to hear this bit of news.\n\n\"What are you two blethering about?\" Dylan asked. \"Has he told you yet why that Clanker boffin is here?\"\n\n\"Mr. Tesla appears to have joined the Darwinists,\" Alek said in English. He turned to the captain again. \"But why are you all in Siberia? Mr. Tesla is an inventor, not an explorer.\"\n\n\"He was searching for something in that fallen forest.\" Captain Yegorov shook his head. \"I have no idea what.\"\n\nAlek remembered the strange device in the ship's belly. \"Something metal?\"\n\nThe man shrugged. \"It could be. A few days ago his soldiers excavated a huge hole, and he was quite excited. After that we retreated inside the wire to wait for rescue.\"\n\nAlek turned to Dylan, roughly translating. \"Tesla was looking for something here, something secret. He may have found it a few days ago, whatever it was.\"\n\n\"Blisters. That means it's come aboard.\" Dylan looked down the crowded corridor, full of men with heavy packs but no Tesla. \"They've taken him forward to speak with the officers.\"\n\n\"Do you suppose they'd want to meet Captain Yegorov?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Aye, they would.\" Dylan smiled. \"And they might need a translator as well.\"\n\nA marine guard stood at the entrance to the forward corridor, keeping back the Russians. But he saluted when Dylan approached, and listened as the boy explained who Captain Yegorov was, and how he spoke no English. A few minutes later Alek found himself and the captain being taken forward.\n\n\"Watch out for that bum-rag!\" Dylan called, then turned away to face the throng.\n\nIn the navigation room were Captain Hobbes, Dr. Barlow, Dr. Busk, and the famous Mr. Tesla. The inventor was elegantly dressed, considering he'd just been rescued from the middle of Siberia, but he had a wild gleam in his eye. He clutched a walking stick that looked as though it had been thrust tip-first into a fire.\n\n\"I see no reason for this man to be here,\" Tesla said, giving Captain Yegorov a cold stare. The man said something short and sharp in Russian back at him.\n\nDr. Barlow spoke in a calming voice. \"This is a difficult moment for us all, gentlemen. Our ship is full of men and empty of supplies. The expertise of another airship captain is welcome here.\"\n\nTesla gave a snort, which the lady boffin politely ignored.\n\n\"If you please,\" she added to Alek. \"My French is a bit rusty.\"\n\nAs he translated her welcome for Yegorov, Alek heard a murmuring overhead, and glanced up to see both Bovril and Dr. Barlow's loris hanging from the message lizard tubes. They were repeating everything, relishing the sounds of a new language.\n\nCaptain Yegorov bowed. \"You have my thanks for rescuing us, and I appreciate the dire situation you are in. But it's no fault of mine. That madman ordered his soldiers to kill my airship. Food for the bears!\"\n\nAlek translated the last part into English haltingly, not quite believing what he was saying. The Leviathan's officers looked horrified as well.\n\nAfter a moment's silence Dr. Busk cleared his throat. \"It is not our place to pass judgment on what has happened here. We are on a rescue mission, nothing more. Perhaps we should all introduce ourselves.\" He turned to Captain Yegorov and said in slow, untidy French, \"I am Dr. Busk, head science officer aboard His Majesty's Airship Leviathan.\"\n\nAs Dr. Barlow introduced herself and the captain, Alek noticed that her French was flawless. He wondered why she really wanted him here.\n\nMr. Tesla looked bored and irritable, tapping his cane and grimacing as pleasantries went around the table. But when Alek introduced himself, the inventor's eyes lit up.\n\n\"The famous prince!\" he said in English. \"I've been reading about you.\"\n\n\"Ah, you, too,\" Alek sighed. \"I had no idea the New York World was so popular in Siberia.\"\n\nMr. Tesla laughed at this. \"My laboratory is in New York City, and you were the talk of the town when I left. And by the time I passed through Saint Petersburg, the czar's court was also buzzing about you!\"\n\nAn unpleasant feeling came over Alek, as always when he thought of thousands of strangers discussing the details of his life. \"Don't believe everything you read in the newspapers, Mr. Tesla.\"\n\n\"Indeed. They claim you're pulling strings in the Ottoman Republic, and yet here you are aboard the Leviathan. Are you concealing the fact that you've become a Darwinist?\"\n\n\"A Darwinist?\" Alek dropped his eyes to the table, suddenly aware of the Leviathan's officers in the room. \"I don't know if you could say that. But if you've read about me, you know that the Clanker Powers plotted my parents' death. The Germans and my granduncle, the Austrian emperor, are to blame for this war. I only want to end it.\"\n\nMr. Tesla nodded slowly. \"We are both servants of peace, then.\"\n\n\"A noble sentiment, gentlemen,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"But at the moment we are at war. We have twenty-eight extra mouths to feed, and we have dropped most of our supplies onto the tundra to make room for them.\"\n\n\"Airships certainly have their limitations,\" Mr. Tesla said.\n\nAlek ignored the man, quickly translating Captain Hobbes's words into French.\n\n\"If we head straight toward the airfield at Vladivostok, we'll all survive,\" Captain Yegorov said. \"It's two days away. We won't starve, and for water we can scoop up snow without landing, as Russian airships have done for years.\"\n\nAlek translated, and Captain Hobbes gave a firm nod.\n\n\"We're grateful that you have joined our side in this conflict, Mr. Tesla, and the czar has asked us to offer any assistance we can. But I'm afraid Captain Yegorov is right. We can't take you back to Saint Petersburg just yet. We'll have to keep heading east.\"\n\nThe inventor waved his hand. \"It doesn't matter. I haven't decided yet where I wish to go.\"\n\n\"Thank heaven for small favors,\" Dr. Barlow said quietly.\n\n\"After we resupply in Vladivostok, we may have to complete our mission in Japan,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"But I won't be sure until the Admiralty's orders reach us from London.\"\n\n\"If you only had wireless,\" Tesla muttered. \"Instead of those ridiculous birds.\"\n\nCaptain Hobbes ignored this. \"In the meantime we shall have to ration our food carefully.\" He looked at Captain Yegorov, and Alek repeated his words in French.\n\n\"We are airmen. Of course we understand,\" Yegorov said. \"We've all missed a few meals since arriving in Tunguska.\"\n\n\"Tunguska,\" said Bovril from the ceiling.\n\nDr. Barlow glanced up at the beast, then asked in French, \"Is that the name of this place?\"\n\nCaptain Yegorov shrugged. \"The Tunguska River passes through this forest, but it hardly has a name.\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" Tesla muttered. \"But soon everyone will know what happened here.\"\n\nDr. Barlow turned to him, switching to English. \"If I may ask, Mr. Tesla, what did happen here?\"\n\n\"To put it simply, the greatest explosion in our planet's history,\" the man said softly. \"The sound broke windows hundreds of miles away. It flattened the forest in all directions, and threw such dust into the air that the skies went red for months around the world.\"\n\n\"Around the world?\" Dr. Barlow asked. \"When was this exactly?\"\n\n\"The early morning of June 30, 1908. Back in the civilized world the atmospheric effects were barely noticed. But if it had happened anywhere except Siberia, the event would have filled all mankind with astonishment.\"\n\n\"Astonishment,\" Bovril whispered softly, and Tesla paused to give the beast an irritated stare. Alek glanced out the navigation room's slanted windows. Even at this height, he could see that the fallen trees stretched out endlessly.\n\n\"I came here to study what happened, and soon I shall report my results.\" As the inventor continued, he placed a heavy hand on Alek's shoulder and turned his gaze to him. \"When I do, the world will shudder, and perhaps at last find peace.\"\n\n\"Peace? Because of an explosion?\" Alek asked. \"But what caused it, sir?\"\n\nMr. Tesla smiled, and tapped his walking stick three times upon the floor.\n\n\"Goliath did.\"\n\n\"He is quite mad, of course,\" Alek said.\n\nCount Volger drummed his fingers on his desk, his eyes still locked on Bovril. Dr. Barlow had handed the creature to Alek as the meeting had broken up, and Alek hadn't stopped to leave it in his own stateroom. The news was simply too extraordinary to wait. But now Volger and the beast were staring at each other, a contest that Bovril appeared to be enjoying.\n\nAlek pulled the creature from his shoulder and placed it on the floor. He stepped closer to the stateroom window. \"Mr. Tesla says he did all this from America, with some kind of machine. Six years go.\"\n\n\"In 1908?\" Volger asked, his eyes still fixed on the beast. \"And he's waited until now to tell the world?\"\n\n\"The Russians wouldn't allow a Clanker scientist into their country,\" Alek said. \"Not until he switched sides. So he couldn't study the effects firsthand. But now that he's seen what his weapon can do, he says he's going to make the invention public.\"\n\nVolger finally tore his eyes from Bovril. \"Why would he test this weapon on a place he couldn't visit?\"\n\n\"He says this was an accident, a misfire. He only wanted to 'create some fireworks' and didn't realize how powerful Goliath was.\" Alek frowned. \"But surely you don't believe any of this.\"\n\nVolger turned to stare out the window. The Leviathan was nearing the edge of the devastation, where only the youngest trees had fallen. But the massive extent of the explosion was still apparent.\n\n\"Do you have another explanation for what happened here?\"\n\nAlek sighed slowly, then pulled out a chair and sat down. \"Of course I don't.\"\n\n\"Goliath,\" Bovril said softly.\n\nCount Volger gave the beast an unfriendly look. \"What do the Darwinists think?\"\n\n\"They don't question Mr. Tesla's claims.\" Alek shrugged. \"Not to his face, at any rate. They seem quite pleased that he's joined their side.\"\n\n\"Of course they are. Even if the man's lost his mind, he can still show them a trick or two. And if he's telling the truth, he could end the war with the flick of a switch.\"\n\nAlek looked out the window again. The magnitude of the fallen forest, and the fact that Volger wasn't laughing outright at Tesla's absurd claim, made him feel queasy. \"I suppose that's true enough. Imagine Berlin after such an explosion.\"\n\n\"Not Berlin,\" Volger said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Tesla is a Serb,\" Volger explained slowly. \"Our country attacked his homeland, not Germany.\"\n\nAlek felt the weight of the war settling on his shoulders again. \"My family is to blame, you mean.\"\n\n\"Tesla might well think so. If this weapon of his really works, and he uses it again, it will be Vienna that lies in splinters.\"\n\nAlek felt something dreadful rising up inside him, like the hollow feeling he'd carried inside since his parents' murder, but greater. \"Surely no one would ever use such a weapon against a city.\"\n\n\"There are no limits in war,\" Volger said, still staring out the window.\n\nThen Alek recalled the dead airbeast, sacrificed to the fighting bears so that Tesla could complete his mission. The man was determined, it seemed.\n\nBovril shifted on the floor, saying, \"Splinters.\"\n\nVolger gave the beast another withering look, then turned to Alek. \"This may be an opportunity for you to serve your people, Prince, in a way few sovereigns can.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alek sat up straighter. \"We'll convince him that Austria is not his enemy. He's read about me in those newspapers. He understands that I want peace too.\"\n\n\"That would be the best solution,\" Volger said. \"But we must be certain of his intentions before we let him leave this ship.\"\n\n\"Let him leave? I hardly think we can convince the captain to arrest him.\"\n\n\"I wasn't thinking of an arrest.\" Count Volger leaned closer, his hands splayed across the map of Siberia on the desk. \"How close were you standing to him in that meeting? How close might any of us find ourselves to this man over the next days?\"\n\nAlek blinked. \"Surely you're not suggesting violence, Count.\"\n\n\"I am suggesting, young prince, that this man is a danger to your people. What if he wants revenge for what Austria has done to his homeland?\"\n\n\"Ah. Revenge again,\" Alek muttered.\n\n\"Two million of your subjects live in Vienna. Would you not lift a hand to save them?\"\n\nAlek sat there, uncertain of what to say. It was true\u2014half an hour ago he'd been standing next to the famous inventor, close enough to put a knife into him. But the whole idea was barbaric.\n\n\"He thinks Goliath can end the war,\" Alek managed at last. \"The man wants peace!\"\n\n\"As do we all,\" Count Volger said. \"But there are many ways to end a war. Some more peaceful than others.\"\n\nThere was a knock on the door.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Bovril said, then gave a giggle.\n\n\"Come in, Dylan,\" Alek called. The lorises had very keen hearing and could tell people apart by their footsteps or door knocks, even the particular rasp of how they drew a sword.\n\nThe door swung open, and Dylan took a step inside. He and Volger exchanged a cold glance.\n\n\"I thought I'd find you here, Alek. How was the meeting?\"\n\n\"Quite illuminating.\" Alek glanced from Dylan to Volger. \"I'll tell you all about it, but . . .\"\n\n\"I need to get some sleep first,\" Dylan said. \"Up all night, and out with the bears while you were napping.\"\n\nAlek nodded. \"I'll keep Bovril, then.\"\n\n\"Aye, but get a squick more sleep yourself,\" Dylan said. \"The lady boffin wants us to do some skulking tonight, to find out what Mr. Tesla's been up to.\"\n\n\"Skulking,\" Bovril said, quite happy with the word.\n\n\"An excellent idea,\" Alek said.\n\n\"There's no telling what he's brought aboard.\"\n\n\"Then, I'll see you after nightfall.\" Dylan made an infinitesimal bow at Volger. \"Your countship.\"\n\nVolger nodded in return. Once the door was closed again, a tiny shiver went through Bovril.\n\n\"Have you two had some sort of a falling-out?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"A falling-out?\" Volger snorted. \"We were hardly friends in the first place.\"\n\n\"In the first place? So you are on the outs with each other.\" Alek let out a dry laugh. \"What happened? Did Dylan talk back during his fencing lessons?\"\n\nThe wildcount didn't answer, but rose from his desk and began to pace about the room. Alek felt his smile fade, remembering what they'd been discussing.\n\nBut when the wildcount finally spoke, he said, \"How important is that boy to you?\"\n\n\"A moment ago, Count, you were suggesting cold-blooded murder. And now you're asking about Dylan?\"\n\n\"Are you trying to avoid the question?\"\n\n\"No.\" Alek shrugged. \"I think Dylan's an excellent soldier and a good friend. A good ally, I might add. He helped me get into that meeting today. Without him we'd be sitting here without a clue as to what's happening on this ship.\"\n\n\"An ally.\" Volger sat back down, dropping his gaze to the map on his desk. \"Fair enough. Does Tesla say he can fire this weapon at any spot on earth?\"\n\n\"I'm having trouble following your leaps in conversation today, Volger. But yes, he says he can aim it now.\"\n\n\"But how can he be certain, if this first event was an accident?\"\n\nAlek sighed, trying to cast his mind back to the meeting. Tesla had gone on at length about the matter. Despite claiming to be keeping secrets, the inventor had a gift for disquisition.\n\n\"He's been working on that problem for six years, ever since the accidental firing. He knew from newspaper accounts that something had happened in Siberia, something extraordinary. And now that he's measured the explosion's exact center, he can adjust his weapon accordingly.\"\n\nVolger nodded. \"So that device you and Klopp put together, it was meant to find the center of the explosion?\"\n\n\"Well . . . that doesn't make sense. Klopp says it's a metal detector.\"\n\n\"When a shell lands, aren't there traces of metal left?\"\n\n\"But it isn't that kind of weapon.\" Alek cast his mind back, trying to remember how the great inventor had described it. \"Goliath is a Tesla cannon of sorts, one that becomes part of the Earth's magnetic field. It casts the planet's energy up through the atmosphere and around the world. Like the northern lights, he said, but a million times more powerful. The way he described it, the air itself caught fire here!\"\n\n\"I see.\" Volger let out a slow sigh. \"Or rather, I don't see at all. This may all be a case of madness, of course.\"\n\n\"Surely,\" Alek said, feeling himself relax. The notion of murdering Tesla to stop some imaginary event was too absurd to contemplate. \"I'll ask Klopp what he thinks. And Dr. Barlow will also venture an opinion, no doubt.\"\n\n\"No doubt,\" Bovril said thoughtfully.\n\nCount Volger waved his hand at the beast. \"Is that all this abomination does? Repeat words at random?\"\n\n\"Random,\" Bovril said, then chuckled a bit.\n\nAlek reached down to stroke the creature's fur. \"That's what I thought, at first. But Dr. Barlow claims that the beast is quite\"\u2014he used the English word\u2014\"perspicacious. And it does make a good suggestion every now and then.\"\n\n\"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day,\" Volger muttered. \"Clearly those creatures were nothing but an excuse to have a snoop around Istanbul. Bringing the behemoth down the strait was always the Darwinists' plan.\"\n\nAlek lifted the beast back up to his shoulder. He'd thought the same thing himself, back in Istanbul. But just that morning in the cargo hold, the creature had borrowed Dr. Barlow's necklace to show how the mysterious device worked.\n\nSurely that couldn't have been random.\n\nBut Alek didn't mention it. No point in making the wildcount even more uneasy around the beast.\n\n\"I may not understand Goliath,\" he said simply. \"But I understand Darwinist fabrications even less.\"\n\n\"Keep it that way,\" Volger said. \"You're the heir to the Austrian throne, not some zookeeper. I'll talk to Klopp about all this. In the meantime you should follow Dylan's advice and get some sleep before tonight.\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow. \"You don't mind me skulking with a commoner?\"\n\n\"If what Tesla says is true, your empire faces grave danger. It's your duty to learn everything you can.\" Count Volger stared at him a moment, a look of resignation coming over his face. \"Besides, Your Serene Highness, sometimes skulking in the dark can prove most enlightening.\"\n\nMaking his way back to his stateroom, Alek felt his missed night of sleep again. The perspicacious loris sat heavily on his shoulder, and too many thoughts buzzed in his mind\u2014images of the ruined forest beneath the ship, the notion that a madman could destroy the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the awful possibility that Alek himself might have to prevent it with the blade of a knife.\n\nBut when he slumped onto his bed, Alek found Volger's newspaper still there, opened to the story about Dylan.\n\nVolger had been so strange today, his questions zigzagging between Tesla's weapon and Dylan. They must have had a fight, but about what?\n\nAlek picked up the newspaper, staring at the photograph of Dylan swinging from the Dauntless's trunk. The wildcount had seen the story too, of course. He read every newspaper Barlow gave him from cover to cover.\n\n\"You know something you shouldn't, don't you, Volger?\" Alek said quietly. \"That's why you and Dylan are fighting.\"\n\n\"Fighting,\" Bovril repeated thoughtfully. Then it crawled from Alek's shoulder onto the bed.\n\nAlek stared at the beast, recalling what had happened in the cargo bay. The creature had sat on Klopp's shoulder all night, listening to everything, rolling words like \"magnetism\" and \"electrikals\" around in its mouth. And then it had plucked Dr. Barlow's necklace from her and demonstrated the purpose of the strange device.\n\nThat was how the beast's perspicaciousness worked. It listened, then somehow drew everything together into a neat bundle.\n\nAlek flipped the newspaper back to the first page, and began to read aloud. Bovril spoke up now and then, repeating new words happily, digesting it all.\n\n. . . He surely has bravery running in his veins, being the nephew of an intrepid airman, one Artemis Sharp, who perished in a calamitous ballooning fire only a few years ago. The elder Sharp was posthumously awarded the Air Gallantry Cross for saving his daughter, Deryn, from the hungry flames of the conflagration.\n\nAlek sat back up. He blinked away sleep, still staring at the words. His daughter, Deryn?\n\n\"Reporters.\" Alek took a deep breath. It was amazing how they could get the simplest facts wrong. He'd explained to Malone several times that Ferdinand was his father's middle name. And yet the man had referred to Alek as \"Aleksandar Ferdinand\" in several places, as if it were a family name!\n\n\"His daughter, Deryn,\" Bovril repeated.\n\nBut why would anyone change a boy into a girl? And where had the unlikely name Deryn come from? Perhaps Malone had been misled by someone in Dylan's family, to hide the fact that two brothers had entered the Air Service together.\n\nBut Dylan had said that was all a lie, hadn't he?\n\nSo this Deryn had to do with the real family secret, the one Dylan refused to talk about.\n\nFor a moment Alek felt dizzy, and wondered if he should put down the paper and forget all about this, out of respect for Dylan's wishes. He needed sleep.\n\nBut instead he read a little further. . . .\n\nAt the time of the tragic incident, the Daily Telegraph of London wrote, \"And as the flames exploded overhead, the father cast his daughter from the tiny gondola, and in saving her life sealed his own fate.\" Surely our brothers across the Atlantic are lucky to count brave men such as the Sharps among their airmen during this terrible war.\n\n\"Sealed his own fate,\" Bovril said gravely.\n\nAlek nodded slowly. So the mistake had been made two years ago, by a British paper, and had been merely copied by Malone. That had to be it. But why had the Telegraph made such an odd error?\n\nA cold feeling went through Alek then. What if there really was a Deryn, and Dylan was lying about it all? What if the boy had only watched the accident, and had inserted himself into the story in his sister's place?\n\nAlek shook his head at this absurd idea. No one would embellish the story of his own father's death. It had to be a simple mistake.\n\nThen, why was Dylan lying to the Air Service about who his father was?\n\nA strange feeling, almost a kind of panic, was coming over Alek. It had to be exhaustion, compounded by this reporter's odd mistake. How was he supposed to believe anything he read, when newspapers could get reality so completely wrong? Sometimes it felt as though the whole world were built on lies.\n\nHe lay down, forcing his eyes closed and willing his racing heart to slow down. The details of a years-old tragedy hardly mattered anymore. Dylan had seen his father die and his heart was still broken from it, of that Alek was sure. Perhaps the boy didn't know himself what had happened on that terrible day.\n\nAlek lay there for long minutes, but sleep wouldn't come. Finally he opened his eyes and looked at Bovril. \"Well, you've got all the facts now.\"\n\nThe creature just stared up at him.\n\nAlek waited another moment, then sighed. \"You're not going to help me with this mystery, are you? Of course you aren't.\"\n\nHe kicked off his boots and closed his eyes again, but his head was still spinning. He wanted more than anything to get some rest ahead of tonight's skulking. But Alek could feel sleeplessness nestling in beside him, like an unwelcome visitor in the bed.\n\nThen Bovril crept up beside his head, seeking warmth against the chill that pushed through the ship's windowpanes.\n\n\"Mr. Deryn Sharp,\" the creature whispered into his ear.\n\nTazza's ears perked up. The beastie strained at his leash, pulling Deryn forward in the darkness of the gut. Just ahead of them a strange two-headed silhouette was emerging from gloom.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" came a familiar voice, and Deryn smiled. It was only Bovril, riding on Alek's shoulder.\n\nTazza leaned back onto his haunches and bounced with excitement as the two approached. Bovril chuckled a bit at the sight, but Alek didn't look happy. He was staring at Deryn, his eyes hollow.\n\n\"Did you not get any sleep?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not much.\" He knelt to pet the thylacine. \"I looked in your cabin. Newkirk said you'd be here.\"\n\n\"Aye, this is Tazza's favorite place for a walk,\" Deryn said. The great airbeast's gut was where all the organic matter of the ship came together to be processed and separated into energy-making sugars, hydrogen, and waste. \"I think he likes the smells.\"\n\n\"Mr. Newkirk seemed quite at home there,\" Alek said.\n\nDeryn sighed. \"It's his cabin too now. We're short of bunks for the next few days. Still, it's better than back when there were three of us middies to a cabin.\"\n\nAlek frowned, his gaze lingering on her again. Even in the faint wormlight of the great airbeast's gut, his face looked pale.\n\n\"Are you all right, Alek? You look as if you've seen a ghost.\"\n\n\"My head's been spinning, I suppose.\"\n\n\"It's not just you. Since meeting with that Clanker boffin, the officers have been as twitchy as a box of crickets. What in blazes did Tesla say in there?\"\n\nAlek paused a moment, still giving her the strange look. \"He claims that he destroyed that forest himself. He has a weapon of some kind in America, called Goliath. It's much bigger than the one we tore down in Istanbul, and he wants to end the war with it.\"\n\n\"He said he . . . w-with a what?\" Deryn sputtered.\n\n\"It's like a Tesla cannon, which he says can set the air on fire anywhere in the world. Now that he's seen firsthand what it can do, he wants to use it to force the Clankers to surrender.\"\n\nDeryn blinked. The boy had said the words so simply, as if repeating a duty roster, but they hardly made sense.\n\n\"Surrender,\" Bovril said. \"Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"A barking weapon did all that?\" She could recall with perfect clarity the night of the battle with the Goeben, when the Tesla cannon's lightning had spread across the Leviathan's skin, threatening to set the whole ship aflame. An astonishing sight, but a fly's fart compared to the destruction here in Siberia.\n\nDeryn felt dizzy. The news was staggering, and it didn't much help that supper hadn't been served that night. Tazza nuzzled her hand, whining hungrily.\n\n\"No wonder you couldn't sleep,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"That was part of it.\" The boy looked her in the eye again. \"It could all be a lie, of course. You can never tell when people are lying.\"\n\n\"Aye, or mad. No wonder the lady boffin wanted us to do a little skulking tonight.\" Deryn stood, pulling on the thylacine's leash. \"Come on, beastie. It's back to the cabin with you.\"\n\n\"We should take the loris with us,\" Alek said as he stood up. \"It's been quite perspicacious lately.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Bovril added, and Deryn gave it a hard look.\n\n\"Well, all right,\" she said. \"But I hope it knows when to shush.\"\n\n\"Shushhh,\" the loris said.\n\nThe belowdecks were full of snoring men.\n\nThe Leviathan might not have had enough bunks for its guests, but the ship's empty storerooms had plenty of space. Except for their captain the Russians were all down here, packed together like a box of cigars. But Deryn reckoned they were happy enough, getting their first night of sleep in weeks without the lullabies of hungry fighting bears.\n\nIt was drafty in the belowdecks, and the men were still wrapped in their furs. Deryn saw no glimmer of watching eyes as she slunk past. Sitting on Alek's shoulder, Bovril softly imitated the sounds of snoring, breathing, and the wind of the airship's passage.\n\nNear the rear of the ship, she and Alek reached a locked door, its wooden frame bound with metal. She pulled out the ring of keys that Dr. Barlow had given her that afternoon.\n\nThe door swung open on silent hinges, and Deryn and Alek slipped inside. \"Some light, your princeliness?\" she whispered.\n\nWhile Alek was fiddling for his command whistle, she relocked the door behind them. His shaky tune came through the dark; then Bovril joined in, and the green light of glowworms sprang up around them.\n\nIt was the airship's smallest storeroom, the only one with a solid door. The officers' wine and spirits were kept here, along with any other cargo of special value. At the moment it was empty except for the captain's lockbox and the strange magnetic device.\n\n\"The crew saved this machine?\" Alek asked. \"Even when they threw all our food away?\"\n\n\"Aye. The lady boffin had to yell a bit to make it happen. She's a clever-boots, thinking ahead like that.\"\n\n\"Clever-boots,\" said Bovril with a chuckle.\n\nAlek's eyes opened wider. \"Of course. This device was meant to find whatever Tesla was looking for.\"\n\n\"Aye. But he's already found it! Captain Yegorov said that Tesla's men dug something out of the earth a few days ago. So whatever they discovered must be aboard the Leviathan right now!\" She looked down at the device. \"And he's supplied us with a way to find out exactly where.\"\n\nAlek's smile grew as his hands took the machine's controls.\n\nTypical, Deryn thought, that it took a clever scheme and a Clanker device to lift Alek's spirits. But it was good to see the boy happy at last, instead of moping about as if the world had ended.\n\n\"These walls are solid,\" she said. \"The Russians won't hear if you turn it on.\"\n\nAlek tapped at one of the dials, then gave the power switch a flick.\n\nThe low whine of the machine built, filling the tiny room. The three glass spheres began to shimmer, a wee sliver of lightning sparkling to life in each one. The electricity flickered aimlessly for a moment, then steadied.\n\nDeryn swore, leaning closer. \"That's exactly the same as this morning\u2014two pointed upward and one astern. It's detecting the engines again.\"\n\n\"One moment,\" Alek said.\n\nDeryn watched as he fiddled with the elegant controls. The machine's parts looked handmade, more like the Leviathan's equipment than a Clanker device. She remembered Klopp complaining about its fanciness as they'd put it together.\n\n\"It almost looks like it belongs here,\" she murmured.\n\nAlek nodded. \"Mr. Tesla has lived in America for some time. It must be difficult to escape the Darwinist influence there.\"\n\n\"Aye, poor man. I'm sure he wished he'd made it barking ugly.\"\n\n\"There!\" Alek said. \"It's got hold of something!\"\n\nThe slivers of lightning had faded for a moment, but now they were flickering back to life. All three of them pointed in the same direction\u2014up and toward the bow.\n\nDeryn frowned. \"That's the officers' staterooms, or maybe the bridge. Could it be detecting the metal in the ship's instruments?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. We'll have to triangulate to be sure.\"\n\n\"What, you mean move it?\"\n\nAlek shrugged. \"It's designed to be carried, after all.\"\n\n\"Aye, and we're supposed to be skulking, not waltzing about with this noisy contraption sparkling in the dark.\"\n\n\"Sparkling!\" Bovril announced, then began to imitate the sounds of the machine.\n\n\"Well, I can turn the current down,\" Alek said, and fiddled with the controls a bit. The glass spheres dimmed. \"How's that?\"\n\n\"It's still barking noisy,\" Deryn muttered, but there was no way around it. With only a single direction to go on, they'd have to search a quarter of the ship. \"You shush, beastie!\"\n\n\"Shush,\" Bovril whispered, and a moment later the sound in the room began to change. The whining grew flatter and dimmer, as if the machine were being carried away down a long corridor. But it was still there, right in front of Deryn.\n\n\"Did you do that?\" she asked Alek.\n\nThe boy shook his head, holding a hand up for silence. He turned to stare at the perspicacious loris on his shoulder.\n\nDeryn squinted in the green-tinged darkness, and soon she saw it. Every time Bovril paused for breath, the whine of the device grew in volume for a moment, then faded again.\n\n\"Is Bovril doing that?\" she asked.\n\nAlek placed a hand over his ear on one side, closing his eyes. \"The creature's whine is making the machine's quieter somehow, as if the two sounds were fighting each other.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\nAlek opened his eyes. \"I have no idea.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose that's a question for the lady boffin.\" Deryn reached for the machine's handles. \"We've got skulking to do.\"\n\nThe device was easy enough for the two of them to carry, but once out in the cargo bay, Deryn realized how tricky this would be. Only a narrow sliver of floor was visible among the sleeping bodies, like a path of paving stones through a carpet of brambles.\n\nAlek led the way, taking slow deliberate steps. Deryn followed, her palms growing sweaty on the machine's metal handles. She was certain of one thing\u2014if the device slipped from her grasp, whoever it landed on was going to make a ruckus.\n\nThe whine of the machine seemed even quieter out here, stifled by the packed bodies and Bovril's mysterious vocal trick. What sound remained was lost in the rush of wind slipping past the airship's gondola.\n\n\"A CAREFUL EXTRACTION.\"\n\nAs she and Alek made their way toward the bow, the slivers of lightning in the glass spheres gradually shifted, until they pointed directly up. Deryn stared at the ceiling, recalling the deck plans she'd copied a hundred times from the Manual of Aeronautics.\n\nOne deck up was the officer's baths, and above that . . .\n\n\"Of course,\" she hissed. Over the baths was Dr. Busk's laboratory, which the head boffin was letting Mr. Tesla use as a stateroom.\n\nThe realization froze her midstride, just as Alek took a long step over a sleeping Russian. Too late Deryn felt cool metal slipping from the fingers of her right hand. . . .\n\nShe stuck out a boot just in time\u2014the right rear corner of the device landed on it, sending a jolt of pain through her foot. She choked back a shriek, grabbing for the bars to steady the contraption before it toppled onto a sleeping Russian.\n\nAlek turned back to give her a questioning look.\n\nDeryn jerked her chin back at the storeroom, afraid that if she opened her mouth, the stifled cry of pain would leap out. Alek looked at the glass spheres, then up at the ceiling, and nodded. He steadied the machine, then reached out and turned it off.\n\nThe way back was even trickier. Deryn led this time, her foot throbbing, her steps slow and painful across the sleeping bodies. But finally the machine was inside the storeroom again. She and Alek slipped back out into the cargo bay, then locked the door behind them.\n\nAs they made their way toward the central stairs, Deryn scanned the sleeping men. None stirred, and a squick of relief competed with the drumbeat of pain in her foot.\n\nBut as she climbed the stairs, Bovril shifted on Alek's shoulder and made a soft sound, like whispers in the dark.\n\n\"Let me do this,\" Alek whispered again.\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. \"Don't be daft. I know every squick of this ship. You've never even been in the laboratory.\"\n\n\"But you can't just sneak into a man's room while he's sleeping,\" Alek said, his voice breaking from a whisper.\n\n\"And you can? You're a barking prince. I hardly think that qualifies you for burglary.\"\n\nAlek started to sputter something else, but Deryn ignored him, glancing up and down the hallway. After a day that had included a rope-and-winch landing and twenty-eight unexpected new passengers, the exhausted crew was mostly asleep, the airship's corridors empty and dark.\n\n\"Just stay out here and keep quiet.\"\n\n\"Mr. Tesla is quite unbalanced,\" Alek whispered. \"Who knows what he'll do if he wakes up? Volger said his walking stick was quite dangerous.\"\n\n\"Aye, there is that,\" Deryn murmured. Tesla had promised the captain that he wouldn't fire the stick inside the airship. But what if she startled the inventor, and he forgot that he was hanging from a giant bag of hydrogen? \"I'll have to make sure I don't wake him, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Why don't we simply tell Dr. Barlow that he's got something in his cabin?\" Alek whispered. \"The ship's marines can search for it in the morning.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"You know what a sneaky-beak the lady boffin is. She wants it all done quietly, so Tesla won't know she's on to him.\"\n\n\"Of course. The simplest path is completely beyond that woman.\"\n\n\"Listen, if you want to help, wait out here and give the door a wee scratch if anyone's headed this way.\" She pointed at the beastie. \"And keep your eye on Bovril. It'll hear any footsteps before you do.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. I'm not moving from this spot.\"\n\n\"Except to hide if you hear anything.\" Deryn recalled the whispering sound Bovril had made as they'd left the belowdecks. \"If any of Tesla's Russians saw us down there, they might pop up to tell him.\"\n\nAlek opened his mouth to protest again, but Deryn silenced him with a stern look, pulling Dr. Barlow's keys from her pocket. The largest was labeled LABORATORY, and fit perfectly into the lock.\n\n\"Shush,\" Bovril said with a quiet, anxious rush of breath.\n\nAs the door opened, a wedge of the corridor's green light spilled into the room, and Deryn's breath caught. Of course, being discovered right away would be easiest. She was simply a dutiful middy checking on an important passenger.\n\nBut Mr. Tesla was asleep in his bunk, his breathing heavy and slow. The moon shone through the window, three quarters full, and the glass instruments that Dr. Busk had left behind glittered with the moon's pearly light.\n\nDeryn stepped inside and leaned back against the door, her heartbeat taking up residence in her bruised foot. The door shut behind her with a soft click, but still Mr. Tesla didn't stir.\n\nA shiny leather suitcase lay open on the floor, revealing a neatly folded white shirt that glowed in the moonlight. The electrical walking stick lay on a laboratory bench, its handle pulled off to reveal a pair of wires. As Deryn's eyes adjusted, she saw they were connected to the airship's power lines. So the bum-rag was recharging his stick, despite his promise to the captain.\n\nDeryn took a few slow steps into the room, her foot still pounding from the contraption landing on it. She knelt by the suitcase and slipped a hand beneath the shirt on top, feeling layer by layer. Nothing but clothing.\n\nShe frowned, looking about the room. Dr. Busk had cleared most of his boffin gear away, so the lab wasn't in its usual cluttered state. There wasn't much space to hide anything, at least not anything big enough to create an explosion forty miles across. But the little slivers of lightning had pointed straight at this cabin, so whatever Tesla had found had to be here.\n\nShe swore under her breath. It was just like the lady boffin, sending Deryn to search for something without saying what it was.\n\nAs she knelt there pondering, a soft scratching sound came from the door. It was Alek, alerting her that someone was coming. . . .\n\nThere was nowhere else to hide, so Deryn dropped to her hands and knees and scuttled beneath the bed.\n\nShe waited there in the darkness, her heart pounding. There were no sounds from the corridor, nothing except the rush of wind and Mr. Tesla's steady breathing.\n\nMaybe it had been only a crewman walking past. . . .\n\nBut then a soft knocking came from the door. Deryn squeezed herself farther under the bed as the sound grew louder. Finally the door opened, spilling wormlight into the room.\n\nDeryn swore silently\u2014she hadn't locked the door behind her.\n\nA pair of fur-lined boots strode to the side of the bed, and she heard Tesla's name amid a stream of whispered Russian. Tesla's voice answered, sleepy and confused at first. Then a pair of bare feet descended before her eyes, and a quiet conversation began in Russian.\n\nLying there, Deryn realized that something was poking into her back. She reached a hand around and felt an object wrapped in a canvas sack. It was as hard as stone.\n\nDeryn swallowed. This had to be what she was looking for, but it wasn't much bigger than a football. Would Tesla have come six thousand miles to find something so small?\n\nShe would make too much noise if she turned over to take a closer look, so she slowed her breath and waited, staring at the fur-lined boots and trying to ignore her own throbbing foot.\n\nFinally the whispered conversation ended. The boots walked away and through the door, and the pair of bare feet shifted as Tesla stood up. Deryn clenched her fists. Was he going to check on his precious cargo beneath the bed?\n\n\"A SKULK INTERRUPTED.\"\n\nBut the feet padded over to the door, and Deryn heard the knob jiggle. Tesla was probably wondering how his Russian friend had simply walked in. But after the long and frantic day, could he be certain he'd locked the door before going to bed?\n\nThe rasp of a key reached her ears, then the click of a dead bolt sliding closed. The bare feet came back to the bed, which creaked above her as the man climbed back in.\n\nDeryn lay there, listening to his breathing, realizing that she would have to wait for ages to make sure he was asleep again. At least her throbbing foot would help her stay awake.\n\nThe mysterious object was still jabbing into her back, and its size still bothered her. How had that contraption detected something so small from the other end of the ship?\n\nMagnetic fields, Klopp had said.\n\nDeryn reached into a pocket and pulled out her compass. She inched it out from beneath the bed until its face caught a squick of moonlight. . . .\n\nHer eyes widened. The needle was pointing straight at the object, toward the bow of the ship. But they were headed south-by-southeast, not due north.\n\nThe mysterious object was magnetized. It had to be what Tesla had been looking for.\n\nDeryn counted a thousand slow heartbeats before daring to turn over. She felt the canvas sack in the darkness, and when her fingers slipped inside, they touched a cool metal surface. Not smooth, like cast metal, but as knobbly as a piece of old cheese.\n\nShe tried to test the object's weight, but it wouldn't budge from the floor. Solid metal was barking heavy, of course. Even hollow aerial bombs took two men to lift.\n\nWhat in blazes was this thing?\n\nDr. Barlow might know, if Deryn could get a sample somehow.\n\nShe remembered the chapter from the Manual of Aeronautics on compasses. Iron was the only magnetic element, and a great spinning blob of it at the earth's core was what made compasses work. She rubbed the metal and sniffed her fingers, and caught a tang almost like fresh blood. There was iron in blood, too. . . .\n\nAnd iron was much softer than steel.\n\nShe pulled out her rigging knife and slipped it into the sack. Her fingers searched until she found a wee sliver jutting up from the object's rough surface. Tesla was snoring by now, so Deryn began to saw away at the sliver, the canvas sack muffling the rasp of her knife.\n\nAs she worked, her mind spun with questions. Had Tesla's weapon used a projectile of some kind and this was all that was left? Or had the electrical explosion somehow fused all the iron in the frozen Siberian ground?\n\nOne thing was certain\u2014Mr. Tesla's claim of having caused all that destruction suddenly seemed more credible.\n\nAt last the sliver broke free, and Deryn slipped it into a pocket. She stretched her muscles carefully one by one. It wouldn't do for her legs to cramp as she was sneaking out of the room.\n\nShe crawled from beneath the bed and slowly stood, watching the rise and fall of Tesla's chest as she pulled her keys out. The door unlocked with a soft click, and a moment later Deryn was in the corridor.\n\nAlek stood there looking pale, a drawn knife in his hand. Bovril still perched on his shoulder, wide-eyed and tense.\n\nDeryn put her fingers to her lips, then turned and relocked the door. With a beckoning wave of her hand, she led Alek to the middies' mess. He followed, his expression still anxious, his eyes darting down every corridor.\n\n\"You can put that away,\" Deryn said when she'd closed the door to the mess.\n\nAlek stared at his knife a moment, then slipped it back into his boot.\n\n\"It was maddening,\" he said, \"standing out there. When that other man stayed so long, I almost burst in to make sure you were all right.\"\n\n\"Good thing you didn't,\" she said, wondering why Alek was so twitchy tonight. \"You'd have started a ruckus for no reason. And look, while I was hiding under the bed from that Russian, I found something!\"\n\nShe pulled the shard of metal from her pocket and placed it on the mess table. It didn't look like much here in the light, just a shiny black blob the size of Bovril's little finger.\n\n\"That can't be what Tesla came here for,\" Alek said. \"It's too small.\"\n\n\"That's just a wee piece of it, Dummkopf. The rest is as big as your daft head.\"\n\nAlek pulled out a chair and sat at the mess table, looking exhausted. \"That still seems awfully small. How did that device detect it?\"\n\n\"Watch this.\" She pulled out her compass and set it close to the sliver of metal, which set the needle shivering. \"It's magnetized iron!\"\n\nBovril crawled down from Alek's shoulder, getting close enough for a sniff.\n\n\"Magnetized,\" the beastie said.\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Alek said. \"What has magnetism to do with an explosion?\"\n\n\"I reckon that's one for the boffins to ponder.\"\n\n\"I'll ask Klopp as well. We have to know if Tesla's telling the truth before he gets off this ship.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"Why's that, exactly?\"\n\nAlek drummed his fingers on the table a moment, then shook his head. \"I can't tell you.\"\n\nDeryn's nerves twitched a bit. There was something odd about the way Alek was looking at her, not just exhaustion and nerves. He'd been tense all night, but now there was something stormy in his eyes.\n\n\"What do you mean you can't tell me?\" she asked. \"What's wrong, Alek?\"\n\n\"I need to ask you a simple question,\" he said slowly. \"Will you listen to every word? And answer me truthfully?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Just ask.\"\n\n\"All right, then.\" He took a slow breath. \"Can I trust you, Deryn? Really trust you?\"\n\n\"Aye. Of course you can.\"\n\nAlek breathed out a sigh as he stood up. He turned without another word and walked from the room.\n\nDeryn frowned. What in blazes was he . . . ?\n\n\"Can I trust you, Deryn?\" repeated Bovril, then it sprawled across the table, chuckling to itself.\n\nSomething coiled, tight and hard, in her chest. Alek had called her Deryn.\n\nHe knew.\n\nShe was a girl. Her name was Deryn Sharp, and she was a girl disguised as a boy.\n\nAlek walked toward his stateroom with steady, determined steps, but the floor was shifting beneath his feet. The soft green wormlight of the corridors looked all wrong, as sickly as when he'd first come aboard the Leviathan.\n\nHe raised a hand to guide himself, his fingers sliding along the wall like a blind man's. The fabricated wood trembled against them, the whole ghastly airship pulsing with life. He was trapped inside an abomination.\n\nHis best friend had been lying to him since the moment they'd met.\n\n\"Alek!\" came a frantic whisper from behind.\n\nPart of him was pleased that Deryn had followed. Not because he wanted to talk to her, but so he could walk away again.\n\nHe kept walking.\n\n\"Alek!\" she repeated, breaking into a full-voiced cry, loud enough to wake the sleeping men around them. Alek had almost reached the officers' cabins. Let the girl keep yelling where they could hear.\n\nShe'd lied to all of them, hadn't she? Her captain, her officers and shipmates. She'd sworn a solemn oath of duty to King George, all lies.\n\nHer hand grabbed his shoulder. \"You daft prince! Stop!\"\n\nAlek spun about, and they glared at each other in silence. It stung him to finally see her sharp, fine features for what they really were. To see how completely he'd been fooled.\n\n\"You lied to me,\" he whispered at last.\n\n\"Well, that's pretty barking obvious. Anything else obvious to say?\"\n\nAlek's eyes widened. This . . . girl had the nerve to be impertinent?\n\n\"All your talk of duty, when you're not even a soldier.\"\n\n\"I am a barking soldier!\" she growled.\n\n\"You're a girl dressed up like one.\" Alek saw that the words cut deep, and he turned away again, shards of satisfaction mixing with his anger.\n\nUntil this moment he hadn't believed it. The newspaper article, her lies to the crew about her father, even the whispered words of the perspicacious loris hadn't convinced him. But then Deryn had answered to her real name without blinking.\n\n\"Say that again,\" she spat from behind him.\n\nAlek kept walking. He didn't want to have this absurd discussion. He wanted only to go inside his stateroom and lock the door.\n\nBut suddenly he was stumbling forward. His feet tangled, and he landed on his hands and knees, staring at the floor.\n\nHe turned to look up at her. \"Did you just . . . shove me?\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Her eyes were wild. \"Say that again.\"\n\nAlek got to his feet. \"Say what again?\"\n\n\"That I'm not a real soldier.\"\n\n\"Very well. You aren't a real\u2014oof!\"\n\nAlek staggered backward, the breath driven from his lungs. His back thumped against a cabin door\u2014she'd punched him in the stomach. Hard.\n\nHe clenched his fists, anger coursing through his blood. In a flash he saw an opening, how her fists were held too low, how she favored her injured foot . . .\n\nBut before he could swing, he realized that he couldn't hit back. Not because she was a girl, but because she wanted so much to fight. Anything to make herself feel like a real boy.\n\nAlek straightened himself. \"Are you proposing that we settle the matter with a fistfight?\"\n\n\"I'm proposing that you say I'm a real soldier.\"\n\nHe saw a glimmer in the darkness, and his lips curled into a thin smile. \"Is that how real soldiers cry?\"\n\nDeryn swore extravagantly, her thumb squashing the single tear on her left cheek, her fists still clenched. \"That's not crying; that's just\u2014\"\n\nHer voice choked off as the door behind Alek opened. He stumbled a moment, then turned and took a hasty step back. A sleepy-looking Dr. Busk stood in the doorway, wearing his nightgown and an annoyed expression.\n\nHis eyes darted back and forth between them. \"What's going on here, Sharp?\"\n\nHer fists dropped. \"Nothing, sir. We thought we heard one of the Russians wandering about. But it might be that a sniffer's got loose.\"\n\nThe boffin glanced up and down the empty hallway. \"A sniffer, eh? Well, whatever it is, keep it quiet, boy.\"\n\n\"Our apologies, sir,\" Alek said, giving the man a small bow.\n\nDr. Busk returned the bow. \"Not at all, Your Highness. Good night.\"\n\nThe door closed, and Alek met Deryn's eyes for a moment. The naked fear in them sent a pang through him. She had expected him to tell the boffin everything. Was that what she thought of him?\n\nAlek turned and walked toward his stateroom again.\n\nHer quiet footsteps followed, as if she'd been invited along. He sighed, the rush of anger fading into the dull throb where she'd punched his stomach. There was nothing else to do but have this out with her.\n\nWhen Alek reached his stateroom door, he pulled it open, extending his hand. \"Ladies first.\"\n\n\"Get stuffed,\" she said, but went in ahead of him.\n\nHe followed, shut the door softly, and sat down at his desk. Out the window the snowy ground glowed in patches, moonlit islands in a black sea. Deryn stood in the center of the room, shifting her weight, as if still ready for a fight. Neither of them whistled for the glowworms to light up, and Alek realized that they'd left the loris behind in the middies' mess.\n\nFor a moment he brooded on the fact that a mere beast had figured Deryn out before him.\n\n\"That wasn't a bad punch,\" he finally said.\n\n\"For a girl, you mean?\"\n\n\"For anyone.\" It had hurt rather a lot; it still did. He turned to face her. \"I shouldn't have said that. You are a real soldier\u2014quite a good one, in fact. But you aren't much of a friend.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\" Another tear gleamed on her cheek.\n\n\"I told you everything,\" Alek said in a slow, careful voice. \"All my secrets.\"\n\n\"Aye, and I've kept them all too.\"\n\nHe ignored her, making a list on his fingers. \"You were the first member of this crew to know who my father was. You're the only one who knows about my letter from the pope. You know everything about me.\" He turned away. \"But you couldn't tell me about this? You're my best friend\u2014in some ways my only friend\u2014and you don't trust me.\"\n\n\"Alek, it's not that.\"\n\n\"So you lie simply to amuse yourself? 'Sorry, Dr. Busk, it might be that a sniffer's got loose.'\" Alek shook his head. \"It's as natural to you as breathing, isn't it?\"\n\n\"You think I'm here for my amusement?\" Deryn stepped closer to the window, her fists clenching again. \"That's a bit odd. Because when you thought I was a boy, you said it was barking brave for me to serve on this ship.\"\n\nAlek looked away, remembering the night Deryn had told him about her father's accident. She'd wondered if it was madness for her to serve on a ship full of hydrogen, as if she secretly wanted to die like him.\n\nPerhaps it was both brave and mad. She was a girl, after all.\n\n\"All right. You're an airman because your father was.\" Alek sighed. \"That is, if he really was your father.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"Of course he was, you ninny. My brother's crewmates knew Jaspert had a sister, so we made up another branch of the family. There's no more to it than that.\"\n\n\"I suppose all your lies have a certain logic to them.\" As he thought it through, Alek felt his anger building again. \"So in my case you thought I'd be a stuffy, arrogant prince who'd turn you in!\"\n\n\"Don't be daft.\"\n\n\"I saw your face when Dr. Busk caught us in the corridor. You thought you were done for. You don't trust me!\"\n\n\"You're being a Dummkopf,\" she said. \"I only thought he might have heard us arguing. We'd said enough for him to figure it out.\"\n\nAlek wondered what Dr. Busk had heard, and found himself hoping it hadn't been too much.\n\nDeryn pulled out the chair and sat down across from him. \"I know you'll keep my secret, Alek.\"\n\n\"As you have kept mine,\" he said coldly.\n\n\"Always.\"\n\n\"Then, why didn't you tell me?\"\n\nShe took a long, slow breath, then spread her hands on the desk, staring at them while she talked. \"I almost told you when you first came aboard, when you thought I might get in trouble for hiding you. They'd never hang a girl, you see?\"\n\nAlek nodded, though he doubted that was true. Treason was treason.\n\nThat thought made him shake his head\u2014this girl had committed treason for him. She'd fought by his side, taught him how to swear properly in English, and how to throw a knife. She'd saved his life, and all while lying to him about what she was.\n\n\"When we were in Istanbul,\" Deryn went on, \"and I thought we'd never get back aboard the Leviathan, I tried a dozen times to tell you. And just a week ago in the rookery, after Newkirk mentioned my uncle, I almost told you then, too. But I didn't want to . . . to ruin everything between us.\"\n\n\"Ruin everything? What do you mean?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It's nothing.\"\n\n\"It's obviously not nothing.\"\n\nShe swallowed, pulling her hands back from the surface of the desk, almost as if his sharp tone had frightened her. But nothing scared Dylan Sharp, nothing but fire.\n\n\"Tell me, Deryn.\" The name tasted strange in his mouth.\n\n\"I thought you couldn't stand to know.\"\n\n\"You mean you thought I was too delicate? You thought my fragile pride would crumble, just because some girl can tie better knots than me?\"\n\n\"No! Volger may have thought that, but not me.\"\n\nAlek squeezed his eyes shut, fresh anger rising in him. Tossing and turning that afternoon, wondering if the loris's hints were true, he'd forgotten about Deryn's falling-out with Volger. But it was all so obvious now. . . .\n\n\"Why didn't he tell me?\"\n\n\"He didn't want to upset you.\"\n\n\"That's another lie!\" Alek stood up. \"I see it all now. This is why you helped us escape\u2014why you've kept my secrets. Not because you're my friend. But because Volger was blackmailing you all along!\"\n\n\"No, Alek. I did all that because I'm your friend and ally!\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"But how can I know that? All you've done is lie to me.\"\n\nFor a long moment Deryn didn't answer, staring at him across the desk. Fresh tears rolled steadily down her cheeks, but she seemed frozen in place.\n\nAlek began to pace about the stateroom. \"That's why Volger never told me, so that he could hold it over you. Everything you've done was to protect yourself!\"\n\n\"Alek, you're being daft,\" she said softly. \"Volger might have tried to blackmail me, but I was your friend long before he knew.\"\n\n\"How can I believe you?\"\n\n\"Volger wasn't with us in Istanbul, was he? Do you think I jumped ship and joined your barking revolution for him?\"\n\nAlek clenched his fists, still pacing the room. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"I didn't go to Istanbul because of Volger, or because of any mission. I was never meant to reach the city, just The Straits. You know that, right?\"\n\nAlek shook his head, trying to order his thoughts. \"Your men were caught, and you were cut off from the Leviathan. So you had no choice but to join me.\"\n\n\"No, you daft prince! That's just what I told the officers. There were a hundred British ships at harbor in Istanbul. I could've taken one into the Mediterranean anytime I wanted. But Volger said you were in danger, that you'd stay in the city and fight instead of hiding. And I couldn't let you do that all alone. I had to save you!\" Her voice broke on the last word, and she steadied herself with a ragged breath. \"You're my best friend, Alek, and I couldn't lose you. I'd do anything not to lose you. . . .\"\n\nHe stared at her, frozen midstride. Her voice sounded so different now, like another person's altogether. He wondered if she'd been putting on a voice before, or whether he somehow heard her words differently, now that he knew she was a girl.\n\n\"What do you mean, lose me? I'd already run away.\"\n\nShe swore, then stood and walked to the door. \"That's all you need to know, you daft prince, that I'm your friend. I have to go collect the beastie, before it starts looking for us. It might wake somebody up.\"\n\nShe left without another word.\n\nAlek watched the door close. Why was it so important that she'd joined him in Istanbul? She'd taken the fight to the enemy, helped the revolution, and saved the Leviathan in the process. That was simply the kind of soldier she was.\n\nBut then it came back to him, that first moment when he'd seen her in the hotel in Istanbul. The way Deryn had looked at Lilit with such suspicion. Even jealousy.\n\nAnd then, without a perspicacious loris whispering the truth into his ear, he finally understood. She hadn't come to Istanbul as a soldier at all. And she never would have revealed her secret to Alek, for the simplest reason in the world.\n\nDeryn Sharp was in love with him.\n\nThe crooked fingers of inlets stretched from the sea into the city of Vladivostok, slicing it into winding peninsulas toothed with piers. Hills rose up from the water's edge, crisscrossed by avenues where mammothines trudged, bearing cargo from the ships scattered across the harbor.\n\nAs the Leviathan's shadow rippled along the rooftops, traffic slowed, with people looking up and pointing. Clearly they had never seen an airship so huge. The airfield looked paltry to Alek, barely half a kilometer across.\n\n\"We're in the middle of nowhere,\" he said. \"Exiled.\"\n\n\"Vladivostok,\" Bovril answered from the windowsill, and Alek wondered where the beast had heard the city's name.\n\nBovril rubbed its paw against the window glass, which was always fogging up here in the officers' baths. The plumbing was integrated into the airbeast's circulatory system, the air as warm and moist as a steam bath in Istanbul, an unpleasant reminder that the ship was a living thing. But at least the room was empty during the day. The officers were on duty, the crewmen not allowed to enter.\n\n\"A SHOWER TO CLEAR THE HEAD.\"\n\nSince finding out Deryn's secret, Alek had steered clear of her and Newkirk. The rest of the crew had little time for him, so he'd taken to wandering the ship alone. It had been an education, seeing places where the middies' duties rarely took them\u2014the ship's electrikal engines, the darkest reaches of the gut. But after two days of skimpy rations, Alek no longer had the energy to explore. Loneliness and hunger were natural allies, together carving an emptiness inside him.\n\n\"Middle of nowhere,\" said the perspicacious loris.\n\nAlek frowned. The beast had sounded almost sad.\n\n\"Do you miss her?\" he asked.\n\nBovril was silent for a moment, staring down at the airship's shadow slipping across the ground. Finally it said, \"Exiled.\"\n\nAlek couldn't argue. He was truly on the outside now, hiding from the crew, his own men, and especially Deryn. He had only Bovril for company.\n\nBut a fabricated beast was better than nothing, he supposed. And its company was much simpler than trying to untangle Deryn's feelings for him. She of all people knew that he could never love a commoner.\n\nThe Leviathan was coming about, turning its nose into the wind, slowly descending. The tiny figures on the airfield resolved into view. Half a dozen cargo bears waited with supplies, and two mammothine-drawn omnibuses stood ready to carry the Russians away. A lone Siberian tigeresque stood sentinel, its fangs as long and curved as scimitars.\n\nAlek dimly recalled that the fangs of a tigeresque came from the life threads of some extinct creature. But surely no dinosaur had been armed with such teeth. Were they from some ancient great cat? For the hundredth time while wandering the ship alone, Alek wished that Deryn were here to provide the answer.\n\nThe door opened behind him, and he turned, half expecting to find her there, ready to deliver a biology lesson. But it was Count Volger.\n\n\"I am sorry to disturb you, Your Highness, but I need you.\"\n\nAlek turned back to the window. The man had betrayed him far worse than Deryn had. She, at least, had her reasons to lie.\n\n\"I have nothing to say to you.\"\n\n\"I doubt that very much, but we haven't time in any case. We must deal with Mr. Tesla before we land.\"\n\n\"Deal with him?\" Alek shook his head. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"He's dangerous. Have you forgotten our discussion?\"\n\nAlek's mind processed the words, and a chill cut through the warm air of the officers' baths. In the last two days he'd forgotten to worry about Tesla and his city-destroying weapon, or Volger's plan to stop him. The possibility of murdering the inventor had never seemed quite real, but the look on the wildcount's face was deadly serious.\n\nBovril shifted nervously on the windowsill.\n\n\"So you're on your way to kill a man, and thought you'd stop by and ask for help?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to involve you in this, Alek. But we have to know if Tesla is leaving the ship today. He has refused to meet with me, but he'll talk to you.\" Volger's face showed a hint of a smile. \"You are all in the newspapers.\"\n\nAlek only glared, though the man was right. In the navigation room Tesla had been excited to meet him\u2014the famous prince. And an invitation to dinner had been slipped under Alek's stateroom door yesterday morning. He had ignored it, of course.\n\n\"You want me to find out if he's staying on board.\"\n\n\"If you please, Prince.\"\n\n\"And what if he's about to leave? Will you and Klopp gut him on the gangplank?\"\n\n\"Neither Klopp nor I will be anywhere near the spot. Nor shall you.\"\n\n\"Gut him on the gangplank,\" Bovril said gravely.\n\nAlek swore. \"Have you gone mad? If Bauer and Hoffman murder someone on this ship, the Darwinists will know who ordered it!\"\n\n\"I may not have to order anything.\" The wildcount gestured toward the door. \"But it's up to you to find out.\"\n\n\"And you waited until now to tell me?\" Alek spat, but Volger's cold smile didn't shift. The man had picked this moment on purpose, when Alek wouldn't have time to argue. \"What if I just stand here?\"\n\n\"Then Hoffman and Bauer will follow their orders. They're already in place.\"\n\nAlek lifted Bovril from the windowsill and put the beast on his shoulder. He took a step toward the door, ready to find his men and tell them to stand down. But where were they lying in wait? And worse, what if they ignored his commands? Now that they were all back aboard the Leviathan, Volger was in charge again.\n\nAlek's two days of sulking had made certain of that.\n\n\"Damn you, Volger. You shouldn't concoct plans without me. And you shouldn't keep secrets from me either!\"\n\n\"Ah.\" For a moment the man looked genuinely sorrowful. \"That was regrettable. But I did warn you not to make friends with a commoner.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you left out something rather important. Did you really think I was too fragile to know what Deryn was?\"\n\n\"Fragile?\" Volger looked about. \"I hadn't thought so, but now I find you brooding in a bathroom. This doesn't speak well of your sturdiness.\"\n\n\"I haven't been brooding! I've been exploring the ship.\"\n\n\"Exploring? And what have you discovered, Your Serene Highness?\"\n\nAlek turned back to the window, feeling a fresh wave of emptiness in his gut.\n\n\"That I can't trust anyone, and that no one has any faith in me. That my best friend was . . . a fiction.\"\n\n\"Brooding,\" Bovril said.\n\nCount Volger was silent. Alek almost added that his suspicion was that Deryn Sharp was in love with him, but he didn't want to see the scorn on Volger's face.\n\n\"I've been a fool,\" he finally said.\n\nVolger shook his head. \"But hardly a singular fool. That girl has tricked her officers and crewmates for months, and has been decorated in the line of duty. She even fooled me for some time. In her way, she's quite impressive.\"\n\n\"You admire her, Count?\"\n\n\"As one does a bear riding a bicycle. One sees it so rarely.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"And along with your admiration, you decided to blackmail her.\"\n\n\"I needed her help to get off this ship. I thought I could prevent you from joining in that pointless revolution and getting yourself killed.\" The annoyance in Volger's voice faded a bit. \"Of course, who knows? We may have need of her help again.\"\n\n\"Are you saying I should stay friends with her?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I'm saying that we can still blackmail her.\"\n\n\"Get stuffed,\" Alek said, and suddenly he had to get out of the steam and heat. He strode toward the door, halting with one hand tight around the knob. \"I'm going to Tesla's cabin. If he intends to disembark today, I shall call the ship's marines to escort him off in safety.\"\n\n\"It's your right to betray us, of course.\" Volger bowed. \"We are at your disposal.\"\n\n\"I won't betray you aloud, Volger, but the captain might draw unfortunate conclusions. Unless you promise me right now that\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't, Alek. Tesla's claims may be madness, but it isn't worth the risk. Two million of your people live in Vienna, and that's probably only the first city on his list. You saw what his machine can do.\"\n\nAlek pulled the door open. He didn't have time for this argument, and he couldn't let a man be killed over some imaginary threat. He had to stop this now. But he found himself pausing to say one more thing.\n\n\"If you threaten Deryn Sharp again, Volger\u2014in any way at all\u2014I'm done with you.\"\n\nThe man only bowed again, and Alek left, slamming the door behind him.\n\nMr. Tesla was still in his stateroom, but a leather suitcase lay on the bed. One of the Russians was packing while Tesla worked at the laboratory bench. The electrikal walking stick lay before him, partly disassembled.\n\nAlek knocked on the open door. \"Excuse me, Mr. Tesla?\"\n\nThe man looked up with irritation on his face, then brightened. \"Prince Aleksandar. You appear at last!\"\n\nAlek returned the bow. \"I apologize for not answering your note. I've been indisposed.\"\n\n\"No need, Prince,\" Tesla said, then his eyes narrowed at Bovril. \"So you really have become a Darwinist.\"\n\n\"Oh, this beast? It's . . . a perspicacious loris. 'Perspicacious' meaning 'wise or canny.'\"\n\n\"Get stuffed,\" Bovril said, then giggled.\n\n\"And it insults people,\" Tesla said. \"How peculiar.\"\n\nAlek gave the creature a sharp look. \"Bovril is usually more polite, as am I. It was an oversight not to join you last night. We have much to discuss.\"\n\nThe man turned back to his walking stick, his long fingers twisting a coil of wire round and round. \"Meals are a dismal affair on this ship, at any rate.\"\n\n\"The food isn't so bad when the galley has supplies.\" Alek wondered why he was defending the Leviathan, but he went on. \"The vegetables are grown fresh in the gut, and sometimes the strafing hawks bring their prey back for us.\"\n\n\"Ah, that would explain the braised hare. The highlight of the evening.\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow. This man had eaten fresh meat while Alek had been chewing on old biscuits? Of course, if the Darwinists believed that Goliath worked, they'd happily feed Tesla caviar three times a day.\n\n\"I'm sorry I wasn't here to share it with you. But now that the ship is resupplied, perhaps dinner tonight?\"\n\nMr. Tesla's face darkened. \"I must return to New York as quickly as possible. At last I have the data to complete my work.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Alek took a slow breath, then looked at the Russian, who was folding a pair of trousers. \"Might we have a moment alone, Mr. Tesla?\"\n\nTesla waved a hand. \"I have no secrets from Lieutenant Gareev.\"\n\nAlek frowned. Tesla had a Russian officer as his valet? No doubt one of the czar's confidants, sent to keep an eye on the inventor.\n\nThen Alek realized that he recognized Lieutenant Gareev. He was the man who'd interrupted Deryn's burglary two nights before. And it was possible that he'd spotted the two of them carrying the metal detector in the cargo bay that night.\n\nAlek switched from English to German. \"Mr. Tesla, can this weapon of yours really stop the war?\"\n\n\"Of course it can. I have always been able to see with absolute clarity how my inventions will operate, how every piece fits into another, even before I put the designs onto paper. Since this war began I have worked to extend this ability into the realm of politics. I am certain the Clanker Powers will yield to me, if only because they have no other choice.\"\n\nAlek nodded silently, struck again by the peculiar effect of listening to Tesla. Half of Alek rebelled at the wild claims; the other half was swept along by the man's certainty. What if Count Volger had got it backward? If Goliath really worked, then Tesla could end the war in a few weeks. It would be mad to plot against him.\n\nBut then Alek recalled the forest of fallen trees and scattered bones, a nightmare landscape stretching in all directions. What if it took the destruction of a whole city to convince the Clanker Powers to surrender?\n\nAll Alek knew for certain was that he couldn't see the future, and he didn't want blood on his men's hands today.\n\n\"Stop the war,\" Bovril said quietly.\n\nTesla leaned in to inspect the loris. \"What an odd beast.\"\n\n\"Sir, if there's any way you could stay aboard, I might be able to help you. I want peace too.\"\n\nThe man shook his head. \"My steamship leaves for Tokyo this afternoon, and I'm catching a Japanese airbeast for San Francisco in two days, then straight to New York by train. Missing a connection could cost me a week, and every day this war goes on, thousands die.\"\n\n\"But you can't leave yet!\" Alek clenched his fists. \"You need my help, sir. This is politics, not science. And my granduncle is the emperor of Austria-Hungary.\"\n\n\"The same granduncle you just accused of murder in the newspapers? My dear prince, you and your family are hardly on the best of terms.\" Tesla smiled gently as he said this, but Alek could hardly argue.\n\nThere was no other way, then. He reached for his command whistle and blew the notes to call a lizard. One popped from a message tube in seconds, but as Alek started to speak, his stomach twisted. He couldn't betray his own men, and he could hardly ask for an armed escort without explanation.\n\nMr. Tesla glanced up at the lizard, raising an eyebrow.\n\n\"Straight to New York,\" Bovril said.\n\nAlek finally found the right words. \"Captain Hobbes, Mr. Tesla and I need to see you at once. We have an important request. End message.\"\n\nThe creature scampered away.\n\n\"A request?\" Tesla asked.\n\nThe plan formed in Alek's mind as he spoke. \"Your mission is too important to waste time with steamships and trains. We should leave for New York immediately, and the Leviathan is the fastest way to get there.\"\n\n\"Are Japanese sea beasties as big as ours?\" asked Newkirk.\n\n\"Aye, they've got a few krakens,\" Deryn said through a mouthful of ham. \"But their wee beasties are deadlier. It was kappa monsters that captured the Russian fleet ten years ago.\"\n\n\"Aye, I remember that lesson.\" Newkirk was pushing his potatoes across his plate, feeling a bit twitchy here in enemy territory. \"Funny how the Japanese and Russians are on the same side now.\"\n\n\"Anything to beat those Clanker bum-rags.\" Deryn reached over to spear one of Newkirk's potatoes, but the boy didn't complain.\n\nDeryn couldn't see any point in not eating. She'd had four huge meals since the Leviathan had resupplied at Vladivostok, and she still felt empty from those two awful days of no rations.\n\nOf course, there was another void inside her, one that food couldn't fill. She and Alek hadn't spoken since he'd learned her secret. Whenever they bumped into each other, he only looked away, his face as pale as a mealyworm.\n\nIt was as if she'd transformed into something awful, a stain on the deck of the Leviathan that someone\u2014not a prince, of course\u2014ought to clean up. Alek had thrown their friendship straight out the window, just because she was a girl.\n\nAnd, of course, he'd taken Bovril for himself. Bum-rag.\n\n\"Where's Alek, anyway?\" Newkirk asked, as if reading her thoughts.\n\n\"Clanker business, I suppose.\" Deryn tried to keep the anger from her voice. \"I saw him with Mr. Tesla this morning, in a meeting with the officers. All very hush-hush.\"\n\n\"But we haven't seen him in days! Did you two have a fight?\"\n\n\"Get stuffed.\"\n\n\"I knew it,\" Newkirk said. \"He's been hiding from us, and you're as grumpy as a bag of wet cats. What in blazes happened?\"\n\n\"Nothing. It's just that, now that everyone knows he's a prince, he's too important to hang about with us middies.\"\n\n\"That's not what Dr. Barlow thinks.\" Newkirk stared down at his food. \"She asked me if you two'd been fighting.\"\n\nDeryn let out a groan. If the lady boffin was ordering Newkirk to spy for her, she had to be barking curious. And for a sticky-beak like Dr. Barlow, there wasn't much distance between curiosity and suspicion.\n\n\"It's none of her business.\"\n\n\"Aye, nor mine. But you have to admit it's a bit odd. After you two got back from Istanbul, you seemed as close as . . .\" Newkirk frowned.\n\n\"As a prince and a commoner,\" Deryn said. \"And now that he has Mr. Tesla to scheme with, he's got no more use for me.\"\n\n\"That's Clankers for you,\" Newkirk said. \"I suppose.\"\n\nDeryn stood and went to the window, hoping the conversation was at an end. The Sea of Japan spread out beneath the ship, glimmering with the afternoon sun, and beyond it the coastline of China. Scouting birds dotted the blue horizon, on the lookout for enemy craft.\n\nThe Leviathan was headed toward Tsingtao, a port city on the Chinese mainland. The Germans had a naval base there, whose warships could raid shipping across the entire Pacific. The Japanese were already besieging the city, but it seemed they needed a hand.\n\nNewkirk joined Deryn at the window. \"It's funny how Mr. Tesla didn't get off in Vladivostok. When I was laundering his shirts, he wanted them folded for packing.\"\n\nDeryn frowned, wondering what had caused the change in plans. She'd spied enough to know that Alek was spending a lot of time with his new friend. According to the cooks the two of them had eaten at the captain's table last night.\n\nWhat in blazes were they all up to?\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Sharp and Mr. Newkirk. Here you are.\"\n\nAs the two middies turned from the window, Tazza bounded forward through the door. Dr. Barlow was behind him, her loris sitting primly on her shoulder. The dark stripes under its eyes somehow gave the beastie a snooty expression.\n\nDeryn knelt to give Tazza's head a rub, glad for once to see the lady boffin, who might know something about Tesla and Alek's plans. Sticky-beaks could come in handy sometimes.\n\n\"Good afternoon, ma'am. I hope you're well.\"\n\n\"I am annoyed, at present.\" Dr. Barlow turned to Newkirk. \"Would you be so kind as to give Tazza his morning walk?\"\n\n\"But, ma'am, Dylan already\u2014,\" the boy began, but a look from Dr. Barlow silenced him.\n\nA moment later Newkirk was gone, having shut the door behind him without being told. The lady boffin sat down at the mess table and gestured at the remains of the middies' lunch. Deryn set to clearing them, her brain spinning.\n\nWas Dr. Barlow here to ask about her fight with Alek?\n\n\"If you would, Mr. Sharp, please describe the object you discovered in Mr. Tesla's room.\"\n\nDeryn turned away with a stack of empty dishes, hiding her relief. \"Oh, that. As I said, ma'am, it was round. A bit bigger than a football, but much heavier\u2014probably solid iron.\"\n\n\"Most certainly iron, Mr. Sharp, perhaps with some nickel. What of its shape?\"\n\n\"Its shape? I didn't get that good a look at it.\" Deryn cleared away a pair of aluminum tea mugs. \"I was under a bed in the dark, trying not to get caught!\"\n\n\"Trying not to get caught,\" the boffin's loris said. \"Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDr. Barlow waved a hand. \"At which you succeeded admirably. But roughly what form did this iron football take? Was it a perfect sphere? Or a misshapen lump?\"\n\nDeryn sighed, trying to recall those long minutes of waiting while Tesla had drifted back to sleep. \"It wasn't perfect at all. It was knobbly on the surface.\"\n\n\"Were these 'knobbles' smooth or jagged to the touch?\"\n\n\"Mostly smooth, I suppose, like that bit I sawed off.\" Deryn reached out a hand. \"If you've still got it, ma'am, I'll show you what I mean.\"\n\n\"The sample is on the way to London, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"You sent it to the Admiralty?\"\n\n\"No, to someone with intellect.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Deryn said, a bit astonished that even Dr. Barlow needed help to solve this mystery.\n\nThe loris crawled down to sniff at the empty milk jug. The lady boffin's eyes followed the beastie, her fingers drumming on the table.\n\n\"I am a species fabricator, Mr. Sharp, not a metallurgist. But what I'm asking is simple enough.\" She leaned forward. \"Would you say that Mr. Tesla's find was natural or man-made?\"\n\n\"You mean, was it cast iron?\" Deryn remembered her hands on the object in the darkness. \"Well, it was close enough to a sphere. But it was awfully banged up. Like a cannonball, I suppose, after it's been shot through a cannon.\"\n\n\"I see. And a cannonball is man-made.\"\n\nDr. Barlow fell into silence, and the loris picked up the teacup in its tiny paws and studied it.\n\n\"Man-made,\" it repeated softly. \"Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn ignored the beastie. \"Begging your pardon, ma'am, but that doesn't make sense. To cause all that wreckage, a cannonball would have to be as big as a barking cathedral!\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp, you are forgetting a basic formula of physics. When calculating energy, mass is only one variable. And the other?\"\n\n\"Velocity,\" Deryn said, recalling the bosun's lectures on artillery. \"But to knock down a whole forest, how fast would a cannonball have to fly?\"\n\n\"Astronomically fast. My colleagues will know exactly.\" The lady boffin leaned back in her chair and sighed. \"But London is a week way, even for our swiftest courier aquilines. And in the meantime Mr. Tesla spins his tales and takes us on a wild goose chase.\"\n\n\"But we're headed to fight the Germans, aren't we?\"\n\nDr. Barlow waved a hand before her face, as if a fly were bothering her. \"We may briefly show the flag, but Mr. Tesla and Prince Aleksandar have convinced the captain to proceed to Tokyo. From there we can contact the Admiralty by underwater fiber.\"\n\n\"What in blazes for?\"\n\n\"Tesla will try to convince them to order us to New York.\" The lady boffin snapped for the loris, which scampered back up her arm and onto her shoulder. \"Where Goliath waits to stop the war.\"\n\n\"What . . . go all the way to America?\"\n\n\"Indeed, and all for a delusion.\"\n\nDeryn's mind was spinning at the thought of crossing the Pacific, but she managed to ask, \"You think Mr. Tesla's lying?\"\n\nThe lady boffin stood, straightening herself. \"Lying, or simply mad. But at the moment I have no proof. Do keep your eyes open, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nShe turned and swept out the door, the loris on her shoulder staring back through slitted eyes.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp!\" it said.\n\nDeryn went back to the window, fretting over what the lady boffin had said. If Mr. Tesla were up to some deception, then he must have tricked Alek into helping him. And little wonder\u2014Alek was angry and alone, feeling betrayed by everyone he'd trusted. Tesla had appeared at just the right moment to take advantage.\n\nAnd it was all Deryn's fault. . . .\n\nBut there was no point telling him that Tesla was lying. Alek would never take her word for it, especially as Dr. Barlow had admitted that there wasn't any proof. Deryn stood there for a long minute, her fists clenched, trying to think of what to do.\n\nIt was almost a relief when the Klaxon began to sound, calling her to battle.\n\nThe ratlines were full, the ropes groaning with the weight of men and beasts. The whole crew seemed to be scrambling topside, eager to fight after a week of flying across the Russian wasteland. The sun was bright, the wind blowing across the Sea of Japan crisp and cool, nothing like the freezing gales of Siberia.\n\nDeryn paused to scan the horizon. A dark silhouette lay ahead\u2014two tall funnels, and turrets bristling with guns\u2014a German warship for certain. To her relief there was no sign of a spindly Tesla cannon on its decks. The ship was making for the Chinese coast, which stretched across the horizon, the haze of a Clanker city rising from a nest of steep-sided hills.\n\nShe continued climbing, following the sound of the bosun's voice.\n\n\"Reporting for duty, sir!\" she called when she reached the spine.\n\n\"Where's Newkirk?\" Mr. Rigby asked.\n\n\"Last I saw, he was seeing to the lady boffin's pet, sir.\"\n\nThe bosun swore, then pointed down at the water. \"There's a Japanese submarine somewhere down there, in pursuit of that warship. It's tending a school of kappa, so we can't put any fl\u00e9chette bats into the air. Let the men on the forward gun know, then report back here.\"\n\nDeryn saluted and turned, running for the bow, where two crewmen were erecting an air gun. She jumped in to help when she arrived, tightening the screws and cleats, feeding a belt of darts into the weapon.\n\n\"There are kappa in the water, so the captain doesn't want any spikes.\" Deryn spun the shoulder stock into place. \"Mind you don't scare the bats when you fire!\"\n\nThe men looked at each other dubiously. Then one said, \"No bats, sir? But what if the Clankers have got aeroplanes?\"\n\n\"Then you lads will have to shoot straight. And we've still got the strafing hawks.\"\n\nShe returned the men's salutes and headed aft, passing the word along. By the time she got back to Mr. Rigby, Newkirk had arrived with a pair of field glasses. Mr. Rigby was staring at the horizon through them.\n\n\"Pair of zeppelins over Tsingtao,\" he said. \"Never seen them this far from Germany.\"\n\nDeryn shielded her eyes. Twin squicks of blackness hovered above the city harbor, where the warship was coming to a halt. But the guns of Tsingtao would offer no protection from the kappa.\n\nAs she watched, the zeppelins seemed to lengthen against the horizon.\n\n\"Are they turning away, sir?\" she asked. \"Or toward us?\"\n\n\"Away, I'd think. They're tiny compared to the Leviathan. But that warship won't be happy to see them go. Without air cover the kappa will make short work of her.\"\n\nDeryn stared down at the sea, her heart beginning to race. Except for the doomed sailors of one unlucky Russian fleet, no Europeans had ever seen kappa in action. The Manual of Aeronautics contained no photographs of the beasties, only a few paintings based on rumors and stories.\n\n\"The attack signal will come soon,\" Mr. Rigby said, handing Deryn the field glasses and scanning the city below with his naked eyes.\n\nShe raised the glasses and peered at the Clanker warship. The name Kaiserin Elizabeth was painted on its side, and it flew an Austrian flag.\n\n\"Not German after all,\" she murmured, wondering if Alek had spotted that, and if he'd go back to dithering over which side he was on. Of course, he had a new Clanker friend to share his worries with, so he didn't need Deryn's shoulder to cry on.\n\n\"Not German?\" Newkirk asked. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"It's an Austrian ship,\" Mr. Rigby said. \"The Germans have got their own ships out and left their allies here to face the siege. Not very kind of them.\"\n\nDeryn squinted through the glasses. The sea around the Kaiserin Elizabeth was starting to look unsettled, like water coming to a boil. The kappa swam just beneath the surface, like dolphins riding the waves.\n\nWith a distant roar the smaller deck guns of the Kaiserin opened up, a torrent of bullets chopping the water into a white froth. Austrian sailors stood at the rails, peering down and fixing bayonets to their rifles.\n\nSuddenly Deryn was very glad to be up in an airship, and not down there.\n\n\"Have you spotted the Japanese submarine?\" Newkirk asked.\n\n\"We won't,\" Mr. Rigby said. \"Her periscope must be up, but it's too small. All we'll see is . . .\"\n\nHis voice faded as a sliver of a wave slid across the water, like a ripple in a cup of tea.\n\n\"That's the submarine now,\" Mr. Rigby said, nodding. \"As the boffins suspected, they use an underwater explosion to send the kappa into a battle frenzy.\"\n\nAs Deryn watched, the first beastie scrambled out of the water and up the side of the ship. It climbed with both hands and feet, four sets of webbed fingers splaying wide on the metal. Somehow the kappa ascended the smooth expanse as easily as it would a ladder, and was upon the men at the railing almost before they'd seen it.\n\nIts long fingers grasped the ankle of a sailor, and a dozen shots rang out, his fellows on either side blasting away at the monster. The poor beastie twisted for a moment in the volley of lead, but its claws stayed locked on its victim. Finally the kappa fell dead into the sea, dragging the unlucky Austrian along.\n\nDeryn held the field glasses tighter, ignoring Newkirk's pleas for them. The kappa were swarming up by the dozens now, their wet green skin shining in the sunlight. A few larger ones shot from the water and arced through the air, descending on the Austrian sailors from clouds of spray.\n\n\"KAPPA SURFACING.\"\n\nFrom the blazing guns of the defenders, a veil of smoke arose, like some makeshift, flimsy barrier. More sailors were pulled into the sea, and a few kappa broke past them and bounded across the deck. Soon the broad windows of the bridge were shattered, and as the beasties leapt through them, Deryn saw the flash of drawn cutlasses within.\n\nHer stomach twisted, and finally she handed the field glasses to Newkirk, wondering why she'd watched for so long. Battle was always like this, excitement and fascination turning to horror as the reality of bloodshed set in.\n\nAnd this wasn't a proper battle at all, just the extermination of an overmatched foe.\n\n\"Are they coming about?\" Mr. Rigby cried, pointing across the water to the zeppelins.\n\nNewkirk lifted the glasses a bit. \"Aye, they're turning back. And from the way their engine smoke is carrying, there's a wind at their tails.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Deryn said, and swore. \"They were waiting for the kappa!\"\n\nNow that the water was swarming with Japanese beasties, the Leviathan couldn't deploy its fl\u00e9chette bats. There was nothing to stop the smaller, faster zeppelins from closing in and using their rockets. . . .\n\n\"Blisters,\" Deryn said.\n\nThis was turning into a real battle, after all.\n\n\"Quick, lads, to the strafing hawks!\" shouted Mr. Rigby.\n\nHe picked up a coil of rope and flung it into Deryn's arms, then set off for the aft end of the ship. The two middies followed, lugging the heavy line as fast as they could.\n\nAs the three headed for the airship's tail, the spine sloped away beneath them. They hurtled down the decline, Mr. Rigby roaring at the other crewmen to jump aside.\n\nDirectly above the rookery he slid to a halt and pulled the rope from the middies' arms. Kneeling to tie one end off, the bosun clutched his side in pain. He'd taken a bullet there two months before, just before the Leviathan's crash landing in the Alps.\n\n\"Are you all right, sir?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"Aye, but I won't be sliding down with you.\" Mr. Rigby thrust a handful of carabiners at her and Newkirk. \"Half the hawks are fitted with aeroplane nets, which are barking useless against zeppelins. Get down there and help the rook men switch them into talons. And hurry!\"\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" Deryn said. \"Me first!\"\n\nSnapping her safety harness to the rope with three carabiners, she turned and ran straight for the edge. The great whale was narrow here, halfway to the tail, and within seconds she was flying off into thin air.\n\nRope hissed through the carabiners like an angry viper, and Deryn let herself fall fast. The first moments of descent were glorious, her worries about Tesla, his iron football, and barking Prince Aleksandar of Hohenberg all left behind. But soon Deryn twisted in midair, tightening the grip of the carabiners, and came to a long and skidding halt. Momentum swung her inward toward the airship's underbelly, where she reached out and grabbed the ratlines with one gloved hand.\n\nAs she climbed down toward the rookery, the cilia were in furious motion beneath her hands. The Leviathan was nervous about the zeppelins closing in. Deryn wondered how the great whale saw the Clanker airships. Did they look like a pair of fellow airbeasts? Or like inexplicable things, in a familiar shape but queerly devoid of life?\n\n\"Don't worry, beastie,\" she said. \"We'll take care of them.\"\n\nThe rookery was in a state, the birds squawking like mad inside their cages. Somehow they always knew when battle or bad weather was afoot. As she hauled herself through the aft window, Deryn called out to rearm the hawks.\n\n\"Aye, the bridge sent orders!\" answered Higgins, the head rook man. He was inside one of the cages already, pulling an aeroplane net harness from a large and fluttering bird. \"We've launched all the hawks we had in talons, and we're switching the rest!\"\n\n\"I'll give you a hand, then.\" Deryn slid down the access ladder, fighting a squick of nerves. She'd handled birds of prey before, but only one at a time. And she'd never set foot in a cage full of stirred-up strafing hawks.\n\nWith a deep breath Deryn opened a cage door and stepped into a blizzard of wings. It was hard to keep her eyes open, hard not to leap back out, but she managed to grab one of the hawks and smooth its wings. She worked quickly then, unclipping the tiny harness that held a folded net of spider silk. Its acidic strands would slice through the fragile wings of an aeroplane in an instant but had little effect on a huge and stately airship.\n\nOnce the harness was off, she moved on to the next bird, leaving it to the rook men to attach the talons. Every rook man she'd ever met carried nasty-looking scars from handling razor-sharp steel, and she wasn't keen to learn the art in the heat of battle. As Deryn moved on to her third hawk, she saw Newkirk at work in the cage beside hers.\n\nLong minutes later the first aerie of hawks had been fitted, and Mr. Higgins opened a chute to discharge them into the air. The rook men gave a quick cheer before setting back to work. Deryn felt the ship climbing, and she wondered if the captain had turned tail and run, or stayed to guard the kappa from the Clanker zeppelins.\n\nSuddenly a boom shook the floor beneath her feet, and the frenzy of the birds redoubled. Deryn was blinded by beating wings but managed to grope her way out of the cage. She climbed up to the rookery windows and peered sternward.\n\nOne of the zeppelins was a few miles behind and a thousand feet below, a horde of strafing hawks swirling around it, tearing at its skin with their talons. But as Deryn watched, a streak of red fire shot from its gondola straight at her. The distance was too great, though\u2014the rocket began to arc away before it could reach the Leviathan. It burst well below the ship, throwing out burning tendrils in all directions.\n\n\"Another close one, but they missed!\" Deryn cried down to the rook men, but as she turned back to the window, her eyes went wide.\n\nOne of the sputtering tendrils was reaching up from the center of the explosion, climbing straight toward the rookery!\n\nAt the last moment the bright ember veered away, drawn toward the ventral engine pod by its whirling propeller. Fire struck metal, and a sheet of sparks shot out from the pod. The engine ground to a halt, spilling a cloud of smoke into the ship's wake.\n\nThe Clanker airship was losing altitude quickly now, its shredded gasbag fluttering in the breeze. The other zeppelin was much farther back, hovering over the Kaiserin Elizabeth and raining metal darts onto the frenzied kappa.\n\nThe Leviathan was safe from the two zeppelins, but the ventral engine was still spitting smoke and flame. Deryn spun about and called to Newkirk, \"We're hit! I'm headed aft. But keep those birds coming!\"\n\nNot waiting for an answer, she hoisted opened the window and looked down. A stabilizing boom connected the gondola to the engine pod, wide enough to walk on in a pinch. But it was a good ten yards below the rookery, and Deryn didn't fancy jumping. If she missed the boom, nothing would stop her fall but the open sea.\n\nLuckily Mr. Rigby had made her draw the ship in profile a hundred times, and she remembered a steel cable connecting the rookery to the boom. It was anchored just overhead, almost close enough to reach. . . .\n\nAlmost, but not quite.\n\nDeryn swore. With smoke still pouring from the ventral engine pod, this was no time for caution. Crawling out the window, she saw a set of handholds leading up to her goal\u2014some poor blighter had done this trick before!\n\nDeryn grabbed the nearest hold and swung off into the air. She pulled herself hand over hand up to the cable and threw out her legs to wrap them around it. Then she was sliding down fast, the steel cable as hot as a teakettle in her gloves. Half a mile below, the plummeting zeppelin fired again, but the rocket burst uselessly low, sending a dozen sizzling threads into the sea.\n\nHer boots landed with a clang against the boom.\n\nAhead of Deryn the hatches and windows of the engine pod were all thrown open, and smoke was gushing out and spilling back into the Leviathan's wake. She entered through the nearest hatch, her eyes stinging.\n\n\"It's Middy Sharp. Report!\"\n\nAn engineer appeared from the smoke, wearing goggles and an ember-tattered flight suit. \"It's bad, sir\u2014we've called for a Herculean. Grab on to something!\"\n\n\"You called for a . . . ,\" Deryn began, her voice fading. A rushing sound was building overhead. She stared up at the belly of the airbeast, and saw the ballast lines swelling.\n\nShe'd never seen a Herculean inundation before. They were called only when the ship was in serious danger of burning, because they were barking dangerous themselves.\n\n\"FIREFIGHT IN THE AIR.\"\n\n\"It's coming!\" Deryn cried, pushing into the pod to look for a handhold.\n\nThe engineer turned and stepped through the thick smoke to a rack of gears and parts, where another man with engineering patches stood. Deryn knelt behind the main turbine, taking hold as the first spume of water exploded into the engine pod. The inundation came straight from the gut, briny and fouled with the clart of a hundred species. The torrent grew, the burning engine spitting white steam to mingle with the smoke and brackish water.\n\nThe inundation lifted Deryn from her feet for a moment, trying to sweep her out the open hatch and into the void. The water filled her boots, churning up to force itself into her nose and eyes. But she held fast until the last sparks in the engine sputtered out and the flood finally began to slacken. The briny water slowly drained from the engine pod, dropping below her waist, then her knees.\n\nOne of the engineers let out a sigh of relief, letting go to take a step toward the blackened mass of gears.\n\n\"Keep hold, man!\" Deryn said. \"We've lost our rear ballast!\"\n\nHe grabbed the rack again just as the ship began to tilt. With thousands of gallons of ballast gone from its stern, the Leviathan was out of balance, tipping the airship into a steep dive.\n\n\"A HERCULEAN INUNDATION.\"\n\nThe remaining water coiled past Deryn's feet, pouring out the forward hatch. She heard the creak of the ratlines overhead as the airbeast strained, bending its nose upward against the dive. But out the nearest porthole she saw the glittering sea rushing toward them.\n\nThen Deryn heard a growl like a pair of hungry fighting bears\u2014the Clanker engines shifting into reverse. The whole ship shuddered, its descent slowing to a crawl. The Leviathan hovered aslant in the air for a moment, until the ballast lines began to swell again with water pumping toward the tail. Gradually the floor of the engine pod leveled off.\n\nA lizard popped its head from a message tube and spoke with the captain's voice. \"Ventral engine pod, help is on the way. Please report your status.\"\n\nThe two engineers looked at Deryn, perhaps a bit nervous that they'd just sent the whole ship plummeting toward the sea.\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"Middy Sharp, sir, just arrived here from the rookery. The pod was set aflame, so the engineers called for a Herculean. The fire's out, but by the looks of things, we won't be giving you any power for a while. End message.\"\n\nThe lizard blinked, then scampered away. Deryn turned to the men. This was her station for the rest of the battle, it seemed.\n\n\"Don't look so sheepish,\" she said. \"You may have saved the ship. But if you want to be proper heroes, let's get this engine running again!\"\n\n\"Hard to starboard,\" the captain said, and the pilot sent the master wheel spinning.\n\nAs the Leviathan turned, the deck shifted beneath Alek's feet, but it was nothing like the sickening dive of a moment before. The ocean had filled the front windows of the bridge, and he and Mr. Tesla had skidded forward on their dress shoes. Not for the first time Alek was envious of the crew's rubber-soled boots. Bovril was still clinging tight to his shoulder, scared into silence.\n\nThe zeppelin that had fired at the Leviathan swung into view below, still falling. A swarm of strafing hawks had spilled its hydrogen from a thousand cuts, and the German airship settled on the ocean like a feather on a pond. As the Leviathan's shadow passed across it, a pair of canvas lifeboats emerged from beneath the billowing membrane.\n\nAn awful thought occurred to Alek. \"Will the kappa attack those lifeboats as well?\"\n\nDr. Barlow shook her head. \"Not unless the submarine sends out another fighting pulse.\"\n\n\"And we're close enough to shore,\" Dr. Busk added. \"Those chaps should be fine, as long as they don't mind a bit of rowing!\"\n\n\"A bit of rowing,\" repeated Dr. Barlow's loris from the ceiling, and had a chuckle. Bovril looked up and joined in, relaxing its grip on Alek's shoulder a little.\n\n\"The others aren't so lucky,\" Mr. Tesla said, staring at the Kaiserin Elizabeth in the distance. She looked like a haunted ship. Her decks were awash with blood and were glittering with spikes, and kappa roamed freely across them, searching for prey. If any crew had survived, they must have hidden belowdecks behind metal hatches.\n\nThe second zeppelin hovered over the warship, sending a last shower of darts down onto the kappa. But the first strafing hawks were arriving, hacking at the zeppelin's fragile skin. Its engines soon fired up, and the German airship began to pull away.\n\n\"We won't pursue them, will we?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"I doubt we shall bother.\" Dr. Busk nodded to Tesla. \"Getting you to Japan is more important than this sideshow.\"\n\nAlek let out a quiet sigh. As Count Volger had suspected, this long voyage had all been for show. The Admiralty wanted to prove that British air power was global, and that the Great War was a contest among European powers, not upstart empires in Asia.\n\nBut at least now that the Union Jack had been waved, the Leviathan could turn around and head for Tokyo\u2014and then America, if the Admiralty allowed it.\n\n\"I don't suppose those creatures recognize the white flag,\" Tesla said.\n\n\"The submarine will call them off,\" Dr. Barlow replied. \"Exactly how is known only to the Japanese, for obvious reasons.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't want the enemy figuring out how to turn your beasties peaceable, would you?\" Dr. Busk scanned the ocean's surface through a telescope. \"Some sort of sound would be my guess. One that humans can't hear, a bit like a dog whistle.\"\n\n\"Quite a vicious dog,\" Mr. Tesla said.\n\n\"Vicious,\" Bovril repeated gravely.\n\nAlek found himself nodding. He'd seen plenty of Darwinist creatures in battle before, but nothing as horrifying as these kappa. The beasts had sprung from the water so quickly, like something from a nightmare.\n\nBut in a way it was a relief, seeing Mr. Tesla so unsettled. If he was appalled to see Austrian sailors slaughtered like this, surely he would think twice before unleashing his weapon on a defenseless city.\n\n\"And yet the ship is undamaged,\" Dr. Busk said. \"She'll join the Japanese navy now, like the Russian fleet did ten years ago. A most efficient form of victory.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"The Japanese can operate a Clanker warship?\"\n\n\"They are adept with both technologies,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"An American named Commodore Perry introduced Japan to mechaniks some sixty years ago. Almost made Clankers of them.\"\n\n\"Lucky we put a stop to that, eh?\" Dr. Busk said. \"Wouldn't want these fellows on the other side.\"\n\nMr. Tesla looked as though he were about to say something impolitic, but instead cleared his throat. \"Your damaged engine, is it electrikal?\"\n\n\"All the Leviathan's engines are,\" Dr. Busk said, then bowed to Alek. \"Except for the two that His Highness kindly lent us.\"\n\n\"So you aren't entirely against the machine,\" said the inventor. \"Perhaps I could be of assistance.\"\n\n\"Allow me,\" Alek said. In his two days of sulking, he had explored all of the ship's engine pods. \"It's a bit tricky, but I know the way.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Prince,\" said Dr. Busk, bowing. \"You'll be pleased to see that we use your alternating current design, Mr. Tesla. A truly ingenious concept.\"\n\n\"You are too kind.\" Mr. Tesla bowed to the two boffins, and Alek led him from the bridge, heading for the aft end of the gondola.\n\nAs they walked, Bovril shifted nervously on Alek's shoulder.\n\n\"A bit tricky,\" it whispered into his ear.\n\nEven in the heat of battle, the boom that ran from gondola to ventral engine pod was unmanned. It was cramped inside, designed more to stabilize the ship than as a passageway, and the leggy Mr. Tesla had to stoop as he walked.\n\n\"That was a ghastly business,\" Alek said once they were alone.\n\n\"War is always ghastly, whether conducted with machines or animals.\" Tesla paused in his stride, watching a message lizard scuttle past overhead. \"Though at least machines feel no pain.\"\n\nAlek nodded. \"Even the great airbeast itself has feelings, which can be a good thing. It retreated from one of your Tesla cannons when the Leviathan's officers would not.\"\n\n\"Useful, I suppose.\" Tesla shook his head. \"But the slaughter of animals is destructive to human morals.\"\n\nAlek remembered an argument Deryn had made in Istanbul. \"But don't you eat meat, Mr. Tesla?\"\n\n\"A personal weakness. One day I shall give up that barbaric practice.\"\n\n\"But you sacrificed your airbeast back in Siberia!\"\n\n\"Not without my reasons,\" Tesla said, tapping his walking stick against the floor. \"I couldn't endure those bears starving to death, so I simply let nature take its course.\"\n\nBovril shifted on Alek's shoulder, murmuring. The loris was always quiet around Tesla, as if cowed by the man. Or perhaps it was listening carefully.\n\nAlek didn't know what to make of the inventor's words. Perhaps it made sense, sacrificing one creature to save many. But what if Tesla applied that same logic to stopping the war?\n\nAs they neared the engine pod, the floor of the passageway grew wet and sticky, and Alek smelled a foul, briny odor. Through an open hatchway ahead came the clang of tools.\n\n\"Hello?\" Alek called.\n\nA figure in a grimy flight suit appeared, sodden and smelly. As she snapped a salute, Alek realized with a start who it was beneath the muck.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp!\" exclaimed Bovril, leaning forward on Alek's shoulder, reaching out for her.\n\nOf course. Deryn Sharp could always be counted on to be in the thick of any mayhem aboard the Leviathan.\n\nAlek stiffly returned her salute. \"Mr. Tesla, I believe you've met Middy Sharp?\"\n\n\"He was kind enough to drop in on me in Siberia,\" the inventor said. \"Are those feathers?\"\n\nDeryn looked down at herself. Trapped in the engine grime on her flight suit were, indeed, a few feathers.\n\nDeryn flicked one off and snapped her heels, as if she were at a formal dance instead of in an engine room covered with bilge. \"I was tending to the strafing hawks. Very kind of you to visit, Mr. Tesla.\"\n\nTesla waved his walking stick. \"I'm not visiting; I'm here to help. This engine is based on my design, you know.\"\n\n\"What exactly happened here?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"The propellers sucked in a bit of rocket,\" Deryn said, avoiding Alek's eyes. \"Started a fire, so the engineers called for a Herculean inundation. Watch your step, please.\"\n\nInside, the engine pod smelled like the gut of the ship. The floor was covered in gunk, the machinery blackened by fire. The engineers stopped their work and stared at Mr. Tesla, their eyes wide.\n\n\"A Herculean inundation?\" the inventor asked. \"As in the seven labors?\"\n\nDeryn looked puzzled, so Alek jumped in. \"They must have flushed the rear ballast through the pod. Hence that sudden dive that sent us all sliding across the bridge.\"\n\nTesla lifted one shoe to peer at its grimy sole. \"Both ingenious and unhygienic, like so much Darwinist technology.\"\n\nDeryn stiffened a bit, but her voice stayed level. \"You say you invented this particular engine, sir?\"\n\n\"I created the principles of alternating current.\" Tesla poked at the machine with his walking stick. \"Much safer on an airship.\"\n\nAlek nodded. Visiting the pods a few days ago, he'd noticed how the electrikal engines didn't spit smoke or sparks, and ran almost silently.\n\n\"Alternating current,\" Bovril repeated happily.\n\n\"But you don't have a boiler room aboard,\" Tesla said. \"Where does the power come from?\"\n\n\"These fuel cells here.\" Deryn looked down at a pile of small metal kegs. \"Hydrogen made by wee beasties in the whale's gut.\"\n\n\"A biological battery!\" Mr. Tesla exclaimed. \"But they can't have much power.\"\n\n\"They don't have to, sir.\" Deryn gestured out the pod's high windows. \"Darwinist airships get most of their push from cilia\u2014those wee hairs along the flanks. The engines just give it a nudge in the right direction, and the airbeast does the rest.\"\n\n\"But the Leviathan is special. It has two Clanker engines as well,\" Alek added. \"It will get you to New York faster than anything else in the sky.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" Mr. Tesla pulled off his jacket. \"Well, let's get to work, then. The more engines the better!\"\n\nAs Mr. Tesla worked, he held forth on a variety of topics\u2014from world peace to his fascination with the number three\u2014but Alek found it all a bit hard to follow. Master Klopp had never taught him much about electrikal engines, which weren't powerful enough to use in walkers.\n\nAt first Alek tried to help by handing Tesla his tools, but the engineers soon crowded him out for the honor. Just like Bovril, they hung on the great man's words. Alek found himself reduced to a waste of hydrogen, as usual.\n\nThen he noticed that Deryn had stepped out onto the stabilizing boom. Of course, Alek had been avoiding her the last few days. But it was childish, pretending not to know each other. Their sudden falling out might start Dr. Barlow asking questions, and the last thing Alek wanted was for Deryn to be found out thanks to him.\n\nHe took a deep breath and stepped out through the hatchway.\n\n\"Hello, Dylan.\"\n\n\"Afternoon, your princeliness.\" Deryn didn't look up. She was staring down at the passing ocean, the wind barely ruffling her muck-matted hair.\n\nFor a moment Alek wondered if she were upset about him seeing her like this, covered in grime. But that was nonsense. Ordinary girls worried about that sort of thing, not Deryn.\n\n\"Mr. Tesla should get your engine working soon,\" he said.\n\n\"Aye, he's a barking genius. You should hear the engineers go on about it.\" She looked aft. \"And it seems he's got the captain's head spinning too.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nDeryn pointed at the glare of sunlight in the airship's wake. \"We're headed due east. We'll be in Tokyo tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Alek said. \"Now that we've lent the Japanese navy a hand, we can depart with Britain's honor intact.\"\n\n\"The lady boffin said the same thing, but I thought she was blethering!\"\n\n\"Dr. Barlow doesn't blether. Your Admiralty couldn't let Tsingtao fall without British aid, because the Japanese aren't properly . . .\" He spread his hands, looking for the right word. \"European. It wouldn't do for them to beat the Germans without our help.\"\n\nFor the first time Deryn looked straight at him. \"You mean we came halfway round the world just for show? That's the biggest load of yackum I've ever heard!\"\n\n\"Yackum,\" Bovril said, and leapt down onto the handrail.\n\nAlek shrugged. \"More or less. But there was a higher purpose, it seems. Now we can help Mr. Tesla stop the war.\"\n\nDeryn gave him the same exasperated look she did whenever he mentioned his destiny.\n\n\"DRAINING.\"\n\n\"Are you going to punch me again?\" Alek asked. \"Because I'd like to get a good grip. It's a long fall.\"\n\nA smirk flashed across her face, but her eyes didn't soften.\n\n\"You are rather strong,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Aye, and I'm taller than you too.\"\n\nAlek rolled his eyes. \"Listen, Deryn\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not a good habit, you calling me that.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not. But I've been calling you the wrong name for so long, I feel I should make up for it.\"\n\n\"It's not your fault I've got two names.\"\n\nAlek looked down at the water slipping past. \"So whose fault is it? I mean, even Volger thinks you're a fine soldier, and yet you have to hide who you are.\"\n\n\"It's just the way things are.\" She shrugged. \"It's no one's fault.\"\n\n\"Or everyone's,\" Alek said. \"Deryn.\"\n\n\"Deryn Sharp,\" said Bovril quietly.\n\nBoth of them stared at the perspicacious loris in horror.\n\n\"Brilliant,\" Deryn said. \"Just barking brilliant. Now you've got the beastie saying it!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Alek shook his head. \"I didn't realize\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly her hand was across his mouth. He smelled engine grease and brine on her palm, then saw the message lizard making its way along the underbelly of the ship. Deryn let her hand fall, gesturing for silence.\n\nThe lizard spoke with Dr. Barlow's voice. \"Mr. Sharp, tomorrow afternoon you shall accompany me to Mr. Tesla's meeting with the ambassador. I seem to recall, however, that you have no formal uniform. We shall have to remedy that when we arrive in Tokyo.\"\n\nDeryn swore, and Alek recalled that her only dress uniform had been destroyed in the battle of the Dauntless. Going to a tailor to replace it would be tricky enough, even without the lady boffin along.\n\n\"Um, but\u2014but, ma'am,\" Deryn sputtered. \"I'll have to\u2014\"\n\n\"Dr. Barlow,\" Alek broke in, \"this is Prince Aleksandar. I know you want young Dylan to look his best, but gentlemen's tailoring is hardly your area of expertise. It would be my pleasure to go with him. End message.\"\n\nThe beastie waited a moment, then blinked and scuttled away.\n\nDeryn gave him a long stare, then shook her head. \"You're both daft. I can see to my own clothes, right?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alek pulled at his own threadbare sleeve. \"But I could use a bit of tailoring myself.\"\n\n\"True. You're looking a bit less than princely.\" Deryn straightened with a sigh. \"Well, I have duties to attend to. See you when we get to Tokyo, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\" He smiled at her.\n\nDeryn turned and strode back into the engine pod, shouting at the engineers to give Mr. Tesla some peace. Alek stayed out on the boom, staring down at the water a little longer and wondering at what he felt inside.\n\nWhatever her name was, he had missed his good friend these last few days, rather a lot.\n\n\"A bit of tailoring,\" Bovril said thoughtfully. \"End message.\"\n\nAlek pulled on another jacket, then scowled at the mirror. His Hapsburg Armor Corp uniform was just as threadbare as the others, shiny at the elbows and missing two buttons. Had he really spent the last weeks walking about in such a disreputable state?\n\n\"This seems unwise,\" Count Volger said.\n\nAlek fingered the jacket's frayed epaulettes. \"I have an ambassador to impress, and I doubt the tailors in Tokyo are expensive.\"\n\n\"I'm not talking about the cost, Alek. You're practically penniless, in any case.\" The wildcount glanced out the window\u2014one of the spires of Tokyo was sliding by, alarmingly close to the gondola. \"I'm talking about that girl.\"\n\nAlek picked up the silk piloting jacket he'd worn the night of the Ottoman Revolution. \"Her name is Deryn.\"\n\n\"Whatever she calls herself, you've managed to escape her influence at last. Why risk another entanglement?\"\n\n\"Deryn isn't an entanglement.\" Alek pulled the jacket on and considered the effect. \"She's a friend, and a useful ally.\"\n\n\"Useful? Only in that she's taken that beast away.\"\n\nAlek didn't answer. Deryn had dropped by his stateroom the night before to \"borrow\" Bovril. Alek found that he missed the creature's weight on his shoulder and its murmurs in his ear. The perspicacious loris had offered comfort when everyone else had betrayed him.\n\n\"You can't trust her,\" Volger said.\n\n\"Nor can I trust you, Count. And Deryn, at least, can tell me what the Leviathan's officers are thinking.\"\n\n\"Tesla does their thinking for them these days. Imagine, trying to requisition this whole ship to take him to America! It's madness to believe that the Admiralty will allow it.\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow. \"That was my idea, you know.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course.\" With a sigh Volger stood up from the desk and went to his traveling trunk. \"This is a diplomatic affair, not a costume party.\"\n\nAlek pulled off his Ottoman piloting jacket. \"Perhaps it is a bit too colorful for a British ambassador.\"\n\n\"You're taking a risk, believing in Tesla.\"\n\n\"He wants peace, and has the power to make it happen.\"\n\n\"Let's hope so, Your Serene Highness. Because if you support him publicly and he turns out to be mad, the whole world will think you're a fool. Do you think the people of Austria-Hungary will want a young fool for an emperor?\"\n\nAlek's glare was wasted on Volger, who was rummaging in his trunk. He pulled out a deep blue tunic with a red collar.\n\n\"My Hapsburg House Cavalry uniform.\"\n\nAlek said, \"Do you think I'm being a fool?\"\n\n\"I think you're trying to do something good. But doing good is rarely easy, and no weapon has ever stopped a war.\" Count Volger handed over the cavalry tunic. \"But who knows. Perhaps the great inventor has changed all that.\"\n\n\"And you wanted to murder him.\" Alek pulled the tunic on. The sleeves were too long, of course, but a decent tailor could fix that. \"Or was that whole business just an idle threat to shake me out of my sulk?\"\n\nThe wildcount smiled. \"Two birds, one stone.\"\n\nThe streets of Tokyo teemed with steam trams, pedestrians, and beasts of burden. The morning sun had crested the buildings, but the strings of paper lanterns hanging overhead still glowed. Each was filled with a little swarm of flickering insects, like a handful of stars.\n\nAlek was always uncomfortable in crowds, and here in Tokyo he felt especially conspicuous. There were no other Europeans about except the pair of marine guards following him. Many of the Japanese men wore western clothing, but the women were dressed in long dresses dyed in indigo and scarlet patterns, with broad silk belts that gathered into bundles on their lower backs. Alek tried to picture Deryn in such a getup, but failed completely.\n\nThe two technologies mixed more elegantly than he'd expected. Streetcars huffed out clouds of steam, but the most crowded were yoked to oxenesques for extra power. A few rickshaws putted along behind diesel two-legged walkers; the rest were pulled by squat, scaly creatures that reminded Alek disturbingly of kappa. Telegraph lines crisscrossed the sky overhead, but messenger lizards scampered along them, and carrier eagles wheeled against the clouds.\n\n\"Are we lost yet?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"Lost,\" declared Bovril from her shoulder, then went back to burbling snatches of Japanese.\n\nAlek sighed, unfolding Dr. Barlow's map for the fortieth time since they'd left the airfield. It was exasperating, not being able to read street signs. On top of which, addresses worked differently here in Japan. Instead of the numbers running along the avenues, they went clockwise around city blocks. Pure insanity.\n\nAccording to a local scientist friend of Dr. Barlow's, a whole street of tailors catering to Europeans was hidden somewhere in this madness.\n\n\"I think we're close,\" Alek said. \"You don't suppose those two could help?\"\n\nDeryn glanced at the marine guards shadowing them. \"They're only here to keep you from running away.\"\n\n\"Hardly necessary. I'm quite happy to be on the Leviathan these days.\"\n\nDeryn gave a snort. \"Aye, thanks to your new boffin pal.\"\n\n\"He's a genius, and he wants to stop this war.\"\n\n\"He's a complete nutter, you mean. Dr. Barlow says his talk of Goliath is daft!\"\n\n\"Nutter,\" Bovril said with a chuckle.\n\n\"Of course she would say so,\" Alek said. \"Mr. Tesla is a Clanker scientist, and she's a Darwinist\u2014and a Darwin to boot! They're natural enemies.\"\n\nDeryn started to reply, but her head swiveled as a food stall drifted slowly past. The whole thing was drawn, customers and all, by a squat two-legged walker. One of the cooks was chopping thin layers of dough into fine noodles; the others were slicing mushrooms, fish, and eels. The smell of buckwheat and prawns carried on the steam rising from the boilers, along with the tang of vinegar and pickles.\n\n\"Might want some of that later,\" Deryn mumbled.\n\n\"Want,\" Bovril said.\n\nAlek smiled. He'd learned in Istanbul that food could always distract Deryn from an argument. But she wasn't done yet.\n\n\"Have you forgotten what I found in Mr. Tesla's room?\"\n\n\"You found a rock,\" Alek said flatly.\n\n\"If it was only a rock, why did he bring it aboard?\"\n\n\"He's a scientist. They like rocks. Didn't Dr. Barlow know what it was?\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"She isn't certain, but it's all very suspicious. Mr. Tesla's weapons all use electricity, and it was a sort of . . . cannonball.\"\n\n\"No cannonball could destroy half of Siberia, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp!\" Bovril repeated.\n\n\"Perhaps I'll simply ask him myself.\" Alek gave a snort. \"Though he might wonder why you were hiding under his bed at night.\"\n\n\"Forget it. If he knows we were spying on him, he won't trust you.\"\n\nAlek shook his head\u2014as if Deryn could offer advice on trust and friendship. \"Once we get to New York and reveal Goliath to the world, I'm sure these minor details will all make sense.\"\n\n\"You think the Admiralty will really let us head off to America?\"\n\n\"Mr. Tesla can be quite convincing,\" Alek said. \"Besides, this is my destiny.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Deryn said, and snorted. \"Your destiny.\"\n\nShe was about to say more, when Bovril interrupted. \"A bit of tailoring!\"\n\n\"The beastie's right.\" Deryn was looking over Alek's shoulder. \"Your destiny is a better-fitting jacket, looks to me.\"\n\nHe turned. Beneath the awning of an open shop front whirred a spidery machine, bristling with spindles of thread. Squeezed onto a hanging banner full of Japanese characters were a few recognizable words: WELCOME TO SHIBASAKI TAILORS.\n\nAlek folded up the map. \"For the moment that will do.\"\n\n\"Irasshai,\" came a call as Alek stepped beneath the awning. Two men stood up from behind sewing machines, one robed in white cotton with a flowered print, the other in a European waistcoat and jacket.\n\n\"Welcome, gentlemen,\" the robed man said in practiced English.\n\nAlek and Deryn returned his bow.\n\n\"We've just arrived here, sirs,\" Alek said slowly. \"We have no money, but we can pay with gold.\"\n\nThe man looked embarrassed at this forwardness, but Alek could only bow again, holding out Volger's cavalry uniform.\n\n\"If you could make this fit me.\"\n\nThe other tailor took the jacket by the shoulders and shook it open. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"And my friend needs a dress shirt in the British naval fashion, by this afternoon.\"\n\n\"We have many shirts for British gentlemen, if we make alterations.\" The man turned to Deryn. \"May we measure you, sir?\"\n\nShe glanced at the marine guards waiting just outside\u2014close enough to hear any exclamations of surprise.\n\n\"I'm afraid not,\" Alek said. \"He has a . . . skin condition. Perhaps you could measure me, and adjust a little.\"\n\nThe tailor frowned. \"But you are shorter, sir.\"\n\n\"Not that much shorter,\" Alek said, and heard Bovril chuckling.\n\nThe tailor bowed gracefully, then extended a length of string between his hands. Alek took off his jacket and turned around, holding out his arms wide.\n\nDeryn leaned back to watch, wearing the first smile Alek had seen on her face in days.\n\nAfter the measurements were done, the tailors told Alek and Deryn to return in two hours. Deryn unerringly tracked down the moving food stall they'd seen earlier, and soon they were seated on a long bench that faced the cooks, shoulder to shoulder with the other customers. The marine guards took up station just behind the stall, watching from a distance.\n\nA dozen pots of noodles bubbled on the boilers, which Deryn said were burning an oil made from fabricated peanuts. The fuel let off a sweet scent that mingled with the briny smell of salmon slices edged with orange, a black vinegar sauce in small bowls, and tiny dried fish curled into silver half-moons.\n\nAs Deryn pantomimed for the cooks, Alek realized how hungry he was. He watched the other customers eating with chopsticks, wishing he'd brought a fork and knife from the Leviathan's mess.\n\n\"Did you hear?\" Deryn asked. \"The meeting's been moved to the Imperial Hotel.\"\n\n\"Why a hotel?\"\n\n\"It's got a barking theater! Seems the ambassador wants to show the whole world that the great Nikola Tesla has changed sides.\" Deryn inspected her chopsticks. \"Maybe that will get the Clankers quaking in their boots.\"\n\n\"Hopefully,\" Alek said. Two bowls were set before them, full of tangled noodles half covered in a thick broth. Atop the noodles sat a spoonful of white mush and a cluster of tiny orange spheres, as translucent as rubies. A plate of fresh salmon was set before Bovril.\n\nAs the beast started in, Alek stared at his dish. \"What have you ordered us?\"\n\n\"No idea,\" Deryn said, picking up a wooden spoon. \"It looked good, so I pointed at it.\"\n\nAlek lifted his chopsticks and attempted to pick up one of the pearly orange spheres. The first exploded, but he managed to get a second into his mouth. It popped like a tiny balloon between his teeth, tasting of salt and fish.\n\n\"It's like oversize caviar.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"Fish eggs.\"\n\nShe frowned, but the revelation didn't slow her eating.\n\nAlek tasted the white substance, which turned out to be pickled radishes chopped into mush. There were also slivers of a pearly fruit, as tangy as lemon rind. He swirled his chopsticks in the bowl, mixing the sharp flavors of radishes, citrus, and fish eggs with the thick buckwheat noodles.\n\nAs he ate, Alek finally took a proper look at the slowly passing city. The rooftops of Tokyo curved and swelled like ocean waves, terra-cotta tiles rippling their surfaces. Miniature potted trees crowded the windows, growing in twisted shapes that mirrored the strokes of calligraphy decorating every shop. Canopies of vines overhead spilled pink blossoms onto the ground, and the hanging paper lanterns seemed to be everywhere, bobbing in the breeze.\n\n\"Quite beautiful, considering,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Considering what?\"\n\n\"That the same culture fabricated those horrid kappa.\"\n\n\"Less horrid than a phosphorous shell, if you ask me.\"\n\nAlek shrugged, not in the mood to revisit the argument he'd had with Tesla. \"You're right. Killing is ugly, whatever shape it takes. That's why we have to stop this war.\"\n\n\"It isn't up to you to fix the world, Alek. Maybe your parents' murder set it off, but the world was ready enough with war machines and beasties!\" She stared into her bowl, twirling noodles onto her chopsticks. \"A fight would have happened one way or another.\"\n\n\"None of that changes the fact that my family started it.\"\n\nDeryn turned to face him. \"You can't blame a match for a house made of straw, Alek.\"\n\n\"A nice turn of phrase.\" All that was left of Alek's meal was broth. The other customers seemed to think nothing of drinking from their bowls, so he lifted his with both hands. \"But it doesn't change what I have to do.\"\n\nDeryn watched him drink, then said simply, \"What if you can't stop it?\"\n\n\"You saw what we did in Istanbul. Our revolution kept them out of the war!\"\n\n\"It was their revolution, Alek. We just helped a bit.\"\n\n\"Of course, but Mr. Tesla can do much more. Destiny brought me to Siberia to meet him, so clearly his plan has to work!\"\n\nDeryn sighed. \"What if destiny doesn't care?\"\n\n\"Why can't you admit that providence has guided my course at every turn?\" Alek counted the points on his fingers. \"My father prepared a refuge for me in the Alps, in the very same valley where the Leviathan crashed! Then, after I escaped, I wound up back on your ship\u2014just as it was headed for the siege of Tsingtao. And that brought me to the wastes of Siberia in time to meet Tesla. All those connections have to mean something!\"\n\nDeryn opened her mouth to argue, then hesitated, a half smile crossing her face. \"So you must think that we're meant to be together.\"\n\nAlek blinked. \"What?\"\n\n\"I told you how I wound up on the Leviathan. If a freak storm hadn't carried me halfway across Britain, I'd be serving on the Minotaur with Jaspert. Never would have met you, then.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose not.\"\n\n\"And when we crashed, and you came to help us on those silly snowshoes, you walked straight up to where I was lying in the snow.\" Her smile grew broader. \"You saved me, first thing.\"\n\n\"Only from a frostbitten bum.\" Alek stared into the empty bowl before him; a fish egg was stuck to one side. He picked it up with his chopsticks and regarded it.\n\n\"And when you jumped ship in Istanbul, you thought you'd got away from me.\" Deryn gave a snort. \"Not likely.\"\n\n\"You do have a habit of showing up.\"\n\n\"Must be rough for you. Having your destiny mixed up with a barking commoner's!\" She shoveled in her last mouthful of noodles, chuckling to herself.\n\nAlek frowned. In two days of brooding it somehow hadn't crossed his mind that without Deryn Sharp the Ottoman Revolution might have failed, and Alek certainly would never have come back aboard the Leviathan. Thus he wouldn't have met Tesla, and would be no closer to stopping the war.\n\nDeryn had been there every step of the way.\n\n\"We are connected, aren't we?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" she said, still chewing. \"And for us to meet at all, I had to pretend to be a boy. Fancy that.\"\n\n\"Barking destiny,\" Bovril said, then burped.\n\nAlek put his hands up in surrender. There were worse things than being connected to Deryn Sharp. In fact, the simple fact that she was smiling sent a wave of relief through him\u2014she was his ally again, his friend. Providence seemed to be saying that she always would be.\n\nAll at once a fist around his heart loosened its grip.\n\n\"It was awful, being at war with you.\"\n\nDeryn laughed. \"I missed you, too, daft prince.\" She started to say more, but then cast a look over her shoulder at the two marine guards, and sighed. \"We should go fetch our clothes. Tesla will be starting in a few hours.\"\n\nAlek nodded. \"It should be quite a show.\"\n\nThe theater of the Imperial Hotel was filling up; there were at least a hundred in the audience already. Deryn wondered if the Clanker boffin had invited them all, or if the British embassy had, or whether the news was spreading on its own across Tokyo.\n\nThe British ambassador was easy to spot, a man in a posh civilian suit surrounded by admirals and commodores. Not far away a dozen Japanese naval officers wore black tunics and hats with red piping. Deryn recognized other uniforms\u2014French, Russian, even a handful of Italians, though Darwinist Italy had yet to join the war. A gaggle of boffins, European and Japanese, stood about in bowlers, some with recording frogs perched on their shoulders.\n\nOf everyone there, only Deryn was alone. Dr. Barlow had abandoned her for the other boffins, and Bovril was sneaking beneath the chairs, listening for new snippets of language.\n\nMost of the audience seemed to be reporters, some already snapping photos of the stage. All sorts of electrical apparatus waited there, metal spheres and glass tubes, coils of wire, a generator the size of a smokehouse, and a large glass bulb hanging from the ceiling. How Tesla had put all these contraptions together so quickly was beyond Deryn. The Leviathan had made good speed and had landed just before midnight, and the man had left in a whirlwind shortly after. He must have spent the whole night and morning hunting for electrical parts.\n\nDeryn spotted Master Klopp off to one side, working on a tangle of wires. Hoffman stood beside him, tools at the ready. Alek had put his men at the disposal of the great inventor, of course. And at the moment, Alek himself was busy chatting to a group of officers in unfamiliar blue uniforms. Americans, perhaps.\n\nDeryn was still surprised at her own words from that morning, about her and Alek being meant to be together. She still didn't really believe any of his claptrap about providence. Blethering about destiny was simply a way for Alek to accept her as a girl, by fitting her into his grand plan to save the world. He'd swallowed it, of course, because deep down Alek knew that he was stronger with her than without.\n\nThe lights flickered, and the audience began to settle into their seats. Bovril returned to Deryn's shoulder, and Dr. Barlow made her way back across the room, taking a seat beside her.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp, have I mentioned it's good to see you so well dressed?\"\n\nDeryn fingered her shirt, which was made out of a thicker, softer cotton than she was used to. It fit marvelously, despite the tailors never having touched her.\n\n\"They take their tailoring seriously here, ma'am.\"\n\n\"And a good thing too. You are in the presence of greatness.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"I thought you didn't like this bumrag.\"\n\n\"Not Mr. Tesla, young man.\" She gestured with a white-gloved hand. \"There is Sakichi Toyoda, the father of Japanese mechanics. And, beside him, Kokichi Mikimoto, the first fabricator of shaped pearls. Clankers and Darwinists, working together.\"\n\n\"To-yo-da,\" Bovril said softly, separating each syllable.\n\n\"Better than fighting each other, I suppose,\" Deryn said. \"But what's the point of all this? The Admiralty's not even here to see it.\"\n\n\"In a way, they are.\" Dr. Barlow nodded her head toward the wings of the stage, where a Royal Navy officer sat at a telegraph key. \"Tokyo is connected to London by underwater fiber. According to the ambassador, Lord Churchill himself has awoken early to follow the proceedings.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. The underwater fiber system, which stretched from Britain to Australia to Japan, was one of the more uncanny creations of Darwinism. Made from mile-long strands of living nervous tissue, it bound the British Empire together like a single organism, carrying coded messages along the ocean floor.\n\n\"But they won't be able to see anything,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"Mr. Tesla claims otherwise.\" Dr. Barlow's voice faded as the lights dimmed and a hush settled over the crowd.\n\nA familiar tall figure strode to the center of the darkened stage, holding a long cylinder in one hand. He flourished it in the air, like a swordsman saluting, and then his voice boomed across the theater.\n\n\"Time is pressing, so I shall begin without prologue. I hold a glass tube full of incandescent gasses.\" Tesla pointed at the ceiling. \"And here is a wire conveying alternating currents of high potential. When I touch both . . .\"\n\nHe took the wire in one hand, and the glass tube suddenly illuminated in the other. There was a slight gasp from the audience, and then a scattering of laughter, as if some of them had known the trick was coming.\n\nShadows shifted across Tesla's features as he rested the glowing tube across his shoulder, like a phantasmal walking stick. \"This is merely an electric light, of course, except for the novelty of using my body as a conductor. But it reminds us that electricity can travel through more than wires. Through the atmosphere, for example, or the Earth's crust, and even the ether of interplanetary space.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Dr. Barlow said softly. \"Not martians again.\"\n\n\"Martians,\" Bovril said, chuckling, and Deryn raised an eyebrow.\n\nTesla placed the tube at the edge of the stage, the light extinguishing the moment his fingers left it. He let go of the wire and straightened his jacket.\n\n\"In some ways our planet itself is a capacitor, a giant battery.\" He reached up to touch the bulb hanging from the ceiling, and a light spread inside it. \"In the center of this sphere is another, smaller, globe. Both are filled with luminous gases, and together they can show us the engine of our planet at work.\"\n\nThe man fell silent then, standing back and saying nothing. The globe stayed lit, but nothing else happened as minutes passed in silence. Deryn shifted in her seat. It was a bit uncanny to see so many important people sitting quietly for this long.\n\nHer mind began to drift, wondering why Dr. Barlow had mentioned martians. Did Tesla believe in them? It was one thing to call the great inventor a nutter, but quite another if he was truly mad.\n\nAlek wanted to stop the war so badly, he was willing to believe any promise of peace. And after all he'd lost\u2014his family, his country, and his home\u2014how would he carry on if this hope were dashed as well? But there was not much she could do, Deryn supposed, except show him that there were other things to life besides saving the world.\n\nA murmur went through the crowd, and she looked up. The light in the glass sphere had formed a shape, a tiny finger of lightning, just like those inside Tesla's metal detector. The flicker was moving, sweeping slowly around the globe like the second hand on a clock.\n\n\"The rotation is clockwise, as always,\" Tesla said. \"Though in the Southern Hemisphere it would go in the other direction, I suppose. You see, this finger of light is set in motion by the spinning of our planet.\"\n\nAnother murmur traveled across the room, a bit unsettled. Deryn frowned. How was that so different from a pendulum or a compass needle?\n\n\"But we are not limited to the brute forces of nature.\" Tesla took a step closer to the hanging light, a small object in his hand. \"With this magnet I can wrest control of this flicker from the earth itself.\"\n\nHe stepped still closer, and the light stopped spinning. Tesla began to walk around the bulb, and the flicker began to move again, always pointing away from him, no matter how he paused or hurried.\n\n\"Strange, isn't it? To think that one can aim lightning as easily as a pistol.\" He pulled out his pocket watch and checked it. \"But now it is time for a larger demonstration. Much larger. A few days ago I sent a message from the Leviathan to Tokyo by courier eagle. The message was forwarded by underwater fiber to London, and finally by radio waves to my assistants in New York, more than halfway around the world. There, a few minutes from now, they will follow my instructions.\"\n\nHe signaled to Klopp, who began to make adjustments in one of the black boxes. A moment later all the devices onstage began to flicker and hum. Mr. Tesla stood among them, his hair standing on end like an angry cat's. Deryn felt her own hairs tingle, as if a summer storm were in the air.\n\n\"The results will be visible on these instruments here,\" Tesla said, then turned toward the Royal Navy officer at the telegraph key. \"And also in the early morning sky of London, if you would kindly ask Mr. Churchill and the Sea Lords to step to a window?\"\n\nAnother murmur went through the room, and Deryn whispered to the lady boffin, \"What's he on about?\"\n\n\"His machine in New York is going to send a signal into the air. Like a radio wave, but far more powerful.\" Dr. Barlow leaned closer. \"It's daylight here, so we need instruments to see its effects. But in London the sun isn't up yet.\"\n\n\"You mean, he thinks Goliath can change the sky?\"\n\nThe lady boffin nodded silently, and Deryn stared at the stage, where needles of light had begun to flicker from every object. Even Mr. Tesla's pocket watch was glowing, and a buzzing filled the air, like the bees in the gut of the Leviathan when they needed feeding.\n\n\"The transmission will begin in ten seconds,\" Tesla said, then snapped his watch closed. \"It will not take long to reach us.\"\n\n\"Transmission,\" Bovril said, shifting unhappily. The loris began to keen softly, and suddenly the buzzing wasn't so bad in Deryn's ear. She reached up to scratch the beastie's head gratefully.\n\nFor a long moment nothing happened, and Deryn let herself hope that the experiment was failing. The great Tesla would be humiliated, and all this yackum about going to America would end.\n\nBut then the fingers of lightning in the hanging globe grew stronger, flickering across the inside surface of the glass. Then they spun aimlessly for a moment, then turned strong and steady, pointing to the left side of the stage.\n\nAll the other instruments had come to life, filling the theater with light. The glass tubes were filled with rainbows of color, the metal spheres covered with a thousand needles of electricity. The antennae on Klopp's black box had erupted, sending shoots of lightning climbing up them, only to sputter out in the air. The officer at the telegraph still tapped away, the buttons on his coat alight with tiny sparks.\n\nGradually the countless fingers of light began to align, all of them pointed to the left. Deryn could feel the hairs on her head pulling in that direction.\n\n\"North-northeast,\" Dr. Barlow muttered. \"Directly toward New York, by great circle.\"\n\n\"As you can see,\" Tesla cried above the buzzing, \"I am able to control the currents in this room, even from ten thousand kilometers away. Imagine a thunderstorm brought to heel at such a distance. Or even the electrical charges of the earth's atmosphere itself, focused and aimed like a searchlight!\"\n\nBovril was burbling madly. The creature's fur stood on end, and its eyes were open wider than Deryn had ever seen.\n\n\"Don't worry, beastie,\" she said. \"He's on our side.\"\n\n\"Let's hope so,\" Dr. Barlow said.\n\nTesla lifted his hands into the air, waving them to and fro. Tendrils of lightning clung to his fingertips, but then went shooting off in the same direction\u2014north-northeast.\n\n\"This is the power of Goliath, that no one on earth, Clanker or Darwinist, can escape. So we all must learn to share the globe, or perish together!\"\n\nHe waved a hand, and Klopp cut a master switch. All the lightning disappeared at once, leaving the room in darkness. The silence was quickly filled with gasps and mutterings. Then came a halting applause that slowly grew in strength.\n\nA thousand flickers seemed to hover in the air, burned like sunbeams into Deryn's vision. Through them she saw Tesla reaching up to grab the hanging wire again. He picked up the simple glass tube, which sprang to life.\n\n\"Any word from the Admiralty?\" he asked, silencing the applause.\n\nThe Royal Navy officer stood up from his telegraph, a piece of paper in his quivering hand. \"Lord Churchill and the Sea Lords send their greetings, and wish to report that your experiment was a success. Subtle but strange colors appeared in the dawn sky over London.\"\n\nThe crowd went dead silent.\n\n\"They offer hearty congratulations.\" The officer cleared his throat. \"Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, but the rest of the message is for the captain of the Leviathan.\"\n\nDr. Barlow leaned back into her seat. \"Well, that's not much of a mystery, is it, Mr. Sharp? It looks as though we're headed for New York.\"\n\n\"New York,\" Bovril said thoughtfully, and began to smooth its frizzled fur.\n\nThe Pacific Ocean was nearly half the world, as Mr. Rigby liked to say. It certainly looked vast now, spread out beneath the ship like a rippling sheet of silver. The Japanese home islands were less than a day behind them, but already the very notion of land seemed distant and obscure.\n\nThe Leviathan was at full-ahead, making airspeed of sixty miles an hour. The wind blew down the spine at whole gale force, thrumming along the ship's surface like a surging river.\n\n\"Is it always like this?\" Alek shouted over the wind.\n\n\"Aye,\" Deryn replied. \"Brilliant, isn't it?\"\n\nAlek just scowled at her. His gloved hands clutched the ratlines in a death grip, and Hoffman's eyes were wide with fear behind his goggles. The two Clankers had been at full-ahead in their engine pods before, but never out here on the open spine.\n\n\"This is real flying!\" Deryn leaned closer. \"But if you're afraid, your princeliness, you can go back down.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"Hoffman needs a translator.\"\n\n\"My German's good enough,\" Deryn said. \"I had a whole month of your Clanker jabbering in Istanbul!\"\n\n\"Wei\u00dft du, was ein Kondensator ist?\"\n\n\"That's easy. You asked me if I know what a Kondensator is!\"\n\n\"Well, do you?\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"Well, it's some sort of . . . condenser. Obviously.\"\n\n\"No,\" Alek said. \"A capacitor. You just blew up the ship, Dummkopf.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. It seemed a bit unfair, expecting her to know German words for contraptions she'd never seen before. But she couldn't argue the point. Hoffman was the engineer best able to follow Tesla's orders, and only Alek could translate Clanker technical jargon into English.\n\nThis whole trip topside was at the bidding of the great inventor. He wanted a radio antenna stretching the length of the Leviathan, but he didn't want the ship slowing down. The captain had little choice but to obey\u2014the Admiralty's orders were to cooperate with Tesla, and to get him to America as quickly as practical.\n\nWorking on the spine at top speed wasn't impossible, after all, just a bit tricky. And also dead good fun.\n\n\"Take the wire to the bow, Sharp!\" Mr. Rigby shouted above the wind. \"And before you head back, make sure that end is secure.\"\n\n\"I'll go along,\" Alek said.\n\n\"No you won't, boy!\" Mr. Rigby shouted. \"It's too dangerous for princes up there.\"\n\nAlek scowled, but didn't argue. Up here on the spine, the bosun was the only royalty.\n\nDeryn waved for Hoffman, then began to make her way toward the great airbeast's head. Reattaching her safety clip every yard or so made progress slow, and the spool of wire was barking heavy. But the trickiest thing was crawling into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind.\n\nHoffman followed, carrying his tools and a small device that Mr. Tesla had been tinkering with all day. He claimed that with a thousand-foot-long antenna at this altitude, he could detect radio signals from anywhere in the world\u2014even beyond.\n\n\"So he can talk to bloody martians,\" Deryn cried. \"That's what we're up here for!\"\n\nHoffman didn't understand, or chose not to comment.\n\nAt full-ahead the bow was bare of life. The fl\u00e9chette bats were all hidden away in their nooks and crannies, the birds safe in the rookery. Soon the last set of ratlines disappeared, and Deryn crawled still more slowly, lying flat, her palms spread across the rough, hard surface of the airbeast's bowhead.\n\nShe was glad for the weight of the spool now. At least with sixty pounds of wire strapped to her back, the wind was less likely to blow her into the ocean. She yelled at Hoffman to keep himself flat. At this speed, rushing air could find a grip in any space between a crewman's body and the airbeast's skin, like a knife prying up a barnacle, and fling him off into the sea.\n\nAt last Deryn reached the mooring yoke, the heavy harness at the extreme bow of the airship. She snapped her safety clip to it and sighed with relief. Hoffman joined her there, and together they began to secure one end of the wire.\n\nAs they worked in the relentless wind, Deryn found herself wondering if Hoffman knew what she really was. She doubted Volger would have told anyone; the man always kept secrets for his own uses. But what about Alek? He'd promised not to tell anyone that she was a girl, but did that include hiding the truth from his own men?\n\nWhen the wire was tied fast and Tesla's device attached, Hoffman clapped Deryn on the shoulder, muttering a few choice German curses into the wind. She smiled, suddenly certain that he didn't know.\n\nAlek might be a Dummkopf sometimes, but he was always true to his word.\n\nThe two started back, unspooling wire as they went, securing it to the ratlines every few yards, to keep it from flapping about. Crawling was much quicker with the wind at their backs, and they soon reached Alek and Mr. Rigby again. Together the four of them headed aft.\n\nThe journey grew easier as they neared the tail. The roar of the Clanker engines lessened with distance, and past the airbeast's middle its body narrowed, the great hump sheltering them from the wind. When the first spool emptied, they halted. Mr. Rigby and Hoffman spliced it to another five-hundred-foot wire.\n\nWhile they waited, Alek turned to Deryn. \"Are you excited about seeing America?\"\n\n\"A bit,\" she said. \"But it sounds like an odd place.\"\n\nThe United States was another half-Darwinist, half-Clanker country. But unlike Japan, the technologies weren't happily combined there. The two halves of America had been fighting a vicious civil war when old Darwin had announced his discoveries. The South had adopted Darwinist agricultural techniques, while the industrial North had stayed loyal to the machine. Even fifty years later the nation remained split in two.\n\n\"Isn't that why people join the Air Service?\" Alek asked. \"To see the world?\"\n\nDeryn shrugged. \"Me, I just wanted to fly.\"\n\n\"I'm beginning to see the appeal,\" Alek said, smiling. He stood up halfway, the airflow thrashing at his hair and flight suit, and he leaned forward at a precarious angle, letting the force of the wind keep him upright.\n\n\"Blazes, Alek. Sit yourself down!\"\n\nThe boy just laughed, splaying his hands like a bird's wings. Deryn leaned forward to grab the safety harness of his flight suit.\n\nThe bosun looked up from his work. \"Quit that skylarking!\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir!\" Deryn pulled at Alek's harness. \"Come on, you dafty. Sit down!\"\n\nAlek stopped laughing, dropping to one knee. He pointed ahead. \"Is that what I think it is?\"\n\nDeryn turned to face the wind. The Leviathan's nose was tipping down a bit, and the great hill of the whale's hump seemed to descend before them, revealing the sky ahead.\n\n\"Mr. Rigby!\" Deryn called, pointing at the bow. \"You should see this, sir.\"\n\nA moment later the bosun swore, and Hoffman let out a low whistle. Ahead of the airship was a towering mass of thunderclouds, framed by a dark wall that stretched across the horizon. It was a huge storm, right in the Leviathan's path.\n\n\"THE COMING STORM.\"\n\nDeryn caught the scent of rain and felt lightning in the air. \"What should we do, Mr. Rigby?\"\n\n\"We finish this job, lad, unless we get new orders.\"\n\n\"Begging your pardon, sir, but there's no way they'd send a message lizard up. Even a hydrogen sniffer would be blown off at this speed!\"\n\n\"The captain can always send up a team of riggers, if he wants.\" The bosun pointed at the second spool of wire, still full. \"In any case we can't stop now, or we'll hit that storm with loose wire flying about!\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. \"Aye, of course, sir.\"\n\nHoffman finished off the splice, and the four of them headed toward the tail again. Crawling along the spine was even trickier now. The wind was shifting unpredictably, the currents of the storm mixing with the airflow of the ship's great speed.\n\nDeryn felt the membrane moving beneath her, rolling to one side. She glanced over her shoulder at the bow.\n\n\"We're turning, sir,\" she said. \"Angling to starboard.\"\n\nMr. Rigby swore, waving them on.\n\n\"That's good, isn't it?\" Alek asked her. \"They're aiming to avoid the center of the storm.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"Hurricanes always spin anticlockwise, so we're headed into a massive tailwind. We're not missing the storm\u2014we're using it to move faster. A brilliant idea from Mr. Tesla, no doubt.\"\n\n\"Is that dangerous?\"\n\n\"The ship should be fine. It's us I'm worried about.\" Deryn snapped her safety clip down with a vengeance. \"If they'd just slow down a bit, we could get this barking job done!\"\n\n\"Settle yourself, Mr. Sharp,\" came the bosun's grumble. \"We have our orders, and the captain has his.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir,\" Deryn said, then set herself to crawling as fast as she could.\n\nHaving a boffin in charge was getting to be annoying.\n\nThey were still out in the open when the airship hit the storm. The rain didn't build gradually but arrived in a silvery wall hurtling down the Leviathan's length at sixty miles an hour.\n\n\"Take hold!\" Deryn cried as the chattering tumult surrounded them. The membrane rippled beneath her, stirred by the wave of cold air that came with the rain, no doubt pulled down from the northern Pacific by the great spinning engine of the storm. Suddenly the driving wind seemed full of ice and nails, the freezing drops hitting her goggles like tiny stones.\n\n\"Don't anyone move!\" Mr. Rigby shouted. \"The captain should slow down for us now!\"\n\nDeryn clung to the ratlines with both hands, gritting her teeth, and it was only moments later that the roar of the Clanker engines went silent.\n\n\"Aye, I didn't think the officers had gone mad,\" the bosun muttered. He rose slowly, holding his side where he'd been shot two months before. A wave of fresh annoyance swept through Deryn. It was all very well for Tesla to send men up topside at full-ahead, when he was safe and sipping brandy in his cabin!\n\nWith the engines off, the airship quickly matched the speed of the wind, and a strange calm settled around the four of them. They headed for the steering house at a jog, the membrane slick with rain beneath their feet. Deryn kept one eye on Mr. Rigby, ready to grab him if he slipped. But the old man was as surefooted as always, and soon they were crowding into the dorsal steering house, the aft-most shelter on the ship.\n\n\"Get that wire secure,\" Mr. Rigby ordered.\n\nAlek translated for Hoffman, who set to work. The bosun plunked down heavily on a box of spare engine parts, and Deryn pulled off her gloves and rubbed her hands together, then whistled for glowworm light.\n\nThe dorsal steering house wasn't luxurious. It was full of parts for tending the ship's rear engines, and had its own master wheel if the bridge somehow lost rudder control. Thankfully it was connected by passageways to the airbeast's gut, so a squick of warmth rose from an open hatchway in the floor.\n\nOnce the wire was tied fast, Hoffman said a few words to Alek, then descended into the airship, unspooling still more wire behind him.\n\n\"Where's he off to?\" Deryn asked Alek.\n\n\"Mr. Tesla wants the antenna to run down through the ship, all the way to his laboratory.\"\n\n\"Aye, anything to keep him dry,\" Deryn muttered. She wondered exactly what the Clanker boffin was up to. Back in Tokyo he'd proven he could send radio waves around the world. What more could he do from up here in the sky?\n\nThe bosun still wore a pained expression, so the three waited a few minutes before moving on. Every gust of wind made the steering house shudder, the rain-spattered windows rattling in their frames. Deryn felt the floor shifting beneath her. The airbeast was flexing its body, turning its face away from the force of the storm. This close to the tail, it was easy to feel the giant body shift, like being at the end of a vast, slow whip.\n\nThe ratlines creaked around them, and an unfamiliar metal groan came through the sounds of wind and rain. The wire leading out into the storm went taut beside Deryn, then shuddered and fell slack.\n\n\"Blast it,\" the bosun sighed. \"That wire must have been too short.\"\n\n\"But Mr. Tesla's measurements were quite precise!\" Alek said.\n\n\"Aye, of course they were.\" Deryn shook her head. \"Too precise. He was thinking of the Leviathan as a zeppelin, a dead thing, rigid from bow to stern. But an airbeast bends, and more than usual in this barking storm.\"\n\nAlek stood up, looking out. \"Perhaps someone might have mentioned that to him!\"\n\n\"Your Mr. Tesla never bothered to ask,\" the bosun said flatly. \"But repairs will have to wait. They'll be starting the engines up again soon.\"\n\nAlek looked as though he were going to argue, but Deryn put a hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"They're idle for now, Mr. Rigby.\" She stepped to the windows, shielding her eyes with her hands. \"And the break might be close by.\"\n\nThe bosun snorted. \"All right. Pop out and take a look.\"\n\nDeryn opened the door a bit and squeezed out onto the blustery expanse of the topside. A moment later something caught her eye. At least five hundred feet away, near the base of the hump, a glimmer of silver danced in the rain.\n\n\"One end of the wire's got loose, sir,\" she called over her shoulder. \"Maybe twenty yards of it. And it's flailing about in the wind!\"\n\nMr. Rigby got to his feet and joined her at the door, then swore.\n\n\"When the engines come back, that'll get a bit lively! Could even cut into the membrane!\" He crossed to the gut hatchway. \"I'm afraid you've got to go back out, lad, and secure both loose ends. I'll find a message lizard and tell the bridge to hold the engines still for a bit longer.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\" Deryn pulled her gloves back on.\n\nThe bosun paused halfway down into the hatch. \"Wait a few minutes to make sure they've got the message, then get it done fast. Whatever happens, I don't want you out there at full-ahead!\"\n\nThe bosun dropped away, and Deryn began to search the parts drawers. All she needed was some pliers and a short length of wire.\n\n\"I'm going with you,\" Alek said.\n\nShe started to say no. The bosun hadn't given orders one way or the other, and she could handle the job herself. But if Mr. Rigby's message arrived too late and the ship went to top speed again, anyone alone out there could be swept away into the sea.\n\nBesides, who knew what Alek would get up to if she left him here alone?\n\n\"I'm not afraid,\" he added.\n\n\"You should be,\" Deryn said. \"But you're right, it's better if we stick together. Hand me that rope.\"\n\n\"Ready?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"I suppose so.\" Alek looked down at the rope tied to his flight suit's harness. He wondered what Count Volger would say about him being bound to a common girl. Probably something unpleasant.\n\nBut it was certainly better than letting a friend go out there on her own.\n\nDeryn opened the hatchway, and a rush of cold air sent a fresh chill through Alek's sodden flight suit. As he followed her out into the rain, the five meters of rope between them grew heavy with water.\n\n\"If the engines start up, drop flat and hold on to the ratlines,\" Deryn said.\n\nAlek didn't argue. The few moments of downpour at full-ahead had been convincing enough.\n\nHe followed Deryn toward the bow, keeping to the middle of the spine, his hands out for balance. Down below, the ocean's surface was in furious motion, the wind tearing whitecaps off the waves like they were plumes of steam.\n\n\"'Pacific' means 'peaceful,'\" he said. \"So far, this ocean isn't living up to its name.\"\n\n\"Aye, and believe me, it's much worse down there than it looks. We've matched the speed of the wind, so all we're feeling is the odd gust.\"\n\nAlek nodded. The sky was dark, the rain still falling, and he could smell a deadly hint of lightning. But the air was eerily calm. It was like being in the placid eye of a storm, with its energies boiling all around them, waiting to be unleashed.\n\n\"Then, why's that loose wire blowing about?\n\nDeryn's hand described an arc in the air. \"The hump always has an untidy bit of airflow behind it when the ship's free-ballooning, ever since the earliest airbeasts were fabricated. The boffins have never been able to fix it.\"\n\n\"You mean Darwinism has its flaws?\"\n\n\"So has nature. Ever seen a red-footed booby try to land?\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"I'm afraid I have no knowledge of red-footed boobies.\"\n\n\"Well, I've never actually seen one myself. But everybody says they're barking hilarious!\"\n\nThey were drawing near the airbeast's hump, and Alek felt the air growing restive around them. The loose section of antenna looked like a glint of silver dancing on the ratlines.\n\n\"Step carefully here,\" Deryn called.\n\nWith every meter the troubled airflow grew worse, driving the rain into a blur against Alek's goggles. But he didn't dare take them off. The loose wire was flailing like the tentacle of some dying creature, and he didn't fancy leaving his eyes unprotected.\n\nDeryn came to a halt. \"Do you hear that?\"\n\nAlek listened. Above the chattering of rain he heard a distant thrum.\n\n\"The rear motivator engines?\"\n\n\"Aye, on low speed.\" She shook her head. \"Just a bit of steering, let's hope. Come on!\"\n\nShe jogged toward the flailing wire, dragging Alek by his harness. The wind shifted every few seconds now, sending the falling rain into a dozen little whirlwinds. The wire skittered away as Deryn made a jump for it, but Alek managed to plant a boot down to bring its thrashing to a halt.\n\nDeryn reached into her tool bag. \"I'm going to splice another ten yards on to the antenna. That should be loose enough to keep it from snapping again. Go find the other end of the break.\"\n\n\"I can't go anywhere, Deryn. We're tied together, remember?\"\n\nShe looked down at the rope. \"Ah, right. Best to keep it that way, though.\"\n\nAlek didn't argue. If Mr. Rigby hadn't got word to the officers, the engines could come back on at any time. Deryn worked swiftly with the pliers, her hands as sure as they were with knots and cable. Alek noticed how rough they were. Of course, any sailor's hands were calloused and scarred, but now that he knew she was a girl . . .\n\nHe shook the thought out of his head. At times like this it was best just to think of her as a boy. Anything else was too confusing.\n\n\"Done,\" she said. \"Let's go find the other loose end.\" As Alek rose to his feet, a chill went through his wet flight suit.\n\n\"Has the wind gotten stronger?\"\n\nDeryn cocked her head to listen. \"Aye, the rear engines are running a bit faster.\"\n\n\"And we're losing altitude.\" Below, the towering waves were clearly visible now, their whitecaps glowing against the dark water.\n\n\"Blisters, we might be in trouble.\" Deryn knelt again, putting one finger into the water building on the airship's surface. \"Almost half an inch already!\"\n\n\"Of course. It's raining.\"\n\nHer eyes closed. \"Just let me remember my sums. Every inch of water spread across the membrane adds . . . eight tons to the ship's weight.\"\n\nAlek opened his mouth, but it took a moment to speak. \"Eight tons?\"\n\n\"Aye. Barking heavy stuff, water.\" She started down the spine toward the tail, letting out the added length of wire behind her. \"Come on. Let's find the other end and get this job done!\"\n\nAlek dumbly followed, his gaze traveling down the endless length of the ship. The Leviathan's topside was huge, of course, so of course a thin layer of water would add up to thousands of liters. And though water was running down the sloped sides and off the ship, the rain was constantly adding more to replace it.\n\n\"They'll have dropped all the ballast by now,\" Deryn said. \"But I reckon the weight's still building. That's why we're losing altitude.\"\n\nAlek's eyes went wide. \"You mean this ship can't fly in the rain without crashing?\"\n\n\"Don't be daft. We can still use aerodynamic lift, but that's what I'm worried about. There it is!\"\n\nShe knelt and picked up a loose end of wire tangled in the ratlines, the other end of the break. Her fingers worked quickly, splicing it together with the added length.\n\nAlek stood close, sheltering her from the rain. \"Aerodynamic lift? Like when we took off in the Alps and had to fly for a bit to get off the ground?\"\n\n\"Right. The Leviathan is like a big wing. The faster we go, the more lift we generate. Done!\" She stretched the wire between her hands once, snapping it hard\u2014the new splice held.\n\n\"So when it rains, your ship has to keep moving to stay aloft.\" Alek looked down at the ocean. The waves were building in strength, the tallest of them almost reaching the bottom of the ship. \"Aren't we getting a bit close to the water?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Deryn said. \"The captain's been waiting as long as he can. But I doubt we have much . . .\"\n\nHer words faded as the Clanker engines roared to life. Deryn swore, then stood there for a moment listening.\n\n\"What do you reckon, Alek? Quarter speed?\"\n\nHe knelt to press his palm against the membrane. \"I'd say half.\"\n\n\"Blisters. We'll never make it back to the wheelhouse before the wind gets too strong to walk.\" She looked around. \"Might as well stay here, where the ship's wider. It'll be harder to fall off.\"\n\nAlek glanced down at the roiling black sea. \"Very sensible.\"\n\n\"But we need to get out of the flooding channel.\"\n\n\"The what?\"\n\n\"You'll see.\" Deryn started jogging toward the stern.\n\nAlek hurried to catch up. The ship's speed was building fast, the wind at his back pushing him harder and harder. The rain felt like cold needles now, and the view through his goggles was a blur.\n\nHe slowed down to wipe them, forgetting the rope stretched between him and Deryn. It yanked tight, and Alek's boots skidded on the wet surface of the spine. He landed badly, the air driven from his lungs, his head cracking hard. With the blow echoing in his ears, Alek realized that he was still moving, sliding along in the flow of rainwater. He clawed at the ratlines, but his cold fingers wouldn't close. For an awful moment the slope of the airbeast's flank dropped away from beneath him.\n\nThen the rope around his waist went taut again, snapping Alek to a halt. He lay there, uncertain of up and down, his heart pounding.\n\nA voice was in his ear. \"This is no use! Clip yourself!\"\n\nAlek nodded, feeling blindly for his safety clip. He snapped it onto the grid of ropes beneath him, then sat up, his head spinning. Every second the engines roared louder, and as their power built, so did the driving power of the rain. His goggles were blurred, and his head still reeled from the impact of his fall.\n\n\"Sorry I fell.\" Talking hurt his head.\n\n\"No worries. We're far enough aft. Just wanted to stay out of that.\"\n\nAlek pulled his goggles off, following Dylan's gaze. Pushed along by the airship's passage, a channel of water was spilling down the backside of the hump, like a waterfall forming after a downpour.\n\n\"The flooding channel?\"\n\nDylan laughed madly. \"Aye, I've never seen it like that. And this is only three-quarter speed!\"\n\nAlek squeezed his eyes shut, suddenly uncertain how he'd gotten out here in this storm. It felt as if he'd just woken up to find himself magically transported from his bed out onto the topside.\n\n\"Blisters, Alek, you're bleeding!\"\n\n\"I'm what?\" He blinked. Dylan was staring at his forehead. Alek reached up to touch the painful spot, then looked at his fingers. They were stained by a thin, watery hint of blood.\n\n\"It's nothing.\"\n\n\"Are you dizzy?\"\n\n\"Why would I be dizzy?\" Alek reached up to pull his goggles off, but found them already in his hand. His vision stayed blurry, though, as if a layer of glass hovered between him and the world.\n\n\"Because you just cracked your head, you dafty!\"\n\n\"I did what?\" It was hard to think with the engines roaring like this.\n\n\"Barking spiders, Alek.\" Dylan grasped both his hands, staring straight into his eyes. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'm cold.\" All the heat in his body was trickling out into the storm, the strength in his limbs carried away by the cold water rushing past. Alek wanted to stand up, but the wind was too strong.\n\nA vast boom rang out, the whole ship shuddering beneath them.\n\n\"Blisters!\" Dylan swore. \"A wave just smacked our underside! The officers left the engines too late.\"\n\nAlek stared at Dylan, the shock wave echoing in his head. He wanted to ask a question about the engines and the storm, but all at once the blurry layer across his vision seemed to clear away.\n\n\"You're a girl, aren't you?\"\n\n\"What in blazes?\" Deryn's eyes grew wide. \"Did your brain get cracked that bad? You've known that for a barking week!\"\n\n\"Yes, but I can . . . see it now!\" Even after he'd known the truth, the lie had remained stuck in his mind, like a mask over Deryn's face. But suddenly the mask had shaken free.\n\nHe touched his forehead. \"Did you always look like this?\"\n\nDeryn's answer was drowned out by the engines. Alek knew the sound from his long hours in the pods, the distinctive roar of full speed ahead. The wind drove even harder, the rain suddenly like hailstones. He pulled his goggles on again.\n\n\"You fell and cracked your head!\" Deryn shouted. \"The ship's heavy with rain, remember? So they're throwing every engine to full speed.\" She turned into the gale, her arm thrown across her face, and stared up at the hump rising over them. \"And that's not all!\"\n\nAlek squinted into the wind and saw it\u2014a white sheet rippling toward them down the slope of the spine.\n\n\"What on earth is that?\"\n\n\"The water from the bowhead\u2014all being blown back at once!\" She wrapped her arms around him. \"Take hold of the ratlines before it hits, in case your safety line snaps!\"\n\nAs Alek dug his fingers into the ropes beneath them, another boom shook the airship. A vast ripple passed through the membrane, bucking Deryn and Alek half a meter into the air, but her arms held tight around him. Her body was a shadow of warmth in the freezing wind.\n\n\"We're still too low!\" she cried. \"A tall enough wave could hit the\u2014\"\n\nThe surge of rainwater struck at that moment, hardly knee height but moving fast. It swept across them where they lay, filling Alek's nose and mouth. He clutched the ratlines with all his strength, and felt Deryn's arms around him tighten. His safety line pulled taut as the torrent tried to carry them both down the sloping flank of the airbeast.\n\nAfter a few long seconds the flood passed by, the water spilling away in both directions from the spine. Deryn let him go, and Alek sat up sputtering and coughing.\n\n\"We're gaining altitude,\" she said, looking down the flank. \"Our speed has pushed a bit of water off.\"\n\nAlek huddled in his soaking flight suit, wondering if the world had gone mad. The wind was roaring with the fury of a hundred engines, a rain like cold gravel was tumbling from the sky, freezing rivers were pouring down the Leviathan's length . . .\n\n\"SPINE SPOUT.\"\n\nAnd his friend Dylan was a girl.\n\n\"What's wrong with everything?\" he said, curling up against the cold and shutting his eyes. The world had broken the night his parents had died, and it just seemed to keep breaking.\n\nDeryn shook him. \"You've got a head wound, Alek. Don't fall asleep!\"\n\nHe opened one eye. \"It's a bit cold for a nap.\"\n\n\"Aye, but don't pass out!\" She leaned closer, their heads almost touching. \"Keep talking to me.\"\n\nAlek lay there shuddering, trying to think of what to say. The rumble of the engines seemed to be inside his head, tangling his thoughts.\n\n\"I forgot you were a girl, just for a moment.\"\n\n\"Aye. That fall scrambled your attic, didn't it?\"\n\nHe nodded, her strange way with words setting off an old memory. \" 'My attic's been scrambled.' You said that the first time we met. After you crashed in the Alps.\"\n\n\"Aye, I was a bit loopy that night. But you sounded mad yourself, pretending to be a Swiss smuggler.\"\n\n\"I didn't know what I was pretending to be. That was the problem.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"You're a hopeless liar, your princeliness. I'll give you that.\"\n\n\"Lack of practice.\" Alek shivered, and they huddled closer, her face only centimeters from his. The hood of her flight suit was pulled up, her wet hair pasted to her forehead, baring the angles of her face.\n\nShe frowned. \"Are you going daft again?\"\n\nAlek shook his head, but his eyelids were heavy. He felt his body stop shivering, giving up its struggle against the cold. His thoughts began to fade into the roar of the world around him.\n\n\"Stay awake!\" Deryn cried. \"Talk to me!\"\n\nHe searched for words, but the rain seemed to strip away his thoughts before they could form. Staring at Deryn, Alek felt his mind switch back and forth, seeing her as a girl, then as a boy.\n\nAnd he realized what he had to say.\n\n\"Promise you won't ever lie to me again.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes.\n\n\"I mean it!\" he shouted above the wind. \"You have to swear it, or we can't be friends.\"\n\nDeryn stared hard at him another moment, then nodded. \"Aleksandar of Hohenberg, I promise never to lie to you again.\"\n\n\"And you won't keep any secrets from me either?\"\n\n\"Are you sure you want that?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\n\"All right. I won't hide anything from you again, for as long as I live.\"\n\nAlek smiled, and let his eyes finally drift closed. That was all he'd wanted, really, for his allies to trust him with the truth. Was it so much to ask?\n\nThen a warmth pressed against his mouth, lips touching his. Soft at first, then harder, trembling with an intensity that lofted above the storm. A quiver went through him, like the shudder of a dream-fall pulling him from the edge of sleep. He opened his eyes and was staring into Deryn's face.\n\nShe pulled away a little. \"Wake up, you daft prince.\"\n\nHe blinked. \"Did you just . . .\"\n\n\"Aye. I did. No secrets, remember?\"\n\n\"I see,\" Alek said, and another shiver went through him, not from the cold. His head was clear now, and the rain chattered in the silence between them. \"You know I can't . . .\"\n\n\"You're a prince, and I'm a commoner.\" She shrugged. \"But this is what no secrets means.\"\n\nHe nodded slowly, wondering at the warmth of her secret still on his lips.\n\n\"Well, I'm certainly awake now.\"\n\n\"So it works on sleeping princes, too?\" Deryn asked, then her smile faded. \"I need a promise from you also, Alek.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Of course. I won't keep secrets from you, I swear.\"\n\n\"I know, but it's not that.\" Deryn turned away, staring off into the blackness, her arms still around him. \"Promise that you'll lie for me.\"\n\n\"Lie for you?\"\n\n\"Now that you know what I am, there's no way to escape it.\"\n\nAlek hesitated, thinking how strange it was to make an oath to lie. But the oath was to Deryn, and the lies would be to . . . anyone else.\n\n\"All right. I swear to lie for you, Deryn Sharp, whatever it takes to protect your secret.\" Saying it aloud made Alek's breath quicken, and the feeling bubbled up into a laugh. \"But I can't promise I'll be any good at it.\"\n\n\"You'll probably be rubbish. But that's the mess we're in.\"\n\nHe nodded, though he wasn't sure at the moment exactly what kind of mess it was. She had kissed him, after all. He found himself wondering if she was going to kiss him again.\n\nBut Deryn was staring off into the storm. Her expression grew serious.\n\nAlek could see nothing but darkness and rain. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Rescue, your princeliness. Namely, the four biggest riggers in the crew, crawling straight into a sixty-mile-an-hour headwind on their hands and knees. Risking their barking lives to make sure you're all right.\" She turned back with a scowl. \"Must be nice to be a prince.\"\n\n\"Sometimes, yes,\" he said, finally letting his eyes close. Another shudder passed through him, shaking every muscle.\n\nDeryn held him tighter, lending him a sliver of her heat until the strong hands of the riggers picked him up and carried him somewhere warm and quiet.\n\n\"That will, I trust, be the last of your heroics.\" Count Volger said this too softly to make Alek's head hurt, but the words were brittle and precise.\n\n\"There weren't any heroics. I was only there as a translator.\"\n\n\"And yet here you are with bandages round your head. Rather tricky translations, I should think.\"\n\n\"Rather tricky,\" said Bovril with a chuckle.\n\nAlek took a drink of water from the glass beside his bed. He was fuzzy on much of what had happened last night. He remembered the airship free-ballooning through the strange calm of the storm, and then the engines roaring to life, lashing the rain into a tempest. Things had gotten complicated after that. He'd fallen and hit his head, then almost drowned in a surge of rainwater.\n\nAnd Deryn Sharp had kissed him.\n\n\"There were important repairs to be done,\" he said. \"A loose antenna.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. What could be more vital than Tesla's giant flying radio?\"\n\n\"Is it working?\" Alek asked, wanting to change the subject. Thinking about last night made his head spin, though it pleased him to have a secret from Count Volger.\n\n\"Apparently. Tesla sits in his laboratory, tapping out messages.\" The wildcount drummed his fingers. \"Instructions to his assistants in New York, to prepare Goliath for our arrival.\"\n\nBovril began to rap out Morse code on the frame of the bed.\n\nAlek shushed the beast. \"Maybe we've done some good, then, getting him home so quickly. If he stops the war . . .\"\n\nHundreds were dying every day. Rescuing Tesla from the wilderness and getting him to America quickly might save thousands of lives. What if something so simple had been Alek's destiny all along?\n\n\"'If' is a word that can never be said too loudly.\" Volger stood up, looking out at the still cloudy sky. \"For example, if you had died last night, the last decade of my life would've been altogether wasted.\"\n\n\"Have a little faith in me, Volger.\"\n\n\"I have great faith, tempered with vast annoyance.\"\n\nAlek smiled weakly, falling back into his pillows. The ship's engines were still at full-ahead, the stateroom rumbling around him. The world was unsteady.\n\nIt wasn't fair of Deryn, kissing him. She knew the story of how his father had married a woman of lesser station, and all the disasters that had resulted. It had torn Alek's family apart, and in turn had upset the balance of Europe. His father's one selfish act of true love had cost more than anyone could count.\n\nThe pope's letter might make Alek the heir to his granduncle's throne, but it didn't alter the fact that he'd been rejected by his own family. The slightest mark against him would cast his legitimacy into doubt. Alek couldn't allow himself to think about a commoner that way. He had a war to stop.\n\nHe made a fist and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.\n\n\"Great faith,\" Bovril repeated. \"Vast annoyance.\"\n\nGiving the beast a withering look, Volger said, \"The captain asked me to mention that he'll be coming to see you.\"\n\n\"He must be annoyed as well. He had to risk four men just to rescue me.\" Alek closed his eyes and began to rub his temples. \"I hope he doesn't shout.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't worry.\" Volger began to pace, his footsteps echoing in Alek's head. \"Unlike mine, his annoyance will be well hidden.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The Darwinists see you as a link to Tesla. You're both Clankers, and both of you have switched sides in this war.\"\n\n\"Tesla doesn't think much of my political connections.\"\n\n\"Not to the Austrian government, no. But he sees you as a way to broadcast the news of his weapon.\" The man mercifully stopped pacing. \"You were famous already, thanks to those ridiculous articles. And soon you will arrive in America on the world's greatest airship.\"\n\nAlek sat up again and stared at Volger, trying to figure out if the man was serious.\n\n\"He's always been a showman. Dr. Barlow told me about his spectacle in Tokyo.\" Volger gave a shrug. \"It makes sense, I suppose. The best way to keep Goliath from being used is to tell everyone what it can do, and that means creating a sensation. So why not promote his weapon to end the war with you, the boy whose family tragedy started it?\"\n\nAlek rubbed his temples again. The pounding was getting worse with every word. First Deryn, now this. \"It all sounds quite undignified.\"\n\n\"You wanted a destiny.\"\n\n\"Are you saying I should let him put me on display?\"\n\n\"I'm suggesting, Your Serene Highness, that you get as much sleep as possible over the next few days.\" Volger smiled. \"Your headaches have only begun.\"\n\nThe ship's officers came a few hours later, just when Alek had managed to fall back asleep.\n\nA marine sergeant shook him awake, then snapped to attention with a painful smack of his boot heels against the floor. Dr. Busk took Alek's pulse, staring at his watch and nodding sagely.\n\n\"You appear to be recovering nicely, Prince.\"\n\n\"Someone should tell my head that.\" Alek nodded at the assembled visitors. \"Captain, First Officer, Dr. Barlow.\"\n\n\"Good afternoon, Prince Aleksandar,\" the captain said, and the four of them bowed together.\n\nAlek frowned. This all seemed oddly formal, given that he was lying here in his nightshirt. He wished they would go away and let him sleep.\n\nDr. Barlow's loris dropped from her shoulder to the floor and crawled under the bed, where Bovril joined it. The two beasts began to mutter snatches of conversation to each other.\n\n\"What can I do for you?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"You've already done it, in a manner of speaking.\" The captain was beaming, his voice altogether too loud. \"Middy Sharp told us how bravely you assisted him last night.\"\n\n\"Assisted him? Dylan made the repairs. I only fell and hit my head, from what I can recall.\"\n\nThe officers all laughed at this, loudly enough to make Alek wince, but Dr. Barlow's expression remained serious.\n\n\"Without you, Alek, Mr. Sharp would have been un-tethered on the spine.\" She looked out the window. \"In gale conditions nothing is more dangerous than working topside alone.\"\n\n\"Yes, I make excellent deadweight.\"\n\n\"Most amusing, Your Majesty,\" said Captain Hobbes. \"But this modesty is falling on deaf ears, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"I only did what any member of the crew would have done.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" The captain nodded vigorously. \"But you are not a member of this crew, and yet you performed heroically. A copy of Mr. Sharp's report has already been dispatched to the Admiralty.\"\n\n\"The Admiralty?\" Alek sat up straighter. \"That seems a bit . . . excessive.\"\n\n\"Not at all. Reports of heroism are sent to London as a matter of course.\" He clicked his heels together and made a small bow. \"But whatever they decide, you have my personal thanks.\"\n\nThe officers made their good-byes then, but the lady boffin remained behind, snapping her fingers for her loris. The beast seemed reluctant to come out from beneath the bed, where Bovril was babbling the names of German radio parts.\n\n\"Excuse me, Dr. Barlow,\" Alek asked. \"But what was that all about?\"\n\n\"You really don't know? How charming.\" She gave up on her loris and sat down on the end of the bed. \"I think the captain means to give you a medal.\"\n\nAlek felt his jaw drop open. A week ago it would have overjoyed him to be made one of the crew, much less decorated as an airman. But Volger's warnings were still fresh in his aching head.\n\n\"To what purpose?\" he asked. \"And don't tell me it's in recognition of my heroism. What does the captain want from me?\"\n\nThe lady boffin sighed. \"So jaded for one so young.\"\n\n\"Jaded, heh,\" came a small voice from beneath the bed.\n\n\"Don't be tiresome, Dr. Barlow. The captain already knows I'll help Mr. Tesla's cause. Why must he bribe me with medals?\"\n\nShe looked out the window at the boiling clouds. \"Perhaps he fears you'll change your mind.\"\n\n\"Why would I do that?\"\n\n\"Because someone might convince you that Mr. Tesla is a fraud.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Alek remembered Deryn's words in Tokyo. \"And might that someone be you?\"\n\n\"We shall see.\" Dr. Barlow reached down and snapped her fingers again, and finally her beast emerged. She lifted it onto her shoulder. \"I am a scientist, Alek. I do not deal in surmise. But when I have proof, I'll let you know.\"\n\n\"It was awful, being at war with you,\" said the loris on her shoulder.\n\nAlek stared at it, recalling when he'd said the words to Deryn in Japan. Had Bovril recounted that entire conversation to the other loris? The thought of all their secrets being traded between the creatures was most unsettling.\n\nDr. Barlow shook her head. \"Pay no attention. These two beasts were clearly damaged in their eggs. Years wasted, all thanks to one bumpy landing in the Alps.\" She reached out to straighten Alek's bandages. \"And speaking of bumps, do get some sleep, or you shall wind up as simpleminded as they.\"\n\nAfter she left, Bovril emerged from beneath the bed. It crawled up onto Alek's stomach, chuckling to itself.\n\n\"What's got you amused?\" he asked.\n\nThe creature turned to Alek, suddenly wearing a serious look.\n\n\"Fell from the sky,\" it said.\n\nIt took five days for the sky to clear again.\n\nThe storm had pushed the Leviathan across the Pacific swiftly, carrying the airship well to the south. The coast of California stretched across the windows of the middies' mess. A few white cliffs caught the sun, and behind them were rolling hills, grassy and patched with brown.\n\n\"America,\" Bovril said softly from Alek's shoulder.\n\n\"Aye, that's right.\" Deryn reached up to stroke the beastie's fur, wondering if it was only repeating the word, or if it had a real sense that this was a new place with its own name.\n\nAlek lowered his field glasses. \"Looks rather wild, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Here, maybe. But we're halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Put together, those two cities have got almost a million people!\"\n\n\"Most impressive. Then, why is it so empty between them?\"\n\nDeryn gestured at the maps on the mess table. \"Because America's barking huge. One country, as big as all of Europe!\"\n\nBovril leaned forward on Alek's shoulder, pressing its nose against the glass. \"Big.\"\n\n\"And growing stronger,\" Alek said. \"If they enter the war, they'll tip the balance.\"\n\n\"Aye, but which way?\"\n\nAlek turned, revealing the fresh scar on his forehead. His color had returned since the accident, and he no longer complained of headaches. But sometimes he got that daft look in his eye again, as if he didn't quite believe the world around him was real.\n\nAt least he hadn't forgotten again that Deryn was a girl. Kissing him had made certain of that.\n\nShe still wasn't quite sure why she'd done it. Maybe the energies of the storm had brought on an unsoldierly madness in her. Or maybe that's what oaths were all about, keeping your word even when it made everything go pear-shaped. No more secrets between them, no matter what. . . . That had a scary ring to it.\n\nNeither of them had spoken of that moment again, of course. There was no future in kissing Alek. He was a prince and she was a commoner, and she'd made her peace with that back in Istanbul. The pope didn't write letters turning Scottish girls dressed as boys into royalty. Not in a million years.\n\nBut at least she'd done it once.\n\n\"They'd never take up arms against Britain,\" Alek was saying. \"Even if they are half Clanker.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"But Americans aren't just a mix of Clanker and Darwinist; they're a mix of nations. Plenty of German immigrants fresh off the boat and still loyal to the kaiser. And plenty of spies among them, I'll bet.\"\n\n\"Mr. Tesla will end the war before any of that matters.\" Alek handed the field glasses to Deryn and pointed. \"On those cliffs.\"\n\nIt took her a moment to spot the mooring tower, rising up from an odd cluster of buildings on the seaside hills. They were a mishmash of styles\u2014medieval castles, ramshackle houses, modern Clanker towers, all half finished. Massive building machines moved among them, huffing steam into the clear sky, and cargo ships swarmed the long pier jutting into the sea below.\n\n\"Blisters, that's this fellow's house?\"\n\n\"William Randolph Hearst is a very rich man,\" Alek said. \"And a bit odd as well, according to Mr. Tesla.\"\n\n\"Which is saying something, coming from him.\"\n\n\"But he's the right man for the job. Hearst owns half a dozen newspapers, a newsreel company, and a few politicians as well.\" Alek said this firmly, then let out a sigh. \"It was a lucky storm that blew us this far south, I suppose.\"\n\n\"News,\" Bovril said softly.\n\nDeryn handed back the field glasses and put a hand on the boy's shoulder. Back in Istanbul, Alek had spilled his secrets to Eddie Malone to keep the reporter from sniffing out the revolution, about fleeing his home after his parents' murder and joining the Leviathan's crew. Everything except the pope's letter that promised Alek the throne, his last secret. He had hated every minute of being in the limelight. And now Tesla wanted to exhibit Alek's story on a much larger stage.\n\n\"Doesn't seem fair, making you go through all that palaver again.\"\n\nAlek shrugged. \"It can't be any worse a second time, can it?\"\n\nThey watched in silence as the sprawling mansion drew nearer. The Leviathan came about and turned its nose into the steady breeze coming off the sea, approaching the mooring tower from the landward side.\n\nA lizard popped its head out of a message tube overhead.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp, report to the topside,\" it said in Mr. Rigby's voice.\n\n\"Right away, sir. End message.\" She looked at Alek. \"I'll be down helping with the landing. Maybe I'll get to see your big entrance from the ground.\"\n\nHe gave her a smile. \"I shall try to look dashing.\"\n\n\"Aye, I'm sure you will.\" Deryn turned to the window, pretending to make a quick survey of the landing field, the obstacles of machines and men, the wind's patterns in the ruffling grass. \"They're just reporters, Alek. They can't hurt you.\"\n\n\"I'll try to remember that, Deryn,\" he said.\n\n\"Deryn Sharp,\" said Bovril with a chuckle as she headed toward the door. \"Quite dashing.\"\n\nShe hit the airfield softly, her gliding wings stiff with ocean air. A dozen ground men waited to steady her, and a young man in civilian clothes presented himself.\n\n\"Philip Francis, at your service.\"\n\n\"Midshipman Sharp, of His Majesty's Airship Leviathan,\" Deryn said, giving him a salute. \"How many ground men do you have?\"\n\n\"Two hundred or so. Is that enough?\"\n\nShe raised an eyebrow. \"Aye, that's loads. But are any of them trained?\"\n\n\"All trained, and they've got lots of practice. Mr. Hearst has his own airship, you know. It's in Chicago at the moment, undergoing repairs.\"\n\n\"He has his own barking airship?\"\n\n\"He dislikes train travel,\" the man said simply.\n\n\"Aye, of course,\" Deryn managed, turning to take stock of the airfield. The swarm of ground men was already in position, arranged in a perfect oval beneath the Leviathan's gondola. They looked sharp enough in their red uniforms, and most wore sandbags on their belts for extra weight, no doubt to guard against the gusty ocean breeze.\n\nShe heard the growl of Clanker engines, and turned to find a trio of strange machines lumbering forward\u2014six-legged walkers. Their pilots rode out in the open, and metal arms rose up from their backsides, carrying some sort of contraption.\n\n\"What in blazes are those?\" she asked Mr. Francis.\n\n\"Moving-picture cameras, on the latest walking platforms. Mr. Hearst wants the Leviathan's arrival captured for his newsreels.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. She'd heard about the Clanker obsession with moving pictures but had never seen one herself. The cameras whirred and shuddered, a bit like the sewing machines back in Tokyo. Each one had three lenses like insect eyes, all staring up at the airship overhead.\n\n\"That's the door on the starboard side, correct?\" Mr. Francis asked. \"We'll want to shoot them coming out.\"\n\n\"You want to shoot them?\"\n\n\"Photograph them.\" He smiled. \"Figure of speech.\"\n\n\"Of course. Aye, the gangway drops from starboard,\" she said, feeling like a traitor to Alek for helping. This Mr. Francis wasn't an airman at all, calling the gangway hatch a door. He was some sort of moving-picture reporter!\n\nBehind the walkers waited more men in civilian clothes, recording frogs on their shoulders, cameras in their hands. They surged forward as the airship dropped its lines to the waiting ground men.\n\n\"You might want to pull those reporters back,\" Deryn said. \"In case there's a gust.\"\n\n\"Mr. Hearst's crew can handle it.\"\n\nShe scowled. The ground men looked sure enough in their duties, but how dare they call her down here just to help with barking camera angles!\n\nThe ground men took hold of the lines and began to spread out, pulling the Leviathan downward. When the gondola was a few yards above the airfield, the gangplank lowered itself to the ground, revealing Captain Hobbes, Mr. Tesla, and Prince Aleksandar. The captain saluted smartly, and the inventor waved his walking stick, but Alek looked unsteady. His eyes flicked between the cameras and the crowd for a moment, until he managed a halfhearted bow.\n\nThe walking platforms plodded closer, their cameras rising up, and suddenly they looked predatory, reminding Deryn of the scorpion walker that had captured her men at Gallipoli. The cameras even looked a bit like Clanker machine guns.\n\nA plump man with a broad hat and pin-striped pants detached himself from the scrum of reporters, making his way up the gangplank. He reached out and pumped the captain's hand.\n\n\"Is that Mr. Hearst?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"The man himself,\" Mr. Francis said. \"You're lucky to find him at home. With the war boiling over, he's been in New York since late summer, tending to his newspapers.\"\n\n\"Lucky us,\" Deryn said, watching Alek greet Mr. Hearst. In the cavalry tunic he'd borrowed from Volger, Alek did in fact look quite dashing. And with his host before him, his aristocratic reflexes seemed to take over. He bowed again, gracefully this time, and even smiled for the cameras looming overhead.\n\nDeryn was glad to see him getting into the spirit of things, but then she had a disturbing thought. What if he started to enjoy all this attention?\n\n\"THE MOGUL.\"\n\nNo, it would take more than a knock on the head to change Alek that much.\n\nShe tore her gaze from the spectacle and checked the landing field once more. To her relief a tangle was developing among the ropes.\n\n\"Looks as though your men might need some help after all,\" she said to Mr. Francis, and took off at a run.\n\nThe snarl of cables was near the bow of the ship, where the breeze was strongest. Overhead the topside crew had already cast a line across to the mooring tower, but they were waiting for the chaos below to settle before hitching the airship fast.\n\nAs Deryn approached, two groups of ground men were shouting at each other. Someone had pulled in the wrong direction, crossing the ropes, and now no one wanted to let go. She waded in, barking orders while making sure the men didn't all drop their lines at once. It was sorted out soon enough, and Deryn pulled out her semaphore flags to flash a quick R-E-A-D-Y to the topside crew.\n\n\"I'm afraid that was my fault,\" came a voice from behind her.\n\nShe turned to find a man in an ill-fitting uniform, a bit older than the other crewmen. Behind his mustache his face was somehow familiar.\n\n\"Are you . . . ,\" she began, but then a croak came from one of the sandbags on his belt.\n\n\"Shush, Rusty,\" he hissed. \"Good to see you again, Mr. Sharp. Do you suppose we might have a quick word in the privacy of your ship?\"\n\nShe squinted at his face, and recognized him just as he stuck out his hand.\n\n\"Eddie Malone. Reporter for the New York World.\"\n\n\"What in blazes are you doing here?\"\n\nMalone considered the question. \"Why am I in California? Or why am I in disguise, instead of snapping photos with the other reporters?\"\n\n\"Aye, both!\"\n\n\"Happy to explain everything,\" Malone said. \"But first we need to get aboard your ship. Otherwise those fellows are about to give me a thrashing.\"\n\nDeryn turned to follow Malone's gaze, and saw a trio of burly men in dark blue uniforms striding across the airfield.\n\n\"Who in blazes are they?\"\n\n\"Pinkertons\u2014security guards in the employ of Mr. Hearst. You see, my paper was owned by a fellow called Pulitzer, and he and Hearst weren't exactly pals. So let's not dawdle.\" The man started to drag her toward the Leviathan's gondola.\n\n\"Surely they won't set upon you in broad daylight!\"\n\n\"Whatever they do, it won't be pretty.\"\n\nDeryn looked at the men again. They carried truncheons in their hands. Perhaps it was better to be safe than sorry.\n\nThe Leviathan's gondola was still too high to jump aboard, and she and Malone would never make it past the Pinkertons to the gangplank on the other side. But where the navigator's bubble bulged downward beneath the bridge were two steel mooring rings, just out of reach.\n\n\"Get ready to grab one of those handholds,\" she ordered Malone, then turned to the ground men she'd just untangled, shouting, \"Give me a good heave in one . . . two . . . three!\"\n\nThe men pulled back in a mass, and the ship's nose dipped just enough. Eddie Malone and Deryn jumped to grab the mooring rings, then hauled themselves up as the ship bobbed back to level.\n\n\"This way,\" she said, scrambling toward the forward cargo bay windows. Malone followed, his shoes almost slipping from the metal rail around the bottom of the gondola.\n\nThe Pinkertons had arrived below them, and were peering up at Deryn and Malone with annoyed expressions.\n\n\"PINKERTONS' PURSUIT.\"\n\n\"Come down here!\" one shouted, but Deryn ignored him. She rapped on a cargo bay porthole.\n\nThe ship shifted a squick beneath her\u2014the ground crew was bringing it slowly down. In another minute she and Malone would be within reach of the Pinkertons' truncheons.\n\nAn airman's face appeared at the porthole, looking a bit perplexed.\n\n\"Open up. That's an order!\" Deryn shouted, and the porthole popped open.\n\nAs she shoved Eddie Malone through, she wondered why she was helping him. Maybe he'd done them a favor back in Istanbul by not spilling the revolution's secrets, but only for a price.\n\nIn any case he was aboard now. It was the captain's decision whether to throw him back or not.\n\nDeryn scrambled after him, not waiting to see if the Pinkertons would take out their frustration on her. She climbed down from the barrels of the ship's honey stacked by the window, then gave the confused airman who'd let them inside a salute. \"Carry on, lad.\"\n\nMalone was looking about the darkened cargo bay, his pencil already scribbling in his notepad.\n\n\"So this is what belowdecks looks like?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid we haven't time for a tour, Mr. Malone. Why were those men after you?\"\n\n\"As I said, I work for the New York World, and Hearst owns the New York Journal. Archrivals, you might say.\"\n\n\"And here in America rival newspapermen attack each other on sight?\"\n\nThe man barked a laugh. \"Not always. But Hearst didn't exactly send me an engraved invitation. I had to disguise myself just to snap a few pictures. Speaking of which . . .\"\n\nHe pulled a camera from one of his sandbags, then reached into the other for his recording frog. As he placed the beastie on his shoulder, it made a burping noise, blinking at Deryn.\n\n\"I thought you were the Istanbul bureau chief,\" she said. \"Again, what are you doing here? Istanbul is seven thousand miles away!\"\n\nThe reporter waved his hand. \"Prince Alek's the best scoop I ever had. I'm not about to let a couple of oceans get in my way. Once I found out the Leviathan was headed east, I sailed back to New York. Been there for two weeks now, waiting to see where you popped up again.\"\n\n\"But how did you get here?\"\n\n\"After Mr. Tesla's shindig in Tokyo made the papers, I jumped on a train for Los Angeles. That's where the biggest airfield on the West Coast is. But last night I got a tip that you were coming here instead.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. Mr. Tesla had only convinced the officers yesterday to resupply at Hearst's. \"A tip? From whom?\"\n\n\"From the great inventor himself. Radio waves aren't like carrier pigeons, Mr. Sharp. Anyone with an antenna can pick them up.\" The man shrugged. \"You shouldn't be surprised that Tesla sent uncoded messages. Why let one newspaper have all the fun?\"\n\nDeryn swore, wondering who else was following the Leviathan's movements. Clanker spies had radios too. She also wondered why she'd been so anxious to rescue Malone. Sticky-beaks like him would only cause trouble in the end.\n\n\"Well, however you got here, Mr. Malone, we'll have to ask the officers if you can stay aboard. Follow me.\"\n\nShe led the man to the central staircase, then up and forward toward the bridge. The ship's corridors were buzzing; the cargo bay was already open to take on fuel and supplies. It was only a matter of time before Malone's pursuers found their way aboard.\n\nBut the bridge was just as hectic as the rest of the ship, and Deryn found herself shunted from one officer to the next. The captain was busy being photographed for the newsreels, and no one else wanted to take responsibility for a wayward reporter. So when Deryn spotted the lady boffin and her loris taking tea in the officers' mess, she pulled Malone inside and shut the door behind them.\n\n\"Afternoon, ma'am. This is Mr. Malone. He's a reporter.\"\n\nThe lady boffin nodded. \"How kind of Mr. Hearst, remembering that there are more than just Clanker scientists to interview aboard this ship!\"\n\n\"Clankers!\" said the loris with a snooty tone.\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am,\" Deryn said. \"But it's not what you think. You see, Mr. Malone doesn't work for Mr. Hearst.\"\n\n\"I'm with the New York World,\" Malone said\n\n\"A trespasser, then?\" Dr. Barlow's eyes traveled over his ground crew uniform. \"And in disguise as well, I see. Do you realize, Mr. Sharp, that there are German spies here in America?\"\n\n\"You're right about that, ma'am,\" Malone said with a smile. \"Stacks of them!\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp, how exactly did this man get aboard?\"\n\nDeryn's voice felt small in her throat. \"Um, I sort of let him in a porthole, ma'am.\"\n\nDr. Barlow raised an eyebrow at this, and her loris said, \"Spies!\"\n\n\"But he can't be a German agent!\" Deryn cried. \"I met him back in Istanbul. In fact, you did too! On the ambassador's elephant, remember?\"\n\nMalone stepped forward. \"The boy's right, though we didn't chat much. And of course I wasn't wearing this.\"\n\nHe reached up and took one end of his mustache, yanked it off in a single jerk, and threw it onto the table. The lady boffin's eyebrows shot up, and her loris crawled over to inspect the false mustache.\n\n\"Ah, you're that Malone,\" she said slowly. \"The one who's been writing those dreadful articles about Prince Aleksandar.\"\n\n\"The very same. And as I was just explaining to young Sharp here, I don't intend to stop. If you Darwinists think you can do an exclusive deal with Hearst's operation, you've got another think coming!\"\n\n\"There is no 'deal' between us and Hearst.\" Dr. Barlow waved a hand. \"This detour was Mr. Tesla's idea.\"\n\n\"Hmph, Tesla,\" said the loris, affixing the mustache to its own face.\n\n\"I've been trying to talk to the captain, ma'am,\" Deryn said. \"It might get a bit tricky for Mr. Malone. Hearst's men are after him.\"\n\n\"Well, of course they are.\" Dr. Barlow stroked her loris, which was now posing with the mustache. \"This land is private property, which makes him a trespasser.\"\n\nDeryn groaned, wondering why the lady boffin was being so bothersome. Had those articles about Alek upset her, too?\n\n\"Oh, so that's how you're going to play it?\" Eddie Malone said; then he pulled out a chair and sat down across from her. \"Let me tell you something, Doctor. You don't want to get mixed up with this Hearst fellow. He has some mighty unsavory friends.\"\n\n\"I should think, sir, that having unsavory friends was the defining attribute of newspapermen.\"\n\n\"Hah! You got me there!\" Malone slapped the table, making the loris jump. \"But there's unsavory, and there's dangerous. A fellow called Philip Francis, for example.\"\n\n\"Mr. Francis?\" Deryn said. \"I just met him. He was in charge of the ground crew.\"\n\nMalone shook his head. \"What he's in charge of is the Hearst-Path\u00e9 newsreel company. At least, that's what most people think.\" He leaned closer, his voice dropping. \"But what they don't know is that his real last name isn't Francis. It's Diefendorf!\"\n\nThere was a moment of silence, and then the lady boffin's loris spoke up.\n\n\"Clankers!\"\n\n\"He's a German agent?\" Deryn asked.\n\nMalone shrugged. \"He was born in Germany, that's for sure, and he hides the fact!\"\n\n\"Many immigrants to America change their names,\" Dr. Barlow said, her fingers drumming the table. \"On the other hand, not all of them create propaganda films for a living.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Malone said. \"You must know how Hearst uses his papers and moving pictures to rail against the British, and against Darwinism, too. And now, all of a sudden, he's being friendly with you?\"\n\nDeryn turned to Dr. Barlow. \"We should tell the captain about this.\"\n\n\"I shall make the proper introductions.\" She waved a hand at her tea dishes. \"You may clear these, Mr. Sharp, and you shall come with me, Mr. Malone. If the captain is done with his theatrics, perhaps he can spare us a moment. I might be able to explain the wisdom of not putting all our eggs in one basket.\"\n\n\"Madam, I think we understand each other,\" said the reporter, rising to his feet. He clapped Deryn on the back. \"By the way, Sharp, thanks for your help back there. Much appreciated.\"\n\n\"Happy to be of service,\" Deryn said. She began to stack the dishes, glad that they'd run into the lady boffin, after all. Everybody else aboard seemed overawed by the famous Tesla, and this Hearst fellow with his cameras and newspapers could only make things worse.\n\nBut then something quite unsettling happened.\n\nAs Malone pulled out Dr. Barlow's chair for her, the loris yanked off the mustache and dropped it into a teacup, fixing Deryn with its haughty stare. Without thinking, she stuck her tongue out at the beastie.\n\n\"Deryn Sharp,\" it said as it rode the lady boffin's shoulder out the door, quite pleased with itself indeed.\n\nMr. William Randolph Hearst certainly knew how to host a banquet.\n\nHis dining room looked like the great hall of a medieval castle, with tapestries on the walls and saints carved into the ceiling. The chandeliers were sixteenth-century Italian, but flickered with tiny electrikal flames, and the marble fireplace was large enough for Alek to walk into without stooping. It was all quite garish and a bit of a muddle, as if Hearst's decorators had gone plundering across Europe, heedless of cost and tradition.\n\nThe dinner itself, however, was impeccable. Lobster Vanderbildt, roasted partridges with salade d'Alger, grouse chaud-froid, and for dessert succ\u00e8s de glace in the style of the Grand Hotel. It was, in fact, the first proper meal Alek had eaten since stealing away from home. Bovril had sampled every course, and was now curled up asleep on the high back of Alek's chair, though the creature's ears still twitched now and then.\n\nThough Alek had always hated formal dinners with his parents, this was altogether different. As a child he hadn't been allowed to utter a word once the conversation turned to politics, but now he was an indispensable part of the discussion. At a table that held thirty people, Alek had been seated at Mr. Hearst's right hand. Tesla sat to the host's left, with the captain beside him and the other officers of the Leviathan trailing off into the distance. Dr. Barlow sat unhappily at the far end of the table with the other ladies, one a newspaper reporter, the rest moving-picture actresses. Alek had been introduced to them before dinner with cameras looking on, the actresses smiling at the whirring machines like old friends. Deryn, of course, a common crewman, wasn't here at all.\n\nAs the meal wound down, Mr. Hearst was giving his views on the war. \"Wilson, of course, will side with his British friends. He won't protest the Royal Navy blockading Germany. But he'll scream bloody murder if German submarines do the same to Britain!\"\n\nAlek nodded. President Wilson was from the South, he recalled, and a Darwinist by upbringing.\n\n\"But he claims to want peace,\" Count Volger said. He was seated across from the Leviathan's first officer, close enough to join in. \"Do you believe him?\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly, Count. The only decent thing about the man is that he wants peace!\" Hearst stabbed at his dessert with a spoon. \"Imagine if that cowboy Roosevelt had been elected. Our boys would be over there already!\"\n\nAlek glanced at Captain Hobbes, who was smiling and nodding politely. The British would no doubt welcome the Americans fighting at their side, if they could arrange it somehow.\n\n\"This war will draw in the whole world sooner or later,\" Mr. Tesla said gravely. \"That's why we must end it now.\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" Hearst clapped him on the back, and the inventor grimaced, but his host didn't seem to notice. \"My cameras and newspapers will be following you every step of the way. By the time you get to New York, both sides will have had fair warning that it's time to stop this madness!\"\n\nAlek noticed that Captain Hobbes's smile froze a little at this talk of \"both sides.\" Of course, Mr. Tesla's weapon could be used against London just as easily as against Berlin or Vienna. Alek wondered if the British had plans for making sure that didn't happen.\n\n\"I have faith that the world will find my discovery hopeful,\" Mr. Tesla said simply. \"And not a cause for fear.\"\n\n\"I am certain that we Darwinists will,\" Captain Hobbes said, and raised his glass. \"To peace.\"\n\n\"To peace!\" Volger said, and Alek quickly joined him.\n\nThe toast went round the table, and as the waiters stepped forward to pour the gentlemen more brandy, Bovril murmured the words in its sleep. But Alek wondered if any of the American guests were truly worried about a war thousands of miles away.\n\n\"So let's get down to brass tacks, Captain,\" Mr. Hearst said. \"Where will you be stopping on the way to New York? I have papers in Denver and Wichita. Or will you just hit the big cities like Chicago?\"\n\n\"Ah,\" the captain said, setting his glass carefully down on the table. \"We won't be stopping at any of those places, I'm afraid. We aren't allowed.\"\n\n\"The Leviathan is a warship of a belligerent power,\" Alek explained. \"It can stay in a neutral port for only twenty-four hours. We can't simply fly across your country, stopping wherever we take a fancy to.\"\n\n\"But what's the point of a publicity tour if you don't stop to make appearances!\" Hearst cried.\n\n\"That is a question I'm not qualified to answer,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"My orders are simply to get Mr. Tesla to New York.\"\n\nCount Volger spoke up. \"And how do you intend to do that without crossing America?\"\n\n\"There are two possibilities,\" the captain said. \"We had planned to go north\u2014Canada is part of the British Empire, of course. But after the storm pushed us this way, we realized that Mexico might be easier.\"\n\nAlek frowned. No one had mentioned this change of plan to him. \"Isn't Mexico neutral as well?\"\n\nThe captain turned his empty palms up. \"Mexico is in the midst of a revolution. As such, they can hardly assert their neutrality.\"\n\n\"In other words, they can't stop you,\" Tesla said.\n\n\"Politics is the art of the possible,\" Count Volger said. \"But it will be rather warmer, at least.\"\n\n\"A brilliant idea!\" Mr. Hearst waved at a servant, who scurried over to light his cigar. \"Flying across a wartorn country on a journey for peace is a cracking good story!\"\n\nEveryone stared at Mr. Hearst, and Alek hoped the man was joking. During the Ottoman revolt Alek and Deryn had lost their friend Zaven, one among thousands killed. And from what Alek understood, the Mexican Revolution was a rather bloodier affair.\n\nWhen the uncomfortable silence stretched a bit, he cleared his throat. \"You know, a granduncle of mine was once emperor of Mexico.\"\n\nHearst stared at him. \"I thought your granduncle was the emperor of Austria.\"\n\n\"Yes, a different uncle,\" Alek said. \"I'm speaking of Ferdinand Maximilian, Franz Joseph's younger brother. He lasted only three years in Mexico, I'm afraid. Then they shot him.\"\n\n\"Maybe you could fly over his grave,\" Hearst said, blowing on the tip of his cigar. \"Toss some flowers down or something.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, perhaps.\" Alek tried not to show his astonishment, wondering again if the man were joking.\n\n\"The emperor's body was returned to Austria,\" Count Volger said. \"It was a more civilized time.\"\n\n\"There still might be a news angle somewhere.\" Hearst turned to the man sitting between Alek and Count Volger. \"Make sure to get some shots of His Majesty on Mexican soil.\"\n\n\"I shall indeed, sir,\" said Mr. Francis, who had been introduced to Alek as the head of Hearst's newsreel company. Along with a young lady reporter and a few camera assistants, he would be coming along to New York on the Leviathan.\n\n\"We shall cooperate in any way possible,\" Captain Hobbes said, saluting Mr. Francis with his glass.\n\n\"Well, enough of politics,\" Mr. Hearst said. \"It's time for this evening's entertainment!\"\n\nAt this command the waiters swooped in and plucked the last dishes from the table. The electrikal flames in the chandeliers flickered out, and the tapestry on the wall behind Alek slid away, revealing an expanse of silvery white fabric.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Alek whispered to Mr. Francis.\n\n\"We're about to see Mr. Hearst's latest obsession. Possibly one of the best moving pictures ever made.\"\n\n\"Well, it will certainly be the best I've ever seen,\" Alek murmured, turning his chair to face the screen. His father had forbidden all such entertainments in their home, and public theaters had of course been out of the question. Alek had to admit he was curious to see what all the fuss was about.\n\nTwo men in white coats wheeled a machine into place across the table, pointing it at the screen. It looked rather like the moving-picture cameras that had stalked Alek all day, but with only a single eye in front. As it whirred to life, a flickering beam of light burst from the eye, filling the screen with dark squiggles. Then words materialized. . . .\n\nThe Perils of Pauline, said the shuddering white letters, which lingered long enough that a child of five could have read them a dozen times. The logotype of Hearst-Path\u00e9 pictures followed, the projector carving its shape into the cigar smoke hanging over the dinner table, like a searchlight lancing through fog.\n\nThe actors appeared at last, hopping about madly. It took Alek long minutes to recognize that the actress sitting beside Dr. Barlow was Pauline herself. In person she'd been quite pretty, but the glimmering screen somehow transformed her into a white-faced ghoul, her large eyes bruised with dark makeup.\n\nThe moving images reminded Alek of the shadow-puppet shows that he and Deryn had seen in Istanbul. But those crisp black shadows had been elegant and graceful, their outlines sharp. This moving picture was something of a blurry mess, full of muddy grays and uncertain boundaries, too much like the real world for Alek's taste.\n\nThe light show was intriguing the perspicacious lorises, though. Bovril was awake and watching, and the eyes of Dr. Barlow's beast glowed, unblinking in the darkness.\n\nOn-screen the characters kissed, played tennis in absurd striped jackets, and waved their hands at one another. The scenes were punctuated by words explaining the story, which was also something of a mess\u2014blackmail, fatal diseases, and deceitful servants. All quite dreadful, but somehow Pauline herself caught Alek's fancy. She was a young heiress who would inherit a fortune once she married, but who wanted to see the world and have adventures before settling down.\n\nShe was a bit like Deryn, resourceful and fearless, though thanks to her wealth she didn't have to pretend to be a boy. By odd coincidence her first adventure was an ascent in a hydrogen balloon, and events unfolded just as Deryn had described her first day in the Air Service\u2014a young woman set adrift all alone, with only her wits, some rope, and a few sacks of ballast to save herself.\n\n\"DINNER WITH PAULINE.\"\n\nWithout a hint of panic, Pauline threw the balloon's anchor over the side and set to climbing down the rope, and Alek found himself picturing Deryn in her place. Suddenly the jittering imperfections of the film fell away, disappearing like the pages of a good book. The balloon sailed past a steep cliff, and the heroine leapt onto the rocky slant and began to scramble toward the top. By the time Pauline was hanging from the edge, her betrothed racing to save her in his walking machine, Alek's heart was pounding.\n\nThen suddenly the moving picture ended, the screen going white, the film reels sputtering like windup toys set loose. The electrikal chandeliers sparked back to life overhead.\n\nAlek turned to Mr. Hearst. \"But surely that isn't the end! What happens next?\"\n\n\"That's what we call a 'cliff-hanger,' for obvious reasons.\" Hearst laughed. \"We leave Pauline in big trouble at the end of every installment\u2014tied to some train tracks, say, or in a runaway walker. Makes the audience come back for more, and it means we never have to end the darn thing!\"\n\n\"Cliff-hanger,\" Bovril said with a chortle.\n\n\"Most ingenious,\" Alek said, though in fact it seemed rather an underhanded scheme to him, making an audience wait for a conclusion that would never come.\n\n\"One of my better ideas!\" Hearst said. \"A whole new way to tell stories!\"\n\n\"Only as old as The Thousand and One Nights,\" Volger muttered.\n\nAlek smirked at this, but he had to admit that the moving picture had possessed a mesmerizing quality, like a tale written in firelight. Or perhaps it was only his mind still wavering\u2014since he'd cracked his head, the boundaries between reality and fancy had been uncertain.\n\n\"Bet you two can't wait till you see yourselves up on the screen!\" Hearst said, reaching out to take Alek and Mr. Tesla by their shoulders.\n\n\"Like a glimpse into the future,\" Tesla said with a smile. \"One day we shall be able to transmit moving pictures wirelessly, just as we do sound.\"\n\n\"What an intriguing notion,\" Alek said, though the idea sounded dreadful.\n\n\"Don't worry, Your Majesty,\" Mr. Francis said quietly. \"I'll make sure you look good. It's my job.\"\n\n\"Most reassuring.\" Alek remembered seeing his own photograph for the first time in the New York World. Unlike any decent painting, it had been unpleasantly true to life, even magnifying his too-large ears. He wondered how these moving pictures would rearrange his features, and if he would look as jittery and hurried on the screen as Pauline and her fellows.\n\nThe thought of the heroine made him turn to Mr. Francis again. \"Do women in America really fly about in balloons?\"\n\n\"Well, they must want to! The Perils of Pauline is so popular that our competitors are getting in on the act, making something called The Hazards of Helen. And we're already planning The Exploits of Elaine.\"\n\n\"How . . . alliterative,\" Alek said. \"But outside of moving pictures, do women actually do these sorts of things?\"\n\nThe man shrugged. \"Sure, I suppose so. Ever heard of Bird Millman?\"\n\n\"The high-wire walker? But she's a circus performer.\" Alek sighed. For that matter, Lilit had known how to use a body kite. But she was a revolutionary. \"What I mean is, do normal women ever fly?\"\n\nCount Volger spoke up. \"I think what Prince Aleksandar wants to ask is, do American women pretend to be men? It is currently a subject of intense study with him.\"\n\nAlek gave the wildcount a hard look, but Mr. Francis only laughed.\n\n\"Well, I don't know about flying,\" he said, \"but we've sure got a lot of women wearing trousers these days. And I just read that one in twenty walker pilots is female!\" The man leaned closer. \"You thinking of getting yourself an American bride, Your Majesty? One with some frontier spirit, maybe?\"\n\n\"That was not in my plans, alas.\" Alek saw Volger's smug expression, and added, \"Still, five percent is something, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Do you want to meet Miss White again?\" Francis asked with a wink. \"She's quite a bit like her character. Does all her own stunts!\"\n\nAlek looked down the table at the actress who had played Pauline\u2014she possessed the rather unlikely name of Pearl White, he recalled. She was deep in conversation with Dr. Barlow and her loris, and Alek wondered what the three were talking about.\n\n\"Could be newsworthy,\" Mr. Francis said. \"A movie starlet and a prince!\"\n\n\"Starlet,\" Bovril said, sliding down onto Alek's shoulder.\n\n\"Thank you, but no,\" Alek said. \"Talking to her now might spoil the illusion.\"\n\n\"Very wise, Your Serene Highness,\" Volger said, nodding sagely. \"It's best not to mix make-believe with reality. At the moment the world is too serious for that.\"\n\nThe resupplied Leviathan took the air before noon the next day, hours ahead of the twenty-four-hour limit. Watching from his stateroom windows, Alek could see the strange truth behind Hearst's estate. The buildings weren't so much unfinished as flat and hollow, designed to be filmed from certain angles but never lived in.\n\nThey were false, in other words.\n\nAlek kept to his cabin most of the day, avoiding the newsreel cameras roaming the ship's corridors. One of his grandaunts believed that photographs snatched pieces of the soul, and maybe she was right. At sixteen frames a second, a moving-picture camera would chip away like a machine gun. Perhaps it was only last night's brandy in his head, but Alek felt as empty as Mr. Hearst's false buildings.\n\nThe airship followed the coast of California southward at three-quarter speed, angling against the cool ocean breezes that blew toward land. Los Angeles slipped past in the late afternoon, and a few hours later Alek felt the airship turn southeast. According to the map on his desk, the sprawling city below was Tijuana.\n\nA sudden blaring of horns and drums cut through the engine noise, and Bovril scampered to the windowsill. Alek looked out\u2014a huge stadium yawned below, packed with cheering spectators. Some sort of double-headed bull was kicking up dust in the arena's center, facing a matador almost too small to see in the fading light.\n\nIt occurred to Alek that however swift airship travel was, one missed a great deal of scenery from the lofty height of a thousand feet.\n\nBy the time he'd dressed for dinner, the desert below was wrapped in darkness. Bovril was still on the windowsill, gazing down. No doubt its large eyes could see by starlight.\n\n\"Meteoric,\" the beast said, and Alek frowned. It was the first word Bovril had said all day, and certainly not one that Alek had uttered.\n\nBut Alek was already late for dinner, so he placed the creature on his shoulder and headed out the door.\n\nThe lady boffin had commandeered the officers' mess for the evening, no doubt the first of many tiresome dinner parties. With so many civilians aboard, the Leviathan's journey to New York was in danger of turning into a pleasure cruise. At least tonight's dinner was for only five, and not two dozen like Hearst's affair.\n\nDeryn stood waiting at the mess door, dressed in her formal serving uniform. When Bovril reached out for her, she ruffled its fur and then opened the door with a deep bow. A smirk played on her face, and Alek felt briefly silly in his formal jacket, as if the two of them were children playing dress-up.\n\nThe other guests had already arrived\u2014Count Volger, Mr. Tesla, and the lady reporter from Hearst's San Francisco paper. Dr. Barlow ushered the young woman forward. She was wearing a pale red dress with a frilled collar, and a pink ostrich plume curled up from her rose-colored felt hat.\n\n\"Your Serene Highness, may I present Miss Adela Rogers?\"\n\nAlek bowed. \"I had the pleasure last night, but only briefly.\"\n\nMiss Rogers extended her hand to be kissed, and Alek hesitated\u2014she was hardly of his social standing. But Americans were famous for ignoring such notions, so Alek took her hand and kissed the air.\n\n\"You missed,\" she said with a baffled smile.\n\n\"Missed?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Her hand,\" said Dr. Barlow. \"The custom in Europe, Miss Rogers, is that only married women are kissed directly on the flesh. You young things are thought to be too easily swayed by the touch of lips.\"\n\nAlek heard Deryn snort, but managed to ignore her.\n\n\"Young? But I'm all of twenty,\" Miss Rogers said. \"My hand has been kissed many times without injury!\"\n\nDr. Barlow's loris laughed, and Alek coughed politely. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"And I was almost married once,\" Miss Rogers said. \"But an old suitor rushed in at the last moment and tore up the marriage license. I think he was still in love with me.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Alek managed. \"No doubt he was.\"\n\n\"Couldn't you have got another license?\" the lady boffin asked.\n\n\"I suppose so. But the interruption gave me time to think. I have decided to put my writing first. One can always get a husband, after all.\"\n\nDr. Barlow laughed as she guided the young lady toward the table. Alek felt himself blushing and looked away, only to see a smirk on Deryn's face\u2014and on Volger's as well. He wondered if all American women were this bold, as ready to embarrass men as they were to escape in balloons.\n\n\"Easily swayed,\" Bovril repeated; then it crawled beneath the table to join the lady boffin's loris. As Alek took his seat, he noticed a sixth table setting before an empty chair.\n\n\"We appear to be awaiting a mystery guest,\" Count Volger said, inspecting his wineglass for spots.\n\n\"Mr. Francis?\" Alek asked Dr. Barlow.\n\n\"He was not invited. You shall soon see why.\" She nodded at Deryn, who opened the door. A man in a somewhat ill-fitting jacket entered. It took a moment, but then Alek gripped the table's edge, half rising from his chair.\n\n\"You!\"\n\n\"Don't get up, Your Highness.\" Eddie Malone bowed. \"Ladies and gentlemen, sorry I'm late.\"\n\nAlek sank back into his chair.\n\n\"Mystery guest,\" the beast muttered.\n\n\"Mr. Malone, I believe you've met Count Volger and His Serene Highness.\" Dr. Barlow was all smiles. \"Mr. Nikola Tesla and Miss Adela Rogers, this is Eddie Malone, reporter for the New York World.\"\n\n\"The World?\" said Miss Rogers. \"Oh, dear.\"\n\n\"Edward Malone,\" Tesla murmured. \"Aren't you that reporter who interviewed Prince Aleksandar in Istanbul?\"\n\n\"That was me, all right.\" Malone took his seat. \"I've been tracking him ever since, you might say. And thanks to your flying radio, I've found him at last!\"\n\nThe inventor smiled. \"A most rewarding experiment.\"\n\nThe two men laughed, and Alek suddenly wished that he and Deryn had let the storm wreck the antenna. Its only purpose had been to generate more publicity.\n\nMiss Rogers looked aghast. \"Has anyone told the chief that one of Pulitzer's men is aboard?\"\n\n\"Mr. Hearst didn't think to ask.\" The lady boffin gestured to Deryn, who stepped forward to pour the wine. \"And you'll find that Mr. Malone has some interesting news.\"\n\nMalone turned to Miss Rogers. \"It has to do with your friend Philip Francis. We've been looking into him for some time now, and it turns out that's not his real name. He was born Philip Diefendorf, about as German a name as you could have!\"\n\nAlek frowned, recalling Mr. Francis from the night before. \"He doesn't have a German accent.\"\n\n\"Maybe he also changed the way he talks.\"\n\nMiss Rogers rolled her eyes. \"Philip was born in New York.\"\n\n\"So he claims,\" Malone said.\n\n\"Hah! You boys at the World are always making out like the chief's a traitor. You just hate him because he sells more papers than you!\"\n\n\"I didn't say Hearst knew anything about this,\" Malone said, raising his hands. \"But the head of your newsreel operation is German, and he's taken pains to hide it.\"\n\n\"Don't most Americans come from somewhere else?\" Count Volger asked.\n\nMr. Tesla nodded. \"I am an immigrant myself.\"\n\n\"An excellent point,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"But the captain is concerned. Last night we took aboard a large quantity of supplies in a great hurry, and not all of it has been searched yet.\"\n\n\"Searched for what?\" Miss Rogers asked.\n\n\"Sabotage is the easiest way to destroy the Leviathan,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"A small phosphorous bomb in the right place would bring us all to a fiery end.\"\n\nThe table went silent, and Alek felt his headache threatening to return.\n\n\"That's not likely, of course,\" Deryn spoke up. \"We've had the sniffers belowdecks all afternoon, and they'd have found any explosives. But something dangerous might've been smuggled aboard.\"\n\n\"Such as?\" Count Volger asked.\n\nDeryn shrugged. \"A weapon of some kind?\"\n\n\"Now, this is just preposterous,\" Miss Rogers said. \"One man can't take on the whole crew, no matter what sort of weapon he has.\"\n\n\"With the right tool one man can do quite a bit,\" Mr. Tesla said, and let out a sigh. \"I recently designed a device that would have been most useful in this situation. I had it built and shipped to me in Siberia, but, alas, it didn't arrive before your ship was kind enough to rescue me.\"\n\nAlek glanced at Deryn, remembering the contraption still sitting in the officers' storeroom.\n\n\"That sounds like a fascinating machine,\" Dr. Barlow said with a smile. \"Perhaps you could give us a demonstration, Mr. Tesla.\"\n\n\"A demonstration? But it never . . .\" He narrowed his eyes at the lady boffin. \"Ah, I see. I would be happy to.\"\n\n\"After dinner, of course. Mr. Sharp?\"\n\nDeryn bowed, then turned to open the door again. The ship's stewards were waiting outside.\n\nAs the dishes came clattering in, their metal covers steaming out the scents of steak and potatoes, Alek pondered what had just happened. The lady boffin never let anything slip without a good reason, but she'd revealed her suspicions about Philip Francis to Miss Rogers, a fellow Hearst reporter. And then she'd let Mr. Tesla know that his metal detecting machine had been aboard the Leviathan all along.\n\nHad she decided that cooperation was better than secrecy?\n\n\"Dinner,\" Bovril said happily, crawling up into Alek's lap.\n\nThe door to the officers' storeroom creaked open, revealing Mr. Tesla's machine among crates of sake and Japanese silks. The party had moved belowdecks after dinner, and the six of them looked out of place in their finery. Miss Rogers was still sipping sherry, and Volger and Malone had brought down their brandy snifters.\n\n\"This was here?\" Tesla asked. \"And you kept it from me?\"\n\n\"Sir, it was you who kept it from us,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"Why on earth did you have it smuggled aboard?\"\n\nTesla sputtered for a moment, then threw out his arms. \"Smuggled? Why would I do that? It must have been a misunderstanding with the Russians.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you merely asked them to exercise discretion?\" Dr. Barlow said helpfully.\n\n\"Well, of course. So many ideas have been stolen from me. And you know the Russians, very secretive people.\" The inventor stepped forward, inspecting the control panel. \"But how did you manage to put it together without plans?\"\n\n\"My men and I found your design quite intuitive,\" Alek said. \"We're still Clankers, you know.\"\n\n\"Clankers!\" Bovril said.\n\n\"Well remembered,\" Count Volger muttered, but Alek ignored him.\n\n\"Just as I visualized it.\" Tesla's hands caressed the woodwork. \"Not a bad job, Your Highness.\"\n\nAlek clicked his heels. \"I shall pass on your compliments to Master Klopp.\"\n\n\"What exactly is this doohickey?\" asked Miss Rogers.\n\nTesla turned to her. \"A magnetometer of the highest sensitivity, using principles of atmospheric conduction.\"\n\n\"In other words, it detects metal,\" Deryn said.\n\nTesla waved a hand. \"One of its more mundane uses.\"\n\n\"But at the moment, the most pertinent.\" Dr. Barlow stepped forward and twisted the main control knob; the machine started up with a hum. The two lorises began to imitate its sound.\n\n\"It appears to be fully charged,\" said Tesla, squinting at the dials.\n\nThe lady boffin smiled. \"Almost fully.\"\n\n\"Almost,\" her loris repeated.\n\nAlek glanced at Deryn, who was smirking again. Dr. Barlow, of course, was letting Tesla know that they'd used the machine already. And to what purpose, he could certainly guess.\n\nAlek recalled his argument with Deryn in Tokyo, when he'd declared that the specimen in Tesla's cabin was nothing but an interesting rock. But if Tesla had created this machine for the sole purpose of finding metal, then the rock must have been the goal of the whole expedition. The mysterious hunk of iron might well be the key to Goliath.\n\nAnd for some reason he'd wanted to keep it all a secret.\n\n\"Well,\" the inventor grumbled. \"Let's see if it even works.\"\n\nTesla was a virtuoso with his machine's controls. He could set it to search for metal in amounts large or small, distant or near. Each of the three globes had slightly different properties, and each could be adjusted separately. As Alek watched, he realized that he'd employed the device in the most fumbling fashion, like a cat playing a piano.\n\nDr. Barlow summoned two crewmen to carry the machine, and soon the globes were dancing, guiding Tesla though the piles of supplies that had been loaded at Hearst's estate. The dinner party trailed behind, Mr. Malone's flashbulb occasionally sending the party's shadows flailing across the darkened cargo rooms.\n\nThe machine's flickers finally led them into the back of a crowded storeroom, toward a stack of barrels buried beneath boxes of dates and apples.\n\nMr. Tesla squinted in the wormlight and tutted. \"These barrels contain more than sugar, it seems.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\nDr. Barlow gestured to Deryn, who ordered the crewmen to take the machine away. Alek helped her unstack the crates on top, and when the way was clear, she stepped forward with a crowbar in her hand. She split the wooden top of a barrel with one blow.\n\n\"Careful, Dylan,\" Alek said. \"If this is sabotage, there might be a trap.\"\n\nThe others took a step backward, but Bovril sniffed and said, \"Sugar.\"\n\nDeryn knocked away the splintered wood, then slid the crowbar into the barrel\u2014it stopped with a muffled thunk.\n\n\"Well, that's interesting.\" She pulled off her white gloves, rolled up a sleeve, and reached in. A moment later she tugged out something long and thin wrapped in oiled rags. Sugar streamed onto the floor as she pulled the object free.\n\nUnwrapped, the metal cylinder gleamed in the wormlight. Alek looked at Count Volger, who nodded and said, \"Yes, it looks a bit like the barrel of a Spandau. But it's a Colt-Browning, most likely the 1895.\"\n\n\"A machine gun?\" Miss Rogers said. \"Oh, dear.\"\n\nMalone's camera flashed again, blinding Alek for a moment. By the time he'd blinked the spots away, Deryn had pulled out another prize. She unwrapped the rags to reveal a metal case the size of a dinner plate.\n\n\"An ammunition drum?\" Alek asked.\n\nVolger stepped forward. \"Not one I'm familiar with.\"\n\n\"Wait. Don't open\u2014,\" Miss Rogers began, but Deryn had already pulled the case into two halves. A black disk fell out and struck the floor with a bang, making them all jump. It rolled away into the darkness, unspooling a sliver of something shiny behind it.\n\nMiss Rogers knelt to peer closer. \"This is unexposed moving-picture film. Or it was, young man, before you opened it. Now it's ruined.\"\n\n\"Film?\" Alek asked. \"But why would anyone smuggle more of that aboard? There's already stacks of it in Mr. Francis's stateroom.\"\n\nCount Volger nodded. \"For that matter, why a machine gun? The Colt-Browning weighs fifteen kilograms. A bit large for a saboteur to use.\"\n\n\"And we won't find any bullets for it either,\" Deryn added. \"Our beasties would've sniffed out the gunpowder.\"\n\n\"Rather a mystery,\" Dr. Barlow said, turning to Miss Rogers. \"Though in a way I am relieved. Perhaps your Mr. Francis is merely an arms smuggler.\" She frowned. \"And a supplier of . . . movie film.\"\n\nMiss Rogers shrugged. \"I have no idea what's going on, I promise. But I'll have a snoop around tomorrow, and see what I can find out.\"\n\n\"Just don't forget that this is my story,\" Malone said.\n\nMiss Rogers frowned, but gave him a curt nod.\n\n\"We'll check the rest of these barrels, ma'am,\" Deryn said to the lady boffin. \"Then I'll have the ship's carpenter seal them back up so no one's the wiser.\"\n\nAlek nodded. If the ship wasn't in immediate danger, there was no need for a confrontation. The best way to uncover Mr. Francis's plans was to let him make the next move.\n\nThe next morning Deryn stayed close to Mr. Francis and his camera assistants.\n\nShe served them breakfast in the middies' mess, then took them on a tour of the ship\u2014\"scouting locations,\" they called it. The captain had given the newsmen free run of the upper decks, so as not to give away any suspicions, and the guards watching the barrels in the cargo room had been ordered to stay out of sight.\n\nDeryn noticed that Adela Rogers, the young lady reporter, was also keeping an eye on Mr. Francis. She pretended to wander the ship on her own, but always stayed within earshot of Francis and his cameramen. And when Deryn left them in the middies' mess with lunch, she found Miss Rogers skulking outside.\n\nClosing the mess door carefully behind her, Deryn whispered, \"Pardon me, miss, but we mustn't let Mr. Francis know we're on to him.\"\n\n\"Well, of course not.\" The woman adjusted her hat. Just as last night, she was immaculately tailored, this time in a matching pin-striped jacket and skirt, with a black fedora in fabricated beaver fur. \"Do you think I was born yesterday?\"\n\n\"No, but you're being a bit obvious, following him everywhere.\"\n\n\"You're the one trailing after him, not me.\"\n\nDeryn pulled the reporter farther down the corridor. \"It's my barking duty to escort him! But you're tagging along like some village lassie in love.\"\n\nMiss Rogers laughed. \"Really, young man, I doubt you would know the signs of that condition. In any case, it isn't Mr. Francis I've been following. It's you.\"\n\n\"Pardon me, miss?\n\n\"Because you're quite obviously the bell captain of this ship.\"\n\nDeryn blinked. \"What are you blethering about?\"\n\nThe woman took a step back, looking Deryn up and down like a tailor sizing up a client. \"I grew up in a hotel, you see. Daddy was hopeless at housekeeping, and my mother wanted nothing to do with us, so it was our only hope of a civilized life. I learned at a tender age that the most important person in a hotel isn't the owner, or the manager, or even the house detective. It's the bell captain. He's the one who knows where the bodies are buried. He got quite a nice tip for burying them, if you know what I mean.\"\n\n\"No, miss, I don't know what you mean,\" Deryn said. \"I'm a midshipman, not a bellman.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. I caught your act last night, all white gloves and merrily pouring the brandy. But underneath it you're in on everyone's secrets, aren't you? And everyone glances at you when they've got a pickle to deal with. Dr. Barlow, Prince Aleksandar, even that crusty old count\u2014they all want to know what the bell captain thinks.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. This woman was either quite mad or dangerously canny. She'd proven quite deft at embarrassing Alek the night before, which had been amusing enough. But now she was being a bit too . . . perspicacious.\n\n\"I'm quite sure I don't know what you mean, Miss Rogers.\"\n\n\"The only thing my mother ever taught me is that the servants always have the keys.\"\n\n\"I'm not a servant. I'm a decorated officer!\"\n\n\"So is the bell captain at any fine hotel! Note the employment of the word 'captain.' I wouldn't mistake you for a bellboy, not ever.\"\n\nDeryn took a step back. What had she meant by that, exactly?\n\n\"Just because I'm a 'girl reporter,' don't think you can\u2014\" Miss Rogers's next words were cut off by the sound of an alert, single rings in quick succession.\n\nDeryn frowned. \"That's the 'enemy spotted' signal.\"\n\n\"What enemy? We're over neutral territory.\"\n\n\"Indeed, miss. You'll have to excuse me.\" Deryn turned away, grateful for any excuse to escape the reporter. As she headed toward the central stairs, the corridors filled with men rushing toward their battle stations.\n\n\"Mind if I come along?\" asked Miss Rogers, who was, in fact, already coming along.\n\n\"No, miss! My post is on the spine, and passengers have to stay in the gondola. You should head back to your stateroom.\"\n\nNot waiting for an answer, Deryn headed off through the bustling corridors. With the ship at high speed there would be no climbing the ratlines, so she made straight for the interior passages. For that matter, the wind topside would be too much for message lizards to be wandering about. Deryn snatched one up and shoved it into her jacket, in case she needed to get word to the bridge quickly. After all, there were German agents wandering about the ship, reporters everywhere, and now an enemy in the sky.\n\nNeutral territory, indeed.\n\nThe desert rolled past below, spotted with cacti and red-flanked gulches, and a few small farms cut into verdant rectangles. At three-quarter speed, the view swept past at almost fifty miles an hour, and only the master rigger, Mr. Roland, and a few of his men were topside. Deryn made her way toward them in a half crouch, ready to grab the ratlines if a gust sent her stumbling.\n\n\"Middy Sharp reporting, sir!\"\n\nMr. Roland returned her salute, then pointed. \"Spotted it twenty minutes ago. Some kind of manta airship. Local colors, Clanker engines.\"\n\nA sleek, broad-winged form stood out against the western sky, the pontoon gasbags under its wings striped with red and green. Smoke trailed from it, though Mexico was a Darwinist power.\n\n\"Might that engine be German-made, sir?\"\n\n\"Can't tell from this range,\" Mr. Roland said. \"But they're matching our speed.\"\n\nDeryn watched the Mexican airship's shadow rippling across the desert, and estimated a wingspan of no more than a hundred feet. \"Too small to trouble us, though. Perhaps they're only curious, sir.\"\n\n\"Fair enough, as long as they don't get too close.\" Mr. Roland frowned, raising his field glasses. \"Is that another one?\"\n\nA second winged shape had caught the sun, just behind the first. Deryn shielded her eyes and swept the horizon, and soon spotted a third manta airship off to starboard.\n\nShe pointed at it. \"More than just curiosity, sir.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Mr. Roland said. \"But even three to one, they don't stand a chance against us.\"\n\nDeryn nodded. Stern chases were tricky in the air. Beasties or rockets launched from the trailing ships would be fighting a fifty-mile-an-hour headwind, while the Leviathan could drop an aerie of strafing hawks into their laps at any time.\n\nA moment later the Leviathan's engines roared up to full speed.\n\n\"It seems the captain has taken a dislike to them!\" Mr. Roland shouted over the thunderous noise. Both of them knelt on the ratlines as the wind grew fiercer. The Mexican airships didn't seem to be losing much ground, though. Their smoke trails thickened, spreading across the horizon like storm clouds.\n\nOne of the riggers called from behind them, and Mr. Roland turned to face the headwind. \"Who in blazes is that?\"\n\nDeryn turned and saw a figure making its way toward them along the spine. She held her hat on with one hand, and her skirts billowed around stockinged legs.\n\n\"Blisters! That lady reporter must have followed me! Sorry, sir. I'll tend to her.\"\n\n\"See that you do, Sharp.\"\n\nMiss Rogers had the wind at her back, and looked surefooted enough. But when Deryn made to stand up, the headwind sent her staggering backward. She swore and clipped her safety line to Mr. Tesla's antenna. It was easier than re-clipping herself every few feet.\n\nShe scuttled ahead in a crouch until she reached the reporter.\n\n\"What in blazes are you doing up here?\"\n\n\"I'd like to interview you!\" the woman yelled, then pulled out a notepad. The pages fluttered furiously, and her unsecured fedora lifted off and shot away. \"Oh, dear.\"\n\n\"Now's not the barking time!\" Deryn shouted. \"As you can see, we've got a bit of trouble brewing!\"\n\nMiss Rogers peered into the distance. \"Our 'enemy' ships would appear to be Mexican. Do you suppose they mean us harm?\"\n\nDeryn took the lady reporter by the arm, but pulling her back toward the hatchway proved impossible. The woman's skirts caught the headwind like a frigate at full sail. It was a wonder she was standing at all.\n\n\"You're not getting rid of me that easily, Mr. Sharp.\" Miss Rogers frowned. \"Is there something moving in your jacket?\"\n\n\"Aye, a message lizard.\"\n\n\"How odd. Now, please tell me about these airships.\"\n\nDeryn glanced back at the Leviathan's pursuers, then sighed. \"If I answer a few questions for you, will you be sensible and go back down?\"\n\n\"It's a deal. Let's say . . . three questions.\"\n\n\"All right, then! But hurry!\"\n\n\"Who is following us?\"\n\n\"Mexicans.\"\n\n\"Yes, but under which of the generals?\" Miss Rogers asked. \"You realize there's a revolution on, don't you?\"\n\n\"I don't know which general, and yes, I do realize there's a revolution on. That was three questions. Now let's go!\"\n\nShe tried to pull Miss Rogers toward the hatch, but the woman stood firm. \"Don't be preposterous! That was only one question, which required two follow-ups due to your vagaries. My father was a lawyer, you know.\"\n\n\"Barking spiders, miss! Why can't you just\u2014\"\n\nA metal shriek shattered the air, and a cloud of acrid smoke whipped across them both. Deryn turned into the wind, and saw the starboard Clanker engine spitting flame. With an awful groan its propeller seized, coughing out one last flurry of sparks.\n\n\"What in\u2014,\" Deryn began, but with one engine halted, the ship went into a sudden starboard turn. The spine rolled beneath them, and Deryn grabbed Miss Rogers's arm and yanked them both to their knees. Tesla's antenna slithered beside them, stretching tighter as the airbeast bent hard along its length.\n\nA moment later the port engine coasted to a halt, and the ship began to straighten again.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Miss Rogers asked.\n\n\"No idea! But you'll have to wait here.\"\n\nThe airflow was already fading as the Leviathan slowed, and Deryn unclipped herself and ran forward toward the pods. Had the captain run the Clanker engines too hard this last week? Or was this sabotage?\n\nBut Mr. Francis had been followed from the first minute he'd come aboard, and the engines were manned at all times. It had to be a coincidence. . . .\n\nDeryn reached the hump above the engines and pulled the message lizard from her jacket. \"Starboard engine pod, this is Middy Sharp. Report!\"\n\nShe set the beastie down, and it scampered toward the pod, making good time. Even with the electrical engines still churning, the wind of the ship's passage was quickly dying. The airbeast's cilia never pushed while the Clanker engines were at full-ahead, so they'd been quiet for the better part of ten days. It might take an hour to wake them up again.\n\n\"Barking Clankers,\" she swore. Those contraptions had made the airbeast lazy.\n\nTo the west the Mexican airships were spreading out, taking time to surround their quarry. At this range Deryn could see their full wings and long whiplike tails, definitely based on the life threads of the manta ray. A brace of gasbags beneath the wings provided lift, with the Clanker engines slung in the middle. She recalled something like them from the Manual of Aeronautics, an experimental Italian craft, perhaps.\n\nThe manta ships weren't large; they didn't even carry a gondola. The crews rode in the ratlines on their backs, rifles in hand. The ships' only heavy armament was a pair of Gatling guns for each ship, mounted fore and aft.\n\nA line of strafing hawks was streaming out from the Leviathan, but not in attack formation yet. The birds encircled their airship home with a glittering ring of talons.\n\nThe starboard engine had stopped belching smoke, and Deryn saw a familiar spiked helmet down in the pod\u2014Master Klopp's. The Clanker machinery must have been acting up already, then. Since old Klopp's injury, the engineers never called him to the pods unless things were going pear-shaped.\n\nThe message lizard scuttled back up, speaking in the master mechanic's gruff German. \"There's something wrong with the fuel, Dylan. It tastes funny.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. Though she'd seen Klopp dip his finger into fuel and give it a sniff, she'd never seen him taste the stuff.\n\n\"The port engine will also be damaged if it keeps running,\" the lizard continued. \"Tell them to shut down.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with that critter?\" came a voice from behind her. \"Sounds like it's talking German.\"\n\nDeryn sighed as she picked up the lizard. \"Yes, Miss Rogers. One of Alek's men is working down there. That's a Clanker engine, after all.\"\n\n\"And you understand German?\"\n\n\"Well enough. I've worked with Master Klopp for more than two months now.\"\n\n\"What a fine coincidence! You've got a German fellow working on your engine that just broke down!\"\n\n\"Master Klopp is Austrian!\" Deryn said, pushing past the woman and heading across the hump.\n\nMiss Rogers followed, notebook in hand. \"Mr. Sharp, do you still suspect Mr. Francis of German sympathies? While ignoring the actual Clankers on your ship?\"\n\nDeryn waved at the riggers, hoping one would take the reporter away, but they were scrambling to set up an air gun. She swore, storming to the far side of the hump to set the lizard down again.\n\n\"Port engine pod,\" she told it. \"This is Middy Sharp. Klopp says your fuel supply has something wrong with it. Don't go to speed unless absolutely necessary! End message.\"\n\nAs she shoved the lizard on its way, she realized the engineers would never obey her orders over the captain's. Maybe she should have sent the lizard to the bridge instead.\n\nMiss Rogers was scribbling in her notebook. \"Fuel supply, eh?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Deryn stood up. \"That's the fuel that Mr. Hearst gave us, and it's damaged our engines right in the middle of an ambush! Now does that sound like a coincidence to you?\"\n\nMiss Rogers scratched her nose with her pencil. \"Hard to say.\"\n\nDeryn looked back at the Mexican airships. One was drawing abreast of the Leviathan, no more than a mile away, a line of semaphore flags running out across its wings.\n\nG-R-E-E-T-I-N-G-S\u2014L-E-V-I-A-T-H-A-N, they said.\n\n\"So now you're being friendly,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Who is?\"\n\nDeryn pointed at the flags. \"They've sent us greetings.\"\n\nAnother string followed, and she read them out to the reporter.\n\nE-N-G-I-N-E\u2014T-R-O-U-B-L-E\u2014W-E\u2014C-A-N\u2014H-E-L-P.\n\n\"Well, that sounds friendly,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\nDeryn frowned. \"Maybe so, but this is all a bit convenient. They knew just where to find us, and this is a barking big desert.\"\n\n\"Young man, this is also a rather big airship.\"\n\nDeryn started to retort, but another string of flags was running out. \"It says these airships follow the orders of General Villa.\"\n\n\"Pancho Villa? Well, that's handy.\" The lady reporter scribbled. \"The chief thinks quite highly of him.\"\n\nDeryn snorted. \"No doubt they're old pals. Now it says they've got an airfield nearby, with everything we need to make repairs. And they're happy to give us a tow.\" She squinted at the rest, then swore. \"And all they want in return is one little thing.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"A bit of sugar for their hungry beasts.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\nDeryn shook her head, remembering what Alek had told her\u2014Hearst had been delighted when he'd found out the Leviathan was headed across Mexico. And somehow he'd set all this in motion\u2014the doctored fuel, the smuggled arms, the airships stalking them\u2014in a single night.\n\nShe looked about. Men and sniffers were streaming up the ratlines now, and a few message lizards as well. She pulled out her command whistle and blew for a lizard. The bridge needed a full report.\n\n\"You say you know this General Villa?\"\n\nThe lady reporter shrugged. \"Only by reputation, but I know some of his business partners well enough.\"\n\n\"All right, then. Stay close to me, and keep your barking eyes open.\"\n\n\"Young man, you hardly need to tell me that.\"\n\nThe cilia woke faster than Deryn had expected; maybe the mantas were giving the airbeast a fright. The motivator engines ran on organic batteries, of course, and hadn't suffered from Hearst's contaminated fuel. So the Leviathan was soon under its own power again, following the Mexican airships at a wary distance.\n\nDeryn sent a message lizard down to the bridge, relating the news that Hearst and General Villa were on friendly terms. It came back and spoke in Captain Hobbes's own voice, telling her to take charge of docking. That was usually a rigger's job, but the captain wanted an officer on the bowhead. If the Leviathan's hosts made any hostile moves, the ship would drop all ballast and shoot into the air. The mooring cables would have to be cut loose\u2014and fast.\n\n\"I'll be ready, sir,\" Deryn said. \"End message.\"\n\n\"That just proves my earlier point,\" Miss Rogers said as the creature scuttled away. \"If you want something done right, always ask the bell captain.\"\n\n\"Stop barking calling me that.\"\n\n\"I assure you, young man, it's the highest compliment a hotel-raised girl can muster.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. And she'd thought Eddie Malone was annoying.\n\nWhoever had doctored the Leviathan's fuel had done a precise job of it. The starboard engine had seized up only an hour away from Villa's airfield. The tip of a mooring tower rose up from a steep-sided canyon, deep enough for the Leviathan to hide itself in. The canyon had only one narrow entrance, but a hundred rocky nooks and crannies along its sides.\n\n\"A natural fortress,\" Deryn said. \"I take it this General Villa is one of the revolutionaries.\"\n\n\"He's a rebel at heart.\" Miss Rogers shrugged. \"Though it's complicated these days, more of a civil war than a revolution.\"\n\n\"But he's using Clanker engines. Do the Germans have a hand in all this?\"\n\n\"All the powers are supplying one faction or another. The Great War has only raised the stakes.\"\n\nDeryn sighed. Alek was right about one thing: One way or another, the war had sunk its claws into every nation on Earth. Even this distant conflict had been shaped by the war machines and fighting beasts of Europe.\n\nAnother reason for Alek to feel bad, to think all the world's troubles were his fault. Sometimes Deryn wished that she could burn the guilt out of his heart, or protect him from how awful the war was. Or at least make him forget somehow.\n\nAs the Leviathan slowed to a halt, the bottom of the canyon came into view. A few Clanker engines aside, these rebels were definitely Darwinists. Patches of fabricated corn covered the ground in bright colors, and a high stone wall penned a herd of fabricated bulls the size of streetcars. Six-legged donkeys carried packs down the steep trails leading into the canyon, and a pair of squidesque airbeasts grazed on the nearby cliff tops, their languid tentacles clearing scrub grass and cacti.\n\nBut on a high outcrop of rock a mile away was another bit of Clanker technology\u2014a wireless tower.\n\n\"So that's how Hearst arranged all this.\"\n\nMiss Rogers tutted. \"Didn't someone tell me that your Mr. Tesla was a radio wiz?\"\n\n\"Aye, but he's hardly arms-smuggling material. He can't stop blethering about peace.\"\n\n\"But his Goliath is a weapon, is it not?\"\n\nDeryn didn't bother to deny that.\n\nThe Leviathan angled itself into the wind, the cilia rippling to push it down. The manta ships drifted at a polite distance, but Deryn wondered if they had any hidden firepower. If the Mexicans were importing Clanker engines, maybe they'd got a few rockets in the bargain. The Leviathan's strafing hawks were still in the air, of course, ready to strike in all directions.\n\nSoon the sides of the canyon were rising up around Deryn, making her feel trapped. It was strange to be up on the spine and yet have stone walls to either side. If there was any treachery, the only way out would be straight up.\n\nThe airbeast's nose eased toward the tower, a team of riggers standing ready at the mooring crossbow. A grappling hook was set in the crossbow.\n\n\"Ready . . . ,\" Deryn called as the tower drew near. \"Fire!\"\n\nThe crossbow snapped, sending the grappling hook soaring. With a rattle of metal and chain, its prongs tangled in the struts of the tower.\n\n\"Draw her in!\" Deryn cried, and the riggers wound the cable fast, tightening the hook's grip. \"Now tie her off!\"\n\nSoon the ship was secure, and from the canyon walls echoed the slither of cables dropping from the gondola below. The captain would be winching the ship down rather than venting hydrogen. That would keep the Leviathan buoyant, sitting in the canyon like a cork at the bottom of a bathtub, ready to pop up and out in case of danger.\n\nDeryn's eyes swept the rocky ground below. The men gathering up the Leviathan's ropes had rifles slung across their backs, but there was no sign of heavy arms, except for a half dozen cannon guarding the mouth of the canyon. They were pointed away from the airship, and looked like leftovers from a bygone war.\n\n\"Little wonder your boss wants to lend General Villa a hand,\" Deryn said, lowering her field glasses. \"The general has got plenty of beasties, but no proper guns.\"\n\n\"I've heard the chief say exactly that.\" Miss Rogers sighed. \"I just wish he'd told me what he was up to.\"\n\n\"Aye, he might have told us, too!\"\n\nThe ground men below were pulling the ropes out in all directions. Deryn spotted Newkirk drifting down on gliding wings to help them. The boy was soon waving his arms as he tried to organize Villa's men.\n\n\"Do you know any Spanish, Miss Rogers?\"\n\n\"As much as any girl from southern California. Which means more than a little but less than I'd like.\"\n\nDeryn nodded. \"You might be the only one on the ship who does. Stand ready.\"\n\n\"Much as I'd love to review my reflexive verbs, Mr. Sharp, it won't be necessary. I'm certain all of General Villa's motion picture contracts are in English.\"\n\n\"His what?\"\n\n\"Didn't I tell you? That's how Mr. Hearst knows him. They're both in the movie business!\" Miss Rogers swept her hand across the encampment. \"That's how Villa finances all this. He takes moving pictures of his battles and sends them to Los Angeles. He's practically a motion picture star!\"\n\n\"So Hearst has a movie deal with him?\"\n\nThe reporter shook her head. \"Villa's contract is with Mutual Films. But I suppose the chief wants to horn in. Crafty, isn't he?\"\n\n\"A bit too crafty for my liking,\" Deryn muttered. If Hearst was such a peace lover, why was he sending weapons into Mexico? Or did he only care about making newsreels?\n\n\"There's something above us, sir,\" one of the riggers called. \"Up on the cliffs!\"\n\nDeryn looked up. A column of smoke was rising from the edge of the canyon. She closed her eyes to listen over the shouts of the men below, and heard it\u2014the rumble of a Clanker engine.\n\nDid the rebels have a walking machine up there? She'd seen nothing from the air, though any number of walkers might have hidden in the rocky terrain.\n\n\"And that way, sir!\" called another man. Deryn turned and saw a second cloud of engine smoke rising from the far side of the canyon. There was dust rising as well, a sure sign of legs in motion. The tiny manta airships might have only Gatling guns, but walkers could carry heavy cannon.\n\nDeryn pulled out her command whistle and blew for a message lizard. \"We're being surrounded, and the officers down on the bridge can't see it!\"\n\n\"But why would General Villa betray us?\" Miss Rogers asked. \"He wants those guns we're bringing him.\"\n\n\"He might also want the Leviathan!\" Deryn cried. \"It's one of the biggest airships in all of Europe. Think how powerful it would make him here in Mexico!\"\n\nMiss Rogers waved a hand. \"But Mr. Hearst just wants a dramatic story. If the rebels destroy us, he'll get no story at all!\"\n\n\"Aye, but has anyone explained that to the barking rebels?\"\n\n\"These are civilized rebels, young man. They have movie deals!\"\n\n\"That's no guarantee of sanity!\" Deryn felt the tug of a message lizard pulling on her trouser leg. She knelt and said, \"Bridge, this is Middy Sharp. Walkers on the cliffs above us, at least two. Could be an ambush! End message.\"\n\nThe beastie scampered away, but it would take at least a minute to reach the bridge. By then the vast topside of the Leviathan would be in the sights of the walkers' guns, as easy to hit as a cricket field.\n\nShe spun around, checking on the manta ships. They didn't seem to be closing in. Not yet, anyway.\n\n\"If only I could send up a scout,\" Deryn muttered. But all the Huxleys were stowed in the ship's gut to protect them from the winds of high speed.\n\n\"Sir,\" said the rigger beside her. \"Mr. Rigby sent up a pair of gliding wings, in case the captain wanted you on the ground. You could use those.\"\n\n\"Aye, but I need to go up to\u2014,\" Deryn began, but then she saw the dust rising from the ground crew's feet. It was climbing the sides of the canyon, carried by an updraft. . . .\n\n\"Get me those wings!\" she shouted. \"Now!\"\n\nAs the man ran off, she watched the airflow in the canyon. The wind was rushing into the entrance, straight into the Leviathan's nose. If Deryn took off dead ahead, she might gain enough altitude to rise above the cliff walls.\n\n\"I still say you're being entirely too suspicious,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\nDeryn ignored her, turning to the crossbow crew. \"If we blow even a squick of ballast, cut this cable. Don't wait for orders!\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\"\n\nTwo men arrived, gliding wings in hand, and Deryn struggled into the rig. She borrowed a pair of semaphore flags, then paced off ten yards from the bow, ready to take a running start. There was only one problem.\n\nThe mooring tower was in the way.\n\n\"Oh, sod it.\" She spread her arms and ran toward the edge. \"Watch out!\"\n\nThe riggers and Miss Rogers ducked beneath the wings, and Deryn sped past them and leapt from the edge of the bow, straight into the wind. The tower reared up before her, but she wrenched herself to starboard, barely clearing the metal struts.\n\nVeering right had pulled her out of the headwind, and she went circling downward. But with another hard jerk the air filled the gliding wings again. She rose a little, climbing just above the canyon walls.\n\nOne of the walkers was in sight now\u2014a two-legged machine the size of Alek's old Cyklop Stormwalker. It had the boxy look of a German contraption, and was rumbling straight toward the cliff edge.\n\nDeryn pulled her wings hard toward it, but she slipped beneath the cliff tops again. She was flying straight into a wall of stone. . . .\n\nAt the last moment she swung her weight back, and the wings climbed hard, almost stalling in midair. Her momentum carried her the last few yards, and Deryn alighted on the edge of the rocky cliff. Her boots slipped on loose stone, but somehow she kept her feet.\n\nThe walking machine towered over her, its head bending down as if to take a closer look. The huge maw of a gun pointed straight at her.\n\n\"Barking spiders!\" she said.\n\nIt wasn't a gun at all\u2014it was a moving-picture camera. She heard the whir and snap of it capturing her image a dozen times a second.\n\nThe wind shifted, pulling her back toward the cliff's edge. Deryn spun about and took a look across the canyon. The other walker was just the same, a two-legged camera platform.\n\nThe rebels wanted to film the Leviathan, not destroy it.\n\nHer message lizard would be at the bridge any moment now, and if the captain grew alarmed and dropped ballast, the landing ropes would rip through the hands of a hundred untrained men below. Worse, a few would hang on to be carried up into the sky, then fall back upon their fellows from a thousand feet. If General Villa didn't want to destroy the Leviathan now, he certainly would after that.\n\n\"THE WALKER SHOOTS DERYN.\"\n\nDeryn spun the gliding wings about and threw herself back off the cliff.\n\n\"Those men on the ropes look quite sharp,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"And this canyon keeps the wind steady enough.\"\n\nNone of the officers answered. They were spread out across the bridge, each at a different window, watching for signs of treachery. Bovril shifted nervously on Alek's shoulder, scenting disquiet in the air.\n\nOutside, the rebels were hard at work, staking ropes into the hard ground and tying them onto metal posts driven straight into the rock. The lines trembled as the Leviathan winched itself down, its huge shadow spreading meter by meter across the canyon floor. The captain hadn't vented any hydrogen, in case a quick takeoff were necessary. To Alek it felt as though the airbeast were fighting the ropes, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.\n\n\"Do you really think these rebels will help us?\" he asked Dr. Barlow.\n\n\"I should hope so, after putting us through all this bother.\" She sniffed. \"I'm sure Mr. Hearst only wanted a bit of drama for his newsreel.\"\n\n\"Newsreel,\" her loris said softly, then hmphed.\n\n\"And to think I trusted that man,\" Mr. Tesla said. He'd been in a dark mood since the breakdown, especially after the engine pod had reported that Hearst's fuel was to blame.\n\n\"He may want peace,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"But conflict sells newspapers.\"\n\n\"I've heard of this Pancho Villa fellow, haven't I?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"He's in all the papers at the moment.\" Mr. Tesla stared out the window at the ground men. \"His name is Francisco Villa, but he goes by the nickname Pancho because he's a friend of the poor. He seizes wealthy plantations and gives them to the peasants.\"\n\n\"Quite a common habit among rebels,\" Dr. Barlow said, and her loris made a sniffing noise. \"One hopes that he is above seizing airships.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. However chaotic the world might be, he knew that providence was guiding him toward peace. His quest couldn't end here in this dusty canyon.\n\n\"Bridge, this is Middy Sharp!\" came Deryn's voice from nowhere.\n\nAll eyes turned to the message lizard clinging to the ceiling.\n\n\"Walkers on the cliffs above us, at least two,\" it said. \"Could be an ambush!\"\n\nA stir went through the bridge, and Bovril shivered on Alek's shoulder. The officers gathered around the captain.\n\n\"Walkers?\" Alek said. \"But they're Darwinists.\"\n\n\"Those airships had Clanker engines,\" Tesla said.\n\nDr. Barlow glanced out the window. \"This is unsettling. The Leviathan is quite vulnerable to attack from above.\"\n\nAlek tried to peer up at the surrounding cliffs, but the gasbag blocked out the sky. He felt trapped beneath the vast expanse of the airship.\n\nBlast Hearst and his news-making games.\n\n\"Prepare to blow all ballast,\" the captain announced.\n\n\"Cut the landing lines, sir?\" an officer asked.\n\n\"Don't bother. At this buoyancy they'll break.\"\n\n\"That's a bit unfriendly,\" Dr. Barlow muttered. \"Those lines can decapitate a man when they snap.\"\n\nOutside, the ground men were still working patiently to secure the ropes, not suspecting the chaos about to be unleashed. A flight-suited figure was among them, a pair of gliding wings folded across his back.\n\nAlek turned to Dr. Barlow. \"But Newkirk's out there. We can't leave him behind!\"\n\n\"I fear we must.\" The lady boffin shook her head. \"If this is an ambush, we can't afford to give them warning.\"\n\n\"You mean we'll just\u2014,\" Alek began, but a dark shape was flickering across the ground\u2014a small, winged shadow just beyond the starboard edge of the airship.\n\n\"On my command.\" Captain Hobbes raised his hand.\n\nAlek squinted, watching the shadow wheel in ever-tightening circles. Its shape reminded him of the gliding wings on Newkirk's back.\n\n\"Deryn Sharp,\" whispered Bovril.\n\n\"Wait!\" Alek cried, spinning about to face the captain. He took two steps closer, but a marine guard blocked his way. \"It's Dylan!\"\n\nThe captain turned, his hand still raised.\n\n\"Middy Sharp's gliding down!\" Alek shouted. \"There must be a reason!\"\n\nThe officers stood ready, their eyes on the captain. The man hesitated a moment, then glanced at the first officer. \"Take a look.\"\n\nAlek crossed back to the windows, pointing at the flitting, wheeling shadow. The men on the landing lines had seen it now\u2014they were looking up and calling to one another.\n\n\"How do you know it's Sharp?\" the first officer asked.\n\n\"Because it's\u2014it's . . . ,\" Alek sputtered.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp!\" Bovril declared.\n\nDeryn's winged form streaked into sight beneath the edge of the gasbag, careening downward at an absurd angle, two semaphore flags rippling in her hands. She shot past the bridge windows in an instant, arms flailing, and then she was gone.\n\n\"Did anyone catch that signal?\" the captain asked.\n\n\"A-M, sir,\" one of the navigators said. \"That's all I got.\"\n\n\"'Ambush,'\" the captain said. \"Stand ready, lads.\"\n\n\"Pardon me, sir,\" the first officer said. \"But there was a C at first.\"\n\nCaptain Hobbes hesitated, shaking his head.\n\nAlek ran to the far side of the bridge\u2014Deryn's shadow wheeled about, and a moment later she swung back into view. She came in low across the front windows, sending the ground men scattering before her.\n\nHer semaphore flags were still waving, but then her boots skidded on hard ground. Deryn reached up to regain control, the flags falling from her hands.\n\nThe wings pulled her up into the air one last time, then crumpled and twisted, dropping her into a stumbling halt. Ground men came running from all directions, and Deryn disappeared among them in a cloud of dust.\n\n\"Did anyone get that signal?\" the captain shouted.\n\n\"E-R-A?\" the first officer said.\n\n\"C-A-M,\" Bovril muttered, and suddenly it all fell into place.\n\n\"The walkers on the cliffs,\" Alek said. \"They're camera platforms!\"\n\n\"Walker cameras?\" The captain shook his head. \"Why would rebels have that sort of equipment?\"\n\n\"With Sharp flying about, they must know we're on to them,\" the first officer said. \"Sir, we should blow\u2014\"\n\n\"The film!\" Dr. Barlow cried. \"Those barrels had unexposed rolls of film in them. So the rebels must have motion picture cameras. This isn't an attack!\"\n\nThe bridge was silent for a moment, all eyes on the captain. He stood there with his arms crossed tight, fingers drumming.\n\n\"They haven't fired at us yet,\" he finally said. \"But stand ready to blow all ballast if you hear so much as a gunshot.\"\n\nAlek breathed out a slow sigh, and Bovril's claws eased their grip on his shoulder. But then Dr. Busk spoke up: \"Sharp looks hurt.\"\n\nAlek ran to the front of the bridge, shoving his way past the marine guards. From the front windows he saw her lying curled on the ground a hundred yards away.\n\n\"I'm going out there.\"\n\nThe captain cleared his throat. \"I can't allow that, Your Highness.\"\n\n\"Does anyone else on this ship speak Spanish?\" Alek asked, trusting that between Italian and Latin he could manage.\n\nThe captain looked at his officers, then shook his head. \"Perhaps not, but if the situation deteriorates, we'll have to blow our ballast.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Any misunderstanding could be a disaster, so give me a chance to sort this out!\"\n\nThe captain thought another moment, then sighed and turned to Dr. Busk. \"You go with him, and take five marines.\"\n\nNewkirk was already at Deryn's side. A crowd of Villa's men surrounded them, one waving and calling \"M\u00e9dico,\" which certainly meant \"doctor\"\u2014at least in Italian. A few landing lines swung freely, and an officer was trying to get the men back to their ropes.\n\n\"Dylan!\" Alek shouted, pushing through the crowd. The rebels pulled away, giving Bovril wide-eyed stares.\n\nNewkirk looked up, his face streaked with dust. \"He's conscious, but he's done his leg.\"\n\n\"Of course I'm barking conscious!\" Deryn shouted. \"It hurts like blazes!\"\n\nAlek knelt beside her. The left arm of her uniform was torn and bloody, and she clasped one knee to her chest. Her eyes were squeezed shut against the pain.\n\nBovril made a soft unhappy noise, and Alek took Deryn's hand.\n\n\"I've brought Dr. Busk,\" he said.\n\nHer eyes sprang open, and she whispered, \"You Dummkopf!\"\n\nAlek froze. Injured or not, Deryn couldn't afford to have a surgeon prying at her.\n\n\"Newkirk, get these men back on their lines!\" Alek ordered. Then he whispered to Deryn, \"Take my arm. If you can stand up, he might not look too closely.\"\n\n\"Stand on my right,\" she said, grasping his shoulder. Alek counted down from three under his breath, then stood, pulling her up onto one leg. Together they faced Dr. Busk, who was making his way through the crowd with the marine guards.\n\nDeryn shifted on her good leg beside Alek, threatening to pull him over. She was rather taller than him, he realized, and heavier than she looked\u2014muscles from climbing, he supposed. Bovril helpfully jumped down onto the ground.\n\nAlek gritted his teeth and nodded at Dr. Busk. \"Mr. Sharp seems well enough.\"\n\nThe surgeon looked Deryn up and down. \"Should you be standing, Mr. Sharp? That was quite a spill.\"\n\n\"It's all right, sir. Just a banged-up knee.\" She skidded forward a bit, and Alek helped her take a step. \"I'll walk it off.\"\n\n\"Blast it, Sharp. Sit down.\" Dr. Busk reached into his black leather bag and pulled out a pair of long scissors. \"Let me take a look at that leg.\"\n\nDeryn glanced at Alek, nodding just a bit, and the two struggled together to a nearby flat rock. Deryn sat down heavily, and Bovril crawled up into her lap. She grimaced at the beast's weight, but swallowed any cry of pain.\n\nA metal stake had been pounded into the shaley stone beside her, and the landing rope that was lashed to it quivered with energy. Alek imagined it snapping with enough force to cut his head off, and glanced up at the bridge windows. He could just make out the captain peering down, his officers crowded around him.\n\n\"We got your message just in time,\" Alek said.\n\n\"C-A-M-E-R-A,\" Bovril said proudly.\n\n\"I wish I hadn't sent the first one.\" Deryn shook her head, stroking Bovril's fur. \"According to Miss Rogers, General Villa's in the barking movie business! That's why Hearst is smuggling him arms and film. He wants battle scenes for his newsreels.\"\n\n\"Newsreels, fah!\" Bovril said.\n\n\"Steady there, lad.\" Dr. Busk was cutting away Deryn's trouser leg above the knee. Her flesh looked pale around a purpling bruise.\n\nShe stared up at Alek, worry in her eyes. If the leg were broken, carrying off her deception would be impossible.\n\n\"Sir!\" one of the marines called. \"Someone's coming.\"\n\nDr. Busk didn't look up. \"Some diplomacy, Your Highness, if you please.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alek gave Deryn what he hoped was a reassuring nod, then stood and turned. Two large creatures were approaching, sending a ripple through the ground men.\n\nThe crowd parted to reveal a pair of gigantic fabricated bulls. They stood at least three meters tall, their horns tipped with metal, their shoulders as broad as train engines. The bulls had riders on their backs, holding steel chains that ran down through silver rings in the beasts' noses. Behind each rider was mounted a platform with another soldier; one bull carried a Gatling gun, the other a motion picture camera.\n\n\"PANCHO VILLA.\"\n\nAlmost lost between the two huge beasts was a man on horseback. He wore riding boots and pale trousers, a small-brimmed hat, and a short brown jacket crossed with two bandoliers of bullets. His clothes looked rumpled, as if he had just arisen from bed, and from above an unkempt, bristly mustache peered two lively brown eyes.\n\nAlek knew only a few words of Spanish, but he bowed and gave it a try.\n\n\"Sono Aleksandar, principe de Hohenberg.\"\n\nThe man laughed and said in a careful but clear English, \"I think you mean 'soy.' General Francisco Villa, revolutionary governor of Chihuahua, at your service.\"\n\n\"It is an honor, General,\" Alek said, bowing again.\n\nSo this was the famous rebel leader, the Robin Hood of Mexican peasants. Alek wondered what the man must think of the wealthy young prince before him, and if he had picked a side in the Great War in Europe.\n\nThe pistol on his belt was a Mauser\u2014German made.\n\n\"Is your man hurt?\" Villa asked.\n\nAlek turned. Deryn was wincing in pain as Dr. Busk applied some sort of compress to her knee. \"We hope not, sir.\"\n\n\"My personal doctor is coming. But please, why did he jump off your ship? He makes us very nervous for a moment.\"\n\n\"It was the camera walkers.\" Alek looked up. \"There was some confusion about their purpose.\"\n\nThe man clicked his tongue. \"Ah, I should have known. Last winter one of these walkers captures a whole platoon of Federales. They thought it would shoot them!\"\n\nAlek compared the Gatling gun and camera on the two monstrous bulls. \"An understandable mistake. It seems an odd machine for an army to travel with.\"\n\nThe man pointed at the Leviathan's gondola. \"But okay for your airship?\"\n\nAlek looked up and saw Mr. Francis and his men filming the encounter through the open windows of the middies' mess. Here he was in front of the cameras, performing again.\n\n\"There seems to be no escaping them,\" Alek said. \"Can you help us repair our engines?\"\n\nThe man bowed low in his saddle. \"Of course. All part of my deal with Se\u00f1or Hearst. He sends his apologies for the inconvenience.\"\n\nAlek was about to say something unpleasant, but a cry came from Deryn, and he spun about. Dr. Busk was pulling off her jacket now, revealing a red stain running down her left arm. In another moment he would have her shirt off.\n\nAlek turned to General Villa. \"Please, sir. If your doctor could be quick. I'm afraid our ship's surgeon is . . . a bit incompetent.\"\n\n\"You are lucky, then. Dr. Azuela is quite experienced with wounds of battle.\" Villa pointed at a man coming through the crowd. \"Take him to your friend.\"\n\nAlek gave a quick bow and raced back to where Deryn sat. He placed a firm hand on Dr. Busk's shoulder. \"General Villa would prefer that his own doctor see to Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Why, for heaven's sake?\"\n\n\"He insists, as our host,\" Alek hissed softly. \"We should not insult him.\"\n\n\"Most irregular,\" Dr. Busk said, but he stood and took a step back. Dr. Azuela was coming through the crowd. A man of less than forty, he was dressed in a tweed suit and string tie, his eyes behind small round glasses.\n\nAlek went to him, wondering how to get Deryn hidden. He looked up at the bright sun, ransacking his brain for a few words of Spanish.\n\n\"El sol. Malo.\"\n\nThe Mexican doctor glanced at Deryn, then at the Leviathan's shadow only a dozen meters away.\n\n\"Can he walk?\" he said in excellent English.\n\n\"We can't move him,\" Alek said. \"Is there some way to get cover?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the man said, and began to shout orders. Soon the ground men were flinging canvas tarps across the landing lines, putting Deryn in the shadow of a makeshift tent and out of view of the Leviathan's gondola.\n\nAs they worked, Alek pulled Dr. Busk aside. \"General Villa wants a message taken to the captain. He says he'll do whatever he can to repair the ship.\"\n\n\"Well, that's good to hear, I suppose. I'll send one of the marines.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"He wants an officer to deliver it.\"\n\nDr. Busk frowned, looking at the tarps. \"I see. Look after Sharp, will you?\"\n\n\"Of course, Doctor,\" Alek said, turning away with a sigh of relief. The only remaining trick was to keep the rebel doctor from discovering Deryn's secret, or at least from making a fuss about it.\n\nHalfway back to the makeshift tent, Alek realized that he had lied to three men in as many minutes. And worse, he'd done so rather skillfully.\n\nHe shook his head, ignoring the queasy feeling in his stomach. Deryn had warned him about this, after all, and he'd given his word. This was the battle that she fought every day, and he was part of her deception now.\n\nWhen Alek slipped between the swaying tarps, he found only Deryn and Dr. Azuela inside. The ground men had swiftly thrown up a cot for Deryn and a case for the doctor's instruments. But now they had gone back to their ropes, and the growl of the winches drawing the ship down had started up again. Bovril was wrapped around Deryn's neck, purring softly.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I've had worse,\" Deryn said, but her eyes stayed fixed on the doctor's fingers as they probed her arm.\n\n\"It isn't broken,\" the man said. \"But this cut is bad. I need to sew it up. Take off your shirt.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" Deryn said softly. \"My arm won't move.\"\n\nThe doctor frowned, feeling carefully along her forearm again. \"But a moment ago you made a fist.\"\n\n\"Just cut the sleeve off,\" Alek said, kneeling beside them. \"I'll help you.\"\n\nDr. Azuela's wary gaze traveled from Deryn to Alek as he reached into his bag. He pulled out a pair of scissors and snipped through the cuff of the middy's uniform, then up her arm. Her pale skin was slick with blood.\n\nDeryn drew in a sharp breath\u2014the doctor's free hand had brushed her chest. Azuela frowned, hesitating a moment. Then, with a flash, the scissors had reversed in his hand. The points quivered at her throat.\n\n\"What's under your shirt?\" he demanded.\n\n\"Nothing!\" Deryn said.\n\n\"There's something strapped there. You're wearing a bomb! \u00a1Asesino!\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" Bovril said quite clearly.\n\nAzuela stared at the beast, dumbfounded and frozen.\n\n\"It's all right, Doctor.\" Alek raised his hands in surrender. \"Deryn, just take off your shirt.\"\n\nShe stared dumbly at him, shaking her head.\n\nDr. Azuela tore his eyes from the loris. \"You're here to kill Pancho! You meant to fly down onto him with a bomb!\"\n\n\"She isn't an assassin,\" Alek said.\n\nThe doctor stared up at him.\n\n\"She,\" Bovril said.\n\n\"Deryn is a girl. That's why she's bound like that.\" Alek ignored the look of despair on her face. \"See for yourself.\"\n\n\"THE DOCTOR'S SUSPICIONS.\"\n\nWith the scissors still at her throat, Dr. Azuela felt her again. Deryn flinched, and his eyes widened as he yanked his hand away.\n\n\"\u00a1Lo siento, se\u00f1orita!\"\n\nDeryn opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her fists clenched, and she began to shake. Alek knelt beside her, gently opening one of her hands to hold it.\n\n\"Please don't tell anyone, sir,\" he said.\n\nThe doctor shook his head. \"But why?\"\n\n\"She wants to serve\u2014to fly.\" Alek reached into his inner pocket, the one the pope's letter always occupied. Beside the scroll case his fingers found a small cloth bag and pulled it free.\n\n\"Here.\" Alek handed it to the man. \"For your silence.\"\n\nDr. Azuela opened the bag, and found the sliver of gold\u2014all that remained of the quarter ton that Alek's father had left him. He stared at it a moment, then shook his head. \"I have to tell Pancho.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Deryn said softly.\n\n\"He is our commander.\" He turned to Deryn. \"But only him, I promise.\"\n\nDr. Azuela called in one of the rebels from outside and gave an order in rapid-fire Spanish. Then he set to work, cleaning the wound with a rag and liquid from a small silver flask, sterilizing a needle and thread, then handing the flask to Deryn. As she drank, he drew the needle through the skin of her arm, pulling the wound closed stitch by stitch.\n\nAlek watched, keeping his hand in Deryn's. She squeezed hard, her nails cutting half moons into his flesh.\n\n\"It'll be all right,\" he said. \"Don't worry.\"\n\nAfter all, why should a great rebel leader care if a girl had hidden herself in the British Air Service?\n\nBefore Azuela had finished, a gust of air from outside sent the canvas around them swaying. It was one of the great bulls snorting, like an exhalation of steam from a freight train.\n\nThe tarps parted, and General Villa stepped inside. \"\u00bfEst\u00e1 muriendo?\"\n\n\"No, he will mend.\" The doctor's eyes didn't leave his work. \"But he has an interesting secret to tell you. You may wish to sit down.\"\n\nVilla sighed, settling cross-legged next to Alek. On horseback he had seemed quite graceful, but now he looked a bit thick about the middle. He moved deliberately, perhaps with a touch of rheumatism.\n\n\"Tell him,\" Dr. Azuela said.\n\nDeryn looked exhausted, but her voice was firm. \"I'm Deryn Sharp, decorated officer in His Majesty's Air Service. But I'm not a man.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Villa's eyebrows rose a little as he looked her up and down. \"Forgive me, Se\u00f1orita Sharp. I didn't know the British use women for their glider troops. Because you are small, yes?\"\n\n\"That's not it, sir,\" Deryn said. \"This is a secret.\"\n\n\"Deryn's father was an airman,\" Alek explained. \"Her brother is too. She dresses as a boy because it's the only way she can fly.\"\n\nGeneral Villa stared at Deryn for a moment, then a snort of laughter rippled through his body. \"\u00a1Qu\u00e9 enga\u00f1o!\"\n\n\"Please don't tell anyone,\" Alek said. \"At least not for a few hours, until we've gone. It's nothing to you, whether you turn her in. But to her it's everything.\"\n\nThe man shook his head in wonder, then raised an eyebrow at Alek. \"And what is your part in this joke, little prince?\"\n\n\"He's my friend,\" Deryn said. Her face was still pale, but her voice sounded stronger now. She offered Villa the flask.\n\nHe waved it away. \"Only a friend?\"\n\nDeryn didn't answer, staring down at the fresh stitches in her arm. Alek opened his mouth, but Bovril spoke first: \"Ally.\"\n\nGeneral Villa gave the loris a curious look. \"What is this beast?\"\n\n\"A perspicacious loris.\" Deryn reached up and stroked its head. \"It repeats things, a bit like a message lizard.\"\n\n\"It does not only repeat,\" Dr. Azuela said. \"It told me I was wrong.\"\n\nAlek frowned\u2014he'd noticed that as well. As the weeks had passed, the lorises' memories had grown longer. They sometimes parroted things from days before, or that they'd heard only from each other. It wasn't always clear now where a word or phrase had come from.\n\n\"That's because it's perspicacious,\" Deryn said. \"In other words, it's clever.\"\n\n\"Dead clever,\" Bovril said, and Villa stared at it again, his brown eyes marveling.\n\n\"Tienen oro,\" Dr. Azuela said into the silence.\n\nAlek's Italian was sufficient for him to understand the word for \"gold.\" He pulled out the small bag again. \"It's not much, but we can pay for your silence.\"\n\nGeneral Villa took the bag and opened it, then laughed. \"The richest man in California sends me guns! And you tempt me with this gold toothpick?\"\n\n\"Then, what do you want?\"\n\nThe man's eyes narrowed on Alek. \"Se\u00f1or Hearst says you are a nephew of the old emperor, Maximilian.\"\n\n\"A grandnephew, but yes.\"\n\n\"Emperors are vain and useless things. We did not need one, so we shot him.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know the story.\" Alek swallowed. \"Perhaps it was a bit presumptuous, putting an Austrian on the throne of Mexico.\"\n\n\"It was an insult to the people. But your uncle was brave at the end. In front of the firing squad, he wished that his blood should be the last to flow for freedom.\" General Villa looked at the red-stained rag in Dr. Azuela's hand. \"Sadly, it was not.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Alek said. \"That was fifty years ago, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"S\u00ed. Too much blood since then.\" Villa tossed the bag back to Alek and turned to Deryn. \"Keep your secret, little sister. But be more careful the next time you jump off your ship.\"\n\n\"Aye, I'll try.\"\n\n\"And be careful of young princes. The first man I ever shot was as rich as a prince, and it was for my sister's honor.\" General Villa laughed again. \"But you are a soldier, Se\u00f1orita Sharp\u2014you can shoot men for yourself, can't you?\"\n\nDeryn gave a one-shouldered shrug. \"It's crossed my mind, once or twice. But pardon me, sir. If you don't like emperors, where did you get those German walkers?\"\n\n\"The kaiser sells us arms.\" General Villa patted the Mauser pistol on his belt. \"Sometimes he gives us arms, so we are his friends when the Yankees join the war, I think. But we will never bow to him.\"\n\n\"Aye, emperors are a bit pointless, aren't they?\" Deryn sat up straighter and held out her right hand. \"Thank you for not telling.\"\n\n\"Your secret is safe, hermanita.\" General Villa shook her hand, then rose to his feet, but suddenly his eyes narrowed and his hand went to his gun. A shadow loomed against the tarp.\n\nVilla reached up and flung the canvas aside, pointing his pistol into the beaming unshaven face of Eddie Malone.\n\n\"Dylan Sharp, Deryn Sharp . . . of course! Well, I can't say I had a clue, but it sure explains a lot.\" The man rubbed his hands together and then thrust one at Pancho Villa. \"Eddie Malone, reporter for the New York World.\"\n\nThe cut on Deryn's arm wasn't much in the end, just eleven neat stitches that hardly itched at all. But she was going to feel her injured knee for a long time.\n\nMost often the ache was simple and honest, as if she'd bashed it on the corner of an iron bed frame. Other times the whole leg throbbed, like her growing pains back when she'd been only twelve and already taller than half the boys in Glasgow. But the worst agony came at night, when her kneecap buzzed and thrummed like a bottle full of bees.\n\nThe buzzing was probably thanks to Dr. Busk's compress. It wasn't mustard seed and oats like her aunties favored, but a wee fabricated beastie of some kind. It had attached itself to her skin like a barnacle, its tendrils creeping inside to heal the ligaments torn in the crash. The surgeon hadn't said what life threads the compress was fabricated from, but it lived on sugar water and a bit of sunlight every day\u2014half plant and half animal, most likely.\n\nWhatever the beastie was, it got annoyed when Deryn moved. Even a squick of weight on the leg was punished with an hour of angry bees. Walking was a nightmare and dressing was tricky, and of course she could hardly ask for help with that.\n\nIf it hadn't been for Alek, the whole crew would've learned her secret that first day. It was Alek who'd persuaded General Villa to stay silent, and had convinced the officers that Deryn could stay in her own cabin, not the sick bay, even though it meant Alek had to fetch meals from the galley himself. It was Alek who half carried her to the heads in the dark gastric channel several times a day, standing guard at a gentlemanly distance while she went. And it was Alek who kept her company so she didn't go stark raving mad.\n\nHe'd done so much, just to make sure that her last few days aboard the Leviathan were spent as a proper airman and not as some mad girl shunned by the officers and crew.\n\nThat bum-rag Eddie Malone hadn't told anyone, not yet. After Mr. Hearst's treachery, the reporters weren't allowed near Tesla's radio or the messenger birds, and Malone was too worried that Adela Rogers would steal his story. But New York was only two days away. Two more days in uniform, and then her secret would be revealed to the world. There was no escaping the fact that this was Deryn Sharp's last journey aboard the Leviathan.\n\nIt was like awaiting execution, every second slow and sharp-edged, but sometimes at night she was grateful to the bees for keeping her awake. At least she could spend a few more hours feeling the vibrations of the ship and listening to the whispers of airflow around the gondola.\n\nMost of the time, though, Deryn wondered what she would do next. She'd have to make up some new lies, of course, to keep her brother Jaspert out of trouble for sneaking her into the Service. But her notoriety would eventually fade, and she'd have to find proper work.\n\nDeryn still knew her aeronautics, even if the Service took away her uniform. And whether or not her knee healed completely, she'd grown strong enough to work alongside most men. Alek said she should stay in America, where, according to him, women who could handle hydrogen balloons were all the rage.\n\nHe'd explained about Pauline and her perils. The girl was nothing but a moving-picture character, a flicker of shadows on a screen, but she'd crawled inside Alek's daft attic somehow.\n\n\"She stands to inherit a lot of money,\" he was explaining the second day out of General Villa's airfield. \"Millions of American dollars, I suppose. But here's the twist: She doesn't get a penny till she marries.\"\n\nDeryn leaned back into her pillows and stared up. The Gulf of Mexico lay sparkling beneath the Leviathan, casting shimmers on the ceiling. Alek sat at the foot of Deryn's bed while Bovril perched on the head, waving its wee arms as if practicing semaphore signals.\n\n\"Poor girl,\" Deryn said. \"Except for the millions of dollars part.\"\n\nAlek laughed. \"It's a melodrama, not a tragedy.\"\n\n\"Melodrama,\" Bovril said in the slow, clear way the lorises did when they learned new words.\n\n\"But instead of getting married,\" Alek went on, \"she goes off to have adventures. And no one stops her, even though she's a girl!\"\n\nDeryn frowned. It didn't sound likely, though if you had a few millions in the bank, perhaps people treated you a bit more like a man. \"Besides that palaver with the hydrogen balloon, what sort of adventures?\"\n\n\"Well, I saw only the first episode. It didn't have a proper ending, just what they call a cliff-hanger.\" Alek thought a moment. \"Though I think Mr. Hearst mentioned something about runaway walkers and being tied to train tracks.\"\n\n\"Tied to train tracks? Sounds like a brilliant career for me.\"\n\n\"Listen, Deryn. It doesn't matter if The Perils of Pauline is rubbish. The point is that it's terribly popular. So even if American women aren't piloting balloons yet, at least they want to. You could show them how it's done.\"\n\n\"Sometimes wanting isn't enough, Alek. You know that.\"\n\n\"I suppose I do.\" He leaned back against the cabin wall. \"For example, you don't want to be cheered up, do you?\"\n\nDeryn shrugged. At the moment she knew exactly what she wanted: for Eddie Malone not to have eavesdropped on their conversation with General Villa. Or for her not to have crashed the gliding wings. Or better yet, for barking Hearst not to have gummed up the Leviathan's engines in the first place!\n\nIf any of it had gone differently, no one would ever have found out she was a girl. Except Alek and that bumrag Volger, of course.\n\n\"Will you be staying in America?\" she asked. \"When the Leviathan heads on?\"\n\nAlek frowned at her. \"Would the captain let me?\"\n\n\"You're doing what the Admiralty wants, helping Mr. Tesla talk up his weapon. Why should they drag you back to England?\"\n\n\"I suppose you're right.\" He stood and went to the window, his green eyes bright as he stared at the sky.\n\nIt was obvious that he hadn't thought much about life after the Leviathan. Deep inside, Alek probably still hoped he could stay aboard. But even if he didn't disembark in New York, he and his men would be passengers only as far as London.\n\n\"You might be in love with the Leviathan, Alek. But the ship doesn't love you back.\"\n\nA sad smile played on his lips. \"It was a doomed relationship from the start. For you and me both, I suppose.\"\n\nDeryn stared at the ceiling. A Clanker prince and a girl dressed as a boy\u2014neither could last forever on this ship. Only dumb luck had kept them together this long.\n\n\"Did I ever tell you how I knew your real name?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"You had plenty of clues,\" she said, then frowned. \"But you tricked me by saying 'Deryn,' didn't you? Where did you hear that?\"\n\n\"It was all Eddie Malone's fault,\" Alek said.\n\n\"That bum-rag!\" Bovril exclaimed.\n\n\"He'd run out of my secrets,\" Alek went on, \"so he wrote an article about you saving the Dauntless. I always meant to show you the photograph. You looked quite dashing in it.\"\n\n\"Wait, are you saying Malone knew my name back then?\"\n\n\"Of course not. But he'd done some research on your family, your father's accident. He wrote about how you\u2014that is, a daughter named Deryn\u2014had survived.\"\n\n\"Oh, aye.\" She sighed. \"That's why I never told that story to anyone but you. And that was enough for you to guess that Deryn was me?\"\n\nAlek glanced sidelong at the perspicacious loris. \"Well, I had a bit of help.\"\n\n\"Barking traitor,\" Deryn said, and gave the head of the bed a thump.\n\nBovril teetered for a moment, its tiny hands out like a tightrope walker. Then it fell into her lap.\n\n\"Ooph,\" they both said together.\n\nAlek took the beast from her. \"You never told me, how did Volger figure you out?\"\n\n\"Fencing lessons. All that touching and moving me about.\" Deryn scowled. \"And I shouted at him too much.\"\n\n\"You shouted at him?\"\n\n\"When you escaped in Istanbul and Volger was left behind, he was being a bit smug. As if he were glad to be rid of you!\"\n\n\"I can imagine,\" Alek said. \"But what's that got to do with you being a girl?\"\n\n\"I was . . .\" She stared at the wall. This was just embarrassing. \"Maybe I got a bit screechy about you.\"\n\n\"Screechy,\" Bovril said with a chuckle.\n\nDeryn forced herself to look at Alek. He was smiling.\n\n\"You didn't want me getting hurt?\"\n\n\"Of course not, you daft prince.\" She found herself smiling back at him. For all her sadness about leaving the Leviathan, it was a relief being able to talk to him like this. What would it be like, once her secret was revealed to the whole world?\n\n\"We could both stay in New York, I suppose,\" she offered softly.\n\n\"That sounds perfect.\"\n\nThe simple words made Deryn's pulse quicken just a bit, enough to make the bees behind her kneecap stir.\n\n\"Really? You want to be immigrants together?\"\n\nAlek laughed, placing Bovril on the windowsill. \"Not quite immigrants. Americans aren't allowed to become emperors, I seem to recall.\"\n\n\"But with Mr. Tesla's weapon, you don't need to be emperor to stop the war!\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Someone has to lead my people after all this.\"\n\n\"Aye, of course,\" Deryn said, feeling foolish.\n\nAlek might pretend to be an airman now and then, but the pope's letter was always in his pocket, and he'd wanted his whole life to be his father's heir. Anything more than friendship with her would destroy his chances of taking the throne.\n\nBut every time one of them had fallen\u2014in the snows of the Alps, in Istanbul, on the stormy topside, in that dusty canyon\u2014the other had been there to pick them up. She couldn't imagine Alek leaving her for some daft crown and scepter.\n\n\"You're right, Deryn. We're both stuck in New York for the rest of the war.\" He turned from the window, his smile growing. \"You should join me and Volger!\"\n\n\"Aye, his countship would love that.\"\n\n\"Volger doesn't decide who my allies are.\" Alek stroked the loris's head. \"If it were up to him, we would have strangled Bovril the night it was born.\"\n\n\"That bum-rag!\" the beastie said.\n\nDeryn frowned. Had Alek just likened her to Bovril?\n\n\"We don't even know where we'll live,\" he continued. \"I've got hardly any gold left, and Mr. Tesla spent every penny he had building Goliath. But it'll be easy to raise more, now that he's proven what it can do.\"\n\n\"No doubt. But do you want to depend on that mad boffin's charity?\"\n\n\"Charity? Nonsense. It'll be like Istanbul, all of us working together to put things right!\"\n\nDeryn nodded, though it was clear Alek barely knew what charity was. His whole life had been spent in a bubble of wealth. He no more understood money than a fish understood water.\n\nBut a much worse notion had entered her mind.\n\n\"They might not kick me off the ship, Alek. They might take me back to London for trial.\"\n\n\"Have you broken any laws?\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him. \"About a dozen, you daft prince. The Admiralty might not want to make a fuss of it, but there's a chance they'll toss me into the brig. And if they do, we'll never see each other again.\"\n\nAlek was silent for a moment, his eyes locked with hers. It was like one of his daft spells coming on, except his expression stayed dead serious.\n\nShe had to look away. \"You should take Bovril with you. You were there when it hatched, and they won't let me keep a beastie in prison.\"\n\n\"You can escape,\" Alek said. \"If I could manage to get off this ship, you certainly can!\"\n\n\"Alek.\" She pointed at her knee. \"It'll be days before I can walk properly, and weeks before I can climb.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He sat down on the bed again carefully, staring at her injured leg. \"I'm an idiot for forgetting.\"\n\n\"No.\" She smiled. \"Well, aye. But not in a bad way. You're just . . .\"\n\n\"A useless prince.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. Alek was a lot of things, but never useless.\n\n\"I've got it,\" he said. \"I'll tell the captain that Mr. Tesla needs your help. He'll have to let you join me!\"\n\n\"He'll ask for orders from London. It's not as though the Manual of Aeronautics has any chapters on girls dressed in trousers.\"\n\n\"But what if I . . . ,\" he began, then sighed.\n\nShe let out a dry laugh. \"Barking prince Alek, always thinking you can fix everything.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with trying to fix things?\"\n\n\"You always . . .\" She shook her head. There was no point in dredging all this up. It would only make the boy angry\u2014or worse, sad. \"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Alek said with a raised eyebrow. \"Are you keeping secrets from me?\"\n\n\"No secrets,\" Bovril said with a giggle.\n\n\"Barking stupid promises,\" Deryn groaned. Lying here in her cabin the last two days, countless mad notions had gone through her head. Was she meant to tell Alek all of them?\n\n\"Mr. Sharp?\" Bovril prompted her.\n\nDeryn gave the beastie a silencing glare, then turned to Alek.\n\n\"It's like this, Your Highness. The world fell apart after your parents died, and it's still falling apart. It must be awful for you, thinking about that every day. But I think you've got the two things muddled.\"\n\n\"What two things?\"\n\n\"Your world, and everyone else's.\" Deryn reached out and took his hand. \"You lost everything that night\u2014your home, your family. You're not even a proper Clanker anymore. But stopping the war won't fix all that, Alek. Even if you and that boffin save the whole barking planet, you'll still need . . . something more.\"\n\n\"I have you,\" he said.\n\nShe swallowed, hoping he really meant that. \"Even if they stuff me back into skirts?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He looked her up and down. \"Though somehow I can't imagine that.\"\n\n\"Don't try, then.\"\n\nThey both glanced at Bovril, expecting it to weigh in. But the beastie only stared back at them, its large eyes glistening.\n\nAfter a moment Alek said, \"I have to stop this war, Deryn. It's all that's kept me going. Do you understand?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Of course.\"\n\n\"But I'll do anything in my power to keep them from taking you away.\"\n\nShe took a shuddering breath, then let her eyes fall closed. \"Promise?\"\n\n\"Anything. As you said in Tokyo, we're meant to be together.\"\n\nDeryn wanted to agree, but she'd promised him she wouldn't lie, and she wasn't certain whether that was true. If they were meant to really be together, why had they been born a prince and a commoner? And if they weren't, why did she feel this way inside?\n\nBut finally she nodded. Perhaps the daft prince's luck would hold and she wouldn't be hauled off to jail in London. And maybe it would be enough to stay by his side, an ally and a friend.\n\nThe East Coast of the United States had been in view all day, white beaches and salt-sheared trees, marshes and low green hills, a few small islands off the Carolinas. No delays for the last thousand miles, and the Leviathan was drawing near its goal. Deryn could hear the crew beginning to hustle about in the corridors. The sound made her heart sink.\n\nLate tonight Eddie Malone would be at the offices of the New York World, handing in his story about Deryn Sharp, the brave airgirl who had fooled the British Air Service. By tomorrow her secret would be in the World, and by the next day it would be in every newspaper in America.\n\nDeryn was exercising her knee, ignoring the buzzing bees, and readying herself to walk with the cane that lovely old Klopp had made for her. It was lathed from fabricated wood, but topped with a heavy Clankerish brass handle. She had no idea whether the captain would kick her off like a stowaway or throw her into the brig, but whatever happened, she didn't want to be helpless.\n\nA knock came at the door.\n\nIt opened before Deryn could answer, and in strolled the lady boffin, her loris on her shoulder and Tazza in tow. The thylacine bounded over and buried its nuzzle in Deryn's palm.\n\n\"Good afternoon, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Afternoon, ma'am.\" Deryn lifted her cane into the air. \"You'll have to forgive me for not standing.\"\n\n\"Not to worry. It looks as though Tazza misses you.\"\n\n\"Don't you miss me too, ma'am?\"\n\nDr. Barlow sniffed. \"What I miss is Tazza being walked at regular intervals. Mr. Newkirk has proven quite unreliable.\"\n\n\"Sorry to hear that, ma'am. But he's got my duties as well as his own,\" Deryn said, then frowned. There wasn't much point in bowing and scraping, now that her career was over. \"Have you never thought of walking Tazza yourself?\"\n\nDr. Barlow's eyes widened a bit. \"What an odd suggestion.\"\n\n\"Mighty unsavory,\" her loris said.\n\n\"Poor beastie.\" Deryn stroked the thylacine's head. \"Well, send Mr. Newkirk round, and I'll tell him he's a bum-rag.\"\n\n\"Bum-rag,\" Bovril chuckled.\n\n\"Such language, Mr. Sharp!\" Dr. Barlow exclaimed. \"Are you sure you're feeling quite all right?\"\n\nDeryn stared down at her leg. Her uniform fit over the compress, but a lump was still visible. \"The cut on my arm's fine, but Dr. Busk isn't sure about my knee.\"\n\n\"So he's told me.\" The lady boffin sat at Deryn's desk, snapping for Tazza to return to her. \"If you've torn the ligaments behind the kneecap, your days of climbing the ratlines may well be over.\"\n\nDeryn looked away, a sudden burning behind her eyes. Not that she would be let near any ratlines, once the officers knew she was a girl. But it still hurt to think that her ma and aunties could be right, after all. What if she couldn't be an airman anymore?\n\n\"Dr. Busk isn't sure about that yet, ma'am.\"\n\n\"No, he is not. But with misfortune may come opportunity.\"\n\n\"Pardon, ma'am?\"\n\nDr. Barlow stood up again and began to inspect the cabin, sliding a white-gloved fingertip along the woodwork. \"Over these past two months you have proven yourself useful, Mr. Sharp. You're quite handy in unpleasant situations, and most adept at improvisation. You even possess, when not brooding in your sickbed, a certain knack for diplomacy.\"\n\n\"Aye, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Let me ask, have you ever thought of serving the British Empire in a more illustrious capacity than scampering about on an airbeast tying knots?\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. \"It's a bit more than just tying knots, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Having seen your talents firsthand, I cannot disagree.\" The lady boffin turned to Deryn and smiled. \"But if you accept my offer, you shall learn that untying knots\u2014figurative ones, of course\u2014can be even more rewarding.\"\n\n\"Your offer, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Am I so unclear?\" the lady boffin asked. \"I am offering you a position, Mr. Sharp. One outside the confines of the Air Service. Though I assure you, a certain amount of airship travel will be involved.\"\n\n\"A position, Mr. Sharp,\" her loris said, and Bovril made a low whistling noise.\n\nDeryn leaned back into her pillows. Quite suddenly the buzz behind her kneecap had redoubled. \"But what sort of position? You're the . . . head keeper of the London Zoo, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Zookeeper, fah!\" Dr. Barlow's beastie said.\n\n\"That is my title, Mr. Sharp. But were you under the impression that our mission to Istanbul was zoological in nature?\"\n\n\"Er, I suppose not, ma'am.\" It occurred to Deryn that she had no idea what Dr. Barlow's real position was, except that it involved ordering people about and acting superior. She was the great fabricator's granddaughter, of course, and had been able to requisition the Leviathan right in the middle of a barking war.\n\n\"Do you work for anyone in particular, ma'am? Like the Admiralty?\"\n\n\"Those half-wits? I should think not. The Zoological Society of London is not a government agency, Mr. Sharp. It is, properly speaking, a scientific charity.\" Dr. Barlow sat down again, and began to stroke Tazza's head. \"But zoology is the backbone of our empire, and so the Society has many members of high station. Collectively, we are a force to be reckoned with.\"\n\n\"Aye, I've noticed that.\" The lady boffin had practically run the ship, until Mr. Tesla had come aboard talking of superweapons. \"But what sort of position would your Society have for me? I'm no boffin.\"\n\n\"Indeed not, but you seem a quick study. And there are times when my scientific work takes me into situations that are, as Mr. Rigby likes to say, quite lively.\" Dr. Barlow smiled. \"At those times a resourceful personal assistant such as yourself might be useful.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Deryn narrowed her eyes. \"How personal an assistant, ma'am?\"\n\n\"You would hardly be my valet, Mr. Sharp.\" She swept her gaze about the cabin. \"Though I see you are in need of one yourself.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. It was barking hard keeping things tidy when you weren't allowed to stand up. But this position looked like a chance to escape prison\u2014or worse, being sent back to Glasgow and stuffed into skirts.\n\n\"That sounds agreeable, ma'am. But . . .\"\n\nDr. Barlow raised an eyebrow. \"You have misgivings?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. But you may, after . . . You see, there's something you don't know about me.\"\n\n\"Do tell, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Do tell,\" her loris said. \"Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn closed her eyes, deciding to blazes with it all.\n\n\"I'm a girl.\"\n\nWhen Deryn opened her eyes, the lady boffin was staring at her with no change of expression.\n\n\"Indeed,\" she said.\n\nDeryn's mouth fell open. \"You mean you . . . Did you barking know?\"\n\n\"I had no idea at all. But I make it a policy never to appear surprised.\" Dr. Barlow sighed, staring out the window. \"Though on this occasion it is proving rather more demanding than usual. A girl, you say? And you're quite certain?\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Deryn shrugged. \"Head to toe.\"\n\n\"Well, I must say this is extraordinary. And somewhat unexpected.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" the loris on her shoulder said again, sounding quite smug.\n\nDeryn found herself smirking a bit at the lady boffin's discomfort. It was rather pleasing, revealing a secret to such a know-it-all. It might not be so awful, seeing the surprise on all the faces of the crew. And what could the officers do to her, now that she had the lady boffin's protection?\n\n\"And why exactly have you perpetrated this hoax?\"\n\n\"To fly, ma'am. And for the knots.\"\n\nThe lady boffin hmphed. \"Well, this is a new wrinkle, Mr. Sharp\u2014or Miss Sharp, I suppose\u2014but perhaps a useful one. The Society's efforts sometimes employ the art of disguise. Really, it's quite amazing that no one ever saw through your deception.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm afraid that's not the case.\" Deryn cleared her throat. \"Count Volger did first, and then a lassie in Istanbul named Lilit. And more recently Alek. Oh, and Pancho Villa and his doctor, and finally that bum-rag reporter Eddie Malone.\"\n\nThe lady boffin's eyes were quite wide now. \"Are you quite certain there aren't any more, young lady? Or am I the last person on this entire ship to know?\"\n\n\"Well, that's just the problem, ma'am. Pretty soon the World\u2014that is, Mr. Malone's newspaper\u2014is going to know as well. He plans to tell them when we get to New York tonight.\"\n\n\"Well, that puts things into rather a tailspin.\" Dr. Barlow shook her head slowly. \"I'm afraid I shall have to withdraw my offer.\"\n\nDeryn sat up straighter. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, Miss Sharp, that you have attained some notoriety in certain circles. You helped foment a revolution in the Ottoman Empire. An ambitious effort, even by the standards of the London Zoological Society!\" The lady boffin sighed. \"But when the news of what you really are is made public, your celebrity will only heighten the scandal.\"\n\n\"Well, aye,\" Deryn said. \"For a week or so.\"\n\n\"For some time, I'm afraid. Young lady, you have made a laughingstock of this ship and its officers. And you have picked a moment when all the eyes of the world are upon us. Think of what people will say of Captain Hobbes, not knowing that one of his own crewmen was a girl!\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Deryn blinked. \"There is that.\"\n\n\"And the shame won't end there, Miss Sharp. The Air Service is quite a new branch of the military forces, and the Admiralty . . . Well, they just gave you a medal!\"\n\n\"But you said they were half-wits!\"\n\n\"Very powerful half-wits, Miss Sharp, whom the Society cannot afford to antagonize.\" She shook her head. \"But I'm sure that someone will be made happy by this revelation.\"\n\n\"You mean the suffragettes, ma'am?\"\n\n\"No, I mean the Germans. What a boon to their propaganda efforts!\" She stood. \"I'm sorry, Miss Sharp, but I'm afraid this won't do at all.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed, trying to come up with some sort of argument, but the crushing truth was that Dr. Barlow was right. Lying in bed these last two days, Deryn had thought only about what Malone's revelation would mean for herself, not for her captain and shipmates, much less the Air Service and the British Empire.\n\nAnd worse, Alek hadn't thought about it either. Would he still want her in his life, once she was famous for humiliating her Service and her ship?\n\n\"Don't get me wrong, Miss Sharp, what you have done is quite brave. You are a credit to our gender, and you have my fullest admiration.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" The lady boffin snapped for Tazza and opened the door. \"And if you hadn't been caught, it would have been a pleasure working with you. Perhaps after this war is over, we can speak of this position again.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said the loris on her shoulder. \"Miss Sharp.\"\n\n\"There is still time to distance yourself from Tesla's madness.\"\n\nAlek stared into the darkness outside his stateroom window. \"Don't you think it's a bit late for that, Volger?\"\n\n\"It is never too late to admit one's errors, even in front of a crowd.\"\n\nAlek pulled on his dinner jacket and straightened it.\n\nSprinkled across the black waters below were at least a hundred small boats set out to greet the Leviathan, their navigation lights like shifting stars. Among them loomed a glittering cruise liner, her fog horn bellowing in the night. The low groan grew into a chorus as the other great ships in the harbor joined in.\n\nPerched on Volger's desk, Bovril attempted to imitate the horns, but wound up sounding like a badly blown tuba.\n\nAlek smiled. \"But they're already singing our praises!\"\n\n\"They are Americans,\" Volger said. \"They toot their horns for anything.\"\n\nBovril went silent, pressing its nose against the window glass.\n\n\"Is that what I think it is?\" Alek said, squinting into the darkness.\n\nIn the distance a towering human form was coming into view. She was as tall as the Leviathan, and her upheld torch glowed with both soft bioluminescence and a shimmering electrikal coil.\n\n\"The Statue of Liberty.\" Volger turned from the sight. \"A few newsreels of you shaking hands with Tesla is one thing. But to stand beside him while he goes into raptures about this weapon seems unwise.\"\n\n\"You still don't think Goliath will work?\"\n\n\"I spoke with Dr. Barlow this evening, and she says no.\" Volger's voice dropped. \"But what if it does work, Alek? What if he uses it on a city?\"\n\n\"I told you. He's promised not to attack Austria.\"\n\n\"So you'll happily preside over the destruction of Berlin? Or Munich?\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"I'm not presiding over anything. I'm helping to publicize Tesla's weapon so that he won't have to use it. The Germans will sue for peace when they realize what he can do. They aren't mad, you know.\"\n\n\"The kaiser's rule is absolute. He can be as mad as he likes. Your tie is crooked.\"\n\nAlek sighed, adjusting his necktie in the reflection of the window glass. \"You have a bad habit of listing everything that can possibly go wrong, Volger.\"\n\n\"I have always considered that a good habit.\"\n\nAlek ignored this, staring at himself. It was refreshing to have proper clothes again. Mr. Hearst might have sabotaged the Leviathan, but at least he'd thrown a few decent dinner jackets into the bargain.\n\nThe floor shifted a bit beneath Alek's feet\u2014the airship was turning north again. He leaned closer to the window and saw Manhattan ahead. A cluster of buildings erupted from the island's southern tip, some of them almost two hundred meters tall, as high as the steel towers of Berlin.\n\nAlek imagined the dark sky above them bursting into flame, the buildings' glowing windows shattering, their metal frames twisting.\n\n\"Tesla will use his machine if he needs to, whether I stand with him or not.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Volger said. \"So why not step aside? Is mass murder what you want to be remembered for, Your Serene Highness?\"\n\n\"Of course not. But a chance of peace is more important to me than my reputation.\"\n\nVolger let out a low hissing sigh. \"Perhaps that's a good thing.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Dr. Barlow also mentioned Dylan to me\u2014or rather, Deryn. It seems the doctor knows the girl's secret now.\"\n\n\"Deryn must have told her. The truth is coming out tomorrow at any rate, so it hardly matters now.\"\n\n\"Dr. Barlow seems to think it does. She says that the captain and this ship will be humiliated, the Admiralty outraged. And more important, your friend will become a point of German propaganda. The proud British Empire sending fifteen-year-old girls to fight their battles? Quite embarrassing.\"\n\n\"Deryn is hardly an embarrassment.\"\n\n\"They will make her into one. You would do well to keep your name out of the scandal. Tesla will thank you for it.\"\n\nAlek set his jaw and didn't answer, watching the city draw nearer. From a thousand feet up he could see a grid of streets traced out in the glowing dots of electrikal gas lamps. The piers were thronging with people gathered to watch the great airship's approach.\n\nWould everyone really turn on Deryn, once they knew? Perhaps the officers of the Leviathan, and of course the Admiralty. But surely lots of women would understand why she'd done it.\n\nOf course, women couldn't vote.\n\nThe Klaxon rang in a long-short pattern, the signal for high-altitude docking. Volger pulled on his cavalry jacket, then held out an overcoat for Alek, gleaming dark sable from among Mr. Hearst's many gifts.\n\nAlek didn't move, staring into Bovril's large eyes.\n\n\"Are you worried about Deryn?\" Volger asked.\n\n\"Of course. And also . . .\" He couldn't finish.\n\n\"This won't be pleasant for her. But if you insist on helping Tesla, it's best to keep your reputation intact for a bit longer.\"\n\nAlek nodded, not saying the rest of what he'd realized. He and Volger were headed off into a whirlwind of diplomacy and publicity, while the Leviathan would be refueled at a proper airfield in New Jersey, leaving the country in only twenty-four hours. When would he see Deryn again?\n\nThey'd never said a proper good-bye. . . .\n\nHe closed his eyes, feeling the rumble of the engines, the faint tug of deceleration as the ship approached Manhattan.\n\n\"Let's go,\" he murmured; then he picked up Bovril and headed for the door.\n\n\"Might I have a few words, Your Highness?\"\n\nAlek turned. Miss Adela Rogers was dressed in a dark red winter coat; the fox around her shoulders was a fabricated pink. Its fur ruffled in the wind of the open cargo bay.\n\n\"A few more, you mean?\" Alek asked. He had spent two hours with the woman the day before, recounting the Leviathan's rescue of Tesla in Siberia. He'd borrowed from Deryn's version, of course, given that Alek had slept through the whole thing.\n\n\"Our interview was delightful.\" Miss Rogers stepped closer, her voice lowering. \"But I forgot to ask you one thing. How do you feel about the danger you're in?\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"Danger?\"\n\nMiss Rogers's gaze drifted over Alek's shoulder. Among the others waiting in the cargo bay were four of the ship's marines. They were armed with rifles and cutlasses, and one had a hydrogen sniffer on a leash.\n\n\"As you can see, the captain is concerned,\" she said. \"There are German agents in New York, after all.\"\n\n\"There were more in Istanbul,\" Alek said. \"Not to mention Austria. I've managed so far.\"\n\nShe scribbled in her notepad. \"Mmm, quite brave.\"\n\n\"Quite,\" Bovril said. \"He can be as mad as he likes.\"\n\n\"Are those critters' sentences getting longer?\" Miss Rogers asked.\n\nAlek shrugged, though it was true.\n\nThe gears of the cargo door growled into motion, and as it opened, the wind began to swirl, bringing in the salt smell of the harbor. Alek pulled his coat tighter, and Bovril shivered on his shoulder.\n\nThrough the widening door Alek saw the air jitney approaching. Four small hot-air balloons glowed beneath the passenger platform, and three vertical propellers thrust out from its sides. The jitney was big enough for no more than a dozen passengers. Alek and Miss Rogers were headed ashore tonight with Mr. Tesla, Count Volger, Eddie Malone, Dr. Busk, Captain Hobbes, and four marines. Dr. Barlow had announced that she did not wish to be photographed with Tesla, and was waiting until the Leviathan landed in New Jersey before she disembarked.\n\nThe jitney slowed to a halt ten meters away, and its gangplank began to unfold. The lifting propellers swayed a bit, their angles in lazy orbits, like juggler's plates spinning on sticks.\n\n\"I shall be glad to have my feet on solid ground,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\n\"I've been happy in the air,\" Alek replied, then saw her scribbling down his words, and resolved to remain silent.\n\nThe gangplank connected with the cargo bay with a clunk, and the riggers set to work binding it fast. Then, without ceremony or good-byes, the shore party hustled across to the jitney.\n\nA moment later Alek was watching the Leviathan slip away.\n\nThe others crowded onto the far side of the platform, gawking at the Woolworth Building, the world's tallest, and the rest of Manhattan. But Alek stared back at the airship.\n\n\"Happy in the air,\" Bovril said.\n\nAlek stroked its chin. \"Sometimes you should be called the obvious loris.\"\n\nAs the beast had a chuckle at this, Alek felt the jitney lifting a bit beneath his feet, unbalanced by the scrum of passengers on the far side. The crew politely asked everyone to disperse their weight across the platform, and a moment later Alek found Eddie Malone at his side.\n\n\"Evening, Your Majesty. Nice and warm, thanks to these hot-air balloons, isn't it?\"\n\nAlek looked down. The burner of the balloon beneath him sent a ripple of heat up into the dark sky. Bovril was holding its hands out, like a soldier beside a campfire.\n\n\"Warm enough, Mr. Malone. But 'Your Majesty' is incorrect. 'Your Serene Highness' is proper. And if you're going to write about me, please remember that my last name isn't Ferdinand.\"\n\n\"It isn't?\" The notebook was produced, its pages fluttering in the cold wind. \"What is your last name, then?\"\n\n\"Nobles don't have last names. Our titles define us.\"\n\n\"Well, that's one way to put it.\" A moment of scribbling later, the man spoke up again. \"Perhaps you want to comment on Deryn Sharp?\"\n\nAlek hesitated. This was his chance to explain who Deryn really was. He could tell Malone, and the world, about her bravery and skill, about why she'd taken to the air. But he saw Volger eyeing him from across the platform.\n\n\"ARRIVING IN MANHATTAN.\"\n\nDeryn's scandal could only distract from Tesla's mission here in New York. And if he spoke on the matter, the headlines about her would only loom larger.\n\n\"I have no comment,\" Alek said.\n\n\"That seems a bit odd, considering how closely you two worked together in Istanbul.\"\n\nAlek turned away from the reporter. He hated this, not helping tell her story, but no one's reputation was more important than peace. Or was that just a convenient excuse? A way to escape being caught up in an embarrassing revelation? At first he'd been so ashamed for not knowing who and what she really was. But there was no shame at all in being a friend of Deryn Sharp. Maybe he should forget Volger's warnings, and explain to Malone how he really felt about Deryn.\n\nAlek swallowed. And how did he feel about her, exactly?\n\nUp in the sky the Leviathan was moving away, now only a silhouette against the starry blackness. When would he see his best friend again?\n\nAlek heard the growl of an engine, and dropped his gaze to the harbor. The jitney was descending quickly, heading toward the aero-piers at Manhattan's southern tip. Some sort of motorboat was skimming across the dark water, darting among the other bobbing lights.\n\n\"And from what I heard back in Pancho Villa's canyon,\" Malone went on, \"you sounded like you already knew what she was. How long ago did you guess?\"\n\nAlek frowned. The motorboat below had turned hard, and was skimming directly toward the jitney now. A sudden flash sparked on its deck, and a cloud of smoke billowed out, hiding the boat for a moment.\n\n\"I think that's some sort of . . . ,\" Alek began, his voice fading as something climbed from the smoke, spilling flame behind it.\n\n\"Rocket,\" Bovril said, and crawled inside Alek's coat.\n\nAlek spun about, but no one else was looking. Even Malone was staring into his notebook.\n\n\"There's a rocket,\" he said, not nearly loud enough. Then he found his voice and shouted, \"We're under attack!\"\n\nHeads turned toward him, as slow as tortoises', but finally a crewman spotted the rocket climbing toward them. Shouts carried across the platform, and one of the lifting engines roared to life. The craft slewed to one side, Alek's boots skidding beneath him.\n\nThe rocket was almost upon them, hissing like a steam train. Alek threw himself down onto the platform deck, sheltering Bovril beneath his body, as the missile roared past.\n\nAn explosion cracked the air above him and flung tendrils of flame down upon the jitney. An ember the size of a pumpkin bounced across the deck, hissing and spilling smoke. It knocked down a crewman, then rolled off the platform and hit one of the hot-air balloons. The thin envelope full of superheated air burst into flame.\n\nAlek's eyes were forced shut by the heat rolling up from below. He covered his face and peered out between gloved fingers. As the crew and passengers fled from the fire, the jitney rolled with their weight, dropping to one side. But a moment later the envelope was consumed, the fire having burnt itself into a ghost in seconds.\n\nWith only three balloons left, the jitney began to tip again, but now in the opposite direction\u2014toward the corner with no lift. The passengers staggered back that way, then one fell and slid, and Alek saw in a flash how this would end. As their weight gathered on the damaged corner of the jitney, the tilt would increase until the craft flipped over.\n\nTesla had realized it too. \"Grab on to something!\" the man cried, taking hold of the platform rail. \"Stay in this side!\"\n\nLying beside Alek, Eddie Malone began to slide away, but Alek seized the man's hand. Around them other passengers were slipping; some managed to take hold of the rail, some spread their weight flat across the deck. Bovril mewled inside Alek's coat, and Malone's hand squeezed his hard. Captain Hobbes was shouting orders at the jitney's crew.\n\nThe craft began to gyrate, like a leaf falling through the air. Buildings spun past, alternating with empty sky. Would they fall into the freezing water? Or crash into Manhattan's steel and marble towers?\n\nThe fall seemed to take forever\u2014the three remaining balloons were still full and functioning, and the jitney was not much heavier than the air around it. Alek saw Captain Hobbes at one of the lifting engines, trying to control the ship's descent.\n\nSoon they were over solid ground. Buildings spun past on all sides, their lit windows streaking across Alek's view.\n\nThen the jitney struck something solid, and the wooden deck beneath him split, hurling splinters into the air. The craft's underside shrieked, skidding sideways. Then came a crash like thunder, and a brick chimney shattered as the craft barreled through it. The captain had brought them down onto a large rooftop.\n\nBrick fragments of the chimney scattered across the deck, but the jitney was still sliding. Ahead Alek saw a wireless aerial rushing at him. He covered his head, but the aerial bent away under the mass of the jitney. The groan of the skid continued for another few seconds, then ended with another crash. The ruined craft had finally run into something heavy enough to stop it.\n\nAlek looked up. A short wooden tower loomed over the jitney's deck. The bottom of the tower's struts were splintered, and it leaned precariously over him, but it didn't fall.\n\n\"Fire!\" someone yelled.\n\nAnother of the balloons had burst into flame. The fuel in its burner was spilling from the jitney's deck, carrying the fire onto the rooftop. The marines and Captain Hobbes were beating the flames, but the blaze simply leapt onto their jackets, borne by the fuel.\n\n\"That's a water tower!\" Malone pointed at the structure the jitney had half knocked over in its crash.\n\nAlek looked about. The jitney carried no tools that he could see, but one of the lifting propellers had broken into pieces. He hefted one of the blades. It was a meter long and wasn't sharp, but it was heavy. Wielding it like an axe, Alek began to hack at the side of the water tower. The heat of the flames grew worse behind him.\n\nThe tower began to split beneath his blows. The wood was old and rotten, the nails rusted, and soon the planks were cracking open.\n\nBut no water rushed from the gap.\n\nMalone stayed Alek's hand, then climbed up and looked in.\n\n\"It's empty, dammit!\"\n\nAlek groaned, turning back to the fire. It had reached the wooden deck of the jitney, and the Leviathan's crewmen were retreating from the blaze.\n\n\"Your Highness!\" the captain called. \"This way! There's a fire escape!\"\n\nAlek blinked. They couldn't leave the building to burn, could they?\n\n\"Come on, Your Majesty!\" Malone said, grabbing his arm.\n\nThen Alek felt a drop of water hit his face, and he reached up and touched a finger to it. More drops fell, and for a moment he thought that it was a perfect and improbable rain spilling from a clear sky.\n\nBut then Alek's nose caught the familiar scent. . . .\n\n\"Clart,\" said Bovril from inside his coat.\n\n\"Indeed.\" Alek breathed in the effluence of a hundred interlocked species, all of it mixed in the gut of a living airship. He shielded his eyes and looked up to see the underside of the Leviathan a hundred meters above, its ballast tubes swelling. The downpour built around him, its roar joined by the plaintive hissing of the blaze.\n\nSomeone aboard must have been looking back, watching the jitney disappear into a tiny flicker against the city lights. Someone had seen the attack and had told the bridge crew to come about.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" said Bovril, then had a chuckle.\n\nThe heat of the fire was gone now, and Alek found himself soaking wet in a cold autumn wind. He cast aside the ruined sable coat, and Bovril scampered up onto his shoulder. The downpour was fading quickly now, and the Leviathan was growing smaller overhead. With its ballast spilled, it was climbing rapidly into the air, safe from any more rocket attacks.\n\n\"Two birds with one stone,\" Alek murmured, then looked about the roof. Dr. Busk was tending to Mr. Tesla and one of the jitney crewmen, but no one seemed seriously hurt. He heard the siren of a fire brigade from the streets below.\n\n\"Look over here, Your Majesty!\" Eddie Malone was backing up, his free hand shielding his camera from the last of the falling ballast. He was taking a photograph of the crashed jitney, with Alek as the star.\n\nIt was pointless scowling, Alek supposed. He dutifully set his jaw. The camera flashed, and he was blinking away spots. When he could see again, he noticed how close Malone was to the edge of the roof.\n\nAn odd realization struck Alek. As the jitney had been crashing, he'd saved Malone from falling. If Alek hadn't seen him, or their fingers had slipped, the man might have slid to his doom. Then Deryn's secret would be safe again.\n\nBut Alek had saved Malone, just as he'd failed to say a word in her defense. It was as though he couldn't stop betraying her.\n\nThen, quite suddenly, a simple and perfect idea entered his mind. Not letting himself think twice, Alek crossed the slick, broken deck of the jitney, until he was close enough to the reporter to speak softly. The camera flashed again.\n\n\"I saved your life during the crash,\" Alek said. \"Didn't I, Mr. Malone?\"\n\nThe man thought for a second, then nodded. \"I suppose you did. Thanks for that!\"\n\n\"You're welcome. Would you consider that payment for, say, not publishing what you know about Deryn?\"\n\nMalone laughed. \"Not likely, Your Majesty.\"\n\n\"I didn't think so.\" Alek smiled, putting his hand on the man's shoulder. \"Luckily, I have a backup plan.\"\n\nThe nightmare had come again.\n\nIt was the same as always\u2014the heat, the smell of propane, the awful crackle of ropes snapping. Then falling to the ground, pushed from the gondola by her da, and watching him soar away, burning in midair.\n\nDeryn had known the dream was coming from the moment she'd closed her eyes. After all, she'd been watching as the rocket had climbed up from the dark water and struck the jitney, setting one of its flimsy balloons alight. The dreadful image hadn't left her mind even when the messenger eagle had arrived half an hour later, carrying the news that all hands had survived.\n\nSo she'd lain there all night, drifting in and out of conflagrations.\n\nAs the sun rose at last, Deryn flung the covers from herself. It was no use pretending to sleep. Today was going to be its own nightmare.\n\n\"All hands\" meant Eddie Malone was still alive. He'd no doubt made it to the offices of the World with his airgirl story in hand. The Leviathan was docked only forty miles from New York City. Once the British consulate spotted the story, the news would make its way here by the fastest messenger eagle they could find.\n\nAt least the captain was off the ship. Deryn doubted that the first officer would have the nerve to toss her into the brig without orders.\n\nStill, the looks on her shipmates' faces would be bad enough.\n\nTwisted knee or not, Deryn decided to wear a decent uniform for when the officers came calling. She had just dressed when a knock came at her door.\n\nShe stood there, staring out the window. Was this it, then? The end of everything she'd worked for?\n\n\"Come in,\" she said softly. But it was only the lady boffin, her loris, and Tazza.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn didn't answer, just stuck out her hand for Tazza to nuzzle.\n\nDr. Barlow frowned. \"Are you unwell, Mr. Sharp? You look a bit peaked.\"\n\n\"It's just . . . I had a bad night's sleep.\"\n\n\"Poor dear. Our welcome to New York was unsettling, wasn't it? But at least we had a bit of luck.\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am,\" Deryn sighed. \"Of course, if that bumrag Eddie Malone had been a bit less lucky, I might be happier.\"\n\n\"Ah, I see.\" Dr. Barlow pulled out the chair from Deryn's desk and sat. \"You find this morning's news dismaying.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. \"News?\"\n\n\"Of course. The whole ship is abuzz with the story.\" Smiling, the lady boffin produced a neatly folded newspaper from her handbag.\n\n\"So it's\u2014it's already . . . ,\" Deryn sputtered. \"And the officers sent you?\"\n\n\"No one sent anyone, young man.\" Dr. Barlow handed the paper over.\n\nDeryn spread it out, her heart thudding in her chest, the bees inside her kneecap awake and angry. In the middle of the front page was a photograph of Alek looking sodden before the wrecked sky jitney, and below that a huge headline said:\n\nSECRET HEIR TO AUSTRIA'S THRONE SURVIVES ROCKET ATTACK\n\nLittle wonder that the attempt on Alek's life was the main story. And as her eyes traveled across the page, Deryn found articles asking whether German agents had been involved, asking whether they'd also meant to kill Nikola Tesla, and about an election for the city's mayor.\n\n\"FRONT PAGE.\"\n\nThere was, however, not a single word on the subject of Deryn Sharp.\n\nShe flipped through the next few pages, finding photographs of the Leviathan over Tokyo, the airship's encounter with Pancho Villa, and the German ambassador denouncing the great inventor's threats against the Clanker Powers. There was even a somewhat mad allegorical illustration of Tesla taming the Darwinist and Clanker Powers with electricity.\n\nBut still no mad airgirl.\n\nDeryn groaned. \"Malone's just waiting, isn't he?\"\n\n\"I think you're missing the point, young man. The first headline says it all.\"\n\nDeryn turned back to the front page, and stared.\n\n\"'The Secret Heir to Austria's Throne,'\" she murmured, the words finally sinking in. \"But how did Eddie Malone find out about the pope's letter?\"\n\nDr. Barlow tutted. \"The pope's letter? Hah! I suspected you knew about all this!\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am. Alek told me back in Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Indeed. One might ask if everyone on this ship has a secret identity?\"\n\n\"I hope not, ma'am. It's quite a bother, you know.\" Deryn shook her head. \"But why would he tell that . . .\"\n\n\"That bum-rag,\" supplied the lady boffin's loris politely.\n\nThen, all in a flash, Deryn understood. Alek had made another trade. Just like in Istanbul, when Malone had been about to reveal the revolution's plans, and Alek had agreed to tell his life story in exchange for the man's keeping silent.\n\nBut this time he'd given up his secrets for her.\n\n\"Oh,\" Deryn said softly.\n\n\"'Oh,' indeed,\" the lady boffin said. \"That was rather slow, Mr. Sharp. Are you sure you didn't bump your head along with your knee?\"\n\nDeryn looked up from the newspaper. \"Why are you calling me Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"Because you would appear to be the midshipman of that name. And given this\"\u2014Dr. Barlow tapped the newspaper\u2014\"no one is likely to believe otherwise. Now please get ready. We shall be traveling within the hour.\"\n\n\"Traveling, ma'am?\"\n\n\"To New York City. The Serbian consulate is giving a party for Mr. Tesla and Prince Aleksandar this afternoon. A formal uniform is required, of course. I see you've managed to dress yourself.\"\n\n\"Aye. But why are you dragging me along?\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp, you apparently have the ear\u2014perhaps even the affections, though I shudder to think it\u2014of the legal heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary.\" Dr. Barlow snapped for Tazza. \"As long as your little skeleton remains in the closet, the Zoological Society of London shall have many uses for you. Now get ready, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" her loris said.\n\nThe ride across the Hudson River was splendid\u2014the Statue of Liberty standing tall to the south, the towering skyscrapers of Manhattan ahead. Even the ferry's engine smoke pouring out across the blue sky looked rather grand. Deryn had grown used to Clanker engines over the last three months, she supposed, just as Alek had become a bit of a Darwinist. The rumble of the motors through her body felt almost natural now, and seemed to soothe her injured knee.\n\nShe and Dr. Barlow\u2014and their marine escort\u2014were met by an armored walker at the ferry docks. It was smaller than a proper war machine, nimble enough for the crowded streets of New York, but definitely bulletproof. After the attack last night, no one from the Leviathan would be venturing out unprotected. Deryn's rigging knife waited in a sheath inside her jacket, and the walking cane that Klopp had made for her was topped with a brass ball the size of an empress plum.\n\nShe might be dodgy in one leg, but Deryn reckoned she still had a bit of fight left.\n\nThe walker made its way through teeming crowds and beneath elevated trains. As they traveled north, the buildings grew shorter and were more like the row houses of London than skyscrapers. The air was clearer here than in Istanbul, the city driven more by electricity than steam, thanks to the influence of Tesla and the other great American inventor, Mr. Thomas Edison.\n\nAt last the walker reached the Serbian consulate, a large and solemn stone building with a line of policemen stretched along the footpath outside.\n\n\"Blisters. They look ready for trouble.\" Deryn turned from the small windows. \"But the Germans wouldn't be daft enough to start a fight in the middle of Manhattan, would they?\"\n\n\"The Germans will test President Wilson's patience, I'm sure,\" the lady boffin answered. \"But the country is divided. There may have been hard words for Germany in the New York World this morning, but Mr. Hearst's papers called the attack the work of anarchists, not Clankers.\"\n\n\"Hmph,\" Deryn said. \"Maybe that bum-rag really is a German agent.\"\n\n\"Mr. Hearst certainly dislikes the British.\" The walker lumbered to a halt, and Dr. Barlow began to straighten herself. \"And the Germans know that one stray rocket won't drag America into war.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"Ma'am, do you reckon the Germans were after Alek? Or are they more worried about Mr. Tesla?\"\n\n\"Last night I'd guess they wanted Tesla.\" Dr. Barlow sighed. \"But after reading this morning's papers, their priorities may shift.\"\n\nWithin the consulate walls it was easy to forget the armed policemen outside. White-gloved butlers in velvet tails took the lady boffin's hat and traveling coat, and the strains of dance music echoed from the marble walls. At a short staircase past the entryway, Dr. Barlow kindly took Deryn's arm, lifting a bit of weight off her bad knee.\n\nThe beastie on Deryn's wound had done its work quickly, and she could walk without limping now, but she was still glad for her cane. The sounds of voices and music grew as a butler guided them through the consulate to a large and crowded ballroom.\n\nThe party was in full swing. Half the gentlemen were in military uniforms, the other half in morning dress\u2014striped trousers and tailcoats. The ladies wore soft pastels, a few hemlines rising to the daring height of midcalf. Deryn's aunties would have been scandalized, but perhaps it was only another sign that American women were changing fast.\n\nOf course, that all mattered less to Deryn now that her secret was safe again. She wouldn't be staying here in America, but heading off with Dr. Barlow to work for her mysterious Society. Deryn had been so relieved this morning that it had taken all day for that simple fact to sink in\u2014when the Leviathan departed for London tonight, she would be leaving Alek behind.\n\nJust as the thought struck her, there he was across the ballroom, with Bovril on his shoulder, standing beside Tesla in a group of fawning civilians.\n\n\"Pardon me, ma'am.\"\n\nDr. Barlow followed Deryn's gaze. \"Ah, yes, of course. But do be . . . diplomatic, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Begging your pardon, ma'am,\" Deryn said. \"But I've been diplomatic enough to fool you these last three months.\"\n\n\"Gloating is unchivalrous, young man.\"\n\nDeryn only snorted at that, and made her way across the room. She was soon within earshot of Tesla, who was expounding about the commercial potential of Goliath\u2014how he could use it not just to destroy cities, but to broadcast moving pictures and free power to the whole world.\n\nShe hovered at the edge of the circle of rapt listeners until she caught Bovril's eye. The beastie murmured something into Alek's ear, and soon the boy was easing himself away from Mr. Tesla, who hardly noticed.\n\nA moment later they were alone together in a corner.\n\n\"Deryn Sharp,\" Bovril said softly.\n\n\"Aye, beastie.\" She looked into Alek's eyes as she stroked the loris's head. \"Thank you.\"\n\nAlek wore the same soft smile he always did when he was rather proud of something. \"I promised to protect your secret, didn't I?\"\n\n\"Aye, by lying. Not by telling the barking truth!'\n\n\"Well, I couldn't let you be disgraced. You're the best soldier I know.\"\n\nDeryn turned away. There was so much she wanted to tell Alek, but it was all too complicated and unsoldierly to say here.\n\nShe began with, \"Volger must be a bit angry with you.\"\n\n\"He's been oddly calm about it.\" Alek's gaze drifted over Deryn's shoulder, but she didn't turn to look. \"In fact, he's at work charming the French ambassador as we speak. We'll need their recognition if I'm ever to take the throne.\"\n\n\"Hang the barking throne. I'm just glad you're not dead!\"\n\nAlek's eyes came back to her. \"As am I.\"\n\n\"Sorry to be snappy,\" she mumbled. \"I couldn't sleep last night.\"\n\n\"It was almost like your father's accident, wasn't it?\" He displayed his hands. \"But I emerged without a scratch. Maybe the curse is broken. Providence.\"\n\n\"Aye, there's no denying you've got a ruinous case of good luck.\" She looked away. \"But now that I'm Midshipman Dylan Sharp again, I'll have to leave with the Leviathan. Our twenty-four hours is up tonight.\"\n\n\"Ah, I'd forgotten that this is still a neutral port.\" Alek's stare faltered, as if he'd only just realized that by protecting her secret he'd sent her away. \"Not much chance of them kicking you off now, is there?\"\n\n\"No.\" She looked around at all the people in their fancy clothes. No one was watching her and Alek, but it still seemed wrong to say good-bye in a crowd.\n\n\"You could still . . .\" He cleared his throat. \"What if you stayed anyway?\"\n\n\"What? You mean jump ship?\"\n\n\"Why not? Sooner or later they're going to find out what you are, Deryn. And now that your secret's safe, you can join us without a scandal.\"\n\n\"Desertion is worse than a scandal, Alek. I can't abandon my shipmates.\"\n\n\"But if they knew what you were, they'd abandon you.\"\n\nShe stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. He was right enough, but that wasn't what mattered. \"My country's at war, and I'm no deserter.\"\n\n\"You can help your country by ending the war. Stay with me, Deryn.\"\n\nShe shook her head, unable to speak. She wanted to stay, of course, but not for any noble reasons. However awful this war might be, she wasn't guided by anything so grand as making peace. Being steered by providence was for barking princes, not common soldiers.\n\nAnd what Deryn wanted was out of reach, whether she stayed here or went ten thousand miles away.\n\nAlek couldn't read her thoughts, of course. He straightened and said in a small voice, \"Sorry. That was foolish of me. We both have our duty. In fact, Mr. Tesla is talking to some very rich men over there. We'll need their money to make improvements to Goliath.\"\n\n\"You should go back and impress them with your Latin, then.\"\n\n\"The faster this war is over, the quicker we can . . .\" His voice faded.\n\n\"See each other again, aye.\"\n\nAlek clicked his heels. \"Good-bye, Deryn Sharp.\"\n\n\"Good-bye, Aleksandar of Hohenberg.\" She felt a hard spot growing in her throat. This was really happening. They'd be apart for years now, and all she could think to say was, \"You're not going to get soppy and kiss my hand, are you?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't dream of it.\" Alek's bow turned into a slow step backward, as if he were trying to leave but couldn't. Then his gaze went past her, and he smiled with relief. \"In any case, there's someone else who wants a moment with you.\"\n\nDeryn closed her eyes. \"Please don't tell me it's that bum-rag Malone.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Alek said. \"It's the ambassador of the Ottoman Republic and his beautiful young assistant.\"\n\n\"The who and his what?\" Deryn said as she turned around.\n\nStanding before her were Lilit and the Kizlar Agha.\n\n\"OLD ALLIES.\"\n\nLilit was the daughter of Zaven, the revolutionary who had befriended Alek and Deryn in Istanbul. The Kizlar Agha, on the other hand, had been the sultan's personal counselor. Zaven had been killed fighting for the revolution, and the sultan's government overthrown.\n\nSo, what were these two enemies doing here in New York . . . together?\n\n\"Mr. Sharp!\" Lilit threw her arms around Deryn, hugging her tight.\n\nFor a moment Deryn feared the girl would kiss her, as she had the last time they'd laid eyes on each other. But when Lilit pulled away, she only flashed a knowing smile.\n\n\"Ah, the airsick airman,\" the Kizlar Agha said, stepping forward to shake Deryn's hand. He was dressed in formal evening clothes, a far cry from his Ottoman uniform. But the mechanical recording owl still sat on his shoulder, its clockwork spinning. \"Pleasure to see you again.\"\n\n\"Aye, and you, too! Both of you.\" Deryn shook her head. \"A bit unexpected, though.\"\n\n\"Unexpected for all of us, I think,\" Lilit said, watching Alek making his way back to Tesla's group. Deryn forced herself not to do the same.\n\nMaybe the war really would end soon, and they could see each other again. But for the moment, thinking about Alek would only make her life more complicated, painful, and likely to fall apart.\n\n\"I thought you'd be busy ruling the Ottoman Republic,\" Deryn said to Lilit.\n\n\"So did I.\" The girl swore in unladylike fashion. \"But the Committee says I'm more suited to rebelling than to governing. So they've sent me as far away as possible.\"\n\n\"Hardly a punishment, though,\" the Kizlar Agha said with a smile. \"At least I hope not, as I am here too.\"\n\n\"Did Alek say you were the ambassador, sir?\" Deryn asked.\n\nThe man straightened. \"Ambassador of the Ottoman Republic to the United States of America. A rather long title to reward a tiny favor.\"\n\n\"Not so tiny, sir,\" Deryn said, bowing. On the night of the Ottoman Revolution, the Kizlar Agha had spirited away the sultan in his airyacht\u2014kidnapping his own sovereign. Thanks to that, the rebellion had ended in a single night. \"I reckon you saved a few thousand lives.\"\n\n\"I simply did my job and protected the sultan. He lives happily in Persia now.\"\n\nLilit snorted. \"He plots happily against the republic, you mean. His spies are everywhere!\"\n\n\"He's not the only one,\" Deryn said. \"As we found out last night.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" The Kizlar Agha reached up to switch off the mechanical recording owl; the tiny wheels whirring within halted. His voice became a murmur. \"As you may remember, Mr. Sharp, the kaiser was a close friend of my former sultan. I still have many contacts among the Germans.\"\n\nLilit stepped closer. \"Recently we learned certain secrets from them. Secrets that the government of the republic can't pass on to the British. Not officially.\"\n\n\"But unofficially?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"As long as no one ever finds out where they came from . . .\" The Kizlar Agha looked about the room. \"Perhaps you two should take a walk and catch up on old times. Relive the splendor of the revolution!\"\n\n\"An excellent idea.\" Lilit took Deryn by the shoulder.\n\n\"I shouldn't leave without telling Dr. Barlow.\"\n\n\"It's not a good idea to make a fuss,\" Lilit said softly. \"We'll be back within the hour. And I promise, what I have to tell you is worth a bit of bad manners.\"\n\nEscaping unnoticed wasn't difficult. Dr. Barlow had found a group of bowler-hatted boffins to chat with, and Lilit seemed to know her way around the consulate. She led Deryn through the kitchens and out a back door, where a pair of policemen looked a bit surprised to see them, but apparently weren't under orders to keep anyone from leaving.\n\nAs they walked along the asphalt streets of Manhattan, Deryn began to feel her knee. It hadn't hurt all day, but the autumn chill and Lilit's quick pace had started it buzzing again. When Deryn shifted more weight onto her cane, Lilit raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"That isn't just for show?\"\n\n\"I had a dodgy landing on glider wings. We probably shouldn't walk so fast.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Lilit slowed a squick. \"But can you still fight?\"\n\nDeryn snorted. \"You haven't changed much, have you?\"\n\n\"The world hasn't changed.\" Lilit shifted her daringly cut dress to reveal a tiny Mauser pistol gartered to her leg. \"I wish you weren't in that Air Service uniform. It's a bit conspicuous.\"\n\nDeryn looked about. The streets were full of bustling people, steam trams, and pushcarts. She'd heard snatches of several languages as they'd walked, and had even seen a few shop signs in German.\n\nShe shrugged. \"I'm an airman. This is my uniform.\"\n\n\"I preferred you in Turkish clothes,\" Lilit said. \"Perhaps we should get off the street and into someplace dark. Fancy a moving-picture show?\"\n\n\"Aye, I would,\" Deryn said. She'd been curious about the whole business after Alek had become so enthralled. \"Is there a cinema about?\"\n\nLilit smiled. \"In New York City? Yes, a few.\"\n\nThey took the next right turn, and a block away Deryn found herself looking up at a huge sign. It was covered in small electric lights that flicked on and off in sequence, as if wee beasties were skittering across it. In the center, giant letters spelled out EMBASSY CINEMA\u2014NEWSREELS ALL DAY.\n\nAs they approached the ticket booth, Deryn's hands went to her pockets, but of course she hadn't a single coin.\n\n\"Sorry, Lilit, but I've got no American money.\"\n\n\"Well, you did risk your life fighting for the revolution,\" the girl said, producing a folded bill from a hidden pocket. \"I suppose the Ottoman Republic can buy you a movie ticket.\"\n\nThe cinema was in most ways like an ordinary theater, with a few hundred seats spread out before a wide proscenium arch. But instead of a stage, a silvery white rectangle faced the audience. It was still late afternoon, and only a handful of people were present. As Deryn and Lilit made their way to seats near the back, the gaslights began to dim.\n\n\"Why exactly are we sneaking about?\" Deryn asked once they were settled. \"Are you afraid of making the Germans angry?\"\n\n\"The Ottoman people have enjoyed the kaiser's generosity for a long time. We still need his engineers to make our machines work.\"\n\n\"Aye, of course.\" Every bit of Istanbul that Deryn had seen was wrapped in steam pipes and other mechanical contraptions.\n\n\"The Germans are desperate for more allies.\" Lilit leaned closer. \"Austria-Hungary is falling to pieces. A few weeks ago they repulsed a Russian attack, but the fighting bears only scattered into the woods. And the creatures still have to eat.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed, remembering the starving bears in Siberia. In a populated countryside the beasties would be much worse. It would be like living in some horrid old fairy tale, with every forest full of monsters.\n\nLilit gave a shrug. \"So we pretend to consider joining the Clankers. A profitable ruse, so far.\"\n\nA sudden clattering came from behind them, and Deryn glanced back. Behind the audience a large machine with a single eye was sputtering and spinning. Light erupted from it to spill across the screen.\n\nAt first it was shadowy and blurred, just as Alek had said. But in a few moments Deryn's eyes adjusted, and a smoky auditorium appeared before her, two ghostly pale boxers in the ring cheered on by a silent crowd.\n\nLilit was settled back into her seat, her eyes wide and glittering. \"It's not just Austria's weakness that has the Germans worried. They're convinced that Goliath will work.\"\n\n\"Aye. You should have seen what it did in Siberia. Not a tree left standing for miles.\"\n\n\"I've seen it. Everyone has.\" Lilit gestured at the screen. \"Mr. Tesla was filming in Siberia, you know. The first of his newsreels appeared two weeks ago. We may see one today.\"\n\n\"Aye, he almost crashed our ship!\" Deryn cried. \"Bringing aboard all his cameras and scientific equipment.\"\n\nBut perhaps it made sense now. As Alek kept saying, the whole point of a weapon like Goliath was to scare everyone so much that you never had to use it.\n\nLilit was watching the boxing now, her shoulders twitching a bit, as if she were throwing the punches herself. But she went on talking.\n\n\"Last week the ambassador asked his German friends, 'How can we side with you now? We don't want Istanbul going up in a ball of flame.' They told him not to worry. They have plans for Mr. Tesla.\"\n\n\"Aye, that rocket attack.\"\n\n\"That was just a warning.\" Lilit swept her gaze across the audience. Two school-age girls sat a few rows away, but there was no one else within earshot. \"And if Tesla doesn't heed it, they intend to destroy Goliath once and for all. With an invasion if necessary.\"\n\n\"An invasion! Right here? Won't that drag the Americans into the war?\"\n\n\"An enemy across the ocean is better than their cities being leveled.\" Lilit's voice sank to a whisper. \"A Wasserwanderer is on its way. That's all we know.\"\n\n\"A water-walker?\" Deryn said.\n\n\"The ambassador thinks it's some sort of U-boat, but amphibious.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. She'd never heard the word \"amphibious\" applied to a machine before, but it had a certain logic. Goliath was on an island near New York City\u2014within a short stroll of the sea, Mr. Tesla always said.\n\nTesla might think to guard himself against saboteurs, but an armored walker popping out of the water?\n\n\"It will attack without warning one night,\" Lilit said. \"Then slip away into the ocean again, leaving only wreckage and a mystery. The Americans might never realize what happened.\"\n\n\"Have you warned Tesla?\"\n\nLilit shook her head. \"He'd only blab to the press about it. He can't afford a private army, after all. And telling the Americans is pointless. They won't send a battleship to protect one man's property against a rumor. Especially when that man wants to wage war like some sort of demigod!\"\n\nDeryn nodded. Some of the newspapers were already questioning whether Tesla should be allowed to wield such power. After all, if Goliath worked the way he claimed, he could become ruler of the world with the flick of a switch.\n\n\"So you want us to help?\"\n\n\"You'll be helping yourself.\" Lilit turned from the screen. The boxing show had sputtered to a halt, and while the projector was being reloaded, the two nearby girls began to chatter about boys. \"The Leviathan is powerful enough to stop a walker, and stealthy enough to lay in wait while Tesla completes his tests. And may I remind you, Mr. Sharp, that his success is entirely in British interests.\"\n\n\"Aye, true.\"\n\n\"Can you deliver this message without revealing who gave it to you?\"\n\nDeryn nodded. Only the lady boffin had to know. Now that Tesla was off the ship, she would have free rein to order people about again.\n\n\"I knew I could count on you.\" Lilit smiled. \"You're still in love with Alek, aren't you?\"\n\nDeryn opened her mouth, but behind her the projector began sputtering again, filling the cinema with flickering light. She cleared her throat, her mouth too dry to speak.\n\n\"He seems to have grown up a bit,\" Lilit said. \"Now that he's got a purpose in life.\"\n\nDeryn found her voice. \"Aye. He's convinced himself that he's destined to end the war. It's all part of a plan.\"\n\n\"Ah. So he's forgotten the most important rule of warfare.\"\n\n\"Which is . . .\"\n\n\"That nothing ever goes to plan. But he finally knows your secret, right?\"\n\nDeryn took a sharp breath. She'd forgotten how annoyingly perspicacious Lilit could be. \"Aye. It's made things a bit tricky between us.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't. Now you can tell him what you want.\"\n\n\"Aye, but to do that I'd have to know what I want,\" Deryn said.\n\nPart of her wished more than anything to remain here in America with Alek, but that meant throwing away her career. She could take up the lady boffin's offer of working for the London Zoological Society, or even stay in the Air Service, but there would always be the danger of being found out and losing everything.\n\nIt was all a great barking mess.\n\nShe turned from Lilit's gaze and stared up as the next newsreel began. . . .\n\nAnd there it was before her, the Leviathan soaring over a hilly expanse of desert, the image muddy and colorless on the screen, but vibrant in her memory. The point of view banked into a turn, and Deryn realized that there'd been cameras aboard General Villa's manta ships.\n\nThen she was seeing the Leviathan from above, the camera peeking over a steep cliff as the airship descended into Pancho Villa's canyon. Crewmen and beasties scurried across the topside like bugs, the steel talons of the ship's ring of strafing hawks glittering in the sun.\n\nSuddenly a winged figure rose into view, an airman staring wide-eyed into the camera. Deryn blinked, not quite believing\u2014it was her own face up there on the screen.\n\nThe image was replaced by a sign . . . THE BRAVE AIRMAN TESTS HIS WINGS!\n\n\"Tests his wings?\" she said aloud. As if she'd been larking about instead of preventing disaster! Giggles came from the pair of girls nearby as the sign disappeared. They were pointing up at her on the screen.\n\n\"They seem to think you make a dashing boy,\" Lilit said. \"Quite right too. When do you leave?\"\n\n\"Our twenty-four hours will be up tonight.\"\n\n\"Too bad. And Alek's staying, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Aye. He works for Tesla now.\"\n\n\"Oh, poor Dylan.\" The flickering screen showed Alek now, standing face-to-face with Pancho Villa's massive fighting bulls. \"But Dylan isn't your real name, is it?\"\n\nDeryn shook her head but supplied nothing more. Lilit seemed to have guessed everything else about her; she might as well figure out the rest on her own.\n\n\"Do you want to stay a man forever?\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem possible. Too many people know already.\" Deryn looked at the schoolgirls, who were unescorted and didn't seem ashamed about it. \"Though maybe I don't have to. Women can ride in balloons here, and they can pilot walkers. Dr. Barlow says that British women will get the vote, once the war is over.\"\n\n\"Fah. The Committee promised the same thing, back when we were rebels.\" Lilit shook her head. \"But now that we're in power, there seems to be no rush. And when I complained, I was sent five thousand miles away.\"\n\n\"Aye, but I'm glad you're here,\" Deryn said softly.\n\nShe'd never talked about Alek aloud before, not to anyone. That was the problem with leading a secret life. The whole unsoldierly business of wanting him had all taken place between her own ears, except for that one brief moment on the topside.\n\n\"I kissed him once,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Well done. What did he do?\"\n\n\"Um . . .\" Deryn sighed. \"He woke up.\"\n\n\"Woke up? Had you snuck into his cabin, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"No! He'd fallen and knocked his daft head. It was a medical emergency!\"\n\nLilit snorted out a laugh, and Deryn turned from her to stare glumly at the screen. Maybe she should just confess to the world what she was. Then she could stop having secrets forever.\n\nBut the reason why she couldn't was right in front of her, written in flickering light. The air was the air, and every minute aboard the Leviathan was worth a lifetime of lies.\n\n\"Do you love him?\"\n\nDeryn swallowed, then pointed at the screen. \"He makes me feel like that. Like flying.\"\n\n\"Then, you have to tell him.\"\n\n\"I told you, I kissed him!\"\n\n\"It's hardly the same. I kissed you, after all. That wasn't love, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Aye, and what exactly was it?\"\n\n\"Curiosity.\" Lilit smiled. \"And as I said, you're quite a dashing boy.\"\n\n\"But I'm pretty sure Alek doesn't want a dashing boy!\"\n\n\"You can't be sure until you ask.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"You were raised to throw bombs. I wasn't.\"\n\n\"Were you raised to wear trousers and be a soldier?\"\n\n\"Maybe not. But those are both dead easy compared to this!\" One of the schoolgirls glared back at them, and Deryn lowered her voice. \"At any rate it doesn't matter what he wants. He's the heir to the Austrian throne, and I'm a commoner.\"\n\n\"That throne may not exist once this war is over.\"\n\n\"Well, that's cheery.\"\n\n\"That's war.\" Lilit pulled out a pocket watch and read it in the jittering light from the screen. \"We should get back.\"\n\nDeryn nodded, but as she followed Lilit up the aisle, she took one last glance over her shoulder. The Leviathan was soaring again across the desert, its engines repaired.\n\nShe promised herself then to make everything clear, the very next time she was alone with Alek. After all, she'd made a solemn vow never to keep secrets from him.\n\nOf course that moment might not come until the war was over, years from now, when the world would be a very different place.\n\nAlek's next two weeks were a whirl of cocktail parties, press conferences, and scientific demonstrations. Money had to be raised, reporters entertained, and diplomats introduced to the young prince with a shaky claim to the throne of Austria-Hungary. It was all so different from the rhythms of the Leviathan, the patterns of watches and bells and mealtimes. Alek missed the steady thrum of engines and the gentle sway of the deck beneath his feet.\n\nHe missed Deryn as well, even more than he had in those awful days after learning her secret. At least then the two of them had been walking the same corridors, but now the Leviathan was missing as well, all connections with his best friend and ally severed.\n\nInstead of Deryn he had Nikola Tesla, a draining man to spend long days with. Tesla wrestled with the secrets of the universe, but he also spent hours selecting the right wines for dinner. He lamented the war's daily toll of lives, but wasted time flattering reporters, wringing every drop of fame from these moments in the spotlight.\n\nHe lived in the grip of odd passions, none stranger than his love of pigeons. A dozen of the gray, warbling creatures inhabited Tesla's rooms at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. He was overjoyed to see them again after his months in Siberia, during which the hotel staff had looked after them dutifully, and at great cost.\n\nAnd yet Tesla knew how to turn his eccentricities into charm, especially when investors were present. He put on electrikal shows in his Manhattan laboratory and presided over lavish dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria, swiftly raising enough money to make the necessary improvements to his weapon.\n\nBut it felt like ages before Tesla and Alek completed their journey to Long Island. In a Pinkerton armored walker paid for by Hearst-Path\u00e9 Newsreels, the inventor finally brought Alek and his men to a huge tower looming over the small seaside town of Shoreham.\n\nGoliath stood as tall as a skyscraper, a giant cousin to the sultan's Tesla cannon in Istanbul. Four smaller towers surrounded the central structure, which was crowned with a copper-sheathed hemisphere that shone brilliantly in the sun. Workmen scrambled over it, making the final adjustments before tonight's test. Beneath the towers was the brick powerhouse of the complex, its chimneys huffing.\n\n\"VISITING THE SECOND TOWER.\"\n\nThe Pinkerton walker entered the compound through a tall barbed wire fence. The fence was enough to keep away tourists and trespassers, but Alek saw nothing that would stop a military walker.\n\nTwo days after the Leviathan's departure, a messenger eagle had arrived bearing a letter from Deryn. She had passed on Lilit's warning, along with a promise that the Leviathan would be lurking off the coast, secretly watching for any sign of U-boats\u2014or \"water-walkers,\" whatever they were.\n\nDeryn had asked Alek not to tell anyone about the German threat. But as Alek watched the pair of guards closing the gate again, with their antique rifles leaning against the guardhouse, secrecy didn't seem like such a good idea. If he and his men were going to sit here in harm's way, a bit more information might be useful.\n\nAlek jostled the great snoozing form beside him.\n\n\"Master Klopp? We're here.\"\n\nKlopp's sleepy eyes peered up at Goliath. \"Looks like a child went mad with a mechanikal set.\"\n\n\"A child with very wealthy admirers,\" Volger muttered. He was fussing with the abundance of luggage he'd brought, dividing its weight between Hoffman and Bauer.\n\nAlek glanced at Tesla, who was riding in front with the pilot, and lowered his voice. \"Have you ever heard, Master Klopp, of something called a water-walker? A U-boat that can come onto land?\"\n\n\"Water-walker,\" Bovril said.\n\nThe old man frowned, wiping sleep from his eyes. \"I've seen a working model, quarter scale. But it's the other way round, young master.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"A water-walker isn't a U-boat with legs. It's a land machine that's waterproof. It walks across the bottom of a river or a lake, like a metal crab.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"A machine like that could never cross an entire ocean, right?\"\n\nKlopp looked at Hoffman, who said, \"Impossible, sir. It would be crushed at a few hundred meters.\"\n\n\"Crushed!\" Bovril said.\n\n\"So it's an empty threat,\" Alek said to himself, breathing a sigh of relief.\n\nBut then Hoffman spoke up again. \"Of course, sir, you could take it across by ship. Then drop it onto the continental shelf.\"\n\nKlopp thought a moment, then nodded. \"And let it walk in from, say, fifty kilometers out?\"\n\n\"I see.\" Alek doubted the Germans could sneak that large a ship past the British blockade, but the water-walker could be carried on some sort of U-boat.\n\n\"You see what, exactly?\" Count Volger said. \"Where did you hear of this machine?\"\n\n\"In the newspapers.\" Alek found that lying had come easier lately. It was distressing but quite useful. \"They were discussing the kaiser's threats against Tesla.\"\n\n\"And this penny paper knew of secret German weapons?\" Volger asked.\n\nAlek shrugged. \"Only rumors.\"\n\nVolger narrowed his eyes as the machine came to a halt. The gangway door opened, and Alek jumped out to help Klopp down. The reporters were piling out of the motorcar that had followed the walker, pointing their cameras up at Goliath.\n\nThe smell of salt was heavy in the air. The open sea was on the far side of the island, twenty kilometers distant, but Long Island Sound was a short walk away. According to the nautical maps Alek had checked, the sound was shallow, child's play for a water-walker to navigate.\n\nAlek stared into the sky, though he knew the Leviathan was too far away, lurking near the narrow passage between the ocean and the sound. But perhaps from the top of Goliath's central tower, with a pair of good field glasses, he could catch a glimpse . . .\n\nVolger was staring at him, so Alek dropped his eyes and hurried ahead. Tesla was already bounding toward the tower, ready to put the weapon through its final paces. If the improvements to Goliath worked as expected, tonight's test would change the color of the sunrise in Berlin\u2014fair warning for what was to come.\n\nThe Germans would have to take notice.\n\nThe control room of Goliath looked like a Clanker version of the Leviathan's bridge. It jutted out from the roof of the power station, with tall windows offering a sweeping view of the towers and the darkening sky. In the room's center stood a huge bank of levers and dials; around it were clustered black boxes on wheels, covered with glowing tubes and glass spheres.\n\nTesla called out orders to his men, making use of a dozen telephones connected to the other parts of the complex. Within a few minutes the smoke from the powerhouse chimneys had redoubled. An electrikal buzz filled the control room, and Bovril's fur began to stand on end.\n\n\"Rather intoxicating, isn't it, Your Highness?\"\n\nAlek turned, and was surprised to find Adela Rogers speaking to him. The Hearst reporter had spent the last two weeks angry at him for leaking the pope's letter to Eddie Malone, one of Pulitzer's men, instead of to her. But she looked caught up in the excitement of the moment, her eyes sparkling as the spheres and tubes began to glow around them.\n\n\"It's a relief more than anything,\" Alek said. \"We may be coming to the end of this war at last.\"\n\n\"There's no maybe about it,\" Tesla boomed from his controls. \"Your faith in me will be rewarded tonight, Your Highness.\"\n\nMiss Rogers raised her writing pad. \"Mr. Tesla, what can we expect the test to look like from here?\"\n\n\"Goliath is an earth resonance cannon, using the planet itself as a capacitor. What you will see is a path of pure energy stretching from the ground below us all the way to the troposphere!\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"Won't that be a danger to aircraft?\"\n\n\"Not this test.\" Tesla's hands paused a moment on the controls. \"But if I ever fire Goliath in earnest, we'll warn them to stay away. Ten kilometers in all directions, I should think.\"\n\n\"Let's hope that doesn't happen, sir,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Alek said, and made a note to warn Deryn in his next letter.\n\nBovril was shifting nervously on his shoulder, trying to smooth its fur. Alek reached up and felt the crackle of static as he stroked the beastie. The air smelled of electricity, like when he and Deryn had been topside over the Pacific, facing the approaching storm. The night she'd kissed him.\n\n\"The kaiser can be quite cantankerous, you know,\" Miss Rogers said. \"How long will you give him to submit?\"\n\n\"That depends on tonight's experiment.\" Tesla gazed up at his machine, a smile on his face. \"If Goliath works as it should, a single demonstration should prove convincing enough.\"\n\nEven a test firing required vast amounts of energy, and it would be hours before the weapon's capacitors were full. So while the chimneys smoked and the dials nudged slowly upward, Mr. Tesla served his guests supper in an ornate dining hall just beneath the control room.\n\nThe inventor sat at the head of the table, as always ordering up several courses and wines, though it was quite late already. Alek had suffered through laboratory demonstrations in Manhattan that had lasted until the wee hours.\n\nHe turned to Volger beside him. \"This will take all night, won't it?\"\n\nAcross the table, Bauer cleared his throat. \"Actually, sir, sunrise in Berlin is at seven. That's midnight here.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Alek said. \"An excellent point, Hans.\"\n\n\"Did you think he'd end the war with a flick of a switch?\" Volger asked.\n\nAlek didn't answer, leaning back as the first course of the evening was served, a consomm\u00e9 of turtle soup. Hoffman and Bauer looked down at their bowls dubiously. They'd been spared Tesla's feasts in Manhattan, but out here in the wilderness of Long Island, there were fewer reporters and investors about, so they had been promoted to dinner guests. Tesla's head engineers were also present, as immaculate in their formal jackets as they'd been in white coats.\n\nAs always at the inventor's table, fabricated beasts were banned. Alek found himself missing Bovril's weight on his shoulder and its nonsense mutterings, especially the snatches of Deryn's Scottish lilt.\n\n\"You seem less than serene, Your Highness,\" Volger said. \"Perhaps a seaside stroll after dinner?\"\n\n\"It's a bit cold for that.\"\n\n\"I suppose. And so many unpleasant things in the water.\"\n\nAlek sighed. He'd said too much about the water-walker in front of Volger. The man wouldn't stop digging now until he knew.\n\n\"I was thinking about visitors,\" Alek said in a low voice. \"Germans.\"\n\n\"I wasn't aware any had been invited.\"\n\n\"They have invited themselves.\"\n\nVolger glanced at the other end of the table, where Tesla was amusing the handful of reporters by ordering that the cutlery be rearranged. He always insisted that the forks, spoons, and knives be laid out in multiples of three. The staff at the Waldorf-Astoria had grown used to his eccentricities, but the servants here in Shoreham were still learning.\n\n\"Who told you about these water-walkers?\" Volger asked quietly.\n\n\"Deryn. And I can't say from whom. In any case there's not much we can do except wait.\"\n\n\"Have I taught you nothing?\" Volger said. \"There are always ways to prepare.\"\n\n\"The Leviathan is stationed nearby, ready to protect us. And preparations are overrated. The fact that we're here in America instead of the Alps is proof of that.\"\n\n\"The fact that you're alive at all is proof of quite the opposite,\" Volger said. Then he leaned away to murmur to Bauer, Hoffman, and Klopp.\n\nAlek let himself relax and enjoy his food, relieved that he'd confessed the secret to Volger. The man might be a schemer at heart, a tight-lipped plotter who could never quite be trusted, but there was one oath he would never break\u2014the one he'd made to Alek's father. Every infuriating thing Volger had ever done, from his grueling fencing lessons to his blackmail of Deryn, had been to protect Alek and see him one day on the throne.\n\nWhen the wildcount turned back to Alek, leaving the other men still muttering, he said, \"We'll be ready, Your Highness.\"\n\n\"I should have known you'd have something up your sleeve.\"\n\n\"I have no other choice,\" Volger said. \"No matter how far from the war we run, it always catches up with us.\"\n\nDeryn stood at attention against the wall of her cabin, taking deep, unhurried breaths. Finally she bent her knees, sliding her back down the wall until she was sitting on her heels. Her muscles quivered and her injury burned. But now came the hard part\u2014pushing herself back up.\n\nIt was slow and agonizing, but Deryn managed it without crying out or toppling over. She stood there panting, her eyes shut against the pain.\n\n\"Exercising, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\nShe opened her eyes to find Dr. Barlow framed in the doorway, Tazza at her side. The boffin's loris sat on its usual perch, looking imperiously about the middy's tiny cabin.\n\nBut Deryn was in no mood for the three of them. \"It's traditional to knock, ma'am, even when the door's open.\"\n\n\"I stand corrected.\" Dr. Barlow rapped twice on the wooden frame. \"Though you are hardly a slave to tradition yourself, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nThe loris chuckled, but didn't repeat the words. It had grown quieter these last two weeks, almost thoughtful. Maybe it was missing Bovril.\n\n\"It's good to see you getting that knee into shape, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"I've got to climb the ratlines again,\" Deryn said. \"I'm going mad, stuck down here in the gondola.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Dr. Barlow said, then frowned. \"You'll be wanting to muck about on the topside of every airship we travel on, won't you?\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am.\" Deryn took a breath and bent her knees again. \"I do love tying those knots.\"\n\n\"In love,\" the loris said softly.\n\nDeryn froze halfway down and stared at it.\n\nDr. Barlow smiled. \"Aha. You are in love, aren't you, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"Ma'am?\"\n\n\"With flying. You're in love with the air.\"\n\nDeryn slid down the rest of the way, then pushed herself back up without a pause, letting pain hide her expression. Nosy boffins and their clever lorises.\n\nOf course, it hardly mattered what Dr. Barlow was really thinking. Alek was gone, swept up in a distant world of power, influence, and peacemaking, maybe forever. How could someone who was in the newspapers every day have anything more to do with Deryn Sharp?\n\n\"Don't worry, young man. My duties with the Zoological Society involve a great deal of travel. You'll see plenty of airships.\"\n\n\"I'm sure, ma'am.\" Deryn sullenly reminded herself how lucky she was for the lady boffin's offer of employment.\n\nHer close call with Malone had taught her one thing\u2014if she were found out, it would humiliate her officers and shipmates. Deryn couldn't risk that, and it was clear that the lady boffin's shadowy Society was an easier place to keep secrets than the Air Service. In the Society, she reckoned, having more than one identity wouldn't be a problem at all. Dr. Barlow had even joked that Deryn might need to disguise herself as a girl, every now and then.\n\nBut it meant that Deryn hadn't just lost Alek; she'd lost her home as well.\n\nShe slid down the wall once more, ignoring the growing pain in her knee. She was desperate for one last climb in the ratlines before they headed back to London, Dr. Busk and his timid advice be damned. Nothing else in the sky measured up to the Leviathan.\n\n\"Disconsolate,\" the loris said softly.\n\nDr. Barlow shushed it. \"You should join us on the bridge, Mr. Sharp. The view may be interesting tonight.\"\n\n\"That's right. They're testing Goliath, aren't they?\" Alek's latest letter had been full of excitement. \"But I thought you said it wouldn't work, ma'am.\"\n\nThe lady boffin shrugged. \"I merely said that Goliath cannot call down fire from the sky. I would never suggest that Mr. Tesla is incapable of putting on a show.\"\n\nWhen they were halfway to the bridge, the Klaxon began to ring.\n\n\"Is that battle stations?\" Dr. Barlow asked. \"How interesting.\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am, it is.\" Deryn winced as she walked faster, wishing now that she hadn't worked her knee so hard. \"But it's probably a drill. Sitting still for two weeks hasn't done much for morale.\"\n\n\"You could be right, Mr. Sharp.\" They both stepped aside as a squad of riggers thundered past. \"But mightn't the Germans think this a fine evening to strike?\"\n\n\"How do you mean, ma'am?\"\n\nThey started walking again, and the lady boffin said, \"Mr. Tesla has warned the world to expect alarms and eruptions in the sky. Any mishap might be written off as his machine going wrong, especially if there are no survivors to tell the tale.\"\n\n\"No survivors,\" the lady boffin's loris said, and Deryn redoubled her pace.\n\nThe Klaxon choked off in midring just as she and Dr. Barlow reached the bridge. The officers had gathered at the starboard windows, field glasses raised. A dozen message lizards were scampering across the ceiling.\n\nThis was no drill.\n\nDr. Busk turned from the windows and gave Deryn a nod. \"I must admit, Mr. Sharp, I was beginning to doubt your story. But this is quite extraordinary.\"\n\nDeryn stepped up beside him, following the stares of the officers. Below the Leviathan three trails of bubbles stretched across the water.\n\nShe shook her head, trying to imagine giant machines beneath the surface, their legs thrashing in the cold and dark.\n\n\"I'm a bit surprised myself, sir.\"\n\n\"The two escorts are no bigger than land corvettes, Captain,\" the first officer was saying. \"But the one in the middle must be the size of a frigate.\"\n\nDeryn leaned out over the handrail, wondering how the man could tell so much from mere bubbles. The water was as black as pitch, and the trails looked like scattered diamonds in the light of the rising half-moon, too delicate to be exhaust from huge Clanker engines.\n\nThe ruckus of battle stations filled the air, shouts and squawks and the roar of engines, and Deryn clenched the rail. She shifted her weight from foot to foot, her whole body outraged to be here on the bridge instead of topside.\n\n\"Our faith in you has been rewarded, Mr. Sharp,\" the lady boffin said from just behind her. \"But do stop jittering.\"\n\n\"Like a barking monkey,\" her loris said.\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am.\" Deryn settled herself. If they sent her back to her cabin, she might well explode.\n\n\"Less than a hundred feet deep here,\" the navigator spoke up. Charts were spread out before him on the decoding table. \"This is the shallowest water for miles, sir.\"\n\nThe captain nodded. \"Then, let us begin our attack. Slow to one quarter, Pilot. Let the wind carry us over.\"\n\nThe thrum of the engines softened, and the airship began to drift to starboard. The trails of bubbles were just reaching a narrow channel among the islands at the entrance to Long Island Sound.\n\n\"Those bubbles must be drifting as they rise,\" the captain said. \"How fast is that current?\"\n\nThe pilot lowered his field glasses. \"About five knots, sir.\"\n\n\"And how long does it take for bubbles to rise a hundred feet?\"\n\nNo answer came, and everyone looked at the lady boffin.\n\n\"That depends on their size,\" she explained. \"Champagne-size bubbles, as we've all seen, can take several seconds to travel an inch.\"\n\nA moment of bemused silence stretched out, until Deryn spoke up. \"These aren't champagne bubbles, ma'am. They're exhaust from barking great diesel engines. The size of cricket balls at least!\"\n\n\"Ah, of course.\" Dr. Barlow stared down at the black water. \"Perhaps ten feet a second, then.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor,\" the captain said. \"Bombs away on my mark. Three . . . two . . .\"\n\nThe deck shuddered a bit as the weight of the aerial bomb fell away, sending a twinge through Deryn's knee. She leaned out over the tilted windows, trying to see directly beneath the ship.\n\nFor a moment there was nothing but the dark, flat ocean, but then a column of water shot into the air as the bomb went in. The detonation followed seconds later, a silvery flower opening in the moonlight. Finally the gasses released by the explosion reached the surface, rising up in a frothing white dome. Ripples tumbled out across the water, full-blown waves cresting and storming as they rolled across the shallows.\n\n\"Bring us about,\" the captain ordered.\n\nThe Leviathan spun slowly in place until the bridge windows faced the channel again. The surface had stilled, and Deryn peered down, searching for exhaust trails.\n\nOne of the machines was in trouble\u2014its stream of bubbles was swelling, filled with pops and splashes. And then another giant dome of water rose up, white and boiling.\n\n\"Secondary explosion,\" the first officer announced. \"That's one of the escorts crushed by the shock wave.\"\n\n\"Fish in a barrel,\" said the captain.\n\nDeryn tried to imagine the men inside the water-walker, fighting their hopeless battle to keep the ocean from gushing in. Now the other escort was failing, its exhaust stream sputtering in fits and starts. This one died with a whimper, though, its scattering of bubbles fading out to nothing.\n\n\"That's both the little ones, sir,\" the first officer said.\n\nDeryn shuddered. It would be dark down there as lights and engines failed, and the water would be icy cold.\n\nShe'd never seen combat from the serene vantage of the Leviathan's bridge before. Running about topside, the horror of battle was lost in a swirl of excitement and danger. This felt inhuman, watching men die when she felt no fear herself.\n\nNot that her squeamishness made any difference to the sailors below.\n\n\"The frigate's made of sterner stuff, Captain.\" The first officer turned from the windows. \"Shall we make another run?\"\n\nCaptain Hobbes shook his head. \"Stand by, but stay at battle stations.\"\n\nDeryn turned to Dr. Barlow and asked softly, \"Why aren't we finishing them off, ma'am?\"\n\n\"BOMBS AWAY.\"\n\n\"Because they're underwater, Mr. Sharp. A German warship that can't be seen is of no use to us.\"\n\n\"No use, ma'am?\"\n\n\"This is a Clanker attack upon sovereign territory of the United States. We can hardly let it go unnoticed.\"\n\nDeryn looked down at Long Island Sound, her eyes widening. The exhaust trail of the surviving walker was still moving, following the coastline toward Tesla's machine.\n\n\"But we can't just . . .\" Deryn's cry faded as she saw the eyes of the officers upon her. She dropped her eyes and said softly, \"Alek's down there.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Dr. Barlow cleared her throat. \"Captain, perhaps we should send a warning to His Highness.\"\n\nCaptain Hobbes thought a moment, then nodded. \"If you would, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn snatched up a piece of paper from the decoding table and began to scribble. \"It'll take an hour for an eagle to get there!\"\n\n\"Steady, Mr. Sharp,\" the lady boffin said. \"That walker's barely making fifteen miles an hour. Half the speed of an eagle at night.\"\n\n\"But Alek thinks we're protecting him, ma'am. He doesn't know we'll wait till that contraption's on his doorstep!\"\n\nThe woman sighed. \"It is unfortunate, but these are orders from Lord Churchill himself.\"\n\nDeryn froze, making a fist around the writing pen. So this had been the plan all along, to destroy the last walker only after it emerged onto land. The Admiralty, of course, wanted a German war machine sitting on American soil for all the world to see, not some wreck lying beneath a hundred feet of water.\n\nThis was all about dragging the United States into the war.\n\nBut Goliath stood only half a mile from shore. The Leviathan would barely have time for one bomb run. If they missed, the water-walker would destroy Tesla's weapon and everyone within.\n\nAlek was down there among the scattered lights of Long Island, without Deryn Sharp to protect him.\n\nDinner was unspeakably tedious. The turtle soup had led to saddle of lamb in sauce b\u00e9arnaise, and that in turn to breast of hazel grouse. Now that the cheeses were done, dessert was \"black cow\"\u2014ice cream floating in something called root beer, a concoction that had sparked a childish glee in Mr. Tesla and Master Klopp.\n\n\"A fencing lesson tomorrow, I should think,\" said Count Volger, leaning back from the table and loosening the lower buttons of his jacket.\n\n\"An excellent idea.\" Alek stared at his unfinished dessert, his ice cream melting into slurry. He'd been too impatient to eat much, but his reflexes were growing rusty from parties and dinners. He needed the feel of a sword in his hand.\n\nAdela Rogers seemed to be in her element, though. She was holding forth at Tesla's right hand, telling the host's end of the table how Hearst had managed to wrangle his new movie deal with the famous Pancho Villa. She didn't seem bothered that she was the only woman in the room. Indeed, she seemed to thrive on it. She was describing Hearst's flattery and bribes of Villa as if it were a romantic adventure, giving her female viewpoint incontestable authority.\n\nAlek tried to imagine Deryn using the same strategy, if she were ever stuffed back into skirts. Could her swagger ever translate into the sort of flair and charm that Miss Rogers deployed?\n\nPerhaps, Alek thought. But Deryn would also be ready with a good solid punch if one were needed. He could testify to that himself.\n\n\"Your Serene Highness?\" It was a servant at his shoulder, presenting a letter on a small silver tray. \"Just arrived by messenger eagle, sir.\"\n\nThe envelope was the apple green of the Leviathan's stationery, and Alek's name was written in Deryn's hand. But she'd sent him a letter just yesterday. . . .\n\nMiss Rogers had paused, and Tesla was staring at him. Alek nodded an apology to them, then ripped open the letter.\n\nThe writing was rushed, even worse than Deryn's usual scrawl.\n\nWater\u2013walker headed your way. You have an hour at most.\n\nThe Admiralty are bum-rags, so we won't engage till it reaches the shore. But we'll be there.\n\nTake care,\n\nDylan\n\n\"Ah,\" said Alek, his pulse quickening.\n\n\"News from our friends on the Leviathan?\" Tesla said. \"They must be in London by now.\"\n\n\"No, sir.\" Alek hesitated a moment, glancing at Miss Rogers\u2014but every reporter in the world would know soon enough. \"They're stationed only fifty kilometers away, at the mouth of Long Island Sound.\"\n\nA stir went round the table.\n\n\"But why?\" asked Tesla.\n\n\"They've been watching over us. There were rumors of a German surprise attack.\"\n\n\"A surprise attack?\" Tesla said. Then his face broke into a smile. \"Your Highness, please tell Dr. Barlow that she is invited to observe my experiments at any time, no excuses needed.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that's not it, sir.\" Alek held up the letter. \"Their fears have proven correct. A German underwater walker will be here within the hour.\"\n\nThe table went silent, and all the guests turned to Mr. Tesla. The inventor stared at Alek for a long moment, then dropped his gaze to the table and began to rearrange his forks. \"An underwater walker? What an absurd notion.\"\n\n\"They exist, sir. My man Klopp has seen working models.\"\n\nTesla looked at Klopp, who appeared to be only half following the English, then brought his dark eyes back to Alek.\n\n\"How large is this machine?\"\n\n\"Large enough to destroy Goliath. Otherwise, why would the Germans bother?\"\n\nTesla spat out an angry noise and pushed away his dessert. \"Pardon me, gentlemen and Miss Rogers, but unless this is some sort of joke, I must prepare my defenses.\"\n\nTaking up his walking stick, he rose to his feet. The engineers jumped up from the table in unison.\n\n\"Defenses?\" Miss Rogers asked.\n\n\"I am not naive, dear lady. I knew that the Germans would make plans against me.\" Tesla waved in the direction of the compound. \"That's why Mr. Hearst provided us with that Pinkerton.\"\n\n\"But, sir,\" Alek said. \"That Pinkerton machine is designed to frighten workers on picket lines. It can't stand up against a proper military walker.\"\n\nThe reporters had broken into a nervous hubbub, some of them heading for the doors out to the observation deck. Others were asking the waiters to take them to a telephone.\n\nAlek rose to his feet, waving Deryn's letter. \"All of you, listen. I am assured that the Leviathan is on its way. It's more than capable of taking on a single walker.\"\n\nAdela Rogers laughed. \"So we should sit here and sip brandy?\"\n\n\"Not at all, miss,\" Count Volger said. \"We should retreat to a sensible distance and let the Leviathan handle this.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary.\" Tesla turned toward the stairs up to the control room. \"I shall stop them myself!\"\n\n\"Sir . . . ,\" Volger said, but the inventor ignored him.\n\n\"It's no use,\" Alek sighed. \"This is a man who took on three fighting bears with nothing but a walking stick.\"\n\n\"That hardly fills me with confidence,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\n\"Nor me. I'll talk to him.\" Alek made for the stairs. \"If only to make sure he doesn't do anything rash.\"\n\n\"Your Highness,\" Volger said. \"We can still put some distance between us and this place, even if we have to walk.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"That won't be necessary, Volger. The Leviathan will protect us.\"\n\nThe control room was abuzz with shouted orders and sparking electrikals. The engineers were rushing about, wheeling equipment into a new configuration. Tesla was at the center of it all, a telephone receiver in each hand and several more tucked under his arms.\n\n\"Deploy the boats!\" he shouted into one. \"We'll destroy them as they come out of the water!\"\n\nHe slammed a receiver down and glared at Alek.\n\n\"How long have you known about this?\"\n\n\"As I said, it was only rumors,\" Alek said calmly. \"Mr. Sharp heard something two weeks ago.\"\n\n\"The very day we arrived in New York.\" Tesla turned to the control room windows. The ocean was just visible in the distance, a silvery plane of reflected moonlight. \"Every time I'm on the brink of a genuine discovery, someone tries to snatch it away.\"\n\n\"Sir, you needn't worry. Mr. Sharp has assured me that the Leviathan will deal with this walker.\"\n\n\"Then, more will come.\" The anger had left Tesla's voice all at once, and he only sounded tired now. \"They'll keep coming for me, one way or another.\"\n\n\"That's a bit dramatic, sir. These water-walkers are experimental weapons. I can't imagine the Germans have too many of them.\"\n\n\"You don't know what smaller men are capable of, Alek. Edison, Marconi, and now the kaiser!\" Tesla began to place the telephone receivers back into their cradles, till only one was left in his hand. He lifted it to his mouth. \"Boiler room? Please go to full.\"\n\n\"Mr. Tesla, we should abandon the test for tonight. Please!\"\n\n\"I am abandoning the test.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"But you told the boiler room\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you understand? These men, these little men, want to destroy my life's work, to rob the world of everything Goliath will one day provide. Free power anywhere in the world, all of man's knowledge coursing across the airwaves! I can't allow that all to be snuffed out by this idiotic war.\"\n\nThe inventor turned to face the windows, his dark eyes gleaming, and Alek felt a cold drop trickle down his spine as Tesla placed the last telephone firmly back onto its cradle.\n\n\"I'm afraid this is no longer a test.\"\n\nThe walker was still half a mile from shore, but already its topside was cresting the surface. Water sluiced across its decks, swirling black with brine and seaweed. But beneath the ocean's detritus, wet metal gleamed. With a roar of its engines, the machine's krakenfighting claws reared above the waves.\n\nDeryn raised the field glasses to scan the deck for gun mounts.\n\n\"Doesn't look damaged at all,\" Dr. Busk was saying to the captain. \"It must be designed for tremendous pressures.\"\n\nThe first officer snorted. \"A direct hit should make it a bit less waterproof.\"\n\n\"Best to blow its legs off.\" Captain Hobbes lowered his field glasses. \"Let's leave the Americans something menacing for tomorrow's papers, eh?\"\n\nA bit of laughter went about the bridge, but Deryn's mouth was dry. Tesla's tower was already visible in the distance, lights shining in every window. The great barking fool of an inventor hadn't evacuated, after all.\n\n\"Alek's still there, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Our young prince would hardly leave an ally behind.\" Dr. Barlow stared out at Goliath and sighed. \"I'd hoped that Mr. Tesla would not stoop to bravery.\"\n\n\"It'll be all right, ma'am,\" Deryn said, trying to keep her voice firm. \"At least that walker hasn't any big guns.\"\n\nThe entire topside of the machine had cleared the surface now, and Deryn could see only a three-and-a-half-inch cannon, like the deck armament of a U-boat. The first crewmen were coming out of the hatches now, working to unplug the seals that kept the barrel waterproof.\n\n\"That's as we expected,\" the lady boffin said. \"The Germans mean to tear down the tower with their krakenfighting arms. Rather brutish of them.\"\n\n\"Aye, but it worked for us in Istanbul,\" Deryn said.\n\nThe captain had spotted the deck gun too. \"A bit more altitude, Pilot. Ready in the bomb bay.\"\n\nThe Leviathan was almost on top of the enemy now; Deryn could feel the walker's great Clanker engines rumbling through her boots. The smokestacks had popped their water seals, and the machine was roaring at full power.\n\nBut there was something shiny in the surf, halfway between the shore and the walker. She raised her field glasses again.\n\n\"REMOTELY FACING AN EMERGING THREAT.\"\n\nIt looked like a fleet of wee metal boats, each only a few feet long. Antennae whipped back and forth on their decks as the ripples from the emerging walker reached them. The boats were heading straight toward the German craft.\n\n\"Do you see those, ma'am?\"\n\nDr. Barlow squinted into the darkness, then nodded. \"Ah, yes. Mr. Tesla's remote controlled boats. He's been trying to sell them to the Royal Navy for years. How pleased he must be to finally make use of them.\"\n\nAs the first of the boats disappeared beneath the walker, light flared out across the water, and a jet of flame curled up around the metal. A few crewmen on the top deck cowered, but the machine hardly paused in its march toward the shore.\n\n\"A bit disappointing,\" the lady boffin said.\n\n\"A few sticks of dynamite and some kerosene, I reckon.\" Deryn frowned. \"Did Mr. Tesla think he'd be fighting wooden ships?\"\n\nDr. Barlow gave a shrug. \"He never was one for chemistry.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" the captain said. \"We'll show him how it's done. Starboard engine to half. Bomb bay, release when ready!\"\n\nDeryn stepped closer to the window, leaning out to see beneath the ship.\n\nThe water-walker's left foreleg was just stepping onto the beach when the shiver went through the deck. Deryn's knee twinged, and she held her breath until the bomb struck home.\n\nIt fell between the walker's two right legs, landing in a few yards of water. A dark column of sand shot into the air, fringed with silvery moonlit spray. Tesla's boats were tossed aside, bursting into flames that spilled across the surface of the sound. The Clanker machine was thrown sideways by the blast, almost tipping over. But finally it crashed back down, its right legs twisting and splitting.\n\nThe shock wave reached the Leviathan then, a great shudder traveling through the ship, the windows of the bridge rattling like teacups. Deryn kept her eyes trained on the walker. It was still trying to move, but its two working legs could only drag it a few yards with every step.\n\n\"Please give the bomb bay my compliments,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"They've left her quite in one piece.\"\n\n\"What about her deck gun, sir?\" the first officer asked.\n\n\"Keep an eye on it. If any more crewmen stick their heads out, we'll introduce them to our fl\u00e9chette bats.\"\n\nMore orders were called, and a searchlight lanced out across the darkness. The burned and battered hulk of the walker suddenly shone brightly.\n\nDeryn's eye caught a sparkle in the distance beyond. The central tower of Goliath was still dark, but the four smaller structures around it were starting to glow.\n\n\"Dr. Barlow?\" she said. \"I think Tesla's contraption is charging up.\"\n\n\"He means to complete his test?\" The lady boffin tutted. \"Captain, perhaps we should give Mr. Tesla some room. Even a test firing could prove unpleasant up here.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Doctor. Engines at one-half reverse.\"\n\nThe Leviathan hesitated for a moment in the air, then Deryn felt the gentle tug of the ship sliding backward. The black water of Long Island Sound pulled into view, and the tableau of the damaged walker and the sparkling towers spread out before them.\n\n\"Sir!\" the pilot called. \"There's another exhaust trail!\"\n\nThe officers crowded the windows, and Deryn took a step forward. Something metal was breaking the surface near the shore.\n\nIt was a smaller walker, its four legs thrashing in the dark water of the sound, heading toward the beach.\n\n\"One of the escorts?\" The captain shook his head. \"But where's it been hiding?\"\n\n\"It must have shut down after our attack,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"Just long enough for us to follow the big one away. Or it may have ridden on the larger walker's back, mingling their exhaust streams.\"\n\n\"Who cares!\" Deryn cried. \"We need to stop that barking thing!\"\n\n\"Well put, Mr. Sharp,\" the captain said. \"Go to full-ahead.\"\n\nA moment later the roar of engines rumbled through the bridge, and the Leviathan was moving forward again.\n\nBut the small walker had already made its way onto land. It was scrambling quickly through the trees, headed straight for the towers half a mile away. The machine hardly seemed large enough to tear Goliath apart, but it could certainly make a mess of things.\n\nSuddenly a burst of sparks and flame ignited on the walker's back, arcing across the darkness. An explosion thudded in the distance.\n\n\"It's got a deck gun!\" the first officer announced. \"Captain?\"\n\n\"Fl\u00e9chette bats,\" came the answer. \"We'll sweep them off the topside!\"\n\nDeryn's fingers curled into two fists. The airship was gaining on the walker, and the searchlights swung out to find it in the darkness. She heard the pop of an air gun overhead, and saw the first cloud of fl\u00e9chette bats streaking away.\n\nBut as her eyes drifted past the German walker, Deryn's breath caught.\n\nThe outer towers of Mr. Tesla's weapon were glowing brighter now, covered with nervous snakes made of fire and lightning. The tall central tower, Goliath itself, had begun to softly glow in the darkness, like the envelope of a hot-air balloon with its burner turned to full.\n\nDeryn tasted acid in the back of her throat, and felt the awful, paralyzing fear of her nightmares. She remembered how the Goeben's Tesla cannon had almost burned them all to a cinder. But Goliath was much more powerful, mighty enough to set the sky aflame thousands of miles away.\n\nAnd the Leviathan was headed straight for it.\n\nThe first shell landed at the edge of the compound, sending a length of barbed wire fence flailing and coiling in the air. A cloud of dust rolled outward from the explosion, and Alek heard pieces of torn metal hitting the rooftops around him.\n\nHe cupped his hands against the glass as the dust cleared, and saw the attacker striding through the trees\u2014a smaller walker, a four-legged corvette. Two searchlights bore down from the Leviathan, revealing the deck gun on the machine's back, its barrel spilling smoke.\n\n\"Mr. Tesla,\" Alek called. \"Perhaps we should evacuate.\"\n\n\"Your British friends may have deserted us, but I shall not abandon my life's work.\"\n\nAlek turned. Tesla's hands were on the levers on the central bank of controls, his hair sticking out in all directions. Sparks flew about the room, and Alek felt the air humming with power.\n\n\"You haven't been abandoned, sir!\" He pointed at the window. \"The Leviathan's still here.\"\n\n\"Can't you see they're too late? I have no choice but to fire.\"\n\nAlek opened his mouth to argue, but another boom sounded in the distance, and the shriek of the incoming shell sent him into a crouch. This one landed inside the compound, throwing dirt and debris against the control room windows.\n\nSuddenly the night turned red outside, the Leviathan's searchlights changing color, and then glimmers of metal were streaking from the sky. The men on the deck of the walker twisted and fell as the fl\u00e9chettes struck home. A moment later the gun was unmanned, rolling from side to side with the machine's gait.\n\nThe metal rain swept closer and closer, slicing through trees and sending up clods of dirt. As the torrent dwindled, one last fl\u00e9chette hit the window with a smack. A crack slithered across the glass, and Alek scrambled a few steps backward, but the attack had ended.\n\nHe cleared his throat, willing his voice to stay firm. \"The Leviathan has silenced that German gun, sir. We can stand down.\"\n\n\"But the walker is still coming, isn't it?\"\n\nAlek took a wary step closer to the window. The spikes had done nothing to the corvette's metal armor, of course. But in the sky above, the Leviathan was still closing in, its bomb bay doors already open.\n\nThen he remembered what Tesla had said about firing Goliath in earnest\u2014any aircraft within ten kilometers would be in danger. The Leviathan was no more than a kilometer distant, and Deryn was still aboard, thanks to Alek and his deal with Eddie Malone.\n\nThis madness had to stop.\n\nAlek turned and strode to the main bank of controls, taking Tesla by the arm. \"Sir, I can't let you do this. It's too horrific.\"\n\nTesla looked up. \"Don't you think I know that? To destroy a whole city . . . It's the most horrible thing any human could conceive.\"\n\n\"Then, why are you doing it?\"\n\nTesla closed his eyes. \"It will take a year to rebuild this tower, Alek. And in that year, how many more will die in battle? Hundreds of thousands? A million?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But you're talking about Berlin . . . two million people.\"\n\nTesla stared down at his controls. \"I can dampen the effect, I think.\"\n\n\"You think?\"\n\n\"I won't destroy the whole city, just enough to prove my theories. Otherwise Goliath will be lost forever! No one will invest money in a smoking crater.\" He looked out the window at the walker scrambling across the dunes. \"And the Germans will only grow bolder. If they aren't stopped now, do you think their assassins will let either of us live out the year?\"\n\nAlek took a step closer. \"I know what it is to be hunted, sir. I have been hounded since the night my parents died. But proving your invention isn't worth this!\"\n\nA clamor of gunfire came from behind Alek, and he spun about. In the red glare of the Leviathan's searchlights, the Pinkerton walker was venturing out to meet the German machine. A Gatling gun had popped up on its back and was chattering away.\n\nBut bullets were useless against steel armor, and the Pinkerton was far too small to stop the water-walker with brute force. It could only buy them time.\n\nThe Leviathan's vast shape had slowed to a halt and was starting to reverse course. The corvette was inside the compound walls now\u2014too close to Goliath for Leviathan to drop an aerial bomb. The airship's officers had to know that Tesla's weapon would be deadly to anything in the sky.\n\nBut there wasn't time to fly ten kilometers away. The air in the control room had begun to crackle, and Alek felt his hair standing on end. The buttons of his jacket softly glowed as the electrikal lights faded around them.\n\nThe weapon would be ready to fire soon.\n\nAlek turned to Tesla. \"The people of Berlin haven't had fair warning! You said we'd give them a chance to evacuate!\"\n\nThe man pulled on a pair of thick black rubber gloves. \"That chance has been stolen, but by their own kaiser, not by me. Please go back down to the dining room, Your Highness.\"\n\n\"Mr. Tesla, I insist that you stop this!\"\n\nWithout looking up from his controls, Tesla waved a gloved hand at his men. \"Show His Highness back to the dining room, please.\"\n\nAlek reached for his sword, but he hadn't worn it tonight. The two men approaching were much larger than him, and there were another dozen that Tesla could call upon in the control room.\n\n\"Mr. Tesla, please . . .\"\n\nThe inventor shook his head. \"I've dreaded this moment for years, but fate has taken control.\"\n\nThe men took Alek firmly by the arms and led him to the stairs.\n\nMost of the guests had fled the dining room, but Klopp was still there, a cigar in one hand, his cane in the other. Miss Rogers sat with him, scribbling madly.\n\n\"Sounds like quite a battle up there,\" she said.\n\nAlek sat heavily, staring at the empty chairs around the table, all askew. Even down here the floor was humming.\n\n\"He's going to fire at Berlin. Not a test, the real thing. What have I done?\"\n\nKlopp said in German, \"The others should be back in a moment, young master.\"\n\n\"Back? Where in blazes have they gone?\"\n\n\"To check on the luggage,\" Klopp said simply.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Your Highness?\" Miss Rogers asked. \"Would you say that Mr. Tesla has become unhinged?\"\n\nAlek spun to face her. \"He means to destroy a city, without warning or negotiation. What would you say?\"\n\n\"That this is what you signed up for. You and the chief, and all those investors in their motorcars, headed for Manhattan as we speak. This is something you all knew might happen.\"\n\n\"This is not what we planned!\" Alek shouted. \"This is murder!\"\n\n\"The whole city of Berlin . . . ,\" Miss Rogers said, shaking her head and scribbling.\n\nBut Alek wasn't imagining a city leveled by fire. He could think only of the Leviathan in the sky above, and of Deryn's nightmares of her father's death.\n\nThe wine trembled in the abandoned glasses around him. The whole table was vibrating.\n\n\"We can't let him do this.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, young master. Here they are.\"\n\nAlek turned. Volger, Hoffman, and Bauer came storming in, carrying the long cases they'd brought from New York.\n\nThe wildcount tossed one down onto the dining table. Dishes smashed and clattered, and wineglasses fell over, spilling red across the white table cloth.\n\n\"I take it we haven't much time?\"\n\n\"Only a few minutes,\" Alek said.\n\n\"And you want to stop him?\"\n\n\"Of course!\"\n\n\"Glad to hear it.\" Volger popped the case open. Inside was a pair of dueling swords.\n\nAlek shook his head. \"He has at least a dozen men up there.\"\n\n\"Have you forgotten your father's watchword?\" Volger asked.\n\n\"Surprise is more valuable than strength.\" Klopp said, and reached into the case that Hoffman had brought up, drawing out a black cylinder with a long fuse. \"I made this little surprise myself, in Tesla's own laboratory.\"\n\n\"THE AFTER-DINNER RAID.\"\n\nKlopp hobbled over to the staircase leading up to the control room, then touched the tip of his cigar to the fuse and grinned as it sputtered to life.\n\n\"Good heavens!\" Miss Rogers looked up from her writing pad. \"Is that a bomb?\"\n\n\"Not to worry, young lady,\" Count Volger said, tying a dinner napkin across his nose and mouth. \"It's only smoke. But lots of it!\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Miss Rogers said.\n\nHoffman threw a napkin to Alek as Bauer opened the other sword case.\n\nA deeper rumble came up through the floor and set the walls quivering. The air itself seemed blurry now.\n\n\"Ready yourself, Your Highness.\" Volger hefted one of the swords.\n\nAlek lifted the other sword from Volger's case. Its hilt was trimmed in gold, and its blade was carved with gears and clockwork. \"Another of my father's heirlooms?\"\n\n\"Hardly a century old. But sharp enough.\"\n\nAlek thrust the sword through his belt and hurriedly tied the napkin across his mouth. The smoke bomb had begun to sputter and spark in Klopp's hand, and had only a few centimeters of fuse left. But the old man waited, calmly staring at it. Finally he heaved it up the stairs.\n\nA whoosh came from above, and then a chorus of shouts and cries. Klopp stepped back as a few engineers came stumbling down the stairs, coughing and spitting.\n\n\"Wish I could join you, sirs,\" the old man said, reaching for his cane.\n\nAlek shook his head. \"You've all done more for me than I can repay.\"\n\n\"We remain at your service, sir,\" Volger said, and bowed to Alek. Then he went charging up the stairs, with Hoffman and Bauer behind.\n\nAs Alek followed, the smoke rolled down to sting his eyes and lungs. The hum in the air grew with his every step.\n\nThe control room was smoke and bedlam. Electrikal sparks were flying, and someone was yelling \"Malfunction,\" which only added to the chaos. Tesla's men seemed to think that the weapon itself had overloaded and set the room ablaze. The floor was shuddering, as if the whole building had turned into a vast engine.\n\nAlek led Volger and his men through the smoke toward the central panel of controls. Tesla stood there calmly, ignoring the pandemonium around him.\n\n\"Sir, shut your machine down!\" Alek ordered.\n\n\"You, of course.\" Tesla didn't look up. \"I should have known not to trust an Austrian.\"\n\n\"Trust, Mr. Tesla? You've gone against all our plans!\" Alek raised his sword, and his men followed suit. \"Turn off your machine!\"\n\nTesla glanced up at their sword tips, and laughed. \"Too late for second thoughts, Prince.\"\n\nWith a rubber-gloved hand he spun a dial, then ducked behind the panel. The crackling in the air suddenly built to a snap, and a spiderweb of lightning leapt out of the smoke from all directions, striking the tips of the drawn swords.\n\nThe hilt of Alek's weapon turned searing hot, but he couldn't drop it\u2014every muscle in his hand was suddenly clenched tight. A wild and unstoppable force seized him, twisting his heart in his chest. A lance of agony shot from his right hand down through his body, down to the soles of his feet.\n\nAlek stumbled backward until he slipped, the dancing cord of electricity breaking as he fell to the ground. His lungs were seared by the smoke, and the palm of his sword hand was charred and stinging. The smell of burned hair and flesh filled his nose.\n\nAlek lay there on his back a moment, but there wasn't time to be stunned. The floor was still shaking beneath him, stronger every second. He staggered to his feet, looking about for his sword, but the control room was a mass of smoke and flickering lights.\n\nHe stumbled over a prone form\u2014Bauer, clutching his burned sword hand to his chest.\n\n\"Are you all right, Hans?\"\n\n\"There, sir!\"\n\nBauer pointed his blackened fingers at a silhouette in the smoke. It was Tesla, his long arms working the levers, and propped beside him on the controls was his electrikal walking stick. Alek lurched toward him and grasped the stick, then rose to his full height.\n\nHe nestled his finger around the trigger and pointed it straight at Tesla.\n\n\"Stop, sir.\"\n\nThe man stared at the metal tip a moment, then gave an arrogant snort and calmly reached for the largest lever among the controls. . . .\n\n\"No,\" Alek said, and pulled the trigger.\n\nLightning slashed out across the room. It took Tesla's body and shook him like a puppet. Fingers of white flame spilled out of the cane to dance across the controls. Sparks spat in all directions, and the smell of burned metal and plastic filled the room.\n\nIn seconds the walking stick sputtered out. Tesla lay slumped across the controls, not moving. Tiny bolts of lightning skittered across his body, and his hair twitched and quivered.\n\nThe rumble in the floor beneath Alek began to shudder, surging and falling, rattling the whole building in shock wave after shock wave, as if a giant were staggering past. Alek's vision blurred with every pulse, and he heard the windows shattering all around him.\n\nHe called out Volger's name, but the trembling air itself seemed to shred the sound apart. The smoke thinned as the smell of salt water rolled in through the broken windows, and Alek staggered toward the nearest one, his lungs crying out for fresh air. His boots skidded, shards of glass cutting him through his burned boot soles. But at least he could breathe.\n\nHe stared up at Goliath looming over the compound. The pulsing beat beneath his feet was echoed in the crackles of electricity coursing the tower's length. The whole machine was bursting with power, and Alek realized what he'd done. . . .\n\nGoliath was like a steam boiler under pressure. It was ready to fire, but he had stopped Tesla from loosing the massive energies building up inside it. The chimneys were still spitting smoke, the generators sending more power to the already brimming capacitors. As Alek watched, he saw more windows shattering across the compound.\n\nIn the middle of it all, the German corvette stood over the wreckage of the Pinkerton walker. It had torn two of the smaller machine's legs off, and seemed to be performing a bizarre victory dance. Its legs were shivering, its body lurching back and forth.\n\nThen Alek saw the webs of lightning on its metal skin\u2014the walker's control systems had been addled by the wild energy that was setting the air aquiver. He looked into the sky.\n\nThe Leviathan itself was glowing, like a cloud catching the setting sun. The airship's cilia were rippling, slowly pulling it away, but the engines were silent, their electrikals also overwhelmed.\n\nWould the hydrogen catch fire? Alek grasped the edge of the window, hardly feeling the broken glass against his palms.\n\n\"Deryn,\" he sobbed. Anything but this.\n\nThen another shape loomed in the distance, something huge lurching over the horizon. It was the first walker, four times the size of the corvette, a tattered German naval jack fluttering from its spar deck. The machine was advancing slowly, its two right legs swinging uselessly. But the kraken-fighting arms were flailing at the ground, dragging the walker across the dunes as though it were a dying beast.\n\nAlek wondered for a moment how its electrikals hadn't shorted yet, but then the walker stumbled onto the tangled metal of the perimeter fence, and a circuit was completed. A single jittering finger leapt from the nearest small tower, striking an upraised kraken-fighting arm of the German machine.\n\nThe lightning from the other towers followed, their built-up charges hungry for a way out, and within an eyeblink five streams of electricity were pouring into the huge water-walker. The machine shuddered for a moment, its limbs rattling mindlessly as sparks swept across its metal skin. The air itself tore open in one long peal of thunder. The scrub trees around the walker burst into flame, the white fire consuming even the soil and sand beneath it.\n\nThe ammunition magazines must have caught then. The walker began to shake harder, and jets of fire burst from its hatches. Flames spat from the smokestacks as the fuel tanks caught all at once, and black smoke roiled out of the engine vents.\n\nWhen the thudding of explosions had finally faded, Alek could hardly hear, but he could feel that the trembling beneath his feet was gone. The control room behind him was dark and silent, save for dazed human voices. Goliath had expended itself on the German walker.\n\nAlek looked up again. The Leviathan's glow was fading, the airship whole and alive with all its crew.\n\nHe shook with another sob, sinking to one knee and realizing that the survival of that one ship\u2014one girl, really\u2014had been for a moment more important than the war itself, or a city's millions. Then the wind shifted, and Alek breathed in the burnt-meat smells that filled the room behind him.\n\nImportant enough for him to kill a man, it seemed.\n\nIn their infinite wisdom, the Admiralty approved Alek's medal for bravery in the air on the very same day the United States entered the war.\n\nThe timing seemed suspicious to Deryn, and of course the medal wasn't for anything useful, like shutting down Tesla's weapon to save the Leviathan. Instead Alek was to be decorated for blundering about on the ship's topside during a storm, and for his great skill in falling over and knocking himself silly. That was the Admiralty for you.\n\nBut at least it meant that the Leviathan was headed back to New York, and she would see Alek one last time.\n\nAfter fighting the German water-walkers on Long Island, the airship had been invited to Washington, DC. There the captain and his officers had testified before the Congress, whose members were debating how to respond to this outrageous attack on American soil.\n\nIt took a bit of droning and dealing, but finally the case was made that the Germans had gone too far, and Darwinist and Clanker politicians voted together to join the war. Already young men were swarming the enlistment offices, clamoring to go and fight the kaiser. As the Leviathan headed north, the streets below were choked with flags and parades and newsboys shouting war.\n\nDeryn was on the bridge when a second message from London arrived, this one marked Top Secret.\n\nShe'd healed enough to put her cane aside, but Deryn hadn't dared the ratlines yet. She spent her time assisting the officers and Dr. Barlow. Being stuck in the gondola was still dead annoying, but bridge duty had taught Deryn more than a bit about how the Leviathan was run.\n\nIt would all be quite useful, if she ever got to command an airship herself.\n\nThe messenger eagle arrived just as the skyscrapers of New York City came into sight, on the day Alek was to receive his medal. The beastie shot past the bridge windows, then angled to the bird port on the starboard side.\n\nThe watch officer called out a moment later, \"For Dr. Barlow's eyes only, sir.\"\n\nThe captain turned to Deryn and nodded.\n\nShe saluted him, then made her way to the lady boffin's stateroom with the message tube in hand. It rattled a bit.\n\nHer knock was answered by Tazza whining from inside, which Deryn took as permission to go in.\n\n\"Afternoon, ma'am. Message from London for you.\" She squinted at the writing on the tube. \"From a P. C. Mitchell.\"\n\nThe lady boffin looked up from a book. \"Ah, at last. Please open it.\"\n\n\"Begging your pardon, ma'am, but it says 'Top Secret.'\"\n\n\"I'm sure it does. But you have proven yourself adept at keeping secrets, Mr. Sharp. Proceed.\"\n\nHer loris chuckled, then said, \"Secrets!\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am.\" Deryn pulled open the message tube. It contained a single piece of translucent avian-mail paper scrolled around a small felt bag with something tiny and hard inside.\n\nShe unrolled the paper and read, \" 'Dear Nora, it is as you suspected: iron and nickel, with traces of cobalt, phosphorous, and sulfur. All quite natural in formation.' And it's signed, 'Regards, Peter.'\"\n\n\"Just as I thought,\" the lady boffin sighed. \"But too late to save him.\"\n\n\"Save who?\" Deryn asked, but then realized the obvious\u2014Nikola Tesla was the only person who'd needed saving lately. No one knew exactly what had happened the night he'd died. But it was fairly certain that the great inventor had been electrocuted by Goliath itself, the machine malfunctioning thanks to German shells and the general chaos of battle.\n\nDeryn upended the felt bag onto her palm, and there it was\u2014the tiny piece she'd cut from the object under Tesla's bed.\n\n\"So this is about that mad boffin's rock?\" She looked at the letter again. \"Nickel and cobalt and sulfur? What does it all mean?\"\n\n\"Meteoric,\" the loris said.\n\nDeryn stared at the creature. She'd read the word somewhere in the Manual of Aeronautics's natural philosophy chapters, but couldn't quite place it.\n\n\"It means, Mr. Sharp, that Tesla was a fraud.\" Dr. Barlow shrugged. \"Or perhaps a madman\u2014he seemed to think he could destroy Berlin.\"\n\n\"You mean Goliath wouldn't have worked?\" Deryn shook her head. \"But what about Siberia?\"\n\nDr. Barlow pointed at Deryn's hand. \"In Siberia a stone fell from the sky.\"\n\n\"A wee stone did all that?\"\n\n\"A meteor, to be precise. And not a small one but a giant piece of iron traveling at many thousands of miles per hour. What Mr. Tesla found was only a fraction of the whole.\" Dr. Barlow placed her book aside. \"I suppose he was testing his machine when the meteor struck, and he took it into his head that he himself wielded cosmic power. Quite typical of him, really.\"\n\nDeryn looked at the tiny piece of iron in her hand. \"But he had that metal detector sent to him, so he was looking for iron. He must have known it was a meteor!\"\n\n\"The greater part of madness is hiding the truth from oneself. Or perhaps Tesla imagined that his machine could call down iron from the sky.\" She picked up the stone for a closer look. \"In any case, what happened in Tunguska was merely an accident. A cosmic joke, so to speak.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head, remembering the fallen trees stretching mile after mile in all directions. It was too much to believe that a mere accident could have created such ruination.\n\n\"It is fitting, though,\" the lady boffin said with a sad smile, \"that Goliath should have been felled by a stone.\"\n\n\"But Tesla's machine made the sky change color. Lord Churchill himself saw it happen!\"\n\nThe lady boffin laughed outright at this. \"Yes, Tesla made the sky change color . . . at sunrise. Not such a difficult trick, if one has a gullible audience. Or perhaps Goliath really could change atmospheric conditions. But that's a far cry from destroying a city, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Gullible,\" her loris said with a snicker.\n\n\"You mean it was all rubbish? Everything we did, everything that Alek . . .\"\n\nDeryn closed her eyes. Alek had been duped, just as she'd always feared.\n\n\"An interesting point, Mr. Sharp. If a meteor falls in the forest and no one realizes it, does it end the war?\" The lady boffin handed back the stone. \"The Germans believed in Goliath, and in their belief they have propelled the United States to join our cause. That falling stone may have brought us peace, one way or another.\"\n\nThe black piece of iron suddenly felt uncanny in Deryn's hand. It was something from another world, wasn't it? She put it back into the bag, rolled the letter up, and slipped them both into the message tube. With a step forward she placed the tube on the lady boffin's desk.\n\n\"This will stay top secret, won't it, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"With Goliath being rebuilt, the Zoological Society will have to keep the truth under wraps. Even His Majesty's Government mustn't know.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"But what about Alek? He's still raising money for the Tesla Foundation.\"\n\n\"Repairing Goliath will make the Germans anxious to sue for peace.\" Dr. Barlow fixed Deryn with her stare. \"Telling Alek would be a mistake.\"\n\n\"But he's not your puppet, Dr. Barlow! Can you imagine what he's feeling? He thought the war would be over by now.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" the lady boffin said. \"So why make matters worse by revealing that Tesla made a fool of him?\"\n\nDeryn started to protest, but the lady boffin had a point. It would crush Alek to discover that his destiny was a lie, nothing but a cosmic accident.\n\n\"But Alek thinks it's his fault the war's still going, because he shut down the machine after Tesla was killed!\"\n\n\"None of this is his fault, Deryn,\" the lady boffin said. \"And the war will end one day. Wars always do.\"\n\nThey pinned the medal on Alek in the cargo bay, with half the crew in formal dress and standing at attention. Captain Hobbes read the honors while a score of reporters snapped photographs, including a certain bum-rag from the New York World. Klopp, Hoffman, and Bauer were there in fresh civilian clothes, while Count Volger still wore his cavalry uniform. Even a few diplomats from the Austro-Hungarian consulate appeared, hedging their bets in case Alek's claim to the throne prevailed.\n\nDeryn managed not to roll her eyes during the ceremony, even when the captain spoke of the grave injuries Alek had sustained.\n\n\"He fell and knocked his head,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Pardon me?\" came a whisper from behind her, and Deryn turned. It was Adela Rogers, the Hearst reporter.\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Surely it's something.\" The woman stepped closer. \"The bell captain never speaks without reason.\"\n\nDeryn bit her lip, wanting to explain that she was not a bell captain but a midshipman, a decorated officer. And soon a secret agent in the employ of the barking Zoological Society of London!\n\nBut she turned away, saying quietly, \"He's done better things, that's all.\"\n\n\"You may be right about that. I was there the night Tesla died.\"\n\nDeryn looked at Miss Rogers again, wondering what this was about.\n\n\"The last I saw of him,\" the woman said, \"His Highness seemed very determined to stop Mr. Tesla.\"\n\n\"Alek saved this ship that night.\"\n\n\"And Berlin, too, I hear.\" The woman's notepad came out. \"In fact, some people are saying the war might have been over already if Goliath had been fired, but Prince Aleksandar didn't want that. He is a Clanker, after all.\"\n\n\"No one even knows if that contraption\u2014,\" Deryn began, but halted herself. That was too close to Dr. Barlow's new secret to say aloud.\n\nWhy couldn't everyone see that Alek had done more to end the war than anyone else? He'd given his gold to the Ottoman Revolution and his engines to the Leviathan, which had rescued Tesla from being eaten in the wilderness. That had all made a difference, hadn't it?\n\n\"You know something secret, don't you, bell captain?\" the woman said. \"You always have.\"\n\nDeryn shrugged. \"All I know is that His Serene Highness Aleksandar wants peace, just like he says. You can quote me on that.\"\n\nAfter the ceremony, once all the photographs had been taken and the diplomats and notables had offered their congratulations, Alek went in search of Deryn. But before he could take two steps into the crowd, he found himself trapped between Captain Hobbes and the lady boffin.\n\n\"Your Serene Highness, congratulations again!\" the captain said, and he offered a salute instead of bowing. As Alek returned the gesture, he imagined himself for a fleeting moment as a member of the crew. But that dream was over.\n\n\"Thank you, sir. For this and . . .\" He shrugged. \"For never throwing us into the brig.\"\n\nCaptain Hobbes smiled. \"It was tricky for you in those first days, wasn't it? And a bit strange for us, having Clankers on the ship.\"\n\n\"But I always knew we'd make a proper Darwinist of you in the end,\" Dr. Barlow said, staring pointedly at Alek's medal.\n\nHe had been awarded the Air Gallantry Cross, the highest honor the British armed services could give a civilian, and right there on its face was a portrait of old Charles Darwin himself.\n\n\"A proper Darwinist,\" the lady boffin's loris said, and Bovril chuckled.\n\n\"I'm not sure what I am, these days,\" Alek admitted. \"But I shall try to live up to this honor.\"\n\n\"A fine watchword in these strange times, Your Highness,\" the captain said. \"If you'll excuse me, I must attend to our American guests. Their Clanker airships will be joining us on our way back to Europe. Most extraordinary.\"\n\n\"It certainly is.\" Alek bowed as the man strode away toward a clump of officers in dark American blue.\n\n\"How quickly things have turned,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"The Ottomans remain neutral, Austria-Hungary is looking for a way out, and now the United States has joined the fray. Tesla may not have ended the war, but his death seems to have shortened it considerably.\"\n\n\"Let us hope so,\" Alek managed to say, and he looked about for a way to change the subject.\n\n\"Klopp!\" said Bovril.\n\n\"Ah, yes.\" Alek waved his men over. \"Master Klopp, Bauer, and Hoffman have left my service. They'll be staying here in America.\"\n\n\"The land of opportunity,\" the lady boffin said in excellent German.\n\nKlopp nodded. \"And the only place in the Clanker world that won't call us traitors and plotters, madam.\"\n\n\"That's only for the moment, Master Klopp,\" Alek said. \"We'll all get home someday, I'm sure.\" The three men still looked odd to him in their civilian suits and ties, but they would be back in coveralls soon enough. \"They're starting work Monday for a manufacturer of passenger walkers.\"\n\n\"Mightn't that be a bit boring?\" the lady boffin asked. \"After months of gallivanting about with your young prince?\"\n\n\"Not at all boring, madam,\" Bauer said. \"Mr. Ford pays five dollars a day!\"\n\nDr. Barlow's eyes widened. \"How extraordinary.\"\n\nAlek smiled. He'd tried to give Klopp the rest of his father's gold, but the man hadn't taken it. In any case, the toothpick weighed less than twenty grams, no more than fifteen dollars' worth. Working for Ford Walkers, the three of them together would make that every day.\n\n\"Land of opportunity,\" the lady boffin's loris said with a sniff. The creature's German accent was also excellent.\n\n\"Where is your Count Volger?\" Dr. Barlow said. \"I've saved a number of periodicals for him.\"\n\n\"He's here somewhere.\" Alek looked about, and saw Volger skulking in a dark corner of the cargo bay. His eyebrows had been burnt off when Tesla's bolt of lightning had struck their swords, making his expression resemble a madman's in a motion picture show.\n\nOr perhaps he was simply in one of his moods. When Alek had told his men to make new lives here in America, only Volger had resisted. The man had vowed to work for Alek's elevation to the throne of Austria-Hungary, whether Alek wanted him to or not.\n\nBut when Dr. Barlow went to the wildcount, his expression softened, and soon they were talking intently together in the privacy of the corner.\n\n\"Perhaps I'm speaking out of turn, sir,\" Hoffman said, looking at them. \"But they are an odd pair, aren't they?\"\n\nKlopp snorted a laugh. \"Quite suited to each other.\"\n\n\"You know what I've always thought, sir?\" Bauer said. \"That this war's been as good as over since they wound up on the same side!\"\n\n\"Plotters,\" Bovril whispered into Alek's ear.\n\nIt took another hour for Alek to extract himself from all the well-wishers and interview-seekers, and to maneuver out of the cargo bay and into a smaller storeroom he'd seen Deryn make a quiet exit toward. She was still there waiting, sitting on a barrel of honey from the Leviathan's fabricated bees.\n\nIt was the first time Alek and Bovril had seen her since they'd said good-bye at the Serbian consulate, and the beastie practically threw itself into her arms. Alek wished he could as well, but the crowded cargo bay was on the other side of an unlocked hatch. Instead he only nodded, wondering how to start.\n\nHe had expected it to be years before they met again, but even three weeks had seemed so long. He couldn't say any of that, though, not yet.\n\nShe was staring at his medal as she stroked Bovril's head. It was, of course, the same decoration that Deryn wore on her own dress uniform, and that her father had earned for saving her life.\n\n\"A bit daft,\" she finally said. \"Getting a medal for falling down.\"\n\nHe swallowed. \"I don't really deserve it, do I?\"\n\n\"You deserve a stack of medals, Alek! For saving the ship back in the Alps, and in Istanbul, and again when you shut down Tesla's machine!\" She paused a moment. \"Not that the Admiralty would ever give you that last one, seeing as how you saved Berlin.\"\n\n\"You were there for all of those, Deryn, and I don't see medals filling up your . . .\" He cleared his throat and glanced away.\n\n\"Chest!\" Bovril said.\n\nDeryn laughed aloud at that, but Alek didn't join her.\n\n\"I'm happy with just the one, thanks,\" she said. \"And I wasn't beside you when you stopped Goliath.\"\n\n\"In a way you were,\" he said softly, staring at the floor. Only the fact that he'd been saving her had made pulling that trigger possible.\n\nDeryn smiled and shook her head. \"You never did recover from that knock to your head, did you?\"\n\n\"A bit daft!\" said Bovril.\n\n\"Maybe not. A lot of things have been a bit fuzzy since then.\" Alek looked up at her. \"Of course, other things have gotten clearer.\"\n\nBovril chuckled at this, but Deryn looked away. A silence stretched out, and Alek wondered if it would always be like this between them now, halting and uncertain.\n\n\"There's something I should tell you,\" he said. \"A secret about Tesla.\"\n\nDeryn's eyes widened. \"Blisters.\"\n\n\"Somewhere more private,\" Alek said, then wondered if he were only stalling. But suddenly he knew where he wanted to go. \"I know I'm not serving on this ship, Mr. Sharp, but do you suppose they'd let me go topside one last time?\"\n\n\"If you're escorted by a decorated officer, maybe.\" A grin spread across Deryn's face. \"And I suppose it's time for me to try the ratlines.\"\n\n\"Your knee's still hurt? But your cane . . .\" The first time he'd spotted her in the crowd, Alek had noticed she wasn't carrying it.\n\n\"It's much better, thank you. I'm still resting it, is all, and I'm forgetting all my knots!\" She shrugged. \"But if you don't mind climbing in your fancy clothes, I'm game to give it a try.\"\n\nThe Leviathan was keeping station over the East River, making a show of patrolling for any German water-walkers that might attack Manhattan, unlikely as that seemed. The ocean breeze blew from the south, keeping the view of the city spires steady. Deryn wondered what the airbeast thought of the huge, uncanny skyscrapers\u2014almost its own size, but planted in the ground sideways and pointing straight into the air.\n\nHer knee hurt as they climbed the ratlines together, of course, but the burning was an old friend now. The feel of rope in her hands and the tremble of the airbeast beneath her weight overwhelmed everything else. And by the time they reached the spine, the muscles in her arms hurt worse than her injury.\n\n\"Barking spiders, I've gotten soft!\"\n\n\"Hardly,\" Alek said, loosening the buttons on his formal jacket.\n\nThe U-boat spotters worked from the gondola, and half the crew had been to Alek's ceremony, so there was hardly anyone topside now. Deryn led Alek forward, away from the few riggers at work amidships. As they passed through the colony of fl\u00e9chette bats, Bovril twitched on her shoulder, imitating the beasties' soft clicking sounds.\n\nThe bowhead was empty, but Deryn hesitated a moment before speaking. It was enough, just standing here with Alek in the salt breeze. And she suspected that his secret about Tesla concerned a certain bit of meteor, and talking about that would only make things sour.\n\nBut they couldn't stand here forever, however much she wished for it.\n\n\"All right, your princeliness. What's this secret?\"\n\nAlek turned away to face the darkening sky, in the direction of Tesla's ruined machine fifty miles away.\n\n\"The Germans didn't kill him,\" he said simply. \"I did.\"\n\nIt took a moment for Deryn's mind to grasp the words.\n\n\"That's not what I . . . ,\" she began. \"Oh.\"\n\n\"There was no other way to stop him.\" Alek looked down at his hands. \"I killed him with his own walking stick.\"\n\nDeryn stepped closer and took Alek's arm. He looked as sad as when he'd first come aboard the Leviathan, back when his parents' deaths still haunted him.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Alek.\"\n\n\"When I was helping Tesla, I never faced the truth of what Goliath was.\" He stared into her eyes. \"But with the Germans storming up the beach, it all became real too fast. Suddenly he was standing there, ready to destroy a city, and I couldn't let him.\"\n\n\"You did the right thing, Alek.\"\n\n\"I killed an unarmed man!\" he cried; then he shook his head. \"But Volger keeps pointing out that Tesla wasn't exactly unarmed. Goliath was a weapon, after all.\"\n\n\"Quite,\" Bovril said.\n\nDeryn swallowed, realizing that Dr. Barlow had been right. They couldn't tell Alek about the meteor now. He could never learn he'd killed a man to stop a weapon that didn't work.\n\nBut she'd promised not to keep secrets from him anymore. . . .\n\n\"It was Volger's idea to lie,\" Alek went on. \"We told the truth about shutting down Goliath, because saving Berlin will make me a hero in the Clanker nations. But we can never say exactly how I did it.\"\n\n\"Aye, and he's right!\" Deryn took both his hands, remembering the suspicions that Adela Rogers had voiced. \"Don't tell anyone you killed him, Alek. They'll think you were in league with the Germans, and they'll blame the rest of the war on you!\"\n\nHe nodded. \"But I had to tell you, Deryn. Because we promised not to keep secrets anymore.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes. \"Oh, you daft prince.\"\n\nThere was no way out of it now.\n\n\"You're right enough about that.\" Alek was staring down at his formal boots, which were a little scuffed from climbing. \"I thought it was my destiny to stop this war, and in the end all I had to do was step aside and it would've all been over. But instead I kept it going. So it really is my fault from now on.\"\n\n\"No, it isn't!\" Deryn cried. \"It never was. And you couldn't have stopped it anyway, because Tesla's machine didn't work!\"\n\nAlek blinked. He took a step back, but Deryn stopped him, squeezing his hands hard.\n\nBovril chuckled a bit and said, \"Meteoric.\"\n\n\"Remember my bit of Tesla's rock?\" Deryn said. \"Dr. Barlow sent it to some boffin in London, and it was from a meteor. You know what that is, right?\"\n\n\"A shooting star?\" Alek shrugged. \"Then, it's as I thought; it was only a scientific specimen.\"\n\n\"This wasn't just some shooting star!\" Deryn tried to remember everything Dr. Barlow had said. \"What Tesla found was just a wee bit of it, but the whole thing was huge, maybe miles across. And it was going so barking fast that it exploded when it hit the atmosphere. That's what knocked down those trees, not some Clanker contraption! Tunguska was just an accident, and Tesla was a rooster taking credit for the dawn!\"\n\nAlek stared at her, his eyes glittering. \"Then, why did he try to fire Goliath?\"\n\n\"Because he was mad, Alek, out of his mind with wanting to stop the war!\"\n\n\"Just like you,\" she didn't say.\n\n\"And Dr. Barlow is certain of this.\"\n\n\"Completely. So it's not your fault the war's still going! It would have gone on, year after bloody year, no matter what you did.\" She flung her arms around him and squeezed hard. \"But you didn't know that!\"\n\nAlek stood there motionless in her embrace, his muscles tight. At last he pushed her gently away, his voice barely a whisper.\n\n\"I'd have done it anyway.\"\n\nShe swallowed. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I would have killed him to save the Leviathan. To save you.\" He put his hands on her shoulders. \"It was the only thing in my mind, when it came time to choose\u2014that I couldn't lose you. That's when I knew.\"\n\n\"Knew what?\"\n\nHe leaned forward to kiss her. His lips were soft against hers, but they kindled something sharp and hard inside her, something that had waited impatiently all the months since this boy had come aboard.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said after it was over. \"That.\"\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Bovril added softly.\n\n\"When we were topside in the storm, is this what you . . . ,\" Alek began. \"I mean, have I gone mad?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\" She pulled him closer, and they kissed again.\n\nFinally she took a step back and looked about, worried for a moment that they might have been seen. But the nearest riggers on the spine were five hundred feet away, huddled around a hydrogen sniffer that had found a tear in the membrane.\n\n\"It's a bit tricky, isn't it?\" Alek said, following her gaze.\n\nShe nodded silently, afraid that one wrong word could ruin everything.\n\nHe pulled something from his pocket, and as Deryn stared at it, her heart sank. It was the leather scroll case, the one with the pope's letter inside. She'd forgotten for a single, absurd moment that Alek was an emperor-in-waiting and she was as common as dirt.\n\n\"Tricky,\" Bovril said.\n\n\"Of course.\" Deryn dropped her gaze, stepping back from his embrace. \"No one's going to write me a letter to turn me royal, are they? And I'd hardly make a proper princess, even if the pope himself sewed me a dress. This is all ridiculous.\"\n\nAlek stared at the scroll case. \"No, the answer's quite simple.\"\n\nDeryn clenched her fists against too much hope. \"You mean we could keep it all a secret? We'd have to hide ourselves for a bit anyway, given that I'm dressed in trousers. And you're a bit better at lying these days . . .\"\n\n\"That's not what I mean.\"\n\nShe stared at him\u2014the daft look was in his eyes again. \"What, then?\"\n\n\"We'll keep some secrets, for a while. And you may need your disguise until the world catches up with you.\" Alek took a slow breath. \"But I have no use for this.\"\n\nAnd with those words Prince Aleksandar of Hohenberg flung the scroll case hard to starboard, and it went spinning out across the Manhattan skyline, the shiny leather glittering in the sunlight. The ocean breeze caught it and carried it astern, but the whirling case still cleared the broadest part of the airbeast's body by some distance, and from the bowhead Deryn could plainly see where it struck the water with a tiny, perfect splash.\n\n\"Meteoric!\" Bovril said a bit madly.\n\n\"Aye, beastie.\" The world had suddenly gone sharp and crackly, as if lightning were kindling the sky over Manhattan. But Deryn couldn't lift her gaze from the dark river. \"That letter was your whole future, you daft prince.\"\n\n\"It was my past. I lost that world the night my parents died.\" He drew close again. \"But I found you, Deryn. Maybe I wasn't meant to end the war, but I was meant to find you. I know that. You've saved me from not having any reason to keep going.\"\n\n\"We save each other,\" Deryn whispered. \"That's how it works.\"\n\nWith a quick glance at the distant group of riggers, she kissed Alek again. This one was longer, better, their hands entwining at their sides, and the steady headwind made it feel as if the ship were underway, going somewhere new and wonderful with only the three of them aboard.\n\nThat thought made Deryn pull away. \"But what in blazes are you going to do, Alek?\"\n\n\"I expect I'll have to get a proper job.\" He sighed, staring down at the river. \"My gold's run out, and it's not likely they'll let me join the crew.\"\n\n\"Emperors are vain and useless things,\" Bovril said.\n\nAlek gave the beast a hard stare, but Deryn felt another smile on her face.\n\n\"Not to worry,\" she said. \"I was thinking of leaving myself.\"\n\n\"What . . . you, leave the Leviathan? But that's absurd.\"\n\n\"Not quite. It turns out the lady boffin has just the job for me. For both of us, I'd think.\"\n\n\"AN END AND A KISS.\"\n\nIn a surprise announcement today, His Serene Highness Aleksandar of Hohenberg, putative heir to the empire of Austria-Hungary, renounced his claim to all the lands and titles of his father's line, including the imperial throne itself. This extraordinary news has shaken his war-ravaged country, many of whose embattled citizens have quietly embraced the fugitive prince as a symbol of peace.\n\nIt is unclear whether Prince Aleksandar would have taken the throne in any case. His claim is based on a papal bull that has not been verified by the Vatican, and which is contested by the current emperor, Franz Joseph. Indeed, as Russian victories mount on the eastern front, it is unclear whether the Austro-Hungarian Empire will exist at all once the Great War is over.\n\nIn a declaration of lesser importance, Aleksandar also renounced his ties to the Tesla Foundation, which is raising money to repair the late inventor's facility in Shoreham, New York. The prince's relationship with the organization had been under strain since the announcement that it was he who shut down the weapon after Nikola Tesla's death, fearing for the safety of nearby aircraft and the city of Berlin. According to his spokesman, Wildcount Ernst Volger, Aleksandar has taken a position with the Zoological Society of London, a scientific organization of royal patronage, best known for its upkeep of the London Zoo.\n\nRumors are flying as to why an heir to one of the great houses of Europe would trade his throne, lands, and titles for the post of zookeeper. But reached by this reporter while on his way to England via His Majesty's Airship Leviathan, Aleksandar had only this for comment: \"Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube.\"\n\nThe phrase is the Latin motto of the Hapsburgs and refers to the house's tradition of gaining influence by alliance rather than conflict. It translates, \"Let others wage war. You, lucky Austria, shall marry.\" What it might mean in this context is unclear, though it suggests to this reporter that the young prince has found the comfort of new and powerful allies.\n\nEddie Malone\n\nNew York World\n\nDecember 20, 1914" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Leviathan 2) Behemoth", + "author": "Scott Westerfeld", + "genres": [ + "alternate history", + "steampunk" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Alek raised his sword. \"On guard, sir!\"\n\nDeryn hefted her own weapon, studying Alek's pose. His feet were splayed at right angles, his left arm sticking out behind like the handle of a teacup. His fencing armor made him look like a walking quilt. Even with his sword pointed straight at her, he looked barking silly.\n\n\"Do I have to stand like that?\" she asked.\n\n\"If you want to be a proper fencer, yes.\"\n\n\"A proper idiot, more like,\" Deryn muttered, wishing again that her first lesson were someplace less public. A dozen crewmen were watching, along with a pair of curious hydrogen sniffers. But Mr. Rigby, the bosun, had forbidden swordplay inside the airship.\n\nShe sighed, raised her saber, and tried to imitate Alek's pose.\n\nIt was a fine day on the Leviathan's topside, at least. The airship had left the Italian peninsula behind last night, and the flat sea stretched in all directions, the afternoon sun scattering diamonds across its surface. Seagulls wheeled overhead, carried by the cool ocean breeze.\n\nBest of all, there were no officers up here to remind Deryn that she was on duty. Two German ironclad warships were rumored to be skulking nearby, and Deryn was meant to be watching for signals from Midshipman Newkirk, who was dangling from a Huxley ascender two thousand feet above them.\n\nBut she wasn't really dawdling. Only two days before, Captain Hobbes had ordered her to keep an eye on Alek, to learn what she could. Surely a secret mission from the captain himself outweighed her normal duties.\n\nMaybe it was daft that the officers still thought of Alek and his men as enemies, but at least it gave Deryn an excuse to spend time with him.\n\n\"Do I look like a ninny?\" she asked Alek.\n\n\"You do indeed, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Well, you do too, then! Whatever they call ninnies in Clanker-talk.\"\n\n\"The word is 'Dummkopf'\" he said. \"But I don't look like one, because my stance isn't dreadful.\"\n\nHe lowered his saber and came closer, adjusting Deryn's limbs as if she were a dummy in a shop window.\n\n\"More weight on your back foot,\" he said, nudging her boots farther apart. \"So you can push off when you attack.\"\n\nAlek was right behind her now, his body pressing close as he adjusted her sword arm. She hadn't realized this fencing business would be so touchy.\n\nHe grasped her waist, sending a crackle across her skin.\n\nIf Alek moved his hands any higher, he might notice what was hidden beneath her careful tailoring.\n\n\"Always keep sideways to your opponent,\" he said, gently turning her. \"That way, your chest presents the smallest possible target.\"\n\n\"Aye, the smallest possible target,\" Deryn sighed. Her secret was safe, it seemed.\n\nAlek stepped away and resumed his own pose, so that the tips of their swords almost touched. Deryn took a deep breath, ready to fight at last.\n\nBut Alek didn't move. Long seconds passed, the airship's new engines thrumming beneath their feet, the clouds slipping slowly past overhead.\n\n\"Are we going to fight?\" Deryn finally asked. \"Or just stare each other to death?\"\n\n\"Before a fencer crosses swords, he has to learn this basic stance. But don't worry\"\u2014Alek smiled cruelly\u2014\"we won't be here more than an hour. It's only your first lesson, after all.\"\n\n\"What? A whole barking hour \u2026 without moving?\" Deryn's muscles were already complaining, and she could see the crewmen stifling their laughter. One of the hydrogen sniffers crept forward to snuffle her boot.\n\n\"This is nothing,\" Alek said. \"When I first started training with Count Volger, he wouldn't even let me hold a sword!\"\n\n\"Well, that sounds like a daft way to teach someone sword fighting.\"\n\n\"Your body has to learn the proper stance. Otherwise you'll fall into bad habits.\"\n\nDeryn snorted. \"You'd think that in a fight not moving might be a bad habit! And if we're just standing here, why are you wearing armor?\"\n\nAlek didn't answer, just narrowed his eyes, his saber motionless in the air. Deryn could see her own point wavering. She set her teeth.\n\nOf course, barking Prince Alek would have been taught how to fight in the proper way. From what she could tell, his whole life had been a procession of tutors. Count Volger, his fencing master, and Otto Klopp, his master of mechaniks, might be the only teachers with him now that he was on the run. But back when he'd lived in the Hapsburg family castle, there must have been a dozen more, all of them cramming Alek's attic with yackum: ancient languages, parlor manners, and Clanker superstitions. No wonder he thought that standing about like a pair of coatracks was educational.\n\nBut Deryn wasn't about to let some stuck-up prince outlast her.\n\nSo she stood there glaring at him, perfectly still. As the minutes stretched out, her body stiffened, her muscles beginning to throb. And it was worse inside her brain, boredom twisting into anger and frustration, the rumble of the airship's Clanker engines turning her head into a beehive.\n\nThe trickiest part was holding Alek's stare. His dark green eyes stayed locked on hers, as unwavering as his sword point. Now that she knew Alek's secrets\u2014the murder of his parents, the pain of leaving home behind, the cold weight of his family squabbles starting this awful war\u2014Deryn could see the sadness behind that gaze.\n\nAt odd moments she could see tears brightening Alek's eyes, only a fierce, relentless pride holding them back. And sometimes when they competed over stupid things, like who could climb the ratlines fastest, Deryn almost wanted to let him win.\n\nBut she could never say these things aloud, not as a boy, and Alek would never meet her eyes like this again, if he ever learned she was a girl.\n\n\"Alek \u2026,\" she began.\n\n\"Need a rest?\" His smirk wiped her charitable thoughts away.\n\n\"Get stuffed,\" she said. \"I was just wondering, what'll you Clankers do when we get to Constantinople?\"\n\nThe point of Alek's sword wavered for a moment. \"Count Volger will think of something. We'll leave the city as soon as possible, I expect. The Germans will never look for me in the wilds of the Ottoman Empire.\"\n\nDeryn glanced at the empty horizon ahead. The Leviathan might reach Constantinople by dawn tomorrow, and she'd met Alek only six days ago. Would he really be gone so quickly?\n\n\"Not that it's so bad here,\" Alek said. \"The war feels farther away than it ever did in Switzerland. But I can't stay up in the air forever.\"\n\n\"No, I reckon you can't,\" Deryn said, focusing her gaze on their sword points. The captain might not know who Alek's father had been, but it was obvious the boy was Austrian. It was only a matter of time before Austria-Hungary was officially at war with Britain, and then the captain would never let the Clankers leave.\n\nIt hardly seemed fair, thinking of Alek as an enemy after he'd saved the airship\u2014two times now. Once from an icy death, by giving them food, and the second time from the Germans, by handing over the engines that had allowed them all to escape.\n\nThe Germans were still hunting Alek, trying to finish the job they'd started on his parents. Someone had to be on his side.\u2026\n\nAnd, as Deryn had gradually admitted to herself these last few days, she didn't mind if that someone wound up being her.\n\nA fluttering in the sky caught her attention, and Deryn let her aching sword arm drop.\n\n\"Hah!\" Alek said. \"Had enough?\"\n\n\"It's Newkirk,\" she said, trying to work out the boy's frantic signals.\n\nThe semaphore flags whipped through the letters once more, and slowly the message formed in her brain.\n\n\"Two sets of smokestacks, forty miles away,\" she said, reaching for her command whistle. \"It's the German ironclads!\"\n\nShe found herself smiling a little as she blew\u2014Constantinople might have to wait a squick.\n\nThe alarm howl spread swiftly, passing from one hydrogen sniffer to the next. Soon the whole airship rang with the beasties' cries.\n\nCrewmen crowded the spine, setting up air guns and taking feed bags to the fl\u00e9chette bats. Sniffers scampered across the ratlines, checking for leaks in the Leviathan's skin.\n\nDeryn and Alek cranked the Huxley's winch, drawing Newkirk down closer to the ship.\n\n\"We'll leave him at a thousand feet,\" Deryn said, watching the altitude markings on the rope. \"The lucky sod. You can see the whole battle from up there!\"\n\n\"But it won't be much of a battle, will it?\" Alek asked. \"What can an airship do to a pair of ironclads?\"\n\n\"My guess is, we'll stay absolutely still for an hour. Just so we don't fall into any bad habits.\"\n\nAlek rolled his eyes. \"I'm serious, Dylan. The Leviathan has no heavy guns. How do we fight them?\"\n\n\"A big hydrogen breather can do plenty. We've got a few aerial bombs left, and fl\u00e9chette bats \u2026\" Deryn's words faded. \"Did you just say 'we'?\"\n\n\"Pardon me?\"\n\n\"You just said, 'How do we fight them?' Like you were one of us!\"\n\n\"I suppose I might have.\" Alek looked down at his boots. \"My men and I are serving on this ship, after all, even if you are a bunch of godless Darwinists.\"\n\nDeryn smiled again as she secured the Huxley's cable. \"I'll make sure to mention that to the captain, next time he asks if you're a Clanker spy.\"\n\n\"How kind of you,\" Alek said, then raised his eyes to meet hers. \"But that's a good point\u2014will the officers trust us in battle?\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't they? You saved the ship\u2014gave us engines from your Stormwalker!\"\n\n\"Yes, but if I hadn't been so generous, we'd still be stuck on that glacier with you. Or in a German prison, more likely. It wasn't exactly out of friendship.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. Maybe things were a squick more complicated now, what with a battle coming up. Alek's men and the Leviathan's crew had become allies almost by accident, and only a few days ago.\n\n\"You only promised to help us get to the Ottoman Empire, I suppose,\" she said softly. \"Not to fight other Clankers.\"\n\nAlek nodded. \"That's what your officers will be thinking.\"\n\n\"Aye, but what are you thinking?\"\n\n\"We'll follow orders.\" He pointed toward the bow. \"See that? Klopp and Hoffman are already at work.\"\n\nIt was true. The engine pods on either side of the great beastie's head were roaring louder, sending two thick columns of exhaust into the air. But to see the Clanker engines on a Darwinist airship was just another reminder of the strange alliance the Leviathan had entered into. Compared to the tiny British-made engines the ship was designed to carry, they sounded and smoked like freight trains.\n\n\"Maybe this is a chance to prove yourself,\" Deryn said. \"You should go lend your men a hand. We'll need good speed to catch those ironclads by nightfall.\" She clapped him on the shoulder. \"But don't get yourself killed.\"\n\n\"I'll try not to.\" Alek smiled and gave her a salute. \"Good luck, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nHe turned and ran forward along the spine.\n\nWatching him go, Deryn wondered what officers down on the bridge were thinking. Here was the Leviathan, entering battle with new and barely tested engines, run by men who should by all rights be fighting on the other side.\n\nBut the captain didn't have much choice, did he? He could either trust the Clankers or drift helplessly in the breeze. And Alek and his men had to join the fight or they'd lose their only allies. Nobody seemed to have much choice, come to think of it.\n\nDeryn sighed, wondering how this war had got so muddled.\n\nAs he ran toward the engines, Alek wondered if he'd told Dylan the whole truth.\n\nIt felt wrong, hurrying to join this attack. Alek and his men had fought Germans\u2014even fellow Austrians\u2014a dozen times while fleeing to Switzerland. But this was different\u2014these ironclads weren't hunting him.\n\nAccording to wireless broadcasts that Count Volger had overheard, the two ships had been trapped in the Mediterranean at the start of the war. With the British in control of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, there'd been no way for them to get back to Germany. They'd been running for the past week.\n\nAlek knew what it felt like to be hounded, trapped in a fight that someone else had started. But here he was, ready to help the Darwinists send two ships full of living, breathing men to the bottom of the sea.\n\nThe vast beast rolled under his feet, the tendrils that covered its flanks undulating like windblown grass, pulling it into a slow turn. Fabricated birds swirled around Alek, some already harnessed and carrying instruments of war.\n\nThat was another difference. This time he was fighting side by side with these creatures. Alek had been raised to believe they were godless abominations, but after four days aboard the airship, their squawks and cries had begun to sound natural. Except for the awful fl\u00e9chette bats, fabricated beasts could even seem beautiful.\n\nWas he turning into a Darwinist?\n\nWhen he reached the spine above the engine pods, Alek headed down the port side ratlines. The airship was tilting into a climb, the sea falling away below him. The ropes were slick with salty air, and as he strained to keep from falling, questions of loyalty fled his mind.\n\nBy the time he reached the engine pod, Alek was soaked in sweat and wishing he hadn't worn fencing armor.\n\nOtto Klopp was at the controls, his Hapsburg Guard uniform looking tattered after six weeks away from home. Beside him stood Mr. Hirst, the Leviathan's chief engineer, who was studying the roaring machine with a measure of distaste. Alek had to admit, churning pistons and spitting glow plugs looked bizarre beside the undulating flank of the airbeast, like gears attached to a butterfly's wings.\n\n\"Master Klopp,\" Alek shouted over the roar. \"How's she running?\"\n\nThe old man looked up from the controls. \"Smoothly enough, for this speed. Do you know what's going on?\"\n\nOf course, Otto Klopp spoke hardly any English. Even if a message lizard had brought the news up to the pod, he wouldn't know why the airship was changing course. All he'd seen were color codes flashed from the bridge to the signal patch, orders to be obeyed.\n\n\"We've spotted two German ironclads.\" Alek paused\u2014had he said \"we\" again? \"The ship is giving chase.\"\n\nKlopp frowned, chewing on the news for a moment, then shrugged. \"Well, the Germans haven't done us any favors lately. But it's also true, young master, that we could blow a piston at any time.\"\n\nAlek looked away into the spinning gears. The newly rebuilt engines were still cantankerous, with unexpected problems always cropping up. The crew would never know if a temporary breakdown were intentional.\n\nBut this was no time to betray their new allies.\n\nFor all the talk of Alek saving the Leviathan, the airship had really saved him. His father's plan had been for Alek to hide in the Swiss Alps for the entire war, emerging only to reveal his secret\u2014that he was heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. The airship's crash landing had rescued him from long years of skulking in the snow.\n\nHe owed the Darwinists for saving him, and for trusting his men to run these engines.\n\n\"Let's hope that doesn't happen, Otto.\"\n\n\"As you say, sir.\"\n\n\"Anything wrong?\" Mr. Hirst asked.\n\nAlek switched to English. \"Not at all. Master Klopp says she's running smoothly. I believe Count Volger is assigned to the starboard engine crew. Shall I stay here and translate for you two?\"\n\nThe chief engineer handed Alek a pair of goggles to protect his eyes from sparks and wind. \"Please do. We wouldn't want any \u2026 misunderstandings in the heat of battle.\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" Alek pulled on the goggles, wondering if Mr. Hirst had noticed Klopp's hesitation. As the airship's chief engineer, Hirst was a rare Darwinist with an understanding of machines. He always watched Klopp's work on the Clanker engines with admiration, even though the two didn't share a language. There was no point in arousing his suspicions now.\n\nHopefully this battle would be over quickly, and they could head on to Constantinople without delay.\n\nAs night fell, two dark slivers came into view on the horizon.\n\n\"The little one's not much to look at,\" Klopp said, lowering his field glasses.\n\nAlek took the glasses and peered through them. The smaller ironclad was already damaged. One of its gun turrets had been blackened by a fire, and an oil slick spread in the ship's wake, a shimmering black rainbow in the setting sun.\n\n\"They've been in a fight already?\" he asked Mr. Hirst.\n\n\"Aye, the navy's been hunting them all over the Mediterranean. They've been shelled a few times from a distance, but they keep slipping away.\" The man smiled. \"But they won't escape this time.\"\n\n\"They certainly can't outrun us,\" Alek said. The Leviathan had closed a gap of sixty kilometers in a few hours.\n\n\"And they can't fight back either,\" Mr. Hirst said. \"We're too high for them to hit. All we have to do is slow them down. The navy's already on its way.\"\n\nA boom rang out on the spine above, and a swarm of black wings lifted from the front of the airship.\n\n\"They're sending in fl\u00e9chette bats first,\" Alek said to Klopp.\n\n\"What sort of godless creature is that?\"\n\n\"They eat spikes,\" was all Alek could say. A shudder passed through him.\n\nThe swarm began to muster, forming a black cloud in the air. Searchlights sprang to life on the gondola, and as the sunlight faded, the bats gathered in the beams like moths.\n\nThe Leviathan had lost countless beasts in her recent battles, but the airship was slowly repairing itself. More bats were already breeding, like a forest recovering after a long hunting season. The Darwinists called the ship an \"ecosystem.\"\n\nFrom a distance there was something mesmerizing about the way the dark swarm swirled in the searchlights. It coiled toward the smaller ironclad, ready to unleash its rain of metal spikes. Most of the crew would be safe beneath armor plating, but the men at the smaller deck guns would be torn to pieces.\n\n\"Why start with bats?\" Alek asked Hirst. \"Fl\u00e9chettes won't sink an ironclad.\"\n\n\"No, but they'll shred her signal flags and wireless aerials. If we can keep the two ships from communicating, they're less likely to split up and make a run for it.\"\n\nAlek translated for Klopp, who pointed a finger into the distance. \"The big one's coming about.\"\n\nAlek raised the field glasses again, taking a moment to find the larger ship's silhouette against the darkening horizon. He could just read the name on her side\u2014the Goeben looked far more formidable than her companion. She had three big gun turrets and a pair of gyrothopter catapults, and the shape of her wake revealed a set of kraken-fighting arms beneath the surface.\n\nOn her aft deck stood something strange\u2014a tall tower that bristled with metal rigging, like a dozen wireless transmitters crammed together.\n\n\"What's that on her back side?\" Alek asked.\n\nKlopp took the glasses and stared. He'd worked with German forces for years, and usually had a lively opinion on military matters. But now he frowned, his voice hesitant.\n\n\"I'm not sure. Reminds me of a toy I once saw \u2026\" Klopp squeezed the glasses tighter. \"She's launching a gyrothopter!\"\n\nA small shape hurtled into the air from one of the catapults. It banked hard and came whirring toward the bats.\n\n\"What's he up to?\" Klopp asked softly.\n\nAlek watched with a frown on his face. Gyrothopters were fragile machines, barely strong enough to lift a pilot. They were designed for scouting, not attack. But the little aircraft was headed straight at the cloud of bats, its twin rotors spinning wildly.\n\nAs it neared the fluttering swarm, the gyrothopter suddenly kindled in the darkness. Bolts of flame shot from its front end, a spray of brilliant crimson fireworks that stretched across the sky.\n\nAlek remembered something that Dylan had said about the bats\u2014they were deathly afraid of red light; it scared the spikes right out of them.\n\nThe stream of fire tore through the swarm, scattering bats in all directions. Seconds later the cloud had disappeared, like a black dandelion in a puff of wind.\n\nThe gyrothopter tried to veer away, but was caught beneath a wave of fleeing bats. Alek could see fl\u00e9chettes falling, glittering in the searchlights, and the gyrothopter began to shudder in midair. The blades of its rotors tore and crumpled, their remaining energy twisting the delicate frame into wreckage.\n\nAlek watched as the flying machine tumbled from the sky, disappearing in a small white splash on the ocean's dark surface. He wondered if its unlucky pilot had survived the fl\u00e9chettes long enough to feel the water's cold.\n\nThe Leviathan's searchlights still swept across the sky, but the swarm was too scattered to resume the attack. Small fluttering shapes were already streaming back toward the airship.\n\nKlopp lowered his glasses. \"The Germans have some new tricks, it seems.\"\n\n\"They always do,\" Alek managed, staring at the ripples spreading out from where the gyrothopter had crashed.\n\n\"Orders coming in,\" Mr. Hirst said, pointing at the signal patch. It had turned blue, the sign to slow the engine. Klopp adjusted the controls, giving Alek a questioning look.\n\n\"Are we giving up the attack?\" Alek asked in English.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Mr. Hirst said. \"Just changing course. I reckon we'll ignore the Breslau for now and go after the big one. Just to make sure that other gyrothopter doesn't trouble us with those sparklers.\"\n\nAlek listened to the thrum of the ship for a moment. The starboard engine was still running high, pushing the Leviathan into a slow turn toward the Goeben. The battle wasn't over yet. More men would die tonight.\n\nHe looked back at the whirling gears of the engine. Klopp could halt them in a dozen subtle ways. One word from Alek would be enough to stop this battle.\n\nBut he'd promised Dylan to fight loyally. And after throwing away his hiding place, his Stormwalker, and his father's gold to make these Darwinists allies, it seemed absurd to betray them now.\n\nHe knew Count Volger would agree. As heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Alek had a duty to survive. And survival in an enemy camp didn't start with mutiny.\n\n\"What happens next?\" he asked Hirst.\n\nThe chief engineer took the field glasses from Klopp. \"We won't waste any more time tearing up their signal flags, that's for certain. We'll probably go straight in with aerial bombs. A gyrothopter can't stop those.\"\n\n\"We're going to bomb them,\" Alek translated for Klopp. \"They're defenseless.\"\n\nThe man just nodded, adjusting the controls. The signal patch was turning red again. The Leviathan had found her course.\n\nIt took long minutes to close the final distance to the Goeben.\n\nThe ship's big guns boomed once, spilling fire and smoke into the night sky. But Mr. Hirst was right\u2014the shells flew well beneath the Leviathan, erupting into white columns of water kilometers away.\n\nAs the Leviathan drew closer, Alek watched the German ship through the field glasses. Men scrambled across the ironclad's decks, hiding her small guns under what looked like heavy black tarps. The coverings shone dully in the last flickers of sunset, like plastic or leather. Alek wondered if they were made of some new material strong enough to stop fl\u00e9chettes.\n\nBut no plastic could stop high explosives.\n\nThe men on the ironclad hardly seemed worried, though. No lifeboats were readied, and the second gyrothopter stayed on its catapult, the rotors strapped down against the wind. Soon it too was veiled with a glossy black covering.\n\n\"Young master,\" Klopp said, \"what's happening on her aft deck?\"\n\nAlek swung the field glasses, and saw lights flickering atop the ironclad's strange metal tower.\n\nHe squinted harder. There were men working at the tower's base, dressed in uniforms made from the same shiny black that covered the deck guns. They moved slowly, as if encased in a fresh layer of tar.\n\nAlek frowned. \"Take a look, Master Klopp. Quickly, please.\"\n\nAs the old man took the field glasses, the flickering lights grew brighter\u2014Alek could see them with his naked eyes now. Shimmers slid along the struts of the tower, like nervous snakes made of lightning.\u2026\n\n\"Rubber,\" Alek said softly. \"They're protecting everything with rubber. That whole tower must be charged with electriks.\"\n\nKlopp swore. \"I should have realized. But they only showed us toys and demonstration models, never one that huge!\"\n\n\"Models of what?\"\n\nThe old man lowered the glasses. \"It's a Tesla cannon. A real one.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"As in Mr. Tesla, the man who invented wireless? You mean that's a transmitting tower?\"\n\n\"The same Mr. Tesla, young master, but it's not a transmitter.\" Klopp's face was pale. \"It's a weapon, a lightning generator.\"\n\nAlek stared in horror at the shimmering tower. As Dylan often said, lightning was an airship's natural enemy. If raw electriks flowed across the airship's skin, even the tiniest hydrogen leak could burst into flame.\n\n\"Are we in range yet?\"\n\n\"The ones I've seen could hardly shoot across a room,\" Klopp said. \"They only tickled your fingers or made your hair stand on end. But that one's huge, and it's got the boilers of a dreadnought to power it!\"\n\nAlek turned to Mr. Hirst, who was watching their conversation with an air of disinterest, and said in English, \"We have to come about! That tower on the aft deck is some kind of \u2026 lightning cannon.\"\n\nMr. Hirst raised an eyebrow. \"A lightning cannon?\"\n\n\"Yes! Klopp has worked with the German land forces. He's seen these things before.\" Alek sighed. \"Well, toy ones, anyway.\"\n\nThe chief engineer peered down at the Goeben. The electriks were sparkling brighter now, unfolding into spidery forms that danced along the tower's struts.\n\n\"Can't you see?\" Alek cried.\n\n\"It is rather odd.\" Mr. Hirst smiled. \"But lightning? I doubt your Clanker friends have mastered the forces of nature just yet.\"\n\n\"You have to tell the bridge!\"\n\n\"I'm sure the bridge can see it well enough.\" Hirst pulled a command whistle from his pocket and blew a short tune. \"But I shall inform them of your theory.\"\n\n\"My theory?\" Alek shouted. \"We don't have time for a debate! We have to turn around!\"\n\n\"What we'll do is wait for orders,\" Mr. Hirst said, dropping the whistle into his pocket.\n\nAlek swallowed a groan of frustration, then turned back to Klopp.\n\n\"How long do we have?\" he said in German.\n\n\"Everyone's cleared the deck, except for those men in protective suits. So it could be any moment.\" Klopp lowered the glasses. \"Full reverse on this engine will turn us around fastest.\"\n\n\"Full reverse from full ahead?\" Alek shook his head. \"You'll never make that look like an accident.\"\n\n\"No, but I can make it look like my own idea,\" Klopp said, then grabbed Alek by the collar and shoved him hard to the floor. As Alek's head cracked against the metal deck of the engine pod, the world went starry for a moment.\n\n\"Klopp! What in blazes are you\u2014\"\n\nThe shriek of gears drowned out Alek's words, the whole pod shuddering in its frame around him. The air suddenly stilled as the propeller sputtered to a halt.\n\n\"What's the meaning of this!\" cried Hirst.\n\nAlek's vision cleared, and he saw Klopp brandishing a wrench at the chief engineer. With his free hand the old man deftly shifted the engine into reverse, then pushed the foot pedal down.\n\nThe propeller sputtered back to life, drawing air backward across the pod.\n\n\"Klopp, wait!\" Alek began. He tried to stand, but his head spun, and he fell back to one knee.\n\nBlazes! The man had actually hurt him!\n\nHirst was blowing on his whistle again\u2014a high-pitched squeak\u2014and Alek heard a hydrogen sniffer howling in response. Soon a pack of the ugly creatures would be thundering down upon them.\n\nAlek pulled himself up, reaching out for the wrench. \"Klopp, what are you doing?\"\n\nThe man swung at him, yelling, \"Got to make this convincing!\"\n\nThe wrench whistled over Alek's head. He ducked and fell back onto one knee again, cursing. Had Klopp gone mad?\n\nMr. Hirst reached into a pocket and pulled out a compressed air pistol.\n\n\"No!\" Alek cried, leaping for the gun. As his fingers wrapped around Hirst's wrist, the pistol exploded with a deafening crack. The shot missed Klopp, but the bullet rang like an alarm bell as it ricocheted around the engine pod.\n\nSomething kicked Alek in the ribs, hard, and searing pain blossomed in his side.\n\nHe fell backward, his fingers slipping from Hirst's wrist, but the man didn't raise the gun again. Hirst and Klopp both gaped, dumbstruck, at the Leviathan's flank.\n\nAlek blinked away pain and followed their stares. The cilia were in furious motion, rippling like leaves in a storm. The airbeast's vast length was bending, twisting harder than he'd ever seen. The great harness groaned around them as it stretched, joined by the pop of ropes snapping in the ratlines.\n\n\"The beast knows it's in danger,\" Klopp said.\n\nAlek watched in wonder as the airship seemed to curl around them in the air. The stars spun overhead, and soon the huge animal had turned itself entirely around.\n\n\"Back to full \u2026,\" Alek began, but it hurt too much to speak. Every word was another kick in the ribs. He looked down at his hand pressed against his left side, and saw blood between the fingers.\n\nKlopp was already working, reversing the engine once more. Mr. Hirst clutched his pistol tight, still staring in wonder at the airbeast's flank.\n\n\"Get out of the pod, young master,\" Klopp yelled as the propeller's gears caught again. \"It's metal. The lightning will jump to it.\"\n\n\"I don't think I can.\"\n\nKlopp turned. \"What \u2026 ?\"\n\n\"I'm shot.\"\n\nThe old man dropped the controls and bent beside him, eyes wide. \"I'll lift you.\"\n\n\"Mind your engine, man!\" Alek managed.\n\n\"Young master\u2014,\" Klopp began, but his words were drowned out by a crackling in the air.\n\nWith a painful heave Alek pulled himself up to look backward. The Goeben was falling behind them, but the Tesla cannon was blindingly bright. It flickered like a welding lamp, sending jittering shadows across the dark sea.\n\nBeside him the airship's cilia still seethed and billowed, pushing at the air like a million tiny oars.\n\nFaster, Alek prayed to the giant airbeast.\n\nA great fireball formed at the tower's base, then swiftly rose, dancing and shimmering as it climbed. When it reached the top, a thunderous boom rang out.\n\nFingers of lightning, jagged and colossal, shot up from the Tesla cannon. They stretched across the whole sky at first, a tree of white fire, then leapt toward the Leviathan as if drawn by scent. The lightning spread a fiery web across the airbeast's skin, a dazzling wave that surged down its length. In an instant the electricity flowed three hundred meters from tail to head, leaping eagerly across the metal struts that supported the engine pod.\n\nThe whole pod began to crackle, the gears and pistons flinging out radiant spokes of fire. Alek was seized by an invisible force; every muscle in his body tightened. For a long moment the lightning squeezed the breath from him. Finally its power wilted, and he slipped back to the metal deck.\n\nThe engine sputtered to a halt again.\n\nAlek smelled smoke, and felt an awful pounding in his chest. His ribs ached with every heartbeat.\n\n\"Young master? Can you hear me?\"\n\nAlek forced his eyes open. \"I'm all right, Klopp.\"\n\n\"No, you aren't,\" the man said. \"I'll get you to the gondola.\"\n\nKlopp wrapped one big arm around Alek and pulled him up, sending a wave of fresh agony through him.\n\n\"God's wounds, man! That hurts!\"\n\nAlek wavered on his feet, dumbstruck by the pain. Mr. Hirst didn't lend a hand, his nervous eyes scanning the length of the Leviathan beside them.\n\nSomehow, the airship was not aflame.\n\n\"The engine?\" Alek asked Klopp.\n\nThe man sniffed the air and shook his head. \"All the electrikals are cooked, and the starboard side is silent as well.\"\n\nAlek turned to Hirst and said, \"We've lost the engines. Perhaps you could put that gun away.\"\n\nThe chief engineer stared at the air pistol in his hand, then slipped it into his pocket and pulled out a whistle. \"I'll call a surgeon for you. Tell your mutinous friend to set you down.\"\n\n\"My 'mutinous friend' just saved your\u2014,\" Alek started, but a fresh wave of dizziness passed over him. \"Let me sit,\" he muttered to Klopp. \"He says he can get a doctor up here.\"\n\n\"But he's the one who shot you!\"\n\n\"Yes, but he was aiming at you. Now please put me down.\"\n\nWith an unkindly look at Hirst, Klopp leaned Alek gently against the controls. As Alek caught his breath, he glanced up at the airship's flank. The cilia were still rippling like windblown grass. Even without the engines to motivate it, the great beast was still headed away from the ironclads.\n\nAlek looked sternward through the motionless propeller. The ironclads were steaming away.\n\n\"That's odd,\" he said. \"They don't seem to want to finish us off.\"\n\nKlopp nodded. \"They've gone back to their north-northeast heading. They must be expected somewhere.\"\n\n\"North-northeast,\" Alek repeated. He knew that was significant somehow. He also knew that he should be worried that the Leviathan was now drifting southward, away from Constantinople.\n\nBut breathing was worry enough.\n\nDeryn stood up slowly, blinking away spots from her eyes.\n\nA barking lightning bolt! That was what had fizzled up from the Clanker warship and leapt across the sky, dancing on every squick of metal on the Leviathan's topside. The Huxley winch had thrown out a blinding flock of white sparks, knocking her half silly in the process.\n\nDeryn looked in all directions, terrified that she would see fires bursting willy-nilly from the membrane. But it was all dark except for the jaggy shimmers burned into her vision. The sniffers must have done their jobs brilliantly before the battle. Not a squick of hydrogen had been leaking from the skin.\n\nThen she remembered\u2014the Leviathan had spun around just in time, the whole airship twisting like a dog chasing its own tail.\n\nHydrogen \u2026\n\nShe looked up into the dark sky, and her jaw dropped.\n\nThere was Newkirk, his arms waving madly, the Huxley blazing over his head like a giant Christmas pudding soaked with brandy.\n\nDeryn felt sick, the way she had in a hundred nightmares replaying Da's accident, so close to the awful sight above her. The Huxley tugged at its cable, carried higher by the heat of the flames, spinning the winch's crank.\n\nBut a moment later, its hydrogen expended, the airbeast began to drop.\n\nNewkirk was twisting in the pilot's rig, still alive somehow. Then Deryn saw a misting in the starlight around the Huxley. Newkirk had spilled the water ballast to keep himself from burning. Clever boy.\n\nThe dead husk of the airbeast billowed out like a ragged parachute, but it was still falling fast.\n\nThe Huxley was a thousand feet up, and if it missed crashing against the Leviathan's topsides, it would drop another thousand feet before the cable snapped it to a halt. Best to make that trip as short as possible. Deryn reached for the winch\u2014but her hand froze.\n\nDid electricity linger?\n\n\"Dummkopf!\" she cursed herself, forcing herself to grasp the metal.\n\nNo sparks shot from it, and she began to turn as fast as she could. But the Huxley was coming down faster than she could reel it in. The cable began to coil across the airship's spine, tangling in the feet of crewmen and sniffers running past.\n\nStill spinning the crank wildly, Deryn looked up. Newkirk was hanging limply beneath the burned husk, which was drifting away from the Leviathan.\n\nThe engines had stopped, and the searchlights had gone dead too. The crewmen were using electric torches to call the bats and strafing hawks back from the black sky\u2014the Clanker lightning contraption had knocked everything out.\n\nBut if the airship was powerless, why was the wind pushing Newkirk away? Shouldn't they all have been drifting together?\n\nDeryn looked down at the flank, her eyes widening.\n\nThe cilia were still moving, still carrying the airship away from danger.\n\n\"Now, that's barking odd,\" she muttered.\n\nUsually a hydrogen breather without engines was content to drift. Of course, the airbeast had been acting strangely since the crash in the Alps. All the old crewmen said that the crash in the Alps\u2014or the Clanker engines\u2014had rattled its attic.\n\nBut this was no time to ponder. Newkirk was gliding past only a hundred feet away, close enough that Deryn could see his blackened face and soaking uniform. But he didn't seem to be moving.\n\n\"Newkirk!\" she yelled, her hand raw on the winch's handle. But he fell past without answering.\n\nThe coils of slack cable began to rustle, like a nest of snakes strewn across the topside. The Huxley was dragging its cable behind as it dropped below the airship.\n\n\"Clear those lines!\" Deryn shouted, waving off a crewman standing among the slithering coils. The man danced away, the cable snapping at his ankles, trying to drag him down as well.\n\nShe went at the crank again, till the line snapped tight with a sickening jerk. Deryn hit the brake and checked the cable markings\u2014just over five hundred feet.\n\nThe Leviathan was two hundred feet from top to bottom, so Newkirk would be dangling less than three hundred feet below. Strapped into the pilot's rig, he was probably all right. Unless the fire had got him, or he'd been jolted to a neck-breaking stop \u2026\n\nDeryn took a deep breath, trying to stop her hands from shaking.\n\nShe couldn't crank him back up. The winch was designed for a hydrogen-filled Huxley, not to haul dead weight.\n\nDeryn followed the taut cable, climbing down the ratlines on the airbeast's flank. From the ship's waist she could just see the Huxley's dark shape fluttering against the whitecaps of the waves.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" she murmured. The water was much closer than she'd expected.\n\nThe Leviathan was losing altitude.\n\nOf course\u2014the great airbeast was trying to find the strongest wind to pull itself away from the German ironclads. It wouldn't care about smacking poor burnt Newkirk against the ocean's choppy surface.\n\nBut the officers could drop ballast, and drag the ship up against its will. Deryn pulled out her command whistle and blew for a message lizard, then stared again at the Huxley below.\n\nThere was no human movement that she could see. Newkirk had to be stunned, at least. And he wouldn't have the right equipment to climb the cable. No one expected to climb up from an ascender.\n\nWhere was that barking message lizard? She saw one scrambling across the membrane, and whistled for it. But the lizard just stared at her and jabbered something about an electrical malfunction.\n\n\"Brilliant,\" she murmured. The bolt of Clanker lightning had scrambled the wee beasties' brains! Down below, the dark water looked closer every second.\n\nShe was going to have to rescue Newkirk herself.\n\nDeryn searched the pockets of her flight suit. In airmanship class Mr. Rigby had taught them about how riggers \"belayed,\" which was Service-speak for sliding down a rope without breaking your neck. She found a few carabiners and enough line to make a pair of friction hitches.\n\nAfter attaching her safety clip to the Huxley's cable, Deryn twisted the carabiner tight. She couldn't wind the rope around her hips because the weight of the dead Huxley would snip her in half. But after a moment's fiddling, she attached the extra carabiners to her harness and strung the cable through them.\n\nMr. Rigby wouldn't approve of this method, Deryn thought as she kicked herself away from the membrane.\n\nShe slid down in short jerks, the carabiners' friction keeping her from falling too fast. But the rope was hot beneath her gloves, its fibers fraying wherever she snapped to a halt. Deryn doubted this cable was designed to hold the weight of a dead Huxley and two middies.\n\nThe ocean thundered below Deryn, the wind growing colder now that the sun had fully set. The peak of a tall wave smacked against the Huxley's drooping membrane, cracking like a gunshot.\n\n\"Newkirk!\" Deryn shouted, and the boy stirred in his pilot's rig.\n\nA shudder of relief went through her\u2014he was alive. Not like Da.\n\nShe let herself fall the last twenty yards, the rope hissing like mad and spilling a burnt smell into the salt air. But her boots landed softly on the squishy membrane of the dead airbeast, which smelled of smoke and salt, like jellyfish cooked on a hearth fire.\n\n\"Where in blazes am I?\" Newkirk mumbled, barely audible over the rumble of the waves. His hair was scorched, his face and hands blackened with smoke.\n\n\"Almost in the barking ocean, that's where! Can you move?\"\n\nThe boy stared at his blackened hands, wriggling his fingers, then unstrapped himself from the harness. He stood up shakily on the frame of the pilot's rig.\n\n\"Aye. I'm just singed.\" He ran his fingers through his hair, or what was left of it.\n\n\"Can you climb?\" Deryn asked.\n\nNewkirk stared up at the Leviathan's dark belly. \"Aye, but that's miles away! Couldn't you have cranked faster?\"\n\n\"You could have fallen slower!\" Deryn shouted back. She unclipped two carabiners and shoved them into his hands, along with a short length of line. \"Tie yourself a friction hitch. Or don't you remember Mr. Rigby's classes?\"\n\nNewkirk stared at the carabiners, then up at the distant airship.\n\n\"Aye, I remember. But I never thought we'd be ascending that far.\"\n\n\"Ascending,\" of course, was Service-Speak for climbing up a rope without breaking your neck. Deryn's fingers worked fast with her own line. A friction hitch slid freely up a rope, but held fast when weight was hanging from it. That way, she and Newkirk could stop and rest without relying on their muscles to keep them from sliding back.\n\n\"You go first,\" she ordered. If Newkirk slid down, she could stop him.\n\nHe pulled himself up a few feet, then tested his hitch, swinging freely from the rope. \"It works!\"\n\n\"Aye. You'll be conquering Mount Everest next!\" As she spoke, another wave slapped at the Huxley, splashing across them both. Deryn lost her footing, but her friction hitch held.\n\nShe spat out salt water and yelled, \"Get going, you Dummkopf! The ship's losing altitude!\"\n\nNewkirk started climbing, scrambling with feet and hands. He had soon cleared enough distance that Deryn could haul herself off the dead Huxley.\n\nAnother wave hit the airbeast, snapping the line tight, and Newkirk skidded down till he was almost on top of her. If the Leviathan dropped any lower, the beastie's carcass would be dragging in the water. If the membrane filled up, it would pull on the rope like a barrel full of stones.\n\nEnough to break any cable \u2026 She had to cut the Huxley loose.\n\n\"Higher!\" she yelled, and started climbing madly.\n\nAbout twenty feet above the Huxley, Deryn halted, hanging just above a badly frayed spot. She pulled out her rigging knife, reached down, and started hacking at the line. Huxley cable was barking thick, but when the next tall wave struck the airbeast, the fibers unraveled in a blur and snapped.\n\nWithout the beastie's dead weight anchoring them, suddenly they were swinging across the black sea, cast about by the wind. Newkirk cried out with surprise overhead.\n\n\"Sorry!\" Deryn yelled up. \"Should have warned you.\"\n\nBut with the Huxley's weight gone, the rope wouldn't snap \u2026 probably.\n\nShe started climbing again, wishing for the hundredth time that she had the arm strength of a boy. But soon the waves no longer threatened her dangling boots.\n\nHalfway up, Deryn took a long breather, searching the dark horizon for the two German ironclads. They were nowhere to be seen.\n\nMaybe the Royal Navy was close by, and had kept the ships running. But Deryn couldn't see any sign of surface ships. The only shape on the water was the Huxley's carcass, a lonely black smear on the waves.\n\n\"Poor beastie,\" she said, shivering. The whole airship and its crew might have wound up like that\u2014burnt black, as lonely as driftwood on the dark sea. If the hydrogen sniffers had missed a single leak, or if the airbeast hadn't spun itself around just in time, they'd all have been done for.\n\n\"Barking Clankers,\" Deryn murmured. \"Making their own lightning now.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes to shut her dark memories away, the roar of skin-prickling heat and the smell of burnt flesh. This time she'd won. The fire hadn't taken anyone she loved.\n\nDeryn shuddered once more, then started to climb again.\n\n\"This is entirely unacceptable!\" Dr. Barlow cried.\n\n\"I'm s-sorry, ma'am,\" the guard sputtered. \"But the captain said the Clanker boy wasn't to have visitors.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head\u2014the man's resistance was already faltering. He was backed up against Alek's stateroom door, sweat breaking out on his forehead.\n\n\"I am not a visitor, you imbecile,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"I'm a doctor here to see an injured patient!\"\n\nTazza's ears perked up at the lady boffin's sharp tone, and he let out a low growl. Deryn held his leash a squick tighter. \"Shush now, Tazza. No biting.\"\n\n\"But the surgeon was already here,\" the guard squeaked, staring wide eyed at the thylacine. \"Said the boy only bruised a rib.\"\n\n\"On top of suffering from shock, no doubt,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"Or did you fail to notice our recent encounter with a prodigious amount of electricity?\"\n\n\"Of course not, ma'am.\" The guard swallowed, still eyeing Tazza nervously. \"But the captain was quite specific\u2014\"\n\n\"Did he specifically forbid doctors from seeing the patient?\"\n\n\"Er, no.\"\n\nJust give up, thought Deryn. It didn't matter that Dr. Barlow was a boffin\u2014a fabricator of beasties\u2014and not a pulse-taking stick-out-your-tongue doctor. She'd be seeing this particular patient one way or another.\n\nDeryn hoped that Alek really was all right. The Clanker lightning had danced across the whole ship, but it must have been worst in the engine pods, with all that metal about \u2026 Well, second to worst, anyway. Newkirk's hair was half burnt off, and he had a knot on his head the size of a cricket ball.\n\nBut how had Alek bruised a rib? That didn't sound like something an electric shock would do.\n\nFinally the guard surrendered his post, slinking off to check with the watch officer and trusting Dr. Barlow to wait till he got back. She didn't, of course, just pushed the door straight open.\n\nAlek lay in bed, his ribs wrapped in bandages. His skin was ashen, his dark green eyes glistening in the dawn light streaming through the portholes.\n\n\"Barking spiders!\" Deryn said. \"You're as pale as a mealyworm.\"\n\nA wan smile spread across the boy's face. \"It's good to see you, too, Dylan. And you, Dr. Barlow.\"\n\n\"Good morning, Alek,\" the lady boffin said. \"You are pale, aren't you? As if you've lost some blood. An odd symptom for electrocution.\"\n\nAlek grimaced as he struggled to sit up higher. \"I'm afraid you're right, ma'am. Mr. Hirst shot me.\"\n\n\"Shot you?\" Deryn cried.\n\nAlek nodded. \"Luckily it was one of your feeble compressed air guns. Dr. Busk said the bullet hit a rib and bounced off, but nothing's broken, thanks partly to my fencing armor. I should be walking about soon enough.\"\n\nDeryn stared at the bandages. \"But what in blazes did he shoot you for?\"\n\n\"He was aiming for Klopp. They had a \u2026 disagreement. Klopp realized what was about to happen\u2014what the Tesla cannon was\u2014and decided to turn us around.\"\n\n\"A Tesla cannon?\" Dr. Barlow repeated. \"As in that awful Mr. Tesla?\"\n\n\"That's what Klopp says,\" Alek said.\n\n\"But you Clankers didn't turn us around,\" Deryn said. \"Everyone says that the beastie itself turned, because it got scared.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"Klopp reversed the port engine first, then the airbeast followed suit. It seems the Leviathan has more sense than its own officers.\"\n\n\"You said they had a disagreement?\" Dr. Barlow asked. \"You mean you changed course without orders?\"\n\n\"There wasn't time to wait for orders,\" he said.\n\nDeryn let out a low groan. No wonder Alek was under guard.\n\n\"That's barking mutiny,\" she said softly.\n\n\"But we saved the ship.\"\n\n\"Aye, but you can't disobey orders just because the officers are being daft. Especially not in battle\u2014that's a hanging offense!\"\n\nAlek's eyes widened, and the room was silent for a moment.\n\nDr. Barlow cleared her throat. \"Please don't say alarming things to my patient, Mr. Sharp. He's no more a member of this crew than I am, and is therefore not subject to your brutish military authority.\"\n\nDeryn bit down a reply. She doubted Captain Hobbes would see it that way. This had probably been his worry since the Clankers had come aboard, that they'd ignore the bridge and pilot the ship whichever way they wanted.\n\nChanging course wasn't like skylarking or learning to fence on duty. It was mutiny, pure and simple.\n\nThe lady boffin sat primly on the stateroom's only chair, snapping her fingers for Tazza to come to her.\n\n\"Now, Alek,\" she said, stroking the thylacine's striped flank. \"You say that Klopp was operating the engine. So this 'mutiny' wasn't your idea?\"\n\nThe boy thought for a moment. \"I suppose not.\"\n\n\"Then, pray tell, why are you under guard?\"\n\n\"When Mr. Hirst pulled the pistol, I tried to take it from him.\"\n\nDeryn shut her eyes. Striking an officer\u2014another hanging offense.\n\n\"Very sensible of you,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"This ship won't get very far without its master of mechaniks, will it?\"\n\n\"Where is Klopp now?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"I reckon he's in the brig,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"And not at work on the engines, thus further delaying my mission.\" Dr. Barlow stood up, straightening her skirts. \"Don't you worry about Master Klopp, Alek. Now that I have all the facts, I'm sure the captain will see reason.\"\n\nShe handed the leash to Deryn.\n\n\"Please walk Tazza and then check on the eggs, Mr. Sharp. I don't trust that Mr. Newkirk, especially with his head swelling up like a melon.\" She turned. \"In fact, I'd much rather that you were watching them, Alek. Please do get better soon.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am. I'll try,\" the boy said. \"But if you don't mind, could Dylan stay a moment?\"\n\nThe lady boffin's eyes measured them both, and then she smiled. \"Of course. Perhaps you could amuse Mr. Sharp with whatever you know about this \u2026 Tesla cannon? I have some familiarity with the inventor, and it seemed a most intriguing device.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I don't know much\u2014,\" Alek began, but Dr. Barlow was already out the door and gone.\n\nDeryn stood silently a moment, wondering where to start. With the Clankers' lightning contraption? Or how Newkirk had almost burnt to a crisp? Or the possibility that Alek would be court-martialed and hanged?\n\nThen her eyes fell on his bandages, and an awful feeling went through her. If the gun had been pointed a few inches higher, Alek might be dead.\n\n\"Does getting shot hurt much?\" she asked.\n\n\"Like a mule kicked me.\"\n\n\"Hmm. I've never been daft enough to let that happen.\"\n\n\"Nor have I.\" Alek smiled weakly. \"But it feels about right.\"\n\nThe two were silent again, Deryn wondering how things had gone pear-shaped so fast. Before Newkirk had spotted the ironclads, she'd been hoping that Alek would wind up staying on the Leviathan somehow. But she hadn't meant lying wounded in bed, or clapped in irons for mutiny, or both.\n\n\"This is the second time someone's shot at me,\" Alek said. \"Remember those gunners on the zeppelin?\"\n\nDeryn nodded slowly. Back in the Alps, the daft prince had stepped out into the middle of a battle, right in front of a machine gun. Only a hydrogen leak had saved him, the German gunners setting their own airship aflame.\n\n\"Perhaps I wasn't meant to die that day,\" he said. \"Or last night, either.\"\n\n\"Aye, or perhaps you were just barking lucky.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Alek said. \"Do you really think they'll hang us?\"\n\nDeryn thought a moment, then shrugged. \"There aren't any rules for something like this, I reckon. We've never had Clankers aboard before. But they'll listen to the lady boffin, because of her grandfather's name.\"\n\nAlek grimaced again. Deryn wondered if it was his wound, or being reminded that Dr. Barlow was related to old Charles Darwin himself. Even after serving on a living airship, the Clankers were still superstitious about life threads and fabrication.\n\n\"I wish we had mutinied,\" Alek said. \"And ended that pointless battle before it started. Klopp and I thought about stopping the engines and making it look like a malfunction.\"\n\n\"Well, thinking isn't the same as doing,\" Deryn said, slumping onto the chair. She'd entertained madder ideas than mutiny. Like telling Alek that she was a girl, or giving Dr. Barlow a smack\u2014the latter more than once. The trick was never to let what you were thinking slip out into the world.\n\n\"And anyway,\" she continued, \"I haven't heard about this mutiny business, so the officers must be keeping dead quiet. Maybe the captain wants to let you off without looking soft. Everyone thinks it was the airbeast who turned us around, for fear of that Clanker cannon.\"\n\n\"The beast did turn us around. It must have smelled the lightning\u2014it knew we'd all burn.\"\n\nDeryn shuddered again, as she did every time she thought of how close they'd come. She could still see the Huxley, blazing in midair just like Da's balloon.\n\n\"But Newkirk isn't dead,\" she told herself softly.\n\n\"Pardon me?\"\n\nDeryn cleared her throat. She didn't want to wind up with her voice squeaking like a girl's. \"I said, the engines are dead. And the airbeast has gone bonkers, and thinks it's still running away from that Tesla thingie. We're halfway to Africa!\"\n\nAlek swore. \"I suppose those ironclads are already there.\"\n\n\"What, in Africa?\"\n\n\"No, Dummkopf\u2014Constantinople.\" He pointed at the desk in the room. \"There's a map in that drawer. Kindly fetch it for me.\"\n\n\"Aye, your princeliness,\" Deryn said, hauling herself up to get the map. It was just like Alek, to be thinking of maps and schemes while lying wounded, guilty of a hanging offense.\n\nShe sat on the bed beside him, smoothing out the roll of paper. It was labeled in Clanker writing, but she could see it was the Mediterranean.\n\n\"The ironclads were headed north into the Aegean,\" Alek said. \"See?\"\n\nDeryn traced the Leviathan's course from southern Italy with one finger, until she found the spot where they'd fought the Goeben and Breslau\u2014almost due south of Constantinople.\n\n\"Aye, they were headed that way.\" She pointed at the Dardanelles, the narrow stretch of water that led to the ancient city. \"But if they head north, they'll be trapped in the strait, like a fly in a bottle.\"\n\n\"What if they plan to stay there?\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"The Ottoman Empire is still neutral, and ships at war can't hang about in a neutral port. Dr. Barlow says we're only allowed to stay in Constantinople for twenty-four hours. It must be the same for the Germans.\"\n\n\"But didn't she also say that the Ottomans were angry with the British? For stealing their warship?\"\n\n\"Well, aye,\" Deryn said, then muttered, \"but that's just borrowing, really.\"\n\nTo be truthful, though, it had been a bit like stealing. Britain had just completed a new dreadnought for the Ottoman navy, along with a huge companion creature, some new sort of kraken. Both the warship and the creature had already been paid for, but when the war had begun, the First Lord of the Admiralty had decided to keep the ship and its beastie, at least until the conflict ended.\n\nBorrowing or stealing, it had caused the diplomatic ruckus that Dr. Barlow and the Leviathan had been sent to sort out. Somehow the mysterious eggs in the engine room were meant to help.\n\n\"So the Ottomans might decide to let the ironclads stay,\" Alek said. \"Just to get back at your Lord Churchill.\"\n\n\"Well, that would make everything trickier, wouldn't it?\"\n\nAlek nodded. \"It would mean even more Germans in Constantinople. It might even bring the Ottomans over to the Clanker side! The Goeben's Tesla cannon is pretty convincing.\"\n\n\"Aye, it convinced me,\" Deryn said. She wouldn't fancy sharing the same city with that contraption.\n\n\"And what happens if the Ottomans close the Dardanelles to British shipping?\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. The fighting bears of the Russian army needed lots of food, most of which was brought in by ship. If they were cut off from their Darwinist allies, the Russians would have a long, hungry winter.\n\n\"But are you sure that's where the ironclads were headed?\"\n\n\"No. Not yet.\" He raised his dark gaze from the map. \"Dylan, can you do me a favor? A secret favor?\"\n\nShe swallowed. \"That depends on what it is.\"\n\n\"I need you to deliver a message.\"\n\n\"Barking bloody princes,\" she muttered, pulling Tazza along the airship's corridors.\n\nShe'd hardly slept a wink last night, what with looking after Newkirk, and the thylacine needed to go for a walk soon. On top of which, Deryn still had to check on Dr. Barlow's precious eggs. But instead of attending to her duties, here she was delivering secret messages for the Clankers.\n\nAiding the enemy in wartime. How was that for mutiny?\n\nAs she drew closer to the cabin, Deryn began to formulate excuses and explanations\u2014\"I was just asking our count friend if he needed anything.\" \"I was on a secret mission from the captain.\" \"Someone had to keep an eye on those mutinous Clankers, and this was the best way!\"\u2014all of them barking pathetic.\n\nShe knew the real reason she'd said yes to Alek. He'd looked so helpless lying there, pale and bandaged, not knowing if they were going to hang him tomorrow at dawn. It had only made the way she felt harder to ignore.\n\nDeryn took a deep breath, and rapped on the stateroom door.\n\nAfter a long moment it opened to reveal a tall man in a formal uniform. He stared down his sharp nose at her and Tazza, not saying a word. Deryn wondered if she should bow, because he was a count and all. But Alek was a prince, which sounded more important, and no one ever bowed to him.\n\n\"What is it?\" the man finally asked.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Mr.\u2026, um, Count Volger. I'm Midshipman Dylan Sharp.\"\n\n\"I know who you are.\"\n\n\"Right. Because Alek and I, we've been fencing and that. We're friends.\"\n\n\"You're that idiot boy who put a knife to Alek's throat.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed, willing her tongue to untangle. She'd only been pretending when she'd taken Alek hostage back in the Alps, to force the Clankers to negotiate instead of blowing up the airship.\n\nBut under the man's imperious gaze, the explanation wouldn't come.\n\n\"Aye, that was me,\" she managed. \"But it was only to get your attention.\"\n\n\"You succeeded.\"\n\n\"And I used the dull edge of that knife, just to be safe!\" She looked both ways down the corridor. \"Do you suppose I could come in?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I've got a message from Alek. A secret one.\"\n\nWith those words Count Volger's stony countenance shifted a squick. His left eyebrow arched, then finally he stepped back. A moment later she and Tazza were inside the room, the thylacine sniffing at the man's boots.\n\n\"What is this creature?\" he asked, taking another step backward.\n\n\"Oh, that's just Tazza. He's harmless,\" Deryn said, then remembered the damage he'd done to the lady boffin's cabin. \"Well, unless you're a set of curtains, which, um, you're clearly not.\"\n\nShe cleared her throat, feeling like a ninny. The man's cold, haughty manner had started her babbling.\n\n\"Will it repeat our words?\"\n\n\"What, Tazza, talk?\" Deryn stifled a laugh. \"He's no message lizard. He's a natural beastie, a thylacine from Tasmania. Dr. Barlow has him as a traveling companion, though, as you can see, he's mostly my responsibility. Anyway, I've got a message from\u2014\"\n\nVolger silenced her with an upheld hand, then glanced up at the message tubes in the cabin. A lizard was poking its head from one, and the count clapped his hands once to scare it off.\n\n\"Those godless things are everywhere,\" he muttered. \"Always listening.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. The other Clankers were even more twitchy about beasties than Alek. They seemed to think that everything living aboard the airship was out to get them.\n\n\"Aye, sir. But lizards only carry messages. They don't eavesdrop.\"\n\n\"And how can you be sure of that?\"\n\nNow, that was a daft question. Message lizards might repeat snatches of conversation by accident now and then, especially when they'd been recently dazzled by a Tesla cannon. But that wasn't the same as eavesdropping, was it?\n\nThen she remembered how Count Volger had pretended not to speak English when he'd come aboard, in hopes of overhearing secrets. And how Dr. Barlow had pulled the same trick on the Clankers, pretending not to know any German. No wonder those two were always suspicious of everyone\u2014they were both sneaky-beaks themselves.\n\n\"Those lizards have got brains no bigger than walnuts,\" she said. \"I don't reckon they'd make very good spies.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not.\" The count sat down at his desk, which was covered with maps and scrawled notes, a sheathed sword serving as a paperweight. \"And what about your brains, Mr. Sharp? You're clever enough to be a spy, aren't you?\"\n\n\"What, me? I told you, Alek sent me here!\"\n\n\"And how do I know that? Last night I was informed that Alek was hurt in the battle, but I haven't been allowed to see him or Master Klopp. And now I receive this 'secret' message from Alek, courtesy of a boy who held him hostage?\"\n\n\"But he \u2026,\" Deryn began, then groaned with frustration. This was what she got for doing favors for Clankers. \"He's my friend. He trusts me, even if you don't.\"\n\n\"Prove it.\"\n\n\"Well, of course he does! He told me his little secret, didn't he?\"\n\nCount Volger's eyes narrowed at her a moment, then he stared down at the sword on the table. \"His secret?\"\n\n\"Aye, he told me who he \u2026,\" Deryn began, but a slow realization was creeping over her. What if Alek had never mentioned to Volger that he'd spilled the beans to her? Finding out now might give the man a wee startle. \"You know, his big secret?\"\n\nThe air hissed as Volger whirled around, sunlight flashing on steel, the chair spinning across the floor and sending Tazza leaping to his feet. The sword suddenly stretched from Volger's hand, its cold, naked tip at Deryn's throat.\n\n\"Tell me what secret,\" the wildcount demanded. \"Now.\"\n\n\"A-about his parents!\" she sputtered. \"His father and mother were assassinated, which is what started this barking war! And he's a prince or something!\"\n\n\"Who else knows this?\"\n\n\"Just me!\" she squeaked, but the metal prodded her. \"Um, and Dr. Barlow. But no one else, I swear!\"\n\nHe glared at her for an endless moment, his eyes prying their way into hers. Tazza let out a low growl.\n\nFinally the wildcount pulled the saber a few inches back. \"Why haven't you informed your captain?\"\n\n\"Because Alek made us promise.\" Deryn stared at the sword point. \"I thought you knew he'd told us!\"\n\nCount Volger lowered the sword. \"Obviously I did not.\"\n\n\"Well, that's not my fault!\" Deryn cried. \"Maybe it's you he doesn't trust!\"\n\nThe man looked at the floor. \"Perhaps.\"\n\n\"And you didn't have to cut my barking head off!\"\n\nVolger gave her a thin smile as he righted the overturned chair. \"It was only to get your attention. And I used a dull edge. Surely you know a fencing saber when you see one?\"\n\nDeryn reached out and grabbed the weapon's blade. She swore\u2014it was the very saber she'd practiced with yesterday, no sharper than a butter knife.\n\nCount Volger sat heavily, shaking his head as he cleaned the sword with a pocket handkerchief and then sheathed it again. \"That boy will be the death of me.\"\n\n\"At least Alek trusts someone!\" Deryn said. \"The rest of you Dummkopfs, you're all as mad as a box of frogs! Lying and sneaking and \u2026 scared of message lizards. With all your scheming it's no wonder the world's in a barking great war!\"\n\nTazza growled again, then made his strange little yelp, hopping on his hind legs. Deryn knelt to calm him down, and to hide her burning eyes from Count Volger.\n\n\"Is Alek really hurt?\" the man asked.\n\n\"Aye. But it's only a bruised rib.\"\n\n\"Why won't they let me see him or Klopp?\"\n\n\"Because of what Master Klopp did during the battle,\" Deryn said, stroking Tazza's flank. \"He turned the ship around just before the Tesla cannon fired. Without orders.\"\n\nVolger snorted. \"So this is why your captain has summoned me? To discuss the chain of command?\"\n\nShe glared up at him. \"He might reckon it was mutiny\u2014a hanging offense!\"\n\n\"An absurd notion, unless he wants his ship to drift forever.\"\n\nDeryn took a slow, deep breath and petted Tazza again. It was true\u2014the Leviathan still needed the Clankers and their engines. More so than ever, with the airbeast acting up.\n\n\"I suppose the captain just wants to make a point,\" she said. \"But that's not what I'm here about.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Your secret message.\"\n\nDeryn gave the man a hard look. \"Well, maybe you don't care one way or the other. But Alek thinks those two ironclads are headed for Constantinople, just like us!\"\n\nVolger raised an eyebrow at that, then pointed to the fallen chair.\n\n\"Sit down, boy, and tell me everything.\"\n\n\"Hear that?\" Corporal Bauer asked.\n\nAlek wiped his hands on an oily rag, listening. The air trembled with the distant clamor of an engine coming to life, sputtering at first, then settling into a low and steady roar.\n\nHe stared at the tangle of gears before him and said to his men, \"Three against one, and Klopp has his engine working first!\"\n\n\"Hate to say so, sir.\" Bauer spread his grease-blackened hands. \"But you and I aren't much help.\"\n\nMaster Hoffman clapped the gunner on his back and laughed. \"I'll make an engineer of you one day, Bauer. It's that one who's hopeless.\" He glanced at Mr. Hirst, who was watching them glumly from the engine pod strut, his hands perfectly clean.\n\n\"What's this about?\" the man asked.\n\nAlek switched to English. \"Nothing, Mr. Hirst. Just that it sounds as though Klopp has beaten us.\"\n\n\"So it would seem,\" the man said, and fell back into silence.\n\nIt was late afternoon, less than forty-eight hours after the unlucky encounter with the Breslau and the Goeben. Alek, his men Hoffman and Bauer, and Hirst had been assigned to the starboard pod, while Master Klopp was over on the port side, under armed guard, with Count Volger translating for him.\n\nSince the incident with the air pistol, it had been decided that Klopp and Mr. Hirst would no longer share the same engine pod. Alek was not under guard, but he suspected that was only because of the bandages wrapped around his injured rib. Every time he lifted a wrench, he winced in pain.\n\nBut no one was locked in the brig, at least. True to her word, Dr. Barlow had convinced the captain to accept reality\u2014without Klopp's help, the airship would drift on the winds. Or worse, the great airbeast might take them on a journey of its own choosing.\n\nThe captain's goodwill had come with certain conditions, however. The five Austrians were to stay aboard the Leviathan until the Darwinists understood their new engines fully, however long that took.\n\nAlek suspected they wouldn't be getting off in Constantinople.\n\nHalf an hour later, the starboard engine finally sparked to life. As smoke poured from the exhaust pipes, Master Hoffman engaged the gears, and the propeller began to spin.\n\nAlek closed his eyes, reveling in the steady thrum of pistons. Freedom might not be any closer, but at least the airship was whole again.\n\n\"Feeling all right, sir?\" Bauer asked.\n\nAlek took a deep breath of sea air. \"Just happy to be under way.\"\n\n\"Feels good to have an engine rumbling underfoot again, doesn't it?\" Hoffman nodded at Mr. Hirst. \"And maybe our sulky friend here has finally picked up a few tricks.\"\n\n\"Let's hope so,\" Alek said, smiling. Since the battle, Bauer and Hoffman had taken a dislike to the Leviathan's chief engineer. After all, the two had been at Alek's side since the awful night his parents had died, and had given up their careers to protect him. They hadn't taken kindly to Mr. Hirst shooting at him and Master Klopp, mutiny or not.\n\nSoon both engines were working in tandem, and the Leviathan set a northward course again. The water's surface slid by beneath them faster and faster, until the airship had left behind its escort of hungry seagulls and curious dolphins.\n\nMoving air tasted better, Alek decided. The airbeast had let itself drift most of the day, matching the speed and direction of the wind, wrapping everything in a dead calm. But now that they were under power, the salt air was sharp and alive against his face, driving away the feeling of being imprisoned.\n\n\"One of those talking things,\" Bauer said, frowning.\n\nAlek turned to see a message lizard making its way across the airship's skin, and sighed. It was probably Dr. Barlow putting him on egg duty again.\n\nBut when the lizard opened its mouth, it spoke with the master coxswain's voice. \"The captain wishes the pleasure of your company on the bridge, at your earliest convenience.\"\n\nBauer and Hoffman looked at Alek, recognizing the English word \"captain.\"\n\n\"Wants to see me at my earliest convenience,\" he translated, and Bauer gave a snort. There wasn't much convenient about climbing down to the gondola with a bruised rib.\n\nBut Alek found himself smiling as he wiped engine grease from his hands. This was the first time any of them had been invited to the bridge. Since coming aboard, he'd wondered how the officers controlled the airship's interwoven complements of men, fabricated animals, and machines. Was it like a German land dreadnought, with the bridge crew directly controlling the engines and cannon? Or an oceangoing ship, with orders dispatched to the boiler rooms and weapon stations?\n\nAlek turned to Mr. Hirst. \"I leave you to it, sir.\"\n\nThe man nodded a bit stiffly. He'd never apologized for shooting Alek, and none of the officers had ever admitted that Klopp had saved the ship. But as they'd started work that morning, Hirst had quietly turned out his pockets, showing that he wasn't carrying a pistol anymore.\n\nThat was something, at least.\n\nAlek found Volger waiting for him on the gondola's main staircase.\n\nIt was strange to see the wildcount's riding clothes spotted with oil, his hair tangled by propeller wash. In fact, Alek hadn't seen Volger since the battle. They'd both been working on the engines every waking moment since Alek's release.\n\n\"Ah, Your Highness,\" the wildcount said, offering a halfhearted bow. \"I was wondering if you'd been summoned too.\"\n\n\"I go where the lizards tell me.\"\n\nVolger didn't smile, just turned and started down the stairs. \"Beastly creatures. The captain must have important news, to let us see the bridge at last.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he wants to thank us.\"\n\n\"I suspect it's something less agreeable,\" Volger said. \"Something he didn't want us to know until after we got his engines working again.\"\n\nAlek frowned. As usual the wildcount was making sense, if only in a suspicious way. Living among the godless creatures of the Leviathan hadn't improved his disposition.\n\n\"You don't trust the Darwinists much, do you?\" Alek said.\n\n\"Nor should you.\" Volger came to a halt, looking up and down the corridors. He waited until a pair of crewmen had passed, then pulled Alek farther down the stairway. A moment later they were on the lowest deck of the gondola, in a dark corridor lit only by the ship's glowworms.\n\n\"The ship's storerooms are almost empty,\" Volger said quietly. \"They don't even guard them anymore.\"\n\nAlek smiled. \"You've been sneaking about, haven't you?\"\n\n\"When I'm not adjusting gears like a common mechanik. But we must speak quickly. They've caught me here once already.\"\n\n\"So, what did you think of my message?\" Alek asked. \"Those ironclads are headed for Constantinople, aren't they?\"\n\n\"You told them who you were,\" Count Volger said.\n\nAlek froze for a moment as the words sank in. Then he blinked and turned away, his eyes stinging with shame and frustration. It felt like being a boy again, when Volger had landed hits with his saber at will.\n\nHe cleared his throat, reminding himself that the wildcount was no longer his tutor. \"Dr. Barlow told you, didn't she? To show that she has something over us.\"\n\n\"Not a bad guess. But it was simpler than that\u2014Dylan let it slip.\"\n\n\"Dylan?\" Alek shook his head.\n\n\"He didn't realize you kept secrets from me.\"\n\n\"I don't keep any \u2026,\" Alek began, but it was pointless arguing.\n\n\"Have you gone mad?\" Volger whispered. \"You're the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. Why would you tell our enemies that?\"\n\n\"Dylan and Dr. Barlow aren't enemies,\" Alek said firmly, looking Count Volger full in the eye. \"And they don't know I'm the legal heir to the throne. Nobody knows about the pope's letter but you and me.\"\n\n\"Well, thank heaven for that.\"\n\n\"And I didn't tell them, not really. Dr. Barlow guessed who my parents were, quite on her own.\" Alek looked away again. \"But I'm sorry. I should have told you they knew.\"\n\n\"No. You should have never admitted anything, whatever they'd guessed! That boy Dylan is completely guileless\u2014incapable of keeping a secret. You may think he's your friend, but he's just a peasant. And you've put your future in his hands!\"\n\nAlek shook his head. Dylan might be a commoner, but he was a friend. He'd already risked his life to keep Alek's identity a secret.\n\n\"Think for a moment, Volger. Dylan let it slip to you, not to one of the ship's officers. We can trust him.\"\n\nThe man stepped closer in the darkness, his voice hardly above a whisper. \"I hope you're right, Alek. Otherwise the captain is about to tell us that his new engines will be taking us back to Britain, where they'll have a cage waiting for you. Do you think being the Darwinists' pet monarch will be agreeable?\"\n\nAlek didn't answer for a moment, replaying all of Dylan's earnest promises in his mind. Then he turned away and started up the stairs.\n\n\"He hasn't betrayed us. You'll see.\"\n\nThe bridge was much larger than Alek had imagined.\n\nIt took up the entire width of the gondola, curving with the gentle half circle of the airship's prow. The afternoon sun streamed through windows that stretched almost to the ceiling. Alek stepped closer to one\u2014the glass leaned gently outward, allowing him to peer straight down at the dazzling water slipping past.\n\nReflected in the window, a dozen message lizard tubes coiled along the ceiling; others sprouted from the floor like shiny brass mushrooms. Levers and control panels lined the walls, and carrier birds fluttered in the cages hanging in one corner. Alek closed his eyes for a moment, listening to the buzz and chatter of men and animals.\n\nVolger gently pulled his arm. \"We're here to parley, not to gawk.\"\n\nSetting a serious expression on his face, Alek followed Volger. But still he watched and listened to everything around him. No matter what the captain's news turned out to be, he wanted to soak in every detail of this place.\n\nAt the front of the bridge was the master wheel, like an old sailing ship's, carved in the Darwinists' sinuous style. Captain Hobbes turned from it to greet them, a smile on his face.\n\n\"Ah, gentlemen. Thank you for coming.\"\n\nAlek followed Volger's lead and offered the captain a shallow bow, one suited for a minor nobleman of uncertain importance.\n\n\"To what do we owe the pleasure?\" Volger asked.\n\n\"We're under way again,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"I wanted to thank you personally for that.\"\n\n\"We're glad to help,\" Alek said, hoping that for once Count Volger's suspicions had proven overblown.\n\n\"But I also have bad news,\" the captain continued. \"I've just received word that Britain and Austria-Hungary are officially at war.\" He cleared his throat. \"Most regrettable.\"\n\nAlek drew in a slow breath, wondering how long the captain had known. Had he waited until the engines were fixed to tell them? Then Alek realized that he and Volger were smeared with grease, dressed like tradesmen, while Captain Hobbes preened in his crisp blue uniform. Suddenly he hated the man.\n\n\"This changes nothing,\" Volger said. \"We're not soldiers, after all.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The captain frowned. \"But judging by their uniforms, your men are members of the Hapsburg Guard, are they not?\"\n\n\"Not since we left Austria,\" Alek said. \"As I told you, we had to flee for political reasons.\"\n\nThe captain shrugged. \"Deserters are still soldiers.\"\n\nAlek bridled. \"My men are hardly\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you saying we're prisoners of war?\" Volger interrupted. \"If so, we shall collect our men from the engine pods and retire to the brig.\"\n\n\"Don't be hasty, gentlemen.\" Captain Hobbes raised his hands. \"I merely wanted to give you the bad news, and to beg your indulgence. This puts me in an awkward situation, you must understand.\"\n\n\"We find it \u2026 awkward too.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" the captain said, ignoring Alek's tone. \"I would prefer to reach some arrangement. But try to understand my position. You've never told me exactly who you are. Now that our countries are at war, that makes your status rather complicated.\"\n\nThe man waited expectantly, and Alek looked at Volger.\n\n\"I suppose it does,\" the wildcount said. \"But we still prefer not to identify ourselves.\"\n\nCaptain Hobbes sighed. \"Then I shall have to turn to the Admiralty for orders.\"\n\n\"Do let us know what they say,\" Count Volger said simply.\n\n\"Of course.\" The captain touched his hat and turned back to the wheel. \"Good day, gentlemen.\"\n\nWhile Volger bowed again, Alek turned stiffly about and walked away, still angry at the man's impertinence. But as he headed back toward the hatchway, he found himself slowing a little, just to listen for a few more seconds to the thrum of the airship at its heart.\n\nThere were worse prisons in the world than this.\n\n\"You know what his orders from the Admiralty will be,\" Volger muttered out in the corridor.\n\n\"To lock us up,\" Alek said. \"As soon as he can do without our help.\"\n\n\"Exactly. It's time to start planning our escape.\"\n\nThat night in the machine room, Alek stared at the eggs, his mind drifting.\n\nThey were such insignificant-looking objects, but this giant, marvelous airship had fought its way across Europe to bring them here. What was inside them? What sort of godless creature could keep the Ottomans from joining the war?\n\nThe heaters packed around the eggs glimmered softly, and in the ship's quiet, Alek felt sleep creeping up on him. He stood and shook himself awake.\n\nIt was just after three a.m., time to get started.\n\nAs he pulled off his boots, a twinge crept down his side. But the pain in his rib cage was only a dull ache. Nothing that would trouble him tonight.\n\nIt had taken an hour of arguing to make Count Volger see the logic of this plan. Klopp was still under guard, Bauer and Hoffman were busy with the engines, and Volger had already been caught skulking below. It was up to Alek to find their avenue of escape.\n\nHe pressed an ear against the machine room door, holding his breath.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe turned the latch and pushed it slowly open. The electrikal lamps were dark. Only the glimmer of glowworms lit the corridors, a green radiance as faint as starlight. Alek stepped into the hall, dead silent in his stocking feet, and eased the door shut behind him.\n\nHe waited for a moment to let his eyes adjust, then started for the stairs. There had to be an escape hatch somewhere, a way for the crew to abandon ship by rope or parachute. The lowest deck of the gondola was the logical place to look for it.\n\nThough, where they would find five parachutes\u2014or a few hundred meters of rope\u2014was beyond Alek. They would have to escape when the ship was grounded in Constantinople, then buy their way to safety with the last bar of his father's gold.\n\nThe stairs made no complaints beneath his weight. The Darwinists' wood came from fabricated trees, and was lighter than natural wood and stronger than steel. The airship didn't groan and creak like a sailing ship, but felt as still as a stone castle. The distant, rumbling engines were reduced to the barest trembling under his feet.\n\nAlek slipped past the central deck of the gondola quickly. At night a guard stood at the door to the bridge, two more were stationed at the armory, and the ship's cooks were always in the galley before dawn. But after the ship's five days on the glacier, the lower cargo holds and storerooms lay empty and unguarded.\n\nHalfway down the last flight of stairs, a sound froze Alek in his tracks.\n\nWas it a crewman walking past on the upper deck? Or someone behind him?\n\nHe turned and looked back up the stairs\u2014nothing.\n\nAlek wondered if airships had rats. Even metal land dreadnoughts could be infested. Or did the six-legged sniffer dogs hunt for pests as well as leaks?\n\nHe shuddered and kept moving.\n\nAt the bottom of the stairs, the deck was chill beneath Alek's feet. The night air was coursing past just below, thin and close to freezing at this altitude.\n\nThe corridors were wider down here, with two rails set in the floor for cargo trolleys. On either side lay open storerooms. They were shrouded in darkness, the glowworms reduced to a few green squiggles on the walls.\n\nThe sound came again\u2014the scrape of boots on wood. There was someone behind him!\n\nHis heart racing, Alek walked faster toward the bow. A few half-empty feed sacks sat in the shadows, but there was no good place to hide.\n\nThe corridor ended at a closed doorway. Alek turned and saw a silhouette moving behind him. For a split second he considered giving himself up and pretending he'd gotten lost. But Volger had already been caught down here \u2026\n\nAlek pushed his way through the door and shut it behind himself.\n\nThe room was pitch-black, and a heavy smell hung in the air, like old straw. He stood there in the darkness, breathing hard. It felt small and crowded in here, but the click of the closing door seemed to echo for a moment.\n\nAlek thought he heard mutterings. Was this a bunk room full of sleeping airmen?\n\nHe waited for his eyes to adjust to the blackness, willing his heart to stop pounding in his ears.\u2026\n\nSomeone, or something, was breathing in here.\n\nFor an awful moment Alek wondered if there were creatures aboard the Leviathan that Dylan hadn't told him about. Monsters, perhaps. He remembered his military toys, and the Darwinist fighting creatures fabricated from the life threads of extinct and giant reptiles.\n\n\"Um, hello?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Hello?\" someone answered.\n\nAlek swallowed. \"Oh, I seem to have gotten lost. I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Gotten lost?\" came the reply. The words sounded hesitant, and there was something eerily familiar about the voice.\n\n\"Yes. I'll just be going.\" Alek turned back to the doorway and felt blindly for the knob. The metal squeaked a little as he turned it, and he froze.\n\nSuddenly the room was full of tiny screeches and complaints.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" a voice said. Then another whispered, \"Hello?\"\n\nThe murmurs increased, building in intensity. The room felt no bigger than a closet, but it sounded as though a dozen men were waking up around him. They muttered half-formed words, in a nervous and agitated babble.\n\nWas this the airship's madhouse?\n\nYanking open the door, Alek banged it into his bare foot. He yelped with pain, and a symphony of angry voices answered. More cries filled the darkness, as though a brawl were breaking out!\n\nThrough the half-open door a green face stared back at him.\n\n\"Barking spiders! What are you doing?\" the intruder said.\n\n\"Spiders! Barking spiders!\" came a dozen cries from every direction.\n\nAlek opened his mouth to scream, but then a low whistling sound floated through the room. The cacophony instantly went silent.\n\nA glowworm lantern lifted in front of Alek's face. In its green light he made out Dylan squinting back at him, a command whistle in one hand.\n\n\"I reckoned it was you,\" the boy whispered.\n\n\"But \u2026 but who are these\u2014\"\n\n\"Shush, you ninny. Don't get the beasties started again.\" Dylan pushed him backward and slipped into the room, closing the door behind them. \"We'll be lucky if the navigators haven't heard this ruckus already.\"\n\nAlek blinked, and in the light of the wormlamp finally saw the stacks of cages climbing the walls. They were full of message lizards, crowded together like puppies in a pet store.\n\n\"What is this place?\" he breathed.\n\n\"It's the barking lizard room, isn't it?\" Dylan whispered. \"It's where Dr. Erasmus takes care of the beasties.\"\n\nAlek swallowed, his eyes falling on a table where a dissected lizard lay pinned. Then he saw that the ceiling was covered with the gaping mouths of message tubes, tangled like railroad tracks at a station. \"And it's a sort of junction, too, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Aye. Dr. Erasmus is in charge of all that palaver\u2014origin and destination tags, emergency alerts, clearing up traffic jams.\"\n\nAlek stared at the dozens of tiny eyes peering at him, all glowing with wormlight. \"I had no idea it was so \u2026 complicated.\"\n\n\"How did you think the beasties always found you? By magic?\" Dylan snorted. \"It's a tricky job, even for a boffin, especially with half the lizards still dizzy from that Clanker lightning. Look at the poor things, and here's you riling them up!\"\n\nA few of the lizards started to murmur, repeating Dylan's words. But when he blew another soft, low note on his command whistle, they settled again.\n\nAlek looked at Dylan. \"You didn't just happen along, did you?\"\n\n\"No. I couldn't sleep. And you know how Dr. Barlow doesn't want us bothering each other on egg duty? Well, I thought if I dropped by now, she wouldn't be about.\"\n\n\"But I wasn't there,\" Alek said.\n\nDylan nodded. \"And that was a wee bit odd. So I thought I'd sniff around and see what you were up to.\"\n\n\"Didn't take you long to find me, did it?\"\n\n\"The beasties' ruckus helped, but I reckoned you'd be down here in the storerooms.\" Dylan leaned closer. \"You're looking for a way to escape, aren't you?\"\n\nAlek felt his jaw clench. \"Am I that obvious?\"\n\n\"No. I'm just dead clever,\" the boy said. \"Have you not noticed?\"\n\nAlek took a moment to think about this, then smiled. \"I have.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Dylan took a step past him and knelt at a small hatch on the opposite side of the room. \"Come through here, then, before we start the beasties yammering again.\"\n\nDylan went first through the hatchway, climbing down a few rungs mounted on the slanted wall.\n\nAlek passed the wormlamp down, spilling light into the small spherical chamber. He'd seen this place from outside the airship: a round bulge in the gondola's underbelly. The space was crowded by what looked like a mismatched pair of telescopes pointed down at the sea.\n\n\"Is that a weapon?\" he asked.\n\n\"No. The fat one is a reconnaissance camera,\" Dylan said. \"And the wee one's a sight for aerial bombs and navigation. But they're useless at night, so it'll be private enough.\"\n\n\"If not luxurious,\" Alek said. He climbed down and wedged himself onto a corner, half squatting on a giant gear attached to the camera's side. \"But aren't we right below the bridge?\"\n\nDylan glanced up. \"That's the navigation room over us, and the bridge is above that. But it's safer here than in the lizard room. You're lucky you didn't send out an alert to the whole barking ship!\"\n\n\"That might have been awkward,\" Alek said, imagining an army of lizards scampering through the airship's message tubes, shouting in his voice to the sleeping crew. \"I'm a pretty useless spy, I suppose.\"\n\n\"At least you were clever enough to be caught by me,\" Dylan said. \"And not someone who might have objected to you skulking about.\"\n\n\"Not so much skulking as bumbling,\" Alek said. \"But thank you for not reporting me.\"\n\nThe boy shrugged. \"I reckon it's a prisoner's duty to escape. After all, you Clankers keep saving the ship\u2014that's three times now\u2014and the captain's treating you like enemies! And just because Britain declared war on your granduncle. I think it's dead rotten.\"\n\nAlek found himself smiling. On the subject of Dylan's loyalty, at least, Volger's suspicions were completely wrong.\n\n\"So that's why you were looking for me,\" Alek said. \"To talk about how we can escape.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not keen to help you. That might be a squick too treasonous, even for me. It was only \u2026\" Dylan's voice faded.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"We'll be in Constantinople by noon tomorrow, so I reckoned you might be slipping away soon, and this might be our last chance to talk.\" The boy wrapped his arms around himself. \"And I've hardly slept anyway.\"\n\nAlek squinted through the darkness. Dylan's fine features looked drawn, even in the soft light of the glowworms. His usual smile was missing.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"It was what happened to Newkirk. It's left me dead shattered.\"\n\n\"Shattered?\" Alek frowned. Dylan's strange way with the English language was playing tricks again. \"Newkirk is the midshipman whose Huxley burned, right?\"\n\n\"Aye, it was so much like \u2026 what happened when my da died. It's given me nightmares.\"\n\nAlek nodded. The boy had never said much about his father's death. Only that he'd been lost in an accident, and that Dylan hadn't spoken for a whole month afterward.\n\n\"You've never told anyone about it, have you?\"\n\nThe boy shook his head, then fell still.\n\nAlek waited, remembering how hard it had been to tell Dylan about his own parents. In the silence he could hear the wind sweeping around the prow of the airship, testing its joints and seams. A draft swirled up from where the camera thrust out into the night sky, snatches of cold air coiling around their feet.\n\n\"I mean, since you're leaving the ship anyway,\" Dylan said, \"I reckoned it wouldn't burden you too much to hear it.\"\n\n\"Of course you can tell me, Dylan. You know plenty of my secrets, after all.\"\n\nThe boy nodded, but fell silent again, his arms still wrapped tight around himself. Alek took a slow breath. He'd never seen Dylan afraid to speak his mind. The boy had never seemed afraid of anything before, much less a memory.\n\nPerhaps he didn't want anyone to see him this way, looking weak and \u2026 shattered.\n\nAlek slipped off his jacket and laid it over the wormlamp. Darkness wrapped around them both.\n\n\"Tell me,\" he said gently.\n\nA moment later Dylan began to speak.\n\n\"Da flew hot-air balloons, you see, even after the hydrogen breathers got so big. I always went up with him, so I was there when it happened. We were still on the ground, the burners firing to warm up the air in the envelope. Then suddenly there was this great blast of heat, like opening a boiler door. One of the kerosene tanks \u2026\"\n\nDylan's voice had gradually gone softer, almost like a girl's, and now it faded away altogether. Alek slid closer, putting his arm around the boy until he spoke again.\n\n\"It was just like with Newkirk. The fire shot straight up until the whole balloon was burning overhead, the heat pulling us skyward. The tethers held, even though they must have been on fire too. And my da pushed me out of the basket.\"\n\n\"So he saved you.\"\n\n\"Aye, but that's what killed him. With my weight gone, the ropes broke, all at once, like knuckles cracking. And Da's balloon went roaring away.\"\n\nAlek's breath caught. He remembered again the German zeppelin in the Alps, falling right in front of him, its hydrogen ignited by machine-gun fire. He could still hear the snow beneath the wreck hissing as it turned to steam, and the thin screams from inside the gondola.\n\n\"Everyone saw how he'd saved me,\" Dylan said, reaching into his pocket. \"They gave him a medal for it.\"\n\nHe pulled out a small decoration, a rounded silver cross that dangled from a sky blue ribbon. In the darkness Alek could just make out the face of Charles Darwin engraved upon its center.\n\n\"It's called the Air Gallantry Cross, the highest honor they can give a civilian for deeds in the air.\"\n\n\"You must be proud,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Back in that first year, when I couldn't sleep, I used to stare at it at night. But I thought the nightmares were over and done with, until what happened to Newkirk.\" Dylan looked at him. \"Maybe you understand a wee bit, how it comes back? Because of your ma and da?\"\n\nAlek nodded, staring at the medal and wondering what to say. He still had dreams, of course, but his own parents' death had happened in far-off Sarajevo, not in front of his eyes. Even his nightmares couldn't compare with what Dylan had described.\n\nBut then he remembered the moment when the Tesla cannon had fired, his horror that the Leviathan would be engulfed in flame.\n\n\"I think you're very brave, serving on this ship.\"\n\n\"Aye, or mad.\" The boy's eyes glistened in the glimmers of wormlight from beneath Alek's jacket. \"Don't you think it's daft? Like I'm trying to burn to death, same as he did?\"\n\n\"Don't be absurd,\" Alek said. \"You're honoring your father. Of course you'd want to be on this ship. If I weren't \u2026\" He paused. \"I mean, if things were different, I'd want to stay here too.\"\n\n\"You would?\"\n\n\"Well, maybe it's silly. But the last few days, it's like something's changing inside me. Everything I ever knew is upside down. Sometimes it's almost as if I'm \u2026 in love \u2026\"\n\nDylan's body tightened beside Alek.\n\n\"I know it sounds silly,\" Alek said quickly. \"It's quite obviously ridiculous.\"\n\n\"But are you saying that \u2026 ? I mean, what if things were different than you thought? If I were \u2026 or have you guessed already?\" Dylan let out a groan. \"Just what are you saying?\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"Perhaps I'm putting this stupidly. But it's almost as though \u2026 I'm in love with your ship.\"\n\n\"You're in love,\" Dylan said slowly, \"with the Leviathan?\"\n\n\"It feels right here.\" Alek shrugged. \"As if this is where I'm meant to be.\"\n\nDylan let out a strange, choked laugh as he put the medal back into his pocket.\n\n\"You Clankers,\" he muttered. \"You're all cracked in the head.\"\n\nAlek pulled his arm from the boy's shoulders, frowning. Dylan was always explaining how the airship's interwoven species sustained one another, how every beast was part of the whole. Surely he could understand.\n\n\"Dylan, you know I've always been alone. I never had schoolmates, just tutors.\"\n\n\"Aye, because you're a barking prince.\"\n\n\"But I'm hardly even that, because of my mother's blood. I never mixed with commoners, and the rest of my family has always wanted me to disappear. But here on this ship \u2026\" Alek laced his fingers together, searching for the right words.\n\n\"This is one place where you fit,\" Dylan said flatly. \"Where you feel real.\"\n\nAlek smiled. \"Yes. I knew you'd understand.\"\n\n\"Aye, of course.\" Dylan shrugged. \"I just thought you might be saying something else, that's all. I feel the same way as you \u2026 about the ship.\"\n\n\"But you're not an enemy here, or hiding what you are,\" Alek said, sighing. \"It's much simpler for you.\"\n\nThe boy gave a sad laugh. \"Not quite as simple as you'd think.\"\n\n\"I didn't say you were simple, Dylan. It's just that you've got no secrets hanging over you. No one's trying to throw you off this ship and put you in chains!\"\n\nDylan shook his head. \"Tell that to my ma.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\" Alek recalled that Dylan's mother hadn't wanted him to join the military. \"Women can be quite mad sometimes.\"\n\n\"In my family they're a squick madder than most.\" Dylan pulled Alek's jacket from the wormlamp. \"Full of stupid ideas. Mad like you wouldn't believe.\"\n\nIn the sudden wash of green light, Dylan's face was no longer sad. His eyes had their usual spark, but there was an angry gleam in them. He tossed the jacket to Alek.\n\n\"We both know you can't stay aboard this ship,\" Dylan said quietly.\n\nAlek held his gaze a moment, then nodded. He would never be allowed to serve on the Leviathan, not once the Darwinists understood their new engines. They would take him and the others back to Britain for safekeeping, whether or not they learned exactly who he was.\n\nHe had to escape.\n\n\"I should get back to my skulking, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Aye, you should,\" Dylan said. \"I'll go up and watch the eggs for you. Come back before dawn, though, or the lady boffin will have both our heads.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Alek said.\n\n\"We can only stay in Constantinople twenty-four hours. You'll have to find whatever you're looking for tonight.\"\n\nAlek nodded, his heart beating a little faster. He reached out a hand. \"In case we don't talk again, I hope we'll stay friends, whatever happens. Wars don't last forever.\"\n\nDylan stared at the offered hand, then nodded.\n\n\"Aye, friends.\" He stood up. \"Keep that lamp. I can find my way in the dark.\"\n\nHe turned and climbed up into the blackness without another word.\n\nAlek looked down at his hand, wondering for a moment what had happened, why Dylan had turned suddenly cold. Perhaps the boy had let more of his feelings show than he'd meant to. Or maybe Alek had said the wrong thing somehow.\n\nHe sighed. There wasn't time to think about it\u2014he had skulking to do. Once the Leviathan started back for Britain, there wouldn't be another chance to escape. He had to be off this ship in less than two days.\n\nAlek picked up the wormlamp and started for the hatch.\n\nDeryn had never seen a Clanker city before.\n\nConstantinople rolled past below, the hills filled to bursting with humanity. Pale stone palaces and domed mosques squashed against modern buildings, some rising up six stories tall. Two narrow arms of sparkling water carved the city into three parts, and a placid sea stretched away to the south, peppered with countless merchant ships under steam and sail, flying a dozen different flags.\n\nA pall of smoke hung over everything, coughed up from countless engines and factories, veiling the walkers striding the narrow streets. The muddled air was empty of messenger birds; only a few biplanes and gyrothopters skimmed the rooftops, skirting stone spires and bristling wireless aerials.\n\nIt was odd to imagine Alek being from a place just like this, full of machines and metal, hardly alive except for human beings and their bedbugs. Of course, it was strange to think of Alek at all right now. She'd made such a Dummkopf of herself last night, blethering on about Da's accident, then mistaking Alek's confidences for something more than they were.\n\nHow completely daft, imagining for a moment that a barking prince would think of her that way. Alek didn't even know her real first name. And if he learned somehow that she was a girl in boy's clothes? He'd run a mile.\n\nThankfully, Alek was planning to run in any case. Sometime tonight he and his Clanker friends would slip away into that smoky mass of city, and be gone for good. Then she'd be done with acting like some village girl, her fists twisting in her skirts whenever a certain boy walked by.\n\nNot that pathetic unsoldierly fate for Deryn Sharp.\n\nThe Leviathan swept in low over the water, and Newkirk leaned closer to the big window of the middies' mess, staring down, wide eyed. No doubt he was searching the forest of masts and smokestacks below for the deadly spindle of the Goeben's Tesla cannon.\n\n\"See any German ships?\" he asked nervously.\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"Just a few merchants and a coaler. I told you those ironclads would be long gone.\"\n\nBut Newkirk, his dress uniform cap pulled down tight over his singed hair, didn't look entirely reassured. The sea below them stretched all the way back to the Dardanelles, with plenty of nooks and crannies to hide a dreadnought in. The Leviathan had come to Constantinople over land, after all, not wanting to risk the ironclads' Clanker lightning again.\n\n\"Midshipmen Sharp and Newkirk!\" came a voice from the doorway. \"I must say you're both looking handsome.\"\n\nDeryn turned and bowed a squick to the lady boffin, feeling awkward in her full-dress uniform. She'd worn it only once before, at her swearing-in ceremony. The tailor who'd made it for her in Paris had probably wondered why some daft girl was going to so much fuss for a costume ball.\n\nNow, a month later, the fancy jacket stretched tight over the new muscles in her shoulders, and the shirt felt as stiff as a vicar's collar.\n\n\"Frankly, ma'am, I feel a bit like a penguin,\" Newkirk said, adjusting his silk bow tie.\n\n\"That may be,\" Dr. Barlow said, \"but we must look respectable for Ambassador Mallet.\"\n\nDeryn turned back to the window with a sigh. The storerooms were empty, and they had only twenty-four hours to resupply the whole ship. It seemed daft to bring diplomats along to the Grand Bazaar, especially if it meant dressing up. Dr. Barlow was all in riding clothes, like a duchess on a fox hunt.\n\n\"Do you reckon we'll find corned beef in Constantinople?\" Newkirk asked hopefully.\n\n\"Is-tan-bul,\" Dr. Barlow said, tapping her riding crop against her boot once for each syllable. \"That's what we must remember to call this city. Otherwise we shall annoy the locals.\"\n\n\"Istanbul?\" Newkirk frowned. \"But it's 'Constantinople' on all the maps.\"\n\n\"On our maps it is,\" the lady boffin said. \"We use that name to honor Constantine, the Christian emperor who founded the city. But the residents have called it Istanbul since 1453.\"\n\n\"They changed the name four hundred-odd years ago?\" Deryn turned back to the window. \"Maybe it's time to fix our barking maps.\"\n\n\"Wise words, Mr. Sharp,\" Dr. Barlow said, then added quietly, \"I wonder if the Germans have already fixed theirs.\"\n\nThe Leviathan came down on a dusty, mile-wide airfield on the western edge of the city.\n\nA mooring mast stood at the center of the field, like a lighthouse in a sea of grass. It looked no different from the mast back at Wormwood Scrubs. Deryn supposed that whether Darwinist or Clanker, an airship had to be secured from the fancies of the wind in pretty much the same way. The dozens of ground men certainly looked sharp as they corralled the landing ropes, their fezzes bright red against the grass.\n\n\"Mr. Rigby says they get plenty of practice on German airships,\" Newkirk said. \"Says we should study their technique.\"\n\n\"We could, if we were closer,\" Deryn said. She itched to be down there helping, or at least working with the riggers topside. But Dr. Barlow had warned the two middies not to muss their dress uniforms.\n\nThe engines were pulsing overhead, turning the ship into the wind. Even Alek and his Clanker friends had honest work to do.\n\nTen minutes later the Leviathan was secured by a dozen ropes, each held by ten men, and the airbeast's nose was pressed against the mooring mast, its great eyes covered with blinders.\n\nDeryn frowned. \"They've lashed us a bit high. We're still fifty feet off the ground!\"\n\n\"All according to plan, Mr. Sharp,\" said Dr. Barlow, pointing her riding crop into the distance.\n\nDeryn looked up and saw what was coming out of the trees\u2014her jaw dropped open.\n\n\"I didn't know Clanker countries had elephantines!\" Newkirk cried.\n\n\"That's no beastie,\" Deryn said. \"It's a barking walker.\"\n\nThe machine lumbered forward on huge legs, its tusks swaying back and forth as it moved. Four pilots in blue uniforms sat on saddles that stuck out from its haunches, one pilot working the controls for each leg. A mechanical trunk, divided into a dozen metal segments, swept slowly back and forth, like a sleeping cat's tail.\n\n\"It must be fifty feet tall,\" Newkirk said. \"Even bigger than a real elephantine!\"\n\nSunlight struck the walker as it left the trees, and its polished steel skin glittered like mirrors. The platform on its back was covered by a parasol shaped like a strafing hawk's cowl. A handful of men in dress uniform stood on the platform, while a fifth pilot perched in the front, working the trunk. The elephant's large metal ears flapped slowly, stirring the brilliant tapestries that hung down its sides.\n\n\"As you can see,\" Dr. Barlow said, \"the ambassador travels in style.\"\n\n\"I know we can't use beasties here in Clanker-land,\" Deryn said, \"but why make a walker look like an animal?\"\n\n\"Diplomacy is all about symbols,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"Elephants signify royalty and power; according to legend an elephant divined the prophet Mohammed's birth. The sultan's own war machines are made in this same shape.\"\n\n\"Do all the walkers here look like beasties?\" Newkirk asked.\n\n\"Most of them, yes,\" the lady boffin said. \"Our Ottoman friends may be Clankers, but they haven't forgotten the web of life around us. That is why I have hope for them.\"\n\nDeryn frowned, thinking for a moment of the mysterious eggs in the machine room. What did the creatures inside them signify?\n\nBut there wasn't much time to wonder. Soon the metal elephant was beside the airship's gondola, with a gangway level between them.\n\n\"Look smart, gentlemen,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"We have an elephant to catch.\"\n\nThe howdah, as the ambassador had called the Dauntless's platform, felt a bit like a small boat at sea. It rocked from side to side with the elephant's gait, but the motion was steady and predictable. Not enough to make Deryn seasick.\n\nNewkirk, of course, was another matter.\n\n\"I can't see why we should have to ride in this contraption,\" he said, his face growing paler with every step. \"We joined the Air Service, not the barking Elephant Service!\"\n\n\"And not the diplomatic corps either,\" Deryn muttered.\n\nSince being introduced the ambassador and his assistants had ignored the two middies. They were prattling away to Dr. Barlow in French, which was daft, as they were all English, but that was diplomacy for you. And, as far as Deryn could tell, no one was saying anything about transporting supplies.\n\nShe wondered how the Dauntless would carry all the provisions the airship needed. There wasn't much room in the howdah, which was all silk and tassels in any case, too fancy for stacks of crates. The machine could pull a sledge or wagon like a real elephantine, she supposed, but there was none in sight. Maybe when they got to the Grand Bazaar \u2026\n\n\"Mind if I ask you boys some questions?\"\n\nDeryn turned. The man who'd interrupted her thoughts wasn't dressed like the diplomats. In fact, his slops were a dog's breakfast. His jacket was patched at the elbows, his hat a shapeless mass on his head. An unwieldy camera hung around his neck, and some sort of frog perched on his shoulder.\n\nThe ambassador had introduced him as a reporter for a newspaper in New York, so Deryn supposed that his strange accent must be American.\n\n\"You'd best ask the lady boffin, sir,\" Newkirk said. \"Midshipmen aren't allowed to have opinions.\"\n\nThe man laughed, then leaned forward and said quietly, \"Off the record, then. Any particular reason why your airship is here in Istanbul?\"\n\n\"Just a friendly visit.\" Deryn nodded at the ambassador. \"Diplomacy and all that.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" the man said, and shrugged. \"And here I was thinking it might be because of all the Germans pouring in.\"\n\nDeryn raised an eyebrow, then glanced at the bullfrog. It had the big-brained look of a memory frog, the sort of beast that recorded court proceedings and sessions of parliament. She decided to watch her words carefully.\n\n\"Engineers, mostly,\" the reporter continued. \"They're building all sorts of things. Just finished a new palace for the sultan.\"\n\n\"Aye, the lady boffin's headed there tomorrow,\" Newkirk said.\n\nDeryn silenced him with an elbow between the ribs, then turned to the reporter. \"What's your name again, sir?\"\n\n\"Eddie Malone, of the New York World. And please don't call me 'sir.'\" He offered his hand, smiling again. \"I won't ask your name, of course, since this is all off the record.\"\n\nDeryn shook the man's hand, wondering if he was full of yackum. When the ambassador had introduced them, she'd seen the reporter scribbling all their names into his battered notebook. He'd taken pictures, too, the battered old camera blazing with light from a fabricated firefly living in its flash apparatus.\n\nAmericans were an odd bunch\u2014neither Clanker nor Darwinist. They dabbled with both ways, mixing technologies as they saw fit. Everyone reckoned they would stay out of the war, unless somebody was daft enough to drag them in.\n\n\"There are German officers here too.\" Malone pointed at the guards standing at attention beside the approaching airfield gates. Instead of red fezzes they wore pointy helmets that looked a bit like Alek's piloting hat.\n\n\"Those are Germans?\" Newkirk said with alarm.\n\n\"No, Ottoman soldiers,\" the reporter said. \"But just look at them. They used to have more colorful uniforms, until the field marshal dressed them up in gray, like proper Clankers.\"\n\n\"Who's that?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"Field Marshal Liman von Sanders. German fellow\u2014a good friend of the kaiser's. The Ottomans made him head of the army here in Istanbul. Your diplomat friends kicked up a fuss, of course, and he bowed out.\" Malone strutted across the howdah with a comically high step. \"But not before he got them marching like Germans!\"\n\nDeryn glanced at Newkirk. The man was clearly cracked. \"The Ottomans put a German in charge of their own barking army?\"\n\nMalone shrugged. \"Maybe they're getting tired of being pushed around. The French and the British used to run things here, but not anymore. I suppose you've heard about the Osman?\"\n\nDeryn nodded slowly. \"Aye, the ship that Lord Churchill borrowed.\"\n\n\"'Borrowed'?\" Malone chuckled, scribbling in his notebook. \"Now, that I can use.\"\n\nDeryn muttered under her breath, cursing herself for a Dummkopf. \"So that must be news here.\"\n\n\"News? It's the biggest story in Istanbul! The sultan is half broke, you see, so that dreadnought was bought with money raised by the people. Grannies sold their jewelry and handed over the money. Kids coughed up pennies, and bought shadow puppets of its companion creature. Everyone in the empire owns a piece of that ship! Or at least they did, till your Lord Churchill went and pinched it.\" The man's smile was maniacal, the bullfrog on his shoulder poised to memorize whatever she said.\n\nDeryn cleared her throat. \"I suppose they're a wee bit angry now?\"\n\nMalone nodded at the airfield gates parting before them, then licked the tip of his pen. \"You'll see soon enough.\"\n\nThrough the gates a broad avenue stretched toward the city. As the walker plodded ahead, the streets grew busier, the buildings rising up as tall as the howdah. People and pushcarts bustled past windows full of carpets and dishes, everything decorated with mad checkerboard patterns that dazzled Deryn's eyes. The footpaths were crowded with stalls selling stacks of nuts and dried fruit, or meat roasting on rotating skewers. Powdered spices lay in rust red and dusty yellow piles, or spilled bright green from sacks as large as feed bags. Rich and unfamiliar scents cut through the smell of engines, so heavy she could taste them in her mouth, like the air inside a fabrication greenhouse.\n\nDeryn saw now what the walker's trunk was for. As the machine lumbered through the crowd, its trunk swept gracefully from side to side, nudging pedestrians out of the way. The howdah pilot's fingers moved nimbly on the controls; he pushed carts aside, and even rescued a child's fallen toy from being crushed by the walker's giant feet.\n\nOther walkers pulled wagons through the streets. Most looked like camels or donkeys, and one took the form of a horned creature that Eddie Malone explained was a water buffalo. A metal scarab beetle as big as an omnibus carried passengers through the crowds.\n\nDown a narrow side street Deryn saw a pair of walkers constructed almost in the shape of men. They stood almost as tall as the Dauntless, with squat legs, long arms, and featureless faces. They were decorated with striped cloths and strange symbols, and carried no weapons in their giant clawed hands.\n\n\"Army walkers of some kind?\" Deryn asked the reporter.\n\n\"No, they're iron golems. They guard the Jewish neighborhoods.\" Malone waved his hand across the crowd. \"Most of the Ottomans are Turks, but Istanbul is a melting pot. Not only Jews, but Greeks, Armenians, Venetians, Arabs, Kurds, and Vlachs all live here.\"\n\n\"Blisters,\" Newkirk said. \"I never heard of half of those.\"\n\nThe man smiled and scribbled in his notebook. \"And all of them have their own combat walkers, just to keep the peace.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a flimsy sort of peace,\" Deryn muttered, watching the streets below. The people were dressed in a dozen different ways\u2014in tasseled fezzes, desert robes, women under veils, and men wearing jackets like any in London. Everyone seemed to be getting along, though, at least under the impassive stares of the iron golems.\n\n\"What's that?\" Newkirk asked, and pointed ahead.\n\nA quarter mile in front of the elephant, the street seemed to be churning, a mass of crimson trickling through the crowd\u2014moving closer.\n\nEddie Malone licked his pen. \"That would be your welcoming committee.\"\n\nDeryn stepped to the front of the howdah and shielded her eyes against the sun. She made out a group of men wearing red fezzes, their fists waving in the air. Behind her the diplomat's French prattle faded suddenly away.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Ambassador Mallet said. \"Those chaps again.\"\n\nDeryn turned to the howdah pilot. \"Who are they?\"\n\n\"A bunch called the Young Turks, sir, I think,\" the man said. \"This town is full of secret societies and revolutionaries. Can hardly keep track of them all, myself.\"\n\nThere was a burst of light as Eddie Malone took a photograph.\n\nThe ambassador began to clean his eyeglasses. \"The Young Turks tried to depose the sultan six years ago, but the Germans put them down. Now they hate all foreigners. I suppose this was to be expected. From what my sources tell me, the newspapers have been riling them up about the Osman.\"\n\n\"Your sources tell you?\" Dr. Barlow asked.\n\n\"Well, I don't speak Turkish, of course, and none of my staff does either. But I have excellent sources, I assure you.\"\n\nThe lady boffin raised an eyebrow. \"Are you telling me, Ambassador, that none of you can read the local newspapers?\"\n\nThe ambassador cleared his throat, and his assistants stared off into space.\n\n\"Not much point,\" Eddie Malone said, feeding the firefly in his camera's flashbulb a sugar cube. \"From what I've heard, the Germans own half of them anyway.\"\n\nDr. Barlow stared at the ambassador with fresh alarm.\n\n\"The Germans only own one of the newspapers,\" he protested, still cleaning his glasses. \"Though it seems quite influential. Very clever of them, spreading their lies here in Constantinople.\"\n\n\"It's called Istanbul,\" Dr. Barlow said quietly, her fingers clenched around her riding crop.\n\nDeryn shook her head and turned back toward the crowd.\n\nThe men were surging closer, chanting, their fists pumping in unison. They rushed through the bustle of people and carts, their fezzes like crimson water flowing past pebbles in a stream. They soon surrounded the walker, yelling up at the pilots on their saddles, waving newspapers. Deryn squinted\u2014every front page showed a picture of a ship under a huge headline.\n\nThe crowd was chanting \"Osman! Osman!\" But there was another word in all the hubbub\u2014\"behemoth\"\u2014that Deryn didn't recognize at all.\n\n\"Well,\" Dr. Barlow said, \"this is a discouraging start.\"\n\nThe ambassador drew himself up, patting the railing at the howdah's edge. \"There is no reason to worry, madam. We've ridden out far worse on the Dauntless.\"\n\nDeryn had to admit that they were safe enough up here, fifty feet above the mob. No one was throwing anything, or trying to climb the elephant's huge legs. The howdah pilot was deftly nudging the protesters aside with the trunk, so the walker's progress was hardly slowed.\n\nBut Dr. Barlow wore an icy expression. \"It's not a question of 'riding it out,' Ambassador. My objective is to keep this country friendly.\"\n\n\"Well, talk to Lord Churchill, then!\" the man cried. \"It's hardly the Foreign Office's fault when he goes and snatches a \u2026\"\n\nHis words faded as a metal groan filled the air, the world tilting beneath them. Deryn's dress boots skidded sideways on the silk carpet, and everyone went stumbling toward the howdah's starboard side. The railing caught Deryn at stomach level, and her body pitched halfway over before she righted herself.\n\nShe stared down\u2014the foreleg pilot below had toppled from his perch, and lay sprawled in a circle of protesters. They looked as surprised as the pilot did, and were bending down to offer help.\n\nWhy had the man fallen from his saddle?\n\nAs the machine stumbled to a halt, something flickered in the corner of Deryn's vision. A lasso flew up from the crowd and landed around the shoulders of the rear-leg pilot, then he, too, was yanked from his seat. A man in a blue uniform was scrambling up the front leg.\n\n\"We're being boarded!\" Deryn cried, running to the port side of the howdah. The Dauntless was under attack there too. The man driving the rear leg had already been yanked from his perch, and the foreleg pilot was pulling against a rope around his waist.\n\nDeryn watched as another man in blue uniform\u2014a British uniform\u2014took the place of the rear-leg pilot and grasped the controls.\n\nSuddenly the machine lurched back into motion, taking a massive stride into the crowd. Someone screamed as a huge foot bore down to shatter cobblestones into dust, and the protesters in red fezzes began to scatter.\n\n\"Do something, Mr. Sharp,\" cried Dr. Barlow above the din. \"We appear to have been captured!\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am, I noticed!\" Deryn reached for her rigging knife, but of course her full-dress uniform had no pockets to speak of. She'd have to use bare fists.\n\n\"How do I get down to the saddles?\" she asked the howdah pilot.\n\n\"You can't from here, sir,\" he said, his knuckles white on the trunk's controls. He was pushing people to safety as the machine stumbled through the panicking crowd. \"The leg pilots climb on from the ground, while the elephant's kneeling.\"\n\n\"Blisters! Do you have any rope aboard?\"\n\n\"Afraid not, sir,\" the man said. \"This isn't a sailing ship.\"\n\nDeryn groaned in frustration\u2014how could any ship not have rope? The machine stumbled again, and she grabbed the railing to keep her footing.\n\nMaking her way around the edge of the howdah, Deryn saw that three of the pilots had been replaced by impostors in blue uniforms. Only the foreleg pilot on the port side remained in his seat. But the rope was still around him, stretching down into the crowd. He'd be pulled off soon enough.\n\nIn the meantime three of the walker's legs were scraping and stamping, trying to get the contraption moving again. As she watched, the huge right forefoot stamped down on a vendor's cart, scattering peeled chestnuts like hailstones across the street.\n\n\"Barking stupid machines!\" Deryn muttered. A real beastie would know who its proper masters were.\n\nSuddenly the trunk swung to the port side. It reached among the protesters and found the man trying to drag the foreleg pilot off his seat. The man shrieked, letting go of the rope as he was flicked aside.\n\n\"Good work!\" Deryn said to the howdah pilot. \"Can you yank the impostors off?\"\n\nThe man shook his head. \"Can't reach the rear saddles at all. But maybe \u2026\"\n\nHe twisted at the controls, and the trunk whipped about to the starboard side. It curled back, reaching for the pilot on the foreleg, but stopped a yard short, metal segments grinding.\n\n\"It's no use, sir,\" the man said. \"She's not as flexible as a real beastie.\"\n\nHowever inflexible, the machine was barking powerful. It was lurching down the street now, scattering people and vehicles in all directions. One of its huge feet stamped down on a wagon and smashed it into splinters. The remaining British pilot struggled to bring the machine to a halt, but there was only so much that one leg could do against three.\n\n\"Can you grab something to use as a weapon?\" Deryn asked the howdah pilot. \"You only need another few feet of length!\"\n\n\"This is a Clanker contraption, sir! It's hardly as nimble as that.\"\n\n\"Blisters,\" Deryn swore. \"Then I suppose it'll have to be me!\"\n\nThe man took his eyes from the controls for a second. \"Pardon me, sir?\"\n\n\"Bend that trunk up this way. And make it fast, man!\" she ordered, pulling off her fancy jacket. She turned to toss it back at Newkirk, then climbed out of the howdah and onto the elephant's head.\n\n\"What in blazes are you doing?\" Newkirk cried.\n\n\"Something barking daft!\" she called as the tip of the metal-jointed trunk reared up before her. She readied herself on the rocking surface of the elephant's head.\n\nAnd jumped \u2026\n\nHer arms wrapped around the shining steel. The segments rasped and clanked as the trunk flexed, carrying her high above the crowd. Her feet swung out from the centrifugal force, as if she were riding the end of a huge whip whistling through the air.\n\nThe blur of passing shapes resolved around her\u2014she was swinging toward the starboard foreleg. The impostor pilot stared, wide eyed, as she aimed both feet at him.\n\nBut he ducked at the last second, her dress boots whistling over his head. As she swung past, Deryn's palms skidded on the shiny metal trunk, her grip sliding.\n\nThe man scowled at her and drew a knife.\n\nThere was something about his face\u2014he was paler than most of the protesters in the street.\n\n\"Dummkopf!\" she shouted at him.\n\n\"Sie gleichen die!\" he yelled back. Clanker-talk!\n\nDeryn narrowed her eyes\u2014this was no Turk, or Vlach, or Kurd, or whatever else they had here in Istanbul. The man was a German, as certain as anything.\n\nThe trouble was, how to get rid of him? She didn't fancy her dress boots in a fight against that knife.\n\nShe glanced up at the howdah. Dr. Barlow was shouting something at the howdah pilot, and Deryn hoped whatever the boffin was cooking up would work quickly. With every lurching step the elephant took, her grip on the polished steel loosened a squick.\n\nThe trunk began to flex again, swinging Deryn low over the street, a blur of paving stones passing below. She wondered what sort of boffin-inspired strategy she was expected to figure out while hurtling through the air.\n\nThen the trunk came to a shuddering halt, the pilot keeping her steady as the machine lurched along. Deryn glanced down. She was hanging just above a table piled with spices.\n\n\"What in blazes?\" she muttered. Did Dr. Barlow expect her to tempt the German off his perch with a home-cooked meal?\n\nBut after a moment of hanging there, a tickle started in the back of Deryn's throat, and her eyes began to burn. Even an arm's length away, the spices were fiery enough to notice.\n\n\"Not bad, Dr. Barlow,\" she muttered, then sneezed.\n\nDeryn reached down, snatching up the reddest and meanest-looking bag of spices.\n\nThe trunk swung back into action, whipping her back toward the German driving the starboard foreleg. She could see the cold look on the man's face as she zoomed toward him, the knife flashing in his hand.\n\n\"Try this for dinner, bum-rag!\" she shouted, and flung the entire bag straight at him.\n\nThe momentum of the speeding trunk redoubled the force of her throw, and the sack hit the German like a cannonball. It exploded against his chest, enveloping him in a dark red cloud. Spice billowed in all directions, swirling back at Deryn.\n\nRed-hot fingers clamped shut her eyes. She gasped for breath, and liquid fire spilled down her lungs. Her chest felt stuffed full of embers of coal, and her grip was slipping.\u2026\n\nBut she landed softly\u2014the howdah pilot had set her down. She lay there coughing and sputtering, her body trying to expel the spices from her lungs.\n\nFinally Deryn forced open her burning eyes.\n\nThe metal elephant stood motionless. Both its front legs were bent, as if the huge machine were bowing down to her. The back legs alone had not been enough to keep it moving.\n\nDeryn saw flashes of blue slipping through the crowd, the two other impostors running away. But the German she'd blasted with spice lay in a pile of red dust, still coughing and sputtering.\n\nAs she rose to her feet, Deryn looked down at herself.\n\n\"Barking spiders!\" she cried, then sneezed. Her uniform was ruined.\n\nBut the loss of one middy's dress slops was nothing compared to the trail of destruction that stretched down the street\u2014overturned carts and wagons, a donkey-shaped walker squashed as flat as a metal bug. The gathering crowd was quiet, still in shock at what the rampaging elephant had done.\n\nA gangway descended from the walker's belly. Two of the ambassador's assistants grabbed the spice-addled German, while Newkirk and Eddie Malone ran through the crowd to her.\n\n\"Are you all right, Mr. Sharp?\" Newkirk cried.\n\n\"I think so,\" Deryn said as Malone's camera flashed with a pop, blinding her again.\n\n\"Then, we'd better get back aboard,\" Newkirk said. \"These chaps could get unruly again.\"\n\n\"But someone might be hurt.\" Deryn blinked away spots, looking down the street. Were there bodies anywhere among the splintered wood and broken windows?\n\n\"Aye, that's why we're in a hurry. We need to find our pilots and get moving again, before things get ugly!\"\n\n\"Things already look ugly to me,\" Eddie Malone said, feeding a handful of sugar cubes to his firefly. He aimed his camera down the devastated street.\n\nStill blinking away red spice, Deryn followed Newkirk back toward the Dauntless. She wondered how many people had seen the impostor pilots coming aboard a hundred yards back. Would anyone realize that the elephant's British crew hadn't caused this disaster?\n\nEven if the crowd had seen what had happened, the newspapers wouldn't report it that way. Not the ones the Germans owned.\n\n\"You saw, right?\" she said to Eddie Malone. \"It was impostors driving! Not our men.\"\n\n\"Don't you worry. I saw them,\" the reporter said. \"And we only print the truth in the New York World.\"\n\n\"Aye, in New York,\" Deryn sighed as she climbed the gangway. The crowd was already stirring around them as the shock of the rampage faded away.\n\nThe question was, would anyone believe them here in Istanbul?\n\nAlek waited in the machine room, wondering when the signal would come.\n\nHe loosened another button on his jacket. Dr. Barlow had made the room as hot as an oven tonight. She always seemed to add more heaters when Alek watched the eggs, just to annoy him.\n\nAt least he wouldn't have to suffer much longer. He could already hear the distant rumble of glow plugs firing in the starboard pod. Klopp, Hoffman, and Bauer were up there, pretending to work on the engine. And being noisy about it, so no one would be surprised to see Alek heading up to help.\n\nAfter the disastrous start of Dr. Barlow's mission today, the escape plan had changed. Alek had watched the elephant-shaped walker's hasty return, carrying no supplies, its side spattered with some sort of red dust. Rumors had spread through the ship that the walker had been attacked, an incident in which dozens of civilians had been injured.\n\nWithin an hour angry crowds had arrived at the airfield's gate, threatening to attack the Leviathan. Guards were posted at all of the airship's hatches now, and a ring of Ottoman soldiers surrounded the gondola. There would be no sneaking out through the cargo deck tonight.\n\nFrom his station up in the engine pod, however, Klopp had reported that no one was guarding the mooring tower. It was connected to the airbeast's head by a single cable that hung eighty meters in the air. If the five of them could climb across and down, perhaps they could escape across the darkened airfield.\n\nAlek listened to the engine misfiring, waiting for the signal. Now that the captain considered him a prisoner of war, he was happy to leave the airship behind. He'd been a fool to let himself grow so attached. Volger was right\u2014pretending that this flying abomination was his home had lead only to misery. Dylan might have been a good friend in some other world, but not this one.\n\nThere it was\u2014five sharp coughs from the glow plugs. The signal meant that Bauer and Hoffman had subdued the Darwinist crewmen in the pod. Volger would be headed up from his stateroom.\n\nThey were really leaving. Tonight.\n\nAlek adjusted the eggs one last time. He picked up a fresh heater and shook it to life, then tucked it into the hay. As hot as the machine room was, Dr. Barlow's mysterious cargo would most likely be fine until dawn. In any case, it wasn't his concern anymore.\n\nAlek noticed an old smear of grease on the egg box and rubbed a finger across it. Then he drew a stripe across his cheeks, as if he'd been working up in the engine pod. If anyone saw him, they would assume that Dylan was down here with the eggs and that Alek was fetching parts for the engineers.\n\nHe stood and hefted his toolbox. It was stuffed with spare clothes and the wireless set from the Stormwalker. The set was heavy, but once he and his men were hidden in the wilds, radio might be their only means of contact with the outside world.\n\nAlek sighed. Here aboard the Leviathan he'd almost forgotten how lonely it was to run and hide.\n\nThe door opened with a soft squeak, and he stared out into the hall, listening to the murmurs of the ship.\n\nA small tapping noise reached his ears. Was someone headed this way?\n\nHe swore softly. It was probably Dylan, coming to talk one last time. Seeing the boy again would only make this harder, and Alek needed to start toward the engine pod.\n\nBut the noise was coming from behind him.\u2026\n\nHe turned around\u2014one of the eggs was moving.\n\nIn the rosy light of the heaters, he could see a tiny hole forming at the top of the egg. Little chips were breaking free and sliding down the smooth white surface. Fleck by fleck the hole grew larger.\n\nAlek stood there, his hand on the doorknob. He should be heading up, leaving these godless creatures behind. But he'd spent seven long nights watching the eggs and wondering what would emerge from them. In another few moments he would finally see.\n\nAlek pulled the door softly closed.\n\nThe odd thing was, it was the middle egg hatching\u2014the one Dr. Barlow had said was sick.\n\nSomething was poking its way out of the hole now. It looked like a claw\u2014or was it a paw? There was pale fur on it, not feathers.\n\nA small black nose poked its way out, sniffing the air.\n\nAlek wondered if the creature was dangerous. Of course, it was only a baby, and he had a rigging knife sheathed on his belt. But Alek stayed close to the door, just in case.\n\nThe beast emerged slowly, reaching out to grip the edge of the box with tiny four-fingered hands. Its fur was damp, and its huge eyes blinked in the glow of the heaters. It looked about attentively, twitching as it pulled itself farther from the broken egg.\n\nGod's wounds, but the thing was homely. Its skin seemed too large for its body, drooping like an old man's. It reminded Alek of his aunt's hairless cat, bred for its bizarre looks.\n\nThe beast stared at him and made a soft, plaintive noise.\n\n\"You must be hungry,\" Alek said softly. But he hadn't the first idea what it ate.\n\nAt least it was clear enough that the creature didn't eat humans. It was far too small for that, and too \u2026 appealing, even with its strange excess of skin. Somehow the large eyes seemed wise and sad. Alek found himself wanting to pick the animal up and comfort it.\n\nThe creature extended a tiny hand.\n\nAlek put down the tool kit and took a step closer. When he reached out a hand, the animal touched his fingertips, squeezing them one by one. Then it leaned forward, letting itself slide from the edge of the egg box.\n\nAlek caught it just in time. Even in the sweltering machine room, the creature's body felt warm, its short fur as soft as the chinchilla coat his mother had always worn in winter. When Alek held it closer, the beast made a cooing noise.\n\nThe huge eyes blinked slowly, staring straight into his. Thin arms wrapped around Alek's wrist.\n\nIt was strange, how the creature didn't give him the same uneasy feeling as other Darwinist creations. It was too small and sleepy-looking, and gave off an air of preternatural calm.\n\nThe engine sputtered again, and Alek realized that he was behind schedule.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he whispered, \"but I have to go.\"\n\nHe placed the creature back in the box amid the warm glow of the heaters. But as his hands pulled away, the animal made a high-pitched mewling noise.\n\n\"Shush,\" Alek breathed softly. \"Someone will be along soon.\"\n\nHe wondered if that were true. Dylan would be here at dawn, but that was hours away.\n\nHe took a step backward, kneeling to pick up the tool kit. The creature's eyes grew wider, and it let out another cry that ended in a high, sweeping note, as pure as a flute.\n\nAlek frowned\u2014that last sound was oddly like the whistles the crew used to command their beasts. And it was loud enough to wake someone up.\n\nHe reached out again, shushing the creature. The instant his hand touched it, the animal went silent.\n\nAlek knelt there for a moment, stroking the soft fur. Finally the large eyes closed and Alek dared to pull away.\n\nThe beast instantly sprang awake and began to mewl again. Alek swore. This was absurd, being held hostage by this newborn. He turned away and crossed the room.\n\nBut as the door opened, the screams shifted into a burst of whistling noises. The glowworms in the machine room reacted, green light spilling from the walls. Alek imagined the whole airship waking up, message lizards scampering from all directions in response to the creature's cries.\n\n\"Quiet!\" he whispered, but the beast didn't stop until he went back and picked it up again.\n\nAs Alek stood there stroking its pale fur, he came to a horrible realization.\n\nTo have any hope of escaping, he had to take the newborn animal with him. He could hardly leave it sitting here, bawling its tiny misshapen head off for the whole ship to hear.\n\nHe had no idea what to feed the creature or how to take care of it, or even what it was. And what would Count Volger say when he showed up with this abomination in his arms?\n\nBut Alek didn't have much choice.\n\nWhen he lifted the animal up from the hay, it scampered up his arm and clung to his shoulder like a cat, the tiny claws stuck fast in the wool of his mechanik's suit.\n\nIt looked at him expectantly.\n\n\"We're going for a walk now,\" he said softly, hefting the tool kit again. \"You're going to stay quiet, right?\"\n\nThe creature blinked at him, a look of smug satisfaction on its face.\n\nAlek sighed, and went to the door. He opened it again, looking up and down the corridor. No one was coming to investigate the strange noises\u2014not yet, anyway.\n\nHe loosened his jacket, ready to shove the creature inside if he encountered anyone. But for the moment the animal seemed happy on his shoulder\u2014and quiet. It felt as light as a bird there, as if designed to travel this way.\n\nDesigned, Alek thought. This animal was fabricated, not born of nature. It had some purpose in the Darwinists' plans, a role in Dr. Barlow's schemes to keep the Ottomans out of the war.\n\nAnd he had no idea what that purpose was.\n\nAlek shuddered once, then strode into the darkened hall.\n\n\"There you are!\" Count Volger called softly from the support strut of the engine pod. \"We'd almost given up on you.\"\n\nAlek made his way along the ratlines, feeling the creature move inside his jacket. It was flexing its claws again, like tiny needles piercing his flesh.\n\n\"I had a small \u2026 problem.\"\n\n\"Did someone see you?\"\n\nAlek shrugged. \"A few crewmen on the way. But they didn't ask where I was headed. You play a very convincing broken engine, Maestro Klopp.\"\n\nFrom down in the pod the master of mechaniks saluted, a broad smile on his face. Beside him was a very angry-looking Mr. Hirst, gagged and bound fast to the control panel.\n\n\"Then it's time to get moving,\" Volger said. \"I trust you're all ready for a fight, if it comes to that.\"\n\nBauer and Hoffman brandished tools in their hands, and Volger was wearing his saber. But Alek could hardly wield a knife with the creature hiding under his coat. The time to tell them was now, not in the middle of the escape.\n\n\"There's still my small problem.\"\n\nVolger frowned. \"What are you talking about? What happened?\"\n\n\"Just as I was leaving, one of Dr. Barlow's eggs hatched. Some sort of beast came out. Quite a loud one. When I tried to leave, it began to howl, like a newborn baby crying, I suppose. I thought it would wake the whole ship up!\"\n\nVolger nodded. \"So you had to strangle it. Most unpleasant, I'm sure. But they won't find its body till morning, and by then we'll be long gone.\"\n\nAlek blinked.\n\n\"You did get rid of it, didn't you, Alek?\"\n\n\"In fact, that strategy didn't cross my mind.\" Inside his jacket the creature moved, and Alek winced.\n\nVolger put a hand on his sword hilt and hissed, \"What in blazes is under your coat?\"\n\n\"I assure you, I have no idea.\" Alek cleared his throat. \"But it's perfectly well behaved, as long as one doesn't try to abandon it.\"\n\n\"You brought it with you?\" Volger leaned closer. \"In case it has escaped your notice, Your Highness, we are currently trying to escape the Darwinists. If you have one of their abominations with you, kindly fling it over the side!\"\n\nAlek tightened his grip on the ratlines. \"I certainly will not, Count. For one thing, the beast would make considerable noise on the way down.\"\n\nVolger groaned softly, his fists unclenching. \"Very well, then. I suppose if it comes to a fight, we could use it as a hostage.\"\n\nAlek nodded, unbuttoning his jacket. The creature poked its head out.\n\nVolger turned away with a shudder. \"Just keep it quiet, or I shall silence it myself. After you, Your Highness.\"\n\nAlek began to make his way toward the bow, the others following in silence. They climbed along the ratlines just above the airship's waist, the ropes sagging under the weight of the five men and their heavy bags. It was slow going, and poor old Klopp wore a look of terror on his face, but at least no one on the spine could see them.\n\nWhen the newborn beast began to squirm, Alek opened his jacket the rest of the way. It crawled out and climbed onto his shoulder, its huge eyes narrowing in the breeze.\n\n\"Just be careful,\" he whispered. \"And stay quiet.\"\n\nThe creature turned to him with a bored expression, as if Alek were saying something terribly obvious.\n\nSoon the awful fl\u00e9chette bats were everywhere.\n\nThe bow of the airship was covered with them, a seething mass of small black shapes all softly clucking. Dylan had once explained to Alek that the clicks made echoes, which the creatures used to \"see\" in the dark. They had eyes as well\u2014a thousand beady pairs were following Alek expectantly. No matter how carefully he moved, the bats fluttered about him. It was like trying to sneak through a flock of pigeons on a footpath.\n\n\"Why are they watching us so keenly?\" Klopp whispered.\n\n\"They think we're here to feed them,\" Alek said. \"Dylan always feeds the bats at night.\"\n\n\"You mean they're hungry?\" Klopp asked, his face shiny with sweat in the moonlight.\n\n\"Not to worry. They eat figs,\" Alek said, leaving out the part about metal spikes.\n\n\"I'm glad to hear\u2014,\" Klopp began, but suddenly a bat fluttered up in front of him. As it shot past his face, his boots slipped from the ratlines.\n\nKlopp jerked to a halt a moment later, his hands white-knuckled on the ropes, but his large body swung into the side of the airship's membrane, sending it billowing out in all directions. Around them bats launched into the air, their clicking noises changing into shrieks and calls.\n\nAlek grabbed for Klopp's wrist as the man struggled to get his feet back on the ropes. A moment later he was safe, but the disturbance was spreading, bats fluttering outward like ripples in a dark pond.\n\nWe're done for now, Alek thought.\n\nThe creature on his shoulder perked up, its claws sinking painfully into Alek's shoulder. A soft clucking noise came from its mouth\u2014the sound the bats had been making a moment before.\n\n\"Keep that beast\u2014,\" Volger hissed, but Alek waved him silent.\n\nAll around them the bats were growing quieter. The screeches faded out, the carpet of black shapes settling back onto the airship's skin.\n\nThe creature went silent and turned its big-eyed gaze upon Alek again.\n\nHe stared back at it. Had the thing, whatever it was, just silenced the fl\u00e9chette bats?\n\nPerhaps \u2026 by accident. It was some kind of mimic, like the message lizards. And yet the creature had required no training, no mothering at all. Perhaps that was the way with all newborn Darwinist beasts.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" Volger whispered, and Alek did.\n\nThe mooring tower stretched into the air before them, but Alek found himself staring downward. In the foggy darkness the ground seemed to be a thousand kilometers below.\n\n\"Does that rope look strong enough?\" he asked Hoffman.\n\nThe man knelt to feel the slender cable that stretched across to the tower, perhaps thirty meters away. It seemed too thin to hold a man's weight, though the Darwinist's fabricated materials were always stronger than they looked.\n\n\"From what I've seen, sir, the heavy cables are all attached to the gondola below. But this must be here for some reason. Pretty useless, if it can't hold a man's weight.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Alek said. He could think of other creatures that could use the cable. It might be for message lizards to dart across, or for strafing hawks to roost on.\n\nHoffman shrugged a loop of rope from his shoulder. \"This line will hold any two of us, along with our gear. We should send someone over carrying one end of it.\"\n\n\"I'll go,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Not with your injury, young master,\" Klopp said.\n\n\"I'm the lightest of us.\" Alek held out his hand. \"Give me the rope.\"\n\nKlopp looked at Volger, who nodded and said, \"Tie that around his waist, so he doesn't kill himself.\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow, a little surprised that Volger was letting him go first.\n\nThe wildcount read his expression and smiled. \"If that cable breaks, we'll all be stuck here, so it hardly matters who goes first. And you are the lightest, after all.\"\n\n\"So my foolhardiness has produced the correct strategy, Count?\"\n\n\"Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.\"\n\nAlek didn't answer, but the creature bristled on his shoulder, as if sensing his annoyance.\n\nKlopp let out a chuckle as he knelt and tied the heavier rope around Alek's waist. Soon it was secure, the other end gripped by Bauer, Hoffman, and Klopp in a tug-of-war line.\n\n\"Quickly now,\" Volger said.\n\nAlek nodded and turned away, walking down the slope of the airbeast's head. The others let the rope out slowly, a gentle pull at his waist. It reminded Alek of when he was ten and his father would let him lean out from castle parapets, keeping a firm hand on his belt. Of course, back then he'd felt much safer.\n\nThe slender cable stretched out ahead, disappearing among the dark struts of the mooring tower. Alek grasped the cable in both hands.\n\n\"I hope you're not afraid of heights, beastie.\"\n\nThe newborn creature just looked at him and blinked.\n\n\"Right, then,\" Alek said, and stepped off into the void. He dangled for a moment from his hands, then swung his legs up to wrap them around the cable. Though its claws sank deep into his shoulder, the beastie didn't make a sound.\n\nThere was one good thing about hanging faceup like this\u2014Alek couldn't see the dark ground below, only his own hands clenching the rope and the stars above. He pulled himself away from the airship hand over hand, the cable cutting into the backs of his knees as he inched along.\n\nHalfway across, Alek was breathing hard. His injured rib had begun to throb, and his hands were losing feeling. The night air turned the sweat on his forehead cold. As he inched away from the airship, the rope hanging from his waist grew longer and heavier.\n\nHe imagined the cable snapping, or his fingers slipping. He would fall for an awful moment, but the rope around his waist would swing him back toward the airship, smashing him into its nose\u2014maybe hard enough for the whale itself to awaken and protest.\u2026\n\nThe mooring tower grew closer, but the cable in his aching hands sloped gently upward now, and was harder than ever to climb. The creature began to moan softly, mimicking the wind in the struts of the tower.\n\nAlek gritted his teeth and pulled himself the last few meters, ignoring his burning muscles. For once he was thankful for the years of Volger's cruel fencing lessons.\n\nFinally a metal strut came within reach, and Alek wrapped an arm around it. He hung there for a moment, panting, then hauled himself up onto the cold steel of the tower.\n\nWith shaking fingers he untied the thick rope from around his waist and knotted it to the strut. Now that it stretched all the way back to the airship's head, the rope seemed to weigh a ton. How had he carried it so far?\n\nAlek lay on his back and watched as the others prepared to cross, dividing up the satchels of tools and weapons. It was odd to see the Leviathan from this head-on perspective. It made Alek feel insignificant, like some minuscule creature about to be swallowed by a whale.\n\nBut the darkness beyond the airship was vaster still. It was dotted with the fires of the protesters at the airfield gate, and past those, the lights of the city.\n\n\"Constantinople,\" he said softly.\n\n\"Mmm, Constantinople,\" the creature said.\n\nClimbing down the tower was simple. A set of metal stairs spiraled through its center, and the five of them descended quickly.\n\nOr was it six of them now? Suddenly Alek could feel the weight of the fabricated beast riding on his shoulder. The single word it had spoken made the animal heavier somehow, as if its uncanniness were something solid.\n\nAlek hadn't told the others, of course. Volger was terrified enough of message lizards. Why provide him with another excuse to get rid of the newborn creature?\n\nAt least it seemed to know when to stay quiet. Since speaking that one word, it hadn't uttered another sound.\n\nAs they neared the bottom of the stairs, Alek found himself level with the airship's bridge. Light from worm-lamps shone through the windows, silhouetting two officers on duty inside. But the faint green glow didn't reach the shadows within the tower.\n\nThe Leviathan's guards stood at attention in the airship's hatches. Ground men in red fezzes faced them, the two groups watching each other warily. The rest of the Ottomans were at the airfield gates, keeping an eye on the protesters.\n\nNo one was guarding the base of the mooring tower.\n\nThe moon was climbing, a fat crescent in the sky, and the tower cast a long shadow pointing west, away from the city and the crowds. Volger lead the others along that slender finger of darkness, heading for an empty stretch of fence at the airfield's edge.\n\nAlek wondered what would happen if they were spotted now. The Leviathan's crew had no authority here on Ottoman soil. But he doubted that the Darwinists would let their only engineers slip away without a fight. For that matter, the Ottomans mightn't take kindly to foreigners trespassing on their airfield.\n\nAll in all, it seemed better to remain unseen.\n\nSuddenly the newborn creature stood up on its hind legs, its ears twisting back toward the ship. Alek came to a halt and listened. The distant shriek of a command whistle reached his ears.\n\n\"Volger, I think they've\u2014\"\n\nA hydrogen sniffer's howl pierced the night. The sound came from near the engine pod\u2014someone had found the bound and gagged Mr. Hirst.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" Volger whispered. \"We're half a kilometer from the fence. They'll search the ship before they think to look out here.\"\n\nAlek broke into a run, shuddering to think what beasts the Darwinists would send after them. The six-legged sniffer dogs? The awful fl\u00e9chette bats? Or were there even worse creatures aboard the ship?\n\nThe alarm spread along the long, dark silhouette behind them, the gondola lights flickering from soft green to brilliant white. On Alek's shoulder the creature softly imitated the sounds of the alert, the barks and cries of the hounds, the shouts and whistles of command.\n\n\"I'm not sure that's helpful,\" he muttered to it.\n\n\"Helpful,\" the creature repeated softly.\n\nA minute later a blinding searchlight lanced out from the ship's spine. At first it pointed at the airfield gate, but slowly it began to turn, like a lighthouse on a dark ocean.\n\nSo much for the Darwinists letting them slip away.\n\n\"You four go ahead,\" Klopp said, his face bright red. \"I can't keep running like this!\"\n\nAlek slowed his pace, taking the man's heavy tool kit from him. \"Nonsense, Klopp. Spreading out just makes it easier for them to spot us.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Volger said. \"Stick close together.\"\n\nAlek glanced over his shoulder. The light was swinging toward them, rippling across the grass like a luminous wave.\n\n\"Get down!\" he whispered, and the five of them dropped flat to the ground.\n\nThe blinding light flashed past, but didn't stop on them\u2014it had been aimed too high. The spotlight crew were searching the airfield from the outside in, checking the boundaries first. But Alek doubted Klopp could make it to the fence before the light swung round again.\n\nThe newborn creature's claws tightened on his shoulder, and it made a new noise in his ear \u2026 a sound like fluttering wings.\n\nAlek glanced back at the ship, his eyes widening. A dark cloud was boiling up from beneath the gondola, thousands of black forms spilling into the air. The tempest of wings climbed through the searchlight's beam, glittering with the flash of steel talons.\n\n\"Strafing hawks,\" Alek breathed. Back on the glacier, he'd seen the hawks in action against German soldiers. And just yesterday he'd seen a crewman sharpening the steel talons they wore, like a razor on a leather strap.\n\nThe birds spread out from the ship, and soon the air above was full of fluttering shapes.\n\nAlek looked ahead\u2014the fence was only a hundred meters away.\n\nBut a moment later the hawks had begun to circle, a whirlwind of wings and glinting steel forming overhead. Alek stooped his shoulders, waiting for an attack.\n\n\"Just keep running!\" Volger cried. \"We're no good to them dead.\"\n\nAlek ran, hoping the man was right.\n\nAs the spinning mass grew larger and larger, the spotlight altered course, heading toward the towering whirlwind of birds. It arrived in seconds, pinning Alek like the stare of a great, blinding eye.\n\nThe howl of hydrogen sniffers reached Alek's ears again, closer than before. The beast on his shoulder imitated the sound.\n\n\"They're coming on foot,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Go on, Bauer,\" Volger shouted. \"You've got the cutters!\"\n\nAlek followed as the man spurted ahead. The airfield's edge wasn't far now; the spotlight streaming past them glinted on the coils of barbed wire.\n\nWhen Bauer and Alek reached the fence, Bauer pulled out the bolt cutters and set to work. He snipped at the mesh of wire, slowly opening a way through. But the cries of the beasts behind them were growing louder every second.\n\nBauer was halfway done when the others caught up.\n\n\"The forest is heavy this way,\" Volger said, pointing at the blackness past the fence. \"Run due west until you drop, then find a place to hide.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Hoffman and I will hold the breach for as long as we can.\"\n\n\"Hold the breach?\" Alek said. \"With wrenches and a fencing saber? You can't fight off those beasts!\"\n\n\"No, but we can slow them down. And once the Darwinists realize they have an engineer and a translator in hand, they may decide it's not worth chasing the rest of you. Especially across Ottoman territory.\"\n\n\"We've thought this out, young master,\" Klopp said, panting. \"It's all in the plan!\"\n\n\"What plan?\" Alek cried, but no one answered. \"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"My apologies, Your Highness.\" Volger drew his sword. \"But you've been a bit loose with our secrets lately.\"\n\n\"God's wounds, Volger! Are you playing the martyr?\"\n\n\"If they weren't right behind us, I'd be going with you. But someone has to hold them here. And between the two of us, Hoffman and I offer them a chance to keep their ship flying, as long as they don't treat us too roughly.\"\n\n\"But I can't \u2026\" Alek swallowed.\n\n\"It's done, sir,\" Bauer said.\n\n\"Go, then,\" Volger said, handing his bag to Klopp, who scrambled through the breach. The shadows of hydrogen sniffers and men loomed, made huge by the searchlight.\n\n\"But, Volger.\" Alek clenched his fists. \"I can't do this without you! Not any of it!\"\n\n\"I'm afraid you must.\" Volger saluted with his saber. \"Good-bye, Alek. Make your father proud.\"\n\nBut my father is dead \u2026 and you're not.\n\n\"Come, sir.\" Bauer grabbed his arm. Alek tried to pull away, but the man was bigger and stronger. Alek found himself dragged through the opening in the fence, his jacket nipped at by the wire's barbs, the creature on his shoulder ducking low and howling like a hydrogen sniffer on the hunt.\n\nA moment later they were among dark trees, Klopp's panting ahead of them. Corporal Bauer still pulled him along, apologizing under his breath. The forest soon smothered the battle's sounds, the searchlight barely glimmering through the leaves. The sniffers' howls were muted, the strafing hawks forced higher by heavy branches.\n\nThe three of them thrashed deeper into the trees, until everything was swallowed up by blackness. All Alek could see were spots burned into his vision by the searchlight. Behind them the sounds faded abruptly.\n\nVolger would be negotiating now, offering Hoffman and himself in exchange for the others' freedom. The Darwinists would have little choice. If they fought their way through the fence, they'd risk killing their last engineer and translator.\n\nAlek found himself slowing. Count Volger's plan had worked to perfection.\n\nBauer tightened his grip. \"Please, sir. We can't go back.\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" Alek shook himself free and came to a halt. \"But there's no need to rush, unless we want to give poor old Klopp a heart attack.\"\n\nKlopp didn't argue. He stood, stooped and panting, his hands on his knees. Alek looked back the way they'd come, listening for sounds of pursuit\u2014nothing. Not even a bird in the sky.\n\nHe was finally free, but he'd never felt more alone.\n\nPrince Aleksandar knew what his father would have said. It was time for him to take command.\n\n\"Did we drop anything?\"\n\nBauer quickly counted the bags. \"The wireless set, the tools, the gold bar\u2014we've got it all, sir.\"\n\n\"The gold \u2026,\" Alek said, wondering how much the last of his father's fortune had slowed them down. He would've traded all of it for the extra minutes that Volger's sacrifice had bought them.\n\nBut this was no time for self-pity, or for wishing that things were different.\n\n\"And there's this,\" Klopp added, pulling a leather scroll case from his jacket. It was marked with the crossed keys of the papal seal. \"He said you should carry it from now on.\"\n\nAlek stared at the object. It was a letter from the pope stating that Alek was heir to his father's titles and estates, despite the wishes of his granduncle, the emperor. One could argue that it made Alek the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary as well. It was why the Germans were hunting him\u2014he might one day have the power to end this war.\n\nAs Alek's fingers closed around the case, he realized that he'd always relied on Volger to keep the letter safe. But now he had to carry his own destiny.\n\nHe slid the case into a pocket and buttoned it shut. \"Very good, Klopp. Shall I take Volger's bag for you?\"\n\n\"No, young master,\" the man panted. \"I'll be fine.\"\n\nAlek held out his hand. \"I'm afraid I must insist. You're slowing us down.\"\n\nKlopp paused. This was the moment when he would normally have glanced at the wildcount for approval, but no longer. He handed the bag over, and Alek grunted as the weight hit him.\n\nVolger, of course, had been carrying the gold.\n\nThe creature mimicked the grunt, and Alek sighed. Less than an hour old, and already it was becoming tiresome.\n\n\"I hope you learn some new tricks soon,\" he muttered, to which the creature blinked its eyes.\n\nBauer hoisted the other two bags. \"Which way, sir?\"\n\n\"You mean Count Volger didn't provide you with any more secret plans?\"\n\nBauer looked at Klopp, who shrugged.\n\nAlek took a slow breath. It was all up to him now.\n\nTo the west lay Europe, descending into madness and war. To the east was the Ottoman Empire, stretching, vast and alien, into the heart of Asia. And spanning the two continents was the ancient city of Constantinople.\n\n\"We stay in the capital, for now. We'll need to buy clothes \u2026 and perhaps horses.\" Alek paused, realizing that with the gold bar they could buy their own walker if they wanted. The possibilities were endless. \"At least in the city some of the storekeepers will understand German.\"\n\n\"Very sensible,\" Klopp said. \"But where tonight, young master?\"\n\nBauer nodded, staring back the way they'd come. The woods were silent, but the searchlight still glimmered on the horizon.\n\n\"We head west for an hour,\" Alek said. \"Then circle back toward the city. Perhaps we'll find a friendly inn.\"\n\n\"An inn, sir? But won't the Ottomans be looking for us?\" Bauer asked.\n\nAlek thought for a moment, then shook his head. \"They won't know who to look for, unless the Darwinists tell them. And I don't think they will.\"\n\nKlopp frowned. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Don't you see, the Darwinists don't want us to be caught.\" As Alek spoke the words, his own thoughts became clearer. \"We know too much about the Leviathan\u2014how its engines work, the nature of its mission. It won't help them to have us in Ottoman hands.\"\n\nKlopp nodded slowly. \"They could say it was only Volger and Hoffman who tried to escape, and they've caught them. So there's no one else to look for!\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Alek said. \"And as a warship, the Leviathan has to leave neutral territory by tomorrow. Once they're gone, no one will know we're here.\"\n\n\"What about the Germans, sir?\" Bauer said quietly. \"They saw the Stormwalker in the Alps, with its Hapsburg crest, and saw the Leviathan mounted with our engines. They must know we were aboard, and they'll guess who was trying to escape tonight, even if the Ottomans don't.\"\n\nAlek swore. German agents were everywhere in Constantinople, and tonight's ruckus hadn't been subtle.\n\n\"You're right, Bauer. But I doubt there are any Germans in these woods. I still say we sleep in an inn tonight\u2014a quiet, comfortable one that will take gold shavings in payment. Tomorrow we'll disguise ourselves properly.\"\n\nHe walked into the darkness, setting his course by the last glimmer of searchlights behind them. The other two hoisted their bags and followed. No arguments, no debate.\n\nAs simple as that, Alek was in command.\n\nDeryn carried the tray carefully, barely trusting herself to walk straight.\n\nThe Clankers' escape had kept her awake all night\u2014scrambling to the rookery to release the strafing hawks, being dragged about by a pack of excited sniffers, then two hours with the officers as they explained it all to the Ottoman authorities, who thought it a squick rude for the Leviathan's crew to be gallivanting across their airfield without permission.\n\nWhen Deryn had finally found a moment to check the machine room, Dr. Barlow was already there. One of the eggs had hatched in the night, and the newborn beastie was missing!\n\nThe odd thing was, the lady boffin had hardly seemed upset. She'd ordered Deryn to take a good look around the ship, but had only smiled when Deryn had come back empty-handed.\n\nThat was boffins for you.\n\nBy the time Deryn had stumbled to her own cabin, it had been dawn\u2014time to go back on duty. To add insult to injury, her first orders had been to deliver breakfast to the man who'd caused the whole palaver.\n\nA guard stood in front of Count Volger's stateroom. He looked as tired as Deryn felt, and stared hungrily at her tray full of toast, boiled eggs, and tea.\n\n\"Shall I knock for you, sir?\" he asked.\n\n\"Aye, feel free to wake his countship up,\" Deryn said. \"Seeing as how he kept us up all night.\"\n\nThe man nodded and gave the door a good piece of his boot.\n\nVolger opened it a moment later, looking as though he hadn't been to bed yet either. His hair stuck out at all angles, and his riding breeches were still spattered with mud from the airfield.\n\nHe gave the tray a hungry look and stepped aside. Deryn pushed past him and set it down on the desk. She noted that Volger's saber was gone, along with most of his papers. The officers must have ransacked the room after the escape.\n\n\"Breakfast for a condemned man?\" Volger asked, closing the door.\n\n\"I doubt they'll hang you, sir. Not today, anyhow.\"\n\nThe man smiled, pouring himself tea. \"You Darwinists are so forgiving.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes at that. Volger knew he was indispensable. The lady boffin might speak Clanker, but she didn't know the fiddly words for mechanical parts. And she certainly wasn't going to spend her days up in an engine pod. Volger would be treated well as long as Hoffman was needed to keep the engines running.\n\n\"I'd hardly say you're forgiven,\" Deryn said. \"There'll be a guard on your door day and night.\"\n\n\"Well, then, Mr. Sharp, I am your prisoner.\" Volger pulled out the desk chair and sat down, then gestured at an empty cup on the windowsill. \"Tea?\"\n\nDeryn raised an eyebrow. His countship was offering her, a lowly middy, a cup of tea? The floral smell rising from the pot had already set her mouth watering. Between the ruckus last night and resupplying the ship before they left today, it might be hours before she sat down to her own breakfast.\n\nBetter a quick cup of tea and milk than nothing.\n\n\"Thank you, sir. I believe I will.\" Deryn picked up the cup. It was fine porcelain, as light as a hummingbird, with Alek's mechanical eagle crest inlaid in gold. \"Did you bring this fancy china all the way from Austria?\"\n\n\"One advantage to traveling in a Stormwalker, there's plenty of room for luggage.\" Volger sighed. \"Though I'm afraid you hold our last surviving piece. It is two centuries old. Pray, don't drop it.\"\n\nDeryn's eyes widened as the wildcount poured. \"I'll try not to.\"\n\n\"Milk?\"\n\nShe nodded dumbly and sat down, wondering at the transformation that had come over Count Volger. He'd always been a dark presence on the ship, skulking through the corridors and glaring at the beasties. But this morning the man seemed almost \u2026 pleasant.\n\nDeryn took a sip of tea, letting its warmth spread through her.\n\n\"You seem in good spirits,\" she said. \"Considering.\"\n\n\"Considering that my escape was foiled?\" Volger stared out the window. \"Odd, isn't it? I feel somewhat light-hearted this morning, as if all my cares had lifted.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"You mean because Alek's got away, and you haven't?\"\n\nThe man stirred his tea. \"Yes, I suppose that's it.\"\n\n\"Well, that's a bit hard, isn't it?\" Deryn said. \"Poor Alek's out there on the run, while you're sipping tea out of a fancy cup, safe and sound.\"\n\nVolger raised his cup, which had the Leviathan's silhouette and nautilus spirals stamped on its side in black. \"That would be you, boy. Mine is quite plain.\"\n\n\"To blazes with your barking teacup!\" Deryn cried, annoyance rising in her. \"You're happy that Alek's gone, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Happy that he's off this ship?\" The wildcount salted his boiled eggs and took a bite of one. \"That he's no longer destined to spend the war in chains?\"\n\n\"Aye, but the poor boy's all on his own. And here you are having breakfast, smug as a box of cats! I think it's dead rotten of you!\"\n\nVolger paused, a forkful of potatoes now halfway to his mouth. He looked her up and down.\n\nDeryn swallowed her next words, realizing she'd let exhaustion get the better of her. Her voice had gone all high and squeaky, and she was gripping the antique teacup so hard it was a wonder it hadn't shattered.\n\nDuring the alert there'd been so much commotion, it had been easy to forget that Alek was out there running for his life. But sitting here watching Volger salt his eggs with a self-satisfied expression, the enormity of it all had finally struck home.\n\nAlek was gone, and he wasn't coming back.\n\nDeryn set the teacup carefully on the desk. Careful to use her boy's voice, she said, \"You seem dead pleased with yourself, is all. And I reckon it's because Alek isn't your problem anymore.\"\n\n\"My problem?\" Volger asked. \"Is that what you think he was?\"\n\n\"Aye. You're glad to see the backside of him, just because he had a mind of his own sometimes.\"\n\nVolger's face fell back into its usual stony expression, as if Deryn were a bug crawling across his breakfast. \"Listen, boy. You have no idea what I've given up for Alek\u2014my title, my future, my family's name. I'll never see my home again, no matter who wins this war. I'm a traitor in the eyes of my people, and all of it to keep Alek safe.\"\n\nDeryn held his stare. \"Aye, but you're not the only one who's had to go against his own country. I kept Alek's secrets and looked the other way when you lot were planning to escape. So don't go getting all high and mighty on me.\"\n\nVolger glared at her another moment, then let out a tired laugh. He finally took his bite of potatoes, and chewed them thoughtfully.\n\n\"You're as worried about him as I am, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Of course I am,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"It's quite touching, really.\" Volger poured more tea for them both. \"I'm glad Alek had you as a friend, Dylan, even if you are a commoner.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. Aristocrats were so barking stuck up.\n\n\"But Alek has trained for this moment his whole life,\" Volger went on. \"His father and I always knew that one day he would be alone, with the whole world against him. And Alek has made it amply clear that he was ready to go on without me.\"\n\nDeryn shook her head. \"But you've got it all wrong, Count. Alek didn't want to go it alone; he wanted more allies, not less. He even said he wanted to \u2026\"\n\nShe remembered the last time they'd spoken, two nights before. Alek had wished that there were a way for him to stay aboard the Leviathan, because the airship felt like the only place he'd ever belonged. And she'd been a bum-rag about the whole thing, just because he hadn't been declaring his undying love for her.\n\nSuddenly her throat was too tight to speak.\n\nVolger leaned forward and regarded her. \"You're a very sensitive boy, Dylan.\"\n\nDeryn glared back at him. It didn't mean she was barking \"sensitive,\" just because she knew when things mattered.\n\n\"I just hope he's all right,\" she said after a good swallow of tea.\n\n\"As do I. Perhaps we can still help Alek, you and I together.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"He has a bigger part to play in this war than you understand, Dylan,\" the count said. \"His granduncle the emperor is a very old man.\"\n\n\"Aye, but the throne doesn't mean anything to Alek, because his mum isn't royal enough. Right?\"\n\n\"Ah, I see he told you everything,\" Volger said, giving her an odd smile. \"But in politics there are always exceptions. When the right time comes, Alek could tip the balance of this war.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. What the count was saying didn't quite square up with Alek's story, about how his family had always looked down on him and his mother. But back in the Alps, of course, the Germans had sent a massive fleet of airships to capture him. They, at least, seemed to think he was important.\n\n\"But what can we do to help him?\"\n\n\"At the moment, not much. But one never knows what opportunities might present themselves. The problem is that I no longer have a wireless set.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"You had a wireless? Did the officers know about that?\"\n\n\"They didn't ask.\" Count Volger waved a hand at his breakfast. \"And I see you haven't thought to bring me the morning newspapers. So if you could keep me apprised of events, I would appreciate it.\"\n\n\"What? Spy for you?\" Deryn cried. \"Not barking likely!\"\n\n\"I could make it worth your while.\"\n\n\"With what? Cups of tea?\"\n\nThe wildcount smiled. \"Perhaps I can do better than that. For example, you must be wondering about a certain missing creature.\"\n\n\"The beastie that hatched last night? You know where it is?\" The man didn't answer, but Deryn's mind was already spinning. \"Then it must have hatched before Alek left the machine room! He's got it with him, hasn't he?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. Or perhaps we strangled it to keep it quiet.\" Volger took his last bite of toast and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. \"Do you think your Dr. Barlow would be interested in the details?\"\n\nDeryn narrowed her eyes. The way the lady boffin was acting, she already had a good idea where the newborn creature had gone. Suddenly it all made sense. Deryn would've seen it herself if she hadn't been so exhausted.\n\nNow that she thought about it, quite a few peculiarities surrounding the eggs were beginning to make sense.\n\n\"Aye,\" Deryn said. \"She might be interested.\"\n\n\"Then, I'll tell you exactly how your creature fared last night, as long as you keep me informed over the next few days.\" The count looked out the window. \"The Ottomans will soon make their decision about entering this war. Alek's next step will depend greatly on that choice.\"\n\nDeryn followed his gaze out the window. The spires of Istanbul were just visible in the distance, the haze of engine smoke already rising over the city. \"Well, I could tell you what the newspapers say. That's not spying, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" Count Volger stood, offering his hand. \"I think you and I may be allies after all.\"\n\nDeryn stared at his hand a moment, then sighed and shook it. \"Thank you for the tea, sir. And by the way, next time you try to escape, I'd be much obliged if you did it more quietly. Or at least in the middle of the day.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Volger bowed gracefully, then said, \"And if you ever want to learn to fence properly, Mr. Sharp, do let me know.\"\n\nHalfway back to the bosun's cabin, a message lizard stopped on the ceiling overhead and fixed her with its beady eyes.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" it squawked in the lady boffin's voice, \"I shall need you in full dress today. We'll be visiting the sultan.\"\n\nDeryn stared up at the beastie, wondering if she'd heard right. The sultan? The man who ruled over the whole barking Ottoman Empire?\n\n\"I have told Mr. Rigby to relieve you of other duties,\" the lizard continued. \"Meet me out on the airfield at noon, and make sure you look sharp.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. \"Aye, ma'am. I'll be there. End message.\"\n\nAs the beastie scuttled away, she closed her eyes and softly swore. She didn't even have a dress uniform to wear, not since yesterday. Deryn had taken off her jacket before she'd jumped onto the Dauntless's trunk, but her only fancy shirt was still bright red from the spice bomb. Even after two washings, one whiff of the shirt was strong enough to make a dead horse sneeze. She'd have to borrow one of Newkirk's, and that meant making adjustments with her sewing kit.\u2026\n\nShe groaned, then headed toward her cabin at a run.\n\nAs Deryn descended the gangway hours later, the rumble of Clanker engines sprang to life around her. In the airship's shadow Newkirk, the bosun, and a dozen riggers were loading themselves onto a squadron of walkers in the shapes of donkeys and water buffaloes. They were headed to the markets for supplies, and looked to be in a hurry. If the Leviathan didn't leave the city by late afternoon today, the Ottomans would have every right to impound it.\n\nThe officers hadn't let on where the ship was going next. But wherever they were bound, Deryn doubted she would be seeing Istanbul or Alek again, not until the war was over.\n\nShe watched Newkirk for a moment, envious of his disguise. The whole party was dressed in Arab robes to keep the Young Turks from spotting them and starting up another protest. If only she could be doing proper ship's work instead of diplomacy \u2026 or whatever Dr. Barlow was up to.\n\nThe lady boffin waited a hundred yards from the Leviathan, on a stretch of empty airfield past the mooring tower. She was dressed in her finest traveling coat, twirling a parasol and standing beside a small hay-filled box. One of the last two eggs sat inside it, shining like a huge pearl in the sun. So Dr. Barlow's secret cargo would at last be delivered to the sultan.\n\nBut why take a spare middy along?\n\nAs Deryn drew near, Dr. Barlow turned and said, \"You're a bit late, Mr. Sharp, and looking positively unkempt.\"\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am,\" Deryn said, adjusting her collar. Her shirt fitted all wrong despite a mad hour of sewing. Worse, it still smelled of Newkirk\u2014the bum-rag hadn't bothered to wash it since yesterday. \"I had to borrow this shirt. Mine was still a bit spicy.\"\n\n\"You possess only one dress uniform?\" Dr. Barlow clicked her tongue. \"We shall have to remedy that, if you're going to continue assisting me.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"Assisting you, ma'am? Frankly, I never fancied myself much of a diplomat.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not. But this is what comes of making your self useful, Mr. Sharp. You were invaluable during the battle of the Dauntless, while the ambassador and his lackeys were quite hopeless.\" Dr. Barlow sighed. \"Soon I shall be afraid to leave the airship without your protection.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. Even when dispensing compliments, the lady boffin always managed a mocking tone. \"I hope you're not expecting to be attacked again today, ma'am.\"\n\n\"One never knows. We are not as welcome here as I might have liked.\"\n\n\"That's right enough,\" Deryn said, still hearing the anger in the protesters' voices. \"But I've been meaning to ask you, ma'am. What's a behemoth?\"\n\nDr. Barlow looked at her with narrowed eyes. \"Wherever did you hear that word, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"It was just something they were shouting yesterday. The Young Turks, I mean.\"\n\n\"Hmm, of course. That is the name of the Osman's companion creature, and thus part of Lord Churchill's unfortunate appropriation.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. \"But krakens don't have names. No beastie does, unless it's a whole ship.\"\n\n\"'Behemoth' is not a proper name, young man, but a species. You see, this creature is not a kraken at all but something altogether new. And a military secret, so perhaps we should drop the subject.\" Dr. Barlow tipped back her parasol to look into the sky. \"I believe this is our airship.\"\n\nDeryn shielded her eyes against the high sun, and saw a peculiar craft coming into view. \"It's quite \u2026 conspicuous, isn't it, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Of course. Guests of the sultan are expected to arrive in style.\"\n\nThe Clanker airship was less than a quarter of the Leviathan's length, but was as fancy as a wedding cake. A fringe of tassels fluttered from its airbag, and canopies of billowing silk covered the gondola, as if some Ottoman prince had decided to go soaring on his four-poster bed.\n\nThe craft was held aloft by a long cylindrical balloon with several funnels leading up into its belly, each fed with hot air by a blazing smokestack in the shape of a monstrous head. Propellers thrust out on long and jointed arms, some pointing up, some down, the two largest pushing the craft forward. The prow was carved in the shape of a falcon's hooked beak, and wings unfolding like straight razors were carved into the gondola's sides.\n\nThe craft's propellers turned and twisted, until it had settled gently on the scrub grass of the airfield.\n\nAs a short gangway unfolded from its gondola, Dr. Barlow closed her parasol and pointed it at the egg box. \"If you please, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Invaluable, that's me,\" Deryn said, lifting the box with a grunt.\n\nShe followed the lady boffin up the gangway to an open platform surrounded by a low railing, like the top deck of a sailing ship. The propeller wash swirled about them, ruffling the veil tucked into Dr. Barlow's bowler.\n\nThe crew were all dark-skinned men, but they weren't wearing desert robes, like the Africans that Deryn had seen from the elephant's howdah the day before. Instead they wore silk uniforms and tall turbans of brilliant red and orange. Two of them took the egg box from Deryn, lashing it fast to metal cleats on the deck.\n\nOne of the men wore a tall conical hat, his eyes protected by piloting goggles. Some sort of mechanical beastie perched on his shoulder, like an owl with big eyes and a wide-open mouth. A tiny cylinder sat on the machine's chest, a metal stylus scratching against its spinning surface.\n\nThe man stepped forward and bowed to Dr. Barlow.\n\n\"Peace be upon you, madam. I am the Kizlar Agha. Welcome aboard.\"\n\nThe lady boffin replied in a language Deryn didn't recognize, one made of softer sounds than German. The man smiled, repeating the same phrase as he bowed to Deryn.\n\n\"Midshipman Dylan Sharp,\" she said, bowing in return. \"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Agha.\"\n\nDr. Barlow laughed. \"Kizlar Agha is a title, Mr. Sharp, not a name. He is the head of the palace guard and of the treasury. The most important man in the empire, after the sultan and grand vizier. A carrier of important messages.\"\n\n\"And important visitors as well,\" the man said, raising a hand. The smokestacks belched fire, sending ripples of heat through the air.\n\nDeryn's nose caught the sweet smell of burning propane. She shuddered and clenched her jaw, turning to grip the rail as the airship lifted into the sky.\n\n\"Are you unwell, Mr. Sharp?\" the Kizlar Agha said, leaning closer to her. \"Airsickness seems a strange malady for an airman.\"\n\n\"I'm quite all right, sir,\" Deryn said stiffly. \"It's just that hot-air balloons make me a wee bit nervous.\"\n\nThe man crossed his arms. \"I assure you, the Imperial Airyacht Stamboul is as safe as any airbeast.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it is, sir,\" Deryn said, but her hands still gripped the railing. The smokestacks belched fire again, roaring like an angry tigeresque.\n\n\"We had something of a battle yesterday,\" Dr. Barlow said, putting a cool hand against Deryn's cheek. \"And alarms and excursions again last night. Mr. Sharp has been quite busy, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. I heard of the Young Turks pestering you,\" the Kizlar Agha said. \"Revolutionaries are everywhere now. But they will not trouble us at the palace, nor in the sky.\"\n\nThe craft had cleared the airfield fence now, and the protesters at the gate looked as small as ants below.\n\nWhile Dr. Barlow and the Kizlar Agha talked, Deryn stared down at the city, trying to ignore the air wrinkling with heat around her. The tangled streets of Istanbul were soon beneath the Stamboul, the metal flash of walkers glinting through the veil of smoke. Gyrothopters flittered past, looking as delicate as butterflies.\n\nAlek was down there somewhere, she supposed. Unless he'd already headed into the wilds of the empire, where the Air Service maps showed only mountains and dusty plains on the way to the Far East.\n\nWhen the Kizlar Agha returned to his duties, Dr. Barlow joined Deryn at the railing. \"Are you quite sure you weren't bumped on the head last night, Mr. Sharp? You look unwell.\"\n\n\"No, I'm feeling brilliant,\" Deryn said, gripping the handrail tighter. She wasn't going to spout off about her father's accident again. Best to change the subject. \"It's just that I had an odd chat with Count Volger over breakfast \u2026 about our missing beastie.\"\n\n\"Really? How enterprising of you.\"\n\n\"He said he saw it last night. The beastie must've hatched before Alek left, and the daft boy took it with him.\" Deryn turned to Dr. Barlow and narrowed her eyes. \"But you already knew that, didn't you, ma'am?\"\n\n\"The possibility had crossed my mind.\" The lady boffin shrugged. \"It seemed the only logical explanation for the creature's disappearance.\"\n\n\"Aye, but it wasn't just logic, was it? You knew Alek would try to escape before we left Istanbul, so you put him on egg duty last night.\"\n\nA smile appeared behind Dr. Barlow's veil. \"Why, Mr. Sharp, are you accusing me of scheming?\"\n\n\"Call it what you like, ma'am, but Alek was always complaining that you rearranged the heaters when he was watching the eggs. Made it hotter for him than for me.\" As Deryn spoke her suspicions aloud, more pieces fell into place. \"And you never wanted me to visit while he was on egg duty. So that when the beastie hatched, it would be just him in the machine room, all alone!\"\n\nDr. Barlow looked away and said sternly. \"Are you certain you weren't bumped on the head last night, Mr. Sharp? I'm not sure what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"I'm talking about the beasties inside those eggs,\" Deryn said, staring at the cargo box. \"What are they, anyway?\"\n\n\"They are a military secret, young man.\"\n\n\"Aye, and now we're taking one to this sultan fellow. A Clanker aristocrat, just like Alek!\"\n\nDeryn stared straight at Dr. Barlow, waiting for a reply. It was the rudest she'd ever dared be with the lady boffin, but between the sleepless night and this morning's realizations, anger had taken control of her tongue.\n\nIt was all starting to make sense. Why Dr. Barlow had been willing to keep Alek's secret from the officers, and why she'd put him on egg duty almost from the start. She'd wanted one of the eggs to hatch while Alek was alone in that room.\n\nBut what on earth was the beastie's purpose? And why hadn't Alek simply left the barking thing behind?\n\nAfter a moment of cold stares between them, Dr. Barlow broke the silence. \"Did Count Volger say anything specific about the creature?\"\n\n\"Not really.\" Deryn shrugged. \"He may have mentioned something about strangling it to keep it quiet.\"\n\nDr. Barlow's eyebrows shot up, and Deryn smiled. Two could play at this game of keeping secrets.\n\n\"But I think he was just trying to be clever.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Dr. Barlow said coldly. \"There appears to be a lot of that going about.\"\n\nDeryn held the woman's gaze. \"I'm not trying to be clever, ma'am. I just want to know \u2026 Is Alek in danger from that beastie?\"\n\n\"Don't be absurd, Mr. Sharp.\" Dr. Barlow leaned closer, lowering her voice. \"The perspicacious loris, as it is known, is quite harmless. I would never put Alek in danger.\"\n\n\"Then you did try to make an egg hatch while he was in there with them!\"\n\nDr. Barlow looked away. \"Yes, the loris was designed with a high degree of nascent fixation. Like a baby duck, it bonds with the first person it sees.\"\n\n\"And you made it bond with Alek!\"\n\n\"A necessary improvisation. After we crashed in the Alps, it seemed that we wouldn't reach Istanbul in time. I didn't want to see all my years of work wasted.\" She shrugged. \"Besides, I'm quite fond of Alek, and wish him every advantage in his travels. To those who listen carefully, the perspicacious loris can be quite helpful.\"\n\n\"Helpful?\" Deryn asked. \"How, exactly?\"\n\n\"By being perspicacious, of course.\"\n\nDeryn furrowed her eyebrows, puzzling over what \"perspicacious\" might mean. She wondered if she could trust the lady boffin's words at all. Dr. Barlow always seemed to have a larger plan than whatever she let on.\n\n\"But it wasn't just to help him,\" Deryn said. \"Alek's an important Clanker, just like the sultan, and that's why you wanted him to have this loris beastie.\"\n\n\"It is as I said yesterday.\" Dr. Barlow gestured at the beaklike prow before them, at monstrous heads belching fire. \"Unlike the other Clanker powers, the Ottomans have not forgotten the web of life. And I think that in his short time with us, Alek may have become amenable to reason as well.\"\n\n\"Reason?\" Deryn swallowed. \"But what does some newborn beastie have to do with reason?\"\n\n\"Nothing, of course, as per my grandfather's law: 'No fabricated creature shall show human reason.'\" The lady boffin waved her hand. \"Take it as a figure of speech, Mr. Sharp. But one thing is certain\u2014this war will make a mess of Europe's royal houses. So it's possible that young Alek may one day be as important as any sultan, proper royalty or not.\"\n\n\"Aye, that's what Count Volger was saying too.\"\n\n\"Was he?\" Dr. Barlow drummed her fingers on the railing. \"How interesting.\"\n\nJust ahead, the strait was shining in the noon sun. Almost directly below were two huge buildings of marble and stone\u2014mosques, of course, their domed roofs like giant shields arrayed against the sky, their minarets thrusting up like spears around them. The plaza between the buildings was crowded with people, their faces turning upward as the Stamboul's shadow slid across them.\n\nThe Kizlar Agha shouted orders, and the propellers shifted on their long, spindly arms. The aircraft began to descend toward what looked like a park surrounded by high walls. Inside it were dozens of low buildings, all stitched together with paths and covered walkways, and one great cluster of still more domes and minarets, almost another city within the palace walls.\n\n\"Perhaps we should keep an eye on Count Volger, then,\" Dr. Barlow said.\n\nDeryn nodded, remembering the wildcount's offer to tell her more about the beastie if she brought him news from outside. He was certainly open to an exchange of information.\n\n\"Well, ma'am, he did say he'd give me fencing lessons.\"\n\nThe lady boffin smiled. \"Then, dear boy, you shall have to learn to fence.\"\n\nThe Stamboul descended just inside the palace walls, in an overgrown garden the size of a cricket field.\n\nThe Kizlar Agha stood at the airship's prow, shouting directions to the propeller men, making adjustments all the way down. Deryn soon saw why\u2014there was barely room to land an airship. But the craft settled precisely at a spot where five paths crossed, as soft as a kiss, like a gaudy pavilion completing the garden's design. The fronds of palm trees around them shivered in the wash from the airship's propellers.\n\nThe gangway dropped, and the Kizlar Agha led Deryn, Dr. Barlow, and the two crewmen with the egg box down into the sultan's garden.\n\nA hundred windows looked down upon them, but all were covered with metal lattices that shimmered gold in the sunlight. Deryn wondered if there were people watching them through the narrow slats, courtiers and advisers, or the sultan's famous harem of countless wives.\n\nThis was nothing like Buckingham Palace, where Deryn had watched the changing of the Royal Lionesque Guard her first day in London. That was four stories tall and as square as a cake. But here the buildings were low and surrounded by colonnades, their arches decorated with checkerboards of black and white marble, as shiny as piano keys. Steam pipes wound across the mosaicked walls like message lizard tubes, sweating and huffing with the energies inside them. Guards stood at every door, Africans in bright silk uniforms armed with halberds and scimitars.\n\nDeryn wondered what it would be like to live among all this spectacle and pomp, all of it designed to dazzle the eye. Had poor Alek grown up in a place this fancy? It would be enough to drive you mad, having a million servants watching your every move.\n\nThe guards all made elaborate bows to the Kizlar Agha, murmuring the same greeting that Dr. Barlow had used.\n\n\"Is that Turkish for 'hello'?\" Deryn whispered, wondering if she should learn the phrase.\n\n\"Arabic. Many languages are spoken here in the palace.\" Dr. Barlow glanced up at the steam pipes. \"Let us hope that German is not one.\"\n\nSoon they were led to a large marble building that stood apart from the rest of the palace. Three blazing smokestacks thrust skyward from its roof, and the sound of grinding gears rumbled within.\n\nThe Kizlar Agha stopped before an archway sealed by two stone doors. \"We enter the throne room of Sultan Mehmed V, Lord of the Horizons.\"\n\nHe clapped his hands three times, and the doors opened with a hiss of steam. A smell rolled out\u2014burning coal and engine grease covered over with incense.\n\nThe throne room was dark after the brilliant sunlight outside, and Deryn could hardly see at first. But before her rose what seemed to be a giant sitting cross-legged, as large as the iron golems in the street the day before. It was a metal statue dressed in countless yards of black silk, a sash of silver cloth spread across its medaled chest, and a crimson fez the size of a bathtub on its strange horned head.\n\nAs her eyes adjusted, Deryn noticed a man beneath the statue. He was dressed in exactly the same clothes, and sat on his silk divan in the same position, cross-legged, his hands resting on his knees.\n\n\"Welcome, Dr. Barlow,\" he said, his right hand turning over to show an empty palm.\n\nBehind him the statue stirred, mimicking his movements. It was an automaton\u2014the whole throne room one huge mechanism! But the rumble of engines and gears was muffled to a whisper by thick tapestries and stone walls, so the huge statue seemed almost alive.\n\nIn the corner of Deryn's vision the lady boffin was curtsying smoothly, as if she met giant statues every day. Deryn recovered from her surprise and bowed from the waist, the way Alek always had when addressing the Leviathan's officers. She realized she had no idea how to behave around a barking emperor, and wished the lady boffin had spared a moment to tell her.\n\n\"My Lord Sultan,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"I bring you greetings from His Majesty, King George.\"\n\n\"Peace be upon him,\" the sultan said, bowing his head a little. Behind him the giant automaton followed in kind.\n\n\"I bring you a gift as well.\" Dr. Barlow gestured at the egg box.\n\nThe sultan's eyebrows rose. Deryn found herself relieved that the automaton didn't make facial expressions. The giant machine was uncanny enough as it was.\n\n\"An odd shape for a dreadnought,\" the sultan said. \"And a bit small for a behemoth.\"\n\nAfter a moment of uncomfortable silence, the lady boffin cleared her throat. \"Our little gift is not, of course, a replacement for the Osman or its companion creature. Though His Majesty regrets that unfortunate affair.\"\n\n\"Does he?\"\n\n\"Profusely,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"We have only borrowed the Osman because our need is greater. Britain is at war, and your empire is\u2014and hopefully shall stay\u2014at peace.\"\n\n\"Peace has its burdens too.\" The sultan crossed his arms, and the statue followed suit.\n\nWatching more closely now, Deryn noticed that the machine's movements were a bit stiff, like a sailor caught with too much rum under his belt and trying to act sober. Perhaps to aid the illusion, the sultan moved slowly and carefully, like an actor in a pantomime show. Deryn wondered if he controlled the automaton himself, or whether there were engineers watching from some hidden cubbyhole, their hands scurrying across levers and dials.\n\nSomehow, wondering about its inner workings made the huge contraption less unsettling.\n\n\"I am sure your cares are great, My Lord Sultan.\" Dr. Barlow looked toward the egg box. \"And we hope that this fabricated creature, humble though it is, will prove a welcome distraction from them.\"\n\n\"The Germans give us railroads, airships, and wireless towers,\" the sultan replied. \"All the glories of the mekanzimat. They train our armies and service our machines. They rebuilt this palace and helped us crush the revolution six years ago. And all your king can offer is a distraction?\"\n\nThe sultan gestured at the egg box, and the automaton's hand stretched out across the room, stirring the air as it passed over Deryn's head. She hunched her shoulders, wondering how powerful those giant fingers were.\n\nDr. Barlow didn't seem ruffled at all. \"Perhaps it is only a start,\" she said, bowing her head a little more. \"But we offer this gift with hope for a happier future.\"\n\n\"A gift? After so many humiliations?\" The sultan looked at the egg again. \"Perhaps we have been distracted long enough by your gifts.\"\n\nSuddenly the giant fingers wrapped around the box, closing into a fist. The crackle of splintering wood echoed from the stone walls, and pieces skittered like matchsticks across the floor. The egg burst with a sickening crack, and translucent strands oozed between the metal fingers. As they pooled together on the stone floor, the reek of sulfur joined coal smoke and incense.\n\nA gasp of horror escaped the lady boffin's mouth, and Deryn stared, wide eyed, at the closed fist, then at the sultan. Oddly, the man seemed surprised himself, as if he hadn't realized what he was doing. Of course, he hadn't done anything\u2014the automaton had.\n\nDeryn looked at the sultan's outstretched hand. His fingers were still open, simply gesturing at the egg box, not curled into a fist.\u2026\n\nHer eyes darted around the room. The Kizlar Agha and the crewmen who had carried the egg box wore astonished expressions, and there was no one else in the room. But then she spotted an upper gallery behind the statue's head. It was covered over with latticed windows, and for a moment Deryn thought she saw eyes peering down between the slats.\n\nShe glanced at Dr. Barlow, trying to get her to notice the sultan's open hand. But the lady boffin's face was pale and frozen, her poise shattered along with the egg.\n\n\"I see, Lord Sultan, that I have come too late.\" Despite her devastated expression, there was steel in her voice.\n\nThe sultan must have heard it too. He cleared his throat softly before speaking.\n\n\"Perhaps not, Dr. Barlow.\" He brought his palms together, but the automaton stayed motionless, its giant hand frozen around the shattered, leaking egg. \"In a way the scales have already been balanced.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"Just today we have been able to replace the dreadnought you 'borrowed' from us, with two ships instead of one.\" The sultan smiled. \"May I present to you the new commander of the Ottoman navy, Admiral Wilhelm Souchon.\"\n\nA man strode from the shadows, and Deryn's jaw dropped. He wore a crisp blue German naval uniform, except for the crimson fez on his head. He clicked his heels and bowed to the sultan, then turned to salute Dr. Barlow.\n\n\"Madam, I welcome you to Istanbul.\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. So that was how the two German ironclads had disappeared\u2014the Ottomans had hidden them, for the price of owning them! And they hadn't just taken the ships, they'd put the master of the Goeben in charge of their whole barking navy.\n\nThe lady boffin simply stared, dumbstruck for the first time Deryn had ever seen. The silence stretched out awkwardly, the only sound the last innards of the egg dripping onto the stone floor.\n\nFinally Deryn cleared her throat and returned the German's salute.\n\n\"As ranking officer present, I extend the thanks of the British Air Service. For all your, um, hospitality.\"\n\nAdmiral Souchon looked coolly at her. \"I don't believe we are acquainted, sir.\"\n\n\"Midshipman Dylan Sharp, at your service.\"\n\n\"A midshipman. I see.\" He turned back to Dr. Barlow and offered his hand. \"Forgive me, madam, for the military formalities. I almost forgot you were a civilian. It is a pleasure to meet you. And how lucky that, thanks to my recent appointment, we do not meet as enemies.\"\n\nThe lady boffin extended her hand and let the admiral kiss it.\n\n\"Charmed, I'm sure.\" She slowly gathered herself, turning back to the sultan. \"Two ironclads is indeed a most impressive gift. In fact, I am so moved by this German generosity that I must offer another gift on behalf of the British government.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The sultan leaned forward. \"And what would that be?\"\n\n\"The Leviathan, Lord Sultan.\"\n\nThe room went silent again, and Deryn blinked. Had the lady boffin gone completely barking mad?\n\n\"It is the most famous of the great hydrogen breathers,\" Dr. Barlow continued. \"As valuable as the Osman and its companion put together, and a creation that your German friends could never match.\"\n\nThe sultan looked quite pleased, and Deryn noticed that Admiral Souchon's smile had frozen on his face. She herself was dizzy, unable to believe what the lady boffin was saying.\n\n\"Dr. Barlow,\" she spoke up. \"It is, of course, customary to check with the captain before, um \u2026 giving away his ship.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course.\" Dr. Barlow waved her hand. \"Thank you for reminding me, Mr. Sharp. We shall require a few days to communicate with the Admiralty, Lord Sultan, before effecting this transfer.\"\n\n\"That is unfortunate, Dr. Barlow,\" Admiral Souchon said, putting a hand on the hilt of his sword. \"The limit for harboring a combatant ship in wartime is twenty-four hours. International law is very strict on this matter.\"\n\n\"May I remind you, Admiral,\" the sultan said mildly, \"that your own grace period was extended while negotiations took place?\"\n\nThe German opened his mouth, then closed it and bowed, low. \"Of course, My Lord Sultan. I am at your command.\"\n\nLeaning back on his divan, the sultan smiled and folded his hands. Without the automaton mimicking him, Deryn noticed that he moved more fluidly. Or perhaps he was simply enjoying pitting two great powers against each other.\n\n\"Then we are all agreed,\" he said. \"Dr. Barlow, you have four days to get me the Leviathan.\"\n\nThirty minutes later the Stamboul rose into the air again. As it passed over the shimmering strait in a slow turn back toward the airfield, the Kizlar Agha joined Deryn and Dr. Barlow at the railing, his face pale.\n\n\"I do not know what to say, madam. My Lord Sultan was not himself today.\"\n\n\"He seemed firm enough in his convictions,\" Dr. Barlow said, her voice still quavering from shock.\n\n\"Indeed. But he has not been the same since moving back into the palace. The Germans have changed so much there. Not all of us approve.\"\n\nDeryn frowned, wanting to mention what she'd noticed about the automaton. But she couldn't in front of the sultan's closest adviser.\n\nThe mechanical owl still perched on the Kizlar Agha's shoulder, but she noticed that the cylinder on its chest was no longer spinning. Perhaps it was some sort of recording machine, and the man had switched it off to keep his words a secret.\n\n\"Are you saying that he may change his mind about the kaiser's gifts?\" Dr. Barlow asked carefully.\n\nThe Kizlar Agha spread his hands. \"That, I do not know, madam. But our empire has fought two wars in the last ten years, and a bloody revolution as well. Not all of us want to join this madness in Europe.\"\n\nDr. Barlow nodded. \"Pray, then, make yourselves heard.\"\n\n\"We shall try. Peace be upon you, and upon us all,\" he said, then bowed and returned to the prow of the airship.\n\n\"How interesting,\" the lady boffin said as he walked away. \"Perhaps there is still hope for this country.\"\n\n\"What did he mean exactly?\" Deryn asked.\n\n\"Perhaps he plans to give his emperor good advice.\" She shrugged. \"Or perhaps something more. Sultans have been replaced before.\"\n\nDeryn turned back to the railing, and suddenly there they were below\u2014the Goeben and the Breslau harbored in the Golden Horn.\n\n\"The admiral wasn't lying,\" she said, seeing crimson Ottoman flags fluttering from the ironclads' mainmasts. \"They must have been hiding up in the Black Sea yesterday.\"\n\n\"I should have known,\" Dr. Barlow said. \"Those ships were trapped, worthless to the Germans. So why not offer them as bribes?\"\n\n\"Aye, and speaking of bribes \u2026\" Deryn swallowed, almost afraid to ask. \"What was that about giving the Leviathan away? You haven't gone barking mad, have you?\"\n\nDr. Barlow gave her a sidelong glance. \"Don't be tiresome, Mr. Sharp. That was merely a ploy to extend our time here. Which of course you knew, as you played your part to perfection. Another four days may prove quite useful.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. Played her part? She'd only said the first thing that had come into her head. \"But if we're not going to give the Ottomans the ship, what's the point of staying?\"\n\n\"Really, Mr. Sharp,\" the lady boffin said, the steel returning to her voice. \"Do you suppose I would journey across Europe without an alternate plan?\"\n\n\"And this is your plan, ma'am? Making false promises to the sultan to make him even angrier?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" The lady boffin sighed. \"I doubt the sultan's anger will make much difference, one way or the other. The Ottoman Empire is already in the Germans' hands.\"\n\n\"Aye, that's true enough,\" Deryn said. \"And speaking of hands, I'm not sure that the sultan really meant to crush that egg.\"\n\nDr. Barlow turned a cold gaze on Deryn. \"Are you saying that my life's work was destroyed by accident?\"\n\n\"Not by accident, ma'am. But the sultan didn't make a fist. He was just pointing at the egg, and then the automaton went and squashed your poor beastie, all on its own!\"\n\nDr. Barlow was silent for a moment, then slowly nodded. \"Of course. I'm an idiot! That throne room was built by German engineers, so they were in control, not the sultan. They forced his hand, so to speak.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Deryn stared back at the water. The Stamboul had completed its turn, and the Goeben was receding into the distance. But she could still see the forbidding shape of the Tesla cannon, its struts covered with fluttering seabirds. \"Makes you wonder how they'll force the sultan's hand next, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Indeed, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn looked at the water stretching into the distance. The Royal Navy's Mediterranean fleet was stationed just south of the strait, still waiting for the Goeben and Breslau to emerge. And in the opposite direction, the Russian navy sat in its Black Sea ports, not yet aware that their old enemy the sultan had two new ironclads.\n\nAll it would take was a quick sortie by Admiral Souchon in either direction, and the Ottomans would be dragged into war.\n\n\"It's probably foolish, leaving the hotel with so many Germans about.\"\n\nThere was no reply as Alek buttoned the jacket of his new suit.\n\n\"But the Germans don't know what I look like,\" he continued. \"And the Ottomans don't even know we're here.\"\n\nAlek put on the fez and stared at himself in the mirror, waiting. But again no reply came.\n\n\"Anyone would think I was a proper Turk in these clothes.\" Alek flicked at the fez's tassel. Was it meant to hang on the left or the right? \"And if I have to speak German, at least I've been practicing my common accent, so I don't sound like such a prince anymore.\"\n\n\"Such a prince,\" the creature finally said.\n\n\"Well, that's your opinion,\" Alek said, then sighed. How had he gotten into this habit of talking to the beast? The animal was probably memorizing all his secrets.\n\nIt was better than sharing his doubts with the men, he supposed. And there was something about the creature's wise, contented expression that made Alek feel as if it really were listening, not just repeating words at random.\n\nAlek checked himself in the mirror one last time, then turned toward the door.\n\n\"Be a good little beastie, and Master Klopp will come and feed you. No whining. I'll be back soon.\"\n\nThe creature gave him a long, hard look, then seemed to nod.\n\n\"Be back soon,\" it said.\n\nCorporal Bauer was dressed in his new civilian clothes and was waiting in the room he shared with Klopp. The master of mechaniks himself couldn't leave the hotel. He was too well known among the Clanker technical class, and Constantinople was full of German engineers.\n\nOn their way into the city the night before, Alek had counted a dozen construction projects flying a black eagle on a yellow pennant, the kaiser's flag of friendship. The ancient walls of the city bristled with shiny new smokestacks, steam pipes, and wireless antennae. Alek remembered his father talking about Germany sponsoring this policy of mekanzimat, the reformation of Ottoman society around the machine.\n\n\"I still say this is a bad idea, young master,\" Klopp said, turning away from the wireless and a pad full of dots and dashes.\n\n\"No one will recognize me,\" Alek said. \"My father was very careful to not let me sit for portraits or photographs. Hardly anyone outside my family knows what I look like.\"\n\n\"But remember what happened in Lienz!\"\n\nAlek drew a slow breath, remembering the first time he'd been in disguise among commoners. \"Yes, Klopp, I acted exactly like a little prince. But I think my common touch has improved since then, don't you?\"\n\nKlopp only shrugged.\n\n\"And if we're going to hide in the Ottoman Empire,\" Alek continued, \"we need to know what the great powers are up to here. I'm the only one of us who can speak anything besides German.\"\n\nThe old man held his gaze for a moment, then looked away. \"I can't argue with your logic, young master. I just wish it weren't you going.\"\n\n\"I wish Volger were here too,\" Alek said softly. \"But I'll be taken good care of. Right, Bauer?\"\n\n\"At your service, sir,\" Bauer said.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Alek said. \"But that reminds me, no sirs while we're outside this room.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. That is, um \u2026 What should I call you, sir?\"\n\nAlek smiled. \"Well, no one who hears us talking will think we're Turkish, so let's pick a good German name. How about Hans?\"\n\n\"But that's my name, sir.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, of course.\" Alek cleared his throat, wondering if he'd ever known Corporal Bauer's first name. Perhaps he should have asked before now. \"I'll be Fritz, then.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I mean\u2014yes, Fritz,\" Bauer said, and Alek saw that Klopp was slowly shaking his head.\n\nSo much for the common touch.\n\nThe hotel was near the Grand Bazaar, the largest market in Constantinople, and the streets were full tonight. Alek and Bauer followed the crowds, looking for a place where German workers might congregate and gossip.\n\nSoon they were inside the bazaar, a gaslit labyrinth of shops under high arched ceilings. The owners cried their wares\u2014lamps, linens, carpets, silks, jewelry, tooled leather, and machine parts\u2014in half a dozen languages. Mechanikal donkeys pushed their way through the crowds, chestnuts and skewers of meat roasting on their steaming engine blocks. Veiled women rode on sedan chairs with silent clockwork legs, wary servants walking on either side.\n\nAlek remembered his first time disguised as a commoner, in the market at Lienz, when the press of bodies and smells had sickened him. But the Grand Bazaar was almost otherworldly, the scents of cumin, paprika, and rose water mixing with the bitter pall of tobacco coiling up from burbling water pipes. Jugglers jostled for space with fortune-tellers and musicians, while tiny clockwork walkers danced on a blanket spread out before a cross-legged man, the crowd clapping with appreciation.\n\nThe man at the hotel desk had said this was a holy month, and that the Muslims of the city would be fasting while the sun was up. They seemed to be making up for it now that night had fallen.\n\n\"Not many Germans about,\" Bauer said. \"Do you suppose they have a beer hall in this city?\"\n\n\"I don't know if the Ottomans have a love for beer.\" Alek gestured to a boy carrying a small tray with empty glass cups. \"But coffee is another matter.\"\n\nHe stopped the boy and pointed at the tray. The boy nodded and waved for them to follow, skipping deftly through the crowds, waiting impatiently for Bauer and Alek to catch up.\n\nThe boy soon brought them to a large public room on the edge of the market. The smell of chocolate-tinged coffee and black tea spilled out of its doors, and tobacco smoke hung in a pall across the ceiling.\n\nAs Alek tipped the boy for his trouble, Bauer said, \"Looks like we've found the right place, sir.\"\n\nAlek looked up. A row of the kaiser's friendship flags fluttered along the awning, and a German drinking song was rumbling along inside.\n\n\"That boy spotted us as Clankers right off.\" Alek sighed. \"Watch your step, and no more sirs. Remember, Hans?\"\n\n\"Sorry \u2026 Fritz.\"\n\nAlek hesitated at the door, the sound of so many German accents sending a shiver through him. Of course, the kaiser's airships had found him even hidden on a mountain peak in the Alps. Perhaps it was safer to keep one's enemies in sight.\n\nHe squared his shoulders and strode in.\n\nMost of the men inside appeared to be German engineers. Some still wore their mechaniks' coveralls, shiny with grease from the day's work. Alek felt out of place in his new Turkish clothes.\n\nHe and Bauer found an empty table, then ordered coffee from a young turbaned boy who spoke excellent German.\n\nAs the boy darted away, Alek shook his head. \"Whether the Ottomans join the war or not, the Germans are already running this country.\"\n\n\"And you can see why.\" Bauer pointed to the wall behind them.\n\nAlek turned to see a large poster tacked to the wall, the sort of crude propaganda his father had always hated. At the bottom was a cartoon city labeled Istanbul, festooned with steam pipes and train tracks. The city sat astride The Straits, with the Russian bear looming over the Black Sea and the British navy threatening from the Mediterranean.\n\nDominating the poster was a giant chimera striding over the horizon, a Darwinist beast fabricated from half a dozen creatures. It wore a misshapen bowler hat, and carried a dreadnought in one clawed hand and a sack of money in the other. A tiny fat man labeled Winston Churchill rode on its shoulder, watching as the obscene beast menaced the tiny spires and domes below.\n\n\"Who will protect us from these monsters?\" read the legend across the top.\n\n\"That must be the Osman,\" Bauer said, gesturing at the dreadnought.\n\nAlek nodded. \"It's odd to think, but if it weren't for Lord Churchill stealing that ship, the Leviathan would never have headed across Europe. We'd still be in that castle in the Alps.\"\n\n\"We might be a bit safer there,\" said Bauer. Then he smiled. \"But a lot colder, too, and no one would be bringing us good Turkish coffee.\"\n\n\"So you think I made the right choice, Hans? Leaving safety behind?\"\n\n\"You didn't have much of a choice, sir\u2014I mean, Fritz.\" Bauer shrugged. \"You had to face what was in front of you, whatever your father's plans. Every man arrives at that point, sooner or later.\"\n\nAlek swallowed, grateful for the words. He'd never asked Bauer's opinion before, but now that he was in command, it was good to know that the man didn't think he was a complete idiot.\n\n\"What about your father, Hans? He must think you're a deserter.\"\n\n\"My parents sent me off a long time ago.\" The man shook his head. \"Too many mouths to feed at home. It was the same with Hoffman, I think. Your father only chose men without families to help you.\"\n\n\"That was kind of him, I suppose,\" Alek said, struck by the thought that he and his men were, in a way, all orphans together. \"But once this war is over, Hans, I swear you'll never go hungry again.\"\n\n\"No need, Fritz. This is duty. And besides, one could hardly go hungry in this city.\"\n\nThe coffee arrived, smelling of chocolate and as thick as black honey. It certainly tasted better than anything that could have been cooked up over a fire in the freezing Alps.\n\nAlek took a long drink, letting the rich flavors sweep away his dark thoughts. He eavesdropped on the surrounding tables, hearing complaints of delayed shipments of parts, and censored letters from home. The conquest of Belgium was almost complete, and the engineers were celebrating. France would fall soon after. Then would come a quick campaign against Darwinist Russia and the island fortress of Britain. Or it might be a long war, some argued, but Germany would prevail eventually\u2014fabricated beasts were no match for Clanker bravery and steel.\n\nIt didn't sound as though anyone cared if the Ottomans joined the war or not. The Germans were confident in themselves and their Austrian allies.\n\nOf course, the high command might have a different view.\n\nSuddenly Alek's ears caught the sound of English. He turned and saw a man moving slowly among the tables, asking questions that drew only shrugs and uncomprehending stares. The man was scruffily dressed in a traveling coat and a shapeless hat, with a folding camera strapped around his neck. Some sort of fabricated beast rode on his shoulder\u2014a frog, perhaps, its beady eyes peering out from beneath the man's jacket collar.\n\nA Darwinist, here, in what was practically German territory?\n\n\"Pardon me, gentlemen,\" he said when he reached Alek's table. \"But do either of you speak any English?\"\n\nAlek hesitated. The man's accent was unfamiliar, and he didn't look British. His camera seemed to be a Clanker design.\n\n\"I do, a little,\" Alek said.\n\nThe man's face broke into a broad smile as he thrust out his hand. \"Excellent! I'm Eddie Malone, reporter for the New York World. Do you mind if I ask some questions?\"\n\nThe man sat down without waiting for an answer, snapping for a waiter and ordering coffee.\n\n\"Did he say reporter?\" Bauer muttered in German. \"Is this wise, Fritz?\"\n\nAlek nodded\u2014this was the perfect opportunity. The job of a foreign reporter, after all, was to understand the politics around him, the maneuverings of the great powers here in the Ottoman Empire. And talking to Malone was much safer than trying to extract gossip from a German, who might notice Alek's aristocratic accent.\n\nA few men at the other tables had glanced at the reporter as he'd sat down, but no one was staring now. The streets of Constantinople were full of stranger sights than a fabricated frog.\n\n\"I don't know how much we can help you,\" Alek said. \"We haven't been here very long.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. My questions won't be too tricky.\" The reporter pulled out a battered notebook. \"I'm just curious about what they call the mekanzimat\u2014all the new buildings the Germans are putting up in Istanbul. Are you here to work on something?\"\n\nAlek cleared his throat. The man had assumed they were Germans, of course. He probably couldn't tell an Austrian accent from the croak of his own bullfrog. But there was no point in correcting him. \"We aren't in construction, Mr. Malone. At the moment we're just traveling. Seeing the sights.\"\n\nMalone's eyes scanned Alek up and down, coming to a halt on the fez on the chair beside him. \"I can see you've been shopping already. Funny thing, though. Men of military age, on a vacation in wartime!\"\n\nAlek swore silently. He'd always been hopeless at any sort of lying, but pretending to be a tourist was absurd when every man in Europe was reporting for duty. Malone probably thought they were deserters, or spies.\n\nOf course, a certain amount of mystery might be useful.\n\n\"Let's just say you needn't know our names.\" Alek gestured at the camera. \"And no photographs, if you please.\"\n\n\"No problem. Istanbul is full of anonymous people.\" The man reached up to scratch his bullfrog's chin. \"I suppose you came in on the Express?\"\n\nAlek nodded. The Orient-Express ran straight from Munich to Constantinople, and he could hardly admit they'd arrived by airship.\n\n\"Must've been crowded, with all the new workers coming in.\"\n\n\"The train might have been crowded, but we had our own cabin.\" As the words came out, Alek cursed himself again. Why did he always find ways to make it obvious that he was wealthy?\n\n\"So you didn't talk to any of the folks working on that wireless tower, did you?\"\n\n\"Wireless tower?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Yep. The one you Germans are building on the cliffs out to the west. A special project for the sultan, they say. It's huge\u2014has its own power station!\"\n\nAlek glanced at Bauer, wondering how much the man was following with the English he'd picked up aboard the Leviathan. A large wireless tower might need its own power station, but so would a Tesla cannon.\n\n\"I'm afraid we don't know anything about that,\" Alek said. \"We've only been in Constantinople for two days.\"\n\nMalone looked at him closely for a moment, a gleam in his eye, as if Alek had just told a subtle but clever joke. \"Not long enough to start calling it Istanbul, I see.\"\n\nAlek remembered Dr. Barlow saying that the locals used another name for their city, but the staff at his hotel hadn't seemed to mind. \"Whatever the city's called, we haven't seen much of it.\"\n\n\"So you haven't been down to the docks yet to see the sultan's new warships?\"\n\n\"New warships?\"\n\n\"Two ironclads, just handed to the Ottomans by the Germans.\" Malone's eyes narrowed. \"You haven't seen them? They're pretty hard to miss.\"\n\nAlek managed to shake his head. \"No, we haven't been to the harbor at all.\"\n\n\"Haven't been to the harbor? This is a peninsula, you know. And doesn't the Orient-Express come in right along the water?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Alek said stiffly. \"But we were quite tired when we arrived, and it was a dark night.\"\n\nThe man looked amused again\u2014this was hopeless. Next, Malone would tell him that the moon was full, or that the Orient-Express never arrived at night.\n\nBut what did it matter? He didn't believe a word Alek was saying anyway. Perhaps it was time to change the subject.\n\n\"It's odd, seeing that creature here,\" Alek said, pointing at the bullfrog. \"I didn't know the Ottomans allowed Darwinist abominations in their country.\"\n\n\"Oh, you just have to know who to bribe.\" The man laughed. \"And I wouldn't go anywhere without Rusty. He's got a much better memory than me.\"\n\nAlek's eyes widened. \"He \u2026 remembers things?\"\n\n\"Sure. Ever seen one of those message lizards?\"\n\n\"I've heard of them.\"\n\n\"Well, Rusty is a close relation. Except he's all brain and no hop.\" The man patted the bullfrog on its head, and the beady eyes blinked. \"He can listen to an hour's worth of conversation and repeat it back to you, word for word.\"\n\nAlek frowned, wondering if the newborn creature back at the hotel was some sort of recording beast. \"Is this animal memorizing what we're saying right now?\"\n\nThe reporter shrugged. \"In as much as you're saying anything at all.\"\n\n\"As I said, we've just arrived.\"\n\n\"Well, at least your English is easy on the ears.\" The man laughed again. \"It's like you've been practicing up, just for me.\"\n\n\"You're too kind,\" Alek said. For the past two weeks, of course, he'd spoken more English than German. \"And you have a sharp ear. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?\"\n\n\"Sure. Why not?\" The reporter licked his pen.\n\n\"Do you think the Ottomans will join the Clankers in this war?\"\n\nMalone shrugged again. \"I doubt the Germans care, one way or the other. They're here for the long term. Defeat the Darwinists in Europe, then expand across the whole world. They're already extending the Express to Baghdad.\"\n\nAlek had heard his father say the same, that the Orient-Express had been built to spread Clanker influence into the Middle East, and then deeper into the heart of Asia.\n\nMalone gestured up at the propaganda poster behind Alek. \"All they want now is for the Ottomans to close the Dardanelles, so the Russians can't ship food in from the south.\"\n\n\"It's easier to starve a man than to fight him,\" Alek said. \"But can the Ottomans hold the strait against the British navy?\"\n\n\"Surface ships can't make it past the mines and the cannon, and they have nets to keep the krakens out. That's everything but airships, and the Ottomans may get one of those soon.\"\n\n\"Pardon me?\"\n\nMalone's face brightened. \"That's a sight you'll definitely want to see. The Leviathan, one of the great hydrogen breathers, is here in Istanbul.\"\n\n\"It's still \u2026 I mean, there's a British airship here? Isn't that a bit odd, with a war going on?\"\n\n\"I'll say it is. And what's odder still, the British are thinking of giving it to the sultan!\" Malone shook his head. \"Seems the Germans donated a pair of ironclads to the Ottomans, and the British want to up the ante. The sultan himself will be taking a joyride tomorrow, along with some of us reporters.\"\n\nAlek was almost too stunned to speak. That the Leviathan might be handed over to a Clanker power was absurd. But if the airship hadn't left yet, then Count Volger was still in Istanbul.\n\n\"Are you going on this \u2026 joyride?\"\n\nMalone beamed. \"Wouldn't miss it for the world. We've got hydrogen breathers in the U.S., but nothing half that big. Just watch the skies tomorrow, and you'll see what I mean!\"\n\nAlek stared hard at the man. If he was right about the Leviathan, then Volger might have another chance to escape. Of course, Volger thought that Alek and the others had already disappeared into the wilds.\n\nIt was madness to trust this strange American, but Alek had to take the chance. \"Perhaps you could do something for me,\" he said quietly. \"There's a message I want delivered to that ship.\"\n\nMalone's eyebrows rose. \"Sounds interesting.\"\n\n\"But you can't put any of this in your newspaper.\"\n\n\"I can't promise that. But remember, my paper's way off in New York City, and I use messenger terns to file my stories. Anything I write will take four days to get back to New York, and it'll take another day or so for the news to find its way back here. See what I mean?\"\n\nAlek nodded. If Volger really could escape, five days would be plenty of time for them to disappear.\n\n\"All right, then.\" Alek took a slow breath. \"There's a man aboard the Leviathan, a prisoner.\"\n\nMalone's scribbling pen came to a halt. \"A German fellow, I presume?\"\n\n\"No. Austrian. His name is \u2026\"\n\nAlek's voice faded\u2014the gaslights were suddenly sputtering around them, the room plunging into darkness.\n\n\"What's happening?\" Bauer hissed.\n\nMalone held up a hand. \"Don't worry. It's just a shadow play.\"\n\nThe coffeehouse went silent, and soon the back wall was flickering to life. Alek realized that it wasn't a wall at all but a thin screen of paper with powerful gaslights burning behind it.\n\nDark forms came into focus on the paper screen, shadows in the shapes of monsters and men.\n\nAlek's eyes widened. One of his aunts in Prague had collected shadow puppets from Indonesia, leather creations with moving arms and legs, like marionettes with sticks instead of strings. But the shadows here danced in perfect clockwork patterns. They were Clanker puppets, moved not by hand but by machines concealed behind the wall.\n\nThe hidden actors spoke in what sounded like Turkish, but the story was easy enough to understand. Across the bottom of the screen, waves rose and fell, and a sea creature bounded among them, a Darwinist monster with flailing tentacles and huge teeth. It approached a ship where two men stood on deck talking, unaware of the kraken coming for them. Alek caught the name Churchill among the unfamiliar words.\n\nThen suddenly the creature leapt from the waves, snatching one of the men and dragging him into the water. Oddly, the other man only laughed.\u2026\n\nAlek jumped as someone squeezed his arm. It was Bauer, who nodded at a pair of German soldiers making their way through the coffeehouse. The two were going from table to table, checking faces against a photograph in their hands.\n\n\"We should go, Fritz,\" Bauer whispered.\n\n\"They're here for someone else,\" Alek said firmly. No photograph of him had ever been taken.\n\nMalone had noticed their nervous glances, and turned to look at the German soldiers. He leaned forward to whisper, \"If you two are busy, perhaps we should meet tomorrow. Noon, at the gateway to the Blue Mosque?\"\n\nAlek began to explain that there was no need to leave, but then one of the soldiers stiffened. He glanced down at the photograph in his hands, then up at Alek.\n\n\"Impossible,\" Alek breathed. Then he realized that the soldier wasn't looking at him after all.\n\nHe was looking at Bauer.\n\n\"I'm a fool,\" Alek whispered to himself.\n\nThe Germans had, of course, investigated the other men who'd disappeared the night he'd run away. Bauer, Hoffman, and Klopp were all Hapsburg House Guards, with photographs in their military files. But somehow Alek had forgotten that commoners could be hunted too.\n\nHe looked frantically around the room. Two more German soldiers stood at the door, and the coffeehouse had no other exits. The soldiers who'd noticed Bauer were talking to each other intently, one glancing at their table.\n\nMalone leaned back in his chair and casually said, \"There's a door to the alley in the back.\"\n\nAlek looked\u2014the back wall was entirely covered by the glowing screen, but it was made of paper.\n\n\"Hans, do you have a knife?\" Alek asked softly.\n\nBauer nodded, reaching into his jacket. \"Don't worry, sir. I'll keep them busy while you run.\"\n\n\"No, Hans. We're escaping together. Give the knife to me, then follow.\"\n\nBauer frowned, but handed over the weapon. The two German soldiers were signaling to their compatriots at the door. It was time to move.\n\n\"Noon tomorrow at the Blue Mosque,\" Alek said, reaching for his fez \u2026\n\nHe leapt to his feet and ran through the tables toward the glowing screen.\n\nThe bright expanse of paper parted with a swift stroke of the knife, revealing whirling gears and gaslights behind. Half blinded, Alek crashed through silhouettes of ocean waves, stumbling against a large, humming contraption. His hand banged against one of the hissing gaslights, which burned like a branding iron against his hand. The light crashed to the ground, spilling naked flames and shards of glass across the floor.\n\nShouts exploded from behind them, the crowd panicking at the smell of burning gas and paper. Alek heard one of the soldiers yelling at the customers to let him through.\n\n\"The door, sir!\" Bauer cried. Alek could see nothing but the spots burned into his vision, but Bauer dragged him along, their boots skidding on machinery and broken glass.\n\nThe door crashed open onto darkness, the night air blessedly cool on Alek's burned palm. He followed Bauer, trying to blink away spots as he ran.\n\nThe alley was like a miniature version of the Grand Bazaar, lined with market stalls the size of closets, and crowded with small tables piled with pistachios, walnuts, and fruit. Surprised faces looked up at Alek and Bauer as they ran past.\n\nAlek heard the slam of the door bursting open behind them. Then a gunshot boomed through the alley, and dust sprayed from the ancient stones beside his head.\n\n\"This way, sir!\" Bauer cried, dragging him around a corner. People were scattering now, the alley turning into a tumult of men and overturned tables. Shutters flew open overhead, and cries in a dozen languages echoed from the walls.\n\nAnother shot shook the air around them, and Alek followed Bauer into a side passageway between two buildings. It was narrow and empty, and their boots slapped through a runnel of drainage that ran down its middle. They had to duck beneath low stone arches as they ran.\n\nThe alley didn't lead back to the Grand Bazaar, or to an open street\u2014it seemed to wind around itself, following the hissing spirals of steam pipes and wiring conduits. Only the barest hint of moonlight made its way down to the paving stones, and soon Alek had lost all sense of direction.\n\nThe walls here were chalked with a tangle of words and symbols\u2014Alek saw the Arabic, Greek, and Hebrew alphabets mixed together, along with signs he didn't recognize. It felt as though he and Bauer had stumbled into an older city hidden inside the first, Istanbul before the Germans had widened its boulevards and filled them with polished steel machines.\n\nAs they turned a corner, Bauer pulled Alek to a halt.\n\nAbove them loomed a walker, six stories high. Its body was long and sinuous, like a snake rearing up, a pair of arms jutting out from its sides. The front of the pilot's cabin looked like a woman's face, which seemed to be staring down at them, absolutely still.\n\n\"Volger told us about these,\" Alek whispered. \"Iron golems. They keep the peace among the different ghettos.\"\n\n\"It looks empty,\" Bauer said nervously. \"And the engines aren't running.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it's only for show. It doesn't even have guns.\"\n\nThere was something magnificent about the walker, though, as if they were staring up at a statue of some ancient pagan goddess. The expression of the giant face seemed to hint at a smile.\n\nShouts came from the distance, and Alek tore his eyes from the machine.\n\n\"We could break in somewhere and hide,\" Bauer said, pointing at a low doorway in the alley wall, an iron-grilled window at its center.\n\nAlek hesitated. Crashing into a strange house would only stir up more trouble, especially if the owners of the motionless walker were about.\n\nThe shriek of whistles echoed around them, as if pursuers were closing in from every direction.\u2026\n\nAlmost every direction.\n\nAlek looked up at the steam pipes climbing the stone walls. They sweated and trembled with heat, but he dashed down the alley, testing them until he found an old tangle of pipes that was cold to the touch.\n\nHe thrust the knife into his belt. \"Let's try for the rooftops.\"\n\nBauer gave the pipes a shake, and brick dust floated down from the rusty bolts. \"I'll go first, sir, in case it breaks off.\"\n\n\"If that happens, Hans, I suspect we'll both be in trouble, but be my guest.\"\n\nBauer took a firm grip and pulled himself up.\n\nAlek followed. His boots found steady purchase on the rough stone wall, and the rusty pipes were good handholds. But halfway up his burned palm began to complain, throbbing as though a splinter of flame were trapped beneath the skin. He let go with that hand and shook it, trying to put out the fire coursing through his nerves.\n\n\"Not much farther, sir,\" Bauer said. \"There's a rain gutter just above me.\"\n\n\"I hope there's some rain in it,\" Alek muttered, still waving his hand. \"I'd kill for a bucket of cold water.\"\n\nHis right boot skidded a few centimeters, and Alek grabbed the pipes with both hands again. Better a little agony than a long fall onto paving stones.\n\nSoon Bauer had hauled himself over the edge and out of sight. But as Alek reached up for the gutter, shouts came from below.\n\nHe pulled himself closer to the wall, and froze.\n\nA group of soldiers was running down the alley, wearing German gray. One called out, and they came to a ragged halt directly beneath Alek. The man who'd shouted knelt, lifting something from the ground.\n\nAlek softly swore. Bauer's knife had fallen from his belt.\n\nIt was Hapsburg Guard issue, the hilt marked with Alek's family crest. If the Germans had been wondering whether he was here in Istanbul or not, this would remove all doubt.\n\nThe men stood there talking, but none of them paid any notice to the steam pipes climbing the wall beside them. The officer was pointing in all directions, splitting up his men.\n\nGo away! Alek pleaded silently. Hanging there motionless was a hundred times harder than climbing. His burned hand was cramping, and the week-old injury in his ribs was pulsing with his heartbeat.\n\nFinally the last man had passed out of sight, and Alek reached out and grabbed the rain gutter. But as he hauled himself up, metal groaned, and the gutter pulled itself from the stone with a series of pops.\n\nAlek felt a sickening lurch downward, the rusted bolts spitting out into his face. The gutter held for another moment, but he could feel it twisting in his hands.\n\n\"Sir!\" Bauer reached out from the rooftop, trying to grab Alek's wrists, but the gutter had pulled too far away from the wall.\n\nAlek kicked out, trying to swing himself closer, but the movement only tore more bolts from the wall.\n\n\"The walker!\" Bauer cried.\n\nAlek realized that a huge shadow was moving beneath him, steam huffing from its joints into the cool night air. One of the great claws was reaching out.\u2026\n\nHe fell, dropping into the giant metal hand. The impact knocked the breath from him, sending pain shooting through his sore ribs. He skidded for a moment, the buttons of his tunic snapping against steel, but the claw closed into a huge bowl around him.\n\nHe looked up\u2014the arm was still moving, carrying him closer to the walker. Its face was splitting open, like a viewport cranking wider and wider. A moment later the pilot's cabin was exposed.\n\nThere were three men inside. Two stood leaning over the edge, peering down at the alley, pistols gripped tightly in their hands. The third sat at the walker's controls, a curious look on his face.\n\nClouds of steam swirled around them, puffing from the joints of the machine. Alek realized that its engines were still silent; it had used stored pneumatic pressure to spring to life.\n\n\"You speak German,\" the man at the controls said. \"And yet the Germans are chasing you. How interesting.\"\n\n\"We're not Germans,\" Alek answered. \"We're Austrian.\"\n\nThe man frowned. \"But still Clankers. Are you deserters?\"\n\nAlek shook his head. His allegiances might have been tangled lately, but he was no deserter. \"May I ask who you are, sir?\"\n\nThe man smiled and worked at the controls. \"I'm the fellow who just saved you from falling to your death.\"\n\n\"Sir, should I \u2026,\" came Bauer's voice from the rooftop, but Alek waved him silent.\n\nThe giant hand drew closer to the walker's head, and opened flat. As Alek rose to his feet, one of the other two men said something in a language he didn't recognize. It sounded more like Italian than the Turkish he'd heard on the streets today. It also sounded unfriendly.\n\nThe first man laughed. \"My friend wants to throw you back, because he thinks you're Germans. Perhaps we should pick another language.\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow. \"By all means. Do you speak English?\"\n\n\"Exceedingly well.\" The man switched effortlessly. \"I studied at Oxford, you know.\"\n\n\"Well, then. My name is Aleksandar.\" Alek bowed a little, then pointed up at the rooftop, where Bauer was staring down, wide eyed. \"And this is Hans, but I'm afraid he has no English.\"\n\n\"I am Zaven.\" The man waved a hand dismissively at the others. \"These two barbarians speak nothing by Romanian and Turkish. Ignore them. But I can see you are an educated gentleman.\"\n\n\"Thank you for saving me, sir. And for not \u2026 throwing me back.\"\n\n\"Well, you can't be all bad, if the Germans are chasing you.\" Zaven's eyes twinkled. \"Did you do something to annoy them?\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\" Alek took a slow breath, choosing his words carefully. \"They've been hunting me since before the war started. They had issues with my father.\"\n\n\"Aha! A second-generation rebel, as am I!\"\n\nAlek looked at the others. \"So that's what you three are? Revolutionaries?\"\n\n\"We are more than three, sir. There are thousands of us!\" Zaven snapped upright in his piloting chair and saluted. \"We are the Committee for Union and Progress.\"\n\nAlek nodded. He remembered the name from six years before, when the rebellion had demanded a return to elected government. But the Germans had stepped in to crush them, keeping the sultan in charge.\n\n\"So you were part of the Young Turks' rebellion?\"\n\n\"Young Turks? Fah!\" Zaven spat into the alley below. \"We split off from those cretins years ago. They think that only Turks are true Ottomans. But as you can see, the Committee takes in all kinds.\" He gestured at the other two men. \"My friends are Vlachs, I am Armenian, and we have Kurds, Arabs, and Jews among us. And plenty of Turks, of course!\" He laughed.\n\nAlek nodded slowly, remembering the chalk scratchings in the passageways below, some sort of code assembled from the empire's jumble of tongues.\n\nAnd all of them fighting the Germans\u2014together.\n\nFor a moment Alek felt unsteady on the giant metal hand. Perhaps it was just an echo of his near fall, but his heart was racing again.\n\nThese men were allies. At last, here was a chance to do more than simply run and hide, a way to strike back at the powers that had murdered his parents.\n\n\"Mr. Zaven,\" Alek said, \"I think you and I are going to be friends.\"\n\n\"Get out, you barking horrible spice!\" Deryn yelled, then sneezed for the hundredth time that day. The sultan and his entourage would be aboard in an hour, and the whole crew was due in full-dress uniform in half that time. But no matter how hard she scrubbed, the red stain in her shirt wouldn't budge.\n\nShe was well and truly stuffed.\n\nA yip came from the door of her cabin, and Deryn turned to see Tazza bouncing happily on his hind legs, a fresh bone in his mouth. That was one benefit of Dr. Barlow's mad scheme of pretending to give the Leviathan away\u2014the beasties were eating better. Over the last two days the crew had made more trips to the markets and smithies of Istanbul, trading the airship's ambergris for food and parts. Except for Deryn's uniform, the ship was fit to receive a foreign emperor, which it shortly would.\n\nThe lady boffin appeared, right behind her thylacine. She'd managed to dig another dazzling dress out of her luggage, and a hat with abundant ostrich feathers that matched her long white gloves. Even Tazza was wearing a fancy collar, a band of diamonds glittering around his neck.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" she said, and tutted. \"Once more I find you in a state of disrepair.\"\n\nDeryn held up her dress shirt. \"Sorry, ma'am. But this is ruined, and I haven't got another!\"\n\n\"Well, it's lucky you won't be serving the sultan this evening. Mr. Newkirk will be stepping in for you.\"\n\n\"But the whole crew is meant to be in full dress!\"\n\n\"Not those with more important matters to contend with.\" Dr. Barlow handed over the thylacine's leash. \"After you walk Tazza, please join me and the captain in the navigation room. I think you'll find our conversation interesting.\"\n\nTazza tried to pull her out the door, but Deryn stood firm. \"Pardon me, ma'am. The barking captain wants to see me? Is this about your alternate plan for the Ottomans?\"\n\nThe lady boffin smiled coolly. \"Partly. But it also concerns your recent behavior. If I were you, I wouldn't dawdle on your way there.\"\n\nThe navigation room was at the bow of the ship, just below the bridge. It was a small, quiet cabin where the captain sometimes retreated to think, or to have an awkward conversation with a wayward crewman.\n\nDeryn felt her stomach tighten as she drew near. What if the officers had noticed her fencing lessons with Count Volger? Whenever Deryn brought him a meal, she stayed for twenty minutes or so, practicing swordplay with mop handles.\n\nBut the captain himself wouldn't issue a reprimand for mere dawdling, would he? Unless he also knew that she'd been supplying Volger with newspapers, and had even told him about Admiral Souchon and the Goeben. Or how she'd looked the other way while the Clankers had been planning to escape!\n\nBut when the lady boffin had announced this meeting, she'd been smiling.\u2026\n\nThe late afternoon sun was slanting in through the windows that curved around the navigation room. Dr. Barlow and the captain were already there, along with the bosun and Dr. Busk, the officers all in resplendent dress uniforms for the sultan's visit.\n\nDeryn frowned. If she was about to receive a reprimand, why in blazes was the ship's head boffin here?\n\nWhen she clicked her heels, the four of them clammed up quickly, like children caught telling secrets.\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Sharp, glad you could join us,\" Captain Hobbes said. \"We need to discuss your recent exploits.\"\n\n\"Um \u2026 my exploits, sir?\"\n\nThe captain raised a dispatch. \"I have communicated with the Admiralty about the matter, and they concur with my recommendations.\"\n\n\"The Admiralty, sir?\" Deryn managed. If the Admiralty was involved, this had to be a hanging offense! She looked at Dr. Barlow, racking her brain for what had given her treason away.\n\n\"Don't look so surprised, Mr. Sharp,\" the bosun said. \"Even in all the recent ruckus, your rescue of Mr. Newkirk has not been forgotten.\"\n\nThe rest of them broke into broad smiles, but Deryn's brain ground to a halt.\n\n\"Pardon me, sir?\"\n\n\"I wish we had time to do this properly,\" Captain Hobbes said, \"but other duties await.\"\n\nHe lifted a velvet jewelry case from the map table, opened it, and produced a rounded silver cross that dangled from a sky blue ribbon. The face of Charles Darwin was engraved upon its center, the Air Service wings at its top.\n\nDeryn stared at it, wondering what the captain was doing with her father's medal, and how it had got so shiny and new.\u2026\n\n\"Midshipman Dylan Sharp,\" the captain began, \"I hereby award you the Air Gallantry Cross for your brave and selfless actions of August 10, wherein you saved the life of a fellow crewman at great risk to your own. Congratulations.\"\n\nAs he pinned the medal to Deryn's chest, Dr. Barlow applauded softly with gloved hands. The captain stepped back, and the officers saluted as one.\n\nA realization meandered its slow way through Deryn's brain\u2014this wasn't her father's medal \u2026\n\nIt was hers.\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" she said at last, barely remembering to return the officers' salutes. Instead of charging her with treason, they'd gone and decorated her?\n\n\"Now, then,\" Captain Hobbes said, turning back to the map table. \"We have other matters to discuss.\"\n\n\"Well done, Mr. Sharp,\" the lady boffin whispered, patting Deryn on the shoulder. \"If only you were properly dressed!\"\n\nDeryn nodded dumbly, trying to gather her thoughts. She was a decorated officer now, pinned with the same medal her father had won. And unlike him, she was still alive. She could still hear her own heart beating, sure enough, like a drummer marching her off to war.\n\nPart of her wanted to weep, to let all the nightmares of the last week spill out of her. And another part wanted to shout aloud that this was madness. She was a traitor, a spy\u2014a girl, for heaven's sake. But somehow she managed to hold the jumble of feelings inside by staring down at the table as hard as she could.\n\nOn it was a map of the Dardanelles, with mines and fortifications drawn by hand in red. As Deryn took slow breaths, her brain gradually focused on the matter at hand.\n\nThe Dardanelles strait was the heart of the Ottoman defenses. It squeezed all ships headed for Istanbul into a channel less than a mile wide, which was stuffed with sea mines and lined with forts and cannon on high cliffs.\n\nWhatever the lady boffin's alternate plan was, Deryn had a feeling it didn't involve more diplomacy.\n\n\"We're forbidden to fly down the strait,\" Captain Hobbes was saying. \"The Ottomans don't want us spying on their fortifications during the sultan's joyride. But they've given us permission to travel down the ocean side\u2014so the sultan can watch the sunset, we've told them.\"\n\nThe bosun chuckled as the captain's finger traveled down the western edge of Gallipoli, the rocky peninsula that separated the strait from the Aegean Sea.\n\n\"Just here is a ridge known as the Sphinx, a natural landmark. We can find our way back to it easily, day or night. So can your landing party, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Landing party, sir?\"\n\n\"That's what I said. You'll have to keelhaul drop from cruising altitude.\"\n\nDeryn raised her eyebrows. A keelhaul drop meant sliding down a cable to the ground. But according to the Manual of Aeronautics, drops were only for abandoning ship.\n\nThe bosun saw her expression, and smiled. \"A bit lively, eh, Mr. Sharp? Especially for your first command.\"\n\n\"I'll be in command, sir?\"\n\nThe captain nodded. \"Can't have a full officer in charge, in case you're captured. Better a middy, so it's less of an incident.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Deryn cleared her throat, realizing why they'd been in such a rush to give her the barking medal. In case she didn't make it back. \"I mean, yes, sir.\"\n\nThe captain's finger slid across Gallipoli. \"From the Sphinx your landing party will cross the peninsula to Kilye Niman\u2014a bit more than two miles away.\" He pointed at a narrow passage at a bend in the strait, which was marked with a dotted red line. \"That's where the Ottomans have their heavy kraken nets, according to our best dolphinesques.\"\n\n\"Pardon me, sir,\" Deryn said, \"but if the dolphins have already scouted them, what am I going for? To take photographs?\"\n\n\"Photographs?\" The captain chuckled. \"This isn't a sightseeing trip, Mr. Sharp. Your job is to bring those nets down.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. Heavy kraken nets were strong enough to stop even the largest beasties from getting through. How was her landing party meant to cut them up? With a pair of clippers?\n\n\"Allow me to explain,\" Dr. Barlow said, gesturing to two jars on the map table. They were crowded with tiny beasties, a honeycomb of white shells clinging to the interior of the glass. She twisted off the top of one, and the smell of salt water filled the room. \"Did you know, Mr. Sharp, that my grandfather was an expert in the field of barnacles?\"\n\n\"Barnacles, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Amazing creatures. They spend their humble lives clinging to ships, to whales, to rocks and driftwood, and yet they are implacable. Enough of them can foul even the largest dreadnought's engines.\" She pulled on heavy gloves and lifted a pair of tongs from the table, then fished out a single beastie from the jar. \"Of course, these are no ordinary barnacles. They're a species of my own devising, prepared in case the Ottomans proved troublesome. You shall have to be careful with them.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, ma'am. I won't hurt your beasties.\"\n\n\"Hurt them, Mr. Sharp?\" the lady boffin asked, and Dr. Busk laughed.\n\nSuddenly Deryn smelled something besides seawater. It was a dark scent, like smoke from a smithy. Then she realized that the tongs were slowly drooping in Dr. Barlow's hand.\n\nThe metal itself was \u2026 melting.\n\nDr. Barlow maneuvered the tongs carefully, so that they dropped the barnacle back into the jar of brine before disintegrating altogether. \"I call them vitriolic barnacles.\"\n\n\"Of course, Midshipman Sharp, you must keep this mission secret from the rest of the crew,\" the captain said. \"Even the men in your landing party won't know the entire plan. Is that clear?\"\n\nDeryn swallowed. \"Perfectly clear, sir.\"\n\nDr. Barlow carefully screwed the top back onto the jar. \"Once the vitriolic barnacles are on the kraken nets, they'll begin to multiply, interbreeding with the natural barnacles already there. In a few weeks the colony will be overcrowded, like these in the jar. Then they shall begin to struggle, trying to dislodge each other's relentless grip. Their vitriolic ooze will tear away at the nets, turning the cables into a stringy paste of metal at the bottom of the sea.\"\n\n\"We'll return a month from now,\" the captain said. \"In the dark of the new moon, the Leviathan will guide a creature down the strait by searchlight. The Ottoman coastal artillery won't be able to hit us in the air, and the beastie will swim deep underwater, unharmed by magnetic sea mines.\"\n\n\"But won't the Ottoman navy have plenty of warning, sir?\" Deryn asked\u2014the strait was almost a hundred miles from Istanbul.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Dr. Busk said. \"But Admiral Souchon won't guess what sort of creature the Leviathan is bringing. It's a new species, more formidable than any of our navy krakens.\"\n\nDeryn nodded, remembering what Dr. Barlow had told her on the sultan's airship.\n\n\"It's called a behemoth,\" the head boffin said.\n\nBy the time she left the navigation room, Deryn felt unsteady on her feet.\n\nFirst a decoration for gallantry, when she'd half expected to be hanged for treason. Then her first command, a secret attack against an empire that Britain was at peace with. That didn't seem right at all. It was more like being a spy than a soldier!\n\nAnd the final shock was the drawing of the behemoth that Dr. Busk had shown them. It was a huge creature, with tentacles like a kraken and a maw big enough to swallow one of the kaiser's submarines. The body was nearly as big as the Leviathan, but made of muscle and sinew instead of hydrogen and fragile membranes.\n\nNo wonder Lord Churchill hadn't wanted to hand it over!\n\nAs Deryn neared the central stairs, she frowned\u2014a civilian was lurking about in the corridor ahead of her. She recognized the shapeless hat and the bullfrog on his shoulder. It was Eddie Malone, the reporter she'd met aboard the Dauntless, no doubt here to cover the sultan's joyride.\n\nBut what was he doing so close to the bow?\n\n\"Excuse me, Mr. Malone,\" she said. \"Are you lost?\"\n\nThe man spun around on one heel, a guilty expression on his face. Then he frowned and took a closer look. \"Oh, it's you, Mr. Sharp. How lucky!\"\n\n\"Indeed you are, sir. You're wandering about in a restricted area.\" She pointed back toward the stairs. \"I'm afraid you'll have to rejoin the other reporters in the mess hall.\"\n\n\"Well, of course,\" Malone said, but he made no move to turn around, just stood there watching a message lizard scuttling past overhead. \"I just wanted a better look at your magnificent ship.\"\n\nDeryn sighed. She had only a few hours to learn how to use a diving apparatus, how to keelhaul drop onto solid stone, and how to handle acid-spitting barnacles! She wasn't in the mood for pleasantries.\n\n\"You're very kind, sir.\" She pointed down the corridor again. \"But if you please.\"\n\nMalone leaned closer and spoke quietly. \"Here's the thing, Mr. Sharp. I'm checking out a story. One that might make your ship look bad, if reported in a certain way. Perhaps you could clear things up for me.\"\n\n\"Clear what up, Mr. Malone?\"\n\n\"I have it on good authority that you're holding a prisoner here. He should be a prisoner of war, but you're not treating him properly.\"\n\nDeryn took a long moment to speak. \"I'm not sure who you're talking about.\"\n\n\"I think you are! A man named Volger is aboard this ship. You're making him work on those Clanker engines of yours, even though he's a real-life count!\"\n\nDeryn's hand went to her command whistle, ready to call for the guards. But then she realized how Malone must have learned about Volger \u2026 from Alek.\n\nWith a quick look in both directions, she pulled Malone out of the main corridor and into the officers' baths.\n\n\"Where did you hear this?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I met an odd fellow,\" he said softly, scratching the chin of his bullfrog. \"I thought he was a bit suspicious, and suddenly the Germans were chasing him. That didn't seem right, as he was Austrian, a fellow Clanker!\"\n\n\"Germans?\" Deryn's eyes widened. \"Is he all right?\"\n\n\"He gave them the slip, and I saw him again today at lunch.\" The man smiled. \"He knew a lot about your ship, which was also odd. Do you think I could meet this Volger fellow? I have a message to deliver.\"\n\nDeryn groaned, her stomach winding into the same tight coils it always did when she was contemplating treason. But Alek was still here in Istanbul, and the Germans were after him! Maybe Count Volger could help.\n\nShe held out her hand. \"All right. I'll take the message to him.\"\n\n\"It won't work that way, I'm afraid.\" Malone pointed at his bullfrog. \"Rusty here has the message in his head, and you don't know how to make him speak.\"\n\nDeryn stared at the frog, wondering if it was memorizing everything she was saying right now. Could she really trust this reporter?\n\nHer thoughts were shattered by a whistle echoing through the ship\u2014the all-hands signal. The sultan was almost here. In a few minutes all the ship's marines would be arrayed along the gangway, waiting for his arrival.\n\nWhich meant that there wouldn't be a guard at Volger's stateroom door \u2026\n\nDeryn reached for her ring of keys.\n\n\"Come with me,\" she said.\n\nAs expected, no one was guarding the count's stateroom.\n\nDeryn opened the door to the sight of Volger leaning halfway out his window, trying to get a better view of the sultan's magnificent walker. Before she'd left the navigation room, Deryn had seen the elephant-shaped machine approaching across the airfield. It was even larger than the Dauntless, its howdah as ornate as a lady's hat on Derby Day.\n\n\"Excuse me, sir,\" she said to Volger's backside, \"but you have a visitor.\"\n\nAs the wildcount extracted himself from the window, Deryn checked the empty corridor and closed the door behind them.\n\n\"A visitor?\" Volger said. \"How interesting.\"\n\nThe reporter stepped forward and thrust out his hand. \"Eddie Malone, reporter for the New York World.\"\n\nCount Volger said nothing, eyeing Malone up and down.\n\n\"He has a message from Alek,\" Deryn said.\n\nVolger's face froze for a moment. \"Alek? Where is he?\"\n\n\"Right here in Istanbul.\" Malone pulled out his battered notebook. \"He told me about you being a prisoner aboard this ship. Are you being well treated, sir?\"\n\nVolger didn't answer, his expression still one of shock.\n\n\"Blisters, Malone!\" Deryn swore. \"We haven't got time for you to do a barking interview. Can your wee beastie please just deliver the message!\"\n\n\"Alek said it was private, just for the count.\"\n\nDeryn groaned with frustration. \"Alek won't mind me hearing whatever he has to say. Right, your countship?\"\n\nVolger regarded the bullfrog with an expression of infinite distaste, but he gave the reporter a nod.\n\nMalone took the beastie from his shoulder and set it on the desk. He scratched beneath its chin, tapping a sort of code with his fingertip. \"Okay, Rusty. Repeat.\"\n\nThe frog began to speak in Alek's voice. \"I can't be sure if this is really you, Count, but I have to trust this man. We're still here in Istanbul, you see, which I'm sure upsets you greatly. But we've met some friends\u2014allies, I suppose you'd call them. I'll say more about that when we meet face-to-face.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. Allies? What was Alek blethering about?\n\n\"Mr. Malone tells me that the Leviathan is still here as well,\" the beastie continued. \"If you and Hoffman can escape, you can join us! We're at a hotel in the old city, with a name like my mother's. We'll stay here as long as we can.\"\n\nAt this, Count Volger softly groaned, his fists clenching at his sides.\n\n\"Oh, and I apologize for making you listen to this abomination. But I need your help, Count, more than ever. Please try to join us. Um, end message, I suppose.\"\n\nThe bullfrog went silent.\n\n\"Do you mind if I ask you some questions, sir?\" Malone said, his pen at the ready.\n\nCount Volger didn't answer, but sank into his desk chair, staring hatefully at the frog. \"I suppose that's really him?\"\n\n\"It sounds like Alek, right enough,\" Deryn said. \"And the beasties can only repeat what they've heard.\"\n\n\"Then why was he speaking in English?\" Volger asked.\n\n\"My name's not Rosencrantz,\" Eddie Malone said. \"I wasn't going to carry a message I didn't understand.\"\n\n\"That little fool,\" the count said quietly, shaking his head. \"What's he playing at now?\"\n\nEddie Malone picked up the bullfrog and placed it on his shoulder, a frown on his face. \"You don't sound glad to hear from this fellow. He seemed to think highly of you.\"\n\n\"Do you know what he was talking about?\" Volger asked Malone. \"Who these new 'allies' of his are?\"\n\nThe man shrugged. \"He was being cagey about it. Istanbul is full of secret societies and conspiracies. There was a revolution just six years ago.\"\n\n\"So he's fallen in with anarchists? Splendid.\"\n\n\"Anarchists?\" Deryn frowned. \"Alek's not completely daft, you know!\"\n\nVolger waved his hand at the bullfrog. \"I believe this proves that he is. All he had to do was leave Istanbul, then find somewhere to hide.\"\n\n\"Aye, but why would he do that?\" Deryn said. \"You and his da kept him cooped up his whole life, like a budgie in a fancy cage, and now he's finally free. Did you really think he'd find some hole to hide in?\"\n\n\"The situation would seem to call for it.\"\n\n\"But Alek can't keep running forever,\" she cried. \"He needs allies, like he had on this ship before the barking war got in the way. He needs somewhere to belong. But I will say this\u2014I'm glad he ran away from the likes of you, even if he's joined the barking Monkey Luddite Brigade! At least he can find his own way now!\"\n\nCount Volger stared at her for a long moment, and Deryn realized that she'd let her voice go all squeaky. That was what came of thinking too hard about Alek\u2014it turned her pure dead girly sometimes.\n\n\"This Alek fellow just gets more and more interesting,\" Malone said, pen scratching against his pad. \"Can you give me a bit more background on him?\"\n\n\"No!\" Deryn and Volger said together.\n\nThe cast off alert sounded, and Deryn heard footsteps scrambling in the corridor outside. She swore\u2014the captain had ordered a fast ascent. They had to make it down the peninsula before sunset, or her landing party would be keelhaul dropping in the dark.\n\n\"We have to go now,\" she said, dragging Malone toward the door. \"They'll be coming for his countship soon, to help with the engines.\"\n\n\"What about my interview?\"\n\n\"If they catch us in here, you'll be interviewing a barking hangman!\" Deryn eased open the door, peeking out and waiting for the corridor to clear.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Count Volger said from behind her. \"I hope you understand that this complicates things.\"\n\nShe looked over her shoulder. \"What are you blethering about?\"\n\n\"I need to rejoin Alek and talk him out of this madness. And that means escaping from this ship. Hoffman and I shall need your help with that.\"\n\n\"Have you gone barking mad as well?\" she cried. \"I'm not a traitor \u2026 not that much of one, anyway.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but if you don't help us, I shall be forced to reveal your little secret.\"\n\nDeryn froze.\n\n\"I had begun to suspect during our fencing lessons,\" the count said coolly. \"There's something about the way you stand. And your outbursts on Alek's behalf have also been revealing. But really it was the look on your face just now that removed all doubt.\"\n\n\"I don't know \u2026 what you're talking about,\" she said. The words came out ridiculously low, like a wee boy trying to sound like a man.\n\n\"Neither do I,\" Eddie Malone said, his pen flying across the page. \"But this is sure getting interesting.\"\n\n\"So if you want to continue serving on this ship, Mr. Sharp, I think you will be helping us to escape.\" A cruel smile spread across Count Volger's face. \"Or shall I give our reporter friend here the news?\"\n\nDeryn's head was spinning like mad. She'd lived this moment in a hundred nightmares, but now the moment had arrived like a bolt of lightning from a clear sky. And from barking Count Volger, of all people.\n\nSuddenly Deryn hated all sneaky, clever people.\n\nShe bit her lip, forcing her thoughts into focus. She was Midshipman Dylan Sharp, a decorated officer in His Majesty's Air Service, not some ninny about to lose her head. Whatever she said now, she could scheme her way out of this later.\n\n\"All right, then,\" she spat. \"I'll help you escape.\"\n\nVolger drummed his fingers. \"It'll have to be tomorrow night, before the Leviathan leaves Istanbul for good.\"\n\n\"Don't you worry. I'll be glad to see the back side of you!\"\n\nWith that, she dragged Eddie Malone out the door.\n\nThree hours later Deryn found herself staring out the Leviathan's open cargo door, a heavy pack on her back and a rocky expanse rolling past below.\n\nShe sighed. Might as well jump now, without a barking rope.\n\nNo matter how she thought the matter through, everything was hopeless and ruined. The count had guessed her secret, and he'd done so right smack in front of a reporter. Her first command was about to begin, but her career was practically over.\n\n\"Don't worry, lad,\" the bosun said from beside her. \"It's never as far as it looks.\"\n\nShe nodded, wishing that it was something piffling like a keelhaul drop that had her jittery. Gravity was something you could beat; all it took was hydrogen, hot air, or even a bit of rope. But being a girl was a miserable, never-ending struggle.\n\n\"I'm fine, Mr. Rigby. Just can't wait to get started.\" She turned toward her men. \"How about you lot?\"\n\nThe three men in her landing party put on brave faces, but their eyes stayed glued to the passing landscape. As the Sphinx drew closer, the airship slowed, turning into the stiff breeze coming off the ocean. But the officers couldn't come to a full halt without giving the sultan and his men too clear a view of the ground beneath them.\n\nA bit cheeky, committing espionage right in front of a nation's sovereign.\n\nThe bosun consulted his watch. \"Twenty seconds, I'd say.\"\n\n\"Clip your lines!\" Deryn ordered. Her heart was starting to race now, driving out her gloomy thoughts. Volger and his threats could get stuffed. She could always toss him out his stateroom window.\n\nThe terrain was rising beneath the ship now, turning from trees to scrub grass and rock, then finally sand. To her right was the Sphinx, a natural formation thrusting up like an ancient statue of some pagan god.\n\n\"Get ready, lads.\" She shouted, \"Three, two, one \u2026\" \u2026 and jumped.\n\nThe rope hissed through her safety clip, angry and piping hot in the sea breeze. She heard her comrades descending around her, a chorus of whirring cables slicing through the air.\n\nThe ground came up fast, and Deryn snapped on a second clip. The friction doubled, jerking her into a slower fall. But solid rock and scrub grass still blurred beneath her, too fast for comfort.\n\nThen she felt it, a sway in her line. The airship was slowing just a squick. Her rope swung forward with her momentum, then began a slow swing backward, so that her position was almost static with the ground below.\n\n\"Now!\" Deryn cried, and pulled her second clip from the line.\n\nShe dropped fast, hitting hard sand and loose, flat rocks that crunched and powdered under her boots. The impact shook her spine, but she stumbled along, managing to keep her feet. The rest of the cable whipped through her safety clip, smacked her hand spitefully, then skipped across the beach toward the sunset.\n\nAs the Leviathan slid away into the distance, its engine noise faded into the crash of the waves. Deryn felt her gloom descend again, along with a lonely feeling of being left behind.\n\nShe turned around, counting three other figures on the ridge. At least none of her command had been dragged into the sea.\n\n\"Everyone all right?\" she called.\n\n\"Aye, sir!\" two calls from the growing darkness, followed by a soft groan.\n\nIt was Matthews, ten yards away and still not on his feet. Deryn scrambled across the loose rocks, and found him curled into a tight ball.\n\n\"It's my ankle, sir,\" he said, teeth clenched. \"I've turned it.\"\n\n\"All right. Let's see if you can stand.\" Deryn waved for the other men, then shrugged out of her heavy pack. She knelt and checked the glass case that held the vitriolic barnacles; it hadn't broken.\n\nWhen Airmen Spencer and Robins had made their way over, she had them lift Matthews to his feet. But the moment his weight settled on the twisted right ankle, he cried out in pain.\n\n\"Set him down,\" she ordered, then let out a slow breath.\n\nThe man's ankle was stuffed. There was no way he could walk two miles across the rocky peninsula and back.\n\n\"You'll have to wait here, Matthews.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir. But when are they picking us up?\"\n\nDeryn hesitated. Of the four of them, only she knew exactly when the Leviathan would return to the Sphinx. That way, if the men were captured, the Ottomans couldn't set a trap for the airship.\n\nAs for Deryn herself, well, she was a decorated hero, wasn't she? The Ottomans would never drag the truth from her.\n\n\"I can't tell you, Matthews. Just wait here, and don't let anyone see you.\" The man winced in pain again, and she added, \"Trust me, the captain won't leave us behind.\"\n\nThey knelt and divided the four packs among the three of them, giving Matthews most of the water and a little bully beef. Then Deryn, Robins, and Spencer headed down the ridge toward the strait, leaving him all alone.\n\nA few minutes into her first command, and she was already one man down.\n\nTwo miles hadn't looked very far on the map, but the real Gallipoli was a different matter.\n\nThe peninsula was crisscrossed by high steep-sided ridges, as if mountains of limestone had been raked to pieces by giant claws. The valleys between were choked with dry, brittle undergrowth. And whenever Deryn and her party rested, ants made their way out of the sandy ground to torment their ankles.\n\nTo make things worse, the Royal Navy's maps of Gallipoli were useless, showing only a fraction of the ridgelines and overgrown ravines. Deryn kept an eye on her compass and on the stars overhead, but the tangled geography still forced her into tortured zigzags.\n\nBy the time they reached the other side of the peninsula, it was after midnight.\n\n\"I reckon this has to be Kilye Niman, sir,\" Spencer said, dropping his heavy pack to the ground.\n\nDeryn nodded, peering down at the beach through her field glasses. Two lines of buoys stretched across the narrow strait, bobbing gently on the waves. The giant metal barrels were covered with cruel-looking barbs and phosphorous bombs. Hanging unseen beneath them would be the kraken nets, a thick lattice of metal cables threaded with more spikes and explosives.\n\nRising from the water at either end of the nets were tall towers, their searchlights sweeping slowly across the water. Deryn made a quick sketch of the fortifications she could see\u2014at least a score of twelve-inch guns aiming down from the cliffs, all sheltered in bunkers cut deep into the limestone.\n\nImpossible for ships to get past, but the behemoth could slip by beneath the water's surface.\n\n\"I reckon the navy will owe us a few favors after this, sir,\" said Robins.\n\n\"Aye, but it's the Russians who'll really thank us,\" Deryn said, spotting a cargo ship waiting for daylight to arrive so it could sail past the nets. \"This is their lifeline.\"\n\nWhen she'd told Volger about the Goeben and the Breslau, he'd agreed that the Germans' ultimate plan was to close The Straits. Starving the Russian army's fighting bears was worth giving the sultan a pair of ironclads.\n\nShe pulled the diving gear from their packs, and knelt in the brush to put the suit together. It was a Spottiswoode Rebreather, the first underwater apparatus created from fabricated creatures. The suit had been woven from salamander skin and tortoise shell. The rebreather itself was practically a living creature, a set of fabricated gills that had to be kept wet even in storage.\n\nIn short, the suit was a Monkey Luddite's nightmare. Deryn felt a squick of jitters herself as she crawled inside, the wrinkled skin of reptiles slithering over her own. At least it made Spencer and Robins nervous too; they were happy to turn away as she put it on. Even as dark as it was, it would have been tricky stripping down to her skivvies in front of two airmen.\n\nWhen Deryn was ready, she and Spencer crept down to the beach, leaving Robins to guard the packs. At the water's edge the tides had carved a yard-high bank of sand to hide behind. They waited there for the searchlights to sweep past, then slapped across the luminous wet sand of the beach, wading into the cool salt water of the strait.\n\n\"Here you go, sir,\" Spencer said, handing her the rebreather. \"I'll stay right here by the water.\"\n\n\"Just stay hidden.\" Deryn dipped her goggles and strapped them on. \"If I'm away longer than three hours, go back and see to Matthews before it's light. I can get back on my own.\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\" Spencer saluted and crept back to the shadows. When he was out of sight, Deryn finally unwrapped the glass cases of vitriolic barnacles. As per the captain's orders, she hadn't let the men catch even a glimpse of them.\n\nThe searchlight was sweeping around again, and she sank down to her neck, pressing the rebreather to her mouth.\n\nJust as in Dr. Busk's office a few hours before, the feeling was uncanny and a bit horrid. The tendrils of the beastie crept into her mouth, seeking a source of carbon dioxide. A fishy taste covered her tongue, and the air she breathed turned warm and salty, like in the Leviathan's galley when the cooks were frying up anchovies.\n\nDeryn bent her knees, dropping beneath the surface.\n\nThe searchlight flickered past overhead, and then it was very dark. She squatted on the sand for a moment, forcing herself to take slow and even breaths.\n\nWhen she'd stopped shivering from the cold, Deryn pushed out toward the first line of nets, staying just beneath the surface. She'd swum in the ocean plenty of times, but never at night. The blackness around her seemed full of huge shapes, and the strange taste of the rebreather was a constant reminder that she didn't belong in this cold and inky realm. She remembered her first sea training exercise aboard the Leviathan, watching a kraken crush a wooden schooner into matchsticks.\n\nBut there would be no krakens in this strait, not yet. This was Clanker territory, where the worst beasties were sharks and jellyfish, neither of which could harm her through the Spottiswoode armor.\n\nAfter a long swim she reached one of the buoys, which bobbed in the water like a spiky metal hedgehog. Deryn took hold of one of the spurs gingerly. They were sharp enough to puncture kraken skin, and tipped with phosphorous bombs that would automatically ignite when the beastie tried to struggle free.\n\nShe clung there, resting before heading down. The vitriolic barnacles had to be placed deep beneath the waterline, so the colony wouldn't gobble up the buoys and give away their presence too soon.\n\nWhen Deryn had caught her breath, she let herself sink, descending until the last glimmer of the waning moon disappeared above. The net was easy to find even in the blackness, its cables as thick as her arm and studded with spurs the size of boat hooks. But it was tricky opening the glass cases while blind and wearing thick gloves of salamander skin, and it took Deryn long minutes to deposit six of the wee beasties a few feet apart. They had to be close enough to create a colony, Dr. Barlow had explained, but not so close that the fighting would start right away.\n\nDeryn kicked her way back to the surface, partly to orient herself and partly to recover from the cold of the deeper water. She stared tiredly down the line of buoys stretching across the half mile to the other shore. The job would take a dozen more dives, at least.\n\nIt was going to be a long, cold night.\n\nHer fingers were dead numb by the time the last barnacle was in place. The cold had seeped through the salamander skin and deep into her bones, and Deryn realized that this was her second lost night of sleep in three days.\n\nOn top of the cold and her exhaustion, the rebreather seemed to be slowly sucking the life from her. It felt as though she hadn't had a proper gulp of air since its tendrils had crept into her mouth. So when she came up for the last time, Deryn decided to risk the searchlights and swim back on the surface.\n\nThe rebreather came out a bit stickily, like pulling toffee stuck between her teeth. But it was worth a moment of irksomeness to taste the pure night air again. She headed back, ducking low in the water whenever the searchlights swung round.\n\nHalfway back to shore, the sharp slap of a gunshot rolled across the strait.\n\nDeryn's exhaustion vanished in a flash, and she sank down until her eyes were just above the surface. A large black shape was lumbering across the sand, perhaps twenty yards from where she'd left Spencer waiting.\n\nIt was a walker, a machine in the form of a scorpion, with six legs and two grasping claws in front. The long tail curled up into the air, the beam of a spotlight flaring from its tip.\n\nDeryn swam closer, hearing shouts and another gunshot. The spotlight was trained on a lone figure in a British flight suit, while a dozen or so men scrambled across the sand in pursuit. The searchlight from the nearest tower left its slow path and swung toward the beach, forcing Deryn underwater again.\n\nShe stuffed the rebreather back into her mouth, then swam closer beneath the surface, her heart pounding in her ears. One of her men had obviously been caught, but perhaps the other was still hidden. If she could find him, they could swim away, sharing the rebreather between them.\n\nA few yards from the beach, Deryn lifted her head above the water, letting herself rise and fall with the swell of the waves. Her eyes swept the shadows behind the shelf of sand, but she saw no one hidden there. She crawled closer, as slow as some primordial beastie taking its first steps on land.\n\nThe scorpion's spotlight shifted closer to the tree line, revealing another figure in a flight suit lying on the ground. Two Ottoman soldiers stood nearby, watching the downed man with their rifles pointed at him.\n\nDeryn swore silently\u2014both her men had been captured. She clung to the darkness behind the shelf of sand, wondering what to do. The walker was moving now, making the sand tremble beneath her knees. How was she meant to take on a giant scorpion and a score of soldiers with nothing but a rigger's knife?\n\nShe poked her head up. The two Ottomans were lifting the downed man now, helping him up from the sand. He was limping on his right foot.\u2026\n\nDeryn frowned. That was Matthews, the man she'd left at the Sphinx. The Ottomans must have captured him. Had he led them here? Or had the Ottomans simply guessed that the kraken nets were their objective?\n\nAnd where was her third man?\n\nThen the spotlight shifted again, and machine-gun fire erupted from the tip of the scorpion's tail, raking the trees along the beach. The branches thrashed madly in the hail of bullets, and sand sprayed into the air.\n\nFinally the machine gun went silent, and a group of Ottoman soldiers charged into the brush. A moment later they dragged something out. It was a body, motionless and as white as a sheet except for the red stains on the flight suit.\n\nDeryn swallowed. Her first command had been killed and captured down to the last man.\n\nWith a noisy grinding of gears, the scorpion moved closer to the dead body. One of its massive front claws dug into the sand, then came up, lifting the lifeless form into the air. The Ottomans were taking her men somewhere, probably to interrogate the survivors and take a closer look at their uniforms and equipment.\n\nThey would soon guess that the landing party had come from the Leviathan, even if they hadn't forced it out of Matthews already. But her men knew nothing about the vitriolic barnacles, and even if the Ottomans inspected the nets, they wouldn't notice a few more beasties among the millions already living along the miles of cable.\n\nHopefully they would think this had been a simple reconnaissance mission, and an utter failure. The Ottomans would probably lodge a protest with the Leviathan's captain, but as far as they knew, this mission had not been an act of war. Deryn was the only one who could explain otherwise.\n\nShe had to get away from here, or risk everything. There could be no heroic attempt to rescue her men, and no heading back to the Sphinx now either. The Ottomans would be patrolling the whole peninsula for weeks to come.\n\nThere was only one place to go.\n\nDeryn stared back out across the black water, to where the cargo ship she'd seen earlier waited to transit the strait. Once the sun rose, it would head for Istanbul.\n\n\"Alek,\" she said softly, and slipped back into the sea.\n\nThe minarets of the Blue Mosque rose up behind the trees, six tall spires like thin freshly sharpened pencils standing on end. The graceful arc of the mosque's dome stood out dark gray against the hazy sky, and sunlight shimmered from the spinning blades of gyrothopters and aeroplanes overhead.\n\nAlek sat outside the small coffeehouse where Eddie Malone had taken him the day before. It was on a quiet side street, and Alek was sipping black tea and studying his collection of Ottoman coins. He had begun to learn their names in Turkish, and which ones to hide from shopkeepers if he wanted a fair price.\n\nWith the Germans handing out photographs of Bauer and Klopp, it was up to Alek to buy supplies. He'd learned a lot, though, wandering the streets of Istanbul on his own. How to bargain with merchants, how to slip through the German parts of town unnoticed, even how to tell time by the prayers drifting down from the city's minarets.\n\nMost important of all, he'd realized something about this city\u2014he was meant to be here. This was where the war would turn, either for or against the Clanker side. A slender strip of water glittered in the distance, the fog sirens of cargo ships wailing softly as they crept along it. This passage from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea was the Russian army's lifeline, the thread that held the Darwinist powers together. That was why providence had brought him halfway across Europe.\n\nAlek was here to stop the war.\n\nIn the meantime he'd also taught himself a little Turkish.\n\n\"Nasilsiniz?\" he practiced.\n\n\"Iyiyim,\" came an answer from the covered birdcage on his table.\n\n\"Shush!\" Alek looked about. Fabricated beasts might not be strictly illegal here, but there was no point in drawing attention to himself. Besides, it was insufferable that the creature's accent was better than his own.\n\nHe adjusted the cage's cover, closing the gap the creature had been peeking through. But it was already sulking in a corner. It was uncannily good at reading Alek's mood, which at the moment was one of annoyance.\n\nWhere was Eddie Malone, anyway? He'd promised to be here half an hour ago, and Alek had another appointment soon.\n\nHe was just about to leave when Malone's voice called from behind him.\n\nAlek turned and nodded curtly. \"Ah, here you are at last.\"\n\n\"At last?\" Malone raised an eyebrow. \"You in a hurry to get somewhere?\"\n\nAlek didn't answer that. \"Did you see Count Volger?\"\n\n\"I did indeed.\" Malone waved for a waiter and ordered lunch, consulting the menu and taking his time about it. \"A fascinating ship, the Leviathan. The sultan's joyride turned out to be more interesting than I expected.\"\n\n\"I'm pleased to hear it. But I'm more interested in what Count Volger said.\"\n\n\"He said a lot of things \u2026 most of which I didn't understand.\" Malone pulled out his notebook and readied his pen. \"I'm curious if you know the fellow who helped me get in to see Volger. Name of Dylan Sharp?\"\n\n\"Dylan?\" Alek asked, frowning. \"Of course I know him. He's a midshipman aboard the Leviathan.\"\n\n\"Did you ever notice anything odd about him?\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"What do you mean by odd?\"\n\n\"Well, when Count Volger heard your message, he decided that joining you might be a good idea, and said so. I thought it was downright rash of him to talk about escaping right in front of a crewman.\" Malone leaned closer. \"But then he ordered Mr. Sharp to help him.\"\n\n\"He ordered him?\"\n\nMalone nodded. \"Almost as if he were threatening the boy. Looked like a case of blackmail to me. Does that make any sense?\"\n\n\"I \u2026 I'm not sure,\" Alek said. Certainly Dylan had done a few things he wouldn't want the ship's officers to hear about\u2014like keeping Alek's secrets. But Volger could hardly blackmail Dylan on that subject without revealing to the Darwinists who Alek really was. \"It doesn't sound right, Mr. Malone. Perhaps you misheard.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe you'd like to hear for yourself.\" The man took the frog from his shoulder, set it on the table, and scratched it under the chin. \"Okay, Rusty. Repeat.\"\n\nA moment later Count Volger's voice emerged from the bullfrog's mouth.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp, I hope you understand that this complicates things,\" it said, then switched to Dylan's voice. \"What are you blethering about?\"\n\nAlek looked around, but the handful of other patrons didn't seem to notice. They looked off into the distance, as if talking frogs came to dine at this establishment every day. No wonder Malone had insisted on meeting here.\n\nThe frog started up a whooping noise, like the Leviathan's Klaxon sounding an alert. Then it continued in a tangle of voices, with the wail of the Klaxon breaking in at odd times, most of the words flying by too fast for the frog to render clearly.\n\nBut then Count Volger's voice came out of the muddle. \"Perhaps, but if you don't help us, I shall be forced to reveal your little secret.\"\n\nAlek frowned, wondering what was going on. Volger was talking cryptically about fencing lessons. At first Dylan sputtered that he didn't understand, but his voice was shaky, almost as if he were about to cry. Finally he agreed to help the count and Hoffman escape, and with one last shriek of the Klaxon, the bullfrog went silent.\n\nEddie Malone lifted it from the table and placed it gently back on his shoulder. \"Care to shed any light on the matter?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Alek said slowly, which was the truth. He'd never heard such panic in Dylan's voice before. The boy had risked being hanged for Alek. What threat of Volger's could frighten him so much?\n\nBut it was no good thinking aloud in front of this reporter. The man knew too much already.\n\n\"Let me ask you a question, Mr. Malone.\" Alek pointed at the frog. \"Did they know this abomination was memorizing their words?\"\n\nThe man shrugged. \"I never told them otherwise.\"\n\n\"How honest of you.\"\n\n\"I never lied,\" Malone said. \"And I can promise you that Rusty isn't memorizing now. He won't unless I ask him to.\"\n\n\"Well, whether he's listening or not, there's nothing I can add.\" Alek stared at the frog, still hearing Dylan's voice. He'd almost sounded like a different person.\n\nWith Dylan's help, of course, Volger and Hoffman stood a better chance of escaping.\n\n\"Did Volger say when they would try?\"\n\n\"It has to be tonight,\" Malone said. \"The four days is almost up. Unless the British really do plan on giving the Leviathan to the sultan, it has to leave Istanbul tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Alek said, standing up and offering his hand. \"Thank you for carrying our messages, Mr. Malone. I'm sorry that I must beg your leave.\"\n\n\"An appointment with your new friends, perhaps?\"\n\n\"I leave that to your imagination,\" Alek said. \"And by the way, I hope you won't write about any of this too soon. Volger and I might decide to stay in Istanbul a bit longer.\"\n\nMalone leaned back in his chair and smiled. \"Oh, don't worry about me making a mess of your plans. As far as I can see, this story is just getting interesting.\"\n\nAlek left the man scribbling in his notebook, no doubt writing down everything they'd said. Or perhaps he'd been lying and the bullfrog had memorized it all. It was mad to trust a reporter with his secrets, Alek supposed, but being reunited with Volger was worth the risk.\n\nHe wished the wildcount could be here for his next appointment. Zaven was introducing him to more members of the Committee for Union and Progress. Zaven himself was a friendly sort, and an educated gentleman, but his fellow revolutionaries might not be so welcoming. It wouldn't be easy for a Clanker aristocrat to earn their trust.\n\n\"You were very good at staying quiet,\" Alek whispered to the birdcage as he walked away. \"If you keep behaving, I shall buy you strawberries.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" the creature answered, then made a giggling sound.\n\nAlek frowned. The words were a snatch of the conversation the bullfrog had repeated. The creature didn't imitate voices, but Count Volger's sarcastic tone was quite recognizable.\n\nAlek wondered why the beast had chosen those two words from everything it had heard.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" it said again, sounding abundantly pleased with itself.\n\nAlek shushed it and pulled a hand-drawn map from his pocket. The route, labeled in Zaven's flowery handwriting, took him north and west from the Blue Mosque, toward the neighborhood he'd stumbled into two nights before.\n\nThe buildings grew taller as he walked, and the Clanker influences stronger. Tram tracks braided through the paving stones, and the walls were stained by exhaust, almost as black as the steel spires of Berlin and Prague. German-made machines huffed down the streets, their spare, functional designs strange to Alek after days of seeing walkers shaped like animals. The signs of rebellion also grew\u2014the mix of alphabets and religious symbols filled the walls again, marks of the host of smaller nations that made up the Ottoman Empire.\n\nZaven's map led Alek deep into a tangle of warehouses, where mechanikal arms stood beside loading docks. The stone walls loomed high above the narrow streets, so tall they almost seemed to touch each other overhead. Sunlight filtered grayly through the fumes.\n\nThere were few pedestrians here, and Alek began to feel wary. Before yesterday he'd never walked alone in a city, and he didn't know which sorts of neighborhoods were safe and which were not.\n\nHe came to a halt, setting down the birdcage to check Zaven's map once more. As he squinted at the flamboyant handwriting, Alek noticed a figure out of the corner of his eye.\n\nThe woman was dressed in long black robes, her face covered by a veil. She was hunched with age, and a few silver coins were sewn into her headdress. He'd seen plenty of desert tribesmen like her on the streets of Istanbul, but never a woman walking alone before. She stood, motionless, beside a warehouse wall, staring down at the cobblestones.\n\nWhen Alek had passed that building a moment ago, she hadn't been there.\n\nHe quickly folded the map, then picked up the cage and started walking again. A moment later he glanced backward.\n\nThe old woman was following him.\n\nAlek frowned. How long had she been there?\n\nHe chewed his lip as he walked. He was close to the address Zaven had given him, but he could hardly lead this stranger straight to his new allies. Istanbul was full of spies and revolutionaries, and of secret police as well.\n\nBut surely he could outrun an old woman. Hoisting the heavy birdcage higher, Alek quickened his pace. He let himself take longer and longer steps, ignoring the complaints from beneath the birdcage cover.\n\nAnd yet when he looked back, his pursuer was still there, gliding gracefully across the paving stones, her robes rippling like waves of black water.\n\nThis was no old woman, perhaps no woman at all.\n\nAlek's hand went to his belt, and he softly swore. He was armed only with a long knife he'd bought at the Grand Bazaar that morning. Its curved steel blade had looked exotically lethal laid out on red velvet. But its edge hadn't been sharpened yet, and Alek had never trained to use a weapon of its kind.\n\nHe rounded the last corner, almost at the address on Zaven's map. With his pursuer out of sight for a moment, he dashed ahead, ducking into the entrance of an alley.\n\n\"Shush,\" he breathed through the birdcage's cover. The creature made an unhappy noise at being bounced about again, but fell silent.\n\nAlek placed the cage carefully on the ground and peeked out.\n\nThe dark figure appeared, moving slowly now, and came to a halt in front of a loading dock on the other side of the street. Alek saw the symbol painted on the dock, and frowned.\n\nIt was the same symbol Zaven had drawn extravagantly on his map.\n\nWas this a coincidence? Or had this pursuer already known where Alek was headed?\n\nThe black-robed figure jumped up onto the loading dock in a single bound, confirming that this was no woman. The man backed into the shadows, but his robes were just visible, billowing softly in the breeze.\n\nAlek stood there in the alley, his back pressed hard against cold stone. Thanks to Eddie Malone, he was already half an hour late. If he waited for his pursuer to give up and go away, it might take ages more. What would his new allies think if he arrived at their secret meeting hours behind schedule?\n\nOf course, if he brought them this spy as his prisoner, they might be somewhat more impressed.\u2026\n\nA six-legged German walker was headed up the street, dragging a heavy cargo train behind it\u2014the perfect cover. Alek knelt and spoke softly to the birdcage. \"I'll be right back. Just stay quiet.\"\n\n\"Quiet,\" the creature muttered in reply.\n\nAlek waited until the cargo train was lumbering past, between him and the other man. He stole out of the alley and scampered along behind the train, then slipped between two cars and across the street.\n\nHis back to the stone warehouse wall, Alek inched his way toward the loading dock. The long, curved knife felt unfamiliar in his hand, and he wondered for a moment if the man had spotted him.\n\nBut it was too late for doubts. Alek crept closer.\u2026\n\nSuddenly a maniacal peel of laughter came from across the street, echoing from the alley where he'd left the beast!\n\nAlek froze. Was it in trouble?\n\nA moment later the black-robed figure jumped down onto the street. It crept toward the maniacal laughter, crossing the street to peer into the alleyway.\n\nAlek saw his chance, stealing up behind to press his knife against the man's throat. \"Surrender, sir! I have the advantage.\"\n\nThe man was smaller than he'd thought\u2014and quicker. He whipped around within Alek's grip, and suddenly they faced each other.\n\nAlek found himself staring into deep brown eyes framed with ringlets of black hair. This wasn't a man at all!\n\n\"Not quite an advantage, boy,\" the girl said in perfect German. \"Unless you want to join me in death.\"\n\nAlek felt a nudge, and looked down.\n\nThe tip of her knife was pressed against his stomach.\n\nAlek swallowed, wondering what to do. But then the door to the loading dock began to rise, rattling with the clatter of chains and pulleys.\n\nBoth of them looked up, still locked in their lethal embrace.\n\nZaven stood there in the doorway, beaming down at them.\n\n\"Ah, Alek! You're finally here. And I see you've met my daughter!\"\n\n\"You should have let me kill him,\" Zaven's daughter said as they climbed the broad staircase inside the warehouse.\n\nThe creature giggled from the birdcage, and Alek wondered what madness had gotten into it.\n\nZaven clicked his tongue sadly. \"Ah, Lilit. You are your mother's daughter.\"\n\n\"He was talking to a reporter!\"\n\nAlek realized that Lilit was speaking German, deliberately letting him understand. He found it rather awkward, being threatened by a girl. Almost as embarrassing as mistaking her for a man.\n\n\"Nene will agree with me,\" Lilit said, fixing Alek with a cold glare. \"Then we'll see who has the advantage.\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes at her. As if a mere girl could get the better of him. It had all been the creature's fault for distracting him. The birdcage seemed heavier than ever, climbing these endless stairs. How high up were they going?\n\n\"Mr. Malone was carrying a message for me,\" he explained. \"From my friend aboard the Leviathan. I didn't tell him anything about your Committee!\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Lilit said. \"But I followed you an hour before you noticed me. Stupidity can be just as deadly as treachery.\"\n\nAlek took a slow breath, wishing for the hundredth time that Volger were here.\n\nBut Zaven only laughed. \"Fah! There's no shame in being trailed by my daughter, Alek. She's a master of the shadows.\" He thumped his chest. \"Trained by the best there is!\"\n\n\"It's true, I didn't notice you,\" Alek said, turning to Lilit. \"But was anyone else following me?\"\n\n\"No. I would have seen them.\"\n\n\"Well, then. I haven't given you away to the sultan's secret police, have I?\"\n\nLilit hmphed and climbed ahead. \"We'll see what Nene says.\"\n\n\"In any case,\" Alek called up after her, \"if the Germans find me, they won't bother trailing me. I'll simply disappear.\"\n\nLilit didn't turn to face him, but muttered, \"That's useful to know.\"\n\nThe staircase continued up, dimly lit by a column of latticed windows letting in gray sunlight. As Zaven lead them above the swirling exhaust fumes on the street, the stairs grew brighter. Small touches of humanity appeared on the cold stone walls\u2014family portraits and the three-barred crosses of the Byzantine Church.\n\n\"Zaven,\" Alek asked, \"do you live here?\"\n\n\"A masterpiece of deduction,\" Lilit said.\n\n\"We've always lived above the family business,\" Zaven said, stopping before a pair of wooden doors with ornate brass fittings. \"Whether it was a hat shop or a mechaniks factory. And now that the family business is revolution, we live above the Committee!\"\n\nAlek frowned, wondering where this \"committee\" was. The warehouse felt as still as an empty church; the paint on the walls was cracked, the stairs in disrepair.\n\nAs Zaven unlocked the doors, he said, \"No disguises at home.\"\n\nLilit gave him an annoyed look, but pulled the desert robes over her head. Beneath them she wore a brilliant red silk dress that almost reached the floor.\n\nAlek noticed again how brown her eyes were, and how beautiful she was. What an idiot he'd been to mistake her for a man.\n\nZaven pushed through the doors into a riot of color. The apartments' divans and chairs were covered with vivid silks, the electrikal lamps decorated with rainbows of translucent tiles. A vast Persian rug was spread across the floor, its meticulous geometries woven in the hues of fallen autumn leaves. Sunlight spilled in from a large balcony, setting the whole mosaic aflame.\n\nThe furniture had seen better days, however, and the rug was worn through in places.\n\n\"Very cozy,\" Alek said, \"for a revolution.\"\n\n\"We do our best,\" Zaven said, taking in the room with a tired sweep of his eyes. \"A proper host would offer you tea first. But we're already late.\"\n\n\"Nene doesn't like to be kept waiting,\" Lilit said.\n\nAlek straightened his tunic. Nene was obviously the leader of the group. It would be best to look smart in front of him.\n\nThey led him to another set of double doors. Lilit knocked softly, waited a moment, then pushed the doors open.\n\nUnlike the outer apartments, this room was dark, the air heavy with incense and the smell of dusty carpets. The viscous light of an old-fashioned oil lamp turned everything the color of red wine. A dozen wireless receivers sat in the shadows, their tubes softly glowing, the chatter of Morse code filling the air.\n\nAgainst the far wall stood a huge canopied bed covered with mosquito netting. It rested on four legs carved with drooping folds of skin, like those of a reptile. Within the netting lay a small, thin figure wrapped in white sheets. Two glittering eyes stared out from beneath an explosion of gray hair.\n\n\"So this is your German boy?\" came a crackly voice. \"The one you had to save from the Germans?\"\n\n\"He's Austrian,\" Zaven said. \"But yes, Mother, he's a Clanker.\"\n\n\"And a spy, Nene.\" Lilit bent to kiss the old woman on the forehead. \"I saw him talking to a reporter before he came here!\"\n\nAlek slowly let out his breath. The fearsome Nene was simply Zaven's mother? Was this whole Committee nothing but an eccentric family hobby?\n\nHe set down the birdcage and bowed. \"Good afternoon, madam.\"\n\n\"Well, you certainly have an Austrian accent,\" she said in excellent German\u2014these Ottomans seemed to know half a dozen languages each. \"But there are many Austrians working for the sultan.\"\n\nAlek gestured at Zaven. \"But your son saw the Germans chasing me.\"\n\n\"Chasing you straight to one of our walkers,\" Nene said. \"A rather convenient introduction.\"\n\n\"I had no idea that machine would catch me when I fell,\" Alek argued. \"I could have died!\"\n\n\"You still could,\" Lilit muttered.\n\nAlek ignored her, kneeling by the birdcage to untie the cover's straps. As he stood, he lifted the cage into Nene's view.\n\n\"Would an agent of the sultan have one of these?\" he said, then whisked off the cover.\n\nThe creature looked out at them all, its huge eyes round. It turned from one face to the next, taking in Zaven's surprise, Lilit's suspicion, and finally Nene's cold, glittering eyes.\n\n\"What on earth is that?\" she asked.\n\n\"A creature from the Leviathan, where I've served as engine crew the last two weeks.\"\n\n\"A Clanker, on the Leviathan?\" Nene let out a chuckle. \"What nonsense. You probably bought that beast from some backroom shop in the Grand Bazaar.\"\n\nAlek drew himself straighter. \"I certainly did not, madam. This creature was fabricated by Dr. Nora Darwin Barlow herself.\"\n\n\"A Darwin, making a cuddly trifle like that? Don't be absurd. And what use would it be aboard a warship?\"\n\n\"It was meant to be a gift for the sultan,\" Alek said. \"As a way to keep the Ottomans out of war. But then it hatched, um \u2026 ahead of schedule.\"\n\nThe old woman raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"You see, Nene? He's a liar!\" Lilit said. \"And a fool to think anyone would believe his nonsense!\"\n\n\"Believe,\" the creature said, and the room fell silent.\n\nZaven took a step backward. \"It speaks?\"\n\n\"It's just a parrot,\" Alek said. \"Like a message lizard, one that repeats words at random.\"\n\nThe old woman fixed it with a long, critical stare.\n\n\"Whatever it is, I've never seen one before. Let me take a closer look.\"\n\nAlek opened the cage, and the beast climbed out and up onto his shoulder. He went closer to the bed, holding out a hand. The creature crawled slowly down his arm, returning Nene's cold stare with its own wide eyed gaze.\n\nAlek saw the woman's expression soften, just as Klopp's and Bauer's did every time he put the creature in their care. Something about its huge eyes and wizened face seemed to generate affection. Even Lilit was struck silent.\n\nNene reached out and took Alek's hands. \"You have never worked for a living, that's for sure. But there's a bit of engine grease under your fingernails.\" She rubbed his right thumb. \"And you fence, don't you?\"\n\nAlek nodded, impressed.\n\n\"Tell me something about the Leviathan that a liar wouldn't know,\" she demanded.\n\nAlek paused a moment, trying to recall all the wonders he'd seen aboard the airship. \"There are fl\u00e9chette bats, flying creatures made of jellyfish, and hawks who wear steel talons.\"\n\n\"Those beasts have been in the penny papers all week. Try again.\"\n\nAlek frowned. He'd never read a newspaper in his life, and had no idea what was public knowledge about the Leviathan. He doubted the Darwinists had shown him any military secrets.\n\n\"Well, we fought the Goeben and the Breslau on our way here.\"\n\nThere was a long moment of silence. From the looks on their faces, it seemed that little fact hadn't been in the papers.\n\n\"The sultan's new toys?\" Nene asked. \"When exactly?\"\n\n\"Eight days ago. We stumbled on them due south of the Dardanelles.\n\nNene nodded slowly, her eyes sliding to one of the chattering wireless receivers. \"It's possible. Something was certainly afoot last Monday.\"\n\n\"It was quite a battle,\" Alek said. \"The Goeben's Tesla cannon almost put us all into the sea!\"\n\nThe three exchanged glances, then Zaven said, \"Tesla cannon?\"\n\nAlek smiled. At least he knew something that these revolutionaries might find useful. \"That tower on her aft deck might look like a wireless transmitter, but it's an electrikal weapon. It makes lightning. I know that sounds absurd, but\u2014\"\n\nNene silenced him with a raised hand. \"It does not. Come for a walk with me, boy.\"\n\n\"A walk?\" Alek asked. He'd assumed the woman was an invalid.\n\n\"Onto the balcony,\" she ordered, and suddenly the delicate sound of a clockwork mechanism filled the room. One of the bed's wrinkled legs took a slow, smooth step forward.\n\nAlek jumped back, and Lilit laughed from across the room. The creature crawled back up to his shoulder, echoing her giggle.\n\n\"Haven't you ever seen a turtle move?\" Nene asked, smiling.\n\nAlek took another step back, getting out of the bed's way as it lumbered toward the double doors. \"Yes, but I never thought of sleeping on one.\"\n\n\"You sleep on one every night, boy. The world itself rests on a turtle's back!\"\n\nAlek smiled at her. \"My mother used to tease me with that old wives' tale.\"\n\n\"Old wives' tale?\" Nene cried, her voice crackling. \"The notion is perfectly scientific. The world rests upon a turtle, which itself stands on the back of an elephant!\"\n\nAlek tried not to laugh. \"Then what does the elephant stand on, madam?\"\n\n\"Don't try to be clever, young man.\" She narrowed her eyes. \"It's elephants all the way down!\"\n\nThe bed made its slow way from the bedroom toward the balcony doors. As he followed, carefully matching its turtle's pace, Alek wondered at the perfection of the mechanism. Clockwork machines ran on wound-up springs instead of noisy steam or gas engines, so the bed's movements were smooth and slow, ideal for an invalid.\n\nBut the woman lying in it had to be mad, with her talk of elephants. All three of them were a bit peculiar, in fact. They reminded Alek of his own poor relations, once-wealthy families who'd fallen on hard times but still had an inflated sense of their own importance.\n\nThe night before, Zaven had said they'd been part of the Young Turk uprising six years ago. But was this strange family a real threat to the sultan, or simply wallowing in past glories?\n\nOf course, Zaven's walker had been nothing to sneeze at.\n\nOut on the balcony Alek realized that the family's apartments were built atop the warehouse, the rooftop surrounding them like a small plot of land. An odd place to live, but it had commanding views of the city. From this height they could see both the Sea of Marmara and the sparkling inlet of the Golden Horn.\n\nThere she was, just as Eddie Malone had said\u2014the Goeben, resting beside a long pier. Her huge kraken-fighting arms were working above the surface, helping to load cargo.\n\nNene pointed a withered finger at the docks. \"How do you know about this Tesla cannon.\"\n\n\"It fired at us,\" Alek said. \"It almost set the whole ship aflame.\"\n\n\"But how do you know its name, boy? I doubt you guessed it.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Alek wondered how much to tell her. \"One of my men is a master of mechaniks. He'd seen experimental models of the cannon.\"\n\n\"Your men have knowledge of German secret weapons, yet you served aboard the Leviathan?\" Nene shook her head in disbelief. \"Tell me who you really are. At once!\"\n\nAlek took a deep breath, ignoring Lilit's cold smile. \"I'm an Austrian nobleman, madam. My father was against this war, and the Germans had him killed for it. My men and I were hiding in the Alps when the Leviathan crash-landed there.\"\n\n\"And they simply invited you aboard?\"\n\n\"We helped the Darwinists escape. Our Stormwalker was damaged, and their airship's engines were destroyed. So we put the two together, so to speak, so that we could both escape the Germans. But once we were airborne, it became clear they considered us prisoners of war. We had to jump ship.\" He spread his hands. \"So here we are, looking for allies to fight with.\"\n\n\"Allies,\" the creature repeated softly.\n\n\"I want revenge on the Germans,\" Alek said. \"The same as you do.\"\n\nThere was a long silence, then Nene shook her head.\n\n\"I don't know what to make of you, boy. Clanker engines on a hydrogen breather? It's ridiculous. And yet \u2026 no spy of the sultan's would dare tell a story so unlikely.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Lilit said, taking her grandmother's hand. \"Remember when the Leviathan flew over the city yesterday? And we thought it funny how the engines were smoking, like Clanker airships' do?\" She glanced at Alek. \"Not that he's telling the truth.\"\n\nNene shook her head again. \"No doubt this boy saw them as well, and that was what inspired this bizarre story.\"\n\n\"Madam, I don't enjoy being called a liar,\" Alek said firmly. \"It makes me a stronger ally that I know both Darwinist and Clanker secrets! I have military training and gold. My men and I can pilot walkers and fix them as well. You must let us help you, unless you're only playing at revolution!\"\n\nLilit sprang to her feet, her teeth bared. Zaven stood silent, but moved a hand to his knife.\n\nNene spoke very calmly. \"Young man, you have no idea what this struggle has cost my family\u2014our fortune, our station in society.\" She gently took Lilit's hand. \"And this girl's poor mother as well. How dare you call us amateurs!\"\n\nAlek swallowed, realizing that he'd gone too far.\n\n\"I doubt you can help us,\" Nene continued. \"I know an aristocrat when I see one. And spoiled brats like you never help anyone but themselves.\"\n\nThe words struck Alek like a kick in the stomach\u2014this was how people always saw him, as a pampered fool, no matter how hard he tried. His knees bent, and he found himself sitting on the bed.\n\n\"I'm sorry for speaking like an idiot,\" he said. \"And I'm sorry about your mother, Lilit. I lost my parents too. I just want to fight back somehow.\"\n\n\"You lost both your parents?\" Nene said, and her voice grew softer. \"Who are you, boy?\"\n\nAlek looked into the old woman's eyes, and realized that he had two choices\u2014he could either trust her or go back to being alone. Without allies he and his men could do nothing but run into the wilds and hide.\n\nBut he was here in Istanbul for more than that, he knew.\n\n\"Who do you think I am?\" he whispered.\n\n\"An Austrian nobleman, certainly. Perhaps an archduke's son?\"\n\nHe nodded, holding her fierce gaze.\n\n\"Then surely you know your mother's full maiden name. And if you don't get every last syllable right, my granddaughter will drop you off this roof.\"\n\nAlek took a breath, then recited, \"Sophie Maria Josephine Albina, Countess Chotek of Chotkow and Wognin.\"\n\nBelief dawned at last on the old woman's face.\n\n\"Our meeting is providence,\" he said. \"I swear I can help you, Nene.\"\n\nInexplicably, Lilit burst into laughter. Zaven let out a low chuckle, and the creature joined in.\n\n\"What a charmer,\" Lilit said. \"He's adopted you now, Nene!\"\n\nAlek realized his mistake. \"Nene\" wasn't a name at all, but simply a word for \"grandmother,\" like \"Oma\" in German.\n\n\"I'm sorry my Armenian is deficient, madam.\"\n\nThe old woman smiled. \"Not to worry. At my age one can never have too many grandchildren. Even if some of them are idiots.\"\n\nAlek took a deep breath, managing to hold his tongue.\n\n\"Perhaps it's my old age, but I'm starting to believe you,\" Nene said. \"Of course, if you are who you say, then surely you can pilot a walker.\"\n\n\"Show me one, and I'll prove it to you.\"\n\nShe nodded, then waved her hand. \"Zaven? Perhaps it's time to introduce His Serene Highness to the Committee.\"\n\nLilit and Zaven led him to the far corner of the balcony, which overlooked a huge courtyard within the walls of several warehouses. The windows of the surrounding buildings were boarded up, and the whole courtyard covered with camouflage netting to hide it from the air.\n\nIn the shadows five walkers stood silently.\n\nAlek knelt at the balcony railing, peering down. Over the last few days, he'd seen them in the streets, the motley array of combat walkers that guarded Istanbul's ghettos. These five were marked with the dents and scrapes of old battles, their armor decorated with a multitude of signs\u2014crescents, crosses, a Star of David, and other symbols he'd never seen before.\n\n\"A committee of iron golems,\" he said.\n\nZaven raised a finger. \"Iron golems is the Jewish name. The Vlachs call them werewolves, and our Greek brothers call them Minotaurs.\" He pointed at the walker from two nights before. \"I believe you've met \u015eahmeran, my personal machine. She is a goddess of the Kurdish people.\"\n\n\"And they're all here together,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Another excellent observation,\" Lilit muttered.\n\n\"Hush, girl,\" Nene said, her bed making its slow way toward them. \"For too long we were content to look after our own neighborhoods and let the sultan run the empire. But the Germans and their mekanzimat have done us a favor\u2014they've united us at last.\"\n\nZaven knelt beside Alek. \"The machines below are only a fraction of those pledged to us. We use these five to train, so that a Kurd knows how to pilot a werewolf, and an Arab an iron golem.\"\n\n\"So you can fight together properly,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Indeed. My own daughter has mastered all of them!\"\n\n\"A girl piloting a walker? How utterly\u2014\" Alek saw Lilit's expression, and cleared his throat. \"How exceptional.\"\n\n\"Fah! Not so strange as you think,\" Zaven said, raising a fist. \"Once the revolution comes, women will be the equal of men in all things!\"\n\nAlek stifled a laugh. More of the family madness, it seemed, or perhaps the influence of the iron-willed Nene on her son.\n\n\"How does that Tesla cannon work?\" Lilit asked.\n\n\"My man Klopp says it's a lightning generator.\" Alek cast his mind back to Klopp's explanation a few days after the battle with the Goeben. \"Mr. Tesla is an American, but the Germans fund his experiments. They've been working on this cannon for some time. How do you know about it?\"\n\n\"Never mind that,\" Nene said. \"Can it stop our walkers?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. The Tesla cannon is designed to be used against hydrogen breathers. But the Goeben still has its big guns, and walkers like these are the perfect targets.\" Alek looked to the southeast, where smoke plumes rose from the sultan's palace\u2014near the water. As long as the German warships waited there, the palace was safe from a walker attack. \"That's the real reason those German ironclads are here, isn't it? To keep the sultan in power.\"\n\n\"And to starve the Russians.\" Nene shrugged. \"A hammer can pound more than one nail. You've had a bit of military training, it seems.\"\n\n\"More than a bit, when it comes to walkers.\" Alek straightened his shoulders. \"Give me the trickiest one you have, and I'll prove it.\"\n\nNene nodded, a slow smile spreading across her face. \"You heard the boy, granddaughter. Take him to \u015eahmeran.\"\n\nAlek flexed his fingers, looking over the controls.\n\nThe instruments were labeled with symbols rather than words, but the purposes of most were clear. Engine temperature, pressure gauges, fuel\u2014nothing he hadn't seen in his Stormwalker.\n\nBut the saunters were a different matter entirely. They rose up from the pilot's cabin floor, like huge levers. The handgrips looked like the armored gloves of a medieval knight.\n\n\"How am I meant to walk with these?\" he asked.\n\n\"You aren't. The saunters control the arms.\" Lilit pointed at the floor. \"You use the pedals to walk, ninny.\"\n\n\"Ninny,\" the creature repeated, then chuckled.\n\n\"Your pet knows you quite well, doesn't it,\" Lilit said, stroking the creature's fur. \"What's its name?\"\n\n\"Name? Fabricated beasts don't have them. Except for the great airships, of course.\"\n\n\"Well, this one needs a name,\" Lilit said. \"Is it a boy or a girl?\"\n\nAlek thought for a moment, then frowned. \"The Leviathan's crew always said 'it' when speaking of beasts. Perhaps they're neither.\"\n\n\"Then where do they come from?\"\n\n\"Eggs.\"\n\n\"But what lays the eggs?\"\n\nAlek shrugged. \"As far as I know, the boffins pull them out of their bowler hats.\"\n\nLilit looked more closely at the beast while Alek stared at the saunters. He'd never piloted a walker with arms before. This \u015eahmeran might be trickier than he'd thought.\n\nBut if a girl could pilot the monstrosity, it couldn't be too difficult.\n\n\"How do I know what the arms are doing? I can't even see them from in here.\"?\n\n\"You just know where they are, as if they were part of your own body. But since this is your first time \u2026\" Lilit spun a crank, and the top half of the pilot's cabin began to move upward, huffing with pneumatics. \"You can try it in parade mode.\"\n\n\"Parade mode?\"\n\n\"For when \u015eahmeran marches in the Kurds' religious festivals.\"\n\n\"Ah, that sort of parade,\" Alek said. \"This is a very odd country. All the walkers seem to be symbols as well as machines.\"\n\n\"\u015eahmeran is not a symbol. She's a goddess.\"\n\n\"A goddess. Of course,\" Alek muttered. \"There certainly are a lot of females in this revolution.\"\n\nLilit rolled her eyes as she pulled the engine starter. The machine rumbled to life beneath them, and the creature imitated the engine noise, then climbed from Alek's shoulder to peek over the front edge of the control panel.\n\n\"Will your pet be all right?\" Lilit asked.\n\n\"It has an excellent head for heights,\" Alek said. \"When we escaped the Leviathan, we climbed across a cable much higher than this.\"\n\n\"But why did you steal it?\" she asked. \"To prove that you'd been aboard the airship?\"\n\n\"I didn't steal anything,\" Alek said, placing his boots carefully on the foot pedals. \"It insisted on coming.\"\n\nThe creature turned to face them and seemed to smile at Lilit.\n\n\"Somehow, I almost believe you,\" she said softly. \"Well, show us how clever you are, boy. Walking is the easy part.\"\n\n\"I doubt it shall be any trouble,\" Alek said, watching the instruments come to life. When the pressure gauges steadied, he pushed down on the foot pedals, slow and steady.\n\nThe machine responded, moving forward smoothly, the spiny legs along its belly moving in automatic sequence. He lifted his left foot from the pedal, guiding the walker into a slow turn.\n\n\"This is easier than my four-legged runabout,\" he exclaimed. \"I could pilot that when I was twelve!\"\n\nLilit gave him a strange look. \"You had your own walker? When you were twelve?\"\n\n\"It was the family's.\" Alek reached for the saunters. \"And boys have a natural gift for mechaniks, after all.\"\n\n\"A natural gift for boastfulness, you mean.\"\n\n\"We'll see who's being boastful.\" Alek slipped his right hand into the metal glove and made a fist. A great pair of claws snapped shut on the machine's right side.\n\n\"Careful,\" Lilit said. \"\u015eahmeran is stronger than any mere boy.\"\n\nAlek pushed the saunter about, watching how the walker's arm followed his movements. The arm was long and sinuous, like a snake's body, its scales sliding against one another with a sound like a dozen swords drawn from their scabbards.\n\n\"The trick is to forget your own body,\" Lilit said. \"Pretend that the walker's hands are yours.\"\n\nThe saunters were amazingly sensitive, the giant arms mimicking every movement of Alek's, but slowly. He paced himself to match the walker's scale, and soon he felt twenty meters tall, as if he were wearing a huge costume, instead of piloting.\n\n\"Now comes the tricky part.\" Lilit pointed. \"Pick up that wagon over there.\"\n\nIn the far corner of the courtyard, an old wagon lay overturned. Its wooden side was scratched and gouged, like an ill-treated child's toy.\n\n\"Looks easy enough,\" Alek said, guiding the machine closer among the motionless forms of the other walkers.\n\nHe stretched out his right hand, and the machine obeyed him. From the control panel the creature imitated the sounds of hissing air and metal as they echoed from the courtyard walls.\n\nAlek closed his fingers slowly, and the claws shut around the wagon.\n\n\"Good so far,\" Lilit said. \"But stay gentle.\"\n\nAlek nodded, remembering Volger's rule on how to hold a sword\u2014like a pet bird, tight enough to keep it from flying away but gentle enough not to suffocate it.\n\nThe wagon shifted in the \u015eahmeran's grip, threatening to fall.\n\n\"Turn your wrist,\" Lilit said quickly. \"But don't squeeze!\"\n\nAlek turned the claw upright, trying to settle the wagon in its metal palm. But the wagon had other ideas, tipping from its side onto its wheels. It began to roll.\n\n\"Careful!\" Lilit said, and the creature repeated the word.\n\nAlek twisted his hand in the saunter again, trying to flip the wagon back onto its side. But it wouldn't stay still, like a marble rolling back and forth in a bowl. The wagon reached the edge of his palm and teetered there, and Alek squeeze a little harder.\u2026\n\nThe giant metal fingers shut with a sharp hiss of air, and he heard the crack of wood splitting. Splinters flew in all directions, and Alek ducked as something large sailed past his head. Tiny wooden needles stung his face.\n\nHe opened his eyes in time to see the wagon's pieces crashing to bits against the paving stones below. He stared at the empty claw, annoyed.\n\nLilit sat back up beside him\u2014a few tiny splinters were caught in her black hair. The creature stared up at him from the pilot's cabin floor, making a sound like the creak of shattering wood.\n\n\"Having the power of a goddess is quite a responsibility,\" Lilit said quietly, flicking at her hair. \"Don't you agree, boy?\"\n\nAlek nodded slowly, turning his wrist and watching the giant claw rotate on its gears. He still felt it, the connection between himself and the machine.\n\n\"I don't suppose you have another wagon,\" he said. \"I think I've got it now.\"\n\nNight was falling at last.\n\nDeryn had spent a long, hot day among the crates on the cargo ship's deck, hiding from the crew and the merciless sun. It was the vessel she'd spotted from the beach at Kilye Niman, a German steamship carrying fat coils of copper wire, and turbine blades the size of windmill sails.\n\nThe ship had waited at the kraken nets till dawn, then had taken most of the day to steam to Istanbul. After spending seven weeks on an airship, Deryn was exasperated by the crawling pace of the surface craft. It didn't help that since her hasty supper the night before, Deryn had eaten only a stale biscuit she'd found among the crates. For drink she'd had only handfuls of dew scraped from a canvas lifeboat cover.\n\nOf course, she was better off than her men, who were all either dead or held captive by the Ottomans. On the slow journey here, she'd replayed the scene on the beach a thousand times in her mind, wondering what she could have done. But against the scorpion walker and two dozen soldiers, she would only have been captured herself.\n\nThe cargo ship was not entirely without conveniences, though. The crew mostly stayed belowdecks, and a line of sailors' uniforms had been left drying in the sun. She'd found a set of slops that would fit well enough.\n\nOnce the sun set, she would swim for shore.\n\nIstanbul was already lighting up before her. Clanker electricals were harsher than the soft bioluminescence of London and Paris, and what had seemed a ghostly glow from the airfield was dazzling this close. The city looked like a fairground coming to life, all glitter and brilliance.\n\nEven the sultan's palace was alight on its hill, the minarets of the two great mosques lancing into the sky around it. Deryn had decided to head for that section of the city, the peninsula where both the oldest and newest buildings were clustered.\n\nBut as she stretched her swimming muscles, Deryn felt one last squick of doubt about her plan and considered the options. There were more than a hundred ships standing off Istanbul, some of them civilian vessels under British flags. If she swam across to one of those, it might carry her back out to the Mediterranean, where the Royal Navy waited. Or north to the Russians in the Black Sea, who were Darwinists, at least.\n\nBut a thousand excuses crowded her head\u2014the Ottomans would be searching British ships carefully. And why would any captain believe that she was a decorated officer in the Air Service and not some mad stowaway? What if without her middy's uniform and a ship full of beasties at her command, anyone could see straightaway that she was a mere girl?\n\nAnd even if she did make it back to the Leviathan, what if Volger hadn't managed to escape? He could destroy her career with a word at any time.\n\nBut it wasn't any of those reasons that had set her on this course, Deryn knew. Alek was here in this city, and needed help. Perhaps it was daft to risk everything for some barking prince, a boy who didn't even know she was a girl. But it was no more daft than Alek walking across a glacier to assist a wounded enemy airship, was it?\n\nWhen the water had turned into a black expanse, an upside-down sky shimmering with the city's radiance, Deryn left her hiding place. She stuffed the stolen uniform inside her diving suit and crept to the bow. After slipping over the gunwales, she descended the anchor chain hand over hand, then slid into the water without a splash.\n\nShe crawled ashore in the shadows beneath a long pier. Even at night, men and walkers worked the bustling docks, scurrying about beneath huge mechanical arms that chuffed smoke as they pulled cargo from half a dozen ships. Floodlights cast hard black shadows that jittered and swung.\n\nDeryn stole into a maze of off-loaded crates and metal parts, and quickly found a dark spot where she could strip off the Spottiswoode suit. Pulling on her borrowed German sailor's slops, she felt a squick of vexation\u2014demoted from an officer in the Air Service to a common seaman! And if the Ottomans caught her like this, out of uniform, they'd hang her as a spy for sure.\n\nThe diving suit had to disappear, so Deryn stuffed all but the boots and her rigging knife into a towering coil of copper wire. She reckoned most dock workers would hardly know what to make of the tangle of turtle shell and salamander skin, except to wonder if a mermaid had come ashore.\n\nIt was easy, staying hidden among the endless piles of crates\u2014enough mechanical parts to rebuild Istanbul from scratch, she reckoned. They were all labeled in German.\n\nDeryn crept inland, heading toward the city lights and the promise of food and water. At the edge of the warren, however, she found herself facing a chain-link fence. It was sixteen feet tall, with three coils of barbed wire glittering along its top side. The only gate in sight was wound shut with a massive chain.\n\n\"Just my luck,\" Deryn muttered. She'd come ashore at a top secret section of the waterfront.\n\nIt would've been simple enough to swim out and come in elsewhere, but Deryn was weak with hunger. The thought of plunging back into the cold, dark water made her shiver. What was so barking important about all this cargo, anyway? As she skulked along the fence, looking for an unlocked gate, she took a closer look.\n\nIt wasn't just mechanical parts, but electricals as well. There were giant rolls of rubber insulation, and a row of glass jar batteries, the same kind of voltaic cells that the Leviathan's searchlights used. But these were the size of outhouses! Deryn remembered the turbine blades aboard the cargo ship. Were the Germans building a power station somewhere here in Istanbul?\n\nShe heard voices, and ducked lower into the shadows. It was a dozen men or so, one with a ring of keys jingling in his hand. Perfect\u2014they were headed out.\n\nDeryn crept behind them to a wide gate in the fence, with tracks leading through and out into the darkness. As their leader unlocked it, the men spread out across its length. They pulled it open, metal scraping over cobblestones.\n\nSomething huge and restless waited beyond the fence, huffing and steaming in the cool night air. Then it began to move, a colossal machine rolling slowly into view. The engine at its front took the form of a dragon's head, and the cargo arms were folded on its back like black metal wings. White clouds of steam roiled from its grinning jaws.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Deryn said softly, realizing that she'd seen pictures of this contraption in the penny newspapers.\u2026\n\nIt was the Orient-Express.\n\nThe great train eased forward, forcing Deryn farther back into the piles of cargo. But she was unable to take her eyes from it.\n\nThe Express seemed to be a strange crossbreed of Ottoman and German design. The engine suggested a dragon's face, with a great lolling tongue spilling from its jaws. But the mechanical arms that unfolded from its cargo cars were unadorned, and moved as smoothly as the wings of a soaring hawk.\n\nThe arms reached out into the piles of cargo, lifting metal parts, coils of wire, and glass insulators shaped like huge translucent bells. The train began to load itself, like some greedy monster ravaging a treasure trove.\n\nSuddenly the dragon's single eye burst to life, a blinding headlight. As brilliance spilled across the darkness, Deryn stumbled blindly back, the shadows of her hiding place ripped away.\n\nA cry sounded above the huffing engines of the Express\u2014\"Wer ist das?\"\u2014and Deryn understood enough Clanker to know what it meant.\n\nSomeone had spotted her.\n\nShe turned and ran, half blinded, stumbling on a bundle of plastic tubing. The tubes skittered underfoot, and Deryn hit the ground hard. She rose painfully to her feet and staggered into the darkness, where she curled up behind a large spool of wire.\n\nHer knee was throbbing, her hands cut and bleeding from breaking her fall. Dizziness swept across her, twenty-four hours without proper food taking its toll. The pounding in her chest felt thin and weak, like a bird's heart instead of her own.\n\nThere was no way to outrun the men\u2014she had to outsmart them.\n\nDeryn ignored the pain, crawling back toward the Express on hands and knees, keeping low in the cargo stacks, squeezing through the narrowest gaps she could find. She hoped they hadn't got a good look at her, and wouldn't realize they were chasing a skinny wee slip of a girl.\n\nTheir voices surrounded her, echoing through the piles of crates and metal. Deryn kept crawling, pushing back toward the bright lights of the train. The shouting men flowed past her, thinking she was still running away.\u2026\n\nThen a shadow spilled across Deryn\u2014a huge mechanical claw reaching down for her. She dropped flat, and the claw's three rubber-tipped fingers closed around a coil of wire as big as a hippoesque.\n\nThe machine paused a moment, its grip settling around the coil, and Deryn saw her chance. She scampered up and climbed inside the cylinder of wire.\n\nWith a lurch the claw hauled it\u2014and her\u2014up into the air.\n\nShe looked down to see the ground sliding past, the electric torches of her pursuers spreading out across the maze of crates. But no one thought to look up at the cargo passing overhead.\n\nThe metal fingers squeezed tighter for a moment, and the wire pressed inward around Deryn. Had the arm's operator spotted her and decided to crush her?\n\nBut it was just the giant claw adjusting its grip. Soon she was being gently lowered, the coil of wire settling in among a dozen others.\n\nShe waited for the arm to swing away again, then climbed out into the belly of an open-topped freight car. The side walls were only a bit taller than Deryn was, and she scrambled up and peered out.\n\nMore men had arrived to join the search. Dogs, too\u2014a pair of German shepherds was yanking their handler along, sniffing everything in sight. Luckily, traveling by mechanical arm didn't leave much of a scent trail. But she had to get out of this cargo car before the next incoming load crushed her flat.\n\nDeryn made her way to the front end, peeking at the next car along. It had a closed top and a fancy-looking glass door at this end. She climbed over and dropped between the cars, then jimmied the door open with her rigging knife.\n\nShe slipped inside and closed it, holding the knife out in front of her.\n\n\"Hallo?\" she called softly, hoping her Clanker accent was believable.\n\nNo one answered. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Deryn let out a low whistle.\n\nIt was a saloon car, as fancy as a box of peacocks. A row of small tables ran down one side. The brass handrails gleamed, and the gently arching ceiling was padded with dimpled leather. The armchairs looked absurdly heavy compared to the spindly furniture on the Leviathan. Each of these chairs had its own tiny footrest rising from the floor. A mechanical bartender wearing a fez stood motionless in the shadows.\n\nShe took a few steps forward, feeling out of place. Even empty and dark, the dining car had the smell of poshness, and Deryn half expected a man in a tuxedo to appear and smirk at her ill-fitting uniform.\n\nShe sat down at one of the tables, peeking out through the curtains at the hunt outside. The electric torches of her pursuers bobbed in the darkness, but they were fanning out in the direction of the water, still thinking she'd run away from the Express. Barks and shouts echoed around the docks, but here inside the train it felt as if a fancy supper were about to be served.\u2026\n\n\"Supper,\" Deryn whispered, and sprang to her feet.\n\nShe climbed behind the bar and hunted through the shelves, finding corkscrews and towels, and bottles of brandy and wine. This was just a saloon, separate from the dining car\u2014there was no barking food here!\n\nBut then she discovered a drawer full of several fancy cakes wrapped up in thick cloth napkins. One of the crew must have set them aside and then forgotten them.\n\nDeryn sat on the floor and began to gobble the cakes. Stale or not, they tasted better than anything she'd eaten since joining the Service. She washed them down with water from the bottom of a silver ice bucket, then had a few swigs from an open bottle of brandy.\n\n\"Not bad at all,\" she said, then burped.\n\nNow that her head had stopped spinning with hunger, Deryn found herself wondering what exactly was going on here. Where were the Clankers taking all this cargo? According to the labels, it had all come from Germany. So why put it on the Express, which would be headed back to Munich?\n\nDeryn peeked out a window again\u2014no sign of the search remained. Her pursuers were probably at the shore, having guessed that she'd snuck in from the water.\n\nThe mechanical arms were finishing up the last few pieces of cargo\u2014huge glass jar batteries and insulators\u2014and the train's engines were rumbling back to life.\n\nWhat if it was headed to a place close by, somewhere it could return from before dawn? No one would notice it had slipped out of the city, or suspect the luxurious Orient-Express of carrying industrial cargo.\n\nThe train jolted into motion, and Deryn reminded herself that she wasn't here to spy on the Clankers. She was here to help Alek, not uncover the secrets of the Ottoman Empire.\n\nThe barbed wire fence was already sliding past on either side\u2014she could jump off anytime now with no one the wiser.\n\nDeryn went back to the bar and selected the fanciest bottle of brandy she could find. It was stealing, plain and simple, but she needed something to trade for money and a proper meal. This dusty old brandy was the best thing she could find.\n\nThe Express crept slowly through Istanbul, not calling much attention to itself. The tracks traveled near the water's edge, past darkened warehouses and closed factory gates. Deryn opened the door and stood between the cars, waiting for the right moment to jump.\n\nAs the train slowed for a turn, she stepped off as smoothly as some tourist arriving on holiday. She skidded down the embankment and crouched there until the steaming dragon had passed, then made her way into the unlit streets.\n\nEven this late, the bright lights of the city still glowed on the horizon, but Deryn reckoned she needed rest more than food now. So she picked the darkest, shabbiest alley she could find and curled up for a few hours of fitful sleep.\n\nShe awoke before dawn to someone prodding her with a broom.\n\nIt was a young man in coveralls, who went about the task without particular enthusiasm. When Deryn scrambled to her feet, he turned back to sweeping the alley, never saying a word. Of course, the man would hardly expect her to speak Turkish. The port of Istanbul was probably full of foreign sailors lugging about bottles of brandy.\n\nDrums were sounding in the distance, along with a vigorous chanting. It seemed a bit early for anyone to be making such a racket. The trio of cats she'd shared the alley with hardly seemed to notice, though, and went back to sleep after the sweeping man had passed on.\n\nDeryn walked at random until she spied the forest of minarets near the sultan's palace. Surely there were restaurants for sightseers thereabouts. The fancy cakes in her stomach had been replaced by gnawing hunger, and she needed to be thinking clearly if she was to find Alek in this giant city.\n\nTouring Istanbul on foot wasn't like looking down from an airship or the howdah of a giant elephant. The smells were sharper down here\u2014unfamiliar spices and walker exhaust snarled in the air, and pushcarts full of strawberries passed, leaving a sweet haze in their wake, along with a few hungry-looking dogs. A dozen languages mixed in Deryn's ears; a jumble of alphabets decorated every news kiosk. Luckily, there were also simple hand gestures among all the babel. Making herself understood would be simple enough.\n\nWhen men in seamen's slops called out to Deryn, she answered them in Clanker. She'd learned a handful of greetings from Bauer and Hoffman, and a few choice curses as well. It never hurt to practice.\n\nShe found a shop window filled with fancy liquor bottles, dusted off her brandy, and went inside. At first the proprietor looked askance at her disheveled slops, and almost tossed her out when he discovered that she was there to sell, not buy. But when he glimpsed the bottle's label, his attitude changed. He offered her a pile of coins, which grew by half when she gave him a hard look.\n\nMost of the restaurants were closed, but Deryn soon found a hotel. A few minutes later she was sitting down to a breakfast of cheese, olives, cucumbers, black coffee, and a small bowl of a gloppy substance called yogurt, which was halfway between cheese and milk.\n\nAs she ate, Deryn wondered how she would find Alek. In his message to Volger he'd said that his hotel had a name like his mother's. That sounded simple enough, except that Alek had never told Deryn his mother's name. She knew his granduncle the emperor, of course\u2014Franz Joseph\u2014and remembered that his father's name was also Franz something-or-other. But wives were seldom as famous as their husbands.\n\nShe watched a group of sailors walk past, and wondered if any of them were Austrian. Surely they would know the murdered archduchess's name, if Deryn could only make her question understood.\n\nBut then she remembered the other half of Alek's message, that the Germans were looking for him. Questions about a fugitive prince from an English-speaking sailor in a Clanker uniform would only attract suspicion.\n\nShe had to find the answer herself. Luckily, Alek's family was famous. Wouldn't they be in history books?\n\nAll she needed was some sort of family tree.\u2026\n\nAn hour later Deryn was standing on a broad marble stair, a brand-new sketchbook in her hand. Before her stood, according to her half dozen conversations in sign language and halting Clanker, the newest and largest library in Istanbul.\n\nIts huge brass columns gleamed in the sun, and its steam-powered revolving doors gathered and disgorged people without pausing. As she passed through them, Deryn had the same jitters she'd felt in the saloon car of the Orient-Express. She didn't belong in any place so fancy, and the bustle of so many machines made her dizzy.\n\nThe ceiling was a tangle of glass tubes, full of small cylinders zooming through them, almost too fast to see. The clicking fingers of calculation engines covered the walls, fluttering like the cilia of the great airbeast when it was nervous. Clockwork walkers the size of hatboxes scrabbled along the marble floor, stacks of books weighing them down.\n\nA small army of clerks waited behind a row of desks, but Deryn made her way through the vast lobby, headed toward the towering stacks of books. There looked to be millions of them, surely a few were in English.\n\nBut she found herself halted by a fancy iron fence that stretched all the way across the room. Every few feet there was a sign that repeated the same message in two dozen languages:\n\nCLOSED STACKS\u2014ASK AT INFORMATION DESK.\n\nDeryn returned to the desks, screwed up her courage, and went to the one with the nicest-looking clerk behind it. He wore a long gray beard, a fez, and pince-nez glasses, and gave her a slightly puzzled smile as she approached. Deryn guessed that most sailors didn't spend their shore leave in the library.\n\nShe bowed to him, then tore two pages from her sketch pad and set them down on the desk. On one she'd drawn the Hapsburg crest that had decorated the breastplate of Alek's Stormwalker. On the other she had sketched a branching tree, like the genealogies of the great airbeasts that Mr. Rigby was always making them memorize. No doubt the Clankers drew their family trees in a different manner, but surely a librarian would understand the concept.\n\nThe man adjusted his glasses, stared at the sketches for a moment, then gave Deryn a quizzical look.\n\n\"You are Austrian?\" he asked in careful Clanker.\n\n\"No, sir. America.\" She spoke in German as well, but tried to mimic Eddie Malone's accent. \"But I want \u2026\"\u2014her brain raced\u2014\"to understand the war.\"\n\nThe man slowly nodded. \"Very well, young man. A moment, please.\"\n\nHe turned to face what looked like a piano set into the desk, and clacked away at its keys. No music emerged, but as he typed a punch card emerged from a slot in the desk. He handed it to her and pointed.\n\n\"Good luck.\"\n\nDeryn bowed and thanked him, then followed his gesture to a kiosk in the center of the room. She watched another patron use it first. The woman fed her punch card into what looked like a miniature loom. The card slid beneath a fine-tooth comb, whose tiny metal teeth jabbed up and down, as if scrutinizing the holes in the card.\n\nAfter a moment's spinning and clattering, the card was spat back out. From the top of the kiosk, a clockwork machine climbed up and out, then went skittering away into the stacks of books.\n\nDeryn felt queasy from following the Clanker logic of it all, but stepped forward to repeat the process with her own card. When the card popped back out, she discovered that it was stamped with a number. After a minute's wandering about the lobby, Deryn found a row of small tables labeled with numbers of their own. She sat down at the one that matched her card and pulled out her sketchbook.\n\nAs she drew, the whirr and clatter of the machines echoed around her, the sounds blending like the crash of distant waves. Deryn wondered how the Clankers managed it, translating questions into scatterings of holes in paper. Did every wee sliver of knowledge have its own number? The system was probably quicker than wandering through the ceiling-high shelves, but what other books might she have found, doing it herself?\n\nShe looked up at the calculating engines that covered the walls, and wondered what they were up to. Did they record every question that the librarians had been asked? And if so, who looked at the results? Deryn remembered the eyes peering at her through the slats of the throne room wall, and began to drum her fingers.\n\nSurely in all this tumult of information, no one would notice a few questions about the tragedy that had started this whole barking war.\n\nFinally her clockwork machine scuttled back, like a dog with a fetched bone. It was weighted down with half a dozen books, all of them heavy and bound with cracked old leather.\n\nShe picked a few up and leafed through the gilt-edged pages. Some were in Clanker, others in a flowing script she'd seen on many of the signs outside, but one had hardly any words at all, only names, dates, and coats of arms. On its cover was the Hapsburg crest, and a Latin phrase she remembered from the first time Alek and Dr. Barlow had met.\n\nBella gerant alii, tu Felix Austria, nube.\n\n\"Let others wage war,\" the first part meant.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Deryn said softly to herself\u2014there were a lot of Hapsburgs. The book was thick enough to stun a hippoesque, and the entries stretched back eight hundred years. But Alek was only fifteen; he'd have to be at the end.\n\nShe turned to the last pages and soon found him: \"Aleksandar, Prinz von Hohenberg,\" along with his birth date and the names of his parents\u2014Franz Ferdinand and Sophie Chotek.\n\n\"Sophie,\" Deryn murmured, leaning back and smiling to herself.\n\nShe left the stack of books on the table and headed back toward the revolving doors. After a quick trip down the marble stairs outside, she approached the first of a rank of six-legged taxis, all of them in the shape of giant beetles. Deryn reached into her pocket for the remaining coins.\n\n\"Sophie Hotel?\" she asked. \"Hotel\" was the same in English or Clanker.\n\nThe pilot frowned, then asked, \"Hotel Hagia Sophia?\"\n\nDeryn nodded happily. That sounded close enough\u2014it had to be the one.\n\nThe taxi pilot inspected her handful of coins, then hooked a thumb toward the back seat. Deryn jumped aboard, for once enjoying the rumble of a Clanker engine beneath her. After tracking Alek down in a city of millions, she deserved to ride instead of walk.\n\nThe Hotel Hagia Sophia was pure dead fancy.\n\nDeryn shook her head. She might have expected to find Alek in a place like this. The lobby alone was three stories high and lit by two gas chandeliers and a giant stained-glass skylight. Uniformed bellmen guided their clockwork luggage carriers through the bustling crowd. Marble staircases spiraled their way to the mezzanines and balconies, while steam elevators huffed into the air like sky rockets taking flight.\n\nEven if Alek had chosen this hotel to match his mother's name, Deryn wondered if he might have found another clue to use\u2014one that would have led somewhere a bit less \u2026 princely. The Germans were still looking for him, after all.\n\nOf course, that meant that Alek wouldn't be listed under his own name. So how was she going to get a message to him?\n\nDeryn stood there, hoping to catch a glance of Alek, Bauer, or Master Klopp in the lobby. But the crowd was full of unfamiliar faces, and soon Deryn felt the eyes of a white-gloved bellman on her. Her stolen uniform was rumpled and dirty from sleeping in the alley, and she stuck out like a clump of clart on a fancy china plate. She had only a few coins left, surely not enough to pay for a room, not here.\n\nPerhaps she could buy coffee and some lunch. Judging by what she'd had for breakfast, there were worse places than Istanbul to crawl ashore half starved.\n\nDeryn took a seat at a small table in the hotel dining room, making sure she had a view of the lobby doors. The waiter understood no English, but spoke Clanker no better than she did. He returned with a pot of strong coffee and a menu, and before long Deryn was feasting again, this time on lamb chopped into a hash with nuts and sultanas, covered with a plum jelly as dark as an old bruise.\n\nShe ate slowly, keeping her eyes on the hotel's main doors.\n\nPeople came and went, most of them well-heeled old Clankers. The man at the table next to hers wore a monocle and a handlebar mustache, and was reading a German newspaper. When he left, Deryn reached over and snatched it up. She leafed through the pages to conceal that she was stalling with her food.\n\nThe last page was all photographs\u2014the latest fashions, new clockwork house servants, and well-dressed ladies at a roller-skating parlor. Nothing earth-shattering, until Deryn's eyes fell upon three photos across the bottom of the page. One was the Leviathan flying over the city, another was the Dauntless kneeling in the street after its rampage, and the last showed two men under guard.\u2026\n\nIt was Matthews and Spencer, the survivors of her disastrous first command.\n\nShe squinted at the caption, annoyed that Alek hadn't taught her any Clanker spelling. These three pictures together could hardly be good news. The Leviathan would be leaving Istanbul under a dark cloud today.\n\nUnless the Ottomans had been angry enough to order the airship away early.\n\nDeryn frowned. Count Volger had planned to escape last night, hadn't he? After her almost sleepless night, she'd forgotten all about him.\n\nShe lowered the newspaper, looking more closely at the stuffy old Clankers in the lobby. None had Volger's tall, lean frame and gray mustache. But the wildcount wouldn't have needed a trip to the library to learn Alek's mother's name. Maybe he and Hoffman were already upstairs, having a cup of tea with Alek and the others!\n\nJust then Deryn noticed a young couple coming in through the lobby doors. They were dressed like locals, and the girl was perhaps eighteen and quite beautiful, with long dark hair in tight braids.\n\nDeryn swallowed\u2014the boy was Alek! She'd hardly recognized him in his tunic and tasseled fez. Not that he could wander about Istanbul in an Austrian piloting uniform, but somehow she hadn't expected him to look so... Ottoman.\n\nAlek drew to a halt, his eyes searching the lobby, but Deryn snapped the newspaper up in front of her face.\n\nWho was this strange girl? One of his new allies? Suddenly that word took on an entirely new meaning in Deryn's head.\n\nA moment later Alek and the girl headed toward the elevators, and Deryn leapt to her feet. Whoever this girl was, Deryn couldn't afford to miss this chance. She slapped her remaining coins onto the table and headed after them.\n\nAn elevator opened up before the two, the attendant ushering them inside. Deryn waved her newspaper, and the attendant nodded, holding the door. Alek and the girl were talking intently in Clanker, and hardly noticed when she stepped in beside them.\n\nAs the door slid closed, Deryn opened the paper, pretending to read.\n\n\"Nice weather we're having,\" she said in English.\n\nAlek turned toward her, a baffled expression on his face. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.\n\n\"Dylan,\" she said politely. \"In case you've forgotten.\"\n\n\"God's wounds! It is you! But what are you\u2014\"\n\n\"It's a long story,\" Deryn said, glancing at the girl. \"And a bit secret, actually.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course\u2014introductions are in order,\" he said, then glanced at the elevator man. \"Or will be \u2026 quite soon.\"\n\nThey rode the rest of the way in silence.\n\nAlek led them to a set of double doors that opened onto a vast room, all silk and tassels, with its own balcony and a shiny brass switchboard for calling servants. There was no bed in sight, just a pair of French doors half opened to reveal yet another room.\n\nDeryn noticed the other girl's eyes widen, and she felt a squick of relief. Apparently this girl had never been here before either.\n\n\"Almost as fancy as your castle,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"And with rather better service. There's someone here you should meet, Dylan.\" Alek turned and called out, \"Guten tag, Bovril!\"\n\n\"Guten tag!\" came a voice from nowhere, and then a wee beastie waddled from behind the curtains. It looked like a cross between a butler monkey and some kind of cuddly toy, all huge eyes and tiny, clever hands.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Deryn breathed. She'd forgotten all about Dr. Barlow's missing beastie. \"Is that what I think it is?\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" the beastie said sarcastically.\n\nShe blinked. \"How in blazes does it know me?\"\n\n\"An intriguing question,\" Alek said. \"Bovril seems to have been listening while it was still in the egg. But it also heard your voice from that reporter's awful bullfrog.\"\n\n\"You mean that bum-rag was recording us?\"\n\nAlek nodded, and Deryn softly swore. What of Volger's threats had the bullfrog repeated?\n\nThe strange girl didn't seem surprised to see Bovril at all. She pulled a bag of peanuts from her pocket, and the beastie crawled over to her and began to eat them.\n\nDeryn remembered her conversation with Dr. Barlow aboard the sultan's airyacht. The lady boffin had been quite vague about the creature's purpose. Deryn still didn't know what \"perspicacious\" meant, and there was all that business about nascent fixation, which had sounded a bit sinister, even if baby ducks did it too.\n\nShe'd have to keep an eye on this beastie.\n\n\"You named it Bovril?\" she asked Alek.\n\n\"I named it, in fact,\" said the girl in slow, careful English. \"This silly boy kept calling it 'the creature.'\"\n\n\"But you're not supposed to name beasties! If you get too attached, you can't use them properly.\"\n\n\"Use them?\" Lilit asked. \"What a horrid way to think of animals.\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. Had Alek taken up with Monkey Luddites now? \"Aye, lassie, and you've never eaten meat?\"\n\nThe girl frowned. \"Well, of course I have. But that seems different, somehow.\"\n\n\"Only because you're used to it. And why in blazes did you name it Bovril, anyway? That's a sort of beef tea!\"\n\nThe girl shrugged. \"I thought it should have an English name. And Bovril is the only English thing I like.\"\n\n\"It's Scottish, actually,\" Deryn muttered.\n\n\"Speaking of names, I've been quite rude.\" Alek bowed a little. \"Lilit, this is Midshipman Dylan Sharp.\"\n\n\"Midshipman?\" she asked. \"You must be from the Leviathan.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Deryn said, giving Alek a hard look. \"Though I was meaning to keep that a secret.\"\n\n\"Secret,\" Bovril repeated, then made a chuckling noise.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Alek said. \"Lilit and I have no secrets from each other.\"\n\nDeryn stared at the boy, hoping that wasn't true. He couldn't have told this girl who his parents were, could he?\n\n\"But where's Volger?\" Alek asked. \"You must have escaped with him.\"\n\n\"I didn't escape at all, you ninny. I'm here for a \u2026\" She glanced at Lilit. \"A secret mission. I've no idea where his countship is.\"\n\n\"But the bullfrog said you were going to help Volger escape!\"\n\nDeryn raised an eyebrow, wondering what else the bullfrog had repeated. Of course, Eddie Malone hadn't understood Volger's threats, and neither would Alek.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" the creature said again, still chuckling.\n\nShe ignored it. \"I was planning to help him and Hoffman escape, but then I was given a mission. Maybe they managed on their own.\" Deryn held up the newspaper. \"But I reckon they didn't have time.\"\n\nAlek took the paper from her and squinted at the captions. \"'The Leviathan had been granted leave to stay in the capital for four extra days, but the night before last the brave Ottoman army discovered Darwinist saboteurs in the Dardanelles. All were killed or captured. In his outrage at this affront, His Excellency the sultan has demanded that the airship leave the capital immediately.'\"\n\nHe let the paper drop.\n\n\"Aye, I thought so,\" Deryn said. \"Volger was planning on escaping last night, but if the ship was sent away yesterday \u2026\"\n\n\"Then he's gone,\" Alek said softly.\n\nDeryn nodded, realizing that the Leviathan was gone too.\n\n\"Where will they take him? London?\"\n\n\"No. They'll head back down to the Mediterranean,\" Deryn said. \"Patrol duty.\"\n\nOf course, it would be much more than patrol. The airship would be awaiting the behemoth's arrival. There would be weeks of training missions, practice in guiding the huge beastie through narrow straits. Battle drills and midnight alerts. And here she was, stuck in this alien city, all alone except for Alek and his men, the perspicacious loris, and this unknown girl.\n\n\"But, Dylan,\" Alek said, \"if you didn't escape, then why are you here?\"\n\n\"Don't you see?\" Lilit spoke up. \"That's a German sailor's uniform\u2014a disguise.\" She turned to Deryn. \"You were one of the saboteurs, weren't you?\"\n\nDeryn frowned. The lassie was quick, wasn't she?\n\n\"Aye, I'm the only one they didn't catch. Those three poor blighters were my men.\"\n\nAlek sat down in a tasseled chair, swearing softly in Clanker. \"I'm sorry about your men, Dylan.\"\n\n\"Aye, me too. And I'm sorry about Volger,\" said Deryn, though she wasn't sure if she meant it. The wildcount was too much of a clever-boots for her liking. \"He really did mean to join you.\"\n\nAlek nodded slowly, staring at the floor. For a moment he looked younger than his fifteen years, like a wee boy. But he gathered himself and looked up at her.\n\n\"Well, I suppose you'll have to do, Dylan. You're a fine soldier, after all. I'm sure the Committee will be happy to have you.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? What committee?\"\n\n\"The Committee for Union and Progress. They seek to overthrow the sultan.\"\n\nDeryn glanced at Lilit, then back at Alek, her eyes widening. Overthrow the sultan? What if Count Volger had been right, and Alek had joined some daft bunch of anarchists? And Monkey Luddite anarchists at that!\n\n\"Alek,\" said Lilit softly, \"you can't go telling this boy our secrets. Not till he's met Nene, at least.\"\n\nAlek waved her protests away. \"You can trust Dylan. He's known for ages who my father was, and he never betrayed me to his officers.\"\n\nDeryn's jaw dropped. Alek had already told this anarchist lassie about his parents? But he'd been in Istanbul only three barking days!\n\nSuddenly she wondered if she should just walk out the door. She'd seen a dozen cargo ships flying British flags. Maybe one would take her out to the Mediterranean and back to sanity.\n\nWhy had she abandoned her sworn duty for some barking prince?\n\n\"Besides,\" Alek said, standing up and putting a hand on Deryn's shoulder, \"fate has delivered Dylan here to Istanbul. Clearly he's meant to help us!\"\n\nDeryn and Lilit looked at each other, and they both rolled their eyes.\n\nAlek ignored their skeptical looks. \"Listen to me, Dylan. You Darwinists want to keep the Ottomans out of the war, right? It's the whole reason Dr. Barlow brought us all this way.\"\n\n\"Aye, but that's all gone pear-shaped. Everything we've done has only pushed the sultan into the Germans' hands.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Alek said. \"But what if the sultan were overthrown? Since the last revolution, the rebels here have despised the Germans. They'd never join the Clanker side.\"\n\n\"The British are just as bad,\" Lilit said. \"All the great powers take advantage of us. But it's true enough, we don't want anything to do with your war. We just want the sultan gone.\"\n\nDeryn stared at the girl, wondering whether to trust her. Alek apparently did, having blathered all his secrets. But what if he was wrong?\n\nWell, in that case he needed someone he could trust.\n\n\"Great powers,\" muttered Bovril, then went back to eating peanuts.\n\nDeryn let out a slow sigh. She'd come to Istanbul to help Alek, after all, and here he was, asking for help. But this was so much bigger than anything she'd expected.\n\nIf the sultan could be tossed out of his palace, then The Straits would stay open and the Russian army wouldn't starve. The Clankers' grand plan to extend their influence into Asia would be stopped in its tracks.\n\nThis was a chance not just to help Alek but to change the course of the whole barking war. Perhaps it was her duty to stay right here.\n\n\"All right, then,\" she said. \"I'll do what I can.\"\n\n\"I do look rather Turkish, don't I?\" Klopp said, regarding himself in the mirror.\n\nAlek hesitated a moment, struggling for words. The man didn't look like a Turk at all\u2014more like a zeppelin wrapped in blue silk with a tasseled nose cone.\n\n\"Perhaps without the fez, sir,\" Bauer suggested.\n\n\"You might be right, Hans,\" Alek said. \"A turban would be better.\"\n\n\"Fez!\" proclaimed Bovril, who was sitting on Dylan's shoulder eating plums.\n\n\"The fez is good,\" Dylan said. The boy's German was getting better, but he still missed words here and there.\n\n\"How does one put on a turban?\" Klopp asked, but no one knew.\n\nBauer and Klopp had been stuck in the hotel for almost a week now, and it had been slowly driving them mad. A cage was still a cage, however luxurious. But at last they were going out, headed to Zaven's warehouse to inspect the walkers of the Committee.\n\nThe problem was how to get them there without being spotted.\n\nAlek and Dylan had tried their best to buy disguises at the Grand Bazaar, but the results hadn't been entirely successful. Bauer looked too fancy, like one of the hotel doormen, and Klopp's voluminous robes had turned him into a silken airship.\n\n\"We don't have to pass for Ottomans,\" Alek said. \"We're just going through the lobby and into a taxi, then straight to the warehouse. Hardly anyone will see us.\"\n\n\"Then why aren't you dressed like a Hapsburg prince, young master?\" Klopp pulled the fez from his head. \"Seeing as how these anarchists already know your name.\"\n\n\"They're not anarchists,\" Alek said for the hundredth time. \"Anarchists want to destroy all government. The Committee just wants to replace the sultan with an elected parliament.\"\n\n\"It's all the same nasty business,\" Klopp said, shaking his head. \"Murdering one's masters. Have you forgotten those Serb boys throwing bombs at your parents?\"\n\nAlek bridled at Klopp's impertinence, but kept his anger in check. The old man had a dim view of revolutions in general, and Lilit's chatter about women's equality had hardly helped.\n\nBut meeting Zaven and the iron golems would put Klopp at ease. Nothing brought a smile to his face like the sight of a new walker.\n\n\"The Germans were behind that attack, Master Klopp. And allying with the Committee is our only way to strike back at them.\"\n\n\"I suppose you're right, young master.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Alek said simply. He looked at Bauer, who promptly nodded his head.\n\nDylan, however, was proving more difficult to convince. He'd taken an instant dislike to Lilit, and refused to tell Alek anything about his mission in Istanbul, saying only that it was too secret to share with \"a bunch of daft anarchists.\"\n\nStill, it was enough that Dylan was here in Istanbul, ready to help. Something about the boy's brisk confidence made Alek remember that providence was on his side.\n\n\"We have to bring the beastie,\" Dylan said in English, pulling on a silk jacket. His clothes fit perfectly\u2014he'd spent an hour alone with the tailor getting them just right. \"Dr. Barlow says it can be quite useful.\"\n\n\"But all it does is babble,\" Alek said, pulling his most important cargo\u2014a small, heavy satchel\u2014onto his shoulder. \"Did she explain exactly how it's meant to help?\"\n\nDylan opened the birdcage, and Bovril scampered over and jumped inside. \"Only that we should listen to it. Because it's quite \u2026 perspicacious.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"I'm afraid that word is beyond my English.\"\n\n\"Aye. It's beyond mine, too.\" Dylan reached into the birdcage and scratched the creature's chin. \"But you're a cute wee beastie, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Perspicacious,\" the creature said.\n\nWhen Klopp was finally ready, Alek used the switchboard to call for a steam elevator. A few minutes later the four of them were downstairs and headed across the lobby.\n\nThe hotel was bustling, and no one stared at their clothes or asked why they were carrying toolboxes. Alek dropped the key off at the desk, and the doorman saluted smartly as he led them all outside. One thing could be said for Istanbul, people minded their own business here.\n\nSeveral of the city's scarab beetle taxis were waiting, and Alek chose the largest. It had two ranks of passenger seats, the rearmost big enough for Klopp's ample frame. Alek climbed into the front rank with Deryn, then handed the pilot some coins and told him the name of Zaven's neighborhood.\n\nThe man gave him a nod, and then they were off.\n\nAbove the noises of the street, Alek heard a rumbling from the birdcage. It was Bovril imitating the walker's engine. He leaned down to shush the beast, then slipped the small, heavy satchel under the seat.\n\n\"A lot of soldiers about,\" Bauer said. \"Is it always this way?\"\n\nAlek looked up, frowning. The walker was striding down a wide avenue lined with tall trees. Ottoman soldiers stood on either side, forming themselves into double ranks. Most were in dress uniforms.\n\n\"I've never seen this many,\" he said. \"Perhaps it's a parade.\"\n\nThe taxi was slowing now, the traffic growing heavier. Ahead of them a cargo walker in the shape of a water buffalo began to belch black smoke, and Klopp made a rude comment about poor maintenance. Hot steam clouds billowed from the surrounding engines, until the four of them were all tugging at their new clothes.\n\n\"Sir,\" Bauer said softly, \"something's going on up there.\"\n\nAlek peered through the water buffalo's exhaust. A hundred meters ahead a squad of soldiers was stopping every vehicle that passed.\n\n\"A checkpoint,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Foreigners are meant to carry passports in this country,\" Klopp said softly.\n\n\"Should we get out and walk?\" Alek said.\n\nKlopp shook his head. \"That'll just make them curious. We're carrying these toolboxes \u2026 and a birdcage, for heaven's sake.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Alek sighed. \"Well, then, we're tourists who've left our passports at our hotel. And if that doesn't work, we can bribe them.\"\n\n\"And if bribery doesn't work?\" Klopp asked.\n\nAlek frowned. They were carrying too much to run, and there were too many soldiers here to start a fight.\n\n\"Let me guess,\" Dylan said in English. \"You're thinking about bribing them. They'll refuse. No soldier takes a bribe with so many captains about.\"\n\nAlek swore softly. It was true\u2014officers with tall plumed hats were everywhere.\n\n\"Can't you pilot this contraption?\" Dylan asked.\n\nAlek peered over the pilot's shoulder at the strange controls. \"With six legs? Not me, but Klopp can handle anything.\"\n\nDylan gave him a grin. \"Enough with your blether, then. When it comes time, I'll give the pilot a heave, and you and Bauer shove Master Klopp in front of the saunters!\"\n\n\"I suppose that sounds simple enough,\" Alek said.\n\nBut of course it wasn't simple at all.\n\nThe next five minutes were quite excruciating. The line oozed along like heavy engine oil, while Klopp listed every conceivable disaster under his breath. But finally the belching water buffalo ahead of them passed the checkpoint, and the taxi strode into place.\n\nA soldier stepped forward and gave them all a long, puzzled look. He held his hand out, saying something in Turkish.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Alek said, \"but we don't speak your language.\"\n\nThe man offered a polite bow, and said in excellent German, \"Passports, then, please.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Alek made a show of checking his pockets. \"I seem to have forgotten mine.\"\n\nKlopp and Bauer followed suit, patting their silk robes and frowning.\n\nThe soldier raised an eyebrow, then turned to his squad and lifted a hand in the air.\n\n\"Oh, blisters!\" Dylan cried, grabbing the startled pilot under his armpits and lifting him up. \"Do it now!\"\n\nAs Dylan dropped the man over the side of the taxi, Alek helped Bauer shove Klopp toward the front seat. He felt as heavy as a hogshead of wine, but a moment later he was sitting at the controls, his hands gripping the saunters.\n\nThe taxi reared up like a stallion on its four hind legs, scattering the guards around them. Then it bolted forward, sparks flying from its metal feet. Past the crowded checkpoint the avenue was clear, and soon Klopp had the machine at full gallop.\n\nThe soldiers cried out, unshouldering their rifles, and soon gunshots echoed around the taxi. Alek ducked, feeling as though his teeth were being shaken from his head. Dylan's arms were wrapped around Klopp's waist to keep them both from flying out of the taxi. Bauer had his hands on the toolboxes, and Alek reached down to secure the small satchel on the floor.\n\nThe only sound from the birdcage was Bovril's maniacal laughter.\n\n\"Hold on tight!\" Klopp shouted, and leaned the taxi into a tight turn. Its six insectlike feet skidded along the cobblestones, making a sound like sabers dragged along a brick wall.\n\nAlek stuck his head up. This side street was narrower, and pedestrians were scattering as the taxi's beetle jaws hurtled toward them.\n\n\"Don't kill anyone, Klopp!\" he shouted, just as the machine's right foreleg clipped a stack of barrels. One barrel split as the stack tumbled, and the sharp scent of vinegar sprayed into the air. At the next turn the taxi began to skid again, threatening to slide sideways through the large windows of a butcher shop, but Klopp wrestled it back under control.\n\n\"Where am I going?\" he cried.\n\nAlek pulled Zaven's hand-drawn map from his pocket, and made a rough calculation. \"Head left when you can, and slow down. No one's behind us yet.\"\n\nKlopp nodded, and brought the machine down into a six-legged canter. The next street was lined with mechanical parts shops and crowded with cargo walkers. No one looked twice at the taxi.\n\n\"I don't know how you can stand these daft contraptions,\" Dylan said, sitting up straight in his seat. \"They're pure murder when they go fast!\"\n\n\"Wasn't this your idea?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"It worked, didn't it?\"\n\n\"For the moment. They'll be after us soon enough.\"\n\nThe taxi made its way deeper into the industrial part of town, with Klopp following Alek's guesses. The markings of the Committee's mix of languages soon filled the walls. But streets signs were rare here, and nothing matched the few avenues labeled on Zaven's map.\n\n\"This is all quite familiar,\" Alek said to Klopp. \"We're close.\"\n\n\"That might be a problem, sir,\" Bauer said. \"Didn't you tell the cabbie where we were headed?\"\n\n\"I told him what neighborhood.\"\n\n\"The Ottomans must have questioned him by now. They'll be here soon.\"\n\n\"You're right, Hans. We have to hurry.\" Alek turned to Klopp. \"Zaven's warehouse has a view of the whole city. We should be able to see it from higher ground.\"\n\nKlopp nodded, turning whenever a road led upward. Finally the taxi eased to a halt at the crest of a hill, and Alek saw the cluster of warehouses, with Zaven's apartments nestled on top.\n\n\"That's it! Maybe half a kilometer!\"\n\n\"Do you hear that sound?\" Dylan asked.\n\nAlek listened. Even with the taxi idling, it was there\u2014a buzzing at the edge of his awareness. He looked around, but there was nothing in sight except cargo walkers and a clockwork messenger cart.\n\n\"It's not down here,\" Dylan said quietly, staring at the sky.\n\nAlek looked up and saw it.\u2026\n\nA gyrothopter hovering directly overhead.\n\n\"Find cover!\" Alek cried.\n\nKlopp urged the taxi forward again, rounding a corner into a narrow alley.\n\nStone walls loomed over them, the sky hardly wider than a sliver. The gyrothopter darted in and out of view. But however the alley twisted and turned, the machine's buzzing echoed in Alek's ears.\n\nHe noticed that the streets had cleared\u2014the people knew that a military operation was on, and were anxious to get out of the way. Only a few dogs were left to scamper out of the taxi's path.\n\nA light sparkled overhead, followed by a crackling sound.\n\n\"Fireworks!\" Dylan cried. \"The gyropilot's signaling that he's found us!\"\n\nAlek heard the shriek of whistles dead ahead.\n\n\"Klopp! Slow down!\"\n\nAs it rounded the next corner, the taxi skidded to a halt, too late. A squad of soldiers waited, their rifles ready. Klopp pulled the saunters back as they fired, and the taxi reared up again. Alek heard the ping of bullets ricocheting from the machine's underside.\n\nKlopp wheeled the taxi around with its forelegs still in the air, and bolted back the way they'd come. Another volley of shots followed, dust spitting from the stone walls on either side.\n\nThe taxi careened around a corner, but gears were grinding beneath the floorboards, and the smell of burning metal filled the air.\n\n\"Our engine's been hit!\" Bauer cried.\n\n\"I know a trick for that,\" Klopp said calmly.\n\nHe turned them aside into a small plaza with an old stone fountain, and walked the machine straight into the water. Hissing clouds of steam rose up around them as the tortured metal cooled.\n\n\"She won't go much farther,\" Klopp said.\n\n\"We're almost there.\" As Alek stared at his map, he noticed a rumbling sound coming from the birdcage. What in blazes was the beast imitating now?\n\nThen he heard it above the hiss of boiling water.\n\n\"A walker's coming.\" Dylan pointed ahead. \"From that way, dead fast.\"\n\n\"It sounds big. We'll have to turn back and face the soldiers.\"\n\n\"Not if we take those,\" Dylan said, pointing at a stone staircase that led down from the plaza.\n\nAlek shook his head. \"Too steep.\"\n\n\"What's the point of legs if you can't take the barking stairs? Just get moving!\"\n\nIn English or not, Klopp could tell what they were talking about\u2014he was also staring down the steps. He looked at Alek, who nodded. The old man sighed, then grasped the saunters again.\n\n\"Hold on, everyone!\" Alek shouted, planting one boot on the satchel at his feet.\n\nThe machine tipped slowly forward, then slid, its hooves rattling like a rock drill as they skidded down the steps. Stone dust flew as the taxi bounced back and forth, battering the ancient walls. Klopp somehow kept the machine from tipping over, and at last it reached the bottom, sliding onto level pavement.\n\nAlek heard a crack and looked up. Soldiers were taking positions in the plaza above, their rifle muzzles flaring. A two-legged walker strode into view.\n\nAlek blinked\u2014it had Ottoman markings, but it was a German design, not like an animal in any way.\n\n\"Get down!\" he cried. \"And keep going, Klopp!\"\n\nThe taxi ground back into motion, its gears whining with every step. As it rounded the next corner, Alek dared to glance back up. Soldiers were streaming down the stairs, but the walker had come to a halt, its crew unwilling to dare the stairway on two legs.\n\nAlek checked the map again. \"We're almost there, Klopp. That way!\"\n\nThe taxi was limping now, one of its middle legs flailing. But it managed to drag itself onto Zaven's street, staggering sideways like a drunken crab.\n\nLilit and her father had heard the commotion, of course\u2014they were waiting with the warehouse door wide open.\n\n\"Go fast, Klopp!\" Dylan shouted in crude German. \"The gyrothopter!\"\n\nAlek looked up. He couldn't see the gyrothopter, but its buzzing sound was building in the air. They had to disappear now.\n\nThe taxi took another step toward the open warehouse door, then sputtered and died. Klopp whirled the starting crank, but the engine only hissed and spat like a fresh log tossed onto a fire.\n\n\"Barking stupid contraptions!\" Dylan cried.\n\n\"Lilit, if you please?\" Zaven said calmly, and she leapt to the controls of the mechanikal arm on the loading dock. It rumbled to life and reached out to slide the taxi through the warehouse door.\n\nThe door rolled closed behind them, and Zaven stepped inside just as the last view of the street disappeared, plunging them all into darkness.\n\nAlek reached down and checked the satchel at his feet\u2014it was still there.\n\nA moment later an electrikal light switched on.\n\n\"A most dramatic entrance,\" Zaven said, his smile gleaming.\n\n\"But won't someone tell them?\" Alek panted, looking at the crack of sunlight beneath the door.\n\n\"Fah! Not to worry,\" Zaven said. \"Our neighbors are all friends. They have ignored greater disturbances than this.\" He offered a deep bow. \"Greetings, Masters Klopp, Bauer, and Sharp. I welcome you all to the Committee for Union and Progress!\"\n\nThe Committee's walkers towered over them like five huge misshapen statues.\n\n\"What an odd collection,\" Bauer said. \"Never seen any of these before.\"\n\n\"A few of those fought in the First Balkan War,\" Klopp said, pointing at the Minotaur. \"They were a bit old-fashioned even then.\"\n\n\"War,\" said Bovril, staring up from Alek's shoulder.\n\nAlek frowned. The first time he'd seen the walkers, he'd assumed the dents in their armor were from training battles. But with the noon sun flooding the vast courtyard, there was no denying it\u2014these machines were ancient.\n\n\"You can fix them up, can't you?\" he asked.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Klopp said.\n\n\"Fah! We shall fix them together!\" Zaven proclaimed. He was already treating Klopp like a long-lost brother. \"You may have modern knowledge, sir, but our mechaniks have those skills that can only be passed from father to son\u2014and to daughter, of course!\"\n\n\"These machines are like family to us,\" Lilit said.\n\nKlopp set down his toolbox. \"Hmm \u2026 grandparents, I suppose.\"\n\nNo one laughed at this joke except Bovril, who climbed down and scampered across the courtyard to inspect the giant steel hooves of the Minotaur.\n\nDylan had been standing silently since they'd arrived, his arms folded. But now he spoke in halting German. \"How many are there?\"\n\n\"How many pledged to the revolution?\" Zaven rubbed his hands together happily. \"We have a half dozen in every ghetto in this city. Almost fifty in all; enough to sweep away the sultan's metal elephants. We could have done so six years ago, but we were not united then.\"\n\n\"And now, sir?\" Bauer asked.\n\n\"Like a fist!\" Zaven said, demonstrating with both hands. \"Even the Young Turks have rejoined us, thanks to all the Germans marching about.\"\n\n\"And thanks to the Spider, too, of course,\" Lilit said.\n\nAlek looked at her. \"The Spider?\"\n\n\"Shall we show them?\" Lilit asked, but didn't wait for her father to answer. She ran to a large metal door in the courtyard wall, and jumped up to grab a chain hanging beside it. As she climbed it, her weight drew the chain down, and the door began to slide grudgingly upward.\n\nA huge machine stood in the shadows.\n\nAlek had no idea what it was for, but could see why Lilit had called it the Spider. A dark mass of machinery rested at its center, from which eight long jointed arms thrust out. A snarl of conveyor belts led into the core, like on a harvesting combine.\n\n\"Is that some sort of walking contraption?\" Dylan asked in English.\n\n\"They called it 'the Spider,'\" Alek translated, then shook his head. \"But it doesn't look as though it can walk.\"\n\n\"This is no mere war machine,\" Zaven proclaimed. \"But a far more powerful engine of progress. Lilit, show our guests!\"\n\nLilit stepped through the doorway, almost disappearing in the shadows beneath the machine's bulk. A panel of dials and levers flickered to life, showing her in silhouette. She worked the controls, and a moment later the paving stones of the courtyard were rumbling beneath Alek's feet.\n\nThe eight arms began to move, stirring the air like the hands of an orchestra conductor, their manipulator claws making fine adjustments to the conveyor belts and other parts of the machine.\n\n\"It does look a bit like a spideresque,\" Dylan said. \"One of the big ones that weaves parachutes.\"\n\nZaven nodded vigorously, answering her in his flawless English. \"The Spider has woven the threads that hold our revolution together. Did you know, lad, that the word 'text' comes from the Latin word for weaving?\"\n\n\"Text?\" Alek said. \"What does that have to do with \u2026 ?\"\n\nHis voice faded as he saw a flicker of white within the gloom. A roll of paper was unspooling along one of the belts, disappearing into the machine's dark center. The arms began to whirl through the air, carrying about trays of metal pieces, pouring buckets of black liquid, then cutting and folding the paper with long, nimble fingers.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Dylan snorted. \"It's a printing press.\"\n\n\"A Spider with a bark, indeed,\" Zaven said. \"Far mightier than any sword!\"\n\nThe machine whirred and spun for another minute, then slowed and darkened again. When Lilit emerged from the shadows, she was carrying a stack of neatly folded leaflets covered with inscrutable symbols.\n\nZaven lifted one up. \"Ah, yes, my article on the subject of women being allowed to vote. Can you read Armenian?\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow. \"Alas, no.\"\n\n\"How unfortunate. But the real message is just here.\" Zaven pointed at a row of symbols across the bottom of the page\u2014stars, crescents, and crosses that looked like mere decoration.\n\n\"A secret code,\" Alek murmured, recalling the markings on the alley walls. With the profusion of newspapers sold on the streets of Istanbul, one more in a hodgepodge of languages wouldn't attract much notice. But for those who knew the code \u2026\n\nHe felt Bovril tugging on his trouser leg. The beast was stepping from one foot to the other.\n\nAlek closed his eyes, and felt the slightest tremor through his boots.\n\n\"What's that rumbling?\"\n\n\"It feels like walkers, sir,\" Bauer said. \"Big ones.\"\n\n\"Have they found us?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Fah. It's just the sultan's parade, for the end of Ramazan.\" Zaven swept one hand toward the stairs. \"Perhaps you would all join my family on the roof. Our balcony has an excellent view.\"\n\nThe Ottoman war elephants paraded down the distant tree-lined avenue, leaving footprints of shattered cobblestones. Their crescent flags snapped in the wind, and their trunks\u2014tipped with machine guns\u2014swayed between long, barbed tusks. They turned in formation, as precise as marching soldiers, heading away toward the docks.\n\nDeryn breathed a sigh of relief, handing the field glasses back to Alek.\n\n\"Mr. Zaven's right. They're not coming this way.\"\n\n\"This must be the parade they were getting ready for,\" Alek said, then handed the glasses to Klopp. \"Was denken Sie, Klopp? Hundert Tonnen je?\"\n\n\"Hundert und f\u00fcnfzig?,\" the master of mechaniks said.\n\nDeryn nodded in agreement. If she understood him rightly, Klopp was guessing the metal elephants weighed a hundred and fifty tons each. Clanker tons were a bit larger than British ones, she recalled, but the point was clear enough.\n\nThose elephants were barking big.\n\n\"Mit achtzig-Millimeter-Kanone auf dem T\u00fcrmchen,\" Bauer added, which was beyond Deryn's Clanker. But she nodded again, pretending to understand.\n\n\"Kanone,\" repeated Bovril, who was sitting on Alek's shoulder.\n\n\"Aye, cannon,\" Deryn murmured, watching the shimmer from the steel turrets on the elephants' backs. The cannon were the important bit, after all.\n\nKlopp and Alek went on talking in indecipherable Clanker, so Deryn strolled to the far corner of the balcony to stretch her legs. Her bum was still sore from the wild ride in the taxi, which had been worse than any galloping horse. She didn't understand how Clankers could ride about in machines all day\u2014they way they moved was just dead wrong.\n\n\"Are you injured?\" came Lilit's voice from just behind her, making Deryn jump a bit. The girl was always sneaking up on her.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Deryn said, then pointed down at the war elephants. \"I was just wondering, do they often parade about like that, smashing up the streets?\"\n\nThe girl shook her head. \"They usually stay out of the city. The sultan is showing his strength.\"\n\n\"That's for certain. Pardon me for saying so, miss, but you can't beat them. Those walkers carry cannon, and yours have only got claws and fists. It'd be like taking boxing gloves to a pistol duel!\"\n\n\"The world is built on elephants, my grandmother always says.\" Lilit let out a sigh. \"It is an old law\u2014our walkers can't be armed, not like the sultan's. But at least we've scared him. His army wouldn't be tearing up the streets if he weren't nervous!\"\n\n\"Aye, he might be nervous, but that also means he's ready for you.\"\n\n\"The last revolution was only six years ago,\" Lilit said. \"He is always ready.\"\n\nDeryn was about to say how cheery a thought that was, but an odd buzzing sound had filled the air. She turned to see a bizarre contraption headed across the balcony. It waddled along on pudgy legs, a cross between a reptile and a four-poster bed, buzzing like a windup toy.\n\n\"What in blazes is that?\"\n\n\"That,\" Lilit said with a smile, \"is my grandmother.\"\n\nAs they walked back toward the others, Deryn saw a mass of gray hair sprouting from the white sheets. It was an old woman, no doubt the fearsome Nene that Alek had talked about.\n\nBovril seemed pleased to see her. It scampered down from Alek's shoulder and across the balcony, then crawled up to the footboard of the bed. The beastie stood there with its fur ruffling in the breeze, as happy as an admiral at sea.\n\nAlek bowed to the old woman, introducing Master Klopp and Corporal Bauer in a stream of polite Clanker.\n\nNene nodded, then turned her steely gaze on Deryn.\n\n\"And you must be the boy from the Leviathan,\" she said, her English accent as posh as Zaven's. \"My granddaughter's told me about you.\"\n\nDeryn clicked her heels. \"Midshipman Dylan Sharp, at your service, ma'am.\"\n\n\"From your accent, you were raised in Glasgow.\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am. You have a good ear.\"\n\n\"Two of them, in fact,\" Nene said. \"And you have an odd voice. Your hands, please?\"\n\nDeryn hesitated, but when the old woman snapped her fingers, she found herself obeying.\n\n\"Lots of calluses,\" Nene said, feeling carefully. \"You're a hardworking lad, unlike your friend the prince of Hohenberg. You draw a bit, and you do a lot of sewing, for a boy.\"\n\nDeryn cleared her throat, remembering her aunties teaching her to quilt. \"In the Air Service we middies darn our own uniforms.\"\n\n\"How industrious of you. My granddaughter tells me you don't trust us.\"\n\n\"Aye \u2026 well, it is a bit awkward, ma'am. I'm under orders to keep my mission here a secret.\"\n\n\"Under orders?\" Nene looked Deryn up and down. \"You don't appear to be in uniform.\"\n\n\"I may be undercover, ma'am,\" Deryn said, \"but I'm still a soldier.\"\n\n\"Undercover,\" Bovril said, chuckling. \"Mr. Sharp!\"\n\nDeryn glared at the beastie, wishing it would stop saying that.\n\n\"Well, boy, at least you're honest about your doubts,\" Nene said, dropping her hands and turning to Alek. \"So, what do your men think of our walkers?\"\n\nAlek answered in Clanker, and soon Klopp and Bauer were peppering Nene and Zaven with questions.\n\nDeryn couldn't follow half of it, but it hardly mattered what language you said it in\u2014this revolution was well and truly stuffed without cannon. Zaven was barking mad to think otherwise.\n\nEven Alek couldn't see the truth. He was always on about how it was his destiny to help the revolution, to get revenge on the Germans and end the war. That was a load of yackum, Deryn reckoned. Providence wouldn't stop the sultan's walkers from chewing up the Committee's antiques, as easy as a box of chocolates.\n\nShe pulled out her sketch pad and stared down at the parade again. The elephants were lining up beside a long pier, their guns elevating, readying to salute a warship.\u2026\n\n\"The Goeben,\" Deryn murmured. The ironclad's new Ottoman flags fluttered bright crimson, her Tesla cannon glittering like a steel spiderweb in the sun.\n\nLilit had been right\u2014the sultan was flaunting his power today. Even if the Committee could beat those elephants somehow, they'd still have to face the big guns of the Goeben and the Breslau.\n\nOr perhaps not. Less than a month from now the Leviathan would be headed up the Dardanelles, guiding a beastie hungry for German ironclads. Admiral Souchon might have fought kraken before, but nothing like the behemoth. The creature was supposedly powerful enough to sink the sultan's two new warships in half an hour.\n\nNow, that would be a barking good night for a revolution to start.\n\nThe problem was, Deryn couldn't tell the Committee what was coming. If just one of them was a Clanker spy, letting the plan slip could spell doom for the Leviathan. She was duty bound to keep quiet.\n\nA torrent of smoke poured from the war elephants' cannon, rippling into a vast dark cloud on the sea breeze. The sound arrived long seconds later, as tardy as distant thunder. Then the Goeben's guns returned the salute, ten times louder and more fiery.\n\nDeryn sighed as she began to sketch the scene\u2014there were too many barking pieces to this puzzle. The behemoth might sink the German ironclads, but it couldn't slither onto land and fight the sultan's elephants as well.\n\nBehind her the discussion had grown heated. Zaven was proclaiming in Clanker while Klopp shook his head, arms crossed.\n\n\"Nein, nein, nein,\" the old man kept repeating.\n\nIf only there were a simple way to handle a hundred and fifty tons of steel \u2026\n\nThen, all in a flash, it came to her.\n\n\"Hold on, Mr. Zaven,\" she broke in. \"It doesn't matter that your walkers haven't got cannon. We can fix that!\"\n\nAlek shook his head tiredly. \"There's nothing we can do. He says the army has strict control over cannon and ammunition.\"\n\n\"Aye, but you don't need anything so fancy,\" Deryn said. \"When the Dauntless was hijacked, the attackers had nothing but a few bits of rope.\"\n\n\"Hijacked?\" Nene asked. \"I thought the Dauntless's rampage was due to sloppy piloting.\"\n\nDeryn snorted. \"Don't believe everything you read in the papers, ma'am.\" She pointed down at the armored elephants. \"See how there's a pilot for each leg? The hijackers lassoed our men and yanked them off, then climbed up to take their place. That's how you stop those metal beasties. Knock out a couple of pilots, and you stop them completely!\"\n\n\"Perhaps on the Dauntless, where the pilots ride out in the open,\" Zaven said. \"But the men down there are well shielded.\"\n\nDeryn had thought of this already. \"Shielded from ropes and bullets, maybe. But they must have vision slits, like Alek's Stormwalker did. What if something spicy got through them?\"\n\n\"Something spicy?\" Nene asked.\n\n\"Aye.\" Deryn grinned, turning to Alek. \"I never told you about how I rescued the Dauntless, did I?\"\n\nAlek shook his head.\n\nDeryn took a moment to compose her thoughts, knowing she had their full attention now. \"It was my idea, in fact. The barking diplomats had no proper weapons aboard, so I snatched up a big bag of spice powder and hurled it at one of the hijackers. The smell of it knocked that bum-rag right off his saddle! And armor will only make things worse\u2014imagine being stuck inside a wee metal cabin with a snootful of spices!\"\n\n\"Spices,\" Bovril repeated quietly.\n\n\"That hijacker could hardly breathe,\" Deryn said. \"And my uniform was pure dead ruined!\"\n\n\"The army doesn't control hot peppers,\" Nene murmured, and Alek began to translate for Klopp and Bauer.\n\nLilit turned to her father. \"Do you think it could work?\"\n\n\"Even a foot soldier can fight a walker that way,\" Zaven said. \"The Committee can flood the streets with spice-wielding revolutionaries!\"\n\n\"Aye, but think bigger than that,\" Deryn said. \"Unlike the German walkers, yours have all got hands. I reckon that Minotaur beastie could throw a spice bomb half a mile!\"\n\n\"Farther than that,\" Lilit said, then smiled. \"If Alek can manage not to crush it first, that is.\"\n\nAlek hmphed a bit. \"Klopp says he can rig something up\u2014some sort of magazine to hold the spice bombs. We're standing above a mechanikal factory, after all.\"\n\n\"Parts aren't a problem,\" Zaven said. \"But the hottest spices are sold by the pinch. We're talking about buying tons!\"\n\n\"If I can provide the money, are you willing to try?\" Alek asked.\n\nZaven and Lilit both looked at Nene. She raised an eyebrow, staring at Alek.\n\n\"We're talking about a lot of money, Your Serene Highness.\"\n\nAlek didn't answer, but knelt to open his satchel\u2014the small one he'd been lugging about all day. He slid out what looked like a brick wrapped in a handkerchief.\n\n\"Junge Meister!\" Klopp said softly. \"Nicht das Gold!\"\n\nAlek ignored him, unwrapping the handkerchief to reveal a metal bar. When sunlight struck it, a pale yellow fire burned across its surface.\n\nDeryn swallowed. Barking spiders, but princes were rich!\n\n\"You really are him, aren't you?\" Nene murmured. A thin few slices had been shaved from the bar's edges, but the Hapsburg crest was still plain.\n\n\"Of course, madam,\" Alek said. \"I am a very poor liar.\"\n\nThe conversation started up again, shifting back to Clanker as Nene, Zaven, and Klopp began to plan.\n\nLilit turned to face Deryn, her eyes glittering.\n\n\"Spices! You're brilliant. Just perfectly brilliant.\" Lilit gathered her into a hug. \"Thank you!\"\n\n\"Aye, I'm dead clever \u2026 sometimes,\" Deryn said, pulling herself quickly away. \"It's just lucky Alek brought that slab of gold along.\"\n\nAlek nodded, but a pained look crossed his face. \"That was my father's idea. He and Volger planned for anything.\"\n\n\"Aye, but it's barking lucky you brought it today,\" Deryn said. \"Otherwise you'd have lost it.\"\n\n\"Pardon me?\"\n\n\"Stop being a Dummkopf,\" Deryn said, shaking her head. \"The taxi pilot knows what hotel we came from. And the way we're dressed, it's dead certain the management will remember us if the police come asking. So we'll have to stay here. We've lost the wireless set, but we've got Klopp's tools, Bovril, and your gold.\" Deryn shrugged. \"That's everything important, right?\"\n\nAlek squeezed his eyes shut, his voice falling to a whisper. \"Almost everything.\"\n\n\"Blisters! You didn't have two slabs of gold, did you?\"\n\n\"No. But I left a letter behind.\"\n\n\"Does it say who you are?\" Lilit asked softly.\n\n\"All too clearly.\" Alek turned to stare at Deryn, his gaze suddenly intense. \"It's well hidden. If no one finds it, we can sneak back and fetch it!\"\n\n\"Aye, I suppose so.\"\n\n\"In a week, once things have settled down. Please say you'll help me!\"\n\n\"You know me, always happy to lend a hand,\" Deryn said, punching Alek on the shoulder. Though, frankly, it sounded a bit pointless to her. The Germans already knew that Alek was in Istanbul, so why risk getting caught?\n\nIt was only a barking letter, after all.\n\n\"You bum-rag!\" Deryn cried. \"I was having a dead good dream!\"\n\n\"It's time to go,\" Alek said.\n\nDeryn groaned. She'd been helping Lilit with the Spider all day, carrying parts and trays of type, and every muscle in her body ached. It was no wonder that Clankers were grumpy all the time\u2014metal was barking heavy.\n\nIn her dream she'd been flying. Not on an airship or a Huxley, but with wings of her own, as light as gossamer. It had been brilliant.\n\n\"Can we not leave it for another night? I'm knackered.\"\n\n\"It's a week since we left the hotel, Dylan. That's what we agreed.\"\n\nDeryn sighed. She could see the desperate gleam in the boy's eye again. He got it every time he talked about his lost letter, though he wouldn't say why it was so barking important.\n\nAlek threw her blanket aside, and Deryn jumped to cover herself. But she'd slept in her mechanic's slops, as she always did now. She'd had to watch her step here. The pilots who came to train in Zaven's warehouse were all curious about the strange boy in the background, who knew none of the languages of the Ottoman Empire. So Deryn stuck with Lilit, working on the Spider, and helped Zaven with the cooking, learning the names of new spices, and slicing garlic and onions until her fingers stung.\n\n\"Leave off!\" she cried. \"I'm getting up.\"\n\n\"Hush. I don't want any questions from the others about where we're going.\"\n\n\"Aye, right. Just wait outside a minute.\"\n\nHe hesitated, but finally left her alone.\n\nDeryn changed into her Turkish clothes, muttering about the various defects of Alek's character. She often talked to herself these days\u2014living among Clankers was driving her mad. Instead of the murmurs of beasties and the steady hum of airflow, Deryn spent her days surrounded by the rattle of gears and pistons. Her skin smelled of engine grease.\n\nOf all the machines she'd worked on this last week, the Spider was the only one she had a fondness for. Its dance of cutting blades and conveyor belts was as elegant as any ecosystem, a whirl of paper and ink converging into neat bundles of information, and its huge legs stretched out like the boughs of an ancient tree. But even that faint suggestion of a living thing only made Deryn miss her airship home the harder.\n\nAnd all to help some barking prince.\n\nShe went out into the training courtyard, where the latest bunch of walkers stood, their spice-bomb throwers half finished. A djinn towered above the rest, its powerful arms crossed, its nozzles still wet from being tested. As fellow Muslims, the Arabs had a dispensation from the sultan to arm their walkers with steam cannon. The cannon didn't shoot projectiles, but in a pinch the djinn could disappear into a white-hot cloud.\n\nThe courtyard's outer door was wedged open a squick. Deryn slipped through to find Alek waiting out on the street.\n\nLilit was there too, dressed up in fancy European clothing.\n\n\"What's she doing here?\"\n\nAlek raised an eyebrow. \"Didn't I tell you? We need someone the hotel staff won't recognize. Lilit rented a suite yesterday.\"\n\n\"And exactly how does that help us?\"\n\n\"My room is on the highest floor, like Alek's was,\" Lilit said. \"Two doors away. And they both have balconies.\"\n\nDeryn frowned. She had to admit, climbing across balconies might be a wee bit easier than picking the lock. But why hadn't anyone told her the plan?\n\n\"I can sneak about just as well as you two can,\" the girl said. \"Ask Alek how easily I trailed him.\"\n\n\"Aye, he's told me that story more than once,\" Deryn said. \"It's just that \u2026\"\n\nShe tried to think of what to say. Lilit wasn't a bad sort, really. She was a dab hand with machines, as good at piloting as any of the men. In a way, she'd managed the same trick as Deryn had\u2014acting like a man\u2014without pretending, and that was a splendid sort of anarchy, one had to admit.\n\nBut the girl had a habit of turning up whenever Alek and Deryn were alone together, which was barking tiresome.\n\nWhy hadn't Alek mentioned that she was coming along? What other secrets was he keeping about her?\n\n\"Is it because I'm a girl?\" Lilit asked stiffly.\n\n\"Of course not.\" Deryn shook her head. \"I'm just sleepy, is all.\"\n\nLilit stood there, looking a little cross and waiting to hear more. But Deryn only turned and headed toward the fancy part of town.\n\nThe Hotel Hagia Sophia stood, dark and silent, a single gaslight burning above the doorway. Deryn and Alek watched from the shadows as Lilit made her way inside, the doorman saluting as she passed.\n\n\"It seems a bit daft, us sneaking in,\" Deryn whispered. \"Do you really think they'd recognize us?\"\n\n\"Don't forget,\" Alek said. \"If they've found my letter, there'll be a dozen German agents in the lobby, day and night.\"\n\nDeryn nodded. That was true enough\u2014any trace of Austria's missing prince would stir up more ruckus than a stolen taxi.\n\n\"She's meeting us back here.\" Alek led Deryn around to a small lane, where rubbish was heaped outside the hotel kitchen door. He and Lilit had done a lot of planning together, it seemed.\n\nDeryn shook the jealous thought from her head. She was a soldier on a mission, not some daft lassie mooning at a village dance.\n\nShe crept closer and peeked through a window. It was dark inside the kitchen, the motionless arms of a clockwork dishwasher casting eerie shadows. But after a few minutes a silent shape slipped through the darkness, and the door creaked opened.\n\n\"There's someone at the front desk,\" Lilit whispered. \"And a man reading in the lobby, so keep quiet.\"\n\nAs they slipped inside, the scents of cooking filled Deryn's nose, as delicious as she remembered from her two days here. Bowls of dates and apricots and waxy yellow potatoes crowded a long and knotted wooden table, a row of aubergines shining purple in the darkness, waiting for the gleaming knives to gut them.\n\nBut the smell of paprika made her wince. Zaven had been mixing up spice bombs all day, and Deryn's eyeballs were still sore.\n\nLilit led them from the kitchen into a dark and empty dining room. The places were all set, the napkins neatly folded as if guests were about to arrive, and Deryn got the shivery feeling she always did in fancy places.\n\n\"There's a back stair for the servants,\" Lilit whispered, heading for a small doorway in the far wall.\n\nThe staircase was narrow and pitch-black, and complained at every step. Clanker wood always sounded so ancient and unhappy, like Deryn's aunties on a damp winter morning. That was what came of chopping down trees instead of fabricating your wood, she supposed.\n\nThe three climbed slowly to keep quiet, and it was long minutes later that Lilit led them out into a wide, familiar hallway.\n\nDeryn felt a squick of chill as she passed Alek's room. What if his letter had been found, and half a dozen Clanker agents were waiting inside?\n\nLilit stopped two doors farther along, pulling out a key. A moment later they were all standing in a suite as fancy as Alek's had been. Deryn wondered again what was so barking important about this letter. Was it really worth spending money on this suite, money that could have gone to the Committee's walkers?\n\nLilit pointed. \"The balcony.\"\n\nDeryn crossed the room and stepped out into the cool of night. Here on the top floor the balconies were almost as wide as the suites themselves. Easy enough to get from one to the next\u2014the sort of jump an airman made every day.\n\nBut she turned to Alek and whispered, \"If you'd let me in on the barking plan, I could have brought a safety line.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Lost your air sense already?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" Deryn put one foot up on the railing, hands out for balance.\n\nAlek turned to Lilit. \"Stay here. There might be someone waiting for us.\"\n\n\"Do you think I can't fight?\"\n\nDeryn paused in her jump, wondering how Alek would answer. Was he more worried about Lilit's safety than his own? Or didn't he want a mere girl helping him?\n\nEither would be dead annoying.\n\n\"It's not that you can't fight,\" he said. \"But if you're captured, someone might recognize you as Zaven's daughter. That would lead the police straight back to the warehouse.\"\n\nDeryn blinked\u2014maybe Alek was just being sensible.\n\n\"What if you two get captured?\" Lilit asked.\n\n\"Then you'll have to overthrow the sultan and set us free.\"\n\nLilit fumed a bit, but nodded. \"Just be careful, both of you.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about us,\" Deryn said, and jumped.\n\nShe landed on the next balcony with a soft clang, then waited to give Alek a hand. He jumped with a grim look on his face, and his hand was shaking a bit when she grabbed it to steady him.\n\n\"Who's lost his air sense now?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Well, it is rather high.\"\n\nDeryn snorted. After skylarking at a thousand feet, half a dozen stories was nothing. She crossed the balcony, climbed onto the railing, and jumped again, hardly glancing at the ground.\n\nShe gestured for Alek to wait as she peeked inside.\n\nThe room was dark, but no one was in sight. Deryn slipped her rigging knife into the crack between the doors to lift the hasp, pushed them open, and listened\u2014nothing.\n\nShe slipped inside and stole softly to the bedroom doors. The bed was empty, the covers and the pillows all straight. If anyone had searched this room, they'd cleaned up after themselves.\n\nIn fact, the whole suite looked exactly as Deryn remembered it: the potted plants, the footstool that had been Bovril's favorite, the low divan she'd slept on while Alek had snored away in the splendor of the bedroom.\n\nShe heard a soft thud and turned around\u2014Alek was stepping in from the balcony. He pulled a screwdriver from his pocket, heading straight for the shiny brass switchboard on the wall.\n\n\"Doesn't that contraption call the front desk?\" she whispered. In her two days here Alek had used the switchboard to call delicious meals up to the room, as if by magic.\n\n\"Yes, of course. But I won't activate it.\" His fingers spun, and soon the front panel slipped off into his hands.\n\nHe set the panel carefully onto the floor and reached into the Clanker guts of the device. From among the tangle of wires and bells, he pulled out a long cylinder of leather.\n\nDeryn took a step forward, squinting in the darkness.\n\n\"It's my letter,\" Alek said. \"It's in a scroll case.\"\n\n\"A scroll case? Someone sent you a barking scroll??\"\n\nAlek didn't answer, slipping the screwdriver back into his pocket.\n\n\"Aye, I know\u2014top secret,\" she muttered, crossing to the suite's front door. \"We may as well take the hallway. No point testing your air sense again.\"\n\nDeryn pressed her ear against the door\u2014no sound at all. But when she looked back at him, Alek was still standing in the same spot, wearing a thoughtful expression.\n\n\"Forgot something else?\" she whispered. \"Another scroll? A bar of platinum?\"\n\n\"Dylan,\" the boy said softly, \"before we go back to Lilit, I should tell you something.\"\n\nDeryn froze, her hand on the doorknob. \"Something about her?\"\n\n\"About Lilit? Why would I \u2026,\" Alek began, but then his expression broke into a smile. \"Ah, you've been wondering about her.\"\n\n\"Aye, a bit.\"\n\nAlek chuckled quietly. \"Well, she is quite beautiful.\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"I was wondering when you'd notice. You've been quite a Dummkopf about it. And she's been trying awfully hard to get you to see.\"\n\n\"To get me to see? But why \u2026\" Deryn frowned. \"What are we talking about, exactly?\"\n\nAlek rolled his eyes. \"You're still being a ninny! Haven't you noticed how much she likes you?\"\n\nDeryn's mouth dropped open, but no sound came out.\n\n\"Don't look so surprised,\" Alek said. \"She's liked you from the start. Did you think she had you working on the Spider for your mechanical skills?\"\n\n\"But\u2014but I thought that you and her \u2026\"\n\n\"Me? She thinks I'm a perfectly useless aristocrat.\" Alek shook his head. \"You really are a Dummkopf, aren't you?\"\n\n\"But she can't like me,\" Deryn said. \"I'm a \u2026 barking airman!\"\n\n\"Yes, she thinks that's quite romantic as well. You do have a certain swagger about you, I suppose. And you're not bad looking, to be sure.\"\n\n\"Oh, leave off!\"\n\n\"In fact, when I first met you, I thought, 'Now, there's the boy I want to be\u2014or would, if I hadn't been born such a hopeless prince.'\"\n\nDeryn glared at Alek, who was clearly enjoying himself now, his eyes glistening with laughter held in check. It made her want to punch him, and yet \u2026\n\n\"Do you really think I'm handsome?\" she asked.\n\n\"Most beguiling, I'm sure. And now that you've masterminded the revolution, Lilit's affections are quite out of control.\"\n\nDeryn groaned, shaking her head. She had to put a stop to this, before it got too blistering tricky.\n\n\"But we should discuss your romantic life another time.\" Alek held up the scroll case. \"I need to tell you about this.\"\n\nDeryn stared dumbly, trying to force her mind to stop spinning. She could deal with Lilit. It was just a matter of\u2026 well, not of telling her the truth, certainly, but of saying something sensible.\n\nAfter all, it was true that women liked an airman's swagger\u2014Mr. Rigby was always saying so. It was just part of being a soldier. Part of being a boy, really. She could make up a story of a girl back home \u2026\n\n\"Right, then,\" Deryn finally managed. \"What's so barking important about this scroll of yours?\"\n\n\"Well, it's like this.\" Alek took a slow breath. \"Along with our revolution here in Istanbul, I think this letter might end the war.\"\n\nThe boy just looked at him, speechless again.\n\nStanding there in the dark, Alek could hear his own heart pounding. Getting those first words out had taken all the willpower he possessed.\n\nBut now that Volger was gone, bearing the secret alone was too much. And Dylan had proven himself loyal a dozen times over.\n\n\"It's from the Holy Father,\" Alek said, holding up the scroll case.\n\nIt took Dylan a moment, but then he said, \"You mean, the pope?\"\n\nAlek nodded. \"It changes the terms of my parents' marriage, making me my father's heir. I suppose I've been lying to you\u2014I'm not just a prince.\"\n\n\"Then you're \u2026 an archduke?\"\n\n\"I'm the archduke of Austria-Este, royal prince of Hungary and Bohemia. When my granduncle dies, it may be that I can stop this war.\"\n\nDylan's eyes slowly widened. \"Because you'll be the barking emperor!\"\n\nAlek sighed, crossing to the large chair with tasseled arms that had been his favorite. He fell into it, suddenly exhausted.\n\nHe'd rather missed this hotel room, with all its Levantine splendor. In the week of hiding here he'd felt \u2026 in command for the first time in his life, with no tutors or mentors to appease. But now he'd joined a committee of revolutionaries, and had to argue over every detail.\n\n\"It's complicated. Franz Joseph has named another successor, but he chose my father first.\" Alek looked at the crossed keys on the leather case, a sign of papal authority that no faithful Austrian could ignore. \"This document might throw the succession into doubt, if the war is going badly and the people want change. My father used to say, 'A country with two kings will always falter.'\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Dylan said, coming closer. \"And if there's been a revolution here, then Germany will be completely alone!\"\n\nAlek smiled. \"Not such a Dummkopf after all, are you?\"\n\nDylan perched on one arm of the chair, looking dizzy and astonished.\n\n\"Pardon me, your princeliness, but this is all a bit much. First you tell me about her \u2026\" The boy waved in the direction of Lilit's room. \"And now this!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I never wanted to lie to you, Dylan. But I learned about this letter the same night I met you. It's still quite strange for me.\"\n\n\"It's pure dead strange for me, too!\" Dylan said, standing up again and pacing across the room. \"Ending a whole barking war with a bit of paper, even if it is a fancy scroll. Who would believe it's real??\"\n\nAlek nodded. He'd felt the same way when Volger had shown him the letter. It seemed too small an object to change so much. But here in Istanbul, Alek had begun to understand what the scroll really meant. The Leviathan had been brought to that mountaintop, and then here. It was up to him, Aleksandar of Hohenberg, to end the war that his parents' death had started.\n\n\"Volger says the pope himself will vouch for me, as long as I keep this letter secret until my granduncle passes away. The emperor turned eighty-four last week. He could die any day.\"\n\n\"Blisters. No wonder the Germans want to catch you so badly!\"\n\n\"True enough. It has made things dangerous.\" Alek looked at the scroll case. \"But that's why we had to come back here. And why I'm willing to trade my father's gold to make the Committee's revolution work. What we do here can change everything.\"\n\nDylan stopped pacing in the middle of the room, his fists clenched, as if struggling with some secret of his own.\n\n\"Thank you for trusting me, Alek.\" The boy looked at the floor. \"I haven't always trusted you. Not with everything.\"\n\nAlek pulled himself up from the chair and walked closer, resting his hands on the boy's shoulders. \"You know you can, Dylan.\"\n\n\"Aye, I suppose. And there's something I should tell you. But you have to swear not to tell anyone else\u2014not Lilit, not the Committee. No one.\"\n\n\"I'll always keep your secrets, Dylan.\"\n\nThe boy nodded slowly. \"This one's a bit trickier than most.\"\n\nHe fell silent again, the pause stretching out.\n\n\"It's about your mission here, isn't it?\"\n\nDylan let out a slow sigh, a sound of relief and exhaustion. \"Aye, I suppose it is. We were an advance party, sent to sabotage the kraken nets in the strait. It was all part of Dr. Barlow's plan from the beginning.\"\n\n\"But your men were captured.\"\n\nDylan shook his head. \"My men may have been caught, but we did our job. Right now those nets are being eaten away by wee beasties. And it's happening so slowly that the Ottomans won't realize until it's too late.\"\n\n\"So you British aren't waiting for the sultan to join the war. You'll strike the first blow.\"\n\n\"Aye, in three weeks. Dr. Barlow says the nets will be in tatters by then. On the night of the next new moon, the Leviathan will guide a new beastie down the strait. It's the companion creature for the Osman, the ship that Lord Churchill stole from the Ottomans. It's called a behemoth, and it's barking huge, like the world has never seen before! Those German ironclads' days are numbered.\"\n\nAlek clenched the scroll case tighter. The weakest link in the Committee's plans had always been the German ironclads. But with some kind of Royal Navy monster on its way, the odds had changed considerably.\n\n\"But this is exactly what we need, Dylan. We have to tell the Committee!\"\n\n\"We can't,\" the boy said. \"I trust Zaven and his family, but there are hundreds of others involved. What if one of them is a Clanker spy? If the Germans find out the Leviathan is coming, the Goeben could surprise it anywhere along the way with her Tesla cannon charged!\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alek shuddered a bit, remembering the lightning coursing through his body. \"But what about Zaven's plan? He's leading walkers with spice bombs against the ironclads. Klopp says it's insane.\"\n\n\"Aye, completely daft,\" Dylan said. \"But don't tell Zaven that! If they strike on the night of the new moon, the Goeben will be sunk before they even get there!\"\n\nAlek nodded slowly, thinking it through. In an all-out battle for the city, the sultan would send his walkers into the streets, relying on the German warships to protect the palace. But if they lay at the bottom of the sea, the revolution could be over in a single night. Thousands of lives might be spared.\n\nOf course, an attack in utter darkness would mean teaching the Committee's pilots how to drive their walkers at night. He'd already explained the principles to Lilit, and she'd picked them up quickly enough. If anything, it would give the revolutionaries yet another advantage.\n\n\"I'll order Klopp to say he's changed his mind, that he thinks spice bombing the Goeben will work. He might grumble a bit, but he'll do as he's told. But how do we get the Committee to pick that exact night?\"\n\n\"Have Klopp say that it's best to attack the ironclads in darkness.\" Dylan shrugged. \"Then we'll point out that September 19 is a new moon, and let them decide on their own.\"\n\nAlek smiled. \"And with your masculine charms, you can persuade Lilit to plead our case for us!\"\n\nDylan rolled his eyes, turning beet red again. \"Speaking of secrets, you won't tell Lilit about that discussion either, will you? It'll only complicate things.\"\n\nAlek chuckled. He'd always heard that Darwinists were quite plainspoken about matters of biology, to the point of being vulgar. But Dylan looked positively shamefaced about the whole thing, more like a schoolboy than a soldier.\n\nIt was most amusing.\n\n\"As I said, all your secrets are safe with me.\"\n\n\"Aye, good, then.\" Dylan hesitated. \"And \u2026 you're completely sure it's me she likes, not you?\"\n\nAlek laughed. \"I should hope so. After all, if we did like each other, I'd have to run a mile.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"For heaven's sake, Dylan. Lilit is a commoner, far more common than my mother.\" Alek held up the scroll case. \"I grew up not knowing if this would ever happen. Not knowing who I really was, and always thinking how much easier it would be for everyone if I hadn't been born. I could never do that to my own children, not in a thousand years.\"\n\nDylan stared at the scroll case sadly. \"Must be tough, being a prince.\"\n\n\"Not any longer, thanks to this.\" Alek clasped Dylan's shoulder again, happy that his only real friend knew his last secret. \"Let's get out of here. We have a revolution to plan.\"\n\nLilit opened her door wearing a frown.\n\n\"Took you two long enough. I thought you'd got yourselves into trouble.\"\n\n\"We were having a bit of a discussion.\" Alek winked at Dylan, then held up the scroll case. \"But we found this.\"\n\nLilit gave them both an odd look, and Dylan turned away in embarrassment, heading toward the servants' staircase.\n\nAlek shrugged for Lilit's benefit, then followed.\n\nAs they descended the stairs, the hotel began to stir around them. The steam elevators rumbled and hissed, building up pressure for the morning traffic, and soon a clattering rose up from below.\n\nDylan came to a halt, raising his hand. \"The cooks are in the kitchen already. We can't go back that way.\"\n\n\"Straight through the lobby doors, then,\" Lilit said. \"If no one found your letter, there won't be any German agents about.\"\n\n\"Aye, but some of us are wanted taxi thieves!\" Dylan said.\n\nAlek shook his head. \"It'll be fine. We'll be out the door before anyone gives us a second look.\"\n\n\"Just try not to act suspicious,\" Lilit said, nudging open the door to the dining room.\n\nShe led them through the empty tables, with a stride as confident as if she owned the hotel. A young boy in a fez looked up from polishing silverware and frowned, but didn't say a word.\n\nThey passed him and headed through the lobby, which was empty except for one rather shabby-looking tourist waiting for a room.\u2026\n\nThe man glanced up from his newspaper, smiled, and waved a hand.\n\n\"Ah, Prince Alek,\" he called. \"I thought you might be somewhere hereabouts.\"\n\nAlek froze in midstride. It was Eddie Malone.\n\n\"Of course, I never took you for a taxi thief,\" Malone said, stirring his coffee. \"But then I heard the name of that hotel.\"\n\nAlek didn't answer, just gazed at his cup in silence. The black surface of the liquid flickered, reflecting the dancing shapes of shadow puppets on the screen behind him.\n\nThe reporter had led them to a coffeehouse, well away from the curious glances of the hotel staff. Each table had its own tiny shadow play machine, and the place was dark and nearly empty, the few patrons all transfixed by their own puppets. But Alek felt as though the walls were listening.\n\nPerhaps it was the beady eyes of the bullfrog staring at him from across the table.\n\n\"My mother's name,\" he said softly. \"Of course.\"\n\nMalone nodded. \"I've been looking at hotel signs ever since, and wondering. The Dora Hotel? The Santa Pera? The Angel?\" He let out a low chuckle. \"And then I heard about some Germans staying at the Hagia Sophia stealing a taxi. So the name Sophie started ringing in my ears.\"\n\n\"But how did you know to call me prince?\" Alek said. \"I'm not the only Austrian with a mother named Sophie.\"\n\n\"That's what I figured, until I started looking into that Count Volger fellow. He and your father were old friends, weren't they?\"\n\nAlek nodded, his eyes closing. He was exhausted, and there was another long day of work ahead\u2014a whole revolution to rethink.\n\n\"But we stole that taxi seven barking days ago!\" Dylan said. \"Have you been sitting in that lobby all that time?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Malone said. \"It took me three days of pondering, then another three to find out who Count Volger was. I practically just got there.\"\n\nAlek winced a little. If only they'd gone to retrieve the letter a day earlier, they might have never laid eyes on the man.\n\n\"But once it all fell into place, I just had to find you again.\" Malone's face was beaming. \"A missing prince, the boy whose family started the Great War! Biggest story I've ever covered.\"\n\n\"Should we kill him now?\" Lilit asked.\n\nMalone gave her a curious look; clearly he hadn't understood her German. He pulled out his notepad. \"And who might you be, miss?\"\n\nLilit's eyes narrowed, and Alek hurriedly spoke up. \"I'm afraid that's none of your business, Mr. Malone. We won't be answering any of your questions.\"\n\nThe man held up his notebook. \"So I'll have to publish my story with so many questions left unanswered? And so soon? Say \u2026 tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Are you blackmailing us, Mr. Malone?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I just don't like loose ends.\"\n\nAlek shook his head and sighed. \"Write what you want. The Germans already know I'm here in Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Malone said, his pen scribbling on the pad. \"See? You're adding background already! But what's really interesting is young Dylan being with you. The Ottomans will be surprised to hear that one of the Leviathan's saboteurs escaped!\"\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, Alek saw Dylan's fists clench.\n\nBut Malone had turned his gaze on Lilit. \"And then there's the matter of your new revolutionary friends. That might raise a few eyebrows as well.\"\n\n\"My knife is ready,\" Lilit said softly in German. \"Just say the word.\"\n\n\"Mr. Malone,\" Alek said, \"perhaps we can convince you to delay publishing your story.\"\n\n\"How long do you need?\" the man said, his pen still poised to write.\n\nAlek sighed. Giving Malone a date only revealed more about their plans. But they had to string the man along somehow. If the Ottomans learned that a Darwinist saboteur was working with revolutionaries here in Istanbul, they might begin to piece together Dr. Barlow's plan.\n\nAlek looked to Dylan for help.\n\n\"Don't you see, Mr. Malone?\" the boy said. \"If you give us all away, then the story's over. But if you just wait a wee bit, it'll get heaps more interesting, we promise!\"\n\nMalone leaned back, drumming his fingers on the table. \"Well, I suppose you've got a little while. I file my stories by messenger tern. That's four days to cross the Atlantic. And because I use birds, the Germans' can't listen in on their fancy new wireless tower.\"\n\n\"Four days is hardly\u2014,\" Alek began, but Dylan grabbed his arm.\n\n\"Excuse me, Mr. Malone,\" the boy said. \"What wireless tower are you talking about?\"\n\n\"The big one they're just finishing.\" Malone gave a shrug. \"It's meant to be a secret, but half the Germans in this city are working on it. Has its own power station, they say.\"\n\nDylan's eyes grew wider. \"Is this tower somewhere along a railroad line?\"\n\n\"I've heard it's somewhere on the cliffs, where the old tracks follow the water.\" Malone narrowed his eyes. \"What's so interesting about that?\"\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Dylan said softly. \"I should have realized the first night I was here.\"\n\nAlek stared at the boy, remembering his story about the night he'd arrived. Dylan had secretly ridden a short way on the Orient-Express, which the Germans were using to smuggle parts out of the city \u2026 electrikal parts.\n\nThe pieces finally fell into place.\n\n\"With its own power station?\" Alek asked.\n\nEddie Malone nodded, his eyes flicking between the two of them.\n\nAlek felt a cold finger sliding down his spine. No mere wireless tower would need that much power. The Leviathan was flying straight into disaster.\n\n\"Can you give us a month?\" he asked Malone.\n\n\"A whole month?\" The reporter let out a snort. \"My editors would have me brought home in a brown bag. You have to give me something to write about.\"\n\nDylan sat up straighter. \"All right, then, I've got a story for you. And the sooner you publish it, the better. That wireless tower\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait!\" Alek said. \"I have something better. How about an interview with the missing prince of Hohenberg? I'll tell you about the night I left my home, how I escaped Austria and made it to the Alps. Who I think killed my parents, and why. Will that keep you busy enough, Mr. Malone?\"\n\nThe man's pen was scribbling, his head nodding furiously. Dylan was staring at Alek, wide eyed.\n\n\"But there's one condition: You can't mention either of my friends,\" Alek said. \"Just say I'm hiding in the hills somewhere, alone.\"\n\nThe man paused a moment, then shrugged. \"Whatever you want, as long as I can take some photographs too.\"\n\nAlek shuddered\u2014of course Malone's newspaper was the sort that published photographs. How perfectly vulgar.\n\nBut he could only nod.\n\n\"Mr. Malone,\" Dylan said, \"there's still one other thing\u2014\"\n\n\"Not tonight,\" Alek said. \"I'm afraid we're all quite tired, Mr. Malone. I'm sure you understand.\"\n\n\"You're not the only ones.\" The reporter stood up, stretching his arms. \"I've been in that lobby all night. Meet me tomorrow in the usual caf\u00e9?\"\n\nAlek nodded, and Malone gathered his things and left, not even offering to pay for his coffee.\n\n\"This is all my fault,\" Lilit said when the man was gone. \"I saw him when I followed you. I should have recognized him on my way up.\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"No. I was the one foolish enough to involve a reporter in my affairs.\"\n\n\"No matter whose fault it is,\" Dylan said, \"we should have told him about the \u2026\" He hesitated, looking at Lilit.\n\nShe waved a hand dismissively. \"The Committee knows all about that tower. We'd been watching the Germans build it for months, wondering what it might be. Until Alek came along and explained everything.\"\n\n\"I did?\" Alek asked, then remembered his first day at the warehouse. Nene hadn't believed a word he'd said \u2026 until he'd mentioned the Tesla cannon. Then suddenly she'd become quite interested, peppering him with questions\u2014what it was called, how it worked, and whether it could be used against walkers. \"But I thought we were talking about the Goeben. Why didn't you tell me the sultan had another Tesla cannon?\"\n\n\"It hardly mattered\u2014you said it couldn't affect our walkers.\" She frowned, looking at Dylan. \"But it can shoot down airships, can't it?\"\n\nThe boy cleared his throat, but only shrugged.\n\n\"And you both just turned green at the thought of that,\" Lilit said.\n\n\"Aye, well, you know,\" Dylan said. \"Those contraptions are a professional hazard, when you're an airman.\"\n\nLilit crossed her arms. \"And you were about to tell that reporter what this 'wireless tower' really was, to warn your Darwinist friends!\" She turned to Alek. \"And you're willing to spill your family secrets just to keep Dylan out of the papers! There's something you two aren't telling me.\"\n\nAlek sighed. Lilit could be annoyingly perceptive sometimes.\n\n\"Shall I ask my grandmother to help me sort this all out? She's very good at puzzles.\"\n\nAlek turned to Dylan. \"We should tell her everything.\"\n\nThe boy threw up his hand in surrender. \"Aye, it hardly matters anymore. We have to put a stop to the whole plan! Just tell Malone about the Tesla cannon tomorrow. Once that's in the papers, the Admiralty will know the plan is too dangerous.\"\n\n\"We can't,\" Alek said. \"The revolution will fail without the Leviathan's help!\"\n\n\"But they'll never make it. If that cannon's got its own power plant, it's got to be barking huge.\"\n\nAlek opened his mouth, but couldn't find words to argue with. There was no way to fly an airship over Istanbul now, not with a giant Tesla cannon overlooking the city.\n\nLilit let out an exasperated sigh. \"Well, since neither of you boys can be bothered to explain, allow me.\"\n\nShe held up one hand, ticking off points on her fingers.\n\n\"One, the Leviathan is clearly on its way back to Istanbul, or you wouldn't care about this Tesla cannon. Two, whatever it's up to can help the revolution, as Alek just said. And three, this all has to do with your secret mission.\" She hesitated a moment, staring at Dylan. \"Your men were captured near the kraken nets, weren't they?\"\n\nAlek opened his mouth again, wanting to interrupt before she figured out the truth. But Lilit silenced him with a wave of her hand.\n\n\"Everyone thinks your mission failed, but they don't know that you weren't captured.\" Her eyes widened. \"You plan to bring a kraken down the strait!\"\n\nDylan looked miserable, but only nodded. \"Not really a kraken, but close enough. And a fine plan it was too. But it's all ruined now! We have to tell Malone about the cannon, or get a warning to the Admiralty some other way.\"\n\n\"But this is perfect!\" Lilit said.\n\n\"Perfect in what way, exactly?\" Dylan cried. \"That cannon is a death trap, and the Leviathan is headed right toward it! That's my ship we're talking about!\"\n\n\"We're talking about the liberation of my people as well,\" Lilit said softly, her eyes locked on his. \"The Committee will deal with this problem, I swear.\"\n\n\"But my mission was meant to be top secret.\" Dylan shook his head. \"I can't let it go forward if a daft bunch of anarchists know about it!\"\n\n\"Then we won't tell anyone else,\" Lilit said. \"Only we three have to know.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"The three of us can't destroy a Tesla cannon.\"\n\n\"No, we can't. But \u2026\" Lilit held one hand up, her eyes squeezing shut for a moment. \"My father plans to lead the assault on the Goeben himself, with four walkers. But if the Leviathan and its sea monster can deal with the ironclads, we have those walkers to spare. So on the night of the revolution, we explain everything to my father, then head to the cliffs and tear this Tesla cannon to the ground!\"\n\n\"Someone might find out,\" Dylan said.\n\n\"What if we only use pilots we trust?\" Alek asked. \"Lilit's walker, mine, Klopp's, and Zaven's. No one else has to know what's going on.\"\n\nLilit shrugged. \"No one else is volunteering to fight the Goeben, after all.\"\n\nDylan stared at them both, a look of terror in his eyes.\n\n\"But what if we fail?\" he said softly. \"They'll all burn.\"\n\nLilit reached across the table and took his hands in her own.\n\n\"We won't fail,\" she said. \"Our revolution depends on your ship.\"\n\nDylan stared at her hands for a moment, then looked helplessly at Alek.\n\n\"It's the only way they can win,\" Alek said simply. \"And the only way to complete your mission. Your men sacrificed themselves for this, right?\"\n\n\"Oh, you had to say that,\" Dylan said with a groan, pulling his hands from Lilit's grasp. \"Aye, all right, then. But you barking anarchists had better not make a mess of this!\"\n\n\"We won't,\" Lilit said, beaming at the boy. \"You've saved the revolution again!\"\n\nDylan rolled his eyes. \"No need to get all moony, lassie.\"\n\nAlek smiled. They really were the most amusing couple.\n\nDeryn spread her arms out straight, and waited.\n\n\"R \u2026\"\n\nShe dipped her left arm forty-five degrees.\n\n\"S \u2026\"\n\nShe let her right arm drop, the screwdriver in her hand pointing straight down.\n\n\"G!\" said Bovril, and ate another strawberry. Then it tossed the stem over the edge of the balcony, leaning its head through the rails to watch it fall.\n\n\"How do you like that?\" Deryn cried. \"It's learnt the whole barking alphabet!\"\n\nLilit and Alek stared at the beastie, then at her.\n\n\"You taught it this?\" Lilit asked.\n\n\"No! I was just practicing my signals. I was saying the letters out loud, I suppose, and after a couple times through \u2026\" Deryn pointed at Bovril. \"The beastie joined in, as quick as a bosun's mate.\"\n\n\"And that's why you want to bring it along tonight?\" Alek asked. \"In case we need to send semaphore signals?\"\n\nDeryn rolled her eyes. \"No, you daft bum-rag. It's because \u2026\"\n\nShe sighed, unsure exactly how to say it. The loris had a knack for noticing important details, just as Dr. Barlow had claimed. And tonight was the most important mission that Deryn had ever been a part of. She didn't dare leave the beastie behind.\n\n\"Perspicacious,\" the creature said.\n\n\"Aye, that's the word,\" Deryn cried. \"Because it's barking perspicacious.\"\n\nTwo weeks before, Zaven had put his posh education to use and explained the loris's species name to Deryn. It turned out that \"perspicacious\" meant the same as \"shrewd,\" or even \"farsighted.\" And though that didn't sound like the sort of thing a beastie could be, it certainly fit.\n\nAlek sighed, and turned toward the family's apartments, where Nene's tortoise bed was emerging, covered with maps fluttering in the breeze. The old woman called to Lilit and Alek.\n\nAs they walked away, Alek said over his shoulder, \"All right, Dylan. But I have a walker to pilot. So you'll be looking after it.\"\n\n\"More than happy to,\" Deryn said softly, scratching the loris's wee head.\n\nOnly having the beastie about had made it bearable, working with Clankers and their lifeless machines, smelling of exhaust and engine grease. The bustling splendor of Istanbul was still so alien, its foreign tongues too many to learn in a lifetime, much less a month. Deryn spent her days printing newspapers she couldn't read, and wondering what the prayers gliding over the rooftops might mean. The intricate geometries of Zaven's carpets and tiled ceilings dazzled her eyes, and even the wondrous food often proved to be\u2014like the rest of the capital\u2014too sumptuous.\n\nBut hardest of all was being so close to Alek, while still hiding from him. He'd shared his last secret with her, and Deryn realized now that she could have told him that same night, in that dark hotel room with no one about to hear.\n\nBut every time she'd tried, Deryn had imagined the look of horror on his face. Not that she was a girl in boy's clothes, or that she'd lied to him for so long. All that yackum Alek would soon get past, she knew. And then he would love her, she knew.\n\nBut that was the problem, because there was one thing that would never change.\u2026 Deryn was a commoner. She was a thousand times more common than Alek's mother, who'd been born a countess, or even Lilit, an anarchist who spoke six languages and always knew which fork to use. Deryn Sharp was as common as barking dirt, and the only reason that didn't matter to His Serene Highness, Aleksandar of Hohenberg, was that she was also, in his mind, a boy.\n\nThe moment she could be anything more than a friend, she would be, and then he'd have to run a mile.\n\nThe pope did not write letters to transform orphan daughters of balloonists, or girls in boy's britches, or unrepentant Darwinists, into royalty. She was dead certain of that.\n\nDeryn watched Alek kneel by Nene's bed like a good grandson, the three of them going over the details of the attack one last time. This battle tonight was something they had helped make together, she and Alek, and this was the closest they would ever be.\n\n\"A, B, C \u2026 ?\" Bovril asked, and Deryn nodded.\n\nShe prayed that her signal practice really would come in handy. If all went well tonight, the Leviathan's crew would be taking a long hard look at the Tesla cannon after it had been destroyed. That could be her only chance to let them know that she was alive.\n\nIt might even be a chance to go home, and leave her prince behind at last.\n\nThe great outer gates of the courtyard swung slowly open, revealing a clear and moonless sky.\n\n\"Lucky it didn't rain tonight,\" Alek said, checking the controls.\n\n\"Right enough,\" Deryn answered. A midnight downpour would have turned the spice bombs into a useless, soupy mess, ruining the Committee's only weapons. That was the thing about battles, Mr. Rigby always said, one squick of bad luck could make all your plans go pear-shaped.\n\nMuch like the rest of life, she supposed.\n\nThe courtyard filled with the rumble of engines from four walkers. \u015eahmeran, with Zaven at its controls, raised a giant hand and waved them forward as it slithered out the gates.\n\nLilit went next, piloting a Minotaur. The half bull, half man bowed low to get its horns through, giant hands out for balance. Spice bombs rattled in the magazine that Master Klopp had welded to its forearm.\n\nAlek placed his feet on the djinn's pedals. Klopp had insisted that Alek pilot an Arab machine tonight; their steam cannon made them the safest of the Committee's walkers. Behind the djinn, Klopp and Bauer sat at the controls of an iron golem.\n\n\"Hold on tight, Bovril,\" Deryn said, and the beastie scampered up onto her shoulder. Its claws poked through her piloting jacket like wee needles.\n\nAlek worked his feet, and the contraption took a huge step forward.\n\nDeryn grasped the sides of her commander's chair, queasy as always in the lumbering machine. At least the djinn was still in parade mode, the top of its head split open, so she could see the stars and breathe fresh air.\n\n\"Turn left here,\" she said. To keep this mission as secret as possible, the four walkers had no copilots. So Deryn was serving as Alek's navigator and, once the shooting started, as range finder for the throwing arm. Deryn had never been a gunner before, but altitude practice had made her a dab hand at estimating distances\u2014as long as she remembered to think in meters instead of yards.\n\nDeryn looked at her map again. It showed four separate routes to the Tesla cannon, with Alek's marked in red. These four walkers were headed out before the main attack began, so they couldn't afford to raise suspicions by traveling together. The trick would be arriving at their target all at the same time.\n\nAlso marked on the map were the positions of the other forty-odd walkers pledged to the Committee, poised to spring into action an hour later. Deryn wondered if there were any spies among those crews, ready to sell the Committee's plans to the sultan for a lump of gold.\n\nAt least she could be certain that this attack on the Tesla cannon had been kept secret. Zaven himself had heard about it only this afternoon. He'd fumed a bit about being kept in the dark, until realizing that he wouldn't have to face the big guns of the Goeben.\n\nUnless the Admiralty had changed the night of the behemoth's arrival, of course.\n\n\"Have you thought about how many things can go wrong?\" Deryn said. \"It's like the bard says, 'The best laid plans of mice and men.'\"\n\n\"Fah!\" said Bovril, imitating Zaven's tone.\n\n\"You see?\" Alek said. \"Your perspicacious friend is confident.\"\n\nDeryn looked at the beastie. \"I just hope it's right.\"\n\nThey made good time on the almost empty streets of Istanbul. The Committee's walkers had been practicing night walking for the last month, pretending to patrol for robbers, so no one gave the djinn a second glance.\n\nThe buildings thinned out at the city's edge, and soon the djinn was traveling down a dusty carriage road. The route was barely wide enough for the walker, and the skirt of steam cannon thrashed the tree branches on either side. When they passed a darkened inn at a crossroads, Deryn saw curious faces peering from the windows. Sooner or later someone would wonder what a walker from Istanbul's ghettos was doing in the countryside.\n\nBut they were too close to their target for that to matter now. The landscape climbed, growing rockier as the cliffs rose. The city came into view out the walker's rear viewport, its glitter and brilliance garish in the moonless night.\n\nA hundred masts and smokestacks were scattered across the water's black expanse, and Deryn wondered again what would happen if the Leviathan were shot down. Would the behemoth simply swim away, or go mad among all those unarmed ships?\n\nShe shook her head. They couldn't fail tonight.\n\nThey were only a few miles from the Tesla cannon when a spotlight lanced out of the dark.\n\nDeryn squinted\u2014her eyes caught a flash of steel, and the silhouette of a trunk and tail.\n\nIt was one of the sultan's war elephants, blocking their path.\n\n\"Range?\" Alek asked calmly.\n\n\"About a thousand yards. That is, nine hundred meters.\"\n\nAlek nodded, pulling a lever. A spice bomb rolled from the magazine into the djinn's hand. Deryn caught a whiff of it and winced. Even wrapped in oiled burlap, the bombs let off eye-burning dust every time they moved.\n\n\"Top down, please,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Aye, your princeliness.\" Deryn set to work on the hand crank, and the djinn's forehead rolled slowly closed across the stars.\n\nAlek stoked the engines, sending power to the steam boilers. The machine's right arm drew slowly back.\n\nSomeone in the war elephant shouted at them through a megaphone. Deryn didn't recognize any of the Turkish words, but it sounded more curious than angry. As far as the Ottomans knew, the djinn was unarmed.\n\n\"They're just wondering what in blazes we're doing here,\" Deryn muttered. \"No reason to be nervous.\"\n\n\"Nervous,\" said the beastie.\n\nAlek laughed. \"Perspicacious or not, the creature knows you.\"\n\nDeryn frowned at the loris. Of course she was a wee bit jittery. Only a fool wouldn't be, heading into battle. Especially on a finicky Clanker contraption.\n\n\"Loaded and ready to fire,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Hold on.\" Deryn watched the ranging gauge that Klopp had installed, its needle slowly climbing as steam pressure built in the djinn's shoulder joint.\n\nThe tricky bit was, Klopp hadn't been able to test every throwing arm in the Committee's army, so he'd marked the gauges using only math and guesswork. Until their first shot landed, there was no telling how far the bombs would actually travel.\n\nThe needle finally reached nine hundred meters.\u2026\n\n\"Fire!\" Deryn cried.\n\nAlek pulled the release trigger, and the djinn's giant hand swung overhead. Clouds of steam gushed from its metal shoulder, turning the air in the cabin scalding.\n\nThe spice bomb struck fifty yards in front of the elephant, exploding into a cloud of dust that swirled as red as blood in the spotlight.\n\n\"Master Klopp knows his sums,\" Deryn said with a smile. \"Next time we'll hit the bum-rags dead-on!\"\n\n\"More steam,\" Alek ordered. \"I'm loading another.\"\n\nDeryn pulled the stokers, and the engines roared beneath them, but the ranging needle was slow to climb. The djinn had exhausted every squick of shoulder pressure with its first throw.\n\n\"Come on!\" she urged it. \"They'll be shooting back any second.\"\n\n\"If this were a proper walker, we'd be taking evasive action,\" Alek muttered. \"What I wouldn't give for a decent gun sight.\"\n\n\"Or a decent gun!\"\n\n\"These spice bombs were your idea, I seem to\u2014\"\n\nThe elephant's main turret roared to life, sending a shell screaming overhead. The explosion came seconds later, rocking the djinn on its feet.\n\n\"They overshot us!\" Alek cried. \"But they have our range now. Can I fire yet?\"\n\n\"Hold on!\" Deryn watched the needle climb. The loris dug its claws deep into her shoulder, imitating the whistle and boom of the near miss.\n\nThe needle passed nine hundred meters, but she needed another fifty at least.\u2026\n\n\"Fire!\" she finally cried.\n\nThe great arm swung again, rocking the cabin backward. The moment the bomb had flown, Alek grabbed the controls and took them charging ahead.\n\nThrough the rocking viewport Deryn watched the war elephant disappear into a roiling cloud of red dust.\n\n\"Bull's-eye!\" she cried.\n\nBut the walker's crew still managed to fire\u2014the main gun blazed again, setting the dust cloud around the elephant into a massive whirlwind. The air cracked once more as the shot zoomed past.\n\nThe djinn reeled from the blast\u2014the shell had landed right where they'd been standing, Deryn reckoned. Alek struggled with the controls as the walker staggered forward.\n\nThe machine gun on the elephant's trunk opened up, setting the path ahead of them jittering with plumes of dirt. Then came a chorus of bullets striking metal, as loud as pistons misfiring.\n\n\"We need steam cover!\" Alek cried.\n\n\"No chance!\" Deryn stared at the motionless pressure gauge. The engines were too busy keeping the walker moving to recharge its boilers.\n\nBut the elephant's main turret didn't fire again. Only its left front leg was moving, like a dog's pawing at the ground. The searchlight swung away aimlessly into the sky.\n\n\"They've got a snootful!\" Deryn cried. Even hundreds of yards away, her eyes were starting to prickle from the spices. She pulled the goggles up from around her neck and snapped them on.\n\n\"Snootful,\" Bovril said, chuckling, then sneezed.\n\nAlek twisted the saunters, putting the djinn's hands out for balance. But he kept the walker charging ahead.\n\n\"I'm going to knock them over. Brace yourself.\"\n\nDeryn checked her straps. \"Hold on, beastie!\"\n\nThe elephant was stumbling in circles now, another of its legs trying to move. But the turret stayed motionless. Had the spice bomb struck it dead-on?\n\nThen Deryn saw the airflow patterns made visible by red dust, and realized what had happened\u2014the cannon's recoil had sucked the spices right into the main turret. The elephant's crew had done themselves in with their own shot.\n\n\"They must be positively gagging!\"\n\n\"Not for long, though,\" Alek said. \"Hold on!\"\n\nThe war elephant had turned sideways, stumbling into a barbed wire fence just behind it. As the djinn charged into the swirling red clouds, Deryn's throat began to burn, and she was glad for her goggles. But Alek didn't waver\u2014he tipped the djinn's left shoulder down \u2026\n\nMetal crunched and tore around them, a shock wave thundering through the djinn's huge frame. The world spun in the viewport, sky and ground and darkness flashing past. Alek swore, twisting at the controls, and a lungful of spices set Deryn coughing.\n\nFinally the djinn stopped spinning; it was listing at a crazy angle. Deryn sprayed a squick of steam to clear the air, unstrapped herself, and leaned out the viewport.\n\nThe white clouds around them parted, revealing the elephant lying motionless on its side.\n\n\"We got them!\"\n\n\"Snootful!\" Bovril shouted.\n\n\"But why are we leaning like this?\" Alek cried. \"And what in blazes is holding us up?\"\n\nDeryn leaned out farther, and saw glittering metal everywhere. The djinn had stumbled through the barbed wire fence, pulling up a quarter mile of it.\n\n\"We're tangled in that barking wire!\"\n\nAlek worked his foot pedals, and wires snapped and scraped. \"There's more of them ahead. We need steam cover\u2014now.\"\n\nDeryn stoked the boilers, then looked through the viewport. Two miles in the distance the Tesla cannon rose up from the cliffs, half as tall as the Eiffel Tower.\n\nAround its base three more war elephants stood waiting, their smokestacks belching to life.\n\n\"Are the others anywhere about?\" Alek asked.\n\nDeryn leaned out the viewport, looking backward. There was nothing on the horizon but the silhouettes of short salt-sheered trees along the cliff tops. Then she spotted them\u2014a trio of smoke trails against the starlight, no more than two miles away.\n\n\"Aye, all of them! Three kilometers or so behind us.\" She glanced at the pressure gauge, which was only now beginning to climb again. \"And a good thing too. It'll be a few minutes before we can throw again.\"\n\n\"We don't have that much time. Give us some cover while I shake this wire off.\"\n\nAs Deryn reached for the steam cannon lever, one of the war elephants fired. The shell landed short, but close, and Deryn was thrown backward from the controls. Gravel and dirt spat through the viewport, leaving a scratch on her goggles.\n\n\"If you please, Mr. Sharp?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Bovril repeated with a chuckle.\n\nDeryn scrambled up from the floor to pull the lever, and hissing filled her ears. The pilot's cabin was suddenly as hot and humid as a greenhouse.\n\nOutside the viewport the world disappeared behind a veil of white.\n\nAlek worked the pedals and saunters, blindly tearing at the tangle of barbed wire. More gunfire boomed beyond the steam cloud, but the answering explosions sounded in the distance.\n\n\"They're shooting at the others,\" Deryn said.\n\n\"Then now's the time to attack! Get me some pressure in my throwing arm.\"\n\n\"I'd be happy to, Your Highness.\" Deryn pulled the engine stokers again. \"But we've emptied the boilers to make this steam, and now you're dancing about like a loon, which is taking even more power!\"\n\n\"Fine, then,\" Alek said, bringing the djinn into a crouched halt. As the engines idled, the ranging gauge began to climb again.\n\nThrough the whiteness came the clatter of machine guns\u2014the Ottomans were firing into the bank of steam clouds, listening to see where their bullets hit metal.\n\n\"They'll find us soon enough,\" Alek said. He pulled the release, and Deryn heard a third spice bomb rattle into place.\n\nShe wiped condensation from the ranging gauge. \"Three hundred meters and climbing.\"\n\n\"That's enough\u2014if we charge them!\"\n\n\"Are you daft? There's three of them and one of us!\"\n\n\"Yes, but we haven't much time. Listen to your beast.\"\n\nDeryn stared at the loris. Its wee eyes were closed, as if it had decided to take a nap. But a soft noise came from its lips\u2014a hum and crackle, like the static on Klopp's wireless. She'd heard the sound before \u2026\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" she breathed.\n\n\"Indeed.\" Alek pushed at the pedals. As the djinn thundered forward, the hot clouds parted around them.\n\nThe Tesla cannon stood tall on the cliffs, its frame glimmering against the dark sky. Faint sparkles traveled along its lower struts, like fabricated fireflies flitting about on Guy Fawkes Day. Its shimmer spilled across the battlefield.\n\nShe leaned forward to squint up at the stars. No dark silhouette moved among them, but if the Ottomans were charging up their cannon, they must have spotted the Leviathan approaching.\n\nThe war elephants were still firing at the other walkers, their mortars elevated high. But as Alek charged ahead, one of the turrets began to spin about.\u2026\n\nMoments later its main gun billowed flame and smoke. The shell struck close enough to send the djinn staggering. The needle on the ranging gauge trembled, then fell\u2014pressure was leaking somewhere.\n\n\"We're hit!\" Deryn cried.\n\n\"The trigger is yours, Mr. Sharp,\" Alek said calmly, his hands white-knuckled on the saunters. The djinn was limping now, the whole pilot's cabin lurching from side to side.\n\nDeryn grasped the release trigger, her eyes flicking back and forth between the ranging gauge and the three steel elephants ahead. The needle had stopped at four hundred meters, trembling uncertainly, and the distance to the elephants was lessening with every step.\n\nThe nearest elephant swung its trunk toward the djinn, its machine gun blazing. Bullets struck armor with a sound like coins shaken in a tin. One bullet slipped in through the viewport, a sliver of hot metal striking sparks around their heads.\n\n\"Are you hit?\" Alek asked.\n\n\"Not me!\" Deryn said.\n\n\"Not me!\" Bovril repeated, then filled the cabin with its maniacal laughter.\n\nAnother of the elephants' big guns was taking aim \u2026\n\nThe ranging needle sputtered again, then climbed, and finally they were close enough. Deryn pulled the trigger, and the walker's throwing arm swung overhead as they ran, like a charging fast bowler unleashing a cricket ball at a batsman.\n\nThe spice bomb went straight into the closest elephant, exploding into a swirl of fiery red. The machine staggered, but the cloud moved hastily away, spreading through the shimmering lower struts of the Tesla cannon.\n\n\"Blisters!\" Deryn cried. \"The wind's too strong up here!\"\n\nOf course, the wind always blew hard against seaside cliffs. She'd been a Dummkopf not to realize it!\n\nBut Alek didn't falter, barreling straight at the elephant. The direct hit had done some damage, at least. The Ottoman machine was stumbling about like a newborn calf.\n\nBut just before they collided, the elephant's great head rolled on its neck, raising the two barbed tusks.\u2026\n\nAlek twisted at the saunters, but the walker was moving too fast to turn. With an awful metal shriek the djinn impaled itself upon one tusk, a white blast of steam shooting from the boilers in its chest.\n\nThe air in the pilot's cabin turned wet and scalding, every valve hissing like a teakettle. The elephant shook its head, tossing the djinn madly and throwing Deryn from her seat. She screamed as her hands splayed against the burning metal floor and the beastie's claws went deep into her shoulder.\n\n\"We're done for!\" she shouted. \"Abandon ship!\"\n\n\"Not yet.\" Alek pulled a saunter back with one hand, hitting the bomb release with another, and with the djinn's last squick of strength brought its throwing arm down.\n\nDeryn stood, squinting through her goggles to watch the remaining spice bombs\u2014almost a dozen of them\u2014rattle down the magazine to burst against the elephant's back.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" said the perspicacious loris.\n\n\"Open us up,\" Deryn said, unstrapping herself. \"In another moment we won't be able to breathe!\"\n\nWhile Alek spun the hand crank furiously, she kicked open the locker in the back of the cabin, pulling a mass of rope from it.\n\n\"Aren't you glad we practiced belaying?\" she shouted over the din of steam and gunfire.\n\n\"I'd rather not know what's coming,\" Alek said.\n\n\"Nonsense. This is easy compared with a sliding escape from a Huxley! I'll tell you about that some time.\"\n\nAs the djinn's head opened, Deryn tied the rope off and flung it over the back of the walker. Stepping up onto the cabin's edge, she peered down into the nebulous white cloud beneath them. The last steam from the djinn's boilers was still billowing from the tusk protruding from its back.\n\n\"I'll go first,\" she said. \"So if you slide too fast, I'll break your fall.\"\n\n\"Won't that hurt a bit?\"\n\n\"Aye. So don't slide too fast!\"\n\nDeryn clipped herself to the rope, taking one last look at the battle spread out around them. Another of the war elephants had been hit\u2014it was stumbling in a circle, red dust splattered across its glittering steel armor. Lilit's Minotaur was charging forward while the iron golem stood back, its huge right arm launching spice bombs at the remaining elephant. Even with the sea breeze at her back, the smells of spices and gunfire were choking.\n\nThen she saw it\u2014\u015eahmeran lying on her belly half a mile from the tower, pouring out black smoke and burning oil.\n\n\"Zaven's been hit!\" she cried.\n\n\"And that's not all.\" Alek pointed toward the city, where a new column of smoke was rising in the distance.\n\n\"Blisters! Enemy reinforcements!\"\n\n\"Don't worry. That walker's ten kilometers away, and the Ottomans don't have anything fast.\"\n\n\"Fast,\" Bovril said.\n\nDeryn gave it a hard look. \"What in blazes are you saying, beastie?\"\n\n\"Fast,\" it said again.\n\nA giant crash rolled across the battlefield\u2014Lilit's Minotaur had charged straight into the last undamaged war elephant. Both machines went down, tumbling over each other like cats in a fight. A vast red cloud billowed out in all directions, driven by the steam from the two machines' broken boilers, turning the stars in the sky blood red.\n\nThe two walkers' tumbling came to a halt in the center of a swirling tower of dust and engine smoke, neither of them moving.\n\n\"Lilit \u2026,\" Deryn said hoarsely.\n\nThe Minotaur was down, but its head seemed to be undamaged. Maybe the girl was safe inside her metal shell.\n\n\"Look,\" Alek said. \"She's opened the way for Klopp!\"\n\nOnly one elephant remained standing, and it was covered with red dust, barely moving. The iron golem was lumbering steadily forward, with nothing between it and the Tesla cannon.\n\nBut Klopp didn't veer toward the wounded elephant or the cannon\u2014he was headed straight toward them.\n\n\"What's he doing?\" Deryn asked. \"Why's he coming here?\"\n\nAlek swore. \"Klopp and Bauer are following Volger's orders. They're coming to rescue me!\"\n\n\"Blisters, this is what you get for being a barking prince!\"\n\n\"An archduke, technically.\"\n\n\"Whatever you are, we have to show him you don't need rescuing. Come on!\"\n\nDeryn lifted the rope, and felt Bovril tighten its grip on her shoulder.\n\n\"Abandon ship,\" the beastie said.\n\nShe jumped, sliding down through hot clouds of vapor.\n\nBefore he followed Dylan, Alek looked down at the war elephant that had impaled the djinn.\n\nCrewmen were abandoning the walker through its belly hatch, coughing and stumbling blindly. They wouldn't be much of a threat for the moment.\n\nBut seeing the ground so far below made Alek pull his piloting gloves tighter. Learning how to \"belay,\" as Dylan called it, had taught him a healthy respect for rope burn. He swallowed, the tastes of paprika and cayenne heavy in his mouth, then jumped \u2026\n\nThe rope whipped past him, wild and angry, like a stream of scalding water. He jerked himself to a painful halt every few meters, his boots banging against the hot metal of the djinn's armor. Steam clouds swirled around him, the engines inside the walker knocking and hissing as they cooled.\n\nAs his feet thumped down onto hard earth, Alek pulled off the gloves to stare at his burning palms.\n\n\"Took you long enough,\" Dylan complained, turning toward the iron golem. \"Come on. That Tesla cannon's getting ready to fire. We need to show Klopp you're okay!\"\n\nAlek unclipped himself and followed the boy, who had broken into a dead run. The iron golem was still headed toward them, making its steady way across the battlefield.\n\nKlopp clearly hadn't seen the Ottoman reinforcements coming from behind him.\n\nAs he ran, Alek squinted at the smoke trail in the distance. It seemed closer already, and he saw now how the column curved backward against the starlit sky.\n\nFast, the creature had said. But what walker was that fast?\n\nDylan let out a yelp from just ahead. He'd tripped and fallen face-first into the dirt. As the boy scrambled to his feet, Alek slowed, staring down at what Dylan had stumbled on\u2014train tracks.\n\n\"Oh, no.\"\n\n\"What in blazes?\" Dylan stared down at the rails. \"Ah, this must be where the Orient-Express \u2026\"\n\n\"Express,\" the beast hissed softly.\n\nTogether they turned to stare at the approaching column of smoke. It was much closer now, charging along the cliffs ten times faster than any lumbering walker.\n\nAnd it was headed straight for the iron golem.\n\n\"He can't see it,\" Alek said. \"It's right behind him!\"\n\n\"Klopp!\" Dylan cried out, breaking back into a run, his arms waving in the air. \"Get away from the tracks!\"\n\nAlek ran a few more steps, his heart thudding in his ears. But yelling was pointless. He searched his pockets for a way to send a signal\u2014a flare, a gun.\n\nThe famous dragon-headed engine was visible in the distance now, it single eye glowing white hot, smoke spewing from its stacks. Dylan was still running toward Klopp, pointing back at the massive train.\n\nThe iron golem came to a lumbering halt, its head lowering for a better view of the tiny boy before it.\n\nAlek watched as two huge cargo arms unfolded from the engine car of the Express. A dozen meters long, they stretched out in both directions, like a pair of sabers wielded by a charging horseman.\n\nKlopp must have understood Dylan's cries, or heard the train behind him, because the walker began to slowly turn \u2026\n\nBut in that moment the Express shot past, its left cargo arm slicing through the golem's legs. Metal shrieked and buckled, and a cloud of steam burst from the ruined knees.\n\nThe walker tipped backward, its huge arms flailing, and landed on the trailing end of the Express. Two freight cars buckled around the fallen machine, and the cars behind kept piling into it, hurling glass and metal parts into the air.\n\nThe shock wave from being pulled in half rippled up the train until it reached the engine, which skidded from the rails, plowing through the dirt. But the pilots had been ready for this\u2014the Express's arms stretched out like wings to steady the engine car. A handful of coal and freight cars dragged behind the engine, sending clouds of dust into the air.\n\nAlek saw Dylan running back toward him, Bovril a tiny silhouette on his shoulder, both of them about to be swallowed in the rolling mass of dust.\n\n\"Run!\" he was shouting, pointing sideways from the tracks.\n\nThe front half of the train, skidding and derailed but still speeding along, was headed straight at Alek.\n\nHe turned and ran the way Dylan was pointing, directly away from the rails. Long seconds later the dust cloud overtook Alek, blinding him and filling his lungs.\n\nSomething flew out of the dark mass and knocked him off his feet, strong hands pushing his head down into the dirt.\n\nA huge shadow swept overhead\u2014the Express's cargo arm, Alek realized. A cascade of dirt and gravel flew over him, and a clamor like a thousand foundries rolled past, full of shrieks and clangs and explosions.\n\nAs the noise faded, the dust cleared a little, and Alek looked up.\n\n\"Well, that was close,\" he said. Not five meters from his head, the skidding claw of the cargo arm had carved a furrow as wide as a carriage lane.\n\n\"You're welcome, your archdukeness.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Dylan.\" Alek stood up, dusting off his clothes and looking dazedly about.\n\nThe front half of the Orient-Express had finally slid to a halt, almost skidding into the Tesla cannon itself. The iron golem lay hissing and steaming on the ground, the back half of the train in piles around it. Alek took a step closer, wondering if Master Klopp and Bauer were all right.\n\nBut Bovril was growling, echoing a low buzzing noise that drifted across the battlefield. A crackle was building in the air.\n\nDylan pointed toward the southern sky, where a long silhouette had finally appeared\u2014the Leviathan, black and huge against the stars.\n\nAlek turned back toward the Tesla cannon. As he watched, the awful shimmers began to travel up into its tip.\n\n\"We have to stop it,\" Dylan said. \"There's no one else.\"\n\nAlek nodded dumbly. Klopp and Bauer, Lilit and Zaven\u2014they all needed his help. But the Tesla cannon was readying to fire, and the Leviathan had more than a hundred men aboard.\n\nHis fists clenched in frustration. If only he were in a walker now, with huge arms to tear the tower down.\n\n\"Express,\" Bovril hissed.\n\n\"The train,\" Alek said softly. \"If we can take the engine car, we can use its cargo arms!\"\n\nDylan gazed at him a moment, then nodded. They ran together, stumbling across the wreckage-strewn ground, dodging the piles of scattered cargo that had been thrown from the train.\n\nThe front half of the Orient-Express had come to rest only fifteen meters from the Tesla cannon. The cargo arms were motionless, but the smokestacks were still belching. A few soldiers stumbled out of the engine cars, wearing German uniforms, rifles strapped across their shoulders.\n\nAlek dragged Dylan to a halt in the shadows. \"They're armed, and we're not.\"\n\n\"Aye. Follow me.\"\n\nThe boy ran to the last car in the line, a freight carrier lying lopsided in the furrow dug by the train's passage. He climbed up and along its top, making his way toward the engine car. Alek followed, crouching low to keep out of sight.\n\nThe soldiers hardly looked alert. They were walking about in a dumbfounded state, gazing at the battle wreckage around them and coughing spices from their lungs. A few stared at the Leviathan in the sky.\n\nAlek heard a familiar sound\u2014the rumble of the airship's engines. He glanced up and saw that the Leviathan was halfway through a turn. The crew had spotted the glittering Tesla cannon and were trying to bring the ship about.\n\nBut they were too late. It would take long minutes to get out of range, and the Tesla cannon was buzzing like a beehive, almost ready to fire.\n\nDylan had reached the coal hopper behind the engine, and Alek jumped in after him. Coal skidded under his feet and turned his hands black as he caught himself from stumbling.\n\nDylan scrambled to the front and climbed out, reaching down to give Alek a hand.\n\n\"Quickly now,\" the boy whispered.\n\nAlek pulled himself up between the two huge cargo arms. He could feel the air crackling; sparks from the giant tower were making the shadows quiver. But the engineer's cabin was just ahead.\n\n\"There's only one man inside,\" Dylan whispered, handing Bovril to Alek and pulling a knife from his jacket. \"I can handle him.\"\n\nNot waiting for an answer, the boy swung himself down and in through a window in a single motion. By the time Alek reached the door, Dylan had the lone engineer cowering in a corner.\n\nAlek stepped inside and looked at the controls\u2014a legion of unfamiliar dials and gauges, brake levers and engine stokers. But the saunters were metal gloves on poles, just like the ones that controlled \u015eahmeran's arms.\n\nHe placed Bovril on the floor, stuck his hands into the saunters, and made a fist.\n\nA dozen meters to his right, the huge claw responded, snapping shut. A few of the German soldiers looked up at the noise, but most were transfixed by the glittering Tesla cannon and the airship overhead.\n\n\"Don't muck about!\" Dylan hissed. \"Tear it down!\"\n\nAlek extended his arm, reaching out for the tower. But the great claw clamped shut a few meters short of the nearest glowing strut.\n\n\"Get us closer!\" Dylan said.\n\nAlek stared at the engine levers, then realized that the train's wheels were useless without a track. But he remembered a legless beggar he'd seen in the town of Lienz, propelling himself along on a wheeled board with his hands.\n\nHe set both claws against the ground, one on either side, and scraped them backward. The engine car lifted a bit, sliding forward a meter or so, then settled back into the dirt.\n\n\"Closer,\" Bovril said approvingly.\n\n\"Well, we've got the Germans' attention now,\" Dylan muttered, looking out the window.\n\n\"I leave that matter to you,\" Alek answered, scraping the huge claws against the ground again. The engine car skidded forward with an ungodly screech, metal striking the bedrock of the cliffs.\n\nShouts came through the windows now, and a soldier leapt up to pound on the door. Dylan punched the engineer in the stomach, crumpling him to the floor, then turned to stand ready with his knife.\n\nAlek outstretched the cargo arms again.\n\nThis time one great claw reached the Tesla cannon's lowest strut. As he snapped the claw shut, a crackle shot through the cabin. The metal gloves sizzled in Alek's hands, and an invisible force seemed to close around his chest. Every hair on Bovril's body was standing on end.\n\n\"Barking spiders!\" Dylan cried. \"The lightning's coming for us!\"\n\nSparks danced along the controls and the walls of the cabin, and the soldier at the door yelped, jumping off the metal running board.\n\nAlek set his teeth against the pain, pulling harder on the saunter. The engine car lifted into the air again, the strut letting out a metal groan as it slowly bent toward them. At the base of the tower, a ball of white fire was spiraling into being.\n\n\"It's about to fire!\" Dylan cried.\n\nAlek pulled as hard as he could, and a sudden shudder passed through the car. The saunters went limp in his hand, and the lightning on the cabin walls flickered out.\n\n\"You snapped it, and the cannon's \u2026\" Dylan frowned. \"It's tipping. The whole barking thing is tipping over!\"\n\n\"From one broken strut?\" Alek stepped to the window, looking up.\n\nThe tower was slowly leaning away, the lightning flowing down from its higher struts into a ball of white fire on its opposite side. A huge snakelike form clung to the struts there, halfway up, wrapped in a glowing cocoon of electricity.\n\n\"Is that \u2026 ?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Dylan breathed. \"It's \u015eahmeran.\"\n\nZaven had somehow piloted his injured walker all the way to the tower. And now it was acting as a conductor, drawing the power of the cannon into itself.\n\nLightning spun in a whirlwind around the goddess walker, glowing brighter and brighter until Alek had to shut his eyes.\n\n\"He'll be done for in there,\" Dylan said, and Alek nodded.\n\nA few seconds later the Tesla cannon began to fall.\n\nThe tower toppled around \u015eahmeran in a maelstrom of white fire.\n\nTendrils of lightning leapt out in all directions, dancing on the frozen djinn and elephant, on the other fallen walkers, and along the wreckage of the Orient-Express. The metal walls of the engine car crackled with sparks and spiderwebs of flame.\n\nAs the lightning faded, the roar of the tower's collapse filled the air. A falling strut struck the engine car\u2014the ceiling dented inward, and the windows shattered all at once. Bending metal howled around them, and smoke and dust billowed through the car.\n\nLong moments later a heavy silence settled over the battlefield.\n\n\"Are you all right, Dylan?\" Alek's words sounded muffled in his own ears.\n\n\"Aye. How about you, beastie?\"\n\n\"Zaven,\" said Bovril softly.\n\nDylan took the creature into his arms. \"Listen. The Leviathan's still up there.\"\n\nIt was true\u2014the soft rumble of the airship's engines had settled over the silent battlefield. At least all this madness hadn't been in vain.\n\n\"Leviathan,\" Bovril repeated slowly, rolling the word around in its mouth.\n\nAlek stepped closer to the window. The Tesla cannon stretched out into the distance, jagged and broken, like the unearthed spine of some huge extinct creature. The djinn lay fallen beside the war elephant, both walkers battered by the cascade of debris.\n\nA cold shiver went through Alek\u2014most of the German soldiers had disappeared beneath the ruined tower.\n\n\"We need to see if Lilit's all right,\" he said. \"And Klopp and Bauer.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Dylan put Bovril on his shoulder. \"But who first?\"\n\nAlek hesitated, realizing that his men might be dead, as Zaven certainly was. \"Lilit first. Her father \u2026\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nThey opened the door and stepped out into a hellish landscape. The smoke and spices and engine oil were choking, but the smells of burned flesh and hair were worse. Alek turned his eyes from what the cannon's last discharge of electricity had done to the men outside.\n\n\"Come on,\" Dylan said hoarsely, dragging him away.\n\nAs they skirted the wreckage, Bovril raised its head and said, \"Lilit.\"\n\nAlek followed the creature's gaze, squinting through the darkness. There at the edge of the cliffs was a lonely figure, looking out over the water.\n\n\"Lilit!\" Dylan called, and the figure turned to face them.\n\nThey ran to her, the cool sea breeze carrying away the smells of battle and destruction. Lilit's piloting gear was torn, her face pale in the darkness. A long canvas bag lay in the dirt beside her feet.\n\nAs they drew close, she stumbled into Dylan's arms.\n\n\"Your father,\" the boy said. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nLilit pulled away. \"I saw what he was doing, so I cleared a path for him. I helped him do it \u2026\" She shook her head, tears tracking the dust on her face, and turned to stare at the fallen tower. \"Have we all gone mad, to want this?\"\n\n\"He saved the Leviathan,\" Alek said.\n\nLilit just looked at him, dazed and uncertain, as if every language she knew had been knocked from her head. Her stare made him feel foolish for speaking.\n\n\"All gone mad,\" Bovril said.\n\nLilit reached out to stroke the creature's fur, her eyes still glassy.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Dylan asked.\n\n\"Just dizzy \u2026 and amazed. Look at that.\"\n\nShe pointed across the water toward the city of Istanbul. Its dark streets sparkled with gunfire, and half a dozen gyrothopters hovered over the palace. As Alek watched, a silent tendril of flame arced through the sky, then disappeared with a rumble among the ancient buildings.\n\n\"See? It's really happening,\" Lilit said. \"Just as we planned.\"\n\n\"Aye, that's the barking strangest thing about battle\u2014that it's real.\" Dylan looked out across the water. \"The behemoth won't be long now.\"\n\nAlek took a step closer to the cliff's edge and gazed down. The Goeben was steaming out, her kraken-fighting arms spread like the claws of a crab. Sparks glimmered across the tower on her aft decks.\n\n\"Another Tesla cannon,\" Lilit whispered. \"I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" Dylan said. \"It's not as big, and doesn't have the range. The lady boffin has this timed to perfection.\"\n\nAs he spoke, a single spotlight lanced out from the airship's gondola, so bright that its beam sliced deep into the water. It slid toward the Goeben, a column of light rippling through blackness.\n\nThe gyrothopters above the palace moved toward the airship, and smaller spotlights from the Leviathan sprang to life, picking the gyrothopters out against the dark sky. From this distance Alek couldn't see the hawks or bats, but one by one, the gyrothopters tumbled from the air.\n\n\"They've had a whole month for repairs and refits,\" Dylan said. \"And to make more beasties.\"\n\nAlek nodded, realizing that he'd never seen the Leviathan at full strength, only damaged and starved. Tonight it would be a different ship altogether.\n\n\"Beasties,\" said Bovril, its eyes glowing like a cat's.\n\nThe main spotlight reached the Goeben, and for a moment the warship's steel guns and armor glowed a blinding white. Then the spotlight flicked from one color to the next\u2014purple, green, and finally blood red.\n\nA pair of tentacles stretched from the water, spilling sheets of rain across the Goeben's decks.\n\nIt was the behemoth.\n\nThe ironclad's kraken-fighting arms swung about, their snippers slashing at the sea monster's flesh. But the tentacles didn't seem to feel the cuts, coiling like slow pythons around the center of the warship. A huge head lifted up from the water, two eyes gleaming in the red of the spotlight.\u2026\n\nAlek took a step back. Unlike a kraken's, the behemoth's tentacles were only a small part of the beast. Its long body was all bony plates and segments, a spiny ridge traveling down its back. It repulsed him, like something dragged up from the deepest ocean, ancient and alien.\n\nA desolate sound rolled across the water, the ironclad's hull wailing as it bent in the behemoth's grasp. Her small guns were firing in all directions, the kraken-fighting arms flailing against the massive tentacles. Men and spent ammunition slid across the warship's decks as she rocked back and forth.\n\n\"Barking spiders,\" Dylan breathed. \"Dr. Barlow said the beastie was huge, but I never thought \u2026\"\n\nSomething flared inside the Goeben's broken hull, one of her boilers spilling flame. Hissing steam clouds shot from ruptures in the ship's armor plates.\n\nThe Tesla cannon tried to fire, but its half-charged lightning barely leapt into the sky, then tumbled back to coil around the behemoth's tentacles and dance on the metal decks. Explosions flickered up and down the warship's length as fuel tanks and magazines were ignited by white fire.\n\nThe searchlight turned a brilliant blue, and in one huge motion the behemoth hauled its body onto the superstructure, forcing the warship down. The Goeben resisted for a moment, but then her foredecks slipped beneath the waves. The aft end rose up, and the Tesla cannon climbed into the dark sky, still shimmering. With a metal shriek the warship split in two, both halves sliding neatly down into the water.\n\nA lone kraken-fighting arm reached up from the churning waves, its claw snapping at the air before it disappeared again. Then a burst of red light flared beneath the surface, sending columns of fresh steam into the air.\n\nThe water settled slowly, and then was still again.\n\n\"Poor bum-rags,\" Dylan said.\n\nAlek stood silent. In the last month he'd somehow forgotten what the revolution would mean for the crew of the Goeben.\n\n\"I have to join my comrades,\" Lilit said, kneeling beside the long canvas bag. She pulled out a mass of metal poles and rippling silk, and set to work. The contraption expanded, driven by coils of springs inside. In moments it was five meters across, the wings as translucent as those of a mosquito.\n\n\"What in blazes?\" Dylan cried.\n\n\"A body kite,\" Alek said. \"But you'll never make it back to Istanbul in that.\"\n\n\"I don't need to. My uncle's fishing boat is waiting beneath the cliffs.\" Lilit turned to Dylan. \"I'm sorry, but he can be trusted. And I had to tell someone else our plan, in case we needed a way back to the city.\"\n\n\"Now?\" Dylan asked. \"But we have to check on Klopp and Bauer!\"\n\n\"Of course you do; they're your friends. But the revolution needs its leaders tonight.\" Lilit stared across the water, her voice falling. \"And Nene will need me too.\"\n\nAs she stood there, fresh tears streaking the grime on her face, Alek thought of the night his own parents had died. Strangely, all he could recall now was repeating the story to Eddie Malone in payment for the man's silence. It was as if the telling had erased the real memory.\n\n\"I'm sorry about your father,\" he said, every word stiff and clumsy in his mouth.\n\nLilit gave him a curious look. \"If the sultan wins tonight, you'll simply run off somewhere new, won't you?\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"That's probably true.\"\n\n\"Good luck, then,\" she said. \"Your gold was very useful.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, if that was meant as a thank you.\"\n\n\"It was.\" She turned to Dylan. \"No matter what happens, I'll never forget what you've done for us. I think you're the most brilliant boy I've ever met.\"\n\n\"Aye, well, it was just\u2014\"\n\nLilit didn't let him finish, but threw her arms around him, kissing him hard on the lips. After a long moment she pulled away and smiled. \"I'm sorry. I was just curious.\"\n\n\"Curious? Barking spiders!\" Dylan cried, a hand at his mouth. \"You hardly know me!\"\n\nLilit laughed and lifted the body kite into the air. As its wings filled with the cool sea breeze, she stepped to the edge of the cliffs, her hands on the pilot strut.\n\n\"I know you better than you think, Mr. Sharp.\" She smiled, turning to Alek. \"You don't know what a friend you have in Dylan.\"\n\nWith that, she stepped off into the darkness \u2026 and fell from their sight.\n\nAlek rushed to the edge of the cliff, looking down in horror. The body kite tumbled for a moment, but then steadied itself and angled out to sea. The wind lifted it up higher, almost level with the cliff tops, and for a moment they could hear Lilit's laughter once more.\n\nThe kite turned hard, banking toward the city lights. A moment later it had slipped away into the darkness.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Bovril said, and chuckled.\n\nAlek shook his head, wondering at Lilit. Her father was dead and her city in flames\u2014and there she was, soaring through the air, somehow laughing.\n\n\"That girl is quite mad.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Dylan touched his mouth again. \"But she's not a bad kisser.\"\n\nAlek looked at the boy, then shook his head again.\n\n\"Come on. Let's go see about Master Klopp.\"\n\nThe iron golem lay in a heap of train cars and scattered cargo, its legs twisted and torn. Only its upper half remained intact, the huge head leaning back against the wreckage of two freight cars, a sleeping giant with a crumpled metal pillow.\n\nDeryn and Alek made their way closer, through electrical parts and shattered glass. The railroad tracks had been torn from the ground, and lay among the other debris like tangled ribbons of steel.\n\n\"Blisters,\" Deryn said as they passed an overturned dining car, its red velvet curtains spilling through broken windows. \"Lucky there were no passengers aboard.\"\n\n\"We can get up to the golem's head that way,\" Alek said, pointing at the huge hand lying splayed in the dirt. They climbed onto it and up the walker's arm, and soon saw two motionless forms strapped into the pilots' chairs.\n\n\"Master Klopp!\" Alek cried out. \"Hans!\"\n\nOne of the men stirred.\n\nDeryn saw that it was Bauer, his eyes glazed, his hands reaching feebly for the seat straps. She followed Alek up and helped him get the man out.\n\n\"Was uns getroffen?\" he asked.\n\n\"Der Orient-Express,\" Alek explained.\n\nBauer gave him a befuddled look, then saw the wreckage around them, belief dawning slowly in his face.\n\nThe three of them unstrapped Klopp and laid him on the golem's broad shoulder. The master of mechaniks still wasn't moving. Blood caked his face, and when Deryn put her hand to Klopp's neck, his pulse was weak.\n\n\"We have to get him to a doctor.\"\n\n\"Yes, but how?\" Alek asked.\n\nDeryn's eyes swept the battlefield. Not a single walker remained standing. But in the sky the Leviathan's silhouette had swung into profile. It was just as she'd expected\u2014now that it had dispatched the Goeben, the airship was coming about for a closer look at the wrecked Tesla cannon.\n\nShe opened her mouth to explain, but suddenly the beastie on her shoulder was imitating a soft thumping sound.\n\nAlek heard it too. \"Walkers.\"\n\nDeryn turned toward the city. A dozen columns of smoke rose from the horizon.\n\n\"Could they be from the Committee?\"\n\nAlek shook his head. \"They don't even know we're here.\"\n\n\"Aye, it was meant to be that way. But that anarchist lassie told her uncle, didn't she?\"\n\nBauer rose unsteadily to his feet, lifting a pair of field glasses. One lens was shattered, so he held the other to his eye like a telescope.\n\n\"Elefanten,\" he said a moment later.\n\nAlek swore. \"At least those things are slow.\"\n\n\"But we'll never carry Klopp out of here,\" Deryn said. \"Not without help.\"\n\n\"And where do you suppose we'll get that?\"\n\nShe pointed up at the dark shape over the water, still turning, its searchlights angling toward the cliffs now. \"The Leviathan is on its way to take a closer look. We can signal them, and get Klopp to the ship's surgeon.\"\n\n\"A, B, C \u2026,\" Bovril said happily.\n\n\"They'll take us prisoner again!\" Alek said.\n\n\"Aye, and what do you think the barking Ottomans will do, after all this?\" Deryn swept her arm across the wreckage. \"At least with us you'll be alive!\"\n\n\"Ich kann bleiben mit Meister Klopp, Herr,\" Bauer said.\n\nDeryn's eyes narrowed. After a month working with Clankers, her German was much better. \"What does he mean, he'll stay with Klopp?\"\n\nAlek turned to Deryn. \"Your ship can pick Bauer and Klopp up, while you and I make a run for it.\"\n\nDeryn's jaw dropped. \"Have you gone barking mad?\"\n\n\"The Ottomans will never spot us in all this mess.\" Alek clenched his fists. \"And just think, if the Committee wins tonight, they'll throw the Germans out. And they owe both of us a debt, Dylan. We can stay here, among allies.\"\n\n\"Not me, you daft prince! I have to go home!\"\n\n\"But I can't do this alone \u2026 not without you.\" His eyes softened. \"Please come with me.\"\n\nDeryn turned from him, for a moment wishing that Alek were asking this same question but in a different way. Not as some Dummkopf of a prince who expected everyone to serve his purposes, but as a man.\n\nIt wasn't his fault, of course. She'd never told Alek why she'd really come to Istanbul\u2014not for the mission but for him. She hadn't told him anything, and it was too late now. They'd been together a whole month, working and fighting side by side, and still she hadn't convinced herself that a common girl could matter to him.\n\nSo what was the point of staying?\n\n\"There's more to do here, Dylan,\" he said. \"You're the best soldier the revolution has.\"\n\n\"Aye, but that's my home up there. I can't live with \u2026 your machines.\"\n\nAlek spread his hands. \"It doesn't matter. Your crew will never see us.\"\n\n\"They have to.\" Deryn stared out across the battlefield, looking for something to signal with. But Alek was right; even if she had ten-foot semaphore flags, no one would ever see her among the wreckage of the train.\n\nThen she saw them\u2014the golem's arms stretched out in both directions. The right one was straight out, the left one at an angle, almost making the sign for the letter S.\n\n\"Can this contraption still move?\"\n\n\"What, the walker?\"\n\n\"A, B, C,\" Bovril said again.\n\n\"Aye. A giant sending signals would be barking hard to miss.\"\n\n\"The boilers are cold,\" Alek said. \"But I suppose the pneumatics might still have some pressure in them.\"\n\n\"Then take a look!\"\n\nAlek gritted his teeth, but climbed back up to the head and knelt by the controls. He rapped at two of the gauges, then turned back, an uncertain look on his face.\n\n\"Can it work?\" she called. \"Don't lie to me!\"\n\n\"I would never lie to you, Dylan. We can signal perhaps a dozen letters.\"\n\n\"Then do it! Follow my lead.\" Deryn held her right arm out straight, her left angled down.\n\nAlek didn't move. \"If I give myself up to your captain, he'll never let me escape again.\"\n\n\"But if you don't signal the Leviathan for help, Klopp is a dead man. We all are, once those walkers get here!\"\n\nAlek stared at her another moment, then sighed and turned to the controls, placing his hands in the saunters. The hiss of pneumatics filled the air, and then the great arms scraped slowly along the ground, exactly matching Deryn's stance.\n\n\"S \u2026,\" the perspicacious loris said.\n\nDeryn swung her left arm across herself. This letter was harder for the iron golem, half lying in the dirt as it was, but Alek managed to bend its elbow just enough.\n\n\"H!\" Bovril announced, and kept up as Deryn continued. \"A \u2026 R \u2026 P \u2026\"\n\nBy the fifth letter the Leviathan's huge kraken spotlight had found them, and together they repeated the sequence twice more before the giant arms' last squick of pressure hissed away into the night.\n\nAlek turned from the saunters. \"Wie lange haben wir, Hans?\"\n\nBauer shielded his eyes from the spotlight's glare. \"Zehn minuten?\"\n\n\"We still have time to get away, Dylan.\"\n\n\"Not with only ten minutes, and there's no need to run.\" Deryn put a hand on Alek's shoulder. \"After what we've done tonight, I can tell the captain how you introduced me to the Committee. And how if you hadn't, the ship would've been shot down!\" She said it all fast. Breaking her silent promise to leave him behind was as easy as breathing.\n\n\"I expect they'll give me a medal,\" Alek said drily.\n\n\"Aye, you never know about that.\"\n\nThe spotlight began to flicker then, long and short flashes. Deryn was out of practice with Morse code, but as she watched, the familiar patterns came back into her mind.\n\n\"Message received,\" she said. \"And the captain sends me greetings!\"\n\n\"How very polite.\"\n\nDeryn kept her eyes on the flickering spotlight. \"They're getting ready to pick us up. We'll have Master Klopp to a surgeon in half a squick!\"\n\n\"Then you don't need me and Hans anymore.\" Alek held out his hand. \"I have to say good-bye.\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Deryn pleaded. \"You'll never make it past all those walkers. And I swear I won't let the captain chain you up. If he does, I'll break the locks myself!\"\n\nAlek stared down at his offered hand, but then his dark green eyes caught hers. They gazed at each other for a long moment, the rumble of the airship's engines trembling on Deryn's skin.\n\n\"Come with me,\" she said, finally grasping his hand. \"It's like you said the night before you ran away, how all the parts of the Leviathan fit. You belong there.\"\n\nHe looked up at the airship, his eyes glistening. He was still in love with it, Deryn could see.\n\n\"Perhaps I shouldn't run off without my men,\" he said.\n\n\"Mein Herr,\" Bauer said. \"Graf Volger befahl mir\u2014\"\n\n\"Volger!\" Alek spat. \"If it weren't for his scheming, we'd all have kept together in the first place.\"\n\nDeryn squeezed his hand harder. \"It'll be all right. I swear.\"\n\nAs the airship drew closer, a whisper of wings came from overhead, steel talons glinting in the searchlights. Deryn let go of Alek's hand, and breathed deep the bitter almond of spilled hydrogen\u2014the dangerous, beautiful smell of a hasty descent. Ropes tumbled from the gondola's cargo door, and seconds later men were sliding down them.\n\n\"Isn't that a barking brilliant sight?\"\n\n\"Beautiful,\" Alek said. \"If one isn't chained up inside.\"\n\n\"Nonsense.\" Deryn banged his shoulder. \"That blether about chains, that was just an expression. They only locked Count Volger in his stateroom, and I had to bring him breakfast every day!\"\n\n\"How luxurious.\"\n\nShe smiled, though the thought of Volger sent a squick of nerves through her\u2014he knew her secret. The man could still betray her to the officers, or to Alek, anytime he wanted.\n\nBut she couldn't keep hiding from his countship forever. It wasn't soldierly. And besides, she could always toss him out a window if it came to that.\n\nAs the airship came to a rumbling halt, Bovril clung tighter to her shoulder. \"Breakfast every day?\" it asked.\n\n\"Aye, beastie,\" Deryn said, stroking its fur. \"You're going home.\"\n\n\"S-H-A-R-P!\" said Newkirk from the mouth of the cargo bay. \"Blisters, Dylan, it's really you!\"\n\n\"Who else?\" Deryn replied, grinning as she took the boy's offered hand. She pulled herself up in a single heave.\n\n\"And you found the missing beastie?\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Deryn hooked a thumb over her shoulder at the wreckage-strewn battlefield. \"One of my many accomplishments.\"\n\nNewkirk looked down. \"You have been busy, Mr. Sharp. But save your bragging. There are German walkers coming, and the bosun says you're wanted in the navigation room.\"\n\n\"Now?\" Deryn glanced back at the rescue operation. Klopp was rising through the air, trussed to a stretcher, while Alek and Bauer waited on the iron golem's shoulder.\n\n\"The bosun says right away.\"\n\n\"All right, Mr. Newkirk. But make sure you get those Clankers up safely.\"\n\n\"Aye, don't worry. We'll not let the bum-rags slip away again!\"\n\nDeryn didn't argue with the boy. It didn't matter what Newkirk thought, as long as the officers knew that Alek had come back of his own free will.\n\nClanker or not, he belonged here.\n\nOn her way to the navigation room, the airship hummed and rumbled beneath Deryn's feet, the corridors full of scrambling men and beasts. Bovril took in everything with eyes the size of florins, awed into a rare silence. The beastie belonged here too, it seemed.\n\nThe lady boffin waited in the navigation room, staring out at the lights of Istanbul across the water. Deryn frowned\u2014she'd expected to find the captain. Of course, with German walkers on the way, the officers would be up on the bridge. But why had she been ordered here instead of to a battle station?\n\nTazza leapt up from the floor beside Dr. Barlow, running over to snuffle at Deryn's boots. She knelt to cup his nose with her palm.\n\n\"Good to see you, Tazza.\"\n\n\"Tazza,\" Bovril repeated, then chuckled.\n\n\"A pleasure to see you too, Mr. Sharp,\" the lady boffin said, turning from the view. \"We've all been quite beside ourselves with worry.\"\n\n\"It's brilliant to be home, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Of course, it stands to reason that you'd make it back safe and sound, resourceful lad that you are.\" The lady boffin's fingers drummed the sill of the window. \"Though I see you've caused a bit of trouble in the meantime.\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am.\" Deryn allowed herself to smile. \"It was a bit of trouble, knocking out that Tesla cannon. But we got it done.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes.\" The lady boffin waved her hand, as if she saw towers wrapped in lightning topple every day. \"But I meant that creature on your shoulder, not this tiresome battle.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Deryn said, looking at Bovril. \"You mean you're glad to have it back, then?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Sharp, that is not what I mean.\" Dr. Barlow let out a slow sigh. \"Have you forgotten already? I went to great pains to make sure that the loris hatched while Alek was in the machine room. So that its nascent fixation would be directed entirely at him.\"\n\n\"Aye, I remember that,\" Deryn said. \"How it's like a baby duck, latching on to whoever it sees first.\"\n\n\"Exactly, which was Alek. And yet here it is on your shoulder, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\nDeryn frowned, trying to remember exactly when Bovril had started riding on her shoulder as often as Alek's. \"Well, the beastie seems to like me just as much as it does him. And why wouldn't it? I mean, Alek is a barking Clanker, after all.\"\n\nDr. Barlow sat down at the map table, shaking her head. \"It wasn't designed to bond with two people! Not unless they're \u2026\" She narrowed her eyes. \"I suppose you and Alek have rather a close friendship, haven't you, Mr. Sharp?\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Bovril repeated, then giggled.\n\nDeryn gave the beastie a hard look, then spread her hands. \"Honestly, I don't know, ma'am. It's just that Alek was busy driving the walker tonight, so Bovril started off on my shoulder, and I suppose that\u2014\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Dr. Barlow interrupted. \"But did you just say Bovril??\"\n\n\"Oh, aye. That's its name, sort of.\"\n\nThe lady boffin raised an eyebrow. \"As in the beef extract?\"\n\n\"It wasn't me who named it,\" Deryn said. \"They taught us all that in middy training, about not getting attached. But this anarchist lassie kept insisting on calling it Bovril, and the name sort of \u2026 stuck.\"\n\n\"Bovril,\" the beastie repeated.\n\nDr. Barlow stepped forward to peer more closely at the loris, then shook her head again. \"I wonder if this excess of bonding is Mr. Newkirk's fault. He never quite kept the eggs at an even temperature.\"\n\n\"You mean, Bovril might be defective?\"\n\n\"One never can tell with a new species. You say an 'anarchist lassie' started this Bovril nonsense?\"\n\nDeryn started to explain, but found herself wavering on her feet, and plonked down into a chair. It wasn't exactly good manners, sitting in a lady's presence, but suddenly all that had happened tonight was hitting Deryn hard\u2014the battle, Zaven's death, the narrow escape of the Leviathan from a fiery end.\n\nMore than anything else, it was a relief to be home. To feel the ship beneath her feet, real and solid, and not burning horribly in the sky. And Alek aboard by now as well \u2026\n\n\"You see, ma'am, when I found him, Alek had taken up with this Committee for Union and Progress, who were dead keen to overthrow the sultan. I didn't approve of them, of course, but then we found out there was a Tesla cannon being built. Knowing that it could destroy the Leviathan, I had to make sure it came down. Even if that meant joining up with anarchists\u2014or revolutionaries, whatever you want to call them.\"\n\n\"Very resourceful, as always.\" The lady boffin sat across from her, reaching down to scratch Tazza's head. \"Count Volger wasn't far wrong, was he?\"\n\n\"Count Volger?\" A squick of panic went through Deryn at the name. \"If you don't mind me asking, ma'am, what exactly wasn't he wrong about?\"\n\n\"He said that Alek had fallen in with unsavory elements. And also that you would be able to find our missing prince.\"\n\nDeryn nodded slowly. Volger had been sitting right there, of course, when she'd heard the clue about Alek's hotel. \"He's a clever-boots, that one.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" The lady boffin stood up again and turned to stare out. \"Though he may be wrong about this Committee. However unsavory their politics, they have performed a valuable service for Britain today.\"\n\n\"Aye, ma'am. They helped us save the barking ship!\"\n\n\"They seem to have toppled the sultan as well.\"\n\nDeryn hauled herself up and joined Dr. Barlow at the window. The ship was under way again, heading back across the water. In the distance the streets of Istanbul were still alight with gunfire and explosions, and Deryn could make out swirling clouds of spice dust in the war elephants' searchlights.\n\n\"I'm not certain he's toppled yet, ma'am. It looks as if they're still fighting.\"\n\n\"This battle is quite pointless, I assure you,\" the lady boffin said. \"A few minutes after the Goeben was destroyed, we spotted the Imperial Airyacht Stamboul lifting off from the palace grounds, flying a flag of truce.\"\n\n\"Truce? But the battle's hardly begun. Why would the sultan surrender?\"\n\n\"He did not. According to the Stamboul's signal flags, the Kizlar Agha was in command.\" Dr. Barlow smiled coolly. \"He was taking the sultan to a place of safety, far from the troubles of Istanbul.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Deryn frowned. \"You mean he was \u2026 kidnapping his own sovereign?\"\n\n\"As I said to you some time ago, sultans have been replaced before.\"\n\nDeryn let out a low whistle, wondering how long this meaningless battle would go on. Out the window the dark water of the bay was still churning where the Goeben had gone down. She wondered if the behemoth was still down there, picking through the jumble of steel and oil for its supper.\n\nThe spotlight came on again, cutting into the water to bring the beastie to heel. The Breslau would be next on the menu.\n\n\"If the Committee's really winning,\" Deryn said, \"then Germany will be the only Clanker power left!\"\n\n\"My dear boy, there is still Austria-Hungary.\"\n\n\"Right, of course.\" Deryn cleared her throat, silently cursing herself. \"Don't know how I forgot about them.\"\n\nDr. Barlow raised an eyebrow. \"You forgot about Alek's own people? How odd, Mr. Sharp.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" came a voice from above them.\n\nDeryn looked straight up, and her jaw dropped.\n\nTwo small eyes were peering back at her from the ceiling. They belonged to another perspicacious loris, its tiny paws clinging to a message lizard tube. It looked almost like Bovril, except for missing the spots on its haunches.\n\n\"What in blazes?\"\n\nThen she remembered\u2014there had been three remaining eggs. Bovril's, the one smashed by the sultan's automaton, and another that she'd forgotten all about. It would have hatched in the last month, of course.\n\nDr. Barlow raised a hand, and the other beastie swung from one paw like a monkey, then dropped. It encircled the lady boffin's arm, sliding down to her shoulder.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" the new beastie said again.\n\n\"Mr. Sharp,\" Bovril corrected, then they both began to giggle.\n\n\"Why does it keep laughing?\" asked the lady boffin.\n\n\"I've no barking idea,\" Deryn said. \"Sometimes I think it's cracked in the attic.\"\n\n\"Revolution,\" Bovril announced.\n\nDeryn stared at it. She'd never heard the creature say something out of the blue before.\n\nThe new beastie repeated the word, rolling it around on its tongue happily, then said, \"Balance of power.\"\n\nBovril chuckled at the phrase, then dutifully parroted it.\n\nAs Deryn watched with growing astonishment, the creatures began to jabber, each repeating what the other said. The single words became a torrent of phrases in English, Clanker, Armenian, Turkish, and half a dozen other languages.\n\nSoon Bovril was reciting whole conversations that Deryn had shared with Alek or Lilit or Zaven, while the new beastie made declamations that sounded just like Dr. Barlow talking, even a few that had to be Count Volger!\n\n\"Excuse me, ma'am,\" Deryn whispered, \"but what in blazes are they doing?\"\n\nThe lady boffin smiled. \"My boy, they are doing what comes naturally to them.\"\n\n\"But they're fabricated! What's natural to them?\"\n\n\"Why, only becoming more perspicacious, of course.\"\n\nThe next morning Alek was allowed to visit Volger.\n\nAs his guard let him into the wildcount's stateroom, Alek noticed that the door wasn't locked. Alek himself had been treated politely the night before, more like a guest than a prisoner. Perhaps the tension between his men and their Darwinist captors had thawed a little in the last month.\n\nCount Volger looked comfortable enough. He was at his desk eating a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and toast, and didn't bother to stand when Alek arrived. He simply nodded and said, \"Prince Aleksandar.\"\n\nAlek bowed. \"Count.\"\n\nVolger went back to scraping butter onto a piece of toast.\n\nStanding there waiting, Alek felt like a schoolboy called in for punishment. He had never been to school, of course, but somehow adults\u2014whether tutors, parents, or grandmotherly revolutionaries like Nene\u2014all wore their disappointment in the same way. Surely headmasters weren't so different.\n\nFinally Alek sighed and said, \"It might save time if I began.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\"\n\n\"You want to tell me that I'm a fool for having been captured again. That it was mad to involve myself in Ottoman politics. By now I could be safely hidden in the wilds.\"\n\nCount Volger nodded. \"Yes, there is that.\"\n\nThe man went back to scraping his piece of toast, seemingly intent on covering every square millimeter with butter.\n\n\"In not taking your advice, I risked my life and the life of my men,\" Alek continued. \"Dr. Busk says that Klopp is recovering well enough, but I led him and Bauer into an all-out battle. Things could have turned out worse.\"\n\n\"Much worse,\" Volger said, then fell silent again.\n\n\"Let's see \u2026 Ah, I've also thrown away everything my father left me. The castle, all your plans, and finally his gold.\" Alek reached inside his piloting coat and felt for a hard lump sewed into a corner of the lining. He tore the fabric, pulled out what remained of the gold, and tossed it onto the table.\n\nAfter a month of buying spices and mechanikal parts, the bar had been mostly shaved away. All that was left was the round Hapsburg crest stamped at its center, like a thick, roughly made coin.\n\nVolger blinked, and Alek let himself smile. At least he'd finally provoked a reaction.\n\n\"Did you finance this revolution entirely on your own?\"\n\n\"Only the finishing touches\u2014a little spice on top.\" Alek shrugged. \"Revolutions are expensive, it seems.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know. I avoid them on principle.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Alek said. \"That's what you're really angry about, isn't it? That I overturned the natural order and deposed a fellow royal? That I forgot that revolutionaries want to overthrow all aristocrats, including me and you?\"\n\nVolger took a bite of toast and chewed thoughtfully, then poured himself more coffee. \"There is that, too, I suppose. But there's one thing you've forgotten.\"\n\nAlek wondered for a moment what his final failure might be, but then gave up. He took a cup from the windowsill, filled it with coffee, and sat down across the desk from Volger.\n\n\"Enlighten me.\"\n\n\"You also saved my life.\"\n\nAlek frowned. \"I did what?\"\n\n\"If you had disappeared into the wilds as you were meant to, that Tesla cannon would have sent me and Hoffman to the bottom of the sea, along with the rest of this ship's crew.\" The count stared into his coffee cup. \"I owe you my life. Quite an annoying turn of events.\"\n\nAlek hid his surprise by taking a sip of coffee. It was true\u2014Count Volger had been saved along with the Leviathan. But was the man really thanking him for joining the Committee's revolution?\n\n\"This doesn't mean that you are any less of an idiot, of course,\" Volger added.\n\n\"Of course not,\" Alek said, a bit relieved.\n\n\"And there is also the matter of your newfound celebrity.\" Volger opened a drawer, pulled out a newspaper, and dropped it onto the desk.\n\nAlek picked it up. It was in English\u2014New York World, read the masthead. And there on the first page was a photograph of Alek, above a long article by \"Istanbul Bureau Chief\" Eddie Malone.\n\nAlek let the newspaper fall back onto the table. He'd never seen a photograph of himself before, and the effect was distinctly disagreeable. Like looking into a frozen mirror.\n\n\"Are my ears really that large?\"\n\n\"Almost. What on earth were you thinking?\"\n\nAlek lifted his cup, staring at the glimmering black reflection on the coffee's surface. He had steeled himself to face any amount of scorn from Volger, but not for this. As the newspaper's name declared, the whole world was gawking at him now. His family secrets were out there for anyone to read.\n\n\"That reporter, Malone, he knew too much about the Committee's plans. An interview was the only way to distract him.\" Alek dared another glance at the photo, and noticed the caption\u2014THE MISSING HEIR. \"So that's why the crew have been so polite to me. They know who I am now.\"\n\n\"Not just the crew, Alek. Britain has a consulate in New York, of course. Even their bumbling diplomats could hardly have missed this. Lord Churchill himself sent that newspaper to Captain Hobbes, carried by some sort of beastly eagle.\"\n\n\"But how in blazes did you get it?\"\n\n\"Dr. Barlow and I have been sharing information for some time now.\" The wildcount leaned back in his chair. \"She is proving to be a most interesting woman.\"\n\nAlek stared at the man, a slight shudder passing through him.\n\n\"Don't worry, Alek, I haven't told her all my secrets. How is your friend Dylan, by the way?\"\n\n\"Dylan? He's \u2026 quite astounding, at times.\" Alek sighed. \"In a way it's because of him that I let myself be captured again.\"\n\nVolger's coffee cup froze halfway to his lips. \"What do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"Dylan convinced me it was safer to give myself up than to escape. There were a dozen Ottoman walkers headed toward us, I suppose. But it was more than that. He seems to think that I belong on this ship.\" Alek sighed. \"Not that it matters. Once we're back in Britain, they'll put me in a cage.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't worry about that just yet.\" The wildcount glanced at the windows. \"Haven't you noticed?\"\n\nAlek looked out the window. Last night when he'd grown too tired to stay awake, the airship had been headed back down the strait, guiding the behemoth back toward the Mediterranean Sea. But now there were mountains passing by, tipped with orange from the rising sun. Their long shadows stretched through the mist, trailing toward his left.\n\n\"Are we headed east?\"\n\nVolger clucked his tongue. \"That took you some time. I'm sure your friend Dylan would have noticed right away.\"\n\n\"No doubt. But why are we headed for Asia? The war's back in Europe.\"\n\n\"When this war began, the German navy had ships in every ocean. The Goeben and the Breslau aren't the only ones that the British have been searching for.\"\n\n\"Do you know where in Asia we're going?\"\n\n\"Alas, Dr. Barlow hasn't been forthcoming on the matter. But I suspect we will be in Tokyo sooner or later. Japan declared war against Germany four weeks ago.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Alek stared out at the mountains passing by. The Japanese had been Darwinists since signing a cooperation pact with the British in 1902. But it was astounding to think that the war ignited by his parents' death had already outgrown Europe, and now encompassed the entire globe.\n\n\"This detour is inconvenient, but it keeps you out of that cage a little longer,\" Volger said. \"Austria-Hungary is not faring well against the great fighting bears of Russia. The time for you to reveal yourself may be sooner than I thought.\" He prodded the newspaper as if it were a dead fish. \"That is, to reveal what little you haven't already.\"\n\nAlek pulled the scroll case from his pocket. \"You mean this?\"\n\n\"I was afraid to ask if you still had it.\"\n\n\"As if I would have lost it!\" Alek said angrily, then realized that he had, in fact, lost it once already. But since the taxi incident, he'd kept the letter with him at all times.\n\nThe night before, the airman who'd searched him in the cargo bay had found the scroll case and opened it. But the letter's ornate Latin script had meant nothing to him, and he had politely returned it.\n\n\"I'm not a complete fool, Volger. In fact, this letter is why I ignored your advice and stayed in Istanbul.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Your Highness?\"\n\n\"A pointless feud among my family started this war, so it's up to me to stop it.\" He held up the case. \"This is the will of heaven, which tells me what I'm meant to do. Not skulk in hiding but take my rightful place and put an end to this war!\"\n\nVolger stared at him for a long moment, then steepled his fingers.\n\n\"That letter is no guarantee that you'll take the throne.\"\n\n\"I know all that. But the pope's word must count for something.\"\n\n\"Ah, I had forgotten.\" The wildcount turned away. \"You've been in a land of heathens and heretics. You haven't heard the news from the Vatican.\"\n\n\"News?\"\n\n\"The Holy Father is dead.\"\n\nAlek stared at the man.\n\n\"They say the war was hard on him,\" Volger continued. \"He wanted peace too much. Of course, what he wanted doesn't matter now.\"\n\n\"But \u2026 this letter represents the will of heaven. The Vatican will still confirm that it's real, won't they?\"\n\n\"One would think so. Of course, someone there told the Germans about your father's visit.\" The man spread his hands. \"We must hope that this someone doesn't have the new pope's ear.\"\n\nAlek turned to stare out the window, trying to make sense of Volger's news.\n\nAfter his parents' death, the whole world had gone mad, as if his family tragedy had broken history itself. But in Istanbul, somehow, things had started to fall back into place. The Committee's revolution, Dylan arriving with the behemoth in his wake, all of it revealed that it was up to Alek to stop the war, to put matters right. For the first time in his life, he had felt a certainty in all his actions, as if providence were guiding him.\n\nBut now the world was turning upside down again. Fate was taking him not back toward the center of the war but away from his homeland and his people, away from everything he had been born to do. And the letter in his hand, the only thing his father had left him that Alek hadn't thrown away, might now be worthless.\n\nWhat mad providence was this?" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Eberron", + "author": "D&D", + "genres": [ + "fantasy" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "The final days of the Last War, in the City of Wroat", + "text": "It was a thing of beauty.\n\nTristam Xain carefully held the small glass sphere between two fingers and stared into its depths. Within the sphere floated a tiny model of a silver airship, a sleek vehicle surrounded by a metal ring. Tristam tapped the side of the glass with one finger and spoke the ship's name.\n\n\"Kenshi Zhann,\" he whispered.\n\nSmall particles of shimmering blue snow began to swirl within the sphere. The metal ring ignited a brilliant purple, like the pure elemental fire that surrounded a true airship. The overall image resembled a ship flying through a winter storm, a tiny replica of the same ship where Tristam dwelled. The light from the sphere suffused the smoky air in Tristam's improvised laboratory, casting the small cabin in a soft blue glow.\n\n\"Remarkable,\" Omax said. The warforged stood at the door of Tristam's tiny cabin. The enormous metal warrior looked down at the fragile trinket. His pale blue eyes shone in their adamantine mask, illuminated by the same magic that fluttered through the sphere.\n\n\"A gift for my teacher,\" Tristam said. \"Do you think he'll like it, Omax?\"\n\n\"A teacher can receive no greater gift than evidence of his student's brilliance,\" Omax said. \"I think Ash will be pleased.\"\n\n\"Do you think it will be enough to make him reconsider?\" Tristam asked, looking at his friend.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Omax said. \"A simple reminder that magic can still be used to make things of beauty might grant him some peace of mind.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" Tristam said, sounding unconvinced. The young artificer tapped the glass again. The whirling snow faded away, and the light died. \"He's been in a dark mood.\"\n\nTristam tucked the sphere into his pocket and rose to leave. He stopped short, catching sight of his own face in the mirror that hung beside the door. He smoothed a hand through his unkempt hair, removed his thin spectacles, and wiped most of the soot and grime from his face with a handkerchief. His chin was rough and unshaven, but there wasn't much he could do for that on such short notice.\n\n\"Do I look presentable?\" he asked.\n\n\"As presentable as anyone who knows you should expect,\" Omax said, patting some soot off of his friend's lapel.\n\nTristam shot the warforged an irritated look, but Omax had directed his attention toward a flask on the low table. Straightening his jacket, Tristam stepped out of the cabin and made his way to the upper deck, ignoring the warforged's chuckle as he departed.\n\nKenshi Zhann was a grand ship. In the Aerenal language her name meant \"Seventh Moon,\" though there was little about her construction or performance that could inspire regret in her creators. Tristam was still young, but he had seen a great deal of the world from the deck of this ship. He had never seen another vessel to match her, though Ashrem's other two airships were close. He was proud to serve aboard such a vessel, and proud to study at the foot of her master even if said master had been distant and moody in recent months.\n\nNot that Ashrem d'Cannith's depression was unexpected or surprising. The old artificer had committed himself to an impossible task. Peace. He had sworn to end the war that had consumed the Five Nations for the last century. Every three months his three crews would rendezvous to share their progress, as they did now. Meeting with friends and colleagues generally improved old Ashrem's mood, even if they had little to report.\n\nTristam hoped for the best.\n\nOmax fell into step beside Tristam as he made his way through the ship. The massive warforged made surprisingly little noise for a being constructed of dense metal and wood. Tristam glanced back to find Omax scanning the halls as they walked. He smiled.\n\n\"I think we're safe, Omax,\" Tristam said with a chuckle.\n\nOmax looked forward quickly. Though his metal face lacked expression, he seemed to radiate embarrassment. \"Old habits,\" he said. \"To realize that I have no enemies has been a difficult adjustment.\"\n\n\"The war isn't over yet,\" Tristam answered. \"You may get your chance for more excitement.\"\n\n\"I do not know if I want that,\" Omax said. \"Having sampled peace, I prefer it.\"\n\n\"You sound like Ashrem,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"I take that as a compliment,\" Omax said. \"Ashrem is a wise man.\"\n\nFootsteps approached from the stairs above. A familiar potbellied man in a dark silken suit of exquisite cut strode down toward them. This was Dalan d'Cannith, Ashrem's nephew, local guildmaster of House Cannith. Moon had put in at Wroat so that Ashrem might visit Dalan during the rendezvous. Dalan's expression was bored and mildly annoyed, though it softened into a pleased smile when he recognized Tristam. Tristam gave a small wave, hoping to move past Dalan and find his master.\n\n\"Ah, the promising young student and his bodyguard,\" Dalan said, upsetting Tristam's expectations. He shook Tristam's hand warmly and then nodded at Omax. \"It has been some time, Tristam. How have the two of you been?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Tristam said. \"You look well, Dalan.\"\n\n\"I am well, my boy. Business is growing. I was hoping that I might convince Uncle Ash to take on a few side contracts, but he insists on discussing it with his fellows first. I don't expect much. He's as stubborn as he has always been.\"\n\n\"You know Ashrem doesn't make weapons anymore, Dalan,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Oh, I am well aware. I respect that.\" Dalan nodded, setting his jowls in motion. \"I would not expect him to set aside the ethics he holds so strongly, even if I do not agree with them. These contracts were of a neutral nature. Enchantments to aid in the preservation of rations and medicine for Aundairian troops. Aiding the war effort without harming anyone directly. You understand. Even so, he was reluctant and has reserved his decision until he can discuss the matter with his associates. The priest seems to want to help, but I fear he will be unable to convince my uncle otherwise. Ash is a difficult man to sway once his mind is set. By the look he gave me, I think I picked a poor time to negotiate.\" Dalan's expression became sad, wistful.\n\n\"He's been occupied,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"And with the training of his apprentice, I hope?\" Dalan said. \"I expect great things of you, Tristam. I mentioned the light-emitting wands you crafted in my report to Baron Zorlan just last week. They've been of extraordinary utility to our miners, providing cheap magical illumination without the danger of a lantern. Exquisite craftsmanship, as well.\"\n\n\"You really thought so?\" Tristam said, awed by the praise.\n\n\"Indubitably,\" Dalan said. \"I am surprised Ashrem has not sponsored you for guild membership yet.\"\n\n\"You and I both,\" Tristam said, smiling weakly. \"That's what I had hoped to talk to him about, actually, since there's a guild house here in Wroat and all.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Dalan smiled. \"Then let me take no more of your time. When Ash puts your name on the list, you can trust that your membership won't be delayed for long. I shall expedite the process personally.\" Dalan winked and chuckled.\n\n\"Thank you, Master Dalan,\" Tristam said, \"but I wouldn't want to be put ahead of someone more deserving.\"\n\n\"False modesty!\" Dalan retorted, walking past them as he made his way toward the galley. \"My uncle is a genius. Who could be more deserving than his heir?\"\n\nTristam looked up at Omax with a grin. The warforged nodded in encouragement, and they moved on. The ship was mostly abandoned. Most of the crew had taken advantage of the moment and scattered to the city's taverns. Tristam stepped into the large chamber at the heart of the ship. The walls were lined with brass runes and shimmering crystals. They shone and hummed, though they were mostly decoration with no true purpose. Tristam's eyes were on the column of dull black metal that stood in the center of the room. His fingers brushed its surface, sensing the magic that pulsed within. This was the ship's heart, the chamber that housed the crystals that bound the Kenshi Zhann's elemental to this reality. It was a wonder of artifice, the living heart of the ship. No matter how many times Tristam saw it, he could not help but be awed by its power and simplicity.\n\nBeyond the core, the floor opened on a large pane of thick glass. This normally offered a breathtaking view of the open sky. It currently displayed the busy street below, darkened by the airship's shadow. At the far end of the chamber, the hatch to Ashrem's cabin was closed. Tristam looked around for a place to sit and wait when a shout from within the room drew his attention. Looking at Omax in concern, Tristam moved closer to listen.\n\n\"I can scarcely believe this hypocrisy, Ash,\" snapped a harsh voice. Tristam recognized the speaker as Brother Llaine Grove. Llaine was an old friend of his teacher, a priest of Boldrei who had served with Ashrem in their youth. \"Many of those soldiers are near starvation. In the last five years, infection and disease have claimed more Aundairian lives than Cyre and Breland's forces combined. You would do nothing to stop this?\"\n\n\"Consider what you are saying before casting the label of hypocrite, Llaine,\" Ashrem said in his cool, even voice. \"Aundair's troops suffer because their leadership is too aggressive. Do you think any aid we offer would lessen their burden? The powers that command them would only push harder. We may save a few innocents, but countless more would suffer. Such misguided efforts only pollute our greater work.\"\n\n\"Greater work?\" Llaine scoffed. \"I go along with your plans only because no more sensible strategy has been presented. Your work is a dream, Ash. This is a reality. The war will continue no matter what we do, but perhaps we can save these soldiers' lives.\"\n\n\"Are you certain that your loyalties have not clouded?\" Ashrem asked. \"You are Aundairian. Perhaps patriotism has narrowed your vision?\"\n\n\"I serve Boldrei first,\" Llaine said. \"She values mercy foremost, and I cannot bear to hear of such suffering, countrymen or not. How can I look an Aundairian mother in her eyes and admit I allowed her son to starve or succumb to disease when it was within my power to aid him? Such an act is unconscionable.\"\n\n\"But necessary,\" said Kiris Overwood, Ashrem's consort and closest advisor. \"Our artificers and wizards work toward a nobler goal, Llaine.\"\n\n\"Not all of them,\" the priest said. \"This is a simple enough task. I am certain Tristam Xain could handle such a task quite admirably by himself, leaving the rest of us free to continue our work.\"\n\nTristam was impressed. Llaine was a harsh man, with few kind words for anyone. He hadn't thought the priest respected him at all. Omax gently clapped his friend on the shoulder.\n\n\"Tristam is still a child,\" answered the husky voice of Norra Cais. Of all his master's apprentices, Tristam knew the least about her. She was a prodigy, a graduate of Morgrave University who had only recently joined Ashrem's alliance. \"He may possess the skills necessary, but he has neither the wisdom nor responsibility to understand the full import of such a task.\"\n\n\"Child?\" Tristam whispered to Omax. \"She's a year older than me.\"\n\nThe warforged shrugged.\n\n\"Norra is correct,\" Ashrem said. \"Tristam was not ready to aid us in our work on the Legacy, and he is not ready for this. His progress has not been quite as impressive as you may believe, Llaine. On a relative scale, he is a mere novice.\"\n\nTristam's heart sank. He slumped against the wall, feeling as if someone had cut the cords that held him upright. Ashrem had expressed no disapproval, at least not to him. If he had been progressing so poorly, why did his master keep him here? Pity?\n\n\"Tristam is your student, Dalan,\" Llaine said. \"I will respect your judgment. Regardless, there is power and talent enough at this table that we could easily fulfill Dalan's contract, help those soldiers, and use the money Dalan pays us to further our research on the Legacy.\"\n\n\"I will not use the spoils of war to purchase peace,\" Ashrem said. \"Such deeds would corrupt everything we have done and hope to do.\"\n\nThe sound of approaching boots snapped Tristam back to himself. He rose and moved away from the hatch, attempting to appear nonchalant as he loitered near the viewing window. Omax watched him impassively, standing near the ship's core.\n\nA tall, thin man dressed in deep red entered the chamber. His blond hair was tied back in a loose tail. He favored Tristam with a quirky grin. This was Orren Thardis, captain of the Albena Tors, sister ship to this one.\n\n\"Evening, Captain,\" Tristam said, nodding to the man.\n\n\"Hello, Tristam,\" Orren said with a broad grin. \"Omax. Are they still at it in there?\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Suppose?\" Orren said, obviously feigning surprise. \"You aren't taking the chance to eavesdrop? I would.\"\n\nTristam laughed despite himself. It was hard to take a man like Orren Thardis seriously. Orren never took anything seriously. Maybe that was why, of Ashrem's colleagues, he was among the easiest to get along with.\n\n\"You're late for the meeting again, Captain,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Not late enough,\" Orren said, looking at the hatch in distaste. \"I was hoping to speak to old Ash without all those other busybodies poking in.\"\n\nTristam nodded. \"I'm waiting for him as well.\"\n\n\"Waiting is a fine way to waste your life, Tristam,\" Orren said, stepping to the glass floor and looking down at the dimly lit street. \"Opportunity won't wait for you. Don't bother to wait for it.\"\n\n\"I think opportunity has already passed me, Captain,\" Tristam said.\n\nOrren shrugged. \"Then find another,\" he said.\n\nTristam thought on it a moment. Preservative reagents for rations and medicine weren't difficult to make. If Ashrem turned down Dalan's contract, he would need someone else to fulfill it. Tristam could do it easily. Ashrem would be enraged if he knew that Tristam had defied him, but he wouldn't have to know. Dalan was the sort who would keep such a favor a secret, and even sponsor Tristam for membership himself if Ashrem continued to deny him.\n\nAnd if Ashrem found out, did it really matter? Was losing the respect of a master who didn't appreciate him such a bad thing?\n\n\"Thank you, Captain,\" Tristam said to Orren. \"That's good advice,\"\n\n\"Don't mention it,\" Orren said.\n\nTristam and Omax walked back to the stairs, making their way toward the galley. In Tristam's pocket, the tiny glass sphere and its miniature airship were forgotten.\n\n[ Four Years Later ]\n\nAs far as Seren Morisse was concerned, Wroat wasn't the sort of place people lived on purpose. It was just where you ended up. There you were, living a normal life, minding your own business, and one day you found yourself in Wroat. Didn't matter if you were rich or poor, Wroat just sort of snuck up on you. You came here thinking it might be a good idea to visit for a time, maybe make money or contacts before moving on to somewhere better, but the city found a way of sinking its hooks into you. Wroat made you need it. It made it easier to stay than to leave, and every day you stayed, the city got a little less pretty. The flaws became a little more apparent. The stink became a little more cloying. The people showed you who they really were, and by then it was too late.\n\nWroat became a part of you, and you were a part of Wroat.\n\nThe King of Breland lived in Wroat. As Seren hauled herself onto the rough stone ledge, she looked at the towering spires of the palace and wondered if the King ever felt the same way. He probably did, maybe even more so than anybody. After all, who had less say in his own future than a king? Maybe she wasn't that different from old Boranel. Let him enjoy his prison of silk, jewels, and fine food. At least Seren had her freedom... precariously huddled on a loosely tiled ledge on the second floor of the Cannith guild house with rain pouring down around her.\n\nSeren sighed deeply.\n\nNo, on second thought, she would most certainly trade him.\n\nSeren peered over one shoulder, around the edge of the window. Within, she saw a richly appointed study, illuminated by a roaring fireplace and a single lamp. A large wooden desk stood near the window, buried under heaps of unfurled scrolls and books, left lying open and stacked in heaps. The walls were lined with shelves stuffed with even more volumes. The number of books was somewhat surprising considering the inhabitant's reputation; he didn't seem the scholarly type. A few plates of half-eaten food and glass tumblers, some still half-filled with wine, sat heaped on the desk and even scattered on the floor. Small models of airships, lightning rail engines, and even the adamantine faceplate of a warforged decorated the walls and shelves in a random, haphazard manner. The decorations were covered with dust, but the books were clean and well maintained.\n\nSeren knew this house had plenty of servants\u2014she had watched them enter and leave the house for the past four days to learn their routine\u2014but they obviously had not touched this room in some time. Perhaps the things kept here were too valuable to trust in the presence of servants. If so, this was exactly what she was looking for. If not, then this was as good a place as any to start. Seren reached for the window, but she drew back as the door within opened. She huddled back against a nearby gargoyle, wrapping her arms around her knees to stay warm in the chilling rain. She tried once again to console herself with the fact that she was so much better off than King Boranel.\n\nHow did it happen? How did she end up here? Good question. Seren's answer was easy. Stupidity. Her father had been a soldier. The end of the War had been a good thing for a great many families\u2014but not for Seren's. Other fathers returned to joyous reunions with loving families. Seren's family received only a black envelope delivered by an apologetic young messenger in a travel-stained uniform. Seren remembered her mother dropping the envelope and bursting into tears. She remembered how the messenger hurried away\u2014he had many more messages to deliver that day.\n\nThe army had provided a small stipend to support the families of veterans who had died in the war\u2014but it wasn't much, just enough to get a family back on its feet or support a single widow. Seren's mother never complained, but with each day that passed the worried lines around her eyes grew a little deeper. Finally, one night, Seren decided to set out and find her own fate. Her mother would miss her, that was certain, but she knew if she stopped to say good-bye she would lose her nerve, and the two of them would starve together.\n\nIn any case, running off to the city seemed a romantic enough notion. How could she fail?\n\nOh, she had heard all the stories, all the warnings. Her mother had always told her how it was dangerous for a young girl to find a life on her own. Her father, when he was home, always warned her how runaways ended up doing the most terrible things to survive. It wasn't that she didn't listen or didn't believe them. Quite the opposite, she believed that sort of fate was exactly what could befall a foolish person, and she was not a foolish person. She ran away from Ringbriar to find a dazzling future somewhere, maybe as an artist or a diplomat. The fact that she had no talents in either art or politics was irrelevant. Those kinds of things weren't hard. It was all a matter of finding the right opportunity.\n\nA tile slid under Seren's feet and she wobbled dangerously. Her hand squished something unpleasant as she clutched the edge of the gutter. She grimaced but didn't risk letting go. She watched the tile spiral downward, wincing as she waited for the shattering report on the street below. The sky flashed overhead, and a riotous peal of thunder filled the night. Seren finally breathed. No one would have heard the falling tile. She whispered a brief prayer of thanks to Kol Korran and, while she was praying, added a polite request that whichever member of the Host was in charge of the lightning this evening, please keep it in the sky until she was safely off this ledge.\n\nIn hindsight, she realized she'd been every bit as foolish as the girls in those stories. Seren was young and pretty, if in a tomboyish sort of way. She soon found quite a number of gentlemen (and one rather curious lady) with many helpful suggestions as to how she could earn her keep, but the prospect of earning a living on her back was not very appealing.\n\nIt wasn't until a particularly fat and odious fish merchant propositioned her at the Steaming Ferret that Seren learned her true calling. Seren enjoyed several drinks with the man, only sipping from her own cup as he threw back mug after mug. She entertained his suggestions with vaguely noncommittal flirtation and then excused herself to use the lavatory. While the drunken merchant sat heaped on his stool, waiting for her to return, Seren snuck out the back door with his belt pouch tucked in her skirt.\n\nShe was no artist or diplomat, but she had proven to be quite a talented thief.\n\nSeren peered carefully through the window again. She now saw the back of a short, thick-bodied man dressed in a rich lavender suit and a peaked green cap. She couldn't see his face but recognized his build and clothing as that of the house's owner. The man sat at his desk, leaning back in his worn leather chair, holding a small frosted cake in one hand and chewing intently as he balanced a thick book upon his knee. Thunder cracked overhead again, and the rain came down even harder. Seren's long black hair was now plastered to her face and down her back. She scowled through the window, trying to compel the man to finish his reading and leave through sheer force of will. Not surprisingly, it didn't work. Seren settled back against the gargoyle, trying to find some shelter or warmth against its bulk. The statue stared blankly down at the street, showing no sympathy whatsoever.\n\nWaiting was the most difficult part of being a thief, by far. The threat of punishment didn't frighten her. The excitement of a job well done balanced that. The danger made the job worthwhile. But this? She muffled a sneeze with one hand, her damp hair slapping forward and covering her face. Waiting was miserable. Where was Jamus? He was late, and she was going to kill him\u2014if she didn't slide off the ledge or perish of pneumonia. Rain streamed down her back and shoulders. Seren wished that she had dressed a bit more warmly. Her short cotton breeches and leather vest offered mobility for climbing but little protection from the elements. The weather had been fair when she started climbing. It wasn't until halfway up the building that the clouds rolled in and the rain started. She should have climbed back down and put off the job until tomorrow, but Seren was a stubborn sort of person.\n\nCarefully holding the gutter with one hand and the gargoyle's stone claw with the other, she leaned out and peered down. She couldn't give up, even if she wanted to. The climb back down would be far too dangerous in the rain. The only way out of here was through the house, and her distraction was taking an inordinate amount of time to arrive.\n\nAlmost on cue, a heavy banging sounded in the street below. Seren sat back against the wall again, peering carefully in the window to see the inhabitant's reaction. The fat man merely sat in his chair, chewing on his cake and reading his book, ignoring the commotion.\n\nMore banging followed, this time accompanied with a quavering voice calling out, \"Hello? Master d'Cannith? Is anyone there?\"\n\nThe man inside set his cake down and sighed. He drummed his fingers on the desk, as if waiting for his visitor to go away.\n\nAnother round of heavy banging. \"Master d'Cannith, my business is most urgent! If you are occupied, I understand, and shall take my business to Master d'Phiarlan. I had hoped to offer your guild this honor first, but such is life!\"\n\nDalan closed his book with a snap, tossed it onto a nearby couch, and stalked out the study door. After several moments, she heard the iron squeal of old hinges below.\n\n\"What?\" snapped a terse voice below.\n\n\"Ah, greetings and good evening to you, Master d'Cannith.\"\n\nShe heard the reply, though she could not see either speaker beneath the sloping overhang.\n\n\"I bring you greetings on behalf of the Lost Children of Wroat. Surely being a member of a household whose humanitarian actions during the Last War are so renowned, you would be eager to aid this prestigious charity? I ask only whatever you can spare to help us purchase food, medicine, perhaps even new toys to brighten what would otherwise be a bleak and hopeless...\"\n\nSeren could not help a smile. Jamus hadn't shared the full details of how he intended to distract their target, but she had trusted the old thief to be creative. She unhooked the metal sphere from her belt, cracking it open to reveal the glowing stone within. Such magic was expensive, but light without a spark was a useful investment in her line of work. She frowned as she studied the window, finding no lock. Holding the stone up to the window, she began tracing the edges of the sill with one finger.\n\n\"Orphans?\" the other voice said below. \"You roused me from my leisure to beg for charity?\"\n\n\"Not just any charity, Master d'Cannith, the Lost Children of Wroat, a proud and well respected\u2014\"\n\nThe sound of a slamming door connecting with the toe of a boot interrupted his monologue.\n\n\"Ahem. A proud and respected charity with, as I am sure one of your impressive social connections is aware, a sterling reputation for\u2014\"\n\n\"I have never heard of you and I can assure you I give quite generously to several legitimate charities. Now get your foot out of my door.\"\n\n\"I can understand your reluctance, Master d'Cannith, for there are many opportunistic souls who seek to twist the generosity of those touched by the War,\" Jamus said, accompanied by the rhythmic sound of a door repeatedly hitting a foot. \"I assure you, however, that we are legitimate. Look only to these beautiful glass marbles, painted by the children\u2014\"\n\n\"Leave before I call the Watch.\"\n\n\"Please, Master, look at these marbles,\" Jamus continued, \"each hand-painted in exquisite detail by the very innocents whom your money will support.\"\n\n\"I am not interested. Return when it is daylight and take up your begging with my servants if you must.\"\n\n\"But please, good master, just examine one and see the simple beauty\u2014\"\n\nA wracking cough resounded from below, followed by the sound of a bag of glass marbles striking a wooden floor and scattering its contents.\n\n\"Oh, drat,\" Jamus said.\n\nThis was followed by the other voice swearing urgently in several languages.\n\n\"I apologize, good master. This chill rain has left me with trembling hands.\"\n\n\"Just pick them up and go!\"\n\nThere, Seren found what she sought. What appeared to be a flaw in the grain was actually a mark, painted in dark brown ink, in the upper corner of the window. It formed a figure eight pattern between the sill and the wood. She didn't recognize the rune. Perhaps it simply held the window sealed unless the proper word was spoken. Perhaps it would raise an alarm, or worse, explode and hurl Seren into the street. The Canniths were artificers and magewrights, and though the man who lived here reputedly possessed no magical training, it was no surprise to find his home was protected. Seren rose from her crouch as much as she dared, studying the ward further.\n\nIn a city as large as Wroat, magic was fairly common. The city drew wizards as surely as it drew everyone else. Seren avoided stealing from wizards or magewrights, not out of any fear of magic but simply because they were more trouble than they were worth. Jamus taught her that magic was no different from any other form of power\u2014worthy of respect, but no more frightening than the flawed men and women who used it. Even if you couldn't learn to use magic, you could learn to deal with it. Seren couldn't build a lock, but she could pick one with a bent wire. Magic was the same. There was always an answer.\n\nSeren drew a small tin and brush from her belt pouch. Shielding the tin from the rain, she opened its lid and wrinkled her nose at the harsh smell of its contents. Carefully, she brushed the thick, clear paste over one of the glass panes, coating it entirely, then closed the tin and put it back in her pouch. She drew out several strips of thick felt and pressed them against the glass, then bound another around her right hand. Taking a deep breath, she punched the glass as hard as she could where she had glued the felt over its surface. She heard only a muffled crack in reply. She peeled the felt away in a single piece, removing the broken pane in one neat sheet, which she carefully folded and stuffed into the gargoyle's open beak.\n\nNext she produced a small mirror with a sharp pin on one side and a long stick of charcoal. Careful to avoid the bits broken glass that clung to the window's frame, she reached through and pinned the mirror to the sill inside, facing her. She adjusted it until she could see the rune pattern on the inside and then carefully began work on the rune with her charcoal. It was the same sort of pigment most mages used to complete such wards, and if she was careful enough she could isolate the pattern on each side and disable the ward, at least for a short time. Finishing the pattern on the inside, she paused only long enough to sharpen her charcoal on a shard of broken glass, then do the same on the exterior. Tucking the tools back in her pouch, she looked at her work cautiously. There was only one real way to tell if it worked. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened the window with a quick heave.\n\nSeren opened her eyes to discover, quite happily, that the window was open, there was no alarm, and she was still alive. She could still hear voices downstairs, one swearing in a rage and the other apologizing obsequiously as he continued to clumsily lose his marbles. With no sign that she had been discovered, Seren plucked up her mirror, nimbly hopped into the study, and closed the window behind her.\n\nThe thick smell of incense and woodsmoke hung heavily in the air, barely covering the more cloying scent of old sweat. This was clearly one man's private refuge, and she would be glad to be out of it. She looked down with a start as something wet touched her shin. A squat, shaggy black hound, its fur shot through with gray, looked up at her mournfully. Its tail thumped the side of the desk when she looked at it.\n\n\"Some watchdog you are,\" she whispered.\n\nThe old dog's ears perked up. It glanced up at the desk, then back at her. A low whine began to rise in the dog's chest, and it opened its mouth as if to bark. Seren quickly snatched Dalan's half-finished cake from the desk and tossed it to the dog. The animal caught the cake in midair and flopped on the floor, consuming the sweet bribe contentedly.\n\nSeren stepped past the dog, eager to find what she sought and leave before the dog reconsidered its treachery. She drew a scrap of paper from her pocket and glanced at the illustration as she scanned the shelves. The paper bore an illustration of a small journal with a black cover, emblazoned with the House Cannith gorgon crest above the image of an albatross in flight. Seren scowled in irritation as she looked at the countless books that lined the shelves. The house's owner had a reputation for being indolent and lazy; he was not known as a scholar. She had thought one book would be easy to find in his house. Now she realized she might search all night and never find the right one. She tested the nearest bookcase, hoping against hope that they were the false vanity books that many nobility favored. They were genuine enough, unfortunately, and focused on a variety of eclectic subjects from magic to history to music and even exotic cooking. All looked well read. She would never find the book she wanted before the guildmaster returned to find his broken window, missing cake, and the small river of rainwater she'd leaked on his floor.\n\nAs she stepped back to give the bookcases a better look, Seren stumbled over a book discarded on the floor. She glanced down to see the gorgon and albatross looking back at her impassively. Seren blinked in disbelief. She looked back at the dog. It only watched her with soulful black eyes, nose buried between furry paws, mourning the untimely demise of the cake. Rather than dwell upon her uncanny luck, Seren snatched the book and tucked it into the sack at her belt.\n\nThe study door no doubt bore wards like the window, but fortunately it had been left open. Seren hurried out and down the stairs, tiptoeing with a silent grace. To her right, she could see the two men. Jamus stood near the door, playing the part of the lost and confused old man as he apologized repeatedly, stroking his long white beard with one hand. The guildmaster, apparently tired of the crazed beggar's floundering, had snatched the marble bag and was now picking up the marbles himself.\n\n\"Here, take the accursed things, and do not drop them again or you shall return to the orphans without them.\"\n\n\"Are you certain you found them all?\" Jamus asked, blinking foolishly. \"I think I saw one roll under the clock in the corner...\"\n\n\"Then here!\" The man snapped. He rummaged in his pocket and held out a handful of silver. \"To pay for your lost marbles.\"\n\nJamus opened his mouth to demur again, but his sharp eyes focused squarely upon Seren in the shadows of the stair. He gave a slight nod and reached for the bag and coins, clasping the guildmaster's hands with both of his own in a gesture of exaggerated gratitude. Seren made her way to the back door and quietly unlocked the latch.\n\n\"I thank you, Master d'Cannith,\" Jamus said, bowing repeatedly as he clasped the man's hands. \"The orphans thank you as well.\"\n\n\"Yes, the orphans,\" she heard the other man growl as she slipped out into the alley. \"Give them my regards. Now go!\"\n\nClosing the door gently, Seren broke into a sprint. Darting between the puddles and strewn garbage of the alleys, she stopped at a particular abandoned house after several minutes of running. Looking back to make certain she wasn't followed, she pulled a loose board aside and stepped through the wall. The interior was lit by a single candle. An older gentleman dressed in a sleek black jacket and trousers reclined on a tattered couch. A long white beard lay discarded on the floor. He toyed with a pair of painted glass marbles, rolling them between his fingers idly.\n\n\"Did you find the book?\" he asked, looking up at her with a faint grin.\n\nShe stared at Jamus. \"How did you get here first?\"\n\n\"I should ask why it took you so long,\" he said, though his smile took the barb off his words. He fell to a fit of coughing for several seconds and then looked up at her with a forced grin. \"So. Find the book?\"\n\nSeren nodded, patting the bag at her hip. She picked up her cloak from where she had left it folded on the floor earlier in the evening and began using it as an improvised towel, drying herself as best she could.\n\n\"May I see it?\" Jamus asked.\n\n\"After you tell me why you left me up on that ledge in the rain for so long.\"\n\n\"Because I didn't think you'd be foolish enough to keep climbing when the storm began,\" Jamus said. \"I thought you would come back down and we'd try another day.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Can't turn back once you start or you'll never finish,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. \"I underestimated your stubbornness, as always. It is your second most endearing and maddening trait.\"\n\n\"Second?\" she said. \"What is the first?\"\n\n\"Your infuriating willingness to speak your mind,\" he said. \"You remind me a great deal of my daughter. I suppose before you give me the book I shall be subject to another lecture on my questionable wisdom of undertaking this mission.\"\n\nSeren folded her arms across her chest and frowned. \"I did the job, Jamus, but my opinion stands,\" she said. \"I don't think it's smart to cross the dragonmarked houses. I don't care what the pay is. It's going to be trouble.\"\n\n\"Afraid of magic, Seren?\" he asked. Jamus rose from his couch and walked toward her. \"I thought I taught you better than that.\"\n\n\"You taught me to respect power,\" Seren said. \"The Canniths are powerful. If they find out what we've done...\"\n\n\"They simply won't care,\" Jamus said. He rested one hand on her shoulder, looking down at her with the expression of a parent soothing a frightened child. \"Dalan d'Cannith has a checkered past. He may be a local guildmaster, but he is not particularly liked or respected among his family. His power is limited outside of Wroat. Our payment for this job will place us far beyond his grasp.\"\n\nSeren's eyes widened. \"We're leaving Wroat?\" she asked, excited. \"You never told me that.\"\n\nJamus nodded, though he glanced away as another fit of coughing shook his spare figure. \"I didn't want to distract you before the job,\" he said. \"Our employer guaranteed future opportunities beyond the city when she gave me our advance.\"\n\n\"There's an advance?\" she asked with a small grin. Jamus hadn't mentioned that either. \"Where's my share?\"\n\nThe old thief smiled. \"Right here,\" he said, tossing her the bag of marbles. She caught it in one hand and favored him with a sour look. \"No worries, Seren, you'll be paid when we deliver. Only the most difficult part remains.\"\n\n\"The most difficult part?\" she said, bewildered. \"What can be more difficult than what we've just done?\"\n\n\"Don't ask that question,\" Jamus said with a chuckle. \"Never ask that question, lest it be answered sooner than you'd like.\"\n\n\"I'm serious, Jamus,\" she said. \"What else is left? We already have the book. All we need to do is deliver it. Are you afraid the Watch will find us, or do you not trust our employer?\"\n\n\"I never trust my employer,\" Jamus said. \"Anyone who enters our line of work, as a client or a professional, is untrustworthy by definition.\"\n\n\"But we trust each other,\" she said. \"Don't we?\"\n\nHe leaned forward and kissed her forehead, then made his way toward the door. \"Only because we both have something to gain,\" he said. \"Ours is a relationship of mutual benefit, teacher and student. Trust is born from mutual benefit. We trust our employer because we are offered payment in return for our services... mutual benefit\u2014but we do not trust foolishly.\"\n\n\"So what do we do if our employer decides there's greater benefit in not paying us?\" she asked. \"What then?\"\n\n\"In this case such a betrayal would be foolish,\" Jamus answered. He pushed the loose board aside, studying the street to make certain no one was outside. \"I have a reputation in this city. Were I to disappear, questions would be asked, and I have arranged for answers. I have written speaker posts addressed to certain allies, describing the details of our work here. If I do not arrive to cancel the deliveries, the Sivis messengers will whisper into their speaking stones and the truth will fly upon the winds of Khorvaire. Within hours, friends as far away as Fairhaven will know the truth.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make me feel much better,\" Seren said. \"If we die, we're still dead, no matter who knows what happened.\"\n\n\"Then ignore the negative and focus on your goals, Seren, dear,\" he said, stepping out into the street. \"Think about leaving this place far behind, and it will be. Until then, be safe. Stay out of sight. The town guards will be suspicious of anyone on the streets on a terrible night like tonight. I will meet you back at the house.\"\n\nThe old thief slid the board back into place behind him. She could hear his wet footsteps and quiet cough recede into the distance. Dalan d'Cannith would have summoned the Watch by now, searching for the thief and his beggar accomplice. It was safer to wait, to move separately.\n\nSeren would have preferred Jamus carry the book, at least. It was his idea to steal it, after all. She took the book out of the sack and studied its cover. She recognized the Cannith crest; she had seen it in the city often enough. Beneath a small hammer and anvil design, the snarling metal bull's head of a gorgon glared up at her. The relatively indifferent albatross beneath it was not typically part of the crest. It must be some sort of personal seal. Seren opened the book and flipped through the pages cautiously. She told herself she was merely checking to make sure that the book hadn't been damaged by the rain. In reality she wanted to know what was so important about it. Diagrams covered the pages within, depicting airships, clockwork mechanisms, and other artifacts whose purpose Seren could not comprehend. The writing was in a strange, arcane cipher. It told her nothing, nothing that would explain why it was important enough to make enemies of House Cannith.\n\nThe Canniths were one of the twelve dragonmarked houses, powerful organizations ruled by individuals born marked by hereditary arcane symbols. Seren didn't really understand what the Prophecy was, nor did she really care. All she knew was that the Prophecy gave incredible powers to those marked by it. Each of the dragonmarked houses boasted magical abilities and had used those abilities to cultivate great wealth and political influence. Each house was as powerful as a country, the services they offered so valuable that their power transcended international boundaries.\n\nHouse Cannith bore the Mark of Making, which granted the ability to repair what had been broken or to create new things. They were engineers, artificers, and weaponsmiths. Many of the most incredible inventions in all of Eberron\u2014the lightning rails, the airships, and even the mysterious warforged soldiers\u2014bore a Cannith artisan's seal. Many of the most ferocious battles in the Last War had been fought with Cannith weapons, and Breland was not the only nation that still owed them a great debt. If this book was as valuable as Jamus claimed and the Canniths realized who had stolen it from them... well, making two thieves in the slums of Wroat disappear wouldn't be such a difficult task for a house that commanded the loyalty of kings.\n\nSeren pushed the book back into the sack and pushed such thoughts away with it. Her own words returned to her\u2014can't turn back once you start or you'll never finish. There was no option now but to see the job through and try to make a profit. If this really got her out of Wroat, then maybe it was worth it.\n\nBut she hated waiting the most.\n\nSeren slipped back into the streets, avoiding the main roads as best she could. She cursed the rain again as it instantly soaked her cloak and clung to her bare legs. No one was in the streets at this time of night, no crowd to fade into. Anyone outside at this time of night would look suspicious. Though she was a fairly talented thief, her face was not unknown to the City Watch. Recognition was inevitable, Jamus had said. Just as even the finest tailor sometimes stuck himself with a needle; all the finest thieves got caught. Even Seren had visited the city's prison.\n\nAll things considered, her brief stay in the dungeon had been comfortable. The cells weren't the dank, shadowed affairs she expected but were in fact surprisingly clean and dry. Her cellmate was a quiet old woman who kept to herself. Seren never even knew why she was there and hadn't wanted to pry. Warden Thomas was a polite and courteous young man. He had seemed a bit taken with Seren, so she flirted innocently to pass the time. The more she flirted back, the more the quality of her food improved. It would have been a rather pleasant stay overall if it hadn't been, well, prison.\n\nAfter a few weeks as a guest of the King (as Jamus called it), Seren had been turned out on the streets. As large a city as Wroat was, its prisons were extremely crowded with all manner of serious criminals. There simply was no room for a minor offender like Seren, so it was not unusual to be set free after such a short time if you knew better than to make trouble for the guards. Yet forgiveness did not imply forgetfulness. The Wroat City Watch was annoyingly vigilant. They kept a list of known thieves, and hardly a week went by that she was not harassed on suspicion of one crime or another, usually a matter in which she had no involvement.\n\nIronically it was her innocence that had earned her something of a reputation with the city watchmen. Seren sometimes found it difficult to control her temper, and more than one guard had been on the receiving end of a scathing verbal assault when she knew she had a solid alibi. One such event had even led to her being thrown into the prisons again after making a particularly brutal comment about a high-ranking watchman's parentage. It had only been for a night, and it was nice to see Warden Thomas again, but Seren had tried to control her temper and avoid the Watch since then\u2014especially on nights like tonight, when she actually had been up to no good and was still carrying the fruits of her illicit labor in a burlap sack on her hip.\n\nThe sound of heavy boots approached from around the corner. Seren fell into a crouch and ducked behind a rain barrel. She could hear the creak of armor and the metal clank of swords as they slapped against armored legs. A cold chill spread down her back; a stream of water spilled from a leak in the gutter directly onto her shoulders, soaking through her cloak and adding to her general misery. She grimaced and stayed where she was. She feared that if she shifted position the new sound of water striking cobblestones might alert the guards.\n\nThe footsteps drew closer, stopping near the barrels. Seren peered up to see the backs of two watchmen, standing uncomfortably close to her. They didn't seem interested in much besides stepping out of the rain, but she quieted her breathing and hunched lower anyway.\n\n\"Damn this weather,\" one of the guards grumbled. \"First night I have patrol in a week and it rains like this. Can't believe they expect us to walk the streets on a night like this.\"\n\nIf the guards hated walking in it, Seren thought to herself, maybe they should try climbing in it. Preferably now, somewhere far away from here, so she could get out from under the leak and leave.\n\n\"Typical,\" the other watchman answered. \"Someone up there doesn't like us I guess, Rolf.\"\n\nSomeone down here doesn't like you much either. Leave!\n\n\"Well it's not as if anything is even going on tonight, Shain,\" the watchman who apparently was named Rolf countered. \"Nobody in their right mind would be out on a night like tonight.\"\n\nSeren had no argument.\n\n\"Mmm-hm,\" came the other guard's agreement. She heard the dry hiss of a match striking stone, followed by the faint smell of burning herb.\n\n\"No thanks, trying to quit,\" Rolf said to some unspoken offer. \"Wife can't stand washing the smoke smell out of my armor.\"\n\n\"You sure?\" said the other. \"Karrnathi cigars. They're the best.\"\n\n\"Aren't those expensive?\"\n\n\"Host, yes,\" Officer Shain said. \"This pack cost me a week's pay, but they're worth it. Finest smoke in Eberron.\"\n\n\"Doris would kill you if she knew you spent that kind of money on cigars.\"\n\n\"That's why I offered you one,\" Shain said. \"So you don't tell her.\"\n\nA long pause. Thunder cracked overhead, and the stream of rain on Seren's back came down a bit more forcefully. \"Very well, then,\" Rolf said. \"May as well enjoy ourselves and wait for this rain to die down.\"\n\nSeren gritted her teeth and clutched her knees with both arms, trying to preserve what warmth she could. She suspected she had never hated two people as much in her entire life as she did these two watchmen. She shivered uncontrollably. She would have to risk moving out from under the leak and hope they were too stupid to notice. If she stayed here any longer they would hear her teeth chatter anyway. She crawled slowly, looking up at the guards as the water fell gently on the street. Seren scowled. Somehow it irritated her that they didn't even notice the sound after she'd suffered so much not to draw any attention. Shaking her head, she began to crawl deeper into the alley.\n\nA sudden shudder passed through her and, despite her best efforts to control herself, she sneezed. Seren slapped herself in the face.\n\n\"Who goes there?\" Rolf shouted, holding up his lantern and flooding the alley with light.\n\n\"Show yourself!\" said Shain.\n\nSeren peered back and tried her best to look innocent, which she found a somewhat difficult prospect crawling on her hands and knees in a garbage strewn alley at night during a thunderstorm. She held out her hands so that they could see she held no weapons and slowly rose, turning to face them. She made sure to keep her hood's shadows over her face but held her cloak open so they could see the rest of her. Watchmen, especially young watchmen, tended to be a bit more easily distracted when they saw she was a girl. Sure enough, Officer Shain stopped wrestling with his crossbow strap and left the weapon hanging at his belt.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Rolf demanded. \"Why are you hiding?\"\n\n\"There's a simple explanation,\" Seren said, keeping a charming lilt in her voice despite her chattering teeth.\n\nRolf lowered his lantern a bit and looked at her warily. \"What is it?\"\n\nSeren pretended to sneeze to buy time. She couldn't think of anything they'd be likely to believe, but at least she had stalled long enough to stand up and get a good look at them. Both guards were somewhat overweight and wore the cumbersome chain mail that was part of their typical uniform. They still hadn't seen her face. Seren doubled over in a fake sneezing fit, then heaved the rain barrel at their legs and ran off through the alleys.\n\n\"Get her!\" Rolf cried, jumping back as the heavy barrel rolled past. The clang of a loud bell followed as he did everything he could to summon his fellow watchmen.\n\nSeren wove and ducked as she ran, trying to present a small and random target. She didn't expect the guards to shoot their crossbows, but she wasn't willing to risk it. Lightning crashed overhead, throwing the alleys into a flash of daylight brilliance. In that moment of clarity she saw a mounted watchman in the intersection ahead, looking toward the clamor. Not willing to attempt outrunning a horse, Seren stopped abruptly and ran back to an unmarked door she had passed.\n\nWell, that was what she intended to do, at least. In reality she tried to turn and found the rain slicked alley unwilling to cooperate. Her feet slipped out from under her and she skidded through the mud and garbage to stop near the horseman. She looked up at the point of a hastily drawn sword and tried to smile demurely. Given that she was flat on her back and covered with filth, the guard was unimpressed.\n\n\"Stop her!\" Rolf cried, running up behind her.\n\n\"She's stopped herself, Officer Rolf,\" the horseman said.\n\nSeren scowled and staggered to her feet. This time, the three watchmen surrounded her. Officer Shain had his crossbow drawn. Rolf still held his lantern and bell. He leaned heavily against a wall, struggling to catch his breath. Ironically, it was at that point that the storm faded into a drizzle, ending as quickly as it had begun.\n\n\"What's this all about?\" the mounted guard asked, looking at Rolf curiously.\n\n\"She was acting suspicious, Sergeant Narem,\" Rolf said. \"She rolled a barrel at us. Probably a thief.\"\n\n\"Search her,\" Narem commanded.\n\nWell used to the ritual, Seren sighed and held her arms up, away from her body. At least in her current filthy state, perhaps the guard would enjoy this as little as she did. Officer Shain put his crossbow away and began to pat her down. Seren grimaced. The way he pressed against her, she realized the dirt wasn't doing a great deal to dissuade him.\n\n\"Can I at least have a cigar so I enjoy this too?\" she asked.\n\n\"Quiet, you,\" Sergeant Narem said. \"Shain, go easy or I'm telling Doris,\" he added in a gentler voice.\n\nThe other watchman looked embarrassed and mumbled an apology.\n\n\"Hello, what's this?\" said a bright voice with an elegant Lhazaarite accent. \"A little midnight justice? What drama unfolds in the weary, rain-soaked roadways of Wroat?\"\n\nThe watchmen looked to the sound of the voice. Seren peered over her shoulder as well, though she kept her hands raised. A young man stepped out of the shadows of an awning, greeting them with a broad smile. He was dressed in a long blue coat and fine black cloak. His sandy brown hair was tied back by a think leather cord, and a thin pair of spectacles sat perched upon his nose. He wore a sword at his belt in the manner of a gentleman, though he kept his hand away from the hilt so as not to upset the guards.\n\n\"My, this is more dangerous than I first suspected,\" the man said, eyes widening as his gaze met Seren's. \"Three watchmen band together to arrest a fifteen-year-old girl?\"\n\n\"Nineteen,\" Seren said tersely.\n\n\"My apologies, my lady, but one day I think you will treasure such underestimations,\" the man said. He looked back to the guards. \"But clearly this is even worse than I suspected. Four years more experience than I thought\u2014all the more reason for caution. Are you certain you three can handle her? I am no citizen of your fair city, but I would be pleased to offer you my modest sword arm for the cause of justice, if deputies are required. I would be proud to participate in such a heroic confrontation.\"\n\n\"You're not funny,\" Rolf growled. \"Move on, stranger.\"\n\n\"What's in this bag?\" Officer Shain asked, tugging at the sack at her hip.\n\n\"Book,\" Seren said. She looked straight ahead and kept her voice and posture bored, hoping this would soon be over. She had no doubt that if they saw the seal on that book's cover, it certainly would be.\n\n\"A scholar!\" the man interrupted again. \"She is obviously a student of some local university. Is this how Wroat's watchmen encourage Breland's youth? No wonder this neighborhood is in such a sorry state.\"\n\nEven Seren glanced back at that, fixing the stranger with a bewildered scowl. She hoped this odd person wasn't trying to pick a fight with the Watch. One man against three guards was bound to go badly for him, and she didn't want to be in the middle of that. The man noticed Seren looking at him. He winked. What was he doing?\n\n\"Go take your advice somewhere else, pirate, before we search you too,\" Narem said. \"Chances are a Lhazaarite has something in his pockets that doesn't belong there.\"\n\n\"Your prejudice does not surprise me, though it saddens me,\" he said. \"I am Tristam Xain, citizen of Zilargo and an honored guest in this city.\" He sighed. His shoulders slumped. \"I am wounded.\"\n\n\"Keep it up and you will be,\" Narem said. He looked up at the horseman. \"Rolf, detain this man.\"\n\nRolf drew his sword, moving purposefully toward the well-dressed stranger.\n\n\"Put your weapon on the ground and back away from it, please,\" Rolf said.\n\n\"Now this is just going too far,\" Tristam answered, removing his spectacles and tucking them into his jacket pocket. \"I am a protected guest of the city with powerful friends. I have papers granting me immunity from such action as this. Omax, show them my papers.\"\n\nThe shadows behind Tristam moved. A bulk that Seren had previously thought to be a large stack of barrels rose and resolved itself into a monstrous figure. It was a foot taller than a man, with shining black wood and gleaming blue metal in place of flesh. Its face was a smooth metal plate, split only by an expressionless line for a mouth and two hollow eyes, glowing with an unnerving blue light. It wore only loose brown trousers and a soft woolen hat. It stepped out of the darkness with movement surprisingly lithe and graceful for a creature of its size. The watchmen each took a step back, and even Narem's horse whinnied nervously. Seren had seen creatures such as this before.\n\n\"Good evening, officers,\" Omax said, his cool voice echoing in its metallic chest. \"Is there a problem?\"\n\nThis was a warforged, one of the automatons created by House Cannith to fight in the Last War. Seren's annoyance was quickly replaced by fear and suspicion. She realized belatedly that the guards had not been looking for her, when by all rights Dalan d'Cannith should have roused the City Watch to investigate the theft. Perhaps he had not wanted the Watch to become involved. Perhaps he wanted to send his own agents to retrieve what Seren had stolen.\n\nNow they were here.\n\nSergeant Narem climbed out of his saddle, drawing his sword and standing beside Rolf as they watched Tristam and Omax cautiously.\n\nSeren watched the warforged with undisguised fear. She knew the dragonmarked houses could be ruthless, but she wondered if the Canniths were ruthless enough to kill three watchmen just to take back what she had stolen. She didn't intend to find out. She scampered into the horse's empty saddle. Rolf charged toward her, but she scattered Jamus's bag of marbles on the rain-slicked cobbles. The watchman squawked in comical surprise and fell forward on his teeth. Seren seized the horse's reins, kicked its flanks, and galloped off.\n\n\"Stop!\" came the cry, followed by the sound of boots falling on cobblestones.\n\nSeren ducked as low in the saddle as she could, hoping that the guards would be unwilling to loose arrows at their own horse. Rolf's bell clanged again. She saw lights flare in the windows along the road as the locals peered out to see what the trouble was, but she saw no more guards. She kept riding till the Watch, the Lhazaarite stranger, and the warforged were out of sight. Seren was not foolish enough to ride through Wroat on a stolen horse wearing City Watch colors, so she slowed just enough to leap out of the saddle and slap the animal's flanks. With a frenzied whinny it continued galloping without her. She darted into the nearest alley. In three years she had come to know the back streets of Wroat well. This was hardly the first time she had used this twisted network of alleys, tunnels, and abandoned buildings to escape pursuit.\n\nSeren kept running for ten minutes before slowing to catch her breath. She stopped for a moment in a leatherworker's shack, using a rag left hanging on a post to wipe the grime from her face, arms, and legs. By all rights she should hurry back to rendezvous with Jamus, but she was tired, cold, and frustrated. She needed a moment to compose herself.\n\nSo Seren sat on a stool, took a cigar out of the box she had taken from Officer Shain's pocket during his energetic search, and enjoyed the finest smoke in all of Eberron.\n\nSeren waited an hour, just to make sure she wasn't followed, and then headed to the rendezvous point. As she made her way to her destination, the streets became softer beneath her feet. Manicured cobblestones gave way to bare ground, paved only by a random covering of occasional wooden planks. Even these did little to make the path more hospitable, as the rain had turned the streets into mud. The streets sucked at Seren's shoes until she finally tired of struggling and took them off with a sigh, slinging the muddy things over one shoulder by their laces.\n\nThe fishermen's district was crowded even at this late hour. It was always crowded. People moved quickly through the streets in tight groups, moving urgently toward whatever clandestine business had brought them here. Few spared Seren any more than a suspicious glance. She minded her own path and ignored them; they were content to do the same. She arrived at the meeting place soon enough.\n\nThe Friendly Buzzard was an abandoned inn. In the three years she had come here to train with Jamus Roland, it had never been anything but a ruin. Jamus lived here and sometimes met clients here to fence stolen goods. She wasn't entirely sure whether he owned the place or had simply taken up residence since no one else wanted it. A painted sign still hung above the doors, depicting a comical, grinning buzzard clutching a mug of ale and a loaf of bread in its talons. The wooden stairs squealed noisily as Seren climbed up to the door. The effect wasn't entirely accidental; Jamus had replaced several of the boards in this place to make it difficult for someone to approach unheard. She tiptoed as she walked inside, setting the sign overhead swinging with a gentle slap as she always did.\n\nThe interior of the inn was dimly lit. Seren knew the way and easily navigated the darkness to the stairwell in the back. On the second floor, a long hallway led to a series of what had once been private dining rooms. She continued to the end of the hall, the floor creaking beneath her feet, and opened the last door. Within was a small room featuring a table and three chairs. Only a single candle provided light. Jamus sat with his back to the far wall. His arms were folded tightly and his chin was tucked against his chest. He seemed to be dozing.\n\nSeren frowned. He had been growing tired more often of late, sometimes even dozing off at important times like now. Much like his cough, his exhaustion was something he never spoke of. His silence on the matter was what worried her the most. Jamus Roland could be a manipulative cad and a demanding teacher, but he was all that passed for a friend in this large, uncaring city. Without him, where would she be? The old thief's body jerked as he was taken by a violent snore. Seren closed the door solidly behind her. Jamus glanced up in surprise, now wide awake.\n\n\"Seren,\" he said. He flushed with embarrassment. \"I'm glad to see you had no trouble getting here.\"\n\n\"A little trouble,\" she corrected him, sitting down across the table. \"A few watchmen,\" she said. She dropped the muddy sack containing the book on the table between them.\n\n\"But you lost them,\" Jamus said. There was no questioning tone in his statement, only a surety that Seren would not have been foolish enough to come here otherwise. He reached for the bag.\n\n\"I lost them,\" she said, leaning back precariously on her chair and propping her muddy feet on the table. \"Some warforged distracted them while I ran off.\"\n\nJamus paused in the act of opening the bag's drawstrings, then offered an uneasy smile. \"Ah, warforged,\" he said with a light chuckle. \"Such curious creatures. Some were built to protect humans, you know. Perhaps he saw a young girl in danger and felt motivated to intervene.\"\n\n\"Jamus, don't lie to me,\" Seren said in a low voice. \"We're hired to break into a Cannith guildmaster's house to steal one particular book out of a whole library. I steal the book, make a mess of his office, and he doesn't even report it to the Watch? And then some Lhazaarite mercenary and a warforged thug coincidentally show up to 'rescue' me from a wandering patrol? What's really going on here? What is this book? Who are we meeting here tonight?\"\n\n\"The less you know the better, Seren,\" Jamus said, his voice surprisingly clear and even. His previous sleepy frown was now replaced with an alert, intense stare.\n\n\"I warned you it was a bad idea to steal from Dalan d'Cannith, Jamus,\" Seren said.\n\n\"And perhaps you were right,\" the old thief answered. \"Now it's probably best if you left. Go home. I'll meet you in the morning, and we can leave this city behind.\"\n\n\"You don't actually expect me to do that,\" she said.\n\nJamus sighed and ran one hand through his thinning white locks.\n\n\"At least tell me who we're working for,\" she said.\n\n\"Well, make up your mind,\" he said with a sudden, irritated tone. \"Do you want to know who we're working for or who we're meeting here?\"\n\nSeren gave him a long, angry stare.\n\n\"It's complicated,\" he said evasively. \"Our employer's identity is a confidence I am not at liberty to betray, even to you, but she can be trusted.\"\n\nSeren wanted to slap the old man off his chair. She restrained herself, holding one wrist tightly with the other hand behind her back. \"Jamus, you know I trust you,\" she said, struggling to keep her voice even and patient. \"I assumed you wouldn't suggest a job like this unless you were sure it was safe. Now you're telling me you can't tell me who we're working for? I'm risking my life. Can't you give me that much?\"\n\n\"I told you, Seren, it's complicated,\" he said. \"Suffice it to say the Canniths are the least of our worries. We have powerful allies. If Dalan d'Cannith moves against us, we'll be protected. Why do you think they offered to move us out of Wroat? Our protection was always part of the deal.\"\n\n\"The fact that a group as powerful as the House of Making is the least of our worries doesn't make me feel much better, Jamus,\" Seren said. \"What are we involved in?\"\n\nJamus folded his hands on the table before him, staring silently at his long, gnarled fingers. He looked much older than he normally did, much more exhausted.\n\n\"Have I ever told you about this place?\" he said. \"About what it once was?\"\n\n\"This inn?\" Seren asked, confused by the sudden change of subject. \"You've told me a little about it, but what does that have to do with anything?\"\n\n\"Be patient, Seren,\" Jamus said, looking at her with a crooked smile. \"I have taught you many things in the time we've known one another, but I suspect this is the most important thing I have to teach.\"\n\nSeren frowned, but did not argue.\n\n\"Years ago this building was home to a den of smugglers,\" Jamus said. \"They were war profiteers. Scum. They stored weapons, supplies, sometimes even the occasional spy here. They used to meet their clients here. After the King's soldiers discovered what was going on, the place was cleaned out. The smugglers were executed for treason, and the building was left empty for twenty years. It was a Cyran woman, Fiona Keenig, who purchased it next. Exiled from her home, she did her best to turn it into a welcoming, comfortable sort of place. She said that she felt like a scavenger, snapping up this old husk of a building, so she named it the Friendly Buzzard.\"\n\n\"You've told me about Keenig,\" Seren said. \"You said she was a friend of yours.\"\n\nJamus nodded. \"Something of an understatement, but yes,\" he said. \"The Last War drove a deep wedge between Breland and Cyre. They were indifferent neighbors at best, bitter enemies at worst, depending on which way the War had turned that week. Fiona wasn't welcome here at first, but she persevered. This was the only place in all of Wroat where you could find genuine Cyran cuisine and hospitality. Fiona's brothers still lived in Cyre that time, and did what they could to send her the spices and ingredients that weren't available here.\" Jamus grinned. \"In a city as crowded as Wroat, it pays to be unique. People started noticing the Buzzard.\"\n\nSeren stared at her teacher in silence. She wanted to demand answers, to demand Jamus stop stalling, but when she saw the sad, distant look in his eyes she could not bring herself to interrupt. There was something deeper here. This was important.\n\n\"But rumors bred, as they always do,\" Jamus said. \"Mistress Keenig was accused of being a Cyran spy. The King's inquisitives conducted a public investigation, and Keenig's business ground to a halt. A few of the locals, people who knew her, braved the stigma of coming here. It wasn't much business, but it was enough to keep her afloat.\"\n\n\"Was she a spy?\" Seren asked.\n\nJamus shrugged noncommittally. \"After two years, the investigators found nothing,\" he said. \"King Boranel offered no apology, of course, because a king cannot apologize. However, he and his retinue did dine here. Boranel gave the Buzzard his highest possible recommendation, and business turned around overnight. The wealthiest members of the nobility lined up to dine at the Buzzard, even braving the wretched streets of the fishermen's district to emulate their beloved king.\" Jamus smiled silently for several moments, remembering. \"To her credit, Fiona did not allow the sudden fame to overwhelm her. She did not forget those who had remained her friends. The upper floor became dedicated to her wealthier clientele, private rooms and tables available only by reservation at astronomical prices. Her new customers were happy to pay. The bottom floor remained open to the common man, offering an alternate menu that was mostly the same thing being served upstairs... but at one-tenth the price.\"\n\n\"Bold,\" Seren said. \"What if the nobles had discovered she was overcharging them?\"\n\nJamus gave a wry smile. \"Fiona was a clever woman. She knew her clientele,\" he answered. \"The nobles expected a high price. After all, had not the king himself dined here? They were paying for the privilege of sharing in his glory. What they were eating certainly didn't matter, and they most assuredly were not going to share the details of their dinner with the scum downstairs. The nobles believed that Fiona only allowed the locals to dine here so that the Buzzard would have an authentic, earthy charm.\"\n\n\"She lied to them,\" Seren said.\n\n\"She gave them what they wanted,\" Jamus said. \"The sheltered rich will pay a fair sum for authenticity, as long as that authenticity is kept safely at arm's length.\"\n\n\"Some people have too much money,\" Seren said.\n\n\"A simple, profound wisdom that has driven my entire career,\" Jamus said with a nod. \"It was a similar thought that first drew me to the Buzzard in the hopes that I might relieve a noble of his excess wealth, and that is how I met Fiona. She caught me sneaking out the back door with a stolen purse in hand.\"\n\n\"She caught you?\" Seren said, impressed.\n\nJamus smirked. \"I could rationalize the matter and say that I was young and inexperienced,\" he said, \"but that's not entirely true. Every man has his match, Seren. I underestimated Fiona Keenig. She took the pouch back and promised not to press charges if I snuck back into the private room and listened in on the conversation there. So I did. More jobs followed, spying on her clients or reporting the information to her other contacts.\"\n\n\"So she was a spy after all?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Of course,\" Jamus said, \"but she wasn't a Cyran spy. She was King Boranel's agent, counter-intelligence, charged with defending the city against foreign infiltrators. The entire investigation had been a ruse. My life became a great deal more interesting after I met Fiona. I worked for her for over twenty years. It was only a few months before you came here that this place closed for good.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"The Day of Mourning happened,\" Jamus said. \"A wave of smoke and flame wiped out the nation of Cyre in a single night. Fiona loved Breland and was loyal to the king, but she had family in Cyre. The day she learned what happened, she closed the Buzzard and set out to find her brothers. That was four years ago, and no one has seen her since. This place has a great deal of memories for me...\" Jamus looked around wistfully and laughed. \"Also several emergency exits, built by the original smugglers who lived here. The perfect den for a spy. The perfect rendezvous point for a thief. No one else seemed to want the Buzzard, so I guess I've sort of adopted it.\"\n\nSeren was silent a long moment. \"What does any of this have to do with our meeting tonight?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"There weren't many people who knew I worked for Fiona,\" Jamus said. \"So when she vanished, I returned to being the two-bit thief the city always believed I was. A few weeks ago, I was given a better offer by someone who knows about my past. I've been offered\u2014 we've been offered\u2014a chance to do something worthwhile again. The payment and escape from this damned city is just a bonus.\"\n\n\"So we're spies now?\" Seren asked. It came out a bit more shrilly than she intended, and she saw Jamus flinch at her outburst.\n\n\"Seren, you left home to become something more than you were,\" he said patiently. \"You can't tell me that you can look at your life now and say you have no complaints?\"\n\nSeren did not answer.\n\n\"I thought as much,\" Jamus said. \"You're a talented girl, Seren, but you are not a normal person. Normal people do not climb on rooftops and pilfer other people's pockets. There are, however, ways to put those talents to use. Ways to help people. We've been given that chance.\"\n\n\"By whom?\" Seren asked. \"Why won't you tell me who we work for?\"\n\n\"Knowledge and security are very rare companions in this line of work, Seren,\" Jamus said. \"I can't tell you, for your own good and for our employer's. You just have to trust me, Seren.\"\n\n\"You say trust is born from mutual benefit,\" Seren said. \"I have mercenaries following me through the streets already. How does this benefit me, Jamus?\"\n\n\"Seren,\" Jamus said plaintively, but before he could say anything more he was interrupted by the protesting squeals of the wooden steps. He looked past Seren, his expression sharp and focused.\n\n\"They're early,\" Seren whispered.\n\nJamus remained silent, his expression worried.\n\n\"That's good, isn't it?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, it's not,\" Jamus said, rising from his chair. \"Early is never good.\"\n\n\"So let's get out of here,\" Seren said. She knelt and flipped a recessed latch on the floor. A small trap door in the floor led to a series of crawlspaces through which they could access any of the other rooms in the inn and make their way back to the street.\n\n\"Wait,\" Jamus said.\n\nSeren looked up at him curiously.\n\n\"There's more to this, Seren, a great deal more,\" he said, settling back into his seat and watching the door. \"Remember when I said the most difficult part still remained? Well, this is it. Run if you must, Seren. I'll understand, but I would prefer if you stood with me.\"\n\nThe doorknob turned. Seren stood quickly, but left the trap door unlatched. Two gruff-looking soldiers in light armor stepped inside. One held a lantern high, eyes searching the room for any sign of a hidden ambush. Seren could see the crest on his breastplate, a golden crown on a field of green. The soldier's eyes fixed on Seren for a brief instant, then moved on, disregarding her as a threat. Downstairs, she could hear more heavy footsteps. Who were they?\n\nSeren stood, slipping her shoes back on and moving to the edge of the shadows behind Jamus. One hand moved into her cloak, resting easily on the hilt of the dagger tucked in the back of her belt. Jamus was as uneasy as she had ever seen him, though she doubted a stranger would see the signs, a faint uneasiness around the eyes. To see her normally unflappable teacher so nervous gave Seren an incredible sense of dread. Yet she said nothing, only stood beside her teacher. If they hadn't attacked yet, then this was to be a negotiation. A focused front was required for all negotiations. Disagreement would make a client nervous. Doubt would convince them they had the advantage. Confidence was everything.\n\n\"Clear,\" the man grumbled. \"Only two of them, Captain.\"\n\n\"Just as promised,\" said an elegantly deep voice. \"You are a man of your word, Jamus Roland. At least thus far.\"\n\nA tall, whisper-thin man slid through the door. A cloak, so deep purple it was almost black, hung from his shoulders so that he seemed little more than a shroud topped by a floating head. His hair and eyes were ghostly white. His face was smooth, pale gray, nearly featureless save for the raw pink burn scars that covered his left cheek. Seren flinched when she saw him.\n\n\"Does my appearance upset your associate?\" the man asked, looking at Seren with a crooked smile.\n\n\"Seren means no offense, Captain Marth,\" Jamus said.\n\n\"I understand,\" he said. \"No doubt she simply has never seen a changeling honest enough to wear his true face? A lie may put her more at ease.\" The man's features blurred. His face was now lean and handsome, with rich black hair spilling out of his hood around his shoulders. \"Is this more pleasing, Seren?\"\n\nSeren nodded politely. Marth ignored her and moved to the table, cloak parting to produce a pale white hand with long, almost skeletal fingers. His fingertips brushed the table near the muddy sack. \"This is what I seek?\"\n\n\"It is, Captain,\" Jamus said.\n\n\"Excellent,\" Marth said, gesturing at one of his soldiers.\n\nThe man produced a thick pouch and spilled its contents on the table. The white gleam of five platinum coins, each stamped with the image of a dragon, reflected the candlelight. Seren's eyes widened. She had never dreamed of seeing so much money in one place.\n\n\"Is that enough?\" Marth asked.\n\n\"The money isn't the part of the reward that interests me,\" Jamus answered. He pushed the muddy bag back across the table.\n\nMarth smiled and reached out again. His eyes met Seren's, and she was taken aback by the strange intensity of his milky white eyes. He smiled, only faintly, and then slid the book from its container. His other hand appeared, producing a strange jeweled hand lens of frosted purple glass. Marth held it over one eye as he scanned through the pages.\n\nAfter nearly a minute of study, his shoulders slumped and he released a deep sigh. He opened the book carefully on the table, tucking the lens into his pocket. Before Seren could even react, one of the soldiers lunged forward and seized her arm, twisting it behind her back painfully, away from her weapon. She cried out and stomped hard on the man's foot with her heel. The bodyguard did not react, but only drew a short sword and held it to her waist. Jamus rose halfway from his seat, but Marth held out a cautioning hand.\n\n\"Please, Master Roland, there have been enough mistakes here tonight,\" Marth said in a calm, almost friendly voice. \"A stomach wound is not a misery I would gladly inflict on one so young, but I will illustrate my sincerity if I must.\"\n\nJamus sat back down, though he turned so that he could watch Marth and his bodyguard simultaneously. Marth took the seat across from Jamus and regarded him quietly. The other soldier stepped forward and started scooping the coins off the table with a bored expression.\n\n\"You have failed, Master Roland,\" Marth said. \"What I wish to know now is\u2014did you intentionally seek to offer me a forgery, or is Dalan d'Cannith responsible for this? If the latter was the case, I would not hold you at fault. I would even offer you half the agreed pay for your discretion, though naturally our professional relationship would be permanently concluded. But the former...\" He trailed off and was silent a long time. He drummed his long fingers on the book. \"I fear I know too much of magic. I know enough to realize that there is no certain way to find truth. Deceit is a powerful force. There is always a way to lie. I cannot think of a way to judge with any degree of certainty that you have not betrayed me, Master Roland. What I am sure you will find even more unfortunate is that I also cannot imagine any particularly dire consequences for me if I were to err on the side of caution.\"\n\nJamus opened his mouth to reply, but Marth held up a silencing hand with a vague smile.\n\n\"Before you seek to lecture me on honor between thieves, contractual obligations, a warning that you have powerful friends, or other such foolishness, consider this. I am no fool. I suspected that this lead might come to nothing. That is why I hired an expendable freelancer rather than risk one of my own loyal servants. However, know that I take no joy in the prospect of killing you. If you must speak, make it a convincing plea of your innocence\u2014nothing more.\"\n\nThe sound of a pained shout and a heavy object smashing into something wooden sounded outside. Marth glanced at his guards in annoyance. Jamus stood, moving with the fluid speed of a man one-third his age. He flipped the table over in Marth's face and drew two daggers from his sleeves, hurling one over his shoulder at the man that held Seren. Seren's eyes widened and she twisted aside, but the knife's path was true. The weapon lodged in her captor's throat.\n\nThe other soldier charged Jamus, but the old thief slashed the air at eye level. The man shrieked and staggered away, bloody hands clutched over his face. Jamus held the weapon high and leapt at the changeling. Marth rolled aside deftly, drawing a twisted amethyst wand from his cloak and aiming it at Jamus. It vomited an explosive cone of green fire, consuming Jamus and painting the ceiling in flame. The fire vanished in an instant, leaving only the smell of charred meat behind. Jamus Roland's unrecognizable corpse collapsed with a sickly thud.\n\nIt happened so fast Seren had no time to even move. Marth pointed the wand at her and smiled as she stood.\n\nShe froze, waiting for the opportunity to act. The Cannith book now lay on the floor at her feet.\n\n\"Poor girl,\" Marth whispered. \"He told you nothing, I imagine. Another pawn in these games, no doubt. How did you come to this life? An orphan of war, I'd wager. Do you have any idea what is happening here?\"\n\nShe only scowled and waited.\n\n\"Do not hate me for what I have done to your teacher, Seren,\" Marth whispered. \"One day you will appreciate the burden of deceit I have removed from your life. Perhaps I may yet offer opportunities for you, if you are wise enough to embrace them.\"\n\nThe doors burst open and three armored soldiers charged in.\n\n\"Captain, are you hurt?\" one said. The guard looked down at Jamus's charred husk with no apparent surprise.\n\n\"No,\" he said, still watching Seren. \"Nothing unexpected. What is happening outside?\"\n\n\"Some lunatic and a warforged are loose in the inn,\" the soldier said.\n\n\"A warforged?\" Marth looked at the man sharply.\n\nSeren reacted instantly to Marth's distraction. She fell into a roll, shoved Marth aside, grabbed the book, and rolled onto the trapdoor. It flipped under her weight, depositing her in the dank crawlspace. She locked the door behind her and ran. Seconds later she heard a riotous explosion and felt a wave of heat wash over her. Marth had turned his magic to removing the trap door. She didn't have long to make her escape. She pushed open another door and dropped through the ceiling of the kitchen. The angry shouts of Marth's guards sounded from the hall outside. The chaos apparently had little to do with her\u2014the Lhazaarite was busy piling furniture against the kitchen door while the warforged braced his shoulder against the door.\n\n\"What in Khyber?\" the Lhazaarite swore, looking up in surprise as he wedged another chair into the heap. \"Where did she come from?\"\n\nThe warforged looked at Seren, pointed at the ceiling, and returned his attention to the door.\n\nThey were, of course, the same pair she had encountered earlier in the street\u2014Omax and Tristam Xain. Seren's dagger was immediately in hand. She clutched the book to her chest and backed away from them.\n\n\"Don't try to stop me,\" she warned.\n\nTristam blinked. He glanced at Omax, then back at her.\n\n\"You're not getting the book back,\" Seren said. She continued backing away, moving toward the corner.\n\n\"Keep it,\" Omax said, turning his eerie blue stare upon her. \"Do you know another way out of here? Please.\"\n\n\"Omax, she's a thief,\" Tristam said. \"We can't trust her.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Omax repeated calmly, ignoring his comrade. \"If you know a way, we could use your help.\"\n\nSeren hesitated. She stood only a foot away from a sliding panel in the wall. She knew she could step through and seal it behind her before either of them could react, but she hesitated. There was something in the warforged's plain, direct demeanor that gave her pause, and Tristam seemed far too harried and confused to be threatening. In either case, if she escaped, Omax could likely just tear the wall away and follow her.\n\nShe already had enough new enemies. What did she really have to lose by helping them?\n\n\"This way,\" she said, sliding open the panel.\n\nTristam looked up at the ceiling, then at the passage with a look of astonishment. \"Another secret passage?\" he asked.\n\n\"This place has an interesting history,\" Seren said, stepping into the darkness.\n\nOmax followed, with Tristam bringing up the rear. The tunnel was narrow, passing through the walls between the ground floor rooms. Seren passed through with ease, but grimaced at the scraping clamor Omax produced as he squeezed his thick metal body through the passage. Fortunately Marth's guards were producing too much noise to notice. The smell of smoke drifted from above.\n\n\"The top floor is on fire,\" Tristam whispered. \"Who are these people?\"\n\n\"You don't know either?\" Seren shot back.\n\nThe warforged gave her a curious look. \"Why else would we\u2014\"\n\n\"Later, Omax,\" Tristam said, his voice a low hiss. \"Let's just get out of here.\"\n\nSeren pushed another hidden door aside. A cool rush of air and the smell of fresh rain washed over her. She stepped into the garbage-strewn alley behind the Buzzard and looked back at the top floor. Behind the upper windows she saw flames, and a plume of thick black smoke spiraled into the sky. Seren felt a bit of hope drain from her. The Buzzard had always been a safe place, with a dozen ways to escape, a hundred places to hide. It had been a refuge from the dangers of her life, and when she saw it burn, she truly realized that her teacher was dead.\n\nShe looked down again with a glum, distracted expression, only to see Omax emerge from the darkened tunnel at a full charge, eyes burning with violent blue fire. Seren's hand darted for her knife, but she knew it would be too late. The warforged was too fast, and her weapon would likely do little harm regardless.\n\nThe massive creature charged past Seren, its heavy fist colliding with something behind her. She turned to see one of Marth's guards slump against the wall, sword tumbling from his hand. She had not even noticed his approach. The warforged had likely just saved her life. Five more guards rounded the corner, shouting for help as they advanced. Seren drew her knife.\n\n\"Get behind me!\" Tristam shouted, darting forward with his sword in hand.\n\n\"I can defend myself,\" Seren retorted, but a heavy metal hand seized her shoulder from behind.\n\n\"Trust him,\" the warforged said, drawing back behind his comrade.\n\nThe soldiers moved to surround Tristam. He held his sword low to one side in one hand and flicked his left wrist. A slender ivory wand appeared between his fingertips and for an instant Seren saw a look of terror in the soldiers' eyes. Tristam shouted an unintelligible word, and a wave of sparkling white energy exploded into their scattering formation. Three fell among the garbage and did not rise, but another charged through the fire with sword held high. Tristam lifted his blade to defend himself, but his movements were slow, clumsy. Seren rolled between the guard and Tristam, slicing at the man's left knee with her blade. He stumbled and his stroke flew wide, allowing Tristam to easily parry. The guard fell to one knee and Tristam swung a second time, dropping the man beside his fellows.\n\nThe other two soldiers had rallied by now, but Omax was already among them. He bore no weapons but lumbered forward with his thick, three-fingered hands outstretched. He seized the first attacker by his chest plate; the metal creaked as it bent around his fingers. The soldier screamed and hacked at Omax's shoulder with his blade, leaving only light dents in his metal skin. He caught the other man's blade in his free hand and twisted, wrenching the sword from his grip. With a savage heave he lifted the first soldier into the air and hurled him at his fellow, crushing a rain barrel as they tumbled in a heap.\n\nOne soldier slumped unconscious, but the other scrambled to his knees, clutching his dented chest plate in pain. He glared at the warforged and searched about for his lost sword. Omax advanced a single thunderous step, squared his shoulders, and released a fierce, reverberating roar. The man kicked up a small cloud of refuse as he fell on his rear and scurried away, whimpering in terror.\n\nOmax looked back at them, his blue eyes casting about for any other threats. The metal plates in his torso still vibrated from the fury of his roar. \"We must go now,\" he said in his usual calm voice.\n\nTristam nodded, offering a hand to help Seren to her feet. She ignored him and stood on her own. The trio hurried through the alleys, away from Marth and his men. Alarm bells and panicked shouts came from every direction.\n\n\"At least this is a stroke of luck,\" Tristam said, looking back at the fire. \"The Watch and the fire brigade should be here soon. If your mysterious visitors are wise, they won't remain here too long.\"\n\n\"Luck?\" Seren snapped, glaring at him. \"They killed my friend.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Tristam said, stopping to look back at her. His mouth hung open lamely. He smoothed one hand nervously over his grime-streaked coat but could find nothing to say. \"I mean at least we're all safe. That's what matters, right? You have my sympathies. To lose a friend and a home...\"\n\n\"My home?\" she said sharply. \"You think I live in an abandoned inn?\"\n\n\"I... er...\" Tristam glanced back at the burning Buzzard and shrugged, obviously at a loss.\n\n\"This conversation is intriguing,\" Omax said, still scanning methodically for any enemies as he paused beside them. \"But this is not the time to have it.\"\n\nSeren flushed slightly in shame for allowing herself to lose her head in such a crisis. They began to move again.\n\n\"I never caught your name,\" Tristam said, looking back at her with an apologetic smile.\n\nSeren pushed past him and kept running. They emerged onto an unusually crowded street for this time of night, gawkers gathered to watch the fire from a safe distance. Seren ran out of the alley, directly toward them.\n\nTristam grabbed her arm. She gave him an icy look.\n\n\"Shouldn't we be keeping a low profile?\" he asked.\n\n\"A crowd is the best place to hide right now,\" she retorted.\n\n\"I am somewhat conspicuous,\" Omax said.\n\n\"Then find your own way out of this,\" she said.\n\nTristam's face burned red. He seemed to be struggling to find something to say.\n\n\"You are right,\" Omax said, and that surprised her. \"We will find our own way from here, but one more thing before we go.\"\n\nSeren looked up at him suspiciously. \"Everyone always wants one more thing,\" she said. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Thank you for saving our lives,\" the construct answered.\n\nSeren blinked.\n\nTristam gave a quick nod. \"Thank you, my lady,\" he added. \"Whatever your name is.\"\n\n\"Seren,\" she said softly. \"Seren Morisse. And I'm not much of a lady.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Seren,\" Omax repeated.\n\n\"Whatever,\" she said, though she her tone was light and drew a smile from Tristam. She turned to vanish into the crowd, but hesitated. She looked back just as the pair were leaving. \"What were you two doing there tonight, anyway?\"\n\n\"Looking for answers,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Answers to what?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Tristam said. \"Come to the docks tomorrow morning. Find Karia Naille, and maybe we can figure it out.\"\n\n\"I've had a terrible night,\" Seren said. \"Quite frankly, I have no reason to trust you.\"\n\nTristam laughed. \"Trust us?\" he asked. \"We're trusting you, Seren.\" He glanced at the thick journal tucked under her arm. \"Enjoy the book.\"\n\nThe Lhazaarite peered back the way they had come for sign of pursuit, then hurried off down the street. Omax followed, pausing only long enough to bow his head respectfully. She watched the strange duo for several moments, and then slipped into the crowd before the City Watch arrived.\n\nIt was only after Seren had returned to her shabby apartment and cleaned off the mud and grime of the evening that the adrenalin of her escape faded. The reality of her situation began to sink in. In a single evening the city of Wroat had become a much darker, stranger, and lonelier place. She had known that Jamus was sick for a long time now, and though he never shared the details she had suspected it was serious. She had wondered how she might survive in the city without him. As much as Seren liked to think of herself as cool, capable, and independent, the truth was that she had come to depend upon him. Now he was gone, and she was alone.\n\nIt wasn't as if she was helpless. In three years she had cultivated her own contacts throughout the city, but Jamus was the only one she really trusted. Maybe that was because of all the people she had met here, he was the only one who honestly admitted he was using her. For a pair of thieves, they had always been remarkably honest with one another, ever since the beginning.\n\nThey had first met shortly after Seren's arrival in the city, only three days after she had realized that her future lay in crime. Seren had spent four hours shadowing a pretty young noblewoman out slumming in the fishermen's district with her two bodyguards. Seren had been watching the girl carefully. When she paid for her drink, Seren noted that she kept her coin purse tucked carefully in her sleeve. She noted the sharp blades on the guards' belts but also noted the bored expressions on their faces. The tavern keeper and patrons treated her with exaggerated courtesy, but called her \"Lady Senthea,\" not \"my lady.\" This was obviously not the first time she had come here. Her guards clearly expected no trouble; their presence at this point was a mere formality. If Seren were to sit beside this Senthea, perhaps brush against her arm as they reached for the same drink, none would notice that her purse had been stolen.\n\nIt was a good plan, and it would have worked if Jamus hadn't stopped her. Just as Seren was making her way across the tavern, the old man rose from a nearby table and seized her wrist. She had seen the old thief around the neighborhood, knew him by name and reputation, but had avoided him as she avoided most people. Seren tried to slip away, but the old man's grip was surprisingly strong and she didn't wish to make the struggle so obvious. Instead she merely drew a short knife from her belt, displaying it to him within the shadows of her coat.\n\n\"I'm not worth the trouble I'd give you, old man,\" she said.\n\n\"Neither is she,\" Jamus whispered with a wry grin. \"You have no idea who she is, do you?\"\n\nSeren looked at him with suspicious curiosity.\n\n\"The esteemed Professor Senthea Montain is on leave from Morgrave University,\" Jamus said. \"She is no one to trifle with.\"\n\n\"Morgrave University?\" Seren said, not familiar with the name.\n\n\"An academy with a reputation for aggressive research,\" Jamus answered with a smile. \"Lady Senthea's particular field of expertise is enchantment.\"\n\n\"She doesn't look like a wizard to me,\" Seren said, trying to glance surreptitiously at Lady Senthea while still hiding her struggle with the old man.\n\n\"Of course she doesn't.\" Jamus cackled softly. \"You can tell by the smell, though. Strawberries and just a hint of ammonia. Wizards always smell a bit off. They can never really get the smell of all those reagents out of their clothes.\"\n\n\"You can tell she's a wizard because she smells funny?\" Seren asked with a dubious chuckle.\n\n\"No, that's how you should be able to tell,\" he answered. \"I know because I talked to her at length the first night I saw her here. She was even more obvious then. I advised her that the jewels she wore were a bit ostentatious, and that she might have better luck if she used less obvious bait. She was quite grateful for my professional expertise, if a bit disappointed her disguise was pierced so easily.\"\n\n\"Bait?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"She's a scholar doing a study on the criminal mind,\" Jamus said. He released her arm now, and Seren did not step away. \"Exploring the use of magic in their rehabilitation. That coin purse you've had your eye on is warded. She'll sense its absence the moment it's removed and find it wherever it goes. She's left a trail of disappointed thieves in her wake, all now permanently charmed to be perfectly law-abiding citizens. Well, except for Markham. Fool got a bit violent when he learned the truth and is now exploring an exciting new life as a frog. I suppose that's a form of rehabilitation, isn't it?\"\n\nSeren looked past Jamus, eyes wide. Lady Senthea was now watching them. She eyed Jamus with the bored, disappointed expression of a cat that has just watched a bird fly away.\n\nSeren tucked the dagger back into its sheath at the small of her back, though her hand still rested on its hilt. She looked at the old thief seriously. \"Why are you helping me?\" she asked.\n\n\"Honestly?\" Jamus ask as he returned to his seat. \"Because I know this city. Senthea means well, but without theft as a viable means of income, what would happen to a young girl like you?\"\n\nSeren's face flushed. She looked away. \"Thank you,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"You never needed me to save you,\" Jamus said. \"You saw the signs just like I did. The only mistake you made was not listening to your instinct. Of course, one mistake is generally more than enough for people like us.\" The old thief leaned back in the chair, clasping his hands behind his head.\n\nHe was right. The smell of spell reagents was only one clue. Seren had thought it somewhat odd that the guards were so bored in such a dangerous part of town. The bartender and other servants recognized Senthea by the way she was acting. She wouldn't have survived an excursion into this part of town without some means of defending herself. Seren had convinced herself she was just lucky. She might have found a more reliable target, but this just seemed too good to be true. She had chalked it up to a well-deserved instance of good fortune. Her hand fell limply from her dagger. She slumped into the chair across from Jamus and stared at the table.\n\n\"As old as I am, I have never seen a real wolf,\" Jamus said, rocking idly on the back legs of his chair. \"I spend too much time in cities. But I have read books about wolves. I am reminded of the lesson of the wolf.\"\n\nSeren glared at the old thief. \"What?\" she said. Her tone was perhaps a bit more irritable than she intended, but she was not in a pleasant mood and had no patience for nonsense.\n\nJamus did not appear to take offense. \"Though many creatures of magic and legend roam the wilds, the simple wolf is still among the most feared,\" Jamus answered. \"The Valenar respect the wolf greatly, for it is a creature of great cunning as well as ferocity. The lesson of the wolf is twofold. The first lesson is patience. The wolf must choose its prey carefully, for if the hunt fails it will not have the strength to hunt again. A poorly chosen hunt can kill a wolf.\"\n\n\"I think I know that feeling,\" Seren said, her voice much softer now. She tried without success to ignore the gnawing feeling in her belly. Seren had counted on a quick pull to earn enough coin to eat, and had almost paid the price.\n\n\"I'm glad you understand,\" Jamus said. \"The second lesson of the wolf is more important. Loyalty.\"\n\nSeren studied Jamus's weathered face thoughtfully. There was a keen, excited look in his eye. \"We had wolves out by my father's farm,\" she said. \"Father always said that the wolf you saw was never the wolf that killed you.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Jamus said, snapping his fingers. \"Strength in numbers. Loyalty born of mutual benefit. Each member of the pack offers strengths the others lack. Each one watches the other's back. Youth and energy are strengths. As are wisdom and experience. With these combined, there is little that the pack cannot accomplish.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Seren said. \"You want me to join your pack, then?\"\n\nJamus nodded.\n\n\"And how many are in your pack?\" she asked.\n\n\"One,\" he said with a laugh. \"This old wolf has lost his pack, and he is too old to hunt alone. What say you, Seren Morisse? Are you interested in learning what I have to teach?\"\n\n\"How do you know my name?\" she asked, folding her arms and leaning back in her chair the same way he did.\n\nJamus smiled.\n\nSeren wiped her face with the back of one hand. She had not even noticed the tears when they came. She huddled on the tattered pallet in the corner of her apartment, rocking gently as memories of her mentor flooded through her mind. He was gone now. She was alone in the city, but that was not the worst part.\n\nWhat had happened tonight? Why had Jamus agreed to take a job from a man like Marth? Why had he hidden the truth from her? They had always been honest with one another, at least professionally. Now, she knew that Jamus had not merely been a thief before they met. He had been a spy. His old \"pack\" had been Fiona Keenig's intelligence network, washed away when the innkeeper vanished after the Day of Mourning.\n\nThere were no answers.\n\nShe still had a little money saved up. It might be enough to buy passage on a coach out of town. She could go back to Ringbriar, back to her mother. Whatever troubles Jamus had stirred up in Wroat would never find her there. She would still have to find a way to scrape out a living without relying on her impoverished mother, but she would be relatively safe. No more stealing. No more strangers following her through the streets or threatening to disembowel her. She might starve, but at least she would see it coming.\n\nThen she saw the seal of the gorgon and albatross looking up at her from the Cannith journal. The eyes of the gorgon glared up at her relentlessly. The albatross looked only to its flight, ignoring her completely. Seren wiped the tears from her cheeks again.\n\nLoyalty.\n\nIf she didn't find out who Marth was and why he killed Jamus Roland, who else would ever care? Jamus had been a spy and a thief. He had taken her under his wing because he was too old to scale walls and pick pockets himself. He was no hero. Even to say he was a good man would have been a stretch.\n\nBut he was her friend. He was her teacher. He had accepted her unconditionally when no one else would. Even if he had hidden things from her, Seren owed it to Jamus to find the truth.\n\nShe cradled the thick book to her chest as she lay back on her bed, quite literally clinging to the only clue she had. She would find the truth, she told herself as she pulled the thin sheets over her shoulders.\n\nBut not tonight.\n\nSeren lay in the dark for several hours, and the tears continued to come. Eventually, somehow, sleep found her.\n\nThe next morning, Seren set out to find Karia Naille. If Tristam and Omax had been truly sincere in their offer for help, then she would need to share information with them. The possibility that this might be some sort of trap flickered only briefly through her consideration. What would they have to gain? If the warforged had wanted to kill her, capture her, or take the book away from her, they could have done so easily last night.\n\nOf course that was no reason to walk into a situation unprepared. She rose and dressed conservatively in a long linen dress and cloak, so as not to draw attention. She stuffed the Cannith journal in a clean woolen bag and then stuffed a blanket in as well. Carrying around an expensive journal bearing the seal of a dragonmarked house might draw a question or two, but carrying a sack of laundry to the river was normal enough. Plucking her coin purse from the broken wooden crate that served as a dressing table, she counted her remaining funds. It would have to do for now. Tucking her knife into the folds of her dress at the waist, Seren set out for the landing.\n\nSeren soon arrived at the docks and carefully inspected each ship from a distance. She couldn't find one named Karia Naille. She began discreetly asking dockworkers and other passersby if they had heard of such a ship; most seemed to know nothing. She felt frustrated and confused. Why ask her to meet them at a ship that didn't exist? It didn't make sense, but then again, most of this didn't make sense. Perhaps she was simply asking in the wrong place. Wroat was a large city, after all, and whatever Tristam and his associates were up to, they would likely keep to themselves. Even so, it wouldn't matter how discreet they wished to be, a ship couldn't dock in Wroat and not announce itself to the Watch. However, that meant talking to the Watch. For a known thief like Seren, that was a tricky sort of undertaking.\n\nLuckily she soon found a watchman whose face she didn't recognize. \"Pardon me,\" she said in as meek a voice as she could muster. \"Do you know where I might find a ship called Karia Naille?\"\n\nThe guard looked at her with a bored expression then pointed past her with his spear. She looked that way only to see an empty area of the docks. Then she looked up. It was amazing, sometimes, what the eye could miss when it was simply unprepared to see it. The city of Wroat sprawled on both sides of the Howling River, and on the opposite side of the river, a series of six short towers faced the docks, each capped by a short bridge that ended in open air. Seren had always wondered what purpose the strange towers served, for she had never seen them in use. Now a long, sleek vessel hovered in the air beside one of the towers.\n\nKaria Naille was an airship.\n\nAirships were a relatively rare sight to begin with, at least in the poorer parts of Wroat. Only the phenomenally wealthy could afford such vehicles, and only expert artificers could maintain them.\n\n\"Do you know who owns that ship?\" Seren asked, looking back at the guard. He had already continued his patrol and didn't hear. Seren let him go. After last night, she reasoned she was better off not leaving a lasting impression on the Watch.\n\nShe crossed a nearby bridge and made her way to the tower's base. Seren felt one final pang of paranoia, a fear that she was walking into danger. She looked up at the ship. Seren didn't believe that Omax and Tristam planned to harm her. Her real fear was that, after this, there would be no turning back. Whatever Jamus, Marth, Dalan d'Cannith, and the others were involved in, it didn't really involve her yet. She didn't know enough to be a threat to any of them, and only Tristam and Omax even knew her last name. She could easily step away now, leave the city with the handful of coins she had left, and face whatever bleak and uncertain fate awaited her.\n\nWas this why Jamus had told her nothing? To give her an easy way out in case he died? It would be just like him, she thought with a scowl. Jamus always underestimated her stubbornness. Seren pushed open the door of the sky tower and stepped inside.\n\nShe was surprised to find no crewmen inside the tower, no one on watch. She climbed the spiraling staircase and stepped out onto the top of the tower. There were no outer parapets, not even a rail to protect a person from falling off the gangplank. A cargo crane mounted on the bridge creaked and wobbled in the wind. Seren felt a sense of vertigo but didn't stumble; she had no fear of heights.\n\nThis close to the ship, Seren could hear the crackling, rhythmic hum emanate from the faint ring of blue fire that surrounded the vessel. The flames hovered around Karia Naille, roughly twenty feet from the top of the deck and only a few feet from the bottom of the hull. A sleek elegant wooden strut rose from the top and bottom of the vessel, grasping the fire in a pair of crystalline hooks. The ring's color shifted by the moment, flickering from blue to white to lavender. Seren had heard that airships were powered by elementals, strange creatures summoned from a world of harsh primal fire and bound into service. She had always found the stories somewhat sad. In her more indulgent moments, she even sympathized with them, forced to serve in a world they didn't want to live in. If the burning ring sensed her sympathy it did not seem to care.\n\nBringing herself back to the matter at hand, Seren scanned her surroundings and again found no crewmen guarding the bridge between the tower and ship. The vessel was relatively small, with a door at each end of the deck leading to a cabin and presumably below decks. She saw no one on deck at all. The only sign of life she could detect was the rather curious odor of freshly baked pastry. She peered around uneasily, certain she must have missed something. Seren had never been on an airship before, but she knew they were very valuable. Why would this one be unguarded? Shouldn't there at least be a crew? It seemed unlikely that there wouldn't be someone around. This certainly wasn't the best neighborhood to leave a valuable ship unguarded.\n\nShe stepped cautiously across the bridge, ignoring the howling winds that sliced at the high tower. Seren felt a sudden sense of unease as she prepared to step onto the deck. A wave of dizziness washed over her. The winds increased, whipping past her and raising a keening wail from the burning elemental ring. She stepped away and reached out to steady herself on the docking crane. Seren felt suddenly as if someone were watching her, someone not altogether pleased by her arrival.\n\n\"Hello?\" she called out over the wind. There was no answer at first. \"Is anyone here?\"\n\nThere was a sudden sound of rushing air and Seren felt something heavy strike the bridge behind her. She turned around to see a reptilian beast the size of a small pony crouched on the top of the tower. Its flesh was a motley pattern of dark greens, with a pale blue underbelly. It held its long beak open just enough for her to see rows of sharp teeth and glared at her with dull black eyes. Most surprising of all was that it wore a leather harness on its back. The creature lowered its thin body and narrowed its eyes at Seren, releasing a birdlike shriek.\n\n\"He wants to know why you're here,\" said a voice from above her.\n\nSeren looked up. A child dressed in wildly colorful outfit of leather and silk now crouched on top of the crane, pointing a small crossbow at her. No, not a child, a halfling. He regarded her with a confident mix of mischief and silent menace as he waited for her answer.\n\n\"My name is Seren Morisse,\" she said calmly, trying not to let the halfling's sudden appearance unnerve her. \"I was invited here by Tristam Xain and Omax. This is Karia Naille, right?\"\n\n\"Oh, so you're not a thief, then,\" the little man said, lowering his crossbow. He chuckled. \"Or at least you're a thief on our side?\"\n\nSeren could not help but smirk. \"I'm not on anyone's side,\" she said. \"I only came here for answers.\"\n\n\"Funny place to look for them,\" the halfling answered, hooking his weapon on his belt. \"Glad to meet you, Seren. I'm Gerith. You've already met Blizzard.\"\n\nWith that, the halfling flipped backward, off the crane and into the wind. Seren's jaw dropped in surprise at the suicidal act, but in the same instant Blizzard shrieked and leapt off the tower as well. With a leathery snap it unfurled wide, batlike wings and dove down, past the bridge. A moment later it soared back up in a spiral. Gerith now clung to the harness on its back. The halfling laughed as the creature flew in a loop around the burning ring and landed gracefully on the ship's railing. Gerith looked back at her eagerly, taking obvious joy at the surprise on her face. He flashed a wide smile, showing off the wide gap where he was missing some of his front teeth. Seren stood with her hands on her hips for a thoughtful moment then clapped politely, drawing more laughter from the halfling.\n\n\"Welcome to Karia Naille, Seren,\" Gerith said, hopping from the saddle with a flourish as she stepped onto the deck. \"I'll tell everyone that you're here. I know you said you wanted answers, but perhaps in the meantime, you'd settle for pie? Pie is usually better than answers. Pie doesn't disappoint.\" He winked.\n\nSeren had been about to refuse, then realized how hungry she was. \"Pie sounds good, Gerith,\" she said.\n\nThe halfling nodded eagerly. \"My chicken pie is the best,\" he said, patting Blizzard on the beak before heading off toward the nearest hatch. \"Back in the Plains, it's said that great chefs make the best lovers, you know. That's a very pretty dress, Seren.\"\n\nSeren looked at the halfling incredulously.\n\nGerith looked back at her, winked again, and vanished below deck.\n\nSeren looked at Blizzard, but the creature was busy preening his wing. His master's antics were clearly something that no longer concerned the creature, and since Gerith had approved of her presence, she was no longer a concern.\n\nSeren heard the opposite hatch open behind her, accompanied by footsteps too heavy to be a halfling's. \"Pay no mind to Gerith Snowshale,\" said a familiar voice. \"He's a good translator and the best scout I've ever known, but he is too eager to impress the fairer sex. Whether they are the proper age, social class, or race is rarely a concern for him.\"\n\nSeren turned to face the new arrival. Her expression became grim when she recognized his face.\n\n\"Is there a problem?\" Dalan d'Cannith asked with a small smile. \"Did you not wish to see me?\"\n\n\"I didn't expect to see you here,\" she said. \"Usually a dragonmarked ship is a little more obvious.\"\n\n\"The ship bears no obvious marks of ownership for good reason, I assure you of that.\"\n\n\"Are you the captain?\" she asked.\n\n\"I own Karia Naille, if that is what you truly meant to ask, but I am not the captain,\" he said. \"I prefer to leave such matters in the hands of more qualified associates. What business do you have here?\"\n\n\"I'm Seren Morisse,\" she said. \"I came to see Tristam Xain and Omax.\"\n\n\"Both are in my employ,\" Dalan said. \"Tristam and Omax are currently in the city, gathering supplies for our departure. Perhaps I can be of assistance? You may as well address your concerns to me, as it is likely they would have referred you to me in any case. Or perhaps I have misjudged your arrival. Perhaps you simply returned to see if I had anything else worth stealing?\"\n\n\"I think I made a mistake,\" Seren said, backing toward the bridge. Dalan continued to watch her with a smug expression.\n\n\"Why am I not surprised?\" Dalan said with a sigh. \"A thief claims to seek answers, but when confronted with the most brutal truths, she scurries back to the safety of ignorance. Would you rather I lied to you, Seren? Would you rather I pretend not to know that you are a thief? I had assumed honesty would be our best starting point. If you change your mind, I will be waiting to discuss this. Enjoy the pie.\" He turned and slipped back into his cabin, closing the hatch behind him.\n\nThe other hatch opened, and Gerith appeared. He held a wooden plate heaped with a thick slice of pie and a crystal goblet of milk. His cheerful expression faded when he saw Seren standing on the bridge.\n\n\"Leaving already?\" he asked, crestfallen.\n\n\"Not yet,\" she said, stopping and looking back toward Dalan's cabin. \"I need to talk to Dalan.\"\n\n\"Ask him if he'd like some pie,\" Gerith offered cheerfully.\n\nDalan looked up with a frown as Seren entered his cabin. Much like his private study, it was packed with books and scrolls. The small chamber was only as tidy as it needed to be for its owner to navigate the room unharmed. A small bed in one corner was the only gesture toward comfort. The shaggy old dog lay half-asleep on it now, though its tail thumped the pillows when it recognized Seren, the beloved giver of cake.\n\n\"We knock before we enter a cabin on this ship,\" Dalan said, setting his quill down and placing whatever he had been writing out of sight.\n\nSeren did not answer his barb, only dug out the journal and dropped it heavily onto the desk. Dalan reached out quickly to steady his wine glass. The volume landed so that the gorgon seal was facing Dalan.\n\n\"My partner and I stole that book last night,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Yes, I know,\" Dalan said, dusting off the cover with one hand. \"Not only did you make a mess of my home, but Gunther was up all night with indigestion. Old dogs are not meant to have sweets.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you report the theft to the Watch?\" she demanded.\n\n\"It was not the Watch's affair,\" Dalan said.\n\n\"The man who hired us killed my partner when he learned that book was a fake,\"\n\nDalan looked up at her frankly. \"Then perhaps you should go to the Watch and report his death.\"\n\nSeren only looked at Dalan.\n\n\"Of course that is not an option for a person in your profession,\" Dalan said. \"As it is not an option for me. We are not so different, Seren.\"\n\n\"Why did our client want that book so badly? My partner didn't tell me much before he died.\"\n\n\"Why do you wish to know?\" Dalan asked. \"If you think you might ransom it back, you are mistaken.\"\n\n\"No,\" Seren snapped. \"I just want to know why my friend died to steal a fake copy of... whatever this is.\"\n\nDalan took a slow sip from his wine before he answered. \"The book is not a fake, Seren,\" he said. \"It merely isn't what your employer believed it to be. It is one of many mundane journals crafted by an author notable for several more significant works. Ironically, we might have more answers had you not so cleverly recovered it.\"\n\n\"Explain,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Tristam placed upon enchantments upon the book so that we could track it,\" Dalan said. He looked at her intently. \"So you really had no idea what your client believed this book to be?\"\n\n\"No,\" Seren said, unable to keep the edge from her voice. She pushed a pile of books from a chair across from Dalan and sat, eliciting an annoyed wince from him as the pile hit the floor. \"Jamus knew more, but he didn't tell me. Marth sure didn't give anything away.\"\n\n\"Marth,\" Dalan said, weighing the name carefully. \"So why did you bother to take the book with you when you escaped?\"\n\n\"I thought it might hold some answers,\" she said. \"I guess it's useless.\"\n\n\"Not entirely,\" Dalan said, leafing through the book's pages. \"It was necessary to use a compelling decoy, and thus it does bear some modest sentimental value. I appreciate its return. Had you not been the sort of person who would make the effort to return my property, for whatever reason, I most likely would not be tolerating your presence on my ship. Now, let us see if we can find some answers. Please tell me as much of your client, the man that killed your partner, as you can. His name was Marth, was it?\"\n\n\"Tell me why you set a trap with an enchanted book first,\" Seren demanded.\n\n\"A trap?\" Dalan said. He laughed, steepling his fingers over the book. \"The paranoid always overestimate their own importance. I did not trap you. I do not care about you. A man makes contingencies for his own protection, and you see it as some contrived plot against you. Realize where you stand. You and your partner chose the lives you did, and this Marth used you to get to me. You knew the risks, and when you failed to deliver genuine merchandise, you paid the price. If you cannot hold yourself to blame for being a thief who will offer her services to a murderer, then the depths of your denial are truly without measure. Keep in mind what your intent was yesterday evening\u2014to steal another man's property for money, on behalf of an employer you neither knew nor trusted. Do not pretend that you are somehow the injured party in this affair. You were simply not as clever as you imagined, and your friend Jamus died. Perhaps rather than curse me for some imagined entrapment, you might thank me for sending Tristam and Omax to save you.\"\n\n\"I saved their lives, actually,\" Seren said.\n\nDalan was silent a long moment, then chuckled. \"The details of that encounter varied slightly with Tristam's telling of the tale,\" he said. \"I suppose I should have known well enough to ask Omax what happened. He may be a construct, but he's far more reliable than the boy. Now, please, let us set aside our respective motivations and concentrate on facts. You thought yourself the clever thief set to receive a legendary reward. I thought myself a keen manipulator, setting an inescapable trap to catch those who conspired against me. We were both wrong. Now tell me what you know and let us help one another.\"\n\nSeren folded her arms and leaned back in the chair with a frown. \"I'm afraid I don't know much,\" she said. \"We met a changeling named Marth, who called himself a captain.\"\n\n\"A changeling?\" Dalan asked. \"He showed his true face to you and admitted he was a changeling?\"\n\nSeren nodded.\n\n\"Strange,\" he said. \"They are a misunderstood and often hated race. Their ability to control their appearance makes them difficult to trust. It's very rare for one to reveal himself in such a manner, except to another whom he trusts implicitly.\"\n\n\"Or maybe he planned to kill us all along so it didn't matter if we knew what he was,\" Seren said.\n\n\"A possibility,\" Dalan admitted.\n\n\"His guards were well armed and trained,\" Seren said. \"They were equipped like professional soldiers. I never saw the crest they wore before, but then I've never seen any soldiers other than Brelish ones.\"\n\n\"Omax recognized their uniforms, and so did I when he described them to me,\" Dalan said. \"They were Cyran.\"\n\n\"Cyre?\" Seren said. \"I didn't think Cyre had an army. Or much of anything else.\"\n\nDalan shrugged. \"Many Cyran soldiers survived the Day of Mourning because they were in enemy lands. The armor and uniforms Omax described were those of the Eighty-Seventh Legion, a unit that was in Karrnath when the tragedy occurred. They became mercenaries after the Day of Mourning. Such a fate is unsurprising. Imagine what that must be like, Seren. To be a warrior, fighting for the future of your homeland in strange and distant country, only to discover that you now have no homeland. All that you've fought for, all that you've lived for, is now gone. You are now irrelevant. Yet the desire to fight remains, the desire to shed blood for a cause endures even though there is no cause at all, except perhaps vengeance. What life would beckon such a lost soul other than that of a mercenary? Those who fought for king and country now fight for gold and silver. It saddens me, to see my own countrymen fall to such a fate.\"\n\n\"You're Cyran?\" she asked. Gunther hobbled out of his bed and sniffed Seren curiously for any sign of food. Finding none, the dog rested his head on her lap and waited to be petted.\n\n\"Many members of my House are Cyran,\" Dalan said. \"Fortunately, unlike the soldiers you met, most of my friends lived outside Cyre. My service to my house gives me continued purpose. But we are wandering far from the meat of this discourse. What else do you know of this Captain Marth?\"\n\n\"Not much,\" Seren said, scratching the dog's ears absently. \"Jamus wouldn't tell me much about who we were working for. I think he wanted to protect me. He said that he had arranged for speaker posts to be sent to his allies, and he mentioned Fairhaven, but I don't know anyone from there.\"\n\n\"A bluff, most likely,\" Dalan said. \"Pity that you survived and he did not. His insight would no doubt be more illuminating than your own. No offense.\" Dalan smiled insincerely. \"Cheer up, little thief. I am certain you are better off without a master who would hitch your wagon to a killer. Indeed, if he truly wished to protect you, he should have avoided taking a job from someone so untrustworthy.\"\n\n\"Are you done judging the dead, d'Cannith?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"For now,\" Dalan said. \"I do tend to go on, a trait I inherited from my mother. A wonderful woman. Pray continue, Seren. Tell me whatever you can remember, no matter how insignificant.\"\n\n\"Well, like I said, Jamus didn't tell me much about our employer,\" she answered. \"I'm not even sure if we were working directly for Marth. I thought our employer was a woman, at least from the way Jamus spoke. Jamus was surprised when Marth arrived so early.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Dalan said, thumbing through the journal as he listened to Seren's information. \"Is there anything else?\"\n\n\"He killed Jamus and set the inn on fire using magic,\" she said. \"Some sort of amethyst wand.\"\n\nDalan's eyes narrowed in thought. \"That makes a great deal of sense,\" he said. \"I have suspected that our competitor was a student of artifice.\"\n\n\"Competitor?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"What I am about to say is quite delicate,\" Dalan said. \"It would be in your best interests, once you leave my ship, to forget what I tell you\u2014not for my sake but your own. My troubles are a heavy thing, and could easily crush one as small as yourself. I am loath to even speak of them, but my associates promised you an exchange of information. As foolish as they may have been to make such an arrangement with a thief, I am a man of my word. Do you understand?\"\n\nSeren nodded.\n\n\"I reiterate the seriousness of this,\" he said. \"I am about to share perhaps more than Tristam's arrangement requires because I feel sympathy, if not responsibility, for your friend's death\u2014but do not mistake sympathy for forgiveness or trust. You stole from me, Seren, and I do not abide thieves. However, I am not a monster, so I will offer you answers to lessen your pain. But realize that what I say to you will be entirely useless to you.\"\n\n\"Useless?\"\n\n\"Because the answers will have no true use to you,\" he said. \"If you betray my confidence, few will believe an insignificant thief. Those who might believe you would likely kill you, suspecting you know more than you do. You seem relatively intelligent, thus I am certain you will remain silent to avoid dangerous scrutiny. But if you do not, your death will trouble me little. Is that understood?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Then I will tell you what I can,\" Dalan said. \"I am currently engaged in a project that has consumed a great deal of my time for the past two years. I have certain competitors in this endeavor, and as much as I despise to admit it, this is not a race I am currently winning. Further, these competitors do not share my regard for law, honor, or human mercy. Various clues, not to mention their previous owners, have vanished or perished before I had a chance to investigate. I have long feared that my competitors might seek to derail my own meager progress, so I set this book aside as a trap. Though it greatly resembles other significant pieces of research written by its author, it is, as you know, not genuine. Tristam placed certain enchantments upon this volume that would allow him to follow it if it was stolen, as long as it remained within a certain range.\"\n\n\"So that was why he interfered when the Watch stopped me,\" Seren said. \"He didn't want me to get caught.\"\n\n\"Not before we found out who you were working for,\" Dalan answered with a small smile. \"Unfortunately your escape from the Watch was a bit more dramatic than Tristam expected. It took him some time to untangle himself and, by the time he was able to triangulate the book's location again, the inn was already surrounded by Marth's henchmen. Being the impulsive individual he is, Tristam resolved to fight his way to rescue you rather than waiting to summon help. Omax is a more practical soul, but his single fault is that he invariably follows Tristam's lead. Thus they became embroiled in the conflict before they realized how hopelessly outnumbered they were. You have already noted that I do not hesitate to condemn you for your previous actions, but neither will I balk at praising you for a job well done. I thank you for saving their lives. Tristam and Omax have many flaws, but their services are irreplaceable. I have precious few trustworthy allies.\n\n\"I know the feeling,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Imagine my surprise,\" Dalan said dryly. \"Unfortunately, Tristam's foolishness lost us much and gained little.\" He sighed. \"Other than your confirmation that this Captain Marth uses magic, happens to be a changeling, and bears a connection to the fallen nation of Cyre, we still know nothing about our enemy's true identity. Knowing a changeling's name means very little. They collect names as other men might collect interesting coins. They often hide behind other identities, live lives as humans or elves so that others will not distrust them for what they are. What truly bothers me is not his identity, but his efficiency. How does he learn so much while we learn so little? How can he command so many minions yet leave no trail?\"\n\n\"It may not mean much,\" Seren said, \"but he tried to recruit me.\"\n\nDalan's eyebrows raised. \"Recruit you?\"\n\n\"He offered to spare my life if I joined him,\" she said. \"He thought I was an orphan of war.\"\n\n\"Very interesting,\" Dalan said. \"The import is unclear, but interesting nonetheless.\"\n\n\"So what comes next?\" Seren asked.\n\nDalan scowled. \"I suspect after this failed theft, Marth will make a more dramatic and violent move against me,\" he said. \"I have already gathered what I need so that I can leave Wroat, but I regret the damage he will do in my wake.\"\n\n\"What does he want?\" Seren asked. \"What's so important that it's worth killing for? What's so important that you would gamble with people's lives?\"\n\n\"I am no gambler, Seren,\" Dalan said, looking at her intently. \"A gambler is a man who risks what otherwise would not be lost. I gamble nothing, for many lives are already at risk.\"\n\n\"That's no answer.\"\n\n\"Fools always believe a simple answer will wipe trouble away,\" Dalan said with a sneer. \"Simple answers are the opiate of simple minds; I prefer things complex. But so be it, Miss Morisse. Let the burden of enlightenment be on your head. My uncle Ashrem d'Cannith was a brilliant scholar, but his primary area of expertise was artifice\u2014magical engineering. Though I doubt you would have heard of him, you know his symbol already.\" Dalan gestured at the crest on the book she had stolen. She realized many more of the books in this room bore the same crest.\n\n\"Ashrem made his career in the Last War,\" Dalan continued, \"fashioning all manner of devices. His skill and innovation are unsurpassed even to this day. You now sit in an example of his brilliance. This airship is one of three he once possessed, and it features many of his own innovations. It was his genius that helped bring about the warforged, as well as countless other creations. Sadly my uncle's political acumen did not match his ingenuity, and thus he made his share of enemies in our house. These enemies turned their ire to me when he passed; a rather dubious inheritance. That, and this, of course...\"\n\nDalan took a scrap of paper from his desk, rolled it into a tube, and held it over the small candle on his desk. Seren watched as it burned into ashes on his desk. Dalan concentrated a moment and, with a wave of his hand, rendered the page whole and undamaged again.\n\n\"Impressive,\" she said.\n\n\"A dragonmark trick,\" he said. \"Those who bear the Mark of Making can repair what has been destroyed, but such tricks are the extent of my magical talents. My uncle was a true genius. My minor talents are quite literally nothing compared to his, and to those of many others in my house. My lack of magical talent, combined with the political situation he left behind, made progress in my house difficult for me. The most I could manage was to maintain my position as guildmaster here, though such a prestigious title amounted ultimately to a clerk's duties. I was to be discarded and forgotten in Wroat.\"\n\n\"The city has a way of collecting unwanted things,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Indeed. A few years ago, while sorting through my inheritance, I discovered a passage in one of my uncle's journals. It made veiled references to other unfinished works, hidden works, in particular an artifact he called the Legacy. It is my belief that the Legacy would have been the most fantastic of my uncle's creations. It is my duty to reclaim it in his name, and to do so before men like Marth can do the same.\"\n\n\"How noble,\" Seren said. \"I'm sure the possibility that you'd win back your House's favor never entered your mind.\"\n\nDalan smiled. \"Naturally my motivations are complex. I hardly find that unusual. A soldier may fight with all his strength and win a battle\u2014in the end justice prevails and the king reigns for another day. Does it matter in the end that, during the battle, the soldier only wished to survive? I think we all do noble things for selfish reasons. I often find that only those who think they are truly selfless\u2014those who act on behalf of abstract ideals or beliefs with no thought for the moment\u2014are those who generally bring the most harm. They lose sight of what truly matters. In any case, I can assure you that my modest political aspirations are far more innocent than whatever this Captain Marth's intent may be for my uncle's work. All of Ashrem d'Cannith's closest colleagues and students have either perished or vanished since his death. Don't you find that unusual?\"\n\n\"What does the Legacy do?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"What indeed?\" Dalan said. \"I am not at liberty to discuss the specifics, but suffice it to say it is incredibly powerful.\"\n\n\"As a weapon?\" she asked.\n\nDalan paused. \"All things can be used as weapons,\" he said in a subdued tone. \"My uncle would not wish his discoveries to be used in such a way. He was a man of peace.\"\n\n\"Then maybe your Legacy is better off undiscovered,\" Seren answered.\n\n\"A conclusion I have not dismissed,\" Dalan said, \"but knowledge is not a thing that can be caged or extinguished. Whatever the truth of my uncle's discovery, one day it will be found, by Marth or others like him. It falls to me to ensure that it is discovered by those who will use the knowledge responsibly.\"\n\n\"And you believe House Cannith will use it responsibly,\" Seren said.\n\n\"In fact I do,\" he said, his tone mildly offended. \"Do not misunderstand me, Seren. I comprehend the mercantile motivations that drive my house. I understand them better than most. The lure of wealth and power are strong, and to be certain many Canniths would be seduced by the notion of exploiting my uncle's work. Yet remember that we have been the custodians of magical knowledge for over three millennia. If there are any with whom my uncle's secrets can be trusted, then who else but his own house?\"\n\n\"Then why didn't he leave the knowledge to you, as he left his ship?\" she asked.\n\nDalan did not answer immediately. \"To be honest, I do not know,\" he said in a sober voice. \"The answer to that question is one of many mysteries he left behind.\" He drummed his fingers on the desk for a long moment, then looked at her with a frown. \"If there is nothing else, Miss Morisse, then I believe our business is concluded.\" He reached into his pocket, scattering a few gold coins on the table. \"Take this for your trouble, and take my advice as well. Leave Wroat and do not involve yourself in this further. I can handle it from here.\"\n\nSeren looked at the coins as they shone in the lamplight. It was more money than she had seen in some time, but she made no move to reach for them.\n\n\"I want to help,\" she said.\n\n\"You?\" Dalan retorted. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because you need help,\" she said. \"You already trusted me enough to tell me what you're after.\"\n\n\"I told you very little.\" Dalan laughed. \"I told you enough to satiate my own meager guilt over your friend's death, and no more. I do not need you, Seren Morisse. Return to your filthy hovel. I wish you a long, prosperous life of digging through other people's pockets. When you meet your final knife in the dark, may you bleed out painlessly.\"\n\n\"Marth killed my friend; I want to help stop him,\" Seren answered, her voice growing heated from Dalan's insults. \"Maybe you can't trust me, but you know I have nowhere else to go. You admitted you need allies. What do you have to lose?\"\n\n\"This ship operates with a surprisingly small crew,\" Dalan said, \"so I do not require another deckhand. What use would I have with a thief?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Seren said, \"you claim that you've studied some of the same clues as Marth, but that he learns more than you do?\"\n\nDalan nodded. \"I possess many copies of my uncle's works, but I believe there is a code, a pattern that I do not yet understand. Marth must have broken this cipher already. It seems he is much more skilled in his craft than Tristam.\"\n\n\"Or he has resources you don't know about,\" Seren said. \"Marth knew the journal was worthless when he studied it with this.\" She reached into her dress and took out a purple frosted lens, setting it on Dalan's desk with a clink.\n\nDalan d'Cannith's eyes widened as he picked up the glass and looked into its depths. \"Interesting,\" he said. \"Where did you find this?\"\n\n\"I took it from Marth's pocket before I ran away,\" she said. She plucked it from Dalan's fingers and returned it to her pocket. \"But you obviously don't have any use for a thief.\" She smiled at him primly.\n\nA wide, dangerous grin spread across Dalan d'Cannith's features. \"You are a shrewd negotiator, Seren Morisse,\" he said, leaning back in his seat. \"There may be room for you on Karia Naille after all.\" He sniffed the air tentatively. Seren detected the faint aroma of cooking\u2014Gerith's, probably. \"You may remain among us, for the time being. Now let us discuss the details of your employment over lunch.\"\n\nCaptain Marth stood in the middle of Dalan d'Cannith's study, his expression one of disappointment and irritation. He ran one hand along a nearby shelf as he examined the titles of the books.\n\n\"Captain,\" called one of his guards from the doorway.\n\nMarth looked up, his hood falling back upon his shoulders. He wore his natural face again, smooth and white except for the unsightly pink burns that crawled across his cheek.\n\n\"Speak,\" he commanded, beckoning to the guard.\n\n\"We discovered very little of interest in the rest of the house, Captain,\" the guard reported. \"Only a few guild logs detailing Cannith operations in the city. Many items were hastily removed, including much of the clothing in Master d'Cannith's wardrobe and the food in his larder. Even the servant's quarters are empty.\"\n\nMarth nodded. The servants would know nothing. Dalan would have already fled. While Dalan obviously bore interest in his uncle's work, the guildmaster had discovered nothing of true value. It came as no surprise. The Canniths were meddlers by nature, but ultimately harmless. They never understood Ashrem's work. Marth's fingers rested for a moment on the binding of one of many volumes bearing the House Cannith gorgon seal, and he remembered.\n\nHe had stood in a house much like this one, the modestly appointed home of a wealthy noble. The smell of smoke hung in the air, along with the shrieks of terrified children and servants. The fires blazed all around him, but Marth cared little. He wore the face of a Cyran soldier as he advanced on his former commanding officer, sword in one hand and wand in the other. Bright red blood shone on the steel blade.\n\n\"Cargul, what is the meaning of this?\" Lieutenant Keiran demanded. Sweat and soot streaked the old soldier's face. He held his broadsword unsteadily in one hand, the other hand pressed up against his bleeding side as he backed fearfully away, trying to distance himself from both his attacker and the fires.\n\n\"I'm not Sergeant Cargul,\" Marth corrected. His face became smooth and gray. He was younger in those days, his natural face unscarred. \"You remember me, sir.\" It was not a question, only a statement awaiting confirmation.\n\n\"You.\" Keiran hissed. \"The changeling spy! By Khyber, if you've harmed my wife...\"\n\n\"She is safe, sir,\" Marth answered calmly. \"I showed your family greater mercy than you offered mine.\"\n\nKeiran sneered and charged Marth with his sword held high. The changeling pointed his amethyst wand at the floor, summoning a wall of green fire between them.\n\n\"Face me without your magic, changeling!\" Keiran demanded. \"Face me with your sword, coward!\"\n\n\"This is not a matter of courage, nor a demonstration of strength,\" Marth said. \"This is revenge. Burn, as they did.\"\n\nGreen fire blazed within the purple crystal again, and the room filled with intense heat. Lieutenant Kieran screamed, vanishing within the blaze. Marth stood where he was, unharmed by the smoke and fire, and listened until the screams faded. Then, slowly, he made his way through the burning house and outside again. Huddled men and women gathered on the grass outside. Their clothing was seared and blackened with soot. They held their children close as they watched Marth with undisguised terror. He ignored them, walking past the crowd to the one man who stood apart from the rest. Marth looked up, his soot-blackened face marked now by trails of tears.\n\n\"You didn't stop me, Ashrem,\" Marth said to the old man.\n\nAshrem d'Cannith looked back sadly. The old man's crystal blue eyes reflected only sympathy. \"Perhaps I did not want to,\" he whispered. \"But it ends now, Marth.\"\n\n\"What happens now?\" the changeling asked.\n\n\"Come with me, and face justice for what you have done,\" Ashrem said.\n\n\"Justice?\" Marth repeated with a bitter laugh.\n\n\"If you come with me, I will stand by you, and defend you to the last,\" Ashrem said. \"If you refuse, you will be hunted. I cannot stop them, Marth, not after what you have done.\"\n\n\"Why not just kill me, Ashrem?\" Marth asked, dropping his sword and wand in the grass. \"Why not end it here? I have my vengeance. I have nothing left and would rather die at your hands than a stranger's.\"\n\n\"I have hope for you, Marth,\" Ashrem said. \"You are a good man, no matter what this war has forced you to become. The world is not done with you yet.\"\n\n\"You were right, d'Cannith,\" Marth whispered, returning to the present.\n\nThe changeling hurled the books from the shelf with a savage sweep of his arm. Reaching into one of the many pouches at his belt, he drew out a handful of pink crystalline powder and sifted it over the fallen books. He clapped the remaining dust from his gloved hands and reached into another pouch, drawing out another handful of chalky black dust. The chemical burned his skin as it mixed with the remaining pink residue, even through his silken gloves. Marth stood where he was for a long moment and studied the scattered volumes, offering no reaction even when a robed figure entered the room behind him.\n\n\"I have dispatched several of the men to determine where Dalan d'Cannith has fled,\" the newcomer said. He was a small, portly man garbed in flowing silken garments of burnished copper. His head was shaved in the manner of a monk, and he wore a long beard woven into a thin braid. \"Doubtless he has covered his trail well, but someone might have seen something.\" He looked at Marth's hand, still holding the corrosive powder over the books. \"Why do you hesitate?\" he asked.\n\n\"Destroying knowledge does not sit well with me, Brother Zamiel,\" Marth said. With a sigh, he scattered the black dust over the scattered books. Where it touched the pink powder, paper, leather, and even the wooden floor began to smoke.\n\n\"An admirable sentiment, but a necessary evil,\" Zamiel answered. \"Dalan d'Cannith is an enemy. We do not have the time to search his home properly, thus we must destroy whatever he might still hide here. We cannot afford to leave him any advantage, any security.\"\n\n\"Dalan is like his uncle,\" Marth said, stepping away from the smoke. \"He is no fool. He would not have left behind anything we can use. This is a pointless, destructive gesture.\"\n\n\"An enemy who cannot be destroyed must be intimidated,\" Zamiel said. \"Consider this a message\u2014a warning to a respected rival. Dalan will look upon the ruins of his home. He will witness the destruction of so many beloved possessions. He will recognize that he should have left well enough alone. D'Cannith is no warrior. He is a bureaucrat, an academic, a coward. If he is wise, he will withdraw from this race and be content that he has only lost his home.\"\n\n\"Unlikely,\" Marth said with a frown. \"I think we will face Dalan again before this is done.\"\n\n\"Then he will die,\" Brother Zamiel said.\n\nMarth did not reply. His smooth face was thoughtful as he watched the first tongues of flame emerge from the fallen books. He turned and made his way down the stairs. Three of his soldiers stood at the door, postures tense, hands on their weapons. One peered cautiously out the window just beside the back door. He looked back at Marth with an uncomfortable expression.\n\n\"Captain Marth, there is a problem,\" the soldier said.\n\nMarth moved to the window. The soldier quickly stepped aside. The first light of morning had only just begun to paint the street outside in pale, pastel colors. The rains had started again but now fell only in a meager drizzle. Few dared the muddy streets at this early hour, but Marth picked out a handful of armored men gathering in the shadows of an alley behind the house. Their eyes were on the Cannith home.\n\n\"The City Watch,\" Marth said with a sigh. He pushed the curtain back over the window, his gaze losing focus as he became lost in thought.\n\n\"We cannot afford to be seen here, Captain,\" Zamiel said as he descended the stairs. \"For Dalan d'Cannith to know we oppose him is one thing. For King Boranel's soldiers to learn of our presence is quite another matter.\"\n\n\"Captain, perhaps we might be able to escape through the front door,\" a soldier offered.\n\n\"The building will be surrounded,\" Marth answered. \"I will handle this. Perhaps their arrival might give us an opportunity for distraction.\"\n\nAs Marth reached for the door, his facial features shifted, becoming a young man's thin face framed by sandy brown hair. He stepped out into the street, arms folded in his sleeves. The instant he did so, four watchmen emerged to surround him.\n\n\"Halt and identify yourself,\" the sergeant commanded. He kept his crossbow trained on Marth's chest.\n\n\"My name is Tristam Xain,\" Marth said calmly, continuing his approach. \"Is there a problem, officer?\"\n\n\"Hands out and to your sides!\" the man said. \"I said stop!\"\n\nThe watchman loosed a crossbow bolt. It struck Marth in the shoulder and fell with a shower of sparks. Unharmed, Marth drew his hands from his sleeves with a flourish, releasing a cloud of sparkling dust toward the watchmen. They fell into fits of hideous coughing. All but one staggered and fell helpless to the earth. The fourth recovered enough to unsheathe his sword, only to see that Marth had drawn his twisted amethyst wand. Its length shone with green fire. The watchman ran. Marth's soldiers emerged from the house, flanking out to surround their leader. One drew his own crossbow, aiming it at the back of the retreating soldier.\n\n\"No,\" Marth said, pushing the weapon down and smiling with Tristam's face. \"Let one escape. Let him tell others who he has seen here.\"\n\nA pained coughing drew Marth's attention. He looked down at the remaining three watchmen, writhing on the earth as the toxins robbed them of their strength. With a slow, deliberate movement, Marth drew his sword and buried it in the chest of the nearest guard. A Cyran soldier drew his blade and advanced toward one of the others, but Marth waved him away.\n\n\"This blood is on my hands alone,\" he said. \"Return to the ship.\"\n\nThe soldiers complied, hurrying through the darkened alleys. Marth finished the other two watchmen and moved on as well. He had not gone far before Zamiel appeared at his side, like a shadow as he walked.\n\n\"Why do you brood, my friend?\" the prophet asked. \"Surely by now you recognize the necessity of what we do. Do you regret the deaths of those soldiers?\"\n\n\"No,\" Marth said. \"They earned their fate when they stood against me, just as Jamus Roland did. Do not worry, Zamiel. Your killer has not grown a conscience yet.\"\n\n\"Then what concerns you so?\" he asked.\n\n\"I fear we were too cautious,\" he said. \"I know the man who was with that warforged last night. I recognized him from the soldiers' descriptions.\"\n\n\"The man whose face you wear,\" Zamiel said, his face darkening. \"I remember him. I also remember your insistence that he would not be a problem.\"\n\n\"Clearly things have changed,\" Marth said. \"Hopefully the City Watch will cause some trouble for him, at least. It will be difficult for him to return to Wroat without explaining the deaths of three watchmen.\"\n\n\"This only reaffirms what I have cautioned from the start,\" Zamiel said. \"We should have confronted d'Cannith directly instead of relying on untested subordinates. We should have killed Dalan and all who stood beside him. If that lens falls into Xain's hands, it will not take long before they determine how to use it and gain ground.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Marth said. \"But think not on what we have lost. Think instead upon what we have gained. Tristam is brilliant, but also foolhardy. He may find clues that you and I would miss, but inevitably he will stumble and we will find his trail. Then we can harvest the fruits of his discoveries and our own search will grow much easier.\"\n\nZamiel was silent for a long time.\n\n\"You do not agree,\" Marth said.\n\n\"Xain should die,\" Zamiel said. \"We do not need the complication he represents.\"\n\n\"You have always told me that I was destined to succeed, prophet,\" Marth said. \"Is my destiny so frail that one foolish tinker could undermine it?\"\n\n\"You misunderstand me,\" the prophet said. \"I do not take destiny lightly, but neither should you. The Prophecy is a living thing. That which it foretells is certain, inevitable, but rarely predictable.\" He looked at Marth seriously. \"I have no time for those who play games with their own destiny. You claim you wish to use Xain to our advantage, but your words stink of mercy. Mercy is a luxury that a conqueror cannot afford.\"\n\n\"That sounds almost like a threat, Zamiel,\" Marth said.\n\n\"Not a threat, a warning,\" Zamiel said in a tired voice. \"You have spent only a few years helping me to fulfill this passage of the Prophecy. I have spent most of my life. Weigh this truth: You are not unique. There were others before you who seemed to be the conqueror I have foreseen. The Prophecy is a powerful force. Weak men who stand before it are ground into dust. Do not allow your enemies to gain ground, Marth. Show them no mercy, or all will be lost.\"\n\nThe changeling folded his arms in silent thought, pondering the prophet's words. \"Very well,\" he said. \"I will keep your words in mind.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Zamiel said. \"That is all I ask. All that I say, all that I have ever done for you was intended only as guidance. Do not follow me blindly. Your decisions must ultimately be your own, or you will never become what you must be.\"\n\n\"I will remember that,\" Marth said.\n\n\"See that you do,\" the prophet said.\n\nWith a sudden shift in the shadows, Zamiel vanished, leaving Marth to find his way to the ship alone. He pushed all thoughts of Ashrem d'Cannith and Tristam Xain out of his mind. The past was a burden, a weight that sought to drag him back down into the miserable mire that had consumed him before. Brother Zamiel had offered him the chance to fulfill a greater destiny, to embrace his talents and forge a better future for all of Eberron. Better to concentrate on that future, he thought, as he looked into a standing puddle and saw Tristam Xain's face staring back at him.\n\nSuch a brilliant, glorious future.\n\nSeren sat on the railing of Karia Naille. She crouched beside the ship's figurehead, overlooking the city. Though much of the deck was shielded from the elements, sitting on the rail offered no such protection. The wind rushed past her, whipping her long hair back in a fury. She paid little mind as she ate her lunch. She had no real fear of heights, and with one foot hooked behind the rail, she was balanced well enough. The old dog, Gunther, lay on the deck behind her. He kept his head nestled between his paws, watching intently for any fallen crumbs. Seren ignored the dog, her thoughts consumed with more urgent matters. She hadn't found the answers she was looking for, but she was off to a good start. If nothing else, she had decent food, a steady wage, and would soon be leaving the city. That, at least, was an improvement.\n\nSeren enjoyed the view from up here, but she found herself returning her attention to the figurehead. It was an impressive piece of sculpture, depicting a slender elf woman with arms folded across her breasts. Her eyes were closed, head thrown back with long hair that spilled over her shoulders. The statue was unpainted, carved from rich, dark wood and highly polished. Something about the statue resonated with Seren, made her feel more at peace here. It seemed so free and untamed, even bound permanently to the hull of the ship.\n\nOther than the rush of the wind, the ship was strangely silent. Gerith was busy scrubbing the deck, singing a soft tune in a tongue Seren did not recognize. Blizzard perched on the rail nearby, regarding his master solemnly. Occasionally Gerith would halt the song for a moment and the animal would produce a high-pitched note in reply, singing along.\n\n\"What are you singing?\" she asked, looking back at him.\n\nGerith looked up with a crooked smile. \"Just an old song.\"\n\n\"What is it about?\" she asked.\n\nGerith paused in his scrubbing and tilted his head. \"I don't think you're old enough,\" he said with a chuckle. \"Let's just say it's a song from my homeland, the song of an explorer, er, yearning for the comforts of home. We'll leave it at that.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Seren said. \"So where is the rest of the crew?\"\n\n\"Rest?\" Gerith asked, peering up at her again. \"Well, you've met Dalan, though he isn't really crew, since he really doesn't do anything to help keep the ship going other than pay the bills. Then there's the captain, Tristam, Omax, me, and... and, well that's pretty much it.\"\n\n\"Doesn't a ship this size need a bigger crew than four people?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Usually, yes,\" Gerith said. \"Throw magic in the mix and things get a bit odd, and airships are things of magic. Think of it this way: The wizards and artificers are already there binding the elemental and enchanting the ship so that she'll take to the wind. They may as well add in a few extra spells so that the ship can function a bit more efficiently, right? Karia Naille has it better than most. One of the finest ships it's been my pleasure to crew on. She has a few special features.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm not giving away her secrets,\" Gerith said with a laugh. \"Wait till you're with us for a bit. Maybe you'll find out.\"\n\nSeren nodded and let the subject slide, though the idea of more secrets didn't sit well with her. She looked past Gerith, at the creature perched behind him. \"What sort of animal is that? I've never seen a lizard so big before.\"\n\nThe creature glared at her with angry black eyes. The leathery crest behind his cheeks flared.\n\n\"Careful,\" Gerith said. \"Blizzard's sensitive. He's not a lizard. He's a glidewing with a proud pedigree. Only the finest warriors in my tribe can ride them. They're the most glorious creatures in all of the Talenta Plains, the rulers of the sky. And he's my friend. The two of us have seen the whole world together.\"\n\nBlizzard gave an irritated flap of his leathery wings and let out a quick shriek.\n\n\"And he gets irritated when we do not finish our song,\" Gerith explained, turning and flicking his towel at the creature. The glidewing blinked, snorted, and shook off the soapy water. Preening one wing, he huddled on its perch and waited patiently for Gerith to continue.\n\nThe cabin hatch beside Dalan's opened just as the halfling resumed his song. A tiny old man, only slightly taller than the diminutive Gerith, strode out onto the deck. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed black uniform, a tight leather cap, and a pair of frosted goggles. Seren recognized him as a gnome, though she had met only a handful of them during her time in Wroat. Jamus had always instructed her to avoid gnomes. Not only did their sharp, inquisitive nature make them difficult to rob, but you generally didn't want to know what they had in their pockets.\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" the little man said, bowing toward Seren.\n\n\"Hello,\" she said.\n\n\"You are Miss Morisse, the thief Master d'Cannith invited onto my ship?\" he asked in a pert voice.\n\n\"I am Seren Morisse,\" she said, taken aback by the abrupt greeting.\n\n\"Excellent!\" the gnome said. \"I am Captain Pherris Gerriman, of the Zilargo Gerrimans, of whom I am almost entirely certain you've never heard and likely couldn't care less. That makes us even, for the details that would lead Master d'Cannith to invite a known thief onboard my vessel would most likely only raise my lather and induce another in the chain of many headaches that have plagued my days of late. Therefore I prefer my ignorance. More importantly, now you are acquainted with me and I am acquainted with you. Most importantly, I see that you are now acquainted with the rail, and that pleases me a great deal.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Because if you steal anything on my ship, Miss Morisse, or if you steal and draw trouble back to my ship because of it, then you will be going over that rail,\" the gnome said in the same cheerful tone. \"Until then, we have no problems with one another, and I will show you the same loyalty I show all my crew. Your past means nothing to me so long as you obey my orders. You are one of us now. Agreed?\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" she said, somewhat stunned.\n\nThe gnome clicked his boots pertly and turned away from her. \"Master Snowshale! Where in Khyber are my artificer and his bodyguard?\"\n\n\"Tristam and Omax are still in the city, I suppose,\" Gerith said, not looking up from his scrubbing.\n\n\"Blast,\" Pherris said. Grumbling under his breath, the gnome climbed onto the railing beside Seren and stared at the skyline. \"I should have sent the dog for supplies. At least he always comes back for dinner. We should have left Wroat hours ago.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to look for them?\" Seren offered. \"I know the city.\"\n\n\"Excellent idea, Miss Morisse,\" Pherris said, rolling his eyes. \"There's nothing I'd like better than to waste time looking for you as well. No, my dear, that shan't be necessary. Master Xain is a magnet for trouble, but I've no doubt he'll find an opportunity to... ah.\" The captain pointed at the southern skyline. \"There. That's their signal.\"\n\nSeren looked in that direction to see a streak of red light dropping from the sky, leaving a trail of thick purple smoke.\n\nPherris stomped back to the middle of the deck, climbing a short ladder to reach the ship's helm. Sensing what was to come, Gunther rose, trotted across the deck, and pawed impatiently at his master's hatch. \"Prepare for takeoff, Master Snowshale,\" Pherris said in a grim voice.\n\n\"Aye, Captain,\" the halfling said, already hopping to his feet. \"Seren, lend a hand.\"\n\n\"What do I do?\" she asked.\n\n\"Just follow me and do what I do,\" the halfling said, busily beginning to untie the mooring ropes that secured the ship to the tower. Seren helped as best she could, though the halfling's deft fingers undid the knots more quickly than she could.\n\n\"Is there trouble, Captain?\" Dalan asked, opening his cabin hatch and peering out. Gunther shoved past his master and disappeared into the shadows beyond, obviously eager to flee the deck before takeoff.\n\n\"Tristam and Omax have been gone too long,\" the gnome said. \"They sent up a flare.\" He pointed in the relevant direction, though he did not take his eyes from the ship's controls.\n\n\"Those fools had best not be drawing attention,\" Dalan said angrily. \"They've caused enough trouble.\"\n\n\"Time enough to cast blame when they're back onboard, Master d'Cannith,\" the captain said. \"Ready for launch!\"\n\nDalan stepped back with a sigh and closed his cabin hatch. Gerith nudged Seren. She looked down to see he was now holding a thick rope, one of many tied securely to the rail at regular intervals. She seized one as well, and Gerith gave a whistle. Pherris nodded and spun the wheel with both hands. Above the deck, the glowing blue ring seethed with red energy and sang with a steady, high-pitched hum. A vibration passed through the deck and the ship lurched away from the tower. Blizzard released a sharp cry and dropped off the rail, only to appear again on the other side of the ship, wings spread wide to catch the wind. Captain Gerriman pulled sharply at a lever beside the wheel and the ship righted herself, falling even and roaring off over the river. Seren saw the streets of Wroat pull away beneath them, people dwindling into dots and buildings shrinking. It was an odd, detached feeling, as if she were falling away from the world. It was strangely thrilling.\n\n\"First flight?\" Gerith asked with a wide grin.\n\nShe nodded, unable to find any words.\n\n\"I envy you,\" he said. \"Wait till you fly through your first cloud.\"\n\n\"Master Snowshale, I would appreciate it if you would scout ahead!\" Pherris shouted over the hum of the elemental.\n\n\"Aye,\" the halfling said. He gave another sharp whistle, and Blizzard appeared once more, soaring beyond the ship's flaming ring. Gerith signaled to the glidewing, and it dove just as he leapt over the rail. Seren watched in astonishment as the halfling caught his steed's leather harness in midair and pulled himself into the saddle just as Blizzard leveled out and soared away over the city.\n\n\"Showboating lunatic,\" the captain said. \"He'll miss one of these days, and I'll never see the money he owes me.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to do now?\" Seren said, shouting over the howling winds.\n\n\"Just hold on, Miss Morisse,\" Pherris said. \"Though I've no doubt those two will need a hand when... Khyber.\" The gnome continued swearing under his breath and concentrated more intently on the small crystal mounted on the ship's wheel. The ring of fire flashed green and the ship surged forward with a burst of speed.\n\nSeren looked ahead and saw a plume of black smoke rising from the city. She saw the black silhouette of Blizzard rise up from the buildings, circle the plume, and then turn back toward Karia Naille. The glidewing banked sharply and landed on the ship. Gerith cartwheeled out of his harness and landed beside the captain, grasping Pherris's shoulder for balance.\n\n\"They're alive!\" Gerith announced in a bright tone. \"Though we should probably hurry before they die in the fire.\"\n\n\"Why have they set the city on fire, Master Snowshale?\" Pherris asked with exaggerated calm.\n\n\"It's just one building, to be fair, Captain,\" Gerith said. \"I think they intended to distract the Watch, but then they got trapped on the roof.\"\n\nThe captain cursed again, in a variety of languages. \"Guide me to them, Master Snowshale.\"\n\n\"Easy enough, Captain,\" the halfling said as he climbed back into his saddle. \"Just head for the fire.\"\n\nBlizzard took to the air again, his broad wingspan barely clearing the elemental ring around the deck. The glidewing soared down toward the city in a dizzying circle and Karia Naille followed, falling into a controlled dive. The city grew beneath them. Wroat looked so strange from above; though Seren knew her way around these streets, nothing was arranged quite how she thought it would be. The crowds that gathered in the streets to look at the rising smoke now stopped and pointed up at the airship in awe.\n\nThe plume of smoke rose just ahead, to the ship's port side. It rose from a dilapidated four-story building. The airship fell level with the streets, soaring between the city's taller structures. Seren could see a large contingent of City Watch galloping down the street beneath them, as well as a brigade of citizens carrying buckets of water from the Howling River. The airship rose gradually, banking to port as she circled the burning building. Blizzard dove and landed on the roof farthest from the smoke, where Tristam and Omax waited. The ship pulled as close as she could, the elemental flames that surrounded her preventing her from getting too close lest more damage be done.\n\n\"Throw that cable to them, Miss Morisse, and pull the lever when they are secure,\" Pherris said, nodding to a nearby coil lashed to the deck.\n\nSeren quickly complied, hurling the heavy cable over the rail. Omax caught it in one hand, passing the slack to Tristam, who gave a quick salute. She pulled the lever and a winch began to turn below the deck, hauling them both up toward Karia Naille. Omax crawled over first, carrying a body over one shoulder. He dumped it unceremoniously onto the deck.\n\nThe captain looked down at the limp bundle with a sour expression. \"Omax, why did you bring me a dead watchman?\" he asked, looking back to the wheel.\n\n\"It was Tristam's idea,\" Omax said.\n\n\"He's not dead!\" Tristam added as he climbed over the side. \"He passed out in the smoke.\"\n\nPherris pulled a lever and the ship banked upward again. \"Then we are merely kidnappers and arsonists, not murderers. That's good news. Don't you agree, Miss Morisse?\"\n\nThe sound of a metallic thunk sounded from the deck beneath them, followed by another.\n\n\"What was that?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Crossbows,\" Gerith said, alighting on the deck nearby. \"I'll be forever working those bolts out of the hull. Tristam, what in Khyber did you do?\"\n\n\"Not now, Master Snowshale,\" Pherris said in a warning tone, concentrating on the ship's control. The airship pulled smoothly to a halt above a low building and Pherris looked back at the warforged. \"Omax, please return to Wroat what is Wroat's.\"\n\nOmax nodded and, picking up the watchman, rappelled over the rail again. He laid the man carefully on the roof and then began scaling his way back up the cable. The flaming circle flared green and the ship started off again even before Omax had cleared the rail.\n\n\"Secure yourselves,\" Pherris said as Omax climbed onto the deck. \"Miss Morisse, say your good-byes to your home. Aeven, please give us a boost before the King's soldiers discover their own airships.\"\n\nThe captain did not remove his hands from the wheel, but the ship lurched heavily. Seren fell to the deck, clinging to the nearest secure rope with both hands. Tristam also fell nearby, though when he saw Seren's eyes watching him his own terrified expression became a grin of false confidence. Even Gerith scrambled for the ropes, securing himself and Blizzard to the deck. Only Omax seemed unaffected, standing in the middle of the deck with feet splayed and shoulders squared against the ship's sudden momentum.\n\nKaria Naille's bow fell forward, and the elemental ring burned white with an incredible burst of speed. The city melted away beneath them, dwindling to the size of a toy and eventually becoming nothing more than a distant black dot beside the blue ribbon of the Howling River. The deck boards shuddered against one another, and sweat streamed down Pherris's face as he gripped the wheel with white knuckles. After several minutes of such frantic speed, the flaming ring burned blue again. The ship fell into a calm cruise far above the Breland plains. Seren wobbled to her feet, holding the railing for support. The ground was now far beneath them. Wisps of white clouds streaked past on each side, some far below. It was unlike anything she'd ever seen. It was like entering a new world, a sea of calm far removed from the chaotic land below. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gerith look at her with a knowing grin.\n\nDalan d'Cannith's cabin opened and the fat guildmaster strode out onto the deck. He looked calm and unruffled by their rapid escape. Gunther peered warily around the corner of the door, then retreated rapidly back inside.\n\n\"What happened in the city, Tristam?\" Dalan asked. He folded his arms behind his back as he looked down at the prone artificer. \"You started a fire and attacked a watchman?\"\n\nTristam scrambled awkwardly to his feet and tried to dust the soot off his jacket with one hand.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Dalan, I dunno what happened,\" he explained. \"Omax found a wanted poster with my face on it, so we tried to investigate...\"\n\n\"If the Watch was looking for you, then wouldn't it make more sense to return and let Gerith and Omax investigate?\" Dalan asked interrupting Tristam's explanation.\n\n\"They think I killed city guards and burned down your house, Dalan! I'd hoped I could set the record straight.\"\n\n\"And making their arson charges a reality and nearly justifying a murder charge in so doing is how you set things straight?\" Dalan asked. \"What a unique approach.\"\n\n\"The building was empty,\" Tristam said. \"The Watch was already chasing us. That was a distraction, to throw them off while we ran back to the ship.\"\n\n\"I understand that,\" Dalan said. \"Why did you choose to create such an elaborate distraction and then trap yourself on top of it?\"\n\nTristam's shoulders slumped. \"We meant to run,\" he said. \"But Omax saw that stupid guard run inside. I guess he thought someone might be trapped inside. We had to help him.\" Omax stood beside Tristam, looking impassively at Dalan with his strange blue eyes.\n\n\"We could not let him die, Master d'Cannith,\" Omax said.\n\nPherris looked back from the wheel, giving the young artificer an appraising look. Dalan only chewed his lip thoughtfully. \"We can scarcely afford such reckless heroism, Tristam,\" Dalan finally said, though his voice was softer now. \"You know how much is at stake here.\"\n\nTristam nodded.\n\n\"Our apologies, Master d'Cannith,\" Omax added.\n\n\"No harm done,\" Dalan replied. \"Our Captain Marth is a changeling. No doubt he assumed your identity and framed you for his own crimes. Now at least one watchman in Wroat might not be so quick to believe you are a killer. Not that it matters in the end; I doubt we'll soon be returning to Wroat. Miss Morisse has provided us with a most intriguing lead in exchange for a position among our crew.\"\n\nTristam looked back at Seren in surprise, then back at Dalan. \"So she's coming with us?\" he asked, not sounding entirely pleased with the news.\n\n\"What did you find, Seren?\" Omax asked in a more pleasant voice.\n\n\"An enchanted hand lens,\" she said. \"Marth used it to study the book I stole. Whatever he was looking for with it, he didn't find it.\"\n\n\"Some sort of magical cipher,\" Tristam said, scratching his chin. \"Ashrem was a prolific writer. He could have easily hidden his work on the Legacy in his many books, written invisibly, and used something like that to read them. May I see the lens, Dalan?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Dalan said.\n\nDalan reached in his vest pocket and produced the small chunk of frosted glass. Tristam grabbed it eagerly, hurrying past Dalan into the cabin. Seren followed, watching Tristam curiously. He picked up one of the many volumes marked with Ashrem d'Cannith's seal and flipped through its pages, holding the lens to one eye.\n\n\"There's definitely something there I haven't seen before, but I can't understand the text,\" he said. He pushed the book aside and quickly seized another, flipping through that one and setting it aside as well. He reached for a third, but stopped as Dalan interrupted with a heavy sigh.\n\n\"Encoded as well as hidden,\" Dalan d'Cannith said, circling Tristam and seating himself at the desk again. \"And if it is one of Ashrem's codes, then all your skills will not unravel it. That is why we are going to Black Pit.\"\n\n\"Black Pit?\" Tristam said, incredulous. \"We don't need his help, Dalan. He already turned his back on us once.\"\n\n\"I hope that you are correct,\" d'Cannith said. \"Yet surely you agree if this truly is some sort of magical code, then his talents are better suited to this matter than yours. Until then, I will retain the lens.\"\n\n\"You aren't even going to give me a chance to crack this myself?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"If I cannot read it, I doubt you can,\" Dalan said. \"I cannot afford to see an item so valuable lost or broken, Tristam.\" He held out his hand.\n\nTristam dropped the piece of glass onto Dalan's palm and turned with a scowl, nearly tripping over Seren as he stormed out of Dalan's cabin. Tristam coughed an embarrassed apology and circled around her, headed to the far end of the deck. Omax sat down cross-legged by his friend's side in a posture of deep contemplation, the glow in his blue eyes dimming.\n\n\"Black Pit,\" Gerith said with a whistle, appearing beside Seren again.\n\n\"What's in Black Pit?\" she asked. \"For that matter, what is Black Pit?\"\n\n\"It's a hole in Eberron,\" Gerith said.\n\n\"Like Wroat?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, I mean literally a hole,\" he said. \"It's a crack in the ground that leads right into Khyber itself. There's a village right near the edge, and it names itself after the pit. That can be a bit confusing, having two places with the same name, but then humans have always been a confusing sort of people. The village built up near the end of the Last War. It's not even on most maps; the folks there prefer it that way. It's a place for deserters, smugglers, mercenaries, criminals. It's also the backbone of Breland's thriving black market. Very interesting place, with all kinds of interesting people.\"\n\n\"Why are we going there?\" Seren asked, looking down at the halfling with a worried expression.\n\n\"Like I said, all kinds of interesting people,\" Gerith answered. \"Zed Arthen is one of them. He's an inquisitive.\"\n\n\"Inquisitive?\" she said. \"An investigator?\"\n\n\"An inquisitive is a bit more than that,\" Gerith said. \"Sort of like a glidewing is a little more than a lizard. An inquisitive answers questions that nobody wants to have answered, questions that folks generally figure can't be answered. You'd like him, I think.\"\n\n\"Why would Arthen be in a place like Black Pit?\" Seren asked.\n\nGerith grinned a broad gap-toothed grin. \"Maybe because in a place like that a person like him always has something to do. Maybe because in a place like that, he hopes that people like us will leave him alone.\"\n\nIt was all so frustrating. She should have known better than to listen to Jamus.\n\nEraina d'Deneith watched the strange airship leave a trail of flame across the northern sky, taking her answers with it. Around her, watchmen and civilian volunteers formed frenzied bucket chains, passing water from the river to the burning building. She ignored them, steering her steed directly toward the building where she had seen the airship pause. Dropping from the saddle and pushing the door open, she strode inside. An elderly couple had been watching the fire from a nearby window, and looked at her with alarm.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" the old man demanded, voice shaking as he looked at Eraina's polished armor, spear, and the shortsword that hung from her belt. \"Get out of our house!\"\n\nEraina drew a thin metal case from her pocket and snapped it open for the couple to see the identification documents inside. Within was a small packet of papers fixed with an official seal, featuring a small illustration of the dark-haired woman that held the case.\n\n\"I am a Sentinel Marshal conducting an official investigation. I have business on your roof and won't be more than a moment.\"\n\nThe man glanced at the papers in Eraina's hand but stayed well out of reach of her sword arm, holding his wife fearfully. Eraina had hoped for as much; though she had not lied to them, she would prefer not to have her name remembered. She snapped the case shut and continued toward the stairs. She climbed up onto the roof and looked around, holding her short spear in her left hand, right hand resting on the hilt of her blade. Her hand fell away when she saw the limp form lying on the roof. She leaned her spear beside the door and knelt, pulling off one mailed gauntlet to press two fingers to the man's throat. He was alive. His armor was blackened with soot but he did not seem to be badly burned.\n\n\"Get up,\" she said, standing and rolling the man onto his back with one steel-toed boot.\n\nThe man lay where he was, unconscious. Eraina knelt again and laid her hand on the man's chest. Her other hand grasped the amulet about her throat and she whispered a brief prayer. For an instant, her hand glowed with a white light. The glowing energy drained from her fingers into the man's body. A spasm shook him and he stirred, his eyes snapping open at the sky.\n\n\"What is your name, watchman?\" she asked. She held one finger out before his face, watching as his eyes focused upon it.\n\n\"Watchman Markus,\" the man said, still a bit dazed.\n\n\"Get up, Markus,\" she repeated with an impatient gesture. She rose and began to pace beside him.\n\nThe watchman sat up with a groan, pulling off his helmet and rubbing his head. Blinking in astonishment, he patted himself down with both hands for any sign of injuries. He looked about in confusion, his gaze eventually resting on the dying plume of smoke rising from the building to the south.\n\n\"How did I get up here?\" he said in a bewildered voice.\n\n\"You were dropped out of a fleeing airship,\" she said. \"Do you remember that?\"\n\nHe stood up unsteadily, staring at the three-headed chimera crest on her tabard with some amazement. \"A Sentinel Marshal?\" he said. \"What's going on here?\"\n\nEraina sighed. \"Boldrei's teachings advocate patience for those who have suffered,\" she said, replacing her gauntlet and stretching her fingers within it. \"However, as a Sentinel Marshal I am required to seek the truth efficiently. I called the Hearth-mother's blessings upon you to heal you, Watchman Markus. Thus I would appreciate it if you finished gather your senses swiftly.\" She fixed him with a stern expression.\n\n\"My apologies, Marshal,\" the man said, flustered. \"What would you like to know?\"\n\n\"As much as you can remember before you awakened here,\" she said, folding her arms across her chest.\n\nThe guardsman nodded. \"I can't remember much, to be honest,\" he said. \"We were pursuing a Lhazaarite who burned the Cannith estate and killed three watchmen last night. When the fire started I ran inside looking for anyone that might have been trapped.\"\n\n\"What was this man's name?\" she asked.\n\nThe guardsman shrugged. \"No name, only a description.\"\n\nMarkus took a folded scrap of parchment from his pocket and offered it to Eraina. She unfolded it and studied it for a long moment. It was a hastily printed wanted poster, and the man in the illustration was unfamiliar.\n\n\"He was the last thing I saw,\" the watchman said. \"He and his warforged friend ran into the fire to rescue me.\"\n\n\"The killer rescued you?\" Eraina asked.\n\nThe man nodded, though he looked rather confused. \"Seeing as how I'm here, Marshal, he must have.\"\n\nEraina sighed. Somehow, after all that had happened, she had hoped that the clues would begin to fall together. She was not truly surprised; she had enough experience to know that the truth rarely fit together in a convenient way as it did in stories. More often, even after a crime was solved, she never knew the full truth. Sometimes she just wished that a mystery would come together cleanly, if only for variety.\n\nWhen she spoke again, her voice was a great deal softer. \"Thank you for your help, Watchman Markus.\" She folded the poster and tucked it in one pocket. \"I have nothing further. No doubt your superior officer will be eager to discover you are still alive.\"\n\n\"Thank you again, Marshal...\" he said, letting the end of the sentence hang as he hoped to catch her name.\n\nEraina merely gave a brief salute and turned, taking up her spear and heading back down the stairs. The elderly couple was just as she had left them, still huddled by the window in terror. Eraina stopped with her hand on the door.\n\nShe moved to the window beside them, looking out at the smoking building. They moved away as much as they dared.\n\n\"Were you at this window the entire time?\" she asked, studying the skyline.\n\n\"Y-yes,\" the old man answered.\n\n\"Did you see the airship?\" she asked. \"Did you see the direction it came from?\"\n\n\"Downriver,\" the old man said, pointing out the window to the south.\n\n\"Boldrei walk beside you,\" she said, bowing thankfully and stepping back outside.\n\nEraina's horse waited patiently where she had left it. She climbed back into the saddle and rode toward the river. The crowd, slowly realizing that the fire was under control and there were unlikely to be any more airships swooping over the neighborhood, had begun to disperse, making passage a great deal easier. The farther south she went, the poorer the neighborhoods became. This was near the place that Jamus Roland had called home. Eraina scowled, pushing away thoughts of the old thief. She had hoped for a better life for him, but now there was no chance of that. He was a good man, despite his flaws. He had deserved better.\n\nShe would never forgive herself.\n\nThe sight of six towers looming above the fishermen's district quickly drew her attention to the task at hand. The towers were four stories tall, double the size of the average surrounding buildings. Each tower had a swooping bridge at its height, leading to nothing, with a large wooden crane mounted on the end. They were airship towers, though they looked to be poorly maintained. It was hardly surprising to see the docking towers unused. The Last War had ground most nonmilitary travel to a standstill. The few privately airships that remained would surely seek to dock in safer areas of Wroat. The thugs, smugglers, and ruffians who frequented this part of town would find greater profits traveling by boat or by road. On the other hand, someone seeking to slip an airship in and out of the city relatively unnoticed could do so quite easily here. Few locals would pry too deeply if the ship was well guarded.\n\nEraina stopped, her brow furrowing as she saw two horses gathered outside one of the towers. She galloped in that direction, drawing a muttered curse from a drunken sailor as he stumbled out of the way. She vaulted to the ground, took her spear from the saddle, and ran toward the tower. A tall, blond man in armor and a tabard matching Eraina's stepped out to greet her with a grim smile. A smaller, dark-haired man stepped out beside him, watching her without expression.\n\n\"Marshal Eraina,\" the blond man said with a brief nod.\n\n\"Marshal Galas,\" she said, striding toward him. \"Marshal Killian.\" She nodded to the other man.\n\n\"Fortuitous timing, Eraina,\" Galas said. \"I see the clues have led us to the same place. Let me spare you a great deal of wasted time. There is nothing here.\"\n\n\"Are you certain?\" she asked, looking past him into the tower. \"I believe the airship containing the suspect came from one of these towers.\"\n\n\"She did,\" Galas said, tightening his gauntlets as he prepared to mount his steed. \"Killian questioned what passes for a harbor master here. We drew him from his cups long enough to learn that an airship docked here last night, shortly before the debacle at the Friendly Buzzard. There were no symbols of ownership on the vessel. No crew wandered out to hit the taverns. No guards watched the tower door. A few nondescript figures boarded, followed by a girl who visited this morning. She matched the description of your friend Roland's partner.\"\n\nEraina looked at Galas. \"Seren Morisse?\" she asked.\n\n\"Whoever,\" Galas said, looking at her with a frown. \"Obviously the thief was not as reliable as Jamus believed and was somehow complicit in his death. It doesn't matter, Eraina. Your friend failed. We are done here.\"\n\n\"Done? How can we be done? This is the first real lead we've had!\"\n\nGalas turned to face her, placing one hand on her shoulder. His frown softened into a sympathetic smile. \"Eraina, I understand your feelings on the matter,\" he said. \"It is always hard for a Marshal to lose one under her protection, and it must be harder still for you, with Roland having been involved. I have served House Deneith as a Marshal for twenty years, so understand that what I say next is not said out of callousness, but out of practicality. While it is important for a Marshal to have passion, it is also necessary to have clarity. We have made a mistake here. Best to let it go rather than compound the danger, Eraina. We should return to Korth to plan our next move.\"\n\n\"Best to let it go?\" Eraina said. \"We have a duty to uphold, Galas!\"\n\nGalas sighed. \"You have an admirable thirst for justice, and I won't deny that injustice has been done here, but remember that your first duty is to House Deneith. Consider the facts. Dalan d'Cannith is rumored to have discovered a lost journal penned by his famous uncle, the very same sort of prize our quarry seeks. We hurry here, believing that the killer may strike again. You discover your old friend, Jamus, has already been contacted about acquiring the volume for an anonymous client. Upon your urging, he takes the contract, hoping to draw the client out so we may learn more. Somewhere the deal goes bad. Dalan d'Cannith's house burns down. Jamus Roland dies. Roland's partner flees in an unidentified airship, pausing only long enough to hover over a burning building and load a wanted killer aboard before fleeing to Khyber knows where. Pardon my swearing.\"\n\nEraina frowned at him.\n\n\"You can't deny how it looks, Eraina,\" he said. \"We've become entangled in something that is no longer our affair.\"\n\n\"None of our affair? We came seeking a killer, and we found one! The trail is still warm. Llaine Grove died for what he knew about Ashrem d'Cannith's work. This is obviously the same suspect. Why would we return to Korth now that things are only beginning to make sense?\"\n\n\"Because nothing makes sense, Eraina!\" Galas snapped, gesturing wildly as he turned away from her. \"Your desperate need for vengeance is forming patterns where there are none. If you wish to hunt random murderers, we could spend the rest of our lives in Wroat and find our fill of them, but I've seen nothing to prove that this is the suspect we seek. Perhaps your friend Jamus discovered the book wasn't what we wanted, tried to fence it, and died when the deal went bad. Perhaps his partner turned on him. Perhaps d'Cannith killed Roland himself and burned his own house down to cover his tracks. We could speculate forever, Eraina, but it's all too random. You dealt with a thief, and things went poorly. Roland's death was regrettable, but it is not our concern.\"\n\n\"Jamus Roland was not just a thief. He deserves better than to be abandoned by us.\"\n\n\"Jamus Roland,\" Galas said, \"was not our client. We owe him nothing. Baron d'Deneith will be upset enough that we became involved with the Canniths without his knowledge. Best that we cut our losses, withdraw before our involvement is detected, and wait for another opportunity for justice.\"\n\n\"An opportunity which may never come,\" Eraina said. \"I cannot believe after two years that you would give up so easily. Do you forget your vows so easily, Marshal? Or does your fear that we will fail again cripple you from any decisive action?\"\n\nGalas turned to face Eraina again. His mouth opened, then closed with a click. His face grew dark red as his temper began to build.\n\n\"Perhaps a compromise is not out of the question,\" Killian said, stepping between them.\n\n\"What?\" Galas demanded, too filled with rage to say anything else.\n\n\"You have already determined that this investigation has struck an impasse,\" Killian answered. \"We are to return to Korth and continue our research into the case. In the meantime, with no other leads, what harm could it do to allow Eraina to investigate her friend's murder? If, by chance, she should be correct and it somehow bears connection to our investigation, then we can only benefit. If there is no connection, we can at least foster good relations with Wroat for aiding them in resolving what must appear to be a truly baffling crime.\"\n\n\"A Sentinel Marshal does not take leave to conduct independent investigations,\" Galas said.\n\n\"Why?\" Eraina demanded. \"Is justice our cause only so long as there is profit?\"\n\n\"Guard your tongue, Eraina,\" Galas said. \"Simply because you bear the Deneith name, do not assume I will not report such insubordination to our superiors.\"\n\n\"Galas, Eraina, please!\" Killian said, holding restraining hands toward them both. \"We are friends! Comrades in arms. Such arguments accomplish nothing. Galas, I realize our duties to House Deneith are your primary concern, but recognize Eraina's position as well. She is a Spear of Boldrei. You cannot possibly expect that she would leave a comrade's murder to the City Watch when she has it within her power to put things right.\"\n\nGalas closed his eyes and did not speak for a long moment. When he regained his composure, he looked at Eraina sternly. \"Eraina, I cannot spare the resources to aid you,\" he said. \"I do not intend to send you into such a dangerous investigation alone. You... are worth too much to us.\"\n\n\"I am never alone, Galas,\" she said, one hand moving to the amulet about her throat.\n\n\"Stubborn paladins,\" Galas said. He grumbled a chain of curses under his breath. \"So be it! I hope you give the Hearth-mother as many headaches as you've given me.\"\n\nEraina smiled wryly. \"Thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"Thank Killian,\" he answered, climbing into his saddle. Galas looked pointedly away from her, studying the road north intently.\n\nEraina bowed to Killian. The soft-spoken marshal returned the gesture silently and mounted beside his commanding officer.\n\n\"We'll be expecting regular reports, Eraina,\" Galas said, still looking at the road. \"Weekly ciphered speaker posts.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" she said.\n\n\"Come back to us alive, Eraina,\" he said softly, still looking away. \"May your goddess take good care of you.\"\n\n\"And you as well, sir,\" she answered.\n\nGalas gave a final sharp salute and rode away. Killian did the same, though he shared an apologetic smile before he left. Eraina watched them go in silence. Then, with a heavy sigh, she returned to the matter at hand. She looked back at the looming airship tower and ran through the facts in her mind.\n\nJamus Roland was no saint, but he was a man of his word and he knew better than to lie to a paladin. He had promised Eraina that he would help her trap the killer she had been following. He would not betray her. Of Jamus's partner, Seren, she knew little. It was possible that Seren might have betrayed Jamus and fled with the book.\n\nBut why burn Dalan d'Cannith's home? Why did the Lhazaarite stranger murder three guards and let another escape? It was obviously sloppy and hardly seemed to fit the pattern she and her fellow Marshals had been following thus far. Either Galas was right and this entire messy affair was entirely unrelated to their quarry, or all of this was a distraction. She frowned as she turned over the details. It wasn't entirely inconceivable that Roland would have invited a potential killer into his tutelage. The old thief had always been a rather spotty judge of character, especially where pretty young girls were concerned.\n\nSuch thoughts began to draw back memories, and with memories came undesired emotion. Eraina cast such distractions aside. She needed answers. She stepped into the tower, seeking focus as she searched for clues. She saw little other than dust. The stairs were well-traveled; she counted several sets of footprints beside those of Galas and Killian. The rest of the tower had fallen into disrepair. She moved to the top of the winding spiral staircase, the butt of her short spear thumping the stairs ahead of her. Her right hand rested on the hilt of her sword out of habit, though she was fairly certain the other two Marshals would have left no threats behind. She stepped out onto the bridge atop the tower, wind whipping around her with a low, keening whistle. Eraina extended one hand to steady herself as she looked down at the river. She wobbled on her feet and prayed to Boldrei for strength. Paladins were said to be without fear. For the most part that was true, but heights made her a little nervous.\n\nEraina stepped out farther onto the bridge. The cargo crane hung at an odd angle, and upon closer inspection she saw that it was long broken. Whoever came here had not been smuggling or taking on supplies, at least not in any great volume. They came specifically for their passengers and left just as quickly. She stepped back toward the safety of the doorway and pondered. Far below, she saw her steed had shied away from the door. The animal tossed its head and shifted weight from foot to foot. Eraina frowned at the horse's odd behavior. She cocked her head, listening more closely. A faint wooden creak sounded on the stairs below.\n\nEraina drew her sword and whispered a brief prayer to Boldrei. A sensation of quiet strength issued through her arm and into her spear. She slid her mailed sleeve up over her left forearm, revealing the swirling dragonmark pattern that extended from her wrist to elbow. She concentrated and felt its power flare as well, surrounding her body with a shimmering protective aura that quickly faded from view. Thus strengthened by her goddess and protected by her House, Eraina d'Deneith stepped into the stairwell.\n\n\"Who goes there?\" she demanded, holding out her spear and shortsword. Brilliant light shone from the spear's head, filling the stairs below.\n\nThe twang of three crossbows issued in reply. Eraina did not flinch. The bolts struck her chest harmlessly and fell on the stairs with a clatter. Three gruff-looking men stood on the stairs beneath, staring up at her in awe. Each now held an unloaded crossbow.\n\n\"Khyber,\" one swore and reached for the knife at his belt.\n\nEraina did not hesitate. Planting her spear against the stairs for balance, she lunged forward and planted her foot in the nearest man's chest. He yelped and rolled backward, seizing the railing in time but sending his friend tumbling into the void. He landed on the ground floor with a crack. The third man leapt over his fallen friend and charged Eraina with a stout pipe, rushing inside her reach before she could swing. She punched him sharply in the throat with the hilt of her sword and he fell backward. She swung her spear in a deadly arc, leaving a trail of red across his chest. He fell backward, screaming, down the stairs. The surviving thief clung to the railing as his dead friend rolled past. He held his knife in his free hand, looking up at Eraina in terror.\n\n\"Stay back,\" he said, though he could barely force the words out for his terror.\n\nEraina sneered and struck out with her sword, viciously slapping the man's wrist with the flat of the blade and sending his dagger flying into the depths. She sheathed her blade and seized his collar in a twisting grip, dragging him to his feet. She held the point of her broad-bladed spear an inch from his eye.\n\n\"Who sent you?\" she demanded.\n\nThe man looked up at her, terrified. \"Nobody sent us!\" he said. \"Three against one seemed like an easy mark is all! Please don't kill me!\"\n\n\"I walk a path of compassion,\" Eraina said. \"I kill only to defend myself or my charge. You are no threat to me.\"\n\n\"Thank the Host,\" the man whimpered.\n\n\"You should,\" Eraina said. \"Boldrei has given you mercy, but I have no time to spare you kindness.\" She leaned her spear against the wall and punched him hard in the temple with a mailed fist. Taking her spear back, she left him lying in an unconscious heap on the stairs. She frowned uncomfortably at the two corpses as she reached the bottom of the stairs. As usual, the rush of combat took all certainty with it. Now that the battle was over, her doubts returned, little by little. These men had been wicked, but could there have been another way? Was redemption beyond them? Now there was no chance for them and she was to blame\u2014again. She could not bring herself to pray for forgiveness; she suspected she deserved none.\n\nBut doubt could wait till later. Eraina peered out of the tower, wary of any more accomplices that might lay in wait. Either there were none or they had wisely fled when the screams began. As the excitement of the battle faded, something stuck in Eraina's mind. She looked back at the tower door. It hung wide open. The doorknob and lock were missing, probably scavenged by some enterprising local decades ago. Eraina frowned.\n\nAn airship was a highly valuable piece of property. Only a fool would land one unguarded in a neighborhood such as this, yet Galas said that there were no guards or obvious crew. It had taken only a matter of minutes for a band of thugs to follow her in here. An airship would not have survived docked to an unlocked tower without incident, not even for one night, unless other precautions were taken.\n\nEraina stepped back inside the tower and looked at the door frame. There, where the door's lock used to be, she saw a strange pattern etched into the wood. She prayed to her goddess, drawing upon Boldrei's wisdom to grant her insight. The pattern glowed blue to her eyes, displaying an intricate pattern of magical energy. It was a ward, intended to seal the door against outside entry until the proper command was given. It was inactive now, but that was not what truly interested Eraina. Like any form of art, magic was given to particular styles. To the trained eye such things quickly became recognizable. She noticed a looping curve in the runes here, a signature flare there, and the particular pigment of the ink was also noteworthy.\n\nThis ward was made by a Cannith, or someone who had been trained by them.\n\nMany possibilities ran through Eraina's mind. Could one of Cannith's underlings have made plans with Seren to obtain the book, kill Jamus, and burn his master's house to conceal the crime? Other than Dalan, there were no members of House Cannith in Wroat who were wealthy enough to possess such an airship, and any who had such holdings would probably be so highly ranked in their house they could have simply demanded that Dalan surrender the book. That left only Dalan d'Cannith. Could he still be alive? Why would Seren betray and kill Jamus only to turn the book over to the man she had stolen it from? Who had burned Dalan's home? Who was the mysterious Lhazaarite who had murdered the guards, and why was Dalan consorting with him?\n\nToo many questions, but at least this was a beginning. Now Eraina knew what to do. Once she had alerted the Watch to the thief and two corpses she had left behind, she could pursue the matter in earnest.\n\nMarshal Eraina d'Deneith climbed into her saddle and galloped away through the streets of Wroat.\n\nSeren woke with a pounding headache and a knifelike pain in her back. All about her was darkness. She sat up awkwardly, feeling around for some sense of her environment. She did not remember this room, nor how she came to be here. She felt a pang of alarm when she realized the knife at her belt was gone. Had she been wrong to trust d'Cannith's strange crew? Had they decided not to trust her after all and locked her in the brig? A thousand paranoid theories burned through Seren's mind.\n\nFear swallowed all rational thought as two pale blue lights suddenly shone in the darkness. The dim light was followed a moment later by a small lantern flaring to life, held by the warforged, Omax. Seren lay on a narrow cot in a cramped chamber. The warforged knelt in the center of the room, holding the lantern in one hand. A small table stood beside the cot. Seren's dagger lay atop it, still sheathed. She quickly snatched the weapon and huddled in the corner, as far away from the construct as she could. The weapon would do her little good if Omax was hostile, but some chance was better than nothing.\n\n\"Hello, Seren,\" Omax said in his deep, measured voice. \"Are you feeling better?\"\n\n\"What am I doing here?\" she asked. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"The captain felt it best if one of us remained to watch over you,\" Omax said. \"Sky sickness can leave one confused and disoriented. We did not wish to see you come to harm. I apologize if I frightened you.\"\n\nAs the initial terror passed, Seren began to remember the events of the previous day. The ship had continued her steady pace over the Brelish landscape. Seren had spent the better part of the first day helping Gerith and Omax tend to the ship, keeping the decks clean and preparing the meals. While helping scrub the aft deck, she had begun to feel unusually ill and could not remember anything after that.\n\n\"Sky sickness?\" she asked, tucking the dagger into her belt. She felt rather foolish for her paranoia but saw little need to apologize to the construct.\n\nOmax nodded. \"The enchantments that keep a ship like this afloat also provide some modicum of comfort, but they are not perfect,\" he said. \"The air is much thinner and colder than you are used to. The movements of the ship itself can be disorienting. A human not accustomed to the conditions can easily be overcome with exhaustion without any warning.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said. Seren climbed off her pallet. Her thighs felt rubbery and sore, and for a moment her legs threatened not to support her. Omax held out a metal hand and she seized it for support. She pulled away just as quickly, unnerved by the construct's thick metal fingers. She had expected them to be cold, but Omax was warm, like a living creature.\n\nThe warforged lowered his gaze. When he spoke again, his voice was subdued. \"I will leave you to your privacy, Seren,\" he said. \"If you require me for anything, I shall be meditating in the forward cargo bay.\"\n\nSeren did not reply. Omax rose, gave a strangely formal bow, and departed. She waited where she was, listening to the sound of the construct's heavy metal footfalls receding through the ship. When she was fairly sure the warforged was gone, she opened her cabin door and tentatively stepped out into the hall. She was on the lower deck of the airship and could hear the steady hum of the ship's elemental ring pulsing beneath her feet.\n\nSmall doors lined the narrow hallway on either side. This part of the ship's lower deck was filled with these small cabins. As she continued forward, Seren heard movement inside the cabin closest to her own. She smelled a pungent, chemical smell from beyond the door, accompanied by a faint bubbling. She leaned closer to listen, and the bubbling grew more intense, followed by the sound of breaking glass and Tristam Xain swearing violently.\n\nSeren moved on, climbing the ladder that separated the cabins and cargo bay, emerging on the main deck. She felt a chill as the wind rushed over her bare arms and cut through her thin breeches. Looking out over the rail it was difficult to tell how high the ship flew. All around was a vast sea of clouds, showing only a rare hint of green beneath. In the distance, she saw Gerith's glidewing diving in and out of the clouds. She felt a detached sense of peace and safety. The flight of an airship was so calming, despite everything that had happened. She had no idea what lay ahead or what truly motivated Dalan d'Cannith and his strange crew, but somehow standing on the deck of Karia Naille she felt safer than she had since leaving Ringbriar so long ago.\n\n\"Good morning,\" Captain Gerriman said blandly from the ship's wheel. He peered pointedly at the sun, fixed precisely overhead in the noonday sky. \"Glad to see your first day on board was such a productive one.\"\n\n\"No one warned me about sky sickness, Captain,\" Seren said.\n\nThe gnome looked at her, stroking his bushy white moustache with one hand. \"I think you misunderstand me, Miss Morisse,\" he said. \"I meant what I said. A crewman willing to work herself to a stupor on the first day is exactly the sort of person who leaves a lasting positive impression on me. Just don't do it again. I respect determination, but I am not a great admirer of stupidity.\" He returned his attention to the ship's controls, turning the wheel idly with one hand.\n\n\"Well,\" Seren said with a small laugh, \"then I should get back to work.\" She looked around at the deck. \"What needs to be done?\"\n\n\"Nothing, really,\" Pherris said with a shrug. \"Gerith can be a little obsessive, always finding something to clean or polish, but she takes care of herself just fine most of the time. Sit and rest for a bit. If you plan to stay on my ship, I'd appreciate coming to know you better.\"\n\n\"I thought you said you preferred ignorance,\" Seren said.\n\n\"About how you came to know Dalan, yes,\" he said. \"But what sort of person you are and what sort of things you've done, while not entirely unrelated, are separate affairs. It is the former that interests me.\"\n\n\"It isn't much of a story,\" she said. She climbed to the upper deck and sat cross-legged in the bow of the ship. \"I come from a little village called Ringbriar. After the end of the war, I just thought I'd be better off somewhere else.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Pherris said. \"Did you lose your family, then? Parents dead in the war?\"\n\n\"My father died in the war,\" she said. \"My mother was alive, the last time I saw her.\"\n\n\"You don't know for sure if your mother is alive?\" he asked, incredulous.\n\n\"I haven't seen her in years,\" Seren said. \"She's better off without me.\"\n\n\"Hrm,\" Pherris said. He studied the clouds off to the left. His thoughts were elsewhere.\n\n\"You seem much different today, Captain,\" Seren finally said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. \"A lot calmer than you were when we first met.\"\n\nPherris wrinkled face twisted in a grin. \"When you met me, I had just been commanded to fly my ship unauthorized into the Brelish capital in the dead of night to rescue my employer from unknown enemies. Today I have the luxury of patience. My patience is not an infinite commodity, and I find it is expended more often than not in Master d'Cannith's service.\"\n\nSeren glanced quickly toward the door of Dalan's cabin, then back at the captain.\n\n\"Oh, trust me, Miss Morisse, he is well aware of my opinion of him,\" Pherris said. \"I am a gnome who speaks his mind, and he knows the ship would fall apart without me.\"\n\n\"If you think so little of him, why do you work for him?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because Karia Naille once belonged to Dalan's uncle, a good and honorable man,\" Pherris said.\n\n\"Ashrem d'Cannith built this ship?\" Seren asked.\n\nPherris looked extremely shocked. \"Built her?\" he said, scoffing. \"Ashrem didn't build Karia Naille. He improved her, certainly, and he understood what drives her better than most humans. I'll argue none of that, but Karia Naille and her sister ships are products of gnomish ingenuity. The Canniths would have you believe they build everything, but I assure you that is not the case!\"\n\n\"I didn't mean any offense,\" Seren said. \"I don't know much about airships.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Pherris said, his tone softening somewhat. \"Well, if you ever wish to know more, I am at your disposal. But to answer your original question, Ashrem once had three airships, Karia Naille, the Kenshi Zhann, and the Albena Tors \u2014or, translated, the Mourning Dawn, the Seventh Moon, and the Dying Sun. If you ask me, this one is the finest of the three, fastest at a sprint and prettiest by far. Ashrem had her built for Kiris\u2014the young wizard who stole his heart. Of course Kiris spent most of her time with Ashrem on the Kenshi Zhann and left the ship under my able command. When she shared Ashrem's fate, the Mourning Dawn passed to Dalan. I can't imagine why Ashrem would bequeath such ship to his nephew\u2014the two were not particularly close\u2014but he did. I offered Dalan my services on the day the will was read. I could not envision Karia Naille in the hands of another captain. Master d'Cannith knew better than to refuse. We have our differences, but on professional matters we recognize one another's talents. He leaves the ship in my hands. I leave the rest to him.\"\n\n\"And what of the others?\" she asked. \"Gerith, Tristam, Omax. How did they end up here?\"\n\n\"Gerith's tale is simple enough,\" Pherris said. \"He was looking for work, and I'd flown with him a few times before. His experience as a scout, explorer, and translator speaks for itself. He's lived half as long as I have and seen twice as much of the world. I was afraid he might get bored and leave again until we hit Wroat. Now we're moving again, so he's interested, and I'm sure a pretty young human girl joining the crew didn't hurt. Tristam and Omax are a bit more complicated.\"\n\n\"Complicated?\" she asked.\n\nPherris looked back at the door of Dalan's cabin, then back at Seren. His voice became much softer, as if concerned he would be overheard. \"It all goes back to Dalan,\" he said, \"and his uncle, of course.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"You ask a great deal of questions, Miss Morisse,\" Pherris said shrewdly. \"You are quite fortunate that gossip is the Zilargo national pastime.\"\n\nSeren laughed.\n\n\"Dalan is obsessed with his uncle's work, and rightly so,\" the captain said, answering her question.\n\n\"The Legacy is some sort of ticket to promotion to him with his house,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Well, it would be ironic, wouldn't it?\" Pherris said. \"It was Ashrem's work that crippled Dalan's career.\"\n\n\"Crippled?\"\n\nPherris sighed. He cast another look toward Dalan's cabin, but this time his gray eyes shone with sympathy. \"It's a sticky sort of story, all blood and politics,\" he said. \"Let's just say that old Ash earned his share of enemies in House Cannith right before the end. He was such a genius that few would ever really oppose him, but when he vanished, his rivals shifted their resentment onto Dalan.\"\n\n\"Dalan said Ashrem disappeared?\" Seren asked. \"I was told he died.\"\n\n\"Died, vanished, it's all the same,\" Pherris said. \"Near the end of the war, Ashrem packed up his flagship, the Dying Sun, and left Zilargo for Metrol, the capital of Cyre. Kiris went with him. She told me that Ash intended to make peace with his family, to make peace with everyone\u2014whatever that meant. That was two days before the Day of Mourning. Ashrem's ship hasn't been seen since, but House Cannith proclaimed him dead. That was bad news for Dalan, as it meant all of Ashrem's enemies had to find someone new to focus their hatred on. Dalan isn't exactly popular in his House these days.\"\n\n\"Hard to believe,\" she said wryly. \"He's such a charmer.\"\n\nPherris's bushy brows furrowed. \"You'd be surprised,\" he answered. \"Dalan is coarse when he has to be, but he has a way of getting what he wants out of people. It's to his credit that despite all his enemies, he managed to remain the Tinkers' Guildmaster in Wroat.\"\n\nSeren cocked her head at the gnome, surprised by the words of praise.\n\n\"Oh, don't get me wrong,\" the captain said quickly. \"I don't like Dalan much, but even I won't deny his talents. Dalan is clever; he knows how people think. He knows how to make them think. He knows what you're about to say before you say it. He knows how to make you change your mind, and you'll believe it was your own idea. But for a Cannith, even that gets you only so far. Wordplay and manipulation have a place, but the Makers want results. Other than a few dragonmark tricks, Dalan has no magical talent. He knew if he wanted to earn a place in his House it would be through his uncle's accomplishments, but he had no chance to understand Ashrem's work alone. So he sought out Ashrem's apprentice.\"\n\n\"Dalan said that Ashrem's colleagues and students were missing or dead,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Oh, not all of them,\" Pherris said. \"Just the most important ones. Kiris vanished with Ashrem. Orren Thardis disappeared not long after. Bishop Llaine Grove and Emil Harek were murdered last year. Norra Cais has been missing for months. Those five were the ones who helped Ashrem with his most critical research. Tristam was just an apprentice, and he left Ashrem two months before the Day of Mourning.\" Pherris frowned at Seren. \"Ashrem refused to sponsor Tristam for membership in House Cannith, and Tristam resigned in outrage. The boy came to work in my shipyard after that, and Omax followed him like he always does. Just on about a year ago, Dalan came to us with his grand quest. Tristam was eager for a chance to prove himself, to reclaim his master's work and earn a place in the House of Making.\" Pherris sighed. \"Poor Tristam. He's a bright lad, but he's such an idiot.\"\n\n\"I've had somewhat the same impression of him,\" she said.\n\n\"You don't know the half of it,\" Pherris said. \"So much potential ruined by so much doubt. Makes me want to toss him over the rail and be done with him some days. But he has his moments. Omax is proof of that.\"\n\n\"Did Tristam build the warforged?\" Seren asked.\n\nPherris laughed. \"No, no, no,\" he said, then paused. \"Well, actually, yes, I suppose he did but only in a sense. Nobody builds warforged anymore, not since the end of the war. No, Tristam saved Omax's life, gave him purpose when he had none. Beyond that, I'm not at liberty to say.\"\n\n\"More secrets,\" Seren said ruefully.\n\n\"Not my secret to share,\" Pherris said. \"Some of us prefer to leave the past where it is. Omax follows Tristam because the boy gave him a chance to become something better. Omax is not what he used to be. He's some sort of holy man now, calls himself a seeker on a path of enlightenment. If you want to know more, you'll have to ask them yourself.\"\n\n\"Tristam doesn't seem an inspiring sort,\" she said.\n\n\"Well, like I said, he has his moments,\" Pherris countered. \"Everyone on this ship has their moments. I suppose you do, too.\"\n\nSeren stood up languidly and frowned at the gnome. \"How do you know for sure?\"\n\nHe only laughed and nodded at the figurehead. \"Because she likes you,\" he said.\n\nSeren looked at the gnome for a long moment. He only smiled at her intently.\n\n\"How far to Black Pit?\" she asked, changing the subject as she looked out at the clouds once again.\n\n\"Six hundred and eighty-two miles,\" he said.\n\nSeren looked back at him, eyes wide. Her home village was almost as far from Wroat, and the trip had taken her a month on foot. \"How long will we be airborne?\" she asked.\n\n\"Three days,\" he said. Seren said nothing for several moments, and Pherris shrugged uncomfortably. \"I'm allowing time to take on supplies, of course. I don't see any point in rushing.\"\n\nSeren looked back down at the clouds. There was no sense of such speed, only a timeless sea of sky. The airship actually felt as if she were moving very slowly. The tiny black shape of Blizzard shot up out of a cloud and dove back down. \"I'm going to lie down again,\" she said.\n\n\"Suit yourself.\"\n\nShe climbed down the ladder into the cargo bay. She noticed Omax sitting among the piled crates. She stepped forward carefully, trying not to make any sound, studying the warforged's massive shape. He looked disturbingly human. His head was almost featureless, still capped with the incongruous woolen hat. Flesh and bone were replaced by sculpted adamantine metal and polished dark wood. Yet the creation was not flawless. As she stared at him, she saw a network of dents and scars laced through his body, a history of battle and conflict. Omax's head was bowed. The construct repeated a low chant, almost a whisper, and Seren moved closer to hear. To her surprise she recognized the words. It was a hymn often sung by the monks of Dol Arrah in the fishermen's quarter\u2014the prayer of a warrior seeking redemption.\n\nThe song stopped.\n\n\"I am sorry, Miss Morisse, I did not notice you,\" he said. \"Did you need something?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Sorry to disturb you.\"\n\nHis blue eyes pulsed as he peered over one shoulder.\n\nSeren returned to her cabin, leaving the warforged in peace. The door of Tristam's cabin stood open now, and the hall was filled with acrid, oily smoke. Fearing a fire, Seren looked inside. It was as small as her cabin, but where hers was empty this one was stuffed with clutter. It featured a small pallet and a table, but also contained a narrow bookcase stuffed with leather-bound tomes, loose journals, and yellowing scrolls. A model airship hung from the ceiling, a perfect reproduction of Karia Naille with an elemental ring sculpted of silvered steel. The table was covered with vials, crystals, and other pieces of alchemical equipment. The oily smoke rose from a bubbling retort filled with clear fluid. A lumpy clay man the size of a small cat sat on the table nearby, waving the smoke toward the nearby porthole as best it could. Tristam sat on the pallet nearby, reading a book, seemingly unconcerned.\n\n\"What is that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Distillation,\" Tristam said, peering up at her over his spectacles. \"I'm purifying some basilisk humors I picked up in the city. They're useful for potions of leaping, though a lot of people don't like the chalky flavor. If you mix it with a bit of rum, it's fine. I apologize about the smoke; it's sort of a necessary...\"\n\n\"No, that,\" she said, interrupting him.\n\nHe followed her eyes to the clay man. \"Oh it's a homunculus,\" he said. It looked up at Seren briefly and returned to waving away the smoke. \"A construct. It helps me in my work.\"\n\n\"Like Omax?\" she asked.\n\n\"No,\" Tristam said uncomfortably. \"Well, sort of. They're based on the same principles, but a homunculus isn't like a warforged. It's not alive.\"\n\n\"How can you tell Omax is alive and the homunculus isn't?\" she asked.\n\nHe looked at her silently for a moment. \"How can you tell that you're alive?\" he said, shrugging. \"Listen, Seren, is there anything else? I really am sort of busy.\"\n\nSeren nodded and turned to leave, but paused in the doorway. \"Tristam, why were you so angry when you learned we were going to Black Pit?\" she said.\n\n\"Because Black Pit is dangerous,\" he said, not looking up from his book. \"I don't think we should risk Karia Naille in a place like that.\"\n\n\"You were angry about Zed Arthen becoming involved,\" she said.\n\n\"You don't know Arthen,\" he said. \"We don't need him.\"\n\n\"Is he untrustworthy?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's not that,\" Tristam answered evasively. \"He's good in a crisis. The rest of the time he's only as reliable as he chooses to be.\"\n\n\"Then is it because the lens is the first real clue you've found, and Dalan doesn't trust you with it?\"\n\nTristam's eyes widened. \"I don't need your analysis, Seren,\" he said. \"Why don't you go find something to steal?\"\n\nSeren glared at Tristam. A dozen scathing replies came to mind, but it wasn't worth the trouble. She stalked out of the room toward her cabin.\n\n\"Seren, wait,\" Tristam said.\n\nShe slammed the door of his room, leaving him alone with his homunculus and the smoke.\n\nZed Arthen was not what you might traditionally consider an imposing figure. Short and stocky with bland features, he had a face that did not stand out in memory. Overall, he didn't mind much. Anonymity was a useful tool. Only fools became an inquisitive to be famous.\n\nArthen walked at an unhurried pace through the dank streets of Black Pit, his cane heavily stumping the cobbles beside him. The village was crowded this late afternoon, as crowded as Black Pit ever got. Most intelligent citizens knew to conclude what business they could before the sun went down. That was simple practicality. In a place like this, you avoided the shadows. The streets were slick with fouled water. A constant stream of sickly gasses roiled up out of Khyber, mixing with the clouds above and producing a chunky, oily black rain that stank like rotting meat. The puddles lingered for days without evaporating, much longer than normal water should. It was disgusting, but relatively harmless.\n\nThe people here claimed that you'd get used to the slime after a while, just like they claimed you got used to the shrieks that reverberated from the depths of the pit. It wasn't true. Nobody could ever really get used to this place, not if they were sane. All but the boldest citizens sought shelter when the clouds gathered and said a brief prayer to whatever gods they still believed in when the shrieking began. After all this time, even Zed gave the puddles a wide berth and felt a sense of nausea whenever he heard thunder approaching.\n\nThe flow of the crowd parted around a member of the Cleaners Guild. The solitary man knelt near an alleyway, shoveling some of the more offensive leavings of yesterday's storm into a large pail. He wore his guild's traditional apron, mask, and thick leather gloves. The cleaners wore the masks both to protect them from the stench of the rains and to hide their identities, for few citizens would willingly associate with someone who shoveled Khyber's offal for a living. Despite the cleaners' reviled status, there were brass bells on every street corner to summon them. Nobody really knew what the garbage that seeped out of the Black Pit really was, but someone had to deal with it.\n\nZed did not step aside as the others did, but strode directly toward the man, nodding in respect and dropping a few silver coins on the street. The cleaner looked up with surprise, probably more shocked by Zed's acknowledgment than his donation. The inquisitive couldn't help but respect the cleaners. Living in a forsaken village populated by deserters, murderers, smugglers, and opportunists, they spent their lives trying to make things better. In a few days, the rains would come again and undo all their work, and the cleaners would start over.\n\nIn a way, Zed considered them kindred spirits.\n\nZed turned down a side street, away from the flow of the crowd. He had entered a court lined with small shops. Some bore small signs, advertising themselves as herbalists or apothecaries. Most bore no signs at all, offering wares better left unadvertised. Zed stopped in the shadows of a doorway and propped his cane against the wall. He drew a long pipe, tobacco pouch, and small box of matches from his coat as he studied the streets and windows. Cupping his hand around the pipe to block the wind, he struck a match and inhaled deeply, wincing at the bitter aftertaste. Confident that he was not followed or watched, Zed limped across the court and entered Ein's Apothecary Shop, leaving a thin trail of smoke in his wake. The pungent smell of dried herbs drove away the stink of the rain. Shelves lined the walls, crowded with neatly labeled glass vials or paper packets filled with herbal remedies. A scrawny, nervous-looking little man sat behind a counter, crushing blue flowers with a mortar and pestle. He looked up at Zed suspiciously.\n\n\"Arthen,\" he said. \"It has been some time.\" He looked curiously at Zed's cane.\n\n\"It was a strange trip, Neril,\" Zed said, exhaling a cloud of smoke.\n\n\"Did you find what you were looking for?\" the apothecary asked.\n\nZed set a small clay bottle on the counter with a clack. The apothecary looked mildly confused when he saw the label.\n\n\"I hired you to remove our problems, not increase them,\" Neril whispered in a low voice.\n\n\"Koathil sap,\" Zed said in a loud, clear voice. \"I understand that your boss is interested in purchasing this?\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" Neril said with a sigh. The apothecary glanced behind him nervously and reached for the bottle. \"Just let me collect this, and I will obtain your payment from Master Ein immediately.\"\n\nZed cupped his hand over the bottle and gave a tight smile. \"I'd rather deliver it myself,\" he said. \"Just to be sure.\"\n\n\"You'll have your payment, Arthen,\" Neril said, a hint of anger in his voice. \"Master Ein is a man who repays his debts.\"\n\n\"I've heard differently,\" Zed said, tapping his pipe out on the floor and tucking it back into his coat. \"Indulge me, or I take my business elsewhere.\" He picked up the small bottle, cupping it in one hand.\n\nThe apothecary looked at Zed with a disappointed frown. He sadly shook his head at the inquisitive. \"Very well,\" he said. \"This way.\"\n\nThe apothecary led Zed through the back room of the shop and up a narrow flight of stairs. The second floor was a narrow hall lined with doors. Zed had the distinct feeling as he followed Neril down the hall that he was being watched from behind more than one door. A large man in black leather armor stood before the door at the end of the hall. He glanced at Neril dismissively, then gave Zed a stern, appraising look.\n\n\"Zed Arthen,\" Neril said. \"He has business with...\"\n\n\"We know,\" the guard said. He gestured impatiently, signaling for Zed to raise his arms. Zed leaned his cane against the wall and complied. The guard patted Zed down thoroughly, pausing to inspect his pipe before returning it to his coat. The guard snatched up the cane with a suspicious frown, inspecting it for any hidden weapons. Satisfied Zed bore none, he handed back the cane and nodded toward the door. Neril shot Zed a final, betrayed scowl and returned to the stairs.\n\nWithin was a large office, dominated by a rich mahogany desk. The man who sat behind it might have been handsome once, but his face was pale and slick with sweat. Dark rings hung below his eyes. He looked up from his ledgers with an irritated scowl. Behind him, another guard placed one hand casually on his sword. A pretty young girl sat on an overstuffed chair in the corner, glancing up from the book she was reading with a coy smile.\n\n\"Zed Arthen to see you, boss,\" the first guard said.\n\nMaster Ein sneered and snapped his ledger closed. \"Sir Arthen,\" he said.\n\n\"Master Arthen,\" Zed corrected him.\n\n\"Of course,\" Ein said. \"Normally I would be quite upset as such an unreasonable demand on my time. My subordinates exist for a reason, to shelter me from annoying distractions. However, if you truly offer what you claim to offer, I am eager to do business.\"\n\nZed walked to the edge of the desk, leaning his cane against the side. He set the clay bottle between himself and Ein. He saw the girl look up intently, setting her book aside. Ein reached for the bottle, but Zed nonchalantly plucked it up again.\n\n\"Before we trade, let's talk price,\" Zed said. \"Koathil sap is hard to come by.\"\n\n\"Five dragons a bottle. That is my price.\"\n\n\"The tree grows in the Watching Wood, in the heart of Droaam,\" Zed said. \"That's a long walk, Ein, and Droaam makes this place look safer than a lover's arms. Five platinum won't even cover my travel expenses.\"\n\n\"Six.\"\n\n\"It isn't as if this stuff is particularly difficult to sell, either,\" Zed said, ignoring the offer. \"It's in high demand. House Jorasco uses it in anesthetics. A proper assassin's guild would value it as well, I imagine.\"\n\n\"Seven.\"\n\n\"That's not even to speak of its addictive qualities, which I hear are quite considerable if used irresponsibly,\" Zed said. He began to juggle the bottle between his hands. The girl half-jumped from her seat and approached the table, standing at Ein's side. Ein's eyes widened.\n\n\"Eight platinum, no more. And be careful with that!\"\n\n\"I could get more in Wynarn,\" Zed said, cupping the bottle in his palm. \"The wizards are very eager to get their hands on this stuff.\"\n\n\"Wizards?\" Ein asked.\n\nZed opened the bottle. The tiny cap tumbled between his fingers and rolled across the desk toward the girl's hand. \"Khyber,\" he swore, smiling at her. \"Could you get that for me?\"\n\nShe bent and reached for the cap with one hand, then drew back. \"Get it yourself,\" she said, eyes narrowing.\n\nZed felt something brush over his awareness, like a feather across his mind. He ignored it, looking at the girl evenly. Fear flickered in her eyes.\n\nEin snatched up the metal cap with a muttered curse and tossed it back to Zed, who caught it in midair. He had missed the exchange between Arthen and the girl.\n\n\"Anyway, as I was saying. Wizards,\" Zed said. \"Koathil sap has been discovered to be a powerful naturally occurring conduit for enchantment. It weakens the will, leaves the user open to magical suggestion. It's a relatively recent discovery, but I still have a few friends at the University.\"\n\nEin's frown deepened. He glared at Zed with thinly veiled hate. The girl now stood close by Ein's side, eyeing the bottle warily. She placed one hand on Ein's shoulder. \"Wizards are of no concern to me,\" he said, his voice an angry hiss. \"I will pay you ten platinum for each bottle.\"\n\nZed stopped tossing the bottle. He took the cork out and sniffed its contents curiously. \"Now that's a very attractive offer. If I ever actually have any real koathil sap, I'll keep it in mind. In the meantime, how much would you pay for holy water?\"\n\nWith that, Zed flicked the bottle at the girl standing beside Master Ein, spraying the contents in her face. She shrieked and doubled over in pain. Ein ducked under his desk quickly just as his two guards drew their swords and charged. Zed held his cane with both hands, blocking the first man's sword even as he dodged the second man's blow. He delivered a knee to the first man's groin, followed by a sharp blow to the jaw that left him senseless. He turned and fell back just as the other guard's sword tore through his flowing coat. The guard lifted his blade for another blow, then stopped, jaw dropping open in horror.\n\nThe girl who had hovered near Ein had risen to her feet again, but not as she was. Her eyes now shone with an infernal yellow light, and her long fingers curled into claws. A pair of tattered bat wings erupted from her back, and a long tail curled around one long leg. She radiated a bizarre, exquisite sensuality despite her inhuman appearance. She blinked painfully and rubbed at her eyes, still blinded by the holy water.\n\n\"What in Khyber is that?\" the guard said fearfully.\n\n\"A demon,\" Zed said, recovering the unconscious man's sword. \"Now help me kill it.\"\n\nThe guard nodded and charged toward the demon. His sword struck her across the chest. She staggered backward from the force of the blow but took no real injury.\n\n\"You don't want to do this, Arthen,\" she said in a sweet voice. \"You want to help me get out of here.\"\n\nZed felt a buzzing sensation at the back of his mind, but that was all. Her catlike eyes narrowed when she realized nothing had happened. She turned to the guard instead, who was still staring at his sword in disbelief.\n\n\"Kill Zed Arthen,\" she said.\n\nThe guard turned, facing Zed with a dull, confused expression. Zed rammed a heavy shoulder into the guard, knocking him on the floor. He charged past at full speed, keeping his eyes averted from the demon's. He swung the guard's sword, but she caught it in one hand, fingers clenching around the blade.\n\n\"Holy water,\" she sneered, wrenching the sword from his hand. \"With a cold iron cap on the bottle. Edgeroot smoke to buffer your will against mine. You came well prepared, Arthen, but it was not enough. I am stronger than you, and you have no weapons.\"\n\n\"You didn't take a good look at the cane,\" he said. He struck the demon hard across the jaw. Her head snapped back, blood streaming from between her lips. She staggered against the wall, looking up at Zed with a suddenly fearful expression. The cane fell heavily a second time. She shrieked in agony and vanished with a flash of light, leaving behind a smoking plume of brimstone.\n\n\"What was that?\" Master Ein said in a terrified voice. He peered out from under his desk.\n\n\"A succubus,\" Zed said. \"Sometimes they crawl out of the Pit, sometimes they just get drawn here.\"\n\n\"Is it dead?\" Ein demanded.\n\n\"Unlikely,\" Zed answered. \"They're damned hard to kill. No pun intended. She probably won't be back for a while, though. They usually sulk for a bit when they get caught.\"\n\nThe remaining conscious guard helped Ein to his feet. He looked away from Zed with an embarrassed expression. \"Seven months!\" Ein shouted. \"For seven months Narisa has been beside me! I trusted her with every aspect of my business, all of my secrets!\"\n\n\"That's what they do,\" Zed said.\n\n\"There's no telling how much damage she's done,\" Ein said, tearing at his hair with one hand. \"How much of what I've done has been really me and how much was that... thing?\" He gestured vaguely at the smoking floor.\n\n\"Hard to say,\" Zed said. \"At the very least, she was the one who made you start drinking koathil. It made it easier for her to control you. My best advice is to get a good night's sleep. And keep a cold iron weapon close at hand; succubi are big on revenge. I'll check in from time to time.\" He offered his cane to Master Ein, who accepted it with a grateful if harried smile. The inquisitive walked toward the door, no longer moving with a limp.\n\n\"Sir Arthen,\" Ein said. Zed glowered over his shoulder. \"Master Arthen,\" he corrected. \"I would appreciate your discretion. If my competitors were to learn about this...\"\n\n\"My discretion for yours,\" Zed said. \"Tell your thugs to stop dealing dreamlily in my city.\"\n\n\"Master Arthen,\" Ein retorted, feigning insult. \"I would not participate in the sale of an illegal substance.\"\n\nZed looked back at Master Ein. Zed's face was no longer the bland, easily forgotten face of a random traveler. His eyes were filled with steel. He flipped his sword in one hand, its point directed at Ein's gaze. Master Ein blanched, his former outrage replaced with frightened shame. \"Count your blessings, Master Ein,\" Zed said. \"You've won back your soul today. All I want is this favor. Weigh it.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" Ein said with a deflated sigh. \"Whatever you wish. I am in your debt.\"\n\n\"Like I said,\" Zed said, planting the sword in the wooden floor. \"I'll check in from time to time.\"\n\nThe inquisitive made his way out of the tiny shop, pausing to take the small pouch of gold that Neril had left at the edge of the counter. The old apothecary hadn't known what was plaguing his master, but it had twisted what passed for an honest business in Black Pit into something even more reviled. Nobody really knew what the garbage that seeped out of the Black Pit was, but everyone agreed someone had to deal with it. Zed Arthen was one of those people.\n\n\"Thank you, Sir Arthen,\" Neril said, looking up from his work from a grateful smile.\n\n\"Master Arthen,\" he corrected, stepping back out into the streets.\n\nA chill wind blew through the streets of Black Pit. Zed shifted his shoulders, huddling into his coat. His hand found the rip in the fabric left behind by the guard's sword, and he mumbled a quiet curse. This was his favorite coat. He'd have to see about getting it fixed tomorrow. The sun was setting now. That Zed understood the dangers of the Pit better than most only made him more eager to avoid them. The distant shrieks of Khyber grew louder. This was no night to be out unarmed. No doubt all manner of peculiar things would happen tonight, mysteries he'd be called upon to investigate.\n\nTomorrow would be an interesting day.\n\nZed walked briskly toward his office. He heard the creak of a shutter as he passed the building next door to his. That was Old Merkin, local spy and information peddler. Arthen pretended not to notice him. So many of the dangers of this world were much less threatening when they thought they weren't noticed.\n\nAs he reached the door, Arthen's head cocked suddenly. A strange sound met his ears. Not that Black Pit wasn't a place for strange sounds, but this one was different, a humming counterpoint to the sounds of the Pit. It was familiar. Zed looked to the southern sky and saw a streak of blue moving toward the city. It was the fire of an elemental airship. He recognized the hue of the flame and timbre of the elemental ring at once.\n\n\"Karia Naille,\" he mumbled to himself in astonishment, stepping back out into the street for a better look.\n\nIt was the simple things that could ruin a man's entire evening.\n\nSeren wasn't sure what she had expected when Gerith described Black Pit. As the airship circled for a landing, whatever expectations she might have had were wiped clean. She heard the pit before she ever saw it, an eerie harmony of inhuman shrieks echoing from the depths. A tremendous wound split the surface between the jagged Blackcap Mountains and the lush forests to the east. The earth within the pit was a disturbing red, like fresh blood. The surrounding land was black and dead. From above, Seren could see veins of dead soil twisting from the pit into the woodlands. It was as if Khyber were reaching out with long fingers, slowly drawing the life of the forest into itself.\n\nThe village perched on a plateau at western edge of the pit. It was no larger than Ringbriar, but while Seren's home consisted of a single road surrounded by houses and businesses, Black Pit was a disorderly sprawl of ill-tended buildings. The setting sun painted the village in a red hue, only deepening the sense that the land was raw and bleeding.\n\nShe stood at the rail as the ship circled the noxious coils of smoke rising from the Black Pit. Pherris was busy at the helm, and Dalan had disappeared into his cabin again. Gerith sat by Blizzard's perch, singing a quiet song to calm the nervous glidewing. Tristam and Omax stood at the opposite side of the deck. Seren sensed the artificer casting nervous looks in her direction. He had attempted to confront her a few times since their conversation three days ago, but she avoided him. He had even sent Omax to offer an apology, which she had answered noncommittally. She wasn't ready to forgive him yet.\n\nThere was something hypnotic, an odd ghastly beauty to the pit. Seren found it difficult to look away and hoped that Karia Naille might fly in for a closer look. The more rational part of her mind was horrified by her own fascination, and she was glad that Pherris kept the ship a good distance away.\n\n\"If I woke up and found something like this next to my village, I think I'd move somewhere else,\" Seren commented.\n\nPherris chuckled. \"The pit was here first, Miss Morisse,\" he said. \"The village came later.\"\n\nShe looked back at him incredulously. \"Someone built a village next to that on purpose?\"\n\nThe captain just shrugged and kept his attention on his course. She noticed that he assiduously avoided looking down.\n\n\"I've always wondered about that as well,\" Tristam said to no one in particular, \"What kind of idiot would build a village in a place like this?\"\n\n\"A certain sort of person just wants to go live where he won't be found,\" Pherris said. \"You should be grateful you don't understand it, Master Xain.\"\n\n\"What's making that noise?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Just the wind, or so they say,\" Tristam said. \"Of course, folks here say a lot of things so they can sleep at night. No one's ever gone into the pit and returned, so I guess they can pretend it's whatever they want.\"\n\nDalan's cabin door opened and d'Cannith stepped out, wincing at the relative brightness. His expression only soured when he saw the smoking pit beneath them. \"Well, at least we are on schedule,\" he grumbled.\n\n\"Two sky towers at the southern end of the village, Master d'Cannith,\" Pherris reported. \"Probably used by local smugglers. If it's all the same, I'd rather just hover in the forest and send Omax in looking for Arthen. As we're not loading cargo, it seems the safest route. No sense attracting attention in a place like this.\"\n\n\"Ordinarily that would be wise advice, but in this case attention is precisely what we want,\" Dalan said.\n\nPherris looked back at Dalan incredulously and returned his attention to the wheel. \"As you say, Master d'Cannith.\"\n\nThe airship banked, and Seren grasped the rail to steady herself. The pungent smell of the pit grew stronger as the ship circled slowly downward. They swooped over the village, dots below swiftly resolving themselves into people. Some stopped and looked up to watch the airship fly overhead. Others simply trudged onward, too jaded to care or too distracted for it to matter.\n\nA pair of rickety-looking towers stood at the far southern end of the village, bordering the road. Seren thought it strange at first that such a small village would have airship facilities, until she thought about it. If Black Pit really was home to the Brelish black market, the towers would come in handy for the occasional wealthy smuggler. The towers looked shoddy and hastily built. From the clutter that surrounded them, Seren suspected that a few of the locals had made homes inside.\n\n\"Prepare to secure the vessel,\" Pherris said as the ship pulled up alongside the western tower.\n\n\"Aye, Captain,\" Gerith said, gesturing quickly to Seren.\n\nShe followed the halfling, leaping from the deck to the tower's docking bridge. A few terrified chickens scampered out of the way, leaving a swirl of downy feathers fluttering to the ground. Seren knelt to tie the rope through one of the iron rings mounted on each side of the bridge but stopped short, looking up cautiously at the four burly men who had emerged from the tower. They looked down at her with smug, dangerous expressions. Their faces shifted to blank looks of terror as a heavy thud sounded on the bridge beside her, followed by another.\n\n\"Good evening, gentlemen,\" Omax said in his even, metallic voice. Tristam stood beside the warforged, letting his coat hang open to display the sword at his hip. Seren tied off the rope and edged behind the warforged, as did Gerith.\n\n\"I assume one of you is the tower master?\" Dalan asked, stepping forward and greeting the thugs with a disconcertingly pleasant smile.\n\n\"Er, yes, that would be me,\" said the leader of the group. He was the largest of the four, an unkempt man whose wealth of dirt and stubble was broken only by a crisscross white scar on his neck. \"Docking fee is two gold per week.\"\n\n\"Omax, please pay these gentlemen,\" Dalan said.\n\nOmax reached into his pocket and drew out two gold coins. The money looked ridiculously small cupped in his adamantine palm as he offered it to the men. The tower master shouldered one of his henchmen, who nervously stepped forward to snatch the coins. Omax closed his hand over the coins with a clank, nearly snatching the man's fingers. He drew back with a start.\n\nDalan chuckled and looked embarrassed. \"My apologies, but my associate is a stickler for formalities,\" Dalan said. \"I shall need to see the King's Seal, tower master, just to make certain that you are in fact the proper authority.\"\n\nThe tower master chuckled. \"This is Black Pit, my friend,\" he said. \"We don't need any official sanction from the King here.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Dalan answered. \"How very interesting. It has long been my personal belief that a man willing to call a total stranger 'my friend' is invariably the least friendly, most untrustworthy sort of person. As pleasing as it is to see that once again I am not wrong, that is no excuse for either your behavior or your odor. If you are not an official authority, then your presence is irrelevant to me. Get away from my ship, or Omax will remove you.\"\n\nSeren's hand moved to the dagger tucked in the back of her belt as she edged back toward the ship. Dalan glanced back at her, his eyes narrowing, making her stop where she was. Seren caught his meaning\u2014a united front was important. Dalan looked back at the four men and folded his arms across his chest. Standing before the thugs, his face remained calm and unafraid. Omax stepped in front of the guildmaster, calmly tucking the coins back into his pocket. He fell into a relaxed stance, hands curled into fists near his waist, and bowed his head to the four men.\n\n\"Bah,\" the tower master said with a sneer. \"Don't let the fat man and his golem intimidate you. I've fought my share of warforged. They die just like men.\"\n\nOmax lunged forward, seized the man's chest in one hand, and hurled him from the tower bridge. There was a shrill yelp of terror, followed by the soft splat of a man landing heavily in the mud. Omax turned and faced the three remaining men calmly. They backed into the tower, then ran down the stairs as quickly as they were able.\n\n\"He survived,\" Dalan said, looking down as the tower master staggered to his feet and limped hurriedly away.\n\n\"What purpose would killing him serve?\" Omax asked.\n\n\"He may come back,\" Dalan said, sighing as he strode back onto the ship.\n\n\"And if he were to die, others might come seeking vengeance,\" Omax said, following him.\n\n\"If there would be risk whether he lived or died,\" Dalan said, looking back at the warforged. \"Then why let him live? That man is useless scum. Probably a killer.\"\n\nOmax shrugged at Dalan. \"Or just a desperate man,\" the warforged said. \"Mercy can put a desperate man on a path to redemption.\"\n\n\"Or grant him the opportunity to kill another day,\" Dalan said.\n\n\"Not everyone is a killer, Dalan,\" Tristam said tersely.\n\n\"Tristam, you misunderstand me,\" Dalan said, looking at the artificer with a smirk. \"I trust Omax's judgment and I value his opinions, even if I disagree with them. I was having a philosophical discussion. If you cannot add anything insightful to our discourse, then stay quiet and listen.\"\n\nTristam looked away, face darkening. Seren thought she might take some small joy in seeing Tristam humiliated after the way he'd insulted her, but she did not.\n\n\"But this is not the time for conversation,\" Dalan said, heading toward the cabin. \"Tristam, get into the village and find Zed Arthen. Take Seren with you to keep you out of trouble.\"\n\n\"I don't really know this village,\" Seren said to Dalan's back.\n\n\"Neither, thankfully, do any of us, save by reputation,\" Dalan said, pausing at the door. \"Nonetheless, if you could survive on the streets of Wroat, I'm certain you'll do well enough here. You'll do far better than Tristam, in any case.\"\n\n\"I will let no harm come to either of you, Seren,\" Omax said.\n\n\"Your loyalty is duly noted, Omax, but I need you to remain here,\" Dalan said. \"I cannot risk leaving Karia Naille undefended in case the 'local authorities' return.\"\n\n\"The ship isn't exactly undefended, Dalan,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Contingencies only retain their strength when they remain in place,\" Dalan said cryptically. \"Omax will remain here as our first line of defense.\"\n\nThe warforged looked at Tristam, waiting for his decision. The artificer looked at Dalan, who peered back with a patient, thoughtful expression.\n\n\"Better listen to Dalan, Omax,\" Tristam said quietly.\n\n[ Omax bowed to his friend. Dalan closed his cabin door ]\n\n\"Good luck, both of you,\" Gerith said cheerfully. The halfling climbed back onto the deck, carrying a struggling chicken under one arm. He headed toward the galley.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Seren said, brushing past Tristam and hurrying down the tower stairs.\n\nShe exited the tower to find Tristam already waiting at the bottom. She did a double-take, looking from him back at the door behind her.\n\n\"Feather fall ring,\" he said, holding up a hand to display a bronze ring with a smirk. \"What good's a little magic if you can't show it off, right?\"\n\n\"You made that?\" she asked.\n\n\"I haven't mastered ringcraft, but soon,\" he said. \"My friend Orren Thardis gave it to me after Ashrem suspended my teaching. He was brilliant; probably taught me as much as Ashrem did.\" Tristam bent low to examine the tower's doorknob. \"I think he gave me the ring because he felt sorry for me.\"\n\nSeren surveyed the area for any signs of danger. A number of locals were still staring at the ship in wonder. The locals all looked generally shady and suspicious, making it difficult to tell if anyone was a relevant danger.\n\n\"Wisdom,\" Tristam said under his breath.\n\n\"What?\" she asked, looking back.\n\n\"That's the password to get through the ward I just put on this door,\" he said, looking at her earnestly. \"Remember it, Seren. Please. I don't want you hurt.\"\n\nShe nodded and gestured for him to follow. She took to the middle of the road, staying as visible as possible to reduce the chance of ambush. Tristam followed, remaining silent for a long time.\n\n\"Seren,\" he finally said, still walking a step behind her. \"Did Omax talk to you?\"\n\n\"I don't like apologies,\" Seren said. \"They're just words.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Tristam said. \"Well, by that logic, when I stupidly called you a thief, that was just words too. Therefore no harm done and I don't need to offer a worthless apology. Right?\"\n\nSeren scowled at Tristam. He offered a crooked grin, and she had a difficult time remembering just why she was so angry at him.\n\n\"Fine. Apology accepted,\" she said, rolling her eyes. They continued walking down the street.\n\n\"Boldrei's blood, that's a relief,\" he said, exhaling. He walked beside her instead of behind, a bit of his cocky self-assurance returning. \"I have enough problems without worrying about you stealing something from me in revenge.\"\n\nShe glared at him again, but his quick laugh took the sting off his words. \"Joking! If there's one man in all of Khorvaire who has no right to judge you for your past, it's me. All in all, I think if you compared our respective professions yours is more worthy of respect. At least a thief is honest.\"\n\n\"How do you figure that?\" she asked. \"You're an artificer. You make things that change people's lives.\"\n\n\"We also make weapons, Seren,\" Tristam said. \"For every airship and lightning rail you can name, I can point to the warforged... or to Cyre.\"\n\n\"Omax is a warforged,\" she said. \"He seems like a good person. So to speak.\"\n\n\"He is,\" Tristam said, \"but that doesn't change the fact that his people were created to kill. The warforged were supposed to be monsters. The fact that some of them, like Omax, are strong enough to rise above their origins was not intentional.\"\n\n\"If you think so little of magecraft, then why are you helping Dalan find the Legacy?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because someone has to make sure it's used responsibly,\" he said. \"Whatever it really is, it's powerful, and I don't want to see it misused. That was why I was so suspicious toward you, Seren. I can't stand the thought of anyone exploiting Ashrem's work. You have to admit we didn't meet on very good terms. You had one of Ashrem's journals in your pocket.\"\n\n\"In a bag, actually,\" she said. \"But you think you can trust Dalan d'Cannith with Ashrem's secrets?\" She looked at him thoughtfully.\n\n\"I do,\" Tristam said, though he hesitated just a moment. \"Dalan wants what I want. He wants to find the truth before someone else does. But that makes me wonder what we're doing here.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Seren asked. She looked at him questioningly, then took stock of their surroundings again. A crudely painted sign depicting a full mug of ale hung over a nearby door. A tavern was as good a place to find information as any, so she headed that way.\n\n\"We've been looking for the Legacy for a long time now,\" Tristam said. \"Zed Arthen was a member of our original crew, but the search was too much for him. He abandoned us and came here.\" He looked at her seriously. \"I don't trust Zed, Seren. I never liked him, even before he left us. The Knights of Thrane don't cast out one of their own without reason.\"\n\nTristam opened the tavern door for her, breaking the tension with an exaggerated, bow. She chuckled and stepped inside. She was surprised to find no one drinking inside. A barkeep in a dirty apron was setting chairs on tables.\n\n\"Closed,\" the man said in a bored voice. \"Sundown.\"\n\n\"Sundown?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Oh, you're new,\" he said with an annoyed sneer. His right eye drifted to the right. \"Black Pit's no place to be out after dark. Get out quick. Find some place to sleep. Not here.\"\n\n\"We can take care of ourselves,\" Tristam said.\n\nThe bartender scratched his chin, grunted to himself, and returned to his work, ignoring Tristam. Seren was about to ask the man if he knew Zed Arthen when the door opened behind them. The tower master stepped inside, his clothes stained with jet-black mud. He was followed by the same three thugs as before, as well as two new arrivals. The barkeep quickly flipped the last chair onto the table and hurried out of the room. Seren looked around for any other exit. The only other door was the one the barkeep had just slipped through, and she heard a latch fall heavily in place.\n\n\"We saw you lock that tower door, magewright,\" the tower master said. He advanced as his thugs fanned out to block any path of escape.\n\nTristam drew his sword and wand, holding them in a ready stance. \"Stay back, Seren,\" he said, stepping between them.\n\n\"Put the sword away, boy,\" the thug said. His comrades drew small crossbows, aiming them at Tristam. \"The warforged is the one we want. Just tell us what we need to know and we'll only give you a beating. We'll even let the girl go.\" He gave Seren a ghastly grin. \"Eventually.\"\n\n\"You haven't the faintest idea who you've insulted,\" Tristam said. \"My name is Tristam Xain, and I rank among the most skilled swordsmen in the Lhazaar Principalities.\"\n\nThe man gave Tristam another appraising look and then laughed out loud. Tristam's bold fa\u00e7ade faded noticeably.\n\nSeren looked at the man coldly. \"Are you an idiot?\" she said. \"Omax let you live because he could. We aren't worth the pain we'd give you. Leave while you can.\"\n\nThe tower master looked at Seren soberly, then glanced back at Tristam, with a disdainful sneer. He reached for the heavy crossbow at his hip.\n\nA mocking chuckle sounded from the doorway, causing the thug to stay his hand. He turned quickly, aiming his crossbow at the newcomer. A stocky man in a long brown coat stepped into the room. His face was plain and unremarkable except for his sharp blue eyes. A long pipe hung from his lip, leaving a drifting plume of smoke as he entered. The newcomer looked at Seren, Tristam, and each of the men before looking at their leader again.\n\n\"This d-doesn't involve you, Arthen,\" the tower master said, stuttering in fear.\n\n\"I'm only trying to help you, Hareld,\" the man said, tapping out his pipe and tucking it into his coat. \"She's right, you know. You are an idiot,\" He looked at Seren with a sly grin. \"You can't even see her hands. Kol Korran knows what sort of weapon she's hiding under that cloak. The boy's no threat. I won't argue that, but look at the girl's eyes. She'll kill the first man that makes a move. Who will be first? Hesitate at all, and at least one of you won't walk away from this. Of course, that's your best-case scenario. That assumes that I don't plan to help them. That shifts the odds considerably.\"\n\n\"Help them?\" one of the others said, meekly.\n\n\"They are my clients,\" Arthen said. He plucked a chair from a nearby table and effortlessly wrenched one of its legs free, hefting it as an improvised club. \"Shall we begin?\"\n\nThe tower master lowered his crossbow and gestured for the others to do the same. \"No, no, that's not necessary,\" he said, stumbling over the words. \"We'll... we'll just go.\"\n\nArthen stepped away from the door, pointing the way with his club. The thugs nearly fell over each other in their haste to depart. When they were gone, Zed dropped the table leg on the floor and looked at Tristam with an unpleasant expression.\n\n\"So I'm nothing, Sir Arthen?\" Tristam asked, snapping his sword into its scabbard. \"I am honored to have risen so highly in your estimation.\"\n\n\"Don't start, boy,\" he said, leveling a dangerous glare at the artificer. \"Don't call me, 'Sir.'\"\n\nTristam's face darkened, but he looked away quickly.\n\nZed looked to Seren, expression softening only marginally. \"Zed Arthen, professional inquisitive,\" he said, flourishing his long coat in a half-bow.\n\n\"Seren Morisse,\" she answered, noticing the many pouches and small tools that hung from Arthen's belt and within his coat. \"We've been sent...\"\n\n\"I know who sent you,\" he interrupted. \"Normally I wouldn't mind keeping Dalan waiting, but we should get you back to your ship before dark.\"\n\n\"What happens here at night?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"The village is perched on a pit into the deepest hells of Khyber. Do you really need details?\" Zed said. \"Now let's go.\"\n\nSeren and Tristam filed back out of the tavern with Zed only a step behind. The streets were empty now, long shadows stretching across the road. The inquisitive hurried past them, his pace brisk as he kept a nervous eye on the setting sun.\n\n\"Could be nothing, mind you,\" Zed said as they jogged to keep up with him. \"It's usually nothing. One night in twenty. Of course, that night is well worth worrying about the other nineteen.\"\n\n\"Criminals and demons. Why do you live here, Arthen?\" Tristam said, shaking his head as they pressed on.\n\n\"Fairly preferable to your own circumstances,\" Zed said. \"Incidentally, Miss Morisse, I know we don't know one another and I hesitate to give advice to strangers, but I'd avoid becoming tangled up with Dalan d'Cannith.\"\n\n\"Arthen,\" Tristam said in a warning tone.\n\nZed ignored him. \"Whatever reason you have to work with him, whatever reason you think you need him, forget it. He's either lying to you or not telling you everything. Probably both. Leave him behind.\" He paused for a moment. \"Once you reach a port safer than Black Pit, just leave. Don't even say goodbye; just go.\"\n\n\"Like you did?\" Tristam asked, leaning close to whisper the password at the tower door.\n\n\"I'm serious,\" Zed said, ignoring Tristam. \"Don't give Dalan a chance to talk you out of it.\" He grasped her shoulder, stopping her at the tower door and looking earnestly into her eyes. \"D'Cannith has a way of endearing himself, of making the unreasonable seem reasonable. You do what he wants and you even think it's your idea.\"\n\n\"Zed, stop,\" Tristam said. He gently took Seren by the arm, pulling her away from the inquisitive. She didn't resist. \"Dalan doesn't have any sort of magic. All his dragonmark can do is fix things.\"\n\n\"Magic?\" Zed laughed. \"I'm not talking about magic. Dalan has never needed magic. The human mind is all he needs. Why do you think he sent you two into a dangerous place like this, unprotected, just before sunset? Because he knew I'd see the ship land. He knew I'd watch whoever came out, and he knew you'd be in danger. He knew I wouldn't leave Tristam to die, and that it was the only way to draw me back to Karia Naille. I suppose he told you some nonsense about how he trusted you not to get into trouble.\" Zed shook his head. \"And now here I am, walking right back into his ship. Dalan knows people, Seren.\" He tapped his temple with two thick fingers. \"He gets into their heads. Probably knows me better than I do.\" The inquisitive sighed as he looked up at the hovering airship. \"Just think about what I've said, all right?\"\n\n\"Seren, ignore him,\" Tristam said, shoving past Arthen through the tower door. \"He's a lunatic.\"\n\nSeren followed Tristam, only stopping briefly to look back at Zed. The shadows of Black Pit now crept across the streets. Arthen was looking back over one shoulder, into the darkness. It looked almost as if he were considering facing the dangers of being caught in the village at night rather than board Karia Naille.\n\nThen, slowly and methodically, Zed Arthen closed the door behind them and made his way up the tower stairs.\n\nWhat are you doing in here?\" Tristam asked, pushing open the door of his cabin with an annoyed frown.\n\nSeren looked up with a friendly smile. She sat on Tristam's cot, her feet kicked up on the chair nearby. A thick book lay open beside her, and the homunculus sat in her lap, staring blankly as she petted it on the head. \"Just reading,\" she said. \"The door was open.\"\n\nTristam looked at her intently.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked. \"Surprised I can read?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that,\" Tristam said. \"It's just that\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't steal anything.\"\n\n\"I never thought you did,\" he said, looking more amused than annoyed. \"I'm just amazed you're still conscious. I left the door open because I was airing out the fumes from my last experiment. It didn't go very well.\" Tristam hung his jacket on a hook behind the door. Omax stepped into the room as well, ducking to pass through the small threshold.\n\n\"What are you reading, Seren?\" the warforged asked, squatting in the corner and looking at her book. His blue eyes shone with curiosity as he extended one hand toward her.\n\n\"Karrnathi myths and legends,\" she answered, handing him the book. \"Seemed interesting. Pherris didn't have anything for me to do, Gerith is off exploring, and Dalan has locked himself in his chambers again.\"\n\n\"Careful with that book, please; it was my mother's,\" Tristam said, gently kicking her feet off the chair and sitting down. \"So you just invited yourself into my cabin, then?\"\n\n\"Not the first time a man's been surprised to find me in his room. But surely the first time he's complained.\"\n\nTristam looked at her with blank surprise and even Omax glanced up from the book.\n\n\"That's a joke,\" she said, rolling her eyes at them. \"My cabin is depressing. It's so empty. When I gathered all my things out of that hole where I lived in Wroat, there was almost nothing. Just some clothes, some tools, some broken furniture I'd taken from someone's garbage. I was actually glad to leave most of it behind. My room is like someone's closet now. It doesn't feel like a home. Sorry I intruded, Tristam.\"\n\n\"Apology accepted,\" he said. \"Now get your dirty shoes off my bed.\"\n\nShe laughed, kicking her heavy shoes onto the floor.\n\n\"I hope you didn't touch any of this,\" Tristam said. He began fidgeting over his table, checking the various vials, crystals, and reagents.\n\n\"I know better than to mess with a wizard's experiments,\" she said.\n\nTristam peered back at her. For the first time since he caught her in his room, he looked truly annoyed. He returned his attention to his work with a sigh.\n\n\"Tristam is not a wizard,\" Omax said, folding the book closed and handing it carefully back to Seren. \"A wizard merely manipulates the forces of magic. An artificer gives magic form, life, and persistence. They are as much different as a poet and a sculptor. Both are masters of their respective art but the results are not comparable.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Seren said. \"So what about Zed Arthen? Is he an artificer as well?\"\n\n\"Arthen?\" Tristam said, giving her an incredulous look. \"Khyber, no. Arthen is nothing, just a washed-up exile. A former Knight of Thrane who fancies himself an inquisitive.\"\n\n\"Then why do we need his help?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Because Zed knew old Ashrem,\" Tristam said. \"Ashrem had a habit of taking in strays, and 'Sir' Zed was a member of Karia Naille's crew for a while. They shared a weird penchant for riddles and code, the same fascination that makes Ashrem's books nearly impossible to read.\"\n\nThe homunculus took the storybook from Seren, carefully opened it to the page she had been reading before, set it down beside her, and returned to its place on her lap. She stroked the clay creature's head absently and frowned as she turned over Tristam's revelations in her mind. If Zed really knew so much, why hadn't their mysterious rival, Marth, hunted Arthen down as he hunted all of Ashrem's other colleagues?\n\n\"If Zed knows so much about Ashrem's codes, why didn't Dalan hire him earlier?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Who says he didn't?\" Tristam asked.\n\nShe thought back to Zed's arrival on the ship. Pherris had seemed to know Arthen, though he only nodded in greeting and returned to his work. She remembered the odd look of reflection, the sense of peace and serenity that she had seen in Arthen's face the instant he stepped aboard. It had only lasted for a moment before Dalan called the inquisitive to his cabin. She only saw him briefly later, hurrying back off the ship early the next morning, returning to his home in the village.\n\n\"Four days,\" Tristam grumbled, setting a glass vial down so hard she heard glass crack. \"Four days that traitor's been studying that lens. Dalan even gave him one of Ashrem's encoded journals so he could try to break the cipher. The Host only knows what he's done with them by now, or if he's even still in Black Pit. He could be in Wroat by now for all we know.\"\n\n\"Not without an airship,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Don't underestimate him,\" Tristam retorted. \"I wouldn't put it past Arthen to hit the local speaker's station. The speakers can send a message anywhere. He could arrange for a ship to come pick him up. An airship could sneak in under the cover of the forest, drop a ladder, pick him up, and we'd never know.\"\n\n\"Or he could board that ship across the street,\" Omax said, nodding toward the porthole.\n\nSeren and Tristam looked through the porthole simultaneously, out at the darkened streets of Black Pit. A sleek red airship, half again the size of Karia Naille, now hovered in port at the opposite sky tower. A proud kraken crest was emblazoned upon the hull.\n\n\"That's one of House Lyrandar's,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Another dragonmarked house?\" Seren said. \"Are the Lyrandar after the Legacy too?\"\n\n\"I doubt they'd care, if they even knew about it,\" Tristam said. \"The Lyrandar are neutral by nature, merchants and sailors. That's a charter ship.\"\n\n\"Then anyone could be onboard,\" Seren said. She set the homunculus aside and moved closer to the window for a better look. The little construct closed the book and carefully placed it back on the shelf, sitting down beside it as an improvised bookend.\n\n\"It has been docked all evening,\" Omax said.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me about this before?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"It is night,\" the construct said. \"The city is dangerous at night. I feared you might do something rash.\"\n\n\"We'd better go check this out,\" Tristam said, rising from his seat and reaching for his jacket.\n\n\"My point exactly,\" Omax said dryly. The warforged rose with a weary metal creak.\n\n\"What do you plan to do, Tristam?\" Seren asked. \"Sneak onto the ship?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I plan to find Arthen. I'm willing to bet he's meeting with whoever came in on that ship.\"\n\n\"You have no idea where he is,\" Seren said. \"You haven't been in the village since we found him.\"\n\n\"But I can track him,\" Tristam said. \"The same way I tracked you, Seren. If he's carrying that lens, I can find him.\"\n\nOmax folded his metal arms across his chest and looked down at Tristam. \"You truly believe you could put a magical tracking device on Zed Arthen and he would not discover and dispose of it?\"\n\n\"He'd better not have disposed of it,\" Tristam said, smirking up at Omax before he pulled his jacket over his shoulders and left the cabin. \"It's the damned lens.\"\n\n\"You enchanted the lens?\" Omax asked, impressed. \"You only had it for a moment.\"\n\n\"And I know Dalan,\" Tristam said. \"I wanted to be able to find it again if I needed to, and knew I might not have another chance. Now let's go find him.\"\n\nOmax looked at Seren. She imagined she saw a long-suffering look in his mechanical eyes. The construct certainly seemed more human the longer she was around him. \"Please help me keep him alive,\" he said quietly.\n\nSeren nodded and hopped off the bed, kicking her oversized shoes onto her feet. Something about what Tristam said bothered her, though she couldn't quite figure out what it was just yet. The two followed Tristam into the hallway. He was already in the cargo bay, opening the lower bay doors and gathering a rope ladder.\n\n\"Shouldn't we wait until morning?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"What better time to meet secretly with someone in a place like this than when everyone else is hiding in their houses?\" Tristam asked. \"Besides, remember what Arthen said. One out of twenty days it might be dangerous\u2014and I feel lucky. Besides, Omax can protect us.\"\n\n\"I am flattered, Tristam,\" Omax said, with perhaps a hint of sarcasm.\n\n\"Pardon me, Master Xain,\" said a stern voice from above. \"What is it that you are doing there?\"\n\nThe trio looked up to see Captain Gerriman standing at the top of the deck ladder. He glared down at them, fists fixed imperiously upon his hips. Though he was half their height, Seren could not help but feel somewhat embarrassed and intimidated by the tiny captain's outrage.\n\nTristam stuttered for a moment before answering. \"We're going into the village, Captain,\" he said quietly, not meeting Pherris's eyes.\n\nPherris looked over his shoulder, toward Dalan's cabin, then glared back at them. \"Without your captain's permission?\"\n\n\"We thought you might disapprove,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Oh, I might!\" Pherris said. \"And one might think that you should wish to seek my approval or lack thereof, considering that I am in fact the captain of this ship! Now. The reasons for your departure are irrelevant. I can easily guess what they are, and thus your excuses are of no interest to me. Could you answer one question for me, Master Xain?\"\n\nTristam nodded.\n\n\"How did you plan to raise that ladder back up after the three of you had climbed down?\" he asked. \"Or did you plan to leave it dangling there so that any manner of demon or thief could climb onto my ship?\"\n\n\"I thought maybe Omax would pull it back up and jump down unharmed?\" Tristam asked.\n\nOmax laughed.\n\n\"I've seen you take worse,\" Tristam said, \"and I can fix you.\"\n\n\"And I can make a fine splint and tourniquet,\" Pherris said acidly. \"By your logic, I'm sure you wouldn't mind Omax breaking your arm.\"\n\nTristam looked at Omax. The warforged seemed to grin. Seren had to work very hard to restrain a laugh.\n\n\"And this is not even to consider that Master Dalan will be most displeased when he finds you've left without his knowledge,\" Pherris said.\n\nTristam looked up at Pherris now, his nervous confusion suddenly gone. \"Dalan made a mistake trusting Zed Arthen, Captain,\" he said. \"I have to fix it, or everything we've done will have been for nothing.\"\n\nPherris looked at Tristam steadily for a long time, then nodded and stroked his moustache with one hand. \"Very well,\" he said, hopping down into the hold. \"Climb on down. I'll pull up the ladder.\"\n\nTristam looked at Pherris, confused. \"But...\"\n\n\"Do not question the Captain's orders,\" Omax said, resting a heavy hand on his friend's shoulder.\n\nThe gnome cackled and waved them toward the ladder. Tristam climbed down first. By the time Seren landed beside him, he had already drawn his sword and wand. The wand shimmered with white light, illuminating the road around them. She quickly pushed his arm down, covering the wand with his cloak.\n\n\"Put that away,\" she whispered. \"The light will just draw anything that's sees us. The starlight is enough to get by.\"\n\nTristam looked about to argue.\n\n\"Are you going to tell me how to sneak around, Tristam?\" she asked.\n\nTristam shrugged and put the wand away.\n\n\"Can you sense the lens?\" she asked him, looking up at the Lyrandar airship.\n\nTristam nodded. \"It isn't on that ship, at least.\" He pointed toward the northern end of town with his sword. \"It's that way, somewhere. I can narrow it down if we get closer.\"\n\nA heavy thud sounded beside them, causing Tristam and Seren both to jump. Omax rose to his full height again, having jumped down without the ladder, and chuckled.\n\n\"I thought you said the fall would damage you,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"I said it might,\" Omax said. \"It's your fault for making me curious.\"\n\n\"I thought it was against a monk's vows to frighten people,\" Tristam said, smoothing his coat over his chest with one hand.\n\n\"A soul cannot appreciate the stillness of the pond until it ripples,\" Omax said. The warforged's head swiveled from one side to the other with a low metallic click, his shining eyes scanning the darkness for any threat. He walked past them, finding his way unerringly in the shadows.\n\n\"Is he joking?\" Seren asked with a half smile.\n\n\"It's always hard to tell,\" Tristam said, sheathing his sword and following.\n\nSeren moved to Omax's left while Tristam flanked the warforged on his right. She kept her hand on the hilt of her dagger. She was unsure if it would do much good against the creatures of the pit, but it would serve her well if the mortal inhabitants of the village decided to pose a problem. Other than the faint haze of starlight and the shimmering blue radiance of Omax's eyes, the city was in complete darkness. The shrieking sounds of the pit were as loud as she had heard them, growing by the moment. The sound was difficult to describe: a mad, piercing wail underscored by babbling. Seren wanted to go back. When she exchanged looks with Tristam, it seemed he was having second thoughts as well, but Omax's gaze was resolute and fearless. She saw no lights in any of the windows, only the occasional faint crack of radiance behind thick shutters. Though there were a few sconces for everbright lanterns on either side of the street, they did not shine. Seren paused by one and studied the empty bracket atop it. She looked at the others.\n\n\"Someone stole the light, I guess,\" Tristam said, shrugging.\n\n\"Or it was removed intentionally,\" Omax suggested. \"I think no one wants to see what happens here at night.\"\n\nThe same thought had occurred to Seren, but she had not wanted to speak it aloud. She gave the sconce a final anxious glance and moved on. Tristam stopped them several times, brow furrowing as he struggled to find the right way. They changed directions several times, until Omax finally sat down in the street and looked up at Tristam patiently.\n\n\"Whenever you know where we are going, I am ready,\" he said.\n\n\"Sorry, Omax, but you know this can be tricky to triangulate,\" Tristam said, scratching his chin as he looked one way, then the next. \"Remember how easily we lost Seren?\"\n\nThen it struck her, what had bothered her from before. \"Tristam, you can track the lens even though you only handled it for a moment,\" she said. \"If Marth is an artificer as well, shouldn't he be able to do the same?\"\n\n\"Doubtful,\" Tristam said. \"The transfusion I used is very rare. Ashrem taught it to me himself. Even if Marth could do it, he'd have to be an artificer of extraordinary power to sense its location all the way from Wroat.\"\n\n\"And what if he is?\" Seren asked. \"You saw what he did to the inn. Are we talking impossible or improbable?\"\n\nTristam grimaced. \"Improbable,\" he admitted. \"Let's not dwell on that, Seren; we already have enough worries.\" He pointed. \"It's that way.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Omax asked, still sitting.\n\n\"I think so,\" Tristam answered, scratching his chin again.\n\nOmax rose with what sounded like a sigh. They continued moving cautiously, if a bit quicker than before. They were almost at the center of town now, and when they emerged at the mouth of an alley Seren thought she heard Omax chuckle.\n\n\"How fortunate we are for your magical tracking ability, Tristam,\" Omax said. \"We might never have found this.\"\n\nA large sign emblazoned with an open eye hung above a door across the street. It read:\n\nINQUISITIVE FOR HIRE\n\nNO QUESTIONS ASKED\n\nALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED\n\nREASONABLE RATES\n\nINQUIRE WITHIN\n\n\"Well, look at that,\" Tristam said, shoulders slumping as he read the sign.\n\nSeren smiled, but her smile faded as she studied the surrounding buildings. They were uniformly dark and rundown, like the rest of the village. There was no way of telling who might be within, or if Arthen's home was already being watched from one of them. In a place like Black Pit, it was almost impossible to find anything conspicuously suspicious, since everything was already rather shady and threatening.\n\nThen Seren saw the small figure crouching on the rooftop next to Arthen's office. She darted forward, seizing Tristam by the sleeve and pulling him back into the alley. Wordlessly, she pointed up.\n\n\"Let's sneak around behind that building to the right,\" Tristam said. \"We should be able to get up on that roof behind him without him noticing.\"\n\n\"We probably don't need to,\" Seren said. \"Whoever that is, they aren't going anywhere unless Arthen does. What if they cry out and Arthen hears?\"\n\n\"He isn't going to hear anything with the racket out tonight,\" Tristam answered.\n\nSeren couldn't really argue the point, though the mysterious noise emanating from the Pit made her less eager to stumble through dark alleys. Omax led the way around to the back of the building adjacent to Arthen's. The alley was littered with refuse and heaped with the black filth that fell from the sky. Seren searched the wall for a way up, but saw nothing beyond a few rough handholds in the stone wall. She prepared to climb, but was surprised to find her feet rooted firmly to the ground.\n\n\"What are we standing in?\" she asked, twisting to look at the ground beneath her.\n\nThe shrieking that resounded from the pit erupted much closer. The pile of garbage that littered the alley exploded into movement. A grotesque amorphous shape surged toward them, a greasy pile of gray flesh studded with bloodshot eyes and clicking, fanged mouths. The sound that came from within it drilled into Seren's head, shaking her bones and robbing her of the will to act. She felt the ground suck at her feet. What once was sturdy earth now sucked at her calves. Tristam reached for his wand with a numb, shaking hand. The creature vomited a ball of black spit in the artificer's eyes and he fell back, screaming and clawing at his face.\n\nThe thing knocked Tristam down with a fleshy limb and rolled over his helpless form, extending more twisted hideous arms toward Seren. Then Omax was there, charging into the creature headfirst. He hit the thing squarely with a meaty slap and it began to extend fleshy, biting tentacles around the warforged's body. With a heavy grunt and a heave, Omax grasped the beast with both arms and lifted it from the ground, pulling it off Tristam's body. He hurled it to the opposite side of the alley. It struck the wall with the sound of cracking stone and oozed downward, leaving a trail of red ichor in its wake. Omax wrapped one arm around Seren's waist and pulled her free of the quagmire. The shifting ground was swiftly becoming stone again now that the creature was further away.\n\n\"Finish it, Tristam,\" Omax said.\n\n\"I can't see!\" the artificer said, panicked. He had tilted back his head and was now liberally dousing his face with something out of a vial from his pocket.\n\nThe creature pulled itself together with a bubbling noise. Its eyes wobbled unsteadily, then all swiveled in the same direction at once, focusing on Omax. Seren drew her knife, out of habit more than any real belief it would help. With a sudden surge it opened all the mouths on its body at once, screaming with a mad, gibbering cry.\n\nA crossbow bolt shot down from the roof above, leaving a trail of sparks as it flew directly into one of the creature's mouths. The abomination bit down hard. A muffled thud rocked the street just as fire erupted from several of the creature's orifices. A cloud of oily black smoke coughed out a moment later. The monster settled to the earth with a disgusting rasp of released gas.\n\nTristam looked around, blinking rapidly to clear his eyes. \"What happened?\" he asked. \"Is it dead?\"\n\n\"That looked like one of your explosive potions,\" Omax said, peering up at the roof above them.\n\n\"That's because it was,\" said Gerith Snowshale, hopping down from the roof. He tucked his crossbow back into his belt with a scowl. \"Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"Other than accumulating more character, I am fine,\" Omax said, poking the bite marks on his left forearm with one finger as he assessed the damage.\n\n\"Gerith, what are you doing here?\" Seren asked, tucking her knife away.\n\n\"How did you get one of my potions?\" Tristam asked.\n\nGerith pretended the question did not exist. He looked up at Seren with a charming grin. \"I've been spying on Zed Arthen for four days,\" he said to her. \"Didn't you know? I thought Dalan sent you to check on me.\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Tristam said, looking at Omax for support. The warforged was still studying the dents on his arm, ignoring Tristam.\n\n\"He doesn't even know you're here, does he?\" Gerith said, looking up at Tristam and chuckling with malicious glee.\n\nA sharp reptilian squawk sounded from above, blending easily with the shrieking of the pit, but Gerith stopped speaking and looked up instantly. He replied with a similar cry, and Blizzard landed on the street nearby with a leathery flap.\n\n\"Arthen's moving,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"I know,\" Gerith said, hopping into the saddle. \"Keep up if you can, but try to keep your distance. And Seren.\" The halfling looked at her pointedly. \"Keep those two out of trouble.\"\n\nOmax looked up at Gerith in shock. The halfling gave a final cocky smile and flapped away on his glidewing.\n\nSeren's life as a street rat had made her fairly competent at shadowing people, or at least she'd thought as much. She was capable of fading into the background and following a mark for hours without attracting his attention. It was easier with a crowd to act as cover, but nearly as simple on a dark evening like tonight. In a place like Black Pit, it should have been relatively simple. To her surprise, Zed Arthen lost her in less than two minutes. She had only one clear glimpse of his ratty brown coat before he disappeared into another alley, during which she noticed that he had a large sword strapped to his back.\n\nThe worst part was that she was fairly certain that he hadn't even noticed her. She had been hanging back farther than usual, with Omax being as conspicuous as he was. The inquisitive ditched them effortlessly, without even knowing they were there. She hadn't seen any sign of Gerith since he had taken off, and could only hope that the little scout was having more luck. It was all in Tristam's hands now.\n\nThe artificer stood in the center of a crossroads, brow furrowed as he closed his eyes in concentration. Omax sat on the road in meditation, obviously not expecting Tristam to sort out the answer any time soon.\n\nSeren was not quite so patient. \"Well?\" she prompted. She scanned the streets for movement, nervous for any sign of life after the strange creature that attacked them. There was nothing. In fact, the mad shrieking of the Pit was now almost silent.\n\n\"This way,\" Tristam said, pointing to his left. \"He's stopped moving. That's good news?\"\n\n\"Or very bad news, depending on why he's stopped,\" Seren said.\n\nTristam laughed.\n\nOmax rose and fell into his usual dauntless stride. They soon found themselves on a path leading out of the village and into the thick forests to the south. The light of a torch shone in the forest ahead. Seren gestured for them to stop. Omax nodded in understanding.\n\n\"I will wait here,\" he said softly, settling into his meditative posture again. \"Silence is not my specialty.\"\n\nTristam laughed, but it was a nervous laugh. He fell in behind Seren, following closely as she picked her way through the forest. She stopped abruptly, looking back at him patiently. After several seconds, he realized he was literally hanging over her shoulder, one hand clenched tightly on her upper arm. He let her go and stepped back with an embarrassed smile.\n\n\"Sorry, Seren,\" he whispered. \"I get nervous sometimes. Omax is the soldier. I'm just a scholar.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Seren said, glancing at him in surprise. \"So the dashing Lhazaarite swordsman act is just bravado?\"\n\n\"You're teasing me,\" he said wryly. \"I'm not entirely clueless in a fight, but that's not how I like to handle things. I figure if I can scare the other guy into not fighting at all, then I don't have to worry about getting thrashed.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" she said, moving forward again.\n\nTristam coughed. \"Did you really think I was dashing, Seren?\"\n\nShe looked back at him, pressing one finger over her lips for him to be silent.\n\nSeren crouched in the underbrush and crawled forward for a closer look at their quarry. Tristam crawled beside her, moving with less grace and drawing a scowl from her. A small clearing lay ahead. Zed Arthen waited there, facing the way they had come. He stood with his back against a tree, one hand tucked in his pocket and the other holding a torch. He was definitely wearing a sword; its elaborate two-handed hilt protruded above his right shoulder. Tristam had mentioned twice before that Zed had been a knight. She wondered if the sword was a souvenir from that previous career.\n\nFor a long time, they watched Zed Arthen stand in the forest and do nothing. He occasionally removed his pipe from his mouth, blowing delicate smoke rings into the night breeze.\n\nTristam shifted restlessly. Seren guessed he had sat down awkwardly and was cramping up. She'd done the same thing the first time she'd spied on someone. She poked him sharply in the side with one finger. He looked at her in surprise. She smiled and laid one finger over her lips again. He frowned miserably and kept still.\n\nAfter a few seconds, Tristam clasped a hand over hers. She shot him a suspicious look. He pointed to the northern edge of the clearing. Another light was rapidly approaching, and the figure carrying it soon resolved from the darkness. It was a tall, fair-skinned woman with long black hair. She was obviously a warrior, the traditional image of a knight. She wore full armor, carried a short spear in one hand, and wore a shortsword at her hip. Her tabard bore an impressive crest, a monstrous creature with the heads of a lion, ram, and dragon underneath an iron gauntlet, holding a double-bladed sword. Seren did not recognize her but noticed the way Tristam's hand tightened when he saw her.\n\n\"Deneith,\" he whispered. His lips pressed into a grim, lipless line. \"Another dragonmarked house.\"\n\nZed did not seem at all distressed to see this newcomer, so this was obviously whom he was waiting for. She offered him a formal salute with her spear. He returned the gesture in such a nonchalant, offhand manner that it caused her to frown in disapproval. Seren couldn't hear what they were saying, but saw Zed brush her irritation away with a laughing comment, which only seemed to annoy her more. The two spoke in hushed voices. Eventually the inquisitive reached into his pocket and produced the purple hand lens. Seren felt Tristam tense. She looked down and saw he had drawn his wand. She squeezed Tristam's hand and he looked at her. She shook her head, cautioning him not to do anything foolish. He only fixed his gaze back on Arthen and the woman.\n\nThe Deneith warrior reached for the lens, but Zed drew it back with a quiet demurral. Seren wished she could hear what they were saying. She considered moving closer when she saw Zed Arthen suddenly tense and look directly toward their hiding place. Had he seen them? No, Seren quickly realized, he was looking slightly to their left. Arthen dropped his torch and drew his sword with the brilliant hiss of steel.\n\nThen eight of Marth's Cyran soldiers charged into the clearing with weapons drawn.\n\n\"Should we help them?\" Seren asked, looking at Tristam.\n\nHer reply was the heavy sound of adamantine footsteps charging through the forest behind them. Omax rushed past them and into the clearing with a mechanical howl. A shriek sounded from the tree above and Gerith soared down on his glidewing. Tristam just sighed and lunged to his feet, wobbling as the blood flowed back into his knees. He drew his sword and followed the others. Seren found her dagger and charged as well.\n\nZed Arthen had already taken down the first of his attackers with a heavy cleave of his sword. He whirled with a glare as Seren and the others burst into the clearing, but his fury changed quickly to astonishment when he recognized them.\n\n\"These are friends, Eraina!\" Zed shouted. The woman only nodded and parried a mercenary's sword with her spear.\n\n\"Take the inquisitive alive!\" the Cyran leader cried as the attackers shifted formation to address the new threat.\n\nOmax charged that one first, seizing him by his cloak and hurling him into a tree trunk. Tristam pointed his wand into the group, releasing a burst of white lightning that sent two more men flying. A third charged through the blast, putting Tristam down with a brutal slash of his sword. Seren shouted out in anger, lunging while still off-balance from the swing. He looked down at her with a murderous gaze and fell to his knees, his throat bleeding profusely from Seren's knife.\n\nSeren staggered back in horror and watched the man fall face down and lie still. She had been in fights before but had never killed a man. It had happened without thinking. She was so stunned she didn't see the sword cleaving toward her.\n\n\"Curse yourself later, girl,\" Arthen said, knocking the blade aside with his own.\n\nZed cut the man down with another swing, but left himself open from behind. A soldier clubbed Zed across the back of the skull with the hilt of his blade, driving Arthen to one knee. Seren hurled her dagger at the soldier but it went wide, lodging in a tree. The soldier ignored her, lifting his sword for a final blow. The weapon tumbled out of his hands as Gerith's crossbow bolt bloomed in his eye. Zed staggered back to his feet, paying no mind to the man dying behind him.\n\n\"Nice shot, Snowshale,\" he called out.\n\nSeren turned to find Tristam and was surprised to see him on his feet. The artificer wobbled unsteadily, looking down at his bloody shirt with a sleepy, bewildered expression. A faint trail of white sparkling light streamed from the rip in his shirt to the hand of the woman Zed had called Eraina. Seeing that Tristam was now stable, the dark-haired woman turned and ducked the sword blow of the nearest soldier. She drew her shortsword in a wicked underhand slash, leaving a red gouge across the man's chest.\n\nSome of the injured mercenaries were already retreating, but one charged at Zed Arthen with a frenzied scream, clutching his longsword in both hands. Omax darted in from behind, kicking the mercenary's feet out from under him. He fell face down and immediately rolled to stand again. Omax planted a foot heavily in the man's face and he went limp.\n\nSeren hurried to Tristam's side, pausing only to snatch her dagger from the tree. Tristam tried to push her away as she reached for his bloody shirt but she slapped his hands away. Her fingers brushed against his stomach and she stared at him in astonishment. Though his shirt was soaked with blood, there was no wound.\n\nZed frowned ruefully as he wiped the blood off his blade with a dead mercenary's cloak and sheathed it. \"If they were trying to take me alive,\" he said, \"They weren't trying very hard.\"\n\n\"Whatcha mean, Zed? You look alive to me,\" Gerith said. He smiled wickedly as he hopped down from a tree.\n\n\"Still following me, Snowshale?\" the inquisitive asked, sheathing his blade with a clack.\n\n\"That's some way to thank us for saving you,\" Tristam said, still shivering from the effects of Eraina's magic.\n\n\"I would have been fine, boy,\" Zed said.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure,\" Tristam shot back angrily. \"What are you doing showing the lens to a Sentinel Marshal?\" He pointed at Eraina accusingly.\n\nEraina d'Deneith looked at Tristam with a cold expression. Her eyes flicked to the gaping hole in his shirt, then back to his face. \"Speaking of questionable thanks...\" she said simply.\n\n\"Time to fight later,\" Omax said as he heaped the body of a mercenary against a tree. \"None of us foresaw the coming of these men, so their presence is our immediate concern. This one is merely unconscious.\" He lifted the soldier lying under his feet and propped him against a tree, then looked at Eraina. \"You are a healer. Can you revive him? Perhaps we can question him.\"\n\nEraina nodded, sheathing her shortsword and walking over to the fallen man.\n\n\"Belay that, Marshal Eraina,\" Zed said, cocking his head to one side. Seren could hear it too, now, a steady throbbing hum growing swiftly louder. \"We'd best run.\"\n\nThe trees above exploded in a blaze of white light just as a sleek silver airship broke through the canopy. It was larger even than the Lyrandar ship, with the national crest of Cyre emblazoned on the hull. Electricity crackled from a long rod mounted on the hull.\n\n\"Khyber,\" Zed grumbled.\n\nSeren turned and ran with the others at her side; a flurry of crossbow bolts pelted the clearing. She felt a burning pain in her calf and her leg went dead. Just as she stumbled, Zed Arthen wrapped an arm around her waist and kept running, bearing her weight with ease.\n\n\"Gerith, we need a distraction and an exit!\" Zed shouted as they ran deeper into the woods.\n\n\"Working on it!\" came the halfling's reply. This was accompanied by a whoosh of air and the flap of broad wings as he swooped overhead and soared up over the trees. The glidewing soared back directly toward the airship, dodging and weaving as missiles rained into the forest. A plume of bright light fired from a tube in Gerith's hand onto the ship's deck, exploding in a cloud of pale gray smoke. Then Blizzard dove again, vanishing into the trees before the Cyran ship could score a lucky hit.\n\n\"What else did he take out of my lab?\" Tristam shouted, looking back with a scowl.\n\n\"Shut up and keep running,\" Zed shouted.\n\n\"Why aren't we running toward the village?\" Tristam shouted back.\n\n\"Black Pit has enough problems,\" Zed said. \"Those soldiers won't stop shooting if innocent people get in the way.\"\n\nUnder different circumstances, Seren might have argued the existence of innocent people in Black Pit. She kept such comments to herself and just kept hopping along in pain. Each jolt sent waves of agony through her leg. The roaring thrum of the strange airship receded and Zed set her down carefully against a tree. Seren was about to offer thanks, but her words became a confused stutter when she saw the crossbow bolt piercing through her calf.\n\n\"A clean wound,\" Zed said cheerfully. He clapped her on the shoulder and stood, facing the others. \"You took it well, Seren. Most men faint the first time they're shot.\"\n\nSeren only nodded dumbly, fighting the urge to do just that.\n\n\"Eraina, please help her,\" Zed said. \"Omax, establish a perimeter. Make sure we don't have any more of those mercenaries chasing us.\"\n\nThe warforged stomped into the woods without a word. The dark-haired marshal knelt by Seren's side, tending her wounded leg with the tender precision of a practiced medic.\n\n\"What's your name?\" she asked, smiling gently.\n\n\"Seren,\" she said, then stifled a cry as Eraina used the moment of distraction to snap the crossbow bolt and draw both ends cleanly from the leg. Eraina bound a scrap of silk cloth tightly over the wound and whispered a soft prayer. Seren heard the name \"Boldrei.\" Motes of white magic spread from Eraina's fingers to the wound. Her leg felt numb, then cold, and then the pain went away. Her calf twitched uncomfortably and itched a little, but there was no more pain.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Seren said, amazed.\n\nEraina studied her with an intensely curious expression.\n\n\"Can she run?\" Zed asked brusquely. \"We have to be ready to move.\"\n\n\"Why do you keep giving us orders, Arthen?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"This is not the time, Xain,\" Zed said, watching the sky.\n\n\"Yes, Sir,\" Tristam said. \"I guess that's the way it always is. We need your help and you run off to Black Pit, but the instant you're in trouble it's back to giving orders. What's your problem, Zed? Do we all look like squires to you?\"\n\n\"I will assume that the stress of the moment has overcome your senses and I will let that slide, Xain,\" Zed answered. \"Do not mock me again. Not about that.\"\n\n\"Then tell me what in Khyber is going on here!\" Tristam demanded. \"Where did that airship come from?\"\n\n\"Zed was as surprised to see that ship as we were, Tristam,\" Seren said.\n\n\"No,\" Zed said. \"That's not what he's talking about, Seren. Tristam recognized that ship. So did I.\" Zed looked at Tristam with a sober, pensive expression. \"Now is not the time to worry on it. We'll all get our answers.\"\n\n\"We had better,\" Eraina said, folding her arms across her chest and glaring coldly at Tristam and Zed.\n\nTristam grimaced at Eraina and quickly looked away, clearly uncertain whether to demand an explanation for her presence or thank her for saving his life. Instead he sat beside Seren with an exhausted sigh. He looked at the bandage on her leg, then at the Deneith Marshal. He shrugged uncomfortably into his heavy coat.\n\n\"Shouldn't we be getting back to Karia Naille?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Gerith went for help,\" Tristam said. \"Pherris is probably on his way to us already.\"\n\n\"How will he find us?\" she asked.\n\n\"Aeven always finds us,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Aeven?\" Seren asked, but was interrupted by the thrum of an airship overhead.\n\nSeren's heart jumped at the familiar rhythm. Even though she had only been on the ship for a short time, the song of Karia Naille's elemental fire was welcome and familiar. She leapt up just as Tristam did, just as Omax returned from his patrol. She watched the airship pass over the trees and stop, hovering above them. The cargo ladder unrolled and hung in the air with a snap.\n\n\"Ladies first, Marshal Eraina,\" Tristam said with equal parts courtesy and suspicion.\n\nThe Marshal did not argue, and quickly began her climb. Seren followed, feeling the strength fully return to her injured leg as she put her weight on it. Gerith and Eraina helped her into the cargo bay, and she turned to help Tristam board behind her.\n\n\"Welcome back, Master Xain,\" Dalan said coldly.\n\nSeren jumped. She had not noticed Dalan d'Cannith standing in the shadows of the cargo bay. He was watching them all with an unpleasant expression.\n\n\"How was your evening?\" he asked acidly.\n\n\"Productive,\" Tristam answered, facing Dalan with all the confidence he could muster. \"More productive than sitting in the airship, doing nothing.\"\n\n\"I missed you, Dalan,\" Zed said, climbing into the hold.\n\nDalan ignored Zed's greeting, standing as he was with arms folded across his thick stomach.\n\nSeren looked down to see Omax making his way up the ladder. The warforged was climbing slowly but surely. Seren thought she heard the wailing hum of the ship's elemental grow suddenly in volume. Omax looked up suddenly.\n\n\"Look out!\" the warforged cried.\n\nA cacophonous explosion sent a shockwave through the hull, sending her tumbling back into the cargo bay.\n\nThe hum had not grown louder at all. The other ship had found them.\n\n\"Enemy ship off the port bow!\" Pherris shouted, his voice echoing through the bronze tubes.\n\nSeren crawled back to the edge of the bay doors, looking down at Omax helplessly. The warforged was now hugging the rope ladder with both arms and legs, struggling to hold on as the ship heaved dangerously. Sparks flew from his shoulder as a crossbow bolt grazed his armor.\n\n\"Draw up the ladder!\" Arthen shouted.\n\n\"He's too heavy,\" Tristam said, tugging fruitlessly at the winch.\n\n\"Status report, crew!\" Pherris demanded from above.\n\n\"Omax isn't aboard yet,\" Tristam shouted.\n\n\"Take off now,\" Dalan said urgently.\n\nKaria Naille banked heavily, pulling higher into the sky. Omax spun helplessly at the end of the ladder.\n\n\"Omax!\" Tristam shouted. He fell to his knees beside the bay doors, tugging at the ropes. \"Someone, help me!\"\n\nGerith and Zed seized each side of the ladder, hauling it up with all their strength. Seren hauled on the ropes too, though she was so exhausted she feared she contributed little. Behind them, she heard Eraina's voice rise in prayer. She felt her exhaustion begin to melt away, and strength surged through her arms. The rope came up, rung by rung. The air thinned as the ship pulled higher into the air. Wind whistled dangerously through the open bay doors. Another explosion resounded as the other ship belched lightning across the sky.\n\nWhen Omax was only a dozen feet from the hold, the ship turned sharply. The left side of the ladder split with a sickly snap. Seren drew back in pain, the rope burning her fingers as it tore free. Almost immediately the remaining side of the rope began to fray and smoke. Omax looked up at them. The light in his blue eyes dimmed for a brief instant, and he bowed his head against his chest.\n\n\"Omax, no!\" Tristam howled, hauling on the remaining rope with all his strength. Zed stood by him, trying desperately to at least anchor the slack before Omax dropped further away. Smoke hissed their gloves, but they held firm.\n\n\"We need to be away from here,\" Pherris shouted from the helm. \"Is everyone aboard?\"\n\n\"Damn it, Dalan, do something!\" Zed hissed.\n\nThen Dalan was there, pulling the collar of his shirt aside to reveal the swirling tattoo on his right shoulder. Without a word, he called upon his dragonmark. There was no surge of magic, no fantastic display. He merely touched the broken ropes and the ladder was whole again.\n\n\"Keep pulling,\" he said blandly.\n\nTristam nodded, hauling with all his strength as Zed, Gerith, and Seren did likewise. Omax crawled up through the hull and collapsed in the cargo bay with a metal clang. Gerith fell on the bay door levers, sealing the hull with a heavy thud.\n\n\"Aeven, we're clear!\" Gerith shouted.\n\nThe winds howled around Karia Naille, and the elemental ring screamed with burning energy. Seren was thrown back on the deck as a burst of speed surged through the airship.\n\nThe sounds of the pursuing ship faded into the distance.\n\nAn uneasy silence had fallen over Karia Naille. The usual even hum of the ship's elemental fire was now broken by a rattling stutter. The bluish-white fire that orbited the ship was streaked with red. Seren had climbed onto the wooden strut above the deck. It was a precarious position. The elemental ring radiated a fierce heat. Her body would have been soaked with sweat if not for the chill winds that howled over her. Her hair was tied back with a black silk kerchief to prevent it from blowing into the fire.\n\nSeren carefully avoided thinking about what might happen if she fell. She leaned as close to the flame as she dared. The end of the wooden arm was singed black from one of the Cyran airship's lightning blasts. The crystalline hook that secured the elemental to the airship was now webbed with tiny cracks.\n\n\"How is it?\" Tristam asked. He stood directly below the hook, peering at it from all angles. The others looked up nervously with the exception of the captain, who was intent on the helm.\n\n\"It's cracked pretty badly,\" Seren said. Even as she spoke, the strut rocked, nearly shaking her off. She clung to it with arms and legs. A small shard of crystal splintered off the hook with a musical chime and disappeared on the wind.\n\n\"Khyber, the ring is coming loose,\" Tristam swore. \"Pherris, we need to land.\"\n\nThe captain looked up at the ring fearfully. \"If I put any more stress on the controls we'll go down quick enough, tinker,\" he said. \"A steady course is all that'll keep us alive now.\"\n\n\"Well, good luck, everybody,\" Gerith said, climbing on Blizzard's back with a nervous grin. \"If anybody wanted to pass on any last words, messages to loved ones, valuable possessions...\"\n\nOmax looked down at the halfling.\n\n\"Just trying to lighten the mood,\" the halfling said. \"Seriously, though. Good luck.\n\n\"Seren, try this,\" Tristam said. He took a small bottle from one of his numerous pouches and tossed it up to her. She snatched it in one hand, looking at it curiously. It was a small, unlabeled black bottle with a long brush clamped to one side.\n\n\"It's a bonding agent,\" Tristam explained. \"I use it for ship repairs. Just brush it on the hook!\"\n\nSeren nodded. She tried to remove the cap with her teeth, hugging the ship's arm with one arm and both lags.\n\n\"Careful, Seren, it bonds in seconds,\" Tristam said. \"Don't get any on yourself.\"\n\nShe quickly took the bottle out of her mouth and decided instead to risk unscrewing it with both hands, clutching the strut with just her legs. The arm shuddered beneath her, nearly shaking her off again. Her heart hammered in her chest, but she held on. Quickly, she held the bottle out and dumped the contents over the hook. The liquid inside was thin and gooey, like syrup. She spread it over the cracks using the brush, or at least did for several seconds until the brush became firmly glued to the hook.\n\n\"The brush is stuck,\" she said, looking down at Tristam.\n\n\"Then I guess it's working,\" Tristam said, his tone somewhat embarrassed. \"I'm still working on that formula. As long as you spread it around consistently it should hold.\"\n\nSeren looked back at the hook. The glue had assumed a shiny, metallic sheen, coating the hairline cracks. The ship's arm still shook, but a great deal less violently than before. Seren tossed the empty bottle over the side and rolled off the hook, hanging by one hand for a moment before dropping to the deck. Omax caught her easily and set her on her feet.\n\n\"Well done, Seren,\" Dalan said, surprising her with his praise.\n\n\"Impressive climb,\" Gerith added, looking up at the thin wooden arm in awe.\n\n\"Why didn't we send Snowshale?\" Zed asked, looking up from his pipe. \"He's lighter.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Gerith asked. \"Climbing something like that is insane.\"\n\nSeren looked at the halfling, then at the flying dinosaur he rode. Gerith shrugged.\n\n\"How long will that glue hold, tinker?\" Pherris asked, ignoring their discussion.\n\n\"Three or four days at most,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Cragwar isn't too far from here,\" Pherris said. \"We can put in for repairs.\"\n\n\"Can't you use your dragonmark to fix the damage?\" Eraina asked.\n\n\"I cannot,\" Dalan said. \"I exhausted my rather limited talents fixing the ladder, and even had I not done so, I am wary about mixing magics\u2014especially where the survival of everyone on board is concerned.\" He glared at Eraina. \"Now could someone perhaps explain why a Deneith Sentinel Marshal is on my ship?\"\n\n\"I might as well ask you why you fly a ship unmarked with any symbols of house or nation,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"A fair question,\" Dalan said. \"But the fact remains this is my ship, and that I have saved your life by allowing you to board it. What are you doing here?\"\n\nSeren was surprised that Eraina did not reply that she had saved Tristam's life and possibly her own as well. The marshal only looked away.\n\n\"Marshal d'Deneith is one of my contacts,\" Zed said, stepping between Dalan and Eraina. \"I was meeting her when those Cyran mercenaries attacked. I assure you, we both appreciate the rescue.\"\n\n\"My pleasure,\" Dalan said graciously, as if it were all his doing. Though his tone was polite, his eyes were shrewd. \"A pity we cannot risk returning you to your home in Black Pit. Cragwar will have to do. Of course you are welcome to stay with the crew if you like, Arthen. Your insights are much appreciated, assuming you remember your place. As for you, Marshal, I would be pleased to deposit you in Cragwar as long as you remain locked in one of the lower cabins until then.\"\n\n\"I'm to be imprisoned?\" she asked. \"Is this the hospitality of House Cannith?\"\n\n\"As you expertly pointed out, this is not a Cannith ship,\" Dalan said. \"If my proposed arrangement does not interest you,\" he added, and stepped to his left, gesturing at the deck rail with a flourish, \"there is your alternate exit. Feel free to utilize it. Surely your goddess will bear you safely to the ground.\"\n\nEraina glared at Dalan in silent hatred but did not rise to his barbs. \"I would appreciate a ride to Cragwar,\" she said. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Dalan said. \"Omax, escort the good Marshal to her cabin.\"\n\nThe warforged nodded and stood beside the ladder leading below decks. Eraina offered Dalan a final scathing look and followed him below.\n\n\"Tristam, you are excused to your studies,\" Dalan said. \"I would like to discuss what just occurred privately with Zed and Seren.\" Dalan returned to his cabin and stepped inside, not even offering Tristam a second glance.\n\nTristam blinked in surprise. \"What?\" he shot back. \"You're just sending me off to my room? Do you even realize that Marth's ship...\"\n\n\"Tristam,\" Zed interrupted, fixing the artificer with a meaningful look.\n\nTristam glared at Zed, shrugged, and stormed off below deck. Seren watched the exchange with a curious expression, wondering what had just passed between them.\n\n\"What happened down there, Arthen?\" Dalan asked as Seren and Zed entered his cabin. The old dog, Gunther, snored noisily on Dalan's bed. Somehow it had managed to sleep through the entire escape from Black Pit.\n\n\"When I first saw that lens you gave me, it reminded me of something from Ashrem's work long ago,\" Zed said. \"But I wasn't sure. Eraina is a colleague of mine and has been conducting an investigation on a related matter, so I sent her a speaker post to get her insight. She agreed to meet me privately and booked the first Lyrandar ship, but she refused to meet me in the village. Some people just don't trust me, I guess.\" He smiled faintly at Seren.\n\n\"And you followed him?\" Dalan asked, looking at Seren.\n\n\"Yes,\" she answered. \"We saw Eraina meet with Zed. The Cyrans attacked only a few moments afterward.\"\n\n\"The soldiers wanted to take me alive,\" Zed added. \"When that didn't work, the whole damned ship came after us. They might have killed Tristam if it wasn't for the Marshal.\"\n\n\"Interesting,\" Dalan said. \"And you saw their ship, Seren? Was there anything notable?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Zed said, interrupting her.\n\nSeren looked at Zed in confusion. \"The ship looked like some kind of military vessel,\" she said, looking back at Dalan. \"Large and silver. I saw the Cyran crest, too. Just like the soldiers we fought before.\"\n\n\"That seems rather distinctive,\" Dalan said, brows rising. \"Strange that an inquisitive missed all of that.\"\n\n\"I didn't get a good look at it,\" Zed said. \"I was running.\"\n\nDalan grunted, unconvinced. He looked back at Seren. \"Is that all you noticed of interest?\"\n\n\"Other than getting attacked by some monster from the pit, yes,\" she said. \"But why question me about this? Tristam knows more about what's going on than I do. I think he even recognized the...\"\n\n\"Dalan is ignoring Tristam because the boy disobeyed orders,\" Zed said, interrupting her again. \"It was Tristam's idea to follow me, wasn't it? I'm guessing you were just looking out for him.\" He reached into his pocket, took out the lens and a small book, setting them both on Dalan's desk. \"Incidentally, you can have these back, Dalan.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Arthen,\" Dalan said, plucking up the lens and examining it briefly for any damage. He placed it into one of his desk drawers, then tucked the book into a shelf. \"He is precisely right, Seren. Tristam is an intelligent young man, but when he behaves in such a childish way I must treat him accordingly. He is too headstrong for his own good. On a ship like this, responsibilities are clearly delineated. To step outside one's bounds, to disobey orders, is to risk all that we have worked for. If one cannot respect the chain of command, then one must either learn respect or leave.\" He looked at Zed briefly.\n\n\"But if we hadn't followed them, Zed and Eraina would have died,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Wrong on two counts,\" Dalan countered. \"First, their lives are not our concern. No offense intended, Arthen.\"\n\n\"None taken,\" Zed said with a cynical chuckle.\n\n\"Second,\" Dalan said, \"you don't know they were in danger. Any number of things might have occurred differently. The Cyrans did not wish Arthen to die. Perhaps they were only watching, saw you approach, mistakenly believed you intended to attack him and sought to capture him alive. Perhaps the Cyrans followed you\u2014and you led them to Arthen. Perhaps your presence was irrelevant, but Arthen had contingencies in mind. After all,\" Dalan pointed to the sword hilt protruding above the inquisitive's shoulder, \"he did attend the meeting armed.\"\n\nSeren looked at him. \"Did you have a way out of there?\"\n\n\"I had an escape tunnel prepared in that clearing,\" Zed admitted. \"I could have dashed out and brought it down behind me, but Omax never would have fit inside. I wouldn't leave the big guy behind.\" He gave a quick smile.\n\nSeren nodded quietly. She suddenly felt very foolish.\n\n\"How noble,\" Dalan said dryly. \"Perhaps you retained some of your Thrane honor along with your Thrane steel.\"\n\n\"You're very funny, Dalan,\" Zed said. \"I'm laughing.\"\n\n\"So how did you come to know this Sentinel Marshal?\" Dalan asked.\n\n\"My contacts are confidential,\" Zed said.\n\n\"As long as she is on my ship, she is my business,\" Dalan said. \"If you wish to retain her anonymity, I will gladly deposit her in the woods. On foot it should take her only five days to reach Cragwar, assuming she can forage for her own food and water.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Zed said. \"She's a colleague, like I said. She's an investigator for the Sentinel Marshals. We've met professionally a time or two and kept in touch through speaker posts. If you want more, just ask her yourself. She won't lie to you. She can't. She's a paladin of the Host, for Khyber's sake. We can trust her.\"\n\n\"Oh, I certainly trust those who blindly place their faith in a higher power,\" Dalan said. \"I trust them to make horrible mistakes, to bring misery to those who disagree with their dogma, and inevitably to die disappointed in the world. I'm surprised you sought a paladin's aid, Arthen. I thought you abandoned your faith.\"\n\n\"This isn't about me, d'Cannith,\" Zed said. \"Don't push me.\"\n\n\"Or you'll silence my uncomfortable truths with your sword?\" Dalan asked with a smug grin. \"You become more like your old self every moment.\"\n\nZed's face darkened. He rose from his chair. Seren took a step back, hoping to look inconspicuous in case Zed drew his weapon.\n\n\"Why did I ever agree to help you?\" Arthen asked.\n\n\"Because we both need the truth, and despite our history we both know we can't find it alone,\" Dalan said, staring at his desk as he drummed his fingers on its surface. \"So did you learn anything useful from the lens and book?\"\n\nZed shook his head. \"There are definitely hidden messages in Ashrem's journals that only that lens can read,\" he said, \"but I couldn't break the cipher.\"\n\n\"Are you certain?\" Dalan asked peering up at him. \"Imagine that. An inquisitive not only fails to find any useful clues but also lets himself be ambushed twice in one evening. I can't imagine what that will do to whatever remains of your reputation.\"\n\n\"Whatever, Dalan,\" Zed said in a dull voice. He stepped toward the door. \"Just put me down in Cragwar, or wherever. I was an idiot to get involved in this again.\"\n\n\"Zed, please,\" Seren said. \"The leader of those mercenaries killed a good friend of mine. This was our only clue to stop him from finding the Legacy. If you discovered anything, anything at all, please help us.\"\n\n\"Ah, the Legacy,\" Zed said with a dark laugh. \"Well, we certainly can't let Ashrem d'Cannith's work fall into irresponsible hands.\"\n\n\"I should have a life as easy as yours, Arthen,\" Dalan said. \"So easy to walk away. Hide in a bottle. So easy to be offered a choice and make no choice at all.\"\n\nZed stopped in the doorway, his back to Dalan. His hands tightened into fists.\n\n\"Did you have something else to add, Arthen?\" Dalan asked.\n\n\"I didn't break the code,\" Zed said, \"but I recognized it.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Dalan asked, suddenly interested.\n\n\"Ashrem didn't create that cipher,\" Zed said. \"Kiris created it for him.\"\n\n\"Kiris Overwood?\" Seren asked, remembering the name from Pherris's stories.\n\nZed and Dalan both looked at Seren with some surprise. \"That's right,\" Zed said. \"It's magically encrypted. Without the proper spells to translate the code, it might take a wizard or artificer years to decipher.\"\n\n\"I sense an 'unless,' \" Dalan said.\n\nZed turned around to face Dalan again, extending a hand. \"Let me see the lens.\"\n\nDalan frowned curiously, then opened the drawer and handed the small chunk of glass back to Zed.\n\n\"Look at the frame,\" Zed said, tracing the white rim around the edge of the glass. \"That's petrified dragon bone. And look at the characters.\"\n\nDalan bent to study the item. \"More illegible rubbish,\" he said.\n\n\"Not quite,\" Zed said. \"That's halfling script. It's a prayer for clarity and wisdom in the name of Balinor, God of the Hunt. It also bears the mark of its creator. These arcane marks are very difficult to forge, and I recognize this one. Kiris Overwood made this herself.\"\n\n\"She signed a piece of glass?\" Seren asked dubiously.\n\n\"Kiris was a wizard,\" Zed said, if that explained it.\n\nSeren looked to Dalan, puzzled.\n\n\"Wizards are a curious lot,\" Dalan explained with a wry smile. \"They have always been somewhat jealous of the lasting mark artificers leave with each wonder they create. Their arrogance drives them to personalize the few rare things of use that they leave behind. Rare is the wizard who does not sign his work.\"\n\n\"So Marth stole this from Kiris?\" Seren asked. \"Does that mean he knows how to read Ashrem's cipher?\"\n\n\"In all likelihood,\" Dalan said. \"A disturbing revelation, but not an altogether surprising one.\"\n\n\"There's more,\" Zed continued. \"The halflings are a people very much in tune with nature. They believe that the gods recreate the world every year on the first day of spring. That belief is reflected in their language. The characters they use to refer to the gods vary by the year, and from the way Kiris wrote Balinor's name I can tell this was made within the last year. Overwood is still alive, Dalan, or at least she was recently.\"\n\n\"Preposterous,\" Dalan retorted. \"Balinor's name? What rubbish is that? You don't even speak the halfling tongue, much know less their customs.\"\n\n\"No, but Gerith does,\" Zed said. \"When I recognized the script two days ago I made him translate it. I figured if he was going to sit on that roof and spy on me all day, he might as well lend a hand.\"\n\n\"Clumsy halfling,\" Dalan muttered under his breath.\n\n\"It wasn't his fault,\" Zed said. \"I knew you'd send someone, so I was looking. Give him credit. It took me two days to catch him.\"\n\n\"Respectable,\" Dalan admitted.\n\nSeren resisted the urge to laugh. Somehow she wasn't surprised that Gerith hadn't told them he had been caught, or that he'd continued spying on Zed even though the inquisitive knew he was there.\n\nZed sat down beside Dalan's desk and placed the lens between them. They both studied it intently, and for a time at least Seren could barely tell how much the two men despised one another.\n\n\"It makes sense, Dalan,\" Zed said. \"If Kiris wanted to vanish, where better than Talenta? A lot of the land is still wild. The halfling tribes keep to themselves. She could fade away there for years.\"\n\n\"Working to unravel the secrets of the Legacy on her own,\" Dalan mused.\n\nZed nodded. \"So the man Seren nicked this from either stole it from Kiris within the last few months or commissioned it to be made. Either way, there's a chance that the halflings will know where she is or might at least have some idea of what happened to her.\"\n\n\"How can we be sure this isn't some sort of trap?\" Dalan asked. \"Overwood has been missing for four years. Might this be some forgery intended to lead us astray?\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous,\" Seren said. \"Why would Marth bother with something like that? He had no way of knowing I'd steal the lens from him. The times we've run into him so far, he just tries to kill us. Something that contrived seems out of character.\"\n\n\"A good point. I am merely entertaining all possibilities,\" Dalan said, dismissing his own argument with a wave of his hand. \"Pardon my paranoid mind. Perhaps I'm just too wary, but we've found misleading clues before. Of course it isn't as if we have any other leads. Even this one is of dubious usefulness. Any halfling in Khorvaire could have taught Kiris how to write this script. She could be in Xen'drik with a halfling manservant for all we know.\"\n\n\"Granted,\" Zed answered, \"but we can make a decent guess. There's only one place I know of that boasts petrified dragon bone and halfling tribes in close vicinity. It's a place called the Boneyard. We should start there.\"\n\n\"We?\" Dalan asked. \"I thought you loathed the idea of the Legacy falling into irresponsible hands.\"\n\n\"I guess that's why I'm going,\" Zed said.\n\n\"I hope you've left nothing of value in Black Pit,\" Dalan said. \"We won't be returning there.\"\n\n\"Nothing that matters,\" Zed said.\n\n\"Then it is settled,\" Dalan said, clapping his hands together. \"We'll need Gerith to plot a course. Seren, please fetch the halfling.\"\n\nSeren nodded and opened the door.\n\n\"Oh, and Seren...\" Dalan continued.\n\nShe looked back at him.\n\n\"After that, make sure Tristam is well,\" Dalan said, sounding genuinely concerned. \"If I know him, he will be in one of his moods and we shall need him alert and aware when we reach Cragwar.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Seren said, exiting the cabin.\n\nShe walked out on the deck to find Pherris still at the helm. Gerith sat on the deck nearby, eating a small meal while his glidewing watched with intense interest.\n\n\"Gerith,\" Seren called out.\n\n\"The Boneyard, I know,\" Gerith said. \"I was eavesdropping.\" He threw the last bit of his food in the air; Blizzard snatched it faster than Seren could even see. The halfling stood, wiped his hands on his pants, and walked past her into Dalan's cabin with a strangely morose expression.\n\nSeren walked toward the deck ladder, pausing only briefly to greet the captain. Pherris did not answer. His eyes were intent on the sky ahead as he struggled to control the wounded airship. Not wanting to distract him, she mumbled a quiet greeting and headed to the ladder.\n\n\"Thank you, Seren,\" Pherris said.\n\nSeren looked back at the captain in surprise.\n\n\"The ship,\" Pherris said. \"Thank you for saving her.\"\n\n\"Captain, who is Aeven?\" Seren asked impulsively. \"I've heard you mention the name. Tristam and Gerith mentioned it too.\"\n\n\"Aeven?\" Pherris asked with a chuckle. \"She's the only member of the crew you haven't met. Don't worry, Seren. She's just shy.\"\n\nSeren smiled, not sure how to react to the captain's reply. She left him to his work and made her way below deck. Omax was meditating in the cargo bay again. She wondered which of the cabins the paladin was locked in. Seren continued to Tristam's door and knocked lightly. There was no answer. She moved on to her own cabin, leaving him in peace.\n\n\"Seren,\" Tristam said, opening the door and peering out. \"I'm sorry. I thought you might be Dalan.\" He had changed out of his ruined and bloody clothing and was wearing a somewhat somber gray shirt.\n\n\"No need to apologize,\" she said.\n\nHe looked back down the hall, beckoned to her, and stepped back inside. With a pensive frown, she followed him. He closed the door and sat at the desk. She sat at the edge of the bed, watching him curiously. The homunculus immediately leapt off the desk into her lap.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked.\n\n\"I have to tell you something, but you can't tell Dalan,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"What is it?\" she said.\n\n\"I recognized that Cyran ship,\" he said. He reached into his pocket and took out a small glass sphere. He tapped the side and whispered the words, \"Kenshi Zhann.\" The sphere immediately illuminated with swirling blue lights, displaying a model of a tiny airship.\n\n\"That's the ship that chased us,\" Seren said, recognizing it.\n\nTristam nodded. \"I made this model for Ashrem, but I never gave it to him,\" he said. \"It's the Kenshi Zhann, the Seventh Moon. Dalan didn't see her, but he would have recognized her too.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"She was Ashrem's flagship.\"\n\n\"The ship he flew into Cyre?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Tristam said. \"Ashrem flew her into Cyre just before the Day of Mourning. Orren Thardis flew his other ship, the Albena Tors, into Cyre after him. Neither ship was ever seen again.\"\n\n\"But now Moon is back,\" Seren said, \"and Kiris Overwood is still alive.\"\n\n\"What?\" Tristam asked, surprised. \"Kiris is alive?\"\n\n\"That's what Zed thinks,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Strange,\" Tristam said. \"Zed should have recognized Moon.\"\n\n\"Maybe he did,\" Seren said. \"He avoided describing the ship to Dalan. Why would he do that?\"\n\nTristam didn't answer for a long moment. He just looked at her, his eyes lost and afraid. \"I don't know,\" he said. \"I don't know who to trust, Dalan or Zed, maybe neither. But I trust you.\"\n\n\"Me?\" she said, surprised. \"I thought you said you couldn't trust me.\"\n\n\"I say stupid things all the time,\" Tristam said. \"If you hold that against me, we'll never get anywhere. The point is, I trust you now, and I want you to know what's going on here.\"\n\nShe leaned closer to him to listen more intently. \"Tell me about Moon, then.\"\n\n\"She was Ashrem's oldest ship,\" Tristam continued. \"He commissioned her back when he still designed and sold weapons. The Cannith sometimes sold to both sides of the same conflict, so they weren't always welcome when they showed up. With that in mind, Ashrem outfitted Moon as a warship, designed to survive on the harshest battlefields of the Five Kingdoms. If her weapons are still intact, what she unleashed on us back there was only a taste. They'll come after us again, Seren. Karia Naille is faster, but we can't run forever.\"\n\n\"What are you getting at, Tristam?\" she asked.\n\n\"You aren't really a part of this,\" he said. \"I don't mean that as an insult. Cragwar isn't such a bad place. It's much nicer than Wroat and safer than Black Pit. Stay there, Seren. Maybe Eraina will even help you find a safe place to start a new life.\"\n\n\"Why would I want to do that?\" she asked stiffly, leaning away from him again.\n\n\"Because I'm not so sure we're going to survive this,\" he said. \"I'm not so sure that I'm doing this for the right reasons.\"\n\nSeren watched him quietly, waiting for him to explain.\n\n\"When I first met Dalan, I was Ashrem's apprentice,\" he said. \"I knew Dalan by reputation. He was one of the only people in House Cannith that Ashrem still trusted. Dalan came to me privately. He offered me a work, to create some infusions for House Cannith. Ashrem didn't seem to be interested in helping me join the house, but Dalan was. He offered me contracts on the side, things Ashrem wouldn't accept, so I took them. Ashrem found out about it eventually, of course. He also found out that the camouflage enchantments I thought were being used to help scouts remain undetected in the field were being used by Brelish soldiers to ambush Thrane border patrols. He was outraged that I had used his teachings and his facilities to create weapons. We argued about it, I called him a hypocrite and a few other things. I told him the war would never end if we stood by and did nothing. The old man didn't take that well at all.\"\n\n\"And that's why he ended your apprenticeship?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"That's right,\" Tristam said with a sigh. \"I never told Ashrem that Dalan was the one to give me the contracts, and Dalan didn't tell him either. When Dalan came back to me, asking me to help him find the Legacy, he said he appreciated my 'discretion,' whatever that means.\" Tristam laughed bitterly.\n\n\"Not that I don't appreciate your sharing something like this,\" Seren said, \"but what does this have to do with my staying or leaving?\"\n\n\"We're not doing anything noble here, Seren,\" he said. \"Don't stay because you think we're heroes or because you think you're doing some great favor by keeping the Legacy out of Marth's hands. Dalan isn't perfect, and neither am I. I might look like I'm fighting to keep my teacher's work pure, but really that's not it at all. I'm a failure, Seren. Ashrem didn't want me. House Cannith doesn't want me. Now I can tell even Dalan's getting tired of me. Don't stay to help me. I'm not worth helping, and anyone with an ounce of sense sees that.\"\n\n\"Omax doesn't see that,\" she said. \"Neither do I.\"\n\nTristam started to voice a reply but found nothing to say. He only lowered his head and clasped his hands over his knees.\n\n\"I don't understand why Omax follows me the way he does,\" he said. \"I'm no hero, Seren. I'm here because I have nowhere else to go, and because, really, I want to prove them all wrong. I'm fighting to prove myself to a dead man. That's what you're risking your life for. That's why you should leave us in Cragwar, Seren, and forget any of this ever happened.\"\n\nSeren set the homunculus on the floor and stood. She looked down at Tristam, arms folded across her breasts. He looked up at her meekly.\n\n\"If you want me to pity you,\" she said, \"you'll have to do better than that. If you need me, I'll be in my cabin.\"\n\nHe blinked in surprise. She turned and left, closing the door behind her.\n\nShe stopped with a start, finding Omax lurking in the hall outside. The warforged's blue eyes shone in the darkness.\n\n\"Thank you, Seren,\" he said in a quiet voice. \"He does not realize what he could be.\"\n\nShe looked at the construct for a long time, then finally nodded and returned to her cabin.\n\nSeren stood at the ship's rail for a long time, looking down at Cragwar as the ship circled for a landing. Gerith walked up beside her after a while, looking over the side and then looking at her in confusion, obviously not seeing what she was so interested in.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said with a small laugh. \"It's just that Wroat is really the only other big city I've ever seen. Cragwar is a lot different, at least from up here.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah, I can see that,\" Gerith said, looking back down. \"Probably because it's clean. Wroat is too big. Too many people living there. Cragwar's different, probably because it's so close to the Aundairian border. The Brelish army is in command here, and they run a tight ship.\"\n\n\"Why does that make a difference?\" Seren asked. \"King Boranel lives in Wroat; you'd think he'd command more respect than the army.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's not it at all,\" Gerith said. \"Wroat's pretty far from any enemies, so the Watch is more likely to let things slide. This close to Aundair, any criminal could be an Aundairian spy. Any lapse in discipline could weaken the border. Not that Aundair is ready to challenge Breland, but better safe than sorry, I guess. The military has to be careful\u2014they're on their own here.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Seren said, looking down at the city again. After a while she realized Gerith was looking up at her with a serious expression.\n\n\"What?\" she asked.\n\n\"Just hoping all that sunk in,\" he said. \"You behave yourself down there, Seren. Not that I'd mind swooping to your rescue and your inevitable gratitude, but I don't want you to get hurt.\" She looked at him sharply, but he held out a hand to stop her. \"I'm not making judgments, Seren. Kol Korran knows every crown I made hasn't been an honest one\u2014but no stealing in Cragwar. Understand?\"\n\nShe laughed lightly and smiled at him. \"I'll keep my hands out of other people's pockets, Gerith,\" she said.\n\n\"Good,\" he said, his usual bright smile instantly returning. He gave a sharp whistle and vaulted over the rail into the open sky, falling with his arms and legs outstretched. With a shrieking cry and the snap of broad wings, Blizzard swooped past and caught his master.\n\n\"One of these days,\" Pherris said.\n\nThe glidewing began its descent, toward a quartet of sky towers at the northern edge of the city. Two of them were already occupied by sleek vessels flying the boar's head banners of Breland. As they drew closer, a group of mounted soldiers emerged from the city and rode toward the towers.\n\n\"Hope this goes better than last time,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"Last time went precisely as planned, Tristam,\" Dalan said. \"Merely because you do not know the plan is not an indication that it has failed. Now, someone please let the paladin out of her cell.\"\n\nOmax disappeared below decks, returning shortly afterward with Eraina in tow. She scowled at Dalan but did not speak a word. The ship pulled smoothly into the sky tower. Dalan strode forward with a pleasant expression, readying his official papers to show the waiting officers. After a few moments' discussion, the soldiers gave the airship a final warning look and returned to the city.\n\n\"We should be safe enough here,\" Dalan said, looking at the other towers. \"Even if Marth pursues us, those Brelish ships should be a match for him.\"\n\n\"Always so ready to let someone else fight your battles, d'Cannith?\" Eraina said coldly. She brushed past him without another word, disappearing into the tower.\n\n\"First time I've seen you let someone else get the last word, Dalan,\" Zed said.\n\n\"What do I care?\" Dalan said. \"She's off my ship. That's all I wanted. How does it look, Tristam?\"\n\nThe artificer had brought a ladder from below deck and climbed up to the strut holding the elemental ring in place. He probed at the crystal hook with a delicate silver wand. A broad bandolier holding many of the strange chemical concoctions and focusing crystals from his cabin now hung over his shoulder. Tristam concentrated intently on the hook. \"Nothing I can't fix,\" he said. \"I'll need some new lodestones to reseal the enchantments. The crystalline structure is badly fragmented.\"\n\n\"How long?\" Dalan asked.\n\n\"Three hours, maybe four,\" he said.\n\n\"Excellent,\" Dalan said. \"Time enough to catch a meal and find a copy of The Chronicle. I'll leave you to your work.\" Dalan paused at the door to the tower bridge and threw a small pouch at Seren. She caught it clumsily against her chest and heard the chink of coins inside. \"Seren, take care of whatever materials he needs,\" he said indifferently. \"That should be more than enough. Omax, accompany me.\"\n\nSeren saw the warforged look up at Tristam. Tristam nodded and went back to work. Dalan and Omax entered the tower.\n\n\"Just like Dalan to send a green girl into the city alone and keep the warforged bodyguard for himself,\" Pherris grunted, leaning back against the ship controls. The gnome looked much older and wearier than he had before, or perhaps he had finally allowed himself a moment to rest now that his ship was finally safe.\n\n\"I can take care of myself,\" Seren said.\n\n\"See that you do,\" Pherris said sternly. \"I am beginning to like you, Miss Morisse. You bring a dash of common sense that I've sorely missed hereabouts.\" The gnome's whiskers twitched with a faint grin.\n\nSeren smiled at Pherris, but the old gnome had dozed off where he sat. She looked up at Tristam, still busy with the repairs.\n\n\"Lodestones?\" she prompted him.\n\nHe nodded without looking down. \"Natural magnets. They're a reagent for a number of enchantments. I'll need about a dozen,\" he answered. \"I could probably use some more royal water to accelerate the dissolution of this binding agent, too.\"\n\n\"And maybe some frankincense to reinforce the elemental matrix?\" she asked.\n\nTristam looked down at her sharply, almost falling off his ladder. \"Yes, that would be useful,\" he said, impressed. \"You've been reading more than my fairy tales, haven't you?\"\n\n\"I only understand a little,\" she admitted.\n\n\"That's still amazing,\" he said, his intense expression fading into a smile. \"And yes, I could use some frankincense. You should be able to find all of that at any magewright's shop. Be careful, Seren. Don't make any trouble.\"\n\n\"Same to you,\" she said, returning his smile.\n\nSeren climbed down the tower stairs and surveyed the streets. Cragwar was a busy, happy place. The streets were crowded with people going about their daily lives. Groups of soldiers patrolled the streets and the citizens met them with friendly greetings, obviously content to be under their protection. Though she had already decided to remain on Karia Naille, she had to admit that this wouldn't be such a bad place to start a new life. For a city near the border of a potential enemy, it was a peaceful sort of place.\n\nSeren stopped at a corner vendor and used one of Dalan's coins to purchase a delicious-smelling treat on a stick. It looked like a sort of frosted bread filled with cooked meat. It tasted as good as it smelled. She chewed thoughtfully as she watched the traffic and considered her next move.\n\nIt was nearly a minute before Seren realized that she had instinctively been casing the local populace, looking for wealthy targets. The instant she realized what she was doing, Seren felt terribly alone. She would never fit in here, not as long as she saw everyone else as targets.\n\n\"Once a thief, always a thief,\" said a voice beside her.\n\nSeren jumped, dropping her food on the ground. Eraina d'Deneith looked down with a sneer. \"Best to pick that up, Seren. There are fines for littering in this city.\"\n\nSeren snatched up her ruined meal and looked at the paladin with a frown. \"What do you want?\" she asked. \"I thought you left.\"\n\n\"Did you kill Jamus Roland?\" she asked bluntly.\n\nEraina's eyes, so dark they were almost black, bored directly into her soul. She sensed anger, pain, and something more, a sense of a power Seren had never felt before. It felt almost as if she were being judged by Boldrei herself.\n\n\"How do you know Jamus?\" Seren asked, unable to keep a quaver of fear out from her voice.\n\n\"Just answer the question. Yes or no.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, a hint of outrage in her answer. \"Jamus was my teacher. He was my friend.\"\n\nEraina's brows furrowed quizzically. She looked disappointed by Seren's answer, but she nodded in acquiescence. \"Just a thief, then,\" she said in a sad voice. \"You have no idea what you have become involved in.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you explain it to me? How does a Sentinel Marshal know Jamus Roland? He was just a thief too.\"\n\n\"He was not just a thief,\" Eraina said. \"He was my father.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Seren said, eyes widening. \"I thought you were a member of House Deneith.\"\n\n\"I am,\" she said. \"My mother's husband was disgraced when he learned the truth. If my mother's dragonmark had not bred true, I might have been given to an orphanage. Instead I was raised and educated by the church.\" She looked at Seren calmly. \"Does it truly surprise you that Jamus Roland would have an affair with another man's wife?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Seren answered, \"but why are you telling me this? I'm a stranger to you.\"\n\n\"Raised as a Spear of Boldrei, I have taken many vows,\" Eraina said. \"A vow of charity, a vow of mercy, a vow of humility, and a vow of honesty. Do you understand these things?\"\n\nSeren nodded.\n\n\"Then also understand that our vow of honesty is the most difficult of all, as well as the most important,\" she said. \"For we can neither lie nor promote falsehood. The fact that Jamus never told you who I was is disturbing, for he broke into Dalan d'Cannith's home on my behalf. He died trying to help me, Seren.\"\n\n\"A paladin hiring thieves?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"I didn't know what he planned, and he knew better than to tell me,\" Eraina said. \"My father has always been a foolish man. For almost a year now I have been hunting the murderer of Bishop Llaine Grove. I was to meet Jamus on the night he died. I traveled all the way from Fairhaven on the promise that he would have the name of the killer I sought. I suppose I should not be surprised that he died. My father was not adept at keeping promises.\"\n\n\"He never told me any of that,\" she said.\n\n\"And now you understand why Boldrei values honesty,\" Eraina said. \"I have wasted a great deal of time chasing you, Seren, thinking that you were responsible for my father's death. Now I know the real killer was on that Cyran ship. Those same mercenaries were probably responsible for Llaine Grove's death as well.\"\n\nEraina looked at Seren for a long time, not speaking. Seren had the uneasy sense that the goddess was judging her through those eyes again. She wanted to move away, but could not bring herself to do so.\n\n\"The truth, at least, is a relief,\" Eraina said. \"Father spoke highly of you in his letters. I wonder if, in some measure, by caring for you he hoped to atone for my unwanted and neglected existence. My father was a strange man.\"\n\n\"Looks like that bred true, too,\" Seren said.\n\n\"And you have adopted my father's intolerable sense of humor,\" she retorted. \"Jamus obviously saw some value in you, so I give you this final warning. Do not return to Karia Naille. I intend to stop Dalan d'Cannith and his allies. It would be best if you did not oppose me.\"\n\n\"Stop them?\" Seren asked. \"Why? They're hunting the same killer you are.\"\n\n\"No,\" Eraina said. \"They merely seek the same thing he seeks, and their greed will only cloud my path. Dalan d'Cannith is a ruthless, ambitious man. I do not doubt he knows more about the Cyrans than he admits, and I will not abide his dishonesty.\"\n\n\"So you want me to abandon my friends and run away in a strange city?\" Seren asked. \"What sort of paladin are you?\"\n\n\"Your faithfulness is admirable, but you do them no favors by letting them pursue petty ambitions,\" Eraina said. \"Do not fear that I would cast you out alone here as Dalan did to me. I have allies in this city. I can give you gold enough to return to Wroat, or even Ringbriar. I could offer you the protection of the Sovereign Host. You could find a new life in the Church if you wished, Seren. My mercy is a sincere mercy, not a Cannith's false promises.\"\n\nSeren looked past Eraina, at the crowds of happy citizens living their normal lives. Beyond them, she saw the sky towers standing tall above the skyline. Two rings of green fire burnt with a steady light, holding the Brelish warships aloft. Between them burnt a smaller ring\u2014blue, crackling with red.\n\n\"Think about it, Seren,\" Eraina said.\n\nSeren walked away. She felt the paladin's eyes watch her for a long time afterward.\n\nSeren went about her business, picking up Tristam's supplies. She dropped them off on the ship without a word, drawing confused looks from Pherris and Tristam as she went back into the city. For a while, she explored. Would it really be so bad to stay here? Was this such a horrible place?\n\nShe looked up at the ring of fire above the walls again, now burning a steady blue. This would be a safe place to live, but no one needed her here. If she were to find a home, it would not be here. After wandering aimlessly for a while, Seren made her way back to the sky tower. She boarded the ship as wordlessly as she had left. Gunther trotted to her feet and rolled over on one side, waiting to be petted. Pherris greeted her with an exhausted smile, which quickly changed to a look of concern as he looked past her toward the tower.\n\n\"Are the repairs done, Tristam?\" Pherris asked.\n\n\"Just touching up the paint now,\" Tristam said from the ladder. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I've a feeling we'll be leaving soon,\" the captain said.\n\nSeren looked up from petting the dog. A dozen Brelish soldiers marched out of the tower door, with Eraina at their head. She looked at Seren with a disappointed shake of her head and turned to face Pherris.\n\n\"Captain Gerriman,\" Eraina said in a bold voice. \"As a Sentinel Marshal of House Deneith, and with the aid and alliance of the Brelish Crown, I regret that I must impound your vessel and take your crew into custody.\"\n\n\"On what charges?\" Pherris asked stiffly.\n\n\"You are not being charged with anything,\" she said, her tone now clipped and formal. \"However, I believe that several members of your crew are withholding information pertinent to an international murder investigation. As a Sentinel Marshal, I have invoked my jurisdiction and enlisted these local officials to assist me. Please do not resist.\"\n\nSeren stood up slowly beside Pherris. Tristam dropped down from his ladder, tucking his tools back into his bandolier. Gerith poked his head up from below deck and quickly disappeared again. Zed, sharpening his sword as he sat on a nearby barrel, set his whetstone aside and sheathed the weapon across his back. Omax stood beside Tristam calmly, waiting for any command.\n\n\"Come out, d'Cannith,\" Eraina shouted.\n\nThe cabin door opened and Dalan stepped out. He held a breadstick treat in one hand, chewing absently. He looked at Eraina and her soldiers without concern. \"Good afternoon, officers,\" he said. \"May I help you?\"\n\n\"You heard me,\" she said. \"Order your crew to stand down and surrender.\"\n\nDalan bit the last scrap of bread from the stick, tossed it in a pail nearby, wiped his hands on his jacket and took a scroll case from his pocket. He looked past Eraina at the soldiers with a bland expression. \"Which of you is the commanding officer?\" he asked.\n\n\"I am,\" one said, stepping forward.\n\nDalan offered the man the scroll. He stepped forward and accepted it, looking at Eraina in confusion. Removing it from its case, he studied the parchment for several moments, rolled it up, and handed it back.\n\n\"My apologies, Marshal,\" the soldier said. \"This man has been granted immunity by the King.\"\n\n\"What?\" she spat.\n\nDalan smiled.\n\n\"My apologies, Master d'Cannith,\" the soldier said.\n\n\"Not necessary,\" Dalan said pleasantly. \"You're merely doing your duty. You are a tribute to your rank, country, and king.\" The man smiled proudly. \"Now if you would excuse us, we're preparing to depart.\"\n\nThe soldier nodded, saluted, and turned to leave. The others followed in his wake. Eraina remained where she was, scowling at Dalan.\n\n\"Let me see those papers,\" she demanded.\n\n\"Why?\" he asked, looking at her. \"Your jurisdiction extends beyond any diplomatic immunities. You are still perfectly free to find non-Brelish troops to aid you, or arrest us on your own.\" He looked at Omax and then smiled at her again. \"If you believe you are able.\"\n\n\"You know Boldrei grants me power to sense falsehood. You refuse to show me your papers because I will see them as the forgery they are.\"\n\n\"How insulting,\" Dalan said with a mocking grin. \"Is this the diplomacy of House Deneith?\"\n\n\"This is not over,\" Eraina said. \"You will not escape me. I will find allies and stop you.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Dalan asked. He looked past her for a moment.\n\nShe looked back just as Zed Arthen clubbed her across the temple with the hilt of his sheathed sword. She staggered, attempting to ready her spear.\n\n\"Sorry, Eraina,\" he said, punching her across the jaw.\n\nThe paladin struck the deck with a thud. Seren looked at Dalan in shock, as did everyone else but Zed.\n\n\"Arthen what in Khyber have you done?\" Tristam shouted. \"You just assaulted a Sentinel Marshal!\"\n\n\"She went down a little more easily than I expected, too,\" Zed said, looking at her limp form with some surprise. \"I thought Omax would have to help me for sure.\"\n\n\"That Sentinel Marshal threatened to cause a great deal of trouble for us,\" Dalan said, turning back toward his cabin. \"Get us out of here, Captain. Zed, return the Marshal to her cell.\"\n\nZed loaded the unconscious paladin over his shoulder and climbed below deck. As Karia Naille swiftly rose above the city of Cragwar, Seren wondered if staying here had been a mistake.\n\nOld Merkin pushed the battered shutter aside and looked outside again. The street was empty, as it usually was this time of day. Zed Arthen preferred things clean and quiet, so most of the Black Pit citizens avoided doing business here. Everyone feared Arthen, though Old Merkin wasn't really sure why. Arthen had a way of turning up dirt, rooting out secrets, and in Black Pit most folks preferred secrets to stay right where they were. To Merkin, that just meant that Arthen was making waves. People who did that inevitably got put down. No one could stand alone forever.\n\nUntil then, of course, there was money to be made.\n\nAt the far end of the street, Old Merkin saw the familiar, stocky figure, leaving a trail of pipesmoke in his wake. The coat and clothes were new, but it was definitely Zed Arthen. Merkin waited for the inquisitive to walk down this way, past his window and approach his office. Arthen looked around warily, as he always did. He didn't see Old Merkin, but of course he never did. Merkin chuckled quietly in self-satisfaction.\n\nAfter Arthen's door closed, Merkin left his home, shrugging into his thick canvas jacket as he walked. He rapped loudly on the door of the inquisitive's office and waited, hands tucked in his pockets as he peered around, alert for any nosey passers-by.\n\nThe door opened after a moment. Zed Arthen looked at Merkin with a hawk-eyed gaze and stood quickly to one side. Merkin grinned and sauntered in.\n\n\"May I help you?\" Arthen asked in a low voice.\n\n\"Perhaps you can,\" Merkin said, voice dripping with sarcasm. \"I saw your little trip into the woods the other night, Arthen. Smart money says you were meeting someone from that Lyrandar charter ship. Care to share the secret?\"\n\nZed did not answer immediately. Instead he moved to the window beside his door, looking curiously outside. \"You came here alone?\" he asked.\n\n\"Like I need any protection from you,\" Merkin said. \"I'm the one man in all of Black Pit that knows you're all talk. Now tell me what you're up to, Arthen.\"\n\n\"I have a better idea,\" Arthen said, locking the door. \"Let me offer you a proposition.\" He turned to face Merkin, but the man who faced Merkin was no longer Zed Arthen. His features were smooth and gray. The left cheek twisted with a swirling burn scar. He looked at Merkin with dead white eyes.\n\n\"Khyber,\" Merkin swore, drawing a dagger from his belt. \"Get away from me, faceless!\"\n\n\"Please,\" the changeling said. He backed away from the door, holding his hands out to show he held no weapons, only the key to the door pinched between the fingers of his right hand. \"The term is 'changeling,' not 'faceless.' If you cannot call my race by a respectful name, then simply address me as Marth.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Merkin demanded. He glanced around for any escape route, but the changeling blocked the only unlocked door. \"Did you kill the real Arthen?\"\n\n\"That is what we do, isn't it?\" Marth said with a deep sigh. \"Changelings come in the night. They murder the innocent and steal their lives, like parasites. Spies and assassins, all of us. No. I did not murder Arthen. He is alive and well, as far as I am aware, and far from here.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Merkin said, not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed. \"Then what are you doing pretending to be him?\"\n\n\"Zed Arthen is an old associate,\" Marth said. \"I came to him regarding a matter of some discretion. He left abruptly, leaving no clues as to his destination. Rather than dig randomly for information in a place like this, I thought that assuming his identity would lead me to those who knew him. And so it has.\" Marth gestured broadly at Merkin.\n\n\"Arthen and I aren't really friends,\" Merkin said fearfully. \"But it doesn't surprise me that he runs with a diseased faceless.\"\n\n\"I never said I was seeking his friends, nor that I was one of them,\" Marth said. \"I seek only information, and I am willing to pay.\" Marth opened his left hand, palm out, to reveal a platinum coin.\n\n\"Well that's different,\" Merkin said, sheathing his dagger with a lewd smile. \"How can I help you, Master Marth?\"\n\n\"First of all, tell me who you are,\" the changeling said. \"What common ruffian speaks to Zed Arthen as boldly as you did when you entered?\"\n\n\"I'm Merkin, a courier for some of the local businesses,\" Merkin said. \"I live next door.\"\n\n\"An informant,\" Marth corrected. \"The local cartels pay you to spy on Arthen, to find out what he's up to, to report which of them he may be investigating next?\"\n\nMerkin smiled. \"A man has to make an honest living.\"\n\n\"But that's not all,\" Marth said. \"I wager you work for Arthen as well. He pays you to filter the information you pass on to your superiors. You came here hoping to perpetuate your web of blackmail.\" He looked at Merkin seriously. \"Have I hit the mark?\"\n\n\"Pretty close,\" Merkin said. \"Impressive.\"\n\n\"Arthen and I were friends once,\" Marth said. He tucked the coin into his pocket, leaving his hand there. \"I know the way the man thinks. I can assure you that any control you believe you maintain over him is an illusion. He is too clever for you by far. You believe you are blackmailing him, but I wonder how much he has learned about your superiors from your churlish thuggery. Look what I have already divined, Merkin, and I am not even trained as an inquisitive.\"\n\nMerkin's face drooped into a worried frown. He began replaying earlier meetings with Arthen in his mind, trying to remember what he had said, and wondering how much he had accidentally revealed.\n\n\"The great irony is this, Merkin,\" Marth said. He traced the fingers of his right hand along the edge of a nearby table as he paced slowly around it, his eyes on the floor. \"You fear me. You distrust me. You call me faceless, for no doubt you have heard the legends. Every village spins the tale of the changeling killer who murders a noble son of the nation and slides effortlessly into his life. We are spies. We are demons. We are monsters unworthy of trust or respect.\" He looked at Merkin intently. \"Yet look at yourself. Every word you use to describe yourself is a lie. 'Courier.' 'Honest living.' At least my face is my only lie, Merkin. You lack the imagination to be truthful.\"\n\nMerkin shrugged. \"Listen, I don't need the lecture. What else do you want to know about Arthen?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Marth said. \"You have already told me all I need to know. If your own relationship with him is any indication, Arthen has covered his tracks with his usual prowess. I doubt you have anything useful to offer me.\"\n\n\"Then what about my money?\" Merkin asked irritably.\n\n\"Still yours for the price of one question,\" Marth said. He looked at Merkin intently, empty white eyes staring at his chest. \"That coat you wear. It looks familiar. Is it part of a military uniform?\"\n\nMerkin nodded. \"Only good thing the army ever gave me,\" he said with a laugh.\n\nMarth offered a thin smile. \"What nation did you fight for?\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about that,\" Merkin said.\n\n\"You are a deserter,\" Marth said. \"A betrayer.\"\n\n\"You said only one question,\" Merkin snapped. \"So pay me and unlock the door.\"\n\nMarth frowned and drew his hand from his pocket. Instead of a coin, he now held a long amethyst. Merkin swore and dove toward Marth with his dagger, but not quickly enough. There was a brief flash of green light, and then pain so intense that Merkin could not even draw the breath to scream. He curled up on the ground, arms and legs twitching, spittle boiling from his mouth. Marth forced Merkin onto his back with one boot, leaving his foot on the old informant's chest.\n\n\"There are few things more reprehensible than a man who would abandon his country,\" Marth said, looming over the man as he twitched uncontrollably. \"A nation that cannot rely upon its sons and daughters has nothing. It is doomed to be crushed under its own weight, consumed by the greed and ambition of its neighbors. You humans call my kind 'diseased' because of our sickly pallor.\" Marth moved his boot forward, placing it squarely on Merkin's throat. \"But it is traitors like you who are a true disease upon all of Eberron.\"\n\nMarth leaned forward, pressing his weight on Merkin's throat. Marth stared into the man's helpless eyes until he stopped moving. He waited a minute more, just to be sure, then put the wand back in his pocket and stepped away. Assuming Zed Arthen's face once again, Marth exited the inquisitive's office and returned to Kenshi Zhann where she hovered in the forest nearby.\n\nAs he climbed aboard the airship, two of the soldiers greeted him with nervous smiles.\n\n\"Captain Marth,\" one said, saluting. \"We are glad you have returned. Black Pit is no place for any man to be alone.\"\n\n\"Worried, Neimun?\" Marth said, returning the salute. \"I was in no danger.\" He felt a scrutinizing presence behind him, and did not even need to look to realize Brother Zamiel had entered the room. He quickly dismissed the soldiers to their duties.\n\n\"You seem in high spirits, Captain,\" Zamiel mused, falling in beside Marth as he began his march to the bridge. A humming pulse ran through the ship as she began to lift into the sky. \"Such contentment is very strange for a man who has spent the night alone in an unfriendly village, disguised as one of his deadliest enemies.\"\n\n\"What do you want, prophet?\" he asked. \"To lecture me for being in a good mood?\"\n\n\"Quite the contrary,\" Zamiel said. \"Your bravery is an example to the men. I doubt even the murder you just committed would lessen their opinion of you.\"\n\nMarth prepared a sharp retort, but it died on his lips. The prophet was, as usual, not only remarkably aware of events he had no way of witnessing, but entirely sincere in his macabre praise.\n\n\"Unfortunately I learned very little,\" Marth said instead. \"Arthen still keeps others at a distance. He weaves lies to catch the truth like a fisherman. It was a mistake to let him live when he distanced himself from this. I should listen more closely to your advice, Zamiel. Mercy for old friends will be my undoing.\"\n\n\"I never said to set mercy aside entirely,\" Zamiel said. \"I said it was a luxury, and luxury brings harm only when indulged in excess. Kept in its proper place, in moderation, a luxury grants opportunity.\"\n\n\"More riddles, prophet?\" Marth asked as they stepped onto Moon's large enclosed bridge. The helmsman was already here, working the controls and plotting a course. \"You urge me to kill Tristam but show no rancor that I let Arthen slip away so long ago?\"\n\n\"Arthen is not a threat like Xain is,\" Zamiel said. \"The fallen knight still has a part to play.\"\n\n\"I disagree,\" Marth said. \"Tristam may be useful; he has both ambition and curiosity. Arthen is dangerous. If we find him, we must kill him.\"\n\n\"Then you may soon have your chance,\" Zamiel said. \"My spy has contacted us again, via speaker post.\"\n\nMarth looked at Zamiel with interest. \"What news?\"\n\n\"Karia Naille is bound for the Talenta Plains,\" the prophet said.\n\n\"Overwood,\" Marth said with a scowl. \"So they have found her.\"\n\n\"An unexpected development,\" Zamiel answered. \"I did not expect this to happen so soon. While you deal with this I shall have to return and consult the prophecy, to determine what I may have misread. You will have go to Talenta and deal with them yourself.\"\n\nMarth was lost for a moment in thought. \"If they find her,\" he mused, \"they will tell her what I have done. Do you think she will believe them?\"\n\n\"A pointless question,\" Zamiel said, settling into his chair. \"If so, I will trust you to deal with it.\"\n\nWhat amazed Seren the most wasn't how callously Zed Arthen had knocked out Eraina and locked her in her cabin. What disturbed her was that the rest of the crew did not seem surprised or concerned. After the ship left Cragwar, everyone returned to their normal duties. The only differences were that Omax occasionally took a plate of food to the paladin, and every time Seren entered the hold she saw the marshal's spear and shortsword lying atop the food crates. No one even mentioned Eraina, and Seren was not about to bring up the matter.\n\nTristam spent most of his time in his own cabin, absorbed in research or perhaps depression. Gerith was always busy tending the ship, cooking meals, or scouting the area on his glidewing. Seren felt increasingly alone. She didn't trust Dalan or Zed, and still wasn't sure what to think of Omax. That left her with the mystery that was Aeven.\n\nAfter all this time, she still had not met the last mysterious member of the crew, only heard her mentioned. Seren began to wonder if there was really an \"Aeven\" at all. The fishermen and riverboat captains she knew in Wroat were the most superstitious people she had met. It stood to reason that airship sailors were no different. Perhaps Aeven was just some sort of guardian spirit or minor goddess who protected airships?\n\nThe lush forests of Breland had given way to the broad green plains of Thrane. Having spent the entirety of her life in dreary Ringbriar or overpopulated Wroat, it was fascinating to see so much of the world in so short a time. Seren spent her free moments on the deck, watching the landscape fly by and occasionally commenting on the more interesting things she saw. If Aeven was real, Seren reasoned, it couldn't hurt to talk to her. If she wasn't real, then there was no harm done.\n\nAt noon on the second day of their journey, Eraina d'Deneith emerged from the hold, accompanied by Omax. The paladin went directly to Dalan's cabin. Seren heard muffled voices for several minutes before Eraina finally emerged once more, her expression somber. She immediately went to work helping Gerith with the ship's maintenance, not offering any word of explanation. The captain regarded her with suspicious curiosity whenever she was on deck, but otherwise kept his attention on flying the ship.\n\n\"Figured that would happen sooner or later,\" Zed Arthen commented dryly. The inquisitive had been sitting on a barrel nearby, slowly working his way through a chunk of beef jerky he had scavenged from the hold.\n\n\"What happened?\" Seren asked. \"Why did Dalan set her free? Why is she helping us now?\"\n\n\"Vow of honesty,\" Zed said, taking another bite. \"Makes the Spears do stupid things. That's my best guess.\"\n\n\"Why would her vow of honesty have anything to do with it?\"\n\n\"You ask a lot of annoying questions,\" Zed said.\n\n\"You're an inquisitive,\" Seren countered. \"Don't you ever ask questions?\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" Zed said, \"but they're not always the best ways to get answers. If you want to know why Eraina is here you should probably talk to her yourself. Or just stop bothering me. I really don't care.\"\n\nSeren grunted noncommittally and headed below deck. Though Eraina's release piqued her curiosity, her real motivation was to get away from Zed. The inquisitive made her uneasy since he had attacked Eraina. She hadn't really put much stock in Tristam's low opinion of the man until that moment. Now she wasn't sure what he would do next. She noticed Eraina was now in the cargo hold, moving the scattered crates into neatly organized stacks. Her polished armor and weapons were set carefully aside in the corner. She wore leather breeches and a sleeveless white blouse that revealed her dragonmark, an exotic pattern of swirling blue and green lines that stretched from her left hand halfway up her bicep. Eraina had obviously been at work for some time, for her hair and clothes were damp from labor. Overall, she looked more like a Wroat dockworker than a Spear of Boldrei.\n\n\"Can you give me a hand, Seren?\" she asked, pushing a dark lock of hair from her eyes.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Seren asked, moving to take up the other side of a heavy box of dried carrots.\n\n\"Cleaning up the hold,\" she said. \"I can't understand the halfling's method of organization.\"\n\n\"I don't think he has a method,\" Seren said, helping her haul the box up on top of another. \"I think he likes it random, so that what he finds to make for dinner surprises him as much as the rest of us.\"\n\nEraina chuckled as she moved to pick up another box. \"That may be fine for him, but not for me,\" she said. \"I like to know where everything is and why it's there.\"\n\n\"Then you're in strange company,\" Seren said under her breath.\n\nEraina looked at her seriously. \"I don't know what you mean,\" she said.\n\n\"Dalan imprisoned you here,\" Seren said. \"Now you're helping him?\"\n\n\"Dalan apologized for his behavior and drew a promise from me,\" Eraina said. \"I swore to aid him in his quest in return for his promise that he would help me bring Marth to justice and that he would use the Legacy only for honorable ends.\"\n\n\"And you believed him?\" Seren asked, astonished mostly by the answer but also by the accuracy of Zed's guess.\n\n\"No,\" Eraina answered. \"I believed in you.\"\n\nSeren looked at Eraina in utter confusion.\n\n\"Tell me, Seren,\" Eraina said. \"What do you have faith in?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Seren asked. \"I pray to Kol Korran a little, but I picked that up from Jamus. My parents prayed to the entire Host, but I never did.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Eraina asked. \"The gods exist to care for us, just as we exist to serve them.\"\n\n\"I figured that they were busy,\" Seren said. \"I'm just one person. They must have better things to do. Prayer seems too much like begging.\"\n\n\"And Kol Korran?\" Eraina asked. \"Why is he the exception?\"\n\n\"He's the god of thieves, so I'm sort of his job, right?\" Seren said with a small smile. \"I pray to him out of habit. I don't place a lot of faith in things I can't see. I guess that sounds sort of blasphemous to a paladin.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised,\" Eraina murmured. \"A paladin does not believe blindly, for if we did, our faith would be without worth. A paladin does not hurl herself into battle and beg Boldrei for salvation. A champion who cannot succeed without her favor is no champion at all. A paladin does not close her eyes to the world and wait for Boldrei's voice to fill the emptiness. We see the will of the goddess in all things, but mostly through people. I have faith in the goodness of mankind. Though I may seem cynical, and I have been disappointed frequently, I can assure you that I see miracles every day. When I saw you had returned to Karia Naille, I knew Boldrei had spoken.\"\n\nSeren continued to stare at Eraina in puzzled silence.\n\n\"Jamus Roland looked upon you as his daughter, Seren,\" Eraina said. \"He wanted to take you from Wroat, to give you a better life. That was part of his deal with me. My father had his flaws and often failed, but he never ceased to try to make the world a better place. Any person in whom he would place such faith is a person in whom I will believe in as well. You saw something worthy in this crew, something that made you return. I have faith in you, Seren, and that is why I remain.\"\n\n\"No,\" Seren said. \"You remain because Zed Arthen knocked you unconscious.\"\n\nEraina laughed quietly and cast a guarded look about them. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. \"What a pitiful Sentinel Marshal I would be if I let one man defeat me in such a clumsy manner. Be honest, Seren, did you not think it a bit foolish of me to threaten Dalan to his face, on his own ship, while so heavily outnumbered. I did not even call upon my dragonmark to protect me. Strange?\"\n\n\"I did think it strange,\" Seren admitted.\n\nEraina smiled enigmatically. \"And now I am here,\" she said.\n\n\"But you said...\" Seren began.\n\n\"I said Dalan would not escape me.\" Eraina finished the sentence for her. \"And he has not. I said I would find allies.\" The paladin placed a hand on Seren's shoulder. \"And I have. Honesty in all things. I stand by you, Seren, and as long as Dalan keeps his word I stand by him as well.\"\n\n\"And if he doesn't?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Then I hope you will stand by me,\" Eraina said, her voice taking a dangerous edge. \"For your own good as well as mine.\"\n\nSeren nodded dumbly.\n\nEraina looked satisfied and returned to sorting crates. She chatted idly with Seren as they worked, asking her mostly about her time in Wroat. The paladin was particularly interested in stories of her father. She often interrupted Seren in midstream when she attempted to embellish the tales or gloss over his shadier accomplishments. Eraina had an unerring sense for falsehood that seemed more a natural talent than any form of magic. She wished only to hear the truth about her father's life, as much as Seren would tell her. She accepted all of it, good and bad, with the same sad smile.\n\nOmax entered the hold after they had been working and talking for nearly an hour. The warforged watched them only briefly before joining in their labor. The work went much more quickly after that, with Omax effortlessly lifting crates the two of them could barely budge together. Gerith entered much later, greeting them with a shriek when he discovered his comfortable chaos had become regimented, efficient order. He gave Eraina a scathing glare, whimpered at Seren like a hurt child, and stalked out of the hold with a sack of potatoes over one shoulder. Eraina and Seren looked at each other in silence for several seconds, then burst into laughter. Omax watched them thoughtfully for several moments, then laughed as well.\n\nWith the job complete, Seren excused herself and headed back above deck. She leaned out over the rail as far as she dared, letting the unimpeded wind wash over her shoulders and cool her after the hard work. She noticed Zed still sitting on his barrel. He stared off into the distance blankly, watching the land speed past as smoke drifted idly from his pipe.\n\nHe looked at her with a scowl. \"More questions?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"No questions.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Zed said, looking back out at the Thrane landscape. \"Cause I'm in no mood.\"\n\nSeren continued to look out at the countryside in silence. The sun set behind them, casting the land in a blanket of darkness disturbed only by the light of a rare farmhouse or village. Zed climbed down off his barrel, drawing a look from Seren.\n\n\"Because this was my home,\" he said, answering her unasked question with a strangely grateful smile. \"Home is always a part of you, no matter what else changes. I wanted to see it.\" Without another word, Zed Arthen returned to his cabin.\n\nThe next several days passed fairly uneventfully. One morning she found Gerith and Pherris looking at a pile of large maps as they plotted their course. Gerith traced a thin line across Karrnath with his compass and looked at the captain with a frown. The course they had plotted was an exaggerated curve, cutting north across the Khorvaire continent and then south again toward the eastern edge of the Talenta Plains.\n\n\"Still not sure we shouldn't have gone south,\" Gerith commented. \"Would have been quicker than cutting through Thrane and Karrnath, and we could have put into port in Zilargo.\"\n\n\"Whereupon my countrymen would have asked no end of questions that Master d'Cannith would have found most uncomfortable,\" Pherris said. \"After that our mission would be advertised on the front page of The Korranberg Chronicle, assuming we survive to see a copy after flying over hobgoblin and Valenar territories unannounced.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Gerith said eagerly. \"The interesting way.\" His little round face drooped when he saw that the Captain did not share his excitement.\n\nSeren studied the map between them. She had never seen a map of the entire continent before, and wondered vaguely why they hadn't merely flown in a straight line. She realized the truth a moment before her eyes found the name of the country to the southeast of them. She looked up quickly in that direction.\n\nThat nation was Cyre.\n\nIt was the first time Seren had ever seen the Mournland. Even from here, she could see churning white clouds boiling over the land. Life itself withdrew from the borders of Cyre. Even beyond the impenetrable mists that marked the Mournland, the ground was bare, vegetation shriveled. The shimmering clouds moved with a peculiar, pulsating rhythm. It was hypnotic and oddly beautiful in its way. A cold sensation spread through Seren as she stared at the white mist. She found it difficult to look away, but something brushed gently against her cheek, breaking the spell. When she looked, there were only Gerith and Pherris, still busy arguing about the ship's course.\n\nThey had been airborne for nearly a week and a half when the drab Karrnathi landscape gave way to an endless golden plain. The first morning over the Talenta Plains, Seren awoke and looked over the rail to see a herd of enormous reptilian creatures marching across the plains. Each was easily three times the size of a horse, with thick heads capped with a cropped thorny crest. Their hides were brilliant green, marked with orange stripes. They moved with a ponderous, steady pace, holding their thick tails above the ground for balance. Seren watched them for several minutes in quiet awe before she realized she was being watched herself. She looked to her left and saw Gerith nearby. His tiny chest was puffed out, and his face was flushed.\n\n\"Threehorns,\" he said, pointing to the herd. \"My brother leads a threehorn cavalry team. Aren't they incredible animals?\"\n\n\"They look a little big for a halfling,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Of course,\" he answered. \"That's why we ride them in teams. What do you think of the Plains?\" He watched Seren, waiting for her reaction.\n\n\"It's beautiful, Gerith,\" she said, looking back out at the land.\n\n\"No place in Eberron like this,\" he answered. His voice was choked with pride, as if he had crafted the land with his own hands.\n\n\"Will we see your home while we're here?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Gerith said very quickly. \"Not yet. I'm not ready.\" He met her puzzled look with a wicked grin. \"There's a saying among the halflings. ' Kapen hara.' It means 'family before all else,' and that's what brought me to this crew. My grandfather is the greatest storyteller in all the Plains, but he's too old to go out and gather stories himself anymore. I promised him that the next time we met I'd have a tale that put all his to shame. I've been wandering the world, collecting stories, but I haven't found a better one yet.\" He sighed deeply. \"I've more or less resigned myself to a simple truth.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Stories are like baking,\" he said. \"A fresh pie is the best pie. So if I can't find a better story, then I'll just have to live through one.\" He chuckled. \"I think I'm on the right track. Karia Naille has always been a magnet for trouble. You'll help, of course. A winsome damsel in distress always adds a bit of spice.\"\n\n\"Damsel in distress,\" she said dryly. \"I thought I was the hero.\"\n\n\"No, obviously I'm the hero,\" Gerith said, \"but I can be flexible.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" she said dryly.\n\n\"Quite welcome,\" he said. He looked down at the plains again, a beatific smile spreading across his childlike features. \"I think you'll like it here, Seren. I hope we're in no hurry to leave. Just be careful around the locals.\"\n\n\"Careful?\" she said.\n\n\"The halflings are passionate people,\" he answered. \"Their love of beauty knows no bounds. Some of them can be a little rude. They haven't learned any manners, especially around pretty girls like yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm not a halfling,\" she said.\n\n\"Not necessarily a disadvantage,\" he answered with a wink. \"Eliminates certain parental responsibilities, if you catch my meaning.\"\n\nSeren smirked at him, holding back a laugh. \"I'll be careful,\" she said.\n\n\"Don't worry, Seren,\" Gerith said. \"If all else fails, I'll protect you from those terrible lechers. I'll tell them we're married.\" He reached up and patted her bottom firmly, then swiftly leapt over the rail before she could react. Blizzard soared off into the clouds a moment later, leaving the mischievous halfling's laughter behind.\n\n\"A whole nation of Snowshales,\" the captain said in a rueful voice. \"I think I'd rather go back to Black Pit.\"\n\nAs the ship continued her flight, the landscape of the Talenta Plains only awed her more and more. While what she had seen of Breland, Thrane, and Karrnath had certainly impressed her, the wild beauty of Talenta was inspiring. Seren often found herself drawing away from her duties on the ship just to look out at the landscape, and when Pherris snapped at her to get back to work, there was no real spirit in it. The captain mostly let the ship do the flying and enjoyed the scenery as well, occasionally dozing off in his seat as he stared at the peaceful plains.\n\nShe noticed that Tristam had emerged on deck again for the first time since leaving Cragwar. His clothes were stained with soot and chemicals, and he exchanged a nervous smile with Seren as he took a deep breath of fresh air. She began to cross the deck to talk to him when Blizzard dove out of the clouds behind them, flapping toward the ship at a frenzied pace. The glidewing did not slow its approach, and as it drew closer she saw Gerith slumped in the harness on its back. Tristam followed her startled gaze and immediately went pale.\n\n\"All hands on deck!\" Tristam screamed, startling Pherris from his nap.\n\nSeren and Tristam dove aside just as Blizzard crashed heavily into the deck. The glidewing shrieked in pain and collapsed. Gerith's body hung limp, still secured in the glidewing's harness. Tristam reached for the straps holding Gerith, but Blizzard snapped menacingly at his hand. Tristam backed away quickly, and Eraina took his place. Blizzard regarded the paladin with a suspicious eye but did nothing to prevent her releasing its master from his harness.\n\n\"He's alive, just stunned,\" she said, laying Gerith on the deck.\n\n\"What happened?\" Seren asked.\n\nThe glidewing shrieked uncomfortably and shifted its position, one wing snapping open to reveal a smoking wound on its leathery flesh. Tristam's face went pale when he saw the burn.\n\n\"Lightning,\" Dalan said, looking at the creature with a deadpan expression. \"Captain Pherris?\"\n\n\"I know,\" the gnome said, busily working the controls. Seren felt the airship accelerate. The blue elemental fire now glowed.\n\n\"Damn, too late,\" Dalan swore, looking out behind them.\n\nSeren looked back as well in time to see a massive shadow emerge from the clouds behind them. It resolved into the sleek, sinister hull of Kenshi Zhann, now bearing down on them with methodical, inevitable speed. A bolt of white electricity fired from its bow, missing Karia Naille by several yards.\n\n\"A warning shot,\" Dalan said.\n\n\"They want us to land,\" Pherris said grimly. \"Awaiting your command, Master d'Cannith.\"\n\n\"We can't outrun them, Dalan,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"I thought our ship was faster than theirs,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Only over short distances,\" Tristam said. \"They'll catch up eventually, and on the plains there's nowhere to hide.\"\n\n\"There's always somewhere to hide,\" Dalan said. \"To Khyber with surrender. Get us out of here, Captain.\"\n\nPherris nodded and leaned into the controls. The ship lurched forward with sudden acceleration.\n\n\"Shouldn't we return fire?\" Eraina shouted.\n\nOmax emerged above the deck, carrying several crossbows and quivers full of bolts. He offered one of the weapons to Eraina.\n\n\"Karia Naille has no built-in weapons,\" Omax said. \"We must defend ourselves.\"\n\n\"Better yet, wake up the halfling,\" Zed said. \"If anyone knows a place where we can hide an airship in Talenta, it's him.\"\n\nEraina nodded, bowing her head in prayer over Gerith's prone body. Omax stepped over her, handing out weapons to the others. Seren weighed her crossbow uncertainly. She had never wielded one before. She looked up to find Zed loading his own weapon, but conspicuously holding it out so she could see how it was done. He gave her a sidelong look, waiting for her to load her own.\n\nWhen she fumbled with the bolt, he loosed his bolt over the side and reloaded, showing her how to do it again. He never offered his advice or asked if she wanted help. He only showed her the way.\n\n\"Save your ammunition, Master Arthen,\" Dalan chided, hefting his own weapon.\n\n\"It just went off, Dalan,\" Zed said, grinning at Seren.\n\nMoon had drawn closer now, and another bolt of searing lightning exploded from its bow. This time it struck Karia Naille squarely in the hull. The ship shuddered violently, throwing Seren to her knees. The ship was so close now Seren could feel the warmth of the elemental fire that held it aloft. A peal of thunder echoed through the sky, and the clouds began to darken.\n\n\"Storm coming fast,\" Zed said. \"Magic?\"\n\n\"Magic,\" Tristam said. \"But not theirs.\"\n\n\"Aeven,\" Pherris shouted with a triumphant cackle.\n\nGerith sat up with a start, gasping as Eraina's blessing roused him from unconsciousness. He twisted and struggled frantically, barking incomprehensibly in his native language. Eraina clasped one arm around the scout's shoulders in an effort to calm him, but Gerith only relaxed when he saw Blizzard's head poking out from its hiding place behind a stack of barrels. The creature gave an annoyed squawk and returned to licking his wounds. Gerith laughed in relief when he saw his pet was alive.\n\n\"Good to have you back among the living, Master Snowshale,\" Pherris shouted without looking away from the wheel. \"Your counsel would be appreciated!\"\n\nGerith stood up on wobbly legs, looking around at the landscape as he attempted to get his bearings. Seventh Moon now soared directly beside them. Seren could see soldiers on the deck readying crossbows. Omax pushed her down behind the ship's rail as he took cover himself. A flurry of bolts thudded into the hull and passed over their heads. The clouds above now churned a dangerous black. A rumble resonated above them as the storm continued to brew. Dalan stood up briefly and loosed a single bolt at the other ship; Seren thought she heard a man cry out on Moon's deck.\n\n\"There's a small gorge about a half mile east of here,\" Gerith shouted. \"If they lose sight of us we can land there unseen.\"\n\nPherris nodded and turned the wheel sharply. The elemental fire now burned pure white as a burst of speed came over the smaller ship. At same instant, the sky exploded in rain and another searing flash of lightning exploded from Moon. Seren wrapped one arm around the railing at the savage force of the explosion. A loud crack sounded from deep inside the vessel, followed by the smell of burning wood.\n\n\"I think that was the keel,\" Tristam said in horror. He staggered clumsily across the shaking deck toward the cargo hold. \"Dalan, I might need your dragonmark!\"\n\nThe fat guildmaster stood and loosed another bolt at Moon, then followed Tristam. Omax followed as well, stopping only long enough to pick up a barrel and hurl it at the other vessel. The improvised missile sailed through the void and left a dent in Moon's hull, which was answered with another flurry of crossbow bolts. The head of one jutted through the railing just beside Zed's face.\n\n\"So tell me about your goddess, Eraina,\" Zed said with exaggerated calm. \"I suddenly find religion interests me.\"\n\n\"Belay your salvation until we are on the ground, Master Arthen,\" Pherris snapped.\n\n\"But if I survive I won't need to be saved!\" Zed said with a grin. The battle appeared to have cheered the grim inquisitive's spirits dramatically.\n\nKaria Naille dropped steadily from the sky even as she gained speed. Moon dove to intercept them. Another flash of lightning lit the sky, but this time from above and directly in Moon's path. The larger ship swerved, losing ground. In the flash of light, Seren thought she saw the silhouette of a slim woman standing protectively over Pherris, arms spread wide against the storm. When the lightning flashed a second time, she saw only the ship's figurehead.\n\n\"This is west, Captain, we're headed west!\" Gerith shouted, pointing the other way. \"The gorge is the other way!\"\n\nThe captain leaned hard into the wheel to fight the ship's steady decline. Smoke was now rising from between the deck boards. She could hear Tristam and Dalan shouting at one another below. Pherris peered back at Moon with a scowl, waiting for something Seren couldn't see.\n\n\"Hold fast!\" the gnome shouted and turned the wheel sharply.\n\nSeren heard a wooden groan and another snap from deep within the ship as Karia Naille spun about in midair. Eraina lost her grip on the rail and tumbled across the deck with a startled cry. Zed snatched her leg before she flew over the side. Their ship hurtled directly toward the larger warship on a suicidal path. Moon swerved hurriedly, but their pilot was less skilled than Pherris. The larger ship rolled dangerously as she turned. There was a moment when the black hull passed only a few feet from Karia Naille. Two rings of elemental fire passed through one another with the crackling smell of ozone. Karia Naille soared off at tremendous speed even as Moon struggled to recover from its dive. The rain came down in a furious downpour, covering their escape.\n\n\"Captain, we have to land!\" Tristam shouted from below.\n\nThe gnome continued to fight the controls as the ship shuddered and lost altitude. Seren clung to the rain-slicked rail. She felt terrified and helpless. She saw a flaming board peel itself away from the hull beneath her and tumble into the storm. The gorge yawned in the ground before them, dividing the landscape. The ship wove into the wide stone mouth and everything went dark. Something gripped Seren's arms tightly. A flash of lightning showed that roots had grown from the wooden deck to hold her fast, saving her from falling into the void.\n\n\"Don't be afraid, Seren,\" a woman's voice whispered in her ear.\n\nThen Karia Naille struck the unforgiving surface with a crash. Seren's head snapped back against the deck, and then there was nothing.\n\nThe storm disappeared as quickly as it came. The helm of Kenshi Zhann filled with eerie silence. Through the forward panel, Marth could see a vast expanse of nothing. He darted to the window, looking in all directions, milky eyes scouring the sky for any sign of their quarry.\n\nKaria Naille was gone.\n\nMarth spun about in a fury, chest heaving with every breath. His hand tightened about his amethyst wand, though there were no enemies about. He composed himself when he realized that the helmsman was staring at him with open terror.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Captain Marth,\" the man said in a low voice. \"I didn't expect them to be so fast, or for the storm to come up so suddenly, or for them to veer at us like that. I take full responsibility for their escape.\"\n\nThe changeling raised a silencing hand, closing his eyes patiently. \"You did nothing wrong, Devyn,\" he said. \"Pherris Gerriman is the finest airship pilot this side of House Lyrandar. I am not altogether surprised. His ship, like ours, needs neither magic nor dragonmark to command her\u2014the proper training and an iron will are all that are required.\" Marth smiled at Devyn. \"Next time, Devyn, your will must be stronger than Gerriman's.\"\n\nThe helmsman smiled in relief. \"I won't fail you, Captain,\" he said.\n\nMarth nodded in reply, ignoring the helmsman. Inwardly, the changeling restrained himself from punishing the pilot. He could not afford to do so, not now. Devyn was the best pilot among his crew, other than himself. He would need the fool if Karia Naille turned out not to be as damaged as she looked. In the meantime, perhaps his presumed mercy would drive the helmsman to try harder. Anything was possible.\n\n\"Land there,\" Marth said, pointing to a nearby valley. \"We will repair the damage to our vessel.\"\n\n\"Captain?\" the helmsman said. \"We suffered minimal damage, but the Karia Naille was crippled. She cannot have run far. If we patrol the area, we may find her.\"\n\n\"There is no need to patrol,\" Marth said. \"I already know where d'Cannith is going... even if he does not.\"\n\nSeren sat up with a groan, rubbing the knot on the back of her skull. She looked at her fingers and was relieved to see no blood. Rising gingerly, she noticed no other injuries besides several bruises and some soreness where the strange roots had held her during the crash. The plants were gone now, just as quickly as they had appeared. She had survived unscathed.\n\nZed lay on the deck nearby, looking dazed. Eraina knelt beside him, applying a bandage to the bleeding gash on his forehead. Pherris lay on the deck as well. His right arm had already been splinted.\n\n\"Are you injured, Seren?\" Eraina asked, looking at her in concern.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Seren said.\n\nThe same, unfortunately, could not be said of Karia Naille. The airship had come to rest at the bottom of a narrow gorge, leaving a deep gouge behind her. The lower strut that once held the ring of fire in place now lay cracked and broken nearby. Tristam knelt beside the hook at one end, studying it while Omax hauled debris and sorted it into a pile. Of the elemental fire that once surrounded the ship, all that was visible was a weak blue plume of crackling fire drifting from the upper arm. Sparkling motes of energy periodically separated themselves from the plume and drifted away on the wind. Seren had the impression the fire was slowly dying.\n\nBut what truly drew Seren's attention was the woman who now sat cross-legged on the upper strut. She was thin and petite, with long pointed ears and a rounded, childlike face. Long, golden hair hung loose over her bare shoulders. She wore a short dress of pale green that seemed woven of thin leaves. Her eyes were closed in quiet concentration and she kept both hands plunged into the elemental fire. It appeared to do her no harm.\n\n\"Don't disturb her, Miss Morisse,\" Dalan said from the cabin behind her. \"She's the ship's only hope of ever flying again.\"\n\nSeren looked back at Dalan. The fat guildmaster's cabin was a mess. Books and trophies had spilled haphazardly from the shelves. Strangely, Dalan paid the mess no mind. He sat on his bed. His old dog lay limply beside him, whining plaintively and gasping for breath. Dalan sat beside it and petted it with a worried frown. Seren stared for a long time. Dalan showing such concern for his pet was almost more surprising than the strange woman sitting atop the ship's strut. It was more genuine emotion than she had ever seen in the man. Dalan noticed her scrutiny, leaned forward, and gently pushed his cabin door closed. Seren looked back up at the woman on the arm, feeling like an intruder for witnessing Dalan in such a state.\n\n\"Who is she?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Aeven,\" Zed said, sitting up a bit, hissing with pain, and quickly lying down again. \"She's a dryad.\"\n\n\"Dryad?\" Eraina asked. \"How is that possible? Such trickster spirits are bound to trees. They cannot leave their forests.\"\n\n\"You know nothing, paladin,\" Aeven said in a soft voice, never opening her eyes. \"The livewood is a tree that never dies unless burned to ashes. Even when cut, it continues to live though it ceases to grow. For a dryad bound to such a tree, this can be both blessing and curse.\"\n\nSeren's eyes moved to the ship's figurehead. The delicate sculpture remained improbably unharmed by the crash. It was the perfect likeness of Aeven.\n\n\"Among my people I was a druid,\" she said. \"The soul of Eberron resonates within me, and I longed to see the world beyond Aerenal. A human sailor offered me a chance to leave my home, cutting and shaping my tree in my image. I was to protect his vessel.\" Aeven paused, a pained look flickering across her face. \"They proved to be wicked men, with savage appetites. Ashrem d'Cannith saved me from their clutches. He gave me a new home on Karia Naille. This ship is my forest now.\" She opened her eyes and looked down at Eraina, her gaze a pure and depthless green.\n\n\"Dryads don't like being called tricksters, Eraina,\" Zed said with a half-smile. \"Especially after they save your life.\"\n\nEraina's face darkened in shame. \"I apologize, Aeven,\" she said. \"I meant no insult.\"\n\nAeven only tilted her perfect chin, gave Seren an inscrutable look, and closed her eyes again. Seren had the sensation that the shimmering blue flame was watching her.\n\n\"Is there anything I can do?\" Seren asked, looking helplessly at the crippled ship.\n\n\"Help Tristam,\" Zed said.\n\n\"I don't really know anything about fixing airships,\" she said.\n\n\"No, but you can make him focus,\" Zed said, drawing a sharp breath as Eraina tightened the bandage around his left leg. \"He's been broken up since the crash, but he's more confident when you're around, Seren. If he can't focus, you're going to have to get him focused for all our sakes.\"\n\n\"You're beginning to sound as manipulative as Dalan,\" Seren said.\n\nZed smirked. \"Dalan has nothing on me.\"\n\nSeren climbed over the rail and dropped lightly to the ground. She stepped back from the ship and examined the damage. The airship looked relatively unharmed save a few patches where the outer hull had been stripped away and the shattered arm. Tristam appeared almost instantly by her side, looking down with a worried expression.\n\n\"Seren, are you all right?\" he asked, interrupting the question she had been about to ask. \"Eraina said you hit your head.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she answered, offering a soothing smile. \"Zed and Pherris look worse than I do, and I think Dalan's dog is hurt.\"\n\n\"You're worried about Gunther?\" Tristam asked with a chuckle.\n\nSeren shrugged.\n\n\"Compassion is that which separates warriors from heroes,\" Omax said quietly, dropping another load of debris in the pile.\n\nTristam gave the warforged a look, then grinned back at Seren. \"Don't mind Omax. He gets philosophical.\"\n\nSeren studied the crippled ship again. \"The damage doesn't look as bad as I thought it would,\" she said.\n\n\"Airships are mostly made of soarwood,\" Tristam said. \"It's naturally buoyant in the air, so with a good pilot a crash is usually something you can walk away from. Usually.\"\n\n\"Will it fly again?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"She, not it, Seren,\" Tristam said. \"Ships are always 'she.' And I don't know. The hull just needs some patching, but the keel arm snapped right off.\"\n\n\"What is Aeven doing up there?\" Seren asked, pointing up at the dryad.\n\nTristam frowned uncomfortably. \"Honestly, I'm not sure. She has some sort of connection with the elemental bound to Karia Naille. With the damage the ship has taken, the elemental could have become unbound and returned to its home plane\u2014or worse yet, stuck around and killed us all. Aeven has convinced the elemental to remain for a while, but even she can't keep it here forever.\" Tristam ran one hand through his unkempt hair as he surveyed the wreckage.\n\n\"Convinced it?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Elementals don't belong in this world,\" Tristam said. \"An airship can bind one and harness its power, but a dead ship can't hold an elemental anymore.\" He sighed. \"That's not even considering that Karia Naille will just collapse under her own weight if we leave her lying on her hull too long. She's designed to be buoyed in the air, not lying on rocks. We need to get her up on some sort of hoist or scaffolding so that I can finish the repairs and replace the keel strut. It wouldn't take long to get her airworthy enough to limp to a real city for proper repairs, but we don't have the materials or the manpower to do it.\" The artificer offered Seren a hopeless look. \"I don't know what to do, Seren.\"\n\n\"You kept the ship together long enough for Pherris to land,\" she said. \"That's what's important, Tristam. You saved us. We'll figure out the rest.\"\n\nHe smiled thankfully, but said nothing.\n\n\"Something is coming,\" Omax said, standing up abruptly. The warforged's glowing eyes fixed on the far end of the gorge, along the deep rut the crashing airship had left behind.\n\nFearing that Marth's soldiers might have found them, Seren reached for her dagger. Tristam's wand was already in his hand. After several moments the sound of heavy footfalls could be heard. Seren thought that they were hoof beats at first, given their speed and volume, but the rhythm was wrong.\n\nA cloud of dust rolled around the corner of the gorge, heralding the arrival of a half dozen large, bipedal lizards. Each was the size of a small horse, their hides a pale gray slashed with brilliant green stripes. Their yellow eyes were catlike and intelligent. Their grinning maws were lined with razor-sharp teeth. Small forearms hung close to their bodies. Each thickly muscled leg ended with a single sharply curved talon. The creatures wore leather harnesses on their backs, and upon each sat a halfling rider. They dressed in wild outfits of dark leather and bright silk, with thick crystal goggles to protect their eyes from dust. Each carried a quiver of short javelins on his back. The riders fanned out in a half-moon formation as they approached the fallen airship, each rider coming to a halt in perfect unison a hundred feet away. Twelve sets of eyes watched them alertly for any sign of hostility.\n\n\"Halfling hunters,\" Tristam said. He did not make any move toward them, but neither did he put his weapon away.\n\nA loud shriek rang out from above, followed by the leathery flap of wings. Blizzard landed gracefully between the crew and the halflings, his injured wing now healed by Eraina's magic. From the glidewing's back, Gerith greeted them with a broad smile.\n\n\"These six fine fellows are elite clawhunters from the Ghost Talon tribe,\" Gerith said, hopping from his saddle and indicating them with a broad gesture. \"This is their leader, Koranth, who will take us to meet Chief Rossa. I believe he's a distant cousin of mine, but it's difficult to be sure. My bloodline is somewhat... tangled.\"\n\n\"Color me surprised,\" Seren said.\n\nKoranth looked at Seren, then at the dagger in her hand. He barked something at Gerith and pointed at her.\n\n\"Put your weapons away, please,\" Dalan said, climbing down the gangplank to join them. \"If you antagonize the Ghost Talons, they'll only increase the fee for their aid. I fear they'll already be charging a great deal, given our obvious desperation.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Seren said, bowing her head pertly to Koranth and sheathing her dagger. Tristam put his wand away as well.\n\nThe halfling scowled and said something unintelligible.\n\n\"Koranth only speaks a little bit of your language, unfortunately,\" Gerith explained. \"The others speak only the halfling tongue.\"\n\nDalan spoke to Koranth in the same high-pitched, rapid language, finishing with a formal bow. Koranth gave a small salute and eyed Dalan suspiciously.\n\n\"Dalan, I didn't know you spoke my tongue,\" Gerith said.\n\n\"I don't,\" he said. He tapped the soft black cap he now wore. \"Tristam's work. It gives me a rough understanding of their speech. It tends to place words poorly in context, stumbles with regional dialects, and is utterly confounded by slang, but it's better than nothing.\" He continued speaking to Koranth in the halfling language again.\n\nThe two spoke for some time, with Gerith often stepping in to explain when Dalan or Koranth misunderstood each other. Dalan made a loud comment and gestured back each of the crew members in turn. There was obviously some attempt at humor in his introductions, for Koranth's sour face broke into a smile and his fellow hunters laughed out loud. Seren wondered what he had said but was more impressed with how expertly he had said it. In mere seconds and without truly knowing their language, d'Cannith had brightened their hostile mood and earned their respect.\n\nAfter several minutes of negotiation, Dalan took several folded papers from his coat and handed them to the halfling. Koranth turned in his saddle and whistled shrilly. In reply, an enormous threehorn rumbled around the bend in the gorge. This one wore a complex harness over its broad back. Two halflings sat at the front, each holding a thick rope tied to one of the creature's horns. Two more hung from the back on each side, shortbows slung over their backs.\n\n\"Their beast can carry three of us to the Ghost Talon camp, where we can negotiate directly with their chieftain,\" Dalan explained. \"I will go, obviously. Gerith, we will need your knowledge of the culture. Follow us on your glidewing.\"\n\n\"Aye, Dalan,\" Gerith said.\n\n\"Seren, I will require your aid as well.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" she said, echoing the halfling.\n\n\"You should take Omax along,\" Tristam offered. \"You may need his strength.\"\n\nDalan looked at the warforged with some surprise. \"Are you certain you don't wish him to remain with the ship?\" he asked.\n\n\"Tristam is correct,\" Omax said. \"You may need me.\"\n\n\"The halfling beast cannot carry you,\" Dalan said.\n\n\"I can keep up,\" the warforged said, undaunted.\n\n\"Very well,\" Dalan said with a respectful nod. \"Probably best we also bring the paladin, if only to keep her away from Aeven for a while.\"\n\n\"Aeven didn't seem angry,\" Seren said.\n\n\"And count us all fortunate,\" Dalan said. \"Aeven's temper is difficult to rouse, but terrible to behold. Gather whatever supplies you will need and bring the marshal, Seren.\"\n\nSeren murmured her agreement and returned to the airship. She did not see Eraina on the deck, so she went to her cabin. She grabbed a leather satchel filled with extra clothing and, assuming the worst, tucked her belt of assorted thieves' tools inside as well. She slung the bag over her shoulder and turned to see Tristam standing in the hall.\n\n\"Seren, take this,\" he said, in a worried voice. He held out a silver bracelet studded with dark green gems. \"Its enchantment is similar to Dalan's hat, so you'll be able to understand the halflings a little, even if you can't talk to them.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, slipping the bracelet over her wrist. She gave him a confident smile and walked past him.\n\n\"Seren,\" Tristam called out.\n\nShe looked back. His expression was distracted, looking at the ground rather than directly at her. \"Be careful,\" he said. \"Marth has found us twice now with no warning.\"\n\n\"If he finds us again, I'll be ready,\" she said.\n\n\"That's not what I mean,\" Tristam said. \"Doesn't it strike you as odd that he keeps finding us so quickly?\"\n\n\"Couldn't he be tracking us like you tracked me?\" she asked.\n\n\"That sort of magic only works at close range,\" he answered. \"It doesn't explain why he keeps finding us half a continent away.\"\n\nSeren caught the darker meaning behind Tristam's words. Marth's attacks had not been the result of magic or coincidence.\n\n\"You think there's a spy,\" Seren said softly. \"Why do you trust me?\"\n\nHe looked at her earnestly. \"Why shouldn't I?\" he asked.\n\nSeren was taken aback by the sincerity in his voice. She wasn't used to people trusting her. Impulsively, she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.\n\n\"You be careful too, Tristam,\" she said.\n\nHe blinked at her in silent surprise.\n\nSeren climbed back up on deck to find Pherris still unconscious. Zed had limped off the ship to speak to Dalan. Eraina stood on the deck alone, near the door of Dalan's cabin.\n\n\"Eraina,\" Seren began.\n\n\"I heard,\" the paladin said, walking down the gangplank. \"I'm coming.\"\n\nSeren followed her to the threehorn, wondering how she had missed the paladin on her way below deck. Dalan was already mounted in the center of the threehorn's back. He peered about in obvious discomfort but offered no complaint. One of the halflings watched Dalan carefully, obviously waiting for the fat human to fall out of the saddle. The gigantic dinosaur stamped one foot in boredom but otherwise looked unconcerned as another halfling helped Eraina climb onto the creature's complex harness. A third hunter offered Seren a hand as well, and she took her place just above the creature's right hind leg.\n\nThe halfling pointed out a leather loop between her knees and instructed her how to strap herself in using gestures and babbling in his native tongue. In her head, Seren heard another voice superimposed over his words, produced by the bracelet Tristam had given her.\n\n\"Hold on there and keep the belt over your left leg secure,\" the voice said. \"If you need to get off quickly, give the slack end a tug. Just don't do that when we're running or you'll fall and bust open your cabbage.\"\n\nSeren had to cough to cover up her laugh. She wondered whether the \"cabbage\" was a translating error or just part of the odd halfling sense of humor. Chances were roughly equal that it was either.\n\nWith their passengers secured, Koranth gave a sharp cry to his men. The threehorn rumbled into movement, and the clawfoot dinosaurs fell into a trot. While the creature she rode moved with a stolid, powerful inertia, the clawfoots loped along with birdlike grace. Their ease of movement suggested that they were capable of far greater speed. Gerith's glidewing swooped into the sky ahead.\n\nFor more than an hour they traveled across the plains. The skies were clear and the land was flat and open. Seren was grateful for that. At least if Moon came after them now, they would see the airship coming. As the sun began to set, a small village of brightly painted conical tents and covered wagons came into view. A pair of clawfoot riders rode out to escort them. These creatures were larger than the others, equipped with impressive white leather armor studded with metal spikes. A quartet of glidewings now circled overhead, each bearing another rider.\n\n\"How do we know these halflings are not in league with the men who shot us down?\" Eraina asked Dalan, eyeing the halflings with caution.\n\n\"Because we are alive,\" Dalan said, as if that were obvious.\n\n\"Perhaps they intend to capture us,\" Eraina countered.\n\n\"An interesting hypothesis,\" Dalan admitted. \"I would argue that even captured we're better off alive than dead, as death offers little opportunity for escape. Now allow me to ignite your paranoia with my own suggestion\u2014how do we really know these halflings don't speak our language?\"\n\nDalan looked back at her with a smirk. One of the halfling drivers glanced at them with an innocent smile and returned to steering the threehorn.\n\nAs they made their way through the camp, a small crowd gathered to watch them pass. Men and women, old and young, all emerged from their tents and wagons to see the strangers. Children no taller than a foot peered out shyly from behind their parents. A dozen dogs with low, stocky bodies and fluffy coats danced around them in a barking frenzy. They were led to a large tent at the center of the camp, where they dismounted.\n\n\"So now we bargain for their aid?\" Eraina asked.\n\n\"Already done,\" Dalan said. \"The chief empowered Koranth to bargain on our behalf, so we resolved it back at the ship.\"\n\nOne of Koranth's men was shouting at a group of laborers lounging around a cart heaped high with lumber and tools. At their command, the massive threehorn pulling the cart lumbered off the way they had come.\n\n\"So what are we doing here, then?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"A halfling chief doesn't leave bargaining to underlings,\" Gerith said. \"Nothing is official till the chief approves. It'd be against tradition.\"\n\n\"But the workers already left,\" Eraina said, pointing at the departing wagons.\n\n\"The halflings rarely let tradition impede efficiency,\" Dalan said. \"One of many things I admire about them. In any case, I still have much to discuss with the chieftain.\"\n\nKoranth looked at them cautiously as they gathered before the tent, eyes resting on Eraina's spear. \"Leave the weapons outside,\" he said to Dalan. \"Even that one.\" He looked directly at Omax.\n\nOmax looked down at the halfling impassively. If he took insult, he gave no sign.\n\nDalan smiled. \"Seren, Eraina, please leave your weapons out here while we meet with the chief,\" he said. \"Omax, it may be best if you remained to guard our possessions, just in case.\"\n\nThe warforged nodded, accepting Eraina's spear and sword and Seren's dagger in grim silence. Koranth removed his boots and set them beside the entrance, glaring and not moving aside so they could enter until they did the same. The interior of the tent was carpeted with thick, soft fur. Six chairs of woven wicker padded with felt stood in a circle. A small table stood before each chair, each featuring several plates of food and a small pitcher of wine.\n\nIn the chair directly opposite the entrance sat a halfling who could only be the chief. He was an older halfling a long, white moustache and white hair tied into thick braids. His clothing was outrageous, consisting of a motley suit of green and gray silk, several sparkling beaded necklaces, and a peaked yellow hat capped with a long green plume. A suit of spiked leather armor hung on a stand beside his chair. It was dyed the same riotous color scheme as the chief's outfit.\n\n\"Chieftain Rossa,\" Koranth said in the halfling language. \"I present to you Dalan d'Cannith and his associates: Gerith Snowshale, Seren Morisse, and Eraina d'Deneith.\"\n\n\"Greetings, travelers, and welcome,\" Rossa said, speaking in the Common tongue. He gestured dramatically at the chairs. \"I offer you all the hospitality the Ghost Talon tribe has to offer. Sit, eat, and let us talk of friendship.\"\n\n\"My thanks, Chieftain,\" Dalan said. He bowed politely and sat directly across from Rossa. Gerith had already taken one of the other chairs and began chewing a chicken leg noisily. Seren sat between Dalan and the halfling. The plates were heaped with roasted bird meat, steamed vegetables, and crusty black bread. A wave of hunger hit Seren when she saw the food; she hadn't realized how famished she was until this moment. There didn't appear to be any utensils, but that neither concerned nor delayed the halflings from consuming their own meals with their hands, so she did the same. The food reminded her of the bold, spicy meals Gerith prepared on Karia Naille. She tore into the offerings with great relish.\n\n\"Gerith told us your airship had been badly damaged,\" Rossa said. \"Most unfortunate.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Dalan said, \"but with the aid of your tribe's carpenters it should be nothing we cannot repair.\"\n\nKoranth, seated at Rossa's right hand, drew the folded papers from his jacket and dropped them on the chieftain's table. Even from here, Seren could see they were letters of credit, marked with the House Cannith household seal. From her experience with the letters of credit she had encountered in her thieving career, she judged Dalan must have paid the halflings a small fortune.\n\n\"I apologize for the price, but it was necessary,\" Rossa said, though his pleased grin demonstrated he wasn't all that sorry. \"Lumber is a prized commodity. We trade with the Valenar for most of our wood, but the elves have been standoffish this year.\"\n\n\"Are the elves preparing for war?\" Dalan asked.\n\n\"The Valenar are always preparing for war,\" Rossa said with a shrug, as if it did not concern him. \"Invading the Plains or Q'barra, or maybe even readying a fleet to sail Balinor knows where and start a fight with someone new. War is a sport to the elves. If they invade the Plains, they'll get bored and leave eventually. Someone will fight them off. I wish them luck. Meanwhile we're headed as far north as we can get before winter.\"\n\nSeren found the comment strange. Though the village was built of tents and wagons, none of them seemed to have been uprooted for some time and none of the halflings looked ready to leave.\n\n\"I am humbled by your generosity,\" Dalan said. \"It is my honor if the wealth of my House helps purchase the security of your tribe this winter, especially if my charity is forgotten.\"\n\nThe halfling chuckled. \"I catch your meaning, d'Cannith,\" he said. \"Have no fear of that. Lumber may be scarce but discretion is our most precious export. As long as your money's good, you were never here.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Dalan said. \"Then as our business is concluded, perhaps you would not mind speaking of other matters? I came here seeking someone and hoped that you or one of your tribe might have information.\"\n\n\"Ask, my friend,\" Rossa said, sipping deeply from his cup.\n\nDalan was silent for the briefest moment. He gave the chieftain a tight smile and continued. \"I am seeking a young woman, a scholar named Kiris Overwood. I believe she was conducting research somewhere in Talenta. Would you know of her?\"\n\n\"Is this Overwood a friend of yours?\" Rossa asked, perhaps a bit more stiffly than was required.\n\n\"We are acquainted,\" Dalan said. \"She owes my family a significant debt.\"\n\nRossa stroked his moustache with a cackle. \"Why am I not surprised?\" he said, voice tinged with malicious glee. \"Yes, I know her. That girl is the lowest sort of thief. She came to us only a few weeks ago, looking for refuge from the law, no doubt. We gave her a home, and in thanks she stole one of my wife's rings from the very tent where I sleep. My guards pursued her, but she fled into the Boneyard, only a few days' journey from here. A shame and a disgrace it is, that I clasped such a serpent to my breast, but there's little to be done. The Boneyard is taboo to my people. Bad luck will haunt any halfling that enters. My wingriders have watched the area carefully, and she has not emerged.\"\n\n\"So, living or dead, we must seek her there,\" Dalan said.\n\n\"I could not allow you to enter the Boneyard, Master d'Cannith,\" Rossa said. \"My riders are distraught enough at the idea of patrolling such a place. I could not place more friends at risk.\"\n\n\"Most of my associates are not halflings,\" Dalan said. \"We are not bound by the taboos of your people. Perhaps we could aid you as you have aided us, and return what has been taken.\"\n\nRossa's eyes lit up as he turned to Seren. \"What a clever idea,\" he said, as if it had only now occurred to him. \"Though she is unlikely to be carrying the ring, I am certain I could encourage her to reveal what she has done with it.\"\n\n\"Dalan, there is something you should know,\" Eraina said in a stern voice.\n\n\"Later, Eraina,\" Dalan said with a warning tone.\n\n\"This is important, Dalan,\" she insisted. \"The chieftain...\"\n\n\"I said later,\" Dalan repeated. \"Negotiation is my specialty, Eraina. Allow me to handle this.\"\n\nEraina rose, her face pale and angry. She strode briskly out of the tent.\n\n\"Is there a problem?\" Rossa asked, looking after her blankly.\n\n\"There is always a problem,\" Dalan said. \"The path of a Spear of Boldrei is beset by obstacles.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Rossa said. \"Paladins.\" There was both understanding and odd sympathy in his tone, as if Dalan had informed him that Eraina was afflicted with some incurable disease.\n\n\"Seren, Gerith, why don't you make certain she is all right?\" Dalan suggested, looking at each of them in turn. \"I have much to discuss with the chieftain in private.\"\n\nSeren looked forlornly at her unfinished meal. She noticed that Gerith took his plate and cup with him without any complaint from the chief, so she did the same. They emerged from the tent to find Eraina pacing back and forth before Omax, who sat on the ground and watched her patiently. She looked up with a cold expression as the tent flap opened, softening when she saw Seren and Gerith.\n\n\"Eraina, is something wrong?\" Seren asked. \"What were you trying to tell Dalan?\"\n\n\"The chieftain,\" she said in a low voice, glancing about to make certain none of the villagers were close enough to hear. \"He is lying to us.\"\n\n\"Lying?\" Seren said. \"About what? About helping us?\"\n\n\"About Overwood,\" Eraina said. \"This tribe has not moved in many months. Why would any chieftain risk the safety of his tribe by lingering so close to a place that is so dangerously taboo, especially in the face of a Valenar invasion? He has lied to us, Seren.\"\n\n\"Chieftains don't lie,\" Gerith said, absently nibbling the last piece of meat from his chicken bone.\n\nEraina looked at the halfling scornfully. \"Gerith, your trust in your countryman is admirable but misplaced. I am quite adept at detecting falsehood with or without my goddess's blessings.\"\n\n\"No, you don't understand,\" he said, tossing the bone over one shoulder. \"A Talenta chieftain is not a normal halfling. A chieftain is free of all sin and vice. A chieftain cannot lie, and he certainly doesn't have extramarital affairs. And if he did he certainly wouldn't give away family jewelry and then get caught.\" He wiped one hand on his shirt. \"If such a thing happened, it would shame him and all his tribe, wouldn't it? So it doesn't happen. Ever.\"\n\n\"What are you saying, Gerith?\" Eraina demanded.\n\n\"What you just saw in there is what we call the hmael,\" Gerith said. \"It means the 'golden lie.' The chieftain can't tell the truth because it would harm his pride and put his virtue into question. Instead he tells an obvious lie, and assumes you'll figure out the truth for yourself.\"\n\n\"But a chieftain can't lie,\" Seren said.\n\n\"Exactly right,\" Gerith said, snapping his fingers. \"See? Seren understands. Thus the honor of the tribe is maintained. Hmael isn't exclusive to chieftains either. Halflings will often tell an impossible lie instead of the truth, and assume that their friends will be smart enough to figure out the truth and polite enough not to bring it up.\" He looked from one face to the next. \"I can't believe any of you could have been around me for any length of time and not notice me doing that.\"\n\n\"What have you lied about, Gerith?\" Seren asked.\n\nThe halfling grinned. \"If you can't figure it out, you'll get no clues from me.\"\n\n\"I cannot believe your people would embrace such dishonesty,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"The halflings say the truth is like a bathtub,\" Gerith said, taking no offense. \"Dipping in can be quite refreshing at the right time and place, but it's too much trouble to carry along everywhere.\"\n\nOmax laughed, but Eraina clearly did not find the analogy humorous. She sighed at the halfling and snatched her spear from the ground. \"I for one don't appreciate being lied to,\" she said. \"If he'll lie to us about Overwood, how do we know he hasn't lied to us about Marth as well? This could be a trap.\"\n\n\"I know the Ghost Talons,\" Gerith said. \"As long as Dalan's money is good, we can trust them. And House Cannith letters of credit are very, very good.\"\n\n\"And what if Marth has made them a better offer?\" Eraina asked.\n\nGerith frowned. \"We don't really have a choice, Eraina. This was the only settlement I could find that had the resources to help us and was anywhere close by. If we turn to anyone else for help, we may as well just keep walking because Karia Naille will never fly again.\"\n\n\"If you fear treachery, Eraina,\" Omax said, \"then all that remains is to be vigilant.\"\n\nThe paladin said nothing.\n\nThis is foolish, Dalan,\" Eraina snapped. \"No good will come of this.\"\n\n\"A foreboding prediction,\" Dalan said. He pushed aside the tent flap and peered outside, probably more out of habit than any real suspicion. Dalan had requested a private tent while he discussed the chieftain's proposition, though he had spent much of his time arguing with Eraina. \"If you disapprove so strongly of the course I have chosen, perhaps you might beseech your goddess to provide a reasonable alternative?\"\n\nThe paladin regarded Dalan coldly. \"You know that the Host does not interfere in such a manner,\" she said. \"I do not see why we have agreed to aid a man who cannot even be truthful with us.\"\n\nSeren almost laughed at that. Was there anyone in the crew other than Eraina who was truthful?\n\n\"We have agreed to aid him because we are surrounded by his warriors,\" Dalan said. \"I have little doubt that whatever Rossa's interest in Kiris really is, it has nothing to do with a ring. I do not intend to expose her to him while she is still valuable to us\u2014but Rossa need not know that.\"\n\nEraina folded her arms across her chest, body tense as she glared at Dalan.\n\n\"I see such a statement does not lessen your disapproval, Marshal,\" he said.\n\n\"If you do not intend to honor the agreement you made with Rossa, you should not have made it,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"First you warn me not to trust Rossa because he is a liar, and now you are upset to hear my agreement with him is insincere?\" Dalan asked with a smug grin. \"Mourn not a ruin built on sand, or so it is said, paladin. Worry not for your honor, d'Deneith, you have made no promises.\"\n\n\"But if I know Rossa cannot trust you,\" she said, \"why should I?\"\n\n\"Because of your irritating talent for detecting falsehood,\" Dalan said. \"Have I lied to you yet?\"\n\n\"Not that I can see, but my senses are not absolute.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Then let us cease this bickering and decide how we shall find Kiris Overwood.\"\n\n\"What exactly should we be looking for, Dalan?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Overwood herself will suffice,\" Dalan said. \"Tristam will need her spells to break my uncle's ciphers. A pity he is also required to repair the airship. His insight would be useful.\"\n\n\"So we intend to take Kiris with us?\" Seren asked. \"What if Rossa's men guarding our ship see her?\"\n\n\"A road to cross when we find her,\" Dalan said.\n\n\"Then what if she does not wish to come with us?\" Eraina asked.\n\n\"She will come,\" Dalan said. He took an envelope from his coat and offered it to Seren. It was sealed with blue wax featuring the House Cannith crest. \"If all else fails, give her this. Try to reason with her at first, if possible. I would prefer not to fulfill the promises contained therein.\"\n\n\"What if Kiris is not alive?\" Omax asked. \"If the Boneyard is as dangerous as we have heard, and she has not emerged in weeks, she may be dead.\"\n\n\"Overwood was my uncle's most trusted confidant,\" Dalan said. \"I do not doubt she is resourceful enough to survive in such a place. It would be a simple matter for her to use magic to sustain herself, and I do not doubt she could find a way to protect herself from whatever horrors dwell there.\"\n\n\"Horrors,\" Gerith said. The halfling laughed bitterly. \"What about them? You haven't even talked about the biggest problem, Dalan. Surviving the Boneyard.\"\n\nDalan looked keenly at the halfling. \"You have known we were bound for the Boneyard since we left Black Pit.\"\n\n\"No,\" Gerith said. \"I knew that we were going near the Boneyard. I didn't expect that Kiris would be stupid enough to actually live there, or that we'd be stupid enough to follow her into the damned place.\" From the way Gerith spoke the word, \"damned\" was deliberately chosen.\n\n\"Then enlighten us before we continue,\" Dalan said. \"What, precisely, is the nature of the Boneyard and its curse?\"\n\n\"It's a graveyard,\" Gerith answered. \"It's filled with the bones of dragons as old as the continent itself. Nobody has ever seen a live dragon there. Nobody knows how the bones got there. It's off limits for all halflings. Even the city halflings who ignore the old ways don't take the curse lightly.\"\n\n\"And what is the curse, specifically?\" Dalan asked.\n\n\"Any halfling who enters will die far from home and be unmourned by his tribe,\" Gerith said.\n\n\"Then nothing prevents you from guiding Seren, Eraina, and Omax there, so long as you remain outside,\" Dalan said. \"After all, they aren't halflings.\"\n\nGerith laughed nervously. \"You don't understand, Dalan. The curse is there to protect us, to stave off curiosity. With or without the curse, the Boneyard is evil. There are dead things there, things better left undisturbed. That place is dangerous.\"\n\n\"We are already in a great deal of danger, Gerith,\" Dalan said. \"Or do you not recall our rough landing? Now will you lead us to the Boneyard, or must I rely upon one of Rossa's guides?\"\n\nGerith looked at Omax and Eraina before casting a long, troubled look at Seren. She offered him as encouraging a smile as she could muster.\n\n\"I'll help,\" he said. \"But I don't like it.\"\n\n\"And I regret forcing you into such a decision,\" Dalan said, \"but we all must make sacrifices.\"\n\n\"Sacrifice, d'Cannith?\" Eraina laughed. \"I notice you did not list yourself as one of those entering the Boneyard. What sacrifice do you intend to make, remaining here?\"\n\nDalan met the paladin's mocking gaze levelly. \"Do not mistake pragmatism for cowardice, Marshal,\" he said. \"I know my limitations. I do not excel in physical arenas. I would only be a burden in a place like the Boneyard. Here, at least, I can keep a watchful eye on Rossa. I assumed that all those more capable than myself would be willing to participate, but if that assumption was incorrect, please speak up. Do any of you wish to remain here?\"\n\n\"No,\" Eraina said.\n\nOmax did not reply. Strangely enough, he looked at Seren.\n\n\"Can't turn back once you start,\" Seren said.\n\nAt that, Omax silently nodded his approval.\n\nThey set out almost immediately afterward, making their way across the Talenta Plains on foot. Rossa claimed his tribe had no suitable steeds to offer humans, though Seren suspected that he did not wish to send his own animals into the accursed Boneyard. She didn't mind walking. After spending so many days cooped inside the cramped airship, a chance to stretch her legs was welcome. The plains were broad and flat, so they made good time.\n\nEraina set the pace for the others, moving with tireless energy. Gerith remained mostly airborne and out of sight, returning to adjust their course or prepare a brief meal. With each hour that passed, the halfling's cheerful demeanor grew more subdued. Seren met the change with mixed feelings. While a part of her was relieved that the halfling had ceased his bad jokes and mischievous flirtations, she was saddened to see the cheerful little scout so depressed.\n\nThe silence of her companions only added to Seren's sense of foreboding. Eraina was in a sour mood after her confrontation with Dalan. The warforged plodded along just behind her, hardly saying a word. That night, they pitched their tents and slept on the grass in tense silence. Early the next morning, they set out again. Seren had grown so used to the silence that Omax startled her with an unexpected question.\n\n\"What do you expect we will find?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" she said, slowing her pace so he walked beside her. \"A lot of the world outside Wroat is still new to me. I never know what to expect.\"\n\nThe warforged looked down at her. His metal face radiated concern, or perhaps she just imagined it. \"If the halflings fear the Boneyard, we should be extremely cautious.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Whatever frightens halflings can't be all that scary.\"\n\n\"You underestimate them,\" Omax answered. \"If halflings fear this place, we would be wise to do the same. Halflings are tenacious warriors. Have you ever seen Gerith shy away from danger? You have seen the way he leaps to his glidewing, hurling himself into the sky without hesitation.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Seren admitted. \"Though Gerith is the only halfling I've really known. It's hard for me to imagine him as a tenacious warrior.\"\n\n\"Then you do not truly know him,\" Omax said. \"Gerith has defeated the most difficult foe with ease.\"\n\n\"What foe is that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Himself,\" Omax said. \"None of the rest of us can claim such mastery. We are all haunted by ghosts, burdened by memories of what we once were, fearful of what we might become, or driven by the impossibly high expectations of others. Most souls look outside themselves for validation. Gerith is one of the few men I have met who knows who he truly is and is at peace with that. He is the strongest of us all, Seren.\" He looked at her. \"And he is afraid.\"\n\nSeren was silent for a long time. \"I never thought about halflings that way, but I never bothered to get to know them. I've never really known a warforged before either. You're more philosophical than I expected.\"\n\n\"Philosophical?\" Omax asked with a rattling chuckle. \"A philosopher asks the world why he exists, but I already know the answer to that question.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Seren asked. \"Why do you exist, Omax?\"\n\n\"To kill,\" Omax said sadly. \"I am a weapon.\" The warforged bowed his head and stared at the back of one wide metal hand, a smooth surface of adamantine and darkwood tattooed with an ancient patchwork of battle scars. \"I was among the first warforged that were truly alive. Beside a legion of my brethren I led a Cyran assault against the nation of Breland. The soldiers we faced were not prepared for our power. A single platoon escaped, taking refuge in the only fortified structure they could find\u2014a monastery of the Sovereign Host.\"\n\n\"That must have been a long time ago,\" Seren said.\n\n\"To me, the memories are fresh,\" Omax said. \"The monks gave our enemies sanctuary and would not surrender them to us. My orders were clear\u2014those who would not surrender were to be showed no mercy. We battered down the doors and invaded the monastery... the monks offered no violence but...\" The warforged's three-fingered hand closed with a metallic clang. \"They would not stand aside.\"\n\n\"Omax,\" Seren said softly. \"You don't have to talk about this if you don't want to.\"\n\n\"It was a slaughter, Seren. They were no match for us, and they knew it.\" He looked at her again. His blue eyes shone coldly. She did not know what else to say, so she continued to listen.\n\n\"One of the last surviving enemy soldiers must have been a wizard or artificer of some sort. As a final show of defiance, he unleashed an explosion that gutted the monastery, burying me and my comrades beneath tons of rubble. The others perished, but I did not. I found myself trapped in silence and shadow. A warforged needs neither food, nor air, nor sleep. So for two decades, I remained there.\"\n\n\"What did you do all that time?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nothing but think about how I had come to be,\" he said. \"Until at last I saw the light again. Tristam was the one who found me and repaired me. He gave me back my life, and this time I did not make the same mistake.\"\n\n\"To be a warrior?\" Seren asked.\n\nOmax shook his head. \"No,\" he said. \"To be a warrior is a worthy task, to fight with honor for a cause. That is not what I was. I was created with the power of choice, Seren. Though I am a machine, intended to be a weapon, I was somehow given the potential to become something more. Instead, I chose to obey blindly because it was the easier path. When I looked into the eyes of those monks, I saw the truth too late. Any crude weapon can take life away. When I refused to find a better way, I chose to be less than I could be. I squandered the gift I had been given, and I squandered the lives of those men and the warforged who followed me. Tristam gave me a second chance. I know what I was meant to be, Seren, but I do not wish to be only that.\"\n\n\"You still sound like a philosopher to me,\" Seren said. \"You know the answers, but now you're looking for a new question.\"\n\nHe glanced at her sharply. His blue eyes flickered. \"Yes,\" he said in an amused voice. \"That is exactly so. You have a keen mind, Seren. I can see why Tristam admires you.\"\n\n\"Me?\" she said. \"He's barely spoken to me since we left Black Pit. He's been obsessed with his work.\"\n\n\"Tristam has difficulty allowing others into his life,\" Omax said. \"Yet he cares for you, Seren. Remember that it was only after Dalan commanded you to join him that Tristam volunteered my aid.\"\n\nSeren blinked at Omax in surprise. She realized that the warforged had not wandered far from her side since leaving Karia Naille. Even during their meeting with the halfling chieftain, he had remained as close to the tent as he dared. \"Tristam sent you to protect me?\" she asked, sounding a bit outraged.\n\n\"It seems that way,\" Omax said. \"I think my efforts will be largely wasted. You appear quite capable of protecting yourself.\"\n\nSeren laughed and smiled up at Omax, but the warforged's blue eyes were locked straight ahead. She followed his gaze to find that Gerith had landed atop a hill. Eraina was already kneeling beside the halfling, shielding her eyes from the sun as she studied the distant horizon. She hurried to join them.\n\n\"Well, there it is,\" Gerith greeted them in a hushed voice. \"This is as far as I go.\"\n\nBeneath them, the grassy plains gradually gave way to a valley of chalky white, nestled just against the mountains. Chasms and gorges crisscrossed the surface, creating a maze of shadowed stone. Large white shapes broke the ground here and there, occasionally curving into a fearsome claw or a narrow skull with empty, staring eyes. The creatures that once owned these bones must have been truly immense if such detail was visible even from here.\n\n\"A graveyard for dragons,\" Eraina said, crouching low as she scanned the area for danger. \"Your people were right to be wary of this place, Snowshale. Boldrei warns me that there is evil here.\"\n\n\"You needed Boldrei to tell you that?\" Gerith asked, stunned.\n\nThe paladin ignored the halfling.\n\n\"Are there still dragons here?\" Omax asked.\n\n\"No,\" Gerith said. \"Nobody's ever seen a live dragon here, though if you ask me that isn't very reassuring. I'd almost rather meet a dragon than whatever frightens the dragons away.\"\n\n\"Or whatever they abandoned here,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"I'll wait in this area,\" Gerith said, glancing from one of them to the next helplessly. \"Are you sure you don't want to turn back? If you want to tell Dalan we didn't find anything...\" His words died away when he saw Eraina's unflinching glare. \"Right then,\" he said. \"I guess lying is out.\"\n\n\"We'll be careful, Gerith,\" Seren said.\n\n\"When you're ready to leave, or if you get in any trouble, fire one of these,\" Gerith said, offering a half dozen thick, cloth-wrapped tubes to Seren. \"Tristam made them. Break them in half and the air will ignite them. They let off a bright light and explode in a cloud of smoke. I'll see them, day or night.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Gerith,\" Seren said, tucking the tubes into one of her pouches. \"We'll be careful.\"\n\n\"See that you do,\" the halfling said. \"My story won't be any good without its heroine.\" He smiled weakly, then tugged at his glidewing's reins. Blizzard hopped into the air and spread its wings with a crack, soaring away over the plains.\n\n\"Where do we start?\" Seren asked, staring out at the vast expanse. \"It's larger than I thought it would be. Overwood could be anywhere.\"\n\n\"Then it doesn't matter where we start,\" Eraina said, starting off down the hill.\n\nSeren followed, with Omax bringing up the rear. When they drew closer, Eraina knelt in the thinning grass. She knelt to pick up a fragment of white stone, then stared out at the bleached expanse with wide eyes. \"The ground is bone,\" she said, gingerly setting the fragment back down. \"The entire valley is paved in fossilized bone.\"\n\n\"There is no wind,\" Omax observed. \"This place is undisturbed by the elements. I can see why the halflings would find this place unnatural.\"\n\n\"Let's find Kiris and leave,\" Seren said.\n\nThe others had no argument. They continued onward, the gentle slope of the plains becoming a steep incline. The scattered bone fragments became thicker until they covered the area like loose shale. Combined with the steep incline, the path became treacherous. Seren was forced to kick loose bone away with each step she took, seeking purchase underneath. The sounds of clattering debris resounded into the valley, making Seren wince.\n\nOmax pitched forward as the ground cracked noisily beneath his feet. His right leg sank into the surface up to his thigh, sending a ripple of scattered bone outward. Seren felt the ground pitch beneath her. Knowing there was little she could do, she leapt forward into a roll rather than fight for balance. She tumbled down the valley wall, grunting as the rough surfaces gouged her arms and legs. She finally tumbled to a halt and, finding nothing broken, came to her feet again. She stood in a forest of larger bone fragments. Broken skulls and hipbones lay like fallen boulders. Enormous ribs and claws reached for the sky like spectral trees, crisscrossing in a ghastly canopy. Spires of bare stone erupted from the bone in places, painted with bizarre sienna patterns. The air was still and musty with the faint taste of lime.\n\nHigher up the slope, Eraina helped Omax pull his trapped leg free. The warforged was annoyed but uninjured as he wrenched himself out of the bones. The dragon bones were hollow, like a bird's, and Omax's heavy tread had broken through the surface of one of the larger ones. The Boneyard was covered with layers upon layers of bone. Seren wondered how deep the remains went.\n\n\"Seren?\" Omax called out, unable to find her amid the broken landscape.\n\n\"I'm all right,\" she said, studying the steep, unstable slope. \"I don't think I can get back up to where you are.\"\n\n\"We'll come to you,\" Eraina said, picking her way gingerly down the slope.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Seren said.\n\nThe gigantic skulls of countless long-dead dragons stared silently down at her. Though it had been early morning when they had arrived, the valley was painted in a dusty half-light. She could no longer find the sun. The Boneyard radiated a sense of timelessness. \"We have been here for ages,\" the bones seemed to say, \"We will be here when you are gone.\"\n\nThere was something distinctly... wrong about the Boneyard. The shadows did not match the light as they should. The colors were not right. The patterns painted upon the stones twisted when Seren looked at them from the corner of her eye. Seren found it both disturbing and somehow familiar. She was an unwelcome intruder in a place where time stood still. She remembered Omax's words; it was obvious why the halflings avoided this place. She retreated into the curve of a fallen jawbone and waited for her friends.\n\nOmax led the way down to Seren, each step cautious and calculated. Eraina followed, spear clutched in both hands as she searched for any sign that the noise had attracted enemies.\n\nSeren saw it first, a furtive movement in the darkness between two towering rib bones. Eraina and Omax did not notice. As they approached, Seren peered out just enough for them to see her. She silently waved them away. A brief look of confusion flickered across Eraina's face, but Omax understood. The warforged marched directly past Seren's hiding place. The paladin followed with an uncomfortable frown. Several seconds after they had moved on, the shadows moved again. Seren saw it more clearly as it moved closer, a young woman in tattered robes, darting through the jagged white forest. The woman didn't offer a second glance in Seren's direction, following Eraina and Omax instead. Seren guessed that she had been drawn by the earlier noise and was investigating the new arrivals but arrived too late to see Seren hide.\n\nSeren crept out from behind the jawbone, falling into step behind the strange woman. Seren could see now that her robes were blue velvet, once obviously of fine quality, now torn and stained with the Boneyard's bleached dust. Her dark hair hung long and unkempt about her shoulders, adding to her savage appearance. Many heavy pouches hung from her belt but she carried no obvious weapons. Seren caught the faint smell of sulfur and jasmine. Seren tucked her dagger carefully away. She moved to the center of the rough path, hands clearly visible and far from her body but ready to spring away instantly if she needed to.\n\n\"Kiris Overwood,\" Seren said, loudly enough so that her friends ahead would hear.\n\nThe woman whirled, one hand reaching for her belt, eyes blazing with fear. She stopped when she saw Seren held no weapons, and realized that Eraina and Omax were now standing behind her.\n\n\"You aren't Cyran,\" she said, studying Seren's face intently. A brief look of relief shone on her dirty face, only to be replaced by intense suspicion. \"Who are you? How do you know me?\"\n\n\"My name is Seren Morisse,\" Seren said, keeping her voice calm and soothing. Kiris moved with the tense energy of a wild animal, as if, finding herself trapped, she would flee or attack at any moment. \"I work for Dalan d'Cannith. We need your help.\"\n\n\"Dalan d'Cannith,\" Kiris said, spitting out the name. \"Why am I not surprised?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Seren asked.\n\nThe heavy thud of a large and heavy thing falling erupted behind Seren, scattering the bones.\n\n\"Khyber,\" Kiris hissed. \"Run!\"\n\nSeren looked back in time to see a second shadowy mass distend, like a raindrop, from the end of a twenty-foot claw. It fell somewhere behind the rumpled heaps of broken bone, landing with a thud. Another, third shape struck the ground somewhere to their left, in the darkness. Kiris rushed past them, scrambling over heaps of shattered bone without hesitation.\n\n\"What?\" Omax said, following the wizard.\n\nThen a shrieking, gibbering screech filled the air. Seren screamed as the sound pressed into her mind, driving away all reason. A shapeless mass of flesh covered with fanged mouths and wide eyes launched from the bones and struck Omax in the chest, pinning the warforged to the ground. Another erupted from the path on the other side, lashing at Eraina with fleshy arms covered with countless biting mouths. The paladin parried the blows with her spear, moving to block its path to Seren. The thief knelt among the bones, laughing hysterically as the world melted and swirled before her eyes. In the distance, she saw Kiris unleash a bolt of arcane power into another thrashing beast and continue running without them.\n\n\"Seren, focus,\" Eraina shouted, stabbing at the nearest creature with her spear.\n\nOmax rolled to his feet, still struggling. The creature chewed hungrily at his chest and limbs. Unable to dislodge it, he instead positioned himself over a sharp bone outcropping and fell forward with all his weight. Something snapped noisily and the creature's mad gibbering became a shriek of pain. Its limbs flailed violently, pushing the warforged away. Omax fell to one side, out of its grasp, leaving the thing impaled on the now fractured spike.\n\nSeren's hand found her dagger and clasped the hilt. Her world drew into focus again. She leapt to her feet, holding the weapon in one hand. The weapon would likely do little good against these things, but being armed once again lent her confidence.\n\n\"These are the same creatures we fought in Black Pit,\" Omax said as another rose over a heap of bony debris.\n\n\"More are coming,\" Kiris said as two more dripped from bony overhangs in the distance. \"These are aberrations of Xoriat, gibbering creatures that corrupt the earth and spread madness to paralyze their prey. We cannot fight so many. Follow me if you can, but do not expect me to wait for you.\"\n\nThe gibbering sounds became louder again. They pressed in like a wave, clawing at their minds, seeking to tear away reason. Seren's eyes narrowed as she fought for focus. She saw another flash of magic far ahead. Kiris was abandoning them... but she was fighting her way toward something.\n\n\"Omax, grab Eraina's hand,\" Seren said, sheathing her dagger and digging through her pouches.\n\nThe warforged complied, though both he and the paladin looked at her with confusion. Seren drew out two of Gerith's flares, broke the ends, tossed them to the ground, and grasped Omax's other arm. The manic gibbering was broken by a loud shriek, a flash of light, and a choking cloud of smoke.\n\n\"Follow me,\" Seren shouted, charging in the direction Kiris had fled. She hoped they had the presence of mind to follow, because she certainly wasn't strong enough to drag Omax against his will.\n\nThey trudged along blindly after her, stumbling out of the smoke. The smell of burning, rotten flesh wafted over them, rising from one of the creatures Kiris had killed. Seren saw a patch of brown movement and ran after it, just in time to see the wizard disappear through a cleft in the bone wall.\n\nSeren hesitated only a moment before darting through after her.\n\nAt first glance, the crack in the wall appeared to extend only a few feet. Kiris had disappeared without a trace. Seren reached out to find the inside wall was actually a dull white curtain, blending seamlessly with the bones. She pushed it aside and stepped into a small natural cavern. A rumpled blanket lay in one corner, surrounded by scattered books. A collection of oddly shaped bone fragments littered the center of the room. The remains of a small fire smoldered in the corner, smoke trickling through a crack in the roof. The chamber smelled of stale sweat and smoke. Kiris Overwood stood in the far corner of the cavern, watching her suspiciously.\n\n\"Mind the wards,\" she said, pointing at Seren's feet with a slender copper wand. \"It is safe for you to step over but break their border and the aberrations of Xoriat will swiftly come for us.\"\n\nThe mad shrieking that filled the Boneyard punctuated her warning. Seren looked down and saw a row of shimmering silver runes spanning the threshold. She stepped over with care, as did Eraina. A loud crack sounded as Omax forced his thick bulk through the narrow opening and carefully followed them inside. Kiris darted past them, pulling the curtain over the opening again and offering them a suspicious look.\n\n\"You picked a fine time to come here,\" she said. \"Some days the Boneyard is quiet. This is not one of them.\"\n\n\"Are you certain we are safe here?\" Eraina asked.\n\n\"Quite certain,\" Kiris said. \"The wards both conceal our presence from the beasts and bar their entrance. They cannot even hear us, but I ask that you keep your voices down regardless. While my magic protects against the horrors from beyond this world, sometimes more mundane threats prowl this place. Fortune seekers. Grave robbers. Opportunists.\" She looked at each of them sharply. \"And tell your weapon to keep its distance.\" She gestured at Omax with her wand.\n\nOmax folded his heavy arms across his chest, neither backing away nor making any aggressive movement.\n\n\"Omax means no harm,\" Seren said.\n\n\"So it claims, I am sure,\" Kiris answered. \"Be wary. I saw the damage those abominable things can do in the war, and I know this one well. Tristam was a fool to ever repair it.\"\n\n\"On my honor as a Sentinel Marshal and a Spear of Boldrei, I vouch for the warforged,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"A Sentinel Marshal working for Dalan d'Cannith?\" Kiris said. \"I thought you mercenaries were more selective.\"\n\n\"There is no need to threaten Omax or insult me,\" Eraina said, her voice cool.\n\n\"I mean no insult, I merely wish to gauge your motivations,\" Kiris said. \"As for threats, that was no threat; it was a warning. If you would ally yourselves with a warforged, you are already in danger. Those beasts have a disturbing propensity for violence and betrayal.\"\n\n\"She is right,\" Omax said. \"Yet I assure you, Lady Overwood, I have set that path behind me. I serve Tristam Xain now.\"\n\n\"Tristam?\" Kiris asked, recognition flickering in her eyes. \"He is here?\"\n\n\"He is repairing our damaged airship,\" Seren said.\n\nKiris's angry scowl softened in confusion, but only for an instant. \"What are you doing here?\" she asked. \"How did Dalan find me?\"\n\n\"We found an enchanted hand lens that you created,\" Seren said. \"It was in the possession of a changeling named Marth. We know that it can read certain codes in Ashrem d'Cannith's journals, but we don't know how it works.\"\n\nKiris's eyes widened. \"You took the lens from Marth?\" she asked. \"Is he still alive?\"\n\n\"For now,\" Seren said.\n\nKiris frowned. \"So Dalan still seeks the Legacy,\" she said. \"I cannot help you, but neither will I offer you harm. You may remain here until the creatures have gone, but then you must leave and forget you saw me here.\"\n\n\"Then while we wait, perhaps you could tell us what you know about this Marth person,\" Eraina said. \"He is responsible for the murder of Jamus Roland and likely Bishop Llaine Grove as well.\"\n\n\"Llaine is dead?\" Kiris said, looking up at Eraina with wide eyes. \"Llaine's self-righteousness and blind faith in those who supported the war was galling at times, but I can't believe Marth would kill him.\"\n\n\"You are gravely deluded, woman,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"I saw Marth murder Jamus Roland,\" Seren said. \"He has been hunting us in Ashrem's old airship, Moon.\"\n\n\"You were aboard that ship on the Day of Mourning,\" Eraina said. \"How did you survive, and why did you allow the world to think you were dead?\"\n\n\"Why should I care what the world thinks of me?\" Kiris said in a hollow voice. \"My life ended in every way that matters on the Day of Mourning. Ashrem is gone. My homeland is gone. My entire family perished. Together, Marth and I repaired Moon enough to limp out of Cyre. I have been here since we escaped, helping him with his work from afar.\"\n\nEraina's stance shifted. The change was slight, but Seren could see that the paladin now held her spear ready. Her eyes were angry, intent. \"So you are his ally,\" she said. \"Who is he? Where is his home port? How did he gather his troops?\"\n\n\"Marth is a visionary,\" Kiris said after a long silence. \"There is no other word for it. He is the sort that others naturally wish to follow. His followers are Cyran soldiers who were fortunate enough to be outside their homeland when Cyre was destroyed.\" She closed her eyes, as if pained by the recollection. \"He is a patriot and a hero, not a killer.\"\n\n\"You are lying,\" Eraina said. \"You lie to us and to yourself. I hear it in your quavering voice. You've suspected what he truly is. What we've told you doesn't surprise you at all, does it?\"\n\n\"Marth is a good man,\" Kiris protested, lowering her eyes. \"Or he was, once. But you are right, Marshal. I have seen him change since the Day of Mourning, but were it not for him I would be dead or worse. The things we have seen, the horror that Cyre has become, have driven him to desperation. I know he has concealed things from me. His cause is noble, but I have seen the rage that burns inside him. Now, to hear that he might have had a part in these killings...\"\n\n\"What is his plan?\" Eraina demanded.\n\n\"He only wishes to finish Ashrem d'Cannith's work,\" Kiris said. \"He wishes to complete the Legacy. He returns here from time to time, and I share what I have learned with him. He applies my findings to his work.\"\n\n\"Why here?\" Omax asked.\n\nThe wizard sighed. \"What do you know of the Draconic Prophecy?\" she asked.\n\nEraina removed her left glove and rolled up her sleeve, exposing the dragonmark on her forearm. The twisting pattern closely resembled the marks on the stones outside. \"I know some,\" the paladin said. \"The Prophecy appears as a series of arcane symbols, like these. It manifests on the earth, the sky, and some say even the dragonmarks that we bear are part of it. The dragons created it as a guide to what is to come, and what has come to be. The writings often carry magical power.\"\n\n\"Partially right,\" Kiris said. \"Though I do not believe the dragons truly created the Prophecy. I think they were merely the first to discover it and thus it bears their name. After all, if a dragon wishes to name something after itself, who are we to argue?\"\n\n\"So where does it come from?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"I do not know,\" Kiris said. \"Such questions cannot be answered. Who created the Sovereign Host? Does the Marshal's inability to answer that question make Boldrei less worthy a goddess?\"\n\n\"Leave my faith out of this,\" Eraina warned.\n\n\"I meant no offense,\" Kiris said. \"I only mean that there is much about this world that none of us understand. We must take some things on faith as we search for answers, and the origin of the Prophecy is one of those things. We can rely only upon that which we know. The Prophecy is ancient. The Prophecy is powerful. The Prophecy\u2014as far as I know\u2014is never wrong.\"\n\n\"So what do those marks outside say?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Many things,\" Kiris said. \"Most of what I have deciphered speaks of a great battle between dragonkind and the demons of Khyber. It says that the dragons would sever the thread that binds the worlds and rend the very essence of their enemies. That battle came to pass before the dawn of mankind. Now the bones and the Prophecy are all that remain.\"\n\nEraina's face darkened. \"There is more you have not told us,\" she said with grave certainty. \"What does the Legacy have to do with this?\"\n\n\"Ashrem,\" Kiris said. \"He first found this place many years ago. With help, he deciphered many of the writings outside. He learned how the dragons defeated the demons. They created an... anchor, if you will. An artifact that negates magic of all kinds. All arcane energies are forcibly and permanently canceled. All enchantments are destroyed. All gateways to other dimensions permanently closed. The tool the dragons forged to defeat the demons is what inspired the Legacy. Ashrem used the principles he learned here to create it. While Marth searches for Ashrem's lost journals, I labor here to understand the Prophecy as Ashrem understood it. My skill at artifice is nothing compared to Marth or Ashrem, but I have always had a talent for deciphering language and codes. I have learned much.\"\n\n\"And what would the Legacy do to creatures of magic?\" Omax asked.\n\n\"See the results for yourself,\" she said, gesturing at the bone samples on the floor. \"Magic is a dragon's lifeblood, and it was stripped from them. The other dragons left their brethren where they fell as a tribute to their sacrifice. The dragons who activated the original Legacy knew what would happen, but to ensure the future of our world they were willing to die.\"\n\n\"The Legacy destroys all magic?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"With how heavily the Five Nations rely on magic,\" Eraina said, \"a thing like that could throw entire cities into chaos.\"\n\n\"It is not a weapon, it is a tool,\" Kiris said. \"If used improperly the potential for damage is great; I will not deny that. Why do you think we hide what we do? Marth intends to use the Legacy to tame the wild energies of the Mournland and restore the former grandeur that was our home. He wishes to restore Cyre.\"\n\n\"Marth has deceived you, Kiris,\" Eraina said. \"If he truly wished to help Cyre, he would approach the nations of Khorvaire and ask their aid. King Boranel would gladly aid him if only to remove the Cyran refugees from his borders. Marth need not steal and murder to reach his goal. He chooses a path of evil.\"\n\nKiris laughed. \"Is that so?\" she asked. \"Then which nation does your master, Dalan, represent? What good deed will he do when he finds the Legacy?\"\n\n\"Dalan is not my master,\" Eraina said. \"I seek only justice.\"\n\n\"Regardless, if you believe Dalan is any more honorable than Marth, or that the kings of Khorvaire can be entrusted with the Legacy, you are the one who is deluded. The surviving nations pretend to grieve for Cyre and offer its survivors what scraps they deign to spare, but they do not truly wish to see the Mournland restored. As far as they are concerned, the death of Cyre means one less enemy. If any of them gained the power of the Legacy, they would only use it against one another.\"\n\n\"Better Dalan than Marth,\" Seren said. \"I saw him kill Jamus Roland with my own eyes.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" Kiris said, though the hesitation before she spoke betrayed her doubt. \"I see your disgust. You think I am a fool, but we have come too far. I cannot allow myself to believe Marth is what you claim he is. I cannot turn against him.\"\n\n\"You are blind and pathetic,\" Eraina said.\n\n\"Am I?\" Kiris asked, looking at the paladin. \"Perhaps I believe he can become the hero he used to be. You embrace a killer who seeks redemption,\" she pointed at the warforged. \"Yet I do so and I am a fool?\"\n\n\"If he seeks redemption, shooting us down over Talenta is a curious way to start,\" Omax said.\n\n\"Then what if you are right?\" Kiris asked. \"What if Marth is a madman? If I turn against him it would be one more in a long chain of betrayals heaped upon him. What hope would there be for him then?\"\n\n\"You are a fool defending a murderer,\" Eraina said.\n\nKiris looked at the tip of Eraina's spear. \"I would think that a paladin of Boldrei would recognize the power of faith. Tell Dalan what I have said. I hope he will understand. I cannot help you, but neither will I tell Marth that you have been here.\"\n\n\"You misunderstand your situation, Overwood,\" Eraina said. \"I am a Sentinel Marshal. You have confessed to aiding a murder suspect. You will accompany us. I do not offer you a choice.\"\n\n\"You cannot force me to leave,\" Kiris said.\n\n\"Is that a threat?\" Eraina asked, hefting her spear. \"I do not fear your magic, wizard.\"\n\nSeren took a step away from Kiris, moving closer to Omax.\n\n\"I will not hurt you,\" Kiris said. \"Neither can you compel me to leave.\"\n\nEraina held the wizard's gaze for several moments and then lowered the point of her spear. With a swift, deliberate movement, she scratched a gouge across the wards that protected the door. Outside, the shrieking of the creatures that haunted the Boneyard began to build.\n\n\"What have you done, Marshal?\" Kiris asked in horror.\n\n\"I present a choice,\" Eraina said, pointing her spear in the wizard's direction. \"You can leave the Boneyard with us, or you can remain here and see if these beasts offer you greater mercy than I do. Can you restore your wards before they arrive?\"\n\nKiris's face paled. \"I cannot,\" she said, \"but I would rather Marth find me here dead than betray him.\"\n\n\"Idiocy!\" Eraina snapped, advancing on the wizard.\n\n\"Wait,\" Seren said, moving between them. \"Dalan said you might not wish to help.\" She took the sealed envelope from her pocket and offered it to Kiris. \"He asked me to give you this.\"\n\nThe wizard accepted it with a pensive eye. She broke the seal and hurriedly tore it open, taking out the letter and letting the envelope fall to the floor. Her eyes moved across the page several times, as if she did not believe what she had read. Her expression grew slowly more troubled. Outside, the beasts drew closer.\n\n\"We must leave now,\" Omax warned, watching the door. \"This is a bad place to be trapped.\"\n\n\"Ever the expert negotiator, Dalan,\" Kiris said in a bitter, subdued voice. \"Very well.\" She creased the letter sharply and dropped it in the fire. She darted for her scattered scrolls, quickly gathering those that were most important and stuffing them into an empty bag. She hoisted the bag over one shoulder and stepped through the curtain. \"Stay close. I know the way out.\"\n\nOmax and Eraina followed. Seren remained a step behind, still stunned by the sudden change in Kiris's demeanor. She glanced back at the discarded envelope, still bearing half a House Cannith seal, and the letter that now burned in the small fire.\n\nShe wondered exactly what sort of promise Dalan had made.\n\nKiris led them through the bone-littered paths to another narrow tunnel in a heap of enormous ribcages. Looking back the way they had come, she gestured nervously at the entrance.\n\n\"This passes beneath the valley and will lead back out onto the plains, the way you came,\" she said.\n\n\"Then you go first, wizard,\" Eraina said, watching Kiris.\n\nKiris sighed. She reached for her pouch, causing Eraina to heft her spear. Kiris slowly drew a glowing stone from within.\n\n\"It's just a light, Marshal,\" Kiris said.\n\n\"Give me your bags and your pouches,\" Eraina ordered.\n\n\"If I meant you any harm with my magic, would I not have attacked you already?\" Kiris asked.\n\n\"If you mean no harm,\" Eraina said, \"there should be no harm in surrendering them.\"\n\nKiris opened her mouth to argue, but the shrieks of the Boneyard beasts drew closer. She quickly took the bag from her shoulder, stuffed her numerous belt pouches inside, and handed it to the paladin. Eraina absently passed it to Seren so that she could keep both hands on her spear. Seren pulled the bag over one shoulder, still stunned by the brusque change that had come over the paladin since they had found Kiris.\n\n\"Lead the way,\" Eraina said stiffly.\n\nKiris entered the passage, holding her stone high to light the way. Seren entered after Eraina, leaving Omax to bring up the rear. The mad gibbering cries of the creatures drew nearer, passing almost directly overhead. Kiris looked back, the dim light of her stone painting ghastly shadows on her thin features. She placed a finger across her lips, though none truly needed the warning. After several tense moments the creatures continued on their hunt.\n\nThe narrow tunnel twisted downward. The air was cold and dry beneath the Boneyard. The faint lime taste was much stronger here. Fine white powder covered the stone walls. Occasionally the light of Kiris's stone would reflect upon a dragonmark scrawled upon the wall. The symbols would sometimes catch the light shine brilliantly in a mosaic of dazzling color, continuing to shimmer in the darkness for some time after they passed on.\n\n\"It is just as well that you are forcing me to leave,\" Kiris whispered. \"I think the Prophecy has grown silent here anyway.\"\n\n\"Silent?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"The Draconic Prophecy is a thing of magic,\" Kiris said. \"Parts of it can be read only under certain conditions. It has taken me some time to understand it as Ashrem did, but one thing is clear. The writings here are incomplete. The tale is continued elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Eraina asked.\n\nKiris looked back at Seren with a pained expression. \"Why are the three of you working with Dalan on this? Surely you know that he'll only surrender the Legacy to House Cannith. They will use it to amass power, selling it to the highest bidders. Have you thought nothing of the damage that would do?\"\n\n\"I don't know anything about magic,\" Seren answered, \"but I know Marth murdered my friend.\"\n\n\"Keep walking,\" Eraina said coldly.\n\nKiris's gaze flicked to the ground.\n\n\"I can see that you hate me, Marshal,\" Kiris said. \"I know how your house and your goddess view the law. I could be no more despicable than if I had killed those men myself. I can respect that, though I regret it. But why do you hate me so, Seren? I did not kill your friend, nor was I even aware that he existed.\"\n\n\"Because you were used,\" Seren said. \"You work for an evil man, yet you refuse to see it.\"\n\nKiris laughed. \"Then we have much in common,\" she said.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Seren said.\n\n\"You would not believe me,\" Kiris said. \"No more than I believe you.\"\n\n\"All of us already know that Dalan d'Cannith is a manipulative weasel,\" Eraina said. \"Our alliance is one of mutual benefit, not blind subservience. Now be silent.\"\n\nKiris continued walking, head bowed. Their trek through the tunnels went on for over an hour, winding underneath the dead earth. At last, a sliver of light shone ahead and Kiris tucked her glowing stone back into her pocket. The tunnel opened on the plains at the foot of a mountain wall. They stepped out onto the soft grass, squinting painfully as their eyes adjusted to the afternoon sun. Kiris slumped against a stone, exhausted. Eraina stood near the wizard, carefully watching her for any attempt to escape. Seren took one of Gerith's cloth tubes from her belt and fired it into the air to signal the halfling.\n\nSeveral minutes passed, with nothing but soft white clouds marking the sky overhead.\n\n\"Something is wrong,\" Omax said at last. \"Gerith should have seen the smoke by now.\"\n\n\"Over here,\" hissed a voice from behind them.\n\nGerith crouched amid the uneven terrain at the foot of the mountain, looking harried and out of breath. He gestured to them impatiently, eyes fixed on the western horizon.\n\nKiris looked up, eyes wide. \"You brought a halfling with you?\" she asked.\n\n\"Gerith Snowshale, pleased to make your acquaintance,\" Gerith said, offering a mischievous grin. \"Now hurry. We need to get out of sight!\"\n\nThey climbed the rocky wall to join the scout just as the rapid footfalls of approaching clawfoots sounded across the plains.\n\n\"We need to leave, quickly,\" Kiris said. Over the rolling hills, a half dozen halfling hunters mounted on clawfoot dinosaurs galloped toward them. Seren recognized the one that rode at the head of the pack - Chief Rossa's bodyguard, Koranth.\n\n\"Ghost Talons,\" Kiris whispered. \"They've been spying on me for almost a year.\"\n\n\"Dalan made a deal with them for repairs when our ship crashed,\" Eraina said. \"He also offered to help them find you, though he did not intend to fulfill that bargain.\"\n\n\"The Ghost Talons follow me when I leave the Boneyard to trade for supplies,\" Kiris said. \"They even hire nonhalfling travelers to draw me out so they can question me. I was afraid your Gerith was one of them.\"\n\n\"They saw your flare, Seren,\" Gerith said.\n\n\"Sorry. I didn't know they were following us,\" Seren said.\n\n\"I didn't know either,\" Gerith said. \"I didn't notice them following us until you went inside the Boneyard.\"\n\n\"Who are they working for?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"I do not know,\" Kiris answered. \"As long as I could avoid them, it was never a concern.\"\n\n\"If someone else is interested in what you're doing here, I'm not surprised they hired the locals to keep an eye on you,\" Gerith said. \"The Talons are just the sort to take that job. They're enterprising sorts.\"\n\n\"Enterprising?\" Kiris said with a laugh. \"You mean scavengers. They hide near the Boneyard because they know that even the Valenar avoid the accursed place. When and if the elves invade, the Ghost Talons can be the first to loot the battlefields. I do not know what interest they have in me. They could be working for anyone.\"\n\n\"Strange that halflings give you so much trouble,\" Eraina said. \"I'd think Marth and his followers could frighten them off for you.\"\n\nKiris hesitated. \"I have not told Marth about the Ghost Talons,\" she said. \"I was... concerned that he might overreact.\"\n\n\"Kill them, you mean,\" Eraina said. \"So much for your faith in your hero.\"\n\nBelow, the Talons had gathered in a small circle just at the tunnel exit. One had dismounted and was studying the grass with a practiced eye. He looked back at Koranth and mumbled something too quiet for them to hear.\n\n\"Servants of Dalan d'Cannith,\" Koranth shouted in a clear voice. \"I know that you can hear me; your tracks are fresh. Please reveal yourselves. We do not wish to do you harm. Chief Rossa is eager to see you return. He has dispatched his finest warriors to escort you back to the camp. Do not be afraid.\"\n\n\"More hmael?\" Seren asked.\n\nGerith nodded rapidly.\n\n\"Should we fight them?\" Eraina asked. \"Six enemies aren't such terrible odds. I've seen worse.\"\n\n\"I think you miscounted,\" Gerith said. \"I see twelve. Those clawfoots aren't just ponies, Eraina.\"\n\nKoranth continued to wait in uneasy silence, the last echoes of his voice still returning over the mountains. He gestured to his riders and two of them darted off, one in each direction, searching for them.\n\n\"Incidentally, your master sends his greetings,\" Koranth shouted. \"He is well guarded by my loyal hunters, and will continue to be until you return safely to the Ghost Talons.\"\n\n\"So now it has come to threats,\" Eraina said in a low growl. \"They are holding Dalan.\"\n\n\"What do we do?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Honestly, we may as well surrender,\" Gerith said. \"They're all hunters and this is their territory. It's only a matter of time before they find us.\"\n\n\"Can't you escape on Blizzard?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Sure,\" Gerith said. \"I can avoid Koranth and his amateurs forever, but Blizzard isn't big enough to carry three humans, a warforged, and me.\"\n\nSeren knelt and dropped Kiris's bag, hurriedly digging through its contents. She removed the pouches of spell reagents and returned them to Kiris, leaving only the books and scrolls inside.\n\n\"What are you doing, Seren?\" Eraina asked.\n\n\"We came here looking for Kiris because she could help us understand Ashrem's work,\" Seren said. \"Maybe the halflings, or whoever they really work for, just want to get their hands on her work too.\" She handed the bag to Gerith. \"Can you get these back to Tristam without being seen?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Gerith said.\n\n\"Those books are mine,\" Kiris protested.\n\n\"And if you let Gerith take them back to our ship, you have a chance of keeping them,\" Seren said. \"Koranth won't give you an offer like that.\"\n\nKiris only shrugged in agreement and secured her reagent pouches to her belt.\n\n\"You sure you'll be all right?\" Gerith asked, looking up at Seren in concern.\n\n\"I don't think Koranth wants to hurt us,\" Seren said. \"As long as he thinks he's in control, we'll have time to plan. If they really have taken Dalan prisoner, I'd be surprised if he hasn't already come up with an escape plan.\"\n\n\"Good point,\" Gerith said. \"I hadn't thought of that,\" The halfling took the satchel and climbed onto Blizzard's back. \"Good luck to you, ladies. You too, Omax. Be safe.\"\n\nGerith whispered something curtly to his glidewing. The creature made several agile leaps up the rock face, away from the hunters and out of their view. There was only the subtle flap of leather and a blur of motion across the sky to mark his departure. Blizzard's pale blue underbelly perfectly camouflaged it from below.\n\n\"Are you lost?\" Koranth shouted. \"Are the plains so confusing? Shall I send my hunters to guide you to us?\"\n\n\"No need, we're right here,\" Seren shouted back.\n\nShe stepped out of her hiding place, scaling down the rock wall carefully. Eraina, Kiris, and Omax followed. Koranth scrutinized each of them carefully, especially Omax, who stood at eye level to him even mounted on his steed. The other two roving hunters returned rapidly, their mounts moving with startling speed.\n\n\"Dusty and bruised but not wounded,\" Koranth said. \"Rossa will be pleased that you are in good health. Lady Overwood, I presume? We have been looking for you for a long time.\"\n\n\"What do you want with me?\" Kiris asked.\n\n\"That is Rossa's business, not mine,\" Koranth answered. He scanned the area briefly. \"Where is your scout?\"\n\n\"He fled,\" Seren said. \"The Boneyard terrified him.\"\n\nKoranth looked at Eraina. \"Is that true, paladin?\" he asked, looking at her shrewdly.\n\n\"Gerith was quite terrified of the Boneyard's curse,\" Eraina said. \"He left as quickly as he dared.\"\n\n\"That's what they get for trusting a Snowshale,\" said one of the other halflings. Koranth and the others laughed. Seren realized abruptly that the hunter had spoken in his native tongue, and that Tristam's bracelet had translated the words.\n\n\"Truly a pity,\" Koranth said with a smug grin. \"Never fear, we shall guide you back to our camp. You'll have to walk, unfortunately. Our steeds are notoriously intolerant of unfamiliar riders.\"\n\nNot to mention that if they tried to escape, the clawfoot riders could quickly run them down. Seren smiled at Koranth, trying not to be unnerved by the violence she detected just beneath his veneer of etiquette. Some of the other hunters were less subtle, scowling openly at her. She had the feeling that the Koranth was almost disappointed that they had chosen to surrender peacefully. The halfling gestured with his spear and moved his steed to one side, signaling for them to begin walking.\n\nThe hunters rode in a loose circle around them as they traveled back to the Ghost Talon village. In time, the sun set and the hunters struck a rough camp in the shadows of a short cliff. The halflings began cooking the evening meal and pitching tents. Seren stepped forward and offered to help but was ordered to return to the others with a gesture and a curt word that Tristam's bracelet didn't understand. The message was clear. Their status as \"guests\" was merely a convenient illusion. They were prisoners. Seren returned to sit beside Omax, Eraina, and Kiris. Koranth arrived shortly afterward, depositing a pot of steaming beans, a jug of water, tin plates, and clay cups.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kiris said in the halfling tongue.\n\nKoranth smiled faintly. \"I know that all of you are concerned by our presence here,\" he said. \"Please, do not be. I assure you, we have your best interests at heart. The Ghost Talons have been retained by Baron Zorlan d'Cannith, who has taken a personal interest in your adventures. All of you will be treated as guests of the Ghost Talons until the Baron's emissaries arrive to collect you.\"\n\n\"Politics,\" Eraina said bitterly. \"So that's why your tribe was so interested in this place. I thought your chief just wanted his ring back? Or was that a lie too?\"\n\n\"A ring?\" Koranth asked. \"I remember hearing nothing about a ring. Perhaps Rossa misspoke. He is an old man. He says many strange things.\"\n\nKoranth's smug grin faded as he looked past them, to the west, his eyes narrowing in concern. Seren looked in the same direction. A faint red glow was visible on the far horizon. A plume of gray smoke curled into the night sky.\n\n\"Pian, Maern,\" he said, calling to two of the other hunters. \"Wait here and guard our guests. The rest of you come with me. Something is happening in the village.\"\n\n\"It's Marth,\" Seren warned. \"The one who shot down our ship. He's attacking your tribe.\"\n\nKiris's face was pale as she looked at the distant fire.\n\n\"Then he will rue that he crossed the Ghost Talon tribe,\" Koranth said.\n\n\"We can help,\" Omax said. \"We have fought him before.\"\n\nKoranth climbed onto his clawfoot with a grimace. \"You cannot keep up with us, outsiders. This is not your fight. The Ghost Talons stand and fall on their own.\"\n\nHe kicked his mount into stride and loped off across the plains, three of his hunters following in formation behind him. The other two remained behind with nervous expressions, watching as their brethren departed.\n\n\"We should go, Maern,\" one of the halflings said, his words translated by Tristam's bracelet. \"Our families are down there.\"\n\n\"We were told to remain,\" the other said, though his reply held no conviction. His eyes were on the fire as well, and they were filled with fear. Seren felt as angry and helpless as they did. She wanted to help, or at least convince them to go to their tribe, but what could she say? And then she remembered.\n\n\"Kapen hara,\" she said to the hunters. \"Family before all else.\"\n\nThey both turned to her, eyes wide, and then looked at each other. Maern bowed his head shamefully. Pian looked back at her with a steady, building resolve. He clapped his comrade on the shoulder and ran to his steed. Maern paused to offer a mumbled thanks and hopped on his steed as well. Together, the two rode off across the plains to defend their village.\n\nEraina, Omax, Kiris, and Seren stood in the now-abandoned camp, watching as the hunters galloped off across the plains. None said a word for a long moment. They were free now. They could easily escape to Karia Naille, assuming Marth had not found it. Tristam might be finished with the repairs. If Gerith had arrived, they might already be preparing to take off.\n\n\"Do what you must,\" Eraina said, hefting her spear as she stared at the distant fire. \"I plan to fight. Keep up with me if you can.\"\n\nThe paladin charged off across the plains, not waiting for the others. Omax fell into step behind her. Seren stopped only long enough to look back at Kiris, still sitting beside the fire. If she left the wizard behind, she left behind the first real chance to understand what Tristam and the others had been seeking, and perhaps let an enemy escape to threaten them another day. But as she watched the silhouettes of her friends and the halfling hunters charging to an uncertain fate, she remembered the night that Jamus Roland died. If Tristam and Omax had not stood beside her, she might have died as well. Could she let the Ghost Talons face Marth alone? Could she abandon Dalan to him?\n\nThere was really no choice at all.\n\nTristam peered up over the side of the ship's railing, removing his spectacles with an exhausted grin. \"I think I have it, Aeven,\" Tristam said. \"Try it now.\"\n\nThe dryad's eyes remained closed. Her hands were still clasped in the ball of seething blue fire. Slowly, she extended her fingers. The fire spilled out to each side, extending in two snaking tendrils. They extended around the sides of the ship and met at the newly repaired keel strut beneath. The flame wavered for several seconds, then resolved itself into a steadily burning ring.\n\nAeven slowly opened her translucent green eyes. She gazed into the fire in wonder. Her childlike face broke into a pleased smile. \"Yes, my friend,\" she whispered to the elemental. \"You can stay for a while longer. The tinker has fixed it so we can remain together.\" She dropped lightly from the upper arm of the ship and kissed Tristam lightly on the lips. \"The ship says thank you.\"\n\nTristam blinked in surprise. Aeven was already gone, having flitted away to sit on the rail near her figurehead. The young artificer could not help but smile. He put his spectacles back on, dropped down from the rope ladder, and stood back to admire his work. Karia Naille had been hoisted on a hastily constructed scaffolding. The ship was not as pretty as she once was. Chunks of the hull were missing and the keel arm was obviously an improvised replacement, but it would do. She was alive again.\n\n\"Excellent work, Xain,\" Zed Arthen said, limping up beside Tristam. The inquisitive had fashioned a crutch out of the halfling lumber and still favored his left leg.\n\n\"I couldn't have done it if Aeven hadn't held the elemental here,\" Tristam said with a sigh. \"And if Pherris wasn't such a skilled pilot, the damage would have been a lot worse. We still need to get her to a proper shipwright. She might not even hold together that long.\"\n\n\"I'm not a man who commonly distributes praise, Xain,\" Zed said, giving Tristam a pointed look. \"Best learn to recognize it, or I won't bother next time. I've walked away from more than one airship crash in my time. This the first time I've seen the ship get back up. Ash himself couldn't have done a finer job.\" Zed looked furtively around the canyon. \"Especially under the circumstances.\"\n\nA dozen halfling laborers sat in a circle around a small campfire, laughing and chatting as they prepared their evening meal. The trio of threehorns that had hoisted the airship onto its scaffolding browsed nearby, searching the canyon for sparse foliage.\n\n\"How many times is it now, Zed?\" Tristam asked quietly.\n\n\"Three times,\" Zed said. \"Three times I've caught those halflings trying to sabotage the repairs. They don't know that I know, but I'm sure they're wondering why the scaffolding didn't fall down when it was supposed to.\"\n\n\"Why are they doing it?\" Tristam asked. \"Do you think they're working for Marth?\"\n\n\"Doubtful,\" Zed said. \"If that were the case they would probably just kill us, or sabotage the ship so it crashed after takeoff and kill us.\" Zed looked worried. \"Are you sure they didn't do that?\"\n\n\"No,\" Tristam said confidently. \"The ship is fine. Aeven would know if it had been harmed.\"\n\nZed nodded. \"Then they're just trying to delay us,\" the inquisitive said. \"They want to keep us here as long as possible.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"Good question,\" Zed said. \"Toughest part of being an inquisitive is recognizing when not to obsess over the wrong questions. I'm not as interested in learning what their game is as I am in removing us from it.\"\n\nZed continued staring at the halflings for a long moment, searching for any clue as to their motives. He gave Tristam a questioning look when he realized the artificer was studying him in turn.\n\n\"What?\" he said.\n\n\"Why didn't you want me to tell Dalan that I recognized Moon the first time I saw her?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"It would have made things prematurely complicated,\" Zed answered, looking away again. \"Dalan didn't see Moon until she attacked us over the plains. Now think about what he's done since then. Why do you think he's spent all his time away from here in Rossa's camp, while you fix the ship? Now that he knows that you know Marth is connected to Ashrem, he's been avoiding you.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Tristam asked.\n\nZed looked at Tristam again, his gray eyes narrowing. \"Listen, Tristam. Your employment with Dalan is based upon several important assumptions. There are things that you're better off not knowing, and things that he's better off not knowing that you know. Let's leave it at that.\"\n\n\"For a person dedicated to solving mysteries, you seem pretty intent on concealing the truth, Arthen,\" Tristam said. \"What are you afraid I'll find out?\"\n\n\"I could answer that question, but I think you'll regret it,\" Zed said.\n\n\"Tell me,\" Tristam said. \"I need to know what's going on here. I need to know how Marth is connected to Ashrem.\"\n\n\"I can't really answer that,\" Zed said. \"But I know how he's connected to Dalan.\"\n\n\"Dalan?\" Tristam asked, surprised.\n\n\"Zed sighed. \"Even back when Ash was alive, Dalan suspected that his uncle was onto some sort of big research. He was always sniffing around, trying to figure out what it was. After Ashrem disappeared, Dalan redoubled his efforts. He figured Ashrem's lost research would be his ticket to the respect he always deserved. Of course, the old man didn't trust his nephew enough to leave him any of his journals. Dalan was a war profiteer, after all, and Ashrem was a pacifist. So Dalan turned to me for help. I owed Dalan a few big favors from back in the war, so I agreed.\"\n\n\"You knew Dalan during the war?\" Tristam asked. \"Does that have something to do with you being a knight?\"\n\n\"That happens to be none of your business,\" Zed said. \"Anyway, he hired me to find out who had inherited Ashrem's journals. Seemed a pretty straightforward job. Then some of the journals started disappearing. Then people who owned them started disappearing. I looked into it, and found out that Dalan had been meeting with displaced Cyran soldiers in some of Wroat's shadier inns. I followed them one night after they left; the soldiers boarded Moon in the wilderness outside Wroat.\"\n\nTristam's frown deepened. \"Dalan was working with Marth?\" he asked.\n\nZed nodded. \"For a while. I could tell that he didn't like it, though. I think he needed Marth's knowledge of artifice\u2014and that's why he brought you on, Tristam. He needed a skilled, trustworthy artificer so that he could eventually sever his association with Marth.\"\n\nTristam absorbed the information.\n\n\"When Bishop Grove was murdered, that was the last straw,\" Zed said. \"Dalan stopped meeting with Marth's agents, but by that time they didn't really need him anymore. Marth knew much more about the Legacy than Dalan did. I was disgusted by the entire affair, but I couldn't' expose Dalan. I owe him too much. So I made up a lame excuse to leave and went to live in Black Pit. I didn't want to be involved anymore.\"\n\nTristam frowned. \"All this time I thought you just abandoned us,\" he said. \"I'm sorry, Zed.\"\n\n\"Eh, you didn't trust me,\" Zed said with a shrug. \"Nothing new to me. If it makes you feel any better, I don't really care what people think of me. No offense.\"\n\n\"So why did you come back to help us?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"Because now Dalan's trying to fix what he did,\" Zed said. \"He knows how dangerous the Legacy is. I believe he really does want to stop Marth from unlocking its secrets and see that it's used responsibly. I didn't buy it at first, and that's why I warned you away from him, but I think he's sincere. I'd like to help him, if I can. I'm a big admirer of redemption. The only parts that still confuse me are how Dalan ever came into contact with Marth in the first place and how Marth commandeered Kenshi Zhann. Oh, and what in Khyber he's planning to do, of course.\"\n\n\"It worries me more that Marth keeps finding us everywhere we go,\" Tristam said. \"Could Dalan still be working with him?\"\n\n\"Doubtful,\" Zed said. \"Marth was trying to kill us when he shot us down. My theory is that he has some other way of finding us that has nothing to do with Dalan... or anyone else that's been on board Karia Naille.\"\n\nA shrill whistle came from the ship's deck above. Captain Pherris stood at the rail, pointing at the eastern sky with a grim expression. Tristam followed the gesture. At first he saw nothing, so he removed his spectacles. There was a subtle blur of movement in the sky. As it flew closer, it became more recognizable as a familiar glidewing bearing a tiny rider.\n\n\"The halfling came back alone?\" Zed said, sounding worried. \"Best see what's going on, Xain. I'll stay down here and make sure our hosts don't become too curious.\"\n\nTristam was already climbing back aboard the ship to wait by Blizzard's perch. With a swoop of leathery wings, the glidewing landed on the ship. The creature's rounded chest heaved with exhaustion. Gerith was nearly unconscious from his frenzied flight. He fell out of the saddle and stumbled toward Tristam. He dropped a heavy bag at the artificer's feet and then collapsed on the deck.\n\n\"From Seren,\" Gerith said, struggling to catch his breath. \"Hide it before the Ghost Talons see.\"\n\n\"Where are the others?\" Pherris asked.\n\nGerith explained as much as he could about how the others found Kiris and then were tracked by Rossa's hunters. Tristam felt a wild surge of emotions. He exulted that the clues he had sought for so long might be contained in the books and scrolls Gerith had brought, but he was terrified that Seren and Omax might be in danger.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Gerith said, looking to Pherris.\n\n\"You get to your cabin and get some rest,\" Pherris ordered. \"You're even more useless than normal when you're half dead.\"\n\n\"Aye, captain,\" Gerith said with a tired laugh.\n\n\"Meantime, we wait,\" Pherris continued. \"I wouldn't be surprised if Seren and the others escape before Rossa's hunters can get them back to his village. If they do, we'll need Seren's help to sneak in and rescue Dalan.\"\n\nGerith gave a lazy salute and limped away to fall below decks and crawl to his cabin.\n\n\"Who says we need to rescue Dalan?\" Tristam asked once the halfling was gone.\n\nPherris's fluffy brows lifted in surprise. \"Where in Khyber did that come from?\" he asked. \"Pherris Gerriman does not leave his crew behind.\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" Tristam said. \"I just learned some unsettling truths about Dalan.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Pherris said. \"So I suppose the next time you're trapped on the roof of a building that you and your metal cohort have set aflame, I should pause to weigh the worth of your eternal soul before I come and rescue you?\"\n\nTristam said nothing.\n\n\"Right, then,\" Pherris snapped. \"I'll just pretend that you never said what you just said and we shall leave it at that, Master Xain.\" The captain turned smartly and marched off across the deck.\n\nAeven knelt nearby, hands folded demurely in her lap. She looked at Tristam with wide green eyes. \"The ship is confused,\" she said. \" Karia Naille is glad to see her sister again, but wants to know why the Kenshi Zhann wounded her so badly.\"\n\n\"I wish I knew, Aeven,\" Tristam said, shrugging helplessly at the dryad. He picked up the heavy sack of books in one hand and returned to his cabin.\n\nFor the next several hours he pored through Kiris Overwood's writings. They were notes on the Boneyard, quotes from the Draconic Prophecy, and copious sketches of magical constructions that Tristam could only assume were part of the Legacy. Unlike Ashrem's own journals, these weren't ciphered. It made little difference. Tristam retained none of it. The words were clear enough, but his mind was too distracted. Each time he sought to understand, his thoughts would trail inevitably to Marth, wondering at his connection to Ashrem, or to Dalan. He wondered how much the guildmaster had lied to him. He thought of Seren, worrying that she might have come to harm.\n\nThe sounds of the halfling laborers shouting at one another outside finally gave him the excuse to put aside the books and climb above deck.\n\n\"Master Xain, I need a word with you!\" Pherris shouted just as Tristam emerged above deck.\n\nHe immediately noticed that the Ghost Talon halflings were in a hurry to leave. Some were rapidly packing their remaining supplies onto their mounts. Others were already running in the direction of their village on foot, holding weapons. Gerith and Zed stood at the edge of the deck, watching the halflings silently. Pherris was calibrating the ship's controls, ignoring the spectacle. Aeven sat cross-legged atop her figurehead, watching them all attentively.\n\n\"Master Xain, I need your expertise,\" Pherris said, not looking up from his work.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"A scout just arrived,\" Gerith said, looking at Tristam bleakly. \"The Kenshi Zhann is attacking Ghost Talon village.\"\n\n\"Khyber,\" Tristam swore.\n\n\"Dalan is still there,\" Zed said, \"and possibly the others as well.\"\n\n\"Master Xain, I've a mind to fly to that village and rescue our friends,\" Pherris said. The gnome captain marched toward Tristam, folding his arms behind his back as he paced across the deck. \"I wonder if this ship is in any condition to survive such an adventure. What is your professional opinion?\"\n\n\"She'll hold together,\" Tristam said. \"As long as we don't push her too hard or take any more direct hits. We won't survive another battle with Moon.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Master Xain,\" Pherris said pertly. \"Aeven, can you provide some sort of distraction when we reach the village?\"\n\n\"I have called the storm,\" Aeven said in her soft, musical voice. \"It will fight beside us.\" Overhead, the sky was already beginning to darken.\n\n\"Then let's see about our missing crewmates,\" Pherris said, stepping up to the ship's controls. \"All hands, prepare for takeoff.\"\n\nThe Ghost Talon encampment was engulfed in flame. Dozens of halflings ran past Seren as she approached the village, mostly fleeing on foot. Some carried bundles of possessions. Others carried injured friends or relatives. The occasional threehorn trundled past with a bleating cry. Many of the creatures had no riders, having broken free and stampeded away from the doomed settlement.\n\nHunters mounted on clawfoots either struggled to round up the fleeing dinosaurs or charged into the village to fight. The sleek silver shape of the Kenshi Zhann hovered above the spectacle. Plumes of lightning raked down from its bow, ravaging the village. Most of the Ghost Talons were not warriors, and those few who were had been no match for Moon's incredible firepower. A dozen charred bodies lay at the outskirts of the village, lying beside their dead steeds. Shrieks echoed through the night, punctuated by the crack of thunder in the distant sky.\n\nSeren caught sight of Omax and Eraina at the edge of the village. Koranth and two of his hunters were surrounded by seven of Marth's heavily armed Cyran soldiers. The riders moved back to back, holding their spears defensively as they prepared to fight to the last.\n\n\"For Boldrei!\" Eraina shouted defiantly and leapt into their midst. She whirled her spear in one hand and her short sword in the other, striking down one of the soldiers before the others even registered her presence.\n\nOmax rumbled up beside her, his massive presence drawing immediate attention. One of the soldiers struck fiercely with his sword, striking the warforged across the chest with a shower of sparks. Omax shrugged off the blow and clapped his hands together heavily on each side of the man's head.\n\nKoranth looked up in surprise. The halfling's anger that his prisoners had escaped was dispelled by a more practical reaction. \"Ghost Talon warriors, to me!\" he cried. His steed lunged forward, pinning another of the soldiers to the ground with one sharp claw. The other Cyrans a banded together, reappraising the situation now that the odds were not so clearly in their favor.\n\nSeren ran forward to join her friends, dagger in hand, but a flash of lightning revealed an unexpected figure. Kiris Overwood was running into the village, heedless of the danger. Seren scowled. Had the wizard believed nothing that they had said? She'd expected at most that Kiris might simply run away once the others had left her behind, or that she might even help them fight Marth. Was she running back to join her mad hero? Seren hurried after her.\n\nIn the center of the village, the Seventh Moon had dropped a boarding ladder near Rossa's tent, which remained mostly intact. Cyran soldiers were already hurriedly climbing back up the ladder, back onto the ship. Kiris was headed directly for them when Seren seized her by the shoulder. The wizard whirled around, only to find Seren's dagger held near throat.\n\n\"Khyber, Kiris are you insane?\" Seren asked. \"Are you going back to him?\"\n\n\"I have to, Seren,\" she said desperately. \"I have to try. I know the prophet is the one doing this, the one twisting him. If I leave him, who will keep him from becoming a monster?\"\n\n\"He's already a monster,\" Seren said.\n\n\"No, there's still hope,\" Kiris said. \"He hasn't completed the Legacy yet.\"\n\nSeren's eyes flicked past Kiris, toward the chief's tent. The tent flap opened and Marth and Dalan stepped out. Dalan looked angry but unafraid. Marth held his amethyst wand in one hand and gestured at the boarding ladder. Dalan began to climb.\n\n\"They're taking Dalan,\" Seren said.\n\n\"I can stop him,\" Kiris said, twisting away while Seren was distracted and running toward the tent. \"I can reason with him!\"\n\nSeveral of Marth's Cyran soldiers turned with weapons ready as Kiris ran toward them. Seren was a step behind, feeling impotent with only her dagger. Marth turned, staring at them with his ghostly white eyes. Kiris halted in her tracks.\n\n\"Hold, do not attack!\" he shouted to the soldiers. \"Kiris?\" he called out.\n\n\"Marth, what are you doing?\" Kiris cried, eyeing the soldiers warily. \"The halflings are no threat to you!\"\n\n\"They harbored our enemies, Kiris,\" Marth said. \"That makes them enemies.\"\n\n\"Kiris, get away from him,\" Seren warned as she crouched behind a pile of overturned crates.\n\n\"Seren?\" Marth said with a faint sneer. \"Is that you? You should have remained in Wroat, girl. Kiris, step away from the thief and join us. It is time to leave.\"\n\n\"Is what she said true, Marth?\" Kiris asked, voice shaking. \"Did you kill Llaine?\"\n\nMarth frowned. His smooth face creased in thought, as if weighing his reply.\n\n\"I am sorry, Kiris,\" he said.\n\nA cone of green fire leapt from Marth's wand. Seren leapt away, rolling between two small abandoned wagons. The smell of burning flesh seared the air. Seren looked back to see a twisting, burnt corpse curled in the road where Kiris had stood. Kiris hadn't even had time to scream.\n\n\"Kill Seren Morisse,\" Marth commanded his remaining troops, then turned to board his ship as well.\n\nSeren searched desperately for a better hiding place as three soldiers charged after her. Seren dropped and rolled under a wagon as two crossbow bolts struck the wood with a dull thunk. The storm that had been building during their approach arrived with a fury. The sky exploded in rain. Savage winds tore across the village and Seren thanked the Sovereign Host for whatever coincidence had brought the sudden storm.\n\nSeren rolled to her feet on the other side of the wagon, only to find herself facing four more of the mercenaries. Disoriented by the sudden storm, they turned to face her sluggishly just as a peal of thunder rocked the sky.\n\nNo, not thunder, Seren realized as the soldiers looked past her in terror. She felt a looming presence behind her. It was the metallic roar of a warforged. Omax held the other halfling wagon over his head with both hands. With a heave, he hurled it at the soldiers. Eraina, Koranth, and a half dozen mounted Ghost Talon hunters rallied to her side as well. The remaining Cyran soldiers stood in a line, readying their weapons. A bolt of lightning hammered down from Moon, blowing the other wagon to splinters and boiling the rain. A second bolt reduced Rossa's tent to ashes.\n\n\"Retreat,\" Eraina called, scowling up at the airship. \"We can't fight that airship!\"\n\n\"Ghost Talons, take cover in the storm!\" Koranth echoed, waving his javelin wildly.\n\nSeren fell back, following the others just as the Cyrans withdrew to their ship. She followed the halflings into the shadows beyond the burning village.\n\n\"What about Dalan?\" Seren shouted over the rain. She looked back over her shoulder to see the bright elemental ring of Moon lift into the sky and soar away.\n\n\"There is nothing we can do for him now,\" Omax said.\n\n\"What have you done?\" Koranth said, staring hopelessly at his village. \"What have you brought upon us?\"\n\n\"Do not blame us for this, Koranth,\" Eraina said. \"Blame Rossa.\"\n\n\"I was speaking to Rossa, curse his ghost,\" Koranth said. \"How can the tribe recover from this loss?\"\n\nJust as the halfling's words faded, a second ring appeared in the sky above them, a blazing circle of familiar blue. As she saw the familiar figurehead in the center of the flame, Seren realized that perhaps the storm was no coincidence after all. Karia Naille swooped over the village, flying in broad circles as she surveyed the scene below. Seren ran to the center of the village, waving her hands wildly to get the captain's attention. The others followed her as well, including Koranth and his halflings.\n\nThe ship's boarding ladder spilled from the hull and Tristam slid down in a flash, sword in hand. Zed dropped beside him, moving a great deal more stiffly with his wounded leg but still holding his weapon with deadly purpose. Seren saw Aeven standing at the rail, her golden hair illuminated by lightning. The winds whirled around her, and she gazed down at the burning village with a strangely cold expression. The look in Aeven's eyes frightened Seren more than any obvious rage or fear ever could. Thunder cracked the sky again. Seren remembered Dalan's warning about Aeven's fierce temper.\n\n\"Seren, are you hurt?\" Tristam asked.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she said, running to his side and sheathing her dagger, \"but they killed Kiris and took Dalan with them.\"\n\n\"What?\" Tristam said, flustered. \"Kiris is dead? And why they take Dalan?\"\n\n\"He probably wants to know how much we know,\" Zed said. \"Dalan's dead, or he will be when Marth is done questioning him. There's no way we can take on Moon, especially with our ship in the shape she is.\"\n\n\"Maybe not,\" Tristam mused. \"In this storm, Moon's weapons won't be as accurate or affective. If we can catch up quickly enough, we can board and rescue him.\"\n\n\"It's suicide, Tristam,\" Zed said.\n\nTristam looked at the inquisitive. \"Are you telling me I shouldn't try?\"\n\n\"No,\" Zed said. \"I'm with you. Just wanted to be clear.\"\n\n\"You know that even if we made it aboard, Marth's soldiers would kill us,\" Gerith said. \"There are too many of them, and only eight of us. That's assuming we all board, of course, which would be stupid, since someone has to fly the ship.\"\n\n\"Koranth,\" Zed said, turning to the halfling warrior.\n\n\"I have heard everything, human,\" Koranth said. \"You have your army, if it means the Ghost Talons have their revenge.\"\n\nKoranth stepped from his saddle, holding his javelin in both hands. Behind him had gathered a dozen of the tribe's remaining hunters and warriors wielding whatever weapons they had salvaged from the village. Hatred burned in their eyes.\n\n\"Everyone aboard,\" Tristam said.\n\nThat way,\" Tristam said, pointing south through the raging storm.\n\nPherris nodded and urged Karia Naille to greater speed. Aeven crouched on the rail of the ship near her figurehead, oblivious to the howling wind. Though the rain fell in sheets all around them, the airship and her passengers remained dry. The deck was crowded with Koranth's halfling warriors and their glidewing steeds. The glidewings were agitated by the unfamiliar movement of the airship, so the halflings spent most of their time soothing the creatures. Blizzard glared disdainfully at the other creatures from his perch.\n\n\"We're getting closer,\" Tristam said. \"Definitely straight ahead, Pherris.\"\n\n\"Pretty lucky that you happened to enchant something Dalan brought with him so that you could track him,\" Zed said.\n\n\"Nothing lucky about it,\" Tristam said, still staring into the storm. \"I gave Dalan and everyone who went with him something so I could find them if something went wrong.\"\n\nSeren's hand moved to the silver bracelet the artificer had given her. For a moment, their eyes met and he smiled at her.\n\nZed chuckled in approval.\n\n\"We need to hurry, Pherris,\" Tristam said. \"I can't sense him if he gets too far away and Moon already has a lead on us.\"\n\n\"The ship can't give you much more, Tristam,\" the gnome said.\n\n\"I can,\" Aeven said softly. The dryad lifted her arms to the heavens and tipped her head back. The winds shifted and the storm built behind them, pushing the airship forward.\n\nTristam turned back to face the assembled crew. \"Each of you take one of these,\" Tristam said. He opened a small pouch at his belt, taking out several glass vials and handing them to Seren, Eraina, Omax, and Zed.\n\n\"What are they?\" Eraina asked, holding up the bottle and looking at the murky contents suspiciously.\n\n\"Leaping potions,\" Tristam answered. \"The halflings have their glidewings, but we'll need these to get aboard Moon and back. Save them for now; they don't last long. And for the love of all that's holy, don't miss when you jump onto Moon.\"\n\n\"Will the potion work on Omax?\" Seren asked, looking at the warforged dubiously.\n\n\"We are creatures of magic,\" Omax said. \"We were built so that we could benefit from other such creations. I suspect that the only reason we were given mouths was so that we might drink potions.\"\n\n\"Can you board an airship with your leg, Zed?\" Pherris asked.\n\n\"My leg is fine,\" Zed said, nodding briefly at Eraina. \"Still a bit sore, but I wouldn't miss the chance to get even with those Cyran bastards for dropping an airship on me.\"\n\n\"All well and good, but do we have a plan beyond 'everyone jump and hope for the best?' \" Eraina asked.\n\n\"I'm coming to that,\" Tristam said. \"I lived on Moon for a while, so I have some idea what we're heading into.\" He took a roll of vellum from his cloak and unrolled it on the deck, revealing a detailed sketch of the Kenshi Zhann's interior.\n\n\"What if Marth has changed the layout since he took the ship?\" Eraina asked.\n\n\"Old information is better than nothing,\" Tristam said. \"Moon's lightning cannon is its main weapon, but it's front mounted. As long as Pherris keeps Karia Naille above and behind her, she won't be able to fire it at us. Our ship is more maneuverable than theirs, so that shouldn't be a problem. The Cyran soldiers will still have crossbows, but with Aeven's storm they'll have trouble hitting anything. We'll use the clouds to approach unseen and, once we get close, Gerith and Koranth will lead the glidewings down Moon's main deck.\" He pointed at the diagram. \"Once they've distracted the crew, the rest of us will leap onto the rear deck. Dalan is probably being held in one of the lower cabins, here.\" He pointed again. \"Omax, Eraina, and Zed will fight their way there and retrieve him. Once you have him, leap back to Karia Naille and send off a flare so that the halflings know to break off combat and leave. We'll have the element of surprise and the Ghost Talons to help us, but with a ship as large as Moon, Marth's crew likely still outnumbers us. We can't afford to linger long. Wait ten minutes after we jump, Pherris. No longer. If anyone isn't back by then, assume the worst.\"\n\n\"And once we have Dalan back, what's to stop Moon from whirling about and firing that cannon at us?\" Pherris asked.\n\n\"That's where Seren and I come in,\" Tristam said. He pointed at the map again. \"Marth will expect that we've come to rescue Dalan as soon as he's aware of the attack, so Seren will help me sneak through the chaos into this room. This part of the lower cargo bay houses the main elemental containment chamber of Moon, the crystal housing that binds their elemental to this plane. While the rest of you do your part, Seren and I will sneak down there and I'll shatter the chamber. Moon will bleed out power fast and drift to the ground, crippled. Is all of that clear?\"\n\nThe others all murmured their assent. Seren did likewise, impressed that Tristam could show such focus and leadership in a crisis.\n\n\"What do we do about Marth?\" Gerith asked.\n\n\"Kill him,\" Zed said. \"Not like he doesn't have it coming.\"\n\n\"Just do what you can, Gerith,\" Tristam said. \"We're not really there to fight. Getting Dalan back and getting out safely is our real priority.\" He turned back toward the bow of the ship. \"Now get ready, everyone. We're getting close.\"\n\nA blur of light was visible in the distance, the glow of Moon's elemental fire gleaming through the storm. Pherris turned the ship's wheel and Karia Naille soared skyward. Churning mist covered the deck as the ship pierced the clouds. It was bitterly cold up here. Seren felt her teeth begin to chatter. The clouds grew thicker, until eventually even Moon's flaming ring could barely be seen.\n\n\"She's just below us now,\" Pherris said, and gestured to Gerith.\n\nThe halfling climbed onto his glidewing and shouted to the others. Koranth mounted his own steed and lifted his javelin in one hand. The creatures leapt from the deck, extending their wings with a synchronized snap. They soared down through the clouds, and soon after they vanished she heard Koranth's defiant cry.\n\n\"For the honor of the Ghost Talon!\"\n\nThe sound of crashing steel and startled cries followed. Pherris worked the helm again and Karia Naille dipped down from the clouds. Moon appeared dangerously close, beneath and just ahead of them. Her forward deck was already covered with Cyran soldiers battling halfling hunters.\n\n\"Now!\" Tristam said, tossing aside the cork from his potion and throwing back the contents.\n\nSeren drank her potion, as did the others. She winced at the chalky taste, but she immediately felt lighter, more energetic.\n\n\"It's better with rum, but we were fresh out,\" Tristam said with a weak grin. \"Just aim yourself at the other ship and jump. It's easier than it looks.\"\n\n\"Unless you miss,\" Zed said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Tristam said. \"Don't miss.\" He drew his sword and leapt from the deck.\n\nSeren stood and watched for a brief, awestruck moment. Tristam soared through the air between the two ships, moving with eerie grace. Omax and Zed were next. The massive warforged and the stocky man with his large sword looked almost comical as they soared through the void. Eraina patted Seren's shoulder encouragingly and followed. Not allowing herself any more time to think about what she was about to do, Seren leapt from the ship's deck.\n\nThe wind rushed by with a keening howl. She felt weightless as she hung in the air, the distance so great it was difficult to tell she was moving at all. When she looked down, she saw only clouds. Then the moment was past, and she landed lightly on the deck of Moon. She looked back the way she had come, at Karia Naille hovering high above them.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Tristam said. \"We don't have to jump that. Pherris will move closer when he sees our signal.\"\n\n\"Unless we die,\" Zed said, hefting his sword with both hands.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Tristam said. \"Don't die!\"\n\nZed cackled. \"Good luck, Xain.\"\n\n\"Good luck, all of you,\" Tristam answered as they stormed off across the deck. A Cyran soldier stepped around the corner and opened his mouth in alarm, but fell silent as a backhand slap from Omax sent him crashing limp into the wall.\n\n\"I have another sketch of the map if you need to see the way, Seren,\" Tristam said, reaching for his pocket.\n\n\"Memorized it,\" she said, moving past him and slipping through an open hatch in the deck.\n\nShe dropped into a darkened bay stacked with crates and barrels. The sounds of the storm and fighting were greatly muffled, interrupted only by the noisy thud of Tristam landing beside her. She gestured for him to wait and stalked ahead. The bay narrowed to a smaller passage. It was similar to the design of Karia Naille, albeit on a larger scale. She pressed herself between a beam and the wall just as one of the cabin doors opened, releasing three startled soldiers who ran past toward the upper deck, oblivious to her. Once they were gone, she gestured to Tristam and they moved down the passage.\n\nA closed door led to the ship's central containment chamber, guarded by a single soldier. The guard held his sword in one hand, looking around nervously as he protected the door. Seren drew her dagger and looked at Tristam.\n\nTristam shook his head and stepped forward from the shadows. The guard whirled with a start just as Tristam hurled a handful of dust in the man's face. The guard blinked, staggered, and slumped to the floor.\n\n\"Only sleeping,\" Tristam said, examining the door. \"These men are just soldiers, Seren. I don't want to kill them if we don't have to. They're only following Marth because they have nothing else left.\" He looked up at her. \"I don't sense any wards on this door. Do you think you can pick the lock?\"\n\nSeren studied the lock briefly, then looked back the way they came. She cocked her head slightly, listening to the chaotic melee above. Seeing no one nearby, she stepped back and kicked the door sharply, jarring it off one hinge and shattering the lock. Tristam stared at her blankly.\n\n\"Picked,\" she said.\n\nTristam didn't argue. He hurried into the room beyond. The large chamber was filled with shining brass runes and shimmering crystals. A large square of the floor was transparent glass, displaying a murky purple cloudscape below them. A cylindrical black column stood in the center of the chamber, radiating heat.\n\n\"That's it,\" Tristam said. \"That cylinder contains the crystal that binds the ship's elemental to this plane.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Send her home,\" Tristam said. He took a small tube from his pocket and unfolded it into a four-foot ivory rod, engraved with runes and capped with a square of shimmering jade. He held the staff in both hands and closed his eyes, concentrating as he turned in a slow circle and concentrated on the crystal chamber.\n\n\"Why not just blast the housing with your wand?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"Because that would just release the elemental into this room, not send her back to his home plane,\" Tristam said. \"After years of servitude, they tend to be quite angry\u2014and we don't want to be here for that.\"\n\nTristam opened his eyes when the door at the far side of the core chamber opened. Seren quickly darted behind the door, preparing to ambush whoever entered. A tall man in long purple robes stepped inside, long, white hair spilling over his shoulders. Tristam dropped the rod and quickly produced his ivory wand, releasing a bolt of crackling lightning at the changeling. When the smoke cleared, Marth was unharmed. An aura of magical power shimmered around him.\n\n\"Impressive but uncalled for, Tristam,\" the changeling said. \"I was prepared for your coming, and I only wish to talk. Had I wanted to kill you, I would have left more soldiers here. After all, crippling the heart of my ship would have been your only real chance of escape.\"\n\nTristam's scowl faded, replaced by a look of startled recognition. \"Your voice,\" he said. \"Orren?\"\n\n\"If it pleases you,\" Marth said. The changeling's features shifted to that of a thin young man with blonde hair tied back in a ponytail. \"Orren Thardis is an old name, given by an old friend. I'd hoped to offer you the same thing Ashrem offered me\u2014a new life.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Tristam said, backing away.\n\n\"Dalan brought you into his quest only when he realized I would not be his pawn,\" Marth said. \"When he realizes you are worthier than that, he will betray you as he betrayed me. He holds you back, Tristam. He forces you to underestimate your own talent because he fears that you will become something greater than he can control\u2014just as he could never control his uncle. He wants you to waste your life waiting for an opportunity that will never come, and all the while he reaps the fruits of your genius.\"\n\n\"And why should I help you?\" Tristam asked. \"So I get to be an accessory to murder?\"\n\nMarth sighed. \"I do not care if you help me, Tristam,\" he said. \"I do not want you to help me. You are my friend, Tristam. I just want you to find your own destiny, and stay out of mine.\"\n\n\"What if I say no?\" Tristam asked. \"Will you kill me like you killed Kiris?\"\n\nMarth's grip tightened on his amethyst wand. \"Zamiel was right,\" he said sadly. \"This was a foolish luxury.\" He pointed the wand at Tristam.\n\nAs Seren pounced, she prayed to Kol Korran that Marth's magical shield didn't protect him from steel as well. Her prayers were answered. She felt steel sink into the changeling's back and heard him cry out in pain. Green fire sprayed wildly through the core chamber as Marth staggered into the wall. Seren rolled away, losing her knife.\n\nTristam darted in front of Marth, seizing and holding his wand ready.\n\n\"Your magic doesn't harm me, Tristam,\" Marth sneered, looking for his own lost weapon.\n\nWithout a word, Tristam turned and fired a bolt of energy into the ship's housing chamber. A guttural roar, full of triumph and anger, echoed through the Kenshi Zhann. Marth's eyes widened in fear as a creature woven of fire and rage rolled over him. The changeling vanished as the elemental filled the room. Tristam ducked under the blast, shattering the glass floor with his wand.\n\nHe leapt into the swirling void with Seren in his arms.\n\nFor several minutes the storm winds howled around them. Tristam held Seren's waist tightly, so she gripped him firmly in return. Though she always thought she wasn't afraid of heights, she discovered she was quite afraid of falling from thousands of feet up. They didn't plummet as they should, but drifted, a feather. Seren didn't open her eyes again until she felt the ground beneath her feet.\n\nFinding herself alive and standing on the soft grass of the Talenta Plains was a most welcome surprise. Seren relaxed her grip on Tristam, though she did not release him yet. She looked around in numb surprise, still shivering from the chill of the storm and the terror of their fall. In the sky far above she could see the twin rings of the two airships. One ring sped away across the sky at extraordinary speed. The other flickered and wavered as she slowly drifted toward the ground. Blue fire also crackled within the ring, as the angry elemental wreaked its vengeance on the Kenshi Zhann. The storm was swiftly dwindling to a light drizzle. The eastern sky glowed red with the haze of the coming sun.\n\n\"I doubt that when he gave me that ring, Orren intended me to use it like that,\" Tristam said, looking up sadly at the plummeting corpse of Ashrem's flagship.\n\n\"You could have reminded me about it before you jumped,\" Seren said, finally catching her breath enough to speak. \"I didn't realize you could carry two people with it.\"\n\n\"Neither did I,\" Tristam said.\n\n\"What?\" she said. She took a step back and glared at him.\n\n\"I'm joking!\" Tristam said, holding his hands out defensively. \"Mostly joking. I mean, theoretically I knew it would support the weight of another light person, but I never really had a chance to test it, and I thought stopping to ask what you weighed wouldn't have been wise.\"\n\n\"What would have happened if you were wrong?\" she asked.\n\n\"I dunno,\" he said, tucking his wand back into his coat. \"I guess I would have given you the ring and let go.\" He looked at her seriously.\n\n\"So what do we do now?\" she asked, folding her arms across her chest.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Tristam said. \"It looks like Karia Naille escaped.\" He pointed at the point of flame in the sky. \"The others hopefully found Dalan and got back on board. If we can make our way to some sort of civilization and make contact with them, everything should be fine.\"\n\n\"But what about Dalan?\" Seren asked. \"Marth said that Dalan had been working with him.\"\n\n\"I'm not in the habit of taking lunatics at their word, even if they used to be friends,\" Tristam said. \"Though I will admit it makes a certain amount of sense. If Dalan wanted to crack the secrets of the Legacy, it would make sense for him to turn to one of Ashrem's old partners. I guess when Marth proved to be a little too ambitious, Dalan turned to me instead. Wroat makes a great deal more sense to me now.\"\n\n\"How do you figure?\" Seren asked.\n\n\"The way I see it is like this,\" he said. \"Dalan was working with Marth, but turned his back on him when he realized Marth was a killer. Later, he realizes that Marth is a great deal further along in his pursuit of the Legacy than we are. Dalan spreads rumors that he knows a little more about the Legacy than he ever let on, in the hopes that Marth will take the bait and give us a chance to track him. Marth is suspicious, so he hires Jamus to take the fall.\" Tristam sat down in the grass and smoothed his hair nervously. \"Of course that's just a theory, but it looks like we've been lied to from the beginning. I need to talk to Dalan.\" He sighed. \"I'm sorry, Seren. Sorry to have gotten you involved in this.\"\n\nSeren looked up at the sky. \"Do you think Marth is dead?\"\n\n\"No,\" Tristam said. \"I think he teleported away when the fire came for him. He's still out there, Seren. Still looking for the Legacy.\" Tristam shook his head slowly. \"I have no idea how to stop him.\"\n\n\"We still have Kiris's notes,\" Seren said. \"There has to be something to be learned there. Not to mention Dalan spent a good amount of time on Marth's ship. He must have learned something, especially if any of the soldiers made the mistake of talking to him.\"\n\nTristam chuckled. \"That's true,\" he said. \"Of course none of this solves our most pressing and immediate problem.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" she asked.\n\n\"The others probably think we're dead,\" he said. He looked around at the vast plain, then back at her. \"We have no idea where in Talenta we are. All I know is that the Valenar are to the south, the mountains are to the east, and the Mournlands is to the west.\"\n\n\"Then my suggestion,\" she said, standing up and offering her hand. \"Is that we head north.\"\n\nTristam smiled, took her hand, and stood. Together, the artificer and the thief began their march across the plains.\n\n[ Two Weeks Later, the City of Fairhaven ]\n\nShaimin loosened the garrote and let the old woman fall on the floor with a wet thud. He leaned back in the elegant mahogany chair where she had been doing her knitting only a moment before. The slim elf rested his chin on one hand as he looked at the corpse. It was almost disappointing. None of the guards had been paying attention. The windows had not been sealed, warded, or locked. He even gave the old woman a chance to see his reflection in the mirror. She didn't yell for help. She didn't have a knife. She only gaped in surprise. Now it would likely be several hours before anyone even found her.\n\nIn. Out. Eberron has one fewer duchess. Shaimin's bank account anonymously receives enough gold to feed a poor family for two years.\n\nThe gold didn't matter, of course. He had enough to live quite comfortably for the rest of his life. That was all most assassins dreamed of, but then most assassins had no sense of style, no understanding of why they killed. Their greed drove them to prison or to early graves. They had no appreciation for the hunt, no appreciation of the skills required to perform a task well.\n\nShaimin drummed his fingers impatiently on the arm of the chair. All that time wasted brooding, and still no guards had arrived. Well, he refused to make any more purposeful mistakes merely to make his evening more interesting. He had a reputation to maintain. That didn't make the boredom any less galling. If these assassinations didn't swiftly prove to be more challenging, Shaimin feared that he might well have to enter a more interesting line of work. Perhaps politics? He already had plenty of contacts.\n\nWith a heavy sigh, Shaimin d'Thuranni sauntered back to the window and bounded across the rooftops of Fairhaven. He moved with animal grace, traveling with no undue noise or hesitation, drawing no notice from the citizens in the street. When he felt he was sufficiently distant from the duchess's house as to draw little suspicion, he paused and concentrated on the elaborate dragonmark scrawled across his shoulder blades. His senses expanded from his body, giving him a view of the alley below as if he were there. Confident that no undue bystanders were watching, he dropped gracefully to the ground. He smoothed his black silken cloak over his shoulders with a feline fastidiousness, pursing his lips in frustration.\n\n\"Do you plan to follow me for the rest of the evening?\" Shaimin asked. \"Or are you quite satisfied with what you have seen?\"\n\n\"I am quite satisfied,\" was the answer. The air rippled. A robed figure appeared from nothing. He was a tall, pale-skinned humanoid with pink burns on one side of his face.\n\n\"Hello, Shaimin.\"\n\nShaimin moved his finger off the trigger of the small crossbow he held beneath his cloak. A smile split his pale features. \"Thardis,\" he said with a malevolent grin. \"I never believed you were dead. It is good to see you again.\"\n\n\"My name is Marth,\" the changeling replied. \"I am pleased to see you as well, though I fear I am not here to renew old friendships.\"\n\n\"I thought as much,\" Shaimin said, his interest piqued. \"A friend wouldn't spy on me while at work; he'd just meet me at the theater afterward. You wished to ensure that my skills had not deteriorated since last we met.\"\n\n\"And I am not disappointed, Shaimin,\" Marth said.\n\n\"I should hope not,\" Shaimin said stiffly. \"This is regarding Ashrem's legacy?\"\n\nThe changeling nodded.\n\n\"Then walk with me,\" the elf said, gesturing to the road. \"Let us speak of old friends and unfinished business...\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Gotrek & Felix 04) Dragonsla", + "author": "Warhammer", + "genres": [ + "dark fantasy" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "NIGHT OF THE SKAVEN", + "text": "Soon, thought Grey Seer Thanquol, my brave warriors will attack.\n\nThanquol rubbed his paws together with glee. Soon all his planning and bargaining would pay off. Soon he would have his revenge on the dwarf, Gotrek Gurnisson, and his loathsome human henchman, Felix Jaeger. Soon they would regret forever that they had meddled in the plans of so mighty a sorcerer. Soon he would send them screaming and begging for mercy to their well-deserved deaths. Soon.\n\nAll around him, he heard his forces moving into position. Rank upon rank of awesome skaven warriors, the very cream of ratman soldiery, moved through the dark. Their pink eyes glittered in the gloom; their long tails lashed with suppressed killing lust; their fangs glistened with saliva. Just behind him, his monstrous bodyguard, a huge rat-ogre, the third to bear the name Boneripper, grunted with bloodlust.\n\nThe rat-ogre was bigger than any human, more than twice as tall and ten times as heavy. Its head was a terrifying combination of rat and wolf. Its red eyes burned with insane rage. Its monstrous talons were extruded from its stubby fingers. Its long, worm-like tail lashed the air furiously. This new rat-ogre, a replacement for the one slain by Felix Jaeger at the Battle of the Lonely Tower, had cost Thanquol a small fortune in warptokens. It was not the only thing that had cost Thanquol during his recent visit to Clan Moulder's huge burrow at Hell Pit. He had been forced to pledge more than half his personal fortune and a share in the spoils of the coming victory to the warped rulers of the clan in return for their support in this new venture. Still, thought Thanquol, it was an immaterial consideration. The rewards of his inevitable victory would more than recompense him for his outlay. Of that he was utterly certain.\n\nHe considered the force that had been rushed to this out of the way place in response to his brilliant scheming. Not only were there Stormvermin and clanrat warriors in the livery of Clan Moulder, there were rat-ogres and packs of huge rats goaded on by beastmasters as well. His army numbered almost a thousand.\n\nWith such a force Thanquol felt certain that victory was assured. Particularly since their opponents were mere humans. How could they stand against the true inheritors of the world, the progeny of the Horned Rat himself? The answer was simple: they could not. It made Thanquol's tail stiffen with pride when he contemplated the scale of the victory that would soon be his.\n\nThanquol sniffed the air with his long, ratlike snout. His whiskers twitched excitedly. Perhaps it was the proximity of the Chaos Wastes he sensed and the presence of a great motherlode of warpstone, the very essence of magical power. Once more he wondered at the stupidity of the Council of Thirteen's edict prohibiting skaven armies from entering those daemon-haunted lands. Surely the loss of a few skavenslaves would be more than compensated for by the vast trove of warpstone they could garner? Granted, in the past the Wastes had swallowed entire armies of ratmen whole, but surely that was no justification for the Council's timidity?\n\nThanquol felt sure that under his leadership, or at least with his guidance from afar \u2014 for, in truth, there was no sense in risking the loss of a skaven of his towering intellect \u2014 a verminhost would succeed in such a mission.\n\nAnd there were alternatives. If he possessed the airship that those accursed dwarfs had built for Gurnisson and Jaeger, and which his doltish lackey, Lurk Snitchtongue, had so far utterly failed to capture, he could use it to prospect for warpstone in the Wastes. He lashed his tail in frustration for a moment when he considered the imbecilic incompetence of Lurk, then wrung his paws together gloatingly as he thought about the aerial vessel. There were no ends to the uses he could put the thing to once it was his.\n\nIt would swiftly transport the grey seer and his bodyguard anywhere in the Old World. It would deliver troops behind enemy lines. It would be used as a prototype to build an aerial fleet and with such an armada Thanquol, and \u2014 he loyally hastened to add \u2014 through him the Council, would conquer the world.\n\nOf course, first he had to get his paws on the airship, which brought his attention firmly back to matters at hand. Through the spyglass he could make out the fortified mansion inhabited by the dwarfs' Kislevite allies. It was typical of the fortified manor houses built by the human clans in this area. It was surrounded by a high palisade and a ditch, and within the house itself was a rugged structure of stone and logs. The windows were narrow, mere arrow slits in many cases. The doors and gates were massive and strong. It was built to resist an attack by the monstrous creatures so common here, close to the Chaos Wastes. Inside there were stables, for the humans here dearly loved their horses. Thanquol had never understood this. He thought the beasts good only for eating.\n\nThe mansion was typical in all respects except one, he noted gleefully. Outside the main building was a massive wooden tower topped with a metal platform. Save for the material from which it was built, it was identical in all respects to the docking tower Thanquol had seen at the Lonely Tower before the airship had sailed off to avoid falling into his clutches. Doubtless this was the place where the airship had stopped en route northwards into the Wastes. Refuelling or reprovisioning obviously. To Thanquol's keen mind that implied there was a limit to the vehicle's range. That was worth knowing. But why here? Why so close to the Chaos Wastes?\n\nBriefly Thanquol considered what this might mean. Why had the dwarfs, particularly the accursed Trollslayer Gotrek Gurnisson, decided to take such a valuable device into the Wastes? If only that dullard, Lurk, had managed to find out. If only he had reported back as he had been instructed. Thanquol was not in the least surprised that he had not. It was ever his fate to be served by buffoons who lived only to spoil his ingenious plans. Thanquol often suspected that these catspaws were foisted upon him by the machinations of his devious enemies back in Skavenblight. The intricacies of skaven politics were endless and mazy, and a leader of Thanquol's genius had many jealous rivals so filled with envy that they would stop at nothing to drag him down.\n\nDoubtless once Gurnisson was in Thanquol's clutches he could be made to reveal his mission by various cunning methods of persuasion known to the grey seer. And if he could not, Gurnisson's henchman, that wicked human Felix Jaeger, could be made to talk. Actually, thought Thanquol, he would probably be the easier of the two. It was not that Thanquol feared a confrontation with the demented one-eyed dwarf, not in the slightest. He was, he knew, in all respects fearless, and not in any way, shape or form scared of a mindlessly violent brute like Gotrek Gurnisson. He had proven this time and time again in his encounters with the Slayer. It was just that it would take less effort to make Jaeger talk.\n\nCome to think of it though, Thanquol was forced to admit, Jaeger himself could be stupidly stubborn about such matters. Perhaps it would be easier simply to capture a few prisoners from the mansion below and interrogate them about the dwarfs' purpose. Surely they must be privy to the secret. After all, how could the stunties have gone to all the trouble to build the tower down there in the midst of this forsaken steppe, and not have revealed their mission to their human allies? He must make sure that his allies captured a few of the humans for questioning. In fact, he would give the order at once.\n\nThanquol tittered at the thought. Whatever plan the dwarfs had, it must be an important one for them to spend so much time and effort, and to risk the airship, to implement it. Perhaps they sought gold or magical treasures in the Wastes. Knowing dwarfs as he did, Thanquol thought this was the most likely explanation. And, as soon as his incredibly brilliant plan was implemented, whatever treasures his enemies had garnered would be gripped firmly in Thanquol's mighty taloned paw.\n\nHe reviewed his scheme in his mind. So simple, yet so devious. So direct and yet so cloaked in subterfuge. So clever and yet so foolproof, as all great skaven plans must be to avoid being fouled up by witless underlings. Truly it was proof, as if any were needed, of the singular genius that was Thanquol's. Step by logical step he reviewed it.\n\nFirst, they would capture the mansion. Then when the airship returned as it assuredly would, they would take the dwarfs by surprise once it docked. Before they could fly off, using superior skaven sorcery, a special spell that Thanquol had prepared for just this moment, they would immobilise the ship. Then nothing would remain for them to do except reap the rewards of victory.\n\nOf course, there were a few things that could go wrong. Thanquol prided himself that part of his genius was his ability to deal with the unexpected. With any skaven force there was the chance that lackeys would mess things up. And there was a slight possibility that the dwarfs might destroy their airship rather than let it fall into skaven paws. Such things had happened in the past, for dwarfs were a foolishly proud and insanely stubborn race. And there was the ever-so-slight chance that they would fly back by a different route.\n\nThanquol shivered. All his divinatory skills told him that this was a near impossibility. He had read his own droppings having eaten only of fermented warpstone-spiced curd for thirteen whole hours, suffering the most dreadful flatulence as he proved his devotion to the Horned Rat in this approved manner. The sanctified excreta had assured him that his plan could not fail and that he would encounter the dwarfs here. Of course, as with all prophesies, there was a certain margin of error that had to be taken into account, but nevertheless Thanquol felt that his vast experience in scrying had stood him in good stead. Other, lesser seers might allow their wits to be clouded by their own desires and hopes, but he had read the signs with the rigorous impartiality that was one of the signs of his unfailing genius.\n\nHe felt sure that the accursed Gurnisson would return from the Wastes. Frankly he doubted that anything could prevent it. Thanquol could read the omens and he knew that the dwarf carried a mighty doom upon his shoulders. It was the sort of destiny that could only be overcome by the possessor of an even mightier one. Naturally Grey Seer Thanquol knew that he was such an individual. Still, it would not pay to underestimate the Slayer.\n\nIn his warpstone-induced dreams, Thanquol had seen many a strange vision as he sought signs of his enemies' whereabouts. He had seen a mighty fortress buried deep beneath a mountain, and a struggle with a daemon of truly terrifying power, a being of such surpassing and baleful might that Thanquol was loath to think about it. He pushed the thought aside.\n\nThe dwarf would return, bringing the airship with him. It was his destiny to fall before the titanic intellect of Thanquol. No lesser doom could stay him.\n\nThanquol noticed that the Moulder clawleaders were watching him. He cursed under his breath.\n\n\"What are your instructions, Grey Seer Thanquol?\" rumbled the most massive of them. \"What do you require of us?\"\n\n\"My orders,\" said Thanquol emphatically, \"are that you and your skaven are to proceed at once with the plan. Take the mansion and keep as many of the humans alive as possible, for questioning. Pay particular attention to preserving breeders and their runts. The manthings become particularly malleable when you threaten them.\"\n\n\"We would preserve them anyway, Grey Seer Thanquol. For our experiments.\"\n\nThanquol tilted his head to one side to consider the clawleader's words. What did the Moulder mean? Was his clan considering some new program of breeding, one that involved mutating humans? That was worth knowing. The skaven seemed to realise that he had let something slip, for he turned his back on Thanquol and lumbered down the hill to instruct his troops. Excitement filled Thanquol. In five minutes the attack would begin.\n\nUlrika Magdova stood on the battlements of the mansion and gazed towards the distant mountains. She was a tall woman, garbed in the leather armour of a Kislevite warrior. Her hair was short and ash blonde, her face broad and oddly beautiful. Her hands played with the hilt of her sword.\n\nBehind the mountains the aurora blazed brightly in the sky. The scintillating light of the Chaos Wastes at night illuminated the peaks from behind. They were huge saw-toothed fangs belonging to a distant monster that intended to devour the world.\n\nAt that moment, she was wondering whether the monster had swallowed Felix Jaeger and his companions. There had been no word or sign from them in weeks, and not all the divinations of the sorcerer, Max Schreiber, had succeeded in revealing anything about their fate. Ulrika wondered whether she would ever see Felix again. She wondered whether she even wanted to.\n\nIt was not that she wanted him dead. Far from it. She desired his safe return with all her heart. It was just that his presence was so\u2026 unsettling. She was more attracted to him than she should be. He was, after all, a landless adventurer from the Empire, a self-confessed criminal and revolutionary. She was the daughter and heir of a March Boyar, one of those nobles who guarded the northern boundary of Kislev from the creatures of the Chaos Wastes. It was her duty to marry according to her father's wishes, to cement alliances with neighbours, to keep the blood of her clan strong and pure.\n\nIdiot, she told herself. Why does that even matter? It was a simple bedding down with a man you liked and wanted. You've done it before and you will do it again. It was not uncommon or disapproved of here in Kislev, where life was short and often ended in violence; where people took what pleasure they could, when they could find it. Why does the fact you slept with a landless adventurer matter at all? There is no future to it. Yet she had thought of little else since he departed. Typical of the man, really, that he should inflict such confusion on her and then depart, the gods alone knew where.\n\nHe had his reasons, she knew. Felix Jaeger was sworn to accompany the Slayer, Gotrek Gurnisson, on his death quest however long that took, and however much it might end in his own death. Ulrika came from a culture that respected oaths, as only a barely civilised people, who enforced their own laws with the sword, could do. Here on the marches there were none of the lawyers and written contracts so common in the Empire. Here you did what you swore to do, or brought shame on yourself and your family.\n\nAnd look what that oath had done to the foolish man. It had carried him away on that great dwarf flying machine into the Chaos Wastes in search of the lost dwarf city of Karag Dum. Ulrika had wanted to beg him not to go, to stay with her, but she was too proud to speak, and she had feared that he might refuse \u2014 and that would have been a shame she was unwilling to endure.\n\nShe kept her gaze on the mountains as if by staring hard at them, she might be able to see through the rock to what lay behind. And anyway, she had no idea how he felt about her. Perhaps it was just a one-night thing for him. Men were like that, she knew. They could promise you the world in the evening, and not even have a kind word come dawn.\n\nShe smiled. She doubted that Felix would be at a loss for a kind word, or any words at all. That was what she liked about him. He was good with words in a way her dour folk were not. It was a gift she envied him, if truth be told, for she was not good at saying how she felt. And in his own strange way, she felt that Jaeger was a good man. He could fight when that was called for, but it was not his whole life, the way it was for the men around whom she had grown up.\n\nThere were times when she thought that he was not hard enough, and there had been times when he surprised her with just how cold and ruthless he could be. Certainly only a dangerous man could be an associate of Gotrek Gurnisson's. From what the dwarfs who had built the tower had told her, the Slayer was already a dark legend among his people.\n\nShe shook her head. This was getting her nowhere. She had her duties to perform. She was her father's heir, and she was needed here to ride the borders, to lead the riders, a duty she fulfilled as ably as any man, and better than most.\n\nFootsteps sounded nearby. She turned her head to see Max Schreiber walking along the parapet towards her.\n\n\"Can't sleep?\" he asked, smiling. \"I could mix you a potion.\"\n\n\"Checking the sentries,\" she said. \"It's my duty.\"\n\nShe looked at the magician. He was tall and dark with a scholar's pallor and wide eyes. Recently he had taken to cultivating a goatee beard, which suited him. He was wearing the formal garb of a magician of his college, long flowing robes of gold over a jerkin of green, and yellow britches. An odd-looking skullcap perched on his head. A handsome man, she thought, but one who made her uneasy, and not just in the unsettling way good-looking men sometimes did. Here was one who truly stood apart from most of humanity, by virtue of the power in him, and the training that let him wield it. She did not quite trust him, which was the way she reckoned most of humanity felt about magicians in general. You always wondered about them \u2014 could they read your mind, bind you to their will with a spell, ensnare you in illusions? And you feared to say such things aloud or even to think them in their presence just in case they could, and they took offence.\n\nSchreiber himself had never given her any reason to doubt his benevolence. It was just\u2026\n\n\"You were wondering about the airship,\" he said.\n\n\"Are you a mind reader, then?\"\n\n\"No. Just a student of human nature. When I hear a young woman sigh and see that she is looking north into the Wastes, I can put two and two together. And I've seen you and Felix together. You make a good couple.\"\n\n\"I think you presume too much.\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\" He smiled; a little sadly, she thought. \"Herr Jaeger is a lucky man.\"\n\n\"What's lucky about having to cross the Chaos Wastes?\"\n\n\"That's not what I meant, and you know it.\"\n\n\"I am not a mind reader either, Herr Schreiber, so how can I know what you mean if you do not say it?\"\n\n\"Why do you dislike me, Ulrika?\"\n\n\"I don't dislike you.\"\n\n\"You do not seem to approve of me.\"\n\n\"It's just you are\u2026\"\n\n\"A sorcerer?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe smiled a little sadly. \"I am used to it. People do not tend to trust us or like us much either. It was not that long ago that they stopped persecuting us in the Empire.\"\n\n\"They still burn witches here, sometimes. Warlocks too. I am sure some of my people here would like to do that to you.\"\n\n\"I have noticed.\"\n\n\"We are close to the Chaos Wastes here. People are suspicious. I would not take it personally if I were you.\"\n\nHe shook his head ruefully, and his sad smile widened. Ulrika realised that, given the chance, she could actually like the man. \"I don't see how I could take being burned at the stake other than personally.\"\n\n\"You have a point.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said with a faint trace of irony. Suddenly he cocked his head to one side. He seemed to be listening.\n\n\"What is it?\" Ulrika asked. She felt suddenly afraid.\n\n\"Hush! I think there is something out there.\" He closed his eyes and his face went slack. She sensed the play of power around him. Through his shuttered eyelids she saw a glowing light, as if his eyeballs had become tiny suns that could shine through flesh! The muscles on his jaw tightened. He muttered words in the arcane tongue under his breath.\n\nHis eyes snapped open. She could see the light in them fading, like the embers of a dying fire. He reached out and touched her on the arm. His grip was surprisingly strong for a scholar. \"Remain calm,\" he said. \"Show nothing on your face. There are things out there and we must get away from this parapet.\"\n\n\"We must give the alarm.\"\n\n\"We will give no alarms if we are shot by a sharpshooter,\" he said softly.\n\n\"Who could hit us in this light?\"\n\n\"Trust me,\" he said guiding her along the parapet. \"Walk normally and then climb up the ladder into the watchtower.\"\n\n\"What is going on?\" Ulrika asked. The urgency in the magician's voice had communicated itself to her.\n\n\"There are skaven out there. The ratmen followers of Chaos.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" she asked and then cursed herself. She already knew the answer. He was a magician. She altered the question slightly to cover her mistake. \"That they are skaven, I mean.\"\n\n\"I have studied the minions of Chaos extensively,\" he said, in his quiet voice. Ulrika knew that his calm tone was meant to reassure her, to keep her calm. It annoyed her slightly that he thought she would need such treatment. If he noticed he gave no sign. \"It's why the dwarfs hired me, after all.\"\n\nThey had reached the ladder. \"Climb. I will follow you in a moment. As soon as you are in the tower sound the alarm bell. We don't have much time.\"\n\nDespite her mistrust of him, she never doubted that he was serious. In this, at least, she had perfect faith in Schreiber. Out of the corner of her eyes, she thought she detected a faint scuttling mass, as of quickly moving creatures coming close. As she swung out onto the ladder she had a crawling feeling between her shoulder blades. She imagined that she was being targeted with a bow or a crossbow or one of those strange sorcerous weapons Felix had told her the skaven used. She felt cold sweat start to run down her back.\n\nShe was amazed by Schreiber's courage. The whole time, he stood there like a man engaged in a casual conversation, keeping up a flow of quiet chatter. Only once she was well up the ladder did he begin his own ascent.\n\nShe scampered up as quickly as she could and as soon as her feet hit the deck of the tower she reached out and grabbed the pull of the great bell. She tugged it with all her strength. The clear chiming tone rang out through the night. She knew it could be heard all across the manor, from the deepest cellars to the highest chambers.\n\n\"Awake!\" she shouted. \"Enemies are without!\"\n\nNo sooner had the bell's tolling started to fade than she heard a great feral roaring in the distance. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the skaven were out there. Warriors were already starting to tumble from the manor house, weapons held ready. She saw her father's massive form emerge into the darkness. A partially buckled cuirass was around his chest and one of his body servants helped him adjust the straps as he roared orders to the men.\n\n\"Oleg \u2014 take your section and man the parapet. Standa \u2014 I want archers on all four walls till we see what direction the attack is coming from. Marta! Gather all the servant girls and draw water from the wells in case of fire. Get bandages and unguents ready for the wounded! Come on! Look lively!\"\n\nUlrika was glad her father was there. He was a veteran of a thousand battles along this dangerous border. His very presence was heartening to all his followers as well as to her.\n\nShe glanced out of the watchtower and saw the horde approaching them. There were hundreds of skaven, advancing like a furry tide across the cleared ground. She wondered if her father had enough men in the manor to hold them. Somehow she doubted it. There had been reports of more and more Chaos followers coming and going through the passes. Most of the troops of riders were patrolling the border with Chaos. It had been their misfortune, or perhaps a tribute to skaven cunning, that they had been attacked when so many of their riders were abroad.\n\nAs she drew her sword, she wondered if she would ever see Felix again. Then the first wave of skaven hit the wall, and she had time to think of nothing else except fighting for her life." + }, + { + "title": "THE RETURN", + "text": "Felix Jaeger looked down from the bridge of the Spirit of Grungni. He was a tall man, blond of hair, broad of shoulder, narrow of hip. His face was tanned and worry lines radiated out from his eyes that really should not have been etched on the face of one so young. But then, as Felix would have been the first to admit, he was a man who in his time had endured more than his share of worries.\n\nHis hands were braced on the great wheel of the airship as he made a course correction, steering the mighty vessel directly towards where he believed the pass out of the Chaos Wastes should lie. His hand still hurt from the burns he had taken wielding the Hammer of Firebeard. He was grateful to be able to grasp anything at all. He had been lucky. The dwarf healing salve had helped a good deal.\n\nHis keen eyes scanned the tormented land below him, watching the arid semi-desert scroll along beneath the Spirit of Grungni. In the distance, he thought he could make out a rising dust cloud.\n\nHe shivered. Whatever was making it, it was not friendly. Nothing here was.\n\nHe looked at the compass but he knew it was not always reliable in the Wastes. Several times he had seen the lodestone needle rotate around in a circle under the influence of evil magic. Fortunately they were now nearing the edge of the cursed land, where the oddly-coloured storm clouds did not always obscure the sky, and the stars were often visible by night and sometimes in the dim light of day. These gave him something to navigate by. Several times they had drifted far off course until they had found a star to navigate by, which had added days to their travel time.\n\nFelix exhaled loudly. He was bone weary. He was no longer glad now that Malakai Makaisson had taught him how to fly the vessel \u2014 although it gave him something to do, and kept his mind from worrying about things he could not control.\n\nThe nose came round sluggishly, which was not surprising. The Spirit of Grungni was loaded to capacity and then some. The survivors of the dwarf community of Karag Dum, those who had been left alive after the last fatal confrontation with the daemonic bloodthirster and its minions, filled every cabin and spare cranny on the airship. The hold bulged with the treasures they had taken from the lost citadel. Felix wondered how Hargrim and his people would take to their new life beyond the Wastes.\n\nThe drone of the engines was loud as they struggled to drive the ship into the wind. Felix cursed, for it seemed that the very elements conspired against them on their journey out of the Wastes. He half-suspected evil magic. There were dozens of mages sworn to serve the Dark Powers down there, and it was easy to imagine one of them whistling up a wind to slow the airship down, or a storm to drive it into the ground. The Spirit of Grungni was protected against the direct effects of magic but there was really nothing anyone except another magician could do against such indirect methods.\n\nFelix strove to push such thoughts aside, to think of happier things. He wondered what Ulrika was doing just now, whether she missed him, or even thought about him at all. Perhaps she had forgotten all about him. Perhaps he had just been a brief fling for her. Any such thoughts were driven from his head by the sound of loud cursing from behind him.\n\nGotrek Gurnisson entered the bridge of the airship and made his presence felt in no uncertain terms. He stomped around the command deck, glaring at the apprentice engineers, and casting irate glances through the crystal windows as if half-expecting to see an enemy flying towards them. Considering that a mere few days ago Gotrek had been near death from the wounds he had taken in his battle with the Bloodthirster of Khorne, the dwarf had made a remarkable recovery. He still did not look well. His massive chest was swathed in bandages. His huge red dyed crest of hair poked out of a turban of similar bandages wrapped around his head. The same cloth obscured the eyepatch that normally covered his empty left socket. One of his arms was bound in a sling but he still managed to carry his massive axe in his right hand. Considering Felix would struggle to lift the weapon with both hands, it was an impressive feat.\n\nActually, the fact that the Slayer was up and about at all was a testimony to the ruggedness of the dwarf physique. Felix knew that if he, or any other man, had suffered the wounds Gotrek had, he would have been bedridden for months, if he could have survived at all.\n\n\"Feeling better?\" Felix asked. Gotrek's cursing had already given him an answer to that question.\n\n\"I feel as if I have been trampled on by a herd of donkeys, manling.\"\n\n\"An improvement then?\"\n\n\"Yes. Yesterday I felt like I had lost a head-butting contest with Snorri Nosebiter.\"\n\n\"Well, you're lucky to be alive at all. That's what Borek says.\"\n\n\"What's lucky about it, manling? If I had fallen in combat with that accursed daemon I would have atoned for my misdeeds, and you would be composing my death saga. As it is, I have to listen to Snorri Nosebiter snoring and boasting about how many beastmen he slew. Believe me, there are some fates that are worse than death.\"\n\nFelix raised an eyebrow. He knew the dwarf well enough now to understand when he was making a joke. Oddly enough, given the fact that his avowed purpose in life was to find a heroic death in battle, Gotrek did not sound all that sorry to still be alive. Felix suspected that he actually detected a note of sour pleasure in the Slayer's voice, though he thought it diplomatic not to point this out. Instead he said, \"But if you had fallen, none of the folk of Karag Dum would have escaped, the Hammer of Firebeard would have fallen into the hands of the Chaos worshippers, and the Great Bloodthirster would have had his revenge on the race of dwarfs. Surely that is something to be thankful for?\"\n\n\"You might have a point there, manling.\"\n\n\"You know I do. And we did help Borek prove his theory about the location of Karag Dum. We did find the lost city, and we did recover the sacred hammer.\"\n\n\"There's no need to belabour the point.\"\n\n\"And we did thwart the powers of darkness, and get a fair haul of gold and\u2014\"\n\n\"I said\u2014\"\n\n\"Felix Jaeger does have a point, Gotrek, son of Gurni,\" said a deep mellow voice. Felix glanced back to see that the ancient dwarf scholar, Borek, had also entered the bridge. He was stooped almost double with age and he had to use a stick to help him walk but there was a vitality about him, and an excitement, that Felix had never seen before. He was filled with life and triumph. Their success at Karag Dum, if you could call taking part in a battle that had left most of the dwarf population of the city dead a success, had given meaning to his entire life. They had recovered Firebeard's hammer and would restore it to the dwarf people. Felix knew that Borek thought they had performed a mighty feat of valour. He himself was not so sure. Beside the scholar was his nephew, Varek, who had accompanied Felix and Gotrek and Snorri into the lost city, and had recorded their deeds. Varek's glasses glittered in the light filtering onto the command deck. He smiled at Felix and the Slayer cheerily.\n\nAs well he might, thought Felix. Not many dwarfs could claim to have survived an encounter with a daemon of Chaos.\n\nJust behind them stood Hargrim, the son of Thangrim Firebeard, his beard dyed as black as his clothing as he mourned his father. Now his father was gone, he was the leader of the folk of Karag Dum. His face was as grim as death. His eyes were sad as only those of a dwarf who had lost father and home at the same time could be.\n\nHe noticed the look Borek gave him. It was not really a look suited to an ancient whose white beard dragged along the floor. It held an element of reverence that made Felix uncomfortable. Since his return from Karag Dum most of the dwarfs on the airship had been giving him that look. He had lifted Firebeard's hammer and invoked its power in the battle with the great daemon. Apparently he was the first and only human in history since the time of the man-god Sigmar to have performed such a feat, and they now regarded him as blessed by their gods. Felix did not feel particularly blessed. Just invoking the hammer's power had almost killed him. And fighting the daemon was a feat he hoped never to have to repeat in his life.\n\n\"Look down there!\" said Felix to distract them. His keen eyes had caught sight of movement in the Wastes from the edge of the vast dust cloud. By all the gods, it was huge. If it were being made by a force of men, Felix would have suspected the presence of an army. Here in the Chaos Wastes, who knew what it signified?\n\nAs they closed with it, he could see a group of figures, made tiny by the airship's altitude, riding across the land, a massive cloud of polychromatic dust rising in their wake.\n\nBorek peered down through his pince-nez glasses. \"What is it? Tell me! My eyes are not so good.\"\n\n\"It's a trail of dust,\" Gotrek said. \"There are riders down there. A lot of them.\"\n\n\"I would say several hundred. Black-armoured Chaos knights. Heading south, the same direction we are.\"\n\n\"Your eyes are better than mine, manling. I'll take your word for it.\"\n\n\"That's the tenth party we have seen since we left Karag Dum. All heading in the same direction.\" Slowly something became evident to Felix. He felt his heartbeat start to pound, and his mouth go dry. They were passing over the heart of the dust cloud now, and he could see many more figures. Thousands of them, perhaps tens of thousands. He thought he could make out the misshapen figures of beastmen, and other more disturbing things. It was apparent that the Chaos worshippers they had seen earlier were either stragglers from, or the rearguard of, a much mightier force. One that was heading directly into the lands of men.\n\n\"By Grungni, it's an army on the march,\" he heard Varek say. The young dwarf had a spyglass pressed to his face and was looking through it intently. \"This is larger than the force that besieged Karag Dum. What is going on?\"\n\n\"I fear the Powers of Chaos are planning a new incursion into the lands of men,\" Hargrim said. \"No place will be safe for my people.\"\n\nFelix felt a thrill of fear. The last thing anybody in the human lands wanted was a full-scale invasion by the followers of the Ruinous Powers. They were numberless and powerful, and Felix suspected, after what he had seen in these Wastes, that only their constant internecine fighting kept them from sweeping away human civilisation.\n\n\"Good. I could use a decent fight,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"I would have thought you'd had enough of that recently,\" Felix said sourly.\n\n\"There's never enough fighting for a Slayer, Felix Jaeger,\" said Borek. \"You should know that by now.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately I do.\" A new worry entered Felix's mind, one he knew he had been trying to keep out all day. \"If they invade, the Chaos hordes will come through the Axebite Pass.\"\n\n\"What of it, manling?\"\n\n\"Ivan Straghov's mansion is right in their path.\"\n\n\"Then we had best hurry on and warn them, hadn't we?\"\n\nExcitement and tension filled Felix's mind. They were through the pass. The land of Kislev lay before them. In hours he would see Ulrika again. He felt more nervous than he cared to admit. As nervous as he had ever been before a battle, perhaps more so. He wondered if she would be as pleased to see him as he was going to be to see her. He wondered what she would say, what he would say, what she would be wearing. He shook his head. He knew he was behaving like a schoolboy with a crush, yet he could not help himself. It had been a long time since he had felt this way about anyone. Not since the death of Kirsten at Fort von Diehl, which seemed like years ago. It was a pity that he had to be bringing such bad tidings.\n\nHe placed the spyglass to his eye and scanned the horizon, hoping for a first glimpse of the mansion, and was rewarded with a view of what he thought was the mooring tower. Soon, he thought, soon.\n\n\"Looking forward to being back?\" said a voice from beside him. Felix looked down at Varek. The young dwarf was looking at him with something uncomfortably like hero worship. Felix had no idea why. Varek had shared in all the perils of the descent into Karag Dum Felix had faced and had done his part to bring their quest to a successful conclusion. There was no reason for him to idolise Felix but it was apparent that he did. Varek wore a leather helmet and flying goggles. Makaisson had been teaching him how to fly a gyrocopter on the return trip. He had just come back from a flight, Felix realised.\n\n\"Course young Felix is,\" said Snorri Nosebiter. \"Even Snorri can see that. He's going to see his lady friend.\"\n\nSnorri winked across at Felix knowingly. It was not a reassuring sight. Even bandaged as he was, Snorri Nosebiter was the only dwarf Felix had ever met who was more terrifying than Gotrek in appearance, and the wounds he had taken at Karag Dum had not improved his looks.\n\nLike Gotrek, Snorri was a member of the Slayer cult, sworn to seek heroic death in battle. Like Gotrek his squat ape-like body was covered in tattoos. Unlike Gotrek, however, he had three nails driven directly into his shaven head. This was in place of the crest of hair that most Slayers had. Snorri was not the brightest of dwarfs but, for a Slayer, he was friendly.\n\nFelix focused the spyglass on the approaching manor house. There was something odd about it. At first he could not work out what, but slowly he started to put his finger on it. There were not enough people in the fields around it. In fact there was no one. There should have been serfs, carts, workhorses, soldiers, sentries, riders coming and going with messages. He ran his gaze across the horizon to make sure he was right. His heart was beating faster. His palms felt suddenly sweaty. There was a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. This was wrong. Had the forces of Chaos already been here?\n\nHe breathed a prayer to Sigmar that nothing had happened to Ulrika, and then added one for her father and the rest of the people on the estate, but he was not sure his prayer was going to be answered. Looking closely at the mansion he could see signs of a disaster.\n\nIt looked as if the gate had been forced with a battering ram. There were signs of burning on the stone walls. Whole sections of the palisade had collapsed. It all reminded him sickeningly of the aftermath of the massacre at Fort von Diehl.\n\n\"No, not again,\" he muttered.\n\n\"What is it, manling? What do you see?\" Gotrek asked.\n\nFelix did not answer. The only thing that gave him hope was the fact that he could not see any bodies. And he was not at all sure that it was a hopeful sign. There were no signs of life at all. No signs of a battle except the damage to the buildings and fortifications. Surely, he thought, there would be corpses, or at least signs of burial. Frantically he scanned the area for a funeral pyre or a mass grave. Perhaps that mound over there was new.\n\n\"What do you see, manling?\" Gotrek asked again. There was a note of menace in his voice now.\n\n\"The mansion has been attacked,\" he said. He was not sure how he managed to keep his voice steady but he did. \"And it looks like everyone has simply vanished.\"\n\n\"Into thin air?\"\n\n\"It looks like it.\"\n\n\"I don't like it,\" Gotrek said. \"It smells of a trap.\"\n\nFelix was forced to agree with the Slayer's assessment. There was a wrongness about the situation down there that he did not like in the least. On the other hand, he desperately needed to find out what had happened to Ulrika. Let her be alive, he prayed.\n\nThe airship moved ever closer to the deserted-looking mansion.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol gazed at the approaching airship through the eyepiece of his periscope. As always, he was more impressed than he cared to admit by the dwarfs' creation. That such a massive vessel could fly hinted at a magic greater than his own. Yet he knew it was not magic that kept the huge vessel aloft, but the dwarfs' arcane technology.\n\nHe began to chew on some carefully hoarded pieces of powdered warpstone, knowing soon he would need all the sorcerous strength it could grant him. He felt a little weak. Last night his magical duel with the human wizard had taken nearly all his strength. It had almost upset all of his carefully laid plans. Who would have expected the humans to have such a strong mage in their midst? Still, in the end, Thanquol had triumphed, as was only inevitable. The power of a true servant of the Horned Rat would always overcome the feeble magic of mankind, just as the righteous skaven warriors had finally succeeded in taking the human keep. It filled Thanquol's heart with pride to think they had managed it even though they had only outnumbered the humans ten to one. It was a fitting tribute to the genius of his leadership that victory was his in the teeth of such odds.\n\nThey had even taken some prisoners, who would doubtless serve as suitable subjects for Clan Moulder's experiments once this expedition was over. It pained Thanquol to think that they had not had enough time yet to really interrogate their captives. There was nothing he found more relaxing than breaking a few terrified humans to his will. In particular he was pleased to have the human wizard in his clutches. The man had been knocked unconscious by magical backlash when attempting to dispel Thanquol's last spell. Once he was conscious and Thanquol had the time, he would torture the man for the secret of his spells.\n\nThey had even managed to capture a few breeders, which was an unexpected bonus. The survivors were imprisoned in the cellars except for the youngest and, Thanquol guessed, the most attractive of the breeders whom he thought he might be able to use to lure Felix Jaeger and Gotrek Gurnisson into a trap.\n\nEven the timing of the airship's arrival seemed to favour him. It was getting dark and that would help cover the ambushing troops waiting in the building and the cellars to erupt on the dwarfs. It occurred to Thanquol as he viewed the oncoming airship that Lurk could still be alive, and perhaps he might be able to contact him. That being the case, Thanquol thought, it was worth the attempt. It might prove very useful to have an agent alive and about Thanquol's business up there.\n\nHe decided he'd better make the attempt.\n\nLurk's head was splitting. It was not unusual these days. In the recent past he had endured more suffering than any skaven in the history of the world. It was so unfair. He had not asked to stow away on this accursed airship. He had not asked for these changes to come over his body. Doubtless it was the warpstone, he thought, and those lightning bolts that had hit the airship what seemed like an age ago. They had caused the changes. He had heard of similar changes coming over grey seers after prolonged consumption of the stuff, and the Horned Rat alone knew how much warpstone dust he had breathed in since the foolish dwarfs had taken their stupid airship out over the Wastes.\n\nIf only he had stayed below in the cupola, where it was safe. Where the air was filtered by screens, there was plenty of food and human and dwarf magic protected you from the effects of Chaos. Alas that had not proved possible. His thirteen-times-be-damned master, Grey Seer Thanquol, had insisted on regular reports and it was impossible for his sorcery to touch his lackey while he was within the protected area. So Lurk had to leave the protection of the gondola to please his accursed master. Thus had Lurk come to be exposed to the mutating dust in the first place. And now, with the cupola full to bursting with stunties, it was all but impossible for Lurk to hide down there. It would only have been a matter of time before he was detected, and he doubted that even a skaven of his prodigious potency could overcome so many dwarf warriors.\n\nHe did not know what was worse \u2014 the pain in his head or the hunger that burned in his belly. He could not remember ever being so ravenous, not even after battle, when every skaven was most in need of sustenance. The hunger had come on him with the changes in his body. He was huge now, and muscular, in a way he had never been before. He had muscles like a rat-ogre and his tail was like a length of steel cable. His body was probably twice its previous size and his talons were like daggers. Knobs of horn, similar to the ones on Grey Seer Thanquol's cranium, had started to protrude from his skull. Was he becoming a grey seer, Lurk wondered? Or was this a sign of some other blessing from the Horned Rat? Right at this moment, Lurk did not feel particularly blessed. Right now he was feeling tired and hungry and sorry for himself. He was filled with the justifiable caution in the face of his enemies that some mistakenly called fear. And there was this strange buzzing in his head. A buzzing that seemed to take the form of words.\n\nLurk! You dolt! Is that you?\n\nLurk wondered whether this was a hallucination brought on by starvation, or whether the horrors he had endured had finally driven him mad. Still, there was something strangely familiar about the voice, an annoying arrogance and a contempt for everyone but its owner.\n\nLurk! Answer me! I know you are there! I can sense you!\n\nLurk's paws strayed to the amulet Grey Seer Thanquol had given him. Was it possible, he asked? After all these long days, that Thanquol had managed to re-establish contact?\n\nI can see the airship, you oaf! And I can feel your feeble mind. If you do not answer me, I shall consume your pathetic soul, and feed your festering carcass to Boneripper.\n\nThe first faint flicker of rebellion flared in Lurk's brain. Who was Grey Seer Thanquol to speak to him in such a manner after all he had endured? Had Thanquol ever ventured into the Chaos Wastes? Had Thanquol ever travelled so far in such a dangerous and experimental vehicle? Had Thanquol ever been exposed to warpstone dust and mutated in such an uncontrollable fashion? Just let him try and feed me to Boneripper, Lurk thought, as the rage built up in his mind. I will tear the creature limb from limb, consume its flesh, crack its bones for marrow and spit the gristle at you, mighty Grey Seer Thanquol. You see if I don't.\n\nBut what he did was reach out and touch the crystal. \"Mightiest of masters,\" he chittered. \"Can it really be you? Has your omnipotent sorcery finally succeeded in overcoming the dire obstacles placed in its way by those wicked dwarfs and re-established contact with your faithful Lurk?\"\n\nYes, idiot, it has!\n\nThe baleful thought blasted through the ether and lodged itself in Lurk's brain. Lurk was amazed that his mouth and forebrain could mouth such gross and insincere flattery while his hindbrain and entire spirit festered with rebellion. He knew that given a chance he would kill Thanquol, and the world would be none the worse for it. The grey seer was mad and incompetent. He deserved to die and be replaced by someone better. Someone not unlike Lurk, in fact. He knew now that it was not only his body that the warpstone had altered but his mind and spirit. He had become smarter and his eyes had been opened to many things. He knew now he was cleverer than Thanquol, and could lead far better, if given a chance. For the moment though, he decided that prudent skaven caution was the best course.\n\n\"Where are you, mightiest of masters?\"\n\nI am below you in the human fortress, waiting to spring a trap on those stunted fools. Now report to me! Where have you been? Why have you not responded to my potent spells of communication?\n\nBecause they never reached me, you overbearing clod, thought Lurk. \"Perhaps my feeble brain was incapable of encompassing such potent sorceries, most masterful of mages,\" he replied.\n\nReport! Are there many dwarfs on the airship? Is it damaged? Where have you been? Do you have many treasures on board?\n\nWhat is this mad skaven on about? Treasures? What treasures could there possibly be? Grey Seer Thanquol had no idea what had been going on up here, that much was obvious. Did he think that Lurk had the run of the airship? That the dwarfs gave him a cheery greeting and an answer to all his questions? His disrespect for Thanquol increased with every passing moment. His mouth said: \"Which question should I answer first, wisest of leaders?\"\n\nAnswer as you will but answer quick-quick! We may not have much time before\u2026\n\n\"Before what, most perspicacious of potentates?\"\n\nNever mind. Just be ready to act when I give the order.\n\n\"As always, most commanding of commanders.\"\n\nIf he closed his eyes, Lurk could visualise Grey Seer Thanquol standing before him, red orbs gleaming with mad knowledge, the froth of the warpstone snuff to which he was addicted clinging to his lips. Lurk wished the grey seer was here right now so that he could reach out and wring his scrawny neck. He flexed his talons in anticipation.\n\nSoon the airship will dock and our trap will be sprung! Prepare to spread as much chaos and confusion among the stunties as you can, but be careful not to damage the airship!\n\nPrepare to get myself killed furthering your crazed schemes, you mean. Lurk had no intention of endangering his life for the greater glory of Grey Seer Thanquol. It occurred to him that he had done this quite often enough already without adding to the tally of misdeeds that Thanquol owed him for. \"Of course, master. I live to obey,\" he said.\n\nGood-good! See that you do and you will be well rewarded! Fail me and\u2014\n\n\"Say no more, most persuasive of pontificators. I will not fail you.\"\n\nNow answer my questions! Are there many dwarfs on board?\n\nLurk answered the catechism, being careful to overstate the strength of the dwarfs in every respect. It was as well to have your excuses prepared in advance with Grey Seer Thanquol. It was something he had learned from the master himself.\n\nFelix peered down at the mansion. It was as bad as he had feared. There was no sign of life. No! Wait! What was that? Was it movement at the window? He focused the spyglass on it but by the time he had done so it was gone.\n\n\"I suppose we had better go down and investigate,\" said Gotrek testily, pulling the sling from his arm and flexing the muscles experimentally.\n\n\"What if it's a trap?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"What's your point, manling? What if it is a trap?\"\n\nFelix considered his words carefully. The Slayer was still determined to seek his doom, that much was obvious. But for once Felix was keen to accompany him. He needed to find out what had happened here. He desperately needed to know what had become of Ulrika. And her people, he added as a guilty afterthought, though he admitted to himself there was only one person down there whose fate he really cared about.\n\n\"We'll go down together,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Snorri will come with you,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"I think the rest of us should stay with the airship,\" Borek said. \"No sense in risking everything and everyone at this late stage.\"\n\nThe old scholar at least had the grace to look embarrassed as he said it. Not that Felix blamed him. If he had been in command of the ship he would have forbade any of the crew except the Slayers to go down. And the only reason he would not have forbade them was because he would have known it was useless to give them orders anyway.\n\n\"We'll dock at the tower,\" he said. \"And you can make your way down. At least the thing is still standing, and it looks completely undamaged too. That's a stroke of luck.\"\n\n\"Is it?\" Felix asked, drawing his dragon-hilted sword. \"I wonder if luck has anything to do with it.\"\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol chuckled malevolently. It was all coming together perfectly. All the pawns were in position. He had even managed to recontact that imbecile Lurk. Perhaps the little runt might still prove to be of some use, Thanquol thought, though he did not have high hopes. Lurk had not proven to be that great a minion in the past. Still, you could never tell.\n\nHe looked at the blond-furred breeder he had ordered brought up from the cellar. He guessed she was attractive by the strange standards of the humans, and you never knew, he might be able to use her as a negotiating chip. Human males were strangely protective of their breeders, the Horned Rat alone knew why.\n\nHe showed her his fangs menacingly, and to his surprise she showed neither fear nor awe. Instead she spat on his face. Thanquol licked away the spittle with his long pink tongue and flexed his claws menacingly. Once again, the breeder surprised him. She reached for the hilt of the sword that was no longer scabbarded at her waist, and Thanquol was suddenly glad it was not there. It seemed that this breeder might actually be dangerous.\n\n\"Be very quiet!\" he chittered softly and menacingly. \"Or your life will be forfeit. Grey Seer Thanquol has spoken.\"\n\nIf she recognised his name she gave no sign. \"It's always nice to know the name of the rat you intend to kill,\" she said.\n\nThanquol opened his eyes a fraction and let her see the power burning there. This time she did quail a little, as almost anyone would when confronted by the supernatural glow.\n\n\"Do not be stupid, breeder. Kill me you will not. Live you only at my pleasure. Die you will if you annoy me.\"\n\n\"You are the skaven sorcerer of whom Felix spoke,\" she murmured to herself, so low that Thanquol almost did not hear. Almost.\n\n\"Know you the accursed Felix Jaeger?\" he demanded.\n\nShe seemed to realise her mistake for her mouth snapped shut, and she said nothing more. Thanquol bared his fangs in a grin. \"Interesting. Very-very.\"\n\nHe turned this knowledge over in his head, wondering what he might do with it, wondering what the nature of the relationship between this breeder and Felix Jaeger was. Had they mated? A possibility. Humans always seemed to be in heat. It was their way. Did they have runts? No. Not enough time. Thanquol cursed. If only he had found this out earlier, he might have been able to do something with the knowledge. Now, he no longer had the time. He needed to prepare his mind for the great spell of binding.\n\n\"Boneripper!\" he commanded. \"Watch this breeder. Do not let her escape.\"\n\nHe sensed other eyes on him, and noticed the nearest Moulder clawleader was watching him closely. How much of the exchange between Thanquol and the breeder had he followed, Thanquol wondered? Not that it mattered. There would be time soon enough to get to the bottom of all this. His enemies were almost within his grasp.\n\nFelix watched as the airship nosed into position near the tower. The dwarfs dropped their grapnels then pulled the ship gently into place. The boarding ramp was extended between the tower and the ship. Felix drew his dragon-hilted sword and got ready to make the long descent to the ground below. He was nervous. He sensed evil eyes watching him. Just your imagination, he told himself, but he knew it was not.\n\n\"Ready, manling?\" Gotrek asked.\n\n\"As I'll ever be.\"\n\n\"Snorri's ready too,\" said Snorri Nosebiter.\n\n\"Then let's go.\"\n\nAs they strode across the ramp, Felix was once more uncomfortably aware of how it flexed beneath their weight and how high up they were. The wind whipped his long red cloak and tugged at his hair. It was cold and chill as only a wind from the northern steppes could be.\n\nGotrek and Snorri would have looked almost comical, swathed as they were in bandages, had they not been so serious. Felix doubted that anybody in his right mind would laugh at two Slayers when this mood was upon them. He did not feel much like laughing himself. He could not help but notice that both Gotrek and Snorri were moving slowly and favouring their wounded sides. He hoped nothing was down there to attack them. When fully fit he knew Gotrek was a match for just about anything that walked on two legs, and nearly anything on four, but right now he was heavily wounded, and that would count sorely against him if there was fighting.\n\n\"I'll go first,\" Felix said, moving to the ladder. He doubted that the elevator cage would work right now, and anyway he did not want to be caught in it if they were attacked. It was too much like a death trap.\n\n\"In your dreams, manling,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"Snorri has a doom to find too,\" said Snorri. \"Your job is to record it, young Felix.\"\n\n\"I only agreed to do that for Gotrek,\" Felix said touchily.\n\n\"Well, if Snorri happens to be there when I find mine, you can surely give him a few lines, manling.\"\n\nFelix looked at the ground below. He was fairly certain he saw movement within the windows of the manor. \"Is there anybody alive down there?\" he shouted. There was no sense in being subtle. Any enemies would already have seen and heard the Spirit of Grungni arrive.\n\n\"There certainly is, manling,\" Gotrek said. \"I can hear them.\"\n\n\"Snorri smells skaven,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"Great,\" Felix said. \"That's just what we needed.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you think so, young Felix,\" said Snorri. \"Snorri thinks so too.\"\n\n\"I have a few scores to settle with those ratmen,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"I'm pretty sure they have a few to settle with us, Gotrek,\" said Felix. After Nuln, he was sure that the skaven would not be in the slightest disposed to talk with them. That was for sure. He forced himself to keep climbing down." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Lurk padded through the great balloon. He knew the airship had come to a halt. He had heard the engine noise fade and die. He had felt the ship shudder as it nudged against something, felt the faint sideways movement as it was tied up. He knew it was time to be about his business. His business, not Grey Seer Thanquol's. He knew that if ever he was to escape from this accursed vessel full of stunties there would never be a better time than during Thanquol's attack. That would keep the crew busy while Lurk made his getaway. There would be time to make his excuses to Thanquol later. Lurk poised himself in readiness to spring into action.\n\nUlrika watched the small figures step out onto the platform above. One of them, she could see, was Felix. Her heart sank. She had not felt this bad since the skaven assault force had swarmed over the walls and began slaughtering her people. She consoled herself with the thought that she had at least killed half a dozen of the scuttling monsters before she was clubbed down from behind.\n\nNot that it had made much difference; there had been just too many of the things. Still, she calculated that her force had taken out a good half of the skaven. She felt sick with worry. All day she had been locked up in the cellars, part of her home turned into a cell, not knowing whether her father or her friends were still alive and now she was being forced to watch while this gloating, horned-headed albino sorcerer stood ready to ambush Felix and his crew. She had no hopes that they could drive off the ratmen. There were not enough of them aboard the airship to withstand the chittering hordes.\n\nShe looked around and wished she still had her weapons. Not that she fancied her chances much against the huge rat-ogre that acted as Grey Seer Thanquol's bodyguard even fully armed but she might have stood some chance. As it was, there was no hope at all. She wished she possessed Max Schreiber's sorcerous powers, then it would not have mattered if she was armed or not. What havoc the mage had wrought last night before being blasted by some spell of the mad ratman before her. Schreiber alone must have killed fifty of the skaven.\n\nSuch thoughts were getting her nowhere. If wishes were horses we'd all ride chargers, as her father used to say. There had to be something she could do, some way she could warn Felix and the others and still escape. She thought about it. Even if there was no escape she could still warn them. She was the hard daughter of a hard land. If her life was forfeit then so be it.\n\nShe glanced around at the hall and the seething sea of ratlike faces. It was a pity they were the last thing she was going to see in this life, she thought, as she hesitated for a moment, then opened her mouth and prepared to shout a warning.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol felt the power surge within him. His moment was almost here. Gurnisson, Jaeger and the beautiful, beautiful airship were almost within his grasp.\n\nHe reached into his pouch and found the necessary components. A piece of magnetised warpstone. A sliver of rune-encrusted metal. The thirteen-sided amulet inscribed with the thirteen fatal runes of utter power. He had everything he needed. He was ready to begin. There would be no escape for his enemies this time. He was certain of that.\n\nHe flexed his paws, reached out with his spirit, drew power from the winds of magic and prepared to unleash his spell." + }, + { + "title": "AMBUSH AT STRAGHOV MANSION", + "text": "Felix looked down. He was not happy. Of the many things he hated and feared in this life, skaven came close to the top of the list. He had loathed the vile vermin ever since he and the Slayer had first encountered them in the sewers of Nuln. What was worse, the awful creatures seemed to have dogged their footsteps ever since, even assaulting the Lonely Tower before their expedition to the Chaos Wastes. Who would have thought they would have shown up here, though? The northernmost provinces of Kislev were a long way from anywhere. Was the reach of the Horned Rat so long?\n\nStill, why should he be surprised by anything in this life? It sometimes seemed to him that he and the Slayer were the most unlucky creatures ever to walk the face of the world. Everywhere they went, they encountered the servants of Chaos. Everywhere they went, they met with disaster and destruction. Another, worse, thought pushed that idea from his mind. Was it possible that Ulrika was alive and down there in the clutches of the ratmen? It was something that did not bear thinking about.\n\n\"Should we go on down?\" Felix asked. They were half way down the ladder, on the fifth platform.\n\n\"Why not?\" Gotrek replied. \"You wanted to find out what happened to the Kislevites.\"\n\n\"Under the circumstances, I'm pretty sure I can guess.\"\n\n\"Guessing isn't good enough, manling. There may be some humans alive down there, and they granted us fire and shelter.\"\n\n\"Fire and shelter and a bucket of vodka for Snorri,\" added Snorri helpfully.\n\n\"That settles it then,\" Felix said sourly. \"I'll gladly sell my life for a bucket of vodka.\"\n\nFelix knew he was just grumbling for the sake of form. Even if the two Slayers had not been there, he liked to think he would continue anyway to find out the fate of Ulrika and her family. Flanked by Gotrek and Snorri there was no turning back. He consoled himself with the thought that if there were skaven down there, a lot of them were going to die.\n\nUnless they have some of those terrible sharpshooters, Felix thought. Or even some with crossbows. Easiest thing in the world to pick us off from a distance. Or maybe not. Not in this light. Not with all these wooden crossbars around. And Snorri and Gotrek were short; they would not make good targets. Of course, that left one obvious target for any sniping. He tried to push the thought from his mind as he put his weight on the rungs of the ladder once more.\n\nA glow surrounded Grey Seer Thanquol. For a moment Ulrika stood frozen, wondering what new horror the skaven sorcerer was about to unleash. The aura of power that surrounded the creature was almost overwhelming. The skaven raised two objects it had taken from its pouch and began chanting something in its own highpitched tongue. All skaven eyes in the room were upon it. The rat-ogre growled as it sensed the gathering of power. Ulrika decided that it did not matter what the skaven was up to. This was her best chance to do something. Whatever wickedness Thanquol was about to commit, she would put a stop to it.\n\nShe sprang forward and sent her booted foot crashing into Grey Seer Thanquol's groin. The skaven gave a squeal of pain and bent over double, dropping his sorcerous adjuncts. A strange smell of musk suddenly filled the air. The rat-ogre roared and reached for her. She dived forward, below its outstretched claws. They missed her by inches as she passed between its columnar legs and headed for the door.\n\nThe skaven shrieked in confusion. Ulrika threw the bar on the door and dashed into the next chamber. The rat-ogre bellowed its rage behind her. She saw a surprised skaven in front of her. Desperation gave her strength. She punched it on the snout. It shrieked in pain and dropped its sword. Ulrika stamped on its lower paw, and while it hopped away reached down to pick up its scimitar. It wasn't quite what she was used to, but she felt better with a weapon in her hand.\n\nShe looked around: to her left were the stairs down into the cellars where her people were imprisoned, to the right was a long corridor full of skaven. No choice as to direction then. With luck she might be able to free a few of her folk. Failing that a narrow corridor was a much better place to make a last stand than an open hallway.\n\nUnder the circumstances, she had no choice at all.\n\n\"What was that?\" Felix asked, hearing a distant roar that was all too familiar. It came hot on the heels of a highpitched squeal of pain.\n\n\"Sounds like one of those big rat monsters to me,\" said Gotrek. \"Whatever it is, it's mine.\"\n\n\"Can Snorri have one too?\" asked Snorri plaintively.\n\n\"You can have mine,\" Felix said, pausing on the lowest platform and getting ready to fight.\n\n\"Thank you, young Felix,\" said Snorri. He sounded grateful.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol clutched his tender bits and cursed. That foolish breeder would pay for this indignity, he swore. She had dared to lay her filthy paws on the greatest of skaven sorcerers. Worse yet, she had interrupted him just as he was about to unleash his spell, the one that would make the ambush foolproof, a spell of compelling potency that would bind the airship until he released it.\n\nNot to worry, there was still time. The element of surprise was still his.\n\nOnly at that moment, as the tears of agony cleared from his eyes, did he realise the full outrageous folly of his underlings. They had mistaken his scream of pain for the signal to attack and had come surging out of the buildings to attack Gotrek Gurnisson, Felix Jaeger and the other Slayer.\n\nWould these minions never learn to follow orders? Thanquol wailed.\n\nThen he realised that the worst had come to pass. Seeing the horde of ratmen surging towards the base of the tower, the cowardly dwarfs had already cast off. Even as he watched, the airship was gaining height above the battlefield. Perhaps it would escape before he could use his magic. It was an awful thought.\n\nThanquol swore that the human breeder was really, really going to pay when he got his paws on her. Right now, though, he had another problem. He had to take charge of this attack before it became a complete fiasco." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Lurk Snitchtongue felt the airship suddenly gain altitude. He heard the engines roar. His keen ears could hear the dwarfish bellow of orders through the speaking tubes in the ship. Just for a moment, he wished that he understood that foul guttural tongue, but then he realised that he did not have to. It was quite obvious what had happened. The dwarfs had spotted the ambush Grey Seer Thanquol had set for them, and were busy escaping from it. Just one more proof, if any were needed, of Thanquol's gross incompetence.\n\nNot that it would do Lurk much good. He was still stuck on the ship and his chance of escape was all but gone. He could hear dwarfs clambering up the ladders within the gasbag to reach the turrets mounted on top of the airship. It seemed that they were preparing themselves for a fight.\n\nUnreasoning rage filled Lurk's brain for a moment, threatening to swamp every rational thought. He would clamber up there and tear them limb from limb and then he would feast on their warm bleeding flesh. He would cave in their skulls then scoop out their brains to make a tasty morsel to satisfy his hunger. He would stick his snout in their entrails and suck out their intestines while they squealed in pain.\n\nJust as quickly, prudent skaven caution returned and resumed command. Perhaps it would be better to clamber up and see if there was any way he could take advantage of the situation. Certainly it was pointless going down into the cupola. There were just too many dwarfs down there even for a skaven of Lurk's surpassing might. Even in his tormented state he could remember only too well how deadly Gotrek Gurnisson's axe was.\n\nQuickly he scurried to the ladder and began to pull himself up it.\n\n\"Here they come,\" shouted Gotrek.\n\nThere's no need to sound so pleased about it, thought Felix, but he kept the thought to himself. He knew he was soon going to need all his strength for fighting. A mass of tightly packed skaven warriors had erupted from the manor house, swords raised, mouths frothing. It was like something out of a particularly nasty nightmare. Any hopes that he might have had for Ulrika's survival vanished immediately. At least he could avenge her, he thought. A fair number of skaven were going to die in the next few minutes.\n\nThe tower shivered. Fearing the worst, Felix looked up. His fears were confirmed. The airship's engines roared to life as it slowly reversed away. Any thought of retreat to the Spirit of Grungni could be abandoned.\n\nThanks, lads, thought Felix. Just what I needed to make my day complete.\n\n\"Come on up and die!\" Gotrek roared.\n\n\"Snorri's got a present for you,\" yelled Snorri, brandishing his axe with one hand and his hammer in the other.\n\nFelix settled himself behind one of the support struts, hoping to get some cover from any missile weapons the skaven might care to deploy. The mass of ratmen warriors had reached the foot of the tower now. Some swarmed up the ladder, others clambered up the legs of the structure itself. There were far too many of them to count, and as he watched Felix saw the monstrous form of a rat-ogre emerge from the manor house. Given the number of close calls he had endured with these monsters in the past, the sight did not reassure him.\n\n\"Not going to be much of a fight, this,\" Gotrek complained.\n\n\"Easy,\" said Snorri.\n\nFelix wished he shared the confidence of these two maniacs. His stomach churned with the fear he always felt before a fight. He wanted nothing more now than to get to grips with the foe, to end this waiting. Part of him even considered jumping down into the mass of skaven but he knew it would be suicide. The fall was too long and he would be surrounded from all sides and dragged down.\n\nThe first furry snout poked up the ladder. Gotrek split it with one stroke of his axe. Black blood splattered his bandages. The skaven dropped down, knocking away the others on the ladder. It started to dawn on Felix that actually, as long as they stayed here, they would have quite a good chance of surviving. Not too many of the skaven could get at them at once, and most of them would be in the uncomfortable position of having to raise themselves onto the platform, leaving themselves vulnerable for vital moments as they did so.\n\n\"This is too easy,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"Snorri thinks we should climb down and start killing properly,\" said Snorri.\n\nDon't you dare, thought Felix, noticing that pink eyes were glaring at him as a skaven pulled itself up the metal strut. He lashed out at it, but in desperation it leapt forward, fangs bared, going right for his throat.\n\nIn a heartbeat he was too busy trying to stay alive to think about the precariousness of their situation.\n\nVarek raced through the corridors of the Spirit of Grungni. Swiftly he entered the hangar deck. The gyrocopters were waiting. He clambered into a cockpit, and worked the crank of the ignition. The engine roared to life. Wind hit Varek's face as the rotors began to spin. Dwarf engineers were already opening the doors at the back of the gondola. One by one the gyrocopters rumbled forward and dropped into the night. He was glad they had used the time flying over the Chaos Wastes to unpack and assemble the crated flying machines. It looked like they would all be needed now. Varek felt a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as his own copter dropped away from the airship, then the rotors above him churned the air and he began to gain altitude. He reached down into the satchel beside him and began to fumble for a bomb. This was almost as exciting as the trip into Karag Dum, he thought.\n\nUlrika raced down the stairs. A skaven turned to look at her, snarling. She split its skull with one stroke of the stolen sword. Its surprised companion growled at her. A strange acrid stink filled the air. She noticed that the creature was venting some sort of musk from glands near its tail. She struck out at it. Sparks flashed as its blade parried her own. There was a screech of metal on metal as she slid her sword down its blade. The guards of the two weapons met. She twisted her sword, disarming her foe. It leapt back, screeching for mercy. She gave it none.\n\n\"What's going on out there?\" she heard a mighty voice bellow. She almost cried with relief at its familiarity.\n\n\"Father \u2014 is that you?\" She was already throwing the door open.\n\n\"Ulrika,\" said her father, Ivan, reaching out to grasp her in a fierce hug. His bushy beard tickled her face. She saw a dozen more ragged and beaten looking men in the cellar. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"The airship has come back. The skaven are trying to ambush it,\" she gasped out.\n\n\"How many of the others are left alive?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I think there are more prisoners down here in the cellars.\"\n\nIvan reached down and picked up the sword of one of the skaven guards. He tossed it to his tall, thin, cadaverous-looking lieutenant, Oleg, and then picked up the sword belonging to the other skaven. His other favourite, Standa, short, burly and high-cheek boned, looked disappointed that there was no blade for him. \"Filthy weapons but they'll have to do.\"\n\n\"What shall we do?\" Ulrika asked.\n\n\"Free as many prisoners as we can find. Kill as many skaven as we can. Use the weapons to arm our warriors, then fight or escape depending on the situation.\"\n\n\"That's a pretty sketchy plan,\" she said, smiling.\n\n\"Sorry, daughter, but it's the best I can manage under the circumstances.\"\n\n\"It'll have to do.\"\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol gnawed on his lower lip as he watched his warriors swarming up the tower. He could see that things were not going well. His brave skaven had the advantage in numbers but their foes' position was a strong one. Gotrek Gurnisson held his ground above the ladder, and chopped anything that came at him. The other Slayer and Felix Jaeger roved around the platform killing any ratman who climbed up the outside of the tower. Thanquol was torn between aiding his troops and preventing the Spirit of Grungni from escaping.\n\nHe stood there undecided for a moment, and then decided to stick as close to the original plan as possible. After all, it was a mighty scheme of his own devising and it should still work despite the incompetence of his lackeys. He opened his mouth and began to chant the words of his spell.\n\nThe winds of magic howled in his ears as he drew their energies to him. Pure pleasure surged through him as the power of the warpstone filled him.\n\nFelix ducked a blow from a skaven sword and slashed at the rat-man attacking him. The skaven leapt back, claws scrabbling on the metal surface of the tower as it realised how close to the edge it was. Felix cursed. He had hoped that in its panic the creature would jump straight off. Well, he could always give it some assistance. He sprang forward, barrelling into it with all his weight. The skaven was much lighter than he and was sent tumbling back through the air, over the edge of the platform. And good riddance, thought Felix before he noticed that the thing had managed to grab a support strut with its tail and was dangling there upside down.\n\nSmiling nastily Felix chopped at the creature's long hairless tail. The tail parted and the skaven shrieked something in its incomprehensible tongue as it dropped to its doom. Felix had time for one brief snarl of satisfaction before the pitter-patter of paws on metal warned him that another skaven was behind him.\n\nHe whirled, sword raised to face his foe.\n\nLurk poked his snout up through the hatchway. He looked around. Dwarfs had taken up position behind the strange looking guns that filled the rotating turrets on top of the airship. He had seen enough of Clan Skryre's engines to know that those guns would probably rip him apart if he tried to attack them. While he was a mighty and invincible skaven warrior there was no sense in courting needless death. There was nothing for him up here.\n\nThere was a roaring sound from below him, and suddenly some sort of flying machine rose into view over the airship. Lurk ducked as it whizzed directly above his head. Here was powerful sorcery, he thought, looking at the small vehicle. If only he had known what it was earlier, maybe he could have stolen it and escaped.\n\n\"Oi! What's that?\" he heard one of the dwarfs shout.\n\nMay the Horned Rat consume their souls, the dwarfs had spotted him! He ducked back out of sight, scuttling down the ladder, wondering what to do next. Perhaps he could go and hide among the nacelles of gas that filled the balloon. No. Pointless. Sooner or later they would seek him out in sufficient numbers to ensure his death. While this would almost certainly fulfil Grey Seer Thanquol's dictum that he create a distraction on the airship, it would do him no good whatsoever. If he was going to help Thanquol to victory he wanted to be alive to claim his share of the credit for the triumph.\n\nNot that Thanquol would allow anyone to share in that, a small sour part of his brain quibbled.\n\nHe kept dropping until he reached the bottom of the gasbag. He saw a dwarf face peering up at him from the hatch that led down into the airship proper. Whichever way he looked there were foes. Nothing for it, then, but to fight. It would not have been his first choice of action but it looked like he had run out of options.\n\nHe bared his fangs and reached out with his claws. The terrified dwarf ducked back into the gondola, pulling the hatch shut behind him. A surge of pain passed through Lurk. He realised his tail had been caught in the heavy hatch.\n\nSomeone, he decided, was going to pay for that.\n\nUlrika fumbled her way through the darkened cellars. The stink of skaven mingled with scents familiar from her childhood, all but overlaying the smell of too many people cramped into too small a space. She was glad though. It meant a lot of her folk were still alive, more than she had dared hope for. They were locked in with the vodka barrels and in the holding cellars from which the hungry skaven horde had emptied the provisions.\n\nShe wished she had a lantern. She wished she had more weapons. She pushed those thoughts aside. It was pointless wishing for things she could not have. She was going to have to work with what she did have. She listened. Even through the tightly packed earth she could hear the sounds of fighting. She could hear the roar of the rat-ogre, the squeals of wounded skaven and the sound of something else.\n\nIt sounded like explosions. What was going on up there? Had the skaven sorcerer unleashed some foul spell? She gave the door of the last cellar a push and confronted two cowering skaven. They obviously had been set here for a special purpose, and that purpose was immediately obvious. One of them held a knife at the throat of Max Schreiber. Max was unconscious, his beautiful golden robes ripped and filthy. The other skaven, a huge black-furred monster rose to meet her.\n\n\"Prepare to die, foolish breeder,\" it chittered, in poorly accented Reikspeil.\n\nFelix saw that things were beginning to turn against them. Despite their best efforts more and more skaven were gaining the platform. Slowed by their wounds, Snorri and Gotrek were not fighting as well as they normally would. With only three of them they could not cover all the possible means of getting on to the platform. There were four pylons, one at each corner of the tower, and the central ladder. While they managed to guard three, two were always clear for the skaven and as more and more of them forced their way onto the platform, they could not even hold those successfully.\n\nHe looked around. Wounded or not, the Slayers were wreaking awful havoc. The platform floor was sticky with blood and spilled entrails. It was increasingly hard to keep a firm footing in the mess. He dreaded the fact that at any moment he might lose his balance and go slithering over the edge. Here and there in the dimming light he could see bodies that had literally been broken apart by the Slayers' axes. Bones and lungs and internal organs had all flopped into the light.\n\nIn one swift flash of terrible insight it struck Felix that they were differently arranged from human entrails, and that it was a dreadful thing that he had seen enough opened corpses to know this. A flicker of movement sent his peripheral vision to Gotrek. The Slayer stood on top of a pile of mangled bodies. He held one skaven in the air at arm's length, throttling it, while his axe described a huge half-circle holding the skaven's comrades at bay. Black skaven blood soiled Gotrek's bandages. Froth blew from his lips. He howled like a madman, drowning out the frightened chittering war cries and the screams of his opponents. Nearby Snorri lashed out with his two weapons, chopping and smashing like a demented butcher in a hellish abattoir. He smiled as he fought, obviously enjoying the mayhem and uncaring as to the nearness of death.\n\nThe stink was abominable. There was the wet fur reek of skaven, the odd musky scent they emitted when frightened, the smell of excrement and torn bodies and blood. At any other time, it would have made Felix want to be sick but right now he found it oddly exhilarating. As always when death was close his senses were almost intolerably keen and he found himself savouring every moment.\n\nA mighty roaring filled his ears. He was suddenly aware of flashes from the base of the tower and the movement of large ominous shadows above him. He risked a glance up and saw a gyrocopter had been catapulted from the airship and was soaring above them. He had a brief glimpse of the mad face of Malakai Makaisson at its controls, as the insane engineer rained bombs down at the foot of the tower. He heard the anguished, fearful screaming of the skaven massed there. The tower itself shook as if kicked by a giant, and Felix had to fight to keep his footing amid the gore.\n\nHe offered up a prayer to Sigmar that the bombs didn't send the whole towering structure crashing to the earth, burying them all in a chaos of smashed wooden beams.\n\nDid Makaisson have any idea what he was doing, Felix wondered? Did he care? Looking down Felix could see that he was causing terrible casualties among the skaven. Broken ratman bodies were hurled skywards. Some were torn completely to bits by the force of the explosions. Others lay on the ground, limbless, bleeding and shrieking. It was a wonder that the skaven could hold their ground in the teeth of so ferocious an assault. Felix realised that more bombs were cascading down, this time from the airship. One hit the tower near him, fuse spluttering. For a horrible moment, he felt that his time had come, that he was about to be blown into a thousand tiny fragments of flesh. He froze on the spot for an instant but then courage and mobility returned and he kicked the bomb off the platform.\n\nHe saw it disappear, sparks trailing from its flickering fuse, into the crowd below. A heartbeat later a terrible explosion blasted through the skaven.\n\nThat was too close, thought Felix. He shook his fist in the air and shouted, \"Watch what you're doing, you stupid bastard!\"\n\nIt was all too much for the skaven down below. They scattered in all directions, unable to face the death crashing down on them from above anymore. A glow from the door of the mansion attracted Felix's attention. He saw a familiar form illuminated by it.\n\nAstonishment almost paralysed him. He recognised the skaven sorcerer. It was Grey Seer Thanquol, who had led the attack on Nuln, and whom Felix had last seen fleeing from the ballroom of the Elector Countess' palace.\n\nHow had he got here, Felix wondered? Had the creature come all this way simply to get revenge? Was it possible that the grey seer had been behind the attack on the Lonely Tower?\n\nFrom the swirling energy around the figure he could tell that the grey seer was about to cast a spell.\n\nWhat new madness was this?\n\nLurk stood on the edge of the cupola. The whole hellish scene was visible below, illuminated by flashes of light from the bombs. He saw his luckless kin torn apart by the violent blasts and felt thoroughly and profoundly glad that he was not down there with them. The relief evaporated when he realised the precariousness of his own position. If he did not get off the airship soon he would be caught by the dwarfs and overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. He needed to get away now but he could see no way to do it.\n\nExcept one. The airship was moving close to the tower again. It was just possible that he could leap from the top of the cupola and land on the tower. It was dangerous, and if he mis-timed his leap or missed his footing he would be sent plunging to his doom. On the other hand, if he stayed here his death was certain, and any chance was better than no chance at all.\n\nLurk screwed his courage to the sticking point. He felt his muscles tense, his heart rate accelerate, his musk glands tighten.\n\nAny second now he was going to do it.\n\nUlrika ducked below the black-furred skaven's swipe and slashed back. The creature bounded away from her counter-blow and bumped into the skaven with its blade at Schreiber's neck, sending it flying. Ulrika realised that the ratman probably had orders to kill the wizard at the first sign of any trouble. It would make sense. On his own, a conscious Schreiber could wreak as much havoc as a troop of cavalry. Wizards had that kind of power.\n\nShe realised that she would have to do her best to save his life, and quickly. She sprang forward while the skaven were still entangled, and split the skull of the huge black beast with one powerful stroke. Its corpse flopped to the earth, trapping its smaller fellow. Taking advantage of the fact, she buried her sword in the still living skaven's throat and then kicked it a couple of times for good measure.\n\nAfter ensuring both were dead, she turned to Schreiber. He was bruised and his hair and eyebrows looked singed but a quick check told her his heart was still beating, a fact for which she was profoundly thankful. Gently she shook him, knowing it was risky to treat an injured man in such a way, and yet needing him to be awake and helping her. He groaned and mumbled and his eyes flickered open. Slowly she saw consciousness return. He smiled through bruised lips.\n\n\"I am too sore to be dead,\" he said eventually. \"It's pleasant to reenter the world of the living and be greeted by such a beautiful face.\"\n\n\"There's no time for flattery, Max Schreiber. The skaven are still here and upstairs a battle rages. We need your help.\"\n\n\"Tis always the way,\" he grumbled, pulling himself slowly and painfully to his feet. He brushed himself down, disgusted at seeing how soiled his golden robes were. \"No one wants to know a wizard\u2026 until they have a problem. Then it's different.\"\n\n\"Herr Schreiber, have your wounds rendered you insane?\"\n\n\"No, Ulrika. I'm just attempting to lighten the situation with a joke. You're a lovely woman, but if I may say so your sense of humour is not your strong point.\"\n\n\"Just get on with it, Max.\"\n\n\"And thank you for saving me. I owe you for it.\"\n\n\"You owe me nothing. Just get out there and start casting spells \u2014 like you did the other night.\"\n\nHe nodded and then a sudden serious expression flashed across his face. \"The grey seer is gathering its powers, and they are immense. I have never felt the winds of magic swirl and flow so turbulently. I wonder what new evil it is up to.\"\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol felt the power surging within him. It was like a snake in his belly, in his chest, fighting to get out. He had consumed an enormous amount of warpstone, enough to have caused lesser skaven mages to explode or devolve into primordial ooze but he was Thanquol. He was the greatest of the grey seers, the mightiest of mages, the supreme sorcerer of the skaven people. Nothing was beyond his powers. Nothing.\n\nControl yourself, he thought. Think. Think. He knew only too well the feeling of extreme self-confidence that filled the habitual warpstone user at such moments as this. Indeed, he believed that most skaven sorcerers had moments of utter grandiosity mere heartbeats before the warpstone led them to their final doom. He was not going to be one of them. It was true that like all grey seers, he had a healthy regard for his own abilities but he was not going to allow the potent raw Chaos stuff to drown out his sense of self-preservation. A sense that was, at this very moment, asserting itself and letting him know that he needed to cast the spell and vent the power now, before it consumed him. It was difficult to do so with so much raw sorcerous energy coursing through his veins and the ecstasy of unlimited power bubbling in his brain, but he knew that he must do it or his doom was certain.\n\nSlowly he forced himself to recite the words of the potent incantation he had devised. One by one he reconstructed the intricate maze of paw gestures that would focus the magic. As he moved his arm, streamers of pure magical energy followed his talons, as if he were slashing holes in the very substance of reality, which in a way, he supposed, he was. He moved his arms in ever-wider gestures; he shrieked the potent syllables of the incantation ever louder. As he did so, a nimbus of light played round his body. Raw magical energy began to leak from his eyes, his snout, his muzzle and the lower extremities of his body. He felt the power roiling back and forth in his gut like acid and knew that he was involved in a race against time, that if he did not complete his spell soon, the power would rip him apart. The part of his mind that was not caught up in the complex mystic geometry of the spell swore that never, ever again would he consume so much warpstone.\n\nHe rushed through the last potent syllables of the incantation and made the final paw gestures. Slowly at first a writhing mass of green tendrils extended themselves from his body. Then one by one, the filaments reached out and up, seeking the airship. Thanquol felt his whole body tingle with vibrant energy as they did so. His fur stood on end and his tail was fully extended. His whole body was uncannily sensitive. The faintest kiss of air on his fur felt like someone was rubbing him down with a wire brush. It was painful and yet not unpleasant. He forced himself to concentrate once more, to see each tentacle of energy as an extension of himself, a thing that he could control, that he could feel through as if it were his paw tips.\n\nHe extended the web of his power. The spell was a giant claw with which he could grasp the airship and immobilise it. Now those foolish dwarfs would learn the folly of opposing Grey Seer Thanquol, mightiest of mages, master of all magics. He would take their puny airship and crush it. He would smash it to pieces and cast it to earth. He would\u2026\n\nNo! What was he thinking? That was the warpstone dust speaking. He would merely immobilise the airship and let his minions take it. Yes. That was it. Concentrate, he told himself. Don't lose sight of the goal now that it is almost within your grasp.\n\nHis questing fingers of power touched the airship's cupola. Thanquol shrieked. He felt as if he had been scorched. What wickedness was this? What evil sorcery was at work here? He watched the streamers of green light retreat from the airship at his command. Of course, the airship was protected against Chaos magic. It needed to have been since it had flown across the Wastes. Gingerly Thanquol sent the streamers flickering back again. He knew he had time. What seemed like minutes to him in his exalted state were mere heartbeats to others. His questing tendrils played over the cupola and retreated. It was no use trying to grasp the airship there. It was well protected. He extended his reach to the gasbag. Success! It was not shielded. No! Correction. Parts of it were. The bits that held turrets. Suddenly as he ran his power over the lower part of the gasbag he sensed a familiar, and yet somehow subtly changed presence. It was Lurk! He detached one streamer of energy to grasp his wayward minion, catching him in mid-leap. The rest he continued to weave around the unshielded parts of the gasbag, anchoring the airship in place.\n\nNo! What was happening! Why was he starting to rise from the ground! This was not supposed to\u2026 Wait! He had it. Thanquol alone could not anchor the airship. His weight was insubstantial compared to the mass of the flying ship. A moment's consideration told him exactly what he needed to do to bind himself to the earth.\n\nAs quick as thought he created more streamers of warpstone energy and sent them burrowing deep into the ground, questing downwards like the roots of some sorcerously swift growing plant. Now he was locked in place. Now he had the leverage to pit himself against the airship's engines. He exerted his power once more.\n\nInstantly he felt himself being drawn back to earth again, and the airship with him. This was more like it. He was a giant! He was a god! With his magic he was going to pull the Spirit of Grungni right out of the sky. He had it hooked like a fish on a line, and now all he needed to do was reel it in. There was nothing any of those pitiful fools could do to stop him.\n\nExtending his power to the fullest, he slowly but surely began to pull the airship to the ground.\n\nFelix watched in astonishment as a mass of shimmering streamers of light surged up from the doorway of the mansion, curling round the tower like serpents until eventually they engulfed the airship. For a moment, the fighting stopped and all eyes were drawn upwards to watch the sorcerous spectacle. For an instant the lights touched the cupola and withdrew, but only for a moment were they thwarted. Almost immediately they encircled the gasbag of the balloon. Felix could see the skin of its surface flex and he wondered whether the skaven intended to rip the bag asunder and destroy the airship.\n\nSeconds later it became apparent that this was not the grey seer's plan. Felix's mouth gaped in astonishment as slowly but surely the Spirit of Grungni was drawn downwards towards the ground. The skaven had ceased to retreat, so awe-stricken were they by this display of the grey seer's powers. It looked all too possible that the airship was going to be captured.\n\nIt seemed as if the airship, and with it the proceeds of the expedition to Karag Dum, was doomed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "BATTLE!\n\nUlrika and Max Schreiber raced through the cellars. All around her were the freed prisoners. Some were armed with weapons taken from dead skaven guards, others were arming themselves with cudgels made from broken chairs, old tools and kitchen knives. Ulrika was not reassured.\n\n\"How many?\" she asked her father.\n\n\"About thirty who can fight. About fifty all told.\"\n\n\"So few?\"\n\n\"So few.\"\n\n\"Do you think our patrols will return in time?\"\n\n\"We must not count on it.\"\n\n\"What is going on above?\"\n\n\"You would know better than I, daughter. I have been down here all this time.\"\n\n\"Mighty magics are being unleashed,\" Max Schreiber said. \"I fear the skaven are going to capture the airship. I suspect that may have been their plan all along.\"\n\n\"They must be stopped.\"\n\n\"How? We could not stop them last night when we held the walls and had a hundred armed men. How can we do so now?\"\n\n\"We must find a way, daughter.\"\n\nMax Schreiber smiled. \"We have an advantage now that we did not have last night.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\" asked Ulrika.\n\n\"They will not be expecting us.\"\n\n\"By Taal, Max Schreiber, you have a gift for looking on the bright side,\" boomed Ivan.\n\n\"Let's go up and see what we can do. At least in the confusion there may be a chance to escape.\"\n\n\"There will be no escape, Max Schreiber. This is my ancestral home. I will not abandon it to some stinking, gods-poxed ratmen.\"\n\n\"I can see why you get on so well with the dwarfs,\" said Max Schreiber. \"You're all as stubborn as hell.\"\n\nFelix Jaeger watched in awe as the grey seer dragged the Spirit of Grungni earthwards. One small skaven was engaged in a contest of strength with an enormous vessel and he was winning. The dwarfs were not going to be beaten quietly though. The engines of the airship roared and Felix could tell from the angle of the fins that whoever was at the controls was trying to get the ship up. The streamers of energy left a glittering after-image on his field of vision. It was an incredible display of magical power, one of the greatest he had ever seen.\n\n\"Best get down there and kill that skaven magician,\" said Gotrek.\n\n\"A good plan,\" said Snorri.\n\nAn idiotic plan, Felix thought. All we have to do is fight our way through a small skaven army and confront a sorcerer who is capable of plucking an airship from the sky. On the other hand, he could think of nothing better himself. The airship represented their best hope of escape and if it were captured or destroyed, they were doomed.\n\n\"Let's get on with it then,\" Felix said with no great enthusiasm.\n\nNow is the moment of my triumph, thought Grey Seer Thanquol. Now all skaven will bow before my genius. Now the Council of Thirteen must recognise my accomplishments. He felt capable of reaching up and pulling the moons from the sky and the stars from the heavens. Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea. Morrslieb, the lesser moon, was said to be made of a gigantic chunk of warpstone. If he could grasp it, then\u2026\n\nNo. Best stick to the matter at hand. First he would capture the airship then he would seize Morrslieb. And if he could not reach it with his spells perhaps he could fly there in the airship. Fully formed, a plan of awful majesty appeared in Thanquol's mind. He could use the airship to fly to the moon and mine all the warpstone he would ever need. It would be an achievement unsurpassed in all the annals of skavendom, and surely his reward must be a place at the Council table. At the very least. Perhaps the whole Council would bow before him, and recognise him as the greatest of all servants of the Horned Rat. Such was the magnificence of his vision that for a moment, Thanquol was lost in contemplation. Only when he felt the strands of his power slipping away was he drawn back to reality by the realisation that first he would have to land his fish before any of it would be possible. He threw himself back into the struggle with renewed ferocity.\n\nLurk was not happy. In mid-leap he had been caught by one of those huge streamers of energy and tossed all over the sky in a deranged frenzy of movement. He had long known how potent the grey seer was but never till now had he shown such full evidence of his might. Was this some sort of revenge by Grey Seer Thanquol for his disloyal thoughts? Had Thanquol been aware of Lurk's ideas concerning him all along? Did he plan to end Lurk's torment by dashing him into the ground?\n\n\"No-no, master!\" he gibbered. \"Spare your loyalest of servants. I will serve you faithfully all of my days. Blast those other foul vermin. They hate you. I do not. I have always done my best for you!\"\n\nIf Thanquol heard Lurk's earnest prayers, there was no sign. Filled with fear, Lurk watched the ground rise to meet him.\n\nUlrika put her sword through the back of the skaven cowering in the hall, and went to the window to look at the source of the eerie glow. She had never seen anything like it. The horn-headed skaven mage floated in the air about twenty strides above the ground. It was anchored to the earth by hundreds of streamers of light, and with hundreds of others it was drawing the straining airship down.\n\nBeneath it, hundreds of skaven muzzles pointed at the sky. They stood frozen in awe, watching their master at work. Beside her she heard Max Schreiber mutter, \"By Sigmar, how does it contain all that power and not explode? It must be consuming pure warpstone, and yet it still has not died.\"\n\n\"What?\" she asked.\n\n\"That thing out there is filled with the raw stuff of Chaos. It is using it to power its spell. It should not be possible for any mortal thing to be doing this but it is. I have no idea how.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it would be better if you applied your mind to the idea of killing it,\" Ulrika suggested.\n\n\"I am not sure I have the strength.\"\n\n\"Then things do not look good.\"\n\n\"You have a gift for understatement, my dear.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Felix watched Gotrek descend the ladder. With one arm the Slayer held the rungs, with the other he wielded his axe like a club, dropping it down on the skulls of any skaven below him. By sheer ferocity Gotrek managed to reach the bottom and clear a space around the base of the ladder. Moments later Snorri joined him. Seeing no other option, Felix began his own descent.\n\nA roar from above him told him that the gyrocopter had returned for another pass. Felix watched a bomb hurtle towards the hovering grey seer. The fuse timing, always a tricky thing at best, was not good, and the bomb went hurtling past Thanquol to explode amidst the skaven. Once more aware of their peril, they tried frantically to hurl themselves aside only to be blown asunder by the dwarf explosive.\n\nFelix shuddered, thinking just how easy it would be for one of those bombs to go astray and catch himself, Gotrek and Snorri in the blast. It did not bear thinking about. Instead he threw himself forward hacking desperately to right and left, trying his best to smash a path through the massed ranks of skaven to the place where Grey Seer Thanquol hovered. Although what he was going to do when he got there eluded him.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol opened his mouth and roared with only slightly crazed laughter. His senses had expanded with his power. He saw himself as a towering giant looking down on the insects below him. His spirit form was as large as the airship with which he grappled. He was a being of awesome proportions. Surely, he thought, this must be how the Horned Rat felt when he gazed down into the world of mortals. Perhaps it was an omen, a harbinger of things to come. Perhaps there would be no limits to Thanquol's destiny. Perhaps he could stride where no skaven had strode before and scale the very peaks of godhood. Certainly at this moment, with the warpstone coursing through his veins, it all seemed possible. There was nothing he could not do.\n\nHe was the master of this situation now. Nothing was going to stop him. Not even his accursed nemesis, Gotrek Gurnisson, or his devious henchman, Felix Jaeger. Finally after all these long months of effort he was going to achieve complete victory over them. How sweet that feeling was!\n\nWait! What was that? He glanced down and saw the gyrocopter flash past. He noticed the bomb that just missed him and exploded among his troops, sending their souls spiralling upwards to join the Horned Rat. How dare they attack the Horned Rat's chosen emissary on earth? He would show them. Quick as thought he reached out with his tentacles of power and swatted the gyrocopter like a man might swat a fly. Unfortunately he was. a tad too slow to catch the fast moving craft and his blow missed.\n\nOnly incidentally did he become aware of something sticking to one of his tentacles. Of course. It was that rascal, Lurk. Briefly, Thanquol considered smashing his errant henchman into the ground as a punishment for his failures but then, through the psychic link that allowed him to perceive through his energy streams, he became aware of the gratifying way Lurk was swearing eternal obedience to him, and more, he was suddenly aware of the changes that had overtaken his minion, of the warpstone coursing through his body, and the way it had been altered. This was something worth investigating. He took a moment to place Lurk not too gently on the ground and returned to his efforts to swat the gyrocopter.\n\nIt proved frustratingly elusive. Still, he thought, the sheer satisfaction of smashing it would be its own reward.\n\nFelix watched in horror as streamers of light impacted on the gyrocopter. The small flying machine began to break up, its parts tumbling headlong through the air, to smash into the ground killing more skaven. A huge cloud of steam and smoke erupted from the broken vehicle's engine. It was followed by a massive explosion, the blast of which sent him tumbling headlong. He guessed that the stock of bombs on the gyrocopter had just gone off. Skaven screams told him the dwarf pilot was not the only casualty.\n\nOverhead the other gyrocopters flashed. One down, three to go, thought Felix.\n\n\"What do we do?\" Ulrika asked. \"You're the magician. This is your field.\"\n\n\"There is no way any mortal form can contain that amount of power for any great length of time. It's possible that its owner will be consumed by it. It's also possible that the power contained within whatever it is he is eating will be exhausted, and he will lose his strength. If he weakens I might be able to disrupt his spell. Other than that\u2026\"\n\n\"You are saying that we should do nothing?\"\n\n\"I am saying that we should wait, Ulrika. There is nothing to be gained by attacking the thing headlong. Look at the way it smashed that gyrocopter. It could easily do the same to us.\"\n\nAh, that was good, thought Grey Seer Thanquol. He felt a monstrous surge of pleasure from destroying that dwarf flyer even at the cost of some dozens of his followers' lives. They were after all expendable. Most skaven were. He was simply glad he wasn't one of them.\n\nHe shook his head as a new problem struck him. During the moments that he had chased the flyer, he had let go of the Spirit of Grungni. It was heading skyward once more at a great rate of knots. Thanquol reached out with his tentacles of power, determined that he would soon put a stop to that.\n\nNo sooner had he grasped the airship once more than he became aware of another challenge. Gotrek Gurnisson, Felix Jaeger and that other accursed Slayer were on the ground and moving towards him. Of course, he was in the air above them but even so he was a little worried. Just the proximity of the Slayer was enough to get on Thanquol's sensitive nerves. He hated that vile creature with a passion.\n\nNow he had the means to end that threat once and for all. What he could do with the gyrocopter he could surely do to one solitary Slayer. Grinning daemonically, he prepared to smash Gotrek Gurnisson into the dirt.\n\nFelix watched the wave of power come towards them. Dozens of streamers of greenish energy raced forward like the tide, smashing aside the screaming skaven between Gotrek and Thanquol. Felix had no doubt whatsoever what would happen when that energy reached them, it was going to be the end of him. He almost closed his eyes, knowing that his doom was moments away but at the last second, determined to see the death that was his, he forced himself to watch.\n\nNow, thought Grey Seer Thanquol, bringing his powers to bear on Gotrek Gurnisson. Now you die!\n\nFelix saw the leading streamers reach Gotrek. As they did so the Slayer brought his axe round in a great arc. The runes on its edges blazed ever brighter where they came into contact with the grey seer's spell. A smell of ozone filled the air. The streamers flew apart in a cloud of sparks, having met with an ancient magic stronger than they. Felix offered up a prayer to Sigmar and whatever other gods might be listening. The remaining streamers withdrew, coiling upwards and backwards away from Gotrek like a cobra about to strike. Felix knew the Slayer had bought them only a moment's respite." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Thanquol felt as if his fingertips were on fire. Of course, it was only the destruction of his spell that he was sensing but the sensation was similar. He cursed the dwarf. He might have guessed that it would not have been so easy to effect his doom. Still, perhaps if the Slayer was invulnerable, his henchman would not prove to be. He could at least destroy Felix Jaeger.\n\nFelix saw the streamers of light part and begin to flow around Gotrek. To his horror he realised that they were aimed at him, and there was nothing he could do about it. The skaven sorcerer obviously intended to see him dead. The spell rushed onwards, a dozen tendrils moving to the right and left of Gotrek, surging directly towards Felix. At least, thought Felix, the skaven mage was killing more of his own warriors. The way they fell to bits as the energy scythed through them did not bode well for his own fate.\n\nUlrika watched what was happening with her heart in her mouth. She saw Gotrek repulse the grey seer's attack and for a moment thought it might be enough. Then she saw that Thanquol intended to attack Felix.\n\n\"Can't you do something?\" she asked Max Schreiber.\n\n\"In a moment I will try a counter spell. I think I understand what the grey seer is doing now and I might be able to pick apart the weave of it.\"\n\n\"Felix doesn't have a moment,\" Ulrika said, knowing it was already too late.\n\nFelix steeled himself to meet death. This was not quite the way he expected it but then it was said that death never came by the route you thought it would. He braced himself, preparing his muscles for one last futile leap to safety. He doubted there was any way he could avoid the spell. It was all over. The tide of dazzling light hurtled towards him. He fought down the urge to scream.\n\nThis was more like it, thought Grey Seer Thanquol, certain that this time at least he was about to kill one of his sworn enemies. That would teach Felix Jaeger to oppose the might of Thanquol. But just before he could crush Jaeger like the insect he was, the Slayer struck once more, lashing out quicker than the eye could follow, first to his left, then to his right, severing the energy bands with that awful axe. Thanquol shrieked with pain. It was like having his own tail cut off.\n\nWorse yet, he felt the warpstone-induced power within him start to stutter and fade. Not now, he thought. No. Not now. Not with triumph so close. But unfortunately, it was so. The energy was already starting to drain out of him. It looked as if the airship was going to escape.\n\nWell at least, he thought, my minions will destroy those upstarts, Jaeger and Gurnisson. Even as he thought it a peculiar sinking sensation struck him. Why is the ground coming closer, he wondered?\n\n\"Now,\" Ulrika heard Max Schreiber mutter, and then the mage began to move his hands and incant in some language she did not understand. As she watched a complex structure of light began to take shape in the space in front of the magician, and then with a gesture of his hand he sent it spinning out towards the grey seer. When it struck Thanquol the glow around the skaven sorcerer faded and he went tumbling headlong to the earth.\n\n\"Now would be a good time to attack,\" Max suggested to her. She did not need to be told a second time.\n\n\"Let's go!\" she shouted and raced out of the mansion, plunging into the surprised skaven from behind. Roaring with battle-lust the Kislevite survivors followed her.\n\nFelix watched in surprise as the glow faded around the grey seer and he began to sink to the earth. He ducked the swing of a skaven warrior and gritted his teeth as he parried a second one. The shock of the impact passed up his arm. He braced himself and slashed downwards cleaving the skaven's skull in two, then whirled to strike the other, slashing it across the throat. Ahead of him Gotrek and Snorri hacked a bloody path towards the skaven mage. They were determined that nothing was going to stop them this time. Bombs continued to rain down from above, dropped by the now freed airship and the circling gyrocopters.\n\nEvery time a bomb hit the ground Felix flinched. He half expected one of them to go off near him, and for his body to be torn apart. He heard a voice shouting at the stupid dwarfs to stop bombing them, and he was surprised to discover that it was his own. He hoped that some time soon somebody up there would realise what was happening on the ground and cease the barrage. Felix doubted that Gotrek's heroic doom encompassed being torn limb from limb by his comrades' explosives. Still Felix had seen worse and stupider things happen in battle, and right now, all was chaos round about them.\n\nSlashing around him with renewed vigour Felix hacked his way through the skaven force.\n\nIt just wasn't fair, thought Grey Seer Thanquol. Just when victory was within his grasp it had been snatched away by the incompetence of his lackeys, and the inferior quality of warpstone sent to him by those cretins back in Skavenblight. Why was he doomed to be constantly thwarted in this manner? He was a good and faithful servant to the skaven cause. He was devout in his prayers to the Horned Rat. He asked so little. What was the problem?\n\nHe lay exhausted on the ground, prostrated by the sudden failure of his warpstone-induced power, and by the unweaving of his spell. Slowly but surely, the full implications of this sunk in. Somewhere out there was a mage potent enough to undo his work, a mage who was undoubtedly fresh and not drained of energy by his selfless efforts to protect his ungrateful minions, a mage who even now might be planning the destruction of Thanquol while he was vulnerable. The thought made Thanquol's glands tighten with the urge to squirt the musk of fear. This was not a fitting reward for his long service to the Horned Rat and the Council of Thirteen, he decided.\n\nSuddenly he became aware of another and even more terrifying threat. Off to his right, he could hear the bestial bellowing of Gotrek Gurnisson, as the Slayer smashed his way through the skaven troops. Doubtless the dwarf had nothing more in his tiny mind than an unjustifiable desire to exterminate Thanquol and rob the world of his genius. And doubtless the dwarf's henchman, Felix Jaeger, would be there to gloat at Thanquol's demise.\n\nWhat was he to do?\n\nAs if he did not have enough reasons to focus his mind on departure, Thanquol heard the sounds of human warcries from behind him. Where had these new forces come from? Had human reinforcements arrived during the fight? Was this some work of the enemy mage? It mattered not.\n\nWith the terrifying onslaught of bombs from above, the bloodcurdling prospect of combat with Gotrek Gurnisson to the fore, and the attack of this massive new force from behind, Thanquol could see only one option open to him. He would heroically elude capture by this overwhelming force of enemies, and return to exact his revenge another day.\n\nMustering the last remnants of his powers, he muttered the words of the spell of escape. It would only carry him a few hundred strides out of the fray but this would be enough. From there he would begin his tactical withdrawal.\n\n\"Where has that accursed mage got to?\" Felix heard Gotrek growl. Felix had no answer. They had reached the spot where he would have sworn he had seen the grey seer fall, and there was nothing there except a faint brimstone aroma in the air. Unreasonably annoyed, Gotrek slaughtered two skaven simultaneously with a stroke of his axe and turned around to look at the monstrous form of the rat-ogre as it approached.\n\n\"Mine!\" he roared.\n\n\"Snorri's!\" shouted Snorri.\n\n\"Race you for it,\" answered Gotrek and rushed forward.\n\nGet on with it, thought Felix as he looked around him. There was a sudden lull in the battle. The strange stink that he had come to associate with frightened skaven attacked his nostrils. He supposed he could not blame them. Their leader had vanished. They were being ripped apart by bombs, assaulted by two of the most vicious Slayers in the world, and ambushed from behind simultaneously. Felix could understand their demoralisation. He doubted that any human force would be less afraid.\n\nStill that did not mean that the peril had passed. The skaven still massively outnumbered their foes, and if given time to realise it, they would return to the fray and quite possibly win. Right now was the moment to seize the advantage and hopefully turn the tide of battle.\n\nHe looked around and saw the rat-ogre flanked on one side by Gotrek and the other by Snorri go down under a blizzard of blows. It toppled like a falling oak. If the sight of that did not help them rout the skaven force, nothing would. Shouting a battle-cry, he charged forward. Gotrek and Snorri accompanied him.\n\nSuddenly from up ahead he thought he heard the sound of human warcries, of one familiar voice shouting orders and encouragement to the troops. His heart leapt. Surely he was hallucinating. There was only one way to find out.\n\nLurk stopped gnawing the flesh of the dead skaven. His hunger momentarily assuaged, he could give his attention back to matters at hand. Behind him he could hear the squeal of terrified skaven, the triumphant shouts of the humans, and the berserker roars of dwarf Slayers. He could tell the battle was lost. It was as certain as the ache in his bones from hitting the ground. Of course, he knew that if it were not for the pain of his injuries, he could turn the tide of battle by his intervention. Unfortunately his bruises, and could that possibly be a sprained ankle, prevented it.\n\nFrom out of the gloom, beams of golden light scythed into the skaven, slashing them down. It looked like their enemies had sorcerous resources too.\n\nDefinitely lost, he thought to himself. Definitely time to go. He picked himself up, glanced around to make sure that no one had noticed him, and scuttled off into the night.\n\nMoving through the carnage of the battlefield Felix caught sight of a familiar figure. His heart leapt. Ulrika was alive. Thinking of nothing else, he moved towards her through the mass of skaven. All around him ratmen turned and fled. They had learned to fear his flashing blade and his proximity to the two Slayers. His mere presence at this moment seemed enough to unnerve them. There was little doubt in his mind that the ratmen were beaten. They milled around looking for a way out, their formation broken, their discipline gone. The loss of their leader and the surprise onslaught from their former captives had been enough to rout them. Now it was only a matter of staying alive while they fled.\n\n\"Ulrika!\" he shouted, but she did not hear him. At that moment, a huge black-furred skaven leapt at her. Terrified that he was about to lose her just when he had found her at last, Felix raced forward to intervene. He need not have bothered. Ulrika parried the rat-man's blow, and put a stop-thrust through its heart. Gurgling in pain, the skaven tumbled forward onto its knees, and then sprawled headlong in the dirt, surrounded by a rapidly spreading pool of its own lifeblood.\n\nUlrika caught sight of something out of the corner of her eye, and whirled ready to attack. For a long tense moment she and Felix faced each other. Neither moved. Neither said anything. Then simultaneously they both smiled, then made to move together. Unable to stop himself, uncaring of the danger, Felix caught her in his arms. Their lips met. Their bodies strained against each other.\n\nSurrounded by the howling madness of battle, they stood like they were the only two people in the world.\n\nMax Schreiber looked around him. He was tired. As much from the magic he had just wrought as from the reaction to the beating he had taken last night. His limbs felt heavy with fatigue. Not even as an apprentice when he had maintained many a days-long vigil in the service of his master had he ever felt so worn out. Still, victory was theirs. The skaven were routed, and even though they still had numerical superiority, he doubted they would return. They were not by nature courageous creatures and it took them a long time to get over defeats.\n\nMax liked to think of himself as a scholar, not a warrior, but he felt satisfied with what he had done here. He had taken a stand against the forces of Chaos and he had helped turn them back. Part of him found the experience far more satisfying than casting protective spells on the homes and vehicles of his clients. He began to understand the thrill of battle he had always read about. He smiled sourly as he caught sight of Felix and Ulrika kissing.\n\nIt appeared that for a sheltered scholar he was getting a crash course in all manner of emotional turmoil. He felt jealousy gnaw away at him, and he knew that not all of his magic could root it out.\n\nHe was more than a little attracted to Ulrika. For the past few days he had felt himself in the grip of passion. He really should have left the mansion days ago but had stayed on under the pretence of waiting for the Spirit of Grungni's return. Seeing the way that Ulrika looked at Felix he guessed that there was little chance of her responding to his ardour.\n\nUnless, the most unworthy thought struck him, something were to happen to Felix Jaeger. Surprised at his own savagery he sent a hail of golden beams slashing into the retreating skaven.\n\nThey died in a most gratifying way.\n\nSilence came suddenly. The battle was over. The dead lay in piles around the mansion. The Spirit of Grungni hovered overhead, nuzzling the docking tower like a horse being hitched to a post. The skaven were defeated.\n\nIt was late. Felix felt tired but elated. He held Ulrika's hand as if he feared she would vanish if he let go of it, and she did not seem at all inclined to lose his grip. All his forebodings on the trip back now seemed senseless and futile phantoms. She was as glad to see him as he was to see her, and he could not begin to express how happy that made him. Instead he could only stand and gaze stupidly into her eyes. Words just would not come. Fortunately, she seemed content with that.\n\nSnorri stomped over. \"Good fight that,\" he said. Black blood crusted his bandages and he bled from dozens of new small cuts but he seemed happy with his lot.\n\n\"Call that a fight?\" Gotrek said. \"I've had more dangerous haircuts.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't want to meet your barber,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Felix made a joke,\" said Snorri. \"Snorri thinks it's funny.\"\n\n\"Let's get some beer,\" Gotrek said. \"Nothing like a bit of light exercise to work up a thirst.\"\n\n\"Snorri wants a bucket of vodka,\" said Snorri. \"And Snorri shall have it.\"\n\nDwarfs had started to climb down the docking tower where the Spirit of Grungni was moored. Soon a small contingent of them were helping the Kislevites pile up the bodies for burning.\n\nFelix thought this was as good a time as any for he and Ulrika to retire to their chamber. She agreed.\n\n\"I never thought I would see you again,\" Ulrika said.\n\nThe dawn was beautiful. Golden beams of sunlight slanted down and caught the endless sea of grass around them. Birds sang. It was so calm that if it were not for the faint smell of burned flesh in the air, Felix would have found it difficult to believe that any battle had taken place the previous evening.\n\n\"There were times when I thought I would never see you again. A lot of them,\" he replied.\n\n\"Was it bad?\"\n\n\"Very.\"\n\n\"In the Wastes?\"\n\n\"In the Wastes and in Karag Dum. You would not believe me if I told you what we found there.\"\n\n\"Try me.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said, gathering her close in his arms.\n\n\"That's not what I meant,\" she said, then kissed him.\n\n\"It will do for the moment,\" he said, pulling her down into the long grass.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied.\n\nAfterwards, as they lay naked on his old woollen cloak, she leaned on her elbow and began to tickle his face with an ear of grass. \"What was it like in the Chaos Wastes?\"\n\n\"Do we really have to talk about it?\"\n\n\"Not if you don't want to.\"\n\nHe considered for a time before replying. \"It is a terrible place. Like the dream of insane gods.\"\n\n\"That's not very specific.\"\n\n\"More than you would think. It changes seemingly at random. Landscapes shimmer and shift\u2026\"\n\n\"Sounds like mirages in the desert.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But there are things there\u2026 Huge idols large as hills, ruined cities that no man has ever heard of, that might just have dropped from the sky. Endless hordes of monsters, and black-armoured men, all of them dedicated to\u2026\"\n\n\"What is it? Why do you fall silent.\"\n\n\"They are coming here. We saw them from the airship. A horde of them. More than I could count, and they are merely the outriders of an even vaster host.\"\n\n\"Why haven't you mentioned this before?\"\n\n\"Because I was so happy to see you, and because I am sure Borek has told your father by now.\"\n\nUlrika sat up straight and stared at the horizon. It did not escape Felix's notice that she was looking northward, to the mountains beyond which lay the Wastes of Chaos. He sensed a change in her mood, a new watchful quality that had something of fear in it.\n\n\"The forces of Darkness have come this way before. We live on their borders. These are the marchlands. We have fought with them and triumphed in the past.\"\n\n\"Not against the force that is coming. This will be like the great Chaos Incursion of two centuries ago, in the time of Magnus the Pious.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"You are sure?\"\n\n\"I have seen it with my own eyes.\"\n\n\"Why now? Why in our time?\" He thought he detected a hint of fear in her voice.\n\n\"I am sure Magnus asked himself the same question.\"\n\n\"That is not an answer, Felix.\" Now there was a note of exasperation. A frown marred her brow. A corresponding annoyance welled up in him.\n\n\"I am not a prophet, Ulrika, I am just a man. I cannot answer these questions. I only know that it fits with what I have seen in other places\u2026\"\n\n\"What other places?\" Her words were sharp. He did not like her tone.\n\n\"In the Empire, the cultists multiply. The worshippers of Chaos are in every city. Beastmen fill the forests. The number of changelings, of mutated ones, is increasing with every month. Wicked magicians prosper. I sometimes think that the doomsayers are right, and that the end of the world is coming.\"\n\n\"Those are not cheerful words,\" she said reaching out and grasping his hand with feverish strength.\n\n\"These are not cheerful times.\" He reached out and stroked her cheek. \"We should go back soon. Find out what the others have been saying.\"\n\nShe smiled wanly and bent forward to kiss his brow. \"I'm glad you're here,\" she said suddenly.\n\n\"Me too,\" said Felix.\n\nMax Schreiber listened to what the dwarfs were saying with growing dismay. Their descriptions of the oncoming Chaos horde chilled him to the bone. The pictures they painted in his mind had even managed to drive out the jealousy he had felt this morning when he saw Felix and Ulrika ride off together.\n\nHe had read descriptions of such things from the time of the great war against Chaos two hundred years ago. He did not doubt that this was a force of similar size. For a long time now, he had suspected that such a thing would happen. He had studied the ways of Chaos for too long not to know its power was on the increase. He looked at the dwarfs' faces. They might well have been chiselled from stone. The matter-of-fact way in which they told of their descent into Karag Dum and their battle with the thing they had found there made him look on the Slayers with new respect.\n\nAnd despite his jealousy of Felix Jaeger he had to admit the man was brave as well as lucky. Max did not think he himself could have faced the thing the dwarfs described with quite the equanimity Jaeger had. He could understand why the dwarfs spoke of him with respect. The thing they had fought was obviously a Greater Daemon of Chaos. He wondered if the dwarfs had any idea of how lucky they had been to survive such an encounter. Not that they had actually succeeded in slaying it, Max knew. Such creatures could not be destroyed by mortals. All that they had done was banish its physical form. It would take on another sooner or later, and return to this plane to seek vengeance. If it could not find Gotrek Gurnisson or Felix Jaeger alive it would seek out their descendants and heirs. Such was the manner of the things.\n\nThere were times when Max Schreiber wished he had not studied this subject so long and so hard. Being privy to such knowledge often gave him nightmares. Still, it had been his choice; he had set his feet on this path long ago, and he had been given many opportunities to turn back. He had chosen not to. Ever since he had watched his family butchered by beastmen as a child, he had hated Chaos and all its works. He was sworn to oppose it in any way he could, and that meant learning its ways. Long ago when he had first started his studies as a mage he had encountered those who were of like mind. They needed to be warned of what was coming from the north. The world needed to be warned.\n\nIvan obviously agreed. \"If what you are saying is true\u2014\"\n\n\"You doubt my word?\" Gotrek Gurnisson said.\n\n\"It is not that I doubt it my friend, it's just that part of me would rather not believe it. The tide of Chaos you are describing could sweep away the world.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Borek. \"It could.\"\n\n\"Except the dwarfholds,\" Gotrek said stoutly.\n\n\"Even those would fall in the end,\" Borek said. \"Remember Karag Dum.\"\n\nGotrek smiled sourly. \"I don't see how I could forget it.\"\n\n\"I must send word to the Ice Queen,\" said Ivan. \"The Tzarina must be warned. The armies of Kislev must be mustered.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said Borek. \"But what about you? You cannot remain here. This manor could not resist the massed might of Chaos.\"\n\n\"I will summon my riders and head south to Praag. That will be where our forces will meet. However, I must ask a boon of you\u2026\"\n\nMax Schreiber leaned forward interestedly. \"So must I,\" he said. Ivan looked up and indicated that he should speak first. It was a measure of the respect the Kislevite held for him since he had used his magic on their behalf.\n\n\"I must ask passage south with you on the airship if that is possible. There are those I must inform about these events.\"\n\n\"The Elector Count of Middenheim, perhaps?\" Borek said.\n\n\"Among others. I am sure that in the face of this threat I can prevail upon him to send aid to Kislev. If nothing else the Knights of the White Wolf will respond.\"\n\n\"The Spirit of Grungni is already full almost beyond capacity,\" Borek said. Max tilted his head to show he understood.\n\n\"That is a pity, old friend,\" Ivan said, \"for I too wished to ask the same boon. I want to send a messenger to the Ice Queen and to be sure your craft is faster than the swiftest rider ever could be.\"\n\n\"I am sure we could find space,\" Borek said. \"If need be we can always find space.\"\n\n\"Good \u2014 I wish to send my daughter Ulrika and two bodyguards. Oleg and Standa will go with her.\"\n\nThey all looked at the old boyar. It was plain from the bleak expression on his face that he had a stronger reason for this than merely warning the Ice Queen. It was clear that he wished to send his beloved daughter out of harm's way, at least for a short time. Max was profoundly grateful that the old man cared enough to do this thing.\n\n\"It shall be so,\" Borek said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Grey Seer Thanquol felt dreadful. His head ached. His body felt as if stormvermin had worked it over with clubs \u2014 not that any skaven would dare to do such a thing to him, of course. Worst of all was the sense of failure that gnawed at his bowels. He was not quite sure how they had done it, but he was sure that somehow Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger had contrived to thwart him yet again. Their malefic powers sometimes seemed unlimited. And of course there was always the worthlessness of his underlings to be considered.\n\nNot that the masters of Clan Moulder were likely to accept this. He was sure he had seen at least one of his clawleaders scurry away in the mad aftermath of the battle. Doubtless he would poison the minds of his stupid kinsfolk with lies about Thanquol. It was true that a small army of Clan Moulder troops had been lost in the attempt to seize the airship, but Thanquol was not to blame for the inferior quality of his troops. And it was equally true that he had failed to capture the airship as he had promised. But only the most biased of churls could blame Thanquol for the deviousness of the Slayer and his minions. Of course, he suspected that the Moulder skaven possessed exactly the amount of bias required to make these poorly informed judgements, and it was all too possible that if he were to return to Hell Pit an accident might befall him. There were no limits to the wickedness of his enemies.\n\nA familiar black depression, the consequence of too much warpstone used too suddenly, settled on him. The enmity of Moulder was only one part of the problem that faced him now. Another was how to get back to friendly skaven territory across a hundred leagues of plain. He knew from bitter experience that Kislevite horse archers were deadly marksmen and it would only take one arrow to end even so brilliant a career as his. What was particularly worrying was that his supply of warpstone was depleted and his sorcerous powers were at a low ebb. In many ways the situation was as dire as any he had ever faced in his long and incredibly successful career as a grey seer.\n\nWhat could he do? He knew that there must be some skaven survivors out here on the plain but he was not at all sure that seeking them out was a good idea. They were, after all, the house troops of Clan Moulder and it was conceivable that their misguided minds might hold a grudge against him because of the failure of the plan. Certainly there were many problems here, and even a mind as keen as Thanquol's quailed when he contemplated the difficulties which loomed before him.\n\nA strange smell made his whiskers twitch. It was oddly familiar and yet subtly distorted. He heard something massive moving through the long grass. Something that might conceivably be the size of a rat-ogre. Had Boneripper survived? It did not smell like him. Swiftly Thanquol summoned the remnants of his power. Whatever it was it would not find him defenceless.\n\nSuddenly a monstrous apparition loomed over Grey Seer Thanquol. It was as large as a rat-ogre. It had a horned head, and a large spiked tail. For a brief moment, Thanquol feared he might be facing the Horned Rat itself, come to make him give an account of himself. He felt his musk glands tighten as the thing opened its mouth to speak.\n\n\"Grey Seer Thanquol, it is I, the humblest of your servants, Lurk.\"\n\n\"Lurk! What happened to you?\"\n\n\"It is a long story, mightiest of masters. Perhaps I should tell it to you as we march.\"\n\nLurk's voice had deepened and though his words were respectful, there was a hungry glint in his eye that Thanquol did not like at all.\n\nNot at all." + }, + { + "title": "STORM TOSSED", + "text": "From the rear observation deck of the Spirit of Grungni, Felix watched the mansion fall away behind them. Sadness filled him. Ivan Straghov's house was a place where he had been happy, before he set off for the Chaos Wastes, and now he doubted that he would ever see it again.\n\nAlready the Kislevites were assembling to begin the long ride south. A troop of horsemen had arrived as they debated their plans; they had rounded up mounts that had fled from the skaven attack, and managed to provide horses for most of the survivors. It was agreed that a dozen or so scouts would remain at the mansion for as long as possible to tell the other troops what had happened as they arrived. After that, Ivan and the others figured that any troops abroad when the Chaos horde arrived would soon work out what had happened for themselves and would act accordingly. It was not much of a plan, but it was the best they could do under the circumstances.\n\nFelix turned and looked at Ulrika. Her face showed a strange mixture of emotions. She had not been happy to be dispatched south by airship to inform the Tzarina of their plight, while the others had to ride. She had wanted to share the dangers of her clan's warriors. Felix thought it was possible that if he had not been on the airship, she might not have agreed at all. Certainly he felt that he had helped persuade her to come. So had Max Schreiber.\n\nFelix looked over at the magician. He liked Max but recently he had noticed the strange looks the man was giving him when he was with Ulrika. Was it possible he was jealous? It was easy enough to believe. She was very beautiful and Max had been around the mansion while he had been away in the Chaos Wastes. Who knows what might have happened then? Felix smiled sourly. It sounded like he was feeling more than a little jealous himself.\n\nHe consoled himself with the thought that the worst was behind them, at least for a while. They had managed to escape from the Wastes with their lives intact, and they had survived the skaven ambush. From here it was a straight run south to the capital of Kislev, and then on to Karaz-a-Karak where Borek intended to present the survivors of Karag Dum and some of its treasures to the High King of the Dwarfs. Felix wondered what Gotrek really thought of that.\n\nAs far as Felix knew the Slayer had been banished from the great underground city, never to return. Felix was not sure whether the exile was self-imposed or a penalty for the Slayer's misdeeds. It had never seemed politic to ask. Gotrek insisted on remaining in Kislev and helping against the Chaos hordes. Felix certainly hoped so. Ivan had pointed out that, as a former engineer, he would be more useful helping prepare the defences to resist a siege. They would get off the airship with Ulrika and her bodyguards.\n\nWhatever the reason, Felix was glad. He wanted to stay with Ulrika and he certainly didn't want the Slayer reminding him of the oath he had sworn to follow him and record his doom. There would be time enough for that later, he did not doubt. With that monstrous army heading south, a mighty struggle was in the offing. There would be plenty of opportunity for Gotrek to find his heroic death.\n\nHe reached out and took Ulrika's hand and squeezed her fingers. She turned and smiled at him wanly. It was obvious that her thoughts were with those tiny figures slowly receding into the distance below. She turned and gazed back, like someone trying to memorise a scene and remember people she feared she might never see again.\n\nIn the wan northern daylight, Grey Seer Thanquol studied Lurk closely. He hated to admit it but he was both impressed and intimidated. His lackey looked like he could take on a rat-ogre and win. He was more than twice Thanquol's height and possibly ten times his mass. His claws looked strong as steel and the massive knob of horned bone at the end of his tail looked potent as a mace. Right at this moment, Thanquol rather regretted all the insults he had heaped on Lurk in the past. He was not sure that in his current state of depletion he could summon the magical energies needed to destroy Lurk. Under the circumstances, craftiness and diplomacy, two of Thanquol's greatest gifts, seemed like the most appropriate measures.\n\n\"Lurk! I am glad you have returned. Good-good! Together we must bring news of the failure of Clan Moulder's ill-conceived attack on the human fort to the attention of the Council of Thirteen.\"\n\nLurk looked at him with reddishly glowing and strangely forbidding eyes. When he opened his mouth to speak he revealed huge sharp tusks. Thanquol fought down the urge to squirt the musk of fear.\n\n\"Yes-yes, most majestic of masters,\" Lurk growled in a voice much deeper than the one Thanquol remembered. Thanquol almost let out a sigh of relief. On their long march through the night, Lurk had been strangely surly. At least now this huge warpstone-altered skaven seemed tractable. That was good. He would be able to protect Thanquol from many of the dangers on the route. And who knew? It was certainly possible that studying his mutated form might reveal many secrets, including how to create more of his kind. Dissection revealed many things. However, thought Thanquol, shifting uncomfortably before that unblinking stare, such matters could wait until they had escaped the immediate danger.\n\n\"These open spaces crawl with horse soldiers,\" Thanquol said. \"The traitors of Moulder will also be out in force. We must use intelligence and cunning to escape our enemies and fulfil our mission.\"\n\n\"As you say, most persuasive of potentates.\" Was there a hint of irony in Lurk's voice, Thanquol wondered? Was it possible his lackey was mocking him? Was that a gleam of hunger in his eyes? Thanquol did not like that look at all. Nor did he like the way in which Lurk was sidling closer. It reminded him uncomfortably of a cat stalking its prey. Lurk licked his lips hungrily.\n\nWith vast effort, Thanquol mustered his power. A flickering glow appeared around his paw. Lurk stopped his approach and froze on the spot. He bobbed his head servilely. Thanquol looked at him wondering whether it might not be a good idea to blast him on the spot, and get it over with. Had he possessed his full magical energies he would have done so without hesitation but now he was not sure whether it was a good idea. He did not want to use what little power he had unnecessarily. There were too many threats around him. Lurk watched him warily. He gave the impression of being poised to spring at the slightest provocation. Thanquol had seen that look before in other skaven. He knew it only too well.\n\n\"We will head northwards first. Towards the mountains. Our enemies will not expect that. Then we will circle round the edge of the plain till we come upon an entrance to the Underway.\"\n\n\"A good plan, most benevolent of benefactors.\"\n\n\"Then let us be away. Quick-quick! I will take the leader's place in the rear.\"\n\nLurk did not seem to object. Looking at his broad back, Thanquol continued to wonder whether this was such a good idea. It was a long way to the mountains on foot, and a longer way yet back to the heartlands of skaven civilisation. Would he be better off travelling with Lurk or should he blast the monster in the back right now? As if sensing his thoughts, Lurk cast him a grim look over his shoulder. Thanquol controlled the urge to squirt the musk of fear.\n\nPerhaps it would be best just to wait and see, he thought.\n\nMax Schreiber walked through the airship. It was more difficult than he remembered from his journey to Kislev. Every inch of corridor was filled with packing cases shifted from the hold to make room for the refugees from Karag Dum. Crew members were sleeping on bedrolls in the corridor. It could not be pleasant lying on those riveted cast iron floors. There was very little comfort on the whole ship.\n\nMax was uncomfortable from keeping in a semi-crouch the whole time. The airship had been built for dwarfs which meant that for him the ceilings were far too low. Movement sometimes seemed like an excruciating new form of torture. Of course, most of this trip had turned out to be that.\n\nHe still ached from the after-effects of the battle, and his heart felt heavy with jealousy over Felix and Ulrika. He had, of course, refused when the dwarfs had placed him in the same cabin as the two lovers. It had been tactless of them to offer, but then he was used to that from the members of the Elder Race. For a people who prided themselves on having been civilised when humanity was still wearing skins, they could be remarkably uncouth when it came to the subtleties of relationships. Not like the elves, Max thought. Of course, it would have been tactless for him to point this out. Most dwarfs hated the Eldest Race with a passion Max found incomprehensible.\n\nDon't be so negative, he told himself. Look on the bright side. You helped win a victory over the skaven the night before last, and you saved some lives with your magic. You even healed Gotrek and Snorri of the worst of their wounds. You have done good work here. You should be proud.\n\nHe paused and looked around for a moment. He wondered about the monster the dwarfs claimed to have spotted on the airship during the battle at the village. He did not doubt they had seen something but perhaps it was an illusion or some minor daemon summoned by the skaven seer. The creature was certainly powerful enough to be capable of such magic. Max considered himself very lucky to have survived that particular encounter. Another thing to be grateful for.\n\nIt was amazing, he thought. As an apprentice, secure in his ignorant pride, he had thought that nothing could threaten him once he became a mage. It seemed that most of his career in the arcane arts had consisted of discovering that the world was full of beings more potent than himself.\n\nAnother set of illusions shattered. How many had there been now? Let's see - one of his idle fantasies as a youth had been the thought that one day he would learn spells that could compel a woman to love him. He did indeed know such spells now, as well as half a dozen others that would command obedience in all but the most strong-willed. Of course now he was bound by the most sacred of oaths not to use such spells except in defence of the Empire and humanity. Such were the responsibilities that came with power.\n\nThe world was a more complicated place than he had ever believed as a lad. He knew he would be putting his immortal soul in peril if he ever used such spells now. The road to damnation was paved not with good intentions but with desires gratified by evil means.\n\nStill, there were times when it had crossed his mind that damnation might not be too high a price for the love of a woman like Ulrika. Swiftly he pushed that thought aside. The snares of Chaos are subtle, he thought, and very, very numerous. He was one of those who should know. His secret masters had taught him that. Look on the bright side, he told himself, and stop thinking such dark thoughts.\n\nDespite all his formidable training, he could not.\n\nUlrika wondered what was going on. All of a sudden her life seemed to have changed utterly. She had returned from Middenheim scant weeks ago and now she had fled her home, perhaps forever. It did not seem possible that things could change so swiftly.\n\nA few days ago she had fervently wished for Felix's return and dreaded it. Now it had happened and it had made her life more complicated than she would have thought possible. Of course, she was glad to see him, too glad in many ways. She knew that the only reason she had allowed herself to be persuaded to board the airship and warn the Ice Queen was because he was aboard, and she could not bear the thought of parting with him so soon after they had been reunited.\n\nAnd at the same time, it made her feel guilty and angry. She was a warrior of her people, and warriors did not shirk their duties simply because they were smitten. She wished now she had remained with her father. That would have been the right thing to do, and she knew it. Her place was at his side.\n\nThese complex emotions were infuriating and she knew they were making her withdrawn and sometimes unpleasant. And there were other complications. She had seen the way Max Schreiber looked at her. Men had looked at her that way before. She did not find it unpleasant, but she knew that though she liked Max she did not want more than friendship from him. She hoped she could make him understand that. If not, things might turn nasty. She knew some men got that way when they were rejected. Just to make things worse, Max was a wizard. Who knew what he was capable of? Well, that was a worry for the future. She pushed it to one side, one of those things that might never come to pass, worthless to consider until it did.\n\nThe question right now was the man standing beside her, holding her hand. Now that Felix was back all the other problems had come back to haunt her. He was a landless wanderer and they were going to the court of the Tzarina. He was oath-bound to follow Gotrek and record his doom. And he was different since he had come back from the Wastes. Quieter and grimmer. Perhaps the Wastes could change a man in more subtle ways than mutation.\n\nAnd how much did she really know about him? She told herself that these were things that should not make a difference to her feelings, but she knew in her secret heart that they did.\n\nIn the distance, she watched storm clouds gathering. They looked different from this altitude but no less menacing. There's a storm coming from the north, she thought, from the Chaos Wastes. The thought filled her heart with fear.\n\nSnorri looked northwards at the gathering clouds. Big storm coming, Snorri could tell. Something to do with the size and the blackness of the clouds and the faint flicker of lightning in the distance. Yes. Big storm coming. Not that Snorri cared. Right at this moment, Snorri was drunk. He had consumed more than a bucket of potato vodka and he was feeling a little the worse for it. That was common these days. Snorri knew he was drinking too much. But then again, Snorri told himself, that was not really possible.\n\nSnorri drank to forget. Snorri had become so good at it that he had forgot what he was drinking to forget. Either that or all those blows to the head he had taken during his career as a Slayer had done it. Right now, he should drink more. It would help him to stay forgetful, just in case.\n\nHe knew that whatever it was he was trying to forget was bad. He knew that he had done something that he must atone for, suffered a grief or shame so great that the only thing he could do to expunge it was to seek death in a heroic fashion and thus earn back his good name for himself and his clan. He wondered what it was.\n\nIn the corner of his mind, images flickered. A wife, children, little ones, all dead. Had he killed them? He did not think so. Was he responsible for their deaths? The stab of pain in his chest told him yes, Snorri probably was. He had been drunk then too? Yes, he had.\n\nHe took another swig from his bucket and offered it to Gotrek. Gotrek shook his head. He rubbed his eyepatch with the knuckles of one big fist and kept his gaze fixed on the clouds.\n\nThe storm was definitely getting closer. It was coming from the north to overtake the ship, Snorri could feel it in his bones. The thought occurred to him that it might be sent by the Chaos sorcerers as revenge for what they had done at Karag Dum. He shared the idea with Gotrek but Gotrek just grunted.\n\nSnorri wasn't offended. Even by Slayer standards, Gotrek Gurnisson was grim. Snorri knew he had reason to be. He had once known why Gotrek had shaved his head. He felt sure of it. But too much vodka or too many blows to Snorri's head had knocked the knowledge out again. It was the way, he thought.\n\nSnorri felt bone-deep aches. Amazing how well he had healed, all things considered. That human magician's spell was potent. Still, it could not get rid of all the pain. Snorri had taken a lot of punishment in the past few weeks, been in a lot of fights.\n\nBut that was all right. He liked fights. More even than vodka, or good dwarf beer, the madness of battle helped him stay forgetful. In combat he could lose sight of who he was and what he once might have been. He knew this was something he shared with Gotrek. He took another swig and watched the wall of blackness coming closer. Worst storm he had ever seen, he supposed. Worse even than the one the airship had endured in the Wastes.\n\nA vision of the Spirit of Grungni smashed to the ground by the force of the storm, lying broken and burned out on the ground filled Snorri's mind. He realised he didn't care. He didn't care much about anything anymore. He was a walking corpse now. His life had burned out long ago. At this moment, it did not matter whether the doom he found was a heroic one, as long as it was a doom. Even as he thought this, part of Snorri rebelled. It seemed too much like a betrayal of himself, and of his dead. And still part of him felt that way. He wondered if Gotrek ever felt the same.\n\nSnorri knew it was just another of those things he would never ask. He offered the bucket to Gotrek again. This time the other Slayer took it.\n\nBad storm coming, Snorri thought. Worst Snorri has ever seen.\n\nThe rising wind ruffled Lurk's fur. His stomach growled almost as loudly as a rat-ogre. He felt as if a whole nest of runts were in his belly trying to eat their way out of his stomach. He could not ever recall being this hungry.\n\nOverhead, black clouds boiled. Huge strokes of lightning burst through the darkness giving the scene a hellish flickering illumination. The rain drove into his face, almost blinding him. He had lost the scent of Grey Seer Thanquol, and wondered if the mage were still behind him in the darkness.\n\nThe high grass rippled and flowed like the waters of a great ocean. The blades slashed at him like soft impotent swords. He did not like this. He did not like this at all. He wanted to be anywhere but here. He wanted to be in some safe burrow of solid stone, not under this roiling turbulent ever-changing sky.\n\nSilently he cursed Thanquol. The grey seer was, and ever had been, the source of all the misery in Lurk's life. He wished he had taken the opportunity to spring on him when he had the chance. He was sure Thanquol's magic could not have been all that potent then. The grey seer had looked exhausted, as if the efforts of the previous evening had drained-him of all power. He knew that his new altered form had been more than capable of overwhelming his former master. He would have liked nothing more than to burrow his snout in the grey seer's belly and eat his intestines, preferably while Thanquol lived.\n\nAnd yet, despite his gnawing hunger, he had not done so. He had to face that fact. He was not entirely sure why. Part of it was simple force of habit, part of it was justifiable skaven caution in the face of Thanquol's magic, and part of it was natural skaven cunning. He knew that if he just bided his time a suitable opportunity would arise to exact his revenge with far less risk to his own precious hide.\n\nAfter all, with a skaven as cunning as Thanquol, you could never be sure whether he was really as weak as he was pretending. It was better to be safe than sorry.\n\nOr so he had thought. But now this hideous storm had arisen, and it felt like it would blow away their entire world. Worse, he could sense a strange taint to it, the faint mephitic odour of warpstone. This storm was coming straight from the Wastes. Which no doubt accounted for the odd multi-coloured aspect of the lightning. He turned to ask Thanquol what they should do. .\n\nThe grey seer was just standing there, eyes wide, mouth open, breathing in the storm winds like a skavenslave gulping down fungusberry wine. It was as if this storm had been made for him. Lurk shivered with fear. Perhaps he could put off his revenge a little longer. After all, he had waited long enough. What difference could a few more minutes, or hours, or days, or even weeks make?\n\nIf only he were not so damned hungry. He looked at Thanquol, measuring every ounce of his flesh. Thanquol saw his look and a faint flickering aura of power snaked around his claws. Now was not the right moment for vengeance, Lurk thought. But soon, very soon.\n\nFelix felt the airship shake.\n\n\"What was that?\" Ulrika asked. She didn't sound afraid. She never did but he could feel her body shiver where it lay against his.\n\n\"The wind,\" he said. The Spirit of Grungni suddenly bucked like a ship on a storm-tossed sea. She clutched tight against him. Felix felt his own heart jump into his mouth. This was not a pleasant sensation but he had experienced its like before in the Chaos Wastes. Come to think of it, so had she. There had been a storm on their first flight between Middenheim and Kislev. He reached out to stroke her hair, and touch her warm and naked body.\n\n\"It's nothing to worry about. I've been through worse in the Chaos Wastes.\"\n\nA keening sound echoed down the corridor and through the chambers. The whole ship vibrated. \"Just the metal of the ship. It's under strain,\" he said, trying to remember all the reassuring phrases that Malakai had taught him. He was surprised at how calm he sounded. He only wished he felt that way. The ship shuddered like a live thing. The two lovers held each other in the darkened cabin. Both were waiting for disaster to strike.\n\nMax Schreiber made his way onto the control deck. Things did not look good. He could see nothing through the monstrous black clouds ahead of them save the occasional flicker of a lightning flash. The whole ship shivered. The engines howled like lost souls as they strained to propel the Spirit of Grungni against the enormous currents of air.\n\nOn the bright side, at least Malakai Makaisson was at the controls. Of all the potential pilots of the ship, Max had most faith in him.\n\n\"Tisnae as bad as it looks,\" Makaisson said. As always his thick guttural accent and odd dialect confused Max. Makaisson was not the easiest of dwarfs to understand.\n\n\"I'm glad you are feeling so confident, Herr Makaisson,\" said Max. He glanced around. Aside from the Slayer engineer, every other face on the command deck was a picture of worry. Makaisson played with the earflap of his peculiar leather flying helmet, which had been cut at the top to let his Slayer's crest show through. He adjusted the goggles which sat on top of his head then he looked up at Max and grinned. It was not a reassuring grin. Makaisson did not look sane at the best of times, and at the moment he looked positively crazy.\n\n\"Nithin tae worry aboot! Ah've got the ship turned oot o' the wind. We'll joost rin afore the storm till it runs oot o' force. Nithin tae it.\"\n\nActually, Makaisson's words sounded suspiciously sensible, as they often did if you listened to them closely. Max pictured the airship running before the wind just like a sailing ship could. The storm would just make it fly faster. As long as the gasbag remained untorn they should be safe. lust as he was feeling slightly reassured the Spirit of Grungni leapt upwards like a horse clearing a fence. Max was forced to grab the edge of one of the command seats just to stay upright.\n\n\"A wee bit o' turbulence, man. Dinnae cack yer breeks!\"\n\n\"Is it just me or is the storm dying down?\" Ulrika asked. Felix had been wondering that himself for some time. Hours had passed since the storm had overtaken them, and they had been among the longest hours of Felix's life. The Spirit of Grungni had never felt quite so unsafe. At any moment he had felt like the whole thing might just break apart, and they would all be sent tumbling to their deaths. Somehow the presence of Ulrika had just made the whole thing worse. The prospect of his own death was not one that he particularly enjoyed, but the thought of the girl in his arms dying at the same time, and there being nothing he could do about, was just awful.\n\n\"I think it is,\" he said eventually. He was fairly sure he was telling the truth too. The airship seemed to have slowed a little. The rain no longer beat quite so strongly against the windows. The lightning flashes had become less frequent. Perhaps the worst had indeed passed.\n\nUlrika buried her head on his shoulder. He held her close and offered up a prayer to Sigmar that they would be spared.\n\nMax Schreiber looked at the speed gauge on the control console. The Spirit of Grungni was definitely slowing \u2014 a sign, according to Makaisson, that the tailwind was less strong. Max wasn't entirely sure what the dwarf meant, but he thought he got the general idea. He was duly grateful that the gods had spared them.\n\n\"Ah telt ye, didn't ah?\" said Makaisson, \"but wud yese listen? Naw! Ah sade this airship can tak far worse than this but ye ah kent better, didn't ye? Aye, well who was right, that's what ah ask ye, noo?\"\n\n\"You were, Herr Makaisson, no question,\" Max said, and he was grateful that the dwarf had been. He was even grateful that the Slayer had known exactly what to do to save his ship. Perhaps his reputation for causing disasters was not entirely deserved. Ahead of them something huge loomed out of the storm dark gloom.\n\n\"What's that?\" Max asked.\n\n\"It's a bloody mountain, ya eedjeet. Help me turn this damn wheel.\"\n\nDesperately Max added his weight to Makaisson's as they tried to change course. Slowly, too slowly, the Spirit of Grungni began to turn.\n\nSnorri woke up. His head was sore and he had to admit his hangover was bad. The whole floor seemed to be tilting and that normally was an effect he usually only got when he was very drunk. Then it dawned on him that maybe it wasn't his hangover. He was on an airship, after all. Maybe the whole thing was tilting? And what was that scraping noise? It sounded like the whole cupola was running along rock. Had they landed? If so, why were they bumping along in this atrocious manner? And why were all those voices in the distance screaming? He looked over at Gotrek. The other Slayer was peering grimly out into the gloom.\n\n\"I knew that idiot Makaisson was going to get us all killed,\" Gotrek said.\n\nThrough the rapidly parting storm clouds Snorri could see mountain peaks all around them. The grinding sound continued. He knew they were scraping rock. Under the circumstances there was only one thing to do. He took another long swig of vodka and waited for the end to come.\n\nMax Schreiber felt the whole hull of the cupola grind against the mountainside. He prayed feverishly that it would stay intact. On the bright side at least the gasbag was still alright. Just a few more moments and they would be clear. If only the airship would hold together a bit longer. He offered up a prayer to all the gods for their aid." + }, + { + "title": "AN AERIAL ENCOUNTER", + "text": "The grinding of the hull suddenly ceased. Max felt a momentary surge of relief. The airship was aloft again. They were off the side of the mountain. Makaisson shouted into the speaking tube, \"Ah want reports from the ship. What's the damage? Hoo are the enjuns? Ony holes in the cupola or gasbag? An' ah want ye tae jump tae it, ya bamsticks!\"\n\nHe pulled control levers and the engine noise died. The airship was still moving, propelled by the wind, but its speed had fallen away to almost nothing. It seemed that the storm had passed them by. Max looked at the Slayer engineer. \"What's the problem?\"\n\n\"Whaur tae start is the problem! Ah think the enjuns might be a wee bit damaged fae bein' dragged alang the mountainside. Joost a theory mind, but ye can see hoo it wood be possible. An' then there's the wee fact that ah hae nae idea whaur we are.\"\n\n\"We're in the World's Edge Mountains, obviously,\" Max said. \"That was the only range in a hundred leagues and we were blown south. I don't see Chaos Wastes below us.\"\n\n\"Gae the big man a prize!\" jeered Malakai. \"Ah ken we're in the World's Edge Mountains. Ah'm a dwarf, am't ah? Ah ken a mountain range when ah see yin. Ah joost don't know whaur exactly we are in it.\"\n\nMax looked at Malakai. The dwarf was upset. Malakai Makaisson was the best-tempered Slayer Max had ever met, and such a display of anger was quite unusual for him. Max was starting to wonder if they were in more trouble than he had imagined.\n\n\"I don't see how that's such a big problem.\"\n\n\"Then let me explain. If we've took serious damage then we're no in ony great shape. Daen repairs in the middle oh naewhaur, way nae proper spares is no gannae be easy. So we might be in for a bit o' a wak hame. Can ye see the problem noo?\"\n\nMax suddenly understood why Malakai Makaisson was so upset. He was distraught by the prospect of abandoning his beloved airship. Max could understand that. He was not exactly thrilled by the idea himself. The World's Edge Mountains were huge and filled with marauding tribes of orcs and other monstrous creatures, as well as by countless savage beasts.\n\n\"I think there might be another problem,\" said one of the apprentice engineers tugging at Makaisson's shoulder.\n\n\"Great! An' joost whit exactly might that be?\"\n\n\"That!\" said the other dwarf pointing.\n\nMax glanced in the direction of the dwarf's pointing finger. His eyes went wide. His jaw dropped open. His heartbeat sounded like a drum in his ear. \"Gods preserve us,\" he breathed.\n\n\"Ah dinnae think they can!\" said Makaisson. \"No fae that!\"\n\n\"Well, we're still alive,\" said Felix, rising into a crouch and drawing on his britches.\n\n\"I'm glad of that,\" said Ulrika. Felix smiled, suddenly looking years younger.\n\n\"Me too.\" He pulled on his boots and shirt and strapped on his sword. \"I'll just go and see what's happening.\"\n\nThe sound of boots hammering on the metal floor of the corridor was suddenly loud in his ear.\n\n\"Manling, get your sword!\" he heard Gotrek shout, as a heavy fist banged on the door.\n\n\"Snorri thinks that's a good idea too,\" he heard Snorri add.\n\n\"What in Sigmar's name is going on?\" he asked.\n\n\"You'll see for yourself in a minute.\"\n\nMax Schreiber looked through the window of the command deck in astonishment. He could not quite believe what he was seeing but that did not stop the sight of it from filling him with terror.\n\nIt was a dragon, and not just any dragon, but quite possibly the largest one he had ever heard of. Not that he was an expert on this particular subject. This was the first and, he quite sincerely hoped, the last he would ever see.\n\nAt first, when he saw it in the distance, he had thought it was just a particularly large bird. But it flew oddly for a bird, and as it came closer, he began to get some sense of the scale of the thing compared to its surroundings. It was far too big to be any bird he had ever heard of, including the war eagles of the elves which were large enough to carry a full grown warrior on their back.\n\nAs it came closer he began to see that the shape was wrong for a bird too. It was too long, and the wings were structured like those of a bat, rather than a bird.\n\nAs it came closer still, he noted the long-lizard like body, the enormous snake-like tail, the serpentine neck supporting the massive head. He saw the colours were like no bird that had ever flown save perhaps in the Chaos Wastes. The general colouration of the scaly leathery skin was red but there were glowing highlights in it that blazed all the colours of the rainbow. A massive shield of bone surrounded the monstrous head. A double row of razor-sharp spines ran down the long back.\n\nOn the command deck pandemonium reigned. Malakai Makaisson shouted orders into the speaking trumpet while all the time throwing the control levers forward to the maximum extent. Engines roared like daemons as the airship picked up speed.\n\n\"Gunners tae yer stations!\" bellowed Makaisson. \"Ah want every gyrocopter oot there, and ah want it noo!\"\n\nMax wondered what good they would do. He felt paralysed with fear as the dragon came effortlessly closer. He had never seen such a large living thing. From nose to tail it must have been as long as the gasbag of the airship. It looked like it could lift a bull in each of its claws. This was something to freeze the heart of even a Slayer.\n\nAll around him he could hear the sound of running feet as dwarfs raced to obey Makaisson's orders. The ship echoed with panicked exclamations and oaths as the dwarfs began to realise what they were facing. Given the fact that these were the survivors of Karag Dum, long inured to horror, it was a tribute to quite how fearsome the dragon actually was that it could stir terror in their hearts.\n\nVarek clambered into the cockpit of the gyrocopter. A dragon, he thought, elated as well as terrified. He had seen a dragon, one of the creatures of legend. One of the eldest of beasts. It was another wonder he had witnessed on this trip, another thing to note down in his book. If he survived, he thought, as the engine roared to life, and the gyrocopter made ready for take-off.\n\nMax felt rooted to the spot. If someone had told him at that moment he must cast a spell or die, he knew he would be dead. His mind was blank. He could not work magic if his life depended on it. The dragon opened its mouth and roared. The sound echoed like thunder through the mountains. Small flames lapped the sword-sized teeth as it did so. As it came ever closer, Max realised one cause of the horror. What he had thought were small jewels inset in its skin and glittering in the sun were in fact tiny shards of warpstone. He shuddered to think what exposure to that dreaded substance must be doing to the dragon. Mutation and madness were its lot at the very least. Perhaps that accounted for the creature's size, and its odd appearance.\n\nAt this range he could see long tendrils of flesh surrounded the mouth and long stalk-like antennae protruded from its brows just above the eyes. Here and there massive pustules blistered the scaly hide. The thing had definitely felt the touch of Chaos. Was it possible it had been brought here by the storm, blown all the way from the Wastes by the force of those daemonic winds? He did not know. He licked his dry lips. He did not want to find out.\n\nThe dragon was almost alongside them now, flying parallel with the airship like a whale sculling alongside a cargo vessel. It had yet to attack but Max did not doubt that it was hostile. It was toying with them like a cat might toy with a mouse.\n\nThis close he could make out the details of its enormous head. Its eyes glowed yellow, the pupils blazing red suns. A malign intelligence glittered in their depths. A cloud of poisonous-looking gas billowed from its nostrils and mouth, where occasionally small flames lapped forth.\n\nGods, the thing was big enough to swallow a horse in one gulp. Those claws could shred the gasbag like a man might tear a piece of parchment. If it breathed there was every chance that the gasbag might catch fire and who knew what might happen then. Max shuddered when he considered that the engines of the Spirit of Grungni were powered by black stuff. It was one of the most inflammable substances known to alchemical science. There were just far too many things that could go wrong here.\n\nHe heard more engines roar as gyrocopter after gyrocopter dropped from the hangar decks of the airship. After the battle at the manor house there were only three left. As far as Max was concerned they would probably cause as much trouble to the dragon as gnats would to a wolf. He could not see any way they could survive this encounter.\n\nEven as he watched the first of the gyrocopters curved into view, heading directly at the dragon. A roaring as of a thousand muskets firing at once told him that the organ gun turrets on top of the gasbags and the bottom of the cupola had opened fire. A line of explosions in the dragon's flesh showed where their shots had struck home.\n\nThe dragon roared its wrath. Its long snaky neck curved to bring the open jaws directly into line with the airship. Max fought down the urge to shriek as a cloud of flames and warpstone gas flashed towards them.\n\nThe wind whipped against Varek's face. He was filled with exultation and a sense of speed. He whooped wildly as the gyrocopter arced around and up towards the dragon. He felt as if he was being pressed into his seat by a giant fist. He had never felt so alive. He thought he understood one of the secrets of the Slayers now, why they constantly sought out death. This was existence on the very edge, and it was sweet. Ahead of him the huge monster loomed ever larger. Fear clutched at Varek's bowels as he felt its burning gaze fall on him. He fought it down, and made ready to attack.\n\nFelix heard the sound of the turrets opening fire above them. What was it? What could be attacking them here so far above the ground? It had to be something flying, and something that could move fast to overhaul them. At any moment he expected the firing to stop. He had once seen a demonstration of an organ gun being fired by the Imperial military during the Emperor's day parade back in Altdorf. The thing had ripped apart a small wooden fortification. Nothing could possibly resist the concentrated fire of half a dozen of them, could it?\n\nGotrek and Snorri had already clambered up the ladder and through the hatch of the gondola. Felix pulled himself up, more swiftly than any dwarf. For a brief moment he was on top of the gondola itself, and he caught sight of what was being fired at. He had a flickering impression of a long reptilian shape, large as the airship, winged like a bat, then the acrid smoke of the organ guns billowed into his line of sight and cut off his view. By all the gods, could it be a dragon, he wondered? Had he really just seen what he thought he had? He most sincerely hoped not.\n\nSnorri and Gotrek continued on up the ladder. It was made of flexible metal hawsers and ran all the way through the gasbag to the top of the airship. It was designed to give access to the turrets up there, and to let the crew into the gasbag to effect repairs.\n\nIt was cold up here, and the sting of the wind brought tears to Felix's eyes until he pulled himself inside the gasbag. Now all around he could see hundreds of smaller gasbags. He knew Makaisson had designed them so that even if the outer skin of the balloon was pierced not all the lift gas could escape at once. According to the dwarf, over half of these nacelles would have to be burst before the Spirit of Grungni would begin to lose altitude.\n\nSuddenly he felt the temperature rise dramatically. He became aware that flames were flickering below him and there was a terrible stench that reminded him of sewage and warpstone. What was happening?\n\n\"Dragonbreath!\" he heard Gotrek roar.\n\nI am going to die, Felix thought.\n\nMax almost screamed as the cloud of burning gas enveloped the airship. He pictured the gasbag catching fire and the whole vessel being blown apart in an apocalyptic blast of heat and flame. For one brief moment, he knew that he was dead. He closed his eyes, took a terrified breath and waited for the inevitable burst of agony that would tell him his life was over. A heartbeat passed, then another and he was still alive. He felt the airship tilt, and then knew it was a false reprieve. He reached out to steady himself instinctively, shocked to find he was still alive.\n\nHe opened his eyes, looked around and saw Makaisson still furiously tugging at the controls. The airship was heading upwards, climbing steeply. He looked around to see the dragon below them, spreading its wings, beginning a long lazy spiral upwards. Around it the three gyrocopters flitted like mosquitoes.\n\n\"We're still alive,\" Max said.\n\n\"Weel spotted!\" said Makaisson. \"Cannae pit much past you, big man, can we?\"\n\n\"How? Why aren't we burned to death? Why didn't the gasbag catch fire?\"\n\n\"Taks mare than a brief scorching to heat metal, as ye would ken if ye ever worked iron, so the cupola didnae melt. We were a wee bit luckier wie the gasbag. Had the explodin' problem wi' ma last airship, so this time ah treated the gasbag an' the nacelles wi' a flameproof alchemical mix. Joost as well, really.\"\n\n\"Makaisson, I don't care what others say about you, I think you're a genius.\"\n\n\"Thanks, ah think,\" Makaisson said. He made a small adjustment to the controls. \"By the way, whit exactly dae others say aboot me? No that ah care, ye ken.\"\n\nFelix emerged on the top of the airship. A metal dorsal spine ran along the top of the gasbag. From it, nets hung over the gasbag itself so that the brave and the foolhardy could climb over. Along the spine were organ gun turrets. A small handrail, set at the right height for dwarfs, ran along the spine. Felix grabbed it and hauled himself into the open. The wind tugged at his hair, and brought tears to his eyes. It roared in his ears when it wasn't drowned out by the thunder of the organ guns. He could see Gotrek and Snorri shout and wave their fists at the dragon but he couldn't hear a word they were saying. Probably just as well, really; it most likely wasn't anything sensible.\n\nHe shook his head, knowing that he was deliberately trying to distract himself from the awesome sight below. It was indeed a dragon, rising through the clouds. Beneath it he could see the streams and valleys of what he assumed must be the World's Edge Mountains. Gyrocopters buzzed around the mighty beast.\n\nFor a moment, he thought how few men had ever been privileged to witness such a sight, but it dawned on him that right now he would cheerfully swap the privilege to be on the ground and as far away from that huge creature as was humanly possible.\n\nHe could see that the gyrocopters were using their steamjets on the dragon, but ineffectually. A creature which burned internally with the fires of Chaos was unlikely to be hurt by a scalding jet of superheated water. Maybe if they tried blasting it directly down the creature's throat it might extinguish the fire but he doubted it. The bombs being lobbed by the pilots were proving just as ineffectual at the moment. Against such a swiftly moving target, it was difficult to judge distances and set the fuse time correctly. Even as Felix watched he saw bombs explode harmlessly in the air around the dragon. Then with a swift move the dragon turned and breathed on the nearest gyrocopter. It exploded as suddenly and explosively as one of the bombs but on a much more massive scale. Felix offered up a prayer for the soul of the pilot tumbling to the earth in a blazing pyre.\n\nThe dragon flexed its wings and began to gain altitude, moving swiftly in pursuit of the Spirit of Grungni. There was a lull in the firing as the gunners waited for it to come within range again.\n\n\"It's mine,\" he heard Gotrek say.\n\n\"It's Snorri's,\" Snorri replied.\n\n\"I think there's enough to go around,\" Felix said, reaching for the hilt of his sword. \"No need to fight over\u2026 Ow!\"\n\nHe drew his hand away from the hilt of his blade as if it had been scorched. It hadn't been but when he touched the dragon-headed hilt of the blade he had felt a strange tingling, and a surge of energy the like of which he had never felt before. It was not an unpleasant sensation merely an unexpected one. He reached out to grasp the sword again, half thinking he had imagined the whole thing, but no sooner had he done so than the sensation returned, redoubled.\n\nAn odd warmth spread through his hand, up his arm and through his body. He felt good. Any lingering fear he might have had of the dragon vanished. He felt exultation, power and strength pour into him. He found that he was quite looking forward to the dragon getting within striking distance.\n\nThe part of him that was an objective observer wondered if he had gone insane. There was nothing good whatsoever about a dragon getting within a hundred leagues of him, nor of this fragile gasbag, and the cupola suspended below it. He knew that some external power must be at work here, some sorcery. Was it possible that Max Schreiber had cast a spell without him knowing it? If so, why had he not noticed any change in Gotrek or Snorri? It made no sense for the magician to cast a spell on him and not the two Slayers, who were a good deal tougher than he.\n\nThe dragon swelled in Felix's field of vision, and a sense of expectation filled him. It was definitely coming from the sword, he felt. Holding the blade before him he could see the runes blazing along its length with a strength and a brightness he had never seen before. It was as if they had been inscribed in fire.\n\nHe wondered about this. He had never known much about the history of this blade, the one sought by the Templar Aldred all those months ago in the ruins of Karak Eight Peaks. He had always known it was magical. It kept its edge like no blade he had ever known, and had never taken a nick in all his many battles. He had thought that was the limit of the enchantment on it.\n\nLooking at it now, and examining the way it was behaving in the presence of that great dragon below them, it seemed that perhaps the hilt of the sword was more than mere decoration. Perhaps it was expressive of the purpose of the sword. From nowhere but the blade itself, it seemed, came the knowledge he was right.\n\nHe joined the Slayers in shouting abuse at the dragon, surprised at his own temerity. Normally, he would never in a million years have dared draw the attention of so powerful a beast to himself in such a way, but it seemed the influence of the sword was affecting him greatly. He could tell by the astonished looks Gotrek and Snorri were giving him that they were just as surprised as he was.\n\nWings beating the air furiously, the dragon rose to the attack. The gyrocopters rose in its wake, though the part of Felix that was still capable of sane thought wondered what they could do to so baleful a creature.\n\nThrough the porthole of the cabin, Ulrika watched the battle below with a growing sense of helplessness. There was nothing she could do to affect the outcome of this struggle. She did not have the skills to man any of the weapons or fly the ship. She doubted that she could nick the fearsome beast even if she could get within striking distance of it. And to make matters worse, they were thousands of strides above the surface of the earth. There was no way to hide or flee even if she wanted to.\n\nNo. She refused to sit here and be helpless. There must be something she could do. There was only one thing she could think of, so she did it. She snatched up the short powerful horn bow she used for horseback archery, strapped the quiver of arrows over her shoulder and set off to find a place she could shoot from.\n\nMax Schreiber was glad to feel the terror pass. It seemed that the overwhelming power of the dragon to inspire fear in him had been dispelled by something. He was not sure quite what, but somewhere close by he felt a surge of magical energy, pulsing like a beacon. Whatever it was, it was very strong. Was it possible there was another sorcerer on the airship? It did not seem likely. Dwarfs were not known for their proficiency in the magical arts, and he knew that neither Felix nor Ulrika nor either of her two bodyguards were mages. It must be something else.\n\nWhatever it was, he was grateful. His mind was clear, and he felt capable of drawing on the winds of magic once more. He reached deep down into the well of his soul and drew upon his power. In his mind he began to review his most potent spells. Perhaps there was something he could do to affect the outcome of the battle after all. Perhaps.\n\nLooking out of the windows of the command deck at the awesome form of the dragon, he doubted it.\n\nFelix watched the dragon come ever closer. He thought he could hear its mighty wing-beats even above the roar of the organ guns. He was impressed by the sheer size of the thing. He did not think he had ever been this close to so large a living creature. It made part of him feel insignificant, puny, despicable.\n\nAnd another part of him thirsted for it to come within striking distance, to reach a place where he could engage it in combat. Felix considered this, and realised that whatever it was that wanted the battle, it wasn't him, it was an external influence. It was something coming from his sword that was making him brandish his blade and shout challenges. While he was glad for the relief from fear, he also resented it. He was the master of his actions, not some ancient semi-sentient weapon. He forced himself to shut his mouth. By an effort of will he brought his sword down and held it in the guard position.\n\nIt was difficult but he managed it. The blade fought against him, writhing in his hand like a serpent. In a way he felt like he was drunk, not quite responsible for his actions. It took all his willpower just to keep quiet and hold still but he did so, and the more he did so, the more he felt the strange urges subside. Either he was his own master again or the sword was conserving its energies for the greater struggle.\n\n\"Come taste axeblade,\" Gotrek bellowed.\n\n\"And have a bit of Snorri's hammer for afters,\" shouted Snorri. Felix watched silently. The creature was almost upon them. He was close enough to smell the Chaos poison on its breath.\n\nThe whole hull echoed as if struck by a giant hammer. The force of the impact almost forced Ulrika from the ladder. She felt the cupola surge and swing, and she knew that one of those giant claws must have impacted on the airship. Her heart leapt into her mouth. A vivid picture of the gondola becoming separated from the gasbag and plunging earthwards to its doom filled her mind. Quickly she pushed it away, and resumed her climb. If she was going to die, she wanted to die fighting.\n\nMax rolled along the floor of the command deck, tossed about like a child's plaything by the force of the impact. He felt the cupola sway as the dragon's claws smashed into the side of the airship. The whole interior of the vessel vibrated like a drum as the huge reptile's wings beat against it in a flurry of blows. In his mind's eye, he saw the dragon clutching at the airship like a tiger on the neck of its prey. It was not a reassuring image.\n\nHe looked up and saw Makaisson wrestling with the controls. The dwarf cursed loudly, \"Bloody overgrown lizard! Tryin' to eat us alive, so it is. Bloody stupid critter if ye ask me. It cannae eat solid steel. Can it? Well, can it?\"\n\nIn his heart, Max was not so sure. He did know that the dragon did not need to be able to consume them to destroy them. A few more blows like that would pull the gondola loose and then they would all be dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Varek was really excited. He had thought that nothing could top his descent into the bowels of Karag Dum with the Slayers and Felix but this was close to proving him wrong. Aerial combat with a dragon, he thought. What a chapter this would be in his book. He lifted the portable organ gun Makaisson had given him. He decided it was time to get a few good shots at the dragon.\n\nFelix felt the deck sway beneath his feet at the impact. The dragon's claws had smashed into the side of the airship. The sound of shrieking metal filled his ears as the hull gave way under the force of the blow. The dragon's long neck snaked up. It took a bite from the gasbag, lifting away a huge patch of the outer skin. Nacelles exploded in its mouth. Felix shuddered, wondering how much of this punishment the ship could take. A sweep of the enormous tail curled right round the gondola and came down on one of the organ guns, flattening it and the gunner. The wreckage of the turret went plummeting into space, tumbling to earth far far below.\n\nThings were not looking good. The whole hull creaked when the dragon rested its weight on it. The dragon extended its long scaly neck and suddenly its head was looming over Felix.\n\nGotrek and Snorri rushed forward. Snorri's axe lashed out and bounced from the dragon's hide. His hammer had no discernible effect. Gotrek's axe on the other hand bit home, cleaving the armoured skin and drawing blood. The dragon bellowed with rage. Its enormous head swung round to regard the Slayer balefully. Felix saw the malign intelligence in the creature's eyes and knew that the dragon planned to revenge itself on the tiny creature that had hurt it.\n\nIt opened its mouth. The fires of hell burned within its jaws. Felix thought the creature looked almost as if it were smiling. Some strange impulse compelled him to throw himself between Gotrek and the dragon just as it breathed. He fought back the desire to scream as a wall of flame hurtled towards him.\n\nMax chanted the words of the spell, drawing more and more magical energy to him. He knew he was only going to get one chance at this and he wanted to make the best use of it. Even if the dragon destroyed them, it gave him slight satisfaction to think that he would hurt it.\n\nAs the words tumbled from his mouth, he felt the winds of magic swirl about him. Responding to the arcane properties of the mantra, golden magic was drawn to him. His gestures shaped it, moulded it, the way a potter moulds clay. Beneath his hands and the force of his mind and words, a huge bolt of energy took shape. When the surge of energy was almost too great to hold, he made the final gesture and sent it spiralling towards the dragon.\n\nA massive beam of gold light smashed outwards, passing harmlessly through the crystal of the window, before impacting on the dragon's flesh and boring inwards towards its heart.\n\nUlrika pulled herself out of the hatchway on the top of the gasbag. She was just in time to see Felix jump between Gotrek and the dragon as it breathed. She knew in that moment that he was going to die.\n\n\"No!\" she shouted. At the same time, responding without thought, her body was already bringing the bow up to the firing position, nocking the arrow, and bringing it to bear on the dragon's eye.\n\nVarek pulled back on the control stick with one hand, and blasted away with the portable organ gun with the other. It had very little effect. He could see scales being blasted out of the dragon's hide but it was like using buckshot on a curtain wall. It might be uncomfortable for the dragon, but he was not going to do any real harm. Perhaps his book was going to end here, he thought. Perhaps this was where the story stopped.\n\nFelix could not quite believe what happened next. As the flame flashed down at him, he brought the sword up to parry. It was a pointless futile gesture, made more from force of habit than from any hope of being able to save himself. And something happened. The runes on the blade blazed brighter. The blaze of heat and pain did not come. Some sorcerous force protected him.\n\nHe felt enormous pressure on him, as if he was pushing against the current of a river. For a moment, he felt as if he was going to be blown right off the top of the gasbag but he braced himself and held his ground. Slowly he forced himself forward, moving to strike the dragon. The blade pulsed brighter in anticipation of the blow.\n\nUlrika unleashed the arrow. It flew straight and true towards the dragon's eye, but at the last second the creature moved and the arrow buried itself in one of the strange tendrils descending from the monster's brow. The creature's roar of hatred was deafening.\n\nThe dragon Skjalandir was frustrated. This was not going as he had planned. This strange vessel was putting up a fight. There was a sorcerer on board directing spells at him. That dwarf's axe was as potent a weapon as any he had seen in his two thousand years of existence, and as for the sword that puny human was carrying, it almost worried him. It glittered with an ancient malice directed at all of his kind.\n\nRage and hatred filled him. He was easily angered now. He knew it. He had changed since those two identical albino sorcerers had woken him from his long sleep. He feared he knew why too. The one with the golden staff had driven warpstone charms into his flesh. The one with the ebony staff had wound him round with charms he had been too drowsy to resist. There was something of the memory of their arcane ritual that filled him with fear as well as anger. He remembered the name of a dark god, the Changer, ringing through his lair. He remembered the way the mages had spurned his great hoard. He knew he had been trapped in some sort of spell of their making, and he knew his mind was clouded and there was nothing he could do about it.\n\nThe axe bit home again, burying itself in the tendons of his neck. It was like an ant bite to Skjalandir. Painful, irritating, but hardly fatal. The same applied to the spell attacking his flanks, and the stings of those tiny guns. Really there was nothing these little creatures could do that would actually harm him. It was time to end this farce.\n\nSkjalandir considered his options. He could breathe on the gasbag structure above the metal gondola. When he had slashed it, he had detected the thousands of smaller nacelles inside. His draconic mind was quite clever enough to grasp that these were what kept the ship aloft. If they could be made to catch fire\u2026\n\nWould the spell the sword had woven to protect its wielder against his breath protect the inanimate structure? Skjalandir doubted it. He would teach these dwarf interlopers to invade his realm, befoul his hunting grounds with their machines. He would kill them as he had killed all the other dwarfs who had come against him. He would destroy this vessel the way he had destroyed the towns surrounding his lair and there was nothing they could do to stop him.\n\nOr perhaps he should continue to strike at the metal gondola. If he separated it from the gasbag all of those within would plummet to their doom. Then he could pick off the creatures on the gasbag at his leisure. Something within his warpstone-tormented mind preferred the latter option. It was more cruel.\n\nHe was aware of the other gyrocopters moving closer. Let them. Their steam breath could not harm him, and their pathetic explosive eggs would barely scratch his armour. That's if they dared use their weapons so close to the airship. They were much more likely to harm their own vessel than to hurt Skjalandir.\n\nMax felt the surge of magical energy above him. A protective spell, he guessed, and not cast by a mortal wizard. All wizards had their own magical signature, as distinctive as a voice. It could be recognised by a fellow worker of the mystic arts unless disguised. A skilled practitioner, like Max, could even tell the race and usually the sex of a caster from it most of the time, but for this one he had no clue. A device or a rune perhaps, and yet there was the hint of some sort of alien intelligence behind it.\n\nNot that he was likely to find out now, Max thought. He had realised moments after he had unleashed his spell that he was fooling himself if he thought he was really going to harm the dragon. He could hurt it, cause it pain, but he could no more kill it than a bee sting could kill an elephant. The creature was too large and powerful and there was too much magic woven into its very nature for Max to be able to really harm it.\n\nAnother thing more powerful than I, he thought wryly. I seem to be meeting a lot of them lately.\n\nHis mind flickered through the routines of the escape spell, but he doubted it would do much good. It probably couldn't carry him all the way to the ground and even if it could he still would be travelling with all his current velocity in the direction he was currently moving. If he got to earth he would be travelling at the same speed and in the same direction as the Spirit of Grungni, and would most likely smash into a rock or a tree or some other obstacle.\n\nAnd he was not sure he wanted to leave. Ulrika was on this ship and he did not want to abandon her. While she still lived, he wasn't going anywhere.\n\nFelix looked up at the dragon. He felt as if it were taunting him. It was flying just out of striking distance and ignoring the challenges roared by Gotrek and Snorri. He knew that it wanted them to know it could destroy them at will. It was toying with them. It appeared that everything he had ever read about the malice and cruelty of dragons was true.\n\nHe felt a brief surge of despair. After all this, was it going to end this way? It hardly seemed fair that after all the many adventures he had survived he was going to meet his doom during a chance encounter in the World's Edge Mountains. Then again, who knew when the day of their death would come? Everyone's luck ran out eventually, and recently he had begun to suspect that he had had more than his fair share. He was only sorry that Ulrika was here -and that he was not with her at this final moment.\n\nHe glanced over at Gotrek to see how the Slayer was behaving now that his last moments were upon him. Fittingly enough, Felix decided. The dwarf was waving his axe and bellowing threats at the dragon. Snorri was egging him on.\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, Felix saw something looping upwards to gain height above the dragon and then come crashing down like a swooping hawk.\n\nVarek grasped the controls of his gyrocopter and gnawed his beard in frustration. He had done his best to slay the dragon but it ignored his organ gun and he could not hit it with his bombs. Now it was about to destroy the Spirit of Grungni.\n\nWorse than that, aboard the airship was the lost treasure of Karag Dum and the Hammer of Firebeard, one of the legendary weapons of his people. If the Spirit of Grungni was destroyed the hammer might be lost once more, perhaps this time forever. Varek was proud of his part in this expedition, proud of being part of the airship's crew, and prouder yet he had taken part in the expedition that had returned this ancient rune-weapon to his people. If they failed now, he knew that he would have to shave his head and become a Slayer to atone for his failure. He knew he could not live with the knowledge that they had come so far, suffered so much, and yet had failed at the last. He knew it would eat away at him for the rest of his life.\n\nAnd a heartbeat after that the thought struck him, he knew the answer to his problem. If he became a Slayer he would need to seek his doom in combat against the mightiest of monsters. Before him was one of the mightiest. He would never find another so great, of that he was sure. He had a weapon that might kill it too, although at the cost of his life. Still, it was a mighty deed. A doom that would cause his name to live forever in the annals of his people and bring eternal glory to his clan and his ancestors. With a single action he could become a Dragon Slayer, and save the lives of all his fellows. Not wanting to give himself a chance to reconsider his decision, he acted immediately. He wrenched the control stick of his gyrocopter, jammed the throttle to full and aimed straight for the dragon before him.\n\nThe rotor blades hit first biting, great chunks out of the dragon's flesh, then the nose rotors chopped in too. The sudden smashing impact ripped the engine apart, and a massive explosion smashed through Varek's body.\n\nHis last regret before darkness took him was that he would never live to complete his book.\n\nFelix watched the gyrocopter flash down on the dragon. At the last moment he got a glimpse of a familiar face. Varek, he thought, don't do it! Even if his thought could have influenced Varek's decision it was too late. The gyrocopter smashed into the dragon. Its rotor blades carved out great chunks of dragon flesh. The force of the impact smashed the dragon down and away from the airship. Moments later there was a massive explosion as the gyrocopter and its cargo of explosives ignited. A fireball enveloped the dragon as it fell. Felix could see no way anything could survive. He was wrong.\n\nThe dragon tumbled headlong towards the ground's hungry embrace. Felix thought that any second it was going to smash into the ground but it did not. At the last moment, its wings snapped open, and its headlong fall stopped. As Felix watched it began to move upwards once more. At first he feared it was unharmed and coming for them again, but then to his relief he saw that its flight was wobbly and that it was heading off into the distance.\n\nGrief tugged at his heart. He could not believe Varek was gone. The young dwarf had been a companion on one of his most dangerous adventures and suddenly he was just not there anymore. Death's claw had reached out and taken him. It was unjust, he decided, looking over at Gotrek and Snorri to see how the Slayers were taking it.\n\nGotrek wore a look of sorrow and respect and something else that Felix could not quite recognise. \"A good death,\" he said slowly and painfully.\n\n\"A great death,\" said Snorri. \"He will be remembered.\"\n\n\"He will be avenged,\" Gotrek said and Felix knew he meant it.\n\nAgony coursing through his ancient body, Skjalandir dropped away from the airship. In all his long life he had never felt such pain. It was no satisfaction that the creature who had inflicted the wound had died in the moment he struck. This was not good. Best return to his lair and heal. There would be time enough to seek revenge on these accursed creatures." + }, + { + "title": "A HERO'S WELCOME", + "text": "Felix stood on the command deck of the Spirit of Grungni. He could tell just by studying the gauges that things were bad. There was no response from about half the dials and the engines. Even from here, just the two remaining motors sounded terrible.\n\nMakaisson limped through the door. Felix had never seen the engineer look so angry.\n\n\"Bad?\" he asked.\n\n\"Ah'll say it bloody is. We're lucky to still be up here. The suspension cables haddin' the gondola tae the gasbag wir near frayed through in three places. Ah hae the lads makin' some repairs but its joost jury-rig stuff. Matter o' time before it ah goes horribly wrang.\"\n\n\"Doesn't sound good,\" Felix said. This seemed to goad Makaisson to further fury.\n\n\"Gasbag's ripped! Twa o' the injuns arnae workin' right. Hulls broken in aboot twenty places! We've lost a turret and ah but yin on the gyros. Bloody hell. Ah tell ye. If it's the last thing ah dae, ah'm gannae make that dragon pay for this. It'll rue the day it ever attacked ma airship.\"\n\nFelix winced. He was sure that Makaisson meant what he said, but he could not see how he was going to fulfil his vow. They had hit the dragon with everything they had, and it had still flown away to its lair. Felix was not even sure they had driven it off. He had a feeling that it had let them go because it suited it. They had about as much chance of killing the dragon as Felix had of becoming emperor, he reckoned.\n\nOld Borek limped onto the command deck. He looked more ancient than ever. His stick moved feebly, like that of a blind man, fumbling to find his way. His long beard dragged along the floor. He seemed to be at the end of his strength. The loss of his nephew had hit him hard.\n\n\"I'm sorry about Varek,\" Felix said. \"He was a fine dwarf.\"\n\nBorek looked up at him and smiled sadly.\n\n\"He was, Felix Jaeger. He was. I should never have let him come on this expedition. I should never have let him leave the Lonely Tower but he wanted to come so badly\u2026\"\n\nFelix remembered Varek's courage in the depths of Karag Dum. His habit of jotting everything down in his great book. His sometimes annoying cheerfulness. His embarrassing hero worship of himself and Gotrek. His short sightedness. His light, slightly pedantic voice. It was difficult to believe that he would never see or hear the young dwarf again. He was surprised. It had been a long time since a death had affected him this badly.\n\n\"He was a guid laddie,\" Makaisson said. \"Ah probably shouldnae hae let him tak me intae teachin' him to fly the gyro.\"\n\n\"If you hadn't, my friend, I suspect none of us would be here right now.\"\n\n\"Aye \u2014 yer right. The laddie wis a hero.\"\n\n\"I am the last of my line now,\" Borek said. Felix saw two drops of water running down the old dwarf's cheeks. Were they really tears? He looked away to spare the scholar embarrassment.\n\n\"Well dinnae you worry! We'll get the basturd that killed him. It's joost gone right to the heid of my very ane list o' grudges.\"\n\nBorek just looked away and shook his head in sorrow.\n\nMax Schreiber stood on the rear observation deck, looking out through the cracked crystal of the window. It must have been shattered some time during the struggle with the dragon, but he was not sure how or when. The whole airship looked dreadful. Internal fixtures had come loose. The cargo crates and treasure chests had been tossed around during the fight, damaging themselves and anything they had hit. Two of the crew had been crushed to death. Twelve others had needed healing by Max's magic.\n\nHe could tell that the airship was badly damaged just from the sick drone of the engines and the lack of headway they were making. Compared to their previous progress this was a snail's pace. He wondered if they would ever get where they needed to go. It seemed that this flight had been dogged by one accident after the other. It was almost as if they were cursed. Perhaps Makaisson's reputation for disaster was not so ill-deserved after all.\n\nHe watched the mountain valleys drift by below them. They were following the path of a stream that descended towards the lowlands. He guessed that the torrent of waterfalls would be beautiful if you were down there, but he knew he would never find out. He would probably never see these places again. Enjoy the view, he told himself. Make the most of this while you're here. You will never come this way again. Somehow the cheery teachings of his mentors in the Golden Brotherhood seemed just a little precious in the aftermath of the battle with the dragon. And yet part of him knew that the words were true. He should enjoy the moment and he should be glad. The fight had shown him just how fragile life could be, and just how quickly it could end. Look at poor Varek and the dozen or so other casualties of the fight.\n\nThe engines stuttered for a moment, then fell silent. For an instant he felt the Spirit of Grungni drift like a rudderless boat on a river. Please, Sigmar, he prayed, aid us. Don't let this happen now. He feared in his heart that the powerless airship might drift into a mountain side or that more of the gas nacelles would burst and they might drop to earth. In the valley below he saw a tiny group of figures moving along at speed. He was not sure but he thought he caught a hint of green.\n\n\"Orcs,\" he heard Ulrika say from close by. He looked over, surprised.\n\n\"Your eyes are better than mine,\" he said.\n\n\"I've spent my life looking along the shaft of an arrow, not reading books by candlelight,\" she said. \"And I long ago learned to recognise orcs at a great distance. Anyone who lives on the plains of Kislev dies swiftly if they do not.\"\n\n\"Are the greenskins so fearsome then?\" he asked. He already knew the answer, he just wanted to hear her voice.\n\n\"Bad as Chaos warriors in their own way. Even more savage and they don't know when they're dead. I've seen an orc with two arrows through its heart and half its head cleaved away chop down half a dozen warriors before it died.\"\n\n\"So have I,\" Gotrek Gumisson said. Max looked over at the Slayer. His massive form filled the hatchway leading into the observation deck. He moved surprisingly quietly for one so massive. Max had not heard him arrive either. \"But a good axe will kill them all in the end.\"\n\nMax was relieved to hear the engines start up again. They began to move forward once more.\n\n\"Wherever we're going I hope we get there soon,\" he said.\n\n\"We'll have to wait till night and fix our position by the stars,\" Gotrek said. \"Then we'll have a better idea.\"\n\nMax wondered if the airship would even make it to nightfall. He had seen some of the ripped hawser cables. It was a miracle they were still here.\n\n\"You're very quiet,\" Ulrika said. Felix nodded and drew his cloak tighter about him. It was cold up atop the gasbag and the wind's bite was cruel. They stood on the dorsal spine of the airship watching the two moons rise over the mountains. It was a sight of strange and intense beauty.\n\n\"I was thinking about Varek. I never really knew him and now he's gone.\"\n\n\"Death comes to everyone,\" she said. Felix looked at her. He wondered if he'd ever get used to the strong streak of fatalism in her. He supposed being brought up on the plains of North Kislev you got used to death early. He had not quite been so hardened before he set foot on the adventurer's path. Being brought up the son of a rich merchant in Altdorf, the capital of the Empire, had left him quite sheltered. The only death he had really been aware of was that of his mother, when he was nine years old. He had been too young to really understand it.\n\n\"I was wondering what he would have done differently today if he had got up knowing this was his last day in the world. To tell the truth, I was wondering what I would have done under the circumstances.\"\n\n\"Have you come to any conclusions?\"\n\n\"I might have told you that I loved you.\" Felix was surprised to hear himself say the words. He knew he had wanted to say them for a while but had been afraid to. He wasn't sure why. She was silent for a long time. He wondered if she had heard him.\n\n\"I might have told you the same thing,\" she said eventually. He felt a strange kick in his stomach when she said the words. He turned and looked away into the distance. He felt as close to her at that moment as he ever had to anybody.\n\n\"Might?\" he asked.\n\nShe smiled too and nodded.\n\n\"Might.\"\n\nThey moved a little apart but their hands drifted together and their fingers interlocked. Overhead the stars glittered like specks of ice. The Spirit of Grungni ploughed on through the night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Max looked through the spyglass at the stars. \"You're right,\" He said. \"That's the polar star, and that is the Fang of the Wolf.\"\n\nMakaisson was already making a notation on his chart. He moved the callipers from the point that indicated their position to a red dot. \"Then the nearest place we can seek repairs is Slayer Keep,\" he said.\n\n\"Slayer Keep?\" Max enquired.\n\n\"Karak Kadrin. The city of the Slayer King. Tis a grim wee place.\"\n\n\"With a name like that I wasn't expecting something from a Detlef Sierck comedy.\"\n\n\"Will dae joost as weel as onywhaur else, so it will.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will, Malakai. You're the expert.\"\n\n\"Aye that ah am.\"\n\nMakaisson bellowed orders into the speaking tube. Slowly, like a dying whale, the Spirit of Grungni responded, taking a new line through the mountains towards the city of the Slayer King.\n\nFelix and Ulrika stood on the command deck of the Spirit of Grungni. Ahead of them, dour and foreboding in the clear light of a mountain morning, lay Slayer Keep. It was a massive fortress carved from the very rock of the mountain peak. Its buildings had not so much been built as carved from the bare rock. Only the outer walls differed. They were built from massive chunks of lichen-encrusted stone. The stonework looked old as the mountains.\n\nKadrin Peak itself was not the highest of the local mountains by any means, but it stood apart from all its surroundings, dominating a massive valley between two chains of higher, grander mountains. A river ran below it. Borek had told Felix that once a forest had filled the valley, but that it had long ago been chopped down to feed the furnaces of Slayer Keep. Below the city were some of the deepest, darkest and most dangerous mines in all the dwarf realms. There were seams of coal and iron down there that had been worked since before the foundation of the Empire. They provided the raw materials for Kadrin steel, famous through the dwarf realms and the lands of men for making the finest of axe blades. Clouds of dark polluted smoke hung over the city.\n\nFelix did not think he had ever seen a more forbidding place. It was a grim fortress of crudely cut stone. Knowing the pride that dwarfs took in their masonry, Felix could only guess that the crudeness of the architecture was a statement of some sort. Karak Kadrin spoke of squat primitive power. It was a castle designed to be defended. A place meant to endure siege. An outpost in a place of infinite danger. He did not like the look of it particularly.\n\nAlready he could see warriors gathering on the walls. Various war engines were being brought to bear upon them. Ballistae, catapults and other things the purpose of which he could only guess were all being swivelled towards them. Even though Borek had insisted on draping rune banners from below the Spirit of Grungni, the occupants of Slayer Keep were treating them as a potential threat. Felix could see the sense in that. Had the airship appeared over any city of the Empire it would have caused similar consternation, even if it was flying the colours of Karl Franz himself.\n\nAs Felix watched, the last gyrocopter whisked past the airship and sped towards the city. It was a machine that would be recognised by any dwarf, and it carried a message for Ungrimm Ironfist, the Slayer King himself. Makaisson threw the engines of the Spirit of Grungni into reverse and they hovered just out of ballista range waiting for permission to land.\n\n\"A grim place,\" Felix said to Ulrika. She nodded agreement to him. They had been strangely shy of each other since their conversation last night. He could not speak for her, but he was relatively new to all of this. He had felt no strong emotional attachment to anyone since the death of Kirsten at Fort von Diehl.\n\n\"As well it might be, Felix Jaeger,\" Borek said from his chair. He looked up at Felix with rheumy old eyes, from which all the spark of triumph had vanished. \"If you knew its history, you would understand more. Slayer Keep has endured more sieges than any other dwarfhold, and it is the home of the Cult of Slayers, and the Shrine of Grimnir, who is the most bloodthirsty of all our Ancestor Gods.\"\n\n\"You say Grimnir is bloodthirsty.\" Ulrika asked. \"Does he accept living sacrifices then?\"\n\n\"Only the lives of his Slayers. He takes their death in payment for their sins. And their hair.\"\n\nBorek must have noticed the startled look pass across Felix's face, for he added, \"Most Slayers take their vow before the great altar of Grimnir down there, that is where they shave their heads, then they burn their hair in the great furnace. Outside is the street of skin artists, where they have their first tattoos inked into their flesh.\"\n\n\"Did Gotrek take his vow there?\" Ulrika asked. Felix tilted his head. The question had crossed his mind too.\n\n\"I don't believe so. To my knowledge he has never set foot in this city before, though I do not know all of his deeds.\"\n\n\"Then is he really a Slayer?\" asked Ulrika. Borek smiled.\n\n\"It does not matter where a dwarf takes the oath and shaves his head. He is a Slayer when it is done. Many choose to take the oath at Grimnir's shrine for the sake of form. They have their names carved on the great pillar in the temple and that way all will know of their passing from life.\"\n\n\"But they're not yet dead,\" Ulrika said.\n\n\"Not yet. But to family and friends, to clan and hearth, a dwarf is dead the moment he takes the oath. It may be that Gotrek chose you as a rememberer, Felix Jaeger, because he had not yet had his name carved on the pillar of woe.\"\n\n\"I don't follow you,\" said Felix.\n\n\"No one would know of his deed had he fallen in a far place with no dwarfs to witness it. A rememberer would bring word of his doom to us, and see his name carved on the pillar.\"\n\n\"That is not what he asked me to do.\"\n\nBorek smiled sourly. \"The son of Gurni was never conventional even before he became a Slayer. Once he greatly craved renown. I think in a way he still does.\"\n\nFelix was about to ask more when he was interrupted by a dull roaring noise from the distance.\n\n\"What is that?\" he asked. \"Are we being attacked?\"\n\nThe sour smile widened on Borek's face. \"I would guess that the Slayer King has received word of our quest's success. That is cheering you hear.\"\n\nAnd indeed it was, thought Felix, as the battered airship half-drifted over the dwarf city. Looking down all he could see was a seething ocean of dwarf faces, looking up. He could hear roaring and chanting. Drums beat, mighty horns sounded. Banners and flags were draped from every window of the city. Felix wondered where they found space to house all those dwarfs. The fortress city did not look large enough to be home to all of them. Then he remembered that like the great ice mountains floating in the Sea of Claws, most of a dwarfhold was hidden from sight, leaving only their smallest portion visible on the surface.\n\nBelow them he saw an enormous structure, squat and massive, with a massive sculpture of two crossed axes inset in its roof. Strange runes were set on the stonework that reminded Felix of those he had seen blazing on Gotrek's axe. He guessed they held some mystical significance for dwarfs.\n\nHe looked at Ulrika and smiled. It was the first time in his life he could ever remember being welcomed as a hero anywhere.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol looked at Lurk. Lurk glared back at the magician with loathing in his eyes. Thanquol's magic had brought down a grazing elk. Lurk had consumed most of it before Thanquol had even buried his snout in the flesh. He was not best pleased.\n\nGranted, he needed far less meat than his mutated henchman, and he could not have eaten one hundredth of what Lurk had anyway, but that was not the point. It was the disrespect that galled him. He was a grey seer. Lurk was a lowly warrior even if he was now a huge and powerful mutant. He should have waited till after Thanquol ate his fill before beginning this disgusting orgy of consumption, and he should have asked Thanquol's leave to eat. He was, after all, a mere lackey.\n\nBriefly Thanquol considered pointing this out. Very briefly. Lurk was now far more physically powerful than Thanquol. The seer's full magical power had yet to come back after the battle, and he had only the smallest piece of warpstone left to augment his energies. He wanted to save it for an emergency.\n\nNo, he decided. It was merely prudent skaven caution to avoid a confrontation with Lurk at this moment. He knew he was physically no match for the great brute. But then again, he consoled himself, what did that matter? As a feeble and skinny runt he had used his gigantic intellect to exact vengeance on skaven far larger and stronger than he. The same thing would happen here eventually, of that he was certain. Also, the thought had crossed his mind that the more Lurk ate now, the less likely he would be tempted to kill and eat Thanquol later. The grey seer had seen some of the hungry glances his minion had been shooting at him. They were in no sense reassuring.\n\n\"Where are we, most knowledgeable of navigators?\" Lurk asked. Thanquol wondered if he detected just a hint of irony in Lurk's tone. He dismissed the thought instantly. Lurk was far too stupid to mock his master.\n\n\"We are coming ever nearer to our destination,\" Thanquol replied with his best oracular vagueness.\n\n\"And where exactly is that, most sagacious of seers?\"\n\n\"Cease this relentless badgering, Lurk. If it was in your best interests to know our whereabouts, reveal them to you I would. Let me worry about such matters. You just continue to eat!\"\n\nThere, thought Thanquol, that showed Lurk. And it gave him some time to think, which was good. For, if the truth be told, Thanquol had no idea where they were. In the storm they had wandered aimlessly. The driving rain had obscured everything more than a few tail lengths from view. He guessed that they were on course, for the mountains were still ahead of them. Once there it should simply mean following the path southwards until they came upon a gateway to the Underways. If worst came to worst, Thanquol knew he could always use some of his power to cast a divination spell. Come to think of it, it might be worth telling Lurk that. It might prevent the massive dolt from braining Thanquol while he slept.\n\nThanquol considered sneaking off while Lurk rested, and making his own way back. Two things prevented it. He suspected that he might be safer with the mutant here on the plains. The Kislevites would doubtless attack the larger of them first on the mistaken assumption that it was the most dangerous. The second reason was that Thanquol suspected Lurk might well be able to track him down. His senses were as keen as any skaven Thanquol had ever known. And in that case sneaking off would only leave Thanquol with the onerous task of explaining his business. For Lurk in his new impudent state might take exception to such behaviour on the grey seer's part. Prudent skaven caution argued for staying with Lurk at least for the moment.\n\nOnce this was over, though, Thanquol swore, things would be different. He would exact a vengeance on Lurk that would be spoken of in terrified whispers by future generations. That would teach him to heap such indignities on the head of a grey seer.\n\nAll except the skeleton crew of the Spirit of Grungni were ushered towards the palace of the Slayer King. An honour guard of warriors clashed their axes upon their shields. Hargrim and the other survivors of Karag Dum had looked stunned at the sheer scale of their welcome. They had once believed themselves the only dwarfs left in the world. Now they knew differently. Felix felt proud to be there. The cheers of the crowds still rang in his ears. He could recall dwarf children running into the street to touch the hem of his cloak so that they could tell their descendants they had done so. Until they had pushed their way through the massed cheering throng, Felix had no idea of the scale of their deed or what it really meant to the dwarf people.\n\nHis association with Gotrek, characterised as it was mostly by outlawry and failure, had in no way prepared him for this. It was like being a king. Perhaps this is how Emperor Karl Franz felt every time he rode though Altdorf, Felix thought, and turned and beamed at Ulrika. She smiled up at him proudly. It seemed she too had no idea of what the Spirit of Grungni had accomplished until this moment.\n\nLooking at his companions, Felix felt happier than he had in a long time. The acclaim even seemed to have raised the spirits of Borek and Makaisson, and since Varek's death these two had looked as thoroughly miserable as any dwarfs Felix had ever seen, which was saying something.\n\nOnly Gotrek looked glum. His expression was as sour as that of a man sucking on a lemon. He glared at the crowd from under his bristling brows with his one good eye, and paused only to occasionally spit at an onlooker who came too close to touching his axe.\n\n\"Why so gloomy?\" Felix asked. Gotrek shot him a glare that would have daunted anybody else. \"I want to know for the telling of your tale,\" Felix added.\n\n\"Tis of no consequence,\" Gotrek said. \"And it would not do to mention it in my death poem.\"\n\n\"Tell me anyway.\"\n\nGotrek sucked his few remaining teeth, spat on the ground, and worked his thumb into the empty socket below his eyepatch. Felix thought he was not going to reply, but then a shame-faced look passed across the Slayer's face. \"I was thinking that if I had died slaying the daemon, it would have been the mightiest doom ever achieved by a Slayer. A laughable, empty vanity, manling, but it crossed my mind.\"\n\nFelix did not know what to say so he kept quiet. Ulrika looked at Gotrek, astonished, as if she had never considered the dwarf capable of such an admission. \"Well, I am glad you're still alive, and that you brought Felix back.\"\n\nTo Felix's astonishment the Slayer laughed. He looked as if he was going to clap Ulrika on the back but caught himself, and forced himself to look grim once more. He glared at the ground, as if embarrassed. At that moment, Felix caught some indication of how much this approbation really meant to the Slayer, how much it actually meant to him to be cheered by his people, and just how well he was hiding it.\n\nI'm happy for him, thought Felix; he has little enough in his life to give him joy.\n\nThe Slayer King was a morose-looking dwarf, squat and powerful like all his race, his hair cut in the distinctive crested fashion favoured by the Cult of Grimnir. His features were massive and his nose was long and beaky. His eyes glittered with a maniacal intelligence. His voice when he spoke was resonant and powerful. \"Greetings, Borek Forkbeard. Greetings, Gotrek, son of Gurni. Greetings Snorri Nosebiter. Greetings Malakai, son of Makai.\"\n\nFelix feared the Slayer King was going to greet them all by name, and his fears proved well-founded. He did so.\n\n\"You have performed a deed of great renown, all of you. Not in all the long years since I ascended my father's throne have I heard of such heroism. The return of Firebeard's hammer is a blessing beyond measure to the kingdom of the dwarfs, and all the kin of Grungni have cause to thank you this day. If there is any boon I can grant you, you have but to name it and\u2014\"\n\n\"Aye, there is,\" said Makaisson.\n\nThe Slayer King paused and eyed Makaisson balefully. He was just getting into his oratorical stride and obviously had not anticipated any interruptions just yet. Felix wondered if all dwarf kings were so long-winded.\n\n\"You have but to tell me, and if it's in my power\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah want a workshop and the service of twenty blacksmiths, and ah want to ken everythin' you can fin oot aboot a big beast o' a dragon that dwells aboot fifty leagues northwest o' here\u2026\"\n\nA gasp passed around the room. \"That would be Skjalandir, the ancient firedrake. Why?\" enquired the Slayer King, obviously shocked to brevity.\n\n\"Ah'm gannae kill the basturd,\" Makaisson said. \"Stone deid!\"\n\n\"And I'm going to help him,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"Snorri Nosebiter will too,\" said Snorri. A huge roar of applause passed through the chamber.\n\n\"Truly you are stalwart examples to Slayers the world over,\" said the Slayer King. \"You have no sooner returned from one mighty deed than you show willing to start another\u2026\"\n\nListening to this madness, it struck Felix that there was a larger issue here which should be addressed. While the Slayers were excited about the prospect of facing the dragon once more, a massive Chaos army was on the move. In the great scheme of things he was sure it posed a larger threat to the world than a single dragon ever would. He thought he saw an opportunity here to make a difference, and to help Ulrika's people and his own.\n\n\"There is another thing worth mentioning,\" Felix spoke up. All eyes in the chamber turned to him. He felt suddenly self-conscious. He was well aware that not all the dwarfs looking at him were pleased that a human was daring to speak in the throne room of their king.\n\n\"And what is that, Felix Jaeger?\" asked the Slayer King.\n\n\"A huge Chaos army approaches from the north.\"\n\n\"Does it pursue you?\" the Slayer King asked. Felix paused for a moment to think about this. It was something he had never considered. Had their deeds in Karag Dum been the start of all this, the pebble that caused the avalanche? He doubted it. The whole idea was too far fetched.\n\n\"No. I do not think so.\"\n\n\"Then why is it a problem? I can see that if\u2014\"\n\n\"Because soon it will enter Kislev, and if it is not stopped there, it will thrust onwards into the lands of dwarfs and men.\"\n\n\"Surely that is a bridge that will be crossed when we come to it?\"\n\nFelix could see that this was going to be the old, old story. The forces of Darkness were someone else's problem. Men and dwarfs would not unite their forces until after it was too late. The enemy would be dealt with only once it became an immediate threat. In the meantime others could fight and die facing it. Felix realised he was being unfair but he felt a little angry. He had learned enough about dwarfs not to let his anger show. They became unbearably stubborn in any form of conflict.\n\n\"I suppose all the glory of facing it will belong to the people of Kislev and their Imperial allies then,\" he said calmly. A quiet came over the room, and he knew he had their full undivided attention. \"I mentioned it only because this dwarfhold is known as Slayer Keep, and when the Chaos force arrives there will be many mighty monsters to slay and dreadful foes to face.\"\n\nA murmur went around the room. Felix knew that his words would be passed around the city swiftly. Even if the king offered no aid, he felt sure that many Slayers would go to Kislev in the hope of achieving a mighty death. To make his point absolutely clearly, he added,. \"It would be a great and memorable doom to fall in such a battle. After all, who does not remember those heroes who fell in defence of Praag during the last great war against Chaos?\"\n\nUngrimm Ironfist's reply surprised Felix. \"That was but a short time ago as dwarfs reckon such things, Felix Jaeger, but your point is well taken. I will think upon what you have said.\"\n\nOf course, Felix thought, dwarfs live longer than men, and their records stretch back further. To them two centuries was not so long ago. Old Borek there had actually been alive during the last great Chaos incursion. Borek's rheumy eyes caught Felix's glance and seemed to be aware of what he was thinking. The old dwarf leaned forward on his staff and spoke.\n\n\"Felix Jaeger speaks to good purpose, your majesty. I can indeed recall the last war with Chaos and it was a dreadful thing. If another such conflict is in the offing we had best prepare now, make new alliances and stand by the old ones. For those of us who have but recently been in the Wastes have seen this foe at first hand and know how terrible it is.\"\n\nThe Slayer King nodded. Borek continued to speak. \"It may be that the Hammer of Firebeard was returned to us at this time by the will of the Ancestor Gods to aid us in the coming battle. Perhaps all of this is part of a greater design than we can comprehend.\"\n\n\"I will seek guidance at the Temple of Grimnir,\" said the Slayer King. \"It may well be that what you say is true.\"\n\nFelix felt grateful to the old dwarf for his wisdom and understanding.\n\n\"That's aw very weil,\" Makaisson said. \"Ah still want that dragon deid. Ah would like to use your engineering shops and your forges. Ah think ah hae an idea o' hoo tae dae it.\"\n\n\"Whatever you require shall be provided, Malakai Makaisson, and my own personal engineers shall be put at your service.\"\n\nMakaisson did not look quite so happy at this, Felix thought. He guessed that the prospect of sharing his new designs with the king's engineers did not thrill him. Like many a dwarf engineer, Makaisson preferred to keep his secrets, Felix guessed. On the other hand, he could not turn down the king's offer with good grace and still expect aid. Makaisson seemed to have come to the same conclusion.\n\n\"Aye, weel, that'll dae fine.\"\n\nFelix and Ulrika inspected their chamber. It was spartan in the style he had come to expect at Karak Kadrin, but at least the bed and other furnishings were built on a human scale. It was obvious this place was designed for human emissaries and equally obvious that it had not been used in some time. The air smelled a little musty. Instead of blankets a mass of furs covered the bed.\n\n\"I thought that was never going to end,\" Ulrika said. \"Dwarfs can be very long-winded when they want to be.\"\n\nFelix agreed. \"True. Still this was an important thing for them. In some ways I suppose it would be as if one of the Runefangs had been lost and returned to the Empire. Probably more so. Firebeard's hammer appears to have religious significance to them.\"\n\n\"Everything seems to,\" Ulrika said. There was an undertone of antagonism to her words. She seemed to be wanting to disagree with him, and he with her. They had been this way ever since their talk that night on the Spirit of Grungni. Felix guessed they were both nervous about what the future held for them. He reached out and stroked her cheek. She caught his hand and turned it palm up to kiss it.\n\n\"What is going to happen to us, Felix?\" she asked suddenly.\n\nFelix looked at her. He was wondering that himself. All through this long day there had been a strange tension between them, an undertone of anger that he did not quite understand. What was there to be so nervous about? They had survived the trip here, lived through an encounter with a dragon, and the near destruction of the airship. Why were they behaving so now?\n\nHe looked down at her beautiful face. She had never seemed so lovely. He searched for an answer to her question within himself. Perhaps it was the very fact that they were safe that was causing them this stress. Now, at least for the moment, there were no external threats to distract them, nothing to keep them from the question that was now being asked. What was to become of them?\n\nTheir lives were so uncertain. A massive Chaos army approached from the north. Perhaps it was the harbinger of the end of the world. Somewhere far to the north her father and his riders might even now be facing the oncoming horde. Gotrek, Malakai and Snorri Nosebiter seemed determined to go and face the dragon. Ulrika had been charged with a mission to the Ice Queen. She almost certainly would have no home to go back to. And what could he offer her?\n\nHe was not rich. He had been disowned by his family and then rejected their offer of reconciliation. He was merely a landless wanderer bound to record the Slayer's doom. Worse than that, he was starting to suspect that it was his own doom too. He and Gotrek had travelled so far and survived so much that their destinies seemed intertwined. He could almost believe that the Slayer was destined to perform some world-shaking deed and it was his duty to witness it.\n\nHe realised that the silence had stretched for many heartbeats and he still had not answered her, that he had no answer to give. \"I do not know,\" he said softly, \"and I wish I did.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" she said. \"So do I.\"\n\nShe leaned forward and kissed him, and they fell entwined onto the bed.\n\nMax Schreiber stalked the streets of Karak Kadrin, knowing that he had found what he was looking for. Around him the buildings were higher, the doorways taller. In the narrow alleyways, he could hear human voices mingling with the deeper tones of the dwarfs. Men and women of the Empire looked at him from the open fronts of shops. They sat among their goods. Some looked at him speculatively, seeing him for what he was. Others shouted invitations to him to come in and study their wares. Max smiled. Even in these remote mountains, in this citadel of the Elder Race, there was a small human quarter. Men and dwarfs were bound by many ancient ties of faith and alliance, but none were more ancient than the bonds of trade. He had known that even here, in this distant highland city, he would find merchants, and with them a way of communicating with his order and his allies. He reached inside his robes and found the letter he had written and closed with his own rune. He smiled, feeling the magic he had woven into it. No one but a member of his order would be able to open the letter without the script vanishing like mist in the morning sun.\n\nJust in case, though, he had written the message in code which he hoped was readable only to one of his fellows. In the letter he had put all he knew of the Spirit of Grungni's journey and the oncoming Chaos army. He mentioned the increased skaven activity along the border and he described in detail his encounter with the grey seer and the spells that it had unleashed. In this way, he thought, even if something happened to him, those who came after would be better prepared to deal with the ratman threat. In a way it was a testament to his life as well as a report to his superiors in the order of the Golden Hammer. He knew his report was timely. It had been a long time since any member of the ancient society had ventured as far north as Max had, and even knowing what he did about the Powers of Chaos, he had been shocked by what he had seen and heard. The arm of Chaos had grown long, and Kislev itself was threatened. And Kislev was the bulwark of the Empire against the incursions of Chaos. If it fell, then the hordes of Darkness could drive deep into the lands of men. And he did not doubt that many traitors would rise up to aid them, and the monsters and mutants of the woods would emerge and\u2026\n\nMax knew only too well how frail the Empire was, and how easily it might fall into darkness. It was what his order had been formed to guard against. He knew that he must send a warning. He hoped to deliver it himself in person, but the future was never certain, and who knew what might happen to him? This letter was a safeguard against ill-chance. Even if he were to die, he hoped his warning and his knowledge would find its way into the right hands.\n\nHe paused in front of a tavern, bearing the sign of the Emperor's Griffon. He knew that he needed to find traders returning to the lands of men, preferably some who were heading all the way to Middenheim. This was a place he had been told he might find some. He took a deep breath and entered the beery warmth of the tavern's interior.\n\nAs he entered the place fell silent. He knew he had been recognised as one of the men who had arrived on the airship. He glanced around and smiled. Immediately someone offered to buy him a drink. He smiled his acceptance and prepared himself to answer a thousand questions.\n\nHopefully, after that, he would find someone to deliver his message.\n\nFelix looked out of the chamber window. It was small and circular, and covered with thick well-made glass. Through it, he could see a fine view of the mountains opposite. Behind him, he heard Ulrika stir on the bed.\n\n\"I must be leaving soon,\" she said. Felix nodded, wondering what business she had here in the Slayer King's palace.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"The court of the Ice Queen.\" He continued to gaze at the mountain opposite, noticing the crown of clouds around its peak. Suddenly the meaning of her words sank in, and he swung around to look at her.\n\n\"Right now?\" he asked, his heart sinking.\n\n\"Now is as good a time as any. I have a message to deliver to my queen.\"\n\n\"You can't,\" Felix said. Her posture stiffened. Her face became a controlled mask.\n\n\"What do you mean by that? Who are you to tell me what I can or cannot do?\"\n\n\"I am not trying to tell you what to do.\" Felix knew that she was right. He had meant to tell her she could not go, he did not want her to, but at the same time he also knew he had no power over her. He searched for a way to retrieve the situation. \"I was just saying you don't know the way.\"\n\n\"I dare say I can find out. Someone here must know the way back to human lands.\" She sounded unreasonably angry. Once again, Felix suspected she was trying to pick a fight. \"The king will know for sure, and there must be libraries with maps. Perhaps he can arrange a guide.\"\n\n\"Why not wait until the Spirit of Grungni is repaired. It will surely get you there much quicker than your own two feet. And a lot more safely.\"\n\n\"In the way it got us here safely you mean?\"\n\n\"Yes. No. I mean, once it's repaired it can cross these mountains a hundred times as swiftly as a man or woman on foot.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but how long will that take? And who says I must go afoot? Surely there must be some horses in this city.\"\n\n\"Dwarfs are not famous for their cavalry,\" he told her.\n\n\"There's no need to be sarcastic.\"\n\n\"I am not being sarcastic. They don't use horses much save to draw carts, and as pit ponies.\"\n\n\"There are human traders here.\"\n\n\"We are in the mountains. They most likely use mules, if anything.\"\n\n\"You have an answer for everything, don't you?\"\n\nWhere did this anger come from, Felix wondered? Why were they both so prickly? He was confused. This was not like the stories he had read, the plays he had seen. There were emotions here lurking below the surface, like pike in a pond. Emotions that did not seem logically connected with their words or with their relationship, and which he knew were somehow part of it. How could he be attracted to this woman, care for her, and still be so annoyed by her attitude? How could she feel the same way about him? Somewhere he felt there was a gap between his image of love and the reality of it, and it was not something he had been prepared for by books and poems.\n\n\"No,\" he said eventually, \"I don't. I just don't want anything bad to happen to you.\"\n\nHe hoped his expression of concern might pacify her a little but it did not. \"Something bad has already happened,\" she said. \"It's happening to the entire world.\"\n\nFelix could not fault her reasoning there. He felt the same way. He reached out to pull her close, but she backed away. Unreasoningly annoyed, he turned and walked away himself. The door made a satisfying slamming noise behind him, but already he felt weak, and foolish and guilty.\n\nMax poured another goblet of wine for his newfound companions. If they had noticed that he had slowed his own drinking they did not seem to care. Boris Blackshield and his brother, Hef, were hard drinking men, and weren't too picky about who paid the tab. After all, as Boris was quick to point out, with the Manflayer loose in the mountains, and the dragon burning the vales, who knew whether you would be alive tomorrow? He seemed proud of the fact that he and his brother blew all of their pay as caravan guards as soon as they hit town, and would leave again with nothing in their purses save their fire-making flints. After all, it just meant that any orc that killed them wouldn't make a profit on the transaction. Max didn't really care. Their caravan master had already retired to his chamber but before he did so he had agreed to deliver Max's message to a certain address in the Ulrikstrasse in Middenheim, on the understanding that he would receive several gold coins for his trouble. Seeing the glint in the merchant's eye, Max did not doubt it would be delivered. The Ulrikstrasse was only two streets away from the market to which the merchant was bound, and two gold pieces was a hefty reward for a short step. Max knew he most likely should have left after concluding the bargain, but when he had heard men discussing the road to the dwarf city he had decided to stay. After all, he might have to walk home, if the Spirit of Grungni could not be repaired, and it did no harm to find out a bit about one's route. Unfortunately, what he heard was more than a little discouraging.\n\n\"Tell me about this Manflayer again,\" he said to Hef.\n\n\"You don't want to know.\"\n\n\"Humour me, and assume I do.\"\n\n\"Big orc chieftain, he is, and a bad one. Likes to skin his enemies alive and make his tent from their cured flesh. They say he's assembling an army of greenskins in the mountains, and intends to drive the dwarfs out of their cities.\"\n\n\"That doesn't seem very likely. This is the strongest fortress I have ever seen\u2026\"\n\n\"Except Middenheim,\" Boris said drunkenly.\n\n\"Except Middenheim,\" Max agreed gently. \"Surely no mere orc warlord could take it.\"\n\n\"You can never tell with orcs,\" said Hef. \"They're sneaky and clever savages and they say this one has a shaman behind him, a shaman with powerful magic.\"\n\nMax felt a prickling of professional interest. \"I'd like to hear about this shaman.\"\n\n\"Don't know much,\" Hef said. \"Just heard tales from the survivors of the caravans they attacked.\"\n\n\"Not that there's many of them,\" said Boris. \"And all of them was fast runners. Who takes the word of yellow-bellies?\"\n\n\"Just tell me what you heard,\" Max said persuasively and poured more wine.\n\n\"They say he speaks with the old orc gods,\" said Boris.\n\n\"And that the gods listen,\" added Hef.\n\n\"The gods listen to everyone who prays to them,\" said Max. \"I don't imagine that orc gods are much different from ours.\"\n\n\"The difference is that the orc gods answer this shaman's prayers. They say he can tumble cliffs with a howl and smash the walls of forts with a wave of his hand.\"\n\n\"Maybe he'll do it to the walls of this city,\" said Hef.\n\nMax doubted it. The dwarfs had worked runes into their walls that were as potent as any defensive spell known to man, and more powerful than most. It would take more than some howling spellshouter to tumble them down. Max was possessed of a great deal of knowledge about defensive magic, and he doubted that he could protect this city any better if he had a hundred good apprentices and twenty years to work in. It wasn't places like Karak Kadrin that were at risk, he knew. It was the small villages and trader towns along the way.\n\nIn any case, though, what he was hearing wasn't good. There were dragons in the mountains and orc warbands gathering. In the north, a Chaos horde advanced, and he had seen for himself that the skaven were active once more. It looked like all those seers prophesying dark times a-coming had the right of it. The world was in a bad way, he thought. Maybe he should drink some more wine. He fought down the urge.\n\n\"Tell me about the dragon,\" he said.\n\n\"It's big and it's bad and it's burned most of the villages between here and the eastern lands.\"\n\n\"That's all you know?\"\n\n\"It's an old beast or so I've heard, slept for centuries until something woke it.\"\n\n\"Woke it?\"\n\n\"Aye. They say two hundred years ago it took up residence in a cave on Dragon Mountain, ravaged the land and then just as suddenly vanished. Some thought it had died. It seems now it was only sleeping. They say dragons can do that. Sleep for centuries.\"\n\n\"Very old dragons do that,\" said Max. \"So I've read.\"\n\n\"You can read?\" asked Boris.\n\n\"Aye. Have some more wine.\"\n\nThe sellswords drank and talked but Max was not listening too closely any more. Could the dragon really have slept for all this time? And if so, what had wakened it? Maybe it's just the coming of Chaos, he thought. Maybe it's just a sign of the times.\n\nOr perhaps it was something else entirely. There was a pattern emerging here, he felt sure of it. He sensed something dark and evil at work.\n\nThe forge blazed brightly. The heat was sweltering. Felix noticed it as soon as he walked into the chamber. He halted for a moment and took a deep breath. His anger had burned down now and he felt more guilty than ever. Perhaps he should go back and speak to Ulrika and patch things up. Part of him wanted to do that and part of him fought stubbornly against it. The latter part won. Anyway, he had come here to find something out, and he might as well continue.\n\nHe glanced around, looking for Makaisson. Amid the heat and fumes, it was difficult to be sure if he was there. There were many dwarfs present working bellows, hammering cherry-hot metal into new shapes, working with odd engines the purpose of which Felix could not even begin to guess at. All of them were moving with the sort of purposefulness that only dwarfs with a mission could muster.\n\n\"Where's Makaisson?\" he asked, reaching out and grabbing the shoulder of the nearest passing dwarf. The squat muscular figure jerked a thumb in the direction of one of the other doorways and continued on his way.\n\nFelix moved through the workroom and ducked his head as he entered the chamber beyond. Makaisson was there all right, bending low over a table containing plans and schematics marked with what Felix recognised as the runes used by the Engineers Guild. He looked up as the man came in, sucked his teeth and said, \"Aye, weel, whaut can ah dae for ye, young Felix?\"\n\n\"I was wondering when the Spirit of Grungni will be ready to leave.\"\n\n\"A couple o' weeks maest likely. Plenty o' time to get this stuff sorted oot and gae that bloody dragon a guid seein' tae.\"\n\n\"You're not serious,\" said Felix, although he knew the Slayer Engineer was most likely all too serious. He had hoped the airship would be repaired soon and could carry Ulrika all the way to the court of the Ice Queen. He had hoped that it might take him with her.\n\n\"Ah am so. That big lizard damn near smashed ma airship, and he killed pare young Varek. That's a grudge tae its credit that ah'll soon be settlin', believe you me.\"\n\n\"How? We barely scratched the thing.\"\n\n\"Aye, well, ah hae a few thoughts aboot that, don't ye worry. There's a few wee engines ah've haud the idea o' for years, and right noo, ah think is as guid a time as ony to be buildin' them.\"\n\n\"What good can any weapons do against a thing as mighty as Skjalandir?\"\n\n\"Ah would hae thocht that by noo ye's hae mare faith in ma machines, Felix Jaeger.\"\n\n\"I do have faith in your skill, Malakai, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, ah don't suppose ah can blame ye. It was a bloody big beastie richt enough. Even so it can still be killed with the right weapon. Any livin' thing can.\"\n\n\"So what are you building?\" Felix asked, glancing over at the plans. Malakai moved between him and the spread sheets of parchment. Like all dwarf engineers, Felix guessed he could be more than a little touchy when it came to sharing his designs with the world. A very secretive people, the dwarfs.\n\nMakaisson looked up at him for a moment then grinned. \"Tak a look if ye want,\" he said, stepping aside, \"Though ah doobt ye'll be able to make hade nor tail o' them.\"\n\nFelix looked down and saw that the dwarf was right. The blue papers were covered in squiggles. To some of the lines were attached runic symbols, to others there were none. It was like looking at a scroll inscribed by a particularly demented astrologer.\n\n\"You're right. I have no idea what these are,\" he said. \"What is it?\"\n\nMakaisson rubbed his meaty hands together in satisfaction. \"Ye'll find oot soon enough, don't ye worry. Noo, oot ye go, young Felix. Ah hae got a lot o' work tae dae, and no all that much time to dae it in.\"\n\nWith that he shooed Felix out of the workshop and into the street. Felix trudged back towards the palace. It was time to bring Ulrika the news. Somehow he just knew she wasn't going to be pleased." + }, + { + "title": "PREPARATIONS", + "text": "Felix looked around the tavern blearily. He did not care for it. The Iron Door was a haunt of lowlifes \u2014 Slayers, tunnel fighters, renegade engineers, outcast mercenaries and others. It had the reputation for being the nastiest hellhole in the city of the Slayer King, which was saying something. For all that, he noticed, the scarred and surly dwarfs were giving their table a wide berth. Felix was quite glad of it. He was now the only human present, and he did not doubt that if he had not been in the company of Gotrek and Snorri, he would have been in deep trouble.\n\nHe knew he was drunk. It seemed that in the past few days he had done very little except drink. While Ulrika studied maps and made ready to depart, Borek and Max scoured the libraries for more information on the dragon and Malakai built his machines, he and the Slayers had done little else but throw down ale. And why not? There was nothing else to do. His fights with Ulrika had gotten worse, and the prospect of heading out to the Dragon Mountain did not fill him with good cheer. Why not get drunk? Why not enjoy himself?\n\nWhere was Max? The wizard had disappeared again. He had only stayed long enough to drink a few goblets of wine and tell them what he had found out. The things he had said were enough to drive any man to drink. Skjalandir was old and powerful. He had awoken a few months ago and in that time he had already driven most of the dwarfs out of the high valleys and burned down most of the towns. A force of mercenaries hired by villagers had never returned nor had any of the many Slayers who had set out to kill him. It was feared that one day soon the monster would attack Karak Kadrin. No one had any idea what would happen then, but they all knew it would be bad. So why not get drunk? Ulrika might not approve, but so what? As she had pointed out, he could not tell her what to do so why should he let her order him about? He would get drunk if he wanted to, no matter how much she sulked.\n\nAnd now he was drunk, gloriously so. They all were: Gotrek, Snorri Nosebiter, and himself. He was perhaps a trifle less inebriated than the others but it was touch and go. He had not drunk a quarter of what the Slayers had drunk but dwarf ale was stronger by far than human ale, and he did not have their tolerance for it.\n\nThe tavern was full. All around were the seediest dwarf warriors Felix had seen since they had fought their way through the halls of Karag Dum. As he considered this, he realised that they were being watched.\n\nThe stranger lurked in a shadowy alcove of the tavern. His features were in shadow but Felix could see from his outline that he had the towering crested haircut that was the mark of a Slayer. He seemed to become aware of Felix's eyes upon him and a head poked out of the shadows. Felix saw a narrow-featured dwarf with mean eyes and a close-cropped beard. His crest was dyed grey and was shorter than Gotrek's. He was lean and quite skinny for a dwarf and his jaws worked constantly as if he were chewing something. Tattoos covered his face and bare arms in odd patterns. He sauntered closer to their table. Felix could see he had a long dagger strapped to his leg and a short handled pick slung over his shoulder. His britches and vest were black, his sleeveless shirt grey.\n\n\"Hear you're going looking for a dragon,\" the stranger said. His voice was low, and the words seemed to come out of the corner of his mouth. He eyed the trio at the table stealthily.\n\n\"What of it?\" asked Gotrek.\n\n\"Dragons have gold.\"\n\n\"So I've heard. What is it to you?\"\n\n\"Skjalandir has a big hoard. Should do anyway. That old firedrake has terrorised these mountains for nigh on a thousand years.\"\n\n\"It's not its gold I'm interested in, it's its life. I mean to kill the thing or die in the attempt,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"Not if Snorri Nosebiter gets there first,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"Quite so. I understand exactly. And a mighty death it would be for a Slayer too. I mean to try it myself.\"\n\n\"Can't stop you,\" said Gotrek. \"Just don't get in my way.\"\n\n\"Fair enough. Mind if I sit and sup with you a while?\"\n\n\"As long as you can pay for your own beer,\" said Gotrek.\n\n\"I can do that and buy a round for you all too,\" said the newcomer.\n\nGotrek's and Snorri's eyes widened. Felix gathered this was uncharacteristic behaviour for a dwarf.\n\n\"Steg, called by some the Light-fingered, at your service.\"\n\n\"A thief,\" Gotrek said tactlessly.\n\n\"Once, to my shame,\" said Steg. \"But I'm a Slayer now.\"\n\n\"You got caught!\" said Snorri Nosebiter.\n\n\"Aye, in the treasure chamber of the Vorgrund clan with the amber necklace in my hands.\" The other Slayers looked at him with interest.\n\n\"I'm surprised the Vorgrunds didn't cut your knackers off.\"\n\n\"They intended to. First they threw me into their dungeon but I picked the locks and escaped. There was a hidden passageway out of their citadel. Of course, there was the shame of being caught and unmasked so I became a Slayer.\"\n\n\"The shame of being caught!\" Gotrek spluttered. Felix was not surprised at Gotrek's outrage. He had always contrived to give the impression that dwarfs had higher standards of honesty than humans. Steg seemed to contradict this, although Felix thought the thief seemed a bit odd by dwarf standards. There was an almost boastful quality to the way he spoke, that was completely at odds with the reticence of Gotrek and Snorri. He was not entirely sane, Felix thought. On the other hand, how many Slayers were?\n\n\"Aye. Once I was unmasked no one would speak to me, my clan ostracised me, my betrothed disowned me, which seemed particularly unfair because I only wanted the necklace as a marriage gift for her.\"\n\nGotrek glared at Steg. Snorri looked on in unabashed amazement. Steg was confessing to the most heinous of all dwarf crimes, shamelessly and in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. If Steg noticed he did not give any sign. \"So it was off to the Shrine of Grimnir for a haircut and a beard trim.\"\n\n\"You don't seem particularly ashamed,\" Felix said. Steg looked at him.\n\n\"Young human, I am a locksmith by trade, and a thief by compulsion. I am ashamed because I brought dishonour on my clan, and because through my lack of skill I was caught. I seek to atone for my crime by death but before I die, I intend restitution to those I have wronged. Since I spent the gold I took I will take my recompense from my share of the dragon's hoard.\"\n\nFelix looked at him sidelong. He wondered how sincere Steg was. Perhaps he suffered from gold fever and merely wanted to be near the treasure. Perhaps he was not really a Slayer at all but merely intended to accompany them and steal the treasure. Who could tell? Gotrek seemed a little mollified by Steg's explanation though. He no longer looked as if he wanted to take his axe to the self-confessed thief's skull. Felix found himself interested in Steg's tale.\n\n\"You are a locksmith? I have heard dwarf locksmiths are prodigiously skilled.\"\n\n\"Aye, we are. I think that was another reason I took to crime. The challenge of it. I wanted to prove myself superior to all other locksmiths by overcoming their creations.\"\n\nGotrek snorted. \"There are some things of which it is better not to speak.\"\n\n\"Snorri thinks he will have another beer.\"\n\n\"Felix thinks he will be staggering back to the palace,\" said Felix.\n\n\"Be careful of your purse,\" Steg said. Felix smiled and patted his belt \u2014 to discover it was not there.\n\nSteg extended a large hand which contained it. \"Sorry,\" he said. \"Old habits die hard.\"\n\nUlrika sat in the library of the Slayer King. The lanterns flickered eerily illuminating the rows and rows of shelves and pigeonholes containing scrolls, leather-bound books, maps and other documents. The Slayer King's library was surprisingly well furnished. Most of the books were unreadable to her, being written in dwarf runes, but there was a good selection of human volumes and many, many maps of the mountains. These were executed with far more detail and precision than human maps. Dwarfs, it seemed, were sticklers for detail.\n\nOn the low dwarf crafted table in front of her was spread out a map of the mountains, the latest product of the king's scribes, showing the area around the city for all of a hundred leagues. Little pictographs indicated towns and villages and it was easy to understand their meanings. A gold axe indicated a gold mine. A red axe might be coal or iron. A boat indicated a port where rafts or ships might go down river. Major trails were marked in thick red lines, lesser ones in thinner ones. What looked like perilous portage routes through mountains were lines of red dots. Crossed swords indicated a battle site. An orc's head most likely marked the lair of some greenskin tribe.\n\nLooking at the map she could see that Peak Pass ran down to the lowlands of the eastern Empire. The way was clear but from there it was a long circuitous route to the court of the Ice Queen. The fastest way north to Kislev lay along the Old High Road to Karak Ungor, and then down the River Urskoy to Kislev city. Unfortunately the dragon symbol lay athwart what had been a major trade route on the older maps, forcing the thick red line to wind a tortuous path through the peaks far longer than it had once been.\n\nIt looked as if Felix was right, she thought sourly. It might be quicker to wait until the airship was repaired. Assuming it could get past the dragon, it would be much faster, and judging by the number of orc symbols on the map, possibly much safer. Looking at the map, she could tell the swiftest way would actually be to go with the Slayers along the Karak Ungor High Road.\n\nPerhaps she simply wanted to believe that, so they could stay together for a little bit longer. It was annoying and frustrating \u2014 and saddening too. It was one of the things that put such a strain on their relationship. She wanted to be with him, and this desire made her want to shirk her duty to her father and nation. She knew she should take her father's message to Kislev. And yet she resented her duty for taking her away from Felix, just as she resented him for tearing her from her duty.\n\nShe was not sure what she felt about him anymore. While they had been separated, she had daydreamed about his return constantly, but his return had changed things. He was not a fantasy figure anymore but a real person, and one whom she could find quite annoying at times, with his cleverness and air of sophistication. He had grown up in the capital of the civilised world, after all, and she was the daughter of a border noble of a semi-barbarous land. She had not realised what a difference that could make. His allusions to poets and plays and books went right over her head, and made her feel stupid sometimes. He lacked the straightforward honour code of her people, and he had travelled so far and seen so much in his life that it was intimidating. At the court in Middenheim she had felt dowdy and out of place among all the sophisticated ladies. He made her feel that way sometimes too.\n\nMore than that, she felt threatened by the intimacy that had grown between them so strongly and so quickly. All of her life she had been in control of her emotions. She had been raised to be a warrior, to fight as well as any man, to be like the son her father had really wanted. That and her position as heir had kept an emotional distance between her and any man. She was not sure whether she wanted that gap closed.\n\nAnd then there was his drinking. Ulrika had grown up around hard drinking men but in Kislev, it was a thing reserved for festivals and feasts. It was too dangerous a place for anyone to risk sottishness more than a few times in a year. Since they had reached the city Felix had got drunk every day. It was worrying.\n\nShe shook her head. This was not like her. This was the first time she had ever felt this way. To worry so about what a man thought about her, and what she thought about a man. In the past, she had taken lovers according to the easy codes of her people's nobility, for evenings of pleasure. She had never felt any deep emotional connection or any unease whatsoever. But then again, she had understood those men, and what she expected of them, and they of her. She was not sure she understood Felix at all. And she was not sure she could see a future for them either.\n\nNot that it mattered anyway, she thought wryly. With the Chaos horde advancing, and the dangers of the road ahead, there most likely would not be a future anyway, so it seemed pointless to worry. She thrust the thoughts aside and returned to her study of the map, looking for the best route towards her goal. It did seem like accompanying the Slayers was the best way.\n\nShe heard the door open and footsteps enter the library. The footsteps were human, and not Felix's light tread. She looked up and saw Max. He gazed at her and winked.\n\n\"So I am not the only one burning the midnight oil,\" he said.\n\nShe nodded, wondering what he was thinking. From the look in his eyes it seemed perfectly possible that he had come here because he knew she was here. At her father's mansion house, he had always been bumping into her, as if by accident. There was also a smell of alcohol on his breath.\n\n\"What are you doing here, Max?\" she asked. His smile widened.\n\n\"I am taking this opportunity to study in a dwarf king's library. They preserve many old books, you know, ones that are rare in the Empire. Some translated from dwarfish by human scribes.\"\n\n\"I never knew that there were humans who could read dwarfish.\"\n\n\"Reading is not counted a great gift among the Kislevites,\" he said. Ulrika could hear the irony in his tone. It reminded her of Felix, and she felt a small surge of anger. Unaware of this, Max continued to speak. \"Among the citizens of the Empire it is different. Some there can not only read, they can read dwarf runes.\"\n\n\"I thought it was a secret tongue the dwarfs kept to themselves.\"\n\n\"It is now. It was not always so. Once dwarfs and men were closer, and in the time of Sigmar Heldenhammer, many were taught the dwarf tongue. Dwarf runes may have formed the basis of the first human alphabets. Certainly, according to the Unfinished Book, Sigmar could speak with dwarfs in their native tongue.\"\n\n\"Sigmar was a god.\"\n\n\"He took human form, and his first priests could speak dwarfish too. They passed it on to those who came after. It is still used by many scholars of the church.\"\n\n\"You are saying that there are humans who can speak dwarfish?\"\n\n\"The ancient version of the tongue, which is not too dissimilar to modern dwarfish. They are a very conservative people, the Elder Race, and not that much has changed in their language over the past two thousand, five hundred years. If you can speak the old version of the tongue, you can make yourself understood in the modern version. And you can most likely read it.\"\n\n\"How do you know all this?\"\n\n\"I am a scholar as well as a magician, and like many scholars I studied in the temples when I was young. Also, a magician these days needs a working knowledge of theology and liturgy if he is not to fall foul of witch hunters. The temples are still not fond of us. There are often times when we need to be able to prove that we are god-fearing men.\"\n\nUlrika remembered the superstitions of her own folk and the hatred that many of the followers of Ulric had borne mages when she was in Middenheim.\n\nShe could see some sense in his words. \"And are you a god-fearing man, Max Schreiber? Or is your soul in peril?\"\n\n\"I am more godly than you could guess, Ulrika Magdova. I have been an enemy of Chaos all my life, no matter what the witch hunters might think.\"\n\n\"You do not need to convince me of that, Max. I saw you fight against the skaven.\"\n\nHe moved closer and sat down opposite her. She could definitely smell the wine on his breath. \"You are contemplating a journey, I see. Going hunting for dragons, are you?\"\n\n\"No. I am trying to find a way to Kislev, to bring my father's warning to my people. The Tzarina must know about this impending invasion.\"\n\n\"You are not going with the dwarfs then? Felix is, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Felix is sworn to accompany Gotrek. I would not ask him to break an oath.\"\n\nUlrika was not quite sure what to make of the expression that moved across Max's face. In the dim light it was hard to tell if he was surprised, pleased, alarmed or a little of all these things. \"I thought you two were inseparable,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"We are bed companions, nothing more,\" Ulrika knew it wasn't true even as she said it, but it was close enough to the reality of the situation so that she did not feel like a liar. Max winced. Was he jealous or was it something else?\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's just that Kislevite women seem a little more forthright on\u2026 matters of the heart than men of the Empire are used to.\"\n\n\"We are honest.\"\n\n\"No question of that. It just took me by surprise that is all. In the Empire a lady does not talk of such things.\"\n\nUlrika looked at him. \"They certainly do such things, though. I spent quite enough time in the court at Middenheim to see that. At least we Kislevite women are not hypocrites!\"\n\nTo her surprise Max laughed. \"Yes. It's true. You have a point.\"\n\n\"There is no need to talk down to me.\"\n\n\"I am not doing that.\" His tone changed. \"How do you intend to get to Kislev? On foot?\"\n\n\"By horse, if we can find any in this place.\"\n\n\"How many of you? Will you be hiring bodyguards?\"\n\n\"I have Oleg and Standa and I have my own good sword. What need have I of any more?\"\n\n\"The way between here and Kislev is long and hard and full of peril.\" He paused for a minute as if considering something. \"Perhaps you could use another sword on the route, and more than a sword, a magician.\"\n\n\"Are you offering your services?\" Ulrika felt suddenly uneasy. She was not at all sure that she wanted Max riding with her, potent mage though he was.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I will think on it.\"\n\n\"You will need me,\" he said confidently. \"There are orcs in those mountains, and they have a shaman with them. It takes magic to fight magic.\"\n\n\"I have said I will think on it,\" she said, and rose to leave. Max bowed goodnight to her. As she reached the door, she felt him gazing at her. He opened his mouth to speak.\n\n\"I love you,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\"You're drunk,\" she said and swept out of the door. Even as she did so, she heard him say, \"True, but that doesn't make any difference.\"\n\nAs she walked through the corridor, she realised she had come to a decision. She would travel with Felix and Gotrek along the High Road to the Urskoy turning; assuming they survived the trip she would make her way north with Oleg and Standa. She felt as if a weight had lifted from her shoulders. She looked forward to seeing Felix and to sharing a bed. They had been apart a lot recently, and she felt some responsibility for that. She would try and make things up.\n\nMax stood in the library, feeling foolish. The effects of the wine he had taken earlier in the Emperor's Griffon had not worn off, and had left his tongue loose. Part of him was glad he had said what he had, and another part was deeply embarrassed by the rebuff. He realised that a lifetime of studying magic in musty old books had in no way prepared him for dealing with a living woman. He felt like he had said the wrong thing right from the beginning of the conversation.\n\nThis was dreadful. He would have to get a grip on himself. He was a master mage of the Golden College and a secret brother of the ancient order of the Golden Hammer. He was not some callow student of the mysteries. He could not afford to lose control of himself in this or any other way. With his powers, disasters could easily happen. He was only too aware of tales of mages who had wreaked terrible havoc whilst drunk. Not that he was going to. He was too clever for that. He would never try using his powers while inebriated. Not for any reason.\n\nIt was dark in here, though. Not enough light to see by. He moved his fingers through the familiar intricate pattern and felt the winds of magic answer. A sphere of softly glowing yellowish light sprang into being around his hand. He rolled it off, and left it to hover in mid-air in the centre of the chamber. Its light flickered erratically as if something were affecting his control of the magic. Perhaps it was the old dwarf protective runes. Perhaps it was something else. He was not going to worry about it now.\n\nHe shook his head and looked at the map Ulrika had been studying. It was not difficult to see the story it told. The dragon's awakening had certainly stirred things up in this part of the World's Edge Mountains. Orc tribes were everywhere. Towns had been destroyed. Trade routes were being blocked. He could easily imagine the cascade of troubles.\n\nThe dragon awakes and begins destroying human and dwarf towns and eating their flocks. This leads to the trade routes and mountain passes being less well-defended. Orcs and other nastier creatures take advantage of the anarchy to increase their own power. The caravan routes lengthen, sellswords increase their hiring price because of the danger. The cost of goods rises here in the mountains and in the human towns of the Ostermark. The ripples of this one event move out across hundreds of leagues, affecting the lives of thousands of people who will never even see a dragon and may even believe it is only a myth.\n\nMax wondered how often similar chains of events affected the human realms. Doubtless far more than he would ever learn of. It seemed all too likely though that enough of them occurring at once might cause the collapse of the Empire. For one thing, looking at this map, it was difficult to see how the dwarfs might move an army quickly through the mountains if the dragon and the orcs decided to oppose them. Even if they wanted to aid the Kislevites against the marching legions of Chaos, they might not be able to.\n\nOf course, there was always the Spirit of Grungni. The airship would allow the movement of many warriors very quickly. Perhaps that would be the answer. If the mighty machine could be repaired. Even then, the dragon had almost destroyed it once. Perhaps it might try again and succeed. Max shook his head. He knew he was simply trying to distract himself from his hopeless passion for Ulrika.\n\nOr was it so hopeless? It appeared that all was not well between her and Felix. Perhaps he might get his chance yet, particularly if she and Herr Jaeger were not travelling together, and he was with her. Who knew what might happen then? He allowed the surge of hope to fade. Just because she and Felix might be falling out did not mean that she would go with him. He felt almost like laughing.\n\nHere he was, sworn to oppose Chaos, with the largest incursion of the forces of Darkness in two centuries about to occur, and all he could think about was this one girl. Somehow, he would have to get his sense of proportion back. He walked over to the shelves and studied the books.\n\nThere was indeed a fair number of volumes here, including some copies of the Book of Grudges for Karak Kadrin that dated back well over 3,000 years. The earlier entries were in the almost pure ancient dwarfish he had learned as a youth. He flipped through the pages, and was soon slumped in the chair, snoring, with the old tales of treachery, betrayal and gloom slipping from his hand.\n\nFelix staggered back into the room he shared with Ulrika. He was none too steady on his feet and his efforts at moving quietly seemed to be failing horribly. Already he had kicked over a chamber pot, and sent his sword tumbling to the floor with a loud metallic clatter. Despite her stillness on the bed, he knew Ulrika was awake. He wondered how long she had been waiting for him. \"So you're drunk as well,\" she said. She sounded angry.\n\n\"You've been drinking,\" said Felix stupidly. \"I thought you were going to the king's library to plan your route home.\"\n\n\"No. Max was drinking.\"\n\n\"You were drinking with Herr Schreiber.\" Felix wondered at how much sullen jealousy managed to creep into his voice during that one sentence.\n\n\"No. I was in the library and he came in drunk.\"\n\n\"And what did you do then?\"\n\n\"We talked.\"\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"About the dwarfish language, as if it were any of your business.\"\n\n\"You've suddenly developed an interest in dwarfish?\"\n\n\"The maps and books in the library are mostly written in it.\"\n\n\"That makes a certain amount of sense,\" said Felix with unsubtle irony. He began to strip off his clothes and get ready for bed.\n\n\"You can be a nasty man, Felix Jaeger.\"\n\n\"Apparently. And Herr Schreiber isn't?\"\n\n\"At least Max offered to accompany me to Kislev.\"\n\nFelix felt his stomach twist. He had not realised that her words could affect him so much. He threw himself down on the bed beside her, and glanced over. In the darkness her expression was impossible to read. Judging by her voice, she sounded upset. He paused to consider what to say. The silence stretched, a vast empty desert that threatened to swallow anything he could say.\n\n\"I would go with you to Kislev,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"What about the dragon?\"\n\n\"After it is slain\u2026\"\n\n\"Ah, after it is slain, you will go\u2026\"\n\n\"I have sworn an oath, and I know what you Kislevites think of oathbreakers.\"\n\nThe silence stretched once more. She did not say anything more. Felix considered what to say next, but the beer surged through his brain, and the tentacles of alcohol-induced sleep dragged him down into the sea of slumber.\n\nWhen he awoke in the morning, Ulrika was gone.\n\nFrom the battlements above the courtyard of the Slayer King's palace, Max watched the morning sun rise over the mountains. His mouth felt dry. His head ached. His stomach churned. He had not gotten drunk like that since he had been a student, many years ago. He felt vaguely embarrassed and ashamed. In part he knew it was simply the effects of the hangover. In part though, it was the knowledge that he had spoken to Ulrika about something that he should have best kept to himself. In part too he was annoyed at himself for getting drunk. It was a bad thing for a master magician to do. He shuddered when he realised he had been using spells, even such simple ones as casting light globes, while being inebriated. Magic was a tricky and dangerous thing at the best of times, without the added complications of booze. He remembered what his old tutor Jared had to say on the subject. A drunken magician is a foolish magician, and a foolish magician is soon a dead magician.\n\nHe knew it should not have happened, but he knew also he had his reasons. He was a mage. He was aware of his state of mind. He took a deep breath, and counted silently and slowly to five as he did so. He held the breath in for a count of ten, and then let it out slowly for a count of twenty. As he did so, he sought to empty his mind, as his tutors had taught him.\n\nAt first it would not come. The sickness in his stomach and the dizziness in his head prevented him from managing it. Another danger of drinking, he thought. If an enemy were to attack me now, I would have difficulty protecting myself. He cursed, knowing that such thoughts were themselves a sign that he was failing to perform even this elementary magical exercise. He continued, concentrating on his breathing, trying to feel calm and relaxed, trying to let the tension flow from his muscles.\n\nSlowly, the exercise began to take effect. His thoughts became quieter and slower. His pains seemed to fade a little. Tension oozed from him. At the edge of his mind, he became aware of the tug of the currents of magic. Colours began to swirl in his mind, reds and greens and a predominant gold. He became aware of himself as an empty vessel, into which the power was starting to flow. The magic softly soaked his pains away; his mind began to feel cleaner and clearer and filled with a golden light. A sense of renewal filled him. The touch of magic was like the effects of some of the narcotic drugs he had experimented with under the supervision of his masters. It made him feel full of energy and almost euphoric in a low-key way. His senses were keener. He was aware of the wind's gentle caress on his skin, the faint tickling sensation caused by his woollen robes. The heat in the stones under his fingers. He could hear the faint voices of dwarfs in the depths of the castle that he had only been subliminally aware of before. The light was brighter and his vision clearer.\n\nOther senses than the five that mankind normally used clicked in. He could sense the flow of magic all around him, and the faint emanations of living things. He could feel the power of the runes that the dwarfs had bound into their buildings, and the way they channelled primal energies in magical defence. He knew that he could reach out in a manner inexplicable to normal mortals and begin to mould those energies to his will. For a moment, he felt utterly and completely alive, and filled with a gladness that he was sure no non-magician would ever understand.\n\nHe achieved emptiness and held it for a few moments, and then as he exhaled began to think again, reviewing his life with a new insight and clarity.\n\nHe could see now that he had gotten drunk as a response to the way things had been running out of control in his life. He had undergone a lot of things recently that were alien to the normal routine of his quiet scholarly life. He had been involved in a battle, and fought a sorcerous duel with a mage far mightier than himself. He could easily have died both in that duel, and in the battles with the skaven. He had fallen in love, passionately and uncontrollably and much to his own surprise. Perhaps he had been more vulnerable to it, out in the wilds of Kislev, far from his homelands, and waiting tensely for the return of the airship. True, Ulrika was a lovely woman, but he had known lovelier, and not fallen hard for them. Anyway, it did not matter what the reasons were, the simple fact was that it had happened and had affected him. He had been jealous, and desperate and filled with an anger he had only been barely aware of, and it had driven him to behave badly, and feel temptations he had never known before. He knew that the whole business was a threat to his peace of mind, and in some ways to his soul. His desire for the woman had led him to contemplate dark paths that should have remained closed to him and consider things he should never have given thought to. Last night he had even gone so far as to get drunk and use his magic. He was lucky he had been too drunk to work some of the spells he knew, ones that could bind others to his will.\n\nHe closed his eyes and considered the secret knowledge he had gained with such cost. Slaanesh, he thought. To the ignorant, he was the dark god of unspeakable pleasures, a master of daemons, whose pleasure-crazed worshippers engaged in orgies of dreadful excess. And such things did happen, as Max well knew. But this was not the only threat Slaanesh represented. He was the god of the temptations of the flesh, subtle and deadly. He could lure even the wisest onto the road of ruin through the urge to gratify their desires. Max knew that Slaanesh could ruin a man in many ways, through the urge to drink, or take drugs or to bed women. He knew that, in a way, what had happened to him last night was something he had to take seriously, for it was the first step on the path to perdition, if he followed up on it.\n\nIt was a thing he knew he must not do. He was sworn to oppose Chaos and not to serve it, that was why he had studied so long and so hard. He knew that he must forswear Ulrika and drink and all the other temptations that might lead him astray, or the consequences would be terrible. But even as he resolved this, part of him whispered that it did not want to do it, and his new insight showed him what might be another truth.\n\nPerhaps he had studied the works of Chaos for so long for a less pure reason, not because he hated it, and wished to oppose it, but because he was fascinated by it. Perhaps he had merely been fooling himself all along.\n\nEven as he told himself that this thought too was but one of the snares of Slaanesh, he was all too aware that it was, at least in part, the truth.\n\nFelix wandered out into the street. He had no idea where to find Ulrika but according to the sentries she, Oleg and Standa had left the palace earlier in the morning and headed off in the direction of the fairground that had sprung up around the Spirit of Grungni in the valley outside the city. This made sense. She would be looking for horses to continue her journey and the market there would be as good a place as any to buy them.\n\nAs he headed downhill, he noticed that a young dwarf of unusual appearance was looking at him. The dwarf was garbed in furs, and his head was covered in a pinkish fuzz that made it look as if it had recently been shaved. He had an axe slung over one shoulder. Noticing Felix was watching him, he began to move forward and fell into step beside him.\n\n\"You are Felix Jaeger!\" The dwarf's voice was even lower than usual for a dwarf's and boomed out loudly. As Felix looked he saw that on the dwarf's arms were an intricate series of tattoos, depicting huge, bleeding monsters. An inscription in dwarf runes ran under them. Seeing that Felix had noticed them, the dwarf flexed his arms proudly causing the muscle to ripple and the tattoo to expand.\n\n\"You've noticed my tattoos, I see! The inscription reads 'Born to Die!'\"\n\n\"Yes. Very impressive,\" said Felix. He lengthened his stride, and soon the dwarf was almost running to keep pace. He had no wish to be rude but he was in a hurry to find Ulrika and apologise for his behaviour of the previous evening. If the youth noticed his brusqueness, he gave no sign.\n\n\"Ulli, son of Ulli, at your service, and your clan's,\" said the dwarf. He tried bowing as he moved and almost tripped.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you,\" Felix said, hoping the dwarf would take the hint and leave him alone. His hangover was not making him feel sociable.\n\n\"You are a comrade of Gotrek Gurnisson's, aren't you? You have held the Hammer of Firebeard in your hand?\" There was a note of awe in the youth's voice as he spoke. Felix was not sure whether it was for Gotrek or for the hammer. He stopped and gazed down at Ulli.\n\n\"Yes. What of it?\"\n\n\"I don't like your tone of voice, human! Do you want to fight me?\"\n\nFelix looked at the youth. He was muscular in the apish way that dwarfs often were, but he was nowhere near as fearsome as Gotrek or Snorri Nosebiter. Still, there was no sense in getting into a fight for no reason, particularly not with a Slayer. \"No. I do not want to fight you,\" Felix said patiently.\n\n\"Good! I would not want to soil my axe with human blood!\"\n\n\"There's no need to shout,\" Felix said quietly.\n\n\"Do not tell me how to speak!\" roared the dwarf. Instinctively Felix's hand went to the hilt of his blade. The young Slayer seemed to flinch back a little.\n\n\"I am not telling you how to speak,\" Felix said as politely as he could manage. \"I am merely asking you to calm down a little.\"\n\n\"I am a Slayer! I am not meant to be calm! I am sworn to die in battle against terrible monsters!\"\n\nFelix grimaced sourly. He had heard such lines before from Gotrek but somehow they didn't seem quite so convincing coming from Ulli Ullisson. \"You've probably noticed that I am not a terrible monster,\" he said.\n\n\"Are you mocking me?\"\n\n\"As if I would.\"\n\n\"Good! I demand the respect a Slayer deserves from your sort!\"\n\n\"And what sort would that be?\" Felix asked softly. A dangerous edge had entered his voice. He was getting a little tired of being badgered by this boastful lout. Ulli seemed to notice it, and flinched back again.\n\n\"Humans! The younger race! The men of the Empire!\"\n\nA crowd of dwarfs was gathering to watch the confrontation. He could hear them muttering to each other in dwarfish. Some of the spectators were nudging each other with their elbows and pointing to him. He heard his own name mentioned several times. It seemed he was quite a well-known figure around the town. \"Is there something I can do for you, Ulli Ullisson?\"\n\n\"Is it true you intend to hunt down the dragon, Skjalandir?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"I seek a glorious death.\"\n\n\"Join the queue,\" Felix said softly.\n\n\"What?\" roared Ulli.\n\n\"That's nothing new,\" Felix said. \"Do you intend to accompany us on our quest?\"\n\n\"I intend to go in search of the dragon with or without you! Still, if you are asking for my protection, I will grant it!\"\n\n\"I am not. Good morning to you,\" said Felix, and turned and strode away. He did not look back but he could hear Ulli blustering loudly behind him.\n\n\"We are lost, aren't we, most perspicacious of pathfinders?\"\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol did not like the way Lurk said this. There was an undertone of menace, combined with a hint of disbelief in Thanquol's abilities that boded ill for future dealings with his henchman. Thanquol's head hurt. He had run out of warpstone snuff two days ago and it was not helping matters. He felt a terrible craving for it. Maybe he could just nibble a little of his stash of warpstone. No! He knew he must preserve the pure stuff for an emergency. He would need its power then.\n\n\"Are we lost?\" Lurk asked again.\n\n\"No! No!\" chittered Thanquol with what he hoped was utter confidence. \"Such are my powers of scrying that we are exactly where we need to be!\"\n\n\"And where exactly is that?\"\n\n\"Are you questioning me, Lurk Snitchtongue?\"\n\n\"Expressing an interest I am.\"\n\nThanquol gazed at the horizon. The glittering peaks that marked the border with the Chaos Wastes seemed a lot closer. Was he being betrayed by his desire for warpstone, he wondered? Had the mysterious lure of those lost lands affected his sense of direction? Or was it simply that this constant badgering by Lurk's inane questioning was beginning to affect his judgement? Perhaps a little of both, he decided.\n\nAnd of course the weather was not helping either. When it was not raining, it was misty. When it was not misty, it was so bright that it hurt their sensitive skaven eyes and forced them to burrow into the earth rather than risk being spotted. Unwilling as he normally was to admit that humans might be superior to skaven in anything, Thanquol had to admit that a man on horseback was much more likely to spot them before they spotted him. There seemed to be no happy medium. The rains were awful. They drove in hard and reduced visibility to almost zero. They left his fur sodden and deadened his sense of smell. It was as if the very elements conspired with his enemies to undermine Thanquol's sanity.\n\nActually, he was surprised that he had not considered this before. It seemed all too likely that this atrocious weather was the product of some enemy's spell. Thanquol could think of several candidates. One thing was certain, he swore, when he returned to skaven civilisation, he was going to make someone suffer for the discomfort he had endured. And one candidate for his certain vengeance was no more than a few tail lengths away from him.\n\nLurk had become less and less endurable as their journey progressed. When he was not being insolent, he was hungry and cast alarmingly voracious looks at his rightful master. When he was not doing that he was asking foolish questions, and actually appeared to be implying that he had no faith in the grey seer's judgement. Thanquol would show him whose judgement was faulty soon enough, he vowed. He was not prepared to put up with insolence from underlings forever.\n\n\"You have not answered my question, most scintillating of seers,\" said Lurk. Thanquol glared at him until he noticed that Lurk was not looking back but instead was staring off over Thanquol's shoulders. Thanquol bared his teeth in a snarl. That was the oldest trick in the book. He was not going to turn around and let Lurk spring on his back. Did Snitchtongue take him for the merest runt?\n\n\"What are you looking at?\" Thanquol asked.\n\n\"Why not use your awesome powers of divination, and find out for yourself?\" suggested Lurk. \"Perhaps you could ascertain what that monstrous cloud on the horizon portends and whether it has anything to do with the way the earth shakes beneath our paws.\"\n\nAt first Thanquol suspected that Lurk was mocking him till he realised that the ground was indeed vibrating. He risked a quick glance over his shoulder and noticed that there was a massive cloud stretching all the way to the horizon, obscuring everything, even the mountain peaks.\n\n\"Some strange mystical phenomenon,\" he suggested.\n\n\"More like an army on the march, it looks to me, mightiest of masters. And a very large one too.\" Lurk could not quite keep the fear from his voice. Thanquol could not exactly blame him. If that cloud was indeed being raised by an army, it was the largest one Thanquol had ever heard of.\n\nThanquol shuddered. There was little they could do except wait and hide.\n\nUlrika looked around the fairground that had sprung up around the airship where it lay outside the town walls. Hundreds of dwarfs surrounded the enclosure and looked at the mighty vessel in awe. Fire eaters and jugglers moved through the crowd. Pie vendors sold their wares from trays around their neck. Alemongers carried massive pitchers of foaming beer through the crowd, dispensing the brew to anyone with a few coppers to spare. A dwarf on stilts towered high over her and shouted jokes to the crowd. Ballad singers rumbled out fanciful tales of the great airship's voyage in the common speech.\n\nShe was disappointed. The horse market had proven to be nothing of the sort. It sold only pit ponies, mules and nags that no true Kislevite would be seen dead riding, beasts that would never survive the long trip north. It seemed, annoyingly enough, that once more Felix had been proven right. Dwarfs were not famous for their cavalry nor for their knowledge of horseflesh. She gritted her teeth. She was not going to allow the thought of the man to annoy her today. She did not want to give way to her anger. Last night she had been ready to make up with him, until he had proven himself a drunken sot. Now he would have to apologise to her.\n\nShe had never seen quite so many dwarfs from so close up before. There must be hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, most of them at least partially inebriated. They were all bent on celebrating in their own dour way. It seemed that the return of the Hammer of Firebeard was an event of great significance to them. Not that it appeared they needed any excuse to get drunk. In this they were like Kislev men. The alesellers were doing good business, but then so were the smiths and weaponsellers. It seemed that the dwarfs liked to haggle, and buy and sell almost as much as they liked to drink.\n\n\"You're a pretty lass,\" said a deep, rumbling voice close to Ulrika's elbow. She looked down to see a dwarf standing there. He was squat, muscular and repulsively ugly. His nose had been mashed and a huge hairy wart stood on the end of it. His head had been shaved and a tufted crest of dyed hair rose above it. Huge gold rings dangled from his ears.\n\n\"And you're a Slayer.\"\n\n\"As clever as ye are pretty, I see. Do you fancy a turn in the bushes?\" The dwarf gestured insinuatingly at the nearest clump of greenery. It took Ulrika a few moments to work out his meaning.\n\nWhen she did she did not know whether to be angry or amused. Oleg and Standa had reached for their blades. She quelled them with a glance. She was quite capable of handling this situation on her own.\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"You'll soon change your mind if you do. There's no a lass ever regretted straddling Bjorni Bjornisson.\"\n\nThis time Ulrika did laugh. If the Slayer was offended, he gave no sign. \"If ye change yer mind, let me know.\"\n\n\"I'll be sure to do that,\" she said, and turned to go.\n\n\"You know Gotrek Gurnisson,\" said the Slayer. \"And Felix Jaeger?\"\n\nThat stopped her. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"They're going hunting for dragons, so I hear.\"\n\n\"You hear correctly.\"\n\n\"I might join them I think. We'll be seeing more of each other, bonnie lass.\"\n\nThe Slayer turned and walked away. Astonished, Ulrika followed him with her gaze. The last she saw of him, he was disappearing into the crowd, arm in arm with two rouged and none-too-young looking human wenches.\n\n\"Never seen anything like that before,\" Standa said, a look of discomfort showing on his moon face. Oleg tugged his long, drooping moustaches in agreement.\n\n\"You'll see a lot stranger things before we're done travelling, I'll warrant,\" said Ulrika. \"Now, let's get going. We might as well get back to the palace. We'll find no horses here.\"\n\nShe was still not sure she believed what she had just seen herself. That was surely the strangest Slayer she had ever encountered.\n\nThe Spirit of Grungni lay at rest. Even to Felix's hungover eyes it was an impressive sight. The massive airship lay in an open field beyond Karak Kadrin. The area was roped off to keep the crowd at bay and surrounded by dwarf soldiers to prevent any interlopers getting too close. The gondola actually rested on the ground anchored by ropes held by hooks driven deep into the ground like tentpegs. More ropes arced up and over the gasbag, running through the guardrails that ran along the top of the dirigible and coming down the other side. Even over the voices of the crowd of spectators Felix could hear the ropes creak as the airship shifted slightly. The spectacle reminded Felix of an old story he had once read of a sleeping giant who had been trapped in his slumber, ensnared in a webwork of ropes, pinned to the earth and unable to move.\n\nFelix had been looking for Ulrika, but like everyone else he was getting distracted by the circus surrounding the airship. He smiled to himself. He had become so accustomed to the Spirit of Grungni on the quest for Karag Dum that he had forgotten just how impressive the massive airship was. The onlookers had not. They had come to gape at it, the way they might at some captive dragon.\n\nThe guards recognised Felix as he forced his way into the roped-off enclosure, and let him pass. He heard his name murmured by the spectators as he moved closer to the Spirit of Grungni. It was strange to be recognised.\n\nDwarfs swarmed over the fuselage of the airship, painting the gasbag with a pitch-like substance which sealed the rips and tears. Felix knew it was made from some alchemical formula known only to Makaisson and his apprentices. Blacksmiths and artificers worked on the engines and the dented cupola, banging away with hammers, twisting nuts into place with huge spanners. The clangour was deafening. Looking through the portholes, he could see more dwarfs inside. It looked like the repairs were proceeding apace. Borek Forkbeard leaned on his stick and watched the work in progress. He looked sadder and older than ever but a smile crossed his face when he noticed Felix approach.\n\n\"Have you seen Ulrika?\" the young warrior asked.\n\n\"I thought I saw her and her guards heading back up to the city.\"\n\nFelix clamped down on his disappointment. He did not feel like going back to the palace right now. Maybe he should have some ale. It might help his hangover. He considered this briefly and decided against it. It probably wouldn't help, and he'd need his wits about him when he saw Ulrika again.\n\n\"How is it going?\" Felix asked. Borek nodded his head. An unlit pipe was clenched between his teeth. Felix knew it was there from force of habit. He would not light it so close to the gasbag.\n\n\"Slowly. Makaisson was here yesterday and said it may be some weeks before the airship is ready.\"\n\n\"Why is he not here himself? Surely he should be supervising this.\"\n\n\"His apprentices know all that is needful or so he claims. The crew were well trained before we set out. We knew he might not be alive to oversee any repairs that were needed.\"\n\nFrom his expression, Felix could tell that the old dwarf was thinking of someone else who was not here to witness this, his nephew. The scholar continued, \"Makaisson is obsessed with slaying the dragon. He gets like that. He has locked himself up in his workshop and is building weapons to kill the beast. He refuses food and drink, and only came to see the repairs being done yesterday because I banged on his door for an hour.\"\n\nFelix looked at him. \"Do you think even Makaisson can come up with something that will destroy Skjalandir?\"\n\nBorek shrugged. \"If anyone can, he can. He is a genius. In a dozen centuries the dwarf realms have not cast up an engineer as brilliant as he.\"\n\n\"A pity then that he has become a Slayer.\"\n\n\"Aye; he might have changed the world otherwise. If his theories had been accepted. If the Engineers Guild had not hounded him. As it is, his name will go down in history anyway. Creating this airship was a deed worthy of the Ancestors. Piloting it to Karag Dum means his name will live forever, even if he does not.\"\n\n\"Was the deed really so notable?\"\n\n\"More than you can imagine. Your name will live as long as the mountains too, Felix Jaeger. Your part in the slaying of the daemon, and the recovery of the Hammer of Firebeard will see to that.\"\n\nFelix found this a strange thought. He was not sure how he felt about the knowledge that his name would be recalled in centuries to come, in a time long after he was dead. He did not want to think of dying just yet. It was not a thought he found pleasant.\n\n\"Where is the hammer now?\"\n\n\"It is in the shrine of Grimnir. Hurgrim has left it there for the time being.\"\n\nA thought struck Felix. Curiosity overcame him.\n\n\"One day I would like to see the inside of the shrine.\"\n\n\"It is not usual for humans to be allowed to view the inside of Grimnir's sanctum.\" Borek paused for a moment. \"But you are the Hammerbearer, and the gods have looked on you with favour, so I suppose an exception could be made in your case.\"\n\n\"I would like that,\" said Felix. If he ever was going to write up the tale of Gotrek's adventures, it might be important. Perhaps seeing the inside of the shrine would give him some insight into the dwarf personality.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Felix said. \"I will go now.\"\n\n\"May the Ancestor Gods watch over you, Felix Jaeger.\"\n\n\"And you,\" Felix said, striding away.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol watched the dust cloud come ever closer. It billowed to the sky. It was as if all the grass of the plain had caught fire and was sending smoke plumes skyward. The ground vibrated. He could feel the thunder of hundreds of hooves against the earth. His nose twitched. He could smell warpstone in small quantities, and cold steel and flesh, human-like and yet not human. His mystical senses told him that powerful magic was present. He and Lurk exchanged scared looks, animosity temporarily fading as they confronted a threat to their common well-being.\n\nAlmost. Thanquol briefly considered running and leaving Lurk to face whatever it was that rushed towards them. What held him in place was the knowledge that it would probably be pointless. Instinct told him that there were so many foes coming towards them, that a few of them could overcome Lurk, and others would still have time to seek him out. Being with Lurk at least offered the possibility of some protection. At moments of stress like these, when the urge to squirt the musk of fear filled him, the scent of another ratman reassured even a skaven as independent as Grey Seer Thanquol.\n\n\"Horse warriors, most perceptive of potentates?\" rumbled Lurk.\n\nThanquol shook his horned head and bared his fangs. His mouth felt dry. His heart pounded within his chest. He fought the urge to begin stuffing the last of the powdered warpstone into his mouth.\n\n\"No. Others. Not humans.\"\n\n\"From the north? From the Wastes?\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes! Black-armoured warriors. Altered beasts. Other things.\"\n\n\"You have seen this? The Horned Rat has granted you a vision?\"\n\nNot in the strictest sense, Thanquol thought, but it served no purpose to let Lurk know, so he maintained a significant silence as he peered into the cloud. The dust made his pink eyes water and his nose twitch. His musk glands felt tight and he lashed his tail to try and dispel the tension. Lurk let out a low threatening growl. Thanquol glared into the advancing dust cloud trying to see into it.\n\nForms moved within the cloud. Massive, dark shapes that emerged slowly from the gloom and resolved themselves into riders. Thanquol had seen many of the mounted warriors the foolish humans called knights when he had served the Council of Thirteen in Bretonnia. The horsemen reminded him of those, save that their armour was made all of black iron with brass rondels. It was more intricate than any human armour Thanquol had ever seen before. Daemonic faces, twisted runes, arcane symbols: all seemed to have been moulded into the steel by some sorcerous technique.\n\nOne warrior had a gaping mawed daemonic face set in his chest plate. His helm echoed the daemon's features and glowing red eyes glared out from behind his visor. Another wore armour covered in monstrous spikes and clutched a similarly spiked mace, shaped like a shrieking human head, in one armoured fist. A third's armour glowed with an eerie yellow light, pulsing softly as if in time to his heartbeat. Behind them came other riders garbed in armour just as fantastically elaborate.\n\nTheir weapons were also of black steel set with fiery runes. They carried swords and maces, lances and morning stars. Their shields showed the symbol of Tzeentch, the Great Mutator, one of the four Ruinous Powers. The horses were huge, far bigger than normal human steeds. They needed to be to carry their massive armoured riders, and the weight of the impossibly intricate, segmented barding. Like their riders, the steeds' eyes glowed with baleful internal fires. It was as if the gates of Hell had opened and these awful spectres had ridden straight out.\n\nThe Chaos warriors were a terrifying sight, and what was even more frightening was the fact that Thanquol knew they were but the outriders of a vast horde. What had those fiends, Felix Jaeger and Gotrek Gurnisson done, Thanquol wondered? He did not doubt for a moment that the onset of this monstrous army was somehow connected with their mission into the Chaos Wastes. It was just like them to stir up a hornets' nest of malefic forces and then run, leaving others in the path. May the Horned Rat devour their souls, Thanquol cursed.\n\nWith a terrified howl, Lurk threw himself headlong on the ground and abased himself. Thanquol cursed him too, and fought the urge to repeat Lurk's action himself. His mind raced. If he prostrated himself before these bloodthirsty madmen, they would most likely simply ride over him, trampling the greatest skaven mind of this age into a bloody husk. Thanquol knew that would never do. He needed to keep all his wits about him if he wanted to survive.\n\nDramatically he threw his arms wide and let a nimbus of power play around his claws. The leading horse reared but its rider kept it under control and dropped his weapon into the attack position. Thanquol desperately controlled his musk glands as they sought to void themselves. He raised his chin high and let them see his horned head, his white fur, his magnificent lashing tail. He felt his power surge within him, and knew that if worst came to the worst he would take a few of these Tzeentch worshippers with him to greet the Horned Rat in the Thirteenth Level of the Abyss.\n\n\"Halt!\" he shouted in the common tongue of humans in his most impressive oracular voice. \"I bring you greetings from the Council of Thirteen, lordly rulers of all skavendom.\"\n\nIf the Chaos warriors were impressed, they gave no sign of it. Instead, one of them touched spurs to the flanks of his mount, dropped his lance and thundered forward, obviously intent on skewering the grey seer.\n\nEverything seemed to slow as the armoured warrior advanced. The spearpoint looked very sharp. Thanquol wondered if his last moment had come.\n\n\"Wait! Wait!\" shrieked Grey Seer Thanquol. \"Don't kill me. You are making a grave error. I bring tidings from the Council of Thirteen. They wish to make obeisance to your all-conquering army!\"\n\nThanquol thought his doom was upon him. He summoned his power to attempt the escape spell that would cast him across the warp. He was not sure he had the time or the energy, but it seemed like his only slim hope. The glittering lance point came ever closer. It looked sharp as Felix Jaeger's sword and ten times as deadly. Just before it pierced his body, the lancer raised his weapon and let out a bellow of mocking malevolent laughter.\n\n\"You wish to ally with us?\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes!\"\n\n\"Or you wish to surrender to us?\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes!\"\n\n\"Which is it? Or is it both?\"\n\n\"Both!\" Thanquol had squirted the musk of fear, but it did not matter right now. What was important was that he preserve his life and his genius for the benefit of the skaven nation. Once he had gotten through the next few difficult moments, he would go about the business of turning the tables on these arrogant dullards. At the moment though preserving his skin took the highest priority.\n\n\"Why should we spare you?\"\n\n\"We have mighty armies! We can aid you in crushing mankind! We have knowledge of the human cities and human dispositions! We know many things!\"\n\n\"Perhaps you could spare this mutant's life and keep it as a jester!\" roared the creature with the daemon's face on its breastplate. Thanquol forced himself to bob his head in an appeasing manner, although inwardly he seethed and swore vengeance on the speaker as soon as the moment was right. If there was as much warpstone nearby as he suspected that moment would come soon.\n\n\"Or maybe we should nail it to our banners as a warning to the rest of its kind. I have met skaven before. I have fought with them. A nasty treacherous bunch they were too.\"\n\n\"Doubtless they were renegades,\" said Thanquol thinking quickly. \"True skaven always keep faith with their allies.\"\n\n\"That's a good joke,\" said daemon face. \"You shall be our jester!\"\n\n\"This one is a grey seer,\" said a Chaos warrior carrying a massive banner depicting a flayed human brandishing a sword. \"It is possible that it does speak for the Thirteen.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should spare it! Perhaps the warlord or his pet sorcerers should interrogate it!\"\n\nListen to this one, Thanquol prayed. He shows common sense. And doubtless the horde's leader would have the wisdom to negotiate with a grey seer.\n\n\"And we can always offer his soul to Tzeentch afterwards. The seers are said to be magicians and our mighty lord might appreciate such a tasty morsel!\"\n\nWhat have I let myself in for, Grey Seer Thanquol asked himself? Perhaps he should have tried the escape spell but before he knew it, the lancer had stopped, snatched him up and thrown him across his saddle like a sack of wheat. The others had surrounded Lurk and were herding him forwards with their weapons.\n\nIn heartbeats they were on their way into the heart of the oncoming Chaos horde. Thanquol's heart raced with fear, and his empty musk-glands hurt from the strain of trying to squirt. It was not a reassuring feeling.\n\nFelix entered the inner sanctum of the Temple of Grimnir. His fame had obviously proceeded him. The priests had made no fuss about letting him in. They had simply seemed surprised that any man should want to enter the place. It was dark and gloomy in here after the huge fire that burned bright in the entrance hall, and it took his eyes a few moments to adjust to the dimness.\n\nThe enormously thick stone walls muffled all sound. The air smelled of incense and the acrid odour of burned hair. This inner sanctum was empty save for a few old dwarfs in plain robes of red. They carried no weapons; their beards were long and bound with clips that showed the sign of two crossed axes. They seemed to do little else but pray and tend the enormous fire that burned constantly in a pit in the antechamber.\n\nFelix looked around. The ceiling would be considered low in a human temple but it was still three times his own height. Enormous stone sarcophagi lined the walls. Each was as tall as a man and carved to represent a dwarf lying flat on his back, a weapon clutched to his chest. These were the tombs of the Slayer Kings, Felix knew. For many generations the royal family of Karak Kadrin had been buried here.\n\nThe centre of the room was dominated by a massive altar over which loomed a statue of a mighty dwarf warrior with an axe held in each hand, standing with his foot on the neck of a dragon. The figure depicted was recognisably a Slayer. His beard was short. A massive crest towered over his head. A dwarf knelt before the altar, murmuring quiet prayers.\n\nOn the altar rested the Hammer of Firebeard. Just looking at it, Felix felt a spasm of pain pass through his fingers. He could still remember carrying it into battle against the great Bloodthirster of Karag Dum. Mortal man had not been meant to wield such a weapon, and he paid the price for it in agony. Sometimes, in the still small hours of the night, he wondered about this. Why, of all the men in the world, had the hammer allowed him to wield it? He was no hero. He had not even wanted to be there in Karag Dum, and he could have lived his entire life quite happily without ever seeing a Great Daemon of Chaos, let alone fighting one.\n\nThe Slayer rose to his feet and turned from the altar abruptly, not in the way a man would leave a shrine sacred to his god, but in the manner of a warrior who had been given a command by his general and goes at once to carry it out. As he passed, he looked at Felix. His face showed no surprise at seeing a human there in one of the most sacred sites of his people. Looking at him, Felix thought the dwarf possessed the bleakest eyes he had ever seen. His face might have been chiselled from granite. His features had a primitive massiveness to them of the sort sometimes seen in ancient druidical statues. His head had been recently shaved, save for a tiny strip of hair that might one day grow into a crest. His beard had been reduced to mere stubble.\n\nFelix made the sign of the hammer and advanced on the altar. There was no particular sign of the presence of the dwarf god. The altar was a massive structure carved of solid stone. The hammer appeared to be just a massive warhammer whose head bore the same dwarf runes as the altar itself. Had Felix himself not held the hammer and felt its power, he would have thought it only an impressive weapon and not some holy relic.\n\nOnce again, he asked himself why he was here. What had he hoped to gain by visiting the shrine? Some insight into the dwarfs, perhaps? A glimpse of the peculiar psychology that caused so many of them to shave their heads and set out to seek their dooms? It was a hard thing for him to understand, and he could not quite picture himself or any other man doing such a thing.\n\nOr perhaps he could. Men did self-destructive things all the time. They drank to excess and performed feats of foolish bravado. They became addicted to witchweed and weirdroot. They joined the cults of the dark gods of Chaos. They fought duels for the most petty and pointless of reasons. Felix sometimes recognised a perverse and self-destructive urge in himself. Perhaps dwarfs just possessed this to a greater degree, and, in typical dwarf fashion, formalised it more. Perhaps here he might look upon their god and understand why they did this.\n\nHe advanced to the front of the altar and knelt at the foot of the statue. The statue itself showed all the dwarf genius for stonework. It was carved to a level of detail that no human sculptor would have the patience or the skill to master. Borek had told him that this statue had been laboured over by five generations of master craftsmen, almost a thousand years as humans reckoned time.\n\nFelix inspected it closely, as if it held the key to some great mystery, as if by studying it he might come to understand what drove Slayers to do what they did. If the statue knew the answer to his questions, it kept an obstinate silence about it. Felix smiled sadly, thinking there was nothing here but old stonework. If these walls were permeated with the essence of millennia of sacrifice, as the dwarfs claimed, Felix could get no sense of it. What had he expected? He was a human, and the dwarf gods showed little enough interest in their own race, so why should they pay any attention to him?\n\nStill, he was in a holy place, and it would do no harm to risk a prayer while he was here. He could think of nothing to ask for, save that the old god grant Gotrek the brave doom he sought, and keep Felix alive to record it. For a moment, as his hands instinctively made the sign of the hammer, Felix thought he sensed something. A deepening of the silence in the place, a keenness coming over his senses, a sense of the presence of something ancient, vast and potent. He gazed up on the blank features of Grimnir once more but they were unchanged. The stern but empty eye sockets in the helm still looked out on the world without pity or understanding.\n\nFelix shook his head. Perhaps it all had been in his imagination. Best mention this to no one. He rose to his feet and almost reached out to touch the hammer for one last time, but as he did so his fingers began to tingle and he remembered all too vividly the pain of bearing the weapon. Perhaps that was the sign he waited for, he thought sourly. Or perhaps it was simply given to a man like him to bear a weapon like that only once in his life, and only for the mightiest of purposes. He did not know.\n\nIt made him think of his strange experience with the sword and the dragon. He had wanted to talk Max about it, but things had been touchy between himself and the magician. He suspected they were both jealous of each other over Ulrika. Felix resolved that when the opportunity arose he would discuss it. He did not look back as he left the shrine and stepped out into the street. It was time to get back to the palace. He knew they would be leaving the city soon." + }, + { + "title": "INTO THE MOUNTAINS", + "text": "Felix marched wearily along the mountain path. His chainmail shirt felt heavy and strange, now that he was wearing it again for the first time in days. He was glad to have it though. There were orcs in these mountains and he wanted all the protection he could get.\n\nAhead of him were Oleg and Standa. They flanked Ulrika, who was conspicuously ignoring him. She had accepted his apology for his drunkenness but now she was sulking again. Well, at least she had decided to come with him as far as the turn-off to Urskoy. All of the Kislevites wore leather armour and carried bows. They scanned the mountainside warily even though Peak Pass was supposedly safe territory. He guessed that just being in the mountains made them nervous. Their homes were the flat plains of Kislev, after all, and they were more used to being on horseback than afoot.\n\nWalking just behind them, leaning on a heavy oaken staff, was Max Schreiber. Max looked a dapper figure in the new robes of golden and yellow brocade he'd had tailored back in the city. He looked ill at ease here, and kept studying the path as if expecting an ambush any moment. Felix understood his fear all too well. The rumours back in Karak Kadrin spoke not only of the dragon but of orcs and goblins in the mountains. Felix had fought greenskins before and did not relish the prospect of another encounter with them.\n\nHe cast a glance back over his shoulder for reassurance. He was astonished to see that they had gathered companions as they had left the city. Four new Slayers had joined the party. Steg had joined them, as he had said he would back in the Iron Door. He had been lurking at the main gate of Karak Kadrin as they left. Ulli, the boastful young Slayer, had fallen in step with them a few hundred strides along the road. A repulsively ugly dwarf called Bjorni Bjornisson had greeted Ulrika with a knowing leer and begged permission to join them. When no one had answered he seemed to take it for granted and tagged along. Half a league later they had overtaken the hammer-wielding dwarf Felix had seen in the Temple of Grimnir. He seemed to know who they were and lengthened his stride to keep up.\n\nGotrek strode along, scowling grimly. His axe was slung over his shoulder and he appeared to be doing his best to ignore his comrades. Snorri Nosebiter chuckled as Bjorni Bjornisson bawled out the ninety-seventh verse of some bawdy song which involved a Slayer, a troll and a convent full of Shallyite nuns among other things. Bjorni was singing in the common tongue so they might all have the benefit of his humour. Felix was astonished by the imagination he showed. He doubted that half the things the Slayer sang were even physically possible.\n\nBehind them rode Malakai. He drove a cart full of mysterious equipment which he refused to let anybody see. As the cart bounced along the rutted road, Felix could hear the clatter of metal on metal, so he knew that the engineer's days at the forge had produced something, though he had no idea what. Every so often the dwarf flexed the reins and the two small pit ponies pulled the heavy cart a little harder.\n\nFelix smiled sourly. It was his suggestion that the Kislevites should try riding the ponies, the only horseflesh available in the city of the Slayer King, that had put him in the doghouse with Ulrika this time. She had not wanted to see the joke. He guessed that she was already embarrassed enough by having to accompany the Slayers after all, and his comment had been all that it took to goad her to fury. This insight had come rather too late to do him any good.\n\nBehind the wagon came Steg, who Felix occasionally saw sneaking peeks at the wagon whenever they stopped. It was only the presence of the last two Slayers, Ulli and the silent newcomer, that kept him from investigating. Felix did not know which was worse, Bjorni's singing or Ulli's incessant boasting. At least the last dwarf, the nameless one, was quiet. There was that to be thankful for.\n\nHe supposed there were other things to be grateful for as well. It was a beautiful day. The mountain air was fresh and pure. The sky was clear and blue with not a cloud in sight. Mountain flowers bloomed along the side of the pass. Had it not been for their eventual destination Felix might almost have enjoyed the walk. In his career as Gotrek's henchman he had been in far less prepossessing places.\n\nHere the Peak Pass was wide and easy to travel. It descended into the plains of the eastern Empire and joined the trade road through the province of Osterland. The path was wide and paved with cracked flagstones that testified to the length of time dwarfs had been using the route. Felix would have liked to follow this path back down into the lands of men, but his oath to follow Gotrek and his desire to be with Ulrika compelled him to do otherwise.\n\nSoon they would turn northwards to take the Old High Road to Karak Ungor, into the valleys haunted by the dragon and by man-hating orcs. He did his best to forget this and concentrate on his surroundings. Copses of pine trees darkened the mountain sides. Smoke rose from where dwarf charcoal burners were at work. Here and there along higher trails herds of goats and sheep were watched over by dwarf shepherds. It was a wonder to Felix to see members of the Elder Race engaged in such mundane professions.\n\nHe always thought of them as Slayers and engineers and diggers of tunnels. To him, as to most men, dwarfs were miners, dwellers in deep tunnels, makers of fine weapons. It was hard now, despite the evidence of his own eyes, to dispel that image. Still, he supposed like everyone else, the Elder Race had to eat, and there certainly were dwarf brewers, butchers and bakers. He had seen evidence of this with his own eyes back in Karak Kadrin. He supposed his own experience with dwarfs had up till now been limited to the more exotic types the mountain people produced: Slayers, scholars, engineers, priests. He had never visited a fully functioning dwarf city, only the tiny colony that dwelled amid the ruins of Karag Eight Peaks, and the enormous desolate labyrinth of Karag Dum. The huge industrial complex at the Lonely Tower that had produced the Spirit of Grungni was far from typical, he knew. It was a secret kept even from the majority of the Elder Race.\n\nHe flexed his shoulders to settle his pack more comfortably. He had considered asking Malakai if he could put it on the cart, but had decided against it for two reasons. The Slayer engineer was touchy enough at the moment, and he wanted to have all his stuff on him if for some reason he got separated from the rest of the party. He had learned enough in his years of adventuring to be prepared for the worst.\n\nHe shook his head, realising that he was simply trying to distract himself from thinking about Ulrika. He knew that if she was being unreasonable, he was too, and he was damned if he could find any reason for it. He just seemed unduly sensitive to her behaviour. It was as if everything she did had a magnified effect on it. What, in any other human being, he would have dismissed as a minor foible, somehow became in her a major flaw. Words, which from anyone else would have been simply a joke, became subtle insults and putdowns, to be brooded over and analysed in depth. The fact that Max was walking closer to her than he was became a threat, and made him unreasonably jealous. Part of him knew that this undue sensitivity was because he was in love, and that perhaps her odd behaviour came about for a similar reason. But part of him went ahead and acted on his own unreasonable impulses anyway. This was something the love poets never mentioned, and he felt annoyed by it. Perhaps it meant that he was not really in love with her after all.\n\nOr perhaps the love poets simplified things, to make them neater and to turn them into better stories. And perhaps they were not being dishonest either. Memory played tricks. He remembered his first love Kirsten fondly, had forgotten most of the bad things about their relationship and idolised the good ones. Yet he knew that he and Kirsten had had bad days, and had argued and had simply not wanted to talk to each other. It was only human. And he had cared about her in spite of the bad things that sometimes happened between them. Sometimes he suspected it was easier and more pleasant to live with the memories of a past love than it was to be involved in a new one. After all, he could edit his memories the way he had once edited his poems, selecting the good parts, polishing them till they shone. Reality always had flaws. Bellies rumbled when you made love. Words that should be spoken sometimes never are. Real people were contradictory, annoying and sometimes selfish. Just like he was, he reminded himself.\n\nHe knew that Ulrika was being unreasonable. He knew that he was in the right. He knew that he should wait for her to come and apologise. His pride demanded it, and so did this strange near subliminal anger. Yet somehow he found his legs carrying himself forward to her side, and his lips murmuring an apology, and his hand reaching out to take hers and squeeze her fingers.\n\nAnd just as strangely as everything else, he found that this made him, if not happy, at least content." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "The camp fire burned. Felix helped himself to another slice of waybread and spiced dwarf sausage. He looked across at Ulrika and smiled. She smiled back. They had made their peace that day, at least for a little while. Max Schreiber was a shadowy form on the far side of the flames. He sat cross-legged on the ground, breathing deeply, seemingly engaged in some mystical exercise. Felix did not know why but he felt certain that despite the fact he appeared to be asleep Max was well aware of all that went on around him. Oleg and Standa kept guard a few paces off, facing out into the darkness so as not to ruin their night vision. Feeling the wine he had drunk earlier go right to his bladder, Felix excused himself and got up to make water.\n\nOn his return he paused to observe the dwarfs for a moment. Makaisson sat glaring into the flames, while his fingers toyed idly with the innards of some small clockwork device. Beside the engineer sat Bjorni, Ulli and the silent dwarf. As Felix passed Bjorni summoned up the courage to do what Felix had wanted to do all day.\n\n\"What's your name?\" he asked the stranger.\n\n\"Grimme,\" answered the newcomer, and his tone and his features were more than enough to prevent any further questions. Bjorni decided that this just made him a better audience.\n\n\"Well, Grimme, you might have heard stories about me and the three elf maidens. It's not true. Well not entirely true. There were only two of them, and only one was elven, well half-elven actually, and I didn't find that out till later, though the pointy ears should have been a giveaway but she was wearing a head scarf you see. And I was drunk, and all cats are grey in the dark and\u2026\"\n\nIf Grimme heard he gave no sign. He simply continued to stare morosely into the fire. Felix tried to tune Bjorni out. He and Ulli seemed to have become soul mates. They at least provided each other with an audience for their endless boasting. Bjorni had an interminable source of anecdotes about his love life. Ulli talked of nothing except the fights he had been in, and the battles he was going to win.\n\n\"\u2026and then I said, bring me a donkey,\" Bjorni said. \"You should have seen the look on her face\u2026\"\n\nFelix glanced over at the other Slayers to see how they were taking it. Grimme simply glared bleakly into the fire, lost in some inner world of misery and torment. Felix wanted to talk to him but he knew his attentions would not be welcome.\n\nSteg sat beneath the wagon, whittling a piece of wood with his knife, seemingly unaware of the casual glances Makaisson directed at him occasionally. Beyond the wagon, Snorri Nosebiter and Gotrek kept watch. Felix walked over to see how it was going.\n\n\"There is a stranger coming,\" said Snorri Nosebiter. \"Snorri can smell him.\"\n\nGotrek grunted. \"I have known that for the last five minutes. It is a dwarf that comes and one we'll soon be having words with.\"\n\nFelix knew better than to question Gotrek or ask how he knew what he did. Over the years he had developed a tremendous respect for the keenness of the Slayer's senses. In the dark and wild places of the world, the dwarf was at home in a way a man could never be.\n\nFelix glanced over in the direction Gotrek indicated with a jerk of his thumb. There was something moving out there. In the light of the two moons Felix could see two shadowy outlines. As they came closer, he could hear the clip-clop of hooves on stone.\n\nAs the stranger approached Felix saw that it was a dwarf leading a mule.\n\n\"Greetings, strangers,\" he said. \"Can an old prospector share your fire?\"\n\n\"Aye, you can,\" Gotrek said. \"If you tell us your name.\"\n\n\"I am Malgrim, son of Hurni, of clan Magrest. Who might you be?\"\n\n\"I am Gotrek, son of Gurni.\"\n\n\"Snorri Nosebiter.\"\n\nThe prospector was within sword's reach now. Felix could see he was a typical dwarf, short but broad. He wore some sort of hooded jerkin which covered his head, and his long beard reached almost to his knees. He had a pickaxe in one hand, and by the way he held it Felix guessed he was proficient at using it as a weapon. There was a shovel slung over the pack on the mule's back, along with the sort of mesh pans prospectors used to filter gold from river water. The dwarf's face was seamed and his eyes were wary. They went a trifle wider when he saw that Gotrek and Snorri were Slayers, and wider still when he saw that Felix was a human.\n\n\"Two Slayers travelling with a man of the Empire,\" he said. \"I am sure there is a tale there.\"\n\nFelix accompanied the dwarfs back to the fire. Malgrim looked at the five Slayers and then at Gotrek and Snorri. \"I had not heard the kinfolk mustered for war,\" he said. \"No battle-banners have passed among the mountain clans.\"\n\n\"There is no mustering,\" Gotrek said and slumped down beside the fire.\n\nFelix realised that Malgrim thought the only reason so many Slayers could have assembled was to answer a call to battle.\n\n\"A pity,\" said Malgrim, \"for there is great need. The orcs of the mountains assemble for battle. Ugrek Manflayer has organised all the tribes under his banner.\"\n\nFelix shivered. Even in distant Altdorf, he had heard tales of the Manflayer. His name was used to terrify naughty children. He was said to be a gigantic orc who skinned his captives alive and used their hides to make his clothing. Felix had always considered the tale merely a legend, but the prospector sounded convinced of his existence, and he did not seem like a dwarf who merely recounted traveller's tales for the sake of it.\n\nTo Felix's surprise it was Max Schreiber who spoke next. \"There are tales of a greenskin shaman in the mountains. He is said to have powerful magic. I heard he too follows the Manflayer.\"\n\n\"Well, if they get in our way, we'll show them what their innards look like!\" bellowed Ulli. \"We are on our way to slay the dragon Skjalandir.\"\n\nThe prospector glanced around him and slowly nodded his head, as if understanding were dawning. \"I had wondered what would bring seven Slayers into the mountains when no battle-banners fly. It is a mighty death indeed that you seek for the dragon will give you one. Since his reawakening he has scoured the High Valleys and made of the Manling Vales a desolation. Still, I wonder if you will even catch sight of him for the greenskins are numerous and there are human bandits in the hills too.\"\n\n\"Things are grim in the mountains,\" Felix said. If Malgrim heard the irony in his voice he gave no sign.\n\n\"Aye. There were always wild hill men but they have been joined by desperate folk driven from their farms by the depredations of the orcs and the firedrake. Life is short and cheap in the heights right now. Even more so than usual.\"\n\n\"Why does Ungrimm Ironfist not gather his army and restore the peace?\" said Felix.\n\nMalgrim's laughter was joined by the other dwarfs. \"It is Ungrimm's duty to keep Peak Pass clear, and prevent the orc hordes of the east from passing through into the lands of men. If he was to desert this vale with his force and the greenskins got word of it, then an orc horde would soon be rampaging through your Empire's eastern provinces.\"\n\n\"Why is that important to the dwarfs? Why should they care whether Osterland is invaded?\"\n\nMalgrim looked shocked. \"There are binding oaths and treaties of friendship between our peoples. Humans may forget the old ties, but the kinfolk do not. As our ancestors swore so shall we do.\"\n\n\"Aye, tis so!\" bellowed Ulli.\n\n\"Also,\" Malgrim added, \"this pass is ours. We will not allow the greenskins free passage through it.\"\n\nFelix could see that all of this was simply a long-winded way of saying that the dwarfs would not send forces to clear out the High Peak Road. As he considered the prospector's words another thought struck him. If the Elder Race felt this way, why would they even consider sending troops to aid the Kislevites? Simple reflection gave him the answer. The threat of Chaos was of an order of magnitude greater than mere greenskin tribes raiding into human and dwarf lands. If the northlands fell before the onslaught of the hordes then all the southlands would fall soon afterwards. At least, he hoped the dwarfs thought this way. There was little hope of help if they did not.\n\n\"I say we stop and slaughter some greenskins on our way to face the dragon!\" said Ulli.\n\n\"You can if ye want tae,\" Makaisson said. \"Ah hae business wae that big beastie and it wullnae wait.\"\n\n\"The greenskins will still be there after the dragon is dealt with. That's if any of us are alive to care,\" Bjorni said.\n\n\"If any orcs get in our way we will kill them,\" Gotrek said. \"Otherwise we go to kill the dragon.\"\n\n\"Snorri thinks that's a fine plan,\" said Snorri Nosebiter, then added wistfully, \"still, Snorri wouldn't mind slaughtering a few greenies.\"\n\n\"It's late,\" Gotrek said. \"Those who aren't on guard should get some sleep.\"\n\nThe prospector nodded and laid himself down by the fire. Felix returned to where Ulrika and the other humans were sitting.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" Ulrika asked.\n\n\"The Slayers can't decide whether we should cleanse the mountains of orcs or dragons first.\"\n\n\"Why not do both?\" asked Oleg ironically.\n\n\"Hush!\" Felix said. \"They might hear you.\"\n\nAll around great bonfires blazed. From nearby Thanquol could hear the disquieting roars of beastmen and the thunder of huge drums. He could smell tens of thousands of beastmen nearby and thousands of the black armoured Chaos warriors. He knew then that he was in the encampment of the largest army he had encountered since he himself had commanded the massive skaven force that attacked Nuln. He also suspected that in terms of sheer raw power this monstrous force completely outclassed even that mighty skaven horde. He knew enough of the followers of Chaos to understand that one for one they were more than a match for all but the most puissant of skaven.\n\nAll around he could smell warpstone, and his magician's senses told him that the winds of magic blew strong around this army. It was worrying, for he knew that this force possessed not only mere physical might, but a terrible magical potency as well. He knew that even at the peak of his powers he would be hard pressed to overcome the sorcerers gathered here, and he was far from the unassailable height of his awesome abilities.\n\nHe could tell just from the flow of energies around him that his captors were approaching the heart of the horde, the nexus around which all this energy flowed. As they came closer he sensed the presence of mighty beings, creatures of a potency he had not encountered since he stood before the Council of Thirteen themselves.\n\nAt the heart of the camp was a great gathering of armoured Chaos warriors. Their steeds roamed nearby as the masters squatted beside camp fires that burned yellow and green and other colours that spoke of magical origin. They talked to each other in their debased tongue and Thanquol could tell just from their tone that they were boasting of conquests to come. Just looking at them filled his heart with fear and tightened his musk glands. He glanced around, suddenly grateful that Lurk was there. The presence of another skaven was somehow reassuring even to Grey Seer Thanquol in the centre of this awful force.\n\nAhead of them, he was sure they would find the war leaders of the horde. He sensed their presence before he saw them, and when they came into view he knew his impressions were correct.\n\nA huge armoured figure lounged in a massive throne of crystal that pulsed with subdued yellows and greens. The throne floated a fingerbreadth over the ground. Using his sorcerer's senses Thanquol could see that both the man and his seat were permeated with the energies of Chaos. Across his knees was a massive two-handed broadsword covered in yellowish glowing runes. Thanquol did not have to be told that the weapon was enwrapped with the mightiest of killing magics. He could see this for himself, just as he could see that the armour was designed to act not merely as a shield against weapons but against sorcery too. The man's armour was golden with greenish rondels and inscribed with runes that Thanquol knew were sacred to Tzeentch.\n\nFlanking the throne were two figures. They were lean and vulturish, unarmoured and swathed in huge cloaks whose folds gave them a resemblance to wings. Their skin had an albino whiteness that was close to the grey seer's own. Looking closely at their thin, hungry features and hellishly glowing eyes Thanquol could see that they were twins, identical in all ways except one. The one on the general's right hand side held a gold sheathed staff in his right hand. The one on the left held a staff of ebony and silver in his left hand. The hand which held the gold-sheathed staff had long talonlike nails of gold. The talons of the left-hand wizard were encased in silver. That the two were potent sorcerers was immediately obvious to Thanquol. Unwilling as he was to concede that any save the Council of Thirteen might be stronger than he in the use of magic, he knew that he would need to consume prodigious amounts of warpstone to overcome either one of these two in sorcerous battle. If they worked together, he feared to consider the powers they might wield.\n\nThe Chaos warlord glared balefully down at Thanquol. The grey seer at once prostrated himself, and said, \"I bring greetings, mighty warlord, from the Council of Thirteen.\"\n\n\"Your masters knew of our coming then, grey seer?\" said the warlord. Thanquol thought it better to lie than to admit the truth. He sensed tendrils of mystical energy coming from the two wizards who flanked the warlord. Immediately he masked his thoughts as best he could. Since he was a grey seer, he knew this was very well indeed.\n\n\"They sensed a mighty gathering of forces and sent me northwards to investigate.\"\n\nWell, it could almost be true, thought Thanquol. \"Alone and unaccompanied. That is most unusual,\" said the magus with the gold staff.\n\n\"I am accompanied by my bodyguard, Lurk Snitchtongue, and protected by my own mighty magic. What need have I of any other protection?\" Thanquol said, a hint of his old arrogance returning.\n\n\"What need indeed,\" said the sorcerer with the ebony staff. Thanquol noticed the hint of mockery in his voice and vowed that one day he would make the magician pay for it. How dare this hairless ape make light of the greatest sorcerer in skavendom. \"Tis true your bodyguard shows signs of the blessings of our lord Tzeentch. The Great Mutator has touched him. He has the favour of the Changer of the Ways.\"\n\nThanquol glared over at Lurk, who preened himself visibly at these words. Black rage ate at the grey seer's bowels. Thanquol wondered if Lurk had been consorting with the followers of the Chaos Powers while he was in the Wastes. That would explain the changes in him, for sure. If this were the case he would be made to pay for his apostasy to the Horned Rat. Another score to settle, Thanquol told himself. Assuming he survived this encounter, which at the moment looked by no means certain.\n\n\"You lead this great host?\" Thanquol asked, out of politeness.\n\n\"I am Arek Demonclaw,\" said the Chaos warrior, \"Chosen of Tzeentch. These are Kelmain Blackstaff and Lhoigor Goldenrod, my spellcrafters.\"\n\n\"I thank you for this information, mighty one,\" Thanquol said diplomatically. \"I am Grey Seer Thanquol and I abase myself a thousand times before you and offer you the alliance of the Council of Thirteen.\"\n\nThanquol knew he was being a little premature here but he was determined to say anything he needed to get himself out of this trap. \"We have no need of alliances, Grey Seer Thanquol. What you see here is but the vanguard of a greater host. The Powers march forth to claim the lands of men once more. Those who do not abase themselves before the Powers of Ruin, and most especially my master Tzeentch, will be destroyed. This world will be cleansed and remade in the image we desire and all the false gods and their followers will be swept away.\"\n\nThere was something in Arek's voice that compelled belief. His words almost convinced even Thanquol, but the grey seer was too wily a sorcerer and too well schooled in the ways of magic not to recognise a potent spell when he encountered one. He dismissed the hypnotic compulsion in the voice by an effort of will. A glance at Lurk told him that his henchman was making no such effort. He looked at Arek enthralled.\n\nThanquol could understand why. Lurk was ensnared by the Gift of Tzeentch the warlord was using, and his feeble mind was enthralled by the dark visions of conquest that hovered behind the Chaos warrior's words. He had even raised his head from the dirt to hear them better. The two sorcerers looked down at him with mocking interest. Thanquol concentrated on matters at hand, deciding he had best find out what was going on, while his enemies seemed in the mood to answer his questions.\n\n\"All four of the Powers march then?\"\n\n\"Aye. Tis the way. When one makes a move, the others must respond, lest they lose some advantage.\"\n\nThat made sense to a skaven as astute as Thanquol. It was exactly the way the clans of his own race manoeuvred back in Skavenblight. He sensed that he was beginning to understand what was happening here, and might even be able to use it to his advantage.\n\nPerhaps he could even see the reason why these Chaos worshippers had spared him.\n\n\"There are advantages to be gained in alliances,\" he said. \"My own god is mighty and has great powers. My people possess vast armies.\"\n\n\"Your god is weaker than ours, Grey Seer Thanquol, but his aid might prove useful. Your armies might join our own in time. Certainly, we are the only ones who will make this offer. The followers of Khorne are too brutish. The followers of Nurgle care only for the spreading of their foul plagues, and the followers of Slaanesh are too wrapped up in their own pursuit of pleasure to consider aught but that.\"\n\n\"I will convey your words to the Council of Thirteen and explain all that you have said to them.\" Thanquol mouthed the empty words expertly, still worrying about what had been done to Lurk.\n\n\"See that you do, Grey Seer Thanquol, and your rewards will be great.\"\n\n\"I thank you mighty warlord.\" Suddenly a thought struck Thanquol. He doubted that his request would be granted but he could see no harm in asking. \"I sense the substance known as warpstone is carried by your army.\"\n\n\"It is one of our master's greatest gifts and is used in sorcery and in the making of weapons.\"\n\n\"We too use it for such purposes, which I take as a sign of our common purpose,\" said Thanquol, pleased with his own eloquence.\n\n\"Do you wish some?\" asked the sorcerer with the golden staff. Thanquol could not quite believe his luck. He licked his lips greedily.\n\n\"Yes-yes!\" he said.\n\n\"Then you shall have it.\" The sorcerer flexed his fingers and the air in front of him glowed. Particles of greenish dust flowed together forming a ball the size of Thanquol's fist. With another gesture the mage sent it spinning towards the grey seer. Thanquol knew instantly what it was, and snatched it out of the air. His paw tingled as he closed it around a sphere of the purest warpstone he had ever encountered. Hastily he pushed it into his pouch. He could not believe the fools had just handed him the key to so much power. Some inner instinct, which he had long ago learned to trust, told him to be careful. Perhaps all of this was merely a trap. Still, he could not quite see what the Chaos worshippers had to gain. He was already in their power.\n\n\"An enclave of your kind is near,\" Arek said. \"The place called Hell Pit. I will instruct my riders to escort you there. See that you bear our words to your rulers, Grey Seer Thanquol, and speak fairly of us.\"\n\n\"Rest assured I will,\" Thanquol said, offering up a silent prayer to the Horned Rat thanking him for his deliverance. It looked like he and Lurk were going to get away from the horde with their lives.\n\nThe suspicious part of him, which had kept him alive so long, told him that it wasn't going to be quite that easy.\n\nFelix watched as Malgrim rolled up his blankets and placed them in the pack on the mule's back. The dwarf looked at them and then shook his head.\n\n\"I'd tell you all to be careful, but it would be daft to say that to seven Slayers and a rememberer, so I'll just thank you for the use of your fire, your food and your company.\"\n\n\"Have you any news of the road ahead?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Aye,\" said the prospector. \"About a day's march ahead, you'll find the village of Gelt. It's an odd place, a meeting place for prospectors, and a trading post for the mountain-folk. There's a deep mine there still. And an inn. I suggest you take advantage of it, for you'll be seeing the last friendly faces you're going to see for a while.\"\n\nMalgrim paused and considered his next words. \"That's if the orcs haven't razed the place to the ground.\"" + }, + { + "title": "AN ORCISH ENCOUNTER", + "text": "Felix strode down the path into the small valley. He was pleased to see that Gelt still stood. It was a placid enough looking little settlement, if you discounted the high stone walls, topped with a wooden palisade, and the guard towers that loomed above the walls. It had been built on a knob of rock rising in the middle of the valley. From his vantage point on the trail above the village, Felix could see smoke drifting upwards through holes cut in the turf roofed stone cottages. There was a large central structure he took to be the inn. On a ledge above the village was what he first took to be another watchtower and eventually realised was the fortified entrance to the mine. A gravel path ran all the way down the hillside to the gates of the town.\n\nJudging from the size of the place several hundred people lived there, and by the look of the fortifications, it would be a hard place to take by storm. He could see humans and dwarfs walking the stony streets in about equal numbers.\n\n\"Looks like a safe enough place,\" he said aloud, as much to reassure himself as for the sake of speaking.\n\n\"Aye, manling, providing the attackers don't have siege engines,\" said Gotrek.\n\n\"Or powerful sorcery,\" said Max Schreiber.\n\n\"Or aren't mounted on flying monsters,\" added Ulrika.\n\nFelix glanced around at his companions. \"Sorry I spoke,\" he said eventually. \"I hate to destroy your cheery mood.\"\n\n\"Snorri is looking forward to a drop of ale,\" said Snorri Nosebiter. \"Old Hargrim said the Broken Pickaxe brews the best ale in the mountains.\"\n\n\"Then what are we waiting for?\" Gotrek said. \"Let's get down there.\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Felix Jaeger,\" Ulli said. \"No orc would dare attack Gelt while I am there.\"\n\n\"Wonder if they have any bar girls?\" Bjorni said. \"I could use a little company.\"\n\n\"Maybe there'll be a game of chance,\" said Steg. \"I brought my own special dice.\"\n\nGrimme merely shook his head, sucked his teeth, and marched stolidly down the hill. At the rear, Standa and Oleg glanced over their shoulders. They had their strung bows held ready in their hands, but there was no perceptible threat.\n\n\"Go on,\" Felix said. \"We should be safe for this evening, at least.\"\n\n\"If the dragon doesn't come get us,\" Oleg said.\n\n\"Look on the bright side,\" Felix said. Misgivings and forebodings aside, everybody looked a little happier once they were past the dwarf sentries on the gate.\n\nThe Broken Pickaxe had a large common room. A roaring fire served to keep out the chill of the mountain night. Felix glanced around at the crowd. Their party was attracting a lot of attention, which wasn't surprising when you considered it. How often did these people see seven Slayers travelling in the company of five humans?\n\nThe crowd itself was an unusual one. It seemed to consist of an equal mix of humans and dwarfs. Most of the dwarfs had the pale faces and scrubbed clean look of miners after work. The humans were a more mixed bunch. Some of the tougher looking ones wore the warm leather garments favoured by high mountain prospectors. Others looked like peddlers and shopkeepers. None of them looked exactly prosperous, but none looked starved either.\n\nA silence had spread across the room as the Slayers took up one long table. This close to Karak Kadrin no one was going to be stupid enough to object. All of them knew exactly what the Slayers were and what they were capable of when annoyed. Felix had joined Ulrika, Max and the two bodyguards at the table next to the Slayers. Some semblance of normal business was restored when Gotrek called for ale, an order swiftly seconded by Snorri Nosebiter and Malakai Makaisson.\n\nA fat, prosperous looking dwarf with a balding head, rosy cheeks and a long greying beard brought the ale over himself. Judging by the proprietorial air he cast over the place, he was obviously the owner of the inn.\n\n\"You'll be wanting rooms for the night?\" he asked.\n\n\"The Slayers will sleep in the common room,\" Gotrek said. \"The humans might want their own chambers.\"\n\n\"We do,\" said Ulrika, glancing over at Felix. Max noticed this and looked away, adding, \"I'll take a room to myself.\"\n\n\"Me and Standa will stay in the common room,\" Oleg said tugging morosely at his moustache. Standa beamed approval of his comrade's decision. Ulrika agreed.\n\n\"I'll see the best rooms are aired and the beds turned out. There's a nip in the air, so you'll be wanting a fire, no doubt?\"\n\nFelix could imagine that the bill was increasing with every word, but so what, he thought. This might be his last chance of a comfortable bed in this life, so why stint tonight?\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"And you'll be wanting food too, no doubt?\"\n\n\"Aye. Bring us the stew we smell, and bread and cheese,\" said Ulli.\n\n\"And more ale,\" added Snorri. \"Snorri has a thirst.\"\n\n\"And you'll be paying for the rooms and the food now, will you?\"\n\nThe innkeeper was obviously taking no chances with their absconding without paying, even if they were Slayers. Possibly even because they were Slayers. After all, they were dwarfs who had somehow failed to abide by the normal dwarf code of honour. Malakai Makaisson dug into his purse and gold changed hands. Felix could not see how much but the innkeeper's eyes widened, and he became particularly jovial. It looked like Malakai thought the same way as Felix did about staying in the inn.\n\n\"And that'll keep the beers comin' ah nicht,\" said Malakai. \"And ah'll be sleeping in the wagon so there's no need to clear me a space in the common room.\"\n\nSteg looked a little disgruntled by that, but after a sip of the ale, his expression became slightly more contented.\n\n\"That it will,\" said the innkeeper and bellowed instructions to his staff. Bjorni's eyes widened as a busty barmaid approached. Within seconds, he was slapping her rump, and whispering in her ear. If the barmaid was offended she gave no sign.\n\nFelix sampled a drop of the ale, and nodded. \"Malgrim was right,\" he said. \"This is fine ale.\"\n\n\"It's not bad,\" allowed Gotrek, which for the Slayer was high praise indeed.\n\nNow that he had been paid, the innkeeper seemed more inclined to be sociable. \"And you'll be taking the High Road to Radasdorp then?\"\n\n\"If it's on the way to the dragon's mountain we will,\" bellowed Ulli, obviously taking a great deal of pleasure from the buzz of conversation this started.\n\n\"So it's the dragon you're after,\" said the innkeeper.\n\n\"Aye,\" Malakai said. \"We're gannae kill the great big scaly beastie!\"\n\n\"It's been tried before,\" said the innkeeper. Felix looked over, his interest suddenly piqued.\n\n\"By whom?\" he asked.\n\n\"Half a dozen Slayers have passed through here in the past couple of years - not all at once mind,\" said the innkeeper. \"None of them ever came back.\"\n\n\"The orcs probably ate them,\" bellowed one of the humans.\n\n\"Or skinned them,\" added another man ominously.\n\n\"Aye,\" said an ancient looking miner. \"That'd be likely enough. One of the Slayers was found skinned alive and nailed to a tree by the roadside. They reckon the Manflayer is using his hide for a new pair of boots now.\"\n\n\"Another's head was found on a spike up near the Mirnek Pass. The crows was pecking his eyes out so they was.\"\n\n\"And there was one of those human knights, on a big black charger,\" said the innkeeper. \"Said he had a magic sword and a dragon-killing lance.\"\n\n\"He never came back either,\" one of the dwarfs said gloomily.\n\n\"Most likely the orcs got him too,\" said the first man who spoke.\n\n\"Or the human bandits. Henrik Richter is a nasty piece of work,\" said the innkeeper. Seeing Felix's enquiring glance, he said, \"He's the local bandit chief these days. He's been forging the human bands into a small army. Since the Manflayer came the humans have needed it to survive. They say there'll be war for control of the high country between those two soon. I can believe it.\"\n\n\"It sounds like the High Road has become very dangerous,\" Felix said.\n\n\"This was never the safest of places to live,\" said the innkeeper. \"But ever since the dragon came back it's got downright dangerous. I reckon it's only a matter of time before it attacks Gelt. It's said to have destroyed all the other towns along the High Road now.\"\n\n\"You mean we could just wait here and it will come to us?\" Felix asked hopefully.\n\n\"Aye. Most likely.\"\n\n\"Ah dinnae hae time tae waste. I want that beastie deid, and ah want it soon.\"\n\n\"There's more glory in seeking it out!\" shouted Ulli. \"And if any greenskin or any human tries to stop us, they'll get a blow from my axe.\"\n\n\"Och, if any of them try to stop us, ah hae a nasty wee surprise for them,\" Malakai said. Felix did not doubt that was true. He had seen ample evidence of the Engineer's genius at devising weapons. Of course, most of Malakai's weapons were experimental and subject to malfunction. Some of them might prove as dangerous to their wielders as to any foe.\n\n\"And what might that be?\" asked a large burly man who looked more like a mercenary than a prospector.\n\n\"Onybody that's interested can attack us and find oot,\" said Malakai with a hint of satisfaction. Felix was now really curious about what the engineer had up his sleeve.\n\n\"There are plenty here in the mountains who will take you up on that,\" said the man with a sneer. Felix wondered if this fool was tired of living. It was not wise to sneer at any Slayer, even one as relatively even tempered as Malakai was.\n\n\"They're mare than welcome tae,\" was all the engineer said in response, and returned to glugging down his beer.\n\nThe innkeeper said, \"You pay no attention to Peter. He is a surly chap at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. He used to make a living selling all along the High Road. Now there's damn few left to sell to. The dragon's seen to that.\"\n\n\"We'll change that!\" bellowed Ulli. His boast was met with laughter from the other tables. For some reason, the dwarfs present refused to take the young Slayer as seriously as the others. Ulli did not seem to mind as long as he was the centre of attention. \"You may laugh but you'll see. You won't mock us after the dragon is dead.\"\n\n\"You'll be dead as well,\" shouted someone and the others laughed.\n\n\"What of it,\" shouted Ulli. \"Everybody dies.\"\n\n\"Some sooner than others,\" said Peter.\n\nBjorni had the barmaid on his knee now. She was running her fingers through his beard while he looked up at her with a lascivious leer. A moment later the woman was tumbled off his knee by a huge man with a scarred face and massive hands. He was without a doubt one of the bouncers.\n\n\"Leave Essie alone,\" he said, his voice flat and menacing.\n\n\"Let it be, Otto,\" said the innkeeper. \"You know this always happens.\"\n\n\"What is that to you?\" asked Bjorni innocently.\n\n\"She's my wife.\"\n\nFelix groaned aloud. He had seen women like Essie before when he and Gotrek worked the taverns of Nuln. Women married to large violent men who thrived on their jealous attention. He couldn't understand why they did it, but they did. The bouncer looked over at him.\n\n\"What are you whining about, boy?\" he said. Felix looked up at him. The man was big. Perhaps a head taller than he was, and broad in proportion. His arms looked almost as large as Gotrek's.\n\n\"Some ale went down the wrong way.\"\n\n\"Watch it or I'll take that tankard and stick it up your\u2026\"\n\nFelix looked at him, and started to rise from his seat, but it was already too late. Bjorni had taken his fist and whacked Otto between the legs while the bouncer wasn't looking. The big man groaned and bent double, and as he went over Bjorni took his tankard and smacked him hard on the head. Otto's eyes crossed and he slumped forward unconscious.\n\n\"Not the first jealous husband I've had to deal with,\" said Bjorni tugging lasciviously at the wart on his nose. \"Now, love, what say you and me find a quiet corner and\u2026\"\n\nThe girl was bent down over Otto and shrieking. \"Otto, what has that brute done to you?\"\n\n\"He'll be all right in the morning,\" Bjorni said. \"Now how about we go behind the woodshed. There's a big gold piece in it for you if\u2026\"\n\n\"Go to hell,\" said Essie.\n\nBjorni shrugged and sat down again. \"Another ale, landlord. My jar is suddenly empty.\"\n\nThe innkeeper was looking at the Slayers warily again. Still, with his biggest bouncer down, and the newcomers not seeming about to start any more trouble, he decided it was best to humour them.\n\n\"More ale, it is,\" he said.\n\n\"I'll help you carry him upstairs,\" said Steg to Essie, moving over to the slumped body and making as if to pick him up.\n\n\"Don't bother,\" said the girl. \"I don't need any of your help.\"\n\nSteg shrugged and dropped the body once more. Felix wondered if he was the only one to notice that the bouncer's purse was suddenly missing from his belt.\n\n\"I think I'll just go for a walk,\" said Steg.\n\n\"Ah think ah'll go with ye,\" Malakai said. \"It's aboot time for me to turn in anyway.\"\n\nIf Steg was disappointed at missing the opportunity to search Makaisson's wagon, he did not show it.\n\n\"Time for bed,\" Felix said, looking over at Ulrika to see if she agreed with him. She nodded and they made their way up the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Grund Hugenose of the Broken Nose tribe looked down on the village. His orc eyes were much keener than any human's, and even by the dim light of the two moons he could make out all he needed. From his vantage point, he could see the wagon in the courtyard. It told him that someone would be leaving the small fortified outpost soon. That meant manflesh, and steel weapons, and maybe gold and rotgut booze. He slipped back from the cliff edge, and headed up the trail.\n\nThere was no need to tell the Manflayer about this, he decided. It was a small party and the spoils would be barely enough for him and the lads. He would get his warband together, and make sure that whatever was on that wagon would be his before the next night's stars shone.\n\nFelix awoke to the sound of metal ringing against metal outside the inn. He threw open the shutters and looked out to see what was going on. From the racket he half expected to see half a dozen orcs swordfighting with Templars in the courtyard but the source of the noise was not immediately evident. After a moment or two of looking he noticed that the back of Malakai Makaisson's cart was bouncing up and down, and that the covered wagon was where all the row was coming from.\n\n\"What is it, Felix?\" Ulrika asked.\n\n\"Don't know,\" he said, \"but it looks like Malakai is up to something.\"\n\n\"If it's important we'll find out soon enough. Now come back to bed,\" she said. Glancing back at her naked form he did not have to be asked twice.\n\nFelix's legs ached from the strain of the constant uphill walking. His feet were sore from slamming down on the hard rocks of the High Road. He drew his red cloak of Sudenland wool tight around his shoulder, glad of it now. Despite the brightness of the sun, it was chilly in these mountain heights and getting chillier. A cold breeze blew down the valleys, and ruffled his hair with invisible fingers.\n\nHe smiled at Ulrika. They were getting on better today, as they usually did after the nights they slept together. She smiled back warmly. Felix could tell she was as tired as he, if not more so, but was determined to show no sign of it. Felix felt a certain sympathy for her. She had grown up on the flat plains of Kislev and had even less experience than he of mountain walking. He at least had travelled among the peaks before he had fallen in with Gotrek. Oleg and Standa were quite visibly faltering. Their breath came in gasps, and every now and again, one or the other would bend over almost double, legs spread wide, hands resting on thighs, heads bowed as they attempted to catch their breaths.\n\nOf all the humans, Max Schreiber showed the least sign of fatigue, which surprised Felix no end. He had gotten used to thinking of the wizard as a sedentary scholar, and yet he had taken to the hills as if born to them. He leaned on his high staff and spoke encouragingly to Oleg then put his hand on the Kislevite's shoulder. Felix could have sworn he saw a spark of energy pass between the two men, and then Oleg rose to his full height, and began to walk with renewed vigour. Perhaps that was Max's secret, Felix decided, maybe he was using his magic to give him strength while they walked, and maybe he had used it to lend some of that strength to Oleg.\n\nWhatever it was, it was effective, Felix thought. Max seemed almost at home here as the dwarfs, and, until today, Felix would have thought that impossible for any human. The dwarfs were unbelievably cheery, considering they were Slayers and bound on a mission that most likely meant their deaths. They strode along tirelessly, taking the steepest of gradients with no apparent effort, sometimes deviating from the path, and scrambling easily up near vertical slopes apparently just for the sheer joy of it.\n\nOnly Malakai did not do so. He stayed with his cart at all times, goading his ponies when they balked on the steep inclines, keeping a beady eye on their surroundings and most especially on Steg, whenever the suspected thief strayed close to the cart. Gotrek and Snorri led the way. Felix could see them at the head of the column, cresting the nearest ridge, where the pathway wound ever higher and further up slope.\n\n\"It is beautiful, is it not?\" said Ulrika. Felix glanced around, knowing what she meant. The mountains had a strange barren loveliness that seemed like a reward for making the effort of walking among them. On either side loomed the great grey flanks of mountains, spotted here and there by the green of woods and scrub brush. High above them glittered the snowline, and the chill proud peaks. Boulders rose from the mountainside, and occasionally blocked the path. Felix guessed that this was where stones had been dislodged and rolled downslope.\n\nFar below them, he could see Gelt. Through a pass between two nearby mountains the trail wound down to a cold clear lake.\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" he said. \"Though not nearly as beautiful as you.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"You are a shameless flatterer, Felix Jaeger.\"\n\n\"It is not flattery. It is merely the truth.\"\n\nShe turned and looked away for a moment, and her smile took on a strange sad quality. \"What am I going to do without you?\" she asked.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I have never met a man who makes me feel like you do.\"\n\nFelix knew she meant it as compliment but felt embarrassed nonetheless. \"Is that good or bad?\"\n\n\"I do not know,\" she said. \"I do know it is confusing.\"\n\nHe struggled for a reply, and could not find exactly the right words to say what he felt. He was almost glad when he heard Gotrek bellow, \"Looks like trouble ahead!\"\n\nFelix and Ulrika made their way to the crest of the ridge. The path ran on, descending into a small valley before passing once more over a series of ridges that rose like giant frozen waves to the horizon. Gotrek and Snorri stood on the ridge, silhouetted against the skyline.\n\nA quick glance showed Felix exactly what Gotrek meant. Hurrying along the path towards them were a group of greenskin warriors. Felix tried counting them, but there were too many and they were too tightly packed for him to be very successful in his efforts. He gave up somewhere over twenty.\n\n\"There are fifty-four of them,\" Ulrika said.\n\n\"Your eyes are better than mine.\"\n\n\"Either that or my counting skills are.\" He knew she was attempting a joke but he could hear the strain in her voice.\n\nOleg and Standa got into position beside them. They had already strung their bows. Ulrika began to ready hers. Max took up a position beside them, leaning on his staff with both hands. \"It seems we are outnumbered,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"They are only greenskins,\" said Snorri. \"No need to worry.\"\n\n\"They outnumber us more than four to one,\" Max said. \"That causes me just a little concern.\"\n\n\"One dwarf is worth ten orcs!\" boomed Ulli.\n\n\"Particularly in bed,\" Bjorni said with a leer.\n\n\"Don't you ever think of anything else?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Sometimes I think about fighting,\" Bjorni said. \"And I think now is as good a time as any to dwell on that.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Gotrek said. That it is. We'll meet them here, and let them come up at us. I would normally take the battle to them but it would be a pity to fall to an orc scimitar when there's a dragon in these mountains'\n\n\"Sound thinking,\" Felix said ironically. Behind him he could hear Malakai Makaisson's cart rumbling slowly up the hill. Felix sincerely hoped that Malakai had the weapons he had been promising and that they worked.\n\n\"Snorri thinks we should just charge them,\" said Snorri Nosebiter.\n\n\"I think Gotrek's plan is better,\" Ulli said. Felix wondered if he heard just a little fear in the boastful dwarf's voice. It would not surprise him. Emptiest vessels make the loudest noise, his father had always claimed. And he should know, thought Felix, for his father was a very loud man.\n\n\"I wonder if they have any gold,\" said Steg. \"You can never tell. If they've just robbed a prospector they might have.\" He became aware of the looks the others were giving him and shrugged affably. \"You never know. That's all I'm saying.\"\n\n\"I'm more concerned as to whether they have any bows,\" said Gotrek. \"Being pin-cushioned by greenskin arrows is no death for a Slayer.\"\n\n\"I might be able to do something about that,\" said Max Schreiber. \"If the winds of magic are strong enough, and there's no shaman down there.\"\n\n\"Doesn't look like there is,\" Gotrek said. \"If there was, he would be dancing around and chanting nonsense to his gods.\"\n\nThe orcs were maybe four hundred paces below them now. Just out of arrow range but closing fast. Felix could hear their savage guttural warcries. They brandished their weapons menacingly.\n\n\"Maybe we could turn back,\" Ulli said. Felix glanced over at him. He looked pale, and a little shaken.\n\n\"That might not be a bad idea,\" Gotrek said. Felix looked at Gotrek curiously. In all their long association, this was the first time he had ever heard the Slayer evince a desire to retreat. \"Why?\" he asked.\n\n\"Because there are some more greenskins to kill down there.\"\n\nFelix looked back in the direction they had come. Orcs and other smaller creatures were pouring down the slopes behind them. It appeared their line of retreat was cut off.\n\n\"This is not looking good,\" said Felix. He noticed that some of the smaller greenskins were mounted on huge spider-like creatures. Just the sight of those savage steeds made his flesh crawl. They were coming on with terrible speed. He began to think that perhaps the Slayers had been overconfident proceeding into the mountains in such a pitifully small party.\n\n\"For them, manling,\" Gotrek said. \"For them.\"\n\n\"I wished I shared your confidence,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Ah'll deal wae this bunch,\" Malakai said. \"You see tae the yins in front o' ye.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you're up to it?\" Felix said.\n\n\"Ye can bet on it,\" Malakai said. With one hand he pulled a lever and the canvas cover of the wagon dropped away. Revealed was an odd looking multi-barrelled gun, mounted on a tripod. Felix had seen a smaller version of the weapon before, and knew what it was capable of. Malakai pulled the brake lever of the wagon, locking it in position on the far side of the hill.\n\nThe spider riders to the rear had begun their advance up the hill. Felix watched as Malakai sighted down the barrel of his weapon and clutched the trigger guards tight. Felix risked a glance at the other side of the hill. The orcs had begun their climb, shouting confidently as they came. Felix knew that if their foes had any idea of what was waiting for them at the top of the hill, they would not be so confident. Still, he wondered, would it be enough?\n\nUlrika, Standa and Oleg had begun to fire their short composite bows. Arrows whooshed away downhill, and impaled three of the leading orcs. Two went down, one with an arrow through his eye, another with one through his throat. The third kept coming despite the feathered shaft embedded in his breast.\n\nIn response to the arrow fire, the greenskins began to spread out so they would not be quite so tightly packed together and not make such good targets. Savage they might be, Felix thought, but they were not stupid. At this moment, he wished he had learned to use a bow. In his youth he had been given some training with duelling pistols, but none in archery. It was not the mark of the gentleman his father had hoped to turn him into. Right at this moment it would have been very useful though. Apparently the orcs agreed, several of them had unslung bows from their backs and begun to string them. It looked like an archery duel was about to break out. All around him, the Slayers bellowed taunts at the greenskins, mocking them, and brandishing their weapons.\n\nGotrek raised his axe above his head, and bellowed, \"Come on up and die!\"\n\n\"Snorri wants to fight!\" shouted Snorri Nosebiter.\n\n\"I slept with your mothers,\" Bjorni shouted, then fell quiet, as the other dwarfs all stared at him. \"Well, needs must when daemons drive,\" he muttered at last. As the dwarfs hurled insults, Ulrika and the Kislevites kept up a steady stream of arrow fire at the orcs. Three more fell but the rest howled angry warcries and kept on coming.\n\nSuddenly a sound like thunder erupted behind them. Felix looked back to see that Malakai Makaisson had activated his gun.\n\nFlames flickered as flint strikers struck home. The barrels rotated and death roared forth from the weapon. As Felix watched one of the spiders crumpled in the middle, its body torn asunder, its legs twitching feebly. Malakai moved the gun slightly on its tripod and the arc of fire changed. A second spider crumpled and then a third.\n\nUnfortunately, the roar of the gun spooked the ponies. It was either that or the sight of the unnaturally huge spiders coming towards them. They began to rear and buck and lash out with their hind legs, kicking at the cart and wrestling with their harness in a desperate attempt to get free. One of the kicks smashed into the brake lever, knocking the mechanism loose and snapping it in two. Another flurry of blows sent the cart rumbling downslope. Slowly at first, and then moving ever faster, it picked up speed. Felix considered racing after it and trying to stop it, but swiftly realised that it was futile. There was no way a man of ordinary strength could bring the careening vehicle to a halt.\n\nIf Malakai Makaisson was dismayed he gave no sign of it. He shouted a dwarf warcry and kept firing, mowing down another spider rider. The last two moved to intercept him.\n\n\"Beware, manling,\" Felix heard Gotrek say, and twisted his head to look at the oncoming orcs once more. Half a dozen of them had managed to get their bows ready and were returning fire at the hilltop. Felix flinched as arrows blurred towards him, then suddenly Max Schreiber raised his hands and finished whatever spell he had been muttering. A glowing sphere of golden light sprang up around the hilltop. The arrows struck its shimmering translucent surface and caught fire, disintegrating harmlessly in a shower of sparks.\n\nThe advancing orcs halted in confusion, dismayed by this display of sorcerous power. The Kislevites kept the stream of arrows coming, taking down two more orcs. Felix guessed that they had taken perhaps ten of the orcs out of the combat now. Still, that left more than enough to overwhelm the hilltop. A crunching sound behind him drew his attention again. He looked back.\n\nThrough the shimmering haze he saw that one of the spider riders had got in the way of the cart and had been crushed under its heavy ironshod wheels. The last one was torn to shreds by a burst of fire from the organ gun. Malakai continued to rumble downhill into the horde of goblin troops. Felix could see them looking up at the oncoming Slayer with wide-eyed panic. Malakai continued to bellow and roar challenges as he raced towards the small greenskins.\n\nA shout from the front drew Felix's attention back there. The orcs had overcome their dismay swiftly enough and continued their advance. Realising the futility of their efforts the greenskin archers had put away their bows, drawn their heavy black iron scimitars, and now rushed to join their comrades. Felix hastily judged the distance and readied his own dragon-hilted sword.\n\n\"I reckon you've time for one more shot, and then you'd better get your blades out,\" he told Ulrika.\n\nA faint smile curved her lips, as she drew the bowstring to her cheek and loosed. \"You don't say\" she said as another orc dropped. From behind them came the sound of explosions. What was Malakai up to, Felix wondered? He dared not look and see the first of the onrushing orcs were almost within striking distance. Ulrika fired once more at almost point blank range, and then hastily dropped her bow and drew her sword. Felix stepped forward, ready to interpose himself between her and anyone who might strike at her before her weapon was out.\n\nThe sound of Max's chanting altered, and the sphere of golden light collapsed inwards, tendrils of energy congealing into a far smaller sphere about the size of a man's head that hovered just in front of Max. Another gesture shattered the sphere and sent bolts of golden light raining down onto the orcs. In an instant the whole front row was felled by the blaze of magical energy. Felix saw one orc sink to its knees, the whole front of its chest ripped away, its ribs visible through the smoking hole in its armour.\n\n\"Right, lads,\" Gotrek said. \"Let's get stuck in!\"\n\nIt was all the encouragement the Slayers needed. All six of them raced forward at the discouraged orcs who stood gawping at them, the momentum of their charge lost in the face of Max's magical onslaught. Even as Felix watched, Gotrek stormed in amidst the orcs. His axe rose and fell in a bloody arc, smashing through one orc to bury itself in the chest of another. With a brutal twist, the Slayer pulled it free and sliced about him, the mighty mystical blade transformed into a whirlwind of death in his hands.\n\nSnorri raced in behind him, axe and hammer held at the ready. He lashed about him with mighty strokes, uncaring of his own life. Each of his blows downed an orc reducing them to lifeless husks in an instant. The other Slayers joined them, forming a wedge that cleaved through the orcs, like a ship sailing through a sea of green blood. Felix watched in awe at the destruction the dwarfs wreaked. He doubted that a company of knights could have created more havoc than the Slayers had in those few brief instants.\n\nBjorni head-butted one orc and as it drew back, he lashed out with his axe, severing its head. Laughing like a maniac, he stamped on the foot of another, kneed it in the groin and then drove his axe into its chest before it could recover. Pale-faced Ulli moved alongside him using his own axe two-handed, hewing at his foes like a woodcutter chopping a trunk. Felix could see he was far less skilled than the other dwarfs but his strokes were nonetheless effective, powered as they were by his mighty dwarf muscles.\n\nSteg lurked at the rear, lashing out with his pickaxe at any orc who threatened to get round his comrades. His eyes darted everywhere, as if looking for loot, but not even his greed could get the better of him in the middle of this swirling, turbulent melee. Grimme fought off to the right on his own, and the carnage he created was appalling. He used his huge hammer two-handed but with a speed that rivalled Gotrek's. One mighty blow reduced an orc's skull to jelly. A second sideways stroke knocked a greenskin head clean off, sending it flying a hundred strides down the slope.\n\nA company of men would have routed in instants under the fury of the Slayers' attack, but these orcs were made of sterner stuff. For a moment only they wavered, and then they threw themselves into the fray with a berserker bravery that almost matched their foes'. They swarmed in over the dwarfs, seeking to overcome them with sheer weight of numbers. A few of them, noticing the humans who stood waiting on the hilltop, swept past the Slayers and charged. Felix considered the position for an instant. Would it be better to wait or charge? Here, they had the advantage of position. If they charged they would have the advantage of momentum.\n\nA glance told him that the orcs did not seem to be too winded by their uphill run. He reached his decision instantly.\n\n\"Let's go!\" he shouted, and ran forward. Ulrika and her bodyguards followed.\n\n\"Stay close. Watch each other's backs!\" Ulrika cried. Felix was glad she had thought of it. It was the one advantage they might have in the midst of the chaos that surrounded them.\n\nMoving downslope added to his speed. He selected the largest of the onrushing orcs as his target and raised his blade high. At the last second, he brought his blade down, ducked under the orc's stroke and with a backward slice chopped it across the spine. He felt bone crunch and leather give way under the impact of his razor-sharp blade and then the orc dropped, its legs no longer obeying it. Standa kicked it in the head as he passed, and the orc grunted and lay still.\n\nFelix was lost in the madness of battle. He ducked and dodged, parried and struck, thrusting out with his blade into the tightly packed mass of bodies. Sweat almost blinded him, blood splattered his face and arms. The howls and screams of his foes almost deafened him. The shock of each parry almost tore his blade from his numb fingers.\n\nHe lashed out to left and right, trying always to keep Ulrika in view, lest a foe strike her down unawares. He saw her fighting with her long Kislevite sword. She moved through the fray like some warrior goddess. If she could not match the orcs for strength, she made up for it in speed. Battle madness seemed to overtake her. Felix had fought her once in play, but had never really witnessed her fight in earnest. Some primordial rage seemed to fill her, and transformed her into an engine of destruction. She danced through the battle like a flame, whirling and cutting, and leaving a trail of death in her wake. Behind her Oleg and Standa fought like men possessed, guarding her flanks. They lacked her skill and speed, but fought with the deadly competence of veterans.\n\nOut of the corner of his eye, Felix caught a flicker of golden light. He glimpsed Max moving through the orcs. His whole body was surrounded by a flicker of yellowish light which seemed to deflect blows. Whenever his staff struck an orc there was a flash of utter brilliance and the smell of burning meat filled the air. Felix knew that the mage's enchanted weapon was burning through whatever it touched. The moment passed. Another orc attacked and Felix was hard pressed to defend himself. He backed away up the hill, frantically trying to keep his balance as he parried, desperately hoping that he would not trip over some unseen obstruction, like a boulder or an orc corpse. His foe was a massive orc, a head taller than he, and half again as broad. Its long ape-like arms gave it greater reach. Its red eyes were filled with hate and bloodlust, and spittle and foam erupted from its mouth, drenching the tusk-like teeth that protruded from its lower jaw. It looked like it fully intended to kill Felix then eat him. It was very strong and very fast, and for a sickening instant Felix doubted his own ability to stop it.\n\nFrom some dark depth of his mind bubbled up the realisation that if he fell here, he would never get his chance to confront the dragon. As if in answer to this, he felt new strength flow into him from the sword. The tidal wave of energy drove back fatigue and fear. He blocked the orc's blow easily, catching its blade with his own, and holding it with ease, as if the orc did not outweigh him by ten stone. He saw a look of shock twist across the orc's face, as it registered this feat by its relatively puny foe.\n\nThen time seemed to slow for Felix. He moved at normal speed but everything around him moved at half its usual pace. He drew his blade back from the orc and before it had time to respond separated its head from its shoulders. He strode forward into the fray once more, killing as he went.\n\nIn an instant the orcs realised they were overmatched. One of them turned to run and, in a heartbeat, all of his surviving brethren came to the same decision. As they chose to flee the dwarfs cut them down. As they ran the Slayers and their human companions followed. The short-legged dwarfs were soon outdistanced but the humans managed to keep up and chop down a few more from behind.\n\nStill, there were too many to overtake and kill them all, and Felix realised that if they kept on the orcs might regroup and overwhelm the humans. He shouted for Ulrika and her bodyguards to halt and reluctantly they obeyed. The orcs kept running.\n\nFrom behind the ridge top came the sound of another explosion. Felix could see a cloud of black smoke rising skyward. Instantly the thought came to him that Malakai Makaisson was down there somewhere, fighting alone against a horde of goblins.\n\n\"We've got to get back and help Malakai,\" he said, and saw understanding pass across Ulrika's face. She nodded and turned at once, Standa and Oleg following her. Felix cursed under his breath as the strain of running up hill told on his legs. His clothes were already saturated with sweat and wet with blood. His muscles ached from the strain of the fight. Yet he forced himself to keep up with the Kislevites.\n\nHe saw that the Slayers had already turned and were racing across the ridge top in the direction of the other battle. He rushed onwards as they vanished out of sight, feeling confident that as they had vanquished the savage orcs, the goblins were likely to prove far less of a threat. Then the thought of those giant spiders entered his mind, and his feelings of confidence vanished.\n\nSilhouetted on the ridge-line, Max Schreiber raised his staff high. A nimbus of yellowish light flickered around him, but it was less bright than it had been and Felix knew instinctively that Max had exhausted a great deal of his strength. Even so, he swirled his staff around his head, and as he did so, the tip seemed to catch fire. Angry golden light blazed brighter and brighter with each rotation of the staff, as if it were a firebrand catching alight in the motion. Finally, having gathered sufficient power, Max unleashed it, sending a torrent of energy vanishing downslope. The spell was answered by the highpitched, piping screams of dying goblins.\n\nFelix crested the ridge ahead of Ulrika and her bodyguards, and looked down on a scene of appalling carnage. The Engineer's cart had cut a bloody swathe through the goblin horde's ranks. The huge spiders were crushed or blown apart. Many small goblin bodies lay still on the ground, testament to the terrifying power of the organ gun. Malakai himself stood precariously atop the cart which had crashed to a halt in a depression by the side of the road. He tossed black bombs into the massed goblins.\n\nThe greenskins huddled together, kept at bay by the power of the explosives, as they tried to gather their courage and assault the inventor. Now it looked as if Max's spell and the sudden advent of six Slayers was enough to daunt them completely. They turned and fled back the way they came. Seeing their departure, Felix decided that he had had enough of slaughter for one day, and slowed from a run to a walk. Ulrika and the Kislevites swept past him, and moved to join the Slayers below.\n\nFelix let them. He knew they would never catch the greenskins now.\n\nGrund ran as hard as he ever had in his life. He liked a fight as much as the next orc but those stunties had just been too much. He had never seen anyone fight like that dwarf with the magic axe save Ugrek himself. He knew that if he wanted revenge he would have to tell the Manflayer his tale. Ugrek would get the lads together then, and they would all come down and stomp those stunties. Grund hoped the warboss was still camped at Bloody Fist knoll. It was less than a day away, a lot less if Grund kept up this pace. Thinking about the stunty with the axe, he decided that might not be such a bad idea.\n\nFelix passed the corpse of a goblin. Smoke rose from the body along with the smell of scorched flesh. It looked like the greenskin had died as a result of Max's spell. There was no mark on the body, no hole that would have marked the passage of organ gun shell or shrapnel from a bomb. When he looked closely, he saw that the small humanoid's eyes had exploded in their sockets, splattering jelly across its face. It was not a pretty sight but then again, few corpses ever were.\n\nHe walked to another of the creatures that lay sprawled face down in the dirt, and turned it over with his boot. It was not very large. Its body was no bigger than that of a child often. Its legs were very short in proportion to the length of its torso and the arms very long. Its head was big for its body. The creature wore a sort of hooded leather tunic, dyed bright yellow, and a sickly green. In death the hood had fallen back to reveal its face.\n\nThe features were twisted and malevolent and cunning. The nose was as long and as thin as a carrot, the mouth filled with sharp, ratlike teeth. The thing that struck him most was the creature's hands. They were gnarled and strong, with large knuckles and very long, very dextrous-looking fingers. Something about them made Felix think of stranglers, and he knew that he would not have liked to find those hands wrapped round his throat.\n\nIn death, though, the creature looked curiously pathetic. There was something infinitely sad about its small, still form. He mentioned this to Ulrika who stood nearby watching him. She looked at him with blank incomprehension.\n\n\"It's dead,\" she said. \"And that's good. For it would have killed us if it had got the chance.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Felix said but still somehow he felt something like shame when he looked down on the small corpse.\n\nFelix walked over to where Malakai Makaisson stood atop his cart. The engineer glared down truculently and Felix soon saw why. One of the wagon's wheels had come off, and the buckboard had fallen open spilling the engineer's tools and equipment into the dirt. At least Malakai himself did not look too hurt, although his fingers were black and his face was smudged with soot or oil.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Aye. Niver better! It'll tak mare than these sleekit wee beasties tae dae fur me, don't you worry. It's ma stuff ah'm worried aboot. Ah hope this crash hisnae damaged it ony.\"\n\n\"I'll help you gather it up,\" Felix offered.\n\n\"Dinnae you bother. Ah hae ma ane system fur this. Ah'll sort it oot masel.\"\n\n\"Suit yourself,\" Felix said.\n\nHe strode over to where Gotrek and Snorri stood side by side, inspecting the hills into which the goblins had fled.\n\n\"Snorri reckons we've seen the last of them,\" said Snorri.\n\nGotrek spat on the ground, and shook his head truculently. \"Then you should leave the thinking to others, Snorri Nosebiter. For they'll be back as soon as they find their brethren. And there will be more of them next time. You can bet gold on it.\"\n\nFelix was forced to agree. Some instinct told him that they had not heard the last of the greenskins, not by a long chalk. Behind him came the sound of hammering, as Malakai Makaisson proceeded to repair his wagon.\n\n\"We'll kill them all then,\" Ulli said. Felix could see that his face was still pale, and his fingers shook where they gripped his axe. Still, he had acquitted himself well enough in the battle.\n\n\"In a brothel in Nuln they had what they claimed were goblin girls,\" said Bjorni reflectively. \"They weren't though. They were just human lassies with their faces painted green and their teeth filed.\"\n\n\"I could have lived my whole life cheerfully without ever finding that out,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Well you'd be missing something then,\" Bjorni said with his repulsive leer.\n\nFelix turned and walked away." + }, + { + "title": "ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD", + "text": "It was dawn. The fire was dead, reduced to a black pit of ash and cinders. Stuffing a hunk of rubbery cheese into his mouth, biting on sour dwarf waybread and washing it all down with flat ale, Felix watched as the dwarfs and the Kislevites broke camp.\n\nUlrika smiled at him. He reached out and squeezed her hand, and was glad to feel the pressure returned. Over Ulrika's shoulder he could see Bjorni giving him a wink. The dwarf leered repulsively then grabbed his left biceps with his right hand and made a pumping gesture. Felix looked away. Malakai had fixed his wagon, packing away some of his components in wooden crates, leaving a bunch of things that looked suspiciously like weapons within easy reach. The ponies had returned after a couple of hours of wandering the previous evening, and were now standing docile in their harnesses.\n\nThe other Slayers had their weapons to hand and their packs over their backs and looked ready for trouble. Oleg and Standa had their bows ready. Only Max Schreiber looked out of sorts. He seemed pale and drawn and more than a little tired. A bemused, somewhat thoughtful expression marked his face. He stood taller. He had in some subtle way altered, and Felix was not quite sure how.\n\n\"Let's go,\" shouted Gotrek. \"We're still a long way from the Dragon Vale.\"\n\nMalakai jerked the reins. The Slayers fell into marching step. Far off, in the distance, Felix could see small clouds." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Max Schreiber felt exhausted. He had used a lot of power yesterday in the battle with the greenskins.\n\nHe had not slept well. Jealousy gnawed at him while Felix and Ulrika lay together under blankets on the far side of the fire. That and the snoring of the dwarfs had not made for a restful night. Eventually, after hours of staring at the cold glitter of the stars, he had managed to get to sleep. Mere moments later, it seemed, Snorri was kicking him awake. He felt like he had not slept at all. His eyed seemed glued together and he ached. Still, all things considered, he did not feel quite as bad as he had expected, and he wondered why.\n\nHe took a deep breath and tested the winds of magic. They blew weakly this day, he knew, but, even so, touching them sent a tingling through his veins, and renewed his energy. He closed his eyes and probed his own being. He felt depleted, and at the same time, curiously elated.\n\nHe knew also that the expenditure of power in yesterday's battle had done him good, in some as yet undefined way. Sometimes, he knew, using his arts was the only way to improve them. He had gained no new insights he could think of during the battle yesterday, yet he knew he had gained something. He had managed to handle the flow of the magical winds with more fluency than he ever had before, and he had delved deeper into the well of his soul than at any time in the past. He knew his power was increasing.\n\nIn the past few weeks he had been called on several times to use his powers as he never had before. In combat with the skaven, with the dragon and yesterday with the orcs. He had used the power under pressures and stresses, the like of which he rarely encountered before in his scholarly life. It seemed to be having some profound effect on him.\n\nAs he grasped at the winds of magic and drew them to himself, he knew he was now a vessel of energies greater than any he had ever held. His senses seemed keener. His grasp of the flows of magic was stronger. His magical vision had grown more perceptive.\n\nHe was now aware in a way he had not been before of the play of awesome energies through the runes of Gotrek's axe, and of the less strong, but nonetheless still potent, magic that permeated the blade Felix carried. He sensed that both weapons had been forged with a purpose, and he could almost grasp what those purposes were. He knew Gotrek's axe had been forged to be baneful to Chaos.\n\nAnd yesterday, when Felix had drawn his blade, he had become briefly aware that it possessed something like sentience. Max wondered whether Felix knew. Most likely, yes. It would be almost impossible to bear a weapon like that for any time, and not be aware of it. Unless of course the weapon itself had concealed its power and its purpose. He decided that it was something he should talk with Felix about when he got the chance. It was something the young man should be warned about.\n\nGrund abased himself before Ugrek Manflayer. To be more precise, he abased himself before Ugrek Manflayer's tent. It offended Grund's orcish sensibilities to throw himself on the ground before anyone or anything, but with the Manflayer it paid to be careful. He was very touchy, and his temper was a thing that put fear even into orcs. That and his habit of skinning his enemies and eating bits of them while they still lived.\n\nUgrek's bodyguards grunted with barely suppressed sniggers at the Broken Nose chieftain's discomfiture. Let them, he thought. He had seen them humiliated often enough by their boss. They silenced themselves instantly when the entrance flap opened and Ugrek emerged from his tent of human skin. Grund shivered. The shaman Ixix was with the big chief and that was never good. The little runt was even madder than Ugrek and claimed to speak with the gods in his dreams. Grund supposed it must be true. Why else would the mighty Manflayer listen to a wizened little runt like the goblin?\n\n\"Wot is it?\" Ugrek asked. Grund looked up at him. Ugrek was the largest orc in the world, Grund was sure of it. He was nearly a head taller than any other orc in the mountains, and far stronger. In one hand he carried his magical cleaver, in the other he held a big axe. His armour had to be made special-like by the captured human smith that Ugrek kept chained to his tentpole. His helmet had two huge horns protruding from it. His eyes were a healthy red.\n\nGrund quickly explained what had happened. Much to his surprise, Ugrek looked at the shaman and then starting laughing. Ixix began to giggle too. He laughed so hard he had to wipe his nose on his snot-encrusted cloak. Grund didn't think he saw anything funny in the situation but he laughed anyway, just to be on the safe side. It never hurt to humour the big boss. Soon the bodyguards joined in. Once they were all howling with mirth, Ugrek silenced them with a gesture of his fist. He looked down at the shaman.\n\n\"It's the dream for sure,\" said Ixix. \"The gods spoke true. They are going to kill the dragon and then you are going to kill them. You will have a magic axe to match your magic cleaver, and you'll have all the dragon's treasure too.\"\n\n\"I will be the greatest orc war leader in the world?\" asked Ugrek.\n\n\"You will be the greatest orc war leader in the world.\"\n\n\"Send out word!\" Ugrek bellowed. \"Summon the tribes. We go to the Dragon Vale. We've got some stunties to kill.\"\n\nJust as everybody ran to obey his orders, Ugrek stopped them again. He was like that. \"And tell every last one of your boys to leave the stunties alone till they get there too. They are mine. I am going to kill them and eat their hearts.\"\n\nUlrika marched along through the mountains. She was not unhappy, but she was not happy either. She wondered what was happening between her and Felix. There were times when she felt certain that she loved him, and there were times when she felt equally certain that she felt nothing at all. It was odd how the passion came and went. Sometimes, as in the moment last night when they had sat by the fire and held hands, she felt they were connected deeply, as if by strong magic. And there were times, like this morning, as they marched forward under these brooding clouds when his merest glance could goad her to fury, and the look of stupid devotion she sometimes caught in his eye made her want to slap him in the face. At times like that it was almost as if he were a different man from the one who lay beside her in the night, as if he were a stranger who somehow had invaded her life.\n\nShe thought about that for a moment, and corrected herself. No. Sometimes, she felt like she was a different person, that something within her had changed in a way that she did not understand herself. He was the source of a spectrum of emotions that both enthralled and frightened her in a way no feelings ever had before. She feared to lose him, but she felt like running away from him. Somehow, in some strange way, he had gained power over her life, and she both hated this and wondered at it.\n\nShe glanced up at the turbulent clouds and felt that in some ways they reflected her own inner turmoil.\n\n\"Best get ready,\" Gotrek said from behind her. \"Looks like it's going to rain hard.\"\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol looked up at the gates of Hell Pit. The walls of the monstrous crater loomed above him. Poisonous-looking lichen covered the gnarled rock. Ahead of him, carved to resemble a monstrous ratlike head with gaping jaws, was the entrance to the lair of Clan Moulder. The black iron gates of the portcullis were its teeth and skaven heads peaked out from its eye sockets. In the distance Thanquol could hear the bellowing of beasts and sense the presence of a brain-numbing amount of warpstone. The sky overhead glittered with strange colours, as clouds of chemicals rose from the chimneys within the crater to pollute the air all around.\n\nThe thunder of hooves told Thanquol that the riders of Chaos had departed behind him. A tingling of his flesh told him that whatever spell had enwrapped them had departed with them. Thanquol felt certain that the spell was simply one to warp time and enhance their speed, allowing them to cover the distance between the horde and Hell Pit in a quarter of the time it would normally have taken. At least he hoped that was what it was. As far as he could tell, he had suffered no ill-effects from the magic nor had it affected him permanently.\n\nHe breathed a prayer to the Horned Rat, almost grateful for his delivery. The followers of Tzeentch had been as good as their word, and delivered him unharmed to this citadel of skavendom. Thanquol paused only for a moment to wonder why. The followers of the Lord of Change were famed for their cunning, not their mercy. Still, he reflected, they most likely had been impressed by his incredible eloquence. Thanquol knew that no matter how cunning they might be, they could not match wits with a grey seer. He knew that once again he had overcome his enemies by the sheer power of his intelligence.\n\nHe was uneasy. He wished that they had not brought him here of all places. He would have preferred any other stronghold than Hell Pit. Any port in a storm, Thanquol thought. And at least now he had great tidings to deliver. Surely, in the face of the threat of Chaos, the elders of Clan Moulder would see the sense of making a common cause with Thanquol.\n\nHe kicked Lurk up the posterior. \"Rise-rise! Get up lazy beast! Now is no time for resting!\"\n\nLurk glared up at him with hate-filled eyes. Foam frothed around his lips. His chest rose and fell like bellows. He had been hard pressed to keep up with the Chaos steeds that had carried his master, but, suspecting that to fall behind would mean his death, he had somehow managed to force his battered body to keep up. Whatever spell the Chaos sorcerers had cast had affected him too. He had not been left behind in spite of their supernatural pace.\n\nThanquol was aware of red skaven eyes glaring down at him from above the huge carved gate. He knew that weapons were being brought to bear on him, and that reinforcements were being hastily summoned to augment the guards within.\n\nFrom high above a skaven voice chittered: \"Who is there? What is your business with Clan Moulder?\"\n\nThanquol drew himself up to his full height and tilted back his head so that his horns were fully visible. He knew the guard would recognise the mark of the Horned Rat's favour. He gave them a few heartbeats to appreciate it, then boomed out in his most impressive oratorical voice, \"It is Grey Seer Thanquol come bearing important tidings for your masters.\"\n\n\"Are you Thanquol or Thanquol's ghost?\" a tremulous voice came back. \"Grey Seer Thanquol is dead. Killed by the dwarfs and their human allies at the battle of the horse soldiers' burrow.\"\n\nAlways, always, this idiocy to contend with, thought Thanquol unhappily. \"Do I look dead, foolish vermin? Open this gate and take me to your masters or I will unleash a spell of grievous deadliness to consume your bones!\"\n\nHe let a glow of pale warpfire build up around his hand to show that he meant what he said. In truth, he was certain that the protective magics woven into the crater's walls would most likely be able to withstand even his most potent sorceries, but how could a mere sentry know this?\n\n\"I must consult with my masters. Wait! Wait!\" Thanquol was not sure whether the guard skaven meant to stay his spell or simply wait outside the gate. It did not matter. He knew that as soon as someone in authority was summoned he would be allowed inside.\n\nNow all he had to do was consider what he was going to say. He needed to work out what would be advantageous to tell the Moulders and what was needful to keep from them. Such things could wait, he told himself. Suddenly, confidence filled him. He knew that a skaven of his supreme intellect would have no trouble outwitting the dullards of Moulder, just as he had easily out-thought the followers of Tzeentch.\n\nStill, he was troubled. Even for a skaven of his superlative abilities, escaping the clutches of the Chaos horde had seemed a little too easy.\n\nFelix stared along the valley. He was amazed by how quickly things changed in the mountains. This morning it had been bright and sunny, clear as a summer's day on the plains of Kislev. Now it was dreary and cold, with a chilliness to the wind that reminded him of snow and winter. The clouds were low and dark. In the distance he could see the flicker of lightning strokes, and hear the faraway boom of thunder.\n\nThe mountains themselves had changed appearance just as dramatically. At dawn they had been bright, clean titans, almost hospitable-seeming. Now they loomed large, dark and forbidding in the dreary light. The further peaks were obscured by more cloud. He felt his own mood darkening. The change in the weather had added to the ominous, oppressive atmosphere caused by knowing that they were coming ever closer to the dragon's lair.\n\nUlrika had moved to the head of the column and was scouting alongside Standa and Oleg. It made a certain amount of sense. She had by far the keenest eyes in the party and would be able to perceive a threat before anyone else. At least, such had been her logic. Felix felt that it was just as much to get away from him. She had become remote and withdrawn again, and ignored all his attempts at conversation. He was fast coming to the conclusion that he would never understand women, or at the very least never understand her.\n\nHe became aware that Max Schreiber had fallen into step beside him. The mage's face wore a curious look, at once exalted, yet indrawn. His first impressions this morning had been correct, Felix thought. There was something different about Max now. He looked even more like a sorcerer than ever he had before. Felix tried to tell himself that it was because now he was simply more aware of the power the mage wielded, but he knew it was more than this. A distinct change had come over the magician in the past few days. Now, more than ever, he seemed like a figure of hidden might.\n\n\"Felix, may I ask you a few questions about the sword you bear?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I am interested in it. It seems to me to be an artifact of considerable power, and it seems to be\u2026 awakening.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean I have sensed changes in it. The weapon harbours some sort of sentience, and it is gaining in strength.\"\n\nFelix thought about the burst of power he had received in the battle yesterday, and the way the blade had shielded him from dragonfire on the Spirit of Grungni. He had long known the weapon possessed magical qualities but not until recently had it exhibited anything like these powers. In the past it had simply been a blade that never lost its edge, with runes that glowed mysteriously under certain circumstances.\n\n\"Do you think that it is dangerous in any way?\" he asked nervously. Max shrugged. A frown marred his fine features.\n\n\"I do not know. All magical weapons are in some way perilous. They are repositories of power that can sometimes affect their wielders in unpredictable ways. Sentient weapons are the most perilous of all, for they can warp the minds and souls of those who carry them.\"\n\nFelix felt his flesh crawl at the magician's words. He did not doubt that they were true. He fought down the instinctive urge to draw the blade and simply cast it away that rose up in him. \"Are you saying that the blade might be able to control me?\"\n\n\"It is unlikely, unless it is particularly potent, and you are particularly weak-minded, which, I hasten to add, you do not appear to be. It might be able to affect your thinking a little, or take partial control in moments of stress. A weapon of the type I suspect this is could not control you, if you decided not to let it. At least, I hope not.\"\n\n\"You are starting to worry me, Max.\"\n\n\"That is not my intention. Could I ask how you came by the weapon?\"\n\nFelix considered this for a moment. \"It belonged to the Templar Aldred of the Order of the Fiery Heart. I took it from him after he died.\"\n\nEven as he said the words, Felix realised that this was both true and untrue. The blade had belonged to Aldred only for moments, when he had snatched it up from the hoard of the Chaos troll in Karag Eight Peaks. The Templar had come seeking the blade; it had not belonged to him. And yet, it felt like it did, or at least it felt like it belonged to his order. Felix had on many occasions felt as if he were merely the temporary custodian of the blade and he had fully intended to return it when the time was right. He mentioned all of these thoughts to Max. The magician looked thoughtful.\n\n\"It seems to me that the blade has been influencing your thoughts for a long time, albeit subtly. It also sounds like you have been unconsciously resisting its influence, which is both normal and instinctive when it comes to magic.\"\n\n\"Why would this blade be trying to influence me?\"\n\n\"Perhaps there is a geas attached to it. Or perhaps it is one of those weapons which possesses a single overriding purpose. Maybe it was forged with the destruction of a particular foe or type of foe in mind. Have you ever thought that this might be the case?\"\n\n\"I suspect you already know the answer.\"\n\n\"Just looking at the workmanship of the hilt is a clue, I would say. I would guess that the blade started to show changes after we encountered the dragon.\"\n\n\"You would be right.\" Felix told the mage of the way the blade had protected him from dragonfire, and of the way it had intervened in the previous day's battle when he had felt he might not survive to confront the beast. Max listened intently until after Felix had finished then said, \"I think your blade was forged to be a bane to dragons.\"\n\n\"Do you mean you think it will give me the power to kill Skjalandir?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I think it could hurt Skjalandir in a way that a normal blade could not but I don't think it will guarantee you could kill him. There are plenty of examples from history of heroes armed with the most potent magical weapons failing to kill the great drakes. Even Sigmar only wounded the Great Wyrm, Abraxas.\"\n\n\"You are not reassuring me, Max,\" Felix said. \"I thought for a moment I was about to become the hero of some mighty tale.\"\n\n\"Truthfully, Felix, judging by your deeds you and Gotrek are already that. I am a magician, not a prophet or a seer, but I do not think it is entirely by chance that your sword, Gotrek's axe, Malakai's weapons and even my own self are here. I suspect the workings of fate. If I were a more vain and a more devout man, I would see the hand of the gods.\"\n\n\"I find that difficult to imagine,\" Felix said. \"I find it easier to believe that Gotrek and I live under the curse of the gods.\"\n\n\"You are too cynical, Herr Jaeger.\"\n\n\"If you had seen what I have seen, you would be cynical too,\" said Felix.\n\nMax looked at Felix, as if trying to weigh how serious he was. After a moment, he glanced away.\n\n\"Gotrek was right,\" he said. \"It's going to rain. Hard.\"\n\nThe track descended into a long valley that might almost have been in the lowlands of the eastern Empire. Trees covered the slopes of the valley sides. Dry-stone walls turned the hills into a patchwork of overgrown fields. Here and there, patches of wild flowers bloomed. Felix caught the distinctive scent of wildberry and summer-thorn roses. Houses were visible among the walls, and at first glance, a stranger might easily have taken the place as inhabited.\n\nA second glance would convince them otherwise, Felix thought. The grey unmortared walls, built like the dykes themselves, were scorched and blackened as if by fire. The sod roofs of many had caved in. Weeds had overgrown the kitchen gardens. There were no signs of domesticated beasts anywhere. Just the occasional dog, gone feral, which looked at them with hungry eyes and then slunk away.\n\n\"Dragon work,\" Ulli said.\n\n\"Or the work of reavers,\" Gotrek said, gesturing to a patch of white bones bleaching in the long grass. Felix walked over to them and discovered grass growing through the eye sockets of a human skull. A rusty blade lay near at hand, and by pushing the grass aside, he discovered the rotting remains of a leather cuirass. It looked like it had been chewed, perhaps by hungry dogs.\n\nEven as he studied the remains, he felt cold wetness on his hair and on his face. The dark clouds above had finally made good on their promise of rain.\n\n\"We can shelter amid these ruins,\" Max said. \"Part of the roof is still intact, and we can rig a tarpaulin over the rest of it.\"\n\n\"Why not just creep into the back of the wagon?\" suggested Steg, with a glint in his eye.\n\n\"Over ma deid boadie!\" Malakai said. Something in Steg's appearance suggested that he might not be averse to that idea.\n\n\"I don't suppose the ruins will be haunted,\" boomed Ulli. He looked a little pale and nervous once more.\n\n\"You're not afraid of ghosts?\" Bjorni asked. \"Are you?\"\n\n\"I fear nothing!\" Ulli said. \"But only a fool tempts the wrath of the spirits of the dead.\"\n\n\"I suppose that means we should send Snorri in,\" Bjorni said nastily.\n\n\"Snorri thinks that's a good idea,\" said Snorri, oblivious to the insult. \"Snorri isn't afraid of ghosts.\"\n\n\"There are no ghosts in this place, or if there are they are the ghosts of mewling men, and what need have we to fear them,\" Gotrek said and stomped after Snorri.\n\n\"Might as well get in out of the rain,\" Felix said, and looked around to see if the Kislevites agreed with them.\n\n\"Ah'll joost stay wae ma wagon,\" said Malakai Makaisson, glaring at Steg from under his beetling brows.\n\nSteg shook his head, and disappeared inside. He was smirking to himself. For the first time it occurred to Felix that Steg might actually enjoy tormenting the engineer \u2014 and that in some perverse way, Malakai took pleasure in being tormented. He shrugged. If the Slayers wanted to indulge in such petty bickering it was no business of his.\n\nThe rain drummed down on the roof of the cottage. It was a typical peasant dwelling: one large room which had once been inhabited by humans, their dogs and their cattle. Rain puddled in the middle of the packed earth floor under the hole in the roof. Rats scuttled about amid the remains of the furniture. Despite the damp, Snorri had managed to get a fire crackling over by the chimney, and the not unpleasant smell of wood smoke filled the room.\n\nMore clouds of smoke drifted across the chamber, mingling with the weed fumes from the Slayers' pipes. All of the Slayers save Ulli had produced them, and were puffing away in the morose silence that passed as companionability among dwarfs.\n\nListening to the rain, Felix found time to be glad that the goblins had not attacked them in the middle of the storm. He wondered how Malakai's gunpowder weapons would have functioned then. Not well, he guessed. He prayed that it was a fine day when they finally confronted the dragon. That made him think of the sword. He drew it from the scabbard and began to inspect the blade, studying it with an intensity he had never used before.\n\nIt was a well-made weapon. From the dragon's head on the pommel to the runes on the blade it gave every indication of high quality. The steel of the blade gleamed. The edges were razor sharp despite the fact he had never taken a whetstone to them. The runes caught the firelight, but, at that moment, appeared merely decorative. There was no hint of any sorcerous power lurking within the blade, and, looking at it, Felix found it hard to believe that there could be. The weapon seemed so prosaic that, were it not for his memories of its power, he would have thought it merely another rich man's blade, not some mystical weapon. Then again, Firebeard's hammer had looked the same way back in the Temple of Grimnir, and Felix knew exactly how potent it was.\n\n\"You look thoughtful,\" Ulrika said. Felix looked up at her. She had been standing in the doorway not moments before, staring out into the rain.\n\n\"And you look lovely,\" he said.\n\n\"Always ready with flattery,\" she said, but there was no hostility in her tone. \"What were you thinking about?\"\n\n\"I was thinking about this sword, and how I found it, and about the dragon.\" Without meaning to, he found himself telling her of the quest to Karag Eight Peaks, of how he and Gotrek and Albrecht and the others had fought their way into the dark tunnels beneath the mountains, and had slain the Chaos troll. He told her of the spirits of the dwarf kings who had appeared before them, and of how they had left the treasures of the lost city in the tomb and he spoke of the eerie grandeur of the ancient dwarf city. It was only when he noticed that silence had fallen over the chamber that he realised that all the dwarfs were listening to him. Suddenly embarrassed, he stopped, but Snorri looked over at him and said, \"Go on, young Felix. Snorri likes a tale as much as the next dwarf and yours is a good one.\"\n\nThe other dwarfs nodded acquiescence, so Felix spoke on, telling of battles with Chaos warriors in the woods of the Empire, and encounters with evil cultists in the cities of men. He talked of the battle with the skaven amid the blazing buildings of Nuln, and of the long voyage across the Chaos Wastes in search of the lost dwarfhold of Karag Dum. It was dark by the time he finished, and the silence in the chamber had intensified. He realised that at some time during his speech the rain had stopped.\n\nHe looked up, and at that moment the smoke cloud which filled the room billowed under the impact of the night breeze, the same breeze that parted the storm clouds. Through the gap he caught a glimpse of the cold sky. Two moons hovered there. The larger one shone silver, sending a chill light down to bathe the land. The lesser moon glowed greenishly, and the aura that surrounded it obscured the stars. He was certain that its glow was brighter than ever he had seen it before, brighter even than on that unholy Geheimnisnacht when he and Gotrek had fought with the worshippers of Slaanesh. He knew then, in the innermost recesses of his soul, that the power of Chaos was growing in proportion to the moon's glow, and that however long he lived, that moon was going to grow brighter until its light eclipsed its larger sibling. He was suddenly dreadfully afraid.\n\nIf any of the dwarfs noticed they gave no sign. Eventually, Bjorni spoke, \"By Grungni, Grimnir and Valaya, Felix Jaeger, you have seen more of the ancient holy places of the dwarfs than many of the dwarfs. I do not know whether you have been blessed or cursed, but I believe that somehow the gods look on you with favour. Why else would you have been chosen to wield the Hammer of Firebeard?\"\n\nAll the other dwarfs except Gotrek nodded their agreement. Felix noted that some time during his tale-telling Gotrek had vanished outside. He could hear the Slayer talking to Malakai Makaisson now that he had stopped speaking himself. Bjorni glanced around, a feverish light illuminating his ugly face. He spat into the fire, rubbed his hands and spoke:\n\n\"Tis a night for tale-telling so I'll give you a yarn. Some of you may have heard the awful rumours about the night I met two elf maidens in a tavern in Marienberg. I want to tell you that the story is not true. Well, not entirely true. It happened like this\u2026\"\n\nThe groans and jeers of the other dwarfs threatened for a moment to cut him off but he continued unabashed. Felix looked over at Ulrika. \"Shall we take a walk?\" he asked.\n\nShe nodded agreement." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "The smell of damp and rain-soaked earth assaulted Felix's nostrils. He looked around warily. They had walked a long way from the cottage and the fire. Perhaps too far for safety in these perilous mountains. Still, he sensed that they had both wanted to be alone, to speak freely, far from the dwarfs. This was the one way they could have some privacy. He was willing to risk the danger, if only for a few minutes.\n\nUlrika's hand felt warm in his. He noticed that her fingers were calloused from blade-work. Her hair smelled faintly of sweat. As did her clothes. It was not a romantic scent but it was hers, and he liked it. He glanced at her face, admiring the profile. She was most certainly beautiful, and at that moment looked thoughtful.\n\n\"Felix, what is to become of us?\" she asked.\n\nHe considered her question for a moment, knowing he was no closer to an answer than he had been in Karak Kadrin. After a while he spoke.\n\n\"I will go with the Slayers to face the dragon. You will go on to Kislev and carry your father's warning to the Ice Queen. If I survive I will seek you out.\"\n\n\"Then what?\"\n\n\"Then most likely we will go to Praag or wherever the armies muster to fight the Chaos hordes.\" He glanced up at the greenly glowing moon, and shivered. \"And then perhaps we will die.\"\n\n\"I do not think I want to die,\" she said softly. It sounded as if it came as a revelation to her. Perhaps it did. He knew she was born and bred on the plains of northern Kislev, where duty and death were things children were taught as soon as they were old enough to understand their meanings.\n\n\"No one does.\"\n\n\"I have been given a holy trust by my father. I am to bear word of his need to our liege lady. And yet I find myself thinking of\u2026 abandoning my duty and running away, of finding a place to hide for a while to laugh and love and live. I find myself thinking this and I am horrified. What would my father think? What would the spirits of my ancestors think?\"\n\n\"What do you think?\"\n\n\"If I were to run away, would you go with me?\"\n\nFelix looked at her. At that moment, he forgot about his oath to Gotrek, about the destiny that Max Schreiber had talked of, about his own dreams and illusions of heroism. \"Yes. Do you want to go?\"\n\nShe was silent for a long moment, and he could see the struggle written on her face. A tear trickled down her cheek, and he almost reached out to wipe it away. Something kept him from doing it. He felt that at that moment, their two lives were hanging in the balance, and that perhaps she could change their destinies with a single word. He looked into her eyes, and saw a spirit at war, and thought, she truly does love me. He was going to speak, but at that moment she turned away. He did not move his hand. The silence lengthened. \"I do not know,\" she said. \"I do not know you and I do not know myself anymore. You are a fool, Felix Jaeger, and you have made a fool of me. I will go with you to face the dragon.\"\n\nShe turned and fled away from him back towards the mined cottage, running as if all the fiends of Chaos were at her heels. Felix wondered what had happened, and realised that he did not have a clue.\n\nFelix returned to find a stranger by the fire. He was a tall, scarred man, garbed in leather. A wide-brimmed leather hat shaded his face. A longsword lay scabbarded by his side. A bundle of cloth, tied to the end of a staff pushed into the earthen floor and the lute the stranger plucked idly with his fingers marked him as a wandering minstrel.\n\nNo one was showing the slightest interest, but the stranger did not seem too bothered. He looked only too grateful for the fire, and companions to share it with. Felix wasn't really all that interested in him. He wanted to talk with Ulrika but she had already cast herself down on the far side of the fire, and lay between her bodyguards, seemingly determined to pretend he was not there. Felix felt obscurely hurt. His pride was wounded. If that's what she wants, he thought, then let her get on with it. He wanted some time to think about what she had said anyway.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked the stranger, none too politely. The stranger regarded him pleasantly enough.\n\n\"Johan Gatz is my name, friend. What is yours?\"\n\n\"Felix Jaeger.\"\n\n\"You are a companion to these Slayers?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's common enough to see men and dwarfs travelling together in these mountains. It is less common to see three Kislevites, a sorcerer, a man of the Empire and a gang of Slayers journeying as a group. Have you joined together for protection on the road, or is there a tale here I might sing of?\"\n\n\"That depends on what type of songs you sing,\" Felix said.\n\n\"All sorts.\"\n\n\"As I told you earlier, we're going to kill the dragon,\" bellowed Ulli boastfully. Johan Gatz winced and raised an eyebrow. \"And you are accompanying these Slayers on their death quest? Your friends here have told me all manner of tales about you and Gotrek there. You've led interesting lives.\"\n\n\"Apparently so.\" Felix did not know why he was offended by the man's curiosity but he was. It was quite common for minstrels to be inquisitive. Their stock in trade was quite often as much news and gossip as it was songs and music. The dwarfs seemed none too bothered by him, but there was something about the man that rubbed Felix the wrong way. He tried telling himself that he was being unfair, that he was just upset by his conversation with Ulrika, but there was something about the man that made him suspicious.\n\n\"How came you to be wandering through these mountains?\" Felix asked. \"I would have thought this a dangerous region for a man to travel in alone.\"\n\n\"A minstrel may travel anywhere he pleases. Even the most savage brigand will not slay a penniless player when he can have a song for free.\"\n\n\"I had not heard orcs and goblins were so appreciative of strolling players.\"\n\n\"I am a fast runner,\" said Johan Gatz with an easy smile. \"Though in truth, I must confess that I am somewhat alarmed by what I have found here.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes. The last time I passed this way was several years ago. The High Road then was lined with towns and villages where a man could earn his bread and some coin. The region was not so wild and lawless. There were neither orcs nor bandits here then. Had I known what I know now, I would not have come back this way but would have stayed in Ostmark regardless of the competition there.\"\n\n\"It might have been wiser.\"\n\n\"Aye, that it might. Hindsight is always wise sight, as my dear old mother used to say.\"\n\n\"You say that even the most desperate bandits will leave a minstrel alone. Have you met any?\"\n\n\"I have met some who might have been, though they let me be.\"\n\n\"Have you heard aught of Henrik Richter? He is said to be the king of the bandits hereabouts.\"\n\nJohan Gatz laughed out loud. \"Then he rules a pretty poor kingdom as far as I can see. I have seen no great armies of bandits nor have I heard anything of this bandit king although I confess that now that you mention him, it might be a good idea for a song.\"\n\n\"I have never met any bandits quite so romantic as the ones you hear about in minstrels' songs,\" Felix said. \"None I have ever met robbed from the rich and gave to the poor, or fought unjust landowners for the rights of the downtrodden. The ones I met only wanted to separate my head from my shoulders and my purse from my belt.\"\n\n\"You have met many bandits then, Herr Jaeger?\" asked Johan Gatz with an odd gleam in his eye.\n\n\"A few,\" replied Felix.\n\n\"Then you must be a hardier man than you seem, to still be alive. You do not sound like a mercenary or a swordsman, if I may say so.\"\n\n\"Hardy enough,\" Felix said, sensing a subtle insult in the man's words.\n\n\"Felix Jaeger is one of the mightiest men Snorri Nosebiter has ever known,\" said Snorri from the far side of the fire. Felix looked over at him in surprise. He had not thought he had made quite such a good impression on the Slayer. Nor had he been aware that the Slayer had been listening quite so closely to the conversation. \"Of course, that is not saying much,\" added Snorri quickly to general laughter from the dwarfs.\n\nFelix shrugged and gave his attention back to the minstrel. \"We go to slay the dragon,\" he said. \"There should be a song in it, if you care to accompany us.\"\n\n\"I like living,\" said the minstrel. \"But should you survive the experience, seek me out and I will make a song of the tale. It will probably make me famous.\"\n\nHe paused for a moment, and considered his words. \"Do you honestly think you have a chance of surviving? Can you even make it to the mountain, if what you tell me of orcs and goblins and human bandits is true?\"\n\n\"We have already put a warband of greenskins to flight,\" Felix said, knowing that he was boasting, but needled by the minstrel's tone. Once again Johan Gatz raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"Twelve of you did that?\"\n\n\"One is a wizard. The Slayers are mighty. Malakai Makaisson is an excellent weapons engineer.\"\n\n\"You use dwarf armaments then, gatling canons and such?\"\n\nFelix nodded. The minstrel laughed gleefully.\n\n\"It seems you are not going about your dragon-slaying in the orthodox manner then. No white horses, no lances, no magical weapons.\"\n\n\"We are too,\" said Snorri. \"Gotrek's axe is magical. He killed a bloody big daemon with it. Snorri saw him. And Felix's sword is magic too. You can tell by the runes if you look closely.\"\n\nFelix wondered if Snorri had been eavesdropping on his conversation with Max Schreiber or whether he really could tell by the runes. In either case, Felix wished he had not said anything about the weapons in front of this inquisitive stranger. He had the feeling that he himself had already said too much. He did not know why but he was starting to trust Johan Gatz less and less, and he had not trusted him very much to begin with.\n\n\"It seems I have underestimated you,\" said the minstrel. \"Your expedition seems remarkably well-prepared. I can almost pity any bandits you run into.\"\n\n\"It's late,\" Felix said. \"I need to get some sleep.\"\n\n\"That seems wise,\" said the stranger mockingly. \"After all you have a busy few days ahead of you.\"\n\nFelix threw himself down on the far side of the fire. He took a last glance at the minstrel, and was not surprised to see the man watching him closely. He was surprised to see Max Schreiber was looking suspiciously at Gatz. It seemed he, too, had his suspicions about the man.\n\nFelix wondered if he would wake up in the night with his throat cut, and then decided that it was unlikely. Anybody who tried it with all the Slayers around was in for a very short life afterwards.\n\nNot that it would be much consolation if he himself were dead, Felix thought, as he dropped into a restless slumber.\n\nJohan Gatz cursed. The gods had spat on him again. When he had noticed the wagon, he had hoped to find a small merchant caravan with maybe a few bodyguards down here. He had not expected a gang of Slayers and this bunch of heavily armed humans. He was particularly annoyed by the presence of the wizard. There was no sense in trying to slip out and give the signal that would bring Henrik and the lads down from the mountainside. The wizard was watching him too closely, and the dwarfs were as suspicious as they were surly.\n\nIt was only to be expected, he supposed. Luck had not been with Henrik Richter's gang recently. Things hadn't really gone right since the dragon had arrived, and the orcs moved in along the High Road. Once there had been rich pickings along this trail, at least rich enough for a smallish band of former mercenaries and cut-throats. With all the extra mouths to feed, things were not so good. Johan cursed the necessity of taking in the human refugees from the destroyed villages, but there had been no other way. They had needed extra swords just to hold their own citadel against the orcs.\n\nHe supposed he should thank Sigmar for small mercies though. At least none of the travellers had questioned his disguise as a wandering minstrel, although that hard eyed man, Jaeger, had seemed suspicious. Taking this lot out was not going to be an easy proposition, he could tell. It wasn't going to be a case of offering an unsuspecting sentry a drugged drink, slitting his throat, and then summoning the boys with a lantern. These laddies were hard, and he did not want to try anything tricky with a magician watching. Anyway, he had always heard that dwarfs could smell poison and his own experience had confirmed this.\n\nHe felt certain that confident as this bunch might be, Henrik Richter and his bandit crew could overcome them. At least they could if Henrik assembled his whole army in one spot. They might even be able to do it with the fifty or so men that Henrik had in the foothills above. \"Might\" being the operative word. This gang looked tough, and even if Henrik and the boys could overcome them, they would probably take an unacceptable number of the lads to hell with them. On the whole it would probably be best to leave them alone.\n\nThere was not going to be any profit in this night's work, he could tell. On the other hand other possibilities suggested themselves. Perhaps he could offer the Slayers an alliance against the orcs. He knew that the stunties hated the greenskins even more than he did. Probably wouldn't work, he thought. They were Slayers and on their way to fight a dragon, and Johan was familiar enough with the ways of dwarfs to know that getting between a stunty and a hoard of gold was a sure way to get boot prints on your chest.\n\nIt was then that the idea struck him. This was a well-equipped expedition. Perhaps the Slayers could kill the dragon. Perhaps not. But there was always the possibility that they could, or wound it badly enough so that it might be slaughtered by an army of men. If that were the case\u2026\n\nSkjalandir had a big hoard of treasure, that was for sure. Dragons always did. That being the case, the way to profit from this might be to follow these maniacs and see what happened. Even if they won, they would most likely be weakened enough by the battle for Henrik and the boys to overcome them. And if they lost, maybe they would weaken the dragon. It was an idea he would put to Henrik tomorrow. He was sure his cousin would grasp its significance at once.\n\nJohan licked his lips at the thought of the dragon's hoard of treasure. He was certain that his share would be more than enough to buy him a little tavern in Nuln and let him leave the dangerous profession of banditry aside. Perhaps things were looking up, he told himself, and drifted into dreams of mountains of gold.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol glared around the great antechamber of the Tower of Moulder. He was furious and he was filled with fear. Since his arrival at Hell Pit he had been kept waiting. Clanrat warriors in the distinctive livery of the Masters had shown him and Lurk to this huge room and then abandoned them there. He wondered why he had been brought here. He had never been allowed into the inner citadel of the Moulders before. Previously all his business with them had been conducted in the cavernous chambers in the crater walls that the clan used for all its business transactions. He was not sure whether it was a good sign or a bad sign that he had been brought here. Being right at the heart of the city made him feel exceedingly nervous. He reached out and touched the winds of magic, just to reassure himself. The power of dark magic was strong here. It was hardly surprising, given how close they were to the Chaos Wastes and how much warpstone dust was in the air, but it was reassuring.\n\nOnce again he inspected his surroundings, searching for the hidden peepholes he felt certain were there. It was not in the least likely that any skaven clan would allow a stranger to stand unobserved in the heart of their fortress, and Clan Moulder were possibly the most devious and suspicious of all the ratman clans.\n\nThanquol wandered over to the window and stared balefully out at the benighted city. It was not made from glass but from some translucent leathery substance whose scent reminded him of flesh. It was a disturbing reminder that the raw material on which Clan Moulder's prowess and fortune was based was nothing less than the stuff of life itself.\n\nHe looked down on an eerie cityscape. Huge towers that reminded him of the tusks of some enormous beast dominated the inside of the crater. From their towering tips emerged clouds of glowing smoke: livid green, ruby, cobalt blue and all manner of other toxic shades. The pillars of smoke rose to contribute to the huge cloud of pollution that eternally hovered above the crater and sometimes descended to create thickly obscuring fog. Thanquol could tell from the faint eerie glitter that the smoke contained trapped particles of warpstone. Part of him was outraged by this flagrant waste, part of him was awestruck by the display of sheer wealth. He had no idea what was taking place within those towers but the cacophony of screams, howls and bestial roars told him that it was not pleasant.\n\nAmong the towers lay other buildings, constructed in a distinctly un-skavenish manner. The buildings were huge tents of decaying leathery flesh, thrown over massive skeletons of twisted bone. They had an odd look that suggested huge ticks or beetles frozen in place by some strange magic. These were the barracks within which the slaves and soldiers of the clans dwelt. The streets below teemed with skaven, and he realised that it was possible that Hell Pit was a ratman city second only to Skavenblight in population.\n\nHere and there, amid the wide streets, were greenishly glowing lakes of polluted water, reputedly still contaminated by the warpstone starfall that had created the vast crater. Far away, he could see the glitter of thousands of lights, windows in the crater wall. It was rumoured that the whole wall had been burrowed out into an endless labyrinth of tunnels and artificial caves to provide burrows and laboratories for the clan. Even as Thanquol watched, a huge door opened in the crater side, and a massive creature emerged. At this distance, in the dark, Thanquol could not make out all the details, but something about the creature suggested a cave rat grown to the size of a mastodon with a howdah on its back.\n\nAcross the night sky flickered forms that Thanquol at first took to be bats, but which he swiftly realised were too big. The simplest explanation was that they were mutant bats grown to massive size, but one of them veered closer to the tower, and he realised that it was a skaven with bat-like membranes under its arms. Part of Thanquol felt horror at this blasphemy. Had not the Horned Rat created the skaven in his own image? Was not tampering with shape of the highest of all creatures the supreme sacrilege? Thanquol had always known the Moulders were mad. He had just never realised quite how insane they really were.\n\nStill, it was a brilliant madness, in its way. Even he had to concede that. In this barren place far from the true centre of skaven civilisation, Clan Moulder had done things that even Thanquol had never dreamed of. He wondered if the Council of Thirteen were aware of quite how much the clan had achieved. Surely, he thought, there must be some way he could use all of this to his advantage.\n\nHe glanced around the room once again. Here, too, was evidence of the mad genius of Clan Moulder. The leather-covered thrones and couches appeared to be incredibly torpid living things. Every time Thanquol looked back, they had changed position ever so slightly, in a manner at once maddening and slightly sinister. The grey seer suspected that the whole room was designed to make visitors uneasy and put them off-balance in any confrontation with the builders. Finally, Thanquol found what he was looking for. High above in the ceiling amid the warpstone-powered globes of the chandelier, he saw a cluster of eyes. They swayed slightly as they observed him, and then, reacting to the fact he had noticed them, they withdrew into the ceiling, vanishing from sight.\n\nAs if this was a signal the door to the chamber opened like a set of great jaws, and the enormously fat figure of Izak Grottle waddled in. A living table covered in bone bowls and translucent fleshy plates followed him.\n\n\"Greetings, in the name of Moulder, Grey Seer Thanquol,\" rumbled Grottle in his unnaturally deep voice. \"Greetings indeed. It is good to see you once more.\"\n\nThanquol doubted that his old rival was pleased to see him. Grottle had tried to betray Thanquol many times when the grey seer had led the army against Nuln. There was bad blood between them, and Thanquol had sworn he would one day have vengeance on Grottle. He did not doubt that, if the opportunity arose, the Moulder would try to do away with him. He knew he would have to be careful.\n\nGrottle slumped into one of the thrones. Its leathery fur moulded itself to his shape, expanding outwards to make room for his fat rump, then enfolding him in an unnatural manner. Its legs flexed slightly as if with strain, and Thanquol would have sworn he heard it emit a slight grunt. After a moment, the chair's back started to ripple as if it were massaging its occupant. Grottle leaned forward and helped himself to a small broiled rat from the table which had manoeuvred itself into position in front of him.\n\n\"So, Grey Seer Thanquol, you have returned bearing the spoils of your attack on the horse-humans' burrow that you promised my Clanlords. You have come to report success in your acquisition of the dwarf airship and have brought the secrets of its construction to share with my overlords. You have come bearing tidings of the whereabouts of the Moulder troops who accompanied you on your quest.\"\n\nGrottle forced the rat whole down his throat and then smiled wickedly. He knew that Thanquol had brought no such pleasant tidings. It occurred to the grey seer that Grottle was enjoying this.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Thanquol said, twitching his tail uneasily. Grottle helped himself to another morsel.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" he muttered to himself, in an almost gloating tone. \"Not exactly. This is not good news, Grey Seer Thanquol. This is not good at all. Clan Moulder lent you the services of several hundred of its finest troops, and many, many of our deadliest beasts, on the understanding that we would share the spoils of your success. At the very least, you will be able to return our warriors and our beasts to us then.\"\n\nThanquol knew that Grottle knew that he could do no such thing. The fat monster was simply toying with him, now that he had the grey seer in his power. He wondered if Grottle would dare do away with him. Thanquol was, after all, one of the chosen of the Horned Rat and a favoured emissary of the Council of Thirteen. Surely, not even this ravenous beast would dare harm him. Considered reflection told Thanquol that this was unfortunately not the case.\n\nAt this moment there was nobody save the Moulders and Lurk who knew of his whereabouts. He had set off in utmost secrecy, hoping to acquire the airship for himself and return to present himself in triumph to the Council. If anything happened to him now, it would be as if he had simply vanished from the face of the earth. Thanquol's fur rose at the sheer unfairness of it. He had come here in good faith to warn the Moulders of the peril of the approaching Chaos horde, and they were prepared to assassinate him over some petty debt they felt he owed them. He glared at Grottle, and swore that whatever happened he would make this fat fool pay for his insolence. He was still capable of blasting his enemies into their component atoms. Grottle had entered this chamber at his peril. As if sensing the change in Thanquol's mood Grottle looked up at him and growled. It was a fearsome sound, and Thanquol remembered that, for all his enormous bulk, the Moulder could be alarmingly swift and terrifyingly strong in battle. He let his anger subside a little, but remained prepared to instantly summon his powers in his own defence.\n\n\"The troops have not returned?\" said Thanquol, affecting surprise.\n\n\"A very few,\" allowed Grottle, spearing another morsel with one of his claws, transferring it to his mouth and gulping it down. \"They brought confused tales of a battle, and sorcery and a massacre of skaven. There were suggestions of incompetent leadership, Grey Seer Thanquol. Very incompetent leadership.\"\n\n\"I left command of the military side of the venture to the Moulders,\" said Thanquol quickly, knowing that in a sense it was true. It was not his fault that the Moulder leaders were incapable of implementing his brilliant plans. \"I would not presume to judge their efficiency.\"\n\nGrottle shook his head, as if Thanquol were a particularly slow runt who had failed to understand his meaning. \"You were in overall command, I believe, Grey Seer Thanquol. You were responsible for the success of the mission. You gave many assurances to the Clanlords of Moulder. They are\u2026 disappointed. Most disappointed.\"\n\nThanquol's tail stiffened in outrage. He bared his fangs angrily. A nimbus of light winked into being around his fingers as he prepared to unleash his most destructive spell.\n\n\"Before you do anything too hasty, Grey Seer Thanquol, please consider this,\" Grottle said. \"After the debacle at Nuln, I do not rank quite so highly within my clan as I once did. You might say I am in disgrace. You might also say that my Clanlords consider me expendable, which is why they have delegated me to have this conversation with you. You might further want to consider that you are in the heart of Clan Moulder's greatest citadel. Within call are thousands upon thousands of clanrat warriors. Not to mention a virtually limitless supply of altered beasts. Anyone so foolish as to attack a member of the clan, and then try to escape from this place, would not get more than a hundred strides. I mention this knowing that you are too wise to attempt any such thing. Far too wise.\"\n\nThanquol ground his teeth in frustration. Grottle's threat was clear. Also implicit in the statement was the fact that no one would care if he took Grottle hostage and tried to negotiate a way out. He was almost embarrassed to admit that he had not even considered trying it. Grottle continued to speak. His deep voice sounded mild, gentle even. \"To tell the truth, I was surprised that you came here. I would not have expected it after the\u2026 embarrassment with the airship. Why did you come?\"\n\n\"I bring appalling tidings, and a warning for the masters of Moulder.\"\n\n\"And what would that be?\" Grottle asked disinterestedly. He sucked something from his extended talon. His claws looked alarmingly sharp, Thanquol noted.\n\n\"A Chaos horde, limitless in numbers and boundless in power, makes its way southwards. It seems the servants of the four Powers are leaving the Wastes and coming south as they did generations ago.\"\n\n\"This is grave news. If true.\"\n\n\"It is true. I swear it by the Thirteen Secret Names of the Horned Rat. I have seen the host with my own eyes, smelled it with my own snout. Lurk and I barely escaped it with our lives.\"\n\nThanquol thought it best not to mention that the followers of Tzeentch had let him go. He wanted to give Grottle no excuse to think that he might be a spy or a traitor to the skaven cause. He knew there were many jealous ratmen who would be only too keen to give such an interpretation to events, despite the inherent ludicrousness of the idea. Despite the fact that Thanquol's name was a byword for devotion to the skaven cause, he was wise enough to know that he had enemies who would give a twisted interpretation to even his most innocent act. He prayed that Lurk would remember this too.\n\n\"This is terrible news then. What do you propose that we should do?\"\n\n\"Muster your armies, make ready to defend Hell Pit against an invasion by the forces of Chaos. It might happen.\"\n\n\"And if it does not?\"\n\n\"Then muster your armies anyway. Surely the horde will sow terror and alarm along its path. In the coming war there will be many opportunities to advance the skaven cause.\"\n\nEven as his words carried him away, Thanquol could see they were true. The Chaos horde was going to attack the human kingdom. Whatever the outcome, the struggle would surely weaken even the victorious side. All the skaven had to do was wait and new opportunities would inevitably fall into their outstretched paw. \"The Council of Thirteen must be notified at once.\"\n\nGrottle yawned and rose from his chair. \"You may be right, Grey Seer Thanquol. I will report your words to my masters. They will decide what to do next.\"\n\nThanquol could not believe it. He had just handed this fat fool information of the utmost importance, and he could not see the urgency of the situation. Thanquol considered blasting him out of sheer frustration. He restrained himself, knowing that he would have to get word to the Council. Armies would have to be assembled. Plans would have to be made. He knew that there was no one better equipped to lead such a force than himself. In his excitement he almost forgot about the airship. In the coming war there would be countless opportunities to cover himself in glory and advance his position in the eyes of the Thirteen. The Horned Rat had surely blessed him once more. Once again he was in the right place at the right time.\n\nGrottle paused at the entrance to the chamber. \"By the way, Grey Seer Thanquol, until this matter is resolved, you are the guest of my clan. We will see to your safety. We will make sure your needs are met. You are, after all, a very special guest. I am sure you understand my meaning.\"\n\nThanquol's heart sank. He knew exactly what Izak Grottle meant. He knew now, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was the prisoner of Clan Moulder." + }, + { + "title": "INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH", + "text": "Felix looked down on the entrance to the Dragon Vale. He had not seen a scene of such surpassing bleakness since they left the Chaos Wastes. Around the shores of a small lake lay a collection of burned out ruins that had once been a town. All the houses, watchtowers and farms that had once surrounded the town had been equally devastated. The fields were overgrown, and here and there what could only be bones glittered whitely amid the long grass. In some ways this was worse than the Wastes, for it was obvious that the lands below had once been as thriving and prosperous as they were now desolate.\n\nAt the far end of the valley stood a great barren peak, rising above the slopes of the foothills. There was something especially horrible about this mountain. It had a sense of presence, of menace. Just by looking at its greyish sides, you could tell that there was something dreadful lurking there.\n\nFelix tried to tell himself that it was just his imagination. Supplied with the knowledge that they were within sight of the dragon's lair, his mind was working overtime, conjuring up an atmosphere of gloom and destruction.\n\nEven as he tried to reassure himself he knew he was right. There was something horrible about this place. No birds sang. The wind that blew down the valley was mournful. The clouds hung low and oppressive in the sky. At any moment, Felix feared to look up and see a huge winged shape descending out of them.\n\nIt had been a long march. Almost three days had passed since their encounter with Johan Gatz, and during that time his suspicions about the supposed minstrel had increased. There had been times when Ulrika had thought she had seen men watching them from the hills. Times when he himself had caught sight of greenskins moving along the high slopes parallel to them. It looked as if they were being watched by at least two factions as they had moved through the mountains.\n\nAt least the watchers had proved wary. They had stayed well out of bowshot and vanished as soon as the Slayers made the first signs of pursuit. By the time they got to the spot where the greenskins had been, the orcs had vanished. It seemed that the fate of their earlier attackers had taught any would-be ambushers a lesson. Either that or they were waiting for something. Felix could not guess what. Perhaps now they had entered the Dragon Vale, they would be left alone. Or perhaps the greenskins were simply waiting for the dragon to slay the interlopers, then they would descend and despoil the bodies. If the dragon left anything to despoil. Felix wasn't feeling any too cheerful about the outcome of their quest. It was all too easy to believe that every last one of them would die in this place.\n\nHe squared his shoulders and smiled experimentally, hoping this would change his mood. If that were the case, he told himself, at least Gotrek would achieve his long-sought doom. He glanced over at Ulrika and any cheery thoughts evaporated. They had barely spoken on the trip here. Actually, she had spoken more to Max Schreiber than to Felix. It was obvious that she was purposefully avoiding him.\n\nIn a way he did not blame her. What future was there for them now? They would most likely die within the next few days. And even if by some miracle they survived the encounter with the dragon, they would soon have to face the horde of Chaos rampaging down into Kislev. He was not even sure how he felt about her himself. He was hurt by the way she treated him, and felt absurdly and exaggeratedly sensitive to her behaviour. At times during the march, he had been more concerned by the way she avoided looking at him, or the way she talked to Max, than he was with the possibility that he might soon be slaughtered by the dragon.\n\nMax, at least, looked cheery. He smiled as he joked with Ulrika. Felix's stomach churned as he saw her smile back. He was jealous and guilty and there was nothing he could do about it.\n\nOleg and Standa refused to look at him too. He was certain it was nothing personal, they were simply standing by Ulrika as was their duty. They could not take his side even if they wanted to. Felix cursed to himself. Even by the excruciating standards of the treks he had endured with Gotrek, this was a miserable journey.\n\n\"There's a dragon about here somewhere!\" bellowed Ulli. \"I can smell him.\"\n\nThe other Slayers looked at the youth with a mixture of contempt, amusement and irritation. \"Does your keen nose tell you how soon we will encounter it?\" asked Gotrek sarcastically. Ulli fell silent.\n\n\"I reckon we'll be at the dragon mount inside a day,\" said Bjorni. \"We'll see it then.\"\n\n\"I wonder how much treasure it has?\" Steg said. Felix looked at him uneasily. He could see the gleam of gold fever in the dwarf's eyes. It was not a reassuring sight. Dwarfs had been known to do many dishonourable things under its influence. It seemed he was not the only one who recognised it.\n\n\"Dinnae you worry yersel aboot the dragon's gold,\" said Malakai. \"You joost keep thinkin' about the big beastie itself.\"\n\nGrimme glared at Steg. Steg looked at his feet. He seemed almost embarrassed.\n\n\"There's something else down there,\" Gotrek said. \"I can smell it. And it's not a dragon.\"\n\nFelix had a lot more faith in Gotrek's nose than he had in Ulli's. \"What is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Gotrek said. \"But whatever it is, you can bet it won't be friendly.\"\n\n\"Now there's a surprise,\" muttered Felix.\n\n\"Who be ye?\" asked the madwoman as they entered the ruined town. She stood outside the remains of an inn. Like all the buildings in the town it was built from stone. Now it spoke only of the dragon's capacity for destruction. Its walls were scorched and caked with soot from the burning of its timbers. In places the stones had melted and run, a testimony to the heat of the dragon's breath.\n\nFelix looked at her. Her face was filthy and her clothing reeked. She was garbed in tattered rags. A blackened scarf held her matted hair out of her eyes. More rags were wrapped around her feet. A huge claw-like nail emerged from the cloth bandaged around her left foot. Just from looking into her eyes, Felix could tell that she and sanity had parted company a long time ago.\n\nThe dwarfs looked at her warily. Gotrek had warned them they were being watched minutes ago, and they had all readied weapons. It was difficult to see what threat she could be to such a heavily armed party unless she were some sort of witch. Felix glanced over at Max. As if reading his thoughts, the sorcerer looked at the woman and shook his head.\n\n\"We are travellers, passing through,\" Felix said. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"I had a name once. I had a man. I had babies. This was my home.\" A wild gesture indicated the burned out shell of the tavern. \"No more. Now I wait. Now you travel and you travel to meet death.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Death dwells on your road. He dwells in a cave in the mountains. Death came here and devoured my family, my friends and my children. Death will come again for me soon.\"\n\nFelix felt an uncomfortable sympathy for the old woman. She had seen her whole life destroyed by the dragon and had retreated into madness. Here was another of the creature's victims, like poor Varek. \"It was the dragon who killed your loved ones,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"Death is the dragon. The dragon is death,\" she said and let out a high pitched cackling laugh. \"And round here death has many servants and many worshippers. As you shall soon find out. As the others did.\"\n\n\"What others?\"\n\n\"Other dwarfs with big axes and bad haircuts. Mighty men mounted on chargers and armed with lances. Men of violence who came seeking death's hoard. All of them bones now, scattered along the road to death's cave.\"\n\nFelix knew she was referring to some of the Slayers who had preceded them. He wondered about the knights though, and this troop of mercenaries who had apparently come seeking the dragon's treasure. It seemed Skjalandir had visited destruction on them all.\n\n\"Tell me about these mercenaries,\" Felix said. \"Who were they?\"\n\n\"They came seeking death's gold. They had swords and shields and axes. They had great engines of destruction and wizards to cast spells. They climbed death's mountain. Death took them. Death gulped down their flesh and spat out their bones. He let a few of them flee and then hunted them down, flying after them on his leathery pinions. Listening to their screams as the shadow of his mighty wings fell across them. In the end, death took them all, but not before he had made them suffer.\"\n\n\"The dragon played with them,\" Max Schreiber said ominously.\n\n\"Death is not kind,\" said the woman. \"Death will come for us all. Some he lets live so that they might worship him. Some he punishes for their disobedience of his will. Death is a terrible, angry god. Best you turn back, strangers, while you yet may.\"\n\n\"Are you saying some of the surviving townspeople worship the dragon? Do you?\"\n\n\"Some there are who still dwell here, who kill newcomers and offer them up as sacrifices to death. I say they are fools. What need has death of their offerings? Death takes what he wishes, and one day he will take their lives as well.\"\n\nWonderful, thought Felix. Not only do we have the dragon, the greenskins and the bandits to worry about, we have some crazed survivors who worship the beast as a god.\n\n\"Thank you for your words. Do you need anything?\" Felix asked. \"Food? Water? Money?\"\n\nThe madwoman shook her head, then turned and limped away into the ruins. Felix felt he ought to do something. Perhaps call her back or offer her their protection, then he realised how ludicrous the idea was. They might well not be able to protect themselves, and the safest place for her to be was well away from them.\n\n\"Let her go,\" said Max Schreiber.\n\nFelix watched her walk away. Part of him thought he might be safer if he did the same.\n\nThe road wound along the shores of the lake. The waters were calm and still, and reflected the surrounding mountains like a mirror. Occasionally, the wind stirred up some waves and sent them to break on the beach. It was the only sound Felix could hear other than the moaning of the wind, and the creak of the wheels of Malakai's wagon. All around the landscape was bleak and desolate. There were many signs of human habitation \u2014 bothies, cottages, shepherds' huts \u2014 but all of them looked abandoned or destroyed. Felix tried to imagine what the valley must have been like when it was inhabited. Sheep must have grazed along these hills. Woodcutters must have worked amid the copses of firs. Lovers must have walked hand in hand along the water's edge. Doubtless fishing boats had dragged their nets through the lake. Felix had seen the stone pylons that had once supported the burned out pier back in the town. He had seen the blackened hulks of ships overturned in the water, scorched by dragonfire, holed by dragon claws.\n\nIt was cold now. He tugged his red Sudenland wool cloak tight around him to fight off the chill. Bjorni broke out into a raucous and bawdy ballad about a troll and a tavern keeper's daughter. His voice boomed out, disturbing the eerie silence. Felix knew that Bjorni was singing to lighten their gloomy mood, but even so, wished that he would not. It seemed somehow unwise to challenge the brooding silence, to draw attention to themselves in any way.\n\nTo do so invited destruction to descend on them as it had done on the inhabitants of the valley.\n\nPerhaps, thought Felix, that's what Bjorni wanted. He was a Slayer after all, and heroic death was his avowed goal. As if in answer to Bjorni's song there was a distant roar, low-pitched, bestial and threatening. It echoed through the mountains like thunder. It was unnaturally loud and terrifying, and on hearing it Bjorni fell silent. Felix stared at the horizon, convinced that in moments the dragon would be on them. His hand went to the hilt of his sword, and immediately a tingling warmth passed through him. He looked all around, but there was no sign of the dragon save the echo of its voice.\n\nHe looked at Ulrika and then Gotrek and saw an unease written on both their faces that mirrored his own. He exchanged glances with the rest of the party and noticed that they were all pallid and withdrawn. For long moments, the silence dragged on. They held their breaths waiting to see what would happen. After a minute or so, Bjorni began to sing again, very quietly at first but his voice gathering strength with every word. He was not singing a bawdy tale this time, but something else, some old dwarf hymn or war-song that resonated through the valley. Soon Malakai joined in, and then Ulli and then Steg. One by one all the dwarfs save Gotrek and Grimme added their voices, then Max Schreiber did as well. Soon Felix found himself humming along.\n\nThere was something reassuring about the singing, as if by doing it, they challenged the dragon and reaffirmed their own courage. As he fell into step with the others, Felix felt his courage return, and he marched along with a lighter heart than he had felt in many a day.\n\nAhead of him, he could see the place where the path left the road, and wound its way up the side of Dragon Mountain.\n\nThe clouds were lower. They billowed through the gaps in the surrounding peaks, extending mist-like tentacles to embrace the Dragon Mountain. Visibility decreased. The air became even more chilly. The sense of oppression deepened.\n\nOut of the mist loomed a small manor house. It looked as if it had once belonged to a wealthy family, perhaps some mountain nobleman. As such, Felix realised, it must have been one of the first places to be destroyed when the dragon awoke from its long sleep. Half the walls were tumbled down. Felix found it all too easy to imagine them being crushed by the weight of the dragon's mighty body ploughing through them.\n\nIn his mind's eye, he immediately conjured up a picture of what it must have been like to be inside the building with the mighty beast rampaging outside. He could almost smell the thatched roof on fire, feel the heat crackling in his face, the smoke making his eyes water. In his daydream he heard the ear-shattering bellows, the crunch of claws on stone, the shrieks of the dying, the unanswered prayers for mercy. Then finally, he envisioned the unnatural sight of the wall bulging inward, the stones cracking, toppling, giving way, and, in the last moment before fiery death, a glimpse of the dragon's hideous visage, the glare of its huge eyes.\n\nSo vivid was the image and so frightening, that he began to wonder if the dragon's mere presence had cast some sort of wicked spell on the place, cursing any who passed to experience the last moments of its doomed victims. He tried telling himself that it was just the mist, the memory of the dragon's roars, and his own impressionable mind that had conjured up the image. Or, perhaps, the image had been created by the sword, responding to the dragon's presence. Certainly he could feel a trickle of energy passing from the blade into his own body. Somehow that did not reassure him.\n\nHis legs ached from the long uphill march. He felt cold and lonely and more than a little depressed. He felt in his heart a certainty of impending death that was only slightly relieved by the magical warmth emanating from his sword. The encounter with the madwoman that morning remained with him, and the memory of her words disturbed him. He did indeed feel the closeness of death at this moment, and he realised that he had retreated into himself to avoid confronting it. The others appeared to have done the same. The singing had ceased the moment they had set foot on the path to the dragon's lair. All of the party of adventurers seemed to want to be alone with their thoughts and their prayers.\n\nFelix considered his life. It seemed likely to be much shorter than he would have wanted it to be. He did not consider it particularly wasted though. In his travels with Gotrek he had seen many things, met many people, and even, perhaps, done some good by combating the forces of darkness. He had done some extraordinary things, like flown in an airship, and seen the Chaos Wastes. He had fought with daemons and monsters, and talked with mages and nobles. He had witnessed rituals of magic and depravity, and feats of heroism. He had known a few good women. He had fought duels.\n\nStill there were things he had not done, and things he wanted to do. He had not completed the tale of Gotrek's deeds, or even fairly begun it. He had not reconciled himself with his father and family.\n\nHe had not even settled things between himself and Ulrika. Of all of them, that at least was possible at this moment, he thought.\n\nWith the shadow of imminent death now hanging well and truly over them, it seemed pointless to be jealous, or to worry about what she had been laughing about with Max, or even whether they would ever truly be lovers again. He felt at that moment that he wanted simply to show her some affection, make some human gesture of trust and understanding, connect for what might be the last time. Even if she rejected him or refused to speak to him, he wanted to at least make the effort.\n\nHe lengthened his stride and walked up the trail to overtake her. He fell into step beside her, reached out to touch her shoulder gently and get her attention.\n\n\"What?\" she said. Her tone was not friendly, but it was not unfriendly either. Suddenly, he was filled with odd emotion, a mixture of anger and need and pity and something else. He knew exactly what he wanted to say, and exactly the words needed to say it, and yet it was difficult just to speak them.\n\n\"This might be the last chance we ever have to speak to each other,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"Yes. So?\"\n\n\"Why are you making this so difficult?\"\n\n\"You are the one who wanted to talk to me.\"\n\nHe took a breath to calm himself, and tried to remember his good intentions of just a few minutes before. Eventually he forced his lips to move.\n\n\"I just wanted to say that I loved you.\"\n\nShe looked at him, but said nothing back. He waited for a response for a moment, slowly feeling the weight of hurt and rejection build up within him. Still she said nothing.\n\nThen, suddenly, the dragon's enormous roar filled the air again. The earth beneath their feet seemed to vibrate with it.\n\n\"I think we're getting close,\" said Ulli.\n\nThe pathway led up over the brow of the hill, and then sloped down to the right. Felix could see that they had entered a long, barren valley. The air smelled foul, and an acrid chemical stench mingled with the mist. It smelled more like the outside of a tannery than a mountain valley. Even the grass of the slopes in this place had a scorched yellowish look to it. It was as if the malign presence of the dragon had leaked into the earth itself, corrupting it.\n\nFelix realised that he had seen something like this before, in the Chaos Wastes. It was almost like the effects of warpstone.\n\nMalakai halted his wagon and began to search about within it. One after another he produced a selection of devices which he strapped to his chest. Felix recognised some of them. One was a portable gatling gun of the sort Varek had carried into Karag Dum. Others were large bombs he clipped to his harness. The last was a long hollow tube into which he loaded a large projectile before slinging it over his shoulder.\n\n\"Ah'm ready to pay the beastie a wee visit noo,\" he said, moving down the slope. Gotrek nodded his agreement and ran his thumb along the blade of his axe, producing a bead of blood.\n\n\"Come out, dragon!\" he bellowed. \"My axe thirsts.\"\n\n\"I wish you wouldn't do that,\" Felix muttered quietly.\n\nGotrek walked down the path, shoulder to shoulder with Malakai.\n\n\"Snorri thinks this will be a good fight,\" said Snorri Nosebiter, and hefting his weapons set off after them.\n\n\"I wonder if there are any sheep around here. I could use a little relaxation,\" Bjorni said, then shrugged and strode downslope. Grimme went with him. This left only the humans, Steg and Ulli standing at the hilltop.\n\n\"I suppose somebody ought to guard the cart,\" Ulli said. He looked a little shame-faced. Not that Felix blamed him. He was not too keen to go and face the dragon himself.\n\n\"I was thinking the same thing,\" Steg said. \"There must be lots of valuable stuff here.\"\n\nUlli and Steg looked at each other. They both looked more and more embarrassed.\n\n\"I thought Slayers were supposed to seek a heroic death,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Me too,\" agreed Ulrika.\n\nUlli gazed at his feet. Steg stared at the sky. Both of them looked very afraid.\n\nFelix shook his head, then he strode into the valley of the dragon. Ulrika and her bodyguards followed, bows held at the ready. Max gave Ulli and Steg a look that was somewhere between sympathy and contempt, and then strode into the valley.\n\nTo his horror, Felix realised that something was crunching underfoot. Looking down he could see that he was walking on sticks of something brittle and black. It took him a moment to realise that they were fire-scorched bones.\n\n\"Well, I guess we know what happened to the other folks who came here,\" he whispered. He wanted to be able to talk loudly and bravely but there was something in the air that compelled him to quietness.\n\n\"Yes,\" Ulrika said, then added, \"I don't think we always knew.\"\n\nShe sounded as if she thought his comment was idiotic. Which in a way, he supposed, it was. He took a deep breath and tried to remain calm. His fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword, and new strength and determination flowed into him. Felix felt as if he ought to resent the usurpation of his body and his will to the sword's purpose, but actually he was grateful for it. He wondered if he would even have been able to contemplate approaching the great beast if he were not carrying the weapon. He was astounded by the bravery of Ulrika and her henchmen, who did not even have to be here, and who did not have the power of a magical sword to encourage them.\n\nHe thought his courage had been tested before in his encounter with the Bloodthirster beneath Karag Dum, but in some ways this was worse. In the ancient dwarf city there had been no possibility of escape. He had been trapped along with the dwarfs. There had been nothing else to do but stand and fight. He did not have to be here.\n\nThere was nothing stopping him from running away, or going back to join Ulli and Steg. There was no army of Chaos warriors blocking the way back, as there had been in Karag Dum. He was not entombed deep beneath the earth. He knew that in some ways he was not even bound by his oath to follow Gotrek anymore. Only the other night, he had offered to run away with Ulrika in spite of it. And yet, here he was advancing into the mist, marching towards a dragon's lair, apparently of his own free will.\n\nIt was not that simple though. He was still bound by a whole complex pattern of events, dependencies and emotions. He did still feel some loyalty to Gotrek. He did not want to look like a coward in front of Ulrika and the others. He did not want to destroy his own image of himself. He knew he despised Ulli and Steg for their cowardice, even though he understood their emotions all too well. He did not want to be like them. He did not want Ulrika and Max and the others thinking of him in the same way.\n\nAnd there was no easy retreat. The hills were still full of orcs and bandits and there was no way back for one man on his own, even accompanied by two cowardly dwarfs. He wondered if Ulli and Steg had realised this. And he suspected that, beneath all his feelings, the power of the sword he held was at work on him, nudging him in the direction it wanted him to go.\n\nFelix wondered if the others were in a similar quandary, if they too felt the same complex mix of emotions that he did. From their grim expressions, it was hard to tell. Every face was a mask of self-control. Every hand was steady.\n\nNot wanting to, and yet somehow compelled to do it, Felix continued to put one foot in front of the other, certain that every step took him closer to death.\n\nMax could sense the dragon up ahead, as surely as he could feel the winds of magic. It was an ominous powerful presence that made him want to quiver with fear. He had read about the aura of dragons, of how they inspired fear in even the boldest heart, and, having experienced it once, he had thought that he was prepared for it. He was wrong.\n\nHe felt that at any moment the great beast might spring out and end his life with a snap of its jaws. This must be how a bird feels, when it senses the nearness of a cat, he thought. To distract himself, he reached out his senses and grasped at the winds of magic, preparing himself to lash out with a spell at the smallest warning. He had already woven his subtlest and most potent protective spells upon himself and his comrades. He wondered if they had even noticed.\n\nHe was also aware that other powers were at work here. The ominous blade that Felix Jaeger bore was beginning to blaze with power. To Max's wizardly eyes it glowed like a beacon. Max could sense the sentience in it was beginning to activate its own spells. Had he not been absolutely certain that the blade was as determined as they to put an end to the dragon, Max would have woven counter spells.\n\nEven as he thought this Max wondered why he was so certain as to the sword's purpose. Was it possible that the blade was affecting his own mind, and making him believe this? He doubted it. He felt that he would have sensed any such encroachment on his mind. He inspected his own mental defences, searching for a breach, just in case, and found none. Then again, any spell of sufficient subtlety to affect his mind would almost certainly leave him thinking that any way.\n\nHe almost laughed. Here he was worrying about a relatively minor possibility when ahead of him he sensed a dragon, with a dragon's magic and a dragon's incredible power. What did it matter what the sword was up to? It was not the only magical weapon here. There was Gotrek's awesome axe, a thing that carried a power within it an order of magnitude greater than Felix's sword, a weapon capable of banishing greater daemons.\n\nThe more Max thought about these events the more he believed there was a pattern to them. Malakai Makaisson was here, also armed with the deadliest devices dwarf steel-craft was capable of building, and he was here too, his magic having reached new heights of potency on the journey. Surely such things could not be accidents. Perhaps the benevolent powers who stood guard over the world had brought them here for a reason.\n\nMax found himself smiling quietly. This was a dangerous line of thinking. Warriors and wizards who thought themselves specially protected by the gods usually found themselves in an early grave. Perhaps they died serving the god's purposes, perhaps not. The higher powers were rarely open with their human followers, and not necessarily kind to them, either.\n\nIf he was honest, he was here because Ulrika was here, and he wanted to protect her. It was a foolish and romantic notion for a wizard, but it was the truth. If that led to his death, then so be it\u2026\n\nHe took another breath. Along with the winds of magic, he sensed rottenness and corruption. This was not the simple stink of evil. It was like the smell of gangrenous flesh he had sometimes scented in a hospice during his apprenticeship in healing magic. A faint hope stirred within him.\n\nPerhaps the dragon had been more badly wounded in its attack on the airship than they had thought. For a moment, his heart lightened then realism reasserted itself. Even if the creature was badly hurt, it was not necessarily a good sign.\n\nDragons, like most beasts, were always at their most dangerous when wounded.\n\nUlrika held her bow ready. She was not sure exactly what a single arrow could do against a monster as mighty as the dragon, but she was determined to at least try. She had already given instructions to Standa and Oleg to do the same as she intended to do: aim for the eyes. No matter how well armoured the creature's body might be, its eyes must still be vulnerable. At least she hoped this was the case. She could not see how they could be armoured.\n\nShe clung to this thought for reassurance. This was a dreadful place. It stank of death and illness. The bones of the dragon's previous victims lay all around, wrapped in rusting chainmail and mouldering leather, sightless eye-sockets staring towards the heavens. It seemed like hundreds had tried to kill the beast before them, and none of them had succeeded.\n\nFor the hundredth time she wondered why she was here. She could have left the Slayers, and tried to make her way north along the High Road. She could even have left Karak Kadrin by the long westerly route. She had not and there were times when she regretted it. Taking a different route would have meant leaving Felix and she had not been prepared to do that. More fool she.\n\nShe felt as if she had deserted her duty to her father and her kinsfolk for a stranger. And for what? She had thought she loved him, but, if this was love, it was not like anything the bards sung of. It was fury and irritation, and an insane sensitivity to the least little thing. It was fear, of loss and of having. It was feeling that you had stopped being yourself and were becoming a stranger to the person you had been. It was this powerful brutish force that made you think about a man even though you would not talk to him and even as you walked into a dragon's lair.\n\nShe wished he had not agreed to go with her the other night, and she was glad he had, even if it would make him an oathbreaker. She wondered whether they could have slipped away and made it through the mountains into obscurity and a life together. And she knew it was an illusion. They were not the sort of people who could have done that. She could not, in the end, abandon family and duty.\n\nShe looked over and saw that Max was smiling, and wondered what the magician could find here to smile about. He was a strange man, but a good one. He could not help it if the gods had gifted him with strange powers. He seemed to at least want to do his best to use them for good, and he had been a true friend to her and the rest of them. She was certain that the only reason he was here was because of her, and she was touched by that, though she thought it was foolish of him to be taking a path that most likely would lead to his death because of love. On the other hand, he was being no more foolish than she.\n\nUp ahead, she saw the Slayers had stopped. They stood before a huge cave mouth. The stink of rot and putrefaction was stronger here, as if they were coming close to its source. They stood now at the mouth of Skjalandir's lair. Where was the dragon, she wondered?\n\nUlli watched Steg rummaging through the back of Malakai Makaisson's wagon. A look of shame and embarrassment crossed his face. He tugged his beard. He kicked a stone. He felt dreadful. He had always known he was a coward. He had fled from his first battle and been ostracised by his clan. He had sought to atone for it by becoming a Slayer. He had thought that Grimnir might smile on him, and grant him the courage to find death. The god had not done so. In fact it looked like his shame was going to be increased. Who had ever heard of a Slayer who was a coward?\n\n\"Found anything interesting in there?\" he asked, just to make conversation.\n\n\"Lots of gear. Lots of tools,\" Steg said. \"Probably weapons. I don't know how to put them together. Must be worth a fortune but I don't know how to use them.\"\n\nHe sounded angry and disappointed. Ulli wondered if he had really thought to make his fortune by stealing the engineer's devices. He had been wondering that since the start of the trip. Not that he would have minded right now. The engineer's weapons had certainly routed those goblins. With them, they might have stood a chance of getting back. Without them, they probably did not.\n\nHe glanced back down slope. To his surprise the mist had started to lift. Through it, he thought he saw humanoid shapes, greenskins, coming ever closer. His heart sank. He knew now there was most likely no escape.\n\nHe felt something hardening within him. This was hopeless. There was no way back. Whichever way he looked there was only death. Perhaps Grimnir had answered his prayers after all. He came to a decision and climbed up onto the back of the cart. He saw that in the cases Steg had rummaged through were a collection of the black spherical bombs that Malakai was so fond of. They would do. He picked up a blanket and, using it as a sack, quickly filled it with bombs. Steg meanwhile had noticed the orcs.\n\n\"Looks like we've got company,\" he said.\n\n\"Aye,\" said Ulli. \"I'd stay and kill them, but the dragon is bigger. It's a better ending for a Slayer.\"\n\nSteg shrugged. \"Aye, you're right. And it most likely has gold too.\"\n\n\"Let's be away then.\"\n\nTogether they raced down into the Dragon Vale. Ulli hoped that if they hurried they might catch up with the others. He was not sure exactly why, but he felt it might be better to die in company.\n\nThe mouth of the dragon's cave loomed before them. Felix guessed that the roof must be nearly five times his own height. He peered in, half-expecting to catch a glimpse of a huge reptilian head in the heartbeat before its fiery breath incinerated him. He saw nothing save that the cave extended deep into the earth. In the shadowy gloom, he could make out stalactites and stalagmites. For a moment, the cave itself seemed to be the maw of an enormous monster, but then common sense reasserted itself. \"I can't see any dragon,\" he said.\n\n\"It's in there. I can smell it,\" Gotrek said. \"It's down in the dark, cowering. We'll just have to go in and get it.\"\n\nGotrek's description of the dragon's behaviour struck Felix as being unrealistic. He doubted very much that the dragon felt any fear of them at all. It probably just hadn't noticed them.\n\n\"We'll need light,\" he said. \"It's too dark to see down there.\"\n\nMax gestured and a sphere of golden fire hovered in the air above him. He gestured again and the sphere split into five smaller spheres, one of which moved to hover over each of the humans. Felix gathered that Max already knew the dwarfs did not need nearly as much light to see by as men did.\n\n\"I guess we're not going to be sneaking up on the dragon anyway,\" Felix said. He looked at the others. \"Let's get this over with.\"\n\nAs they descended into the darkness, Felix was glad of the magical light. It hovered just behind his head and gave him enough illumination to see by. It was an absolute necessity in this place. The floor of the cavern was rough, and descended steeply into the gloom. Rocks protruded from the floor at intervals. He did not doubt that if he had tried to feel his way forward in the dark, he might easily have fallen and broken his neck.\n\nThe way followed many branching paths but it was always obvious, from the smell, and the trail of slimy blood that lay before them, in which direction they would find the dragon. Felix was glad of the marked trail too. This was not one cave, he realised, but a vast underground labyrinth in which it would be all too easy to get lost.\n\nAn enormous roar echoed through the caverns. The winding corridors amplified it to the point where it was almost deafening. Felix's ears rang. He had no idea where the dragon might be. Once, judging from the intensity of the sound, he would have thought it was close, but his experiences in the tunnels of dwarf cities had taught him that noises could be deceptive. In a way this was worse. The uncertainty filled him with dread.\n\nAround him the others were shadowy figures. The humans were outlined by the sorcerous spheres. The dwarfs were near invisible as they moved through the gloom. He could see their silhouettes, and hear their voices, but nothing more. The smell of corruption was getting worse. He put his hand over his mouth and nostrils to keep from gagging.\n\nBehind him, he could hear the noise of running feet. He turned to see Ulli and Steg moving down the corridor. He noticed that Ulli had a huge sack thrown over his shoulder.\n\n\"I'm glad you could join us after all,\" Felix said sardonically. \"You're not too late for the action.\"\n\n\"We didn't have much choice,\" Ulli said, looking more than somewhat embarrassed. \"A whole tribe of greenskins has shown up outside.\"\n\n\"The way back is cut off,\" added Steg.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Felix said. \"Just what I needed to hear.\"\n\n\"Don't worry\" said Snorri. \"We'll get them on the way out.\"\n\nThe cave became a long high tunnel. Shadows danced away from the glowing globes. The trail led on deeper into the earth. Somewhere off in the distance they could hear running water. The walls were damp, and covered in slick greenish moss. Suddenly the bellowing stopped.\n\n\"Och, the beastie must hae smelled us,\" said Malakai. \"Ah dinnae doot it kens we're here.\"\n\n\"Snorri thinks that's just fine,\" said Snorri. \"Snorri wouldn't want to take unfair advantage.\"\n\n\"The creature must die,\" Gotrek said. \"The dwarf folk have a mighty grudge against it.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Grimme said. \"That they have. So have I.\"\n\nEveryone looked at him in surprise. It was the first time he had ever spoken to them. His voice was quiet and sad and sour. He met their gazes evenly. Hatred and sorrow were etched upon his face. \"The beast killed my whole clan. I was in the lands of men trading or I would have died with them. I have come back bearing this grudge. I will either kill the beast, or die expunging the shame of failing to die with my clan.\"\n\n\"The beastie will die,\" Malakai said. \"It owes me for what it did tae ma lovely airship.\"\n\n\"The dragon must pay for the death of Varek,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"We'll make it,\" Bjorni said.\n\n\"Are you going to stand here all day boasting?\" Gotrek said. \"I have better things to do.\"\n\n\"Let's go,\" Malakai said.\n\nAhead they could hear the roar of water, and see something glittering. \"Gold,\" Steg said, lengthening his stride, apparently unconcerned now with his personal safety. \"Or the glitter of dragon scales,\" Max said. \"Be prepared to fight.\" As they moved closer, Felix could see a great cavern looming ahead of them. It was a monstrous chamber, as vast as the interior of the Temple of Sigmar in Altdorf. At one end was a waterfall, which tumbled into a large pool. The wetness of the spray moistened Felix's face, even at this distance. The air stank of rotting flesh.\n\nAround the chamber's edge ran several ledges large enough to hold a man. The tunnel on which they walked ran into a crude ramp, smoothed by the passage of the dragon's massive body over the years. Here and there lay the bones of men and beasts and monsters. There was indeed treasure glittering in the cavern, great mounds of it, silver and copper and gold and jewellery all mingled together. It held the eye for mere moments though before it was drawn to the creature that dominated the huge space.\n\nIn the centre of the chamber lay the dragon, the largest living thing Felix had ever seen, or hoped to see.\n\nIt was the size of a small hill, an enormous mass of muscle and sinew and scale. Its leathery wings were wrapped tight around its body. Its long tail was tipped with a great razor-edged paddle-blade of flesh. Double rows of serrated spines, each as large as a tall man, ran down its spine. Even as Felix watched the monstrous serpentine neck uncurled as the dragon lifted its head to see who disturbed its slumber. It glanced down at them with baleful, hate-filled eyes. Felix could see pain and madness in the gaze. Part of him wanted to flee, but from the blade in his hand came a flow of strength and calm and courage.\n\nEven the dwarfs were daunted by those evil eyes, Felix could tell. Behind him, he heard Ulli and Bjorni and Steg whimper. Even Snorri let out a groan of despair. Only Gotrek, Malakai and Grimme stood their ground with no show of fear. Felix could sense Max and the Kislevites would turn tail at the slightest provocation. He did not blame them. The dragon was as large as the Spirit of Grungni. Its mouth was a massive tooth-filled chasm which could easily swallow a man whole. Flame flickered from its nostrils along with clouds of acrid chemical smoke.\n\n\"Hold fast,\" Felix said, surprised at how calm he sounded. Once again, he felt the power of the sword at work. \"Ulrika, Oleg, Standa, get up on the ledges and start shooting for the eyes, the throat or any vulnerable spot you can think of. Max, can your magic protect us from the flames?\"\n\n\"Aye. I hope so. For a time, at least.\"\n\n\"Then do so!\" A note of command entered Felix's voice and he was amazed to see them jump to obey. Something else struck him. The dragon was moving slowly, dragging its left side. Hope surged through Felix. He thought he understood what had happened.\n\n\"It's wounded,\" he said. \"It still hasn't recovered from Varek crashing the gyrocopter into it.\"\n\nThe dragon reared unsteadily, spreading its wings for balance. Its huge shadow flowed over the wall behind it, but that was not what held Felix's attention. He could see now that he was right. There was a massive wound in the beast's side, which festered greenly. This was the source of the stink in the air. Varek had hurt the creature far more than he had ever believed possible.\n\n\"Try firing arrows at the wound in its side,\" Felix shouted. \"The scales have fallen away there.\"\n\nUlrika and the two Kislevite bowmen were already running along the ledges, spreading out and taking cover behind the stalagmites. Max raised his staff and a wave of power flowed out of him, setting the air shimmering.\n\n\"Charge!\" roared Gotrek. All of the Slayers except Malakai raced forward. Without quite understanding why Felix did the same. The dragon moved to meet them, the earth shaking beneath its ponderous tread. Its roars were deafening. Its head looped forward on its neck and it breathed a sheet of flame. Felix raised his sword to parry it as he had done on the airship but there was no need. The shimmering protective field cast by Max held the flames at bay.\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, Felix noticed that Steg was not running towards the dragon, but towards the largest pile of loot. He dived into it like a swimmer plunging into water and shrieked, \"Gold! Lovely gold! It's all mine.\"\n\nHe's mad, Felix thought. Even as the dragon loomed over them, Steg tossed handfuls of coins ecstatically into the air, shouting, \"Mine! All mine!\"\n\nFrom behind Felix came a weird spluttering hissing noise. Something flashed past overhead, trailing fire. It exploded in the dragon's wounded side, sending great chunks of flesh hurtling outwards, and exposing bone and inner organs. The dragon let out a fearsome roar that was somewhere between a bellow and a scream. As he closed with the creature, Felix could hear the air hissing out of the dragon's lungs through the hole in its chest.\n\nThe mighty creature reared upwards, its wings flexing as it did so. The movement drove the stench of rotting flesh towards its attackers in an almost overpowering wave. Felix fought to keep from gagging, and looked up in wonder. He did not think he had ever imagined a living thing quite so large. It loomed over him like a walking tower. There was something unnatural about it, as if a building had grown legs and started walking around. It was so tall that its head almost touched the ceiling of the cavern, and that was almost twenty times the height of a man.\n\nHow can we possibly overcome this, he thought, as awe threatened to paralyse him? It did not seem possible that human or dwarf valour could prevail against such a thing. It was just too big. They were like mice trying to overcome a grown man. Even as these thoughts surged through Felix's mind, Gotrek reached the dragon's foot.\n\nFelix's numbed mind noted that the talons of the creature's paw were almost the size of the Slayer. If this dismayed Gotrek, he gave no sign of it. His axe flashed through a thunderous arc and bit into the dragon's leg at about the spot the ankle would have been in a human. The mighty blade parted scales and flesh. Greenish blood spurted steaming from the wound. The dragon bellowed its rage and pain once more then bent forward, its head coming down with the speed of a striking serpent, its huge jaws opening and threatening to take Gotrek with one gulp.\n\nFelix wondered if the moment of the Slayer's doom had finally arrived.\n\nDesperately Ulrika tried to get a bead on the dragon's eye. It should not be difficult, she told herself. The orb was larger than the targets she had used for archery practice ever since childhood. Of course, those targets had not moved around at enormous speed, nor had they been attached to something quite as overwhelmingly fearsome as a dragon. Part of her did not want to fire for fear of attracting the creature's attention. And, in archery practice, there was not the distraction of having Felix and the Slayers fighting with the target either.\n\nStay calm, she told herself. Breathe easily. It does not matter how large the beast is. It does not matter what it is doing. It is just another target. You can hit it easily enough. You have hit birds in flight. This should not be so difficult as that.\n\nTime seemed to slow. Her mind emptied and calmed. She drew back the arrow. With what seemed to her incredible slowness, the dragon's head started to descend. She compensated for the movement, aimed at where the eye should be when the arrow reached it, and then released.\n\nThe arrow flew straight and true. She prayed to Taal that it would find its mark.\n\nAn arrow flashed out of nowhere and hit the dragon in the eye, just before the head reached Gotrek. The Slayer threw himself to one side, and the dragon's jaws snapped shut on empty air. The dragon's own motion, and Gotrek's hamstringing blow, combined to overbalance the creature. It tumbled forward, headlong. Felix cursed, realising that it was going to land on him. Screams from Ulli and Steg told him that they had realised that they, too, were in the path of its descent.\n\nThe dragon's wings flapped instinctively, slowing its fall. Felix felt the wind flutter his cloak and threw himself to one side. Ulli did the same. For some reason, Steg refused to move. \"You can't have my gold,\" he shouted, swinging his pick up to strike at the dragon, even as the huge body landed on him. Felix heard the squelch as he only just rolled clear.\n\nFelix saw that Malakai was stuffing something into the metal tube he carried once more. As the dragon started to rise, he finished the operation and swung the cylinder into position on his shoulder. The dragon stretched its neck towards him, and as it did so, Malakai pulled some sort of trigger on the front of the tube. Sparks flew from the back of the tube and another projectile flashed forth and sped straight towards the dragon's mouth. It reminded Felix of the fireworks he had seen unleashed at Altdorf to celebrate the Emperor's birthday. No firework had ever exploded with quite such violence though. The force of the explosion loosened several of the dragon's man-sized fangs, and tore a hole in the top of the creature's mouth. How could anything survive such punishment, Felix wondered.\n\nIt had its terrible festering wound. It had a huge hole ripped in its chest. It had an arrow sticking from its eye. It had blood seeping from its ankle where Gotrek had hamstrung it. And yet it still refused to die. It lashed around in a frenzy. Its tail cracked the air like a whip. Its wings drummed like thunder. It lashed out with a claw that would have flattened Malakai like a swatted fly, had not the engineer thrown himself flat below it. As the dragon rose for another blow, Felix saw the flattened form of Steg was still attached to its chest. His pick was driven between the creature's scales, and even in death his hand still clutched the weapon's shaft. The force of the impact had embedded bits of gold in his skin and armour. In death, he glittered.\n\nGotrek's warcry rang out and Felix saw that the Slayer was at the dragon's rear, chopping at its tail with the axe. Each blow carved great chunks out of the dragon's flesh. Snorri had joined the fray and battered away with axe and hammer. Felix could not see whether his blows were having any effect.\n\nA flash of gold light told Felix that Max had cast a spell. A bolt of uncanny power flashed at the dragon's other eye. The eyeball sizzled and popped and now the dragon was blinded. Grimme raced forward as its head swooped low, and ran almost into the creature's mouth. His hammer smashed through a great arc, and pulped scale and flesh beneath it.\n\nThe dragon breathed, and even from where he stood Felix could feel the heat. Grimme was too close to its source for any protective spell to intervene: His armour and hair caught alight. His crest became a sizzling flame. His flesh blackened and then ran like liquid, so fierce was the heat. He did not even have time to scream, then he was gone. The dragon sprawled forward on all fours once more, emitting the fiery jet at its tormentors.\n\nOutrage flared within Felix's brain at the sight of this horrible death. The flames continued to flicker outwards, scouring the ledges on which the Kislevites stood. Max's magical barrier flickered but held, but Felix could see that it was starting to collapse. He had no idea how much longer the wizard could hold it for. Once the shimmering spell shield went down, Ulrika and Max and the archers would suffer the same fate as Grimme. Just the thought of that happening triggered something within Felix's brain. Power flowed out of the sword. Without even realising what he was doing, he found himself running forward towards the mighty beast. His path took him up a pile of treasure and a flying leap took him right on top of the dragon's skull.\n\nIf the blinded dragon felt his presence it gave no sign. He stood upright atop its head. The runes on the blade blazed bright with deadly magic. He summoned all his strength and drove the blade downwards, even as he felt the dragon rear up beneath him.\n\nThe deadly spells woven into it by its ancient creators enabled the blade to pass through scale and flesh. There was resistance as the enchanted steel met the bones of the skull. Felix leaned forward with all his weight. The blade twisted in his hands, aiding him. In a moment, the weapon was through and its deadly runes were lodged in the dragon's brain.\n\nThe dragon gave one last deadly bellow, and its whole body spasmed reflexively. Felix felt a sickening sense of acceleration as its neck uncoiled and the ground receded below him. He was almost thrown clear. Knowing the drop would kill him, Felix held onto the embedded blade with all his strength. Then the dragon began to topple backwards.\n\nThis was not such a good idea, thought Felix, as the ground rose to meet him once more." + }, + { + "title": "THE BATTLE", + "text": "Felix fell. He knew that he had moments to live. There was nothing in his mind save fear and a sick sense of vertigo as he dropped. No noble thoughts. No last memories of life. Just the thought that he had made an error. One strange image burned itself into his brain. The sorcerous sphere still followed him, keeping pace effortlessly. It occurred to him that perhaps he could reach out and grab it. The magic that allowed it to fly might slow his fall.\n\nDesperately he grabbed for it, but it remained out of his reach. His sword fell from his hands. He twisted desperately, straining with every fibre of his being to grab the light but it eluded him. He cursed and then there was the impact.\n\nDeath was not quite what he expected. There was pain. There was darkness. There was a sense of air being expelled from his lungs. There was a sense of being pushed downwards by an enormous force. He was not sure though that he should feel quite so wet. Blood, he thought irrationally. His body had split open on impact. That was the wetness he felt.\n\nThen the wet stuff filled his mouth and started to trickle down his throat. He could not breathe.\n\nI am not dead yet then, he thought. Maybe my lungs are filling with blood like those poor devils I saw dying of poison gas in Nuln.\n\nPanic filled him. This was worse than a nightmare. It was horrible knowing that these were his last few seconds of life and that there was nothing he could do about it.\n\nThen he noticed there were bubbles all around him. The light was still above him. Was he hallucinating, he wondered? Instinctively he grasped that something important was going on here. He had missed something. Then it came to him. He was not dead. He was in water. He must have been catapulted into the pool at the far end of the cave by the force of the dragon's last spasm. There was still a chance that he might live. He breathed out, expelling the water from his mouth, trying desperately not to breathe any more in.\n\nBut it was only a chance, he realised. The force pushing him down was not a product of his imagination. It was the pressure from the tons of water falling into the pool, driving him downwards with enormous force. He tried kicking upwards but it was useless. There was nothing he could do against such power.\n\nFor a moment he felt despair. He had merely exchanged one death for another. He was not going to be killed by the monster or by the fall, he was going to drown. His lungs were almost empty. In its need for air, his desperate body sought to betray him. It took a huge effort not to breathe in the water.\n\nFierce resolution filled him. He had not come so far and survived an encounter with a dragon in order to be killed by a waterfall. There had to be something he could do. He relaxed and let the pressure drive him downwards. His face hit rock. His mouth almost opened reflexively to scream but he held it shut by force of will. His lungs felt like they were bursting.\n\nBe calm, he told himself. Think. He noticed that he was starting to drift to one side. The current had hit the rocky floor of the pool and was being deflected. He allowed it to carry him, and the pressure from above eased.\n\nDarkness hovered at the edge of his vision. He was on the verge of blacking out. Just keep going, he told himself. Don't give up. The worst is past.\n\nHe struck out for the surface and noticed that the glowing sphere still followed him. That was good; it gave him some light to see by.\n\nHis chainmail shirt felt like it was made of lead. The weight of it tugged at him, pulling him down. He considered stopping and trying to pull it off, but knew that he would just be wasting precious time and air. He had to keep going.\n\nStroke by stroke, with all the effort of a man pulling himself up a mountainside, Felix swam for the surface. His limbs felt like lead. He could barely see. His lungs were about to explode. Still he swam onwards and upwards. Until at last, just as he was certain he could endure no more, his head broke the surface, and he breathed in a lungful of pure fresh air. He was certain he had never tasted anything so sweet.\n\nFelix pulled himself over the edge of the pool. Water puddled at his feet. His clothes were sodden. He saw that the dwarfs and Ulrika were running towards him. Despite the age he felt he had been underwater, he realised that only moments had passed since he killed the dragon. Its huge corpse lay flopping and twitching on the ground nearby, its movements scattering gold coins everywhere.\n\nUlrika raced up. Tears streamed down her face. \"I thought you were dead,\" she said as she embraced him.\n\n\"I feel like I ought to be,\" he murmured, pulling her close and feeling the warm weight of her body against his.\n\nThe dwarfs gathered round to congratulate him.\n\n\"Aye, well, we're rich,\" said Malakai, looking at the dragon's hoard.\n\n\"Except that we can't carry more than a small part of this treasure,\" Max said.\n\n\"And there's a small army of greenskins outside,\" Ulli said. \"What are we going to do about them?\"\n\n\"Kill them,\" Gotrek said. \"Or die trying. We've failed to achieve our dooms here. The gods have provided us with another.\"\n\n\"I've had enough of seeking death for one day\" Felix said.\n\n\"You're a dragon slayer now,\" Bjorni said. \"Surely you're not scared of a few greenskins.\"\n\n\"I would like to live to enjoy my triumph,\" Felix said sourly.\n\nHe looked around. Oleg and Standa were still with them, and more or less unmarked. Gotrek and Snorri appeared unharmed. Ulli looked almost exultant having survived his encounter with Skjalandir. Bjorni contemplated the dragon's hoard in wonder.\n\nTheir casualties had been surprisingly few. They had been very lucky.\n\nVarek had done them more of a favour than they had ever guessed when he gave his life to drive the dragon off. The wound he had inflicted on it had weakened the monster enough for them to kill it. If anyone deserved the title \"dragon slayer\" it was Varek.\n\nHe walked over and picked up his sword. It no longer felt particularly magical. All power seemed gone from it. It was just a fine blade once more. No hint of its fell purpose remained.\n\nStill, it was a good weapon, and he was used to it. He stuck it back in its scabbard.\n\nFelix wondered if he should suggest burying the dead, but Steg was lost beneath the body of the fallen dragon and Grimme was charred to a crisp. It hardly seemed worth the effort. Particularly since the orcs might soon be arriving. He mentioned this to the others.\n\n\"Perhaps we can find another way out,\" suggested Max. \"These tunnels must lead somewhere.\"\n\n\"They might be an endless maze,\" Ulrika said. \"We could get lost and wander till we die.\"\n\n\"No dwarf ever got lost underground,\" Bjorni said. The other Slayers nodded their agreement.\n\n\"Be that as it may,\" Felix said, \"there might not be another way out.\"\n\n\"The manling has the right of it,\" Gotrek said. \"And what's more, no Slayer ever ran from a mass of goblins.\"\n\nThinking of the less than totally courageous behaviour exhibited by some of their company, Felix wondered if that were true. Now did not seem like a good time to air his doubts however. Instead he said, \"What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"Snorri thinks we should go up to the surface and kill them,\" said Snorri Nosebiter.\n\nAre these maniacs really going to talk us all into going up to the surface and getting killed, wondered Felix? It seemed all too likely.\n\n\"What if they kill us all?\" Max asked. \"Are you really going to leave all this treasure here for them to take?\"\n\nThank you, Max, thought Felix. You just mentioned the only thing that might influence a gang of dwarf Slayers in a situation like this.\n\n\"They will not pass us,\" said Snorri. \"We shall stand on a wall of corpses and throw them back!\"\n\n\"Let's just assume you don't,\" Max said. \"All of this treasure will go to enrich the orcs. They could use it to buy weapons, and attack dwarf lands.\"\n\n\"No dwarf would ever sell them weapons.\"\n\n\"Alas, some humans might,\" said Max. The dwarfs nodded their heads sagely at the thought of such human treachery.\n\n\"You hae a point,\" said Malakai. \"If ah had some blastin' pooder ah could rig this ceilin' tae collapse. But ah dinnae!\"\n\n\"I brought a sack of your bombs from the cart,\" Ulli said.\n\n\"Guid lad!\" said Malakai beaming broadly. The smile faded just as quickly as the thought of someone fumbling around amongst his treasures occurred to him. Felix could read it on his face.\n\n\"It's a bit early to be thinking of such things,\" Bjorni said. \"Surely we should head up to the cave mouth and take a look.\"\n\n\"Best be careful, then,\" Max said. \"While they think the dragon is still alive I doubt that they will come in. If they see you up there, they might think we killed it, and come looking for us.\"\n\n\"But we did kill the dragon,\" said Snorri, obviously confused.\n\n\"We will all head up,\" Gotrek said. \"Except Malakai and Ulli. You can stay here and rig the tunnel to blow.\"\n\n\"Right ye are,\" Malakai said cheerfully.\n\nWhy do I think this is going to end in disaster, thought Felix, as he squelched back up the tunnel, shivering in his sodden clothes?\n\nFelix crawled forward to the lip of the cave mouth. Ulrika crawled alongside him. The two of them had been selected since they had the best eyesight. Max had doused his light spell so that it would not attract attention to them.\n\nThe stone was wet and cold under his hands. Felix wished he had something dry to wear. The mist had cleared away; a bright sun beamed cheerfully down. Carefully he poked his head forward and gazed down into the valley. One look told him the worst had happened.\n\nInstead of one army, there were two. On one side of the valley was a horde of orcs and goblins. They were drawn up in crude battle formation. Massive orcs stood in the centre armed with crude scimitars and round, spike-bossed shields. Masses of goblin archers scuttled about between the ranks. Off to one side were some orc riders mounted on huge battle boars. Their grunts and squeals were audible up the valley. A strange device had been set up on the brow of the hill. It resembled the catapults that Felix had used as a boy, only it was large enough to throw a boulder rather than a small stone. Beside it were several oddly attired goblins, wearing pointed spiked helmets, flapping odd bat-winged attachments fixed to their arms. Spider riders scuttled along the brow of the hill. On the back of one was mounted what must be some sort of shaman. He brandished a skull-tipped staff in the air and chanted encouragement to his troops. The greenskin force must be almost a thousand strong, Felix realised. He was glad the Slayers had not simply rushed out to meet it. There were too many greenskins down there for them to overcome.\n\nFacing the orcs across the valley were hundreds of armed men. There were ranks of halberdiers, and rows upon rows of crossbowmen. One or two of the leaders were mounted on horseback. There were some wild highlanders with massive two-handed swords. None of the men were well armoured but they were much better disciplined than the orcs. Even if they were outnumbered they still had a chance. Particularly if they held the high ground, Felix thought, and let the greenskins come at them.\n\nThis must be the bandit army of Henrik Richter, Felix realised. What had brought him here? What strange chance had caused these two forces to meet outside the dragon's cave?\n\nHe heard Ulrika gasp. \"Look there! To the right of the human army,\" she whispered.\n\nFelix instantly saw what she meant. He recognised the figure of Johan Gatz, the minstrel. Felix felt his suspicions had been justified. The man had been a spy for the bandits. They must have followed us. Both armies must have. The orcs probably wanted revenge for the slaughter we wreaked. The men probably came to see if they could hijack the treasure, if we slew the dragon.\n\nBut why were they drawn up in battle array now, and what were they waiting for?\n\nJohan Gatz cursed. This was not going according to plan. Henrik had assembled the army and brought it here along the high mountain passes as he had asked. The scouts that always watched for sign of the dragon stirring had seen nothing of it since it had flown back from the north well over a week ago. One of them who had witnessed its arrival had even claimed it looked wounded. That fitted with the story the dwarfs had told him. The same men had seen the dwarfs enter the caves this morning, and they had yet to come out. He wondered if they had actually succeeded in killing the beast. It seemed unlikely \u2014 the valley was littered with the bones of those who had tried, but there had been something about that bunch which had compelled him to think they might do it.\n\nEither they were the most convincing braggarts Johan had ever heard, or they were something special. Johan knew himself to be a sound judge of character, and they had convinced him. More than that, the names of Gotrek Gurnisson and Felix Jaeger were not unfamiliar to him. On his travels he had heard tales of a pair answering to their description, and if even a tenth part of those tales were true, they were not people to take lightly. Some of the lads had seen the airship pass over the valleys too, so that had confirmed their story of the Spirit of Grungni. All in all, he had judged it worth taking the chance of bringing the whole gang here to rob them of the treasure if they should manage to kill Skjalandir. Henrik had thought it worth the risk too.\n\nWhat they had not counted on was the orcs coming up with the same plan, and being there as well. The idea had been to lie low and wait and see whether the dwarfs came out of the caves. That had gone out the window when the greenskins were spotted. The troops had mustered in plain sight. There was too much bad blood between men and orcs for either side to do differently. It was sheerest stupidity and bad luck, Johan thought.\n\nIf they had known the orcs were going to do this, they could have let the greenskins attack the Slayers and then ambushed them afterwards. But all they had gotten were reports of orcs shadowing the Slayers en route, and they did that to every caravan they spotted going through the mountains. Who would have guessed they would assemble their whole force? Now they all stood in the open like idiots, neither side willing to back down in front of the other. Johan shuddered to think of what might happen if the dwarfs did not kill the dragon, and it emerged from the cave. Maybe there were enough warriors assembled here to kill the beast. Even if there were, the casualties would be appalling. Johan considered legging it, but there was no way he could slip away without being noticed.\n\nWhat could have gotten the greenskins so stirred up, he wondered?\n\nUgrek Manflayer glared across at the hated human foes. For the hundredth time he considered ordering his warriors to charge. It would be good to feel human blood flow and human flesh part under his blade. It would be good to break bones and crack skulls. It would be good to kill, he thought. The need to give in to his violent nature was almost overwhelming. Almost.\n\nUgrek had not risen to be boss of all the orc tribes of the Big Mountains by giving way to his impulses. By orc standards he possessed a great deal of patience and so much cunning that some suspected him of having goblin blood. If anyone still harboured those suspicions they no longer grunted them; he had killed and eaten all those who had muttered such things. He pushed the distracting memories to the back of his mind. He needed to think. There was always the possibility that the shaman's dreams were wrong, and the dwarfs might not succeed in killing the beast. He knew that if the dragon emerged from its lair, it would not do for his lads and the pinkskins to be rucking. That would make them all easy meat for the monster, and Ugrek had no intention of providing anybody with a meal any time soon.\n\nAnd if the shaman was right, then the dwarf with the big axe would soon come out. Ever since he had heard Grund's tales of the slaughter the dwarf had wreaked with that blade, Ugrek had known it must be his. With such a weapon, and the dragon's treasure, he could forge a horde that would sweep through the human lands like an avalanche. orcs would muster from across the land to follow him, and kill and loot in his name.\n\nIt annoyed him that these humans had got in the way of his destiny. It annoyed him so much that he almost gave the order to attack anyway. Just bad luck that they were here, he thought. Their bad luck. More meat for his troops, he thought. That made him wonder what dragonflesh tasted like. He guessed he would find out soon enough if the shaman's dreams were true.\n\nThey always had been in the past. Why not this time?\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" asked Felix. His explanation of the situation outside had not been well received. The Slayers were silent. Max looked thoughtful. The Kislevites looked worried.\n\n\"If we wait there will be a battle,\" Max said. \"I don't see how it can be avoided.\"\n\n\"Maybe they'll send scouts to investigate the caves,\" suggested Ulrika. \"It's only a matter of time before one side or the other plucks up the courage to investigate.\"\n\n\"In either case, our goose is cooked,\" Felix said. \"There doesn't seem to be any way out, unless we wait for the battle and try to sneak away then.\"\n\n\"I will not sneak away, manling,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"If there's a battle, Snorri wants to be part of it,\" added Snorri Nosebiter.\n\n\"I suspect you'll get your wish,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Everybody has to die sometime,\" said Ulli. He seemed to have acquired the proper Slayer attitude of brute stubborn stupidity since the fight with the dragon. Either that or he was in shock.\n\n\"I was hoping to die a long time from now in my bed,\" Felix said.\n\n\"I wanted to die in bed once too. Identical twins it was,\" said Bjorni. \"I thought nothing could improve on that.\"\n\nThe other dwarfs looked at him in disgust. \"You're all just jealous,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"Enough of this,\" Gotrek said. \"It's time for an ending.\"\n\nHe strode up to the mouth of the cave and raised his axe above his head, holding the shaft in both hands.\n\n\"We've killed the dragon!\" he shouted. \"If you want its treasure, you're going to have to get it over my dead body.\"\n\nFor a moment, all was silence then there was a roar of voices. A moment after that Gotrek leapt back as a hail of arrows rained down where he stood. Felix noticed that some were black-fletched, some white. He wondered which had been fired by humans, which by orcs.\n\n\"I suppose being pin-cushioned with arrows is no death for a Slayer,\" Felix said. Gotrek glared at him.\n\n\"You'll see what is a suitable death for a Slayer soon enough, manling.\"\n\n\"I fear you are correct,\" Felix said and readied his blade.\n\n\"That's torn it,\" muttered Johan Gatz, perching himself on one of the boulders strewn across the hillside. The dwarfs' appearance had thrown the orcs into turmoil. The leading ranks obviously didn't understand a word of what Gotrek had said, but had correctly assumed their hereditary enemy was taunting them. They wouldn't have been orcs if they had stood for this. The nearest greenskin archers opened fire on the Slayer. The closest unit of orcs began to lumber up the hill.\n\nWhat surprised Johan the most was that some of the humans had fired as well. That was a waste of arrows. He supposed the lads must be on edge from waiting. A shout from the front ranks of the humans told him exactly how on edge they were. A group of halberdiers had rushed forward to take the orcs moving towards the cave in the flank.\n\nIt was the pebble that started an avalanche. The boar riders charged straight at the nearest unit of men. Hooves churned the thin mountain soil. Enormous droppings spurted from their rear as the creatures grew excited. The mountain clan's men, never the most disciplined of warriors and always eager to prove their bravery, rushed downslope. As they did so, some sort of drug-crazed goblin, using a chain to swing a massive iron ball almost as large as it was, broke out of the greenskin ranks and ploughed through them. In less than a minute all was a chaos of hacking, chopping, howling warriors.\n\nJohan Gatz watched them, thinking that as soon as the opportunity arose, he was out of here.\n\nFelix heard the crash of weapon on weapon, the screams of dying men, the guttural chanting of the orcs, the howled war cries of men. \"What in the name of Sigmar is going on down there?\" he asked.\n\n\"Sounds like a battle,\" Max said sardonically.\n\n\"Your powers of observation astonish me.\"\n\nFelix crept cautiously forward to take a look, mindful of the arrows that had almost skewered Gotrek earlier. He looked down and saw that the valley had erupted into a maelstrom of combat. Man and orc and goblin were locked in battle. Most of the human units had managed to restrain themselves from charging and held the higher ground against the more numerous orcs and goblins. As he watched he saw a rank of halberdiers repulse a charge by a gang of hulking green-skinned warriors. Both sides were taking awful casualties. The humans pursued the retreating orcs and were themselves caught in the flanks by a gang of crazed goblin warriors. Even as Felix watched the men vanished beneath a tide of tiny humanoids only half their size.\n\nA strange twanging noise attracted his attention and he glanced over to see one of the oddly garbed goblins clambering onto the giant catapult. The cable was drawn back by a team of sweating lackeys, and then suddenly unleashed. The goblin was ejected into the air and went swooping off towards the human position. It moved its be-winged arms, as if believing it could somehow control its flight, and screamed ecstatically as it flew. Perhaps it did manage to control its direction, for it descended on top of one of the human leaders, impaling him with the spike of its helmet. The impact must have broken its neck, for it did not rise after that. It was an impressive tribute to either its fanaticism or its stupidity that it would give its life like that.\n\nSuddenly other matters urgently required Felix's attention. One group of orcs had broken out of the general ruck and were racing up the hill towards him. He rose into a crouch and backed into the cave.\n\n\"They're coming,\" he shouted.\n\nUgrek spat on the corpse of his dead foe. So much for waiting, he thought. So much for patience. So much for planning. One shout from that accursed dwarf and those stupid Broken Nose bastards had charged in like orc boys at their first battle. He would crack a few heads and eat a few brains for that once this battle was done. By the great green-skinned gods, he would. He glanced around. It wasn't all bad tidings. He thought that his lads could rout these humans easily enough. And then he would have the axe and the dragon's treasure. It wasn't going to be such a bad day after all. He shouted to his bodyguard and began to make his way across the battlefield towards the mouth of the dragon's cave.\n\nHe was going to take the axe from the stunty's cold dead hands, he thought. And then he was going to eat his fingers.\n\nJohan could see the battle was finely balanced. The greenskins had the numbers, and their odd weapons and tactics were taking a toll. Those ball-wielding drugged crazed fanatics left a path of red ruin behind them until they collapsed from exhaustion or got entangled in their chains. The flyers had killed more than one brave horseman. The sheer strength and ferocity of the orcs was amazing to watch. He saw one that had to be literally hacked to pieces before it stopped fighting. They did not seem to feel pain as men did.\n\nOn the other hand, the humans were better disciplined. They had mostly managed to keep to their ranks and hold the higher ground. The crossbowmen were taking a heavy toll on the lightly armoured orcs and goblins. Even a few of those horrid giant spiders had fallen to them. If only they had a few cannons or even one of those organ guns. Or a squadron of heavy cavalry. With one charge they could have broken the orc ranks. Might as well wish for Sigmar to arrive with the host of the righteous dead, Johan thought. They did not have any knights. They were just going to have to win with what they had.\n\nHe wasn't certain this was possible. At least some of the orcs were distracted by attempting to get at the dwarfs in the cave. And it looked like the orc chieftain, the great Ugrek himself, was trying to cut his way up there. Johan decided that he wouldn't want to be up there when the Manflayer arrived. Not for all the gold in the dragon's hoard.\n\nFelix chopped down the last orc. He was breathing hard, and blood mingled with the water that saturated his clothes. Some of it was his own. He glanced around the cave mouth. Dead orcs lay everywhere. Gotrek and Snorri had done their usual bloody work. Between them they must have put paid to at least ten of the greenskins. Five lay blasted and smoking, a testimony to the deadliness of Max Schreiber's magic. Three more lay with arrows sprouting from their breasts. Felix himself had accounted for three. He guessed the others had killed about a dozen.\n\nThey had taken casualties themselves. Standa was dead, his skull split by an orc scimitar. Bjorni had taken a nasty wound. Felix watched Max mutter some kind of healing spell that knitted the flesh together, then wrap a torn piece of his cloak around it. Bjorni looked as pale as a corpse; he had lost a lot of blood. Ulrika and Oleg moved among the bodies, retrieving arrows to replenish their quivers.\n\nAbout thirty dead orcs, he estimated. It wasn't enough. There were hundreds more greenskins out there, and almost as many desperate men, all of whom would doubtless want their share of the dragon's treasure. Maybe that was the answer. Maybe they should offer to split it with the humans in return for their assistance. Good idea, he thought. Now all he had to do was get it to the human leader. And then wait for the inevitable treachery if they survived the fight.\n\nFootsteps sounded from behind them. He saw Malakai and Ulli coming up the corridor. The engineer was bent almost double. In one hand he held a black bomb. He was dribbling powder from it onto the ground. Felix knew what he was doing. A spark would ignite that powder. The powder would act as a fuse. The fuse would detonate whatever cache of explosives they had left back there.\n\n\"It's din,\" said Malakai. \"Black powder's in place. If it looks like the orcs are going to over-run us, ah'll set fire tae this pooder, an' boom the whole tunnel comes doon. Then let's see them get the dragon's treasure wie a whole mountain o' rock on tap o' it.\"\n\nFelix shivered. He hoped it would not come to this. If it did, it would mean that he and Ulrika would be dead along with all the rest of them. It was not a reassuring thought. He walked over to the woman. It was time for them to talk.\n\nUgrek chopped down another human, thumped one of his own bodyguards who had accidentally blundered into him, and continued to hew his way up the hill. His mighty blade dripped with blood. His axe was smeared with gore. He bellowed instructions and encouragement to his followers, certain that victory would soon be his. Heartened by his presence the lads fought on with redoubled fury, cutting down the pinkskins by the dozen. Ugrek could smell victory.\n\nJohan ducked back behind the rock. A random arrow had come close to ending his life and he did not feel like exposing himself to death at the moment. He glanced up and to his astonishment saw a tiny goblin, his eyes glazed in some sort of trance, go flying overhead. From its arms extended some sort of bat-like artificial wings. On its head was a sharp spiked helmet. Johan could have sworn it was shouting: \"Wheee!\"\n\nThis was madness, he thought. The orcs were mad, the goblins were mad, his comrades were mad and he was mad for staying here when he could be running. Unfortunately he found the whole scene dreadfully fascinating.\n\nOff at the valley mouth two units of orcs had blundered into each other in their eagerness to get at the men. Now they fought each other with the same ferocious savagery they had wanted to vent on their human foes. Maybe they were from different tribes or clans, Johan thought.\n\nOr maybe it was true what he had heard: when an orc's battle lust was up, it would fight with anyone.\n\nA change rippled over the battlefield. He sensed arcane powers at work. His hair stood on end. Something drew his eye to the goblin shaman the way iron filings were drawn to a magnet.\n\nThe shaman's cloak billowed behind him. His spider had reared, raising its four forelegs as if in salute. A yellow glow blazed from the goblin's eyes. A swirling green light flickered on the end of its staff. Streamers of greenish ectoplasm swirled outwards from its tip. When the magic energy touched an orc or a goblin, the recipient's eyes glowed reddishly, their muscles swelled like great cables, foam erupted from their mouth and they fought like berserkers. At each point this happened the battle started to turn against the humans.\n\nPerhaps the shaman's uncanny powers would turn the tide, Johan thought.\n\n\"Magic is being unleashed on the battlefield,\" Max said. \"I think the shaman has invoked the power of the orc gods.\"\n\n\"I wish the gods would aid us,\" muttered Felix, surveying the rent in his chainmail and the agonising red cut on his side the wizard was healing. Golden light flowed from the mage's hand, and where it touched his body the area first went extremely hot and then numbingly cold. It took all Felix's willpower to keep from screaming. After a moment, the chill passed and sank to a dull ache. He looked down and saw the flap of skin peeled away by an orc scimitar blow had knitted together. He could still remember the agonising pain and the satisfied look on the face of the orc who had chopped at him. He had turned just too late to parry the stroke. His own blow had beheaded his attacker. It had given him a certain satisfaction knowing that he had killed the brute he thought had killed him. It was a miracle he had not been killed. He had managed to keep fighting until the greenskins were repelled and Max could heal him.\n\n\"The gods gave us courage to stand our ground, manling, and weapons to cleave our foes. What else do we need?\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"An army of Sigmarite Templars would be good,\" Felix said. \"I prefer my divine aid to take tangible form.\"\n\nGotrek merely grunted and returned his attention to the cave mouth. Snorri stood at the edge gazing down.\n\n\"Good fight coming,\" he said. \"Some big orcs and a shaman on a spider. The spider is Snorri's.\"\n\n\"You can have him,\" Gotrek said. \"The chieftain is mine.\"\n\nBjorni shook his head. \"I heard somewhere that female spiders eat their partners when mating. I've met some women who did that too.\"\n\n\"Don't you ever think of anything else?\" Ulli asked.\n\n\"Only when I'm fighting,\" Bjorni said. \"And sometimes not even then.\"\n\nMax finished his spell. Felix thanked him and stood up.\n\n\"You'll feel real pain in a few hours, but the spell should keep you going till then. You won't be up for much fighting though. Unless\u2026\"\n\nFelix knew what Max was thinking. Unless the orcs swarm in, and I'll have to fight anyway. In a few hours it wouldn't matter since they would be dead anyway. The last wave had left Oleg dying slowly from a stomach wound that not even Max's magic could cure. That could so easily have been me, he thought. If the orc's blow had slightly more power behind it. If my mail had not deflected it just enough.\n\nThe man's groans and prayers filled the chamber, and worked on Felix's nerves like poison. It would be a mercy to kill him, he thought, and a mercy to the rest of us to silence him.\n\nHe shivered. He was becoming as bad as Gotrek and the rest of the dwarfs. Worse. None of them would have suggested such a thing.\n\nPainfully he went over to where Ulrika sat beside the dying man, holding his hand. He noticed that both of them were silent now. Oleg's skin looked waxy. His moustache drooped. A small amount of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.\n\n\"Is there anything I can do?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" she said softly. \"He is dead.\"\n\nSuddenly Felix felt terribly guilty.\n\nUgrek led the lads right up the hill. He chopped down a few of the Broken Noses that were in his way, just to teach them not to do it again, and halted twenty strides away from the cave mouth. He turned for a moment to look back, and saw with some satisfaction that his lads were about to win the battle. The shaman's magic had helped. Filled with the spirit of the gods, his warriors were fighting as if possessed.\n\nThe spider had borne its mystic master all the way to where Ugrek stood. No one had interfered with it. It regarded Ugrek with beady intelligent malign eyes, and the warboss wondered whether it was true, and Ixix had bound the spirit of his former shamanic master into it. Not that it mattered. If he gave Ugrek any lip, he would die like anyone else. The shaman was gibbering and pointing at something excitedly. Ugrek looked to see what it was.\n\nIn the distance he saw a small dot approaching. From its size, he would have thought it was the dragon, but the dwarfs claimed to have killed it. It would be just like a stunty to lie about such a thing, and let the dragon escape by another exit. It was too late to worry about such things now, he decided.\n\n\"Right, lads,\" he bellowed. \"Into the cave. Kill the stunties. Grab the treasure. Leave the axe for me!\"\n\nHaving explained his plan, he implemented it instantly.\n\nFelix watched the inexorable tide of greenskins roll up the hill and knew he was going to die. These were the largest, fiercest orcs he had ever seen, and their leader made them look weak and mild-mannered. He was huge, half again as big as a normal orc, and he bore a cleaver in one hand, and an axe in the other. His cloak of manskin billowed behind him. His tusks dripped with saliva. His voice boomed out over the battle. Felix noticed that he was looking back at something and looked to see what it was.\n\nFrom beside him, he heard Ulrika gasp.\n\n\"It looks like we might be saved.\"\n\n\"Aye, if we can hold on long enough,\" he said sourly.\n\n\"Who said anything about holding on?\" Gotrek asked. \"I say we charge!\"\n\n\"Snorri agrees,\" said Snorri Nosebiter. \"Snorri is going to kill that spider.\"\n\nThe Slayers plunged downhill to meet the astonished orcs. There was a mighty crash as weapons met and the killing became fast and furious.\n\nJohan felt a shadow fall on him, and looked up. Was this more goblin sorcery, he wondered, seeing the vast shape that filled the sky overhead? No. It did not look like greenskin work although there was certainly powerful magic here. To tell the truth, it looked more like dwarf work. It had runes on the side and it flew the banners of the Slayer King.\n\nThis must be the airship the Slayers had told him about, Johan realised. It was certainly impressive. Even as he watched, spluttering black bombs began to fall into the middle of the battle. The explosions tore through greenskin and human ranks indiscriminately. Judging from the way they fell, the dwarfs were trying to aim for the orcs and goblins, but not very hard. It was an impossible task anyway. The two sides were too intermingled for any sort of precision shooting.\n\nA roaring noise announced the entry of another dwarf weapon into the battle. From turrets on the underside of the cupola, gatling cannons roared to life. Shells ripped man and goblin apart with ease. Johan had seen enough. It was time to be going. Maybe he could grab a horse.\n\nThe sound of explosions and the roar of gatling cannons told Felix that the Spirit of Grungni was doing its bloody work. His prayer had been answered, it seemed. The dwarfs must have finished repairing the airship and come looking for them. Judging by the new weapons bristling on its sides, they had come prepared to fight the dragon too. Felix knew that even if he died here, he would be avenged.\n\nScreams from nearby drew his attention back to the melee. He watched as Gotrek tore through Ugrek Manflayer's bodyguard. The dwarf killed a foe with every stroke. Snorri was right beside him. True to his word he was aiming for the spider and its rider. Felix wanted to rush down into the melee and aid them, but he was tired and the pain of his wound would make it impossible to fight. No, he would stay here and record Gotrek's doom if it came to him, and hope that the airship arrived in time.\n\nSnorri had reached the spider now. It came for him, huge mandibles dripping poison. Snorri ducked its bite, rolled under its belly, and chopped upwards. Felix heard the spider's evil scream and watched it sag in the middle. Snorri rolled out from behind it and lashed out at its rider, but the shaman leapt from his seat to avoid the blow, and scuttled away. Powerful he might be, but he did not have the nerve to face the Slayer.\n\nUlrika calmly nocked her bow and fired, nocked her bow and fired. With every shot an orc fell. The death of her bodyguards seemed to have goaded her into a calm, silent killing rage. Malakai stood next to her, his rocket tube over his shoulder. He took careful aim and pulled the trigger. Sparks flew from the rear of the tube and the rocket whizzed forth tearing through the orc ranks, killing half a dozen. Malakai threw down his weapon.\n\n\"Last rocket,\" he explained, unslinging his portable gatling cannon and starting to blaze away. Bjorni and Ulli fought back to back against the huge orcs. They used their opponents' size against them expertly, ducking between legs, moving through the press of bodies, hacking and chopping as they went. Felix felt useless and wished he could join in. Then he saw that Gotrek had fought his way to the orc chieftain.\n\nUgrek confronted the dwarf with the axe. Good. It saved him hunting the stunty down and killing him. He bellowed a challenge and glared down at the dwarf. Surprisingly the Slayer did not flinch, which was unusual. Ugrek had never met anything on two legs that did not back away when confronted by his massive form. This made him slightly uneasy. Still it did not matter. He was twice the dwarf's size and three times his weight. He was the toughest orc who had ever lived. He was going to kill this stunty.\n\nHe lashed out with his cleaver. Surprisingly, the dwarf wasn't there. That was unusual too. Ugrek knew he was fast for an orc. No one had ever been able to match his eye-blurring speed before. The dwarf struck back. That was good too. Ugrek liked it when his food put up a bit of a fight. It made things more interesting.\n\nSparks flashed as their blades met. The power of the Slayer's blow took Ugrek off guard. He was driven back by the force of the impact. The dwarf was strong. That was good too. Ugrek would gain some of that strength when he ate his heart. He lashed out with his axe. The dwarf ducked beneath it and aimed a counter blow at Ugrek's legs. Ugrek leapt above it, and brought both weapons down at once, knowing there was no way the dwarf could avoid them both.\n\nThe dwarf did not try. Instead, he used his axe two-handed and caught both blows in the haft of the weapon. The force of the impact drove him to his knees. He rolled backwards and away, coming to his feet easily. Ugrek was enjoying this. Already the dwarf had lasted longer than any foe Ugrek had ever faced, and he was showing no signs of running out of fight. Ugrek had always believed that you could measure an orc by the strength of his enemies, and when he killed this Slayer, all orcs would know that Ugrek was mighty indeed. The thought gave him some satisfaction.\n\nThe dwarf came at him, beard bristling, a mad light in his eye. He unleashed a hail of blows at Ugrek, each faster and more powerful than the last. It slowly dawned on Ugrek as he parried desperately that the dwarf had not really been trying before. Being knocked down by Ugrek had goaded him to make a mighty effort. Ugrek was forced to admit that the Slayer was almost as mighty as he was. This was even better. More than ever Ugrek looked forward to eating his heart.\n\nHis arms ached a little from parrying the dwarf's blows. It felt like his hand had been nicked. This was unusual. He had never met a foe that had done that before. The Slayer aimed another blow at him and Ugrek raised his cleaver to parry. At the last moment, he realised his cleaver wasn't there. In fact, his hand wasn't there either. The pain he had felt was it being separated from his wrist. By the gods, that axe was sharp. He must have it, he thought.\n\nIt was the last thought to pass through his brain before the axe descended, bringing eternal darkness with it.\n\nFelix watched Gotrek finish the orc chieftain. The bodyguards looked panicky, their morale already undermined by the flight of the shaman, the havoc wreaked by the dwarfs, and the screaming of their comrades behind them. A few turned and looked back to see the airship. It was the last straw. They must have thought the dwarf gods had come to punish them. First one then another turned and began to flee. Felix looked down to see that the battle had turned into a general rout. orcs and goblins and humans all intermixed, and no longer fighting, streamed out of the valley in all directions. The relentless death toll inflicted by the Spirit of Grungni was too much for them.\n\n\"I do believe we might survive this,\" Felix said to Ulrika, then wondered at the look of horror on her face. He turned to see what she was pointing at. A stream of fire was already receding into the depths of the mountain. Malakai's rocket tube lay near at hand. Instantly Felix realised what had happened. A spark from the weapon had ignited the detonating powder.\n\nCould they possibly get down there and put it out, Felix asked himself? He knew he would not be able to, not in his wounded condition. And he would not ask Max or Ulrika to try something he was not willing to do. He had no idea how powerful the explosives down there were, or what the possible consequences of an explosion might be.\n\n\"We'd best get out of here,\" he said and tried to move forward only to discover his legs weren't working properly. He fell forward onto his face. His wound must have been worse than he thought.\n\n\"Go!\" he shouted. \"Save yourselves!\"\n\nHe felt himself being lifted up by Ulrika and Max and they carried him down the slope towards the dwarfs.\n\n\"Prepare yourselves,\" he heard Max say. \"The tunnel's about to go up!\"\n\nAs one the dwarfs threw themselves flat on the ground. Felix felt the earth shake. There was a great blast of fire and heat from behind him, and the sound of rocks collapsing and stone grinding against stone.\n\n\"There goes a king's ransom,\" he heard Ulli mutter, then the sound of dwarf cursing filled the air." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Felix opened his eyes and saw the steel ceiling of the Spirit of Grungni. Borek and Ulrika stooped over him. He could tell by the rocking of the chamber that the airship was in motion.\n\n\"I'm alive, then,\" he said.\n\n\"Only just,\" Borek said. The wrinkles of his ancient face crinkled benevolently as he smiled. \"There was some infection in your wounds. I am surprised that you are alive at all, with what Ulrika here has told me of your adventures. Slaying a dragon is not something most men live through.\"\n\nFelix felt embarrassed as well as pleased. \"I am glad to see you. I see you managed to repair the airship.\"\n\n\"Malakai left very specific instructions.\"\n\n\"Is he well?\"\n\n\"He and all the others. Although they are all disappointed about the treasure.\"\n\n\"Is it lost then?\"\n\n\"Nothing buried below the earth is ever lost to dwarfs,\" said Borek. \"It will take years to excavate all of the rock but we will get it eventually.\"\n\nFelix fell silent for a moment, thinking of the bodies of Steg and Grimme. They had received a more thorough burial than anything he could ever have given them. It was an alarming thought that he could have all too easily been buried with them. He reached out and took Ulrika's hand.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" she said. \"Max says you'll be up and about by the time we reach our destination.\"\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Felix asked, fearing he already knew.\n\n\"Praag,\" she said simply.\n\nHe shivered, knowing the greatest Chaos army assembled in two centuries would soon be there too." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Legend 03", + "author": "Marie Lu", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Out of all the disguises I've worn, this one might be my favorite.\n\nDark red hair, different enough from my usual white-blond, cut to just past my shoulders and pulled back into a tail. Green contacts that look natural when layered over my blue eyes. A crumpled, half-tucked collar shirt, its tiny silver buttons shining in the dark, a thin military jacket, black pants and steel-toed boots, a thick gray scarf wrapped around my neck, chin, and mouth. A dark soldier cap is pulled low over my forehead, and a crimson, painted tattoo stretches all over the left half of my face, changing me into someone unfamiliar. Aside from this, I wear an ever-present earpiece and mike. The Republic insists on it.\n\nIn most other cities, I'd probably get even more stares than I usually do because of that giant goddy tattoo\u2014not exactly a subtle marker, I gotta admit. But here in San Francisco, I blend right in with the others. The first thing I noticed when Eden and I moved to Frisco eight months ago was the local trend: young people painting black or red patterns on their faces, some small and delicate, like Republic seals on their temples or something similar, others huge and sprawling, like giant patterns of the Republic's land shape. I chose a pretty generic tattoo tonight, because I'm not loyal enough to the Republic to stamp that loyalty right on my face. Leave that to June. Instead, I have stylized flames. Good enough.\n\nMy insomnia's acting up tonight, so instead of sleeping, I'm walking alone through a sector called Marina, which as far as I can tell is the hillier, Frisco equivalent of LA's Lake sector. The night's cool and pretty quiet, and a light drizzle is blowing in from the city's bay. The streets are narrow, glistening wet, and riddled with potholes, and the buildings that rise up on both sides\u2014most of them tall enough to vanish into tonight's low-lying clouds\u2014are eclectic, painted with fading red and gold and black, their sides fortified with enormous steel beams to counter the earthquakes that roll through every couple of months. JumboTrons five or six stories high sit on every other block, blaring the usual barrage of Republic news. The air smells salty and bitter, like smoke and industrial waste mixed with seawater, and somewhere in there, a faint whiff of fried fish. Sometimes, when I turn down a corner, I'll suddenly end up close enough to the water's edge to get my boots wet. Here the land slopes right into the bay and hundreds of buildings poke out half submerged along the horizon. Whenever I get a view of the bay, I can also see the Golden Gate Ruins, the twisted remnants of some old bridge all piled up along the other side of the shore. A handful of people jostle past me now and then, but for the most part the city is asleep. Scattered bonfires light alleyways, gathering spots for the sector's street folks. It's not that different from Lake.\n\nWell\u2014I guess there are some differences now. The San Francisco Trial Stadium, for one, which sits empty and unlit off in the distance. Fewer street police in the poor sectors. The city's graffiti. You can always get an idea of how the people are feeling by looking at the recent graffiti. A lot of the messages I've seen lately actually support the Republic's new Elector. He is our hope, says one message scrawled on the side of a building. Another painted on the street reads: The Elector will guide us out of the darkness. A little too optimistic, if you ask me, but I guess they're good signs. Anden must be doing something right. And yet. Every now and then, I'll also see messages that say, The Elector's a hoax, or Brainwashed, or The Day we knew is dead.\n\nI don't know. Sometimes this new trust between Anden and the people feels like a string... and I am that string. Besides, maybe the happy graffiti's fake, painted by propaganda officers. Why not?\n\nYou never know with the Republic.\n\nEden and I, of course, have a Frisco apartment in a rich sector called Pacifica, where we stay with our caretaker, Lucy. The Republic's gotta take care of its sixteen-year-old most-wanted-criminal-turned-national-hero, doesn't it? I remember how much I distrusted Lucy\u2014a stern, stout, fifty-two-year-old lady dressed in classic Republic colors\u2014when she first showed up at our door in Denver. \"The Republic has assigned me to assist you boys,\" she told me as she bustled in to our apartment. Her eyes had settled immediately on Eden. \"Especially the little one.\"\n\nYeah. That didn't sit well with me. First of all, it'd taken me two months before I could even let Eden out of my sight. We ate side by side; we slept side by side; he was never alone. I'd gone as far as standing outside his bathroom door, as if Republic soldiers would somehow suck him out through a vent, take him back to a lab, and hook him up to a bunch of machines.\n\n\"Eden doesn't need you,\" I'd snapped at Lucy. \"He's got me. I take care of him.\"\n\nBut my health started fluctuating after those first couple of months. Some days I felt fine; other days, I'd be stuck in bed with a crippling headache. On those bad days, Lucy would take over\u2014and after a few shouting matches, she and I settled into a grudging routine. She does make pretty awesome meat pies. And when we moved here to Frisco, she came with us. She guides Eden. She manages my medications.\n\nWhen I'm finally tired of walking, I notice that I've wandered right out of Marina and into a wealthier neighboring district. I stop in front of a club with THE OBSIDIAN LOUNGE scored into a metal slab over its door. I slide against the wall into a sitting position, my arms resting on my knees, and feel the music's vibrations. My metal leg is ice-cold through the fabric of my trousers. On the wall across from me, graffiti scrawled in red reads, Day = Traitor. I sigh, take a silver tin from my pocket, and pull out a long cigarette. I run a finger across the SAN FRANCISCO CENTRAL HOSPITAL text imprinted down its length. Prescription cigarettes. Doctor's orders, yeah? I put it to my lips with trembling fingers and light it up. Close eyes. Take a puff. Gradually I lose myself in the clouds of blue smoke, waiting for the sweet, hallucinogenic effects to wash over me.\n\nDoesn't take long tonight. Soon the constant, dull headache disappears, and the world around me takes on a blurry sheen that I know isn't only from the rain. A girl's sitting next to me. It's Tess.\n\nShe gives me the grin I was so familiar with back on the streets of Lake. \"Any news from the JumboTrons?\" she asks me, pointing toward a screen across the road.\n\nI exhale blue smoke and lazily shake my head. \"Nope. I mean, I've seen a couple of Patriot-related headlines, but it's like you guys vanished off the map. Where are you? Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Do you miss me?\" Tess asks instead of answering.\n\nI stare at the shimmery image of her. She's how I remember from the streets\u2014her reddish-brown hair tied into a messy braid, her eyes large and luminous, kind and gentle. Little baby Tess. What were my last words to her... back when we had botched the Patriots' assassination attempt on Anden? Please, Tess\u2014I can't leave you here. But that's exactly what I did.\n\nI turn away, taking another drag on my cigarette. Do I miss her? \"Every day,\" I reply.\n\n\"You've been trying to find me,\" Tess says, scooting closer. I swear I can almost feel her shoulder against mine. \"I've seen you, scouring the JumboTrons and airwaves for news, eavesdropping on the streets. But the Patriots are in hiding right now.\"\n\nOf course they're in hiding. Why would they attack, now that Anden's in power and a peace treaty between the Republic and the Colonies is a done deal? What could their new cause possibly be? I have no idea. Maybe they don't have one. Maybe they don't even exist anymore. \"I wish you would come back,\" I murmur to Tess. \"It'd be nice to see you again.\"\n\n\"What about June?\"\n\nAs she asks this, her image vanishes. She's replaced by June, with her long ponytail and her dark eyes that shine with hints of gold, serious and analyzing, always analyzing. I lean my head against my knee and close my eyes. Even the illusion of June is enough to send a stabbing pain through my chest. Hell. I miss her so much.\n\nI remember how I'd said good-bye to her back in Denver, before Eden and I moved to Frisco. \"I'm sure we'll be back,\" I'd told her over my mike, trying to fill the awkward silence between us. \"After Eden's treatment is done.\" This was a lie, of course. We were going to Frisco for my treatment, not Eden's. But June didn't know this, so she just said, \"Come back soon.\"\n\nThat was almost eight months ago. I haven't heard from her since. I don't know if it's because each of us is too hesitant to bother the other, too afraid that the other doesn't want to talk, or maybe both of us are just too damn proud to be the one desperate enough to reach out. Maybe she's just not interested enough. But you know how it goes. A week passes without contact, and then a month, and soon too much time has passed and calling her would just feel random and weird. So I don't. Besides, what would I say? Don't worry, doctors are fighting to save my life. Don't worry, they're trying to shrink the problem area in my brain with a giant pile of medication before attempting an operation. Don't worry, Antarctica might grant me access to treatment in their superior hospitals. Don't worry, I'll be just fine.\n\nWhat's the point of keeping in touch with the girl you're crazy about, when you're dying?\n\nThe reminder sends a throbbing pain through the back of my head. \"It's better this way,\" I tell myself for the hundredth time. And it is. By not seeing her for so long, the memory of how we'd originally met has grown dimmer, and I find myself thinking about her connection to my family's deaths less often.\n\nUnlike Tess's, for some reason June's image never says a word. I try to ignore the shimmery mirage, but she refuses to go away. So damn stubborn.\n\nFinally, I stand, stub my cigarette into the pavement, and step through the door of the Obsidian Lounge. Maybe the music and lights will shake her from my system.\n\nFor an instant, I can't see a thing. The club is pitch-black, and the sound's deafening. I'm stopped immediately by an enormous pair of soldiers. One of them puts a firm hand on my shoulder. \"Name and branch?\" he asks.\n\nI have no interest in making my real identity known. \"Corporal Schuster. Air force,\" I reply, blurting out a random name and the first branch that comes to mind. I always think of the air force first, mostly because of Kaede. \"I'm stationed at Naval Base Two.\"\n\nThe guard nods. \"Air force kids over in the back left, near the bathrooms. And if I hear you picking any fights with the army booths, you're out and your commander hears about it in the morning. Got it?\"\n\nI nod, and the soldiers let me pass. I walk down a dark hall and through a second door, then melt into the crowds and flashing lights inside.\n\nThe dance floor is jammed with people in loose shirts and rolled-up sleeves, dresses paired with rumpled uniforms. I find the air force booths in the back of the room. Good, there are several empty ones. I slide into a booth, prop up my boots against the cushioned seats, and lean my head back. At least June's image has disappeared. The loud music sends all my thoughts scattering.\n\nI've only been in the booth for a few minutes when a girl cuts her way through the crowded dance floor and stumbles toward me. She looks flushed, her eyes bright and teasing; and when I glance behind her, I notice a cluster of laughing girls watching us. I force a smile. Usually, I like the attention in clubs, but sometimes, I just want to close my eyes and let the chaos take me away.\n\nShe leans over and presses her lips against my ear. \"Excuse me,\" she shouts over the noise. \"My girlfriends want to know if you're Day.\"\n\nI've been recognized already? I shrink instinctively away and shake my head so the others can see. \"You got the wrong guy,\" I reply with a wry grin. \"But thanks for the compliment.\"\n\nThe girl's face is almost entirely covered in shadows, but even so, I can tell she's blushing furiously. Her friends burst out laughing. None of them look like they believe my denial. \"Want to dance?\" the girl asks. She glances over her shoulder toward the flashing blue and gold lights, then back at me. This must be something her friends dared her to do too.\n\nAs I'm trying to think up some sort of polite refusal, I take in the girl's appearance. The club's too dark for me to get a good look at her, and all I see are glimpses of neon highlights on her skin and long ponytail, her glossy lips curved into a smile, her body lean and smooth in a short dress and military boots. My refusal fades on my tongue. Something about her reminds me of June. In the eight months since June first became a Princeps-Elect, I haven't felt excited about many girls\u2014but now, with this shadowy doppelg\u00e4nger beckoning me onto the dance floor, I let myself feel hopeful again.\n\n\"Yeah, why not?\" I say.\n\nThe girl breaks into a wide smile. When I get up from the booth and take her hand, her friends all let out a gasp of surprise, followed by a loud cheer. The girl leads me through them, and before I know it, we've pushed our way into the crowds and carved out a tiny space right in the middle of the action.\n\nI press myself against her, she runs a hand along the back of my neck, and we let the pounding beat carry us away. She's cute, I admit to myself, blinded in this sea of lights and limbs. The song changes, then changes again. I have no idea how long we're lost like this, but when she leans forward and brushes her lips over my own, I close my eyes and let her. I even feel a shiver run down my spine. She kisses me twice, her mouth soft and liquid, her tongue tasting of vodka and fruit. I flatten one hand against the small of the girl's back and pull her closer, until her body's solidly against mine. Her kisses grow more urgent. She is June, I tell myself, choosing to indulge in the fantasy. With my eyes closed, my mind still hazy from my cigarette's hallucinogens, I can believe it for a moment\u2014I can picture her kissing me here, taking every last breath from my lungs. The girl probably senses the change in my movements, my sudden hunger and desire, because she grins against my lips. She is June. It is June's dark hair that brushes against my face, June's long lashes that touch my cheeks, June's arm wrapped around my neck, June's body sliding against mine. A soft moan escapes me.\n\n\"Come on,\" she whispers. Mischief laces her words. \"Let's go get some air.\"\n\nHow long has it been? I don't want to leave, because it means I'll have to open my eyes and June will be gone, replaced with this girl that I don't know. But she pulls on my hand and I'm forced to look around. June is nowhere to be seen, of course. The club's lights flash and I'm momentarily blinded. She guides me through the throngs of dancers, down the club's dark hallway, and out an unmarked back door. We step into a quiet back alley. A few weak spotlights shine down along the path, giving everything an eerie, greenish glow.\n\nShe pushes me against the wall and drowns me in another kiss. Her skin is moist, and I feel her goose bumps rise beneath my touch. I kiss her back, and a small laugh of surprise escapes her when I flip us around and pin her against the wall.\n\nShe's June, I tell myself on repeat. My lips work greedily along her neck, tasting smoke and perfume.\n\nFaint static sizzles in my earpiece, the sound of rain and frying eggs. I try to ignore the incoming call, even as a man's voice fills my ears. Talk about a buzzkill. \"Mr. Wing,\" he says.\n\nI don't answer it. Go away. I'm busy.\n\nA few seconds later, the voice starts up again. \"Mr. Wing, this is Captain David Guzman of Denver City Patrol Fourteen. I know you're there.\"\n\nOh, this guy. This poor captain's always the one tasked with trying to get hold of me.\n\nI sigh and break away from the girl. \"Sorry,\" I say breathlessly. I give her an apologetic frown and gesture at my ear. \"Give me a minute?\"\n\nShe smiles and smoothes down her dress. \"I'll be inside,\" she replies. \"Look for me.\" Then she steps through the door and back into the club.\n\nI turn my mike on and start slowly pacing up and down the alley. \"What do you want?\" I say in an annoyed whisper.\n\nThe captain sighs over the earpiece and launches into his message. \"Mr. Wing, your presence is requested in Denver tomorrow night, on Independence Day, at the Capitol Tower's ballroom. As always, you are free to turn down the request\u2014as you usually do,\" he mutters under his breath. \"However, this banquet is an exceptional meeting of great importance. Should you choose to attend, we'll have a private jet waiting for you in the morning.\"\n\nAn exceptional meeting of great importance? Ever heard so many fancy words in one sentence? I roll my eyes. Every month or so, I get an invitation to some goddy capital event, like a ball for all the high-ranking war generals or the celebration they held when Anden finally ended the Trials. But the only reason they want me to go to these things is so they can show me off and remind the people, \"Look, just in case you forgot, Day is on our side!\" Don't push your luck, Anden.\n\n\"Mr. Wing,\" the captain says when I stay silent, as if he's resorting to some final argument, \"the glorious Elector personally requests your presence. So does the Princeps-Elect.\"\n\nThe Princeps-Elect.\n\nMy boots crunch to a halt in the middle of the alley. I forget to breathe.\n\nDon't get too excited\u2014after all, there are three Princeps-Elects, and he might be referring to any one of them. A few seconds pass before I finally ask, \"Which Princeps-Elect?\"\n\n\"The one who actually matters to you.\"\n\nMy cheeks warm at the taunt in his voice. \"June?\"\n\n\"Yes, Ms. June Iparis,\" the captain replies. He sounds relieved to finally have my attention. \"She wanted to make it a personal request this time. She would very much like to see you at the Capitol Tower's banquet.\"\n\nMy head aches, and I fight to steady my breathing. All thoughts of the girl in the club go out the window. June has not personally asked for me in eight months\u2014this is the first time that she's requested I attend a public function. \"What's this for?\" I ask. \"Just an Independence Day party? Why so important?\"\n\nThe captain hesitates. \"It's a matter of national security.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\" My initial excitement slowly wanes\u2014maybe he's just bluffing. \"Look, Captain, I've got some unfinished business to take care of. Try convincing me again in the morning.\"\n\nThe captain curses under his breath. \"Fine, Mr. Wing. Have it your way.\" He mumbles something I can't quite make out, then goes offline. I frown in exasperation as my initial excitement fades away into a sinking disappointment. Maybe I should head home now. It's time for me to go back and check up on Eden, anyway. What a joke. Chances are he's probably lying about June's request in the first place, because if she'd really wanted me to go back to the capital that badly, she\u2014\n\n\"Day?\"\n\nA new voice comes over my earpiece. I freeze.\n\nHave the hallucinogens from the meds worn off yet? Did I just imagine her voice? Even though I haven't heard it in almost a year, I would recognize it anywhere, and the sound alone is enough to conjure the image of June standing before me, as if I'd run across her by chance in this alley. Please, don't let it be her. Please, let it be her.\n\nDid her voice always have this effect on me?\n\nI have no idea how long I was frozen like this, but it must've been a while, because she repeats, \"Day, it's me. June. Are you there?\" A shiver runs through me.\n\nThis is real. It's really her.\n\nHer tone is different from what I remember. Hesitant and formal, like she's speaking to a stranger. I finally manage to compose myself and click my mike back on. \"I'm here,\" I reply. My own tone is different too\u2014just as hesitant, just as formal. I hope she doesn't hear the slight tremor in it.\n\nThere's a short pause on the other side before June continues. \"Hi.\" Then a long silence, followed by, \"How are you?\"\n\nSuddenly I feel a storm of words building up inside me, threatening to pour out. I want to blurt out everything: I've thought about you every day since that final farewell between us, I'm sorry for not contacting you, I wish you had contacted me. I miss you. I miss you.\n\nI don't say any of this. Instead, the only thing I manage is, \"Fine. What's up?\"\n\nShe pauses. \"Oh. That's good. I apologize for the late call, as I'm sure you're trying to sleep. But the Senate and the Elector have asked me to send this request to you personally. I wouldn't do it unless I felt it was truly important. Denver is throwing a ball for Independence Day, and during the event, we'll be having an emergency meeting. We need you in attendance.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Guess I've resorted to one-word replies. For some reason, it's all I can think of with June's voice on the line.\n\nShe exhales, sending a faint burst of static through the earpiece, and then says, \"You've heard about the peace treaty being drafted between the Republic and the Colonies, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah, of course.\" Everyone in the country knows about that: our precious little Anden's greatest ambition, to end the war that's been going on for who knows how long. And so far, things seem to be going in the right direction, well enough that the warfront has been at a quiet stalemate for the past four months. Who knew a day like that could come, just like how we'd never expected to see the Trial stadiums sitting unused across the country. \"Seems like the Elector's on track to becoming the Republic's hero, yeah?\"\n\n\"Don't speak too soon.\" June's words darken, and I feel like I can see her expression through the earpiece. \"Yesterday we received an angry transmission from the Colonies. There's a plague spreading through their warfront cities, and they believe it was caused by some of the biological weapons we'd sent across their borders. They've even traced the serial numbers on the shells of the weapons they believe started this plague.\"\n\nHer words are turning muffled through the shock in my mind, the fog that's bringing back memories of Eden and his black, bleeding eyes, of that boy on the train who was being used as a part of the warfare. \"Does that mean the peace treaty is off?\" I ask.\n\n\"Yes.\" June's voice falls. \"The Colonies say the plague is an official act of war against them.\"\n\n\"And what does this have to do with me?\"\n\nAnother long, ominous pause. It fills me with dread so icy cold that I feel like my fingers are turning numb. The plague. It's happening. It's all come full circle.\n\n\"I'll tell you when you get here,\" June finally says. \"Best not to talk about it over earpieces.\"\n\nI despise my first conversation with day after eight months of no communication. I hate it. When did I become so manipulative? Why must I always use his weaknesses against him?\n\nLast night at 2306 hours, Anden came to my apartment complex and knocked on my door. Alone. I don't even think guards were stationed in the hallway for his protection. It was my first warning that whatever he needed to tell me had to be important\u2014and secret.\n\n\"I have to ask a favor of you,\" he said as I let him in. Anden has almost perfected the art of being a young Elector (calm, cool, collected, a proud chin under stress, an even voice when angered), but this time I could see the deep worry in his eyes. Even my dog, Ollie, could tell that Anden was troubled, and tried reassuring him by pushing his wet nose against Anden's hand.\n\nI nudged Ollie away before turning back to Anden. \"What is it?\" I asked.\n\nAnden ran a hand through his dark curls. \"I don't mean to disturb you so late at night,\" he said, leaning his head down toward mine in quiet concern. \"But I'm afraid this is not a conversation that can wait.\" He stood close enough so that if I wanted to, I could tilt my face up and accidentally brush my lips against his. My heartbeat quickened at the thought.\n\nAnden seemed to sense the tension in my pose, because he took an apologetic step away and gave me more room to breathe. I felt a strange mixture of relief and disappointment. \"The peace treaty is over,\" he whispered. \"The Colonies are preparing to declare war against us once again.\"\n\n\"What?\" I whispered back. \"Why? What's happened?\"\n\n\"Word from my generals is that a couple of weeks ago, a deadly virus started sweeping through the Colonies' warfront like wildfire.\" When he saw my eyes widen in understanding, he nodded. He looked so weary, burdened with the weight of an entire nation's safety. \"Apparently I was too late in withdrawing our biological weapons from the warfront.\"\n\nEden. The experimental viruses that Anden's father had used in attempts to cause a plague in the Colonies. For months, I'd tried to push that to the back of my mind\u2014after all, Eden was safe now, under the care of Day and, last I heard, slowly adjusting to semblances of a normal life. For the last few months, the warfront had stood silent while Anden attempted to hash out a peace treaty with the Colonies. I'd thought that we would be lucky, that nothing would come out of that biological warfare. Wishful thinking.\n\n\"Do the Senators know?\" I asked after a while. \"Or the other Princeps-Elects? Why are you telling me this? I'm hardly your closest advisor.\"\n\nAnden sighed and squeezed the bridge of his nose. \"Forgive me. I wish I didn't have to involve you in this. The Colonies believe that we have the cure to this virus in our laboratories and are simply withholding it. They demand we share it, or else they put all of their strength behind a full-scale invasion of the Republic. And this time, it won't be a return to our old war. The Colonies have secured an ally. They struck a trade deal with Africa\u2014the Colonies get military help, and in return, Africa gets half our land.\"\n\nA feeling of foreboding crept over me. Even without him saying it, I could tell where this was going. \"We don't have a cure, do we?\"\n\n\"No. But we do know which former patients have the potential to help us find that cure.\"\n\nI started shaking my head. When Anden reached out to touch my elbow, I jerked away. \"Absolutely not,\" I said. \"You can't ask this of me. I won't do it.\"\n\nAnden looked pained. \"I have called for a private banquet tomorrow night to gather all of our Senators. We have no choice if we want to put a stop to this and find a way to secure peace with the Colonies.\" His tone grew firmer. \"You know this as well as I do. I want him to attend this banquet and hear us out. We need his permission if we're going to get to Eden.\"\n\nHe's serious, I realized in shock. \"You'll never get him to do it. You realize that, don't you? The country's support for you is still soft, and Day's alliance with you is hesitant at best. What do you think he'll say to this? What if you anger him enough for him to call the people to action, to tell them to rebel against you? Or worse \u2014what if he asks them to support the Colonies?\"\n\n\"I know. I've thought through all of this.\" Anden rubbed his temples in exhaustion. \"If there was a better option, I'd take it.\"\n\n\"So you want me to make him agree to this,\" I added. My irritation was too strong to bother hiding. \"I won't do it. Get the other Senators to convince Day, or try convincing him yourself. Or find a way to apologize to the Colonies' Chancellor\u2014ask him to negotiate new terms.\"\n\n\"You are Day's weakness, June. He'll listen to you.\" Anden winced even as he said this, as if he didn't want to admit it. \"I know how this makes me sound. I don't want to be cruel\u2014I don't want Day to see us as the enemy. But I will do what it takes to protect the Republic's people. Otherwise, the Colonies will attack, and if that happens, you know it's likely the virus will spread here as well.\"\n\nIt was worse than that, even though Anden didn't say it aloud. If the Colonies attack us with Africa at their side, then our military might not be strong enough to hold them back. This time, they might win. He'll listen to you. I closed my eyes and bowed my head. I didn't want to admit it, but I knew that Anden was right.\n\nSo I did as he requested. I called Day and asked him to return to the capital. Just the thought of seeing him again leaves my heart pounding, aching from his absence in my life over these past months. I haven't seen or spoken to him for so long... and this is going to be how we reunite? What will he think of me now?\n\nWhat will he think of the Republic when he finds out what they want with his little brother?\n\n1201 HOURS.\n\nDENVER COUNTY COURT OF FEDERAL CRIME.\n\n72\u00b0F INDOORS.\n\nSIX HOURS UNTIL I SEE DAY AT THE EVENING BALL.\n\n289 DAYS AND 12 HOURS SINCE METIAS'S DEATH.\n\nThomas and Commander Jameson are on trial today.\n\nI'm so tired of trials. In the past four months, a dozen former Senators have been tried and convicted of participating in the plan to assassinate Anden, the plan that Day and I had barely managed to stop. Those Senators have all been executed. Razor has already been executed. Sometimes I feel like someone new is convicted each week.\n\nBut today's trial is different. I know exactly who is being sentenced today, and why.\n\nI sit in a balcony overlooking the courtroom's round stage, my hands restless in their white silk gloves, my body constantly shifting in my vest and black ruffled coat, my boots quietly tapping against the balcony pillars. My chair is made out of synthetic oak and cushioned with soft, scarlet velvet, but somehow I just can't make myself comfortable. To keep myself calm and occupied, I'm carefully entwining four straightened paper clips in my lap to form a small ring. Two guards stand behind me. Three circular rows of the country's twenty-six Senators surround the stage, uniform in their matching scarlet-and-black suits, their silver epaulettes reflecting the chamber's light, their voices echoing along the arched ceilings. They sound largely indifferent, as if they're meeting about trade routes instead of people's fates. Many are new faces that have replaced the traitor Senators, who Anden has already cleaned out. I'm the one who sticks out with my black-and-gold outfit (even the seventy-six soldiers standing guard here are clad in scarlet; two for each Senator, two for me, two for each of the other Princeps-Elects, four for Anden, and fourteen at the chamber's front and back entrances, which means the defendants\u2014Thomas and Commander Jameson\u2014are considered fairly high risk and could possibly make a sudden move).\n\nI'm no Senator, clearly. I am a Princeps-Elect and need to be distinguished as such.\n\nTwo others in the chamber wear the same black-and-gold uniform that I do. My eyes wander over to them now, where they sit on other balconies. After Anden tapped me to train for the Princeps position, Congress urged him to select several others. After all, you cannot have only one person preparing to become the leader of the Senate, especially when that person is a sixteen-year-old girl without a shred of political experience. So Anden agreed. He picked out two more Princeps-Elects, both of them already Senators. One is named Mariana Dupree. My gaze settles on her, her nose turned up and her eyes heavy with sternness. Thirty-seven years old, Senator for ten years. She hated me the instant she laid eyes on me. I look away from her and toward the balcony where the second Princeps-Elect sits. Serge Carmichael, a jumpy thirty-two-year-old Senator and great political mind, who wasted no time showing me that he doesn't appreciate my youth and inexperience.\n\nSerge and Mariana. My two rivals for the Princeps title. I feel exhausted just thinking about it.\n\nOn a balcony several dozen yards away, sitting flanked by his guards, Anden seems calm, reviewing something with one of the soldiers. He's wearing a handsome gray military coat with bright silver buttons, silver epaulettes, and silver sleeve insignias. He occasionally glances down toward the prisoners standing in the chamber's circle. I watch him for a moment, admiring his appearance of calm.\n\nThomas and Commander Jameson are going to receive their sentences for crimes against the nation.\n\nThomas looks tidier than usual\u2014if that's possible. His hair is slicked back, and I can tell that he must've emptied an entire can of shoe polish onto each of his boots. He stands at attention in the center of the chamber and stares straight ahead with an intensity that would make any Republic commander proud. I wonder what's going through his mind. Is he picturing that night in the hospital alley, when he murdered my brother? Is he thinking of the many conversations he had with Metias, the moments when he had taken down his guard? Or the fateful night when he had chosen to betray Metias instead of help him?\n\nCommander Jameson, on the other hand, looks slightly disheveled. Her cold, emotionless eyes are fixed on me. She has been watching me unflinchingly for the past twelve minutes. I stare back for a moment, trying to see some hint of a soul in her eyes, but nothing exists there except for an icy hatred, an absolute lack of conscience.\n\nI look away, take deep, slow breaths, and try to focus on something else. My thoughts return to Day.\n\nIt's been 241 days since he visited my apartment and bid me good-bye. Sometimes I wish Day could hold me in his arms again and kiss me the way he did on that last night, so close that we could barely breathe, his lips soft against mine. But then I take back that wish. The thought is useless. It reminds me of loss, just like how sitting here and looking down on the people who killed my family reminds me of all the things I used to have; it reminds me too of my guilt, of all the things Day used to have that I took from him.\n\nBesides, Day will probably never want to kiss me again. Not after he finds out why I've asked him to return to Denver.\n\nAnden's looking in my direction now. When I catch his gaze, he nods once, excuses himself from his balcony, and a minute later he steps into my balcony. I rise and, along with my guards, snap to a salute. Anden waves a hand impatiently. \"Sit, please,\" he says. When I've relaxed back into my chair, he bends down to my eye level and adds, \"How are you holding up, June?\"\n\nI fight the blush as it spreads across my cheeks. After eight months without Day in my life, I find myself smiling at Anden, enjoying the attention, occasionally even hoping for it. \"Doing fine, thanks. I've been looking forward to this day.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Anden nods. \"Don't worry\u2014it won't be long before both of them are out of your life forever.\" He gives my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Then he leaves as swiftly as he arrived, vanishing with the faint clink of medals and epaulettes, then reappearing moments later in his own balcony.\n\nI lift my head in a vain attempt at bravery, knowing that Commander Jameson's icy eyes must still be upon me. As each of the Senators rises to cast aloud his vote on her verdict, I hold my breath and carefully push away each memory I have of her eyes staring me down, folding them into a neat compartment at the back of my mind. The voting seems to take forever, even though the Senators are all quick to say what they think will please the Elector. No one has the courage to risk crossing Anden after watching so many others convicted and executed. By the time my turn comes, my throat is parched. I swallow a few times, then speak up.\n\n\"Guilty,\" I say, my voice clear and calm.\n\nSerge and Mariana cast their votes after me. We run through another round of voting for Thomas, and then we're done. Three minutes later, a man (bald, with a round, wrinkled face and scarlet floor-length robes he's clutching with his left hand) hurries into Anden's balcony and gives him a rushed bow. Anden leans toward the man and whispers in his ear. I watch their interaction in quiet curiosity, wondering whether I can predict the final verdict by their gestures. After a short deliberation, Anden and the messenger both nod. Then the messenger raises his voice to the entire assembly.\n\n\"We are now ready to announce the verdicts for Captain Thomas Alexander Bryant and Commander Natasha Jameson of Los Angeles City Patrol Eight. All rise for the glorious Elector!\"\n\nThe Senators and I stand with a uniform clatter, while Commander Jameson simply turns to face Anden with a look of utter disdain. Thomas snaps to a sharp salute in Anden's direction. He holds the position as Anden stands up, straightens, and puts his hands behind his back. There's a moment of silence as we wait for his final verdict, the one vote that really matters. I fight back a rising urge to cough. My eyes dart instinctively to the other Princeps-Elects, something I now do all the time; Mariana has a satisfied frown on her face, while Serge just looks bored. One of my fists clenches tightly around the paper clip ring I'm working on. I already know it will leave deep grooves in my palm.\n\n\"The Senators of the Republic have submitted their individual verdicts,\" Anden announces to the courtroom, his words bearing all the formality of a traditions-old speech. I marvel at the way his voice can sound so soft, yet carry so well at the same time. \"I have taken their joint decision into account, and now I give my own.\" Anden pauses to turn his eyes down toward where both of them are waiting. Thomas is still in full salute, still staring intently at the empty air in front of him. \"Captain Thomas Alexander Bryant of Los Angeles City Patrol Eight,\" he says, \"the Republic of America finds you guilty...\"\n\nThe room stays silent. I fight to keep my breathing even. Think about something. Anything. What about all the political books I've been reading this week? I try to recite some of the facts I've learned, but suddenly I can't remember any of it. Most uncharacteristic.\n\n\"... of the death of Captain Metias Iparis on the night of November thirtieth\u2014of the death of civilian Grace Wing without the warrants necessary for execution\u2014of the single-handed execution of twelve protesters in Batalla Square on the afternoon of\u2014\"\n\nHis voice comes in and out of the blur of noise in my head. I lean a hand against my chair's armrest, let out a slow breath, and try to prevent myself from swaying. Guilty. Thomas has been found guilty of killing both my brother and Day's mother. My hands shake.\n\n\"\u2014and thereby sentenced to death by firing squad two days from today, at seventeen hundred hours. Commander Natasha Jameson of Los Angeles City Patrol Eight, the Republic of America finds you guilty...\"\n\nAnden's voice fades away into a dull, unrecognizable hum. Everything around me seems so slow, as if I'm living too quickly for it all and leaving the world behind.\n\nA year ago I'd been standing outside Batalla Hall on a different sort of court stage, looking on with a huge crowd as a judge gave Day the exact same sentence. Now Day is alive, and a Republic celebrity. I open my eyes again. Commander Jameson's lips are set in a tight line as Anden reads out her death penalty. Thomas looks expressionless. Is he expressionless? I'm too far away to tell, but his eyebrows seem furrowed into a strange sort of tragedy. I should feel good about this, I remind myself. Both Day and I should be rejoicing. Thomas killed Metias. He shot Day's mother in cold blood, without a second's hesitation.\n\nBut now the courtroom falls away and all I can see are memories of Thomas as a teenager, back when he and Metias and I used to eat pork edame inside a warm first-floor street stand, with the rain pouring down all around us. I remember Thomas showing off his first assigned gun to me. I even remember the time Metias brought me to his afternoon drills. I was twelve and had just begun my courses at Drake for a week\u2014how innocent everything seemed back then. Metias picked me up after my classes that afternoon, right on time, and we headed over to the Tanagashi sector, where he was running his patrol through drills. I can still feel the warmth of the sun beating down on my hair, still see the swoosh of Metias's black half cape, the gleam of his silver epaulettes, and still hear the sharp clicks of his shining boots on the cement. While I settled down on a corner bench and turned my comp on to (pretend to) do some advance reading, Metias lined up his soldiers for inspection. He paused before each soldier to point out flaws in their uniforms.\n\n\"Cadet Rin,\" he barked at one of the newer soldiers. The soldier jumped at the steel in my brother's voice, then hung her head in shame as Metias tapped the lone medal pinned on the cadet's coat. \"If I wore my medal like this, Commander Jameson would strip me of my title. Do you want to be removed from this patrol, soldier?\"\n\n\"N-no, sir,\" the cadet stammered.\n\nMetias kept his gloved hands tucked behind his back and moved on. He criticized three more soldiers before he reached Thomas, who stood at attention near the end of the line. Metias looked over his uniform with a stern, careful eye. Of course, Thomas's outfit was absolutely spotless\u2014not a single thread out of place, every medal and epaulette groove polished to a bright shine, boots so flawless that I could probably see my reflection in them. A long pause. I put my comp down and leaned forward to watch more closely. Finally, my brother nodded. \"Well done, soldier,\" he said to Thomas. \"Keep up the good work, and I'll see that Commander Jameson promotes you before the end of this year.\"\n\nThomas's expression never changed, but I saw him lift his chin with pride. \"Thank you, sir,\" he replied. Metias's eyes lingered on him for a second, and then he moved on.\n\nWhen he finally finished inspecting everyone, my brother turned to face his entire patrol. \"A disappointing inspection, soldiers,\" he called out to them. \"You're under my watch now, and that means you're under Commander Jameson's watch. She expects a higher caliber from this lot, so you'd do well to try harder. Understood?\"\n\nSharp salutes answered him. \"Yes, sir!\"\n\nMetias's eyes returned to Thomas. I saw respect on my brother's face, even admiration. \"If each of you paid attention to detail the way Cadet Bryant does, we'd be the greatest patrol in the country. Let him serve as an example to you all.\" He joined them in a final salute. \"Long live the Republic!\" The cadets echoed him in unison.\n\nThe memory slowly fades from my thoughts, and Metias's clear voice turns into a ghost's whisper, leaving me weak and exhausted in my sadness.\n\nMetias had always talked about Thomas's fixation on being the perfect soldier. I remember the blind devotion Thomas gave to Commander Jameson, the same blind devotion he now gives to his new Elector. Then I see Thomas and me sitting across from each other in an interrogation room\u2014I remember the anguish in his eyes. How he'd told me that he wanted to protect me. What happened to that shy, awkward boy from Los Angeles's poor sectors, the boy who used to train with Metias every afternoon? Something blurs my vision and I quickly wipe a hand across my eyes.\n\nI could be compassionate. I could ask Anden to spare his life and let him live out his years in prison, and give him a chance to redeem himself. But instead I just stand there with my closed lips and unwavering posture, my heart hard as stone. Metias would be more merciful in my position.\n\nBut I was never as good a person as my brother.\n\n\"This concludes the trial for Captain Thomas Alexander Bryant and Commander Natasha Jameson,\" Anden finishes. He holds a hand out in Thomas's direction and nods once. \"Captain, do you have any words for the Senate?\"\n\nThomas doesn't flinch in the slightest, doesn't show a single hint of fear or remorse or anger on his face. I watch him closely. After a heartbeat, he turns his eyes up to where Anden stands, then bows low. \"My glorious Elector,\" he replies in a clear, unwavering voice. \"I have disgraced the Republic by acting in a way that has both displeased and disappointed you. I humbly accept my verdict.\" He rises from his bow, then returns to his salute. \"Long live the Republic.\"\n\nHe glances up at me when the Senators all voice their agreement with Anden's final verdict. For an instant, our eyes meet. Then I look down. After a while, I look back up and he's staring straight ahead again.\n\nAnden turns his attention to Commander Jameson. \"Commander,\" he says, extending his gloved hand in her direction. His chin lifts in a regal gesture. \"Do you have any words for the Senate?\"\n\nShe doesn't flinch from looking at the young Elector. Her eyes are cold, dark slates. After a pause, she finally nods. \"Yes, Elector,\" she says, her tone harsh and mocking, a stark contrast to Thomas's. The Senators and soldiers shift uneasily, but Anden raises a hand for silence. \"I do have some words for you. I was not the first to hope for your death, and I won't be the last. You are the Elector, but you are still just a boy. You don't know who you are.\" She narrows her eyes... and smiles. \"But I know. I have seen far more than you have\u2014I've drained the blood from prisoners twice your age, I've killed men with twice your strength, I've left prisoners shaking in their broken bodies who probably have twice your courage. You think you're this country's savior, don't you? But I know better. You're just your father's boy, and like father, like son. He failed, and so will you.\" Her smile widens, but it never touches her eyes. \"This country will go down in flames with you at the helm, and my ghost will be laughing at you all the way from hell.\"\n\nAnden's expression never changes. His eyes stay clear and unafraid, and in this moment, I am drawn to him like a bird to an open sky. He meets her stare coolly. \"This concludes today's trial,\" he replies, his voice echoing throughout the chamber. \"Commander, I suggest you save your threats for the firing squad.\" Then he folds his hands behind his back and nods at his soldiers. \"Remove them from my sight.\"\n\nI don't know how Anden can show so little fear in front of Commander Jameson. I envy it. Because as I watch the soldiers lead her away, all I can feel is a deep, ice-cold pit of terror. Like she's not done with us yet. Like she's warning us to watch our backs.\n\nWe touch down in denver on the morning of the emergency banquet. Even the words themselves make me want to laugh: emergency banquet? To me, a banquet still means a feast, and I don't see how any emergency should be cause for a goddy mountain of food, even if it is for Independence Day. Is that how these Senators deal with crises\u2014by stuffing their fat faces?\n\nAfter Eden and I settle into a temporary government apartment and Eden dozes off, exhausted from our early morning flight, I reluctantly leave him with Lucy in order to meet the assistant assigned to prep me for tonight's event.\n\n\"If anyone tries to see him,\" I whisper to Lucy as Eden sleeps, \"for any reason, please call me. If anyone wants\u2014\"\n\nLucy, used to my paranoia, hushes me with a wave of her hand. \"Let me put your mind at ease, Mr. Wing,\" she replies. She pats my cheek. \"No one will see Eden while you're gone. I promise. I'll call you in an instant if anything happens.\"\n\nI nod. My eyes linger on Eden as if he'll disappear if I blink. \"Thanks.\"\n\nTo attend an event this fancy, I need to dress the part\u2014and to dress the part, the Republic assigns a Senator's daughter to take me through the downtown district, where the city's main shopping areas are clustered. She meets me right where the train stops in the center of the district. There's no mistaking who she is\u2014she's decked out in a stylish uniform from head to toe, her light brown eyes set against dark brown skin and thick black curls of hair tied up into a knotted braid. When she recognizes me, she flashes me a smile. I catch her looking me over, as if already critiquing my outfit. \"You must be Day,\" she says, taking my hand. \"My name is Faline Fedelma, and the Elector has assigned me to be your guide.\" She pauses to raise an eyebrow at my clothes. \"We have some work to do.\"\n\nI look down at my outfit. Trousers tucked into scuffed-up boots, a rumpled collar shirt, and an old scarf. Would've been considered luxurious on the streets. \"Glad you approve,\" I reply. But Faline just laughs and loops an arm through mine.\n\nAs she leads me to a government clothing street that specializes in evening wear, I take in the crowds of people rushing around us. Well-dressed, upper-class folks. A trio of students pass, giggling about something or other, dressed in pristine military uniforms and polished boots. As we round a corner and step inside a shop, I realize that soldiers are standing guard up and down the street. A lot of soldiers.\n\n\"Are there usually this many guards downtown?\" I ask Faline.\n\nShe just shrugs and holds up an outfit against me, but I can see the unease in her eyes. \"No,\" she replies, \"not really. But I'm sure it's nothing for you to worry about.\"\n\nI let it drop, but a pulse of anxiety rushes through my mind. Denver's beefing up its defenses. June hasn't explained why she needed me to attend this banquet so badly, badly enough to contact me herself after so many months of no word. What the hell would she need from me? What does the Republic want this time?\n\nIf the Republic really is going back to war, then maybe I should find a way to get Eden out of the country. We have the power to leave now, after all. Don't know what's keeping me here.\n\nHours later, after the sun has set and fireworks for the Elector's birthday have already started going off in random parts of the city, a jeep takes me from our apartment toward Colburn Hall. I peer impatiently out the window. People travel up and down the sidewalks in dense clusters. Tonight each of them is dressed in very specific clothing\u2014mostly red, with hints of gold makeup and Republic seals stamped prominently here and there, on the back of white gloves or on the sleeves of military coats. I wonder how many of these folks agree with the Anden is our savior graffiti and how many side with the Anden is a hoax message. Troops march up and down the streets. All the JumboTrons have images of enormous Republic seals on display, followed by live footage streaming from the festivities happening inside Colburn Hall. To Anden's credit, there's been a steady decline in Republic propaganda lately on the JumboTrons. Still no news about the outside world, though. Guess you can't have everything.\n\nBy the time we reach the cobbled steps of Colburn Hall, the streets are a mess of celebrations, throngs of people, and unsmiling guards. The onlookers let out a huge cheer when they see me step out of the jeep, a roar that shakes my bones and sends a spasm of pain through the back of my head. I wave hesitantly back.\n\nFaline's waiting for me at the bottom of the steps that lead up to Colburn Hall. This time she's clad in a gold dress, and gold dust shimmers on her eyelids. We exchange bows before I follow behind her, looking on as she motions for others to clear a path. \"You clean up nicely,\" she says. \"Someone's going to be very pleased to see you.\"\n\n\"I don't think the Elector will be as excited as you think.\"\n\nShe smiles at me over her shoulder. \"I wasn't talking about the Elector.\"\n\nMy heart jumps at that.\n\nWe make our way through the shouting mob. I crane my neck and stare at the elaborate beauty of Colburn Hall. Everything glitters. Tonight the pillars are each adorned with tall scarlet banners displaying the Republic seal, and hanging right in the middle of the pillars and above the hall's entrance is the largest portrait I've ever seen. Anden's giant face. Faline guides me down the corridor, where Senators are carrying on random conversations and other elite guests talk and laugh with one another like everything in the country is going great. But behind their cheerful masks are signs of nervousness, flickering eyes, and furrowed brows. They've gotta sense the unusual number of soldiers here too. I try to mimic the proper, precise way they have of walking and talking, but stop when Faline notices me doing it.\n\nWe wander the lush, open setting of Colburn Hall for several minutes, lost in the sea of politicians. The tassels of my epaulettes clink together. I'm looking for her, even though I don't know what I'll say when\u2014if\u2014I find her. How will I even catch a glimpse of her in the middle of all this goddy luxury? Wherever we turn, I see another flurry of colorful gowns and polished suits, fountains and pianos, waiters carrying skinny glasses of champagne, fancy people wearing their fake smiles. I feel a sudden sense of claustrophobia.\n\nWhere am I? What am I doing here?\n\nAs if on cue, the instant I ask myself these questions is the instant I finally see her. Somehow, in the midst of these aristocrats who blend into one blurry portrait, my eyes catch her silhouette and pause. June. The noise around me fades into a dull hum, quiet and uninteresting, and all of my attention turns helplessly to the girl I thought I'd be able to face.\n\nShe's dressed in a floor-length gown of deep scarlet, and her thick, shining hair is piled high on her head in dark waves, pinned into place with red, gem-studded combs that catch the light. She's the most beautiful girl I've ever seen, easily the most breathtaking girl in the room. She's grown taller in the eight months since I've seen her, and the way she holds herself\u2014poised and graceful, with her slender, swanlike neck and her deep, dark eyes\u2014is the image of perfection.\n\nAlmost perfection. At closer look, I notice something that makes me frown. There's an air of restraint about her, something uncertain and unconfident. Not like the June I know. As if powerless against the sight, I find myself guiding both Faline and me toward her. I only stop when the people around her move apart, revealing the man standing at her side.\n\nIt's Anden. Of course, I shouldn't be surprised. Off to the side, several well-dressed girls are trying in vain to catch his attention, but he seems focused only on June. I watch as he leans in to whisper something in her ear, then continues his relaxed conversation with her and several others.\n\nWhen I turn silently away, Faline frowns at my sudden shift. \"Are you okay?\" she asks.\n\nI attempt a reassuring smile. \"Oh, absolutely. Don't worry.\" I feel so out of place among these aristocrats, with their bank accounts and posh manners. No matter how much money the Republic throws at me, I will forever be the boy from the streets.\n\nAnd I'd forgotten that a boy from the streets is no match for the future Princeps.\n\n1935 HOURS.\n\nCOLBURN HALL, MAIN BALLROOM.\n\n68\u00b0F.\n\nI think I see day in the crowd. A flash of white-gold hair, of bright blue eyes. My attention suddenly breaks from my conversation with Anden and the other Princeps-Elects, and I crane my neck, hoping to get a better look\u2014but he's gone again, if he was ever there. Disappointed, I return my gaze to the others and give them my well-rehearsed smile. Will Day show up tonight? Surely Anden's men would have alerted us if Day had refused to get on the private jet sent for him this morning. But he'd sounded so distant and awkward over the mike that night, perhaps he just decided it wasn't worth coming out here after all. Maybe he hates me, now that we've had enough time apart for him to think clearly about our friendship. I scan the crowd again when the other Princeps-Elects are laughing at Anden's jokes.\n\nA feeling in my stomach tells me Day will be here. But I am hardly a person who relies on gut instinct. I absently touch the jewels in my hair, making sure they're all still in the right places. They're not the most comfortable things I've ever worn, but the hairdresser had gasped at how the rubies stood out against my dark locks, and that reaction was enough for me to think they're worth the trouble. I'm not sure why I bothered to look so nice for tonight. It is Independence Day, I suppose, and the occasion is a large one.\n\n\"Miss Iparis is as precocious as we all assumed she would be,\" Anden's saying to the Senators now, turning his smile on me. His apparent happiness is all for show, of course. I've shadowed Anden for long enough now to know when he is tense, and tonight the nervousness reflects off every gesture he makes. I'm nervous too. A month from now, the Republic might have Colonies flags flying over her cities. \"Her tutors say they've never seen a student progress so rapidly through her political texts.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Elector,\" I reply automatically to his compliment. The Senators both chuckle, but underneath their jolly expressions lies the lingering resentment they have against me, this child who has been tapped by the Elector to potentially become their leader one day. Mariana gives me a diplomatic, albeit stern, nod, but Serge doesn't look too pleased with the way Anden singles me out. I ignore the dark scowl that the Senator casts in my direction. His scowls used to bother me\u2014now I'm just tired of them.\n\n\"Ah, well.\" Senator Tanaka of California tugs on the collar of his military jacket and exchanges a look with his wife. \"That's wonderful news, Elector. Of course, I'm sure the tutors also know how much of a Senator's job is learned outside of texts and from years of experience in the Senate chamber. Like our dear Senator Carmichael here.\" He pauses to nod graciously at Serge, who puffs up.\n\nAnden waves off his concern. \"Of course,\" he echoes. \"All in good time, Senator.\"\n\nBeside me, Mariana sighs, leans over, and tilts her chin at Serge. \"If you stare at his head long enough, it might sprout wings and take flight,\" she mutters.\n\nI smile at that.\n\nThey steer off the topic of me and onto the topic of how to better sort students into high schools now that the Trials are discontinued. The political chatter grates on my nerves. I start scanning the crowd again for Day. After more futile searching, I finally put a hand on Anden's arm and lean over to whisper, \"Excuse me. I'll be right back.\" He nods in return. When I turn away and start blending in with the crowd, I can feel his stare lingering on me.\n\nI spend several minutes walking the ballroom in vain, greeting various Senators and their families as I go. Where is Day? I try to hear snatches of conversations, or notice where clusters of people might be gathering. Day is a celebrity. He must be attracting attention if he already arrived. I'm about to make my way across the other half of the ballroom when I'm interrupted by the loudspeakers. The pledge. I sigh, then turn back to where Anden has already taken his place on the front stage, flanked on both sides by soldiers holding up Republic flags.\n\n\"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the Republic of America...\"\n\nDay. There he is.\n\nHe's standing about fifty feet away, his back partially turned to me so that I can only see a tiny sliver of his profile, his hair loose and thick and perfectly straight, and on his arm is a girl in a shining gold dress. When I observe him more closely, I notice that his mouth isn't moving at all. He stays silent throughout the entire pledge. I turn my attention back to the front as applause fills the chamber and Anden begins his prepared speech. From the corner of my eye, I see Day turn to look over his shoulder. My hands tremble at this momentary glimpse of his face\u2014have I really forgotten how beautiful he is, how his eyes reflect something wild and untamed, free even in the midst of all this order and elegance?\n\nWhen the speech ends, I head straight in Day's direction. He's dressed in a perfectly tailored black military jacket and suit. Is he also thinner? He looks to have lost a good ten pounds since the last time I saw him. He's been ill recently. As I get closer, Day catches sight of me and pauses in his conversation with his date. His eyes widen a little. I can feel the heat rising on my cheeks, but force it down. This will be our first face-to-face meeting in months, and I refuse to make a fool of myself.\n\nI stop a few feet away. My eyes wander to his date, a girl whom I recognize as Faline, the eighteen-year-old daughter of Senator Fedelma.\n\nFaline and I exchange a quick nod. She grins. \"Hi, June,\" she says. \"You look gorgeous tonight.\"\n\nShe makes a genuine smile escape from me, a relief after all the practiced smiles I've been giving the other Princeps-Elects. \"So do you,\" I reply.\n\nFaline doesn't waste a single awkward second\u2014she catches the slight blush on my cheeks and curtsies to both of us. Then she heads back into the crowd, leaving Day and me alone in the sea of people.\n\nFor a second, we just stare at each other. I break the silence before it stretches on for too long. \"Hi,\" I say. I take in his face, refreshing my memory with every little detail. \"It's good to see you.\"\n\nDay smiles back and bows, but his eyes never leave me. The way he stares sends rivers of heat racing through my chest. \"Thanks for the invite.\" Hearing his voice in person again... I take a deep breath, reminding myself of why I invited him here. His eyes dance across my face and to my dress\u2014he seems ready to comment on it, but then decides against it and waves his hand at the room. \"Nice little party you have here.\"\n\n\"It's never quite as fun as it looks,\" I reply in a hushed voice, so that the others can't hear me. \"I think some of these Senators might burst from being forced to talk to people they don't like.\"\n\nMy teasing brings a small smile of relief to Day's lips. \"Glad I'm not the only unhappy one.\"\n\nAnden has already left the stage, and Day's comment reminds me that I should be escorting him to the banquet soon. The thought sobers me. \"It's almost time,\" I say, motioning for Day to follow me. \"The banquet is very private. You, me, the other Princeps-Elects, and the Elector.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Day asks as he falls into step beside me. His arm brushes once against mine, sending shivers dancing across my skin. I struggle to catch my breath. Focus, June. \"You weren't exactly specific in our last conversation. I hope I'm putting up with all of these snobby Congress trots for a good reason.\"\n\nI can't help my amusement at the way Day refers to the Senators. \"You'll find out when we get there. And keep your insults to a minimum.\" I look away from him and toward the small corridor we're heading for, Jasper Chamber, a discreet hall branching away from the main ballroom.\n\n\"I'm not going to like this, am I?\" Day mutters close to my ear.\n\nGuilt rises in me. \"Probably not.\"\n\nWe settle down in the private banquet room (a small, rectangular cherrywood table with seven seats), and after a while, Serge and Mariana filter in. They each take a seat on either side of Anden's reserved chair. I stay next to Day, as Anden had wished. Two servers go around the table, placing dainty plates of watermelon and pork salad before each seat. Serge and Mariana make polite small talk, but neither Day nor I says another word. Now and then, I manage to steal a glance at him. He's eyeing the lines of forks, spoons, and knives at his place setting with an uncomfortable frown, trying to figure them out without asking for help. Oh, Day. I don't know why this gives me a painful, fluttering feeling in my stomach, or why it pulls my heart to him. I'd forgotten how his long lashes catch the light.\n\n\"What's this?\" he whispers to me, holding up one of his utensils.\n\n\"A butter knife.\"\n\nDay scowls at it, running a finger along its blunt, rounded edge. \"This,\" he mutters, \"is not a knife.\"\n\nBeside him, Serge notices his hesitation too. \"I take it you're not accustomed to forks and knives where you're from?\" he says coolly to him.\n\nDay stiffens, but he doesn't miss a beat. He grabs a larger carving knife, purposely disturbing his place's careful setup, and gestures casually with it. Both Serge and Mariana edge away from the table. \"Where I come from, we're more about efficiency,\" he replies. \"A knife like this'll skewer food, smear butter, and slit throats all at the same time.\"\n\nOf course Day's never slit a throat in his life\u2014but Serge doesn't know that. He sniffs in disdain at the reply, but the blood drains from his face. I have to pretend to cough so that I don't laugh at Day's mock-serious expression. For those who don't know him well, his words actually sound intimidating.\n\nI also notice something I hadn't earlier\u2014Day looks pale. Much paler than I remember. My amusement wavers. Is his recent illness something more serious than I'd first assumed?\n\nAnden arrives in the room a minute later, causing the usual stir as we all rise for him, and gestures for all of us to take our seats. He's accompanied by four soldiers, one of whom closes the door behind him and finally seals us in to our private meal.\n\n\"Day,\" Anden greets. He pauses to nod courteously in Day's direction. Day looks unhappy with the attention, but manages to return the gesture. \"It's a pleasure to see you again, if under unfortunate circumstances.\"\n\n\"Very unfortunate,\" Day says in return. I shift uncomfortably in my seat, trying to imagine a more awkward scenario than this dinner setup.\n\nAnden lets the stiff reply slide. \"Let me catch you up on the current situation.\" He puts his fork down. \"The peace treaty we've been working on with the Colonies is now shelved. A virus has hit the Colonies' southern warfront cities hard.\"\n\nBeside me, Day crosses his arms and regards the crowd with a suspicious expression on his face, but Anden goes on. \"They believe this virus was caused by us, and they are demanding that we send them a cure if we want to continue peace talks.\" Serge clears his throat and starts to say something, but Anden holds up a hand for silence. He then goes on to spill all the details\u2014how the Colonies first sent a harsh message to the Republic, demanding info on the virus wreaking havoc amongst their troops, hastily withdrawing their affected soldiers, and then broadcasting their ultimatum to the warfront generals, warning of dire consequences if a cure was not delivered immediately.\n\nDay listens to all of it without moving a muscle or uttering a word. One of his hands grips the edge of the table tightly enough to turn his knuckles white. I wonder whether he's guessed where this is going and what all this has to do with him, but he just waits until Anden has finished.\n\nSerge leans back in his chair and frowns. \"If the Colonies want to play games with our peace offer,\" he scoffs, \"then let them. We've been at war long enough\u2014we can handle some more.\"\n\n\"No, we can't,\" Mariana interjects. \"Do you honestly think the United Nations will accept the news that our peace treaty fell apart?\"\n\n\"Do the Colonies have any evidence that we caused it? Or are these empty accusations?\"\n\n\"Exactly. If they think we're going to\u2014\"\n\nDay suddenly speaks up, his face turned toward Anden. \"Let's stop dragging our feet,\" he says. \"Tell me why I'm here.\" He's not loud, but the ominous tone of his voice hushes the conversation in the room. Anden returns his look with an equally grave one. He takes a deep breath.\n\n\"Day, I believe this is the result of one of my father's bioweapons\u2014and that the virus came from your brother Eden's blood.\"\n\nDay's eyes narrow. \"And?\"\n\nAnden seems reluctant to continue. \"There's more than one reason why I didn't want all my Senators in here with us.\" He leans forward, lowers his voice, and gives Day a humbled look. \"I don't want to hear anyone else right now. I want to hear you. You are the heart of the people, Day\u2014you always have been. You've given everything you have in order to protect them.\" Day stiffens beside me, but Anden goes on. \"I fear for the people. I worry about their safety, that we'll be handing them over to the enemy just as we're starting to put the pieces together.\" He grows quieter. \"I need to make some difficult decisions.\"\n\nDay raises an eyebrow. \"What kind of decisions?\"\n\n\"The Colonies are desperate for a cure. They will destroy us to get it, everything both you and I care about. The only chance we have of finding one is to take Eden into temporary\u2014\"\n\nDay pushes his chair from the table and rises. \"No,\" he says. His voice is flat and icy, but I remember my old, heated argument with Day well enough to recognize the deep fury beneath his calmness. Without another word, he turns from the group and walks away.\n\nSerge starts to get up, no doubt to shout at Day about his rudeness, but Anden shoots him a warning stare and motions for him to sit. Then Anden turns to me with a look that says, Talk to him. Please.\n\nI watch Day's retreating figure. He has every right to refuse, every right to hate us for asking this of him. But I still find myself rising from my own chair, stepping away from the banquet table, and hurrying in his direction.\n\n\"Day, wait,\" I call out. My words send me a painful reminder of the last time we'd been in the same room together, when we had said our good-byes.\n\nWe head into the smaller corridor that leads out to the main ballroom. Day doesn't turn around, but he seems to slow his steps down in an attempt to let me catch up. When I finally reach him, I take a deep breath. \"Look, I know\u2014\"\n\nDay presses a finger to his lips, silencing me, and then grabs my hand. His skin is warm through the fabric of his glove. The feel of his fingers around mine is such a shock after all these months that I can't remember the rest of my sentence\u2014everything about him, his touch, his closeness, feels right. \"Let's talk in private,\" he whispers.\n\nWe head inside one of the doors lining the corridor, then close it behind us and turn the lock. My eyes do a categorical sweep of the room (private dining chamber, no lights on, one round table and twelve chairs all covered in white cloths, and a single large, arched window at the back wall that lets in a stream of moonlight). Day's hair transforms in here to a silver sheet. He turns his gaze back to me now.\n\nIs it my imagination, or does he look as flustered as I am about our brief handhold? I feel the sudden tightness of the dress's waist, the air hitting my exposed shoulders and collarbone, the heaviness of the fabric and the jewels in my hair. Day's eyes linger on the ruby necklace sitting at the small of my throat. His parting gift to me. His cheeks turn a little pink in the darkness. \"So,\" he says, \"is this seriously why I'm here?\"\n\nDespite the anger in his voice, his directness is like a cool, sweet breeze after all these months of calculated political talk. I want to breathe it in. \"The Colonies refuse to accept any other terms,\" I reply. \"They're convinced that we have a cure for the virus, and the only one who might carry the cure is Eden. The Republic's already running tests on other former... experiments... to see whether they can find anything.\"\n\nDay cringes, then folds his arms in front of his chest and regards me with a scowl. \"Already running tests,\" he mutters to himself, looking off toward the moonlit windows. \"Sorry I can't be more enthusiastic about this idea,\" he adds dryly.\n\nI close my eyes for a moment. \"We don't have much time,\" I admit. \"Every day we don't hand over a cure further angers the Colonies.\"\n\n\"And what happens if we don't give them anything?\"\n\n\"You know what happens. War.\"\n\nA note of fear appears in Day's eyes, but he still shrugs. \"The Republic and the Colonies have been at war forever. How will this be any different?\"\n\n\"This time they'll win,\" I whisper. \"They have a strong ally. They know we're vulnerable during our transition to a young new Elector. If we can't hand over this cure, we don't stand a chance.\" I narrow my eyes. \"Don't you remember what we saw when we went to the Colonies?\"\n\nDay pauses for a heartbeat. Even though he doesn't say it aloud, I can see the conflict written clearly on his face. Finally, he sighs and tightens his lips in anger. \"You think I'm going to let the Republic take Eden again? If the Elector believes that, then I really did make a mistake throwing my support behind him. I didn't help him out just to watch him toss Eden back into a lab.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I say. No use trying to convince him of how much Anden also hates the situation. \"He shouldn't have asked you like this.\"\n\n\"He put you up to this, didn't he? I bet you resisted too, yeah? You know how this sounds.\" His tone turns more exasperated. \"You knew what my answer would be. Why'd you still send for me?\"\n\nI look into his eyes and say the first thing that comes to mind. \"Because I wanted to see you. Isn't that why you agreed too?\"\n\nThis makes him pause for a moment. Then he whirls around, rakes both hands through his hair, and sighs. \"What do you think, then? Tell me the truth. What would you ask me to do, if you felt absolutely no pressure from anyone else in this country?\"\n\nI tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. Steel yourself, June. \"I'd...,\" I begin, then hesitate. What would I say? Logically, I agree with Anden's assessment. If the Colonies do what they threaten, if they attack us with the full force of a superpower's help, then many innocent lives will be lost unless we take a risk with one life. There is simply no easier choice. Besides, we could ensure that Eden would be treated as well as possible, with the best doctors and the most physical comfort. Day could be present during all of the potential procedures\u2014he could see exactly what was happening. But how do I explain that to a boy who has already lost his entire family, who saw his brother experimented on before, who has been experimented on himself? This is the part that Anden doesn't understand as well as I do, even though he knows Day's past on paper\u2014he still doesn't know Day, hasn't traveled with him and witnessed the suffering he's gone through. The question is too complicated to be answered with simple logic.\n\nMost importantly\u2014 Anden's unable to guarantee his brother's safety. Everything will come with a risk, and I know with dead certainty that nothing in the world could possibly make Day take this risk.\n\nDay must see the frustration dancing across my face, because he softens and steps closer. I can practically feel the heat coming off him, the warmth of his nearness that turns my breath shallow. \"I came here tonight for you,\" he says in a low voice. \"There's nothing in the world they could've said to convince me, except that you wanted me here. And I can't turn down a request from you. They told me you had personally...\" He swallows. There's a familiar war of emotions in his expression that leaves me with a sick feeling\u2014emotions that I know are desire, for what we once had, and anguish, for desiring a girl who destroyed his family. \"It's so good to see you, June.\"\n\nHe says it like he's letting go of a huge burden that's been holding him down. I wonder whether he can hear my heart pounding frantically against my ribs. When I speak, though, I manage to keep my voice steady and calm. \"Are you okay?\" I ask. \"You look pale.\"\n\nThe weight returns to his eyes, and his brief moment of intimacy fades as he steps away and fiddles with the edge of his gloves. He's always hated gloves, I remember. \"I've had a bad flu for the last couple of weeks,\" he replies, flashing me a quick grin. \"Getting better now, though.\" (Eyes flickering subtly to the side, scratching the edge of his ear, stiffness of his limbs, timing slightly off between his words and his smile.) I tilt my head at him and frown.\n\n\"You're such a bad liar, Day,\" I say. \"You might as well tell me what's on your mind.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to tell,\" he replies automatically. This time he points his eyes at the floor and puts his hands in his pockets. \"If I seem off, it's because I'm worried about Eden. He's gotten a year of treatment for his eyes and he still can't see much. The doctors tell me that he may need some special contacts, and even then, he might never get his full eyesight back.\"\n\nI can tell this isn't the real reason behind Day's exhausted appearance, but he knows that bringing Eden's recovery into this conversation will stop any questions from me. Well, if he really doesn't want to tell me, then I won't pressure him. I clear my throat awkwardly. \"That's terrible,\" I whisper. \"I'm so sorry to hear it. Is he doing okay, otherwise?\"\n\nDay nods. We fall back into our moonlit silence. I can't help recalling the last time we were alone in a room together, when he took my face in his hands, when his tears were falling against my cheeks. I remember the way he whispered I'm sorry against my lips. Now, as we stand three feet apart and stare at each other, I feel the full distance that comes with spending so much time apart, a moment filled with the electricity of a first meeting and the uncertainty of strangers.\n\nDay leans toward me, as if drawn by some invisible force. The tragic plea on his face twists my stomach into painful knots. Please don't ask this of me, his eyes beg. Please don't ask me to give up my brother. I would do anything else for you. Just not this. \"June, I...,\" he whispers. His voice threatens to break with all the heartache he's keeping bottled inside.\n\nHe never finishes that sentence. Instead, he sighs and bows his head. \"I can't agree to your Elector's terms,\" he says in a somber tone. \"I'm not going to hand my brother to the Republic as another experiment. Tell him I'll work with him to find another solution. I understand how serious this all is\u2014I don't want to see the Republic fall. I'd be glad to help and figure something else out. But Eden stays out of this.\"\n\nAnd that's the end of our conversation. Day nods at me in farewell, lingers for a few last seconds, and then steps toward the door. I lean against the wall in sudden exhaustion. Without him nearby, there's a lack of energy, a dulling of color, gray moonlight where moments earlier there had been silver. I study his paleness a final time, analyzing him from the corner of my eye. He avoids my gaze. Something is wrong, and he refuses to tell me what it is.\n\nWhat am I missing here?\n\nHe pulls the door open. His expression hardens right before he steps out of the room. \"And if for some reason the Republic tries to take Eden by force, I'll turn the people against Anden so fast that a revolution will be on him before he can blink.\"\n\nSERIOUSLY, I SHOULD BE USED TO MY NIGHTMARES BY NOW.\n\nThis time I dream about me and Eden at a San Francisco hospital. A doctor's fitting Eden with a new pair of glasses. We end up at a hospital at least once a week, so that they can monitor how Eden's eyes are slowly adjusting to medication, but this is the first time I see the doctor smile encouragingly at my brother. Must be a good sign, yeah?\n\nEden turns to me, grins, and puffs his chest out in an exaggerated gesture. I have to laugh. \"How does it look?\" he asks me, fiddling with his huge new frames. His eyes still have that weird, pale purple color, and he can't focus on me, but I notice that he can now make out things like the walls around him and the light coming in from the windows. My heart jumps at the sight. Progress.\n\n\"You look like an eleven-year-old owl,\" I reply, walking over to ruffle his hair. He giggles and bats my hand away.\n\nAs we sit together in the office, waiting for paperwork, I watch Eden busily folding pieces of paper together into some kind of elaborate design. He has to hunch close to the papers to see what he's doing, his broken eyes almost crossed with concentration, his fingers nimble and deliberate. I swear, this kid's always making something or other.\n\n\"What is it?\" I ask him after a while.\n\nHe's concentrating too hard to answer me right away. Finally, when he tucks one last paper triangle into the design, he holds it up and gives me that cheeky grin. \"Here,\" he says, pointing to what looks like a paper leaf sticking out of the ball of paper. \"Pull this.\"\n\nI do as he says. To my amazement, the design transforms into an elaborate 3-D paper rose. I smile back at him in my dream. \"Pretty impressive.\"\n\nEden takes his paper design back.\n\nIn that instant, an alarm blares throughout the hospital. Eden drops the paper flower and jumps to his feet. His blind eyes are wide open in terror. I glance to the hospital's windows, where doctors and nurses have gathered. Out along the horizon of San Francisco, a row of Colonies Airships sail closer and closer to us. The city below them burns from a dozen fires.\n\nThe alarm deafens me. I grab Eden's hand and rush us out of the room. \"We have to get out of here,\" I shout. When he stumbles, unable to see where we're going, I hoist him onto my back. People rush all around us.\n\nI reach the stairwell\u2014and there, a line of Republic soldiers stops us. One of them pulls Eden off my back. He screams, kicking out at people he can't see. I struggle to free myself from the soldiers, but their grip is ironclad, and my limbs feel like they're sinking into deep mud. We need him, some unrecognizable voice whispers into my ear. He can save us all.\n\nI scream out loud, but no one can hear me. Off in the distance, the Colonies Airships aim at the hospital. Glass shatters all around us. I feel the heat of fire. On the floor lies Eden's paper flower, its edges crisping from flames. I can no longer see my brother.\n\nHe's gone. He's dead.\n\nA pounding headache pulls me from my sleep. The soldiers vanish\u2014the alarm silences\u2014the chaos of the hospital disappears into the dark blue hue of our bedroom. I try to take a deep breath and look around for Eden, but the headache stabs into the back of my skull like an ice pick, and I bolt upright with a gasp of pain. Now I remember where I really am. I'm in a temporary apartment back in Denver, the morning after seeing June. On the bedroom dresser sits my usual transmission box, the station still tuned to one of the airwaves I thought the Patriots might've been using.\n\n\"Daniel?\" In the bed next to mine, Eden stirs. Relief hits me, even in the midst of my agony. Just a nightmare. Like always. Just a nightmare. \"Are you okay?\" It takes me a second to realize that dawn hasn't quite arrived\u2014the room still looks dark, and all I can see is my brother's silhouette against the bluish black of the night.\n\nI don't answer right away. Instead, I swing my legs over the side of the bed to face him and clutch my head in both hands. Another jolt of pain hits the base of my brain. \"Get my medicine,\" I mutter to Eden.\n\n\"Should I get Lucy?\"\n\n\"No. Don't wake her,\" I reply. Lucy's already had two sleepless nights because of me. \"Medicine.\"\n\nThe pain makes me ruder than usual, but Eden jumps out of bed before I can apologize. He immediately starts fumbling for the bottle of green pills that always sits on the dresser between our beds. He grabs it and holds out the bottle in my general direction.\n\n\"Thanks.\" I take it from him, pour three pills into my palm with a shaking hand, and try to swallow them. Throat's too dry. I push myself up from the bed and stagger toward the kitchen. Behind me, Eden utters another \"Are you sure you're okay?\" but the pain in my head is so strong that I can hardly hear him. I can hardly even see.\n\nI reach the kitchen sink and turn the faucet on, cup some water into my hands, and drink it down with the medicine. Then I slide down to the floor in the darkness, resting my back against the cold metal of the refrigerator door.\n\nIt's okay, I console myself. My headaches had worsened over the past year, but the doctors assured me that these attacks should last no longer than a half hour each time. Of course, they also told me that if any of them felt unusually severe, I should be rushed to the emergency room right away. So every time I get one, I wonder if I'm experiencing a typical day\u2014or the last day of my life.\n\nA few minutes later, Eden stumbles into the kitchen with his walking meter on, the device beeping whenever he gets too close to a wall. \"Maybe we should ask Lucy to call the doctors,\" he whispers.\n\nI don't know why, but the sight of Eden feeling his way through the kitchen sends me into a fit of low, uncontrollable laughter. \"Man, look at us,\" I reply. My laughter turns into coughs. \"What a team, yeah?\"\n\nEden finds me by placing a tentative hand on my head. He sits beside me with his legs crossed and gives me a wry grin. \"Hey\u2014with your metal leg and half a brain, and my four leftover senses, we almost make a whole person.\"\n\nI laugh harder, but it makes the pain of my headache that much worse. \"When did you turn so sarcastic, little boy?\" I give him an affectionate shove.\n\nWe stay hunched in silence for the next hour as the headache goes on and on. I'm now writhing in pain. Sweat soaks my white collar shirt and tears streak my face. Eden sits next to me and grips my hand in his small ones. \"Try not to think about it,\" he urges under his breath, squinting at me with his pale purple eyes. He pushes his black-rimmed glasses farther up his nose. Bits and pieces of my nightmare come back to me, images of his hand getting yanked out of mine. Sounds of his screams. I squeeze his hand so tightly that he winces. \"Don't forget to breathe. The doctor always says taking deep breaths is supposed to help, right? Breathe in, breathe out.\"\n\nI close my eyes and try to follow my little brother's commands, but it's hard to hear him at all through the pounding of my headache. The pain is excruciating, all-consuming, a white-hot knife stabbing repeatedly into the back of my brain. Breathe in, breathe out. Here's the pattern\u2014first there's a dull, numbing ache, followed shortly by the absolute worst pain you can ever imagine going into your head, a spear shoved through your skull, and the impact of it is so hard that your entire body goes stiff; it lasts for a solid three seconds, followed by a split second of relief. And then it repeats itself all over again.\n\n\"How long has it been?\" I gasp out to Eden. Dim blue light is slowly filtering in from the windows.\n\nEden pulls out a tiny square com and presses its lone knob. \"Time?\" he asks it. The device immediately responds, \"Zero five thirty.\" He puts it away, a concerned frown on his face. \"It's been almost an hour. Has it gone on this long before?\"\n\nI'm dying. I really am dying. It's times like this when I'm glad that I don't see much of June anymore. The thought of her seeing me sweating and dirty on my kitchen floor, clutching my baby brother's hand for dear life like some weepy weakling, while she's breathtaking in her scarlet gown and jewel-studded hair... You know, for that matter, in this moment I'm even relieved that Mom and John can't see me.\n\nWhen I moan from another excruciating stab of pain, Eden pulls out his com again and presses the knob. \"That's it. I'm calling the doctors.\" When the com beeps, prompting him for his command, he says, \"Day needs an ambulance.\" Then, before I can protest, he raises his voice and calls out for Lucy.\n\nSeconds later, I hear Lucy approach. She doesn't turn the light on\u2014she knows that it only makes my headaches that much worse. Instead, I see her stout silhouette in the darkness and hear her exclaim, \"Day! How long have you been out here?\" She rushes over to me and puts one plump hand against my cheek. Then she glances at Eden and touches his chin. \"Did you call for the doctors?\"\n\nEden nods. Lucy inspects my face again, then clucks her tongue in worried disapproval and bustles off to grab a cool towel.\n\nThe last place I want to be right now is lying in a Republic hospital\u2014but Eden's already placed the call, and I'd rather not be dead anyway. My vision has started to blur, and I realize it's because I can't stop my eyes from watering nonstop. I wipe a hand across my face and smile weakly at Eden. \"Damn, I'm dripping water like a leaky faucet.\"\n\nEden tries to smile back. \"Yeah, you've had better days,\" he replies.\n\n\"Hey, kid. Remember that time when John asked you to be in charge of watering the plants outside our door?\"\n\nEden frowns for a second, digging through his memories, and then a grin lights up his face. \"I did a pretty good job, didn't I?\"\n\n\"You built that little makeshift catapult in front of our door.\" I close my eyes and indulge in the memory, a temporary distraction from all the pain. \"Yeah, I remember that thing. You kept lobbing water balloons at those poor flowers. Did they even have any petals left after you were done? Oh man, John was so pissed.\" He was even madder because Eden was only four at the time and, well, how do you punish your wide-eyed baby brother?\n\nEden giggles. I wince as another wave of agony hits me.\n\n\"What was it that Mom used to say about us?\" he asks. Now I can tell that he's trying to keep my mind on other things too.\n\nI manage a smile. \"Mom used to say that having three boys was kind of like having a pet tornado that talked back.\" The two of us laugh for a moment, at least before I squint my eyes shut again.\n\nLucy comes back with the towel. She places it against my forehead, and I sigh in relief at its cool surface. She checks my pulse, then my temperature.\n\n\"Daniel,\" Eden pipes up while she works. He scoots closer, his eyes still staring blankly off at a spot to the right of my head. \"Hang in there, okay?\"\n\nLucy shoots him a critical frown at what his tone implies. \"Eden,\" she scolds. \"More optimism in this house, please.\"\n\nA lump rises in my throat, turning my breath shallower. John's gone, Mom's gone, Dad's gone. I watch Eden with a heavy ache in my chest. I used to hope that since he was the youngest of us boys, he might be able to learn from John's and my mistakes and be the luckiest out of us, maybe make it into a college or earn a good living as a mechanic, that we'd be around to guide him through the difficult times in life. What would happen to him if I were gone too? What happens if he has to stand alone against the Republic?\n\n\"Eden,\" I suddenly whisper to him, pulling him close. His eyes widen at my urgent tone. \"Listen close, yeah? If the Republic ever asks you to go with them, if I'm ever not home or I'm in the hospital and they come knocking on our door, don't ever go with them. You understand me? You call me first, you scream for Lucy, you...\" I hesitate. \"You call for June Iparis.\"\n\n\"Your Princeps-Elect?\"\n\n\"She's not my\u2014\" I grimace at another wave of pain. \"Just do it. Call her. Tell her to stop them.\"\n\n\"I don't understand\u2014\"\n\n\"Promise me. Don't go with them, whatever you do. Okay?\" My answer's cut short when a jolt of pain hits me hard enough to send me collapsing to the ground, curled up into a tight ball. I choke out a shriek\u2014my head feels like it's being split in two. I even put a trembling hand to the back of my head as if to make sure my brain's not leaking out onto the floor. Somewhere above me, Eden is shouting. Lucy places another call to the doctor, this time frantic.\n\n\"Just hurry!\" she yells. \"Hurry!\"\n\nBy the time the medics arrive, I'm fading in and out of consciousness. Through a cloud of haze and fog, I feel myself getting lifted off the kitchen floor and carried out of the apartment tower, then into a waiting ambulance that has been disguised to look like a regular police jeep. Is it snowing? A few light flakes drift onto my face, shocking me with pinpricks of coldness. I call out for Eden and Lucy\u2014they respond from somewhere I can't see.\n\nThen we're in the ambulance and pulling away.\n\nAll I see for a long time are blobs of color, fuzzy circles moving back and forth across my vision, like I'm peering through thick, bumpy glass. I try to recognize some of them. Are they people? I sure as hell hope so\u2014otherwise I really must have died, or maybe I'm floating in the ocean and debris is just drifting all around me. That doesn't make any sense, though, unless the doctors just decided to toss me right into the Pacific and forget about me. Where's Eden? They must've taken him away. Just like in the nightmare. They've dragged him off to the labs.\n\nI can't breathe.\n\nMy hands try to fly up to my throat, but then someone shouts something and I feel weight against my arms, pinning me down. Something cold is going down my throat, choking me.\n\n\"Calm down! You're okay. Try to swallow.\"\n\nI do as the voice says. Swallowing turns out to be more difficult than I thought, but I finally manage a gulp, and whatever the cold thing is slides right down my throat and into my stomach, chilling me to my core.\n\n\"There,\" the voice goes on, less agitated now. \"Should help with any future headaches, I think.\" He doesn't seem to be talking to me anymore\u2014and a second later, another voice chimes in.\n\n\"Seems to be working a little, Doctor.\"\n\nI must've passed out again after that, because the next time I wake up, the pattern on the ceiling's different and late afternoon light is slanting into my room. I blink and look around. The excruciating pain in my head is gone, at least for now. I can also see clearly enough to know I'm in a hospital room, the ever-present portrait of Anden on one wall and a screen against another wall, broadcasting news. I groan, then close my eyes and let out a sigh. Stupid hospitals. So sick of them.\n\n\"Patient is awake.\" I turn to see a monitor near my bedside that recites the phrase. A second later, a real human's voice pops up over its speakers. \"Mister Wing?\" it says.\n\n\"Yeah?\" I mutter back.\n\n\"Excellent,\" the voice replies. \"Your brother will be in shortly to see you.\"\n\nNo sooner than her voice clicks off, my door bursts open and Eden comes running in with two exasperated nurses hot on his tail. \"Daniel,\" he gasps out, \"you're finally awake! Sure took you long enough.\" His lack of sight catches up with him\u2014he stumbles against the edge of a drawer before I can warn him, and the nurses have to catch him in their arms to keep him from falling to the floor.\n\n\"Easy there, kid,\" I call out. My voice sounds tired, even though I feel alert and pain-free. \"How long was I out? Where is...?\" I pause, confused for a moment. That's weird. What was our caretaker's name again? I grasp for it in my thoughts. Lucy. \"Where's Lucy?\" I finish.\n\nHe doesn't answer right away. When the nurses finally situate Eden beside me in bed, he crawls closer to me and flings his arms around my neck. To my shock, I realize that he's crying. \"Hey.\" I pat his head. \"Calm down\u2014it's okay. I'm awake.\"\n\n\"I thought you weren't going to make it,\" he murmurs. His pale eyes search for mine. \"I thought you were gone.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not. I'm right here.\" I let him sob for a little while, his head buried against my chest, his tears blurring his glasses and staining my hospital gown. There's a coping mechanism I've started using recently where I pretend to retreat back into the shell of my heart and crawl out of my body, like I'm not really here and am instead observing the world from another person's perspective. Eden's not my brother. He's not even real. Nothing is real. Everything is illusion. It helps. I wait without emotion as Eden gradually composes himself, and then I carefully let myself back into my body.\n\nFinally, when he's wiped away the last of his tears, he sits up and burrows in beside me. \"Lucy's filling out paperwork up front.\" His voice still sounds a little shaky. \"You've been out for about ten hours. They said they had to rush you out of our building through the main entrance\u2014there just wasn't any time to try sneaking you out.\"\n\n\"Did anyone see?\"\n\nEden rubs his temples in an attempt to remember. \"Maybe. I don't know. I can't remember\u2014I was too distracted. I spent all morning out in the waiting room because they wouldn't let me inside.\"\n\n\"Do you know...\" I swallow. \"Have you heard anything from the doctors?\"\n\nEden sighs in relief. \"Not really. But at least you're okay now. The doctors said you had a bad reaction to the medicine they put you on. They're taking you off it and trying something different.\"\n\nThe way Eden says this makes my heart beat faster. He doesn't fully grasp the reality of the situation\u2014he still thinks that the only reason I'd collapsed like that wasn't because I'm getting worse, but because I just had a bad reaction. A sick, sinking feeling hits my stomach. Of course he'd be optimistic about it all; of course he thinks this is just a temporary setback. I'd been on that damn medication for the last two months after the first two rounds also stopped working, and with all the extra headaches and nightmares and nausea, I'd hoped that the pills had at least done some good, that they were successfully shrinking the problem spot in my hippocampus\u2014their fancy word for the bottom of my brain. Apparently not. What if nothing works?\n\nI take a deep breath and put on a smile for my brother. \"Well, at least they know now. Maybe they'll try something better this time.\"\n\nEden smiles along, sweet and na\u00efve. \"Yeah.\"\n\nSeveral minutes later, my doctor comes in and Eden moves back outside to the waiting room. As the doctor talks in a low voice to me about \"our next options,\" what treatments they'll try to experiment with next, he also quietly tells me how small of a chance they have. Like I feared, my reaction wasn't just some temporary medicine issue. \"The medication is slowly shrinking the affected area,\" the doctor says, but his expression stays grim. \"Still, the area continues to fester, and your body has begun to reject the old medication, forcing us to search for new ones. We are quite simply racing against the clock, Day, trying to shrink it enough and pull it out before it can do its worst.\" I listen to it all with a straight face; his voice sounds like it's underwater, unimportant and out of focus.\n\nFinally, I stop him and say, \"Look, just tell me straight up. How much longer do I have? If nothing works out?\"\n\nThe doctor purses his lips, hesitates, and then shakes his head with a sigh. \"Probably a month,\" he admits. \"Maybe two. We're doing the best we can.\"\n\nA month or two. Well, they've been wrong in the past\u2014a month or two probably means more like four or five. Still. I look toward the door, where Eden's probably pressed against the wood and trying in vain to hear what we're saying. Then I turn back to the doctor and swallow the lump in my throat. \"Two months,\" I echo. \"Is there any chance?\"\n\n\"We might try some riskier treatments, although those have side effects that may be fatal if you react badly to them. A surgery before you're ready will likely kill you.\" The doctor crosses his arms. His glasses catch the cold fluorescent light and shine in a way that blocks out his eyes entirely. He looks like a machine. \"I would suggest, Day, that you begin getting your priorities in order.\"\n\n\"My priorities in order?\"\n\n\"Prepare your brother for the news,\" he replies. \"And settle any unfinished business.\"\n\nAT 0810 HOURS ON THE MORNING AFTER THE EMERGENCY banquet, Anden calls me. \"It's Captain Bryant,\" he says. \"He has put in his last request, and his last request is to see you.\"\n\nI sit at the edge of my bed, blinking away a night of fitful sleep, trying to work up the energy to understand what Anden is telling me.\n\n\"Tomorrow we transfer him to a prison on the other side of Denver to prepare for his final day. He's asked if he can see you before then.\"\n\n\"What does he want?\"\n\n\"Whatever he has to say, he wants it heard by your ears alone,\" Anden replies. \"Remember, June\u2014you have the option to refuse him. We don't have to grant this last request.\"\n\nTomorrow, Thomas will be dead. I wonder whether Anden feels any guilt over sentencing a soldier to die. The thought of facing Thomas alone in a jail cell sends a wave of panic through me, but I steel myself. Maybe Thomas has something to say about my brother. Do I want to hear it?\n\n\"I'll see him,\" I finally reply. \"And hopefully this is the last time.\"\n\nAnden must hear something in my voice, because his words soften. \"Of course. I'll arrange for your escort.\"\n\n0930 HOURS.\n\nDENVER STATE PENITENTIARY.\n\nThe hall where Thomas and Commander Jameson are being held is lit with cold, fluorescent light, and the sound of my boots echoes against the high ceiling. Several soldiers flank me, but aside from us, the hall feels empty and ominous. Portraits of Anden hang at sporadic intervals along the walls. My eyes stay focused on each of the cells we pass, studying them, details running through my mind in an effort to keep myself calm and focused. (32 \u00d7 32 feet in size, smooth steel walls, bulletproof glass, cams mounted outside of the cells instead of inside. Most of them are empty, and the ones that are filled hold three of the Senators who had plotted against Anden. This floor is reserved for prisoners associated specifically with Anden's attempted assassination.)\n\n\"If you experience any trouble at all,\" one of the soldiers says to me, tapping his cap in a polite bow, \"just call us in. We'll have that traitor down on the ground before he can make a move.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I reply, my eyes still fixed on the cells as we draw closer. I know I won't need to do what he just said, because I know Thomas won't ever disobey the Elector and try to hurt me. Thomas is many things, but he isn't rebellious.\n\nWe reach the end of the hall where two adjacent cells sit, each one guarded by two soldiers.\n\nSomeone stirs in the cell closest to me. I turn toward the movement. I don't even have time to study the cell's interior before a woman raps her fingers against the steel bars. I jump, then swallow the cry that rises up in my throat as I stare into the face of Commander Jameson.\n\nAs she fixes her eyes on mine, she gives me a smile that makes me break out in a cold sweat. I remember this smile\u2014she'd smiled like this on the night Metias died, when she approved me to become a junior agent in her patrol. There is no emotion there, nothing compassionate or even angry. Few things frighten me\u2014but facing the cold, merciless expression of my brother's true killer is one of them.\n\n\"Well,\" she says in a low voice. \"If it isn't Iparis, come here to see us.\" Her eyes flicker to me; the soldiers gather closer to me in a protective gesture. Don't be afraid. I straighten as well as I can, then clench my jaw and force myself to face her without flinching.\n\n\"You're wasting my time, Commander,\" I say. \"I'm not here for you. And the next time I see you will be the day you stand before the firing squad.\"\n\nShe just smiles at me. \"So brave, now that you have your handsome young Elector to hide behind. Isn't that so?\" When I narrow my eyes, she laughs. \"Commander DeSoto would've been a better Elector than that boy could ever be. When the Colonies invade, they'll burn this country to the ground. The people will regret ever putting their support behind a little boy.\" She presses against the bars, as if trying to edge as close to me as possible. I swallow hard, but even through my fear, my anger boils under the surface. I don't look away. It's strange, but I think I see a sheen of gloss across her eyes, something that looks disconcerting above her unstable smile. \"You were one of my favorites. Do you know why I was so interested in having you on my patrol? It's because I saw myself reflected in you. We're the same, you and I. I would've been Princeps, too, you know. I deserved it.\"\n\nGoose bumps rise on my arms. A memory flashes through my mind of the night Metias died, when Commander Jameson escorted me to where his body lay. \"Too bad that didn't work out, isn't it?\" I snap. This time I can't keep the venom out of my words. I hope they execute you as unceremoniously as they did Razor.\n\nCommander Jameson only laughs at me. Her eyes dilate. \"Better be careful, Iparis,\" she whispers. \"You might turn out just like me.\"\n\nThe words chill me to the bone, and I finally have to turn away and break my stare away from hers. The soldiers guarding her cell don't look at me; they just keep staring forward. I continue walking. Behind me, I can still hear her soft, low chuckle. My heart pounds against my ribs.\n\nThomas is being held inside a rectangular cell with thick glass walls, thick enough that I can't hear anything of what's happening inside. I wait outside, steadying myself after my encounter with Commander Jameson. For an instant I wonder whether I should have stayed away and turned down his final request; maybe that would have been for the best.\n\nStill, if I leave now, I'll have to face Commander Jameson again. I might need a little more time to prepare myself for that. So I take a deep breath and step toward the steel bars lining Thomas's cell door. A guard opens it, lets two additional guards in after me, and then closes it behind us. Our footsteps echo in the small, empty chamber.\n\nThomas gets up with a clank of his chains. He looks more disheveled than I've ever seen him, and I know that if his hands were completely free, he'd go about ironing his rumpled uniform and combing his unruly hair right away. But instead, Thomas clicks his heels together. Not until I tell him to relax his stance does he look at me.\n\n\"It's good to see you, Princeps-Elect,\" he says. Is there a hint of sadness in his serious, stern face? \"Thank you for indulging my final request. It won't be long now before you're rid of me entirely.\"\n\nI shake my head, angry with myself, irritated that in spite of everything he has done, Thomas's unshakable loyalty to the Republic still stirs a drop of sympathy from me. \"Sit down and make yourself comfortable,\" I tell him. He doesn't hesitate for a second\u2014in a uniform motion, we both kneel down onto the cold cell floor, him leaning against the cell wall, me folding my legs underneath me. We stay like that for a moment, letting the awkward silence between us linger.\n\nI speak up first. \"You don't need to be so loyal to the Republic anymore,\" I reply. \"You can let go, you know.\"\n\nThomas only shakes his head. \"It's the duty of a Republic soldier to be loyal to the end, and I'm still a soldier. I will be one until I die.\"\n\nI don't know why the thought of him dying tugs on my heartstrings in so many strange ways. I'm happy, relieved, angry, sad. \"Why did you want to see me?\" I finally ask.\n\n\"Ms. Iparis, before tomorrow comes...\" Thomas trails off for a second before continuing. \"I want to tell you the full details of everything that happened to Metias that night at the hospital. I just feel... I feel like I owe it to you. If anyone should know, it's you.\"\n\nMy heart begins to pound. Am I ready to relive all of that again\u2014do I need to know this? Metias is gone; knowing the details of what happened will not bring him back. But I find myself meeting Thomas's gaze with a calm, level look. He does owe it to me. More importantly, I owe it to my brother. After Thomas is executed, someone should carry on the memory of my brother's death, of what really happened.\n\nSlowly, I steady my heartbeat. When I open my mouth, my voice cracks a little. \"Fine,\" I reply.\n\nHis voice grows quieter. \"I remember everything about that night. Every last detail.\"\n\n\"Tell me, then.\"\n\nLike the obedient soldier he is, Thomas begins his story. \"On the night of your brother's death, I took a call from Commander Jameson. We were waiting with the jeeps outside the hospital's entrance. Metias was chatting with a nurse in front of the main sliding doors. I stood behind the jeeps some distance away. Then the call came.\"\n\nAs Thomas speaks, the prison around us melts away and is replaced by the scene of that fateful night, the hospital and the military jeep and the soldiers, the streets as if I were walking right beside Thomas, seeing all that he saw. Reliving the events.\n\n\"I whispered a greeting to Commander Jameson over my earpiece,\" Thomas continues. \"She didn't bother greeting me back.\n\n\"'It has to be done tonight,' she told me. 'If we don't act now, your captain may plan an act of treason against the Republic, or even against the Elector. I'm giving you a direct order, Lieutenant Bryant. Find a way to get Captain Iparis to a private spot tonight. I don't care how you do it.'\"\n\nThomas looks me in the eye now and repeats, \"An act of treason against the Republic. I tightened my jaw. I'd been dreading this inevitable call, ever since I'd first learned about Metias's hacking into the deceased civilians' databases. Keeping secrets from Commander Jameson was damn near impossible. My eyes darted to your brother at the entrance. 'Yes, Commander,' I whispered.\n\n\"'Good,' she said. 'Tell me when you're ready\u2014I'll send in separate orders to the rest of your patrol to be at a different location during that time. Make it quick and clean.'\n\n\"That's when my hand began to shake. I tried to argue with the Commander, but her voice only turned colder. 'If you don't do it, I will. Believe me, I will be messier about it\u2014and no one's going to be happy that way. Understood?'\n\n\"I didn't answer her right away. Instead I watched your brother as he shook hands with the nurse. He turned around, searching for me, and then spotted me by the jeeps. He waved me over, and I nodded, careful to keep my face blank. 'Understood, Commander,' I finally answered.\n\n\"'You can do it, Bryant,' she told me. 'And if you're successful, consider yourself promoted to captain.' The call cut off.\n\n\"I joined Metias and another soldier at the hospital entrance. Metias smiled at me. 'Another long night, eh? I swear, if we're stuck here until dawn again, I'll whine to Commander Jameson like there's no tomorrow.'\n\n\"I forced myself to laugh along. 'Let's hope for an uneventful night, then.' The lie felt so smooth.\n\n\"'Yes, let's hope for that,' Metias said. 'At least I have you for company.'\n\n\"'Likewise,' I told him. Metias glanced back at me, his eyes hovering for a beat, then looked away again.\n\n\"The first minutes passed without incident. But then, moments later, a ragged slum-sector boy dragged himself up to the entrance and stopped to talk to a nurse. He was a mess\u2014mud, dirt, and blood smeared across his cheeks, dirty dark hair pulled away from his face, and a nasty limp. 'Can I be admitted, cousin?' he asked the nurse. 'Is there still room tonight? I can pay.'\n\n\"The nurse just continued scribbling on her notepad. 'What happened?' she finally asked.\n\n\"'Was in a fight,' the boy replied. 'I think I got stabbed.'\n\n\"The nurse glanced over at your brother, and Metias nodded to two of his soldiers. They walked over to pat down the boy. After a while, they pocketed something and waved the boy inside. As he staggered past, I leaned closer to Metias and whispered, 'Don't like the look of that one. He doesn't walk like someone who's been stabbed, does he?'\n\n\"Your brother and the boy exchanged a brief look. When the boy had disappeared inside the hospital, he nodded at me. 'Agreed. Keep an eye on that one. After our rotation's done, I'd like to question him a bit.'\"\n\nThomas pauses here, searching my face, perhaps for permission to stop talking, but I don't give it.\n\nHe takes a deep breath and continues. \"I blushed then at his nearness. Your brother seemed to sense it too, and an awkward silence passed between us. I'd always known about his attraction to me, but tonight it seemed particularly naked. Maybe it had something to do with his weary day, your university antics throwing him off, his usual air of command subdued and tired. And underneath my calm exterior, my heart hammered against my ribs. Find a way to get Captain Iparis to a private spot tonight. I don't care how you do it. This vulnerability would be my only chance.\"\n\nThomas looks briefly down at his hands, but carries on.\n\n\"So, sometime later, I tapped Metias on the shoulder. 'Captain,' I murmured. 'Can I speak to you in private for a moment?'\n\n\"Metias blinked. He asked me, 'Is this urgent?'\n\n\"'No, sir,' I told him. 'Not quite. But... I'd rather you know.'\n\n\"Your brother stared at me, momentarily confused, searching for a clue. Then he motioned for a soldier to take his place at the entrance and the two of us headed into a quiet, dark street near the back of the hospital.\n\n\"Metias immediately dropped some of his formal pretense. 'Something wrong, Thomas? You don't look well.'\n\n\"All I could think was treason against the Republic. He would never do it. Would he? We'd grown up together, trained together, grown close.... Then I remembered my commander's orders. I felt the sheathed knife sitting heavily at my waist. 'I'm fine,' I told him.\n\n\"But your brother laughed. 'Come on. You've never needed to hide anything from me before. You know that, right?'\n\n\"Just say it, Thomas, I told myself. I knew I was teetering between the familiar and the point of no return. Force the words out. Let him hear it. Finally, I looked up and said, 'What is this between us?'\n\n\"Your brother's smile wavered. He grew very silent. Then he took a step back. 'What do you mean?'\n\n\"'You know what I mean,' I told him. 'This. All these years.'\n\n\"Now Metias was studying my face intently. Long seconds passed. ' This, ' he finally replied, emphasizing the word, 'can't happen. You're my subordinate.'\n\n\"Then I asked, 'But it means something to you, sir. Doesn't it?'\n\n\"Something joyful and tragic danced across Metias's face. He drew closer. I knew that a wall between us had finally formed a crack. 'Does it mean something to you?' he asked me.\"\n\nAgain, Thomas pauses. Then, in a softer voice, he says, \"A blade of guilt twisted painfully in my chest, but it was too late to turn back. So I took a step forward, closed my eyes, and\u2014I kissed him.\"\n\nAnother pause. \"Your brother froze, like I thought he would. There was complete stillness. We drew apart, the silence heavy around us, and for a moment I wondered whether I'd made a huge mistake, whether I'd simply misread every signal from the past few years. Or perhaps, perhaps he knew what I was up to. I felt a strange sense of relief at that thought. Maybe it'd be better if Metias figured out Commander Jameson's plans for him. Maybe there's a way to get out of this.\n\n\"But then he leaned forward and returned the kiss, and the last of that wall crumbled away.\"\n\n\"Stop,\" I suddenly say. Thomas falls silent. He tries to hide his emotions behind some semblance of nobility, but the shame is plain on his face. I lean back, turn my face away from him, and press my hands to my temples. Grief threatens to overwhelm me. Thomas hadn't just killed Metias knowing that my brother loved him.\n\nThomas had taken that knowledge and used it against him.\n\nI want you to die. I hate you. The tide of my anger grows stronger until finally I hear the whisper of Metias's voice in my head, the faint light of reason.\n\nIt's going to be okay, Junebug. Listen to me. Everything is going to be okay.\n\nI wait, my heart beating steadily, until his gentle words bring me back. My eyes open, and I give Thomas a level stare. \"What happened after that?\"\n\nIt takes Thomas a long moment before he speaks again. When he does, his voice trembles. \"There was no way out. Metias had no idea what was going on. He'd fallen into the plan with blind faith. My hand crept to the knife at my waist, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I couldn't even breathe.\"\n\nMy eyes fill with tears. I want so desperately to hear every detail and at the same time for Thomas to stop talking, to shut this night away and never return again.\n\n\"An alarm cut through the air. We jumped apart. Metias looked flushed and confused\u2014only a second later did we both realize that the alarm came from the hospital.\n\n\"The moment broke. Your brother snapped back into captain mode and ran toward the hospital entrance. 'Get inside,' he shouted over his earpiece. He didn't look back. 'I want half of you in there\u2014pinpoint the source. Gather the others at the entrance and wait for my command. Now!'\n\n\"I started running after him. My chance to strike had vanished. I wondered whether Commander Jameson had somehow been able to see my failure. The Republic's eyes are everywhere. They know everything. I panicked. I had to find another moment, another chance to get your brother alone. If I couldn't do it, then Metias's fate would fall into much harsher hands.\n\n\"By the time I caught up with him at the entrance, his face was dark with anger. 'Break-in,' he said. 'It was that boy we saw. I'm sure of it. Bryant, get five and circle east. I'll go the other way.' Already your brother was on the move, gathering his soldiers. 'He's going to have to get out of the hospital somehow,' he told us. 'We'll be waiting for him when he tries.'\n\n\"I did as Metias commanded\u2014but the instant he was out of earshot, I ordered my soldiers to head east and then snuck away into the shadows. I have to follow him. This is my last chance. If I fail, I'm as good as dead, anyway. Sweat trickled down my back. I melted into the shadows, reminding myself of all the lessons Metias had taught me about subtlety and stealth.\n\n\"Then from somewhere in the night I heard glass shatter. I hid behind a wall as your brother raced past, alone and unguarded, toward the source of the sound. Then I followed. The night's darkness swallowed me whole. For a moment, I lost Metias in the back alleys. Where is he? I whirled around in an alley, trying to figure out where your brother had gone.\n\n\"Just then, a call came through. Commander Jameson barked at me. 'You'd better find a second chance to take him down, Lieutenant. Soon.'\n\n\"Finally, minutes later, I found Metias. He was alone, struggling up from the ground with a knife buried in his shoulder, surrounded by blood and broken glass. A few feet from him lay a sewer cap. I rushed to his side. He smiled briefly at me, while clutching the knife in his shoulder.\n\n\"'It was Day,' he gasped. 'He escaped down the sewers.' Then he reached out to me. 'Here. Help me up.'\n\n\"This is your chance, I told myself. This is your only chance, and if you can't do it now, it will never happen.\"\n\nThomas's voice falters as I search for my own. I want to stop him again, but I can't. I'm numb.\n\nThomas lifts his head and says, \"I wish I could tell you all the images whirling through my mind\u2014Commander Jameson interrogating Metias, torturing information out of him, tearing off his nails, slicing him open until he screamed for mercy, killing him slowly in the way that she did to all prisoners of war.\" As he speaks, the words come faster, tumbling from his mouth in a frantic jumble. \"I pictured the Republic's flag, the Republic's seal, the oath I'd taken on the day Metias accepted me into a patrol. That I would forever remain faithful to my Republic and my Elector, until my dying day. My eyes darted to the knife buried in Metias's shoulder. Do it. Do it now, I told myself. I seized his collar, yanked the knife from his shoulder, and plunged it deep into his chest. Right up to the hilt.\"\n\nI hear myself gasp. As if I expected a different ending. As if once I hear it enough times, the story will change. It never does.\n\n\"Metias let out a broken shriek,\" Thomas whispers. \"Or perhaps it came from me\u2014I can't remember anymore. He collapsed back onto the ground, his hand still clutching my wrist. His eyes were wide with shock.\n\n\"'I'm sorry,' I choked out.\" Thomas looks at me as he continues, his apology meant for both me and my brother. \"I knelt over his trembling body. 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' I told him. 'I had no choice. You gave me no choice!'\"\n\nI can barely hear Thomas as he continues. \"A spark of understanding appeared in your brother's eyes. With it came hurt, something that went beyond his physical pain, a bleeding moment of realization. Then revulsion. Disappointment. 'Now I know why,' he whispered. I didn't have to ask to know that he was referring to our kiss.\n\n\"No! I meant it! I wanted to scream. It was a good-bye, the only one I could give. But I meant it. I promise.\n\n\"Instead I said, 'Why did you have to cross the Republic? I warned you, over and over again. Cross the Republic too many times, and eventually they'll burn you. I warned you! I told you to listen!'\n\n\"But your brother shook his head. It's something you'll never understand, his eyes seemed to say. Blood leaked from his mouth, and his grip tightened on my wrist. 'Don't hurt June,' he said. 'She doesn't know anything.' Then a fierce, terrified light appeared in his eyes. ' Don't hurt her. Promise me.'\n\n\"So I told him, 'I'll protect her. I don't know how, but I'll try. I promise.'\n\n\"The light gradually faded from his eyes, and his grip loosened. He stared at me until he couldn't stare anymore, and then I knew that he was gone. Move. Get out of here, I told myself. But I stayed crouched over Metias's body, my mind blank. His sudden absence hit me. Metias was gone, Metias was never coming back, and it was all my fault. No. Long live the Republic. That's what really mattered, I told myself, yes, yes, that was the important thing. This\u2014whatever this was between Metias and me\u2014wasn't real, could never have happened anyway. Not with Metias as my captain. Not with Metias as a criminal working against the country. It was for the best. Yes. It was.\n\n\"Eventually I heard shouts from approaching troops. I picked myself up. I wiped my eyes. I had to carry through now. I'd done it, I'd stayed faithful to the Republic. Some survival instinct kicked in. Everything seemed muted, like a fog had settled over my life. Good. I needed the strange calm, the absence of everything, that it brought. I folded my grief carefully back into my chest, as if nothing had happened, and when the first troops arrived on the scene, I placed a call to Commander Jameson.\n\n\"I didn't even need to say a word. My silence told her everything she needed to know. 'Fetch Little Iparis when you get a chance,' she said to me. 'And well done, Captain.'\n\n\"I didn't reply.\"\n\nThomas stays silent; the scene fades. I find myself back in his prison cell, my cheeks streaked with tears, my heart sliced open as if he had stabbed me in the chest as surely as he'd stabbed my brother.\n\nThomas stares at the floor between us with hollow eyes. \"I loved him, June,\" he says after a moment. \"I really did. Everything I did as a soldier, all my hard work and training, was to impress him.\" His guard is finally down, and I can see the true depth of his torture now. His voice hardens, as if he is trying to convince himself of what he's saying. \"I answer to the Republic\u2014Metias himself trained me to be what I am. Even he understood.\"\n\nI'm surprised by how much my heart is breaking for him. You could have helped Metias escape. You could have done something. Anything. You could have tried. But even now, Thomas doesn't budge. He will never change, and he will never, ever know who Metias really was.\n\nI finally realize the true reason he requested this meeting with me. He wanted to give a real confession. Just like during our conversation when he first arrested me, he is fishing desperately for my forgiveness, for something to justify\u2014in any small way\u2014what he did. He wants to believe what he did was warranted. He wants me to sympathize. He wants peace before he goes.\n\nBut he's wasted his efforts on me. I cannot give him peace, even on his final day. Some things cannot be forgiven.\n\n\"I feel sorry for you,\" I say quietly. \"Because you're so weak.\"\n\nThomas tightens his lips. Still searching for some bit of validation he says, \"I could've chosen Day's route. I could have become a criminal. But I didn't. I did everything right, you know. That was what Metias loved about me. He respected me. I followed all the rules, I obeyed all the laws, I worked my way up from where I started.\" He leans toward me; his eyes grow more desperate. \"I took an oath, June. I am still bound by that oath. I will die with honor for sacrificing everything I have\u2014 everything \u2014for my country. And yet, Day is the legend, while I am to be executed.\" His voice finally breaks with all his anguish and inner torment, the injustice he feels. \"It makes no sense.\"\n\nI stand up. Behind me, the guards move toward the cell door. \"You're wrong,\" I say sadly. \"It makes perfect sense.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because Day chose to walk in the light.\" I turn my back on him for the last time. The door opens; the cell's bars make way for the hall, a new rotation of prison guards, freedom. \"And so did Metias.\"\n\n1532 HOURS.\n\nThat afternoon, I head to Denver University's track with Ollie in an attempt to clear my thoughts. Outside, the sky looks yellow and hazy with the light of the afternoon sun. I try to picture the sky covered with the Colonies' Airships, ablaze with the fire from aerial dogfights and explosions. Twelve days before we need to offer something to the Colonies. Without Day's help, how are we ever going to do that? The thought troubles me, but thankfully it helps keep the memories of Thomas and Commander Jameson out of my head. I pick up my pace. My running shoes pound against the pavement.\n\nWhen I arrive at the track, I notice guards stationed at every entrance. At least four soldiers per gate. Anden must be doing his exercise routine somewhere out here too. The soldiers recognize me, let me through, and usher me into the stadium, where the track wraps around a large, open field. Anden's nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he's down in the stadium's underground lockers.\n\nI do a quick round of stretches while Ollie waits impatiently, dancing from paw to paw, and then I begin making my way down the track. I run faster and faster along the curved path until I'm sprinting around the turns, my hair streaming out behind me, Ollie panting at my side. I imagine Commander Jameson sprinting after me, gun in hand. Better be careful, Iparis. You might turn out just like me. When I loop around to the side of the track with targets set up, I skid to a halt, whip out the gun at my belt, and shoot at each of the targets in rapid succession. Four bull's-eyes. Without pause, I loop around the track again and repeat my routine three times. Ten times. Fifteen times. Finally I stop, my heart beating a frantic tune against my chest.\n\nI shift to a walk, slowly catching my breath, my thoughts whirling. If I had never met Day, could I have grown up to become Commander Jameson? Cold, calculating, merciless? Hadn't I turned into exactly that when I first figured out who Day was? Hadn't I led the soldiers\u2014led Commander Jameson herself \u2014to his family's door, without a second thought for whether or not his family might be harmed? I reset my gun, then aim at the targets again. My bullets thud into the centers of the boards.\n\nIf Metias were alive, what would he have thought of what I did?\n\nNo. I can't think about my brother without remembering Thomas's confession from this morning. I fire my last bullet, then sit down in the middle of the track with Ollie and bury my head in my hands. I'm so tired. I don't know if I can ever outrun how I used to be. And now I'm doing it all over again\u2014trying to persuade Day to give up his brother again, trying to use him to the Republic's advantage.\n\nFinally I pick myself up, wipe the sweat from my brow, and head to the underground lockers. Ollie settles down to wait for me under the cool overhang near the doors; he laps hungrily at a pouch of water I set before him. I head down the stairs, then turn the corner. The air is humid from the showers, and the lone screen embedded at the end of the hall has a light film of mist over it. I walk down the corridor that splits off into the men's and women's locker rooms. A few voices echo from farther down the hall.\n\nA second later, I see Anden emerge from the locker room with two guards walking alongside him. I blush in embarrassment at the sight. Anden looks like he just stepped out of the shower a few minutes ago, shirtless and still toweling off his damp hair, his lean muscles tense after his workout. He has a crisp collar shirt swung over one shoulder, the white of the fabric a startling contrast against the olive of his skin. One of the guards talks to him in hushed tones, and with a sinking feeling, I wonder whether it has something to do with the Colonies. A moment later, Anden glances up and finally notices me staring at them. The conversation pauses.\n\n\"Ms. Iparis,\" Anden says, a polite smile covering up whatever might have been bothering him. He clears his throat, hands his towel to one of the guards, and pulls one arm through the sleeve of his collar shirt. \"I apologize for my half-dressed state.\"\n\nI bow my head once, trying hard to look unfazed as all of their eyes fixate on me. \"No worries, Elector.\"\n\nHe nods at his guards. \"Go ahead. I'll meet you both at the stairs.\"\n\nThe guards bow in unison, then leave us alone. Anden waits until they've disappeared around the corner before turning back to me. \"I hope your morning went well enough,\" he says as he starts buttoning up his shirt. His eyebrows furrow. \"No trouble?\"\n\n\"No trouble,\" I confirm, unwilling to dwell on my conversation with Thomas.\n\n\"Good.\" Anden runs a hand through his damp hair. \"Then you've had a better morning than I. I spent several hours in a private conference with the President of Ross City, Antarctica\u2014we've asked them for military help, in case of an invasion.\" He sighs. \"Antarctica sympathizes, but they aren't easy to please. I don't know whether we can get around using Day's brother, and I don't know how to persuade Day to allow it.\"\n\n\"No one will be able to convince him,\" I reply, crossing my arms. \"Not even me. You say that I'm his weakness, but his greatest weakness is his family.\"\n\nAnden stays quiet for a moment. I study his face carefully, wondering what thoughts are going through his mind. The memory comes back to me of how merciless he can be when he chooses, how he didn't flinch when sentencing Thomas to death, how he'd thrown Commander Jameson's insult right back in her face, how he never hesitated to execute every single person who tried to destroy him. Deep underneath the soft voice and kind heart lies something cold. \"Don't force him,\" I say. Anden looks at me in surprise. \"I know that's what you're thinking.\"\n\nAnden finishes buttoning his shirt. \"I can only do what I have to do, June,\" he says gently. It almost sounds sad.\n\nNo. I will never let you hurt Day like that. Not the way I've already hurt him. \"You're the Elector. You don't have to do anything. And if you care about the Republic, you won't risk angering the one person who the public believes in.\"\n\nToo late, I bite my tongue. The people believe in Day, but they don't believe in you. Anden winces visibly, and even though he doesn't comment on it, I silently curse myself for my notorious turns of phrase. \"I'm sorry,\" I murmur. \"I didn't mean it like that.\"\n\nA long pause drags on before Anden speaks again. \"It's not as easy as it seems.\" He shakes his head. A tiny bead of water drops from his hair onto his collar. \"You would do differently? Risk an entire nation instead of one person? I can't justify it. The Colonies will strike if we don't give them an antidote, and this whole mess stemmed from something that I'm responsible for.\"\n\n\"No, your father was responsible. That doesn't mean you are.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm my father's son,\" Anden replies, his voice suddenly stern. \"What difference does it make?\"\n\nThe words surprise both of us. I tighten my lips and decide not to comment on it, but my thoughts churn frantically. It does make a difference. But then I think back on what Anden had once told me about the Republic's founding, how his father and the Electors before him had been forced to act in those dark, early years. Better be careful, Iparis. You might turn out just like me.\n\nPerhaps I'm not the only one who needs to be careful.\n\nSomething showing on the screen at the end of the hall distracts me. I look toward it. There's some news about Day; the footage shows some old video close-up of him and then a brief shot of the Denver hospital, but even though most of the video's cut off, I can catch glimpses of crowds gathered in front of the building. Anden turns to look at the screen too. Are they protesting? What could they be protesting?\n\nDaniel Altan Wing admitted to hospital for standard medical exam, to be released tomorrow.\n\nAnden presses a hand to his ear. An incoming call. He glances briefly at me, then clicks on his mike and says, \"Yes?\"\n\nSilence. As the screen's broadcast continues, Anden's face turns pale. It reminds me for an instant of how pale Day had looked while at the banquet, and the two thoughts converge into a single, frightening thought. I suddenly know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that this is the secret Day's been keeping from me. A horrible feeling builds in my chest.\n\n\"Who approved this footage's release?\" Anden says after a moment, his voice now a whisper. I hear anger in it. \"There won't be a next time. Inform me first. Is that understood?\"\n\nA lump rises in my throat. When his call finally ends, he drops his hand and gives me a long, grave look.\n\n\"It's Day,\" he says. \"He's at the hospital.\"\n\n\"Why?\" I demand.\n\n\"I'm so sorry.\" He bows his head in a tragic gesture, then leans forward to whisper in my ear. He tells me. And suddenly I feel light-headed, like the entire world has funneled into a blur of motion, like none of this is real, like I'm standing right back at the Los Angeles Central Hospital on the night I knelt before Metias's cold, lifeless body, staring into a face that I no longer recognized. My heartbeat slows to a stop. Everything stops. This can't be real.\n\nHow can the boy who stirred an entire nation be dying?\n\nThey keep me at the hospital overnight before they release me to my apartment. By now, the news is out\u2014bystanders had seen me wheeled out, had spread the word to other folks, and soon the wildfire was unstoppable, and the rumor's been uttered in every corner of the city. I've seen the news cycles try to hide it twice already. I was in the hospital for a standard checkup; I was in the hospital to visit my brother. All sorts of goddy stories. But no one's buying it.\n\nI spend all day enjoying the luxury of a non-hospital bed, watching light, slushy snow falling outside our window, while Eden camps out on the bed by my feet and plays with a robotics kit we'd gotten from the Republic as a gift. He's piecing together some sort of robot now; he matches up a magnetic Light cube\u2014a palm-size box with mini screens on its sides\u2014with several Arm, Leg, and Wing cubes to create what's essentially a little flying JumboTron Man. He smiles in delight at it, then breaks the cubes apart and rearranges them into a pair of walking Legs that display JumboTron video feeds whenever they step down. I smile too, momentarily content that he's content. If there's one good thing about the Republic, it's that they indulge Eden's love for building stuff. Every other week we seem to get some new contraption that I've only ever seen upper-class kids own. I wonder if June's the one who put in this special request for Eden, knowing what she does. Or maybe Anden just feels guilty for all the stuff his father put us through.\n\nI wonder if she's heard the news yet. She must have.\n\n\"Careful,\" I say as Eden climbs up onto my bed and leans over to stand his new creation up at the edge of the window. His hands fumble around, feeling for the windowsill and the glass pane. \"If you fall and break something, we'll have to head back to the hospital, and I am not going to be happy about that.\"\n\n\"You're thinking about her again, aren't you?\" Eden fires smoothly back. His blind eyes stay squinted at the blocks standing barely an inch from his face. \"You always change your voice.\"\n\nI blink at him in surprise. \"What?\"\n\nHe looks in my direction and raises an eyebrow at me, and the expression looks comical on his childlike face. \"Oh, come on. It's so obvious. What's this June girl to you, anyway? The whole country gossips about you two, and when she asked you to come to Denver, you couldn't pack us up fast enough. You told me to call her in case the Republic ever comes to take me away. You're gonna have to spill sooner or later, yeah? You're always talking about her.\"\n\n\"I don't talk about her all the time.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh, right.\"\n\nI'm glad Eden can't see my expression. I've yet to talk with him about June and her connection to the rest of our family\u2014another good reason to stay away from her. \"She's a friend,\" I finally reply.\n\n\"Do you like her?\"\n\nMy eyes go back to studying the rainy scene outside our window. \"Yeah.\"\n\nEden waits for me to say more, but when I remain silent, he shrugs and goes back to his robot. \"Fine,\" he mutters. \"Tell me whenever.\"\n\nAs if on cue, my earpiece blares out a second of soft static, warning me of an incoming call. I accept it. A moment later, June's whispered voice echoes in my ear. She doesn't say anything about my illness\u2014she just suggests, \"Can we talk?\"\n\nI knew it'd only be a matter of time before I heard from her. I watch Eden playing for a second longer. \"We gotta do it somewhere else,\" I whisper back. My brother glances at me, momentarily curious at my words. I don't want to ruin my first day out of the hospital by breaking my depressing prognosis to an eleven-year-old.\n\n\"How about a walk, then?\"\n\nI glance out the window. It's dinnertime, and the caf\u00e9s down on the street's ground level are crowded with patrons, almost all of them huddled under hats, caps, umbrellas, and hoods, keeping to themselves in this twilight slush. Might be a good time to walk around without attracting too much attention. \"How about this. Come on over, and we'll head out from here.\"\n\n\"Great,\" June replies. She hangs up.\n\nTen minutes later, my doorbell rings and startles Eden to his feet\u2014the new cube robot he built falls from my bed, three of its limbs snapping off. Eden turns his eyes in my direction. \"Who's there?\" he asks.\n\n\"Don't worry, kid,\" I reply, walking over to the door. \"It's June.\"\n\nEden's shoulders relax at my words; a bright grin lights up his face, and he hops off the edge of the bed, leaving his block robot by the window. He feels his way toward the other end of the bed. \"Well?\" he demands. \"Aren't you gonna let her in?\"\n\nIt seems like during the time I'd spent living on the streets, I'd been missing out on seeing Eden blossom. Quiet kid turned stubborn and headstrong. Can't imagine how he inherited that. I sigh\u2014I hate keeping things from him, but how do I explain this one? I'd told him over the past year who June is: a Republic girl who decided to help us out, a girl who's now training to be the country's future Princeps. I haven't figured out yet how to tell him the rest\u2014so I just don't say anything about it at all.\n\nJune doesn't smile when I open the door. She glances at Eden, then back to me. \"Is that your brother?\" she says quietly.\n\nI nod. \"You haven't met him yet, have you?\" I turn around and call out to him. \"Eden. Manners.\"\n\nEden waves from the bed. \"Hi,\" he calls out.\n\nI step aside so that June can come in. She makes her way over to where Eden is, sits down next to him with a smile, and takes his small hand in hers. She shakes it twice. \"Pleased to meet you, Eden,\" she says, her voice gentle. I lean against the door to watch the exchange. \"How are you doing?\"\n\nEden shrugs. \"Pretty good, I guess,\" he replies. \"Doctors say my eyes have stabilized. I'm taking ten different pills every day.\" He tilts his head. \"But I think I've been getting stronger.\" He puffs out his chest a little, then strikes a mock pose by flexing his arms. His eyes are unfocused and pointing slightly to the left of June's face. \"How do I look?\"\n\nJune laughs. \"I have to say, you look better than most people I see. I've heard a lot about you.\"\n\n\"I hear about you a lot too,\" Eden replies in a rush, \"mostly from Daniel. He thinks you're really hot.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's enough.\" I clear my throat loud enough for him to hear, then shoot him a cranky look even though he's blind as a rock. \"Let's head out.\"\n\n\"Have you eaten yet?\" she asks as we head toward the door. \"I was supposed to be shadowing Anden with the other Princeps-Elects, but he's been called to the Armor barracks for a quick briefing\u2014something about food poisoning among the soldiers. So I had a couple of free hours.\" A faint blush touches her cheeks as she says this. \"I thought maybe we could grab a bite.\"\n\nI raise an eyebrow. Then I lean in toward her so that my cheek brushes against hers\u2014to my excitement, I feel her shiver at my touch. \"Why, June,\" I tease in a low, soft voice, smiling against her ear. \"Are you asking me out on a date?\"\n\nJune's blush deepens, but its warmth doesn't touch her eyes.\n\nMy moment of mischief ends. I clear my throat, then look over my shoulder at Eden. \"I'll bring some food back for you. Don't go out on your own. Do what Lucy tells you to do.\"\n\nEden nods, already engrossed with the block robot again.\n\nMinutes later, we head out of the apartment complex and into the thickening drizzle. I keep my head down and my face hidden under the shadow of a soldier cap; my neck's protected beneath my thick red scarf, and my hands are shoved deep into the pockets of my military coat. It's strange how much I've gotten used to Republic clothing. June pulls her coat collar high, and her breath billows out around her in clouds of steam. The slush has picked up some, sending fresh ice and water into my face and tickling my eyelashes. Bold red banners still hang from the windows of most high-rises, and the JumboTrons have a red-and-black symbol in the corners of their broadcasts in honor of Anden's birthday. Others along the street rush past in a blur of motion. We walk in comfortable silence, savoring the simple nearness of each other.\n\nIt's kind of weird, actually. Today's one of my better days, and I don't have a lot of trouble keeping up with June\u2014today, it doesn't feel like I only have a couple of months to live. Maybe the new medicines they gave me are going to work this time.\n\nWe don't say a word until June finally stops us at a small, steaming caf\u00e9 several blocks from my apartment. Right away I can see why she chose it\u2014it's mostly empty, a tiny little spot on the first floor of a towering high-rise washed wet with slush, and not very well lit. Even though it's open to the air, like many other caf\u00e9s in the area, it has a few dark nooks that are nice for us to sit at, and its only lights come from glowing, cube-shaped lanterns on each of its tables. A hostess ushers us inside, seating us at June's request in one of the shadowy corners. Flat plates of scented water sit scattered throughout the caf\u00e9. I shiver, even though our spot is pretty warm from our heat lantern.\n\nWhat are we doing here again? A strange fog washes over me, then clears. We're here for dinner, that's what we're doing. I shake my head. I recall the brief struggle I'd had a few days ago, when I couldn't remember Lucy's name. A frightening thought emerges.\n\nMaybe this is a new symptom. Or maybe I'm just being paranoid.\n\nAfter we place our orders, June speaks up. The gold flecks in her eyes shine in the lantern's orange glow. \"Why didn't you tell me?\" she whispers.\n\nI hold my hands against the lantern, savoring the heat. \"What good would it have done?\"\n\nJune furrows her eyebrows, and only then do I notice that her eyes look kind of swollen, like she's been crying. She shakes her head at me. \"The rumors are all over the place,\" she continues in a voice I can barely hear. \"Witnesses say they saw you being carried out of your apartment on a stretcher thirty-four hours ago\u2014one of them apparently overheard a medic discussing your condition.\"\n\nI sigh and put my hands up in defeat. \"You know what, if this is all somehow causing riots in the street and more trouble for Anden, then I'm sorry. I was told to keep it a secret\u2014and I did, as well as I could. I'm sure our glorious Elector will figure out a way to calm folks down.\"\n\nJune bites her lip once. \"There must be some solution, Day. Have your doctors\u2014\"\n\n\"They're already trying everything.\" I wince as a painful spasm runs through the back of my head, as if on cue. \"I've been through three rounds of experiments. Slow and painful progress so far.\" I explain to June what the doctors had told me, the unusual infection in my hippocampus, the medication that's been weakening me, sucking the strength out of my body. \"Believe me, they're running through solutions.\"\n\n\"How long do you have?\" she whispers.\n\nI stay silent, pretending to be fascinated with the lantern. I don't know if I have the heart to say it.\n\nJune leans closer, until her shoulder bumps softly against mine. \"How long do you have?\" she repeats. \"Please. I hope you still care about me enough to tell me.\"\n\nI gaze back at her, slowly falling\u2014as I always seem to do\u2014back under her pull. Don't make me do this, please. I don't want to say it out loud to her; it might mean that it's actually true. But she looks so sad and fearful that I can't keep it in. I let out my breath, then run a hand through my hair and lower my head. \"They said a month,\" I whisper. \"Maybe two. They said I should get my priorities in order.\"\n\nJune closes her eyes\u2014I think I see her sway slightly in her seat. \"Two months,\" she murmurs vacantly. The agony on her face reminds me exactly why I didn't want to let her know.\n\nAfter another long silence between us, June snaps out of her daze and reaches to pull something out of her pocket. She comes back up with something small and metallic in her palm. \"I've been meaning to give this to you,\" she says.\n\nI stare blankly at it. It's a paper clip ring, thin lines of wire pulled into an elegant series of swirls and closed into a circle, just like the one I'd once made for her. My eyes widen and dart up to hers. She doesn't say anything; instead, she looks down and helps me push it onto my right hand's ring finger. \"I had a little time,\" she finally mutters.\n\nI run a hand across the ring in wonder, my heartstrings pulled taut. A dozen emotions rush through me. \"I'm sorry,\" I stammer out after a while, trying to put a more hopeful spin on everything. That's all I can say, after this gift from her? \"They think there's still a chance. They're trying out some more treatments soon.\"\n\n\"You once told me why you chose 'Day' as your street name,\" she says firmly. She moves her hand so that it's over mine, hiding the paper clip ring from view. The warmth of her skin against mine makes my breath short. \"Every morning, everything's possible again. Right?\" A river of tingles runs up my spine. I want to take her face in my hands again, kiss her cheeks and study her dark, sad eyes, and tell her I'll be okay. But that would just be another lie. Half of my heart is breaking at the pain on her face; the other half, I realize guiltily, is swelling with happiness to know that she still cares. There's love in her tragic words, in the folds of that thin metal ring. Isn't there?\n\nFinally, I take a deep breath. \"Sometimes, the sun sets earlier. Days don't last forever, you know. But I'll fight as hard as I can. I can promise you that.\"\n\nJune's eyes soften. \"You don't have to do this alone.\"\n\n\"Why should you have to bear it?\" I mutter back. \"I just... thought it would be easier this way.\"\n\n\"Easier for whom?\" June snaps. \"You, me, the public? You would rather just pass away silently one day, without ever breathing another word to me?\"\n\n\"Yes, I would,\" I find myself snapping back. \"If I'd told you that night, would you have agreed to become a Princeps-Elect?\"\n\nWhatever words sat on the tip of June's tongue go unspoken. She pauses at that, then swallows. \"No,\" she admits. \"I wouldn't have had the heart to do it. I would've waited.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" I take a deep breath. \"You think I wanted to whine to you about my health in that moment? To stand in the way of you and the position of a lifetime?\"\n\n\"That was my choice to make,\" June says through clenched teeth.\n\n\"And I wanted you to make it without me in the way.\"\n\nJune shakes her head, and her shoulders slightly droop. \"You really think I care so little about you?\"\n\nOur food arrives then\u2014steaming bowls of soup, plates of dinner rolls, and a neatly wrapped package of food for Eden\u2014and I lapse gratefully into silence. It would've been easier for me, I add to myself. I'd rather step away than be reminded every day that I only have a few months left to be with you. I'm ashamed to say this out loud, though. When June looks expectantly at me for an answer, I just shake my head and shrug.\n\nAnd that's when we hear it. An alarm wails out across the city.\n\nIt's deafening. We both freeze, then look up at the speakers lining all the street's buildings. I've never heard a siren like this in my entire life\u2014an endless and earsplitting scream that drenches the air, drowning out anything in its path. The JumboTrons have gone dark. I shoot June a bewildered look. What the hell is that?\n\nBut June's no longer looking at me. Her eyes are fixed on the speakers blaring out the alarm across the entire street, and her expression is stricken with horror. Together, we watch as the JumboTrons flare back to life\u2014this time each screen is bloodred, and each has two gold words etched in bold across its display:" + }, + { + "title": "SEEK COVER", + "text": "\"What does it mean?\" I shout.\n\nJune grabs my hand and starts to run. \"It means that an air strike's coming. The Armor is under attack.\"\n\n\"EDEN.\"\n\nIt's the first word out of Day's mouth. The JumboTrons continue broadcasting their ominous scarlet notice as the alarm echoes across the city, deafening me with its rhythmic roar and blotting out all other sounds in the city. Along the street, others are peeking out of windows and pouring out from building entrances, as bewildered as we are over the unusual alarm. Soldiers are flooding into formation on the street, shouting into their earpieces as they see the approaching enemy. I run right beside him, thoughts and numbers racing through my mind as we go. (Four seconds. Twelve seconds. Fifteen seconds a block, which means seventy-five seconds until we reach Day's apartment if we keep up our pace. Is there a faster route? And Ollie. I need to get him out of my apartment and to my side.) A strange focus grips me, just like it had the moment I first freed Day from Batalla Hall all those months ago, like the moment Day climbed the Capitol Tower to address the people and I led soldiers off his trail. I may turn into a silent, uncomfortable observer in the Senate chamber, but out here on the streets, in the midst of chaos, I can think. I can act.\n\nI remember reading about and rehearsing for this particular alarm back in high school, although Los Angeles is so far away from the Colonies that even those practice drills were rare. The alarm was to be used only if enemy forces attacked our city, if they were right at the city's borders and barging their way in. I don't know what the process is like in Denver, but I imagine it can't be that different\u2014we are to evacuate immediately, then seek out the closest assigned underground bunker and board subways that will shuttle us to a safer city. After I entered college and officially became a soldier, the drill changed for me: Soldiers are to report immediately to a location their commanding officers give them over their earpieces. We must be ready for war at a moment's notice.\n\nBut I've never heard the alarm used for a real attack on a Republic city, because there hasn't been one yet. Most attacks were thwarted before they could reach us. Until now. And as I run alongside Day, I know exactly what must be going through his mind. It triggers a familiar guilt in my stomach.\n\nDay has never heard the alarm before, nor has he ever gone through a drill for it. This is because he's from a poor sector. I was never sure before, and I admit that I never thought much about it, but seeing Day's confused expression makes it all very clear. The underground bunkers are only for the upper class, the gem sectors. The poor are left to fend for themselves.\n\nOverhead, an engine screams by. A Republic jet. Then several more. Shouts rise up and mix with the alarm\u2014I brace myself for a call from Anden at any moment. Then, far off along the horizon, I see the first orange glows light up along the Armor. The Republic is launching a counterattack from the walls. This is really happening. But it shouldn't be. The Colonies had given us time, however little, to hand over an antidote to them\u2014and since that ultimatum, only four days have passed. My anger flares. Did they want to catch us off guard in such an extreme way?\n\nI grab Day's hand and pick up my pace. \"Can you call Eden?\" I shout.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Day gasps out. Immediately I can tell that he doesn't have the stamina he used to have\u2014his breathing is slightly labored, his steps slightly slower. A lump lodges in my throat. Somehow, this is the first evidence of his fading health that hits home, and my heart clenches. Behind us, another explosion reverberates across the night air. I tighten my hold on his hand.\n\n\"Tell Eden to be ready at your complex's entrance,\" I shout. \"I know where we can go.\"\n\nAn urgent voice comes over my earpiece. It's Anden. \"Where are you?\" he says. I shiver as I detect a faint hint of fear in his words\u2014another thing I rarely hear. \"I'm at the Capitol Tower. I'll send a jeep to pick you up.\"\n\n\"Send a jeep to Day's apartment. I'll be there in a minute. And Ollie\u2014my dog\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll have him sent to the bunkers immediately,\" Anden says. \"Be careful.\" Then a click sounds out, and I hear static for a second before my earpiece goes dark. Beside me, Day repeats my instructions for Eden over his own mike.\n\nBy the time we reach the apartment complex, Republic jets are screaming by every other second, painting dozens of trails into the evening sky. Crowds of people have already started gathering outside the complex and are being guided in various directions by city patrols. A jolt of fear seizes me when I realize that some of the jets on the horizon are not Republic jets at all\u2014but unfamiliar enemy ones. If they're this close, then they must've gotten past our longer range missiles. Two larger black dots hover at the end of the sky. Colonies Airships.\n\nDay sees Eden before I do. He's a small, golden-haired figure clutching the railings by the apartment complex's entrance door, squinting in vain at the sea of people around him. Their caretaker stands behind him with both of her hands firmly on his shoulders. \"Eden!\" Day calls out. The boy jerks his head in our direction. Day hops up the steps and scoops him into his arms, then turns back to me. \"Where do we go?\" he shouts.\n\n\"The Elector's sending a jeep for us,\" I reply in his ear, so that the others don't hear. Already a few people are casting us glances of recognition even as they stream past us in a haze of panic. I pull my coat collars as high up as they can go, then bow my head. Come on, I mutter to myself.\n\n\"June,\" Day says. I meet his eyes. \"What's gonna happen to the other sectors?\"\n\nThere's the question I've been dreading. What will happen to the poor sectors? I hesitate, and in that brief moment of silence, Day realizes the answer. His lips tighten into a thin line. A deep rage rises in his eyes.\n\nThe jeep's arrival saves me from answering right away. It screeches to a stop several feet from where the others have crowded around, and inside I see Anden wave once at me from the passenger's side. \"Let's go,\" I urge Day. We make our way down the steps as a soldier opens the door for us. Day helps Eden and their caretaker inside first, and when they're both buckled up, we climb in. The jeep takes off at breakneck pace as more Republic jets fly by overhead. Off in the distance, another bright orange cloud mushrooms up from the Armor. Is it me, or did that seem like a closer hit than before? (Perhaps closer by a good hundred feet, given the size of the explosion.)\n\n\"Glad to see you all safe,\" Anden says without turning around. He utters a quick greeting at each of us, then mumbles a command to the driver, who makes a sharp turn around the next block. Eden lets out a startled yelp. The caretaker squeezes his shoulders and tries to soothe him.\n\n\"Why take the slower route?\" Anden says as we veer down a narrow street. The ground shakes from another far-off impact.\n\n\"Apologies, Elector,\" the driver calls back. \"Word's that several explosions have gone off inside the Armor\u2014our fastest route's not safe. They bombed a few jeeps on the other side of Denver.\"\n\n\"Any injuries?\"\n\n\"Not too many, luckily. Couple jeeps overturned\u2014several prisoners escaped, and one soldier's dead.\"\n\n\"Which prisoners?\"\n\n\"We're still confirming.\"\n\nA nasty premonition hits me. When I'd gone to see Thomas, there had been a rotation of guards standing in front of Commander Jameson's cell. When I left, the guards were different.\n\nAnden makes a frustrated sound, then turns to glance back at us. \"We're headed to an underground hold called Subterrain One. Should you need to enter or leave the hold, my guards will scan your thumbs at its gateway. You heard our driver\u2014it's not safe to head out on your own. Understand?\"\n\nThe driver presses a hand to his ear, blanches, and looks at Anden. \"Sir, we have confirmation on the escaped prisoners. There were three.\" He hesitates, then swallows. \"Captain Thomas Bryant. Lieutenant Patrick Murrey. Commander Natasha Jameson.\"\n\nMy world lurches. I knew it. I knew it. Just yesterday I'd seen Commander Jameson securely behind bars, and talked to Thomas while he was withering away in prison. They couldn't have gone far, I tell myself. \"Anden,\" I whisper, forcing my senses straight. \"Yesterday, when I went to see Thomas, there had been a different rotation of guards. Were those soldiers supposed to be there?\" Day and I exchange a quick look, and for an instant I feel as if the entire world is playing us for fools, weaving our lives into one cruel joke.\n\n\"Find the prisoners,\" Anden snaps into his mike. His own face has turned white. \"Shoot them on sight.\" He glances back at me while he continues talking. \"And get me the guards that were on duty. Now.\"\n\nI cringe as yet another explosion makes the ground tremble. They couldn't have gone far. They'll be captured and shot by the end of the day. I repeat these words to myself over and over. No, something else is at work here. My mind flits through the possibilities:\n\nIt's no coincidence that Commander Jameson managed to escape, that the Colonies' attack happened on the same day she was being transferred. There must be other traitors in the Republic's ranks, soldiers that Anden hasn't rooted out yet. Commander Jameson may have been passing information to the Colonies through them. After all, the Colonies somehow knew when our Armor soldiers would rotate shifts, and particularly that today we had fewer Armor soldiers stationed than usual due to the food poisoning. They knew to strike at our weakest moment.\n\nIf that's the case, then the Colonies may have been planning an attack for months. Perhaps even before the plague outbreak.\n\nAnd Thomas. Was he in on the whole thing? Unless he was trying to warn me. That's why he asked for me yesterday. For his final request, but also in hopes that I would notice something off about the guards. My heartbeat quickens. But why wouldn't he just shout a warning?\n\n\"What happens next?\" I ask numbly.\n\nAnden leans his head against the seat. He's probably thinking through a similar list of possibilities about the escaped prisoners, but he doesn't say it aloud. \"Our jets are all engaged right outside Denver. The Armor should hold for a good while, but there's a strong chance more Colonies forces are on their way. We're going to need help. Other nearby cities have been alerted and are sending their troops for reinforcement, but\"\u2014Anden pauses to look over his shoulder at me\u2014\"it might not be enough. While we keep funneling civilians underground, June, you and I need to have a private talk right away.\"\n\n\"Where are you evacuating the poor to, Elector?\" Day pipes up quietly.\n\nAnden turns in his seat again. He meets Day's hostile blue eyes with as level a look as he can manage. I notice that he avoids looking at Eden. \"I have troops on their way to the outer sectors,\" he says. \"They'll find shelter for the civilians and defend them until I give a command otherwise.\"\n\n\"No underground bunkers for them, I guess,\" Day replies coldly.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Anden lets out a long breath. \"The bunkers were built a long time ago, before my father even became the Elector. We're working on adding more.\"\n\nDay leans forward and narrows his eyes. His right hand grips Eden's tightly. \"Then split the bunkers up between the sectors. Half poor, half rich. The upper class should risk their necks out in the open as much as the lower class.\"\n\n\"No,\" Anden says firmly, even though I hear regret in his words. He makes the mistake of arguing this point with Day, and I can't stop him. \"If we were to do that, the logistics would be a nightmare. The outer sectors don't have the same evacuation routes\u2014if explosions hit the city, hundreds of thousands more people would be vulnerable in the open because we wouldn't be able to organize everyone in time. We evacuate the gem sectors first. Then we can\u2014\"\n\n\"Do it!\" Day shouts. \"I don't care about your damn logistics!\"\n\nAnden's face hardens. \"You will not talk back to me like that,\" he snaps. There's steel in his voice that I recognize from Commander Jameson's trial. \"I am your Elector.\"\n\n\"And I put you there,\" Day snaps back. \"Fine, you wanna talk logically? I'm game. If you don't make a bigger effort to protect the poor right now, I can practically guarantee that you'll have a full-on riot on your hands. Do you really want that while the Colonies are attacking? Like you said, you're the Elector. But you won't be if the rest of the country's poor hears about how you're handling this, and even I might not be able to stop them from starting a revolution. They already think the Republic's trying to kill me off. How long do you think the Republic can hold up against a war from both the outside and the inside?\"\n\nAnden's facing forward again. \"This conversation's over.\" As always, his voice is dangerously quiet, but we can hear every single word.\n\nDay lets out a curse and slumps back in his seat. I exchange a glance with him, then shake my head. Day has a point, of course, and so does Anden. The problem is that we don't have time for all this nonsense. After a moment of silence, I lean forward in my seat, clear my throat, and try an alternative.\n\n\"We should evacuate the poor into the wealthy sectors,\" I say. \"They'll still be aboveground, but the wealthy sectors sit in the heart of Denver, not along the Armor where the fighting is happening. It's a flawed plan, but the poor will also see that we're making a concerted effort to protect them. Then, as the people in the bunkers are gradually evacuated to LA via underground subways, we'll have the time and space to start filtering everyone else underground as well.\"\n\nDay mutters something under his breath, but at the same time he grunts in reluctant approval. He shoots me a grateful look. \"Sounds like a better plan to me. At least the people'll have something. \" A second later, I figure out what it was that he'd muttered. You'd make a better Elector than this fool.\n\nAnden's quiet for a moment as he considers my words. Then he nods in agreement and presses a hand against his ear. \"Commander Greene,\" he says, then launches into a series of orders.\n\nI meet Day's eyes. He still looks upset, but at least his eyes aren't burning in anger like they were a second ago. He turns his attention back on Lucy, who has an arm wrapped protectively around Eden. He's curled up in the corner of the jeep's seat with his legs tucked up and his arms wrapped around them. He squints at the scene blurring by, but I'm not sure how much of it he can actually make out. I reach across Day and touch Eden's shoulder. He tenses up immediately. \"It's okay, it's June,\" I say. \"And don't worry. We're going to be fine, do you hear?\"\n\n\"Why did the Colonies break through?\" Eden asks, turning his wide, purple-toned eyes on me and Day.\n\nI swallow hard. Neither of us answers him. Finally, after he repeats his question, Day hugs him closer and whispers something in his ear. Eden settles down against his brother's shoulder. He still looks unhappy and scared, but the terror is at least tempered, and we manage to finish the rest of the ride without saying another word.\n\nIt feels like an eternity (in actuality the trip takes a mere two minutes and twelve seconds), but we finally arrive at a nondescript building near the heart of downtown Denver, a thirty-story high-rise covered with crisscrossing support beams on all four of its sides. Dozens of city patrols are mixed in with crowds of civilians, organizing them into groups at the entrance. Our driver pulls the jeep up to the side of the building, where patrols let us through the door of a makeshift fence. Through the window, I see soldiers click their heels together in sharp salutes as we pass by. One of them is holding Ollie on a leash. I slump in relief at the sight of him. When the jeep halts, two of them promptly open the doors for us. Anden steps out\u2014immediately he's surrounded by four patrol captains, all feverishly updating him on how the evacuation is going. My dog pulls his soldier frantically to my side. I thank the soldier, take over the leash, and rub Ollie's head. He's panting in distress.\n\n\"This way, Ms. Iparis,\" the soldier who opens my door says. Day follows behind me in a tense silence, his hand still clutched tightly around Eden's. Lucy comes out last. I look over my shoulder to where Anden's now deep in conversation with his captains\u2014he pauses to exchange a quick look with me. His eyes dart to Eden. I know that the thought he has must be the same thought running through Day's mind: Keep Eden safe. I nod, signaling to him that I understand, and then we move past a crowd of waiting evacuees and I lose sight of him.\n\nInstead of dealing with the lineup of civilians at the entrance, soldiers escort us through a separate entrance and down a winding set of stairs, until we reach a dimly lit hallway that ends in a set of wide, steel double doors. The guards standing at the entrance shift their stance when they recognize me.\n\n\"This way, Ms. Iparis,\" they say. One of them stiffens at the sight of Day, but looks quickly away when Day meets his stare. The doors swing open for us.\n\nWe're greeted by a blast of warm, humid air and a scene of orderly chaos. The room we've stepped into seems like an enormous warehouse (half the size of a Trial stadium, three dozen fluorescents, and six rows of steel beams lining the ceiling), with a lone JumboTron on the left wall blasting instructions to the upper-class evacuees who mill all around us. Amongst them are a handful of poor-sector people (fourteen of them, to be exact), those who must have been the housekeepers and janitors of some of the gem-sector's homes. To my disappointment, I see soldiers separating them out into a different line. Several upper-class people cast them sympathetic looks, while others glare in disdain.\n\nDay sees them too. \"Guess we're all created equal,\" he mutters. I say nothing.\n\nA few smaller rooms line the right wall. At the far end of the room, the end of a parked subway train rests inside a tunnel, and crowds of both soldiers and civilians have gathered along both of its platforms. The soldiers are attempting to organize the crowds of bewildered, frightened people onto the subway. Where it will take them, I can only guess.\n\nBeside me, Day watches the scene with silent, simmering eyes. His hand stays clamped on Eden's. I wonder whether he's taking note of the aristocratic clothing that most of these evacuees are wearing.\n\n\"Apologies for the mess,\" a guard says to me as she escorts us toward one of the smaller rooms. She taps the edge of her cap politely. \"We are in the early stages of evacuations, and as you can see, the first wave is still in progress. We can have you, as well as Day and his family, on the first wave as well, if you don't mind resting for a moment in a private suite.\"\n\nMariana and Serge might already be waiting in rooms of their own. \"Thank you,\" I reply. We walk past several doors, their long, rectangular windows revealing empty, blank rooms with portraits of Anden hanging on their walls. A couple look as if they have been reserved for high-ranking officials, while others appear to be holding people who must have caused trouble\u2014detainees with sullen faces flanked by pairs of soldiers. One room that we pass by holds several people surrounded by guards.\n\nIt is this room that makes me pause. I recognize one of the people in there. Is it really her? \"Wait,\" I call out, stepping closer to the window. No doubt about it\u2014I see a young girl with wide eyes and a blunt, messy bob of a haircut, sitting in a chair beside a gray-eyed boy and three others who look more ragged than I recall. I glance at our soldier. \"What are they doing in there?\"\n\nDay follows my lead. When he sees what I see, he sucks in a sharp breath. \"Get us in there,\" he whispers to me. His voice takes on a desperate urgency. \" Please.\"\n\n\"These are prisoners, Ms. Iparis,\" the soldier replies, puzzled by our interest. \"I don't recommend\u2014\"\n\nI tighten my lips. \"I want to see them,\" I interrupt.\n\nThe soldier hesitates, glances around the room, and then nods reluctantly. \"Of course,\" she replies. She steps toward the door and opens it, then ushers us in. Lucy stays right outside with her hand tightly gripping Eden's. The door closes behind us.\n\nI find myself staring straight at Tess and a handful of Patriots.\n\nWell, damn. The last time I saw tess, she was standing in the middle of the alley near where we were supposed to assassinate Anden, her fists clenched and her face a broken picture. She looks different now. Calmer. Older. She's also gotten a good bit taller, and her once-round baby face has leaned out. Weird to see.\n\nShe and the others are all shackled to chairs. The sight doesn't help my mood. I recognize one of her companions immediately\u2014Pascao, the dark-skinned Runner with a head of short curls and those ridiculously pale gray eyes. He hasn't changed much, although now that I'm close enough, I can see traces of a scar across his nose and another one near his right temple. He flashes me a brilliant white grin that drips sarcasm. \"That you, Day?\" he says, giving me a flirtatious wink. \"Still as gorgeous as you've always been. Republic uniforms suit you.\"\n\nHis words sting. I turn my glare on the soldiers standing guard over them. \"Why the hell are they prisoners?\"\n\nOne of them tilts his nose up at me. Based on all the goddy decorations on his uniform, he must be the captain of this group or something. \"They're former Patriots,\" he says, emphasizing his last word as if he's trying to make a jab at me. \"We caught them along the edge of the Armor, where they were attempting to disable our military equipment and aid the Colonies.\"\n\nPascao shifts indignantly in his chair. \"Bullshit, you blinder boy,\" he snaps. \"We were camped out along the Armor because we were trying to help your sorry soldiers out. Maybe we shouldn't have bothered.\"\n\nTess watches me with a wary look that she's never used with me before. Her arms look so small and thin with those giant shackles clamped around her wrists. I clench my teeth; my gaze falls to the guns at the soldiers' belts. No sudden moves, I remind myself. Not around these trigger-happy trots. From the corner of my eye, I notice that one of the others is bleeding from the shoulder. \"Let them go,\" I tell the soldier. \"They're not the enemy.\"\n\nThe soldier glares at me with cold contempt. \"Absolutely not. Our orders were to detain them until such time\u2014\"\n\nBeside me, June lifts her chin. \"Orders from whom?\"\n\nThe soldier's bravado wavers a little. \"Ms. Iparis, my orders came directly from the glorious Elector himself.\" His cheeks flush when he sees June narrow her eyes, and then he starts blabbing something about their tour of duty around the Armor and how intense the battle's been. I step closer to Tess and stoop down until we're at the same eye level. The guards shift their guns, but June snaps a warning at them to stop.\n\n\"You came back,\" I whisper to Tess.\n\nEven though Tess still looks wary, something softens in her eyes. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nTess hesitates. She looks over at Pascao, who turns his startling gray eyes fully on me. \"We came back,\" he replies, \"because Tess heard you calling for us.\"\n\nThey'd heard me. All those radio transmissions I'd been sending out for months and months hadn't ended up lost somewhere in the dark\u2014somehow, they'd heard me. Tess swallows hard before she works up enough courage to speak. \"Frankie first caught you on the airwaves a few months ago,\" she says, nodding toward a curly-haired girl tied to one of the chairs. \"She said you were trying to contact us.\" Tess lowers her eyes. \"I didn't want to answer. But then I heard about your illness... and...\"\n\nSo. The news has definitely gotten around.\n\n\"Hey now,\" Pascao interrupts when he catches my expression. \"We didn't come back to the Republic just because we felt sorry for you. We've been listening to the news coming from both you and the Colonies. Heard about the threat of war.\"\n\n\"And you decided to come to our aid?\" June pipes up. Her eyes are suspicious. \"Why so generous all of a sudden?\"\n\nPascao's sarcastic grin fades away. He regards June with a tilt of his head. \"You're June Iparis, aren't you?\"\n\nThe captain starts to tell him to greet June in a more formal way, but June just nods.\n\n\"So you're the one who sabotaged our plans and split up our crew.\" Pascao shrugs. \"No hard feelings\u2014not that, you know, I was a big fan of Razor or anything.\"\n\n\"Why are you back in the country?\" June repeats.\n\n\"Okay, fine. We got kicked out of Canada.\" Pascao takes a deep breath. \"We were hiding out there after everything fell apart during the\"\u2014he pauses to glance at the soldiers around them\u2014\"the, ah, you know. Our playdate with Anden. But then the Canadians figured out that we weren't supposed to be in their country, and we had to flee back south. A lot of us scattered to the winds. I don't know where half our original group is now\u2014chances are that some of them are still in Canada. When the news about Day broke, little Tess here asked if she could leave us and head back to Denver on her own. I didn't want her to, well, die\u2014so we came along.\" Pascao looks down for a moment. He doesn't stop talking, but I can tell that he's just babbling at this point, trying to give us any reason but their main one. \"With the Colonies invading, I thought that if we tried helping out your war effort, then maybe we could get a pardon and permission to stay in the country, but I know your Elector probably isn't our biggest\u2014\"\n\n\"What is all this?\"\n\nAll of us turn around at the voice, right as the soldiers in the room snap into salutes. I get up from my crouch to see Anden standing in the doorway with a group of bodyguards behind him, his eyes dark and ominous, his stare fixed first on June and me and then on the Patriots. Even though it hasn't been that long since we left him behind to talk with his generals, he has a fine layer of dust on the shoulders of his uniform, and his face looks bleak. The captain who'd been talking to us earlier now clears his throat nervously. \"My apologies, Elector,\" he begins, \"but we detained these criminals near the Armor\u2014\"\n\nAt that, June crosses her arms. \"Then I'm guessing you weren't the one who approved this, Elector?\" she says to Anden. There's an edge to her voice that tells me she and Anden aren't on the best of terms right now.\n\nAnden regards the scene. Our argument from the car ride over is probably still stewing in his mind, but he doesn't bother looking in my direction. Well, good. Maybe I've given him something to think about. Finally, he nods at the captain. \"Who are they?\"\n\n\"Former Patriots, sir.\"\n\n\"I see. Who ordered this?\"\n\nThe captain turns bright red. \"Well, Elector,\" he replies, trying to sound official, \"my commanding officer\u2014\"\n\nBut Anden has already turned his attention away from the lying captain and starts to leave the room. \"Take those shackles off them,\" he says without turning back around. \"Keep them in here for now, and then evacuate them with the final group. Watch them carefully.\" He motions for us to follow him. \"Ms. Iparis. Mr. Wing. If you please.\"\n\nI look back one more time at Tess, who's watching the soldiers unclip the shackles from her wrists. Then I head out with June. Eden rushes over to me, nearly colliding with me in his hurry, and I take his hand back in mine.\n\nAnden stops us before a group of Republic soldiers. I frown at the sight. Four of the soldiers are kneeling on the ground with their hands on their heads. Their eyes stay downcast. One weeps silently.\n\nThe remaining soldiers in the group have their guns pointed at the kneeling soldiers. The soldier in charge addresses Anden. \"These are the guards who were in charge of Commander Jameson and Captain Bryant. We found a suspicious communication between one of them and the Colonies.\"\n\nNo wonder he brought us out here, to see the faces of our potential traitors. I look back at the captured guards. The crying one looks up at Anden with pleading eyes. \"Please, Elector,\" he begs. \"I had nothing to do with their escape. I\u2014I don't know how it happened. I\u2014\" His words cut off as a gun barrel cuffs him in the head.\n\nAnden's face, normally thoughtful and reserved, has turned ice-cold. I look from the kneeling soldiers back to him. He's silent for a moment. Then he nods at his men. \"Interrogate them. If they don't cooperate, shoot them. Spread the word to the rest of the troops. Let it be a lesson to any other traitors within our ranks. Let them know we will root them out.\"\n\nThe soldiers with the guns click their heels. \"Yes, sir.\" They haul the accused traitors to their feet. A sick feeling hits my stomach. But Anden doesn't take back his words\u2014instead, he looks on as the soldiers are dragged, shouting and pleading, out of the bunker. June looks stricken. Her eyes follow the prisoners.\n\nAnden turns on us with a grave expression. \"The Colonies have help.\"\n\nA dull thud echoes from somewhere above us, and the ground and ceiling tremble in response. June peers closer at Anden, as if analyzing him. \"What kind of help?\"\n\n\"I saw their squadrons in the air, right beyond the Armor. They're not all Colonies jets. Some of them have African stars painted on their sides. My generals tell me that the Colonies are confident enough to have parked an Airship and a squadron of jets less than a half mile from our Armor, setting up makeshift airfields as they go. They are ramping up for another assault.\"\n\nMy hand tightens around Eden's. He squints at the swarms of evacuees crowded near the subway, but he probably can't see anything more than a mass of moving blurs. I wish I could take that frightened look off his face. \"How long is Denver gonna hold?\" I ask.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Anden replies grimly. \"The Armor is strong, but we can't fight a superpower for long.\"\n\n\"So what do we do now?\" June says. \"If we can't hold them off alone, then are we just going to lose this war?\"\n\nAnden shakes his head. \"We need help too. I'm going to get us an audience with the United Nations or with Antarctica, see whether they're willing to step up to the plate. They might buy us enough time for...\" He glances at my brother, quiet and calm beside me. A stab of guilt and rage hits me. I narrow my eyes at Anden\u2014my hand clamps tighter on my brother's arm. Eden shouldn't have to be in the middle of this. I shouldn't have to choose between losing my brother and losing this damn country.\n\n\"Hopefully it won't come to that,\" I say.\n\nAs he and June launch into an in-depth conversation about Antarctica, I look back at the room where Tess and the Patriots are being held. Through the window, I can see Tess tending carefully to the girl with the bleeding shoulder while the soldiers look on with uneasy expressions. Don't know why all those trained killers should be scared of a little girl armed with a handful of bandages and rubbing alcohol. I shiver as I think of the way Anden ordered those accused soldiers out of the bunker and killed. Pascao looks frustrated, and for a moment, he meets my stare through the glass. Even though he doesn't move his mouth, I can tell what he's thinking.\n\nHe knows that trapping the Patriots inside a room during the middle of a battle, while civilians and soldiers alike are getting killed aboveground, is a total goddy waste.\n\n\"Elector,\" I suddenly say, turning back to face Anden and June. He pauses to stare at me. \"Let them out of this bunker.\" When Anden stays silent, compelling me to go on, I add, \"They can help your effort up there. I bet they can play the guerrilla game better than any of your soldiers, and since you won't be evacuating the poor sectors for a while, you might need all the help you can get.\"\n\nJune doesn't say anything about my little jab, but Anden folds his arms across his chest. \"Day, I pardoned the Patriots as part of our original deal\u2014but I haven't forgotten about my difficult history with them. While I don't want to see your friends shackled like prisoners, I have no reason to believe that they'll now help a country that they have terrorized for so long.\"\n\n\"They're harmless,\" I insist. \"They have no reason to fight against the Republic.\"\n\n\"Three death-row prisoners just escaped,\" Anden snaps. \"The Colonies have launched a surprise attack on our capital. And now my would-be assassins are sitting a dozen yards from me. I'm not in the most forgiving mood.\"\n\n\"I'm trying to help you,\" I fire back. \"You just caught your traitors, anyway, didn't you? Do you really think the Patriots had anything to do with Commander Jameson's escape? Especially when she threw them to the dogs? Do you think I like the idea that my mother's killers are on the loose now? Unleash the Patriots, and they'll fight for you.\"\n\nAnden narrows his eyes. \"What makes you think they're so loyal to the Republic?\"\n\n\"Let me lead them,\" I say. Eden jerks his head up at me in surprise. \"And you'll get your loyalty.\" June shoots me a warning glare\u2014I take a deep breath, swallow my frustration, and will myself to calm down. She's right. No point getting angry at Anden if I need him on my side. \"Please,\" I add in a lower voice. \"Let me help. You have to trust someone. Don't just leave people out there to die.\"\n\nAnden studies my face for a long moment, and with a chill, I realize how much he looks like his father. The similarity is only there for an instant, though\u2014and then it vanishes, replaced by Anden's serious, concerned gaze. As if he suddenly remembers who we are. He sighs deeply and tightens his lips. \"Let me know what your plan is,\" he finally says. \"And we'll see. In the meantime, I suggest you get your brother on a subway.\" When he sees my expression, he adds, \"He'll be safe until you join him. You have my word.\"\n\nThen he turns away and motions for June to accompany him. I let my breath out as I watch a soldier lead him and June toward a cluster of generals. June looks over her shoulder at me as they go. I know she's thinking the same thing I am. She's worried about what this war is doing to Anden. What it's doing to all of us.\n\nLucy interrupts my thoughts. \"Perhaps we should get your brother on the evacuation train,\" she says. She gives me a sympathetic look.\n\n\"Right.\" I look down at Eden and pat his shoulder. I try my best to have faith in the Elector's promise. \"Let's head over to the train and get the details on how to get you out of here.\"\n\n\"What about you?\" Eden asks. \"Are you really going to lead some kind of assault?\"\n\n\"I'll meet up with you in Los Angeles. I swear.\"\n\nEden doesn't make a sound as we make our way over to the train platform and let the soldiers escort us toward the front. His expression has grown serious and sullen. When we're finally in front of the train's closed glass door, I bend to his eye level. \"Look\u2014I'm sorry I'm not going with you right away. I need to stay here and help, yeah? Lucy's got you. She'll keep you safe. I'll join up with you soon\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, fine,\" Eden grumbles.\n\n\"Oh.\" I clear my throat. Eden is sickly and tech-minded and occasionally obnoxious, but he's rarely angry like this. Even after his blindness, he's stayed optimistic. So his bluntness throws me off. \"Well, that's good,\" I decide to respond. \"I'm glad you're\u2014\"\n\n\"You're hiding something from me, Daniel,\" he interrupts. \"I can tell. What is it?\"\n\nI pause. \"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\"You're a terrible liar.\" Eden pulls himself out of my grasp and frowns. \"Something's up. I could hear it in the Elector's voice, and then you said that weird thing to me the other day, about how you were afraid the Republic's soldiers would come knocking on our door... Why would they do that all of a sudden? I thought everything was fine now.\"\n\nI sigh and bow my head. Eden's eyes soften a little, but his jaw stays firm. \"What is it?\" he repeats.\n\nHe's eleven years old. He deserves to know the truth.\n\n\"The Republic wants you back for experimentation,\" I reply, keeping my voice low so that only he can hear me. \"There's a virus spreading in the Colonies. They think you have the antidote in your blood. They want to take you to the labs.\"\n\nEden stares in my direction for a long, silent moment. Above us, another dull thud shakes the earth. I wonder how well the Armor's holding up. Seconds drag by. Finally, I put a hand on his arm. \"I won't let them take you away,\" I say, trying to reassure him. \"Okay? You're going to be fine. Anden\u2014the Elector\u2014knows that he can't take you away without risking a revolution among the people. He can't do it without my permission.\"\n\n\"All those people in the Colonies are going to die, aren't they?\" Eden mutters under his breath. \"The ones with the virus?\"\n\nI hesitate. I never asked much about exactly what the plague's symptoms were\u2014I stopped listening the instant they mentioned my brother. \"I don't know,\" I confess.\n\n\"And then they're going to spread it to the Republic.\" Eden turns his head down and wrings his hands together. \"Maybe they're spreading it right now. If they take over the capital, the disease will spread. Won't it?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I repeat.\n\nEden's eyes search my face. Even though he's nearly blind, I can see the unhappiness in them. \"You don't have to make all my decisions, you know.\"\n\n\"I didn't think I was. Don't you want to evacuate to LA? It's safer there, and I told you\u2014I'll catch up with you there. I promise.\"\n\n\"No, not that. Why'd you decide to keep this a secret?\"\n\nThis is why he's upset? \"You're kidding, right?\"\n\n\"Why?\" Eden presses.\n\n\"You would've agreed?\" I move closer to him, then glance around at the soldiers and evacuees and lower my voice. \"I know I declared my support for Anden, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten what the Republic did to our family. To you. When I watched you get sick, when the plague patrols came to our door and dragged you out on that gurney, with blood blackening your eyes...\" I pause, close my eyes, and shut the scene out. I've played it in my head a million times; no need to revisit it again. The memory makes the pain flare up at the back of my head.\n\n\"Don't you think I know that?\" Eden fires back in a low, defiant voice. \"You're my brother, not our mom.\"\n\nI narrow my eyes. \"I am now.\"\n\n\"No, you're not. Mom's dead.\" Eden takes a deep breath. \"I remember what the Republic did to us. Of course I do. But the Colonies are invading. I want to help.\"\n\nI can't believe Eden's telling me this. He doesn't understand the lengths the Republic will go to\u2014has he really forgotten their experiments? I lean forward and put my hand on his tiny wrist. \"It could kill you. Do you realize that? And they might not even find a cure using your blood.\"\n\nEden pulls away from me again. \"It's my decision to make. Not yours.\"\n\nHis words echo June's from earlier. \"Fine,\" I snap. \"Then what's your decision, kid?\"\n\nHe steels himself. \"Maybe I want to help.\"\n\n\"You've gotta be kidding me. You want to help them out? Are you just doing that to go against what I'm saying?\"\n\n\"I'm serious.\"\n\nA lump rises in my throat. \"Eden,\" I begin, \"we've lost Mom and John. Dad is gone. You're all I have left. I can't afford to lose you too. Everything I've done so far, I've done for you. I'm not letting you risk your life to save the Republic\u2014or the Colonies.\"\n\nThe defiance fades from Eden's eyes. He props his arms up on the railing and leans his head against his hands. \"If there's one thing I know about you,\" he says, \"it's that you're not selfish.\"\n\nI pause. Selfish. I am selfish\u2014I want Eden to stay protected, out of harm's way, and screw whatever he thinks about that. But at his words, my guilt bubbles up. How many times had John tried to keep me out of trouble? How many times had he warned me against messing with the Republic, or trying to find a cure for Eden? I had never listened, and I don't regret it. Eden stares at me with sightless eyes, a disability the Republic handed to him. And now he's offering himself up, a sacrificial lamb to the slaughter, and I can't understand why.\n\nNo. I do understand. He is me\u2014he's doing what I would've done.\n\nBut the thought of losing him is too much to bear. I put my hand on his shoulder and start steering him inside. \"Get to LA first. We'll talk about this later. You better think this through, because if you volunteer for this\u2014\"\n\n\"I did think it through,\" Eden replies. Then he pulls out of my grasp and steps back through the balcony door. \"And besides, if they came for me, do you really think we could stop them?\"\n\nAnd then his turn comes. Lucy helps him step onto the subway, and I hold his hand for a brief moment before he has to let go. Despite how upset he seems to be, Eden still clutches my hand hard. \"Hurry up, okay?\" he says to me. Without warning, he throws his arms around my neck. Beside him, Lucy gives me one of her reassuring smiles.\n\n\"Don't you worry, Daniel,\" she says. \"I'll watch him like a hawk.\"\n\nI nod gratefully at her. Then I hug Eden tight, squeeze my eyes shut, and take a deep breath. \"See you soon, kid,\" I whisper. Then I reluctantly untangle his fingers from mine. Eden disappears onto the subway. Moments later, the train pulls away from the station and takes the first wave of evacuees toward the Republic's west coast, leaving only Eden's words behind, ringing in my mind.\n\nMaybe I want to help.\n\nI sit alone for some time after his train leaves, lost in thought, going over those words repeatedly. I'm his guardian now\u2014I have every right to keep him from harm, and hell if I'm going to see him back in the Republic's labs after everything I've done to keep him from there. I close my eyes and bury my hands in my hair.\n\nAfter a while, I make my way back to the room where the Patriots are being kept. The door's open. When I step inside, Pascao quits stretching out his arms and Tess looks up from where she's finishing the bandaging of the wounded girl's shoulder.\n\n\"So,\" I say to them, my eyes lingering on Tess. \"You guys came back to town to give the Colonies some hell?\" Tess drops her gaze.\n\nPascao shrugs. \"Well, it won't matter if no one lets us back up there. Why? You have something in mind?\"\n\n\"The Elector's given his permission,\" I reply. \"As long as I'm in charge, he thinks we'll be good enough not to turn against the Republic.\" What a stupid fear, anyway. They still have my brother, don't they?\n\nA slow smile spreads on Pascao's face. \"Well. That sounds like it could be fun. What do you have in mind?\"\n\nI put my hands in my pockets and put my arrogant mask back on. \"What I've always been good at.\"\n\n51.5 HOURS SINCE MY FINAL CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS.\n\n15 HOURS SINCE I LAST SAW DAY.\n\n8 HOURS SINCE THE COLONIES' BOMBARDMENT OF DENVER'S ARMOR CAME TO A LULL.\n\nWE'RE ON THE ELECTOR'S PLANE HEADED TO ROSS City, Antarctica.\n\nI sit across from Anden. Ollie's lying at my feet. The other two Princeps-Elects are in an adjacent compartment, separated from us by glass (3 \u00d7 6 feet, bulletproof, Republic seal carved on the side facing me, judging from the edges of the cut). Outside the window, the sky is brilliant blue and a blanket of clouds pads the bottom of our view. Any minute now, we should feel the plane dip and see the sprawling Antarctican metropolis come into view.\n\nI've stayed quiet for most of the trip, listening on as Anden takes a stream of endless calls from Denver about the battle. Only when we're almost over Antarctican waters does he finally fall silent. I watch how the light plays on his features, contouring the young face that holds such world-weary thoughts.\n\n\"What's the history between us and Antarctica?\" I ask after a while. What I really want to say is, Do you think they'll help us? but that question is just silly small talk, impossible to answer and thus pointless to ask.\n\nAnden looks away from the window and fixes his bright green eyes on me. \"Antarctica gives us aid. We've taken international aid from them for decades. Our own economy isn't strong enough to stand on its own.\"\n\nIt still unsettles me that the nation I once believed so powerful is in reality struggling for survival. \"And what is our relationship with them now?\"\n\nAnden keeps his gaze steadily on me. I can see the tension in his eyes, but his face remains composed. \"Antarctica has promised to double their aid if we can draft a treaty that can get the Colonies talking with us again. And they've threatened to halve their aid if we don't have a treaty by the end of this year.\" He pauses. \"So we're visiting them not just to ask for help, but to try to persuade them not to withhold their aid.\"\n\nWe have to explain why everything has fallen apart. I swallow. \"Why Antarctica?\"\n\n\"They have a long rivalry with Africa,\" Anden replies. \"If anyone with power will help us win a war against the Colonies and Africa, it'll be them.\" He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. His gloved hands are a foot away from my legs. \"We'll see what happens. We owe them a lot of money, and they haven't been happy with us for the past few years.\"\n\n\"Has the President ever met you in person?\"\n\n\"Sometimes I visited with my father,\" Anden replies. He offers me a crooked smile that sends unexpected flutters through my stomach. \"He was a charmer during meetings. Do you think I have a chance?\"\n\nI smile back. I can sense the double meaning in his question; he's not just talking about Antarctica. \"You're charismatic, if that's what you're asking,\" I decide to say.\n\nAnden laughs a little. The sound warms me. He looks away and lowers his eyes. \"I haven't been very successful at charming anyone lately,\" he murmurs.\n\nThe plane dips. I turn my attention to my window and take a deep breath, fighting down the pink rising on my cheeks.\n\nThe clouds grow nearer as we descend, and soon we are engulfed in swirling gray mist; after a few minutes we emerge from their underbelly to see a massive stretch of land covered in a dense layer of high-rises that come in a wild assortment of bright colors. I suck in my breath at the sight. One look is all I need to confirm just how much of a technological and wealth gap there is between the Republic and Antarctica. A thin, transparent dome stretches across the city, but we pass right through it as easily as we sliced through the clouds. Each building appears to have the ability to change colors on a whim (two have already shifted from a pastel green to a deep blue, and one changes from gold to white), and each building looks brand-new, polished and flawless in a way that very few Republic buildings are. Enormous, elegant bridges connect many of the towering skyscrapers, brilliantly white under the sun, each one linking one building's floor to its adjacent building and forming a honeycomb-like web of ivory. The uppermost bridges have round platforms in their centers. When I look closer, I see what seem like aircraft parked on the platforms. (Another oddity: All of the high-rises have enormous silver holograms of numbers floating over their roofs, each ranging between zero and thirty thousand. I frown. Are they being beamed from a light at each rooftop? Perhaps they signify the population living in each skyscraper\u2014although if that were the case, thirty thousand seems like a relatively low ceiling given the size of each building.)\n\nOur pilot's voice rings out over the intercom to inform us of our landing. As the candy-colored buildings gradually fill our entire view, we zero in on one of the bridge platforms. Down below, I see people hurrying to prepare for our jet's landing. When we're finally hovering over the platform, an abrupt jolt jerks all of us sideways in our seats. Ollie lifts his head and growls.\n\n\"We're magnetically docked now,\" Anden tells me when he sees my startled expression. \"From here on out, our pilot doesn't need to do a thing. The platform itself will pull us down for the landing.\"\n\nWe touch down so smoothly that I don't feel a thing. As we step out of the plane along with our entourage of Senators and guards, I'm shocked first by how nice the temperature is outside. A cool breeze, the warmth of the sun. Aren't we at the bottom of the earth? (Seventy-two degrees is my assumption, southwest wind, a breeze surprisingly light considering how high up from ground level we are.) Then I remember the thin, substance-less dome we passed through. It might be a way the Antarcticans control the climate in their cities.\n\nSecondly, I'm shocked to see us immediately ushered into a plastic tent by a team of people in white biohazard suits and gas masks. (The news of the Colonies' plague must have spread here.) One of them quickly inspects my eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, and then runs a bright green light across my entire body. I wait in tense silence as the person (male or female? I can't be sure) analyzes the reading on a handheld device. From the corner of my eye, I can see Anden undergoing the same tests\u2014being the Republic's Elector does not apparently exempt one from being possibly contaminated with plague. It takes a good ten minutes before we are all cleared for entry and led out from under the tarp.\n\nAnden greets three Antarctican people (each dressed respectively in a green, black, or blue suit, cut in an unfamiliar style) waiting for us on the landing bridge with a few guards. \"I hope your flight went well,\" one of them says as Mariana, Serge, and I approach. She greets us in English, but her accent is thick and lush. \"If you prefer, we can send you home in one of our own jets.\"\n\nThe Republic is hardly perfect; that much I've known for a long time, and certainly ever since I met Day. But the Antarctican woman's words are so arrogant that I feel myself bristle. Apparently our Republic jets aren't good enough for them. I look at Anden to see what his reaction will be, but he simply bows his head and offers a beautiful smile to the woman. \" Gracias, Lady Medina. You are always so gracious,\" he replies. \"I'm very grateful for your offer, but I certainly don't want to impose. We'll make do.\"\n\nI can't help admiring Anden. Every day, I see new evidence of the burdens he shoulders.\n\nAfter some argument, I reluctantly let one of the guards take Ollie away to the hotel quarters where I'll be staying. Then we all fall into a quiet procession as the Antarcticans lead us off the platform and along the bridge toward the connecting building (colored scarlet, although I'm not sure if it's in honor of our landing). I make a point of walking close to the bridge's edge, so that I can look down at the city. For once, it takes me a while to count the floors (based on the bridges branching out from every floor, this building has over three hundred floors\u2014approximately three hundred twenty-seven, although eventually I look away to shake off a sense of vertigo). Sunlight bathes the uppermost floors, but the lower floors are also brightly illuminated; they must be simulating sunlight for those walking at ground level. I watch Anden and Lady Medina chat and laugh as if they are old friends. Anden falls so neatly into it that I can't tell whether he genuinely likes this woman or he is simply playing the role of an agreeable politician. Apparently our late Elector had at least trained his son well in international relations.\n\nThe building's bridge entrance, an archway framed with intricately carved swirls, slides open to greet us. We halt in a lavishly decorated lobby (thick ivory carpet that, to my fascination, bursts with swirls of color wherever I put my feet down; rows of potted palms; a curved glass wall displaying bright ads and what seem like interactive stations for things I don't understand). As we walk, the Antarcticans hand each of us a thin pair of glasses. Anden and many of the Senators immediately put them on as if they're used to this ritual, but the Antarcticans explain the glasses anyway. I wonder whether they know who I am, or whether they care. They certainly noticed my puzzlement at the glasses.\n\n\"Keep these on for the duration of your visit,\" Lady Medina tells us with her rich accent, although I know her words are directed at me. \"They will help you see Ross City as it really is.\"\n\nIntrigued, I put the glasses on.\n\nI blink in surprise. The first thing I feel is a subtle tickle in my ears, and the first thing I see are the small, glowing numbers hovering over the heads of each of the Antarcticans. Lady Medina has 28,627: LEVEL 29, while her two companions (who have yet to utter a sound) respectively have 8,819: LEVEL 11 and 11,201: LEVEL 13. When I look around the lobby, I notice all sorts of virtual numbers and words\u2014the green bulbous plant in the corner has WATER: +1 hovering over it, while CLEAN: +1 floats above a dark, half-circle side table. In the corner of my glasses, I see tiny, glowing words:" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\u2002JUNE IPARIS\n\n\u2002PRINCEPS-ELECT 3\n\n\u2002REPUBLIC OF AMERICA\n\n\u2002LEVEL 1\n\n\u2002SEPT. 22. 2132\n\n\u2002DAILY SCORE: 0\n\n\u2002CUMULATIVE SCORE: 0\n\nWe've started walking again. None of the others seem particularly concerned about the onslaught of virtual text and numbers layered over the real world, so I'm left to my own intuition. (Although the Antarcticans aren't wearing glasses, their eyes occasionally flicker to virtual things in the world in a way that makes me wonder whether they have something embedded in their eyes, or perhaps in their brains, that permanently simulates all of these virtual things for them.)\n\nOne of Lady Medina's two companions, a broad-shouldered, white-haired man with very dark eyes and golden-brown skin, walks slower than the others. Eventually he reaches me near the end of the procession and falls into step beside me. I tense up at his presence. When he speaks, though, his voice is low and kind. \"Miss June Iparis?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" I reply, bowing my head respectfully in the way Anden had done. To my surprise, I see the numbers in the corner of my glasses change:\n\n\u2002SEPT. 22. 2132\n\n\u2002DAILY SCORE: 1\n\n\u2002CUMULATIVE SCORE: 1\n\nMy mind spins. Somehow, the glasses must have recorded my bowing action and added a point to this Antarctican scoring system, which means bowing is equal to one point. This is also when I realize something else: When the white-haired man spoke, I heard absolutely no accent\u2014he's now speaking perfect English. I glance over to Lady Medina, and when I catch hints of what she's saying to Anden, I notice that her English now sounds impeccable too. The tickle I'd felt in my ears when I put on the glasses... maybe it's acting as some sort of language translation device, allowing the Antarcticans to revert to their native language while still communicating with us without missing a beat.\n\nThe white-haired man now leans over to me and whispers, \"I am Guardsman Makoare, one of Lady Medina's newer bodyguards. She has assigned me to be your guide, Miss Iparis, as it seems you are a stranger to our city. It's quite different from your Republic, isn't it?\"\n\nUnlike Lady Medina, the way Guardsman Makoare speaks has no condescension in it at all, and his question doesn't rub me the wrong way. \"Thank you, sir,\" I reply gratefully. \"And, yes, I have to admit that these virtual numbers I see all over the place are strange to me. I don't quite understand it.\"\n\nHe smiles and scratches at the white scruff on his chin. \"Life in Ross City is a game, and we are all its players. Native Antarcticans don't need glasses like you visitors do\u2014all of us have chips embedded near our temples once we turn thirteen. It's a piece of software that assigns points to everything around us.\" He gestures toward the plants. \"Do you see the words Water\u2014Plus One hovering over that plant?\" I nod. \"If you decided to water that plant, for example, you would receive one point for doing so. Almost every positive action you make in Ross City will earn you achievement points, while negative actions subtract points. As you accumulate points, you gain levels. Right now, you are at Level One.\" He pauses to point up at the virtual number floating over his head. \"I am at Level Thirteen.\"\n\n\"What's the point of reaching... levels?\" I ask as we leave the hall and step into an elevator. \"Does it determine your status in the city? Does it keep your civilians in line?\"\n\nGuardsman Makoare nods. \"You'll see.\"\n\nWe step out of the elevator and head out onto another bridge (this time it's covered with an arched glass roof) that connects this building to another. As we walk, I begin to see what Guardsman Makoare is talking about. The new building we enter looks like an enormous academy, and as we peer through glass panels into classrooms lined with rows of what must be students, I notice that all of them have their own point scores and levels hovering over their heads. At the front of the room, a giant glass screen displays a series of math questions, each with a glowing point score over them.\n\n\u2002CALCULUS SEMESTER 2\n\n\u2002Q1: 6 PTS\n\n\u2002Q2: 12 PTS\n\nAnd so on. At one point, I see one of the students attempt to lean over and cheat from a neighbor. The point score over his head flashes red, and a second later the number decreases by five.\n\n\u2002CHEATING: \u22125 PTS\n\n\u20021,642: LEVEL 3\n\nThe student freezes, then quickly returns to looking at his own exam.\n\nGuardsman Makoare smiles when he sees me analyzing the situation. \"Your level means everything in Ross City. The higher your level, the more money you make, the better jobs you can apply for, and the more respected you are. Our highest scorers are widely admired and quite famous.\" He points toward the back of the cheating student. \"As you can see, our citizens are so engrossed in this game of life that most of them know better than to do things that will decrease their scores. We have very little crime in Ross City as a result.\"\n\n\"Fascinating,\" I murmur, my eyes still glued to the classroom even as we reach the end of the hallway and head out onto another bridge. After a while, a new message pops up in the corner of my glasses.\n\n\u2002WALKED 1,000 METERS: +2 PTS\n\n\u2002DAILY SCORE: 3\n\n\u2002CUMULATIVE SCORE: 3\n\nTo my surprise, seeing the numbers go up gives me a brief thrill of accomplishment. I turn to Guardsman Makoare. \"I can understand how this leveling system is good motivation for your citizens. Brilliant.\" I don't say my next thought aloud, but secretly I wonder, How do they distinguish between good and bad actions? Who decides that? What happens when someone speaks out against the government? Does her score go up or down? I marvel at the technology available here\u2014it really makes clear, for the first time, exactly how far behind the Republic is. Have things always been so unequal? Were we ever the leaders?\n\nWe eventually settle inside a building with a large, semicircular chamber used for political meetings (\"The Discussion Room,\" Lady Medina calls it). It's lined with flags from countries around the world. In the chamber's center is a long, mahogany wood table, and now the Antarctican delegates sit on one side while we sit on the other. Two more delegates who are at similar levels as Lady Medina join us as we begin our talks, but it's a third delegate who catches my attention. He's in his midforties, with bronze hair and dark skin and a well-trimmed beard. The text hovering over his head reads LEVEL 202.\n\n\"President Ikari,\" Lady Medina says as she introduces him to us. Anden and the other Senators bow their heads respectfully. I do the same. Although I don't dare turn my eyes away from the discussion, I can see the Republic's flag in my peripheral vision. With my glasses I see the virtual text THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA above it in glowing letters. Right next to it is the Colonies flag, with its black and gray stripes and the bright gold bird in its center.\n\nSome of the other countries' flags have the word Ally hovering under their names. But we don't.\n\nFrom the beginning, our discussion is tense.\n\n\"It seems like your father's plans have backfired against you,\" the President tells Anden. He leans stiffly forward. \"The United Nations is, of course, concerned that Africa has already given aid to the Colonies. The Colonies declined an invitation to talk with us.\"\n\nAnden sighs. \"Our scientists are hard at work on a cure,\" he continues. I notice he doesn't mention Day's brother in all this, and Day's lack of cooperation. \"But the Colonies' forces are overwhelming with Africa's money and military supporting them. We need help to push them back, or we risk being overrun within the month. The virus could spread to us as well\u2014\"\n\n\"You speak with passion,\" the President interrupts. \"And I have no doubt that you're doing great things as the Republic's new leader. But a situation like this... The virus must first be contained. And I've heard the Colonies have already breached your borders.\"\n\nThe President's honey-gold eyes are piercingly bright. When Serge tries to speak up, he silences him immediately, never taking his eyes off Anden. \"Let your Elector respond,\" he says. Serge falls back into sullen silence, but not before I catch a smug look pass between the Senators. My temper rises. They\u2014the Senator, the Antarctican President, even Anden's own Princeps-Elect\u2014are all taunting Anden in their own subtle ways. Interrupting him. Emphasizing his age. I look at Anden, quietly willing him to stand up for himself. Mariana nods once at him.\n\n\"Sir?\" she says.\n\nI'm relieved when Anden first shoots a disapproving look at Serge, then lifts his chin and calmly replies. \"Yes. We've managed to hold them off for now, but they are right at the outskirts of our capital.\"\n\nThe President leans forward and rests his elbows on the table. \"So, there's a possibility that this virus has already crossed into your territory?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Anden replies.\n\nThe President is silent for a moment. Finally, he says, \"What exactly do you want?\"\n\n\"We need military support,\" Anden replies. \"Your army is the best in the world. Help us secure our borders. But most of all, help us find a cure. They've warned us that a cure is the only way they'll retreat. And we need time to make that happen.\"\n\nThe President tightens his lips and shakes his head once. \"No military support, money, or supplies. I'm afraid you're far too indebted to us for that. I can offer my scientists to help you find a cure for the disease. But I will not send my troops into an area infected with disease. It's too dangerous.\" When he sees the look on Anden's face, his eyes harden. \"Please keep us updated, as I hope as much as you do to see a resolution for this. I apologize that we can't be of more help to you, Elector.\"\n\nAnden leans on the table and laces his fingers together. \"What can I do to persuade you to help us, Mr. President?\" he says.\n\nThe President sits back in his chair and regards Anden for a moment with a thoughtful look. It chills me. He's been waiting for Anden to say this. \"You're going to have to offer me something worth my while,\" he finally says. \"Something your father never offered.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\"\n\n\"Land.\"\n\nMy heart twists painfully at those words. Giving up land. In order to save our country, we'll have to sell ourselves to another nation. Something about it feels as violating as selling our own bodies. Giving up your own child to a stranger. Tearing away a piece of our home. I look at Anden, trying to decipher the emotions behind his composed exterior.\n\nAnden stares at him for a long moment. Is he thinking about what his father would say in a situation like this? Is he wondering whether he's as good a leader to his people? Finally, Anden bows his head. Graceful, even in humility. \"I'm open to discussion,\" he says quietly.\n\nThe President nods once. I can see the small smile at the corners of his lips. \"Then we'll discuss,\" he replies. \"If you find a cure to this virus, and if we agree to the land, then I promise you military support. Until then, the world will have to deal with this as we do with any pandemic.\"\n\n\"And what do you mean by that, sir?\" Anden asks.\n\n\"We will need to seal your ports and borders, as well as the Colonies'. Other nations will need to be notified. I'm sure you understand.\"\n\nAnden's silent. I hope the President doesn't see the stricken look on my face. The entire Republic is going to be quarantined.\n\nJune's left for antarctica. Eden's gone to los angeles with the second wave of evacuees. The rest of us stay down in this bunker, listening as the Colonies' assault continues. This time the fighting sounds worse. Sometimes the earth trembles so much that fine dust rains down on us from the underground bunker's ceiling, coating lines of evacuees with gray ash as they hurry onto the waiting trains. Rotating lights over the tunnel paint us all in flashes of red. I wonder how other bunkers across the city are holding up. The evacuations grow more urgent as each train leaves on the hour and is replaced by a new one. Who knows how long this tunnel will stay stable. Now and then I see soldiers shoving civilians back into line when they get unruly. \"Single file!\" they bark out, hoisting their guns threateningly. Their faces are hidden behind riot masks that I know all too damn well. \"Dissidents will be left behind, no questions asked. Move along, people!\"\n\nI stay at one end of the bunker as the dust continues to rain down, huddled with Pascao, Tess, and the other remaining Patriots. At first a few soldiers tried to hustle me onto one of the trains, but they left me alone after I lashed out at them with a string of curses. Now they ignore me. I watch people load onto the train for a few seconds before I return to my conversation with Pascao. Tess sits beside me, although the unspoken tension between us makes her feel much farther away. My ever-present headache pounds a dull rhythm against the back of my head.\n\n\"You saw more of the city than I did,\" I whisper to Pascao. \"How do you think the Armor is holding up?\"\n\n\"Not great,\" Pascao responds. \"In fact, with another country helping the Colonies, I wouldn't be surprised if the Armor breaks down in a matter of days with this kind of assault. It's not gonna hold for long, trust me.\"\n\nI turn to see how many people are still waiting to board the trains. \"How should we go about throwing the Colonies some curve balls?\"\n\nAnother voice pipes up. It's one of the Hackers, Frankie, the girl with the wounded shoulder. \"If we can get our hands on a few electrobombs,\" she says in a thoughtful voice, \"I can probably rewire them to scramble some of the Colonies' weapons or something. We might be able to throw their jets off too.\"\n\nJets. That's right\u2014Anden had mentioned the Colonies jets parked on a makeshift airfield outside the Armor's walls. \"I can get my hands on some,\" I whisper. \"And some grenades too.\"\n\nPascao clicks his tongue in excitement. \"So we get to have fun with nitroglycerine in your plan? You get on that, then.\" He turns to address Baxter, who shoots me a cranky glare. His ear looks as mangled as ever. \"Hey, Baxter boy. Back up Gioro and Frankie, make sure you give them cover while they're working their magic.\"\n\n\"Pascao,\" I say quietly. \"You up for some decoy work?\"\n\nHe laughs. \"It's what Runners are best at, yeah?\"\n\n\"Let's play with them a little\u2014I want you to be my double while I'm heading toward their makeshift airfield.\"\n\n\"Sounds promising.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Despite the grimness of the situation, I smile. A note of haughtiness creeps into my voice. \"This night'll end with a bunch of expensive, useless military machines.\"\n\n\"You're out of your mind, blinder boy,\" Baxter snaps at me. \"The Republic itself can't even keep the Colonies out\u2014you think our little group stands a chance at beating them?\"\n\n\"We don't need to beat them. All we need to do is stall them. And I'm pretty sure we're good at that.\"\n\nBaxter lets out a loud snort of irritation\u2014but Pascao's grin grows wider. Next to me, Tess shifts uncomfortably. She's probably thinking back on my past crimes, how she'd had to witness them all and how she'd had to bandage me up after every single one. Maybe she's worried about me. Or maybe she's glad. Maybe she'd rather me not be here at all. But she had come back here because of me. That's what she said, isn't it? She must still care, at least on some level. I try to think of the right thing to say to her to fill this awkward silence, but instead I question the others. \"You told me back in the room that you guys came back here because you wanted to be pardoned. But you could've tried escaping to a country other than the Republic, yeah? You wouldn't even have to help the Republic out. Anden\u2014the Elector, that is\u2014he would've pardoned you all anyway.\" My eyes fall on Pascao. \"You knew that, didn't you? Why'd you all really come back here? I know it's not just because you heard my plea.\"\n\nPascao's grin fades, and for a moment he actually looks serious. He sighs, then gazes around at our little group. It's hard to believe they used to be a part of something so much larger. \"We're the Patriots, right?\" he finally says. \"We're supposed to be committed to seeing the United States return in some way or other. With the way things seem to be in the Colonies, I don't know if they'd be the right ones to bring that kinda change about. But I gotta admit, the new Republic Elector has potential, and after what Razor pulled on us, even I think Anden might be the answer we've been waiting for.\" Pascao pauses to nod at Baxter, who just shrugs. \"Even Baxter boy here thinks so.\"\n\nI frown. \"So you guys came back here because you genuinely want to help the Republic win this war? You seriously want to help us defend ourselves?\" Pascao nods again. \"Why didn't you say that back in the room? Would've sounded pretty noble.\"\n\n\"No, it wouldn't.\" Pascao shakes his head. \"They wouldn't have believed us. The Patriots, the terrorists who used to blow up Republic soldiers every chance they got? Yeah, right. I figured it'd be better for us if we played the pardon card instead. It'd seem like a more realistic answer for your Elector and your little Princeps-Elect.\"\n\nI stay silent. When Pascao sees me hesitate, he dusts off his hands and stands up. \"Let's get started,\" he says to me. \"No time to waste, not with this hailstorm happening upstairs.\" He motions for the other Patriots to gather around and starts divvying up their individual tasks. I rise to a crouch.\n\nTess takes a deep breath, and when she catches my gaze again, she speaks to me for the first time since being in the room together. \"I'm sorry, Day.\" She says it softly, so that the others can't hear.\n\nI freeze where I am, resting my elbows on my crouched legs. \"Why?\" I reply. \"You don't have anything to be sorry for.\"\n\n\"Yes, I do.\" Tess looks away. How did she grow up so quickly? She's still thin, still delicate, but her eyes belong to someone older than I remember. \"I didn't mean to leave you behind, and I didn't mean to blame June for everything. I don't really believe she's bad. I never really believed that. I was just so... angry.\"\n\nHer face pulls me to her like it always does, the way it did all the way back when I first saw her digging around in that dumpster. I wish I could hug her, but I sit back and wait, letting her make the call. \"Tess...,\" I say slowly, trying to figure out the best way to express what I'm feeling. Hell, I've said so many stupid things to her in the past. \"I love you. No matter what happens between us.\"\n\nTess wraps her arms around her knees. \"I know.\"\n\nI swallow hard and look down. \"But I don't love you the way you want me to. I'm sorry if I ever gave you the wrong impression. I don't think I've ever treated you as well as you deserve.\" My heart twists painfully as the words leave my mouth, striking her as they go. \"So don't be sorry. It's my fault, not yours.\"\n\nTess shakes her head. \"I know you don't love me that way. Don't you think I know that by now?\" A note of bitterness enters her voice. \"But you don't know how I feel about you. No one does.\"\n\nI give her a level look. \"Tell me, then.\"\n\n\"Day, you mean more to me than some crush.\" Her brows furrow as she tries to explain herself. \"When the entire world turned its back on me and left me to die, you took me in. You were the one person who cared about what might happen to me. You were everything. Everything. You became my entire family\u2014you were my parents and my siblings and my caretaker, my only friend and companion, you were both my protector and someone who needed protecting. You see? I didn't love you in the way you might've thought I did, although I can't deny that was part of it. But the way I feel goes beyond that.\"\n\nI open my mouth to reply, but nothing comes out. I don't know what to say. All I can do is see.\n\nTess lets out a shaky breath. \"So when I thought June might take you away, I didn't know what to do. I felt like she was taking everything that mattered to me. I felt like she was taking away from you all the things that I didn't have.\" She lowers her eyes. \"That's why I'm sorry. I'm sorry because you shouldn't have to be everything to me. I had you, but I'd forgotten that I had myself too.\" She pauses to look over at the Patriots, who are deep in conversation. \"It's a new feeling, something I'm still getting used to.\"\n\nAnd just like that, we're both kids again. I see the younger us, dangling our feet over the edge of some broken high-rise, watching the sun dip every evening below the ocean's horizon. How much we've seen since then, how far we've come.\n\nI reach over to tap her nose once, just like how I always have. She smiles for the first time.\n\nThe night has transitioned into the early hour before dawn, and the drizzle and slush has finally paused, leaving the city glistening under the moonlight. The evacuation alarm still echoes every now and then, and the JumboTrons continue their ominous red warning to seek cover, but a brief lull has hit the battle and the skies aren't full of jets and explosions. Guess both sides have to rest up or something. I rub the weariness from my eyes and try to ignore my headache\u2014I could use some rest.\n\n\"It's not gonna be easy, you know,\" Pascao whispers to me as we both survey the morning. \"They're probably on the lookout for Republic soldiers.\" We're perched on top of the Armor, watching the field just beyond the city's boundaries. It's not like people don't live outside the Armor, but unlike LA, which is just one large spread of buildings that melts right into its neighboring cities, Denver's population is sparser outside the safety of its walls. Small clusters of buildings sit here and there. They seem empty, and I wonder if the Republic saw the Colonies approaching from a distance and evacuated their people inside the Armor. Although the Colonies' Airships have returned back to their own land in order to refuel, they've left a bunch of jets in the fields, and the areas they've occupied are well lit with floodlights. I'm kind of shocked by how repulsed I am at the thought of the Colonies taking us over. A year ago, I would be cheering at the top of my goddy lungs for this exact scenario. But now I just hear the Colonies' slogan over and over in my head. A free state is a corporate state. The ads I remember from their cities make me shiver.\n\nIt's hard to decide which I prefer, really: watch my brother grow up under the Colonies' rule, or watch him taken back for experimentation by the Republic?\n\n\"Yeah, they'll be on the lookout,\" I agree. Then I turn away from the Armor's edge and start making my way down the wall. Along the Armor's outer edge, Republic jets lie parked, manned, and ready. \"But we're not Republic soldiers. If they can hit us with a surprise attack, then so can we.\"\n\nPascao and I are dressed exactly alike, in black from head to toe, with masks pulled over our faces. If it weren't for a little height difference, I don't think anyone would be able to tell us apart.\n\n\"You two ready?\" Pascao mutters into his mike to our Hackers. Then he glances at me and gives a thumbs-up signal. If they're in place, then that means Tess is in place too. Stay safe.\n\nWe make our way down to the ground and then let several Republic soldiers guide us around to a small, discreet underground passage. It leads outside the Armor and into dangerous territory. The soldiers nod a silent \"good luck\" to us before retreating back inside. I hope to hell this all works.\n\nI look out at the field where Colonies jets are parked. When I first turned fifteen, I had set fire to a series of ten brand-new F-472 Republic fighter jets parked at the Burbank air force base in Los Angeles. It was the first stunt that landed me at the top of the most wanted list, and one of the crimes June herself actually made me confess to when I'd been arrested. I did it by first stealing gallons of highly explosive blue nitroglide from air force bases, then pouring the liquid into the jets' exhaust nozzles and across the tail end of the jets. The instant their engines turned on, their tails exploded into flames.\n\nThe memory comes back to me in sharp focus. The design of the Colonies jets looks different, with their strange, forward-swept wings, but at the end of the day they're still just machines. And this time, I'm not working alone. I've got the Republic's support. Most importantly, I've got their explosives.\n\n\"Ready to make your move?\" I whisper to Pascao. \"Got your bombs?\"\n\n\"You think I'd forget to bring bombs? You should know me better than that.\" Pascao's voice turns taunting. \"Day\u2014no bull this time. Got it, pretty boy? If you suddenly think you wanna go rogue, you sure as hell better tell me first. Then at least I'll have time to sock you in the face.\"\n\nI smile a little at the jab. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\nOur outfits blend us into the shadows. We creep forward without a sound, until we're past the short distance where the Armor's guns could protect us from the ground. Now we're out of range, and the Colonies' makeshift airfield looks within reach. Their soldiers stand guard along the edges of the field. Not far away are a couple rows of tanks. Their Airships might not be here, but there sure as hell are enough war machines to start up another battle.\n\nPascao and I crouch behind a pile of rubble near the airfield. All I can see in this light is his silhouette. He nods his head once before whispering something into his mike.\n\nWe wait for a few tense seconds. Then the JumboTrons that line the outer edges of the Armor light up in unison. Displayed across the screens is a Republic flag, and over the city's loudspeakers, the pledge blares out across the night. The whole thing looks exactly like one of the Republic's typical propaganda reels\u2014the JumboTrons start displaying generic videos of patriotic soldiers and civilians, war victories and prosperous streets. At the airfield, the soldiers' attention shifts to the JumboTrons' feed. At first they look alert and wary, but as the reel continues for a few seconds longer, the Colonies soldiers relax.\n\nGood. They think the Republic's just broadcasting morale-boosting video. Nothing weird enough to put the Colonies on high alert, but something entertaining enough to hold their interest. I pick out an area where the soldiers are all watching the JumboTrons, then nod at Pascao. He motions at me. My turn to head out.\n\nI squint harder to see where I can squeeze onto the airfield. There are four Colonies soldiers here, all of them focused on the broadcast; a soldier dressed like a pilot is the farthest away and has his back to me, and from here it looks like he's making fun of the broadcast with a pal of his. I wait until all of the guards are looking away from where I am. Then I scamper over the edge without a sound and hide behind the closest jet's back landing wheel. I tuck myself into a tight ball, letting my black outfit blend me in with the shadows.\n\nOne of the guards looks casually over his shoulder toward the jet. When he doesn't see anything interesting, though, he returns to surveying the Armor.\n\nI wait for a few more seconds. Then I adjust my backpack and climb up inside the jet's exhaust nozzle. My heart pounds with anticipation at the d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu this gives me. I waste no time now\u2014I pull a small metal cube out of my pack and attach it firmly to the inside of the nozzle. Its display panel gives off a very faint red glow, so dim I can barely see it. I make sure it's secure, and then shift to the edge of the nozzle. We won't have much longer before the guards lose interest in our little propaganda distraction. When the coast's clear, I hop out of the nozzle. My cushioned boots land without a sound. I melt back into the shadows cast by the jet's landing gear, watch for guards, and move to the next row of jets. Pascao should be doing the exact same work on the other side of the field. If this all goes down as planned, then one explosive per row should do plenty of damage.\n\nBy the time I make my way to the third row of jets and finish my work there, I'm soaked in sweat. Off in the distance, the JumboTrons' propaganda keeps running, but I can tell that some of the guards have already lost interest. Time to get out of here. I lower myself silently toward the ground again, dangle there in the shadows, and then pick the right moment to drop and rush toward the darkness.\n\nExcept it wasn't really the right moment. One of my hands slips and the metal edge of the exhaust nozzle slices my palm open. My weakened body doesn't land perfectly\u2014I let out a grunt of pain and move too slowly into the landing gear's shadows. A guard spots me. Before I can stop him, his eyes widen and he lifts his gun at me.\n\nHe hasn't even had a chance to shout out when a shining knife comes flying out of the darkness and sinks itself in the soldier's neck. I watch for an instant, horrified. Pascao. I know it was him, saving my ass while drawing attention to himself. Already a couple of shouts have gone up on the other side of the airfield. He's pulling their focus away from me. I seize the opportunity, racing into the relative safety of the land outside the airfield.\n\nI click my mike on and call Pascao. \"Are you safe?\" I whisper urgently.\n\n\"Safe as you, pretty boy,\" he hisses back, the sounds of heavy breathing and footsteps loud in my earpiece. \"Just got out of the airfield's range. Give Frankie the okay\u2014I gotta shake two more off my tail.\" He hangs up.\n\nI contact Frankie. \"We're ready,\" I tell her. \"Let 'em go.\"\n\n\"You got it,\" Frankie answers. The JumboTrons suddenly stop their reel and go dark\u2014the sound blasting across the city cuts short, plunging us all into an eerie silence. Colonies soldiers who'd probably been pursuing Pascao now look up at the blank JumboTrons in bewilderment, along with the others.\n\nA few seconds of silence pass.\n\nThen a bright, blinding explosion rips apart the center of the airfield. I steady myself. When I look back at the first line of soldiers on the street, I see them knocked off their feet and picking themselves slowly up in a daze. Sparks of electricity fill the air, jumping frantically back and forth between the jets. Soldiers farther down the street point their guns up at the buildings, firing randomly\u2014but the ones along the front line discover that their guns no longer work. I keep running back toward the Armor.\n\nAnother explosion rocks the same area and an enormous golden haze engulfs everything in sight. Shouts of panic rise from the Colonies troops. They can't see what's happening, but I know that right now each bomb we'd planted is destroying the rows of jets, both crippling them and temporarily disabling the magnets in their guns. Some of them pull out their guns and fire randomly into the darkness, as if Republic soldiers are lying in wait. I guess they're not entirely wrong. Right on cue, the Republic jets along the Armor take off into the sky. Their roars deafen me.\n\nI switch my mike back to Frankie. \"How are the evacuations going?\"\n\n\"As smoothly as possible,\" she replies. \"Probably two more waves of people left. Ready for your big moment?\"\n\n\"Go for it,\" I whisper back.\n\nThe JumboTrons flare to life. This time, though, they're displaying my painted face on all of their screens. A prerecorded video we made. I smile widely for the Colonies, even as they scramble to what jets they still have, and in this instant, I feel like I'm looking into the face of a stranger, a face that's unfamiliar and terrifying behind its wide black stripe. For a moment, I can't even remember recording this video in the first place. The thought makes me scramble for the memory in a panic, until I finally recall it and breathe a sigh of relief. \"My name is Day,\" my JumboTron video self says, \"and I'm fighting for the Republic's people. If I were you, I'd be a little more careful.\"\n\nFrankie cuts my feed again. Overhead, the Republic's jets scream across the sky\u2014I see orange fireballs light up the airfield. With our stunt and half their jets gone, and the advantage of surprise, the Colonies soldiers scramble for a retreat. I bet the calls going back to their command are flying fast and furious now.\n\nFrankie comes back online. She sounds elated. \"The Republic's troops have gotten wind of our success,\" she says. In the background, I hear\u2014to my relief\u2014Pascao's line click on too. \"Nice job, Runners. Gioro and Baxter are already on their way.\" She sounds distracted. \"We're heading back in now. Gimme a few seconds, and we'll be\u2014\"\n\nShe cuts off. I blink, surprised. \"Frankie?\" I say, reconnecting to her. Nothing. All I hear is static.\n\n\"Where'd she go?\" Pascao says through the white noise. \"Did she go offline for you too?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" I scramble onward, trying not to think the worst. The safety of the Armor isn't far away\u2014I can make out the tiny side entrance we're supposed to return through\u2014and here, in the midst of all the chaos, I see several Republic soldiers rushing through the dust to face off against any Colonies troops that might have followed us. Just a few yards from the door now.\n\nA bullet sparks past me, narrowly missing my ear. Then I hear a scream that makes my blood run cold. When I whirl around, I see Tess and Frankie running behind me. They're leaning on each other. Behind them must be five or six Colonies soldiers. I freeze, then quickly change course. I yank a knife from my belt and throw it at the soldiers as hard as I can. It catches one of them clean in the side\u2014he drops to his knees. The others notice me. Tess and Frankie barely make it to the door. I dash toward them. Behind me, the soldiers hoist their guns.\n\nJust as Tess pushes Frankie through the entrance, a soldier steps out of the shadows near the door. I recognize him instantly. It's Thomas, a gun dangling from one hand.\n\nHis eyes are fixed on Tess and me, and his expression is dark, deadly, and furious. For an instant, the world seems to go silent. I glance at his gun. He hoists it. No. Instinctively, I move toward Tess, shielding her with my body. He's going to kill us.\n\nBut even as this thought races through my mind, Thomas turns his back on us, facing the oncoming Colonies soldiers instead. His hand quivers with rage and tightens on the gun. Shock pulses through me, but there's no time to think about that now. \"Go,\" I urge Tess. We stumble through the side door.\n\nIn that same moment, Thomas raises his gun\u2014he fires one shot, then another, then another. He lets out a bloodcurdling yell as each bullet hurtles toward the enemy troops. It takes me a second to make out what he's screaming.\n\n\"Long live the Elector! Long live the Republic!\"\n\nHe manages six shots before the Colonies soldiers return fire. I hug Tess to my chest, then cover her eyes. She lets out a cry of protest. \"Don't look,\" I whisper in her ear. At that very moment, I see Thomas's head snap violently back and his entire body go limp. An image of my mother flashes before my eyes.\n\nShot through the head. He's been shot through the head. Death by firing squad.\n\nThe blast makes Tess jump\u2014she utters a strangled sob behind my shielding hands. The door swings shut.\n\nPascao greets us the instant we're safely through. He's covered head to toe in dust, but he still has a half grin on his face. \"The final evacuation wave is waiting for us,\" he says, nodding toward two parked jeeps ready to take us back to the bunker. Republic soldiers have already started toward us, but before any of us can feel relieved, I notice that Frankie has collapsed to the ground and Tess is hovering over her. Pascao's half grin vanishes. As soldiers seal off the side entrance, we gather around Frankie. Tess pulls out a kit of supplies. Frankie has started to convulse.\n\nHer coat's stripped completely off, revealing a blood-soaked shirt beneath. Her eyes are open wide in shock, and she's struggling to breathe.\n\n\"She was shot as we were getting away,\" Tess says as she tears away the cloth of Frankie's shirt. Sweat beads along her brow. \"Three or four times.\" Her trembling hands fly across Frankie's body, scattering powder and pressing ointment into the wounds. When she's done, she yanks out a thick wad of bandages.\n\n\"She's not gonna make it,\" Pascao mutters to Tess as she pushes him out of the way and pushes firmly down on one of Frankie's gushing wounds. \"We have to move. Now.\"\n\nTess wipes her brow. \"Just give me another minute,\" she insists through gritted teeth. \"We have to control the bleeding.\"\n\nPascao starts to protest, but I silence him with a dangerous look. \"Let her do it.\" Then I kneel beside Tess, my eyes helplessly drawn to Frankie's pitiful figure. I can tell that she's not going to make it. \"I'll do whatever you say,\" I murmur to Tess. \"Let us help.\"\n\n\"Keep pressure on her wounds,\" Tess replies, waving a hand at the bandages that are already more red than white. She rushes to make a poultice.\n\nFrankie's eyelids flutter. She chokes out a strangled cry, then manages to look up at us. \"You've\u2014got\u2014to go. The Colonies\u2014they're\u2014coming\u2014\"\n\nIt takes a whole minute for her to die. Tess keeps applying meds for a while longer, until I finally put a hand over hers to stop her. I look up at Pascao. One of the Republic soldiers approaches us again and gives us a stern frown. \"This is your final warning,\" he says, gesturing toward the open doors of two jeeps. \"We're heading out.\"\n\n\"Go,\" I tell Pascao. \"We'll take the jeep right behind you.\"\n\nPascao hesitates for a second, stricken at the sight of Frankie, but then hops to his feet and disappears into the first jeep. It tears away, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake.\n\n\"Come on,\" I urge Tess, who stays hunched over Frankie's lifeless body. On the other side of the Armor, the sounds of battle rage. \"We have to go.\"\n\nTess wrenches free of my grasp and flings her roll of bandages hard at the wall. Then she turns to look back at Frankie's ashen face. I stand up, forcing Tess to do the same. My bloody hand leaves prints on her arm. Soldiers grab both of us and lead us toward the remaining jeep. As we finally make our way inside, Tess turns her eyes up to mine. They're brimming with tears, and the sight of her anguish breaks my heart. We pull away from the Armor as soldiers load Frankie onto a truck. Then we turn a corner and speed toward the bunker.\n\nBy the time we arrive, Pascao's jeep has already unloaded and they've headed down to the train. The soldiers are tense. As they clear us past the bunker entrance's chain-link fence, another explosion from the Armor sends tremors through the ground. As if in a dream, we rush down the metal staircase and through the corridors flooded with dim red lights, the sound of pounding boots echoing dully from outside. Farther and farther down we go, until we finally reach the bunker and make our way onto the waiting train. Soldiers pull us on board.\n\nAs the subway flares to life and we pull away from the bunker, a series of explosions reverberate through the space, nearly knocking us off our feet. Tess clings to me. As I hold her close, the tunnel behind us collapses, encasing us in darkness. We speed along. Echoes of the explosions ring through the earth.\n\nMy headache flares up.\n\nPascao tries to say something to me, but I can no longer hear him. I can't hear anything. The world around me dulls into grays, and I feel myself spinning. Where are we again? Somewhere, Tess screams out my name\u2014but I don't know what she says after that, because I lose myself in an ocean of pain and collapse into blackness.\n\n2100 HOURS.\n\nROOM 3323, LEVEL INFINITY HOTEL, ROSS CITY.\n\nAll of us have settled into our individual hotel rooms. Ollie's resting at the foot of my bed, completely knocked out after an exhausting day. I can't imagine falling asleep, though. After a while, I get up quietly, leave three treats for Ollie near the door, and step out. I wander the halls with my virtual glasses tucked into my pocket, relieved to see the world as it really is again without the onslaught of hovering numbers and words. I don't know where I'm going, but eventually I end up two floors higher and not far from Anden's room. It's quieter up here. Anden might be the only one staying on this floor, along with a few guards.\n\nAs I go, I pass a door that leads into a large chamber that must be some public, central room on this floor. I turn back and peer inside. The place looks whitewashed, probably because I don't have my virtual glasses on and can't see all the simulations; the room is partitioned into a series of tall cylinder-like booths, each one a circle of tall, transparent slabs of glass. Interesting. I have one of those cylinder booths in a corner of my hotel room, although I haven't bothered trying it yet. I look around the hall, then push gingerly on the door. It slides open without a sound.\n\nI step inside and as soon as the door slides shut behind me, the room declares something in Antarctican that I can't understand. I take my virtual glasses out of my pocket and put them on. Automatically, the room's voice brightens and repeats her phrase, this time in English. \"Welcome to the simulation room, June Iparis.\" I see my virtual score go up by ten points, congratulating me for using a simulation room for the very first time. Just as I suspected, the room now looks bright and full of colors, and the glass walls of the cylindrical rooms have all sorts of moving displays on them.\n\nYour access to the portal away from home! one panel says. Use in conjunction with your virtual glasses for a fully immersive experience. Behind the text is a lush video depicting what look like beautiful scenes from around the world. I wonder whether their portal is their way of connecting to the Internet. Suddenly, my interest piques. I've never browsed the Internet outside of the Republic, never seen the world for what it was without the Republic's masks and filters. I approach one of the glass cylinder booths and step inside. The glass around me lights up.\n\n\"Hello, June,\" it says. \"What can I find for you?\"\n\nWhat should I look up? I decide to try out the first thing that pops into my head. I hesitantly reply, wondering whether it'll just read my voice. \"Daniel Altan Wing,\" I say. How much does the rest of the world know about Day?\n\nSuddenly everything around me vanishes. Instead, I'm standing in a white circle with hundreds\u2014thousands\u2014of hovering rectangular screens all around me, each one covered with images and videos and text. At first I don't know what to do, so I just stay where I am, staring in wonder at the images all around me. Each screen has different info on Day. Many of them are news articles. The one closest to me is playing an old video of Day standing on top of the Capitol Tower balcony, rousing the people to support Anden. When I look at it long enough (three seconds), a voice starts talking. \"In this video, Daniel Altan Wing\u2014also known as Day\u2014gives his support to the Republic's new Elector and prevents a national uprising. Source: The Republic of America's public archives. See whole article?\"\n\nMy eyes flicker to another screen, and the voice from the first screen fades. This second screen comes to life as I look on, playing a video interviewing some girl I don't know, with light brown skin and pale hazel eyes. She sports a scarlet streak in her hair. She says, \"I've lived in Nairobi for the past five years, but we'd never heard of him until videos of his strikes against the R-oh-A started popping up online. Now I belong to a club\u2014\" The video pauses there, and the same soothing voice from earlier says, \"Source: Kenya Broadcasting Corporation. See whole video?\"\n\nI take a careful step forward. Each time I move, the rectangular screens rearrange around me to showcase the next circle of images for me to peruse. Images of Day pop up from when he and I were still working for the Patriots\u2014I see one blurry image of Day looking over his shoulder, a smirk on his lips. It makes me blush, so I quickly glance away. I look through two more rounds of them, then decide to change my search. This time I search for something I've always been curious about. \"The United States of America,\" I say.\n\nThe screens with videos and images of Day vanish, leaving me strangely disappointed. A new set of screens flip up around me, and I can almost feel a slight breeze as they shift into place. The first thing that pops up is an image that I instantly recognize as the full flag that the Patriots both use and base their symbol on. The voiceover says, \"The flag of the former United States of America. Source: Wikiversity, the Free Academy. United States History One-oh-two, Grade Eleven. See full entry? For textual version, say 'Text.'\"\n\n\"See full entry,\" I say. The screen zooms in toward me, engulfing me in its contents. I blink, momentarily thrown off by the rushing images. When I open my eyes again, I nearly stumble. I'm hovering in the sky over a landscape that looks both familiar and strange. The outline of it appears to be some version of North America, except there's no lake stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and the Colonies' territory looks much larger than I remember. Clouds float by below my feet. When I reach a hesitant foot down, I smudge part of the clouds and can actually feel the cool air whistling beneath my shoes.\n\nThe voiceover begins. \"The United States of America\u2014also known as the USA, the United States, the US, America, and the States\u2014was a prominent country in North America composed of fifty states held together as a federal constitutional republic. It first declared independence from England on July 4, 1776, and became recognized on September 3, 1783. The United States unofficially split into two countries on October 1, 2054 and officially became the western Republic of America and the eastern Colonies of America on March 14, 2055.\"\n\nHere the voiceover pauses, then shifts. \"Skip to a subtopic? Popular subtopics: the Three-Year Flood, the Flood of 2046, the Republic of America, the Colonies of America.\"\n\nA series of bright blue markers appear over the west and east coasts of North America. I stare at them for a moment, my heart pounding, before I reach out and try to touch a marker near the southern coastline of the Colonies. To my surprise, I can feel the texture of the landscape under my finger. \"The Colonies of America,\" I say.\n\nThe world rushes up at me with dizzying speed. I'm now standing on what feels like solid ground, and all around me are thousands of people huddled together in makeshift shelters in a flooded cityscape, while hundreds are launching an all-out attack against soldiers decked out in uniforms I don't recognize. Behind the soldiers are crates and sacks of what look like rations.\n\n\"Unlike the Republic of America,\" the voiceover starts, \"where the government enforced rule through martial law in order to crack down on the influx of refugees into its borders, the Colonies of America formed on March 14, 2055 after corporations seized control of the federal government (the former United States, see higher index) following the latter's failure to handle debt accumulated from the Flood of 2046.\" I take a few steps forward\u2014it's as if I'm right here in the middle of the scene, standing just a few dozen feet from where the people are rioting. My surroundings look shaky and pixelated, as if rendered from someone's personal videos. \"In this civilian recording, the city of Atlanta stages a fifteen-day riot against the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency. Similar riots appeared in all eastern cities over the course of three months, after which the cities declared loyalty to the military corporation DesCon, which possessed funds the beleaguered government did not.\"\n\nThe scene blurs and clears, placing me in the center of an enormous campus full of buildings, each displaying a symbol I recognize as the DesCon logo. \"Along with twelve other corporations, DesCon contributed its funds to aid the civilians. By early 2058, the United States government ceased to exist altogether in the east and was replaced with the Colonies of America, formed by a coalition of the country's top thirteen corporations and bolstered by their joint profits. After a series of mergers, the Colonies of America now consists of four ruling corporations: DesCon, Cloud, Meditech, and Evergreen. Skip to a specific corporation?\"\n\nI stay silent, watching the rest of the immersive video unfold until it finally pauses on the last frame, an unsettling image of a desperate civilian shielding his face from a soldier's hoisted gun. Then I remove my virtual glasses, rub my eyes, and step out of the now-blank and sterile-looking glass cylinder. My footsteps echo in the empty chamber. I feel dizzy and numb from the sudden lack of moving images.\n\nHow can two countries with such radically different philosophies ever reunite? What hope do we possibly have of transforming the Republic and the Colonies into what they once were? Or perhaps they're not as drastically different as I think they are. Aren't the Colonies' corporations and the Republic's government really the same thing? Absolute power is absolute power, no matter what it's called. Isn't it?\n\nI exit the chamber, lost in thought, and as I turn the corner to head to my room, I almost bump right into Anden.\n\n\"June?\" he blurts out when he sees me. His wavy hair is slightly disheveled, as if he's been raking his hands through it, and his collar shirt is crumpled, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and the buttons near his neck undone. He manages to compose himself enough to offer me a smile and a bow. \"What are you doing up here?\"\n\n\"Just exploring.\" I return his smile. I'm too tired to mention all my online research. \"I'm not sure what I'm doing here, to be honest.\"\n\nAnden laughs softly. \"Me either. I've been wandering the halls for over an hour.\" We pause for a moment. Then he turns back in the direction of his suite and gives me a questioning look. \"The Antarcticans won't help us, but they've been kind enough to send a bottle of their best wine up to my room. Care to have a sip? I could use some company\u2014and some advice.\"\n\nAdvice from his lowliest Princeps-Elect? I fall into step with him, all too aware of the closeness between us. \"How very polite of them,\" I reply.\n\n\"Exceedingly polite,\" he murmurs under his breath so that I can barely hear him. \"Next they'll be throwing us a parade.\"\n\nAnden's suite is nicer, of course, than my own\u2014at least the Antarcticans did him that courtesy. A curved glass window runs along half of the wall, giving us a breathtaking view of Ross City engulfed in thousands of twinkling lights. The Antarcticans must be simulating this nightfall too, considering how it's supposed to be summer down here\u2014but the simulation seems flawless. I think back on the dome-like film we passed through as we descended into the city. Maybe it acts like a giant screen too. Streaks dance quietly across the sky in sheets of breathtaking color, turquoise and magenta and gold, all of them swirling together and vanishing and reappearing against a backdrop of stars. I catch my breath. Must be imitating the aurora australis. I'd read about these southern lights during our weekly lessons, although I hadn't expected them to look this beautiful, simulation or not.\n\n\"Nice view,\" I say.\n\nAnden grins wryly, a small spark of amusement shining through his otherwise weary mood. \"The useless advantages of being the Republic's Elector,\" he replies. \"I've been reassured that we can see through this glass, but that no one from outside can see us. Then again, perhaps they're just messing with me.\"\n\nWe settle into soft chairs near the window. Anden pours us both glasses of wine. \"One of the accused guards confessed about Commander Jameson,\" he says as he hands a glass to me. \"Republic soldiers unhappy with my rule, paid off by the Colonies. The Colonies is taking advantage of Commander Jameson's knowledge of our military. She might even still be within our borders.\"\n\nI sip my wine numbly. So, it was all true. I desperately wish I could go back in time to when I'd visited Thomas in his cell, that I could have noticed the unusual setup in time. And she could still be within our borders. Where is Thomas?\n\n\"Rest assured,\" Anden says when he sees my expression, \"that we're doing everything we can to find her.\"\n\nEverything we can might not be enough. Not with our attention and soldiers spread out so thin, trying to fight a war on so many sides. \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"We return to the Republic tomorrow morning,\" he replies. \"That's what we do. And we'll push the Colonies back without the Antarcticans' help.\"\n\n\"Are you really going to give up some of our land to them?\" I ask after a pause.\n\nAnden swirls the wine in his glass before taking a sip. \"I haven't turned them down yet,\" he says. I can hear the disgust with himself in his voice. His father must've seen such a move as the ultimate betrayal of his country.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" I say quietly, unsure how to console him.\n\n\"I'm sorry too. The good news is I've received word that Day and his brother have both successfully evacuated to Los Angeles.\" He exhales a long breath. \"I don't want to force him into anything, but I might be running out of options. He's keeping his word, you know. He'd agreed to help us in any way he could, short of giving up his brother. He's trying to help, in the hopes that it'll guilt me out of asking for Eden. I wish we'd brought him. I wish he could see the situation from my point of view.\" He looks down.\n\nMy heart squeezes again at the thought of Day being killed in action, and settles in relief at the news that he has survived unscathed. \"What if we persuade the Antarcticans to take Day in for his treatment? It might be his only chance at surviving his illness, and it might at least make him consider the risk of letting Eden undergo experimentation.\"\n\nAnden shakes his head. \"We have nothing to bargain with. Antarctica has offered as much help to us as they're willing. They won't trouble themselves with taking in one of our patients.\"\n\nDeep down, I know this too. It's just a final, desperate idea from me. I understand, as well as he does, that Day would never hand over his brother in exchange for saving his own life. My eyes wander back to the display of light outside.\n\n\"I don't blame him, not at all,\" Anden says after a pause. \"I should have stopped those bioweapons the instant they named me Elector. The very same day my father died. If I were smart, that's what I would've done. But it's too late to dwell on that now. Day has every right to refuse.\"\n\nI feel a swell of sympathy for him. If he forcefully takes Eden into custody, Day will no doubt call the people to rise up in revolt. If he respects Day's decision, he risks not finding a cure in time and allowing the Colonies to take over our capital\u2014and our country. If he hands over a piece of our land to Antarctica, the people may see him as a traitor. And if our ports are sealed, we won't be receiving any imports or supplies at all.\n\nAnd yet, I can't blame Day either. I try to put myself in his shoes. The Republic tries to kill me as a ten-year-old; they experiment on me before I escape. I live the next few years in the harshest slums of Los Angeles. I watch the Republic poison my family, kill my mother and older brother, and blind my younger brother with their engineered plagues. Because of the Republic's experiments, I'm slowly dying. And now, after all the lies and cruelty, the Republic approaches me, begging for my help. Begging for me to allow them to experiment once again on my younger brother, experiments that can't guarantee his absolute safety. What would I say? I would probably refuse, just as he did. It's true that my own family suffered horrible fates at the hands of the Republic... but Day had been on the front lines, watching everything unfold from the time he was small. It's a miracle that Day had given his support to Anden in the first place.\n\nAnden and I sip wine for four more minutes, watching the city lights in silence.\n\n\"I envy Day, you know,\" he says, his voice as soft as ever. \"I'm jealous that he gets to make decisions with his heart. Every choice he makes is honest, and the people love him for it. He can afford to use his heart.\" His face darkens. \"But the world outside of the Republic is so much more complicated. There's just no room for emotion, is there? All of our countries' relations are held together with a fragile web of diplomatic threads, and these threads are what prevent us from helping one another.\"\n\nSomething's broken in his voice. \"There's no room for emotion on the political stage,\" I reply, putting my wineglass down. I'm not sure if I'm helping, but the words come out anyway. I don't even know if I believe them. \"When emotion fails, logic will save you. You might envy Day, but you'll never be him and he'll never be you. He isn't the Republic's Elector. He's a boy protecting his brother. You are a politician. You have to make decisions that break your heart, that hurt and deceive, that no one else will understand. It's your duty.\" Even as I say this, though, I feel the doubt in the back of my mind, the seeds that Day has planted.\n\nWithout emotion, what's the point of being human?\n\nAnden's eyes are heavy with sadness. He slouches, and for a moment I can see him as he really is, a young ruler standing alone against a tide of opposition and attempting to bear the burden of his country on his own shoulders, with a Senate cooperating only out of fear. \"I miss my father sometimes,\" he says. \"I know I shouldn't admit that, but it's true. I know the rest of the world sees him as a monster.\" He puts his wineglass down on the side table, then buries his head in his hands and rubs his face once.\n\nMy heart aches for him. At least I can grieve for my brother without fear of others' hatred. What must it be like to know that the parent you once loved was responsible for such evil acts?\n\n\"Don't feel guilty for your grief,\" I say softly. \"He was still your father.\"\n\nHis gaze comes to rest on me, and as if pulled by some invisible hand, he leans forward. He wavers there, hovering precariously between desire and reason. He is so close now, close enough that if I were to move even a little, our lips might brush against each other. I feel his breath faintly against my skin, the warmth of his nearness, the quiet gentleness of his love. In this moment, I feel myself drawn to him.\n\n\"June...,\" he whispers. His eyes dance across my face.\n\nThen he touches my chin with one hand, coaxes me forward, and kisses me.\n\nI close my eyes. I should stop him, but I don't want to. There is something electrifying about the bare passion in the young Elector of the Republic, the way he leans into me, his desire exposed even beneath his unfailing politeness. How he opens his heart for no one but me. How in spite of everything working against him, he still has the strength to step out every day with his chin up and his back straight. How he soldiers on, for the sake of his country. As do we all. I let myself succumb. He breaks away from my lips to kiss my cheek. Then the soft line of my jaw, right under my ear. Then my neck, just the softest whisper of a touch. A shiver sweeps through me. I can feel him holding back, and I know that what he really wants to do is to lace his fingers through my hair and drown himself in me.\n\nBut he doesn't. He knows, as much as I do, that this isn't real.\n\nI have to stop. And with a pained effort, I pull away. I struggle to catch my breath. \"I'm sorry,\" I whisper. \"I can't.\"\n\nAnden looks down, embarrassed. But not surprised. His cheeks flush a faint pink in the dim light of the room, and he runs a hand through his hair. \"I shouldn't have done that,\" he murmurs. We fall silent for a few uncomfortable seconds, until Anden sighs and leans all the way back. I slouch a little, both disappointed and relieved. \"I... know you care deeply for Day. I know I can't hope to compete with that.\" He grimaces. \"That was inappropriate of me. My apologies, June.\"\n\nI have a fleeting urge to kiss him again, to tell him that I do care, and to erase the pain and shame on his face that tugs at my heart. But I also know I don't love him, and I can't lead him on like this. I know the real reason we went so far is that I couldn't bear to turn him away in his darkest moment. That I wished, deep down... he were someone else. The truth fills me with guilt. \"I should go,\" I say sadly.\n\nAnden moves farther from me. He seems more alone than ever. Still, he composes himself and bows his head respectfully. His moment of weakness has passed, and his usual politeness takes over. As always, he hides his pain well. Then he stands up and holds a hand out to me. \"I'll walk you back to your room. Get some rest\u2014we'll leave in the early morning.\"\n\nI stand too, but I don't take his hand. \"It's fine. I can find my own way back.\" I avoid meeting his eyes; I don't want to see how everything I say only hurts him more. Then I turn toward the door and leave him behind.\n\nOllie greets me with a wagging tail when I return to my room. After a petting session, I decide to try out the Internet portal in my room while he curls up nearby and falls promptly asleep. I run a search on Anden, as well as on his father. My room's portal is a simplified version of the portals I used earlier, without interactive textures and immersive sounds attached, but it's still miles beyond anything I've seen in the Republic. I sift quietly through the search results. Most are staged photos and propaganda videos that I recognize\u2014Anden having his portrait done as a young boy, the former Elector standing in front of Anden at official press events and meetings. Even the international community seems to have little information on the relationship between father and son. But the deeper I dig, the more I stumble across moments of something surprisingly genuine. I see a video of Anden as a four-year-old, holding his salute with a solemn young face while his father patiently shows him how. I find a photo of the late Elector holding a crying, frightened Anden in his arms and whispering something into his ear, oblivious to the crowd that surrounds them. I see a clip of him angrily shoving the international press away from his small son, of him clutching Anden's hand so tightly that his knuckles have turned white. I stumble across a rare interview between him and a reporter from Africa, who asks him what he cares about the most in the Republic.\n\n\"My son,\" the late Elector answers without hesitation. His expression never softens, but the edges of his voice shift slightly. \"My son will always be everything to me, because someday he will be everything to the Republic.\" He pauses for a second to smile at the reporter. Inside that smile, I think I see glimpses of a different man who once existed. \"My son... reminds me.\"\n\nWe had initially planned to return to the capital the next morning\u2014but the news comes just as we board our jet in Ross City. It comes earlier than we thought it would.\n\nDenver has fallen to the Colonies.\n\n\"DAY. WE'RE HERE.\"\n\nI open my eyes groggily to the gentle sound of Tess's voice. She smiles down at me. There's pressure on my head, and when I reach up to touch my hair, I realize that bandages are wrapped around my forehead. My cut hand is also now covered in clean white linen. It takes me another second to notice that I'm sitting in a wheelchair.\n\n\"Oh, come on,\" I immediately blurt out. \"A goddy wheelchair?\" My head feels foggy and light, the familiar sensation of coming off a dose of painkillers. \"Where are we? What happened to me?\"\n\n\"You'll probably need to stop at a hospital when we get off the train. They think all the commotion triggered a bad response in you.\" Tess walks beside me as some soldier pushes me down the length of the train car. Up ahead, I see Pascao and the other Patriots getting off the train. \"We're in Los Angeles. We're back home.\"\n\n\"Where are Eden and Lucy?\" I ask. \"Do you know?\"\n\n\"They've already settled into your temporary apartment in Ruby sector,\" Tess replies. She's quiet for a second. \"Guess a gem sector's your home now.\"\n\nHome. I fall silent as we exit the train and stream out onto the platform with the other soldiers. Los Angeles feels as warm as ever, a typical hazy day in late fall, and the yellowish light makes me squint. The wheelchair feels so foreign and annoying. I have a sudden urge to bolt out of it and kick it onto the tracks. I am a Runner\u2014I'm not supposed to be stuck in this cracked thing. Another bad response, this time triggered by commotion? I grit my teeth at how weak I've become. The doctor's last prognosis haunts me. A month, maybe two. The frequency of severe headaches has definitely been increasing.\n\nThe soldiers help me into a jeep. Before we leave, Tess reaches through my open car window and gives me a quick hug. The sudden warmth from her startles me. All I can do is hug her back, savoring the brief moment. We stare at each other until the jeep finally pulls away from the station and Tess's figure disappears around a bend. Even then, I keep turning around in my seat to see if I can spot her.\n\nWe stop at an intersection. As we wait for a group of evacuees to cross in front of our jeep, I study the streets of downtown Los Angeles. Some things appear unchanged: Lines of soldiers bark orders at unruly refugees; other civilians stand on the sidelines and protest the influx of new people; the JumboTrons continue to flash encouraging messages of the Republic's so-called victories on the warfront, reminding people: Don't let the Colonies conquer your home! Support the cause!\n\nMy conversation with Eden replays in my mind.\n\nI blink, then look closer at the streets. This time, the scenes I'd thought were familiar take on new context. The lines of soldiers barking orders are actually handing out rations to the new refugees. The civilians protesting the new people are actually being allowed to protest\u2014soldiers look on, but their guns stay tucked away at their belts. And the JumboTrons' propaganda, once images that looked so ominous to me, now seem like messages of optimism, a broadcast of hope in dark times, a desperate attempt to keep people's spirits up. Not far from where our jeep's stopped, I see a crowd of children evacuees surrounding a young soldier. He's knelt to their eye level, and in his hands is some sort of puppet toy that he's now using animatedly to tell the kids a story. I roll my window down. His voice is clear and upbeat. Now and then, the children laugh, their fear and confusion momentarily held at bay. Nearby, the parents look on with faces both exhausted and grateful.\n\nThe people and the Republic... are working together.\n\nI frown at the unfamiliar thought. There's no question that the Republic has done some horrible things to us all, that they might still be doing those things. But... maybe I've also been seeing the things I want to see. Maybe now that the old Elector is gone, the Republic's soldiers have started to shed their masks too. Maybe they really are following Anden's lead.\n\nThe jeep takes me first to see the apartment where Eden's staying. He rushes out to greet me when we pull up, all unhappiness from our previous argument gone. \"They said you caused a bunch of trouble out there,\" he says as he and Lucy join me in the jeep. A disapproving look creeps onto his face. \"Don't ever scare me like that again.\"\n\nI give him a wry smile and ruffle his hair. \"Now you know how I feel about your decision.\"\n\nBy the time we end up outside the Los Angeles Central Hospital, word of our arrival has spread like wildfire and a huge crowd is waiting for my jeep. They're screaming, crying, chanting\u2014and it takes two patrols of soldiers to form enough of a walkway for them to usher us inside the hospital. I stare numbly at the people as I pass by. A lot of them have the scarlet streak in their hair, while others hold up signs. They shout out the same thing.\n\nSAVE US.\n\nI look away nervously. They've all seen and heard about what I did with the Patriots in Denver. But I'm not some invincible super-soldier\u2014I'm a dying boy who's about to be stuck, helpless, in the hospital while an enemy takes over our country.\n\nEden leans over my wheelchair's handlebars. Even though he doesn't say a word, I take one look at his solemn face and know exactly what's running through his mind. The thought sends terror trickling down my spine.\n\nI can save them, my little brother's thinking. Let me save them.\n\nOnce we're inside the hospital and the soldiers bar the doors, they wheel me up to the third-floor rooms. There, Eden waits outside while doctors strap a bunch of metal nodes and wires to me. They run a brain scan. Finally, they let me rest. Throughout it all, my head throbs continuously, sometimes so much that I feel like I'm moving even though I'm lying down on a bed. Nurses come in and give me some sort of injection. A couple of hours later, when I'm strong enough to sit up, a pair of doctors come to see me.\n\n\"What is it?\" I ask before they can speak up. \"Do I have three days left? What's the deal?\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" one of them\u2014the younger, more inexperienced one\u2014assures me. \"You still have a couple of months. Your prognosis hasn't changed.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I reply. Well, that's a relief.\n\nThe older doctor scratches uncomfortably at his beard. \"You can still move around and do normal activities\u2014whatever those are,\" he grumbles, \"but don't strain yourself. As for your treatments...\" He pauses here, then peers at me from the top of his glasses. \"We're going to try some more radical drugs,\" the doctor continues with an awkward expression. \"But let me be clear, Day\u2014our greatest enemy is time. We are fighting hard to prepare you for a very risky surgery, but the time that your medication needs may be longer than the time you have left. There's only so much we can do.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\" I ask.\n\nThe doctor nods at the dripping fluid bag hanging next to me. \"If you make it through the full course, you might be ready for surgery a few months from now.\"\n\nI lower my head. Do I have a few months left? They're sure as hell cutting it close. \"So,\" I mutter, \"I might be dead by the time the surgery comes around. Or there might not be a Republic left.\"\n\nMy last comment drains the blood from the doctor's face. He doesn't respond, but he doesn't need to. No wonder the other doctors had warned me to get my affairs in order. Even in the best of circumstances, I might not pull through in time. But I might actually live long enough to see the Republic fall. The thought makes me shudder.\n\nThe only way Antarctica will help is if we provide proof of a cure against this plague, give them a reason to call in their troops to stop the Colonies' invasion. And the only way to do that is to let Eden give himself over to the Republic.\n\nThe medicine knocks me out, and it's a full day before I come around. When the doctors aren't there, I test my legs by taking short walks around my room. I feel strong enough to go without a wheelchair. Still, I stumble when I try to stretch too thin and spring from one end of the room to the other. Nope. I sigh in frustration, then pull myself back into bed. My eyes shift to a screen on the wall, where footage from Denver is playing. I can tell that the Republic is careful about how much of it they show. I'd seen firsthand how it looked when the Colonies' troops started rolling in, but on the screen there are only faraway shots of the city. The viewer can just see smoke rising from several buildings and the ominous row of Colonies Airships hovering near the edge of the Armor. Then it cuts to footage of Republic jets lining up on the airfield, preparing to launch into battle. For once, I'm glad that the propaganda's in place. There's just no point in scaring the hell out of the whole country. Might as well show that the Republic's fighting back.\n\nI can't stop thinking about Frankie's lifeless face. Or the way Thomas's head snapped back when the Colonies soldiers shot him. I wince as it replays in my mind. I wait in silence for another half hour, watching as the screen's footage changes from the Denver battle to headlines about how I'd helped slow down the invading Colonies troops. More people are in the streets now, with their scarlet streaks and handmade signs. They really think I'm making a difference. I rub a hand across my face. They don't understand that I'm just a boy\u2014I'd never meant to get involved so deeply in any of this. Without the Patriots, June, or Anden, I couldn't have done anything. I'm useless on my own.\n\nStatic suddenly blares out of my earpiece; an incoming call. I jump. Then, an unfamiliar male voice in my ear: \"Mr. Wing,\" the man says. \"I presume it's you?\"\n\nI scowl. \"Who's this?\"\n\n\"Mr. Wing,\" the man says, adding a flourish of cracked excitement that sends a chill down my spine. \"This is the Chancellor of the Colonies. Pleased to make your acquaintance.\"\n\nThe Chancellor? I swallow hard. Yeah, right. \"Is this some sort of joke?\" I snap into the mike. \"Some hacker kid\u2014\"\n\n\"Come now. This wouldn't be a very funny joke, now would it?\"\n\nI didn't know the Colonies could access our earpiece streams and make calls like this. I frown, then lower my voice. \"How'd you get in?\" Are the Colonies winning in Denver? Did the city fall already, right after we finished evacuating it?\n\n\"I have my ways,\" the man replies, his voice dead calm. \"It seems that some of your people have defected to our side. I can't say I blame them.\"\n\nSomeone in the Republic must have given up info to the Colonies to allow them to use our data streams like this. Suddenly my thoughts rush back to the job I'd done with the Patriots, where the Colonies soldiers had shot Thomas in the head\u2014the image sends a violent shudder through me, and I force myself to push it away. Commander Jameson.\n\n\"I hope I'm not inconveniencing you,\" the Chancellor says before I can respond, \"given your condition and such. And I'm sure you must be feeling a bit tired after your little escapade in Denver. I'm impressed, I must say.\"\n\nI don't respond to that. I wonder what else he knows\u2014whether he knows which hospital I'm currently lying in... or worse, where our new apartment is, where Eden's staying. \"What do you want?\" I finally whisper.\n\nI can practically hear the Chancellor's smile over my earpiece. \"I'd hate to waste your time, so let's get to the meat of this conversation. I realize that the Republic's current Elector is this young Anden Stavropoulos fellow.\" His tone is condescending. \"But come now, both you and I know who really runs your country. And that's you. The people love you, Day. When my troops first went into Denver, do you know what they told me? 'The civilians have plastered posters of Day on the walls. They want to see him back on the screens.' They have been very stubborn to cooperate with my men, and it's a surprisingly tiresome process to get them to comply.\"\n\nMy anger slowly burns. \"Leave the civilians out of it,\" I say through a clenched jaw. \"They didn't ask for you to barge into their homes.\"\n\n\"But you forget,\" the Chancellor says in a coaxing voice. \"Your Republic has done the exact same thing to them for decades\u2014didn't they do it to your own family? We are invading the Republic because of what they did to us. This virus they've sent across the border. Exactly where do your loyalties lie, and why? And do you realize, my boy, how incredible your position is at your age, how you have your finger on the pulse of this nation? How much power you hold\u2014\"\n\n\"Your point, Chancellor?\"\n\n\"I know you're dying. I also know you have a younger brother who you would love to see grow up.\"\n\n\"You bring Eden into this again, and this conversation's over.\"\n\n\"Very well. Just bear with me. In the Colonies, Meditech Corp handles all of our hospitals and treatments, and I can guarantee you they would do a much finer job dealing with your case than anything the Republic can offer. So here's the deal. You can slowly whittle away whatever's left of your life, staying loyal to a country that's not loyal to you\u2014or you can do something for us. You can publicly ask the Republic's people to accept the Colonies, and help this country fall under the rule of something better. You can get treatment in a quality place. Wouldn't that be nice? Surely you deserve more than what you're getting.\"\n\nA scornful laugh forces its way out of me. \"Yeah, right. You expect me to believe that?\"\n\n\"Well now,\" the Chancellor says, trying to sound amused, but this time I detect darkness in his words. \"I can see this is a losing argument. If you choose to fight for the Republic, I'll respect that decision. I only hope that the best will happen for you and your brother, even after we establish our place firmly in the Republic. But I'm a businessman, Day, and I like to work with a Plan B in mind. So, let me ask you this instead.\" He pauses for a second. \"The Princeps-Elect June Iparis. Do you love her?\"\n\nAn icy claw grips my chest. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Well.\" The Chancellor lets his voice turn somber. \"You have to see this situation from my point of view,\" he says gently. \"The Colonies will win, inevitably, at this rate. Ms. Iparis is one of the people sitting at the heart of the losing government. Now, son, I want you to think about this. What do you suppose happens to the ruling government on the losing side of a war?\"\n\nMy hands tremble. This is a thought that has floated in the dark recesses of my mind, something I've refused to think about. Until now. \"Are you threatening her?\" I whisper.\n\nThe Chancellor tsks in disapproval at my tone. \"I'm only being reasonable. What do you think will happen to her once we declare victory? Do you really think we will let live a girl who is on track to become the leader of the Republic's Senate? This is how all civilized nations work, Day, and it's been that way for centuries. For millennia. After all, I'm sure your Elector executed those who stood against him. Didn't he?\" I stay silent. \"Ms. Iparis, along with the Elector and his Senate, will be tried and executed. That is what happens to a losing government in a war, Day.\" His voice turns serious. \"If you don't cooperate with us, then you might have to live with their blood on your hands. But if you do cooperate, I might find a way to pardon them of their war crimes. And what's more,\" he adds, \"you can have all the comforts of a quality life. You won't need to worry for your family's safety ever again. You won't have to worry for the Republic's people either. They don't know any better; the common folk never know what's good for them. But you and I do, don't we? You know they're better off without the Republic's rule. Sometimes they just don't understand their choices\u2014they need their decisions made for them. After all, you chose to manipulate the people yourself when you wanted them to accept your new Elector. Am I correct?\"\n\nTried and executed. June, gone. Dreading the possibility is one thing; hearing it spelled out to me and then using it to blackmail me is another. My mind spins frantically for ways they could escape instead, to find asylum in another country. Maybe the Antarcticans can keep June and the others overseas and protected in case the Colonies overrun the country. There must be a way. But... what about the rest of us? What's to stop the Colonies from harming my brother?\n\n\"How do I know you'll keep your word?\" I finally manage to croak.\n\n\"To show you my genuine nature, I give you my word that the Colonies have ceased their attacks as of this morning, and I will not resume them for three days. If you agree to my proposition, you just guaranteed the safety of the Republic's people... and of your loved ones. So, let the choice be yours.\" The Chancellor laughs a little. \"And I recommend that you keep our conversation to yourself.\"\n\n\"I'll think about it,\" I whisper.\n\n\"Wonderful.\" The Chancellor's voice brightens. \"Like I said, as soon as possible. After three days, I'll expect to hear back from you on making a public announcement to the Republic. This can be the start of a very fruitful relationship. Time is of the essence\u2014I know you understand this more than anyone.\"\n\nThen the call ends. The silence is deafening. I sit in the thick of our conversation for a while, soaking it in. Thoughts run endlessly through my mind... Eden, June, the Republic, the Elector. Their blood on your hands. The frustration and fear bubbling inside my chest threatens to drown me in its tide. The Chancellor's smart, I'll give him that\u2014he knows exactly what my weaknesses are and he's going to try to use them to his advantage. But two can play at this. I have to warn June\u2014and I'll have to do it quietly. If the Colonies find out that I've passed the word along instead of keeping my mouth shut and doing as the Chancellor says, then who knows what tricks they might try to pull. But maybe we can use this to our advantage. My mind whirls. Maybe we can fool the Chancellor at his own game.\n\nSuddenly, a shriek echoes from the hallway outside that raises every hair on my skin. I turn my head in the sound's direction. Somebody's coming down the corridor against her will\u2014whoever it is must be putting up a pretty damn good fight.\n\n\"I'm not infected,\" the voice protests. It grows louder until it's right outside my door, then fades as the sounds of the voice and gurney wheels travel farther down the hall. I recognize the voice right away. \"Run your tests again. It's nothing. I'm not infected.\"\n\nEven though I don't know exactly what's going on, I'm instantly sure of one thing\u2014the sickness spreading through the Colonies has a new victim.\n\nTess.\n\nFor the first time in the republic's history, there is no capital to land in.\n\nWe touch down at an airfield located on the southern edge of Drake University at 1600 hours, not a quarter mile away from where I used to attend all of my Republic History classes. The afternoon is disconcertingly sunny. Has it really been less than a year since everything happened? As we step off the plane and wait for our luggage to unload, I look around in a dull stupor. The campus, both nostalgic and strange to me, is emptier than I remember\u2014many of the seniors, I hear, have been pushed through graduation early in order to send them off to the warfront to fight for the Republic's survival. I walk in silence through the campus streets a few steps behind Anden, while Mariana and Serge, as part of their Senator nature, keep up a steady stream of chatter with their otherwise quiet Elector. Ollie stays close to my side, the hackles up on his neck. The main Drake quad, normally crowded with passing students, is now home to pockets of refugees brought over from Denver and a few neighboring cities. An unfamiliar, eerie sight.\n\nBy the time we reach a series of jeeps waiting for us and begin traveling through Batalla sector, I notice the various things throughout LA that have changed. Evacuation centers have popped up where Batalla sector meets Blueridge, where the military buildings give way to civilian high-rises, and many of the older, half-abandoned buildings along this poor sector have been hastily converted into evacuation centers. Large crowds of disheveled Denver refugees crowd the entrances, all hoping to be lucky enough to get a room assignment. One glance tells me that, naturally, the people waiting here are probably all from Denver's poor sectors.\n\n\"Where are we placing the upper-class families?\" I ask Anden. \"In a gem sector, I'm sure?\" I find it difficult now to say something like this without a sharp edge in my voice.\n\nAnden looks unhappy, but he calmly answers, \"In Ruby. You, Mariana, and Serge will all have apartments there.\" He reads my expression. \"I know what you're thinking. But I can't afford to have our wealthy families revolting against me for forcing them into evacuation centers in the poor sectors. I did set a number of spaces in Ruby to be allocated for the poor\u2014they'll be assigned to them on a lottery system.\"\n\nI don't answer, simply because I have nothing to argue against. What is there to do about this situation? It's not like Anden can uproot the entire country's infrastructure in the span of a year. As I look on through the window, a growing group of protesters gathers along the edge of a guarded refugee zone. MOVE TO THE OUTSKIRTS! one of their signs says. KEEP THEM QUARANTINED!\n\nThe sight sends a shiver down my spine. It doesn't seem so different from what had happened in the Republic's early years, when the west protested the people fleeing in from the east.\n\nWe ride in silence for a while. Then, suddenly, Anden presses his hand against his ear and motions to the driver. \"Turn on the screen,\" he tells him, gesturing to the small monitor embedded into the jeep's seats. \"General Marshall says the Colonies are broadcasting something onto our twelfth channel.\"\n\nWe all watch as the monitor comes to life. At first we only see a blank, black screen, but then the broadcast comes in, and I look on as the Colonies slogan and seal appear over an oscillating Colonies flag." + }, + { + "title": "THE COLONIES OF AMERICA", + "text": "[ CLOUD . MEDITECH . DESCON . EVERGREEN ]\n\n[ A FREE STATE IS A CORPORATE STATE ]\n\nThen, an evening landscape of a beautiful, sparkling city comes up, completely covered in thousands of twinkling blue lights. \"Citizens of the Republic,\" a grandiose voice says. \"Welcome to the Colonies of America. As many of you already know, the Colonies have overrun the Republic capital of Denver and, as such, have declared an unofficial victory over the tyrannical regime that has kept you all under its thumb. After over a hundred years of suffering, you are now free.\" The landscape changes to a top-down map of both the Republic and the Colonies\u2014except this time, the line dividing the two nations is gone. A shiver runs down my spine. \"In the weeks to come, you will all be integrated into our system of fair competition and freedom. You are a citizen of the Colonies. What does that mean, you might wonder?\"\n\nThe voiceover pauses, and the imagery shifts to a happy family holding a check in front of them. \"As a new citizen, each of you will be entitled to at least five thousand Colonies Notes, equivalent to sixty thousand Republic Notes, granted from one of our four main corps that you decide to work for. The higher your current income, the higher we'll pay you. You will no longer answer to the Republic's street police but to DesCon's city patrols, your own private neighborhood police dedicated to serving you. Your employer will no longer be the Republic, but one of our four distinguished corps, where you can apply for a fulfilling career.\" The video shifts again to scenes of happy workers, proud, smiling faces hovering over suits and ties. \"We offer you, citizens, the freedom of choice.\"\n\nThe freedom of choice. Images flash through my mind of what I'd seen in the Colonies when Day and I first ventured into their territory. The crowds of workers, the dilapidated slums of the poor. The advertisements printed all over the people's clothes. The commercials that covered every square inch of the buildings. Most of all, DesCon's police, the way they had refused to help the robbed woman who had missed her payments to their department. Is this the future of the Republic? And suddenly I feel nauseous, because I cannot say whether the people would be better off in the Republic or the Colonies.\n\nThe broadcast continues. \"We only ask that you return a small favor to us.\" The video shifts again, this time to a scene of people protesting in solidarity. \"If you, as a civilian, have grievances with the Republic, now is the time to voice them. If you are courageous enough to stage protests throughout your respective cities, the Colonies will pay you an additional five thousand Colonies Notes, as well as grant you a one-year discount on all of our Cloud Corp grocery goods. Simply send your proof of participation to any DesCon headquarters in Denver, Colorado, along with your name and mailing address.\"\n\nSo, this explains the various protests popping up around the city. Even their propaganda sounds like an advertisement. A dangerously tempting one. \"Declaring victory a little too soon,\" I say under my breath.\n\n\"They're trying to turn the people against us,\" Anden murmurs in reply. \"They announced a ceasefire this morning, perhaps as a chance to disseminate propaganda like this.\"\n\n\"I doubt it will be effective,\" I say, although I don't sound as confident as I should. All these years of anti-Colonies propaganda are going to be difficult for the Colonies to work around. Aren't they?\n\nAnden's jeep finally slows to a halt. I frown, confused for a second. Instead of taking me back to a high-rise for my temporary apartment, we are now parked in front of the Los Angeles Central Hospital. The place where Metias died. I glance at Anden. \"What are we doing here?\" I ask.\n\n\"Day's here,\" Anden replies. His voice catches a little when he speaks Day's name.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nAnden doesn't look at me. He seems reluctant to discuss it. \"He collapsed during the evacuation to LA,\" he explains. \"The series of explosions we used to knock out the underground tunnels apparently triggered one of his severe headaches. The doctors have started another round of treatment for him.\" Anden pauses, then gives me a grave stare. \"There's another reason we're here. But you'll see for yourself.\"\n\nThe jeep comes to a halt. I climb out, then wait for Anden. A feeling of dread slowly creeps through me. What if Day's illness has gotten worse? What if he isn't going to pull through? Is that why he's here? There's no reason for Day to ever set foot inside this building again, not unless he was forced to, not after everything this hospital put him through.\n\nTogether, Anden and I head into the building with soldiers flanking us. We travel up to the fourth floor, where one of the soldiers swipes us inside, and then step into the Central Hospital's lab floor. The tense feeling in my stomach only tightens as we go.\n\nFinally, we stop in front of a smaller series of rooms that line the side of the main lab floor. As we go through one of these doors, I see Day. He's standing outside a room with glass walls, smoking one of his blue cigarettes and looking on as someone inside gets inspected by lab technicians in full body suits. What makes me lose my breath, though, is that he's leaning heavily on a pair of crutches. How long has he been here? He looks exhausted, pale, and distant. I wonder what new drugs the doctors are trying on him. The thought is a sudden, stabbing reminder of Day's waning life, the few seconds he has left, slowly ticking by.\n\nStanding beside him are a few lab techs with white jumpsuit gear and goggles dangling from their necks, each of them watching the room and typing away on their notepads. A short distance away, Pascao's deep in conversation with the other Patriots. They leave Day alone.\n\n\"Day?\" I say as we approach.\n\nHe looks over to me\u2014a dozen emotions flicker through his eyes, some that make my cheeks flush. Then he notices Anden. He manages to give the Elector a stiff bow of his head, then turns back to watching the patient on the other side of the glass. Tess.\n\n\"What's going on?\" I ask Day.\n\nHe takes another puff of his cigarette and lowers his eyes. \"They won't let me in. They think she might've come down with whatever this new plague is,\" he says. His voice is quiet, but I can hear an undercurrent of frustration and anger. \"They've already run tests on me and the other Patriots. Tess is the only one who didn't come up clean.\"\n\nTess bats away one of the lab techs' hands, then stumbles backward as if she's having trouble keeping her balance. Sweat forms on her forehead and drips down her neck. The whites of her eyes have a sickly yellow tint to them, and when I look closely, I can tell that she's squinting in an effort to see everything around her\u2014something that reminds me of her nearsightedness, the way she used to squint at the streets of Lake. Her hands are trembling. I swallow hard at the sight. The Patriots couldn't have been exposed for long to the Colonies soldiers, but apparently it was long enough for some soldier carrying the virus to pass it to one of them. It's also a very real possibility that the Colonies are purposefully spreading the disease right back to us, now that they're in our territory. My insides turn cold as I remember a line from Metias's old journals: One day we'll create a virus that no one will be able to stop. And that just might bring about the downfall of the entire Republic.\n\nOne of the lab techs turns to me and offers a quick explanation. \"The virus looks like a mutation of one of our past plague experiments,\" she says, shooting Day a nervous glance (he must have given her a hard time about this earlier) before continuing. \"As far as we can tell from the statistics the Colonies have released, the virus seems to have a low uptake rate among healthy adults, but when it does infect someone, the disease progresses rapidly and the fatality rate is very high. We're seeing infection-to-death times of about a week.\" She turns momentarily to Tess on the other side of the glass. \"She's showing some early symptoms\u2014fever, dizziness, jaundice, and the symptom that points us to one of our own manufactured viruses, temporary or possibly permanent blindness.\"\n\nBeside me, Day clenches his crutches so hard that his knuckles look white. Knowing him, I wonder whether he's already had several fights with the lab techs, trying to force his way in to see her or scream at them to leave her alone. I know he must be picturing Eden right now, with his purple, half-blind eyes, and in this moment a deep hatred for the former Republic fills my chest. My father had worked behind those experimental lab doors. He had tried to quit once he found out what they were actually doing with all those local LA plagues, and he gave his life as a result. Is that country really behind us now? Can our reputation ever change in the eyes of the outside world\u2014or of the Colonies?\n\n\"She tried to save Frankie,\" Day whispers, his eyes still fixed on Tess. \"She'd made it back inside the Armor right after we did. I thought Thomas was going to kill her.\" His voice turns bitter. \"But maybe she's already marked for death.\"\n\n\"Thomas?\" I whisper.\n\n\"Thomas is dead,\" he murmurs. \"When Pascao and I were fleeing to the Armor, I saw him stand and face the Colonies soldiers alone. He kept firing at them until they shot him in the head.\" He flinches at this final sentence.\n\nThomas is dead.\n\nI blink twice, suddenly numb from head to toe. I shouldn't be shocked. Why am I shocked? I was prepared for this. The soldier who had stabbed my brother through the heart, who had shot Day's mother... he's gone. And of course he would have died in this way\u2014defending the Republic until the end, unwavering in his insane loyalty to a state that had already turned her back on him. I also understand right away why this has affected Day so much. Shot through the head. I feel empty at the news. Exhausted. Numb. My shoulders sag.\n\n\"It's for the best,\" I finally whisper through the lump in my throat. Images flash through my head of Metias, and of what Thomas had told me about his last night alive. I force my thoughts back to Tess. To the living, and those who still matter. \"Tess is going to be okay,\" I say. My words sound unconvincing. \"We just have to find a way.\"\n\nThe lab techs inside the glass room stick a long needle into Tess's right arm, then her left. She lets out a choked sob. Day tears his eyes away from the scene, adjusts his grip on his crutches, and begins to make his way toward us. As he passes me, he whispers,\" Tonight. \" Then he leaves the rest of us behind and heads down the hall.\n\nI watch him go in silence. Anden sighs, looks sadly toward Tess, and joins the other lab techs. \"Are you sure Day is clean?\" he says to the one who'd shared the virus information with us. She confirms it, and Anden nods at her in approval. \"I want a second check run on all of our soldiers immediately.\" He turns to one of the other Senators. \"Then I want a message sent right away to the Colonies' Chancellor, as well as their DesCon CEO. Let's see whether diplomacy can get us anywhere.\"\n\nFinally, Anden gives me a long look. \"I know I have no right to ask this of you,\" he says. \"But if you can find it in your heart to ask Day again about his brother, I would be grateful. We might still have a chance with Antarctica.\"\n\n1930 HOURS.\n\nRUBY SECTOR.\n\n73\u00b0 F.\n\nThe high-rise I'm staying in is just a few blocks away from where Metias and I used to live. As the jeep I'm riding in approaches it, I look down the street and try to catch a glimpse of my old apartment complex. Even Ruby sector is now blocked off with segments of tape indicating which areas are for evacuees, and soldiers line the streets. I wonder where Anden's staying in the midst of all this mess; probably somewhere in Batalla sector. He'll definitely be up late tonight. Before I'd left for my assigned apartment, he had taken me aside in the lab hall. His eyes flickered unconsciously to my lips and then back up again. I knew he was dwelling on the brief moment we shared in Ross City, as well as the words that had come after it. I know you care deeply for Day.\n\n\"June,\" he said after an awkward pause. \"We're meeting with the Senate tomorrow morning to discuss what our next steps should be. I want to give you the heads-up that this will be a conference where each of the Princeps-Elects will deliver some words to the group. It's a chance to experience what each of you would do if you were the official Princeps\u2014but be warned, things may get heated.\" He smiled a little. \"This war has left us all on edge, to put it lightly.\"\n\nI'd wanted to tell him that I would sit this one out. Another meeting with the Senators\u2014another four-hour-long session of listening to forty talking heads all battling to outdo one another, all attempting to either sway Anden to their side or embarrass him in front of the others. No doubt Mariana and Serge will lead the arguments to see which of them can come across as the better Princeps candidate. The mere idea of it drains me of all my remaining strength. But at the same time, the thought of leaving Anden to shoulder the burden alone in a room full of people who were so cold and distant was too hard to bear. So I smiled and bowed to him, like a good Princeps-Elect. \"I'll be there,\" I replied.\n\nNow the jeep pulls up to my assigned complex and stops, and I push the memory out of my mind. I get out of the jeep with Ollie, then watch it go until it turns a corner and disappears completely from sight. I head inside the high-rise.\n\nI initially plan to stop by Day's room right after settling into my own, to see what he meant by his \"tonight\" comment. But as I reach my hall, I see that I don't have to.\n\nDay is camped outside my door, sitting slouched against the wall and absently smoking a blue cigarette. His crutches are lying idly beside him. Even though he's not moving, some small piece of his manner\u2014wild, careless, defiant\u2014still shines through, and for an instant I flash back to when I'd first met him on the streets, with his bright blue eyes and quicksilver movements and unruly blond hair. That nostalgic image is so sweet that I suddenly feel my eyes watering. I take a deep breath and will myself not to cry.\n\nHe pulls himself to his feet when he sees me at the end of the hall. \"June,\" he says as I approach. Ollie trots over to greet him, and he pats my dog once on the head. He still looks exhausted, but manages to give me a lopsided, if sad, grin. Without his crutches, he sways on his feet. His eyes are heavy with anguish, and I know it's because of our earlier stint in the lab. \"From the look on your face, I'm guessing the Antarcticans weren't much help.\"\n\nI shake my head, then unlock my door and invite him inside. \"Not really,\" I reply as I close the door behind me. My eyes instinctively study the room, memorizing its layout. It resembles my old home a little too closely for comfort. \"They've contacted the United Nations about the plague. They're going to seal off all of our ports to traffic. No imports or exports\u2014no aid, no supplies. We're all under quarantine now. They've told us that they can help us out only after we show them proof of a cure, or if Anden hands over a chunk of Republic land to them as payment. Until then, they won't send any troops. All I know now is that they're monitoring our situation pretty closely.\"\n\nDay says nothing. Instead, he wanders away from me and stands on the room's balcony. He leans against the railing. I put out some food and water for Ollie, then join him. The sun set a while ago, but with the glow from the city lights, we can see the low-lying clouds that block the stars, covering the sky in shades of gray and black. I notice how heavily Day has to lean on the railing to support himself, and I'm tempted to ask him how he's feeling. But the expression on his face stops me. He probably doesn't want to talk about it.\n\n\"So,\" he says after another puff on his cigarette. The light from distant JumboTrons paints a glowing line of blue and purple around his face. His eyes skim across the buildings, and I know he's instinctively analyzing how he would run each one of them. \"Guess we're on our own now. Can't say I'm all that upset about it, though. The Republic's always been about closing off her borders, yeah? Maybe she'll fight better this way. Nothing motivates you like being alone and cornered on the streets.\"\n\nWhen he lifts his cigarette to his lips again, I see his hand trembling. The paper clip ring gleams on his finger. \"Day,\" I say gently. He just raises an eyebrow and glances at me sideways. \"You're shaking.\"\n\nHe exhales a puff of blue smoke, squints at the city lights in the darkness, and then lowers his lashes. \"It's strange being back in LA,\" he replies, his voice distracted and distant. \"I'm fine. Just worried about Tess.\" A long pause follows. I know the name\u2014Eden\u2014that hangs at the tips of both of our tongues, although neither one of us wants to bring it up first. Day finally ends our silence, and when he does, he approaches the topic with slow and laborious pain. \"June, I've been thinking about what your Elector wants from me. About, you know... about my brother.\" He sighs, then leans farther out on the railing and rakes a hand through his hair. His arm brushes past my own\u2014even this small gesture sends my heart beating faster. \"I had an argument with Eden about it all.\"\n\n\"What did he say?\" I ask. Somehow, I feel guilty when I think back on Anden's request for me. If you can find it in your heart to ask Day again about his brother, I would be grateful.\n\nDay puts his cigarette out on the metal railing. His eyes meet mine. \"He wants to help,\" he murmurs. \"After seeing Tess today, and after what you just told me, well...\" He tightens his jaw. \"I'll talk to Anden tomorrow. Maybe there's something in Eden's blood that can, you know... make a difference in all this. Maybe.\"\n\nHe's still reluctant, of course, and I can hear the pain plainly in his voice. But he is also agreeing. Agreeing to let the Republic use his little brother to find a cure. A small, bittersweet smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. Day, the champion of the people, the one who can't bear to see those around him suffer on his behalf, who would gladly give his life for those he loves. Except it's not his life that we need in order to save Tess, but his brother's. Risking one loved one for the sake of another loved one. I wonder whether anything else made him change his mind. \"Thank you, Day,\" I whisper. \"I know how hard this is.\"\n\nHe grimaces and shakes his head. \"No, I'm just being selfish. But I can't help it.\" He looks down, laying bare his weaknesses. \"Just... tell Anden to bring him back. Please bring him back.\"\n\nThere's something else bothering him, something that's making his hands shake uncontrollably. I lean into him, then place one of my hands over his. He looks me in the eyes again. There's such deep sadness and fear in his face. It breaks my heart. \"What else is wrong, Day?\" I whisper. \"What else do you know?\"\n\nThis time, he doesn't look away. He swallows\u2014and when he speaks, there's a slight tremor in his voice. \"The Colonies' Chancellor called me while I was in the hospital.\"\n\n\"The Chancellor?\" I whisper, careful to keep my voice low. You never know. \"Are you sure?\"\n\nDay nods once. Then he tells me everything\u2014the conversation he had with the Chancellor, the bribes, the blackmail and threats. He tells me what the Colonies have in store for me, should Day refuse them. All my unspoken fears. Finally, he sighs. The release of all this information seems to lighten the burden on his shoulders, if only by a hair. \"There must be a way we can use this against the Colonies,\" he says. \"Some way to trick them with their own game. I don't know what yet, but if we can find some way to make the Chancellor think that I'm going to help him out, then maybe we can take them by surprise.\"\n\nIf the Colonies really do win, they will come after me. We'll be killed, all of us. I try to sound as calm as he does, but I don't succeed. A tremor still manages to creep into my voice. \"He'll expect you to react emotionally to all this,\" I reply. \"It might be as good an opportunity as any to hit the Colonies with your own brand of propaganda. But whatever we do, we have to be careful about it. The Chancellor should know better than to trust you wholeheartedly.\"\n\n\"Things won't go well for you if they win,\" Day whispers, his voice pained. \"I never took them to be some goddy compassionate softies\u2014but maybe you should find a way to flee the country. Sneak off to a neutral place and seek asylum.\"\n\nFlee the country, run away from this entire nightmare, and hole up in some faraway land? A small, tiny, dark voice in my head whispers agreement, that I will be safer that way... but I recoil from the thought. I draw myself up as well as I can. \"No, Day,\" I reply gently. \"If I flee, what will everyone else do? What about those who can't?\"\n\n\"They will kill you.\" He draws closer. His eyes beg me to listen. \"Please.\"\n\nI shake my head. \"I'm staying right here. The people don't need their morale crushed any further. Besides, you might need me.\" I give a little smile. \"I think I know a few things about the Republic's military that could come in handy, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nDay shakes his head in frustration, but at the same time he knows I won't budge. He knows, because he would do no differently in my position.\n\nHe takes my hand in his and pulls me toward him. His arms wrap around me. I'm so unused to his touch that this embrace sends an overwhelming wave of heat through my body. I close my eyes, collapse against his chest, and savor it. Has it really been so long since the last time we kissed? Have I really missed him this much? Have all the problems threatening to crush us both weakened us to the point where we are gasping for breath, clinging desperately to each other for survival? I've forgotten how right it feels to be in his arms. His collar shirt is rumpled and soft against my skin, and beneath it his chest is warm and pulses with the faint beating of his heart. He smells of earth, smoke, and wind.\n\n\"You drive me insane, June,\" he murmurs against my hair. \"You're the scariest, most clever, bravest person I know, and sometimes I can't catch my breath because I'm trying so hard to keep up. There will never be another like you. You realize that, don't you?\" I tilt my face up to see him. His eyes reflect the faint lights from the JumboTrons, a rainbow of evening colors. \"Billions of people will come and go in this world,\" he says softly, \"but there will never be another like you.\"\n\nMy heart twists until it threatens to break. I don't know how to respond.\n\nThen he releases me abruptly\u2014the coolness of the night is a sudden shock against my skin. Even in the darkness, I can see the blush on his cheeks. His breathing sounds heavier than usual. \"What is it?\" I say.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he replies, his voice strained. \"I'm dying, June\u2014I'm no good for you. And I do so well until I see you in person, and then everything changes again. I think I don't care about you anymore, that things will be easier once you're far away, and then all of a sudden I'm here again, and you're...\" He pauses to look at me. The anguish in his expression is a knife cutting through my heart. \" Why do I do this to myself? I see you and feel such\u2014\" He has tears in his eyes now. The sight is more than I can bear. He takes two steps away from me and then turns back like a caged animal. \"Do you even love me?\" he suddenly asks. He grips both of my shoulders. \"I've said it to you before, and I still mean it. But I've never heard it from you. I can't tell. And then you give me this ring \"\u2014he pauses to hold his hand up\u2014\"and I don't know what to think anymore.\"\n\nHe draws closer, until I feel his lips against my ear. My entire body trembles. \"Do you have any idea?\" he says in a soft, broken, hoarse whisper. \"Do you know how... how badly I wish...\"\n\nHe pulls away long enough to look me desperately in the eyes. \"If you don't love me, just say it\u2014 you have to help me. It'd probably be for the best. It'd make it easier to stay away from you, wouldn't it? I can let go.\" He says it like he's trying to convince himself. \"I can let go, if you don't love me.\"\n\nHe says this as if he thinks I'm the stronger one. But I'm not. I can't keep this up any better than he can. \"No,\" I say through gritted teeth and blurry vision. \"I can't help you. Because I do love you.\" There it is, out in the open. \"I'm in love with you,\" I repeat.\n\nThere's a conflicted look in Day's eyes, a joy and a grief, that makes him so vulnerable. I realize then how little defense he has against my words. He loves so wholly. It is his nature. He blinks, then tries to find the right response. \"I\u2014\" he stumbles. \"I'm so afraid, June. So afraid of what might happen to\u2014\"\n\nI put two fingers against his lips to hush him. \"Fear makes you stronger,\" I whisper. Before I can stop myself, I put my hands on his face and press my mouth to his.\n\nWhatever shreds of self-restraint Day had now crumble into pieces. He falls into my kiss with helpless urgency. I feel his hands touch my face, one palm smooth and one still wrapped in bandages, and then he wraps his arms frantically around my waist, pulling me so close that I gasp aloud. No one compares to him. And right now, I want nothing else.\n\nWe make our way back inside, our lips never apart. Day stumbles against me, then loses his balance, and we collapse backward into my bed. His body knocks the breath out of me. His hands run along my jaw and neck, down my back, down my legs. I tug his coat off. Day's lips move away from mine and he buries his face against my neck. His hair fans out across my arm, heavy and softer than any silk I've ever worn. Day finally finds the buttons on my shirt. I've already loosened his, and underneath the fabric his skin is hot to the touch. The heat radiating from him warms me. I savor the weight of him.\n\nNeither of us dares to say a word. We're afraid that words will stop us, that they'll tear apart the spell that binds us. He's trembling as much as I am. It suddenly occurs to me that he must be just as nervous. I smile when his eyes first meet mine and then lower in a bashful gesture. Day is shy? What a strange new emotion on his face, something out of place and yet so fitting. I'm relieved to see it, because I can feel the blush rising hot on my own cheeks. Embarrassed, I feel an urge to cover up my exposed skin. I've frequently imagined what this would be like, lying with Day for the first time. I'm in love with him. I tentatively test these new words again in my mind, amazed and frightened by what they might mean. He is here, and he is real, flesh and blood.\n\nEven in his feverish passion, Day is gentle with me. It is a different gentleness from what I've felt around Anden, who is refinement and properness and elegance. Day is coarse, open, uncertain, and pure. When I look at him, I notice the subtle smile playing at the edges of his mouth, the smallest hint of mischief that only strengthens my desire for him. He nuzzles my neck; his touch sends shivers dancing along my spine. Day sighs in relief against my ear in a way that makes my heart pound, a sigh of freeing himself from all of the dark emotions that plague him. I fall into another kiss, running my hands through his hair, letting him know that I'm okay. He gradually relaxes. I suck in my breath as he moves against me; his eyes are so bright that I feel like I could drown in them. He kisses my cheeks, tucking a strand of my hair carefully behind my ear as he goes, and I slide my arms around his back and pull him closer.\n\nNo matter what happens in the future, no matter where our paths take us, this moment will be ours.\n\nAfterward, we stay quiet. Day lies beside me with blankets covering part of his legs, his eyes closed in a drowsy half sleep, his hand still entwined with mine as if for reassurance. I look around us. The blankets hang precariously off the corner of the bed. The sheets have wrinkles that radiate out, looking like a dozen little suns and their rays. There are deep indents in my pillow. Broken glass and flower petals litter the floor. I hadn't even noticed that we'd knocked a vase off my dresser, hadn't heard the sound of it shattering against the cherrywood planks. My eyes go back to Day. His face looks so peaceful now, free of pain in the dim glow of night. Even na\u00efve. His mouth is no longer open, his brows no longer scrunched together. He's not trembling anymore. Loose hair frames his face, a few strands catching the city's lights from outside. I inch forward, run my hand along the muscles of his arm, and touch my lips to his cheek.\n\nHis eyes open; they blink at me sleepily. He stares at me for a long moment. I wonder what he sees, and whether all of the pain and joy and fear he had confessed earlier is still there, forever haunting him. He leans over to give me the gentlest, most delicate kiss. His lips linger, afraid to leave. I don't want to leave either. I don't want to think about waking up. When I pull him close to me again, he obliges, aching for more. And all I can think about is that I'm grateful for his silence, for not telling me that I am joining us together when I should be letting him go.\n\nIt's not like I haven't had my share of moments with girls. I had my first kiss when I was twelve, when I locked lips with a sixteen-year-old girl in exchange for her not ratting me out to the street police. I've fooled around with a handful of girls in the slum sectors and a few from wealthy sectors\u2014there was even one gem sector, high school freshman who I'd had a couple days' romance with back when I was fourteen. She was cute, with pixie-short, light brown hair and flawless olive skin, and we'd sneak off every afternoon to the basement of her school and, well, have a little fun. Long story.\n\nBut... June.\n\nMy heart's been torn wide open, just like I feared it would be, and I have no willpower to close it back up. Any barrier I might've succeeded in putting up around myself, any resistance I might've built up against my feelings for her, is now completely gone. Shattered. In the dim blue light of night, I reach out and run one hand along the curve of June's body. My breathing is still shallow. I don't want to be the first to say something. My chest is pressed gently against her back and my arm's resting comfortably around her waist; her hair drapes over her neck in a dark, glossy rope. I bury my face against her smooth skin. A million thoughts pour through my head, but like her, I stay silent.\n\nThere's simply nothing to say.\n\nI jolt awake in bed, gasping. I can barely breathe\u2014my lungs heave in an attempt to suck in air. I look around frantically. Where am I?\n\nI'm in June's bed.\n\nIt was a nightmare, just a nightmare, and the Lake sector alley and street and blood are gone. I lie there a moment, trying quietly to catch my breath and slow the pounding of my heart. I'm completely drenched in sweat. I glance over at June. She's lying on her side and facing me, her body still rising and falling in a gentle, steady rhythm. Good. I didn't wake her. I hurriedly wipe tears from my face with the palm of my uninjured hand. Then I lie there for a few minutes, still trembling. When it's obvious that I'm not going to be able to fall back asleep, I slowly sit up in bed and crouch with my arms against my knees. I bow my head. My lashes brush against the skin of my arm. I feel so weak, like I just finished climbing up a thirty-story building.\n\nThis was easily the worst nightmare I've had yet. I'm even terrified to blink for too long, in case I have to revisit the images that danced under my eyelids. I look around the room. My vision blurs again; I angrily wipe the fresh tears away. What time is it? It's still pitch-black outside, with only the faint glow from distant JumboTrons and streetlights filtering into the room. I glance toward June, watching how the dim lights from outside splash color across her silhouette. This time, I don't reach out and touch her.\n\nI don't know how long I sit there crouched like that, taking in one deep lungful of air after another until my breathing finally steadies. It's long enough for the sweat beading my entire body to dry. My eyes wander to the room's balcony. I stare at it for a while, unable to look away, and then I gingerly slide out of bed without a sound and slip into my shirt, trousers, and boots. I twist my hair up into a tight knot, then fit a cap snugly over it. June stirs a little. I stop moving. When she settles back down, I finish buttoning my shirt and walk over to the glass balcony doors. In the corner of the bedroom, June's dog gives me a curious tilt of his head. But he doesn't make a sound. I say a silent thanks in my head, then open the balcony doors. They swing open, then close behind me without a click.\n\nI pull myself laboriously onto the balcony railings, perch there like a cat, and survey my surroundings. Ruby sector, a gem sector that's so completely different from where I came from. I'm back in LA, but I don't recognize it. Clean, manicured streets, new and shiny JumboTrons, wide sidewalks without cracks and potholes, without street police dragging crying orphans away from market stands. Instinctively, my attention turns in the direction of the city that Lake sector would be. From this side of the building, I can't see downtown LA, but I can feel it there, the memories that woke me up and whispered for me to come back. The paper clip ring sits heavily on my finger. A dark, terrible mood lingers at the back of my mind after that nightmare, something I can't seem to shake. I hop over the side of the balcony and work my way down to a lower ledge. I make my way silently, floor by floor, until my boots hit the pavement and I blend into the shadows of the night. My breaths come raggedly.\n\nEven here in a gem sector, there are now city patrols guarding the streets, their guns drawn as if ready for a surprise Colonies' attack at any moment. I steer clear of them to avoid any questions, and go back to my old street habits, making my way through back alley mazes and shaded sides of buildings until I reach a train station where jeeps are lined up, waiting to give rides. I ignore the jeeps\u2014I'm not in the mood to get chatty with one of the drivers and then have them recognize me as Day, and then hear rumors spreading around town the next morning about whatever the hell they think I was up to. Instead, I head into the train station and wait for the next automated ride to come and take me to Union Station in downtown.\n\nHalf an hour later, I step out of the downtown station and make my way silently through the streets until I'm close to my mother's old home. The cracks in all the slum sector roads are good for one thing\u2014here and there I see patches of sea daisies growing haphazardly, little spots of turquoise and green on an otherwise gray street. On instinct, I bend down and pick a handful of them. Mom's favorite.\n\n\"You there. Hey, boy.\"\n\nI turn to see who's calling. It actually takes me a few seconds to find her, because she's so small. An old woman's hunched against the side of a boarded-up building, shivering in the night air. She's bent almost double, with a face completely covered in deep wrinkles, and her clothes are so tattered that I can't tell where any of it ends or begins\u2014it's just one big mop of rags. She has a cracked mug sitting at her dirty bare feet, but what really makes me stop is that her hands are wrapped in thick bandages. Just like Mom's. When she sees that my attention is on her, her eyes light up with a faint glint of hope. I'm not sure if she recognizes me, but I'm also not sure how well she can see. \"Any spare change, little boy?\" she croaks.\n\nI dig around numbly in my pockets, then pull out a small wad of cash. Eight hundred Republic Notes. Not too long ago, I would've put my life in danger to get my hands on this much money. I bend down next to the old woman, then press the bills into her shaking palm and squeeze her bandaged hands with my own.\n\n\"Keep it hidden. Don't tell anyone.\" When she just continues to stare at me with shocked eyes and an agape mouth, I stand up and start walking back down the street. I think she calls out, but I don't bother turning around. Don't want to see those bandaged hands again.\n\nMinutes later, I reach the intersection of Watson and Figueroa. My old home.\n\nThe street hasn't changed much from how I remember it, but this time my mother's home is boarded up and abandoned, like many of the other buildings in the slum sectors. I wonder if there are squatters in there, all holed up in our old bedroom or sleeping on the kitchen floor. No light shines from the house. I walk slowly toward it, wondering if I'm still lost in my nightmare. Maybe I haven't woken up at all. No more quarantine tape blocks the street off, no more plague patrols hang around outside the house. As I walk toward it, I notice an old bloodstain still visible, if only barely, on the broken concrete leading toward the house. It looks brown and faded now, so different from how I remember it. I stare at the bloodstain, numb and unfeeling, then step around it and continue on. My hand clings tightly to the thick bundle of sea daisies I brought.\n\nWhen I approach the front door, I see the familiar red X is still there, although now it's faded and chipped, and several planks of rotting wood are nailed across the door frame. I stand there for a while, running a finger along the dying paint streaks. A few minutes later, I snap out of my daze and wander around to the back of the house. Half of our fence has now collapsed, leaving the tiny yard exposed and visible to our neighbors. The back door also has planks of wood nailed across it, but they're so rotten and crumbling that all I have to do is put a little weight on them and they come apart in a dull crackle of splinters.\n\nI force the door open and step inside. I remove my cap as I go, letting my hair tumble down my back. Mom had always told us to take our hats off while in the house.\n\nMy eyes adjust to the darkness. I step quietly up a few steps and enter the back of our tiny living room. They may have boarded up the house as part of some standard protocol, but the furniture inside the house is untouched, different only in that it's all covered in a layer of dust. My family's few belongings are still here, in exactly the same condition as I'd last seen them. The old Elector's portrait hangs on the room's far wall, prominent and centered, and our little wooden dining table still has thick layers of cardboard tacked to one of its legs, still doing their job of holding the table up. One of the chairs is lying on the ground, as if someone had to get up in a hurry. That had been John, I now remember. I recall how we'd all headed into the bedroom to grab Eden, trying to get our little brother out before the plague patrols came for him.\n\nThe bedroom. I turn my boots in the direction of our narrow bedroom door. It only takes a few steps to reach it. Yeah, everything in here is exactly the same too, maybe with a few extra cobwebs. The plant that Eden had once brought home is still sitting in the corner, although now it's dead, its leaves and vines black and shriveled. I stand there for a moment, staring at it, and then head back into the living room. I walk once around the dining table. Finally, I sit in my old chair. It creaks like it always did.\n\nI lay the bundle of sea daisies carefully on the tabletop. Our lantern sits in the middle of the table, unlit and unused. Usually, the routine went like this: Mom would come home around six o'clock every day, a few hours after I'd gotten back from grade school, and John would get home around nine or ten. Mom would try to hold off on lighting the table lantern each night until John returned, and after a while Eden and I got used to looking forward to \"the lantern lighting,\" which always meant John had just walked through the door. And that meant we'd get to sit down to dinner.\n\nI don't know why I sit here and feel the familiar old expectation that Mom is going to come out from the kitchen and light the lantern. I don't know how I can feel a jolt of joy in my chest, thinking John is home, that dinner's served. Stupid old habits. Still, my eyes go expectantly to the front door. My hopes rise.\n\nBut the lantern stays unlit. John stays outside. Mom isn't home.\n\nI lean my arms heavily against the table and press my palms to my eyes. \"Help me,\" I whisper desperately to the empty room. \"I can't do this.\" I want to, I love her, but I can't bear it. It's been almost a year. What's wrong with me? Why can't I just move on?\n\nMy throat chokes up. The tears come in a rush. I don't bother to stop them, because I know it's impossible. I sob uncontrollably\u2014I can't stop, I can't catch my breath, I can't see. I can't see my family because they're not here. Without them, all this furniture is nothing, the sea daisies lying on the table are meaningless, the lantern is just an old, blackened piece of junk. The images from my nightmare linger, haunting me. No matter how hard I try, I can't push them away.\n\nTime heals all wounds. But not this one. Not yet.\n\nI don't stir, but through my half-lidded, sleepy eyes, I see Day sit up in bed beside me and bury his face in his arms. He's breathing heavily. Seven minutes later he gets up quietly, casts one last glance in my direction, and disappears out the balcony doors. He's as silent as ever, and if him waking up from his nightmare hadn't roused me, he would easily have left my room without my ever knowing.\n\nBut I do know, and this time I rise right after he leaves. I throw on some clothes, pull on my boots, and head out after him. The cool air washes over my face, and moonlight drenches the whole night in dark silver.\n\nEven in his deteriorating condition, he's still fast when he wants to be. By the time I catch up with him at Union Station and follow him through the streets of downtown, my heart is pounding steadily in the way it does after a thorough workout. By now, I already know where he's going. He's returning to his family's old home. I look on as he finally reaches the intersection of Watson and Figueroa, turns the corner, and heads inside a tiny, boarded-up house with a faded X still painted on its door.\n\nJust being back here makes me dizzy with the memory. I can't imagine how much worse it must be for Day. Gingerly I make my way over to the boarded windows, then listen intently for him. He goes in through the back door\u2014I hear him shuffling around inside, his footsteps subdued and muffled, and then stop in the living room. I go from window to window until I finally find one that still has a crack between two of its wooden planks. At first I can't see him. But eventually I do.\n\nDay is sitting at the living room table with his head in his hands. Even though it's too dark inside for me to make out his features, I can hear him crying. His silhouette trembles with grief, and his anguish is etched into every single crumpled, devastated muscle of his body. The sound is so foreign that it tears at my heart; I've seen Day cry, but I'm not used to it. I don't know whether I ever will be. When I reach up to my face, I realize that tears are running down my cheeks too.\n\nI did this to him... and because he loves me, he can never really escape it. He'll remember the fate of his family every time he sees me, even if he loves me, especially if he loves me.\n\nI finally return, bleary-eyed and exhausted, to june's bedroom just before dawn. She's still there, apparently undisturbed. I don't try to crawl back into bed beside her; instead, I collapse onto her couch and fall into a deep, dreamless sleep until the light strengthens outside.\n\nJune's the one who shakes me awake. \"Hey,\" she whispers. To my surprise, she doesn't comment on how red or puffy my eyes must look. She doesn't even seem shocked to wake up and find me lounging on her couch instead of in her bed. Her own eyes look heavy. \"I've... informed Anden about what you decided. He says a lab team will be ready to pick you and Eden up in two hours, at your apartment.\" She sounds grateful, weary, and hesitant.\n\n\"I'll be there,\" I mutter. I can't help staring vacantly off into space for a few seconds\u2014nothing seems real right now, and I feel like I'm swimming in a sea of fog where emotions and images and thoughts are all out of focus. I force myself off the couch and into the bathroom. There, I unbutton my shirt and splash water on my face and chest and arms. I'm afraid to look in the mirror this time. I don't want to see John staring back at me, with my own blindfold tight around his eyes. My hands are shaking so badly; the gash on my left palm is open again and bleeding, probably from the fact that I keep clenching that hand instinctively. Had June seen me leave? I shudder as I relive the memory of her standing there outside my mother's home, waiting at the head of a squadron of soldiers. Then I revisit the Chancellor's words to me, the precarious situation that June is in... that Tess is in, that Eden is in\u2014that we're all in.\n\nI splash water repeatedly on my face, and when that doesn't help, I jump in the shower and drown myself with scalding hot water. But it doesn't numb the images.\n\nBy the time I finally emerge from the bathroom, my hair still wet and my shirt half buttoned, I'm sickly pale and trembling. June watches me quietly as she sits on the edge of her bed, sipping a pale purple tea. Even though I know it's pointless to try hiding anything from her, I still give it a shot. \"I'm ready,\" I say with as genuine of a smile as I can muster. She doesn't deserve to see this sort of pain on my face, and I don't want her to think that she's the one causing it. She's not the one causing it, I angrily remind myself.\n\nBut June doesn't comment on it. She studies me with those deep dark eyes. \"I just got a call from Anden,\" she says, running a hand uncomfortably through her hair. \"They have some new evidence that Commander Jameson's the one responsible for passing along some military secrets to the Colonies. It sounds like she's working for them now.\"\n\nUnderneath my tidal wave of emotions, a deep hatred wells up. If it weren't for Commander Jameson, maybe everything would have been better between June and me\u2014and maybe our families would still be alive. I don't know. We'll never know. And now she's working for the enemy when she's supposed to be dead. I mutter a curse under my breath. \"Is there any way to know exactly where she is? Is she actually in the Republic?\"\n\n\"No one knows.\" June shakes her head. \"Anden says they're trying to see if anything on her can be tracked, but she must have long changed out of her prison clothing, and her boots' tracking chips must be gone by now. She'll have made sure of that.\" When June sees the frustration on my face, she grimaces in sympathy. Both of us, broken by the same person. \"I know.\" She puts her tea down and squeezes my uninjured hand.\n\nViolent flashbacks flicker through my memory at her touch\u2014I wince before I can stop myself. She freezes. For a second, I see the deep hurt in her expression. I quickly cover up my mistake by kissing her, trying to lose myself in the gesture as I did last night.\n\nBut I've never been the best liar, at least not around her. She takes a step away from me. \"Sorry,\" she whispers.\n\n\"It's okay,\" I say in a rush, irritated with myself at dragging our old wounds back to the surface. \"It's not\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\" June forces herself to face me. \"I saw where you went last night\u2014I saw you in there....\" Her voice fades away as she looks down in guilt. \"I'm sorry I followed you, but I had to know. I had to see that I was the one causing all of the grief in your eyes.\"\n\nI want to reassure her that it's not all because of her, that I love her so desperately that I'm terrified of the feeling. But I can't. June sees the hesitation on my face and knows it's a confirmation of her fear. She bites her lip. \"It's my fault,\" she says, as if it's just simple logic. \"And I'm not sure I will ever be able to earn your forgiveness. I shouldn't.\"\n\n\"I don't know what to do.\" My hands dangle at my sides, helpless. Terrible images from our past flash through my mind again\u2014my best attempts can't stop them. \"I don't know how to do it.\"\n\nJune's eyes are glossy with tears, but she manages to hold them in. Can one mistake really destroy a lifetime together? \"I don't think there's a way,\" she finally says.\n\nI take a step toward her. \"Hey,\" I whisper in her ear. \"We'll be okay.\" I'm not sure if it's true, but it seems like the best thing to say.\n\nJune smiles, playing along, but her eyes mirror my own doubt.\n\nThe second day of the Colonies' promised ceasefire.\n\nThe last place I want to return to is the lab floor of the Los Angeles Central Hospital. It's hard enough being there and seeing Tess contained behind glass walls, with chemicals being injected into her bloodstream. Now I'll be back there with Eden at my side, and I'll have to deal with seeing the same thing happen to him. As we get ready to head down to the jeep waiting in front of our temporary apartment, I kneel in front of Eden and straighten his glasses. He stares solemnly back.\n\n\"You don't have to do this,\" I say again.\n\n\"I know,\" Eden replies. He brushes my hand impatiently away when I wipe lint off his jacket's shoulders. \"I'll be fine. They said it wouldn't take all day, anyway.\"\n\nAnden couldn't guarantee his safety; he could only promise that they would take every precaution. And coming from the mouth of the Republic\u2014even a mouth that I've come to grudgingly trust\u2014that little cracked bit of reassurance means almost nothing. I sigh. \"If you change your mind at any point, you let me know, yeah?\"\n\n\"Don't worry, Daniel,\" he says, shrugging off the whole thing. \"I'll be fine. It doesn't seem that scary. At least you get to be there.\"\n\n\"Yeah. At least I get to be there,\" I echo numbly. Lucy fusses over his messy blond curls. More reminders of home, and of Mom. I shut my eyes and try to clear my thoughts. Then I reach out and tap Eden on the nose. \"The sooner they start,\" I say to him, \"the sooner it can all be over.\"\n\nMinutes later, a military jeep picks me up while a medic truck transports Eden separately to the Los Angeles Central Hospital.\n\nHe can do this, I repeat to myself as I reach the fourth-floor laboratory. I'm escorted by technicians to a chamber with thick glass windows. And if he can, then I can live through it. But still, my hands are sweaty. I clench them again in an attempt to stop their endless trembling, and a stab of pain runs through my injured palm. Eden's inside this glass chamber. His pale blond curls are messy and ruffled in spite of Lucy's efforts, and he's now wearing a thin red patient scrub. His feet are bare. A pair of lab technicians help him up onto a long, white bed, and one of them rolls up Eden's sleeves to take his blood pressure. Eden winces when the cool rubber touches his arm.\n\n\"Relax, kid,\" the lab tech says, his voice muffled by the glass. \"Just take a deep breath.\"\n\nEden murmurs a faint \"okay\" in response. He looks so small next to them. His feet don't even touch the floor. They swing idly while he stares off toward the window separating us, searching for me. I clench and unclench my hands, then press them against the window.\n\nThe fate of the entire Republic rests on the shoulders of my kid brother. If Mom, John, or Dad were here, they'd probably laugh at how ridiculous this whole thing is.\n\n\"He's going to be okay,\" the lab tech standing next to me mutters in reassurance. He doesn't sound very convincing. \"Today's procedures shouldn't cause him any pain. We're just going to take some blood samples and then give him a few medications. We've sent some samples to Antarctica's lab teams for analysis too.\"\n\n\"Is that supposed to make me feel better?\" I snap at him. \"Today's procedures shouldn't cause him any pain? What about tomorrow's?\"\n\nThe lab tech holds his hands up defensively. \"I'm sorry,\" he stammers. \"It came out wrong\u2014I didn't mean it like that. Your brother won't be in any pain, I promise. Some discomfort, perhaps, from the medicine, but we're taking every precaution we can. I, er, I hope you won't report this negatively to our glorious Elector.\"\n\nSo, that's what he's worried about. That if I'm upset, I'm going to run to Anden and whine. I narrow my eyes at him. \"If you don't give me a reason to report anything bad, then I won't.\"\n\nThe lab tech apologizes again, but I'm not paying attention to him anymore. My eyes go back to Eden. He's asking one of the technicians something, although he's speaking quietly enough that I can't hear. The lab tech shakes his head at my brother. Eden swallows, looks back nervously in my direction, and then squeezes his eyes shut. One of the lab techs takes out a syringe, then carefully injects it into the vein of Eden's arm. Eden clenches his jaw tight, but he doesn't utter a sound. A familiar dull pain throbs at the base of my neck. I try to calm myself down. Stressing myself out and triggering one of my headaches at a time like this is not going to help Eden.\n\nHe chose to do this, I remind myself. I swell with sudden pride. When had Eden grown up? I feel like I blinked and missed it.\n\nThe lab tech finally removes the syringe, which is now filled with blood. They dab something on Eden's arm, then bandage it. The second technician then drops a handful of pills into Eden's open palm.\n\n\"Swallow them together,\" he tells my brother. Eden does as he says. \"They're a bit bitter\u2014best to get it all over with at once.\"\n\nEden grimaces and gags a little, but manages to wash the pills down with some water. Then he lies down on the bed. The technicians wheel him over to a cylindrical machine. I can't remember what the machine's called, even though they told me less than an hour ago. They slowly roll him inside it, until all I can see of Eden are the balls of his bare feet. I slowly peel my hands off the window. My skin leaves prints on the glass. A minute later, my heart twists in my chest as I hear Eden crying from inside the machine. Something about it must be painful. I clench my teeth so hard that I think my jaw might break.\n\nFinally, after what seems like an eternity, one of the lab techs motions for me to come inside. I immediately shove past them and enter the glass chamber to lean over Eden's side. He's sitting on the edge of the white bed again. When he hears me approach, he breaks into a smile.\n\n\"That wasn't so bad,\" he says to me in a weak voice.\n\nI just take his hand and squeeze it in my own. \"You did good,\" I reply. \"I'm proud of you.\" And I am. I'm prouder of him than I've ever been of myself\u2014I'm proud of him for standing up to me.\n\nOne of the lab techs shows me a screen with what looks like a magnified view of Eden's blood cells. \"A good start,\" he tells us. \"We'll work with this and try injecting Tess with a cure tonight. If we're lucky, she'll hang in there for another five or six days and give us some time to work with.\" The tech's eyes are grim, even though his words are pretty hopeful. The weird combination makes a chill run down my spine. I grip Eden's hand tighter.\n\n\"We don't have a lot of time left,\" Eden whispers to me when the lab techs leave us to talk in peace. \"If they can't find a cure, what are we going to do?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I admit. It's not something I really want to think about, because it leaves me feeling more helpless than I like. If we don't find a cure, there won't be any international military aid. If there's no aid, then we'll have no way to win against the Colonies. And if the Colonies overrun us... I recall what I saw when I was over there, and remember what the Chancellor had offered me. If you choose, we can work together. The people don't know what's best for them. Sometimes you just have to help them along. Isn't that right?\n\nI need to find a way to stall them while we work on a cure. Anything to slow the Colonies down, to give the Antarcticans a chance to come to our aid. \"We'll just have to fight back,\" I tell Eden, ruffling his hair. \"Until we can't fight back anymore. That's the way it always seems to be, yeah?\"\n\n\"Why can't the Republic win?\" Eden asks. \"I always thought their military was the strongest in the world. This is the first time I actually wish they were right.\"\n\nI smile sadly at Eden's na\u00efvet\u00e9. \"The Colonies have allies,\" I reply. \"We don't.\" How the hell do I explain it all? How do I tell him exactly how helpless I feel, standing by like a broken puppet while Anden leads his army in a battle they just can't win? \"They have a better army, and we just don't have enough soldiers to go around.\"\n\nEden sighs. His little shoulders slump in a way that chokes me up. I close my eyes and force myself to calm down. Crying in front of Eden at a time like this is way too embarrassing. \"Too bad everyone in the Republic isn't a soldier,\" he mutters.\n\nI open my eyes. Too bad everyone in the Republic isn't a soldier.\n\nAnd just like that, I know what I need to do. I know how to answer the Chancellor's blackmail, and how to stall the Colonies. I'm dying, I don't have many days left\u2014my mind is slowly falling apart, and so is my strength. But I do have enough strength for one thing. I have enough time to take one final step.\n\n\"Maybe everyone in the Republic can be a soldier,\" I reply quietly.\n\nLast night feels like a dream, every last detail of it. But this morning stands in stark contrast\u2014there is no mistaking the flinch I felt from Day when I touched his arm, the violent shudder that went through him at just a brush of my hand. My heart still hurts as I leave my apartment, headed for a parked jeep that will be waiting for me. A morning spent with the Senate. I try in vain to clear Day from my mind, but it's impossible. A Senate meeting feels so trivial right now\u2014the Colonies are gradually pushing our country back with the help of strong allies, Antarctica still refuses to help us, and Commander Jameson is at large. And here I'll sit, talking politics when I could be\u2014 should be\u2014out in the field, doing what I'm trained to do. What am I going to say to all of them, anyway? Are any of them even going to listen?\n\nWhat are we going to do?\n\nNo. I need to focus. I need to support Anden as he attempts, yet again, to negotiate with the Colonies' Chancellor and CEOs and generals. We both know that it won't get us anywhere.... The only thing that will make them budge is a cure. And even then, it might not be enough to hold the Colonies back. But still. We have to try. And perhaps he'll be up for helping the Patriots with their plans, especially if he knows how much Day will be involved in them.\n\nThe mere thought of Day brings back memories of last night. My cheeks turn hot, and I know it's not because of the warm Los Angeles weather. Stupid timing, I chide myself, and push last night from my thoughts. All around me, the usually busy streets of Lake are eerily empty, as if we're preparing for an oncoming storm. I suppose that's not so inaccurate.\n\nA prickling sensation suddenly travels up my spine. I stop for a moment, then frown. What was that? The streets still look deserted, but a strange premonition makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Someone is watching me. Immediately the idea feels too far-fetched, but as I walk, I tighten my jaw and let my hand rest on my gun. Maybe I'm being ridiculous. Perhaps the warning that Day had given me\u2014that the Colonies might use me against him or that they might have me in their sights\u2014is starting to play tricks on my mind. Still, no reason to throw caution to the winds. I lean against the closest building so that my back is protected, and call Anden. The sooner this jeep arrives, the better.\n\nAnd then I see her. I stop the call.\n\nShe wears a good disguise. (Weathered Republic attire that's supposed to be worn only by first-year soldiers, which means she looks unremarkable and easily missed; a soldier's cap pulled low over her face, with only a few dark red strands poking out from underneath it.) But even from this distance, I recognize her face\u2014cold and hard.\n\nCommander Jameson.\n\nI look casually away and pretend to dig around in my pockets for something, but inside, my heart pounds at a furious pace. She's here in Los Angeles, which means she somehow managed to escape the fighting in Denver and avoided the Republic's clutches. Is it too big a coincidence that she is where I am? Perhaps she is here because she knew that I would be here? The Colonies. There must be other eyes here. My hands shake as she passes me by on the other side of the street. She gives no indication of seeing me, but I know that she's noticed. On such an empty block, I should be impossible to miss\u2014and I'm not in disguise.\n\nWhen her back is finally turned to me, I cross my arms, tilt my head slightly downward, and call Anden on my earpiece again. \"I see her. She's here. Commander Jameson is in Los Angeles.\"\n\nMy voice sounds so quiet and mumbled that Anden has trouble making it out. \"You see her?\" he asks in disbelief. \"She's on the same block as you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I whisper. I'm careful to keep an eye on Commander Jameson's disappearing figure. \"She might be here intentionally, looking for where my jeep will take me or perhaps trying to locate you.\" As she pulls farther away, an overwhelming desire rises up in me to tag along. For the first time in a long time, my agent skills are calling out to me. Gone are politics; suddenly I've been thrust back in the field. When she turns a corner, I immediately abandon my spot and start heading after her. Where is she going? \"She's at Lake and Colorado,\" I whisper urgently to Anden. \"Turning north. Get some soldiers out here, but don't let her know you're following along. I want to see where she's going.\" Before Anden can say anything else, I end the call.\n\nI trail along the side of the buildings, careful to stay in the shadows as much as I can, and take a shortcut through one alley toward the street where I think Commander Jameson had gone. Instead of peering around the corner and potentially giving myself away, I instead huddle in the alley and calculate how much time has passed. If she kept up the same pace, and she stayed on this street, then she should have walked past this alley at least one minute ago. Carefully, I lean out until I can catch a quick glimpse of the street. Sure enough, she's already walked past me, and I can see the back of her figure hurrying away. This quick glimpse is also enough to tell me something else\u2014she's talking into her own mike.\n\nI wish Day were with me. He'd know instantly the best way to travel unseen through these streets. For a second I contemplate calling him, but for him to get here in time would be too much of a stretch.\n\nInstead, I follow Commander Jameson. I tail her for a good four blocks, until we enter a strip of Ruby that borders part of Batalla, where two or three pyramid Airship bases sit along the street. She makes a turn again. I hurry to turn with her\u2014but by the time I look down the street, she's gone. Perhaps she knew someone was following her; after all, Commander Jameson is much more experienced in this sort of tracking than I am. I look to the roofs.\n\nAnden's voice crackles in my earpiece. \"We lost her,\" he confirms. \"I've put out a silent alert to the troops there to search for her and report immediately back. She couldn't have gone far.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" I agree, but my shoulders sag. She'd disappeared without a trace. Who had she been talking to on her mike? My eyes scan the street, trying to figure out what she must have come here for. Maybe she's scouting. The thought unnerves me.\n\n\"I'm heading back,\" I finally whisper into my own mike. \"If my suspicions are correct, then we might have\u2014\"\n\nA whoosh of air\u2014a blinding spark\u2014something explodes before my eyes. I flinch and throw myself instinctively to the ground behind a nearby trash bin. What was that?\n\nA bullet. I look to the wall where it hit. A small chunk of brick is missing. Someone tried to shoot me. My sudden turn to go back the way I came must have been the only thing that saved my life. I start placing another frantic call to Anden. Blood rushes through my ears like a tidal wave of noise, blocking out logic and allowing the panic in. Another bullet sparks against the metal of the trash bin. There's no question now that I'm under attack.\n\nI click the call off. Where is Commander Jameson shooting from? Are there others with her? Colonies troops? Republic soldiers turned traitorous? I don't know. I can't tell. I can't hear and I can't see \u2014\n\nThrough my rising panic, Metias's voice materializes. Stay calm, Junebug. Logic will save you. Focus, think, act.\n\nI close my eyes, taking a deep, shuddering breath, and allow myself a second to still my mind, to concentrate on my brother's voice. This is no time to fall apart. I have never let emotions get the best of me, and I'm not about to start now. Think, June. Don't be stupid. After over a year of trauma, after months and months of political bargaining, after days of war and death, I am starting to suspect everything and everyone. This is how the Colonies could tear us apart... not with their allies or weapons, but with their propaganda. With fear and desperation.\n\nMy panic clears. Logic sweeps back in.\n\nFirst, I yank my own gun out of its holster. Then I make an exaggerated gesture, like I'm about to dart out from behind the trash bin. Instead, I stay put\u2014but my feint is enough to provoke another bullet. Spark! It ricochets off the brick wall that my back is pressed up against. Instantly I glance at the mark it leaves and pinpoint where it might have come from. (Not from the roofs\u2014the angle isn't wide enough. Four, maybe five floors up. Not the building directly across from me, but the one right next to it.) I look over to the windows lining those floors. Several are open. At first I want to aim right back at those windows\u2014but then I remind myself that I might hit someone unintentionally. Instead, I study the building. It looks like either a broadcast station or a military hall\u2014it's close enough to the air bases that I wonder whether it's where the Airships are being monitored from.\n\nWhat is she up to that involves the air bases? Are the Colonies planning a surprise attack here?\n\nI click my mike back on. \"Anden,\" I whisper after I input his code. \"Get me out of here. Use my gun's tracking.\"\n\nBut my call has no time to go through. A split second later, another bullet cracks right above my head\u2014this time I flinch and flatten myself underneath the trash bin. When I open my eyes, I find myself staring straight into the cold eyes of Commander Jameson.\n\nShe grabs for my wrist.\n\nI bolt out from under the trash bin before she can reach me. I twist around to aim my gun at her, but she's already darted away. Her own gun's raised. Right away I can tell that she's not aiming to kill. Why? The question runs through my mind at lightning speed. Because the Colonies need me alive\u2014because they need me to bargain with.\n\nShe fires; I roll on the ground. A bullet misses my leg by inches. I hop onto my feet and aim at her again\u2014this time I fire. I miss her by a hair. She ducks behind the trash bin. At the same time I try to put a call through again. I succeed. \"Anden,\" I gasp into the mike as I turn tail and run. \"Get me out!\"\n\n\"Already on our way,\" Anden replies. I sprint around a corner right as I hear another shot fired behind me. It's the last one. Right on schedule, a jeep races toward me and screeches to a halt several feet away from me. A pair of soldiers pours out, shielding me while two others run out to the street toward Commander Jameson. I already know it's too late to catch her, though\u2014she must've made a run for it too. It's all over as quickly as it began. I hop into the jeep with the soldiers' help, then collapse against the seat as we speed away. Adrenaline washes through me. My entire body trembles uncontrollably.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" one of the soldiers asks, but his voice sounds far away. All I can think about is what the encounter meant. Commander Jameson had known I would wait at that block for my jeep; she must have lured me out in an attempt to capture me. Her presence at the Airship bases was no coincidence. She's feeding information to the Colonies about our rotations and locations here. There are probably other Colonies soldiers hiding amongst us too\u2014Commander Jameson is a wanted fugitive. She can't move around this easily without help. And with her experience, she could probably hold off a manhunt for her on these streets long enough for the Colonies to arrive. For the Colonies to arrive. They've targeted their next city, and it's going to be us.\n\nOver my earpiece, Anden's voice comes on again. \"I'm on my way,\" he says urgently. \"Are you all right? The jeep will take you straight to Batalla Hall, and I'll have a full guard on you\u2014\"\n\n\"She's feeding them information about the ports,\" I breathe into the mike before he can finish. My voice shakes as I say it. \"The Colonies are about to attack Los Angeles.\"\n\nI get the call about june as I'm sitting with eden. After a morning of experimentations, he's finally fallen asleep. Outside, clouds blanket the entire city in a bleak atmosphere. Good. I wouldn't know how to feel if it were a bright, sunny day, not with this news about Commander Jameson and the fact that she'd tried to shoot June out in the open on the streets. Clouds suit my mood just fine.\n\nWhile I wait impatiently for June to arrive at the hospital, I spend my time watching Tess through the glass of her room's window. The lab team still surrounds her, monitoring her vitals like a bunch of goddy vultures on an old nature show. I shake my head. I shouldn't be so hard on them. Earlier they let me put on a suit, sit inside next to Tess, and hold her hand. She was unconscious, of course, but she could still tighten her fingers around mine. She knows I'm here. That I'm waiting for her cure.\n\nNow the lab team looks like they're injecting her with some sort of formula mixed from a batch of liquid made from Eden's blood cells. Hell if I know what'll happen next. Their faces are hidden behind reflective glass masks, turning them into something alien. Tess's eyes stay closed, and her skin's an unhealthy yellow.\n\nShe has the virus that the Colonies spread, I have to remind myself. No, that the Republic spread. Damn this memory of mine.\n\nPascao, Baxter, and the other Patriots stay camped out at the hospital too. Where the hell else do they have to go, anyway? As the minutes drag on, Pascao takes a seat next to me and rubs his hands together. \"She's hanging in there,\" he mutters, his eyes lingering on Tess. \"But there have been reports of some other outbreaks in the city. Came mostly from some refugees. Have you seen the news on the JumboTrons?\"\n\nI shake my head. My jaw is tense with rage. When is June arriving? They said they were bringing her here over a quarter of an hour ago. \"Haven't gone anywhere except to see my brother and to see Tess.\"\n\nPascao sighs, rubbing a hand across his face. He's careful not to ask about June. I'd apologize to him about my temper, but I'm too angry to care. \"Three quarantine zones set up now in downtown. If you're still planning to execute your little stunt, we gotta move out within the next day.\"\n\n\"That's all the time we'll need. If the rumors we're hearing from June and the Elector are true, then this will be our best chance.\" The thought of parts of Los Angeles being cordoned off for quarantines sends a dark, uncomfortable nostalgia through me. Everything's so wrong, and I'm so tired. I'm so tired of worrying about it all, about whether or not the people I care about will make it through the night or survive the day. At the same time, I can't sleep. Eden's words from this morning still ring in my thoughts. Maybe everyone in the Republic can be a soldier. My fingers run along the paper clip ring adorning my finger. If June had gotten injured this morning, I wonder if the last shreds of my sanity would've vanished. I feel like I'm hanging on by a thread. I guess that's true in a pretty literal sense too\u2014my headaches have been relentless today, and I've grown used to the perpetual pain pulsing at the back of my head. Just a few months, I think. Just a few months, like the doctors said, and then maybe the medication will have worked enough to let me get that surgery. Keep hanging on.\n\nAt my silence, Pascao turns his pale eyes on me. \"It's gonna be dangerous, what you've told me,\" he says. He seems like he's treading carefully. \"Some civilians will die. There's just no way around it.\"\n\n\"I don't think we have a choice,\" I reply, returning his look. \"No matter how warped this country is, it's still their homeland. We have to call them to action.\"\n\nShouts echo from the hall beyond our own. Pascao and I both stop to listen for a second\u2014and if I didn't know any better, I'd swear it was the Elector. Weird. I'm not exactly Anden's biggest fan, but I've never heard him lose his temper.\n\nThe double doors at the end of the hall swing open with a bang\u2014suddenly, the shouts fill the hall. Anden storms in with his usual crowd of soldiers, while June keeps up beside him. June. Relief floods through my body. I hop to my feet. Her face lights up as I hurry over to her.\n\n\"I'm okay,\" she says, waving me off before I can even open my mouth. She sounds impatient about it, like she's spent the entire day convincing everyone else of the same thing. \"They're being overly cautious, bringing me here\u2014\"\n\nI could care less if they're being overly cautious. I cut her off and pull her into a tight embrace. A weight lifts from my chest, and the rest of my anger comes flooding in. \"You're the Elector,\" I snap at Anden. \"You're the damn Elector of the Republic. Can't you make sure your own goddy Princeps-Elect isn't assassinated by a prisoner you guys can't even seem to keep imprisoned? What kind of bodyguards do you have, anyway\u2014a pack of first-year cadets?\"\n\nAnden shoots me a dangerous look, but to my surprise, he stays silent. I pull away from June so I can hold her face in my hands. \"You're okay, right?\" I ask urgently. \"You're completely okay?\"\n\nJune raises an eyebrow at me, then gives me a quick, reassuring kiss. \"Yes. I'm completely okay.\" She casts a glance over at Anden, but he's too distracted talking to one of his soldiers now.\n\n\"Find me the men assigned to retrieve the Princeps-Elect,\" he snaps at the soldier. Dark circles line the skin under his eyes, and his face looks both haggard and furious. \"If luck hadn't been on our side, Jameson would have killed her. I've half a mind to label them all traitors. There's plenty of room in the firing squad yard for all of them.\" The soldier snaps to attention and rushes off with several others to do as Anden said. My own anger wanes, and a chill runs through me at how familiar his wrath feels. Like I'm looking at his father.\n\nNow he faces me. His voice turns calmer. \"The lab team tells me that your brother pulled through his experimentation so far very bravely,\" he says. \"I wanted to thank you again for\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't lay it on too thick,\" I interrupt with a raised eyebrow. \"This whole thing isn't over yet.\" After more days like today, where Eden's going to fade even faster from all the experiments, I might not be so polite. I lower my voice, making an effort to sound civil again. It's half working. \"Let's talk in private. Elector, I have some ideas to run by you. With this recent news from Commander Jameson, we might just have an opportunity to stir up some trouble for the Colonies. You, me, June, and the Patriots.\"\n\nAnden's eyes darken at that, and his mouth tightens in an uncertain frown as he scans his audience. Pascao's giant, ever-present grin doesn't seem to improve his mood. After a few seconds, though, he nods at his soldiers. \"Get us a conference room,\" he says. \"I want security cams off.\"\n\nHis soldiers scramble to do his bidding. As we fall into step behind him, I exchange a long glance with June. She's okay, she's unharmed. And yet, I'm afraid that she'll disappear if I'm careless enough to look away. I force myself to hold back on asking her about what happened until we're all in a private room\u2014and from the look on her face, she's also waiting for the right moment. My hand aches to hold hers. I keep that to myself too. Our dance around each other always seems like it's doomed to repeat itself over and over again.\n\n\"So,\" Anden says once we've settled into a room and his patrol has disabled all of the cams. He leans back in one of the chairs and surveys me with a penetrating look. \"Perhaps we should start with what happened to our Princeps-Elect this morning.\"\n\nJune lifts her chin, but her hands shake ever so slightly. \"I saw Commander Jameson in Ruby sector. My guess is that she was in the area to scout locations\u2014and she must have known where I would be.\" I marvel at how steady June sounds. \"I tailed her for a while, until we reached the strip of Airship bases that border Ruby and Batalla. She attacked me there.\"\n\nEven this short of a summary is enough to make me see red. Anden sighs and runs a hand through his hair. \"We suspect that Commander Jameson may have given some locations and schedules to the Colonies about Los Angeles Airship bases. She may have also attempted to kidnap Ms. Iparis for bargaining power.\"\n\n\"Does that mean the Colonies are planning to attack LA?\" Pascao asks. I already know his next thought. \"But that would mean it's true, Denver has fallen...\" He trails off at Anden's expression.\n\n\"We're receiving some early rumors,\" Anden replies. \"The word is that the Colonies have a bomb that can level the entire city. The only thing holding them back from using it is an international ban. They wouldn't want to finally force Antarctica to get involved, now would they?\" Since when did Anden become so sarcastic? \"At any rate, if they attack now, we will be hard-pressed to have a cure ready to show Antarctica before the Colonies overwhelm us. We can defend against them. We can't defend against them and Africa.\"\n\nI hesitate, then bring up the thoughts that have been churning in my mind. \"I talked to Eden this morning, during his experimentation. He gave me an idea.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\" June asks.\n\nI look at her. Still as lovely as ever, but even June is starting to show the stress from this invasion, her shoulders slightly hunched. My eyes turn back to Anden. \"Surrender,\" I say.\n\nHe hadn't expected that. \"You want me to raise the white flag to the Colonies?\"\n\n\"Yes, surrender.\" I lower my voice. \"Yesterday afternoon, the Colonies' Chancellor made me an offer. He told me that if I could get the Republic's people to rise up in support of the Colonies and against the Republic soldiers, he'd make sure that Eden and I are protected once the Colonies win the war. Let's say that you surrender, and at the same time, I offer to meet the Chancellor to give him the answer to his request, that I'm going to ask the people to embrace the Colonies as their new government. You now have a chance to catch the Colonies off guard. The Chancellor already assumes you're going to surrender any day now, anyway.\"\n\n\"Faking a surrender is against international law,\" June mumbles to herself, although she studies me carefully. I can tell that she's not exactly against the idea. \"I don't know whether the Antarcticans will appreciate that, and the whole point of this is to persuade them to help us out, isn't it?\"\n\nI shake my head. \"They didn't seem to care that the Colonies broke the ceasefire without warning us, back when this all erupted.\" I glance at Anden. He watches me closely, his chin resting on his hand. \"Now you get to return the favor, yeah?\"\n\n\"What happens when you meet with the Chancellor?\" he finally asks. \"A false surrender can only last so long before we need to act.\"\n\nI lean toward him, my voice urgent. \"You know what Eden said to me this morning? 'Too bad everyone in the Republic can't be a soldier.' But they can.\"\n\nAnden stays silent.\n\n\"Let me mark each of the sectors in the Republic, something that will let the people know that they can't just lie down and let the Colonies take over their homes, something that will ask them to wait for my signal and remind them what we're all fighting for. Then, when I make the announcement that the Colonies' Chancellor wants me to make, I won't call on the people to embrace the Colonies. I'll call them to action.\"\n\n\"And what if they don't respond to your call?\" June says.\n\nI shoot her a quick smile. \"Have some faith, sweetheart. The people love me.\"\n\nIn spite of herself, June smiles back.\n\nI turn to Anden. Seriousness replaces my flash of amusement. \"The people love the Republic more than you think,\" I say. \"More than I thought. You know the number of times I saw evacuees around here singing patriotic Republic songs? You know how much graffiti I've seen over the last few months that support both you and the country?\" A note of passion enters my voice. \"The people do believe in you. They believe in us. And they will fight back for us if we call on them\u2014they'll be the ones ripping down Colonies flags, protesting in front of Colonies offices, turning their own homes into traps for invading Colonies soldiers.\" I narrow my eyes. \"They'll become a million versions of me.\"\n\nAnden and I stare at each other. Finally, he smiles.\n\n\"Well,\" June says to me, \"while you're busy becoming the Colonies' most wanted criminal, the Patriots and I can join in your stunts. We'll pull them on a national level. If Antarctica protests, the Republic can just say they were the actions of a few vigilantes. If the Colonies want to play dirty, then let's play dirty.\"\n\n1700 HOURS.\n\nBATALLA HALL.\n\n68\u00b0 F.\n\nI hate senate meetings. I hate them with a passion\u2014nothing but a sea of bickering politicians and talking heads, talking talking talking all the time when I could instead be out in the streets, giving my mind and body a healthy workout. But after the plan that Day, Anden, and I have concocted, there's no choice but to brief the Senate. Now I sit in the circular meeting chamber at Batalla Hall, my seat facing Anden from across the room, trying to ignore the intimidating looks from the Senators. Few events leave me feeling more like a child than Senate meetings.\n\nAnden addresses his restless audience. \"Attacks against our bases in Vegas have picked up since Denver fell,\" he says. \"We've seen African squadrons approaching the city. Tomorrow, I head out to meet my generals there.\" He hesitates here. I hold my breath. I know how much Anden hates the idea of voicing defeat to anyone, especially to the Colonies. He looks at me\u2014my cue to help him. He's so tired. We all are. \"Ms. Iparis,\" he calls out. \"If you please, I hand the floor over to you to explain your story and your advice.\"\n\nI take a deep breath. Addressing the Senate: the one thing I hate more than attending Senate meetings, made even worse by the fact that I have to sell them a lie. \"By now, I'm sure all of you have heard about Commander Jameson's supposed work for the Colonies. Based on what we know, it seems likely that the Colonies will hit Los Angeles with a surprise attack very soon. If they do, and the attacks on Vegas continue, we won't last for long. After talking with Day and the Patriots, we suggest that the only way to protect our civilians and to possibly negotiate a fair treaty is to announce our surrender to the Colonies.\"\n\nStunned silence. Then, the room bursts into chatter. Serge is the first to raise his voice and challenge Anden. \"With all due respect, Elector,\" he says, his voice quivering with irritation, \"you did not discuss this with your other Princeps-Elects.\"\n\n\"It was not something I had an opportunity to discuss with you before now,\" Anden replies. \"Ms. Iparis's knowledge comes only because she was unfortunate enough to experience it firsthand.\"\n\nEven Mariana, often on Anden's side, raises her voice against the idea. \"This is a dangerous negotiation,\" she says. At least she speaks calmly. \"If you are doing this to spare our lives, then I recommend you and Ms. Iparis reconsider immediately. Handing the people to the Colonies will not protect them.\"\n\nThe other Senators don't show the same restraint.\n\n\"A surrender? We have kept the Colonies off our land for almost a hundred years!\"\n\n\"Surely we're not all that weakened yet? What have they done, aside from temporarily winning Denver?\"\n\n\"Elector, this is something you should have discussed with all of us\u2014even in the midst of this crisis!\"\n\nI look on as each voice rises higher than the next, until the entire chamber fills with the sound of insults, anger, and disbelief. Some spew hatred over Day. Some curse the Colonies. Some beg Anden to reconsider, to ask for more international help, to plead for the United Nations to stop sealing our ports. Noise.\n\n\"This is an outrage!\" one Senator (thin, probably no more than a hundred and forty pounds, with a gleaming bald head) barks, looking at me as if I'm responsible for the entire country's downfall. \"Surely we're not taking direction from a little girl? And from Day? You must be joking. We'll hand the country over based on the advice of some damn boy who should still be on our nation's criminal list!\"\n\nAnden narrows his eyes. \"Careful how you refer to Day, Senator, before the people turn their backs on you.\"\n\nThe Senator sneers at Anden and raises himself up as high as he can. \" Elector,\" he says, his tone exaggerated and mocking. \" You are the leader of the Republic of America. You have power over this entire country. And here you are, held hostage to the suggestions of someone who tried to have you killed. \" My temper has begun to rise. I lower my head so that I don't have to look at the Senator. \"In my opinion, sir, you need to do something before your entire government\u2014and your entire population \u2014sees you as nothing but a cowardly, weak-willed, backroom-negotiating pushover bowing to the demands of a teenage girl and a criminal and a ragtag team of terrorists. Your father would have\u2014\"\n\nAnden jumps to his feet and slams his hand down on the table. Instantly the chamber turns silent.\n\n\"Senator,\" Anden says quietly. The man stares back, but with less conviction than he had two seconds ago. \"You are correct about only one thing. As my father's son, I am the Elector of the Republic. I am the law. Everything I decide directly affects who lives or dies.\" I study Anden's face with a growing sense of worry. His gentle, soft-voiced self is slowly disappearing behind the veil of darkness and violence inherited from his father. \"You'd do well to remember what happened to those Senators who actually plotted my failed assassination.\"\n\nThe chamber falls so quiet I feel like I can hear the beads of sweat rolling down the Senators' faces. Even Mariana and Serge have turned pale. In the midst of them all stands Anden, his face a mask of fury, his jaw tense, and his eyes a deep, brooding storm. He turns to me\u2014I feel an awful, electric shudder run through my body, but I keep my gaze steady. I am the only one in the chamber willing to look him in the eye.\n\nEven if our surrender is a fake one, one that the Senators aren't meant to understand, I wonder how Anden will deal with this group once it's all over.\n\nMaybe he won't have to. Maybe we'll belong to a different country, or maybe Anden and I will both be dead.\n\nIn this moment, sitting amongst a divided Senate and a young Elector struggling to hold them together, I finally see my path clearly. I don't belong. I shouldn't be here. The realization hits me so hard, I find it suddenly hard to breathe.\n\nAnden and the Senators exchange a few more tense words, but then it's all over, and we file out of the room, an uneasy crowd. I find Anden\u2014his deep red uniform a bright marker against the Senators' black\u2014in the hall and pull him aside. \"They'll come around,\" I say, trying to offer reassurance in a sea of hostility. \"They don't have a choice.\"\n\nHe seems to relax, if only for a second. A few simple words from me are enough to dissipate his anger. \"I know. But I don't want them to have no choice. I want them solidly behind me of their own will.\" He sighs. \"Can we speak in private? I've something to discuss with you.\"\n\nI study his face, trying to guess at what he wants to say, dreading it. Finally, I nod. \"My apartment's closer.\"\n\nWe head out to his jeep and drive in silence, all the way to my high-rise in Ruby sector. There, we make our way upstairs and enter my apartment without a word. Ollie greets us, as enthusiastic as ever. I close the door behind me.\n\nAnden's temper has long vanished. He looks around with a restless expression, then turns back to me. \"Do you mind if I sit?\"\n\n\"Please,\" I reply, taking a seat myself at the dining table. The Elector Primo, asking for permission to sit?\n\nAnden takes the seat beside me with all of his signature grace, and then rubs his temples with weary hands. \"I have some good news,\" he says. He tries to smile, but I can see how heavy it is. \"I've made a deal with Antarctica.\"\n\nI swallow hard. \"And?\"\n\n\"They've confirmed that they will send military support\u2014some air support for now, more ground support when we prove we've found a cure,\" Anden replies. \"And they will agree to treat Day.\" He doesn't look at me. \"In exchange for Dakota. I had no choice. I'm giving them our largest territory.\"\n\nMy heart jumps with an overwhelming sense of joy and relief\u2014and at the same time, it sinks with sympathy for Anden. He's been forced to fragment the country. Giving up our most precious resource; everybody in the world's most precious resource. It was inevitable. Every win comes with a sacrifice. \"Thank you,\" I say.\n\n\"Don't thank me yet.\" His wry smile quickly turns into a grimace. \"We are hanging by a thread. I don't know if their help will come fast enough. The word from the warfront is that we're losing ground in Vegas. If our plans with this phony surrender fail, if we don't find a cure soon, this war will be over before Antarctica's support ever arrives.\"\n\n\"Do you think finding a cure will make the Colonies stop?\" I ask quietly.\n\nAnden shakes his head. \"We don't have many options,\" he replies. \"But we have to hang on until help arrives.\" He falls silent for a moment. \"I head to the warfront in Vegas tomorrow. Our troops need it.\"\n\nRight into the thick of war. I try to stay calm. \"Are your Princeps-Elects going too?\" I ask. \"Your Senators?\"\n\n\"Only my generals will join me,\" Anden replies. \"You're not going to come, and neither are Mariana and Serge. Someone needs to hold firm in Los Angeles.\"\n\nAnd here's the meat of what he wants to tell me. My mind spins over what I know he'll say next.\n\nAnden leans on the table and threads his gloved fingers together. \"Someone needs to hold firm in Los Angeles,\" he repeats, \"which means one of my Princeps-Elects will need to take my place as an acting Elector. She would need to control the Senate, keep them in check while I'm away with the troops. I would select this person, of course, and the Senate would confirm it.\" A small, sad smile plays at the edges of his lips, as if he already knows what my answer will be. \"I've already spoken individually with Mariana and Serge about this, and they are both eager for my appointment. Now I need to know whether you are, as well.\"\n\nI turn my head away and look out the apartment window. The thought of becoming an acting Elector of the Republic\u2014even though my chances of being chosen pale in comparison to that of Mariana and Serge\u2014should excite me, but it doesn't.\n\nAnden watches me carefully. \"You can tell me,\" he finally says. \"I realize what a turning point this decision is, and I've sensed your discomfort for quite some time.\" He gives me a level stare. \"Tell me the truth, June. Do you really want to be a Princeps-Elect?\"\n\nI feel a strange emptiness. I had been contemplating this for a long time, my disinterest and weariness with the politics of the Republic, the bickering in the Senate, the fighting among Senators and the Princeps-Elects. I'd thought this would be hard to say to him. But now that he's here, waiting for my answer, the words come easily, calmly.\n\n\"Anden, you know that the role of a Princeps-Elect has been a huge honor for me. But as time goes on, I can tell that something's missing, and now I know what it is. You get to head off and lead your army against our enemies, while Day and the Patriots are fighting back against the Colonies in their own guerilla way. I miss being out in the field, working as a junior agent and relying on myself. I miss the days when things were straightforward instead of political, when I could easily sense the right path and what I should do. I... miss doing what my brother helped train me to do.\" I hold my gaze steady. \"I'm sorry, Anden, but I don't know whether I'm cut out to be a politician. I'm a soldier. I don't think you should consider me as a temporary Elector in your absence, and I'm not sure whether I should continue on as your Princeps-Elect.\"\n\nAnden searches my eyes. \"I see,\" he finally says. Although there's a twinge of sadness in his voice, he seems to agree. If there's one thing Anden excels at, even more than Day, it's understanding where I'm coming from.\n\nA moment later, I see another emotion in his eyes\u2014envy. He's envious that I have the choice to step away from the world of politics, that I can turn to something else, when Anden will forever and always be our Elector, someone the country needs to lean on. He can never step away with a clean conscience.\n\nHe clears his throat. \"What do you want to do?\"\n\n\"I want to join the troops in the streets,\" I reply. I'm so sure of my decision this time, so excited by the prospect, that I can hardly bear it. \"Send me back out there. Let me fight.\" I lower my voice. \"If we lose, then none of the Princeps-Elects will matter anyway.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Anden says, nodding. He looks around the room with an uncertain expression, and behind his brave front I can see the boy king in him struggling to hold on. Then he notices a rumpled coat hanging at the foot of my bed. He lingers on it.\n\nI'd never bothered to put Day's coat away.\n\nAnden finally looks away from it. I don't need to tell him that Day had spent the night\u2014I can already see the realization on his face. I blush. I have always been good at hiding my emotions, but this time I'm embarrassed that something about that night\u2014the heat of Day's skin against mine, the touch of his hand smoothing my hair away from my face, the brush of his lips against my neck\u2014will show up in my eyes.\n\n\"Well,\" he says after a long pause. He gives me a small, sad smile, then rises. \"You are a soldier, Ms. Iparis, through and through\u2014but it has been an honor to see you as a Princeps-Elect.\" The Elector of the Republic bows to me. \"Whatever happens from here, I hope you remember that.\"\n\n\"Anden,\" I whisper. The memory of his dark, furious face in the Senate chamber comes back to me. \"When you're in Vegas, promise me that you'll stay yourself. Don't turn into someone you're not. Okay?\"\n\nHe may not have been surprised by my answer, or by Day's coat. But this seems to catch him off guard. He blinks, confused for a second. Then he understands. He shakes his head. \"I have to go. I have to lead my men, just like my father did.\"\n\n\"That's not what I mean,\" I say carefully.\n\nHe struggles for a moment to find the next words. \"It's no secret how cruel my father was, or how many atrocities he committed. The Trials, the plagues...\" Anden trails off a little, the light in his green eyes turning distant as he dwells on memories of someone few of us had ever come to know. \"But he fought with his men. You understand this, perhaps more than anyone. He didn't hang back in a Senate chamber while he sent his troops off to die. When he was young and brought the country from a lawless mess to strict martial law, he was out in the streets and in front of his squadrons. He fought at the warfront itself, shooting down Colonies jets.\" Anden pauses to give me a quick look. \"I'm not trying to defend anything he did. But if he was anything, he was unafraid. He won his military's loyalty through action, however ruthless.... I want to boost our troops' morale too, and I can't do it while hiding out in LA. I'm\u2014\"\n\n\"You are not your father,\" I say, holding his gaze with my own. \"You're Anden. You don't have to follow in his footsteps; you have your own. You're the Elector now. You don't have to be like him.\"\n\nI think back on my own loyalty to the former Elector, of all the video footage of him shouting orders from the cockpit of a fighter jet, or heading up tanks in the streets. He was always on the front lines. He was fearless. Now, as I look at Anden, I can see that same fearlessness burning steadily in his eyes, his need to assert himself as a worthy leader of his country. When his father was young, perhaps he had also been like Anden\u2014idealistic, full of hopes and dreams, of the noblest intentions, brave and driven. How had he slowly twisted into the Elector who created such a dark nation? What path had he chosen to follow? Suddenly, for however brief a second, I feel like I understand the former Republic. And I know that Anden won't go down that same road.\n\nAnden returns my look, as if hearing my unspoken words... and for the first time in months, I see some of that dark cloud lift from his eyes, the blackness that gives birth to his moments of furious temper.\n\nWithout his father's shadow in the way, he's beautiful.\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" he whispers.\n\nTHE SECOND NIGHT OF THE COLONIES' CEASEFIRE.\n\nWell, no point in returning home tonight. Pascao and I are gonna run through Los Angeles, marking doors and walls and alerting the people quietly to our cause, and we might as well do it from a central location like the hospital. Besides, I needed to sit with Eden for a while. An evening of blood tests haven't treated him well\u2014he's thrown up twice since I've been here. While a nurse rushes out of the room with a bucket in hand, I pour a glass of water for my brother. He guzzles it down.\n\n\"Any luck?\" he asks weakly. \"Do you know if they've found anything yet?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\" I take the empty glass from him and set it back on a tray. \"I'll check in with them in a little bit, though. See how they're doing. Better be worth all this.\"\n\nEden sighs, closes his eyes, and leans his head against the mountain of pillows stacked on his bed. \"I'm fine,\" he whispers. \"How's your friend? Tess?\"\n\nTess. She hasn't woken up yet, and now I find myself wishing that we could go back to when she was still able to shove the lab team around. I swallow hard, trying to replace my mental image of her sickly appearance with the sweet, cheery face I've known for years. \"She's asleep. Lab says her fever hasn't broken.\"\n\nEden grits his teeth and looks back at the screen monitoring his vitals. \"She seems nice,\" he finally says. \"From everything I've heard.\"\n\nI smile. \"She is. After all this is over, maybe the two of you can hang out or something. You'd get along.\" If we all pull through this, I add to myself, and then hurriedly banish the thought. Damn, every day it's getting harder and harder to keep my chin up.\n\nOur conversation ends after that, but Eden keeps one hand gripped tightly in my own. His eyes stay closed. After a while, his breathing changes into the steady rhythm of sleep, and his hand falls away to rest on his blanket. I pull the blanket up to cover him to his chin, watch him for a few more seconds, and then stand. At least he can still sleep pretty soundly. I don't. Every hour or so, for the last two days, I shake myself out of some gruesome nightmare and have to walk it off before attempting to sleep again. My headache stays with me, a constant, dull companion, reminding me of my ticking clock.\n\nI open the door and sneak out as quietly as I can. The hall's empty except for a few nurses here and there. And Pascao. He's been waiting for me on one of the hall's benches. When he sees me, he gets up and flashes me a brief grin.\n\n\"The others are getting into position,\" he says. \"We've got about two dozen Runners, all in all, already out there and marking the sectors. I think it's about time for the two of us to head out too.\"\n\n\"Ready to rouse the people?\" I say, half joking, as he leads me down the hall.\n\n\"The excitement of it all is making my bones ache.\" Pascao pushes open a set of double doors at the hall's end, ushers us into a larger waiting room, and then into an unused hospital room with the lights still turned off. He flicks them on. My eyes go immediately to something lying on the bed. It looks like a pair of suits, dark with gray outlines, both laid out neatly on top of the sterile blankets. Beside the suits is some kind of equipment that looks a little like guns. I glance at Pascao, who shoves his hands into his pockets. \"Check these out,\" he says in a low voice. \"When I was throwing ideas around this afternoon with Baxter and a couple of Republic soldiers, they loaned out these suits for us Runners. It should help you in particular. June says she uses suits and air launchers like these to get around the city quickly, without being detected. Here.\" He tosses me one. \"Throw this on.\"\n\nI frown at the suit. It doesn't look like anything particularly special, but I decide to give Pascao the benefit of the doubt.\n\n\"I'll be in the next room,\" Pascao says as he swings his own suit over his shoulder. He nudges my shoulder as he passes. \"With these things, we should have no trouble covering Los Angeles tonight.\"\n\nI start to warn him that, with my recent headaches and medications, I'm probably not strong enough to keep up with him around the entire city\u2014but he's already out the door, leaving me alone in the room. I study the suit again, then unbutton my shirt.\n\nThe suit's surprisingly featherweight, and fits comfortably from my feet all the way to my zipped-up neck. I adjust it around my elbows and knees, then walk around for a bit. To my shock, my arms and legs feel stronger than usual. Much stronger. I try a quick jump. The suit absorbs almost all of my weight's force, and without much effort I'm able to jump high enough to clear the bed. I bend one arm, then the other. They feel strong enough to lift something heavier than what I've been used to for the past several months. A sudden thrill rushes through me.\n\nI can run in this.\n\nPascao raps on my door, then comes back in with his own suit on. \"How's it feel, pretty boy?\" he asks, looking me over. \"Fits you nicely.\"\n\n\"What are these for?\" I reply, still testing my new physical limits.\n\n\"What do you think? The Republic usually issues these to their soldiers for physically taxing missions. There are special springs installed near joints\u2014elbows, knees, whatever. In other words, it'll make you a little acrobatic hero.\"\n\nIncredible. Now that Pascao's mentioned it, I can feel the very slight push and pull of some sort of spring along my elbows, and the subtle lift the springs give my knees whenever I bend them. \"It feels good,\" I say, while Pascao watches me with a look of approval. \"Really good. It feels like I can scale a building again.\"\n\n\"Here's what I'm thinking,\" Pascao says, his voice lowering again to a whisper. His lighthearted attitude fades. \"If the Colonies land their Airships here in LA after the Elector announces a surrender, the Republic will get its troops into position to stage a surprise attack on those Airships. They can cripple a hell of a lot of them before the Colonies even realize what we're up to. I'll lead the Patriots in with the Republic's teams, and we'll wire up some of the Airship bases to blow up ships that are docked on them.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a plan.\" I flex one of my arms gingerly, marveling at the strength that the suit gives me. My heart hammers in my chest. If I don't carry out this plan just right, and the Chancellor figures out what we're really up to, then the Republic will lose the advantage of our fake surrender. We only get one shot at this.\n\nWe slide open the hospital room's glass doors and head out onto the balcony. The night's cool air refreshes me, taking away some of the grief and stress of the last few days. With this suit, I feel a little like myself again. I glance up at the buildings. \"Should we test these things out?\" I ask Pascao, hoisting the air launcher on my shoulder.\n\nPascao grins, then tosses me a can of bright red spray paint. \"You took the words right out of my mouth.\"\n\nSo off we go. I scale down to the first floor so fast that I nearly lose my footing, and then make my way effortlessly to the ground. We split up, each covering a different section of the city. As I run my sector, I can't help but smile. I'm free again, I can taste the wind and touch the sky. In this moment, my troubles melt away and once again I'm able to run away from my problems\u2014I'm able to blend right in with the rust and rubble of the city, changing it into something that belongs to me.\n\nI make my way through Tanagashi sector's dark alleys until I come across landmark buildings, places where I know most people will have to pass by, and then take out my spray paint can. I write the following on the wall:\n\nLISTEN FOR ME.\n\nBelow that, I draw the one thing I know everyone will recognize as coming from me\u2014a red streak painted onto an outline of a face.\n\nI mark everything I can think of. When I'm finished, I use the air launcher to travel to a neighboring sector, and there, I repeat the entire process. Hours later, my hair drenched in sweat and my muscles aching, I make my way back to the Central Hospital. Pascao's waiting outside for me, a sheen of sweat across his own face. He gives me a mock salute.\n\n\"Care to race back up?\" he asks, flashing me a grin.\n\nI don't reply. I just start climbing, and so does he. Pascao's figure is nearly invisible in the darkness, a shapeless form that leaps and bounds each story with the ease of a natural Runner. I dash after him. Another story, and then another.\n\nWe make it back to the balcony that runs all along the tower's fourth floor. Inside lies the hospital wing we'd left from. Even though I'm out of breath and my head is pounding again, I made the run almost as fast as Pascao did. \"Hell,\" I mutter to him as we both lean against the railing in exhaustion. \"Where was this equipment when I was at my healthiest? I could've single-handedly destroyed the Republic without breaking a sweat, yeah?\"\n\nPascao's teeth shine in the night. He surveys the cityscape. \"Maybe it's a good thing you didn't have it. Otherwise there'd be no Republic for us to save.\"\n\n\"Is it worth it?\" I ask after a while, enjoying the cool winds. \"Are you really willing to sacrifice your life for a country that hasn't done much of anything for you?\"\n\nPascao stays silent for a moment, then lifts one arm and points toward some spot on the horizon. I try to make out what he wants me to see. \"When I was little,\" he replies, \"I grew up in Winter sector. I watched two of my little sisters fail the Trial. When I went to the stadium myself and had to take my own Trial, I almost failed too. I stumbled and fell on one of the physical jumps, you know. Ironic, don't you think? Anyway, one of the soldiers saw me fall. I'll never forget the look in his eyes. When I realized that no one else had seen me except for him, I begged him to let it go. He looked damn tortured, but he didn't record my fall. When I whispered my thanks, he told me that he remembered my two sisters. He said, 'I think two deaths in your family's enough.'\" Pascao pauses for a moment. \"I've always hated the Republic for what they did to the people I loved, to all of us. But sometimes I wonder whatever happened to that soldier, and what his life was like, and who he cared about, and whether or not he's even still alive. Who knows? Maybe he's already gone.\" He shrugs at the thought. \"If I look the other way and decide to let the Republic handle its own business, and then it falls, I guess I could just leave the country. Find a way to live somewhere else, hide out from the government.\" He looks at me. \"I don't really know why I want to stand on the hill with them now. Maybe I have a little bit of faith.\"\n\nPascao wants to explain himself further, like he's frustrated that he doesn't know how to put his answer into the right words. But I understand him already. I shake my head and stare out toward the Lake sector, remembering June's brother. \"Yeah. Me too.\"\n\nAfter a while, we finally head back inside the hospital. I take off the suit and change back into my own clothes. Plan's supposed to kick into effect starting with Anden's surrender announcement. After that, it's all one day at a time. Anything could change.\n\nWhile Pascao heads off to get some rest, I retrace my steps down the hall and back toward Eden's room, wondering if the lab teams have sent up any new results for us to look at. As if they've read my mind, I see a few of them clustered outside Eden's door when I arrive. They're talking in hushed tones. The serenity I'd felt during our brief night run fades away.\n\n\"What is it?\" I ask. I can already see the tension in their eyes. My chest knots up at the sight. \"Tell me what's happened.\"\n\nFrom behind the clear plastic of his hood, one of the lab techs tells me, \"We received some data from the Antarctican lab team. We think we've managed to synthesize something from your brother's blood that can almost act as a cure. It's working\u2014to a degree.\"\n\nA cure! A rush of energy courses through me, leaving me dizzy with relief. I can't help letting a smile spill onto my face. \"Have you told the Elector yet? Does it work? Can we start using it on Tess?\"\n\nThe lab tech stops me before I can go on. \"Almost act as a cure, Day,\" he repeats.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The Antarctican team confirmed that the virus has likely mutated from the original one Eden developed immunity to, or that it may have combined its genome with another genome along the way. Your brother's T cells have the ability to shift along with this aggressive virus; in our samples, one of the cures we've developed seems to work partially\u2014\"\n\n\"So I can understand you,\" I say impatiently.\n\nThe lab tech scowls at me, as if I might infect him with my attitude. \"We're missing something,\" he says with an indignant sigh. \"We're missing a component.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you're missing something?\" I demand. \"What are you missing?\"\n\n\"Somewhere along the way, the virus that's causing our current outbreaks mutated from its original Republic plague virus and combined with another virus. There's something missing along the way, as a result. We think it may have mutated in the Colonies, perhaps quite a while ago. Months ago, even.\"\n\nMy heart sinks as I realize what they're trying to tell me. \"Does that mean the cure won't work yet?\"\n\n\"It's not only that the cure won't work yet. It's that we don't know if we can ever get it to work. Eden's not Patient Zero for this thing.\" The lab tech sighs again. \"And unless we can find the person who this new virus mutated from, I'm not sure we'll ever create a cure.\"\n\nI awake to the sound of a siren wailing across our apartment complex. It's the air raid alarm. For a second, I'm back in Denver, sitting with Day at a little lantern-lit caf\u00e9 while sleet falls all around us, listening to him tell me that he's dying. I'm back in the panicked, chaotic streets as the siren shrieks at us\u2014we're holding hands, running for shelter, terrified.\n\nGradually, my room fades into reality and the siren wails on. My heart begins to pound. I jump out of bed, pause to comfort a whining Ollie, then rush to turn on my screen. News headlines blare out, fighting with the siren\u2014and running along the bottom of the screen is an angry, red warning." + }, + { + "title": "SEEK COVER", + "text": "I scan the headlines." + }, + { + "title": "ENEMY AIRSHIPS APPROACHING LOS ANGELES'S LIMITS", + "text": "[ ALL TROOPS TO REPORT TO THEIR LOCAL ]\n\n[ HEADQUARTERS ]\n\n[ ELECTOR PRIMO TO MAKE EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT ]\n\nThey'd predicted that the Colonies would still take three more days before making a move on Los Angeles. It looks like they're ahead of schedule and preparing for the end of the three-day ceasefire, which means we need to put our plan ahead of schedule. I cover my ears from the siren, rush over to the balcony, and look out at the horizon. The morning light is still weak, and the cloudy sky makes it difficult for me to see properly, but even so, the dots lining up above California's mountain skyline are unmistakable. My breath catches in my throat.\n\nAirships. Colonies, African\u2014I can't quite tell from this distance, but there is no mistaking the fact that they are not Republic ships. Based on their position and speed, they will be hovering right over central Los Angeles before the hour's over. I click my mike on, then rush into the closet to throw on some clothes. If Anden's preparing to make an announcement soon, then it will undoubtedly be the surrender. And if that's the case, I'll need to join Day and the Patriots as quickly as I can. A fake surrender will only work for so long before it turns into a real one.\n\n\"Where are you guys?\" I shout when Day comes onto the line.\n\nHis voice sounds as urgent as mine. The echo of the siren sounds out from his side too. \"Eden's hospital room. You see the ships?\"\n\nI glance again at the horizon before lacing up my boots. \"Yes. I'm in. I'll be there soon.\"\n\n\"Watch the sky. Stay safe.\" He hesitates for two seconds. \"And hurry. We've got a problem.\" Then our call cuts off, and I'm out the door with Ollie close at my side, galloping like the wind.\n\nBy the time we reach the Central Hospital's lab floor in the Bank Tower and are ushered in to see Day, Eden, and the Patriots, the sirens have stopped. The sector's electricity must have been switched off again, and aside from the main government buildings like the Bank Tower, the landscape outside looks eerily black, swallowed nearly whole by damp morning shadows. Down the hall, the screens show an empty podium where Anden will be standing any minute now, poised to give a live national address. Ollie stays glued to my side, panting his distress. I reach down and pat him several times, and he rewards me with a lick of my hand.\n\nI meet Day and the others in Eden's room right as Anden appears onscreen. Eden looks exhausted and half conscious. He still has an IV hooked up to his arm, but aside from that, there are no other tubes or wires. Beside the bed, a lab tech is typing notes onto a notepad.\n\nDay and Pascao are wearing what look like dark Republic suits meant for physically demanding missions\u2014it's the same sort of suit I'd once worn back when I first needed to break Day out of Batalla Hall, when I spent a late night skimming building roofs in search of Kaede. Both of them are talking to a lab tech, and based on their expressions, they're not getting good news. I want to ask them for details, but Anden has stepped up to the podium already, and my words fade away as we turn our attention to the screen. All I hear is the sound of our breathing and the ominous, distant hum of approaching Airships.\n\nAnden looks composed; and even though he's only a year older than the first time I met him, the weight and gravity on his face make him look much more mature than he actually is. Only the slight clench of his jaw reveals a hint of his real emotions. He's dressed in solid white, with silver epaulettes on his shoulders and a gold Republic seal pinned near the collar of his military coat. Behind him are two flags: One is the Republic's, while the other is blank, white, devoid of color. I swallow hard. It's a flag I know well from all my studies, but one that I've never seen used. We all knew this was coming, we had planned this and we know it's not real\u2014but even so, I can't help feeling a deep, dark sense of grief and failure. As if we are truly handing our country over to someone else.\n\n\"Soldiers of the Republic,\" Anden begins addressing the soldiers surrounding him at the base. As always, his voice is at once soft and commanding, quiet but clear. \"It is with a heavy heart that I come to you today with this message. I have already relayed these same words to the Chancellor of the Colonies.\" He pauses for a moment, as if gathering his strength. I can only imagine that for him, even faking such a gesture must weigh on him far more than it already does on me. \"The Republic has officially surrendered to the Colonies.\"\n\nSilence. The base, filled with noise and chaos only a few minutes ago, is now suddenly still\u2014every soldier frozen, listening in disbelief.\n\n\"We are now to cease all military activity against the Colonies,\" Anden continues, \"and within the next day, we will meet with the Colonies' leading officials to draft official surrender terms.\" He pauses, letting the weight settle over the entire base. \"Soldiers, we will continue to update you on information regarding this as we proceed.\" Then the transmission stops. He doesn't end with Long live the Republic. A chill runs through me when the screens are replaced with an image of, not the Republic flag, but the Colonies'.\n\nThey are doing a stellar job of making this surrender look convincing. I hope the Antarcticans are going to keep their word. I hope help is on the way.\n\n\"Day, we don't have much time to get these bases ready to blow,\" Pascao mutters to us as the address stops. The three Republic soldiers with us are geared up in a similar fashion, all ready to guide them to where the air bases will be wired. \"You're gonna have to buy us some time. News is that the Colonies will start landing their Airships at our bases in a few hours.\"\n\nDay nods. As Pascao turns away to rattle off some directions to the soldiers, Day's eyes flicker to me. In them, I see a strained sense of fear that makes my stomach churn. \"Something's gone wrong with the cure, hasn't it?\" I ask. \"How's Eden doing?\"\n\nDay sighs, running a hand through his hair, and then looks down at his brother. \"He's hanging in there.\"\n\n\"But...?\"\n\n\"But the problem is that he isn't Patient Zero. They said they're missing something from his blood.\"\n\nI look at the fragile boy in the hospital bed. Eden isn't Patient Zero? \"But what? What are they missing?\"\n\n\"It'd be easier to show you than try to explain it. Come on. This is something we'll need to alert Anden about. What's the point of staging this whole surrender if we won't be able to get help from Antarctica?\" Day leads us out and down the hall. We walk in a tense silence for a while, until we finally stop in front of a nondescript door. Day opens it.\n\nWe step inside a room full of comps. A lab tech monitoring the screens rises when he sees us, then ushers us over. \"Time to update Ms. Iparis?\"\n\n\"Tell me what's going on,\" I reply.\n\nHe sits us down in front of a comp and spends several minutes loading up a screen. When he finally finishes, I see two side-by-side comparisons of some slides of what I assume are cells. I peer more closely at them.\n\nThe lab tech points to the one on the left, which looks like a series of small, polygonal particles grouped around a large central cell. Attached to the particles are dozens of little tubes sticking out of the cell. \"This,\" the lab tech says, circling the large cell with his finger, \"is a simulation of an infected cell that we're trying to target. The cell has a red hue to it, indicating that viruses have taken hold inside. If no cure's involved, this cell lyses\u2014bursts open\u2014and dies. Now, see these little particles around it? Those are simulations of the cure particles that we need. They attach to the outside of the infected cell.\" He taps the screen twice where the large cell is, and a short animation plays, showing the particles latching on to the cell; eventually, the cell shrinks in size and the color of it changes. \"They save the cell from bursting.\"\n\nMy eyes shift over to the comparison on the right, which also has a similarly infected cell surrounded by little particles. This time, I don't see any tubes for the particles to attach to. \"This is what's actually happening,\" the lab tech explains. \"We're missing something from our cure particles that can attach to the cell's receptors. If we don't develop that, the rest of the particles can't work. The cell can't come in direct contact with the medicine, and the cell dies.\"\n\nI cross my arms and exchange a frown with Day, who shrugs helplessly. \"How can we figure out the missing piece?\"\n\n\"That's the thing. Our guess is that this particular attaching feature wasn't a part of the original virus. In other words, someone specifically altered this virus. We can see traces of that marker on it when we label the cell.\" He points to tiny glowing dots scattered across the cell's surface. \"This might mean, Ms. Iparis, that the Colonies actually physically altered this virus. The Republic certainly has no records of tampering with this one in this specific fashion.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Day interrupts. \"This is news to me. Are you saying that the Colonies created this plague?\"\n\nThe lab tech gives us a grim look, then returns to the screen. \"Possibly. Here's the curious thing, though. We think this additional piece\u2014the attaching feature\u2014originally came out of the Republic. There's a similar virus that came out of a small Colorado town. But the tracers tell us that the altered virus came out of Tribune City, which is a warfront city on the Colonies side. So somewhere along that line, Eden's virus somehow came in contact with something else in Tribune City.\"\n\nThis is when the pieces of the puzzle finally fall into place for me. The color drains from my face. Tribune City: the city that Day and I had originally stumbled into when we first fled into the Colonies. I think back to when I'd gotten ill during my arrest in the Republic, how sick and feverish I'd been when Day carried us through that underground tunnel from Lamar all the way into the Colonies' territory. I'd been in a Colonies hospital for a night. They'd injected medicine into me, but I never considered the fact that they might have been using me for a different purpose. Had I been a part of an experiment without even realizing it? Am I the one holding the missing piece of the puzzle in my bloodstream?\n\n\"It's me,\" I whisper, cutting the lab tech short. Both he and Day give me a startled look.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" the lab tech asks, but Day stays silent. A look of realization washes over his face.\n\n\"It's me,\" I repeat. The answer is so clear that I can hardly breathe. \"I was in Tribune City eight months ago. I'd gotten ill while under arrest in Colorado. If this other virus you're talking about originated first in the Republic and then came back from Tribune City in the Colonies, then it's possible that the answer to your puzzle is me.\"\n\nJUNE'S THEORY CHANGES EVERYTHING.\n\nImmediately she joins the lab team in a separate hospital room, where they strap several tubes and wires to her and take a sample of her bone marrow. They run a series of scans that leave her looking nauseous, scans I've already seen being run on Eden. I wish I could stay. Eden's tests are over, thankfully, but the risk has now shifted to June, and in this moment all I want to do is stay here and make sure everything goes smoothly.\n\nFor chrissakes, I tell myself angrily, it's not like you being here is going to help anything. But when Pascao finally ushers us out the door and out of the hospital to join the others, I can't help but glance back.\n\nIf June's blood holds the missing piece, then we have a chance. We can contain the plague. We can save everyone. We can save Tess.\n\nAs we take a train from the hospital toward Batalla's Airship bases with several Republic soldiers in tow, these thoughts build in my chest until I can barely stand to wait around. Pascao notices my restlessness and grins. \"You ever been to the bases before? I seem to recall you doing a few stunts there.\"\n\nHis words trigger some memories. When I turned fourteen, I broke into two Los Angeles Airships that were set to head out for the warfront. I got in\u2014not unlike my stunt with the Patriots back in Vegas\u2014by sneaking in through the ventilation system, and then navigating the entire ship undetected by weaving my way through their endless air vents. I was still halfway through my growth spurt back then; my body was thinner and smaller, and I had no trouble squeezing my way through their myriad of tunnels. Once inside, I stole as much canned food from their kitchens as I could, then set fires in their engine rooms that destroyed the ships enough to ultimately cripple them from serving the Republic for years, maybe forever. It was this particular stunt that first landed me on top of the Republic's most wanted list. Not too bad a job, if I do say so myself.\n\nNow I think back on the bases' layouts. Aside from some Airship bases in Batalla sector, the four main naval bases in LA occupy a thin strip of land along the city's west coastline that sits between our enormous lake and the Pacific Ocean. Our battleships stay there, unused for the most part. But the reason that the Patriots and I head there now is that all of LA's Airship docks are there too, and it's where the Colonies will dock their Airships if\u2014when\u2014they try to occupy the city after our surrender.\n\nIt's the third and final day of the Colonies' promised ceasefire. As the train speeds through the sectors, I can see groups of civilians crowding around JumboTrons that are now running Anden's surrender notice on repeat. Most look stricken with shock, clinging to one another. Others are furious\u2014they throw shoes, crowbars, and rocks up at the screens and rage against their Elector's betrayal. Good. Stay angry, use that anger against the Colonies. I need to play out my part soon.\n\n\"All right, kids, listen up,\" Pascao says as our train nears the bridges leading to the naval bases. He holds out his palms to show us a series of small, metal devices. \"Remember, six per dock.\" He points to a small red trigger in the center of each device. \"We want clean, contained explosions, and the soldiers'll point out the best spots for us to plant these things. If done right, we'll be able to cripple any Colonies Airship using our landing docks, and an Airship with a messed-up landing bay is useless. Yeah?\" He grins. \"At the same time, let's not screw up the landing docks too much. Six per dock.\"\n\nI look away and back out the window, where the first naval base draws near on the horizon. Enormous pyramid landing bases loom in a row, dark and imposing, and I instantly think of the first time I'd seen them in Vegas. My stomach twists uneasily. If this plan fails, if we're unable to hold the Colonies back and the Antarcticans never come to our rescue, if June isn't what we need for the cure\u2014what will happen to us? What will happen when the Colonies finally get their hands on Anden, or June, or myself? I shake my head, forcing the images out of my mind. There's no time to worry about that. It'll either happen or it won't. We've already chosen our course.\n\nWhen we arrive at the first landing dock of Naval Base One, I can see enough of the inner city to notice the tiny, dark specks in the sky. Colonies troops\u2014Airships, jets, something\u2014are hovering not far from the outskirts of Los Angeles, preparing to strike. A low, monotonous hum fills the air\u2014guess we can already hear their ships' steady approach. My eyes turn up toward the JumboTrons lining the streets. Anden's announcement continues on, accompanied with a bright red Seek Cover warning running along the bottom of each screen.\n\nFour Republic soldiers join up with us as we hurry out of the jeep and inside the pyramid base. I keep close to them as they usher us up the elevators toward the looming inner roof of the base, where Airships take off and dock on. All around us is the deafening sound of soldiers' boots on echoing floors, rushing to their stations and preparing to take off against the Colonies. I wonder how many troops Anden had been forced to send off to Denver or Vegas for reinforcement, and I can only hope that we have enough left behind to protect us.\n\nThis isn't Vegas, I remind myself, trying not to think about the time when I'd let myself get arrested. But it doesn't help. By the time we've ridden our way up to the top of the base and climbed a flight of stairs up to the open top of the pyramid, my heart's pounding up a storm that's not all because of the exercise. Well, if this doesn't bring back memories of when I'd first started working for the Patriots. I can't stop studying the metal beams crisscrossing the interior underbelly of the base, all the little interlocking parts that will bind with an Airship once it lands. The dark suit I'm wearing feels as light as air. Time to plant some bombs.\n\n\"Do you see those beams?\" one Republic captain says to Pascao and me, pointing up to the shadows of the ceiling at one, two, three crevices that look particularly difficult to reach. \"Max damage to the ship, minimal damage to the base. We'll have you two hit those three spots at each of the bases. We'd be able to get to them ourselves if we set up our cranes, but we don't have time for that.\" He pauses to give us a forced smile. Most of these goddy soldiers still don't seem entirely comfortable working alongside us. \"Well,\" he says after an awkward pause, \"does that look doable? Are you guys fast enough?\"\n\nI want to snap at the captain that he's forgotten my reputation, but Pascao stops me by letting out one of his loud, sparkling laughs. \"You don't have enough faith in us, do you?\" he says, nudging the captain playfully in the ribs and smirking at the indignant blush that he gets back.\n\n\"Good,\" the captain replies stiffly before moving on with the other Patriots and his own patrol. \"Hurry. We don't have long.\" He leaves us to our work, then starts dictating bomb-planting spots to the others.\n\nOnce he's gone, Pascao drops his giant grin and concentrates on the crevices that the captain had pointed out. \"Not easy to reach,\" he mutters. \"You sure you're up for this? You strong enough, seeing as how you're dying and all?\"\n\nI cast him a withering glare, then study each of the crevices in turn. I test my knees and elbows, trying to gauge how much strength I have. Pascao's a bit taller than me\u2014he'll be able to handle the first two crevices best, but the third crevice is wedged in such a tight position that I know only I can get to it. I can also see right away why the captain pointed that spot out. Even if we didn't plant six bombs along this side of the base, we'd probably disable any Airship with a single bomb on that location. I point to it.\n\n\"I'll take that one,\" I say.\n\n\"You sure?\" Pascao squints at it. \"I don't want to watch you fall to your death on our very first base.\"\n\nHis words coax a sarcastic smile out of me. \"Don't you have any faith in me at all?\"\n\nPascao smirks. \"A little.\"\n\nWe get to work. I take a flying leap from the stairs' ledge to the closest crisscrossing beam, and then weave myself seamlessly into the maze of metal. What a feeling of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. The springs embedded in my suit's joints take a little getting used to\u2014but after a few jumps I grow into them. I'm fast. Really fast with their help. In the span of ten minutes, I've crossed a quarter of the base's ceiling and am now within striking distance of that crevice. Thin trickles of sweat run down my neck, and my head pulses with familiar pain. Below, soldiers pause to watch us even as all of the base's electronic tickers continue to run the surrender notice. They have no goddy clue what we're doing.\n\nI pause at the final leap, then make my jump. My body hits the crevice and slides snugly in. Instantly I pull out the tiny bomb, open its clip, and plant it firmly into place. My headache makes me dizzy, but I force it away.\n\nDone.\n\nI slowly make my way back along the beams. By the time I swing down onto the stairs again, my heart's pounding from adrenaline. I spot Pascao along the beams and give him a quick thumbs-up.\n\nThis is the easy stuff, I remind myself, my excitement giving way to an ominous anxiety. The hard part's going to be pulling off a convincing lie to the Chancellor.\n\nWe finish with the first base, then move on to the next. By the time we're done with the fourth base, my strength is starting to give way. If I was fully in my element, this suit could've made me damn near unstoppable\u2014but now, even with its help, my muscles ache and my breaths sound strained. As the soldiers now guide me into a room in the air base and prepare me to make my call and my broadcast, I'm silently grateful that I don't need to run any more ceilings.\n\n\"What happens if the Chancellor doesn't buy you?\" Pascao asks while the soldiers file out of the room. \"No offense, pretty boy, but you don't exactly have the best reputation for keeping your promises.\"\n\n\"I didn't promise him anything,\" I reply. \"Besides, he'll see my announcement go out to the entire Republic. He's going to think that everyone in the country will see me switch allegiances to the Colonies. It won't last. But it'll buy us some time.\" Silently, I hope to hell that we can figure out the final cure before the Colonies realize what we're doing.\n\nPascao looks away and out the room's window, where we can see Republic soldiers finishing up the last few bomb placements on the base's ceiling. If this fails, or if the Colonies realize the surrender's fake before we have time to do anything about it, then we're probably done.\n\n\"Time for you to make your call, then,\" Pascao mutters. He locks the door, finds a chair, and pulls it off to one corner. Then he settles down with me to wait.\n\nMy hands tremble slightly as I click my mike on and call the Colonies' Chancellor. For a moment, all I hear is static, and a part of me hopes that it somehow can't trace the name that had called me before, and that somehow I'll have no way of reaching him. But then the static ends, the call clears, and I hear it connect. I greet the Chancellor.\n\n\"This is Day. Today is the last day of your promised ceasefire, yeah? And I have an answer to your request.\"\n\nA few seconds drag by. Then, that crisp, businesslike voice comes on the other end. \"Mr. Wing,\" the Chancellor says, as polite and pleasant as ever. \"Right on time. How lovely to hear from you.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you've seen the Elector's announcement by now,\" I reply, ignoring his niceties.\n\n\"I have, indeed,\" the man replies. I hear some shuffling of papers in the background. \"And now with your call, this day is looking to be full of good surprises. I'd been wondering when you would contact us again. Tell me, Daniel, have you given some thought to my proposal?\"\n\nFrom across the room, Pascao's pale eyes lock on to mine. He can't hear the conversation, but he can see the tension on my face. \"I have,\" I reply after a pause. Gotta make myself sound realistic and reluctant, yeah? I wonder if June would approve.\n\n\"And what have you decided? Remember, this is entirely up to you. I won't force you to do anything you don't wish to do.\"\n\nYeah. I don't have to do anything\u2014I'll just have to stand by and watch while you destroy the people I love. \"I'll do it.\" Another pause. \"The Republic's already surrendered. The people aren't happy about your presence, but I don't want to see them harmed. I don't want to see anyone harmed.\" I know I don't have to mention June by name for the Chancellor to understand. \"I'll make a citywide announcement. We got access to the JumboTrons through the Patriots. It won't be long before that announcement hits all the screens in the entire Republic.\" I kick in a little more attitude to keep my lie authentic. \"That good enough for you to keep your goddy hands off June?\"\n\nThe Chancellor claps his hands once. \"Done. If you're willing to become our... spokesman, so to speak, then I assure you that Ms. Iparis will be spared the trials and executions that come with an overturning of power.\"\n\nHis words send a chill through me, reminding me that if we do fail, then what I'm going to do isn't going to save Anden's life. In fact, if we fail, the Chancellor will probably figure out that I'm behind all this too, and there goes June's... and probably Eden's... chances at safety. I clear my throat. Across the room, Pascao's face has turned stony with tension. \"And my brother?\"\n\n\"You need not worry about your brother. As I mentioned to you before, I am not a tyrant. I will not hook him up to a machine and pump him full of chemicals and poisons\u2014I will not experiment on him. He\u2014and you\u2014will live a comfortable, safe life, free from harm and worry. This, I can guarantee you.\" The Chancellor's tone changes to what he thinks is soothing and gentle. \"I can hear the unhappiness in your voice. But I do nothing except what is necessary. If your Elector imprisoned me, he would not hesitate to execute me. This is the way of the world. I am not a cruel man, Daniel. Remember, the Colonies are not responsible for your lifetime of suffering.\"\n\n\"Don't call me Daniel.\" My voice comes out low and quiet. I am not Daniel to anyone outside of my family. I am Day. Plain and simple.\n\n\"My apologies.\" He actually sounds genuinely sorry. \"I hope you understand what I'm saying, Day.\"\n\nI remain silent for a moment. Even now, I can still feel the pull against the Republic, all of the dark thoughts and memories that whisper to me to turn my back, to let it all crumble to pieces. The Chancellor can gauge me better than I would've thought. A lifetime of suffering is hard to leave behind. As if she can sense the dangerous pull of the Chancellor's spell, I hear June's voice cut through this train of thoughts and whisper something to me. I close my eyes and cling to her, drawing strength from her.\n\n\"Tell me when you want me to make this announcement,\" I say after a while. \"Everything's wired up and ready to go. Let's get this whole thing over with.\"\n\n\"Wonderful.\" The Chancellor clears his throat, suddenly sounding like a businessman again. \"The sooner, the better. I will land with my troops at the outer naval bases of Los Angeles by early afternoon. Let's arrange for you to speak at that time. Shall we?\"\n\n\"Done.\"\n\n\"And one more thing,\" the Chancellor adds as I'm about to hang up. I stiffen, my tongue poised to click my mike off. \"Before I forget.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I want you to make the announcement from the deck of my Airship.\"\n\nStartled, I glance at Pascao, and even though he has no idea what the Chancellor just said, he frowns at the way my face has just drained of color. From the Chancellor's Airship? Of course. How could we think he'd be that easy to fool? He's taking precautions. If something goes wrong during the announcement, then he'll have me in his grip. If I make an announcement that's anything other than telling the Republic people to bow down to the Colonies, he could kill me right there on the Airship's deck, surrounded by his men.\n\nWhen the Chancellor speaks again, I can sense the satisfaction in his voice. He knows exactly what he's doing. \"Your words will be more meaningful if given right from a Colonies Airship, don't you agree?\" he says. He claps his hands once again. \"We'll expect you at Naval Base One in a few hours. Looking forward to meeting you in person, Day.\"\n\nThe revelation about my connection to this plague changes all of my plans.\n\nInstead of heading out with the Patriots and helping Day set up the Airship bases, I stay behind at the hospital, letting the lab teams hook me up to machines and run a series of tests on me. My daggers and gun lie on a nearby dresser, so that they won't get in the way of all the wires, and only one knife stays tucked along my boot. Eden sits in bed beside me, his skin sickly pale. Several hours in, and the nausea has begun to hit.\n\n\"The first day's the worst,\" Eden says to me with an encouraging smile. He speaks slowly, likely from the medication the lab team gave him to help him sleep. \"It gets better.\" He leans over and pats my hand, and I find myself warming to his innocent compassion. This must be what Day was like when he was young.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I reply. I don't speak the rest of my thoughts aloud, but I cannot believe that a child like Eden was able to tolerate this sort of testing for days. Had I known, I might have done what Day originally wanted and refused Anden's request altogether.\n\n\"What happens if they find out that you match?\" Eden asks after a while. His eyes have started to droop, and his question comes out slurred.\n\nWhat happens, indeed? We have a cure. We can present the results to Antarctica and prove to them that the Colonies deliberately used this virus; we can present it to the United Nations and force the Colonies back. We'll have our ports opened up again. \"The Antarcticans promise that help is on the way,\" I decide to say. \"We might win. Just maybe.\"\n\n\"But the Colonies are already at our doorstep.\" Eden glances toward the windows, where our enemy's Airships are now dotting the sky. Some have already docked at our bases, while others loom overhead. A shadow cast across our own Bank Tower building tells me that one is hovering over us right now. \"What if Daniel fails?\" he whispers, fighting back sleep.\n\n\"We just have to play it all carefully.\" But Eden's words make my gaze linger on the cityscape too. What if Day does fail? He told me as he left that he would contact us before his broadcast to the public. Now, seeing how close the Colonies' Airships are, I feel an overwhelming sense of frustration that I can't be out there with them. What if the Colonies realize that the Airship bases are all rigged? What if they don't come back?\n\nAnother hour passes. While Eden falls into a deep slumber, I stay awake and try to will away the nausea rolling over me in waves. I keep my eyes closed. It seems to help.\n\nI must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I'm awakened by the sound of our door opening. The lab techs have finally returned. \"Ms. Iparis,\" one of them says, adjusting his MIKHAEL name tag. \"It wasn't a perfect match, but it was close\u2014close enough that we were able to develop a solution. We're testing the cure on Tess now.\" He's unable to keep a grin from crossing his face. \"You were the missing piece. Right under our noses.\"\n\nI stare at him without saying a word. We can send results to Antarctica \u2014the thought rushes through my mind. We can ask for help. We can stop the plague's spread. We have a chance against the Colonies.\n\nMikhael's companions start unhooking me from my tangle of wires, and then help me to my feet. I feel strong enough, but the room still sways. I'm not sure whether my unsteadiness is from the tests' side effects or the thought that this might all have worked. \"I want to see Tess,\" I say as we start heading for the door. \"How quickly will the cure start working?\"\n\n\"We're not sure,\" Mikhael admits as we enter a long hall. \"But our simulations are solid, and we ran several lab cultures with infected cells. We should start seeing Tess's health improve very soon.\"\n\nWe stop at the long glass windows of Tess's room. She lies in a delirious half sleep on her bed, and all around her are lab techs rushing about in full suits, monitors dictating her vital signs, charts and graphs beamed against the walls. An IV's injected into one of her arms. I study her face, searching for some sign of consciousness, and fail to find it.\n\nStatic in my earpiece. An incoming call. I frown, press a hand to my ear, and then click my mike on. A second later, I hear Day's voice. \"Are you okay?\" His first thought. Of course it is. The static is so severe that I can hardly understand what he's saying.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I reply, hoping he can hear me. \"Day, listen to me\u2014we've found a cure.\"\n\nNo reply, just static, loud and unrelenting. \"Day?\" I say again, and on the other side I hear some crackling, something like the desperation to communicate with me. But I can't get us hooked up. Unusual. The reception on these military bands is usually crystal clear. It's as if something else is blocking all of our frequencies. \"Day?\" I try again.\n\nI finally catch his voice again. It holds a tension that reminds me of when he'd chosen to walk away from me so many months ago. It sends a river of dread through my veins. \"I'm giving\u2014announcement on board a Colonies Airship\u2014ellor won't have it any other way\u2014\"\n\nOn board a Colonies Airship. The Chancellor would hold all the cards in that case\u2014if Day were to make a sudden move, or make an announcement that went against what they agreed to, the Chancellor could have him arrested or murdered right on the spot. \"Don't do it,\" I whisper automatically. \"You don't have to go. We've found the cure, I was the missing piece of the puzzle.\"\n\n\"\u2014June?\u2014\"\n\nThen no answer, just more static. I try again twice more before I click my mike off in frustration. Beside me, I can see the lab tech also trying in vain to make a call.\n\nAnd then I remember the shadow cast across the building we're in. My frustration fades immediately, followed by waves of terror and comprehension. Oh no. The Colonies. They're blocking our frequencies\u2014they've taken them over. I had not thought that they would make their move so quickly. I rush over to the window looking out at Los Angeles's cityscape, then turn my eyes skyward. I can see the enormous Colonies Airship that hovers overhead\u2014and when I look more closely, I notice that smaller planes are leaving its deck and circling lower.\n\nMikhael joins me. \"We can't reach the Elector,\" he says. \"It seems all the frequencies are jammed.\"\n\nIs this in preparation for Day's announcement? He's in trouble. I know it.\n\nJust as this thought crosses my mind, the doors at the end of the hall swing open. Five soldiers come marching in, their guns hoisted, and in a flash I can see that these are not Republic soldiers at all\u2014but Colonies troops, with their navy blue coats and gold stars. Panic rushes through me from head to toe. Instinctively I move toward Eden's room, but the soldiers see me. Their leader waves his gun at me. My hand flies to my gun strapped to my waist\u2014and then I remember that all of my weapons (save for one ankle knife) are lying useless back in Eden's room.\n\n\"With the Republic's surrender,\" he says in a grandiose voice, \"all reins of power have been transferred to Colonies' officials. This is your commander telling you to stand aside and let us pass, so that we can run a thorough search.\"\n\nMikhael throws up his hands and does as the official says. They draw closer. Memories whirl in my mind\u2014they're all lessons from my days at Drake, a stream of maneuvers that run through my head at the speed of light. I gauge them carefully. A small team sent up here to accomplish some specific task. Other teams must be swarming each of the floors, but I know these soldiers must have been sent up to us for something in particular. I brace myself, ready for a fight. It's me they're after.\n\nAs if he read my mind, Mikhael nods once at the soldiers. His arms stay up high in the air. \"What do you want?\"\n\nThe soldier answers, \"A boy named Eden Bataar Wing.\"\n\nI know better than to suck in my breath and thus give away that Eden's on this floor\u2014but a tidal wave of fear washes over me. I was wrong. They're not after me. They want Day's brother. If Day's forced to give his announcement on board the Chancellor's Airship, alone, he'll be helpless if the Chancellor decides to take him hostage\u2014and if he gets his hands on Eden, he'll be able to control Day at his every whim. My thoughts rush even further. If the Colonies truly succeed in taking over the Republic today, then the Chancellor could use Day indefinitely as his own weapon, as a manipulator of the Republic's people, for as long as the people continue to believe in Day as their hero.\n\nI open my mouth before Mikhael can. \"This floor just houses plague victims,\" I say to the soldier. \"If you're looking for Day's brother, he'll be on a higher floor.\"\n\nThe soldier's gun swivels to me. He narrows his eyes in recognition. \"You're the Princeps-Elect,\" he says. \"Aren't you? June Iparis.\"\n\nI lift my chin. \"One of the Princeps-Elects, yes.\"\n\nFor a moment, I think he might believe what I said about Eden. Some of his men even start shifting back toward the stairs. The soldier watches me for a long time, studying my eyes, and then looks down the hallway behind me, where Eden's room lies. I don't dare flinch.\n\nHe frowns at me. \"I know your reputation.\" Before I can think of anything else to say in order to throw him off, he tilts his head at his troops and uses his gun to gesture at the hall. \"Do a thorough search. The boy should be on this floor.\"\n\nToo late to lie now. If I owe Day anything, I owe him this. I shift into the space between the soldiers and the hallway. Calculations rush through my head. (The hallway is a little over four feet wide\u2014if I move into it, I can prevent the soldiers from attacking me all at once and break up my opponents into two smaller waves instead of one large one.) \"Your Chancellor won't want me dead,\" I lie. My heart pounds furiously. Beside me, the lab tech looks on with stricken eyes, unsure of what to do. \"He'll want me alive, and tried. You know this.\"\n\n\"Such big lies out of such a small mouth.\" The soldier hoists his gun. I hold my breath. \"Move out of the way, or I shoot.\"\n\nIf I didn't see the hint of hesitation on his face, I would've done as he asked. No use to Day or Eden if I'm just dead and gunned down. But the soldier's flash of uncertainty is all I need. I hold my arms up slowly and carefully. My eyes stay fixed on him. \"You don't want to shoot me,\" I say. I'm shocked at how firm my voice sounds\u2014not a ripple of fear in it, despite the adrenaline rushing through my veins. My legs sway a little, still a touch unsteady from the experiments. \"Your Chancellor doesn't sound like a forgiving man.\"\n\nThe soldier hesitates again. He doesn't know what the Chancellor has in mind for me. He has to give me the benefit of the doubt.\n\nWe hold our standoff for several long seconds.\n\nFinally he spits out a curse and lowers his gun. \"Get her,\" he snaps at his soldiers. \"Don't shoot.\"\n\nThe world zooms in at me\u2014everything fades, except for the enemy. My instincts kick into overdrive.\n\nLet's play. You have no idea who you're dealing with.\n\nI crouch into a fighting stance as the soldiers rush at me all at once. The narrowness of the hallway works instantly to my advantage\u2014instead of dealing with five soldiers at the same time, I only deal with two. I duck the first soldier's swing, rip my knife out from my boot, and slash his calf as viciously as I can. The blade tears effortlessly through both his pant leg and his tendon. He shrieks. Instantly his leg buckles, taking him to the floor in a thrashing heap. The second soldier rushing at me trips right over his falling comrade. I kick out at the second soldier's face, knocking him out, and step off from his back to lunge at the third soldier. He tries to punch me. I block his blow with one arm\u2014my other hand shoots up toward his face and smashes into his nose so hard that I feel the crunch of breaking bone. The soldier staggers backward once and falls, clutching his face in agony.\n\nThree down.\n\nMy advantage of surprise vanishes\u2014the last two soldiers take me on more warily. One of them shouts into his mike for backup. Behind them, Mikhael starts sneaking away. Even though I don't dare glance in his direction, I know that he must be moving to lock down the corridors in the stairwell, making it impossible for more Colonies soldiers to come swarming up. One of the remaining soldiers lifts his gun and points it at my legs. I kick out at him. My boot hits the barrel of his gun right as he fires it, sending a bullet ricocheting wildly over my shoulder. An alarm blares across the entire building's intercoms\u2014the stairwells are locked down, an alert's been sent out. I kick the gun again so that it arcs backward, hitting the soldier hard in the face. It stuns him momentarily. I spin and strike him hard in the jaw with my elbow\u2014\n\n\u2014but then something hits me hard in the back of my head. Stars explode across my vision. I stumble, falling to one knee, and struggle to swim up through my blindness. The second soldier must've struck me from behind. I swing out again, trying my best to guess at where the soldier is, but I miss and fall again. Through my hazy vision, I see the soldier raise the butt of his gun to strike me again in the face. The blow will knock me unconscious. I try in vain to roll away.\n\nThe strike doesn't come. I blink, struggling to my feet. What happened? When my vision clears a bit, I notice the last soldier lying on the ground and lab techs rushing over to tie their hands and feet. Suddenly there are people everywhere. Standing over me is Tess, pale and sickly and breathing hard, clutching a rifle from one of the other fallen soldiers. I had not noticed her leaving her room.\n\nShe manages a weak smile. \"You're welcome,\" she says, extending a hand to help me up.\n\nI smile back. She pulls me, trembling, to my feet. When I sway on uncertain legs, she offers me her shoulder to lean on. Neither of us is very steady, but we don't fall.\n\n\"Ms. Iparis,\" Mikhael gasps out as he hurries over to us. \"We've managed to reach the Elector\u2014we've told him about the cure. But we also just received a warning to evacuate the Bank Tower. They say the fake surrender will end very soon and that one of the Colonies' first targets of retaliation will be\u2014\"\n\nA shudder shakes the hospital. We all freeze where we are. I glance at the horizon\u2014at first the shudder felt a bit like an earthquake, or the rumble of a passing Airship, but the shaking is set off in short, regular intervals instead of the sharp roll of a seismic wave or the low, steady hum of Airships\u2014and an instant later, I realize that the Airship bases' bombs must have begun going off. I run to the window with Tess, where we look on as bright plumes of orange and gray billow up from the bases lining the horizon. Panic takes hold of me. Day must have made his announcement. Whether or not he survived it, I have no idea.\n\nThe phony surrender's over; the ceasefire has ended. The final fight for the Republic has begun.\n\nWhen I was fifteen, I broke into a bank in los angeles after guards standing at its back entrance didn't believe I could do it in ten seconds. The night before, I had made a detailed mental checklist of the layout of that bank, noting every foothold and window and ledge, and guesstimated every floor inside. I waited until its guards rotated at midnight, and then I snuck into the building's basement. There, I set a tiny explosive on the vault's lock. There was no way I could break in at night without triggering their alarms... but the next morning, when guards headed down to the vault to check on the inventory, most of the laser-guided alarms throughout the building would be off. I timed my entrance the next day to coincide. As I taunted the guards at the bank's back entrance, the guards inside the bank were opening the vault door. And the explosive went off. At the same time, I leaped through the bank's second floor window, then down the steps, then into the vault through smoke and dust, and made my way out of the building by hooking the bank's waiting line chains to myself and swinging out of the top floor. You should've seen me.\n\nNow, as I walk straight up the inner ramps of a pyramid dock and toward the entrance of my very first Colonies Airship, flanked on both sides by Colonies soldiers, I run through my old bank stunt and feel an overwhelming urge to flee. To swing onto the side of the ship, lose the troops tailing me, and weave into its vents. My eyes sweep the ship and try to map out the best escape routes, the closest hiding places, and most convenient footholds. Walking straight up to it like this leaves me feeling way too open and vulnerable. Still, I don't show it on my face. When I reach the entrance and a pair of lieutenants ushers me inside, then pats me down thoroughly for any weapons, I just smile politely at them. If the Chancellor wants to see me intimidated, he might be disappointed.\n\nThe soldiers don't catch the tiny, coin-size round discs sewn into my boots. One is a recorder. If there's any conversation I want to have to use against the Colonies, it's this one, to be shown to the entire public. The others are tiny explosives. Outside, somewhere beyond the Airship base and hidden in the buildings' shadows, are Pascao and several other Patriots.\n\nI hope the people are ready for my signal. I hope they're listening for my final step, watching and waiting.\n\nIt's the first time I've been in an Airship that has no portraits of the Elector hanging on its walls. Instead, interspersed between swallowtail-shaped blue-and-gold flags are ads, screens as high as the walls that advertise everything from food to electronics to houses. I get an uncomfortable sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, recalling the time June and I had stumbled into the Colonies, but when the lieutenants glance my way, I just shrug at them and keep my eyes down. We make our way through the corridors and up two flights of stairs before they finally usher me into a large chamber. I stand there for a moment, unsure of what to do next. This looks like some sort of observation deck, with a long glass window that gives me a view of Los Angeles.\n\nA lone man stands by the window, the city's light painting his silhouette black. He waves me over. \"Ah, you're finally here!\" he exclaims. Instantly I recognize the smooth, coaxing voice of the Chancellor. He looks nothing like how I pictured him: He's short and small, frail, his hair receded and gray, his voice way too big for his body. There's a slight hunch to his shoulders, and his skin looks thin and translucent in some areas, like it's made of paper and might crumple if I were to touch it. I can't keep the surprise off my face. This is the man who rules over corps like DesCon, who threatens and bullies an entire nation and negotiates with manipulative precision? A little anticlimactic, to be honest. I almost write him off before I get a good look at his eyes.\n\nAnd that's where I recognize the Chancellor I've spoken to before. His eyes calculate, analyze, and deduce me in a way that chills me to the bone. Something is incredibly wrong about them.\n\nThen I realize why. His eyes are mechanical.\n\n\"Well, don't just stand there,\" he says. \"Come on over. Enjoy the view with me, son. This is where we'll have you make your announcement. A nice vantage point, isn't it?\"\n\nA retort\u2014\"The view's probably better without all the Colonies Airships in the way\"\u2014is on the tip of my tongue, but I swallow it with some effort and do as he says. He smiles as I stop beside him, and I do my best not to look into his false eyes.\n\n\"Well, look at you, all young and fresh faced.\" He claps me on the back. \"You did the right thing, you know, coming here.\" He gazes back at Los Angeles. \"Do you see all that? What's the point of staying loyal to that? You're a Colonian now, and you won't have to put up with the Republic's twisted laws anymore. We'll treat you and your brother so well that you'll soon wonder why you ever hesitated to join us.\"\n\nFrom the corner of my eyes, I make note of possible escape routes. \"What'll happen to the people in the Republic?\"\n\nThe Chancellor taps his lips in a display of thoughtfulness. \"The Senators, unfortunately, might be less happy about the whole thing\u2014and as for the Elector himself... well, you can only have one real ruler for one country, and I am already here.\" He offers me a smile that borders on kindness, a startling contrast to his actual words. \"He and I are more alike than you might think. We are not cruel. We are simply practical. And you know how tricky it can be to deal with traitors.\"\n\nA shiver runs down my spine. \"And the Princeps-Elects?\" I repeat. \"What about the Patriots? This was part of our deal, remember?\"\n\nThe Chancellor nods. \"Of course I remember. Day, there are things you'll learn about people and society when you get older. Sometimes, you just have to do things the hard way. Now, before you work yourself up into a panic, know that Ms. Iparis will be unharmed. We already have plans to pardon her for your sake, given that you'll be helping us out. Part of our deal, just like you said, and I do not go back on my word. The other Princeps-Elects will be executed along with the Elector.\"\n\nExecuted. So easy, just like that. I get a nauseous feeling in my stomach at the memory of Anden's botched assassination. This time he might not be so lucky. \"As long as you spare June,\" I manage to choke out, \"and as long as you don't hurt the Patriots or my brother. But you still haven't answered my first question. What will happen to the people of the Republic?\"\n\nThe Chancellor eyes me, then leans closer. \"Tell me, Day, do you think the masses have the right to make decisions for an entire nation?\"\n\nI turn to stare at the city. It's a long drop from here to the bottom of the naval base; I'll have to find a way to slow myself down. \"The laws that affect an entire nation will also affect that nation's individuals, yeah?\" I reply, goading him. I hope my recorder's picking all this up. \"So of course the people have a right to contribute to those decisions.\"\n\nThe Chancellor nods. \"A fair answer. But fairness does not power nations, Day, does it? I have read histories about nations where every person is given an equal start in life, where everyone contributes to the greater good and no one is richer or poorer than anyone else. Do you think that system worked?\" He shakes his head. \"Not with people, Day. That's something you'll learn when you grow up. People by nature are unjust, unfair, and conniving. You have to be careful with them\u2014you have to find a way to make them think that you are catering to their every whim. The masses can't function on their own. They need help. They don't know what's good for them. And as for what will happen to the people of the Republic? Well, Day, I'll tell you. The people as a whole will be thrilled to be integrated into our system. They will know everything that they need to know, and we will make sure they are all put to good use. It will be a well-oiled machine.\"\n\n\"Everything they need to know?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He folds his hands behind his back and sticks his chin up. \"Do you really believe that the people can make all of their own decisions? What a frightening world. People don't always know what they really want. You should know that better than anyone, Day, what with your announcement so long ago in favor of the Elector, and with the announcement you'll give us today.\" He tilts his head a little as he talks. \"You do what you need to do.\"\n\nYou do what you need to do. Echoes of the philosophy of the Republic's own former Elector\u2014echoes of something that, no matter what country I'm in, never seems to change. On the surface, I just nod, but inside, I feel a sudden hesitation to go through with my plan. He's baiting you, I remind myself, lost in the struggle. You are not like the Chancellor. You fight for the people.\n\nYou are fighting for something real. Aren't you?\n\nI've got to get out of here, before he works his way deeper into my mind. My muscles tense up, ready for the announcement. I study the room from my peripheral vision. \"Well,\" I say stiffly, \"let's get this over with.\"\n\n\"More enthusiasm, my boy,\" the Chancellor says, clicking his tongue in mock disapproval, and then gives me a serious look. \"We thoroughly expect you to sell your point to the people.\"\n\nI nod. I step forward toward the window, then let two soldiers hook my mike up to broadcast from the Airship. A transparent, live video of me suddenly appears on the glass. Shivers run down my entire body. There are Colonies soldiers all over the place, and they've ensured that if I don't make my move just right, I'll have sentenced myself and most likely all of my loved ones to death. This is it. There is no turning back from here.\n\n\"People of the Republic,\" I begin. \"Today, I stand here with the Chancellor of the Colonies, on board his very own Airship. I have a message for all of you.\" My voice sounds hoarse, and I have to clear my throat before continuing. When I shift my toes, I can feel the bump of the two tiny explosives on the bottom of my boots' soles, ready for my next move. I hope to hell that the markers that Pascao, the other Runners, and I left across the city have done their work, and that the people are prepared.\n\n\"We've been through a lot together,\" I continue. \"But few things have been more trying than the last few months in the Republic. Believe me, I know. Adjusting to a new Elector, seeing the changes that have come around... and as you all know by now, I haven't been doing so well myself.\" My headache throbs as if in response. Outside the Airship, my voice echoes across the city from the video feed playing from dozens of Colonies Airships and hundreds of Los Angeles JumboTrons. I take a deep breath, as if this might be the last time I ever speak to the people. \"You and I will probably never get a chance to meet. But I know you. You have taught me about all the good things in my life, and why I've fought for my family all these years. I hope for great things for your own loved ones, that they can go through life without suffering the way mine have.\" I pause here. My eyes turn to face the Chancellor, and he nods once, coaxing me on. My heart is beating so loudly that I can barely hear my own voice.\n\n\"The Colonies have much to offer you,\" I say, my voice growing stronger. \"Their ships are now in our skies. It will not be long before you see Colonies banners flying above your children's schools and over your homes. People of the Republic, I have one final message for you, before you and I say farewell to each other.\"\n\nIt's time. My legs tense, and my feet shift ever so slightly. The Chancellor looks on.\n\n\"The Republic is weak and broken.\" I narrow my eyes. \"But it is still your country. Fight for it. This is your home, not theirs.\"\n\nIn the same moment that I see the Chancellor's enraged expression, I spring from where I'm standing and kick at the glass as hard as I can. Colonies soldiers rush toward me. My boots hit the window\u2014the explosives embedded in my soles give two brief pops, sending tremors through my feet. The glass shatters.\n\nAnd now I'm midair, sailing through the open space. My arms whip up and grab the top edge of the broken windowpane. A bullet zips by. The Chancellor's furious shout rises up from inside. Guess they're not going to try keeping me alive after that. All my adrenaline rushes forward in a flood of heat.\n\nI shimmy up and out into the evening air. No time to waste. My cap threatens to blow off\u2014I hang out the window for a second and try to adjust it more snugly onto my head. Last thing I need right now is to have my hair blowing around like a beacon for anyone on the ground to see. When the gusts die down a bit, I pull myself completely out and cling to the window frame. I look up, gauging the distance to the next window. Then I jump. My hands grab on to the bottom ledge of the frame, and with difficulty, I manage to pull myself up. I grunt from the effort. Never would've had a problem with this a year ago.\n\nWhen I've hopped to a fourth window, I hear the faint sound of something popping. Then, the first explosion.\n\nA tremor runs deep through the entire Airship, nearly shaking loose my grip, and when I glance down, I see a ball of orange and gray explode from where the Airship is docked to its pyramid base. The Patriots are making their move. A second explosion follows\u2014this time the Airship creaks slightly, tilting to the east. Gritting my teeth, I pick up speed. One of my feet slips against a window frame at the same time a gust of wind blows by\u2014I almost lose my balance. For a second my leg dangles precariously. \"C'mon,\" I scold myself. \"You call this a run?\" Then I throw one arm up as far as I can and manage to catch the next window before my legs give way completely. The effort triggers a dull flash of pain at the back of my head. I wince. No, not now. Anytime but now. But it's no use. I feel the headache coming. If I get hit with it right now, I'll be in so much pain that I'll plummet to my death for sure. Desperately, I climb faster. My feet slip again on the topmost window. I manage to catch myself at the last second, then grab the ledge of the upper deck as my headache explodes in full force.\n\nBlinding white pain. I dangle there, clinging on for dear life, fighting against the agony that threatens to pull me under. Two more explosions follow the first couple in rapid succession, and now the Airship creaks and groans. It tries to launch, firing away from the base, but all it manages to do is shudder. If the Chancellor gets his hands on me now, he'll kill me himself. Somewhere far away, I hear a siren sound\u2014soldiers on the upper deck must know by now that I'm heading there, and they'll be ready for me.\n\nMy breaths come in short gasps. Open your eyes, I command myself. You have to open them. Through a blurry veil of tears, I see a glimpse of the upper deck and soldiers running. Their shouts ring out across the deck. For an instant, I lose my memory again of where I am, what I'm doing, what my mission is. The unfamiliarity makes my stomach heave, and I have to keep myself from throwing up. Think, Day. You've been in bad situations before. My memory blurs. What did I need up here again? Finally I clear my mind\u2014I need some way to swing down to the bottom of the ship. Then I remember the sleek metal chain railings lining the edge of the deck, and my original plan\u2014my eyes swivel up to the nearest chain. With enormous effort, I reach out and grab at it. I miss the first time. The soldiers see me now, and several of them run in my direction. I grit my teeth and try again.\n\nThis time I reach the chain. I grab it with both hands, then yank down. The chain pops free from its hooks. I throw myself off the side of the ship\u2014and let myself fall. I hope to hell this chain can support my weight. There's a chorus of pops as the chain snaps free of hooks on both sides, sending me down at dizzying speed. The pain in my head threatens to weaken my grip. I hang on with every shred of strength that I have. My hair billows around me, and I realize my cap must've fallen off. Down, down, down I fall. The world zips past me at the speed of light. Through the rushing wind, my head slowly clears.\n\nSuddenly one side of the chain snaps loose right as I reach the bottom of the ship. A lungful of air escapes me as I'm vaulted to one side. I manage to grab the remaining chain with both hands and hang on tightly as I swing along the bottom side of the ship. The pyramid base is almost close enough under my feet for me to jump, but I'm going way too fast. I swing closer to the side of the ship, then scrape the heels of my boots hard against the steel. There's a loud, long screech. My boots finally find traction\u2014the force spins me from my swing and sends me twirling. I fight to steady myself. Before I can, though, the chain finally breaks and I tumble onto the outside of the pyramid base.\n\nThe impact knocks all the wind out of me. I skid against the smooth, slanted walls for a few seconds, until my boots catch against the surface and I stop there, bruised and limp, convinced soldiers are going to fill me with bullets as I lie vulnerable against the pyramid. Pascao and the others will know by now that I've made my move, and they'll be setting off the bombs all along the naval bases. I better get off this thing before I'm burnt to a crisp. That thought fills my mind and gives me the strength to pull myself up. I slide down the side as fast as I can\u2014below, I can already see Colonies soldiers rushing to stop me. A sense of hopelessness stabs me. There's no way in hell I'll get past all of them in time. Still, I keep moving. I have to get away from the explosion site.\n\nI'm several dozen yards from the bottom. Soldiers are clambering up to seize me. I tense up, push myself up into a crouch, and quickly move sideways against the slanted base. I'm not going to make it.\n\nThe instant this crosses my mind, the two final explosions go off under the Airship.\n\nA huge roar above me shakes the earth, and when I glance behind me, I see an enormous fireball rise up from where the Airship is docked with the top of the base. All along the naval base, orange flames burst from every single pyramid dock. They've gone off in unison. The result is absolutely jaw-dropping. Quickly I glance back to the soldiers who were chasing me\u2014they've paused, shocked by what they're witnessing. Another deafening burst of flame erupts above us and the tremors knock everyone off their feet. I struggle to stabilize myself against the slanted wall. Move, move, move! I stagger down the last few yards of the base's wall and fall to my knees on the ground. The world spins. All I can hear are the shouts of soldiers and the roar of the infernos lighting up the naval bases.\n\nHands grab me. I struggle, but I have no more strength left. Suddenly they drop me and I hear a familiar voice at my side. I turn in surprise. Who is this? Pascao. His name is Pascao.\n\nHis bright gray eyes crinkle at me\u2014he grabs my hand and urges me to run. \"Nice to see you alive. Let's keep it that way.\"\n\nFrom the bank tower in downtown la, I can see the giant plumes of orange flame lighting up the naval bases along the coast. The blasts are enormous, illuminating the edge of the sky with blinding light and echoing through the air, the force shaking the glass windows of the tower as I look on. Hospital staff mill around me in a scene of commotion. The lab teams are prepping both Tess and Eden for evacuation.\n\nA call comes in from Pascao. \"I've got Day,\" he shouts. \"Meet us outside.\"\n\nMy knees turn weak with relief. He's alive. He made it. I peek inside Tess's room, where she's being secured to a wheelchair, and give her a thumbs-up. She brightens, even in her weakened state. Outside the tower, I see the shadow engulfing our building begin to move\u2014the Colonies Airship hovering overhead is heading away from us to join into battle. As if our explosions have unsettled a nest of wasps, dozens of Colonies fighter jets are taking off from its deck as well as the decks of the distant, crippled Airships, their shapes forming squadrons in the sky. Republic jets meet them in midair.\n\nHurry, Antarctica. Please.\n\nI rush off the lab floor and down the stairs to the lobby of the Bank Tower. There's chaos everywhere. Republic soldiers hurry past me in a blur of motion, while several gather at the front doors to prevent anyone else from getting inside. \"This hospital is off limits!\" one barks. \"Bring the injured across the street\u2014we are evacuating!\" The screens lining the hall show scenes of Republic soldiers clashing with Colonies troops in the streets\u2014and, to my surprise, Republic civilians wielding whatever weapons they can find and joining in to push the Colonies back. Fires burn along the roads. At the bottom of every screen in bold, menacing letters is the scrolling text: ALL REPUBLIC SOLDIERS TO BREAK SURRENDER. ALL REPUBLIC SOLDIERS TO BREAK SURRENDER. I cringe at the scene, even though this is exactly what we had planned for.\n\nOutside, the noise of battle deafens me. Fighter jets roar past us overhead, while others hover directly over the Bank Tower, prepared to defend the tallest building in LA if\u2014 when \u2014the Colonies try to attack. I see similar formations over other prominent downtown buildings. \"Come on, Day,\" I mutter, scanning the streets nearby for signs of his bright hair, or of Pascao's pale eyes. A deep tremor shakes the ground. Another ball of orange flame explodes behind several rows of buildings, then a pair of Colonies jets zoom by, followed closely by a Republic plane. The sound is so loud that I press both hands to my ears until they've passed.\n\n\"June?\" Pascao's voice comes over my mike, but I can barely hear him. \"We're almost here. Where are you?\"\n\n\"In front of the Bank Tower,\" I shout over the noise.\n\n\"We've gotta evacuate,\" he replies immediately. \"Getting some feedback from our Hackers\u2014the Colonies are aiming to attack the building within the hour\u2014\"\n\nAs if on cue, a Colonies jet screams by, and an instant later, an enormous explosion goes off at the very top of the Bank Tower. Soldiers all around me let out shouts of warning as glass falls from the highest floors. I jump backward into the safety of the building's entrance. Debris rains down in a thunderous storm, crushing jeeps and shattering into a million pieces.\n\n\"June?\" Pascao's voice comes back on, clearly alarmed now. \" June \u2014are you okay?\"\n\n\"I'm fine!\" I shout back. \"I'll help with evacuations once I see you. See you soon!\" Then I hang up.\n\nThree minutes later, I finally spot Day and Pascao staggering toward the Bank Tower against the tide of civilians escaping the area and soldiers rushing to defend the streets. They stumble through the debris. I rush from the entrance toward Day, who's leaning heavily against Pascao's good shoulder.\n\n\"Are either of you injured?\" I ask.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Pascao replies, nodding at Day. \"Not sure about this guy. I think he's more exhausted than anything.\"\n\nI swing Day's other arm around my shoulder. Pascao and I help him inside the lobby of a building several blocks from the Bank Tower, where we still have a direct view of the tower and the chaotic, debris-filled square that sits between the two buildings. Inside, rows of injured soldiers are already camped out, with medics running frantically between them. \"We're clearing out the tower,\" I explain as we gently help Day down to the ground. He grimaces in pain, even though I can't find any specific wounds on him. \"Don't worry,\" I reassure him when he glances up at me in alarm. \"Eden and Tess are being evacuated right now.\"\n\n\"And so should you,\" he adds. \"The fight's just beginning.\"\n\n\"If I tell you to stop worrying, will you?\"\n\nMy reply gets a wry smile from him. \"Are the Antarcticans coming to help us?\" Day asks. \"Did you tell Anden about the cure\u2014\"\n\n\"Calm down,\" I interrupt him, then stand up and put a hand on Pascao's shoulder. \"Watch out for him. I'm going back to the tower to help with the evacuations. I'll tell them to bring his brother here.\" Pascao nods quickly, and I cast one last glance toward Day before running out of the building.\n\nA stream of people is making its way out of the tower, with Republic soldiers flanking them on either side. Some are on crutches or in wheelchairs, while others are strapped to gurneys and being wheeled out by a team of medics. Republic soldiers bark orders at them, their guns hoisted and their bodies tense. I hurry past them and toward the entrance, then push my way inside to the stairs. I hop up the steps two at a time until I finally reach the lab floor, where the door's propped open and a nurse is directing people toward the elevator.\n\nI reach the nurse and grab her arm. She turns to look at me, startled. \"Princeps-Elect,\" she manages to blurt out, hastily bowing her head. \"What are you\u2014\"\n\n\"Eden Bataar Wing,\" I say breathlessly. \"Is he ready to go yet?\"\n\n\"Day's brother?\" she replies. \"Yes\u2014yes, he's in his room. We're preparing to move him comfortably. He still needs to be in a wheelchair, but\u2014\"\n\n\"And Tess? The girl who was under quarantine?\"\n\n\"She's already on her way downstairs\u2014\"\n\nI don't wait for the nurse to finish before rushing into the main lab room and toward the corridor. At the very end, I see a pair of doctors wheeling Eden out. He looks like he's unconscious, resting on a small pillow propped between his head and the chair's back, his forehead damp with sweat.\n\nI give the doctors instructions on where to take him as we all hurry together toward the elevator. \"You'll see Day there. Keep him with his brother.\"\n\nAnother explosion rips through the building, forcing half of us to our knees. Some of the medics scream. Dust rains down from the ceiling, making my eyes water\u2014I unbutton my coat, then shrug out of it and throw it across Eden to shield him. \"No elevator,\" I gasp out, heading toward the stairs instead. \"Can we carry him down?\"\n\nOne of the nurses gingerly picks Eden up and holds him tight in her arms. We hurry down the stairs as more dust showers us and muffled sounds of shouts, guns, and explosions echo from outside.\n\nWe rush out into a lengthening evening lit completely by the fire of battle. Still no call from Anden. My eyes sweep the roofs as we pause underneath the entrance, other evacuees streaming around us and between Republic guards. One of the guards recognizes me and hurries over, throwing a quick salute before he speaks. \"Princeps-Elect!\" he shouts. \"Get to the adjacent shelter, as quick as you can\u2014we'll send a jeep to take you to the Elector.\"\n\nI shake my head right away. \" No. I'm staying here.\" A spark from the roofs makes me look up, and instantly we all cringe when a bullet hits the overhang in front of the main entrance. There are Colonies gunmen on the roofs. Several of the Republic soldiers point their guns and open fire. The guard who had spoken to me puts a hand on my shoulder. \"Then move out,\" he yells, gesturing wildly for us.\n\nThe nurse holding Eden takes several steps forward, her eyes still fixed in terror on the rooftops. I put a hand out to stop her. \"Not yet,\" I say. \"Stay here a moment.\" Not two seconds after the words leave my mouth, I see a bullet hit one of the evacuees\u2014blood sprays, and instantly the people around him flee, screams reverberating in the air. My heart pounds as I scan the roofs again. One of the Republic soldiers finally catches a gunman, and I see somebody in a Colonies uniform fall from the top of a nearby building. I look away before the body hits the ground, but I'm still struck by a violent wave of nausea. How do we get Eden to safety?\n\n\"Stay here,\" I command the nurse holding Eden. Then I tap four of the Republic soldiers. \"Cover me. I'm heading up there.\" I gesture for one of the guards to hand me the gun at his belt, and he passes it over without hesitation.\n\nI move into the crowds and make my way toward the buildings. I try to imitate the effortless grace that Day and Pascao have in this urban jungle. As the chaotic evacuations continue and soldiers from both sides face off against one another, I hurry into the shadows of a narrow, nearby alley and start making my way up the side of the building. I'm small, dressed in dark clothes, and alone. They won't expect me to head up here. My mind runs through all of my sharpshooting lessons. If I can throw them off, it'll give the evacuees that much more of a chance to make it out in one piece. Even as I think this, another Colonies jet zooms overhead and a huge plume of bright red flame erupts on the Bank Tower. A Republic jet tails close behind it, firing as it goes\u2014as I look on, it manages to hit the Colonies plane and ignite one of its engines, sending it careening wildly to one side and leaving a trail of dark smoke behind it. A deafening roar follows; it must have crashed several blocks down. I look back up at the burning tower. We don't have much time. This building is going to come down. I grit my teeth and make my way up as fast as I can. If only I were as good a Runner as Day and Pascao.\n\nI finally reach the top floor's ledge. From here, I get a good view of the battle zone below me. The Bank Tower is under siege from the sky and the ground, where hundreds of Republic troops are pushing back in the streets against a steady tide of enemy soldiers. Patients and medics alike still stream from the tower and down the street toward the makeshift shelter, along with government officials from the higher floors, many of them covered completely in white dust and blood. I peer over the top ledge.\n\nNo gunmen here. I pull myself up onto the roof, careful to stay in the shadows. My hand grips the gun so tightly that I can barely feel my fingers. I scan the roofs in the danger zone leading up to the shelter, until finally I see several Colonies soldiers crouched on top of the neighboring buildings, taking aim at the Republic troops heading up the evacuation. I make my way silently toward them.\n\nI take the first one down quickly, aiming at him from behind as I peer over the building's top ledge. It's as if I can feel Metias guiding my gun, making sure I hit him somewhere that isn't fatal. As he collapses with a muffled shriek that's lost in all the chaos, I rush over and grab his gun, then fling it over the side of the roof. Then I hit him in the face hard enough to knock him out. My eyes settle on the next soldier. I press one hand against my earpiece and click my mike on.\n\n\"Tell the nurse to keep waiting,\" I hiss urgently at the guard by the Bank Tower. \"I'll send a signal when it's\u2014\"\n\nI never get a chance to finish my sentence. An explosion throws me down flat onto the roof. When I open my eyes and look down, the entire street is completely covered in ash and dust. Dust bombs? Through the veil of smoke and dirt, evacuees are running in panic toward the shelter and breaking through the lines of Republic soldiers flanking them, completely ignoring their shouts. The Colonies gunmen have visors on. They must be able to see through all this smoke. They fire down at the crowds, scattering them in all directions. I look frantically toward the tower. Where's Eden? I hurry to my next target, taking him down in the same way as the last. Another gunman down. I lock on to my third target, then spit out a curse as I realize that my gun has just run out of bullets.\n\nI'm about to make my way off the roof when something bright glints from a rooftop. I freeze in my tracks.\n\nNot far from me on a higher building, Commander Jameson crouches on a roof. A chill shakes me from head to toe when I see that she has a gun in her hand. No. No.\n\nShe's picking off Republic soldiers, one bullet at a time. Then, my heart stops as she catches sight of something that piques her interest. She takes aim at a new target on the ground. My eyes follow the line of her gun. And that's when I see a boy with bright blond hair pushing his way against the stream of the crowd and toward the Bank Tower.\n\nShe's aiming at Day.\n\nTess gets evacuated first\u2014i see her limp form being carried in the arms of a nurse as they exit the Bank Tower. I take her from the nurse's arms as soon as they reach ground level, then carry her alongside the stream of other evacuees. She seems only half conscious, unaware of my presence, her head lolling to one side. Halfway to the shelter, I slow down. Damn, I'm so exhausted and in so much pain.\n\nPascao takes Tess from my arms. He hoists her up to his chest. On the roofs, sparks fly\u2014signs of gunfire. \"Get back to the Bank Tower entrance,\" he yells at me before turning his back. \"I'll get her over!\" And then he's off before I can argue.\n\nI watch them go for a while, unwilling to look away until I'm sure Tess is safely across the square. When they reach the shelter, I turn my attention back to the tower. Eden should be down by now. I crane my neck, squinting through the crowds for a head of blond curls. Has June come back downstairs yet? I don't see her in the panicking masses either and her absence sends a jolt of worry through me.\n\nThen, an explosion. I'm thrown to the ground.\n\nDust. A dust bomb, I manage to think through the pounding in my head. At first I can't see anything through all the smoke\u2014there's chaos everywhere, sparks flying, and the occasional muffled sound of gunfire; through the floating white dust, I see a blur of people running toward the safety of the Republic barricades, their legs moving as if in slow motion, their mouths open in silent shouts. I shake my head wearily. My own limbs feel like they're dragging through the mud, and the back of my head throbs, threatening to drown me in pain. I blink against it, trying to keep my senses straight. Desperately I call out again for Eden, but I can't even hear my own voice. If I can't hear it, how can he?\n\nThe people thin out for a moment.\n\nAnd then I see him. It's Eden. He's unconscious in the arms of a terrified Republic nurse, one who seems to be stumbling blindly through the dust, headed in the wrong direction\u2014straight toward the Colonies troops lining the left side of the square, opposite of where the shelter is. I don't stop to think or shout at him, I don't hesitate or wait for a good interval in the gunfire. I just start running toward him.\n\nCommander jameson's going to shoot him\u2014the direction she's aiming her gun is unmistakable.\n\nDay's sprinting through the dust that blankets the street. Day, what are you doing? He stumbles in his dash, and even from the roofs I can tell that he's struggling to make his body move, that every last inch of him is screaming from exhaustion. He's going to push himself too far. I glance in the direction he's going, searching out what has drawn his attention.\n\nEden. Of course. The nurse holding Eden trips and falls in the midst of all the billowing smoke, and when she gets up, fear gets the best of her because she just starts running away. Fury rises up inside me. Left behind is Eden, slowly stirring and completely vulnerable in the open street, blind, separated from the group, and coughing uncontrollably from the smoke.\n\nI jump to my feet. With the way Day's running opposite of everyone else, he'll soon be in an area where he's an open target.\n\nMy hand flies to my waist\u2014and then I remember that my own gun is out of bullets. I sprint back across the rooftop toward my last target, where I hadn't yet dropped his gun off the roof. When I glance toward Commander Jameson again, I see her tense and aim. No. No! She fires a shot.\n\nThe bullet misses Day by a couple of feet. He stumbles in his rush, throwing an arm briefly over his head out of instinct, but picks himself up and continues doggedly on. My heart thuds frantically against my chest. Faster. I take a flying leap from one roof to the next. Down below, I see Day nearing Eden. Then he's there, he's reached him, he's skidding to a halt next to Eden and throwing his arms protectively around his little brother. The dust around them makes them hard to focus on, as if they're both ghosts in faded colors. My breath comes in shallow gasps as I draw closer to the fallen soldiers. I hope the dust is throwing Commander Jameson's aim off.\n\nI reach the downed soldier. I grab his gun. One bullet left.\n\nBelow, Day picks up Eden, puts one hand protectively against the back of his brother's head, and then starts staggering back toward the shelter as fast as his broken body will allow him. Commander Jameson takes aim again\u2014I scream in my head and push myself to go faster. All of my adrenaline, every fiber of my attention and concentration, is now focused like an arrow on her. She fires. This time the bullet misses the brothers, but it sparks barely a foot away from Day. He doesn't even bother to look up. He only clutches Eden tighter, then stumbles onward.\n\nI finally near the roof where she is. I leap onto it, landing on its flat concrete surface. From here, I can see both the roof I'm on and the street below. Three dozen yards ahead of me, partially obscured by chimneys and vents, Commander Jameson crouches with her back turned to me, her focus on the streets.\n\nShe fires again. Down below, I hear a hoarse shriek of pain from a voice I know all too well. All my breath escapes me. I glance quickly to the street to see Day fall to his knees, dropping Eden for a moment. The sounds around me dull.\n\nHe's been shot.\n\nHe shudders, then picks himself up again. Hoists Eden into his arms again. Staggers onward. Commander Jameson fires one more time. The bullet makes impact. I hoist the gun in my hands, then point it straight at her. I'm close enough now, close enough to see the ridges of her bulletproof vest lining her back. My hands shake. I have a perfect vantage, a straight shot right at Commander Jameson's head. She's getting ready to fire again.\n\nI aim.\n\nAs if the world has suddenly slowed to a million frames a second, Commander Jameson spins around. She senses my presence. Her eyes narrow\u2014and then she swivels her gun toward me, taking her focus off Day. Thoughts flash through my mind at the speed of light. I pull my gun's trigger, firing my last bullet straight at her head.\n\nAnd I miss.\n\nI never miss.\n\nNo time to dwell on this\u2014Commander Jameson has her gun pointed at me, and as my bullet whizzes past her face, I see her smile and fire. I throw myself to the ground, then roll. Something sparks barely an inch from my arm. I dart behind a nearby chimney and press myself as tightly against the wall as I can. Somewhere behind me, the sound of heavy boots approaches. Breathe. Breathe. Our last confrontation flashes through my mind. Why can I face everything in the world except Commander Jameson?\n\n\"Come out and play, Little Iparis,\" she calls out. When I stay silent, she laughs. \"Come out, so you can see your pretty boy bleeding to death on the street.\"\n\nShe knows exactly how to slice right into my heart. But I grit my teeth and force the image of a bleeding, dying Day out of my head. I don't have time for this bullshit. What I need to do is disarm her\u2014and at that thought, I look down at my useless gun. Time to play a game of pretend.\n\nShe's silent now. All I can hear is the soft tap of approaching boots, the steady nearing of my brother's killer. My hands tighten on my gun.\n\nShe's close enough. I shut my eyes for an instant, mutter a quick whisper for good luck\u2014and then whirl out from my hiding place. I point my gun up at Commander Jameson as if I'm about to fire. She does what I hope\u2014she flinches to the side, but this time I'm ready, and I lunge straight for her. I jump, then kick her face as hard as I can. My boots make a satisfying sound on impact. Her head snaps backward. Her grip on her gun loosens, and I take the opportunity to kick it right out of her hands. She collapses onto the roof with a thud\u2014her gun flies off to one side, then falls right off the roof and to the smoke-filled streets below.\n\nI don't dare stop my momentum. While she's still down, I swing my elbow at her face in an effort to knock her unconscious. My first blow hits\u2014but my second one doesn't. Commander Jameson grabs my elbow, snaps her other hand on my wrist like a shackle, and then twists. I flip with it. Pain shoots up my arm as it bends in her grasp. Before she can break it, I twist around and stomp on her arm with the sharp heel of my boot. She winces, but doesn't let go. I stomp again, harder.\n\nHer grip loosens by a hair, and I finally manage to slip out of her grasp.\n\nShe hops to her feet right as I put some distance between us and turn again to face her. We start to circle each other, both of us breathing heavily, my arm still screaming in pain and her face marred by a trickle of blood coming from her temple. I already know I can't win against her in an all-out brawl. She's taller and stronger, equipped with years of training that my talents can't match. My only hope is to catch her by surprise again, to find a way to turn her own force against her. As I continue to circle, waiting and watching for an opening, the world around us fades away. I draw on all my anger, letting it replace my fear and give me strength.\n\nIt's just you and me now. This is the way it was always meant to be, this is the moment I've been waiting for since it all began. We'll face each other at the very end with our bare hands.\n\nCommander Jameson strikes first. Her speed terrifies me. One second she's before me, and the next she's at my side, her fist flying toward my face. I don't have time to dodge. All I manage to do is jerk my shoulder up at the last second, and her fist hits me instead as a glancing blow. Stars explode across my eyes. I stumble backward. I manage to dodge her next blow\u2014barely. I roll away from her, fighting to clear my vision, and pop back onto my feet. When she lunges again, I jump up and kick at her head. It catches her, but she's too fast for it to be head-on. I dart away again. This time I back up slowly toward the edge of the roof, my eyes terrified to leave her. Good, I remind myself. Look as frightened as you can. Finally, the back of my boot hits the roof's ledge. I glance down, then back up at Commander Jameson. Despite a slight unsteadiness, she looks undaunted. It isn't hard for me to fake the fear in my wide eyes.\n\nShe stalks toward me like a predator. She doesn't say a word, but she doesn't need to\u2014everything she's ever wanted to tell me has already been said before. It runs through my head like a poison. Little Iparis, how much you remind me of myself at your age. Adorable. Someday, you'll learn that life isn't always what you want it to be. That you won't always get what you want. And that there are forces out of your control that will shape you into who you are. Too bad your time ends here. It would've been fun to see what you grow up to become.\n\nHer eyes hypnotize me. In this moment, I can imagine no worse sight.\n\nShe lunges forward.\n\nI have only one chance. I duck, grab her arm, and flip her right over my head. Her momentum sends her sailing over the edge of the roof.\n\nBut her hand clamps down on my arm. I'm yanked halfway over the ledge\u2014my left shoulder pops out of its socket. I scream. My heels dig in against the ledge, fighting to keep me from falling over. Commander Jameson flattens herself against the side of the building, grappling for footholds. Her nails dig so deep into my flesh that I can feel my skin ripping. Tears spring to my eyes. Down below, Republic soldiers are still herding evacuees, firing on enemy soldiers on other roofs, shouting orders into their mikes.\n\nI scream at them with everything I have left. \"Shoot her!\" I shout. \" Shoot her!\"\n\nTwo Republic soldiers snap their heads in my direction. They recognize me. As they lift their guns in my direction, Commander Jameson looks up into my eyes and grins. \"I knew you couldn't do it yourself.\"\n\nThen the soldiers open fire, Commander Jameson's body convulses, her grip suddenly loosens, and she plummets like a wounded bird to the street. I turn away so I don't have to look, but I still hear the sickening sound of her body against pavement. She's gone. Just like that. I'm left with her words and my own ringing through my ears.\n\nShoot her. Shoot her.\n\nMetias's words flash through my mind. Few people ever kill for the right reasons.\n\nI hurriedly wipe the tears from my face. What did I just do? Her blood stains my hands\u2014I rub my good hand against my clothes, but I can't get it off. I don't know if I'll ever be able to. \"This is the right reason,\" I whisper repeatedly.\n\nPerhaps she destroyed herself, and I only helped. But even this thought seems hollow.\n\nThe agony of my dislocated shoulder makes me light-headed. I lift my right arm, grip my wounded left arm, grit my teeth, and push hard. I scream again. The bone resists for an instant\u2014and then I feel my shoulder pop back into place. Fresh tears course down my face. My hands tremble uncontrollably, and my ears ring, blocking out any sound around me except the beating of my heart.\n\nHow long has it been? Hours? A few seconds?\n\nThe pulsing light of logic seeps into my mind, cutting through the pain. As always, it saves me. Day needs your help, it whispers. Go to him.\n\nI search for Day. He has reached the other side of the street and the safer areas around the shelter, where Republic soldiers have set up their barricades... but even as I start rushing to the edge of the roof, I notice that others have pulled Eden's unconscious form away from Day and are taking him to safety. A few hover over Day as he lies on the ground, momentarily obscuring him from my view. I scramble down the building as fast as I can, until I reach a fire escape and rush down the metal steps. Fear and adrenaline numb my injuries.\n\nPlease, I beg silently. Please let him be okay.\n\nBy the time I reach him, a crowd has formed. I can hear one of them shouting, \"Move it! Get back, give us some room! Tell them to hurry up!\" A lump in my throat chokes me, leaving me short of breath. My boots pound against the ground, keeping rhythm with my heart. I shove people aside and drop to my knees at Day's side. The person shouting was Pascao. He gives me a frantic look.\n\n\"Stay with him,\" he tells me. \"I'm going for the medics.\" I nod once, and he dashes off.\n\nI barely notice all the people crowded around us in a ring. All I can do is look down at Day. He's trembling from head to toe, his eyes wide open in shock, his hair clinging to his face. When I look closer at his body, I notice two wounds spilling dark blood across his shirt, one wound in his chest and the other near his hip. A strangled cry comes from someone. Maybe it's from me. As if in a dream, I bend over him and touch his face.\n\n\"Day, it's me. It's June. I'm right here.\"\n\nHe looks at me. \"June?\" he manages to gasp out. He tries to lift a hand to my face, but he's shaking so hard that he can't. I reach out and cradle his face with both of my hands. His eyes are full of tears. \"I\u2014I think\u2014I've been shot\u2014\" Two people from the crowd place their hands over his wounds, pressing down hard enough to force a painful sob from his mouth. He tries to look down at them, but has no strength to lift his head.\n\n\"Medics are on their way,\" I tell him firmly, leaning close enough to press my lips against his cheek. \"Hang on. Okay? Stay with me. Keep looking at me. You'll be okay.\"\n\n\"I don't\u2014think so,\" Day stammers. He blinks rapidly, spilling tears down the sides of his face. They wet the tips of my fingers. \"Eden\u2014is he safe\u2014?\"\n\n\"He's safe,\" I whisper. \"Your brother is safe and sound and you'll get to see him very soon.\"\n\nDay starts to reply, but can't. His skin looks so ashen. Please, no. I refuse to let myself think the worst, but it hangs over us like a black shadow. I feel the heaviness of death looming over my shoulder, his sightless eyes staring down into Day's soul, waiting patiently to overwhelm his light.\n\n\"I don't want\u2014to go\u2014\" Day finally manages to say. \"I don't want\u2014to leave you\u2014Eden\u2014\"\n\nI shush him by touching my lips to his trembling ones. \"Nothing bad will ever happen to Eden,\" I reply gently, desperate to keep him with me. \"Stay focused, Day. You're going to the hospital. They're coming back for you; it won't be long now.\"\n\nIt won't be long now.\n\nDay just smiles at me, an expression so sad that it breaks through my numbness, and I begin to cry. Those bright blue eyes. Before me is the boy who has bandaged my wounds on the streets of Lake, who has guarded his family with every bone in his body, who has stayed by my side in spite of everything, the boy of light and laughter and life, of grief and fury and passion, the boy whose fate is intertwined with mine, forever and always.\n\n\"I love you,\" he whispers. \"Can you stay awhile?\" He says something else, but his voice trails off so quietly that I can't make out what it is. No. No. You can't. His breathing grows shallower. I can tell that he is fighting to stay conscious, that with every passing second, his eyes have more and more trouble focusing on me. For a moment, Day tries to look at something behind me, but when I glance over my shoulder, there's nothing there but open sky. I kiss him again and then lean my head against his.\n\n\"I love you,\" I whisper over and over again. \"Don't go.\" I close my eyes. My tears fall on his cheeks.\n\nAs I crouch there against him, feeling his life slowly ebb away, I'm consumed with grief and rage. I have never been a religious person. But right now, as I see medics in the distance hurrying toward us, I send a desperate prayer to some higher power. To what, I don't know. But I hope that Someone, Anyone, hears me. That It'll lift us both into Its arms and take pity on us. I throw this prayer into the sky with every shred of strength I have left.\n\nLet him live.\n\nPlease don't take him away from this world. Please don't let him die here in my arms, not after everything we've been through together, not after You've taken so many others. Please, I beg You, let him live. I am willing to sacrifice anything to make this happen\u2014I'm willing to do anything You ask. Maybe You'll laugh at me for such a na\u00efve promise, but I mean it in earnest, and I don't care if it makes no sense or seems impossible. Let him live. Please. I can't bear this a second time.\n\nI look desperately around us, my vision blurred with tears, and everything is a smear of blood and smoke, light and ash, and all I can hear is screaming and gunfire and hatred, and I am so tired of the fighting, so frustrated, angry, helpless.\n\nTell me there is still good in the world. Tell me there is still hope for all of us.\n\nThrough an underwater veil, I feel hands on my arms pull me away from Day. I struggle stubbornly against them. Pain lances up my injured shoulder. Medics bend down over his body. His eyes are closed now, and I can't see him breathing. Images of Metias's body flash back to me. When the medics try again to pull me from Day, I shove them roughly away and scream. I scream for everything that has gone wrong. I scream for everything broken in our lives.\n\nI think june is leaning over me, but I have trouble making out the details of her face. When I try too hard, the edges of my vision filter out into blinding white. The pain, at first excruciating, is nothing now. Memories fade in and out\u2014memories of my first days frightened and alone on the streets, with my bleeding knee and hollow stomach; of young Tess, and then of John when he first learned that I was still alive; of my mother's home, my father's smile, of Eden as a baby. I remember the first time I met June on the streets. Her defiant stance, her fierce eyes. Then, gradually, I have trouble remembering anything.\n\nI always knew, on some level, that I wouldn't live long. It's simply not written in my stars.\n\nSomething bright hovering behind June's shoulder catches my attention. I turn my head as much as I can to see it. At first it looks like some glowing orb of light. As I keep staring, though, I realize that it's my mother.\n\nMom, I whisper. I stand and take a step toward her. My feet feel so light.\n\nMy mother smiles at me. She looks young and healthy and whole, her hands no longer wrapped in bandages, her hair the color of wheat and snow. When I reach her, she gently cups my face between her smooth, uninjured palms. My heart stops beating; it fills with warmth and light and I want to stay here forever, locked in this moment. I falter in my steps. Mom catches me before I can fall, and we kneel there, together again. \"My little lost boy,\" she murmurs.\n\nMy voice comes out as a broken whisper. \"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"Hush, my baby.\" I bow my head as she kneels over me. She kisses my forehead, and I am a child again, helpless and hopeful, bursting with love. Past the blurry, golden line of her arm, I can look down at my pale, broken body lying on the ground. There's a girl crouched over me, her hands on my face, her long dark hair draped over her shoulder. She's crying.\n\n\"Are John and Dad...?\" I begin to say.\n\nMom just smiles. Her eyes are so incredibly blue, like I can see the entire world inside them\u2014the sky and the clouds and everything beyond.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" she replies. \"They are well, and they love you very much.\"\n\nI feel an overwhelming need to follow my mother wherever she's going, wherever that might take us. \"I miss you guys,\" I finally say to her. \"It hurts every day, the absence of someone who was once there.\"\n\nMom combs a gentle hand through my hair, the way she used to when I was little. \"My darling, there's no need to miss us. We never left.\" She lifts her head and nods at the street, past the crowds of people who have gathered around my body. Now a team of medics is lifting me onto a stretcher. \"Go back to Eden. He's waiting for you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I whisper. I crane my neck to see if I can catch a glimpse of my brother in the crowds, but I don't see him there.\n\nMom rises; her hands leave my face, and I find myself struggling to breathe. No. Please don't leave me. I reach out a hand to her, but some invisible barrier stops it. The light grows brighter. \"Where are you going? Can I come with you?\"\n\nMom smiles, but shakes her head. \"You still belong on the other side of the looking glass. Someday, when you're ready to take the step over to our side, I'll come see you again. Live well, Daniel. Make that final step count.\"\n\nFor the first three weeks that day is in the hospital, I never leave. The same people come and go\u2014Tess, of course, who's in the waiting room as much as I am, waiting for Day to come out of his coma; Eden, who stays as long as Lucy allows him to; the other remaining Patriots, especially Pascao; an endless assortment of doctors and medics who I begin to recognize and know by name after the first week; and Anden, who has returned from the warfront with his own scars. Hordes of people continue to stay camped out around the hospital, but Anden doesn't have the heart to tell them to disperse, even when they continue to stake out the grounds for weeks and then months. Many of them have the familiar scarlet streaks painted into their hair. For the most part, they stay silent. Sometimes they chant. I've grown used to their presence now, to the point where it's comforting. They remind me that Day is still alive. Still fighting.\n\nThe war between the Republic and the Colonies, at least for now, is over. The Antarcticans finally came to our rescue, bringing with them their fearsome technology and weapons that intimidated Africa and the Colonies into returning to our ceasefire agreement, bringing both Anden and the Chancellor before the international court, imposing the proper sanctions against us and them and finally, finally beginning the process for a permanent peace treaty. The ashes of our battlegrounds are still here, though, along with a lingering hostility. I know it will take time to close the wounds. I have no idea how long this ceasefire will last, or when the Republic and the Colonies will find true peace. Maybe we never will. But for now, this is good enough.\n\nOne of the first things the doctors had to do for Day, after stitching up the horrific bullet wounds, was to operate on his brain. The trauma he'd suffered meant he couldn't receive the full course of medications needed to properly prep him for the surgery... but they went ahead with it. Whether or not he was ready was irrelevant at that point; if they didn't, he would've died anyway. Yet, still. This keeps me awake nights. No one really knows whether he'll wake up at all, or whether he'll be an altogether different person if he does.\n\nTwo months pass, and then three.\n\nGradually, we all start to do our waiting at home. The hospital's crowds finally begin to thin.\n\nFive months. Winter passes.\n\nAt 0728 hours on an early spring Thursday in March, I arrive at the hospital's waiting room for my usual check-in. As expected at this hour, I'm the only one here. Eden's at home with Lucy, getting some needed sleep. He continues to grow, and if Day were awake to see him now, I know he'd comment on how his brother is starting to lean out, losing the baby fat on his face and taking the early steps into adulthood.\n\nEven Tess isn't here yet. She tends to come in the late morning to work as a medic assistant, shadowing the doctors, and when I catch her on her breaks, we huddle together and exchange conversation in hushed voices. Sometimes she even makes me laugh. \"He loves you, really he does,\" she told me yesterday. \"He'd love you even if it destroyed him. He matches you. I guess it's kind of cute.\" She said this with a shy, grudging smile on her face. Somehow, she had managed to return to the place where I'd first known her, but now as someone older, taller, and wiser.\n\nI nudged her affectionately. \"You guys have a bond I could never touch,\" I replied. \"Even when we're at our worst.\"\n\nShe blushed at that, and I couldn't help opening my heart to her. A loving Tess is one of the sweetest sights in the world. \"Just be good to him,\" she whispered. \"Promise?\"\n\nNow I greet the nurse at the waiting room's window, then settle down into my usual chair and look around. So empty this morning. I find myself missing Tess's companionship. I try to distract myself with the news headlines running on the monitor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "\u2002ANTARCTICAN PRESIDENT IKARI, UNITED NATIONS, SHOW APPROVAL FOR NEW PEACE TREATY BETWEEN REPUBLIC AND COLONIES\n\n\u2002ELECTOR PRIMO ANNOUNCES START OF NEW\n\n\u2002RANKING SYSTEM TO REPLACE FORMER TRIALS\n\n\u2002NEW BORDER CITIES BETWEEN REPUBLIC AND COLONIES TO BE RENAMED THE UNITED CITIES, TO BEGIN ALLOWING IMMIGRATION FROM BOTH NATIONS STARTING LATE NEXT YEAR\n\n\u2002SENATOR MARIANA DUPREE OFFICIALLY INDUCTED AS PRINCEPS OF THE SENATE\n\nThe news headlines bring a faint smile to my face. Last night, Anden had stopped by my apartment to tell me in person about Mariana. I'd told him that I would extend my congratulations to her directly. \"She's very good at what she does,\" I said. \"More so than I was. I'm happy for her.\"\n\nAnden bowed his head. \"You would have been better in the long run, I think,\" he replied with a gentle smile. \"You understand the people. But I'm happy that you're back where you feel the most comfortable. Our troops are lucky to have you.\" He hesitated then, and for a moment he took my hand in his. I remember the soft neoprene lining of his gloves, the silver shine of his cufflinks. \"I might not get to see much of you now. Maybe it's best that way, isn't it? Still, please do drop by now and then. It'll be nice to hear from you.\"\n\n\"Likewise,\" I replied, squeezing his hand in return.\n\nMy thoughts snap back to the present. One of the doctors has emerged from the hallway near Day's room. He catches sight of me, takes a deep breath, and approaches. I straighten, tensing. It's been a long time since I've heard any real updates on Day's condition from Dr. Kann. A part of me wants to jump up in excitement, because perhaps the news is good; another part of me cringes in fear, in case the news is bad. My eyes scan the doctor's face, searching for clues. (Pupils slightly dilated, face anxious, but not in the manner of one who is about to break the worst news. There are hints of joy on his face.) My pulse quickens. What is he going to tell me? Or perhaps it's no news at all\u2014perhaps he's simply going to tell me what he usually does. Not much change today, I'm afraid, but at least he's still stable. I've grown so used to hearing that.\n\nDr. Kann pauses before me. He adjusts his glasses and scratches unconsciously at his trimmed salt-and-pepper beard. \"Good morning, Ms. Iparis,\" he says.\n\n\"How is he?\" I ask, my usual greeting.\n\nDr. Kann smiles, but hesitates (another oddity; the news must be significant). \"Wonderful news.\" My heart stops for a second. \"Day has woken up. Less than an hour ago.\"\n\n\"He's awake?\" I breathe. He's awake. Suddenly the news is too overwhelming, and I'm not sure whether I can bear it. I study his face carefully. \"There's more to it than that, though. Isn't there?\"\n\nDr. Kann puts both hands on my shoulders. \"I don't want to worry you, Ms. Iparis, not at all. Day has pulled through his surgery remarkably well\u2014when he woke up, he asked for water and then for his brother. He seems quite alert and coherent. We ran a quick scan of his brain.\" His voice turns more excited. \"We'll need to do a more thorough check, of course, but upon first glance it seems everything has normalized. His hippocampus looks healthy, and signals seem to be firing normally. In almost every aspect, the Day that we know is back.\"\n\nTears prickle at the edges of my eyes. The Day that we know is back. After five months of waiting, the news is so sudden. One minute he was lying unconscious in bed, hanging on to life night by night, and now he's awake. Just like that. I break into a smile with the doctor, and before I can stop myself, I hug him. He laughs, patting my head awkwardly, but I don't care. I want to see Day. \"Can he have visitors?\" I ask. Then, abruptly, I realize what the doctor actually said. \"Why do you say 'almost'?\"\n\nThe doctor's smile wavers. He adjusts his glasses again. \"It's nothing we can't fix over the course of extended therapy. You see, the hippocampus region affects memories, both short- and long-term. It seems that Day's long-term memories\u2014his family, his brother Eden, his friend Tess, and so on\u2014are intact. After a few questions, however, it seems like he has very little recollection of both people and events from the last year or two. We call it retrograde amnesia. He remembers his family's deaths, for instance...\" Dr. Kann's voice trails off uncomfortably here. \"But he does not seem familiar with Commander Jameson's name, or the recent Colonies' invasion. He also doesn't seem to recall you.\"\n\nMy smile fades. \"He... doesn't remember me?\"\n\n\"Of course, this is something that can heal over time, with proper therapy,\" Dr. Kann again reassures me. \"His short-term memory abilities are working well. He remembers most things I tell him, and forms new memories without too much issue. I just wanted to warn you before you see him. Don't be startled that he might not remember you. Take your time and reintroduce yourself to him. Gradually, perhaps in a few years' time, his old memories might come back.\"\n\nI nod at the doctor as if in a dream. \"Okay,\" I whisper.\n\n\"You can see him now, if you'd like.\" He smiles at me, as if he's delivering the greatest news in the world. And he is.\n\nBut when he leaves me, I just stand there for a moment. My mind in a haze. Thinking. Lost. Then I take slow steps toward the hallway where Day's hospital room is, the corridor closing in around me like a foggy, blurry tunnel. The only thing running through my head is the memory of my desperate prayer over Day's wounded body, the promise I had offered up to the heavens in exchange for his life.\n\nLet him live. I am willing to sacrifice anything to make this happen.\n\nMy heart sinks, turns gray. I understand now. I know that something has answered my prayer, and at the same time has also told me what my sacrifice must be. I have been offered a chance to never hurt Day again.\n\nI step into the hospital room. Day is alert, propped up on pillows and startlingly healthier than the times I've seen him lying unconscious and wan over the past few months. But something is different now. Day's eyes follow me without a hint of familiarity in them; he's watching me with the polite, wary distance of a stranger, the way he looked at me when we first met.\n\nHe doesn't know who I am.\n\nMy heart aches, pulling at me as I draw closer to his bedside. I know what I have to do.\n\n\"Hi,\" he says when I sit on his bed. His eyes wander curiously across my face.\n\n\"Hi,\" I reply softly. \"Do you know who I am?\"\n\nDay looks guilty, which only digs the knife in deeper. \"Should I?\"\n\nIt takes all of my effort not to cry, to bear the thought that Day has forgotten everything between us\u2014our night together, the ordeals we've been through, all that we've shared and lost. We have been erased from his memory, leaving nothing behind. The Day that I knew is not here.\n\nI could tell him right now, of course. I could remind him of who I am, that I'm June Iparis, the girl he had once saved on the streets and fallen in love with. I could tell him everything, just like Dr. Kann said, and it could possibly trigger his old memories. Tell him, June. Just tell him. You'll be so happy. It'd be so easy.\n\nBut I open my mouth and no sound comes out. I can't do it.\n\nBe good to him, Tess had told me. Promise.\n\nSo long as I remain in Day's life, I will hurt him. Any other alternative is impossible. I think of the way he had crouched, sobbing, at his family's kitchen table, mourning what I had taken away from him. Now fate has handed the solution to me on a silver platter\u2014Day survived his ordeal, and in return, I need to step out of his life. Even though he looks at me now like a stranger, he no longer has the look of pain and tragedy that always seemed to come with the passion and love he gazed at me with. Now he is free.\n\nHe is free of us, leaving me as the only bearer of our past's burden.\n\nSo I swallow hard, smile, and bow my head to him. \"Day,\" I force myself to say, \"it's good to meet you. I was sent by the Republic to see how you're doing. It's wonderful to see you awake again. The country is going to rejoice when they hear the good news.\"\n\nDay nods politely in return, his tenseness unmistakable. \"Thank you,\" he says warily. \"The doctors tell me that I've been out for five months. What happened?\"\n\n\"You were injured during a battle between the Republic and the Colonies,\" I reply. Everything I'm saying sounds like it's coming from someone else's mouth. \"You saved your brother Eden.\"\n\n\"Is Eden here?\" Day's eyes light up with recognition, and a beautiful smile blossoms on his face. The sight of it brings me pain even as I am happy that he remembers his brother. I want so much to see that look of familiarity on his face when he's talking about me.\n\n\"Eden will be so happy to see you. The doctors are sending for him, so he'll arrive shortly.\" I return his smile, and this time it's a genuine one, if bittersweet. When Day studies my face again, I close my eyes and bow slightly to him.\n\nIt's time to let go.\n\n\"Day,\" I say, carefully choosing what my final words to him should be. \"It has been such a privilege and honor to fight by your side. You've saved many more of us than you'll ever know.\" For a small moment, I fix my eyes on his, telling him silently everything that I'll never say to him aloud. \"Thank you,\" I whisper. \"For everything.\"\n\nDay looks puzzled by the emotion in my voice, but he bows his head in return. \"The honor's mine,\" he replies. My heart breaks in sorrow at the lack of warmth in his voice, the warmth I know I would have heard had he remembered everything. I feel the absence of the aching love that I've come to yearn for, that I wanted so much to earn. It is gone now.\n\nIf he knew who I was, I would say something else to him now, something I should've said to him more often when I had the chance. Now I am sure of my feelings, and it's too late. So I fold the three words back into my heart, for his sake, and rise from his bed. I soak in every last, wonderful detail of his face and store it in my memory, hoping I can take him with me wherever I go. We exchange quiet salutes.\n\nThen I turn away for the last time.\n\nTwo weeks later, what feels like the entire city of Los Angeles turns out to see Day leave the country for good. On the morning I left Day's bedside, Antarctica came calling for both him and his brother. They'd taken note of Eden's gifted touch with engineering and offered him a place in one of their academies. At the same time, they offered Day the chance to go along.\n\nI don't join the crowds. I stay in my apartment instead, watching the events unfold while Ollie sleeps contentedly beside me. The streets around my complex are teeming with people, all jostling with one another to watch the JumboTrons. Their muffled chaos turns into white noise as I watch it unfold on my screen." + }, + { + "title": "DANIEL ALTAN WING AND BROTHER TO LEAVE TONIGHT FOR ROSS CITY, ANTARCTICA", + "text": "That's what the headlines say. On the screen, Day waves at the people gathered around his apartment as he and Eden are escorted to a jeep by a city patrol. I should call him Daniel, like the screen does. Perhaps he truly is just Daniel now, with no need for an alias anymore. I look on as he lets his brother get into the vehicle, and then follows, lost completely from view. It's so strange, I think to myself as my hand moves absently across Ollie's fur. Not long ago, the city patrols would have arrested him on sight. Now, he's leaving the Republic as their champion, to be celebrated and remembered for a lifetime.\n\nI turn the monitor off, then sit in the quiet darkness of my apartment, savoring the silence. Outside on the streets, people are still chanting his name. They chant it deep into the night.\n\nWhen the commotion finally dies down, I get up from my couch. I pull on my boots and a coat, then wrap a thin scarf around my neck and head out into the streets. My hair blows in the balmy night breeze, wisps catching now and then on my lashes. For a while I wander the quiet roads on my own. I'm not sure where I'm going. Maybe I'm trying to find my way back to Day. But that's illogical. He's already gone, and his absence leaves a hollow, aching pain in my chest. My eyes water from the wind.\n\nI walk for an hour before I finally take a short train ride to Lake sector. There, I stroll along the edge of the water, admiring the lights of downtown as well as the now-unused, unlit Trial stadium, a haunting reminder of events long gone. Giant water wheels churn in the lake, the rhythm of their movement settling into a comforting background symphony. I don't know where I'm going. All I know is that, in this moment, Lake sector seems more like home to me than Ruby does. Here, I'm not so alone. On these streets, I can still feel the beating of Day's heart.\n\nI begin to retrace my old steps, past the same lakeside buildings and the same crumbling homes, the steps I'd taken when I was a completely different person, full of hate and confusion, loss and ignorance. It's an odd feeling to wander these same streets as the person I am now. At once familiar and strange.\n\nAn hour later, I pause alone before a nondescript alleyway that branches off an empty street. At the end of this alley, an abandoned high-rise towers twelve stories up, each of its windows boarded up and its first floor just the way I remember it, with missing windows and broken glass on the floor. I step into the shadows of the building, remembering. This is where Day had first reached his hand out to me in the midst of smoke and dust and saved me so long ago, before we even discovered who the other was; this was the start of the few precious nights when we simply knew each other as a boy on the streets and a girl who needed help.\n\nThe memory comes into sharp focus.\n\nThere's a voice telling me to get up. When I look to my side, I see a boy holding out his hand to me. He has bright blue eyes, dirt on his face, and a beat-up old cap on, and at this moment, I think he might be the most beautiful boy I've ever seen.\n\nMy wandering has led me to the beginning of our journey together. I suppose it's only fitting for me to be here at that journey's end.\n\nI stand in the darkness for a long time, letting myself sink into the memories we once shared. The silence wraps me in comforting arms. One of my hands reaches over to my side and finds the old scar from where Kaede had wounded me. So many memories, so much joy and sadness.\n\nTears stream down my face. I wonder what Day is thinking at this moment while on his way to a foreign land, and whether or not some small part of him, even if it is buried deep, holds slivers of me, pieces of what we once had.\n\nThe longer I stand here, the lighter the burden on my heart feels. Day will move on and live his life. So will I. We will be okay. Someday, perhaps in the far and distant future, we'll find each other again. Until then, I will remember him. I reach out to touch one of the walls, imagining that I can feel his life and warmth through it, and I look around again, up toward the rooftops and then all the way to the night sky where a few faint stars can be seen, and there I think I really can see him. I can feel his presence here in every stone he has touched, every person he has lifted up, every street and alley and city that he has changed in the few years of his life, because he is the Republic, he is our light, and I love you, I love you, until the day we meet again I will hold you in my heart and protect you there, grieving what we never had, cherishing what we did. I wish you were here.\n\nI love you, always." + }, + { + "title": "LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA", + "text": "[ REPUBLIC OF AMERICA ]\n\n[ TEN YEARS LATER ]\n\n1836 HOURS, JULY 11.\n\nBATALLA SECTOR, LOS ANGELES.\n\n78\u00b0 F.\n\nTODAY IS MY TWENTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY.\n\nI celebrate most of my birthdays without too much trouble. On my eighteenth, I joined Anden, a couple of Senators, Pascao and Tess, and several former Drake classmates for a low-key dinner at a rooftop lounge in Ruby sector. My nineteenth happened on a boat in New York City, the Colonies' rebuilt version of an old drowned city whose outskirts now slope gently into the Atlantic Ocean. I'd been invited to a party thrown for several international delegates from Africa, Canada, and Mexico. I spent my twentieth comfortably alone, tucked into bed with Ollie snoring on my lap, watching a brief newscast about how Day's brother Eden had graduated early from his academy in Antarctica, trying to catch a glimpse of how Day looked as a twenty-year-old, taking in the news that he himself had been recruited by Antarctica's intelligence agency. My twenty-first birthday was an elaborate affair in Vegas, where Anden invited me to a summer festival and then ended up kissing me in my hotel room. Twenty-second: the first birthday I celebrated with Anden as my official boyfriend. Twenty-third: spent at an induction ceremony that placed me as the commander of all squadrons in California, the youngest lead commander in Republic history. Twenty-fourth: a birthday spent without Ollie. Twenty-fifth: dinner and dancing with Anden on board the RS Constellation. Twenty-sixth: spent with Pascao and Tess as I told them about being freshly broken up from Anden, how the young Elector and I came to a mutual agreement that I simply couldn't love him the way he wished I would.\n\nSome of these years were spent in joy, others in sadness\u2014but the saddest events were always tolerable. Far worse things have happened, and nothing tragic during these later years could compare with the events from my teenage years. But today is different. I've been dreading this particular birthday for years, because it takes me back to some of the events from my past that I've tried so hard to keep buried.\n\nI spend most of the day in a fairly quiet mood. I rise early, follow my usual warm-up routines at the track, and then head to Batalla sector to organize my captains for their various city operations. Today I'm leading two of my best patrols to escort Anden during a meeting with Colonies' delegates. We may not share the same apartment anymore, but that doesn't change how fiercely I watch over his safety. He will always be my Elector, and I intend to keep it that way. Today, he and the Colonies are deep in the middle of discussions about the smooth immigration status along our border, where the United Cities have turned into flourishing areas with both Colonies and Republic civilians. What was once a hard dividing line between us now looks like a gradient. I look on from the sidelines as Anden shakes hands with the delegates and poses for photos. I'm proud of what he's done. Slow steps, but steps nonetheless. Metias would've been happy to see it. So would Day.\n\nWhen late afternoon comes, I finally leave Batalla Hall and head to a smooth, ivory-white building at the east end of Batalla Square. There, I show my ID at the entrance and make my way up to the building's twelfth floor. I trace familiar steps down the hall, my boots echoing against the marble floors, until I stop in front of a four-square-inch tombstone marker with the name CAPTAIN METIAS IPARIS embedded in its crystal-clear surface.\n\nI stand there for a while, then sit cross-legged before it and bow my head. \"Hi, Metias,\" I say in a soft voice. \"Today's my birthday. Do you know how old I am now?\"\n\nI close my eyes, and through the silence surrounding me I think I can sense a ghostly hand on my shoulder, my brother's gentle presence that I'm able to feel every now and then, in these quiet moments. I imagine him smiling down at me, his expression relaxed and free.\n\n\"I'm twenty-seven today,\" I continue in a whisper. My voice catches for a moment. \"We're the same age now.\"\n\nFor the first time in my life, I am no longer his little sister. Next year I will step across the line and he will still be in the same place. From now on, I will be older than he ever was.\n\nI try to move on to other thoughts, so I tell my brother's ghost about my year, my struggles and successes in commanding my own patrols, my hectic workweeks. I tell him, as I always do, that I miss him. And as always, I can hear the whisper of his ghost against my ear, his gentle reply that he misses me too. That he's looking out for me, from wherever he is.\n\nAn hour later, when the sun has finally set and the light streaming in from the windows fades away, I rise from my position and slowly make my way out of the building. I listen to some missed messages on my earpiece. Tess should be leaving her hospital shift soon, most likely armed with a slew of new stories about her patients. In the first years after Day left, the two of them stayed in close contact, and Tess would keep me constantly updated about how he was doing. Things like Eden's improving eyesight. Day's new job. Antarctican games. But as the years went on, their chatter grew less frequent, Tess grew up and into her own life, and gradually, their conversations dwindled to brief annual greetings. Sometimes none at all.\n\nI'd be lying if I said I didn't miss her stories about Day. But still, I find myself looking forward to some dinner chatter with her and Pascao, who should be heading over from Drake University, probably eager to share his latest adventures in training cadets. I smile as I think about what they might say. My heart feels lighter now, a little freer after my conversation with my brother. My thoughts wander briefly to Day. I wonder where he is, who he's with, whether he's happy.\n\nI really, sincerely, deeply hope that he is.\n\nThe sector isn't busy tonight (we haven't needed as many street police in the last few years), and aside from a few soldiers here and there, I'm alone. Most of the streetlights haven't turned on yet, and in the gathering darkness I can see a handful of stars flickering overhead. The glow from JumboTrons casts a kaleidoscope of colors across the gray pavement of Batalla sector, and I catch myself walking deliberately underneath them, holding a hand out to study the colors that dance across my skin. I watch snippets of news on the screens with mild disinterest while skimming through my missed messages. The epaulettes on my shoulders clink softly.\n\nThen I pause on a message Tess had left me earlier in the afternoon. Her voice fills my ears, full of warmth and playfulness.\n\n\"Hey. Check the news.\"\n\nThat's all she says. I frown, then laugh a little at Tess's game. What's going on in the news? My eyes return to the screens, this time with more curiosity. None of it catches my eye. I keep searching, looking for what Tess might have been talking about. Still nothing. Then... one small, nondescript headline, so brief that I must have been skipping over it all day. I blink, as if I might have misunderstood it, and read it again before it cycles out." + }, + { + "title": "EDEN BATAAR WING IN LOS ANGELES TO INTERVIEW FOR BATALLA ENGINEERING POSITION", + "text": "Eden? A ripple glides across the silence that has stilled me all day. I read the headline over and over again before I finally convince myself that they are indeed talking about Day's younger brother. Eden is here to interview for a potential job.\n\nHe and Day are in town.\n\nI look around the streets instinctively. They're here, walking the same streets. He's here. I shake my head at the little adolescent girl who has suddenly woken up in my heart. Even after all this time, I hope. Calm down, June. But still, my heart sits in my throat. Tess's message echoes in my mind. I return to walking down the street. Maybe I can find out where they're staying, just get a glimpse of how he's doing after all this time. I decide to call Tess back once I've reached the train station.\n\nFifteen minutes later, I'm at the outskirts of Batalla sector; the train station leading to Ruby appears around the corner. The darkness has lengthened enough for the streetlights to turn on, and a few soldiers are heading down the opposite sidewalk; aside from them, I'm the only one on this block.\n\nBut when I reach a slight curve in the street, I see two other people headed in my direction. I stop in my tracks. Then I frown and peer closer at the street before me. I'm still not sure of what I'm seeing.\n\nA pair of young men. Details flit automatically through my mind, so familiar now that I hardly think twice about them. Both are tall and lean, with pale blond hair that stands out in the dimly lit night. Instantly I know that they must be related, with their similar features and easy gaits. The one on the left wears glasses and is talking animatedly, brushing golden curls out of his eyes as he goes, his hands painting some sort of diagram in front of him. He keeps rolling his sleeves back up to his elbows, and his collar shirt is loose and rumpled. A carefree smile lights up his face.\n\nThe young man on the right seems more reserved, listening patiently to his curly-haired companion while he keeps his hands tucked casually in his pockets. A small grin touches the corners of his lips. His hair is different from what I remember, now short and endearingly unruly, and as he walks he occasionally runs a hand through it, leaving it even more wayward. His eyes are as blue as ever. Even though he's older now, with the face of a young man instead of the teenager I'd known so well, he still shows hints of that old fire whenever he laughs at his brother's words, moments of startling brightness and life.\n\nMy heart begins to beat, cutting through the heaviness that weighs on my chest. Day and Eden.\n\nI keep my head down as they draw closer. But from the corner of my vision, I see Eden notice me first. He pauses for a second in the middle of his sentence, and a quick smile appears on his face. His eyes flicker to his brother.\n\nDay casts me a look.\n\nThe intensity of it catches me off guard\u2014I haven't been subjected to his gaze in so long that suddenly I can't catch my breath. I straighten and quicken my pace. I need to get out of here. Otherwise, I'm not sure whether I can keep my emotions from spilling onto my face.\n\nWe pass each other without a word. My lungs feel like they might burst, and I take a few quick breaths to steady myself. I close my eyes. All I can hear is the rush of blood in my ears, the steady thumping of my heart. Gradually I hear the sound of their footsteps fade behind me. A sinking feeling slowly settles. I swallow hard, forcing a flood of memories out of my mind.\n\nI'm heading toward the train station. I'm going home. I'm not going to look back.\n\nI can't.\n\nThen... I hear footsteps behind me again. Hurried boots against pavement. I pause, steel myself, and look over my shoulder.\n\nIt's Day. He catches up to me. Some distance behind him, Eden waits with his hands in his pockets. Day stares into my eyes with a soft, puzzled expression\u2014it sends an electric shiver down my spine. \"Excuse me,\" he says. Oh, that voice. Deeper, gentler than I remember, without the rawness of childhood and with the new elegance of an adult. \"Have we met before?\"\n\nFor a moment, I'm at a loss for words. What do I say? I've spent so many years convincing myself that we no longer know each other. \"No,\" I whisper. \"Sorry.\" In my mind, I beg myself to tell him otherwise.\n\nDay frowns, confused for a moment. He runs his hand through his hair. In that gesture, I catch a glimpse of something shiny on his finger. It's a ring made out of wires. Of paper clips. A breath escapes me in shock.\n\nHe is still wearing the paper clip ring I'd once given him.\n\n\"Oh,\" he finally replies. \"I'm sorry to bother you, then. I just... You look really familiar. Are you sure we don't know each other from somewhere?\"\n\nI search his eyes in silence. I can't say anything. There is a secret emotion emerging on his face now, somewhere between strangeness and familiarity, something that tells me he's struggling to place me, to find where I belong. My heart protests, reaching out for him to discover it. Still, no words come out.\n\nDay searches my face with his soft gaze. Then he shakes his head. \"I have known you,\" he murmurs. \"A long time ago. I don't know where, but I think I know why.\"\n\n\"Why, then?\" I ask gently.\n\nHe's quiet for a moment. Then he takes a step closer, close enough for me to see that tiny ripple of imperfection in his left eye. He laughs a little, pink creeping onto his cheeks. \"I'm sorry. This is going to sound so strange.\" I feel like I'm lost in a haze. Like this is a dream I don't dare wake from. \"I...,\" he begins, as if looking for the right words. \"I've been searching a long time for something I think I lost.\"\n\nSomething he lost. The words bring a lump to my throat, a sudden surge of wild hope. \"It's not strange at all,\" I hear myself reply.\n\nDay smiles in return. Something sweet and yearning appears in his eyes. \"I felt like I found something when I saw you back there. Are you sure... do you know me? Do I know you?\"\n\nI don't know what to say. The part of me that had once decided to step out of his life tells me to do it again, to protect him from this knowledge that had hurt him so long ago. Ten years... has it really been that long? The other part of me, the girl who had first met him on the streets, urges me to tell him the truth. Finally, when I do manage to open my mouth, I say, \"I have to go meet up with some friends.\"\n\n\"Oh. Sorry.\" Day clears his throat, unsure of himself. \"I do too, actually. An old friend down in Ruby.\"\n\nAn old friend down in Ruby. My eyes widen. Suddenly I know why Tess sounded so mischievous on her message, why she told me to watch the news tonight. \"Is your friend's name Tess?\" I ask hesitantly.\n\nIt's Day's turn to look surprised. He gives me an intrigued, puzzled smile. \"You know her.\"\n\nWhat am I doing? What's happening? This really is all a dream, and I'm terrified to wake up from it. I've had this dream too many times. I don't want it taken away again. \"Yes,\" I murmur. \"I'm having dinner with her tonight.\"\n\nWe stare at each other in silence. Day's face is serious now, and his gaze is so intense that I can feel warmth running through every inch of my body. We stand together like this for a long, long moment, and for once, I have no idea how much time has passed. \"I do remember,\" he finally says. I search his eyes for that same aching sadness, the torment and anguish that had always been there whenever we were together. But I can no longer see it. Instead, I find something else... I see a healed wound, a permanent scar that has nevertheless closed, something from a chapter of his life that he has finally, after all these years, made peace with. I see... Can it be possible? Can this be true?\n\nI see pieces of memories in his eyes. Pieces of us. They are broken, and scattered, but they are there, gradually coming together again at the sight of me. They are there.\n\n\"It's you,\" he whispers. There is wonder in his voice.\n\n\"Is it?\" I whisper back, my voice trembling with all the emotions I've kept hidden for so long.\n\nDay is so close, and his eyes are so bright. \"I hope,\" he replies softly, \"to get to know you again. If you are open to it. There is a fog around you that I would like to clear away.\"\n\nHis scars will never fade. I am certain of that much. But perhaps... perhaps... with time, with age, we can be friends again. We can heal. Perhaps we can return to that same place we once stood, when we were both young and innocent. Perhaps we really can meet like other people do, on some street one balmy evening, where we each catch the other's eye and stop to introduce ourselves. Echoes of Day's old wish come back to me now, emerging from the mist of our early days.\n\nPerhaps there is such a thing as fate.\n\nStill I wait, too unsure of myself to answer. I cannot take the first step. I shouldn't. That step belongs to him.\n\nFor a moment, I think it won't happen.\n\nThen Day reaches out and touches my hand with his. He encloses it in a handshake. And just like that, I am linked with him again, I feel the pulse of our bond and history and love through our hands, like a wave of magic, the return of a long-lost friend. Of something meant to be. The feeling brings tears to my eyes. Perhaps we can take a step forward together.\n\n\"Hi,\" he says. \"I'm Daniel.\"\n\n\"Hi,\" I reply. \"I'm June.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Sung in Blood", + "author": "Glen Cook", + "genres": [ + "fantasy", + "steampunk" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Death stalked the night. It haunted the shadowed alleys of Shasesserre.\n\nThose it passed near hurried away, driven by the knives of fear.\n\nDeath wore the guise of a squat, gnarly man in a vile yellow mask, the mask of a shantor, a carrier of the weeping sickness.\n\nDeath was a liar, a wearer of false faces.\n\nThe gnarly man zigzagged the darkest ways, hurrying toward the City's heart\u2014the Plaza of Jehrke Victorious. Across his back he carried a rag-wrapped bundle. He reached the edge of the great square. Beyond, the Rock and its crown, Citadel Nibroc, reared their humped and spiky silhouettes against the stars.\n\nIt was a rare and cloud-clear night there at the crossroads 'twixt land and sea.\n\nBetween plaza's edge and Citadel stood a five-hundred-foot temporary needle of timbers, kept upright by scores of guylines. The masked man paused to see if he was observed, then ran to its foot. He swarmed upward with the tireless energy of a machine. When he reached the crowning platform, from which rope divers would plunge during tomorrow's celebrations, he was barely panting.\n\nThe gnarly man shed his burden. For a moment he stared at the nearest spire of the Citadel, then began ripping rags off his bundle. Starlight glinted off steel and polished wood. He began assembling some mysterious engine.\n\nA moist breeze off the Golden Crescent lifted his yellow mask. It betrayed an evil, gap-toothed murderer's grin.\n\nJehrke entered his laboratory almost furtively. His lamp illuminated a face gaunt with worry, with fear.\n\nThe Protector afraid? Impossible. For three centuries his wizardry had nurtured and shielded Shasesserre in a world that hungered to rape its wealth and plunder its power. He had brushed aside a thousand perils. He had survived a thousand threats. His might and skill were legend.\n\n\"It's him! But how does he come, that I do not smell him in every shadow?\" His web of sorcery lay everywhere upon the City. No magician great or feeble, white or dark, could evade his notice. \"The breath of him stinks. And what better time to strike?\"\n\nJehrke moved about, lighting lamps. They revealed a laboratory that would have amazed his most advanced colleagues. \"Through what dark crack does he design to thrust his wickedness?\"\n\nShasesserre remained Queen of the Orient, Crossroad of the World, because for three centuries no shadow had leaked past Jehrke's vigilance. There was a saying: \"Good or bad, Kings and Queens come and go. Jehrke is forever.\"\n\nIt was a time of a good King, and the Protector, and all at the heart of the world prospered.\n\nBut wolves howled beyond the border, dark and jealous. Their master kept them whipped to a frenzy.\n\nJehrke looked out the window on the night, on the constellation that was the city that never sleeps. The hairs on his neck bristled. A chill made him shudder.\n\nHe turned gaunt face and hollow eyes toward a map of Shasesserre's domains. \"Can there be a rent in the fabric of the web? Has he found some way to steal close unremarked?\" He scowled at the chart. It told him nothing he had not known for centuries.\n\nSuddenly, he whirled to face the window. He knew he felt death's cold breath and clammy touch.\n\nCursing, the gnarly man hammered a wooden frame member with his fist. It snapped into place. He glanced at the newly lighted window. The man passed the light.\n\nThe gnarly fellow cursed again and furiously pumped a crank on the side of his engine. Wood creaked. Steel scraped, a large coil spring wound tighter and tighter.\n\n\"He must die. The Master has condemned him. He must die tonight.\"\n\nFinished cranking, he gazed through a metal tube attached to his device. He adjusted its position. Satisfied, he tripped a wooden lever. The engine creaked as the coil spring drove gears and pulleys and hauled back the string of the massive crossbow that was the machine's heartpiece.\n\nA short arrow, or long quarrel, dropped from a hopper into the channel of the crossbow.\n\nThree hundred yards away the doomed man faced a map, back to the window, centered within its rectangle. The gnarly man tripped another lever and dove for the ladder down. Behind him the death engine thunked and began to rewind.\n\nA terrible cry ripped the fabric of the night. It shook the foundations of the Rock. A bleak and horrible wind bowled through the Plaza of Jehrke Victorious. The gnarly assassin clung to the ladder four hundred eighty feet above cobblestones and shrieked entreaties to heathen gods.\n\nThe wind departed as suddenly as it came. The killer resumed his scramble toward the ground.\n\nAbove, the death machine creaked and thunked methodically.\n\nThe first bolt shattered the window and hit Jehrke an inch above the heart. It flung him back against the map. Nine of its eighteen inches buried themselves in the wall.\n\nDirect physical assault! Never had he considered the chance of an attack so unsubtle.\n\nAgony tore his flesh. Almost, his control slipped as he screamed a death-curse that sent his web into insane paroxysms. He gestured with his left hand. Pale fire crawled about the laboratory. He gestured with his right. Shadows flew out into the storm, toward the diving tower, only possible point for launching the attack.\n\nThe next bolt arrived. The Protector jerked, then sagged. Soon another missile thumped home. Then another; and another, in regular, deadly rhythm." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "There were five people in the room with the pincushioned Protector. None were ordinary, but the eye tended to a grim-faced fellow in imperial Ride-Master of Cavalry uniform. He was tall, well-muscled, with arcticly cold blue eyes. He paced like a captive panther, restless grace in a cage. He was the last to arrive.\n\n\"We tried to find you as soon as Chaz told us, Rider,\" said a moonfaced imp of a fellow. He was an imp. He tried hard to look human, but yellow fangs lapped his fat lower lips and his eyes were all oily ruby pupil. Puffs of sulphurous smoke occasionally escaped his wide nostrils. \"But you was on patrol, Captain.\"\n\nThe imp's name was Su-Cha. He was the Ride-Master's familiar, kept in this world as one of his several associates.\n\nThe other three present were human men, but odd in their ways.\n\nChaz was a giant barbarian from the far north. In most ways he was faithful to stereotype. He enjoyed busting things up. Near Chaz stood a nut-brown, rail-thin, beetle-faced easterner whose hobby was crafting odd machines. His name was Omar and a lot more, but his friends called him Spud. The third man looked like a derelict, with wild white hair and beard, and clothing little better than rags. He had to be reminded to change. He used the name Greystone. He spent his attention on studying and thinking, not his appearance.\n\n\"Where's Preacher? Where's Soup?\" the man with the frosty eyes asked, about members of the group not present.\n\n\"Looking for you,\" said Su-Cha. \"Unless they got distracted by some floozy.\"\n\nRider\u2014for so he was called by his friends\u2014faced the corpse of the man who had been his father, for the first time squarely. \"He knew it would come. But he didn't expect it this soon, nor this way.\"\n\n\"Three hundred years,\" Chaz intoned. \"Hard to believe, Rider. Even that way he looks too young.\"\n\nThe younger Jehrke's eyes grew colder. \"The torch has been passed, ready or not.\"\n\n\"We're ready, Rider,\" Su-Cha said. \"Let's get at it.\"\n\nRider ignored the imp. \"Chaz. You're sure nobody has gotten in here? That only we and the assassins know?\"\n\n\"I was with him. He just wanted to check something, he said. I waited outside. I started to wonder how come he was taking so long. Then he yelled. When I broke in he was like that.\"\n\nRider went to the window, glared at the tower in the Plaza. Though festivities were not to start for hours, spectators had begun to assemble. \"They came from the diving platform. You went to find Su-Cha. How long were you gone?\"\n\n\"Two minutes.\"\n\n\"Then there was no time for an intruder to destroy any message my father left.\"\n\n\"Message? We would've found one if\u2014\"\n\nRider raised a hand. He cocked his head. \"You hear anything?\" he asked Su-Cha, indicating the door.\n\nThe imp shook his head but glided that way. He was accustomed to Rider's finely tuned senses. The dead wizard had raised his son to stretch every human capacity. At the door the imp vaporized. He reassumed corporeality moments later. \"Nobody. But there may have been someone. The sand you scattered was disturbed.\" Among other attributes Su-Cha had a perfect memory for the most minuscule details.\n\nRider merely nodded. He assembled various items from the laboratory, performed a slight magic. Then he dusted a handful of orange powder upon a blank piece of wall. Chaz gasped. \"Parts of words.\"\n\n\"My father's final message. I've long suspected it was there, awaiting his death to activate it.\" He stepped up to the wall, passed a palm over the message. The powder fluoresced.\n\nSon. Your hour is come. I have prepared you as well as I could. Protect Shasesserre from the wolves without and worms within. Always there will be enemies of tranquility and prosperity. You will be occupied continuously. Their wickedness knows no proportion. In the bathhouse on the Saverne side, in the place I once showed you, you will find the names of those who must be watched.\n\n\"He updated that list frequently,\" Rider said. \"I didn't know he kept it there, though.\"\n\n\u2002Do not waste time mourning me. Shasesserre's enemies will not. They will be moving before you read this.\n\n\u2002Your father\n\nThe elder Jehrke had had difficulty expressing affection even in writing.\n\n\"There it is.\" Rider brushed a palm over the wall again. The message vanished. He went to the window. \"Chaz. You said there was a howl outside?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nRider stared at the Plaza. \"How long will his name remain, now? He was not the sort to eradicate his enemies. There must be a dozen cabals awaiting this chance. One is moving already. We'll have to act fast if we're to grab the reins before word gets out.\"\n\nSome of his companions nodded. Chaz grunted. It was something they had discussed often. Though no traditional dictator, Jehrke had maintained himself as Protector by the terror he instilled in those who would plunder Shasesserre. With the Protector gone, any number of strongmen would attempt to prevent his ideals being perpetuated. Among them could be counted nobles, high officials, churchmen, rich men of trade, even gangsters. Not to mention the Queen City's foreign enemies.\n\n\"Chaos,\" Rider said. \"We look that dragon right in the mouth.\"\n\n\"Surely there will be popular support for the son to continue the work of the father.\"\n\n\"There will be. But ordinary people do not wield the power. The men who would see my father's ideals put aside care not about the popular voice. The voices they hear are power and greed.\"\n\nThe imp, Su-Cha, murmured, \"Then there are those who hearken overmuch to the siren call of revenge.\"\n\nRider acted as though he had not heard. He said, \"We'd better examine that tower. The assassin might have left a clue.\"\n\nThe group piled out of the room. None of the others noticed that Rider delayed a few seconds before joining them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Preacher and Soup were headed for the Rock. \"Somebody found him by now,\" Soup said.\n\n\"Verily.\" Preacher was so called because of his dress, manner of speech, and his incessant efforts to convert his comrades to a baffling dogma endemic to his native Frista. It was doubted even he took himself seriously. He yielded to temptation too easily.\n\nThe two rounded a corner and found themselves face to face with a short, gnarly man who looked remarkably like a bull gorilla. The gnarly man's eyes bugged. He gaped. He whirled and ran.\n\n\"The evil flee where no man pursueth,\" Preacher intoned.\n\n\"You said a mouthful, brother. Want to bet that geek had something to do with croaking Rider's old man?\"\n\n\"Gambling is a snare of the devil,\" Preacher replied. \"No bet. Let's get him.\"\n\n\"I got a better idea. Let's see where he goes. He's heading up Floral. Looked like a foreigner. Maybe he don't know you can cut through Bleek Alley.\"\n\n\"I'll take the alley. You run him.\"\n\n\"Lazy.\" Preacher had that reputation.\n\n\"He's gaining.\"\n\nThat gnarly man could move for having such short legs.\n\n\"The wings of fear carrieth the wicked.\"\n\n\"Stuff it, Preach. Cut out and head him off.\"\n\nPreacher ducked into Bleek Alley, black clothing flying around him. It was a dark, twisting way little more than the span of his arms wide, filled with trash and shadows.\n\nOne clot of shadow coughed up a swarm of gnarly men. \"Ambush!\" Preacher gasped. Footsteps hammered behind him. There was no exit.\n\nPreacher never backed down from a fight. And he was five times tougher than he talked, ten times tougher than he looked. He let rip one great bloody shriek and hurled himself forward.\n\nHis attack astonished them. Long thin arms tipped by fists as hard as rocks hammered them. The gnarly men grunted as the blows fell, got tangled as they tried to reorganize. Preacher produced a sand-filled leather sap and started thumping heads. Two gnarly men went to sleep.\n\nThen the tribe behind arrived. A wave of stubby limbs rolled over Preacher. Someone snatched his sap away and used it. His aim was erratic. Gnarly men suffered more often than Preacher.\n\nThen darkness enveloped Preacher.\n\nFour gnarly men stood over him, panting and rubbing bruises. Their leader snarled, \"Get the wagon. Get him out of here before the other one comes.\" He spoke a language of the far east, little-known in Shasesserre.\n\nAnother man, kneeling over the fallen, said, \"Broken neck here, Emerald.\"\n\nThe leader, Emerald, indistinguishable from the others, cursed the dead man for complicating his life. \"Throw him in the wagon, too.\" He kicked Preacher.\n\nSoup\u2014so called since childhood, for reasons he no longer recalled\u2014became suspicious. His quarry was not trying hard enough to escape. When there was no Preacher waiting, and the gnarly man turned into Bleek Alley, he knew.\n\nSoup trotted back the way he had come.\n\nSoup carried no weapon but the knife he used when eating. He did not approve of bloody-minded violence\u2014 not to mention that Shasesserre had laws banning civilians carrying blades\u2014though he was not shy about mixing it up when the occasion arose. None of Rider's gang were.\n\nHe stopped at a smithy, bought a pick, left its head with the baffled toolmaker.\n\nHe repaired to the mouth of Bleek Alley, listened, heard the distant creak of wagon wheels. Of Preacher there was no sign. \"Trouble for sure,\" he muttered, and stalked into the shadows.\n\nTrouble did not disappoint him. There was a sudden rush of feet. He hoisted his pick handle and used it like a two-handed sword.\n\nIts heavy end tapped skulls. Gnarly men shrieked. Heads cracked like eggshells. Bones broke. Soup let out a wild howl. \"Who ambushed who?\" he laughed, and laid on again.\n\nEmerald saw the way of things early. He fell back, scrambled up onto a rusted metal balcony dangling precariously eight feet above, yelled at his men to flee. As Soup passed below, shouting, \"Stand and take it, you cowards!\" Emerald reached down and whacked the back of his head. Soup's lights went out. Moments later he was bound and in the wagon with Preacher and several dead gnarly men." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Rider went up the tower with a tireless ease matched only by Su-Cha, who levitated from stage to stage. The imp grinned down at Chaz, Spud, and Greystone, offering endless unsolicited advice.\n\nChaz threatened, \"Any more mouth and we'll see how you rope dive without a rope.\" It was an empty threat. Su-Cha would fall only if he wanted.\n\nRider reached the high platform well ahead of his men. Below, people pointed and asked what the Protector's son was doing. He was well-known, which he did not like. It would interfere with his new work.\n\nThe side of the platform facing the Golden Crescent boasted a pair of lithe, springy fifty-foot poles of newly trimmed green wood brought up just that morning. Workmen were attaching long, tough, elastic ropes. Similar poles and ropes were installed at stages all up the tower. Later, Shasesserre's young men would place their ankles in harnesses attached to those ropes and dive into space. The springy poles would absorb their momentum and halt them just short of death. They would dive from ever higher stations, their numbers dwindling as altitude betrayed courage's limit. It would be dark before they reached the top. The remaining divers would jump carrying torches. Rider had won the competition during his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth years.\n\nHe glanced at the workmen, then paid them no mind. They showed more interest in him. He was a remarkable physical specimen, and a reputed genius.\n\nThe death engine stood at the side of the platform facing the Citadel. Rider asked, \"Anyone touched this?\"\n\nHeads shook. One man offered, \"We didn't know what it was for. What is it?\"\n\nRider ignored the question. \"Ingenious.\" He moved around the engine cautiously, never touching it.\n\n\"Geep!\" a workman said.\n\n\"Hello to you, too,\" Su-Cha singsonged.\n\nRider faced his associates. \"Look this thing over when you catch your breath, Spud. See if it's booby-trapped.\"\n\n\"Never again,\" Spud gasped. \"Never again.\" He began studying the machine.\n\n\"You still got to get down,\" Chaz reminded.\n\n\"Let him jump,\" Su-Cha said. \"Maybe he can knit wings before he hits.\"\n\n\"Your sense of humor is juvenile,\" Chaz observed.\n\n\"I'm just a young thing. Barely two thousand.\"\n\n\"No booby traps,\" Spud announced.\n\n\"Do you recognize the workmanship?\"\n\n\"No.\" Spud looked over the edge. He swayed. Rider grabbed his arm.\n\n\"Dang!\" Su-Cha said. \"Thought he'd try it.\"\n\nChaz kicked toward the imp's behind. Su-Cha was absent when his foot arrived. He cackled from a far corner of the platform, perched atop a workman's tool chest.\n\nMumbling, the workmen started leaving.\n\n\"Let's see if my father marked his killer. Su-Cha, do you smell anything?\"\n\nThe imp sniffed around the killing machine. His face puckered into one huge frown. \"It's there. But weak. Be hard to isolate.\" He got down on all fours, snuffled like a hound. He went right to the top of the ladder and over the side, head down.\n\n\"Don't take no demon to figure that,\" Chaz said. \"No murderer was going to fly out of here.\"\n\nGreystone suggested, \"We could offer a reward for witnesses.\" The scholar seldom spoke. When he did, even Rider listened. \"Even at midnight someone might have seen him.\"\n\n\"Hmm. No,\" Rider said. \"Not yet. Likely to raise questions. Maybe if the news gets out. You and Spud might visit neighborhood watering holes. If anybody did see a climber he'll talk about it.\"\n\nSpud complained, \"Come on, Rider. Why can't we go with you? How come Chaz and Su-Cha get in on all the excitement?\"\n\n\"Chaz will miss out, too. He'll be looking for Soup and Preacher. We should have heard from them.\" Rider slowly turned as he spoke, flicked a glance toward the Citadel. \"Ah. I thought so.\"\n\n\"What?\" Chaz demanded.\n\n\"Someone is in the lab. Thought I saw movement a while ago.\"\n\n\"Let's go!\" Chaz whooped, and went over the side. Spud and Greystone followed. Rider examined the death machine again, then seized one of the diving ropes.\n\nHe jumped.\n\nWorkmen yelled. Rider plunged toward the Plaza. The spring in rope and pole absorbed his momentum. He came to a halt six feet from the surface, let go, landed running. His associates were not yet thirty feet down from the tower platform.\n\nHe whipped into the Citadel, climbed stairs at a pace punishing even for his iron muscles, slammed into his father's laboratory.\n\nThe place was a shambles.\n\nHe placed one finger on the wall. It was warm. He nodded, made supple-fingered passes over the floor. Glimmering footprints appeared. Two men. One larger than the other. The larger tracks ran to the window and back. A lookout. The smaller feet went straight to the door, spacing indicating haste. The lookout had witnessed Rider's jump.\n\nRider was rereading his father's message when Chaz, Omar, Greystone, and Su-Cha arrived. \"Catch them, Rider?\" the imp piped.\n\n\"No. They were looking for a last message. And found one.\"\n\n\"Darn. That means trouble.\"\n\n\"For them.\" Rider indicated the wall.\n\nSu-Cha chortled. \"You changed it. Are they going to be mad.\"\n\n\"More than you know. I'll be there to greet them.\"\n\nChaz rubbed his hands together eagerly, drew the huge and entirely illegal sword he carried. He examined its edge.\n\n\"No,\" Rider said. \"I'm going alone. You have your assignments.\"\n\n\"Rider!\"\n\nRider ignored their protests, leaned out the window.\n\n\"What is it?\" The whole laboratory shivered. Glass rattled. Dust danced.\n\n\"Military airship. I should have sensed it sooner. The web is more damaged than I thought. We'll have to wrap this up fast and get to repairing it.\"\n\nNoise rose from the Plaza as the airship passed over. It settled toward the military moorings on the Martial Fields.\n\nIt was a gaudy bombard from the eastern fleet. The side effects of the sorcery that propelled it faded.\n\n\"Off on your errands now,\" Rider said.\n\n\"Suppose we catch the killer?\" Su-Cha asked.\n\n\"Bring him here.\" Rider's voice was cold grey iron. \"There are questions I want to ask.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nChaz was out the door already, humming. He'd thought of an amusing trick to play on Soup and Preacher.\n\nSu-Cha, Spud, and Greystone followed.\n\nRider busied himself in the laboratory, collecting items he concealed about himself. Then he set out on the trail of glowing footprints. He believed he knew where they were headed, but wanted to see what stops they made.\n\nThe footprints materialized a dozen steps ahead of him, faded that far behind. Before long the men making them separated. He elected to follow the smaller prints." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chance led Su-Cha, Spud, and Greystone across Chaz's path. The northerner was holding up a wall with one shoulder while talking to an attractive young woman. His mind was not on business.\n\nSu-Cha said, \"Feast your glims on this, guys,\" and he scrunched his eyes tight shut.\n\nHis body changed. Not much, but enough to provide the appearance of a child about four. Then he charged Chaz, wrapped his arms around the barbarian's legs. \"Daddy. Daddy. Mommy says you have to come right home.\"\n\nChaz's jaw dropped. The woman's brow wrinkled. The barbarian saw Spud and Greystone grinning. He roared, \"Su-Cha! I'll flay you and use your damned spook hide...\"\n\n\"Daddy? Are you mad?\"\n\nChaz kicked the imp into traffic, where he narrowly missed being trampled.\n\nThe young woman gave him bloody hell. He tried to explain. She did not believe a word he said. Imps!\n\nChaz was angry. He did not observe his surroundings in the alert way survival in the north demanded. He overlooked the gnarly men entirely, though they stood out even among the ten thousand outrageous foreigners haunting that Shasesserren street.\n\nHe worked his way from place to place, asking after Soup and Preacher. None of their acquaintances had seen them. He grew concerned. They should not have been so hard to find.\n\nHe made the acquaintance of the gnarly men as he cut through a delivery way between major streets. Those men seemed to prefer alleyways.\n\nA rush of feet from behind.\n\nChaz's reactions were not impaired. Out came the illegal but seldom challenged sword. A gnarly man howled out his life as a cross stroke opened his belly. Another shrieked and clutched a savaged bicep. The mob halted, danced back out of reach.\n\nEmerald cursed his men for idiots, cursed himself for being saddled with them, cursed the orders that brought him to Shasesserre. He redeployed. Two men with gladiatorial-style nets moved to the fore.\n\nChaz was not given to suicidal heroics. He retreated.\n\nThe net men knew their stuff. They feinted, pressed, feinted, tried to tangle Chaz's legs and blade. Their comrades threw brickbats. One especially savage throw glanced off Chaz's shin and succeeded in distracting him.\n\nNet in high, brushed aside. But the net low tangled his right ankle. Down he went. The pack leaped forward. Chaz bellowed and roared, punched, kicked, and bit. He littered that alley with howling villains. But all the while Emerald danced in and out, whapping his hard northern head with the captured sap.\n\nChaz gave up to the darkness.\n\nSoup wakened to a world throbbing and fogged. At one moment it seemed he was in a darkened coliseum, its walls so distant they were invisible, the lamps starry pinpricks miles away. The next moment it all rushed in. He was near crushed by gaudy eastern furnishings impossible to enumerate. His limited attention focused on a single detail, a slim, golden-skinned woman of incredible beauty, who paced before a wallhanging embroidered with eastern fantasies.\n\nShe was a little thing, and young, but no child. She moved with an animal litheness that set Soup's brain more aspin.\n\nShe said something softly.\n\nA muffled male voice replied. Soup could not distinguish individual words. But it seemed a voice he should know.\n\nThe woman glanced at the prisoners. She had the most remarkable eyes Soup had ever seen. Big, green, they were eyes to swallow a man's soul. She was a trap to break a heart of stone!\n\nShe faced left. \"There is no point complaining. Emerald is not here. And no change in plan can be made before the Master arrives.\"\n\nThe male voice became more strident but no more clear. Soup wished for a glimpse of the speaker.\n\nThe woman replied, \"Your desires are of consequence only insofar as they complement those of the Master.\"\n\nMore male talk, angry. Threatening.\n\nThe woman smiled. She pointed. \"Do you wish to join them? Or to do the Master's bidding?\"\n\nThe complaints subsided.\n\nAll this while Soup's world shrank and swelled and rolled on its belly and back. Now darkness returned.\n\nLater the veil parted again. A large, fluffy cat was nosing around his face. It would not go away.\n\nA different male voice grumbled something in an eastern tongue. Many feet tramped. Men grunted. A body flopped down nearby. A gnarly man bent over it, forced something small and brown between slack lips.\n\nChaz!\n\nAnother of the group taken. What was going on?\n\nThe woman said, \"Emerald, our friend doesn't like the way we're doing this. We're not moving fast enough to suit him.\"\n\nThe gnarly man spat. \"I came here with twelve men, as you asked, friend. I have five dead and two with broken bones already. You were not honest with us. I think, when the Master arrives, you will answer for that.\"\n\nThe unknown man responded with fear in his muffled voice.\n\nThe woman said, \"Your plan is sound. It will be pursued. We will isolate the Protector's son from his friends, then handle him. Then we will eliminate others who would resist us. That will not be difficult once the Master arrives.\"\n\nThe Master. The Master, Soup thought. Who is that?\n\nEmerald said, \"I suggest you obtain local helpers. I cannot keep losing men.\"\n\nThere was a stir. Someone came to where Soup, Preacher, and Chaz lay. He wore a heavy papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 mask pierced by two narrow eyeslits. The man in the mask laughed. \"For this I will hire an army. I must have them all.\"\n\nSoup again thought he sensed something familiar.\n\n\"Go recruit, then,\" Emerald said.\n\nThe man in the mask went away.\n\nEmerald and the golden-skinned woman murmured to one another. Soup's universe remained unstable. And now his head hurt terribly. Preacher, he noted, showed signs of recovering, too. Chaz, though, was out for the count.\n\nThen he went down into the darkness again.\n\nHe wakened to: \"The Master comes!\" The golden-skinned woman's breath caught in her throat. A fetching effect, he thought... The dizzies caught and spun him around.\n\nHe was not sure what he saw next was not part of a drug dream. A hideous little man no bigger than Su-Cha, with a large normal head, stood peering down at him. His coloring and dress were oriental. His hands were folded before him. His fingers were encased in golden shields meant to protect nails grown many inches long.\n\nThe dwarf radiated malevolence.\n\nThe Master.\n\nThe golden-skinned woman lay face down behind him, abasing herself. Of Emerald there was no sign.\n\nEmerald was stalking the remainder of Rider's men.\n\nHis manpower depleted, he had opted for cunning. He posted his men, then sought out Spud, Greystone, and Su-Cha. Speaking Shasesserren brokenly, bowing, he blocked their path. \"Is told you fella seek holy joe fella Pleacher, so? Is bounty find same?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Spud said. \"Depends.\"\n\n\"You come see belong you fella fliend Pleacher, longside tlouble.\" Emerald hurried away.\n\nThe three followed. \"A remarkable physical specimen,\" Greystone said, scholarly curiosity piqued.\n\nSpud grumbled, \"There's an accent behind that pidgin that I know from somewhere. Can't get my hooks on it.\"\n\nGrinning, prancing ahead, back to the gnarly man, Su-Cha said, \"We've found our man. This is the guy Rider's old man marked.\"\n\nSpud and Greystone halted. \"You mean?...\"\n\n\"Yes indeed.\" Su-Cha's little round face went hard.\n\n\"You fella come?\"\n\n\"By all means,\" Greystone replied. \"By all means.\"\n\n\"Ambush of some kind,\" Spud decided.\n\n\"Somebody's going to ambush somebody,\" Su-Cha chirped.\n\nBut they were not prepared when it happened, as, passing a tavern, they were set upon by five gnarly men with nets and ropes. It was no fight at all. Greystone and Spud were netted, tied, and dragged into an alley almost before bystanders were aware something was happening.\n\nSu-Cha was another matter. The gnarly men could not keep a net on a creature able to discorporate and reintegrate elsewhere. But they produced fetishes of holly and garlic and a rope of silver. They surrounded him with the rope. He could not escape their closing circle. The holly and garlic prevented him getting close enough to strike back.\n\nGrinning, Emerald tossed a net into which silver thread had been plaited.\n\nThe last of Rider's associates was caught.\n\n\"Better this time,\" Emerald said. \"Let's deliver them. Then we try the tough one.\"\n\n\"These guys were tough enough,\" one man protested.\n\n\"We'll have help after this. Shut up and come on. People are getting nosey.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Rider followed the glowing footprints to a grand mansion on the Balajka Hill, Shasesserre's wealthiest section. He faced a decision. The tracks went in, but then came out again. Continue following them? Or investigate the house?\n\nThat was supposed to be empty.\n\nJehrke had known all Shasesserre's leading men, so his son knew them, too. This mansion belonged to one Vlazos, currently posted to the western army for his year in five of public service.\n\nSomeone had usurped the place in his absence.\n\nRider decided he would come back later. He continued tracking the man who had had his father murdered.\n\nHe was two hundred yards away when a rushing coach nearly overran him. He rose angrily. Such drivers had no place in Shasesserre on the overcrowded streets. The coach turned in through the gate to the Vlazos mansion.\n\nRider intuited the arrival of an important conspirator. Perhaps one more important than the man he tracked. He turned back.\n\nThe Vlazos grounds were surrounded by a fifteen-foot wall. Rider made sure no one was in sight, swarmed up using cracks between stones for foot-and handholds. He peeped over the top, saw nothing remarkable, hoisted himself, dropped lightly to the manicured turf inside. He reached the side of the house only moments after the front door closed behind the newcomer.\n\nThe carriage stood untended. Rider sent his wizard-trained senses to explore. He could find no guard behind the door. The newcomer and his driver were moving deeper into the house, one toward the kitchens, the other toward where several lifesparks glimmered.\n\nHe recognized the sparks of Preacher, Chaz, Soup.\n\nThe conclusion was unavoidable. His father's enemies had made them prisoners.\n\nRider went through the door as silently as death. He followed the man who had come in the coach. Already his driver was in the kitchens, drinking. Soon Rider heard a piping voice say something unintelligible.\n\nA dozen steps more, along a shadowed hallway. He noted that oriental furnishings had replaced those Vlazos preferred. Ahead, a strong smell of rare eastern incense. A tapestry hung across a large doorway. He heard movement beyond it.\n\nRider peeped through the narrowest of gaps on one side. He saw his three men immediately, bound and unconscious. Nearer him, an attractive oriental woman abased herself upon the floor. She chattered in a melodic tongue.\n\nRider spoke half a hundred languages, but this one evaded him.\n\nThe newcomer spoke one curt syllable. Rider nearly jumped. The man was right in front of him. Was he invisible? His gaze dropped. A dwarf!\n\nHe hearkened back to tales his father had told, in his uncertain, fragmentary fashion. There were many old enemies. One was an especially nasty dwarf. What was that name? Yes. Kralj Odehnal.\n\nKralj Odehnal, renowned sorcerer and dreaded torturer. One of the villains long stifled by the Protector. But Odehnal was a loner.\n\nThe dwarf and young woman chattered at one another. The fate of Rider's men was being determined. He prepared to surprise their captors.\n\nBut, it seemed, they were to be spared a while. He supposed as potential leverage. He decided to await developments. There was more afoot than a murder plot.\n\nTime passed. Then men trooped in through another entrance. They carried Spud, Greystone, and Su-Cha.\n\nSu-Cha! Even the imp.\n\nHis father's enemies were wasting no time bringing the shadow to Shasesserre.\n\nIt was time to move. To break the conspiracy's back before it became aware it had been found out.\n\nRider took an ebony figurine from a hidden pocket, held it against his forehead, over the point called the third eye. After a moment of concentration, he spat on it.\n\nBeyond the tapestry the dwarf and gnarly men gabbled at one another in the unfamiliar language. Rider ripped the hanging aside, tossed the figurine, shouted, \"Pyznar, you live!\"\n\nA shadow exploded into a dark, tusked demon. Its fangy mouth opened in a silent roar. Men squealed and shrieked. The sudden monster jumped on one of Emerald's gang. The dwarf cursed. The woman fled instantly, without thought or hesitation.\n\nThe shadow turned on a second victim as Rider stepped past the tapestry, his hands afire with fresh sorcery. Odehnal looked at him, snarled, \"You!\"\n\n\"Me. And the end of your game, Kralj.\" The shadow turned to a third gnarly man. Rider slapped his hands together, thrust them toward the dwarf. The combined fires flared violently, blindingly.\n\nOdehnal shrieked, terrified, knowing he could muster no spell in time to save himself.\n\nA gnarly man staggered into the space between Rider and Odehnal, shoved there by Emerald. The chief of the gnarly men snagged the dwarf and ran.\n\nRider's spell hit Emerald's sacrifice. Golden fires gnawed the man. He screamed. Then went silent when the shadow turned upon him.\n\nFinished there, and with all Emerald's crew, the shadow faced Rider's men. It took Rider a full minute to restore the demon to miniature form. By then he had abandoned hope of catching Odehnal. His task, now, was to get his men out before the dwarf struck back.\n\n\"Good show,\" Su-Cha congratulated, as Rider freed him first. The imp was the only one conscious.\n\n\"Help get these guys untied. We have to get them out. This place will be under attack in a few minutes.\"\n\nSu-Cha moved. He knew Rider wasted no threats. \"Who were those guys?\"\n\n\"The dwarf is Kralj Odehnal. A sorcerer. An old enemy of my father. It can't be coincidence that he turned up as soon as the web began to fray.\"\n\nSoup proved to be conscious. When Rider removed his gag, he croaked, \"The runt's the mastermind, Rider. But there's somebody from the Citadel involved. He came up with the original plan. He got the runt in. Then he took over. They were going to wipe out a lot of people besides us.\"\n\n\"Uhm,\" Rider responded. \"If you can walk, get out. Help Preacher.\" Rider hoisted Spud and Greystone effortlessly, ran to the nearest exit, out onto the lawn, dumped the two men, was back for Chaz in seconds.\n\nThe house had begun to glow when he charged out with the barbarian. The glow grew into a blinding brilliance. The roar of collapsing masonry rose inside the brightness.\n\nRider never looked. He dropped Chaz by Su-Cha. \"When they recover, go to the laboratory. Wait for me there.\" Before Su-Cha could protest he spun and ran to the gate.\n\nThe street showed no sign of Odehnal or his coach.\n\nRider shrugged, took up the trail of glowing footprints once more. Now he ran, a long, distance-devouring lope. Twice the trail led to and from the homes of men high in imperial councils. Rider did not pause. He would get back to those men later.\n\nThen the trail turned the direction he expected.\n\nRider's teeth showed in a grim smile." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Emerald did his bandy-legged best to keep pace with Rider while remaining unnoticed. He failed. He was built for endurance. Of speed he was capable only of short bursts. He turned back, watched the crowd gathering to stare at the wreckage of the Vlazos mansion. In time Rider's gang came out the gate, supporting one another. He trailed them. His heart thumped wildly whenever he reflected on the fact that thirteen men had come to Shasesserre. He was the last one left, and only the Protector himself had been dispatched.\n\nThe Master might be in for as much trouble with the son as he had had with the father. Maybe more. They said the Protector trained his child from birth to assume the role he now faced.\n\nHe had to seize it first, though!\n\nRight to the Citadel. Just as expected. Emerald blended into the holiday crowd in the Plaza. The initial festivities had begun. He pretended interest till he was sure he saw movement behind the window of the Protector's laboratory. Then he went to report to the Master.\n\nRider's men picked up and cleaned up. \"Looks like a whole tribe of northmen camped here a week,\" Preacher grumbled, adding some scriptural quote about the savages bringing the earth low.\n\n\"Why do you always accuse us?\"\n\n\"Because civilized people...\"\n\nSu-Cha, observing from the window, cackled.\n\nChaz glowered his way. \"I haven't forgotten you, devil. Your time is coming. Stewed imp with a garlic garnish. Think about it. Wonder when you're going into the pot.\"\n\nSpud said, \"If you ask me it would be revenge enough just getting him to help here. He wouldn't do his share if...\"\n\n\"Hold it,\" Su-Cha said, in a tone suddenly serious. \"Take a look at this.\" He dropped off the sill, stood looking over with his chin resting on his forearms, childlike.\n\nChaz and Preacher joined him. Cautiously.\n\n\"It's that villain, Emerald,\" Preacher said.\n\nThe festivities were gathering momentum. The Plaza was crowded. Nevertheless, Emerald stood out. He was on the fringe of the mob, watching the Citadel gate.\n\nThe entire band crowded the window now. \"Let's get him,\" Spud said.\n\n\"Rider said stay here,\" Greystone countered. \"The web needs mending. He'll want our help.\"\n\n\"But he'd want us to do something if we saw that guy.\"\n\n\"We should stay put,\" Chaz said, surprising everyone. Usually Chaz was the first to yield to impulse, the most eager to jump into trouble.\n\n\"This mess is big,\" he said defensively. \"We need to get organized to handle it.\"\n\nSu-Cha declared, \"I don't need to be organized to dance on that thug's head. And this time he isn't going to slick me.\" The imp headed for the door. Everyone but Chaz and Greystone followed.\n\nChaz went to the window to watch the gnarly man. Greystone continued picking up. He said, \"Precipitous action often leads to its own reward. The sensible course is to restore the web before undertaking any action. We need its support.\"\n\n\"You figure the news is out yet?\" Chaz glanced at the grisly ornament still pinned to the wall.\n\n\"This cabal would have an interest in maintaining secrecy till they placed themselves in the most favorable position.\"\n\n\"What happens tonight?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Jehrke always hands out the prizes to the rope divers.\"\n\n\"Ah. Yes. So. These enemies of ours must have been confident they could achieve their ends before then.\"\n\n\"Rider will take his father's place, I guess. Oh-oh. There they go.\"\n\nGreystone joined Chaz. They watched their comrades race toward the gnarly man, who spotted them, took off, stubby bowlegs pumping furiously. \"That fellow can surely run.\"\n\n\"For a ways,\" Chaz said. \"Bet he ain't much over a quarter mile.\" Below, Soup suddenly slowed to a trot, though he did not give up pursuit. \"What's Soup up to?\"\n\nSoup had been smitten by a suspicion that Emerald had been too easily spotted. Maybe he was leading them into another ambush. If so, he would get a surprise of his own. Soup would materialize after the trap was sprung.\n\nEmerald began to slow and his pursuers to gain. The looks he cast back seemed genuinely desperate. He whirled around a corner, knobby limbs flailing.\n\nRider's men rounded the corner and drifted to a halt. \"Where'd he go?\" Spud demanded. \"He couldn't disappear into thin air.\"\n\n\"Look around,\" Preacher said.\n\n\"I know. 'Seek and ye shall find.' Su-Cha, do your stuff.\"\n\nThere was no place for the gnarly man to have gone. The street was just a wide alleyway between two doorless walls. It dead-ended in another brick wall.\n\n\"Dig through that trash,\" Soup said. \"Maybe he's under it.\" He had arrived to find his friends baffled.\n\nThe usually loquacious Su-Cha said nothing for several minutes. Then he grunted, snatched up a broken brick, flung it at the alley-spanning wall. It did not rebound. It simply vanished.\n\nSoup howled. \"We've been hornswoggled! The wall is an illusion.\"\n\nHe charged forward\u2014and through. His hair stood up and crackled. When he looked back he saw no evidence of the illusory wall, just his comrades looking baffled.\n\nThere was no sign of Emerald.\n\nThe others joined him. \"What now?\" Spud asked.\n\n\"We still have a trick,\" Su-Cha said. He grinned and tapped his nose.\n\nThe others chuckled. \"Is he going to be surprised.\"\n\nSoup, though, recalled his earlier reservations. \"He may be leading us away from the laboratory.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Spud admitted. \"But Chaz and Greystone are there. And he expected to lose us here. Let's go, imp.\"\n\nThere was a delicate tap at the laboratory door. Chaz and Greystone exchanged looks. Greystone whispered, \"I'll cover,\" and stepped into a contrivance of mirrors from which a man could watch the doorway without being seen. He picked up a light crossbow.\n\nThe tapping was repeated.\n\nChaz pulled the door inward.\n\nHis eyes grew huge. He gasped, \"I think I'm in love. The heavens have opened and shed an angel on my doorstep.\"\n\nThe woman was startled, not just by this remark but by the barbarian's size. Then she glanced over her shoulder fearfully, as if expecting peril to overtake her any moment. \"May I come in?\" she asked breathlessly.\n\n\"A godsend,\" Chaz said. \"I have to be dreaming. Do come in. Do sit down. Just anywhere.\"\n\nThe woman did so, her gaze fixing upon the cadaver of Protector Jehrke. Her mouth opened and closed several times. Nothing came out. Horror flooded her face.\n\n\"More like a devil in disguise,\" Greystone said, stepping out of the mirror contraption. \"This is the witch Soup told us about.\"\n\n\"Mercy,\" Chaz breathed, startled. \"It isn't possible. The gods could not be so cruel as to make something so gorgeous so wicked.\"\n\n\"Horsefeathers,\" Greystone countered. He prided himself on his immunity to the glamor and wiles of the fair sex. \"Bet that Emerald character was supposed to draw us off so she could get in here and unravel what's left of the web.\" The scholar kept his weapon aimed at the woman's heart.\n\nChaz was smitten but not blind. \"Well? What about it, Sweetheart?\"\n\n\"The Master planned that. But not I. I knew you would not all pursue Emerald. Your reputations say you are too wise.\"\n\nGreystone snorted and muttered.\n\nThe woman continued, \"I hoped to be captured.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Greystone demanded.\n\n\"Because that is the only way I will ever escape him.\"\n\nChaz drifted to the window. Below, the festivities were approaching a roar. The rope divers had begun jumping. He saw nothing alarming. He moved to the doorway, checked the hall. Nothing. From a shelf nearby he took an earthen jar, scattered part of its contents outside. Tiny seeds rolled around. He stomped one. It exploded with a loud pop. \"Good enough.\" He closed and locked the door.\n\n\"Tell your story, Sister,\" Greystone said. His crossbow remained unwavering. \"I haven't heard a good fairy tale in years.\"\n\n\"Kralj Odehnal\u2014the sorcerer who had you captured, and would have had you killed had he taken Ride-Master Jehrke into his power...\"\n\n\"We know all that. We want to know about you. Who are you?\"\n\n\"Easy, Greystone,\" Chaz said. \"Would you care for something to drink, sweet lady?\"\n\nThe woman glanced at the remains of the Protector. \"I couldn't.\"\n\n\"Going to have to do something about him,\" Chaz muttered. \"Starting to spook me, hanging there. Like he was watching everything we do.\"\n\n\"Tell your story,\" Greystone snapped.\n\n\"I am Caracen\u00e9, a slave of Kralj Odehnal, who is known to his creatures as the Master. I was given to him as part payment for his joining the scheme to destroy Protector Jehrke and unseat Shasesserre as mistress of the world.\"\n\nShe was no Shasesserren, nor had her like appeared among the City's slaves. At least openly. Such beauty was too rare and precious to be allowed public display. Nor did she dress as, or have the manner of, a slave. Those eyes... She was a slave-taker.\n\nPuzzled, Chaz asked, \"Who gave you to him?\" He found that name Odehnal vaguely familiar. He could not imagine anyone bribing such a monster.\n\nThe woman stared at the cadaver on the wall. \"I cannot say. One greater than he. One from whom none escape.\"\n\n\"Horsefeathers,\" Greystone said again. \"We're being stalled, Chaz. It's time for a truth-casting. I'm no sorcerer, but I can manage that much.\"\n\nThe woman bolted to her feet. \"No! It would kill me! I must go. I was wrong to come here. There is no hope here, either.\" She looked at the dead Protector once more. \"Not even he...\"\n\nChaz moved to comfort her. As he reached out, a loud pop! pop! pop! came from beyond the door.\n\nThe woman gasped, \"He knows I thought to betray him!\"\n\nGreystone jerked his crossbow irritably, indicating that she should retreat into the connecting library. Chaz moved to a peephole that, through a succession of mirrors, would show him who was outside without his having to reveal himself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Rider slowed his pace after he had run three miles. Not that he was exhausted. He'd barely worked up a sweat. He ran ten miles every morning. But the tracks he followed were increasingly fresh. He did not want to overtake his man here, between the piers and yards and warehouses and ways of the Golden Crescent, and the strip of ten thousand markets the great ships served. There were crowds like no other city ever boasted. This was the hub of world trade, where the quarters of the earth came together in a frenzy and babble. Here there was no privacy, ever.\n\nRider's mouth was set in a grim smile. No doubt about it. His father's killer was headed into the trap prepared.\n\nHe stopped to purchase a quart of juice and a meat pasty. There had been no time to eat before. When he estimated time enough had passed, he washed at a public fountain, then strode toward the airship yards.\n\nNone but guards were on duty there, for it was a public holiday. The gatemen knew him, waved him through. He strode between vast construction docks, mooring stays, gas works where Jehrke's apprentices produced the magical air that buoyed the ships of the sky. All this vast industry was his father's doing. His greatest legacy to the City, perhaps, for it would go on even if his peace failed to persevere. The secrets here would be the first plunder sought by Shasesserre's enemies.\n\nThus, Rider had altered his father's message, knowing his murderer would believe the airship yards the likeliest place for the Protector to hide something.\n\nThe nethermost part of the yards occupied a promontory overlooking the Golden Crescent, the miles of waterfront facing the Bridge of the World, that long, narrow, snaking channel connecting the Amor Ocean with the Middle Sea. The ruin of an ancient watchtower stood at the headland's tip. Around it were structures of recent vintage, the Protector's original and now personal shipyard. As Rider approached he saw his father's ships protruding from their cradles like the brightly colored humped backs of whales breaking the surface of a flotsam-strewn sea. Twelve of them, in a variety of shapes and sizes. The family wealth.\n\nThe Jehrke yards were more still than the greater yards around them. Here even the guards were on holiday.\n\nA shadow fell across Rider's path. He looked up at the four-hundred-foot mast which rose beside the ruined watchtower. In his youth, in rare moments when he was free of studies, he had climbed that tower and watched the parti-colored sails scud along the Bridge, outward bound or coming home. So often he had longed to fly away upon those canvas wings, to lands of adventure... There was adventure enough now. And a lifetime's worth to come.\n\nHe entered the vast, long, hollow building where airships were brought out of the weather, making not a sound. He listened. Seconds later there was a pop, like a dry branch breaking, from far down the building. A startled exclamation, then curses, echoed off the empty walls.\n\nRider began walking, making no effort to keep his heels from clicking on the polished stone floor.\n\nThe cursing ceased. It was followed by a rustling, like that of frantic rats in a wall. As Rider neared the doorway beyond which his quarry waited, he heard a sob of frustration.\n\nHe stepped through the doorway into what had been his father's shipyard office.\n\nThe man caught there, one hand inside a desk that refused to let him go, was not surprised to see him. He had a dagger in his left hand.\n\n\"Vlazos!\" Rider said, startled. \"I thought you were with the army in Kleyvorn.\"\n\nVlazos said nothing.\n\nRider pulled up a chair. \"It does come together, though.\"\n\nVlazos hammered the desk with his dagger.\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" Rider said. He stared hard at his captive, his gaze like that of the fabled snake. He made a gesture with his left hand, caught Vlazos' gaze and held it. Vlazos' mouth opened and closed like that of a guppy as he fought a compulsion to betray his confederates. \"Tell me who else is participating in this atrocity.\"\n\nRider took several measured breaths, counting. His anger threatened to overwhelm him. He could not comprehend why a man of Vlazos' status would betray Shasesserre for personal gain.\n\nRider's spell took the inhibitions off the telling of the truth. He used it sparingly, for societies are founded upon mutually shared self-deceptions. But in Vlazos' case the spell opened no floodgate. Had the man acted from idealistic, if misguided, motives, he would have defended himself.\n\nSilence, too, is a telling of truth. Greed and powerlust were the foundation stones of the conspiracy threatening Shasesserre's peace.\n\n\"Where, besides your mansion, has your cabal set up?\" Rider demanded. \"Who belongs?\"\n\nVlazos was under the spell fully now. He began naming names, most of them ones Rider expected. They were men who obstructed the Protector at every turn. \"And Kralj Odehnal? How did he become involved?\"\n\nVlazos' breath caught in his throat. He gobbled, and scratched at his neck. His face puffed and darkened. His eyes grew huge. He was strangling on sorcery.\n\nRider heard someone move in the great space outside. He did not turn, for he was trying to find the end of the spell killing Vlazos, to unravel it before the man suffocated. He could not... Vlazos got out one whimper before life abandoned him.\n\nRider rose. \"Shy key?\" he murmured. \"What would that mean?\"\n\nHe rushed out of the office. Nothing stirred within the cavernous building. But the far door, through which he himself had entered, stood ajar. It leaked a pane of light. He had not left it that way.\n\nRider reached it in a time that would have shamed most athletes. He paused before stepping outside, every sense probing for signs of an ambush.\n\nHe detected only the fading disturbance of the powerful cycle of magicks that propelled airships.\n\n\"Feeble and high-pitched,\" he murmured. \"A small ship driven by someone self-taught.\" He stepped into the glare of day, caught a glimpse of an airship hurrying down the Golden Crescent, flying low.\n\nHe thought about taking one of his father's small ships in pursuit. But none were ready. It would take an hour to charge one with gas. The murderer of his father's murderer was safely away.\n\nHe went back and searched Vlazos. There was nothing of interest on the man except a key of the sort which fit the safe chests at the Imperial Treasury. He pocketed it.\n\nHe found no satisfaction in the fact that his father's killer had himself been slain. Vlazos set the wheel rolling, but now it was Odehnal's toy.\n\nWhere had the dwarf learned the spells to move an airship? How? That complex was a closely guarded secret, taught only to men whom Jehrke trusted absolutely.\n\nRider strolled toward the Citadel. The sun was into its westward plunge. About time he sought an audience with the King. The man needed to know, to prepare for the storm. And Rider hoped for his blessing in his assumption of the Protector's role.\n\nHe decided he'd better get himself a chariot. All this walking and running\u2014even he was subject to cumulative fatigue.\n\nBut first, before anything\u2014even before seeing the King\u2014he had to restore the web. When an enemy could bring a pirate airship within a few hundred yards undetected, the situation was desperate.\n\nJust how tired he had become, and thus unalert, was demonstrated when he reached his father's laboratory. He failed to notice the pop seeds scattered in the hall. His feet stirred a rapid-fire racket.\n\nThe door swung inward. \"Rider!\" Chaz said. \"We've got company.\"\n\nHe saw the golden-skinned woman in the doorway to the library. She saw him for the first time. Her eyes widened.\n\n\"You catch him?\" Greystone asked.\n\n\"Yes. It was Vlazos.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"He died before he could say much.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nRider heard the hollow sound in Greystone's voice. \"No. Not me. His confederates. With a strangulation spell. They fled in an airship.\"\n\nGreystone looked properly astounded.\n\n\"Yes. First order of business now is to restore the web. Where are the others?\"\n\nChaz explained about Emerald.\n\n\"I told them to stay here. Well. I suppose they have to learn the hard way.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Emerald shambled along with his hands in his pockets, grinning and whistling. He had made clowns of those guys again. Too bad he had not had men enough to ambush them. Ten or fifteen guys with crossbows waiting behind the illusory wall. They wouldn't have known what hit them. But he had no men now, because the Master and that Vlazos fool insisted Rider's gang be taken alive. That damned Vlazos better find some local talent.\n\nSomeone stepped into his path. Emerald halted, lifted his gaze... and squawked.\n\nPreacher grinned.\n\nEmerald looked around wildly.\n\nThe other three closed in. Spud was next nearest, about twenty feet away, popping a fist into a palm meaningfully.\n\nThe gnarly man was quick! Preacher just had time for a startled squeak. Then he was in the air, flailing toward Spud. Emerald put on speed. More than a touch of panic drove him. He did not know what to do. There was no provision in the plan for his not being able to shake his pursuers. The wall of illusion should have worked.\n\nIt was a failed plan anyway. Not all Rider's men had left the Citadel.\n\nThe Master would know what to do. But he could not run to the Master. That would lead these men to him.\n\nHe grimaced. Then grinned. He would lead them away from the Master. Wear them down, till the Master became disturbed by his failure to report and investigated.\n\nSoup gasped, \"Are we going to keep this up all day? Or are we going to catch him?\" He stopped at a chandler's shop. The others paused. As long as Su-Cha could sniff Emerald's trail they would not lose him. \"Let's get organized. He isn't going to lead us anywhere. If he gets too tired and scared he might try picking us off. We've got to capture him.\"\n\n\"How you figure on doing that?\" Su-Cha demanded. \"Preacher and Spud already blew it.\"\n\n\"Buy some rope. Rope him like a steer, bind him up, and carry him back to the Citadel.\"\n\nSu-Cha cackled. \"Great. Get it! Reams or bales or bundles or whatever rope comes in. A mile of it! We'll turn him into a human cocoon.\"\n\nThree minutes later they were on the trail again, armed with coils of light line. Fifteen minutes later they had Emerald surrounded.\n\nThe gnarly man saw their intent. He darted this way and that. A wicked knife sprang into his hand. He feinted toward Preacher, rushed Spud.\n\nHands and feet flashed. The knife flickered away. Spud and Emerald rolled over and over, grunting and yelling. Su-Cha pranced around them, trying to slip a noose over Emerald's head. Soup got one on an ankle and pulled.\n\nPreacher looped an arm, took off. Emerald stretched out, cursing and flailing. Spud thumped his head a few times. Soup got another rope on. The four of them began baling the gnarly man.\n\nAll this took place on a busy street. Passersby pretended blindness. Shasesserre was that kind of city still, centuries after Jehrke began trying to turn it around.\n\n\"Hi ho, hi ho,\" Soup laughed as he and Spud hoisted their prisoner. \"Off to gaol for you, friend. Let's somebody find a wagon. This sucker's pants are full of lead.\"\n\nPreacher hired a rickshaw. Emerald rode. The others ran alongside, laughing and clowning.\n\nChaz answered the laboratory door. He grinned when he saw Emerald, but held a finger to his lips. \"Keep it down. Rider is mending the web.\"\n\nSoup and Preacher plopped Emerald down under the open window, where he could look at the Protector and contemplate his fate. They joined the crowd in the library, where Rider had spread his father's extra web charts atop a table fifteen feet long and five wide. Rider neither welcomed them nor upbraided them for leaving the Citadel. He gave them jobs to do.\n\nHours passed. The sun dropped to within two diameters of the horizon. The rope divers were just a few stages short of the tower's top. Rider finally rose, sighing wearily. \"That's enough for now. We'll put the final touches on after we finish this business.\"\n\n\"Got you a present, Rider,\" Su-Cha crowed. He pranced around, made smoke come out his ears. \"In the laboratory.\"\n\nRider followed the imp to the other room. Emerald sat where he had been dumped. \"He's the one who did the deed,\" Su-Cha said. \"It was him on the tower last night.\"\n\n\"Cool one,\" Chaz remarked. \"If he can sleep now.\" Rider darted forward, afraid he had lost another prisoner. But Emerald was asleep. \"There would have been a tug on the web,\" he told himself. He closed his eyes, allowed his being to flow out the web's strands, and the web to fill him. He sensed every magic within five miles of the Rock. Each was legitimate. He could detect nothing of Kralj Odehnal.\n\n\"Get the gag off him,\" Rider said. \"Untie him. Let him get some circulation back. There's nowhere he can go.\"\n\nEmerald cursed them roundly. He crawled to his feet, stood unsteadily. Then he spotted Caracen\u00e9.\n\nUnintelligible words whipped back and forth. They got hot. Emerald was angry, accusing; Caracen\u00e9 bitter and defensive. Emerald became increasingly pale. He began to shake.\n\n\"Are you ready to talk to us?\" Rider asked.\n\nEmerald spat on the floor.\n\n\"I guess that means a truth-drawing. Greystone, Spud, set it up.\" Rider followed Emerald's gaze to his father's body. Something would have to be done.\n\n\"Hey!\"\n\n\"Grab him!\"\n\n\"Su-Cha!...\"\n\nRider whirled as Emerald's feet went over the windowsill. The imp clung to one, desperately trying to catch Chaz's hand. He failed.\n\nEmerald made not one sound as he plunged to his death.\n\nSu-Cha, who was in no danger, did enough screeching for eight fall victims.\n\nRider elbowed his way to the window. He did not watch Emerald hit the Rock. He searched the Plaza for an island of reaction to Emerald's fall. He spied none. The gnarly man had done it on his own.\n\n\"Hey!\" Greystone shouted. \"The witch is getting away!\"\n\nRider turned. Caracen\u00e9 had slipped out while they were distracted. His helpers rushed to the door. \"Let her go,\" he said. \"We can find her when we want.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Su-Cha?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"The web. I marked her while we were in the library. Greystone, you keep track. Maybe she'll run to Odehnal. The rest of you stay here. And stay alert. I'll be back in time to give out the rope-diving prizes.\"\n\n\"Where you going?\" Soup asked.\n\n\"To see the King. Not a task I'll enjoy, I'm sure.\" As he departed he heard Chaz and Greystone pick up their argument about Caracen\u00e9. Chaz was of the opinion that he was in love, and that Caracen\u00e9 was not unmoved by his own manly attributes. Greystone was of the opinion that Chaz had a head full of feathers. The others seconded his view." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\"His Majesty is at dinner,\" a chamberlain told Rider. \"Then he must prepare to join your father for the ceremonies. I suggest you return at a more normal time.\" He scowled blackly. Few men dared that with Ride-Master Jehrke.\n\n\"It's about the ceremonies. There's been a change of plan. I'm giving the medals in my father's stead.\"\n\nThe chamberlain's scowl deepened. \"Even so...\"\n\nRider glanced at the nearby guards. They fought smirks. Not everyone appreciated his family's special status.\n\n\"Meghan, I am tired, upset, and short on patience. I have to see the King. I'll walk through you or over you if you make me.\" Was the chamberlain part of the conspiracy? Doubtful. The man was doing his job as he saw it, with a touch of officious spite.\n\n\"What is the nature?...\"\n\n\"If I wanted you to know I would have told you.\"\n\nThe chamberlain spun angrily, slammed a door in Rider's face. Rider was more irked with himself than with Meghan. He should not let his control slip like that. He stepped to the door, giving the guards a look that made them decide he was invisible. A tiny spell broke the bolt.\n\nThe King was a spare man in his thirties, tall and dark of hair and complexion, and new to the Shasesserren crown. His coffee eyes flashed fire as he shoved away from a table shared with two other men. Rider noted that both were trustworthy functionaries.\n\nThe King said, \"This runs in the family. I tolerate your father's lack of manners and respect because he serves a purpose. But you're not Jehrke Victorious, Ride-Master. Tell me why you shouldn't be flogged out of here.\"\n\nRider's patience remained thin. \"I'll give you two reasons. One is, I wouldn't let you. As my father would not. The other is that Jehrke is dead. I've taken over for him.\"\n\nAbsolute, deadly silence. Mouths worked but nothing came out.\n\n\"He was murdered before dawn, at the order of Khev Vlazos, by an assassin serving the sorcerer Kralj Odehnal. Vlazos, the assassin, and most of Odehnal's men have been dispatched. Odehnal remains at large, as do Vlazos' fellow conspirators. The web was damaged severely but has been restored. All is peaceful in Shasesserre\u2014at the moment. I expect a wave of assassinations\u2014reaching even the royal household\u2014was planned for tonight. These attempts may go forward despite what I've done to inhibit Odehnal. End of report, except to note that an unlicensed airship is in the hands of the conspirators.\"\n\n\"Jehrke dead,\" one of the ministers breathed. \"The gods forfend! Every barbarian on our borders will try to plunder the provinces.\"\n\nThe King noted, \"We have more to fear from homegrown pillagers. They'll get the news first.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\"\n\nRider said, \"Do nothing. Nothing has changed except that I stand in my father's stead.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" the King countered. \"Never again will any one man exercise that much power.\"\n\n\"Are you saying my father abused his?\"\n\n\"Hardly. But...\"\n\n\"He did tend to be a check on royal excess? Yes. I know. Though he seldom intervened even in your predecessors' blackest villainies.\"\n\nThe King glowered.\n\nKing Belledon was accounted a good ruler, but had held the throne only a year. Some of Shasesserre's most terrible monarchs had entered their reigns auspiciously.\n\n\"There will be no more Protector,\" the King said. \"The office dies with the man.\"\n\nRider had anticipated this exchange. Good or evil, no monarch willingly accepted a potential check on his power. \"There never was such an office. As you know. 'Protector' is an honorific bestowed by popular acclaim. No one appointed Jehrke. He did what was necessary for Shasesserre. As I will do. I have trained for the task since birth. I hope to achieve as much as Jehrke did.\"\n\nThe King went livid. \"You defy me?\"\n\nCalmly, \"Of course. As my father did you and every king before you.\" He raised a forestalling hand. \"Save your outrage, your pride. Think about it when you're calm. Ask the people their wishes.\"\n\n\"The wishes of shopkeepers are of no consequence.\"\n\n\"That attitude is what makes shopkeepers and tradesmen hail a Jehrke Protector. I have done my duty to the state by giving warning. I'm going to get ready for the awards ceremony now.\"\n\nThe King stared at Rider, exasperated. \"Like father, like son,\" he said. \"Where are you going, Konstantin?\"\n\n\"My people need to be alerted. I must tell...\"\n\n\"No one. You will tell no one, on your life. Rider at least sees the ramifications of Jehrke's death, if he is so vain as to arrogate his father's place.\"\n\nThe other man present, a greyhair whose role was informal and advisory, said, \"There should be no announcement. Let Rider take over. There will be speculation but slight inclination toward adventurism and chaos. A formal announcement would unleash the hounds of fear Jehrke kept chained.\"\n\nThe King grumbled something.\n\n\"You have your enemies, Belledon. Are they more restrained by the numbers of your soldiers or by the Protector's approval of your reign? Has any ruler he approved been found by an assassin? How many of the Bad Kings died natural deaths?\"\n\n\"It is something to consider, Your Majesty,\" Konstantin observed.\n\nThe older man said, \"You are a king, Belledon. Not a god. Never forget your oath. You serve Shasesserre. The City does not serve you.\"\n\nThe King continued to grumble, but admitted the truth. It was just such moments the old man was supposed to get him through.\n\nRider returned to his father's laboratory, thinking he had to get used to it being his. \"Everyone's still here?\" he asked in mock surprise. \"I'm amazed.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Chaz grumbled.\n\nSpud said, \"Rider, have you decided what to do about your father? Can't put it off much longer.\"\n\n\"Yes. It's grisly, but... A pattern of spells of stasis and preservation, and leave him where he died. As his own memorial. And as a reminder to us that we're mortal. That we can't let our vigilance slip.\"\n\nChaz leaned out the window, tossed something. Rider asked, \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Throwing pop seeds at Su-Cha. He's down there waiting to see if anybody comes for that Emerald.\"\n\nSpud snickered. \"He's been doing it since you left.\"\n\nRider looked outside. There were torches on the uppermost platform of the diving tower. The crowd was noisy and restless. \"Almost time to go down. Chaz, I want you, Soup, and Preacher to follow me. This would be a good time for our enemies to express their displeasure with us.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Spud, you stay and back up Greystone and Su-Cha.\"\n\n\"Hey! How come I have to miss out?\"\n\nRider tended not to hear such protests. He stepped into the library, where Greystone was perched on a massive oak throne of a chair. It served as the heart of the web for those who, unlike Rider, were unable to make themselves part of it.\n\n\"Greystone. What have we got?\"\n\n\"She's stopped moving.\" He tapped the map on the table with a pointer. \"One of these tenements.\"\n\n\"Right against the river. Heart of the Protte rookery. Not a good place for a woman alone. Fifty thousand foreign sailors and not a ghost of law.\"\n\n\"But a good place for a foreigner to disappear.\"\n\n\"A most excellent place. We'll go down in the morning.\"\n\n\"Why not tonight?\"\n\n\"These ceremonies. And we're tired. When we're tired we make mistakes. We'll rest. Odehnal will wait.\"\n\nRider moved on through the library. Beyond lay a vast suite of rooms he and his father had used from time to time. There he would find apparel appropriate to the awards ceremony. He told Spud, \"We'll refurbish these rooms so we can hole up here comfortably.\"\n\n\"Our lives are going to change, aren't they?\"\n\n\"They have already. It'll be a long time before we comprehend how much.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "There was a band to precede the King, and guards in flashy uniforms with ostrich plumes atop their helmets. In a tradition which antedated the celebration of Jehrke Victorious, the King scattered tiny, specially struck silver coins.\n\n\"Helps clear the way,\" he told Rider, who walked beside him. Citizens scrambled wildly as a dozen coins arced into the crowd.\n\n\"Cynical attitude.\"\n\n\"Only a cynic and pessimist will survive wearing the crown.\"\n\n\"Or a stoic?\"\n\n\"My father was a stoic. A very patient stoic. He got a foot of steel stuck into his gizzard. Philosophy means nothing to a dagger.\" The King seemed more companionable than earlier. Was that a good sign or bad?\n\nAs the procession neared the tower, where the medalists waited, onlookers began to murmur about the Protector's absence. Rider was not universally known. But he was recognized by some. His presence fueled speculation.\n\nShasesserre was a wild and rowdy city. More so on festival days. Fifteen minutes passed before there was order sufficient for the King to speak. He did so at length, dulling the edge of the crowd. He passed the stage to Rider without explaining his presence. Rider presented the victors' laurels with amusing asides and humorous observations, and no more explanation. He finished swiftly, yielded the rostrum to the organizers of the contests.\n\n\"So your assassins turned out specters,\" Belledon said as they pushed through the crowd. \"I wonder if half what you've told me isn't imagination.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" During his presentation he had felt a tug at the web, just a tiny vibration. Someone learning that the web had been made sound. The deaths of Emerald and Vlazos had not ended the game.\n\nThe attack came as the party passed behind an arm of the Rock and started up the incline to the Citadel gate. The King's guards were feeling safe.\n\nA horde of waterfront villains poured out of the dark cracks in the Rock, howling in a dozen languages. Odehnal seemed to have cleared the rookeries. In an instant the guards were all locked in struggle. More thugs swept toward Rider and the King.\n\nRider's men charged into the fray, falling on the villains from behind.\n\nRider dipped into pockets, spoke words of power rapidly. He scattered a handful of small black marbles. Smoke and stench boiled out of them. He shoved the King toward the densest smoke, called his men to join him.\n\nA scarfaced rogue plunged toward him, cutlass reaching. He turned inside the thrust, seized his assailant's wrist. The man shrieked as bones broke. Rider caught the dropped weapon and threw himself between another attacker and Belledon. He used the sword with a skill that would have embarrassed Shasesserre's most famous duelists.\n\nThe smoke caused confusion and bought time, but not enough. The evening breeze off the Golden Crescent dispersed it all too soon, and the scene it betrayed was not one to inspire hope.\n\nMost of the King's guards had been slain. A score of attackers remained upright. They began to close in.\n\nRider became aware of a great warp in the web. Someone had cast a powerful spell. He stood at its center. Everyone and everything within fifty paces was invisible to outside eyes.\n\nNo help would come, for no one could see this disaster.\n\nHe dipped a hand into a pocket, freed the thing he had loosed at the Vlazos mansion.\n\nHis men joined him, the King, and two surviving guards, everyone getting their backs together.\n\nThe demon raged. And still the villains came on. What had they been promised?\n\nThere was a violent twist in the web. Rider's demon shrieked, dropped a mangled victim, began to spin head over heels. And to shrink. In seconds it dwindled to a point, which vanished with a loud pop!\n\nBut before it went the monster did, momentarily, frighten the attackers into backing off. Rider turned his attention to the spell that masked the fray.\n\nThe attackers again moved in. The area was carpeted with soldiers and assassins. Chaz growled, \"These guys must be getting paid gold by the boatload.\" None were the sort who threw themselves on swords for causes.\n\nThe clangor resumed. A guard went down. A blow staggered the King himself. Chaz collapsed, struck on the head. Rider fended blows... He ripped the fabric of the invisibility spell.\n\nNot three seconds later there was a wild bray of trumpets from the Citadel. The garrison was alert already, concerned because the monarch had not yet appeared.\n\nSoldiers poured from the Citadel. The villains saw their deaths upon them. No reward was worth the mercy they could expect if they were captured. They fled.\n\nGroggy, Chaz caught one by the heel and piled onto him.\n\nThe very sky seemed to shriek in frustration.\n\nRider was ready when the deadly sorcery fell. So swift and sure was his response, none of his companions realized they came within seconds of death by melting.\n\nRider asked the King, \"Now will you concede the possibility Shasesserre may be in danger?\" But he paid little attention to the response.\n\nThat attack had not come from Kralj Odehnal. Of that he was sure. It did not have the dwarf's stamp. Nor did Rider believe Odehnal to be that powerful, nor possessed of so mighty an arrogance.\n\nAs he helped Chaz with his prisoner, he told his men, \"This is even bigger than we suspected. And there are more players in the game than we thought.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Rider wakened with the sun. His body ached from the previous day's exertions and bruises, yet he was eager to be at his new vocation. He leapt out of bed, began doing calisthenics.\n\nSu-Cha stuck his head in the doorway. \"Up already?\" Su-Cha was always up. Imps did not sleep often.\n\n\"The juices are flowing, little friend.\"\n\n\"Shall I waken the others?\"\n\n\"No need. They deserve their rest. How is the prisoner?\"\n\n\"Unhappy. And as full of blessed ignorance as ought to elevate him direct to nirvana. Someone put sixty pounds of gold on your head. The King's, too. Chaz is going to wilt when he hears his noggin is worth only five.\"\n\n\"What I expected. What of the web?\"\n\n\"Nothing shaking. His nibs ain't moved.\"\n\nRider abandoned his exertions, though customarily he devoted an hour to exercise. \"I'll bathe quickly. Two chores to be done. Take your pick. Cook breakfast or fetch shantor's robes for the whole crowd.\"\n\n\"And if I choose cooking?\"\n\n\"I'll boot you downstairs.\"\n\n\"What I thought.\" Having little need to consume food, Su-Cha had no need to learn cookery. His occasional efforts verged on the poisonous. \"Enough for everybody?\"\n\n\"Yes. It'll take the whole crew to corner a rat like Odehnal.\"\n\n\"Remember the old saw.\"\n\n\"I do. I don't expect he'll be taken easily.\"\n\nSomeone in one of the sleeping rooms grumbled about all the racket. Moments later Spud toddled past, headed for the kitchen. He banged around enough to waken everyone else. When Su-Cha returned with the shantor disguises he found the whole crowd tripping over one another while cooking and eating.\n\nThe donning of disguises took place not far from the suspect tenements. The weeping sickness was common in the slums, and the terror of the riverbanks. It was a slow and gruesome killer, and one challenge Jehrke had not been able to meet. Rider's men would not stand out unless they made it appear there were too many shantors in one area. People would stay out of their way. Though Jehrke had proven the weeping sickness not to be communicable like measles or the pox, no one believed him.\n\n\"Take your time getting into position,\" Rider told the others. \"Don't attract attention. I'll touch you through the web when I'm ready.\" He sent them off in pairs, ringing their warning bells.\n\nHe let a half hour pass. He spent that time touching the neighborhood through the web. There was a disconcerting quiet about it, as though people had sensed Odehnal's presence and knew it augured explosion and terror.\n\nOdehnal was not difficult to locate, this close. The woman Caracen\u00e9 made an outstanding marker. From her Rider caught hints of turmoil, from the dwarf a glowing calm.\n\nThere were others in the place. At least four more men, none of whom Rider gave any special attention. They would be the dwarf's hirelings.\n\nHe tugged that part of the web which allowed him to touch his associates. I am going in now, he sent. Be alert.\n\nHe moved into the filthy street, stooped, tinkling his shantor's bell. Through a gap between drunkenly leaning tenements he glimpsed the brown dirtiness of the river. Here the old wooden buildings stood with their tails over the water, supported by pilings rising from the bottom mud. These places were always collapsing into the flood, drowning their occupants, and being rebuilt as slovenly as before.\n\nThe suspect structure was identical to its neighbors. Rider tinkled from door to door, pausing before each as if begging. When he reached his destination, though, he flicked a finger. A soft click sounded behind the door, a bolt snapping open. There was no guard.\n\nHe stepped inside. Behind him one of his men rang his bell.\n\nThe darkness within was asphalt thick. He drew a gemlike crystal from a pocket, whispered to it. It began to glow, no more brilliant than a lightning bug. He did not go on till his eyes adjusted.\n\nOdehnal was too confident, Rider thought. No guard, no spell to alert him to intruders. As a soldier Rider had learned that one must always expect the worst in enemy territory.\n\nEyes adapted, he touched his men again. I am going upstairs now. Odehnal was above somewhere. Caracen\u00e9 and the others were in the rear, also upstairs.\n\nOdehnal was not as lax as first glance suggested. Two thirds of the way up, Rider froze. Something was wrong. He allowed his senses free rein, not moving a muscle. His attention focused upon a stairstep a couple above that where his feet rested.\n\nEven knowing where to look it was a moment before he spied the black thread stretched taut an inch above the worn and grimy tread.\n\nTricky, setting the trap for a point where an intruder would begin worrying more about what lay ahead. He examined the steps above with even more care. He would have set a back-up.\n\nThere it was. A step set to trigger an alarm when weight fell upon it.\n\nHe stepped over both carefully.\n\nThe stair ended on a balcony which ran athwart the building and L-ed to his right. Several doors along the back leaked light beneath them. But Odehnal waited out along the L.\n\nHe paused to scatter pop seeds at the elbow of the L, then moved to Odehnal's door. He listened, sensed. The dwarf seemed to be sleeping.\n\nHe examined the doorknob minutely. The crystal's light revealed no trap.\n\nBelow, he heard the slightest breath of sound. Sunlight poured inside. He saw a shape the size of Chaz slip inside, followed by one of Su-Cha's slightness. He frowned. It was too soon for them to come.\n\nMove quickly!\n\nHe turned the doorknob, passed through the doorway swiftly... and stopped, startled, awed.\n\nThe room was as opulent as an eastern potentate's private quarters. Odehnal lounged upon huge down-stuffed pillows, face asmile and dreamy. Burnt opium embittered the air.\n\nQuickly, now! Before Chaz or Su-Cha called attention to their presence.\n\nHe cast a small spell which sealed Odehnal's lips. He used a modified form of the same spell to join the dwarf's ankles, then his wrists, and even his fingers one to another.\n\nOdehnal stirred once, but only to make himself more comfortable.\n\nA gong hammered in the rear of the house.\n\nRider hurtled out of the room, into intense light. Chaz stood upon the trap step, a dumb look on his face.\n\nTwo men charged out of rear rooms, weapons in hand. Su-Cha materialized between one's legs. He pitched off the balcony with a shriek. The other saw Rider, whirled, charged into the room where Rider knew Caracen\u00e9 and another man to be.\n\nRider followed, pop seeds exploding beneath his feet. He hurled a shoulder at the door. It burst inward. Chaz breathed down his neck as he entered a room outshining Odehnal's. A thrown knife ripped between them.\n\nIn the rear of the room, in shadow, Caracen\u00e9 stood with hands at mouth, looking down. The man who had preceded Rider slammed her out of the way, dropped like a badger plopping into its hole. Caracen\u00e9 scrambled...\n\nThen Chaz had hold of her, and Rider was staring down at a man thrashing through brown water, chasing a boat which meant to waste no time on him.\n\nRider's gaze fixed on the man in the boat, a lean, powerful oriental with astonishing green eyes. \"Shy key, Vlazos said,\" he murmured. \"Shai Khe.\" One hand came from a pocket clutching a phial. He hurled it.\n\nThe man in the boat dropped his oars, raised hands, loosed a warding spell. The phial plopped into the river.\n\nThe man saved himself from the misery in that fluid, but lost his oars. He drifted at the mercy of the current.\n\nRider heard shouts. Soup and Greystone. They had spotted the fugitive. Someone threw a line to the man abandoned.\n\nThe oriental's long fingers began weaving sparks. Rider snapped, \"Out of here, Chaz. Take the woman. Su-Cha. Get Odehnal.\" His tone brooked neither questions nor argument.\n\nHe drew on the web, began binding it around the sorcerer. Chaz and Su-Cha pounded away.\n\nToo late Rider realized what the oriental was doing. Not attacking him directly at all.\n\nA piling snapped like a twig. The house lurched. Another piling went. The house began to shift, to groan, to tilt toward the river.\n\nRider did not hesitate. He dropped through the hole, hit the water feet first. He drove himself deep with one powerful stroke, then swam with the current. His strokes were strong and practiced.\n\nThe water screamed with the sound of the building collapsing. The scream grew to a roar. But no building comes down in seconds.\n\nWhen Rider surfaced he was beyond danger of the collapse. Indeed, the structure's main mass smashed into the river as he came up. It raised a wave that lifted him five feet. From the wave's crest he looked at the man in the boat.\n\nThe sorcerer's face betrayed frustration. His fingers began weaving again. But the wave caught the boat and toppled him into its bottom. When he recovered Rider had made the riverbank. The oriental wasted no time on an enemy in a position to best him. His boat flew away as though upon a lightning current.\n\nRider clambered between houses, to the street, where he settled on a stoop to drain his boots.\n\nChaz settled down beside him, Caracen\u00e9 held almost negligently in one arm. \"Who was that guy?\"\n\n\"Shai Khe,\" Rider replied. \"I should have thought of him when Vlazos tried to tell me. He said Shai Khe and I heard shy key.\"\n\n\"That's his name,\" Chaz said. \"But it don't tell me nothing about him.\" They watched Su-Cha drag Odehnal their way. The dwarf remained imprisoned in his opium dream.\n\n\"I know only one thing more,\" Rider said.\n\n\"Uhm?\"\n\n\"My father was afraid of him.\"\n\nChaz looked startled.\n\n\"Yes. He wouldn't talk about it. Shai Khe is some great terror in the east. He commands an empire more vast than Shasesserre's. But that does not satisfy him. He wants it all.\"\n\nWreckage from the collapsed building drifted away. Rider's men assembled. Neighbors came to watch from a distance safe from shantors.\n\n\"More prisoners,\" Greystone said. The man who had jumped into the river was trying to talk Soup and Spud into turning him loose.\n\nRider caught his eye. \"You're luckier than your friends.\" He indicated the wreckage. Two men were in it somewhere. To his own men, he said, \"We've done what we can do here. Take these people to the Citadel. We'll question them later. Spud, Su-Cha, Preacher, come with me.\"\n\n\"Where we headed?\" Su-Cha asked.\n\n\"Airship yards. Before we left the Citadel I sent word for a ship to be readied. We'll use it to hunt Shai Khe. Particularly if he runs to his own ship.\"\n\nShai Khe, not Kralj Odehnal, had killed Vlazos and escaped in an unlicensed airship.\n\nChaz stepped close as Rider was about to leave. He whispered, \"What about the girl?\"\n\n\"Treat her the way she wants you to treat her. If she doesn't suspect she's marked for the web, arrange it so she can escape again. She could lead us again.\"\n\n\"Right. Will do.\"\n\nRider and those he had chosen hurried a quarter mile, to where a pair of chariots waited. They shed their shantor's robes as they went." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Rider's ship was ready. It was a light vessel, capable of carrying just a ton of crew and freight, designed for speed. Rider and Spud went to the control array. There were great magicks involved in the airship's propulsion, but much of its control was mechanical. Spud had helped refine the system.\n\n\"Ready to cast off,\" Rider called to the ground. \"Dump ballast, Omar.\" Rider was the only one of the group to use Spud's proper name. And he forgot much of the time.\n\nSpud tripped levers. The ship began tugging at its restraining lines. \"Cast off!\" Rider shouted.\n\nThe ship lurched upward. Rider murmured to the demonic body, spellbound and beguiled, which constituted its motive force. The airship turned toward the river, began to slide forward like a fish through water.\n\nAft, Su-Cha and Preacher hastened to take in the mooring lines.\n\n\"He was headed Henchelside when last I saw him,\" Rider said. \"And downriver. We'll start looking where Deer Creek Drain runs into the river.\"\n\n\"Keep an eye out for his airship, too,\" Spud said, making an adjustment to levers which controlled flaps on the ship's sharklike fins. \"Be hard to hide something that big.\"\n\nRider nodded.\n\nThe airship's balance shifted as Preacher and Su-Cha came forward. Spud adjusted with the fins. \"Any sign of him?\" Su-Cha asked.\n\n\"Too soon to tell,\" Rider replied. The river along Henchelside was crowded with the boats of fisherfolk. Rider directed the demon to follow the shoreline south toward the Golden Crescent. \"Take us lower, Omar. I want to see their faces.\"\n\nThere was no tension in the web. Shai Khe was not using his power.\n\nThe fisherfolk all looked up as the airship passed over. Rarely did one drop so low.\n\nIn time the riverbank curved away westward. The land grew marshy and wild. \"Not going to find him this way,\" Spud said.\n\n\"We'll return a ways inland, looking for somewhere where he might have put his ship down,\" Rider said. So they ran inland again, as far as that part of the city on Henchelside opposite the Protte rookery. Still they found nothing.\n\nRider persisted till nightfall made continued search pointless.\n\n\"You could turn a hand with this one,\" Soup complained to Chaz, as they faced the stair to the laboratory. Soup was carrying Odehnal.\n\n\"I could. But I like the one I've got just fine.\" He had Caracen\u00e9 over one shoulder. She was thoroughly bound despite Rider's admonition to treat her well. She wriggled, and squeaked behind her gag. Chaz just grinned at his companions.\n\nGreystone prodded his man with the tip of a sheathed dagger. That fellow never quit protesting his innocence of anything and everything.\n\nAt the laboratory door Greystone said, \"Somebody tried to get in while we were out.\" Evidence of attempted entry was obvious. The effort had been a failure, though.\n\nChaz said, \"Vlazos' friends, no doubt.\"\n\nGreystone popped a signet ring into a small hole in the wall some feet from the doorway. Each of Rider's men wore identical rings. The door responded with a down-scale, musical whine. \"Should have done something like this a long time ago.\"\n\nSoup countered, \"When the old man was running things nobody had the guts to try getting in. It'll be that way again when they get used to Rider.\"\n\n\"Let's hope.\"\n\nOne small lumber room had been converted to a cell for the prisoner already on hand. Odehnal and the other man joined him. \"Have you some dinner in a few minutes,\" Soup told them. \"Except you, Odehnal. You'll have to wait on Rider.\"\n\nThe dwarf's eyes smoldered.\n\nChaz released Caracen\u00e9 in another room. He told her, \"Couldn't give you special treatment in front of the dwarf. Sorry.\"\n\nShe did not answer. There was an odd, measuring look in her eyes. She watched him closely still when she sat down to eat with the three men.\n\n\"Shai Khe,\" Greystone said. \"An ill name out east. One that strikes terror everywhere. I wouldn't have thought his interest in Shasesserre to be so intense as to bring him here personally.\" He glanced at Caracen\u00e9.\n\nShe said, \"Shasesserre is all that stands between Shai Khe and creation of the greatest empire the world has known.\"\n\n\"He the one gave you to Odehnal?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What can you tell us about him?\" Greystone asked.\n\n\"Nothing. While he lives, nothing.\"\n\n\"Me, I lost something somewhere, beautiful lady,\" Chaz said.\n\n\"I am his slave.\" She said that as though it explained all. In her native land, perhaps it did.\n\n\"Who?\" Chaz insisted. \"Odehnal or Shai Khe?\"\n\nCaracen\u00e9 bowed her head. Softly, she replied, \"Shai Khe.\"\n\n\"Why? You're in Shasesserre.\"\n\n\"There are no slaves in Shasesserre?\"\n\nChaz had to think his way around the side of that. \"He is an enemy of the state. As such he has no rights. You have been freed. We could get you manumission papers by tomorrow.\"\n\nShe looked at him with eyes in which tenderness warred with exasperation. \"Paper has no meaning while Shai Khe lives.\"\n\nGallantly, Chaz offered, \"I'll kick his head in, then. Just tell me where he is.\"\n\n\"I cannot betray him. He is my master.\"\n\nSoup snickered. Even Greystone smirked.\n\n\"I give up,\" the northerner said. He began muttering about \"Women!\" under his breath. He cleared his plate and cutlery away, then prepared a tray for the prisoners.\n\nDuring the afternoon and evening he made every opportunity for Caracen\u00e9 to escape. She did not seize her chance.\n\nRider reached the laboratory quite late. He examined the prisoners while the others prepared themselves a supper. \"Any message from the King?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nary a word,\" Chaz replied. \"Nothing from anybody.\"\n\n\"I suppose that means he's decided to accept me as Protector\u2014to the extent that he'll ignore me. Till he wants something.\"\n\n\"That's what most of them did with your father. How long you reckon Belledon will last?\" Few Shasesserren kings fulfilled normal lifespans. Some years there were three or four self-coronations. Jehrke had held the opinion that the City was its empire's worst enemy. The Protector had provided more stability and continuity than the crown.\n\n\"He could be a good one. If he stays alive. Suppose we skip the hired hands and deal with Odehnal directly?\"\n\n\"A truth-drawing?\"\n\n\"Get it ready. I'll eat first.\"\n\nOdehnal's eyes were wild. He was hopelessly caught, for the first time ever at another's mercy. Judging his captors by himself, he was frantic.\n\n\"Ought to be interesting,\" Chaz said, closing the lumber room door. Softly, \"The girl wouldn't run.\"\n\n\"I noticed. We'll find him another way.\"\n\nAfter eating they brought a more composed Odehnal into the library and strapped him into a chair the twin to that Greystone had used to monitor the web. Rider exercised the utmost caution while unbinding the spells which restrained the dwarf. Odehnal was dangerous still.\n\n\"Bit backwards from the way you're used to?\" Rider asked. \"You willing to tell me what I want to know?\" Fear still lurked behind the dwarf's eyes. \"Got in over your head when you joined up with Shai Khe, didn't you?\"\n\nOdehnal betrayed a flicker of surprise.\n\n\"Oh, yeah,\" Chaz said. \"We know about your friend and his pirate airship.\"\n\n\"That being the case, you have no need to question me,\" Odehnal concluded with a snarl.\n\n\"Where is he?\" Rider asked.\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Do you consider yourself more valuable than Vlazos? He killed Vlazos.\"\n\nAgain Odehnal betrayed a moment's surprise. Vlazos, Rider believed, had been the foot in the Shasesserren door, the lone contact between outsiders and conspirators.\n\n\"Let's get on with the truth-drawing, Rider,\" Su-Cha chirruped. \"I love it when they squeal.\" His cherubic face darkened. \"And this one has abused so many of my kind. Let me have him when you're done.\"\n\nKralj Odehnal was not to be manipulated by psychological maneuvers. He was old and tough and tempered, and knew all the games interrogators played. He believed he had invented some himself.\n\nRider shrugged. \"Since we have no choice, then.\"\n\nGreystone placed a contraption on a stand in front of the dwarf. Odehnal looked puzzled. \"Spud's special design,\" Greystone said. \"More efficient than candles and mirrors.\"\n\nOdehnal drew a deep breath...\n\nChaz stepped behind him, clapped a hand over his mouth. The hand held a wad of cotton impregnated with a fluid of Rider's devising. In moments Kralj Odehnal wore a drugged smile. His head lolled to one side.\n\nSu-Cha stuck him with a hot pin. \"Just to make sure he isn't faking.\"\n\nRider said nothing, though he knew the Odehnal who was a legend among assassins had self-control sufficient not to start at a pin's prick. \"Start it.\"\n\nGreystone cranked a handle, opened a tiny door. Light flickered upon Odehnal's face. Greystone made a few adjustments.\n\nThis was a truth-drawing much less unpleasant than the traditional, which combined a bit of witchcraft with subtle torture. \"Waken him,\" Rider said.\n\nChaz buried Odehnal's face in cotton moistened with ammonia. The dwarf sputtered and spat and wakened. His eyes met the light and glazed.\n\nRider asked several hundred questions, each phrased so a yes or no answer would suffice. Greystone recorded questions and answers and kept his notesheets positioned so Rider could refer to them. The others stayed back, conferring in whispers. Occasionally Soup would dart forward with a note suggesting a question.\n\nThe picture that shaped was not one to gladden men devoted to Shasesserre's welfare.\n\nFor several years Shai Khe had been recruiting among the sorcerers of the world. Those who refused to make common cause, under his command, he crushed. Those who joined him he gave gifts like Caracen\u00e9, and powers torn away from those who would not serve him. Now he felt strong enough to test Shasesserre and its Protector.\n\nRider worked with especial care when he began drawing the names of those Shai Khe had recruited. Yes and no answers were not possible.\n\nSome names amazed him. Some chilled him. Some left him blank, for they were names unknown to him. Those he did know were widely scattered, proving the eastern master had a far reach indeed.\n\nHe had drawn just over a dozen names when Odehnal suddenly bucked against his restraints, made squealing noises, and began foaming at the mouth.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" Greystone demanded.\n\n\"I don't know... He's dying. Somebody get the medical kit.\"\n\nBlood flecked the foam on Odehnal's chin.\n\nRider brushed the hypnotic engine aside, laid hands on the dwarf's heaving chest. He felt the inner wrongness instantly. \"Poison!\"\n\n\"What kind?\" Soup demanded, yanking a battery of antidotes out of the medical kit.\n\n\"Can't tell. Something different... Complex.\"\n\nOdehnal's eyes opened. Hatred and the knowledge of his own murder filled them. \"Polybos House,\" he croaked. \"The Devil's Eyes.\" His eyes rolled up. He began to shudder violently.\n\n\"Rider!\" Chaz shouted from the laboratory. \"There's something out here.\"\n\nRider ripped away from Odehnal, rushed into the darkened laboratory. Chaz was at the window. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Down there now.\"\n\nRider leaned out. A shadow clung to the face of the tower, seventy feet below. Points that might have been eyes blinked. A limb of shadow moved. Rider whipped back, into the laboratory an instant before something tick! ed against the window frame. \"Light,\" he said. \"Get lamps in here.\" And, \"We have to get that pane replaced.\" He moved to the library door behind Chaz, blocked that against the rush of his men.\n\n\"Whatever it was, it shot something at me. It ricocheted off the window frame into the laboratory. Watch where you step. Find it.\" He took an oil lamp from Preacher, cautiously returned to the window. He leaned out and dropped the lamp.\n\nDown it plunged to smash on the foot of the Rock. He caught one glimpse of something scuttling into darkness.\n\n\"What was it? A demon?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"No. It was mortal. There was no strain on the web. But exactly what manner of mortal I don't know.\"\n\n\"Here,\" Soup called.\n\nRider joined him, looked where he pointed. \"A dart. Get tongs. Handle it with care. Let's see if we can't find another around Odehnal.\"\n\n\"This Shai Khe is some nice fellow,\" Chaz observed. \"Kills anybody... Caracen\u00e9. Where did that woman get to?\"\n\n\"I think Odehnal getting got, got her moving,\" Greystone said. He indicated the exit door. It stood open a crack.\n\n\"Su-Cha,\" Rider said. \"You follow her. I'll keep in touch through the web.\"\n\n\"Thought you had her on the web,\" Chaz said.\n\n\"Not anymore. She figured she was marked and negated it. Su-Cha.\"\n\n\"Yes sir, boss, sir.\" The imp dived out the window. This time he did not howl on the way down.\n\nRider moved back to Kralj Odehnal. In a moment he found the lethal dart. \"The bodies pile up. And still we make no progress.\"\n\n\"At least they aren't our bodies,\" Chaz said. \"That thing could have gotten one of us as easily as it got Odehnal.\"\n\n\"A point we were meant to take, I'm sure,\" Rider observed. \"A bit more caution from now on, friends. Omar. I want you to fix that window. Soon.\"\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Preacher asked.\n\n\"We find a place called Polybos House and something called the Devil's Eyes. We stay in touch with the web. And we wait for something to happen.\"\n\nIn the other room the dead eyes of Jehrke Victorious seemed to gleam with approval." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Su-Cha returned soon after daybreak. He wore a chagrined look. \"She shook me in the Protte rookery. I figured she'd cross to Henchelside, so I staked out King's Ferry. She never showed.\"\n\nSoup snickered. Spud said, \"We'll hear from her again. How can she resist that great chunk of beef?\" He indicated Chaz, snoring in a chair.\n\nRider returned from setting Preacher and Greystone to searching land titles for a place called Polybos House. \"Soup, you and Omar head down to the Golden Crescent. Look at ships recently in from the east. Find ships that carried unusual cargoes or passengers.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Soup asked.\n\n\"Shai Khe's airship is a small one. He may have brought more men and equipment than it could have carried. He strikes me as careful and methodical. He would not have come unprepared for a difficult campaign.\"\n\nSoup and Spud departed. They returned that evening with nothing to report. Preacher and Greystone had no luck either. Greystone said, \"If a Polybos House exists it has to be outside the Wall.\" By that he meant outside the legal corporate limits. The city wall proper lay well inside those, and had been in decay for a century.\n\n\"Try again tomorrow,\" Rider said.\n\n\"What're you doing?\" Preacher asked.\n\n\"Trying to analyze the poison on these darts. It's eluded me so far. Looks like something drawn from an insect, though.\"\n\nSpud said, \"The jungles of Maijan fester with poisonous bugs. And lizards and snakes and bats.\"\n\n\"I'll remember that next time I'm in the far east,\" Chaz grumbled. He was in a sour mood. He had spent the day washing alembics and retorts under the dead, cold eyes of Jehrke.\n\n\"Patience, friend,\" Rider chided. \"Our turn will come.\"\n\n\"Soon, I hope.\" Chaz tested the window Spud had installed, for the hundredth time. \"My nerves are getting me.\"\n\nSoon did not come for four days.\n\nIt began with Soup and Spud. They had, at last, found a vessel whose origins and crew were suspect. After watching the ship, and noting the presence of men of both Emerald's and Shai Khe's races, they decided to contact Rider.\n\nBut their persistent presence over several days had betrayed them.\n\nThe attack was sudden and bold, initiated by a seaman who stepped into their path and shouted, \"At last my brother's daughter's honor will be avenged!\" Another half dozen seamen joined him, a wild, scruffy gang of cutthroats.\n\nSpud and Soup were not fooled. The easterner pointed a finger, declared, \"You have the wrong men, friend.\"\n\nThe sailor collapsed.\n\nSpud pointed at another man. He went down, too.\n\nBlades came out. A howl went up. More sailors materialized.\n\nSoup, meantime, dipped a hand into his pocket and crushed a crystal. That sent a screaming shock through the web. Then he activated an amulet which Rider could track. Then he scattered fistfuls of what looked like gold coins.\n\nAttackers and onlookers alike dived for the money.\n\nSpud dropped another two men with his pointed finger, ducked inside a clumsy cutlass, buried a fist in a fat belly.\n\nSoup's coins started an independent brawl. They exploded in the hands or pockets of those who had seized them.\n\nSpud pushed away from the man he had punched. \"Let's get out of here!\" he yelled.\n\nIn the confusion that was not difficult. But...\n\nSoup laughed. \"The idiots! Hoist by their own greed!\"\n\n\"Oh-oh,\" Spud said.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nThey had slipped into a breezeway to make their getaway. Their path, suddenly, was blocked by men of Emerald's ilk.\n\nRetreat, too, vanished.\n\nTough-looking orientals had appeared behind them.\n\n\"The coin trick won't work this time.\"\n\n\"I didn't reload my spring gun.\"\n\n\"Been nice knowing you. Take it out on the gnarly guys?\"\n\n\"Let's get them.\"\n\nPreacher and Greystone had been butting their heads against a stone wall. There was no Polybos House within fifty miles of Shasesserre, at least on record. They were with Rider, plotting a new strategy, when the web relayed Soup's trouble cry.\n\n\"Ask around the merchants' taverns,\" Rider said, and loped out. A minute later he passed through the Citadel gate in a racing chariot, sounding a warning trumpet. Though the way was longer, he took the Via Triumpha, which by law was closed to wheeled vehicles. Because there was no commerce there, few pedestrians were about.\n\nThe Via's prime function was as a processional for military holidays, and for the celebration of major victories.\n\nRider swung off the Via Triumpha a quarter mile from where his men had found trouble. During his mad flight he had acquired an escort of City Guards, who had recognized him and were carrying warning ahead. They made passage through the waterfront district much easier.\n\nSo quick was Rider to reach the scene that the crowd had not yet dispersed. A dozen people lay unconscious, not yet carried off by comrades. \"Collect these and deliver them to the Citadel,\" Rider told his escort. He left his chariot and set off after the moving disturbance the web noted as the location of his men.\n\nHe found the back-up ambush. There were signs of a vigorous fight, and spilled blood. Had Soup and Spud been slain, their bodies carried off with those of their enemies?\n\nHis heart sank. Shai Khe was a relentless and merciless opponent.\n\nHe allowed his wizard's senses to extend. This was a good time and place to jump someone tracking the missing men.\n\nThey were there, just ahead in the breezeway, hidden beneath trash and inside shadows. There were eight of them. They had several mystical devices that would have been potent had they taken Rider unaware. They were growing impatient.\n\nRider produced a deck of plaques the size of tarot cards. He shuffled out the one he wanted. It portrayed a man asleep, dreaming hideous devils. The devils were about to seize and drag him through a fiery gap in a background wall. There were graven words around the plaque's margin. Rider read them aloud.\n\nAs he spoke each word, it disappeared. After he spoke the last, the picture itself faded. The plaque crumbled into dust which dribbled between his fingers.\n\nRider went back and told the City Guards they could collect another eight customers in the breezeway. Then he set out after the receding disturbance marking the location of his men.\n\nHe loped to the waterfront, where he immediately identified both the vessel they had unmasked and the outbound fishing smack carrying them. The ship reeked of old sorceries forgotten by all but their victims.\n\nRider raced back to his chariot, pounded through the streets to the airship yards, where, in accordance with standing instructions, his airships were ready for immediate flight. He selected the fast vessel he had used before.\n\nLiftoff was hectic, as he had to cover the places of crewmen not present, but once he was aloft he had no trouble. He reached through the web, touched Chaz and Preacher, told them he wanted everyone atop their tower of the Citadel. He tried to reach Soup and Spud, but a grey null intervened. They might be unconscious. Or worse.\n\nChaz and Su-Cha were in the parapet when Rider halted the airship above the Citadel. Both carried packs. Rider hastened to the gondola door, dropped a rope ladder. As Chaz and Su-Cha scrambled up, Greystone and Preacher appeared.\n\n\"What's up?\" Chaz demanded as he clambered aboard.\n\n\"The game is afoot. They snatched Spud and Soup. What are the packs?\"\n\n\"Some odds and ends we threw together. Just in case.\"\n\n\"The laboratory secure?\"\n\nSu-Cha chuckled. \"And then some.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chaz repeated the news for Preacher and Greystone. Rider ordered the ship demon to proceed toward the Golden Crescent at speed, for the fishing boat was near the limit of the web. He had to get the vessel in sight first or lose it among a hundred others.\n\n\"I think I've been outmaneuvered,\" he said.\n\n\"How's that?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"The boat is leaving the web. To follow we'll have to keep it in sight. Which means they'll be able to see us, too.\"\n\n\"How about an invisibility spell?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't hide something this big.\"\n\n\"What about an angel?\" Su-Cha asked. Already he had shed his shirt and sprouted wings.\n\nRider understood immediately. \"An albatross or eagle would be less flashy.\"\n\n\"Dig out some of those mirrors and flares,\" Su-Cha told Chaz. Already his head was avian.\n\n\"A shape to go with his brain,\" Chaz said, ransacking the packs. He produced signal mirrors and four small flares, which he placed in a pouch the imp grew among his ventral feathers. Su-Cha retained rudimentary hands beneath his wings.\n\nRider spread a maritime chart. \"The ship is here, now, and headed so. If there are others around, watch the one that is in a hurry. They're making all the speed they can.\"\n\nSu-Cha squawked and plunged through a hatch Preacher opened. In a moment he was headed out over the strait on long white wings.\n\nGreystone looked over Rider's shoulder. \"They headed for the Hurm Islands?\"\n\n\"Maybe. They could shift course once they're sure they're clear of the web.\"\n\n\"How soon?\"\n\n\"I've lost them already.\"\n\n\"Signal from Su-Cha,\" Chaz said. \"He has them.\"\n\nRider peered out the window. Far away, a mirror flashed.\n\n\"Keeping their heading,\" Chaz read.\n\n\"Tell him not to get too close,\" Rider replied. \"What do you know about the Hurm Islands, Greystone?\"\n\n\"Not much to know. Uninhabited and considered uninhabitable. Except for the biggest, Radhorn Island, they're little more than marshy places off the mouth of the Claytyne River.\" The Claytyne emptied into the Bridge of the World from its southern, Saverne side. \"Long ago, before the seas were ours alone, there were naval fortifications on Radhorn. Earlier still, pirates nested there, lying in wait for ships headed west.\"\n\nRider nodded. \"And these days it's suspected of being a hideout for smugglers. The ruins of the fortifications would provide a good hiding place for a pirate airship.\"\n\n\"But Odehnal said Polybos House,\" Preacher protested.\n\n\"Let's forget that for the moment. Chaz. Can you make out Su-Cha?\"\n\n\"Only when he flashes an all right.\"\n\n\"Maybe we ought to call for an all-out raid,\" Preacher said. \"Half a dozen airships and a company of air marines. Could be anything waiting out there.\"\n\n\"If it becomes necessary.\" Rider spoke to the propulsive demon. The ship surged forward. \"Chaz. We're going down channel and crossing over. Tell Su-Cha.\" He began shedding altitude.\n\nThe airship crossed the Bridge of the World just yards above the waves. It was seen by several merchantmen and fishing vessels, but Su-Cha reported none steering near the Hurm Islands. Rider took the airship up into the southern hills, finally grounded in a side canyon leading down to the Claytyne River.\n\n\"Now what?\" Chaz asked. He was working his sword with a whetstone.\n\n\"We wait for darkness. And for Su-Cha.\"\n\nSu-Cha arrived first, but not by much. \"They stuck Soup and Spud in a basement under the old ruins, then headed back for the north shore.\"\n\n\"They just dumped them?\" Chaz asked. \"Didn't leave any guards or anything?\"\n\n\"Oh, there's guards. Fifteen or twenty smugglers and runaway slaves and such, that they paid to watch them.\"\n\nChaz said, \"Something's wrong here, Rider. Either it's a trap or we've been snookered into leaving town.\"\n\n\"No trap,\" Su-Cha said. \"I looked the place over good.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Shai Khe has fallen victim to his own arrogance.\"\n\n\"Well, at least we could have followed the fishing boat if the runt hadn't...\"\n\nSu-Cha was grinning his biggest grin.\n\n\"What instructions were the smugglers given as to the care of our friends?\" Rider asked.\n\n\"They're to treat them well. Till they hear otherwise. The men from the boat\u2014they were all orientals\u2014paid the smugglers for two weeks.\"\n\n\"And did you do what I suspect you did with your flares?\"\n\n\"Yep.\" Su-Cha grinned again.\n\n\"And your mirrors?\"\n\n\"Right up on the masthead. Nobody pays attention to a bird.\"\n\n\"Or a birdbrain,\" Chaz mumbled.\n\nRider said, \"Let's get flying, then. Soup and Spud are safe for the moment.\"\n\n\"You just going to leave them there?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"If we don't mess with them, Shai Khe will think we're off the trail,\" Su-Cha said.\n\nRider took the airship back along the reverse of his approach route, but midway across the Bridge of the World he lifted into the normal air lane from Kaizherion. \"Take over, Chaz.\"\n\nHe busied himself in the rear of the cabin for several minutes. In time he brought forward a plate of frosted violet glass. He handed this to Su-Cha. The imp held it at eye level, extended, in both hands. \"Ready when you are.\"\n\nRider spoke one Word of Command. Su-Cha turned rapidly, staring through the glass. \"There!\"\n\nRider marked the direction. \"Charts, Greystone. Not the direction I expected.\"\n\n\"Thought they would head for the City?\" Su-Cha asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe boat was bound westward.\n\nRider examined the chart. \"They're hugging the coast. Trying to slip past the patrol in the Narrows. Go down, Chaz. Let's see if we can't raise the guardship.\"\n\nFinding the Narrows sentinel was simple. The trireme was showing her lights. There were no challengers on Shasesserre's seas.\n\nRider went down the rope ladder, spoke with the vessel's commander. When he returned, he said, \"All set.\"\n\nSu-Cha squealed maliciously, then spoke the Word of Command that ignited the flares aboard the fishing boat.\n\nThe trireme was headed north already, cadence drum pounding. \"They'll make it look like a rescue,\" Rider said. \"But then they'll stay on station till they're relieved. Shai Khe will have to do without those men for a while.\"\n\n\"We could use a few for a truth-drawing.\" Chaz opined.\n\n\"The captain will turn them in as suspected smugglers. They'll be available.\"\n\n\"There she goes!\" Su-Cha crowed.\n\nA growing fire illuminated the strait.\n\n\"Pity we couldn't follow them,\" Chaz said.\n\nRider mused, \"I don't think they would have led us anywhere. I suspect their function was to draw us away.\" He shrugged. \"We'll see. Meantime, Shai Khe is short even more of his resources. Those can't be infinite.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Rider used the ladder to deposit Chaz and Su-Cha atop the Citadel, then returned the airship to its cradle. It was near dawn when he reached his laboratory. Chaz opened the door grinning.\n\n\"Good news?\"\n\n\"Good and bad,\" Chaz said. \"The good is, we had visitors. They're still here.\"\n\n\"The woman?\"\n\n\"How did you know?\"\n\n\"It seemed reasonable. She saw a ring used to open the door. I assume that is how she got inside?\"\n\nChaz nodded. \"She used Soup's. The guy used Spud's.\"\n\n\"Guy?\"\n\n\"Look him over. He wants to play hard-boy. Wouldn't talk to us.\"\n\n\"All right. What's the bad news?\"\n\n\"Two kinds of it. Somebody let out the prisoners you took this afternoon. People are claiming it was all a mixup and misunderstanding, but a couple City Guards got themselves killed. And Kentan Rubios is dead. The King wants to see you about that.\"\n\n\"He was murdered?\"\n\n\"Belledon thinks he was. I already talked to the physician. Says he didn't find anything suspicious.\"\n\nRider checked to see if there had been disturbances in the web while he was out of touch. None were evident. Shai Khe was playing a careful game where the web was concerned. Perhaps he had come in contact with it before and been burned by Jehrke.\n\nThe library contained two outsiders, each still as a statue. Caracen\u00e9 was one. Her eyes gleamed fear. The other was a well-dressed man, though his clothing was a little flashy. He seemed more resigned than frightened.\n\n\"Searched him?\" Rider asked.\n\n\"Yep. Down to his socks.\" Chaz indicated ten pounds of razor-sharp cutlery upon the library table. \"Regular walking arsenal, this guy.\"\n\n\"I'll release him from the field,\" Rider said. He ignored Caracen\u00e9.\n\nChaz drew his sword.\n\nRider negated the static spell which held the captives. Caracen\u00e9 staggered. Greystone and Preacher caught her, placed her firmly into a chair. Rider offered a second chair to the other captive. The man seated himself with dignity. He kept his hands carefully in sight.\n\n\"A professional,\" Chaz said.\n\nRider nodded. Of the man, he asked, \"Do I need to indulge in a truth-drawing?\"\n\n\"You'd be wasting your time. I don't know anything.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. Who gave you the ring you used to gain entry?\"\n\n\"Sanjek Polybos House.\"\n\nRider concealed his astonishment. The others were less successful. The prisoner seemed not to notice.\n\n\"Your assignment?\" Rider asked.\n\n\"Pick up anything he might find interesting.\"\n\n\"That's pretty general. Wasn't he more specific?\"\n\nThe captive thought a moment. He eyed Greystone, who was setting up for a truth-drawing, just in case. \"He did mention a key to a Treasury lock box. Nothing else specific. I got the impression papers and documents would be of considerable interest.\"\n\n\"Your name?\"\n\nThe man smiled. \"Zantos? Yes. Zantos Leaela.\"\n\nRider nodded. In a Saverne side country dialect the name meant approximately Stranger Dark As Night. More colloquially, Shadowman. In a way, what Rider had expected from his first glimpse of the man. \"Put him in the lumber room.\"\n\n\"You made sense out of that?\" Chaz asked, once the prisoner was out of the way.\n\n\"Yes. He's one of the King's Shadows.\"\n\n\"The secret agents who watch for sedition? But...\"\n\n\"Sanjek Polybos House,\" Rider said. \"We have been mistaken again. We were looking for a place, a building, when we should have been looking for a person.\" He took Vlazos' key from his pocket. \"A person very high up, who is part of the conspiracy.\" Sanjek, as a title, ranked with legate, legionary commander, or general. Rumor said five men of sanjek rank controlled the King's Shadows. One ranked the other four and reported directly to King Belledon. Of the others, one was responsible for the City, another for the Home Territories. The other two oversaw the eastern and western provinces of the empire.\n\n\"Obviously, Shai Khe has found ways around Vlazos' death.\"\n\nRider faced Caracen\u00e9. \"And what was your mission?\"\n\n\"I was not sent. I came to warn Chaz...\"\n\n\"Been singing us the same song,\" Su-Cha said. \"As if anybody is fool enough to believe that even the big thug's own mother would give him warning...\"\n\nThe barbarian snagged Su-Cha from behind. His meaty hands surrounded the imp's neck. He wore several silver rings. Su-Cha could not escape. Chaz lifted him chest high. \"Should we stew him or fry him?\"\n\n\"Warn Chaz about what?\" Rider asked.\n\nCaracen\u00e9 would say no more.\n\n\"Chaz?\"\n\n\"The way I get it, Kentan Rubios expected an attempt on his life.\" He beamed at Caracen\u00e9. Su-Cha kicked and squeaked, to no avail. \"He talked about asking us to help. One of the conspirators heard. When Shai Khe found out, he sent men to intercept any messengers coming from Rubios.\"\n\n\"Did a message come?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Interesting. But you didn't explain why Caracen\u00e9 is here.\"\n\n\"Rubios was supposed to be killed. She was afraid I might try to stop it and get myself hurt.\"\n\nSu-Cha unleashed a wild, braying, peacock peal of derisive laughter. Chaz cut it off by squeezing his throat.\n\n\"So. Independent confirmation of Belledon's suspicions.\"\n\n\"You going to see him?\"\n\n\"Soon. Yes. He may know more than I thought. And I should let him know what we've found out.\"\n\n\"What about our spy?\"\n\n\"We'll keep him till we track down Polybos House. But we'll let him go eventually. He hasn't done any evil.\" Rider fingered the Vlazos key. That bore immediate investigation if someone wanted it recovered. \"I'd best get to it.\"\n\nAt the door, Chaz whispered, \"What about the woman?\" He now carried Su-Cha in one hand, toes dragging, like a child dragging a doll.\n\n\"Hold on to her. If she's told the truth, she's put herself in danger.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "\"Well,\" Soup said as Spud sat up, clutching his head. \"We're alive. For now.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\" Spud asked. And, \"What did they give us? I've never had a hangover like this.\"\n\n\"I don't know. To both. With me it's my stomach.\"\n\n\"They dragged us onto a ship. I remember that.\"\n\n\"This is no ship.\" Darkness surrounded them. So did the odors of damp earth and rot. \"You tied up?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Are you?\"\n\n\"Yes. But I think I can get loose.\"\n\nA bright square of light materialized overhead, nearly blinding them. Vague dark shapes looked down. \"You guys awake?\"\n\nSpud saw no need to pretend otherwise. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Good. Ready to eat?\"\n\n\"How the hell are we going to eat tied up like this?\"\n\n\"I don't know. That's your problem. We just get paid to watch and feed you.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"In a hole in the ground.\" Both men above laughed. One lowered a basket by rope.\n\n\"Hurry it up,\" one jailor said. \"I ain't going to sit here all day.\"\n\n\"Hell, let the rope go,\" the other said.\n\nThe line snaked down. The square of light vanished. Soup asked Spud, \"What do you make of our new quarters?\"\n\n\"Only what we know already. It's an old cellar of some kind.\"\n\n\"Those weren't the guys who caught us.\"\n\n\"Hired thugs.\"\n\n\"How do we get out?\"\n\n\"First let's get untied. Step at a time.\"\n\n\"I'm almost loose... There. Be done in a minute.\"\n\nIt took longer. Soup's fingers were numb. But in ten minutes both men were free. Soup said, \"Shall we sample our host's hospitality?\"\n\n\"Your stomach better? My head is still pounding.\"\n\n\"A little. I'm starved. We must have been out a long time.\"\n\nThey emptied the basket.\n\nThey used the rope to measure their prison. It was twenty-one paces by twelve, and in terrible repair. One end wall was partly collapsed. But that was no help.\n\nSpud found human bones. Neither he nor Soup cared to speculate on their significance.\n\nSoup said, \"Looks like the only way out is the way we came in.\"\n\n\"Yeah. How high you figure that was?\"\n\n\"Twelve feet.\"\n\n\"We could reach it if I stood on your shoulders.\"\n\n\"Maybe. If we could find it. If it isn't locked or something. And if there isn't a guard outside. If I was guarding I'd sit on the lid.\"\n\n\"Best time would be at night, wouldn't it? Real early in the morning night.\"\n\nSoup asked, \"How are you going to know?\"\n\nThe darkness was dense in that pit. It was a darkness so dense it set the eye to seeing imaginary spooks. But it was not a darkness reserved to them alone. Whenever they were silent for a time, small things rustled. Sometimes it seemed the things were not so small.\n\n\"There,\" Spud said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Made a lariat out of the rope.\"\n\n\"What good is that?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Yet. It's a tool. The only one we have. Maybe I could rope the guy and pull him in.\"\n\nSoup did not think much of that. \"Maybe we ought to sit tight.\"\n\n\"You think Rider knows where we are?\"\n\n\"There's a good chance.\"\n\nThey sat tight a few hours because they had no choice.\n\nNext time a meal came through the hatchway the light was weaker outside. Spud complained, \"How about you guys untie us? There's rats down here.\"\n\nOnly one man had come. He laughed. \"You don't eat for a few days, those ropes will loosen up.\" He lowered another basket.\n\n\"Keep him talking,\" Soup whispered.\n\nSpud did his best. Soup examined their prison.\n\nIt had been used as a garbage pit. And dump for bodies. He saw fragments of several skeletons. But nothing useful as a tool or weapon.\n\n\"Quit your whining,\" the man above said. \"You're alive.\" And, \"I heard you guys was tough. Guess maybe you're not so much after all.\" He laughed as Spud spat something back.\n\nThe easterner demolished the man's claim to a family history.\n\nThe light went out.\n\n\"I think you made him mad, Spud.\"\n\nSpud chuckled. \"That was the idea. Look up there.\"\n\nSoup saw a hairline crack of light.\n\nThey argued about who would climb onto whose shoulders. The fading of the light caused Soup to give in.\n\nSpud fell off his first two tries. Third time around he caught hold and kept his balance. Soup huffed and muttered. Spud strained and stretched, forced the tips of his fingers through the crack. He ground his teeth, expecting a heel to smash them.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nHe pulled himself up, pushed the cover with his head. \"Heavy!\" he gasped.\n\n\"Hurry!\" Soup growled. \"You're ruining my shoulders.\"\n\nSpud heaved again. A corner of the lid rose. Then the whole thing slid aside. He threw an arm over the edge of the hole, anchored himself, looked around. \"Nobody up here.\" A moment later he was out. \"The rope!\" he said.\n\nIt came up. He hoisted Soup. They swung the lid into place.\n\n\"Where are we?\" Soup asked.\n\n\"Someplace near the Bridge. Tell that by the smell.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Looks marshy down there... What's that?\"\n\nA whiny, muted, metallic sound came from the north. \"Music,\" Soup said.\n\n\"If you say so.\" Spud coiled his lariat. \"Let's take a look.\"\n\nIn a moment they crouched behind a fallen wall, looked at a shabby building which leaked light and sound. A door opened on the far side. Enough light escaped to betray a small ship drawn up on a narrow beach.\n\n\"Smugglers,\" Soup said. \"They hired smugglers to watch us.\"\n\n\"What now?\"\n\n\"Put some distance between us and them. Hole up till dawn. Then head along the coast till we come to a village.\"\n\nSpud snorted. \"We'll see.\"\n\n\"We won't see much for long if we don't start stepping.\"\n\nThe sun had not been up an hour before they knew the awful truth. \"An island!\" Soup snarled. \"We're on an island.\"\n\n\"One of the Hurm Islands, to be exact,\" Spud said. \"Nowhere else fits.\"\n\n\"So we're trapped anyway.\"\n\n\"We'll steal a boat. We're not that far from the Saverne side.\"\n\nSoup demanded, \"How do you expect to do that? It won't be long before they know we're gone and start hunting. We can't grab one of their boats in broad daylight.\"\n\n\"We won't. I'll lower you back down so you can grouch and complain when they come to feed us. I'll pull you out again after dark. Then we'll grab a boat. And have twelve hours' head start.\"\n\n\"Why don't you go down in the hole?\"\n\n\"It's my plan.\"\n\nBickering, they headed for their former prison." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Rider was thoughtful as he descended to the Treasury chambers.\n\n\"Why so quiet?\" Su-Cha asked. In the shadows the imp was almost invisible. He gave Rider a start.\n\n\"I'd better pay more attention,\" Rider said. \"You could have been one of Shai Khe's gang.\"\n\n\"Right. I could. So what did Belledon say?\"\n\n\"That Kentan Rubios was the chief of the King's Shadows.\"\n\n\"Aha.\"\n\n\"Aha indeed. Polybos House\u2014a pseudonym, of course\u2014 is the only other sanjek in the City.\"\n\n\"Aha again. Where are you headed?\"\n\n\"To look into Vlazos' safety chest. Afterward, we'll visit Rubios' City house. Belledon said he ordered everything left as it was found.\"\n\n\"What's he going to do about Polybos House?\"\n\n\"Call him in for a conference and surprise him with a set of chains. We get first crack at him.\"\n\n\"What was that?\" They were near the Treasury vault, deep in the living stone of the Rock. The hallways were nests of shadows.\n\nRider saw nothing, but trusted Su-Cha's senses. He took hold of the web, probed. \"Something... The thing that murdered Odehnal. It's gone now. Evidently just spying.\"\n\n\"You'd better be quick. He might have gone for help.\"\n\n\"He probably did.\" Rider lengthened his stride. \"Keep watch.\"\n\nTwo old pensioners guarded the vault. They knew Rider. He had a Treasury secure chest of his own. He gave them a sealed order from Belledon. Half the security of the vault arose from the fact that only the vault attendants themselves could distinguish between the thousands of identical chests.\n\nThey argued. Not even the King, they said, could authorize...\n\nRider waved a hand. They fell silent. \"Show me the box,\" he commanded.\n\nThe elder turned, led the way. The other remained on guard, occasionally shaking his head puzzledly. Su-Cha vanished into the shadows outside.\n\nRider's guide indicated a chest indistinguishable from a hundred others. Rider tried the Vlazos key. The chest opened immediately.\n\n\"Ah.\" Several bound ledgers lay inside the chest, with one packet of letters tied together with a red ribbon. Rider opened a ledger at random.\n\nNames. Dates. Places. Minutes of topics discussed.\n\n\"This is what I came for.\" He took ledgers and letters and headed for the door.\n\nSu-Cha sent warning by tugging at the web.\n\nRider cast a small spell which set shadows dancing like a madman's dream. Those who lurked outside became disoriented. They called to one another in confusion.\n\nA second spell sent shadows playing over Rider's own body. He entered the chaos in the hallway\u2014and seemed to disappear.\n\nSu-Cha, meantime, shifted form. He grew into something huge and ugly, a nightmare beast with eight-inch fangs and a disposition so foul fire bubbled from his nostrils. He jumped at a man. \"Boo!\"\n\nPanic added its mad whip to the confusion.\n\nThe two old guards came to investigate. Su-Cha frightened them, too. He giggled, then took off after Rider.\n\n\"Names, dates, places, and plans,\" Rider told the others. The contents of Vlazos' chest lay scattered across the library table. \"A meticulous man, our Vlazos. He kept records of everything.\"\n\n\"When do we round them up?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"We'll let Belledon have the credit for that,\" Rider said. \"We're going to Kentan Rubios' house.\"\n\n\"Let Belledon do it? When you can't trust anyone anymore?\"\n\nRider tapped the ledgers. \"He'll have these to go by.\"\n\n\"But they know about them. Else why would a bunch of them have been down at the vault?\"\n\n\"Maybe we'll see the rats scatter,\" Su-Cha said. \"Rider, you think Belledon will grab Polybos House? Because we still got to figure out about the Devil's Eyes.\"\n\n\"Things are going to get crazy, we'd better see about Spud and Soup, too,\" Chaz said. \"Shai Khe might kill them out of spite.\"\n\n\"I don't think he's the petty sort,\" Rider said. \"Still, he can't keep a close rein on all his henchmen. We'll go first time things slow down.\"\n\nChaz jerked his head to indicate Caracen\u00e9. \"What about her?\"\n\n\"We can't have her running off, can we? She knows what we know. I'll set the doors and window so they can't be opened from inside or out... What's that?\"\n\n\"Somebody pounding on the door.\"\n\nRider strode into the laboratory. Chaz ducked into the contraption of mirrors. \"It's all right,\" Rider said, after peering through the peeping device. \"One of the King's men.\" He opened the door.\n\nChaz was determined to trust no one. Likewise, Su-Cha, who had secreted himself behind a rack of glassware. Even Preacher and Greystone, in the library, had drawn weapons.\n\nThe King's man did not enter. Breathlessly, he said, \"His Majesty has taken the prisoner. But people from the Shadows are clamoring to talk to him. His Majesty suggests you take custody.\"\n\nInside his hiding place, Chaz snorted derisively.\n\nRider replied, \"I'll do that. But not right away. Tell him he might reduce the clamor by giving the Shadows an assignment. Chaz. Get me those ledgers.\"\n\nWhen Chaz returned with the books, Rider told the messenger, \"His Majesty should find these very interesting. They should tell him what to do till I can get to him.\"\n\nThe messenger accepted the load with ill grace, departed.\n\n\"You think he's going to be safe, walking around with those?\" Chaz asked.\n\nRider, concentrating, raised a hand that asked for silence. He wove mystic patterns with his fingers, clapped his hands. \"That should do it.\"\n\n\"Do what?\"\n\n\"Fix him so people won't notice him.\"\n\n\"You made him invisible?\"\n\n\"That would have been too difficult and too time-consuming. No. He'll just not seem worth paying attention to.\"\n\n\"What now?\"\n\n\"Now we go see how Kentan Rubios died.\"\n\nRider had his associates assemble certain equipment. Five minutes later, they left. Chaz stalled outside the laboratory door. Suddenly, he grinned. \"She's not that anxious to stay after all.\"\n\nSomeone was trying to get the door open.\n\n\"It's your overpowering charm,\" Preacher said. \"She can't stand to be parted from you.\"\n\nChaz looked hurt. \"Hey! I maybe got to take that from the runt, here, but from you I don't...\"\n\nSu-Cha cackled. \"You bring it on yourself.\"\n\n\"We don't have all day,\" Greystone observed from down the hallway.\n\nThey hurried to catch up.\n\nGreystone asked Rider, \"How long before Shai Khe hears Polybos House is incommunicado and gets suspicious? He hasn't been reluctant to shed potential embarrassments.\"\n\n\"I've been wondering myself. Especially since the appearance of those men near the vaults.\" Rider ordered chariots brought for them. \"We suffer the disadvantage of all defenders. We don't know where or when the enemy will strike next.\"\n\nGreystone observed, \"A closer study of those ledgers might yield a few hints.\"\n\nChaz snorted. \"How?\"\n\n\"They not only tell who is part of the conspiracy, by omission they tell us who isn't. Among those who aren't named we'll find the men Shai Khe will want to remove.\"\n\n\"True,\" Rider agreed. \"And we'll look at that angle. But more, we need to strike back. We need to get on his tail and stick. To keep him moving. To take away his time to plan murders.\"\n\nA black wreath decorated the gate to Kentan Rubios' Balajka estate. It was the only outward show of tragedy's having struck. A gateman let them into the grounds. Rider stared around narrowly. \"Su-Cha, you and Chaz look for traces left by an uninvited guest. Greystone, Preacher, stay with me.\"\n\nSu-Cha and Chaz dismounted. Servants moved the chariots aside and began caring for the horses. Su-Cha began walking the base of the estate wall, sniffing. Chaz followed, looking bored, pestering the imp with unpleasant remarks. There was little else he could contribute.\n\nA footman led them to the atrium, where a household servant met them and said, \"Doctor Recer has remained with the Lord. I fear he has grown impatient. We all expected you sooner.\"\n\n\"We had hoped to arrive sooner,\" Rider said, and extended gracious apologies. \"Our enemies kept us busy. I'll smooth the doctor's feathers.\"\n\nThe body lay on a couch in a library. The doctor and a woman of the household staff were waiting nearby. After extended apologies and social amenities, Rider said, \"Describe the circumstances surrounding the death.\"\n\nGreystone and Preacher began prowling the bookshelves, the former making little sounds of awe whenever he spotted a tome he especially coveted.\n\nThe woman replied, \"The Lord had closed himself in here, leaving instructions that he was not to be bothered. At about the tenth hour he cried out. Several of us went to the door, but found it locked. He cried out again. 'Keep away, shadow,' we think he said. When the men broke the lock they found him sprawled on the floor.\"\n\nRider was standing before a window, watching Su-Cha and Chaz while he listened. Now he interrupted. \"On the floor? I was assured nothing would be disturbed.\"\n\nDoctor Recer said, \"There is no evidence that he died of aught but natural causes. His position was undignified.\"\n\nRider interrupted, speaking to the woman. \"This window is locked. Was that his custom?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It was. When he was working on something important.\"\n\n\"Yet he shouted at someone or something.\" Outside, Su-Cha's gestures, as he spoke to Chaz, indicated that he had found the point where something had crossed the wall.\n\n\"Rider?\" Greystone said. \"Look here.\"\n\nThe scholar was kneeling beside the room's one anomaly, an overturned chair. He pointed. A splinter of leg was split loose. Grey-brown hairs were caught there.\n\nRider squatted, considered, grunted. Then he went to the fireplace, in which no fire had been laid. Soot speckled clean firebrick. To the doctor, he said, \"Examine him again. Look for a puncture such as might have been made by a pin.\" He continued to examine the fireplace. Inside, caught on a brick, he found another hair.\n\n\"Well?\" Greystone asked.\n\n\"I think it was the same thing that killed Odehnal. It must be very agile and fairly intelligent.\"\n\nPreacher looked up the chimney. \"Skinny, too. This is a tight fit.\"\n\nThe doctor loosed a soft explosion of breath.\n\n\"You found it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Recer indicated a tiny purple bruise centered by a pinhead scab on the corpse's hip. \"Not that it's especially noteworthy. The man had a history of heart problems.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Rider cut off the excuses, turned to the woman. \"Is anything missing?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"We were not permitted to come in here.\"\n\nIn minutes Rider knew her for a well gone dry. Kentan Rubios had been a secretive man.\n\nSu-Cha blew in bubbling with his news. Rider indicated the hairs snagged on the chair leg. \"Can you get enough from that to trail the creature?\"\n\nSu-Cha snuffled while Chaz made rude remarks.\n\nThe imp grinned. \"Got it. A close thing, too. Any imp but me couldn't have managed it.\" He hustled out the door. Chaz grumbled in his wake.\n\nRider told the doctor, \"We're finished. You can remove the body now.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to interview the rest of the staff?\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary. Tell His Majesty his suspicions were well-founded. That we are on the trail of the killer. Greystone. Preacher. Come.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Rider overtook Su-Cha a block up the street. The imp looked crestfallen. \"It boarded a vehicle here.\"\n\nRider was not surprised. \"A closed coach, I'm sure. It would have spent some time waiting.\"\n\nChaz caught on before Su-Cha did. He guffawed.\n\nPreacher observed, \"Horses are as full of offal as the Lord is with mercy, and have no more sense of propriety than a northern barbarian.\"\n\nChaz shut up. He glared at Preacher, not quite sure what had happened.\n\nSu-Cha scowled but contained his pride. He sought the trail of the horses.\n\nGreystone, ever attentive to detail, observed, \"We're being watched. That man yonder picked us up at the gate.\"\n\nChaz glared at the loiterer, who was having trouble looking like part of the landscape. His sort did not belong on the Balajka Hill. \"Want me to grab him, Rider?\"\n\n\"Later, perhaps. Keep an eye on him. And keep another out for somebody watching him. Su-Cha. Can you track the horses or not?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" The imp's reply was curt. His expression dared disparaging remarks.\n\n\"Head in the right general direction but don't follow them exactly,\" Rider said.\n\n\"Eh? Why?\"\n\n\"Our nervous friend may be there to see if we can pick up the trail. We don't want him to run off and set up an ambush.\"\n\n\"Let's ambush him,\" Chaz urged. His blood was up. He was sick of being frustrated. He wanted to smack somebody around.\n\n\"We will,\" Rider said, his thoughts and plans shifting momentarily. \"Once we know if he's being watched in his turn.\"\n\nChaz chuckled wickedly.\n\nThey walked a block past where Su-Cha said the assassin had turned. Rider said, \"We'll go this way,\" and turned the opposite direction. That put them round the corner of a wall, out of view of the man who followed.\n\nRider reached into the web and drew power, hastily spun images of himself and Su-Cha. He did not have time to weave them well. In ten minutes they would begin floating between steps and leaking light through their bodies.\n\nRider swarmed up the wall, Su-Cha at his heels. From the wall's top, Rider said, \"Lead him along. Work your way back to the chariots. Lose him, then take the way Su-Cha pointed out,\" all in a rush. The web told him the watcher was nearby.\n\nTentative footsteps rounded the corner. Rider peeked carefully. The man seemed satisfied he was on the right track.\n\nRider reached into the web, seeking a watcher of the watcher. He found one quickly. \"Another one coming,\" he breathed.\n\nThis man's steps indicated great self-confidence. Rider let him pass, raised his head carefully. A man of Shai Khe's race. He murmured, \"Mark him carefully, Su-Cha. If we lose the horses we can follow him.\"\n\n\"Rider.\"\n\nSu-Cha's tone said they had trouble. Rider shifted and looked.\n\nA night gardener squatted among moon poppies, milk pot and milking fork in hand, gaping at them. He did not seem inclined to cause a fuss. Maybe he thought he'd caught an inadvertent whiff of pollen.\n\nThe oriental tracker's attention was directed in front of himself. Rider cast a small glamor that left the gardener shaking. He would be sure he had breathed pollen.\n\n\"He's out of sight,\" Su-Cha said. \"Let's go.\"\n\nRider jumped down. Su-Cha floated. They trotted into the street down which the assassin had departed his handiwork. Rider left a small chalk mark at each crossway, to indicate which direction he had gone.\n\nThe trail departed the Balajka district and its quiet, almost untenanted streets, dipping into an area occupied by merchants, tending downhill toward the Golden Crescent. The quality of their surroundings deteriorated. The farther they descended, the busier the night became, despite the hour.\n\nRider slowed the pace. He kept a greater part of his attention in the web, observing his surroundings. Su-Cha he charged with using his preternaturally sharp eyes and nose. In crowds like these it would be hard to spot Shai Khe's confederates. Dawn found them very near the waterfront, in a warehouse district. The assassin had traveled a long way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Pure good luck attended Spud and Soup. They slipped a boat away unnoticed, caught a brisk breeze, made a landfall not a half mile from a legionary encampment. The prefect of the camp was a friend of Rider and Jehrke. Within an hour they were crossing the Bridge of the World aboard the legion's courier airship. First light was just starting to limn the City when they stepped down into the jungle of the military yards.\n\nThough they were as far from the exit gate as they could get, they grinned at one another and set off jauntily. Spud whistled as he walked.\n\nMinutes later Spud's tune died behind Soup's hand. Both ducked into shadows.\n\nSoft voices approached. They saw men moving quickly, cautiously, probing shadows with shielded lights, arguing.\n\n\"Those knobbly guys again,\" Spud said. \"What're they doing here?\"\n\n\"Right now they're looking for a whistler.\"\n\nSpud reddened. \"Let's get them.\"\n\n\"I admire your confidence. Nevertheless, the odds aren't exciting for one of my delicate sensibilities.\" There were six gnarly men, none of whom were completely alert. They were going through the motions of a search, complaining.\n\n\"Let's even them up, then.\" Spud vanished, moving with feline silence.\n\nSoup sighed. Spud was in one of his moods. He would not give it up till he bashed a few heads. Or got bashed himself. Soup retreated the way he had come. Twenty feet back, he kicked a wooden support away from an airship cradle still under construction. He ducked behind the cradle.\n\nThe noise brought the gnarly men his way.\n\nSpud stepped out behind the last and smacked his head with a board. He jumped back into shadow.\n\nGnarly men chattered at one another. Knives came out. Lights probed shadows diligently.\n\nSoup took his turn crowning a man. When the gnarly men turned to rush him, Spud struck again.\n\nThen Rider's men waded in. Confused, howling, the gnarly men panicked. They fled into striped shadows. The yards resembled a boneyard populated by the skeletons of monsters more vast than any leviathan of the deep. The dawn itself was as bloody as a newly mown army.\n\nSoup and Spud skidded to a halt, dove into cover. The gnarly men had joined a young regiment working around a monster of an air warship from the eastern fleet. Soup sputtered, \"They're trying to steal that airship!\"\n\nChaos spread as the fugitives reported.\n\nSpud observed, \"Some big payoffs must have been made to let that many men sneak in here.\" An entire cohort guarded the military yards.\n\n\"Couldn't be all of them, though,\" Soup observed.\n\n\"No. Just a few officers and noncoms. A big enough racket ought to get the rest out here.\"\n\n\"What're you going to do? Howl like a mad dog?\"\n\nThe how did present a problem. They had come out of captivity with nothing but their clothing.\n\n\"Better think of something fast,\" Soup said. \"They're not going to wait around.\" The would-be airship thieves were organizing a counterstroke.\n\nSoup found himself talking to empty air.\n\nHe found Spud searching the apparel of a fallen gnarly man. \"Aha. Here we go. Now something flammable.\"\n\nSoup thought he got the idea. He also thought it was too dangerous. If the fire got out of hand the whole yard could go. Nevertheless, he collected a pair of dropped lanterns. One still burned. He tuned it up high, whirled like a hammer thrower in the athletic games, arced it toward the gas bladders.\n\n\"What are you, crazy?\"\n\nSoup glared. What did Spud want? He collected another lantern. \"Light this.\" Spud had taken a spark-striker from the gnarly man he had plundered.\n\nThe sparks betrayed their hiding place. But as men started toward them others nearer the airship sent up a howl of panic.\n\nThe lantern Soup threw had blown its reservoir. A merry fire was popping and crackling as it crawled toward the gas bladders. Would-be airship pirates fled. Some of the bolder tried to keep the burning oil contained. Those stalking toward Soup and Spud turned back.\n\nSoup sent the second lantern arcing into the crowd. Meantime, Spud set a safer fire which sent up billows of dark smoke. \"This is what I had in mind,\" he said. \"Not attempted suicide.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Let's get out of here. We don't want to get rounded up with that lot. Too much explaining, I figure.\"\n\nAvoiding capture, though, proved easier said than done. First, several very angry, determined, and perseverant gnarly men got onto their trail. Then soldiers popped up everywhere, sooner than expected.\n\nThe guilty officers, nervously alert, had heard the first uproar. They had decided to cover up. Three hundred soldiers were in the yards with orders to take no prisoners.\n\nUnlike the pirates, Soup and Spud did not try to escape, only to evade. They lay low during the worst howl and clang. When it waned and the troops were feeling smug, they spied around and found a noncom known to themselves and Rider.\n\n\"Baracas,\" Soup called. \"Over here.\" He stepped from the shadows skirting a mooring mast, into light where he could be recognized. Spud followed.\n\n\"You guys? What're you doing here?\"\n\n\"Foiling an airship theft.\"\n\nThe soldier frowned. \"That what was going on?\"\n\n\"We rushed in on the courier from the Twelfth's camp on the Saverne side...\" Soup shut up. Spud had gouged him.\n\nThe soldier, baffled, shrugged and said, \"Stay close to me or you might get gutted with the rest. We'll let the tribunes sort you out later.\"\n\n\"That was the idea,\" Soup admitted.\n\nThe troops had the fires out. They were collecting bodies. Not a few wore imperial uniforms. The gnarly men and easterners were fierce when cornered. Soup counted a score of the squat men and nearly as many orientals. Spud observed, \"This ought to break Shai Khe's back. He'll have to do his own dirty work now.\"\n\n\"How many got away?\" Soup asked Baracas.\n\n\"None. That we know of.\"\n\nSoup chuckled. \"That'll get Shai Khe's goat. Can you imagine what he could have done with that airship? And his powers? He could have held the City hostage.\"\n\n\"Who the hell is this Shy Key?\" Baracas asked.\n\n\"A villain with enough wealth to make your officers blind while forty men steal an imperial warship.\"\n\nBaracas took them to the leading centurion of his maniple, who immediately kicked the question of their presence up to the tribune level.\n\nThey found officers gathered, discussing the excitement in secretive voices, when Baracas brought them to headquarters, near the yard gates. A sour-faced subaltern demanded, \"What do you want, Baracas?\"\n\n\"Sir, these men were mixing it up with the foreigners trying to steal the Grand Phantom, and I thought...\"\n\n\"They were in there? What're they doing here? You had orders...\"\n\n\"They're Rider's men, sir. They were trying to stop that gang.\"\n\nA half dozen heads jerked around. Faces went pale. Someone muttered, \"If the Protector is mixed up in this...\"\n\nA tribune moved closer. He snapped, \"You! Baracas, is it? Why haven't you executed your orders?\"\n\n\"Sir, they're Rider's...\"\n\n\"Is Rider your superior officer? Kill them.\"\n\nSoup grinned. \"Now we know who'll be first to hang.\"\n\nAnd Spud, \"You do it, Baracas, and I'll bet you your pension you don't make it to sundown yourself.\"\n\nBaracas grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. He whispered, \"Shut up! You want to get out of this alive?\" The soldier was no fool. He had seen the lay of things.\n\nUnfortunately, the tribune had, too. He drew a dagger. \"Take them!\"\n\nSoup told Spud, \"Brother, in this thing there's no end to the heads that need busted.\" He snatched up a camp stool.\n\nSpud produced a knife taken from a fallen easterner. The officers closed in carefully. Those who knew the reputations of Rider and his men hung back, knowing a lot of people were going to get hurt.\n\nSuddenly, darkness descended." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Rider stepped over the fallen tribune, knelt beside Spud, held an open phial beside his nose. He told Su-Cha, \"Get the rest of these men tied.\"\n\nSpud revived swearing and swinging. Rider plucked his fist out of the air. \"Easy, Omar.\"\n\n\"Rider! How'd you get here?\"\n\n\"Might ask you the same thing,\" Su-Cha chirruped. \"You're supposed to be buried under a ruin on the Hurm Islands.\"\n\nSoup reiterated Spud's behavior and question.\n\nSu-Cha said, \"We were thinking about rescuing you in a couple days. All that brainwork wasted.\"\n\n\"How come you're here, Rider?\" Spud asked.\n\n\"We were tracking a creature that killed the chief of the King's Shadows. The trail passed near the military yards. We saw smoke. We arrived in time to see you being brought in here. Once the situation became clear, I used a knockout spell. Hurry, Su-Cha.\"\n\n\"We know why Shai Khe was in the area, now. And by now he must suspect his plan has gone sour. Let's find him before he gets away again. Omar. This soldier, Baracas. Do you trust him to keep this lot under arrest?\"\n\n\"He knows what would happen to him if he didn't.\"\n\n\"Put him in charge, then. We have to go.\"\n\nMinutes later they departed the military yards. Baracas came behind, leading the prisoners. All had been stripped of togas and badges of rank. They seemed a well-kempt chain of convicts. Baracas headed for the Citadel.\n\nRider headed toward the waterfront, along the yard fence.\n\n\"Look there,\" Soup said. \"One of our eastern friends got away.\"\n\nA man had dropped over the fence. He spotted them hastening toward him. His eyes got big. He whirled and ran.\n\nSoup whooped and charged after him. Rider followed in a deceptive lope that ate ground fast. Over his shoulder, he told Su-Cha, \"Get upstairs and follow him.\"\n\nThe imp stopped laboring to keep up. Soon he was a bird circling high above.\n\nRider snagged Soup's shoulder. \"Let him lose us now.\"\n\nPuffing, Soup glowered. \"I'm not finished with those guys.\"\n\n\"He won't lead us while he can see us. If he loses us he'll run to his master.\"\n\nAnd so it proved. Touching Rider through the web, Su-Cha reported their quarry moving more cautiously, watching his backtrail, yet now traveling with obvious purpose. Rider said, \"Keep a sharp watch. Shai Khe will have sentries out.\"\n\nThat, too, proved true. But Rider's crowd kept them from reporting. They left a half dozen snoring thugs behind.\n\n\"This is the place,\" Rider said, staring at the blank face of a brick warehouse. Su-Cha circled above. \"This time let's not let him get away.\" He dipped into his pockets, passed out what appeared to be green hens' eggs. He assigned posts around the warehouse. \"Don't challenge him,\" he said. \"If he comes your way, throw that, yell, and get under cover.\"\n\n\"What are they?\" Spud asked.\n\nRider might not have heard. \"Move out. I'll keep track through the web. I'm going inside on the count of a hundred.\"\n\nThe door through which the would-be airship pirate had fled stood ajar. Rider gave it a minute examination. It was as safe as it seemed. He slipped inside.\n\nThe warehouse was dark and seemed empty. The scurry of mice sent hollow clackings tumbling into the distance and back. Shai Khe was fond of dark places.\n\nHe slipped a green egg into each hand and advanced slowly. His eyes adjusted. Enough exterior light leaked in to permit navigation.\n\nHe heard a voice raised somewhere below, then the sounds of men moving hurriedly.\n\nThe fugitive had reported. His master was about to make his exit.\n\nRider ran, hunting a descending stairway.\n\nHe was too eager. He failed to notice a black silk trip line at ankle level. His toe hooked it.\n\nHe pitched forward, twisting. He hurled the egg in his right hand so he would not crush it when he broke his fall. He managed that in adequate silence, but the breaking egg sounded like a bottle smashing against pavement.\n\nThe sound was heard. Orders barked in an eastern tongue. Feet hammered on the steps. Rider ghosted into the concealment of a pillar. Three men pitched out of a shadow he had not recognized as a doorway. He flung his second egg.\n\nIt broke against a man's chest. The man flopped down immediately. The man behind him took three steps before collapsing. The third, to one side, halted in consternation. Rider leapt, felled him with one powerful punch.\n\nThrough the shadowed door and downstairs he loped\u2014directly into a pair of guards with drawn blades.\n\nHe could not stop. It was too late. He flung himself through the air. His shout froze them for a second. A boot connected with a chin. A fist hammered the crown of a skull. Rider hit the floor and rolled, looking for more resistance.\n\nA vast cellar surrounded him, dank and rank. There wasn't a soul to be seen.\n\nA faint noise caught his ear. He hurried forward to a narrow canal leading into one wall of the basement. Shai Khe was escaping through the sewers!\n\nThe sound came again. It was the creak of an oar in an oarlock.\n\nRider extended himself through the web. The sewers were not well known to him. He traced them in his proximity. They formed a maze. He tried pinpointing Shai Khe, had no luck. The easterner used some clever sorcery to blind the web to his presence.\n\nHad Rider had the proper tools he could have raised a spirit to set tracking Shai Khe, but he did not have the tools. The easterner had evaded him again.\n\nOr had he? There was the thing Rider had been tracking when the uproar at the yards diverted him. Did Shai Khe's invisibility extend to it? It must be with its master.\n\nHe reached out, tugged at the web, took it in mental fingers, wove a net that would capture the whereabouts of the killing creature. And there it was! Moving away slowly, underground...\n\nRider raced upstairs, through the warehouse, into the bright street, touching his men as he went. They gathered quickly. \"Shai Khe escaped into the sewers, but I'm tracking him through the web. Follow me.\"\n\nHis lope was deceptive. Soon even Chaz was puffing and straining.\n\nRider slowed till everyone caught up. He beckoned Su-Cha down. The imp perched on a balcony railing. Rider said, \"Shai Khe is almost directly beneath us here. There is an outflow into the Bridge a few hundred yards away. There's nowhere else he can go.\"\n\n\"We going to jump him?\" Chaz puffed.\n\n\"Yes. And don't hesitate an instant. He'll be ready. Don't take any needless risks, either.\" He loped off again. People paused to admire his swift, easy grace. He reached the outflow well before he expected Shai Khe.\n\nThe others joined him.\n\nThe outflow debouched between wharves. Small grain ships were tied up alongside each. Rider subjected them to a swift visual examination, saw nothing suspicious. He sent Soup and Spud aboard the nearest vessel on the right side, left Preacher and Chaz above the outflow, took Greystone aboard the vessel to the left. The masters of both ships protested.\n\nA boat shot from the sewer mouth.\n\nEggs hailed against it. Rider hurled a grapnel appropriated aboard his ship. In a moment he was hauling the boat in. The sea breeze began to disperse the green mist hiding it.\n\n\"Where the hell is he?\" Chaz shouted.\n\nShai Khe was not aboard.\n\nThe boat contained only an unconscious, shaggy, monkey-like thing slightly smaller than Su-Cha.\n\n\"Somewhere enjoying his joke at our expense,\" Rider said. He did not hide his disappointment." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Chaz tossed the shaggy assassin down onto the worktable in the laboratory. \"What is it?\" he asked Caracen\u00e9.\n\nShe chewed her lip for a moment. \"A khando. Their forebears were human. They lived in a city in the jungle in the east. One of their sorcerers overstepped himself a thousand years ago. A few generations later they had degenerated into near animals. They are just intelligent enough to be useful to Shai Khe.\"\n\n\"Well. A straight answer.\"\n\nRider completed a quick examination of the suite. The woman had done no damage. \"You men get some rest. I'll look into the matter of Polybos House.\"\n\n\"What about our friends in the closet?\" Preacher asked.\n\n\"Feed them. And the khando when it wakens. By which time I suggest you have it caged.\"\n\nSu-Cha snickered. He was studying the khando intently. Rider anticipated some devilment.\n\n\"I wonder if it could lead us to Shai Khe if we turned it loose,\" Chaz said.\n\n\"It might. And he'll be looking for that.\" Rider finished replenishing his pockets with oddities. \"I'll be back soon. Try to restrain your propensities for finding trouble.\" He went to the door.\n\nBehind him, Chaz growled, \"Don't even think about it, runt. You shift into one of those, I'll break two necks just to make sure I get the right one.\"\n\n\"Always bullying. Do they send barbarians to school for that? One of these days... wham!\"\n\nThe others began bickering about who had to feed the prisoners.\n\nRider smiled. They were handling the troublesome situation well.\n\nKing Belledon grumbled, \"You took your good sweet time getting here.\"\n\n\"I had a chance to capture Shai Khe. It didn't work out, though. He had one more bolt hole than I could plug. You heard what happened in the yards?\"\n\n\"Yes. I've been in a state of siege here. The Shadows have done everything but try to break in.\"\n\n\"Did Polybos House have anything to say?\"\n\n\"Nothing. Neither accusations nor offers of pardon reach him. The more time passes, the more he seems in dread, though.\"\n\n\"His master does not have an easy way with followers who get themselves captured. Let me have a look at him.\"\n\nHouse was isolated in a sitting room that could be entered by but one door. One of Belledon's nephews guarded that. The King carried the only key.\n\nRider did not recognize the bony human caricature called Polybos House. But House recognized him, and retreated in terror. Rider observed, \"You judge all humanity by yourself.\" He settled into the room's one chair, stared at the prisoner. \"Are you ready to talk?\"\n\n\"He would kill me.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But won't he do that anyway? Isn't that what you expected from the beginning? And thought you could evade?\"\n\nHouse did not reply.\n\nRider was sure he had touched the truth, though. \"Tell me about the Devil's Eyes.\"\n\nHouse looked blank.\n\nRider said, \"There is no way the King can overlook your treason. But you can get out of this with your skin if you help us take Shai Khe.\"\n\nStill nothing.\n\n\"I don't understand this unreasoning fear of the man.\" He began tapping the fingernails of his right hand against the arm of his chair. When House still did not respond, he said, \"I don't want to resort to a truth-drawing.\"\n\n\"There is no hope against him,\" House said. \"He has half the world at his command. He has half of Shasesserre.\"\n\n\"He has very little of the City. I have taken it away. If he doesn't run soon...\" Rider shifted subject. \"Who were the most important men scheduled for assassination?\"\n\nNothing.\n\nThere was a vaguely sagey, sweet smell in the air now. House began to look sleepy.\n\n\"General Partricus?\" Rider asked. \"His province is the east. I'd think Shai Khe would find him especially interesting. He returned to the City the other day. And he is a man beyond temptation or fear. If he hadn't those qualities he would not have received the eastern command.\"\n\nShasesserre, unlike some empires, was blessed with many devoted commanders.\n\nHouse's eyes were almost shut. He nodded feebly. Then he started, glared at Rider suspiciously. Rider continued tapping his chair. House's eyes drifted shut.\n\nSilent as death, Rider stalked closer. The sweet sage smell grew stronger. House began to snore.\n\nRider waited several minutes before breaking the seal on a small phial. He let House breathe the vapors that came forth. House wakened, but his eyes remained glazed.\n\nRider performed a series of small magicks. House became as stiff as a wooden statue.\n\nRider asked questions. House answered in a low, slow, flat voice, very literally. Rider had to phrase himself carefully to obtain answers filled with sense.\n\nEven then he was not sure he had learned anything of value.\n\nPolybos House had used the King's Shadows to advance Shai Khe's cause, but was not in the know in the easterner's organization. House mentioned names, but none were news to Rider. Every one had been in the book left by Vlazos. Those scheduled for assassination were no surprise either.\n\n\"The Devil's Eyes.\" Rider kept returning to that. And getting nothing, no matter how he phrased his question.\n\nMaybe there was no connection. Just random thoughts from the mind of a dying man.\n\nRider brought the King into the room. \"I've gotten what little there is to be had. Keep him out of the way.\"\n\n\"You got nothing useful?\"\n\n\"Very little. Shai Khe remains the key. I have to find him. Till I do we all have to stay alert. He'll keep trying.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "\"So what do we do now?\" Chaz asked. \"He's outguessed us right down the line.\"\n\n\"He is here to eliminate men who threaten his imperialist dream. I've looked over the list of candidates for assassination. I want one of you to attach yourselves to each of the most likely. Excepting you, Su-Cha. I want you to shift again and fly around looking for places that might hide an airship.\"\n\n\"Come on!\" Su-Cha protested. \"You know how much energy shifting takes? You know how much a bird has to eat to keep going? My bones still ache from the last time. And I lost ten pounds. When you're my size you can't afford to lose ten pounds.\" He spun on Chaz, source of a volcanic, rumbling, mocking chuckle.\n\nBut it was Preacher who sank the spurs with a scriptural quotation about shirkers and malingerers.\n\n\"How does a guy get any respect around here?\" Su-Cha demanded. \"Without wearing a skirt? I'm the only one who's contributed anything in this business. But do I get any appreciation? Oh, no! What I hear is a chorus of disdain from a bunch of losers.\"\n\nSoup and Spud made violin noises. Squeaky violin noises. Only Greystone refrained from baiting the imp. Su-Cha glowered his way, expecting one of his rare but powerful jibes.\n\nChaz asked, \"What're you going to do, Rider?\"\n\n\"Barhop. And ask about the Devil's Eyes.\" He looked at the woman. \"Do you have anything to report on the subject, Caracen\u00e9?\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\nRider watched closely. He concluded that she knew nothing.\n\nHe did not understand women well. His life was too busy for them. But he knew the small twitches and evasions of eye that came with the slightest of lies, and believed women and men to be much alike in that respect.\n\nHe turned to his list of prospective murder victims. In a moment he began writing letters of introduction he hoped would place his followers near the men most at risk. He sent a man out as he completed each letter. The last gone, he began donning the disguise he would wear. Su-Cha watched. And ate.\n\nThe imp became bottomless when he did a lot of shifting, though in normal times he seldom ate at all. Su-Cha's metabolism was a mystery Rider could not penetrate. He suggested, \"If you've learned the khando well enough, you might assume its shape. If the opportunity arises. After you have yanked the web to let me know where you are.\"\n\nSu-Cha lifted a honey bun in salute. \"My thoughts exactly.\"\n\nRider looked at the woman. \"You're satisfied to be here?\"\n\n\"I am safe here.\"\n\nRider betrayed no expression. But he wondered. \"Su-Cha. Time. I'm ready, and I want to lock up behind me.\"\n\n\"Right. Any time.\" The imp grabbed two more buns. Once they had departed the room, he asked, \"When are you going to rest, Rider?\"\n\n\"I can't right now.\"\n\n\"A tired man makes mistakes.\"\n\n\"True. I haven't forgotten that.\"\n\n\"You think Shai Khe will run now? After the latest roundup?\" The easterner's men from the warehouse had been collected by the City Guard.\n\n\"Not till he is under more pressure than we've managed so far. He should limit his ambitions, though.\"\n\n\"Later, then.\"\n\nRider watched Su-Cha rise and fly southward, toward the Golden Crescent. The warehouses were among the largest structures in Shasesserre. If Shai Khe were to hide an airship inside the City, he almost had to do so there.\n\nRider drifted into alleyways where he would have no trouble ambushing anyone following him. Setting several ambuscades yielded nothing. Finally, confident that he was not followed, he donned the rest of his disguise and returned to the streets as a Tiberian sailor. The hour was yet early for the taverns to bustle, but those that catered to sailors were busy enough. Rider faded in, looking as rough and fierce as the worst. A livid false scar, down his left cheek from temple to chin, leaving his left eye partially closed, lent him an especially piratic air.\n\nA stranger in a sailors' bar dared not ask too many questions too directly. The distinction between merchant and smuggler was a matter of commercial or imperial viewpoint, and the crown was known for sending King's Shadows to look for customs evaders.\n\nRider, though, had a creditable story. He was hunting the man who had given him his scar, the man supposedly having struck him from ambush and left him for dead. He had come all the way from Tiberia seeking revenge. He had a perfect Tiberian accent, knew that land well having been there in service, and, as a Tiberian would on such a quest, he vacillated between frugality and offering drinks to anyone who might help him. The man he described to all listeners was Emerald.\n\nFew Tiberians came as far east as Shasesserre. But other westerners sympathized with Rider's tale, and a few began accompanying him from one stew to another, seeking his mythical adversary.\n\nHe had been legitimized among the sailors.\n\nIn time he felt safe enough to insert questions about the Devil's Eyes.\n\nMany a man had known Emerald, and none had become his friend. But no one recalled seeing him around lately.\n\nThe hunt widened as westerners with their own grievances began taking more active roles. Rider noted a growing uneasiness among eastern sailors, many of whom must have known who Emerald was and now feared being lumped together with him.\n\nRider suspected his imposture was getting out of hand.\n\nIt might have been the thirtieth tavern. He kept no count. But he was as alert as ever. He noted, amidst the rowdiness, one eastern face which remained quietly thoughtful. After a few minutes its owner began edging toward the door.\n\nBefore the man was halfway there Rider excused himself from his companions and headed for the rear of the tavern.\n\nHe ducked out the back and loped through the nearest breezeway to the street, arriving moments before the easterner marched past, oblivious to watching ayes.\n\nRider shed most of his disguise. He tore his sailor's clothing, making himself look less prosperous. He slipped a pebble into a shoe, donned a stoop, and set out after the easterner.\n\nRider's precautions were wasted. The sailor was not concerned about his backtrail. He merely meant to report news probably of minimal interest.\n\nThe trail, inevitably, led toward water. Toward the river again. It seemed Shai Khe had to have water at his back. As he hurried through the gathering shadows, Rider pondered the significance of that.\n\nHe reached through the web and touched his men. Without exception he found them bored. Then he reached for Su-Cha.\n\nHe found the imp perched among the gargoyles surrounding the statue of an old king atop a commemorative pillar facing the sea the king had conquered. Su-Cha had assumed the shape of a gargoyle. He was sleeping.\n\nRider nudged him.\n\nThe imp squawked and launched himself from the pillar, to the astonishment of witnesses below. He filled the web with conflicting excuses for his having taken a nap.\n\nRider ignored them all. Come help me follow a man, he sent. Disguise or no, his continued presence behind the man he stalked meant ever-increasing risk of discovery, especially as the gathering night made it necessary to remain close.\n\nSu-Cha arrived quickly. His night vision was superb. Rider drifted back.\n\nThe stalk led up the bank of the river, beyond the water gate and wall, and then past suburbs into marshes where country folk hunted waterfowl and gathered wild rice. The easterner seemed well acquainted with the path he followed through the boggy land.\n\nSu-Cha dropped down to confer with Rider, who followed a safe quarter mile behind. \"He's probably heading for an old hulk that's on the river's edge over yonder,\" the imp said. \"The trail is hard to spot from up there. But I did notice two places where men like that Emerald are hanging around. Good ambush places.\"\n\nRider gave the imp two green eggs. \"Drop these on them after the man goes past. Wait for me outside the hulk.\"\n\nSu-Cha grunted and flapped away.\n\nAn hour later Rider met the imp a hundred yards from the hulk, which loomed like the corpse of a beached whale against the night. Su-Cha said, \"I think we and our friend have had a long walk for nothing.\"\n\n\"How's that?\"\n\n\"Right after I egged the first ambush I noticed a boat leaving the hulk. Headed downriver. I'm pretty sure Shai Khe was in it.\"\n\n\"Uhm.\" Rider stared at the hulk.\n\n\"Do we hit it anyway? Take it away, too?\"\n\n\"Did those men seem suspicious before they fell asleep?\" He had slipped past both sets of guards without bothering either.\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Then we'll leave things be. For now. Except to add a few flourishes.\" In his pockets Rider carried several stones, cousins to that through which he had tracked Soup and Spud. He showed them to Su-Cha, who grinned as much as he could with a beak. Then the imp began changing shape.\n\nHe became one of the huge semi-aquatic rodents that inhabited the marshes, a beast variously called a waterbear, a waterdog, or a waterrat. The creatures were known for their curiosity, stupidity, and a fearlessness based primarily on the fact that their flesh was so tough and ill-flavored even a crocodile avoided eating them. The men aboard the hulk would be accustomed to occasional inspections by itinerant waterbears.\n\nSu-Cha filled his rat mouth with Rider's stones.\n\nTen minutes later the hulk reverberated to shouts of exasperation. Five minutes more and Su-Cha had returned, grinning. He changed again. \"I marked most of them.\"\n\nRider sensed the stones through the web. \"Their movements should tell us a lot. Let's get back to the City. Shai Khe will be up to some deviltry.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Chaz had been told to guard Lord Priscus Procopio. Procopio was a retired general who had won distinction in the far east. He had won many new provinces, and the hearts of the people who dwelt in them. He had shown no mercy to the old cults and tyrants that had oppressed and tortured those lands.\n\nNow Procopio was a leading royal adviser. And Rider assumed he was a man familiar with the threat posed by the sinister Shai Khe.\n\nIndeed he was. \"We crossed swords twice, out in Nuna,\" he told Chaz, as they looked out over Shasesserre from behind heavy glass. \"He was old and cunning even then. Lucky for me he hadn't the reputation he's got now. The people out there exposed his plots both times. The second time I caught and executed his son. Or a man purported to be his son.\"\n\n\"Then you really believe he's trouble, eh?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"'Bout time we ran into somebody who does.\" Chaz knew Soup and Preacher had been refused access to the men they were supposed to guard, and that the others had gotten only slightly more cooperation from their charges.\n\n\"I'll believe anything I hear about Shai Khe. The man is a devil. I've seen the wretches who have escaped his rule. I've talked to them. And I know I'm near the top of his hate list, because of his son. Shasesserre itself must bear that hatred, so long as he lives. No, I don't doubt anything. And I'm terrified.\"\n\nChaz said, \"You don't look it.\"\n\n\"You learn to tame fear, and mask it, when you're a proconsul trying to rule twenty millions and you're backed only by five thousand swords and a few airships. You learn to appear as indifferent as stone. If the dogs sense so much as an apprehension in you, you're lost.\"\n\nChaz scanned the lights of the great City. Even after years he was not comfortable here. \"And is there a point to it? To the army being in Nuna, I mean. Is there a mutual benefit?\"\n\nProcopio's expression soured. \"Until the magnates and tax farmers feel it's tamed enough to move in. Even then, I suppose. Our reign isn't nearly so fearful as that we displaced.\"\n\nA foreigner himself, Chaz vacillated between viewpoints on the benefits of imperial rule. Some were obvious, like freedom from continual intertribal warfare. But they seemed balanced by losses less tangible.\n\n\"Ach!\"\n\n\"What?\" Procopio demanded.\n\n\"Someone in the street. Passed through the light coming from yonder window. He was only there for a second, but I'd bet it was Shai Khe. Moved that snaky way he has.\"\n\nProcopio shuddered. \"Think he'll use sorcery?\"\n\n\"No. That would get Rider hot on his trail.\"\n\n\"It'll be something cunning and unexpected, then.\"\n\n\"Better be very sneaky. Or he's had it.\" The entire household was alert. Nevertheless, Chaz began another circuit of the darkened room, seeking weaknesses hitherto overlooked.\n\nThere were only two possible points of entry, other than a direct smash through the massive window.\n\nA faint drone came from the mouth of the fireplace. It put Chaz in mind of a beehive wakening.\n\nThe big barbarian grinned. For this he was prepared.\n\nOn a table nearby were several earthenware jars in the amphora shape but only eight inches tall. Each was sealed with a thin layer of wax. From the wax protruded a wick. He lighted one of these from a small candle hitherto concealed within a cabinet. He placed the jar in the fireplace. He and Procopio both drew deep breaths and buried their faces in balls of moistened cotton.\n\nThe jar suddenly sent flames and gases roaring up the flue. The fire blasted thirty feet up from the chimney's head.\n\nThe flue filled with a brief flutter, then a rattle. Chaz lowered the candle, watched scores of giant bees rain down upon the hearthstone. Each was dead, wingless, roasted, poisoned.\n\nChaz grinned wickedly in the candlelight. He beckoned Procopio. \"Come on.\"\n\nThe old soldier was spry enough to keep pace with Chaz's wild charge for the hatch that gave access to the roof. He snatched an old war axe off a wall along the way, a trophy from some campaign of his younger years.\n\nThe two erupted onto the roof in time to see a silhouette vanish over the edge. Another lay beside the chimney.\n\nFearless of the height, Procopio dashed to the edge. He hefted his axe and paused, as if timing... Down the weapon went, hurled. A yell attested to the accuracy of his throw.\n\nChaz knelt beside the form lying against the chimney. The man's face was gone. He must have been looking down the chimney when Chaz had sprung his surprise.\n\nBeside him lay an ovoid box, which proved to house a paper nest.\n\n\"Nasty thing,\" Procopio said. \"Saw them out east. Their sting can fell a mule. Worst part is, they can be trained. Never heard of using a whole nest before, though. Guess Shai Khe wanted to make sure.\"\n\nChaz straightened, stared down at the patch of light spilling from the window across the way. A tall, lean form glided into it. Its eyes glowed greenly. It bowed slightly, then moved away.\n\nHastily, Chaz dragged out a knife and hurled it. It rang upon stone. An almost mischievous chuckle floated upward. Chaz cursed. \"Let's get after him.\"\n\nThe old soldier restrained him. \"He would like nothing better. Stay. Savor the triumph we've achieved.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "All through the night assassins moved. They were not many, but their ways were stealthy and cunning. Never were they so direct or crude as to employ frontal attack with steel.\n\nThey struck in six places in addition to making the attempt on Procopio. Rider guessed well enough to have sent men to four of the slated victims. Not one man died who had the wit to accept protection from one of Rider's men. Both men who refused it perished.\n\nRider himself reached the City too late to participate in anything but the mourning.\n\n\"Four men dead.\" For the first time since the affair began his anger threatened to betray him. He had driven himself to the limit of his astonishing physical resources. \"One more imposition, Su-Cha. One more change. Patrol above the river. High up. See if Shai Khe's boat returns to that hulk.\"\n\nWeariness and reaction to the murders had sapped the imp's spirit. He voiced none of his customary complaints. He simply nodded.\n\nRider said, \"I'll be waiting at the airship yards.\"\n\nSu-Cha went up into the night. Rider gathered his men and led them to the yards, where they boarded his favorite fast airship. They all collapsed into exhausted sleep.\n\nSu-Cha arrived as Rider wakened, alerted by the imp's tug on the web. \"He's there,\" Su-Cha gasped, and collapsed.\n\nRider wakened his men. They gaped at the imp, for this was the first time they had seen him sleep.\n\n\"Take your stations,\" Rider said. He alerted the airship's motive demon. Then he described what he and Su-Cha had discovered while the others were, for the most part, trying to save the lives of men who refused to believe themselves endangered.\n\n\"We could be seen lifting off,\" Greystone cautioned.\n\n\"I intend operating on the assumption that we will be,\" Rider replied. \"But we'll feint to the east, up the Bridge. In any event, the ship can outrun any messenger.\"\n\nThe airship came out of the east, with the rising sun. It hurtled over the marshes so low the belly of the gondola whispered to the touch of tall reeds. Below, waterbears squeaked in sudden fright. Yawning marsh crocodiles bellowed in amazement and slithered into the safety of their deep pools.\n\nStartled Emerald-like sentries gawked, then shouted warnings that were far too late.\n\nThe hulk loomed ahead. Rider lifted the airship a dozen feet and slowed it. His men sent canisters tumbling down...\n\nA noxious violet miasma enveloped the decaying ship.\n\nSu-Cha, who had wakened only moments before, put into words what only Rider had noticed. \"The boat. It's gone.\"\n\nSullen grumbles greeted the news.\n\nRider backed and lowered the airship, dropped Chaz and Preacher. The purple fog had dissipated already.\n\nThe two were back in minutes. \"Nobody there,\" Chaz reported as he clambered aboard.\n\nRider nodded as he began making altitude, looking for a boat. The stones Su-Cha had planted were still alive. And still aboard the hulk. Shai Khe had detected their emanations and had known his hideout stood betrayed.\n\nNo suspicious boat plied the river. Shai Khe could not have gone far, for he hadn't had time. Rider doubted he could have reached the hulk long before the airship's arrival.\n\nThe eastern sorcerer had a sixth sense for peril, that was certain. He hadn't bothered wasting time setting booby traps. He had gotten while a chance to get remained.\n\n\"Back to square one again,\" Greystone said.\n\n\"Hardly,\" Preacher countered. \"Hardly at all.\" He handed Rider a sheet of paper.\n\nRider moved nearer a window and stared at the sheet a long time. Finally, he handed it to Greystone.\n\nThe scholar grunted. \"Il Diavolo. From the nether shore.\"\n\nChaz looked over Greystone's shoulder. \"Looks like Shroud's Head to me. Pretty good drawing, for charcoal.\"\n\n\"It is Shroud's Head. But when King Shroud had it sculpted, the slaves who did the work called it Il Diavolo. The Devil. The island sea peoples, they gave Shroud that name after he beat them off Klotus, then made them commemorate the defeat by carving the cliff into a face that would watch them forever.\"\n\nChaz said, \"That means that fishing boat was going somewhere after all.\"\n\nRider nodded. \"That's possible.\"\n\nShroud's Head had been carved from a two-hundred-foot-high promontory just miles down the Bridge from where Rider had had the guardship intercept the boat that had carried away Soup and Spud.\n\n\"The Devil's Eyes,\" Spud mused. \"One of them is a cave, isn't it?\"\n\nRider nodded. \"Big enough to conceal a small airship.\"\n\n\"What're we waiting for?\" Chaz demanded. \"Let's go get them.\"\n\n\"Haste is not indicated,\" Greystone scolded.\n\n\"He's right,\" Rider said. \"A clue like this is almost too sweet a find. For the moment we'd better assume it was left deliberately. Instead of rushing into a trap, let's see if we can't entangle Shai Khe in his own snare. In any event, we can close that door when we want. For now we'll concentrate on thwarting his assassins.\"\n\nRider started the airship down river in a not very hopeful search, leaving the hulk burning behind. After a few minutes, he said, \"We've won one victory, of sorts. We've forced him to abandon his designs on the City. To lower himself to the spiteful murder of fancied enemies.\"\n\n\"Kind of understating there,\" Greystone observed.\n\n\"Possibly. Our job now is to take away his killing game. To compel him to come at us head to head.\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Chaz said. \"That's what I've been waiting for all my life. A chance to go one on one with a guy so bad he scares himself when he walks past a mirror.\"\n\n\"We can handle him,\" Rider promised. \"And while he's preoccupied with us he won't have time for anybody else.\"\n\nChaz grumbled a lot.\n\nAs Rider expected, they found no sign of Shai Khe's boat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Between them, Rider and his men had hundreds of friends and acquaintances in all walks of life and at every stratum of society. Most notably at the lowest stratum, where the dark deeds and secret things are known, and the wicked deeds are done. Rider had the word go out at all levels, with a promise of a substantial reward where that might count: the Protector's son wanted information about certain easterners who might have been involved in his father's murder.\n\nThe Protector's death was a secret no more. And much of the City was aware that strange doings were afoot. The news of the murder had come out slowly, to a populace already certain something bad had occurred. There was tension and apprehension, but no panic.\n\nMost people believed Rider could assume the Protector's mantle. He was Jehrke's son and Jehrke had trained his boy to step into his shoes. This crisis would test the temper of the sword that Jehrke had forged.\n\nChaz thought the whole business had turned hilarious. \"Those guys are the ones on the spot now,\" he crowed. \"They stick their heads out anywhere and they're had.\"\n\nRider watched the woman Caracen\u00e9 hover around the barbarian. \"I'm uncomfortable being dependent on the help of others. We have to remain self-sufficient. There will be many times, in years to come, when we will have no other resources.\"\n\nGreystone countered, \"Your father himself said to use the tools at hand. In this case I think the threat justifies an appeal to the people.\"\n\nThe others were a bit puzzled. They were not used to seeing Rider doubt himself.\n\nRider said, \"I expect Shai Khe to make a gesture before long. A show of force, if you will, to demonstrate that he can move at will even in reduced circumstances. Chaz, you'd better go back to General Procopio.\" He also assigned men to Soup, Spud, and Su-Cha.\n\n\"What about me and Greystone?\" Preacher complained. \"Are you cutting us out?\"\n\n\"You hold the fort. Keep track of whatever reports come in. If anything comes in that looks especially good, investigate if you like. Don't start anything with Shai Khe. Just keep an eye on him.\"\n\nLooking at Caracen\u00e9 with an odd glint in his eye, Chaz smacked a fist into a palm and said, \"I'd like to lay something more than an eye on that wheezer.\"\n\n\"Where are you going to be?\" Su-Cha asked. Already Rider was adopting one of his many disguises.\n\nAs he often did when he did not wish to answer a direct question, Rider developed a sudden deafness.\n\nThose who were to go out on guard duty began collecting items they might need. No one pressed Rider when he did not want to talk.\n\nThey watched in awe as he prepared himself. It was amazing just how much he could secrete about his person." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Rider and the others had not been gone twenty minutes when there was a pounding at the door. Trusting no one, Preacher concealed himself within the device of mirrors and covered Greystone.\n\nGreystone looked through the periscope peephole. \"It's an officer of the King's bodyguard.\" He unlocked the door \"What can I do for you?\"\n\nThe officer looked embarrassed. \"The King insists you guys should take charge of the prisoner Polybos House. His Majesty isn't up to all the fuss and bother.\"\n\nGreystone scowled. There were moments when he was not too fond of his sovereign. \"I guess we can throw him in with the others. Which reminds me. They're overdue to be fed.\"\n\nPreacher groaned from concealment. It was his turn to make the meal.\n\nThe officer said, \"The sergeant of the guard said to tell you he's got a bunch of reports for you guys down in his office. Everyone in town wants a piece of that reward. They're lined up at the gate.\"\n\n\"I'll go down while you're getting House.\"\n\nGreystone was astonished. Four harried scribes were taking statements as fast as they could write. They had completed a stack of reports nearly a foot high. \"We didn't expect this,\" he told the sergeant of the guard.\n\n\"It's just getting started. Take a look outside.\"\n\nGreystone looked. There must have been two hundred people waiting. Quite a few wore shantor's robes.\n\nThat made sense. Both Jehrke and Rider had done their best to help victims of the weeping sickness.\n\n\"I'll come back down as soon as we've digested these,\" Greystone promised, scooping up the stack already prepared.\n\n\"Anything strange happened around here lately?\" Chaz asked as he joined General Procopio. The general was in his study again. Chaz noted that several meticulously mounted giant bees had been added to the old soldier's collection of memorabilia.\n\n\"Been as quiet as a mouse's fiftieth birthday party.\" Procopio moved to the window.\n\n\"Mice don't live...\" Chaz reddened.\n\n\"Unless you count the shantors.\" Procopio pointed.\n\nChaz watched as two victims of the weeping sickness moved slowly past the house.\n\nProcopio observed, \"They usually don't beg this neighborhood.\"\n\nChaz grunted. \"Bet they usually ring their warning bells, too.\"\n\n\"And they don't keep shuffling around the same block.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should go down and give them some alms.\"\n\nProcopio put on a big grin. There was a lot of adventure left in that old soldier. \"Maybe.\"\n\nThe shantors Spud encountered were ringing their bells. They seemed old and advanced in their disease. They moved at a snail's pace, leaning upon their staffs heavily. \"Alms?\" one croaked hopefully as Spud came up.\n\nSpud reached into a pocket.\n\nAnd the instant his hand was engaged the shantor on his right swung his staff.\n\nSpud managed to evade that blow but not the one coming in from his left. That fake shantor tapped him over the ear. He sagged into the grasp of his attackers.\n\nBystanders gawked. Then they began shouting. Someone had recognized Spud and reasoned that these fake shantors must belong to the gang Rider was hunting.\n\nBut there were few bystanders, and none of them armed well enough to overcome two villains skilled with staffs. The shantors dragged Spud away.\n\nThe two who tried to take Soup were less fortunate. Bystanders overcame them. In moments they were trussed up and on their way to cells in the Citadel. Soup was on his way, too. He whistled. But now he was more alert.\n\nThe shantors outside the Citadel gate were not ringing their bells. They had been, but with so much enthusiasm that the sergeant of the guard had ordered them to stop.\n\nThey were very nervous. Their master had ordered out every man he had left on what seemed to be a desperate last gamble. One man, more bold than the others, dared say, \"This is a pretty savvy plan. We go charging into the Citadel so we don't inconvenience anybody by making them drag us here from halfway across town.\"\n\n\"Shut up and listen for the signal.\"\n\nThe sergeant of the guard was never sure if the shrill whistle came from behind him or from outside. He would never forget exactly what happened next, though.\n\nA mob of shantors poured through the gate, clubbing guards, would-be reward collectors, and scribes. He managed to cut one attacker with his shortsword, then his lights went out.\n\nThe gang split into two parties. One went upstairs. The other went down, toward cells where many of their associates were confined. As fate would have it, the latter group took a wrong turn, became lost for five minutes, and when they found their way again also found that they had used up too much time. Soldiers and jailors fell upon them while they were opening the cells.\n\nWhat followed was a merry roughhouse.\n\nThe invaders did not get the best of it.\n\n\"It's that captain and House and a couple of soldiers,\" Greystone said from the peephole. He opened the door.\n\nThe soldiers started House through...\n\nA wave of shantors hit them from behind. Greystone, House, the captain, and the soldiers went down under the tide.\n\nPreacher shot one man and brained another with his crossbow before the rush made a shambles of his hiding place. Then he was trying to defend himself against clubs with bare hands. He got in a few good licks before he fell.\n\nHe lay there in semi-consciousness while the raiders located Caracen\u00e9, the prisoners, and the hairy man-ape. Going into and returning from the suite the raiders gave Jehrke a superstitiously wide berth. They kept yelling at one another to hurry.\n\nHands grabbed Preacher up. He saw Greystone lifted, and Caracen\u00e9...\n\nAfter that there was a lot of confusion. A lot of fighting, in which a lot of Citadel folk seemed to be helping the raiders and getting killed for their trouble.\n\nThen one of the men carrying Preacher got bashed in the face with a pike butt. His partner dropped Preacher and ran for it.\n\nPreacher's world went watery for a while.\n\nA vigorous shaking wakened Preacher. He swore, then admonished himself with a scriptural quotation. He opened his eyes.\n\nIt took him a moment to recognize the man shaking him. The fellow had blood in his hair and all over his face. It was the captain who had tried to deliver Polybos House. The captain asked, \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'll probably live. Worse luck. Did we get them all?\"\n\n\"Maybe a dozen got away.\" The captain looked around. \"Really brought all the rats out of the walls this time. Your eastern friend played every counter he had. And used most of them up.\"\n\n\"That seemed an awful lot of trouble just to rescue Polybos House.\"\n\nThe captain laughed a hard laugh. \"Rescue him? He's the first one they killed.\"\n\n\"Then what?...\"\n\n\"The woman. That ape thing. You and your sidekick. But I think mainly the woman.\"\n\nPreacher tried to get up. The pounding in his head forced him back down. \"Greystone?\"\n\n\"Took him with them.\"\n\nThe first reports began to filter in soon afterward. No one was stopping the raiders\u2014they were moving faster than the news\u2014but their every step was noted. Their path\u2014of course\u2014led directly to the river." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Rider noticed the men tailing him immediately. There were three of them and they were fairly good, but he spotted them all the same. He shook them by a method that was almost cruel.\n\nHe began running, confident none of his pursuers could stay with him all the way to his destination.\n\nThe toughest kept up for five miles.\n\nRider ran five more miles, at a slower pace. By then he was well into the farm country west of Shasesserre. He ducked into a woodlot and adjusted his disguise slightly. When he reappeared upon the road he looked to be just another farm laborer trudging along with hands thrust into pockets.\n\nHis trudge was deceptive. It ate ground quickly. And when he was sure no one was watching he ran.\n\nIt was the hard way to make this journey. The slow way. But Shai Khe's spies and eyes would not be watching for a man afoot. An airship or a dromon, yes. Perhaps chariots, coaches, or horsemen. But not a lone, stooped, tired farm hand.\n\nAt dusk he came to the ridge that formed the spine of Shroud's Head. He was more than forty miles from the Citadel. That much walking tired even him. He located a sheltered place and fell asleep immediately.\n\nHe wakened six hours later, in the ebb hour of the night, exactly as planned. He listened to cricket sounds. Nothing else was moving, a fact he confirmed by cautious extension of his wizard's senses.\n\nConfident that he was alone and unwatched, he began working his way up and out the ridge. He avoided trails and easy traveling. In the dark even the most skilled of men could overlook some warning device.\n\nHe reached the crown of Shroud's Head without incident or discovery. Once there he settled himself and set his wizard's senses roaming in earnest.\n\nThere were guards, yes. And warning devices. And an incredibly complex net of spells meant both as alarm and trap... And something more. Something dark, the nature of which he could not immediately discern.\n\nThere were only two men, though. One was asleep and the other was nodding. There should have been more. Unless Shai Khe had grown so short of manpower he had stripped his airship of its crew.\n\nThat must be it. Rider could detect no other human beings anywhere within reach of his talent.\n\nThat other thing, though... He had begun to sense its outlines, its black formless form. And he had begun to suspect what it might be. And if it was, he had learned much about the horror that slithered within a man named Shai Khe.\n\nIf that thing were loosed, no single sorcerer, not even a Jehrke or a Shai Khe, would be able to bind it again. An army would be needed, and many of them would die in the struggle. Horribly. But for now it was confined and constrained and could, with relative ease, be returned to that foul place whence it had been summoned.\n\nIf Rider could untangle the net of spells shielding both airship and devil.\n\nNow he knew why Kralj Odehnal had said \"Devil's Eyes\" instead of \"Devil's Eye.\" The deep cave and hidden airship were only half the story. There was, perhaps, the approximation of a pun in confining the devil in the other, shallower eye.\n\nRider examined the nest of spells. His regard for Shai Khe, as a sorcerer, rose. It would be a long, arduous, interesting, dangerous job, penetrating that without leaving tracks. He settled in to do it.\n\nHe was through. He was safely inside unseen. He had done what he had come to do and had seen what he had come to see. And now he was trapped.\n\nJust as he was about to leave, Shai Khe's airship crew returned, having come down the Bridge of the World by boat. And with them they had brought Caracen\u00e9, Soup, and Greystone. How had they gotten to Greystone and the girl?\n\nFor the moment all three were safe enough. The airshipmen had orders to install them in the airship and keep them confined. Nothing more.\n\nRider wished he could get back to the City and learn what had happened. The airshipmen knew nothing. But he could not depart without being seen, or, at least, without leaving traces that would be instantly apparent to Shai Khe's eye.\n\nHe slipped into a shadowed cleft and rested, and waited for a chance to make a properly discreet departure." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\"The boat just vanished?\" Chaz demanded, keeping one eye on General Procopio, who had his nose into everything in the laboratory. The general was as excited as a kid. Retirement had been a bore for him. \"Right in the middle of the river?\"\n\nPreacher nodded. He was tired of repeating the story.\n\n\"Then he used sorcery. Meaning he was willing to disturb the web and attract attention.\"\n\n\"Like maybe he hadn't been noticed so far?\" Su-Cha sneered. \"The boat only had to disappear for a couple minutes. Just long enough to get to shore and let those guys do a fade.\"\n\nChaz paced. He was concerned about Caracen\u00e9, though torture would not have gotten him to admit that. He stared at the darkness beyond the laboratory window. The gruesome memorial that had been Jehrke Victorious watched over his shoulder. \"Where is the boss?\"\n\n\"Gone. Without saying where he was going. The way he does.\"\n\nChaz stared at the vermilion characters in the window glass. They had, according to Preacher, simply appeared while his back was turned.\n\nRide-Master Jehrke: You no longer possess the pearl so precious to me. I now possess two gems priceless to you.\n\n\"What do we do now?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"We wait,\" Preacher said.\n\nGeneral Procopio was stirring through wreckage left from the recent raid. \"What is this thing?\" He indicated something that looked like a mummified gorilla head. \"Ugly character.\"\n\n\"No telling,\" Chaz replied. \"Jehrke had at least one of everything weird there ever was around here.\"\n\nSu-Cha scooted past the barbarian. \"Don't touch that!\" he squeaked.\n\nProcopio jerked away. Startled, Chaz asked, \"What's the matter, little buddy?\"\n\n\"That's nothing Rider or Jehrke ever had. That's a Koh-Rehn. We've been double-shuffled. Those clowns that broke in here left it for us. A little gift. A little nightmare come midnight, while you're all tucked safely into your beds, you think.\" He squatted beside the ugly head, studying it.\n\n\"Relative of yours?\" Procopio asked, catching on more quickly than the others.\n\n\"In a manner of speaking.\" After a thoughtful moment, Su-Cha said, \"Dirty tricks, eh, Shai Khe?\" And after another moment, \"We can play that game, too. Listen up, you guys. I've got an idea.\"\n\nMidnight. A blinding flash lighted the window of Jehrke's laboratory. Tough though the glass there was, it disintegrated, showering the Rock with fragments. Roars and screams ripped out into the night. A man who might have been Ride-Master Jehrke could, for a moment, be seen battling a huge shadow. Then the screaming stopped.\n\nOne minute. Two minutes. Three. Two battered men fled the Citadel gate, a semi-conscious woman dragging between them. As they neared the edge of the plaza, the shorter man stumbled. He let go the woman to break his fall. The shawl wrapping the woman's hair and concealing her features fell away.\n\n\"Damnit!\" Chaz exploded, but softly. \"Watch yourself. They find out we've still got her, we lose our chance to pull this out without Rider.\" He re-wrapped the woman while Preacher muttered weary apologies.\n\nThey resumed hurrying through the night, following a circuitous path that in time led them to a new hideout at General Procopio's City house. The general had insisted. He wanted to be in the middle of things, and the Protector himself had proofed the house against sorcerous espionage. He said. Where better to stake out the goat and wait for the lion? he asked.\n\nThere were fragile indications to convince Chaz that they were being followed. He allowed himself one merry grin.\n\nGood times and bad, chaos or disorder, there were comings and goings at the Citadel gate. Day, night, the hour made no matter.\n\nA curtained coach departed twenty minutes after Chaz and Preacher and their charge. Within were Spud, Procopio, and a stack of reports from the sergeant of the guard, who had not permitted a little thing like a raid to cancel his report-taking.\n\nThe coach hurried through the night, straight to Procopio's back gate, and so arrived there long before the others did afoot. They were in the darkened study, watching, to confirm the presence or absence of trackers when Chaz and Preacher arrived.\n\nThose two burst in with their burden. \"Well?\" Chaz boomed as Su-Cha surrendered the Caracen\u00e9 shape and collapsed with a feeble plea for food.\n\n\"Two of the bloody beggars,\" Procopio replied. \"One ran away to tell tales. One stayed.\"\n\n\"We ought to sneak out the back way and follow him home to Daddy,\" Chaz growled.\n\nSpud, trying to spoon-feed Su-Cha in the dark, said, \"We already know where to find Daddy.\"\n\n\"What? How?\"\n\n\"All those reports the sergeant gave me? While you guys were loafing I was reading. There's wheat in amongst all that chaff, and it adds up to another waterfront warehouse. While we were killing time giving you guys a head start, the general called in some favors. As soon as Shai Khe's gang heads out, wherever, they'll hit the place and get Soup, Greystone, the girl, and whoever is guarding them. Then they'll lay for Shai Khe in case he gets lucky or gets away out here.\"\n\nChaz grunted. It was an eloquent grunt, replete with sarcasm and cynicism. \"And it all depends on Rider being somewhere handy, looping snares and nets into the web for when Shai Khe cuts loose, eh? Ingenious.\"\n\nPreacher quoted something scriptural; predictably cryptic and confused; fierce, fiery, and deifically vengeful. He added, \"It's falling together. We have that rat in the middle, between two terriers, and we'll choke him on his own arrogant overconfidence.\"\n\nPerhaps the word choke occurred to him because of the strangling noises issuing from Su-Cha because Spud kept jabbing too-rapid spoonfuls of food into the imp's mouth. Su-Cha finally got his message through. He was recovering. He was ready for the next stage.\n\nThey began their wait for the mad enemy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "When the alarms went off there was a tinge of grey in the night beyond the nose of the pirate airship. Men bolted to their weapons. There was panic in the air. The airshipmen's morale was low.\n\nIt was not about to improve.\n\nA man appeared outside, hands raised, yelling at them to restrain themselves, that he was on their side, that he had a message, that they were to let him come inside.\n\nThey let him in. Not because he insisted but because some of the crew recognized him. Immediately he began chattering in a clicky tongue Rider recognized but could not follow. His message was received with groans and outrage.\n\nA sleepy crewman leaned out of the airship gondola and demanded, in a language Rider could follow, \"What's all the racket?\"\n\nOne of the others replied, \"The Celestial Lord wishes us to put our guests back on the boat and take them back to the City. Right now.\"\n\nPuzzled, Rider watched preparations being made. When the airshipmen brought their \"guests\" forth he began to get a glimmer. Whatever had happened in the City, some of his associates had survived to counterattack. Through guile.\n\nCaracen\u00e9 had arrived under loose, indulgent restraint, like a wayward child being shepherded home. She was departing in bonds, hung about with every piece of silver the airshipmen could muster. She went silently, aware that protest was useless and time the sole cure for this indignity.\n\nRider permitted himself a rare grin. Somehow, Su-Cha had convinced Shai Khe that Caracen\u00e9 might in fact be a certain nimble-witted, shape-shifting imp.\n\nThe airshipmen hustled their prisoners out of the cave. Before they disappeared, Rider was at work preparing his own unnoticed departure.\n\nA spell of minor scale\u2014the one he had employed to escape the Treasury vaults\u2014blinded the stay-behinds to his presence. He then turned to Shai Khe's network of protective and detective spells. He saw instantly that slipping through would be easy. All the hectic in and out of airshipmen, prisoners, and messenger had left the magical artifact in a state of vibrant dissonance. It was a moment's work to confuse his own passage with that of those ahead of him.\n\nA narrow, steep pathway descended the face of Shroud's Head. From a ship on the Bridge it looked like the thin scar that appeared on the faces of all the old king's statues and busts.\n\nRider reached the head of the path only minutes behind the others. They were just two hundred yards ahead. But he was stumped.\n\nThe pathway slanted down to a wooden jetty that would be invisible from the shipping lanes. Tied up to it was a small smuggler's ship with mast unstepped. From the Bridge it might look like a rock.\n\nRider's immediate concern was the fact that the pathway appeared to be the only way to reach the ship. Or was it?\n\nHe set his mystic senses roaming.\n\nThere were handholds enough for a descent, but that way would be slow. And, shadow spell or no, he would be seen if exposed to enemy eyes that long. However...\n\nThe alternative appeared mad even for a man as remarkable as Rider. He cast his senses again. And hesitated not an instant.\n\nHe retreated into the cave as far as he dared, took several quick, deep breaths, sprinted forward\u2014right out into the nothing of a two-hundred-thirty-foot drop to the waters of the Bridge.\n\nShadow flickered around him. His plunge went unremarked\u2014till he hit water a dozen feet from the jetty.\n\nThe airshipmen halted and gabbled at one another about the tremendous splash. Several of the more daring hurried ahead.\n\nRider's collision with the face of the sea left him stunned for a few seconds. Then he realized he was going deeper than he wanted, dragged down by the mass of gewgaws he carried. He swam upward with powerful kicks and armstrokes, slanting so as to surface beneath the jetty. He rose, gulped air, clung to a float just long enough to dispose of such devices as would have been ruined by the water. Then he went under again, stroking under the smuggling craft.\n\nThe ship was long and narrow and had a very low freeboard. Rider grasped the gunwale amidships, levered himself aboard. The spell of shadows guarded him from the eyes of the forerunner airshipmen, who were approaching the foot of the path. He slipped into shadows beneath a raised foredeck. Before concealing himself within a pile of old tackle and sailcloth he flung a small spell across the deck and gunwale. The dampness there evaporated.\n\nThe three leading airshipmen clumped aboard the smuggler, grumbling. They had decided the splash had been caused by a rock falling off the face of Shroud's Head.\n\nWithin minutes the entire complement had boarded. The ship got under way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "With Chaz and General Procopio more or less running the show, the welcome planned for Shai Khe was about as subtle and gentle as a sledge hammer.\n\nChaz was not a man to use a rapier where a battleaxe would do.\n\nBut it seemed the battleaxe would not get taken in hand.\n\nIt was not that long a wait before shadows began flitting about outside. There was even a moment when one of those solidified into the devil shape of Shai Khe, calmly assessing the house. But the easterner was not to be taken easily. Whether or not he believed Rider dead, he would not abandon caution. Nothing else happened.\n\nWhen dawn came the watchers retreated. There was never any doubt of their nearby presence, though. Each few hours Su-Cha assumed Caracen\u00e9's form and showed himself at a window, casting longing looks toward liberty.\n\n\"I wish he'd do something!\" Chaz growled.\n\n\"He is,\" Preacher rejoined. \"He's working on your mind. In a little while he'll have you charging out where he can bang your head all day long.\"\n\nChaz scowled but refused the bait. \"We're the guys laying in the weeds. What's he waiting for?\"\n\n\"He smells a rat,\" the general said. \"The man has a nose for danger. The gods alone know how many times he slipped my snares out east.\"\n\nSu-Cha guessed, \"He's waiting for the real Caracen\u00e9, I'll bet. I'll bet he sent her out of the City, then had to have her brought back to make sure she isn't me.\"\n\n\"So we didn't accomplish anything.\"\n\n\"Sure we did. We bought time for Rider to finish whatever he's doing and get back into the lists here. While we've had Shai Khe tied down accomplishing nothing himself. We got rid of all but a handful of his thugs. If the general's pals have held up their end, we've grabbed off his hideout behind him. When he goes running back...\"\n\n\"Yeah? You're forgetting something, runt. If he figures Rider is croaked, the only thing keeping him from popping the cork on Shasesserre is the chance we've still got the woman. Whatever she means to him.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Preacher said, peeping out the corner of the window. \"We've got some action coming.\"\n\nThey all crowded the window. Below, an oriental horseman galloped toward the house. A pair of City Guardsmen pursued him, bellowing. Their words could not be distinguished, but it seemed they wanted the oriental to desist from his reckless behavior.\n\nAll three passed without slowing.\n\nA minute went by.\n\nMen began to appear as if from nowhere. One was Shai Khe himself. They departed at a brisk pace.\n\n\"One watcher each, front and back, I would guess,\" Chaz said. \"Get out there and do your stuff, little buddy.\"\n\nSu-Cha grinned. \"Ever notice how I get to be his buddy when he wants me to stick my neck out?\" But already he was shifting form, as they had made it up ahead.\n\nThey had no trouble with Shai Khe's men, who had not foreseen danger in the guise of a cute little boy. Besides the immediate watchers, the easterner left two sentries along his backtrail. His path led straight to the warehouse Preacher had identified as Shai Khe's current headquarters.\n\nAfter the last fell, Chaz said, \"I've got a feeling Shai Khe isn't going to be surprised we're hot after him.\"\n\nThe general said, \"No doubt. But, then, the surprise is at the other end, isn't it?\"\n\nAt that point they entered the street of Shai Khe's headquarters. And at that moment all hell broke loose inside the warehouse.\n\nThey charged the door by which Shai Khe had entered their trap." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Rider felt the smuggling craft nudge gently against a wharf. Sounds and odors told him they had docked along Tannery Row on Henchelside. The airshipmen, though tired, quickly made fast and left the ship. Moments later Rider heard the creak of oarlocks.\n\nHe popped out of hiding, surprised. And that was a mistake, for a guard had been left aboard. He was turning, drawing breath for a shout. Rider snagged the broken corpse of a single reeve stay block and hurled it. It thunked off the airshipman's forehead. The man went over backward.\n\nRider crept forth. He peered over the gunwale. Wonder of wonders. The spot of action had gone unnoticed, though the oarsmen in the two boats faced the ship.\n\nRider slithered to the wharf side and, when he was sure he would not be noticed, left the ship.\n\nA group of urchins audience to everything gave him a hand\u2014then scattered when he scowled.\n\nHe loped into the stench of Tannery Row, headed for King's Bridge, which lay a mile away. Thirty minutes later he was in hiding on the east bank, watching the airshipmen unload their prisoners and make their boats ready for a quick getaway. They left one guard again.\n\nWhen the main party was out of sight he moved in. In moments he had the sentry trussed up and the boats adrift. He resumed his shadowing of the airshipmen. He caught up as they entered a warehouse.\n\nHe reached into the web and extended his senses, searching for signs of Shai Khe. There were none. But someone was there. And that someone was not friendly toward the easterner's men. A fight broke out. It was over in seconds, a successful ambush. Rider did not go investigate.\n\nHe suspected it would be wiser, tactically, to remain on the outside of events, unseen and unknown.\n\nA wagon rolled up to the door Rider watched. Men from the warehouse loaded it with bound airshipmen, covered them with a tarp. Away the wagon went. A brisk, efficient piece of work.\n\nThe tough look of those men gave them away. They were air marines in mufti.\n\nSo. The next step was obvious. Wait for Shai Khe to come meet his people in a headquarters he believed to be secure.\n\nThere had been some busyness while he was off to Shroud's Head, that was certain. Despite his absence, his associates seemed to have Shai Khe on the run. But Rider had no great confidence in that appearance.\n\nHow long before the eastern devil showed himself?\n\nNot long at all.\n\nIt started like the row with the airshipmen. But that lasted only fifteen seconds. Then a brilliant flash illuminated the backs of the warehouse's few windows. The tenor of the uproar changed.\n\nRider was watching through the web.\n\nShai Khe had used a powerful spell to neutralize and incapacitate the marines, but before he could finish them off, Chaz, Su-Cha, and their gang broke in. The easterner had some bad moments with them. In fact, Chaz and General Procopio got in blows that nearly incapacitated Shai Khe.\n\nSu-Cha used the sorcerer's moments of distraction and disorientation to shove Caracen\u00e9 into hiding and take her place.\n\nRider nudged the web and added to the confusion by undoing the spells binding the marines. Those gentlemen jumped up with blood in their eyes.\n\nShai Khe was not whipped yet. Not by a mile and a year. But he was rattled. The unexpected recuperation of the marines decided him to retreat and regroup.\n\nHe grabbed Su-Cha/Caracen\u00e9's hand and took off.\n\nRider tugged the web just enough to make sure everyone in the warehouse was free and conscious. Then he withdrew and waited.\n\nShai Khe burst out the warehouse door. Fifty yards down the street he halted, whirled, hurled a vicious spell that undermined the warehouse's foundations. That whole nearer face of the building came down. Shai Khe headed for the river at a brisk walk.\n\nThe collapse should have killed all of the easterner's enemies. But Rider aborted that.\n\nHe had reached through the web and jammed an interior door. Chaz, the general, the marines, and the others had gone galloping toward the far exit before the collapse began.\n\nRider jogged to a parallel street, then raced to the river. He was sure Shai Khe meant to rendezvous with the airshipmen's boats. Shai Khe did things meticulously, calculatedly. He would know where the boats and ships made landings, for those points would have been preselected for his convenience.\n\nRider was in hiding not twenty yards away from the man he had left bound when the easterner loped into view, casting angry glances behind him. His enemies were closing in again.\n\nHe cursed once, softly, when he reached the river's edge and found his man unconscious and his boats gone.\n\nHe let go Caracen\u00e9's hand, used both of his in a complicated series of gestures. The airshipman's bonds fell away. But he would not arise from his dreams.\n\nShai Khe faced his pursuers.\n\nHe seemed to swell in stature, in presence. An aura of great dread grew around him. The bowl of his uplifted left hand began to glow turquoise.\n\nChaz and the crowd were just thirty yards away. In almost ridiculous unison they stopped, flung themselves around, and scattered.\n\nShai Khe arced the blue fire after them. It floated through the air, trailing turquoise mists, crackling, leaving a rent in the web that was almost painful to Rider. The easterner either thought Rider out of the game or no longer worried about attracting his attention.\n\nThe blue fireball hit the street with an impact that rattled buildings for half a mile. It shattered. Pieces flew about, landing with their own thunderous impacts, fragmented, impacted, fragmented. Some chunks knocked holes in nearby walls. The smaller the chunk, the faster it moved and more dangerous it was. But the smaller pieces turned into mist more quickly, so remained dangerous for only a few seconds.\n\nWhile the blue show ran, Shai Khe gathered his fallen henchman under one arm and Caracen\u00e9 under the other. With effortless ease. He raced toward the river, each step a longer one than the last. He did not stop because water lay in his way.\n\nWater flew as if from huge hammerblows each time one of his feet hit. Rider was reminded of a skipping stone flying in reverse. Shai Khe's last bound to Henchelside was fifty yards long.\n\nThe easterner headed for the smuggler. And that pushed Rider into a tight moral bind.\n\nThe man he had left unconscious could ruin everything. He had but to tell his story. If Shai Khe was not totally suspicious already, finding his bridges burned before him.\n\nRider considered alternatives and discarded them. Each was self-defeating, requiring the expenditure of so much sorcerous energy that Shai Khe would be alerted anyway. The choices were two. Let Shai Khe be warned. Or work a small magic and close a man's mouth forever.\n\nThere was no choice, really. Shai Khe was a shadow intent on poisoning millions of lives. He could not be allowed to escape just to avoid taking the life of his minion.\n\nNecessity made the thing no more pleasant.\n\nRider reached through the web and, as Shai Khe bounded aboard the smuggler, snapped a blood vessel in the airshipman's brain, behind the bruise left by the thrown block." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Shai Khe's feet hit the deck of the ship. He cursed, dropped his burden. A glance told him his man was dead. He whirled, began arcing a fireworks show toward the east bank.\n\nSu-Cha decided it was time he absented himself from the sorcerer's company. To go on meant ever-increasing danger. And it was unlikely that Shai Khe would ever be less attentive than he was at the moment.\n\nHis intent was to slip over the side behind Shai Khe, hit the water, become a porpoise, and swim as if sharks were after him.\n\nRider saw Su-Cha begin to move, guessed his approximate intent.\n\nHe would never make it. A sorcerer of Shai Khe's attainments never became so angry or so distracted he failed to notice the movement of people around him.\n\nRider cooked up a little golden firework of his own.\n\nThis quite needless bombardment, which threatened to demolish the district, hinted that the easterner was fishing for a reaction anyway.\n\nSu-Cha was not expendable. Neither were the people of the district.\n\nRider stepped out and delivered his apple-sized golden ball in one smooth motion. It streaked across the river. Halfway over it looked as if it would miss the smuggler by fifteen feet. Three quarters of the way over it began to slide to the right. In the last fifty feet it jumped.\n\nIt impacted upon the ship. Light flared. Timbers flew. A third of the smuggler burst into flames.\n\nMocking laughter and a volley of blue fireworks were Shai Khe's responses. He had won the roll, drawing Rider out.\n\nRider noted that Su-Cha was in the water.\n\nHe plucked another golden ball out of his left hand and hurled it. This one streaked straight toward Shai Khe. Another followed an instant later. Then another. The first died a hundred yards from the blazing ship, the second fifty. The third almost reached the easterner.\n\nShai Khe grabbed his surviving airshipman and bounded away, in leaps as long as those he had taken when he crossed the river. He trailed wicked laughter.\n\nRider's golden balls pursued him, through every twist and turn of his flight through Henchelside.\n\n\"Wondered when you were going to turn up,\" Chaz said, coming to stand beside Rider and glare at the burning ship.\n\n\"You played too long a bet,\" Rider admonished gently. \"You'd all have been dead if I hadn't.\"\n\n\"I know.\" The barbarian was not the least chagrined as he added, \"We didn't expect you. Glad you showed, though.\"\n\nOthers began leaving cover. Even a few residents began looking out to see if the storm had passed.\n\nGeneral Procopio lumbered up. \"Good show! Eh? What? Got the beggar on the run. What next?\"\n\n\"First we dig the woman out of the warehouse,\" Rider said.\n\nChaz gaped. \"But... The sorcerer. He carried her off with him.\"\n\nRider chuckled. \"That was Su-Cha again. He ought to be turning up any second, hungry enough to eat one of us.\" He was talking to the barbarian's back.\n\n\"And after Chaz saves Caracen\u00e9? What then?\" Greystone asked. The scholar looked exhausted, physically and emotionally.\n\n\"Then we loaf down to our yards and take a short airship ride.\" He peered across the river. Shai Khe was no longer visible, but his progress could be traced by the fireworks he tossed off as he went.\n\n\"He's going to turn into a ghost again in about two minutes.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But this time I know where he will do his haunting.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "\"Caracen\u00e9!\" Chaz bellowed. The interior of the warehouse was a ruin. Spears of sunlight stabbed down through dust almost too thick to permit breathing. He stepped past an eastern airshipman groaning beneath rubble which buried his legs.\n\n\"Caracen\u00e9!\"\n\n\"Here.\" The woman's voice was feeble, like the mewl of an injured kitten.\n\nShe was all right. Just shaken and dirty, looking as if she had been dragged twice around the chariot course at the coliseum. Chaz's concern weakened the moment he saw her safe. Then he recalled that she had started out a witch in apparent alliance with Kralj Odehnal, and only later had she melted into the sort of woman to whom he was more accustomed.\n\nShai Khe was clever and savage. She might be the sorcerer's ultimate piece to be played. Chaz felt he was not as clever as Rider or Greystone. He was more likely to stumble into something unpleasant. So he was a little cool, a little distant, as he helped Caracen\u00e9 to her feet.\n\nShe was not so cool. She threw her arms around his neck and clung tightly, shivering like a captive rabbit.\n\nRider chose a larger ship this time, one intended to survive the rigors of battle. Greystone argued for speed.\n\n\"Speed will not count in this,\" Rider said. \"Survivability will. We're coming up to the face-to-face, where Shai Khe cannot duck us anymore. If it doesn't go our way, we want to be in good shape for getting out alive.\"\n\n\"You really think...\"\n\n\"In an hour we'll see. He'll have to surrender or fight.\" Rider looked directly at Caracen\u00e9. \"Will he fight, knowing you are with us?\"\n\nOutside, one of the ground crew shouted that the airship lines were ready to cast off.\n\nCaracen\u00e9's gaze became evasive.\n\nRider repeated the question.\n\n\"He would fight,\" she admitted. \"He cannot back down. Not for anything. He is totally committed.\"\n\nRider nodded. He surveyed his companions. \"This is what we've worked toward... I have to warn you. It could go sour. This is as great a wickedness as has ever arisen. Does anyone want out?\"\n\n\"Silly question,\" Chaz grumbled. \"What I want is to get my hands around his throat.\"\n\nEveryone else nodded.\n\n\"Take your stations, then. Tell them to cast off.\"\n\nIt was a bright, clear day. The Bridge was a broad blue highway running to the horizon. Its face was dotted with fishing boats and merchantmen. Rider viewed that traffic with concern. Someone down there could get caught in the middle.\n\n\"Shroud's Head,\" Preacher announced. He was steering the monster airship while Rider prepared for what was to come. \"Battle stations, everybody.\"\n\nChaz sat Caracen\u00e9 in a seat usually reserved for an airship's commander. \"You stay put till I tell you otherwise. You hear?\"\n\nHer eyes flashed fire, Rider noted. She had begun to show sparks of life. But she did as she was told, if only because it was the wisest thing she could do.\n\nSpud joined Preacher in handling the airship. Chaz and the others manned some of its weapons\u2014though little good they might do in a confrontation between sorcerers the caliber of Rider and Shai Khe. Rider said, \"Take station a half mile off the point, Preacher. Hold fast there. And wait.\" He seemed to go completely inside himself then.\n\nPreacher and Spud did exactly as instructed.\n\nShroud's Head glared malevolently.\n\nNothing happened for a long time.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Soup squawked suddenly. He pointed a shaky finger.\n\nThe air before Caracen\u00e9 had begun to glitter. The glitter became more intense, gave way to crawling patches of color that collided, mixed, spread, shone rainbow like oil on water. They formed the outline of a man.\n\n\"Our opponent wants to talk,\" Rider said.\n\nAs he spoke, the colors around the figure's head sorted themselves out and became fixed in the oriental features of the sorcerer Shai Khe. For half a minute those evil green eyes stared vacantly. They sparked then, recognized Caracen\u00e9, shifted their gaze to Rider.\n\nA hissing whisper seemed to come from everywhere at once. \"So. Face to face now, Ride-Master. You have been a stubborn, resourceful, and lucky opponent, if foolish now. You grow overconfident, leaving the shield of your father's web. Go back. You are overmatched here.\"\n\n\"I was never overmatched. You have fled me time and again. But now there is nowhere you can run. Surrender yourself.\"\n\nSoft, malicious laughter filled the cabin. \"I was about to suggest you do the same. For the sake of the woman. You are a gentleman, Ride-Master, and would not see her destroyed. She is of value to me. I will give you and your men your liberty, after you have been disarmed, if you return her to me.\"\n\nRider did not respond. He stepped to a window, examined the Bridge. The broad blue strait remained sun-drenched and busy. Finally, he faced the image of the easterner. \"Your hour is done. Give it up. Or suffer the consequences you bring upon yourself.\"\n\nRider's men stirred nervously.\n\n\"Brave, Ride-Master. But I am far too old to be bluffed that easily. Not even your father could do that.\" There was a glint of malice in Shai Khe's eye each time he mentioned Jehrke.\n\n\"As you will, then,\" Rider said. \"I have warned you enough. Still, one last warning. Do not bring that airship out of Shroud's Eye. I disclaim responsibility for what will happen if you do.\"\n\nPure evil animated the sorcerer's laughter. Then he vanished.\n\nA half hour had passed. Nothing had happened. Rider was growing concerned. Had Shai Khe, in his caution, readied one more bolt hole than expected?\n\n\"Think he's decided to take your advice?\" Chaz asked.\n\n\"No. Though he may try to wait us out.\"\n\n\"He won't get anywhere doing that.\" Chaz pointed.\n\nFour giants of the air were crossing the Bridge, two to either hand. Rider said, \"Procopio. I believe we'll hear from Shai Khe soon enough now.\"\n\nGeneral Procopio had left the group back in the City. It had been his idea to land troops upon Shroud's Head, to prevent flight to the landward side. He had convinced someone very high up\u2014maybe King Belledon himself.\n\nThe airships discharged their weapons as they passed the headland. The great stone face became spotted with fires. Several missiles penetrated the eye where Shai Khe's airship lay. The airships moved on. Soldiers slid down ropes.\n\nA spear of emerald fire ripped out of the Devil's Eye. Its target was Rider's airship. Rider was ready. At a gesture the light bent heavenward.\n\nBoth of the monument's eyes began to burn an evil carnelian. Darkness gamboled behind the light.\n\nThe troops were all off the airships. They were linking up. Soon they would draw their line tighter.\n\nThe sea itself leapt at Rider's command, a foot-thick serpent of water rising to hammer the monument with its head. The power of that stream tore huge chunks from the stone face.\n\nA horrible scream came from Shroud's Head. It grew louder rapidly. Just when it seemed it would become unbearable, it died.\n\nThe world was totally silent. And in the silence Rider's water monster collapsed.\n\nThe fires still burned in the monument's eyes.\n\nThe snout of an airship protruded from one.\n\n\"He's coming out,\" Preacher announced.\n\nRider nodded. \"Back off. Don't let him get too close. Everybody hang on.\"\n\nThe pirate airship exited the Devil's Eye slowly\u2014till its rear steering vanes cleared. Then it charged like a bull in the arena.\n\nRider sighed, both relieved and concerned. Such confidence might mean Shai Khe had no glimmer of his earlier visit\u2014or it might mean that the easterner had detected it and taken steps.\n\nRider's airship backed down more slowly than Shai Khe's charged. The gap between ships dwindled. Chaz and the others readied their weapons. Without a battle complement Rider's ship would have a feeble sting, but still one stronger than the pirate's. The easterner would have no crew to spare for fighting.\n\nA thin, almost invisible string of darkness connected Shai Khe's airship with the eye where Rider had detected the terror. The farther the easterner came out, the fatter and darker that line grew. Rider watched, face grim. \"The man is smart and strong, but a fool at times.\"\n\nThe others did not understand. But Rider's face told them he had done something of which he was mildly ashamed.\n\nA storm of sorceries exploded from Shai Khe's airship. Preacher dodged while Rider fended. Chaz discharged his weapon. Its flaring bolt arced toward the pirate, but fell far short.\n\nThe air before Caracen\u00e9 sparkled. Shai Khe's face appeared. A whisper of a voice said, \"Now you meet the true despair, Ride-Master.\" The face vanished.\n\nRider looked sad.\n\nThe air itself shuddered as if from godlike hammer strokes. The black cable connecting the sorcerer's airship with the promontory fattened till it was as thick as a big man's waist. Then the landward end broke loose.\n\nA globule of a darkness like nonexistence whipped toward Shai Khe's vessel. The eye could not fix upon it.\n\nIt impacted upon the easterner's airship.\n\nThe pirate folded like a sausage bent over a knee. \"Move back now!\" Rider ordered. \"Move fast!\"\n\nPreacher needed no encouragement.\n\nEveryone, on both ships, knew what would happen. But it was a long time coming\u2014as though mocking by delay.\n\nShai Khe's ship folded almost double before a skin crack appeared where the strain of folding was greatest.\n\nA gas bladder burst.\n\nAnd that was the pirate's doom.\n\nThe gas exploded on contacting the air. Billows of fire flung out of the airship. The fire penetrated another bladder, which exploded in turn. The airship settled toward the water. New fires continued erupting.\n\nWaves of heat beat against Rider's airship.\n\nRider took control and pressed closer, following the easterner down. Below, the nearest surface ships scurried away.\n\nTwo flaming crewmen jumped from the pirate. Rider tried to reach for them, to buoy them up, but without the web could not respond fast enough.\n\nGobbets of flaming ship dropped away, splashed into the Bridge, set the sea aflame.\n\n\"Holy Zephod,\" Preacher finally gasped. \"I never saw one blow before. What a sight.\"\n\nThey all watched in awe.\n\n\"What's that?\" Chaz asked, as the dying monster of the air started the final hundred feet of its fall.\n\n\"Sounds like...\" Su-Cha frowned. \"Sounds like somebody laughing.\"\n\nThe sound grew swiftly louder. And it was mad laughter.\n\nCaracen\u00e9 made a startled, squeaky noise. Chaz whirled. He gasped. \"Rider! You won't believe...\"\n\nRider turned. A vast, sparkling face was taking form between him and the woman. Flames enveloped and distorted it. It was laughing.\n\nIt glared at Rider. Its laughter became mocking. All-enveloping words filled the cabin. \"You have won nothing, Ride-Master. Nothing. Even I am but a messenger.\" More laughter, rising toward the insane.\n\nThe phantom snapped out of existence.\n\nThe pirate airship hit the water. A last half-dozen gas bladders erupted at once. A violent updraft staggered Rider's airship, sent it rising and whirling. He fought for control, finally got the vessel moving toward Shasesserre.\n\n\"What did he mean, he was only a messenger?\" Chaz demanded. His question was for Rider but he was looking at Caracen\u00e9.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Rider replied.\n\n\"Well, I don't like it.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I do, either. In some ways this has been almost too easy a victory.\"\n\n\"Too easy?\" Su-Cha squawked.\n\nChaz glared at Caracen\u00e9. \"Woman?\"\n\nBut Caracen\u00e9 remained silent. She stood at a window now, staring back at the nest of fire and flock of smoke celebrating Shai Khe's destruction." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Neither Rider nor his men bragged up what had happened. But countless others had been in the affair. They talked. In fact, most of the City had become aware of the struggle before its conclusion. So when it became generally known that the threat from a great devil of a sorcerer out of the east had been overcome by Jehrke's son, there developed a general acclamation of the son as Protector in his father's stead.\n\nKing Belledon was not pleased.\n\nRepercussions continued for some time, as the King purged or exiled the last of those who had conspired against Shasesserre.\n\nBorder situations that had threatened all along the empire's frontiers evaporated almost magically. The troublesome easternmost provinces fell into an abnormally peaceful state. Agents in those far lands said the report of Shai Khe's demise had paralyzed the eastern sorcerer's shadowed kingdom of terror. The great peril was at an end. The thing was done. Even King Belledon sent Rider his grudging gratitude and congratulations.\n\nBut the world was filled with illusions, and the greatest illusion of all was that of safety.\n\nNot for the first time, Preacher asked, \"What did Shai Khe mean when he said he was only a messenger?\"\n\nRider had not forgotten that. He, Greystone, Spud, and Su-Cha all were scouring their sources and resources in an effort to prepare for possible troubles.\n\nThey unearthed no news of any value\u2014not even a concrete indication that Shai Khe had been anything less than his own agent. They found only the faintest wisp of a rumor from the nethermost east about a cabal of which Shai Khe might have been a junior member. But that was only hearsay of a rumor of hearsay.\n\nChaz figured that in Caracen\u00e9 they had the next best thing to a primary source. \"Press her,\" he told Rider, in private. \"She knows a lot that she isn't telling.\"\n\nRider raised an eyebrow. It was an expressive querying gesture. Chaz reddened slightly. He had been paying elaborate public court to Caracen\u00e9. And she seemed pleased by his attention.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Rider replied. \"We're not under the sword. She has been a slave\u2014and more. She needs time to rediscover the meaning and bounds of her freedom. She has to determine for herself if she has a moral obligation to speak or to remain silent. With Shai Khe gone, and with his hold upon her charred and sunken beneath the Bridge, I can see no reason to doubt that she will come around. It will have far more meaning when it comes from the heart. Exercise your famous barbarian patience. Take her out on the town. Take her to the Little Circus. General Procopio is giving three days of games to celebrate his part in our success.\"\n\nThere had been some grumpiness over Procopio's having claimed so much. Rider, though, was pleased because the old officer was diverting attention from himself and his men.\n\n\"Take her out and buy her a western-style wardrobe. I do not know women well, but never heard of one whose morale could not be improved by a shopping spree. Especially when someone else is picking up the cost.\"\n\nChaz grumped, \"I think she looks just fine wearing what she has.\"\n\n\"You would. Most of the time she's half-naked. But she can't wander the streets like that.\"\n\nChaz grumped some more, mostly because he had fixed notions of the way women shopped. He did not look forward to squiring Caracen\u00e9 around the courtiers of the City. But he went out and collected her.\n\nHe knew his duty. And there was a fine chance that doing it would earn him pleasant rewards." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "General Procopio invited Rider's gang to share his personal box at the Little Circus\u2014reluctantly, after Chaz accused him of ingratitude and glory-hogging. Since the public were well aware that the Protector's son\u2014himself acclaimed Protector now\u2014was primarily responsible for thwarting the danger to the City, a few bitter words could make of the Procopio Games the disaster of the social season. The general issued his invitation rather than risk humiliation.\n\nOther than Chaz, only Greystone evinced much interest in attending. The scholar had worked out systems for betting on horse and chariot races and wanted to test them in the field. Su-Cha would have attended had he been allowed, but the law was adamant about forbidding his kind to attend sporting events, the outcome of which might be mystically jiggered. Too many bettors' money might be affected.\n\nCaracen\u00e9 was both elegant and exotic in a white pleated creation which fell to her ankles but left her arms bare. Her hair was in a single twist that came around her neck to the right and fell between her breasts. Chaz felt drab and inadequate as they made for Procopio's private box. Ten thousand eyes measured Caracen\u00e9 and found her beauty more than adequate. A thousand men murmured their admiration and asked one another who that beauty might be.\n\nChaz felt smaller than ever.\n\nBut he was carrying his sword, his illegal sword, without challenge, so those who mattered did not lose track of his identity amidst Caracen\u00e9's radiance. That was reassuring.\n\nThe box of honor was shaded by a gaudy awning. The only other seating so honored was the royal box. Chaz dropped onto one of the stone benches. \"Thanks for small favors.\" He pointed upward. \"It's days like this that make me wonder why I never stayed home.\" It was hot, yes, and very humid.\n\nGeneral Procopio turned, held a finger to his lips. Charioteers were getting themselves aligned for a start and the herald was about to announce the contestants.\n\n\"You haven't told me anything about your homeland,\" Caracen\u00e9 whispered.\n\n\"Neither have you, Sweetheart. Sounds to me like we're even.\"\n\nGreystone had arrived before Chaz and Caracen\u00e9. He was seated behind the general, calculating on a wax tablet. He turned and scowled.\n\n\"Do they have chariot races there?\"\n\nChaz eyed the woman suspiciously. Why this empty-headed act? \"No. Pony races. Bareback. Through the woods.\"\n\nProcopio and Greystone both scowled. The herald had begun announcing the charioteers and the stables they represented. Caracen\u00e9 got the message, if Chaz did not. She folded her hands in her lap and watched the race get under way.\n\nChaz hardly noticed. A shadow too small for that of a cloud or airship, yet big, was rippling over the crowd. Some people were looking up instead of following the race. He stepped to the edge of the canopy, caught a glimpse of a large wing vanishing beyond the stadium rim. \"Su-Cha clowning around?\" he wondered.\n\n\"I don't think so.\" Greystone startled Chaz, who had not seen the scholar rise. \"The runt has more style. The bird is big but dingy. He'd be colorful.\"\n\nRising crowd noise kept Chaz from responding.\n\nThe chariots were running hub to hub going into the back stretch. The mob expected real excitement going into the final turn.\n\n\"It been here before?\" Chaz shouted.\n\n\"All morning. Here it comes again.\"\n\n\"Looks like a giant chicken hawk,\" Chaz opined. \"My size.\"\n\nCaracen\u00e9 moved up beside him. When she saw the bird she gasped and lost color. Chaz asked, \"You know what that thing is?\"\n\nCaracen\u00e9 nodded. As she opened her mouth to say something, Procopio shouted, \"If you people can't keep it down back there, go away.\"\n\nThe bird turned a half circle, one yellow eye fixed upon the stadium somewhere above Procopio's box.\n\nCaracen\u00e9 gasped again, and lost more color.\n\nThe bird folded its wings, falling into an attack dive. Its plunge was directly toward Chaz.\n\nHe hurled Caracen\u00e9 and a squealing Greystone into the concealment provided by the awning, dragged his blade out and braced himself.\n\nThe chariots were into the final leg of the race, the three frontrunners still neck and neck. The crowd was shrieking. Only a few spectators, quite close, noted Chaz's actions and looked up. They out-shrieked the race aficionados.\n\nAs Chaz prepared to meet his death Caracen\u00e9 bounded to her feet and rejoined him. Her hair was aflame. Her eyes had become whirling pools of smoke. She flung her hands toward the hawk. They glowed like red-hot steel.\n\nThe bird staggered just yards from completing its strike. That saved Chaz.\n\nIt smashed into the awning, shrieking and snapping at him over its shoulder. Beneath the canvas people scrambled. The bird ripped fabric and flesh with its talons.\n\nChaz swung his blade in a flat arc, scored the monster's beak and opened flesh nearby. His backstroke pruned feathers from a wingtip. The beast seemed of mixed minds. It wanted to face and fight him while continuing to rip at those still trapped beneath the canopy.\n\nIt dipped its head, snapped its beak, came up with a severed human arm. Chaz bounced a sword-stroke off its forehead, peeling flesh back. Blood flooded its eyes. It shrieked and dropped its booty, flung itself up to attack with its talons. Chaz clipped more feathers from the same wing, batted one monster foot aside with his blade, rolled beneath the other. From flat on his back he drove the tip of his sword into the beast's belly. Though he caused only a minor wound, the bird screeched and tried to flee.\n\nIt flung itself into the air, wings thundering. But with blood-blinded eyes and one wing trimmed it could not fly a straight line. It plunged into the crowd fifty yards away. People screamed as it began killing anyone it could reach.\n\nChaz gained his feet, ripped the canvas off the remains of those who had occupied Procopio's box, dreading what he might see when he found Greystone.\n\nBut the little scholar was fine. He had stretched out against a stone bench where it was impossible for the bird to reach him.\n\nProcopio had been less fortunate. It was he who had lost the limb.\n\nChaz roared and looked for the bird.\n\nIt had tried to fly again, and again it had plunged into the crowd. The panic was spreading. In a rage, he prepared to storm through the mob on a quest for revenge.\n\nCaracen\u00e9's touch stayed him. He looked down into her eyes. They had returned to normal. Her hair no longer blazed. Her face was drained. Once she had his attention, she pointed.\n\nHe looked up a dozen rows. He saw a tall, grey-haired gentleman in antiquated apparel who stood calmly observing the growing terror. As his gaze swept over Chaz a taunting smile tugged at his lips.\n\n\"Green eyes!\" Those awful green eyes! \"It's him!\" Chaz roared. \"It has to be him.\" He hurled himself out of Procopio's box.\n\nThe old man strode away. The chaos parted for him as though he were fiery to the touch.\n\nChaz did not have the same luck.\n\nA hammercrack of sorcery rang out over the stadium. Every hair on Chaz's head stood up and crackled. The monster bird screamed once, died.\n\nIn the moment he was looking away Chaz lost track of the grey-haired gentleman with the green eyes. He cursed.\n\nThen he sighted Rider and Su-Cha ploughing through the crowd, headed his way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "\"What brought you here?\" Chaz demanded when Rider reached him.\n\n\"Caracen\u00e9 twisting the web. What happened?\"\n\n\"She tried to stop that bird. I don't know where it came from, but I know how it got here. Shai Khe brought it.\"\n\n\"But...\" Su-Cha piped.\n\n\"I saw him. Caracen\u00e9 pointed him out. Where is she? He had greyed his hair and was wearing old-time clothes, like one of the Cynics, but it was him. Not his brother or cousin or uncle or whatever you're going to say, but him. There aren't any other eyes like his eyes. Where's Caracen\u00e9 gotten to?\"\n\n\"There is no strain on the web,\" Rider said, scanning the crowd. \"Su-Cha, start looking for him.\"\n\nChaz was looking around now, quietly desperate, seeking Caracen\u00e9. He did not catch a glimpse of her. He had remained calm throughout the crisis. Now he was ready to panic.\n\n\"Keep a watch for the woman, too,\" Rider told Su-Cha. He started down toward Procopio's box.\n\n\"Can't you feel her?\" Chaz demanded.\n\n\"She isn't leaving any trail in the web.\"\n\n\"It's his fault. Shai Khe. He did something to her. She was almost ready to come over to our side. How could he have survived an airship's destruction? Especially with that shadow of his trying to gobble every soul in sight?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Rider confessed. \"I'm as mystified as you. I was convinced that he was dead. But he is old and powerful and tricky.\"\n\n\"I'm going looking, too. He isn't getting away with Caracen\u00e9 if I've got anything to say about it.\"\n\n\"I don't know how he could have gotten through that alive,\" Rider repeated. \"Unless he was not aboard the airship at all. Which could have been, though I don't see how he could have managed the airship so deftly from ashore.\"\n\nChaz, a glob of moroseness feeling sorry for itself huddling in a corner, did not look up. No slightest trace of Caracen\u00e9 or the green-eyed man had come to light yet.\n\n\"We'll hear from Shai Khe again,\" Rider said. \"If, indeed, it was he that Chaz saw.\" Rider was not convinced that his only witness was reliable. \"His ego wouldn't let it be otherwise.\" What was meant to be a feather of hope fell flat with Chaz.\n\n\"If it was Shai Khe, I'm convinced he has left the City. He would have to do so. He would need to restore the edifice of terror that began crumbling with the report of his death. If he lives, and Caracen\u00e9 is with him, he will be in the east and we will have report of them soon enough.\"\n\nBut the big northerner refused to be encouraged. \"I'll find her,\" he mumbled. \"I'll find them both. And when the dust settles there won't be no more green-eyed spook doctor hanging around. No more slave-master for her to be afraid of.\"\n\nRider looked at his friend with compassion, but he said nothing more. There was nothing to say. What was needed now was the passing of time.\n\nIt would be a time shorter than any of them imagined." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(The Technocrat War 3) Maelstrom", + "author": "Austen Andrews", + "genres": [ + "fantasy", + "Ultima Online" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Sosaria as it appears in The Technocrat War is the synthesis of many extraordinary talents. Armand de Orive, Andy Hoyos, Starr Long, Damion Schubert, and the entire team on the Origin project deserve credit for dreaming the world in which I am privileged to write.\n\nThanks also go out to the Ultima Online team at Origin Systems, who picked up the ball and ran with it. And of course we owe everything to the \"Lost King\" himself, who flapped his wings in Texas and sent hurricanes around the world.\n\nFor my parents and grandparents and everyone who came before me; for my children, nephew and nieces who came after me; and for Elizabeth, who stood beside me during the long, long War.\n\nAnd the terrible day came when Lord Blackthorn marched against the great army of the King. Foremost of His Majesty's defenders was the brave Sir Lazaro, resplendent in his silvery armor. When Blackthorn's dark troops appeared on the battlefield, the other knights lamented, \"What bleak injustice befalls us that the kingdom battles itself?\"\n\nSir Lazaro answered them, \"There is no injustice, for we have honored the Virtues. We have lived as good men. We have passed this to our children. Therefore no wickedness can defeat us, for though we may die, evil has already fallen. To live well is the truest act of Justice.\"\n\nAnd so did the Virtue of Justice triumph, though thousands of knights would perish in the flames on that horrifying day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Tell me what troubles you, Sartorius.\" \"The plot has grown... complex.\"\n\n\"Complexity is an illusion. The design is very simple. The Juka Clans are invading Logosia. The New Britannians are coming to help. We must do all that we can to ensure their success.\"\n\n\"Perhaps that is a simple design for one in your position, Chamberlain Kavah, but it is my nation that falls under the enemy's sword. I have just sacrificed most of my armada to farther our scheme.\"\n\n\"You have nothing to fear. The Pact of Four is strong. General Nathaniel and Warlord Bahrok will remove Blackthorn from power. After the war is over, you will be left in control. Always remember that ultimate goal, Lector. It will make your sacrifice bearable.\"\n\n\"I am uncertain that Bahrok and Nathaniel are trustworthy. Already they have betrayed the secrecy of the Pact for the sake of their primitive honor.\"\n\n\"You are correct, of course. They're ambitious savages. But they are useful to our purposes.\"\n\n\"And what about me, Kavah? Am I a useful savage, as well?\"\n\n\"I hold the Technocrats in the highest esteem, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\"You did not answer my question. What is your goal in this war? You have never made that clear and it gives me some magnitude of concern. The time has come for you to answer.\"\n\n\"Very well. Like you, I am unsatisfied with the...arrangements in my homeland. The Matriarchs have disrupted the ancient order of Meer society. I intend to correct that mistake.\"\n\n\"I see. Then you seek political power, like the rest of us do. And how does this war service your needs?\"\n\n\"That is something you shall learn very soon. The scheme draws toward its conclusion. As it does so you must keep a clear head, Lector Sartorius. The plot is very simple. New Britannia and the Juka Clans will invade Logosia. We must ensure their success. We shall be rewarded in the end.\"\n\n\"As you say, Chamberlain. As you say.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Devastation at Akar", + "text": "Thulann's braids, silky and white, streamed back at the cusp of a desert breeze. The elderly Juka stood as tall and straight as the walking staff she carried. Her slim figure parted the hot, bitter wind. Her long cloak danced and snapped behind her. The laces of her armor creaked.\n\nIn front of her the sky boiled ash and embers. Golden flames reflected in the sweat of her jade-green face. Her one, weathered eye stared out with mounting rage.\n\nFrom atop a toothy, windswept bluff, she witnessed a fiery massacre. A distant Technocrat city burned redder than blood, sheeting the sky with clouds of black smoke. Three armies deployed on the cracked desert around it. One large force had seized the granite buildings of the city and occupied them in the midst of the hellish inferno. Even from miles away Thulann recognized the banners of Clan Kumar. They were her own people, the proud clan of Shirron Turlogan. They had succeeded in capturing this settlement, Akar, which was a key victory in the invasion of Logosia.\n\nBut the Technocrat defenders were extracting a deadly payment. If they could not hold Akar, the followers of Blackthorn looked eager to destroy it. Above the city hovered the dark hulks of Logosian airships, dozens of them, like iron spikes suspended from the clouds. Devastation rained down from the steam-driven war machines. Thulann saw spouts of amber flame feeding the blaze that tore through the captured buildings. She winced at the silver flashes of artificial lightning, eerily silent until the thunder reached her ears. She ground her teeth at the wafting reek of smoke and metal cinders.\n\nThe army of Clan Kumar was being decimated by fire, body by burning body.\n\nBy destroying Akar, the airships supported the retreat of the Technocrat ground army. The black-armored troops hurried southward, abandoning their dead soldiers and their wheeled war engines. The Logosians' march was hasty and desperate. They were beaten, vulnerable. Yet a third army watched unmoving, though it was poised to cut off their escape. The vast Jukan force arrayed in the west. Thulann could never mistake the tall banners of Clan Varang. Their chieftain, Warlord Bahrok, had finally arrived at Akar. And despite the fact that he was an ally, Bahrok took no action to help Clan Kumar escape its fiery destruction.\n\nA small figure drew beside the old Juka and spat a curse. The human girl's sea-green eyes narrowed with fury. She bared her teeth and dragged russet curls from her pale, freckled brow. \"Why doesn't Bahrok move in? This is the feast he's been hungry for! His catapults could drive off those airships. He's got eight thousand warriors standing around like virgins at a cathouse!\"\n\nThulann pushed words through a wrinkled frown. \"This battle is over, Toria. Clan Kumar has won it. What we are witnessing now is the calculated murder of the victors.\"\n\n\"You're saying Bahrok is deliberately waiting for our soldiers to be wiped out!\"\n\n\"This is a trap, laid by Bahrok. He waited for our army to capture the city. Then he called upon his Technocrat accomplices to strike us down with their hidden airships. But breathe deep, child, and snuff your fears. We shall not be defeated. The slaughter will end soon.\"\n\nToria glanced at the tall Juka. \"How do you know that?\" The old Way Master laid a palm on the hilt of her sword. \"Because I am here now. I am going to stop it myself. Now help me down this hillside. These rocks are damnably loose. Defeating those airships will be difficult enough without a broken ankle hindering my bladesmanship.\"\n\nThe desert floor was parched and dusty, laced with fissures from a recent earthquake. Under a titanic column of smoke, Toria and Thulann drew near the burning city. A line of refugees moved past them, hurrying in the opposite direction. The civilians of Akar were fleeing toward the craggy hills in the west. Fear lit their soot-blackened eyes. Thulann knew why. Warlord Bahrok offered little mercy to the civilian victims of his conquests. To Bahrok, security was paramount. Every Logosian, human or Juka, he regarded as a patient enemy. Even a child could poison a well or cut a sleeping man's throat. They all deserved chains and guards.\n\nThulann pitied the warlord for his angry existence. She murmured a soft prayer for the terrified refugees. The wilds of Logosia would not be kind to them. The bedraggled families carried fewer possessions than even Thulann and Toria, who each hefted weapons and a well-laden shoulder sack.\n\nThe blasting heat of fiery Akar conjured whirlwinds from the sand. The two women wrapped scarves over their faces. Toria looked up at the many Technocrat airships, glowing in the pillar of smoke like lanterns in a giant tree. Fire and lightning slashed down from the gloom. She clutched Thulann's arm and murmured, \"How do we stop them, hey? Are we going up there?\"\n\nThulann sighed at a twinge of pain in her back. Sixty-seven years had worn her body to its innermost nerves. She loosened her spine and answered, \"When I was younger, I would have done precisely that. But after that business with Braun's Needle I have resolved to keep my feet within striking distance of the earth. This old crow has clipped her wings for good.\"\n\nFlames clawed the outskirts of town, reaching up ten times the height of the redheaded Toria. She cried out, \"Then what can we do? We don't have time to map out a plan. Venduss and Turlogan are inside there!\"\n\n\"Indeed they are,\" growled the Way Master, \"and I know where.\" Without another word she rushed into the city. Toria followed at her heels. When they reached the first slab-paved road, the horror of the battle grew tangible. The air scalded their exposed skin and eyes. Fumes and embers stole the breath from their mouths. When they darted between buildings the heat struck like a hammer. The hellish roar shook their bones. They moved with care amid smoldering debris, not only of ruined wood and ironwork but increasingly charred corpses, both Logosian soldiers and Jukan clansmen. Farther through the inferno they plunged and the mounds of bodies grew larger. Heat ignited the littered dead. The piles stirred with terrible animation; flaming breaths and smoking eyes. Screams rose like sparks in the air.\n\nBlackthorn's war machines continued to smash the city from above. The ground shuddered and twitched.\n\nIn the chaos Thulann glimpsed Toria's expression and saw the hardness growing. The aged Juka frowned. In time every young warrior learned to accept the nightmare scenes of war. Their eyes tempered like metal. The transformation was never joyful, and yet the hardening of Toria seemed particularly tragic. The minstrel had lived an impoverished childhood, but had emerged with her innocence intact. To lose it like this, to Bahrok's treachery, was violence of the worst kind.\n\nBut Toria never hesitated and neither did Thulann. The Way Master led them toward the center of town. From the distant bluff she had discerned a pattern to the Technocrat attacks. The fiercest blazes described a circle around the perimeter of Akar. This fiery wall imprisoned more than half of Clan Kumar's forces. The Jukan warriors sheltered under sturdy granite buildings. Center-most of all structures was a tall, pointed tower, bristling with chimney pipes. Thulann had spotted the Shirron's banner flying at the summit. It was clear evidence that the city had been captured before the airships arrived.\n\nThulann intended to reach that tower where Shirron Turlogan stood his ground. Turlogan was her lover of many decades. His smile was her only home. But today she did not seek him for selfish reasons. The battle hinged on his presence.\n\nWhen they breached the interior of the ring of flames, the atmosphere grew bearable again. They paused to catch their breaths. Explosions echoed around them, joined by the haunting steam whistles and trumpets of Technocrat airships communicating with each other. Toria plugged her ears with a grimace, then muttered, \"Great Mother! How can they do this to their own city? I thought they'd spent the last few years building it into an airship factory.\"\n\n\"Do not forget who orchestrates this atrocity. Warlord Bahrok and Lector Sartorius are both members of the Part of Four. They have choreographed this battle from either side to further their own careers. I am certain Sartorius's rivals must be losing much in this battle. And yet both the Lector and the warlord are precise and efficient. I cannot believe that their goal is the simple destruction of Akar and Clan Kumar.\"\n\n\"Why not? A few more hours like this and both will be ashes.\"\n\nThulann shook her head. \"The airships cannot maintain this pace. They will run out of munitions before night has fallen. Then they must retreat to Logos or Crevasse, lest Bahrok decide to knock them out of the sky with his artillery. Pact or no pact, Sartorius would never leave himself that vulnerable. No, this action has a more strategic objective. And I suspect I know what it is.\" Leaning on her walking staff, she peered around a corner and pointed. \"Do you see the tower where Turlogan's banner flies? Notice the airships hovering just above it. Those are command vessels. Troop ships. They have deployed Janissars to capture or kill the Shirron. I am certain of it.\"\n\nToria squeezed her companion's shoulder. \"And Venduss is with him! I've lost him twice now. I won't lose him again. We've got to find them!\"\n\n\"On the contrary, we must ensure that they are not found. Unfortunately, Janissars are expert shock troops and not easily turned aside. They will not leave until they have what they came for. And I fear we have little chance of killing them all.\" She scrutinized the scene around the tower. From a distance the Logosian soldiers seemed tiny, though she knew most of them were quite tall and stout. Then she pursed her lips and mumbled, \"Perhaps there is a way. We shall have to scavenge from our own dead, but I doubt they will begrudge us.\" She glanced over the petite human. \"Get undressed, Toria.\"\n\nThe girl startled. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Fetch out those Logosian clothes you have been carrying. I need bait for a trap and you have a gift for drawing men's eyes.\"\n\nIn the pandemonium of shadows and smoke they traversed the battered city. Shafts of lightning pounded the angular buildings, flinging rubble and ruined machinery with dangerous velocity. Thulann trusted her armor to ward off flying debris. But Toria was now dressed as a Logosian youth, in a short leather skirt and bodice that revealed more than they covered. An oiled cloak was her only protection from harm. So the Way Master knew they could waste no time in reaching the tower where Turlogan was barricaded with his personal Tarkosh guard. With regret she hurried past groups of Kumar clansmen who huddled under strong metal roofs. She could hear their curses when lightning strokes exploded nearby. She longed to reassure them, but could not afford the delay.\n\nI am here now, she called out in her thoughts. I shall put a stop to this.\n\nThe grey tower at the center of Akar was angled like a steep pyramid. Tall chimney pipes bristled along its height. The structure was ringed by Technocrat troops, some of whom battled to capture the tower, while others fended off Jukan warriors desperate to aid their chieftain from outside. Thulann and Toria used the cover of a large pipeline to slip past the enemy forces. The clamor of battle afforded them freedom. They hid in the complex of doors and courtyards that surrounded the base of the tower, where Janissars clashed with the Shirron's elite Tarkosh guard.\n\nOverhead, Turlogan's proud banner undulated against the roiling blackness. Thulann watched it for an indulgent moment. She was only minutes away from the tall chieftain, with whom she ached to reunite. But he was not her present goal. Instead, from the smoky gloom she scrutinized the Logosian troops. Soon she found what she needed. She nudged her petite companion.\n\nToria let out a shriek as she sprinted across an open courtyard. Her minstrel's voice cut through the din and fetched the ears of a group of Janissars. The girl was convincing as an Akarian native. The Janissars pointed and bellowed in protest as Thulann chased after her. A stroke from the Way Master's sword drew blood from Toria's arm. Then the two women ran through a doorway that Thulann had carefully selected.\n\nThe Way Master faded into the shadows and listened. Boot steps clambered after them. The Janissars had fallen for the ruse. Inside the high-vaulted corridor, Toria clutched her superficial wound and glowered at the old Juka. Thulann waved her off. The Janissars had arrived. The girl loosed another scream to draw them deeper into the corridor.\n\nFive men charged past Thulann. She nurtured a calm, protracted breath, then flashed into their midst with a drawn sword. A quick sweep felled two Janissars, one with a severed windpipe and the other with a slash across the face. The latter was down but not dead, though Thulann could not spare a heartbeat to worry about it. Two enemies whirled to face her while the last one bolted after Toria. Thulann selected the weaker of her opponents and darted around him, so that he shielded her from the larger Janissar. Then she engaged him in a dance of blades, her ornamented Garronite steel clanging against his razor-edged Logosian hook sword. Their tempo was frantic. In the granite corridor the weapons chattered a loud, metallic song. It finished when she guided her sword-point through a seam in his armor and slit open certain organs in his torso. He snarled as he collapsed.\n\nThunder roared as the ground rushed up and hammered Thulann in the chin. The larger Janissar had kicked her. A heavy boot stamped on her white braid, pinning her head to the floor. The man grunted as he brandished a weapon that was apparently quite heavy, though she could not turn her face to see it. Without thinking she tossed her braid around his ankle, then kicked up her legs and rolled end-over-end. The braid became a snare around the Janissar's leg, unbalancing him. His weapon smashed the stone floor inches from Thulann's cheek. Granite chips stung her eye. She planted her feet and sprang away, her hair no longer trapped.\n\nThe Janissar recovered his balance while Thulann blinked away the dust. Her vision focused on the gigantic man. The Logosian Juka stood nearly two heads taller than herself. His frame was wide and athletic. She judged him to be close in size to the mountainous Shirron himself.\n\nThat was, of course, why she had not killed him first.\n\nThe man hoisted an enormous hammer into guard position. Its striking surface was augmented by a spring-mounted plate. Through the face mask of his helmet she could see his furious eyes and the outraged twist to his frown. \"I know you,\" he growled. \"Thulann of Garron. The Way Master who serves the Shirron.\"\n\nShe bowed her head a bit, panting. \"You have me at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\"You withered monster! You preyed on chivalry to trap us.\"\n\n\"I apologize. I would have preyed on something less noble, but my thoughts are not as agile as they once were. I have grown old and distracted.\"\n\n\"And dishonorable as well. I'd heard better of Way Masters.\" His fists tightened on the haft of his maul. He stepped a pace nearer. His footwork was unerring. \"I thought you were gone to New Britannia. They told us that's why the sneak attack was not detected.\"\n\n\"You flatter me, but I have concluded my business abroad.\"\n\n\"Business more important than your Shirron? Then it's true that Garronites prefer intrigue to loyalty!\"\n\nA pang darted through her gut. She disapproved of this conversation. Soundlessly she assumed a ready stance, two hands on her sword hilt, as perfect and still as an instructional diagram. Her eye fixed on his chest. \"I have returned now. Reckon with me.\"\n\n\"That I will.\"\n\nWhen he advanced into her range, one clean stroke from her sword penetrated his chest plate at a joint. She felt her blade cleave an underlayer of padding and part the Janissar's flesh. She thrust her sword tip inside his shoulder. He sneered in pain.\n\nThen his giant hammer smashed against her breastbone. Ribs popped and the corridor spun. Her weak leg smacked the wall with brutal speed, wrenching it at the hip. She toppled down. By instinct she folded into a ball and rolled, then stood and swatted away a second blow.\n\nHe had knocked the breath from her lungs. Without a respite she would falter in a few seconds. Before that could happen she carved a pattern of strikes in the air to freeze him in a defensive sequence. Then she dropped to the ground and wheeled her leg at his ankles. He jumped over her leg sweep. Without a pause she spun around again and on the second turn her foot connected. The Janissar hit the floor hard. She rammed her blade at the gap in his chest armor, but missed it by an inch.\n\nHer lungs burned. She cartwheeled backward and caught her breath. As sultry air tumbled into her chest, the enormous Logosian sprang up and grabbed her. With a practiced move she twisted loose, but by then she hurtled through the air once more. She was upside down when her back slammed the wall. Inverted, she saw the man's hammer racing toward her head. Her only possible reaction was to turn her face away from the blow.\n\nWhen the spring hammer struck, her head lay flush against the smooth, granite wall. The shell of her helmet collapsed and transmitted the impact to her skull. Vision and thought exploded apart in a burst of brilliant white. The pain was spectacular. She fell to the ground.\n\nThough her body answered the command to rise, her head felt like iron. Her ears chirred with deafening volume. Her sword was gone, nor could she see to find it. Blindly she jabbed a lunge kick where she thought the Janissar might be. He grunted as she knocked, him away. She tore another breath from the air, then tracked the vibration of her opponent's footfalls and leapt at him.\n\nShe fastened a grip on his arms. Her brief panic disappeared. Her eyesight had not yet returned, but she did not require it immediately. Darkness suited wrestling forms. She clamped a hold on his elbows, which no amount of strength could untangle. He twirled his body, preparing to slam her to the ground, but after decades of training her limbs moved unconsciously into position. As both combatants started to fall, her legs scissored around his throat. They dropped and his weight pounded atop her, but she locked herself into place and ignored the pain. The choking maneuver was complete. He would sleep soon, despite any effort he might undertake.\n\nSomething stung her waist. Though his strength was vanishing and his arms were pinned, the Janissar had forced his knee up at a startling angle. The top of his boot was barbed with a squat knife, which he drove into her flank. Bands of blood streamed from the wound, but she was confident the attack would not kill her before he lost consciousness. She thanked the Great Mother that the blade was not poisoned.\n\nMore running footsteps came to her ears. Her bruised eye regained sight, as if she stared into a murky pool, in which appeared the russet-haired Toria. The human was bloody and her clothes were tom, but she charged down the corridor with healthy rage. Above her head she lifted a large cutlass that shimmered with otherworldly light. Her target was the Janissar who pinned Thulann to the ground. The girl's enchanted blade stroked down with a noise like an ocean wind.\n\nThulann had to react with perfect timing. She kicked the cutlass aside, just before it severed the Janissar's spine. The shock of impact numbed her leg. The blade crashed on the floor and cast up a spray of sparks. In the next instant the Janissar yanked his throat away from Thulann's clutches, though his strength was nearly gone. He lay gurgling for a breath.\n\nThulann barked at Toria, \"We must not kill him!\" Then she stared into the man's glassy eyes and muttered, \"What is your name, warrior?\"\n\nThe weakness of his voice did not diminish its pride: \"I am Master Enosh of Junction.\"\n\n\"I greet you with respect and honor, Master Enosh. You fight splendidly and honorably. And no, I do not deny your charge that my people are afflicted with intrigue. But before you condemn us, I advise you to observe your own Lectors. Sartorius betrays your people. You yourself are the tool of his schemes.\"\n\nThe Janissar growled angrily, \"You're lying.\"\n\n\"I feint in battle, but I do not lie.\" Thulann winced at her injured ribs. Then she cocked back an elbow, ready to strike the Janissar. \"Now I must apologize, but you have become my tool, as well. Take comfort that I have chosen you for the most flattering of reasons.\" Her elbow landed on his face with a loud crack. When he did not fall unconscious, she repeated the action.\n\nMaster Enosh lolled onto the ground. Thulann's arm throbbed with pain.\n\nToria was peering through the doorway at the battle outside. She wiped blood from her cheek and murmured, \"No one else is coming, but we'd better hurry all the same.\"\n\nThulann summoned a Way Master's composure against the torment of her injuries. She staggered to her feet and said, \"You may put your armor back on, child. And bring me a lock pick and that bottle of ink Captain Bawdewyn gave you. He must forgive you writing him one less letter, for the sake of the nation of Jukaran.\"\n\nPain lanced her torso. Thulann realized with dismay that she had fallen down again. Her skull boomed like an iron drum. As Toria leapt to her side the old Juka rasped, \"And find me a healing potion, if you please. Concussions are not as deadly as sword-thrusts and stricken hearts, but they weaken you like the former and knock you senseless like the latter.\"\n\nToria rushed away to retrieve their gear. Thulann sat up and gritted her teeth to resist a savage headache. Then she steadied her breathing, raised an elbow above Master Enosh's unconscious face and resumed her exhausting work.\n\nSomeday, the Way Master resolved, she would commission a suit of Janissar armor specifically fitted to her body. As a spy she had many occasions to don the enemy's mail. For all of their advanced manufacturing methods, however, the Technocrats could not seem to fashion armor that was remotely comfortable for her. Straps bound too tightly. Hidden comers worried her skin. Despite the absence of ornamentation, Technocrat suits were heavier, not lighter, than those crafted in Jukaran. Thulann could not fathom it. Perhaps the philosophy of the Machine dictated that its adherents must suffer. More likely, she surmised, Logosian armorers were either unconcerned with comfort or unabashedly sadistic.\n\nCurrently she endured the Technocrats' handiwork in her disguise as a Logosian soldier. Through smoky corridors she made her way toward the Janissars who ringed Turlogan's tower. Behind her she dragged the body of Master Enosh. The Janissar was not dead, but Thulann and Toria had altered his appearance a great deal. He was dressed now in fine, if bloody, Garronite armor. His head was shaven. Toria had burned away the Janissar tattoo that adorned his massive arm, while Thulann had used ink and a needle-like lock pick to inscribe a new tattoo on his chest. The marking was distinctive, simple and regal: the sigil of the Shirron himself.\n\nTo complete the masquerade, Thulann had battered Master Enosh's face until it was entirely unrecognizable. He would not wake for many days, since the Technocrats did not embrace healing magic.\n\nNow she hauled his limp, heavy form back to the Janissar troops. She took care to select a platoon on the far side of the tower from Enosh's own company. When she broke into the open, her ears pulsed with the thunder of battle and the blare of airship horns. Several Logosians scrambled to help her. Wearing a full Technocrat face plate, she was not concerned about being recognized. \"It's the Shirron!\" she howled at the others. \"Take him, quick! His guardsmen can't be far behind me!\"\n\nThe Janissars looked incredulous. \"How did you get to him? What company are you from?\"\n\n\"I serve with Master Enosh and I want to get back there fast! Haul this Garronite beast to your airship so we can get out of this inferno. That monster Bahrok is lurking outside of town and I don't trust him to keep civil much longer.\" Thulann found Toria in the shadows of the original corridor, repacking their belongings. The girl was again dressed in the leather armor of a New Britannian buccaneer. The knee-length hauberk was a bit too large, but in Toria's case it seemed neither uncomfortable nor unflattering. Thulann envied the girl's versatility. \"It is done,\" commented the Way Master, joining Toria in the gloom. She found her walking staff and leaned her weight upon it. \"Do you hear how the war trumpets have changed their melody? They believe they have acquired their prey, and so they are retreating. Bahrok will move his troops in presently.\"\n\nThe minstrel hissed, \"He's got a lot to answer for. I can't wait till he shows that ugly face!\"\n\nThulann sighed. \"I shall be content to separate my face and the rest of my body from this unforgiving suit of armor. These Technocrat disguises are murder\u2014\"\n\nWithout warning someone smashed into her from the thick of the darkness. She flung to the ground. A cruel pain chewed her calf. The Way Master immediately knew that her game leg had broken again. She flipped away her attacker and tumbled to a defensive stance.\n\nThe man fell upon her once more. She plucked the sword from his grip and hurled it aside. Fighting unarmed, he engaged her with a barrage of expert kicks and punches. Thulann recognized the techniques of a Way Master, which meant he was a clansman, probably a Tarkosh guardsman. His stealth was impressive to have eluded her notice. Through his guard she jabbed an open-palm blow that thumped onto his throat. His steel gorget did not absorb the entire force. He gasped, then kicked her in the chest and toppled her backward. Her sore ribs complained.\n\nShe dove into deeper shadows and bit down a smoldering anger. Then a glittering light invaded the dark corridor. Toria had unsheathed her enchanted cutlass, strewing brilliant motes like flashing sand. The girl's face shone pale in the eerie glow. She ran toward the silhouette of their attacker.\n\nThe man choked out the name, \"Toria?!\"\n\nThe minstrel froze in place and answered, \"Venduss?\" Thulann closed her eye and frowned. A part of her was relieved that her former student was alive and healthy. Another part wanted to punish Venduss for attacking her without verifying that she was truly Logosian, despite the armor she wore. But prudence cautioned her to stillness. Until a week ago, Toria had believed that Venduss was dead, and not until this moment did Venduss know that his lover yet lived. Thulann had no part in this reunion.\n\nThen another burst of light chased away the gloom altogether. Thulann recognized the radiance of a magical spell. It sprang from the tip of a bladed spear, held aloft by a young Jukan woman in a white robe. Painted on her brow was an intricate symbol. Her garment distinguished her as an Initiate of the Way.\n\nThe Jukan magician was preparing to unleash sorcery at Toria.\n\nThulann stood in full view and snapped, \"Enough!\" In a quick motion she removed the Janissar helmet, allowing the attackers to see her face. Both of them dropped to their knees.\n\n\"Teacher!\" gulped Venduss.\n\n\"Way Master,\" murmured the young woman, bowing her head with obeisance proper to a lesser member of Thulann's order. Her spell faded away, replaced by a soft, benign light.\n\nThe old Juka sniffed at the ache of her broken leg. She regained her walking staff and stamped it against the floor. \"Venduss! Get up, suckling! You are learning to be a war master now. You kneel only to the Great Mother herself.\" The tall warrior rose at her order, though Thulann did not command his attention. His gaze was still attached upon Toria, whose own expression was transforming from shock to delight. Thulann added, \"See what I found overseas, Venduss? It turns out that when humans die, they only go to New Britannia.\"\n\nHer green eyes dampening, the minstrel rushed forward and threw her arms around the young warrior. But her happy murmurs clipped short when Venduss stiffened and pulled away. His face was taut with disbelief. Toria stepped back a pace, confused.\n\nThulann sighed and motioned to the kneeling Jukan woman. \"Toria, allow me to introduce Tekmhat of Clan Eryem, daughter of Warlord Savan. She is betrothed to Venduss. Tekmhat, this is my traveling companion, Toria of New Britannia.\"\n\nThe two young women regarded each other with cryptic expressions. When Tekmhat glimpsed Thulann again, she cast her eyes downward. Toria's blood-smeared face hardened once more, as it had when they traversed the burning city. \"I've come back to you, Venduss,\" she said with measured calm. \"I am happy to see you fit and breathing.\"\n\nVenduss composed himself and answered, \"As am I, Toria. The Great Mother blesses us with good fortune.\"\n\nThulann's broken bone sang with pain. Her patience dissolved. She snorted, \"You are quite fortunate indeed, nursling, that Tekmhat is learned in the arts of water magic. If my leg is not soon healed, I am liable to grow angry with you!\"\n\nTekmhat dashed to her aid. Using a spell learned from a New Britannian sorcerer, the teenager flooded Thulann's leg with exquisite, sparkling relief. As she did so the Jukan girl muttered, \"Way Master, what has happened? Why are the Technocrats retreating?\"\n\n\"I have given them fool's gold and they took it for the real thing. Pray that they do not uncover the deception before Bahrok secures the city. But even still, this nightmare is not over. We are trapped in an inferno and our army is scattered. We must quit this town and regroup. Our injured are legion. Tekmhat, with your healing magic I daresay you shall be the most exhausted of us all by morning.\"\n\nVenduss turned away and knelt to recover his sword, which lay on the ground nearby. Over his shoulder he remarked, \"My father is recovering near the peak of the tower. The fighting has been heavy. He will be glad to see you, Thulann.\"\n\nThe old Juka nibbled her lip. \"Indeed. There is much work to do. He cannot carry this burden alone.\"\n\nHer three companions gave no further comment. As they prepared to go, tension forced an uneasy quiet. Thulann joined in the silence. Days as black as this one were beyond the scope of conversation. The shadows between words more accurately expressed the pain.\n\nOutside the corridor, in the burning city, the boom of Technocrat thunderbolts dwindled like the fading of an old storm.\n\nThe chamber was sour with blood and sweat. Twilight deepened the shadows. The flames of Akar slung rippling light through a tall, iron-barred window. A giant of a warrior stood in the crimson glow, an armored outline watching the wreckage of a city. Shirron Turlogan held a notched sword in one hand. His grip was fierce. His breathing was heavy and doleful.\n\nThulann slipped her fingers into his other hand. Though both Juka wore fighting gloves, the warmth of the touch was overwhelming. Their fingers laced together as if they had never parted. Turlogan relaxed just slightly. He had not yet looked at her, nor did he have to.\n\n\"The Technocrat armada has been defeated,\" she said, knowing what his first question would be. \"Braun's Needle is destroyed. The New Britannians are preparing to sail to our aid.\"\n\nThe Shirron nodded. His voice pinched through angry lips. \"We shall need it. Kumar is decimated.\" He squeezed her palm. \"Welcome home. I wish I could give you happy news in turn.\"\n\nShe conjured a hint of a smile. \"No need, my love. Just sing me a bad poem.\"\n\n\"Look around you. This is my poetry today.\" The room was littered with dead Janissars. Firelight glinted in the wetness.\n\n\"Gruesome as ever,\" she murmured, then leaned against him. \"How did Venduss fare in the attack?\"\n\n\"Marvelously. He commands with conviction. He thinks and acts quickly. The war masters are fond of teaching him.\" For an instant his face lightened. He wrapped a long arm around her. \"You did well with my son.\"\n\nThe Way Master pressed her temple to his shoulder. She sensed the rage bound in his muscles. \"And not so well with you. I should have done better not to go to New Britannia. The airships\u2014\"\n\nTurlogan's finger touched her lips. \"No one in our clan is to blame.\"\n\nHis tone betrayed the lie. Thulann could see whom he blamed. Her absence had played a part in the disaster\u2014if she had not left the continent, she might have discovered the trap before it sprung\u2014but history would record the welfare of a clan as the responsibility of its chieftain. The weight of it hardened the Shirron's wrinkled face.\n\nIn her mind the aged woman whispered I should have beenhere, though no sound passed through her lips. Her arm snaked around her lover's waist. Her presence beside him conveyed as much of a statement as the bleak circumstances warranted.\n\nBy the next sunrise, the scope of the devastation was clear. Fires still smoldered in isolation, but the worst of the inferno was finished. Akar was a charred bone yard, heaped with corpses and cracked, ruined buildings. The soldiers of Clan Varang had secured the remains. They looted what few spoils the fires had left intact.\n\nThrongs of refugees herded into barricades. Warlord Bahrok's troops scoured the western hills for escapees. Untended livestock dispersed in clumps across the sandy desert, where Logosia's wild predators collected for a meal. Swarms of scavengers attended to their duty.\n\nThe survivors of Clan Kumar mustered in the arid plain to the north. Between the battle for Akar and the subsequent air attack, the losses to the army were terrible. Of a force of eight thousand, a full third had perished. Three thousand more suffered from diseases or injuries more severe than the clan healers could soon repair. The remaining soldiers were afforded little rest as they cared for the wounded and sorted the dead. A host of ridge-backs pulled charnel wagons. Funeral smoke pillared the desert.\n\nThe mood of the encampment was dour. Daylight had transformed anger into numbness. The only sounds were metallic, the clink of tools and the rattle of iron-shod wheels. Heat rose quickly in the windswept desert. Tiny steel creatures scuttled between shadows, the mechanical vermin of Logosia.\n\nOnce the army had regrouped, Thulann had convinced Turlogan to retire to his pavilion and rest. He had to be strong and alert now, for the sake of the clan. For some time that morning they lay together while Thulann postulated a lawful course of action against Bahrok. Even though Turlogan was the Shirron, he could not pass judgment on a grievance in which he himself was the injured party. Thulann decided that the only answer was to summon a council of warlords to vote. Bahrok would bring his allies to speak and Turlogan would bring his own, and so the unaligned clans would ultimately decide whether to punish Varang and in what kind.\n\nTurlogan listened to Thulann's words and never once dissented. Yet she knew that his thoughts still smoldered with Akar.\n\nShe woke to the flutter of a tent flap, bright in the desert sun. She did not know how long she had slept. Her heart immediately chilled.\n\nTurlogan was gone. His weapons and armor were not in the pavilion.\n\nShe dashed outside to find Toria sitting in the shade of the tent. The girl held a Logosian padlock and absently toyed her lock-picks inside it. When the lock drooped open, she snapped it shut again.\n\n\"Toria, did you see the Shirron?\"\n\n\"He was walking to the south end of the camp, half an hour ago.\"\n\n\"Damn.\" She glanced at the human, whose tone had been sour. \"I thought you were assisting the healers.\"\n\n\"I wasn't much help. The Initiates use so much healing magic now, I'm just in the way.\"\n\n\"Next time use songs instead of bandages. Music helps the dying as well as the injured. But as long as you are not presently occupied, I have a task for you. Find Venduss and tell him to meet me here as soon as possible. Make sure that he stays put until I arrive. It is very important that he does so.\"\n\nToria closed her eyes. \"I'd rather not see him, mistress. Not this morning.\"\n\n\"Our actions determine the future of the clan. You may settle your affair with Venduss at your own pace, but do not expea history to slow down for you!\" At the minstrel's scowl she added, \"Please, Toria. I need you right now.\"\n\nWith a nod and a sigh, the girl tossed away the lock and trotted off to find the Shirron's son. Thulann hurried back inside the pavilion and laced up her own armor.\n\nThe southern edge of the camp faced the smoking ruins of Akar, a mile away. Around the city clustered the peaked tents of Clan Varang. Thulann took a ridge back from the nearest corral and started in that direction. Clouds of dust rose phantomlike around her. To keep from breathing the fine desert sand she pressed her sleeve over her mouth. She owned a black silk scarf that normally served the purpose, but it was missing from Turlogan's pavilion when she awoke.\n\nAs she approached Warlord Bahrok's vast encampment, a small commotion caught her eye. Soldiers streamed from their tents and gathered into a crowd. She kicked her ridge back into a trot. Before long she plunged through the crowd to reach Shirron Turlogan. Unmolested, he walked among the startled soldiers, heading for the pavilion of Bahrok himself. Thulann dismounted and took step beside him.\n\nShe assumed a regal bearing and whispered, \"After careful deliberation, then, you have decided to stick a knife in Bahrok's gut?\"\n\n\"It is my legal right to seek the Black Duel.\"\n\n\"It is not the best answer. The council of warlords\u2014\"\n\n\"I shall not defend Kumar's honor with words! I am after vengeance, not redress.\"\n\n\"I know the Duel better than anyone. Now is the wrong time. Please turn around.\"\n\n\"Not even for you, my dearest.\"\n\nThulann paused, then muttered, \"Are you rested enough to beat him?\"\n\nA wild flash lit his eyes. \"In this affair I have rested enough to cut down Blackthorn himself. Do you not think?\"\n\nShe tried to stifle a smirk, but failed. \"Each one in his turn, love.\"\n\nThe warriors of Varang followed them with murmuring tension. Their faces registered confusion. When they pointed at Turlogan their individual moods shifted. Some appeared relieved, others somber, yet others sad or angry. Thulann realized that these men had thought the Shirron was captured or dead. His appearance this morning must be a shock. She wondered what lies Bahrok had told them to justify yesterday's treachery. These soldiers were loyal to their chieftain, and rightly so, but they were also Juka and men of honor. Many of them would not sleep well tonight.\n\nNor were they alone in their surprise. When Thulann and Turlogan reached the warlord's pavilion, Bahrok himself greeted them outside with a perplexed frown. The stocky chieftain was Thulann's height, much less than the Shirron, though both men shared a similar weight. Bahrok was dressed in a robe and trousers of exquisite material and utilitarian design. On his left hand he wore a glove. In his gaze sparkled angry cunning. \"Shirron Turlogan! I was told you were captured last night!\"\n\n\"Inside,\" growled the aged warrior as he pushed past the warlord and stepped under the large tent.\n\nBahrok squinted, then glanced at Thulann. \"And you have returned so soon from New Britannia? Then surely it was you who freed him from the Technocrats' hands.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Every hand that touched him lies severed on the floor. He was never captured, Bahrok, because I know how you think.\"\n\n\"I?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"The next time you want to commit treason, give clearer details to the enemy. The Janissars kidnapped the wrong person. I could paste feathers on a fleshwing and they would take it for an eagle.\"\n\n\"Mind your words, old witch. I do not indulge accusations.\" He tied shut the tent door after they passed through it. When he faced into the room, Shirron Turlogan stood inches from him. Bahrok stared at the older man's chest.\n\nTurlogan glared down and took a deep breath. \"I am here for payment. You will honor me.\"\n\n\"Of course. Your army is in need of assistance. I shall do everything I can to escort them back to Jukaran.\" He followed the comment with a smile.\n\nThe Shirron seized Bahrok's collar with a large hand. The warlord snatched his wrist in return and both chieftains traded glowers. Turlogan barked, \"Oh, you will pay me, warlord, every price I name! Because despite what you have done I am still stronger than you. I shall always be stronger than you. No bluster or back-stabbing can change that fact and you know it.\" He released Bahrok's collar with a slight shove.\n\nThe warlord crossed his arms and smirked. \"Stronger than I? Your army is sliced in half, Shirron. I am no scholar, but I think your math is faulty.\"\n\nThulann interjected, \"Soldiers do not vote in a council of warlords! The other chieftains will weigh your punishment and I assure you, justice will be your heaviest burden.\"\n\nBahrok spat a laugh. \"A council, shall it be? During an invasion? By all means summon one! The chieftains will not gather again until I am leading them down the streets of Logos to accept Blackthorn's surrender. Call for my blood on that day, if you believe your case is strong enough.\"\n\n\"We shall,\" she growled, \"if we do not yet have satisfaction.\"\n\nTurlogan gripped her shoulder. \"Thank you, my dear, but I have my own mouth with which to bite. And bite you I shall, Bahrok, until the bone cracks.\"\n\nThe warlord's tone lowered a register. \"Do you threaten a clan war now? With Logosia laid out like a meal before us and the New Britannians coming for dinner? You are as brash as your human-loving son and just as foolish.\"\n\nThe aged Shirron snarled, \"Foolish! Let me demonstrate what kind of fool I am.\" From his sleeve he withdrew Thulann's black scarf, which he flung on the ground before Bahrok. \"I am fool enough to wager everything on that piece of silk. Look at it, you viper! Look closely, because that is something you have forgotten. That is the Jukan soul. We face conflict with law and honor, not with treasonous pacts and needless slaughter. We are not barbarians!\"\n\nWarlord Bahrok stared at the black scarf with uneasy suspicion. Thulann almost imagined he was shrinking away from it. With an etched brow he muttered, \"What do you mean, wager everything?\"\n\n\"I mean you and I, sword to sword, horn to horn. If I win the Black Duel, you pledge your loyalty to me without question or condition. And if I lose, I shall step down from the office of Shirron. Only by tournament can you win the right to succeed me, but I shall no longer stand in your way and neither, as you know, will anyone else.\"\n\nThulann's body went cold. \"Turlogan\u2014\"\n\nThe immense Shirron ignored her. 'Why do you hesitate, Bahrok? Is that not what you most desire, what you have slavered over for so many years, like a hound by a butcher's door? There lies the meat, still bloody to taste. Bare your teeth, dog!\"\n\nThulann clutched her fists together. The breath caught in her throat. She wished she could pluck up the scarf and throw it away, but nothing could withdraw the challenge now. This was the decision Turlogan's pride demanded.\n\nBahrok peered at the black silk, then glanced up at Turlogan and opened a toothy grin. \"Die in your sleep, old man. I shall not notch my blade for your sake.\" His emerald lips parted and he spat on the black scarf. His eyes never released the Shirron's gaze.\n\nThulann winced. She realized that Bahrok had planned this entire scene. And he was playing it with a craft and patience of which she had not thought him capable.\n\nTurlogan's face ignited with fury. \"You still fear me! Forty years ago I beat your father in the Great Tournament, and you still see me with a child's terrified eyes!\"\n\n\"Fear you? Turlogan, I have already beaten you! After the war the other chieftains will clamor for me to replace you. Your throne is a sham. Your clan is in ruins. March around Logosia with your one-eyed nanny on a leash, if it suits you, but I have an invasion to complete. I shall not smear my hands on the filth of your reputation!\" With a snort he kicked a plume of dust over the black scarf and stomped deeper into the pavilion.\n\nThe air in the tent seemed to lurch as Shirron Turlogan hurtled forward and threw his fist at Bahrok. The warlord saw the attack but could not evade it. Gauntleted knuckles crashed against his cheekbone and the warlord tumbled backward, upending a desk amid a flurry of loose parchment. In an instant Bahrok was on his feet again with blade in hand. Turlogan's broadsword flashed as well. Thulann rushed forward to intervene, though she had no hope of stopping them.\n\nThen Bahrok raised his sword over his shoulder and flipped it at the ground. The blade stuck through the patterned rug and deep into the packed sand underneath. He lifted his chin, spread out his arms and presented his unarmored chest to the Shirron. \"This is your honor? This is your law? It seems you are a barbarian, after all! Nor am I surprised, after the way you squandered a throne built by your own mother and father. You have no more discipline, old man. Forty years in that palace have broken you apart. You are an honest catastrophe.\"\n\n\"Pick up that scarf and I shall show you how broken I am!\"\n\n\"Go back to Garron, Turlogan. Polish that fine sword for Venus wedding. Occupy yourself until the end comes. It shall not be long now.\"\n\nThe Shirron slapped his blade into its sheath, then with lightning speed snatched Bahrok's collar again. The warlord tried to free himself but Turlogan swatted away his hands and pulled him off-balance. Leaning down into Bahrok's face, the taller Juka muttered, \"As a coward, you are an absolute trailblazer! You redefine the term. That is the legacy you have secured at Akar. You have defeated yourself, not me! Not me. You have not beaten me.\"\n\nHe thrust Bahrok against a tent pole. The pavilion shuddered. Then he turned away and stormed out the door, his exquisite, bloody armor creaking at its leather joints. The shambles of the room seemed to roil in his wake. The tent flap hung slightly open, admitting a slash of bright desert sun.\n\nThulann knew better than to touch the Shirron as he left, or to follow him. Her heart wrung in her chest.\n\nBahrok straightened his robe and snorted. \"Rancid old pteranx.\"\n\nThe Way Master sneered, \"Quiet, vermin! Savor your success today. Tomorrow you will die for it. Or the next day, or the next.\"\n\nThe warlord's face eased into a smirk. \"He never had your wit, old hag. He is a helpless child without you.\"\n\nShe closed her weary eye and sighed. \"I know that.\"\n\nUnder a brightening sky, Turlogan was a tiny spot in the distance as Thulann guided her ridge back across the desert toward him. The tents of Clan Kumar spread out ahead of them. The Shirron walked in silence. She trotted alongside him and murmured, \"You were right, you know. Bahrok was terrified of you. He always shall be.\"\n\nTurlogan reached out a hand and patted her forearm gently. Then he quickened his pace without uttering a sound. Thulann grimaced, then hurried ahead to clear the way to his pavilion. He would not benefit from the attention of soldiers just now, nor would the soldiers benefit from his.\n\nThe Shirron's large tent looked deserted until Thulann peeked inside. She fell quiet. Toria and Venduss were there, as she had requested. The Way Master had wanted to ensure that Venduss did not interfere with the confrontation between Turlogan and Bahrok; but the young warrior and Toria were taking advantage of this rare opportunity for privacy. They stood together and embraced. It was a long, emphatic touch that expressed what words could not, a touch that knew neither the past nor the future but existed willfully in the present. They pressed a moment of time between their bodies and held it there.\n\nThulann pulled away from the tent flap and sat down outside. Heartbeats stampeded through her willowy frame. She summoned a trance to steady herself, then gazed ahead at the place where Turlogan would soon appear. In her mind he had already arrived, bearing on his broad shoulders the weight of this desert morning. The dry wind brought dampness to her eye.\n\nI should have been here, my love, she called to him, but I will not leave your side again." + }, + { + "title": "Junction", + "text": "And when Sir Lazaro and his knights reached the bottom level of the cavern, they found a great chamber hot with smoke and lava. The cave bared its stalagmites like the teeth of a giant dragon. A dark shape slithered through the haze, clicking its claws on the stone floor and drooling flame from its snout. Sir Jacob of Yew led the charge against the ancient wyrm but it was Sir Lazaro's enchanted sword, the Talon of Covetous, that finally slew the monster. Ten knights lay dead beside its carcass.\n\nDeeper in the cavern the survivors found a hoard of gold and stiver. Sir Lazaro surrendered his share of the treasure. In exchange he took a simple iron pot, inscribed with peculiar runes. The knight-wizard Lord Blackthorn recognized the Cauldron of Kwan Li, a fabled artifact that rendered immortality upon the ancient wyrms of Sosaria. The other knights were amazed when Sir Lazaro placed the cauldron on the ground and smashed it to pieces with his magic sword, the blade of which flew apart in the action.\n\nOn that day did the brave knight forfeit his legendary weapon and the riches of a king in order to protea Britannia from the hunger of the wyrms. In the bowels of the earth, the Virtue of Sacrifice triumphed once again.\n\nSteel rivets clattered as the iron door rolled open. Steam and bright light tumbled into the darkened room. Two silhouettes stood in the doorway. One of them wore a robe and hood that concealed the shape of his body. The other stood tall and proud, his outline glinting from silvery plate armor. A triangular shield hung on one arm. A sword flashed in his hand.\n\nThe knight Montenegro took a step into the chamber and peered through the sultry murk. Steam and darkness concealed details, but he sensed a large open space between himself and the far wall and a considerable height to the ceiling. Metallic clanks haunted the chamber, the echoes of great machinery behind the walls. The stench of hot grease nipped the air.\n\nSilently Montenegro resolved, I'll kill them if that's what it takes.\n\nSomething moved in the gloom, a slick, mechanical sound. He could not place it. He lifted a small device to his face and hooked it to a stud on his helmet. The glass lens, banded with copper, pressed against one eye. For an instant his vision blurred. When he regained his focus, strange images resolved.\n\nThrough the sepia-hued lens he saw the room as if the darkness were gone. Steam still clouded the air, but he could make out the shape and contents of the chamber. The place resembled a large warehouse. The walls were fashioned of cement and steel. Wooden pallets crowded much of the floor space, stacked with half-assembled machine components in grotesque arrangements, like sculptures in frozen animation. From cranes in the rafters drizzled a shower of chains, their hooks clicking together as they swayed among currents of hot air. Vents in the high walls exhaled thick, tumbling fumes.\n\nA blur darted past the comer of Montenegro's eye. He whirled and thrust out his shield, but the movement was gone. The runner had exploited the limited peripheral vision of the miner's monocle. Whoever was out there was masterful at stealth. Nor was he the only enemy lurking in the storage chamber.\n\nMontenegro grimaced. He had not come here to skulk around in the dark. He sheathed his sword, crouched low and dashed across the open space. His plate mail clacked with each footfall. Then he stepped to the side and jumped up, gaining purchase on a mound of gears and axles. The machine parts shifted under his weight. Stout netting held them together. He knelt atop the pile. From this vantage he could scout the room for concealed enemies.\n\nHis grey eyes punctured the gloom. No one else was visible, except for the robed figure in the doorway. With a frown he thought, Where is everyone, then? Afraid to face a Montenegro?\n\nWhen a fierce light blinded him he knew the battle had come. He slammed his iron-clad shield in the path of a bolt of lightning that sprang from deep inside the room. The static shock banged through his armor like a physical blow. He kicked out his legs and dropped underneath the bolt. Arrows whizzed past him as he rolled away to the edge. Two enemy warriors lurked there, Technocrats in their distinctive armor, waiting for him to jump down. Instead he gripped the strands of netting. He slung out his feet. The men ducked, then charged forward as he clambered back onto the mound. Missiles bashed his shield. Ignoring the impacts he whisked out his sword and sliced downward, severing the net and releasing an avalanche of heavy metal parts. The two Technocrat warriors leapt over the cascade of machinery, but lost their balance when they tried to land on it. They toppled into the steely, sharp-edged tide.\n\nMontenegro let go of the chain from which he was hanging. He landed in an alert crouch.\n\nSomething clamped onto his shield. He spun around to see another Technocrat soldier behind him. This one wore a long, armored gauntlet with mechanical steel jaws at the end. The jaws bit down on his shield, chewing through its iron plating and shattering the wooden core. The knight released the shield. Then he kicked the jaws aside and clanged his sword against the Technocrat's chest plate. He recognized the sound of spring-enhanced kinetic armor. He changed his tactics to favor thrusting. The Technocrat dropped the shield and faced him. For a split second they gauged one another, then both men lunged forward. With furious speed they clashed in the gloom, longsword ringing, jaws snapping, throwing kicks and elbows amid a chorus of grunts and curses. Finally Montenegro unbalanced his opponent with a blow to the head, then knocked the man's legs out from under him. The knight flung himself atop the Technocrat and pressed the tip of his blade under the man's chin. The Technocrat froze.\n\nMontenegro felt his own breaths suddenly shorten. He glanced down to see the Technocrat's steel-jawed gauntlet clamped around his own plate-armored throat. The weapon had nearly crushed the metal of his gorget.\n\nThey would both be dead men in another instant.\n\n\"Cease,\" boomed a voice from the doorway. The robed silhouette raised one hand. \"Brigadier Khyber, I believe the point is made.\"\n\nMontenegro growled at his own lack of concentration. He pulled his longsword away from the Technocrat's head. His armor relaxed as the steel jaws undamped from his own throat. Montenegro began to rise, when a loud pop startled him. He brandished his sword. The blade had been sheared in half by the mechanical jaws of the Technocrat's gauntlet.\n\nThe Logosian soldier threw back his face mask as he stood. The bearded human's expression was pitiless. \"No, Your Excellency, now the point is made.\"\n\nThe knight snorted and flung down the broken sword. \"Lector Gaff, you should whip your dogs when they snap like that. Otherwise they're likely to get into trouble.\"\n\nWithout emotion the hooded figure said, \"Silence. The demonstration is complete. Conduct yourselves with civility.\"\n\n\"I was more civil than necessary in submitting to this test, but my tolerance is at an end. Patience, you recall, is not among the Virtues.\"\n\nLector Gaff nodded. \"You have proven your skill against Brigadier Khyber. Let us proceed. The task before us is urgent.\" He turned a crank on a device in his hand. A blue light sprouted in the glass of the spark lantern, illuminating the Mathematician under his yawning cowl. Lector Gaff was a middle-aged man with a sharp, angular face. Every inch of his skin was laced with tattoos, depicting the intricate mathematical equations sacred to the order that he commanded. His deep-set eyes were as cold as the numbers surrounding them. They reflected the icy glow as if they were luminant themselves.\n\nMontenegro caught the Mathematician's gaze for an instant. The knight narrowed his eyes. Gaff was the most powerful man in Logosia, behind only Lector Sartorius and Blackthorn himself. His glance demanded respect. The knight could not deny the Mathematician's deadly cunning and steely charisma. He was a formidable, impressive leader.\n\nMontenegro had disliked him from the moment they had met.\n\nWith a grumble the knight turned away, pulling off his metal helm. He removed the skullcap underneath, freeing long, ebony curls. Sweat dribbled down his cheeks. As more Technocrat soldiers emerged from the darkness, equipped with an assortment of mechanical weapons, Montenegro wiped his brow and muttered to Gaff, \"For elite soldiers these men weren't trying very hard. Perhaps I should put them through a test of my own, to see if they are worthy of a Montenegro's time.\"\n\nBrigadier Khyber growled back, \"I know who you are. The grandson of the famous Sir Lazaro Montenegro. You may assure yourself, Sir Gabriel, that in Logosia we judge a man's worth by his skill, not his pedigree.\"\n\n\"Do not goad me, Khyber,\" warned the knight. \"You are not far from becoming another head among the Technocrats I've collected.\"\n\nThe officer did not flinch. \"Count yourself fortunate that you never met my brigade on the battlefield, or we would not be having this discussion now. You've never faced anyone like me.\"\n\nThe New Britannian saw that Brigadier Khyber was not boasting. The Logosian was not a large man, but his body was taut, fast and lethal. From his carriage and frosty countenance he projected an impression of forged confidence, the emotional callus of brutal combat experience. Montenegro knew that look. It could not be counterfeited.\n\nThe knight grunted. \"Don't task me, Khyber, when we are supposed to be working together. Lector Gaff, I believe I can fight alongside these soldiers of yours. They have skill and spirit, even if they do bleed commoners' blood. Now I beg you to take me out of this place. We have plans to make and I find it difficult to concentrate in here, with the stench of your machines and your men.\"\n\nGaff nodded and stepped out the door, into the hallway beyond. Montenegro followed. The Mathematician entwined his fingers and said, \"Come, then. We shall make arrangements for your continued stay in Junction. Though I must warn you that animosity toward Khyber helps no one. You and he must learn trust.\"\n\n\"Trust? Will he ever trust the man who sank Braun's Needle? The man who has personally killed dozens of Technocrat soldiers? He won't, and neither would I in his position.\" Montenegro sniffed as he tucked his helmet under one arm. \"You will never trust me, either, Gaff, but that is irrelevant. We can work together without trust, as long as we are clear about each other's motivations.\"\n\n\"And precisely what is your motivation? Why have you come to join your enemy?\"\n\n\"You know exactly why. I intend to stop this dishonorable war. You and I shall defeat Warlord Bahrok's army. We'll sue Shirron Turlogan for peace before the invasion gains momentum. Not a drop of New Britannian blood need be shed for the sake of this worthless landscape.\"\n\n\"Except perhaps for General Nathaniel's blood.\"\n\nThe Mathematician's tone had been cold. The knight raised an eyebrow. \"You want to strike down the Pact of Four as badly as I do. And I thought Mathematicians were supposed to be emotionless.\"\n\n\"Lector Sartorius betrays the Machine. He is a component that must be replaced. It is a logical deduction, not an emotional one.\"\n\nMontenegro grunted. \"Call it by whatever name you see fit, but don't deny that you want revenge. Lies are most egregious when directed at oneself. Personally, I am not by nature a man who hides his feelings.\"\n\nThe Lector gave him no response, except to hand him a dark cloak. Montenegro donned the garment, which concealed his distinctive New Britannian plate mail. Then Lector Gaff led him down the wide corridor. The hall was fashioned of cement and stone. Its floor was rutted from the passing of many carts. Clearly the place was centuries old. This region of the vast building provided storage for a huge, fiery factory into which the two men now emerged.\n\nThe chaotic factory chamber could have been called a smithy or a foundry, though such terms did no justice to the scope of the nightmarish clamor. A jungle of machines clanged and thrummed and ground away amid the roar and flash of hundreds of fires. Smoke tumbled through the air. Molten steel pulsed around a labyrinth of stone conduits, like blood vessels pumping a ghastly yellow light. The entire, mountainous chamber crashed with animation. Huge bellows groaned. Giant pistons stomped in rhythm. Enormous gears gnashed hungrily. The mechanical din was furious. Even the scalding air itself was violently percussive.\n\nMontenegro retreated under the hood of his cloak to conceal his face from the factory workers. Consisting of both humans and Juka, the army of workers used rakes and hammers to tend the liquid steel. Their faces were masked with soot, their skin metallic with sweat. Every one of them was bald and solidly muscled. Yet these workers did not hold the knight's attention. His gaze was drawn instead to other faces in the chaos, faces unturned by fatigue or exertion. Their eyes gaped blankly, unheeding of the sparks and the clamor. Their mouths spoke no words. These were Blackthorn's tech drones, part men and part apparatus, part flesh and part gearworks, bodies and machinery tinkered together to create living factory tools. Most of the drones were small and mobile, equipped with pneumatic arms or pincers for manipulating white-hot metal. Others were monstrous, as large as trees, with furnaces in their gullets and multiple limbs acting like cranes. At a glance they appeared as gigantic spider-shapes made of wheels and rivets and girders. Montenegro found himself reluctant to turn his back on them.\n\nThe grotesque sight of the drones brought a tightness to his gut. In the presence of such horrors he had difficulty reconciling his new alliance with the Technocrats. Blackthorn wrought unforgivable abominations with his foul engineering. Montenegro did not enjoy the thought of risking his life in defense of such atrocity.\n\nYet he reminded himself that Logosia was a victim of the same conspiracy that threatened his own home of New Britannia. The two nations had been goaded into an unnecessary conflict. Warlord Bahrok of Jukaran was the relentless catalyst, the most active member of the Pact of Four that was determined to guide the war to its bloodiest conclusion. And General Nathaniel of Britain had personally betrayed Montenegro's trust. Lector Gaff had been correct, of course. Such an insult could not be forgiven. Montenegro was not acting in defense of Logosia, but rather they joined together against their common enemy. In his heart he fought out of loyalty to New Britannia herself.\n\nThe proud name of Montenegro afforded him no other desire.\n\nHe followed the Mathematician through a wide doorway. The smaller room beyond was choked with heat and smoke.Several vats of molten metal seethed along the wall. Another robed silhouette met them in the gloom. Beneath a wide cowl, Sister Raveka's skin was as smooth and unblemished as white porcelain, shaped into handsome features under a stream of black hair. Her brown eyes stared forward. She did not acknowledge Montenegro's presence. She and Gaff exchanged a musical chant, which served as a greeting among their sect.\n\nThe tattooed Lector bowed his head to Montenegro. \"Sister Raveka will prepare you for infiltration. You and I shall meet again this evening to discuss the further course of our endeavor.\"\n\nThe knight paused. \"I thought we were going to make our plans now.\"\n\n\"I have business in Logos. When night falls I shall be ready to discuss strategy. Good day to you.\"\n\nMontenegro frowned, but relaxed once Gaff had departed. The Lector's mood was indulgent, to have left him and Raveka alone. He glanced at the young Mathematician. She was watching the metal door. Her brow pinched with concern. In a soft tone she asked, \"How did Khyber's test go?\"\n\nThe knight shrugged as he doffed his cloak. \"How else could it go? I jumped through Khyber's hoops. Neither he nor I revealed our true skills. We sniped and insulted each other like children, as fighters will do. I am now convinced that I can kill him if the need arises. He is convinced of the reverse. I think we shall work together just fine.\"\n\nShe tilted her head. \"Are you sure something hasn't gone wrong?\"\n\nHe grimaced at the clang of the unwholesome factory. \"There is a great deal wrong in this museum of horrors, but nothing that isn't obvious. Why?\"\n\n\"I have never seen His Excellency so upset before.\"\n\n\"I have seen corpses more agitated than Gaff.\"\n\n\"No, he fears something. I can see it plainly. That should not be.\"\n\nThe knight shrugged. \"He doesn't trust me. He risks a lot by working with a dangerous enemy. And he might be a little concerned about the invasion, or have you forgotten about that? In a few months' time Warlord Bahrok and General Nathaniel will be knocking on the doors of this very building, unless you and I and Brigadier Khyber can turn them around before then. To that end, my dear, do you mind helping me out of this armor? It's served me through many campaigns and it is due some respect.\"\n\nRaveka paused for a moment longer, then took the helmet from him. Without meeting his eyes she carried it to a vat of molten iron. He blinked when she dropped it inside. The liquid flared, sputtered, and drank in the helm.\n\nMontenegro watched as she returned. Even though she wore a Mathematician's raiment, he saw only her long, athletic body, draped as it should be in the exquisite gown of a New Britannian noblewoman. Many weeks earlier Raveka had vowed to forsake the Order to be his lady. She claimed that she did not belong in Logosia anymore. But her present, stoic demeanor belied the sincerity of her oath.\n\nHe tried to catch her eyes. She ignored him as she reached for the buckle of his gauntlet. In a quick motion he grabbed her wrist and yanked her close to him. He glared at her, quelled her struggles, until the mask of the Mathematician slipped. The woman who stared back was frightened and defiant. She neither submitted to him nor rebuffed him, but faced him with eyes alight. This was the Raveka behind the masquerade, the one he had worked to reveal.\n\n\"You will not quit me,\" he said, then let go.\n\nHer mood calmed with practiced speed. \"We shall not see each other after today,\" she commented as she unfastened his steel gauntlets.\n\nThe knight furrowed his brow. \"Gaff is sending you back to Britannia so soon? We haven't been here for two days.\"\n\n\"Lord Gideon is vulnerable to my suggestions. He has fallen in love with Lady Aria. I cannot delay my return if I hope to persuade him against invasion. The equations are clear in this regard.\"\n\nMontenegro stretched his arms as she peeled off his chest-plate. \"Your equations are notoriously unsympathetic. I had hoped to spend more time with you before then.\"\n\nSister Raveka did not reply. Methodically she deposited each piece of armor and each garment of underpadding into the vats of molten metal. Warm steam and smoke rose from them, which felt oddly pleasant on Montenegro's bare skin. He raised his arms to enjoy the sensation while Raveka undressed him, until a single article remained on his body. It was a gold pendant hanging from a sturdy chain. When she reached for it, he pushed her fingers away. \"No. I'm keeping this.\"\n\n\"Disguise is the sum of details. You must wear nothing that is not Logosian.\"\n\n\"I do not care. I will not surrender this.\"\n\nShe peered at the necklace. \"Your family crest?\"\n\nHe nodded, lifting the chain to show her the pendant. It depicted a heart seized by a dragon's claw. \"My grandfather's crest. I've lost everything else now, my home, my life, but Sir Lazaro shall always be my companion. I inherited his legacy. I must honor his legend.\"\n\nShe sighed and caught his glance. \"You are not your grandfather, Gabriel.\"\n\n\"No, but one day I intend to be somebody's grandfather.\" A smile trickled across her lips. \"So you must,\" she answered, then took his hands.\n\nThe door scraped open and a figure entered on a carpet of steam. The legless tech drone floated several inches above the floor, carried by a small levitant engine. The whir of gears and the chop of propellers comprised the creature's only noise. Its spidery pincers clamped around one of the vats of molten iron, then hoisted the massive container from its support and hauled it out of the room, into the factory beyond. The iron door clamped shut behind it. The drone had never noticed Raveka or Montenegro.\n\nThe Mathematician chuckled. \"They're very diligent now, hey? They're making more drones for the war. I have to confess, they are adorable when they're children. The alchemy makes them grow up too fast, though.\"\n\nMontenegro blanched. His stomach hollowed at the thought of drone children. Abruptly he felt his nakedness. He cupped the back of Raveka's neck, clutching her raven hair. \"We're leaving this place the instant the war is over. We shall live in my manor at Cove. The Royal Senate will chastise me for faking my death, but my heart can bear the shame. I shall give you a wholesome life, Raveka.\"\n\nShe smirked. \"You are very confident of yourself.\"\n\n\"I am not being sentimental. New Britannia is your home now. You return there as a citizen, not as an enemy. Remember that fact when you conduct your espionage upon Lord Gideon. It is the Pact of Four you want to defeat, not the New Britannian army. Is that clear?\"\n\nRaveka squinted. \"I know what I must do, Gabriel.\"\n\n\"Be sure of that, my dear. I don't want to learn that you've engaged in sabotage as well as seduction.\"\n\nShe twisted her neck, pulling away from his grip. \"Which one would upset you more, hey?\" She crossed the room and lifted a bundle from a shelf. Unwrapping it she revealed a collection of Logosian garments. Leather and buckles highlighted in the red glow of the vats. She picked through the clothes for a moment, then handed them to Montenegro with a sigh. \"I am your lady. That much is done. But you must allow me time to adjust. It's not a simple thing to leave your life behind.\"\n\nMontenegro held up a long, full coat of grey leather. The Logosians wore them even in the summer, to ward off the storms of rancid dust that polluted this factory town. Here in Junction he would make a temporary home. For six months he had fought the Technocrats and now he would serve beside them, under the gaze of Lector Gaff. Everything had changed. His war-horse was a continent away, his magic sword had returned to its home, his armor was even now being reforged into mechanical drones. In the green hills of Britain they were erecting him a tomb.\n\nHe clutched the pendant around his neck and murmured, \"The Virtues guide us when the path is dark, and Sacrifice most of all. Sometimes Sacrifice is the greatest weapon we have. That is a cruel truth.\"\n\nThe factory clamored around him as he slipped into the Logosian clothes. Sister Raveka studied every motion he made. She hardly uttered another sound. Montenegro had the impression that she was indulging in the moment, as if this were the last time she would ever see him again. When Brigadier Khyber reappeared to take him away, Raveka resumed her stoic demeanor. She left him with a quiet glance and a whisper: \"Some things are immune to Sacrifice.\" The comment darkened his mood, though his bizarre surroundings were so oppressive that he maintained his silence.\n\nWhen Raveka was gone the brigadier remarked, \"She is solace to the eyes, isn't she? Cold as glass, too, by the look of it.\"\n\nMontenegro gave no response as he pulled on the overcoat.\n\n\"Don't roll with a Mathematician,\" warned Khyber. \"They don't know their own emotions. I speak from experience.\"\n\nThe knight grumbled, \"I'm not interested in your experience. I am here for war and nothing else. Let's get out of this pit. I want to talk tactics as soon as we can collect some privacy.\"\n\n\"We can't make plans until Lector Gaff comes back from Logos.\"\n\n\"To hell with Gaff. He can catch up when he returns.\"\n\nKhyber pursed his lips, as if suppressing a grin. \"You have much to learn about handling Technocrats. But no matter, we'll have privacy where we're going. Brother Barghast, my chief tinker, has offered to lodge you in his workshop. You can train with our equipment there. You'll enjoy this part, Sir Gabriel. It's time to put away the toys of New Britannia and learn the weapons of a real warrior.\"\n\nThe knight shook his head as they walked onto the factory floor. \"The heart and the mind are the only true weapons. Everything else is embellishment. If Blackthorn understood that, maybe you wouldn't need my help.\"\n\nKhyber chuckled. \"Lighten up and look around. This is the real world. This is Logosian magic.\"\n\nMontenegro disregarded the statement. He quickened his pace to put the factory and its horrors behind him.\n\nThe evening descended with unnerving calm. Beneath an overcast sky of purple and orange, Khyber led him through the dingy streets of Junction. The town was a chorus of mills and manufactories performing a symphony of smoke. Swirls of dust adhered to Montenegro's coat in a strange, oily fashion Gusting fumes turned his breathing shallow. He moved among a listless stream of dark-clad natives, comprised of humans and Juka and occasional mechanical shapes that smelled of burning oil. Rarely did anyone acknowledge his presence. The mood of the town was hard and somber. Above it all loomed a dark grey silhouette in the clouds, the spectre of mighty Logos fixed in the heavens like a giant, unblinking eye.\n\nMontenegro stared up at the floating city, his vision watery from the dust. Absently he thumbed his golden pendant and thought, Guide me in the footsteps of Virtue, Grandfather. I have walked into the mouth of the dragon. I can hear the roar of its hunger. But I am hungry, too, Grandfather, and in the name of New Britannia I'll take what I must until the Virtues are satisfied.\n\nOverhead the city of Logos crouched in the sky like a phantom of girders and rivets. It was an animated thing, a mindless clockwork titan chained to the earth by steel tethers, shrouded by an ocean of roiling, muddy smoke. Lifts and air carriages, tiny by comparison, transported goods and men from the surface. A constant thrum shook the surrounding air, like monstrous heartbeats or great, sleeping breaths.\n\nWithin Logos, a single tower reached above the forest of smokestacks. The edifice floated freely, itself tethered to the bulk of the city by an enormous, black chain. It was a place rarely visited by Logosians, who feared it as much as they worshiped it. At the center of that mechanical fortress echoed the lair of a solitary god.\n\nSomewhere inside was a large chamber that resonated a clear, metallic tone, as if the walk themselves sang incantations. The iron-plated floor vibrated with the sound. The only light in the room drizzled through a vent in the ceiling, chopped into slivers by a wide, torpid fan. The pale glow oozed across riveted walk. A garden of smoke drifted from the vent as well, of abrasive smells and textures, dispersing into a languid, ambient haze. The chamber was bare of furnishing and decor, naked in its sonorous calm.\n\nA tall Mathematician stood motionless in the center of the floor. A grey hood masked his features, except for the stem mouth and pointed chin that emerged from the blackness. His jaw was covered with tattoos. His hands were clasped at his waist, unseen in the volume of his sleeves. His breathing, though steady, was a fraction more shallow than might be expected of a disciplined Lector.\n\n\"Gaff,\" called a voice that hummed with the resonance of the room. Its tone was rolling, perfectly pitched. It sounded from a thicket of shadows the Mathematician could not penetrate. \"Lector Gaff. My artful Lector Gaff. I must kill you for coming here. I hope that doesn't embarrass you. There are rules, you see, which I wrote myself. Only my Chosen may speak to me unbidden.\"\n\nThe Lector bowed his head and murmured, \"Your Eminence, I am prepared to accept the punishment due me for this trespass. I am of the Machine and cognizant of its orders. But first I beseech Your Eminence to hear the dire information that I surrender my life to deliver, for it concerns Your Eminence's own safety and indeed, the security of all Logosia.\"\n\nThe voice answered, \"There is no difference between the two. You are presumptuous to imply otherwise. Yet you do nothing without a reason, do you, Gaff? I have watched you. You have spent your entire career perfecting the craft of intrigue. And now you have succeeded. You have intrigued me. It is a genuine pity to have to tear you apart.\" A shape moved in the darkness. Among slices of smoky light the Lector glimpsed an apparition of flesh and iron. It hovered like a factory drone several feet above the floor. It possessed a man's body, or parts of one, lodged among clumps and accretions of jagged machinery. Half of a human face regarded Lector Gaff, and half of something meant to look like a face. One eye glowed as red as a furnace. A massive, articulated claw flexed its long digits, whispering a dull, greasy sound.\n\nBlackthorn wore machines like a tattered garment, or perhaps the reverse was true. When the shadows cloaked the Techno-Prophet once more, Lector Gaff did not look again. He had never grown comfortable with the sight of his master. He spoke quickly, before Blackthorn could approach. \"Your Eminence, there is a traitor among us. He is Lector Sartorius of the Theorists. Your Chosen. He plots to deliver Logos into the hands of our enemies.\"\n\nThe Techno-Prophet commented, \"You are mistaken. Cogs do not plot. They simply function or they do not.\"\n\n\"Lector Sartorius engages in a plot that he has named the Part of Four. His accomplices are Warlord Bahrok, General Nathaniel and Chamberlain Kavah of the Meer ambassador's entourage. By allowing the Garronites and New Britannians to conquer Logosia, Sartorius seeks to undermine Your Eminence's power. I have calculated the threshold\u2014\" \"Time is measured by teeth on a gear, not by sand in a glass. That is how it must be.\"\n\n\"Your Eminence, I have calculated that if the invaders reach Junction, the probability is high that Logos will also fall. Your Eminence will be forced to parley\u2014\"\n\nA loud screech ripped through the air, startling the Mathematician. In the gloom he saw Blackthorn's steel claw gouging a mark into the armored floor, scooping up a curl of iron. The action seemed casual, as if the Techno-Prophet had grown bored. \"Lector Gaff, let me tell you a story with a happy ending.\"\n\n\"Your Eminence?\"\n\n\"Once there lived two wizards who became the best of friends. One of them was a king and the other a baron. Each one used his magic to improve the lives of the people of Sosaria. One day the king said, 'The path to happiness lies in Order. Only in a structured, lawful society will the people be content.' The baron replied, 'But every man must be free to pursue his own destiny. Only through Chaos will the people be fulfilled.' The two wizards did not agree, and yet they remained friends. That is, until the day came when the king discovered a spell that would remove all Chaos from the land and secure the reign of Order in Sosaria.\"\n\nLector Gaff knew the story of the Cataclysm. The Lost King was the ruler of New Britannia and the baron was Blackthorn himself. Gaff opened his mouth to interrupt, but the Techno-Prophet's rumbling voice overwhelmed him. \"The baron knew he must stop his friend from perpetrating the spell. A great sadness fell between them, for the two men had become enemies. And so each wizard raised a great army, one to safeguard the Ritual of Order and the other to disrupt it. When the two forces clashed, the universe could not withstand the fury of the battle. The world was tom to pieces. The king vanished in the conflagration and the baron was exiled to a faraway land. But there in the desert, the baron discovered the solution that might have saved his friend and his world.\"\n\n\"Your Eminence was revived by the Prime Overlord here in Logos,\" said Gaff quickly. \"I am aware of the history of our nation, Your Eminence. Sartorius\u2014\"\n\n\"It was not the Prime Overlord who saved the baron. The Overlords were pawns. Servants of a greater whole. It was the Machine that rescued the baron from the blackness that had consumed his body and soul. Though he learned it too late, the baron discovered that the Machine is the ultimate reconciliation of Order and Chaos. For all life is bom lawless. Chaos resides in the blood. But the Machine brings Order to the flesh, the Order that resides in iron and steel. The Machine weaves the two forces together. And so the baron embraced the Machine and brought it to his followers, for in the Machine dwelled the memory of the Lost King, the ghost of a fallen friendship. The Machine is harmony. The Machine is unity.\"\n\nThe Mathematician disliked Blackthorn's riddles. He sorted through the Techno-Prophet's words. \"Your Eminence suggests that Lector Sartorius represents Chaos? And the Machine will subsume his treachery.\"\n\n\"One wheel turns another. You have come to me, have you not?\"\n\n\"I have come to request that you punish Lector Sartorius. We must not allow him to destroy our nation.\"\n\n\"There is no clanger.\"\n\nGaff squinted. \"May I inquire what Your Eminence means?\"\n\nSomething like a metallic chuckle rang from the gloom. \"You know, I miss hunting. Do you hunt, Gaff?\"\n\nThe Lector swallowed his frustration. \"Not as such, Your Eminence.\"\n\n\"The best thing about hunting is the hounds. A good huntsman does not interfere when the hounds fight for dominance. In the end, all that matters is the dead fox.\"\n\nGaff closed his eyes and nodded. \"Then I must deal with Lector Sartorius without Your Eminence's aid. Please forgive my impudence. My concern for Logosia impelled me to seek your counsel.\"\n\n\"I am touched, Gaff. Truly. You have earned my respect in coming here. But as I said, my welfare and that of Logosia are the same. As long as I am unbeaten, Logosia is unbeaten. And there is something you do not seem to understand, something that will calm your troubled thoughts.\" Blackthorn's claw flashed in the gloom. Lector Gaff flinched. \"Logos shall never fall, Gaff, because I am greater than my enemies. I am greater than the Garronites, greater than the New Britannian wizards, greater even than the Matriarchs of Ishpur. I am certainly greater than Lector Sartorius. I am an undying spirit. Let them come to my doorstep if they can. Let them massacre the Technocrats. If every Logosian dies, I shall remain. I am the Forge and the Furnace. I am the Guardian of the Machine. Through me, Logos is immortal. That is the comfort I offer you and that is all you must rely on.\"\n\nGaff bowed his head. \"As you say, Your Eminence. We are all weapons of the Machine. Respectfully, then, I go to attend the defense of Logos.\"\n\n\"Logos itself is my weapon,\" said Blackthorn, \"and there are still more defenses injunction, below us.\"\n\n\"Indeed? I am not aware of any, except for the troops there.\"\n\n\"They are ancient defenses built by the Overlords. Sartorius knows of them. Seek your answers from him.\"\n\nLector Gaff bowed again. \"Thank you, Your Eminence. I shall do so. With your permission, I take my leave.\"\n\nWhen the Lector turned his back on the monarch, Blackthorn murmured, \"You've forgotten something.\"\n\n\"Your Eminence?\"\n\n\"I must kill you for coming here. Only Sartorius may give you permission to do so. The authority of the Chosen must not be spurned.\"\n\nGaff nodded. \"I am at your service. Summon me at your convenience and I shall submit to my punishment.\"\n\nA hard, gurgling noise erupted from the shadows. Lector Gaff realized it was the machine half of Blackthorn, laughing. \"As you say, Gaff. The next time you visit me, I shall tear out your heart. You are, I think, too clever for my comfort.\"\n\nThe Mathematician bowed in acknowledgment, then moved to the nearest wall and turned the wheel that activated the door. It hissed steam as it slid aside, and again as it closed behind him.\n\nGaff disregarded the Janissar guards who waited in the corridor. His eyes grew stony as he pondered the exchange with his lord. The mad Techno-Prophet was uncommonly ludd today. Because of that fact, the Lector had taken more from the meeting than his calculations had predicted. He had secured Blackthorn's tacit approval to bring down Sartorius. It was a legal foundation upon which to build. The mention of ancient defenses under Junction was a boon Gaff had not expected, but he intended to learn more. Blackthorn spoke in riddles, and yet he harbored an agenda that might serve Gaff's purposes. The Mathematician would decipher that mystery in time.\n\nThe Lector pressed on through the halls of Blackthorn's Citadel amid the thrum of Logos' vast machines, which marked a smoky rhythm in the bleak Logosian sky.\n\nA dozen spark lanterns illuminated the tall cement room. In the furtive blue light, Montenegro examined a steel creature walking toward him. It stood as black as opal on four large hooves. Its body was stout and artistically curved, with a proud arch to its neck and a head sculpted to convey both menace and beauty. Its skin was a mosaic of black metal plates that slid together organically as it moved. Its tail recalled a dragon's, spiny and serpentine. The strange mechanical horse emitted whirs and hums in a gait that mimicked a flesh-and-blood stallion so methodically that it chilled the knight. He could not look away from its dull, red eyes.\n\n\"A beautiful mockery of a horse,\" he frowned, crossing his arms. \"Do you expect me to ride this armored puppet?\"\n\nBrigadier Khyber raised a palm. The clockwork horse halted, utterly motionless. The soldier replied, \"Unless you intend to walk to the battlefield.\"\n\n\"I should prefer to travel the same way as the rest of your men.\"\n\n\"We use kite skids. They take months to learn. You need something else in the meantime. This automaton is extravagant but at least you can master it quickly. It rides very much like the real thing.\"\n\nAnother man added, \"As much as I was able to estimate, at least, with very little firsthand experience.\" The speaker was a middle-aged Juka wearing the robe of a Mathematician. His horns had a peculiar twist to them. Brother Barghast was Montenegro's host in Junction, in whose exotic workshop the knight had taken lodging. The mechanical creature was Barghast's creation. He talked about the machine in the dry tones common to his sect. \"Why are you reticent, Sir Gabriel? You are responsible yourself for this particular piece. The city's master merchants are fascinated with the exploits of your cavalry. Many of them have commissioned mechanical horses from myself and others. What you see before you is the culmination of six months of refinement. I was preparing to offer it for bids when His Excellency told me that you had joined the brigade. I realized immediately that it would be ideal for your quick assimilation. And so, at some financial loss, I am giving the construct to you.\"\n\nIn the context of this Technocrat workshop, the offer repulsed Montenegro. The high chamber appeared to him like the mechanical equivalent of a slaughterhouse. The walls and ceiling were draped with half-completed automatons, their metal bodies laid open to expose entrails made from gears and wheels and slender chains. Limbs were stacked in one corner, heads in another, while the bodies were suspended by hooks that dangled from the rafters. Mostly animal shapes lay in pieces around the shop. Two or three had an almost human outline, though, or would if assembled. They were roughly the size of a child. Montenegro grimaced at the sight. He approached the steel horse and mumbled over his shoulder, 'Tour generosity is a credit, despite your unseemly engineering. However, a knight on horseback, mechanical or not, is going to be conspicuous. You seem to have forgotten that I am in hiding. If the Pact of Four finds out I'm here, your brigade will attract more attention than you want.\"\n\nKhyber shook his head. \"Few will even see you. The brigade strikes quickly. We're shock troops. Night fighters. We attack from surprise. Lector Gaff has created a fog of misinformation to keep it that way. Besides, who would suspect it's you? Sir Gabriel Montenegro is dead, right? His corpse lies at the bottom of the ocean, according to Thulann of Garron herself.\"\n\n\"So I have heard, though he was always difficult to kill.\" In a swift motion he mounted the automaton. Its body felt more supple and organic than steel ought to. He disliked the sensation, precisely because it was so comfortable. \"But I have scars to prove my own incompetence at subterfuge, so I'll defer to Lector Gaff's expertise. That is, of course, provided that we take the battle to Warlord Bahrok as quickly as possible. He is the Pact's real weapon. Without him, their plot fails.\"\n\nThe brigadier grumbled, \"We will certainly strike at Warlord Bahrok By the close of this war I'll have his heart on a spit. I'm very interested in your thoughts on that particular matter, Sir Gabriel.\"\n\nMontenegro opened a hard smirk. \"I've had enough thoughts on Bahrok's death to fill the Britannian library. The bastard\u2014\" He swallowed his sentence when the mechanical horse reared. He had pulled the reins incorrecdy, or perhaps touched some control stud with his legs. When slits opened in the creature's steel sides, he realized that something new was happening. From the withers unfolded two arrangements of metal rods. Dark leather tightened over the frames. In another instant the mechanisms had extended seven feet on either side of him, knocking over dismembered automatons. Montenegro realized that the frames were shaped like a bat's wings.\n\nBrother Barghast jogged forward. \"My apologies. I should have disengaged the vanes until the levitant engine is functional.\"\n\nThe knight shifted his balance as the machine dropped onto four hooves. \"Levitant? Are you telling me this horse flies?\"\n\n\"How else would it match speed with our kite skids?\"\n\n\"Put the machine away, Brother,\" said Khyber, \"before someone gets hurt.\"\n\nMontenegro nudged the reins. The bat wings tilted in response. He waved off the brigadier and said, \"No. Leave it. Let's talk, Barghast. We've got some adjustments to make if this thing is going to have combat reflexes.\"\n\n\"I had hoped you would guide me in that,\" replied the Juka.\n\nThe brigadier chuckled. \"Our engineering is not so unseemly, after all.\"\n\n\"Even the darkest cave can yield a diamond,\" said the knight. \"I intend to make good use of every weapon I can, no matter who manufactures it or how. I trust the rest of you agree with that sentiment, because I have arranged to bring some weapons of my own here.\"\n\n\"Intriguing,\" said Khyber, \"though I'm not sure Lector Gaff will approve.\"\n\nA deep voice rumbled, \"I approve of innovation. We must be efficient and decisive. The odds of success have decreased tonight.\" The three men startled. A robed figure stood in the workshop where no one had been an instant before. Lector Gaff had entered without a sound. \"We stand alone against the Pact of Four. The Techno-Prophet will not take action against Lector Sartorius.\"\n\nMontenegro winced. \"Are you sure? Blackthorn told you that himself?\"\n\n\"Of course not. No one but the Chosen may attend His Eminence unbidden. Nevertheless we cannot rely upon his assistance, and so we must not delay in perpetrating our own strategy.\"\n\n\"You speak to my very heart,\" said the knight, who smiled as he leaned forward on the black, steel beast. \"I have no stomach for waiting. Tonight we plan. Tomorrow we start training. In two weeks' time we can make our first strike.\"\n\nLector Gaff blinked and replied, \"The equations are more complex than that, but your intentions are correct. The Pact of Four has constructed its schemes. We must show them that precisely concerted action can destroy what two years of treachery creates. We shall be swift, gentlemen, and surgical.\"\n\nKhyber and Barghast grunted their approval. Montenegro did likewise. As he dismounted the clockwork steed, his body felt charged with energy. Though darkness pressed from all sides, he breathed freely again. Warfare was his preferred condition. The Pact of Four dominated his contempt. He had traded everything to be here at this moment and the sensation was exquisite.\n\nThough perhaps, came a quiet thought, he had traded little of real value. He carried the Virtues inside him, and his grandfather's honored legacy. Everything else was expendable resources. Whether that served the Virtue of Sacrifice; he did not have the time to consider, as the four men converged on an empty table and unrolled a map of Logosia. In the buzzing glow of twelve spark lanterns they began to design their revenge. They spoke of blood and ambush and of their common, simmering hatred." + }, + { + "title": "Encounter at Cove", + "text": "Dark shapes moved through the twilight forest as Sister Raveka descended on her carriole. The flying machine nestled into a familiar rock crevice in the side of a large hill. Shadows swallowed the vehicle. A loaded bolt thrower perched in the Mathematician's hand. She dismounted and scanned the terrain.\n\nThe trees of New Britannia welcomed her with the flutter of leaves. The breeze was laden with the smells of mud and moss and damp bark. Raveka inhaled deeply. This country was a glory to the senses. Her heart lifted at its greeting. But New Britannia sheltered many unsavory species of men, as well, one of which was stalking this black forest in considerable numbers. She smelled their reek, too, filthy and sour. Unmistakably ores. The savage creatures had been on the move several weeks earlier, when she and Montenegro had departed for Logos. In the knight's absence, they appeared to have overrun his estate by the dozens. Traversing the grounds would be dangerous. Ores were not clever, but when they found a victim their attacks were ferocious. Raveka draped a camouflage tarp over the carriole, strapped on a traveling bag and set out for the manor house. In the dusk her grey-cloaked shape vanished.\n\nAs she moved through the darkening forest, a warm memory rose inside her. These were the paths she and Montenegro had walked while getting to know each another. Here they had developed the persona of Lady Aria, Montenegro's distant relative and clandestine lover. For Raveka those days were the fulfillment of a childhood fantasy. She had pledged herself to a knight and had become a noble lady. She would always regard this place as a dreamland, though the circumstances had greatly changed with Gabriel's false death. The fact that Lady Aria had inherited this estate was, of course, delightful compensation.\n\nAt present she had a task to perform, though, one that would call her away from this new home. She had come to Cove only to retrieve a few papers and possessions. Then she must depart for the capital city of Britain, where Lord Gideon awaited her return. Lady Aria had begun to romance the powerful senator in the days before Montenegro's counterfeit demise. Now she would develop his confidence as far as necessary to turn him against the invasion of Logosia. Since Gideon was the lord of the House of the Lion, all military affairs fell under his jurisdiction. By seducing him, Raveka might save her homeland from slaughter.\n\nShe quickened her steps across the estate and up a hill to the manor. The house was mostly dark, except for a few slivers of candlelight peeking between the shutters on the ground floor. Someone was inside. Raveka frowned. Her mind raced through tactical equations. The intruder was probably a maid or a groundskeeper, but she could take no chances. She pocketed her bolt thrower, slipped extra ammunition beside it and crept through the shadows to the back door.\n\nThe house was locked tight. Every window was shuttered and every lock was enchanted by very old runes. Raveka was not comfortable with the supernatural traditions of this land, but she did appreciate the usefulness of sorcery. The enchantments prevented the ores from entering the house. They would protect her, as well. That also meant the intruders either possessed a key or had used sorcery to let themselves in. The latter possibility gave her great concern.\n\nAbruptly she crouched behind a bush. A band of ore scouts lumbered past. The creatures were larger than humans, sporting long tusks and an assortment of crude, deadly weapons. This group was loitering around the perimeter of the house, doubtless waiting for someone to venture out. Raveka kept still until they were gone, then reached into her bag. A large key was nestled within. It tingled when she touched it. She inserted it into the back door, causing a pale flash inside the lock. Then the door creaked open. Without delay Sister Raveka hurried into the safety of Montenegro Manor.\n\nShe relaxed a bit when the door clicked shut behind her, but she dared not let her guard down. She stood in a back hallway. The interior of the house was veiled in shadows. She strained to hear any noise. The manor sounded unoccupied, but her ears rang from the carriole journey, rendering them unreliable. Softly she removed her cloak, uncovering a lady's modest dress, then made her way to the nearest rooms. Candlelight flickered somewhere around the kitchen. She smelled cooked food. After a few minutes she discovered a parlor where a dinner table was laid, with a serving plate steaming between two place settings. Raveka nibbled her lip. A housekeeper or groundsman would have prepared a local dish, with bread or cheese or vegetables.\n\nThis meal was a game bird, cooked with the utilitarian technique of a wilderness traveler. Raveka noticed finger smudges on the dishes. The smell of sweaty leather lingered in the room.\n\nWhoever was here did not belong in a noblewoman's house. She adjusted the bolt thrower in her pocket so that it was quickly accessible. She had too many enemies to give anyone the benefit of the doubt. As she moved toward an adjacent corridor she fought down a lilt of sadness. It is a pity, she thought, to kill someone so soon upon returning to New Britannia. The cool evening wind had made her journey otherwise enjoyable and the moons were shining quite beautifully tonight.\n\nCobwebs and dust haunted the old wine cellar. The stone floor and wooden vaults and bottle-heavy shelves were grey with layer upon layer of age. The air hung thick and dry. For Jatha of Ishpur the ambience conjured a feeling of reverence. Dust, after all, was the footprint of time. It was the mande of tradition, the vindication of an enduring culture. Humans measured their era in centuries while Jatha's home of Avenosh counted its age in millennia, yet dust was the same no matter the continent, thick and frosty like the hair of a wise, old man. The ancestors smiled upon timeworn places.\n\nAs it always did, though, the mood quickly faded. Jatha rubbed the furry bridge of his nose. In a swift motion the Meer plucked a bottle of brandy from the nearest shelf, then stepped deeper into the cellar. To the shadows ahead he announced, 'Tve staked the bird onto a plate upstairs. You had best go up and eat before it squirms loose and tracks gravy on the rug.\"\n\nSilence answered him. The wizard glanced around a comer. At the far end of the cellar was a broad niche. Designed to hold select vintages, it was enclosed by iron bars like a jail cell, secured by a heavy lock. A single lantern strewed light over the area. Inside the niche the wine had been removed and in its place, on a low, wooden bench, lay a small Meer figure with fur glistening in the light. The slender woman did not move. Outside the bars, on a sturdy chair, sat a blond, muscular human. The man wore a white shirt, neat trousers and a wiry beard, and appeared to be very lost in thought.\n\nJatha called out, \"Did you hear me, Fairfax? I said dinner is ready. It is yet another of my culinary masterworks designed to enrapture the mouth, or at least to enliven the bowels.\"\n\n\"I cannot leave,\" replied Fairfax the Ranger as he contemplated his steepled fingers. \"I am not finished.\"\n\nJatha stopped a few feet from his companion. \"Finished with what? Your vigil over Shavade? You may as well employ your drool for its intended purpose. Have some faith in my locking spells. Shavade will still be here after you have slobbered over the pheasant.\"\n\nThe strapping ranger lifted a finger. \"The vigil over my goddess shall never be complete, but I was talking about something more concise than that. She is my inspiration, you see. She has inspired me to compose a song, but it has not yet emerged fully from my innards.\"\n\n\"A song! And I thought I was a fearless man. Pray keep it to yourself. Poetry sings in the heart but usually screeches in the ear.\"\n\n\"Keep it to myself? No, this song is destined for Shavade's own ears, those wondrous, velvety mussel shells. When it is finished I shall sing it to her, though a chorus of gods could do no justice to my love.\"\n\nThe Meer wizard crossed his arms. \"She's going to hate it. You realize that.\"\n\nFairfax shrugged. \"Probably.\"\n\n\"All right, then. Let me hear what you've got so far. Perhaps the two of us can bolt some words to your emotions before the bird upstairs gets cold. I used some strange ingredients from Montenegro's kitchen and I'm curious to find out if they're edible.\"\n\nThe ranger grinned and dragged his fingers through a shower of blond hair. \"Very well! Tell me honestly if I am half as inspired as our wayward friend Toria. This is what the ovens of my passion have baked:\n\n\u2003\"You make my heart swell\n\n\u2003A hundred miles in girth!\n\n\u2003You impregnate my soul;\n\n\u2003To Love I shall give birth!\n\n\u2003\"You 're a star overhead;\n\n\u2003You light up my path!\n\n\u2003The kingdom of my love\n\n\u2003No borders it hath!\"\n\nFairfax rubbed his hands together nervously. \"You can see how much I adore her.\"\n\nJatha realized his catlike ears were pressed flat against his head. He blinked to shake them loose. \"You're right. A chorus of gods could not do it justice.\"\n\nThe ranger scowled. \"You mock my devotion to her!\"\n\n\"No, I mock your song.\"\n\n\"I told you, it's not finished.\"\n\n\"You shall starve to death before that song is ready. Fairfax, you did not eat lunch, if you can remember that far back. Go get some dinner, man.\"\n\nFairfax sighed and glanced at the Meer woman inside the niche. \"But she'll wake up soon.\"\n\n\"You have several minutes before then. I'll watch her while you're gone. If she wakes I'll knock her out again with a rap to the head. I wouldn't want to deprive you of a moment of her consciousness.\"\n\nThe ranger smiled as he rose from the chair. \"A finer friend I could not ask for, even though your taste in poetry is wanting.\" To the sleeping Shavade he added, \"Good-bye for the moment, my goddess. You fill my heart but alas, it is Jatha who fills my stomach. Two great storms clash and I am buffeted between them.\"\n\nAs his companion passed by, Jatha held up the dusty bottle of brandy. Fairfax shook his head at the offer, then trotted out of the wine cellar. When the door creaked shut at the top of the stairs, the tall wizard dropped into the chair beside the iron-barred niche.\n\nA voice from inside murmured, \"How long are you going to keep me here with that buffoon?\"\n\nJatha glanced at Shavade of Arjun. The small warrior had not moved nor opened her eyes, but her face registered scorn. He chuckled and set down the liquor. \"Until the Matriarchs tell me what to do with you. I apologize if that interrupts your busy schedule.\"\n\n\"It could take weeks to get a message back from Ishpur! You can't keep me imprisoned that long.\"\n\n\"I shall likely miss the invasion of Logosia because of it. But if you tell me about your masters, perhaps I can arrange something agreeable to us both. I want Chamberlain Kavah and the Pact of Four, not a hireling like you.\"\n\nThe Hunter bared her teeth and spat.\n\nJatha tilted his head. \"Fear not, then. The days will pass quickly for you.\"\n\nThe woman grunted as she struggled to sit up. \"I'm going to kill you for this sleeping spell, Firstborn. How long since I was last awake?\"\n\n\"Two days. I do apologize, but every hour you're awake is an hour you plot to escape. I respect you enough to be cruel. Besides, your only alternative is sixteen hours a day listening to Fairfax's poetry, which would be cruder still.\" From the air he plucked the seed of an enchantment and cracked it open in his palm. A white glow appeared. \"I can get rid of that headache, if you like.\"\n\n\"Choke on it,\" she growled as she cast him an angry glare. Her large eyes were bloodshot but strikingly alert, accentuated by tiny spots in her fur. Shavade was small for a member of the Warrior caste, though her face bore the sleek angles distinctive to her kind. Jatha could not deny that she was beautiful. As an elite Hunter trained to fight wizards, she was also deadlier than he cared to ponder.\n\nShavade sat up and crossed her legs. Sleep had tousled her tawny hair and wrinkled her kidskin tunic. She pressed knuckles to her brow and groaned, \"Where the hell are we, anyway?\"\n\n\"Somewhere Chamberlain Kavah will not find us. He is not the sort of company I want to arrive uninvited.\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes and smirked. \"You are far from the traditions of home, eh, Firstborn? To reject the company of a peer.\"\n\nJatha extinguished the glow in his hand and reached for the bottle of brandy. \"I have rejected a great many things, just as you have, Hunter.\" He uncorked the liquor and sniffed. The bouquet was exquisite. He pressed it to his Ups and drank a swaUow. It seared his throat magnificently.\n\nThe warrior leaned forward on the bench. \"Don't flinch like that. You know what I'm talking about. You're not so different from Kavah, are you? Tell me why you turned away from Ishpur.\"\n\nHe brushed a drop from his chin and grumbled, \"Choke on it, Hunter.\"\n\nShe snorted and leaned back against the wall, tapping her head on the stone. \"Where is my Stinger?\"\n\n\"It's safe and well-fed.\"\n\n\"I know that. I want to see her.\"\n\nJatha planted his feet on the ground and rose from the chair. He pushed the cork back into the bottle. \"Sorry, I won't be handing over your venomous pet today. However, I shall do you the courtesy of summoning Fairfax now. He has written you a song as painful as any poison a Living Weapon might secrete.\"\n\nShavade closed her eyes. \"I know. I heard it just now. Please, at least grant me the mercy of a dagger. I'll either cut off his tongue or my own ears. That man chatters more than a flock of hatchling kael.\"\n\nAnother speU leapt into Jatha's mouth. A Ught gUmmered while the iron bars rattled, then quieted in their mounts again. Jatha did not think the locking enchantments needed to be strengthened, but aU Hunters were trained to defeat sorcery. He took no chances when he left Shavade alone and awake. Only a proper key would release her. He gave the woman a smile. \"Take comfort in my friend's affection. He is as earnest as a teenager. Not every girl would shrink from the adoration of a fair-hearted man.\"\n\nThe Hunter sneered, \"What would you know about it, Firstborn?\"\n\nJatha shrugged as he tucked the bottle under his arm. \"More than you might imagine. I recognize honest desire when I see it. You might see it as well, if you paid closer attention to him.\" Then he ambled off, leaving a trail of boot prints on the dusty stone floor.\n\nIn her little prison, Shavade of Arjun waited for the creak of the cellar door. Then she twirled an iron key between her fingers. \"Maybe Fairfax should have paid closer attention to me.\" With a grin she uncurled from the bench and slid her feet into a pair of well-worn boots.\n\nRaveka froze. Someone was behind her in the darkened corridor. She heard the woody creak of a bow and the calm breaths of a person experienced in combat. He must have been an expert in stealth and tracking. The spring-powered bolt thrower was loaded in her pocket, but the archer's missile would run her through before she could hope to retrieve it. Instead she raised her arms and stepped into the center of the dim hallway.\n\nA familiar voice said, \"I have met a great many ores in my life, if only for a brief moment each, but you are certainly the best-dressed of them all.\"\n\n\"Please don't kill me,\" wheezed Raveka with conjured terror. She examined the silhouette to confirm his identity, though the voice was unmistakable. \"Fairfax? Is that you?\" The archer lowered the aim of his bow. \"Lady Aria?\"\n\nShe clutched her hands to her breast and exhaled deeply. \"Yes, it's me. By the Virtues, you had me terrified!\"\n\nFairfax did not move. 'Why are you sneaking around your own house?\"\n\n\"I saw lights inside and I didn't know if it might be ores. Thank the stars it was no one more uncivilized than yourself!\"\n\n\"Jatha has often compared me to an ore. It is a Meerish expression of brotherhood, I suppose. I shall never understand that rabbit-eared yeti. But my lady, where are your servants? Surely you did not come here alone.\"\n\nShe stepped closer. \"I have no servants. I shared the road with a group of soldiers traveling to Britain. They escorted me to the doorstep.\"\n\n\"I heard no such commotion.\"\n\nShe gave him a smile bright enough to show through the gloom. \"We were very quiet. The ores looked hungry tonight.\" She had advanced within a yard of the ranger. His nervousness was plain. He was hiding something. His secret was probably not dangerous, but her training dictated that she gain control of the situation. She reached out a hand with deliberate awkwardness. \"Fairfax, good sir, would you mind putting away your bow? I feel like a fox in a hunting pen here. This is my house, after all.\"\n\nHe relaxed the nocked arrow. \"Of course. A bounty of apologies upon you, my lady.\" Then he let out a chuckle.\n\n\"What's funny?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nothing. I just remembered a conversation I had about you.\"\n\nRaveka hooked her elbow into his. \"Indeed? With my poor cousin Gabriel?\"\n\n\"No. With an old acquaintance of yours.\"\n\n\"You intrigue me. Who is it? Someone from Coventine?\" As she spoke, her eyes scoured his shadowy features for an answer. She had assumed the identity of Lady Aria less than two months earlier. Not enough time had passed for her to have an \"old acquaintance.\" Nor had she ever visited Coven-tine, where the genuine Lady Aria lay unmounted in a tomb. This was a troubling development.\n\nBut the ranger gave no hint of his meaning. Instead he responded, \"Let us discuss the matter over dinner, if I may be so impertinent as to invite you to your own table. It saddens me to say that the fare is nothing more than Jatha's unsophisticated output, yet he cooks it with honest intentions. That should console your heart, if not your tongue.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"An honest cook is rarely a good one, but I am famished enough not to care. Tell me, is Jatha the only other person here or shall I have even more guests for dinner tonight?\"\n\n\"There is only Jatha and me to share your sup, and even so we are one too many. Would that I had you to myself, Lady Aria, for not often does a simple man partake of such a banquet of beauty as you place before my eyes right now. A feast for the highest king you are, and I am humbled to enjoy whatever morsel falls upon my tongue.\"\n\nWith a laugh she said, \"Take me to the food, my friend! Though if dinner is as saucy as you are, we shall never find the meat.\" She clung to his elbow with a calculated grip, though not out of affection. She wanted to control his weapon arm. From his body language she knew that Fairfax was lying to her. He was tense, as if prepared for quick action. She would require every possible advantage if the situation turned against her, especially when the Meer wizard Jatha was involved.\n\nThey arrived at the parlor to find Jatha already seated. The furred sorcerer rose with an expression of surprise. \"Fairfax, I thought perhaps you had caught a burglar, but I see that the reverse is true. We have invaded the good lady's house and she has arrived to take us to task for it.\" He executed an elaborate bow. \"My Lady Aria, I have anticipated meeting you again. Please forgive our intrusion here. Do allow me to point out, if Fairfax has not already done so, that Montenegro gave us a key on a previous occasion. We are merely availing ourselves of his kindness. And of course I offer my deepest condolences on the passing of your heroic cousin. Never have I met a man with like courage and skill. May his soul find peace. May those responsible for his murder find none.\"\n\nShe bowed her head with an appropriate mixture of gratitude and mourning. Then she released Fairfax and sat in the chair next to Jatha, who represented the greater threat. She squeezed his hands and murmured, \"Please, do not speak of Gabriel just now. I'm starving. Let's fill our mouths with food and heartening words.\"\n\nFairfax set down his bow, then lifted a fork and carving knife. The implements gleamed silver in the candlelight. He raised his eyebrows and smiled. \"Ah, but my lady, we do have heartening news concerning your cousin. As fortune would have it, we have discovered the whereabouts of his murderer.\"\n\nShe squinted. \"Have you indeed!\" Her shock was not feigned. Montenegro had arranged the fiction of his own death, disguising the corpse of a Pact agent as his own. No murderer existed to be found. \"Who is the villain? And how did you find him?\"\n\nJatha let out a laugh. \"Not villain, but villainess. And she is currendy trapped within these very walls! Might I add that Fairfax and I are blessed with a most comely prisoner, at that. The ancestors smile upon us.\"\n\nRaveka did not like the menace in the Meer's face. She had never grown accustomed to the bestial aspects of Jatha's race, despite their peaceful society. And Jatha seemed less peaceful than most. \"She is here, you say? Who is she?\"\n\n\"Come now, my lady,\" said Fairfax as he stabbed the pheasant, \"this wickedness does you no compliment. You know well of whom we speak.\"\n\nAbruptly Jatha grabbed her wrist. She startled as he drew closer and said, \"It took us some time to remember the first night we met you, but ultimately Riona Lynch was unforgettable. Your eyes are as enchanting as any I have seen inside of a human head. So, first Fairfax and I met Riona, and then we met Lady Aria, and still we have not been properly introduced. Tell me, my ravishing Technocrat, what is your real name?\"\n\nRaveka's eyes dashed between the two men. Fairfax gazed back at her with a threatening grin as he sawed the cooked pheasant into pieces. With a gasp she murmured, \"Gende-men, have you gone mad? I am not entertained by this joke of yours!\"\n\nThe ranger lifted the knife to his mouth and licked the steaming juice. \"Nor are we entertained by yours. Montenegro was our trusted friend. You seduced and then murdered him. It was Captain Bawdewyn\u2014your 'old acquaintance'\u2014 who told us about the pretty Technocrat spy who had captured Montenegro's heart. With that information even an ape-wit like Jatha could deduce what had happened. It was always your intention to kill him when the time was right, wasn't it? Just like you ordered Lord Valente's assassination, two years earlier. I confess, though, that I never expected a murder weapon to be as a handsome as yourself. My compliments to the smith. Of course the biggest question remains, who wields you against us? Blackthorn or the Pact of Four? It is a rare point of contention between Jatha and myself.\"\n\nRaveka conjured a scowl. \"How dare you make such accusations! I vowed my love to Gabriel! I won't listen any further.\" With a precise maneuver she yanked her hand from Jatha's grip. Then a loud thump shot through the room. She found herself unable to rise from the chair. The carving knife was stuck in the seat, pinning down her skirt. Fairfax had thrown it with uncanny skill to keep her from escaping.\n\nThat was just the sort of reaction she had hoped to provoke. He had disarmed himself. In a lightning motion she drew the bolt thrower and pressed it against Jatha's skull. The Meer flinched as she shouted, \"Do not move, please! Hands on the table.\" Growling, the wizard complied. To Fairfax she commanded, \"Drop the fork and cross your arms. Do it now! Don't force me to kill him before we have a chance to talk. I apologize, but with you two this is the only way to muscle a word into the conversation.\"\n\nFairfax folded his arms across his chest and grumbled, \"Another toothsome woman seeks to kill us! And I thought giving up the bottle would make me more appealing. Temperance is overrated, my friend.\"\n\nJatha groaned, \"I do not succumb to temperance and look at my predicament! Yet in defeat I am vindicated. I have always maintained that woman is an inherently warlike species. Beauty is nothing but a clever feint.\"\n\n\"Quiet,\" ordered Raveka as she tugged loose the carving knife and pocketed it. She stood carefully. Neither man challenged her. She took a deep breath and continued, \"What a predicament indeed, hey? Let's try to solve this, then, with some modicum of candor. You're correct, of course. I was Riona and I am Logosian. However, I did not murder Gabriel, nor did any Technocrat. I tell you that with strict adherence to the Virtue of Honesty.\"\n\nThe wizard grimaced. \"Then one of your associates did. The Pact of Four has agents from every kingdom.\"\n\n\"You could not be more mistaken. The Pact of Four is my enemy just as it is yours. I plan to interfere with its schemes ' as far as my skills allow.\"\n\nFairfax commented, \"She lies with true charisma. See the glimmer in her eyes. I understand how she penetrated even Montenegro's armored heart.\"\n\nRaveka sighed. \"I shall satisfy your skepticism if you do me the courtesy of silence. In fact, you may occupy your lips on that bottle of brandy.\" She motioned to a dusty bottle in front of Jatha. \"Each of you shall take turns drinking until the last drop is finished. That should give me enough time to explain.\"\n\nThe ranger snorted. \"I no longer drink.\"\n\n\"I see. I'll save the brandy for later, then, and just stick a tap into Jatha's head.\" She nudged her bolt thrower into the Meer's scalp. Jatha hissed in pain.\n\nFairfax picked up the bottle and mumbled, \"Liquor, old friend, once more a woman drives me back to your company. Such is our destiny together.\" He guzzled a mouthful and squeezed his eyes shut.\n\nRaveka monitored them cautiously as they exchanged the brandy, each swallowing heady gulps. Their eyes began to redden. Their reflexes would soon diminish. In the meantime she explained how Montenegro had faced charges of treason from General Nathaniel, a member of the Pact, and how the knight had contrived his own death to escape the plot against him. Even now, she added, he resided in Logosia, working with the Technocrats to undermine the Pact's schemes. She did not reveal this information out of trust for the two men, but rather for fear of them. Jatha was a powerful wizard and Fairfax a deadly swordsman and archer. Her chances of escaping the manor were too low for the Mathematician's comfort. Even if she did get free, both men were veterans of the New Britannian wilds whom she could scarcely hope to evade in the forest. The best hope of retaining her freedom lay in winning their confidence. Montenegro had expressed to her his deep friendship with them, so she felt somewhat safe revealing the compromising truth.\n\nIn fact, if Gabriel had been present, she knew he would have been smug. Honesty was her greatest weapon now. The Virtues indeed lit her path.\n\nWhen she finished the tale, her two captives looked incredulous. Jatha thumped down the half-empty bottle and mumbled, \"I would sooner believe in a drunken Matriarch than Montenegro fighting beside Technocrat soldiers. You overestimate the potency of that brandy.\"\n\nThough the men were more lucid than she had expected them to be, she could see that the liquor had done its job. Their heads had begun to sway. She replied, \"If I wanted to deceive you, would I invent such an unlikely scenario? It is the truth. Montenegro is more cunning than his enemies give him credit.\"\n\n\"And you are more cunning still,\" said Fairfax with wet pronunciation. \"We know you to be a liar, my little eggshell. A bottle of brandy does not change that fact. To be absolutely truthful, when liquor and women are present in tandem, Jatha and I have learned that the wisest course is to assume the worst. And so we must reject your very imaginative alibi. Have you prepared another one, perhaps? We are willing to listen to all that you have. Your voice, at least, is pleasing to the ear.\"\n\nRaveka narrowed her eyes. \"I have confided secrets that could cost Montenegro his life. I can give you no more than that. If you lack the wit to recognize that we are allies, then you make yourselves my enemies. I cannot risk anyone interfering with my mission. I have no choice but to kill you now, while I have the advantage.\"\n\nJatha smirked. \"Ah, Fairfax, the wheel never stops turning, does it? Once again our death is at hand. It has been so many weeks since the last time, I was beginning to grow complacent.\"\n\nThe ranger uncrossed his arms. \"Women, liquor and death. One must take each in moderation and be wary of the sum of them all. What philosopher said that?\"\n\n\"I did,\" answered Jatha, then darted up from his chair. Raveka tilted down the bolt thrower and squeezed the firing lever. The weapon activated with a loud clack. The wizard toppled forward with a blossom of red on his throat. The brandy bottle thudded on the floor. It rolled aside as Jatha collapsed nearby, clutching at his neck.\n\nRaveka felt herself shudder.\n\nFairfax let out a scream and clambered across the table. She swept the carving knife from her pocket and jabbed it at the ranger. Though his reflexes were slowed, he managed to bat the knife aside. Then he kicked her. Raveka's face burst with heat. She hurtled backward against a chair that upended, dumping her onto the floor. His boot swept forward again, this time bashing into her gut, which erupted with fiery pain. Several times he kicked her as she lay stunned. Her mind swam, her thoughts in shambles. She was aware that he turned away from her and cried out, \"No, no, no, my friend! Not this way!\"\n\nShe watched as Fairfax knelt over the bloody form of his companion. He fished a vial of healing potion from the wizard's belt, but his inebriated hands fumbled it. The vial clattered on the floor. He snatched it up and popped out the cork.\n\nRaveka's mind filled with mathematical chants. They focused her thoughts and drove her to action. She spotted the brandy bottle a few feet away. Quietly she retrieved it and while Fairfax maneuvered the healing potion to Jatha's lips, she swatted the heavy glass butt across his skull. It thumped loudly. He cursed as he fell to the side. From the table she snatched a heavy silver plate. A few edgewise blows rendered Fairfax unconscious. Jatha lay beside him, senseless and bloody, unable to form sounds with his ruined throat.\n\nFor an instant she leaned against the table and trembled. Her gut throbbed with pain. She sipped a mouthful of brandy and set it aside for later. Then she followed a calculated plan. Quickly she hauled the two men into back-to-back chairs, yanked down a bell pull and tied their hands together. Jatha's healing potion lay half-spilled on the ground. She tipped the remainder into his mouth. The bleeding stopped. As he sputtered awake she gagged him with a cloth, which she tied in an intricate knot. Then she fetched a pitcher of water from a basin in the comer and splashed it over Fairfax's head. The ranger coughed and opened his bleary eyes.\n\nRaveka clutched her aching stomach and sighed, \"There's no intimidating you two, is there?\"\n\nFairfax growled, \"Ungag Jatha so he can heal himself.\"\n\n\"I don't trust sorcerers. If he can heal himself, he can strike against me. I can't give him back his tongue until we reach an agreement.\"\n\n\"Pray tell me what agreement I should make with an assassin. I won't kill you if you don't kill me? Meanwhile the serpent wets her fangs with more venom.\"\n\n\"Use your head, Fairfax. You are tied up. Jatha is half healed. That means I don't intend to kill you.\"\n\n\"No, it means you want something from us.\"\n\n\"I only want to convince you that we are on the same side. Together we\u2014\" Abruptly she held her breath. She had heard a noise. A door had creaked somewhere inside the house.\n\nFairfax's eyes widened. \"You didn't let her out, did you?\"\n\n\"Who else is here?\"\n\nHe glared suspiciously. \"Someone else who may be on your side.\"\n\nRaveka glanced over the knots that bound her two captives. They looked secure. She reloaded her bolt thrower as she darted out of the parlor toward the front wing of the house. The sound had come from the wine cellar. Carefully she crept through the shadows until she spotted the open cellar door. She knelt to listen more closely.\n\nSomething sprang at her. A fist connected with her nose. She fired the bolt thrower and a woman shrieked in pain. Raveka fell back as her attacker, a petite Meer warrior, threw open a shuttered window and leapt away into the dark summer night. Raveka spat a mouthful of blood, then swayed to her feet.\n\nBy the time she returned to the parlor, Jatha and Fairfax lay on the floor. Their chairs were overturned and partly demolished as they worked to free themselves. Fairfax looked up with panic in his eyes. \"Where is she? What happened?\"\n\n\"That was Shavade of Arjun, wasn't it? The Pact agent!\"\n\n\"The goddess herself! What did you do to her?\"\n\n\"I let her get away, dammit! Why didn't you tell me she was here?\" With a surge of anger she plucked the carving knife from the table and flashed it down at Jatha. The blade sliced through his gag. Then she cut their bonds and stepped back. \"Hurry or we'll lose her in the forest!\"\n\nWithout warning the house began to shake. The floorboards croaked and swelled, then split apart as something lunged up from underneath. A long, black tentacle lashed through the air and snapped at Raveka. Powerful coils enveloped her. She tried to squirm loose but the tentacle solidified into hard, smooth granite.\n\nSmoke curled around the room. A pair of eyes glowed at her through the haze. They belonged to Jatha of Ishpur. \"I want you to stay here,\" he snarled as he ran out of the parlor. Fairfax was already gone.\n\nRaveka attempted to free herself, but Jatha's spell held fast. She decided to conserve her strength. The magic would fade soon enough. While regaining her breath she sorted through her options. As a Pact agent Shavade must not be allowed to escape, but Raveka doubted whether her own skills could aid Jatha and Fairfax in the hunt. The New Britannian forest was not her element. Besides, as soon as they composed themselves, those two would be craving retribution. Meanwhile Lord Gideon awaited her return. She had perhaps less than two months to turn him against the invasion. Her primary mission had to take precedence. She resolved to make for Britain immediately. At that moment the security of the city called to her like a choir.\n\nBrusque noises reached her ears. Someone was poking around the house. She heard glass shatter and a series of low, barking laughs. She swallowed. Ores had entered the manor. Jatha and Fairfax must have left a door open. When the laugh was answered by many guttural voices, Raveka strained at the granite tentacle holding her. After several minutes it had grown britde. She cracked loose a segment and wriggled free. Catching her breath she retrieved the bottle of brandy, which retained half of its contents. It was a rare label, one of Lord Gideon's favorites, which she could make use of in Britain.\n\nAs she dashed toward Montenegro's old office, she was already calculating the optimal route to retrieve her papers and return to her carriole. Stealth was essential. The forest was full of men who wanted to kill her. Such was the lot of a spy, of course, though Raveka doubted she would ever get comfortable with it. She longed for the day she could become Lady Montenegro and live out her years in peace. The dream appeared to be impossible, yet she clung to it without faltering. There was a magic in New Britannia that made her believe anything could happen, if her desire was great enough. All she had to do was stay alive. For that, if nothing else, she knew she had a genuine talent." + }, + { + "title": "The HuntRess", + "text": "Morning light sprinkled through the treetops and lit the dewy forest. A summer fog slithered across the ground. Throughout the woods a parliament of birds commenced its daily debate, filling the air with wails and chattering. In a narrow clearing Jatha leaned against a tree. He waited for his breath to return. His ears rang with the echoes of battle.\n\nNearby, Fairfax was collecting arrows. A few of them were embedded in soil and tree bark. More protruded from a dozen ores who lay about the clearing in the awkward poses of death. When the ranger finished, he knelt and brushed away the fog. Through a curtain of blond hair he scrutinized the ground. After a moment he crept to another spot, and then another. His movements were informed by a patient urgency.\n\nThe Meer wizard rubbed fatigue from his face and said, \"Are you sure you haven't lost her trail?\"\n\nFairfax did not look up. \"Lost her trail! You insult my devotion as well as my skill. I sense my goddess intrinsically. Her footfalls mark the beating of my heart. I know her every breath.\"\n\nJatha chuckled. \"You should have paid attention to her hands, instead of her lungs and toes. Maybe then she wouldn't have stolen your key.\"\n\n\"The torrents of love dissolve worldly bonds. Perhaps in some deep, unconscious way I could not bear to see her imprisoned. My very soul reaches out to her.\"\n\n\"There's that soul of yours again, careening about like a drunken headless. It will get you killed one day and pride shall force me to gloat over your grave.\" He watched as his companion searched for Shavade's tracks with uncharacteristic quiet. Jatha was unused to his friend's silence. To break the calm he added, \"But if I recall how this usually works, the two of you inhabit a single soul, correct? And that's why fate summoned you together.\"\n\n\"No, that's just a tired cliche. It's different with Shavade. How can I describe my spiritual hunger? I fall into her like a shooting star plummets to the earth, unable and unwilling to resist, wanting only to touch her or explode in the striving.\" \"And the end result is a smoking crater.\"\n\n\"Who knows? Maybe I'll start a fire.\"\n\nThe wizard crossed his arms. \"I still think you've lost her trail.\" Fairfax snorted. Jatha shrugged. \"It doesn't matter. She will come to us.\"\n\n\"Such a divine thought!\"\n\n\"Not divine. Purely material. She wants her Stinger back, and this.\" From his shoulder bag he retrieved a small rod of black crystal. The object felt strange in his hand. It resisted movement as if it had great mass, though the weight of it was negligible. Jatha examined the rod carefully, as if it might plot its own escape.\n\nFairfax glanced back for an instant. \"What is that little sliver anyway, to make your eyes twitch like that?\"\n\n\"The root of corruption.\"\n\n\"I remember when she used it. It teleports people like a moongate. What's so irretrievably corrupt about that?\"\n\n\"How can I explain forbidden sorcery? Let me try to squeeze it into that constricted brain of yours. Imagine that the Ether is a wall around the entire world. A moongate is a carefully constructed door, built in such a way that the strength of the wall is preserved. That's responsible magic. But this shard is more like a miner's pick, gouging out a new, ragged hole every time it is used. Eventually the wall must crumble. Nasty things happen when the Ether starts to collapse.\"\n\n\"Let me guess. The world flies apart like a jilted poet.\"\n\n\"You're smarter than your hygiene portends. Human history claims that Blackthorn unleashed the Cataclysm, but as usual your scholars are wrong. It was the Lore Council of Anjur that split the world apart by misusing exactly this kind of sorcery. After the Cataclysm the Matriarchs disbanded the Council, forbade its sorcery and sealed away its dangerous spells. But this...\" He turned the rod in his hand. \"If Shavade carried this shard, then the seals must have been broken. Chamberlain Kavah has stolen power greater than even the Matriarchs can control. Disaster is stalking us, my friend, and this is one of its teeth.\"\n\nStill studying the ground, Fairfax spat a derisive laugh. '\"Disaster is stalking us!' By the Virtues, what fever afflicts wizards with melodrama? You mull over doom like a bad cook over soup.\"\n\n\"This is a serious threat, Fairfax.\"\n\n\"So was the last one and the one prior to that. When did we ever frown about it? Yet it's different this time and not because of an incontinent Ether. This is personal for you. I can see that. You know I'll never pry into your past, but some old wound has turned you as dark and bitter as Blue Boar stout.\" He looked over his shoulder at his companion. \"If I can ease your burden with some word or action, it's your duty as a friend to tell me so. I'm in love, in case you have forgotten. If you think the world is in peril, let us dispatch the villain so I can go on being in love. You and I cannot both be morose. One of us has to sleep.\"\n\nJatha relented a smile and returned the crystal to his bag. \"Quite so. But don't fret over Shavade. We won't lose her. She'll come looking for us soon enough.\" With a grumble he added, \"It's Lady Aria who has cleanly escaped us. We botched that one like children, my friend.\"\n\n\"You saw no sign of her when you returned for our things?\"\n\n\"Only a few dead ores. She has sharp edges, that porcelain doll.\"\n\nThe ranger paused. \"Do you believe her story about Montenegro?\"\n\n\"She shot me in the throat. That diminishes her credibility.\" He squinted. \"Why? Do you?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I suppose not. She did seem sincere, though.\"\n\n\"By the Ar'Kannor, you are like molten glass in the presence of women. They blow you into a hundred shapes and you never even feel the heat.\"\n\n\"You're wrong. I enjoy the heat. If I am malleable like glass, it is simply to entice them to pucker. That is life's most fundamental vice.\"\n\nJatha laughed. \"You're a wicked soul. No doubt my ancestors disapprove of our acquaintance and yet, for my part, I feel less wicked in your company. Onward then, unvirtuous ranger. Let's find the spoor of your goddess, if it will appease your hungry soul. We can hunt for breakfast along the way. My own hunger is altogether more gustatory.\"\n\nThe ranger extended his search of the area. Soon he recovered the Hunter's trail. Jatha gave in to the silence. His tall ears stayed alert to the sounds of the forest. Shavade would come for them, of course, and they had to be prepared. Fairfax's devotion would not stop her from killing them both like an assassin. Jatha would have it otherwise, even if the Hunter had to die herself. He dreaded the possibility, given his friend's infatuation, but the old ways of Avenosh were still entrenched inside him. He had lost his resolve to forget them. Years ago he had abandoned his home to avoid the conflicts in Ishpur, but if they followed him here, a continent away, he would meet them as a Firstborn Mystic. The pride of the caste had to be defended. No other allegiances stood above that.\n\nHe stifled a frown as he glanced at his companion, who nosed through the forest like a hound on a scent. Then he fetched a small bottle from his sack, uncorked it and drank a tongueful of liquor. It burned his throat pleasandy. After another sip he pocketed the bottle and chased after Fairfax through the underbrush. As usual they would pursue this matter a single footstep at a time. That was, Jatha appreciated, one of the unique appeals of traveling through the wilderness.\n\nThe levitant engine chirred as the carriole soared above the trees. Raveka crouched in the saddle, squinting against the bellicose wind. The sun had risen high enough to pale the sea in the south, beyond a ledge of jagged cliffs. The ocean's horizon was dotted with flecks of white. They were the sails of tall ships, dozens of them, speeding westward to the ports of Britain. The fleet that would invade Logosia had already begun to muster.\n\nBelow her the coast road curved inward. She veered the carriole northward over a vista of rustling treetops. She did not want to be seen by the ranks of soldiers who filled the road. The troops were heading toward the capital from as far back as Cove itself. She had counted thousands of them, equipped as infantrymen and marching imprecisely. They were not professional soldiers like rangers or knights. Rather they were volunteers, armed civilians, seeking glory and adventure in the war against Blackthorn. Each of them had left his home and family to join the army. They did not have the luxury to train together. That meant the fleet must be departing soon, because no general would leave volunteers idle for long.\n\nRaveka ground her teeth. This deployment was impossible. The invasion force could not be ready so quickly. By taking Montenegro to Logosia, she had missed some critical factor in the equation. As the carriole sailed over the forest she began to rework the formulae of her mission. Though she possessed little information, her new estimates did not yield an optimistic chance for stopping the fleet's departure. And low odds, of course, demanded greater risks. She hoped she would not be forced into desperate tactics. Gabriel had warned her against sabotage and she did not like the thought of placating his wrath again. It was the only time she ever thought her love for him might falter.\n\n\"Aria, my darling, look at the present I made for you. It's a lovely picture, don't you think?\" Lord Gideon spoke with pride as he wrapped a powerful arm around Raveka. The pair stood on a rooftop balcony amid a landscape of chimneys and slate tiles. They gazed at the breadth of Britannia Bay, just beyond the city. A fiery sunset spattered orange across the waters and painted purple the sails of a large, resplendent armada. The docks were clogged with countless tall ships, a bramble of spars and masts and riggings. Many more were already under sail, gliding toward the mouth of the harbor. Most were escort and provisioning ships, heavy with weapons and supplies. Their holds were jammed with barrels and crates, forges and smithing equipment, the timbers and planks that would become siege engines, great stacks of cloth from which to fashion acres of tents; the endless transportable components of New Britannia's centuried military society. So many ships filled the bay that their decks became a floating island, a gigantic wooden mosaic that obscured as much seawater as it revealed. Masts stood high like a forest of winter trees. Birds wheeled overhead with raucous excitement.\n\nRaveka had also observed countless troop carriers off the beaches east of the city, loading their plentiful human cargo as well as streams of horses and livestock. She had known the order of magnitude of the New Britannian forces, but she was unprepared for the emotional impact of the spectacle itself. Lady Aria should have been awestruck by the glorious sight. All Sister Raveka could see, however, was the horror of invasion and the devastation that this primitive horde might bring to Logosia. Her homeland was already scorched by the war with Garron. This was a blow it could little withstand.\n\nHer gut churned despite all attempts to calm herself. The armada was already under way. Her mission had failed before it began.\n\nHe laughed. \"No. We'll have to get the troops there the old-fashioned way. The fleet is a marvelous sight, though, wouldn't you agree?\"\n\nShe leaned her head against his muscular shoulder. \"But it's a terrible gift for me, Gideon.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\"\n\n\"Because it means you'll be leaving soon. I had hoped to spend some time with you.\"\n\nHe squeezed her closer. \"Oh, my dear lady, but we shall. The moments will be few but exquisite. I promise you.\" \"How soon until you go?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow. But tonight belongs to us.\"\n\nShe heaved a doleful sigh. It was not altogether insincere. \"Were you able to handle the business matters I requested?\" \"Exactly as your letter asked. The Montenegro estate is now legally yours. I found a buyer for the silver mine and sent the payment to the individual you specified. However, my lady, forgive me if I say that I heartily disapprove of sending gold to criminals, and especially in such a tremendous sum! I don't care if Anzo helped the navy at the Battle of Buccaneer's Den. He is a plague on Sosaria second only to Blackthorn himself. I would rather have diverted the armada for a week and leveled his wicked pirate kingdom! I am horrified to think that Sir Gabriel had so much traffic with him.\" \"I do not care to investigate my cousin's past affairs. I do, however, intend to settle the debts of his estate. Honor demands it, even if criminals are involved. Money is worthless if one sacrifices Virtue to keep it. Do you not agree?\" The nobleman smiled with warm condescension. \"You're a rare flower, Aria. Virtue must be wonderfully simple in Coventine. While you're in this city, though, you had best allow me to keep an eye on your affairs. Britain may be the City of Compassion, but not everyone here defines the term correctly.\"\n\n\"And what shall I do when you're not here?\"\n\n\"I'll see that you're well attended. Worry not.\"\n\n\"But I am worried, about everything. What will happen when the soldiers leave? The troll king is raiding every settlement within a day of the Serpentspine Mountains, including Coventine. They've chased the ore tribes south. The Montenegro lands are filthy with them. Now half the men of New Britannia are going to sail away and I'm very afraid, Gideon. I have terrible doubts about this invasion.\"\n\n\"I know you do, but we have taken precautions. We would be fools to leave our home unguarded, don't you think? Enough soldiers will remain here to keep everyone safe.\"\n\n\"Twenty companies of rangers,\" said a man behind them on the roof. They turned to see General Nathaniel at the top of the stairs. Like Raveka and Gideon he wore the clothes of a wealthy courtier, though his haughty bearing revealed him as an elder knight. His long braids and trim beard had eluded the grey of age. His face lit with an unreadable smile. \"Half a garrison shall remain in each major city, as well as a master sorcerer. The trolls and ores won't dare to come near. And trust me, my lady, the invasion will do fine without the extra troops. When we muster with the Juka Clans, Blackthorn's armies will fall like wheat to a scythe.\"\n\nRaveka startled at the arrival of the officer. She concealed her surprise with a curtsey. \"General, forgive me. I did not mean to disparage your plans.\" Then she nesded into Gideon's arms. His strength lent her a feeling of safety in the presence of a member of the Pact of Four.\n\nGeneral Nathaniel chuckled and offered a bow. \"No, forgive me, your ladyship. I have rudely interrupted your conversation. Lord Gideon, I've just come to tell you that the Samlethe is ready for loading. I'm having my trunks carried on board in a few minutes, if you would like to do the same.\"\n\n\"Thank you, General, I'll see to it at once. I'm sorry, Aria, but I'll have to meet you at dinner. I must be present for this. Protocol, you see. We're moving confidential papers on board the flagship. One cannot be too wary of spies.\"\n\nShe nodded and glanced at Nathaniel. The officer looked away from her quickly. She read apprehension behind his smile, though she was not sure what it meant. \"Why, Gideon,\" she said with a manufactured giggle, \"you make it sound as if there are enemies everywhere.\"\n\n\"One can never be too careful,\" the nobleman repeated, tapping the side of his nose. \"You must always remember that, my darling. Battles are limited to batdefields, but war knows no bounds at all.\"\n\nThey exchanged farewells and the two warriors departed. Raveka retired to the guest wing of Lord Gideon's town-house, where she occupied a richly appointed suite. A young handmaiden arrived to dress her for dinner. To Raveka's surprise, Gideon had commissioned her an evening gown. It cradled her body lavishly and brought a genuine smile to her face.\n\nWhen she was ready for dinner, she sent the handmaiden away and sat in front of the ornate vanity. Staring back from the mirror was the beautiful Lady Aria, her hair as lush as sable, her skin as radiant as pearl, her gown an exquisite labyrinth of satin and silk and jewels. Aria was the perfect future, the goal for which Raveka had always yearned. And at this moment she was more than that. Aria was a weapon to strike at the enemies of Logosia. One day she would be Montenegro's wife, but never would she forget her homeland or allow it to be plundered. Gabriel would have to forgive her that conviction.\n\nFrom her bags she retrieved the half-empty bottle of brandy that had served her against Jatha and Fairfax. She uncorked it, opened a tiny metal box and tapped a pinch of powder into the liquor. It dissolved quickly. Then she held the bottle for a moment to subdue a feeling of dread. A quiet litany of numbers helped.\n\nAfter dinner she walked with Lord Gideon under the bright double moons. The nobleman's walled garden became a mystery in the silver light, its pools wavering and its flowers bleaching white. Insects started their nighdy chorus, a sound that was pleasant to her. Logosia had no such music. She enjoyed its soothing, exotic drone as the sea whispered in the distance.\n\nLord Gideon was explaining the extravagance of Britain's social season. Though he was a veteran of the battlefield, the nobleman had been raised a creature of wealthy Britannian society, a world of formal courtships and warrior chivalry. His notions of romance were stubbornly innocent. Raveka could see that he was thrilled in her company. His affection was deep and pure. The realization warmed her.\n\nIt also moved her into action. At an opportune moment she squeezed his arm and murmured, \"Gideon, stay in Britain for the season. Please don't leave me alone.\"\n\n\"I'll return before spring. I promise.\"\n\nShe smiled sadly. \"You can't abandon me.\"\n\n\"I'm a knight commander, if you please! My place is with the army. You're welcome to stay here in my house until I get back.\"\n\n\"I have a better idea. If you won't stay, then take me with you.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Would that it were possible, my darling.\"\n\n\"Why isn't it possible? Move me onto the Samlethe. I won't be a nuisance. Who will question the lord of the House of the Lion?\"\n\n\"General Nathaniel, for one. He commands the invasion. I am only going in my capacity as head of the Silver Serpents. I have agreed to submit to Nathaniel's judgment in all but the most strategic matters.\"\n\n\"Then ask him if I may come along.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"There's no need to ask. He will not allow it.\"\n\nShe murmured, \"I confess, I don't like General Nathaniel.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. That is your cousin talking.\"\n\n\"You don't think Gabriel was right? That Nathaniel wants your position as Lord of the House?\"\n\nHe grunted. \"That hardly makes him a villain.\"\n\n\"But there's more to it. He frightens me, Gideon. I don't like the way he looks at me. It's... unseemly.\"\n\nHe patted her hand. \"Surely you're imagining that! Nathaniel is happily married.\"\n\n\"As if that makes him ogle a lady less instead of more.\" She leaned very dose and wrapped both her arms around his elbow. \"Never mind. Of course you know him better than I do. I'm just being a fool.\"\n\nGideon made no answer. It was the response Raveka had wanted. After a calculated pause, she halted and pressed against his body. \"Stop. Please wait.\" She turned her face away and conjured a blush.\n\n\"My darling, what is it?\"\n\nShe bent her knees slightly so that she gazed up at him, then dampened her large, brown eyes. \"Gideon, I don't know what else to do, so I'm going to beg you. Please, take me with you to Logosia. Please. If you don't I'm afraid I might do something rash.\"\n\n\"Aria! What do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"I mean this.\" She raised onto her toes and mashed her lips against his.\n\nThe nobleman flustered. For a long moment he fell into the kiss, then abruptly pulled back. \"By the shrines, what are you doing?\"\n\n\"I'm using the time we have left. I can't take this, dammit! We've only known each other a short while and my heart is galloping faster than a racehorse. And now you're going to leave me alone\u2014\"\n\nHe held her shoulders gently. \"So soon after your cousin's death. I know. But you must be strong. I'll come back to you. There's no need to rush this.\"\n\nShe blinked a tear from her lashes. \"But there is a need. Because if you die in Logosia I'll always . . Her lips quivered. \"Gideon, I'll always regret...\"\n\nThe lord took her into his arms. She felt him tremble. \"Aria, please.\"\n\n\"No. Let me say it.\" She pushed away from him. \"Let me say it or let me go.\"\n\nHe heaved a deep sigh. With a large hand he cupped her cheek. She gazed into his eyes and whispered, \"I'm in love with you, Gideon, and I want to make\u2014\" and he pulled her mouth to his own, as if he did not want to hear her speak the words. But the passion of his kisses informed Raveka that she had succeeded. He was an honorable lord and a chivalrous knight, but underneath he was a man of flesh and blood. And tonight he was her prisoner. By morning, she knew, she would have everything she wanted.\n\nNighttime swelled in the thick of the forest under a humid blanket of clouds. In the crook of a tangled willow root, Jatha rested in dark silence. His tall ears flicked at a persistent gnat. His eyes half-glowed in a moonbeam. He watched as a black silhouette crept toward him, hardly brushing a twig or leaf as it passed through deep layers of undergrowth.\n\n\"Let's go,\" whispered Fairfax as he knelt before his companion. \"She's on the move again. She can't be more than a quarter mile ahead.\"\n\nThe Meer wizard inhaled a bouquet of earthy scents. He held his breath for a moment, then answered, \"No.\"\n\nThe ranger paused while slinging his bow across his back. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Shavade. She's not behaving.\"\n\n\"I don't follow you.\"\n\n\"She's still running. It doesn't make sense. She should have turned to fight by now.\"\n\n\"Fight both of us? Give her some credit. Just because she's beautiful doesn't mean she's an imbecile, as appealing a combination as that might be.\"\n\nJatha sat up and flattened his ears. \"Think about it. She knows by now that you won't lose her trail. The longer she runs, the more fatigued she'll get. She can't elude us forever. But she's a skilled enough warrior to lay an ambush for us. She could attack while one of us is asleep and have a reasonable chance of bagging both our heads in time for breakfast. That is what a Hunter is trained to do.\"\n\nFairfax scratched his beard. \"You sound as if you're disappointed to keep your neck intact.\"\n\n\"I wonder what other plans she might have for it.\" He gazed into the twilight that hung between the trees. \"She's not fleeing from us, my heart-whipped brother. She's leading us somewhere. We're coursing like foxes right into her trap.\"\n\nThe ranger glanced in the direction of their quarry. \"A trap out here? I have my doubts. These woods are sick with ores and trolls, who can hardly be her allies.\"\n\n\"True, but she is allied with the Pact of Four. Their resources stretch farther than the stink of the troll king. Listen, my friend, I say we should break off this pursuit. We're only two or three days north of the Black Goat Inn. I say if we must collide with Shavade and her packmates, let's do it on the battleground of our choosing.\"\n\n\"You're mad as a Jukan jester! If I lose her scent now we'll never find her again.\"\n\n\"We don't have to find her. We have her Stinger and the black crystal. She will follow us. That's my point.\"\n\n\"You can't be sure.\"\n\n\"I am completely sure. Hunters have a deep bond with their Living Weapons. I've dealt with them on many occasions.\"\n\n\"But never with one like my goddess!\" The ranger sucked a deep breath to compose himself. \"All right. I confess, you offer an intriguing argument. She may well be luring us into a camp of assassins or a pit of asps or a coop of murderous chickens for all we know. That is a perfecdy valid reason to turn away. However, I submit that I have a far more valid reason to stay on her track.\"\n\n\"I think I can guess what you're about to say.\"\n\n\"Precisely. My heart tells me I must. It charges after her like a sprinting hound and it's everything I can do to keep pace.\"\n\n\"Your heart! It isn't a charging hound, Fairfax, it's a potbellied mule dragging us behind it with plodding steps. You should lay a stout lash to that heart of yours and make it listen to reason.\"\n\n\"Reason! When has reason ever been a star that we followed? Something has come over you, my woolly brother, and it's clouding your baser judgment. Love and lust and hunger and whim, those are the blades we use to cut our path. Isn't that what we've always vowed?\"\n\nJatha rubbed at his eyes. \"Life is more tangled than that, though I don't expect your pastry of a brain to see it.\"\n\nFairfax stood and spread out his arms. \"I reject your tangles and the cowardice they spawn! And I am going to pursue my goddess Shavade tonight. In response to your redolent pile of doubt I have but this to offer:\n\n\u2003\"She makes my heart swell\n\n\u2003A hundred miles in girth!\n\n\u2003She impregnates my soul;\n\n\u2003To Love I shall give birth!\n\n\u2003\"She's a star overhead;\n\n\u2003She lights up my path!\n\n\u2003The kingdom of my love for her\n\n\u2003No borders it hath!\"\n\nThe echoes of his song chased night birds from the branches. The Meer grimaced and muttered, \"A star doesn't light up anything. It's too small.\"\n\nFairfax smirked. \"Granted.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't give birth to love or anything else. You're male, or so your prolific sweat leads me to conjecture.\"\n\n\"It's a metaphor,\" said the ranger.\n\n\"A romantic poem should never involve the word 'girth.'\"\n\nFairfax kicked the wizard's leg. \"Get up, you sour old stain. The mule is plodding out again.\"\n\nJatha rose sluggishly enough to retain his dignity. But as he trudged behind his lively companion, a weight settled on his brow. They might well continue in the blithe manner that had guided them for so many years, but the stakes were as high now as Jatha had ever seen them. The time would soon come when they must follow a more serious path. He did not know if Fairfax could accept that fact, and worse, he was unsure what to do if the human refused to see reason. Jatha knew where his own loyalties must fall. He could only hope that Fairfax would understand, because when action was required he would not hesitate to strike at Shavade or anyone eke.\n\nDawn blazed over the docks of Britain, hurling amber light through the riggings of the countless tall ships. The boardwalk was a swirl of activity, rattling with thousands of footsteps and the creak of wooden cranes heavy with cargo. In the center of the hubbub was a carriage in a wide clearing. Knights in silver armor held back the bustling crowd as Lord Gideon and General Nathaniel prepared to embark for Logosia. Standing before them were Lady Annabel, who was the general's elegant wife, and Lady Aria of Coventine. The couples exchanged farewelk with brave faces and discreet embraces. As the two commanders turned to leave, Raveka stopped them with a shout. \"My lords! I nearly forgot my gift to you both.\" From her pocket she produced the bottle of brandy, which she presented to Lord Gideon. \"It's a splendid label from the cellar I recently inherited.\"\n\nGideon beamed her a smile. \"We shall drink to your ladyships' health this very evening, on board the Samlethe.\"\n\nRaveka waved her hand. \"No. There isn't much left in the bottle, as you can see. You must save that for the day you land on the shores of Logosia. Toast us, brave warriors, and Lady Annabel and I shall toast you from here, and the treacherous oceans will not suffice to keep our spirits apart. Promise me!\"\n\nThe lord nodded happily. \"By my Honor and Valor, it shall be done.\"\n\nGeneral Nathaniel laughed. \"Do keep an eye on this tall damsel, Annabel. She's got a poet's imagination and I daresay, a child's mischief.\" He twinkled a glance at Raveka, which seemed several heartbeats too long. She sensed a vague threat in it.\n\nThen the men left for their proud warship and Raveka linked arms with Lady Annabel, who escorted her back to their carriage. Battling the sadness of the moment, the middle-aged gentlewoman remarked, \"You've positively entranced our poor Lord Gideon. I've never seen him so giddy.\"\n\nRaveka grinned. \"I nearly convinced him to take me along. But he was prepared to duel your husband for permission, so I decided not to press him too hard.\"\n\nAnnabel giggled. \"Nathaniel's right. You are a devil. I look forward to introducing you in my circles, depleted though they shall be with the knights going away. Will you be staying at Lord Gideon's house for the season?\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Just for a short while. I must leave for Cove soon. I have an inheritance to oversee and it's crawling with ores just now. Perhaps I can convince a company of rangers to help me chase them off.\"\n\n\"Lady Aria! By the lost shrines, you should stay here in the city. It isn't safe in the forests.\"\n\nRaveka glanced out at the Samlethe, looming like a monster over the smaller ships in the harbor. \"There's nothing to be afraid of here, compared to the place they're going. Blackthorn has weapons more deadly than a thousand ores.\"\n\nThe remark stilled the conversation, which suited the Mathematician's needs. She had many calculations to perform. Much remained for her to accomplish and little time in which to do so.\n\nThe morning simmered into afternoon. The spectacle of the departing fleet captured the attention of the city, but Raveka excused herself to Lord Gideon's townhouse under the pretext of preparing for the trip back to Cove. In reality she had other arrangements to make. When she was ready to undertake the next phase of her plan, she indulged in a few minutes to rest in her suite and gather her strength. Then she took out a paper and quill and wrote a letter of farewell to Lady Annabel. Her departure would seem abrupt, but she had no choice in the matter.\n\nShe glanced into the vanity mirror when the chamber door opened. A young handmaiden entered with a tray and a teapot. \"Put it there,\" mumbled Raveka, motioning to a table beside the bed. The servant complied, then began to straighten the sheets. When the girl lifted a heavy bag from atop a pillow, Raveka stood and collected the sack. Its contents were compromising. She chuckled and said, \"There's no need. The bed is exquisite already, don't you think?\"\n\n\"It won't take but a moment, your ladyship.\"\n\n\"It's all right. You can go.\" She raised the cup of tea as the handmaiden turned away. The steam had a sharp, subtle odor. Raveka squinted, then pretended to take a sip. \"Wait,\" she called out when the servant opened the door. \"I'm so sorry, but will you turn down the sheets for me, after all? I suddenly feel a bit woozy.\"\n\n\"Of course, your ladyship.\" The girl moved back to the bed. Raveka set down the teacup, then untied a long ribbon from her sleek, black hair. She stepped beside the handmaiden. When the girl leaned across the bed Raveka slipped the ribbon over her neck and looped it around the bedpost. The servant let out a squeal. Raveka yanked the ribbon violently, pulling the girl off her feet and lashing her neck to the post.\n\nThe Mathematician held her prisoner secure. In a cold tone she demanded, \"Who is your master? To whom do you report?\"\n\nThe servant choked, \"Ladyship! I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"You put sedative in my tea. I would be within my rights to strangle you for that. But you're young and probably terrified right now, so I'll let you go if you tell me who you work for.\" She jerked on the ribbon for punctuation. \"Allow me to help you. It's General Nathaniel.\"\n\nThe girl's face paled with surprise. Raveka nodded. \"There, that wasn't so difficult. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Faith, your ladyship.\"\n\n\"Faith, why did the general send you to spy on me?\"\n\n\"I don't know!\"\n\n\"You're lying. He suspects that I know about his secret affairs, correct? That my cousin Gabriel told me everything before he died. And you're here to look for a diary or letters or some other record that might reveal what I know. Do I have that right?\"\n\nThe girl rasped, \"Yes, ladyship! Please, I can't breathe!\"\n\nShe let go of the ribbon. The handmaiden fell onto the edge of the bed and rubbed her marked throat. Raveka sighed. \"Faith, it's time you left Lord Gideon's service. We don't need spies in the household.\"\n\nThe young woman nodded with a fearful expression. \"Yes, ladyship. I'm sorry.\" She took one quick step and stumbled. Something metallic jangled on the ground. She had tripped on Raveka's heavy bag, spilling its contents onto the floor. A ring of small keys lay glinting in the afternoon light. They were duplicates of the keys to the lockboxes that Lord Gideon had loaded onto the Samlethe. Raveka had stolen them last night, when Gideon was asleep.\n\nFaith's mouth gaped open. She recognized what she was seeing. \"Ladyship, I don't understand!\"\n\nThe Mathematician sighed. \"That is the saddest part of all.\" She whisked the bolt thrower from her pocket and fired it at the girl, who doubled over when the missile thumped inside her breast. Raveka lunged forward and guided Faith onto the bed sheets, then reached down to select an object from the overturned bag. It was a tiny metal box. She opened the lid to reveal the same powder she had sprinkled into Lord Gideon's bottle of brandy.\n\nThe handmaiden lay quivering on her back, her bloody mouth agape. Raveka touched the box to the girl's lip and stroked her fine, brown hair. \"I'm sorry, Faith. Someday this nightmare will be over. I promise you.\"\n\nRaveka did not look as she tapped a pinch of poison into the girl's mouth. The desiccation was never pleasant to watch. When it was finished, she wrapped the shrunken body in the red-stained sheet and plotted the safest course to the sewers. Scavengers would dispose of the evidence in less than an hour. Raveka could arrange an excuse for the girl's disappearance later. At the moment certain appointments awaited her that she could not afford to miss.\n\nBy now the ink had dried on the letter to Lady Annabel. Raveka folded and sealed it, then laid it on the pillow for a servant to find. She stood before the mirror again. Lady Aria gazed back, beautiful and elegant. Raveka sighed, \"We shall meet again soon, my dearest,\" and pulled a long knife from her bag. She lifted a fistful of sable hair and began to slice it off. Tears welled in her eyes and blinked from her long, dark lashes.\n\n\"Duck down!\" cried Fairfax as he leapt onto a tree limb. Jatha complied, kneeling behind a thicket of vines. In the mellow afternoon light the ranger scrambled for a high perch and quietly pulled his bow to full draw. After a heartbeat he loosed the arrow, which clipped through several curtains of leaves. Beyond a copse of trees something monstrous roared in pain. A second later the air burst with smoke and Fairfax's tree limb exploded into flames. The human dove away and tumbled across the ground, rising with another arrow nocked. He fired it and two others before a second fireball blazed past him. Then he scrambled into hiding and knelt at Jatha's side.\n\n\"It's a gazer,\" he panted, \"though it looks different than I'm used to. It saw me but I don't think it knows you're here.\"\n\nThe Meer grumbled, \"It knows.\"\n\n\"What are you not telling me?\"\n\n\"It's bigger than a regular gazer, right? And just has the one eye.\"\n\nFairfax squinted. \"It's one of those battle gazers from Avenosh?\"\n\n\"Correct. An oculus. I told you Shavade has friends out here. Someone has sent their hound to look for us.\" He flexed his hands, popping the knuckles. \"Let's bring it down.\"\n\n\"Light me,\" said the ranger, drawing another arrow. Jatha nurtured a spark in his palm, which he placed on the steel arrow tip. Fairfax rose and fired the missile, which spat embers as it shot through the woods and impaled a dark shape in the distance. The unearthly roar shook the trees again. Both men sprang from hiding and charged through the underbrush.\n\nJatha tracked the creature as it rose into the air. The oculus flew by means of a natural enchantment, maneuvering its bulbous thorax among the high branches of the forest canopy. It was a large beast, the weight of several men, with many spiderlike limbs that clambered through the dark tree-tops. Jatha could not see its single, giant eye. Neither did he want to. Instead he cracked open a spell that reached into the earth below him, seized upon a clump of heavy stones and tore them violently out of the soil. The stones streaked at the oculus, smashing through its cover of leaves and branches and pounding the monster with brutal force. A gold light flared around it. Smoke filled the air. Jatha leapt aside as the oculus unleashed another ball of flame that strewed fire across the brushy terrain.\n\nHe heard the thump of Fairfax's bow, several times in rapid sequence. The monster howled. Then the treetops shook and many branches snapped loose, toppling to the ground. When Jatha scanned the foliage he saw a hole through which the creature had escaped into the westering sky. The two men crouched in silence, convincing themselves that the oculus was gone.\n\n\"Damn,\" grumbled the wizard.\n\n\"Shh.\"\n\n\"Do you hear something?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nJatha paused for a few seconds longer, then stood. \"It's not coming back. And Shavade isn't here either, you mooncalf. If she was going to attack she would have done it while we were engaged.\"\n\nFairfax sighed. \"Hope never dies.\"\n\n\"Hope is closer to death now than it was five minutes ago.\n\nThe ranger slipped the bow across his shoulders as he rose. \"Go ahead, tell me the bad news that's wriggling on your tongue.\"\n\n\"An oculus is not just another Living Weapon. It's an aristocrat's war beast. Only high-ranking members of the Mystic caste keep them. Firstborn males of the Matriarch lines. As wizards they're second only to the Matriarchs themselves.\"\n\n\"I take it Chamberlain Kavah is one of these Firstborns?\"\n\nJatha grimaced. \"So he is. But Thulann said that he was a member of the ambassador's entourage in Logos. I cannot imagine he would be this far afield, unless the trip was extremely important.\"\n\nFairfax stomped out a handful of fires in the underbrush. \"And so we've got a very powerful enemy out there, in pursuit of some business of grave importance. I pray you won't try to convince me that we should turn back because of it. The way my blood is pumping right now, I confess the lure of my Huntress feels stronger than ever.\"\n\nThe Meer sorcerer shook his head. \"You'll be pleased to learn I have changed my mind. I agree that we should continue to track Shavade. She's probably luring us into a trap to get rid of us, so she can help Kavah with whatever he has come here to do. Well, my furless friend, I intend to stop him from doing whatever he is up to. It can't be wholesome. And Shavade is the only means we have to find him. I'll brave her traps for a chance to reach Kavah.\"\n\nFairfax chuckled. \"So why the dour face? You should be pleased. We have followed my heart, as our hedonistic principles instruct us, and we find ourselves on the proper course to do good. It is proof that selfishness and altruism need not be mutually exclusive.\"\n\n\"Altruism is merely a flavor of selfishness. Every nursemaid knows that. But this isn't a game anymore, Fairfax, and you'd best slither your mind around that fact. Kavah is no ore to be toyed with or pretty warrior to lech. He's the force behind the Pact of Four and one of the deadliest sorcerers in Sosaria. When we find him, he won't be unprepared. This is grave business indeed.\"\n\nThe ranger coughed. \"I think that point has been made prodigiously clear.\" He batted the ashy smoke that drifted through the trees. \"Let's move on, then, in case Kavah sends more hounds after us. A still fox is a doomed fox. I'd like to meet Shavade with a smile on my face and not a rictus grin.\"\n\nThey started off into the deeps of the forest, with Fairfax in the lead. The human scrutinized the terrain for clues of Shavade's recent passing. Though Jatha had little skill for it, the Meer found himself doing likewise. He felt as eager as his companion now to find the fugitive Huntress. It was a backward sort of synchrony, which he accepted for its own sake.\n\n[ Interlude ]\n\nSartorius, you are failing in your duties and I find myself somewhat distressed by it.\"\n\n\"You must cope with the facts in whatever way you see fit, Kavah.\"\n\n\"I told you, the plot is simple. The Juka Clans invade Logosia. New Britannia comes to their aid. Logos falls and Blackthorn is removed from power. It is a simple sequence of events.\"\n\n\"I am extraordinarily busy at this moment, Chamberlain. Please state your complaint succinctly.\"\n\n\"I have interrupted my own affairs, as well, to address this matter. Bahrok claims that your troops are doing considerable damage to his armies in the east of Logosia. He says that the battle plans you give him are no longer reliable. This is not in accord with our design.\"\n\n\"It is his own incompetence that returns to vex him. Ever since he and General Nathaniel revealed our pact to outsiders, I have been struggling to maintain secure lines of intelligence. There are forces in Logos that conspire against me.\"\n\n\"You assured us that the defeat of the Needle and the destruction of Akar would eliminate Lector Braun as a threat.\"\n\n\"Braun is no longer a factor. However, Lector Gaff of the Mathematicians controls an elite force of his personal training. I have not yet pinpointed its members. And he owns great influence in the command structure of the army. He is circumventing my designated tactics so that Bahrok cannot take advantage of the intelligence I give him. Without my help, you understand, Bahrok is just another well-armed barbarian.\"\n\n\"I see. Then eliminate Lector Gaff from the equation.\"\n\n\"If it were that easy, Gaff would be dead. But he is an order of magnitude more formidable than Braun.\"\n\n\"I am not interested in the details, Sartorius. Warlord Bahrok must proceed with the invasion unhindered.\"\n\n\"Chamberlain, I am enacting my response to the situation.\"\n\n\"Splendid. Then there is one more action you must perform.\"\n\n\"Elaborate.\"\n\n\"You must take the Ishpurian ambassador as your prisoner.\"\n\n\"You're a madman, Kavah.\"\n\n\"A platoon of Janissars should be sufficient to dispatch her guards. Bring along a juggernaut if it makes you feel more secure.\"\n\n\"Dame Adhayah is a Matriarch. Is she not one of the foremost sorceresses in the world? I have seen with my own eyes what destruction an archmage can conjure.\"\n\n\"Indeed she is spectacularly powerful. She is also a pacifist. She shall not resist you. I give you my assurance as a member of her entourage for ten very long years. More importantly, as your prisoner she shall not be able to interfere when Bahrok and Nathaniel break down the gates of Logos.\"\n\n\"That would be reassuring, except that her capture would be an act of war against your government.\"\n\n\"Leave that to me. Avenosh will not respond.\"\n\n\"You demand a great deal of trust.\"\n\n\"Just as I have put my trust in you, Lector. We are civilized men in an age of savagery. Trust is the currency in which we trade.\"\n\n\"Keep your rhetoric, Chamberlain. I shall do as you instruct. If this action visits harm upon Logos, you know that I shall hold you bodily responsible for it.\"\n\n\"As you say, Lector Sartorius. As you say.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Kumar's Throne", + "text": "And when Sir Lazaro felled the last dragon in the hellish caverns of Covetous, he stood bloody and ragged before a great wooden shrine. Inside rested an artifact sought by every warrior to brave that pit since the days of ancient heroes. It was the Talon of Covetous, the Sword of the Dragon-slayer, the culmination of the knight's lifelong quest. Though his wounds scarcely allowed him to lift it, he carried the weapon to the surface and held it aloft before his army. A great cheer erupted to honor the triumphant knight. Never once had danger turned him aside. On that day the Virtue of Valor presented Sir Lazaro with his reward.\n\nMontenegro unleashed a howl of joy as he charged into the Jukan horde. The savage clansmen barraged him with furious blows, but his static-charged kite shield lashed back with an electric bite. The spring-mounted plates of his kinetic armor repelled the swords and spears that slipped past his shield. And the whirling terror of his chain and mornings tar drove back the crowded Jukan warriors. Flames roared from the ball of his weapon, fueled by a furnace inside the Technocrat device. His assault carved a smoking path through the Garronite formation, littering the desert sunrise with twisted, sizzling corpses.\n\nIn the dry wastes of eastern Logosia, the front ranks of Khyber's Brigade pounded through the defenses of the Jukan military encampment. Fortifications lay destroyed by advance Logosian engineers. Showers of arrows peppered the rocky ground. Two hundred Technocrat soldiers fought beside Montenegro in crisp, responsive formations, their brutal advance hastened by war machines that vomited gouts of lightning and flame. Small, mobile smoke cauldrons flooded the air with a greasy haze. A bank of drums marked the rhythm of the attack.\n\nMontenegro admired Brigadier Khyber's offensive strategy. His elite troops had spent the night hours in a bloodless infiltration of the terrain, then ambushed their prey in the pale languor of dawn. The crafty approach required half the men of an ordinary frontal assault. Consequently the brigade was extremely mobile, swooping in and out of its missions before the enemy had time to mount a defense. It was as efficient a fighting force as Montenegro had ever seen.\n\nHe lamented that he had never met Khyber on the battlefield. He would have gladly pitted his knights against these shock troops. The conflict would have been legendary.\n\nInstead he battled in the midst of the brigade, leading his own unit against the armies of Clan Varang. Presently his men breached the perimeter and hurried their war engines inside the encampment. Montenegro climbed the ladder of a small, wheeled tower and surveyed the smoky conflict.\n\nKhyber's Brigade had swamped the modest encampment of a hundred warriors, one of whom was among Warlord Bahrok's most trusted generals. Farther to the north, across a stretch of cracked mud flats, lay a much larger force of Jukan clansmen. He could see plumes of dust rising from the ridgeback-mounted cavalry who rushed to the aid of their war master. But the knight disregarded them. The smoke cauldrons would slow their charge. This action would be finished before the Varang clansmen arrived in numbers. From the south approached a single Technocrat airship, traveling low over the desert floor, to spirit away the bulk of the brigade. The rear guard would escape using levitant-fueled kite skids. Riding his clockwork horse, Montenegro would be among the last to leave. The Technocrat troops had given him the nickname \"Cavalier\" and regarded him as something of a batde-hungry rogue. He felt a duty to meet their expectations. He had become an icon to them, a dark, exotic fighter from another world. He swore they fought harder in his presence.\n\n\"Cavalier! It's done!\" The warrior who had called out, a giant of a Juka, rushed beside the small tower on which the knight was standing. The huge officer sported exquisite kinetic armor and hefted a spring-plated war maul. The other soldiers called him \"Shirron\" and Montenegro agreed that it was an apt name, for in size and shape Master Enosh was the mirror image of Shirron Turlogan of Garron. His steadfast honor likewise recalled the proud warriors of Jukaran. His face was a lightningstorm of scars from a recent battle that he refused to discuss, though the loss of it had seemingly inspired him to join Khyber's Brigade. He spoke in a deep, confident rumble. \"The camp is secure. We've cornered the general on the hill.\"\n\nMontenegro nodded, examining the tangle of troops surrounding the central pavilion. \"Excellent. Make him the usual offer.\"\n\n\"I already did. He chooses to fight rather than surrender.\"\n\n\"They always do. Where's the brigadier?\"\n\n\"Organizing the extraction.\"\n\n\"Then what are you waiting for? Go fight the general. Or aren't you up to the challenge?\"\n\nMaster Enosh chuckled. His noble eyes smiled. \"The men want you to do it.\"\n\n\"Well, I can't. We've got cavalry on the way.\"\n\nThe weapons master thumped his hammer on the ground. \"I'll take over for you. Go cut down that war master. A lot of bets have already been placed.\"\n\nMontenegro laughed and climbed down the ladder. \"Very well, since we haven't time to argue about it. Yours is an immoral people, Shirron, but I can't fault your love of victory.\"\n\nAs he jogged into the ranks of eager Technocrat soldiers, the knight glanced at the feeble sunrise that tinged the smoky haze. The war drums crashed out the meter of the dawn. Assault engines clanked into position, ready to help the brigadesmen aboard the approaching airship. Montenegro inhaled the sharp whiff of the battle and smiled to himself. Forgive my unseemly company, Grandfather, but I fight where the Virtues have led me. You had the luxury of dragons for an enemy. My curse is to battle men. In the end, perhaps I may be arrogant enough to dream that my Valor outshines even yours. He did not believe it, of course, but the thought gave him a chuckle. He had found it prudent to keep his spirits high. The arid wastes of Logosia provided a sullen environment and he did what he must to survive.\n\nThe midnight ocean nuzzled the shore with gentle, foamy breakers. The sharp rocks of the coastline glistened like wet jewels. Whitecaps danced over the surface of the water, reaching out several hundred yards to surround a tall ship at anchor. Many rowboats bobbed their way closer to Logosian soil. Lanterns glowed sharp amber in the sheeting moonlight.\n\nFrom dry land Montenegro watched the New Britannian buccaneers pull their dinghies onto the rocky shore. The men slogged through glowing spume wearing loose, rugged clothes and high boots. The tallest of them sported a long coat as well, in the fashion of a naval officer. His wide-brimmed hat fluttered in the breeze, its plumage rippling like fire. From his rowboat he hoisted a short, burly animal. The creature was a ball of white fur that capered through the tide pools as it followed the man across the pebbled beach. The tall sailor drew his cutlass as he approached Montenegro.\n\nThe knight spread out his arms and said, \"Surely you would not cut down a Technocrat with breeding as impeccable as mine.\"\n\nThe brown-skinned buccaneer cupped a hand over his eyes, as if the light of two moons was blinding. Then he sheathed his blade and began to laugh. \"By Blackthorn's gaskets, I would not believe it if it wasn't standing right in front of me. Sir Gabriel Montenegro, alive and well and dressed in Technocrat armor! And I thought I was insane coming here like this.\"\n\nThe two men shook hands. Montenegro chuckled, \"The whole world has gone insane, my friend, and we're standing at the eye of the hurricane. But I'm glad to see you as well, Bawdewyn.\"\n\n\"Ain't this a spectacle, though? In Britain they're hailing Montenegro the fallen hero. The slayer of Braun's Needle.\n\nMartyrs are good for morale, you know. But what would they say to the sight of you clapped in springs and gears with a clockwork stallion beside you?\" Captain Bawdewyn examined the mechanical horse that stood a few feet away, black and motionless atop a flat boulder. \"Nice. You should keep it out of the sea wind, though. The salt's going to ruin it.\" \"They tell me it'll withstand the elements, but I don't trust much about these absurd machines. This one will never be nimble enough for battle, anyway. It does carry me around with a certain degree of panache, however.\" He glanced down at the buccaneer's animal, which was snuffling the clockwork steed. It was a white bear cub, as hefty as a war hound and sloppy with sea foam. \"I see you have a new companion, as well.\"\n\n\"Her name is Molly. She's a glory, hey? She eats enough to crew her own ship but she's a pretty little brute. A couple of years from now she's going to be an interesting addition to my boarding parties.\"\n\n\"Provided you can teach her to swing on a rope.\" He looked out at the other sailors, who were unloading barrels from the rowboats. \"You brought what I requested?\"\n\n\"I did indeed. Though I almost didn't believe your message was genuine. There's no dearth of Technocrats who would like to catch me in Logosian waters. But this arrangement struck me as a little too bizarre to be a simple trap. Besides, Valor breeds enterprise, hey?\"\n\nMontenegro patted his shoulder. \"I shall not keep you for long.\"\n\n\"Absolutely you won't. My lads shove off in twenty minutes, with or without me. I gave the order myself.\" He waved an arm toward the cargo his men were stacking on the rocks. \"Well, here's your magic swill and curse you for making me go to Anzo for it. I can't imagine what you must have paid for this stuff. Your cousin must be very loyal, selling half her inheritance to finance your secret vendetta.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"She is completely loyal to me.\"\n\n\"Are you sure about that?\"\n\n\"Why do you doubt it?\"\n\n\"Because I know who she is. Lady Aria. She's your Technocrat spy, ain't she? Me and Fairfax and Jatha figured it out after the battle. You know I never trusted that little love affair of yours.\"\n\nThe knight grumbled a sigh. \"I would be dishonest to say you were entirely unjustified. But put your faith in my judgment. Aria fights on the same side we do. I have transformed her into a New Britannian lady, though you are welcome to disbelieve it.\"\n\nCaptain Bawdewyn glanced over the knight in his intricate Technocrat armor. \"Uh-huh. Listen, I don't want to seem unfriendly, but since I came all this way I figure you owe me an explanation. What scheme are you working over here? Why does it look for all the world like you joined the enemy?\"\n\n\"It is an alliance of convenience. I'm taking down Warlord Bahrok using the best resources available. That's why I need the potions in those barrels. If my Logosian cohorts are skilled enough to keep up with me, this war will be over before the Senate gets the fleet under way. New Britannia need not be a pawn of the Pact of Four.\"\n\n\"I admire your initiative, but my friend, you're far too late. The sails are already flying by now.\"\n\n\"What's that? Are you certain?\"\n\n\"Certain as an itchy harlot. Why do you think I need to get back in such a hurry? I'm joining the fleet south of the Den. I'll be leading ten privateer warships myself. Can you believe it? Bawdewyn the Beast, Fleet Commander!\" He nudged the white bear cub with his boot. \"Someday, Molly, they're going to wake up and remember I'm just a pirate. We've got 'em fooled for now, though.\"\n\nMontenegro gritted his teeth. \"Damn Duarte and his obsession for efficiency! He could be a Technocrat himself This is all happening too fast. Do you know how soon the troops are supposed to land here?\"\n\n\"Hard to say. A fleet that big won't move like lightning, but the whole trip can't take more than a month, at the longest.\"\n\n\"Then I have to step up my plans. I appreciate the information.\" He grimaced and rubbed at a pain in his brow. \"You had better haul your carcass off these shores now, before a leviathan wanders this way. My memories of the Menagerie are favorable enough that I'm concerned for her well-being. She will be my preferred means of traveling home someday.\"\n\n\"If she's still afloat, I'm happy to oblige you. And Gabriel, do me the favor of relaying that offer to someone else here, if you see her. I'm talking about little Toria. You give her my love, hey? Tell her when she wants to go home, I'll sail up a river to fetch her away. And remind her she owes me some letters. You got it?\"\n\nHe smirked. \"I promise. Go with Virtue, Bawdewyn.\" \"Walk with Honor, you cunning bastard.\"\n\nThey clasped forearms again and the privateer headed back for his boat. The bear cub lumbered after him, splashing through the salty tide pools. As Montenegro watched them go, he growled to himself. This was disheartening news. Lector Gaff's informants had not reported that the New Britannian fleet was at sea. No more than a month remained now in which to cripple Bahrok's forces. He and Khyber had devised a strategy based on no less than thrice that span of time. So far their actions had been successful, but he was unsure how they could meet this new deadline. Even with the magic potions Bawdewyn had brought, the odds of success appeared scant.\n\nHe needed time to think. Success hinged on strategic decisions. Gaff would have to be involved. In a swift action he mounted the clockwork horse and reared its sleek body. Batwings snapped out from its withers. The levitant engine chittered awake and the steed leapt into the air, its serpentine tail lashing to maintain balance. As he gained altitude he spotted Captain Bawdewyn waving his oversize hat. Montenegro flew above the privateer, his moonshadow falling across the rowboat.\n\n\"Don't forget!\" shouted the captain. \"I promised Anzo I'd find him the head of Pikas of Enclave! Bring it to me if you happen across it!\"\n\n\"If he's not dead already, I shall bring you what's left after I'm finished gnawing it!\"\n\n\"And watch out for shooting stars, you black-winged demon!\"\n\nMontenegro saluted as he climbed into the star-dappled sky. The other sailors stared in wonder. The boats started back for the Menagerie and Khyber's brigadesmen climbed out of hiding to collect the barrels of potion. When the knight was satisfied that the situation was under control, he steered his mount inland. The high wind was brisk, despite the summer weather. It helped to clear his thoughts, like the numerical chants of a Mathematician. Lately he needed the extra concentration. The air of Logosia was sultry to breathe and too often he found his thoughts reaching homeward.\n\n\"This does irreparable harm to our schedule,\" said Lector Gaff in the shadow-streaked room. \"We shall not complete our dissection of Clan Varang in time.\"\n\nBrigadier Khyber offered, \"We can narrow our focus to the coastline. If we can prevent the New Britannians from landing too quickly, maybe we can buy ourselves another week or two.\"\n\n\"I won't support that plan,\" glared Montenegro. \"I am here to prevent New Britannian entanglement, not to draw them into battle.\"\n\n\"You are correct,\" nodded the Lector. \"We must not involve the New Britannian fleet, if possible. To do so risks full invasion. Gentlemen, the numbers no longer favor a stricdy military solution. I am undertaking certain political stratagems in Logos, in which you must now play a role. The time has come for greater stealth. Sir Gabriel, I have need to probe your personal experiences. Tell me about the Juka named Thulann of Garron.\"\n\nThe pavilion of Shirron Turlogan was a pageant of silver and silk. As befitted the ruler of proud Jukaran, the warrior chieftain lavished his tent with an arrangement of finery that was at once audacious and refined. Veils of intricate weave were draped and knotted according to centuried custom. Braziers flickered across a precise arrangement of idols. Not one bauble or ornament was out of place. Neither would the Shirron have noticed if they were, for though he adhered to the rituals of his society, his affairs addressed more practical concerns. Presently he had summoned a council to the crescent-shaped table dominating the room. Turlogan sat at the cusp of the crescent, a mountainous figure with a shaven head and two stout horns jutting from a large brow. The Juka's emerald flesh was glazed from the heat of the desert. He wore a full caftan, richly embroidered.\n\nAt his side sat Warlord Savan, the chieftain of Clan Eryem, broad-shouldered and opulently clad. Behind Savan stood his teenage daughter Tekmhat, a handsome, athletic figure in the bleached robe of an Initiate of the Way. Her black hair was braided under the hood of her raiment. On her brow was painted a sigil that denoted her betrothal.\n\nOn Turlogan's opposite side sat his only son Venduss, wearing the ornamented mail of an officer. Beside him was General Fekhet, Turlogan's most trusted war master. Completing the council was Thulann of Garron, dressed in her dark Way Master's robe, and her exotic attendant Toria. A collection of cups and pitchers littered the table. A large map of Logosia dangled before them, suspended on the pavilion's center pole.\n\nTurlogan swallowed a gulp of wine and clasped his hands together. \"Very well, Savan, let us hear this urgent message.\"\n\nThe middle-aged warlord motioned to his daughter. \"Tekmhat, please relate the news from Garron.\"\n\nThe statuesque teenager bowed, rustling the white fabric of her Initiate's robe. \"The Way Priests have received information from Master Badralghazi of Britain. They say the Royal Senate has already deployed the New Britannian armada. Their army shall arrive on the shores of Logosia in three weeks' time.\"\n\nTurlogan wrinkled his brow. \"Great Mother! These humans do not tarry when they have a goal in sight. Then we must secure enough coastline to grant them a safe landing. How many of our advance groups have established a camp?\"\n\nGeneral Fekhet answered, \"Three groups, Shirron.\"\n\n\"Only three? I sent twelve for the purpose. What is delaying them?\"\n\nThe war master grumbled, \"Clan Varang.\"\n\nThulann pointed at the map. \"Bahrok wants to capture the coast himself. He sends his allied warlords to keep us from staking our ground.\"\n\n\"Has there been open fighting?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but the danger is thick. He waits for us to set the first spark to the tinder.\"\n\nThe Shirron exhaled into his hands. \"We must control that landing zone. Whoever meets the New Britannians will set the conditions of the invasion. Bahrok knows that. It is critical to his plans.\"\n\nVenduss leaned forward. \"Then we have to push him aside. Father, we must not back down from this challenge.\"\n\n\"I do not intend to, my son, but neither can I fight Logos and Varang at the same time. Thulann, tell me again about Bahrok's troubles in the east. I like that story.\"\n\n\"Blackthorn is hitting him fiercely in the deserts around Enclave. Bahrok is stretched thin, in order to keep his supply lines secure. The Technocrats have forced him to do so with, I daresay, mathematical precision. I believe it marks a change in their defensive strategy.\"\n\nWarlord Savan nodded. \"They realize that Bahrok is the primary threat against them.\"\n\nTurlogan grunted disapproval at the comment. \"And what about these rumored assassinations of Bahrok's generals?\"\n\nTekmhat shook her head. \"The healers have not been able to confirm it. We doubt the assassinations took place.\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" interjected Toria, leaning over the table. \"Bahrok has tried to cover it up, but four war masters are dead according to our spies in Varang. I spoke to one this morning. You should ask the keeners for confirmation, Tekmhat, not the healers.\"\n\nThe Jukan girl lifted her chin and said nothing.\n\nThe Shirron raised an eyebrow. \"Is this true, Thulann?\" \"Quite true. Bahrok has silenced the news, but I can hear the echoes plainly. The fact is, Blackthorn wants to cripple Bahrok and he is doing so in methodical fashion.\"\n\n\"That is a mixed blessing. Will it jeopardize the invasion?\" \"I doubt it. Once the New Britannians arrive, the Technocrats will have no choice but to pull back and fortify their cities. The final push should see little resistance until we reach Junction and Logos.\"\n\nThe mountainous chieftain smacked his hands on the table. \"Excellent! Then I am decided. We shall concentrate our forces at the coast to secure a landing zone for the New Britannians. If Bahrok wants to fight me for control, let him stretch his lines that much thinner. Blackthorn can pluck them like strings on a harp for all I care.\"\n\nGeneral Fekhet put down his wine and fidgeted his large hands. \"Shirron, with due deference to the pride of our clan, I do not believe it is wise to provoke open conflict with Clan Varang. We are at half our strength. Even weakened, Bahrok can inflict grave damage upon us.\"\n\n\"I strongly concur,\" said Thulann.\n\nThe Shirron snorted. \"Let him try. Ours will be the defensive advantage. We need only hold our ground until the New Britannians arrive.\"\n\nThe Way Master narrowed her single eye. \"Defense can be a bloody game. Akar was proof of that.\"\n\nVenduss raised a finger and said, \"Clan Eryem has a garrison in Jamark that can come to our aid, if necessary. They are no more than a week's journey by longboat from anywhere on the northern coast.\"\n\nWarlord Savan frowned. \"You would ask us to leave Jamark unguarded, Venduss?\"\n\n\"In the name of Clan Kumar I would, Savan, just as we would sacrifice for your sake. That is the strength of the bond between us.\" He reached behind his father to take the hand of Tekmhat, who returned him a proud smile.\n\nTurlogan smiled as well. He gazed across the table at Thulann. \"Come now, my dearest skeptic. Show some confidence in this old sword arm. It may ache when the weather turns bad, but it can still generate a storm of its own.\"\n\n\"Storms break,\" frowned Thulann.\n\n\"Not this one. Do not be a skittish old crow. We have suffered much, but we are not as weak as Bahrok wants us to believe. We fight in the name of honor.\"\n\n\"Let us hope it is a victorious sort of honor,\" muttered the Way Master. \"I am not certain we can afford any other kind.\"\n\nOutside the pavilion sprawled the seasoned army of Clan Kumar. The thronging encampment filled the basin of a red stone valley, the walls of which had eroded to form a maze of hard rocks. Under the high, jagged bluffs burned thousands of campfires, throwing light upon countless banners. The glow of the camp swelled out from the valley, holding back the desolate Logosian evening. The bustle of men and ridgebacks stirred a hot summer wind. The very rocks were alive with the clank of smiths and carpenters.\n\nThrough the tireless military clamor walked a pair of eyecatching figures. Toria was nearly a foot shorter than the Juka who surrounded her, yet her mane of russet curls stood out in the chaos. Beside the minstrel strode the willowy Thulann of Garron in the dark, textured robe of a Way Master. Her face was grooved with ire. When her mood became too sour to bear, she stamped her walking staff against the hard earth and growled, \"That rattle-skulled codger! His pride cannot accept what we lost at Akar. Kumar is not the juggernaut it used to be. Bahrok is a storm we shall be hard-pressed to shelter.\" She leaned on her staff and snorted. \"He pays no heed to my counsel and then wonders why I removed myself so long from his affairs.\"\n\n\"At least he's not sulking anymore. For a while I thought he was wasting away like a spectre.\"\n\nThulann calmed herself with a sigh. \"Thank the Great Mother for that. I was afraid for him, as well. It is a pity he has restored himself into a headstrong buck, though, instead of something more temperate. There are days I believe he has no more control over his passions than Venduss does.\" The redhead nibbled her lip. \"I am not scorched by the heat of Venus passion.\"\n\nThe Way Master glanced at her for a moment, then nodded. \"He does play the bridegroom rather diligently.\"\n\n\"But not faithfully. He still asks me to be his mistress. He knows I won't do that, though. He can marry me or he can marry Tekmhat, but he can't have both of us.\" She shook her head. \"But he's too much of a coward to decide.\"\n\n\"You are being unfair to him. He is shackled by protocol. His betrothal to Tekmhat is a symbol of the alliance between Kumar and Eryem. He will not jeopardize that bond while we are in the thick of a war.\"\n\n\"Then he should screw up the courage to send me away.\" A chuckle formed on Thulann's lips. \"He will not. That would admit defeat. He and his father share that particular inhibition. Toria, I suggest you apply a healthy dose of fortitude to this bind you are in. Venduss loves you, but only when the war is finished will he be able to demonstrate it to your satisfaction. Surely you can forestall your ultimatum until then.\" The girl watched her own feet, a curtain of ringlets hiding her face. \"I'm not sure I should take your advice on this, Thulann.\"\n\n\"What? That is an ungrateful remark to the woman who sanctioned your affair for two years, despite my more realistic instincts.\"\n\n\"That's not what I mean.\" She brushed back her curls and turned sea-green eyes on the Way Master. \"I don't understand you, Mistress. I dream of what you have. Turlogan worships you. He would give up everything if you'd agree to marry him. But you've rejected him for twenty years. I wonder if you know what you've lost.\"\n\nThulann smirked. \"I know all too well. You saw tonight what happens when Turlogan and I spend too much time together. Flint and steel are not wisely marriageable.\"\n\n\"No, that's not true. You want to hide behind that illusion, but the reality is much less glamorous, hey? You're just afraid to commit to that choice. Admit it, Thulann. You're exactly like Venduss.\"\n\nA mouthful of barbs welled up in the Way Master, but the old Juka swallowed them. She cast a glower over the presumptuous girl. Toria stood proudly in the slithering desert wind. Her long Garronite dress exaggerated the lean proportions of her body. Her freckles were reminiscent of a human child, but Toria's face was seasoned with hardship. She flinched at the disapproval of her mistress, but she did not look away.\n\nThulann pursed her lips. \"I stand at Turlogan's side now. I shall not leave it again. That is more than he ever sensibly expected.\"\n\nToria shrugged and glanced at the sky. \"That's all Venduss expects of me, too.\"\n\nFor a long while they stared in silence at the irregular shape of the valley ridge. The stars cascaded through the heavens beyond. Then the Way Master laid a hand on her companion's shoulder and said, \"I need you to do something for me, child.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"An informant from Akar should arrive at my tent soon. Please be so kind as to interview him for me. I am not in the proper mood after tonight's council.\"\n\nThe girl blinked at the unprecedented request, then bowed her head. \"Yes, Mistress. What will you be doing?\"\n\n\"I think I shall take a walk. Sometimes I need to rattle these old bones a bit, to shake some feeling back into them.\"\n\nThe valley was nestled inside a giant bowl of rich, red stone. The impressive mineral formation rose haughtily from the desert scrub, a blood-hued butte visible for miles in every direction. The high blufis of the perimeter were etched with deep channels and fractures from the corrosive rains that once plagued Logosia. The result was a labyrinth of rocky corridors in a ring around the valley. Thulann strolled without direction among those high crimson walls, where the sounds of the army grew muffled. Shadows streamed around her in the drizzling glow of the moons.\n\nIn the niches and corners of the crimson maze she passed many small structures of metal. They were the aged and rusty stems of pipelines that thrust out from the chiseled rock. The pipes were long shattered and abandoned. Thulann did not know what they had been used for, but she knew why they were here. This place was once a mineral quarry. Scores of Juka had worked here as slaves in the service of the Overlords. Ancient songs recounted a time when there was no valley at all, when the great machines of the Overlords had conjured the entire rock formation out of the depths of the earth. Bubbling pools of mud supported the legend of that volcanic event. For centuries the Juka had chipped away at the fresh, red rock, until the center of the formation became a wide valley. No song or record indicated the purpose for which the Overlords used the minerals. The Juka were never told. In those days they were regarded as nothing but strong hands and tireless backs to swing tools, and sometimes weapons, for the greed of their unseen masters.\n\nYet the Juka did not despair in those dark, cruel ages. As a neglected race they had cherished their own traditions of honor and discipline. Spoken lore grew lush and elaborate. Ritual mitigated the drudgery of their lives. The smoke-shrouded factories developed powerful bonds of community that would one day transform into the clan kinships of Jukaran. And the highest glory for the Juka came when the Overlords warred with each other. The fury of battle, though painful and terrible, granted the slaves freedom from their crushing work. As warriors they excelled beyond all other callings, for their spirits soared with weapons in their hands. As soldiers they could destroy, in fleeting clashes, the black machines that were the instruments of their bondage. In war they could unleash their shackled rage.\n\nWhen Thulann had learned the songs of recent history, it seemed inevitable to her that the Juka would rise against the Overlords. Not even those godlike beings could bottle the warrior spirit forever. Indeed, when the Hand of Honor led the shires in revolt, the movement spread so quickly that after five years only one citadel remained unconquered. It was named Citadel Moonglow, the fortress of the Prime Overlord, impregnable even in the fiercest mechanized wars. It was the last bastion of technological slavery, the heart of the foulest monster. Turlogan's parents, Kumar and Narah, gathered the Jukan armies to strike the floating city. In uncountable numbers they amassed in preparation for the final siege. And here in this valley of crimson stone did Kumar reside in the weeks before they marched to freedom. Legend had dubbed this place Kumar's Throne. Though it lay now in Logosian territory, it was a shrine of great honor for the Juka Clans. They called it the drum that sounded their liberty.\n\nNor was it happenstance that Turlogan had brought the army here after the slaughter at Akar. The location was convenient in both strategic and tactical terms, but of greater impact was the effect on morale. Here the soldiers could remember the glory of Kumar himself, the first Shirron and the father of the clan. Here they touched again the foundation of their strength. The benefit to Turlogan himself was most dramatic of all. After Akar he had sunk into a grave depression, but a week at Kumar's Throne had revived him to his old, fearless self.\n\nThulann was glad for his rejuvenation, though she was unsure that his thinking was sound. He wanted to recapture the glory of Kumar. She was not certain the feat was possible.\n\nShe set aside her walking staff, braced her foot on a rusty pipe and climbed up one of the red walls. From a high perch she looked out across the army in the valley. The sight was magnificent, she had to admit. Five thousand warriors dwelled in the dazzling firelight. The flags and banners adorning their tents combined in a vast, rippling tableau. On the north side of the basin camped the cavalry, with hundreds of armored ridgebacks bleating under the moons. In the east corner sprawled the engineers, their wagons heavy with elongated timbers and their forges ablaze with iron. The rest of the valley contained dozens of battalions, many of whom drilled with weapons even at this late hour. The mood of the encampment seemed taut and alert.\n\nThey wanted revenge for Akar, of course. They were proud Jukan warriors, eager to redeem themselves. Centuries of sacred tradition demanded nothing less. She felt the same resonance in her own chest. She understood their stem pride. Though her assessment of strategy reached a different conclusion, her devotion to the clan cried out for the blood of their enemies.\n\nShe laughed at herself as she sat on the ridge. Such emotions led to needless suffering. She would not heed them, nor would she let Turlogan do so. In these moments she recognized the utility of the cold society of the Technocrats. Their actions arose from strict, practical necessity. But at the same time she pitied the Logosian Juka. Did they carry the same passions in their blood? Or had they forgotten the heritage of ancient hardship? She had difficulty believing the latter, though the evidence suggested it was largely true. She let out a sigh, then sat quietly and trained her ears on the complicated sounds of the encampment.\n\nSomething stirred in the darkness nearby. She realized she was not alone. When she glanced in the direction of the movement, no one was there.\n\nHer body flushed with energy. She noted the lay of the sword across her back, then swiveled on the rock wall and slid down to her feet. A few yards away she glimpsed a figure. She nearly reached for her weapon until she recognized the towering silhouette of Turlogan standing on the path.\n\nHer smile was melancholy. \"Have you come to apologize or to convince me you're not a brash fool? I am unlikely to be receptive to either argument, I warn you.\"\n\nThe black shape did not answer. Thulann tensed. She realized with a jolt that the silhouette was not opaque but translucent like a veil, showing the night sky behind it. The spectre darkened slowly, devouring the stars inside its body. This was sorcery of a boldness she had not seen outside of New Britannia. And as the figure solidified the mystery deepened, for she saw that the enormous Juka wore the finely-crafted mail of a wealthy Technocrat soldier. In his hands rested a huge mallet, augmented by a spring-mounted striking plate. His stance was ominous but not overtly threatening.\n\nA sharp memory throbbed in her skull. Thulann lifted her chin and murmured, \"Dreams of the Great Mother, it is Master Enosh of Junction come to haunt me. I greet you with respect and honor, Janissar.\"\n\nThe Juka materialized slowly. Thulann recognized the dwindling effects of invisibility, possibly from a potion of the sort Montenegro had once employed inside Braun's Needle. She was shocked to see a Logosian employing magic at all. Though the weapons master's face was masked by the darkness, she glimpsed a webwork of scars on his cheeks and brow. In a grave tone Master Enosh replied, \"My allegiance to the Janissars is over. You forced that from me at Akar. I march in more discerning company now.\"\n\n\"I am gratified to have made an impact, if perhaps a bit surprised.\"\n\nBehind her a man said, \"You shall be more surprised still to learn with whom he serves.\"\n\nShe flashed her sword from its scabbard and wheeled around to face the second person. He too materialized from the thick summer air. Several others appeared behind him, each wearing Logosian kinetic armor; yet it was not the sudden arrival of these enemies that had caused her to draw steel. Rather it was the voice of the tall human who had spoken. She knew that rich, distinctive tone. She wondered if she might not be facing ghosts, after all.\n\n\"Sir Gabriel Montenegro is dead,\" she remarked, pointing her subdy curved blade at the human. \"To mock his memory is to provoke my anger.\"\n\n\"Way Master, in the past you have mocked me so ferociously that I still wake at night with retorts on my tongue. Yet our hostility vanished in the sewers under Britain. I stand before you now as a friend, offering you a greeting and a proposition.\"\n\nThulann's heart pounded. This smacked of an audacious ruse. \"Show me your face, Technocrat. Prove that you are who you portray yourself to be. Magic potions or no, you and your warriors stand in the midst of Turlogan's army and shall therefore live or die at my discretion.\"\n\n\"Put away your fangs, old cobra. I walk the path of Honesty.\" The man removed his Technocrat helmet, unfurling long, ebony curls like a banner in the circulating wind. Moonlight draped across familiar features. From under his gorget he withdrew a gold pendant, which glinted as it dangled on a chain. It depicted a heart seized by a dragon's claw, the family crest of Montenegro. \"I suppose you will want an explanation.\"\n\nThe Way Master propped her swordpoint on the ground and leaned her weight on the blade. \"I suppose I shall want to sit down first. I cannot articulate the joy in my heart until it stops hammering so loudly.\"\n\nThe black-armored knight gave her an earnest smile. They sat together on a slab while the Logosian soldiers stood watch for prying ears. In sparse detail Montenegro explained the circumstances behind his false death and his alliance with the Technocrats. When her mind ceased reeling and accepted the improbable reunion, she sorted his tale into the events of the last few weeks. \"Then it is you who have led the Logosian resurgence against Warlord Bahrok. This is your revenge against him.\"\n\n\"It's not only my doing, but of course my new allies as well. They are quite skilled and quite angry. Now that they know Lector Sartorius is the Logosian traitor, they're able to throttle his treachery. And so Bahrok's undeserved success has come to a halt. But to answer your question I am not seeking revenge, though it shall certainly spice the victory. No, my goal is to honor the Virtue of Justice. The Pact of Four nurtured this unjust war. I am going to squelch it.\" He pointed at her with a black gauntlet. \"And you are in a position to help me do that.\"\n\n\"If you imagine I might join your band and attack Clan Varang, you need to review my career. Above all I am loyal to Garron. Warlord Bahrok, despite his wickedness, fights on my side of this war. I shall not raise steel against him without due provocation.\"\n\n\"Thulann, you would be a treasure among these Technocrat soldiers. They are experts at warfare but they lack your singular refinement. I know better than to make that request, however, and so I shall make a more interesting one.\" His armor clanked as he leaned closer. \"Tell me, how committed would you say the Shirron is to this invasion?\"\n\n\"To his warrior's heart, of course. Otherwise we would not be here.\"\n\n\"He is determined to push all the way to Logos?\"\n\n\"Against my own counsel, yes. History has marked the path he follows. He hangs the honor of the clan on this victory.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Montenegro rubbed his chin. His grey eyes sharpened. \"What would you say if I told you Lector Gaff is willing to petition for surrender before the New Britannians arrive?\"\n\nA tingle shot through her. \"I would dread that you were deceiving me.\"\n\n\"You know I would not lie. Gaff wants to avoid further bloodshed. While Bahrok's resources are overextended, Turlogan has the power to call off the invasion. When the New Britannians arrive they can join with Turlogan to enforce the peace, despite any treachery Bahrok might attempt. The war will be finished and the crows will go hungry again.\"\n\nShe tumbled the thought around in her head. \"It is a breathtaking offer, I confess. It might even be convincing if it had the weight of law. Unless a great wheel has turned in Logos, I believe Lector Sartorius still holds the title of Blackthorn's Chosen. Lector Gaff does not possess the authority to surrender.\"\n\n\"Gaff has a plan for hobbling Sartorius. He claims the equations favor his success. Trust me, for a Mathematician the numbers have more authority than any god or king.\"\n\n\"And what of Blackthorn himself? Will he accept defeat?\"\n\n\"No one knows Blackthorn's mind, but Gaff has certainly factored him into the calculations.\"\n\nShe grimaced. \"The Pact of Four will fight you to the death.\"\n\n\"We will have neutralized Bahrok and Sartorius. I shall deal personally with General Nathaniel, and with considerable relish. They'll write songs about his downfall.\"\n\n\"And the Meer contingent? Chamberlain Kavah?\"\n\n\"He is an unknown. So far he's only served a supporting role, providing spells and equipment. I cannot imagine he would be able to jeopardize a truce signed by all three warring nations.\"\n\nThe Way Master grunted assent. She entwined her long fingers. \"Then tell me the terms of the surrender.\"\n\n\"Negotiators will have to decide the particulars, but Logos will cede the border mountains to Jukaran. They'll hand over the new mines to the Shirron. Lector Gaff proposes instead to trade for resources from New Britannia, assuming everyone can overcome their mutual distrust. Ironically enough, the end game is not far from what the Pact of Four had designed in the first place. Gaff's version, of course, subtracts the wholesale slaughter.\"\n\n\"It sounds as if Lector Gaff and I have solved the same equation. It is comforting to know that common sense is truly common.\" She closed her weary eye. Her mind thundered with possibilities. Many questions were still unanswered, and yet the window of opportunity was plainly open. Peace could be forged, but only with quick action. The New Britannians would arrive in three weeks. The bargain must be struck before then, to stave off their own desire for war.\n\nShe dragged her hands over her face, then smiled and squeezed the knight's wrist. \"I am grateful that your death was not binding, Montenegro. You are a blessing to us all. I shall present Turlogan with Lector Gaff's proposal.\"\n\n\"You'll do more than that. You'll convince him to accept the surrender. I won't have New Britannian blood spilling on Logosian earth.\"\n\n\"I make no promises, unfortunately, except to do everything I can. Turlogan is a stubborn man.\"\n\n\"He cannot be more stubborn than you. I'd wager my grandfather's ghost on it. Thulann, we can't accept failure this time. There's too much at stake.\"\n\n\"And what if Turlogan rejects the ofier?\"\n\n\"Do not fail me, Way Master. Blackthorn is a deadly enemy. Don't comer him.\"\n\nShe sighed and glanced at the other Technocrat soldiers. They formed a tight perimeter, watching for the approach of Kumar clansmen. From their expert deployment she judged them to be as skilled as the Shirron's personal Tarkosh guard. The presence of Master Enosh underscored the similarity.\n\n\"They are calling you assassins,\" she commented to the knight. \"They say you murder Bahrok's generals in their sleep.\"\n\n\"You know me too well to believe that.\" He stood and lifted his black helmet. Before donning it he said, \"I shall meet you again ten nights from now. I can only accept one answer, Thulann. I mist no one more than you to bring this war to an honorable close.\"\n\nShe rose beside him and clasped his arms. \"I accept the burden. My back will not stoop. Great Mother grant us victory, my friend.\"\n\n\"Victory for everyone, except the Pact of Four.\" He slipped the helm over his head and added, \"Oh, and I have a message for Toria. Captain Bawdewyn has offered to spirit her home. It appears she has struck his fancy. And tell her also, for my part, that I am glad she's still alive. If the world is burdened by a man like me, it deserves to be lightened by a face like hers.\"\n\nThulann opened a smile. \"I shall inform her. Perhaps it will be a comfort.\" She looked to Master Enosh and said, \"I am sorry for what I forced upon you, good warrior. Perhaps with this negotiation I can redeem myself.\"\n\nThe weapons master rose to his full height, a daunting apparition in the gloom. His eyes drifted into a cold moonbeam. \"Way Master Thulann, you taught me to question the false master I followed. You have nothing for which to apologize. I've joined Montenegro to secure my own redemption.\"\n\nThe Technocrats each drew a vial out of their belts, from which they drank a quaff of magic potion. Then the band dissolved into the warm, whirring air. Montenegro was the last to vanish, giving her a nod as he did. She was aware of their receding footsteps, almost imperceptible. Then she was alone in the red rock corridors, the noises of the encampment filtering back into her awareness.\n\nHer heart leapt suddenly. She had no time to delay. She retrieved her walking staff from where it rested against an old pipe, then hurried off into the night.\n\nAt the edge of Kumar's Throne bubbled a series of mud ponds. Steam churned beneath the ochre sludge, filling the air with a dense, viscous haze. Under this natural cover Montenegro and his men reappeared. The knight plucked off his helm. To the shadows he muttered, \"Khyber, it's done. She's taking the offer to Turlogan. Signal Barghast to bring the skids and let's leave this place before someone gets curious.\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" replied the brigadier, stepping into view. \"I want to make sure you weren't followed.\" He ordered the soldiers to double-check the perimeter.\n\nMontenegro frowned. \"Let's not dawdle. There are five thousand clansmen out there. Most of them will not be as accommodating as Thulann.\"\n\n\"And if just one of those clansmen sees our signal, we'll be dead before Brother Barghast ever gets here. Patience, Montenegro. Your job is done tonight. Let me do mine.\"\n\nThe knight squinted and massaged his eyes. Then he smirked at Master Enosh, who sat down beside him. \"So, Shirron, you have dealt with the old battleaxe before. I daresay it explains your melancholy demeanor when I ask why you joined the brigade.\"\n\nThe enormous Juka darkened his gaze. \"Thulann forced me to rethink who I was serving. I came to the conclusion that Sartorius was not the honorable choice.\"\n\n\"She has a talent for questioning motivations. Meeting Thulann will test a man's convictions, or at the very least his patience. I presume she is the one who gave you those scars?\"\n\n\"I'm not interested in discussing it.\"\n\n\"Come now, Shirron. By the look of it Khyber will be hours securing our privacy. I'm of a mind to relax.\"\n\nThe weapons master scowled. \"Naturally. It wasn't your nation that just surrendered.\"\n\nMontenegro held back a retort. He slapped a palm on the Juka's back. \"Quite so. Forgive me, Enosh. My family's shrine is devoted to Compassion and yet too often I neglect its demands.\"\n\nThe Juka pursed his lips. \"Enough of your Virtues, Cavalier. Grant me some quiet. This has been a long night.\"\n\nThe New Britannian said nothing more. The soldiers waited beside the burbling pools of mud until Brigadier Khy-ber returned. To the gathered men he announced, \"It's safe now. Barghast is on his way. When we get airborne we can't waste any time. We have to reach Junction in three days or less to rendezvous with the others.\"\n\nMontenegro furrowed his brow. \"Junction? I thought we were returning east.\"\n\n\"The plan has changed. His Excellency needs us in the city.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me before?\"\n\n\"I did not want to risk revealing the matter in the course of your discussion with Thulann.\"\n\nThe knight sneered. \"I am giddy at your confidence. But what is so important in Junction that it takes us away from the battlefiront? Unless...\" He raised an eyebrow. \"Unless Gaff has located the old defenses under the city?\"\n\nKhyber said nothing in response.\n\nMontenegro grinned. \"So we'll capture them from Sarto-rius's troops and force him to negotiate with Gaff. That should prove satisfying. I confess, I shall enjoy fighting Technocrats again. It appeals to something aesthetic in my bloodlust.\"\n\nThe brigadier rolled his eyes. \"You think too much of aesthetics. When Barghast gets here, try to force that dumsy automaton of yours to keep up with our skids. I don't want you slowing us down.\"\n\n\"I am in no hurry to smell the reek of Junction again, but under the present circumstances I'll make my best speed. The sooner we secure this peace, the sooner I can return home. I'm anxious to mount a proper horse again and tread grass instead of raindouds.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "When the soldiers climbed aboard their machines and fled into the night sky, a slender shape emerged from one of the pools of hot mud. Thulann coughed and stumbled out of the haze, shaking off the steaming muck. She scrambled atop a boulder and indulged a chestful of satiny desert air. Then she knelt and gazed southward, in the direction the Technocrats had gone.\n\nThe effort had taxed her skills, but she had managed to track Montenegro and evade detection by the man named Khyber. The information she had gained was not as rewarding as she had hoped. Apparently Lector Gaff's authority hinged on physically capturing Junction. Her confidence in the surrender was not improved. Yet Montenegro had proposed the first sensible resolution to this fractured mess of a war. Thulann would have to convince Turlogan to accept it. The alternative would devastate Logosia, redden the wastelands with Jukan blood and possibly end the reign of Clan Kumar in Jukaran. The weight of the matter took its toll on her body. She returned to the encampment leaning heavily on her walking staff, a noticeable stoop in her back." + }, + { + "title": "Tizan's Wall", + "text": "In the lush folds of the Shirron's pavilion, Thulann leaned against the crescent table and watched her lover pace the tapestried rug. Turlogan stalked around the flickering bloom of a ring of braziers. His demeanor was anxious as he spoke. \"Of course I shall accept Lector Gaflf's surrender. When I march down the streets of Logos, I shall be happy to oblige him.\"\n\nThe Way Master crossed her arms. \"That is a rejection, not an acceptance. The intention of the surrender is to keep us away from Logos. They will accept defeat but not subjugation.\"\n\n\"Then we have nothing further to discuss. I tell you again, my dogged sweet, I will conquer this land by springtime.\"\n\n\"By springtime the continent will lie in ruins. End the war now and we might just get the harvest in this fall.\"\n\nHe laughed and shook his head. \"The benefits of peace are appealing, I grant you, but the notion is pocked with impossibilities.\"\n\nShe tilted her head. \"It has certain difficulties, but I do not view it as unrealistic.\"\n\n\"Do you not? Very well, how do you propose to placate the New Britannians when ten thousand of them step onto the shore? I wager they did not build a hundred ships and sail them for three weeks only to turn around because Lector Gaff grows timid. Blackthorn sent an armada to level their capital. They are eager to return that sentiment. They will crave their plunder.\"\n\nShe spread out her hands. \"They want recompense for their trouble and we shall have to give it to them. Consider this. There are forests on the southern coast that Blackthorn has not yet ravaged. I shall propose that Logos hand them over to the Britannians. They can settle beside the Technocrats and cement the trade relationship that Gaff wants to build. The two nations do share a common heritage, after all, such as it is.\"\n\nThe Shirron chuckled bitterly. \"You are very optimistic for someone who has felt the bite of failed diplomacy so many times. Are you eager to lose another divot of flesh?\"\n\nThulann rose from the table and barked, \"I would lose it all to save the flesh of those soldiers outside! You know this invasion will cost thousands of lives. We never thought Junction would fall easily. Now we learn it has even more defenses than we suspected. And Logos has been impregnable throughout history, even when the Overlords fought for it. Yet you want to march us into that slaughterhouse to fulfill some dream of glory. I say you dream too dangerously, my handsome young buck.\"\n\n\"Young buck,' is it? You see me as a headstrong boy? Let me tell you what this boy is dreaming about right now. He dreams that the Shirron accepts this surrender. The other clans perceive that it was Warlord Bahrok who forced Blackthorn into submission. When they return to Garron, the chieftains demand a Great Tournament to place Bahrok on the throne. Clan Kumar slinks away in disgrace, trodden by Bahrok's ambition.\" His mouth registered distaste at the words. Then he fastened an intense look upon the Way Master. \"But there is another version of the dream, you see. In this one the Shirron leads the armies of Jukaran and New Britannia to the very doorstep of Blackthorn. Though the victory is costly, Garron conquers Logosia. Clan Kumar occupies Logos and Blackthorn's armies become ours. The alliance with New Britannia is hardened in the fires of battle and we retain our honor and our dominance. That, my love, is a dream for which our soldiers will readily give their flesh.\"\n\n\"I never doubted your boldness, my love, but that is an ambitious vision.\"\n\n\"We forge the future. We are Jukan warriors. Without honor and glory we are worse than dead.\"\n\n\"Yes, we are warriors, but we are also mothers and fathers and wives and children. Let us not become a clan of orphans and widows. We are a mighty family, Turlogan. You would tear us apart in the lust for swift glory. I say our lives are better spent rebuilding. Kumar has lost no honor to Bahrok's treachery.\"\n\nA sigh issued from his broad chest. He stopped pacing and massaged his temples. \"You were always calm in the face of hardship. But my love, Akar is a weight I must bear every hour, every second I live. I have lost honor. I felt it crack apart with every stroke from those airships. Every warrior who died that day is a wound I must endure.\"\n\nThulann's heart sank. Akar was the crux of his pain, of course. Softly she murmured, \"I should have been at your side.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"The past is spent coinage. It has purchased our future. The defeat at Akar forces my hand. I cannot carry anything less than victory now.\"\n\n\"You can, Turlogan, because I shall carry it with you.\"\n\n\"Nothing you say will convince me to accept Gaff's surrender.\"\n\n\"And if I say I shall marry you?\"\n\nHis shoulders tensed. His brow furrowed. \"What was that?\"\n\nShe spoke quickly, listening to herself as if from a distance. \"Negotiate an end to this war and the next time we set foot in the Hall of the Shirron, I shall be your wife.\"\n\nTurlogan paled. \"Great Mother. You look sincere.\"\n\nHer breath began to flutter but she dared not stop. The words had been lurking inside her for longer than she could remember. They leapt from her tongue with strange catharsis. \"I have never had better cause for sincerity. The fact is, I dream as well, my dear. I dream of spending my last years in a real home with a doting husband, like an old woman deserves. I want to enjoy the peace of your bed, the calm of your days and nights. I want to midwife Venduss's children and watch them grow underfoot. That is my dream, old man. We have earned it, you and I. But it cannot come true if the invasion proceeds.\"\n\nThe Shirron drew back as if her voice frightened him. His eyes searched her face. They almost looked frantic.\n\nShe reached out to clasp his giant hands. \"Accept Gaff's surrender. Take me as your wife. Together we shall return to Garron and meet whatever challenge Bahrok flings at us. I have beaten him in combat before. We shall beat him in the Council of Warlords. He has never faced us when we stand together.\"\n\nHe closed his eyes and turned his face away. \"Please, Thulann. Let me think.\"\n\n\"We have no time. The New Britannian fleet approaches. Gaff expects an answer in ten days.\" She stepped before him, clasped his waist. \"I know what your heart is saying. Heed it, my love. I am yours to take, if you will.\"\n\nTurlogan shook his head vehemently, then pulled away from her. \"I said quiet! I need to ink!\" Toward the entrance of the pavilion he staggered wounded, then plunged out into the summer darkness. The tent flap sloughed loosely behind him. Thulann stared at it while her heart banged inside her chest. She felt the urge to cry out or to laugh or to call his name, but she simply lingered in heavy silence imagining where he had gone. She felt as if she had loosed some great animal into the night. Only the wild moons knew what direction it might run.\n\nThe blackness tasted metallic. Montenegro flared his nostrils, scenting the reverberant dark. He moved through some manner of tunnel or corridor that stung with smoky miasma. No light braved the cryptlike space, but small sounds whispered its shape. Steel floor panels registered his footfalls. Iron curves distorted the tenor of his breathing. He sensed the dull presence of a great mass around him, as if he ventured through the innards of some gigantic structure. Tiny clicks leapt through nearby spaces, like grains of rust or insect claws.\n\nHe nestled a miner's monocle over his eye. The lens had an alchemic glaze that imagined light where none existed. What Montenegro viewed in sepia tones surprised him. The underground corridor teemed with ancient, dormant machinery. The pathway traversed a hanging garden of beams and chains and heavy pipelines, threading between stout vertical axles and clusters of wheel-size gears. A million bolts held the components together. The huge device was decrepit with age, cracked by time and trauma and choked with roots that never reached the surface. Hazy smoke drifted from gaps in the crumbling pipework. Vermin skittered in and out of the holes, rusty metal embedded in their shells.\n\nThe knight paused to gauge his surroundings. Other figures crept through the murk with him, brigadesmen in the act of infiltration. Their weapons perched ready in their gaundets, but Montenegro did not think they would need them. This place was long deserted. If these were the only war machines that lay beneath Junction, he could see why Lector Sartorius had chosen to seal them off. They had not operated in generations.\n\nAfter several minutes he uncoiled from his stealthy posture and leaned against a block of old iron. The Technocrats around him relaxed as well. A compact silhouette drew beside him and lit the blue spark of a lantern.\n\n\"There's no one here,\" said Brigadier Khyber with cautious relief in his voice. \"I suppose Sartorius decided to lock up the tunnels and trust that no one would find them.\"\n\nMontenegro nodded. \"It nearly worked, too. If he had sent engineers down here, Gaff would have learned about it within hours. As it stands, we are only here through the dubious grace of the Techno-Prophet.\" He scanned the dead machinery. \"Though I'm not certain that we have achieved any great victory.\"\n\nA man in a grey Mathematician's robe stepped forward and warned, \"Never leap to judgment when discussing the works of the Overlords. These machines have not been used since before the Cataclysm, yet they are not as ruined as they appear.\"\n\nThe knight grimaced. \"Barghast, all the healers in Britain couldn't resurrect this contraption.\"\n\n\"It is not sorcery that can repair this machine, but alchemy. Do you see this pipe? It is designed to carry restorative fluids for metals, not unlike your healing potions work for flesh. The Overlords relied heavily upon such fuels. We still use them today inside dreadnoughts and other automatons. It is science of the highest order.\" Brother Barghast rapped a knuckle on the dusty metal. \"If we repair this pipeline and the pump to which it is attached, perhaps we may breathe new life into these old defenses. That should force Lector Sartorius to listen to His Excellency's demands.\"\n\nMontenegro pursed his lips. \"Can you really fix it?\"\n\n\"Not I. This task requires many craftsmen with specific expertise.\"\n\nKhyber wiped the dust from his hands and said, \"In any case we shall need to secure the tunnels while we decide what to do. Sartorius will learn all too quickly that we're here. And from the look of this place I'd say we have plenty of ground to defend.\"\n\n\"There are probably miles of tunnels,\" said Barghast.\n\n\"And we have less than three weeks to repair them,\" frowned the knight. \"It looks like we may not get many chances to hit Bahrok's army again before the surrender. That is a genuine pity.\"\n\nA large head thrust into the group. Master Enosh gave Khyber an urgent look. \"Sir, you had best come down here. Something's happening.\"\n\nThe men rushed deeper into the caves. The eerie light of their spark lanterns turned the mechanical gloom into a ghostly network of shadows. Montenegro was unsettled by the bizarre geometry of the place. Throughout Logosia the older, large-scale machines traced their origins to the mysterious Overlords who had ruled here before the Cataclysm. Not even the Jukan loresingers understood the nature of their vanished masters. The ancient technology reflected an alien symmetry that stirred deep, unnamed fears in Montenegro's gut. Blackthorn's most vile creations worried the same center of dread inside him. When he imagined a sprawling warren of these machines underneath the factories of Junction, the knight fought back revulsion.\n\nBut the sensation was not completely emotional, for he found himself enclosed by the sudden reek of decay. They moved through a region of odors that tangled the smoky air. It was the smell of organic rot. He wondered how that was possible in this lifeless place.\n\nFarther down the corridor he saw the answer. Half a dozen brigadesmen peeked through a large doorway. Their demeanor was alert, even fearful. Their weapons were bared. In the chamber beyond the door sat a large, boulderlike shape that glinted metal. Its surface teemed with crablike vermin, picking at rotten flesh. The stench was choking.\n\nAfter staring for a moment, Montenegro recognized the grotesque thing. It was a dreadnought, a fearsome half-living war machine, probably dead for a week. Under the carpet of scavengers he made out the shape of its metal chassis and its many-jointed steel arms. He pulled away and covered his nose. \"I'm afraid to imagine what might have killed it.\"\n\nKhyber's expression grew wary. \"Keep your voice down. It isn't dead, it's just dormant. Their flesh decays like that sometimes.\"\n\nBarghast added, \"The parasites inflict no lasting harm. Every few days it will wake up and circulate its restorative fluids, like we must do to these machines.\"\n\nMontenegro rode a surge of repulsion. He clenched his fists and whispered, \"Then let's get some heavy scourges down here and carve it up while it's still asleep! There's fifty of us. We can kill it if we have the stamina.\"\n\n\"We will not,\" countered the brigadier. He motioned to the soldiers around him. \"Fall back. We're pulling out.\"\n\n\"You have to be joking!\"\n\n'We'll send juggernauts to handle this. Maybe His Excellency will be able to enlist a dreadnought or two for the job.\" He nudged Montenegro in the direction from which they had come. \"Sartorius has chained a big watchdog down here, to keep us from overrunning the place. I won't lose ten or twenty men to subdue it. We'll let the automatons handle their own.\"\n\n\"You speak as though they're soldiers, too.\"\n\n\"They are what they are. Where's Piper? It's time to sound the retreat.\"\n\nA safe distance from the dreadnought's chamber, a lanky boy arrived wearing light armor. To his body was strapped a box of gears with a wheel-shaped crank. Several tall levers jutted up and over his shoulder. Piper turned the crank and the device began to moan. Steam rushed from inside. When he tilted the levers the musical instrument chirped out a raspy tune. At the signal the platoon of Technocrats hurried back toward the exit of the tunnels.\n\nFrom deep inside where the stragglers remained, Montenegro heard a piercing scream. He snapped the clockwork sword from his scabbard and lunged forward, but Khyber held him back. \"Cavalier! Don't bother.\"\n\nThe knight threw off the brigadier's hand, but realized that the screaming had stopped. Instead a heavy clanking sound banged closer and closer from the depths of the machine-choked cave. The stench of death invaded the tunnel. Montenegro cursed and followed Khyber as the soldiers fled out of the dry, smoky darkness. For a change he welcomed the dreary sight of Junction, its polluted sky awhirl with the throes of a coming storm.\n\nThulann crouched in a thicket of serrated leaves. The desert shrub clung to the slopes of a steep, rocky mountain. Its roots held fast like claws, sucking the earth so dry that the surface fractured into disjointed blocks. The Way Master squatted on a bend of the tough plant, ignoring the ache in her game leg as she peered down the side of the mountain. A narrow pass split through the cliffs below. Insect shapes winged among the crags. The afternoon sun rained down with such force that the bluffs exhaled dust like a sigh.\n\nInside the pass was a large commotion. A force of Jukan warriors crowded the space with polearms and banners held high. They had erected a stone wall to block the pass. They faced the east with swords and spears brandished.\n\nOn the cusp of the desert before them was a dark ribbon of soldiers. The army of Clan Kumar was approaching the mountains. Bolts of sunlight rang from their shields in a vast, sparkling display.\n\nThe old Way Master leaned back against the high, arid slope. She licked warm sweat from her lip, then pointed into the rocky pass. \"As I thought. There is the banner of Warlord Tizan of Clan Dragham. Bahrok picked his fattest toad to guard the pass against us.\"\n\nShe spoke to a tall, young warrior who knelt beside her.\n\nVenduss shaded his eyes with a hand and gazed at the troops below. \"He has no more than three or four hundred soldiers down there, I would say. Our siege engines can get us over that barricade. We can make a direct assault and punch through in less than a day.\"\n\nThulann nibbled her cheek in thought. \"We do not have that luxury. Clan Dragham is known for their perseverance. We might sustain three casualties to their one.\"\n\n\"Once we are through the pass, nothing stands between us and the sea. I say it is worth the risk of casualties to secure that landing zone. In two weeks the New Britannians will arrive with their swarms of healers to repair the damage.\"\n\n\"You assume that our soldiers will be injured and not dead. Even an archmage cannot heal a body two weeks down the path to dust. Think strategically, Venduss. This will be a long war and we dare not spend our resources on Bahrok's traps.\"\n\nVenduss grunted, \"Will it truly be long, though? We may see its end soon. My father has not rejected the surrender as such.\"\n\n\"Nor has he accepted it. Until he does, we must assume the worst.\"\n\nHe turned to watch her face. \"So you think my father will lead us into disaster.\"\n\n'When the enemy surrenders, the war is over. Further conflict is dangerous vanity.\"\n\n\"Pride, Thulann, not vanity. There is honor to redeem.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"This invasion will decimate us. We shall see how proud he is when the clan is destitute. I would expect such nonsense from a milk-toothed suckling like you, but your father has scars enough to know better.\"\n\n'Way Master! Sheathe your tongue, please. I happen to agree with your position. I believe we would acquit ourselves better than you imagine, but I see no pressing need to continue the invasion. I do not fear Bahrok's peacetime machinations. He will pay for his crimes in due course.\" He brushed a film of perspiration from his brow, then looked at her again. \"But something is wrong. You seem more agitated about this surrender than I have ever seen you before. Why is that?\"\n\nShe had told no one of her proposal to Turlogan. Neither had the Shirron divulged the secret. She mumbled, \"This may be your first war, pup, but it is my final one. I want an end to it before I am gone.\"\n\n\"I have known you too long to accept that answer. Something else is happening. There is some personal conflict boiling between you and my father. It is plain to see.\"\n\nShe glanced down at the soldiers in the mountain pass. \"Turlogan and I have always butted wills. We are two very old goats. This matter is no different.\"\n\n\"You should not lie to your future chieftain.\"\n\n\"And you should mind your own garden before you root around in someone else's! Your father and I shall tend our t relationship as we see fit. You, young buck, need to prune the extra branches from your own.\"\n\nHe lifted his chin and glowered. \"What are you suggesting?\"\n\n\"Simply that you make a fool of yourself and everyone else by pursuing two women. You are betrothed to Tekmhat. You must break off with Toria or break off the engagement. Your passion is not long enough to stretch between them both.\"\n\n\"Now who is rooting in someone else's dirt?\"\n\n\"It is not a private affair, Venduss. You represent all of us in the alliance with Clan Eryem. I will not presume to tell you which girl to choose, but you must make a choice.\"\n\nWith a blink he grumbled, \"Why must I? Important men keep their mistresses.\"\n\n\"Toria is no mistress and never shall be. If you do not marry her, you will lose her. You know that.\"\n\n\"I do not accept it.\"\n\n\"Then you will suffer. In the end you sacrifice both love and honor.\"\n\nThe warrior stared for a moment at the gathering forces of Clan Kumar. He measured his breathing and said, \"Tekmhat will be an astonishing wife. But I cannot let Toria go. Not again, teacher.\"\n\n\"Behave like a man, Venduss! The time has come to display some backbone.\"\n\n\"If and when I am ready. Not before!\" He punched the rough bark of the mountain shrub. The leaves rustled very slightly. \"Mind your own agenda, Thulann.\"\n\nShe narrowed her one, old eye. \"Heed my advice or not. It is your decision. For my own part, I have made my choices. Presently I await the consequences.\" In the rocky pass, another group of soldiers arrived to fortify the wall. The clatter of their voices and weapons careened from the stone bluffs. \"There, you see? Fifty more of Tizan's clansmen. This pass has teeth like a nest of gulbani.\"\n\n\"I still say we can take it easily with a frontal attack. Tizan will blink.\"\n\n\"There is no need for such theater. We can find a less dangerous way. War is a craft, not a show.\"\n\nVenduss displayed a frown. \"Sometimes the path goes straight ahead.\" He crossed his arms and leaned back against a stone. As they watched the troops of Clan Dragham, Thulann saw his expression shift from careful observation to a glare that was distinctly predatory. She did not approve of his attitude, but she doubted her opinion held much sway.\n\nThat night she dreamt of Venus childhood years, when Warlord Turlogan was lusty and fierce. For fifteen summers the son of Kumar and Narah had occupied his parents' throne, during which time he had been folded and hammered like fine steel into the personification of wild confidence. He was as strong as his namesake, the great enemy of the Overlords; he led the other chieftains with a mighty voice and a mightier sword arm; he was ferociously loyal to his motherless son; and for the war master named Thulann, he was the sinful epitome of temptation. Her own marriage was a dismal memory, her children turned into enemies; she was alone with her career when he stood before her with eyes agleam and mouth agrin, the glisten of wine on his lips, his titan's body fit and lean and taut as a stalking predator. He came for her and she ran, because she wanted to be hunted. She never relented; in her heart she knew that he was capable of running her down; and she meant to savor every moment until the day he captured her honestly. She was not young but she was beautiful and terrible, feared in Garron, and only one man could hope to chase her. And he did so, and he caught her often, but she never let him hold her; for she knew the night would fall when she could not break loose and she would be his prisoner, captive in his eyes and body. The fire of their passion would burn Garron to the ground. The rest of the world would be cinders and ash.\n\nShe woke in a sweat with the sheets thrown from her bed. A pale face leaned over, calling her name. \"Thulann! Mistress! Wake up! It's starting!\"\n\nThe Way Master squinted and gained control of her senses. Outside her tent honked the clan's war trumpets. The troops were attacking the mountain pass. She sprang from her bed and shouted, \"Armor!\" as she leapt into her silk fighting clothes.\n\nDawn had not fully spread its wings, but the crest of the sun hurled copper beams at the stone wall blocking the pass. Thulann and Toria kicked their ridgebacks as they galloped toward the clamorous front line. The Way Master saw the banners of three siege battalions mounting the initial assault. They would secure the walls for the siege towers, after which the heavy fighters would plunge into the fray. Thulann scanned across a thousand soldiers for the identity of the second wave. When she saw their insignia, she ground her teeth. The Tarkosh guard would spearhead the main attack. Turlogan, of course, would fight at their head.\n\nHe had not hinted that this action would take place. He must have planned it carefully behind her back. Her distraction had been unforgivable and this morning the clan might pay the price.\n\nThulann halted her mount in a swirl of dust. They had arrived at a spot on the parched ground that was unmarked but very tangible. It was the range boundary of the defensive artillery. Already the battleground was pitted with great wounds from spark stones hurled out of the crags. She and Venduss had mapped out the fortifications yesterday, so she was well aware of the ranges and positions of Clan Dragham's catapults and trebuchets. Turlogaris scout units were presently scaling the rock walls to eliminate them. Meanwhile, Clan Kumar's own artillery lined up at the boundary. Thulann galloped her ridgeback toward the huge stone throwers, with Toria close behind.\n\nShe dismounted beside the first trebuchet she reached. The enormous machine was a frame of timbers lashed with tarry rope. It had been erected during the night, according to standard protocol, but the crew of thirty showed no sign of fatigue. They sang hearty chants as they loaded another huge spark stone into the scoop, then unleashed the fifty-foot throwing arm. A sound like a gale wind roared from the swirling timber. The great arm flung the stone as if it were a pebble. The missile shrank from sight as it sailed toward the slopes. Its impact was marked by a burst of smoke and a blossom of electrical discharge. The sound arrived moments later.\n\nThulann motioned the crew to halt while she climbed to the spotter's platform. An engineer greeted her with a salute. She took from him a long spyglass. The contraption was prized booty from the Technocrats, one of their few devices that endured more than a week without replacement parts. She peered through the array of lenses to get a better look at the front ranks. Under the banner of the Tarkosh guard she discovered the Shirron. He sat under an armored shelter, safe from Dragham archers until his attack commenced. But Thulann did not see Venduss. She handed back the spyglass and hurried to ground level.\n\n\"We must not delay,\" she told Toria as they climbed into their saddles. \"I want to go into those cliffs on the left.\"\n\n\"I thought you were supposed to fight beside the Shirron.\"\n\n\"He does not appear to want me as part of the main attack.\"\n\n\"That's not necessarily unflattering.\"\n\n\"Leave it,\" grumbled the Juka. \"Venduss is not with him, either. I think I know why. When we mapped the bluffs yesterday we discussed a hidden pathway that would be ideal to take a small force unseen into the pass. There.\" She pointed to a slither of shadows in the rocks a quarter mile beside the defensive wall. \"I believe that is where Venduss has gone.\" The redhead ruffled her brow. \"Mistress, that's underneath their catapults, in the strike path of our own artillery. It'd be suicide to go through there.\"\n\n\"That is what makes it ideal. They will not expect enemies to use that route while the stones are falling.\"\n\n\"But even if he survives, he can't get more than a dozen men through at a time. Why would Venduss bother?\"\n\n\"For the same reason that we shall bother. Because on the other side of that path is a clear route to Tizan's wall. And in less than an hour Turlogan will be climbing that wall and swimming through an ocean of spears and swords and arrows. He might have some use for assistance from unexpected quarters.\"\n\nToria flinched as the giant trebuchet launched another spark stone boulder. The rush of sound was jarring. Seconds later the boulder crashed against the distant mountainside, exploding in an electric blast that toppled a landslide of stones bigger than herself. She raked small fingers through her mane of curls. \"Yeah, he'll be in a heap of danger, hey? Good thing we'll be along.\"\n\nThey skirted the battlefield to reach the rubble-strewn base of the mountain. On foot they crept among boulders and scrub brush until they reached the tiny path. It crossed under a ridge of stone for several yards, then dipped down to a level out of sight of both the open desert and the pass. Already the ground was littered with charred rocks thrown from artillery craters in the cliff face above them. They paused while another boulder whizzed overhead. It smashed against the mountain and rained heavy stones onto the pathway ahead.\n\nThulann handed Toria a small shield and strapped another to her own forearm. The minstrel looked incredulously at the wooden disk. \"What happens if we get trapped by rocks?\"\n\nThe Way Master shrugged. \"I rely upon you to tell me that. You have been buried before. I have not.\"\n\nThe minstrel smirked and crooned:\n\n\u2003\"When you are buried, and can't see the sun,\n\n\u2003Cast off your worries and try to have fun!\n\n\u2003Sing with the maggots and dance with the worms!\n\n\u2003You might as well rot on your own bloody terms!\"\n\nThey dashed along the pathway with urgent stealth. Each of them clutched a vial of healing potion in her shield hand. Within a few seconds the world shook and a rain of boulders crashed upon them. They whisked their shields overhead but the relentless blows hammered them to the ground. Thulann felt her ribs and one of her ankles crumple. The pain ripped her like knives. She swallowed her potion and the agony ceased. She heard Toria cursing as she did the same. When they proceeded, their pace was quickened. Then the whoosh of another boulder sounded overhead and they pressed against the rock face. The impact occurred behind them. They had taken two more steps when the next explosion tore through the cliff. Thulann's skull flashed with heat and the sunlight vanished. After a span of darkness she felt her fingers moving. She pushed outward. Stones fell away from her. Daylight returned. She coughed from the dust and gulped her second healing potion. Then she crawled from the rubble to find Toria pinned to the ground, her legs flattened under a slate of rock. The girl's green eyes lay open as wide as coins, her mouth trembling in horror. A crystal vial lay inches from her fingers.\n\n\"Great Mother,\" murmured Thulann. She crouched down and leaned her back against the rock. For a few seconds she chanted into a trance of the Way, then shoved her legs to lift. The huge rock slid from the girl's mangled legs. Thulann's back spasmed. She poured the healing potion onto Toria's tongue. When the girl crawled to her feet she pressed against the Way Master like a frightened child.\n\n\"Come,\" said Thulann, \"we are almost halfway there.\"\n\nAround a blind corner they stumbled upon a scene of carnage. An enormous slab of rock, twenty feet on a side, had separated from the mountain. It rested at an angle against the wall. Half a dozen corpses lay crushed where it landed. They had all died instandy. Thulann's heart fell cold when she recognized the livery of Tarkosh guardsmen. But Venduss was not among them, and so she whispered a prayer and moved on. There was no courage without risk. They faced that truth themselves.\n\nThey squeezed through the dark, narrow hole between the slab and the cliff. Two more rockslides pounded over them, but the slab gave them shelter. On the other side they were yards from safe ground. They wasted no time in crossing.\n\nThey had entered into a stone crevice that paralleled the mountain pass. A hundred yards ahead it joined the main corridor. The sounds of battle echoed from the cliffs. They crouched behind a swatch of scrub and caught their breaths. Their armor and clothes were a bloody mess. By habit Thulann checked the healing potions she had brought. Inside the leather bag on her belt, the stout crystal vials had been shattered by falling rocks. She licked a tingling drop from her glove and muttered, \"Conserve your healing, child. Mine is gone.\"\n\nThe human let out a whimpering sigh. \"I have one left. Let's hope we don't need it to get back out.\" Then she jerked her head and mouthed, \"Did you hear a voice?\"\n\nThey scrambled up a low slope behind them and discovered a Dragham soldier kneeling on a high ledge. His back was turned to them. He seemed to be watching something below. Thulann dispatched him noiselessly and they peered over the edge to see what was happening.\n\nFifteen feet below, the path they had followed rounded another bend. In an open area between hillsides was a band of nine Dragham warriors surrounding a smaller group. A pair of Tarkosh guardsmen braced shoulder-to-shoulder, their bow-spears jutting outward. With them stood two athletic figures, a tall Kumar officer and a female Initiate of the Way. Bloodstains covered the healer's white robe. Thulann grumbled under her breath, \"Venduss brought along his bride. How gallant of him. Warlord Savan will be ecstatic to hear about it.\"\n\n\"I guess I spoiled him. Who's that talking to them?\"\n\nA Dragham officer addressed Venduss. Some sort of parley was occurring. Thulann stared for a few moments longer and then exhaled sharply. \"By the Hand of Honor, I know that man. He comes from Ruhn. His name is Way Master Amhet.\"\n\n\"A Way Master? That's really bad news. Look, Venduss is going to fight him.\"\n\nThulann winced. \"Venduss is going to lose. Prepare yourself to jump down.\"\n\nThe two warriors clashed swords in single combat. Ven-duss was the larger man but Way Master Amhet hurled two strokes for every one of his. The youth lurched and tumbled around his middle-aged opponent. His armor striped with cuts and blood. Then he leapt into a handstand kick that toppled the Way Master backward. Amhet of Ruhn cartwheeled to his feet, then sprang up at an impossible height. His longsword cleaved down into the leather seam of Venus shoulder armor. The steel plunged deeper and deeper. The Way Master landed nimbly as his opponent struggled to remain upright, though the effort looked futile.\n\nThulann's breath caught as she slithered over the side and dropped soundlessly to the earth. Her game leg protested the landing.\n\nA bright sparkle tore across the path. As Venduss fell to his knees, Tekmhat loosed a glittering spell that engulfed her injured fiance. When one of the Dragham soldiers thrust his spear at the healer, he let out a sudden cry and clutched his throat. The hilt of a knife protruded from his gorget.\n\nToria touched down beside Thulann and twirled another throwing knife in her fingers. In her right hand crackled her enchanted cutlass, dripping magical sparks into the dust. She bared her teeth at the soldiers. \"Let's talk this out, hey?\"\n\n\"Stop!\" bellowed Way Master Amhet to his men. The sol-diers held their weapons in check. The officer flicked Venus blood from his weapon and straightened his posture. \"By the crows of Garron. Way Master Thulann. This is an unanticipated privilege. I greet you with the utmost respect and honor.\"\n\n\"I greet you with respect and honor, Amhet of Ruhn. Kindly help my student to rise.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Without looking down he offered a hand to Venduss, who was reeling to his feet. The youth grimaced and accepted the help. He nodded tersely at Thulann. His face was scarred with frustration.\n\nThulann called out, \"Tekmhat! Heal that Dragham dog.\" She pointed to the soldier with the knife in his throat. As the teenager complied, Thulann stood before her fellow Way Master. Her body required coaxing to its full height. She wished she had brought her walking staff, though it probably would have perished in the rockslides. \"Way Master, we must pass this way. Stand aside.\"\n\n\"Warlord Tizan doubted anyone would use this path. He commands great perseverance but too often he underestimates the trait in others. I do not share that weakness.\" He pressed his palms together before his chest. \"With respect, I shall not let you pass without conflict.\"\n\nThulann nodded. \"Then I believe this is an engagement you and I can settle between us, if you think it warrants the trouble.\"\n\n\"Do 1! What swordmaster does not dream of this opportunity? But again, with respect, you look somewhat haggard. Are you prepared?\"\n\nShe smiled darkly. \"For you, I am prepared.\"\n\nThe soldiers of both clans watched in wonder as the two masters bowed to each other. Amhet met Thulann's gaze and said, \"My last victory was Timbesk of Jamark in a White Duel, two seasons ago. She lost an arm.\"\n\n\"My last victory was Bahrok of Garron in a Black Duel this season. We both died, but he yielded first.\"\n\nThey bowed again. Each of them began a slow ritual dance. Thulann breathed into a trance and her joints and muscles remembered flawless moves. Her mind flooded with a lifetime of training. The feeling was exhilarating. She swept into a soft mental flow in preparation for the Duel of the Way. Unlike other contests, this one engaged particular rules that limited it to Masters of the Way. The battle was one of strategy and execution. It followed a strict sequence of actions. In trading accounts of their victories they had negotiated the pace and character of the fight. By announcing her defeat of Bahrok, Thulann had asserted the magnitude of her stamina and thereby warned Amhet against a protracted encounter. In turn he had conveyed to her that he was a highly mobile duelist. She knew to keep the contact tight. Thus had they agreed upon a very close and very quick engagement. Each then calculated how best to defeat the other. The ritual dance was a portrayal of the moves they would perform in the course of the duel. Thulann watched Amhet reveal exactly how he would try to kill her. She offered him the same courtesy.\n\nWhen the dances were complete, they bowed again. They had no secrets between them. All that remained was execution. The sensation was one of overwhelming liberation.\n\nIt was almost enough for Thulann to forget that Turlogan was rushing into danger.\n\nThey faced one another, swords sheathed. They monitored unseen currents of interaction. Then they struck.\n\nSeven pure metallic rings leapt in the air like birds. Thulann finished on one knee, her head bent, her sword flush to the pebbled ground. She was aware of dust clouding around her, filtering into her nostrils.\n\nBehind her came two thumps, one from Amhet's body, the other from his head.\n\nAfter a heavy silence followed the cries of the Dragham soldiers. Then their weapons clattered against those of the Tarkosh guards. In a whirl Thulann launched herself from the ground and streaked into the midst of the enemy. Her blade flew by scent and sound and the tactile impressions of breath and footsteps and tender, parting flesh. The tang of blood stirred in the air as the last Dragham soldier thudded at her feet. Then she rose proudly and took a step forward.\n\nShe stumbled and fell to her hands and knees. She blinked at the sting of dust, but it was no use. Darkness was everywhere, a furtive tapestry over the world.\n\nAmhet's first stroke had sliced open her eye. She was blind.\n\nA glorious pain scintillated before her face. When she looked up, Tekmhat was gazing down at her with the remnants of a spell crackling between her fingers. The girl's expression was one of awe. Thulann smiled her appreciation for the healing. Her chest unknotted in a distinctly uncomfortable way.\n\nVenduss helped her to stand. \"Thank you, teacher. Are you all right?\"\n\nShe blew out a very long, very relieved breath. \"I am a grand fool.\" She did not look at Amhet's corpse as she wiped and sheathed her sword. \"Let us keep moving. The battle does not wait for us and the object of my folly is in no less danger for this little skirmish. Toria, come here and let an old woman lean on you.\" The human rushed to her side. Thulann noticed a glance pass between Toria and Tekmhat, and another between the minstrel and Venduss; but the moment disappeared as the group hurried in the direction of the clamor of battle.\n\nWhen they crested the rise that overlooked Tizan's wall, they found brace-mounted crossbows and sacks of quarrels resting on the ground. Way Master Amhet's men must have been posted here as archers. Thulann, Venduss and Toria each loaded a crossbow while the two guardsmen nocked their bow-spears. Tekmhat flattened in the dust as the group watched a brutal melee unfold on the wall, twenty feet below them and twenty more away. Clan Kumar's wooden siege towers were fastened to the stone barricade by many steel hooks. The siege battalion pushed back the defenders with long pikes and bladed polearms. The Dragham soldiers sprayed flaming oil atop the structures and just as quickly the healers of Kumar doused the fires with water magic. A torrent of arrows slashed the noisy air, streaming in both directions. The roar of clashing warriors fed itself with a deafening frenzy.\n\nThen war trumpets blared. The army of Clan Kumar surged up the wooden towers and plunged into the sea of defenders. The Tarkosh guardsmen leading the charge overmatched the Dragham warriors, though sheer numbers slowed their advance to excruciating inches. And in the midst of the chaos stood one giant far above the others.: Shirron Turlogan wheeled his father's great two-handed sword as if it were completely weightless. Enemy Juka flew aside in swift, bloody ranks. The warlord's face was a mask of berserk rage as he carved into the horde of brawny warriors, the majority of whom were less than half his age. Yet his fury was greater than theirs. Within seconds his guardsmen had eased away to give him more room, as he had no use for their protection. The defenders shrank back from him as well and he seized every foot of the wall they surrendered. When he let out a furious war cry, Thulann's spirit leapt. \"Look at the magnificent idiot!\" she shouted. \"The Great Mother herself would melt in his heat!\"\n\nAn arrow sprouted from his chestplate, but he did not acknowledge it. A second arrow followed, then a terrible stream of them, one after another, eight or nine in the span of a second. He bellowed and staggered back. When enemy soldiers rushed forward he chopped them down in mighty strokes; but his stance was rapidly failing. Thulann and her companions fired their heavy missiles into the crowd. Then she gathered her legs to leap to his aid, when a column of glittering light spouted from the Kumar ranks. The healing spell from the siege battalion splashed the Shirron and restored his strength. The arrows dropped from his body. He renewed his assault with even greater vigor. Thulann noticed an awful kind of glee in his eyes. She spat a laugh and slapped Venduss on the rear. \"That stone-headed pter-anx does not need our help! But neither should he steal the glory. Lower this frail old crone to the wall and let us see if we can match his body count!\"\n\nIn the pounding sun of afternoon, deep inside the throat of the pass, Warlord Tizan sounded the retreat. Turlogan rode his ridgeback in the lead as Clan Kumar chased the Dragham forces down the long, rubble-thick corridor. At the other end the enemy Juka clambered aboard longboats that bobbed at the edge of the sea. They fled to the cheers of the triumphant army. Their triangular sails shrank into the distance, but Thulann's gaze fell elsewhere. To the south lay a wide strip of barren land bounded on one side by the ocean and on the other by the talon foothills of the high, grey mountains. This was the ground they must secure for the New Britannian landing. They would be woefully vulnerable to attacks from the sea, yet they needed to hold it for only two weeks. By that time, if the Great Mother willed it, the surrender would be finalized. She could not imagine what might happen after that. Wars she understood, espionage she had mastered, intrigue constituted her daily affairs; but peace was something that had always eluded her. It seemed a daunting proposition, though one that made her heart beat quickly. She had always enjoyed new challenges. This might be the most difficult yet." + }, + { + "title": "The Dagger", + "text": "Into a lair at the top of a mountain did Sir Lazaro lead his ten knights. There they awakened the ancient wyrm Malgotha and set themselves to killing it. One by one did the serpent devour the brave knights, and one by one did each strike a grievous wound before falling. In the end only Sir Lazaro remained, trapping the wounded creature in its cave.\n\nBut when he raised his magic sword, the Talon of Covetous, to render the felling blow, Malgotha the Wyrm begged him to stay his wrath. \"I am a human cursed by sorcery with an immortal form and a terrible hunger. If you kill me I shall rise again. If you help me remove the curse, the world shall be free of my terror.\" Sir Lazaro agreed to help the foul creature. The moment he did so the wyrm cried a tear that transformed into a golden heart. And Malgotha returned to the shape of a beautiful, grey-eyed maiden. On that day did the Virtue of Compassion move a brave knight to pity and thus rid the world of a monster.\n\nThe tunnel was a bramble of twisted machinery, shredded and heaped with savage force. Montenegro held up his spark lantern and whistled at the scope of the destruction. The slanted corridor must have once been a nexus of pipelines and great, oily axles, or so he surmised from the ruined metal shapes that clogged the fifteen-foot tunnel. Plumbing and mechanics had been tom from the walls and jammed together with deliberate intent. At some time in the past, someone had sealed off this passage. The result was imposing. The scene reminded him of an unthinkable rat's nest.\n\nA collection of robed men examined the wall of debris. Among them worked Brother Barghast. His jowled, green face was animated with thought. Montenegro stepped beside him and commented, \"You're going to need an ocean of restorative fluid to repair this little corner of the den.\"\n\nThe Juka nodded. \"There is no recovering these machines, but the Order of Engineers assures me that the war engines will function without them. The pumps we repaired do not service these conduits. A second circuit of pipes is in place here.\" He tilted his head and explained, as if he still pondered the theory, \"It seems, Cavalier, that the tunnels go much deeper than we expected. There is a complex of machines below us that serves a purpose or purposes we have not yet fathomed.\"\n\nThe knight grimaced at the thought, then muttered, \"I don't think they shall be functional in the near term.\" He touched a bent shaft that looked like a pipe, only to discover it was solid iron. \"By my Humility, that is a terrific bit of mayhem. Is it more handiwork of Sartorius's dreadnought?\"\n\n\"This is more than a dreadnought can do. Mechanical strength alone will not suffice.\" The Mathematician pointed to a strip of blackened steel. \"Do you notice the scorching? This metal was softened with heat before it was ripped apart. No dreadnought nor juggernaut can produce a fire that intense.\"\n\n\"So Sartorius has built a new kind of gear-boned monster, with a furnace in its gullet.\"\n\n\"No. One cannot construct so powerful a machine in a tinker's workshop. It needs factory resources. That would require the complicity of Lector Braun and the Engineers, and the odds are considerable that His Excellency would have mentioned such a project to us.\"\n\nThe knight chuckled. \"Braun did seem rather eager to stick a dagger in Sartorius's belly. But if the Chosen didn't do this, then it must have happened long ago. Before the Cataclysm. No one's been down here since then.\"\n\nBrother Barghast sighed. \"I fear this was done only recently.\"\n\n\"How recendy?\"\n\n\"Since we entered the tunnels. Not more than two days ago. Probably when our automatons were fighting the dreadnought.\"\n\nMontenegro widened his eyes. \"You're saying whatever did this is still down here with us?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. It is probable that the creature or creatures remain in the deeper levels of the complex.\"\n\n\"How can you be sure?\"\n\n\"Because this tunnel was sealed off from the other side.\" He clasped his forearms together and stared up at the massive, tangled blockage. \"Something does not want us to penetrate its lair. I believe it is prudent that we heed its wishes. There are many automatons constructed by the Overlords that still lurk in the pits of Logosia. We do ourselves no benefit to test their wrath.\"\n\n\"I should say not.\" He gaped at the mangled machinery for a few seconds longer, then said, \"Do what you think is wisest, Barghast. I shall not be here to help you. I leave tonight for the north. Lector Gaff has completed the formal application for surrender and Khyber and I are going to deliver it to Thulann. We'll soon find out how smart Turlogan is.\"\n\nThe Mathematician bowed his head. \"The Machine subsumes all outcomes, violent or peaceful. Yet the weaker half of my soul prays for your success.\"\n\nThe knight smiled. \"As do we all. The brigade should do fine without us for a week. We're well entrenched. Sartorius's troops are still loitering on the surface like nervous children. I doubt they will move in before we return.\"\n\n\"We shall manage in your absence. The first war engines should be functional in a few days. Once that occurs, we shall easily answer any hostility from Lector Sartorius.\"\n\n\"I'm here to ask about a different machine, though. Have you begun the latest modifications to my horse?\"\n\n\"My apprentices are constructing the parts, but we have not yet applied them to the automaton.\"\n\n\"Good, then I can take it with me. I have no mad wish to ride a kite skid again.\"\n\n\"You should learn anyway. That automaton was supposed to be a temporary solution. It is slow and your 'improvements' will make it slower still.\"\n\nMontenegro laughed. \"We're building a warhorse, my friend, not a racehorse. Have no fear. Once this business is over I'll take the machine home to New Britannia and not bother you again.\"\n\n\"I shall miss the challenge. It is among my finest work.\" The Juka blinked and said, \"And I shall miss you as well, Cavalier, after you go. I suppose we shall not convince you to remain in Khyber's service.\"\n\n\"Not with a tower of gold and Pikas' head impaled at the top. The green hills of Cove have never stopped calling me. I have a life to win back.\" He smirked and added, \"And a wife to conquer, as well, I suppose.\"\n\nBrother Barghast stared at him. \"Sister Raveka must not leave the Order. You are aware of that fact.\"\n\nHe boxed the Technocrat on the arm. \"We can fight about it later. Walk with Virtue, Baighast.\"\n\n\"And you as well, noble savage.\"\n\nThe knight chuckled and turned away. He exited the shredded ruins of ancient Overlord machinery, a huge, jagged whorl of rusty metal. The devastation was sobering but the end result was desirable. All of this foul technology from darker times ought to be crushed. He would be glad to leave it behind and return to the woods and meadows of New Britannia. He craved a draught of pure, silken air and the organic sensations of home.\n\nThe compound outside the Shirron's pavilion was alight with celebration of the day's victory. So many flames burned on lamps and braziers and firestacks that the tips of the ocean waves shone gold instead of pearl. The chime and tinkle of percussive Garron music danced atop the rush of sea wind. Long tables brimmed with food and dark wines. Great Jukan bull carcasses roasted over pits of coals, heaving their savory smoke across the jubilant scene. Overhead the banner of Shirron Turlogan fluttered and snapped with excitement.\n\nA bustle of smartly clad servants attended the whims of the revelers, who comprised the officers and war masters of Clan Kumar. The festivities were raucous with tales of the day, as drunken warriors leapt about to demonstrate their achievements in battle. Turlogan himself participated in the exchange. In dramatic fashion he mimed with stalks of vegetables the pattern of arrows that had stuck into his chest. Then he threw the stalks aside and showed the crowd how he had cut down the Dragham defenders. A cup of wine sloshed in his hand, thirsty for frequent refills.\n\nThulann sat at the head table wearing a shawl of the finest, gold-sprinkled silk. The voluminous fabric covered her head, one edge sweeping in a graceful curve to conceal her missing right eye. Toria had washed the Juka's cloud-pale hair and braided it for several hours. Her gown was belted with a silver cord. The embroidered fabric draped with luxuriant weight. A ruby glistened on her brow. She watched the animated Shirron with a quiet smile on her face. This was a Turlogan she had not seen in many years. He was acting like a child in the throes of victory. Ritual propriety lay trampled in the rush to celebrate, and yet this boisterous display was itself something of a tradition. Warriors sang the joys of life, and never more so than after battle.\n\nWhen Turlogan wheeled to face her, she broadened her smile. He leaned over the table and kissed her hand, then grinned, \"My dearest, tell them how you lost your beautiful eye this morning.\"\n\nThe officers goaded her into complying, though she spoke from the comfort of her chair. Briefly she recounted her introduction to Way Master Amhet and then described the swordstroke that had landed on her face. \"He cut my eye straight through like a grape with his first slice. Luckily Tekmhat gave me a fresh one from her bag of spells. But I felled six of their warriors without the luxury of sight.\"\n\n\"Five!\" protested Venduss, slamming down his goblet. \"The guardsmen slew one apiece and I killed two of them.\"\n\n\"You only thought you killed two. My blade is swifter than your eye, suckling, and even when I am blind I see more than you.\"\n\nThe crowd broke into laughter and Venduss threw cheese at them. Then General Fekhet rose from his chair and lifted his wine cup high. \"I rejoice that you are not blind, Way Master. We should be lost without your vision. Great Mother watch over brave Tekmhat and the wizards of Water Magic.\"\n\nThe festival murmured its agreement. A slip of calm invaded the seaside as everyone drank a swallow of wine. Thulann drank two herself and said, \"Indeed. Though I confess, I am not certain I approve of healing magic in all cases. It often makes us sloppy, do you not agree?\"\n\nTurlogan laughed and cupped her cheek. \"We should all be as sloppy as you, my love.\"\n\n\"But Thulann,\" asked Fekhet, \"what happened to the Way Master you fought? Did you slay him?\"\n\n\"In the end I removed both of his eyes, with a little room to spare.\" She dragged her hand edgewise across her throat. A golden choker twinkled in the action. The officers barked with laughter. \"Honor the name of Amhet of Ruhn. His skill was a lesson even to me.\"\n\nThe warriors raised their cups again and toasted a fallen enemy.\n\nThe Shirron cast his reddened eyes around the compound. \"Where is my daughter-to-be, anyway? I have not seen her tonight. Did her father spirit her away?\"\n\nVenduss shook his head and smiled. \"She is close. As an Initiate of the Way she does not indulge in wine, so I presume she has excused herself from the noise.\"\n\n\"I shall find her,\" said Thulann as she stood with the aid of her walking staff. \"I am overfull from the clamor myself. You swordsmen with your bleating voices overwhelm my delicate constitution.\" The officers laughed and hooted at the jibe, but none of them dared to throw food.\n\nShe walked away from the merriment and into the calmer shadows behind Turlogan's pavilion. The ocean breeze swept over her with a cool, salty touch. Her loose clothes waved and flowed in perfect arcs, evidence of the expense with which the Shirron adorned her. But she rarely wore his gifts of finery. Their appeal was mostly fleeting. She only did so tonight by way of apology to him. She held herself responsible for the way he had neglected her this morning. She had not approved of the frontal assault. Her demeanor had given him no room for negotiation and so he had not informed her of the dawn attack. Yet the result of the action was an easy victory. Warlord Tizan had not counted on such quick aggression. He was caught unprepared. Clan Dragham lost a hundred men. Clan Kumar lost fewer than forty. The evidence suggested that Turlogan's very presence in the thick of battle had demoralized the enemy and hastened their retreat. And so she owed an apology to Venduss, as well. He had been correct yesterday afternoon. Sometimes the path did go straight ahead.\n\nBut she would have to wait for the celebration to subside before offering Turlogan her apology in earnest.\n\nShe clasped both hands to her steel-encased walking staff. Pausing in the windy calm, she attended her pointed ears. She made out two female voices laughing. She tracked the sound behind Venus tent, where she discovered an unlikely scene. Toria sat cross-legged atop a wooden barrel. The girl wore fine clothes of her own, a filmy dress and sari acquired from a trader weeks ago. The outfit was disheveled, immodest. In her lap teetered a bottle of wine that looked mostly empty. The minstrel fought a spasm of giggles as she reached out to pat the shoulder of her companion. Kneeling on the ground in front of her was Tekmhat of Clan Eryem in a white Initiate's robe. The Jukan girl was laughing as well. Thulann heard the smack of wine in her voice. The jubilant pair gathered their self-control and began to sing in unison:\n\n\u2003\"Now pull, bully boys, and I'll tell you a lot\n\n\u2003'BoMt the wealthy young lassie they call Tekmhat!\n\n\u2003Her lust was unbound but her virtue policed,\n\n\u2003But she never had nothin' on Bawdewyn the Beast!\n\n\u2003So hey-holly-hoyo, now pull, bully-boy-os!\n\n\u2003'Twas never another like Bawdewyn the Beast!\"\n\nTheir composure collapsed into breathless laughter. Thulann recognized the shanty sung by the crew of Captain Bawdewyn's brigantine Menagerie. Toria drank from the bot-de again and Tekmhat followed suit. Then they prepared themselves and attempted a second verse:\n\n\u2003\"Now pull bully boys, and I'll tell you a story\n\n\u2003'Bout the wee little minstrel they call Tiny Tori!\n\n\u2003She'll give you a rise like a fistful of yeast,\n\n\u2003But she never had nothin' on Bawdewyn the Beast!\n\n\u2003So hey-holly-hoyo, now pull, bully-boy-os!\n\n\u2003'Twas never another like Bawdewyn the Beast!\"\n\nWhen they completed the song Thulann struck from the shadows. She cracked the end of her staff against the barrel, toppling it. Toria squealed and thumped onto her back, sandaled feet thrown high in the air. The minstrel watched the barrel as it rolled across the rocky ground, bumped past the limit of Turlogan's compound and splashed into the tossing breakers. The girl doubled over and choked with laughter.\n\nTekmhat's reaction was precisely the opposite. Her eyes followed the length of the staff until she saw Thulann standing in the gloom. The Initiate paled with terror and hurled her face and hands to the ground at the Way Master's feet. Thulann nudged her and growled, \"To your tent, filthy cub. Pray your judgment comes from me and not your father.\" Tekmhat reeled off into the encampment, her face a twist of raw panic.\n\nThulann glowered at the sodden Toria, who lay on her back and giggled. Her freckled face had turned scarlet and her lips were fastened into a smirk. \"Well, Mistress, I guess this means you won't invite me to the party, hey?\"\n\n\"I may well invite you to leave my service! What in the name of Kumar's honor were you trying to accomplish here?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" grunted the human as she struggled to sit up. Her copious hair fell into her face. She blew at a lock of it and laughed. \"Nothing, honestly. We were just getting to know each other.\"\n\nThulann growled, \"If this is some amateurish attempt to disgrace that girl\u2014\"\n\n\"No! Great Mother, Thulann, not everyone connives like you do, hey?\" The comment jabbed the Way Master deeply, but before she could retort Toria continued, \"Tekmhat came to me and asked how she could repay me for saving her life this morning. Can you imagine that? I mean, what was I supposed to say? So I told her she could sit down and share a drink with me. I thought maybe we could break the ice. I don't know. Work things out or... I don't know.\"\n\nThe old Juka regulated her angry breaths. \"You made a mistake, Toria. Tekmhat is not like you. She is a creature of tradition and ritual. She has no command of her world or herself. One trespass like this could ruin her life. Do you understand the damage you may have done?\"\n\nThe girl looked away and said nothing more. Thulann grumbled her pique, but did not shape it into further reprimand. Toria was too inebriated to listen. With a sniff she said, \"Take yourself away from here until you acquire a more respectable disposition. Perhaps you can celebrate with the Tarkosh guard. Their manner of revelry is more closely aligned to your own.\" The statement was not an insult but a genuine assessment of the facts. The minstrel seemed to take it as such.\n\nWhen Thulann turned away the human called out, \"You look beautiful tonight, Mistress. I mean that.\"\n\nShe did not look back. \"Thank you, child.\"\n\n\"Treat him well, Thulann.\"\n\nThe Way Master brought a crockery jar into Tekmhat's humble tent. The girl was chanting mantras of the Way, tear tracks staining her cheeks. Thulann found a cup and dipped warm tea from the jar. She handed it to the frightened teenager. \"Drink this. It will take the edge off the wine and help you sleep. You must also swallow five goblets of water tonight or your skull will split to pieces by morning. Do not forget. And hide your chamber pot. It can betray you. I shall come around later to collect it. I expect to find you asleep by then.\"\n\nThe Initiate was not yet proficient enough in Water Magic to eliminate the alcohol from her own blood. The fact must have mortified her, for she accepted Thulann's medicine as if it were an antidote to Logosian poison. She bowed her head quickly. \"I am unworthy of your mercy, Way Master.\"\n\n\"None of us are worthy, little insect, but we must pass the days nonetheless. Now hurry and drink. You are not my most important business tonight.\"\n\nThulann found Turlogan standing outside the door to his pavilion. He had thrown off the sleeves of his embroidered caftan, so that the garment draped in pleats over his belt. Above the hips the warrior's body was bare. She saw him in silhouette, his striking outline traced by the backlight of a lamp. To the Jukan woman he looked like temptation personified. Her body shivered. She crept behind him and snaked her arms around his waist and in an instant familiar warmth passed between them. He laid his giant hands over hers. She felt as much as heard his gruff moan of pleasure.\n\n\"Take me inside, old man,\" she murmured. \"I have had enough of the world tonight.\"\n\nThey were alone under the drapery of his opulent tent. He kissed her hand and opened a wooden cabinet, from which he selected another bottle of wine. As he poured two cups he said over his shoulder, \"Did you find Tekmhat?\"\n\nThulann leaned against the center pole and adjusted the lilting drape of her shawl. \"I did, poor child. She is cowering in her bed. One drop of wine and she fears being burned at the stake. I considered it, of course, but I thought I might save the effort until the weather turns cold.\"\n\nThe towering Shirron handed her a cup. \"I shall forget you said that if Savan comes to call. He need not know how rotten an influence we are. He coddles that girl, but she is stronger than he wants her to be.\"\n\n\"Strength without wisdom is a recipe for hardship. You should know that well enough, my darling.\" She chuckled, then attempted to banish her thoughts of Venus tangled relationships. She failed. The matter weighed upon her. She found solace in Turlogan's glistening eyes. After a sip she laughed, \"Great Mother, explain to me why some people dream of being young again? Youth is not a blessing. It is a disease. Time and again I have watched its ravages. It is a pox that irritates the flesh and enfeebles the senses. I spent a great deal of energy surviving my youth. I have no desire to be reinfected.\"\n\nThe warrior grinned, sly and askance. \"And what shall you do now that you have escaped into healthier decades?\"\n\nShe dangled the wine cup between two fingers, stepping away from the tent pole. Her exquisite gown swirled as she neared him. \"I believe I shall find an old man who has taken the measure of the world. I have no use for childish groping. I want results.\"\n\nHe stepped back and raised his hands. \"No. Stand there in the firelight. I am not finished looking at you.\"\n\nShe stopped and tilted her head. \"The landscape is pleasant to see, Shirron, but to conquer it you must walk the hills and dales.\"\n\n\"I thought I might avoid a frontal assault this time.\" She laughed without inhibition. With a heavy stare he watched her and said, \"You were like a mountain to me once, you know, when I was a boy and you were my mother's fetching young spy. You were so grand I could scarcely see all of you at once. But I knew I had to climb to the top. And I did. By the Hand of Honor, I did! And look at you now. You are my treasure. The years have tom down your clifls and crags and all that remains is this diamond at the center, bright and keen and harder than any steel. You dazzle me, my love, now more than ever.\"\n\n\"You shall recite a poem next, proclaiming the virtues of my bodily components. I can hear the winds building.\"\n\nHe tilted down his head, aiming his squat horns in her direction. \"If I do, you shall listen in silence, my dear.\"\n\nShe raised her eyebrows. \"Ah, the wine sharpens your tongue. Perhaps you shall slit me open.\"\n\n\"I have dreamed for years of the sight before me. I have lain awake in the night with this vision over my head, like a phantom. If words leap from my mouth it is because they cannot He still any longer.\" He lifted one hand as if reaching for her, but rubbed his fingers together instead. She sensed a nervous tremble. Quickly he gulped another mouthful of wine. \"And I do apologize for the quantity of drink I have poured into my gullet. I speak more boldly when the room spins, and I must be bold to do what I have to do.\"\n\nShe stepped before him. Her fingertips tickled up the line of his abdomen. \"If you drink much more, old serpent, I wonder if you shall do anything at all.\"\n\n\"But that is the entirety of the challenge, you see,\" he said. His breath caught. She swore he stuttered. \"Because I do not intend to do anything with you tonight, nor any other night, despite everything in the world that you are to me.\"\n\nHer hand tingled against him. He could not have spoken the words she had heard. She squinted. \"Will you say that again, my love?\"\n\n\"No. Yes, I will. I must\u2014 I have decided\u2014\" He pushed her wrist aside and took a long step away. He stared at the richly decorated wall of the pavilion. \"I have decided to be your chieftain and your Shirron, but not your lover, Thulann. Not anymore. I am withdrawing my heart.\"\n\nHer body turned to ice. Her muscles responded like molasses. She rotated to face him but could not see his expression. \"I see. This is about the surrender, is it not?\"\n\nHis great fists clenched. \"Of course it is, that offer, that damned dagger you shoved into my heart! What else would compel me to this?\" Then he latched a scowl upon her and she wished that he had not. Her chest began to ache. \"For twenty years I begged you to marry me, Thulann. For twenty years our love looked forward. And now you tell me that this is what I was waiting for, this political trick, this sleight of hand. If I surrender, you will marry me. How splendid! At least you saved that card for something extremely important.\"\n\nShe reached for him, but he deflected her with a disdainful glance. Her mouth could not form the proper words. \"Great Mother. Turlogan. You know that was not my intention.\"\n\n\"I have spent a week in hell. Do you know that? I tried to hate you for it. I truly did. But damn my soul, I cannot. I adore you, Thulann, but I have made up my mind. I shall not dangle on your hooks any longer. You have always schemed ton my behalf and Garron is in your debt for it, but by the Great Mother you shall not scheme against me! I am not a pebble on a game board. You ruined everything when you tried to move me like one.\"\n\n\"That was never\u2014\"\n\n\"No! I do not want to hear your explanation. We have never muddied our feelings with words. Reality is as hard as stone and we cannot deny when it sits before us.\" He sucked a tremulous breath and entwined his fingers before him. With measured calm he stated, \"The invasion will go on, my dearest, and we shall not be married. That is my decision. You may leave the army if you think I have betrayed you. You may leave the clan if you hate me now. But whatever happens, you must leave my side. You must leave my side, Thulann.\"\n\nShe regained her breath and murmured, \"You owe me a chance to defend myself.\"\n\n\"No, I do not. Leave me, Thulann.\"\n\n\"You are drunk, Turlogan!\"\n\n\"Yes, I am! I could not do this any other way.\"\n\nHer face grew stern. \"I shall not go, old man!\"\n\n\"But you shall!\" The tremendous weight of his body swept toward her. His arms enfolded and plucked her off her feet. She found herself moving quickly toward the exit.\n\nIn shock she cried out, \"Great Mother! Turlogan! Forget what I said, forget the surrender, look at what you are doing!\" and then the night air surrounded her. He planted her gold-braided sandals on the hard ground and pushed her away from his tent. Perhaps the wine had sapped his control or perhaps it was sheer anger, but his irresistible strength hurled her backward until her balance vanished. She could have recovered but her attention was captured by the flutter of the pavilion entrance. It closed with a distinct snap. Then Thulann landed on her back, tearing some part of her billowing gown. The insistent ocean breeze lifted the shawl from her head and flung it away into the encampment. Passersby lunged forward in several small groups, gasping and calling her name, but no one came near. Fear tinged their voices.\n\nThulann opened her mouth to speak, but a choked silence emerged. She knew Turlogan was correct, of course. Nothing meaningful between them had ever involved words. All that mattered were their actions, those that had provoked him and those he had taken in response. The result was plain in the amber firelight, sprawled out on the rocky ground for the benefit of the gathering crowd. The crash of the ocean waves could not fill their gaping silence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "From atop the barren, moonlit crags, the ocean breakers looked like ranks of silver cavalry galloping ashore. Montenegro imagined steel-armored horseheads tossing in a frenzy. He was not prone to fantasy but nostalgia had captured his thoughts, though admittedly the feeling was bittersweet. In less than a week the New Britannian fleet would land within miles of here. The knights would come ashore in reality then. He was not sure how he might greet them.\n\n\"If the invasion continues,\" Brigadier Khyber had said to him, \"you must commit your intentions immediately. I would be more than satisfied to keep you in my company, but only if your motivations are clear. I have to trust you, Cavalier, or you must go.\"\n\n\"Then we'll spare no effort to stop the invasion,\" Montenegro had replied, \"because I have no wish to be your enemy.\"\n\nThe Technocrat had laughed. \"Don't lie. You would love to meet me on the battlefield. We would be spectacular enemies.\"\n\n\"That is the terrible truth,\" was his answer, \"and that is why we must not fail.\"\n\nNow he and Khyber and Master Enosh perched atop a coastal mountain. A squad of brigadesmen watched the perimeter of the scrubby plateau for signs of approaching Juka. Thousands of campfires scintillated on the beaches to the north, the sparkling might of Clan Kumar.\n\nThulann would arrive in an hour or two. She would bear the Shirron's response. In turn Montenegro would hand her a scroll that documented Lector Gaff's intent to negotiate a settlement. If all went well, they would effectively end the war tonight. A few days later Montenegro would meet the New Britannians as an unlikely, resurrected hero.\n\nAnd then he would pursue the Pact of Four until the last scrap of earth refused to harbor them.\n\n\"Montenegro, you could have at least drunk your draughts of invisibility and made this a challenge for me.\"\n\nThe windswept clearing sang a chorus of drawn steel. The brigadesmen leapt into a ring around Thulann, who stood, impossibly, a few feet behind Khyber. The officer himself crouched behind his shield, his mechanical-jawed gauntlet open wide to strike. The old Juka made no response except to lean motionless on a staff. Her textured Way Master's robe danced in the salty wind.\n\nAt her side stood the waifish Toria, dressed in loose Garronite clothes that were tied at the ankles and wrists. Her hair was cinched into a foxtail and her expression was restrained joy.\n\nMontenegro laughed and waved off the soldiers. \"Now that is the old woman I remember from the Vesper beaches. You've lost none of your skill, Thulann, though I am closing the gap between us.\" He shone a smile at Toria. \"Well, little thief, shall I embrace you or would Venduss and Bawdewyn fell me with jealous daggers?\"\n\nToria traded glances with Thulann and then sprang forward, throwing her arms around him. \"You may carry me away any time you want! I am yours forever, black ghost.\"\n\nHe gave her a squeeze. \"Perhaps I shall at that. You are less trouble than my present lady by a cataclysmic margin.\"\n\nShe wrapped her arm around his waist and giggled. \"I'll take that as a challenge, hey?\"\n\n\"And Thulann,\" he called out, \"tell me the news. I have never been good at reading your face and I am half as capable since you lost that eye.\"\n\n\"What is that scroll you carry?\"\n\nHe held up the metal tube. \"Lector GafF's truce, ready to sign and seal.\"\n\nShe glanced down for a fraction of a second, then said, \"Take it back to Logos. The Shirron is not interested.\"\n\nHis gut went cold. \"Are you positive? Did he even consider it?\"\n\n\"He took it under advisement, like a dog considers fruit, but his goal has long been set. If anything, this has encouraged him to proceed.\"\n\nMontenegro patted the small of Toria's back and she stepped away. He twisted the scroll in his hands as he talked. \"And you did everything you could to convince him? Be honest, Thulann. It would be uncharacteristic of you not to have another scheme in your quiver.\"\n\nShe chuckled with little sound. A sadness flitted across her features. \"I have used all my missiles, my friend. Too many, in fact. He will no longer talk to me except in the most formal of settings.\"\n\nThe knight remembered the glow on her face when she used to speak of Turlogan. She showed as much pain now as on that dread night, years ago, when they believed Venduss to be dead. He felt for her, but the sympathy was only a drop compared to the storm rising inside him. This simply could not be true. The Shirron would be a fool of historic proportions to turn down this offer of peace. He thrust the scroll forward again. \"Take it to him anyway. Let him read it. Maybe he'll see reason if it is written before his eyes.\"\n\n\"It will not sway him.\"\n\n\"Try it anyway! By the scars of Stonegate, he can't be that thirsty for carnage.\"\n\nThe Juka accepted the metal tube, though her expression showed no confidence. \"He believes the offer is proof that Logos cannot defend itself from us.\"\n\n\"It is exactly the reverse,\" said Brigadier Khyber. His voice was chilly and firm. \"We don't want bloodshed but we are extremely capable of producing it. Do not force us to prove that fact.\"\n\nMontenegro nodded. \"The brigadier is right. Thulann, I've seen a fraction of their defenses. You'll lose warriors by the thousands. This doesn't have to happen.\"\n\nThe Way Master sighed gravely. \"You need not convince me. I do not want to spend my final years mourning the decimation of my clan. But I fear I cannot help you, except to deliver this to the Shirron.\" She tucked the scroll into her belt.\n\nThe knight massaged his temples. \"Then he's the one who stands in the way of peace.\"\n\n\"And he shall not be moved.\"\n\nHe opened a deep frown. \"Nor shall I be denied.\" His stomach knotted in a wave of anger. He clenched his fists to stanch the feeling. Then he muttered, \"If he rejects Gaff, he'll force me to undertake more direct action. The Pact of Four will regret their deeds.\" He leveled a dark stare at Thulann. \"Are you willing to act with me, like you did in Braun's Needle?\"\n\nThe Way Master lifted her chin. \"What will you do, Sir Gabriel?\"\n\n\"Everything required.\"\n\nShe seemed to consider the offer, but her one eye closed. \"I shall not leave Turlogan's side, though he might have it otherwise.\"\n\n\"Then do what you must, of course,\" said Montenegro, \"but do not stand in my way.\"\n\nThulann gazed back. \"I shall stand where I stand.\"\n\nToria touched his gloved hand. \"Will you go after Bahrok?\"\n\n\"Stay with Thulann, little thief.\"\n\n\"I want to know.\"\n\n\"Stay with Thulann,\" he repeated. \"You'll be far safer at her side than mine.\"\n\n\"I don't care about that.\"\n\nHe wanted to say she needs you right now but the old Juka's dignity did not need that blow. Instead he nudged the girl and murmured, \"I'll return to you, I promise. We shall share a bottle on the cliffs of Cove and pretend nothing exists beyond the traitorous sea.\"\n\nShe grumbled and walked away.\n\nHe pointed a finger at Thulann. \"Take him the scroll. Do your best. This is the most important task you've ever accepted. I'll return here in a few days to find out what he says.\"\n\nThe Way Master nodded. \"Of course I shall try.\"\n\n\"Make it work. I know you, old woman. You're stronger than he is.\" When she did not respond, he motioned to Khy-ber. \"Let's leave her to her work. She has a long night ahead of her.\" He turned to Thulann. \"I'll be back for an answer in a few days, Way Master.\" He faced Toria but the girl had turned her back. \"Good night, little thief.\"\n\n\"Montenegro,\" said Thulann as he departed with his companions, \"do not forget your bloodline. You are a knight, not an assassin.\"\n\n\"I am true to the Virtues. That's all I need to be.\"\n\nAs they climbed over toothy ridges to reach their hidden flying machines, Master Enosh drew beside the New Britannian. 'What will you do if Turlogan still declines?\"\n\n\"We shall see on that day.\"\n\n\"It's a fair question, Cavalier.\"\n\nHe paused to frown at the towering weapons master. \"And everyone seems compelled to ask it. But I'll answer with a question of my own. Do you want to bring an end to the Pact of Four?\"\n\n\"Of course I do.\"\n\nHe called ahead, \"Khyber! What say you?\"\n\n\"My gauntlet has been hungry for a long time,\" answered the officer.\n\n\"Then we haven't the opportunity to consult Gaff. We must leave tonight. Bahrok's army is down the coast, not more than a day away by air.\"\n\nEnosh raised his scar-cleft eyebrows. \"If Turlogan changes his mind, it would be a mistake to attack Bahrok before the surrender is formalized.\"\n\n\"That gives us a few days to survey his encampment. Khyber has shown me the use of tactical patience. If Turlogan maintains this lunacy, then we can strike Bahrok at will.\"\n\nThe brigadier grinned. \"The noble Montenegro learns warfare from a Technocrat of common blood. It is a triumph of the Machine and no mistake. But Bahrok is not a fish in a barrel. He's got an army of thousands and we're only ten here. Even if we had time to summon the brigade, we couldn't spare the manpower from Junction.\"\n\n\"But he has a weakness,\" said the knight. \"He has secrets to keep.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But if we don't use assassination techniques, Cavalier, the odds of eliminating him are minuscule.\"\n\nMontenegro shook his head. \"I will only strike him with Honor. That is not subject to debate.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Master Enosh.\n\nKhyber grimaced, then chuckled. \"Your honor is an obstacle I have learned to overcome. We'll have to find a solution that's simultaneously honorable and successful.\"\n\n\"A triumph of the Virtues, indeed,\" noted Montenegro, grinning as he started to climb. But their mood was not as light as they portrayed it. Thulann had failed. Turlogan was a glory-mad fool. Full invasion was almost inevitable. Sosaria had never seen a war of the magnitude that was blowing on the stiff ocean wind. And in as little time as a week from now, Montenegro might be forced to raise steel against his friends. By blood he was a New Britannian knight. In a war he would ride with his fellows. But before that happened he would spare no effort to eliminate the source of the conflict. Valor and Justice commanded him to do so." + }, + { + "title": "The Behemoth", + "text": "And Sir Lazaro brought his magic sword, the Talon of Covetous, to the base of a low, dark mountain. Riding with him were ten bold knights dressed for battle. The villagers watched in terror as Sir Lazaro led his men up the slopes to face an ancient dragon at the top. Day turned into night and the mountain burned with a terrible fire. When dawn broke Sir Lazaro returned. His knights had perished but the beast was no more. From its lair he had rescued a grey-eyed maiden.\n\nThe villagers celebrated his courage but he did not hear their praise. So awed was he by the beauty of the maiden that he married her that very day. He built her a home under the shelter of the black mountain. From the old tongue he assumed the landed name of Montenegro. And so in the face of Love did Sir Lazaro honor the Virtue of Humility, discarding all glory for the simple rewards of the hearth and the heart.\n\nThe passage of four nights found Montenegro and his company concealed in the mountains farther south. Dawn paled the eastern sky, transforming the peaks into a sawtooth silhouette. Below them on the beach twinkled the immense encampment of Clan Varang. As many as six thousand soldiers were stirring at the blue of first light. So numerous were the torches and lanterns that it seemed the pebbles of the shoreline had caught fire, one by one. The seething glow sprawled in both directions for over a mile in length. The salty wind was tinged with smoke.\n\nA soldier arrived at Montenegro's side, panting heavily. He dropped something on the shadowy ground. The knight donned his miner's monocle and saw it was the metal tube containing Gaff's truce. He picked it up and discovered a layer of soot blackening the surface. When he opened the cap, ashes streamed into the gusty breeze.\n\nHe threw the message down and gritted his teeth. \"Brigadier, the time is upon us.\"\n\nThe officer grunted, \"And only a few years tardy.\"\n\nA quarter mile south of the army lay a deep fold in the mountains. The canyon was shielded from the ocean wind by a turn in the rocky cliffs, which permitted coarse plant life to bristle in the lee. The stone walls and rubble were thick with scrub like tufted fur. Under the brushy layers reclined an ancient, steel monster.\n\nThey had not seen the decrepit machine at first, overgrown and half-buried in dust and rocks. When they did uncover its dark outline, every one of them had shivered. The metal construct resembled a squid of inconceivable proportions. Lying at the base of the slope, its rusted body was the size of a small inn, though crushed and rent by rock-slides long ago. Massive gears and pistons were visible under a coat of red, spiny moss. But the machine's many appendages constituted the greater marvel. Like giant, black tentacles they lolled up the sloping walls of the canyon, their steel frames bent to the contours of the ground. They looked more like shadowy folds in the rock than pieces of machinery. And their scope seemed even more awesome when Master Enosh pointed out that they were not tentacles but jointed legs. This had once been an Overlord's war machine. It was called a behemoth and it had walked three hundred feet high, with a striking arm of equal length that acted like a giant war pick. The technology had vanished with the Overlords, of course, but the ruins were a reminder of what the Machine could achieve. For the Technocrat soldiers the sight elicited proud wonder. For Montenegro it stirred his bile.\n\nThey had discovered the site two days earlier in the course of their reconnaissance. Now the brigadesmen vanished into the surrounding terrain, while the officers quaffed invisibility potions from their dwindling supply and infiltrated the chassis of the behemoth. Their flying machines were concealed nearby, though Montenegro doubted they would need to reach them quickly. This action allowed for two outcomes, success or disaster. The margin for error was too small to accommodate a third result.\n\nInside the behemoth were the remains of what might have been a cargo bay. The large chamber, jumbled with rusted gears and chains, had a heavy door at one end that comprised the entire wall. At one time it was hinged from the top, though presently it gaped open on edge. Small breezes whirled inside, kicking up dust and the dry smell of fungus. A host of seaside fauna scrabbled through the whispering scrub.\n\nMontenegro watched the door with anxious resolve. His body felt charged with power. The rising light of morning applied details to the canyon outside and he scrutinized every inch for signs of Juka. He kept perfectly still in his kinetic armor, to avoid making any sounds. He regulated his breathing, though the effort was increasingly difficult.\n\nHe had dreamt of this moment for better than two years. In that time Bahrok had plotted the death of the knight and his friends, robbed him of hard-won victories, expelled his troops from the deserts of Logosia and embroiled New Britannia in costly battles to serve the warlord's greed. Montenegro despised the chieftain and he knew that the hatred was mutual. And so this would be a gift to Bahrok, as well. Both men had long craved the opportunity to cross swords. Though the brigadesmen had secured the area and Khyber and Enosh stood at his side, this morning's clash would involve just two warriors. Honor would be vindicated.\n\nThe sound of footsteps rasped outside. Montenegro tensed. Three shapes appeared at the cargo door and lifted themselves in. They were Jukan soldiers from Bahrok's command guard. The men fanned through the chamber, searching among the gears and thick grass for any signs of infiltration. They passed inches in front of Montenegro, whose invisibility served him well. Neither did they find Khyber or Enosh. After a few minutes they returned to the door and waved to someone beyond.\n\nThe body of the behemoth rocked slightly when Warlord Bahrok put his full weight into a footstep. The Jukan chieftain was a slab of a fighter, Montenegro's height and twice his mass. Bahrok wore utilitarian armor and a single sword at his hip. Imposing spars of metal adorned his helmet, which he removed almost immediately. With a grunt he dismissed the three soldiers. After they exited, he drew something from his belt and slapped it onto the horizontal surface of a large, toppled gear. In that dreary scene of rust and decay, the object glinted brightly. It was Montenegro's golden pendant in the shape of his family crest. Khyber had placed it in the warlord's pavilion while he slept last night.\n\nThe brigadier had lamented the lost opportunity for assassination. Enosh and Montenegro refused to hear his complaints.\n\nNow Bahrok yanked another item from a sack at his waist. It was a short rod made of black crystal. Montenegro had once seen Shavade of Arjun use a similar rod to teleport herself. Jatha of Ishpur had seemed quite distressed by its existence. It was wicked sorcery, as sorcery was judged, and it must have been Chamberlain Kavah's contribution to the resources of the Pact of Four. The fact that Bahrok employed it now indicated that he had taken the bait. Montenegro and his company had watched him come to this site the day before, for some kind of private meeting. They gambled he would return here if he needed to contact his agents again. All that remained was to give him a reason. The pendant had worked flawlessly.\n\nWith luck they would strike more than just the warlord this morning. The next few minutes would tell.\n\nThe massive Juka held up the rod and growled, \"Bring your foul carcasses here right now. I have something important to ask you.\"\n\nA moment later the room bleached with light. Half hidden by the afterimage in Montenegro's eyes, a new figure stood before the warlord. She was short and slender, more petite than even Toria, though her presence was decidedly more intimidating. She wore leather armor that covered little. Most of her lithe form displayed sand-colored fur dashed with sable spots. Her catlike ears stood tall and alert. Strapped to her body was a multitude of weapons, crystal blades and throwing needles and a short staff fixed to her back. Shavade of Arjun lounged on a giant gear and crossed her booted ankles. \"You should try to be more polite, Warlord. I might think you're trying to flirt with me.\"\n\nBahrok's face bunched into a scowl. \"Stuff that insolent tongue back inside your mouth or I shall slice it off myself. Where are the others?\"\n\n\"They're busy. Are you?\"\n\n\"I am about to be. With what agenda, you must inform me.\" He snatched up the gold pendant and held it in front of her face. \"Do you have an explanation for this?\"\n\nShe looked closer. \"That's Montenegro's crest, isn't it?\" \"Yes. I found it in my tent this morning. It was not there before. What game is this, Shavade? You told me Montenegro was dead.\"\n\n\"He is. Brother Rictor poisoned him. Thulann of Garron said so.\" She smirked. \"Maybe she's the one who left it for you. They were friends, right?\"\n\n\"It is not her method to play games. If she wanted to give me a message, she would do it to my face.\"\n\n\"What about her little human pet? Or maybe the Shirron's son? You do not want for enemies, Warlord, which must mean you're not a total failure.\"\n\nHe glared down at the Meer. \"What talk is this? It is not I who fail on the eastern battlefields! Sartorius gives me bad intelligence.\"\n\n\"Don't get too puffed up. If it wasn't for Sartorius, you would have never reached the eastern battlefields in the first place.\"\n\nIn a blur Bahrok's hand shot forward and clamped around the Huntress's throat. She flinched as he lifted her into the air.\n\n\"You shall only speak to the questions I ask. Is that dear?\"\n\nThe Meer tried to grin, though the effort looked physically challenging in her predicament. Montenegro thought the warlord might be squeezing her. But the knight had seen enough. With a deliberate thought he shrugged off the invisibility. In the shadows he took one step forward. The clatter of his armor sounded through the chamber.\n\nShavade became a whirl in Bahrok's hand. Montenegro swore that she cartwheeled in midair. Something shot at him and he threw his shield into its path. Tiny white spines danked into the metal, then vanished in the electric bite of the static-charged surface. Across the room the Meer warrior landed in a crouch atop a high, ruined piston. A bulbous object perched in her hand. The Stinger, a Living Weapon from Avenosh, was lashed by a thong to the handle of the weapon. The Huntress's ears pressed flat into her tawny hair. Her eyes reflected light like an animal's.\n\nWarlord Bahrok peered into the gloom and barked, \"Who the hell are you, Technocrat? Have you something to do with this?\" He held up the pendant with no hint of alarm.\n\nMontenegro lowered his shield to his side. With measured calm he removed the helmet that concealed his face, then stepped closer to the warlord where the dawn's glow could find him. He watched Bahrok's expression as it registered his identity. The Juka displayed shock and delight in equal quantity.\n\nThe knight muttered, \"No more obstacles, Juka.\"\n\n\"Absolutely none. Great Mother, I had thought my retribution was denied.\"\n\n\"Bahrok,\" said Shavade, \"he's not the only one here.\"\n\nBrigadier Khyber and Master Enosh materialized from the darkness. Bahrok tensed and glowered at Montenegro. The knight shook his head. \"They will not interfere.\"\n\nThe Juka nodded. \"Neither will she. Do you hear that, Shavade?\" He glanced at the Meer, then back at Montenegro. \"I shall kill you in honorable fashion in the name of my son Sigmhat, whom you murdered in cold blood.\"\n\n\"I shall kill you for that accusation, and for everything else,\" returned the knight.\n\n\"Noble vendetta,\" grumbled Shavade, \"the lifeblood of grave robbers everywhere.\"\n\nMontenegro frowned at her. Then he noticed a short braid dangling on her belt. The hair was as pale as flax. It looked human. \"Where did you get that?\"\n\nShe fingered the braid and smiled. \"It's just a memento.\"\n\nWarlord Bahrok donned his helmet again and sneered at his opponent. \"So you have joined the Technocrats. I knew you for a traitor from the beginning. That mechanical gear suits you, who hid behind sorcerers for so long.\"\n\n\"We can strip off these weapons and armor. I shall kill you knife-to-knife, if that is your preferred end.\"\n\nThe warlord smirked gravely. \"Keep your toys. They will sweeten the story of your demise.\"\n\nMaster Enosh propped his war maul on his shoulder and said, \"Gentlemen, there is little room to duel in here. We should take this outside.\"\n\nBahrok shook his head. \"We stay here. I do not want any of my soldiers to see or hear us. We must not be interrupted.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Montenegro.\n\nEnosh sighed. \"Then draw your weapons and fight with honor.\"\n\nMontenegro pulled the morningstar out of his belt. It consisted of a two-foot handle from which hung a chain and a spiked ball of iron. He twisted a heavy knob. The ball flashed from inside. Then a globe of flame encircled the weapon, hissing as the chain swung like a pendulum.\n\nBahrok regarded the morningstar with amusement. \"I see Blackthorn is tinkering with New Britannian weapons now. Tell me, you are the one they call 'Cavalier,' are you not? I have heard tales from the eastern fields.\"\n\n\"I bear the name with pride.\"\n\n\"I shall see that it is written on your tomb. You may rot with pride in your barbaric fashion.\" He drew his sword with a clatter and stood ready. \"Proceed.\"\n\nMontenegro thumbed a stud on the morningstar as he twirled it at the Juka. From inside the handle the chain unreeled so that the ball flung over Bahrok's shoulder. The warlord smashed his blade against the knight's shield with an ear-splitting crack of static charge. Then the elongated chain of the morningstar wrapped twice around Bahrok's thick neck. The spiked ball rammed into his jaw and flames billowed up his face. He roared and staggered back a step. Montenegro braced himself. The chain went taut and the knight gained control of the Juka's movements.\n\nOr so he believed, until he discovered the power of Bahrok's huge frame. When the Juka lurched to the side, Montenegro was nearly yanked off his feet. He crouched low and leaned back, bracing the handle of the morningstar under his arm. The fire continued to sear the warlord's face as Bahrok raised his sword for another blow. It clanged upon the sturdy chain. Montenegro fought the jerk of impact. A dazzle of sparks shot from the metal links.\n\nThe knight leapt forward as Bahrok prepared another strike. Montenegro slammed the edge of his shield into the warlord's unguarded stomach, forcing the Juka to double over. The Jukan sword crashed down again but the chain had gone slack. No damage was inflicted. Then Montenegro swept the flat of his shield into the Juka's face. The hit drove the spiked ball deep underneath Bahrok's jaw. A fan of sparks ripped across the warlord's mouth and eyes. Montenegro heard a bone break.\n\nThe knight flew backward abruptly. Bahrok had thrust his shoulder against the shield. The morningstar chain yanked tout again and Montenegro tottered off-balance. Then the warlord's blade swooped down a third time on the chain and the iron links flew into pieces. Bahrok flung off the burning ball and howled with fury. Tears poured from his scorched eyes. His face had erupted in blisters.\n\nThe massive warrior charged Montenegro, who lifted his shield in defense. Bahrok's sword hammered him backward. The static charge of the shield blackened the expensive weapon, but the Juka did not relent. Montenegro's mom-ingstar was ruined and so the knight reached for his own sword; but the warlord's juggernaut assault permitted only defensive moves. Again Bahrok struck the shield in a crash of sparks and hot metal. Yet another blow pushed the knight back against the square teeth of a five-foot gear. On the next strike Montenegro tucked his shield under the Juka's arm and deflected the momentum of the swing. The Jukan blade clanged against the gear and Warlord Bahrok flipped over the knight's shoulder. He tumbled into a thicket of dry grasses and rusty machine parts.\n\nIn a comer of the chamber, the morningstar still burned. A patch of dry plants started to smolder. Montenegro pointed and shouted, \"Put it out or the smoke will bring others!\" Khyber and Enosh leapt to comply.\n\nHe whisked out his sword, then his ribs burst with pain. Bahrok had thrown a skillful kick from an awkward position, pounding the New Britannians chest and knocking him across the upended cargo bay. He gained his balance on a patch of empty floor and rose prepared. Impossibly, Bahrok was already atop him. He threw his shield out to parry. The warlord's blade imparted in an explosion of sparks. A metallic shriek stung both combatants. Bahrok lifted the sword again to discover that the blade had shattered. The static charge of the shield had destroyed it. The Juka flung down the hilt and drew a short dagger from his belt.\n\n\"Stop!\" bellowed the knight. \"Not with that. Khyber! Give him a weapon!\"\n\nThe brigadier had kicked sand over the embers in the grass. The Technocrat carried steel mandibles on one arm and a shield on the other, behind which he held a static scourge. A longsword hung across his back. He glared through the slit in his helmet and answered, \"No.\"\n\nMontenegro snarled, \"Damn you! Enosh, throw him yours!\"\n\nWithout hesitation the enormous Juka tossed his hammer across the room. Bahrok plucked it from the air and wheeled to face the knight. \"Did you catch your breath, you murderous gulbani?\"\n\nMontenegro opened his mouth to reply, but something seemed wrong. He hoisted the shield into guard position and its weight shifted awkwardly. He glanced down to find the steel casing split. The wooden core was bashed to splinters. With a growl he dropped it to the ground. \"Proceed,\" he grumbled, seizing his mechanical sword with two hands. He flipped a lever on the hilt. Moving parts whirred and whined. The device was called a clockwork sword and was as much a saw as a blade. It consisted of five razor-edged wheels in a narrow, sturdy frame. A compact engine spun the gear-driven blades at a fantastic rate, giving it tremendous cutting power. As a slashing weapon it was exquisite, though Montenegro sometimes missed the brute impact of an ordinary sword.\n\nThe kinetic hammer in Bahrok's hands was the same spring-enhanced maul that Master Enosh always used. Though the warlord was nowhere near Enosh's height, his strength looked to be equal if not greater. Luckily Montenegro's kinetic armor was most effective against blunt weapons, but even so he did not relish the thought of a solid blow. With this in mind he calculated a plan of attack.\n\nWhen Bahrok hoisted the great hammer, Montenegro sprang across the ground. He rolled past the burly Juka and slashed his clockwork sword atop the side panel of a steel breastplate. The spinning wheels chewed a groove in the metal. Then the hammer fell and the knight twisted aside. The weapon pounded a thick, rusted gear lying on the floor. The corroded metal fractured into pieces. A wash of tiny creatures evacuated the space beneath it. Montenegro darted behind the Juka and stroked his sword again. The clockwork blades grated across the same cut as before.\n\nBahrok executed a furious pirouette. The war maul whooshed toward the knight, who kicked an iron pipe for momentum to leap over the formidable swing. He landed, then used a quick fencing move to tap his sword against Bahrok's side once more. This time embers sprayed from the cut. He was almost through to flesh.\n\nThen Bahrok rotated the hammer strangely, with the head pointing down. He clutched the long handle with both hands and threw a barrage of rapid haft blows. He was using the hammer like a weighted staff. Montenegro had never seen the style before. The knight parried with capable reflexes but the tactic concerned him. Bahrok was not supposed to be this fast. This was a practiced ruse. The Juka was distracting him into a defensive sequence. Eventually the business end of the hammer would lunge upward to catch Montenegro off guard. He did not intend to let that happen.\n\nThen a parry missed its mark and the hammer haft cracked against Montenegro's helmet. His skull rang. He punched a counterattack but his gauntlet was empty. His clockwork sword squealed on the ground nearby, its blades sawing into a rusted gear shaft. Bahrok had disarmed him. He had used one of Thulann's moves. Montenegro snarled a curse. One of Thulann's moves!\n\nHe batted away another blow with his open palm, then dove for his weapon. He heard Khyber scream, \"Watch out!\" an instant before his spine erupted. Bahrok had brought down the war maul on his back. All sense of his body disappeared below the chest. Resisting the pain he snatched up his clockwork sword, then gathered the strength of his upper body to twist around. He faced up and saw Bahrok raising the hammer once again. \"That's a mistake,\" he grunted as he thrust out his arm. The clockwork blades slashed through the warlord's armor and tore loose a spout of blood. Bahrok cried out and reeled backward.\n\nMontenegro's legs were still numb but they responded again to commands. He planted his feet and swiftly stood. Bahrok charged him but the knight saw only the Juka's wound. It poured out a sheet of blood. One deep thrust would finish the raging troll. He tossed out a jab with expert precision, even as Bahrok's maul roared at him.\n\nThe world turned to flashes and fire. He felt himself soaring through the air. He banged against jagged machinery and slumped across it in an undignified position. Through his scrambled vision he spotted Shavade of Arjun leaning over him. Her handsome features were drawn into a smirk. As if speaking through water she murmured, \"Pity the halfwits who fight for pride or love. They never understand how pointless their death is.\"\n\nThen he raised himself and slid to his feet. He saw Bahrok doubled over, growling his anger at the blow Montenegro had traded him. The warlord's strength was draining away. The knight took a step forward, then toppled. His abdomen blazed with pain. He collected himself and stood once more.\n\nA cluster of heavy rocks thumped suddenly in front of him. They had fallen from the gloom of the ceiling. He looked down to see that they were not rocks but heads, the heads of the seven brigadesmen Khyber had stationed outside the ruins of the behemoth. Then a strapping figure landed in front of him. The man wore black kinetic armor identical to Montenegro's, though the helmet was not in place. Gabriel recognized the Juka's kelp-colored face, which was bright with a toothy grin.\n\n\"Look who's still alive,\" said Pikas of Enclave as he unsheathed his sword and threw a strike at Montenegro's neck. The knight got his blade in the way. When the weapons collided a great flash bathed the room. Montenegro stumbled backward from the force of the electric burst. But when the light did not fade he realized that Pikas' weapon was not the typical, static-charged design. An arc of streaming electrical power connected Pikas' blade with the clockwork sword. The long surge of energy buzzed at a deafening volume. In less than a second the clockwork mechanics threw out smoke and rending squeals. The device came apart in a snap of light, then the electrical arc was gone.\n\nShavade crouched with a crystal blade in hand and said, \"As usual, Pikas, you're rude and late.\"\n\nMontenegro looked at the smoking ruins of his weapon, destroyed in an instant. The assassin clucked at him derisively. \"A clockwork sword, Montenegro? That's all you could find to replace Starfell?\"\n\nThe knight answered by twitching both his arms. He had no particular attack in mind. The action was intended to keep Pikas' attention while Warlord Bahrok swung the war maul from behind. The hammer connected with Pikas' flank and tossed the assassin across the chamber. He smashed headfirst into a pipe with such force that Montenegro winced.\n\n\"Dammit, Pikas,\" grumbled Shavade, \"now I've got to get involved.\" Khyber and Enosh took note.\n\nThrough his bloody, ruined mouth Bahrok said, \"Vermin deserve no honor. Let us continue.\" Montenegro realized that the warlord's jaw was shattered, which accounted for his lack of conversation. The Juka laid down his hammer. Montenegro dropped his broken sword. The two men drew daggers and assumed guard positions.\n\nThe knight assessed his odds. The gash in Bahrok's side drained his immense strength. Montenegro still believed a solid thrust would finish the Juka. But he knew that his own wounds were severe, as well. He had abdominal injuries that would require healing very soon, before internal bleeding and damaged humors poisoned him. One good blow would finish him, as well. So the duel boiled down to defensive integrity.\n\nBut Montenegro knew how to proceed. For as long as he could remember, he had relied upon healing magic to aid him in battle. He had developed an offense-centered style that earned him numerous, agonizing injuries, yet bore rapid damage upon his enemies. He traded personal pain for sure victory. He reasoned that he was honoring the Virtue of Sacrifice. His record in battle was vindication.\n\nHe did not know if he could be healed this time. He heard the sounds of combat as Khyber and Enosh clashed with Shavade and the bloodied Pikas. In the distance, in tandem with the hush of the sea, he imagined the cries of many Jukan warriors coming to the aid of their chieftain. Pikas must have warned them. Time was against him now. But victory was all that really mattered. He would push this dagger into Bahrok's side and the rest of the world would take care of itself.\n\nHe met eyes with the warlord. An understanding passed between them. Then Montenegro lunged.\n\nHe feinted and then his dagger penetrated the Juka's flesh, as deep as he could shove it. He saw horror flash over Bahrok's face, but it switched to stubborn anger. Bahrok gazed into the knight's eyes as he jammed his own dagger under Montenegro's rib armor. The knife point tore through sensitive tissues. Montenegro's body shot through with trauma. He felt the day darkening around him. He poured all fury into his storm-grey eyes. He glowered a lifetime of rage at Bahrok but the Juka looked back clearly, even calmly. Triumphantly.\n\nSir Gabriel collapsed when Bahrok removed the blade. His head lay beside those of the slain guardsmen. He seemed to notice the warlord retrieving the war maul and hoisting it high in the air. Montenegro howled at his body to move, but it disobeyed him. It disobeyed.\n\nThe hammer did not fall. Something impeded Bahrok. It was Master Enosh grappling him from behind. The war maul fell to the ground and the two mighty Juka wrestled, then Enosh hurled Bahrok across the chamber. The warlord did not rise. Pikas and Shavade were missing. Montenegro felt himself lifted off the ground and carried outside. The barks of approaching clansmen fluttered on the ocean wind.\n\nA healing potion bathed his mouth. His body returned in stutters. Montenegro thrust his feet underneath him and stood.\n\nKhyber and Enosh and the knight were standing on the slope above the behemoth's ruined body. A swarm of Varang clansmen charged into the canyon, less than a minute behind them. \"Go,\" said the brigadier and the three men hurried up the scrub-covered slope. When arrows began to clatter around them, they doubled their pace. Behind a boulder waited their flying machines. Montenegro leapt atop the mechanical horse and churned its levitant engines. When the beast rose off the ground and tucked in its hooves, he snapped out the leather control vanes and aimed for the sky. Khyber and Enosh were close behind, perched in the frames of their propeller-driven kite skids.\n\nThe clansmen and the mountains shrank below them. A landscape of low, chilled clouds replaced the terrestrial world. The trio leveled their path and steered inland, toward the blossoming sun. When they found a sure wind and steadied their flight, the brigadier maneuvered between his companions and shouted, \"This is what comes of your damnable Honor!\"\n\nAt that moment Montenegro was ready to kill the Technocrat, but he had no weapons to use. Neither was he confident that his limbs would respond to battle. His body had failed him today. His flesh and bones had rebelled in the midst of a critical duel, and the worst part was that he suspected Honor had been satisfied. His conflict with Bahrok had been resolved according to proper form.\n\nIt occurred to him that he had left the gold pendant behind, but the loss seemed appropriate. He doubted that he deserved such good company any longer.\n\n\u2003\"Ravens black the belfry took,\n\n\u2003The belfry took, the belfry took,\n\n\u2003Ravens black the belfry took Atop the castle gold;\n\n\u2003\"Ravens black the belfry shook,\n\n\u2003The belfry shook, the belfry shook,\n\n\u2003Ravens black the belfry shook The day my heart was sold.\"\n\nThulann woke to the echoes of crows in her dreams. Her body tingled with energy. She climbed from her veiled bed to find Toria singing softly with Tekmhat. The two girls were dressed in sleeping gowns. They sat on a rug in the Way Master's tent, applying scrub cloths to her sand-dusted armor. Dawn had not yet brightened the fabric walls.\n\nThe old Juka shrugged on a flimsy caftan and left without a word. On bare feet she strode in the direction of Tur-logan's pavilion. The breeze traced her willowy frame in loose silk. Moments later the minstrel and the Initiate caught up to her. Toria whispered, \"Mistress, is something wrong?\"\n\nThulann did not answer. Her heart thumped loudly. The dream was barely an impression in her mind, like the dimple on a bed when a person rises; but the feeling it left behind was leaden in her chest. Sleep had gifted her a moment of unmuddied truth. She had seen beyond her pride and anger, beyond her guilt and sadness, beyond the passions and politics of the moment. She had gazed past all of it and realized that Turlogan was her home. Like a dying woman she would stay with him fiercely. Like a frail old crone she would kneel and beg for clemency. Her body moved with its own resolve before her mind could override it.\n\nShe threw open the flap to his pavilion and found the bed empty. Something nagged her. The room was not disheveled but parts of it were out of place. The precise arrangement of drapes and idols was disturbed. From his weapons stand she unsheathed a short sword and pushed through the back wall.\n\nA man stood in the bleak shadows. He wore a Technocrat's kinetic armor and held a bloody sword in his hand. A helmet covered his face. As he faded out of sight she saw the glint of Montenegro's golden pendant.\n\nOn the ground beside him lay a giant body, glittering with wounds.\n\n\"Tekmhat!\" shouted the Way Master as she leapt at Montenegro, but the knight had fled the instant he became invisible. Thulann saw the two girls rush around the pavilion. The Initiate cried out and dropped to her knees, summoning a handful of scintillating flares with which to heal the fallen Shirron. Toria ran to the Way Master's side but Thulann snapped, \"Fetch the master healers!\" The redhead dashed into the encampment as Thulann charged away from it. She knew that Montenegro and his Technocrat soldiers must have hidden their flying machines in the ripples of the mountain. She could outrace them and wait for their arrival. Whatever was happening, they would suffer justice for it.\n\nMinutes turned to hours as she combed the jagged slopes, but she saw no sign of Montenegro that was not many days old. Her caftan was soaked with sweat and humidity, tom from one shoulder after several difficult climbs. The risen sun lashed her with summer heat. Braids of white hair became a loose tangle on her neck.\n\nAn army of scouts joined her in the search but the morning yielded no answers. Weighted by fatigue, she paused on a boulder overlooking the army's encampment. Faint sounds reached her ears, dancing as echoes along the hard, stony inclines of the mountain. She thought at first they might be sea birds calling out the new day's hunger. But her body turned to ice when she realized the truth. They were the wails of keeners lamenting in the Shirron's compound.\n\nThe landscape seemed to detach from her thoughts. Something swept past her on the wind, a small body with scimitar wings and a color that looked familiar. It was a New Britannian falcon hunting for the first time on Logosian shores. The fleet from Britain must be close now. The humans would find a different land than they expected. The parched ground was drinking hot blood and its thirst only seemed to be growing." + }, + { + "title": "The Beacon", + "text": "The skyward surface of the forest canopy spread to the horizon like a surreal, green ocean. At the summit of a very high tree, Jatha the wizard and Fairfax the ranger peeked over the leafy vista from their roost on a sturdy limb. The Meer squatted near the trunk of the tree, scraping bark with a knife to collect a patch of rare, dark moss. A few yards away the bearded ranger lolled in a crux of two branches, his arms crossed and his gaze cast into the distance. In a lazy voice he commented, \"Jatha, I have been thinking.\"\n\n\"How ominous,\" mumbled the wizard, not looking up from his work.\n\n\"How long have we been tracking Shavade through this forest?\"\n\n\"Eight days.\"\n\n\"And how long since we were last attacked by an oculus?\"\n\n\"Five days.\"\n\n\"My friend, I don't think she's leading us into a trap anymore.\"\n\nJatha shrugged. \"Perhaps it's very far away.\"\n\n\"I don't think she's leading us anywhere. She's just running for her life now. I conclude that this chase is fruitless.\"\n\n\"Oh, when we catch her she'll yield up some fruit. I assure you of that. You can pluck it from her branches and I shall feast to the pit.\"\n\nThe ranger laughed. \"In truth I'm feeling uncommonly logical today. I think we should leave off the hunt and turn southeast for Britain. After all, the invasion party will be nearly gone by now. I thought you had an invitation to that wood-and-bamacle fete.\"\n\n\"I told you, I forfeited my role. This business with Kavah supersedes it. I notified Mistress Aurora two weeks ago.\"\n\n\"But you'll miss the glory of populating foreign graveyards.\"\n\n\"They will clog up with or without me.\"\n\n\"But you do it with such aplomb! Come now, I've grown weary of this pursuit. I am cured of the affliction named Shavade.\"\n\nThe wizard snorted a laugh. \"The ancestors take pity on me at last.\"\n\n\"You don't believe me, do you? The fires of the soul bum hot, my friend, so hot that they sometimes expend themselves in a brief but dazzling flash of glory!\" He popped open two fists to illustrate the analogy.\n\nJatha smirked. \"That's the same excuse you used on that flower seller in Yew.\"\n\n\"That was different. She smoked inferior tobacco. It affected her bouquet.\"\n\n\"Explosions of the heart are inconsequential, Fairfax. I'm not chasing Shavade for love. Go back to Britain if your ashen soul desires, but I shall cleave to her trail.\"\n\n\"Ha! As though you could distinguish a footprint from a forest sausage.\" Fairfax snickered to himself. \"It was only a ruse, anyway. My heart shall never be free of her touch.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nThe human grunted, \"No, you didn't.\"\n\n\"I did. It's obvious when you're lying.\"\n\n\"It is?\"\n\n\"You get a certain cadence to your words. An incriminating timbre.\"\n\nFairfax turned at the waist to stare at his companion. \"What timbre?\"\n\n\"You can't tell?\"\n\n\"If I could, I would change it. My life would be astronomically easier.\"\n\nThe Meer chuckled. \"Good point.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"What timbre, damn you!\"\n\n\"I don't know. It's just a way that you speak. It doesn't matter. I'm trying to work here, while you flap those hairy lips of yours. Why don't you get some sleep and spare me your glass-paned ruses?\"\n\nFairfax spat in disgust from the lofty branch. Jatha ignored him and continued with his task. This patch of bloodmoss was a rare discovery in the area and he would take as much as he dared. The dark substance contributed to many of his spells of Earth and Air Magic. It would justify the effort of climbing to this precarious spot.\n\nThe ranger examined the forest to the west. The midday sun glinted on the leaves. \"Do you recognize where we are?\"\n\n\"These are the Valente lands, aren't they?\"\n\n\"Quite so. The Valley of the Beacon lies over that hill. Did you ever visit one of Lord Valente's Wisp Hunts?\"\n\n\"I watched the beacon once with Mistress Aurora. Very impressive.\"\n\n\"I thought it only happened in the autumn.\"\n\n\"So it does.\"\n\n\"Then we must have slept for three months last night, because I swear I just saw a light over there.\"\n\nThe Meer looked up. To the west the terrain acquired more relief, dipping and bobbing in serpentine ridges. A verdant, wind-tossed carpet of trees textured the majestic scene. A few miles away lurched the crest of a hill, beyond which the forest disappeared into a wide valley. Jatha recognized the landmarks. The Valley of the Beacon had a distinctive bowl shape. He also recognized the furtive lights that wheeled in and out of view beyond the hilltop. Wisps were j not easily seen in the full glare of summer, but the strange geometry that guided their formations could not be mistaken for any other phenomenon.\n\nHe cinched up a small bag that now brimmed with blood-moss. \"Fairfax, in what direction do Shavade's tracks lead?\"\n\nThe ranger pointed toward the valley.\n\nHe tucked the bag inside a large satchel slung across his shoulder. \"We'd best move on, then. There's no time to nap after all, it seems. We may just have found the trap we've been pining for.\"\n\n\"I pine for love today, not danger, though one could argue the difference is semantic.\"\n\nThey climbed down from the tall tree and pressed forward, moving quietly among the gnarled vines and branches that characterized the old wood. Hanging moss loomed in the sun-dappled canopy. A blanket of dry leaves whispered on the ground, yet neither man stirred them enough to draw attention. Soon they mounted a steep incline and peeked over the rim of the valley. The forest grew thin below. In the center was a wide clearing in which twirled a pillar of sapphire sparkles.\n\nJatha studied the twisting lights with a swell of fascination. The \"beacon\" was a convergence of otherworldly energies, the nature of which was mysterious. The consensus among human archmages was that it represented a rift or leak in the Ether from which magical forces periodically seeped. Normally the beacon only lit one night a year. The trait revealed its kinship to wild moongates, which changed their behavior according to the phases of the moons. But the beacon's annual ignition fell on a predictable evening in autumn. Today was a brassy summer afternoon. Given the circumstances that had brought him here, Jatha felt uneasy about the incongruous event.\n\nBut the wisps were behaving as he would expert. They swooped and careened in the air above the beacon, fashioning daytime constellations of elusive volumes and angles. The shapeless entities themselves appeared as little more than shifting, shimmering lights. Their motives were unfathomed but their power was very clear. They were known to possess ancient, potent magicks. Even the Matriarchs gave them respect. Only once had a wisp been known to die in battle and the tale had become a legend. And so their muster by the hundreds around the beacon signaled an occurrence of momentous import. During the gathering in the fall the wisps performed a dance of infinite shapes and movement. They seemed to be duplicating the effort today. Jatha's human teacher. Mistress Aurora, had theorized that the wisps were conducting some manner of ritual or spell designed to influence the beacon, or perhaps the etheric rift that created it. Since the wisps had amassed today, as well, the Meer had to wonder at their purpose. Were they here to study, or perhaps to harvest power? Or might they somehow be responsible for igniting the beacon?\n\nAnd what had drawn Shavade of Aijun to the valley while this mysterious spectacle took place?\n\nFairfax grumbled, \"This might be bad.\"\n\nJatha nodded. \"It grows worse as I think about it.\"\n\n\"It's getting caught in my shirt now.\"\n\nThe wizard squinted. \"Come again?\"\n\n\"My hair. It's uncomfortably long.\" When the Meer looked at him with disdain he added, \"This display of lights is quite magnificent, I grant you, but natural beauty must assume its proper subservience to my personal comfort.\" \"Your mind is a cozy place, isn't it? Slice off your hair if it bothers you, then kindly rejoin me in the outside world.\"\n\n\"I don't want to cut it. I'm growing it to please Shavade.\" \"Your persistence would shame a horsefly.\"\n\n\"It needs a braid. Can you make one for me?\"\n\nJatha growled, \"Do I look like a handmaiden to you? There's a serious matter in front of us!\"\n\n\"Show some backbone! It is only emasculating if you tell someone else. I can't do it myself, backward and behind my head and all.\"\n\nThe Meer grimaced. \"All right. Turn around.\" The ranger faced away and Jatha grabbed a lock of the human's shoulder-length, flaxen hair. Then he drew out his knife and positioned it for a trim.\n\nThe ranger heard the noise and cried, \"Hey!\" He leapt away and rolled through the brambles, finishing on his back. Jatha shook his head and turned to watch the lights in the valley.\n\nFrom the underbrush Fairfax said, \"By the orchids of Bor-dermarch, that is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.\"\n\nJatha looked at his companion. The ranger lay on his back. He was staring up the length of a slender pair of legs, sleek with rich, spotted fur. The Huntress Shavade stood over the human with a long, crystalline quarterstaff in her hands. Her attention focused on Jatha. \"Welcome, Firstborn. Let me show you my own sleeping spell.\"\n\nShe slammed the butt of her staff into Fairfax's brow, shoving his head down into the brambles. Then she braced against the pole and used it to propel her nimble body forward, directly at Jatha. To free his hands the wizard flung the knife at her, though he had little skill for it. She deflected the dagger with a limber kick. He plucked a seed of lightning from the sultry air as she landed a foot before him. Her staff plunged toward his neck. The bolt of electricity burst out from his hand and caught the warrior in the stomach. The blast heaved her backward as thunder pealed across the forest. A tendril of smoke followed her into the underbrush. Her own strike had not landed, to his considerable relief.\n\nHe prepared a second thunderbolt when he realized her trick. She had not aimed the staff at his throat but rather at the strap of his shoulder-slung satchel. The bag was now gone, flipped away into the tangled bushes. Without the bloodmoss and other diverse contents, Jatha's range of spells was severely restricted. Of course Shavade had known that. As an Avenosh Hunter she was trained to battle sorcerers. She was versed in the effects and timing of all lesser circles of magic. Without his reagents Jatha could not draw upon the greater circles. And now Shavade had vanished again, somewhere in the tangled forest.\n\nBy instinct Jatha conjured a whirlwind around himself and was rewarded a second later. A volley of crystal daggers streaked at him from above. The whorl of air cast away the blades. The wizard's hair and leather clothes danced in the whistling funnel.\n\nHe was ready when she attacked again, springing down from a tree limb over his head. Hunters fought close and swiftly to overwhelm a wizard, in order to reduce the opportunity for spellcasting. Jatha knew he had to keep her at bay or finish her quickly. He thrust out another lightning bolt, hoping to knock her from the air before she landed atop him. But impossibly she parried the spell out of her path. Then she fell upon him, her weight disrupting the whirlwind, and smashed a kick on his lightly armored sternum. Jatha growled as he fell into the dirt. Shavade landed on his chest like an imp and blew on his face. Some manner of dust invaded his nose. He struggled to breathe but his throat rejected the notion. Without a voice, he realized with rising panic, he could not cast any spells.\n\nShe had sprayed him with saravan powder, a special concoction used by Hunters for just this purpose. Jatha cursed himself for being unprepared, but he had been away from Avenosh for nearly a decade. His reflexes were attuned to the fighters and fauna of New Britannia. And Shavade seemed quite dangerous even for a Hunter.\n\nShe punched him in the face several times before he threw her off his chest. His head throbbed and reeled. He coughed and frantically rolled to his feet. From his belt he drew a small rod that instantly shot out forks of magic power. But he did not aim the wand at her. Shavade was too alert to Jatha's attacks. However, he had one resource she could not predict. He had Fairfax. The wand propelled a healing spell atop the unconscious ranger. As Fairfax awoke and sprang off the ground, Shavade brandished a longsword and thrust it at the wizard. Jatha lunged aside. The blade that nearly punctured his chest gleamed as black as obsidian. Its length was inscribed with mystic runes. Jatha knew the weapon. It was the enchanted blade Starfell, property of the Valente family and once carried by Sir Gabriel Montenegro. How Shavade had acquired it he did not want to guess.\n\nHe forced down a breath, though it was not enough to power a chant. Then Starfell slashed across his abdomen, rocketing pain through his body. The wand of healing toppled from his grasp. She smashed a kick against his skull and he crumpled. The last image he glimpsed was Fairfax standing with sword in hand, doing absolutely nothing except to gape at the pretty Meer warrior.\n\nUnpredictable indeed, thought Jatha as darkness consumed him.\n\nHe woke with a throb in his wrists and arms. The world seemed unstable, shifting, and he saw why when he opened his eyes. Shavade had tied his wrists and ankles behind his back and hung him from a tree branch. Bent backward into an uncomfortable circle, he dangled knees-down four feet above the earth. A mound of animal droppings lurked below him. \"Charming,\" he muttered.\n\nHe was stripped to his kidskin breeches, bereft of weapons and magical reagents. He had mastered a few spells that worked without physical components, but they required precise hand gestures. Shavade had bound his fingers with the meticulous skill of a Hunter. Magic would not aid him now. A rush of helplessness soured his mood even more.\n\nAt least she had healed the wound to his stomach. Appar-endy she had some agenda for him.\n\nFrom the slant of the terrain he knew that she had brought him deeper into the valley. He was suspended at the edge of a hand-cut clearing, though he faced out into the woods and could not see any other signs of life. He resolved to use what few resources remained to him. That meant guile. His voice rasped from the saravan powder as he called out, \"Am I to be roasted over an open flame or cooked in a bed of coals? Or perhaps my coffin will be made of dough and you're having wizard pie for breakfast?\"\n\nFrom the clearing behind him Shavade replied, \"You'll know if I'm going to eat you, because I'll fatten you up first. 1 don't like rangy meat.\"\n\n\"Where's Fairfax?\"\n\n\"He got away from me. He runs fast for a human.\"\n\nJatha relaxed significantly. He smiled. \"Sometimes I wonder if he's human at all. He moves like a spider in the forest. It's almost unnatural.\"\n\n\"The human rangers learned their best skills from us.\"\n\n\"Fairfax is better than we are. I've watched him stalk wildcats with nothing more than a club. When he's bored he'll pick off bats with throwing knives. It's very nearly disquieting.\"\n\nThe warm breeze conveyed vague, sour smells. Shavade's small footsteps shuffled around the clearing. In a calm tone she said, 'Your bluster is manly, Firstborn, but don't imagine you're making me skittish. He's going to try to rescue you and when he does, he's a dead man.\"\n\n\"I see. So you're keeping me alive as bait?\"\n\n\"For the moment.\"\n\nHe grunted. \"Then as long as we're just waiting, why don't you tell me what's going on with the beacon down there?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You'd have me give that information to a hostile wizard? I'd sooner bake my Stinger in a pie.\"\n\n\"I don't seem to be in a position to take advantage of the knowledge.\"\n\n\"Choke on it, Mystic.\"\n\nThe wizard grumbled, then steadied himself with a deep breath. \"I looked after your Stinger as best I could manage. 1 had no idea what it eats, but certain bugs sated it.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She sounded grudgingly sincere.\n\n\"Where's Chamberlain Kavah?\"\n\n\"He'll come when he can.\"\n\nHe tried to move his fingers, but they had gone numb in their elaborate binding. He felt his shoulders weakening as his weight stretched the joints. A pang in his wrist made him wince. Trying to ignore the discomfort he commented, \"How interesting that you carry Starfell now. Where did you come by it?\"\n\n\"You don't want to find out.\"\n\n\"Show some mercy. Any conversation will be an improvement over staring at this pile of dung beneath me.\"\n\n\"You think so?\"\n\nSomething pushed his kneecap. He was dangling by a single rope and the touch started his body turning. Slowly the clearing behind him rotated into view. First he saw Shavade standing nearby, pulling back the crystal staff she had used to nudge him. Next he spotted an opulent carriage at the mouth of a forest road. It glittered with glass bangles that shifted in a delicate wind. The Valente crest was inlaid on the door. Two horses lay dead on the ground in front of it, large, dark mounds in a nest of dried leaves.\n\nThree human corpses littered the clearing, as well. Two of them wore chain mail hauberks and tabards with the Valente crest. The third looked to be a New Britannian lady. Her expensive dress bunched into peculiar shapes where she had fallen. From her silver hair Jatha judged her to be elderly, though he could not see her face. Black streaks painted all three bodies, the bloody marks of a brutal attack. Summer flies had begun to descend.\n\nJatha scowled at the diminutive Huntress. \"You're a monster, Shavade.\"\n\nShe laughed again and crossed her arms. \"You left your own trail of dead enemies all the way back to Cove. You've got no right to chastise me.\" She glanced over at the slain woman. \"That's Lady Valente, of course. Apparently when the wisps showed up she rushed out here to see them. She was waving the magic sword around like a madwoman. 1 have no idea why. Probably some barbaric superstition. Simple enough to put an end to it, really.\"\n\nThe wizard grumbled, \"Her late husband used to greet the wisps every year when the beacon lit. He would salute them with that sword. Are you aware that Starfell is the only blade known to have slain a wisp? I think Lord Valente saw it as a peace gesture.\"\n\n\"Or maybe as a warning.\"\n\nJatha examined the carnage to look for anything that might help him escape. He saw no sign of his own equipment. Lady Valente's guards had carried halberds, which leaned now against the back of the carriage. The sight of the dead men saddened him, but when he gazed at the slain noblewoman his anger started to boil. For his own good he turned away and muttered, \"Why are you here, Hunter? You come from a proud company. You know Kavah's work is evil. What did he promise you in exchange for all these crimes?\"\n\n\"Only to fulfill my every dream.\"\n\n\"I don't want to know what you might dream.\"\n\nShe smiled and cradled her staff against the elegant line of her cheek. \"My dreams aren't that different from yours, Firstborn. I just do a little more to make them come true.\"\n\nAbruptly she let out a shriek and rolled across the ground. Jatha startled and tracked her to the limit of his sight. An arrow stuck through one of her calves. Most of the shaft protruded from the exit wound. As the Huntress snapped the arrow in two and removed it, a familiar voice shouted from the billows of an oak tree across the clearing:\n\n\u2003\"You make my heart swell\n\n\u2003A hundred miles in girth!\"\n\nJatha grinned, even though the moment was dire. Shavade hurled a crystal knife into the thick foliage of the oak tree and then leapt upward, snatching the limb from which Jatha dangled. Her balanced weight hardly shuddered the rope. He heard her climbing and felt a small rain of leaves around him. Then more whizzing noises erupted from the oak tree. Three thunks sounded overhead. Shavade gasped. Blood drops spattered down.\n\n\u2003'Tom impregnate my soul;\n\n\u2003To Love I shall give birth!\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" howled the Huntress in anguish. Jatha sensed her scrambling through the tree like a squirrel, rushing to engage Fairfax face-to-face. But another volley of arrows flew and Shavade of Arjun dropped to the ground in the clearing. She staggered to her feet. Arrows jutted in neat clusters from her right shoulder and her left thigh. The warrior snarled and unsheathed Starfell. To Jatha's dismay she turned in his direction and charged, bellowing, \"He's killed you, the fool!\"\n\nAn arrow smacked into her sword arm. Starfell skidded across the ground. The wounded Shavade lost her balance and sprawled onto her face.\n\n\u2003\"You're a star overhead;\n\n\u2003You light up my path!\"\n\nWith a loud curse the Huntress plucked the rod of black crystal from her belt. Jatha grimaced at losing it. She raised the shard into the air. Sparkles danced over its length and then poured down to engulf her. An instant later she was gone.\n\nFairfax helped Jatha down from his binding and handed him the satchel of spell components. The shirtless wizard draped it over his shoulder. From inside he retrieved a leather cord, which he used to secure the bag redundantly to his belt.\n\nThe ranger chuckled, \"I think you're right. She didn't like the song.\"\n\n\"And that was your best delivery yet. But why didn't you put her down, dammit? One shot to the spine is worth a hundred to the leg. That's twice you've shown her mercy and nearly at the cost of my neck!\"\n\n\"You know why. I can't risk killing her, despite these murders.\"\n\nJatha clenched his fists. \"But your sick heart shall be the death of me! I've had about all I can stand of it.\"\n\n\"That's unkind, after I just saved your life. But you have endured a lot of strain, so I forgive you.\"\n\n\"Hand me back to Shavade. At least greed and bloodlust are rational motives.\" He rubbed his wrists to generate some feeling in his hands again. Then he glanced at Fairfax. \"I see you managed to braid your hair while I hung there like a draining pig.\"\n\nThe human fingered a short knotwork that thrust down from his yellow mop. \"In combat a man must be self-sufficient. Alas, she never even saw it.\" He slid his foot under the carpet of leaves and kicked. The black shape of Starfell sprang into the air. He snatched the hilt and said, \"Look what she left us, though.\"\n\n\"We can use it to disacquaint her head and her shoulders. You see what she did to Lady Valente.\"\n\nFairfax took in the bloody scene again. He closed his eyes and sighed. \"But she has the black crystal now. That ruins any chance of tracking her, I suppose.\"\n\n\"It may be as well. We might have our hands full elsewhere.\" He motioned to the glittering beacon in the center of the valley. It had begun to shudder as if it were unstable. Jatha had noticed the change when Shavade activated the black crystal, and the effect had since increased. He believed he knew what was happening. Shavade's teleportation had disrupted the local substance of the Ether. If the disturbance had spread outward, the rift that caused the beacon might have shaken open even more. The result would be unpredictable. Judging from the frantic reaction of the wisps, it might even be disastrous. \"We had better leave the valley,\" he suggested as the wisps darted through the air in patterns too complex to follow.\n\nFairfax was already backing up. \"I defer to your judgment. Your cowardice is better informed than mine.\"\n\nThen the beacon seemed to fly apart as if the air ripped open. Blinding scintillae shot out in all directions. In the midst of the display appeared many dark shapes. As they resolved in the glare Jatha realized that they were oculuses, trained Ishpurian war monsters, looking like giant ticks with a single eye for a body. The flying creatures poured from the beacon by the dozens. The soaring wisps descended and the two hovering swarms began a sorcerous battle that shook the forest with explosions and thunder. Light and dark spots wheeled and clashed and snapped with power. There seemed to be no end to the oculus invasion as more streamed out to replace those slain by the wisps. Embers fell and smoked in the trees. The ground itself shuddered, though none of the combatants touched the earth.\n\nWhen the battle expanded over their heads, Jatha shoved his companion toward the rim of the valley. \"This is an unfortunate place to be and it will only get more so.\"\n\nThen something changed in the character of the beacon itself. A solid glow appeared, catching Jatha's attention. When he stared for a moment he recognized that the light was in the shape of a man. Slowly the figure solidified. Standing in the midst of the otherworldly melee was a Meer in a sorcerer's colorful robes. The man engaged a spell that drew the sparkling beacon around him like a halo. The wisps redoubled their attacks on the oculus swarm.\n\nFairfax whistled. \"I think our Chamberlain Kavah has arrived.\"\n\nJatha felt his anger rising again. He tested the firmness of the knot on his satchel. The bag felt snug. He smacked the ranger on the back and said, \"I'd get away if I were you.\" Fairfax murmured, \"You're not going down there!\"\n\n\"He's right in front of me. I can't let him get away.\"\n\n\"Look at the bastard! He's commanding those gazers like a personal army! You'll be cinders before you get close.\"\n\n\"The oculuses are busy distracting the wisps. He's doing something else with the beacon. I'm going to stop him.\"\n\n\"Are you mad, Jatha?\"\n\nThe wizard smirked grimly. \"My heart calls out to me and I must answer. I am no madder than you.\"\n\nFairfax widened his eyes, then popped the flat of Starfell's blade against his palm and laughed, \"Well spoken, you marble-headed romantic! Lead on!\"\n\nUnder cover of the smoking trees they sneaked closer to Chamberlain Kavah. When they were less than twenty yards away, Fairfax nocked an arrow and said, \"Light me. We'll strike from surprise before he can toss up any defensive enchantments. And keep your head down, you troll!\"\n\nJatha smiled and answered, \"The wizards of Ishpur conduct themselves differently.\" The ranger watched in surprise as Jatha stepped into plain view of Kavah. He lifted both hands in the air and summoned into them the seeds of many lightning bolts. When he cracked them open the woods blinked in a white glow. The lightning burst from the valley and carved up the sky. In a haze of aftersmoke the wizard called out, \"Chamberlain Kavah! I am Jatha Sayarukan, Firstborn of Hidasah and Secular Heir to the House of Ramish-pur! I see the wickedness in your deeds and I've come to take you to task!\"\n\n'Wizards have no inkhng of guile,\" mumbled the ranger. The man in the beacon gazed at Jatha with eyes aglow. His very long ears flattened in anger. \"Stay your wrath, Sayarukan! My work here is delicate!\"\n\n\"Not so delicate as your flesh shall be when I carve it into pieces!\" He called upon the highest circle of sorcery he had achieved. Mistress Aurora had instructed him in the hybrid arts of Crystal Magic, where Earth and Air intersected.\n\nMuch of the discipline's focus involved the binding of spells into gemstones. But in dealing with such fundaments of magic Jatha had also learned how to disrupt ordinary, unbound enchantments. Presently he conjured into his arms a cloud of crystal splinters that thirsted for magic like a sponge. He chanted loudly and the splinters billowed at Kavah. When they entered the beacon they began to absorb power. When they had drained enough, Kavah's sorcery would be momentarily dispelled. At that point he would fall to a single arrow from Jatha's bow.\n\nExcept that the splinters drank their fill with no discernible effect. Jatha sent more at the chamberlain and again the attack failed. The crystal splinters rang loudly and shattered. Chamberlain Kavah spread out his arms and laughed, \"You have no concept of the power here! Yet it can be yours as well if you join me, Firstborn!\"\n\nJatha answered with a more direct attack. He pointed his hands toward the earth and reached his mana downward. Like sorcerous claws his spell gouged out stone and earth and roots and dragged them upward in a great swell. The ground puckered and split underneath Kavah. The beacon itself was engulfed in a rising column of earth. Jatha strained to keep control of the mighty spell even as many oculuses turned their fury against the mound that swallowed their master. The creatures lobbed balls of fire at the earthen pillar. The young wizard ground his teeth with exertion. Mana streamed through him in raging torrents and shook him to the bones. He could not channel this much power for long, but for now the magical trap was holding. He hoped the wisps might come to his aid.\n\nThen he felt a choke in the stream of mana. His sorcery stuttered or coughed and his body raked with agony. He fought to maintain control but his spell began to collapse. The earthen pillar shot through with glowing cracks and then flung apart with a stupendous crash. The world reeled. Jatha fell back. Kavah remained inside the glittering swirl of the beacon, though his demeanor had hardened noticeably.\n\n\"Very well, Sayarukan,\" said the chamberlain and began to glow more brightly.\n\nFairfax leapt to his companion's side. He grabbed Jatha's arm and pulled. \"I've decided I like your first plan better. Let's indulge in the sin of retreat.\"\n\n\"Too late!\" hissed Shavade of Arjun as she appeared next to the ranger. She fluttered a pair of crystal swords in the air around him. Fairfax ducked and dodged with nimble moves and whisked Starfell from his belt. When he parried one of her blades, the crystal split. It shattered on the second blow. The Huntress cartwheeled backward and crouched low.\n\n\"Fall back, my goddess, for I don't wish to skewer you!\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter at this point, does it?\" She looked up at the sky, which was sheeting with light. No, thought Jatha, not the sky but the valley. Chamberlain Kavah had conjured a spell that filled the terrain with sorcerous energy. Jatha felt the strength draining from his body. Kavah was sucking up all the mana in the area. Fairfax teetered as well. Then the ranger let loose a defiant cry and sprang at Shavade. Their swords clanged a dissonant chorus and abruptly he pressed against her. With a quick move he touched a kiss to the warrior's lips. An instant later she kicked him solidly in the abdomen, propelling him back to Jatha's side.\n\nThe Meer wizard suffered an overwhelming ache. His mana was nearly gone. The day was lost again but with effort he shouted, \"By the Ar'Kannor, you are a genuine god of lust!\"\n\nFairfax grimaced and spat blood. \"I'm more than that,\" he replied and slapped something into Jatha's hand. It was the black crystal rod that Shavade had carried.\n\n\"You pickpocket!\"\n\n\"Use it! Get us out of here!\"\n\nThe valley roared with Kavah's spell. Jatha's body faded into helplessness. Even Shavade was succumbing now, shrieking as she toppled to the ground. But the rod in Jatha's hand was a vasdy greater evil. He bared his teeth and said, \"I won't do it!\"\n\n\"You will! Jatha, if you don't, Kavah wins right now!\"\n\nThe chamberlain floated above the sundered earth. His body and the beacon had become one, a fountain of sorcer-ous power that pushed back the wisps and caused oculus bodies to burst into flames. From Jatha's chest boiled a howl of anger as he channeled the last of his magic into the black rod. The boundless power that filled the valley gave way to flashes of pure white. Jatha and Fairfax were engulfed in scintillae.\n\nWhen the clamor of the valley abruptly halted, the wizard felt a groan like the rocking of a ship. It was the Ether itself, he knew, protesting its crude violation.\n\nThen the flashes dissipated. They found themselves on the floor of what looked like a voluminous cave. The ceiling was shored by wide, stone arches. The floor was a mosaic of granite tiles, etched with swirling designs. Braziers threw amber light into the dank, stuffy air.\n\nA large, round table sat in the center of the floor. Around it collected a group of Meer men wearing the layered, gos samer robes of sorcerers. They stared at Jatha and Fairfax in surprise.\n\n\"Um, where are we?\" whispered the ranger.\n\nFighting the pain that gripped his body, Jatha answered, \"An old Terathan cave. We must be somewhere in Avenosh.\" He squeezed his eyes shut and moaned. He had not known how to control the rod, which remained in his grip. He had simply charged the device with power. They had teleported an extremely great distance, which meant the damage to the Ether would be great as well. His gut twisted with anguish.\n\nFairfax swallowed and said, \"Oh. Avenosh. That's unexpected.\"\n\nOne of the Meer sorcerers called out, \"What's this about? Who are you?\"\n\nWhen Jatha gave no answer Fairfax announced, \"This is Jatha Sayarukan, Firstborn of Dasadahaha and, um, Second Heir to the House of... uh...\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" rasped Jatha.\n\nAn old sorcerer frowned. \"Does Kavah know you're here?\"\n\n\"Damn,\" grumbled the human, \"they're his men. Can you walk?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Hang on to me, then. We're going to try retreating again. Who knows, it might work this time.\"\n\nJatha felt himself hoisted over his companion's shoulder. The action loosed a staggering pain through his body. He moaned aloud as Fairfax smiled, \"Kavah is occupied but he sends his love. Good day to you gentlemen!\" Then darkness enfolded the wizard once more, bringing a welcome relief from his torment." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "He heard the sound of sloshing water. His feet were cool and wet. Jatha parted his eyelids and saw that he was lying across Fairfax's shoulders. The ranger waded through black, swampy water to his waist. The Meer's boots dragged through the slime, collecting a drapery of thick algae. Stale humidity lingered above the surface. Insects choked the air. Exotic squawks and chirps clamored around them. Overhead loomed a vault of greenery, a mosaic of broad, dark leaves that did not grow in New Britannia. This was a marshland in northern Avenosh. Jatha had seen such jungles when he was young, though they were too dangerous for a Mystic child to visit past the daylight hours.\n\nHe glimpsed fragments of a moon through rare gaps in the canopy. Night was a bad time to be moving through an Avenosh swamp. In a cracked voice he muttered, \"What are we doing?\"\n\n\"Retreating,\" said Fairfax.\n\n\"We should stop till dawn. It's not safe here.\"\n\n\"It's less safe that way, toward the caves.\" He pointed behind them with his thumb. \"They're still looking for us.\" \"Kavah's sorcerers?\"\n\nThe ranger nodded. \"And their gazers.\"\n\n\"How long have we been running?\"\n\n\"Can't see the stars in this pit of a forest, so I'm not really sure. Thirteen, fourteen hours. Maybe more.\"\n\nJatha groaned weakly. \"It's a jungle, not a forest. Fairfax, you have to rest.\"\n\n\"Nope. Shavade stayed ahead of us for more than a week. I have my pride to think about.\"\n\nThe Meer wanted to protest further, but fatigue and soreness overtook him. Instead he mumbled, \"Pride is not a Virtue,\" and drifted back to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "\"Wake up, Jatha,\" whispered the ranger in an urgent tone. The wizard squinted at a sunbeam that punctured through the trees. He was laid out on a cradle of interlaced roots that suspended him above the swamp water. Fairfax knelt beside him with Starfell in hand. The black blade shimmered with gore. The wizard saw coin-size reptile scales stuck in the blood. The ranger himself had red drips trailing from his nose and mouth.\n\nSomewhere nearby, a very large animal roared with fury.\n\n\"Made a friend?\" coughed the wizard. His flesh still ached terribly.\n\n\"Shut up and be honest. Are you strong enough to heal me?\" He held up his left arm. The small bone of his wrist was broken.\n\nJatha evaluated his own mana. Chamberlain Kavah had ripped the sorcerous energy from him, doing untold damage to his body in the process. He closed his eyes and tried to conjure a simple spell. He was answered with stinging pain. His hands would barely move. \"Damn. I can't do it. Drink a potion.\"\n\n\"I used the last one yesterday. Your healing wand is missing, too.\" The human rubbed sweat and grime from his eyes, then tucked his injured forearm under the strap of his halffull quiver. \"Never mind. Stay quiet and keep those mule ears sharp. And as long as you're awake, try to eat something.\" He pushed a hardtack biscuit into Jatha's palm. Then he clutched Starfell and stood, peering through mossy vines in the direction of the roaring animal. \"Don't worry. I think he's had about all he can take.\"\n\n\"Wait. How long did I sleep?\"\n\n\"Three days and sixty miles. A hundred if you don't count delirium as waking, but I estimate you were as lucid as I've seen you in years.\" He twinkled a grin and leapt through the tangled undergrowth.\n\nJatha tried to get the biscuit to his lips, but could not manage the task. He would have to forestall his hunger and hope that Fairfax killed the angry beast in time for dinner.\n\nThe skyward surface of the jungle canopy spread to the horizon like a surreal, green ocean. At the summit of a very high tree, Fairfax the ranger and Jatha the wizard relaxed on a sturdy limb. Fairfax was skinning a fat, predatory snake. The serpent was spiked to the branch by a throwing knife, in the same place the ranger had discovered it stalking their treetop beds. Jatha reclined at a juncture where one branch became two. The Meer folded his hands behind his head and watched the gathering sunset. \"Fairfax,\" he said, \"I've been thinking.\"\n\n\"How bodeful,\" mumbled the human, not looking up from his work.\n\n\"How long have we been traveling this swamp?\"\n\n\"Twelve days.\"\n\n\"And how long since we were last attacked by an oculus?\" \"Seven days.\"\n\n\"My friend, I don't think they're following us anymore. I think they've abandoned us to the jungle.\"\n\n\"It's probably as lethal as any executioner's axe.\"\n\n\"You're more correct than you know. I'm convinced now, this swamp is one that extends all the way to the northern coast. It's brimming with old magicks from before the Cataclysm. It's easy to get lost here. They used to call it the Swamps of Deceit.\"\n\n\"Charming. But we have a problem if you want to reach.\"\n\n\"No, that's perfect. Ishpur lies to the south. You can visit the city that spawned me and take your vengeance for the act.\"\n\nFairfax stared over the treetops to the southern horizon. \"We have a long way to go. I don't suppose you want to try walking again?\"\n\n\"I might just manage it this time. I'm almost as strong as a kitten now.\"\n\n\"Good, because I'm not going to carry you another yard. All that fur gets heavy when you're wet.\"\n\nJatha chuckled. \"You forget, I can tell when you're lying.\"\n\n\"One day you must tell me your secret. You're right, I wouldn't leave you behind. Someone has to buy the wine when we reach Ishpur.\"\n\n\"Wine? You gave up drink to woo Shavade. Have you finally surrendered that infatuation?\"\n\nThe ranger smirked. \"Fill my cup, barkeep, and aim me at the lasses.\"\n\n\"They grow no finer than in Ishpur. But look, I just noticed that your braid is missing. Personal comfort overtook aesthetics, I see.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I lost it in the fight with Shavade. Sliced clean off. Better my braid than my neck, eh?\"\n\n\"You should have asked her to trim that beard, as well. Meer children can be easily frightened.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'll be their boogeyman and scare them into behaving. If someone had done that for you, we might be sharing a draught at the Blue Boar right now. How am I so fortunate to travel with a mad, crusading wizard? I'd trade every Meer in Sosaria right now for one frothy mug of stout.\"\n\nJatha chuckled. Of course it was another lie. The beer at the Blue Boar tavern was not worth a lame-winged mong-bat, much less a Meer. Watering the stout would improve it. But as with any alehouse, the appeal of the Blue Boar lay not with the drink but the fellowship. When the company was good, everything else was bearable. That, Jatha decided, was the primary lesson of hedonism. Everything else was froth." + }, + { + "title": "Assassins", + "text": "Raveka stepped on bare feet through the gloom of the ship's cabin. Her miner's monocle replaced the darkness with the illusion of sepia light. The floor heaved gently with the rocking of the ocean, drawing a low, ponderous croak from the timbers of the flagship Samlethe. The contents of the cabin shifted back and forth with lazy calm. Stars peeked between opaque curtains.\n\nThe cabin was well-appointed, even for an officer's quarters. It was spacious and sturdy, fitted with a fine desk and bed, sealed tightly enough that the atmosphere was not choked with salt and mildew. The door had a lock tooled anew for this voyage. Raveka possessed a copy of the key, though she would not have needed it to enter. She could pick the lock if necessary. Nothing would keep her from the information in the chamber's desk.\n\nOn the bed lay a strapping knight, snoring with vigor. Raveka smiled at Lord Gideon. He was handsome even in the sepia monochrome. She considered leaning down to kiss his brow, but as usual she thought better of it. She could not play with toys when serious work awaited her.\n\nShe turned away, then glimpsed herself in a tall mirror. The sight made her pause. She was long and sleek, like a stalking cat. Her clothes were black and close-fitting. She wore knee-length breeches and a long-sleeved shirt, both of them men's apparel. They were less than comfortable but they suited her needs when she sneaked around the big ships of the fleet. On the Samlethe and a few others she kept a hidden stash of these garments. After sunset she swam between the ships and changed into the dry clothes before undertaking the night's chores. Never once had she been in danger of discovery.\n\nBut looking in the mirror, her eyes were mostly drawn to the arrangement of her hair. To infiltrate the fleet she had cut it very short, just a few inches from her head. The style was not unlike the one she had worn years ago, when Logos was her only home. It was now dyed a sandy blond, to further divert suspicion.\n\nShe had left Lady Aria far behind in Britain. Her hair was a frequent reminder. The woman who traveled with the invasion fleet was coarser, tougher and distinctly more dangerous. She acted in the name of Logos and the Machine. She was a Technocrat and she would die to save her people from harm.\n\nThe teakwood desktop was empty save for a small cup, inverted to keep it from sliding. Gideon always took his nightcap here after locking up his documents. He was obligingly methodical. From her pocket Raveka selected a key. She unwrapped its fabric winding, then tapped it with her fingers to loosen the oily coating. She inserted the key into a particular drawer, waited for the oil to seep into the mechanism and tenderly unlocked it. Inside the drawer was Lord Gideon's journal. He kept in the book a strict account of strategy and logistics as the New Britannian officers slowly evolved their plans. Raveka had come to his cabin several times a week to update her mental records. The information would prove golden to the Technocrat defenders.\n\nAnother tiny key released the journal's hasp. The monocle allowed her to read in the dark. She studied the pages with uncanny speed and committed every line to memory. Her training as a Mathematician served her espionage tremendously.\n\nWhen finished, she restored the desk to its original state. She paused to review what she had read, using precise mnemonic techniques to ensure that nothing would slip. Then she prepared to leave. Three more vessels awaited her infiltration tonight. The armada was only a few days from the Logosian coast and her work had become critical.\n\nHer nose wrinkled. A familiar smell came to her, sharp and subtle. She traced it to the inverted cup from which Gideon had drunk before bed. She raised her eyebrows. The wine had been drugged. Gideon was presently sedated. She had not done it herself, of course, and given the particular drug used she presumed this was General Nathaniel's handiwork. But why would Nathaniel drug Gideon?\n\nThe answer might be simple to discover. Keeping an eye on the snoring nobleman, she climbed atop his desk and reached for the ceiling. During the three weeks of the journey she had managed to cut a small hole in the timber. The cabin above belonged to General Nathaniel. From here she could watch and listen to him, though the effort was rarely very illuminating.\n\nShe removed the false knothole and peered up. Nathaniel's cabin was the largest on the ship, designed with enough room to accommodate officers' meetings. Such a gathering was taking place now, though at first she did not recognize the participants. After a moment she realized what she was seeing. Her long body shuddered from head to toe.\n\nAround a small table sat General Nathaniel, Warlord Bahrok, Chamberlain Kavah and Lector Sartorius. The whole of the Pact of Four was assembled above her. The fifth person in the room was a petite Meer warrior bristling with weapons. Raveka assumed it was Shavade of Anjur, though her glimpse of the woman at Cove had been fleeting. Otherwise the cabin was empty and doubtless locked up solidly.\n\nNathaniel had sedated Lord Gideon to prevent him from eavesdropping. But he had given the opportunity to Raveka instead. She observed the meeting with razor-sharp attention.\n\nThe Meer sorcerer named Chamberlain Kavah was speaking to the others. He wore colorful robes not unlike those of the Ishpurian ambassador's entourage. His voice was rich and confident in the manner of diplomats, though his words revealed trepidation. \"Sartorius, where is your man Pikas? I thought he was the security expert. He should be here for this.\"\n\nWarlord Bahrok interjected with a stem voice and a thick, pointed finger. \"I shall not allow that madman to disrupt this meeting! He is sadistic and undisciplined. Shavade will suffice as a watchdog, provided that the general has kept this room secure.\"\n\nNathaniel was his usual, ageless self. His long braids slung over an opulent tunic. He spoke with a neatly bearded smile. \"We are safe to speak freely, gentlemen, and I must say I am pleased to finally meet you face-to-face. Warlord, of course I remember your visit to Britain two years ago, though we did not have the pleasure of an introduction in those dark days. Chamberlain, Your Excellency, I am honored to clasp your hands. History will remember this hour with wonder.\" \"History need not record this meeting,\" remarked Lector Sartorius. He was a spectre of an old man, his black Theorist's raiment hooded and full. His skin, like all high-ranking Technocrats, was a filigree of mathematical tattoos. His voice was gruff and very cold. His presence churned Raveka's bile. \"Secrecy is a cornerstone of the Pact of Four. Yet it has been neglected with considerable impunity. Might I open this discussion with a comment on how this failure has damaged our cause?\"\n\nGeneral Nathaniel nodded and sighed. \"Yes, I'm aware of my own failure in this, for which I apologize. Might I point out, however, that no disclosures on my part can explain the current Technocrat victories in eastern Logosia. Someone has discovered you, Lector Sartorius, and not because of me. I did not know your identity until this very night.\"\n\n\"General, my own security is beyond doubt. The only agents who know me are also known to you. The breach did not come from my organization.\"\n\nNathaniel retorted, \"But someone started second-guessing the battle plans you're giving to Bahrok Otherwise your troops would not be harrying him in the eastern desert.\"\n\n\"It is Lector Gaff of the Mathematicians who moves against me. I am taking steps to eliminate his threat.\"\n\nAbrupdy Bahrok leaned his tremendous weight forward. The action drew the attention of the table. The Juka's demeanor became heated. \"I am not certain I appreciate your implication, General! My warriors in the east are not incompetent. We operate with poor intelligence, not with unsound tactics. And let me say that your confessed security failures, Nathaniel, have affected me in a very personal way that compels me to require immediate compensation.\"\n\nChamberlain Kavah spread out his hands and said, \"Gentlemen, let us not rush into these negotiations with the haste of emotionalism. We'll have the opportunity to address each of our concerns. We are businessmen. Let us apply ourselves to the compact between us.\"\n\nNathaniel shook his head. \"With all respect, Chamberlain Kavah, I must ask that Warlord Bahrok explain the remark he just made.\"\n\nThe warlord grumbled, \"There is nothing to explain. There is only this.\" He slapped an object on the table. From her perspective Raveka could not see what it was, but General Nathaniel drew back in surprise.\n\n\"That's the Montenegro crest! Where did you get that?\"\n\n\"From the black knight himself. He came to kill me yesterday. He failed.\"\n\nWhen Nathaniel lifted the gold object into Raveka's view, her every muscle seized with shock. It was Gabriel's pendant, the one he would not allow her to remove. So Gabriel truly had attacked Bahrok. And what had become of him, that Bahrok carried his necklace?\n\nGeneral Nathaniel ruffled his brow. \"You're certain it was he? I was told Montenegro fell at the Battle of Buccaneer's Den, to Brother Rictor's poison, no less. My spies watched his surviving cousin and reported no evidence to the contrary.\"\n\n\"It was Montenegro,\" growled the Juka. \"I could never mistake that demonic face. I do not know how he survived Braun's Needle, but he ambushed me outside my encampment yesterday morning, thirsty for my blood. We executed a proper duel. I won back the honor of my son, whom he murdered three years ago. That, at least, is satisfying.\"\n\nRaveka listened with stunned dispassion. She did not know how to react, except to evade the anguish that tightened her stomach. She dared not chant in her head, for fear of missing details.\n\nBahrok continued, \"But he escaped the killing blow and he is still out there.\" Relief tingled through Raveka's body. She exerted a conscious effort not to relax too quickly, lest Shavade detect her presence. The warlord added, \"We all know how dangerous he is. General Nathaniel, I hold you responsible for his involvement in our affairs. And Lector Sartorius, are you aware that Montenegro now wears the black of a Technocrat? He is the deadly warrior they call 'Cavalier.'\"\n\nThe Theorist steepled his fingers. \"In the service of Lector Gaff. Of course. It fits the evidence.\"\n\nNathaniel responded with waxing displeasure. \"And what do you imagine I must do to 'atone' for this, Warlord?\"\n\n\"I want your blood,\" grinned Bahrok.\n\nKavah rose from his chair and interrupted, \"Gentlemen, please! Bahrok, we shall have time to address your grievance later. First let us make a full disclosure of where our designs now stand. This fleet is three days from the coast. Warlord, are you prepared to secure the landing?\"\n\n\"As long as it lands where we agreed, and not where Clan Kumar thinks it will.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Lector Sartorius, what is the status of your army?\"\n\n\"We are recalling the majority of our forces to defend the capital. The east will soon belong to Garron. Lector Gaff has seized the war machines underneath Junction but I am not sure he will be capable of repairing them. If he does, I have troops in place to storm the facility before the invasion force arrives. Junction will fall without significant contest.\"\n\n\"Good. General, your troops will be ready to march immediately?\"\n\n\"Indeed we shall. Sartorius, I hope the intelligence that you give us will have improved by the time we arrive in Junction, but it doesn't matter in the end. We 11 force Blackthorn out of power for you. Rely upon that.\"\n\nRaveka grimaced. She had heard enough. With a slow, steady motion she reached a hand to her belt and inside a long, black bag.\n\n\"Excellent,\" said Kavah, \"then our only setback is that Bahrok's army is more scattered than we had hoped. I believe we shall recover from that. We can move on to our immediate plans. Lector, explain your next move.\"\n\nThe Technocrat gazed at Nathaniel. \"A force of airships will attack your fleet as you come ashore. I was unable to prevent this action without jeopardizing the confidence of my generals. I have eliminated any ground-based support, but you must be prepared to take some casualties. I suggest you decide which of your vessels you are prepared to sacrifice.\"\n\nFrom the bag at her waist, Raveka withdrew a slender bolt thrower. With careful patience she turned the handle that cocked the spring into place. Scrupulously maintained, the weapon made no sound. Then she pulled out a small vial and two needle-shaped darts. She dipped the points into the vial. They glistened with venom. She eased one of the poison darts into the bolt thrower.\n\nAbove, the general frowned bitterly at the Technocrat's suggestion. \"I knew it would come to this. It's distasteful, but such is warfare. I have just the rabble in mind for you to strike. We're abiding ten privateer ships, led by the Menagerie, that Admiral Duarte insisted we bring along. They're crewed by pirates and thieves who imagine they've been forgiven for their crimes. Sink them at your leisure. I shall not mourn them.\"\n\nSartorius nodded. \"Command them to secure the southern limit of the fleet. We shall attack from there.\"\n\n\"They'll be in position, and unsuspecting. Show no mercy to those cutthroats.\"\n\n\"Technocrats are rarely merciful, General.\"\n\nRaveka gauged the angles from which she could fire her weapon. She calculated a suitable trajectory to hit each person in Nathaniel's cabin. All that remained was to choose her targets. Kavah would have to die first, of course, lest his magic revive any others. Then she would have time for one more shot before the survivors fled or killed her. The death of any member of the Pact of Four would serve the defense of Logosia, but one of them must pose the greatest threat. She worked through the permutations to decide who must die.\n\nChamberlain Kavah remained on his feet. He gestured as he spoke, the idiom of a statesman. \"Very well. Let us proceed. There is more news from Logos, which I shall deliver myself. At my behest Lector Sartorius has made a prisoner of Dame Adhayah, the ambassador from Ishpur. This will ensure that she does not interfere with the attack on the city.\"\n\nRaveka pinched her brow. Her mind raced through political calculations. Why take the Meer ambassador as a prisoner?\n\nThe general nearly choked. \"Are you mad? That's an act of war! What do we gain from it? We don't need the Ishpurian army to help us with the invasion. And perhaps you know your own people better than I do, but I have a difficult time believing that a Matriarch would meddle in a full-scale bat-de. Not even one that's going on around her.\"\n\nBahrok let out a growl. \"Indeed, Chamberlain. What are you up to? Now that we know who you are, it is time you explained your stake in this war. I like to know a man's motives before I trust him with my well-being.\"\n\n\"He has been elusive with his intentions,\" commented Sartorius, \"and such behavior grows inappropriate.\"\n\n\"Gendemen,\" said Kavah, \"there's no cause for suspicion. I've served Dame Adhayah for many years. I tell you there's a danger that she might interfere.\"\n\nBahrok crossed his massive arms. \"You did not answer the question, sorcerer, and our patience is thinner by the second.\" At the side of the room, Shavade shifted her weight and smiled at the Juka.\n\nKavah clasped his hands together. \"Very well. You're correct, of course. I shall explain.\" He braced his fingertips on the table. \"Why take the Matriarch hostage? Because she might learn what I have planned. She would certainly move to stop me. You're right, I do have a concrete motive in this war. There's something in Logos that is very valuable to me and I intend to take it when the city is attacked.\"\n\nSartorius scowled. \"Elaborate at once.\"\n\n\"It's something you cannot give to me, Your Excellency, because it's not within your reach. It is a place of magical power in the city. A rift in the Ether, to be specific, though I don't expect you to understand what that means.\"\n\n\"Where is this place?\" asked the Technocrat.\n\n\"The Techno-Prophet's tower,\" said the Meer, \"in the keep of Blackthorn himself. As you are well aware, His Eminence never leaves that building. And I am not strong enough to challenge him directly.\"\n\nBahrok stroked his chin. \"You organized an invasion to distract Blackthorn long enough to get inside his tower? By the crows of Garron, our ally is nothing more than a burglar! Great Mother help us all.\"\n\n\"No,\" said General Nathaniel, \"it has to be bigger than that. What kind of power are you talking about, Kavah? What will you do with it?\"\n\n\"The rift will grant me a direct source of mana from the very Ether itself. With it I'll be able to strike down the theocracy of the Matriarchs and restore the ancient dignity of the Firstborn Mystics.\" He patted his chest. \"Until this century, my kind were the equals of Matriarchs. Our society was balanced between the masculine and the feminine. But the Matriarchs took advantage of the Cataclysm to outlaw our Lore Council. We've never had the power to take back our birthright, until now.\"\n\nRaveka blinked. So it was a political move for Kavah's benefit. The issue was not immediately relevant. She refocused her thoughts on the decision at hand.\n\nLector Sartorius said, \"Perhaps it is possible to direct the ambassador's wrath at Blackthorn himself. Pikas and I have secured her in the tunnels underneath Junction. She is cut off from outside contact. We can fabricate information that implicates the Techno-Prophet. A Matriarch would be a powerful contributor to Blackthorn's demise.\"\n\nAnd Raveka made up her mind. Sartorius plotted too big. He had to die now, while she had this remarkable chance. She gauged the optimal path between the bolt thrower and Chamberlain Kavah. One quick shot would fell the sorcerer. She would reload and fire the second dart before Sartorius could clear his chair. After that Warlord Bahrok would probably vanish using his crystal teleporting rod. General Nathaniel and Shavade, however, would certainly pursue her. She could leap out the window and swim away, but she doubted she could evade them for long. Nathaniel would set magicians of Water Magic on her trail. If she stayed among the fleet she would be found. She knew she could not swim all the way to the coast.\n\nHer death would come soon, then. The thought chilled her, but her body coursed with energy. A mathematical chant steadied her nerves. Then she aimed the bolt thrower and thought, Good-bye, Gabriel. Perhaps I'll see you soon.\n\nShe stopped her finger from throwing the switch.\n\nShe pursed her lips and realized that she dared not die. The information she carried was too important. She knew the logistics of the New Britannian army and just as impor-tandy, the plans of the Pact of Four. She knew where the Meer ambassador was being held. She might learn more yet.\n\nKilling Sartorius would not stop the invasion. Presenting her knowledge to Lector Gaff could save thousands of lives.\n\nShe closed her eyes and stifled a curse. Then she removed the poison dart and slid the weapon into the bag again.\n\n\"I shall help you with your civil war, then, Kavah,\" said Bahrok, \"and you can help me with mine. It is my turn to speak now. Gendemen, the four of us hold history in our hands. We must share in the difficult decisions. Tomorrow a change occurs in Jukaran and all of you must do your part. General, if you want to know what I require of you, it is literally a drop of your blood.\" The warlord whisked out a long dagger and stabbed it into the tabletop. \"My people have a ceremony known as Sanguination. Before embarking upon a journey or battle, warriors sacrifice their blood to the Great Mother in return for her blessing.\"\n\nSartorius muttered, \"Perhaps you might get to the point.\"\n\n\"It was Montenegro's attack that finally decided me. There is beauty in direct action. Shirron Turlogan of Garron will die tonight. We shall send Pikas to do the job. He shall wear this pendant to place suspicion on Montenegro. When the news reaches Clan Varang I shall declare myself Shirron of the Juka Clans and have authority over the people of Jukaran.\"\n\nKavah said, \"And you want us to participate in this Sanguination to share the blame among us.\"\n\n\"Do not balk at the responsibility. We are shaping nations.\"\n\nGeneral Nathaniel snapped, \"But we are not assassins! I agreed to eliminate Blackthorn with honorable warfare. Pikas is a vicious dog. The Virtues do not allow cutting throats in the dark of night!\"\n\n\"The Virtues! General, perhaps it is not clear to you, who have been so isolated from the conflict, but this war goes beyond the rules of any one society. Sartorius betrays the Machine because he refuses to serve a madman. Kavah rises against the Matriarchs to correct an injustice. I myself am loath to condone assassination, yet I am doing just that to unify my people. And so must your Virtues stand aside for the good of four nations. Nathaniel, we agreed to this pact with the understanding that each of us possesses the courage to make it work. Show us your courage now.\"\n\nSartorius added, \"He is correct, General. I am sacrificing tremendous resources in this affair. Surely you would not demean that loss with naive trepidation.\"\n\n\"I must concur,\" nodded Kavah.\n\nNathaniel entwined his fingers and stared at them grimly. Then he thrust out his hand and snatched the knife from the table. Pulling back his sleeve, he touched the blade to his forearm. \"Let Valor and Sacrifice stand where Honor fails.\" With a quick stroke he slit open his arm. A stream of blood poured onto the teakwood table.\n\nBahrok grinned. \"Great Mother, bless us with victory.\" He took the knife and cut himself, spilling his blood atop Nathaniel's.\n\n\"May our ancestors grant us fortitude,\" said Kavah as he added to the crimson pool.\n\n\"The Machine is the universe,\" grumbled Sartorius, then squeezed his bleeding arm. \"I do not approve of wanton magic, yet I insist that you heal me now, Chamberlain. I approve of this barbaric ritual even less.\"\n\nWarlord Bahrok laughed. \"It is not a sacrifice if you heal it, Technocrat! But do as you will. Turlogan's blood will be on all of our hands now.\"\n\nChamberlain Kavah smiled and rubbed his hands together. \"Excellent. This is a pivotal moment, gendemen. The destiny of Sosaria turns around this room. I propose that we toast the moment. General Nathaniel, I presume you have something to drink here? You look as though you could use it.\"\n\nThe general's expression was black. He pointed to a cabinet across the room. At Kavah's gesture Shavade opened it and began to pour brandy into the first of four glasses.\n\nRaveka held her breath. The Huntress had selected the bottle that Lady Aria had given to Nathaniel and Gideon. The brandy contained the deadliest poison in Logos.\n\nBut Nathaniel waved his hand. \"Not that one! It has a special purpose. Take the bottle beside it.\"\n\nShavade shrugged and complied. Raveka winced with disappointment. When the Pact of Four toasted their schemes, Shavade raised to her own lips the one glass that contained a splash of poisoned liquor.\n\nHer ears flattened before she drank. She sniffed the brandy. Then she glanced at Nathaniel and giggled.\n\nOn his bed, Lord Gideon coughed and began to stir. In a flash Raveka slipped behind the desk for cover. The nobleman stopped snoring, but he did not rise. The Mathematician sighed with relief. She strained her ears but heard no more voices in the cabin above. A series of bright flashes blinked through the spy hole, the signature of the Pact's teleportation crystals. The meeting, it seemed, had run its course.\n\nWhen Gideon resumed his snoring, Raveka massaged her eyes and pondered this unexpected gift of knowledge. She did not care about the assassination of the Shirron, of course. Turlogan was the enemy of Logos. She was more concerned with Kavah's agenda in Avenosh. The kidnapping of Ambassador Adhayah could bring more unwanted military attention to Logosia. She would have to inform Lector Gaff of the danger. But most of all she feared the coordination between parties on both sides of the invasion. Sartorius, Bahrok and Nathaniel could architect the bloodiest results from this war. It was almost an explicit part of their plan.\n\nBut Gaff had instructed her how to fight back. Fundamentally a system was only as organized as its components. Dissension could lever them apart. She had already planted the seeds while she was in Britain. From the desk she retrieved a quill and a sheet of paper, upon which she wrote, Nathaniel is responsible for the fate of Turlogan. Ask him about the stain on his table. For credibility she added, He will punish the privateers. Then she dried the note with a quiet breath and folded it. As she slipped it under Lord Gideon's pillow, she kissed the drugged man's brow. \"Rescue me, noble knight,\" she whispered, then crept out of the cabin as it swayed with the ocean waves. She still had much to accomplish tonight. The war was only beginning." + }, + { + "title": "Intruders", + "text": "Clinging jungle vegetation gave way to a broad, golden savanna. The stagnant odor of the swamp relented to a fresh breeze. Painted in brown shades of muck, Jatha and Fairfax stood at the boundary of the two regions and gazed into the distance. On the southern horizon was a tiny spot that glittered in the afternoon sun.\n\nJatha smiled broadly at the distant sight of Ishpur, the city of crystal that was his childhood home. \"I told you it was beautiful, didn't I? The twinkle in the eye of Sosaria.\"\n\nFairfax seemed less impressed. At the end of a great task, he had begun to lament its difficulty. \"Three weeks. It took us three weeks to get here. We could cross the breadth of New Britannia in that time! Did all my skills drown in that vile cess pit?\"\n\n\"Cork your despair, you yeti cub. I told you this jungle is sometimes called Deceit. There's magic inside that confuses directions. Not even the Meer travel it lightly. No doubt that's why Kavah and his accomplices chose it for a lair.\"\n\n\"I shall return to this swamp someday and conquer it. By the Virtues, I have my pride.\"\n\n\"Don't lie. You wouldn't go back in there for all the wine in Trinsic. Neither would I.\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes and grumbled, \"Maybe not, but I'll curse it to the end of my days. But look, we've reached civilization at last. You promised you'd explain to me all those tides you hold. I don't wish to compromise your privacy, but it will probably have some bearing on our status and comfort when we enter the city.\"\n\n\"I suppose you have earned some modicum of kindness. Very well, my full name is Jatha Sayarukan, Firstborn of Hidasah and Secular Heir to the House of Ramishpur. Sayarukan is my family name, you see. I am the oldest son of Hidasah, who is the great-granddaughter of Dame Sayaru, the most revered of the living Matriarchs. The House of Ramishpur consists of the families of my mother and her sisters.\"\n\n\"What's a 'Secular Heir'?\"\n\n\"As the firstborn son of the eldest sister, I am the ranking male member of the household. That means I inherited all of its secular responsibilities. That is to say, the administrative chores. I was to become the supreme clerk of my family. Do you wonder why I left for more libertine enterprises? Yet if I were a woman I would have been in line to become a Matriarch myself. Fate works with unexpected tools, my friend. But for a trick of plumbing, I could have governed Avenosh.\"\n\n\"I knew your family was wealthy, but I did not know you were exalted! I'd be humbled if I didn't know you for a degenerate sot.\" When Jatha dignified no response, the ranger slapped him on the back. \"Thank your ancestors that you're not a woman. I couldn't bear to see you lose what little sense and integrity you manage to retain. Besides, govemment is nothing but a jewel-infested prison. Who would want to rule a kingdom at the expense of liberty and base gratification?\"\n\nThe wizard blew a wistful sigh. \"I wanted to, before I left Ishpur.\"\n\n\"You're joking.\"\n\nJatha chuckled. \"There was a time when I was headstrong and idealistic. Yes, I know that's not an easy image to conjure, but as a youth I was seduced by the glory of my tides. I wanted to fulfill some grand, undefined destiny. But these are spare times for a Firstborn. Before the Cataclysm I could have joined the Lore Council and participated in Ishpurian government, but when Adranath brought the Cataclysm upon the world, the Matriarchs disbanded the council and assumed full control of the government. And so Firstborn sons like me are obliged to become very esteemed household clerks. It was not the glorious fate my porridge-brain had envisioned.\"\n\nFairfax grinned. \"So you concocted some idiotic scheme to rectify the injustice?\"\n\n\"Not a scheme so much as an ultimatum. I informed Dame Sayaru that the time had come to return men to their place in government. I demanded to stand among the female leaders of the Mystic caste.\"\n\n\"You wanted to become a Matriarch? Ha! And I thought my ego was a juggernaut.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"The notion seemed reasonable at the time. I guess I would have called myself a Patriarch. Not that the title was ever debated, of course. They chased me off like a fox from a huntsman's yard. I bellowed my indignation to the ancestors and then sailed for New Britannia to escape my embarrassment. That's when I met you and my destiny was forever corrupted.\"\n\n\"You owe me for that, too. What a disaster you would have been without my artful guidance. Well, your family sends you a stipend, so I assume you're not a pariah. I have a chafing suspicion, though, that our welcome will not be without controversy. Should I be worried?\"\n\n'Worried? What is there to worry about? Those days are forgotten history.\"\n\n\"Don't kid me, Jatha. The Meer don't forget anything. That's the only reason you can call your society 'ancient.' But I'll partake of your confidence, despite my instincts to the contrary. And so, my friend, where your family is concerned I have just one further question to present.\"\n\n\"I hesitate to ask.\"\n\n\"When will you introduce me to your sisters?\"\n\n\"I have no sisters, Fairfax.\"\n\n\"Now who is the liar? You once told me you have ten of them!\"\n\n\"That was before your boots touched Avenosh soil. As of now, consider me an only child.\"\n\n\"What kind of gratitude is that?\"\n\n\"You assume I'm protecting them from you and not the reverse.\"\n\n\"Sorry, you're only intriguing me.\"\n\nJatha smirked. \"Forget it, you bearded troll. Mystic women are not like Shavade. They're chaste and dignified. Out of your depth.\"\n\n\"If I drown then I drown, my hirsute friend, but at least I'll be submerged in beauty. That is my own notion of a glorious destiny.\"\n\nWith a laugh they started across the wide savanna. Jatha leaned on a walking staff even though his strength had mostly returned. In a flood of energy his companion darted across the open field, slashing a furrow through the amber grass. His howl of freedom startled winged creatures to flight.\n\nWhen the armies of New Britannia arrived at Logosia, the production was a marvel to behold. A hundred tall ships anchored some distance from the rocky shore. Their sails were furled to reveal a spiny landscape of masts and pulleys and bowsprits. In the drizzle of a wet morning their lanterns shone like yellow gemstones. Proceeding from the midst of the fleet was a tide of smaller landing boats, each driven shoreward by many pairs of oars. Like a plague of insects did the boats crawl to land in a slow, inexorable swarm. Each boat carried at its prow a spellcaster whose magic ignited a lavender globe of light. When the boats landed, soldiers in leather armor disembarked, collected their long weapons and formed into neat platoons at the commands of their officers. As more troops arrived they marched farther up the pebbled beach. Soon the shoreline was brimming with ranks upon ranks of soldiers, measured by glowing points of magic.\n\nA few hundred yards inland, the length of the shore was walled by rough, grey crags. The harsh mountains stood watch like giant sentinels against the barbarian sea. The range extended to both horizons. Scattered across the slopes and crowding the open beach to the north was a vast horde of Jukan warriors staring in amazement. The army of Clan Varang was mighty to behold. In troops it seemed limitless, though the New Britannian forces arrived in such a swell that by dusk they would outnumber the Juka by a third.\n\nThe mood of the scene was somber, darkly expectant, as if the Logosian mountains themselves might lift up their foothills and squash both armies of invaders.\n\nBut so far no threats had materialized. Raveka kept her eyes to the south, though, in case the low, roiling clouds hid an ambush. The wooden Britannian ships looked fragile atop the steely sea.\n\nThe Mathematician sat in a boat with thirty soldiers and pulled on a stout, soggy oar. She was dressed in a hauberk of studded leather like the rest of the infantry. Naturally, penetrating the army had required trivial effort. With nearly ten thousand troops deployed, every soldier worked beside a stranger. While still in Britain she had contrived a false identity and insinuated herself into a platoon of spearmen. Or perhaps spearwomen was the better term, for her troop-mates were entirely female. They had accepted her at once when she demonstrated her brass. The company had been pleasant on the journey across the sea and had never suspected her nocturnal forays. Raveka would almost be sad to leave them.\n\nBut of course they were enemies and she had to detach herself. This landing would be the last she saw of them. So she ignored their chatter as she spied the southern clouds, wondering when Sartorius would strike.\n\n\"Sian's infatuated,\" commented one armored woman, using Raveka's false name. \"She can't stop looking at those privateer barks.\"\n\n\"Can't be,\" said another. \"She's too pretty to mix with that load of vagabonds. Sian, listen to me, you should find yourself a rich knight and let him pamper you. You're fair as any lady I ever saw and twice the man of any soldier.\"\n\n\"Nah, look at her. She's smitten. There's rogues in her eyes. You can see it in her face. She wants one of those dangerous lovers.\"\n\n\"I ran with a sailor once. They ain't so tough. More salty than hardy, if you get me.\"\n\nThe women all laughed except for Raveka, who jutted up a stem finger. \"Listen!\"\n\nThe platoon fell silent. The resdess ocean sloshed against the boat. Oars creaked in their mounts. Puddles rippled under their feet, amplified by the round, wooden hull.\n\nSomething bumped the bottom of the boat. They were still in deep water, a hundred yards from shore.\n\nThen the entire craft lurched upward with a great splash. The women cried out as they scattered through the air. Raveka clung to her oar and tried to glimpse what had upended them. In the frothy tumble of seawater she discerned a large, steely shape with mechanical claws. It was a clockwork leviathan, a marine cousin of the juggernaut. This was not the attack she had expected.\n\nShe hit the water hard and kicked away from the capsized boat. The leviathan began to tear the hull to pieces with devastating ease. The automaton was the size of a New Britannian carriage and riveted with thick, metal armor. Its crablike claws were larger than saddles, snapping through wooden planks like scissors. In seconds the boat was flotsam. Soldiers swam away from the monster and it pursued them by churning broad, submerged propellers. The women it caught proved as fragile as the boat. Now others turned against the leviathan and laid into it with swords and spears. The clangs of metal on metal filled the misty air, alongside the screams of human warriors and a constant, frantic splashing.\n\nAll around Raveka the sea boiled with blood as two or three dozen of the automatons surfaced. Then the wizards launched counterattacks of fire and roaring whirlpools. Great winds swept down from the sky. Leviathans tossed through the air, smoking and flailing, and crashed against the rocky beach. More than a thousand soldiers had already landed and they stormed the mechanical beings with a torrent of crashing blows. The troops of Clan Varang closed in to help.\n\nRaveka swam for shore through the thick, grisly seawater. She fought down a panic as her legs kicked opaque water. When her feet discovered the bottom she scrabbled onto the rocks, assisted by other infantrymen. Scores of other swimmers arrived with her. She draped on a flat rock and turned around to survey the battle.\n\nThe leviathan attack was over. Perhaps fifteen of the steel creatures were dismantled. The others must have fled. She estimated a hundred or more casualties, though the healers were already illuminating the distant waves with their spells. The final tally of dead would be lower than a conventional army. Such was the strength of the New Britannian military, permeated with sorcery.\n\nThen she heard a series of dull popping sounds. She looked south. The ambush had begun on the privateer ships. In the distance she saw blooms of fire, penstrokes of lightning, followed by unsynchronized booms. She shook the seawater from her close-cropped hair and dashed down the beach for a closer look. A host of other soldiers followed. As she closed on the battle she picked out airships hovering in the low, angry clouds. They seemed to be clustering over two or three privateer warships. The vessels fought back with sorcery and flaming missiles but their hulls had already begun to bum. One of the ships, she saw, bore the name Menagerie on its prow.\n\nAbruptly an airship listed in the sky. Slowly the floating vessel descended toward the ocean. Raveka saw chains attached to its hull. Great winches on the Menagerie dragged the airship from its high position of safety. Privateers thronged the barquentine's riggings, ready to board. The airship vomited great clouds of fire. Sailors screamed and dove for safety. Spells glittered across the Menagerie to extinguish the rising flames.\n\nRaveka watched in amazement as Captain Bawdewyn reeled the airship to the level of the mainmast. A stream of sailors leapt aboard the Technocrat vessel waving spears and cutlasses. She knew the airship was lost then. These bombardment craft were manned by engineers, not fighters, and the bloodthirsty sailors outnumbered them five to one. In minutes the airship descended to the water's surface. The privateers let out a hearty cheer as the waves swallowed the black, smoking vessel.\n\nMore lightning streaked from the sky. The Menagerie shook with the impact. One of its masts split and toppled. Raveka spotted a second wave of airships descending from the concealing clouds, doubling the number in the assault. She saw Bawdewyn's men preparing to fire another volley of boarding chains, but it was clear they could not haul down the airships fast enough. Another privateer vessel had started to blaze.\n\nWith excitement she clutched her hands to her chest. Though the privateers were not part of the New Britannian ground force, every Technocrat victory now was a boost to her spirit. Her emotions were rampant. She chanted a geometric proof to calm her twisted nerves, but abandoned it on the first verse. The drama on the water shackled her attention.\n\nA dazzling cascade erupted from the sea. In the middle of Bawdewyn's flotilla appeared a huge, resplendent galleon. She recognized the Akalabeth, the warship of the House of the Griffin. The archmages must have lain in wait for the full brace of airships to appear. A glimmering, translucent sphere enclosed the huge craft and repelled the lightning and fire that streaked from above. Wailing funnel clouds snaked from the deck and swatted aside airships like toys. The flying vessels tumbled to the mountainside at achingly slow speeds. Their impacts were gradual and devastating.\n\nThen the ocean itself emitted a groan. The rumbling noise hushed the land-bound audience. As the battle raged the privateer warships began to toss and roll fiercely. The waterline receded many yards from the beach. Then gigantic columns of seawater thrust underneath the privateers, hoisting the ships into the air. Plumes of white spray pounded the hulls like drums. Raveka gaped. This was unprecedented sorcery. She watched as each privateer vessel soared on a pillar of water to a position beside an airship. The Menagerie and her sisters disgorged howling warriors who overwhelmed the Technocrat engineers. The archmages on board the Akalabeth moved the privateers like kites among the airships, which succumbed to ruthless, unstoppable boarding attacks. Slowly, silently, the beaten Technocrat vessels descended from the clouds. The turbulent sea gulped each in turn. When the privateer warships touched gently to the ocean's surface, a titanic cheer exploded from the army.\n\nBut Sister Raveka fought a sickness in her belly. She hurried away from the waterfront and darted behind the boulders of the foothills. She doubled over and gasped for breath. Finally she droned a mathematical chant, softly but aloud.\n\nOf course this was the result of her note to Lord Gideon. She had mentioned the privateers so that, after this attack occurred, he would be convinced that her accusation of General Nathaniel was genuine. But Gideon must have deduced that an attack was imminent. He had alerted the archmages. With astounding efficiency they had organized a response. She could never have anticipated such a crushing defeat. The thought of it weakened her physically.\n\nAfter a few minutes she leaned her head back against the rock wall. She repeated the chant in her mind and the weakness of her body incrementally faded. Then she rubbed her tired face. Lector Gaff had been correct. She had become too emotional in her affinity for New Britannia. It had made her impulsive and prone to mistakes. The stakes were too high for that. To be an effective spy she would need to ground herself again in the strictures of the Machine. To do so she must travel to Logos. While she was there she would also deliver the vital information that she carried.\n\nAnd in Junction, in Logos's shadow, she would return to Gabriel's arms, which no verse or litany could entice her to forget.\n\nAt least today's events indicated that Gideon had received her message. Whether he would investigate General Nathaniel she could not say, but the nobleman was charmingly idealistic and faithful to the Virtues. The odds were not hopeless that he might foil the general's schemes.\n\nBut she had already fired that particular arrow. Now she must press onward. After a deep breath she headed up the mountain slope to a hidden place among the crags. She had swum ashore last night and stashed her clothes and equipment there. She would collect them, steal a ridgeback and set off to the southeast. The steam of Logos called to her and she intended to breathe it soon.\n\nThe crystal audience chamber of the venerable Dame Sayaru was at once austere and luxurious. In the manner of Matriarchs the very old Meer honored elegant, organic rules of design. The room had a high ceiling with simple arches, supported by pillars that evoked asymmetric crystalline shapes. Very little adornment cluttered the open spaces\u2014pots of smoldering herbs to scent the spicy air, a broad, soft rug underfoot, long veils draped from above to grant privacy to the Matriarch's glittering throne. Yet the walls were fashioned of magnificent crystal in the colors of sapphire and emerald. A gentle glow issued from within, softly illuminating the chamber. The rug and veils were woven using techniques honed by millennia, their textures and reflective qualities exquisitely cultured. Even the play of sound in the open spaces revealed deliberate, skillful refinement.\n\nJatha breathed deep the stately ambience of the room. A feeling of reverence swept through him. Here was the footprint of his ancient culture, the physical manifestation of thousands of years of civilization. The spirits of the ancestors guided them. Calm, dignified, natural, magical; these traits pervaded Meer society and were exemplified in the Mystic caste. His return to Ishpur had fanned the embers of his cultural pride.\n\nYet old resentments had flared inside him as well. As he knelt now before his exalted great-great grandmother, the ancient Matriarch Sayaru, he stifled the disenfranchised feeling that had driven him from Avenosh a decade earlier.\n\nInstead he respectfully explained the events that had brought him back.\n\nThe aged Matriarch listened with attentive reserve. She was a proud figure on her angular crystal throne. Gem-studded silk swathed her gaunt frame. A draped headdress fell across her shoulders. Her fur was marbled grey, painstakingly washed and oiled to grant her a nearly glasslike sheen. Her voice was rich and high. \"You say Chamberlain Kavah has captured the nexus point in New Britannia?\"\n\nThe wizard nodded from the pillow where he knelt. \"Yes, Venerable Grandmother, he has secured it. The humans call the phenomenon a 'beacon.' I've never seen such power before.\"\n\nThe old woman narrowed her severe eyes. \"I have. It is the result of the ghastliest violence to the Ether. The Lore Council once wielded it. I fear Kavah's desire is to resurrect that cursed circle. His cabal of Firstborn sons in Deceit are laying the groundwork for their abomination. And as yet, I fear, we have been unable to stop them. The Warrior caste cannot track them in that jungle. The Firstborns shield themselves from our dreams. Their power is already great, for they control a second nexus point in their lair.\"\n\n\"Fairfax and I were there. We saw no second beacon in that old Terathan cave.\"\n\n\"It is there. It is the source of the enchantment that makes the swamp impassable. You are lucky to have emerged from the heart of that foul place. Your human companion is to be commended.\"\n\nJatha dared a grin. \"Please don't tell him that, Grandmother. He thinks too much of himself already.\"\n\nThe Matriarch scowled. \"These are not flippant affairs, Jatha!\"\n\nHe dropped his gaze to the floor. He quelled his irritation. \"Forgive me, Grandmother.\"\n\n\"Are you aware of the nature of a nexus point?\"\n\n\"I understand they are rifts in the Ether.\"\n\n\"They are indeed, but that does no justice to the danger they pose. They are remnants of the Cataclysm itself.\"\n\nHe perked his ears. \"Interesting. The human archmages know nothing of this, that I am aware of.\"\n\n\"Nor should they. Some knowledge is too dangerous. It tempts weak minds, as it has done with Kavah. So we feign ignorance of these matters. You must use discretion, Jatha, before you tell this to anyone. Swear to it.\"\n\nHe blinked slowly. \"I swear, Grandmother.\"\n\n\"You are aware that every culture tells its own story of the Cataclysm. The New Britannians claim that Blackthorn and the Lost King unleashed it in a great battle. The Juka insist that the Overlords created it with a thunderous machine, to quell the slave revolt. And, of course, we know that our Lore Council attempted to reshape the world with disastrous consequences. But the fact is, these three separate events joined our worlds together in the fusion that was the Cataclysm.\" \"Fusion? I thought the Cataclysm tore the world apart.\"\n\n\"I can remember the days when the Meer were all that were. No other civilized races shared our lands. The humans and Juka did not exist. In those times the three races dwelt in different worlds, Jatha. Different Sosarias. But each of those worlds destroyed itself with the folly of great power. Each universe met its end. We stand today upon a patchwork, a mosaic of what remained. Fragments of our sundered lands came together in the Ether, like leaves in a pond. The Cataclysm destroyed three worlds and created a fourth one. It was a convergence.\"\n\nJatha nodded. \"I see. And the nexus points are weaknesses in the seams.\"\n\n\"It is a reasonable metaphor. We know of two such points, one in New Britannia and one in the pits of Deceit. We conjecture that a third exists somewhere in Logosia, near the place where the Overlords built their terrible machine.\"\n\n\"If I recall my Jukan history, that would be Logos itself, which was once called Citadel Moonglow.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. We do not know precisely where it is, though we fear that Kavah has located it. We fear too that he has perpetrated this so-called 'Pact of Four' as a scheme to capture it. If he does so, his power will become unthinkable.\"\n\n\"I have seen what one nexus point can do. Three would be daunting.\"\n\nSayaru raised a hand for emphasis. \"The three are more dangerous than their sum. Our world is composed of three great continents, three great fragments. If he controls a nexus point in all of them, he holds the breadth of Sosaria in his power.\"\n\n\"I don't understand, Grandmother.\"\n\n\"Imagine a clay pot with three cracks. Drive a wedge into one crack and water will leak out. Drive a wedge into all three cracks and the pot will fall to pieces. That is the power Kavah seeks to possess.\"\n\nJatha flattened his ears. \"You mean he could cause another Cataclysm?\"\n\n\"Which would rip the world asunder once more. The fragments would remain, but in what form no one can say. It is certain, however, that societies and governments will be thrown into chaos. We fear Kavah intends to use this power to strike down the Matriarchs and establish the rule of a new Lore Council.\"\n\n\"That's unthinkable!\"\n\nThe Matriarch lifted her chin. Her old eyes watched him closely. \"You are not unacquainted, Jatha, with the resentment that drives him.\"\n\nOld grudges stirred inside his chest. This time he could not conceal it from his face. \"Venerable Grandmother, understand me when I say that I gravely disapprove of such a comparison.\"\n\nHer stare literally flashed. \"Keep your tongue, Jatha! You are no pride to your house and family. You are a dissolute man.\" Then she deigned to add, with a sigh, \"But at least I can say that you are not evil.\"\n\nShe had deliberately provoked him to justify her own response. It was the guile of a pacifist. He subdued his pique and spoke in a low, measured tone. \"Thank you, Grandmother.\" Then he added, \"Kavah flirts with the ultimate evil, to use Cataclysm as a weapon.\"\n\n\"May the ancestors guide us to salvation. Three worlds are tossed together and the result is a maelstrom. Our universe, I fear, is a sinking ship.\"\n\nHe saw troubled thoughts behind Sayaru's austere mask. He had never imagined that she would be afraid of anything. But Kavah's treachery posed the first real challenge to the Matriarchs since the Cataclysm itself. He wondered how they would respond. Their collective power was as great as any in Sosaria but they were stubbornly passive when conflicts arose.\n\nJatha, however, knew the value of action. He was determined to rouse them to address the danger. If a threat appeared in a distant land then the Matriarchs must strike it down. Whether he could convince them of the necessity was a daunting question. Taking another deep breath, he began to pursue the answer.\n\nThe western shore of Logosia swarmed with New Britannian troops. By nightfall the bulk of the infantry had landed, albeit with no small amount of worry. But no further attacks came. Tents and torches and campfires sprang up by the thousands. The fleet of stolid warships observed the deployment quietly, their hundred golden lanterns impaling the ocean with serrated reflections. The boats that rowed back and forth mostly shuttled cargo and livestock now. Wagons were already assembled and loaded, preparing for the march inland.\n\nInside a laige tent at the center of the encampment, two men converged upon a small, wooden crate. General Nathaniel opened the lid and retrieved a bottle of brandy and two glasses, which he began to fill. \"There you are. Hale and intact, as I promised.\" He handed a glass to Lord Gideon, who accepted it absently. The nobleman's face was marked with unease.\n\n\"It does not make sense, Nathaniel. Clan Kumar was supposed to meet us, not Clan Varang. We should have been dealing with the legitimate government of Garron.\"\n\nThe general shrugged. \"Perhaps someone told Kumar the wrong landing point. You know these Juka. They plot against one other as casually as you or I might throw a summer party.\"\n\nGideon glanced at the officer. \"That's exactly my fear.\"\n\n\"Don't trouble yourself over it. The internal politics of the Juka Clans are not our problem, as long as they're united against Blackthorn. I'm interested in their strength, not their honor.\" He lifted his brandy glass. \"Look here, the time has come to toast our exquisite ladies, as we promised them in Britain. Here's to Aria and Annabel, whose beauty and loyalty shine all the way across the ocean. May they always be custodians of our souls.\" When Gideon gave no answer, the general frowned. \"What's wrong? I thought you were anticipating this moment.\"\n\nThe nobleman set down his glass with a conspicuous thump. \"I was. I am. But I must ask you a question first.\" Nathaniel tilted his head. Long braids whispered over his breastplate. \"I'm listening.\"\n\n\"Shirron Turlogan is dead. Warlord Bahrok has declared himself the successor to the throne.\"\n\n\"I know. Of course the murder is shocking, but this is a war. No one accuses Blackthorn of honor.\"\n\nGideon stared at the general. \"Nathaniel, what role did you play in his death?\"\n\n\"What's that? I don't understand.\"\n\n\"You heard my question.\"\n\nNathaniel lifted his chin. His face hardened. \"What are you implying, Gideon?\"\n\n\"Just this: I want you to look me in the eye and deny that you had a hand in Turlogan's assassination.\"\n\nThe general slammed down his brandy on the wooden crate. \"That's outrageous!\"\n\n\"I know you for an honest man. I shall take your word as truth, but you must give it to me explicitly.\"\n\n\"Who told you this slander?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. Nathaniel, your reticence is an implication itself.\"\n\nThe older man threw up his hands in shock. \"Reticence! Insult, you mean! I can't believe you would suspect me of such a crime.\"\n\n\"Then explain to me the bloodstain on the table in your cabin.\" Gideon watched the general's eyes dart away for an instant. But the officer said nothing and Gideon continued, \"I saw it before we came ashore. It has some meaning. I want to know what.\"\n\nThe general paused to rub the bridge of his nose. \"Gideon, I beg you. Don't pry into my secret dealings. I make many allies while gathering my intelligence. Not all of them are savory people.\"\n\n\"I don't expect your allies to be honorable, but I do expect you to adhere to the Virtues. You're a knight, Nathaniel, in the order I command.\"\n\n\"And your order,\" growled Nathaniel, \"serves my army. Don't throw your rank at me. We're in a military action now.\n\nI shall do what I deem appropriate to secure our victory. I won't brook dissension, even from the lord of the House of the Lion.\"\n\n\"Won't you? Then settle the issue now. Tell me you had no part in Turlogan's assassination. Tell me it wasn't a plot between yourself and Warlord Bahrok to put that great boor on the Jukan throne.\" The general seemed to be weighing an answer, which was response enough for Lord Gideon. The nobleman moved toward the door of the tent. \"Very well. I shall not drink with you.\"\n\n\"Montenegro's paranoia has infected you, as well.\"\n\nGideon stopped. He spoke with subdued ire. \"Ever since Sir Gabriel presented his case to me, I have watched you for personal reasons. I now know I should have listened to him with more of an open mind. He was imperfect but he lived and died with a devotion to Honor. If we are diligent, you and I, perhaps the same can be said of us.\"\n\nNathaniel muttered, \"It is not Honor you appease. It is Montenegro's cousin. She's got into your head.\"\n\nThe nobleman glowered, \"Speak of her again and I shall draw my sword, Nathaniel. Is that dear?\" Then he turned away and headed for the exit.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To collect my knights, if you please. I understand Clan Kumar is camped several miles north of here. The Silver Serpents shall ride to Logos alongside Warlord Venduss. I want no part of this criminal alliance between you and Warlord Bahrok\"\n\n\"You can't do that!\"\n\n\"Watch and see if I can, Nathaniel. Don't bother to saddle up. You are not welcome among us.\"\n\nGeneral Nathaniel pointed a finger and stalked after the nobleman. \"This is insubordination! You'll be disgraced in the House of the Lion!\"\n\n\"Why do you protest? Your design is now complete, isn't it? That's what this invasion means to you. A chance to take the Lion from me. You conniving toad! Tell me, am I next after Turlogan? Will I wake some night with a dagger at my throat?\"\n\n\"Get out, you bastard! If I see you again I'll have you in chains!\"\n\nThe lord's eyes flashed. \"Oh, rest assured you'll see me in Logos. I'll save some Technocrats for you, if you get there quickly enough. And you'll see me again in the Royal Senate when I hang you from the rafters!\"\n\n\"The knights won't follow you! I am the commander of this invasion.\"\n\nGideon laughed bitterly. \"Nathaniel the Dragonslayer, leader of knights and assassin of the Shirron! We'll see who they follow, General. Mark my words, the only cavalry you'll command will plod around on ridgebacks.\"\n\nWhen the nobleman vanished through the tent flap, General Nathaniel stormed back to the wooden crate. With a growl he swatted aside the brandy bottle and both glasses, which smashed to pieces on the hard ground. Catching his breath, he stared at the twinkling glass shards. With a frown he murmured, \"Forgive me, Annabel. I do it for us.\" Then he banged his fist on the crate, pounding the wooden lid back into place. The noise rang loudly in his ears.\n\nAs dawn broke over the city of Ishpur, the sun threw golden beams upon a multitude of crystal spires. The translucent structures captured the light and multiplied it across endless facets in a vast, dazzling spectacle. Each spire comprised a Matriarch's abode, busy with attendants of the Mystic and Warrior castes. The streets thronged with Meer and their birdlike ostard mounts. The hum of their voices echoed from the glassy buildings. Beyond the city stretched the plains and jungles of Avenosh, in which Ishpur shone like a sparkling jewel, a crystal garden in a verdant tableau.\n\nFrom a balcony on a particular spire, Fairfax reclined on a pallet of pillows and watched the theatrics of the sunrise. He was dressed in a filmy robe of lush silk. Beside him rested a plate of fruits of odd shapes and colors. In his hand perched a cup of satiny wine.\n\nA commotion interrupted his tranquility. He glanced behind him to see Jatha stomping onto the wide balcony. The wizard's colorful Mystic robes tossed about him as he marched angrily to his companion's side.\n\nFairfax chuckled and shook his head. \"Do the Matriarchs only give audience before breakfast? They must prefer their subjects in a chipper mood.\"\n\n\"The cowardly old harpies!\"\n\n\"Is that any way to speak of your elders? No wonder they chased you off all those years ago.\"\n\nJatha bared his teeth. \"You wouldn't say that if you spoke to them yourself. They sit on their glass thrones and dream that their feet will never get muddy!\"\n\n\"Ishpur is excruciatingly clean, I do confess. Do they never feed those ostards? But I can see that you've made some demand which your grandmother outrageously chose to disobey. Tell me, exalted Patriarch, what cowardice do they manifest?\"\n\n\"We are on the brink of a terrible crisis and they do nothing more than lounge in their temples and talk!\"\n\n\"Which crisis is that? Not the war, surely.\"\n\n\"Not just the war. It's treachery of the most heinous regard. Kavah's treachery.\"\n\n\"He did appear to have an unseemly amount of fun with Valente's beacon.\"\n\n\"Unseemly indeed! The power of the beacon is too great for any man to wield.\"\n\n\"Why, what can he do with it?\" He sipped his wine and swallowed quickly. \"Nay, permit me to conjecture. It is 'forbidden' magic in the ubiquitous, wizardly sense of the word.\"\n\n\"It is just that! Nor can I tell you much more without breaking an oath to Dame Sayaru. Suffice to say that our world may be in peril.\"\n\n\"Please, not before breakfast.\"\n\n\"Listen, I've worked out Kavah's scheme. He created the Pact of Four to convince the Royal Senate to invade Logosia.\n\nIt was a strategic maneuver. While the archmages are gone, unable to hinder him, Kavah has captured that nexus point on Valente's property. He's got another one under his control in the caves of Deceit. And there's a third nexus point in Logos, or near it, that he's eager to capture, as well.\"\n\n\"He is a captivating man.\"\n\n\"He's churlishly cunning. You see, with Logosia under attack, Blackthorn's attention will focus on repelling the invaders. That will free Kavah to secure the third nexus point. If he succeeds, Fairfax, his power will be greater than anyone can control.\"\n\n\"I begin to understand why the Technocrats lock up their alchemy inside machines. Wheels and gears seem more reliable than greedy wizards.\"\n\n\"If you understood even a dram of sorcery, you would never say such a thing. Magic belongs in skilled hands, not iron machines. But your mind is simple, like the food in Yew, so I absolve you of blame for that remark.\"\n\n\"I rather like the food in Yew, in a boiled tuber sort of manner. But O great, effulgent Patriarch, pray enlighten me. How do you propose that the Matriarchs ought to proceed? Should they mount their chariots and ride forth to do battle with Kavah? That would be a parade to catch the eye, though their gowns might billow with frightening portent.\"\n\n\"They have no interest in battle. It's their greatest strength and their greatest weakness.\"\n\n\"How is it a government of women shows such restraint? Most lasses I know are absolutely promiscuous with their violence. Especially in the last month or so.\"\n\n\"Flowers attract honeybees. Sweat attracts mosquitoes. If you'd remember that, your love life would improve a thousandfold. And if you want to know my counsel, I told Sayaru that the Matriarchs need to send the Warrior caste to secure the nexus point in New Britannia. Several thousand Hunters should be able to control that valley until the archmages return. Especially since the wisps would be their allies. Then the Matriarchs themselves should travel to Logosia, stop Kavah and free the Ishpurian ambassador.\"\n\n\"Slow down. The ambassador?\"\n\n\"Dame Adhayah. Apparently she's been missing for several weeks. The Matriarchs use dreams to communicate with each other and she has been out of contact. It can only mean that Kavah has locked her away somewhere that's enchanted with powerful spells.\"\n\n\"Or maybe she's just dead.\"\n\nJatha shook his head. \"The Matriarchs would know. The ambassador is both alive and imprisoned. Nor will she free herself, if it means violence against her captors.\"\n\n\"One wonders how the caste survived for thousands of years.\"\n\n\"It's a testament to the power of harmony. Pacifism is the cornerstone of Matriarchal magic. Like it or not, it has made them the most potent magicians in Sosaria.\"\n\n\"To what end, though, if the power is never used?\"\n\n\"That is the very question I posed to Dame Sayaru! Some emergencies require force. But the Matriarchs will never agree to it, the squawking old crows.\"\n\n\"Then why do you have that look in your eye?\"\n\n\"What look?\"\n\n\"Hungry anticipation. In years past, I have relied upon that look as an omen of fresh debauchery. In the last six months, however, I have come to associate it with causes and crusades. I have a feeling that you have a feeling that something can be done without the Matriarchs.\"\n\nJatha grinned. \"You know me too well.\"\n\n\"I have often said so.\"\n\nHe pointed a finger at the ranger. \"My crass but intrepid friend, you and I must hurry to Logosia and set things straight. If we can rescue the ambassador she may help us stop Kavah's scheme. Unlike the Matriarchs here in Ishpur, Dame Adhayah is already waist-deep in the muck. And she doesn't have to kill anyone if we do it for her, right?\"\n\n\"Slayers in the service of peace. Why not? We have certainly slain for lesser rewards. But didn't we try to perforate Kavah once already? I carried your carcass for two weeks afterward. My dignity still smarts when the weather turns.\"\n\n\"He was drawing his power from the nexus then. I'll gladly pit my spells against him under different circumstances. Besides, you and I shall not undertake this adventure by ourselves. There's someone in Logosia whose aid we must solicit for the task.\"\n\n\"You don't believe Lady Aria's tale about Montenegro being alive, do you?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I'm talking about Way Master Thulann of Garron.\"\n\n\"Capital plan! We did not see enough of the old turtle after that business with Braun's Needle. But how shall we find her? She travels more than a seaman's rash.\"\n\n\"Her clan is mustered on the western shore of Logosia, preparing to meet the New Britannians as they arrive.\"\n\n\"You sound very confident of that.\"\n\n\"The Matriarchs have monitored the conflict fastidiously. Apparendy voyeurism is an essential component of pacifism.\"\n\nFairfax laughed. \"Will they grant us the use of a ship, as well, so they can spy on us as we embark on our quest?\"\n\n\"We shall do better, my friend. Dame Sayaru has not been entirely unaccommodating. She has agreed to cook up a wild moongate to take us to Logosia.\"\n\nThe human whistled. \"That's no small feat, if I recall our journey to Garron two years back. She must be frightfully anxious to see us off.\"\n\nJatha selected a purple fruit from his companion's platter. He bit through the skin and savored the sweet nectar. With a brimming mouth he noted, \"It's your presence among her granddaughters that quickens her resolve. She doesn't approve of a serpent among the eggs.\"\n\nFairfax grumbled, \"An apt comparison, alas, for every one of your fair sisters is locked inside a shell. I'll need a hammer and chisel just to get a kiss.\"\n\n\"Courtship among Mystics is a formal ritual. I daresay you don't qualify to participate.\"\n\n\"It's not the rules that thwart me. It's the girls' insistence upon following them. I find myself longing for Shavade's brisk candor. Now there's a woman who skewers laws and men to get what she desires.\"\n\nJatha swallowed a bite and groaned, \"By all that's merciful, please don't start that again.\"\n\n\"I hope she didn't die in that valley. I never won her smile. If I could do that, I would be satisfied.\"\n\nThe wizard spat a seed over the edge of the balcony. \"Fairfax, you'll never be satisfied. You have all the restraint of a sotted berserker. Now start deciding how to say good-bye to my sisters while retaining some particle of dignity. The moongate should be ready in a day or two. We'll set out as soon as possible.\"\n\nFairfax lifted his cup to the glimmering city before him, shining copper and amber in the streaming dawn. \"Alas, radiant Ishpur, too briefly did our lips meet. But danger now calls me from your crystalline arms. You know, Jatha, for everything I sacrifice on your lamentable behalf, I ask so little in return. You would think I might demand something for myself, wouldn't you?\"\n\nJatha sucked a drop of sweet juice from his lip, then chuckled. \"You would think so, you wormy hound. You would think so.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Black Veil", + "text": "Thulann's black, flowing gown streamed at the cusp of an ocean breeze. A dark veil pressed against her face. The elderly Juka stood on a high, flat rock, as tall and straight as the walking staff she carried. Her slim figure parted the cool, salty wind. Overhead the sky was steely and low, a snarl of clouds that diffused the morning light to a dull character. The breakers on the beach heaved a whispering sigh.\n\nThe flat ground between the mountains and the sea was filled with Jukan troops. The splendid army of Clan Kumar was arrayed in parade formation, a glittering composition of shields and spears in crisp geometry. Five thousand clansmen stood at attention with armor polished and weapons presented. Their colorful banners lashed the wind. No other sounds emerged from the ranks.\n\nTo the south gathered a second force, nearly a thousand in number. These were the soldiers of Clan Eryem with their triangular flags and painted armor. Their many-oared longboats lined the rocky shore. At their head was Warlord Savan astride his giant ridgeback, in the posture of an arrogant chieftain. Since his army had arrived, his proper place was among them.\n\nStrangest of all was the ocean of steel that gleamed on the far side of Clan Eryem; for the knights of New Britannia had arrived unexpectedly as the muster began. A thousand strong, the silver warriors rode proudly atop their strapping horses. Tassels and ribbons adorned the slender-legged mounts. The knights' long, barbed lances were raised in a vertical salute. Their polished armor reflected the clouds. Every helmet displayed a crest unique to the knight who wore it, composing a sea of rainbow colors. A single banner raised above them, bearing the emblem of the Silver Serpent.\n\nBut the pageant of military strength was a distant backdrop for Thulann. Her attention lingered atop the flat rock on which she stood. Beside her waited Toria in a formal gown, the Way Master's constant attendant, but the other members of the ritual party each fulfilled a precise ceremonial role. General Fekhet and the other high officers saluted with drawn swords. A collection of robed loresingers formed a half-circle and chanted an undulating song. Tekmhat of Clan Eryem knelt in ritual supplication. And in the center of the gathering was Venduss of Garron in a suit of exquisite armor, his face locked into a reverent frown. With well-rehearsed precision he led the ritual that confirmed him as the chieftain of Clan Kumar.\n\nThulann's training compelled her to monitor the particulars of the display, but the deeper parts of her mind lay elsewhere. On the entire coast, only a handful of Kumar clansmen were absent from the coronation of the new warlord. These few gathered around a pillar of smoke that rose from the north side of the encampment. They were Turlogan's keeners, weeping shrilly around the slain chieftain's pyre. They would continue to do so for fifty days as prescribed by Jukan lore, accompanying the ashes back to Garron where priests would lay them to rest in the clan's tomb. The task of keening was difficult but essential. The funeral was now over, Turlogan's Life Song had been chanted to the Blessed Halls of Honor by his only son, and the new chieftain was nearly confirmed. All that remained for Turlogan's soul was the lamentation of the keeners, whose wails even now could be heard over the solemn ritual.\n\nThulann herself wore a keener's veil. Her cries, however, had no voice and no tears.\n\nThe Jukan healers had done what they could, but Turlogan had passed beyond their help. The assassin had been expert in his work. Perhaps a New Britannian archmage might have conjured back Turlogan's spirit, as Master Gregorio had once done with Venduss, but no such wizard had been on hand and that miracle was only possible within a few hours of death. And so did Turlogan receive a fatal answer to his rejection of Lector Gaff's surrender.\n\nBut the truth had to be more complex. The facts were clear. Turlogan had been killed by stealth. A battle would have certainly drawn attention. In all likelihood Turlogan would have beaten any assassin, even one as deadly as Montenegro. But Thulann could not accept that Montenegro would have cut a sleeping man's throat, continued to stab him until he was dead, then selectively mutilated certain organs to ensure that no healer could rekindle the spark of life. To be sure, the knight had the skills for it. He was a lethal bladesman. He had the requisite knowledge of healing magic, having fought beside spellcasters all of his life. He carried the potions of invisibility. He could have murdered Turlogan, but she did not want to believe that he would have. He had ruthlessness in his heart, but he had tamed it. She had seen him tame it.\n\nIf she looked into his eyes, she could be certain.\n\nOn the rocks before her the confirmation ended and Warlord Venduss announced himself to the mustered troops. He shouted the order to march for Logos. The warriors cheered their new leader and rushed to move out. But the next hour found Thulann in her sizable tent, packing a single shoulder bag. Toria helped, though the girl looked despondent. \"I just don't understand how you can leave, Thulann. Today of all days.\"\n\nThe Way Master still wore her mourning costume. She spoke from beneath a near-opaque veil. \"Venduss has Fekhet and Savan to guide him. He does not need my counsel.\"\n\n\"You know that's not true.\"\n\n\"It is his own choice. I have advised him against marching on Junction and Logos, just as I advised his father. And just as his father did, he ignores my words.\"\n\nToria leveled an incredulous stare. \"That's ridiculous! After the assassination, every one of those soldiers outside would give his life to avenge the Shirron. There's no turning back now. You know that.\"\n\nThe old Juka shook her head. \"Do we vote upon our strategies now? Leaders are obliged to make unpopular decisions. Venduss's grandmother knew that when she was chieftain.\"\n\n\"That's not fair. Turlogan himself couldn't live up to Narah's legacy. Why are you acting this way? Everyone's looking to you for guidance and you're hiding behind that veil.\"\n\n\"They look to Venduss, not to me.\"\n\n\"You're not that naive, Thulann!\"\n\nThe Way Master stuffed a fold of clothes into the sack with a brusque action. Her voice lowered a register. \"And how naive are you, Toria?\"\n\nThe human girl paused, then reached a tentative hand for Thulann. \"I'm sorry, Mistress. I didn't mean to... I know this has been terrible for you. I'm sorry.\"\n\nThulann clasped Toria's fingers and squeezed. \"Do not pity this old warrior. I have lost more friends in my lifetime than you would be able to count. I shall carry on.\" Her throat began to swell. She let go of the girl's hand before emotion overcame her.\n\nThe minstrel picked up a scabbard and short sword and commenced a ritual binding for travel. \"This would be easier if you'd tell us where you're going. What you're doing. Tekmhat thinks you're riding to Garron ahead of the keeners.\"\n\n\"That would be unwise. Now that Bahrok calls himself Shirron, I expea the city will be overrun by his soldiers. It will not be a friendly place for prominent members of Clan Kumar.\"\n\n\"Then where are you going? I never thought you would leave Venus side.\"\n\nThulann sighed. \"Nor shall I, when the time comes. But right now I remain at Turlogan's side. I must do so until honor is satisfied.\"\n\nToria blinked. \"You're off to avenge him.\" Thulann made no reply. \"So where does that road go? To Bahrok? He must have had a part in this.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly. But I have to be sure. I shall find the assassin first and then follow his leash.\"\n\n\"You don't think Montenegro really did it?\"\n\nThe Juka took the bound short sword and placed it in the bag. \"I shall ask him.\"\n\n\"You're going to Logos!\" Toria's face turned anxious. \"Mistress, that'll be very dangerous.\"\n\n\"It will be more dangerous if I wait until our armies surround it.\"\n\nThe girl looked down. \"I can't go with you, Mistress. I'm staying with Venduss.\"\n\n\"I know, child.\"\n\n\"They're having the wedding on the march and I promised Tekmhat I'd be there.\"\n\n\"Toria. Of course you must stay with the army. I need you to take over my duties as spymaster.\"\n\nThe human looked stunned. \"Me?\"\n\n\"You have assisted me for two years. You know my work You know my operatives and they know you. I need you to keep gathering intelligence in my absence. The invasion will be crippled without it.\" She smiled sadly, though Toria could not see it. \"Venduss needs you more than I do. Stay at his side.\"\n\n\"I'm worried that I won't see you again.\"\n\nShe took the girl's hand once more. \"Few things are certain, child, but this is one: I am proud of you and Venduss both. If you are the legacy I leave to this world, I shall walk boldly into the Blessed Halls of Honor.\"\n\nToria's eyes misted as she embraced Thulann. For long moments they held one another, then the Way Master pulled back. \"Enough. Say good-bye to the warlord for me. I shall not interrupt his business for this womanly foolishness.\"\n\n\"Lord Gideon wants a meeting before you leave.\"\n\n\"Give him my apologies. You can act in my stead now.\n\nRemember, he is a lord and a senator but he is also a noble warrior. Treat him with respect, be forthright, and he shall do the same for you.\"\n\nThe girl swallowed. \"Yes, Mistress.\"\n\n\"Farewell, Toria. Tread softly and wisely. You are one root of a mighty tree.\"\n\nShe did not look behind her when she exited the tent. As she walked from the camp she passed Venduss's tall pavilion. The young warrior stood outside conversing with the plate-armored Lord Gideon. Thulann knew that the knight would not recognize her in the black veil and robe of a keener, so she paused to indulge in one final image of Venduss. The youth had grown into a handsome chieftain. He was brash and foolish, but so had his father been all those decades ago. He would survive these trials. They would strengthen him daily. Someday he might even challenge for the tide of Shirron. She would watch that hour with pride from the afterlife.\n\nThe young warlord glanced up and saw her. She gave him a nod, though the windblown veil resisted her, and then she left him behind. One day she might stand beside him again. For the moment, however, she had a duty to Turlogan. She was a keener, after all, though she would force the wails from the throats of the guilty.\n\nIn the mountains above the striking encampment she came upon two figures. They wore the leather armor of New Britannian travelers. The taller of the pair, a Meer, bowed when she approached. The other, whose hair was a thicket of flaxen tangles, crossed his arms and frowned.\n\n\"What treachery is this?\" asked Fairfax. \"You want us to leave without saying hello to Toria?\"\n\nThulann set down her bag and pulled off her veil. \"I did not ask you to wait for me here just to take you back down to the beach again. You must trust my judgment. Toria needs no reminders of home right now. This is a dire time for her and for Venduss. He is marrying Tekmhat of Jamark in a few days. Her heart is breaking.\"\n\nThe ranger squinted. \"All the more reason for us to cheer her up, right?\"\n\nJatha laid a hand on his companion's shoulder. \"For a change, try to use that boiled tuber you call a brain. They're marching off to war. Toria needs to focus on the invasion, not pine for New Britannia. She's got a minstrel's soul, prone to daydreams and wandering. We would be an all-too-welcome distraction.\"\n\nThe Way Master fished dark garments from the bag. \"Besides, we have to make for Logos as quickly as possible. I want to get there well before any troops. Now put on these clothes so we can blend with the locals.\"\n\nThe Meer wizard grinned. \"I shall have a difficult time passing for a Logosian.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" murmured Thulann as she handed him a long scarf. \"Wrap it around your head so that only your eyes show. It is not an uncommon fashion for desert travelers.\" Jatha grimaced. \"I should wear a full mask in the desert heat? By my ancestors, this is an inhospitable place. Take me back to the swamps of Deceit.\"\n\n\"You can carry yourself this time,\" grumbled Fairfax.\n\nAs Thulann unbelted her robe she said, \"We shall be there in less than a week. Let us try to minimize our complaining during that time. If Montenegro and Lector Gaff are amicable, we may solve both of our problems shortly thereafter. If they are not amicable, however, we shall see hardship far greater than warm, sunny days.\"\n\nThe wizard chuckled. \"Ah, but I have missed your blithe demeanor, Thulann.\"\n\nThe Way Master paid them no attention as she changed into her Logosian disguise. The world seemed oddly remote. A more immediate sensation hit her\u2014she felt Turlogan's presence, strongly, physically, as if his ghost walked at her side. The feeling was both wonderful and frightening. She sensed herself moving in a twilight between life and death, between dark and light, between Shirron Turlogan and Warlord Venduss. It was a thin, taut sort of limbo that compelled her never to stop. As long as she kept walking Turlogan would still walk beside her. She imagined she might walk until the last day of her life.\n\nAnd the terrible day came when Lord Blackthorn declared war on the King. The knight-wizard rode before Sir Lazaro and said, \"I have given you a priceless gift and now I ask something in return. Stand with me against the King and repay your debt.\"\n\nAnd Sir Lazaro replied, \"I shall not stand with you, for on the day I became a knight I pledged my sword to the King.\"\n\n\"If you stand with the King, \" said Lord Blackthorn, \"then you stand as my enemy.\"\n\n\"That is not my desire but I am compelled by my oath. I should rather be an honored enemy than a dishonored friend.\"\n\nAnd so did Sir Lazaro uphold the Virtue of Honor, though it would soon cost him his life.\n\nIn the electric glow of the Technocrat workshop, Montenegro watched as Brother Barghast's apprentices took apart his mechanical steed. Its chest comprised a remarkable number of steel plates in a curved shell. Underneath was a frame of heavy bars and a dizzying mass of axles and wheels. He saw gears with strange, irregular cogs that ' rocked on and off as the tinkers moved the horse's limbs. In the center of the chest cavity perched the copper levitant tank. It connected to chains that drove the propeller inside. And along the flanks of the machine rested the rods and folded leather of the batwing levitant vanes, which the apprentices began to dismantle. The knight studied the work with intense care, as if to block out the words of Master! Enosh, who sat fidgeting beside him.\n\nThe brawny Juka flustered, \"I'm only saying, Cavalier, that honor is complex. You know I don't take it lightly. We have only served together a few months, it's true, but the brigade is part of you now. What honor is there in joining the Knights of the Silver Serpent and fighting against us?\" Montenegro mumbled, \"I have always been a knight, Shirron. When we fought Clan Varang I was still a knight. I made an oath. If they ride out, I must ride with them.\"\n\n\"But that oath was invalidated when they expelled you! Since then you've lived in Logosia. You've seen who we are. You know we are not monsters.\"\n\n\"I have also seen dark things in this land. Repulsive things.\"\n\n\"And have you no dark things in New Britannia? Your trolls and ores and dragons are superior to our Overlord machines?\"\n\n\"I have taken the measure of ores and goblins, but your machines are boundlessly wicked.\"\n\n\"You're trying to steel yourself against us, even though you know it will not work. I am not your enemy.\" He massaged the flesh around the base of his stout horns. \"To be truthful, I'm not even sure why New Britannia is invading us at all.\"\n\n\"Old grievances die hard. And don't forget, it was Blackthorn who struck the first blow.\"\n\nEnosh sneered, \"Lector Sartorius sent the armada to Britain, not the Techno-Prophet.\"\n\n\"The Royal Senate makes no distinction. A warship the size of a mountain was sent to attack the capital. That is not a deed they are likely to dismiss.\"\n\n\"You know that Sartorius betrayed us all. The honorable response is to reject his manipulation. That's what brought me to Khyber's Brigade in the first place. I wanted to beat the right enemy.\"\n\nMontenegro said nothing. He observed as tinkers unbolted the wheels that controlled the mechanical horse's wings. They hefted more massive assemblies into place, then tested the controls. The new wheels chirred and tilted with a distinctly heavier sound.\n\n\"So that's your decision?\" muttered Enosh. \"You're going to join the Silver Serpents and try your hardest to kill me? Is that what you think is right? Is that what you think is honorable?\"\n\nThe knight remained silent. His instinct, of course, was to swiftly address any challenge to his honor. His tongue moved inside his mouth, ready to bark a stem response. But the truth of the matter was, he had no answer to Enosh's question. He had waited for his heart to instruct him but it was black and empty. He did not know where Honor lay. He was unsure if it lay anywhere at all.\n\nIn the days since his failure against Warlord Bahrok, the numbness inside him had never faded. Instead it had become a place that he dared not look, for if Honor had been satisfied with his defeat, then he had failed to uphold the legacy of his grandfather. He had lost the final vestige of New Britannia. He no longer had a home.\n\nHe renounced that conclusion and turned away from his heart. Instead he relied upon the trappings of Honor, like his oath to the Silver Serpents, to inform his decisions. He had vowed to rejoin his old company of knights and fight whatever Technocrats they met. The thought of crossing steel with brigadesmen put an ache into his chest, but his life, if he were to be honest, was a parade of such dark moments. He had always survived them before. Perhaps the Virtue of Humility demanded that he bear the pain.\n\nBut he had not yet announced his decision to Brigadier Khyber. The words had never quite formed on his tongue.\n\nFrom a workbench the tinkers moved in tandem to lift a massive, black component. It was long, flat and jointed. When they attached it to the mechanical horse its shape became obvious. The new control vane resembled an eagle's wing in giant scale. Its length was jagged with black, steel feathers. When they fastened the second wing in place Montenegro stepped between the workers and leapt atop the automaton. He nudged the reins. The new mechanisms reacted just as the old ones had. He worked the controls until the wings pointed nearly straight up, forming a barrier on either side of him. Then he tried a few, subde adjustments. He smiled. With practice the machine would be responsive enough to use the wings like shields, while leaving both his hands free. He could invent new schools of mounted combat if the footing proved nimble enough in battle.\n\n\"How tough are these feathers?\" he asked the Technocrats.\n\n\"Resilient as kinetic armor, I would estimate,\" replied one of them.\n\nMontenegro thumped a wing and grinned. Here, at least, was a companion whose allegiance was beyond question. Whatever cause he might honor, this machine would serve him faithfully. He patted the creature's armored neck and murmured, \"Steady on, Humbolt.\"\n\n\"I see you are well accustomed to our technology now.\"\n\nThe luxurious voice flooded his body with warmth. He looked toward the staircase to find two new arrivals in the workshop. Brigadier Khyber wore an unpleasant expression, as had been his custom for a week now. Beside him was a tall, slender figure in the grey robe of a Mathematician. No one had told Montenegro that Sister Raveka was in the city. Even in her austere raiment, she looked like paradise to him.\n\nHe grinned and sprang from the automaton. In the presence of the others she would maintain the demeanor of a Mathematician, but at that moment he was not interested in decorum. He strode before her and cried, \"My lady!\" Then he took her hand and kissed the knuckle. He noticed that she wore equations painted on her hands and face. Apparently she had been in Junction for a few hours, at least.\n\nFrostily she replied, \"My good sir knight.\"\n\n\"Come,\" he said, leading her away, \"I want to hear about your adventures.\"\n\nAbruptly Khyber snapped, \"Cavalier!\"\n\nMontenegro lifted an eyebrow.\n\n\"Have you made your decision?\"\n\n\"Soon.\"\n\nThe officer grimaced. \"Tonight. I mean that. I can't wait any longer.\"\n\nMontenegro nodded, then led Raveka to the back room that had been his home for several months. When they were alone he took her in his arms. The curves and volume of her lean body were exquisite to the touch, like the landscape of home. He pulled back her hood, cupped her neck and pressed her painted face to his own. Their lips ignited with passion.\n\nIn a lull Raveka giggled, \"I surmise that you have missed me.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"What happened to your hair?\"\n\n\"I traveled with the fleet in disguise. It was remarkably successful. Once I marched right in front of Lord Gideon and he didn't recognize me.\"\n\nHe touched a finger to her lips. \"I don't want to hear about Gideon. Not yet.\" Then he kissed her again and the war vanished for a while.\n\nThey lay together on his narrow cot and she recounted in broad detail the story of her journey to New Britannia and back. In turn he told her of his life as a Technocrat soldier. The feeling of release was cathartic. Though every inch of her was marked with mathematical symbols, he still regarded her as a New Britannian. For the first time in months he could talk at leisure to a fellow countryman. And of course her touch, her breath, her presence were magical in spite of everything else. The longer he remained in her company, the more of a thrill charged his body. He was amused by the reaction. \"By the Virtues, you are a delirium to me.\"\n\n\"Is that a compliment?\"\n\n\"It's a deliverance.\"\n\nShe laid her head on his chest. \"Then stay here with me, Gabriel.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"You mean fight on the side of Blackthorn? Would that it were so simple.\"\n\n\"Why isn't it?\"\n\n\"For two reasons. One, I am a knight. I'm not about to war against New Britannian soldiers. Two, you have given me your vow that no matter where I go, you will follow me. So if I decide to ride with the Silver Serpents, you must ride with them as well.\"\n\n\"Do you think it is that simple?\"\n\nHe kissed the top of her head. \"Yes.\"\n\nShe nestled closer. \"Perhaps. I don't want to leave you and I certainly won't fight you. But you've forgotten the logic of your position, my love.\"\n\n\"What logic?\"\n\n'You are here to fight the Pact of Four. If you join the knights, you can't ride against General Nathaniel or Warlord Bahrok.\"\n\nHe stifled a sigh. \"I can fight them in other ways.\"\n\n'Your skill lies in battle. That's why you joined Khyber in the first place.\" She tucked her arm under his. She felt splendidly soft. \"And what's more important, if you leave here you'll never touch Lector Sartorius. Our only chance of reaching him is from within.\"\n\nHe nodded. His chest tightened a bit. \"Maybe so.\"\n\n\"I know where he is. I overheard it when I spied on their meeting. He's holding the Meer ambassador somewhere under the city.\"\n\nMontenegro looked at her sharply. \"Are you certain that's what they said?\"\n\n\"I informed His Excellency already. He is going to investigate it.\" She kissed his throat. \"Sartorius will surely have automatons to defend him. Maybe dreadnoughts. But we can kill him by other means.\"\n\n\"That has a sinister ring to it.\"\n\n\"We can use stealth. Shoot him from hiding and flee. Khyber will agree, it's the surest way to evade dreadnoughts.\"\n\nHe grunted, 'You're talking about assassination.\"\n\n\"We must fight however we can. I have to do it in my work. I'm almost good at it now. I'd never ask you to compromise the Virtues, but you have to accept the reality that we cannot meet every challenge face-to-face. What good have we accomplished if we lose?\" Then she raised her head and rested her palms on his chest. \"Oh, Gabriel, I'm sorry. I wasn't talking about your duel with Bahrok.\"\n\nHe closed his eyes. \"Yes, you were. I take your point, Raveka, believe me.\"\n\nShe crossed her hands to make a pillow. \"There's no shame in losing face-to-face, my love. I mean that. Somebody has to fall first. What's shameful is to lose the whole war because of it.\"\n\n\"'Victory is a necessary evil.' That was my motto once.\"\n\n\"I'm not saying you should forget the lessons you've learned. I simply mean you have to respect Khyber's way of operating, too.\"\n\n\"You're trying to convince me to become a Technocrat assassin.\"\n\nShe pinched his side. \"Gabriel! I'm trying to get you to look past the oath you gave to the Silver Serpents so many years ago. You're a different man now. Look around you and see what's important at this very moment. Listen to your heart, my love.\"\n\nIn feet he was listening. What he heard was Raveka's voice. She called out from that place he dared not look. It was childish romanticism, he knew, but she absolved him of defeat. The feel of her overwhelmed his doubt.\n\nAnd most interesting of all, she was talking sense.\n\nHe squeezed her firmly and kissed her brow. \"Raveka, I shall stay here with you. It's time to bring down the Pact of Four.\"\n\nHer long, brown eyes dosed. Even amid a swirl of mathematical symbols, her smile was a thing of glory.\n\nThe plume of smoke was visible from many miles away. It was a giant, tilting column in the center of an acrid desert. Its yellow-grey billows poured into the sky, feeding an expanse of ugly, stagnant douds that lingered overhead. When Thulann, Jatha and Fairfax rode their ridgebacks doser, they spotted below the smoke the distant dties of Junction and Logos. From far away they looked like thin charcoal smudges, one floating just above the other. The plume rose from them in relentless gouts.\n\nFairfax wiped the sweat and grime from his eyes. \"This place makes no sense. I see a city that must be burning, but I see no fire.\"\n\nThulann answered, \"It is the smoke from their factories. They are preparing to be attacked. No doubt they are producing an extra weapon or two.\"\n\n\"What a stink!\" spat Jatha from beneath his fadal windings. \"Behold the glory of Blackthorn. I'm shocked they ever convinced a Matriarch to come here.\"\n\nThe ranger muttered, \"And to think we left Ishpur for this garden of filth. This is why we avoid political causes, my friend. They always seem to lead to the most dismal pocks on the face of the world.\"\n\nIn the guise of Logosian travelers they rode toward the distant cities. Parades of refugees converged there as well, abandoning towns and villages for the shelter of the capital. Long streams of families and livestock plodded through the cruel desert. Thulann knew they feared the approach of Warlord Bahrok. As in Akar, she felt pity for these bedraggled souls. They were the losers in this war, victims of the pride of great men. Their weary faces cried out in silence.\n\nAlso marching toward the two cities were companies of Technocrat soldiers. She noticed a profusion of older men in the ranks, as well as boys hardly old enough to fight. This would be the last stand of Blackthorn's people. Every resource would be put into play. Lector Sartorius intended to fight to the last man, sacrificing these conscripted soldiers to force Blackthorn himself into the fray. Then the archmages of New Britannia would bring down the mad tyrant, leaving Sartorius to rule the nation.\n\nThulann had no love for Blackthorn, but Sartorius would be a scant improvement. And she did feel compassion for the people of Logosia. They had suffered enough.\n\nBut none of it mattered until Turlogan was laid to rest. Presently he was with her still, riding at her elbow.\n\nOn the outskirts of Junction, Thulann felt an eerie sense that she had seen this sight before. The city was a sprawl of factories, tangled with pipework and silos and flame vents, thrusting smokestacks obscenely into the air. Like tributaries flowing into a river did each chimney pour its fumes into the great pillar of smoke in the sky. And ornamenting the plume itself were dozens of airships. Thulann recalled the picture of Akar in flames, with the attacking airships hovering above it like lanterns in a tree.\n\nBut these craft had come to defend, not to destroy. In fact, they were presently aiding in construction. Around the perimeter of the city, a great, steel wall was being erected. Serving as floating cranes, many airships hoisted tall slabs of metal into position. Juggernauts muscled each slab to fit with its neighbor. Tech drones swarmed the wall, riveting the segments together. Directing the project was a force of Technocrat engineers. They employed steam whistles with tall pipes to bleat coded instructions to the workers and automatons. The operation looked quite efficient. Thulann expected the wall might be complete in as little as a few days.\n\nBut the city's passive defenses were not its most impressive sight. The barren fields around it were black with Technocrat legions. At first guess Thulann decided twenty thousand soldiers had mustered to defend the capital. Among them were platoons of fearsome juggernauts, divisions of ridgeback-mounted cavalry and of course the endless, baroque war machines that conjured such fear in their enemies. Even so many days before battle, great iron drums boomed the pulse of the mechanized army.\n\nHer stomach felt hollow. Montenegro had not exaggerated. The Technocrats were well prepared to protect themselves. She could already envision the acres of clansmen who must die to capture Junction. And a thousand feet above the city, like a smaller reflection, lurked the floating enclave of Logos itself. It connected to the earth by great chains that looked like wispy strands from a distance. Even when Junction fell, Logos would be a supreme challenge. She did not know how the Pact of Four was planning to undertake that assault. As a general her own scenarios had involved commandeering mass numbers of airships, though she had little confidence it would work. Blackthorn was effectively unreachable. Siege was the only real answer and in the middle of a desert, it was hardly a pleasant one.\n\nWhen they reached the city, the trio blended among the refugees crowding the streets. A band of soldiers confiscated their ridgebacks. They offered no resistance. In the haze of fumes they withdrew into an alley and spoke in sullen tones.\n\n\"We must find an air carriage,\" said Thulann, \"to take us up to Logos.\"\n\nFairfax muttered, \"But the Meer ambassador is somewhere under Junction. You said Montenegro was with Khy-ber down there, securing the defensive machines.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Montenegro may well be underneath us, but unless you know of an entrance, we must find a local guide. The man I choose is Lector Gaff. He controls the Order of Mathematicians from a tower in Logos. He will take us to Montenegro.\"\n\nJatha grimaced. \"Lector Gaff! We're just going to sashay into his office and charm him into helping us? At least our heads will look good when they're piked.\"\n\nThulann snorted, \"If you refrain from injudicious commentary, there should be no pikes involved. Lector Gaff knows who I am. He sent Montenegro to contact me. When I am in his power I see no reason why he will not allow me to speak with Montenegro.\"\n\n\"Brilliant,\" grumbled Fairfax. \"Your logic is breathtaking. What happens if Montenegro turns out to be your assassin? I doubt Gaff is going to hand you a sword and ask him to kneel.\"\n\nShe narrowed her one eye. \"If Montenegro is the assassin, I shall not need a sword to kill him. Bare hands will be more satisfying, would you not agree?\"\n\nThe ranger glanced at his companion. \"What did I tell you? Promiscuous with violence. Even the old ones.\"\n\nJatha ignored the comment, at the behest of the Way Master's frown.\n\nSparks crashed through the gloom as the tech drones tore loose a huge piece of ruined machinery. In the mechanical tunnels under Junction, a crew of the strange automatons was digging through the whorl of twisted metal that clogged the route to the lower levels. Brother Barghast was the foreman of the operation. The young soldier named Piper stood beside him with his steam whistle, tooting coded commands as the Mathematician instructed him. In the light of several buzzing spark lanterns, a gap in the blockage began to show through. Younger Technocrats of the Order of Engineers shooed aside the tech drones and climbed the wreckage for a closer look.\n\n\"We shall be through within hours,\" said Barghast to the three people in front of him. Montenegro nodded as he observed the workers. His grey eyes revealed impatience. His hand rested on the small of Raveka's back. The tall woman wore her Mathematician's raiment and, for the second day, the painted equations on her skin. Also with them was Brigadier Khyber, who shook his head and mumbled, \"Please, Brother. I don't want to go down there without any idea what to expect. You must be able to give us some advice where the Pact of Four might be holding the Meer ambassador.\"\n\nThe Juka shrugged. \"I fear not, sir. My knowledge of the lower levels is unfortunately quite small. I can tell you that I believe the entire tunnel system is shaped like an inverted cone. The lower you go, the less floor space you shall need to search.\"\n\n\"That's some consolation,\" said the brigadier.\n\nBarghast added, \"But my research has suggested the nature of some dangers you might face. Montenegro, you explained to me about a sword that Pikas of Enclave carried. One that streams electric energy into whatever it strikes. Such a weapon was once employed by those in the favor of the Overlords. It was known as arc weaponry. The construction was extremely limited and quite secretive. I believe it may have required the intervention of the Overlords themselves.\"\n\nThe knight squinted. \"Huh. So you think Pikas, or someone else in the Pact of Four, might have found it down there.\"\n\n\"It's very possible. No arc weapons have been recorded since the Cataclysm, but the upper tunnels of this particular complex were sealed off by Kumar's rebels before then. There is a high probability that the deeper we go, the more we shall find undisturbed Overlord technology.\"\n\nMontenegro sighed grimly.\n\n\"That's fascinating,\" grunted Khyber, \"but I'm more interested in the creature that did this.\" He pointed to the gigantic clog of machinery in the tunnel. \"If that thing is still down there, I want to know how to kill it.\"\n\n\"I believe it is an automaton that the Juka slaves once called a 'salamander.' If one still exists, it would possess the correct traits to fashion this wall of metal.\" The Juka raised a finger as he explained, \"Recall that the Overlords mined a great deal of their resources from lava under the earth. This defensive complex draws its power from one such magma stream. Now, in order to maintain the lava pumps and conduits, the Overlords built an automaton that thrives in such high temperatures. It had the ability to withstand immersion and it could transport reservoirs of magma when required. So, if one of these salamanders existed today, it might well contain enough heat to soften the metal like we see in this wreckage. And it was a heavy loader, so its strength would be comparable to a dreadnought.\"\n\nThe brigadier grimaced. \"That sounds plausible, if not terribly heartening. How do we kill it?\"\n\n\"I doubt you can. The organic portion would be heavily armored to protect it from the heat. If it contains reservoirs of molten ore, you certainly don't want to hack it open. I would suggest striking its appendages and attempting to render it immobile.\"\n\nSister Raveka interjected, \"But our best approach is not to face it at all. If the Pact of Four is aware of us, they can escape using Kavah's black crystals. If we find them by stealth, we can surprise whoever is there. Perhaps we can finish them before they even know they've been infiltrated.\"\n\nMontenegro grimaced but said nothing. Raveka had a point\u2014they could not afford to lose this battle\u2014but he would not condone dishonorable tactics. He squeezed her waist to register his displeasure. She pretended to ignore him.\n\nThen another soldier arrived and whispered into Khyber's ear. He exchanged murmurs with the man and then turned to Montenegro. \"His Excellency has summoned you to his receiving chamber. It's a very urgent matter.\"\n\nThe group exchanged glances. To Raveka the knight said, \"Take me there.\"\n\nFor less formal occasions Lector Gaff kept his audience chamber furtively lighted, to avoid informing his enemies when guests had arrived. The steam-laced room was webbed with shadows. A broad fan slowly pulled hot air from the metal enclosure. A thousand rivets shone as humidity polished their surfaces.\n\nThe figure standing before Montenegro looked uncomfortably gaunt. The old Juka was dressed in the unfettered clothes of a much younger Logosian woman. Her arms and legs were bare, wiry and very aged. He had never seen Thulann in quite such detail; but her face elicited his strongest reaction. Her dour expression was genuinely frightening. He had seen the spectrum of emotions from the Way Master, but she had always grounded herself with either tranquility or a controlled release of anger. But presently she glowered at him with the sheerest veil of composure. He watched her body tense as he drew near. Her single eye blazed with hatred. She was a heartbeat away from trying to kill him, even though she wore neither weapons nor armor.\n\nHe knew what fire burned inside her. Raveka had told him of the plot to murder Turlogan and to frame him for it. Judging by the Way Master's demeanor, the villainy had succeeded. His heart ached for the old woman.\n\nAnd he knew exactly what she had come here for. He stepped in front of her using the calmest of movements. He focused both eyes upon her, inhaled deeply and said, \"Thulann, it was Pikas of Enclave. It wasn't me.\"\n\nThe old warrior blinked. Her breath caught. Her white braids shivered where they were pinned up high.\n\nMontenegro glanced at Gaff, Raveka and the two brigadesmen in the chamber. \"Please, leave us.\" They did not go, but they turned away. Then he laid his arm across the Way Master's shoulders and pulled her into an embrace.\n\nThulann shed a tear on his cheek. In a few seconds she had regained control. She took a step back and thrust out her jaw. \"Does your offer still stand? I am ready to take direct action against our enemies.\"\n\nThe knight opened a grin that was both sympathetic and eager. \"As it happens, and for the first time I can recall, I am in a position to give you exactly what you want. Surely that bodes well for the endeavor.\"\n\nLector Gaff turned to face them again, folding his hands together. \"Your skills are welcome in these dire times, Way Master Thulann.\" Coldly he added, \"Do not abuse my hospitality.\"\n\nShe returned him a look as icy as his own. \"Montenegro and I share Honor between us. That is what you must rely upon, Lector, for I shall give you nothing more.\"\n\nAs they rode an air carriage down to Junction they were accompanied by Jatha and Fairfax, who had hidden outside the Mathematicians' tower. They greeted Montenegro with warm camaraderie and jibes about his Logosian attire. Raveka, on the other hand, faced a somewhat cooler reception. Thulann gave her polite acknowledgment and nothing else. Fairfax and Jatha were more vocal. The ranger glanced over her dramatic appearance. \" 'Sister Raveka' is your actual name, then? So you do kill people in Blackthorn's service. You see, Jatha, I was correct. And you thought she was an agent of the Pact of Four.\"\n\nThe wizard protested, \"I did not! That was your folly. I knew that someone so brutally calculating could only serve the Order of Mathematicians.\"\n\n\"If you please,\" said Montenegro with a frown. \"I'll ask you to keep a civil head on your shoulders, or you may end up with none there at all.\"\n\nRaveka touched his arm and said, \"It is no trouble, Gabriel. I can bear the weight of misunderstanding.\"\n\nJatha's ears flattened. \"Misunderstanding? You shot me in the throat!\"\n\n\"Only because you left me no alternative. I had to defend myself from your irrational accusations. But under the present circumstances I forgive you.\"\n\nThe Meer looked at his companion and grumbled, \"She shoots me and is gracious enough to forgive me for bleeding. So much for famous Technocrat logic.\"\n\n\"Logic is an excellent servant,\" said the ranger, \"for it is easily dismissed.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" growled Montenegro. As their carriage dropped through the pungent smoke of Junction, their thoughts turned to the task at hand. The ancient bowels of Logosia awaited them. The Pact of Four lurked in the darkness. Their own disagreements would pale before the dangers that they presently sought to awaken." + }, + { + "title": "The Tomb", + "text": "Brother Barghast guided the party through the entrance to the sealed-off tunnels, but the Jukan Mathematician did not join them. Thirty brigadesmen moved quietly downward and fanned out through the darkened complex. Their objective was to locate the Meer ambassador. They reasoned that she must be guarded and that rescuing her would draw out the Pact of Four. Joining the soldiers were Thulann, Montenegro, Sister Raveka, Jatha and Fairfax, who comprised a search unit among themselves.\n\nAs they crept through the steely gloom, Thulann scanned the tunnels with the aid of a miner's monocle. In shades of sepia she examined the endless bundles of pipes and gears and vents and gauges, all dormant and dusted with sand. Clearly this pit had been long abandoned. Yet the ghost of a sharper smell lingered, as if some great heat had recently cooked the rusty metal and desert silt. She saw few of the dry roots that had plagued the levels above. The Jukan engineer named Barghast had been correct. Something currendy dwelled in this forgotten place. She wondered what evils the intrusion might stir.\n\nWhen she was young, she had asked Shirron Narah about the Overlords. The old warrior had been a member of the Hand of Honor, leading the Jukan revolt against their slave-masters. Narah had seen the Overlords themselves. But she had been elusive about their nature. In her eyes Thulann had recognized a suppressed anxiety, as if she avoided the memory. When pressed she had offered the cryptic answer, \"The tombs of the Overlords are empty.\" The statement had given Thulann chills. Her first thought was that their ancient masters had not perished at all, that they had somehow escaped the shackles of the grave. But in time she had deduced Narah's true meaning. The Overlords were gone entirely, body and spirit. By some alchemy they had fled the world. It was fruitless to seek knowledge about them, for all that remained were ruins and memories. Like the Juka who now cremated their dead, everything else was ashes.\n\nYet the corpses of their machines remained, buried inside the rocky earth. Like bones were the metal beams that shored the walls of this rust-haunted cavern. The Way Master shuddered at an unwelcome thought, that she was an insect creeping through the cavities of a dead body. Nor did she imagine that she and her companions were the only vermin here. The Overlords had spawned animate things that still haunted Logosia. She expected them to defend their black lairs.\n\nClanging sounds echoed from distant parts of the caves. Then came the shouts of soldiers and the musical piping of Technocrat communication. Thulann gathered with the others. Montenegro held up his hands and whispered, \"We have to keep searching. Unless they've found the 'salamander' that Barghast mentioned, we'll let the brigadesmen handle it.\"\n\nScreams cut through the dusty air. They heard the faraway roar of great flames. The metallic clamor grew more frantic. Montenegro reached out to Fairfax. \"Dammit! Give me Starfell. I'm going to help. Jatha, come with me.\"\n\nThe ranger handed him the sword and scabbard. \"I think I prefer a bow anyway, if that thing is truly a walking oven.\"\n\nRaveka shook her head. \"Let Gabriel and Jatha go alone. The three of us need to continue searching.\"\n\n\"She's right,\" agreed the knight. \"They probably know we're here now, so we've got to make the most of our time.\" He unsheathed Starfell a few inches and smiled at the black blade. \"Well, old friend, we are together once more. Now we must avenge your lord and lady both.\"\n\nThe knight and the sorcerer vanished in the direction of the distant combat. Thulann regarded her two remaining companions and said, \"The enemy will be watchful now. Montenegro gave us the last of his invisibility draughts. We must not use them until it is necessary. Let us hide from the Pact of Four, not from each other.\"\n\nThey continued for what seemed to be a very long distance. Thulann soon lost herself in the labyrinth of corners and intersections, but Sister Raveka had assured them that she would remember how to return to the surface. Periodically they stopped and listened to the darkness. The battle raged farther away now. Then Thulann heard'the cadence of voices. The trio moved more quietly as they tracked the sound to a vertical shaft in the floor. A large pipeline filled most of the space. It was warm to the touch. The Way Master squeezed between the pipe and the wall and climbed down the shaft. Her companions followed above her.\n\nThey emerged through the ceiling of a large chamber, the open space of which was tangled with pipes and chains. Spark lamps strewed crackling light over a series of deep pits in the floor. Inside each hole nestled a round tank or silo, fashioned of riveted metal. The tops were level with the ground. The room appeared to be a central storage facility with tunnels and conduits leading off in all directions.\n\nIn the center of the room, surrounded by lanterns, were three figures engaged in an animated discussion. One of them stood tall in a black, hooded robe. From her perch on a pipe near the ceiling, Thulann recognized the garments of a high-ranking member of the Order of Theorists. This would be Lector Sartorius. The Way Master felt a thrill of anticipation. Their plan might just work. Lounging on a horizontal beam near the Technocrat was the petite Meer warrior, Shavade of Arjun. And leaning against a steel pillar was a brawny figure in kinetic armor, his familiar Jukan face uncovered. Pikas of Enclave had a coin in his hand. It twirled nimbly through his fingers.\n\nThulann's body shot with tingles. A heat rose inside her. She conjured a soothing mantra in her mind, then swallowed her potion of invisibility. She searched for a route to the ground, thirty feet below. The others followed her, likewise invisible.\n\nShavade was in the process of advising Sartorius, \"We lave to leave here right now! If Khyber's men find us there may not be time to get out.\"\n\n\"I am aware of that, Shavade, but the salamander will not abey your commands. I must remain to instruct it to guard he ambassador. Then we shall see about removing her to a more secure location.\"\n\nPikas murmured, \"Or we could just kill her.\"\n\nShavade laughed. \"She's pacifistic, not suicidal. She would defend herself against murder. I'd like to see you try it.\"\n\n\"She is Chamberlain Kavah's hostage,\" said Sartorius, \"and I shall not kill her without his consent.\"\n\n\"Then there's only one way to solve this,\" said Pikas. \"You've got to attack Khyber from the surface to draw his men away from us here. There's no guarantee your automaton will stop them all, especially with Montenegro out there.\"\n\n\"I intend to do so, but I do not want to leave the ambassador unguarded.\"\n\n\"Leave her to us,\" said the Meer. \"We'll lead Khyber's men off if they make it this far.\"\n\nPikas smirked. \"I told you we needed to bring a full contingent of Janissars down here to guard the old witch.\" Sartorius answered without emotion, \"If we had, Khyber would have penetrated this place weeks ago. The more men one deploys, the less secure their mission becomes. Secrecy alone has brought us this far. Though I shall be interested to learn where Lector Gaff gets his intelligence. He has discovered us far too quickly.\" The Technocrat closed his tattooed eyelids for a moment. \"Very well, I shall go to the surface and command the Janissars to attack from above. Then I shall return. Prepare the ambassador to move, in case it comes to that.\"\n\nShavade rolled off the beam and crouched beside the nearest pit. Thulann had the impression she was looking inside for something. The Way Master surmised that the ambassador must be locked in that particular silo. Then Lector Sartorius reached into the folds of his raiment and pulled out a black crystal. The old Juka thought quickly. He was about to escape. She wore her armor and weapons but had brought no throwing knives to stop him from escaping. In another instant Sartorius would be gone.\n\nThen a jangling sound chimed near the lector. A slender chain careened through the air and swatted the black crystal from Sartorius's hand. A figure appeared before the elder Technocrat. It was Sister Raveka in her own hood and robe, with a chain whip attached to her forearm. She had used the weapon to foil his departure. The sudden action had disrupted her invisibility.\n\nPikas grinned broadly as he stepped forward. \"Well, it's the slippery little sister! I haven't seen you since Buccaneer's Den, though I understand you've kept your hands full.\"\n\nShavade plucked out the crystal fighting staff that was strapped to her back. \"Pikas, introduce me to your friend.\"\n\nRaveka raised her off hand, in which she held a loaded bolt thrower. \"There's no need for formality. This shall only take a moment.\"\n\n\"Kill her,\" growled Lector Sartorius.\n\nPikas and Shavade sprang into action and Thulann followed immediately. As the Way Master traversed a dozen or so yards she saw Raveka fire her weapon at Pikas, who was the most dangerous target. The assassin feinted. He ducked underneath the whizzing bolt. Sartorius backed away while Shavade thrust her staff at a low angle to trip the Mathematician.\n\nThen three thumps shot through the chamber. Shavade screeched and leapt backward. Lector Sartorius clutched his chest while Pikas crouched and scanned the room. Thulann saw an arrow protruding from each one's ribs. Over her shoulder, Fairfax squatted on a large pipeline and whisked another arrow into his bow. \"Anyone for seconds?\"\n\nThe Way Master stamped her foot to break her own invisibility. She drew her sword as she materialized into view, mere yards from the assassin. \"Leave Pikas to me,\" she hissed.\n\nThe man once called the Viper of Levanto plucked the arrow from his breastplate and faced her. Thulann saw Montenegro's pendant hanging around his neck. He unsheathed his sword and smirked, \"You're going to strike me down? And I thought you said you were beginning to respect me.\" His blade snapped with electric power in an arc that connected the scabbard and the swordtip. The air vibrated with its power.\n\n\"You are irredeemable, assassin,\" she muttered, \"and I am going to kill you now.\"\n\nSister Raveka watched Shavade leap across pipes and beams to reach Fairfax, who slowed her down with a barrage of arrows. Lector Sartorius, then, remained alone with the Mathematician. The older Technocrat wheezed as he held onto the arrow stuck in his chest. Blood drooled on his chin. She coiled her chain whip at her feet, then popped out the retractable talons along its length. In a low voice she said, \"Betray the Techno-Prophet and earn the consequences, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\"Silence,\" said the lector, then dropped a small sphere on the ground. It emitted a series of violent clicks and then exploded, tossing Raveka onto her back. A cloud of black smoke gushed around her. She heard the lector's footsteps as he fled. With a grunt she rose and pursued him, winding the chain whip on a reel on her forearm.\n\nThen from the thick smoke emerged the blare of a horn. Raveka listened as she chased Sartorius. From somewhere deep in the tunnels came an answer, harsh and metallic; but she dared not stop to consider what it was.\n\nThe salamander vomited a spray of molten rock at Montenegro, but the enchantment on his shield held fast. He deflected the lava and smashed Starfell against the automaton's pneumatic leg. The steel mechanism screamed and spat. But another burst of lava drove the knight backward from the sheer heat. He knelt for a moment to catch his breath.\n\nA good twenty brigadesmen were fighting the mechanical creature and so far the battle seemed even. The thing itself was terrible to behold. Montenegro had expected something shaped like a lizard, but the salamander more resembled an enormous metal insea. It walked on many segmented legs. Its long thorax was a white-hot tank of magma. Through a nozzle it spewed gouts of the liquefied rock that scorched every soldier it hit. Their only wizard, Jatha, kept busy healing the injured brigadesmen. Montenegro and the others occupied the monster by rushing in, striking its spindly limbs and then fleeing before it could spray them. Already two of its half-dozen legs twitched with wounded malfunction.\n\nThe knight prepared to move in again. Unless the salamander changed its tactics he was confident they could finish it, though the time required might prove exhausting. He only hoped that Thulann and the others had managed to find the ambassador or the Pact of Four. Otherwise this would be wasted effort.\n\nHe sidestepped a pool of smoking magma as he charged forward. The salamander had turned the other way and so he landed three solid blows on one of its rear legs. It whirled around quickly to attack him. The violent action wrenched the damaged leg and caused the creature to stumble. Montenegro dove aside as the automaton clanged on the ground. Its searing-hot magma tank melted the floor panel where it fell. But just as quickly the creature was on its feet again and Montenegro ducked behind his shield.\n\nFrom elsewhere in the tunnels came the blare of a horn. Without pausing, the salamander lunged past its attackers to follow the sound. It barked a harsh, metallic noise in response. Its glow receded down the corridor. Then a bolt of lightning streamed toward the creature. Jatha blasted it in the thorax, which smoked and groaned but did not rupture. Montenegro led Khyber's brigadesmen in swift pursuit. The salamander turned a corner far ahead and vanished.\n\nMontenegro cursed the creature's speed, which was astonishing even with its damaged legs. Wherever it was going it would arrive long before they did. He hoped it would not make the difference in the mission.\n\nEvery time Thulann's sword clashed with Pikas', a blinding electric stream linked the two blades. His arc weapon lashed at hers even from several feet off. The Way Master felt the metal of her blade weakening. The battle was furious, a clash of two master swordsmen throwing strikes and parries as fast as the eye could follow. Yet the inevitable shift in momentum came when Thulann's sword cracked. Her next parry shattered the expensive steel. She somersaulted backward and whisked out two short swords.\n\nPikas laughed raucously. \"You're slowing down, old hag! I always thought you'd be more threatening in a stand-up fight. Well, keep pulling out those weapons. I'll get through them all eventually.\"\n\nShe disregarded his taunts. She was in no mood for games. Though anger interfered with her concentration, she flung herself at him with rage in her throat. Turlogan fought beside her, of course, her tall, phantom ally.\n\nHer twin swords flurried around the assassin, clanging wildly against his arc weapon, trading the electric stream back and forth between them. She thrust snap kicks into his gut and drove him back. Once, then twice, she hacked his sword arm. A drizzle of blood sprang from beneath his armor. In turn Pikas bellowed his own fury and renewed his attacks. One of her short swords chipped apart in seconds. He smashed his blade against her shoulder and the arc stung her fiercely. She struck his sword to bring the arc back to her weapon and away from her flesh. But the action doomed the second blade. It burst into smoking shards. Unarmed she tumbled backward again and assumed a guarded stance.\n\nBoth combatants fought for breath. Her shoulder heated with pooling blood. Pikas clutched his arm where she had chopped it open. Panting, Thulann gazed at the pendant that dangled around his neck, the crest of Montenegro that he had worn when he murdered Turlogan. She saw the golden heart clutched by a dragon's claw. A spike of anger rose inside her.\n\nOn the other side of the room Fairfax was running away from Shavade the Huntress. The ranger's arrows were nearly spent and the Meer had not slowed down. Thulann feared his chances were dim.\n\nShe held no more weapons and Pikas was closing in. He hurled more insults but she did not hear them. To Turlogan she silently called I shall die for you and then straightened to a posture for unarmed combat. She knew she had little chance of beating the assassin when he wielded the arc sword, but the calm of a Way Master overtook her once more. All that remained now was to fight well until the end.\n\nThen she saw the Montenegro crest again. She realized what she must do.\n\nWhen he flung out his blade she caught it in her gloved hand. Instantly the electric charge seared her flesh, but she clung fast to the steel and threw a high kick. Pikas blocked it with his arm. She kicked again and struck his chin. He staggered backward. The sword pulled from her grip but she advanced with her hand upraised, keeping the arc attached to her palm. Her arm was nearly numb as she fell upon him with a hurricane of kicks and punches. He struck out with his sword but always she kept that one hand in its path. When her glove caught fire she ignored the pain and landed three fast kicks to his neck. He toppled over and rolled again to his feet. She dropped and struck his knee. Something in his leg broke. He howled and swung down the arc sword and its edge hacked through her glove and through her flesh and severed most of the fingers; and still she kept her hand close to the weapon, drawing off its terrible electric sting. Pikas stumbled on his injured leg. She leapt into the air and spun, connecting her boot with the side of his head and slamming him to the ground. Then she scissored her legs around his throat and began to squeeze. He crashed the arc sword against her chest. She swatted it aside with her ruined hand. Her old body was in agony but she felt him grow weaker. She had lost her hand but Pikas was falling.\n\nShe had used Montenegro's style of combat, in which the Virtue of Sacrifice lent the decisive advantage. Turlogan would be amused at the nature of her vengeance.\n\nThen Fairfax shouted, \"Thulann, look out!\" When she glanced up, a seething monster loomed above her. The giant mechanical insect thrust out a nozzle from what might be a face and unleashed a spray of white-hot, molten rock in her direction. She yelped and tumbled aside. The lava thudded behind her, catching Pikas in its searing ooze. Barely sensate, the assassin shrieked and clambered for safety. Thulann used her maimed hand as best she could to scale a cluster of pipes, until she stood well above the automaton. It was Barghast's salamander, of course. Lector Sartorius must have summoned it with the horn that he had blared. The creature seemed to be looking for him as it lurched around on broken legs, but the Technocrat had fled moments earlier. Sister Raveka had chased him. Thulann did not know if the Mathematician could find Sartorius, or what would happen if she did; but just then the Way Master was more concerned with the matter at hand. The salamander looked up and swiveled its smoking nozzle at her. Thulann prepared for further acrobatics, though she did not know how much more she had in her.\n\nShadows flailed around Raveka as she rushed down the machine-encrusted tunnel. The blast from Sartorius's smoke bomb had shattered her miner's monocle. She had grabbed a spark lantern and charged after him, though he now had the advantage. He could see the glow of her lantern, but she could not see him. His footsteps clattered ahead of her, though, easy enough to follow. His lead was dwindling. If he kept fleeing, she would catch him. If he stopped and concealed himself, however, he might well escape.\n\nThe corridor was lined with pipes and canisters that emitted liquid sounds. These particular machines were apparently functional; but she could spare no attention for them. She was gaining on Sartorius. When she followed him around a corner she faced a dead end. Blackthorn's Chosen was trapped between her and the far wall. When the Theorist realized his situation, he rose to his full, proud height and turned to face her.\n\nThe sight of his hooked nose and dour frown startled Raveka. She shivered reflexively. Lector Sartorius had held the position of the Chosen for as long as she could remember. She had grown up in awe of his somber presence. Now she faced an icon and a moment of hesitation took hold. Then the voice of Blackthorn himself rose from her memory, chanting litanies to soothe and focus her. She shaped her expression into the icy scowl of a Mathematician.\n\nSartorius's eyes were lit by the low angle of the lantern. They were cold as iron. His monocle gleamed. \"There is no point to this. Gaff has lost.\"\n\n\"He has not,\" said Raveka with an even tone. \"He controls the ancient defenses above us. He will sweep away your troops if they do not follow him.\"\n\n\"That is absurd. Gaff's machines rely on the magma pumps in these lower levels. I have disabled them.\"\n\nShe almost flinched. \"Then we shall repair them.\"\n\n\"You cannot. Only I know how.\"\n\n\"You're bluffing. Lector Braun sides with us. You cannot know more than he.\"\n\n\"Can't I? Sister Raveka, I know more than Gaff or Braun can conceive. As the Chosen I have seen wonders that amaze Blackthorn himself.\"\n\nShe watched his hands carefully. She saw his fingers moving when he thought she could not. \"That is irrelevant,\" she uttered as she released the catch on her chain whip. The links of her weapon streamed onto the ground in a neat spiral.\n\nSartorius flinched, then composed himself. \"Sister, I need you to tell me something. As a Mathematician you know the importance of discipline and logic. How then can a man like Blackthorn be our Techno-Prophet? You have met him. You know he is insane. He has neither discipline nor logic. Do you believe he is an adequate leader for Logosia? A suitable figurehead of the very Machine itself?\"\n\nRaveka blinked slowly. \"That is irrelevant.\"\n\n\"Logos needs sane Technocrats in charge of the Orders. We cannot continue to languish under the rule of a madman. Blackthorn is a victim of Chaos, a slave of the flesh, driven mad by his organic parts. Logos requires Order, Sister. Logos is Order.\"\n\nIn her mind she yelled at him Logos is the Machine, you old fool! The Machine is not Order, it is the synthesis of flesh and metal, of Order and Chaos! Blackthorn's humanity makes him mad hut it also gives him compassion, something of which you know nothing! She wanted to cry out all of these thoughts, but her training dictated a frozen countenance. She gave nothing of herself to him. Her fingers curled around the control handle of her chain whip. \"That is irrelevant,\" she said.\n\nHe scowled, \"Sister! I am your prisoner. Stay your weapon. Yours is not the authority to judge me. Only Blackthorn himself can do so.\"\n\nShe exhaled a long, measured breath. \"He already has, Your Excellency. He told Lector Gaff about this place. It is as good as an execution order.\"\n\nThe Theorist looked taken aback, though the effect was subtle. \"I see. Then that is where Gaff has received his intelligence. I am surprised, though I am not defeated.\" Abruptly his hand shot outward. As Raveka lashed her whip at him she noticed the bolt thrower in his grip. She heard its clack and time stood still. The missile was no doubt poisoned. She saw the whip coil around his neck as she waited for the bolt to strike.\n\nThe spark lantern crashed. The tunnel went dark. He had shot out the light in hopes of escape. But she felt a tug on the whip and she knew she had him caught. With a twist of the handle she snapped out the whip's talons. In the blackness Sartorius gurgled and choked. She heard him fall to the ground. The chain tugged and thrashed, but with decreasing strength. In less than a minute it did not move at all.\n\nShe followed the chain to his body. Then she knelt atop his chest, pressing out what little life might remain. She stayed there for a while to convince herself that she had succeeded. Her concentration faltered with the magnitude of the deed. Her hands began to shake. To still herself she conjured Blackthorn's voice once more, which carried away her fears in a deep, glorious drone of sound. She opened her lips and chanted with the Techno-Prophet and the world became at peace.\n\nThulann soared through the air as she leapt away from another spout of magma. She landed inches ahead of the white-hot stream. Smoke curled from her back. The salamander was chasing her around the large room like a fixed artillery piece. Its aim was maddeningly precise. She did not have time to pause for a breath. Judging from the size of its thorax the creature might continue the barrage for a long time yet. Retreat was her only viable option. She glanced about for an exit when she spotted Fairfax's predicament. The ranger's bow was broken on the ground. Shavade the Huntress attacked him with her staff. He was trying to escape but Thulann saw the futility of it. Fairfax would be unconscious in seconds, if not dead. Quickly she plotted a course to retrieve him.\n\nThen a voice shouted, \"Shavade! Get the ambassador! We're leaving!\" Thulann looked to the center of the room. Pikas had recovered himself enough to stand. He was struggling to lift his arc sword. In his off hand was a rod made of black crystal, of the sort that might ensure his escape.\n\nThulann cursed and thought of rushing him, but the salamander kept her at bay. The assassin remained behind the huge automaton. She took it as evidence of the gravity of his injuries.\n\nShavade left Fairfax, who was struggling to his feet. She somersaulted to Pikas' side and knelt on the silo that contained Ambassador Adhayah. She spun a large wheel valve and opened a trapdoor in the top of the silo. At that moment Pikas raised his arc sword overhead. With a sinister grin he said to Shavade, \"This is for letting Bahrok get away with that blind strike!\" He crashed the sword into a weak spot on the salamander's thorax. Shavade let out a scream as molten lava broke loose from the metal tank and cascaded toward her.\n\nA blur streaked behind Pikas. Glowing lava flooded the pit and curtains of smoke and steam rose into the air. But Shavade lay safely beside the deadly flow. Fairfax the ranger had snatched her from the fiery doom. He leaned shakily on his side and looked at the startled Meer. \"The crazy deeds we do for love, eh?\"\n\nShavade smiled back at him. \"You're sweet,\" she murmured, then snatched a crystal dagger from her belt and rammed it under his jaw. The flaxen-haired ranger popped his eyes open wide and clawed at his throat. Thulann howled and rushed toward them. Then thunder cracked the air as a streak of lightning pounded Shavade in the chest. She tossed away from Fairfax and landed in a smoking pile. When she started to rise a second blast sprawled her onto the ground.\n\nJatha of Ishpur stood in the entrance of a side tunnel. With a cry he ran toward Fairfax, followed by Montenegro and a crowd of brigadesmen.\n\nThe salamander protested its injury with a metallic squeal. It whirled to attack Pikas, who vanished in a cascade of sparkles. The creature's molten contents had drained into the pit and so when it turned upon Thulann again, its nozzle spat only steam. Without magma it was no fiercer than a juggernaut. The Way Master retrieved Shavade's crystal war staff and faced the creature with Montenegro and the brigadesmen at her side. They fell upon the monster, ducking around its massive legs as they bashed its exposed mechanics. One by one they disabled its limbs. The mechanical beast attempted to stagger away, but collapsed a dozen yards from the tunnel entrance it sought. It was not dead but neither was it a further threat.\n\nThulann indulged in a moment to collect her strength. Her ruined hand seared with pain. She swallowed a healing potion. Of course it did not restore her missing fingers, but the pain did fade to a dull throb. Then she lifted Shavade's crystal staff and ran in the direction that Raveka had chased Sartorius.\n\nMontenegro called after her, \"Where's the ambassador?\"\n\nGrimly the Way Master pointed to the seething pit of lava that had drained from the salamander. Montenegro paled. When Thulann hurried past Jatha, she saw that his healing spells had not wakened the bloody Fairfax. The wizard sat cradling his lifeless friend, silent sobs shaking his body.\n\nIn the darkness Raveka fumbled about for Sartorius's monocle. When she nestled it into her eye socket, the tunnel became visible in crude sepia. She hoisted the lector's body onto her shoulder and struggled to her feet, hoping that the battle outside had gone as well as her own.\n\nWhen she looked up, an eye stared back at her from inches away. She flinched backward. When she looked again, she realized what she was seeing. A long, glass tube was bolted among the mechanisms on the wall. Inside was a transparent liquid in which floated a single eyeball. She furrowed her brow and examined the strange machine of which it was a part. More clear tubes and canisters lined the walls, bubbling with thick fluids. Some of the conduits were shielded with vents. Others seemed open in places, oozing wispy fumes. As she broadened her view she got a sense of many small, fidgeting movements. Shapeless objects\u2014 perhaps scraps of fabric or globs of denser liquids\u2014traveled through the series of tubes, carried by bubbles or some internal flow. The sight of the machine chilled her. She shifted the weight of Sartorius on her shoulder and started to walk away from it.\n\nThe clear tube continued down the tunnel, beside her path. The eyeball Was floating along its length, peering at her as she walked. When she stopped, the eye stopped as well, rolling gently but always staring.\n\nA shudder coursed through her. She began to walk faster when she noticed more eyes inside other tubes and canisters, gazing blankly when she passed. The entire tunnel seemed filled with animation as if the machinery was awakening to her presence. Metal shutters snapped open and amorphous blobs swam inside. They were scraps not of fabric but of organic tissue, somehow animated in their alchemical bath. A strange buzz arose in her ears, like the ratde of vibrating glass. It came in crisp, distinct pulses like the cadence of speech. Vents exhaled sweet fumes across her face. Tiny gears whirred and chattered. The collection of these mechanical events blanketed the walls like a chattering swarm.\n\nRaveka broke into a run, her skin crawling with unfettered revulsion. Then something sprang in front of her. It looked like a humanoid skull, or most of one, with steel, spidery legs protruding under the cranium. The weighdess thing fanned its sharp legs and latched onto her chest. She screamed and knocked it off, then sprinted as fast as she could manage with her burden. She did not know how far she had come down this tunnel, but she knew she had to leave as soon as possible. This place was a living nightmare. She did not want to conjecture why Sartorius had come this way.\n\nWhen Thulann heard Raveka's scream, she charged down the corridor. The Technocrat ran into view carrying the limp form of Sartorius. Thulann saw that the girl was frightened but healthy. She allowed Raveka to pass and assumed a combat stance. \"Are you being followed?\"\n\nThe Technocrat answered, \"No.\"\n\nOnly then did the Way Master notice the animated walls. She took in the grotesque sight and backed away with rising disgust. When she realized what she was seeing, her gut wrenched. This was a catacomb of the Overlords, the answer to Shirron Narah's riddle, \"The tombs of the Overlords are empty.\" The Jukas' ancient masters had no bodies to entomb. Rather their flesh was strewn throughout their machines so that all semblance of rational life had vanished. They had become the machines in which they dwelled. The Overlords were the tomb. This was the master the Juka had served, the tyrant they had rejected.\n\nThulann hurried out of that terrible corridor. She vowed never to speak of what she had seen.\n\nWhen she reached the large chamber again, she witnessed a dazzling scene. From the glowing pit of lava emerged a sphere of white light. Within it stood a very old Meer in the gem-studded gown of a Matriarch. Ambassador Adhayah rose unscathed from the burning fluid. On slippered feet she alit beside Jatha. The Meer wizard pleaded to her with glistening eyes. The Matriarch reached down and touched the fallen Fairfax on the brow. A silent flash erased the room for an instant. When it was over, the ranger stirred.\n\nThe ambassador met eyes with Thulann. The aged Meer's gaze was somber and alert. The Way Master nodded in acknowledgment. Then the Matriarch raised her arm and a streak of light fell upon Thulann. The old Juka startled. Then she lifted her maimed hand to discover that the fingers were restored.\n\nFrom where he knelt, Jatha murmured, \"Thank you, Venerable Grandmother.\"\n\n\"Take me back to my chambers,\" said the old wizardess. \"I must dream to my sisters.\"\n\nWhen they emerged from the tunnels into the murky Junction air, the horns and whisdes of the airships bellowed a grim song. Thulann had fought the Technocrats enough to understand snippets of their army's musical language. The airships were announcing the arrival of the enemy. One of the Juka dans was gathering outside the tity's steel walls. Within days the others would join them, twenty-five thousand strong or more, as well as the teeming forces from New Britannia. The war was not over yet, though she prayed to the Great Mother that by felling Sartorius they had struck the killing blow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "My troublesome Lector Gaff, I promised I would kill you the next time I saw you. Kneel, please.\"\n\n\"Your Eminence, I have important news. Your Chosen, Lector Sartorius, is slain.\"\n\n\"I said kneel!\"\n\n\"Please, Your Eminence. The city is in crisis. The enemy troops are arriving by the thousands and we have no Chosen to lead us.\"\n\n\"Bow your head. That's good. So you caught up to Sartorius, did you? I thought you might.\"\n\n\"I humbly owe it to Your Eminence's counsel.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do. And I suppose you want to be my new Chosen. Is that what you want, Gaff?\"\n\n\"I shall serve you in whatever office you desire.\"\n\n\"I'm not in a humor for cats and mice. Tell me, what will you do if I make you my Chosen?\"\n\n\"I shall surrender to the enemy, Your Eminence.\" \"Interesting. You would hand over Logosia to wizards and barbarians?\"\n\n\"No. I shall allow them to enter Junction as they please and negotiate some compensation for their trouble. This is preferable to a devastating battle. It is better that we lose resources than lose lives. In any case we shall retain sovereignty and Logos shall not be touched.\"\n\n\"Sartorius would have called you weak.\"\n\n\"Sartorius wanted to kill you. His mind was not rational.\" \"Surrender is dangerous. What if the enemy decides to attack us once we have invited them inside our defenses?\"\n\n\"Then we shall have a battle unlike anything since the Cataclysm.\"\n\n\"I should almost like to see that.\"\n\n\"As you say, Your Eminence. There is one other matter.\" \"The nexus point within my tower.\"\n\n'Why, yes, Your Eminence. You are aware that Chamber-lain Kavah wishes to reach it?\"\n\n\"It's a delightful bauble. I see things in it sometimes, when I look.\"\n\n\"What things?\"\n\n'Wisps. I've always been intrigued by them, since I was a boy. Did you know the wisps had their own Cataclysm, just like ours? A lot of them are trapped in the Ether. But they have heroes, too, just as we do.\"\n\n\"As you say, Your Eminence. I humbly request that you make certain the nexus point is secure. I am led to believe there is great danger if Kavah reaches it.\"\n\n\"He shall have to get past me, Gaff. Do you think he can?\" \"No.\"\n\n\"And what shall I do with you, my troublesome Gaff? Do I kill you or make you my Chosen? Or perhaps both?\"\n\n\"I should be honored to become your Chosen, Techno-Prophet.\"\n\n\"Of course you would. Very well, Lector Gaff. Tell the others that you are Blackthorn's Chosen. I am interested to see what you will do with the remains of Sartorius's war. And Gaff?\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Eminence?\"\n\n\"I shall kill you someday, like I killed Sartorius.\"\n\n\"It shall be my greatest honor, Your Eminence.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Maelstrom", + "text": "And a day came when Sir Lazaro found his young wife sobbing. He asked her the matter and in return she asked of him, \"Will you always serve the King?\" and he answered, \"I would die for the King. \" And then she asked, \"Will you always serve the Virtues?\" and he answered, \"I would die for the Virtues. \" \"Will you always serve me?\" \"I would die for you. \" \"Will you someday serve our children?\" \"I shall die for our children.\"\n\n\"Very well, \" said she, \"then I shall tell you my secret. I am under a curse. Though my form is mortal my spirit is immortal. 1 shall never die, but neither shall I bear you children.\"\n\nAnd Sir Lazaro said, \"Then I shall search the world for an answer to this curse, for though I do not wish to see you die, to live without children at your breast would be the greater evil.\"\n\nAnd thus did Sir Lazaro undertake the most terrible quest of his life, which the Virtue of Honesty laid before him.\n\nIn the haze of a crowded Junction street, Montenegro sat astride his mechanical horse. He wore the black kinetic armor that had served him well in Khyber's Brigade. A static-charged shield rested at his side. Its surface was painted with his family's coat of arms. Under his elbow was tucked a new helmet that Brother Barghast had forged, with his knight's crest adorning the top. The longsword Starfell hung from his belt.\n\nSister Raveka stood beside him in her Mathematician's paint and robe. The cowl of her raiment concealed her face from onlookers. For this reason she gifted him with a warm smile. \"Good luck. I wish I could come with you.\"\n\n\"Why don't you? Climb up here.\"\n\n\"I dare not. Someone might recognize me. Don't worry, everything should go smoothly. His Excellency has made the necessary calculations.\"\n\nThe knight stared deeply into her feather-shaped eyes. \"There's only one calculation you need to make, my darling: How to say good-bye to Logos. No matter what happens today, we'll be going home to Cove soon.\"\n\nShe blinked and almost reached for his hand, but refrained for the sake of propriety. \"Please, Gabriel. Not now.\"\n\n\"Soon.\" He nudged a control stud on his equestrian machine. The ebony creature walked forward, leaving the Mathematician behind. He donned his black, crested helmet. From a soldier he accepted the long, black shaft of a knight's lance, which Barghast had also constructed at his request. He held the weapon upright. Then he quickened his horse's pace and trotted toward the city gates. Behind him, riding unadorned ridgebacks, followed a contingent of hooded Technocrats from all three Orders. The streets were jammed with citizens and refugees who watched with fear as the mounted delegation set forth.\n\nMontenegro eyed the city's defenses as he rode past each layer. The original boundary was defined by many large factory complexes. While the facilities continued to operate during the crisis, they were thick with Technocrat platoons. Ballistas and lightning cannons had been fixed to the outer walls.\n\nBeyond the factories stretched a zone of open desert that ended at the huge steel wall encircling the city. More divisions of Technocrat warriors and elite Janissars waited here, as well as a vast formation of juggernauts and dreadnoughts. Here also was the larger artillery consisting of pneumatic trebuchets, flame hurlers and spring-operated catapults.\n\nThen Montenegro trotted through the massive, sliding gate of the wall itself. No battering ram would ever bring it down. At that moment he knew the Juka Clans could not hope to take the city without the aid of New Britannian sorcerers.\n\nOutside the walls lay the bulk of the Technocrat forces, both cavalry and infantry. And in the smoky sky above, between the earth and hulking Logos, hovered dozens of ominous airships with furnaces aflame in their bellies. Such was the state of the Logosian military as Montenegro rode among them that morning, looking like one of them himself.\n\nWhen he was past the troops he activated his mount's steel wings, which spread out dramatically to either side. He swept them up and aftward, forming barriers to protect his flanks as he continued trotting on. He heard the hushed reaction of the invaders as he did so.\n\nFilling the view ahead of him were the collected forces of Garron and New Britannia. Countless thousands of Jukan warriors arrayed under their fluttering banners. He recognized Clan Varang as the leadmost army. Kumar, Savan and many others followed. Siege towers and huge, wooden artillery machines rose above the ranks.\n\nThe New Britannians stood beside their Jukan allies, in formations that were very different but no less impressive. Most striking of all were the Knights of the Silver Serpent on steel-clad horseback, their plate mail agleam even in the dingy light of Junction. A thousand of the armored riders watched from atop their restless warhorses.\n\nMontenegro saw many of his erstwhile companions pointing out the crest that he wore. When he was nearer to them he removed his helmet, to eliminate any doubt of who he was. A shocked murmur rippled throughout the New Britannian formations.\n\nAhead of him was a lane that divided the two, great armies. In the center stood a wheeled platform that contained the highest officers of both forces. Montenegro made out Bahrok and General Nathaniel as well as Lord Gideon, Warlord Venduss and several others.\n\nHis face hardened. As he led the Technocrat contingent forward, he lowered his lance until it was horizontal. Stuck to the end of it was a severed human head, covered with mathematical tattoos. Lector Sartorius gaped at the invaders when Montenegro arrived to greet them. The knight gazed directly into the eyes of Bahrok and Nathaniel. The two men subdued their alarm, though Montenegro relished it.\n\n\"The villain Sartorius is dead,\" he announced. \"Lector Gaff of the Mathematicians is now Blackthorn's Chosen, speaking with the voice of the Techno-Prophet. On his behalf and for the glory of New Britannia, I bring you an offer of surrender.\"\n\nBahrok crossed his arms and snapped, \"What need do we have for surrender? We shall take what we want with or without Blackthorn's complicity.\"\n\n\"Look behind me. You see the army you face. There is no need to sacrifice so many lives, theirs and yours, when Logos has already conceded the war. I have brought these worthy Technocrats to negotiate the details of surrender. Take the offer, General. Warlord. It is the honorable end to this conflict.\" Bahrok growled, \"Address me as Shirron, you cur!\"\n\nNear to him on the platform Venduss grumbled, \"He has it correct, Warlord. There is no Shirron without the Great Tournament.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" said Lord Gideon, \"Honor demands that we listen to their offer. Let us accept these negotiators and consider their terms. General Nathaniel?\"\n\nThe plate-armored general grimaced at Sartorius's severed head. With a gruff sigh he answered, \"Lord Gideon speaks true. We must hear their offer. With Sartorius dead, the nature of the war changes.\"\n\nWarlord Bahrok sneered, \"Very well! Bring them forward. But you, Montenegro, are not welcome in our presence.\" \"Don't worry, Warlord. Your presence is not a place I enjoy. Our personal affairs shall wait until after the surrender is finalized, which is all the more reason to stop dawdling, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nThe Juka grinned darkly. \"One defeat at a time, human, or you may overreach.\"\n\nThulann indulged in a trance to assess the condition of her aged body. She bore no wounds after the Matriarch's healing, though her old joints complained of the drills she had practiced for two days. She would not stop preparing herself, pain or not. She intended to remain sharp. The death of Sartorius was a great victory, but it was not necessarily the final one. Greater opponents might require her attention. And Pikas of Enclave remained at large.\n\nShe sat on the metal floor of an unadorned room inside the Techno-Prophet's tower. Lector Gaff had brought her here to safeguard the nexus point, located somewhere deeper within Blackthorn's private chambers. She joined the tower's own Janissar guards as well as the ranger Fairfax, who crouched in the comer fashioning arrows. Both he and Thulann glanced up when a tall figure stomped into the room. Dressed in his wilderness leathers, Jatha of Ishpur looked perturbed.\n\nFairfax chuckled to himself. \"So where is the ambassador, O mighty Patriarch?\"\n\n\"Where else? Talking! She's dreaming to the other Matriarchs and as usual, they're going to continue talking while their enemies run amok. We're on our own against Kavah, I fear.\"\n\nThe ranger shrugged. \"So much for rousing them to action. And people accuse you and me of sloth. How about Shavade? What's happened to her?\"\n\n\"She's going back to Ishpur for punishment. I do not envy her future.\"\n\n\"Alas, heavenly Huntress. At least I succeeded in winning her smile.\"\n\nThe Meer laughed without humor. \"Winning it? She smiled because she'd stuck a knife in your throat!\"\n\n\"She called me 'sweet.'\"\n\n\"Have you never met sarcasm before? And I took you for an intelligent man, from your refined and hygienic character.\"\n\nFairfax grinned and combed his bushy hair with his fingers. \"What about Sister Raveka? I haven't seen that bitter blackberry today.\"\n\n\"She's with Lector Gaff, calculating geometric permutations or some such, no doubt.\"\n\n\"I still say I should turn her over my knee for what she did to us in Cove.\"\n\nJatha shook his head. \"You have no instinct for self-preservation, do you? Leave women alone for a while, Fairfax. They've amply proven which is the weaker sex.\"\n\n\"There is no courage without weakness.\"\n\nThulann opened her eye and grumbled, \"Why not demonstrate the courage to rest your lips for a while? You may need all that energy later, if Kavah tries to get at the nexus point.\"\n\nThe ranger smiled. \"Ah, Way Master Thulann returns to the land of the conscious! But Kavah won't dare come here, though. Not with Blackthorn wary of the danger.\" He wrapped his fist around a bundle of arrow shafts and tapped the ends on the ground. \"We ought to be down there with the armies. I saw a company of rangers with whom I'd dearly love to share my latest escapades.\"\n\nThe Juka unfolded from her trance position and stretched. \"No, Montenegro was correct to go alone. We have no guarantee that Kavah will not come, nor that Blackthorn will be lucid enough to attend the problem, if you believe Gaff's assessment. Stay alert, my friends. The battle is not yet over.\"\n\n\"Or we can follow the Matriarchs' strategy,\" muttered Jatha, \"and continue to sit here and chat.\" He plopped down on a metal bench and removed his shoulder bag, then began to sort the components of his spells in anticipation of the call to battle.\n\nMontenegro was surrounded by an ocean of silvery armor. He walked through a crowd of New Britannian knights who watched him with a mixture of wonder and disapproval. He could not fault their surprise. His black kinetic armor gleamed in wicked contrast to theirs, and of course his death had been announced almost two months earlier. He must have seemed like a devilish apparition. But there would be time ahead to pave the rough spots on the return to his homeland. For the moment Lord Gideon was his primary reconnection. He strolled now beside the nobleman on the parched ground outside of Junction.\n\n\"You astound me, Sir Gabriel,\" the lord was saying. \"Two months ago I thought you were a traitor or a dupe. Now you have delivered Sartorius's head on a lance and Logos's surrender in your pocket. I am forced to confess, I'm glad you did not let me throw you into prison. We would have missed the astonishing sight of you on that steel horse. Naturally we must address your actions in a proper court of law, but after this morning I daresay you will be forgiven your lesser transgressions.\"\n\nMontenegro pursed his lips. \"I do not want to be forgiven for anything. I stand ready to face any punishment the Royal Senate deems appropriate. But we should not get ahead of ourselves. It is still early in the day. How fared the negotiations?\"\n\n\"I don't know the final terms. Bahrok and Nathaniel agreed to them in private. But the surrender is accepted and the documents have been sent back to Lector Gaff. When the horns blow, we shall enter Junction.\"\n\nThe black-haired knight smirked. \"How did you convince the archmages?\"\n\n\"There was no point to involving them in the discussion. In their eyes this place is one tremendous abomination. They would just as soon level it as walk through that gate.\"\n\n\"There are times I might agree with them, but let us be fair. The humans here are our cousins. They've forgotten our code of ethics, but they have not forgotten the ethics themselves. Like us they have their rotten grapes but on the whole the vine is healthy.\"\n\n\"I still don't like their grotesque half-machines.\"\n\n\"Neither do I, by any means. I cannot wait to leave this place and never return. But they don't like New Britannia's less pleasant denizens, either. We each endure what we must.\"\n\n\"Endure is the proper word. I won't mind returning home with this army so we can stop enduring the trolls and start eradicating them. They're on the move worse than ever now.\"\n\nMontenegro nodded. \"I'll have to dig my estate out from ore droppings when I get back.\"\n\n\"I hope you might join us for the larger campaign. But listen, Sir Gabriel, you remind me of an issue that's occupied far too much of my thoughts lately. I need your confidential honesty.\"\n\n\"You shall have it, of course.\"\n\nThe nobleman lowered his voice. His expression shifted nervously. \"It concerns your cousin, Lady Aria.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"I don't know how to say this except directly, so here it is. I shall ask her to marry me when I return to Britain. But I don't know how she might take the proposal. You and she were close before your premature demise, so perhaps you can give me some insight?\"\n\nMontenegro chuckled and glanced away. \"Ah, even the mightiest trees bow to the winds of love.\"\n\nGideon laughed. \"Indeed.\"\n\n\"As you well know, my lord, Aria is an independent soul. No matter what I say or think, she will do what she will do.\" \"Yes, but what's your opinion? I can use some guidance. Will she marry a man like myself? Do you think she is the sort to marry at all?\"\n\nMontenegro looked up at the mechanical hulk of Logos. \"We shall have to see, my lord.\"\n\nA loud, raspy tone sounded over the Junction wall. The knights watched the tall, steel gates as they slid open with a rattling clamor. Gideon and Montenegro exchanged a glance. The nobleman said, \"In we go,\" as the younger knight turned away. Montenegro jogged beside his black steed, which had collected a tangle of curious knights. He mounted it with a single leap. He activated a brisk canter and headed for the gates himself.\n\nA column of Varang cavalry reached the opening first. By the dozens they trotted into Junction, eyed warily by the Technocrat troops on the ramparts. Montenegro stopped to observe the clansmen stream inside. The procession seemed orderly. He knew the negotiators would only have agreed to the surrender with assurances that the occupation force would conduct themselves in a civil manner. Bahrok's distorted sense of honor made the arrangement work.\n\nHe looked straight up. According to the terms of surrender, the airships were beginning to pull away. The spectacle was impressive. Nearly fifty hovering, steel towers fanned outward in all directions, dispersing from a dense cloud into a broad, spotted canopy overhead.\n\nJukan horns sounded a victorious fanfare. The officers' wheeled platform rolled toward the gates of Junction with Warlord Bahrok standing proudly at the top, alone and arrogant, a many-pointed spear in his hand.\n\nMontenegro turned away in disgust. Bahrok would have his moment of glory, but Gabriel did not have to watch it. The Juka would get his reward soon enough. Patience was Montenegro's weapon now.\n\nAnother horn sounded. This one was Technocrat. He looked back to see a tuft of smoke rising from inside the wall. The war trumpets of Clan Varang called out a charge and all at once the Jukan warriors poured into the city. Flashes of lightning erupted from the steel parapets. Bahrok's artillery began to lob spark stones deep into the Technocrat complex. The Logosian troops cried out in anger and the great armies arrayed on the desert began to stir into action.\n\n\"Dammit!\" bellowed Montenegro as he activated his horse's levitant engine. The automaton lifted him to the height of the wall and gave him a better vantage. Clan Varang was flooding through the gates, spearheaded by their ridgeback cavalry. The wall-mounted lightning cannons and flame belchers scoured the outermost ranks of the Juka, but the sheer number of clansmen overwhelmed the Janissars inside. At the same moment great phalanxes of New Britannian infantry rushed toward the Logosian troops on the open ground. Sheets of arrows flooded the sky. The Technocrats lit their smoke cauldrons and moments later a tide of opaque clouds rushed across the battlefield. A symphony of blats and whistles directed the Logosians in the gloom. War engines began to flare and flash; fire and lightning ripped through the densely formed invaders. Montenegro heard the screams of his countrymen.\n\nThen the brickwork stacks of Junction coughed out torrents of black cauldron smoke that washed across the city in a mighty swell. The concealment would aid in Junction's defense. The steel walls brimmed with leaping plumes. The high gate poured thick clouds like a spout, even as it rattled closed again. The thunderous war drums of the Technocrat army crashed out a beat that echoed from distant mountains. Overhead the airships began to moan and toot an alien conversation and descend with eerie, deliberate calm.\n\nMontenegro squeezed the grip of his lance. This was Bahrok's treachery, of course. It would be his last. The black knight spread his horse's wings and soared down to find the Jukan villain. A clearing appeared in the midst of the smoke. A group of spellcasters had created a broad whirlwind that repelled the thick clouds. Warlord Bahrok stood in the center on his platform. Montenegro lowered his lance and streaked toward him.\n\nBut the warriors of Clan Varang launched a wave of arrows to intercept him. He wheeled to the side and tipped up the automaton's mechanical wings. The missiles clanked against the armored feathers. He grimaced. A direct assault would be suicidal now that the wizards and archers were in play. He veered away from the clearing in the smoke, plunged inside the dark cloud and alit on the cracked, dry ground.\n\nFrom his belt he produced a miner's monocle that he fixed to a stud on his helmet. The device did not penetrate the smoke but it gave him clearer vision than the Varang clansmen had. With his black garb and mount he was nearly invisible to them. He churned the levitant engine at a very low speed, just enough to glide without touching the ground. The horse's lashing, serpentine tail was enough to propel them forward. With lance and wings upraised to make his profile slender, he headed in Bahrok's direction.\n\nThose Juka who challenged him fell quickly to Starfell's blade.\n\nHe soon arrived at a clearing of circular winds that held back the opaque cloud. Montenegro touched down just within the wall of thick smoke. He gazed into the windy clearing at what he mistakenly thought would be Bahrok's rolling dais, but was actually the entourage of General Nathaniel. The older knight, estranged from his order, glittered on horseback in a fine suit of plate mail. He was surrounded by a handful of other, loyal knights as well as a collection of foot soldiers, messengers and a pair of mounted spellcasters. The group was moving at a slow pace toward the city. Nathaniel was busy listening to reports and sending out commands.\n\nMontenegro's body tingled with fury. From the quick deployment of the New Britannian troops, he knew that the general had been privy to Bahrok's treachery. It would be Nathaniel's last mistake, as well. He trotted his mechanical steed in the path of the entourage and waited for the gusting winds to reach him.\n\nThe roiling smoke pulled away from Montenegro in pale, wispy strands. He materialized from the haze like a phantom astride his black, mechanical warhorse. The automaton's wings tilted backward, its serpentine tail lashing the air. The knight glowered through his crested helmet. His dark armor glinted at distant flashes of lightning. With slow precision he aimed his barbed lance and nudged the clockwork steed forward.\n\nThe mounted general startled at the outlandish vision before him. Quickly his expression turned to rage as he snapped down the visor of his great helm and took up his own lance. Sorcerous enchantments glittered across his silvery plate mail. His tall, white horse stomped anxiously. When he lunged into a charge, Montenegro engaged his machine to gallop. Sparks crashed from iron hooves. The two men hurtled toward one another and the smoke-plumed battlefield seemed to dissolve around them.\n\nIn his mind Montenegro cried, Grandfather, I do this for Honor!\n\nMoments before they clashed he flipped a switch on his lance. A pneumatic mechanism shoved out the tip by three more feet. He struck Nathaniel first. The end of his lance punctured the general's armor, but still Nathaniel's spear bashed his shield like a hammer. He felt himself lifted from the saddle, falling backward. Quickly he leaned against one of the wings and prevented himself from unhorsing. He dropped his damaged lance. Then he reared his clockwork mount and spun around.\n\nGeneral Nathaniel was rising from the ground. His arm hung limply, blood rushing from a hole in his steel shoulder piece. Montenegro leapt forward to charge again but a bolt of lightning streaked at him. He ducked behind a wing. The bolt crashed against the machine and the gears inside complained. He frowned. Lightning was particularly effective against Technocrat mechanisms. He himself was the first New Britannian to discover that fact.\n\nThe wizard's attack had been designed to allow Nathaniel to regain his warhorse. The general's arm had apparently been healed, as well. He hefted a large mace and galloped toward Montenegro. The black knight pulled Starfell loose and charged. They passed with a great clang of colliding weapons. Then they closed. Each man's weapon battered the other's shield. Their mounts circled. Montenegro was at a disadvantage, having to actively steer his clockwork horse as well as fight; but he compensated by activating the levi-tant engine. With a leap his mount sprang up high, granting him the benefit of a loftier position. A steel wing rushed past the general's head, forcing him to duck. Montenegro kicked out his boot and bashed Nathaniel from his saddle again.\n\nA barrage of lightning crashed into his horse and his kinetic armor. He hissed in pain and reared the machine to conceal himself behind its body. When General Nathaniel mounted his warhorse a third time, Montenegro shouted, \"Enough!\" He feinted twice with Starfell and jammed the sword into the general's side. Then he steered his horse upward and carried Nathaniel into the sky.\n\nThe general gasped for breath as he clung to the sword that impaled him. They soared a hundred feet above the bat-defield, which roared and flashed under its blanket of smoke. Through bloody lips Nathaniel choked, \"Why? Why oppose me? I'm fighting for our victory!\"\n\nThe black knight spoke with deliberate enunciation: \"Because victory without Honor offends me, General. And because you crossed a Montenegro and it must be answered.\"\n\nThen he jerked the sword back. Nathaniel shrieked as he fell into the dense, billowing cloud. Montenegro knew the odds were low they would find the body in time for resurrection. He blew out a heavy breath.\n\nAround him the conflict escalated. The airships had lowered to battle altitude, which was the same height he was flying, and commenced raining fire and steel missiles on the enemy below. Steam horns blared on all sides of the knight. By the glow of the furnaces inside the vessels he could see crews of engineers toiling fiercely.\n\nA deafening sound bellowed near him. His flying steed lurched, nearly unseating him. He regained control of the steering vanes and leveled off, allowing him to watch as a gigantic pillar of rushing wind and dust roared past. The airships that it struck bent and tumbled. The funnel cloud swooped around for another pass through the flying armada. Montenegro dove out of the way. He stared down the length of the whirlwind to the batdefield, where an archmage was slinging it like an enormous whip. He presumed this was Mistress Aurora's work, though he could not make out the spellcasters identity.\n\nA swarm of airships floated nearer. They pounded the archmage with a storm of lightning and fire. The funnel cloud leapt again from the smoke and knocked down another aircraft. Montenegro dodged debris slinging past him at high speed. He thought it prudent to move away from the area.\n\nElsewhere the airships were devastating both the Jukan and New Britannian lines. Though smoke obscured the battle near the walls of Junction, farther out he could see masses of invaders falling back or outright fleeing. The Jukan artillery was reduced to flaming timbers. The cavalry of both armies frequendy rushed from the smoke to regroup. Montenegro knew exactly why. Blackthorn's automatons had rumbled onto the open plains. A platoon of juggernauts and a handful of dreadnoughts were a match for almost any number of soldiers. Only the Knights of the Silver Serpent had the skill to meet them and Montenegro noticed, with some surprise, that Lord Gideon had not entered the fray.\n\nThe entire tableau seized him with rising anguish. Even if the invaders triumphed, the cost would be terrible. This bloodshed was completely unnecessary, a product of the Pact of Four's lust for power. He thrust out his jaw with grim determination. The Pact was only two now. He was halfway finished.\n\nWhen he scanned the battle, smirched with black fog, he could not see Bahrok at all. He decided the warlord could wait. Chamberlain Kavah would be lurking around Blackthorn's tower now. The time had come to join Thulann and the others.\n\nThen the sky shrieked and split open.\n\nFrom a giant gash in the air tumbled a blast of hot wind, followed by many blurs of color. As huge shapes approached on great, fanning wings Montenegro's mouth dropped open. The archmages had just cast the largest summoning spell he had ever seen. A dozen or more dragons, seventy feet long, roared fire as they swept atop the hovering airships. Each great serpent was as big as one of the vessels. Their shield-size talons latched onto the black machines and ripped open their armor in seconds. Long necks reared back and flared like cobras as they belched tumbling waves of golden flame. The airships moved far too slowly to engage the terrible monsters. Soon the sky fleet of Blackthorn was half awash with fire.\n\nMontenegro flew toward Logos as quickly as he could. He presumed the dragons would attack anything in the air and he had no desire to be a target. His fear was confirmed when one of the massive beasts swiveled to face him. With a stroke of its wings it rocketed forward. He jerked the reins to careen aside as the monster's gigantic body stormed past. The wind alone caused his clockwork steed to tumble. He leaned against the horse's neck and regained control. Then he ducked near a burning airship and hid inside the billowing smoke, using the plume for concealment as he followed a path to the edge of the floating city. Logos was built upon a skeleton of great, riveted beams.\n\nHe rose toward an exposed girder where he could rest and gauge his options.\n\nBut a monstrous growl shook the air behind him. The dragon had tracked his escape. It thundered upward. He streaked among the exterior girders of Logos, searching for an escape. He plunged into a small hollow defined by a metal floor and riveted walls. His mechanical horse nearly touched the ceiling and he had to dismount to fit inside. To his dismay, there was no exit at the other end. Then the light dimmed. A giant head blocked the entrance to the hollow. Raptor-like eyes stared at him with fierce hunger. The dragon's snout was larger than a canopied bed, its slavering teeth as long as swords. He drew Starfell with a steely ring and faced down the monster, though he knew his end was at hand. Not even Sir Lazaro could have met a dragon this large, one-on-one.\n\nDammit, Grandfather, this is not the monster I want to fight!\n\nDust swirled around him suddenly. He realized the dragon was exhaling. With a shout he dove for cover as the beast's fiery breath smashed into the hollow and the air itself turned to flame.\n\nInside Blackthorn's hovering tower, Thulann rushed forward when Sister Raveka entered the room. The Way Master demanded, \"What is happening in Junction? Why do I hear a battle? I thought the truce had been signed!\"\n\nThe Mathematician had abandoned her stoic temperament. Her painted face registered panic. \"Bahrok attacked when his troops entered the city! It's a bloodbath down there on both sides!\"\n\nThe old Juka clenched her fists in the air. \"Damn him and all of his ancestors! His madness has no end!\"\n\nFairfax slung his bow across his chest. \"That's it. I'm going down there.\"\n\n\"No, look!' cried Raveka as she ran to the nearest wall. She turned a crank to open a set of metal shutters. Outside the window lay the cityscape of Logos, a bleak accretion of somber buildings and soot-black factories and huge, cryptic machinery. The smokestacks had begun to gush flames. The machines churned with increasing speed. The entire city shook with a swelling rumble, as if giant gears had begun to turn in the deeps of the ancient citadel.\n\nThulann uttered, \"Great Mother, it is the Cataclysm again.\"\n\nRaveka pointed into the air. A shape hovered there, small by comparison to the vast mechanical cityscape. It could have been called an automaton, except that such creatures had the appearance of practical design, displaying evidence of symmetry and function. The thing outside the tower was a conflict of man and machine, a horrid, parasitic adhesion of metal upon flesh, a human being whose body was half-swallowed by riveted steel. It had a portion of a human head. In place of one arm hung a heavy steel claw that flexed absendy. From its misshapen body draped a cloak and tunic, as if it had forgotten that it was no longer a man.\n\nThulann watched in horror as the Techno-Prophet Blackthorn glided away from his tower, heading for the edge of the city. All around him the machine called Logos whirled into strident, grinding activity.\n\nSister Raveka moaned, \"Lector Gaff tried to convince him to stay, but His Eminence wouldn't listen!\"\n\n\"Then we're not going anywhere,\" grumbled Jatha of Ishpur, gazing at his companions. \"Kavah's plan is working and we've got to be ready for anything.\"\n\nThe walls shook with what sounded like an explosion, somewhere high in the tower. They heard guards crying out in alarm. Thulann clutched the hilt of her sword and murmured, \"I have but one question. Is Kavah ready for us?\"\n\nAs an agonizing inferno devoured his body, Montenegro bit down on several glass vials he had shoved into his mouth. The healing potions drained down his throat. He felt with torment the battle between dragon's fire and the Water Magic. His skin burned away beneath his armor and healed itself again in torturous cycles. He screamed in the depths of the blaze.\n\nThen it was over. The air became white smoke. He coughed and rose from behind the glowing slag that moments before had been his mechanical horse. Wispy fumes rose from his kinetic armor. His shield lay in ruins. He heard the grumble of the dragon's breath as it sniffed at him.\n\nHe had drunk the last of his healing potions. He would not get another reprieve. He gritted his teeth, whisked Starfell to bear and sprang at the monster's gigantic head. Its lips curled back from scimitar fangs but he lunged faster than it could react. With a perfect thrust he shoved the enchanted sword deep into the dragon's huge eye. The beast yelped and began to withdraw its face from the hollow, but Montenegro tumbled over its snout and slashed his blade across the other eye. Then he rolled backward into a crouch. The blinded giant reared back its head and pawed its face with confusion. As it inhaled once more, Montenegro decided to retreat. He cast one last glance over the gear-driven machine that had shielded him from the brunt of the flames. \"Ride free, Hum-bolt,\" he whispered, then scrambled quickly out of the hollow.\n\nHe climbed up a framework of girders and struts toward the lip of the city. High winds shoved at him. His hands began to sweat. Below him the dragon clung to the steel beams and blew another gout of flame into the hollow. Montenegro flattened against a metal panel to evade the incidental ball of smoke and fire that billowed past him. The heat scorched his face through the eyeslit of his helmet. Then he scaled the girders once more, as the sightless dragon roared its displeasure and beat its mighty wings to sail away from the battle.\n\nMontenegro secured handholds and gazed down at embattled Junction, a thousand feet below. The city and most of the land around it still lurked under a blanket of cauldron smoke. A portion of the steel wall succumbed to a ferocious onslaught of lightning and fire, he presumed from one or more archmages. But the momentum of the battle belonged to the Technocrats. Again and again did the invading troops pull back from the opaque war cloud. Artillery machines inside Junction flung balls of flame and spark stones toward the unengaged segments of the Jukan and New Britannian armies. Even Lord Gideon's knights seemed to be involved now, as Montenegro could not see them. The airships, though contested by wizards and dragons, still struck at the ground troops with their myriad flashing, booming, clattering weapons. And presently a metallic shriek cut through the air. From the shroud of smoke that obscured the city rose many tall, mechanical arms or tendrils. Like gigantic swans' necks they arched above the black cloud. Then their steel jaws flung open and hurled white and yellow sprays of magma into the air. Where the fountains rained on invading troops, devastation followed. Even the dragons were halted by the clinging barrage thrown from the magma spouts. The huge beasts yowled in pain as lava stuck to their scales. The accumulated weight quickly dragged the monsters into the cauldron smoke, where Montenegro heard automaton companies tearing the dragons to pieces.\n\nHe turned away with fury in his eyes. The magma spouts were the very war machines that he had secured with Khy-ber's Brigade. His intent had been to leverage their power against Sartorius's troops and to deter Bahrok and Nathaniel from attacking. Now the machines were slaughtering New Britannians by the dozens. Montenegro snarled at his own tears and climbed toward the streets of Logos with increased determination. I have acted with Virtue, Grandfather! How can I have gone so wrong?\n\nThunder rolled across the desert. Montenegro pulled himself over a railing and onto a platform at the edge of the lofty city, then caught his breath and looked down. The sound came again, booming and cracking. He could not locate a source, though he noticed dark fissures traveling across parts of the desert floor. Abruptly the dry ground seemed to lurch underneath the Jukan formations. Soldiers crowded together as broad chunks of the earth rose into the air. Montenegro gaped. The New Britannian archmages had literally torn up the desert surface and were lifting the pieces toward Logos itself. Within seconds a throng of clansmen would pour into the hovering city.\n\nHe looked behind him. Janissar troops were hurrying to repel the invaders, but he wondered if they could man the perimeter quickly enough. Clearly they were unprepared for intruders. Most of the Technocrat soldiers were fighting below. No one had imagined that the height of Logos could be scaled so easily.\n\nThe city itself clamored with activity, flame spouts blowing brightly, huge gears spinning frantically. The floor shook beneath him. Logos was enraged.\n\nThen he saw, atop one of the rising islands of desert sand, the wheeled platform that carried Warlord Bahrok. The Jukan leader stood amidst a hundred of his personal guards. He raised up his spear as if leading a charge, though he could do no more than wait for his island to carry him to the city.\n\nThat is the dragon I want to slay! Aloud he hissed, \"Bahrok, you shall continue to reckon with me until one of us lies dead.\" Then he gauged where the warlord would land and sprinted in that direction.\n\nThe creature in front of Thulann was a cousin of the dune gazers of Jukaran, though its spidery legs were longer and it had just one, gigantic eye. It darted nimbly through the air, blocking the corridor to Blackthorn's chambers. The Way Master feinted a charge. The gazer spat a ball of fire. Thulann dove underneath its trajectory, rolled across the floor and stroked her curved sword across the monster's face. It bellowed in pain. She struck twice more. The gazer wheeled around to flee and she drove her blade into its spherical body. It thumped heavily onto the ground.\n\nFootsteps rushed behind her. She saw Jatha and Fairfax hurrying up the corridor. \"Where's Sister Raveka?\" she asked.\n\nFairfax said, \"She went with Gaff to follow Blackthorn.\n\nForget about her. There's more oculuses coming from that way! They're pushing back the guards.\"\n\nShe wiped her blade and asked, \"Are these Kavah's creatures?\"\n\n\"They are his swarm,\" sighed the ranger.\n\nJatha added, \"He'll use them to harry the opposition while he does his dirty work. If we can get past them, we'll be able to touch the chamberlain himself.\"\n\n\"Then let us start touching,\" said Thulann as she led them farther into Blackthorn's chambers." + }, + { + "title": "Cataclysm", + "text": "And Sir Lazaro searched the world for a remedy to his wife's curse. No island was too distant nor pit too black for him to explore on his quest. But neither scholar nor wizard nor hidden scroll could reveal the secret cure. At last he fell to his knees before the Shrine of Spirituality. There he studied his own soul to find the weakness that caused him to fail.\n\nAs he did so a man approached him and said, \"You seek the remedy for your wife's curse.\"\n\nAnd Sir Lazaro said, \"Lord Blackthorn! I did not know you were in Skara Brae.\"\n\n\"I have waited here for you,\" said the knight-wizard, \"because I knew the day would come when you would search your own soul for the answer. Only now have you proved yourself worthy to find it. You must go to the depths of the caverns of Destard and destroy the Cauldron of Kwan Li. Then shall the curse be lifted and your wife bear you children.\"\n\nAnd on that day did the Virtue of Spirituality give Sir Lazaro the answer that he sought.\n\nOn the smoky streets of Logos, Montenegro rounded a comer and saw Warlord Bahrok plant his boots onto the metal-plated ground. A throng of fierce Janissars battled the warlord's guardsmen, but the knight did not foresee the defenders resisting for very long. Already Bahrok was tearing through them with hellish fury, impaling Janissars with his forked spear and hurling them like hay through the air. Montenegro had never seen Bahrok in group combat before. The sight was genuinely formidable.\n\nHe pondered how best to face the Juka. He had tried the direct approach and failed. For an instant Raveka's words visited him: We cannot meet every challenge face-to-face. What good have we accomplished if we lose? Khyber's strength, of course, had come from ambush. If Montenegro struck from hiding, he could throw one or two disabling blows before Bahrok might respond. The scales would tip in his favor. He would have to contend with the guardsmen, but Blackthorn's Janissars would keep them busy long enough for him to finish the job.\n\nInstinctively he reached for his pendant, before he realized it was not there. Bahrok, of course, had given it to Pikas. He shook his head. No. I am not an assassin. Victory without Honor is not worthy of a Montenegro. There's only one way to do this. He prepared to step into the street and confront Bahrok with a challenge, as he had done with General Nathaniel.\n\nThen a metallic sound made him flinch. He whirled around to see a dreadnought rushing at him from behind. Its huge, steel arm was extended and its claw was flared for attack. He jumped aside and brandished Starfell; but the automaton floated past him without stopping. He exhaled from relief. He was wearing Technocrat armor, so the creature did not recognize him as an enemy. Instead it charged into the middle of the melee on the street. The Janissars formed around the mechanical creature while the chieftain's guards fell back into a defensive stance. Warlord Bahrok himself remained in the thick of the fighting. His enormous spear slammed the dreadnought again and again. It pounded him back, but Jukan healers had repaired the damage even before he regained his feet.\n\nAbruptly another shape descended into view. Montenegro could not identify the automaton, though its cloak and peculiar shape seemed somehow familiar. When a flame spout blazed high on an adjacent building, the amber glow erased the smoky shadows and sent a chill through the knight's bones. The automaton had half of a human face, which Montenegro recognized. He had seen paintings of Lord Blackthorn from before the Cataclysm. This machine-clad nightmare was the Techno-Prophet himself. His grotesque mechanical form matched Raveka's description, though Montenegro had not anticipated the tyrant's loathsome aura of sickness. Blackthorn was just as abominable as the archmages predicted.\n\nThe Techno-Prophet waved aside the Janissars and the dreadnought. When he glided among the Varang clansmen they set upon him with as much ferocity as Montenegro had ever seen. Bahrok recognized his opponent, as well, and commanded his elite troops to attack with their full might. For an instant Blackthorn vanished in a sea of burly warriors and flinging polearms. Then his head raised above the mob. The Jukas' blows did not appear to concern him. He flashed a terrifying claw and began to rip through the invaders as if they were cobwebs. Two dozen had fallen before the guardsmen retreated. Bahrok stood tall among his men, bellowing insults at his foe.\n\nThen Blackthorn rushed forward. His claw snapped around Bahrok's waist and lifted him overhead. The warlord's taunts cut short. Blackthorn whisked backward to where the dreadnought idled. He handed the struggling Juka to the automaton. Montenegro picked out the words, \"Take him to my Chosen for sentencing,\" in a voice at once sonorous and harshly mechanical. The dreadnought soared away with Warlord Bahrok in its arm as Blackthorn confronted the clansmen again, who were pushing through the remaining Janissars. His claw shut with a shrill crash. \"Let us continue. It has been too long since I've heard the screams of unfamiliar voices.\"\n\nSixty elite Varang warriors charged at Blackthorn. Montenegro thought they might survive a few minutes, if they fought well.\n\nBut his concern was Bahrok and Kavah, not the Techno-Prophet. He hurried away from the staggering carnage and raced for Blackthorn's tower, not far from the battle. The imposing structure floated above the streets of Logos, attached by a collection of heavy chains. A stair-stepped bridge reached up to the atrium. As he mounted the steps he heard the sounds of combat ahead. Inside the front gate his boots slipped on a bloody floor. He caught his balance and surveyed the situation. The large atrium was a dour place, tall and shadowy, draped with chains to retract the bridge and lush with steam venting from other parts of the building. The floor was busy with the corpses of gazers and Janissars. Several passages led deeper into the tower. He followed the clang and flash of combat until he discovered a group of guards pinned down by the gazers' fireballs. They told him that Thulann, Jatha and Fairfax were beyond a door at the end of the smoky hallway. Montenegro borrowed one of their shields and led a charge against the gazers. He endured several nasty wounds on the assumption that Jatha would heal him when he reached the end. A few of the Janissars did not make it that far.\n\nBut eventually he fought past the oculus swarm and reached the interior door. On the other side, warned the guards, was one of Blackthorn's personal chambers. The Janissars seemed as daunted by the Techno-Prophet as the hostile gazers. Montenegro assured them that their master was not inside the building. They ran through the door and slammed it shut.\n\nThe room beyond was more grim than the atrium. It was completely unadorned except for a strange series of carvings that blanketed the armored walls. Montenegro saw that it was not skilled artwork. Instead it consisted of crude sketches, lisdess writing, mathematical equations, random doodles; all gouged into the heavy steel by some powerful tool. He remembered the Techno-Prophet's lethal claw and decided not to examine the carvings any further.\n\nRather the action inside the room demanded his attention. Jatha, Fairfax and Thulann knelt behind a crude wall of stone that Jatha must have conjured for protection. Several Janissar bodies strewed the floor, felled by sorcery. In the center of the room stood a Meer wizard shining with power, his colorful robe swirling about him. His hand stretched out toward a spinning funnel of blue lights. Montenegro recognized a beacon identical to the one that shone at Lord Valente's Wisp Hunt.\n\n\"Montenegro!\" laughed Chamberlain Kavah. \"You're just in time to see the end.\"\n\nFairfax lifted his bow over the lip of the stone barricade and fired an arrow at Kavah. The missile gleamed with some enchantment. It smashed against Kavah's hand and a brilliant light erupted. The Meer snarled and drew back, then hurled a torrent of lightning against his collected enemies. Montenegro dove behind Jatha's barricade. Some of the Janissars were not fast enough. Jatha returned a stream of his own lightning, forcing the chamberlain to erect a shimmering wall to defend himself.\n\nThulann was rubbing at a singe in her sleeve. \"Welcome to our stalemate. So far we have kept him from casting his spell on the nexus point, but we cannot do this much longer. We need to finish him.\"\n\nMontenegro grinned. \"Nathaniel is dead. Bahrok is in Gaff's hands. Our work is nearly finished.\"\n\nThe Way Master grabbed his arm. \"Bahrok is in Gaff's hands? Where?\"\n\n\"Outside.\"\n\nShe cursed under her breath. \"I must go there.\"\n\n\"Why? Gaff will have his head on a pike by the time we're through with Kavah.\"\n\n\"That is my fear. Bahrok must face his crimes before a council of warlords.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"He surrendered that right when he marched his army into Logos.\"\n\nThe old Juka shook her head. \"This is not for his sake. It is for Turlogan.\"\n\nMontenegro patted her shoulder. \"Go. Take these guards with you. There's a hive of gazers outside the door who'll roast you like a duck.\" While she gathered herself he added, \"Go with Virtue. May the Great Mother grant you victory, old woman.\"\n\n\"Live or die, I shall do my best, young pup.\"\n\nJatha tossed globes of fire to cover the Jukas' exit from the chamber. Then the wizard crouched beside his two companions. As he healed Montenegro's injuries he muttered, \"She's right. We have to end this. He's stronger than I. I'm going to wear out long before he does.\"\n\nThe knight hefted his Janissar shield into position. \"Enchant me with everything you've got. I'll rush him while you two keep him on the defensive.\"\n\nFairfax let out a laugh. \"Some of us are drunkards. Others are heroes. I'm not sure who is the more foolish!\"\n\nMontenegro smirked as Jatha infused his body and equipment with magical force. His muscles felt wildly energetic. With a nod he sprang over the stone barricade and charged at the glowing form of Kavah.\n\nSomething flashed in front of him, a cascade of sparkles, and another man intercepted his attack Pikas of Enclave bashed his arc sword against Montenegro's shield. The buzzing stream of electric charge found no purchase on the metal plates, however, rebuffed by Jatha's magic spell. Montenegro flung a torrent of sword blows at the assassin. Starfell clanged savagely against the arc sword. The black blade showed no evidence of damage from the electric assault. When the knight slashed a hole into Pikas' helmet, a trickle of blood emerged. The assassin backflipped and assumed a guard stance.\n\nFearsome spells and bewitched arrows flew back and forth around them, but the other combatants seemed thoroughly engaged. Pikas wiped at his blood and laughed, \"Back to your old form, I see! Recovered from the shaming Bahrok gave you?\"\n\nMontenegro had no desire to talk He faked a blow, batted the parry with his shield and jammed Starfell into Pikas' hip. The assassin roared with pain and lunged at him, flinging a high kick that battered Montenegro to the ground. The strapping Juka leapt atop the knight's shield and pinned him. One boot pressed Starfell against the floor. Through bloody lips Pikas cackled, \"You're right where I used to be, aren't you? You know you're a damn good warrior, but you still keep losing! One day you'll snap and realize that winning is the best Virtue of all.\"\n\nThe knight saw his family crest dangling from the assassin's neck. He bellowed with anger and tossed Pikas from atop the shield, then rammed the sharp comer into the Juka's gut. Pikas bashed the arc sword against Montenegro's helmet. The electric stream seared his face. He swatted at the arc with Starfell, drawing it off his helm. They each backed away.\n\n\"Look at you, Montenegro! From a knight to a Technocrat in two short months. You're one step from Khyber and two steps from me. Ruthless enough to win at any cost.\"\n\nMontenegro growled at the assassin's words. In his mind he cried It's a lie, Grandfather! You knew it's a lie! Then he barreled forward once more, his sword strokes becoming a hurricane of ever increasing force.\n\nAs Thulann dashed out of Blackthorn's tower, her sense of balance suddenly faltered. She stopped on the staircase drawbridge to regain her bearings, and then realized what was happening. Logos was a storm of activity, belching smoke and flame, clanging and clattering and rumbling to the very roots of its Cyclopean machinery; and for just an instant, for one terrifying moment, the entire floating city had tilted in the sky. At the lip of the city Thulann saw why. A horde of Jukan warriors had streamed onto the metal-plated streets. When the city had listed downward, great clumps of soldiers had toppled off the edge.\n\nThe Way Master had to look twice to register the scene. Huge slabs of desert earth floated upward from Junction, carrying with them masses of Jukan clansmen. Meanwhile numerous gigantic, crane-like arms had unfurled from the interior of Logos. The steel-frame tentacles swatted at the hovering slabs. When they hit their mark, the enchanted desert earth crumbled to pieces and countless soldiers plunged into the smoke of Junction. Blackthorn himself hovered in the air, directing the unearthly defense of his city.\n\nFireballs the size of tower trees roared up the perimeter of Logos. The heat caused the giant tentacles to bellow in metallic pain. Thulann knew the archmages were deploying the mightiest spells they had in their effort to conquer the impregnable Logos. The Techno-Prophet answered by rousing even more violent passion from his mechanical citadel. The pistons and furnaces of Logos rampaged with a thunderous din, great masses of steel smashing upon steel, gey-sering sparks and bursting smokestacks, until Thulann imagined a gear might crack and the whole city might fly to pieces. From the billows of smoke and rattling booms she knew terrible events were taking place on the battleground below, though she could not see what was happening. She could only imagine the terror and death that must have ruled the deserts of Junction.\n\nThe scope was too much for her to apprehend. Adjusting to the quake of the ground, she rushed down the steps on her original task, to locate the captured Bahrok. She had to ensure that the warlord traveled to Garron for trial. Turlogan needed proper justice and she would not fail him.\n\nA wide courtyard stretched out from the base of Blackthorn's tower. To her relief she spotted Lector Gaff at the far end. Sister Raveka stood beside him, with a dozen Janissars and a large, repugnant dreadnought. Trapped in the automaton's segmented arms was Warlord Bahrok, struggling poindessly, holding a defiant sneer on his face.\n\nThe clamor of Logos prevented Thulann from railing out. Instead she ran closer, until she realized that Raveka was pointing a bolt thrower at Bahrok. With the warlord restrained and so many soldiers on hand, the Way Master understood that the weapon was not for security. This was an execution. Quickly she ducked into the smoke and shadows of the closest building and crept near the two Mathematicians. Gaff and Raveka stood fifteen feet from the edge of the courtyard. Thulann crouched behind a pillar, drew her sword and listened to the conversation.\n\nIn his usual icy tone Lector Gaff was saying, \"It is a courtesy, Warlord Bahrok, one for which you might perhaps be thankful. I shall ask you a final time, have you any last messages to deliver to your heirs?\"\n\n\"I shall haunt this city!\" snarled the bold chieftain of Clan Varang. \"You shall never be rid of me!\"\n\n\"I am not prone to superstition,\" said Gaff.\n\n\"I shall not be a gjiost in your corridors, Technocrat, but in your history! I was the first to bring my troops to your streets! Not even Kumar himself did that!\"\n\n\"You would never have survived the first week of your invasion without the treason of Lector Sartorius. Your people are primitive barbarians.\"\n\nBahrok's eyes flashed. \"Behold this barbarian on your doorstep!\"\n\nGaff sniffed arrogantly and glanced at Raveka. \"Sister, is your weapon prepared?\"\n\nThulann bunched up her muscles.\n\n\"Yes, Your Excellency.\"\n\n\"Very well. Farewell, Warlord Bahrok. Sister Raveka, kill him.\"\n\nThe Way Master hurled across the open space and thrust out her sword. With one stroke she batted the missile as it emerged from the spring-powered weapon. A return stroke pressed her blade against Raveka's throat. \"I shall thank you not to murder a dan chieftain, if you please.\"\n\nBahrok grinned and barked, \"Thulann, you old pteranx!\" The Janissars lunged forward but Gaff stopped them with an upraised hand. \"Way Master Thulann, what do you want?\"\n\n\"Justice. Bahrok must return to Garron for trial.\"\n\n\"I see. And you would kill my servant over it?\"\n\n\"Indeed I would.\" She gazed at Raveka, who shivered as the blade kissed her neck. \"I have never liked you, Sister. You are a poor influence on Montenegro and he does not need more of those. Nor have I forgotten the nine bolts you shot into my stomach over Garron. I will have to reckon with the knight, alas, but that is the only remorse I shall feel if you convince me to slice open your throat.\"\n\nLector Gaff sighed. \"Killing her shall not help Bahrok.\" \"But threatening her gains your attention, does it not? I ask for a simple truce, Lector Gaff. Stay the execution until the battle is done. We can negotiate his release. Otherwise you shall make a martyr of him.\"\n\nThe Lector folded his hands together. \"What do you say, Sister Raveka?\"\n\nThe hooded woman swallowed. \"She speaks sensibly.\" \"Very well, Way Master Thulann. You have your truce.\" Thulann pulled the sword from Raveka's throat and sheathed it in a single action. Warlord Bahrok howled a laugh. \"You old witch, you never fail to bewilder me! But I never doubted where your loyalties lie.\"\n\nShe leaned close to him and bared her teeth. \"My loyalty is to Garron and to Turlogan, not to you! You are a disgrace to the clans and I intend to make you confess it before the council of warlords. You will never be Shirron, Bahrok!\"\n\nThe muscular warrior grinned wider. \"I am Shirron already! I have decreed it. Who will defy me?\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\n\"You cannot stop me, Thulann. History might squabble over how I did it, but nothing you do can erase the fact that I am in Logos at this moment. I may not have conquered it, but look how far I got. Look how far I got, Way Master!\"\n\nShe snorted. \"You may brag to the crows. When I am through with you no one shall announce you to Blessed Halls of Honor. Your corpse will rot, not bum.\"\n\nLector Gaff interjected, \"Perhaps you might save this discussion for another time. Something seems to be happening.\" The assembled group looked up at the sky. Directly overhead, amid swirls and pillows of smoke, appeared a disk of rich, scarlet color. Slowly the circle expanded until it covered the entire space above clamorous Logos. It was neither bright nor dark but a translucent phenomenon, like a heavenly veil encircling the city. When it continued to grow and drop below the city's edge, the thunder of the battle abrupdy ceased. The furious machines of Logos began to pace their activity. The sky had turned a lush red, with clouds of smoke wafting gently beyond the veil.\n\nSister Raveka began to reload her bolt thrower, stammering, \"Is this one of the archmages' spells?\"\n\n\"I suspect,\" said Thulann, her heart pounding roughly, \"that the Meer Matriarchs have decided to stop talking and start acting.\"\n\nMontenegro's body throbbed with burns. Jatha's enchantments had faded and the electric charge of Pikas' arc sword lashed through the steel kinetic mail. The wizard tossed him an infrequent healing spell but Chamberlain Kavah had stepped up his attacks. Jatha and Fairfax were now fighting a defensive battle, ducking behind the crumbling stone barricade to evade Kavah's fury. Montenegro was on his own.\n\nBut Pikas also bore his share of wounds. His kinetic armor was battered and cut. Springs hung broken from between the plates. Through it all the assassin never lost his mocking tone. At the finish of a brutal exchange he panted, \"The general said you shot him in the back with a crossbow. How did that feel?\"\n\n\"Be quiet,\" grumbled Montenegro.\n\nThen a terrific blast tore through the far end of the room. When the smoke turned to haze, the knight saw that his two companions were down. His ire spiked. He glared at Kavah, who was reaching again for the swirling beacon. If he cast his spell on the nexus point, according to Jatha he might be strong enough even to hold off Blackthorn himself.\n\nPikas smirked, \"It's a sham, isn't it? You and the Virtues? You're just pretending to be a knight. In your heart you know victory is all that matters, and the Virtues don't always let you win, do they?\"\n\nMontenegro frowned at the Juka. \"The Virtues don't achieve victory. They define victory.\" He took two steps forward in an unexpected direction and thrust his sword at Chamberlain Kavah. He was aware of the cold, terrible exposure of his back to the assassin, but Starfell tore through the wizard's defensive spells and penetrated the flesh of Kavah's belly. Then Montenegro watched in amazement as the black weapon split into a thousand shards and released a brilliant light. It was a wisp, a glimmering, otherworldly creature that Starfell was said once to have slain. The coruscating light forced the chamberlain to scream.\n\nAbruptly Montenegro felt the scorch of Pikas's arc sword as it cracked through his back armor, shoved through his spine and plunged out from the center of his chest.\n\nHe dropped prone on the metal ground. He could not move. It was not pain he felt but extremes in temperature, burning in his torso and frost in his limbs. He witnessed via patterns of color on the wall a dazzling conflict of sorcery between Chamberlain Kavah and something unseen, something that pulsed and shifted and scintillated but made very little sound. The Meer howled, \"It's the wisps! The damn wisps!\"\n\nAnd then the conflagration vanished. He could not sense the presence of wisps or spells or even the nexus beacon. The only light emitted from a vent high in the wall, painting wan stripes across the settling haze.\n\nPikas mumbled, 'It's gone. Is it gone?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course it's gone!\" snapped Kavah.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"There was a wisp in the sword. It captured the nexus and allowed others to come in.\"\n\n\"They destroyed it?\"\n\n\"They closed it. The damned wisp was in the sword! How could they have known?\"\n\n\"Who cares? I'm leaving this place. I've got one more score to settle.\"\n\n\"Help me up, Pikas.\"\n\n\"Shove it up your robe, Kavah.\" Pikas knelt down and pushed his face close to Montenegro's. He frowned bitterly. \"I hope that's how you define victory, you bastard. I wanted to kill you fairly and you turned your back on me. You bastard!\" He spat in the knight's face. \"Rot.\" As he pushed himself off the ground, Montenegro saw the gold pendant that remained around his neck. A pang lilted through the knight's gut. Then the room flashed for a moment with the scintillation of a black teleportation rod.\n\nA loud clang rocked the chamber. He heard Kavah gasp and spring to his feet. Then came mechanical sounds, the whisper of greasy joints, the grind of a levitant propeller, the gurgle of fluid in a tank. The Meer staggered backward as something large glided in. Montenegro saw a bulky shadow on the wall, though he could hardly discern a man in it. Then a voice murmured, \"Run, little mouse,\" in a tone that sounded as if it were spoken through a musical instrument.\n\nKavah vanished in another burst of flashing lights.\n\nThe air stirred. The stink of burnt oil drifted past in waves. Blackthorn moved closer to Montenegro, though the knight struggled simply to keep his eyes open. His body was dissolving, like melting ice. He wondered if Jatha might wake to heal him.\n\n\"I'm sorry it came to this, Sir Lazaro,\" said the Techno-Prophet with a soothing timbre. Montenegro heard the madness in his words. \"I asked you to join me but you wanted to stay with the King, didn't you? I can't fault you, I suppose. You did give him an oath. I know how important it is for you to leave a Virtuous legacy. Don't worry. You know I regard your children as the closest thing I have to my own. If I can, I shall watch over them, and Lady Malgotha as well. She does need watching, too, doesn't she? A genuinely cantankerous woman. I warned you about marrying a dragon.\"\n\nThe words seeped into Montenegro's mind like a dream or a rising memory. He fought to place them among the tales of his grandfather. Blackthorn had known Sir Lazaro, of course, but the Techno-Prophet was insane now, rambling nonsense. His mechanical tomb had stolen his reason.\n\nBlackthorn continued, \"I suppose that's all anyone really wants in the end, isn't it? To inspire their children. To make them proud. Did you know I can see the future, Sir Lazaro? No, I'm not mad. I'm a wizard. Yes, you must believe it, I truly can. I've seen your grandson. Yes, your son's son. The lad bears your name and your crest. He is proud of you. Quite proud. Rest easy on that. And I'D tell you a secret. Unlike you, my old friend, he shall deflect a Cataclysm in his time. Even you didn't do that, did you?\"\n\nThe knight no longer heard his own breath. His heartbeats, which a moment earlier had drummed in his chest, were now trickling away. By the Virtues, he thought, Jatha isn't going to reach me in time. Is Jatha dead, too?\n\n\"Yes, of course you're proud of him, too. You're his grandfather. Don't make too much of a fuss, you old fool.\"\n\nI shall miss the sight of Raveka in Cove. I believe that must be my only regret. Grandfather, was life this hard for you, as well?\n\n'\"All right, then. Go on. I shall see you again in time.\"\n\nThe mechanical din of Logos subsided as the scarlet veil descended over the city. In bewilderment Thulann and the others stared in the direction of Blackthorn. The Techno-Prophet rose higher into the air. Before him appeared a half-circle of tall figures with gemstones glistening in their robes. They were hazy apparitions of the Meer Matriarchs. The Way Master guessed that Ambassador Adhayah had summoned them from Ishpur. Blackthorn was having a subdued conversation with them.\n\nThen the Techno-Prophet turned away and glided back to his tower. The Matriarchs faded away. The clockworks of Logos resumed their normal thrumming and the scarlet veil remained in place.\n\nSister Raveka lowered her bolt thrower. \"The Meer have interfered. I believe it's to our favor.\"\n\nThe noises of the ground battle had disappeared.\n\nFrom the dreadnought's arms Bahrok grumbled, \"It is not over yet.\"\n\n\"But it is for you, you ugly gulbani!\" cried a voice from a rooftop. Thulann looked up to see a haggard Pikas of Enclave. The assassin lifted a knife in his hand and flung it at Warlord Bahrok. The Way Master jumped forward to knock it aside. Her hand missed the pommel by inches. The knife thudded into Bahrok's arm and the warlord let out a terrified howl.\n\n\"That's for blindsiding me!\" howled Pikas.\n\nThe dagger carried Logosian poison. The burly warlord writhed as his flesh began to wrinkle and split, his eyes shriveled, his powerful muscles pulling at bones until they cracked.\n\nThulann turned away. She knew there was nothing they could do for him, and that justice would never come for Turlogan.\n\nShe snorted. She could do nothing for Bahrok, but she could do something for herself. Without thinking she scrambled up a pillar to the rooftop. Pikas spat at her and whisked out a rod of black crystal.\n\nWith a crack the shard jumped from his hand. It landed at Thularm's feet. She stomped on it and the assassin darted away.\n\nSister Raveka stood in the courtyard with her bolt thrower upraised. She had shot the rod from his grip. She pointed in the direction he had fled and Thulann ran after him.\n\nThe Way Master kept pace as he leapt from roof to roof, scrambling across lofty pipelines, dodging large, churning gears and vents that exhaled noxious fumes. Over the outlandish roofscape of Logos she chased him until the edge of the city appeared. He stopped at the end of a platform that looked down on the ground, a thousand feet below. The scarlet veil continued under the floating city. Thulann had the impression it was a sphere around them.\n\nPikas gasped for breath as he drew his arc sword and wheeled around to face her. \"I killed Montenegro,\" he growled at her.\n\n\"Perhaps he shall recover,\" answered Thulann. \"You shall not.\"\n\nThe assassin groaned as he shook his head. \"No. I won't fight you anymore. I'm done with it. I can kill anyone in the world, but you were different, Way Master. I could have killed you in Crevasse, but I didn't. I wanted to beat you without tricks. I believed I was good enough, but I was wrong, huh? We fought face-to-face over the ambassador and you took me down.\"\n\nShe grumbled, \"Ego suffers without Honor, and just as often suffers with it.\"\n\n\"Don't mock me! Montenegro mocked me to the last. He didn't give me the honest fight I wanted.\"\n\nShe stepped closer. \"I am not moved to tears.\"\n\nHe sneered. \"You don't have to be, old woman. I just wanted to say that before I go.\"\n\n\"You shall not go anywhere.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"But I shall, because I refuse to die at anyone's hands but my own. Farewell, Way Master. Shed me a tear someday.\"\n\nWith astounding grace he performed a high backflip and hurtled off the edge of the floating city.\n\nThulann sprang after him. Logos vanished and a thousand feet of air separated them from the ground. She swatted her blade but he parried. Her second stroke landed true. Her sword passed through his neck and his head tumbled free with an expression of alarm. She grabbed his Jukan horns as she fell. With a painful thump she landed atop the airship that careened below them. Pikas' body bounced off a corner and continued to plummet to the desert below. She winced at the pain in her legs as she sat up, lifting the assassin's head. Something clattered on the metal panel where she sat. Gold glinted in the scarlet light. It was Montenegro's pendant. She picked it up, then rose to her full height and surveyed the vista below.\n\nThrough the Matriarchs' blood-red veil she saw the battlefield of Junction dispersing. The invading armies had pulled away from the city walls. Though she could not pick out many details from this height, she was horrified at the scope of the carnage that littered the open ground. Bodies carpeted the desert. The arid ground was cracked and gouged from the archmages' lifting spells. Giant black furrows had been raked by weapons she had not seen, except perhaps for their engines in Logos. Fallen airships blackened the fields. The steel wall surrounding Junction was bashed down in several places and ruined automatons smoldered around the gaps. The cauldron smoke had faded from the city itself, parts of which now burned. She saw the corpses of dragons twisted atop factories. The armies of Blackthorn huddled around the city and rested.\n\nIn decades past she had been one of Turlogan's generals. She well knew that this brief battle was costlier than any nation could afford. The lessons here would endure. The Pact of Four had arranged this conflict. Diligent work had ended it before the carnage was even worse. Jatha's arguments to the Matriarchs had provided the finishing stroke, but they had all risked their lives for this conclusion. History needed to record that fact, as the lesson would surely be needed again.\n\nWhile the airship on which she stood gently lifted her back up to Logos, Thulann rubbed her stiff neck and smiled. Turlogan, I did my best. I shall continue to do so. You will have time to forgive me before I join you in the Halls of Honor, but you must not forget your old rainbow. For I shall certainly honor you. We did far too little of that in life, but it is not too late. It is never too late, my love.\n\nSister Raveka knelt quickly when she entered Blackthorn's gloomy chamber. She cast her eyes to the ground to avoid the terrible gaze of the somber half-machine. Only then did she notice she was crouched in a pool of blood.\n\n\"Sister,\" came the Techno-Prophet's flawless voice, \"I believe that you knew this Britannian.\"\n\nShe looked up to see a body lying prone on the floor. Montenegro's lifeless face was angled toward her. His grey eyes stared blankly at the wall. Her gasp erupted involuntarily. She felt a clawing, hollow sensation inside. In a detached way she was horrified by her own sobbing in the presence of the Techno-Prophet.\n\nLector Gaff stood near the doorway. His tone was particularly cool. \"The ranger and the Meer wizard survived. We must deliver them to the New Britannian army. You shall do it, Sister Raveka, if you think you are able.\"\n\nBlackthorn added, \"You will be in no danger. The Matriarchs have mediated a new truce, without the benefit of Bahrok and Nathaniel. This one shall stand with the aid of the Matriarchs' veil of protection. Though I suspect it was actually designed to contain a burgeoning Cataclysm.\"\n\nRaveka barely heard what he said. She attempted to compose herself, but her litanies failed. The words fell apart on her lips. She mashed her eyelids shut. \"Your Eminence, Your Excellency, please forgive me. I do not think I can go.\"\n\nA sharp smell stung her nostrils. She opened her eyes again. Blackthorn was hovering directly in front of her, his human hand lain atop her cowled head. \"My dear Sister, do not cry. We are all of the Machine, which is Eternity itself. See, you smudge your paint. Come, let the equations comfort you. They are a part of Eternity. They are a part of you, my beautiful child.\"\n\nA heavy tear filled her eye and she blinked. Her vision turned red. It had not been a tear but a trickle of blood. Then pain rushed into her brow and she glanced up to see Blackthorn's claw gently cutting her flesh.\n\n\"Quiet, child. This is more fun if you resist the urge to scream.\"\n\nBut again, to her dismay, she could not obey the Techno-Prophet's wishes." + }, + { + "title": "Ashes", + "text": "Thulann removed her headdress as she exited the Hall of the Shirron. The nighttime sky over Garron seethed with a million stars, like embers blown by the crisp mountain wind. The firelight of the hall threw her shadow long. Her ornately embroidered gown rustled with every step.\n\nThree people greeted her in the spiky garden outside. The smallest one pulled back her russet curls and grinned. \"So you're still Regent Thulann, hey?\" said Toria.\n\nThe Way Master heaved a sigh. \"I proposed Warlord Ustenn for the third time but they will not hear of it. Apparently they are stricken by my girlish beauty.\" She shrugged. \"The Great Tournament is only a month away. I suppose I shall endure my sentence until then.\"\n\n\"You're twice as competent as any warlord in that hall,\" said Jatha as he leaned against a pillar. \"I say you are the correct person for the office and I also say that false modesty is bad for the complexion.\"\n\nFairfax swirled the wine in his cup and offered, \"How about Venduss? He's a keen lad and easy on the ladies' eyes.\n\nBesides, everyone loves him right now, the mighty war hero who so valiantly penetrated the black orifices of Junction to capture those magma spouts.\"\n\nToria frowned, \"Hey, I found the bloody entrance!\" and Fairfax mouthed the words as she spoke them.\n\nThulann smiled. \"So you did, Toria. That was a fine piece of intelligence work You could train to be an excellent spy-master in Venus service, if I can somehow convince you to stay.\"\n\nThe freckled girl shook her head. \"Sorry, I've got some business to take care of in Britain. I also need to give Pikas' 'remains' to Bawdewyn, so he can settle his debt with Anzo. And anyway, Tekmhat wants me to send her some spices from Vesper. And Venduss...\" She smiled. \"Venduss needs time with his wife.\"\n\nJatha chuckled. \"You're a Virtuous lass, Toria, despite what the Tarkosh guardsmen claim.\"\n\n\"You should come with us, little sister,\" said Fairfax, \"after your chores are complete. Jatha and I are returning to Avenosh. There are wilds in that land that have languished without our calming presence for torturous millennia. Surely they would benefit from the intrusion of your brandywine voice.\"\n\nThe Meer flattened his ears. \"Avenosh? We have made no such agreement, Fairfax.\"\n\n\"You did agree, did you not, to assist me in resuscitating my romantic enterprises?\"\n\n\"I didn't mean I'd let you have another go at my sisters!\"\n\nToria giggled and wrapped an arm around each man's waist. \"We can discuss it as we sail to Britain. I may just be persuaded to travel in your company, if you can stifle your arguments for at least a few hours a day. I do need to sleep sometime, hey?\"\n\nThulann unpinned her hair and let the many white braids fall loosely around her shoulders. \"Ask not for miracles, child. Humility is the most neglected Virtue of all.\"\n\nThey laughed together and walked through the gardens of lofty Garron. The twin moons of Sosaria draped them in a silvery glow.\n\nThe vibrant New Britannian forest enveloped Toria with morning rain. Her senses filled with the battle of a thousand greens and browns, the hiss and patter of raindrops on leaves, the tumult of brisk, organic odors that rose from the soggy earth. She stood before a mossy hillside in which lay a sheltered hollow. Under the hanging shadow squatted a pedestal of carved stone. Atop it was a small icon, depicting a heart in the clutches of a reptilian claw. The mellow light of the morning shower antiqued the golden surface. Its gleam was guarded and subtle. Toria wrinkled her nose at the tingling scent of an active enchantment.\n\nMontenegro's shrine had been built to serve Compassion, but she knew it honored all eight Virtues. The magic of the Dragon's Tear protected the niche from destruction by the marauding ores. Toria, however, was not entirely safe from the savages who continued to stalk the forests around Cove, and so she wasted no more time. She knelt before the shrine, her bare legs cooled by the rain-soaked ground, and poured satiny words from her lips:\n\n\u2003\"Time absolves the dragon's flame\n\n\u2003And yet eternal shall he fly.\n\n\u2003The passing of his thund'rous wing\n\n\u2003Lends sparkle to the starry sky.\"\n\nGrunting voices sounded from the distance. Toria sighed and rose to her feet. She had expected the rain to hide her song from orcish ears. In any event she had to hurry along. She preferred to be alone for the moment. A company of knights would arrive soon to scour the woods of vermin. Many of the Silver Serpents had prioritized that task upon their return from Logosia, to honor their fallen comrade.\n\nToria had chosen a more private remembrance. The echoes of Montenegro still danced inside her, as well as other warriors she had left across the sea. The thought drew a smile to her face.\n\nIn case the ores found her, she unbuckled the enchanted cutlass from her waist, shouldered the blade and scabbard and stepped lightly through the dripping forest. The way to Cove, where Bawdewyn had anchored, was long and wild. Anticipation brought a pleasant tune to her mouth, which she hummed as she proceeded around the rocky foot of a proud, ominous mountain of black stone.\n\nThe first snow in Logos that year was a luxurious shade of grey. It formed a metallic slurry in the riveted streets, painting marbled colors on the frosty surface. Sister Raveka strolled through the razor-edged wind with a cloak draped over her raiment. Her cowl deflected the biting cold from her face.\n\nAs she traversed a landscape of black machinery, a lilt of excitement tingled inside her. Winter often elicited that feeling. Since she was a child she had always taken the chill as a sign to regroup, to make plans, to prepare for the eventual coming of spring. She enjoyed the solitude of a Technocrat's hibernation, when she could spend more hours each day in meditation and calculation. Winter was a time of intricate promise. And this one was more exciting than most.\n\nShe came upon a puddle of ice on the ground. When she glanced into the clouded reflection, a tattooed face looked back. Her sigh was bittersweet. To be inscribed by the Techno-Prophet was as great an honor as any Mathematician could desire, though the actual process had been less than enjoyable. Now Lector Gaff had begun her training for the rank of Mother in the Order. She had been given a second chance, which she knew she did not deserve. Despite her trespasses, her mentor asserted the highest regard for her talents. She was flattered by his confidence.\n\nBut of course his plans interfered with her own. The emerald hills of New Britannia still called to her from across the sea. Lady Aria was a phantom on those faraway shores, whom Raveka longed to give flesh again. The extra trouble would be bothersome, but she was proficient enough with a spy's cosmetics to conceal the tattoos on her face. Then she could set about finding sorcery to restore her pure, white skin. Lord Gideon would wonder where she had gone for several seasons, but she had an excuse that would more than suffice. Any story would, really. He had fallen for her completely. She could be his wife with no effort at all.\n\nHer reflection in the ice revealed a round, swollen belly. The baby would arrive in the springtime. She would convince Gideon that she carried his child, and that this was the reason for her long absence. She would hide the truth. The child was Gabriel's. He had left her a final gift. She could only be happier if he had lived to see it.\n\nLector Gaff had commanded that she surrender the baby to the Order. Raveka was formulating a different plan. The offspring of Montenegro would be New Britannian. Gold and satin would swaddle the baby. The wealthy society of Britain would be its playground. The child would learn to carry the shield and the lance of a Virtuous knight. It was the destiny of Montenegro blood and Raveka's fiercest wish.\n\nThe task would require the most stringent preparations. Gaff would not concede to her desires. To realize the dream she must extricate herself from Logos while leaving him powerless to fetch her back. Such conditions would be difficult to achieve. A tentative openness had developed between the two nations that would render Lady Aria more vulnerable to Technocrat scrutiny. But Gaff himself showed great confidence in her abilities. She gave herself hopeful odds of success. The most difficult months were those ahead of her now, the frigid winter nights during which she must calculate the details of the plan.\n\nThe challenge gave Raveka a unique thrill, like the knife edge of the icy wind. Of course she had a sharp edge of her own. She had carved her place in New Britannia once before. This time she would do it permanendy. If Gaff or anyone else interfered, they might just find themselves carved, as well.\n\nShe imagined that the Lord Blackthorn of old, that Virtuous knight and wizard of legend, would approve of her valor.\n\nThulann leaned back in her tall, granite chair and waved a hand in a dismissive gesture. The voluminous sleeve of her Way Master's robe wafted in the action. Before her in the small room, three war masters bowed and turned to exit. They vanished in the muted light from the doorway. A soft spring breeze rolled in from beyond.\n\nThe old Juka rubbed a palm over her face. These generals were becoming tedious. The fragments of Clan Varang were proving difficult for them to subdue. Even several years after his death, Bahrok's coalition of allied clans remained loosely committed to his treachery. They gave the other clans fits of political trouble. Shirron Ustenn and his loyal chieftains too often reacted with strength instead of craft. Sometimes Thulann had to chuckle. Generals were as lost as children when it came to diplomatic guile. She gave them advice on frequent occasions, like today, but only after they asked politely.\n\nThe best part of the arrangement, of course, was that she lived at her own home. She did not have to travel and she could dismiss her visitors whenever it suited her. The perks of being a respected elder had finally caught up to her.\n\nStill, the schedule wore down her old body. Retirement had stolen the energy from her bones and muscles. Even the crisp spring winds were enough now to rouse the ache in her joints. Neither was her patience what it used to be. The tides of warfare yielded to other concerns.\n\nA tall silhouette appeared in the doorway. Venduss wore full trousers and no shirt, the casual attire of a warrior chieftain. A slender braid lolled over his shoulder. He crossed his arms and leaned against the jamb. \"You should keep your voice down. I can hear your groans from the yard.\"\n\nThulann laughed. \"Bahrok once counseled me to speak louder on my own behalf. Perhaps his advice is sinking in at last.\"\n\n\"You saw his fate with your own eyes. Do you wish for the same?\"\n\n\"He had it easy. He shriveled up in a matter of seconds. My demise has lingered for a decade and shows no sign of finishing. When I am a hundred you shall be draping me over this chair to squawk at visiting soldiers.\"\n\nVenduss grinned. \"I shall do my best to wear you down before then. There are two more war masters to see you.\"\n\nShe closed her eye and grimaced. \"Send them away. I have nothing left for them.\"\n\n\"Not even a chieftain could send them away, I fear.\"\n\nHer face brightened when two small children dashed into the room. Tarkosh and Torika, the son and daughter of Venduss and Tekmhat, nearly sprang into her lap before they remembered their manners. In their little warriors' clothes they bowed before her and said in unison, \"Good day, Way Master.\"\n\nShe conjured a frown. \"You say it is a good day? I shall not take your word for it, nurslings!\" In a fluid motion she leapt from her seat and tumbled through the air above them. Her quick hands snatched their collars. When she landed, she carried a child on each shoulder. \"You must escort an old woman outside and prove how good it is.\" Tarkosh and Torika giggled with delight.\n\nVenduss shook his head. \"So much for the decrepit old crone! What an act you play for the war masters. You are as decrepit as a sword fresh from the anvil.\"\n\nShe bumped him with her elbow as she passed. \"I exert myself for very few causes and warfare is not among them. If I must deceive the generals to keep it that way, then so be it. I do not lie, but I feint in battle.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Go easy on my kids, hey?\" She ignored him as she walked outside. Springtime had unfurled blue skies above Garron. A flock of iridescent firewings crackled overhead. The children squirmed on her shoulders, making themselves seem twice as heavy to her old bones. But Thulann had borne terrible weights over the length of her career. Seventy hard years had deposited her in this place at this moment and she had no complaints. Wriggling children and brisk Garron winds were a happy load. They were precisely the burden she had always wanted to bear.\n\nWith white hair braided and no sword at her back, the old Jukan woman hefted her load and ambled into the springtime and the life that she could, at long last, begin to live." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Heritage of Power 3)", + "author": "Lindsay Buroker", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "The sun blazed in the western sky, the wind whipped Captain Telryn \"Sidetrip\" Yert's scarf around, and the ocean gleamed dark and blue thousands of feet below his flier. The southern polar cap, more than a thousand square miles of sheets of ice, hadn't yet come into view, but icebergs bobbed in the water far below, promising the team was getting close.\n\nTrip had never been to the Antarctic and looked forward to seeing a new place. Even more, he looked forward to completing their challenging mission to destroy the portal that had been re-opened, allowing hostile dragons into the world. He and the others would be hailed as heroes then. There would be newspaper articles. Photographers. Pictures of him standing in front of his flier and\u2014\n\n\"Can't you keep your silly scarf from whipping into my face?\" his backseat passenger, Dreyak, demanded.\n\nIt was the latest of several grievances from the shaven-headed Cofah warrior. The last had been in regard to the lack of lavatory amenities in the open-air fliers. Trip could understand a woman being less than thrilled about the simple tube setup, it being more for emergencies than comfort, but one expected men to have fewer qualms about where they urinated.\n\n\"I thought you might want to use the end to keep your hairless head warm,\" Trip called back over the wind. \"The air is starting to get nippy.\"\n\nHe was glad he had donned his parka and the Iskandian winter uniform at their last stop. They had started their flight three days before from the Pirate Isles just south of the equator, with only short rest breaks along the way, sometimes on uninhabited islands little more than bare rocks thrusting up from the ocean. It hadn't been until that morning that the air had truly grown cold.\n\n\"Cofah warriors do not need such ridiculous garments,\" Dreyak announced, and without looking back, Trip was sure his chin had an arrogant tilt to it. \"We are a hardy people.\"\n\n\"You don't have scarves with playful little fringes on the ends?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What about ear muffs?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Fur caps with tufted balls on the top? What with your trend toward shaven heads, you must feel the need to protect those shiny domes from snowfall.\"\n\n\"For extreme winter conditions, we have fur coats and caps. Nothing is tufted. Or fringed.\"\n\n\"That must be why Iskandia is known for setting the world's fashion trends.\"\n\n\"What a pitiful thing to be known for.\"\n\n\"We can't all be known as conquering warmongers with a quota of countries to be invaded. Some of us prefer peace.\"\n\n\"I haven't noticed that your preferences for peace\u2014\" Dreyak said it as if it were the filthiest word in the dictionary, \"\u2014have kept your country from violence. It is better to be strong and fierce, thus to make enemies quail at the idea of attacking your shores.\"\n\n\"Yeah? And how's that working for the Cofah when it comes to dragons?\"\n\nThey were on this mission together since both of their countries had a dragon problem.\n\n\"It is highly likely that the dragons, realizing how fearsome Cofah warriors are, will soon grow weary of attacking our cities and instead will attack the easy targets that Iskandia offers, cities defended only by puny soldiers.\"\n\nTrip refused to get angry at the jabs. It was the most his passenger had spoken the whole trip, and after the frigid silence, Trip didn't mind having something to talk about with him. Besides, he always got the sense that Dreyak was deliberately goading him\u2014all of them\u2014with his ridiculous proclamations about the glory of war and the Cofahre empire. For the first time, he wondered if it was to divert their attention from something else, questions about him personally perhaps. And why exactly he'd been chosen for this mission.\n\nThat is a surprisingly astute observation, Jaxi, his borrowed soulblade, spoke into his mind. The weapon hung in its scabbard from the belt on his left hip, wedged awkwardly between his seat and the hull. Did sentient swords feel discomfort?\n\nSurprising because you hadn't thought of it? Trip asked, responding silently, though he still hadn't figured out if he could transmit his thoughts, like a real sorcerer could. Was transmit even the right word? He had little knowledge of terms related to the magical and the arcane. Or surprising because of the source?\n\nThe latter. In the time I've known you, you haven't convinced me to expect astuteness.\n\nYou've known me for less than a week.\n\nPlenty of time to suss out astuteness. It's hard for me to consider you as anything except obtuse, given your grasp of your own abilities regarding magic.\n\nThanks.\n\n\"Watch who you're calling puny,\" Trip said over his shoulder, realizing he was more likely to come out ahead in his sparring with the Cofah than with Jaxi. \"I have two swords up here with me now.\"\n\nA second soulblade, the one he'd picked up after Rysha defeated a pirate sorceress in battle, was jammed through his belt on his right hip. He'd found that he had to be very careful getting into and out of his flier with all the extra appendages dangling from his body.\n\n\"The second one should be in my hands,\" Dreyak said. \"It is a Cofah soulblade, and I am Cofah.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know. The setting sun reflecting off your shiny head keeps reminding me.\"\n\nA snicker sounded over the communication crystal in the cockpit.\n\n\"Good one, Trip,\" Leftie said. He, Duck, and Blazer flew ahead of Trip in their four-flier formation.\n\n\"Thanks, Leftie.\"\n\nTrip glanced back, wondering how his passenger would respond. His scarf tried to tickle Dreyak's nose, leading him to roll his eyes heavenward.\n\n\"I'd be happy to give you the sword if the sword requested it,\" Trip said, \"but it hasn't said a word to me yet. Jaxi said it went dormant after its handler died.\"\n\nJaxi had also said giving it to Dreyak to take home to his people would be the right thing to do. Trip planned to do just that when they parted ways at the end of the mission, assuming the blade didn't request it sooner, but for now, it seemed like a good idea to have the Cofah soulblade right next to Jaxi where she could keep an eye on it.\n\nOn him, she said dryly. We've discussed this. His name is Azarwrath, and he is most certainly a boy.\n\nHe's not speaking to you, is he?\n\nNot now, no. But he introduced himself to me before we engaged in battle.\n\nThat was polite.\n\nNot really. It included informing me about his superiority and suggesting I'm not reverent enough to be a sorceress, followed by promises to smite me into molten ore.\n\nI see. Trip looked down at his right hip, reconsidering the wisdom of keeping the blade so close. He didn't want anything down there smote. If Azzy wants someone else to hold him, all he has to do is tell me.\n\nTrip didn't necessarily want to give Dreyak a weapon that would make him more powerful than he already was, adding magic to his repertoire of abilities as a combat specialist, but Trip didn't want to keep Azzy against its\u2014his\u2014will, either.\n\nThere are times when you're not unlike Ridge, Jaxi shared in that same dry tone.\n\nYou're comparing me to General Zirkander? I'll take that as a compliment.\n\nHe, too, has a tendency toward flippancy. It must be a trait inculcated in all Iskandian pilots.\n\nI've noticed it seems to be inculcated in Iskandian soulblades too.\n\nReally. Jaxi sniffed, the sound penetrating his mind as effectively as if she had a nose.\n\n\"The scarf, Captain,\" Dreyak growled, pulling out a knife as long as his forearm. \"Take care of it, or I will take care of it for you.\"\n\nTrip tucked the end of his scarf into the back of his leather flight jacket again. It kept wanting to wiggle free, to Dreyak's obvious consternation. Rysha hadn't complained about it when she'd ridden with him.\n\nHe looked toward Leftie's flier where Lieutenant Rysha Ravenwood rode in the back seat. Was he regaling her with piloting stories? Or tales of his cunning athleticism on the hookball field?\n\nTrip well remembered the long appreciative look\u2014leer\u2014Leftie had given Rysha when she'd walked out of the airship hold in that extremely revealing pirate costume. Since then, he'd shown a lot more interest in her. Trip couldn't pretend to be surprised, but he'd been fond of Rysha since she'd stood up for him in that dreadful bar in the capital. Wasn't there a rule that said girls were supposed to reciprocate the liking of whichever boy liked them first?\n\nNow you sound more like a twelve-year-old than Ridge, Jaxi said. What did that even mean?\n\nI don't know. I'm not good with girls. Women. Since he was a few months from his twenty-fifth birthday, he should probably think of himself as a man and interesting female prospects as women.\n\nImagine my shock, Jaxi said. I suggest you rein in your romantic interests toward the lieutenant, at least until the mission is over and she hands that dragon-slaying sword to someone else. A dragon-slaying sword that will happily slay sorcerers too.\n\nIt hardly seems fair when I'm not truly a\u2014\n\nOr those with the potential to become sorcerers, Jaxi added, cutting him off.\n\nTrip sighed and gazed toward the horizon. He'd given up denying that he was that. Even if all he wanted to do was fly and defend his homeland from pirates, imperial invaders, and dragons.\n\n\"Major Blazer?\" Captain Duck asked over the crystal. \"My passenger was wondering how much farther we'll fly today. She's unimpressed with the lavatory facilities and wishes a chance to stretch her legs.\"\n\n\"I knew I wasn't the only one,\" Dreyak growled, the words almost lost on the wind.\n\n\"Preferably not by propping them up on my shoulders again,\" Duck added. \"That makes me feel like she's the praying mantis and I'm the, uh, prey.\"\n\n\"Some men get excited at the prospect of being preyed upon by Captain Kaika,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"I'm sure it would be stimulating, ma'am,\" Duck said. \"I'm not sure I'd survive the experience. Earlier, she was fondling her explosives in my back seat.\"\n\nSomething twanged Trip's senses, and he scanned the horizon instead of staring glassy-eyed at it. Was someone else out there? Or something else? Dragons were faster than fliers and could reputedly cross oceans with ease.\n\nKaika leaned over Duck's shoulder to speak\u2014the back seats weren't equipped with communication crystals. \"All I was doing was trimming fuses. Captain Duck is being melodramatic.\"\n\n\"It's just that I've heard about your reputation for devouring men, ma'am.\" Even though they were the same rank, Duck seemed certain he should call her ma'am instead of by name.\n\n\"You needn't get your feathers all ruffled, Duck.\" Kaika patted him on the shoulder. \"You're not in danger of my attention.\"\n\n\"That's a relief.\" He seemed to consider that for a moment. \"Wait, does that mean you don't find me appealing? Why not?\"\n\n\"Do you want a list of reasons?\"\n\nDuck's shoulders slumped. \"No, I reckon not.\"\n\n\"Wise man.\"\n\nTrip heard the conversation, but he ignored it. He definitely sensed something out there ahead of them, something with a significant aura. So far, the only beings he'd encountered that oozed power and presence like that were dragons. He supposed a magical artifact, like the portal they sought, might do so, but he didn't think he sensed an artifact.\n\nJaxi? he asked. Do you feel a dragon out there?\n\nNot yet, but I wasn't trying to sense anything. I was contemplating the image of Captain Kaika as a praying mantis.\n\nTrip, who was learning how to extend his senses to search for life and get a feel for the terrain around them, attempted to reach out farther than his eyes could see. A strange thing to contemplate when the sky was clear, and visibility was more than ten miles.\n\nHe imagined himself in the lead flier, sailing far ahead of their tiny formation and looking down from above. Last time, that mental exercise had worked a lot better than Jaxi's suggestion that he imagine his mind unfurling like a flower bud.\n\nEveryone's a critic, Jaxi said.\n\nDoing his best to concentrate, Trip didn't answer. As his mind\u2014his senses\u2014extended outward, the cockpit controls grew fuzzy, and a different view came into focus. The ocean still lay dark and blue underneath him, but he also saw a white shoreline, a shoreline of solid ice. It was jagged along the edge, with icebergs floating in the water all around it, some as small as fliers, others as large as cities.\n\nAt the far edge of his vision, a bronze dragon soared over the white landscape. He couldn't tell if it was on its way somewhere or simply flying around, perhaps patrolling the area.\n\nMaybe hunting, Jaxi said. I see her now too. I don't know what she would be patrolling, or why a dragon would be lingering down here, unless she just came out of the portal. Dragons don't care for cold weather.\n\nAnother dragon flew into the range of Trip's senses, a silver this time. It paralleled the female's course.\n\nHe shifted uneasily in his seat. Despite what Jaxi had said, he had the distinct impression that the dragons were patrolling the shoreline.\n\nWhat if some were left down here to guard the portal? Trip suggested, though he hoped that wasn't the case. The plan was to sneak in and destroy the portal without encountering dragons. Had that been a delusional plan? Is it possible the dragons know humans are targeting it?\n\nDragons can easily read humans' minds, so it's definitely possible, but as far as I'm aware, we're the only team that's been sent to destroy it.\n\nBut you wouldn't know if the Cofah or some other nation had sent a team, right?\n\nThat's correct, but the Cofah sent your surly friend there with us, supposedly because their people didn't know the location of the portal. We don't know the location, either, but thanks to our missing ally, Bhrava Saruth, we at least knew to start in the polar regions.\n\nWhat if Dreyak was sent along to spy on us and report back to his government once he learned the location of the portal? Trip didn't know if Rysha had shared the coordinates that she and Sardelle had narrowed down, based on locations of dragon ruins, with anyone except the pilots. But if Dreyak had asked, she might have innocently answered his question. She enjoyed speaking about her passions, and with her degree in dragon history, this mission had to fall under that category. You said you can't read Dreyak's thoughts, right? Because he has dragon blood?\n\nBecause he's been trained to keep people out of his head, Jaxi said. You have dragon blood, and I can read you like a romance novel.\n\nI don't know how to respond to that.\n\nNo response necessary. Just ask Sardelle about walling off your thoughts from other telepaths when you sign up for her classes after this is over.\n\nSign up for her classes? Trip imagined browsing through a catalog like one might at a university. Under which section were the magicking classes?\n\nSo obtuse. It's a marvel you sensed those two dragons before I did.\n\nThree now.\n\nThree?\n\nThere's another one farther east. I don't know if it's with the others, but\u2026 I'm going to tell the others. The dragons will sense us as easily as I sense them, I assume.\n\nOh, more easily. Granted, we don't have the auras that they have, but their powers and abilities to sense their surroundings are far greater than any human's. I'll do my best to shroud us, but that generally only works against other sorcerers.\n\nWill they sense the chapaharii swords? Trip asked, using the term Rysha did for the dragon-slaying swords, though he didn't know what it meant.\n\nIt seems likely.\n\nAny chance that will cause them to leave our fliers alone and let us search the ice without interference?\n\nJaxi snorted even more effectively than she sniffed. She had an amazing range for a sword.\n\nIf anything, it will make them more likely to come investigate, and perhaps try to destroy us. They'll see us as a threat and probably believe we brought the weapons because we're hoping to hunt and kill them.\n\nNo, we just want to hunt and kill the portal they used to invade our world.\n\nTechnically, they're not invaders. You would have to ask your archaeology-loving lieutenant, but I'm fairly certain dragons evolved here on Linora. Then they were tricked into leaving, something it's unlikely we'll manage to do again. Humans weren't even the ones responsible for it last time, according to Bhrava Saruth.\n\nTrip wondered if he would ever get to meet this Bhrava Saruth or the other dragon the Iskandians had befriended, dragons that had been conspicuously absent since the portal opened and all the unfriendly ones spewed into the world.\n\nWhen Jaxi didn't comment on that, Trip addressed the rest of his team. \"We have a problem.\"\n\n\"Is it that Captain Kaika is using my shoulders for a leg rest again?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"No. There are dragons ahead of us, about thirty miles away. They're flying right along the shoreline where we were planning to cut inland.\"\n\n\"Jaxi reported that?\" Major Blazer asked.\n\nTrip hesitated. So far, he didn't think anyone on the team had figured out that he had a sixth sense\u2014more than a sixth sense\u2014and that somewhere in the distant past, a dragon had apparently frolicked horizontally, as Jaxi had called it, with one of his ancestors. He wouldn't be surprised if Rysha had some inklings, but he believed Blazer, Kaika, and the others thought the chapaharii blades responded unfavorably to him because he was carrying magical soulblades.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Trip said.\n\nIt wasn't exactly a lie.\n\nSure, hero, tell yourself that.\n\nJaxi, you know how magic is viewed in Iskandia. I know Sardelle has changed the mind of her friends and maybe some others in the capital, but my mother was hanged because the people in our village believed her a witch. You must understand why I don't want people to know I'm\u2026 different.\n\nHe thought Jaxi would make some sarcastic comment about different being an understatement, but instead, she sighed into his mind and said, I know, and I do understand. But you can't hide it from everyone. Trust me. Sardelle found that out quickly. When you have the power to do good, to save lives, you have to use it. And then the people around you find out. If you trust them, and they're supposed to be able to trust you, don't you think it's better to tell them on your own terms?\n\nTrip glanced toward Leftie, someone who had been his friend for six years, and someone who was superstitious and uncomfortable around magic. When the very nonthreatening, and very pregnant, Sardelle had openly admitted that she was a sorceress, he'd looked like he'd been torn between wanting to attack her and wanting to jump out the second-floor window to flee from her.\n\nBlazer swore, asking a question of her own before Trip could answer Jaxi's, not that he wanted to.\n\n\"Can she guide us around them? By my calculations, we're twenty-seven miles out from the shoreline, but then we have to fly four hundred more miles inland to reach the first destination we're checking.\"\n\n\"We can try,\" Trip said, \"but they can sense things over extremely long ranges, even greater than Jaxi's range.\"\n\nOr your range, Jaxi chimed in.\n\n\"And she said they may be able to sense the chapaharii swords,\" Trip added, \"that they might draw them to attack us.\"\n\n\"They can try,\" came Rysha's determined voice, as she leaned over Leftie's shoulder.\n\nHer hand rested on that shoulder, and Trip looked away, telling himself it was only because she had to lean awkwardly forward to be heard over the communication crystal.\n\n\"We don't want to pick a fight with them,\" Trip said. \"It won't be like standing on the ground and battling a sorceress.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of that,\" Rysha said, looking over at him. \"Might I remind you that I've read numerous history texts and am quite well versed on dragon capabilities?\"\n\nShe sounded cooler and more aloof than usual, and Trip wondered if her new chapaharii sword, Dorfindral, was influencing her, sending tendrils of magic into her to remind her that he was a hated foe and not a friend. It pained him every time he remembered the loathing-filled look she'd given him when he'd walked up the beach toward her after she had, with the magical sword's help, defeated the pirate sorceress. It had been so different from the friendly smiles she'd given him previously, the way she'd stood up for him before she had even gotten to know him.\n\n\"You're welcome to remind me of your versedness any time you like, Lieutenant,\" Trip said, opting for an affable response rather than a disgruntled one. \"You know pilots aren't that bright. Sometimes, you have to thump us over the head with your knowledge a few times before we remember it.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself, low speed,\" Blazer said, even though Duck nodded agreeably from his cockpit.\n\nIt was hard to tell across the distance, but Trip thought Rysha looked a little abashed, either at her own comment or because his response had made her realize it had been snippy.\n\n\"You're not dim, Trip,\" Rysha said. \"I've seen you fix things. You're a whiz with wobbly tables.\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah,\" Leftie said, \"he's a genius. Now, if we could discuss our more pressing problem?\"\n\n\"Twenty-three miles,\" Blazer updated them. \"We'll see the shoreline soon.\"\n\n\"Turn east,\" Trip said. \"Let's follow the coast about twenty miles out, and I'll let you know when Jaxi tells me there aren't any nearby dragons. Maybe then we can turn inland and get back on course.\"\n\n\"Isn't there anywhere we can land and get out of these flying jail cells for a couple of hours?\" Kaika called over Duck's shoulder. \"Maybe we'd have better luck flying inland at night, anyway. Do dragons hunt by day or by night?\"\n\n\"Both,\" Rysha said, before Trip could consult Jaxi.\n\n\"There is a Cofah research outpost that I believe may only be about a hundred miles away,\" Dreyak said.\n\n\"I'm sure they'd welcome us with open arms,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"They would welcome me,\" Dreyak said.\n\n\"Are shaven heads required for entrance?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"My presence would ensure your safety. If you are concerned about a few scientists.\"\n\n\"Considering the only Cofah scientist we know has the nickname Deathmaker,\" Blazer said, \"I've got reason to be concerned about them.\"\n\n\"Deathmaker is a traitor,\" Dreyak snarled with vehemence he usually reserved for enemies he was about to slay.\n\nTrip? Jaxi asked. You watching that silver?\n\nHe'd been paying attention to the conversation, but he shifted his attention outward. I am now.\n\nIt's heading our way.\n\nI see that.\n\n\"We're about to have company,\" Trip told his comrades." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Lieutenant Rysha Ravenwood unfastened the straps that kept Dorfindral's ancient wooden sword box secure next to her seat, then unlatched the lid and withdrew the sword. The dragon Trip had warned them about hadn't appeared in the sky yet, but the blade flared a pale green as soon as she had it in hand.\n\nHunt!\n\nOh, she didn't truly hear the word, nor did Dorfindral speak to her, but when she held the hilt, she sensed what the blade wanted, to slay dragons and all those with dragon blood. It also, as she'd discovered when it coerced her into pulverizing a magical construct, hated artifacts made by sorcerers.\n\nShe'd learned\u2014almost too late\u2014that it hated Trip, too. Something that saddened her a great deal. Because of that, she'd even tried to get out of wielding it. But Kaika had pointed out that there were three chapaharii blades and only five people along on the mission who were capable of wielding them. Rysha, Kaika, and Blazer each had swords with them now, Kaika and Blazer because they had a lot of unarmed combat experience, and Rysha because she had all the magical control words memorized and knew more than anyone else here about the chapaharii weapons.\n\nThe main control word that she had to keep on the tip of her tongue was meyusha, which meant \"stand down.\" There was also one that ordered the blades to stand guard, presumably while the wielder slept or was otherwise unable to remain alert. Another phrase, antyonla masahrati, ordered the swords to \"take over,\" a notion that Rysha found alarming. Dorfindral had already guided her movements when she'd battled the sorceress. She couldn't imagine what it would do if it was given that order, and she had no intention of trying it.\n\n\"Any chance it'll be afraid of us because we have a way to hurt it?\" Blazer asked, glancing toward Trip's flier.\n\nThey were paralleling the shoreline now, or so Rysha assumed\u2014after Trip had suggested it, all the fliers had turned, putting the setting sun at their backs. They couldn't yet see the ice of the polar cap.\n\n\"Jaxi snorted when I asked her that,\" Trip said. \"The good news is that all the fliers with the dragon-slaying blades in them should have a modicum of protection from the dragon's attacks. The bad news is that mine won't.\"\n\n\"Shit, we should have rifled through that pirate's stash and found a fourth blade,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"I don't think there were more,\" Rysha said. She imagined how badly Trip's shoulder blades would itch if someone with a chapaharii sword were sitting behind him.\n\n\"Give me the Cofah soulblade,\" Dreyak said, his voice sounding distant since he spoke from Trip's back seat. \"You can't wield two swords while you're flying.\"\n\n\"I doubt I can wield one sword while I'm flying,\" Trip said.\n\n\"You better acquire the skill fast.\"\n\nWithout commenting, Trip pulled a scabbard into view and one-handedly extended it over his shoulder. As far as Rysha could tell, it didn't glow or show any sign of life. Would the soulblade consider coming out of dormancy to help them battle a dragon? If it didn't, and Trip's flier crashed, it could be lost forever, sinking to the bottom of the ocean.\n\nDreyak wrapped a hand around the scabbard, but as soon as he touched it, he yelped and jerked his hand away.\n\nTrip glanced back.\n\n\"It zapped me,\" Dreyak growled. \"Or did you do that?\" He glared at Trip.\n\n\"Me? I agreed with you. Better we each have one to use. It's not like our pistols will do anything against a dragon.\"\n\nRysha doubted the soulblades would do anything against their foe, either. The red lightning the sorceress's blade had shot out had been effective at damaging fliers, but getting through a dragon's defenses was another matter. Still, a soulblade could shield Trip's flier for a while. Maybe a long while if two of them worked together.\n\n\"Jaxi says she didn't do anything, either,\" Trip added. \"Actually, she says you're welcome to take Azzy and drop him over the side because she doesn't need help.\"\n\n\"She sounds young and arrogant,\" Dreyak said with a sniff.\n\nTrip gave him a long look over his shoulder, one Rysha had no trouble reading even from her position well off his flier's wing. He thought Dreyak could have been describing himself. Rysha suspected Dreyak was simply irritated\u2014with his pride wounded\u2014because a Cofah soulblade was more interested in staying with Trip than in working with him.\n\n\"I see him,\" Duck blurted and pointed to the south.\n\nThe silver dragon had appeared on the horizon, powerful wingbeats carrying him against the wind without trouble. He flew straight toward them. There was no question about his destination.\n\nTrip jabbed the soulblade back through his belt or wherever he was keeping it. Somewhere secure, Rysha trusted. She'd seen Trip fly upside down and knew it was part of his battle repertoire.\n\n\"Keep your thoughts away from our mission,\" Trip warned everyone. \"Dragons can read minds.\"\n\n\"Fantastic,\" Blazer growled. She sounded like she had one of her cigars in her mouth, though Rysha couldn't imagine how it would stay lit in the wind.\n\n\"What should we think about?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"Praying mantises?\" Leftie suggested.\n\n\"Staying alive,\" Trip said.\n\n\"There's no way we can outrun a dragon, right?\" Leftie asked.\n\n\"No, they're faster than our fliers,\" Blazer said. \"Trust me. I know from experience.\"\n\nLeftie drew something from his pocket, his lucky ball on a chain, and kissed it before returning it to his pocket.\n\nThe group eyed the silver as it flew closer, the setting sun reflecting off its gleaming scales. It flew with its maw partially open, its fangs visible. Each one had to be as long as a soulblade, if not longer. Its powerful muscles grew visible, rippling beneath those scales. Silver eyes with reptilian slits bored into Rysha's soul.\n\nShe flexed her hand around Dorfindral's hilt, allowing the sword's eagerness to flow into her. Its desire for battle swept aside some of her fear. She made sure her rifle was wedged down beside her seat and strapped in tightly. Just because the sword would be her weapon for this battle didn't mean she wanted to lose her firearm.\n\n\"Diamond formation,\" Blazer said. \"Three points with Trip in the middle. Assuming these swords work as advertised, we'll do our best to protect his flier.\"\n\n\"That's not going to be enough, Major,\" Trip said. \"You're going to have to try to get close enough to him to touch his defensive barrier with one of the blades. If you do, Jaxi and Azzy can attack him with magic. I don't think they can kill him, but they might be able to drive him away.\"\n\n\"How close do we have to get?\" Rysha called over Leftie's shoulder. \"To reach the barrier? How far does it extend from him?\"\n\n\"We're not sure,\" Trip said, and she imagined Jaxi speaking into his head. Might the Cofah soulblade be speaking to him too? Azzy? Was that its name?\n\n\"You don't think the dragon will just go away if he finds it impossible to get to us?\" Blazer didn't sound like she wanted to jump into battle.\n\nAt first, that surprised Rysha. But she realized that this wasn't their mission. Fighting random dragons all over Linora wouldn't necessarily make a dent in their numbers, even if they were successful. Whereas every time they fought, they risked deaths or damage to their fliers that couldn't be fixed, not way out here. If someone was forced to land, this polar region wasn't a hospitable environment in which to be stranded. If someone crashed into the icy ocean, that would be even worse.\n\n\"I wouldn't assume that, ma'am,\" Trip said. \"Dragons are as smart as we are. I think he'll just keep harrying us until he finds out a way to get around the swords' defenses. Jaxi says a silver might be powerful enough to manipulate the weather too. And magic is the only thing those swords will make you immune to. We\u2014\"\n\nThe dragon surged forward, accelerating as it closed on the formation, and Trip broke off.\n\nA blast of wind whistled toward the fliers from the side. Rysha didn't feel it, but the wings of the flier wobbled, and the frame trembled. Trip's flier reacted far more strongly, as he'd predicted.\n\nIt shuddered in the air and bucked as if it were riding a wave. Concentration stamped Trip's face. His flier wasn't hurled to the side\u2014Rysha had witnessed that happen to many of the fliers protecting the city in the battle the week before\u2014so the soulblades must have been protecting it somewhat. But how many attacks could they stave off?\n\nAnother blast of wind slammed into their formation. Leftie's flier groaned and shivered, and Rysha gripped the seat well, wishing the dragon would come close enough to strike at.\n\nThe dragon's eyes narrowed in contemplation. He didn't appear worried, but maybe he was wondering why his attacks weren't doing more damage. Or, maybe he was simply probing them for weaknesses.\n\nTrip looked at the silver as he flew, and he raised Jaxi. But it was the other soulblade that sent the first attack. Its familiar red lightning shot out of Trip's cockpit, branching around the propeller and sizzling through the air toward the dragon.\n\nAs predicted, it didn't come close to touching his scales. Nor did the dragon's cold reptilian eyes show any sign of concern.\n\n\"There's your barrier location,\" Trip said.\n\nIt took Rysha a second to realize what he meant, but it struck her as the lightning faded. It had branched all around the dragon, delineating the invisible barrier, showing its distance outward from the dragon's scales. About ten feet in all directions.\n\n\"Get us within ten feet of it, Leftie.\" Rysha thumped one of his shoulders while pointing her sword over the other one. It flared with hungry green light.\n\n\"Shit, Ravenwood. Don't lop off my ear with that thing. The ladies like my ears.\"\n\n\"Get me close too,\" Kaika barked at Duck.\n\n\"Does that mean we're not trying to protect Trip?\" Duck asked.\n\nTrip answered before Blazer did. \"No. Get its defenses down.\"\n\nHumans are succulent, a voice spoke into Rysha's mind\u2014into all of their minds, she could tell from people's startled glances at the creature. My mate has ordered that I invite you to dinner. To be our dinner. The dragon chuckled.\n\nIf that was an example of dragon humor, Rysha found it appalling.\n\nTrip banked and flew straight at the silver, a fiery orange ball of flames shooting toward it from his left side and more red lightning streaking out from his right. He looked like some ancient god hurling magical power about more easily than a kid throwing rocks, but the attacks merely bounced off the dragon's defensive barrier. Trip was forced to bank again lest he run into it.\n\nHe was careful not to get close enough to be within range of the creature's fangs or talons, but as he flew past, the dragon lashed out with its tail. The long, sinewy appendage snapped toward him like a whip. The tip cracked into the barrier the swords had erected and didn't get through, but his flier shuddered again, affected by whatever magical power accompanied the attack.\n\n\"Leftie, go,\" Rysha ordered.\n\nLeftie was already veering toward the creature's other side, so she needn't have barked in his ear, but she couldn't help it. Dorfindral craved dragon blood, and Rysha wanted to protect Trip.\n\nTo her surprise, Dorfindral didn't send a surge of indignation into her at that thought. Probably because the sword was too focused on its target right now.\n\nLeftie took her toward the side of the dragon opposite Trip, firing his machine guns as he went in. So much for a sneak attack. Not that one would have worked, anyway.\n\nAs she rose up in her seat as much as her harness would allow, Rysha glimpsed Duck flying in from above, trying to get Kaika and her sword close. Blazer chased after the dragon's tail. She had no passenger in her flier, unless the group's gear and Kaika's bomb collection counted, so she would have to fly and wield the third blade at the same time. Maybe she hoped to get lucky and go unnoticed, swiping at the tip of that tail.\n\nAnother blast radiated out from the dragon in all directions. Once again, Rysha heard the wind blow past them, and the flier shivered, but Dorfindral did seem to be protecting her and the things around her, at least somewhat.\n\nLeftie tilted them sideways, their heads toward the dragon's side, just avoiding the wings beating up and down. Gravity tipped Rysha into the side of the seat well. Even though the harness limited her reach, she was glad she hadn't unfastened it. She lunged as far as it would let her go and slashed over her head with the sword.\n\nBut she swiped through empty air. She remembered the zing of energy that had gone up her arm when the blade touched the sorceress's defensive shield, and she felt nothing like that now.\n\n\"That wasn't close enough,\" Rysha yelled. \"Turn and try again.\"\n\n\"You're a demanding passenger,\" Leftie yelled back, though he was already looping to go in again.\n\nAfter strafing the top of the dragon, bullets bouncing off uselessly, Duck dipped low to take Kaika in for an attack.\n\n\"Don't shoot,\" Blazer ordered, \"or we'll end up hitting each other. Stick to the swords, and\u2014look out, Duck!\"\n\nThe dragon was dipping to chase Trip's flier. Its tail whipped up as it dove, the pointed tip smashing into Duck's flier.\n\nRysha gaped as Duck and Kaika spun away, wing tips rolling over wing tips.\n\n\"I thought we were supposed to be immune to attacks,\" Blazer snapped, swiping over her head as she dove along with the dragon, still trying to get close enough to hit that barrier.\n\n\"Magical attacks,\" Trip said after a few seconds. After he'd gotten clarification from Jaxi? \"Apparently, a physical attack can get through.\"\n\n\"Took some damage,\" Duck said grimly.\n\nHe'd righted his flier, but when he turned back toward the battle, the craft flew with a pronounced hitch.\n\nFortunately, the dragon barely seemed to have noticed that it had struck him. Or maybe that was unfortunately. The silver arrowed down after Trip's flier, its intent clear. Those magical attacks from the soulblades could be irritating it.\n\nTrip weaved and dove, corkscrewing to avoid his pursuer. The mechanical fliers always seemed clunky to Rysha, especially when compared to dragons, but he made his seem graceful. And the dragon truly struggled to anticipate all his crazy moves. It snapped at his tail repeatedly, but didn't come close enough to test the soulblades' barrier.\n\nUntil it hurled some mental attack at the flier, one that made it through. The dragon must have finally worn away the soulblades' defenses. Trip's craft lurched to the side, then dipped downward into a tailspin straight toward the ocean. Black smoke flowed from the back.\n\n\"No,\" Rysha cried, and gripped Leftie's shoulder. \"Go, go! We have to help him.\"\n\nLeftie chased the dragon downward. \"Don't you dare get yourself killed, Trip,\" he snarled, his hand tight around his flight stick as their nose pointed toward the dark ocean.\n\nThey shot down far faster than gravity alone would have carried them. The wind tore at the flier, and tears sprang from Rysha's eyes. The fuselage vibrated, and something shifted to her side. Her rifle had almost shaken free.\n\nCursing, she stuffed it down deeper and jammed her hip against it so it would stay put.\n\n\"Hurry,\" Blazer urged. \"We're not losing any people out here.\"\n\nHer flier was right beside Leftie's, and she fired at the dragon, despite her admonition telling the others not to. Rysha waved Dorfindral, wishing it had power it could shoot out like the soulblades did.\n\nThe dragon picked up speed as it closed on Trip's flier, both of them descending rapidly toward the ocean. As fast as Leftie flew after them, Rysha knew they wouldn't catch up in time. But maybe she could get a slash in as the dragon pulled up to avoid hitting the water. Right now, it seemed intent on catching up to Trip and crushing his flier in its talons.\n\nRysha didn't think it would reach him before his flier plummeted into the ocean. Not that it mattered. He would die either way.\n\nShe couldn't feel anything but horror at that thought, but if he had to die, she found solace in knowing the dragon wouldn't be able to deliver him to its mate for dinner.\n\nAt the last second, when it looked like Trip would plunge into the ocean, he pulled up. His flier skimmed so close to the waves that water sprayed up on either side of him.\n\nAs quick and agile as dragons were, it seemed the creature should have had time to react, but it plunged head first into the waves.\n\n\"Be ready for it to come out,\" Trip said, his voice utterly calm.\n\nHad he engineered that? Feigned the near crash? The smoke following him down? Maybe the soulblades had created an illusion.\n\n\"Jaxi's going to light up the spot where it's coming out,\" he added. \"Be ready to strike. There, now!\"\n\nA red sphere seemed to float on the water's surface, like some bullseye on a gun range. Leftie and Blazer flew toward it.\n\nRysha risked unfastening her harness. She might need the extra two feet of reach she could get without it. She just hoped that if she went for a swim, Leftie would come back for her before the sharks darted in.\n\nThe dragon burst from the water like a geyser erupting.\n\nThere was no time for thought, only to react. As Leftie flew toward it, tilting to give Rysha the angle she needed, she lunged from her seat, slashing overhead. Once again, she cut through air. But she was so close. Twelve feet away? Thirteen?\n\nIts silver body sped past, and she thought she would be too late for another lunge, but there was the tail, streaming out after it.\n\nKill! Dorfindral seemed to cry into her mind.\n\nShe wasn't sure if it was her idea or the sword's, but she jumped onto her seat and sprang toward that tail. Instead of slashing wildly, Dorfindral guided her arm into a neat stab. The very tip encountered resistance, and it felt like a bubble popping.\n\nAn electrical backlash shot up her arm, and she cried out at the shock, almost pain. But it was soon replaced with the shock of landing in the water. Absolutely frigid water.\n\nShe plunged downward, her head going under, as the ocean enveloped her, shocking her body with its iciness. At first, she couldn't move, and her body descended into the darkness, but fear sent a fresh surge of energy through her, and she kicked wildly.\n\nHer boots and her clothing dragged at her, and Dorfindral was a dead weight, but her flailing and kicking brought her to the surface. She tried to gasp in air, but it was as if the cold had shocked her lungs like a sharp blow to the solar plexus. They couldn't seem to work.\n\nIn the air above, red lightning streaked into the dragon's body, wrapping all around it at the same time as a blaze of white energy slammed into its body. For the first time, those attacks reached its scales. Machine guns fired, as well, and one of the fliers zoomed past right over her head.\n\nLeftie. He glanced over the side, lifting a finger toward her, but banked and pursued the dragon.\n\nRysha's lungs finally kicked into gear, and she managed to gasp in air. She treaded water as vigorously as she could, more than needed to stay afloat, and she hoped the energy expenditure would warm her body. She'd never been in water so cold in her life.\n\nThe dragon must have had enough of the battle because it flew away. Rysha had lost all sense of direction, and she had no idea if it sped out to sea or back toward land\u2014ice.\n\nThree of the fliers tried to pursue it, but it soon outpaced them, pulling ahead even though its wings didn't seem to beat that rapidly. The fourth flier\u2014Duck's damaged one?\u2014had more of a hitch now, and it looked like it needed to head straight for a safe landing spot. Wherever that would be.\n\nTwo of the fliers turned back. Rysha lifted Dorfindral out of the water, waving to get their attention. Could they still see her? She had to be the tiniest of specks in the dark ocean, especially with the waves rising and falling all around her.\n\nShe willed Dorfindral to glow green, since daylight was fading, and that glow would make it easier for her comrades to see her. But it didn't glow. What the hells? Because there was no magic nearby?\n\nSeven gods, she was freezing. How long could she survive in this frigid water? Even if she got out, would they be able to get her somewhere to warm her up in time?\n\nShe was so busy thinking about hypothermia that she wasn't paying attention to her surroundings. Her arm brushed against something, and she shrieked, images of sharks lurching into her mind.\n\nWhirling, Rysha hacked with the sword before it registered what had touched her. An iceberg floated there. Her boot bumped the underwater part of it as Dorfindral sank into the visible ice, lodging there.\n\nShe grunted, feeling foolish, then wondered if she could climb atop it to make herself more visible.\n\nBut the roar of the fliers' propellers reached her ears, and she knew they were close. Leftie and Trip came into view over the waves, cruising low over the water. Trip had Dreyak behind him, but her seat behind Leftie waited for her.\n\nRysha yanked her sword free and pushed away from the iceberg. She reached her free hand up. She could see Leftie and Trip yelling to each other, but couldn't hear their words, not with freezing water burrowing into her ear canals. Her teeth chattered so loudly they hurt as they knocked together.\n\nTrip pointed at Leftie, then pointed at Rysha. As she looked at their fliers from below, she realized the problem. They couldn't land in the water, and with the thrusters mounted on the lower half of the craft, they wouldn't be able to reach her if they simply leaned over the sides and lowered a hand. The soulblades also wouldn't be able to levitate her out, if that was within their power, as long as she held Dorfindral.\n\nLeftie flew toward her, leaning over the side of his flier as he came in. He was going to make a grab for her.\n\nThough she did not think it would work, Rysha lifted her hand, trying to keep it steady as she treaded with her legs, raising herself as much as possible.\n\nThe propeller roared as he came in, leaning far out of the cockpit and stretching his fingers toward her. He missed by two feet.\n\nDamn it.\n\nTeeth cracking together, Rysha sank back down into the water. She couldn't feel her toes, and numbness was creeping into her legs, despite her efforts to warm herself through exertion. This wasn't the lake in her family's valley back home.\n\nShe thought about jabbing Dorfindral into the iceberg, leaving it there so they could reach her with magic. Surely, they could figure out a way to retrieve the blade once she was back in one of the fliers. But what if she didn't lodge it in well enough, and it fell out? They could never get it off the bottom of the ocean.\n\nThere was the surge of indignation from the blade that she'd expected to feel earlier.\n\nA flier cruised toward her again, Trip this time. Dreyak had been in his back seat a moment before, but now it was empty. Maybe the soulblades had levitated him over to Leftie's flier?\n\nRysha didn't care, as long as someone plucked her out of the water.\n\nDorfindral flared green as Trip approached.\n\n\"Knock it off,\" she told it, the words barely audible over her chattering teeth.\n\nTrip flipped completely upside down, his eyes never leaving hers. Their intensity sent a tingle through her. Or maybe that was from her body going entirely numb.\n\nShe grunted and hefted her leaden arm into the air as high as she could as he approached, praying he would be able to reach her.\n\nThe propeller roared, and she feared it would take her head off\u2014his upper wings were only an inch above the water. But she kept her arm up, resisting the urge to duck out of the way.\n\nFingers wrapped around her wrist, and she was yanked out so quickly, she almost dropped Dorfindral. Though her hand was so numb, she could barely tell, she willed her fingers to stay wrapped around the hilt, clenching so hard it hurt. The one thing she could not do was lose that sword. Her country needed it.\n\nTrip rolled his flier sideways, and briefly, she lay on the fuselage, her wrist still clasped in his hand. He glanced at her\u2014did he expect her to climb into the back seat? Normally, she could, but her body was so numb, she couldn't move anything, couldn't do anything except focus on keeping her grip on the sword.\n\nTrip rolled the flier the rest of the way upright, took them up over the waves, then twisted and grabbed her with his other hand too. Pain flashed in his eyes, and Dorfindral flared with intense green light. As Trip maneuvered her into the seat behind him, Rysha realized the sword must be hurting him, punishing him for being so close.\n\nHer mouth wouldn't work when she tried to yell the control order for, \"Stand down\" at the blade, so she yelled it in her mind. It seemed to work, somewhat. The glow faded partially.\n\nWith Trip's help, Rysha collapsed into the seat well. Trembles wracked her body, and the sword dropped from her limp fingers.\n\nShe reached for it, afraid it would fall out if she didn't hold it, but Trip yelled, \"Don't,\" over his shoulder. \"Don't touch it for a few minutes, and Jaxi will warm you up. I'll fly straight so it won't fall out.\"\n\nRysha slumped deeper into the seat, happy to comply, happy to do anything that would result in her being warm.\n\nRight after Trip spoke, a slow, subtle heat flowed into her. She continued to tremble and shake, and she knew it would take a while to truly warm up. She just hoped Trip had gotten her out quickly enough that there wouldn't be lasting damage. Though the soldiers all had combat-medic training, there weren't any doctors or healers among them, and she didn't want to be a burden going forward.\n\nTrip looked back at her. They'd ascended above the waves, and Rysha could see the three other fliers sailing ahead of them, Blazer and Leftie matching the slow pace of Duck's damaged craft. But she only glanced at them. She met Trip's gaze, wanting to tell him how grateful she was, but her teeth hadn't stopped chattering. Even though the warmth filling her was driving away the tremendous cold, she didn't think she could manage words yet.\n\nHis lips parted, as if he wanted to ask a question, but didn't know how to phrase it. He was probably wondering if she was all right, or if she would be.\n\nShe lifted her numb arms and leaned forward to hug him. She was soaking wet and had to look like something an owl had coughed up, but he didn't pull away. He reached back and wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her as close as possible, given the seat back between them.\n\n\"Guess that answers my question,\" he said, warm humor in his voice, his cheek against hers.\n\n\"Wha\u2014at?\" she asked, proud she'd gotten a word out. Sort of.\n\n\"I wondered if the sword was going to make you brain me if you're riding behind me.\" He said it lightly, but she knew it had to be a true concern for him. That was the reason she hadn't been flying behind him, as she had done at the beginning of the mission.\n\nShe squeezed him tightly. Almost fiercely. Afraid. Afraid of what, she wasn't sure. That the sword would attempt to make her kill him? As it had been doing in the dream where she'd stalked him through a dark forest?\n\n\"I'll ha\u2014han\u2014dle the sword,\" she said, wishing the words came out more firmly, as if that could make them more true. No, they would be true. She swore it to herself.\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nHe drew back, not holding the hug for nearly as long as she wished, but she told herself he had to fly the craft. Before pulling away completely, he smiled and kissed her on the cheek. It was a perfectly chaste I'm-glad-you-didn't-die kiss, but it sent a warm tingle through Rysha. Long after Trip turned around, and she was looking only at the back of his head, she found herself thinking of the intensity of his dark green eyes as he'd flown in to get her.\n\nA sense of disgruntlement seemed to waft up from Dorfindral, even though she wasn't touching the sword, but she sat back in her seat and did her best to ignore it. Instead, as the soulblade continued to warm her numb limbs, she closed her eyes and thought of Trip's determined expression as he'd come to help her. Determined and confident. He'd never doubted he could pull her up. And why would he? He seemed more comfortable in the sky than on land. Maybe he was." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "As a full moon gleamed in the night sky, shining silvery light over the fields of ice below, Trip looked dubiously down at the Cofah research outpost. They were close to a mile away, but the ambient light was enough that he could make out two corrugated metal buildings that were standing, and a dozen more that weren't.\n\nWreckage scattered the ice all around the area, and the dark deflated envelope of an airship pooled like a blanket next to one of the remaining buildings. He couldn't tell if the ship itself was damaged. It was currently being smothered by the limp balloon.\n\nThere weren't lights on in the buildings, nor did he see or smell smoke. Given how cold he was, even with his parka on, he couldn't imagine sitting down there without a fire going. Though he didn't think his senses would tell him anything his eyes didn't, he did his best to stretch out with them, trying to determine if anyone was alive down there.\n\nHe detected a few small animals, but no people.\n\n\"There's nobody there, Major,\" Trip said.\n\n\"You sure? Jaxi tell you?\"\n\nJaxi? Trip asked, more because he didn't want to lie than because he didn't trust his senses.\n\nBy all means, let us keep up your ruse. You can truthfully let her know that I've detected no humans.\n\n\"Yes,\" Trip said.\n\n\"Well, I guess my worry about us getting shot down by Cofah scientists won't prove true,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"We must check on my people,\" Dreyak said from Leftie's back seat.\n\n\"We're landing because you said we could repair our battle damage here,\" Blazer said, \"but you're more than welcome to look for people who aren't there.\"\n\nThat started an argument, which Trip ignored. Instead, he told Jaxi, Thanks.\n\nShe could have forced him to lie to Blazer.\n\nYes, you should be pleased that Sardelle told me to help you without being specific in regard to how. Dragon portals, lying, who knows?\n\nTrip didn't respond to her sarcasm because he didn't want to argue about his decision to continue to hide his abilities. Maybe he would have been more open if Leftie hadn't been with them, as he wouldn't have had as much to lose if near strangers shunned him\u2014he was used to that.\n\nSelf-pity? Jaxi asked. I don't know what you've been reading, but the ladies are not drawn to that.\n\nI wasn't planning to share it with any ladies.\n\nWhat do you think I am?\n\nAn overly judgmental sword?\n\nYou're thinking of Dorfie. He was the one grumping about you kissing his handler.\n\nHe? You've given it a gender? Trip looked back at Rysha, more interested in how she was doing than anything regarding her sword.\n\nAs I told Sardelle years ago in regard to Kasandral, anything that surly and belligerent must be male.\n\nRysha was dozing, having finally warmed up enough to do so, though from the way she clutched her parka around her, she wouldn't mind being warmer yet. He would be happy to hug her again after they landed, to transfer some of his body heat to her.\n\nBody heat, of course, Jaxi said. That's why you want to wrap your arms around her.\n\nAre you sure you aren't the judgmental sword?\n\nCertainly not. I am merely sharing my wisdom with you when it's appropriate. You're young, and it's blatantly obvious that you need a mentor.\n\nTrip couldn't argue with that. But he'd always imagined someone like General Zirkander being his mentor, rather than a mouthy sword.\n\nYou don't need a pilot mentor. You need a mentor who can help you with magic. And your love life.\n\nAnd you're the one to do that?\n\nI can certainly advise you on the matter of relationships. I've had a dozen handlers over the years and learned much from observing their mating rituals. Also, I've read numerous books.\n\nOn\u2026 mating rituals?\n\nIndeed.\n\nTrip tried to decide if that implied anthropological textbooks or romance novels.\n\n\"Are we going to land, ma'am?\" Duck asked. \"Or just circle this place? I ask because my propeller hasn't been happy since it got clubbed by a dragon tail.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Blazer said. \"Everyone, land by the airship there. The remains of the airship.\"\n\nTrip turned his attention back to the outpost. He'd been following the others as they flew around it, looking with their eyes at what he'd already seen with his senses, presumably trying to determine if any danger lurked below.\n\nTrip was less worried about any danger the Cofah might present and more about dragons. He sensed a couple at the very edge of his range. He wasn't sure how far away that was, but he thought he would have time to warn his teammates if one headed this way, and they could hightail it into their fliers if need be. Not that a dragon couldn't catch up to a flier.\n\nIt was discomfiting to realize there weren't any places to take cover here, no way to escape angry predators. Judging by all the flattened buildings, hiding inside them wouldn't do much.\n\nTrip wished they had managed to kill that silver, especially after Rysha had so bravely leaped from the flier to pierce its defenses. But the dragon had screeched and taken off after that. Maybe, its injury would send the message to the other dragons out there that this team wasn't to be trifled with. But Trip feared the silver would simply, as soon as it licked its wounds sufficiently, round up some more dragons and come back for them.\n\nHe hadn't shared those grim thoughts with the others. Maybe he would be wrong.\n\nDoubtful, Jaxi said. Also, I don't sense any dragons, and my range for detecting something with such a powerful aura is at least forty miles.\n\nOh? Trip guided his flier toward the ground since the others had already set down. Are you suggesting I'm not sensing them? That it's my imagination? He still wasn't sure how much stock to put into his \"senses.\" He didn't think he was imagining them\u2014he'd been right earlier, after all\u2014but who knew?\n\nNo, I believe you sense them. I can see that you do, in fact. I'm just informing you that your range is remarkable.\n\nThat's a good thing, right? Maybe Trip should have been pleased by her observation\u2014it was certainly better than having her call him obtuse\u2014but he'd always wanted to be remarkable for his flying ability, not\u2026 this.\n\nIt suggests you have the potential to be a powerful sorcerer. Which is very rare in this time period. Even Tylie, Sardelle's student with the most potential, isn't powerful in the way sorcerers of my time period were. Six hundred years ago.\n\nI didn't know you were that old. I guess you are a lady. Or a matron?\n\nEw, gross. Don't call me that again, or I'll melt your flight stick.\n\nTrip glanced at the stick he held as he activated the thrusters for the landing.\n\nI might be talking about that flight stick.\n\nIt took him a few seconds to get the joke, if that's what it was. His mind was busy dwelling on her earlier words. Jaxi\u2026 would I have to choose? Between becoming a sorcerer and being a pilot? I'm sure you've figured it out, but I'd much rather be the latter.\n\nThat flummoxes me, but yes, I've figured it out. Speaking purely from the viewpoint of one gauging potential, there's no reason why you couldn't be both, though you wouldn't become as diverse and talented with magic if you only studied it part time.\n\nWhat about from the viewpoint of\u2026 other people? I'm concerned that if my fellow officers and my superiors found out, they wouldn't want me in a squadron.\n\nRidge's people have found Sardelle useful, Jaxi pointed out. At first, they mistrusted her, but she's become close with some of the pilots.\n\nOn her own merits or because she was\u2014is\u2014General Zirkander's wife?\n\nShe wasn't when Wolf Squadron first met her.\n\nBut she was his something, wasn't she? I mean\u2014\n\nI know what you mean. She had a national hero to vouch for her. Yes, I'll admit that it may be more difficult if you have to win people over on your own, but they would be utter fools not to want a sorcerer flying into battle on their side.\n\nOr\u2026 born into a time of rampant prejudices.\n\nThat's all times, Jaxi said dryly. People are the same in every era. The only thing that changes is what the prejudices are.\n\nTrip, not finding the conversation as encouraging as he would have liked, especially from his self-proclaimed mentor, unfastened his harness. Blazer, Dreyak, and Kaika were already on the ground with rifles and pistols at the ready as they gazed at the buildings and the wreckage around them.\n\n\"Rysha?\" Trip turned to wake her up if need be, but she was sitting up and looking around the flier curiously.\n\nShe must have brushed against her sword, because it flared green, highlighting her face. The curiosity disappeared, replaced by determination and something unfriendly as she looked toward Trip. But then she clenched her jaw, visibly wrestling with herself\u2014with the sword's influence.\n\nTrip jumped down to give her some space. He imagined the blade grew even more irate when in closer proximity to dragon blood.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Rysha said, leaning over the side and giving him a quick smile, as if to say she had control of the sword now.\n\nHe believed she could control it, but he didn't want to be the cause of her need to wrestle with it. As sad as it made him feel, it would be wisest if she went back to riding with Leftie, and he did his best to give her space.\n\n\"Good.\" Trip nodded to her and kept his thoughts to himself. \"I didn't know when I was given Jaxi that she would be able to dry clothes and warm hands.\"\n\nI am a versatile as well as powerful sorceress. Should you dedicate yourself to studying magic, you too could dry clothes one day.\n\n\"I think she\u2014and you\u2014saved my life.\" Rysha climbed down and touched his hand.\n\nThey both wore gloves, so he barely felt it, but he appreciated the gesture. Especially since the tightness at the corners of her eyes suggested she had to fight the sword to do it.\n\nHis only answer was a sad smile.\n\nCaptain Duck lowered himself down from his cockpit, keeping one hand on his flier and eyeing the white ground warily. He stamped a boot experimentally. \"Oh, it's snow. I thought it would all be ice.\"\n\n\"There's ice under the snow,\" Rysha said. \"And in parts of the south pole, there's also land under the ice. Approximately seven hundred square miles spread across thirty islands believed to have originally formed as a result of volcanic activity. While there are human tribes that live within the Antarctic Circle, there are none known to have inhabited those islands, though they have left sign of visits. One can travel across the ice sheets that run between the islands and cover much of the pole itself. The ice is reputed to be anywhere from thirty to forty feet deep in the summer and even more in the winter. The edges of the sheet recede in the summer. Most likely, the Cofah outpost here was placed far enough inland so as not to be disturbed by the summer melts.\"\n\n\"Does that mean we're on ice now?\" Duck looked between his feet. \"Just ice?\"\n\n\"Thick ice, sir.\" Rysha stamped a boot. \"I dozed off after my unwise leap from the flier, so I'm not entirely certain of our coordinates, but I believe we're between two of the islands now, perhaps forty miles from solid land. But the ice is quite solid. As you can see from the buildings.\"\n\n\"The destroyed buildings,\" Blazer said, pointing toward some of the wreckage. They appeared to have been knocked down by force, rather than being burned or melted by fire. \"Did dragons do this?\"\n\n\"We'll have to look around, perhaps with better lighting.\" Rysha looked toward her previous flier. \"Leftie, is my pack still back there? And my rifle? It kept trying to slip free.\" Her voice held a plaintive note as she admitted the last.\n\n\"It's all there,\" Leftie said. \"I made Dreyak keep an eye on it.\"\n\n\"You made me,\" Dreyak said coolly, though his heart didn't seem to be in the grousing. He was frowning as he gazed all around.\n\n\"Yup, told him not to root through your belongings to peek at your undergarments too,\" Leftie said, throwing Rysha a wink.\n\nDreyak strode off, his pistol in hand. He didn't bother to light a lantern.\n\nKaika knelt by her pack, perhaps digging one out.\n\nTrip knew he should do the same, that he would be given the order to fix Duck's flier shortly, but he gazed out at the ice fields stretching for as far as the eye could see. The wind and snow had combined to make small ridges and peaks, but nothing high enough to block the view. Nothing to hide behind should trouble come find them.\n\nHe wondered how Dreyak had known how to guide them to this place. There were no landmarks other than the two standing buildings themselves. He also wondered if Dreyak had some private reason for wanting them to come here. He'd suggested it even before Duck's flier had been damaged.\n\nBlazer walked toward Trip, and he eyed her warily since she also carried one of those swords. She could have left it in the flier in favor of her rifle or pistol, but she hadn't. Kaika hadn't left hers behind, either. Its scabbard rested against her pack as she pulled out her lantern.\n\nWere they simply being cautious, keeping the weapons close at hand in case dragons came? Or were the blades compelling them somehow? Insisting on being carried along?\n\nIt's true that they don't like to miss out, Jaxi said. They're a bit like puppies. Fortunately, you have two soulblades who are far superior to puppies.\n\nComing from you, that's high praise for Azarwrath. Trip hadn't yet heard a word from the Cofah soulblade, but it\u2014he\u2014had helped with the dragon battle, so he was inclined to think of the sword more respectfully now.\n\nI thought that if I complimented him, he'd be more likely to help us fight again.\n\nThat probably wasn't a bad idea. Trip suspected the soulblade had only assisted them because it didn't want to end up on the bottom of the ocean. He didn't want to be holding it if they ever came face-to-face with enemy Cofah. He could all too easily imagine the blade turning on him. Azarwrath seemed to have rejected Dreyak as a handler, for whatever reason, but maybe Trip could leave the soulblade here in the Cofah outpost, so some of the scientists could ensure it made it back to its homeland. If they found the scientists.\n\nBlazer stopped several feet from Trip, grimacing at him.\n\n\"Did Captain Kaika and Lieutenant Ravenwood give you a copy of those command words, ma'am?\" Trip guessed the reason for the grimace had little to do with his rumpled uniform and beard stubble.\n\n\"Yeah. They're gobbledygook and hard to remember. I've got the one for 'stand down' memorized though.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"Definitely.\" Blazer prodded her sword's hilt. \"This thing really wants me to kill you. Or maybe it just wants to kill those.\" She jerked her head toward the two soulblades hanging from his belt.\n\nAll of the above, Trip thought, but all he did was nod and say, \"I assume I'm on flier repair duty, ma'am?\"\n\n\"You got it, kid. Requisition whoever you need to help. Get Duck's up to spec again, and check the others too.\" Blazer gazed toward the night sky. \"I have a feeling we're not going to get off this continent without another fight. Or ten.\"\n\n\"Is it a continent?\" Trip thought of Rysha's description of islands.\n\n\"Probably not, but I only fly over land. I don't study it.\" Blazer looked in the direction Dreyak had gone. Kaika and Rysha were heading that way, too, each with a lit lantern. \"The rest of us will look around. Ravenwood and Dreyak both want to know what happened to the Cofah. I, frankly, don't give a damn, but it's too cold to sit around and do nothing while we wait.\"\n\nTrip considered pointing out that they could help him with the fliers, but he didn't truly want the women with their surly swords breathing down his neck while he worked.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nLeftie and Duck came over as Blazer grabbed her rifle out of her flier and headed after the others.\n\n\"Which one of us is getting the honor of holding your wrench, Trip?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"Don't ask things like that,\" Leftie said, nudging Duck. \"He doesn't have much luck with women. He might take you up on the offer.\"\n\nDuck paused, as if working through the joke.\n\nTrip sighed and nodded to Duck. \"You were in the cockpit when you got hit. You see what took the brunt of the attack? Can you describe what the flier was doing after that? I saw you had a hitch.\"\n\n\"That's right. The engine was clunking, and one of the propeller blades might have gotten bent too. I'll show you.\"\n\nLeftie fell in beside Trip as they walked over and gave him a pat on the shoulder. \"That was quick thinking with Lieutenant Ravenwood. Good job. Wish I'd thought of flying upside down.\"\n\nTrip appreciated the praise, especially since his friend had been giving him so many wary looks lately, every time magic came up. \"I didn't think to suggest it when you were going in. I should have. She wouldn't have been stuck in the water as long if you'd gotten her on that first run.\"\n\n\"And then I could have been the hero she flung her arms around and kissed afterward.\" Leftie sighed melodramatically as they reached Duck's flier and started opening panels.\n\n\"She didn't kiss me.\" Trip decided not to mention that he'd kissed her. Only on the cheek, but he had a feeling officers weren't supposed to put their lips anywhere on other officers.\n\n\"She didn't?\" Leftie stared at him. \"Did you not give her The Look?\"\n\n\"What look?\"\n\n\"The deep gaze into her eyes that lets her know you saved her life and that she should now feel it required to give you a long, passionate, and deeply thankful kiss that could lead to clothing removal.\"\n\n\"How do you do that look?\" Duck asked from the other side of the flier.\n\n\"I'd show you, but I don't want you feeling required to kiss me, passionately or otherwise.\"\n\n\"I think I can control myself, Lieutenant.\"\n\n\"Not many people can.\"\n\n\"You're about as arrogant as the lone cock in the henhouse, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Not without reason, I assure you.\" Leftie grinned at Trip. \"I'm surprised the lieutenant didn't need to shuck her wet clothing to dry off and survive. I expected her to. Kept looking back at your flier, hoping to get a show.\"\n\n\"You're a bit of an ass sometimes, Leftie,\" Trip said.\n\n\"I just say what's on my mind.\"\n\n\"I think that's what makes you an ass. Others refrain.\"\n\n\"They must be repressed. Mostly, I'm just sad that she was completely fine by the time we got here. All the way to the outpost, I was figuring we might have to build a fire when we got down here and snuggle with her. You know, to help her warm back up.\"\n\n\"We? Are you including me in that scenario?\"\n\n\"Nah, I meant me and my wrench.\"\n\n\"Definitely an ass,\" Trip said, punching him in the shoulder as he climbed into the flier to grab one of the toolboxes.\n\n\"Am not. I'm just impressed with how tough our bookish lieutenant is.\"\n\nTrip didn't mention that Jaxi had used her power to dry Rysha's clothes, warm her body, and save her from the hypothermia that had been setting in. No need to remind Leftie that magic was being used all around him.\n\n\"Bookish?\" Duck asked. \"Just because she knows some stuff, you think she's bookish? She single-handedly slew that sorceress. And she seems fit and comfortable in the wilds. I could see an alpha wolf choosing her to be his mate.\"\n\nTrip grimaced, hoping that didn't mean that Duck saw himself as an interested alpha wolf.\n\n\"I don't think she has mating on her mind,\" he murmured and groped for a way to steer the conversation to another topic, perhaps that of repairing fliers.\n\n\"Only because you didn't give her The Look,\" Leftie said.\n\nTrip shook his head and shifted his focus to his work. The longer they were stuck at this forlorn outpost, the more time that dragon had to find buddies and return for a rematch. He was fairly certain The Look wouldn't work on their scaled enemies." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Wind scraped across the ice fields, swirling the powdery snow about and chilling Rysha through her winter clothing. She missed the warmth Jaxi had shared with her after her unfortunate dip in the ocean. While she had never had an interest in taking weapons to bed, she might make an exception for a soulblade that could warm the sheets on winter nights.\n\nRysha wanted to head straight into the buildings to look for the scientists, or perhaps clues about what they had been researching way down here, but Kaika and Blazer joined Dreyak who was already examining the snow outside the outpost. Rysha tagged along, not believing the group should split up any more than it already had. Also, if the scientists were dead inside those buildings, their bodies horribly mauled, she didn't want to walk in on that by herself. Captain Kaika wouldn't be fazed, Rysha was sure, but it would take her longer to grow used to things like that. To death.\n\n\"Claw marks,\" Dreyak said, pointing down at several spots on the white ground. \"It's snowed since this happened, but you can tell that dragons were here. The marks are far apart. No polar bear made them. And here.\" He walked a few feet and pointed to another spot. \"Something huge and scaled was rolling around in the snow. At first, I thought it had settled down here to rest, but I'm finding several places torn up like this, and they're more indicative of a fight than of a nap.\"\n\nRysha couldn't imagine dragons flying into a human outpost for a nap. Oh, she knew they slept, but this seemed an odd place for it.\n\n\"Why would a dragon have been fighting another dragon?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"Actually, I think multiple dragons were fighting. Far more than two.\" Dreyak continued to walk along the perimeter and point out spots to back up his suppositions. He hadn't claimed to be more than a warrior, but it seemed that reading signs and tracking were in his repertoire.\n\n\"Fighting over this place? To claim it as their territory?\" Blazer eyed the outpost dubiously.\n\nRysha couldn't imagine why a small human settlement would be coveted by dragons.\n\n\"I don't know. There aren't many settlements out here, are there? I'm only aware of this one from the Cofah, but I suppose there could be natives, or outposts from other countries.\" His gaze shifted to Rysha.\n\n\"There are native tribes that come out to the pole in the winter,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"Winter being the tourist season when it's especially appealing?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"In the winter, the ice sheets extend to the tip of the Dakrovian and Myar continents and the isolated countries of Yon-yon and Bygeronii. The people can easily walk across and hunt. There are native species. Seals, bears, penguins, and smaller animals. Winter is a good time to get furs too. Did you know that white seal fur goes for as much as five thousand nucros in the markets back home? And the natives covet their fat over all others since it's incredibly calorically dense?\"\n\n\"She's a veritable encyclopedia, isn't she?\" Blazer asked.\n\nRysha blushed. She already felt chagrined after flinging herself into the freezing sea earlier. She supposed this shouldn't embarrass her. It was hardly the first time someone had singled her out for her tendency to overshare.\n\n\"It's good that she knows stuff.\" Kaika draped an arm around Rysha's shoulders. \"We'd be in trouble if you were the smart one here, Blazer.\"\n\n\"That's Major Blazer. If you're going to insult me, I insist you use my rank.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind. Dreyak, what did you say your people were researching here?\"\n\nKaika tossed the question out so casually that Dreyak opened his mouth and almost responded, but he seemed to catch himself. His eyes narrowed.\n\n\"I didn't say.\"\n\n\"Do you know?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Is it something dragons would be interested in?\" Kaika asked.\n\nDreyak walked another dozen meters along the perimeter, and Rysha didn't think he would answer. He stopped and looked down at an area next to a few six-foot stakes protruding from the snow. Snow dotted with several dark red spots. He kicked aside some of the recent layer of snow, showing that the stains were larger than they had first appeared.\n\n\"It is possible,\" Dreyak said, frowning down.\n\n\"Does it have to do with the portal?\" Rysha asked.\n\nDreyak pressed his lips together and didn't answer.\n\nRysha and the others joined him by the stakes. Dog paw prints marked the snow in addition to the bloodstains. Had the Cofah researchers brought teams for dog sleds? It seemed a primitive way to travel, given that steam-powered machines and vehicles were common in the world now, at least in Iskandia. But they were heavy too. Rysha imagined there were areas where the ice wasn't as thick as the averages the encyclopedia articles reported.\n\n\"I think at least one of the dogs was eaten,\" Dreyak said grimly. He walked over and picked up what appeared to be half of a leg bone.\n\nAlmost everyone looked uneasily toward the sky. They all wore clothing to protect their faces and necks from the cold, but Rysha had no problem reading the concern in people's eyes.\n\n\"And the humans?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"I'm not sure yet.\"\n\n\"Is it possible the dragons were fighting over the outpost because it represented dinner?\" Kaika asked. \"Maybe there aren't enough of those succulent seals to go around.\"\n\n\"If the dragons are hungry, why don't they just go elsewhere in the world?\" Rysha asked. \"They're cold-blooded creatures. They prefer warm climates.\"\n\n\"Maybe they're guarding the portal,\" Dreyak said.\n\n\"Unless it's much closer to this outpost than we believe,\" Rysha said, \"it seems like overkill for them to patrol the entire polar ice cap.\"\n\n\"Are dragons known for subtlety?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"Perhaps not.\" Rysha turned toward Kaika. \"Captain, can we look inside the buildings?\" She glanced at Dreyak. \"There could be survivors.\" She felt bad for misleading him about her interests, but she would like to find out what the Cofah had been researching, and he wasn't inclined to tell them. Besides, she would certainly grab a first-aid kit and help the inhabitants if she found them here and injured.\n\n\"Yeah, you and I will go, Lieutenant. It'll be nice to get out of this wind.\"\n\n\"I see it's your sense of altruism leading you to those buildings, ma'am.\"\n\nKaika gave her a sarcastic salute and led Rysha toward the closest structure. Dreyak frowned after them, but something else on the ground caught his interest, and he knelt for a better look.\n\n\"Something wrong with a man who can track in the middle of the night without a lantern,\" Kaika muttered as they rounded a corner and located a door.\n\n\"Maybe his dragon blood lets him see better in the dark,\" Rysha said. \"Or maybe he's using his mind more than his eyes.\"\n\n\"Both are creepy thoughts.\" Kaika touched the hilt of her chapaharii blade. She had claimed Brysdral, the one the pirate king had wielded. The third one, which Blazer now carried, was, according to the runes on its box, named Eryndral. \"My new buddy here would like to be thrust into his heart.\"\n\n\"I know, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Though it really wants to be thrust into Captain Trip's heart. Having two soulblades must make him a doubly appealing target.\" Kaika stopped at the door, tilting her head curiously. \"You'd think its focus would be on the swords though, rather than Trip's heart.\"\n\nSince Kaika seemed to expect an answer, Rysha offered one that wouldn't reveal Trip's secret. \"The chapaharii tools aren't that smart. They were magically instilled with a basic purpose and can respond to the command words, but they're not thinking beings, not like the souls inside the soulblades.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\nRysha couldn't tell if Kaika fully believed her. Maybe she was starting to put together the pieces in regard to Trip.\n\nOpting for her pistol rather than the sword, Kaika pushed open the door and stepped inside, the firearm in one hand and her lantern in the other. Judging by the foot of snow that had blown up against the door, nobody had used it for a while.\n\nRysha followed her inside, though she didn't anticipate finding anything interesting in this structure, as it had the look of vehicle storage rather than a laboratory or office building.\n\nKaika started looking around immediately, her lantern not pushing the shadows back very far. Even so, Rysha got the sense of a single cavernous space inside. There was a vehicle, a steam wagon with a plow blade on the front for snow removal. There were also harnesses and bags of dog food. Rysha hoped that only one animal had been caught by a hungry dragon and that the others had been able to get away, or maybe been harnessed to sleds and mushed away.\n\nShe paused. Was that possible? She hadn't seen sleds yet. Maybe the scientists had received enough warning, and most of them had fled before the dragons arrived. Or they'd had the opportunity to flee while the big scaled creatures had been fighting with each other.\n\nThe thought of dragons thrashing about in the snow outside the outpost puzzled Rysha. Oh, they had definitely been known for fighting with each other the last time they'd lived in the world, sometimes in one-on-one territorial squabbles and sometimes, among those who had allied with humans, against dragons living in other countries.\n\nShe hoped they could find some of those dragons that had been friendly toward humans. Trip had mentioned making a deal with the bronze that had attacked the pirate fortress, but that hadn't sounded like a true alliance. People had once ridden dragons into battle. They must have had close relationships. It was hard to believe, given that she'd thus far only encountered dragons that wanted to enslave or eat humans.\n\n\"Not much here,\" Kaika said, returning from her circuit of the building. \"I think that's the only vehicle they had. Not much sign that others were stored next to it.\" She waved toward the wagon and the roll-up door on another wall.\n\n\"I was wondering if the people might have fled by dog sled.\"\n\n\"If they did, I'm sure Dreyak will let us know. Let's check the other building.\"\n\nRysha jogged out ahead of her. That was the one she was more interested in investigating, since it looked like it might hold offices. She had no idea what the destroyed buildings had held, as most of them were completely flattened. Living areas, perhaps.\n\nShe didn't see Blazer or Dreyak as she hurried across the walkway toward the other building, but assumed they were all right. Trip or Jaxi would warn them if dragons were coming. It was handy to have them along. Rysha thought it strange that so many people had a hard time understanding that, that sorcerers could be helpful and shouldn't automatically be considered enemies.\n\nThough, she still wasn't sure how she felt about Trip on a more personal level, now that she suspected he could read minds. He'd only hinted that he could do that once, replying to a thought she'd had but not voiced. Was it possible he knew everything that sauntered through her brain? If he did, he'd probably grow bored quickly, since she was often dwelling on academic topics rather than scintillating ones. Of course, he never seemed bored when she rambled on, and he hadn't once cut her off.\n\nFaint clanks drifted from the direction of the fliers, and she wondered if he minded that he always got stuck doing repairs. He did have the engineering degree, and he had said he liked fixing things, but if it were her, she would definitely prefer to explore.\n\nThe front door was locked, placing an obstacle in front of her own exploration. She thumped her shoulder against it, hoping the lock might be old\u2014or frozen\u2014and break easily, but the metal door was sound.\n\nRysha stepped back, eyeing the windows. They had bars over them. The other building hadn't had windows, so she didn't know whether to get her hopes up that the extra security for this one signaled something valuable. Or valuable research?\n\nThere wasn't a hanging lock, or she might have shot it\u2014or seen if Dorfindral could cleave through it. Instead, the knob held a simple keyhole.\n\n\"Is my assistance needed?\" Kaika asked, coming up beside her.\n\n\"Yours or maybe Jaxi's.\" Rysha waved to the door. \"Do you have any explosives suitable for blowing open locks?\"\n\n\"My explosives typically blow the doors right off their hinges.\"\n\n\"That would be acceptable to me.\" Rysha gazed around at the mostly destroyed outpost. \"Who would even know it had been us?\"\n\nKaika lined herself up, shoulder to the door. She hummed a few bars, then performed a step-behind side kick. The door flew open so hard it banged on the corrugated metal wall inside.\n\n\"I like explosives more than the next person,\" Kaika said, \"but I prefer to save them for when they're truly necessary.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. A good policy.\"\n\nRysha hurried inside to a large room with a dozen interior doors. She hoped they weren't all locked, or Kaika's kicking foot would get quite the workout. The long tables in the large room kept her from checking right away. Large papers were sprawled across them, and she trotted over to take a look.\n\nMaps. Dozens of them. Topographical maps of the Antarctic in the summer as well as the winter, showing ice coverage for different years. Some of the maps were marked with ruins sites. Dragon ruins sites.\n\nRysha didn't have to take out her notes from Sardelle to know that the Cofah had marked some of the same spots she had. Interestingly, the coordinates that Trip had pointed to, saying he had a hunch that was their destination, were marked and described, as were several others within a couple hundred miles of the outpost.\n\nRysha peered closer to read the description for that one. It was on land. Mount Eldercrag. Ice Caves. Cave. Dragon statues carved into a fissure. Three thousand years old, no markings. No evidence of recent use. Cave explorations unfruitful. Dragons in area.\n\nRysha frowned. If the Cofah had already investigated her team's most likely prospect and found it lacking, was there any point in flying out there? The Cofah couldn't have anticipated that Iskandians would show up at their outpost, so it seemed unlikely these were fake notes meant to lead them astray.\n\nSimilar notes described what had been found at the other sites that had been investigated. None of them mentioned the portal, but Rysha had a feeling that was what the Cofah had been looking for, even if Dreyak hadn't been willing to verify that. With dragons terrorizing the empire, they also had a vested interest in destroying it.\n\nRysha gazed around, eyeing the walls, lights, and furnishings, only vaguely aware of Kaika opening doors and peering into rooms. \"This place hasn't been here long, has it?\"\n\nThe Cofah might have only set up the outpost after the dragon problem had started up.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Kaika said. \"And the people haven't been gone long, either.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Rysha thought of the snow drift against the vehicle building door. It had made her think the area had been abandoned for a while, but for all she knew, it could have snowed the day before.\n\n\"And they left in a hurry.\" Kaika walked out of a room carrying a tea mug and a half-eaten sandwich. \"The bread isn't that hard yet, even though there's not a lick of moisture in the air here. Humidity ten, twenty percent, I'd wager. I think those scientists were here as recently as yesterday. Maybe even this morning.\"\n\n\"I guess if dragons were fighting on the doorstep, that would be a good reason to leave.\"\n\n\"It would convince me to find a new apartment.\"\n\n\"But where did they go?\" Rysha looked back to the maps, this time investigating the area right around the outpost.\n\n\"I don't know, but it's not our mission to find them.\"\n\n\"Dreyak won't like the idea of leaving them.\"\n\n\"Dreyak isn't in charge.\"\n\nRysha pointed at something marked on the map simply as \"Cave.\" The spot was only five miles from the outpost. Though she couldn't imagine caves in an ice field, not significant ones anyway, it sounded like the kind of place one might seek out to hide from dragons.\n\n\"There are some journals and notes in some of these rooms if you want to take a look,\" Kaika said. \"I'm going to check on the flier repairs and see if our assiduous young men need help.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nSince they hadn't found any mauled bodies\u2014only a half-mauled sandwich\u2014Rysha didn't mind being left alone. Besides, she was intrigued by the fact that the Cofah had apparently been looking for the same thing her team was\u2014and for longer. Was there any chance they had found it? And that the dragons had somehow known?\n\nIt seemed unlikely, but it also struck her as strange that the outpost had apparently been here a couple of months without being harried, and that a bunch of dragons had descended on it out of nowhere. Maybe within the last twenty-four hours.\n\nEven though Kaika hadn't sounded interested, Rysha suspected it would be a good idea to convince the team to go looking for the scientists. Her instincts, formed by reading about countless Cofah invasions growing up, not to mention the attacks she had lived through, railed against the idea of working with those people. But they appeared to have more information than she did. In this instance, it might make sense for the two teams to join together.\n\nShe would look around more and hope to find something more substantial than maps to convince Major Blazer to lead a hunt for the survivors." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The sounds of an argument outside drifted to Trip's ears, and he looked up from the project he was working on to keep himself busy\u2014and warm. After fixing the damaged flier and checking the others, he'd taken a look at the airship and found it only had a few issues, the torn envelope being the largest one. He had located patch kits in its hold, so it wasn't an insurmountable issue. Had the scientists been given the time, which it seemed they hadn't, they could have repaired it and left within a day or two.\n\nHe'd brought one of the other issues, a broken valve control from the airship's single large helium tank, into the vehicle shed to a workbench in the back. A clump of patch tar from his flier's repair kit was temporarily keeping the tank shut while he worked on the valve. Technically, he'd finished working on it, but thanks to a rickety kerosene heater, his little corner had warmed up enough that he was comfortable without his gloves on. He'd been loath to go back outside, so he'd started an extracurricular project.\n\n\"\u2026not staying here,\" Blazer's determined voice came through the walls, even though Trip had shut the door.\n\nNeither Leftie nor Duck stirred. They, too, had found their way inside and slept against the wall near his workbench, bundled in their parkas with their hands tucked under their armpits. Apparently, Leftie hadn't been interested in snuggling with Duck to share body heat.\n\nDeeming his small project complete\u2014it only needed installation\u2014Trip headed to the door with it. He left the others sleeping for now, though it sounded like the team would be leaving soon. He wasn't surprised. This wasn't a good place to loiter. Given how many dragons seemed to be down here in the Antarctic, he was surprised the outpost had survived as long as it had without being attacked.\n\nOutside, dawn had come, but clouds blanketed the sky, from icy white horizon to icy white horizon, so it wasn't much lighter than it had been during the night. Kaika and Blazer faced Dreyak and\u2026 Rysha. Oddly, she was standing by the Cofah's side.\n\n\"According to the map I found,\" Rysha said, \"there's a big cave only five miles to the east.\"\n\n\"The very direction that the dog sled tracks I found go.\" Dreyak stood with his gloved hands on his hips. \"Now that it is daylight, I will go after them, even if you won't. It won't take long.\"\n\n\"You can take as long as you like,\" Blazer said, \"but we're not waiting for you. If we're feeling generous, we'll fly back this way on our way out and see if you want a ride home.\"\n\n\"There was blood in the snow. Many could be injured. It is not noble to leave without finding the survivors and seeing if they need help.\" Dreyak thrust an arm toward the outskirts of the outpost. \"There was a dragon attack. How can you abandon the people who suffered from it? You've seen what the dragons do.\"\n\n\"Yes, which is why we have this mission to destroy their portal,\" Blazer said. \"That's our priority.\"\n\n\"If this was an Iskandian outpost, and those were your people, you would help them.\"\n\n\"Not when I've got a time-sensitive mission,\" Blazer said, though she didn't sound entirely convinced.\n\n\"But, Major\u2014\" Rysha held up an old book, as well as a much newer journal, the kind of item that one could pick up at the corner market, \"\u2014I believe the Cofah may have already searched the site I gave you coordinates to. And, according to their notes, they didn't find anything.\"\n\nBlazer frowned at her.\n\n\"I also found this very old book. It's Dakrovian, but I can read it. It's full of information on dragon artifacts. There's nothing specific to portals, but it mentions some of the strengths and weaknesses of the metals the dragons favored, and also that they created special crystals to imbue with their power. I believe information in here may be crucial to destroying the portal when we find it. It's possible that neither Captain Kaika's explosives nor our swords will be enough.\"\n\n\"Damn, are we talking about magic again?\" Leftie grumbled, walking out of the building with a yawning Duck following behind him.\n\n\"You two have an enjoyable night together keeping each other company?\" Kaika asked them. She smirked, though it didn't seem heartfelt.\n\nTrip sensed she was trying to lessen the tension radiating from Blazer and Dreyak.\n\n\"Dakrovian?\" Blazer frowned at the book. \"I've been to that continent for a mission. It's primitive, even today. What would they have known about all that stuff?\"\n\n\"They have powerful shamans,\" Kaika said. \"I remember Sardelle saying that their continent didn't have purges of witches, the way ours and Cofahre did.\"\n\nRysha nodded. \"Archaeological evidence suggests that dragons may have originated in those jungles and that some of humanity's earliest encounters with them happened on the continent.\"\n\n\"Fine, take the book with us,\" Blazer said. \"You can read it while we fly.\"\n\n\"That's thievery,\" Dreyak said, his eyes flaring.\n\n\"Nah, it's borrowing. We can return it when we come back to pick you up. What's the problem?\"\n\nDreyak seethed in silent fury.\n\nJaxi? Trip thought. Are you awake?\n\nSoulblades don't sleep.\n\nOh? You've been quiet for a long time.\n\nWatching you bend metal around and screw things into holes didn't excite me enough to comment.\n\nSorry my work isn't more exciting. I would have used a blowtorch if I'd been able to find one.\n\nThat would have been an improvement. The application of fire makes all projects better. As the glaring match between Blazer and Dreyak went on, Kaika, Rysha, Leftie, and Duck sharing uneasy looks with each other, Jaxi spoke again. I was also contemplating dragons and portals. Also, I have been missing Sardelle a little.\n\nSorry, Trip repeated, though there wasn't much he could do to help a homesick soulblade. He felt bad that he'd brought Jaxi on this mission without her handler, though it wasn't as if he'd had a choice.\n\nNo, and it's not your fault you're not Sardelle. Though you could at least try to be a little more interesting.\n\nI'll work on that.\n\nThank you.\n\n\"There's something else,\" Rysha said into the frosty silence. This time, she held up the journal. \"This is full of notes about the searches the scientists were doing. Though they were careful not to explicitly state what they were seeking, one gets the feeling they weren't looking for old tools and potsherds. Also, there's a page at the end of the journal that's missing. The last page of writing.\" She held the journal open to show the remains of a page that had been torn hastily from the back.\n\nDreyak narrowed his eyes at her, as if he objected to the fact that she'd been investigating here. Or snooping around, as he might consider it.\n\nTrip found himself walking over to stand closer to Rysha, as if his not-so-intimidating form could keep Dreyak from glaring at her.\n\nInstead, Rysha jerked in surprise, her hand twitching toward Dorfindral and irritation flashing in her eyes.\n\nTrip halted. He kept forgetting about that sword\u2014and his vow to give her space.\n\nRysha moved her hand away from the hilt and smiled at him, though it had a forced aspect to it.\n\n\"Are we ready to go, Captain Trip?\" Blazer waved toward the fliers but frowned at the object in his hands. \"Or does that need to be installed? What is that?\"\n\n\"Uhm.\" Trip hadn't particularly wanted to unveil it in front of everyone, mostly because he anticipated being mocked. But everyone looked expectantly at him. \"Lieutenant Ravenwood mentioned having trouble keeping her rifle from slipping out when she was flying with Leftie. I thought to build a simple gun rack into the side of the seat well, but that would have been\u2026 Well, I had an idea to add more versatility.\"\n\n\"It doesn't have drink holders, does it?\" Rysha's smile grew more genuine, even though a faint green glow slipped from Dorfindral's scabbard, a sure sign the sword was reminding her that it wanted to slay him.\n\n\"No, but I'll mount it on the side of the seat well, like this.\" Trip shifted the rack and demonstrated its features as he spoke. \"It'll secure the rifle when down in this position, but it can unfold and pop up when you need to fire. Very simple. There's a swivel here, so you can point your rifle anywhere on that side of the flier, but you can unlatch it here if you need to point at a target on the opposite side or up overhead. Also, this little lock will keep it in place if you need to alternate between firing and using the sword.\"\n\nA few people blinked at him and at the contraption. Leftie dropped his face into his gloved hand.\n\n\"Trip, Trip, Trip, don't you know you're supposed to give a woman you like flowers and chocolate, not gun holders?\"\n\nHeat flared in Trip's cheeks, more at this public announcement that he \"liked\" Rysha than at the admonition itself.\n\n\"Uh.\" Kaika lifted a finger. \"I'd rather have a gun holder than flowers.\"\n\n\"Hells, yes, me too.\" Blazer seemed to forget her feud with Dreyak and walked over with Kaika to examine the new contraption.\n\nTrip, more interested in what Rysha would rather have, looked at her with hope.\n\nShe bit her lip, still smiling back at him. He found that expression promising.\n\n\"I don't think the women here are representative of the sex as a whole,\" Leftie announced.\n\n\"That's not a bad thing,\" Duck said.\n\n\"I'm going to search for the wounded people,\" Dreyak said, sending a scathing glare at all of them. \"Leave if you feel that is the honorable thing to do.\"\n\n\"No,\" Rysha blurted. \"We all need to go. Major, I'm convinced the scientists have information that could shave a lot of time off our search.\"\n\n\"Didn't you say they haven't found the portal yet?\" Blazer asked. \"And that you're not even positive that's what they're looking for?\"\n\n\"The location of the portal could be on the missing page. The missing page that someone tore out, folded up, and stuffed into a pocket.\"\n\nBlazer scowled at her.\n\n\"It doesn't sound like it would take long to check,\" Trip said.\n\n\"I agree,\" Duck said, \"and if there are wounded people, I think it would be the right thing to help them. All the way down here, what does it matter if they're Cofah or Iskandian?\"\n\n\"It matters,\" Blazer grumbled. \"And we aren't taking a vote. This isn't a damned democracy.\"\n\n\"I'll build you a gun mount if you say we can go, Major.\" Trip offered a smile, though he utterly lacked Leftie's knack for smiling at women, flirtatiously or otherwise.\n\nDreyak sent a why-was-I-sent-on-a-mission-with-these-heathens look toward the heavens.\n\n\"Fine,\" Blazer finally said. \"Four hours. That's all you're getting. That should be plenty of time to walk five miles and back.\"\n\nTrip, having no idea how extensive the cave system was, didn't think that left much time for actually searching for the scientists, but he did not object.\n\n\"Walk?\" Rysha asked. \"Can't we fly?\"\n\n\"Not if we wish to follow the tracks. There is no proof they went to this cave of yours.\" Dreyak, already wearing his weapons and gear, strode off across the snow without waiting.\n\nBlazer strode up to Trip, and he expected her to chastise him for trying to manipulate her. Or a glower as her dragon-slaying sword suggested she attack him.\n\nAll she did was point at his fancy gun rack. \"I want to see a sketch on paper before you build anything. I want to have some input.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Trip,\" Rysha whispered, then grinned and waved at him before she jogged to the flier to grab her pack.\n\nHe gazed after her, warmth spreading through his limbs despite the frigid wind sweeping across the ice fields. He didn't mind one bit that he'd just made extra work for himself.\n\n\"No kiss for that, either?\" Leftie asked, stopping at his shoulder. \"Trip, you definitely need to work on The Look.\"\n\n\"Is there a class I can sign up for back in the capital?\" Maybe Trip could hunt for it while he was signing up for magicking lessons with Sardelle.\n\n\"You better hope there is. You need more help than I can give you.\" Leftie walked away, shaking his head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "A soft snow fell as Rysha and the others strode across the field, slipping and skidding on the treacherous ground as they attempted to catch up to their determined tracker. Thus far, it had been easy to follow the parallel prints from the dog sleds, along with the paw prints themselves, but if that snow continued to fall, it would soon obscure the trail. The map showed where the cave was, but she didn't have any proof that the scientists had gone there. Maybe they had some other outpost or hideout that wasn't on the map.\n\nMaybe they had all been eaten.\n\nRysha looked back at Trip and Leftie, who strode side-by-side at the end of their little column. Even though Dorfindral continued to ooze disgruntled thoughts about Trip's presence, she kept murmuring the stand-down order at it whenever he came around. So far, it was working, though she had to watch for a tendency to feel irritation or flashes of anger toward him. And toward Dreyak, too, but she wasn't entirely sure she should blame the sword for that. The man was irritating. Or at least obstinate. Not like Trip.\n\nShe looked back at him again, and this time, she caught his gaze, and he lifted a hand. She waved back. When he'd shown her the gun mount he'd made, describing it with as much enthusiasm as she explained things she was passionate about, she'd wanted to hug him and thank him profusely, but everyone had been looking at them. And then Leftie had made that stupid comment. And then Blazer and Kaika came over. Hugs had been out of the question, but she vowed to find a moment for one later.\n\nDorfindral sent out another wave of disgruntlement, as if determined to warn her that Trip was an enemy. She wondered if there were any texts on the chapaharii that she hadn't yet read. A lot of the Iskandian and Cofah books related to the magical had been destroyed long ago by people who feared they would be used as grimoires or who knew what to teach people to become witches.\n\nToo bad the Dakrovians had few written texts\u2014they relied largely on oral histories. She'd been delighted to find that book in the outpost and couldn't wait to read it. In truth, she already was reading it. Any time the footing grew easy enough that she could manage it, she flipped open the pages to devour as much of the information as possible.\n\n\"In the elite troops,\" Kaika said, walking at her side while Duck and Blazer strode ahead, with Dreyak farther ahead still, \"you're expected to be perpetually alert. Scanning the horizon, watching for any indications of an enemy's passing, listening for hints of an ambush, and sniffing the air for traces of gunpowder or kerosene or even chewing gum\u2014anything that might suggest humans are nearby.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But if we find the Cofah scientists, I'll feel obligated to give them their book back.\" Rysha lifted the open tome, having no doubt as to why Kaika had offered that particular bit of advice. \"I want to memorize it first, if possible.\"\n\n\"Memorize? It's four hundred pages.\"\n\n\"Closer to five hundred. Isn't it wonderful? I noticed a section on chapaharii tools\u2014well, the Dakrovians called them something else, but they work in a similar manner\u2014and I can't wait to read it, but I'm forcing myself to check on everything that could be useful in regard to the portal first.\"\n\n\"Memorize?\" Kaika asked again, eyeing the text doubtfully.\n\n\"Well, not really. I mean, I'm going to familiarize myself with it. I'll only memorize pertinent passages.\"\n\n\"So, what? Only a hundred pages?\"\n\nRysha didn't think there was anything mean-spirited behind Kaika's teasing, but she always felt a little self-conscious when people pointed out that her interests were on the all-consuming side. \"I bet you could recite a hundred pages' worth of information on all the different explosives out there.\"\n\n\"After almost twenty years of working with them, I imagine so. Not after an hour of reading information in a book. While walking. Through the snow.\"\n\nRysha brushed some of that snow off the pages. \"I could teach you some memorization techniques sometime if you want. There are all kinds of tricks for speeding up the process.\"\n\n\"Good to know.\" Kaika smiled as she faced forward again, picking up their pace since the snow fall was growing heavier, partially obscuring Dreyak from sight. Duck and Blazer had picked up the pace too.\n\nRysha shut the book as they hurried to close the gap. She slipped on the ice, but caught her balance before pitching over. She was glad she hadn't fallen flat on her face while she'd been reading. Balance had always been one of her strengths, perhaps thanks to the tumbling and trampolining she'd done as a child\u2014a former circus acrobat had come out to tutor her and her brothers for several summers. She hadn't put that on her application for the elite troops, figuring it would mostly be seen as a sign that she'd come from a noble family with too much money to spend on their children.\n\n\"Do you think I've got a shot at making it, ma'am?\" Rysha asked. \"Into the elite troops. Or am I\u2026 not close enough to the mold?\"\n\n\"You're not even sitting in the same room where the molds are stored.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nKaika patted her on the shoulder. \"It's not bad for the army to have people with diverse backgrounds in it, and the same goes for the elite troops. The more kinds of expertise your people have, the more the unit has to draw upon. If you can pass the physical stuff\u2014and I'll be the first to admit, it's challenging\u2014then I think your only problem may be in carrying out missions that involve killing people. You have a gentle soul. That could be problematic.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\nAt least Kaika hadn't said her passions would be the problem. Unfortunately, Rysha feared there might be some truth in the rest. If Dorfindral hadn't been so busy giving her nightmares about stalking and slaying Trip, she was sure she would be having bad dreams about killing that sorceress, about the look in her eyes as she'd died upon the sword.\n\n\"Does it get easier?\" Rysha asked, though she had a feeling the answer would disturb her either way. \"Killing people?\"\n\n\"You do get hardened to it all after a while. If you're lucky, you'll get commanders who realize that your best assets don't have anything to do with assassination, and you won't be sent on those kinds of missions, but\u2026 you probably need to brace yourself for anything. You'll end up working for someone like Colonel Therrik at least once in your career. Trust me.\"\n\n\"Nothing I've heard about that man makes me want to meet him.\"\n\nKaika grinned. \"You just have to know how not to pull his triggers. He's better now, if you can believe that, since he got himself married to a nice professor. You'd like his wife, I bet. She's a paleo\u2026 something. Studies old bones.\"\n\n\"Paleontologist.\"\n\n\"Yup, that.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised, from what I've heard about Therrik, that he would fall for an academic.\"\n\n\"She has nice squishy bits.\"\n\n\"Well, that's important.\"\n\n\"And she stands up to him. Not many people do. She's a civilian, so that's allowed. You'd better not try it.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. And thank you.\" Rysha wasn't sure she felt better after their talk, but she appreciated that Kaika was willing to answer her questions and address her doubts.\n\nUp ahead, Dreyak stopped. He lifted a hand, waving the group forward.\n\nRysha detected the outline of something large and dark through the falling snow. A cave? Was it made from ice? Or were they now atop one of the islands down here?\n\nKaika's walk turned into a fast jog, and Rysha hurried to catch up. The outline of a huge cave mouth came more clearly into view. Interestingly, there wasn't a mountain or slope of any kind behind it. The curving roof seemed to be made from snow and ice, forming a concave opening about twenty feet high and at least fifty wide. One could have driven that steam vehicle at the outpost into it, which made Rysha wonder why the scientists hadn't taken it. No time? Dogs could be harnessed faster than a fire built in the box and the water in the boiler heated.\n\n\"The tracks have been hidden by the snow, haven't they?\" Blazer asked as Rysha caught up with them.\n\nTrip and Leftie jogged up from behind.\n\n\"Yes, but they were heading this way.\" Dreyak looked at Trip. \"I just want to make sure there's nothing inimical inside before we charge in. Looks like that cave stretches back a long way.\"\n\n\"It does,\" Trip said. \"It descends so that it's under the surface, and inside, someone has hollowed out side chambers, as if they were turning this into a possible outpost or base of operations. The whole thing appears to be manmade. As far as dragons and the inimical go, I\u2014Jaxi\u2014did sense one at the edge of her range a while ago, about forty miles away, but it's gone now. It wasn't the same one we fought. She has no idea where that one went.\"\n\nRysha noticed his slip. She wasn't surprised that he could sense dragons, too, as she had read numerous reports about how they had incredible magical auras that sorcerers could feel from great distances. She was a little surprised that his range might be as great as Jaxi's.\n\nEven though the soulblade wasn't specifically listed in any books that Rysha had read, Sardelle had mentioned during their meeting in the library that Jaxi had been a sorceress over six hundred years ago. Reference material frequently stated that the more recent one's dragon ancestor was, the more powerful one was likely to be. Because of the thousand-year gap during which dragons had supposedly vanished from the world, nobody born recently should have abilities comparable to the sorcerers of old. Soulblades supposedly retained a great deal of the power they'd possessed as humans. So in theory, Jaxi should be stronger than Sardelle, and Sardelle should be stronger than Trip or Dreyak or any other humans in this time with a smidgen of dragon blood in their veins.\n\nAdmittedly, despite her studies about dragons, Rysha wasn't an expert on mages or soulblades. She did know that some sorcerers' gifts led them into different fields. One might specialize in mental manipulation and illusions, while another might be inclined toward healing, and another toward hurling fireballs. Maybe Trip was inclined toward sensing things over great distances?\n\n\"There are people inside the cave,\" Trip said. \"And dogs too.\"\n\n\"Can you tell if they're injured?\" Dreyak skewered him with his intense gaze.\n\nHe seemed genuinely worried about that.\n\n\"I don't think anyone is grievously wounded, but there may be some injuries.\" Trip shrugged, not sounding positive. \"They're a ways back in there.\"\n\nBlazer turned and walked toward the cave.\n\n\"Wait.\" Dreyak ran past her, taking the lead. \"Let me go in first and talk to them. They may shoot if they see Iskandians.\"\n\n\"We're not at war with each other right now,\" Blazer pointed out.\n\nThe look Dreyak sent over his shoulder did not seem to be one of agreement.\n\n\"Stick close to me,\" Trip said, waving to include Rysha, Duck, Leftie, Blazer, and Kaika. \"Jaxi will throw up a barrier around us if any of them attack.\"\n\n\"We don't think Dreyak will stop that?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"Just a precaution.\" Trip took a step, but stopped again. \"Oh, I forgot. Jaxi can't protect those with the anti-dragon swords. You three better walk behind me. You won't be within the bubble, but as long as they're firing from in front of us, the effect will be largely the same.\"\n\nHe was doing a lot of thinking for someone who thought this was \"just a precaution,\" Rysha decided, waiting for him, Duck, and Leftie to pass before following with Kaika and Blazer. Did Trip's senses tell him something he hadn't shared yet?\n\nDreyak stopped at the mouth of the cave and looked at the ground. Dogs barked a little deeper in, but he pointed at gouges in the snow, gouges that hadn't been filled in by the fresh flakes yet.\n\n\"A dragon was here too,\" he said.\n\n\"Chasing the people into the cave?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"It could be so.\" Dreyak pointed at a couple of other places, including a spot smudged with soot, as if some explosive had gone off there. \"They may have made a stand here.\"\n\n\"One that worked?\"\n\n\"There are ten people still alive back there,\" Trip said.\n\n\"One that worked, then.\" Dreyak jogged into the cave, taking the lead again.\n\nThe group followed more slowly. Dogs with heavy coats barked and growled at them, but they were tied to stakes driven into the ice, so it was easy to avoid them. Blood spattered the ground in front of them, remnants of frozen steaks or the like, Rysha assumed. Nearby, five dog sleds were parked against the wall.\n\n\"That's the alarm going off,\" Kaika said dryly, as they passed the dogs. \"If the Cofah didn't know we were here, they do now.\"\n\nThe light coming in through the mouth of the cave faded as they strode deeper inside, but Rysha spotted some of the alcoves Trip had mentioned. One had a desk and chair in it. Another a gun vault. The yellow light of lanterns appeared in the darkness ahead. Several lanterns.\n\nDreyak strode toward them, his hands in the air.\n\n\"Stop right there,\" a man's voice rang out, his Cofah accent unmistakable.\n\n\"I'm Dreyak. I'm from the capital.\"\n\n\"Yeah, we've heard that before. Stay right there.\"\n\nTwo men jogged toward him, wearing red military uniforms, their faces and heads recently shaven, despite this remote outpost.\n\n\"Those don't look like scientists,\" Rysha murmured, though after snooping through the labs, she believed scientists were here somewhere. Could they be military scientists? Or maybe these were guards for a civilian team.\n\nTrip stopped and spread his arms, warning the others to do so too.\n\nThe two Cofah men had reached Dreyak and were walking around him, their rifles pointed at him while they scrutinized him and asked him questions too quietly for Rysha to hear.\n\n\"I'd like to know what they're saying,\" Blazer said, looking like she didn't want to wait behind Trip.\n\n\"There are people in the back with a variety of gas grenades,\" Trip said. \"They seem very on edge, and someone is saying they should gas us without even talking to us.\"\n\nKaika grunted. \"Must be old colleagues of Tolemek's.\"\n\n\"I can see why they would be on edge if they were just attacked by dragons,\" Rysha said, \"but we're not dragons.\"\n\n\"We are Iskandians,\" Duck said.\n\n\"And thus almost as bad?\"\n\n\"Some Cofah might think so.\"\n\n\"I wasn't planning on eating any of them,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"I reckon they'll be heartened to learn that.\"\n\nTrip gazed deep into the cave, toward those lanterns, as the interrogation of Dreyak continued. Rysha was surprised so much talking was going on. He'd never given a surname or identified himself as anything but a soldier, but she had assumed he came from one of their noble families or was at least an officer in their army. It would have been odd if the Cofah, who deemed rank and heritage important, sent a nobody for a mission in another country.\n\n\"We can come back,\" Dreyak finally called to the rest of the group.\n\n\"Do we have to?\" Blazer looked over her shoulder, toward the semicircle of light that marked the cave entrance, snow continuing to fall beyond it.\n\n\"I'd like to see what that torn page says,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"And what if the Cofah aren't interested in sharing it with you?\"\n\n\"Then I would have to practice my pickpocket skills.\"\n\n\"Do you have pickpocket skills?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"Helpful.\"\n\n\"Jaxi says she once read all the books in a prison library from under thousands of tons of solid rock,\" Trip said, walking toward Dreyak, who was waiting for them.\n\n\"Does that mean she'll read a note in someone's pocket for me?\"\n\n\"If it's in a language she knows, she says yes.\"\n\n\"That's lovely,\" Rysha said. \"Give her a kiss for me, please.\"\n\nTrip blinked and looked over at her. \"We don't have a relationship that involves lips.\"\n\n\"Trip struggles with getting ladies to accept kisses from him,\" Leftie said.\n\nRysha frowned at him as they walked. \"That seems unlikely.\"\n\n\"You're welcome to prove me wrong if you wish.\" Leftie smirked at Trip and gave him a nod, as if he were a mastermind setting up a smooching session, with her too dense to notice it.\n\nRysha was glad that Trip gave him a dour look and nothing more.\n\n\"We're invited back?\" Blazer asked, walking ahead to join Dreyak. He hadn't moved, but the two military men had strode back into the darkness broken only by the distant lanterns.\n\n\"Most of them would prefer it if we left.\" Dreyak sounded puzzled, as if he couldn't imagine his own people not welcoming him with open arms. \"But a couple of the scientists want to know what we're doing here.\"\n\n\"So, it's all right for us to go back if we agree to being interrogated?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"They just want to talk to you.\"\n\n\"And find out why we're here.\"\n\n\"Likely.\"\n\n\"Maybe they want to compare notes,\" Rysha said, happy to do the same.\n\nBlazer shook her head, grumbling, \"Lieutenants are like puppies.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose Jaxi can read pocket notes from here, Trip?\" Rysha asked, worried Blazer would order them to leave.\n\nTrip wasn't looking deeper into the cave any longer. His gaze had turned back toward the way they had come.\n\n\"If they don't need our help with injured people, then let's leave,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"There's a dragon coming,\" Trip said.\n\n\"Or we could stay,\" Blazer amended.\n\n\"It would be hard to fly in all that snow,\" Duck said.\n\n\"Is there anything that's going to deter the dragon from coming into the cave?\" Rysha asked as they strode deeper.\n\nThe cave was wide enough for one to fly right in. Even if it narrowed farther down, a dragon could simply shape shift into a smaller form and keep coming. From what Rysha had read, they retained their mental powers when in other forms, even if they couldn't breathe fire or crush people in their massive maws.\n\n\"No,\" Trip said. \"But it wouldn't be able to attack us from all sides.\"\n\n\"We can stand three abreast with our swords,\" Kaika said.\n\n\"Are we sure we want the Cofah to know all about those swords?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"No,\" Trip said again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Trip hung back as the uniformed Cofah pointed their team into an alcove with lanterns perched around it. He sensed that dragon about five miles away, soaring over the outpost. It wouldn't take it more than a minute to fly over to their cave. It could also destroy the fliers, if it wished. There'd been talk of leaving someone there to guard them, but what could one person do against a dragon if it attacked? They'd decided\u2014hoped\u2014the dragons would be less interested in the fliers if there weren't any people nearby to draw attention to them.\n\nYou'd better pay attention to these Cofah, at least for the moment, Jaxi advised him.\n\nI know.\n\nOne of them is a sorcerer.\n\nI know that too. Trip also knew that woman hadn't yet made an appearance.\n\nShe was farther back in one of the other alcoves, talking to a man. Six people sat down in the alcove they'd been led to, in addition to the two soldiers, who stood guard by the entrance. The other six, four men and two women, wore civilian clothes, and several were in need of haircuts. They were some of the original outpost researchers. The soldiers, Trip sensed, were newer additions. The sorceress might be too.\n\nYou're getting much better at sensing things, Jaxi said.\n\nYes, but I have no idea how to hide our auras, or camouflage them. Like you do. Is it too late to consider that? Trip hadn't realized until the men had been questioning Dreyak that a Cofah sorceress was among them.\n\nYou don't want her to know that you have dragon blood? Jaxi asked.\n\nIdeally not. I sense\u2026 These people are very suspicious of us. They were even suspicious of Dreyak, and he looks like one of them and speaks with their accent.\n\nI noticed that. I could camouflage you and dampen down my aura, Jaxi said, as it's possible she hasn't noticed us yet, due to the proximity of a dragon\u2014their auras drown out those of less powerful beings\u2014but as soon as the woman walks in, she'll likely recognize my scabbard. And I can't camouflage Azarwrath there unless he wants me to. Be careful with him. If he's been waiting for his chance to jump ship, this would be it. The Cofah sorceress doesn't have a soulblade.\n\nSo, she might be shopping for one?\n\nJaxi snorted. As if you can select a soulblade from a market aisle along with cereal and cheese.\n\nIf Azarwrath wants to stay with these people, that's not a problem for me. Maybe I should offer to give him to the sorceress.\n\n\"Please sit down,\" one of the women said, gesturing Trip's team not to chairs but to crates stacked around the alcove. She wore spectacles, appeared to be about forty, and had a notebook and pen sticking out of a cargo pocket. \"I'm Jylea.\" She went around introducing her comrades, but didn't give the names of the soldiers.\n\nI can't sense her thoughts very well, Jaxi said. I don't sense that she has any dragon blood, but she has a very schooled mind. The others are being careful, too, not to think about anything other than the battle they had with those dragons.\n\nIs it possible that isn't due to duplicity? That it's just paramount on their minds right now? Understandably so, Trip thought.\n\nPossible, I suppose. I tend to assume humans are being duplicitous until proven otherwise.\n\nI had no idea you were such a suspicious soul.\n\nOnce you spend more time surfing around in the minds of men, you'll see why.\n\nThat's not encouraged, is it? Trip could see how it would be useful to know what enemies were plotting, but he wouldn't wish to invade the privacy of others on a regular basis.\n\nNo, there were rules against it in our era.\n\nThat you're breaking?\n\nUntrained people often ooze their thoughts like water from a squeezed sponge. It's hard not to sense what they're thinking.\n\nThat doesn't really answer my question, Trip observed.\n\nDoesn't it? Huh.\n\n\"You're here to destroy the dragon portal?\" Jylea asked after the introductions. Her voice was neutral. Carefully neutral?\n\nBlazer shot a dark look at Dreyak, one that Trip understood perfectly. He shouldn't have shared the details of their mission with strangers.\n\n\"The same as you presumably are, yes,\" Rysha said, smiling.\n\nJylea's eyes narrowed. \"I'm not used to the lieutenants doing the talking when I deal with Iskandians.\"\n\n\"She's our dragon expert.\" Blazer folded her arms over her chest. She'd leaned against her crate rather than sitting on it. \"We let her do the talking when it comes to dragonly things.\"\n\n\"Dragonly? That's not a word in Cofahre.\"\n\n\"It is in Iskandia,\" Blazer said. \"You have to put a couple of those little dots over the O.\"\n\nJylea's face crinkled up as she seemingly tried to figure out if Blazer was being serious.\n\n\"That's a diaeresis,\" Rysha told Blazer, then added to Jylea, \"and a joke.\" Perhaps thinking she might form a rapport with Jylea if she emphasized their commonalities, Rysha leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, \"She's a pilot.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Jylea said, as if that explained everything. She smiled.\n\n\"Don't get too relaxed with them, Jylea,\" the man on her right said. \"Remember that Toph was charming too, and look where that got us.\"\n\n\"I haven't forgotten,\" Jylea said, her voice cooling, and she exchanged a long look with the man.\n\nToph? Trip couldn't imagine that being the sorceress's name. It neither sounded Cofah, nor like a woman's name.\n\nNo, despite their preoccupation, I'm learning a few things from these people's surface thoughts, Jaxi told him. It was a\u2014\n\nSomething seemed to tickle his mind, and Jaxi broke off. Did she feel it too? He had the sensation of fingers scraping through sand at the beach, searching for a lost coin.\n\nShe's probing us, Jaxi said. Do you want to block her from reading your thoughts?\n\nIs that an option?\n\nNaturally. There's a mental exercise to learn how.\n\nTrip grimaced. It doesn't involve unfurling flowers, does it?\n\nThat hadn't worked that well for him.\n\nYou barely tried it. Many do prefer to imagine their minds like rose buds, the petals still wrapped up inside the bud, inaccessible to outside elements. You, preferring manly images, would perhaps like to imagine laying a brick wall around your mind.\n\nIt takes days to lay a brick wall. I helped my grandfather build his current house. I know.\n\nLay yours more quickly. She's digging into your thoughts now.\n\nAlarmed, Trip gave up on thoughts of troweling mortar and imagined a brick wall instantly forming around his head. No, bricks weren't sturdy enough. He would use steel. No, iron. Wasn't iron supposed to have some element in it that blocked sorcerers from penetrating it with their magic? Or was that an old myth? In case it wasn't, he imagined some iron. The first thing that popped into his mind was his grandmother's cast iron pots, but that wouldn't work. He thought of a big, hulking bank vault with foot-thick walls. He stood inside it as the door clanged shut, and the circular handle spun into the locked position. Unfortunately, he also imagined the darkness and claustrophobia of being trapped inside a vault. He mentally added a light and a workbench. Some tools and a project to work on while he was stuck inside. Blazer's gun rack perhaps. And if he finished that, there was a cushy chair and some metalworking magazines to flip through. Perhaps an article on experimenting with the ore content of various new alloys.\n\nSeven gods, Jaxi moaned into his mind.\n\nWhat? Was I too late? Did she read all my thoughts?\n\nI'm sure she's sorry if she did. Are there actually magazines about metal? Who would read such things?\n\nTrip grimaced again. If Jaxi had tracked all that, then he hadn't been successful.\n\nYou were for a moment. When you locked yourself in the vault, I couldn't read anything. I was about to praise you for being such a quick study. Then you lost your focus.\n\nYou were going to praise me? He found that rather shocking and didn't think it had happened before.\n\nI was considering it. Just imagine the bank vault whenever you're trying to keep someone from probing your thoughts. Eventually, you'll get good at it, and it will become subconscious. You'll be able to keep people out while performing other magical feats.\n\nBut in the meantime, I was too late?\n\nWe'll see. Thinking about things other than what the sorceress is trying to extract can be a viable technique, too, though it doesn't usually work with those more powerful than you. Definitely not with dragons.\n\nShe's not a dragon, I assume? Trip could still sense the dragon flying around the outpost five miles away. He sensed that this woman had some power, but she possessed a much smaller aura or presence than the dragons radiated. It seemed similar to what he'd felt around Sardelle, though he'd barely been conscious of having more than a sixth sense then.\n\nCertainly not. I was merely warning you since we'll encounter more dragons, and since we won't want them to know why we're here. After you master walling off your own thoughts, you may want to learn how to protect the thoughts of those around you. Mundane humans can often be read as easily as books with large print.\n\nEven those carrying the dragon-slaying swords?\n\nTo a lesser extent. They are somewhat protected while they hold the weapons. It's Leftie and Duck that you may want to work on locking into the vault with you.\n\nCan that be done?\n\nYes. It's easier if they're close to you and harder over a distance, but you may be up to the challenge. Eventually, you might be able to protect the whole group.\n\n\"I'm going to be frank, Lieutenant,\" Jylea said. \"I don't see what we would have to gain from working with you.\"\n\nTrip realized their conversation had continued while he'd spoken with Jaxi and tried his mental exercise, but he'd missed most of it. He did his best to keep his bank vault locked around his mind while trying to catch up.\n\n\"We also have clues in regard to the portal's location,\" Rysha said. \"Clues you may need to find it.\"\n\nJylea exchanged glances with the man beside her.\n\n\"I highly doubt you know half as much as we do. And having someone wandering around with soulblades is only going to attract dragons to us.\" Jylea waved at Trip.\n\nA couple of her people looked at the weapons, giving him looks that ranged from wariness to that-man-is-odd-for-carrying-two-swords-at-once.\n\n\"It seems you attracted dragons before we came,\" Major Blazer said, her arms still crossed over her chest.\n\nKaika was in a similar pose, but closer to the alcove entrance. She kept eyeing the soldiers, who eyed her right back.\n\n\"Temporarily,\" Jylea said.\n\n\"One brief appearance is all it takes to kill people and annihilate an outpost,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"I cannot dispute that, but we have what we need to find the portal on our own.\"\n\nRysha's fingers curled into a fist. A triumphant fist? Maybe she hadn't known for certain that they were hunting for the portal.\n\n\"At which point, you intend to destroy it, correct?\" Dreyak squinted at Jylea.\n\nHe leaned against one of the frigid ice walls, his gloved fists propped on his hips. He was closer to the scientists, closer to the conversation, but they hadn't been looking at him much.\n\n\"We are not at liberty to discuss our mission here in front of Iskandians, your\u2014Mr. Dreyak.\"\n\nMr. Dreyak? What had she been about to say?\n\nRysha looked at Trip, holding his gaze for a few seconds. She'd noticed that slip-up, too, it seemed.\n\n\"They've rifled through your lab,\" Dreyak said, his mouth twisting. \"I doubt there's any point in hiding anything from them. There's no point in hiding it from me, either.\"\n\n\"Nonetheless, we have our orders. And you are not mentioned in them.\"\n\nDreyak lifted his chin, his eyes closing to slits.\n\nOffended, was he?\n\nI wish I could read him, Jaxi said wistfully.\n\nYou believe he's thinking about more interesting things than metalworking magazines?\n\nThat's a given.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Rysha said, drawing the scientists' attention back to her, \"we should compare notes without making assumptions that we have nothing worth sharing with each other. My team did receive clues directly from a dragon.\"\n\nDirectly? Meaning a dragon had vaguely mentioned the portal years ago to Sardelle, and then Sardelle had shared what she remembered with Rysha?\n\n\"As did we,\" Jylea said.\n\nThat's interesting, Jaxi said. I wonder which dragon or dragons are currently working with the empire. I do remember that one of the females released from those prisons the same time as Bhrava Saruth\u2014Yisharnesh, was her name\u2014was reputedly aligned with Emperor Salatak. But that was three years ago when our people kidnapped him in Dakrovia. We haven't heard anything to suggest that Yisharnesh is still working with the imperial leaders.\n\n\"And I believe we shall keep our notes to ourselves,\" Jylea added. \"While we appreciate that you came to check on us\u2014\" she nodded to Dreyak, \"\u2014we will soon complete our mission, and all of the empire\u2014all the world\u2014will know that the Cofah are the ones who saved them from death and destruction created by rogue dragons.\" She jerked her chin up, an arrogant tilt to the gesture.\n\n\"I hope you won't need your airship to do so,\" Trip said.\n\nEveryone looked at him, their expressions startled or confused. He hadn't spoken since entering the alcove, so maybe the Cofah had considered him the muscle. An amusing thought, but he probably did look like some sword dancer of old with the two soulblades on his hips.\n\n\"We're aware that it's damaged,\" Jylea said, \"and also that we have the materials to repair the balloon once we're able to return to the outpost.\"\n\nTrip fished in his pocket and pulled out the valve control lever for the helium tank. \"Not if a piece is missing.\"\n\nJylea blinked slowly. \"You sabotaged our airship?\"\n\nTrip debated whether it would be better to be seen as a cunning asshole who'd imagined this scenario in advance or to admit to the truth. He twitched a shoulder and opted for the latter, figuring he should go for being less menacing rather than more if Rysha wanted to work with these people.\n\n\"I removed the part to repair it, but if our two teams aren't going to work together, I'm less inclined to help with repairs.\"\n\n\"Or return it, I'll wager,\" the man at Jylea's side grumbled.\n\nTrip smiled agreeably.\n\n\"What is that part?\" Jylea whispered to her man.\n\n\"Hells if I know. Yaruk was the engineer.\"\n\nThey shared grim looks. Had the man died? While Trip didn't care to capitalize on someone's death, it did occur to him that the Cofah team might find an engineer useful\u2014or necessary\u2014if they had lost theirs.\n\n\"Can we get to the ruins site by dog sled?\" Jylea whispered.\n\n\"No,\" the man whispered back. \"The geothermal activity to the northeast has melted huge lakes and left the rest of the ice for a hundred miles to either side unstable.\"\n\nTrip barely caught the words. Rysha, who was closer, leaned forward and, judging by the furrow in her brow, didn't quite catch them.\n\nYes, you're amplifying your hearing, Jaxi told him. Good job. There are all manner of handy things you can do once you learn to focus properly. Also, our company is coming.\n\nWhat?\n\nKaika and Blazer stirred, fingers resting on the triggers of their rifles, though they didn't raise them.\n\n\"Actually,\" a woman's voice came from the cave, \"you will return that part to our airship. After you finish repairing it.\"\n\nThe speaker\u2014the sorceress\u2014walked into view. A beautiful woman with bronze skin, black hair that fell to her shoulders, and fierce brown eyes, she looked Cofah through and through. She radiated power, and Trip sensed that was intentional, that she was doing the equivalent of puffing up her feathers to appear more threatening. He had no idea how to gauge how threatening she truly was. Her fingers were smudged with ink, and she wore simple attire suitable for the climate, fur-lined trousers and a parka. He would have expected an enemy magic-wielder to wear a robe or some flowing garment hemmed with golden thread sewn into mystical runes.\n\nYou're wearing an army uniform and goggles, Jaxi pointed out.\n\nTrip almost replied that he wasn't a sorcerer and hadn't been initiated to the fashion requirements, but the real sorceress was frowning imperiously at him, so he remained focused on her.\n\nHer gaze flicked to his waist. \"You will also give me the Cofah soulblade that you carry. You have no right to it. I do not know how you came by it, but I assume the blade only let you touch it because you were the only one around when a volcano erupted and a lava flow threatened to consume it.\"\n\n\"Actually, it was a beach, and the tide was coming in,\" Trip said.\n\nThe woman continued to glare at him.\n\nThe blade hung at Trip's side, unspeaking as usual.\n\nAzarwrath, he thought to it, assuming the blade could hear him, since Jaxi always seemed to, do you want to go with that woman? Even though it might give the sorceress the upper hand, he would rather hand over the blade openly than try to keep Azarwrath against his will. As had been pointed out, the soulblade might attack him and Jaxi later, at an inopportune time.\n\nSilence was his only answer.\n\n\"Give it to me.\" The sorceress held her hand out.\n\nDreyak watched her intently. Would he feel rejected if the soulblade was willing to go with her when it hadn't accepted him as a handler?\n\n\"Please,\" Trip said. \"There's no need to be rude.\"\n\nIndignation flashed in the woman's eyes. \"You are Iskandian scum. And you are attempting to blackmail us. That is a reason.\"\n\n\"I suppose that latter bit is true, with the former depending on the definition of scum currently in the Cofah dictionary, but either way, we'll probably get along much better if you're polite.\"\n\n\"Polite! You dare tell me how I should act, boy?\"\n\n\"Uh, Trip,\" Leftie whispered from a few feet away. \"Maybe you should give her the pig sticker.\"\n\nJaxi, are you strong enough to handle her if she lashes out at me? Is it all right to goad her?\n\nIt's always all right to goad Cofah mages who are ridiculously full of themselves. Jaxi sounded quite approving as she shared the words.\n\nHe noticed, however, that she hadn't answered his first question. There was probably nothing the woman could do to kill Jaxi, but what about Trip and the others?\n\nThe sorceress strode toward him, and he worried he'd gone too far. He imagined one of Jaxi's barriers going up to block the sorceress's advance, and hoped she took the hint and made it happen.\n\nRysha was the one to spring to his defense, drawing Dorfindral and thrusting the blade out between Trip and the sorceress. The sword flared with its pale green light.\n\nA painful snap to his mind startled Trip and almost made him stumble back. It felt like a rubber band shot to the forehead.\n\nIn defending you, your noble lieutenant broke your barrier, Jaxi told him dryly.\n\nMy barrier or yours?\n\nYours. I was excited to find out if yours would be effective, so I didn't create one. Also, I'm keeping an eye on Azzy there to make sure he doesn't plan to make this confrontation interesting. He may not be speaking to us, but I can definitely sense that he's awake and alert.\n\n\"Filthy blade,\" the sorceress snarled.\n\n\"We've got three of them,\" Major Blazer said, tapping the hilt to hers and nodding to the one Kaika carried in its scabbard on her back. \"Since Iskandians are scum, it should be no surprise that we enjoy filth.\"\n\n\"How could they have acquired so many chapaharii swords?\" the man Jylea had been speaking with whispered, awe on his face as he stared at Rysha's weapon.\n\nShe still held it out between Trip and the sorceress, her face fearless and determined as she glared at the woman. Having that sword bared and active so close to him made Trip's skin crawl, but he appreciated her defense of him.\n\nFor the record, Jaxi said, you didn't need her defense.\n\nThat doesn't make it less appreciated. It was kind of sexy, too, Trip decided.\n\nI may gag.\n\nTrip hadn't meant to share that thought. I can see I need to practice my bank vault more.\n\nIn order to keep me from reading your thoughts? Wouldn't you be bored without my commentary?\n\n\"We would be happy to share the story of how we acquired the swords,\" Rysha said, glancing toward the man who'd spoken while keeping the sorceress in her peripheral vision. \"With allies.\"\n\nJylea sighed. \"If you'll step outside, we'll confer on the\u2026 possibilities.\"\n\nRysha looked at their team members and nodded toward the cave outside.\n\n\"Mr. Dreyak,\" Jylea said, as he turned to go out with the others. \"Stay here, please.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure,\" Trip said. \"He gets a please.\"\n\nThe sorceress shot him a scorching glare that could have melted ice. Or steel. Trip had to fight the urge not to scurry out of the alcove. It helped that Rysha still had her blade out and was glaring right back at the sorceress, with intensity that also could have melted ore.\n\n\"Is this worth the hassle?\" Blazer whispered, as soon as their group had moved away.\n\nThe two Cofah soldiers stood at the alcove, looking out at them, but she'd put her back to them and was speaking low enough that they shouldn't hear.\n\nI can make sure they don't hear, Jaxi said. And the sorceress too. Unless Azzy tells her what's going on.\n\nHas he given any indication that he'll do so? Trip asked.\n\nI don't know. He still hasn't spoken a word to me. Which I find suspicious. I'm delightful to speak with, as you know.\n\nIndeed.\n\n\"It does add an element of uncertainty,\" Rysha said, seeming to realize that both Kaika and Blazer were looking at her. \"Even though Cofahre and Iskandia aren't technically at war right now, we have millennia of hatred and mistrust between our peoples.\"\n\n\"Yeah, since they've tried to invade Iskandia and take it over hundreds of times,\" Blazer growled. \"It's a rite of passage for all their idiotic emperors. It's only a matter of time before the one on the throne over there now tries something.\"\n\n\"He's a prince, not an emperor,\" Rysha said. \"Not yet.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it'll only be a matter of time before he makes things official.\"\n\n\"Trip?\" Rysha looked at him, and her sword pulsed a few times. She glowered at it, concentrated visibly, then jammed it into its scabbard. After taking a deep breath, she asked, \"Did Jaxi manage to find that page in anyone's pocket and read it? My vote would be to forget the alliance if we could get the information they have. It's just a hunch, but I suspect they've figured out where the portal is. Maybe the dragons know they have, and that's why their outpost was attacked yesterday after being ignored for months.\"\n\nI did look for the page that was torn out, Jaxi told Trip. And I believe I've found it.\n\nAnd can read it?\n\nNo. It's written in\u2026 not the same language as the rest of that journal was written in. Sardelle has studied the ancient languages and might have been able to translate it, but I'm not sure it even is an ancient language. I don't recognize it.\n\nJaxi flashed the image of the page into his mind. He saw nonsensical words written in tidy black ink. At least they were nonsensical to him.\n\nWhy would one of those scientists have switched to some obscure language halfway through the journal? he asked.\n\nBecause she didn't want anyone but her to know where the portal is? Jaxi suggested.\n\nHer? Jylea? Oh, wait. Would Rysha recognize the language? She's a lot smarter than I am.\n\nOf that, I have no doubt. But I can't show her an example of it while she's holding her glowy buddy.\n\n\"Trip?\" Rysha prompted.\n\n\"Sorry, we're discussing it.\" Trip shared what Jaxi had told him.\n\nLeftie made that grimace of distaste he made any time Trip admitted to communicating with Jaxi.\n\n\"Can she write down a couple of the words so I can see them?\"\n\n\"Can swords write?\" Duck whispered to Leftie.\n\n\"You know more about this creepy magic stuff than I do,\" Leftie whispered back.\n\nIt's a good thing those two geniuses can fly, Jaxi grumbled. Just tell Rysha to put the sword down for a minute, and I'll show her.\n\nTrip relayed the message.\n\nRysha reached for her belt to unclasp it, but her hands froze on the buckle. She grimaced and squinted. Fighting the sword again? It objected to being taken off?\n\nThat notion made Trip uneasy.\n\nKasandral is a cranky ass, Jaxi informed him. I don't expect any of these new swords to be different.\n\nKaika leaned forward and pointed to Rysha's buckle. \"That hook lifts up, and then you slide that out of there.\"\n\nBlazer snorted.\n\nRysha muttered something under her breath. One of those command words for the sword. Then she was able to unfasten the buckle.\n\n\"Thanks for the advice, ma'am,\" Rysha told Kaika. \"There's a reason I've decided to consider you as my mentor.\"\n\n\"Because I'm so worldly and well-versed in belt buckles?\" Kaika grinned. \"I have undone a lot of them.\"\n\n\"As the boys in the barracks will attest,\" Blazer said.\n\nRysha handed the sword to Kaika, though not without a hitch in the movement, as if the sword truly did not want to leave her grasp.\n\nWill you fight me like that if I try to let you go, Jaxi?\n\nI suppose it depends on who you're trying to hand me to. A worldly belt expert? Or a dragon to be melted down for scrap?\n\n\"I'm ready.\" Rysha nodded at Trip.\n\nLet's hope Dorfie doesn't punish her later for letting some tainted sword touch her mind, Jaxi grumbled.\n\nPunish? Trip hoped that wasn't possible.\n\nRysha's eyes widened, and her mouth parted. In wonder? Worry? He doubted Jaxi had communicated with her often.\n\n\"I insist,\" came loud, firm words from the alcove where the Cofah were conversing. It sounded like the sorceress.\n\nThe voices dropped again after that. Trip thought about trying to eavesdrop\u2014Jaxi had implied he might have that ability. But Rysha frowned and shook her head, drawing his attention back to her.\n\n\"It's Cytrikic,\" she said. \"I recognize it, but I can't read it. It's a province on an island chain to the northeast of the Cofah mainland. The inhabitants were conquered fairly late in imperial history, and their remoteness has resulted in them being given more lenience in regard to adopting Cofah culture. They speak the language and observe the holidays, but they've kept their own language too. Children learn both when they're growing up.\"\n\n\"Is one of the scientists from there?\" Trip guessed.\n\n\"Whoever was keeping the journal, it would seem.\"\n\nIt was in the sorceress's pocket, Jaxi said.\n\nYou mean, she's a scholar? One of the researchers? And isn't just here to sense dragons and use her powers?\n\nThat may be the case. That might also explain her ability. There aren't many legitimate sorcerers left in Cofahre, much like in Iskandia, but Cytrik, I believe, wasn't a part of the empire yet during their purge of those with dragon blood. Sardelle would know more, but it seems likely they could still have a tradition of finding and training sorcerers.\n\n\"Is there any way that Jaxi can simply pluck the information from the researcher's mind?\" Kaika asked. \"If we can figure out which one of them was keeping that journal?\"\n\n\"We already know which one,\" Trip said. \"And I'm guessing she'll prove pluck-resistant.\"\n\nRysha sighed. \"The sorceress?\"\n\nTrip nodded.\n\n\"I saw the ink marks on her fingers and thought it might be her. Even if she doesn't exactly look like an academic.\"\n\n\"What does an academic look like?\" Kaika smirked, plucking at Rysha's army parka sleeve.\n\nRysha smiled ruefully. \"Someone with bad eyesight from poring over texts, I should think.\"\n\n\"Maybe a sorceress can heal her own vision if it goes bad.\"\n\nRysha's smile went from rueful to wistful. \"That would certainly be nice.\"\n\nTrip wondered if he could ever learn to do something like that. Healing someone's vision? That would be even better than building a gun mount for someone. For Rysha.\n\n\"So, what I'm hearing,\" Blazer said, \"is that the witch knows where the portal is, so we have to work with these people. Unless we want them to potentially beat us to it.\"\n\nRysha nodded and accepted her sword belt back from Kaika. \"Assuming they're willing to work with us.\"\n\nBlazer pointed at Trip's hand\u2014he was still holding the valve control. \"Is that truly a critical component to their ship, or is it the handle off a lavatory door or something?\"\n\n\"Critical component,\" he said.\n\n\"Huh. That was quite clever of you to take it then.\"\n\nTrip thought about again mentioning that he'd simply removed it to repair it, but if his commanding officer wanted to list in her mission report that he'd been \"clever,\" that couldn't hurt. Maybe General Zirkander would send him on more important missions if he proved himself valuable here.\n\nAssuming you survive this one, Jaxi said.\n\nYou don't think the odds are in my favor?\n\nDo you really want me to answer that? Given that half your team is carrying weapons that long to decapitate you?\n\nPerhaps not." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Rysha was disappointed that she hadn't been able to read the notes Jaxi had shown her. Only her second telepathic encounter with a magical soulblade, and she'd been forced to admit her ignorance\u2014and hear Jaxi sigh into her mind.\n\nIf those notes had been written in Middle or Old Iskandian or Ancient Cofah, or even Dragon Script, she could have read them, but modern languages? She'd never been particularly interested in them, and she was lucky she had even recognized the Cytrikic script. If there were more than ten thousand speakers in the entire world, she would be shocked. It was dumb luck that the researcher was from those islands.\n\nAs if her thoughts had drawn the woman, the sorceress strode out of the alcove, leading the two soldiers and the rest of the team. Jylea walked at her side. Rysha suspected Jylea was the mission leader, but she also suspected the sorceress\u2014had that woman shared her name yet?\u2014had a lot of sway over the group.\n\n\"We agree to join forces with your group,\" Jylea said, \"if three conditions are met.\"\n\n\"I'll bet,\" Kaika muttered from behind Rysha.\n\nBlazer moved to the front of their group, facing the Cofah and propping her fists on her hips. Earlier, she'd seemed willing to let Rysha take the lead in the negotiations, but maybe she sensed these \"conditions\" would have a military or security aspect rather than an academic one.\n\n\"First off,\" Jylea said, \"your mage agrees to fix and return that part, as well as\u2014\"\n\n\"Our what?\" Blazer asked.\n\nJylea's forehead furrowed, and she pointed to Trip. In his military uniform and parka, with his pilot's cap on, along with his scarf stained with engine grease from his flier, he hardly looked like a mage.\n\n\"Oh, our mage,\" Blazer said. \"Right. Go on.\"\n\nJylea's furrow didn't smooth, and she looked at the woman at her side. The sorceress lifted her shoulders and said, \"We can discuss him further later.\"\n\nRysha watched Trip for a reaction, but he was wearing a mask today, and she couldn't read him. He'd seemed indifferent to the sorceress's posturing in the alcove, and with two soulblades at his waist, Rysha hadn't been sure he'd needed her intervention. But she'd reacted on instinct, feeling the urge to protect him, if she could. Maybe he hadn't thought it through yet, but since the second soulblade he carried was Cofah, it was extremely possible it could turn on him eventually. It might be biding its time to do so in a way that would bring glory to the empire.\n\n\"As I was saying,\" Jylea continued, facing Blazer again, \"he will repair that part and lead repairs on the rest of the airship, ensuring that it's in as pristine a condition as possible.\"\n\nThe sorceress smiled and watched Trip, as if she thought this was some punishment he would find repulsive. Hardly. He was probably even now thinking about upgrades he could give the ship.\n\n\"Once that's been accomplished, you'll load your fliers onto the airship, and we'll all fly together on that vessel toward the site we believe holds the portal.\"\n\n\"How'd she know we have fliers?\" Duck whispered.\n\n\"You're wearing your goggles around your neck, and there's a Wolf Squadron pin on your parka,\" Trip pointed out.\n\n\"For all they know, that's a new fashion trend in Iskandia.\"\n\n\"You don't look like a fashion maven.\"\n\nDuck's forehead creased, as if he couldn't imagine this lack within himself.\n\n\"Is that all part of the first stipulation?\" Blazer asked dryly, ignoring the men.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It figures.\"\n\nJylea's eyes narrowed. \"We don't need you people. You're blackmailing us.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you won't need help destroying the portal?\" Rysha touched Dorfindral's hilt.\n\n\"We will not,\" the sorceress said coolly.\n\nThinking of the Dakrovian book she'd found, Rysha wondered if they had figured out another way to destroy it. Or thought they had. It was also possible they didn't intend to destroy it at all. That thought had crossed her mind a few times during her conversation with Jylea, but it was hard for her to imagine why else they would be looking for it.\n\nIt wasn't as if they could set up a recruiting booth next to the portal and try to coerce each dragon that came out to align with the Cofah Empire. More likely, they and the booth would be incinerated by the first cranky gold to come out.\n\nThough Rysha knew some dragons had worked with humans once, and Iskandia had a couple of allies from a past era, she hadn't seen much evidence that the ones coming into the world now were amenable to that. Maybe that era had passed. Or maybe those dragons that remembered humans as something other than prey had died off. That thought saddened her. As a girl, she'd read many of those novels with dragons in them, dragons who helped humans or even fell in love with them. They were part of the reason she'd gone into studying the field. The dragons she'd encountered thus far had been\u2026 disappointing, at least to her childhood memories. As an adult, she told herself that this was probably how it had always been, that even when some of the dragons of old had allied with humans, they had been using them to their own ends. People wouldn't have wanted to think of it that way, of course. History books, after all, were always written with the biases of the one doing the recording.\n\n\"The second condition,\" Jylea said, \"is that I remain the leader of the mission. You'll defer to me or to my co-leader, Kiadarsa.\" She tilted a hand toward the sorceress. \"When the portal is ultimately destroyed, our people will receive credit for it.\"\n\nLogically, Rysha knew it was more important for the portal to be destroyed than for anyone to receive credit for it, but she wasn't surprised when Blazer looked at the ceiling of the cave and shook her head, as if these demands were slowly torturing her to death.\n\n\"Third,\" Jylea said, \"your mage will return that stolen soulblade to its rightful people.\" She gestured again to the sorceress\u2014Kiadarsa.\n\n\"It's egregious, bordering on blasphemous, for an Iskandian to carry it around so,\" Kiadarsa added, glowering at Trip. \"Assuming that's what you are.\"\n\nTrip's eyebrows lifted, but he didn't reply to the snide comment. Rysha supposed that was a dig at his skin color. He wasn't as dark-skinned as the Cofah, and none of the ones in the group shared his green eyes. It was true that he did not look very Iskandian, but now that Rysha considered him alongside the Cofah, she doubted that had been his father's heritage, either.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Blazer muttered over her shoulder to Kaika. \"We haven't even tried on our own to find it. It's early to assume we need these people and to give in to their demands.\"\n\nIf Rysha hadn't seen the researchers' big map, and learned that the Cofah had already investigated and dismissed the spot she and Sardelle had considered most likely, she would agree. There was no reason to suspect the Cofah had marked up their map with lies, anticipating Iskandian spies would come along and read it. She was inclined to believe it accurate.\n\n\"I'll defer to Lieutenant Ravenwood in this,\" Kaika said.\n\nBlazer lifted her eyebrows.\n\n\"It doesn't matter who destroys it or who gets credit,\" Rysha said, \"just that it's destroyed. And if Trip is willing to give up the soulblade, it might be better for us that a sentient Cofah weapon isn't traveling with us.\" She hadn't pointed out that the sword could be, even now, spying on them and reporting to someone else\u2014this Kiadarsa, perhaps\u2014but maybe she should.\n\n\"It's actually yours to give up or keep.\" Trip nodded to Rysha. \"Inasmuch as the soulblade will allow. You killed the pirate sorceress.\"\n\nBoth Jylea's and Kiadarsa's eyebrows rose. Rysha decided to take that as surprise that a pirate had carried a soulblade rather than shock that she had defeated one.\n\n\"Then I say it should go back to the Cofah,\" Rysha said. \"If that's what it wants.\" She felt compelled to add that last because they were essentially dealing with a person, if all the legends were to be believed. And now that Jaxi had spoken, however briefly, into her mind, she had no reason not to believe them.\n\nKiadarsa looked toward the cave mouth, her eyes taking on a distant aspect. \"The dragon has flown away. We should be able to return to the outpost.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Jylea said. \"Our new mechanic can fix our ship. As soon as you two finish your deal.\" She waved toward the Cofah soulblade.\n\nUnlike Jaxi, who had a scabbard that hooked to Trip's belt, the Cofah blade's scabbard was thrust awkwardly through his belt on the opposite hip. Trip pulled it out without hesitating and held it toward the sorceress, hilt first.\n\nHer eyes gleamed as she strode toward it. Rysha wagered she hoped to claim it for herself rather than take it home for \"its rightful people.\"\n\nShe grabbed the hilt, but jerked her hand back immediately with a pained gasp. She gripped it, as if she'd been burned.\n\n\"You,\" she snarled at Trip, giving him a murderous look. \"You pretend to give it to me, then attack?\"\n\nTrip opened his mouth, an obvious protest about to come out, but she flung her hand toward him as if to hurl some attack at him.\n\nBelatedly, Rysha yanked Dorfindral from its scabbard and ran over. But she paused. Nothing seemed to be happening.\n\nTrip lowered his arm, the scabbard still in hand, and he gazed at the woman, as if she were doing nothing but standing there in tableau, some child pretending she had the ability to fling magic around.\n\nWe've got this handled, Jaxi spoke into her mind, startling Rysha. We'd appreciate it if you didn't zap our defenses with Dorfie again.\n\nRysha stared at Jaxi's hilt. Again? Did that mean when she'd thought she had been protecting Trip, she'd gotten in the way? Chagrined, she lowered her sword and backed up.\n\nDon't worry, Jaxi said cheerfully. Trip found it sexy.\n\nWhat? He said that?\n\nHe thought it.\n\nDoes he know you're talking to me and sharing his thoughts?\n\nNo, but soulblades speak with whom they wish. And sometimes, sharing romantic thoughts can hasten things along. You humans are so bad about speaking honestly about your feelings and desires with each other. Though perhaps I shouldn't encourage you to engage in romance and rutting, given the tastes\u2014or distastes\u2014of your newfound green-glowing friend.\n\n\"I didn't do it,\" Trip said. \"I assure you.\"\n\n\"As if your assurance means anything,\" Kiadarsa said. \"Who are you, anyway? Another spy?\"\n\nJylea looked sharply at her. \"You suspect that?\"\n\n\"I'm suspicious of everything after our incident.\"\n\nTrip looked as confused as Rysha felt. Spy?\n\n\"I'm Captain Trip.\" He shrugged. \"Wolf Squadron, Iskandian flier battalion.\"\n\nJylea looked at Kiadarsa again.\n\n\"I don't know. It seems unlikely. The Iskandians hate magic even more than the Cofah do. Most Cofah.\" Kiadarsa smiled for the first time, though it was directed at Jylea and not anyone else.\n\n\"Set the blade down and back away from it,\" Kiadarsa told Trip. \"I want to try one more time, though I suppose you'd have no trouble stopping me from the other side of the cave, if you wanted.\"\n\nTrip set the scabbard on the gritty ice at his feet and backed away. \"I've been told that soulblades can't be taken against their will.\" He shrugged. \"Maybe he's hitching a ride with me until somebody better comes along.\"\n\n\"Maybe he's holding out for a dragon,\" Duck said.\n\n\"Dragons don't need swords.\" Kiadarsa looked at him as if he were an uneducated toddler. \"The dragon riders of old carried soulblades into battle, and sometimes even the chapaharii weapons, but the dragons certainly didn't need them.\"\n\n\"Today's dragons don't seem to believe they need riders, either,\" Jylea said.\n\n\"No.\" A wistful expression crossed Kiadarsa's face.\n\nFor the first time, she seemed more a human being than a donkey's ass. Or maybe Rysha could simply identify with that wistfulness since she'd been having similar thoughts earlier.\n\n\"Try again, Kia,\" Jylea said. \"Maybe it was him and not the sword.\"\n\n\"If it's useful to know, it also did not allow me to touch it,\" Dreyak said.\n\nHe stood to the side, between both groups. He hadn't said anything, but he'd been watching the negotiations, such as they were, with interest.\n\n\"That's to be expected,\" Kiadarsa said. \"You've had little training, Mr. Dreyak.\"\n\nDreyak lifted his chin. \"I've had some.\"\n\nShe raised her eyebrows.\n\nHe lowered his chin and snorted softly. \"Little compared to you. I concede.\"\n\nRysha found it interesting that Dreyak seemed to know these people and vice versa. Perhaps not know, but know of? She'd caught a slip in the way Jylea had first addressed him and wondered if he might be a little more than some Cofah army officer of noble blood.\n\nKeeping a wary eye on Trip, Kiadarsa walked toward the soulblade again. She crouched and reached for it, but this time she paused without touching it. Her hand hovered above it, unmoving, for several seconds.\n\n\"I see,\" she said, and withdrew her hand.\n\nShe frowned at the blade, but did not try to touch it again.\n\n\"Did he speak to you?\" Trip asked curiously.\n\nKiadarsa squinted at him, and Rysha didn't expect her to answer.\n\nSurprisingly, she admitted, \"Only to say that he is not for me.\"\n\n\"That's more than I got,\" Dreyak said. \"I just got zapped. You should feel honored.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Kiadarsa stood up, still looking at Trip. \"Does he speak to you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, that's something. I would be upset if a Cofah soulblade defected and linked to an Iskandian. An Iskandian who already has a soulblade.\" Kiadarsa glanced at Jaxi.\n\nTrip opened his mouth, no doubt to tell her that Jaxi was on loan, but must have thought better of revealing the information, for he closed his mouth again.\n\n\"If that's truly what you are,\" Kiadarsa added quietly.\n\n\"The accent is right,\" Jylea offered.\n\n\"What else would I be?\" Trip tilted his head, like he truly cared what they thought. Or maybe he thought they might actually know. Hadn't he said he didn't know which country his father had come from?\n\n\"We'll see,\" Kiadarsa murmured. \"We'll see.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Trip fastened the valve control back onto the helium tank, and Leftie clapped from the doorway. They were belowdecks in the airship, night having fallen again, and Trip longed for sleep. He regretted having stayed up all of the previous night. He would happily let someone else handle their navigation to\u2026 wherever they were going. As far as he knew, the Cofah hadn't announced a destination.\n\n\"I didn't know the flow of helium got you so excited,\" Trip said, turning on the gas so it could fill the envelope.\n\nDuck, Rysha, Leftie, Kaika, and the Cofah soldiers and scientists had spent the day patching it and repairing the framework for it. Rebuilding it, rather. It had been utterly smashed, as if a dragon had fallen out of the sky on top of it. Maybe it had.\n\n\"I was showing my approval for your whole scheme,\" Leftie said. \"Even though I'm not sure we came out on top in the end.\" He leaned backward into the passageway to look up and down it, then lowered his voice. \"I'm surprised the major agreed to the Cofah people being in command. I'm not real comfortable with that. I'm not going to yes, sir and yes, ma'am them, are you?\"\n\n\"I hadn't thought about it. Sometimes, those words automatically come out. They drilled them into us good at the academy.\"\n\n\"That's the truth. And Colonel Anchor liked to assign push-ups any time you forgot to yes, sir him.\"\n\n\"I remember.\" Trip checked a gauge and was pleased at the even flow of gas up the pipe and into the envelope. Not all of the pipework was visible, so he had worried there might be holes that he could only reach by digging into the bulkheads.\n\n\"And if you were in your flier and couldn't do them, he'd keep a tally for you. Did you ever see his little notebook? He actually wrote it down. Leftie, push-ups: one hundred and twenty.\"\n\n\"I saw it. I got up to three hundred once.\"\n\n\"I remember that. He made you do them in front of the formation before we could go home. I wonder if the Wolf Squadron commander will be like that. Colonel Tranq, isn't it? I can't believe we didn't get to meet her and just went straight off on this mission.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's a good thing. We weren't able to start accumulating push-ups.\" Trip moved over to the gauge that measured the fill percentage in the envelope. The airship had already been loaded, including moving the fliers onto its big open deck, and there weren't any ropes tying them down. They would start lifting as soon as they had the gas to do so.\n\n\"I'm curious about what Tranq looks like. She's supposed to be about forty, but that's not that old. Women can still be sexy at forty. And they have a lot of experience.\" Leftie grinned.\n\n\"I hope this speculation doesn't mean that you're hoping to sleep with our squadron commander. Lieutenant.\"\n\n\"Sleeping isn't what I do with women in bed.\" The grin widened. \"And I've never gotten with a colonel. Just Major Bee back in Charkolt. Remember her?\"\n\n\"Wasn't she married?\"\n\n\"Not happily.\" Leftie added a wink to his grin.\n\nHe looked up and down the passageway again. Before, he'd probably been hoping nobody was out there to overhear them. Now, he probably hoped someone was. Trip hadn't ever noticed that he was shy about sharing his exploits.\n\n\"Speaking of experience,\" Leftie said, \"I've been trying to work up the courage to proposition Captain Kaika.\"\n\n\"I didn't think you were ever lacking in courage when it came to women.\"\n\n\"Normally not, but the rumors about her and the king being a couple are daunting. It's too bad that Cofah witch is a witch. What do you think of her? She's a beauty, huh? I'd like to see her without her parka on.\"\n\n\"Leftie, we haven't been on this mission long enough for you to be this horny.\" Trip held up a finger, leaned toward a brass funnel\u2014part of the ship's communications system\u2014and flicked the switch under it. \"Major Blazer, are you in the wheelhouse?\"\n\n\"Yup, I'm here with our new mission commander.\" Blazer's voice managed to drip sarcasm even though it sounded tinny and distorted coming out of the funnel.\n\nTrip suspected Leftie wasn't the only one who wouldn't yes, sir or yes, ma'am the members of the Cofah team. He assumed Blazer had only agreed to that conditionally, at least in her mind, and that once a dragon appeared, she would be barking orders.\n\nTrip wondered what the odds were of them making it to this ruins site without encountering any. Not good, he suspected.\n\nEven though the sorceress had announced that the dragon investigating the outpost had left, Trip had continued to sense it at the edge of his range. And he sensed it still. It had to be forty miles away, but he had the feeling it had an eye on them. The presence of the dragon-slaying swords might be keeping it away. He wouldn't assume that. The bronze dragon in the Pirate Isles had proven that his kind weren't so terrified of the blades that they would be swayed from their goals.\n\n\"We should be ready to lift off in about five minutes,\" Trip said.\n\n\"Good,\" Blazer said.\n\nAs soon as he stepped away from the horn, Leftie said, \"A week is a long time, Trip. And it's getting closer to two now. You know I'm used to having company any time I want it.\"\n\n\"And that you want it often, yes.\"\n\n\"Any strapping young man should.\" Leftie peered into the passageway again. \"Seriously, what do you think of the witch? Normally, I'd steer clear of anything to do with magic, and happily sign a petition that would see her hanged, but\u2026\"\n\nTrip froze, staring at the gauge, chilled by his friend's casual words.\n\n\"I honestly was never expecting witches to be sexy. Like, in all the books, they're old and warty, unless they shape-change into young women to lure men away, and only afterward, the men find out they were disgusting. But Mrs. Zirkander is a real beauty, and this Cofah woman, man, she's got that exotic look from way in the west.\"\n\n\"Those with dragon blood are just people,\" Trip said. \"I imagine they can be beautiful or not, the same as anyone else. Luck of the gods.\"\n\n\"I can't help but wonder what it would be like to be with one. Do you think they do witchy things in bed? And if so, what would they be?\" Leftie managed to look appalled, horrified, and intrigued at the same time.\n\nGiven his prejudices, Trip couldn't believe he was considering it at all. Trip had been too worried about the loathing the sorceress had been sending his way to think of her as a sexual being.\n\n\"Witchy things?\" a woman asked from the passageway.\n\nLeftie jumped, cracking his head on the low doorjamb.\n\n\"Shit,\" he blurted, spinning around. He took a step into the passageway, looking like he meant to flee from the newcomer. But he glanced at Trip, clenched his jaw, and stepped back into the fuel room.\n\nThe sorceress appeared in the doorway, and Leftie backed farther into the room. To get away from her? Or did he have some notion of protecting Trip?\n\nTrip silently echoed his friend's curse. He'd been doing his best to avoid Kiadarsa. He wasn't too worried about the physical threat she posed, but he did worry that she would reveal what he was to his team. It had been clear she knew he had dragon blood. \"The mage,\" she'd called him. She had to be making assumptions that he had powers and training based on the fact that he had Jaxi. Trip didn't know if that was a good thing or not. Maybe she would leave him alone if she believed he might be her equal when it came to flinging magic around. But what if she wanted to challenge him?\n\nRealizing she might be trying to read his thoughts, Trip attempted to put that bank vault around his mind. \"Can I help you find something, ma'am?\"\n\nLeftie's eyebrow twitched at the honorific, but he didn't mention push-ups.\n\n\"I've actually found what I'm looking for.\" Kiadarsa squinted at him. She liked to do that. Scrutinize him.\n\nAnd he sensed her trying to probe his mind, too.\n\nBank vault, bank vault. Jaxi, you hear me?\n\nHe had left both soulblades in the cabin he and Leftie had been given, since he'd had to crawl through ductwork and clamber up on the framework of the envelope earlier. Doing so with swords dangling from one's hips was difficult. But now, he felt naked without the weapons close at hand.\n\nOf course, I hear you. I'm one deck above you, not on the other side of the world. Though I'm fairly certain I could hear your shouting from there too.\n\nJust checking. I have a visitor.\n\nSo I see. Perhaps you can interest her in Leftie. Since he wants to know about her witchy things.\n\nTrip felt somewhat comforted to know Jaxi was monitoring the situation, even if she was doing it irreverently.\n\nReverence is for minions, not mighty soulblades.\n\nI feel like you would get along well with that bronze dragon we met.\n\nUnlikely. He was on the dull side. One expects more from dragons.\n\n\"I'd like to speak with you\u2014Trip, was it?\" Kiadarsa wore a dubious expression as she said his name.\n\nHe shrugged. \"You can call me Telryn Yert, if you want.\"\n\nShe blinked. \"Is that your mage name?\"\n\n\"My what?\"\n\nShe didn't answer, merely staring at him, and he worried he'd made a mistake. Could she do something with his name?\n\n\"He's a pilot,\" Leftie told her slowly, as if he were explaining the situation to someone particularly dim.\n\n\"Yes, thanks for the tip.\" Kiadarsa waved a dismissive hand at Leftie. \"Run along, will you? I want to have a conversation with your friend, and I think he would prefer it be a private one.\"\n\nShe smiled at Trip, a knowing smile.\n\nHis stomach did a nervous flip. He had a feeling his bank vault hadn't been effective, or she'd just figured out from his reactions that he was keeping things from his comrades.\n\nHer smile remained, but her eyes narrowed in speculation. Or\u2026 concentration?\n\nThe probe he'd sensed before returned in more force, raking over his mind.\n\n\"I'm going to get irritated if you keep attempting to invade my privacy,\" Trip said, letting his voice cool.\n\nIf she truly believed him a trained sorcerer, would she be probing him so? Wouldn't she worry it would anger him? He hoped she hadn't noticed the lack of soulblades in the vicinity to protect him.\n\n\"I'm certain I don't know what you mean.\" Kiadarsa flicked her fingers at Leftie again. \"Leave.\"\n\n\"Nah,\" Leftie said, feet planted. \"I think he'd like me to stay here with him, to make sure you don't do anything witchy to him.\"\n\n\"And how will you do that?\"\n\nLeftie puffed out his chest and dropped a hand to the butt of his pistol.\n\nShe rolled her eyes. Leftie's belt unbuckled, and his trousers dropped to his ankles.\n\n\"Shit,\" he blurted for the second time in five minutes, lunging down to grab them.\n\nKiadarsa smirked at Trip, as if they were colleagues sharing a joke. Hardly that.\n\nAs soon as Leftie had his belt buckled again, Trip patted him on the shoulder. \"It'll be all right. I'll talk to her.\"\n\n\"Alone?\" Leftie scowled at both of them. \"I don't think that's a good idea.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's not, but I'll do it anyway.\"\n\nThe deck tilted slightly underfoot, the airship lifting off. That should mean Trip's time as mechanic was over, and he could get some sleep. Assuming the sorceress didn't say something to give him nightmares. Or do \"witchy things\" to him.\n\nDespite his words, Leftie didn't move. He wore a mulish expression and crossed his arms over his chest. Though only for a second. Then he shifted his hands to his hips, one finger hooking around his belt. To keep it up if she tried to drop it again, no doubt.\n\nKiadarsa met his eyes and said, \"Go.\"\n\nTrip sensed the magical compulsion\u2014the power\u2014in the command even before Leftie took a step toward the door. But he only took one step, then halted with a scowl.\n\nTrip sensed her gathering more power to try again, and before he could consider if it was wise to challenge her in any way, he stepped between the two of them, holding a hand toward her.\n\n\"Don't,\" he said as coldly as he could. Hoping Jaxi would protect him, he turned his back to her and gripped Leftie's shoulder. He deliberately did not try to persuade him with anything except words. \"Come on, give us ten minutes, Leftie, will you?\" He tried a smile, though he didn't feel amused in the least. \"If we have a good time, I'll tell you all about it.\"\n\nLeftie grunted. \"I'd leave in a second and hang a scarf on your doorknob on the way out if I thought that was what you had in mind.\"\n\n\"Good to know.\" Trip shooed Leftie toward the door.\n\nThat mulish expression remained, and Trip thought Leftie might refuse to be shooed\u2014would it be unmanly to ask Jaxi to help foist him out?\u2014but he finally grumbled, \"Fine, fine, sacrifice yourself to a dragon if you want.\"\n\nHe stomped out and slammed the door. Outside, Trip sensed him taking one step, putting his back to the wall opposite the door, crossing his arms over his chest, and glowering.\n\nEven though Leftie's babbling about women and sports\u2014but especially women\u2014could grow old, Trip felt lucky to have someone who would watch out for him. He believed he could count Rysha as someone like that now, too, even though he hadn't known her for long. Some people had legions of friends like that\u2014Trip wondered how many people would take a bullet for General Zirkander\u2014but for him, he felt lucky to have two.\n\nWhen he turned reluctantly to face Kiadarsa, he found her studying him again. Would he have to threaten her once more? Would it do any good? Probably not. At least, he didn't sense her probing his mind this time. She merely looked him up and down with her eyes. It still felt invasive.\n\nHe didn't know if it was within his power, but he attempted to exude some of the aura, the presence, that he'd sensed from the dragons. And from her when she'd been doing the mage equivalent of puffing up her feathers.\n\nTo his surprise, she stepped back, her mouth parting as her gaze jerked to his face.\n\nHe started to feel relieved, hoping it had worked and that she would leave him alone with her mind and her eyes, but she recovered and looked him up and down again. If anything, it was worse, with more sexual interest in her gaze now.\n\n\"What do you want to talk about?\" Trip refrained from asking what she found so damn fascinating about him. It wasn't as if he was gorgeous and women couldn't keep their eyes off him.\n\n\"Who are you working for?\"\n\nHe arched his eyebrows and pointed to the tag on his parka that read Iskandian Army.\n\nShe snorted. \"No mage with your power is going to be a stupid soldier in the army.\"\n\nPower? Was his attempt to radiate some truly working? Or did she assume he had power because she thought Jaxi had been given to him? That he'd earned her through some deed and display of great sorcery?\n\n\"Actually, I'm an officer in the army,\" Trip said.\n\nAnother snort. \"Sure, you are. With a soulblade.\"\n\nAh, yes, she was basing things on the presence of Jaxi.\n\n\"You're clearly somebody's spy, but not one of ours, right?\" Kiadarsa cocked her head. \"I would have heard of you if you were aligned with the Cofah. I used to work for Prince Varlok. Until a better offer came along. I know most of the sorcerers of any worth in Cofahre. There aren't that many these days, sadly. Not with any real power.\" She grasped her chin as she studied him. \"I don't care if you are somebody's spy unless it gets in the way of my mission again. The last person to get in the way was\u2014\" she bared her teeth, \"\u2014intolerable.\" Her eyes narrowed again. \"One of the dragon alliances didn't send you, did they?\"\n\nDragon alliances? Trip did his best to keep his face expressionless. He'd already made a mistake by allowing his confusion to show at the term \"mage name.\" Jaxi was right. Long before this mission, he should have gone to the capital for lessons from Sardelle. If only he'd known.\n\n\"Let me ask you a question,\" Trip said, figuring he should get information if there was any chance he could. He also wondered at her comment about a \"better offer\" than working for the prince. What could that be?\n\nHer eyebrows rose. \"Do you need to?\"\n\nWas that insinuation that she thought he could read her mind? Or that Jaxi could? She hadn't pointed out the lack of a soulblade on his hip. Maybe she knew the swords were on the deck above.\n\n\"I prefer being polite.\"\n\n\"That's surprising. Unless you are used to working with dragons and having to step lightly.\"\n\nNot sure what to make of that statement, he said, \"My grandmother always told me to be a gentleman.\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\"\n\n\"Will you tell me about this spy that betrayed you?\" Trip asked.\n\n\"Jylea wouldn't appreciate me sharing that story with strangers.\"\n\n\"Even those who are now aligned with you and will assist you in destroying the portal?\"\n\nShe hesitated. Thoughtfully? Uncertainly?\n\nFor once, Trip wished he did have the ability to read people's minds.\n\n\"For the moment, Jylea and I have agreed that we will work with you and your team, yes,\" she said. \"But as I've already told you, I suspect you work for someone other than the Iskandians. Is destroying the portal truly what you wish to do?\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed, and he expected her to try to probe his mind again, but she did not, at least not that he could detect.\n\n\"Of course.\" Trip made himself gaze back into her eyes, even though he didn't find it comfortable. On the chance that it would help, he tried to will her to answer. \"Who betrayed you? Why are you so sure we're at cross purposes?\"\n\nKiadarsa stepped toward him and licked her lips. Trip noticed those lips, along with the rest of her face. She was, as Leftie had pointed out, quite attractive. But if she had seduction or who knew what in mind, he wouldn't fall for it. Not that he could imagine her seducing him. Surely, if she wanted information, Leftie would be easy to read\u2014and happy to go along with a seduction. And he was the one with a face that made women want to look twice.\n\n\"A dragon,\" she said. \"Tophurnikus, as we found out later. But Toph was what he introduced himself as. He came in human form, a beautiful man with flowing blond hair\u2014golden hair\u2014and deep golden eyes that you could fall into. That I did fall into. As did Jylea. We ladies had quite the adventurous night during one of the blizzards.\" Kiadarsa smiled, her first self-deprecating smile.\n\nTrip had no idea what to make of it\u2014or the story so far\u2014but he nodded and said, \"Go on.\"\n\nIt seemed incredulous that she was sharing something with him, and he figured he shouldn't trust any of it, but he might learn something, even from lies. And she did go on.\n\n\"Toph claimed to be an Iskandian, but years gone from his homeland. An archaeologist and a treasure hunter. He knew all about dragon ruins, and we talked him into joining our team. While Aeolus was away, foolishly.\"\n\n\"Who is that?\" Trip had learned the rest of the Cofah researchers' and soldiers' names while he'd been working with them on repairs, or so he thought. He didn't remember that one.\n\n\"Who was that, you mean. A bronze dragon that was found and released from one of the three ancient stasis prisons around the world.\"\n\nTrip had no idea what she was talking about\u2014three prisons?\u2014but he nodded as if this wasn't news to him.\n\n\"He was an ally who was sent down here to work with us, a Cofah dragon from the old days, and one loyal to\u2026 another dragon ally. He even let me ride him, as he'd had a rider once, long ago, he said. He was helping us with our research before Toph showed up.\"\n\n\"The old dragon didn't simply know where the portal was?\" Trip had assumed all of the magical creatures would know that, that they would be able to sense it from afar, even if they hadn't themselves come through it.\n\n\"No. It was tampered with\u2014enshrouded I should say\u2014so it's no longer easy to detect, even for dragons. Also, we had other questions related to it.\"\n\n\"Such as how to destroy it,\" he guessed.\n\n\"Indeed. Aeolus was helping us investigate other ruins, some that have been here since before his birth, to try to find all of the answers we sought. He said to be wary of any other dragons we encountered until we were ready to make our move, but I wasn't wary enough. He had gone off hunting and then to an alliance meeting when Toph came, pretending not to be a dragon, but simply a human whose goals were similar to ours. He worked with us, but he secretly guided us toward the wrong conclusions, and he used his powers to affect our minds.\"\n\nKiadarsa squinted at Trip, and his heart beat a little faster as he wondered if she had sensed his feeble attempt to get her to talk. Had that even done anything?\n\n\"I'm not a dragon,\" he said dryly, then immediately felt stupid for saying it. As if a sorceress would believe him one under any circumstances.\n\n\"No,\" she agreed. \"I would sense that. I mean, I wouldn't be fooled again, I don't think. Toph was very good at dampening his aura and hiding what he was. I just thought he was a human with some dragon blood.\"\n\n\"But he was a dragon that wanted to ensure you never found the portal?\"\n\n\"Exactly. I believe now that we may have actually searched the right ruins without knowing it, with him using his magic to hide clues from our eyes.\" Her hand strayed to her hip. To a pocket? The one with that page of notes folded up inside? \"When Aeolus returned, he knew exactly what Toph was, and he soon saw how he'd been tricking us. He challenged him, even though he was just a bronze.\" She looked away, toward the dark porthole. A few snowflakes drifted past it. \"The battle was the day before yesterday. The two took their natural dragon form. Right in our camp. It didn't go well. For the camp or for Aeolus.\"\n\n\"The gold won,\" Trip assumed.\n\n\"He might not have if it had been one-on-one. Aeolus was an old and crafty dragon, who had survived many wars. But Tophurnikus had many allies he could call to help. And he did. Dragons who resented the idea of humans disturbing their portal. We\u2014the researchers\u2014all ran to the cave when we sensed them coming. Aeolus told us to. I felt like we were abandoning him, especially when Toph had already injured him, and was up there in the air, wheeling about and cackling into our minds. But Aeolus flew off, trying to lead them from the camp so we could make it to the cave. He'd put some glamour on that cave early on, making it so it would be harder for other dragons to see into it. We made it inside, but not before I sensed his death. Not before I heard the laughter of Tophurnikus. Not before I sensed that they'd razed our camp.\"\n\nJaxi? Can you hear me? Are you getting this?\n\nKiadarsa had turned back to him, though she gazed at his chest now instead of into his eyes. Trip didn't know what to make of the story. It seemed to match up with what Dreyak had seen of the camp, of multiple dragons fighting, but why would Kiadarsa go from glaring at him and oozing distrust and hatred to standing before him and confessing all this? Confessing a story that did nothing to make her shine, since she and her colleagues had been duped. Did she have something to gain from telling it? Did she want his sympathy for some reason? Or was it all a lie meant to trick him into revealing something?\n\nOh, yes, Jaxi said. This is quite entertaining. I'm munching on garlic-roasted pumpkin seeds up here and listening.\n\nCan you tell if she's lying?\n\nNo, I can't read her. She's better at bank vaults than you are.\n\nI think everyone is.\n\nGive it time. You only learned the exercise today. Sorcery takes a lifetime to master.\n\nKiadarsa stepped closer to him, her gaze still toward his chest instead of his eyes. Her demeanor was much different from the confident one she had come in with, or the challenging one from earlier in the day. She stopped less than a foot away from him.\n\nTrip was positive it wasn't manly to panic when a woman came close, but sweat dampened his palms, and he could feel his heart slamming against his ribs.\n\nIs she trying to seduce me? he asked Jaxi. If a telepathic voice could come out squeaky, he was sure his did.\n\nI'm not sure. This is quite interesting.\n\nPumpkin seeds interesting?\n\nKiadarsa rested a hand on his shoulder, her thumb brushing the side of his neck.\n\nIndeed. The seduction guess seems most likely, though I'm not sure what she wants or why she believes you're a spy. She could just be drawn to you, I suppose.\n\nDrawn to me? Jaxi, women aren't drawn to me. Trust me, I'd know if I had this power by now. The urge to bolt filled him.\n\nWell, other than Sardelle, have you been around any sorceresses? Women with dragon blood?\n\nI don't know any sorceresses, and for the other, how would I know?\n\nYou'd be able to sense it.\n\nThen no, he said, though he highly doubted he could have sensed anything two weeks ago. Until Jaxi had started giving him these mental exercises, his sixth sense had been erratic.\n\nKiadarsa raised her eyes, but not all the way to his, just to his lips. If she tried to kiss him, he was going to sprint out of the room. Up to the deck to talk to a normal woman. Rysha. Yes, he longed to run and find her now.\n\n\"I've told you my lamentable tale,\" Kiadarsa murmured. \"Will you share with me who you're working for? I need to know\u2026 I can't make the same mistake again. My people are counting on me.\"\n\nTrip had been prepared to flee, but he made his feet stay rooted to the deck. If he ran now, she would think he was hiding something.\n\n\"I am Iskandian,\" he said firmly. \"I serve King Angulus. Nobody else.\"\n\nHe expected some sign of disgust from her, but she seemed too busy considering his lips.\n\n\"I mistrust Iskandians deeply,\" she murmured. \"And those with powerful auras who claim to be Iskandians, as well.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a personal problem.\" The flippant words came out before he could think better of them. He didn't want to make light of the story she'd told him, but all of this was too strange, and he was positive she was toying with him, wanting to use him for some reason.\n\nTo his surprise, she chuckled. Then she inhaled deeply, as if she was breathing in his scent.\n\nHe found it bewildering. He knew his scent wasn't anything appealing right now.\n\n\"I have to go,\" he said, taking a step back.\n\nHe would have taken five steps back\u2014or five hundred\u2014at least enough to dislodge her hand from his shoulder, but he bumped against the door.\n\nHe expected that hand to dig in, to try and hold him there. But when she looked up, meeting his eyes, she had that scrutinizing look in hers again, as if he were some puzzle she meant to figure out. She drew her hand back and looked at it, then lowered it.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, the weird seductive voice shifting back to a more normal tone. \"Of course. As do I.\"\n\nShe stepped toward the door, but he was still standing in front of it. She frowned at him, the challenge back in her eyes. \"Let me pass.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" He stepped aside.\n\nShe strode out, shutting it behind her.\n\nTrip pushed a hand through his hair. Jaxi, what just happened?\n\nI have some ideas, but I'd like to cogitate on them before sharing. It's too bad Sardelle isn't here. She's more of a historian than I am.\n\nWhy would he need a historian to shed light on his women issues?\n\nSince Sardelle isn't here, you should ask Rysha. She's a historian, one who didn't fear studying the magical. Or at least magic related to dragons. I bet she would have some ideas.\n\nI'm not telling her the sorceress wanted to get cuddly with me.\n\nWhy not?\n\nBecause\u2026\n\nAh, because you want to get cuddly with her, and she may be upset? Well, if you choose to stay ignorant, there's nothing I can do about it.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Trip muttered and walked out." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Rysha rested her hands on the railing of the airship, gazing toward the snow falling from the black clouds obscuring the stars. The flakes dropped straight down and disappeared into darkness below the hull of the craft, the ship's running lanterns doing little to drive back the night.\n\nHow high were they? A thousand feet? Two thousand? Rysha couldn't make out the icy fields below and wondered how Major Blazer could keep them on course in weather like this.\n\nShe shivered inside her parka. She knew she should crawl into the bunk she had been given, burying herself under the pile of furs atop it, but the quiet of the night drew her. There was something magical about being out here, sailing through territory she'd read about but never thought she would visit. If only the constant threat of dragons didn't make it dangerous.\n\nShe imagined being an archaeologist, out there exploring the ruins those dragons had left long ago. Few people had spent much time down here in the perennial cold of the Antarctic, searching for signs of past civilizations, human and otherwise. She wagered there were a lot of temples and caves that mankind had never set foot in.\n\n\"Didn't expect to find you out here, Ravenwood,\" came Kaika's voice from behind her. She ambled up to the railing, the shadows and her fur-trimmed hood hiding her face, only the bright orange tip of one of Blazer's cigars visible. The sweet tobacco scent mingled with something else\u2014vanilla?\u2014and lingered in the air. \"Figured you'd be curled up and sharing body heat with your strapping young captain. I couldn't help but notice there aren't any heaters in the cabins. I bet most of the crew sleeps in the boiler room when they're flying around down here.\"\n\n\"My strapping young captain? Trip?\"\n\n\"I haven't seen you making moon eyes at Duck. Or at me. Those are the only options for captains.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, but even if moon-eyeing were appropriate during a mission, Dorfindral wouldn't approve of it.\"\n\n\"So, leave him in the boiler room.\"\n\n\"He doesn't like being left behind.\"\n\n\"If that's true, and he can let you know that, that's disturbing.\" Kaika leaned her elbows against the railing and peered into the night ahead.\n\n\"Doesn't yours give you the feeling it's\u2026 feeling things?\"\n\n\"Maybe, but I've been ignoring it. And keeping it in its box whenever we're not in battle.\" Kaika looked pointedly at the strap Rysha had found that let her keep Dorfindral in its scabbard slung across her back.\n\n\"You think I should be doing that?\" Since Rysha couldn't sense dragons coming from a distance, the way Jaxi could\u2014or maybe that was Trip warning them\u2014she'd deemed it wise to never leave the sword out of reach.\n\n\"It's up to you. You know more about those things than I do. But\u2026 I've seen a friend killed by one. By accident. Someone spoke some of those command words to the sword to get it all riled up, and it's like a rabid dog once it gets going. Hard to calm it down even with the other command words. 'Course we didn't know how to tell it to stand down back then, but I've still seen Kasandral try to turn on people, even when those words were spoken.\"\n\n\"Your friend had dragon blood?\"\n\n\"No, he just got in the way. Between the sword and someone who did. Sardelle, to be exact.\"\n\n\"I'm being careful, and I'm aware of when it tries to manipulate me.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Kaika withdrew the cigar and offered it to Rysha. \"Puff? I won a couple off Blazer in a bet. I never much liked smelling like smoke when there might be enemies around, but it warms you up when the air is cold enough to freeze your nose hairs off.\"\n\nRysha snorted, her nose hairs were doing fine. It was cold, especially when she was used to the temperate, if rainy, climate around the capital, but she didn't think it was more than ten degrees below freezing. She wouldn't want to be here in the winter, but that was a few months away.\n\nStill, out of curiosity and some vague sense that soldiers were supposed to smoke and drink together when off-duty, she accepted the cigar.\n\n\"Pull the smoke into your mouth, hold it there a bit to enjoy the nuances of the flavor, then exhale through your nostrils. That's the best way to do it.\"\n\nThat sounded complicated, but Rysha lifted the cigar to her lips. The vanilla scent did smell appealing. Unfortunately, she inhaled more than she was probably supposed to, and thick warm smoke invaded her lungs. It irritated everything along the route, and she ended up coughing all over the railing.\n\nWith tears pricking her eyes, she handed the cigar back.\n\nKaika chuckled and accepted it. \"Takes a few tries to get used to it.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Rysha rasped, wiping her eyes. \"What was the bet?\"\n\nKaika grinned at her. \"This morning, when you were walking on the ice and reading, Blazer wagered you'd fall on your ass at least three times on the way to the cave. I said you wouldn't.\"\n\nRysha wrinkled her nose, not sure whether to be offended that she'd served as entertainment for the senior officers or pleased that Kaika had bet against her falling.\n\n\"I saw you on the obstacle course,\" Kaika said. \"You only look like you'd be a klutz.\"\n\n\"Was that\u2026 a compliment?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but I thank you for not falling.\" Kaika drew deeply on the cigar and blew out rings of smoke, clearly getting more out of the experience than Rysha had. \"Got a question for you, my scholarly prot\u00e9g\u00e9. Or I guess you would say that I'm seeking some confirmation.\"\n\n\"Yes?\" Rysha arched her eyebrows, glad for a chance to be helpful. That was more appealing than being the subject of bets.\n\n\"Jaxi's not the only reason our new swords want to attack Trip, is she?\"\n\nRysha's shoulders\u2014and eyebrows\u2014drooped. She didn't want to talk about Trip behind his back, and she also didn't want to divulge his secrets. \"Between Jaxi and the new soulblade, he's carrying a lot of magic around.\"\n\nKaika slanted her a flat look.\n\nRysha sighed. Did she truly have to confirm this for her? It sounded like she already knew.\n\n\"It took me a while to twig to it,\" Kaika went on. \"Because of Jaxi. But looking back, I've gotten that feeling from him since the beginning\u2014that he's a little odd.\"\n\n\"He's not odd.\"\n\nKaika chuckled. \"Don't think I've run into any sorcerers yet, just sorceresses, so I don't have a basis for comparison, but he reminds me a little of Phelistoth and Bhrava Saruth when they're walking around in human form. They can pass for normal if people aren't paying much attention, but there is this sense of otherness about them that puts you on edge. Of course, Bhrava Saruth can turn on his charms. Hm, that's not the right word. Allure, maybe? Anyway, when he turns it on and crooks a finger at you, you're perfectly willing to have sex with him, no matter what stupid things he's saying about you being one of his worshipful followers.\"\n\nRysha didn't know what to say to that. She had never met either of Iskandia's ally dragons, in human form or any other, and she hadn't met any sorcerers, either. She'd barely met Sardelle, and she wasn't sure if she had any kind of allure that went beyond standard human beauty. Obviously, General Zirkander was drawn to her, but was it because of dragon blood in her veins? Rysha had read of such things. It had generally referred to dragons, but the humans who had been direct descendants of dragons had apparently had a modicum of their allure too. As with magic, the farther removed from the dragon one was, the less powerful it was.\n\n\"You haven't, have you?\" Rysha asked, mostly because she didn't want to discuss Trip's dragon blood.\n\n\"What? Had sex with Bhrava Saruth?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nKaika took another puff from the cigar. \"I got permission first. From my steady fellow. Sometimes, if you get an opportunity to do something that crazy, you just have to do it.\"\n\nRysha stared at her. She hadn't truly expected the answer to be yes.\n\n\"I told him that if he ever gets the chance to sleep with a female dragon, I would be fine with that. He doesn't have quite as adventurous a soul as I have, though, so I'm not sure he'd actually do that. Unless the dragon used her dragonly allure on him.\"\n\n\"It's called scylori,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"Oh, there's a term?\"\n\n\"Yes. And you're right, dragons can compel humans to do things against their wishes. Or make them believe they aren't against their wishes.\"\n\n\"I wasn't compelled. I was just curious. And he was amenable.\"\n\n\"Was it worth\u2026\" Rysha didn't want to say betraying her lover, because it didn't sound like it had been that exactly, but she couldn't imagine a man being excited about his woman sleeping with a dragon\u2014or anyone else.\n\n\"Nah, not really. He was very much focused on his own pleasure. You'd be better off with Trip. I suspect he'd be much more appreciative than a dragon. And that he'd be amenable to doing whatever you asked.\"\n\nRysha blushed. How did they keep ending up talking about Trip? She wasn't sure if doing it in this context was better than discussing his blood or not.\n\n\"You do know what to ask for, right?\" Kaika grinned at her.\n\n\"Of course I know. I'm not sixteen, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Yes, I forgot. You've kissed three boys. And had sex with one of them. That's good. Just remember, it's fine and good to polish his sword if he likes it and you like it, but make sure he knows how and where to use his tongue. You want to have a good time while you're cuddling, right?\"\n\n\"Ma'am, we haven't even\u2014\" Kissed, she was going to add, but Kaika kept speaking.\n\n\"And once you're familiar with each other's tastes, don't be afraid to bring in some props and toys. You know the Gilded Lady in the capital? Over on Aspen Lane? They sell some quality stuff, and everything comes with instructions and diagrams, so you don't have to feel awkward about asking the sales woman. Take him along too. You can pick out things together. If you want a list of recommended products, just ask. I'd be happy to provide it.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, when you told General Zirkander that I was your prot\u00e9g\u00e9, I was very honored, but I'd really imagined you teaching me about guns and bombs and how to kick men's butts rather than\u2026 products.\"\n\nKaika clapped her on the shoulder. \"We can do all those things too. I'd be delighted to teach you about demolitions. And now that we're not cramped up in those fliers, we can definitely practice with the swords. First thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"I would like that.\" Rysha remembered her battle with the sorceress, how the woman had been more experienced and had been getting the upper hand toward the end, even with Dorfindral guiding Rysha's movements. It would be a good idea to\u2014\n\n\"Ma'am?\" Leftie called, jogging toward them. \"Is that you, Captain Kaika?\"\n\n\"It's me.\" Kaika turned her back to the railing, propping her elbow on it.\n\n\"Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to ask you, er, warn you about something.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"It's the Cofah sorceress. I think she might be trying to\u2014\" Leftie glanced toward the doorway he'd exited from. \"I don't know why she would pick him, but I think she might be trying to control Trip. Is that possible? I mean, I know women can seduce men, and vice versa, but Trip's not very\u2014I mean, he's sort of the opposite of oversexed, you know? But if she's a witch and has powers she can use on him\u2014I don't know why she would, but she came down to the gas room and wanted to talk to him alone, and was looking him up and down. Honestly, I don't know why, except that he's the highest ranking after you and Blazer. Well, and Duck, but Duck's not a lady's man, and Trip's all-right looking, don't you think? It's not his face that gives him trouble with women. But what could she want from him? That sword, do you think? He seemed willing to give it to her without seduction.\"\n\nRysha shifted uneasily at the rapid flow of words\u2014and the topic. She hadn't heard Leftie babble and trip over sentences before, so it took her a few seconds to realize he was nervous. And worried.\n\n\"She's alone with him now?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"And you're sure\u2014\" Kaika glanced at Rysha, \"\u2014it's not by his choice?\"\n\nLeftie hesitated, also glancing at her.\n\nRysha's gut tied itself in a knot.\n\n\"He did ask me to leave them in privacy, but he's not\u2014he never\u2014it's not like him.\"\n\nKaika scratched her jaw. \"I suppose it's possible that sorceresses can have magical allure too.\"\n\n\"I really don't want to hear about this woman's allures,\" Rysha said, trying to sound tough and casual, as if she wasn't worried in the least about Trip being allured. \"But if he's in danger, we should help him. He knows a lot about\u2026\"\n\nWhat? He'd just transferred to Wolf Squadron and the capital, so he wouldn't know any military secrets there, and he didn't have a background in dragons or archaeology or magic.\n\n\"Very little?\" Kaika offered.\n\n\"Machines,\" Rysha said sturdily. It wasn't as if Trip was ignorant. He just didn't have specialties that she could imagine an enemy caring about.\n\n\"I'm sure she wants to seduce him to learn all about making gun mounts,\" Kaika said dryly.\n\n\"Ma'am,\" Leftie said, frowning. \"I don't trust her or any of them, and I don't think we should be unconcerned by things out of the ordinary happening.\"\n\n\"Don't you think Jaxi will protect him if he's in there against his wishes?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"Is a soulblade more powerful than a sorceress?\" Leftie sounded skeptical.\n\n\"I have no idea.\" Kaika looked at Rysha.\n\n\"It would depend on what era the soulblade came from and the abilities of the original sorcerer,\" Rysha said, the words sounding distant to her ears. She was barely aware of answering. As stupid as it was, she was imagining Trip down in that room, with that sorceress seducing him.\n\nWould he actually fall for that? The woman had been so antagonistic when they'd met, and that had been less than ten hours earlier.\n\n\"It's also possible the Cofah soulblade would interfere,\" Rysha said, looking toward the door. She wanted to go check on Trip and make sure untoward things weren't happening.\n\nBut the door opened as she watched it. Dorfindral sent a thrum of excitement through her, and she knew who was coming out before he stepped into the light of the lantern mounted there.\n\n\"Meyusha,\" she grumbled to the blade.\n\nSome of the Cofah scientists were out on the deck at the opposite end of the ship, but Trip looked right at Rysha, Kaika, and Leftie even though they were in the shadows and their parkas hid their faces. He strode past the parked fliers and toward them. There were, Rysha decided, many clues that he had dragon blood, for those interested in looking.\n\nAs he walked closer, his step determined, she tried to decide if he looked like a man who'd recently been seduced. Though what that would look like, she didn't know. The sorceress hadn't been wearing lip paint that she might have left on his clothing or his neck. His eyes didn't blaze with triumph and self-satisfaction or with chagrin. She told itself it was unlikely anything had happened. Maybe he was coming to report that the woman had tried to seduce him and failed.\n\n\"Two dragons, ma'am,\" he told Kaika without preamble.\n\n\"Shit. Where?\"\n\n\"Twenty miles that way.\" Trip pointed to the left. \"They flew to that distance quickly, and now they're paralleling us.\"\n\nEveryone looked in the indicated direction, even though, with the snow falling, they couldn't see one mile, much less twenty.\n\n\"They're silver dragons,\" Trip added. \"They won't be able to breathe fire, but they can destroy the airship with mental and physical attacks.\"\n\n\"We should get into the fliers and be ready,\" Leftie said. \"With passengers carrying those special swords.\"\n\n\"I'll report to Major Blazer,\" Trip said, and the two men jogged toward the wheelhouse together.\n\n\"Looks like we'll get all manner of sword-fighting practice on this trip,\" Kaika said.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Rysha said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Trip woke with a start to the sound of steel clashing against steel.\n\nImagining the battle already underway\u2014and why hadn't anyone told him?\u2014he lurched upright, cracking his knee against the flight stick of his flier. He stood in his cockpit, looking all around the deck of the airship, expecting to see sign of the dragons. He'd kept a mental eye on them the night before, standing with Blazer in the wheelhouse so he could let her know when they veered toward them, but the two silvers had maintained a course paralleling the airship and never drawing closer than twenty miles.\n\nHe, Duck, and Leftie had finally been ordered to sleep next to their fliers so they would be ready to take off at a second's notice. He'd opted for sleeping in his cockpit, buried under his fur and a parka. Daylight had come, though the snow continued to fall, and the gray clouds made it hard to tell what time it was. He stretched his senses out to check on the dragons and found that they continued to parallel the airship.\n\nTrip found the source of the commotion at the far rear of the airship, Kaika and Rysha leaping about and slashing with their dragon-slaying swords. It took him a moment to realize they were sparring with each other rather than battling some enemy.\n\n\"Seven gods, that's a racket,\" Leftie said, lurching upright in the next flier over. He, too, had opted to sleep in his cockpit, ready for action. Sort of. His leg hung over one side of the cockpit, his arm over the other, and his hair stuck up in so many directions it looked like lightning had struck him while he slept. He spotted the women, then slumped back in his seat. \"It would have been less alarming to wake up in a dragon's jaws.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to contact the dragons to see when that's scheduled?\" Trip asked.\n\n\"You can't do that, can you?\"\n\n\"I can do it.\" Trip patted Jaxi's scabbard to imply she would be the one handling the telepathic communication. \"I can't guarantee the dragons would answer.\"\n\nYou're asking that question yourself, hero.\n\nI wouldn't think dragon jaws would scare you. You can't be that palatable.\n\nTrue, but if my handler gets eaten, there's nobody left to carry me to interesting places. To unfrozen places.\n\nTrip clambered out of his flier, shivering as soon as he removed the fur. After taking care of biological needs, he looked for Major Blazer in the wheelhouse so he could update her on the dragons. But she was standing on the deck with Jylea, the two women holding mugs of coffee while watching the sparring match. Blazer also held a magazine in her gloved hand, though she seemed more interested in the swordplay. It amused Trip that the airship had a kitchen and a stove. So much more luxurious than travel by flier. But he wouldn't want to be stuck on the lumbering craft when enemies attacked.\n\nHe spotted Kiadarsa near the railing, gazing off in the direction of the dragons. Trip hurried past her, but not before she looked back at him, a long look over. He didn't acknowledge it. He didn't want to do anything to encourage her to make contact.\n\nBlazer and Jylea stopped their conversation when they noticed Trip approaching. Irritation flashed across Blazer's face, and he hesitated. She tucked her magazine under her arm and reached for her sword hilt\u2014the hilt of the chapaharii blade\u2014but halted before she touched it. Her hand hovered there for several long seconds. She took a deep breath, pulled her hand back, and withdrew her magazine again. It was folded open to what looked like sewing patterns for decorative squares. Not what he would have expected Blazer to read, but what did he know about women?\n\n\"Didn't mean to interrupt, ma'am,\" Trip said as he walked up warily, \"but I thought you'd want an update on the dragons' location.\"\n\n\"We've been getting updates from Kia,\" Jylea said blandly, looking toward her sorceress.\n\nTrip tried to decide if the statement contained censure. He didn't know what time it was, but feared he'd slept later than most people. That was surprising because he'd dozed off worried about the dragons, but he hadn't slept at all the previous night. His body had apparently decided to knock him out for as many hours as possible.\n\n\"Good,\" he said. \"Did they do anything in the night?\"\n\n\"They're maintaining their course and speed,\" Jylea said. \"I'm hoping that means it's a coincidence and that they have nothing to do with us.\"\n\n\"I don't think so, ma'am,\" Trip said. \"Even if they just happened to be heading the same way, it's unlikely they would perfectly match our speed. Dragons naturally fly faster than fliers and most certainly faster than airships.\"\n\n\"Did you just call my vessel slow, young man?\"\n\n\"I believe he did,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"Just in comparison to a dragon.\" Trip wondered if it was a good thing that Blazer was standing with the Cofah leader, jointly picking on him. Bonding with the enemy? \"Is there any terrain ahead of us that could potentially be hazardous? That an enemy might consider a good spot for an ambush?\"\n\nBlazer tilted her head. \"Would a dragon feel it needed to use trickery on us? To lay an ambush?\"\n\n\"We do have the swords. We drove off the other one and hurt it.\"\n\n\"Kia!\" Jylea called across the deck, waving for the sorceress to join them.\n\nTrip groaned inwardly and was tempted to slink away before she arrived. He could check on Kaika and Rysha. How long had they been sparring? Maybe they needed him to bring water.\n\nKiadarsa strode down the deck, her head high, looking much more like the sorceress from the cave than the woman who'd touched his shoulder in the gas room. She did not look at Trip as she approached. That relieved him. He felt more comfortable handling the tough sorceress than the odd one.\n\n\"We're about twelve hours from the ruins site we're going to check again, right, Kia?\" Jylea asked when she reached them.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Again?\" Blazer asked.\n\nKiadarsa and Jylea exchanged looks.\n\n\"Someone who proved untrustworthy was the one who reported there was nothing significant there,\" Jylea said. \"Upon further research, we believe it may indeed be the place we seek.\"\n\n\"Where is it?\" After sleeping for hours, Trip wasn't sure where they were. He sensed the ice fields stretching in all directions, but trusted Blazer, who'd been helping with navigation the night before, had a better idea.\n\n\"You'll find out when you need to,\" Jylea said.\n\n\"I'm just trying to figure out if there's a place we might be ambushed along the way.\"\n\nJylea's lips pressed together, and she looked toward Kiadarsa.\n\n\"It's flat the whole way,\" Kiadarsa said.\n\nWhat had they said the day before? That they couldn't reach the ruins site by dog sled because of places where the ice had melted? Creating an inland sea or lakes or some such?\n\nTrip gazed at Jylea, wishing he could pluck some information from her brain.\n\nHe'd no sooner had the thought than an image of a map floated into his mind. He recognized it as the one from the building in the outpost, the one with all the notes scribbled on ruins locations. He focused on the spot that Rysha had pointed to back in the Black Stag and that she'd also pointed out in the outpost. The words, what had they read?\n\nThe words appeared in his mind, as if he were reading them right there. Mount Eldercrag. Ice Caves. Cave. Dragon statues carved into a fissure. Three thousand years old, no markings. No evidence of recent use. Cave explorations unfruitful. Dragons in area.\n\nTrip twitched, realizing that sounded like an excellent place for a portal. Perhaps the words on that map had been inaccurate. If that proved true, the Iskandian team might not have needed to link up with the Cofah researchers, after all. They could have gone straight to that spot and\u2014\n\nWait, had he truly seen what Jylea was thinking? That wasn't one of his meager abilities.\n\nGuess again.\n\nGood morning, Jaxi.\n\nWe are heading to that location. I thought about mentioning it earlier, but you were snoozing like a dog in front of a fire crackling in a hearth.\n\nI wasn't nearly as warm.\n\nYes, it's odd that the Cofah didn't outfit an airship going to the Antarctic Circle with hearths, isn't it? And dogs. Since you haven't suggested to your lovely lieutenant that she should cuddle with you, you could at least keep warm with some dogs pressed against your back.\n\nInstead of answering, Trip considered the route ahead again. Now that he knew their destination, maybe he could better gauge what might be prompting the dragons to bide their time. He had no personal familiarity with the area, but he'd studied the maps.\n\nWould the dragons simply wait until the airship made it to the ruins to attack? Maybe they had more allies there, or something else that would make humans easier to slay. Or maybe\u2014\n\nThe inland sea, Trip thought with a lurch. The melted areas. If the dragons attacked there, they could sink the airship\u2014and the swords. To be lost forever in the depths of the Antarctic.\n\nHe looked toward the bow of the ship, wondering how close they were to that area now.\n\n\"You should learn to guard your thoughts better, Jylea,\" Kiadarsa said, squinting at Trip.\n\nJylea's eyes flew open, and she also looked at Trip.\n\nBlazer's brow furrowed, but she sipped her coffee and didn't comment.\n\n\"No,\" Trip said, thinking they believed he'd read Jylea's thoughts and discovered something enlightening. He had read them, according to Jaxi, but that wasn't what had enlightened him. \"I was thinking about what you said yesterday. That we had to fly instead of going on foot because of water blocking the way.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026\" Jylea raised her eyebrows.\n\n\"The dragons might wait and attack us there. If they were to bring us down on the ice, the dragon-slaying swords would be there for anyone to retrieve, but if they fell into the ocean\u2014how deep is it under the ice here?\"\n\n\"Approximately one mile,\" Jylea said.\n\n\"Then we have nothing that could go down and get them. They'd be lost forever.\"\n\n\"A sorceress could levitate\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Trip interrupted her as Kiadarsa also shook her head.\n\n\"Nobody can use magic on them,\" Kiadarsa said. \"Nor can anyone with dragon blood touch them. They would be stuck down there indefinitely.\"\n\n\"Then we can't let them fall in,\" Blazer said, her hand straying to the hilt of hers again. This time, she let it rest there, not trying to stop it.\n\nTrip hoped she was thinking of using it on dragons and not on him.\n\n\"How far are we from the spot?\" Trip asked Jylea. \"And how wide is it?\"\n\nShe looked at him without answering. Considering whether she should?\n\nHe understood why they wouldn't trust Iskandians in general, but why hesitate to answer in this situation? They were all on the airship together.\n\n\"You might as well tell him, Jylea,\" Kiadarsa said. \"You're not trained to keep secrets from mages.\"\n\nBlazer eyed Trip. Trip shrugged at her. Her gaze flicked toward his waist where Jaxi hung. He'd left the Cofah soulblade in the flier, but he'd learned his lesson and didn't go many places without Jaxi now. Even to the head.\n\nYes, and let me tell you how exciting it is to watch a man pee.\n\nCan't you turn your back?\n\nHow would that work? Her hilt pulsed a subtle gold for a moment.\n\nHe was fairly certain that was meant as a reminder of her swordness, but Jylea, who'd been looking at the blade, twitched. Then sighed.\n\n\"Only about a half hour,\" she said. \"And it's about twenty miles wide, so it won't take us long to cross it.\"\n\n\"Assuming there are no complications,\" Kiadarsa grumbled.\n\n\"It's fortunate we have so many mages among us now, isn't it?\" Jylea said.\n\n\"It may prove so\u2014that is still debatable. But even so, mages aren't the equivalent of dragons.\"\n\nBlazer gripped Trip's shoulder and nodded for him to walk with her. They headed closer to Rysha and Kaika's ongoing sparring session, and he hoped she just wanted to get a good look at that, rather than question him about the mage comments. Given the firmness of the grip on his shoulder, he doubted it.\n\nHe stopped before they got too close, because he didn't want the women, prompted by their swords, to feel the urge to run over and attack him. As it was, being surrounded by all those blades made him uneasy.\n\nBlazer stopped too and released him. They were out of the Cofahs' earshot, and she looked frankly at him. \"They're just calling you a mage because you're wandering around with a soulblade, right?\"\n\n\"Technically, two soulblades.\" Trip wondered if he could sidestep the question without outright lying.\n\nGeneral Zirkander hadn't been even remotely fazed by the idea of one of his pilots having some magical powers, but he was clearly an exception to the rule and not the example.\n\n\"Uh huh, but that's why they believe it, right?\"\n\nTrip believed Kiadarsa sensed that he had dragon blood, but he wasn't positive. He shrugged. \"I suppose it's a logical assumption on their part, and I haven't corrected it, since they're not exactly trustworthy allies.\"\n\n\"No, definitely not. But could our own evasiveness backfire on us? I'm inclined not to tell them anything, either, but what happens if they expect you to be able to hurl fireballs, and then you can't?\"\n\n\"Jaxi can.\"\n\n\"Will that be enough?\"\n\n\"Nothing she or a sorcerer could do against a dragon would be enough. That's why this is important.\" He gestured to the sparring women.\n\nSweat dripped from both their faces, and their movements were slower now, with longer pauses between attacks, than they had been when he first woke up. He was surprised they'd been going this long. Trip well remembered from his basic army training how even a few minutes of hand-to-hand combat could leave a man panting.\n\nHe was impressed with how much force the women threw behind their attacks. They definitely weren't taking their training session lightly. Kaika, he noticed, had whiplike movements, and seemed to get a lot of power from the speed of the blade even though the way she slung it around appeared almost effortless. Her brow wasn't as sweat-slathered as Rysha's, nor was she breathing as hard. She looked like she could go all day.\n\nRysha managed to block her attacks, but Trip thought she put more effort into it than Kaika did. Muscling the movements instead of relaxing her arms and letting everything flow. But he would probably be the same way. Telling the body to relax was one thing. Having it obey was another.\n\nThe swords did not appear to be influencing them, not the way Rysha's had the night she'd battled the sorceress. If that was true, and this was only her second time picking up a blade, Trip decided she was doing extremely well. She always seemed in balance, even when scurrying back under a flurry of blows, and he admired her athleticism. And her sheer determination.\n\nKaika launched a series of high attacks, forcing Rysha to parry above her head, before whipping her blade down toward her thigh. Rysha jumped back as she jerked her sword down, but she wasn't quite fast enough. Kaika's sword tapped the inside of her thigh.\n\n\"Thirty-seven,\" Kaika said, backing off. \"Break?\"\n\nRysha huffed out a breath and wiped away a damp lock of hair that had escaped her bun. Her spectacles were so fogged that Trip couldn't imagine how she'd seen any of those attacks.\n\n\"If you're tired, ma'am. I don't want to overwork you, since we may have a real battle coming.\"\n\n\"That's very thoughtful, what with my advanced age.\"\n\n\"Lieutenants have to be mindful of their elders.\"\n\n\"How many points have you gotten, Ravenwood?\" Blazer asked dryly.\n\n\"Uhm, I\u2026 believe I lost count.\" Rysha looked at Trip.\n\nHe braced himself, expecting the sword to turn it into an irritated glower, but she wore a sheepish expression instead.\n\n\"Because there have been so many?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"Yes, that's it.\"\n\n\"It's thirty-seven to two,\" Kaika said, smirking.\n\nShe grabbed a towel hanging from the railing. They would need to dry off and put their parkas, scarfs, and gloves back on before their bodies chilled.\n\n\"You lost count of two, Lieutenant?\" Blazer's eyes crinkled.\n\n\"Well, a lot of other things happened between the two points.\"\n\n\"Like Kaika's thirty-odd points?\"\n\n\"Those would be the things, yes.\" Rysha shrugged at Trip, still looking sheepish.\n\nIt was only then that he realized she felt embarrassed or chagrined that she hadn't been doing better. Or maybe that she hadn't done better in front of him? He'd thought she had been doing great for a beginner.\n\n\"When did you pick up swords, Kaika?\" Blazer asked, as Rysha sheathed the sword and also grabbed a towel, using it first to wipe off her spectacles. \"I didn't think you cared for anything larger than a knife unless it could explode.\"\n\n\"I didn't, but there have been a couple of times in the last three years where I've almost gotten stuck with Kasandral. Maybe it was fate that I would end up wielding one of these.\" She ticked a fingernail against the hilt of her sword.\n\nIt and Rysha's weapon both glowed green currently. Trip wasn't sure if that had to do with his proximity, the dragons' proximity, or if they were simply excited\u2014could magical swords get excited?\u2014over the sparring match.\n\nOf course magical swords can get excited, Jaxi said. Right now, I'm most eager to go into battle. I want to see if we can actually kill a dragon this time. We were so close last time.\n\nIt's hard to finish them off when they can simply fly away when they're wounded.\n\nI've noticed. It must be convenient to have wings.\n\nI imagine so. Trip pictured a winged soulblade flying after a dragon.\n\n\"Once Colonel Therrik got back from his duty in the mountains,\" Kaika said, \"I asked him to give me some lessons.\"\n\nBlazer's upper lip curled. \"Why would you intentionally want to spend time with that man?\"\n\n\"He's really good at what he does.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Trip asked.\n\n\"Making people dead.\"\n\n\"Ah.\"\n\n\"You didn't have to do any favors for him in exchange for the lessons, did you?\" Blazer asked, her lip curling further.\n\nSomething at the edge of Trip's awareness changed, and he gazed out over the railing.\n\n\"No,\" Kaika said. \"He's married now, you know. Faithfully, I presume. He has his flaws, but disloyalty isn't one of them. Anyway, he loves sharp pointy things, and he's amenable to teaching people how to use them, for free. As long as you're not on the list of individuals who irk him.\"\n\n\"That's a long list, isn't it?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"I believe his list could fill a book. Chapter One would start with Zirkander.\" Kaika grinned. \"I was highly amused when Therrik married Zirkander's cousin, and they became in-laws. I dearly wish someone would invite me to a family dinner. If there are such things.\"\n\nTrip, his focus outward instead of on the conversation, realized what had changed. He no longer sensed the dragons. He hadn't noticed them flying away; they had simply disappeared from his awareness.\n\nHe looked toward Jylea and Kiadarsa, wondering if the sorceress had noticed anything. She was also frowning over the railing. The snow had stopped, the clouds lightening, but visibility wasn't anywhere near twenty miles.\n\nKiadarsa might have sensed him looking at her, for she turned and met his eyes. Trip started to take a step toward her, but she spoke into his mind.\n\nCan you sense them? she asked.\n\nA surge of panic ran through him. He hadn't anticipated that she would speak telepathically to him. She was sure to think it odd if all he did was think his response and expect her to pick it up without projecting or whatever it was sorcerers did.\n\nThey disappeared, he thought and tried to thrust the words into her mind\u2014he would have to ask Jaxi for a lesson on this.\n\nShe staggered back, touching her temple and wincing.\n\nWhat are you doing to the woman? Jaxi asked. Didn't I already tell you that you shout? Bring it down a notch. Or ten.\n\nI don't understand.\n\nJust look at the person you want to talk to and think the words toward them. You've already figured out telepathy.\n\nI\u2026 have?\n\nAnd I concur, Jaxi added. The abruptness with which the dragons disappeared is suspicious. I believe they're masking their auras.\n\nHow close are we to the water?\n\nLess than five miles.\n\n\"Trip?\" Blazer prodded him with her rolled-up magazine. She, Kaika, and Rysha were all looking at him, as were Jylea and Kiadarsa. How had he ended up surrounded by women?\n\n\"I think the dragons are coming,\" he said, \"but they may be in disguise.\"\n\n\"How does that work?\" Blazer asked. \"Hats and stick-on beards?\"\n\n\"We'll find out soon.\" Not waiting for his commander's orders, Trip jogged toward the fliers. \"Leftie, Duck, you ready to fly?\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Blazer said, lunging to catch him by the shoulder. \"You and your two magical friends are staying on the airship.\"\n\n\"What?\" Trip blurted, alarmed. \"I have to fly.\"\n\n\"It won't be a good idea to have you up there with a magic-hating sword at your back, and since machine guns don't do anything to dragons, there's no point in you flying around up there.\"\n\n\"I can still harry them with the help of the soulblades.\"\n\n\"Harry them from the deck. The airship is going to need some protection.\"\n\n\"But, Major\u2014\"\n\n\"Do it. No more arguing.\" Blazer ran to meet Leftie and Duck, yelling for Kaika and Rysha to climb into the fliers' back seats with their swords.\n\nDreyak must have heard the orders being given because he burst out from belowdecks, his scimitar and pistol in hand, and he also raced toward the fliers. Blazer stopped him with an outstretched hand, then pointed to Trip.\n\nHe said something\u2014a protest?\u2014but Blazer turned her back on him and vaulted into the cockpit.\n\nTrip tried his best not to glower at her, but it was hard. How was he supposed to stand down here while his comrades flew out to meet the dragons and risk their lives? He vowed to hop into his flier as soon as it looked like he was needed, whether Blazer said it was all right or not.\n\nBoots pounded on the deck behind Trip, the two Cofah soldiers running up with rifles. \"Which way are the dragons coming from?\" They looked toward Kiadarsa, who had drifted closer to Trip.\n\n\"We're not sure,\" he said. \"We don't sense them anymore.\"\n\n\"Uh, and that's a problem?\" a soldier asked.\n\nTrip nodded firmly. \"I'm certain it is.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Sitting behind Duck in his flier, Rysha gripped Dorfindral as they coasted in large circles around the airship, its huge black envelope in stark contrast to the snow and ice far below it. And the ice-rimmed blue water two miles ahead of it.\n\nThough Rysha assumed she would primarily use the sword against the dragon, she had mounted her rifle in the fancy rack Trip had affixed to the side of the seat well. She'd grinned when she spotted it and looked forward to having the leisure to see what all it could do, but for now, it kept her rifle secure and out of the way, and also close at hand.\n\nRysha glanced toward the port side of the airship as they flew past, at the stone-faced Trip down there, the two soulblades hanging from his belt. He stood by the rail with the sorceress, Jylea, Dreyak, the two Cofah soldiers, and a few of the researchers. His arms were folded over his chest, and he kept glancing at the lone flier that remained on deck, as if he was contemplating living up to his name and taking a \"side trip\" against orders.\n\nRysha didn't know why Blazer had ordered him to stay down there. To defend the airship? That made sense, but it wasn't as if they weren't all going to defend the airship. Those in the fliers would simply do it from the air.\n\n\"Not much threatening out here, is there?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"Nope,\" Leftie said. \"Kind of a pretty day. If you don't mind looking at it through the ice crystals edging your goggles.\"\n\nBlazer, up in the lead, banked so they wouldn't get too far away from the airship. They flew in a route that would allow them to circle it at a distance.\n\n\"Anyone see any dragons on the horizon yet?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"Nothing except birds, so far,\" Leftie said.\n\nThe sky had cleared enough that Rysha could see a seal colony near the water's edge, too, but there was nothing larger around.\n\n\"Birds can be dangerous if they get in your propeller,\" Duck said. \"Or poop on the cockpit when you're in it.\"\n\n\"Is that dangerous or simply inconvenient?\" Rysha asked.\n\n\"It depends on if it hits your goggles and spatters, making it so you can't see good.\"\n\n\"Why do I have the feeling you're speaking from experience, Captain Duck?\" Leftie asked.\n\n\"Because I'm an experienced pilot. And because nature is drawn to me.\"\n\n\"Nature, right.\"\n\nDown on the deck, Trip broke away from the others and sprinted toward his flier. Rysha thought he was going to power it up, but he slapped the communication crystal instead.\n\n\"They're coming,\" he blurted, his voice sounding from Duck's control panel.\n\n\"Which direction?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"The west. They've shape-shifted and dampened down their auras. That's why they seemed to disappear.\"\n\n\"Shape-shifted?\" Duck asked. \"Into what?\"\n\n\"Pigeons, I think. Birds, for sure. Innocuous-looking ones. I think they're hoping to get right on top of us before we notice them.\"\n\n\"Or they're planning a special bird-only attack on Duck's goggles,\" Rysha said.\n\nTrip didn't respond. He probably hadn't heard the comment. Which was fine. It had been a silly one.\n\n\"Are there really pigeons in the Antarctic?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"Polar pigeons,\" Rysha said. \"They're actually a different species and white instead of gray, but the first Cofah explorers found them as irritating as their local pigeons and gave them a similar name without worrying about scientific accuracy.\"\n\n\"Damned ignorant Cofah,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"An early Iskandian explorer dubbed a constellation only visible from the southern hemisphere Walrus Penis.\"\n\n\"That's not ignorant. It's just crude.\"\n\n\"It's good that we Iskandians are so much more evolved.\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"You ready, Dorfindral?\" Rysha rubbed the sword hilt with her thumb, wondering if the shape-shifting would fool it.\n\nBut it flared brightly, as if it knew exactly what was coming.\n\n\"Uhm, are those all dragons?\" Duck pointed to his left.\n\nA huge flock of white pigeons was heading their way.\n\n\"Trip?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"I see them.\" Trip dangled half out of his cockpit, his head thrust down into the seat well, as if he was trying to repair something. How could he see anything? \"And no, they're not. It's just the two, but they're camouflaging themselves among the rest of that flock, and they're coercing the pigeons to head this way.\"\n\nTrip jumped down, the communication crystal from the cockpit now in his hand. He ran back to the railing, pulling Jaxi free and standing there, glaring at the oncoming flock.\n\n\"We can't fly into a bunch of birds,\" Duck said.\n\n\"They're heading for the airship, it looks like,\" Leftie said. \"What happens if you shoot a dragon when it's a pigeon? Will the bullets get through?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Duck said.\n\n\"Are we sure those are the dragons?\" Blazer asked skeptically.\n\n\"I don't reckon a bunch of pigeons would attack an airship of their own accord.\"\n\nEven as Duck spoke, the flock flew past right under their flier. Dorfindral agreed that there was magic afoot\u2014the sword flared even brighter.\n\nHunt! it seemed to cry into Rysha's mind.\n\n\"Chase after them, Captain,\" she ordered, even if lieutenants weren't supposed to give captains orders.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Duck said, apparently forgetting he outranked her.\n\nRysha leaned forward as much as her harness would allow, tempted to unfasten it to extend her reach, but Duck might have to fly upside down for her to have a chance at reaching those birds.\n\nLeftie came in from the side, also chasing after the pigeons. He fired into the flock, and blood and feathers flew.\n\n\"Aw, Leftie, that's not sporting,\" Duck said. \"Unless you're planning to collect those pigeons and fry 'em up later, you shouldn't kill 'em.\"\n\n\"They're about to attack the airship, Captain,\" Leftie growled, firing again.\n\nRysha found it telling that the pigeons didn't break up, not even with some of them being killed in their midst. They continued on, heading straight toward the airship. Would all the birds attack it?\n\n\"Faster, Duck,\" Rysha urged, amazed that the creatures were staying ahead of their flier.\n\nDorfindral blazed, the hilt warming her hand. It knew even if her eyes didn't that two of those birds were dragons.\n\nBut she couldn't hit any of them yet, not with the sword. Rysha jammed Dorfindral between her knees and leaned over to the rifle mount. Duck weaved as he rained fire into the back of the flock, striking them from different angles. It gave her opportunities to fire without the risk of hitting him or the propeller.\n\nDorfindral, still in contact with her, seemed to guide her aim. She let it, and her sights settled on a plump bird near the center of the flock. She fired, and though it was a small target, she struck it. But, unlike with the pigeons Leftie had hit, it didn't die. The bullet bounced off and didn't hurt it at all.\n\nYou will not strike me down so simply, a voice spoke into her mind. Our purpose is noble and just, and we shall prevail.\n\nThough Rysha appreciated her gun mount a great deal, she realized there was no point in firing at dragons with the rifle, so she took Dorfindral in hand again.\n\nDuck caught up to the rear of the flock, bringing her almost close enough to take a swing. She leaned to the side and as far out of her seat as her harness would allow.\n\nBut Duck had to pull up before she could strike. They had reached the airship.\n\nThe birds did not pull up. They streaked below the envelope and across the deck, fearlessly flying at the humans on it, their expressions warring between surprise and disbelief as they watched the flock approach. Neither Trip nor Kiadarsa wore such expressions. They crouched, ready for battle.\n\nRysha twisted to look back as Duck sailed around the envelope, frustrated that she hadn't gotten to take a swing. Would they be able to fly across the deck and give chase? Or were the quarters too tight for that?\n\nThe pigeons battered at several of the Cofah, their wings flapping wildly and aggressively. The ship's defenders shot back, but struggled to aim with dozens of sets of wings battering them.\n\nTrip ran toward the birds, Jaxi in his hand and the sorceress running at his side. A twinge of jealousy ran through Rysha at seeing them together. She tamped the emotion down. This wasn't the time.\n\nFire flared around Jaxi's blade, and a blazing orange fireball that seemed certain to set the balloon on fire roared into several of the pigeons. The soulblade had avoided aiming toward an area with people in it, but the Cofah soldiers still stumbled back, raising their arms to ward off the heat. The flames incinerated the birds instantly. Most of them. One survived the fire, twisting in the air and transforming into something else.\n\nWould it turn into a dragon right there? Was there room?\n\nRysha twisted the other way as Duck looped around, taking the flier toward the airship again.\n\nTrip sprang while the dragon was still transforming, swinging Jaxi toward it as lightning shot from his hip, from the other soulblade. The charge of electricity took down more of the attacking pigeons.\n\nBefore Jaxi could strike the creature\u2014it was turning into some giant cat\u2014an invisible force slammed into Trip.\n\nIt hurled him all the way across the deck and toward the railing on the far side. He almost went over, but the swords must have stopped him, for he jerked to a halt in the air. His feet dropped down to the deck again.\n\nBy now, the dragon had finished transforming. A huge white tiger with black stripes crouched on the deck.\n\nA second tiger had emerged from the flock near the Cofah\u2014Kiadarsa stood protectively in front of her people, ignoring the pigeons that still pecked and battered them as she faced the tiger. She splayed her fingers, launching some invisible attack.\n\nDuck flew by, looking like he wanted to angle bullets toward the magical creatures, but there was no way he could do so without hitting their allies.\n\nTrip ran back across the deck toward the tiger he'd tried to attack earlier. It sprang at him with its clawed paws outstretched. When it roared, the sound reached Rysha's ears over the noise of the propellers.\n\nJaxi slashed defensively in front of Trip, blocking those slashing claws and knocking the tiger aside. Trip lunged after it, raising the blade to strike, but once again, he was hurled away with great power. He slammed into a support post, and Jaxi tumbled from his grip.\n\n\"We have to do something, Duck,\" Rysha yelled in frustration as they flew uselessly past again. She barely resisted the urge to thump him on the shoulder. \"Can you land? I can't fight tigers from the air.\"\n\nLightning shot from Trip's hip as Jaxi launched another fireball from the deck. Both attacks slammed into the invisible bubble around the tiger as Trip grabbed the soulblade and rolled out of the creature's path. Once again, the attacks did nothing to hurt it.\n\nRysha clenched her fist. She needed to be down there, using Dorfindral to pierce the dragon's defenses.\n\n\"Find a spot to land,\" Blazer ordered from the other side of the airship, apparently coming to the same conclusion Rysha had.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Duck said.\n\nAs Trip turned to face the tiger, its pursuit relentless, Rysha hoped they wouldn't be too late." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "It wasn't a tiger.\n\nTrip reminded himself of that as the creature raced toward him once again, death in its predatory yellow eyes, eyes with reptilian slits. One of those mental attacks had nearly thrown him from the ship.\n\nAs he crouched, bracing himself with Jaxi in his hand, a surge of exhilaration flooded his veins. He felt in over his head, but that didn't keep him from longing to fight, to dominate his enemy.\n\nAzarwrath hurled lightning at the tiger. It branched around the creature without touching it. Trip had hoped the dragon's shields might be weaker in a shape-shifted form, but that wasn't proving to be the case.\n\nIt sprang, claws flashing as they slashed at Trip. He leaped to the side as he swung Jaxi at the creature's body. He hoped the blade might sink in and ravage his enemy, but once more, the sword bounced off before striking fur and flesh. The tiger twisted in the air, claws raking toward Trip's face. He jerked his head back, but a couple of those claws caught him, and fiery pain erupted from his temple.\n\nJaxi hurled a fireball at the tiger, the power and heat making Trip stumble back. He imagined a shield of his own flaring to life to protect him. Maybe it worked. Or maybe Jaxi did something, because the heat halted abruptly. The fireball still burned, filling his vision for a second, but he didn't feel it.\n\nUnfortunately, the tiger didn't seem to feel it, either. It landed, turned, and sprang at him again.\n\nTrip raised the soulblade to block it as he tried to throw a mental attack of his own, anything to keep the deadly foe away.\n\nTo his surprise, the tiger faltered in mid-air, as if struck by a powerful gale. Lightning and fireballs streaked toward it, Jaxi and Azarwrath working together.\n\nEvil humans, you think to hurt me? came a powerful cry in Trip's mind. You think you have the right to hurt me? To keep my kind from reclaiming our rightful homeland? You will know our wrath, and you will never get close to the Portal of Avintnaresi.\n\nBefore Trip could think of a response, intense pressure crushed his mind. It felt like his skull was shrinking, or his brain was expanding, and there wasn't enough room. He wouldn't let himself drop Jaxi, but he reflexively brought his hands to his head, as if that would help. But the pain only increased. His vision darkened, and he lost track of the tiger\u2014the dragon. He dropped to his knees, gasping for air.\n\nI'm trying to protect you, Jaxi said, but this one is strong in the mental ways.\n\nYeah, noticed that. Trip winced, trying hard to focus on his surroundings, knowing he was vulnerable right now.\n\nFight it off. We're shielding you so he can't physically get in to finish you off.\n\nTrip forced his eyes open enough to see the tiger throwing itself at him, but not reaching him, instead bouncing off the soulblades' barriers. But it kept trying, and Trip could sense the barrier faltering as their enemy threw mental attacks as well as physically slashing at it. Even two soulblades couldn't hold off a dragon, not indefinitely.\n\nYou have more strength than you believe, a male voice Trip hadn't heard before spoke into his mind. He tried to concentrate, to listen to it, even though his brain pulsed with pain, and he thought his heart would stop from the stress of it all. And you have two of us. You must attack the dragon back so that its concentration falters. If it is struggling to protect itself, it won't be able to continue this attack on you.\n\nGreat. How?\n\nYou tried a mental attack. That wasn't bad, but your strength will probably be fire. Hurl fire at it.\n\nTrip had trouble thinking of anything but the pain assailing him, the constant attack on his brain. He dropped his forehead to the deck, his body curling in on itself, as he imagined obeying the suggestion by finding matches, lighting them, and flinging them at the tiger. Obviously, that wouldn't help.\n\nBut, wait. He'd made fire before, hadn't he? Back on the pirate airship. Jaxi had said he'd done that, not her.\n\nTrip lifted his head and attempted to channel his anger, pain, and rage into one focused attack. He envisioned fire engulfing the tiger and burning its brain from the inside out. With a ferocious roar, he flung his arms out, willing the attack to happen.\n\nThe pressure on his brain halted, disappearing so quickly that he almost toppled over. But he caught himself on Jaxi, digging the tip of the sword into the deck and leaning on it. A wall of fire burned in front of him, but he didn't feel its heat. Was it real? An illusion? Had he created it or had the soulblades done it?\n\nA screech of pain filled his mind, so loud and powerful, he almost thought it a new attack. The deck quaked in response.\n\nThe roar of a flier propeller filled his ears, and he glanced left in time to see Rysha leap from the back seat of Duck's craft. She raced toward the fire, her sword held aloft, the blade blazing with that pale green glow.\n\nAfraid she would be burned, Trip willed the flames to go out. They disappeared, revealing the tiger on its back, writhing with all four legs in the air.\n\nHe realized he'd made a mistake in letting the fire die out, because the creature sprang to its feet. It transformed in front of his eyes, turning from the white tiger into a silver dragon. The hulking creature's head brushed the bottom of the envelope.\n\nRysha was close enough to spring at the dragon, slashing her green blade toward it. A spark of light flashed as Dorfindral pierced their enemy's protective barrier. Rysha jumped closer, slashing for scale and flesh this time.\n\nThe dragon bunched its legs to spring away. Though still on his knees, Trip locked eyes with the creature. A wave of ferocity welled up from deep within him, and he snarled as he willed it to stay in place, its talons locked to the deck.\n\nIt hesitated, frozen in place, but only for a couple of seconds before that big silver head shook itself. The dragon's eyes narrowed, staring into Trip's soul. He expected to be punished for his blasphemous attempt, but his soulblades attacked then, Jaxi sending another fireball and Azarwrath hurling lightning. Their magical attacks landed as Rysha sank Dorfindral deep into the dragon's side.\n\nHold him, the male voice ordered, or he'll simply get away. It's within you, I swear.\n\nThe voice was compelling, as if it had a power of its own over him, and Trip felt obligated to obey. Once again, he tried to light a fire in the dragon's mind, to inflict the kind of pain on it that it had thrust onto him. Anything to keep the creature busy, to prevent it from flying away.\n\n\"Don't let it escape,\" someone yelled. Kaika?\n\n\"I'm trying,\" Rysha yelled back, yanking Dorfindral out so she could sink it into the dragon's side again.\n\nIts tail whipped toward her, the angle such that it would knock her over the ship's railing.\n\nLook out! Trip yelled, and envisioned her flattening to the deck to avoid it.\n\nHe wasn't sure if his warning worked, or her own quick reflexes were responsible, but Rysha dropped to her belly as the tail whooshed over her. She sprang up immediately, raced in, and jabbed the blade into the dragon's haunches.\n\nThe creature screeched again, the deck quaking in response. It stood frozen, its eyes locked on to Trip, but pain gripped its body, and it didn't attack him.\n\nKaika raced in from the other side and sprang for the dragon's side. She sank her sword between scales and into flesh, then used it as a handhold to pull herself up onto its back. From there, she ran up and thrust her blade into the creature's neck.\n\nAnother screech burst from the dragon, but this one was weaker. Kaika sank her weight against the sword, driving it deeper. She twisted it, cutting through vertebrae. The dragon's head and long neck flopped to the deck. The eyes stared at Trip, accusingly.\n\nExcellent, the male voice said. You did well.\n\nTrip looked down at his hip. Was that Azarwrath speaking to him?\n\nIn truth, he wasn't sure he had done anything. All evidence of the fire was gone\u2014had it been his imagination? There was no soot on the deck, no burn hole in the envelope.\n\nThe male voice chuckled. Your accuracy is improving.\n\nWell, look who's talking, Jaxi said. But you two boys better not pat yourselves on the backs yet. Look.\n\nA man's scream came from the bow of the ship. The other dragon had also changed back to its natural form, and two bloody men lay on the deck next to it. Someone else knelt, injured. Jylea.\n\nBlazer stood over her protectively. She lunged and swept her blade toward the dragon, trying to get close enough to hurt it without leaving their injured allies vulnerable. The dragon jumped back, evading those swipes.\n\nEvil humans, it cried into everyone's minds, even if you slay me with those vile tools, know that you'll never make it to the portal. You'll never leave this land of ice and cold again. You haven't the right to deny our kind access to this, our homeland, and we know it. We will fight you!\n\nBlazer faltered, dropping to one knee and wincing at the force accompanying those words. Even with the sword protecting her from attacks, it couldn't keep out telepathic communications, and those communications resonated with intense power.\n\nThe dragon must have sensed that its words could affect its attackers, for it ran toward Blazer, wings spreading and its maw open, long, sharp fangs leering at her.\n\nWe wouldn't try to keep you out, Trip thought at the dragon, trying to make his own words intense, or at least heard, so the creature would focus on him long enough for Blazer to recover, if you didn't kill us or threaten to enslave us. If you would live in peace with humans, we wouldn't object to your presence.\n\nWe are great predators, the dragon replied, pausing its charge to glare at him. A predator does not live in peace with its prey. This territory, this world, belonged to us long before it belonged to your puny kind. You, of all humans, should understand this.\n\nBlazer regained her feet and stalked toward the dragon. Kaika and Rysha, who had also faltered at the dragon's words, now sprinted down the deck to help.\n\nKiadarsa clenched her fists. Blood smeared the side of her face, but she glared defiantly at the dragon. Trip sensed her launching a mental attack, trying to knock it toward Blazer and her sword.\n\nBut the silver wheeled and sprang at her, fangs flashing and talons slashing toward her. She raised a barrier, but the creature batted it aside with its mind while hurling an attack that knocked her to her back. Snarling with the pleasure of the hunt, it lunged for her.\n\n\"No,\" Trip cried, attempting to thrust flames into its mind, willing the creature to feel pain. He tried to channel all of his own energy into the attack, as if by sheer will he could stop the dragon.\n\nIts head jerked back, and it screamed in pain. The entire airship trembled.\n\nKiadarsa jumped to her feet and raced out of the way as the dragon's head whipped around on its long neck, as if it were a giraffe trying to get a bug out of its ear. Kaika and Rysha reached the creature, and they joined Blazer in an attack. As one, they raced in, cutting with those dragon-slaying blades, obliterating its defensive shield and springing for its scaled sides.\n\nTrip's legs trembled, and he sank to his knees, leaning on Jaxi to keep from collapsing all the way to the deck.\n\nHumph, Jaxi thought. I would hurl some more fireballs, but those silly swords are in the way.\n\nThose swords are more effective than your fireballs, the male voice said. Azarwrath. Women should know their limitations.\n\nWhat does that mean? Jaxi demanded.\n\nWomen are frail creatures that should be protected. If they have magic, they should become healers, not warriors.\n\nI assure you there's nothing frail about me. My fireballs may not be that effective against dragons, but in all other circumstances, they are most excellent. Much better than your unimpressive little lightning.\n\nA woman's place is at a man's side, or behind him, not in front of him.\n\nWhat benighted century are you from, you arrogant pig poker?\n\nAzarwrath sighed. A long-past one.\n\nTrip closed his eyes, not having the energy to join in the argument, and not sure what he would say if he did.\n\n\"Is it hard to feel manly when you're resting on your knees while three women hack a dragon to death on the other side of the ship?\" Leftie asked, walking up and looking curiously down at Trip.\n\n\"Extremely hard.\" Trip wasn't sure how much of a role he'd played in the battle, so he didn't try to defend himself. His weary body promised he'd done something. Even if all it had been was buying a couple of seconds here and there for the sword wielders, it had been worth it.\n\n\"If it makes you feel better,\" Duck said, coming up from behind them, his flier now parked next to Leftie's and Blazer's, \"all I got to do was shoot a couple of pigeons.\"\n\n\"That's better than I managed,\" Trip said.\n\nA ragged cheer went up at the front of the ship as the three women raised their bloody blades. The dragon's huge body lay unmoving on the deck, one wing dangling over a broken railing. Unfortunately, several people were unmoving as well.\n\nKiadarsa met Trip's eyes across the deck and across the neck of the dragon.\n\nCan you heal? she asked. Some of my people will die without a healer, and I haven't the training.\n\nTrip gulped. He'd been afraid something bad would happen if he let people think he was a sorcerer. And now it had. Kiadarsa believed he had power that he didn't have, and all the Cofah would frown at him in disappointment as people died at his feet.\n\nNo, Azarwrath said. Go to them. I have some knack for healing, despite it being a woman's art.\n\nA woman's art? Jaxi asked. Just so you know, I can make fire hot enough to melt a soulblade.\n\nYou can heal? Trip asked, hoping to stop the argument before it started again. I wouldn't have thought those who specialized in hurling lightning bolts at people could then heal them.\n\nIn my day, sorcerers learned a rudimentary level of skill in all the fundamentals. You were considered poorly educated if you didn't. Healing isn't an easy art to master, and many say it takes the patience of a woman, but I'll be shocked if you can't pick it up easily, Telryn.\n\nTrip wouldn't be shocked at all if he couldn't pick it up, but he pushed himself to his feet and forced his wobbly legs to stride across the deck. Those people needed whatever help he\u2014or the soulblade\u2014could offer.\n\nHe met Rysha's eyes as he approached. He would have liked to hug her, but his gaze flicked toward the bloody blade she held, the glow it still held, and he only gave her a quick smile.\n\nShe smiled back, but it appeared strained. Because she was injured and in pain? Or because she was fighting the blade again?\n\n\"Who's worst off?\" Trip looked at those sitting or lying on the deck, wincing when he saw right away that one of the researchers was dead. Yarokk, had that been his name?\n\n\"Many are injured,\" Dreyak said, frowning. \"They should not have been on the deck when they had no way to harm the dragons.\" He turned his frown toward Jylea.\n\nShe frowned back at him. \"You would have had us cower belowdecks? While our ship was destroyed around us?\"\n\n\"Better than to die needlessly when there were those here who could harm them.\"\n\n\"Iskandians.\"\n\n\"Iskandians with dragon-slaying swords,\" Dreyak said.\n\n\"You did not go belowdecks, Mr. Dreyak.\" Jylea gave the honorific an odd emphasis. \"You had no weapon with which to harm the dragons.\"\n\nDreyak glanced at the Cofah soulblade hanging from Trip's hip. \"No, but I am a soldier, sworn to protect my people. I have training. Few of your team have any manner of combat training.\"\n\n\"Your training and your sword were useless against the dragon. Though I see you managed to avoid getting hurt.\"\n\nDreyak's eyes narrowed. \"'Ware the tone you use with me.\"\n\nGo to the man over there first, Telryn, Azarwrath said, and ignore this bickering. Politics. A disgusted noise sounded in Trip's mind, something between a grunt and a harrumph. People have changed so little over the centuries. It is a pity.\n\nTrip headed toward the wounded man the soulblade indicated.\n\nI may need to draw upon some of your power, Azarwrath warned him.\n\nJust as long as I won't need to walk any time soon.\n\nYou are young. You will recover swiftly.\n\nThis new soulblade is awfully chatty, now that he's chatting, Jaxi said.\n\nTrip knelt beside the soldier and rested a hand on his shoulder while trying not to look at all the blood pooled on the deck underneath him. Or the way he'd been half eviscerated by tiger claws.\n\nAzarwrath's blade grew warm at his side.\n\n\"Jaxi can heal?\" Kaika asked, watching him. Dreyak and Jylea had moved away to continue their argument without onlookers. \"I'm not complaining, but I didn't think that was in her repertoire.\"\n\n\"It's the other one,\" Trip said. \"He's decided to talk to me. And these are his people, so I guess he's interested in helping them out.\"\n\n\"It must be getting busy inside your head, Trip,\" Rysha said, giving him a sympathetic look.\n\nLeftie, who had followed him over to the group, gave him a bewildered look.\n\nTrip, growing aware of a strange feeling in his body, as if his energy was seeping out of him, let his head droop to his chest and closed his eyes. After that battle, he didn't feel like he had much energy left. He assumed Azarwrath wouldn't draw so much from him that he would be in danger. At least he hoped that was the case.\n\nWell, you are just an Iskandian, Jaxi said. And he's healing Cofah. He might prioritize them.\n\nThanks, Jaxi. Now I'm afraid to close my eyes, lest I won't wake up.\n\nI'll keep an eye on him and let you know if things start looking shifty.\n\nI'm deeply heartened.\n\nAs I knew you would be." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Rysha knew she should be cleaning off her blade\u2014and perhaps herself\u2014but she found herself watching Trip. He wasn't doing anything mesmerizing, other than moving from person to person, healing wounds. He'd said the Cofah soulblade was doing the healing, but she wasn't sure she believed that he was merely a holder for the sword. An odd weariness marked his posture as he knelt beside the injured people, resting a hand on them and closing his eyes. Clearly, it was taking something out of him.\n\nWhen she'd leaped from Duck's flier, Trip had been down on a knee, looking like he needed saving. But as she ran toward the dragon, that fire had come out of nowhere. Jaxi's work? Whoever had been responsible, the dragon had been delayed. Instead of leaping away from her attack, as she had expected, it had frozen for several seconds, staring at Trip, and she'd gotten a chance to sink her blade in. Then she remembered Trip's warning, the cry to look out, and the compulsion to drop to the deck. Everything had happened so fast that she couldn't say for sure, but she was fairly certain that cry had been into her mind and not aloud. And that he'd been the reason she had been flattened to the deck in time.\n\nHow much credit could Rysha, Kaika, and Blazer take for the dead dragons, and how much had Trip and the soulblades done?\n\nThe Cofah sorceress came back up on deck\u2014she'd escorted Jylea to one of the cabins below\u2014and walked toward the wounded people. Toward Trip.\n\nLeftie's words from the night before came to mind, his claims that Kiadarsa had been trying to seduce Trip. Only trying and not succeeding, Rysha trusted, but seeing the woman walk toward him made her uneasy.\n\nKiadarsa crouched, resting a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up at her. She murmured something, closed her eyes, and dropped her gaze demurely. The day before, Rysha wouldn't have guessed she would ever have used that word to describe the woman, but even though she stood and he knelt, there was something\u2026 subservient about the gesture, about her whole demeanor. Maybe Rysha was imagining things, but there seemed to be an unspoken offer there too. Of herself?\n\nRysha wondered if Trip had also saved Kiadarsa's life during the battle. And if she was now grateful.\n\nHer fingers curled into a fist. Even though she logically knew that she hadn't said anything to Trip to imply she wanted a relationship with him, she felt indignation and anger that another woman was touching his shoulder and giving him looks. Offers. It didn't help that the Cofah sorceress was beautiful, even with her hair tangled and blood dried on her jaw.\n\n\"What exactly are we supposed to do with two dead dragons?\" Leftie asked, waving at the closest one.\n\n\"Roll them over the railing and let them plop down into the water?\" Blazer asked.\n\nTrip nodded at something the sorceress said, then returned to his chin-to-chest position, one hand on the person he knelt beside, and one hand on the hilt of the Cofah soulblade. Kiadarsa rose and walked away. Disappointed? Pleased? Rysha couldn't tell.\n\n\"That seems wasteful, ma'am,\" Duck said. \"They're fresh meat. Anyone know how dragon tastes? Maybe we could find out.\"\n\nBlazer made a disgusted noise.\n\n\"They might be real fine,\" Duck said. \"Slip some chunks on a skewer, and we can build a nice fire in the cook stove and roast 'em up.\"\n\n\"That does seem fair,\" Leftie said. \"They were contemplating eating us, after all. At least one of the ones we've met was.\"\n\n\"And these dragons called us prey and themselves predators.\" Duck waved to the fallen creatures.\n\n\"It seems wrong to eat something intelligent,\" Rysha said.\n\nThe dragons were beautiful, too, when they soared through the skies. Even if they were enemies, it seemed a crime to contemplate turning them into kebab.\n\nMore than that, the words the dragons had spoken during the battle bothered her. Rysha knew from her research that dragons were believed to have evolved here on Linora, the same as humans. And, even though she hadn't chanced across texts that verified it, Sardelle had told her the dragons had been tricked into leaving through that portal a thousand years ago. Not by humans, but by some of their own kind, bronze dragons that had been tired of being on the bottom of their hierarchy. If the dragons had been trying all this time to return and had finally found a way, destroying the portal did seem questionable. But what choice did humanity have? What choice did she have? She was a soldier, obeying orders. And, with her grandmother's death fresh in her mind, it was hard to see the dragons as rightful inhabitants of the world rather than invaders. Cruel invaders.\n\n\"We should see if we can collect some of the blood,\" Blazer said. \"I'm not sure if anything special has to be done to keep it alive, but our mad scientist, Tolemek, can make weapons out of the stuff. Weapons that can hurt dragons.\"\n\n\"Collect? Like in vials?\" Leftie wrinkled his nose. \"Who gets that job?\"\n\n\"Sounds like a task for a lieutenant,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"It sounds like a task for a butcher.\" Leftie looked at Duck. \"Or someone already making kebabs.\"\n\nNow Duck wrinkled his nose.\n\n\"What are we doing?\" Kaika asked, limping up to join the group. \"Contemplating if we have the strength to roll these huge bodies over the railing?\" She peered over the side of the ship. They had sailed past the inland sea and flew over the ice and snow again.\n\n\"Duck is contemplating turning that one into our dinner,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"Gross.\"\n\n\"How do you know, Captain?\" Duck asked. \"We've had nothing but rehydrated dehydrated rations since we left Iskandia. A little fresh meat would taste good.\"\n\n\"I don't eat anything that talks to me before it dies.\"\n\n\"All sorts of animals talk to you when they're dying, crying out and the like. Haven't you heard a rabbit squealing as the wolves tear it to bits? That's the way of nature.\"\n\nKaika grimaced. \"I don't think the rabbit tells the wolves that it's told its buddies to avenge its death.\"\n\n\"You caught that, eh?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"That this one promised it had warned the other dragons that we were coming? Yes.\"\n\n\"Do we need to make some plans for that, ma'am?\" Duck asked. \"Seems like flying straightforward into this portal place might not be the wisest course.\"\n\n\"Too bad we can't turn into pigeons,\" Leftie said.\n\n\"That didn't turn out well for some of the pigeons.\" Kaika waved at the deck. More than a few dead birds had splatted onto the wood planks.\n\nBlazer looked thoughtfully around their group. Aside from Trip, who was healing the last of the prone researchers, their entire team had gathered together around the slain dragon. Kiadarsa was overseeing the removal of one of her people who had died, the man gutted by the dragon's talons. If the Iskandians wanted to talk in private, this was a good time.\n\nPerhaps thinking the same thing, Blazer tilted her head toward a less bloody spot on the deck and said, \"Let's chat.\"\n\n\"I'll see if Trip will finish soon and can join us,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"We don't need him right now,\" Blazer said. \"We can fill him in later.\"\n\nRysha didn't think it was right to exclude him from the decision-making, but she couched her objection in terms more likely to sway the major. \"We'll want the soulblades with us on any decisions we make. They may have advice.\"\n\n\"They?\" Kaika asked. \"Are we sure we want both of them with us? I trust Sardelle's sword, but the Cofah one? Didn't Trip say it was helping now because it wanted to heal its people?\" She waved toward the Cofah research team.\n\n\"Unless we're going to talk about something that would put the Cofah in danger, does it matter?\" Rysha asked.\n\nKaika and Blazer exchanged looks, making her think she might have missed a briefing.\n\n\"Let's just have a quick discussion without magical allies being involved,\" Blazer said, tilting her head toward her chosen spot again.\n\nThough Rysha didn't like the idea of excluding Trip, she followed the others.\n\n\"We leaving Dreyak out of this too?\" Duck asked, nodding toward the door leading belowdecks.\n\nRysha wasn't sure when he'd left or what he'd gone to do, but he wasn't around now.\n\n\"Yes,\" Blazer said. \"We'll make this a magic-free and a Cofah-free meeting.\"\n\n\"Are we plotting nefarious things?\" Rysha asked.\n\n\"Just figuring out the best way to ensure we complete our mission.\" Blazer put her back to the railing and fished out her cigar tin. \"I don't think we can survive a battle against more than two dragons at a time.\"\n\n\"With all due respect to our team,\" Rysha said, \"I'm not sure we should even count on surviving a battle against one at a time. Those two almost turned us into fools by circumventing the fliers and the swords. If Trip and the soulblades hadn't been on deck to delay them, they could have killed everyone and destroyed the airship before we managed to get our fliers back down here.\"\n\nBlazer looked like she might object, but then she nodded. \"You're right. That's true. Let's be glad we have the soulblades with us. I never would have guessed that Sardelle's sword would be so useful, and it seems to be quite a boon that we acquired another one.\" She extended a hand toward Rysha.\n\nGiving her credit for that?\n\nRysha might have defeated the sorceress, but Trip had picked up the soulblade. So far, the magical sword hadn't let anyone else touch it, and she highly doubted it would have let her take it after she'd slain its handler. If not for Trip, they might not have the weapon at all. Rysha didn't like the way Blazer wasn't giving him any credit for helping with the dragons. She wanted to come to his defense; she suspected he'd done much more than simply yelling that warning into her mind.\n\nBut what could she say without implying that he had magical powers? Nothing. And if he'd wanted that known, he would have told Blazer already. Of course, Kaika had already guessed at it. Maybe Blazer had too. Or maybe Kaika had told Blazer. Could that be why Blazer was excluding him now? Did she not trust Trip now because they'd figured out he had dragon blood?\n\nRysha didn't see how that mattered, not when it came to trust. She could understand someone who was afraid of magic being uncomfortable around him if they found out, but he was an army officer sworn to obey the king. He wouldn't do anything to endanger the mission or any of them, not intentionally. General Zirkander must have trusted him, and Sardelle too. Sardelle wouldn't have lent him Jaxi, otherwise, right? Unless Jaxi was along to keep an eye on him.\n\nRysha scratched her jaw, contemplating that. The idea of others in his chain of command not trusting Trip made her sad. She trusted him, and she barely knew him.\n\n\"My point is that we struggled with two dragons,\" Blazer said, addressing the group again. \"And if that silver truly warned all of its kin, there could be more of them waiting at the portal. A lot more.\"\n\nEveryone nodded grimly.\n\n\"Ravenwood, you have any idea about the number of dragons that are in the world now?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"No, ma'am. They were never as fecund as humans, with the females only going into heat once every few decades, so their birthrates are low, but they lived a long time.\"\n\n\"Decades?\" Duck asked.\n\n\"They have the potential to live for millennia,\" Rysha pointed out.\n\n\"Must be nice,\" Kaika said wistfully.\n\n\"Living for thousands of years?\" Blazer asked. \"Or only going into heat once every ten years?\"\n\nKaika snorted. \"Both.\"\n\nLeftie leaned close to Duck and whispered, \"They're not going to start talking about female problems, are they?\"\n\nBlazer stuck a cigar in her mouth. \"Just be glad you boys don't have to deal with them on missions. There'd be a lot more complaining in the unit.\"\n\n\"I haven't noticed a lack of complaining in units full of pilots as it is,\" Kaika said.\n\n\"They may be dealing with female problems right now,\" Leftie again whispered to Duck.\n\n\"How would we know?\" Duck whispered back. \"Major Blazer is always grumpy.\"\n\nBlazer cleared her throat. \"Let's get back to the mission. I don't know how much private time we'll have here. I was in the wheelhouse all night with Jylea's pilot. I'm ninety-nine percent certain we're heading to the spot we meant to head to before we diverted to the research outpost for repairs.\" She waved at Rysha. \"The spot you and Sardelle chose as the most likely location for the portal.\"\n\nAnd the spot Trip's hunch had pointed to, Rysha thought, remembering his certainty that night at the Black Stag.\n\n\"If that's the case,\" Blazer said, \"we know our destination, and we can fly there on our own.\"\n\n\"And we could get there faster than the airship,\" Duck said.\n\n\"Yes, or we could get there slower than the airship.\"\n\nHis brow wrinkled. \"Ma'am?\"\n\n\"You want to let the Cofah get there first and take the brunt of the dragons' attack?\" Rysha said. \"While we do our best to sneak in undetected?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Duck said, nodding in enlightenment.\n\nRysha frowned. As far as she knew, Kiadarsa was the only person among the researchers who had any power, and she didn't have a soulblade. None of them had the chapaharii swords. They would be close to defenseless against the dragons.\n\n\"I like that plan,\" Kaika said. \"It's not like they wanted to join forces with us, anyway. We can just say we decided to go our separate way and take off in the fliers.\"\n\nThe men nodded their agreement.\n\nWas Rysha the only one who found the plan unpalatable? And as the lowest-ranking person here, did she have the right to say so?\n\n\"I have an objection, ma'ams,\" Rysha said slowly, looking at both Kaika and Blazer. Even though Blazer was the mission leader, she and Kaika seemed to confer often on tactics. \"We would be sacrificing the Cofah, no doubt about it. They don't have a way to defend themselves.\"\n\n\"That's their fault for coming here in the first place without more firepower,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"What more firepower could they have brought, ma'am? Dreyak said that they've only uncovered two chapaharii weapons, and they were needed to defend their homeland.\"\n\n\"They could have brought one along if they'd known they were sending a team of people into a dragon's den.\"\n\n\"Did they know that?\" Rysha asked. \"Or were they just here to locate the portal? And then perhaps send word back to their people, asking for reinforcements or a team dedicated to destroying it. It's not like many of them are soldiers. Maybe our presence, our mission, has forced them to accelerate their timeline. Also, if they're like us, they probably didn't expect there to be so many dragons down here to deal with. Dragons don't like cold weather. Why are they lingering here? To guard the portal? We haven't answered that question.\"\n\n\"We weren't sent to answer questions, Lieutenant,\" Blazer said firmly. \"Nor were we told to worry about Cofah scientists. We're here to fulfill our mission in whatever manner is most likely to lead to success.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"I've noted your objections, but we will make plans to leave, let the Cofah arrive first, and sneak in while the dragons are, we hope, focused on them.\"\n\nBefore Rysha could decide whether she wanted to be a good subordinate officer and acquiesce, Kaika spoke up.\n\n\"When do you want us to be ready, Major?\"\n\nThe plan didn't seem to bother her. Or if it did, she knew she had to follow orders, regardless.\n\nRysha struggled with her desire to model herself after Kaika and to be a dutiful soldier, and her certainty that this wasn't the morally correct choice to make.\n\n\"We'll wait until nightfall,\" Blazer said. \"This barge is limping along at a snail's pace, so there's no hurry. I estimate it'll reach the ruins site after midnight. We can wait until a couple of hours before then to break away. That'll give them less time to figure out what we're up to, and it'll also give the dragons less time to react if they notice they've got humans coming in on two fronts. Though I'm hoping our little flier team will avoid their notice altogether.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" several people said.\n\nRysha grimaced and said nothing. She wouldn't do anything to impede the mission, but she couldn't nod and agree with it, either.\n\n\"Ravenwood, Leftie,\" Blazer said, stopping Rysha as she'd been about to turn away. \"Don't tell Trip. Not until right before it's time to leave.\"\n\n\"Ma'am?\" Leftie asked.\n\nRysha grasped the reason for the order right away, but once again, she did not agree with it.\n\n\"We tell him, we're telling the soulblades. Including the Cofah one.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Leftie said. \"I understand.\"\n\nRysha opened her mouth, but Blazer pointed at her and spoke first.\n\n\"Yes, I know they can read minds, and that the Cofah soulblade might figure things out whether we say anything or not. I don't know how to combat that, but I suggest we all do our best to keep from thinking of the plan.\" She nodded to all of them. \"Check the fliers for pigeon guts and then take a nap if you can. Tonight could be eventful.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Rysha said. On that last point, she could agree." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "As darkness claimed the Antarctic and stars grew visible over the icy fields, Trip stood at the bow of the ship, gazing at the route ahead. For the first time, a mountain stood out on the horizon, its snow-covered silhouette jagged and dark. He remembered Rysha's mention of islands under the ice down here and suspected this was one such example. He also suspected it was their destination.\n\nHe sensed something powerful in that direction. Not dragons, though he wagered they were there, perhaps hiding their auras. This was something else, some powerful artifact.\n\nI sense it too, Jaxi shared. But barely. If it's the portal, I'm surprised I wasn't able to sense it from a long ways away. Perhaps the dragons have muffled its aura. I think it's underground, but I'm struggling to pinpoint where. There may be some iron in that mountain that's further interfering with my ability to sense it.\n\nTrip nodded. He hadn't thought of iron, but that seemed like as good an explanation as any. He, too, struggled to get anything more than a vague sense of magical energy.\n\nActually, my explanations are usually superior to other ones, Jaxi informed him.\n\nYes, of course. I shouldn't doubt you.\n\nPrecisely.\n\nA soft clang reached his ears, and Trip looked over his shoulder in time to see Rysha pushing her pack and the boxed sword into the back of Duck's flier. She was the third person who'd gone out to load the fliers when none of the Cofah were watching.\n\nTrip wasn't supposed to know about the updated plan, but Blazer had been naive if she'd thought she and four other people could keep a secret when Jaxi was around. If not for Jaxi, he wouldn't have known about the plan, and it stung him that they hadn't invited him to their meeting, even if he understood why. When he'd woken up from an extremely long nap\u2014exhaustion had forced it upon him after he'd helped Azarwrath heal everyone\u2014Jaxi had filled him in.\n\nAzarwrath hadn't said anything about it\u2014hadn't said anything since they had worked together to heal the Cofah\u2014but Trip wagered he knew everything Jaxi knew. The soulblades didn't seem shy about scraping through people's surface thoughts to glean information.\n\nActually, I try not to do that often, Jaxi informed him. There were rules about invading people's minds in my time. But in my time, people were a lot better about not oozing their thoughts all over the place too. Your would-be cuddle buddy thought about the plan every time she walked past me today. I think she wanted me to know.\n\nOh? Why?\n\nAside from the fact that it was quite rude of Major Blazer to exclude you from the planning in the first place? She objects to our people using the Cofah as cannon fodder.\n\nAh. Trip wasn't surprised. Rysha had a lot of heart and a definite sense of fairness. The Cofah hadn't endeared themselves to him with their talk of ensuring they received the credit for destroying the portal, so he was more inclined to let them fend for themselves. Further, he worried that Kiadarsa or Jylea would inadvertently say something that would remove all doubt and make his team realize he had dragon blood. He would be glad to get away from the Cofah researchers.\n\nStill, some of them had shown gratitude when he'd healed them. Technically, he hadn't healed them. He'd merely lent some of his body's energy to Azarwrath's efforts, and he'd told them the sword had been responsible, but they hadn't been belligerent about magic or tried to fight him. Some had gripped his hand and thanked him heartily.\n\nHe didn't particularly want to see them all killed by dragons.\n\nAzarwrath? he asked, wondering if the Cofah soulblade would deign to speak with him again. Azarwrath hadn't seemed irked with him that morning, nor had Trip gotten the impression that he was holding a grudge, but he didn't know how promising to find that, especially in light of Blazer's new plan.\n\nI am here, the soulblade replied neutrally.\n\nIt looks like my people are going to part ways with yours. Trip wondered if Blazer intended to leave Dreyak here or invite him to continue along with them. Do you want to stay here with Kiadarsa to help protect them from dragons?\n\nI have been considering this today. While you rested and your people conspired.\n\nTrip wanted to object to the idea that his team had been conspiring, as he knew they were only doing their best to ensure they completed their mission, but he understood why a Cofah soul would feel that way.\n\nI do not blame you for being one of them, Azarwrath said. People have always warred. This is simply how it is. Though it bemuses me that our two peoples are engaged in the same battle as they were fifteen hundred years ago. Will you Iskandians never concede that your nation would be better served by being assimilated into the empire?\n\nI highly doubt it.\n\nThe soulblade chuckled into his mind. It was different from Jaxi's laughs and cackles. It seemed the soft chuckle of an older man, one who rarely threw back his head and laughed uproariously anymore. His voice, too, seemed one of an ancient soul.\n\nAncient, really, Azarwrath said dryly.\n\nYou did just claim to be fifteen hundred years old.\n\nMuch of that time was spent in a stasis chamber, locked up with my great great great granddaughter for crimes she committed in an era when the rule was particularly draconian and spitting in the street was considered a crime. She wasn't the most noble of people, which I always lamented, but she didn't deserve to be imprisoned for centuries. A twinge of bitterness accompanied the words, but only a twinge.\n\nTrip had the feeling that whatever had happened, Azarwrath had come to terms with it a long time ago.\n\nIt is hard to stay bitter for centuries. I was sixty-three when I entered the soulblade. I'd been wounded in battle, a battle where my son was one of the generals leading the armies. The empire, as it seems to like to do again and again, had overextended itself and was attempting to claim Dakrovia as part of its domain, thinking it would be easy to defeat the jungle savages.\n\nBut their shamans were powerful, Azarwrath went on. Dragons originated on that continent, and mated frequently with the humans there. Even their mundane people knew every square inch of those jungles. Our armies, as well-trained and technologically superior as we were, never had a chance. One night, there was an ambush. My son was captured and dragged away, and I was grievously wounded. A gut wound. My people found me, and there wasn't a healer along powerful enough to help me, but there was time for me to make a decision, to decide whether to accept my death or to pour my soul into a blade that had been prepared by our sorcerers.\n\nI had never longed for eternity and hadn't considered the soulblade ceremony before, but I was worried about my son. I didn't want to leave this world when his fate was in enemy hands, when he might have been suffering through torture even as I lay dying. So, I entered the blade and helped my people recover him. And then he became my handler. We fought many battles together in the years that followed, until his own death came. When I'd made my quick decision that night years before, I hadn't considered that it would mean outliving, in a manner of speaking, my own son. But I was passed on to my grandson, and then to his daughter and so on.\n\nTrip stirred. Was the pirate king's\u2026 mate the great great great granddaughter you spoke of?\n\nShe was.\n\nTrip did not know what to say. He was more surprised than ever that Azarwrath was talking to him and had let him pick him up that night.\n\nI did debate for a long time over that, Azarwrath said. Not over initially being picked up, as I didn't want the tide to come in and for me to rust.\n\nI knew it, Jaxi inserted, proving that she was listening to the story too.\n\nIgnoring her, Azarwrath continued. I considered forcing you to leave me on that island, though I wasn't amused by the possibility that the dragon might find me and stick me into some hoard of treasure he planned to collect. As powerful as a soulblade is, we are not powerful enough to fight a dragon, not alone.\n\nDo you\u2026 Trip paused, not certain he should ask his question in case Azarwrath hadn't considered it, but the soulblade must have considered it. Right away that first night. Do you have any plans to avenge yourself on Rysha for defeating your descendant in battle?\n\nIt would be somewhat fitting if I wanted to kill her since her sword wants to kill us, but no. It was a fair fight, and my descendant, as you put it, and I weren't always in agreement. In my time, women did not become warriors or battle mages. They did not foolishly risk their lives. So, we disagreed on that aspect, but not only that. She reveled in the pirate life and being Neaminor's lover. He'd rescued her from stasis, if you didn't know. After finding her story in a book of legendary criminals and falling in love across time, he went looking for her, for at the end of her story, it explained how she'd been put into stasis at a dragon-rider outpost, to be tried later. But then, when the outpost was overrun, she was forgotten. Forgotten for over a thousand years. He found her and figured out how to free her, and she couldn't help but fall in love with him. For the next twenty years, they lived together as pirates.\n\nInvading Iskandia and killing people and stealing. Trip knew he shouldn't harp on that to someone who had been related to the woman, but he wanted to make sure the soulblade understood why Rysha had done what she had done. And why he had helped.\n\nYes, I understand.\n\nAzarwrath fell silent, and Trip realized he hadn't answered the original question.\n\nA freezing wind gusted across the ice field and battered the airship's envelope. Maybe it was his imagination, but it seemed to come from that mountain.\n\nKiadarsa, Azarwrath? Trip prompted. Do you want to stay and help them?\n\nA part of me does want to help them. Even if they are little like my comrades of fifteen hundred years ago, they are Cofah. But Kiadarsa\u2026 She would not even have been considered a sorceress in my day. Her powers are very limited, and, as you saw, she is easily influenced. Your aura drew her, most certainly, and you don't even exude it the way you should. It's as if you've spent your life crumpling yourself into a tiny ball and trying not to be noticed by anyone.\n\nUhm. Trip could hardly deny that, since it was true, at least when it came to magic. He did want to be noticed for his piloting skills, but the rest\u2026 If you can read my thoughts, you know what happened to my mother.\n\nYes, the world is a strange place these days. Sorcerers were always feared by mundane humans, rightfully so, but they were respected, as well, and in my time, people wouldn't have dared hang someone for suspected dragon blood.\n\nIt didn't make Trip feel better to know his mother would have been left alone to pursue her passions if she'd only lived during another era.\n\nAs to Kiadarsa, Azarwrath went on, it is perhaps petty, but I could not see myself bonded with such a weak soul. If you wish to bed her, she would be yours, even though she doesn't trust you. If a dragon turned into a human and crooked a finger toward her, she would drop to her knees to please him in any way he wished. His tone turned dry. I believe that happened recently.\n\nAccording to her story, yes.\n\nHer story? Did you not see that it was true? All you have to do is look into a person's mind to see if they are telling the truth.\n\nA convenient talent.\n\nThat you have. There was that chuckle again. Most sorcerers have to spend years learning to master arts that come easily to you when you simply try. While a modicum of modesty and humbleness are admirable traits in a sorcerer, it is more than time for you to realize your talents and to take credit for what you can do, what you have done.\n\nTrip, uncomfortable with the suggestion that he might easily read people's minds, did not respond. Having such a power, aside from moral considerations, would only make his comrades more uncomfortable around him. If they allowed him to stay near them at all. Sorcerers, he suspected, did not fly as officers in Wolf Squadron. They were probably supposed to stay in dark mountain caves until they were needed to help defend their homeland.\n\nSardelle lives in a house on the outskirts of the city with Ridge, Jaxi said dryly. It's private, but definitely not a cave. She makes cookies with Ridge's mother and trains students in the ways of magic. I'm sure she would be more than willing to train you, as much as she's able. In between your Wolf Squadron missions.\n\nTrip hesitated. Do you truly think I'd be allowed to keep flying? Would the other officers accept a sorcerer in their midst? I've seen so much hatred and fear toward those even suspected of having magic.\n\nThe average Iskandian is not enamored with magic, Jaxi said, but I'm positive General Zirkander wouldn't object to having a sorcerer in one of his squadrons, and the others ought to learn to appreciate having your abilities up there. They would be foolish not to want any advantage that could help keep them alive.\n\nTrip, thinking of how many times he'd seen Leftie circle his heart with two fingers, a superstitious gesture to ward off witches and magic, knew pilots had their foolish moments.\n\nYour lieutenant is coming, Jaxi said. And she left her guard dog in the flier. Maybe she longs to cuddle with you.\n\nTrip glanced back to see Rysha heading his way. More likely, she was coming to tell him they would be leaving soon, assuming the team intended to bring him and not leave him to be cannon fodder with the Cofah. He knew that was unlikely, but admitted to feeling a little resentful at the moment.\n\nI will leave you for a private conversation, Azarwrath told him as Rysha drew nearer. But to answer your initial question, no, I do not wish to be left with the Cofah.\n\nThat's fine, Trip said. I'm happy to have your lightning bolts streaking out of my flier. But I feel obligated to point out, since this may be your last chance, that if Kiadarsa survives the battle for the portal, she could take you back to your people, and maybe you could find another Cofah sorcerer to bond with, one that's more powerful.\n\nI've considered that, but I understand that your other soulblade is on loan.\n\nYes, Jaxi is linked to a healer back home.\n\nThus, you do not have a soulblade.\n\nTrue, Trip said slowly, as what Azarwrath was suggesting sank in, but I'm just a pilot who barely knows anything.\n\nI will not disagree with that, Azarwrath said blandly.\n\nJaxi giggled. Or was that a chortle?\n\nBut you are learning much quickly, and will progress even more quickly once you have time for training. As it is, I suspect your people will barely recognize you when you get home.\n\nTrip knew the comment was meant to be encouraging, but he could only feel bleakness at the statement. He didn't want to return home a stranger to his grandparents, or General Zirkander and his colleagues. He just wanted to be Captain Trip. Pilot extraordinaire. Occasional maker of furnishings and gadgets to please women. At least one woman, he amended as he watched Rysha approach.\n\nSeven gods, what would she think about all this?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Rysha couldn't see Trip's face in the darkness, and she couldn't tell what he was thinking. He hadn't lifted a hand in invitation, though he'd been watching her approach. Was he lost in thought? Or had he realized what the squadron was planning, and it irked him that he'd been left out?\n\n\"Rysha.\" He nodded as she stepped up to the railing beside him. Was there wariness in those two syllables?\n\n\"Blazer will probably come up soon to tell you, but we'll be leaving in less than an hour. Our team. In the fliers.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Did Jaxi figure it out a while ago?\" Rysha looked sidelong at him, almost asking if he'd figured it out.\n\n\"While I was sleeping. Apparently, soulblades don't nap.\"\n\n\"Oh? What do they do while you nap?\"\n\n\"Pine with loneliness.\"\n\nRysha swatted his arm, relieved by his humor. It seemed to mean he wasn't irked. At least, not with her.\n\n\"I got to try my gun mount today,\" she said, starting with that since it was an easy topic. \"Only for one shot, which I used to peg a dragon-pigeon in its armored butt, but it was enough to see how useful it will be. Thank you for making it and installing it.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. I'm always glad to hear when my creations assist in dragon-pigeon assaults.\"\n\n\"That happens often, does it?\"\n\n\"This may have been the first time. If I ever open a gadget-making business, may I put your testimonial on the pamphlet?\"\n\n\"Verbatim? No editing?\"\n\n\"There's no need to edit that testimonial.\"\n\nRysha grinned, tempted to swat his arm again. Actually, she was tempted to lean against it, to lean against him. With their parkas, hoods, mittens, and scarves, she doubted they could warm each other up effectively by leaning together, but it would still be nice.\n\nShe'd been relieved when she'd seen him up here alone, not off somewhere with that sorceress. She hadn't seen him reciprocate that woman's touches, but Rysha also hadn't been watching him day and night. And Leftie's words about seduction had concerned her, for more reasons than one.\n\nShe wanted to find a way to let Trip know that she was developing\u2014had developed\u2014feelings for him. In case he'd been contemplating\u2026 other options. Because he didn't know she was an option. Maybe he didn't have such feelings for her, but she at least wanted him to know that she cared for him.\n\n\"I wanted to talk to you about a couple of things,\" Rysha said, looking toward his face, though the darkness and fur-lined parka hood ensured she wouldn't get any clues from it. \"If it's all right. Or did you want to be alone?\"\n\n\"Trust me, I wasn't alone.\" Trip tapped the two sword hilts near his hips.\n\nAgain, she found the humor in his voice encouraging, but he hadn't answered her question.\n\n\"I don't know who else to talk to,\" she said quietly.\n\n\"You can talk to me about anything.\"\n\nCould she? He didn't seem one given toward hyperbole, but they hadn't truly known each other that long.\n\n\"Anything? Even female problems? Leftie and Duck seemed completely uninterested in discussing them.\"\n\nHe shifted, looking down at her, and she blushed, glad the darkness would hide her red cheeks. How silly of her to have brought that up. She suspected her subconscious was trying to avoid talking about more serious matters.\n\n\"You can tell me about them, but I don't think I can fix them with a soldering iron and metal scraps.\"\n\n\"This is likely true.\" Rysha pushed her spectacles higher on her nose. \"First off, since you apparently know all about our new plan, I'd like to ask you what you think. Or if you can think of any way we can do this without leaving the Cofah defenseless. I know they haven't been that friendly to us, but we're not technically at war with them right now, so throwing them to the wolves\u2014the dragons\u2014doesn't seem right. Even if we were at war, these are mostly researchers. Aside from their sorceress, they don't have any way to fight dragons.\"\n\n\"I know, but I don't know what to do. I asked Azarwrath if he wanted to stay with them and help them, but he's disinclined.\"\n\n\"Oh? Really? Because he thinks it's a lost cause, and he'd end up left in an ice cave for all eternity?\"\n\nTrip paused. Considering his next words? \"He wasn't interested in bonding with Kiadarsa.\"\n\nRysha also paused, to rethink a snide comment that wanted to spring from her lips. She was too old to act like some snippy teenager making disparaging comments about the female competition.\n\n\"Earlier today, while I was supposed to be sleeping and was instead wrestling with this issue, I did have a thought about how to help them,\" Rysha said. \"I actually think Blazer's plan is good and improves our odds. I just can't dismiss other people as expendable.\"\n\n\"It's not wrong to care.\"\n\nHis words were off-hand and simple, but they touched her. He understood how she felt. And he didn't seem to judge her for it, didn't seem to think that someone training for the elite troops should harden herself and learn to accept that people died in military maneuvers.\n\nShe hadn't meant to lean against him, but she did, pressing her shoulder against his.\n\nAt first, he didn't react, but he soon shifted to wrap his arm around her shoulders. The wind was cold, and she wouldn't have minded snuggling closer, but she wanted his opinion on her plan. If she was going to enact it, she had to do it soon\u2014she was running out of time. But she had struggled to decide on her own and wanted someone to talk to about it.\n\n\"We have three chapaharii swords,\" Rysha said. \"And you and the soulblades. I'm not going to say three is overkill and that we wouldn't miss one if it disappeared, but one could make the difference between life and death for the Cofah on the airship. The dragons, if they sensed it, might hesitate to attack. That might give them more time. And it shouldn't affect our own incursion. If anything, the dragons might then focus on the airship for longer, giving us more time to get in without them noticing.\"\n\n\"So, you want to give one of the Cofah your sword?\"\n\n\"Lend it to them. Just for tonight. And then, if all goes well, I fly over and get it back after the portal has been destroyed.\" Rysha would, of course, need a pilot to fly her over, but she didn't say that out loud. She didn't want Trip to think that was the only reason she'd chosen to confide in him.\n\nShe truly couldn't imagine going to anyone else about this, not even Kaika. As much as she respected Kaika, she didn't believe she cared about the Cofah or would understand this choice. Kaika also might tell Blazer, and if Blazer outright forbade it, Rysha couldn't hand over the blade without disobeying orders. Given the seriousness of the situation, that might be grounds for a court-martial. At least if she did it without telling the others until it was too late, it couldn't be considered disobeying orders. She could still be court-martialed, of course. For handing over an irreplaceable artifact to the enemy, an artifact that could be key in defending Iskandia from dragons.\n\nShe rubbed her face, her cold cheeks. Was this the right thing? She was only at the beginning of her career, a career she'd dreamed of for a long time. Were these Cofah worth risking everything for? What would her parents say if she ended up kicked out of the army over this? What would Grandmother have said?\n\n\"You know if you need a pilot, I'm yours. And\u2014\" Trip added, his tone going dry, \"I wouldn't be that displeased if you weren't carrying that sword around. But\u2014\" his tone turned serious again, \"\u2014I think you should tell Blazer and Kaika rather than taking them by surprise.\"\n\nRysha grimaced. She'd considered that and knew it would be the more mature thing to do, but she kept thinking about that old axiom about it being easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.\n\n\"I'll stand by your side if you want to talk to them now,\" he said.\n\nShe appreciated the offer, but she also knew he was just a pilot to them, and the new kid at that. Even though Rysha disagreed with that assessment of him, she was positive his words wouldn't have a lot of sway with Kaika and Blazer.\n\n\"I can ask Jaxi to throb with an authoritative aura.\" Trip squeezed her shoulders.\n\nShe laughed, but stopped when she realized she hadn't been speaking her objections aloud and that he'd seemed to sense them anyway.\n\n\"Are you reading my thoughts?\" Rysha asked.\n\nHe hadn't been moving much, but he grew noticeably stiller.\n\n\"I know you probably can,\" she said, \"and I didn't mean to make that an accusation. I just\u2026 I guess I'd just like to know.\"\n\nHe lowered his arm, and she winced, wishing she hadn't said anything. It was obvious he wanted to keep his abilities a secret, and that was understandable given how the majority of Iskandians felt about magic. She wished she could retract the words.\n\n\"You know I probably can?\" Trip gripped the railing with his gloved hands and did not look at her.\n\n\"Well, you've spoken to me telepathically a couple of times now, so I didn't need all of my degrees to figure it out.\" Rysha smiled, hoping that humor could lighten the mood\u2014and make him realize she wasn't going to judge him for having dragon blood. Even if the mind-reading aspect made her uncomfortable, she thought she could learn to accept it. To accept him.\n\nHe looked sharply at her. \"I didn't realize\u2026 I didn't mean to do that.\"\n\n\"Really? I felt you help me with the dragon. I know you were the reason I fell at just the right time to avoid getting clubbed by that tail.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He looked forward again, staring out at the white expanse and the dark mountain looming ahead.\n\n\"I'm glad you did.\"\n\nEven though he didn't seem that approachable now, she risked resting her hand on his forearm and squeezing him through his sleeve. She wished he wasn't wearing a parka, and that she wasn't wearing gloves, so she could feel the warmth of his skin against hers.\n\n\"I can understand why you wouldn't be eager to tell people, since it might not be well received, but if I can talk to you about female problems, you can most definitely talk to me about sorcerer problems.\"\n\nHe snorted. \"I'm not a sorcerer.\"\n\n\"But you do have dragon blood.\" Rysha looked over her shoulder to make sure nobody was nearby. There wasn't anyone on deck, and only one person near the lamp in the glassed-in wheelhouse. The navigator wouldn't be able to hear them from there.\n\n\"You're not surprised.\"\n\n\"No. I figured it out a long time ago.\" Realizing he might find that odd, since they'd only known each other a couple of weeks, she amended the statement. \"All right, I figured it out a few days ago. On the Pirate Isles. Before you spoke 'be careful' into my mind. I'm a brainy book girl, remember? I figure things out.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" He tightened his fingers around the railing and looked down at them.\n\nTensely. She didn't want him to be tense or worried around her, but she didn't know what else to say to make him more comfortable.\n\n\"Which isn't always a great boon,\" she said. \"Sometimes, you figure things out that people would rather you wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I don't mind you knowing,\" he said quietly. \"I'm just concerned about the others. Flying is all I ever wanted to do, and I'm afraid they wouldn't want me in the squadron. I know Wolf Squadron and the capital are different from Cougar Squadron and Charkolt, but it's still\u2026 It's scary. I've spent my whole life hiding my quirks. Or trying to. My grandparents had to move a lot when I was young because of those quirks, because people would notice I was odd. Like my mother had been. I made it all the way to adulthood, even though there were a couple of close calls when I was young, a couple of times we had to abandon everything and leave town in the middle of the night. I didn't even understand. I was too young to realize I was the problem.\"\n\n\"Trip,\" she whispered, his words tugging at her heartstrings, and stepped closer to him, wanting to ease his burden, or at least comfort him somehow. She slid her arm around his back and rested her other hand on his chest, looking up at him. \"I'm sorry you had to live through that and that you lost your mother. And I get why you're so wary now. I won't tell anyone, I promise, but I do think you'll find that you're in the perfect place to let people know, if you choose to do so.\"\n\n\"In sub-zero temperatures on a Cofah airship?\"\n\nShe swatted him on the chest. \"In Wolf Squadron and under General Zirkander's nose. I'm sure if you told him, he wouldn't bat an eye. Or does he already know? I assumed Sardelle did. And that Jaxi did before she agreed to go with you.\"\n\n\"He knows, though I'm not sure he knew in the beginning. He figured it out when we fought those dragons attacking the city.\"\n\n\"There you go. Zirkander and Sardelle already paved the way for sorcerous city defenders.\"\n\n\"I know. I've discussed this with Jaxi. But as I pointed out to her, I'm not dating or married to a national hero who has the king's ear.\"\n\n\"Hm, yes, clearly a problem. Do you want me to help you to find a national hero to date when we get back? My family has connections.\" She smirked at him, hoping to lighten his mood.\n\nHe gazed into her eyes for the first time since she'd confessed to knowing his secret. He also seemed to notice for the first time that she had an arm around him, for he returned the embrace, sliding his arm around her back. Too bad the parkas made it so she barely felt the gesture.\n\n\"I'm not sure who that would be,\" he said. \"Everyone pales in comparison to Zirkander, though Leftie informs me that there are sports figures that people idolize.\"\n\n\"Male or female?\"\n\n\"Male, I believe. I'd have to be\u2026 flexible.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure flexibility is what's required. We could ask Kaika. She seems to know about all things bedroom related.\"\n\n\"Even involving relationships between men?\" Trip lifted his finger to wipe a snowflake off the center of one of her lenses.\n\nHis glove left a watery smudge, but she appreciated the sentiment. And it wasn't as if she needed to see right now. It was night, and even if her lenses had been un-smudged, she wouldn't have been able to make out his features.\n\n\"I wouldn't be surprised,\" Rysha said. \"She's quite worldly. She offered to give me a list of her recommended sex toys.\"\n\nShe thought he might gape or snort, but all he said was, \"Oh? Do you also have your eye on a national hero?\"\n\n\"A table-making pilot, actually, though I'm a little concerned a beautiful sorceress is trying to seduce him.\"\n\nShe gazed at him, nervous about what his reaction might be. She had wanted to talk about this, to let him know that she felt\u2026 feelings, but maybe this wasn't the right moment, when he was wrapped up in other concerns.\n\n\"He's not interested in sorceresses,\" Trip said, touching her cheek with his fingers this time. \"He likes women who come to his defense in pubs, threatening to beat up brutes that won't leave him alone.\"\n\nRysha snorted softly, though all manner of emotions rushed into her heart at this simple admission that he was interested in her. \"I didn't threaten to beat anyone up.\"\n\n\"Would you have if they hadn't left me alone?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"I thought so,\" he murmured, then lowered his mouth to hers.\n\nShe danced on the inside, spinning pirouettes. Her aunt would have said pirouettes were unladylike, as was reacting so strongly to some man she barely knew, but Rysha didn't care. She leaned her chest against his and kissed him back eagerly, wanting to show him her enthusiasm, to let him know that she cared about him and that she'd stand beside him, no matter what. It didn't matter that his veins held some dragon blood in them. She liked that he made her laugh, that he listened to her rambles, and that he paid attention to her.\n\nAnd she liked the way he kissed too. At first, their lips had been cold from the frigid air, but sparks kindled, and fire ran up and down her nerves, heating her body all over. She forgot the cold, forgot everything except him.\n\nShe longed to slip her hands under his parka\u2014under his shirt\u2014and run them over his warm skin, but a door slammed somewhere, and Trip drew back, breaking the kiss. He didn't look away though. He held her gaze for a long minute and rested his hand on the side of her head.\n\n\"We should do this again with less clothing on,\" Rysha whispered. Only after the words came out did she realize she might have implied, or suggested, more than kissing. But maybe that was all right.\n\n\"I agree.\" He hugged her once more before releasing her and turning to face the two people who had walked out on deck.\n\nBlazer and Kaika. Rysha blew out a slow breath, wishing they hadn't shown up and that it wasn't time to leave for the mission. But they had, and it was.\n\nResolutely, Rysha walked toward the fliers.\n\nTrip matched her pace, sticking to her side. \"Are you going to tell them?\"\n\nIt took her a moment to bring her mind back to what they'd originally been speaking about.\n\n\"I think so. But if I have a stupid moment and don't, will you help me get the sword back afterward?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nShe expected him to add, \"But I think you should do the smart thing and tell them beforehand,\" but he didn't. She appreciated that, appreciated that he wouldn't try to push her, that he would support her even if she was doing something to hurt her career.\n\n\"Ravenwood,\" Blazer said as they approached. \"Trip. We're going to leave in our fliers and head to the ruins separately from the Cofah.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Trip said.\n\nBlazer frowned at Rysha.\n\n\"Jaxi told me when I woke up,\" Trip said.\n\nNow that they were closer to the fliers and Dorfindral, Rysha sensed the blade's discontent. She doubted the sword knew she had been kissing Trip, or what kissing was, but it definitely didn't want her standing next to him now.\n\nToo bad.\n\n\"Ah,\" Blazer said. \"Then I don't need to fill you in on anything?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. My flier is packed.\"\n\n\"Good. We're just waiting for Leftie, Duck, and Dreyak then.\"\n\n\"Dreyak is coming?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"I just asked him if he wanted to stay, but he said his assignment was to stick with us.\" Blazer's mouth twisted. \"Maybe I shouldn't have given him an option.\"\n\n\"He's been useful to have on the team,\" Trip said. \"And he's argued with his own people more than he has with us.\"\n\n\"That is true, isn't it?\" Rysha wondered a bit at that.\n\nBlazer only grunted.\n\nRysha took a deep breath. \"Major Blazer?\" She glanced at Kaika. Rysha doubted Kaika would understand her motives, but hoped she might back her up anyway. Having a prot\u00e9g\u00e9/mentor relationship should be good for more than getting a list of sex props, shouldn't it?\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"You remember that I had concerns about the Cofah being left without any defenses.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Blazer's face grew guarded, wary.\n\n\"I'd like to temporarily lend them my sword.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Dorfindral.\"\n\n\"I know its name.\"\n\n\"If they get attacked by dragons, then at least they'll have something to fight with,\" Rysha said, glad for Trip's presence at her side, even if he wasn't saying anything. \"And the dragons might hesitate to attack the airship if it's on board. If they don't have the blade, the dragons could make quick work of them and then have the time to turn their attention to us. The Cofah would likely prove a better diversion if they could make the battle last.\" That, of course, wasn't why Rysha wanted to lend them the sword, but she thought it might be more likely to sway Blazer. \"Did you know that dragons, though they resent being compared to animals, are like many other predators with a self-preservation instinct and will weigh their options and consider the strength of their opponent before picking a fight?\"\n\nBlazer dropped her face into her hand.\n\n\"Is that, by chance, agreement, ma'am?\" Rysha asked. Or defeat?\n\n\"No,\" Blazer snapped. \"Get in your flier. With your sword.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Even if I didn't think we would need it for tonight's battle, I wouldn't authorize giving an incredible weapon capable of helping defend our country to the Cofah.\"\n\n\"Not permanently, ma'am. If they're not willing to return it after this is over, I'll go get it personally.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they'll tremble in their boots knowing a lieutenant four months out of the academy is going to come after them.\"\n\n\"I'll go with her,\" Trip said, resting his fingers, not on Jaxi's hilt but on the other one's. Azarwrath's.\n\nBlazer lifted a dismissive hand and started to scoff at him, but when she looked his way, her gaze snagged on him. Other than the touch of the sword, he hadn't moved, but he seemed different. As he held Blazer's gaze, he had an unmistakable presence, an aura. Not as commanding as that of the dragons, perhaps, but he definitely exuded power. Rysha sensed it, even though he wasn't looking at her, and it sent a little zing of heat through her.\n\nShe wondered if the sword was lending some aura to Trip, or if he was simply not hiding what he was, at least not right now.\n\n\"All right,\" Blazer said, appearing mesmerized briefly. She soon grimaced and wrenched her gaze from him, and Rysha thought the moment had passed, that she had recovered and would rescind the words, but Blazer glared at her and said, \"You want to go defenseless into a dragon's den, then that's your choice. Make sure to tell one of your comrades if you have any last words you want delivered to your parents if you die.\"\n\nBlazer stomped off to round up Leftie and Duck. Or maybe to punch some holes into walls.\n\nKaika looked at Rysha, her face hard to read.\n\n\"I already asked Trip to let my parents know what happened to me if I die out here,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"Oh? Is that what you were doing over in the dark shadows by the railing? Because it looked like something else to me.\"\n\nTrip lost his aura of power when he blushed, a sheepish expression crossing his face. Rysha grinned, both because Kaika didn't seem to be angry with her and because, even though she was admittedly attracted to Powerful Trip, she liked Goofy Trip better. He was the one that fixed tables for her.\n\nLeftie and Duck jogged toward the fliers, a woman trailing after them. Or after Leftie, it appeared, since she blew him a kiss when he looked back at her.\n\n\"Does his cocky arrogance actually work on women?\" Rysha muttered.\n\n\"It's proud confidence, he tells me,\" Trip said.\n\nDreyak strode out by himself, his head freshly shaven, his face flinty. He jumped into Trip's flier without a greeting for anyone.\n\nAs Leftie and Duck hopped into their fliers, Blazer walked back out, Jylea running after her. Kiadarsa trailed at a less frantic, but still brisk pace.\n\n\"You're leaving now?\" Jylea demanded. \"We'll be there in an hour.\"\n\n\"We've decided to go in on our own,\" Blazer said over her shoulder.\n\n\"So you can reach the portal first and brag that you destroyed it before the Cofah? That's not going to happen.\" Jylea raced around Blazer and halted in front of her, her fists on her hips as she blocked the route.\n\nJylea looked at Kiadarsa, as if she expected the sorceress to make sure it didn't happen. Could the woman sabotage the fliers?\n\nBut Kiadarsa looked at Trip and shook her head once at her colleague. Jylea scowled. Blazer walked around her and headed toward her flier.\n\nMaybe this was the time to offer the sword. Rysha pulled Dorfindral's box out of Duck's flier, experiencing the usual tug to open it and hew down all the dragon-blooded people present, but she also experienced a feeling of reluctance. Not from the sword, she didn't think, but from within her. Did she not want to give it up? A few days ago, she hadn't wanted the dangerous weapon at all.\n\nShaking her head, Rysha strode toward Jylea with the box. The woman had been alternately glaring at Blazer's back and waving at Kiadarsa, urging her to do something. She didn't notice Rysha until only a few steps separated them.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Jylea asked her.\n\nKiadarsa eyed Dorfindral's box warily and backed up. \"It's one of the magic-hating swords,\" she told Jylea.\n\n\"We have three,\" Rysha explained. \"They won't make you impervious to dragons, but they help against magical attacks, and can pierce their mental defenses. They also want to kill dragons, very badly.\"\n\n\"Why are you telling me this?\"\n\n\"We didn't want to leave you defenseless, so I'm offering to let you borrow one of mine. You have to be careful around sorcerers because\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm aware of how they work,\" Jylea said. \"What do you mean borrow?\"\n\n\"We don't need one of those blades,\" Kiadarsa said, lifting her chin.\n\nJylea lifted a hand toward her. \"Go on,\" she told Rysha.\n\n\"If you have someone who can wield it, you can have it for the night. I do need to take it back to Iskandia as soon as we're done here\u2014\" Rysha waved toward the dark mountain, \"\u2014so it can only be a loan.\"\n\nKiadarsa gripped Jylea's elbow and drew her away. \"We don't need it,\" she said in a whisper that Rysha barely heard. \"The others are coming. Soon. We just need to delay the Iskandians. We\u2014\" The sorceress frowned at Rysha and drew Jylea farther away. Both women turned their backs and kept muttering.\n\nRysha turned her own back but eased closer to them, trying not to make it obvious that she wanted to spy.\n\n\"\u2026still use it,\" Jylea whispered. \"\u2026powerful to defend our homeland.\"\n\n\"\u2026won't matter after this.\"\n\n\"Still\u2026 to have.\"\n\n\"What if they\u2026 destroy\u2026\"\n\n\"\u2026won't have time.\"\n\n\"We're going, Ravenwood,\" Blazer called and pointed her toward Duck's flier. Duck was already in the cockpit.\n\nLeftie was in his, too, and Trip stood by his craft, though he was watching Rysha and the Cofah women. Waiting to see if Rysha needed him? Or also trying to spy on the others' words?\n\nKiadarsa and Jylea had stopped talking. They faced Rysha's team, their faces frosty.\n\n\"Do you want it?\" Rysha held the box out in front of her, though from those snippets of conversation, she wondered if she should rescind the offer. Who was coming, and what did these Cofah plan? \"I wrote down the ancient words that can command it. They're on a piece of paper inside.\"\n\nKiadarsa's eyes narrowed. With suspicion? Did she think this a trick?\n\nThough Jylea's scowl didn't lessen, she said, \"Yes,\" and took the box.\n\nHoping she hadn't made a mistake, Rysha ran to join her team. She was tempted to switch with Dreyak and climb into Trip's flier instead of Duck's since she no longer carried a sword that wanted to kill him. She paused in front of his craft.\n\n\"Ravenwood,\" Blazer said from her cockpit.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am?\"\n\nBlazer hefted a box, the one that held her chapaharii sword. \"You're not getting out of wielding one.\"\n\n\"Ma'am?\" Rysha stared at her, her feet rooted to the deck in confusion. It wasn't so much that she'd longed to get out of having one; it was that she didn't understand why she should receive another. She wasn't a sword-fighting master. Her sparring session with Kaika had proven that.\n\n\"You're the only person who can wield one who isn't piloting. As I found before, trying to poke dragons and fly at the same time isn't that effective.\"\n\n\"Oh, I guess that makes sense.\"\n\n\"That's me. Sensible.\" Blazer shoved the box toward her.\n\nRysha accepted it, giving Trip a sad smile as she left his flier. She wouldn't be riding with him, after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "The dark silhouette of a dragon appeared in the starry sky above the snow-smothered mountain. It wasn't a surprise to Trip\u2014he could sense that dragon, as well as three others in the vicinity\u2014but his colleagues groaned and swore over the communication crystals.\n\nThey were flying low to the ice, around the far side and back of the mountain, hoping to come to the ruins site from a different direction than the airship. The last he'd heard, the plan was to land a few miles away, camouflage the fliers as well as possible, and go in on foot. Ideally while the dragons focused on the Cofah.\n\nTrip hadn't yet mentioned that the dragons could and would sense the fliers' magical power crystals even if they completely covered the aircraft with snow. He was surprised the dragons hadn't already come over to investigate. Was the presence of the chapaharii swords keeping them away?\n\nActually, me and your new buddy, Azzy, are responsible, Jaxi informed him.\n\nTrip was less inclined to think of the Cofah sword as \"Azzy\" now that he knew a sixty-something-year-old soul lay within the blade. Technically, a fifteen-hundred-and-sixty-something-year-old soul.\n\nWe're doing our best to dampen our auras, your aura, and that of the crystals, she added.\n\nYou must be working well together\u2014and effectively. Trip nodded toward the mountain. I don't think they've even looked this way yet.\n\nWe're working together due to necessity. Azzy is almost as stuffy as Wreltad, Tylie's soulblade. They should probably spend time together. Boring time.\n\nI am not stuffy, Azarwrath proclaimed. You are impertinent. I've never met a soul so young and impertinent within a blade.\n\nThat is true. I am a supremely unique soul.\n\nThat is not what I said.\n\nTrip looked back at Dreyak, as if the Cofah warrior could save him from the silly bickering. Was it necessary for the soulblades to use his head as a meeting place for it?\n\nOh, we've been having discussions that you haven't been privy to, as well, Jaxi thought. We've been debating your potential as a sorcerer and who your father might have been. Or might be. Do you know if he's still alive? One would think that likely.\n\nI know nothing about him. My grandparents never knew him, and my mother didn't tell me much before she died. Trip decided the silly bickering might be preferable to having the swords discussing him.\n\nYou should probably go on a quest to find him.\n\nA man should know the male who birthed him, Azarwrath agreed.\n\nThe male doesn't do the birthing, Jaxi told him, conveying an eye roll. When she did that, Trip got an impression of her as a red-haired young woman with pigtails rather than a wise and venerable sword. Even particularly obtuse old men from primitive times should have a clue about how biology works, Jaxi added.\n\nI am not old, nor were my times primitive. I lived during the heyday of magic, when it was everywhere, improving the lives of all.\n\nBut not the biology knowledge, apparently.\n\n\"Dreyak,\" Trip blurted, not caring that his tone came out as desperate. Maybe if he had a conversation of his own going on, the swords would take their conversation out of his mind. Even though dealing with Azarwrath hadn't been difficult so far, he was starting to miss the days when the Cofah soulblade had been silent, if only because Jaxi hadn't had another soul to argue with then. \"You haven't spoken much since we met up with your people.\"\n\nHe glanced back, catching Dreyak looking toward that dragon silhouette as it did the aerial equivalent of pacing in the sky above the mountain. Or flying a patrol route?\n\n\"Among the Cofah, that is not considered a flaw.\"\n\n\"Not speaking?\"\n\n\"Yes. I have noticed that Iskandians feel the need to fill the air with inane chatter.\"\n\nTrip thought about mentioning that the Cofah soulblade seemed inclined to chatter too. Or was it different if it was arguing?\n\nMuch different, Azarwrath told him.\n\n\"We are a companionable people,\" Trip said aloud. \"I'm curious why you didn't want to abandon us and join the research team.\"\n\n\"Aside from the fact that you sent them off to be cannon fodder?\"\n\n\"Rysha gave up her sword in the hope that they wouldn't be cannon fodder.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\"\n\nTrip thought that might be the end of the conversation, and that his question would go unanswered, but after contemplating the mountain for a time, Dreyak spoke again.\n\n\"My mission is to destroy the portal,\" he said.\n\n\"Isn't that their mission too?\"\n\n\"They would speak little of their mission to me. I believe we may be at cross-purposes, which is disconcerting since the prince sent me to Iskandia.\"\n\n\"To help destroy the portal?\"\n\n\"Among other things.\"\n\nTrip frowned back at him. \"Such as?\"\n\nDreyak still gazed toward the mountain, and he didn't meet Trip's gaze. His lips pressed together firmly, and he did not answer. It was too bad Jaxi had said she couldn't read him. Trip would have liked to know what he was thinking. This was the first Dreyak had admitted he'd been sent by the prince\u2014was that Prince Varlok, the current leader of all of Cofahre?\u2014though perhaps King Angulus had known all along.\n\nHe imagined Dreyak in a great marble audience chamber, standing before a dais and facing a black-haired and bronze-skinned man in purple and blue robes. Receiving an assignment to work with the Iskandians, to offer his services, but also to keep an eye out for clues that would suggest Emperor Salatak still lived, for the Cofah believed the Iskandians had kidnapped him three years earlier and exiled him in a secret place. That was the reason Varlok had been unable to gain the support of the rest of his government, to be officially proclaimed the next emperor for Cofahre.\n\nDreyak's gaze shifted toward Trip, and his eyes narrowed.\n\nTrip started, feeling as if he'd been caught eavesdropping, and faced forward again. Had that been his imagination or something else? Jaxi? Did I\u2014\n\nYes.\n\nDid you know he had that mission?\n\nNo. I can't read him, as I told you.\n\nThen how can you be sure I saw his thoughts? Trip asked.\n\nBecause I can read you\u2014you need to work on making your bank vault a permanent fixture\u2014and sensed the magic you used to extract that information.\n\nTrip shifted uneasily in his seat. \"Extract that information\" made it sound like he was some inquisitor, torturing someone to pry out secrets.\n\nExcept without the torture. Sorcery is much more civil.\n\nBut no less an invasion of privacy.\n\nNo, and you're clumsier than a drunken ox walking a balance beam, so he sensed it. He's glaring at the back of your head right now.\n\nThinking of sticking his sword into me?\n\nYou'd know that better than I would. Jaxi sniffed.\n\nGreat, had he offended her too? By seeing something she couldn't? Or maybe she was just irked that he was a clumsy oaf and had alerted a questionable ally about his gifts.\n\nI said ox, not oaf. Though I suppose I don't object to either classification.\n\nTrip didn't know what to say to that. He thought about prying into Dreyak's thoughts again to see what his intentions were, but decided it wasn't necessary now. For obvious reasons, people rarely stabbed their pilots while riding in the back seats of fliers.\n\n\"Trip?\" Leftie spoke over the crystal.\n\nTrip realized he'd had the channel open, and the others might have heard his conversation with Dreyak. The wind was quiet tonight, nothing but the buzz of their propellers stirring the air and making noise.\n\n\"Yes?\" Trip asked.\n\n\"I told the major but realized I didn't tell you. When I was taking the tour of the airship with my lady friends\u2014\"\n\n\"Friends?\"\n\nThere had been more than one? They hadn't even spent two full days with the Cofah team.\n\n\"Friends, yes. You needn't be jealous. You got a sorceress, after all.\"\n\nMortified, Trip blurted, \"I didn't get a sorceress.\"\n\nEven though Rysha was in the back seat of Duck's flier, Trip feared she would hear the exchange without trouble.\n\n\"No?\" Leftie asked. \"You were in that room alone with her for a long time. With the door closed.\"\n\n\"A long time?\" Captain Kaika asked. \"I wouldn't have guessed our young captain had such stamina.\"\n\n\"It wasn't that long,\" Trip muttered, having a feeling that nothing he said would make things better. He glanced back at Dreyak. \"You may be right. A tendency toward silence might not be a flaw.\"\n\n\"As I said.\"\n\n\"Anyway,\" Leftie said, \"I saw that the airship had a whole lot of rope and hooks in their hold.\"\n\n\"So?\" Trip remembered seeing them, too, but he hadn't paid much attention. He'd been focused on looking for mechanical problems and making repairs.\n\n\"At first, I was just contemplating whether coils of ropes could make a useful place to lie down if one wasn't assigned a cabin. The answer is yes, ropes are fine to lie on, and no, hooks are not. But after I was down there a while, I had a thought that those ropes were really big, and it looked like the Cofah might be planning to pull something up with them.\"\n\n\"Like what? A dragon portal?\"\n\nTrip meant it as a joke, but Leftie asked, \"Did they ever actually say they were planning to blow it up?\"\n\n\"Kiadarsa led me to believe they were, but Jaxi couldn't read her thoughts.\"\n\nTrip now wished he'd attempted to do some mind-reading of his own. The idea of invading another's privacy might make him uncomfortable, but when it came to enemies\u2026\n\nI did notice the expedition leader, Jylea, was very guarded with her thoughts and careful not to think about the portal, Jaxi said thoughtfully.\n\n\"I can't imagine why the Cofah would want to take this hornet's nest back to their homeland,\" Blazer said.\n\nHer flier was in the lead, and she swung around the base of the mountain toward the southern side. Trip banked to follow her. Their growing proximity to the dragons made his head ache.\n\n\"I can't, either, ma'am,\" Leftie said, \"but maybe it's good that we parted ways from them.\"\n\n\"I'm beginning to feel like a fool for leaving my sword with the Cofah,\" Rysha said, her voice faint from the back seat of Duck's flier.\n\nNobody corrected her notion, and Trip saw her slump low in the back of the flier.\n\n\"We'll make sure the portal is destroyed,\" Blazer said. \"Captain Kaika is in my back seat, rubbing her bombs, and I know she'd be disappointed if she didn't get to blow anything up.\"\n\n\"I have no problem blowing up the portal while it's inside a Cofah airship,\" Kaika spoke over Blazer's shoulder.\n\n\"The portal is inside the mountain,\" Trip said. \"I don't see how they could get it out easily.\"\n\n\"It's there?\" Blazer asked sharply. \"Is Jaxi sure?\"\n\nJaxi, are you sure?\n\nNo, and neither are you.\n\n\"Something powerful is in there,\" Trip said. \"I'm assuming it's the portal, especially since there are so many dragons around, but it's possible it's another artifact.\"\n\n\"Lieutenant Ravenwood,\" Blazer said, \"it looks like we're about five miles from the ruins site. Do you concur?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"I see a likely landing spot there in the shadow of the mountain. Follow me down, boys.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Trip and the others said.\n\nHe eyed the side of the mountain as they descended. No trees or brush poked up from the snow. Was it too frigid for things to grow way down here? It wasn't just snow, he realized as they drew closer, but massive glaciers atop the rocks and dirt.\n\n\"Take food, water, clothing, those straps for the bottoms of our boots, and rope and picks,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"So, everything we packed?\" Leftie asked.\n\n\"You can leave behind that little ball that you kiss.\"\n\n\"No way, ma'am. That's my lucky ball. It goes everywhere with me. It was a gift from a lady.\"\n\n\"Didn't your grandmother give it to you when we graduated?\" Trip asked.\n\n\"Grammy Erma is most certainly a lady.\"\n\nThey set the fliers down between white boulder-sized chunks of ice that had broken free of the glaciers and tumbled down the mountain. If there was land underneath the aircraft, Trip couldn't see it. The ground seemed to consist of nothing but ice and snow.\n\nThe air was crisp and clear, but not unpleasant, even though it had to be twenty or thirty degrees below freezing. Maybe Trip was simply growing accustomed to the climate. What he wasn't accustomed to was the presence of the dragons and the way it made his head ache. The pressure against his eardrums was almost painful, as if he'd taken a dive in Charkolt Harbor and gone down too far.\n\nThe airship is approaching the ruins from the other side, Jaxi reported. The dragon scout is still flying around the top of the peak, even though the Cofah are definitely within his range to sense. He has to know they're coming.\n\nI see him. The three other dragons have gone into the mountain, right? Planning some ambush?\n\nThe chapaharii blade could be giving them pause. If those two silvers warned their buddies, then the dragons here know that people on that airship have been successfully killing their kind.\n\nLeftie slipped as he plopped down from his flier. The ground was slick here, more ice than snow. For the first time since arriving in the Antarctic, Trip strapped on the crisscrossing rope-like harnesses for his boots. They were a part of the winter army gear and were supposed to offer better traction on ice. He didn't want to fall on his ass during a dragon fight. Or while a dragon was watching. Or while Rysha was watching.\n\nSo, in general, you'd prefer to remain upright.\n\nYes, can a soulblade assure that happens?\n\nI could, but how would that be entertaining for me?\n\nRysha came up to stand next to him, a heavy pack on her shoulders. It wasn't quite as large as the one Kaika wore, perhaps not containing as many materials for demolitions, but it wasn't any lighter than the packs the men carried.\n\nHer sword\u2014Blazer's sword\u2014seeped its green glow out of its scabbard. Trip chose to believe it simply wanted to light the way for them, rather than that it was trying to influence her or having fantasies of killing him. Could swords have fantasies?\n\nSoulblades can, Jaxi said. Those chapaharii swords are far inferior.\n\nSo, Trip-slaying fantasies are unlikely? I'll find that encouraging.\n\nRysha smiled at Trip, and he also found that encouraging. Maybe it meant she'd gotten to the point that she could control the weapons, and he wouldn't be in danger from her. He hoped so.\n\nHe returned her smile as he remembered their kiss. He also remembered that she hadn't seemed bothered by his blood. He wasn't surprised that she'd figured it out, but it did worry him that he wasn't being as subtle about hiding things as he'd hoped.\n\nIt's hard to be subtle when you're hurling fireballs, Jaxi informed him. I've always preferred to be grandiose and magnificent, rather than subtle.\n\nI wouldn't have guessed.\n\n\"Who's leading?\" Kaika asked, striding away from her flier to join the gathering group. Everyone else had also stopped to attach the traction straps to their boots.\n\n\"Our archaeologist,\" Blazer said. \"Or our soulblade whisperer.\"\n\nEveryone looked at Rysha and Trip.\n\n\"I think we just got nominated to lead together,\" Trip murmured.\n\n\"I'm game as long as your pointy friends let us know if the dragons turn their interest toward us.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they will. Grandiosely and magnificently.\"\n\nRysha looked curiously at him.\n\nTrip waved a dismissive hand and started off, following the base of the mountain. Rysha walked at his side, and the rest of the team trailed behind. They slipped often, despite their fancy boot straps. The ground seemed the ice equivalent of a field of hardened lava, with ridges and ripples making the footing tricky. Maybe the dragons came out and practiced breathing fire on the snow to ensure the walk up was unpleasant for non-winged visitors.\n\nTrip pulled out a ration bar that he'd stuffed into his pocket before slinging his pack over his shoulders. It was all they had for dinner tonight, nobody having suggested they take the time to start a campfire and rehydrate some of their dehydrated rations.\n\nAlas, Azarwrath spoke into his mind.\n\nAlas, what?\n\nAlas, you're going to eat another of those sawdust-like bars of compressed\u2026 whatever is compressed into that flat stick.\n\nTrip looked down at the bar. They weren't exactly his grandmother's cooking, but they weren't awful.\n\nI beg to differ.\n\nWhat does it matter to you? You're not sharing it with me. Trip glanced at the sword hilt, wondering if the handler-soulblade relationship was more symbiotic than he'd imagined. I mean, you're not, right?\n\nI do not take in sustenance anymore, no. I do miss it, however. I enjoyed food a great deal when I was alive. All I can do now is live vicariously through my handlers. In a sense, I can taste what you taste. Such as honey-laced sawdust. The words seeped disappointment.\n\nSorry. Trip took a bite. It wasn't as if there were other options out here, and he would need energy if they had to battle dragons.\n\nWhen you return home, you will visit this grandmother? Her meals sound promising.\n\nI hope so. We'll probably go back to the capital first. I'm sure there are fancy restaurants there. Trip was less sure captains could afford them. Officers made more than sergeants and privates, but the army assumed its troops would live in fort housing and dine at the mess hall, so there was no need to pay them enough to purchase room and board.\n\nI dearly hope so. I would be most curious to know about modern culinary trends. Berasa was not much of a food enthusiast, I'm afraid, and the options in those pirate taverns were barely above abysmal.\n\nDuck cursed from the rear of their formation. \"Even a slug would slip and fall on this stuff,\" he grumbled.\n\n\"What about a waddling duck?\" Kaika asked.\n\n\"Ducks never fall, ma'am.\"\n\nAn \"oomph\" and a painful-sounding thud followed the comment.\n\n\"You may need to update your wilderness lore, Duck,\" Kaika said, helping him to his feet.\n\n\"Or get a new nickname, ma'am. Think Crash would mind if I borrowed his this week?\"\n\nA few people chuckled, but Trip's head hurt too much for humor. He'd always sensed the dragons when they were nearby, but this was more intense than before, and he wondered if more of them might be within the mountain than he believed. Or was it that the ones he sensed were extremely strong and had powerful auras? If so, that didn't bode well for their incursion.\n\nThe airship is drawing close to the start of a canyon cutting north to south along the side of our mountain, Jaxi reported. Two more dragons have come outside to join the first. They're sitting on the top of the mountain, looking down at the airship.\n\nTrip relayed the information.\n\n\"The canyon?\" Rysha asked, doing an excited hop. Her boots slipped when she came down, but she recovered more easily than Duck had. \"That's our destination. There are supposed to be statues carved along the sides and also a cave with drawings in it. The drawings are believed to have been made by humans visiting the area thousands of years ago. I can't wait to see them. They used charcoal and umber and yellow ochres that aren't native to the region. Did you know the iron oxide and manganese oxide in umber is largely found in\u2014\"\n\n\"This isn't a good time for lectures, Lieutenant,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"Oh, sorry, ma'am.\" Rysha was silent for a minute as they clomped along the ice, then said, \"Why not, ma'am? We're not discussing anything else. Our minds could use a distraction.\"\n\nBlazer paused, as if groping for an answer that didn't involve confessing that she didn't want to be lectured by a lieutenant. \"The dragons might hear us,\" she finally said.\n\n\"Are they not interested in umber and ochre?\" Duck asked.\n\nLeftie sniggered.\n\nTrip was gaining a greater appreciation for Dreyak's silence. He strode along beside Duck without a word, only the soft crunch of ice under his boots giving away his position.\n\nEveryone fell silent as they rounded the mountain, and Trip suspected that even those without magic could now sense the oppressive closeness of the dragons' presence, the power of their auras.\n\nThey passed through a field of those broken ice-chunk boulders, and two things came into view. A long dark canyon cut into the ground\u2014or perhaps the ice\u2014that didn't appear to be a natural geological formation, and the silhouette of the airship at the far end. The oddly straight canyon stretched for ten miles before ending as abruptly as it began, a deep scar in the earth. There was no evidence that a river had ever flowed through the area, or that anything other than magic had created it.\n\n\"How do we get down?\" Kaika whispered as the group gathered at their end of the canyon, using one of the ice boulders to hide them from the dragons perched atop the mountain.\n\nA few trees and brush would have been nice to help camouflage them.\n\n\"More than that, how do we get down without the dragons seeing us?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"Your ruse appears to have worked,\" Dreyak said. \"They are focused on the airship.\"\n\n\"Are we sure about that?\" Rysha touched the hilt of her sword. \"We have more magic on us than the airship has on board. Our swords should be like shining beacons to them. Just because their eyes aren't pointed this way doesn't mean they're not aware of us.\"\n\n\"Maybe they heard this group was giving boring lectures,\" Leftie said, \"and that scared them away even more than our swords.\"\n\nRysha did not say anything, but Trip sensed her gritting her teeth.\n\n\"Don't be an ass, Leftie.\" Trip knew Rysha didn't need his protection or for him to stand up for her, but he found himself putting his arm around her shoulders. Just in case she wanted the support.\n\nShe found his gloved hand and patted it.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Leftie said, sounding sincere. \"I meant it as a joke. It came out less funny than I intended.\"\n\n\"One wonders how he lured Cofah women into a cargo hold,\" Kaika said.\n\n\"I assumed he didn't talk much,\" Duck said.\n\n\"All right, all right, it can't be acceptable to pick on me if it's not acceptable to pick on Ravenwood,\" Leftie said.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Duck asked. \"Because this feels right.\"\n\n\"Trip, I'm going to need you to come put your arm around my shoulders here in a minute.\"\n\nThe largest of the dragons\u2014a gold\u2014leaped from the mountaintop, flapped its wings, and headed toward the airship. The other two sprang into the air and followed.\n\n\"This is our chance.\" Blazer clenched her fist.\n\n\"There are still dragons inside the mountain,\" Trip said, \"but that's all of the ones outside.\"\n\n\"We'll figure out how to deal with the inside ones when we reach them,\" Blazer said, jogging toward the edge of the canyon to peer in, \"preferably by hiding a lot and not being noticed.\"\n\nRysha stepped away from Trip to join her. \"That's deeper than I expected.\"\n\n\"Our ropes won't reach the bottom.\" Blazer looked toward Trip. \"Got any soulblade magic that will help?\"\n\nJaxi? Trip asked. Azarwrath? What do you think?\n\nThat it is rather odd that a woman leads your military mission, Azarwrath said.\n\nHow can you possibly be that old-fashioned and stupid-fashioned when your last handler was female? Jaxi asked.\n\nShe was unorthodox. Are women not primarily healers, child-rearers, and caregivers in Iskandia?\n\nYou suggest to Kaika that she rear something, and she'll probably drop an explosive on your pommel.\n\nI am concerned about the altered values in this era. Certain policies seem less than wholesome.\n\nAware of Blazer waiting for a response, Trip cleared his throat. The canyon?\n\nI can thicken the air to carry your group to the bottom without injury, Azarwrath said.\n\nWe just step off the edge, and you'll float us down? Trip eased up beside Blazer and looked over the edge into the deep shadows below, shadows that the moon and stars did nothing to illuminate. He had to use his senses to detect the bottom\u2014a good three hundred feet down. Uhm.\n\nWe can do it, Jaxi added. You'll have to trust us. It would take hours for you to climb down in the dark, even if you had the right climbing gear.\n\n\"The swords are going to levitate us down,\" Trip said, even as power flared from his hip, and a rush of air swept in from all sides. His feet left the ground. He fought down an alarmed squawk that tried to come out. The others wouldn't want to follow him if they knew he was afraid. Besides, it didn't feel like he was floating. The compressed air was almost like a platform that he stood upon. \"There are no easy routes, and it's a long drop.\"\n\n\"Levitate?\" Leftie blurted.\n\n\"Do it,\" Blazer said, glancing toward the flying dragons. They were already more than halfway to the airship.\n\n\"No, don't touch me with that damn magic. I'll stand guard up here.\"\n\n\"We're not splitting up.\"\n\nCan you do us all at once? Trip asked silently.\n\nNo, Jaxi said.\n\nYes, Azarwrath said.\n\nTrip sensed Jaxi scowling at the other soulblade.\n\nThis is not a difficult task for me, Telryn, Azarwrath informed him.\n\nJaxi's scowl deepened, an impressive thing since she had neither a face nor lips.\n\nDo we take the ignorant one down against his wishes? Azarwrath asked while Jaxi fumed.\n\nIs that Leftie? Yes.\n\nI don't care how powerful you think you are, Azzy, Jaxi thought. You won't be able to levitate anyone with a dragon-slaying sword.\n\nAh, this is true. They must drop them down first, then retrieve them at the bottom.\n\n\"Drop them?\" Trip asked.\n\nThey are magical blades. The fall will not damage them.\n\nAware of Blazer frowning at him, Trip explained.\n\n\"Not a problem,\" Kaika said, striding to the edge and dropping her sword point down into the canyon.\n\nRysha gave her a startled look.\n\n\"We don't have a close relationship. It's been trying to make me surly around our magical allies, the way Therrik is.\" Kaika glanced at Trip. \"And I have a lovely disposition, so I object.\"\n\nRysha walked forward, drawing her sword, but she wasn't so quick to drop it. She stood at the edge with the blade across her gloved hands and struggled to let go. Long seconds passed, her jaw clenched. Finally, with a jerky movement, she dropped her hands, and the sword plummeted into the darkness.\n\nBlazer's feet left the ground. She dropped into an alarmed crouch, her arms spread for balance. She and Trip sailed over the edge, and his heart tried to leap out of his chest as fear overrode logic. He knew the soulblades were powerful and could handle this. But hanging in the air over absolutely nothing terrified him.\n\nThey descended rapidly, but not like they were falling. It was a controlled descent.\n\nWhen Trip's feet touched the ground, he gazed up at the slit of stars high above and his comrades being levitated down after him. A strange feeling came over him, something akin to peace, serenity. He still sensed the dragons, but the pressure in his head had lessened, and the icy canyon walls emitted a warmth that made his skin tingle in a pleasant way. Magic? He tried to decide if he sensed that. There was definitely an otherworldliness about the place.\n\n\"This canyon is a geological oddity,\" Rysha said, as she landed beside him, apparently too intrigued by their surroundings to have been disturbed by the magical descent. Kaika was the one to retrieve their swords and hand her borrowed blade to her. \"Unless I'm grossly mistaken, we're below sea level. Well below. And look at the walls. And the floor. This is all ice. Yet the walls are smooth. There's no sign of glacial activity. We\u2014\"\n\nA hand gripped Trip's shoulder and spun him around.\n\n\"Do not let them do that again,\" Leftie snarled, anger and terror radiating from him.\n\n\"It was the fastest way down.\"\n\n\"You don't pick someone up with magic when he's not\u2014when it's not\u2014 It's gods-cursed magic, damn it.\" Leftie circled his heart with two fingers while still grasping Trip's shoulder.\n\n\"Enough,\" Blazer said, pushing between them and breaking Leftie's grip. \"We need to find the portal before those dragons\u2014\"\n\nBooms sounded in the distance, and her gaze lurched up toward the stars.\n\n\"The airship must be firing its cannons,\" Kaika said.\n\n\"It won't do them any good,\" Dreyak said grimly, the entire group on the ground now.\n\n\"No, but it'll help us,\" Blazer said. \"Ravenwood, where\u2014\"\n\n\"That way, ma'am,\" Rysha said, waving for everyone to follow. \"If the maps are correct, there's a cave down there. We should check it first, but I wish there was time to explore everything. Those are magnificent.\" She pointed toward the sides of the canyon.\n\nStatues carved from the walls, from the ice, rose a hundred feet over their heads. Trip couldn't tell what they depicted yet, not with the darkness so thick at the bottom of the canyon, but he would be surprised if they weren't dragons.\n\nI believe they're statues of dragon gods, Jaxi said, as the group walked under them on their way to a dark opening in one side of the canyon. Which is rather remarkable since many dragons seem to believe themselves gods.\n\nThey do? Trip hadn't heard any of them proclaim that yet, but he'd only had a prolonged conversation with one of them, the bronze dragon at the pirate fortress.\n\nWell, perhaps not many, but of the two I know well, one believes he's a god. And he's deluded others into believing he's a god, as well. There's a temple in the capital.\n\nReally?\n\nRidge and Sardelle got married there. Her part-time job is being his high priestess.\n\nEr, does she believe he's a god?\n\nNo, but she, Ridge, and even King Angulus have been willing to feed Bhrava Saruth's delusions since he's been our best ally. He heals and blesses his followers regularly. It's a shame he's been missing for several months. I'm sure his followers are bereft without their god.\n\n\"Oh, I wish dearly that I had a lantern.\" Rysha paused at the mouth of the dark cave, looking left and right toward the walls. Looking for her ochre and umber paintings?\n\nTrip stopped at her side and drew Jaxi. Can you\u2014\n\nOf course, Jaxi said, glowing a soft silvery blue.\n\n\"Oh,\" Rysha blurted, grinning at him. \"I forgot about the swords.\"\n\nShe pulled out her own, and it glowed its usual pale green. A somewhat sickly green that wasn't nearly as appealing as Jaxi's illumination.\n\nHow kind of you to notice its clear inferiority.\n\nTrip suspected that dragon wasn't the only magic-user with delusions.\n\nReally. Jaxi sniffed.\n\nThe swords' light brightened the cave walls, illuminating a dark ice mixed with dirt that supported the crude paintings from the past. How old were the paintings? Did their presence mean this ice never melted? And was there no insulation down here? Trip thought he remembered some trivia that caves were roughly the same temperature all over the planet, a temperature well above freezing.\n\nNot caves made with magic, Azarwrath said. You were right out there. There's not a lot of it remaining, but the walls of the canyon and this cave are imbued with it. I believe this place was ancient even in my time.\n\n\"Don't turn those swords up too bright,\" Blazer grumbled, glancing back into the canyon.\n\nBooms continued to filter down to them, so the airship hadn't succumbed yet. Trip couldn't imagine they would be able to hold three dragons off for long.\n\n\"The chapaharii blades object to the magic that seems to be infused into the very nature of this place,\" Rysha said. \"I don't think we can get them to dim themselves.\"\n\n\"Keeping them sheathed helps,\" Kaika said dryly.\n\n\"But then I wouldn't be able to see the artwork.\"\n\n\"Darn.\"\n\n\"Let's get a move on,\" Blazer said.\n\nWith obvious reluctance, Rysha tore herself from the old paintings, which depicted dragons flying or swooping down to pluck up giant buffalo or something similar.\n\nTrip glanced left and right as he headed deeper into the cave. In one faded painting, a human rode a dragon while holding a sword aloft. A soulblade? Or one of the dragon-slaying blades? Or simply some crude copper weapon from a long bygone era?\n\n\"I dreamed of being a dragon rider when I was a girl,\" Rysha whispered to him. \"My grandmother used to tell me tales about noble dragons helping humankind fight against evil dragons. I suppose they were mostly just stories, but there are ruins of dragon-rider outposts around the world. Some of that must have truly happened.\"\n\nShe steered the group around a wide bend, the ground made from slippery ice that challenged even their special footwear.\n\n\"I wonder where all those noble dragons have gone,\" she added. \"Were they all left behind? In the world beyond the portal?\"\n\n\"Jaxi was telling me about a dragon in the capital that helps humans,\" Trip said.\n\nCaptain Kaika, who was walking behind him with Blazer, snorted.\n\n\"Do you mean Bhrava Saruth?\" Rysha asked. \"The dragon who believes himself a god?\"\n\n\"Apparently. Does that not qualify as noble?\"\n\n\"He did help defend the city from other dragons a few years ago, and he does heal people, I understand,\" Rysha said. \"If you can catch him in his temple. I saw it once. It's quite pretentious. And large. Larger than the temples in the city to the real gods. I'm not sure noble is quite the word to describe that dragon.\"\n\nGiven the distaste in her voice, Trip decided not to ask what she thought about Sardelle being the dragon's high priestess. Maybe that wasn't well known. Or maybe Sardelle didn't wish for it to be well known.\n\nYou're catching on, Jaxi said.\n\n\"Oh, more paintings,\" Rysha said, hefting her glowing blade high and jogging toward a wall ahead of them. She was remarkably agile on the ice, keeping her balance without appearing to try.\n\nEven though she has no dragon blood, Azarwrath said, I believe she would birth capable sorcerers, presuming a union with a sorcerer. She seems intelligent.\n\nEr, yes, Trip said, flummoxed by the random comment.\n\nI believe Azzy just gave his blessing, should you two wish to rut with abandon and create babies.\n\nIt's only been a few hours since we kissed for the first time.\n\nSardelle and her soul snozzle turned their first kiss into their first rutting session all in the same night. Granted, babies didn't come until much later, but I've observed that people overcome by attraction are perfectly capable of accelerating their mating rituals.\n\nSardelle and her what?\n\nTrip stopped beside Rysha, as there was nowhere else to go. They had reached the end of the cave. He raised Jaxi to help spread light across the walls, though he was hoping for a secret passage rather than more dragons hunting buffalo.\n\nSoul snozzle, Jaxi said. Ridge.\n\nI don't need to know those things about my commanding officer, Jaxi.\n\nThose things? Nicknames? Or rutting habits?\n\nBoth.\n\n\"Lieutenant Ravenwood,\" Blazer said dryly. \"I'm sure those dragon stick figures are fascinating, but we have a problem.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. This is what the Cofah map described. A canyon and a cave, and nothing else. But there must be something else. Or why would Jylea's team be coming back here?\" Rysha faced Trip. \"Did you say you\u2014Jaxi\u2014sensed something in the mountain?\"\n\nTrip nodded. Holding Jaxi aloft, this time to provide lighting for himself, he examined the back of the cave and the floor at the base of it. He didn't see any scrapes or cracks to suggest a secret door opened anywhere. Nor did claw marks mar the ice at their feet, but if the dragons came in and out this way, they might fly.\n\n\"Duck,\" Blazer said, \"take your tracking abilities over there to help him.\"\n\n\"I've never tracked a dragon, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Just see if you can find sign.\" Blazer looked over her shoulder. The booms had stopped.\n\n\"Dragon sign? I haven't noticed any spoor in the canyon or this cave, but perhaps they\u2014\"\n\n\"The door. Find sign of the door.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nAny ideas, Jaxi? Azarwrath? Trip worried the dragons had defeated the airship and were on their way back.\n\nActually, Jaxi thought, a second airship has appeared in the distance. The dragons have pulled back to consider it.\n\nA second airship? Trip sheathed Jaxi so he could run his gloves along the ice, peering close and searching again for cracks. The bared chapaharii blade nearby provided plenty of light.\n\nIt's of similar construction to the Cofah airship, Jaxi thought.\n\nBackup?\n\nIt seems a possibility. Also, there are two dragons accompanying it. Guarding it, it seems.\n\n\"Are we sure there's something back there?\" Kaika asked. \"A continuation of the cave or another room? Because I brought plenty of explosives along. I can blow a hole in that wall if it isn't too thick.\" Her lips quirked. \"And possibly even if it is.\"\n\nI could also melt a hole in it, Jaxi thought. If there's another cave back there. I can't tell. The ice you're touching appears to be reinforced with magic, and I still sense the portal or some other artifact within the mountain, but I can't tell quite where. Everything is obscured, and the nearness of the dragons and their powerful auras doesn't help. They drown out everything around them.\n\nDreyak came up beside Trip, tugging off his glove. He laid his bare palm on the ice wall.\n\nWhite light flared under his hand.\n\n\"That could be a sign,\" Duck observed.\n\n\"Your wilderness skills are not overrated, I see,\" Blazer told him.\n\nTrip sensed magic welling underneath Dreyak's hand and wondered if he should remove his own glove and touch the wall. But Rysha, ever curious, beat him to it. The wall remained dark and cold under her hand, and she sighed with disappointment.\n\nRealizing the wall must be responding to the presence of dragon blood in one's veins, Trip clasped his hands behind his back.\n\n\"Are you unlocking a door for us, Dreyak?\" Kaika said. \"Or do I still need to blow things up?\"\n\nA beam of intense light appeared all around Dreyak, and Trip jumped back, his hand dropping to Jaxi's hilt.\n\nDreyak stepped back from the ice and spread his arms, but the light enveloping him did not fade. He peered down his body and grimaced. Trip couldn't tell if he was in pain.\n\n\"Is it hurting you, Dreyak?\" he asked, wondering if prodding the incorporeal beam with a soulblade would do anything.\n\n\"No, it's just uncomfortable. My skin is crawling.\"\n\nI have seen this magic before, Azarwrath announced. A long time ago. It is called a scan.\n\n\"A scan?\" Trip asked, not realizing he spoke aloud until people looked at him.\n\nBefore Azarwrath could answer, someone\u2014or something\u2014else spoke. A sonorous voice boomed in Trip's mind, uttering words he did not understand. Power laced the words, making them painful as they rang out, as if someone were beating the inside of his skull with a drumstick.\n\nThe others winced, too, Rysha and Kaika jerking their hands to their ears. Thankfully, the words ended after a few sentences, and the light beam around Dreyak disappeared. The wall remained in place, and it was as if nothing had happened.\n\n\"Was that a language?\" Blazer looked to Rysha.\n\n\"One I haven't heard spoken before, but yes. Old Dragon Script. I think if I saw it in writing\u2026\" Rysha closed her eyes, nodding to herself, then tore off her pack and rummaged until she found a pencil and notebook. \"Dreyak, can you do that again?\"\n\nDreyak grimaced, but he pressed his hand against the wall. This time, there was no beam. An angry flash of white flared, then disappeared.\n\n\"I think I've been deemed unworthy,\" Dreyak said.\n\nThe words started repeating, and Rysha bounced on her toes as she copied down what she heard. It sounded like gobbledegook to Trip. She continued to write after the words ended, her lips moving as she nodded to herself again, like someone remembering the lyrics to a ballad.\n\n\"My philology professor would be appalled at my phonetic liberations with the text,\" Rysha said, holding her notepad up, \"but it's close enough. I think I can translate. Here goes.\" She cleared her throat and spoke in a deeper tone of voice. \"In this ancient prison, only they who are worthy may pass, the golden keepers of the law, they doing the will of the gods, they being god-like themselves. Only they or their offspring may come within to judge the merit of the imprisoned, whether they shall be released or held for all eternity. They of lesser blood shall not be permitted to judge those within, nor shall they pass through this gate.\" Rysha lowered her notepad. \"This is a prison? Fascinating.\"\n\n\"Uh huh,\" Blazer said. \"More importantly, are we going to be able to get in at all?\"\n\n\"I wager I can permit us to pass.\" Kaika slung her pack off her shoulders.\n\n\"Perhaps this place was a prison long before the portal was built?\" Rysha gazed around at the paintings again. \"That one over there\u2014I wondered about it. It seems to depict two gold dragons capturing a silver dragon. Maybe the gate will only open for gold dragons and their offspring, but the bronze and silver dragons must have been allowed to enter if they were brought through in a gold's keeping, thus to be imprisoned. Oh, and since dragons hate cold, it makes sense that they might have created a prison here. To truly punish those who strayed. Also, dragons aren't fecund in cold temperatures, so imprisonment might have been meant to ensure they didn't reproduce.\"\n\n\"So, what does that mean for us?\" Blazer asked. \"We can go in if we just find a gold dragon to escort us?\"\n\n\"Or one's offspring.\" Rysha hitched a shoulder.\n\n\"We'll see about that,\" Kaika said, kneeling now, and pulling a fistful of fuses out of her pack.\n\n\"A very distant ancestor of mine is reputed to be a gold dragon,\" Dreyak said.\n\n\"So just having a gold in the bloodline isn't enough then,\" Rysha said. \"Too bad, but I'm not surprised. My translation suggested as much.\"\n\nRealizing he hadn't relayed Jaxi's most recent update, Trip said, \"There's another airship coming with two more dragons. They seem to be there to join or protect the original Cofah airship.\"\n\n\"Is either of the new dragons a gold?\" Blazer asked.\n\nYes, Jaxi said.\n\nTrip nodded.\n\n\"Shit, maybe that's why Jylea and that sorceress didn't fight harder to keep us from leaving the airship,\" Blazer said. \"Maybe they knew we couldn't get in.\" She pointed at Kaika. \"You have my permission to blow that wall open, Captain.\"\n\n\"You know I wasn't waiting for that, right?\" Kaika whistled and set a bundle at the base of the wall.\n\nBlazer snorted.\n\nTrip worried the explosives might backfire, either bringing down the cave on top of them or doing nothing to the back wall. Or both.\n\n\"To destroy this cave would be a crime against archaeology,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"I'm only going to destroy this back part here,\" Kaika said.\n\nRysha turned a bleak expression on Trip. He spread his hands, not aware of anything he could do.\n\nTry touching the wall, Azarwrath suggested.\n\nMe? I'm not a gold dragon.\n\nIf your friend's translation is correct, the offspring of gold dragons may also enter.\n\nOffspring, not descendant. Not someone fifty generations removed from a gold dragon, or whatever I am.\n\nTrip removed his glove, though he knew he would only be scanned, the same as Dreyak.\n\nI don't know how far removed you are from your dragon progenitor, Azarwrath said, but I am positive it's not fifty generations. Or even ten.\n\nTrip froze, his fingers in the air inches from the wall. But that's impossible. Until a few years ago, there weren't any dragons in the world.\n\nNeither of the soulblades responded.\n\nRight? Trip prompted.\n\nThere weren't any known dragons, Jaxi said. That doesn't mean that some couldn't have been around, lying low. Or spending time in a stasis chamber, as was the case with Phelistoth. Sardelle and I suspected as soon as we met you that you had the potential to be very powerful. Three years ago, we encountered\u2014battled\u2014a sorceress who came from another time period, and she claimed to be the great granddaughter of a dragon. Even though you dampen down your aura well, we both thought you had at least as much dragon blood as she.\n\nTrip knew he must look stupid, standing there frozen with his palm in the air, but all he could think about were the soulblades' words.\n\nAre you saying\u2026 Is that the reason I was transferred? He looked down toward his collar, even though the parka hid his uniform and rank tabs. And promoted? And sent on this mission?\n\nSuch an intense disappointment filled him that he wanted to cry. He'd assumed\u2014even though nobody had said as much, he'd assumed his knack for killing enemies and his willingness to risk himself in battle had been the reason he'd come to General Zirkander's attention, the reason he'd been promoted so young and called to join the flier battalion's star squadron. To be given something because of blood that he had no control over\u2026\n\nRelax, hero, Jaxi said. Your pirate-slaying ways are what got you transferred and invited on the mission. Ridge didn't know about the rest until that dragon's defenses mysteriously went down. Sardelle and I didn't know until we met you. Well, about ten minutes before we met you when we sensed your presence in Ridge's office as we were walking into the citadel. That alarmed the hells out of us, I'll have you know. Thus far, all the powerful sorceresses and shamans we've encountered have been working for the other side. We assumed some spy had infiltrated Ridge's troops in the guise of a young pilot.\n\nWhen did you figure out I wasn't a spy? Trip asked numbly.\n\nWhen you fell off the couch.\n\nShall I thank the gods for the general's slippery cushions then? Trip imagined what might have happened if they had truly believed him a spy. He could have been dragged off and imprisoned in some iron coffin or whatever was done to enemy sorcerers.\n\nThus far, we've just killed them, Jaxi said brightly. But we realized right away from the fact that you didn't shield your thoughts and we could read everything in your mind that you were completely untrained.\n\nHe tried to remember if he'd been thinking anything embarrassing that day, anything that he would have been chagrined to have shared with others.\n\nNo, but I've since witnessed your lurid fantasies about Lieutenant Ravenwood.\n\nHe flushed, though he didn't think anything had been particularly lurid. Other than the day she'd worn that revealing pirate costume.\n\nNo, your fantasies aren't nearly as disturbing as those of your friend. He's speculated more than once about encounters featuring him in the middle of a threesome with Kaika, Blazer, and Ravenwood.\n\nAzarwrath cleared his throat in Trip's mind\u2014perhaps in Jaxi's mind too. There are dragons coming. It would not be good to be trapped in here when they arrive. Both of the new arrivals are gold dragons.\n\nYes, Jaxi said, and I believe I know those dragons too. Yisharnesh and her mate. Our people have battled them before. They were let out of a prison in Iskandia.\n\nAs golds, they will be able to open the gate, Azarwrath said.\n\n\"I'm ready to blow this wall as soon as our pilot statue is moved.\" Kaika rose from her kneeling position and looked at Trip. Three of her bombs rested along the base of the wall, linked by a wire to a detonator with a timer.\n\n\"Move it, Trip,\" Blazer said, the others having already backed away.\n\nThough he doubted it would do anything, Trip would feel like a coward if he didn't try, since the only reason he didn't want to try was because it might work.\n\nHe took a deep breath and pressed his bare palm to the wall. A beam of light flared out, identical to the one that had engulfed Dreyak. He felt a surge of relief until Duck spoke.\n\n\"Is that because of the soulblades?\" Duck asked, looking at Rysha.\n\nShe hesitated, then shrugged. Protecting Trip's secret.\n\nThe voice spoke words into their heads. Different words this time? There were only a few of them.\n\nAn ominous rumble came from all around them, and Trip backed away from the wall, afraid he'd triggered some trap. Or maybe the dragons were close enough to send some attack ahead.\n\n\"You are permitted to pass,\" Rysha whispered.\n\n\"What?\" Blazer looked sharply at her.\n\n\"That's what the words said.\"\n\nThe wall in front of them disappeared, revealing an icy passage stretching into the depths of the mountain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "The translation must have been wrong.\n\nAs fascinated as Rysha was by the new passage leading deeper into the mountain, including numerous dragon statues carved into the ice and a soft blue light that emanated from all around them, all she could think about was the translation. She must have gotten some of the words wrong. Specifically, the one for offspring. Should it have been descendant? Because if she'd gotten it right, that implied Trip was not just some descendant of a dragon but the son of a dragon. And that wasn't possible, not in this era.\n\nAt least, everything she'd read suggested it wasn't. But if there was a dragon alive out there, one who hadn't left through the portal a thousand years earlier and had simply been lying low all this time\u2026\n\n\"What in the hells does that mean?\" Leftie asked, pointing at the passage and staring, first at Trip, then at Rysha, then back at Trip. \"You're half dragon?\"\n\nIf Trip's shoulders had slumped any further, they would have fallen off. All he could manage was a puzzled spreading of his hands.\n\n\"I must have translated incorrectly,\" Rysha said. \"The words must have stated that only the descendant of a gold dragon would be allowed to open the gate.\"\n\n\"Then it should have worked for me.\" Dreyak was frowning at Trip almost as darkly as Leftie was.\n\nDuck merely appeared confused.\n\nTrip's forehead creased, and he turned his puzzled expression toward Rysha. No, it wasn't a puzzled expression. It was more of a betrayed one.\n\nShe wished she'd kept her mouth shut and not shared the translation, damn it. This hadn't been her secret to reveal.\n\n\"It doesn't matter now,\" Blazer said, pointing at the bombs and nodding to Kaika. \"Disarm those, and let's go. We'll figure out everything else after we complete our mission.\"\n\nTrip winced. Rysha didn't need telepathic powers to know he didn't want to be \"everything else.\" He just wanted to be a pilot.\n\nKaika repacked her bombs, and she and Blazer led the way down the passage. Trip walked after them, and Rysha hurried to walk at his side. She felt the urge to apologize to him, though she didn't know what she could say. Sorry I told everyone your dad is a dragon?\n\nShe glimpsed Duck, Dreyak, and Leftie bringing up the rear, Leftie kissing his lucky ball before he fell in behind them. He'd known Trip longer than anyone else here, but he seemed the most rattled by this. Maybe it was because he'd known Trip so long that he was rattled.\n\nThe group strode along in silence. Rysha sneaked glances at Trip, but his puzzlement was buried now, replaced by a mask. She couldn't tell if he was angry, scared, full of dread, or what. Some people would have been perfectly delighted at finding out something like this, but he'd already been shying away from the idea that he had the power to perform magic. This was that to a much higher magnitude.\n\nSeven gods, no wonder the chapaharii blades wanted to kill him.\n\nAnd what did she want? She didn't know. Did this change anything? Should it?\n\nNo, she decided firmly. Though it was impossible not to think about what kind of power Trip might have the potential to develop, and that old axiom about power corrupting people. But wasn't there another quotation about wisdom in gifting power to those who least wanted it?\n\nRysha shook her head. Blazer was right. All of this should wait until after the mission was completed. The dragons would likely sense that the gate had been opened, including the ones reputedly allied with Jylea and her team. Rysha didn't know why the Cofah, or a band of the Cofah, would want to take the portal\u2014and the dragon problem\u2014to their homeland, but after listening to Trip talking to Dreyak, and Leftie's words about hooks and ropes in the airship, she believed they did. She'd wondered from the beginning why Dreyak had been at odds with the researchers from the outpost. This could explain it.\n\nThe passage opened up ahead, the blue glow shining from the white ice walls growing brighter, giving the place the sense of daylight. The group reached a ledge that overlooked a chasm, the bottom dark except for an orange glow far, far below. The scent of sulphur drifted up on a warm wave of heat.\n\n\"That's lava down there,\" Trip said, sounding bemused.\n\n\"That's even more of a geological oddity than the below-sea-level ice canyon,\" Rysha said, staring down at it. \"I don't see how it's possible.\"\n\n\"This place was built by powerful magic. I think that means anything is possible.\" Trip tilted his head. \"The portal is that way.\"\n\nTrip pointed toward the leftmost of three ice bridges that arced over the chasm, each leading to tunnels on the far side. They all appeared the same, beautiful, artistic, and very fragile, as if they were there for decoration, not to be used. And perhaps that was the case. A dragon would fly across the chasm rather than walk on a bridge.\n\n\"The swords telling you that?\" Leftie asked. \"Or do you just know these things now?\"\n\nRysha winced, wishing again that she had been vaguer with her translation, wishing she hadn't said anything aloud at all. She could have simply suggested Trip try touching the wall. Not that she could have foreseen that he would have the blood required to open it.\n\nTrip looked sadly at her, and she wondered if he was reading her thoughts. For a dragon, or a half-dragon, that would be simple magic, wouldn't it? By the gods, if he had that much dragon blood, he ought to be able to shape-shift and control people's minds and do all other manner of magic that the sorcerers of old had been able to employ. She did her best not to shudder at this new realization, and told herself that he was still the same person, the person who'd made her a gun mount and liked fixing fliers.\n\n\"The portal is this way,\" Trip said, his only answer to Leftie, and stepped toward the bridge.\n\nBut Leftie gripped his arm. \"Damn it, Trip, why didn't you say something before? Did you always know? I've known you six years. Have you been lying to me the whole time?\"\n\n\"I didn't think anyone would understand,\" Trip said quietly.\n\n\"So, you did know.\"\n\n\"Just that my father was probably some shaman from another country.\"\n\n\"Or a dragon,\" Duck whispered. \"Isn't that what Ravenwood meant? Is that even possible?\"\n\n\"You didn't think you could tell me?\" Leftie demanded. \"What, did you read my mind and not like what you saw in there? Didn't think I was good enough to share your secrets with?\"\n\n\"I didn't do that\u2014didn't know how to do that. But I knew how you felt about magic. I didn't have to read minds to know\u2014\"\n\n\"So, you didn't even give me a chance? You just lied to me? To everyone in the squadron? All the people who thought they knew you? That's cowardly, Trip.\"\n\n\"It is,\" he agreed, his eyes still sad. \"But would you have befriended me and stood up for me all those times if you'd known?\"\n\nLeftie hesitated, and Rysha suspected he knew the answer was no, but what he said was, \"How would I know? You didn't give me a chance to find out.\"\n\nRysha looked at Blazer, hoping she would remind them there wasn't time for this, but she and Kaika were pointing at the bridge and conferring quietly. Wondering if it was a trap? The bridges did look fragile.\n\n\"Do you need anyone standing up for you?\" Duck whispered, sounding more awed than betrayed.\n\nTrip grimaced, not looking like he appreciated that reaction any more than the other.\n\n\"Doesn't this mean you're like Sardelle?\" Duck added.\n\n\"There isn't time to discuss it now,\" Trip said, his gaze flicking back the way they had come. \"The two gold dragons have driven off the ones that were standing guard from the mountaintop, and they're escorting the Cofah airships down to land in front of the cave. They'll come in soon. I don't believe their mission is to destroy the portal.\" Trip looked at Dreyak. \"We need to get to it first, to protect Iskandia by destroying it. Before it\u2014and the dragons coming through it\u2014can be put to some other use.\"\n\nNot waiting for agreement, Trip strode onto the bridge he had indicated before.\n\n\"Ma'am?\" Rysha asked, looking toward Blazer and especially Kaika. Trip had the engineering degree, but with Kaika's demolitions background, she had to have experience assessing structures.\n\nKaika didn't look happy, but she didn't shake her head in the negative.\n\n\"We don't have any better choices,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"Follow him two at a time,\" Kaika said. \"Those bridges\u2014are they even bridges, or just decorative arches?\u2014don't look like they can sustain that much weight.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" Blazer said. \"Look down there. I see some that already broke.\"\n\nRysha hadn't noticed that before, but she squinted into the gloom and did see places where arches extended a few meters out from the sides of the chasm, then ended abruptly, broken off. Or maybe melted off. In a couple of spots, they lined up with protrusions on the other side, protrusions with which they must have once linked. Perhaps the magma lake rose at times, spitting lava into the air and melting the fragile bridges.\n\n\"So long as that doesn't happen now,\" she whispered.\n\nTrip hadn't waited, merely striding up the icy incline. Rysha followed after him, placing her feet carefully. No more than three feet wide, it was extremely slippery, like ice that had melted and refrozen numerous times.\n\n\"Hope he can levitate us again if this breaks,\" Duck muttered from behind her.\n\nLeftie muttered something else that Rysha couldn't make out. Maybe that was for the best.\n\nAs she climbed, she did her best not to look over the sides, nor to notice the sulfurous scent, the promise that deadly lava boiled far below.\n\nTrip reached the apex of the arch, where the bridge widened, making a platform about five feet wide. He paused and turned back. Waiting for Rysha? No, he was gazing back into the passage they had all come through.\n\n\"Trouble?\" Rysha whispered.\n\n\"Yes. Keep going.\" He raised his voice. \"Everyone hurry across. The soulblades will make sure the bridge holds. But there isn't much time. Those dragons are coming now. They\u2014\"\n\nPuny humans, a female voice rang in Rysha's head. Do you think we will let you destroy that portal? Or a priceless dragon artifact? Do you think you even could?\n\nThe voice made the others hustle more than Trip's urging had. They slipped as they hurried, and Blazer and Duck ended up using their hands as well as their feet, gripping the edges so they wouldn't fall.\n\nAfter we destroy you for your impudence, we will raze your tiny country. Those who survive will belong to the empire. And to Yisharnesh. I have not forgotten the scars your kind left on me.\n\nRysha looked at Dreyak as he reached the platform, but he didn't appear pleased to hear that the dragon had allegiance to the Cofah.\n\n\"Keep going straight. You'll reach the portal. You can't miss it.\" Trip drew Jaxi from her scabbard. Then, after a moment's hesitation, he also drew Azarwrath.\n\nThe soulblades glowed with power, with readiness.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Rysha asked, stopping on the platform as Dreyak, Duck, and Leftie hurried past.\n\nKaika and Blazer also paused at the apex.\n\n\"I'll delay them if I can,\" Trip said grimly, then met Blazer's eyes. \"Make sure the mission succeeds, Major.\"\n\nBlazer didn't question him. She said, \"I will,\" and hurried after the others.\n\nRysha drew her borrowed blade, Eryndral, and faced the passage with Trip. The sword flared an intense pale green, and she itched to swing it at him, itched to knock those soulblades into the lava and drive Eryndral into his chest.\n\nShe muttered the control words and glared at the blade, willing it to understand that a real enemy approached. It took a moment for the sword to understand, but its glow faded somewhat, and it stopped fighting her.\n\n\"You'll need help,\" Rysha said, noticing Trip frowning at her. \"A sword that can get through their defenses.\"\n\nKaika also lingered on the platform, and she drew her chapaharii blade. \"I can stay, too, though this is an iffy perch for sword fighting. I suggest the ledge on the far side there.\"\n\nShe pointed to where the arching bridge ended at the tunnel the others were hurrying toward. Duck and Leftie had already reached the ledge, an icy perch that extended about three feet from the wall.\n\n\"You two go with the others,\" Trip said, shaking his head. \"They'll need those swords to destroy the portal.\"\n\n\"Not both of them,\" Rysha said. \"I'll stay, Captain.\"\n\nA pulse of light came from the passage\u2014that gate scan operating? Letting the gold dragons through?\n\n\"Kaika,\" Blazer called from the ledge. \"We're going to need you, your sword, and your explosives.\"\n\nKaika cursed, gave Rysha a long look, and said, \"Don't do anything stupid.\" She included Trip in her look. \"Either of you.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Rysha said.\n\nTrip did not acknowledge the order, only facing the passage, both swords in hand. Rysha didn't want to distract him, but she couldn't help but say, \"Kaika is right. Let's do this from the ledge over there, not some precarious little perch that could be melted by dragon fire. We can more effectively block the dragons from getting into the tunnel there too. Here, they could just fly over us.\"\n\nTrip looked down at the platform and the lava lake far below. \"You're right.\" He tilted his head in the direction the others had disappeared. \"Go.\"\n\nRysha hurried down the bridge, but glanced back, afraid Trip would do something stupid, like not following her. But he was right behind her, jogging backward across the ice, not taking his eyes off the far side.\n\nThe sound of wingbeats came from that passage. Rysha could feel their draft even across the chasm, the wind ruffling the fur lining her parka hood. She and Trip reached the ledge as the first gold dragon sailed out of the passage.\n\nRysha licked her lips, telling herself this one was no different from the bronze and silver dragons they had faced. Except that these dragons could breathe fire. And this time, she didn't have Kaika and Blazer, also with chapaharii blades, backing her up.\n\nBut she did have Trip and two powerful soulblades.\n\nThe dragon flapped into the great chasm, the ceiling high enough to provide plenty of room for its fifty-foot wingspan. It didn't fly straight toward them, instead holding a position above the far ledge. Waiting for its cohort?\n\n\"Just so you know,\" Rysha whispered to Trip, \"I'm planning to survive this.\"\n\nHe looked at her.\n\n\"And you better be planning to as well,\" she added. \"I want another kiss. Our first one was far too abbreviated.\"\n\nHis mouth parted. In surprise?\n\nWhy? Nothing had changed for her.\n\nAll right, maybe a few things had changed, but she still cared about him. And she still wanted to be friends with him. More than friends. Unless he suddenly believed himself too powerful to sleep with a mere mundane human and decided to seek out a sorceress or even a female dragon, but Rysha couldn't truly imagine that. Not from Captain Trip, pilot.\n\nShe rose on her toes and kissed him. He froze for a second, his lips slack, but then returned her kiss warmly. Her chapaharii sword buzzed an angry protest in her mind, but it wasn't as if there was time for a lengthy embrace anyway.\n\nTrip smiled as she drew back. \"That was also rather abbreviated.\"\n\n\"I know. Clearly, we need to finish our mission, so we can go off somewhere for a weekend together.\"\n\n\"That lake by your castle looked nice,\" Trip said.\n\nThe lake that was also by the house where her grandmother had died? That didn't sound like an appealing spot to her, not anymore. \"There's a pond farther back in the valley that's beautiful, and there's a little stone cottage by it. We can go there.\"\n\n\"Will your parents mind?\" Trip asked, alternating between watching the dragon and looking at her.\n\n\"Yes, but I don't care. Also, it's a manor, not a castle.\"\n\n\"Forgive me my ignorance. You know how commoners are.\"\n\nCommon, hah. He was anything but.\n\n\"Not much like you.\" Rysha wished she could swat him in the butt with her sword, but the sword might take that as a sign that an attack would be appropriate. \"You're odd.\"\n\n\"But you don't mind?\" He asked the question lightly, but he watched her intently.\n\n\"Not at all. You're a very lucky boy.\"\n\n\"I believe I am.\"\n\nRysha might have kissed him again, but the second dragon flew out of the passage. And she saw more shapes in the blue-lit passage behind it. Humans. Humans in Cofah uniforms, and was that the sorceress from the airship too? Kiadarsa?\n\nThe portal is still intact, the same dragon that had spoken before announced. The female. We are in time to take it back to the empire and to control which dragons come through it, those who will be loyal to Yisharnesh, those who will make Cofahre the most powerful land in the world. And under my rule.\n\nRysha arched her eyebrows. Did none of the Cofah object to that? Was Prince Varlok willing to be a figurehead\u2014or even less\u2014while this dragon ruled his nation? Or did he know about this scheme? Maybe he'd gotten wind of this, and that was why he'd sent Dreyak to help her people. To get here first.\n\nBefore her mind could parse more thoughts, the two dragons flapped their wings and sailed straight for her and Trip. Rysha shoved her spectacles higher on her nose and raised her sword, ready." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Trip did not move as the dragons approached, unsure what they would do. Breathe fire? Strike at him magically? Attempt to pass? The more time he could buy for Blazer and the others, the better.\n\nNext to him, Rysha crouched, her borrowed chapaharii sword blazing with its green inner fire. She appeared every bit the warrior, ready to face their great winged foes.\n\nIn Trip's hands, the soulblades also blazed, also ready. Only Trip did not feel that he belonged here, did not know how to battle the dragons without his flier and his machine guns. The last half hour may have changed the way the others looked at him, but nothing had changed for him. He still felt bumbling and accidental with his power, a man desperately in need of a tutor.\n\nNo time for that now, Azarwrath said. Launch mental attacks similar to what you did before. Try your best to force them to lower their defenses.\n\nYou can do it, Jaxi encouraged. You faced a gold before. And won.\n\nWith all of General Zirkander's squadron fighting alongside him.\n\nThe dragons were almost upon them, leaving no more time to question, no more time to doubt. Despite his fear, some instinct deep within him heated his blood and almost convinced him he longed for the fight, the chance to pit himself against mighty enemies.\n\nRed lightning streaked from Azarwrath's blade, branching in the middle to attack both dragons at once. It struck their invisible shields, doing no damage. Jaxi hurled a fireball. Though it bloomed into a massive inferno, completely engulfing one of the dragons, it, too, was thwarted by the creature's defenses.\n\nThe female\u2014Yisharnesh\u2014opened her maw, her long sword-like fangs gleaming, reflecting the blue light emanating from the walls. Smoke curled in the back of her throat, promising she would spew fire at them.\n\nCan you block it? Trip asked the soulblades even as he focused on the other dragon's eyes, trying to needle his way into its thoughts, as he'd done before.\n\nA couple of times, yes, Jaxi said.\n\nRysha waited, her sword raised, needing the dragons to get closer before she could strike. Not wanting them close, Trip threw his mental attack at one as the other breathed fire onto their ledge.\n\nIt crackled in the air, flames blocking his view, but he continued to see the far dragon's head in his mind. It was the male, Yisharnesh's mate. As he'd done on the airship, Trip tried to distract the dragon with pain, tried to burn into its brain with mental fire.\n\nYisharnesh's very real fire beat at the soulblades' concave barrier. Their efforts protected the ledge from the flames, but Trip still felt the heat.\n\nThe dragon he'd been targeting screamed into his mind. Trip stepped back bracing himself. Had that been a cry of pain from his attack? Or was it a counter attack?\n\nThe fire-breathing female swooped away before she encountered the soulblades' barrier. But she only flew up and looped around, obviously intending to come in for another attack.\n\nNot sure he'd been effective with his attack, Trip tried again as the smoke and flames faded, and he could see the male's yellow reptilian eyes.\n\nPain! he cried into the dragon's mind, doing his best to hammer a mental nail between those eyes.\n\nThe dragon shook his head, screeching aloud, but lashing out in response. Trip staggered as a magical blow struck his brain like a sledgehammer.\n\nFocus on defending yourself, Azarwrath ordered. His defenses are temporarily down. We are attacking him.\n\nBefore he finished speaking, one of Jaxi's fireballs sprang forth. This time, it took the male directly in the face. He screeched and wheeled away, the smell of singed scales rising over that of the sulfurous chasm.\n\nTrip tried to imagine a bank vault protecting his mind, not sure if it would work for attacks the same way it did with prying telepaths.\n\nOn the heels of Jaxi's fireball, Azarwrath's lightning shot out, also striking the dragon, curling around his body and making him jerk in the air. He flew erratically, one of his wings clipping the bridge. Though it was a glancing blow, the snap of ice rang out, echoing from the walls.\n\nThe dragon recovered, flapping back up above the bridge, but a ten-foot-wide section of it, including the platform at the apex, crumbled and disappeared into the chasm. Ice plopped into the lava far below, melting instantly with a hiss of steam.\n\nYou dare attack my mate? Yisharnesh cried, the words so powerful they felt like an attack in their own right.\n\nTrip gritted his teeth, bracing himself for more.\n\nRaw power slammed into him, half physical attack and half mental attack. The massive force crumbled the soulblades' protective shields and hurled him back into the tunnel as pain exploded inside his skull. He smashed down, his head cracking against the ice floor.\n\nPain gripped his entire body, and he could scarcely draw in a breath, but he scrambled to find his footing, terrified because he'd left Rysha alone on the ledge. He slipped in his haste to rise, cracking his knee down on the ice.\n\nRysha yelled, and the pain blasting Trip disappeared from his mind. He raced toward the ledge as she slashed the sword into a dragon's tail.\n\nAn inferno blasted in from the side. Flames engulfed Rysha, and she disappeared from Trip's sight.\n\nShe screamed, and he couldn't tell if it was in pain or rage.\n\nAttack! he ordered the soulblades as he reached the edge of the flames. He sensed the dragons nearby and tried to fling a mental attack of his own.\n\nThe fire disappeared, and Trip shouted an alarmed, \"No!\" when he saw the ledge was empty, save for ice dripping water into the chasm.\n\nThen he saw Rysha out on the remains of the bridge. She sprang into the air as the female soared over her, banking to keep from running into the wall. The chapaharii blade slashed through the dragon's defensive shield and all the way to the scales of her belly.\n\nThe dragon screeched and whipped away, her body contorting in the air as she rushed out of the blade's reach. Her tail slammed down on the remains of the bridge, not five feet from Rysha.\n\nHer eyes bulged, and she flailed as the frail structure quaked under her. She turned, running back toward Trip and the ledge, but the ice snapped, and the bridge started crumbling underneath her.\n\nTrip willed her to levitate on a channel of air, the way the soulblades had levitated him in the canyon. But he had no experience doing what he needed to do. It didn't matter. He realized he couldn't help her, not when she carried that sword. It defended her from all magic, even friendly magic.\n\nThe ice cracked, and more pieces fell behind her. Trembles wracked the bridge, and she slipped, a knee slamming down.\n\n\"Throw the sword,\" Trip yelled, barely aware of what the dragons were doing.\n\nThankfully, Jaxi and Azarwrath continued to attack them. All he could do was focus on Rysha.\n\nRysha didn't hesitate, understanding what he wanted to do. She hurled the sword to the ledge, where it skidded into the tunnel behind Trip.\n\nThe bridge crumbled the rest of the way, and she cried out as her footing disappeared. Again, Trip willed her to levitate, for a huge gust of wind to form and blow her to safety behind him.\n\nHe wasn't sure whether he did it or the soulblades were responsible, but a hurricane gale carried her up and onto the ledge, her eyes wide and her arms flailing until she landed beside him. He wanted to hug her and kiss her, but the battle wasn't over yet, and she knew it. She raced into the tunnel to retrieve the sword.\n\nLook out! Jaxi yelled into his mind.\n\nTrip felt the soulblades raising a shield again to protect him, just before a wave of power slammed into it. He jerked up his hands, also attempting to raise defenses. Though injured, both dragons arrowed toward him, rage in their slitted reptilian eyes. The soulblades deflected a second attack, but a third struck the wall underneath the ledge, and Trip realized their mistake. Jaxi and Azarwrath had protected him, not the ledge on which he stood.\n\nThe ice crumbled and gave way before he could think of whirling and jumping back into the tunnel. There was nothing to jump from.\n\nHe tumbled down into the chasm as chunks of ice plummeted alongside him, battering his shoulders and back. Below him, the fiery orange of the lava lake grew closer and closer.\n\nLevitate, he cried in his mind.\n\nEven as he tried to figure out how he might channel wind to blow him back up and to safety, the air thickened underneath him, slowing his fall. The heat of the magma toasted him, and he halted, his boots scant feet from the surface. Ice and rock continued to rain down, dropping into the lava and spraying molten droplets in all directions. Trip roared with pain as some struck his legs, singeing him through his clothing.\n\nA huge piece of ice pounded him on the top of his head. He thrust his hands into the air, willing a defensive shield into place all around him.\n\nTo his surprise, it worked. The ice chunks bounced off, landing in the lava lake all around him, steaming and hissing as they instantly melted.\n\nThanks to whoever's holding me up. Trip peered upward, wondering if the soulblades could float him back up to the ledge.\n\nBut through the ice sloughing down, he saw that there was no ledge. Not anymore. He couldn't even see the tunnel. The entire top of that chasm wall appeared to have collapsed, burying it. Seven gods, had Rysha survived that? She must have been in the tunnel right behind him.\n\nAn angry dragon looked down at Trip from the ceiling of the chasm, yellow eyes flashing with irritation that he hadn't plunged into the magma and been incinerated. The other dragon perched on the remains of one of the bridges, healing its wounds, but this one\u2014the female, he sensed\u2014plunged down toward him. He had no doubt she meant to finish him off.\n\nThere are more tunnels and caves down here, Jaxi blurted into his mind, and he found himself floating upward and also toward the side of the chasm.\n\nLightning streaked from Azarwrath's blade\u2014if he'd had time, Trip would have marveled that he'd maintained a grip on both swords\u2014and toward the dragon's face. But the female had reestablished her defenses, and the lightning bounced off as she plummeted toward Trip, talons spread to grab him. Or pierce his heart.\n\nTrip tried to pour more energy into strengthening his defensive barrier, but he feared it would be far too weak to stop the dragon. It was. A mental attack assaulted him, wrenching down his barrier before the female reached him.\n\nBut Jaxi had lifted him to a cave a few dozen feet above the magma lake. Unlike some of the other openings in the chasm walls, no stubs of broken bridges thrust out of it. And Trip had no sense of a tunnel leading deeper into the mountain. Jaxi swept him into the cave a split second before those talons would have reached him.\n\nThe female screeched, spreading her wings to keep from hitting the lava. She swooped back up, angling to reach the cave.\n\nTrip sprinted away from the entrance. Her huge golden maw and yellow eyes grew larger as she flew straight toward it.\n\nHe hurled a wave of power at her and urged the soulblades to help, for he knew he wasn't strong enough to stop her. They wouldn't be, either. Realizing that, he shifted his aim, channeling his energy into the ice at the cave entrance.\n\nThunderous snaps and cracks nearly deafened him. Ice broke away and slammed down. Trip drew back as far as he could until his shoulder blades bumped the back of the cave. Shards of ice flew at him like shrapnel from a bomb. All he could do was lift his arms to shield his face. He didn't have the energy to do more.\n\nAll light disappeared, leaving him alone in the darkness with the walls and ceiling tumbling down all around him. One of the swords created a barrier to protect him from being pummeled, but as ice continued to slam down, he had no idea if he'd saved himself from the dragon or condemned himself to being buried alive." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "\"Trip!\" Rysha cried, hacking at the ice and rock boulders with her sword.\n\nEryndral, surely eager to reach the dragons on the other side of the rockfall, glowed fiercely. The blade cut through the boulders that had collapsed the tunnel more effectively than a normal sword could, but Rysha feared it wouldn't be enough. There had to be ten feet of ice and rock between her and the ledge. Between her and Trip.\n\nOr was the ledge even there anymore? She'd seen it crumbling under his feet as ice poured from the ceiling.\n\n\"Trip,\" she yelled again, hoping he would hear her and answer. In this case, she wouldn't object to telepathic communication, not one bit.\n\n\"Ravenwood, stop,\" someone\u2014Dreyak?\u2014ordered from behind her.\n\nRysha ignored the command and kept hacking at the ice. But hands gripped her from behind.\n\nShe almost whirled and attacked them, wanting to force her captors away, but Kaika yelled, \"Stop, Rysha!\"\n\nThis time, the words sank in, the words of her superior officer.\n\nPanting, Rysha let the sword droop, let Leftie and Duck pull her away from the wall. But she wasn't ready to give up.\n\n\"We're leaving Trip.\" Rysha said, pointing behind her.\n\n\"I know, but I don't think there's anything we can do, and we need as many obstacles between us and those dragons as possible.\" Kaika grimaced. \"We need more time. We can't find the portal, and there are all these\u2014hells, I don't know what they are. I need my archaeologist.\" Kaika jerked her thumb toward the tunnel behind her, toward another blue-lit opening farther down.\n\n\"We can't just abandon him, ma'am,\" Rysha whispered, looking back again.\n\nLeftie, too, was staring bleakly at the compacted ice and rock, the solid wall between them and the dragons.\n\n\"I doubt there's anything left to abandon.\" Kaika gripped Rysha's arm and pulled her in the opposite direction.\n\n\"No,\" Rysha protested. \"He can levitate. Or the swords can. And he's got their magic.\" She spun toward Dreyak. \"You have dragon blood\u2014can you tell if he's alive? Sense him?\"\n\nDreyak's eyes grew distant, as if he were checking, but he soon shook his head. \"I cannot sense him. The magic all around and the proximity of the dragons with their domineering auras may be interfering, but\u2026\" He finished with a shrug.\n\n\"Even if he kept himself from falling into the lava,\" Kaika said, \"the dragons would have finished him off. Soulblades aren't enough against dragons. Trust me, I know. I've been in such battles before.\"\n\nKaika kept pulling her, but Rysha dragged her feet, her mind whirring, seeking a plausible argument to make them believe that Trip had survived, that it was worth clawing their way back out and into the fight to help him.\n\n\"Rysha,\" Kaika said, squeezing her arm. \"This was what he wanted. He was willing to give his life to buy us time. Don't make his sacrifice pointless.\"\n\nTears welled in Rysha's eyes, and a lump thickened in her throat, but the argument persuaded her. Reluctantly, she let Kaika guide her forward.\n\nFor the moment, nothing but silence came from the other side of the cave-in. Rysha hoped that meant that if Trip had died, he'd somehow managed to take out the dragons first. Better yet, she hoped he was sitting on one of those broken ice nubs, resting while the defeated dragons writhed and died in the lava lake.\n\nAbsorbed by her thoughts, Rysha barely noticed the huge chamber that Kaika guided her into, another large area with blue illumination coming from the walls and the ceiling, though there was no obvious light source. Wherever the portal was, it wasn't sitting in the middle of the chamber, as they'd hoped. But there were other things in the cavernous room. At least a dozen huge alcoves were set into the far wall, their contents in shadows, but still discernible. Dragons.\n\nEach alcove held an unmoving dragon, the creatures' eyes closed. Were they dead? Or imprisoned? She'd read about the stasis magic that dragons possessed, chambers that kept their occupants alive but in a deep hibernation where they did not age and weren't aware of time passing.\n\n\"We're looking for the portal,\" Blazer said from the far end of the chamber, \"but there's only one other tunnel leading out of here, and Leftie already ran down it a ways. It winds deeper into the mountain and gets very narrow, far too narrow for what we assume is a large portal to have been carried through it. See those empty walls? We were thinking that they look similar to the one at the back of the entrance cave and might lead to secret passages or chambers.\"\n\n\"Which we now have no way to open if they have the same requirements as the last,\" Rysha said.\n\n\"Do you think these are dragons from thousands of years ago?\" Duck asked, walking past the alcoves. \"Or were they just put into these jail cells?\"\n\nRysha started to shrug, but she noticed plaques set into the ice walls next to each alcove. The names of the occupants?\n\n\"We're going to have to figure out how to get out one way or another,\" Blazer said, pressing her bare hand against an ice wall. \"The way back is destroyed.\"\n\n\"I'm always amenable to exploring alternative exit strategies,\" Kaika said, patting her pack.\n\n\"I know, but we need to find the portal first.\"\n\n\"Trip could have directed us to it,\" Rysha said, sighing.\n\nShe looked into an alcove at a gold dragon, its wings pressed to its sides, its head hung, as if in shame. Not that she'd ever read about dragons having shame. The plaque read Shulina Arya. Rysha had come across some names in her reading of history texts, but she wasn't familiar with that one. There weren't dates on the plaque, so she had no way of telling how long the dragon had been imprisoned. Even if she came across names she did recognize, that wouldn't help her determine if the dragons had been stuck in this chamber months ago or a thousand years ago, not when they were so long-lived.\n\n\"I wonder if it's possible to let these dragons out,\" Blazer said, \"and get them to fight the gold dragons for us. Think those gold dragons were the ones who stuck them in here?\"\n\n\"Releasing imprisoned dragons didn't work out well for Angulus,\" Kaika said. \"Technically, he only released one, but that made it trendy, and a sorceress came along and released some more.\"\n\n\"Didn't Bhrava Saruth come out of that batch?\" Blazer asked. \"He's been a good ally for the city.\"\n\n\"Yes, but Morishtomaric came out of there, too, and he was a nightmare,\" Kaika said. \"I'm pretty sure those gold dragons that just killed Trip came out of that prison too.\"\n\nRysha flinched. Just killed Trip.\n\nWere her teammates already convinced he was dead? Already so certain he couldn't have survived?\n\nWhile Kaika and Blazer investigated the walls and sought secret doors, Rysha moved along the alcoves, checking other names. If they came across an occupant who'd been known to humans, one who'd perhaps been linked to an Iskandian dragon rider, it might be safe to let that one out. Assuming they could figure out how. What if it took a gold dragon\u2014or Trip\u2014to unlock the doors and thaw out the inmates?\n\nDuck let out a startled squawk.\n\nBlazer whirled toward him, a hand on her pistol. \"What is it?\"\n\nHe was gaping at an alcove at the end. \"Tylie,\" he blurted.\n\n\"What?\" Kaika spun toward him.\n\nRysha frowned in puzzlement. Had she heard that name before? It definitely wasn't a dragon name.\n\nKaika and Blazer ran toward Duck, barely noticing as they slipped and skidded on the ice floor.\n\n\"And Phelistoth,\" Duck said, still staring. \"It must be.\" He leaned to the side, looking at the next alcove over. \"Here's a gold dragon. I can't tell these dragons apart, especially with their eyes closed, but doesn't it look like this might be Bhrava Saruth?\"\n\n\"Ravenwood,\" Kaika barked.\n\nRysha was already heading over to read the plaques for them. All of the Iskandians had converged on those last two alcoves. Only Dreyak remained by the entrance, watching impassively and keeping an eye on the tunnel leading back to the rockfall.\n\nDuck pointed into an alcove with a silver dragon in it, and Rysha jerked with surprise because the dragon wasn't alone. A young human woman stood beside him, leaning against his haunches, touching him with a hand, as if to comfort him, or perhaps draw support from him. Her eyes were closed, just as the dragon's were.\n\nKaika touched the front of the alcove, and her finger encountered something that gave slightly on the surface, like gelatin, but she could not press deeply into it.\n\n\"Phelistoth,\" Rysha affirmed, reading the plaque. The names were written in Middle Dragon Script. \"No mention of the human.\"\n\n\"That's Tylie,\" Duck said firmly, and Kaika and Blazer nodded in agreement. \"She's Tolemek Targoson's little sister and one of Sardelle's students.\"\n\nRysha spread a hand, not disagreeing with them. She'd just never met Targoson\u2014the ex-pirate formerly known as Deathmaker\u2014and hadn't known he had a sister. But then, she'd met Sardelle for the first time at General Zirkander's briefing.\n\n\"She's very sweet,\" Blazer said. \"How in the world did she end up in a dragon prison?\"\n\n\"Is Phelistoth sweet?\" Rysha asked.\n\n\"Not really,\" Duck said. \"He's arrogant. And eats all of General Zirkander's cheese.\"\n\n\"Clearly, the crime he was imprisoned for,\" Rysha said.\n\nDuck snorted.\n\n\"The woman\u2014Tylie\u2014may just have been captured with him. I hope she's alive in there.\" Rysha thought this looked like the dragon stasis magic she'd read about, but she couldn't be sure. Maybe they were fancy coffins. A grim thought, that, especially with the young woman standing at the silver dragon's side.\n\n\"How do we let them out?\" Kaika asked. \"Sardelle and Tolemek wouldn't forgive us if we found them, then left them here.\" She looked into the next alcove. \"And I'm fairly certain that is Bhrava Saruth.\"\n\nRysha checked the plaque. \"That's what this says.\"\n\n\"I bet he would help us against the other ones if we could get him out,\" Duck said. \"He fought those same two before to protect the capital. They were all tearing into each other in the sky over the harbor like cats squabbling in an alley.\"\n\nRysha grimaced, remembering that the most recent dragons to attack the capital had promised to return. If they'd indeed only waited three days, they would have come by now. Come and gone? She hoped the chapaharii sword Captain Ahn had been standing guard with had been enough to fight them off.\n\n\"There aren't any instructions anywhere in the chamber that I've seen,\" Rysha said, looking around. \"Those empty squares under the plaques might have a purpose.\" She placed her bare palm on one, but nothing happened.\n\nEven if they were controls for opening the prisons, it wasn't likely they would respond to her touch. Maybe if Trip were with them\u2026\n\nSighing, Rysha backed up. For the first time, she looked up. And she almost fell over.\n\nA huge purple donut made from crystal hung from the ceiling forty feet above their heads, its face toward them. It glowed softly, the light reflecting off the icy walls around it. Its surface was smooth except for another smaller crystal on the side toward them. Its three visible points protruded from the donut\u2014the portal?\u2014and three or four other points appeared to be sunken into it, staying there against the dictates of gravity.\n\n\"Uhm, Major?\" Rysha pointed.\n\nThe others gaped or jerked with surprise when they followed her gaze.\n\n\"That looks like a magical portal to me,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"Hells,\" Kaika said. \"How am I supposed to climb up there to blow that up?\"\n\nThe slick ice walls had no handholds, nor was there anything around that could serve as a ladder. Because the dragons flew, presumably.\n\n\"If Trip were here, one of the soulblades could have levitated you,\" Duck said.\n\n\"Note to self,\" Blazer said. \"On future missions, don't let the person with all the powerful magical tools sacrifice himself to dragons.\"\n\nRysha frowned at her, not finding the joke funny.\n\n\"You've got a grappling hook, don't you, Blazer?\" Kaika slung her pack off her shoulders. \"And Duck, you've got the rope. We'll have to see if we can find something up there to catch a hook on.\" She eyed the smooth crystal portal dubiously.\n\nA crack echoed from the direction of the lava lake, followed by the sound of boulders shifting and clunking to the ground.\n\nDreyak drew his scimitar and faced into the tunnel. \"The dragons are coming.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "I have good news and bad news, Jaxi announced.\n\nTrip's entire body hurt, and his head felt like someone was bludgeoning it with a truncheon. As he hunkered under tons and tons of ice, he wasn't sure he cared about any news. Only the knowledge that Rysha and the others should still be up there and might need his help made him lift his head and grunt to acknowledge Jaxi.\n\nThe good news is, the dragons either believe you're dead or assume you won't continue to be a problem. I can't read their minds, but they've stopped hovering outside of your blocked cave.\n\n\"And the bad news?\" he whispered, grimacing when warm blood trickled from his lower lip. Maybe he would stick to mental speech.\n\nThey're now hovering outside the blocked tunnel that the others went through. And unblocking it.\n\nDid Rysha\u2014our people\u2014get to the portal?\n\nThey are in the chamber with it now, Azarwrath said, but they are unable to reach it, and they're about to have visitors.\n\nDamn. He'd been willing to sacrifice himself so the others could finish the mission, but if he had only given them a few seconds, how was it worth it?\n\nI would prefer it if you not sacrifice yourself, Jaxi told him. I've been buried under rock for centuries before. It's not an experience that I'm eager to repeat. Also, as shocking as it is to me, I'm finding that I miss Ridge and Sardelle's squalling offspring and that I wish to see if Sardelle has delivered the new one yet.\n\nIs there a way out of here? Trip lifted his hands above his head to see if he could stand up. He was aware that Azarwrath had formed a barrier above him and also that ice boulders buried it from all sides.\n\nThis is a tunnel, not simply a cave, Azarwrath said. It was blocked long before you entered it, but I sense that it continues on beyond a pile of rocks. It's quite a maze of passages back there, but I believe it may be possible to find one that connects to the chamber where your comrades are now. As for escaping this cave-in, due to the unique geological nature of this tunnel system, getting out should be fairly simple.\n\nThat was a long-winded way of saying that we're surrounded by ice, and I love to melt ice. Jaxi's pommel flared, and heat radiated from the blade.\n\nI am not long-winded, Azarwrath said.\n\nPlease, you should have bonded with Professor Ravenwood. You two could have gone on the lecture circuit together. Make a hole in your barrier, will you? I'll melt the ice through it.\n\nDone.\n\nHold me out, Trip. Jaxi shared a mental picture of what she imagined. I plan to reunite you with your professor so you can give her a much more thorough kiss than up on that ledge. Though, you didn't initiate that kiss at all. Or the first one. She's going to think you're not interested.\n\nTrip held Jaxi out, and a red beam shot through a gap in the barrier, melting into the ice in the tunnel behind them. Maybe she'll believe I'm shy.\n\nShyly not interested. When you reunite, promise me you'll kiss her like you mean it.\n\nI'll keep your suggestion in mind.\n\nOh, no. That wasn't a suggestion. I need a promise, or you're not getting out of here.\n\nAzarwrath? Trip asked, though he wasn't sure what he was asking. If the other soulblade would help if Jaxi didn't?\n\nFor the first time since I've met her, I concur with your Iskandian soulblade, Azarwrath said. You must show your lady that you are most definitely interested.\n\nTrip didn't make a promise, mostly because he did want to kiss Rysha\u2014frequently\u2014but he didn't want there to be any question that it had been of his own free will.\n\nJaxi hummed, sounding contented, as her beam burrowed into the ice. It melted away huge chunks rapidly, but Trip paced his little enclosure as he watched. He could sense the dragons flying toward his comrades, and he wasn't sure if it would be rapidly enough." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "A wave of power slammed into Dreyak, hurling him backward into the chamber. He skidded across the icy floor and smashed into one of the alcove barriers.\n\nRysha, the chapaharii sword in hand, rushed to take his place in the mouth of the tunnel as Kaika ran toward the spot from the other side.\n\n\"I'll handle this,\" Rysha said, though the back of her mind screamed at her, telling her that was a ludicrous thing to proclaim, since she could see a gold dragon charging through the tunnel. \"You need to destroy that portal, Captain.\"\n\n\"No doubt about that, but I haven't found a ladder yet.\" Kaika raised her own blade, its subtle green glow flaring to a blinding one as the dragon approached, half running and half flying. \"Maybe I'll climb up a dead dragon,\" she growled.\n\n\"No luck with the rope and grapple?\"\n\n\"Blazer's working on it.\"\n\nAnother wave of power preceded the dragon down the tunnel, and Rysha sensed wind or something similar rushing past them, but the swords flared, and they did not feel the attack.\n\n\"Slash and get out of the way,\" Kaika ordered. \"It can still stomp us.\"\n\nWith the dragons almost upon them, Rysha didn't respond. The one in front\u2014it was the male, she thought\u2014charged them.\n\nRysha waited until the last second, then swung as she jumped to the side, using the wall for protection. Her blade bit into the dragon's shield, and that now-familiar jolt of electricity flowed up her arm. Had she succeeded in dropping the male's defenses? She didn't have Trip or the soulblades here to tell her.\n\nShe started to jump back in as the dragon came fully into the chamber, but his head whipped toward her, jaws snapping. Dropping to the floor, Rysha rolled out of the way. Against all instincts, she made herself roll closer instead of farther away, hoping to come up under the dragon's belly.\n\nThe head followed her, and fangs sliced into the back of her parka.\n\nA screech erupted from that deadly maw, and his head jerked up. As Rysha leaped to her feet, crouching under the dragon's belly, she glimpsed Kaika withdrawing her sword as the neck twisted, the jaws angling toward her. Her blade dripped blood.\n\nShe was agile enough to evade the snapping fangs, but the dragon spread his wings, knocking her back.\n\nRysha, encouraged by the sight of that blood, drove her blade upward.\n\nThe dragon must have sensed the attack coming, because he sprang into the air. But not before she sank her sword between scales and into three inches of flesh.\n\nThe dragon shrieked as he flew up toward the portal, flapping his wings to stay out of their reach.\n\nGunshots fired\u2014Duck, Blazer, and Leftie trying to help. Rysha didn't know if they could. Even with the creature's defenses down, the scales might deflect bullets.\n\n\"The other one is coming,\" Dreyak yelled, back in the tunnel once more.\n\nRysha was more worried about the one flying right above them.\n\n\"Fire coming,\" Kaika yelled, waving for Duck and the others to get back.\n\nThe dragon's maw yawned open, smoke filling the back of his throat, and Rysha shouted, adding her warning to Kaika's. The attack wasn't aimed toward them but toward the rest of their team, toward those who didn't have chapaharii blades to protect them.\n\nDuck, Blazer, and Leftie sprinted for the tunnel Blazer had identified earlier, one exiting the back of the chamber, but they wouldn't make it in time. The dragon flew after them, fire curling past its fangs.\n\nThough it would leave her vulnerable to attack, Rysha hurled her sword, point first, toward the dragon's belly. Seeing it coming, the creature twisted in the air. The blade only skimmed his flank, but that was enough to divert his stream of fire, so he didn't spray flames at the others.\n\nIt was not, however, enough to keep him from spraying flames at her. The dragon's eyes lit up when her sword clattered to the floor, leaving her without protection.\n\nRysha raced toward it, but the dragon unleashed a gout of fire at the bare blade.\n\nCursing, she tried to stop, but she slipped on the ice and fell. She scrambled to the side on hands and knees as the flames shifted toward her. Ice melted, the air smoldered, and her spectacles fogged up. Damn it, being blind right now would not help.\n\nKaika yelled, \"Over here, ugly!\"\n\nMaybe Kaika also threw her sword, because the call worked. The fire shifted away before it caught up to Rysha, and she was able to slide her way through melted ice toward the sword. Frigid water seeped through her clothes, but she ignored it. Relief surged through her veins when her fingers wrapped around the hilt again.\n\nHer spectacles defogged enough for her to see not one but both dragons veering toward Kaika. Trying to corner her?\n\nBoth were injured, dripping blood onto the ice floor as they flew, but it didn't slow them down. Kaika dropped something, then sprang to the side as the dragons converged, almost crashing into each other in their eagerness to chomp down on her.\n\nShe slashed wildly as she ran away. Or maybe it only seemed wild. Her sword bit into dragon flesh twice.\n\nThe creatures twisted to follow her, but an explosion ripped from the floor underneath them.\n\nRysha staggered as the ground shook.\n\nSmoke obscured the dragons, half hiding them from sight. Had the bomb or grenade or whatever it had been hurt them?\n\nKaika didn't wait to see, and neither did Rysha. They ran toward the smoke, their blades raised to cut into their enemies while they were\u2014Rysha hoped\u2014stunned.\n\nMetal clashed near the entrance tunnel, and Rysha almost faltered. Dreyak swung his scimitar at a shaven-headed man in a Cofah uniform. Rysha grimaced, spotting the sorceress back there too.\n\n\"Dragons first,\" she whispered, and leaped in to help Kaika." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Trip heard the clangs and shouts of the battle before he came close enough to see the light in the chamber ahead. Three figures crouched in the passage, firing rifles into the fray. Was that Leftie, Blazer, and Duck?\n\nAs Trip sprinted to join them, to help in whatever way he could, a gold dragon's tail slammed into the floor right in front of the entrance. The three pilots sprang back, one slipping on the treacherous ice, and falling against the wall.\n\n\"Incoming,\" Trip barked, wanting to warn them he was coming without wasting the time to say a lot.\n\nHe sensed all the enemies ahead, two dragons, as well as more than a dozen humans, including the sorceress Kiadarsa.\n\n\"Trip,\" Leftie blurted, then skittered to the side, eyes widening at the two soulblades glowing in Trip's hands.\n\nNot taking the time to respond, Trip sprang past his teammates and into the chamber. At once, he sensed the dragons were injured, that the portal was above them, and also that other dragons, their auras severely muted, lined the back of the chamber. It took him a second to realize they weren't a threat, not at the moment.\n\nHe spotted Kaika fighting a dragon on the other side of the chamber, leaping to try to reach it as it flew up and down, alternating swiping its talons at her, breathing fire, and evading her slashes.\n\nNot far from Trip, Rysha drove her sword into another dragon, the gold whose tail he'd just seen. More injured than the other, this one fought from the ground, crouching on its haunches. Smoke and the scent of spent gunpowder filled the air.\n\n\"Antyonla masahrati akarli!\" came a cry from the tunnel\u2014Kiadarsa.\n\nTrip did not recognize the words\u2014they sounded like gobbledegook\u2014but Rysha halted in the middle of a swing that would have driven the sword into the dragon's neck. Her chapaharii blade pulsed, and her face twisted with a conflagration of emotions. Frustration? Anger? Loathing?\n\nBefore Trip knew what was happening, Rysha whirled toward him. Her eyes widened with surprise that quickly shifted to horror. She strode toward him, raising the glowing sword high, as if she intended to hew him down.\n\nAbruptly, Trip realized what those words had been, one of the control phrases for the sword. What was the one that told it to stand down?\n\n\"Meyusha!\" he blurted.\n\nKiadarsa cried out again, repeating her words. For some reason, they seemed to carry more power than his, and Rysha kept coming.\n\n\"What are you doing, Ravenwood?\" Blazer yelled from the tunnel as Rysha stomped closer to Trip. \"Stand down!\"\n\nTrip glanced across the chamber to see if Kaika was also heading his way, but she'd dropped her chapaharii blade. It lay on the floor while the dragon flew above it, jerking its head left and right on its long neck, snapping at the air behind it. No, it was snapping at the person on its back. Kaika.\n\nSomehow, she'd climbed up the side of the dragon and on top of it. Crouched on her feet, she didn't look like she wanted to stay. She kept glancing up at the glowing purple portal mounted to the ceiling.\n\nRysha charged Trip, and he yanked his attention back to her.\n\nNot this again, Jaxi groaned into his mind.\n\nBoth soulblades came up in front of Trip, forming an X to block the downward swing of Rysha's sword. Metal screeched, and sparks flew in the air between them. Even though he'd blocked, her amazing strength\u2014strength augmented by the sword\u2014sent painful jolts down his arms.\n\nRysha's face contorted with intense concentration, as if she was trying to fight this, and her lips moved as she kept repeating the term for stand down. But with the sorceress back there yelling the other term, the sword wasn't inclined to listen. It lashed at Trip again, feinting toward his face, then, when he parried, whipping back in low.\n\nTrip was no sword-fighting expert, and he would have been injured\u2014or killed\u2014but the soulblades knew what to do, and they guided his movements. They defended, parrying again and again so rapidly he couldn't track his own movements.\n\nThat instinct that liked to rear its head when Trip engaged in battle crept into his awareness. Blood surged to his muscles, and he wanted to spring, to pummel this enemy that dared attack him. To destroy her, to prove his might as he emerged victorious from battle, a mighty predator.\n\n\"No,\" he snarled, tamping down those urges, relieved the soulblades were in complete control of their movements.\n\nTrip glimpsed Duck creeping out of the tunnel, maybe thinking of jumping in and grabbing Rysha from behind.\n\n\"Don't,\" Trip yelled, envisioning him being hurt\u2014or worse\u2014by accident. Hadn't Blazer said that had happened before to one of their comrades? \"Stay back. Or better yet\u2014\" A slash to his face interrupted him, and Trip had to leap back, his shoulder bumping against a barrier stretching across one of those alcoves. \"Fight the others. Finish off the dragons.\"\n\nAfter uttering the order, Trip concentrated on parrying, on keeping Rysha as far away from him as possible.\n\nStop, Rysha, he cried into her mind, hoping she would hear him, that the words would somehow give her strength. You're strong. You can control that sword. We need you to control it.\n\nSweat beaded on her forehead, and she gritted her teeth. Though she appeared to fight the blade with her mind, that didn't keep it from using her body how it wished. The sword cut for his throat. Trip, his back already to the barrier, had to dive sideways. Rysha turned and chased after him, the blade held aloft.\n\nHe shoved up to his knees, bringing up the soulblades in an X again to parry.\n\nWe can do more, Jaxi said, but we know you don't want to hurt her.\n\nNo, Trip thought, still on his knees as he parried another barrage of blows. Is there no way to knock that sword out of her hands?\n\nWe can try, Azarwrath said grimly, but it is giving her great power right now.\n\nRifles fired out in the chamber. Consumed with defending himself, Trip prayed nobody was aiming at him.\n\nHe tried to throw a blast of power at Rysha's hand, hoping to force her to release the sword. But she didn't even seem to notice.\n\nHe should have known better, that the sword would protect her from all magical attacks. Would it protect everything around her and on her body? An image of trying to drop her trousers or unlace her boots came to mind.\n\nSweat\u2014or were those tears?\u2014ran down her cheeks as Rysha slashed relentlessly, backing him into a corner.\n\nWe may have to strike to wound her, Azarwrath said. The dragons are recovering.\n\nWhat had happened to Kaika? Trip spared a glance toward the dragons, but didn't see her.\n\n\"Rysha, please,\" Trip said. \"Fight it. Tell it there are dragons over there. A far greater prize than a lowly mage.\"\n\nHer eyes remained horrified behind her spectacles, and her movements seemed to slow slightly as she tensed her muscles, fighting the blade's influence.\n\nHer spectacles. Trip's gaze locked onto them. They weren't a part of her. Was it possible he could strike against them? Or one of the soulblades could?\n\nJaxi, he thought, even as he tried to formulate an attack of his own. He glared at the spectacles and, as he blocked another powerful blow, he imagined them snapping apart and falling from her eyes.\n\nThe lenses shattered, and Rysha squawked, stumbling back and flinging a hand to her face. Trip paused, horrified. He hadn't meant to break them in such a way that glass might pierce her eyes. The sword slipped from her loosened grip. Or maybe she let it slip free.\n\nTrip, worried about the sorceress yelling those words again, kicked the sword across the slick floor. A jolt of pain ran up his leg at the contact, but he gritted his teeth and shook it off.\n\nHe spun back toward the battle, but didn't run straight into it. Worried he'd handicapped Rysha, he stepped in front of her. He could fight with magic from the side. Or at least, the soulblades could.\n\nAs he had the thought, Jaxi and Azarwrath sent fireballs and lightning streaking toward a dragon in the air. Yisharnesh. The creature was flying back and forth, snapping at the portal. What the hells?\n\nA shadow moved on top of the portal, just visible through the hole in the center, and Trip understood. Kaika. She crouched atop it. Setting her explosives?\n\nThe dragon had reestablished its barrier, and both fireball and lightning bounced off. The other dragon\u2014the male that had been slumped against the wall, was rising to his feet. Blood pooled on the ice under him, but he looked like he wanted to get back into the fight.\n\nTrip heard Rysha behind him, her breaths coming in labored pants after their battle. His own breaths were ragged, and sweat streamed down the sides of his face. Should he direct her to the sword? He wouldn't be surprised if the magical weapon could use her to attack a dragon even if she couldn't see well.\n\nBut he spotted Kiadarsa across the chamber, standing in the mouth of the tunnel. She was waving to men behind her and pointing at the chapaharii swords. Both Kaika's and Rysha's lay unclaimed on the floor now.\n\n\"Get this dragon off me, Trip,\" Kaika yelled from her lofty perch. \"I'm trying to do something up here.\"\n\nAzarwrath hurled more lightning. Trip focused on the dragon's head, hoping he could recreate the mental attacks he'd effectively employed before and wishing to all the gods he'd had some training so he could do more than hope.\n\nActually, Jaxi said, why don't you see if you can let our allies out? Let them battle the other dragons.\n\nAllies? Trip asked, bewildered.\n\nThat one behind you is Bhrava Saruth.\n\nThough still confused\u2014he'd only glanced at the alcoves and been aware that disabled dragons were in them\u2014he risked glancing away from the fight.\n\nA gold dragon with its head bowed and eyes closed stood in the alcove.\n\nYou're sure that's an ally?\n\nIf you tell him you'll worship him, he'll be even more of one. Try pressing your hand to the wall there. See if it works like the entrance gate did.\n\nI will continue to harry the enemy, Azarwrath announced as more lightning streaked out. This time, his target was the injured male rising to his feet. That dragon didn't have his defenses up.\n\nHe shrieked, glaring at Azarwrath, and Trip sensed an attack before it came. He envisioned a barrier forming around him, and was relieved to feel Jaxi's energy pouring in to strengthen his meager effort.\n\nEven so, he stumbled as ferocious power slammed into the barrier.\n\nPerhaps harrying dragons isn't a good strategy, Jaxi said, even though she'd also been attacking the one after Kaika.\n\nHoping she was right about the imprisoned dragon, Trip lunged to the side so he could plant his palm against a square on the wall. White light flared about his hand. The barrier in front of the alcove disappeared, as did the magic he sensed inside of it, holding its prisoner in stasis.\n\nThe gold dragon's eyes opened, a dark emerald green with reptilian slits.\n\nGreetings, Bhrava Saruth, Jaxi announced with atypical cheer. I've brought you new potential worshippers, but they're in trouble. We need\u2014\n\nYisharnesh, came the dragon's cry. He sprang from the alcove, almost knocking Trip and Rysha over as he flew straight up to the creature hurling fire at the portal\u2014and at Kaika. We shall have that final dance now.\n\nI forgot, Jaxi said as the new dragon lashed out, batting aside the female's defenses and snapping at her with fang and talon. They've met before.\n\nKiadarsa and two soldiers trotted out, trying to sneak along the wall as the dragons warred overhead. They headed straight for Kaika's chapaharii blade.\n\nTrip, reacting on instinct, imagined halting them by creating a barrier between them and the weapon. But Azarwrath, with a growling sound in Trip's mind, did more than that. He hurled red lightning, and it forked into three branches, each slamming into one of the people.\n\nThe men screamed, dropping to the ground and writhing as their clothing\u2014and their skin\u2014grew charred. The sorceress dropped to one knee and did her best to raise her defenses, but Azarwrath was unrelenting. More lightning poured into her barrier. Jaxi joined in, hurling a fireball so large it engulfed her.\n\nTrip would not have killed Kiadarsa, even after what she'd almost forced Rysha to do, but the soulblades were less forgiving. By the time he thought to call them off, her defenses had failed, and she lay on the ground next to the men, their bodies charred and quite dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Rysha's hands shook as she groped for one of the ammo pouches on her utility belt, the one where she kept a spare set of spectacles. Her other lenses were so fractured, she might as well have been looking through blocks of ice. She heard the battle raging all around her, and felt the heat of fire against her face, but the world was an incomprehensible blur, and that terrified her.\n\nFinally, she managed to pry the clasp open, dig out the case, and pull on the spectacles. She dropped her other ones, knowing they were beyond anyone's ability to repair.\n\nThe chamber came into focus, part of it. Someone was standing in front of her, protecting her. Trip.\n\nShe gulped, surprised he would risk standing so close with his back to her after\u2026 Shit, she'd known all the command words, and she'd still lost control. How had that sorceress's utterances proven more powerful than her own? And how had she known the words to start with?\n\n\"You gave them to her, idiot,\" Rysha whispered, realization slamming into her like a dragon's tail. She'd included the words in the box when she'd given it to Jylea.\n\nBut even so, shouldn't the chapaharii blades prioritize the words of their wielders? Why had the sword turned on her like that?\n\n\"Something to research later,\" she whispered, though her failure stung her deeply.\n\nWould Trip hesitate to get close to her in the future if she kept a chapaharii sword around? Would she be expected to carry one after this mission was over?\n\nOf course, maybe it didn't matter to him. He'd figured out an easy way to defeat her.\n\nRysha grimaced, touching her spectacles. Would other enemies think of that in the future? Somehow, it seemed worse that Trip had done it. She understood why he'd done it, and surely it was better than having him cleave her arm off, but it felt like he'd known her weakness and used it against her. A betrayal.\n\nNot a logical feeling, but she couldn't deny it. Maybe it was more that she resented having such a weakness to exploit.\n\nReminding herself the battle wasn't yet over, Rysha peered about to see where she could help\u2014and where her sword had gone. That was when she saw not two but three gold dragons in the chamber. She cursed.\n\nHer first assumption was that the new dragon had shown up to help the others, but it dawned on her that it was battling the others. In between the lightning and fireballs launching from Trip's soulblades, the dragon whirled and wheeled in the air, snapping and tearing at the larger of the two other golds. The female, Yisharnesh? She appeared injured, but she was also larger than the newcomer\u2014another male?\u2014with powerful muscles rippling under her scales.\n\nThe smaller male dragon that had been wounded earlier now hunkered against a wall, wings furled, eyes closed. Maybe that one was already dead?\n\nBlood streamed from the aerial combatants, drenching the icy floor. Some of it splattered on three dead people, their features charred beyond recognition.\n\nThe Cofah? Or\u2014where was Kaika? Rysha's heart lurched. She saw Leftie, Blazer, Dreyak, and Duck, but not Kaika.\n\n\"Trip,\" Major Blazer called from the back tunnel. \"Let Phelistoth out too.\"\n\nTrip looked at Rysha as he turned toward one of the alcoves. The glow of the soulblades bathed his face, and his intense green eyes gleamed with power.\n\nShe jerked her hands up, palms open, afraid for a moment. She remembered them battling, trying to strike each other down. But no, he'd never done more than defend himself. He hadn't wanted to hurt her, not then and not now.\n\nHe strode past her now, shifting the blades so he could plant his hand on the wall.\n\n\"You can get the sword,\" Trip told her, tilting his head toward where Eryndral lay on the floor, abandoned. \"The sorceress is gone. I'll watch your back.\"\n\nRysha nodded and crept toward it. As she did, light flared and went out inside the alcove he stood near. The silver dragon\u2014and the woman who had been trapped with him\u2014stirred.\n\nA squeal of sheer pain thundered in the chamber, reverberating from the walls. The female dragon had been flying up near the portal, but she plummeted to the ground, landed on her side, and did not move.\n\nThe great male dragon soared around the chamber, his head high. I, the god Bhrava Saruth, have avenged the pain and indignity inflicted upon me by Yisharnesh the Conniving.\n\nRysha peered around, expecting attacks from more sides. But the remaining Cofah appeared to have fled the chamber.\n\nThe dragon\u2014Bhrava Saruth\u2014dropped to all fours, his wings stretched wide.\n\nYou did have a little help, Jaxi pointed out, and Rysha twitched, not accustomed to hearing the soulblade speak. We injured her and the other one before you woke up.\n\nYes, I am awake! It is most glorious. Bhrava Saruth spun slowly, flexing his leathery wings like a bird ruffling its feathers. Where is my high priestess? Was she the one to wake me? He lowered his head to human level and gazed at Trip and Rysha, large luminous green eyes radiating power. His entire muscular form did that.\n\nThose eyes had a familiarity to them, despite the reptilian slits in them. The green\u2026\n\nShe glanced at Trip. Was it a common color for dragons? She'd rarely seen humans with eyes as deep and dark a green as Trip's. Her father was the geneticist in the family, but she thought she remembered some studies about how brown was the more dominant eye color among humans. What about with dragon-human pairings? Did the dragon eye color win out and appear for many generations?\n\nOf course, if she'd translated those words correctly, and Trip truly was the offspring of a human-dragon pairing, then there wouldn't have been many \"generations\" involved.\n\nTrip lifted his chin, holding the dragon's powerful gaze. Rysha found it difficult to meet those eyes, and was glad when they shifted toward Blazer, Leftie, Duck, and Dreyak, because she didn't have an answer to the question.\n\nLastly, the dragon's gaze turned upward, toward the portal. Would he object to having it destroyed? What would they do if these dragons didn't want to allow that?\n\nSardelle stayed home with Ridge to protect the city and birth another baby, Jaxi announced. Judging by the way Leftie shared uneasy glances with the others, the rest of the team was hearing the soulblade's words too.\n\nI thought you would all want to know what we were talking about, Jaxi added.\n\nHrummph. Bhrava Saruth ruffled his wings again, then stretched them outward. An intimidating sight, though he did not appear to mean it to be one. It does not seem fitting that my high priestess is not here but her mouthy sword is.\n\nI am delightful, not mouthy. And I was paramount in freeing you.\n\n\"How did she free the dragon?\" Rysha whispered. \"Wasn't Trip the one who touched the wall with his special fingers?\"\n\nTrip grimaced, looking down and rubbing his fingers together.\n\nI told him to touch the wall, Jaxi informed them.\n\n\"How did you end up imprisoned, mighty Bhrava Saruth?\" Rysha asked, aware of the silver dragon watching from his alcove, his wing draped protectively over the woman, Tylie, who was slumped against him, her eyes not yet open. Rysha noticed an old sword scabbard decorated with faded runes hanging from her belt. Some family heirloom? Or another soulblade?\n\nMighty, yes! Bhrava Saruth lifted his head, and Rysha turned her attention back to him. You acknowledge my mightiness? And my godliness? Perhaps you could make a good interim high priestess.\n\nSardelle will lament how easily she's being replaced, Jaxi said.\n\nRysha was too busy feeling alarmed by the statement. That was definitely not a job she wished to pursue. What would the real gods think of such proclamations?\n\n\"I acknowledge your mightiness, yes,\" she said carefully.\n\nAs to how I was imprisoned, that thief Yisharnesh found my secret spot where I had hidden the Akii Shard. Bhrava Saruth tilted his head toward the portal, or perhaps the purple crystal embedded in it. She stole it. I sensed this at once, but I did not immediately realize she was bringing it here to open the portal of old. I wouldn't have guessed that she wanted more dragons in the world to compete with, but I did not realize she had the audacity to see herself as a queen of dragons who wished to invite only those she could command into her fold.\n\nImagining yourself a queen, Jaxi said. It's almost as audacious as imagining yourself a god.\n\n\"Uh, Jaxi,\" Trip said, dropping his hand to the soulblade's hilt, perhaps wishing she had lips that he could cover. \"Maybe we shouldn't deliberately irk an ally.\"\n\nI, the god Bhrava Saruth, and those dragons I could talk into helping, stole the portal from Yisharnesh and brought it here to hide it from her, but we were followed and ambushed. They forced us into these prison cells, and they went back through the portal into their old world, to gather reinforcements, those who would also be loyal to Yisharnesh. Bhrava Saruth looked toward the portal. Did they come through? Do you know?\n\n\"Breyatah's breath, I hope not.\" Blazer rubbed the back of her neck.\n\n\"Captain\u2026 Wasley?\" an uncertain voice asked from the alcove with the silver dragon.\n\nCaptain who?\n\nThe dark-haired woman\u2014Tylie\u2014had stepped out in front of the silver dragon, and she peered toward Blazer, Leftie, and Duck.\n\n\"Tylie,\" Duck said, waving and running toward her. \"I'm glad you're all right. Your brother has been more worried than a rooster that knows there's a fox in the henhouse.\"\n\n\"Is Tolie here? And Sardelle?\"\n\n\"No, they're back at home, but we're here to take you to them.\"\n\nTylie smiled and stepped forward to hug Duck. The silver dragon\u2014Phelistoth\u2014also strode out of the alcove, but he didn't look like he wanted hugs. He gazed around, his eyes frosty, as if he sought the ones who had imprisoned him, so he could promptly slay them.\n\nPhelistoth's gaze settled on Trip with the kind of power that could bring a man to his knees. Rysha was glad it wasn't directed at her, but she worried because the dragon had singled out Trip.\n\nTrip gazed back at Phelistoth, seemingly fearless as he crossed his arms to rest his hands on the hilts of the soulblades hanging from his belt.\n\nWho is this? Phelistoth asked.\n\nTylie looked curiously at Trip, and Bhrava Saruth also swung his gaze down to him.\n\nRysha was impressed that Trip didn't squirm under all that scrutiny, human and dragon. He had changed since she first met him. That was probably a good thing\u2014they needed people who didn't tremble and hide when dragons showed up\u2014but she couldn't help but feel wistful, remembering the awkward young man from the pub. Was that person still in there? She struggled to see it now.\n\nHe smells familiar, Bhrava Saruth announced, and his massive head lowered on his long neck so his eyes could look straight into Trip's. He inhaled, nostrils quivering like those of a hound.\n\n\"Smells?\" Trip stepped back. \"Not like roasted lamb or a pot roast or anything, right?\"\n\nRysha grinned. Ah, there was a bit of his old awkwardness.\n\nLike one of the elder dragons. Agarrenon Shivar, I believe. Once, before the Rider Wars started, he had a voice on the Council of Elders and many listened to him, even though he had the personality of a malignant mushroom. He had great power, and dragons respect power. But I did not think he was still in the world. When I woke, only Phelistoth and Morishtomaric and those who woke with me were here. That we sensed. Has he been in hiding?\n\n\"I really don't know,\" Trip said.\n\nRysha gazed at him and noticed everyone else doing the same. No, not gazing. Gawking. Bhrava Saruth was lending evidence to the theory of Trip as the son of a dragon. A powerful dragon.\n\nYou have never sought out he who gave life to you? Bhrava Saruth asked. Are you not curious to know him? Or perhaps, the human books also speak of his malignant mushroom personality, and you have no interest. This is understandable. Not all dragons have the charisma and will to become gods to humans.\n\nTrip didn't look like he knew what to say.\n\n\"Is that dragon saying Trip is the son of a dragon?\" Leftie whispered.\n\n\"You hadn't figured that out yet?\" Blazer replied. \"When magical dragon doors started opening for him?\"\n\n\"I did. I just didn't really believe\u2014\" Leftie gripped the icy wall for support. \"I don't see how it's possible. Wouldn't he be better at sports if his blood was that magical?\"\n\nTrip smiled faintly. At least Leftie sounded more surprised than hateful.\n\n\"Can either of you strapping dragons give me a lift down?\" Kaika called.\n\nShe sat atop the portal, her legs dangling through the hole.\n\n\"Captain,\" Rysha blurted with enthusiasm, relieved to see her uninjured. And doing her duty. She never should have expected anything else. \"You're alive.\"\n\n\"A little dragon fire can't kill me.\" Kaika brushed ashes off her sleeve. \"A forty-foot drop might. Bhrava Saruth? A little help? I'll bring some chocolate dragon-horn cookies by your temple when we get back.\"\n\nI do appreciate a worshipper who provides appropriate offerings to her god. Bhrava Saruth stopped sniffing Trip and rose to his full height, so his head was directly under Kaika.\n\n\"You got things on a timer?\" Blazer asked her.\n\nKaika nodded. \"We've got thirty minutes to get out of here. I can change that if we need to, but I figured with our helpers here, we could get a ride back out in time.\"\n\nYou seek to destroy the portal? Bhrava Saruth asked, sounding shocked.\n\n\"Well, it's our mission,\" Blazer said, watching him warily. \"Dragons have been killing people and leveling towns all over Iskandia. And the rest of the world, as well.\" She waved toward Dreyak, who hadn't said much, merely watching everything unfold. \"And if more dragons that are friendly to the empire might be coming, as you suggested, that seems like an extra reason to destroy it.\"\n\nFrom what Bhrava Saruth had suggested, Rysha feared those dragons might already be here.\n\nYour mission was not to free your god?\n\nYou are a fool, Bhrava Saruth, Phelistoth said. As if humans would care if you disappeared from the world.\n\nThey would miss me greatly. I am a kind and benevolent god, and I now have three hundred and eighty-seven worshippers that I bless and receive offerings from.\n\nPhelistoth gave him a dark look, and Rysha wondered just how much of an ally to Iskandia he was. He certainly didn't seem to be an ally to Bhrava Saruth.\n\nTylie stepped close to Phelistoth and patted his flank. \"I'm sure they would have rescued you\u2014us\u2014if they had known where we were.\"\n\n\"I reckon that's true,\" Duck said. \"Tolemek was real worried about his sister, and I know the king was upset when you dragons disappeared.\"\n\nYou see? Bhrava Saruth said. Even the human king missed us. We are very valuable dragons. And now, we must free these other dragons. They are also valuable.\n\n\"Uh, hold on.\" Blazer held up a hand. \"We don't know these other dragons.\"\n\nThey were also imprisoned because they helped us steal the portal and wished Yisharnesh's plan to fail. They are good dragons. Even the surly ones. Bhrava Saruth eyed Phelistoth.\n\n\"Twenty-eight minutes, people,\" Kaika said, then dropped to the top of Bhrava Saruth's head. From there, she slid down his neck, to his back and to the floor. The dragon didn't seem to mind. \"How about we save the reunion chat for later and get out of here?\"\n\nBhrava Saruth eyed the portal, or maybe that purple crystal, but turned his attention to the alcoves. As soon as I free our allies.\n\nBlazer fingered her rifle, looking like she wanted to oppose that. But what could she do? What could any of them do?\n\nRysha looked at Trip, wondering if he thought this would be a good idea or a bad one. Not that he could do anything to stop it. Being half dragon could make him one of the most powerful sorcerers in the world, but he still wouldn't be the equivalent of a dragon.\n\nAs Bhrava Saruth walked to the various alcoves, touching a wing to the squares on the wall, Rysha picked up and sheathed the chapaharii blade. Kaika had already picked up hers.\n\nEveryone else fingered weapons as they watched the barriers disappearing from the alcoves. Everyone except Tylie. She smiled and clasped her hands together in front of her mouth, her eyes alight.\n\nRysha hoped she knew something the rest of them didn't.\n\nAre we certain we want them free? Phelistoth asked, a long-suffering aspect to his words. The female was\u2014is\u2014young and goofy.\n\nYou believe every dragon that is not as moody and morose as you are is goofy, Bhrava Saruth replied.\n\nDragons are meant to be stately and majestic, not\u2026\n\nFreedom, a new voice rang out, and a gold dragon hopped out of an alcove, her wings spread. She twirled. Rysha had never seen such a maneuver from a dragon, but it was definitely a twirl. Humans!\n\nShe looked around at all of them. Despite Phelistoth's promise that she was goofy, she was still a dragon and had that powerful aura and a compelling allure in her violet eyes.\n\nI have always wanted to meet humans, she announced.\n\nThese humans freed us, Bhrava Saruth said as he opened more alcoves.\n\nThen they are goodly humans? Like the riders from the stories? Wonderful! The female dragon finished bouncing about and turned toward Rysha.\n\nShe scrambled back a few steps as the creature's large head lowered on its\u2014her\u2014long neck. The deep violet eyes stared into her soul, and her maw opened, fangs gleaming.\n\nThough Rysha had sheathed the sword, the blade hurled the urge to draw it into her mind, to leap forth and slay the dragon.\n\nAre you a goodly human? the female asked. Your sword wishes to slay me.\n\n\"What it wishes is not necessarily what I wish,\" Rysha said, choosing her words carefully. \"I only want to protect my homeland, Iskandia. Dragons\u2014un-goodly dragons\u2014have been raiding it lately, killing our people and destroying our towns. That is why I carry the sword.\"\n\nDon't take it personally, female dragon, Jaxi said. Her sword wants to slay almost everyone. Just minutes ago, it attacked her lover.\n\nRysha's mouth dropped at this unexpected\u2014and inaccurate\u2014defense.\n\n\"Trip isn't my lover,\" she blurted aloud, then wondered if she should have responded in her mind. Had Jaxi's announcement been for everyone, or only for her and the dragon?\n\nBlazer's eyebrows arched. Captain Kaika smirked.\n\nTrip smiled at Rysha, though it seemed tinged with sadness. Regret?\n\nShe hadn't meant to imply that he could never be her lover. Though after she'd lost control of the chapaharii blade, she reluctantly admitted that wasn't something that should happen for a while. Until\u2026 she wasn't sure when. Someone else took the sword. Or she found a more reliable way to control it. Seven gods, what if something happened, and she ended up attacking him while he slept and couldn't defend himself?\n\nNo, for now, her words had been accurate. They couldn't be lovers.\n\nThe young female, Shulina Arya, was born in Dyrashinor, the temporary world, Bhrava Saruth explained. She knows humans only from stories the others told her. He extended a wingtip toward the dragons shambling out of their alcoves, flexing their muscles and spreading their wings.\n\nThe chamber was growing crowded, and Rysha was tempted to ease over to the tunnel where Kaika now stood with the others. Only Trip stood near her still, near the dragons. But he probably had the power to keep himself from being stomped on.\n\nUn-goodly dragons? Shulina Arya responded to Rysha's earlier words, as if she had been considering the idea and found it perplexing.\n\n\"Those who pick on humans and threaten to kill or enslave us,\" Rysha said. \"While it's true that good and evil are in the eye of the beholder, I must consider anyone who threatens my country an enemy. In addition to those who simply enjoy rampaging through my homeland, I must seek to keep out those who align themselves with the Cofah Empire, an empire that has, for more than two thousand years, sought to squash out or forcibly assimilate other weaker nations.\" Rysha hoped she sounded fair in her assessment and that the dragon appreciated such things.\n\nShulina Arya was gazing at her. Raptly? Or was she considering eating Rysha, since she carried that pesky sword?\n\nFeeling nervous, Rysha babbled a bit as she continued on, \"Did you know that Griyon, the first emperor of the Cofah, a man who conquered thousands of square miles in the time of bronze weapons and in an era when horses were the only means of transportation, convinced his people that the elder gods were on his side and that they decreed the Cofah the worthy rulers of the world? But in truth, he was an atheist. It was one of his eighteen wives who gave him the idea of claiming a divine right to rule, something would-be emperors and monarchs have glommed on to over the centuries\u2014almost everyone ruling a nation today claims the gods willed it to be so.\"\n\n\"Ravenwood,\" Blazer said, making a cutting motion across her throat with her hand, then pointing to the portal.\n\nOh, right. Kaika's detonator was counting down.\n\nYou're a storyteller, Shulina Arya blurted, the words thundering in Rysha's mind, powerful and\u2026 excited?\n\n\"A historian,\" Rysha said. \"Historians tell good stories,\" she added, since the dragon seemed to like the idea.\n\n\"Or bore people to sleep,\" Blazer said.\n\nThere are Cofah airships flying away from this place, a new voice cried into their minds. A male one. They are not utterly destroyed. The Cofah must be utterly destroyed.\n\n\"I don't know who that dragon is,\" Kaika said, \"but I like him.\"\n\nFollow me, comrades. A gold dragon flew toward the main tunnel, and two bronzes and a silver flapped after him. We will teach them not to trouble the humans or dragons of Iskandoth.\n\nWe shall also depart, Phelistoth said. I see enough explosives have been planted to destroy this entire mountain.\n\n\"Only half of it.\" Kaika smirked.\n\nTylie climbed onto Phelistoth's back and waved at Duck as the silver dragon flew her into the tunnel.\n\nHuman female, Shulina Arya said. Climb aboard my back. If you keep your evil sword sheathed, I will take you from this place. And you can tell me stories!\n\n\"I would be happy to tell you stories.\" Rysha grinned at the idea of riding a dragon, as if she were a dragon rider in the legends of old.\n\n\"That's an odd dragon,\" Blazer whispered.\n\n\"I like her,\" Duck said. \"She's right friendly. And doesn't seem to think she's a god.\"\n\nNot all dragons can be gods, Bhrava Saruth announced. One must have a divine presence and many worshippers.\n\n\"Leftie said he'd become one of your worshippers, Bhrava Saruth, if you carry us all out of here,\" Duck said.\n\n\"What?\" Leftie blurted.\n\n\"Wait.\" Blazer lifted a hand. \"We need to pick up our fliers. Also, someone is going to have to stay close and make sure the explosives do indeed blow up the portal. And if they don't\u2026\" She pointed at Kaika's chapaharii blade.\n\n\"Let me take a look at it,\" Trip said. \"The soulblades may have some insight into whether the bombs will be sufficient.\"\n\n\"Good luck getting up there,\" Kaika grumbled. \"I had to\u2014\"\n\nTrip rose into the air, as if he were in one of those fancy steam-powered elevators in the newer buildings in the capital. Rysha told herself it wasn't any different from when the soulblades had levitated them to the bottom of the canyon, but she wasn't positive they were responsible this time. Was that their power? Or Trip's?\n\nI don't know how to make myself fly, Trip said softly, speaking into her mind. There was a sadness to his tone again, as if he believed they would all distance themselves from him because everyone now knew about his scaled father\u2014and his potential as a sorcerer.\n\nBut that wasn't why she'd been thinking of distancing herself, or at least not kissing him again for a while. The sword was the problem, not him.\n\nToo bad, she thought, deciding on a joke instead of attempting to explain her concerns, concerns she feared he would attempt to bat away. You would be able to repair fliers while they were in the air.\n\nThat could indeed be handy, he allowed.\n\nTrip floated up through the donut and crouched atop the portal as Kaika had done. He pulled off a glove and laid his hand flat on the crystal.\n\nThe portal flared a brighter purple, highlighting his face and the startled expression on it.\n\n\"It's not telling him it's going to annihilate the world if we destroy it, I hope,\" Blazer said.\n\n\"Trip, don't kick any wires while you're up there,\" Kaika called up. \"I'd prefer it if the explosives didn't go off until after we're out of the mountain.\"\n\nTrip leaped through the hole, dropping forty feet to the ground and landing in an easy crouch.\n\nI did that, Jaxi said into Rysha's mind, sounding smug. Your dragonly future lover is an utter novice when it comes to magic. You should convince him to see Sardelle about some training. His primary interest is flying and shooting things. He takes after Ridge. It does seem like he should be Ridge's son instead of that of some big, scaly dragon that sounds like he has the personality of a dyspeptic warthog.\n\nWe don't get to choose our fathers, Rysha thought back, her own family coming to mind. She loved her father and wouldn't wish to have another, but there were times when she wished he were more like his mother had been when it came to outlooks and beliefs.\n\n\"I believe the portal can be destroyed with the explosives,\" Trip said, facing Blazer, \"if it's first drained of its power. If it's turned off, essentially.\"\n\nRysha looked around at the dragons, wondering if they would object further to the destruction of this doorway into another world. Bhrava Saruth had been surprised at the announcement, but he hadn't brought it up again. Because he'd been distracted? What about the other dragons? If some of their allies remained on the other side, they might fight the destruction of the portal. Or had all the dragons that wanted to come through already done so?\n\nBut she couldn't read expressions on those reptilian faces, and if they were speaking telepathically among themselves, she would never know it.\n\n\"Also,\" Trip said, \"when I touched the portal, it showed me in sort of an accelerated-time vision all the dragons that have come through it since it was powered up this time.\" His eyes were grim, somber.\n\n\"And it's a lot?\" Blazer asked.\n\n\"I can't tell whether they were loyal to the Cofah and Yisharnesh or not, but four to five hundred easily.\"\n\n\"That's more than the few dozen Sardelle thought.\" Blazer sighed.\n\n\"But we have some allies against them now, right?\" Duck gestured to Bhrava Saruth who was facing six other dragons, the ones who hadn't left to go after the airships. Were they all having a telepathic conference?\n\n\"A dozen at most,\" Blazer said. \"If we count the ones that flew out already. And if we assume all of those are interested in helping Iskandia. I won't object to any allies, but I'm concerned about how many that leaves that aren't interested in helping us.\"\n\n\"Who may be interested in eating us,\" Kaika said.\n\nHumans do not taste good. Bhrava Saruth's neck twisted, so he could look at them. Not like sheep. Sheep are delicious. He drew out that last word with loving care.\n\n\"Better than tarts?\" Duck asked.\n\nNo, tarts are also delicious. Many foods are delicious. Except humans. And muskrat. Muskrat is awful. It tastes like spoiled beef.\n\nWhat's a tart? Shulina Arya asked.\n\nI will show you. Humans make wonderful sweets. I do not know why other dragons want to destroy humans. Who would be left to make pastries?\n\n\"We need to power down the portal and get out of here,\" Trip said, pointing up.\n\nI can ensure the portal is not used again by Cofah dragons. Bhrava Saruth gazed up at it, and the purple crystal floated out of the socket it had been placed in. The portal grew dark. The crystal itself still glowed, and it floated down to his side, then disappeared from sight.\n\nHad he destroyed it? Or was he magically hiding it somehow?\n\nRysha noticed Bhrava Saruth hadn't said he would ensure the portal was destroyed. Just that it wouldn't be used by Cofah dragons again. Did that mean he didn't think the explosives would do anything? That the portal would remain intact and only inaccessible as long as the crystal wasn't inside that keyhole?\n\nOr was Rysha reading too much into his words?\n\n\"Is that all we had to do to make it so no more dragons could come through?\" Blazer asked, glancing at Kaika. \"Could Trip have done that?\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but wouldn't you feel better knowing it was also blown into a thousand pieces?\"\n\nRysha would feel better if Trip had removed the crystal and now had control of it. Bhrava Saruth seemed goofy, but it was entirely possible that was an act, or that he was goofy and intelligent.\n\n\"Assuming there's no way to trick all those dragons into leaving again, I guess that's the next best option.\"\n\nOur kind would not go through again under any circumstances, a male voice said. The other world was inhospitable to dragons. All this time, we have longed to come home.\n\nBlazer grimaced. \"Bombs it is, then.\"\n\nCome, my worshippers and future worshippers. Bhrava Saruth crouched low, spreading his wings to offer access to his back. Let us give you a ride over the lake of lava and out to finish off the Cofah before all the fun is done.\n\nThe rest of the dragons seemed more reserved, none of them offering rides as Blazer and the others headed toward him. Except for Shulina Arya.\n\nHer head swung toward Rysha again. You will ride with me, storyteller, yes?\n\n\"Yes.\" It seemed impolite, and possibly bad for one's health, to refuse a ride from a dragon. \"And so will Trip.\"\n\nHe'd started walking toward Bhrava Saruth, but he paused as Rysha extended a hand toward him.\n\nExcellent. I see that his swords do not wish to kill me.\n\n\"No, but Jaxi may insult you.\"\n\nI only insult delusional dragons, Jaxi informed them.\n\nRysha climbed onto the female dragon, and Trip followed her up. It wasn't quite like mounting a horse. He found a position behind her and, as the dragon sprang into the air, he brought his hands to her waist, either to keep her from falling off, or to keep himself from falling off.\n\nThe chapaharii blade sent a rumble of discontent into Rysha's mind, and she sensed it wasn't happy about her riding a dragon or being touched by Trip. She hoped she could figure out what the sorceress had done to give her command words more power than Rysha's because she didn't want to be a threat to any of their new dragon allies. Even more, she didn't want to be a threat to Trip.\n\nShe closed her eyes and thought of their kiss on the airship, his warm presence contrasting with the chill air. She wanted to kiss him again, to invite him to be a part of her life.\n\nOne way or another, Rysha vowed to find a way to completely and reliably control the swords. Because that was the only way her allies would be able to trust her. And because she liked the feel of Trip's hands on her waist, damn it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "The smoking wreckage of the two Cofah airships grew visible as the dragons soared through a soft snow, following the canyon northward. Trip still rode behind Rysha on the female, Shulina Arya, while Blazer, Duck, Leftie, Kaika, and Dreyak all sat astride Bhrava Saruth's back.\n\nEven as large as the golds were, it seemed the team's combined weight would be far too much for one dragon. But perhaps magic played more of a role than physics. Trip hadn't missed Bhrava Saruth making that purple crystal disappear and that he'd abruptly stopped sensing its magical aura. He didn't believe the dragon had destroyed it or left it behind, and even though the entire side of the mountain had crumbled as the muffled booms of Kaika's explosives sounded, Trip wondered if the portal had truly been demolished. Or was it buried intact under the rubble? He couldn't sense it, but that had been true since the portal had been turned \"off.\"\n\nHe hoped, as long as Yisharnesh was dead and Bhrava Saruth had the crystal, the portal wouldn't be used against Iskandia, but he wished his team had dealt with it before freeing the dragons. With them looking on, Trip couldn't be certain he and the others had made the right choice. Maybe they should have hacked at the portal with the chapaharii blades before collapsing the mountain. Would Bhrava Saruth and the other dragons have allowed that?\n\n\"Is anyone left alive down there?\" Rysha asked, the wind almost stealing her words.\n\nTrip thought he knew the answer, but he swept out with his senses, something that was growing more natural for him. He didn't detect anyone left alive among the smoldering wreckage of the airships. The vessels had crashed near the edge of the canyon, and though he deemed it unlikely, he also checked for life at the bottom. But nothing lived down there.\n\nHe sensed more dragons flying over the surrounding fields of ice, and he jerked in alarm. Then he recognized them as the ones that had been freed and raced out to deal with the Cofah. Were they looking for more enemies to destroy? Trip shuddered at the devastation below.\n\nBlazer waved toward Trip and Rysha from atop Bhrava Saruth's back, a lit cigar once again clenched between her teeth, and she pointed toward the wreckage. Trip missed their fliers with the embedded communication crystals, and thought about attempting to speak telepathically into Blazer's mind, but he doubted she would appreciate that. Besides, he could guess what she wanted.\n\nYour teammates wish to retrieve the chapaharii sword, Azarwrath verified, then go back to your flying machines. They're not finding the experience of riding a dragon as glee-inspiring as your female is.\n\nMy female? Rysha? Trip would have told the soulblade that Rysha was hardly his, but Azarwrath spoke again first.\n\nIndeed. She is grinning every time Shulina Arya banks or swoops about. And they are speaking with each other.\n\nTelepathically?\n\nYes, the dragon is asking why these humans were slain. She wants stories that explain the differences between the Cofah and your Iskandians.\n\nYou could likely eavesdrop if you concentrated on it, Jaxi put in.\n\nDidn't you say that spying on people's thoughts was frowned upon?\n\nIn my era, yes, but times have changed. There's nobody left enforcing the Referatu rules.\n\nTrip shook his head. Though he felt a little left out because the dragon wasn't including him in the conversation, he wasn't tempted to intrude on their private words. The thought that he might be able to made him uneasy.\n\nRemembering Rysha's question, Trip rested his hand on her shoulder. \"There aren't any survivors down there, but we need to go down and retrieve your sword.\"\n\nRysha stiffened. Because of his words, or because of his touch? Worried it was the latter, he withdrew his hand. She still wore one of the chapaharii swords at her waist.\n\nRysha nodded, but didn't otherwise respond. Trip chose to believe the carnage below was what had upset her, the lack of survivors. Either way, he sensed her pleasure from riding a dragon disappearing.\n\nMaybe she didn't want to retrieve Dorfindral, and that was what bothered her. The squadron, or at least Blazer, seemed determined that she wield one of the chapaharii blades, whether she wanted to or not.\n\nTrip supposed it was selfish, but he hoped someone else would be given that task once they returned to the capital. He didn't have to ask Rysha to know she was upset that she'd allowed the sword to guide her into attacking him. Forced her to attack him.\n\nBhrava Saruth and Shulina Arya landed in the snow next to the wreckage. There wasn't any wind, and the smoke hung low over the field of ice. Strange how it smelled of nothing more than a campfire or someone's wood stove burning on a chill day. Smoke from a fire that resulted in death and destruction should have a gloomier scent.\n\n\"Can you lead me to it?\" Rysha asked Trip after they slid off the dragon's back.\n\nBlazer dismounted and headed over, but there was no need to wait for her orders, no question as to what she wanted.\n\nThe chapaharii swords did not emit auras of power the way the soulblades did\u2014indeed, they seemed designed to be difficult to find by those with magic\u2014but Trip found that he'd been around Dorfindral long enough that he could find its faint signature among the wreckage.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"I'll show you the way.\"\n\nRysha jogged over and gave Blazer the chapaharii blade she'd carried during the battle, Eryndral. Then she followed Trip up the smashed hull of the airship, over the remains of the charred railing, and across the hole-riddled deck.\n\nThe smoke scent grew stronger, the haze thicker in the air. Here and there, flames still crackled. The envelope had burned away, with the skeletal remains of its framework toppled to one side, like a felled tree.\n\nTrip spotted the first body, charred and mutilated but not unrecognizable. He almost wished it had been. It was one of the Cofah researchers, a man that he and Azarwrath had healed.\n\nEven though the Cofah team had been withholding information and working at cross purposes to them, seeing people dead that he'd been speaking with the day before made Trip feel sick. He wished he'd tried to keep the dragons from going out to raze the airships, but how could he have? They would never have listened to him. Besides, he'd made his choice the day before, when he'd agreed to leave the Cofah airship to be bait so his team could sneak into the dragon compound. It seemed hypocritical of him to be upset now.\n\n\"There's Jylea,\" Rysha said, her voice numb as she pointed to a charred body dusted with snowflakes. Dorfindral's hilt was still in Jylea's hand, though her fingers had unfurled in death. The blade appeared undamaged by the dragon fire that had half-consumed the woman. It glowed a faint green, no doubt noticing Trip's presence, and that of the nearby dragons. \"What's left of her,\" Rysha added softly.\n\nTrip barely heard the words. He turned and, through the falling snow, glimpsed tears in her eyes. The flakes sticking to the lenses of her spectacles didn't quite hide the moisture behind them.\n\nHe thought about pointing out that Jylea had made her choice and had wanted to work with a megalomaniacal dragon, one that would have happily enslaved Iskandia. Or worse. But he doubted that would make Rysha feel better. Instead, he waited for her to catch up to him, and rested an arm around her shoulders, something he might not have done if she'd still carried the other blade.\n\nThis time, she didn't stiffen at his touch. She leaned into him, her chin dropping to her chest.\n\n\"I know they are\u2014they were\u2014Iskandian enemies,\" she said, \"and I also know that, in giving Jylea the control words for the sword, I set up that whole stupid encounter in the chamber.\"\n\nTrip hadn't caught that, that Rysha had shared the words when she'd handed over the sword. Jylea must have then shared them with Kiadarsa. He grimaced, realizing Rysha had to feel their battle had been her fault.\n\n\"But it's hard to see them like this,\" she went on. \"Dead, their bodies freezing. They'll soon be buried by the snow. Forgotten. Will their people, their relatives, even know what happened to them?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Trip said quietly, wishing he had something more helpful to say.\n\n\"Maybe this was a mistake,\" Rysha said, looking past the broken railing and into the falling snow. \"Me becoming a soldier. I thought I could handle anything, but I didn't know I'd care this much. That the killing would be this hard. When I was ten, one of our shepherd dogs caught a squirrel I'd been feeding all winter. Killed it before I could get there to free it. I cried for weeks. Maybe that should have been a sign that I don't have the heart for killing and death.\"\n\nTrip pulled her closer, turning the arm around her shoulders into a hug. \"You're doing fine, Rysha. It's all right to care. I'm sure it's better for the unit if someone does care. And question. Otherwise you get\u2026\" He thought of his own instincts, the savagery\u2014the glee\u2014he sometimes felt in battle when he was flying, holding down the triggers of his machine guns as he tore into pirate ships. And pirates. People. Did he have his heritage to thank for that? Were those the instincts of a predator arising within him?\n\nHe patted her back. \"It's just important that people care, at least some of them. That goes for soldiers too.\"\n\nShe dropped her forehead against his shoulder and let him hold her. He knew this wasn't the time, but he found himself wondering if she'd meant what she'd said before the battle, that they could spend a weekend together at a cottage on her family's property. He would love to escape all this, at least for a couple of days, and just be a man enjoying time with a woman who freely spoke of her passions and liked the things he built.\n\n\"Is the sword up there?\" Blazer yelled from the ground.\n\nShe shouldn't have been able to see them from down there, but Rysha stepped away from Trip. \"Yes, we're almost there, ma'am.\"\n\nShe removed her spectacles and seemed to pull herself together as she took a few seconds to wipe them off. \"Thank you, Trip.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Support.\"\n\n\"You're welcome.\" He thought about retrieving the sword for her, so she wouldn't have to go closer to Jylea's body, but Dorfindral wouldn't allow it. \"When we get back\u2026\" He paused, not wanting to mention the cottage or the weekend, since that implied more than she may have meant to offer, especially given that they'd only kissed a couple of times thus far. \"Will you have dinner with me and go for a sunset walk along the harbor?\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" Rysha stared down at her spectacles, still wiping them, though the lenses were clean. She didn't look at his eyes. \"I would like that, but I don't feel I can be with you as long as I'm a wielder for one of these swords. At least not until I figure out how to ensure that I and only I can control the one in my hands.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Trip bit his lip to keep protests from flowing off his tongue. He wanted to tell her that he was willing to risk being around her, that he'd been able to keep her from hurting him even when she had lost control, but he realized she wouldn't appreciate being reminded that he had ways to come out on top if they fought. And he wasn't entirely sure that this was about the sword and not about him. About what he had the potential to become. She'd said she didn't mind that he was odd, but he was more than odd now, wasn't he?\n\nTears pricked his own eyes, and when he blinked, they froze in his lashes. He wished he could go back to just being Trip. Captain Trip, Wolf Squadron pilot. Nothing more.\n\nRysha put her spectacles back on and pushed them up on her nose, an achingly familiar gesture. She walked toward Jylea and knelt, pulling the sword from the dead woman's hand.\n\nIt flared an even brighter green as Rysha turned back toward Trip. Her eyes reflected that green, and her face seemed to grow harder, more determined. Because she was fighting it, ensuring it wouldn't convince her to attack him?\n\nTrip turned his back, not wanting to see the battle in her eyes. And not wanting to think about how they wouldn't get that walk along the harbor, not as long as she carried one of those swords.\n\nHe wished he could ensure that someone else would be given the wielder job when they got back, but he feared that wouldn't happen. Unless this mission changed her mind about her career, she would resume her training in the elite troops, and that combined with her expertise on dragons would probably stamp her as an ideal candidate to carry a chapaharii weapon.\n\nThe only way he could see that changing was if the situation with the dragons changed. If they somehow became less of a threat to Iskandia.\n\nBut how? As the portal had shown him, hundreds of dragons had come into the world. A few\u2014maybe a dozen\u2014seemed willing to ally themselves with Iskandia, but there were so many others to worry about.\n\nUnless someone could make a deal with the dragons to ensure they left the nation alone, Iskandia would have to worry about them for years to come. Maybe forever.\n\nBut who could make such a deal? The king? Him? Hardly. What could either of them possibly offer a dragon, anyway?\n\nThis thousands-of-years-old elder dragon that Bhrava Saruth had spoken of\u2026 he might be able to sway others. Agarrenon Shivar.\n\nTrip blinked a few times, considering the thought from different angles. Was it possible that Agarrenon Shivar could be convinced to help? Assuming he was alive somewhere?\n\n\"I found the box,\" Rysha said from behind him.\n\nTrip jumped. He'd been so focused on his thoughts that he'd lost track of her.\n\nShe stepped up beside him, Dorfindral in its box, its glow hidden away for now. \"Are you ready to go? Shulina Arya said she would take us back to the fliers.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Trip said, \"but let me ask you something first. Do you think, if you did some research, you might be able to find where Agarrenon Shivar is located? Or was located approximately twenty-five years ago? If he's still alive, maybe\u2026\"\n\n\"You want to find the dragon that fathered you?\"\n\nTrip nodded.\n\n\"I don't think\u2014I mean, did you know that male dragons shape-shifted into all manner of animals to have sex and explore pleasure in various incarnations? Horses, lions, apes, even sea creatures such as whales. It's believed that unicorns, winged tigers, flash apes, giant octopi, and other creatures that are nearly extinct now first came into existence as a result of dragons mating with normal animals. The dragons weren't known to have any feelings toward these half-magical offspring. I think that if you went looking for your father, you would be disappointed, even if you found him.\"\n\n\"It's good to know not to get my expectations up, I guess.\" Trip managed a lopsided smile. \"But I mostly thought that if we found him, we might be able to make a deal with him and get his help in defending Iskandia. From what Bhrava Saruth said, he was respected among all dragons. Maybe\u2026\" He decided not to mention that he hoped to create a world where she didn't need to carry that sword around. It sounded selfish. Besides, he wanted to protect his homeland, not just his love life. That was what he'd sworn to do the day he'd accepted his commission as an officer.\n\nTrip shrugged and finished with, \"Maybe it would make a difference.\"\n\n\"I can't make any promises,\" Rysha said, \"but I would definitely be happy to do the research.\"\n\n\"Good. Thank you.\"\n\nThey walked back to join the others. With that sword box tucked under Rysha's arm, Trip didn't try to touch her again. And when it was time for the dragons to take them back to the fliers, he rode on Bhrava Saruth's back instead of on Shulina Arya's with her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Trip followed Blazer, Kaika, Rysha, Duck, Leftie, and Dreyak through the courtyard of the citadel toward the double doors and stairs that led to General Zirkander's office. The team had arrived late the night before after a long flight from the Antarctic. Their new allies had accompanied them for a portion of the journey before declaring the \"human flying contraptions\" tediously slow and disappearing over the horizon. Trip hoped they had headed to Iskandia and would be around to help in future battles. At least the capital hadn't been attacked again while his team had been away. The gold dragon that had promised to return in three days had either been bluffing at the time, or the presence of Kasandral had kept him away.\n\nThe soldiers standing guard at the entrance to the citadel did not stop Blazer's group or even quirk questioning eyebrows in their direction. Trip suspected reports had already been delivered and the general had received the details of the mission, if not by paper, then by soulblade. Maybe it was self-centered, but he worried that some of those details included the new revelations about him, that he was\u2026 what he apparently was.\n\nHis mouth twisted. Leftie hadn't spoken to him all the way back. He hadn't said anything mean, but he no longer seemed comfortable including Trip in his banter. As if he were some stranger rather than a friend of the last six years.\n\nKaika had mentioned him in her banter, including speculations about whether people who were half dragon were better endowed than typical humans, but since the jokes had been reminders of his otherness, he hadn't been enthused by them. Blazer and Duck didn't seem to know how to treat him, either. Maybe he was being overly sensitive, but he no longer felt a part of the one organization where he'd previously belonged, and he worried that he wouldn't be wanted in Wolf Squadron. As Jaxi had said, it would be logical for them to take him\u2014to want him\u2014for his burgeoning abilities, but humans weren't particularly logical creatures.\n\nRysha brushed his hand as they navigated the stairs inside and smiled at him. He managed a return smile for her, though she, too, had been more distant since she'd told him they couldn't be together until she figured out how to completely control the sword.\n\nHopefully, that would happen with time, or they would find Agarrenon Shivar, and the dragon would help them find a way to keep winged enemies from Iskandia's doorstep. For now, Trip would try to avoid doing something stupid that would drive Rysha away.\n\nLike moping and worrying about things that haven't come to pass? Jaxi asked. And that may not come to pass?\n\nI don't know. Is that the kind of thing that scares women away?\n\nMost definitely. Nobody likes a broody dragonling.\n\nThat's not very funny.\n\nAre you sure? Azzy is giggling.\n\nI most certainly am not. I was busy looking up dragonling in the Iskandian dictionary to see if it's a word. It is not.\n\nJaxi made a phhhht noise in their minds.\n\nRysha's step slowed when they reached the top of the stairs, and Trip looked up, wondering at the reason. Four men in uniforms that Trip didn't recognize stood, two on each side of Zirkander's closed door. Long knives, pistols, and ammo pouches hung from their belts, and they clasped rifles in their hands.\n\n\"What is that uniform?\" Trip whispered to Rysha.\n\nKaika, Blazer, Duck, and Dreyak didn't seem fazed, but Leftie glanced back, perhaps having the same question for Rysha.\n\n\"The king's personal guard,\" she said.\n\n\"Does that mean the king is in there?\"\n\n\"Most likely.\"\n\nTrip's first thought was that they would have to wait for Angulus to finish his appointment with Zirkander\u2014or would it be Zirkander who had an appointment with the king? But when Kaika gave the guards a sultry, \"Hello, boys,\" and knocked on the door, he realized the king might be there because of them. Or because of\u2026 him? No, surely not. Angulus would want the details of the portal mission, maybe a count of all the dragons that had passed into the world.\n\nTrip didn't have an exact number. Would the king expect an exact number? Would he assume Trip could provide it? Because of his dragonness?\n\nThat is also not a word, Azarwrath informed him.\n\nI hope you'll forgive me for going back to Sardelle, Jaxi said, and leaving you with this staid, vocabulary-obsessed log, Trip. You'll have to introduce him to Wreltad. They'll be perfect for each other.\n\nThe door opened, and the king's men moved nothing but their eyes as the group passed inside.\n\nTrip tried to tell himself there was no reason to feel worried by the guards\u2014any guards. Now that he knew how to erect barriers around himself, he needn't fear men with rifles. Men with the power to make or break his career, that was another matter.\n\nHe swallowed, stepping to the side of the door as soon as he passed over the threshold. He'd intended to duck into a corner, but another of those guards stood there, so he didn't have easy access. He glanced at the couch, but that was taken too. Sardelle sat on it, not yet having delivered her baby, but looking like she would do so soon. No doubt, she'd been waiting until Jaxi arrived home and could be there for it.\n\nBabies don't work that way, Jaxi said, but I am pleased to be back in time.\n\nGeneral Zirkander stood in a similar position as the last time Trip had been here, next to the desk instead of sitting at it, one thigh propped over the corner.\n\nIt took Trip a few seconds\u2014and several people saluting and saying, \"Good morning, Sire\"\u2014before he spotted the king near the window.\n\nAngulus was a tall, stocky man with broad features and short salt-and-pepper hair that wanted to curl. He looked far more normal than Trip would have expected. Like an ordinary person. Trip had never been to any of Angulus's speeches, since those were typically in the capital, but the man usually had a crown and a fur-trimmed cloak of office in the newspaper articles. Today, he wore well-tailored but unremarkable dark trousers and a cream-colored shirt with the sleeves rolled up. If not for the photographs and portraits around the country\u2014and the guards\u2014Trip wouldn't have guessed who he was.\n\nRealizing he was staring, he hurried to add his salute to those of the others, relieved that was the appropriate greeting for a soldier in uniform. He had no idea how one was supposed to greet one's monarch, otherwise. Bows? Genuflections?\n\nAngulus gazed over at him for a long moment, and Trip wondered what he'd been told.\n\nBut it was Zirkander who started the debriefing. \"You blew up the portal, Captain Kaika?\"\n\n\"It was a group effort, sir, but we destroyed it. Most of it. We didn't need the fancy dragon-slaying swords, after all. My mundane explosives worked juuuust fine. We did have to remove what appeared to be its power source first. A rather familiar pointy purple crystal that had been stuck into a slot in the portal.\"\n\nZirkander arched his eyebrows. \"The crystal from the Magroth mines?\"\n\n\"The one that Bhrava Saruth claimed?\" Sardelle asked.\n\nKaika nodded to both of them. \"He said Yisharnesh found his hiding spot, stole it, and was the one to stick it into the crystal-sized keyhole in the portal. That allowed her to open it and invite more allies to come through.\"\n\n\"I always believed that crystal was more than a 'repository of knowledge,'\" Sardelle murmured.\n\n\"Our dragonly allies stole the portal and hid it, sir,\" Blazer said, her cigar missing today. \"Temporarily. They were discovered and were imprisoned for doing so. I imagine they beat us here and gave you the story.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Zirkander exchanged looks with Sardelle, their mouths twisting wryly.\n\n\"Any idea on the number of dragons that came through?\" Angulus asked. \"And how many were truly Yisharnesh's allies\u2014and therefore may still be Cofah allies\u2014and how many are simply here to wreak havoc?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't think they came to wreak havoc, Sire,\" Rysha said. \"They may enjoy that, but they are intelligent, and they do consider this their homeland, however long they were gone. It's a desirable world to them.\"\n\n\"A desirable place for havoc wreaking?\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps to some, Sire.\"\n\nRysha didn't appear intimidated by speaking to the king, and Trip wondered if she'd met him before. Maybe those in noble families got invited to fancy dinners and balls at the king's court. He had no idea if that was done in the modern day, but had heard numerous fairy tales that suggested such things had been common once.\n\n\"As to the numbers, Trip was the one to touch the portal and receive\u2026\" Rysha looked at him. \"A vision?\"\n\nTrip tried not to squirm as Angulus's gaze swung toward him. He was certain the king would think him crazy if he spoke of visions.\n\n\"I saw something, Sire. It seemed to be a glimpse of dragons coming out of the portal in a compressed time frame. I'd guess there were four to five hundred of them.\"\n\n\"Hundred?\" Angulus mouthed.\n\n\"It's possible the portal, uhm, lied to me\u2014\"\n\n\"I do hate it when magical portals aren't honest,\" Zirkander said.\n\nAngulus glared at him.\n\n\"But,\" Trip said, deciding to ignore the exchange, \"a lot of doors opened for me in there, so I think it makes sense that the portal would have worked for me too.\"\n\nMost of his team members looked at him. Even though they'd been there, they couldn't quite hide that they all thought this was odd. Even Rysha seemed daunted by the reminder of what he was.\n\nHe sighed, not wanting to be odd. Just wanting to fly. And to take her for a walk along the harbor at sunset. He gave her a sad smile.\n\nShe recovered, masking the concern he'd caught in her eyes, and smiled back.\n\n\"We'll assume that what you saw is accurate,\" Angulus said, not commenting on Trip's ability to interact with the dragon compound. Neither he, Sardelle, nor Zirkander appeared surprised by it, so Trip was positive reports had preceded him.\n\nWhen one discovers a direct descendant of a dragon, one must tell everybody one knows, Jaxi said.\n\nI understand. Trip frowned. Er, how many people do you know?\n\nHe imagined word getting across the continent to his grandparents before he'd had a chance to tell them personally.\n\nNot that many that I can speak with\u2014not everybody appreciates having the delightful personality of a sentient sword in their minds.\n\nHuh, that's odd.\n\nExtremely so.\n\n\"I must attempt to get the so-called friendly dragons, the ones that may be willing to work with Iskandians, to come to a meeting.\" Angulus turned toward Sardelle. \"Can you ask Bhrava Saruth to humbly request that they come to the castle soon?\"\n\n\"I can ask Bhrava Saruth,\" Sardelle said, \"though I haven't observed that he understands what humbleness is or is overly loved by his fellow dragons.\"\n\n\"Do they not bow to his godliness?\" Kaika smirked.\n\n\"It's possible another among them is more of a leader. I'll do my best to find out, Sire.\"\n\n\"There were about twelve of them?\" Angulus looked at Trip again.\n\n\"Yes, Sire.\"\n\n\"Four of them went out to attack the Cofah airships without being asked,\" Blazer said. \"It's possible they may be eager to work with Iskandians.\"\n\n\"What were the other ones doing?\"\n\n\"Watching Bhrava Saruth sniff Trip like a hound, Sire.\"\n\nTrip resisted the urge to drop his face into his hand. Barely.\n\n\"I'm sure that was riveting,\" Zirkander said.\n\n\"A dozen dragons,\" Angulus said, not quirking a smile at the humor, \"seems so few in comparison to the hundreds that were mentioned, but it is more than we have now. I will do my best to secure a commitment of assistance from them.\"\n\n\"I'm certain that not all of those hundreds of dragons are aligned with the Cofah, Sire. The future is daunting\u2014\" Sardelle rested a hand on her stomach, \"\u2014but I do think it's unlikely we'll be swarmed. And we may have a little time to shore up our defenses since Yisharnesh is dead. It may be a while before another Cofah-loyal leader will arise among the dragons. Also, Tolemek has requested that I bribe Bhrava Saruth for samples of his blood so he can use it to make more weapons that are capable of harming dragons, as he did the last time we had vials of dragon blood.\"\n\n\"What bribes work on dragons, ma'am?\" Rysha asked. \"When they have the power to get whatever they want?\"\n\nSardelle smiled faintly. \"Fern, Ridge's mother, is helping me perfect a mango tart recipe.\"\n\n\"Apparently, they're best when they're still warm out of the oven,\" Zirkander said.\n\n\"We did also manage to bring back a few vials of blood from a dead dragon,\" Blazer said. \"I'm not sure if they were properly prepared, or how that's done exactly, but it's only been a few days since we acquired it. Maybe it's still viable and Tolemek can make use of it, no bribes required.\"\n\n\"Good, get them to him immediately.\" Angulus gazed out the window and toward the harbor for several long seconds before turning back to the room. \"Keep me apprised on everything dragon-related. I'll do my best to shore up our defenses, as Sardelle suggested, but we definitely need weapons that can strike at our enemies. There may be more missions to retrieve chapaharii swords, if they can be located.\" He nodded at Rysha, as if to suggest she would be responsible for that. \"I'll let our military leaders decide whether the ones we have should be reallocated or not. Thank you all for retrieving them and disabling the portal.\"\n\nTrip joined the others in nodding and murmuring, \"You're welcome, Sire.\"\n\nAngulus and his guards left the office, and Trip was relieved he hadn't been singled out for anything else, though he was surprised nobody had asked about his father. He had been wondering about how to find him all the way back, and if he could possibly be the answer to their problems.\n\nZirkander dismissed the team, and they headed for the door. Trip started after them, but the general spoke again.\n\n\"Trip?\" Zirkander waved him back into the room. Maybe Trip's heritage would be brought up, after all. \"You forgetting something?\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\n\"I know soulblades are trendy, but you really don't need two.\" He extended a hand toward Sardelle.\n\n\"Oh,\" Trip blurted, feeling like an idiot as he unbuckled the scabbard. He would have remembered before leaving the citadel, he was sure.\n\nIf not, I would have reminded you, Jaxi said.\n\nI'm sure of that.\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am,\" Trip said, handing the scabbard to Sardelle. \"She was useful on the trip.\"\n\n\"Because of her sage advice or because she lit a lot of enemies on fire?\"\n\nZirkander grinned. \"Do you truly need to ask that question?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sardelle said. \"I was curious how diplomatic our young captain is.\"\n\n\"Pilots aren't generally known for their diplomacy,\" Zirkander said.\n\n\"Some pilots aren't.\" She gazed blandly at him.\n\n\"And yet they get promoted anyway. Exceedingly odd.\" Zirkander waved, as if to leave Trip to Sardelle, and plopped down in his desk chair, opening a folder.\n\nTrip looked back and forth between them, not sure what he was supposed to do. He hadn't been dismissed.\n\nSardelle smiled at him and gestured at his remaining scabbard. \"Azarwrath, is it?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Jaxi and Wreltad are the only soulblades I'm aware of left in Iskandia that haven't gone dormant. Technically, Wreltad isn't even an Iskandian blade. It's a good thing he likes playing cards with Ridge and our house guests.\"\n\nShe smiled at Zirkander while Trip tried to decipher what the comment meant. He'd briefly been introduced to Wreltad on the flight back and knew Tylie to be the soulblade's handler. He didn't think a soulblade could be linked to two people or to a mundane\u2014\n\nThey're just friends, genius. Don't hurt your brain thinking so hard. It seemed Jaxi, despite being back in Sardelle's hands, would continue to share advice with him.\n\nIt would be unfair of me to leave you bereft of my wisdom.\n\n\"I haven't heard of that many soulblades left in Cofahre, either,\" Sardelle said. \"I would appreciate it if you would come by the house for dinner, Trip, so we can all chat.\"\n\n\"We? Uhm, you and\u2026 the swords?\"\n\n\"You're welcome to speak too,\" she said dryly.\n\n\"At your house?\" Trip didn't know what he found more intimidating, the idea of going to the house of a sorceress he barely knew or the idea of going to General Zirkander's house. For dinner. \"Er.\"\n\n\"Life tip, Trip,\" Zirkander said, not looking up from the file he perused. \"If a woman shows interest in your sword, you should always chat with her.\"\n\nSardelle's eyebrows rose. \"Really, Ridge. It should depend on the woman.\"\n\n\"Oh? Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\n\"Huh.\"\n\nSardelle shook her head and met Trip's gaze again. \"We'd love to have you, too, of course. Soulblades, regardless.\"\n\nWe? She and General Zirkander? Trip couldn't imagine that the general truly wanted young pilots traipsing around his house.\n\n\"I imagine you have questions and perhaps an interest in receiving training.\" Sardelle spread a hand. \"I admit I'd be intimidated at the prospect, but I can offer instruction in the basics. Jaxi informs me that you're quite a novice currently.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I'm\u2014I don't know what I am.\" He hadn't meant that to come out quite so bleak and helpless.\n\n\"One of Ridge's pilots, I gather.\" She nodded toward the wolf head pin on his flight jacket. \"With the potential to do more than thwack enemies with machine guns.\"\n\n\"Not that there's anything wrong with machine guns,\" Zirkander said, proving he was listening, however distracted by his paperwork he appeared.\n\n\"Certainly not. Though they are noisy.\"\n\n\"So is the fwump of Jaxi lighting someone's flier on fire.\"\n\n\"Will tomorrow evening work, Trip?\" Sardelle asked. \"I understand the squadron is finally getting a day off, presuming no enemy dragons appear on the horizon. I hear that even overworked generals have been promised a day off.\"\n\n\"We'll see about that.\" Zirkander flipped a page and scribbled something with a pen.\n\n\"Bring Lieutenant Ravenwood, if you wish. We usually have a few house guests around, so there are plenty of people to talk to, especially now that our allies have returned.\"\n\n\"Did you say plenty of people to talk to?\" Zirkander asked.\n\nSardelle smiled serenely.\n\n\"Tomorrow is fine, ma'am,\" Trip said. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Come early if you want,\" Zirkander said, looking up from his folder. \"We'll have a beer. You may need one.\"\n\n\"Ridge, are you suggesting that he'll find our discussion onerous?\" Sardelle attempted a stern look, but the way her lips quirked didn't make it convincing.\n\n\"No, I'm suggesting he'll find our house guests onerous. I don't know whether to feel flattered or alarmed that we were their first stop. And that there are more of them now.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. I had better perfect that tart recipe soon.\"\n\nTrip didn't know exactly what they were talking about, but he caught himself smiling for the first time since he'd waved his hand and opened the gate in that dragon compound. He still felt intimidated by the idea of dinner at their house, and talk of training his talents, but General Zirkander had invited him to have a beer. He knew it was silly, especially now that he was a grown man, but that delighted him. He well remembered his daydreams of finding out Zirkander was his father and having him invite him to have a drink. The father dream was more of an impossibility now than ever, but Trip would happily share a beer with him.\n\nEpilogue\n\nTrip walked down a dead-end street toward the address General Zirkander had given him, the writing bordering on illegible. Was this the right way? He'd been strolling through well-populated suburban areas since leaving the city walls, but this last turn was taking him down a dirt road with a far more rural feel. On either side, tall trees stretched up toward the blue sky, and sunlight glinted on a large pond at the end of the street.\n\nWhen he located the right address, it was the last house before the pond, with nothing except tall grass and blackberry bushes on the lot across the street. The home itself was two stories and unpretentious, with a grassy lawn in front and more trees in the back. Trip turned up a tidy walkway toward the front door.\n\nHe wished Rysha were with him, but she'd gone home for her grandmother's funeral. He'd thought about offering to go with her for support, but couldn't imagine her parents wanting to see him with their daughter\u2014or at all. Besides, things hadn't been as comfortable between them since the sword fight. That saddened him, but he didn't know how to change it.\n\nA squeal of young giggles drifted through an open window.\n\nTrip lifted a hand to knock on the door, but it opened before he touched it. Nobody was standing there.\n\n\"General Ridge's guest is here,\" came the familiar voice of a young woman. Tylie?\n\nTrip hadn't seen her since she had flown away with Phelistoth and the other dragons.\n\nCome in, Trip, Sardelle spoke into his mind from wherever she was in the house. We're going to take over babysitting duties, so you and Ridge can have your beer in peace. Relative peace.\n\nTrip had gotten used to people\u2014well, swords\u2014speaking into his mind, but hearing Sardelle's voice that way surprised him. He wasn't sure why.\n\nAs he stepped inside, more giggles came from the other side of an eccentric couch that looked to be made from flier parts. Parts from crashed fliers. Bullet holes riddled the sides of it.\n\nEven though it wasn't his preferred aesthetic, Trip walked forward, curious despite himself. He was distracted from a more thorough examination by Zirkander\u2014the general lay on his back with his legs in his air and a brown-haired toddler in a polka-dotted dress resting on his socked feet, her little hands in his larger ones. He tilted his legs from side to side and front and back, eliciting whoops and giggles.\n\nZirkander winked when he noticed Trip. \"It's important to instill the love of flying in them when they're young.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" It was all he could manage to say, feeling flummoxed by seeing the legendary general on the floor playing with his kid.\n\nA golden ferret ran out from what Trip guessed was the kitchen. Powdered sugar dusted its tail, and the toddler giggled at the sight of it.\n\nOn first glance, Trip didn't think anything of the creature. It wasn't until his sixth sense kicked in that he realized that was no ferret. It was\u2014\n\nYes, it is I. Bhrava Saruth, the god!\n\nZirkander rolled to a sitting position, shielding his little daughter as the ferret launched itself onto his shoulder. He grimaced as claws dug into his clothing, and possibly his skin. The ferret\u2014was that truly Bhrava Saruth?\u2014leaned his head in to rub Zirkander's jaw. Zirkander reached up and patted the furry creature while Trip stared.\n\nIf seeing his general playing with his daughter had flummoxed him, seeing a dragon in ferret form acting like a house pet truly floored him.\n\nHouse pet? Certainly not. A dragon god must assume a pleasing form so as not to alarm his worshippers. The ferret lowered his head so the toddler, who was giggling once again, could give him some clumsy pats.\n\nYes, she missed you, Bhrava Saruth, Zirkander thought.\n\nTrip stirred, startled he had heard the silent words. As far as he knew, the general couldn't speak telepathically. Trip supposed he'd opened up his mind to hear the dragon's words and was catching surface thoughts from Zirkander. That was alarming. He didn't want to read his commanding officer's mind.\n\nDid you not also miss me, Ridgewalker? You were my first true worshipper when I awoke in this era.\n\nI know. Zirkander's expression grew wry. And yes, the house was entirely too restful without you and Phelistoth traipsing through periodically. My cheese wheel got moldy without any dragons here to consume large quantities.\n\nGoing solely by Zirkander's expression, Trip would have assumed the response sarcastic, but he got the sense that the general truly had missed the dragons being around.\n\nCheese? I do not understand why that snooty silver dragon likes that loathsome stuff. It is not at all sweet or appealing. Not like pastries. The ferret sprang from his shoulder to land on the back of the couch. Did you know that my high priestess has acquired a recipe for mango tarts? This is most fabulous news. I cannot wait to sample the results.\n\nYes, my mom has been instructing Sardelle on the finer points of baking. When she hasn't been busy with her students. Uh, speaking of students\u2026 Zirkander shifted his gaze toward Trip.\n\nTrip might have shied away from the attention switching to him, especially when the ferret rose on his hind legs to peer at him, but the fact that he'd met Bhrava Saruth already eased his nerves somewhat. It wasn't as if the dragon didn't know exactly what he was.\n\nGreetings, Telryn Yert, Bhrava Saruth spoke into his mind. It is good to see you have returned to Iskandia. Have you seen my temple? It is most magnificent. Have you decided to renounce all lesser gods and accept me as the pinnacle of divinity? Should you choose to worship me, I will bless you and be available to guide you as you learn to use your powers.\n\nTrip hadn't noticed before that Bhrava Saruth had deep green eyes, disturbingly similar to his own, especially now that he wasn't in dragon form. Oh, ferret eyes weren't all that close to human ones, either, but they didn't have slitted irises like a snake's.\n\n\"I think he just came for dinner,\" Zirkander said, and Trip realized Bhrava Saruth must have also been sharing the telepathic words with him. Or everyone in the room. Trip glanced at the girl, who couldn't have been more than two, and wondered if she also received telepathic communications. \"If you promise to bring him sweets and you rub his belly,\" Zirkander added, \"he'll probably bless and guide you regardless of your religious affiliation.\"\n\nYes, belly rubs are most excellent. The ferret dropped down onto the back of the cushion, rolling over to expose his stomach.\n\nWhen Trip hesitated, Zirkander gave that stomach a significant look. Bhrava Saruth, his small ferret paws crooked into the air, also gave it a significant look.\n\nTrip stepped forward and stroked the slinky creature. A contented ahhhh sounded in his mind, reminding him of a purring cat.\n\nThe kitchen door swung open, and Tylie walked out, barefoot, trailed by a boy and a girl of eleven or twelve.\n\n\"There he is.\" Tylie pointed at Trip. \"He's the one I told you about. He rescued us from our imprisonment.\"\n\nTrip started to protest\u2014all he'd done was press his palm to a wall\u2014but the boy blurted, \"Are you really a half dragon? That's cracking!\"\n\n\"Where's your father?\" the girl asked. \"Do you know him? Is he big and scary? Or is he\u2026\" She looked at Bhrava Saruth, who was still making contented sounds as Trip stroked his belly.\n\n\"I've never met him,\" Trip said. \"I'm not sure if he's even alive.\"\n\n\"He must be alive if he's a dragon,\" the girl said. \"Dragons live for eons.\"\n\n\"Can you shape-shift like Bhrava Saruth?\" the boy asked. \"Can we see?\"\n\n\"I don't know how or if that's possible.\" Trip's mind boggled at the idea of turning into a ferret. Or an anything.\n\n\"Trip, that is Ferrin,\" Zirkander said, waving to the boy, \"and Ylisa. You've met Tylie. They're all Sardelle's students. Kids, that's Captain Trip, one of my pilots. I don't think he's decided yet if he's going to be a sorcerer.\"\n\nTrip couldn't believe how calmly Zirkander said that, as if sorcerers and magic were such a common thing. But maybe in this house, they were. That boggled his mind anew.\n\n\"If your dad is a dragon, you have to be a sorcerer,\" the girl said. \"That's a rule. It must be.\"\n\n\"But he's too old to train with us, isn't he?\" The boy wrinkled his nose.\n\n\"Tylie's old, and she trains with us.\"\n\n\"But she's\u2026\" The boy waved to Tylie's bare feet and paint-spattered dress. \"She doesn't seem old.\"\n\n\"I need help with the cookies,\" came a call from the kitchen. Sardelle?\n\nThe kids bolted in that direction. Tylie waved at Trip and collected the little girl from Zirkander.\n\n\"Sardelle says you and Captain Trip can go have your beer, General Ridge,\" she proclaimed, smiling. \"We're going to babysit.\" The smile broadened. \"Jaxi's going to help. She missed babysitting terribly.\"\n\nThat's not what I said, Jaxi spoke into Trip's mind. I said I missed the family. Being in charge of a toddler? Nobody could miss that.\n\n\"Thank you, Tylie,\" Zirkander said, rolling to his feet. \"Why don't we go out to the duck blind, Trip? It's my escape for when the house gets a little too hectic. Magically hectic, that is.\" He didn't quite shudder, but Trip received the distinct image of Zirkander trying to read a magazine on the bullet-riddled couch while objects levitated across the living room, occasionally crashing to the floor when a young student's concentration lapsed.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Trip followed him out of the house, though a duck blind wasn't quite what he'd imagined when he'd pictured having a beer with the general. Did Zirkander hunt? Shooting ducks seemed like it would be boring after battling against flying pirates and enemy pilots, targets that shot back.\n\nA chittering came from behind them, and the golden-furred ferret ran past them and along a path out of the yard and toward the pond. He disappeared around a bend, following the shoreline.\n\n\"Alas, it's hard to keep magic entirely out of the duck blind,\" Zirkander admitted.\n\n\"He comes by often?\"\n\n\"To visit his high priestess, yes,\" Zirkander said, leading the way along the pond's edge, reeds and grasses stretching up to either side of the muddy path. \"And Phelistoth visits because he's linked to Tylie, who is here a lot, still learning from Sardelle. I guess it takes years to grasp all the finer points of magic. And last night, a new dragon came to dinner. I believe I have you to thank for that.\" Zirkander looked back and quirked his eyebrows.\n\n\"Yes, sir. I mean, we did free the Iskandian dragons. We were happy to do so once we learned they actually liked humans and wanted to be our allies. I didn't know visits to your dinner table would be the result. Which one was it?\"\n\n\"Shulina-something. I'm not positive, but I believe Bhrava Saruth may have been flirting with her. They\u2014ah, hm.\" Zirkander paused, his gaze forward again.\n\nThey had reached the duck blind, a cement and stone structure set into the shoreline at one end of the pond. A wide rectangular window overlooked the water, and a wooden door in the side stood open, revealing the interior, which had nothing to do with hunting. A faded carpet covered the cement floor, and two old, hideously upholstered chairs rested against the back wall, a table between them. A bookcase on the far side held magazines, novels, and a phonograph, as well as a cracker tin and a grease-stained brown bag.\n\n\"Well,\" Zirkander said, looking at the roof of the structure rather than inside. \"I guess that explains the absence of the ducks that usually rush the place, hoping for crackers.\"\n\nNot one but two golden-furred ferrets scampered about on top of the duck blind.\n\n\"I assume that's the female?\" Zirkander looked at Trip.\n\nThough the dragons' auras were significantly diminished when they were in this form, something Trip had first experienced when he'd struggled to pick the silver dragons out of that pigeon flock, he could still sense that they were magical creatures. And he could tell that Shulina Arya was the second ferret. Her aura brimmed with youthful energy and enthusiasm.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"That most definitely looks like flirting,\" Zirkander decided.\n\nBoth ferrets stopped scampering and rose up on their hind legs to look down at them. Bhrava Saruth's deep green eyes were different from Shulina Arya's violet ones, but they both contained power and an appealing allure, even in this form. Trip had the sense of them gazing into his soul and knowing all of his hopes and fears. Zirkander gazed back at them, a hand in his pocket, looking as unflappable as always. Though he'd battled enemy dragons numerous times, he didn't seem to have any trouble accepting these as allies. And house guests.\n\nGreetings, friends, the female said. I have been informed that many humans in this era are not yet aware that some dragons are amicable and do not pose a threat, so I am hiding in this diminutive form. The female ferret\u2014she was slightly larger than Bhrava Saruth\u2014dropped to all fours, ran forward, and peered over the roof. Also, Bhrava Saruth said it would be fun.\n\n\"Captain, does that ferret have frosting smudged in its whiskers?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, sir,\" Trip said, startled by the question.\n\nThe female's whiskers did seem to be oddly clumped together on one side, and a smear of something white stuck to one furred ear.\n\nThe male ferret chittered, dropped to all fours, and sprang off the roof of the duck blind. He disappeared into the grasses, and the female leaped after him.\n\nZirkander shook his head and walked inside.\n\n\"Fish for a while?\" he asked, plucking up two poles that leaned in the corner by the door.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" Trip grinned as he accepted one of the poles.\n\nHe suspected Zirkander had invited him out here to talk about something, but he didn't care. He was happy to chat with the general, both because of who he was and because he was one of the few people he'd encountered who wasn't perturbed by magic. If Zirkander had dragons and sorcerers-in-training all over his house, he wasn't likely to object to another magically inclined being in his life. Or in one of his squadrons, Trip hoped.\n\n\"Damn, I was afraid of that.\"\n\n\"Sir?\"\n\nZirkander had moved to the far side of the duck blind to peer in the brown paper sack.\n\n\"My stash from Donotono's Bakery was raided.\"\n\n\"By ferrets, sir?\"\n\n\"It seems so. Fortunately, Sardelle is making cookies. They're always good, and I pretend the eggs weren't magically lifted over the bowl and cracked open as part of a training exercise.\" Zirkander turned toward a rope that dangled through the open window and into the water outside. The inside end was tied to something reminiscent of a cat bookend. \"Beer or sarsaparilla?\" he offered.\n\n\"Yes, sir. Beer.\"\n\nZirkander tugged up the rope, revealing a net full of stoneware bottles that had been nestled in the pond. \"It's fed by glacier water from the Ice Blades,\" he said with a wink. \"The pond doesn't need to be resupplied daily with ice to stay cold.\"\n\n\"That's smart, sir. Though I imagine some magical device could be made to keep beverages chilled.\" Trip wondered if he could use his newfound talents to augment the devices he enjoyed building.\n\n\"Oh, no. The duck blind is a magic-free zone.\" Zirkander drew two bottles from the net with Rampaging Ram Brewery stamps on the front. \"It's a refuge for those unenlightened mundane folk needing a break from the peculiarities of sorcery.\"\n\nTrip peered past him toward the recently raided bakery bag.\n\n\"Well, in my fantasies it is.\" Zirkander handed him a beer, quirked a half smile, and grabbed a bait bucket.\n\nThey used a stump to clamber up to the roof. There weren't seats, but Zirkander plopped down on the edge of the duck blind, dangling his legs over the side, and poked into the bait bucket. Trip settled beside him and did the same. They cast out lines, carefully avoiding a surprisingly large flock of ducks making a home in the nearby reeds, and Trip looked over at Zirkander a few times, expecting the general to bring up whatever he had wanted to talk about.\n\n\"The swirlblers are most numerous, but sometimes you'll catch a dragon darter,\" Zirkander offered.\n\n\"I don't think we have those in Eastern Iskandia.\"\n\n\"You fish often over there?\"\n\n\"A few times with my grandfather. He used to make me scrounge for the bait.\"\n\n\"Ah, I have access to an eleven-year-old boy for that.\" Zirkander waved toward the house. \"I pay him a nucro for ten worms and pretend he doesn't use magic to dig them out of the ground in about five seconds.\"\n\nAs they further discussed the types of fish in the pond and strategies for retrieving them, it slowly dawned on Trip that the general hadn't invited him out here to speak of anything in particular. Maybe he'd just wanted to get to know Trip better or show him all the eclectic visitors that came and went here, and also show that he was accustomed to them. Even though Trip's heritage revelation seemed momentous to him, it might not be a big deal to Zirkander. If he'd had three full-blooded dragons as dinner guests the night before, what was one rather human-looking half-blooded one?\n\n\"Sir,\" Trip said, \"will there be more missions soon? I know the king was concerned about our report.\"\n\n\"Very likely, but we haven't put anything together yet. Tomorrow, we'll start training pilots to fly with soldiers wielding the dragon-slaying swords from the back seats, do some practice runs and figure out the best way to get them close enough to strike.\"\n\n\"Will Major Blazer continue to be a wielder?\"\n\n\"Nah, better to have the pilots piloting.\" Zirkander thumped him on the shoulder with the back of his hand. \"We're the flying rickshaw service for the army, you know.\"\n\n\"I suppose in the case of dragons, that makes sense.\"\n\n\"They'll all go to the elite troops, I figure. Brace yourself. You'll meet Colonel Therrik soon. He has a dislike for pilots, magic, dragons, magic, lower-ranking officers who don't salute him promptly enough, and magic. Did I mention magic?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Also, if you get stuck taking him up to fight, he may throw up in your back seat.\"\n\n\"Er, is it possible to avoid getting him? I'd much rather have\u2026 oh, I guess I don't know if she'll continue to be a wielder.\" Trip hoped her sword would go to someone else, but he doubted he would be that lucky.\n\n\"Lieutenant Ravenwood?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. She left my back seat in pristine condition, even pried out a ration bar wrapper that some previous occupant had left crammed in there.\"\n\nZirkander chuckled. \"I expect she will continue to wield one of the swords, if she's willing. Her academic background gives her some insight into the blades that the average combat soldier doesn't have, so she might even end up as an advisor on them.\"\n\nTrip hadn't expected anything less, though he felt a pang of disappointment at this confirmation. He would still like to have her in his flier, rather than some other soldier. Admittedly, it had nothing to do with tidiness or wrapper extraction.\n\n\"The king mentioned having already sent some archives over for her to study, information she might not have come across before that could help with locating more of those swords.\" Zirkander wiggled his pole. So far, neither of them had had any nibbles. \"As you could probably guess, he's worried about all those dragons reputed to have come through the portal, especially when compared to the small number of dragons interested in allying themselves with Iskandia.\"\n\n\"I wish my report had been more favorable for us.\" Trip wondered if he should mention the idea he'd been mulling over, of seeking his father. Unfortunately, it sounded like Rysha would be busy with other research.\n\n\"At least you kept the empire from getting the portal. That's something. I prefer the dragons that terrorize the countryside and eat sheep over the ones that ally themselves with enemy nations.\"\n\n\"But the ones that ally with us are acceptable?\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely.\" Ferret chitters came from the grass behind the duck blind. Zirkander's eyelids drooped as he looked in that direction, then back to his inactive fishing pole. \"Is it possible their dragonly aura is keeping the fish away?\"\n\n\"You're asking me? I think you're more of a dragon expert than I am, sir.\"\n\n\"Am I? That's alarming.\"\n\nZirkander pulled his line in and checked the bait. The worm still dangled there. He plumped it up a little and tossed it back in. \"I've tried pieces of pastries before and had some luck. It's too bad my stash was raided.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nTrip didn't particularly care that his line hadn't received any nibbles. He sensed the fish down there, lounging in the afternoon sun, and thought about pointing out that they would be livelier earlier in the morning. But he doubted Zirkander would invite him out for fishing at dawn. Besides, it was pleasant out here with the sun warming his shoulders. Maybe this would be a good time to bring up his idea. If he wanted to go hunting for Agarrenon Shivar, he would need Zirkander to approve leave for him.\n\n\"Sir? I was also told\u2014well, Bhrava Saruth suggested it actually\u2014that the dragon who, uh, sired me\u2026 Is that the right term?\"\n\n\"If you're part horse, certainly.\"\n\n\"What about part dragon? You are the expert, sir.\"\n\n\"I'll have to consult with Sardelle later. She's more expertly than I.\" Zirkander spread a hand toward him. \"Your sire\u2014go on.\" He cocked his head, seemingly interested in the direction of the conversation.\n\nTrip found that promising. \"Apparently, Bhrava Saruth could tell by sniffing me who that dragon was. Is. Well, I'm not sure if it's an is or a was. He didn't go through the portal with the others a thousand years ago, so Bhrava Saruth didn't know, either. His name is Agarrenon Shivar. Nobody knows what happened to him, but he was supposed to be very powerful and thus respected by the rest of the dragons. Apparently, you just have to be powerful to be respected in their society, not charismatic, smart, or fair.\"\n\n\"I'd like to say that it's different for humans, but I can't make that claim.\"\n\n\"On the way back, I was thinking that if I could find him and entice him to join us, that he could, at the least, boost our allies by one. But if the rest of the dragons still fear and respect him, maybe he could do even more, like tell them to leave Iskandia alone altogether.\"\n\n\"You think he might be amenable to this because you're a relative?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, sir. I'm inclined to think not, as when I mentioned this idea to Rysha\u2014Lieutenant Ravenwood\u2014she said that dragons don't have feelings for their offspring and that the ones that mated with humans often mated with all manner of interesting creatures, and it was more about pleasure and, uh, sexual conquest than relationships.\" Trip's cheeks heated. When he'd envisioned beer and fishing with Zirkander, talk of sexual conquests hadn't been a part of it. \"But,\" he pressed on, \"maybe we could offer him something. Maybe he's lonely wherever he is.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure there's room in the capital for another dragon temple,\" Zirkander said.\n\n\"It was just a thought, sir. Since we do have fewer dragon allies than Cofahre.\"\n\n\"Yes, we always seem to have fewer resources than they do.\" Zirkander sighed wistfully.\n\n\"I'll train with Sardelle whenever there's time, sir. If she'll have me. Then we can at least have\u2026 Well, I'd never dreamed of becoming a sorcerer, but since that fate has come my way, I'd at least like to be less bumbling with my abilities.\"\n\n\"She'll be happy to hear that, though I gather she is daunted by the idea of training you.\" Zirkander grinned. \"Even in her time, when sorcerers were more powerful than the ones around today, there wasn't anyone who was the offspring of a dragon.\"\n\nTrip couldn't imagine anyone being daunted by him, except perhaps pirates going up against him in aerial battles.\n\n\"So, are you proposing a mission?\" Zirkander asked. \"To find your father and try to recruit him?\"\n\nA mission? He hadn't considered that might be a possibility.\n\n\"I think it could be worthwhile to find him. But I figured it would just be something I could try to do the next time I have some leave. Are captains even allowed to propose missions?\"\n\n\"Sure. Whether anyone listens when they do so is debatable, but it might be good for you to do this sooner rather than later.\" Zirkander's face grew grim. \"We might not have time later.\"\n\n\"I confess, I wouldn't know where to start looking, sir. My mother was an herbalist and traveled quite a bit, looking for exotic plants useful in tinctures and such. I don't know which continents she went to. After I was born, she stayed at home with me, but before that, she went all over the world, I understand.\" Trip wished he'd had the chance to know his mother as an adult. She'd told him stories when he'd been a boy, but he barely remembered them now, and that saddened him.\n\n\"I imagine Lieutenant Ravenwood could help you research. It's a good idea to make friends with a smart woman, no matter how powerful you are.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that advice in mind, sir. It does seem sage.\"\n\n\"Any thoughts as to who you'd like on a dragon-seeking mission?\" Zirkander asked. \"I'd want to keep the team small, so we don't have too many people away from the country. It's been blessedly quiet this last week\u2014maybe all the dragons were concerned about the portal?\u2014but we can't count on that continuing. There were two more attacks in the north after your team left.\"\n\nTrip scratched his jaw, surprised he was being asked. Would he be in charge of such a mission? Even though he was technically a captain now, he still felt like a lieutenant.\n\nHe was tempted to throw out Leftie's name, since he knew what to expect from Leftie, but if he had the opportunity to use magic, he didn't want to have to stifle it because it might make people uncomfortable. Duck had been fairly unflappable in regard to dragons and magic. He supposed any of the soldiers who'd worked with Sardelle in the past would have a similar viewpoint. The trouble was that he didn't know who those people were.\n\nIf Blazer came along, Trip definitely wouldn't be in charge. That might be all right, so long as he had the leeway to follow hunches\u2014and wasn't left out of any planning meetings. He still felt a tad disgruntled over that.\n\n\"Should I pick some people?\" Zirkander asked when Trip didn't answer.\n\n\"You know everyone over here far better than I do, so that might be best, sir. I think people who aren't intimidated by magic would be ideal. I liked working with Duck. And Captain Kaika.\" Trip didn't know if Zirkander could get Kaika, since she was in another unit, and this would not be like the last mission, not sanctioned by the king. Somehow, Trip doubted Angulus would want to put a lot of resources toward a young pilot's search for his father.\n\n\"Major Blazer will be crushed that she didn't make your short list.\" Zirkander grinned.\n\n\"She was all right to work for, sir. I wouldn't mind flying with her again. I'm just not sure she adored me.\"\n\n\"Were you expecting that? I've yet to have a commanding officer who adored me, and Sardelle assures me that I'm adorable. Possibly because she's not expected to get me to obey orders.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Trip said, not wanting to comment one way or another on his commanding officer's adorableness.\n\n\"All right, a hunt for another dragon ally. Good.\" Zirkander clapped him on the shoulder. \"I'll see what kind of team I can put together for this.\" He cocked his head for a few seconds, then looked in the direction of the house and rose to his feet. \"Sounds like it's dinnertime.\"\n\nThere hadn't been a \"sound,\" so Trip assumed Sardelle had spoken telepathically to him.\n\n\"Fortunately, the fish we didn't catch weren't paramount for the meal.\" Zirkander pulled in his line. \"Actually, I think Sardelle prefers it when I don't catch anything.\"\n\n\"Does she have to clean the fish?\"\n\n\"No, I get that dubious duty, but nobody under twenty in the house cares for fish, so it's a battle to convince them to eat it.\"\n\n\"Do the dragons end up with the leftovers?\" Trip asked, still bemused by their presence in the general's house. But encouraged by it. He was beginning to believe some of those stories about humans and dragons living and battling together in dragon-rider outposts. And, as alarming as it was to have them back in the world en masse, he felt some hope that Iskandia would survive. He thought of Zirkander's little girl and his new baby coming and vowed he would do his best to make sure the country did survive.\n\n\"Baked goods leftovers? Yes. Fish? Not usually.\" Zirkander hopped down from the duck blind and tucked his pole inside. \"They prefer cheese, chili mango beef jerky, mangoes in general, strawberries, sweets of all kinds, vinegar crisps, and Phelistoth often shows up in human form for coffee in the morning. It's a good thing I ultimately accepted the promotion to general because my grocery bill has been alarming these last couple of years.\"\n\n\"I'll try not to eat too much at dinner.\"\n\n\"You eat as much as you want,\" Zirkander said as they walked up the path toward the house. \"You have a quest coming up.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'm excited about it, even though\u2014well, I'll try not to get my hopes up that he'll be interested in me.\" Trip winced. He hadn't meant to voice that concern again.\n\n\"We don't all get the fathers we wish we had. But it goes both ways. Fathers don't always get the kids they want.\"\n\nSince Trip doubted the general's toddler was old enough to elicit such a sentiment, he assumed Zirkander was referencing his relationship with his father.\n\n\"I'm sure you couldn't have been a disappointment, sir.\"\n\n\"My father wanted someone to climb mountains with him and search for ancient treasures. He positively loathes dragon fliers and thinks I'm a kook for going up in them.\" Zirkander grinned as they crossed onto the lawn, and there didn't seem to be any bitterness in it. He must have come to terms with his relationship with his father long ago. \"But look, blood isn't everything. You find people in your life that you can trust and that care for you, and don't worry too much about the ones who are disappointed you're not the person they wanted you to be.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Trip said.\n\nZirkander paused at the door, holding it open as he looked back toward the yard. Trip thought he might give some more advice, but he merely watched as the two golden ferrets raced through the grass and into the house.\n\n\"I believe that means the cookies are done,\" he said." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Daemonslayer", + "author": "William King", + "genres": [ + "Fantasy", + "Adventure" + ], + "tags": [ + "Warhammer", + "Gotrek & Felix", + "dark fantasy", + "action", + "airships" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Fresh from their adventures battling the servants of the rat-god in Nuln, Gotrek and Felix are now ready to join an expedition northwards in search of the long-lost dwarf hall of Karag Dum. Setting forth for the hideous Realms of Chaos in an experimental dwarf airship, Gotrek and Felix are sworn to succeed or die in the attempt. But greater and more sinister energies are coming into play, as a daemonic power is awoken to fulfil its ancient, deadly promise." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\u2002This is a dark age, a bloody age, an age of daemons and of sorcery. It is an age of battle and death, and of the world's ending. Amidst all of the fire, flame and fury it is a time, too, of mighty heroes, of bold deeds and great courage.\n\n\u2002At the heart of the Old World sprawls the Empire, the largest and most powerful of the human realms. Known for its engineers, sorcerers, traders and soldiers, it is a land of great mountains, mighty rivers, dark forests and vast cities. And from his throne in Altdorf reigns the Emperor Karl-Franz, sacred descendant of the founder of these lands, Sigmar, and wielder of his magical warhammer.\n\n\u2002But these are far from civilised times. Across the length and breadth of the Old World, from the knightly palaces of Bretonnia to ice-bound Kislev in the far north, come rumblings of war. In the towering World's Edge Mountains, the orc tribes are gathering for another assault. Bandits and renegades harry the wild southern lands of the Border Princes. There are rumours of rat-things, the skaven, emerging from the sewers and swamps across the land. And from the northern wildernesses there is the ever-present threat of Chaos, of daemons and beastmen corrupted by the foul powers of the Dark Gods. As the time of battle draws ever near, the Empire needs heroes like never before.\n\n\u2002\"After the dire events in Nuln we travelled northwards, for the most part following back roads, lest the Emperor's roadwardens come upon us. The arrival of the dwarf-borne letter had filled my companion with a strange anticipation. He seemed almost happy as we made our weary way to our goal. Neither all the long weeks of journeying, nor the threat of bandits or mutants or beastmen ever served to daunt him. He would barely stop for meat or, more unusually, drink, and would answer my questions only with muttered references to destiny, doom and old debts.\n\n\"For myself, I was filled with anxiety and recrimination. I wondered what had happened to Elissa and I was saddened by my parting with my brother. Little did I guess how long it would be before I would meet him again, and under what strange circumstances. And little, too, did I guess how far the journey which began in Nuln was to take us, and how dreadful our eventual destination was to be.\" \u2014From My Travels With Gotrek, Vol. III, by Herr Felix Jaeger (Altdorf Press, 2505)\n\n[ THE MESSAGE ]\n\n\"You spilled my beer,\" Gotrek Gurnisson said.\n\nIf the man who had just knocked over the flagon possessed any sense, Felix Jaeger thought, the menacing tone of the dwarf's flat gravelly voice would have caused him to back off immediately. But the mercenary was drunk, he had half a dozen rough-looking mates back at his table and a giggling tavern girl to impress. He was not going to back down from anybody who only came up to his shoulders, even if that person was nearly twice as broad as he.\n\n\"So? What are you going to do about it, stuntie?\" the mercenary replied with a sneer.\n\nThe dwarf eyed the spreading puddle of ale on the table for a moment with a mixture of regret and annoyance. Then he turned in his seat to look at the mercenary and ran his hand through the huge crest of red-dyed hair which towered over his shaven and tattooed head. The gold chain that ran from his nose to his ear jingled. With the elaborate care of one very drunk, Gotrek rubbed the patch covering his left eye socket, interlocked his fingers, cracked his knuckles \u2014 then suddenly lashed out with his right hand.\n\nIt wasn't the best punch Felix had ever seen Gotrek throw. In truth, it was clumsy and unscientific. Still, the Trollslayer's fist was as large as a ham, and the arm that fist was attached to was as thick as a tree-trunk. Whatever it hit was going to suffer. There was a sickening crack as the man's nose broke. The mercenary went flying back towards his own table. He sprawled unconscious on the sawdust covered floor. Red blood gushed from his nostrils.\n\nOn considered reflection, Felix decided through his own drunken haze, as punches went it had certainly served its purpose. Given the amount of ale the Slayer had consumed it had been pretty good, in fact.\n\n\"Anybody else want a taste of fist?\" Gotrek inquired, giving the mercenary's half-dozen comrades an evil glare. \"Or are you all as soft as you look?\"\n\nThe soldier's comrades rose from their benches, spilling foaming ale onto the table and tavern wenches from their knees. Not waiting for them to come at him, the Slayer swayed to his feet and bounded towards them. He grabbed the nearest mercenary by the throat, pulled his head forward and headbutted him. The man went down like a pole-axed ox.\n\nFelix took another sip of the inn's sour Tilean wine to aid his reflections. He was already several goblets south of sober, but so what? It had been a long, hard trek all the way here to Guntersbad. They had been moving constantly ever since Gotrek had received the mysterious letter summoning them to this tavern. For a moment, Felix considered reaching into the Slayer's pack and examining it again but he already knew that it would be a useless effort. The message had been penned in the strange runes favoured by dwarfs. By the standards of the Empire, Felix was a well-educated man but there was no way he could read that alien language. Foiled by his own ignorance, Felix stretched his long legs, yawned and gave his attention back to the brawl.\n\nIt had been brewing all night. Ever since they had entered the Dog and Donkey, the local hard boys had been staring at them. They had started by making nasty remarks about the Slayer's appearance. For once, Gotrek had paid not the slightest attention, which was very unusual. Usually he was as touchy as a penniless Tilean duke and as short-tempered as a wolverine with a toothache. Since receiving the message, however, he had become withdrawn, oblivious to anything but his own excitement. All he had done all evening was watch the door as if expecting somebody he knew to arrive.\n\nAt first Felix had been quite worried by the prospect of a brawl but several flagons of the Tilean red had soon helped settle his nerves. He had doubted that anybody would be stupid enough to pick a fight with the Trollslayer. He had reckoned without the sheer native ignorance of the locals. After all, this was a small town on the road to Talabheim. How could they be expected to know what Gotrek was?\n\nEven Felix, who had studied at the University of Altdorf, had never heard of the dwarfs' Cult of Slayers until the long-ago night when Gotrek had pulled him from under the hooves of the Emperor's elite cavalry during the Window Tax riots back in Altdorf. On the mad drunken spree which followed, he had discovered that Gotrek was sworn to seek death in combat with the fiercest of monsters to atone for some past crime. Felix had been so impressed by the Slayer's tale \u2014 and to tell the truth, so drunk \u2014 that he had sworn to accompany the dwarf and record his doom in an epic poem. The fact that Gotrek had not yet found his doom, despite some heroic efforts, had done nothing to reduce Felix's respect for his toughness.\n\nGotrek slammed a fist into another man's stomach. His opponent doubled over as the air whooshed out of his lungs. Gotrek took him by the hair and slammed his jaw down hard onto the table edge. Noticing that the mercenary still moved, the Slayer repeatedly banged his groaning victim's head on the table edge until he lay still, looking strangely rested, in a pool of blood, spittle, beer and broken teeth.\n\nTwo big burly warriors threw themselves forward, grabbing the Slayer by an arm each. Gotrek braced himself, roaring defiance, and hurled one of them to the ground. While he was down there, the Slayer planted his heavy boot into the man's groin. A high-pitched wailing shriek filled the tavern. Felix winced.\n\nGotrek turned his attention to the other warrior and they grappled. Slowly, even though the man was more than half-again Gotrek's height, the dwarf's enormous strength began to tell. He pushed his opponent onto the ground, straddled his chest, and then slowly and methodically punched his head until he was unconscious. The last mercenary scuttled for the door \u2014 but as he did so he slammed into another dwarf. The newcomer took a step back, then dropped him with one well-aimed punch.\n\nFelix did a double-take, at first convinced he was hallucinating. It seemed unlikely that there could be another Slayer in this part of the world. But Gotrek was now looking at the stranger as well.\n\nThe recent arrival was, if anything, bigger and more muscular than Gotrek. His head was shaved and his beard cropped short. He had no crest of hair; instead it looked for all the world like nails had been driven into his skull to make a crest and then painted in different colours. His nose had been broken so many times it was shapeless. One ear was cauliflowered; the other had actually been ripped clean away, leaving only a hole in the side of his head. A huge ring was set in his nose. Where his body was not criss-crossed with scars it was covered in tattoos. In one hand he held an enormous hammer and thrust in his belt was a short-hafted, broad-bladed axe.\n\nBehind this new Slayer stood another dwarf, shorter, fatter and altogether more civilised looking. He was about half Felix's height, but very broad. His well-groomed beard reached almost to the ground. His wide eyes blinked owlishly from behind enormously thick glasses. In his ink-stained fingers he carried a large brass-bound book.\n\n\"Snorri Nosebiter, as I live and breathe!\" Gotrek roared, his nasty smile revealing missing teeth. \"It's been awhile! What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Snorri's here for the same reason as you, Gotrek Gurnisson. Snorri got a letter from old Borek the Scholar, telling Snorri to come to the Lonely Tower.\"\n\n\"Don't try and fool me. I know you can't read, Snorri. All the words were bashed out of your head when those nails were bashed in.\"\n\n\"Hogan Longbeard translated it for Snorri,\" Snorri said, looking as embarrassed as it was possible for such a hulking Trollslayer to look. He glanced around him, obviously wanting to change the subject.\n\n\"Snorri thinks he missed a good fight,\" the dwarf said, eyeing the scene of terrible violence with the same sort of wistful regret that Gotrek had expended on his spilled ale. \"Snorri thinks he'd better have a beer then. Snorri has a bit of a thirst!\"\n\n\"Ten beers for Snorri Nosebiter!\" Gotrek roared. \"And better make that ten for me as well. Snorri hates to drink alone.\"\n\nAn appalled silence filled the room. The other patrons looked at the scene of the battle then at the two dwarfs as if they were kegs of gunpowder with a burning fuse. Slowly, in ones and twos, they got up and left, until only Gotrek, Felix, Snorri and the other dwarf were left.\n\n\"First to ten?\" Snorri enquired, knuckling his eye and looking up at Gotrek cunningly.\n\n\"First to ten,\" Gotrek agreed.\n\nThe other dwarf waddled towards them and bowed, politely in the dwarfish fashion, raising his beard with one hand to keep it from dragging on the ground as he leaned forward.\n\n\"Varek Varigsson of the Clan Grimnar at your service,\" he said in a mild, pleasant voice. \"I see you got my uncle's message.\"\n\nSnorri and Gotrek looked at him, seemingly astonished by his politeness, then began to laugh. Varek flushed with embarrassment.\n\n\"Better get this youth a beer as well!\" Gotrek shouted. \"He looks like he could use being loosened up a little. Now stand aside, youngling, Snorri and I have a bet to settle.\"\n\nThe landlord smiled ingratiatingly. A look of relief passed over his face. It looked like the dwarfs were set on more than making up for all the custom they had driven away.\n\nThe landlord lined the beers up along the low counter. Ten sat in front of Gotrek, ten in front of Snorri. The dwarfs inspected them the way a man might inspect an opponent before a wrestling match. Snorri looked over at Gotrek, then looked back at the beer again. A swift lunge brought him within range of his chosen target. He grabbed the flagon, lifted it to his lips, tilted back his head and swallowed. Gotrek was a fraction slower to the draw. His jack of ale reached his lips a second after Snorri's. There was a long silence, broken only by the sound of dwarfs glugging, then Snorri slammed his flagon back on the table a fraction of a second before Gotrek slammed his. Felix looked over in astonishment. Both flagons had been drained to the last drop.\n\n\"First one's easiest,\" Gotrek said. Snorri seized another flagon, grabbed a second with his other hand and repeated the performance. Gotrek did the same. He snatched up one in each hand, raised one to his lips, drained it, then drained the other. This time it was Gotrek who put down his beers fractionally before Snorri. Felix was staggered, particularly when he considered how much beer Gotrek had already drunk before Snorri had arrived. It looked like the two Slayers were entering into a well practiced ritual. Felix wondered if they really intended to drink all that beer.\n\n\"I'm embarrassed to be seen drinking with you, Snorri. A girly elf could do three in the time it took you to down those,\" Gotrek said.\n\nSnorri gave him a disgusted look, reached for another ale and tipped it back so fast that suds erupted from his mouth and frothed over his beard. He wiped his mouth with the back of one tattooed forearm. This time he finished before Gotrek.\n\n\"At least all my beer went in my mouth,\" Gotrek said, nodding his head until his nose chain jingled.\n\n\"Are you talking or drinking?\" Snorri challenged.\n\nFive, six, seven beers went down in quick succession. Gotrek looked at the ceiling, smacked his lips and let out an enormous cavernous belch. Snorri swiftly echoed it. Felix exchanged glances with Varek. The scholarly young dwarf looked back at him and shrugged his shoulders. In less than a minute the two Slayers had put back more beer than Felix would normally drink in one night. Gotrek blinked and his eyes looked slightly glassy, but this was the only sign he gave of the enormous amount of alcohol he had just consumed. Snorri looked not the slightest worse for wear, but then he had not been drinking all night already.\n\nGotrek reached out and downed number eight, but by that time Snorri was already half way through number nine. As he set down the flagon, he said, \"Looks like you'll be paying for the beer.\"\n\nGotrek didn't answer. He picked up two flagons at once, one in each hand, tilted back his head, opened his gullet and poured. There was no sound of gulping. He was not swallowing, just letting the beer run straight down his throat. Snorri was so impressed by the feat that he forgot to pick up his own last pint before Gotrek had finished.\n\nGotrek stood there swaying slightly. He belched, hiccupped and sat down on his stool.\n\n\"The day you can out-drink me, Snorri Nosebiter, is the day Hell freezes over.\"\n\n\"That will be the day after the day you pay for a beer, Gotrek Gurnisson,\" Snorri said, sitting down beside his fellow Trollslayer.\n\n\"Well, so much for starters,\" he continued. \"Let's get down to some serious drinking then. Looks like Snorri has some catching up to do.\"\n\n\"Is that proper World's Edge tabac you have there, Snorri?\" Gotrek asked, looking hungrily at the stuff Snorri was tamping into his pipe. They had all settled down by the roaring fire in the best seats in the house.\n\n\"Aye, 'tis old Mouldy Leaf. Snorri picked it up in the mountains afore coming here.\"\n\n\"Give some here!\"\n\nSnorri tossed the pouch over to Gotrek, who produced a pipe and started filling it. The Slayer glared over at the scholarly young dwarf with his one good eye.\n\n\"So, youth,\" Gotrek growled. \"What is the mighty doom your Uncle Borek has promised me? And why is old Snorri here?\"\n\nFelix leaned forward interestedly. He wanted to know more about this himself. He was intrigued by the thought of a summons which could excite even the normally morose and taciturn Slayer.\n\nVarek looked at Felix warningly. Gotrek shook his head and took a sip of beer. He leaned forward, lighted a spill of wood in the fire then lit his pipe. Once the pipe was burning well, he leaned back in his chair and spoke earnestly.\n\n\"Anything you want to say to me, you can say in front of the manling. He is a Dwarf Friend and an Oathkeeper.\"\n\nSnorri looked up at Felix. Surprise and something like respect showed in his dull, brutish eyes. Varek's smile showed sincere interest and he turned to Felix and bowed once more, almost falling out of his chair.\n\n\"I'm sure there is a tale there,\" he said. \"I'd be most interested in hearing it.\"\n\n\"Don't try and change the subject,\" Gotrek said. \"What is this doom your kinsman has promised me? His letter dragged me halfway across the Empire and I want to hear about it.\"\n\n\"I wasn't trying to change the subject, Herr Gurnisson. I simply wanted to get the information for my book.\"\n\n\"There will be time enough for that later. Now speak!\"\n\nVarek sighed, leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers over his ample stomach. \"I can tell you little enough. My uncle has all the facts and will share them with you in his own time and fashion. What I can tell you is this is possibly the mightiest quest since the time of Sigmar Hammerbearer \u2014 and it concerns Karag Dum.\"\n\n\"The Lost Dwarfhold of the North!\" Gotrek roared drunkenly, then suddenly fell silent. He looked around, as if fearing that spies might have overheard him.\n\n\"The very same!\"\n\n\"Then your Uncle has found a way to get there! I thought he was mad when he claimed he would.\" Felix had never heard such an undercurrent of excitement in the dwarf's voice. It was contagious. Gotrek looked over at Felix.\n\nIt was Snorri who interrupted. \"Call Snorri stupid if you like, but even Snorri knows Karag Dum was lost in the Chaos Wastes.\" He looked directly at Gotrek and shivered. \"Remember the last time!\"\n\n\"Be that as it may, my uncle has found a way of getting there.\"\n\nA sudden trepidation filled Felix. Finding the location of the place was one thing. Having a method of getting there was another. It meant that this wasn't simply a fascinating academic exercise but a possible journey. He had a terrible sinking feeling that he knew where all this was going to end up, and he knew that he wanted no part of it.\n\n\"There is no way across the Wastes,\" Gotrek said. Something more than mere caution was in his voice. \"I have been there. So has Snorri. So has your uncle. It is insanity to attempt to cross them. Madness and mutation wait for those who would go there. Hell has touched the world in that accursed place.\"\n\nFelix looked at Gotrek with new respect. Few people had ever travelled so far and returned to tell the tale. To him, as to all folk of the Empire, the Chaos Wastes were but a dire rumour, a hellish land in the far north, from which the terrible armies of the four Ruinous Powers of Chaos emerged to reave and plunder and slay. He had never heard the dwarf speak of having been there, but then he knew little of the Slayer's adventures in the days before they had met. Gotrek did not speak of his past. He seemed ashamed of it. If anything, the dwarf's obvious fear made the place seem even more daunting. There was little enough in this world which dismayed the Slayer, as Felix well knew, so anything that did was to be feared indeed.\n\n\"Nonetheless, I believe that is where my uncle wants to go, and he wants you to go with him. He has need of your axe.\"\n\nGotrek fell silent for long moments. \"'Tis certainly a deed worthy of a Slayer.\"\n\nIt sounds like absolute madness, Felix thought. Somehow he managed to keep his mouth shut.\n\n\"Snorri thinks so too.\"\n\nThen Snorri is an even bigger idiot than he appears to be, thought Felix, and the words almost burst forth from his lips.\n\n\"Then you will accompany me to the Lonely Tower?\" Varek asked.\n\n\"For the prospect of such a doom, I would follow you to the mouth of Hell,\" Gotrek said.\n\nThat's good, Felix thought, because it sounds like that's exactly where you're going. Then he shook his head. The dwarf's madness was beginning to infect him. Was he actually taking all this talk of journeys to the Chaos Wastes seriously? Surely this was just tavern talk and the fit of madness would pass by morning\u2026\n\n\"Excellent,\" Varek said. \"I knew you'd come.\"" + }, + { + "title": "MARK OF THE SKAVEN", + "text": "The bouncing of the wagon did nothing for Felix's hangover. Every time a wheel hit one of the deep ruts in the road, his stomach gave a troubled lurch and threatened to send its contents arcing out onto the roadside hedges. The inside of his mouth felt furry. Pressure was building up inside his skull like steam within a kettle. Oddest of all, now he had a terrible craving for fried food. Visions of fried eggs and bacon sizzled through his mind. Now he regretted not having taken breakfast earlier with the Trollslayers, but at the time the sight of them throwing back piled plates of ham and eggs and chomping on great hunks of black bread had been enough to turn his stomach. But now he was almost prepared to commit murder for the same food.\n\nIt was some consolation to him that the Slayers were more or less silent, save for grumbles in dwarfish which he assumed concerned the awfulness of their hangovers or just how plain dreadful human beer was. Only young Varek seemed cheerful and bright-eyed, but then he ought to. Much to the disgust of the other two, he had stopped drinking after three ales, claiming that he had had enough. Now he guided the mules with sure tugs of the reins and whistled a happy tune, oblivious to the dagger-like looks his companions aimed at his back. At that moment, Felix hated him with a passion which could be explained only by the intensity of his hangover.\n\nTo distract himself from that, and from thoughts of the awful adventure that was surely to come, Felix gave his attention to their surroundings. It was indeed a beautiful day. The sun was shining brightly. This part of the Empire looked particularly productive and cheerful. Huge half-timbered houses rose from the surrounding hilltops. Thatch-roofed cottages, the homes of the peasant labourers, surrounded them. Big splotch-sided cows grazed in enclosures, bells tinkling cheerfully on their necks. Each bell had a different tone, which Felix deduced was to enable the herdsmen to track each individual cow by sound alone.\n\nAlongside them a peasant drove a gaggle of geese along the dusty track for a while. Later, a pretty peasant girl looked up from the hay she was forking into a stack and gave Felix a dazzling smile. He tried to muster the energy to smile back but couldn't. He felt like he was a hundred years old. He kept his eyes on her until she disappeared around a bend in the road though.\n\nThe wagon hit another rut and bounced higher.\n\n\"Watch where you're going!\" Gotrek growled. \"Can't you see Snorri Nosebiter has a hangover?\"\n\n\"Snorri doesn't feel too good,\" the other Slayer confirmed and gave an awful muffled gurgle. \"It must have been that goat and potato stew we had last night. Snorri thinks it tasted a bit off.\"\n\nMore likely it was the thirty or so jacks of ale you threw back, Felix thought sourly. He almost said this out loud, but even through the misery of his hangover a certain prudent caution stopped him. He had no wish to be cured of his hangover by having his head chopped off. Well, maybe, he thought, as the wagon and his stomach gave another lurch.\n\nFelix gave his attention back to the hard-packed stony earth of the road that jarred and juddered along beneath them, trying to focus his mind on anything except the awful churning in his stomach. He could see the individual rocks jutting out of the ground, any one of which looked like it could break the wagon's wooden wheels if hit at the wrong angle.\n\nA fly landed softly, ticklingly, on the back of his hand and he swatted at it miserably. It eluded the blow with contemptuous ease and proceeded to buzz around Felix's head. His initial effort had exhausted him and Felix gave up the attempt to strike the insect, only shaking his head when it came too close to his eyes. He closed his eyes and focused his willpower on the creature, urging it to die, but it refused to oblige. There were occasionally times when Felix wished that he was a sorcerer and this was one of them. He bet that they didn't have to put up with hangovers and the disturbances created by fat-bodied buzzing flies.\n\nSuddenly it got darker and slightly cooler on his face, and he looked up to see that they were passing through a copse of trees which had overgrown the road. He glanced around quickly \u2014 more from habit than fear \u2014 because these were the sort of woods that bandits liked to frequent, and bandits were not uncommon in the Empire. He wasn't sure what sort of fools would attack a wagon which contained two hungover Trollslayers, but you could never tell. Stranger things had happened to him on his travels. Maybe those mercenaries from the night before would come back seeking revenge. And there were always beastmen and mutants to be found in these dark times. In his time Felix had encountered enough of them to be something of an expert on that subject.\n\nTo tell the truth, Felix thought, he would almost welcome taking an axe blow from a beastman the way he felt right now. At least it would put him out of his misery. It was strange, though, how his eyes were playing tricks. He was almost sure he could see something small and pink-eyed skulking amongst the undergrowth a little way back from the track. It was only there for a second and then it was gone. Felix almost called Gotrek's attention to it but decided against doing so, because interrupting the Slayer's recovery from a hangover was never a good idea.\n\nAnd it really probably was nothing after all, just some small furry animal scuttling for safety as travellers moved by on the road. Still, there was something familiar about the shape of the head that nagged at Felix's numb brain. He couldn't quite place it just yet but if he thought about it long enough he was sure it would come back to him. Another great lurch by the cart almost threw him off. He fought to keep last night's goat and potato stew within his stomach. It was a long fight and he only won it when the stew had battled halfway up his throat.\n\n\"Where are we heading?\" he asked Varek to distract himself from his misery. Not for the first time he swore that he would never touch another drop of beer. It sometimes seemed that most of the troubles in his life had somehow begun in taverns. It was amazing, really, that he had not had the sense to realise this before.\n\n\"The Lonely Tower,\" Varek said cheerfully. Felix fought down the urge to punch him, more because he couldn't summon the energy to do it, than from any other reason.\n\n\"Sounds\u2026 interesting,\" Felix managed to say eventually. What it really sounded was ominous, like so many other places he had visited in his sorry career as the Slayer's henchman. Any place called the Lonely Tower to be found anywhere in the Empire was most likely to be the sort of place no one in their right mind would visit. Fortifications in the middle of nowhere had a habit of being overwhelmed by orcs, goblins and other worse things.\n\n\"Oh, it's an interesting place all right. Built on top of an old coal mine. Uncle Borek took it over and renovated it. Good sound dwarfish workmanship. Looks like new. Better in fact, because the original work, human,\u2014no offence \u2014 was a bit slipshod. It was abandoned for several hundred years till we came along, except for the skaven. Of course, we had to clear them out first, and there might still be a few lurking down in the mine.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Gotrek grunted. \"Can't beat a spot of skaven-slaughtering for sport. Clears up a hangover better than a pint of Bugman's.\"\n\nPersonally Felix could think of dozens more appealing ways of spending the time than hunting for vicious rat-like monsters in an abandoned and doubtless unsafe mine but he did not communicate this information to Gotrek.\n\nVarek looked back over his shoulder to where his passengers huddled alongside their gear. They must have made a pitiful sight, for Snorri wasn't any better equipped than Gotrek or Felix. His pack was as empty as a sailor's purse after a spree in port. He didn't appear to own a cloak or even a blanket. Felix was glad that he had his red Sudenland wool cloak to huddle under. He did not doubt that the nights would get pretty cold. He did not look forward to the prospect of a night on cold ground.\n\n\"How long till we get there?\" he asked.\n\n\"We're making good time. If we take the short path through the Bone Hills, we'll be there in two, three days at most.\"\n\n\"I've heard bad things about the Bone Hills,\" Felix said. It was true. Then again, there were few places beyond the cities and towns of the Empire that he had not heard bad things about. At once Gotrek and Snorri looked up, interest written all over their faces. It never ceased to amaze Felix that the worse things sounded, the happier a Slayer looked.\n\n\"The skaven from the mine used to haunt them, and attack travellers. They'd come down and raid the farms as well. Nothing to worry about now though. We've seen them off,\" Varek said. \"Snorri and I came all the way down here in the cart by ourselves, never sniffed a hint of trouble.\"\n\nThe two Slayers slumped back into apathetic contemplation of their hangovers. Somehow Felix was not reassured. In his experience, trips through the wilderness never went smoothly. And something about the mere mention of skaven caused that rat-like shape he had noticed back in the wood to begin niggling worryingly at the back of his mind.\n\n\"You came all the way here yourselves?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Snorri was with me.\"\n\n\"Are you armed?\" Felix asked, making sure that his own longsword was within easy reach.\n\n\"I have my knife.\"\n\n\"You have your knife! Oh good! I'm sure that will be very useful if skaven attack you.\"\n\n\"Never saw any skaven. Just heard a little scuttling some nights. Whatever it was, I think Snorri's snoring scared it away. Anyway, if something attacked I have my bombs.\"\n\n\"Bombs?\"\n\nVarek fumbled inside his robe and produced a smooth black sphere. A strange metal device appeared to have been glued to the top. He handed it to Felix who inspected it closely. It looked like if you pulled the clip on top, it would come free.\n\n\"Be careful with that,\" Varek said. \"It's a detonator. You pull that, it tugs the flint striker which lights the fuse which sets off the explosive. You've got about four heartbeats to throw it, then \u2014 boom!\"\n\nFelix looked at it warily, half-expecting the thing to explode in his hand.\n\n\"Boom?\"\n\n\"It explodes. Shrapnel everywhere. That's assuming the fuse fires. It sometimes doesn't. About half the time, actually, but it's very ingenious. And of course, very, very occasionally they go off for no reason at all. Almost never happens. Mind you, Blorri lost a hand that way. Had to have it replaced with a hook.\"\n\nFelix swiftly handed the bomb back to Varek who tucked it back inside the pocket of his robes. He was beginning to think this mild-mannered young dwarf was crazier than he looked. Perhaps all dwarfs were.\n\n\"Makaisson made it, you know. He's good at that sort of thing.\"\n\n\"Makaisson. Malakai Makaisson?\" Gotrek asked. \"That maniac!\"\n\nFelix looked at the Slayer in open-mouthed astonishment. He wasn't sure he wanted to meet this Makaisson. Anyone who Gotrek could describe as a maniac must be crazed indeed. Could probably win prizes for their madness, in fact. Gotrek caught Felix's look.\n\n\"Makaisson believes in heavier-than-air flight. Thinks he can make things fly.\"\n\n\"Gyrocopters fly,\" Snorri piped in. \"Snorri been up in one. Fell out. Landed on head. No damage.\"\n\n\"Not gyrocopters. Big things! And he builds ships! Ships! That's an unnatural interest for a dwarf. I hate ships almost as much as I hate elves!\"\n\n\"He built the biggest steamship ever,\" Varek said conversationally. \"The Unsinkable. Was two hundred paces long. Weighed five hundred tons. It had steam-powered gatling turrets. It had a crew of over three hundred dwarfs and thirty engineers. It could sail at three leagues an hour. Such an impressive sight it was, with its paddles churning the sea to foam and its pennons flying in the breeze.\"\n\nIt certainly sounded impressive, Felix thought, suddenly realising how far the dwarfs had taken this strange magic they called \"engineering\". Like everybody else in the Empire, Felix knew about steam-tanks, the armoured vehicles which were the spearhead of the realm's mighty armies. This thing sounded like it made the steam-tank look like a child's toy. Still, if it was so impressive, he wondered, why had he never heard of it?\n\n\"What happened to the Unsinkable? Where is it now?\"\n\nThere was a brief embarrassed silence from the dwarfs.\n\n\"Err\u2026 it sank,\" Varek said eventually.\n\n\"Hit a rock on its first trip out,\" Snorri added.\n\n\"Some people claim the boiler exploded,\" Varek said.\n\n\"Lost with all hands,\" Snorri added with the almost happy expression with which dwarfs always seemed to confront the worst news.\n\n\"Except Makaisson. He was picked up later by human ship. He was thrown clear by the explosion and clung to a wooden spar.\"\n\n\"Then he built a flying ship,\" Gotrek said, savage irony evident in his voice.\n\n\"That's right. Makaisson built a flying ship,\" Snorri said.\n\n\"The Indestructible,\" Varek said.\n\nFelix tried to imagine a ship flying. In the abstract he could manage it. In his mind's eye, he saw something like the old river barges on the Reik, their sails filled, their sweeps tugging. It was powerful sorcery indeed that could do that.\n\n\"Amazing thing it was,\" Varek said. \"Big as a sailing ship. Wrought iron cupola. Fuselage almost a hundred paces long. It could fly at ten leagues an hour \u2014 with the wind behind it, of course.\"\n\n\"What happened to it?\" Felix asked, a sinking feeling hinting that he already knew the answer.\n\n\"It crashed,\" Snorri said.\n\n\"Crosswinds and some liftgas leaks,\" Varek said. \"Big explosion.\"\n\n\"Killed everybody aboard.\"\n\n\"Except Makaisson,\" Varek said, as if this made a big difference. He seemed to think this was an important point. \"He was thrown clear and landed in some treetops. They broke his fall along with both his legs. Had to use crutches for the next two years. Anyway, the Indestructible had a few teething problems. What do you expect? It was the first of its kind. But Makaisson has sorted them now.\"\n\n\"Teething problems?\" Gotrek said. \"Twenty good dwarf engineers killed, including Under-Guildmaster Ulli and you call that 'teething problems'? Makaisson should have shaved his head.\"\n\n\"He did,\" Varek said. \"After he was drummed out of the guild. He couldn't face the shame, you know. They did the Trouser Legs Ritual to him. Pity. My uncle says he's the best engineer who ever lived. He says Makaisson is a genius.\"\n\n\"A genius at getting other dwarfs killed.\"\n\nFelix was thinking about what Gotrek had said about Makaisson shaving his head. \"Do you mean Makaisson became a Trollslayer?\" he asked Varek.\n\n\"Yes. Of course. He still does engineering work though. Says he'll prove his theories work or die trying.\"\n\n\"I'll bet he will,\" Gotrek muttered darkly.\n\nFelix wasn't listening. He was wrestling with another, far more troubling concept. Counting Gotrek and Snorri, that would make three Trollslayers in one place. What was Varek's uncle up to? A mission which required three Slayers didn't sound good. In fact, it sounded positively suicidal. Suddenly something that Varek had said earlier came sharply into focus in Felix's mind, cutting through even the awful fog of his hangover.\n\n\"You said earlier you heard scuttling,\" Felix said, thinking of the small shape he had seen in the undergrowth. He was starting to have an awful suspicion about that. \"On your way to meet Gotrek and myself.\"\n\nVarek nodded. \"Only at night, when we made camp.\"\n\n\"You've no idea what made the scuttling?\"\n\n\"No. A fox, maybe.\"\n\n\"Foxes don't scuttle.\"\n\n\"A big rat.\"\n\n\"A big rat\u2026\" Felix nodded his head. That was exactly what he hadn't wanted to hear. He looked over at Gotrek to see if the Slayer was thinking what he was thinking, but the dwarf had his head thrown back and was staring blankly into space. He appeared to be lost in his own thoughts and was paying not the slightest bit of attention to the conversation.\n\nRats made Felix think of only one thing, and that thing scared him. They made him think of skaven. Could it be possible that the foul rat-men had tracked him even here? It was not a comforting thought.\n\nFelix sat beside the fire and listened to the tremulous whickering of the mules. The darkness and the occasional distant howls of the wolves made them nervous. Felix rose and ran his hand over the nearest one's flanks in an effort to calm it and then returned to the fire where the others were sleeping.\n\nAll day the track had risen into the Bone Hills, which had turned out to be as bleak and unprepossessing as their name suggested. There were no trees around them, only lichen covered rocks and sharp hills covered by short stunted grass. It was fortunate that Varek had thought to bring firewood with them or they would have spent an even more uncomfortable night camped out. It was cold in the hills, despite the summer heat of the day.\n\nSupper had consisted of some bread bought at the inn back in Guntersbad and hunks of hard dwarf cheese. Afterwards, they had sat round the fire and all three dwarfs had lit their pipes. For entertainment they had the distant howling of the wolves. Felix found this marginally less depressing than dwarfish conversation which always seemed to rotate around ancient grudges, tales of misery long endured and epic drinking bouts. And horrifying as the howling was, it at least drowned out the sound of dwarfish snoring. Felix had drawn the short straw and won the dubious privilege of taking the first watch.\n\nHe tried not to stare into the fire and kept his eyes turned in the direction of the darkness so that he would not ruin his night vision. He was worried. He kept thinking about skaven and the thought of those ferocious Chaos-spawned rat-men appalled him. He remembered encountering them in the Battle of Nuln. It had been like a scene from a nightmare, battling in the dark with man-sized humanoid rats who walked upright and fought with weapons just as humans did. The memory of their hideous chittering language and the way their red eyes glittered in the darkness came back to him and made him shudder.\n\nThe most awful thing about the skaven was that they were organised in a hideous parody of human civilisation. They had their own culture, their own fiendish technologies. They had armies and sophisticated weapons that were in some ways more advanced than anything humanity had ever produced. Felix had seen them when they had erupted from the sewers to invade Nuln. He could still picture that monstrous horde rushing through the burning buildings, spearing anything that got in their way. Vividly he remembered the green flames of their warpfire throwers illuminating the night and the sizzle of human flesh as it was eaten away by the blazing jets.\n\nThe skaven were the implacable enemies of humanity, of all the civilised races, but there were those who sided with them for pay. Felix himself had killed their agent, Fritz von Halstadt, who had risen to become the chief of the Elector Countess Emmanuelle's secret police. He wondered how many other agents the rat-men had in high places. He did not want to think about it now in this lonely spot. He pushed thoughts of the skaven aside and tried to turn his mind to other things.\n\nHe let his thoughts drift back into the past. The howling reminded him of the terrible last nights of Fort von Diehl down in the Border Princes, where he watched his first great love Kirsten die, murdered by Manfred von Diehl, and saw most of the population slaughtered by goblin wolf riders let in by Manfred's treachery. It was strange, but he could still remember Kirsten's gaunt face and her soft voice. He wondered if there was anything he could have done to make things turn out differently. It was a thought that tormented him sometimes in the quiet watches of the night. It was an event that still caused him pain although of late he had felt it less often and knew that it was fading. He could even consider other women now. Back in Nuln, there had been the tavern girl, Elissa, but she had left in the end.\n\nThe picture of the smiling peasant girl in the field came back to him very vividly. He wondered what she was doing right now. He resigned himself to the fact that he would never even know her name, just as she would never know his. There were so many encounters in the world like that. Chances that never turned out right. Romances which died stillborn before ever they had a chance to live. He wondered whether he would ever meet another woman who touched him as much as Kirsten had.\n\nSo engrossed was he in these thoughts that it took some time for him to realise that he was hearing scuttling, the soft sounds of claws scrabbling on flinty rock. He kept himself low to the ground and then glanced around, carefully, suddenly fearing that at any moment he might feel the searing pain of a poisoned knife driven into his back. As he moved, however, the scuttling sounds stopped.\n\nHe kept still and held his breath for a long moment and it started again. There. The sound came from off to his right. As he watched, he could see the glitter of red eyes, and dark silhouettes creeping ever closer over the ridge top. He slid his sword from its scabbard. The magical blade which he had acquired from the dead Templar Aldred felt light in his hand. He was about to shout a warning to the others when an enormous howling battle-cry erupted. He recognised the voice as Gotrek's.\n\nA strange musky scent that Felix had smelled before filled the air. The rat-like shapes turned and fled immediately. The Slayer dashed past into the darkness, the runes on his huge axe glowing in the night, swiftly followed by Snorri Nosebiter. Felix would have raced after them himself, but his human eyes could not see in the gloom like a dwarf's. He flinched as Varek moved up beside him, one of his sinister black bombs in his hands. The firelight reflected off the young dwarf's spectacles and turned his eyes into circles of fire.\n\nThey stood side by side for long tense moments, waiting to hear the sounds of battle, expecting to see the sudden rush of a horde of rat-men. The only sound they heard was the stomping of boots as Gotrek and Snorri returned.\n\n\"Skaven,\" Gotrek spat contemptuously.\n\n\"They ran away,\" Snorri said in a disappointed tone. Treating the event as if nothing untoward had happened, they returned to their places by the fire and cast themselves down to sleep. Felix envied them. He knew that even once his watch had ended, there would be no sleep for him this night.\n\nSkaven, he thought, and shuddered." + }, + { + "title": "THE LONELY TOWER", + "text": "Felix looked down into the mouth of the long valley and was overcome with awe. From where he stood, he could see machines, hundreds of them. Enormous steam engines rose along the valley sides like monsters in riveted iron armour. The pistons of huge pumps went up and down with the regularity of a giant's heartbeat. Steam hissed from enormous rusting pipes which ran between massive red brick buildings. Huge chimneys belched vast clouds of sooty smoke into the air. The air echoed with the clanging of a hundred hammers. The infernal glow of forges illuminated the shadowy interior of workshops. Dozens of dwarfs moved backwards and forwards through the heat and noise and misty clouds.\n\nFor a second the fog cleared as the cold hill wind cut through the valley. Felix could see that one vast structure dominated the length of the dale. It was built from rusting, riveted metal with a corrugated iron roof. It was perhaps three hundred strides long and twenty high. At one end was a massive cast-iron tower, the like of which Felix had never seen before. It was constructed from metal girders, with an observation point and what looked like a monstrous lantern at its very tip.\n\nHigh over the far end of the valley loomed a monstrous squat fortress. Moss clung to its eroded stonework. Felix could make out the gleaming muzzles of cannons high among the battlements. From the middle of the structure loomed a single stone tower. On the face nearest the roof was a massive clock, whose hands showed that it was almost the seventh hour after noon. On the roof, an equally gigantic telescope pointed towards the sky. Even as Felix watched, the hand reached seven o'clock and a bell tolled deafeningly, its echoes filling the valley with sound.\n\nThe eerie wail of what could only have been a steam whistle \u2014 Felix had heard something like it once at the College of Engineering in Nuln \u2014 filled the air. There was a chugging of pistons and the clatter of iron wheels on rails as a small steam-wagon emerged from the mine-head. It moved along iron tracks, carrying heaps and heaps of coal into some great central smelting works.\n\nThe noise was deafening. The smell was overwhelming. The sight was at once monstrous and fascinating, like looking at the innards of some vast and intricate clockwork toy. Felix felt like he was looking down upon a scene of strange sorcery of a kind which, if truly unleashed, might change the world. He had not realised what the dwarfs were capable of, what power their arcane knowledge gave them. He was filled with a wonder so strong that, for a moment it overcame the fear which had been nagging at the back of his mind all day.\n\nThen the thought came back to him, and he remembered the tracks he had seen this morning mingled with the hob-nailed boot prints of the Slayers. There could be no doubt that they belonged to skaven, quite a strong force at that. Felix knew that fearsome as the Slayers were, the rat-men had not fled out of terror. They had retreated because they had other things to do, and getting into a fight with his companions might have slowed them down in the performance of that mission. It was the only possible explanation for why so strong a party of skaven had fled from so few.\n\nLooking at this place now, he understood what the probable objective of the skaven force was. Here was a thing which the followers of the Horned Rat would want to capture \u2014 or destroy. Felix had no idea what was taking place down in that valley but he was certain that it was important because so much industry, energy and intelligence were being expended, and Felix knew that dwarfs did nothing without a purpose.\n\nOnce more, though, he felt his heart start to race. Here was industry on a scale that he had not imagined possible. It had a sordid magnificence and implied a terrifying understanding of things beyond the knowledge of human civilisation. In that moment Felix understood just how much his people had yet to learn from the dwarfs. From beside him he heard a sharp intake of breath.\n\n\"If the Engineers Guild ever finds out about this,\" Gotrek rumbled, \"heads will roll!\"\n\n\"We'd better get down there and tell them about the skaven.\" Felix replied.\n\nGotrek looked at him with something like pride showing in his one mad eye. \"What could those people down there have to fear from a bunch of scabby ratlings?\"\n\nTempted as he was to agree, Felix kept quiet. He was sure that he could think of something, given long enough. After all, the skaven had given him plenty of reasons for terror in the past.\n\nSomewhere off to their right something glinted, like a mirror catching a beam of sunlight. Felix wondered briefly what it was and then dismissed it from his mind as being some part of the wondrous technology he saw being deployed all around him.\n\n\"Let's go tell them anyway,\" he said, wondering why the dwarfs had put something that glittered so brightly amongst a clump of bushes.\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol peered down at the scene through the periscope. The device was yet another magnificent skaven invention, combining the best features of a telescope and a series of mirrors, thus allowing him to watch those unsuspecting fools below unobserved from within the cover of this clump of bushes. Only the lens at the mechanism's tip was visible and he doubted that the dwarfs would notice even that. They were so slow-witted and stupid.\n\nStill, even the grey seer had to admit that there was something magnificent about what the dwarfs had built down there. He wasn't sure what it was but even he, in his secret ratty heart, was impressed. It was fascinating to look at, like one of the mazes he kept for humans back home in Skavenblight. There was so much going on that the eye did not quite know where to look. There was so much activity that he just knew that something important was happening down there \u2014 something that might well rebound to his credit with the Council of Thirteen once he had seized it.\n\nYet again he congratulated himself on his foresight and his intelligence. How many other grey seers would have responded to the reports of a bunch of skavenslaves who had been driven out of the old coal mines beneath the Lonely Tower?\n\nNone of his rivals had paused to consider that there must be something important going on when the dwarfs sent an army to reclaim an old coal mine in these desolate hills. Of course, he had to admit, none of them had had the chance because Thanquol had executed most of the survivors before they had an opportunity to tell anybody else. After all, secrecy was one of the greatest weapons in the skaven arsenal and none knew this better than he. Was he not pre-eminent among grey seers, the feared and potent skaven magicians who ranked just below the Council of Thirteen themselves? And given time even that would change as well. Thanquol knew that it was his destiny to take his rightful place on one of the Council's ancient thrones some day.\n\nAs soon as he was certain the report was true he had journeyed here with his bodyguards. And as soon as he had seen the size of the dwarf encampment, he had sent a summons to the nearest skaven garrison, invoking the name of the Horned Rat and enjoining the strictest secrecy of its commander, on pain of a long, protracted and incredibly agonising death. Now the valley was all but surrounded by a mighty skaven force, and whatever it was that the dwarfs sought to protect would soon be his. This very night he would give the command that would send his invincible furry legions surging forward to inevitable victory.\n\nA flicker of movement attracted Thanquol's attention for a moment, a flutter of red in the breeze which reminded him vaguely of something ominous he had seen in the past. He ignored it and tracked the periscope along the side of the hill, inspecting the potent dwarf-built engines. Greed and a lust to possess them filled him; ignorance of their purpose did nothing to discourage him. He knew that they simply must be worth having. Anything which could make so much noise and create so much smoke was in and of itself a thing to make any skaven's heart beat faster.\n\nSomething about that fluttering scrap of red nagged at his mind but he dismissed it. He began to draw up a plan of attack, studying all the lines of approach along the valley edges. He wished he could summon a huge cloud of poison wind and send it blowing down the valley, killing the dwarfs and leaving their machine intact. The simple beauty of the idea struck him. Perhaps he should sell it to the warp engineers of Clan Skryre the next time he was negotiating with them. Certainly a device which could pump out gas the way those chimneys pumped out smoke would\u2026\n\nWait a moment! The strange familiarity of that flapping scarlet cloak sunk into his forebrain. He suddenly remembered where he'd seen its like before. He remembered a hated human who wore something very similar. But surely\u2026 it couldn't be possible that he was here.\n\nHastily Thanquol twisted the periscope on its collapsible frame. He heard a grunt of pain from the skavenslave to whose back it was strapped, but what did he care? The pain of a slave meant less to him than the fur he shed each morning.\n\nWith a flick of his paws he brought the lenses into focus on the source of his unease. For a shocked instant he fought down an almost overwhelming urge to squirt the musk of fear. He stopped himself only by reminding himself that there was no way that the hairless ape could see him.\n\nThanquol flinched and ducked his horned head down, even though his mighty intelligence told him that he was already out of sight. He looked around to see if his two lackeys, Lurk and Grotz, had noticed his unease. Their blank faces looked up at him placidly and he was reassured that he had not lost face in front of his underlings. He took a pinch of warpstone snuff to calm his shaking nerves, then offered up something which could have been a prayer, or might conceivably have been construed as a curse to the Horned Rat.\n\nHe could not believe it. He simply could not believe it! As plain as the snout on his face, he had seen the human, Felix Jaeger, when he looked through the periscope. He leaned forward and snatched another glance just to be sure. No \u2014 there was no mistake. There he stood, as plain as day. Felix Jaeger, the hated human who had done so much to thwart Thanquol's mighty plans, and who mere months before had almost succeeded, beyond all reason, in disgracing him before the Council of Thirteen!\n\nJustifiable hatred warred with the rational instinct of self-preservation which dominated Thanquol's soul. His first thought was that somehow Jaeger had sought him out and had come all this way to thwart his schemes of glory again. The cold light of logic told him that this could not be the case. Nothing so simple could possibly be true. There was no way that Jaeger could know where to find him. Not even Thanquol's masters on the Council of Thirteen knew his current location. He had cloaked his departure from Skavenblight in the utmost secrecy.\n\nThen the terrifying thought struck Thanquol that perhaps one of his many enemies far away, back in the City of the Horned Rat, had by some arcane means located him, and was feeding the information to the human. It would not be the first time that wicked rat-men had betrayed the righteous skaven cause for their own gain or revenge on those they envied.\n\nThe more he thought of it, the more likely this explanation seemed to Thanquol. Rage bubbled through his veins along with the powdered warpstone. He would find this traitor and crush him like the treacherous worm he was! Already he could think of half a dozen culprits who would be deserving of his inevitable vengeance.\n\nThen another thought struck the grey seer, one which very nearly sent the musk of fear squirting despite all of his efforts at self-control. If Jaeger was present it meant that the other one was most likely there as well. Yes, it meant that most likely the only other being on the planet who Thanquol hated and feared more than Felix Jaeger was there too. He did not doubt, and nor was he mistaken, that when he next looked through the periscope, that he would see the Trollslayer, Gotrek Gurnisson.\n\nIt was all he could do to suppress the mighty squeak of rage and terror that threatened to burst from his lips. He knew he was going to have to think about this.\n\nThe bustling activity of the place became even more evident to Felix as the wagon descended into the valley. All around them groups of dwarfs moved purposefully. Leather aprons protected their burly chests. Sweat ran down their soot-smudged faces. Dozens of odd-looking implements \u2014 which reminded Felix of instruments of torture \u2014 hung from loops on their belts. Some of the dwarfs wore strange-looking armoured suits; others were mounted in small steam-wagons with forked lifting tines on the front. These machines carried heavy crates and packages along the iron rails between the workshops and the central metal structure.\n\nAll around the factory complex a shanty town had sprung up where the dwarfs apparently lived. The buildings were of wood and drystone, with sloping roofs of corrugated metal. They seemed empty, all their occupants were out at work.\n\nFelix looked at Gotrek. \"What is going on here?\"\n\nThere was silence for a long moment as Gotrek appeared to consider whether he should even answer at all. Eventually he spoke in a slow, solemn voice.\n\n\"Manling, you are looking on something I had never thought to see, that perhaps only you of all your people will ever see the like of. It reminds me of the great shipyards of Barak Varr but\u2026 So many forbidden Guild secrets are being used here that I cannot begin to number them.\"\n\n\"All of this is forbidden, you say?\"\n\n\"Dwarfs are a very conservative people. We do not care much for new ideas,\" Varek said suddenly. \"Our engineers are more conservative than most. If you try something and it fails, like poor Makaisson did, then you are ridiculed and there is nothing worse than that to a dwarf. Few are even willing to risk it. And of course some things have been tested and because the tests failed so\u2026 spectacularly\u2026 they were forbidden to be used, by the guild. There are things here which we have known of in theory for centuries, but which only here have we dared put into practice. I know that what my uncle wants to do is considered so important that many talented young dwarfs were prepared to take the risk, to work here in secret on our great project. They think it is worth the attempt.\"\n\n\"And the expense,\" Gotrek said, with something like awe in his voice. \"Somebody spent a pretty penny here, and no mistake.\"\n\n\"Well, and that too,\" Varek said, flushing red to the roots of his beard for no reason that Felix could understand.\n\nGotrek glanced around with a critical eye. \"Not very well fortified, is it?\"\n\nVarek gave an apologetic shrug. \"Things were built so fast, we didn't have time. We've only been here just over a year. And anyway, who would possibly think to attack such an out of the way place as this?\"\n\nGrey Seer Thanquol scuttled back down the slopes to where his army had mustered in the gathering gloom. Clawleaders Grotz and Snitchtongue were already in position at the heads of their respective forces. Both looked at him with the expression of brute submissiveness which he had come to expect from lackeys. The communication amulets he had hammered into their foreheads glittered with the fire of trapped warpstone.\n\nHe looked down on a seething sea of shadowy, rat-like faces, each one set with fierce determination to conquer or die. He felt his tail stiffen with pride as he looked upon this mighty horde of chittering warriors. He could see black armoured stormvermin where they loomed over the lesser clanrat warriors, the masked and heavily muffled warpfire thrower teams, and his own mighty bodyguard, Boneripper, the second rat-ogre to bear that name.\n\nIt was not the most formidable force he had ever commanded. In truth, it was a mere fraction of the size of the force he had led to attack the human city of Nuln. There were no plague monks present, none of the mighty war engines that were the pride of his race. He would have liked a doomwheel or a screaming bell, but there had not been time to drag them here through the tunnels or over the rugged hills to this remote place. Still, he was certain that the hundreds of fine troops standing before him would be enough for his purposes. Particularly attacking at night, and with the benefit of surprise.\n\nAnd yet\u2026 A spasm of doubt shuddered through him and made his fur bristle. The dwarf and Jaeger were present down there and that was a bad omen. Their presence never seemed to augur well for Thanquol's plans. Had they not managed to somehow thwart his invasion of Nuln, and in some not-as-yet-understood way destroyed an entire skaven army? Had they not forced the grey seer himself to beat a hasty but prudent tactical withdrawal through the sewers, while the streets above ran black with skaven blood?\n\nThanquol dribbled some more warpstone snuff onto the back of his paw from the manskin pouch he always carried. He stuck his snout into it and sniffed, and felt anger and confidence surge back into his brain. Visions of death, mutilation and other wonderful things flooded through his soaring mind. Now he felt sure that victory would be his. How could anything resist his mighty powers? Nothing could stand in the way of the supreme skaven sorcery he commanded!\n\nHis hidden enemies back in Skavenblight had overreached themselves when they sent Jaeger and Gurnisson here. They thought to strike a blow against Thanquol by using his bitterest enemies to smite him! Well, he would show them that what they believed was cunning was merely sorely misguided folly! All they had succeeded in doing was placing the two fools he most wanted to humble within the grasp of his mighty paw. They had provided him with the opportunity to take a most terrible vengeance on his two most hated foes, while at the same time covering himself with glory by seizing the machinery the dwarfs had built in this place!\n\nSurely, he thought as the foul stuff bubbled like molten Chaos through his veins, this would be his greatest triumph, his finest hour! For a millennium, skaven would speak in hushed whispers about Grey Seer Thanquol's cunning, ruthlessness and awesome intelligence. He could almost taste victory already.\n\nHe raised his paw and gave the signal for silence. As one, the entire horde laid off its chittering. Hundreds of red eyes looked at him expectantly. Whiskers twitched in anticipation of his words.\n\n\"Now we will smashcrush the dwarfs like beetle-bugs!\" he squeaked in his most impressive, oratorical tones. \"We will roll over the valley from both sides and nothing will stop us. Forward, brave skaven, to inevitable victory!\"\n\nThe horde's squeaking rose in volume until it filled his ears. He knew that tonight victory would certainly be his.\n\nFelix shivered as he walked. A sense of foreboding filled his mind. Instinctively, he threw his cloak back over his right shoulder to free his sword arm. His hand strayed to the hilt of his sword, and he felt a sudden urge to pull it free and be ready to fight.\n\nThe castle loomed high above them, and he could see from this close that it was not quite as formidable as it looked from a distance. The walls were cracked and weakened; in some places the stone had crumbled away entirely. Despite what Varek had claimed, the work of the dwarfs did not in any way appear to have increased the defensibility of the place. Although Felix was no expert, he could see that Gotrek's claim that the place was not particularly well fortified was true. If they were to be attacked, this whole valley would turn out to be one big death-trap.\n\nThey were almost at the castle now. Their road had led all the way to the foot of the cliffs on top of which the castle sat. Despite the gathering gloom, Felix could spy an old dwarf with an enormously long beard who had emerged onto a turreted balcony above the castle portcullis. The ancient waved. Felix was about to wave back when he realised that the dwarf was greeting Gotrek. The Slayer looked up, gave a sullen grunt and raised his ham-like fist up a few inches in greeting.\n\n\"Gotrek Gurnisson,\" the old dwarf called. \"I never thought I would see you again!\"\n\n\"Nor did I,\" Gotrek muttered. He sounded almost embarrassed.\n\nLurk Snitchtongue felt his heart beat faster with pride, excitement \u2014 and a certain justifiable caution. Grey Seer Thanquol had chosen him to lead the attack, while the skaven mage observed the battle site from the slopes to the rear. It was the proudest moment of Lurk's life and he felt an emotion which could almost have been described as gratitude to Thanquol, had gratitude not been a weak, foolish, un-skaven emotion. He had not been so happy since he had recovered from the plague which had threatened his life back in Nuln. It appeared he had been forgiven for his part in the failure in that great human warren. Once again he was Grey Seer Thanquol's favoured emissary. Of course, if Grey Seer Thanquol ever found out how Lurk had conspired with his enemies during the Nuln fiasco\u2026\n\nLurk pushed that thought aside. He knew that if this attack succeeded he would be well rewarded with breeders, warptokens and promotion within the ranks of his clan. More than that, he would gain a great deal of prestige, which to a skaven like him was worth more than any of the other things. Those siblings who had sneered at him, mocked and ridiculed him behind his back would be silenced. They would know that Lurk had led his mighty horde to victory over the dwarfs.\n\nThe thought sidled sideways into his mind that it might even be possible to eliminate Thanquol and claim credit for this operation himself. He dismissed the idea as absurd immediately, fearing that the mage even now might be reading his thoughts through the amulet on his brow, but somehow the wicked notion stayed put, leaping into his consciousness despite all his attempts to suppress it.\n\nHe cast around for something to distract himself, and felt his heart race with anxiety. They had almost reached the crest of the hill and still they had not been spotted. Soon would come the moment of truth. As they broached the hilltop they would become visible to the dwarfs below unless their advance was concealed by the night and smoke. He raised his claw in the sign for silence. All around him, his stormvermin stalked near-silently forward, save only for the occasional clanking of sheath against armour that most likely would not be noticed by their dull-witted opponents.\n\nIt was not the slight noises of the stormvermin which worried Lurk. It was the racket that those stupid clan rat warriors and skaven slaves were making! Lacking the imperial discipline of the stormvermin, and the long hours of training, they were making a great deal of noise. Some of them were even chittering among themselves, trying to keep their morale up in the traditional skaven way \u2014 by boasting to each other about what torments they would inflict on their prisoners.\n\nMuch as Lurk sympathised with their sentiments, he swore that he would have those chatterers' lips sewn shut after his inevitable victory. Since he could not see who was talking at this distance, he decided that he would just have to pull out a few clanrats at random and make an example of them.\n\nBy now he knew that Clawleader Grotz was most likely in position on the other side of the valley. With typical skaven precision, they would be in place ready to sweep down on both sides of the valley, taking the surprised stunties from two sides and drowning them under a furry wave of unstoppable skaven might!\n\nHe looked around him and offered a silent prayer in hope that the warriors remembered his last feverish instructions \u2014 no burning of buildings, no taking of loot. Grey Seer Thanquol wanted everything left in one piece so that they could sell it to the warp engineers. He froze for a moment, almost hesitant to give the order to attack. Then the thought that Grotz might already be sweeping down on the valley and seizing all the glory took hold of him and swept away what remained of his caution. He crawled up the slope and looked down into the valley, driven on by the comforting smell of the mass of skaven around him.\n\nThe dwarfish settlement stretched out below him. By night it was even more impressive than by day. The flames of the foundries and the fires within the smokestacks illuminated the place with an eerie glow which was reminiscent of the great city of Skavenblight. The buildings bulked vast and shadowy in the gloom.\n\nLurk hoped there were no unpleasant surprises waiting down there, but then realised that it was impossible for there to be. Had not the great Grey Seer Thanquol himself planned this attack?\n\nVolgar Volgarsson stared out into the gathering darkness and tugged his beard distractedly. He was getting mightily hungry, and the thought of the ale and stew which the others would be digging into down in the Great Hall made his mouth water. He patted his belly just to make sure it was still there. After all, he hadn't eaten a morsel in over four hours. Except, of course, for that loaf of bread and hunk of cheese, but that hardly counted at all, not by Volgar's standards.\n\nBy Grungni, he hoped that Morkin would hurry up and relieve him. It was cold and uncomfortable up here in this sentry post and Volgar was a dwarf who valued his comforts. Of course, he was proud in his way to be part of the great work going on here, but there was a limit. He knew he wasn't smart enough to be an engineer and he was too clumsy to help in the manufacturing, so he did what he could, acting as a guard and sentry, spending long lonely hours with nary a morsel of food in this chill, damp place, keeping a look-out for anyone or anything creeping up on the valley.\n\nHe knew his position was a good one. The sentry's pillbox was set in the ground, with only an observation slot looking out on the far side of the valley. There were similar such posts on the other side and looking down on the road. All he had to do was keep an eye open for trouble and if he spotted anything nasty sound the horn. Simple really.\n\nAnd in a way it was actually a good posting. What trouble could there possibly be in this gods-forsaken spot? Ever since they had kicked the skaven out, there had not been the slightest hint of a problem. Now there had been a good fight, Volgar told himself, taking a long pull from his hip flask, just to keep the chill away, of course. They'd helped settle the score for a few grudges against the rat-men there. Over a hundred of the furry little buggers killed and barely a dwarf scratched. He belched loudly to show his appreciation.\n\nIt had been so quiet that Volgar had even managed a quick nap this afternoon. He was sure he had missed nothing. That was the one good thing about the settlement being so undermanned.\n\nThere was no troublesome fellow sentry to keep you awake with their talk about ale and the grudges they would settle when they got back to Karaz-a-Karak. Volgar liked a good natter about score-settling as much as the next dwarf but he preferred his kip more. Couldn't beat a good snooze right after luncheon. It helped set you up proper for the rest of the day.\n\nAnd now, well, his dwarfish eyes were good at night, and his dwarfish ears, attuned to listening to the warning hints concealed within the sounds of subsidence in the depths of the earth, were more than capable of alerting him to any trouble. If there was anything out of the ordinary \u2014 like that faint scuttling sound \u2014 or even something which sounded like the clink of weapon on weapon \u2014 like the noise he had just heard, in fact \u2014 he would notice it in an instant, and be ready to respond.\n\nVolgar shook his head. Was he hearing things? No, there it was again, and there was a faint high-pitched chittering as well. It sounded just like skaven. He rubbed his eyes to clear them of any obscuring film and peered out through the observation slot into the darkness. His eyes were not deceiving him. A tide of shadowy rat-like shapes were flowing up the hill all around him. Their beady red eyes glittered in the darkness.\n\nHis hand almost shook as he grasped the sentry horn. He knew that if he kept quiet, the skaven would most likely pass him by. They obviously hadn't spotted his concealed outpost. If instead he gave the signal, then he was going to die. He would give away his position to the horde which surrounded him and they would swarm over it like flies on carrion. The door behind him was strongly barred but it would not hold them forever, and then there was the poison gas and the flame-throwers, and all the other strange skaven weapons he had heard of. One poison globe through the observation slot and that would be the end for old Volgar.\n\nOn the other hand, if he did not give the signal, his companions would be overwhelmed by the rat-men, and would most likely die in his stead. The great work they were embarked on would fail and it would all be his fault. If he lived, he would have to live with the shame that he had brought on not only himself but on his ancestors.\n\nVolgar was a dwarf, and for all his flaws he had a dwarf's pride. He took a last long pull from his flask, wasted a second on a final regretful thought of the dinner he was never going to have, took a deep breath, put the horn to his lips and blew." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The lonely bellow of the horn filled the valley. It seemed to come from below the earth itself. Felix looked around wildly.\n\n\"What was that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Trouble,\" Gotrek responded cheerfully, pointing at the vast horde of skaven swarming over the brow of the hill and into the valley." + }, + { + "title": "THE SKAVEN ATTACK", + "text": "Felix watched in abject horror as the dark tide of skaven flowed down the hill towards him. He was unsure how many there were but it looked like hundreds, maybe thousands \u2014 it was hard to tell in the darkness. He whirled to investigate as a great clamour arose behind him. Looking up he saw yet more skaven entering the valley from the other side. The jaws of a huge trap were closing.\n\nFelix fought down a surge of panic. Somehow, no matter how many times he had been in situations like this \u2014 and he had been in many \u2014 it never got any easier. He felt a sick feeling spread in the pit of his stomach, a tenseness in his muscles, and somehow a strange light-headedness too. His mouth was dry and his own heartbeat sounded loud in his ears. Just for once he would have liked to have been calm and relaxed in the face of danger, or filled with furious berserker rage like all those heroes in the storybooks. As always, it didn't happen.\n\nAll around him, dwarfs were downing tools and snatching up weapons. Horns sounded, each one with a different tone, their long notes like the wails of souls in torment, adding to the cacophony all around. Felix turned again and was about to make a sprint for the portal of the castle when he realised that no one else was doing that. All around him dwarfs raced through the gloom towards the enemy.\n\nWere they all mad, Felix wondered? Why did they not make a dash for the safety of the castle? Unsound as its walls appeared, they would doubtless have a better chance within them. It would almost certainly be safer inside the keep but these crazy dwarfs paid no attention.\n\nHe froze momentarily, overcome with curiosity and apprehension. The thought struck him that perhaps there was some good reason why they weren't going into the keep\u2026 and perhaps finding out that reason for himself was not such a good idea.\n\nSlowly it percolated into Felix's panicking brain that the dwarfs were not going to leave their machines in the hands of the skaven. They were prepared to fight and, if need be, die in defence of these monstrous smoke-belching mechanisms. It showed a determination that was either truly impressive or monumentally stupid, Felix could not decide which.\n\nWhile he was still making up his mind, an ominous clanking sound started up from behind him, followed by the ring of metal on stone. He turned just in time to see the keep's portcullis slam down. From inside he heard the grinding of gears and the whistling of a steam engine's boiler, then the enormous chains which held the drawbridge in place tightened and begin to raise the wooden structure. Suddenly there was a deep ditch between him and the castle. At least someone inside was showing some sense, Felix thought, even if they had trapped him outside in what promised to be a mad melee.\n\nA thunderous roar erupted from the castle above. A huge cloud of smoke belched above his head and the acrid smell of ignited gunpowder filled the air. Felix realised that someone above had wit enough to bring one of the cannons to bear. There was a whistling sound and then an explosion ripped through the darkness. A dozen of the charging skaven were thrown into the air. Limbs flew in one direction, torsos in another. The dwarfs let out a loud cheer; the skaven emitted what sounded like a long hiss of hatred.\n\nAll around him dwarfs raced into battle positions. Deep voices bawled out harsh guttural words in the ancient dwarf language. Felix felt lost and alone in the midst of this maelstrom of furious and yet somehow ordered activity. He could see that from the mad whirl of shouting and running dwarfs a coherent pattern was starting to emerge. The engineers and warriors were taking up their places beside their brethren in the line. Felix felt that he was the only one here who did not seem to have some idea where he was supposed to go.\n\nThey were all rallying around the horns, Felix suddenly realised, and now the different notes made sense. They were like those individual bells he had seen on the cattle a few days before. They identified their owners, gave his comrades a point to rally to, a nucleus around which a hard armoured shell could form.\n\nFelix could see now that this was a tactic which had long been drilled into the dwarfs, until they had it down perfectly. Where a few moments ago there had been a mass of disorganised souls just begging to be massacred, now there were well-disciplined ranks of dwarf warriors, wheeling to face their foes, marching with a discipline that would have shamed imperial pike-men. Perhaps whoever was in charge here knew what he was doing, Felix thought. Perhaps this was not going to be the utter bloody slaughter he had feared only a few moments ago.\n\nHe wasn't sure it would be enough, judging by the size of the skaven force tearing down the hill, picking up speed like a juggernaut, gathering what looked like irresistible momentum for its charge. The seething furry horde was so close now that he could see individual skaven, make out their foam-covered lips, the rabid fanaticism in their eyes. Some of them were larger, more muscular, and better armoured than others. He had fought such beasts in the past and knew that they would be the toughest. He kept his eyes peeled for any of those clumsy, awkward and yet oh-so-deadly field weapons the skaven loved, but mercifully could see none present.\n\nSuddenly Felix felt very alone. He was not part of any of those hastily assembled dwarfish units. There was no one beside him to watch his back. Perhaps in the darkness the dwarfs might even take him for a foe. There was only one place for him here. He looked around for Gotrek but overcome with battle-lust he and Snorri had raced off to get closer to the foe.\n\nFelix spat out a curse and clambered hastily onto the wagon, to get a better view of his surroundings. He noticed that Varek was sitting there, peering interestedly out into the gloom, occasionally laying the bomb he held in his hand down on the seat beside him, and scratching a note in the book before him with what looked like some strange mechanical pen. His eyes glittered feverishly behind his glasses.\n\n\"Isn't this exciting, Felix?\" he asked. \"A real battle! This is the first one I've ever been in.\"\n\n\"Pray it isn't your last\u2026\" Felix muttered, taking a few practice sweeps with his sword, hoping to loosen his tense muscles before the horde smashed into the dwarf line. He took a quick glance around hoping that he would be able to pick out Gotrek.\n\nThe Slayer was nowhere in sight.\n\nFrom his perch on the hill high above the battle, Grey Seer Thanquol peered down at his seeing stone. It lay blank and dormant before him. Within its depths there was perhaps a tiny flicker of warpfire, undetectable save to an eye as keen and all-seeing as Thanquol's.\n\nIndeed, to the untrained skaven eye it looked merely like a large multi-faceted piece of coloured glass inscribed with the Thirteen Most Sacred Symbols. Thanquol knew enough about the race of man to know that to a human eye, it would look like some tawdry gewgaw used by a sideshow fakir. He was also wise enough to know that the human eye would be mightily deceived, for this was a most potent artefact indeed.\n\nAt least, he hoped so. The raw moon-crystal had cost Thanquol many warptokens. The carving of those runes, each one inscribed on a different moonless night, had cost Thanquol much lost sleep. The embedding of potent spells within the crystal had been paid for in blood and pain, some of it the grey seer's.\n\nNow was the moment to find out whether it had all been worth it. It was time, thought Thanquol, to begin to use his new toy. Hastily he scratched runes in the hard earth around him, making the Thirteen Sacred Signs of the Horned Rat with practised ease. Next he put his thumb into his muzzle and bit hard. His sharp teeth drew blood, though he hardly felt a thing through the haze of powdered warpstone snuff and the seething sorcerous energies which filled his brain.\n\nBlack blood dripped from the wound. He held his thumb out over the first rune. A droplet impacted in the centre of the symbol and as it did so Thanquol spoke a word of power, a secret name of the Horned Rat. Immediately the fluid vaporised into a puff of acrid smoke, forming a small skull-like mushroom cloud over the rune. The symbol flared to life, lines of green fire illuminating its outline brilliantly before fading down into a less lurid yet still visible glow.\n\nQuickly and expertly Thanquol repeated the procedure with every rune and, once that was completed, he carefully dribbled three final droplets of his own precious blood onto the seeing stone itself. Instantly a dim picture flickered into life. He could make out the scene of chaos and imminent carnage in the valley below as if looking down on it from a great height, then the picture flickered and a cloud of static filled the stone. Thanquol administered an irritated thump to the side of the crystal and the picture cleared and settled. The sight of the battle came into view as clear as day. Well almost \u2014 there was a faint greenish tinge to the picture that would not go away, no matter how many gentle taps and thumps of adjustment Thanquol administered.\n\nNo matter! Thanquol felt like the master of some vast and secret game. All those skaven below were now but pieces for him to command. Pawns to be moved by his mighty paw. Tokens to be placed on the board and guided by his titanic intelligence. He took another pinch of warpstone snuff and almost howled with glee. He felt his power to be infinite. There was nothing like it, this sensation of control, of mastery. Best of all, he could exercise his power from well out of sight and personal danger. Not that he feared danger, of course, it was merely sensible to keep himself out of the way of unnecessary risks. It was every grey seer's greatest dream come true!\n\nThanquol allowed himself to gloat for a long moment, then gave his attention to the battle, trying to decide in exactly which spectacular way he would seize victory and immortal fame among skavenkind.\n\nFelix splayed his feet wider, trying to find his balance on the back of the wagon. The vehicle rocked slightly on its suspension and he wondered whether it was wise to stand here. On the one hand, the footing was unsure and he was a conspicuous target standing upright on the wagon's back. On the other hand, at least up here he had the advantage of being on somewhat higher ground and having partial cover from the wagon's sides. He decided to remain where he was for the moment \u2014 and to jump to the ground at the first sign of missile fire. That was the logical thing to do. Besides, it looked like someone would have to stay here and look after Varek.\n\nThe unworldly young dwarf was scribbling away for all he was worth in his book. Felix was amazed that he could see to write. He knew from his long association with Gotrek that dwarfs could see in the dark better than humans, but here was astonishing proof of the fact. By the flickering furnace light, which showed Felix only the barest of outlines of objects, the young dwarf was writing for all the world like a scribe copying a manuscript by candlelight If nothing else, it was an amazing feat of concentration.\n\nTo tell the truth Felix would have been happier if Varek paid more attention to the mules. The animals were showing distinct signs of distress as the skaven raced ever closer.\n\nFelix glanced nervously about them, wondering if any of those nasty skaven assassins with poison blades were skulking around. It was unlike the rat-men to go for a simple frontal assault without springing some nasty, sneaky surprises. He knew from bitter experience what they were capable of. He nudged Varek gently with the tip of his boot.\n\n\"Best pay attention to the mules,\" he said. \"They look restless.\"\n\nVarek nodded amiably, put his pen back in his capacious pockets, snapped his book shut and picked up his bomb.\n\nSomehow Felix was not reassured." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Thanquol glared into the seeing stone with furious concentration. He placed a paw on either side of it and chittered frantic invocations, trying to keep control of his point of view. It was not nearly as easy to control as he would have liked.\n\nHe raised his right claw and the point of view swung up and to the right. He clenched his paw into a fist and punched it forward, and the viewpoint shifted until he had a panoramic view of the battlefield. He saw the skaven loping down the hillside towards the hastily marshalling dwarfs. He saw the great furry spearheads of stormvermin aimed directly at the centre of the assembling dwarf host. He saw the flanking forces of clanrats and skavenslaves running somewhat less enthusiastically by their sides. He saw his bodyguard, Boneripper, running along beside Lurk Snitchtongue.\n\nThe keep above the valley looked like a ratchild's toy when viewed from this height, and the whole vast intricate structure of the dwarf camp looked suspiciously ordered and patterned, almost as if every building, pipe and chimney were the component of one vast machine. It was all very fascinating and he had to fight to keep his attention on the upcoming conflict. One of the side-effects of warpstone snuff was that the user could become enthralled by the most trivial things, losing himself in contemplation of the majesty of his toenails while all around cities burned. Thanquol was an experienced enough sorcerer to be aware of this, but sometimes even he forgot for a moment. And it was such a tantalising scene, so\u2026 He wrenched his thoughts back to the battle and willed his point of view to shift, zooming in like the eyes of a bird on the centre of the dwarf lines, to the wagon on which Felix Jaeger stood, sword in hand, looking tense and justifiably afraid.\n\nA simple but brilliant plan struck the grey seer. He had some doubts as to whether this Boneripper could handle the Slayer any better than his predecessor had, but he had no doubts whatsoever that the monster could slaughter that Jaeger. He had some special instructions for the rat-ogre concerning the human and he knew that the fierce, loyal and stupid brute would obey them to the death. In a glorious rush, he knew that Felix Jaeger's painful death was assured.\n\nHaving located his intended victim, Thanquol sent his sorcerous gaze questing back in search of Boneripper. When he found the monstrous hybrid of rat and ogre, he muttered another spell which would allow his thoughts to communicate with those of his henchling.\n\nHe felt a sudden dizziness and the blast furnace of hunger, rage and brute stupidity that was the rat-ogre's consciousness. Swiftly he placed the image of Jaeger's position in the monster's mind and gave his instructions: Go, Boneripper, kill!! Kill! Kill!\n\nFelix shivered. He knew someone was watching him. He could almost feel the burning eyes boring into his back. He glanced around, certain that he would see some malevolent skaven ready to plunge a knife between his shoulder blades, but when he did so, no one was there.\n\nSlowly the eerie feeling passed from him, to be replaced by a more immediate worry. The skaven were almost upon them! He could hear their chittering, and their crude weapons clashing terrifyingly on their shields. With a great rushing hiss, a flight of bolts flashed overhead from the castle battlements. Dwarf crossbowmen were at work firing into the nearest and largest skaven. A few of them fell, but not enough to slow the skaven advance. Their fellows simply ran on, trampling their fallen comrades into the dirt, in their frantic haste to enter combat.\n\nAn enormous roar filled Felix's ears, the deep basso rumbling of a creature far larger than a human. The mules whinnied and reared in terror, fear foam frothing from their lips. Felix shifted his weight to keep his balance as the wagon shifted. He turned his head, gripped his sword tightly and turned to look at the monster he knew was behind him.\n\nThis time his premonition was correct.\n\nLurk fought the fear which filled him, threatening to overwhelm his ratty frame. It was a sensation that he was used to. It nagged at his mind and told him to scamper from the fray, chittering with fright. With the mass of his fellows around him, he knew he could not do that without being trampled so instead, as he knew it would, the fear turned inward and like a dammed river flowed in a new direction.\n\nSuddenly he wanted desperately to get into combat, to face the source of his terror \u2014 to rend it with his weapons, stamp on its recumbent corpse, to bury his muzzle in its dead flesh and tear out its still warm entrails. Only by doing this could he slow his racing heart, fight down the urge to void his musk glands, and end this anxiety which was almost too terrible to be borne.\n\n\"Quick-quick! Follow me!\" he chittered and, racing forward, hurled himself at a burly leather-aproned dwarf armed with an axe." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Felix doubted that he had ever come face to face with a humanoid creature quite so big. Even the monsters he had fought in the streets of Nuln were small by comparison. This thing was huge, immense. Its monstrous head, a distorted parody of that of a rat, was level with his own, despite the fact that he was standing high atop the back of a wagon. Its shoulders were almost as broad as the wagon itself, and its long muscular arms reached almost to the ground. Its vast hands ended in wicked curving claws that looked capable of shredding mailed armour. Enormous pus-filled boils erupted through its thin and mangy fur. A long hairless tail lashed the air angrily. Red eyes, filled with insane bestial hatred, glared into his own.\n\nFelix's heart sank. The beast had come for him, he just knew it. There was a look of feral recognition in its malevolent eyes, and something oddly familiar in the way that it tilted its head to one side. A pink tongue flickered over its lips, suggesting an obscene and all-consuming hunger for human flesh. Sharp rending teeth, each as long as a dagger, showed themselves in its mouth. The creature let out another triumphant bellow \u2014 and reached for him.\n\nIt was all too much for the mules. Frenzied with fear, they reared and fled. The wagon lurched forward, almost tipping as the terrified beasts turned just in time to avoid the ditch around the keep. The wagon hit a rock and bounced, sending Felix sprawling in the back. He had just enough presence of mind to hold on to his sword.\n\nThe rat-ogre behind them gaped at him in stupid astonishment and then lurched forward in pursuit.\n\n\"No!\" Thanquol shrieked, seeing Jaeger slip from Boneripper's grasp. The power of the seeing stone let him view the scene from close up. He had gloated in delight at the look of horror and apprehension on the man's face, felt a thrill of anticipation as Boneripper prepared to reach out, pull off his arm and eat it in front of Jaeger's horror-struck eyes \u2014 and been appalled when the mules had pulled the wagon into motion.\n\nIt was all so unfair.\n\nAnd yet somehow it was typical of the human's luck that, just as he was about to receive his well-merited doom, those dumb brute creatures should save him. It was galling that the man should still be alive and unharmed, instead of writhing in agony. Briefly and bitterly Thanquol wondered whether Jaeger had been born simply to thwart him, and then pushed the notion aside. He sent another thought arcing towards Boneripper: What are you waiting for, idiotfool beast? Get after him! Follow quick-quick! Kill! Kill! Kill!\n\nFelix rolled about in the back of the wagon, instinctively trying to get his footing. He could hear Varek calling to the mules, trying to calm them and bring them under control. Briefly Felix wondered whether this was wise. At the speed they were currently moving they were at least keeping ahead of the rat-ogre\u2026 weren't they?\n\nHe managed to get his hands underneath him at last, and pushed himself up onto his knees. As he stuck his head above the level of the wagon's tailboard, he saw that the monster was pursuing them and closing the distance with appalling speed. Its long stride was covering the ground as fast as any charger. Its yellow fangs gleamed in the light of the furnaces. Its long tongue lolled out. It brandished its claws furiously. Felix knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that if ever he got within range of those talons he was going to die.\n\nHe heard something metallic rolling about on the floor of the wagon, then felt something cold and hard brush against his leg. He reached down and found that it was one of Varek's bombs. It must have rolled off the wagon seat when the animals shied. He almost dropped the thing in fright. He felt like at any moment it might explode; in truth, he was surprised that it hadn't done so already. He was tempted simply to lob it from him as fast and as far as he dared, when the thought struck him that that was exactly what he should do.\n\nHe fumbled the orb up in front of his face, fighting to hold onto it as the wagon lurched again, throwing him painfully against the wooden side wall. In the half-light, he could see the firing pin in the top and the complex cumbersome mechanism below. He frantically tried to remember how it worked. Let's see: you pull the pin, then you've got five \u2014 no!\u2014four heartbeats in which to throw it. Yes, that was it.\n\nHe dared to glance up again. The rat-ogre was closer. It seemed like it was almost on top of them. In mere moments it was going to leap into the back of the wagon and shred his flesh with those awful claws and fangs. Felix decided he could wait no longer. He pulled the pin.\n\nHe felt resistance as the pin came free, and something long and soft whipped into his hand. As he did so he noticed sparks coming from the top of the bomb. It seemed that there was a string attached to the pin, and the string was attached to some sort of mechanical flint-striker. When you pulled the pin, the flint struck, lighting the fuse. All of these thoughts flickered idly through his head as he rapidly counted up to three.\n\nOne. The rat-ogre was only a few strides away, moving impossibly fast, a look of awful hunger distorting its face. From behind him, he could hear Varek beginning to shout \"Whoa\u2014\"\n\nTwo. The monster was so close now that Felix could almost count its monstrous tusk-sized teeth. He was uncomfortably aware of the huge claws reaching out to grasp him. He knew that he wasn't going to make it. Perhaps he should just throw the bomb now. Varek called \"\u2014oa\u2014\"\n\nThree. Felix lobbed the bomb. It arced towards the creature, its fizzling fuse leaving a trail of sparks spraying behind it. The rat-ogre opened its mouth to bellow in triumph \u2014 and the bomb went in. Another lurch of the wagon threw Felix flat, slamming painfully on to the wooden boards. Varek finished shrieking \"\u2014aaaa!\"\n\nTime seemed to stretch out for a hour. Felix lay on the floor gasping hard, remembering what Varek said about these bombs often not working, expecting at any second to feel the great razorlike claws burying themselves in his neck and to be hefted from the back of the wagon. Then he heard a dull crump, and something horribly moist and jelly-like splattered onto his hair and face. It took a few moments for Felix to realise that he was covered in blood and brains.\n\nThanquol watched Boneripper's head explode and cursed the stupid brute long and loudly. It was true, he thought: if you want a bone gnawed properly, you had to gnaw it yourself. The foul and unreliable monster had been so close. Jaeger had been almost within his grasp. If the dumb brute had not swallowed the bomb, the human would now be writhing in pain. It was almost as if Boneripper had done it deliberately just to frustrate him. Perhaps the creature had been in league with his hidden enemies. Perhaps its idiot brain had been tampered with during its creation. Stranger things had happened.\n\nThanquol chewed his tail with frustration for a moment and expended a hundred furious curses on Boneripper, Felix Jaeger and every rival in skavendom he could think of. If pure malevolent wishes had been enough, their bones would have been filled with molten lead, their heads would have exploded and their guts turned to rotting pus in that singular moment. Unfortunately, such fine things were beyond even Thanquol's sorcerous powers at this range. Eventually he calmed, and contented himself with the thought that there was more than one way to skin a baby. He sent his point of view soaring over the larger battlefield once more.\n\nFortunately here things were going better. At a glance Thanquol saw that most of the dwarfish units had formed up in squares ready to resist the two-pronged skaven attack. The initial skaven rush has reached the dwarfish line. It had broken against it like the sea crashing down on a rock but the stormvermin, at least, were still fighting. As more clanrats and slaves poured into the melee, slowly the weight of numbers was starting to tell. Even as he watched, one closely packed dwarf unit started to break up and the melee became close and general. Under such circumstances, the greater number of skaven was a considerable advantage.\n\nThanquol saw one dwarf warrior bludgeon a stormvermin with his hammer, only to be leapt on from behind by a skavenslave. While the dwarf frantically tried to dislodge his clinging foe, he was dragged down like a deer surrounded by hounds by the rat-man's fellows. As he disappeared under the pile of skaven bodies, he managed a last blow with his hammer, smashing a clanrat's skull and sending blood and fragments of brain and bone everywhere. Thanquol felt no pity for the dead skaven. He would gladly make such a trade for a dwarf life with every heartbeat. There were always plenty more stupid warriors where those had come from. Thanquol knew that out of all skaven, only he was truly irreplaceable.\n\nThanquol watched happily as the green blaze flung from a warpfire thrower incinerated a clutch of dwarfs, melting their armour, causing their beards to ignite, reducing them first to skeletons and then to wind-blown dust within mere heartbeats. He was considering rewarding the weapon team when they themselves vanished in an enormous green fireball, killed by their own malfunctioning weapon. Still, thought Thanquol, at least they served the greater purpose\u2026 his purpose.\n\nSlowly but surely, across the whole battlefield the tide was turning in favour of the skaven. The dwarfs were well-disciplined and brave in their foolish way, but they had been caught unprepared. Many of them were unarmoured and equipped only with the hammers they had been using to work with. They were inflicting incredible casualties on the skaven but these were meaningless. Thanquol did not care if they slaughtered his entire force, just so long as the dwarfs were all dead by the end of the evening. So far, he congratulated himself heartily, things were going just exactly as he planned \u2014 except on one corner of the battlefield.\n\nSwift as thought, he sent his view arcing towards the disturbance. Somehow he was not surprised to find two burly shaven-headed figures hewing a path of bloody carnage through his troops. One of them he recognised instantly as the hated figure of Gotrek Gurnisson.\n\nThe other was new to Thanquol, but just as fearsome in his own way. Where Gurnisson fought armed only with that appallingly powerful axe, the second Slayer fought with a smaller axe in one hand and large hammer in the other.\n\nThe slaughter the pair wreaked was immense. With every blow at least one skaven fell. Sometimes Gurnisson would drive his axe through several bodies at once, hewing through skaven flesh and bone as if it were matchwood. At that moment Thanquol would have given anything for the presence of some jezzail teams. He would have ordered those cunning skaven snipers to pick off the gruesome pair from a distance. Still, there was no point in wishing for what you could not have. He would just have to do something about the pair himself.\n\nHis initial gambit was to send tendrils of his thought out to the leaders of two of his units, drawing them away from the main melee and into combat with the Slayers. It was regrettable that this would relieve pressure on the embattled dwarfs, but also necessary. Thanquol knew that he could not take the chance of leaving those two free to slaughter at will. It was sound good sense, as well as gratifying to his personal desire that Gotrek Gurnisson and his comrade should die.\n\nLurk looked up in disbelief as the voice spoke within his head. Take your squad to your left and slaughter those two Slayers.\n\nHe recognised the voice at once as belonging to Grey Seer Thanquol. A vivid picture of his route through the melee towards the tattooed dwarfs appeared in his mind. For a moment he considered the fact that he might be hallucinating but the voice spoke again in the familiar imperious chittering style which Lurk knew so well. What are you waiting for, foolscum? Go now-now or I will eat your heart!\n\nLurk decided that it would be best to obey. \"At once, most superlative of sorcerers,\" he muttered. He shrieked for his troops to follow him and raced off in the direction he had been ordered.\n\nDrawn by the panicked mules, the wagon raced through the melee out of control. Hastily dwarfs and skaven threw themselves aside to avoid the creatures' flailing hooves. Felix rolled about in the back, trying frantically to regain his balance. He could hear Varek alternately shouting at the mules to stop and laughing maniacally as he tossed bombs into onrushing groups of skaven. It did not seem to have occurred to him that every time the tired mules appeared about to slow down, he spooked them some more by lobbing another of his explosive devices. It did not surprise Felix in the least that the poor mules were terrified. The bombs had that effect on him too. Every moment he half-feared that one of the devices would explode in Varek's hand, destroying the wagon and sending the dwarf and Felix straight to the grave.\n\nEvery so often he managed to pull himself above the level of the wagon's sides and he caught glimpses of sights that he knew would be burned into his memory forever. Some of the buildings had caught fire and the blaze was spreading. Clouds of sparks and soot floated on the wind. Perhaps other dwarfs had used bombs like Varek, perhaps it was the effect of some dread skaven weapon or sorcery, but Felix did not doubt that the conflagration would consume the entire complex. Already flames gouted from the great chimneys, fitfully illuminating the battle to produce a selection of scenes from some lunatic vision of hell.\n\nHe saw a skaven burst out from one the foundry buildings, its entire body in flames, burning hair trailing from its body like a comet's tail. The horrible but tantalising smell of scorched flesh filled the air. The creature's agonised squeaks were shrill and audible even above the roar of the battle. As he watched, the dying rat-man threw itself on a dwarf warrior and held on like grim death. The flames from its body lapped around its victim and the dwarf's clothing began to smoulder, even as he put the creature out of its death agony with a swift blow of his axe.\n\nThe wagon shuddered and bounced over the ground. Something cracked and there was hideous sensation of snapping and grinding. Looking backwards Felix could see they had run over the corpse of a dwarf. The wheel had squashed its chest, and blood and pulped flesh oozed from its mouth and beard.\n\nSteam blinded him, and his skin felt momentarily scorched. Condensation gathered on his blade and brow, and he had a horrible feeling that this must be what it would be like to be boiled alive. After a brief, agonising moment they emerged from the cloud of steam. He saw then that one of the great pipes was broken, steam spraying freely across the battlefield. As he watched, a dwarf and two skaven rolled free of the cloud, hands still locked around each other's throats. The dwarf's face was lobster red and great patches of skin had blistered and come away from the heat. The skaven's fur looked horribly wet and sticky.\n\nThe wagon thundered into the centre of a great melee. Bodies were packed so close that there was no chance of anyone avoiding the mules' hooves. Skulls cracked and bones splintered as the wagon rolled through the ruck like a war-chariot. Those who fell were crushed beneath the iron-shod wheels. As the vehicle slowed, Felix managed to sway to his feet, and take a look around. Varek had stopped tossing his bombs. To do so now would be to cause indiscriminate carnage. The dwarfs and skaven were now too intermingled to provide any easy targets.\n\nThe mules reared and struck out with their hooves. As they did so the wagon started to unbalance. There were tides and currents in this vast ruck just like those in the sea. The press of bodies from one side began to tip the overbalancing wagon. Felix grabbed Varek by the shoulder and indicated that they should jump. Varek looked up at him and smiled. He paused only to snatch up his book, then leapt out into the throng.\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, Felix thought that he saw two squat, tattooed figures hacking their way through a horde of skaven. From his high vantage point he could see a new force of rat-men emerging from the gap between two buildings and bearing down on the Slayers. Pausing only to fix the direction in his mind, Felix leapt down from the wagon, sword swinging. Even before he hit the ground, his blade was cleaving skaven flesh.\n\nLurk halted for a moment and let his warriors sweep past him. He pointed to the two dwarfs he had been sent to kill and barked an order: \"Quick-quick! Slay-slay!\"\n\nHeartened by the fact that they outnumbered their foes twenty-to-one, his brave stormvermin swept forward, frothing with eagerness to be in at the kill, to claim the credit and the glory. Lurk was tempted to join them but just the look of these two dwarfs made the fur near the base of his tail stand on end, and sent shivers of justifiable caution running up his spine.\n\nHe was not quite sure what it was about them. Certainly they were big for dwarfs, and certainly they looked fierce with their bristling beards, outlandish tattoos and their gore-caked weapons, but that was not it. There was something about the way they stood, their complete lack of fear, the suggestion that they might even be enjoying the fact that they faced hopeless odds which gave him pause. It seemed certain that they were quite insane, and that in itself was cause to give them a wide berth. Then he recognised one of them from the battle of Nuln, and he wanted no part in fighting that one. Was it possible that Gotrek Gurnisson was really here, of all places?\n\nHis forebodings became certainties as the first stormvermin reached the two. He knew the skaven: it was Underleader Vrishat, a pushy, fierce foolish skaven who all too obviously wanted to challenge Lurk for the position of clawleader. A fool, but a fierce warrior and one who would doubtless make short work of their stunted foes \u2014 although the dwarfs gave no sign of any concern. The familiar one, the one with a huge crest of dyed hair rising above his furless scalp, lashed out with his monstrously large axe, and parted Vrishat's head from his shoulders. He didn't wait for the following skaven to come to him either, but charged forward, axe swinging, roaring and bellowing outlandish challenges in his own brutish and uncivilised tongue.\n\nLurk fully expected to see the dwarf go down, overwhelmed by a tidal wave of skaven but no \u2014 he wasn't even slowed. He came on like a ship of steel crashing through a storm-tossed sea, massive axe whirling, ham-like fist lashing out, breaking bones, severing limbs, killing anything that got in his path.\n\nThe other one was no better. His mad laughter roared out over the battlefield as he struck out with a weapon in each hand, killing just as dextrously with either, his appalling strength displayed by the way his hammer reduced helmeted skulls to jelly, and his axe buried itself happily within thickly armoured stormvermin breasts.\n\nAs Lurk watched, one smaller, more cunning skaven managed to circle behind the Slayer and leapt at his back, fangs bared, bright blade gleaming in the light of the blazing buildings. Without pause, somehow aware of the skaven presence without even seeing him, the dwarf whirled and chopped down his foe with his axe, then for good measure broke his neck with the hammer \u2014 all the while laughing out loud like a maniac and calling: \"Snorri kill loads!\"\n\nWas the dwarf's hearing so good that he could not be snuck up on? Had he felt the merest presence of the skaven's shadow fall across his own in the half-light? Lurk could not guess but the lightning quickness with which he had turned and lashed out told Lurk that he himself wanted to get nowhere near those weapons, at least until their owners were tired and severely wounded. This was not a thought he decided to share with his followers. He booted the nearest towards the fray.\n\n\"Hurry quick. Weakening they are! The kill is yours.\"\n\nThe warrior looked back at him somewhat dubiously. Lurk revealed his fangs and lashed his tail menacingly and was gratified to see the skaven charge, somehow more afraid of his clawleader than of the foe. Lurk pushed another two forward, shrieking: \"Swift swift. Outnumber them you do. Good their hearts will taste.\"\n\nThis reminder of superior numbers was all it took to encourage the rest of the claw to advance into the fray. Such a sign of superiority always heartened bold skaven warriors. Lurk only hoped he didn't run out of minions before the dwarfs tired.\n\nThanquol cursed once more. What fool had set light to the buildings? Thanquol swore that if it was one of his incompetent lackeys he would eat the fool's raw heart before his very eyes. If those buildings were destroyed, this great victory would count for almost naught. He wanted them taken whole and intact so that they could be inspected by the warp engineers, their secrets snatched and improved on by superior skaven technology. He did not want the whole complex burned to the ground before then. Right at this moment he could see nothing that he could do except order all of his clawleaders to take more care.\n\nAt least he would see the accursed Trollslayer destroyed, he consoled himself.\n\nThe agonised screams of the dying. The night pierced by the flickering light of burning buildings, the light dimmed further by the thick clouds of scalding steam. The press of hairy bodies. The shock of blade on bone. The sticky feel of warm black blood flowing over his hand. The look of sick hatred in the dimming eyes of the dying skaven. All of it, the whole infernal scene, seared itself into Felix Jaeger's memory. For a brief breathless moment time seemed to stop and he was alone and calm in the centre of this howling, turbulent maelstrom. His mind cleared of fear and horror. He was aware of his surroundings in a way that a man can only be when he knows each breath he draws may be his last.\n\nClose by him, two burly dwarfs fought back to back against a pack of howling skaven. The dwarfs' beards bristled. Their hammers were caked with gore. Their leather aprons were soaked with glistening black blood. The rat-men were thin, stringy, underfed, with the gaunt feral look of winter wolves. Bloody froth foamed from their lips where they had bitten their tongues and the inside of their cheeks in their battle-frenzy. Their swords were nicked and rusty. Filthy rags covered their scabby hides. Their eyes glittered with reflected firelight. One of them bounded forward, clambering over his fellows in a hasty rush to get at his prey. It reminded Felix of the seething advance of a pack of rats he had once witnessed in the streets of Nuln. Despite their humanoid forms, at that moment there was nothing human whatsoever about the skaven. They were unmistakably beasts in man's image and their resemblance to humanity only made them all the more horrifying.\n\nA terrible shriek from his right grabbed Felix's attention and he looked around to see a wounded dwarf warrior being dragged down by a pack of rat-men. There was a look of stoic endurance in the dwarf's eyes.\n\n\"Avenge me,\" he croaked with his dying breath.\n\nSomething about the way the skaven fell to fighting over scraps of the still-warm corpse sickened Felix. He leapt over to where it lay and plunged his sword into the back of a skaven slave. The glowing blade passed right through the scrawny body and into the neck of a skaven below. A kick sent another skaven flying backwards. Felix ripped his weapon free and brought it down again, driving it with full force into the bodies below him. The shock of the impart flexed the blade until he feared it would break. Driven by his hatred, Felix rotated the hilt, opening the wound with a hideous sucking sound, then he stepped back with barely enough time to parry the stroke of the huge skaven who leapt at him.\n\nHe had passed beyond fear now. He was driven only by the instinct to kill. Knowing there was no way to avoid fighting, he was driven to do so as best he could. It made him an awful opponent. He lashed out with his foot, catching the skaven a crunching blow to the knee. As it hopped backward shrieking in agony, he drove the point of his sword into its throat, turning his head to avoid the blood which sprayed from the severed artery. Now was no time to be blinded.\n\nIn the distance he heard a familiar bull-like voice bellowing a battle-cry. He recognised it instantly as Gotrek's and began to move towards it, hewing to left and right as he went, not caring whether he killed his foes, merely intending to clear them from his path. The skaven gave way before his furious rush and in ten heartbeats he came upon a scene of the most appalling carnage. Snorri and Gotrek stood atop a great heap of skaven bodies, hewing all around them with their terrible weapons. Gotrek's axe rose and fell with the monotonous regularity of a butcher's cleaver, and every time it descended more skaven lives ended. Snorri moved like a dervish, whirling this way and that, the foam of berserker rage bubbling from his lips as he lashed out with axe and hammer, pausing occasionally only to headbutt any rat-men which had got within his guard.\n\nAll around the pair flowed a tidal wave of huge black-armoured rat warriors better armed than most. The hideous emblem of the Horned Rat was emblazoned upon their shields. There must have been two score of these elite skaven warriors and it seemed all but impossible that anything could survive their furious charge. Even as Felix watched, the press of bodies obscured Snorri and Gotrek from view. It seemed like they must surely be dragged down by sheer weight of numbers.\n\nFelix stood frozen for a moment, unable to decide whether he was too late to be of assistance, then he saw Gotrek's axe pass through a skaven body, chopping the armoured figure in two despite its mail. In an instant the area around the Trollslayers was cleared. It seemed like nothing could live within the circle of that unstoppable axe. The skaven backed off and regrouped, trying to gather enough courage for a second rush.\n\nFelix charged down into the fray, striking right and left, shouting at the top of his lungs, trying to make it sound like there was more than just the one of him. Gotrek and Snorri moved to meet him, killing as they came. It was all too much for the skaven, who turned tail and tried to flee into the night.\n\nFelix found himself face to face with the Slayer, who paused for a moment to inspect the mound of dead and dying he had left in his wake. Blood caked the Slayer's entire form, and he himself bled from dozens of nicks and scratches.\n\n\"Good killing,\" he said. \"Reckon I got about fifty of them.\"\n\n\"Snorri reckons he got fifty-two,\" Snorri said.\n\n\"Don't give me that,\" grumbled Gotrek. \"I know you can't count above five.\"\n\n\"Can too,\" Snorri muttered. \"One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Er, seven. Twelve.\"\n\nFelix looked on in astonishment. The two maniacs looked almost happy in the midst of this scene of incredible destruction.\n\n\"Well, best get going. Plenty more to slaughter before this night is over.\"\n\nThanquol bit his tail with a raging fury. He could not believe it. Those incompetent fools had failed to kill the Slayers despite their overwhelming advantage in numbers and superior skaven ferocity. Not for the first time, he suspected some hidden enemy was sabotaging his efforts by sending him inferior pawns. Doubtless it was the same wicked conspirators who had dispatched Jaeger and Gurnisson to this distant location in the first place. Well, there would be a reckoning, he would see to that!\n\nRight now, though, he did not have time to worry about it. This was the moment to inspect the battlefield and see how his forces were doing. He pulled both hands backwards and upwards away from the seeing stone, and his point of view retracted until it seemed that he hovered over the battlefield like some enormous bat. Below him he could see the burning buildings \u2014 curse those incompetent fools!\u2014and the signs of the savage struggle.\n\nHere and there, huge clumps of warriors still battled it out. Weapon clashed with weapon. Sparks flew where skaven sword hit dwarf-forged axe blade. Blood gouted from fresh wounds. Headless corpses writhed in the dust, still spending the last of their life blood in a spasm of furious energy. Sparks rose, driven skywards by the night wind.\n\nOn the walls of the keep, a group of sweating dwarfs struggled to push a multi-barrelled organ gun into position.\n\nIt was obvious that this was the moment of crisis. Everything hung in the balance. It was equally obvious to the grey seer that his skaven were going to win. They had overwhelmed the dwarfs from both sides and the sheer weight of their numbers had ground down their ill-equipped opponents. Thanquol's frustration at the escape of his two deadliest enemies started to be replaced with the warm glow of imminent triumph.\n\nFelix knew that he was going to die. Wearily he parried the blow of a skaven scimitar. His aching muscles turned his arms and sent a counter-blow arcing towards his foe. The huge black-furred thing sprang backwards, lithely avoiding the stroke. Its tail lashed out, entangling Felix's legs, trying to trip the human by tugging him off his feet. A spark of exhausted triumph flickered feebly in Felix's mind. He had seen this trick before and knew how to respond instantly. He lashed out with his sword, severing the tail near its root, but only just managed to get his blade back into guard position in time to block the downward sweep of the rusting scimitar.\n\nThe shock of the impact almost numbed his hand, and reflexively he clutched tighter on the hilt of his sword to prevent it from slithering from his sweaty grasp. The skaven shrieked in horror and swished the stump of its tail. It made the mistake of looking down to inspect the flow of blood. As its eyes left him, Felix took advantage of its distraction to launch his sorcerous blade into its stomach. Warm entrails tumbled over his hand. He fought down a feeling of disgust as he stepped back. Clutching its stomach with both paws, an almost human look of disbelief on its face, the skaven tumbled forward. Felix drove his blade through the back of its neck, severing the vertebrae just to make sure that it was dead. He had seen many warriors dragged down to death by foes they thought they had killed, and he was determined never to make that mistake himself.\n\nFor an instant all was calm. He looked around and saw Gotrek and Snorri and a whole group of battered and fierce looking dwarfs. They all looked bone-tired, even the Slayers. It seemed like they had been killing for hours, yet for every foe that fell another two strode forward to take its place. The skaven came on in seemingly inexhaustible waves. In the distance Felix could hear the clamour of weapon on weapon, so he knew somewhere others still fought on but even as they listened an ominous silence fell, and then there was a roar that seemed to have been torn simultaneously from a hundred bestial throats. The dwarfs exchanged glances that told Felix that they were all thinking the same thing as him. Perhaps they were the very last dwarfs left alive outside the keep.\n\nThat wasn't going to last. Looking around them, Felix could see that they were ringed by fierce skaven warriors. Hundreds of reddish eyes glittered in the darkness. The light of the burning buildings reflected off a similar number of glistening blades. The skaven had pulled back momentarily to regroup for what he knew would be their final rush. They moved with a strange precision as if being organised by some swift, evil and unseen intelligence. In that moment Felix knew that he was definitely going to die, right here.\n\nHe took advantage of the momentarily lull to wipe the sweat from his brow. His breath came raggedly from his lungs. He gulped in air as greedily as a drowning man. All his muscles were on fire. His blade weighed a ton or more. He felt sure that he could not raise it again, even to save his life, but was thankful that he had enough experience to know how false that feeling was. When the time came, there was always a little more strength with which to fight. Not that it made much difference now, looking out onto those rows and rows of silent rat-like faces.\n\n\"Form up there,\" he thought he heard someone say behind him. \"Get ready to repel the charge. Let's give those verminous scum a taste of true dwarf steel!\"\n\nFelix wondered at the sheer stubborn courage of the dwarfs. The sergeant who spoke must know it was thoroughly hopeless, yet he was heartening his troops to sell their lives dearly. Felix prepared to do the same but only because he had no choice in the matter. If he could have seen a way out of here to live to fight another day, he would have taken it.\n\nSomewhere in the distance he thought he heard a droning as of some monstrous insect \u2014 or an engine. What was going on? Was this some new infernal device that the skaven were launching at their foes. Oddly enough, it seemed to be coming from the direction of the castle. A faint hope stirred in Felix's breast. Perhaps the dwarfs had a surprise waiting for their attackers. Although it seemed unlikely they could do anything before the skaven overwhelmed their current position, perhaps they might be avenged.\n\nThe skaven leaders seemed to be grunting orders to their teeming followers. Slowly, almost reluctantly, as if they feared to be first to spend their lives against the living wall of their grim foes, the skaven began to advance. As they took their first faltering steps they seemed to gain in confidence and their advance picked up speed and momentum at a terrifying rate. The strange thrumming noise grew much louder. It seemed to be coming from overhead. Felix wanted to look up but couldn't tear his eyes from the rush of the rat-men.\n\n\"Come on and die!\" Gotrek roared and the skaven looked prepared to take him at his word as they charged forward ever faster, brandishing their weapons, chittering their evil sounding war-cries, swishing their tails in fury. Felix braced himself for the impact and then fought the urge to throw himself flat as some outlandish shape roared close overhead. This time he did look up, and he saw a great flight of bizarre machines passing above them. Trails of fire leaked from their boilers as they blazed across the night. Enormous rotor blades whirled near-invisibly over their hulls.\n\n\"Gyrocopters!\" he heard somebody roar and realised that he was witnessing the night flight of some of the legendary dwarfish aircraft.\n\nBlazing sparkles of light descended from the machines and landed in the middle of the oncoming skaven. It was only when they began to explode in the rat-men's midst that Felix realised that they must have been the fizzling fuses of dwarf bombs.\n\nThe skaven rush slowed as the bombs tore their targets limb from limb. Their apoplectic leaders tried frantically to rally them, but as they did so one of the copters descended almost to head height and sent a wide jet of scalding, super-heated steam into their midst. Yelping with unutterable terror a huge group of the rat-men turned tail and fled. The panic was contagious. Within moments the charge had become a rout. The dwarfs around Felix watched with almost numbed disbelief, too weary even to chase after the fleeing foe." + }, + { + "title": "THE GREAT PLAN", + "text": "Felix slumped down against the broken wreckage of the wagon and inspected the blade of his sword. It had seen a lot of use in this battle but somehow it wasn't notched. The edge was still as keen as ever, even after all the hacking and chopping he had done. The ancient enchantment on the weapon obviously still held good.\n\nSomewhere off to his right, the wall of a burned-out shed, unable to support its own weight anymore, came down with a crash. Overhead a gyrocopter moved with the sinister grace of an enormous insect, pausing for a moment to hover over a blazing building. Its nose swivelled downwards and with a hiss like an angry serpent a jet of steam emerged. Felix wondered what the pilot hoped to achieve.\n\nThe steam met the fire and the flickering flames changed colour, becoming a duller yellow with perhaps a hint of blue. As the jet continued to spray, the fire slowly died down, smothered by the vapour and condensation like a small rainstorm. Even as Felix watched, the gyrocopter swung around on the spot and moved towards the next nearest blaze.\n\nHe suddenly felt enormously tired, drained of all energy by the conflict. He was bruised and battered, bleeding from dozens of small nicks and cuts which he had not noticed during the frenzy of combat. His right shoulder, the shoulder of his sword arm, ached horribly. He was almost convinced that the repeated swinging of the sword had dislocated it. It was an illusion he was familiar with, having survived many other battles. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a hundred years.\n\nLooking around him, he wondered where the dwarfs got their energy. Already they were starting to clear up the debris of the battle. Bodies of fallen dwarfs were being gathered for burial in the sacred earth. Skaven corpses, meanwhile, were being lugged into a huge pile for burning. Fully armoured sentinels had descended from the keep and kept watch, just in case the skaven should return.\n\nFelix doubted that they would tonight. In his experience it took the skaven longer than a human army to recover and reassemble after a defeat. They did not seem to like to return so swiftly to the scene of a defeat, and for this he was profoundly glad. At this moment he doubted he could move a muscle, even if the rat-ogre was to rise from the dead and come looking for him. He pushed that evil thought from his mind and searched for a happier topic.\n\nHe found one: at least he was still alive. He was beginning to believe again that he just might live. Sometimes before and during a battle, when fear threatened to overwhelm his reason, he had this terrible sensation that he was certain to die. It settled on him like a curse, this certainty of his own mortality. Now it amazed him that he was still here, that his heart still beat, that breath still moved in and out of his lungs. Looking around he could see plenty of evidence that this could easily not have been the case.\n\nBlood-covered corpses were everywhere, being pulled like sacks of dead meat through the thoroughfares by bone-weary, grumbling dwarfs. The sightless eyes of the dead stared at the sky. Despite his earlier imaginings, he knew they would not get up again. They would never laugh or cry or sing or eat or breathe. The thought filled him with a profound melancholy. Yet at the same time, he knew with certainty that he still lived, that he could do all those things, and for that he should therefore rejoice. Life is all too brief and fragile, he told himself, so enjoy it while you can.\n\nHe began to laugh softly, filled with a quiet joy which felt strangely like sorrow. After a moment he limped painfully off into the night to see if he could find Gotrek or Snorri or anybody else he might know amidst this vast shambles.\n\nThanquol could not believe it. How could it all have gone so wrong so quickly? One moment, victory was within his grasp. His brilliance seemed to have assured triumph. In the next, it had vanished as quick as a skavenslave turning tail in battle. It was a sickening, dizzying sensation. It took long, bitter moments of reflection to convince the grey seer that even the most brilliant of schemes could be foiled by the incompetence of underlings. Through no fault of his own, his lazy, cowardly and stupid minions had let him down once more.\n\nReassured by this brilliant insight, he considered his options. Fortunately he had a contingency plan, devised for just such an unlikely eventuality as this. Lurk was still alive and still reachable through his speaking stone. With any luck, he could be left in place, ready to report on the secrets the unscrupulous dwarfs had tried to conceal here.\n\nThanquol looked into the seeing stone once more and sent his mind questing for contact.\n\nFelix felt a tug on his sleeve. Looking down he saw Varek. The young dwarf's blue robes were soiled with mud and blood. The sleeve of his robe had come away, ripped at the seams to reveal a torn and tattered white linen shirtsleeve. His glasses were broken; a crazy web of cracks marked their lenses. In one hand he clutched a small warhammer. The other held his leather-bound book tightly against his chest. Felix was surprised by how large Varek's hands were, how white the knuckles seemed. There was a mad feverish gleam in the youth's eyes.\n\n\"That was the most amazing experience of my life, Felix,\" he said. \"I have never seen anything so exciting, have you?\"\n\n\"It's the type of excitement I could cheerfully live without,\" Felix said sourly.\n\n\"You don't mean that. I saw you fighting back there. It was like watching a hero from the days of Sigmar. I never knew humans could fight so well!\"\n\nVarek blushed, seeming to realise just what he had said. It was a dwarfish fault, being blunt about what they considered to be the inferior abilities of the younger races.\n\nFelix laughed softly. \"I was only trying to stay alive.\"\n\n\"And I hate skaven,\" he added as an afterthought. He considered that fact and felt slightly appalled. He did not consider himself to be a particularly violent or vengeful man, but the skaven made his flesh crawl. He was slightly shocked by the idea that he took pleasure in killing them but inspecting his feelings now he was honest enough to admit that it was true.\n\n\"Everybody hates the skaven,\" Varek agreed. \"Even other skaven, most likely.\"\n\nLurk Snitchtongue moved stealthily through the burned-out ruins. Fear filled his heart and warred with his hatred of Thanquol. His musk glands felt tight and he fought down the urge to squirt the fear scent, for it might give away his presence to the dwarfs all around him.\n\nRight now, away from the comforting scent and furry mass of his brethren, he felt terribly alone and exposed. He wanted to run swiftly into the night and find the other survivors of the battle. The thought goaded him intolerably.\n\nStill, fear of the grey seer was uppermost in his mind. Staying here most probably meant death, but defying one of the Chosen of the Horned Rat meant an inevitable, agonising doom. There were worse things than a swift blow from a dwarf axe, as Lurk well knew. Not that he wanted one of those either.\n\nTurn right, the nagging voice said inside his head.\n\n\"Yes, most magnificent of masters,\" Lurk whispered. He followed orders, moving down a long, quiet alley towards the monstrous structure which dominated the centre of the dwarf settlement. He flinched, wondering whether Thanquol could read his thoughts. He certainly hoped not, after some of the things he had been ruminating on.\n\nHis paw toyed idly with the amulet and briefly he considered what would happen if he tore it from his flesh and threw it away. Something nasty, he was sure. It would be just like a grey seer to have some intricate curse woven into the device. He did not doubt that digging it from his skull would most likely kill him, or cause him severe pain at the very least, and Lurk was no keener on pain than most skaven.\n\nAgain he flinched, hoping that thought had not gone over the link to Thanquol. He hoped not; he was only supposed to be able to send when he touched the stone and concentrated. He supposed it would take a lot of effort to drive his thoughts through the ether. He didn't know that for sure, not having tried it, but right at this moment he actually hoped it was the case.\n\nStop! came the imperious command. He did so at once, automatically and instinctively. A moment after he did so, he heard the sound of booted dwarfish feet ahead of him. A moment after that, a small squad of dwarfs stomped past the alley mouth. Lurk shivered instinctively when he saw that they were dragging skaven corpses off to be burned. His whiskers twitched. He had already recognised the foul scent of scorching skaven flesh earlier.\n\nNow \u2014 run quickly across the street. Hurry-scurry while the way is clear.\n\nHe steeled himself and leapt forward into the wide exposed space between the buildings, risking a quick glance right and left as he did so, and seeing that the way was indeed clear save for the backs of the departing dwarfs. He had to admit that, whatever else he might be, Thanquol was a mighty sorcerer. He had no idea how the grey seer was able to guide him so well, but so far he had made no mistakes.\n\nLurk dove into the cover of the alleyway opposite and hurried on. Directly in front of him now was the huge dwarfish building. Its metal roof gleamed in the moonlight. He saw that vast and powerful steam engines were attached to its side. His skaven curiosity was piqued. He wondered what could possibly be stored within so huge a structure.\n\nQuick-quick \u2014 head right till you find the entrance or swift death will be yours.\n\nLurk hastened to obey. He slid through the entrance arch and halted \u2014 and stared upwards in wide-eyed wonder. A gasp of pure amazement was torn from his uncomprehending lips.\n\nFelix wandered through the burning night, Varek by his side. Things look worse than they are, he told himself, hoping against hope that it was true. It was evident that both sides had taken enormous casualties. Many dwarfs had fallen in the conflict and each and every one of them seemed to have taken at least two skaven with him. The stink of burning rat-man flesh was well-nigh unbearable. Felix pulled his cloak across the lower half of his face to keep out the smell. No one else seemed at all bothered.\n\nIt looked like the vast complex had taken a lot of damage. Felix wondered whether it would be enough to set back whatever project the dwarfs had been working on, and realised that he was in no position to hazard a guess. He simply did not have enough knowledge of what was going on here.\n\n\"What is this all in aid of?\" he asked Varek suddenly. The young dwarf stopped polishing his broken glasses on the hem of his tunic and looked up at him. He breathed on the lenses as if wanting time to gather his thoughts, then started to polish again, not noticing that a shard of glass had broken free.\n\n\"What is what in aid of, exactly?\"\n\n\"All this machinery,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Er \u2014 perhaps I should leave that for my uncle to explain. He is in charge here.\"\n\n\"That's very discreet of you. Where can I find your uncle?\"\n\n\"In the keep, along with the others.\"\n\nBefore he could ask another question, a gyrocopter whizzed low overhead. Standing on the strut of the landing gear was a burly figure with a shaven head. He held a monstrous multi-barrelled musket. Something about the way he stood set Felix's senses to prickling. The dwarf turned a crank on the side of the musket and a hail of shot churned up the earth at Felix's feet. Felix pushed Varek to one side and threw himself flat, turning to track the gyrocopter, wondering what madness had possessed the demented dwarf. Surely he had not mistaken Felix for a skaven? Then from behind him Felix heard a chorus of agonised squeaks.\n\nIt was only as he turned his head that Felix saw the group of skaven who had been advancing noiselessly behind him, blades bared. Felix recognised them as gutter runners, the dread skaven assassins he had fought in the Blind Pig tavern back in Nuln. The dwarf on the gyrocopter had cut the things down with his strange weapon. He had most likely saved their lives, even if his lack of accuracy had almost killed them both.\n\nThe gyrocopter swept backwards and slewed down to a not-quite perfect landing. The musket-toting figure leapt down from its side, and hurried away from the flying machine in a low crouch designed to stop the swiftly rotating blades separating his head from his shoulders. The downdraft from the machine flattened the enormous crest of red dyed hair which rose above his head.\n\nThe gale sent Felix's cloak flapping in the wind and the dust the machine stirred up brought tears to his eyes. Varek was forced to squint through the lenses of his broken glasses. He had covered his mouth with his book to prevent himself from breathing in the dust. The strange chemical smell of the vehicle's exhaust reached Felix's nostrils even through the wool of his cloak.\n\nThe newcomer was short and incredibly broad. His chest was bare, revealing amazing muscular definition. Twin bandoleers of what must have been ammunition were looped over his shoulders. A red scarf was tied round his forehead. He wore high leather boots with a large dagger scabbarded on the right boot. A monstrous silver skull buckled the belt which held up his green britches. His white beard was cut short almost to his jaw. A two-headed Empire eagle was tattooed on his right shoulder.\n\nStrange thick optical lenses covered his eyes. Felix could see that they were engraved with some sort of crosshairs. Judging from his appearance, Felix decided that this had to be another Trollslayer. The stranger clumped over to him and looked him up and down, then he spat on the corpse of one of the skaven.\n\n\"Nasty, evil wee creatures, skaven!\" he said by way of a greeting. \"Never liked them. Never liked their machinery.\"\n\nHe turned to Felix and executed a formal dwarfish bow. \"Malakai Makaisson, at your service and your clan's.\"\n\nFelix returned the bow with that of an Imperial courtier. He used the movement to cover up his expression of astonishment. So this was the famous mad engineer of which Gotrek and Varek had talked. He did not look that crazed. \"Felix Jaeger, at your service.\"\n\nThe dwarf turned the crank on his musket again. The barrels spun. Shot tore into the skaven corpses. Black blood spurted as fur and flesh tore.\n\n\"Ye cannae be too careful with these beasties. They're awfae sleekit, ye ken.\"\n\n\"He means they are very cunning,\" Varek translated.\n\n\"Ach, awae wi' ye! Ah'm sure Herr Jaeger kens exactly what ah mean, don't ye, Herr Jaeger?\"\n\n\"I think I follow you,\" Felix said non-committally.\n\n\"Well, there ye go then. Best be gettin' up tae the castle. Auld Borek will be wantin' tae talk tae ye and the others. I suppose ye'll be wantin' tae ken what this is ah aboot.\"\n\n\"That would be excellent,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Well, just wait till they lower the brig then \u2014 unless ye want a wee lift back the noo. Ah think the copter will tek an extra body.\"\n\nIt took Felix a few moments to work out that this maniac was offering him a ride on the landing gear of the gyrocopter. He tried to force a pleasant smile onto his face as he said, \"I think I'll just wait for the gate to open, if it's all the same to you.\"\n\n\"Fine by me. See ye later then.\"\n\nMakaisson clambered back on to the landing gear of the gyrocopter and shouted something to the helmeted and goggled pilot. The engine roared and the machine lurched skyward \u2014 leaving Felix wondering whether the meeting had ever actually happened at all.\n\n\"Do all your engineers talk like that?\" Felix asked Varek. The young dwarf shook his head.\n\n\"Makaisson's clan comes from the Dwimmerdim Vale, way up north. It's an isolated place. Even other dwarfs find their manner of speech strange.\"\n\nFelix shrugged. He could hear the creaking of huge chains as the drawbridge into the keep was lowered. He paced rapidly in the direction of the gate, suddenly aware of exactly how tired he was and hoping to find a place to lie down for the night.\n\nFelix woke from a nightmare of insane violence, in which a great rat-ogre chased him round a burning town while the gigantic figure of an enormous pale-skinned skaven leered down from the sky. Sometimes the city was the dwarfish community around the Lonely Tower; sometimes he ran through the cobbled streets of Nuln; sometimes he was in his home city of Altdorf, the Imperial capital. It was one of those dreams where his foes' blades were bright and terribly sharp and his own blade simply bounced off unarmoured flesh. He ran and ran while mangy, flea-infested skaven-things clutched at his arms and legs, slowing him, and all the time his monstrous pursuer came ever closer.\n\nHis eyes snapped open and he found himself staring at the ceiling of an unfamiliar room, an awakening which always disoriented him, even after many years of wandering.\n\nHe found that he was lying in a bed designed for a much shorter and broader person, and that even though he was lying diagonally his feet still protruded over the bottom. He was sweating from the heavy blankets entangling his limbs and he began to see where the feeling of being dragged down in his dream might have stemmed from. He had vague memories of entering the castle the night before, being introduced to various dwarfs and being shown to this chamber. He could remember casting himself on the bed, and after that nothing \u2014 except his fast-fading bad dreams.\n\nHe had not even taken off his clothes. Blotches of blood and dirt stained the sheets. He sat upright and shook his head wearily, aware of all the aches in his muscles left behind by his participation in last night's battle. Still he felt a sense of exhilaration. He had survived to see a new dawn, and that was the main thing. There was no feeling quite like it, knowing that you were one of the lucky ones after a battle. He pulled himself off the bed and stood up, half-expecting to need to duck his head and therefore rather surprised to find that the castle had been built on a human scale.\n\nHe moved to one of the narrow arrowslit windows and gazed out into the valley. Clouds of smoke rose from below and with them came the stench of burning skaven flesh. He wondered how much of the obscuring vapours came from the machines down there and how much from the funeral pyres, and then he realised that he didn't care.\n\nHe was suddenly very hungry. There was a knock on the door and he realised the sounds of his awakening had been noticed.\n\n\"Come in!\" he shouted.\n\nVarek entered. \"Glad to see you're up. Uncle Borek wants to see you. You're to come to breakfast in his study. Hungry?\"\n\n\"I could eat a horse.\"\n\n\"I don't think it will come to that,\" Varek said.\n\nFelix laughed \u2014 then from the expression on the dwarf's face he realised that Varek wasn't joking.\n\nIt was a comfortable room, which reminded Felix of his father's study. Books lined three walls, embossed spines showing Reikspiel script and dwarfish runes. Scroll racks filled some shelves. A huge map of the northern Old World, covered in pins and small flags, draped all of the fourth wall. The northernmost parts of the world showed symbols for cities and mountains and rivers in an area that Felix had never seen shown on any human map, and which he realised must have been long swallowed by the Chaos Wastes. A massive desk in the centre of the study was drowning beneath a sea of letters and scrolls and maps and paperweights.\n\nBehind the desk sat the oldest dwarf Felix had ever seen. His huge, long beard was forked and reached all the way to the floor before being looped back up into his belt. The crown of his head was bald. Wings of snowy white hair framed his face, which was lined with deep furrows of age in the tough leathery skin. The eyes that peered out from behind the thick pince-nez glasses twinkled like those of a youth, and at once Felix discerned a family resemblance to Varek.\n\n\"Borek Forkbeard, of the line of Grimnar, at your service and your clan's,\" the dwarf said, advancing from behind the desk. Felix saw that he was so bowed as to be almost hunch-backed and walked only with the aid of a stout, iron-shod staff. \"Excuse me if I don't bow. I am not as flexible as I once was.\" Felix bowed and introduced himself.\n\n\"I must thank you for your aid in the battle last night,\" Borek said, \"and for saving my nephew.\"\n\nFelix was going to say that he had only fought to save himself, but somehow that did not seem very appropriate.\n\n\"I only did what any man would under the circumstances,\" he managed to force himself to say.\n\nBorek laughed. \"I think not, my young friend. Few of Sigmar's people remember the old debts and the old bonds these days. And few indeed can fight like you do, if my nephew is to be believed.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he exaggerates.\"\n\n\"Few dwarfs speak anything but the truth, Herr Jaeger. You are making a serious accusation when you say such a thing.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I did not mean to say\u2026\" Felix stammered, then realised from the look in the old dwarf's eye that he was teasing him. \"I simply meant that\u2026\"\n\n\"Do not worry. I will not mention this to my nephew. Now you must be hungry. Why do you not join the others to eat? After that there are serious matters to be discussed. Very serious matters indeed.\"\n\nBreakfast lay spread across the table in the adjoining chamber. Huge ham hocks lay on plates of wrought steel. Monstrous slabs of cheese formed monuments to gluttony. Massive loaves of dwarf waybread, dark and yeasty, made mountain ranges across the middle of the spread. The smell of beer filled the air from the barrel that had already been broached. It came as no surprise to Felix, to see Gotrek and Snorri squatting down by the massive fire, swilling ale and cramming food into their mouths like they had just heard news of an imminent famine.\n\nVarek watched them as if they were about to perform new prodigies of valour at any moment. His leather-bound book lay close at hand just in case he needed to record them. He wore new glasses of a style Felix now realised had been copied from his uncle's.\n\nAnother dwarf was also present, one whom Felix did not recognise and who did not immediately move forward to make his introductions in the dwarfish fashion. He glared at Felix suspiciously, as if expecting him to steal the cutlery. Ignoring his glares, Felix walked up to the table and helped himself to food. It was among the best he had ever tasted, and he wasted no time in saying so.\n\n\"Best wash it down with some ale, young Felix,\" Snorri suggested. \"It tastes even better then.\"\n\n\"It's a bit early in the day for that,\" Felix said.\n\n\"It's after noon,\" Gotrek corrected.\n\n\"You've slept through two watches, young Felix,\" Snorri said.\n\n\"A minute wasted is like a copper spent,\" grumbled the dwarf Felix did not recognise. He turned to regard him. He saw a dwarf shorter than most, and broader than most too. His beard was long and black; his hair was close cut and parted in the middle. His eyes were keen and piercing. His severe black tunic and britches while obviously well made were old and threadbare. His high boots looked old but well-polished. Metal segs protected the heels from wear and tear. He was portly and there was a fleshiness about his face which reminded Felix of his father and other rich merchants he had known. There was a suggestion to it of large meals eaten in well-appointed guildhalls where serious business was discussed. The dwarf's hands flexed at his belt as if constantly checking to see whether his rather flat purse was still there.\n\nFelix bowed to him. \"Felix Jaeger at your service, and your clan's,\" he said.\n\n\"Olger Olgersson at yours,\" the dwarf said before bowing back. \"You wouldn't be connected with the Jaegers of Altdorf, by any chance would you, young man?\"\n\nFelix felt momentarily embarrassed. He was the black sheep of the family after all, and had left the family home under a cloud after killing a man in a duel. He forced himself to meet Olgersson's gaze calmly and said, \"My father owns the house.\"\n\n\"I have done good business with them in the past. Your father has a good head for business \u2014 for a human.\"\n\nThe near contempt in the dwarf's tone made Felix bristle but he kept calm, reminding himself that he was a stranger here. It would not do simply to take offence in a keep full of touchy dwarfs who may all be this stranger's kin.\n\n\"He'd have to be, if he made any money dealing with you, Olger Goldgrabber,\" Gotrek said unexpectedly.\n\n\"Olger is a famous miser,\" Snorri said cheerfully. \"Snorri knows that when he takes a coin from his purse the king's head blinks.\"\n\nThe two Slayers cackled uproariously at this ancient joke. Felix wondered how much they had already drunk. Olgersson's face went red. He looked as if he would like to take offence but did not dare.\n\nObviously neither Gotrek or Snorri cared about his wealth, his influence or his kin.\n\n\"No one ever got rich by spending money,\" he said huffily and turned and stalked back into the other room.\n\n\"You should be kinder to Herr Olgersson,\" Varek said. \"He is the one funding this expedition.\"\n\nGotrek sputtered out a mouthful of beer in astonishment. His head swivelled to inspect the young scholar as if he had just claimed that gold grew on trees. \"The greatest tightfist in the dwarf kingdom is giving you gold. Tell me more about this!\"\n\n\"My uncle will, in just a few moments.\"\n\nFelix felt a mixture of trepidation and curiosity as they filed into Borek Forkbeard's study. He was curious to hear what had drawn all these disparate dwarfs to this out-of-the-way place. He was worried by the prospect of where this whole thing might lead. Looking out the window at those mighty industrial structures, recalling the ferocity of the skaven's attempt to take possession of them, and seeing the huge assemblage of craftsmanship and skill which had been put into place here made it difficult for him to imagine that the dwarfs were not serious about their mysterious purpose. It was all too easy to imagine how Gotrek and himself might be drawn into it.\n\nBorek looked up at him with twinkling eyes. Olger stood in the far corner, swivelling a globe of the world with his hands, his back ostentatiously turned to the party. The old scholar grinned at them, and bade them all take a seat. Since the dwarf armchairs were too close to the ground for Felix he remained standing.\n\nThere was a moment's silence while Borek consulted some of the papers on his desk and made an annotation in runic with a quill pen. Then he coughed to clear his throat just like Felix's lecturers used to back at the University of Altdorf and began to speak.\n\n\"I am going to find the lost citadel of Karag Dum,\" he said without preamble. There was a challenging look in his eye when he glanced over at Gotrek.\n\n\"You cannot,\" Gotrek said flintily. There was a hint of bitterness in his voice. \"We tried all those years ago. We failed. The Wastes are impassable. Nothing can survive there sane and unchanged. You know that as well as I do.\"\n\n\"I believe we have found a way.\"\n\nGotrek snorted then shook his head in disbelief. \"There is no way. We tried to force a passage with the best armed and equipped expedition ever assembled for the purpose. You know how many of us survived. You, me, Snorri, maybe a handful of others. Mostly dead now or mad. I tell you it cannot be done. And you know how many died in the expeditions before ours.\"\n\n\"You did not always think that way, Gotrek, son of Gurni.\"\n\n\"I had not then seen the Chaos Wastes.\"\n\n\"Then you will not even listen to what I have to say?\"\n\n\"No, no. I will listen, old one. Go ahead, tell me what crazy scheme you have in mind. Perhaps it will give me a good laugh.\"\n\nThere was a shocked silence in the room. Felix suspected that dwarfs were not used to hearing venerable loremasters spoken to in that way. To break the tension, he dared to ask, \"Why do you want to go to this place? What's so special about it?\"\n\nAll eyes in the room turned to him. Eventually Borek spoke: \"Karag Dum was one of the greatest cities of our people, the mightiest in all the northern lands. It was lost over two centuries ago during the last great incursion of Chaos, just before the reign of the one you call Magnus the Pious. In the great Book of Grudges, on page three thousand, five hundred and forty-two of volume four hundred and sixty-nine, you will find a record of the debt of blood we owe to the foul followers of the Dark Powers. In the ancillary codicils, we find records of all the names of those who fell, of all the clans which were wiped out. The last message we had was that Thangrim Firebeard had led his brave hosts in a doomed defence of the citadel against a mighty host which came from the north as the Chaos Wastes advanced. Since then, there has been no word from Karag Dum, nor has any dwarf from our lands been able to reach the place.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"For the Chaos Wastes advanced and swallowed all the lands between Karag Dum and the Blackblood Pass.\"\n\n\"How can you know where to find it then?\"\n\n\"It was I who brought the last message from Karag Dum,\" Borek said, bowing his head sadly. \"The city was once my home, Herr Jaeger. I am kin to King Thangrim himself. During those last dreadful days, our foes had summoned a mighty daemon, and our need for aid was great. We drew lots to see who would carry the word of our need to our kinfolk. I and my brothers were chosen. We left the citadel by secret routes, known to but a few. Only myself and my brother, Varig, Varek's father, made it through the Wastes. It was a hard trek and not one I wish to recall at this moment. When we reached the south, we found that war raged there too and no aid was to be had. Then we found there was no way back.\"\n\nWas it possible that this dwarf was so old, Felix thought? He certainly looked ancient and Felix knew that dwarfs lived longer than men. Even so, it was an astonishing idea that this dwarf was at least ten times his age, perhaps more. Then another thought struck him.\n\n\"If the Wastes are so deadly, how could you make it through and then not get back?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"I see you are a sceptic, Herr Jaeger. I must convince you. Well, let me just say that in the days of our escape, the Wastes had only just advanced and the influence of Chaos was not so strong. By the time we tried to return, the fell power of Chaos had grown great indeed and the land was impassable. Now, if I have your permission to continue\u2026\"\n\nFelix realised that he was interrupting the old dwarf, and making him go over ground that everybody else present seemed familiar with. He suddenly felt embarrassed. \"Of course. Forgive me,\" he said.\n\n\"Tell us of the treasure that was lost,\" Olgersson cut in.\n\nBorek looked less than pleased by the second interruption. He cast a quick glare at the merchant. Felix caught the glint which had appeared in the miser's eye. It was something akin to madness and Felix knew enough about dwarfs now to recognise it for what it was: gold fever. Suddenly it was no mystery why Olger was putting up money to fund this quest. He was in the throes of the near-insane thirst for gold which sometimes overtook even the sanest of dwarfs.\n\n\"Yes, the huge hoard of Karag Dum was lost when the city fell, and all the treasure was lost. And of all the treasures that were lost, the most precious were the Hammer of Fate, the mighty weapon born by King Thangrim himself, and the Axe of the Runemasters.\"\n\nAt this point, Borek turned and looked at Felix. \"We are talking of such things that it is moot only for a dwarf or a Dwarf Friend to know, Felix Jaeger. Gotrek, son of Gurni, has spoken for you, but now I must ask you for your word that you will speak of nothing discussed here with any but a dwarf of the true blood or with another Dwarf Friend. If you feel that you cannot give your word on this, we will understand, but we must ask you to leave this gathering.\"\n\nAs if a light had been shone upon him, Felix suddenly felt that he had reached a boundary, one which if he crossed would significantly change his life. He felt that if he agreed to stay he was in some way, tacitly committing himself to whatever mad scheme these dwarfs were undertaking. At the same time, he had to admit to a fascination with what was being discussed, with this tale of lost cities, ancient battles, old grudges and vast treasures. He certainly was curious \u2014 and surely there could be no harm in simply listening.\n\n\"You have my word,\" he said, almost before he realised he had spoken.\n\n\"Very good. Then I will continue.\" Somehow Felix had expected something more. He had expected to be asked to swear an oath or maybe seal the bond in blood as he had done with Gotrek during that epic drinking bout. This simple taking of his word at face value seemed altogether too casual for one about to be initiated into the lost secrets of an Elder Race. Something of his astonishment must have shown in his face, for Borek smiled at him.\n\n\"Your given word is enough for us, Felix Jaeger. Among our people, a warrior's word is a sacred thing, stronger than stone, more enduring than mountains. We ask for nothing more. If you will not hold to it, what use are written contracts, oaths sworn before altars or anything else?\"\n\nFelix realised that disagreement would only reflect badly on him, so he kept quiet while the old scholar continued to speak.\n\n\"Yes, the Hammer of Fate and the Runemaster's Axe, perhaps the most potent of the artefacts bequeathed to us by the Ancestor-Gods were lost to us, and with them a mighty portion of our ancient power and heritage. When Karag Dum fell, we believed it lost forever. The howling Chaos Wastes flowed over the ancient lands like a sea of corruption and buried the ancient peaks, and we wailed and gnashed our teeth in dismay and resigned ourselves to our loss. We thought them lost forever, and so it seemed for these two centuries.\"\n\n\"And they remain lost,\" Gotrek said grimly. \"And always will be. I repeat that there is no way through the Wastes.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. Perhaps not. After we failed in our last attempt, Gotrek, I renewed my search through the lorehalls and libraries. In the master lorehall of Karaz-a-Karak I searched through the oldest galleries, pulled dust-encrusted tomes from shelves where they had lain mouldering for millennia. I recorded every tale and mention of survivors who claimed to have visited the Wastes. I gained access to the forbidden vaults of the Temple of Sigmar in Altdorf. In their records, taken from the confessions of wracked heretics across the centuries, I found references to runes, spells and talismans that would protect against the influence of Chaos. I was determined to succeed this time. And I believe I have found the man who can make them.\"\n\n\"And who would that be?\" The note of mockery had diminished somewhat in the Slayer's voice.\n\n\"The man you will meet soon enough, Gotrek. He has convinced me that his enchantments work. I give you my sworn word that I believe they will shield us.\"\n\n\"For how long can you protect those who travel in the Chaos Wastes from madness and mutation?\"\n\n\"Weeks, maybe. Certainly days.\"\n\n\"Not long enough. It would take months to cross those wastelands to Karag Dum.\"\n\n\"Aye, Gotrek \u2014 on foot, or in armoured wagons as we tried to use last time. But there is another way. Makaisson's way.\"\n\n\"By airship?\"\n\n\"Yes, by airship.\"\n\n\"You are mad!\"\n\n\"No \u2014 not at all. Listen to me. I have studied the phenomenon of the Chaos Wastes extensively. I know much more now than we did then. Most of the mutations are caused by warpstone dust contaminating the food and the water or being breathed into unprotected lungs. It is that which drives folk mad and twists their shapes and forms.\"\n\n\"Aye, and it is present in the very sands of the Waste and in the clouds which rise from it. It is in the dust and the sandstorms and in the wells.\"\n\n\"But what if we were to fly above the clouds?\"\n\nGotrek paused for a moment and appeared to consider this. \"You would have to descend to take bearings, to check landmarks.\"\n\n\"The airship will be sealed with screens of fine mesh. There will be portholes and filters of the type you see on the submersibles of our fleets.\"\n\n\"The airship might be forced down by storms, or winds or mechanical failure.\"\n\n\"The amulets would protect the crew until repairs could be effected or the storm cleared.\"\n\n\"Perhaps repair would be impossible?\"\n\n\"A risk, certainly, but an acceptable one. The amulets would allow survivors to at least attempt a march home.\"\n\n\"No airship could carry enough coal for its engines to make the journey without stopping.\"\n\n\"Makaisson has developed a new engine. It uses the black water instead of coal. It has the power to propel the airship and the fuel is light enough to make the journey.\"\n\nAs quickly as his objections were overcome, the Slayer seemed to find new ones. He seemed to be frantic to find a hole in the loremaster's arguments.\n\n\"What about food and water?\"\n\n\"The airship would carry enough of both to make the trip.\"\n\n\"It would be impossible to build an airship large enough to do this.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, we have already done so. It is what we have been building here.\"\n\n\"It will never fly.\"\n\n\"We've already made trial flights.\"\n\nGotrek played his final card: \"Makaisson built it. It's bound to crash.\"\n\n\"Maybe. Maybe not. But we're going to try it anyway. Will you come with us, Gotrek, son of Gurni?\"\n\n\"You would have to kill me to stop me!\"\n\n\"That is what I hoped you would say.\"\n\n\"The airship \u2014 is that what the skaven were seeking?\"\n\n\"Most likely.\"\n\n\"Then you will need to move fast before they can amass another army.\"\n\nFelix paused for a moment, his mind reeling from what he had heard. It seemed that Gotrek was taking very seriously indeed all this lunatic talk of flying to the Chaos Wastes in an untried and highly dangerous machine, designed by a known maniac. And he did not doubt that he would be expected to come along for the ride.\n\nThen there was the fact that there was most likely some great foul daemon waiting for them at the end of the journey.\n\nWorse yet, it appeared that the skaven knew all about this new machine and would stop at nothing to get their hands on it. What hellish sorcery had they used to find out about something so new and well concealed? Or had they secret traitorous agents in place even among these dwarfs? Felix's respect for the long reach and fiendish intelligence of the rat-men was raised another notch by this evidence of their foresight and planning ability.\n\nAs he heard the dwarfs approach, Lurk quickly scurried into cover. He had spent most of the night gnawing his way through the back of a packing crate and had finally broken through just in time. He wriggled into its innards just before it was picked up by one of the strange, steam-powered lifting machines. He seemed to going up some sort of ramp.\n\nHis mind was still reeling from what he had seen last night. Within the huge hangar a massive sleek thing like an enormous shark had hovered overhead, apparently unsupported by any girders. The thing had bobbed up and down like an angry beast. The resemblance had been increased by the fact that the dwarfs had seen fit to tether it with steel hawsers. The sight of the monster had caused Lurk to spurt the musk of fear, but he felt not the slightest sense of shame at having done so. He did not doubt that any other skaven would have done just the same under similar circumstances, even the great Grey Seer Thanquol.\n\nIt had taken him long moments of observation, during which he thought his pounding heart would fight its way out of his breast, before he had realised that the creature was not actually alive and was in fact a machine. Something very like wonder had filled his mind as he contemplated the scale of the thing. It was several hundred skaven tails long, larger and more impressive than any other piece of machinery Lurk had seen in Skavenblight or in this dwarf town.\n\nHe was amazed by the sorcery which could keep such a huge seeming thing airborne. The skaven warrior in him turned over the possibilities in his mind. With such a machine, a skaven army could fly over human cities and drop poison wind globes, plague sacks and all manner of other weapons, without ever being attacked by the defenders below. It was every skaven leader's dream come true: a means of attack against which there might be no sure defence! For surely such a large armoured vessel must be proof against anything, short of an attack by dragons. And even then, judging by the size of it, and were those \u2014 yes, they were! \u2014 weapons cupolas embedded in the thing's fuselage, the vessel would have a good chance of surviving. This vessel would provide an awesome weapon in the paws of any skaven intelligent enough to understand the possibilities it offered.\n\nAt that moment, he guessed that Grey Seer Thanquol had come to much the same conclusion, for a mighty voice had squeaked inside his head. Yes-yes, this flymachine must be mine-mine!\n\nPerhaps, Lurk realised, he would soon have a chance to seize it, for the crate in which he was hiding was surely being raised on high into the very bowels of the mighty airship." + }, + { + "title": "DEPARTURE", + "text": "Felix stared out from the battlements of the keep. Below him the dwarf township filled the entire valley, but his eyes were glued to the huge central building, the one he now knew contained the airship. Beside him Gotrek leaned against the battlements. His massive head rested on his arms, which were folded atop the parapet. His axe lay near at hand.\n\nBelow them Felix could see long lines of dwarfs assembling in ranks before the great doors of the central hangar. Small but powerful steam-engines moved along the rails to the entrance. He picked up the telescope that Varek had lent him and placed it against his eye. A twist of his hands brought the scene into focus. He made out Snorri, Olger and Varek far below. They stood at the head of the line of dwarfs, almost like troops at attention.\n\nFlags fluttered from the struts of the enormous steel tower which loomed over the hangar. It was an imposing structure, more like a spider web of girders than a fortification. At the very top of the tower was what appeared to be a small hut or an observation post with a balconied veranda running all the way around it.\n\nSomewhere in the distance a steam whistle sounded its long lonely cry. By the side of the hangar one of the engineers pulled a huge lever. Pistons rose and fell mightily. Great cogwheels turned. Steam leaked from the monstrous pipes that had been hastily patched after the previous day's battle. Slowly, but surely, the top of the hangar opened. The roof itself slid apart, folding down the sides of the building. Eventually, an enormous structure rose into view, like a gigantic butterfly emerging from a monstrous chrysalis.\n\nFelix knew at once that, as long as he lived, he would never forget his first sight of the airship. It was the most impressive thing he had ever seen. With painful slowness great hawsers were paid out and, like an enormous balloon, the airship rose into view. At first Felix saw only a tiny cupola raised on the top of the vehicle, and towards the rear an enormous fin-like tail. Then, like a whale of the northern seas breaking surface, the gleaming expanse of the airship rose from below.\n\nIt was like watching the birth of a new volcanic island in the midst of the trackless ocean. The vast body of the vehicle was almost as long as the hangar and it sloped smoothly downwards like the beaches of an island running down to the sea. As the great craft continued to rise, Felix saw that this first impression was wrong, for, having reached its widest point, the hull curled inwards again, a smoothly curved cylinder. At the stern of the vessel were four massive fins, like the flights of a crossbow bolt.\n\nDangling from below its belly was a smaller cylindrical structure constructed from riveted metal. In this smaller structure were portholes, and from it protruded cannons and rotors and other mechanical devices whose purpose Felix could only guess at. He focused the telescope on it and could see that this smaller structure resembled the hull of a ship. Right at the front of the airship was a huge glass window. Through this he could see Malakai Makaisson, standing at the controls. Around him were many engineers.\n\nSlowly a strange thought occurred to Felix. Was it possible, he asked himself, that the real ship was the smaller vessel dangling beneath the mighty structure, that somehow the larger structure was something like the sail of a ship or the gasbag of a hot air balloon, huge and necessary for locomotion but not part of the living or working quarters below it? He did not know but he found himself at once repelled and fascinated by the idea, and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that, even if he only did so once in his life, he had to get aboard that craft. It was a thought which filled him with fear and curiosity. He glanced over at Gotrek, who was watching with equally rapt attention.\n\n\"Are you seriously considering going across the Chaos Wastes in this thing?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Yes, manling.\"\n\n\"And you expect me to come with you?\"\n\n\"No. That choice is yours alone.\"\n\nFelix looked over at the dwarf. Gotrek had not mentioned the oath that Felix had sworn, perhaps because he had felt that no reminder of it was needed \u2014 or perhaps because he was genuinely offering Felix the choice. Even after all this time Felix found it difficult to read the Slayer's moods.\n\n\"You have tried to cross the Wastes before, with Borek, and others.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nFelix drummed his fingers on the cold stone of the battlements. For long moments there was silence and then, just when Felix thought the dwarf was not going to say any more, Gotrek spoke again.\n\n\"I was younger then, and foolish. There were many of us, young dwarfs, full of ourselves. We listened to Borek's tales of Karag Dum and the Lost Weapons and how it would make our people great again if we found them. Others warned us that the quest was madness, that no good would come of it, that it was impossible. We would not listen. We knew better than them.\n\n\"Even if we failed, we told ourselves, we would fail gloriously, seeking to restore the pride of our people. If we died, we would give our lives in a worthy cause, and not have to witness the long slow years of attrition which ate away at our kingdom and our kin. Like I said, we were fools, with the confidence only fools have. We had no idea of what we were letting ourselves in for. It was a mad quest but we were desperate for some of the glory that Borek promised.\"\n\n\"The Hammer of Fate \u2014 what is it?\"\n\n\"It is a great warhammer, about the length of your forearm but weighing much more. The head is made from smooth, impervious rock, inscribed deeply with runes that\u2026\"\n\n\"I meant, why is it so important to your people?\" If Felix had not known better he would have suspected that Gotrek was trying to avoid the subject.\n\n\"It is a sacred object. The Ancestor Gods inscribed it with master runes when the world was young. Some think that it contains the luck of our people, that by losing it we brought a curse upon ourselves that we can only remove by recovering it. Certainly since the hammer was lost, things have not gone well for our race.\"\n\n\"Do you really believe that bringing it back will change things?\"\n\nGotrek shook his head slowly. \"Perhaps. Perhaps not. It may be that recovering the hammer will bring new heart to a people who have lost much over the past centuries. It may be that the weapon itself will unleash its magic to aid us once more. Or it may not. Even if not, the Hammer of Fate is said to be an awesome weapon, able to unleash lightning bolts and slay the most powerful foes. I do not know, manling. I do know that it is a mighty quest, and a worthy doom to fall on such a quest. If we can find Karag Dum. If we can cross the Wastes.\"\n\n\"And the axe?\"\n\n\"Of that I know even less. It is as ancient as the hammer, but few have ever looked upon it. It was always kept in a secret holy place and brought forth only in times of greatest danger, wielded by the High Runemaster of Karag Dum. In three millennia it was carried into battle less than a dozen times. Some whisper that it was the lost Axe of Grimnir himself. Only the High Runemaster of Karag Dum would know the truth of that for certain and he is dead, lost when the Wastes swallowed that place.\"\n\n\"Are the Wastes so bad?\"\n\n\"More terrible than you can imagine. Much more terrible. Some claim they are the entrance to Hell. Some claim they are the place where Hell and Earth touch. I can believe it. In all my days I have never seen a more foul place.\"\n\n\"And yet you would go back!\"\n\n\"What choice have I, manling? I am sworn to seek my doom. How could I remain behind when old Borek and Snorri and even that young pup Varek will go? If I remain behind I will be remembered as the Slayer who refused to accompany Borek on his quest.\"\n\nIt seemed strange to hear Gotrek express doubts or admit that he was considering accompanying the loremaster only because of the way others would remember him. He was usually so terrible and full of certainty that most of the time Felix had come to look upon him as something more than human, more like an elemental force. On the other hand, the Slayer was also a dwarf, and his good name meant far more to him that it could mean to even the proudest human. In this the Elder Race seemed truly alien to Felix.\n\n\"If we succeed, our names will live in legend for as long as dwarfs mine the under-mountains. If we fail\u2026\"\n\n\"You can but die,\" Felix said ironically.\n\n\"Oh no, manling. Not in the Chaos Wastes. There, you really can find fates far worse than death.\"\n\nWith this Gotrek fell silent and it was obvious that he would speak no more.\n\n\"Come on,\" Felix said. \"If we're going we'd better get down there and join the others.\"\n\nThe airship had emerged fully from the hangar now. It was moored, like a galleon at anchor, to the top of the great steel tower. It was only when he stood below it, and looked up at the tower's enormous metallic height that Felix truly appreciated the sheer size of the thing. It seemed as large as a cloudbank, big enough to block out the sun. It was larger than any ship Felix had ever seen, and he came from Altdorf, where ocean-going traders sometimes moored, sailing up the Reik all the way from Marienburg.\n\nHe had changed into clean clothes. His red woollen cloak flapped in the breeze. His pack was slung over his shoulder. He thought that he was packed and ready to go but now, for the first time, standing in the shadow of the immense metal tower with Gotrek and Snorri, he had some inkling of what he was really letting himself in for.\n\nA metal cage descended from the heights, supported by great metal hawsers unwinding from a drum at the structure's base. The drum was powered by one of the dwarfs' steam engines. As it moved it reeled the cable in and out and raised and lowered the cage as needed. It seemed like a mechanical marvel to Felix but Gotrek had remained unimpressed, insisting that such things existed in dwarf mines throughout the World's Edge Mountains.\n\nThe cage stopped next to them and its barred door was opened by one of the engineers. He bowed and gestured for them to enter. Felix felt a surge of trepidation, wondering whether the cable was strong enough to hold the combined weight of all three of them and the cage, wondering what would happen if it snapped, or something went wrong with the mechanism.\n\n\"Heh! Heh!\" Snorri cackled. \"Snorri likes cages. Snorri's been going up and down in this one all day. Better than riding a steam-wagon it is. Goes much higher!\"\n\nHe leapt in like a child given an unexpected treat. Gotrek followed him in showing no emotion whatsoever, his enormous axe slung lightly over his shoulder. Felix stepped tentatively inside and felt the metal floor flex under his feet. It was not a reassuring feeling.\n\nThe engineer slammed the cage door shut and suddenly Felix felt like a prisoner in a cell. Then another engineer pulled a lever and the engine's pistons started to rise and fall.\n\nFelix's stomach gave a lurch as the cage began to move and the ground fell away beneath them. Instinctively he reached out to grab one of the bars and steady himself. He gulped in air as nervous as he had been before the battle with the skaven. He noticed that he could see the ground through the small holes in the floor beneath his feet.\n\n\"Whee!\" went Snorri happily. The faces of the dwarfs on the ground shrank beneath him. Soon the machines were small as child's toys and the vast bulk of the airship swelled ever larger above them. Looking down gave Felix a very unsettling feeling. It wasn't as if they were really going that much higher than the topmost battlement of the castle, it just felt so much further.\n\nPerhaps it was something to do with the motion, or the wind whistling past through the bars of the cage but Felix felt very much afraid. There seemed to be something unnatural about just standing there with all your muscles rigid and your knuckles white from gripping cold metal while the girders of the metal tower glided past. His heart almost stopped as the cage came to rest and all motion ceased save for the slight swaying of the cage on its hawsers.\n\n\"You can let go now, manling,\" Gotrek said sarcastically. \"We've reached the top.\"\n\nFelix pried his grip loose to allow the engineer at the top to open the cage. He stepped through the opening and out onto a balcony. It was a structure of metal struts that ran around the top of the metal tower. The chill wind whipped his cloak and brought tears to his eyes. He felt suddenly frozen with fear when he saw how high he was above the ground. He could now no longer see all of the airship. It was too large for all of it to fit within his field of vision. A metal gangplank ran between the top of the tower and a door in the lower part of the airship's side. On the far side of it he could see Varek and Borek and the others waiting for him.\n\nFor a moment he could not make himself move. The ground was at least three hundred paces below him and that metal gangplank could not be that firmly attached to the airship or the tower. What if it gave way below him and he fell? There would be no chance of surviving a drop of this magnitude. The pounding of his heart sounded loud in his ears.\n\n\"What is Felix waiting for?\" he heard Snorri ask.\n\n\"Move, manling,\" he heard Gotrek say and then a powerful shove sent him stumbling forwards. \"Just don't look down.\"\n\nFelix felt the fragile metal bridge strain under his weight and for a moment thought that it was going to give way. He virtually bounded forward on to the deck of the airship.\n\n\"Welcome aboard the Spirit of Grungni,\" he heard Borek say.\n\nVarek grabbed him and pulled him further past. \"Makaisson wanted to call this ship the Unstoppable,\" the dwarf whispered, \"but for some reason my uncle wouldn't let him.\"\n\nFelix slumped beside Makaisson at the helm of the airship. He had been forced to duck as he came below. The airship had been designed with dwarfs in mind and so the ceilings were lower and the doors wider than they would have been for humans.\n\nThe engineer was dressed differently today. He wore a short leather jerkin with a massive sheepskin collar raised against the cold. A leather cap with long earflaps covered his head. There was another flap cut in the top for Makaisson's crest of hair. Goggles covered the dwarf's eyes, presumably as some protection against the wind if the front window was to shatter. Heavy leather gauntlets enclosed the dwarf's large hands. Makaisson turned and looked up at Felix, beaming with all the pride a father might show when pointing out the achievements of a favourite child.\n\nAs far as Felix could tell, some of the controls resembled those of an ocean-going ship. There was an enormous steering wheel which looked rather like a cartwheel, except that it had handgrips around the rim at strategic intervals to allow the pilot a comfortable grip. Felix imagined that by swinging the wheel the pilot could alter the direction of the craft. Beside the wheel were set a group of levers and a square metal box bearing all manner of strange and alarming gauges. Unlike with a ship, the pilot stood at the bow of the craft behind a shield of glass so that he could see where he was going. Looking out the window over the prow Felix could see there was a figurehead, some bearded and roaring dwarf god, which Felix presumed was the dwarf god, Grungni.\n\n\"Ah can tell yer impressed,\" Makaisson said, glancing over at Felix. \"An so ye should be \u2014 this is the biggest and best airship ever built. Actually, as far as ah ken it's only the second one ever built.\"\n\n\"You're certain that this thing will fly?\" Felix asked nervously.\n\n\"As certain as ah am that ah had ham fur breakfast. The balloon, that big thing above yer heed, is full of liftgas cells. There's enough o' the stuff up there to keep twice oor weight airborne.\"\n\n\"Liftgas?\"\n\n\"Och, ye ken, it's stuff that's lighter than air. It naturally wants to rise skyward, and as it does it taks us way it.\"\n\n\"How did you manage to collect the stuff if it's lighter than air. Wouldn't it just float away?\"\n\n\"A sensible enough question, laddie, an' one that shows ye hay the makin' o' an engineer. Aye, it's naturally rarer than hen's teeth but we make the stuff oorselves doon there in the toon. At least oor alchemist dae. Then we pipe it intae the balloon above us.\"\n\n\"The balloon.\" The thought worried Felix even more. It made him think of the tiny hot air balloons he had made of paper as a child. It seemed inconceivable that such a thing could lift a weight of solid metal, and he said so.\n\n\"Aye well, is a lot stronger than hot air and the balloon above yer heed is no made o' metal, nae metter what it looks like. It's made of mare resilient stuff. Alchemists made that as weel.\"\n\n\"What if the gas leaks out?\"\n\n\"Och, it woudnae dae a thing like that! Ye see inside that big balloon are hunnerds o' wee balloons. We call them gasbags or cells. If yin bursts it disnae metter much, we'll still hae plenty o' lift. Ivver half they wee balloons would hae tae burst before we lost altitude and even then it would be gradual. It just woudnae be natural for them tae aw burst at yince.\"\n\nFelix could see the sense of this arrangement. If the balloon above held thousands of smaller balloons, it was indeed unlikely that they could all be burst at once \u2014 even if they were attacked with hundreds of arrows, only the gasbags on the outside would be punctured, if arrows could even penetrate the outer structure of the balloon. Clearly Makaisson had given considerable thought to the safety of his creation.\n\nSomewhere at the rear of the ship a bell rang out. Felix looked around to see that the gangplank had been slid into place and a railing had been swung back round to cover the gap. He felt marginally safer.\n\n\"That's the sign that we're supposed to be awa',\" Makaisson said. He pulled one of the smaller levers close to hand and a steam-whistle sounded. Suddenly engineers swarmed across the ship to take up positions all around. From the ground below Felix heard cheering.\n\n\"Brace yersel!\" shouted Makaisson and tugged another lever. From somewhere below the ship came the sound of engines starting up. Their roar was almost deafening. At the sides of the ship the dwarfs were starting to reel in the hawsers on great drums, for all the world like a horde of sailors weighing anchor. Slowly Felix began to sense movement. Currents of air stroked his face. The airship began to rise and to move forward. Almost unwilling, he moved to the side of the ship and looked out through the porthole. The ground was starting to slip away below them, and the Lonely Tower complex fell away behind. The tiny figures of the dwarfs on the ground waved up at them and on impulse Felix waved back. Then he was overwhelmed by a sickening sense of vertigo and had to step back from the window.\n\nFor the first time it came home to him that he really was on a flying ship heading out for parts unknown. Then he started to wonder how they were ever going to land again. There were no hangars and no great steel towers that he knew of out in the Chaos Wastes.\n\nVarek led him down a metal stepladder which had been welded into the structure of the airship. Felix was glad to be off the command deck, away from the mass of excited dwarfs. The drone of the engine was audible even through the thick steel of the vehicle's hull, and occasionally for no reason that Felix could detect the floor flexed beneath his feet.\n\nSuddenly the whole vessel lurched to one side. Instinctively Felix reached out with his hand to steady himself against the wall. His heart leapt into his mouth and for a moment he was convinced that they were about to plummet to their doom. He realised that he was sweating, in spite of the chill.\n\n\"What was that?\" he asked nervously.\n\n\"Probably just a crosswind,\" Varek said cheerfully. Seeing Felix's confusion, he began to explain: \"The part of the ship we're in is called the gondola. Its not rigidly attached to the balloon above us. We're actually dangling from hawsers. Sometimes the wind catches us from one side and the whole gondola starts to swing in that direction. Nothing to worry about. Makaisson designed the airship so that it could fly through a gale if need be \u2014 or so he claims.\"\n\n\"I hope he did,\" Felix said, finding the nerve to put one foot in front of the other once more.\n\n\"Isn't this exciting, Felix?\" Varek asked. \"Uncle says we're probably the first people ever to fly at this altitude in a machine!\"\n\n\"That just means we have further to fall,\" Felix muttered.\n\nFelix lay on the short dwarfish bed and stared at the riveted steel ceiling of his stateroom. He found it difficult to relax with the thought of the long drop below him and the occasional motion of the vessel. He was pleased to discover that the cramped bunk had been bolted to the floor of the chamber to prevent it from moving about. The same was true of the metal storage chest in which he had thrown his gear. It was a good design and showed that the dwarfs had thought of things that he never would have. Which, he admitted, was typical; as a people, they were if nothing else thorough.\n\nHe turned on his stomach and pressed his face against the porthole, a small circle of very thick glass set in the airship's side. A chill communicated itself almost immediately to the tip of his nose and his breath misted the pane. He wiped it away and saw that they had risen still higher and that below them lay clouds in a near-endless rolling sea of white.\n\nIt was a view which Felix had imagined that only gods and sorcerers had ever seen before, and it sent a thrill of fear and excitement coursing through his whole body. Through a sudden gap in the clouds he could see a patchwork quilt of fields and woods spread out far below. They were so high that, for a moment, he could read the surface of the world like a map, glancing from peasant village to peasant village with a turn of his head. He could follow the course of streams and rivers as if they were the pen-strokes of some divine cartographer. Then the cloud closed again, to lie below him like a snow field. Above them the sky was an incomparable blue.\n\nFelix felt privileged to be given even a glimpse from such heights. Perhaps this is what the Emperor himself felt like when he looked down from the saddle of his royal pegasus, he thought, and took in all the kingdoms of his domain, stretching off into the distance as far as his regal eyes could see.\n\nThe gondola of the Spirit of Grungni was very impressive, in a cramped, claustrophobic sort of way, Felix decided. It was as big as a river barge and certainly a lot more comfortable. En route to his stateroom they had passed many other chambers. There was a small but well stocked kitchen, complete with some sort of portable stove. There was a ship's mess with enough space for thirty dwarfs to dine at a sitting. There was a map room filled with charts and tables and a small library of volumes. There was even a huge cargo hold packed with wooden crates which Varek had assured him were full of all the food and gear they would require further north. The thought reminded Felix that when they next stopped \u2014 if they next stopped \u2014 he would have to pick up some winter clothing and equipment. He did not imagine that it was going to get any warmer the further north they got.\n\nFelix wondered to himself whether this meant he was committing himself to going with the dwarfs. He wasn't certain. In its way, it was an exciting prospect, making such a journey in this mighty airship, to visit a place that no man had seen for three thousand years. If only they had been going any place other than the Chaos Wastes, Felix was certain that he would have chanced it in an instant.\n\nHe was not a particularly brave man but neither, he knew without false modesty, was he a coward. The thought of what this vessel was capable of excited him. Mountains and seas would prove no obstacle to a machine which could simply float over them, and this airship was capable of speeds far greater than the fastest ship. According to Varek it could average over two hundred leagues a day, a stupendous velocity.\n\nBy Felix's best reckoning it had taken him and the Slayer over a month to cover a similar distance on foot and cart. This vessel was capable of making passage to Araby or Far Cathay in under a week, journeys which took many months. Assuming the vehicle didn't crash or get blown from the sky by a storm or attacked by a dragon, it was capable of amazing feats of locomotion. The commercial possibilities were enormous. It could be used to move small precious perishable cargoes at speed between distant cities. It could do the work of a hundred couriers or stagecoaches. He was sure that there were those who would pay simply to be given a glimpse of the stupendous views he had witnessed through the gap in the clouds. Felix smiled ironically, realising that he was thinking as his father would under the circumstances.\n\nBut of course, having created this amazing vehicle, what did those crazed short-legged idiots propose to do with it? Nothing less than fly directly into the deadliest wilderness on the planet, a place which Felix had been brought up to believe was the haunt of daemons and monsters and those who had sold their souls to the Dark Powers \u2014 a belief that Gotrek had practically confirmed was true.\n\nFelix wondered at that. Was there some strange compulsion lodged in the dwarfish mind to always seek destruction and defeat? Certainly they seemed to relish tales of disaster and woe the way humans relished epics of triumph and heroism. They seemed to enjoy brooding on their failures and recording their grudges against the world. Felix doubted that any such cult as the Slayer cult could attract worshippers in the Empire and then pulled himself up short. That was most likely not true. Even the incredibly evil Chaos Gods had found worshippers amongst his people, so there would probably be no shortage of human Slayers if they were offered the chance.\n\nHe dismissed this line of speculation as pointless, and realised that he did not have to come to any decisions right now about whether he would accompany the dwarfs. He could always decide when they stopped.\n\nIf they stopped, he corrected himself.\n\nLurk flexed muscles long cramped from inaction. He wondered where he was. He wondered what he was supposed to do. For many hours now, he had heard no communication from Grey Seer Thanquol. For many hours now, he had felt a sense of isolation that was quite new in his experience, and in a way terrifying.\n\nHe had been born in the great warrens of Skavenblight, eldest of an average sized litter of twenty. He reached full growth surrounded by his siblings and all the others in the cramped burrow. He had lived in a city filled to bursting point with his fellow skaven, hundreds of thousands of them. When he had left that city it had always been on military duties, as part of a mighty unit of skaven. Even in the smallest guard posts there had been hundreds. He had lived and ate, defecated and slept always within squeaking distance of his kind. There had never been an hour of his short life when he had not been surrounded by the scent of their musk and their droppings, or the sound of their constant stealthy movements.\n\nFor the first time in his life he felt that absence like a sharp pain, as a man newly blinded might feel the absence of light. Certainly, all his fellows had been his rivals for the favour of his superiors. Certainly, they would all have stabbed him in the back for a copper token, just as he would them. But always they had been there. There had been something reassuring about their massed presence, for it was a world full of danger, of lesser races who hated the mighty skaven breed and envied their superiority, and in numbers there was safety from any threat. Now he was isolated and hungry and filled with the urge to squirt the musk of fear although there were no fellow skaven around to heed its warning. Now it was all he could do to simply listen to his racing heart and not bury his head in his paws in paralysed terror. In that horrible moment, he realised that he even missed the presence of Grey Seer Thanquol in his mind. It came as a terrible revelation.\n\nAt that exact moment, the whole ship began to shake.\n\nFelix opened his eyes in alarm. He realised that he must have dozed off. What was that banging sound? Why were the walls shaking. Why was his bed moving? Slowly it came to his puzzled mind that he was on the dwarf airship and it looked like something had gone terribly wrong. The floor was bucking and he could feel the vibration through his mattress. He rolled off the bed, sprang to his feet and banged his head painfully on the ceiling.\n\nHe fought down a feeling of claustrophobic terror as the whole airship thumped, creaked and vibrated round about him. In his mind's eye he pictured the ship breaking up and everyone in it plunging to their doom. Why had he ever allowed himself to set foot on this terrible machine, he asked himself as he opened the door. Why had he ever agreed to accompany these dwarf maniacs even this far?\n\nExpecting something terrible to happen at any moment, he threw open his door and shuffled out into the corridor, praying frantically to Sigmar to get him out of this mess, and hoping against hope that he lived long enough to find out what was going on." + }, + { + "title": "EN ROUTE", + "text": "The rocking of the airship threw Felix headlong into the corridor. Stars flashed before his eyes and pain seared through his head as his skull struck one of the metal walls. He started to pull himself upright again, realised that he was simply begging to have his head cracked on the ceiling and instead stayed down and started to crawl along the corridor.\n\nOf all the terrors he had ever faced, this was quite possibly the worst. Any second he expected the hull to shatter, the wind to snatch him up and then a long fall to his death. It occurred to him that, for all he knew, the gondola may already have parted from the balloon and be plunging to its doom. Impact with the solid earth might happen at any second.\n\nIt wasn't so much the fear that was appalling. It was the sense of helplessness. There was simply nothing he could do to alter his predicament. Even if he managed to get to the control room, he did not know how to steer the craft. Even if he found his way to an exit they were thousands of feet above the ground. Never before had he known a sensation quite like it. Even in the midst of battle, surrounded by enemies, he had always felt like he was in charge of his own destiny and could fight his way clear by virtue of his own skill and ferocity. On a tempest-tossed ship he might have been able to do something; if it sank, he could dive into the sea and swim for his life. His chances in either case might be slim but at least there was something that he could do. Here and now there was nothing to be done except crawl along this claustrophobic walkway, with the vibrating steel walls pressing in, and pray to Sigmar that he would be spared.\n\nFor a moment, something like blind panic threatened to overwhelm him, and he fought down an overwhelming urge to simply curl up in a ball and do nothing. He forced himself to breathe normally as he pushed these thoughts aside. He was not going to do anything to shame himself in front of these dwarfs. If death came he would face it standing, or at least crouching. He forced himself upright and slowly made for the control chamber.\n\nJust as he was congratulating himself on his determination, the airship rose then fell mightily, like a ship breasting an enormous wave. For a long moment, he was convinced that the end had come and he stood there waiting to greet his gods. It took several heartbeats for him to realise that he was not dead, and several more before he could gather the nerve to put one foot in front of the other and continue.\n\nOn the command deck no one showed any signs of panic. Tense-looking engineers strode backwards and forwards, checking gauges and pulling levers. Makaisson stood straining at the wheel, his enormous muscles swollen under his leather tunic, his crest bristling through his helmet. All the dwarfs stood with their legs wide apart, maintaining perfect balance. Unlike Felix they were not having any trouble standing upright. Envy filled him. Maybe it was because they were smaller, broader and heavier, he thought. Lower centre of gravity. Whatever it was, he wished he had it.\n\nThe only one showing any discomfort was Varek, who had turned a nasty shade of green and had covered his mouth with his hand.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Felix asked. He was proud that he managed to keep his voice level.\n\n\"Nithin tae worry aboot!\" Makaisson bellowed. \"Joost a wee bit o' turbulence!\"\n\n\"Turbulence?\"\n\n\"Aye! The air beneath us is a wee bit disturbed. It's just like waves in water. Dinna worry! It'll settle itself doon in a minute. Ah've seen this before.\"\n\n\"I'm not worried,\" Felix lied.\n\n\"Guid! That's the spirit! This auld ship was built for far worse than this! Trust me! Ah should ken \u2014 I built the bloody thing!\"\n\n\"That's what I'm worried about,\" Felix muttered beneath his breath.\n\n\"Ah still wish they'd called her the Unstoppable. Cannae understand why they didnae.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Lurk squirted the musk of fear again. The inside of the packing case stank of it. His fur was matted with fine droplets. He wished he could stop but he couldn't. The banging and shaking of the dwarf airship had him convinced that he was going to die. He knew he should stop, that the reek of the musk was only likely to draw attention to him but that thought just scared him more and kept him squirting the bitter acrid stench. It was only when his glands were empty and sore that he stopped. Bitterly he cursed Thanquol and the machinations that had placed him in this position of jeopardy. What was the grey seer doing now, he wondered?\n\nThanquol sat hunched in the desolate cave high in the mountains, pondering how he was going to get in touch with Lurk and find out the location of the airship. He had watched its departure, his heart filled with a lust to possess the thing such as he had never in all his life felt before. He finally understood what the dwarfs had been working on, and what it represented.\n\nThe military possibilities were endless. Judging by the speed with which the vehicle had gained height and flown off, it was capable of moving from one end of the Old World to the other in less than a week. The vision of a great fleet of such ships carrying the invincible skaven legions to inevitable victory filled his mind. The sky would be darkened by mighty vessels bearing the banner of the Horned Rat and Thanquol, his most favoured servant. Armies could be moved behind the lines of bewildered enemies before they realised what was happening. Cities could be brought to their knees by bombs, gas globes and plague spores dropped from above.\n\nWhen he looked at that airship, Thanquol had known that he looked upon the very pinnacle of technological achievement in the Old World and that it was the destiny of the skaven race to possess it and improve on it in their own inimitable way. Refitted with superior skaven engines and weapons, the airship would become better, faster and more powerful than its creators could ever imagine. Thanquol knew that it was his duty to his people and to his own destiny as one of their leaders, to acquire that airship, whatever the cost, however long it took. Only a skaven of his brilliance could understand its true potential. He must have it!\n\nBut right now the first problem was to find out where the thing was. He had lost contact with Lurk when his lieutenant had passed out of the range of the speaking stones. Thanquol knew he would have to extend himself to re-establish contact by sorcerous means. The link between his stone and his lackey's still existed but there was just not enough power in the spell. He believed he could compensate for that himself, given the opportunity.\n\nHe swiftly glanced round the cave. It was a propitious spot, one of the entrances to the great web of tunnels that linked the Under-Empire, the place where the survivors of his attack on the Lonely Tower had mustered beyond reach of dwarfish vengeance. It had been a long, tiring scuttle through the night to reach this place and Thanquol was weary as he had not been in many a year. Still, he was not about to let fatigue stop him from gaining possession of the airship.\n\nHe touched the amulet with the slender talon that tipped one of his long delicate fingers. He sensed the surge of warpstone energies trapped within the talisman. Patiently he sent his thoughts questing down the tenuous ectoplasmic link which streamed from the amulet. It was reassuring to know that it still existed in some form, even though it was stretched far beyond any distance he had ever envisioned. Slowly the grey seer gathered his power and sent his mind reaching out further. He closed his eyes to aid his concentration, feeling like one stretching further and further out over some abyss.\n\nIt was no use. He could not make contact over this distance, not unaided. He reached into his pouch and took a generous pinch of warpstone snuff, snorting it hungrily. The power aided him, bringing him the strength he required. Far, far off, at enormous range, he sensed the dim, frightened presence of the wretched Lurk. A smile of triumph revealed Thanquol's fangs. He knew instantly the distance and direction in which the airship flew. He could find it again when required. Now he needed more specific information.\n\nLurk, listen to me! Here are your orders!\n\nYes, mightiest of masters! the reply came back.\n\nFelix looked out through the window of the command deck in astonishment. The turbulence had ended. Night had come. Below him he could see countless lights which marked the presence of taverns and villages spread across the hills and plains of the Empire. Some that moved marked the presence of coaches hastening through the darkness to inns or other refuges. Off to the left he caught the glitter of moonlight on a river and patches of denser shadow which marked a forest. It was a scene of strange and eerie beauty, and something that Felix knew few men had ever seen.\n\nThey had passed through the turbulence of the storm and everything seemed to be going smoothly. The droning of the engines was regular. None of the dwarfs showed the faintest signs of alarm. Even Varek had lost some of his greenness and headed off to his cabin to rest. All was peaceful in the control deck.\n\nThey had been aloft now for many hours and at last Felix was starting to believe that this ship really could fly. It had survived the shaking and bucking earlier. Aside from a bruise on his forehead there was no sign of any trouble. Incredible as it had seemed just a few hours ago, he was starting to enjoy the sensation of being airborne, of travelling at astonishing height at god-like speed.\n\nHe glanced around. By the soft lamplight he could see the skeleton crew on the command deck. Most of the dwarfs had gone off to rest. Makaisson was slumped in a padded command chair while another engineer took the wheel. His eyes were shut but a maniacal grin of justified triumph spread across his face. Behind him, with his back to Felix, Borek leaned on his staff and gazed out the window. Thighs burning from maintaining his unnatural crouch, Felix shuffled over to him.\n\n\"Where are we headed?\" Felix asked quietly.\n\n\"Middenheim, Herr Jaeger. We're going to pick up some fuel and supplies and a few more passengers, then we'll be heading northeast to Kislev and the Troll Country. Makaisson says we lost some time against the head winds but we should reach the city on the spire by dawn tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Dawn! But it must be scores of leagues from the Lonely Tower to the City of the White Wolf.\"\n\n\"Aye. This is a fast ship, is it not?\"\n\nIntellectually Felix had already grasped this point but now he realised that emotionally he had not. Nor would he, really, until he saw the narrow, winding streets of Middenheim below him. It was all very well calculating in your head just how fast the airship was moving. It was another thing entirely experiencing it.\n\n\"It is one of the wonders of the age,\" Felix said with feeling.\n\nBorek stroked his beard with gnarled fingers and limped over to a seat. It was a huge, padded leather armchair, built to accommodate dwarfs. It was fixed to a short column, atop of which it swivelled, and there was a harness for strapping the occupant in which at the moment lay loose on the floor.\n\nGratefully the old dwarf slumped into his seat, took out his pipe and lit it. He fixed Felix with one bright eye. \"That it is! Let us hope that it is good enough for our purposes. For if it fails, there will most likely never be another.\"\n\nLurk levered open the packing case and steeled his courage to the sticking point. Slowly, stealthily, he clambered out onto the mass of packing cases. He realised at once that the Horned Rat had smiled upon him. If the case in which he had taken refuge had been on the bottom of this mass, he would never have been able to get free. The weight of all the other cases packed above him would have left him trapped to die of slow starvation.\n\nHe paused, nose twitching and sniffed the air. He could detect no scents of anyone close to him. His eyes probed the darkness. They were well adapted for this task. The skaven were a race of tunnel dwellers. Although their vision was poorer than that of human eyes in full daylight, they could see much better in the gloom. There was no sign of anybody in the hold either. To most people the cargo space would have been in total darkness. Lurk guessed this most likely meant that it would be night outside.\n\nThe first thing he needed to do was shift his refuge. If any dwarf looked into the case, they would find it suspiciously empty and stinking of his musk and droppings. It would not take them long to work out that they had a stowaway aboard ship and start a search. The very thought made Lurk's musk glands tighten.\n\nAs it turned out, the empty case was light enough and he had little difficulty lifting it and placing it further back in the rows of similar cases. Perhaps he should look for something to put in it, so that anyone lifting it would not notice its suspicious lightness. For the life of him he could not think how to do this, though, so he abandoned consideration of the problem and gave thought to something else. He was hungry!\n\nFortunately he could smell food. Nearby were sacks of grain. He gnawed the corner of one and plunged his muzzle in deep, chewing and swallowing frantically to assuage his hunger. In the far corner he now noticed hundreds of cured hams hung from a steel rack. Surely no one would miss one, and he knew that meat would satisfy his stomach far better than grain. He grabbed a haunch of meat and gobbled half of it greedily. It was just too bad it wasn't fresh and raw, but then he supposed you couldn't expect the Horned Rat to provide everything. He stuffed the rest of the joint inside his tunic for later. Now it was time to set about his mission for the grey seer, to carry out Thanquol's orders and search the ship.\n\nSlowly, using all the stealth he had learned in long years of ambushes and sneak attacks, he stalked forward. His natural posture caused him to slouch forward and he had little difficulty moving on all four paws. Actually, had the floors not been metal and had he not been surrounded by the presence of his enemies, he would have felt quite at home here. These low wide corridors reminded him oddly of a skaven burrow.\n\nHe fought down feelings of nostalgia. Ahead of him was a metal ladder fixed into the walls. He scampered up it easily and prowled on down a long corridor. All around him he heard the sound of snoring, from where the unsuspecting dwarfs lay asleep. If only he had a squad of his stormvermin now, he thought, he could take the entire ship. Unfortunately he did not, so he scurried on.\n\nAhead of him he heard the sound of pistons moving up and down and dwarfish voices shouting above the din. Slowly, heart pounding, he poked his head through a doorway and looked within. Fortunately the chamber's occupants had their backs to him. He glanced around. The room was filled with huge machines. Cogs turned, pistons pumped and two enormous crankshafts ran out through the walls, rotating as they went.\n\nSome buried instinct told Lurk that be had found the engine room. If only he could sabotage this machine he could bring the whole ship to a halt. He had no idea what good this would do him, but he felt that he'd best report the fact to Grey Seer Thanquol.\n\nNot wanting to push his luck, he ducked backwards and scampered along his scent trail back towards the hold. He still had not found what he was looking for and from portholes along the side of the ship he could see the sun was starting to peek over the horizon. He wanted to be back in his hiding place before the crew came fully awake.\n\nGlancing out through the porthole, he suddenly realised he had the answer to the grey seer's question. In the distance he could see a mighty peak rising out of the forest. That peak was crowned with the towers of a human city. He knew that city.\n\nFor long years he had been part of the skaven garrison which dwelt in the tunnels below the peak, ready at a moment's notice to infiltrate the metropolis of their hated enemies. The airship was heading for the place humans called Middenheim, the City of the White Wolf.\n\nFelix's eyes snapped open. He had fallen asleep in one of the armchairs in the control room. He noticed at once that the sound of the engines had altered and that the craft was juddering slightly as it lost height. He rose up, and only at the last second remembered to stoop before he banged his head on the ceiling. He shuffled slowly over to the window and saw distant towers silhouetted against the rising sun. It was a sight of considerable beauty, for the buildings rose out of a mighty fortress that occupied the heights of a great peak. They had reached Middenheim more or less on schedule.\n\nEven as he watched, he saw a large creature starting to rise from within the citadel and fly towards the airship. He fervently hoped that it had no hostile intent." + }, + { + "title": "MIDDENHEIM", + "text": "As Felix watched in rapt fascination, he could see that the creature was a winged horse, one of the fabled pegasii. Its rider wore the long robes and intricate headpiece of a sorcerer. A globe of fire encased one hand, and Felix knew that the mysterious rider could unleash it with a gesture. He had seen the wizards of the Empire on the field of battle and knew the awesome power they wielded.\n\nThe wizard directed his great flying steed alongside the airship. Its mighty pinions moved rhythmically, keeping the creature abreast of the airship with ease. The mage looked over and Borek rose from his chair and hobbled over to the window. He waved to the man, who answered him with a look of recognition. He applied spurs to his steed and hurtled forward, gesturing for them to follow.\n\nMakaisson took over the wheel and began to make minute adjustments to their course. The airship moved in response, losing speed and altitude swiftly as they descended towards the spires of the city.\n\nLooking down, Felix could see that the cobbled streets were full of people. They stared upwards in amazement, craning their necks for a better view of the vessel passing overhead. On some faces was written wonder, on others merely fear. In a way, Felix realised, whether they knew it or not, those people down there were looking on the passing of their way of life.\n\nFor thousands of years their city had rested secure and impregnable in its rocky eyrie. The only approach was up a long, narrow, spiralling path in the cliffside or via a cableway that ran from the villages below. In its entire existence, no invader had ever managed to conquer this place. It was a location where ten men could easily hold off a thousand, and often had. There were relatively few pegasii, wyverns or other flying steeds \u2014 and certainly no great armies of them.\n\nThe Spirit of Grungni changed everything. It could carry an entire company of soldiers in its hold. A fleet of such ships could deliver an army on to this spire. The odd-looking cannons he had noticed in the ship's side could bombard those cobbled streets and shale roofs from afar in a way no besieger could ever have managed before. In an odd way, today was the beginning of a new era, and he wondered if anybody except he himself realised it.\n\nThey passed over the steep and winding streets. The tall narrow tenements of the city rose towards the central heights of the peak which were dominated by the twin masses of the Elector Count's Palace and the mighty Temple of Ulric, Lord of Wolves. The two enormous structures glared at each other across the highest square of the city and it was over this open space, with a clear view of the maze of rooftops and chimneys spread out beneath them, that the airship came to rest.\n\nFor the past few minutes Felix had wondered how this operation was going to be achieved and now he watched in fascination as it was revealed to him. Clearly they were expected. A group of dwarfs had mustered in the square, where great metal rings had already been driven into the stones of the plaza. Makaisson threw one of his control levers backwards and the noise of the engines altered.\n\n\"Reverse engines,\" he called. \"Brace yersels!\"\n\nFelix had a few moments to realise what he meant before the airship slowed to a stop. Makaisson then moved the lever to a neutral position and the noise of the engines died almost completely.\n\n\"Anchors awa'!\" A group of engineers stood by the hawser cables. They hit release catches and the cables spun out dropping their attached lines. When the cables dropped like anchors, the dwarfs below were ready. They grabbed the lines and swiftly attached them to the hooks. In a matter of moments, the airship was made fast. Felix was still not sure how they themselves were going to get down, though. His curiosity on this point was soon satisfied.\n\nIt was a long way down. They were in the very bottom level of the gondola, looking at a massive hatch that an engineer had just thrown open. As Felix watched, a rope ladder was unrolled and dropped through the hatch. Still unfurling as it fell, it soon reached the ground below. One of the dwarfs in the square grabbed it and attempted to brace it but, for his pains, began to swing backwards and forwards.\n\nGotrek looked down through the hatch, grabbed the rope and swung himself out into space. He began the long descent, as agile as an ape. He used only one hand, fearlessly clutching his enormous axe in the other.\n\n\"After you, Felix,\" Snorri said.\n\nFelix looked down. It was a long drop but if he ever wanted to get his feet on solid earth again he was going to have to use the ladder. He swung himself outwards and down, feeling a moment of sick fear as his feet kicked in empty air before contacting the rope. Next he grabbed the top rung with his hands and began his descent, clinging on desperately as the wind tore at his cloak and brought tears to his eyes.\n\nThe rope ladder was not at all stable. It swung back and forwards in the breeze. Felix wished he had worn gloves, for the rope was digging into his fingers painfully. He forced himself to put one foot down and then the other. Having learned from his experiences when boarding the airship he did his best not to look down. At the level of the rooftops he was surprised to see people hanging out the windows and waving to him. In the distance he could hear cheering.\n\nA dizzying sense of vertigo overtook him as he glanced down for the source. He saw that the square was surrounded by a throng of people being held back only by the count's elite guard of Knights of the White Wolf. It slowly dawned on him that the people were cheering for him. He was the first and only human to have descended from this airship and they assumed that he was some kind of hero. So as not to disappoint them he waved. Losing his grip almost overbalanced him and the ladder lurched to the right, nearly sending him tumbling to the cobblestones below. Hastily he gripped the ladder once more and continued his descent.\n\nHe doubted there was ever a man happier than he was when his boots touched the ground.\n\nA group of heavily armoured and richly-dressed men strode out of the palace to greet them. Their robes were of the finest cloth, their heavy fur cloaks of mink and sable pelt. On their tabards was the wolf-head emblem of the Elector Count of Middenheim. They presented a sight that was at once redolent of wealth and strangely barbaric. Felix knew this was in keeping with the reputation of the city of their origin, for, in many ways, the Middenheimers were a people apart. The dominant faith in this city was the cult of the berserker god Ulric, and the priesthood of Sigmar, patron deity of the Empire, was more tolerated than revered. It was a source of abiding tension within the Empire but such was the wealth and military might of this powerful city-state that it was free to carve out its own path. Felix knew that this was a rare thing in a land where religious dissent had often been the cause of bloody civil strife.\n\nIt seemed that these men had been sent to welcome the dwarfs and usher them into the presence of Elector Count Stephan. Felix noticed that they were looking at him with something like surprise in their eyes. Quite obviously, whatever else they had been expecting, having a human descend from the great airship had not been included. Nonetheless they bowed to him in a courtly manner and informed him that the count requested his company. Felix returned their bows and allowed himself to be led into the palace, not quite sure whether he was a prisoner or a guest.\n\nThe palace was old and sumptuous. Great tapestries covered the walls, depicting scenes from the city-state's long, proud history. As he walked Felix recognised scenes from the Battle of Hel Fen, and the wars with the vampire counts of Sylvania. He saw wolfskin-cloaked warriors engaged in battle with green-skinned orcs. And depictions of the hideous hordes of Chaos, which had besieged the city two hundred years ago during the time of Magnus the Pious.\n\nThe palace was huge, carved from the same stone as the peak by craftsmen who had obviously been stupendously skilled. Above each doorjamb, gargoyle heads leered down and the arches themselves were carved with the most intricate of frescoes. Carpets from Tilea, Araby and distant Cathay covered the heavy flagstones. In each hall a massive fire burned, keeping the chill of the heights at bay. Even in the daytime, lanterns burned in those halls furthest from the light, shining out in the gloom.\n\nHere and there massive burly palace guards moved around on missions for their master, and every so often richly garbed councillors paused to gape at the dwarfs and those that accompanied them. So it was, spreading a strange silence in their wake, that Felix and his companions entered the throne room of the Elector Count of Middenheim, and confronted the lean, powerful figure sitting erect on the Wolf Throne.\n\nFelix could see others grouped around the throne. Most were old, bearded men who he assumed were councillors, but two figures stood out. One leaned forward and whispered something in the count's ear. He was a tall and slender man, garbed in robes of sumptuous purple.\n\nThe robes were trimmed with gold cloth inscribed with symbols which Felix had come to recognise as mystical signs. An ornate headpiece rested on his brow, of all things it resembled most a tall, conical elvish helm, only fashioned from felt and cloth-of-gold. Rings containing precious stones glittered on the man's fingers. An intangible aura of power hung over him, and made Felix uneasy. It was the pegasus-riding wizard and in the past his dealings with wizards had rarely been pleasant.\n\nThe other figure was equally intriguing. She stood just below the count's dais, a tall woman and perhaps a lovely one, but it was difficult to tell. Felix guessed that she was almost his height. She was not dressed in a court gown as the other ladies present were. She wore a sleeveless jerkin of leather over a white linen shirt. Her leather britches were cinched at the waist with a studded leather belt. High riding boots encased the thighs of her long legs. Her ash-blonde hair was cropped short almost to the scalp. Two swords were sheathed at her narrow waist. She stood straight-backed, with her chin tilted back. There was an air about her of far lands and distant places. Feeling his eyes upon her, she turned and glanced back in his direction.\n\nThe dwarfs bowed before the count's throne and began making florid introductions. Count Stephan cut them short politely enough, but with the manner of a military man who had no time for long-winded speeches. Felix was brought forward to stand beside Gotrek and Snorri and gave the best courtly bow he knew how. He saw interest flicker in the eyes of the count when he noticed a human in the dwarf party, before the ruler returned his full attention to Borek.\n\n\"Our chancellors have prepared the substances you requested for transfer to your vessel,\" Count Stephan said.\n\nBy the look on Olger's face, Felix guessed that whatever those substances were, they must have cost a pretty penny. The miser looked as pale and miserable as a man who had undergone amputation.\n\n\"I thank you, noble lord, and welcome this affirmation of the ancient friendship among our people.\"\n\nThe count smiled as if he and Borek were old friends and he had only been too pleased to make the gift. Felix looked up and was startled to find himself looking directly into the blue eyes of the woman on the dais. She was about the same age as he was, he realised. Unlike the noblewomen, her face was tanned. She had high cheekbones and wide lips, which lent her a decidedly exotic beauty. Felix guessed that she was not from anywhere within the Empire. She cocked her head to one side and examined him. Felix was unused to such direct and appraising scrutiny from a woman but he forced himself to hold her gaze. She smiled at him challengingly.\n\n\"Now you must tell me of your unique vessel and your mission,\" Elector Count Stephan was saying.\n\nBorek looked around the chamber meaningfully. \"Gladly, your Excellency, but some things are best discussed in private.\"\n\nThe count surveyed the vast audience hall, the crowds of lackeys, guards and hangers-on. He nodded to show he understood and clapped his hands.\n\n\"Chamberlain, I would speak to noble Borek in private. Have food and wine brought to my apartments.\"\n\nThe chamberlain bowed and without further ceremony Count Stephan rose, descended from his dais and offered Borek his arm to lean upon. Before Felix had even realised it, the audience chamber began to clear. In moments, he and the remaining dwarfs were left alone in the suddenly empty chamber.\n\nFelix turned to Varek. The young dwarf shrugged.\n\n\"Who were the wizard and the girl?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"I think they might be our passengers,\" Varek replied.\n\n\"Passengers?\"\n\n\"I'm sure either they or my uncle will tell you more when you need to know.\" Varek seemed to realise that he had said more than he ought to and scuttled swiftly out, leaving Felix alone with Gotrek, Snorri, Olger and Makaisson.\n\n\"I'll be leaving the expedition here,\" Olger said suddenly. \"Much as I would like to stay with you, I have clan business to transact here in Middenheim. Good luck and bring back the gold.\"\n\nHe bowed and stumped away.\n\n\"Good riddance,\" Gotrek jeered.\n\n\"Snorri thinks the old skinflint is scared,\" Snorri said.\n\nAnd why shouldn't he be, thought Felix? He was beginning to suspect that the miser was the most sensible dwarf of all he had ever encountered.\n\n\"Let's find some beer,\" Gotrek said.\n\nFelix stopped to purchase a pastry from a street vendor. He paused and looked around the street, happy to be in a human city once more, enjoying the teeming throngs all around him. Overhead the tall tenements of Middenheim loomed. People filled the narrow winding streets. Jugglers tossed multicoloured balls. Acrobats tumbled. Gaudily garbed men on stilts towered over the crowd. Drums beat. Pipers played. Ragged beggars stuck out grubby hands. The smells of roasting chicken, cooked pies and night soil filled the air.\n\nFelix kept one hand on his purse and the other on the hilt of his sword, for he was familiar with the perils and predators of urban life. Thieves, cut-purses and armed robbers were all too common. Dirty-faced children watched him with predatory eyes. Here and there warriors in the tabards of guardsmen moved through the crowds.\n\n\"Hello, handsome. Want a good time?\" Painted women waved to him from the doorways of shabby houses. One jiggled her hips in a parody of lust. From the narrow windows above, others blew him kisses. Felix turned his eyes away and pushed on past. Briefly he wondered about the woman he had seen back in the palace, but he pushed the thought aside. There would be time enough to get to know her as their journey continued.\n\nA drunk staggered from the door of a tavern and reeled against Felix. Felix smelled the man's beer soaked breath and then felt fingers fumbling for his purse. He brought up his knee, jabbed it into the would-be pickpocket's groin. The man collapsed, groaning.\n\n\"Quickly, this poor fellow has been taken ill,\" shouted Felix and stepped over the prostrate body. Like wolves on a sickly deer, the street people descended on the fake drunkard. Felix vanished swiftly into the crowd before the guards noticed the disturbance.\n\nHe smiled. It felt good to be back in civilisation, surrounded by his own people. It felt good to have some time to himself. He was glad that he had been given the day off while Borek talked with the count, and the dwarf engineers loaded the barrels of black stuff aboard the airship. Gotrek and Snorri had headed off to a tavern in the lower levels but Felix was in no mood for an all day drinking session. The memory of his last appalling hangover was still too fresh in his mind. Instead he had decided to take a wander round the city and meet up with the Slayers later. He was sure that the Wolf and Vulture tavern would be an easy one to find. He did not have to return to the airship until dawn tomorrow. There would be plenty of time for carousing later, if he decided that was what he wanted to do.\n\nFelix shook his head ruefully. Somewhere, somehow, during the flight to Middenheim he had obviously made up his mind to accompany the dwarfs. He was not entirely sure why, for it was certain to be dangerous. On the other hand, perhaps that was the reason. If he had wanted a calm, safe life he would doubtless now be working in the counting house of his father's business back in Altdorf. At some point during his wanderings with Gotrek he had come to enjoy the life of the wandering mercenary adventurer, and he doubted now that he could return to his old life even if he wanted to.\n\nThis quest was taking on a momentum of its own. There was an excitement about simply being aboard the airship which genuinely thrilled him. By daylight, in this teeming city, even the prospect of the Chaos Wastes was not so daunting. In fact, it represented a chance to see a place which few sane men had ever visited and returned to tell the tale. And of course, there was his oath to accompany Gotrek and record his doom as well.\n\nOf course, he knew he was kidding himself. He could pinpoint exactly where his decision to remain with the airship had taken place. And it had nothing to do with oaths or adventure or the thrill of travel. He had made up his mind to go on when he had discovered that the woman in the throne room was also going to be a passenger.\n\nAnd there was nothing wrong with that, he told himself. Providing it didn't result in his death.\n\nFrom the edge of the city, Felix looked down on the forest below. He had followed the winding alleyways all the way down to the great outer walls, where a short climb had taken him up to the battlements. From here he could see the cableway that brought merchants and their goods up from the small township below. As he watched, the last carriage of the day crawled up the cables towards its terminus in the walls.\n\nLooking further afield he saw the woods and the river stretching away to the horizon, and he appreciated the fact that the inhabitants of Middenheim had almost as good a view as the one he had got through the portholes of the airship. He wondered at the ingenuity and determination that kept this vast city supplied. According to the books of legend that he had read, the City of the White Wolf had started life as a fortress, its heights giving shelter to those who fled the constant tide of warfare that flowed below.\n\nDown through the long centuries a fair-sized community had grown up on the heights, clustered around the fortress and the monastic temple of Ulric. The township had begun as home to the nobility and their garrisons, but had grown to include the merchants who provided them with luxuries. Of course, all food and goods were more expensive here, for they had to be hauled up the cables from below, but the nobles controlled vast estates out there in the hinterland and were not short of a gold piece or two. The cost was more than made up for by the increased security they enjoyed on their lofty perch. And, of course, there were the mines below the peak, a source of much wealth.\n\nAnd other darker things besides. Felix had heard Gotrek talk of those mines and of a vast labyrinth of tunnels which extended below the peak. The mines were patrolled by dwarf soldiers and human guards, for it was rumoured that skaven had established a lair down there. Felix cursed suddenly, wondering if he was ever going to be out of reach of the accursed rat-men. Probably not. Somehow he knew that if the airship turned its nose towards the steaming jungles of legendary Lustria, they would arrive to find skaven already scuttling through the undergrowth.\n\nThe sun was starting to set. A bloody glow spread across the clouds as it descended below the horizon. Lanterns flickered to life on the watchtowers along the walls, and looking back Felix could see lights appearing in the windows of the tenements and taverns of the city. Soon he knew the lamplighters would be emerging and lantern-toting watchmen would start tolling the hours in the streets.\n\nHe knew it was time to go back. He had taken the last glimpse of Imperial society that he might ever have, and he felt strangely relaxed and contented, as if by making his decision to accompany the dwarfs on their quest, he had somehow absolved himself of all fear and doubt. It was better to have the thing decided, he thought, than to writhe in an agony of uncertainly. His way was clear now and he was relieved to find that he was not unhappy about it. He turned and started back up the long, cobbled path towards the palace, wondering whether he was imagining things when he thought he heard scurrying over the rooftops behind him." + }, + { + "title": "BEYOND THE SEA OF CLAWS", + "text": "As the airship cast off, the crowds stared up in awe. Makaisson turned the wheel and pulled the levers to alter their course a fraction. Narrowly avoiding the great spire of the Temple of Ulric, they set off northwards.\n\nFelix relaxed in one of the armchairs on the command deck. There was plenty of room. Most of the dwarfs were sleeping off hangovers, leaving only a skeleton crew to man the bridge.\n\nTo tell the truth, Makaisson himself looked a little worse for wear. The little groans he emitted from time to time, combined with the way he squinted at the horizon through sore eyes, were not reassuring. Felix was not at all sure that he should be flying the ship.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" he asked the chief engineer.\n\n\"What dae ye mean, young Felix?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I can take the controls while you rest.\"\n\n\"Ah dinnae ken. It's a highly technical job.\"\n\n\"I could try. It might prove useful to have somebody else on board who can fly the ship, in case anything should happen to you. I mean you are a Slayer, you know.\"\n\n\"The other engineers ken hoo to dae it\u2026 still, ah suppose ye hae a point. It woudnae dae onnie herm to hae an extra pilot \u2014 just in case.\"\n\n\"Does that mean you'll do it.\"\n\n\"Ah shouldnae really. It's against guild regulations tae teach onybody but a dwarf hoo to dae these things, but then again, this whole bloody thing is against guild regs, so whar's the herm, ah ask ye?\"\n\nHe beckoned for Felix to come over and stand where he was standing. \"Tak the wheel, Herr Jaeger.\"\n\nFelix had to bend his knees to stand at the same height as the dwarf and he found the position fairly uncomfortable. The wheel felt heavy in his hands. He did his best to hold it steady but it felt like it had a life of its own, exerting pressure first this way and then that, so that Felix had to constantly fight to hold his position.\n\n\"That's the air currents,\" Makaisson said. \"They tug at the rudder and the ailerons. Take's a while tae get used to it. Ye got it?\"\n\nFelix nodded nervously.\n\n\"Look doon a wee bit and tae yer left. Ye'll see a wee gadget there. It's a compass.\"\n\nFelix did so. He could see a compass that swung on a complex arrangement of gimbals so that the needle in its centre always pointed north.\n\n\"Ye'll notice that we're heading north-north-east at the moment. That's oor course. If ye turn the wheel a wee bit, we'll shift the course. Joost jink aroond a wee bit and bring the course back to north-north-east,\"\n\nFelix did as he was told and moved the wheel as gently as he could. Outside the window, the horizon seemed to spin slowly. He moved the wheel the opposite way and they spun back onto the correct heading.\n\n\"Weel din! Nithin' tae it, eh?\"\n\nFelix found that he was grinning back at Makaisson. There was something exhilarating about being in control of so massive and swift a thing as the airship.\n\n\"What next?\" he asked.\n\n\"See that row o' levers next tae yer right hand?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"OK, the first yin is fur speed. Dinna dae onything till ah tell ye tae, right, but when ye push it forward the engines pick up speed. When ye pull it back the engines lose speed. When ye pull it ah the way back, ye gan backwards, intae reverse. Ye follow me?\"\n\nFelix nodded again.\n\n\"Noo there's a dial in front ye, marked in increments. Ye'll see that it's marked in different colours as weel.\"\n\nFelix saw the indicated gauge beside the compass. Right now the needle was in the green zone at the tenth increment. It was about five increments short of the red zone.\n\n\"While the needle is in the green, ye're fine. That's the zone o' tolerance for the engine. Move it forward \u2014 but keep the needle in the green.\"\n\nFelix leaned forward on the lever. It resisted his efforts, so he pushed harder than he had originally intended. As he did so the needle moved forward and the drone of the engine altered to a higher pitch. The ground seemed to unreel faster below them, and the clouds drifted by more quickly on either side. Suddenly Felix felt Makaisson's hard hand on top of his. Fingers like steel bands closed and he found the lever was being pulled back.\n\n\"Ah said keep it in the green, ye unnerstan? The red is for emergencies only. Ye run the engine in the red and ye'll gaun much faster but ye'll burn it oot after awhile, maybe even explode it. That's no such a guid thing at this height.\"\n\nFelix saw that he had accidentally run the needle into the red zone. He tried to pull his hand away but Makaisson's held it in place for a moment. \"Dinnae tak yer hand off the controls until ah tell ye. Keep yer hand on the speed stick the noo, alright?\"\n\nFelix nodded and the engineer freed his hand. \"Dinnae worry. Ye're no daein' too bad. So, the next stick on the right controls the fins. Try tae no get the two sticks mixed up, it could be messy!\"\n\nFelix was beginning to wish he had never suggested that he might learn this. It seemed that there were many possibilities for disaster that he had never thought of. \"In what way?\"\n\n\"Well, the fins control oor height above the ground. When ye pull that lever back the fins on the tail change attitude and we gaun up. When ye push it forward we gaun doon. That's all ye really need tae ken. The actual reasons are a wee bit technical and ah doobt ye'd understand them.\"\n\n\"I'll take your word for it.\"\n\n\"Right, pull the lever back. Gently! We dinna want to wake onybody up. Now ye'll notice a wee gadget next tae the speed gauge. That's yer altitude. The higher the increment, the higher we are. Yince mare, dinna gaun intae the red zone for ony reason. That could be fatal because we'll be flying too high. An' try no to lay the thing get doon to zero either, coz that means we'll hae hit the ground. Now, slide the lever back to the neutral position. Ye'll feel a wee click when ye dae. That means we'll hae levelled off.\"\n\nFelix did as he was told. There was an odd buzzing in his ears, which vanished when he swallowed. He took his hand off the altitude lever and pointed to a smaller row of stubby levers attached to a panel at the height of his left hand. \"What do these do?\"\n\n\"Dinna touch ony of them. They control different functions like ballast, fuel and ither stuff. I'll tell ye aboot them anither time. Right noo, ye ken ah ye need to fly the ship. Noo, keep headin' north-north-east. An' see that clock there? In two hours' time wake me up. Ah'm ganne hae a wee kip. Ma heed's a bit sare fae ah the booze yesterday.\"\n\n\"What if something goes wrong?\"\n\n\"Joost gae me a shout. Ah'll be in this chair here.\" So saying, Makaisson sat himself down in the chair, and soon his snores filled the bridge of the airship.\n\nFor the first few minutes Felix felt a certain nervousness guiding the craft but as time wore on he gained confidence that nothing was going to go wrong. As time went on, some of the engineers came onto the bridge. Some glanced at him in amazement but seeing Makaisson slumbering nearby let him be. After a while, it became quite relaxing to watch the land and the clouds unroll beneath them.\n\n\"Are you the pilot then?\" The soft voice stirred Felix from his reverie. It was a woman's voice, husky and with more than a trace of a foreign accent in it. At a guess he would have said Kislevite.\n\nFelix shook his head but did not turn to look at the woman. He kept his attention focused on where they were going, just in case anything unexpected came their way. \"No. But you could say I am training to be one.\"\n\nA soft laugh. \"A useful skill.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I doubt that I can base a career on it. There are not too many vessels like this in the world.\"\n\n\"Only this one, I think. And given its mission, I doubt there will be another.\"\n\n\"You know where we are going, then?\"\n\n\"I know where you are going, and I do not envy you.\"\n\nFelix had to fight to keep his eyes fixed ahead and not to look round at her. He remembered what he had sworn to Borek back at the Lonely Tower. He did not really know this woman, and it was possible she was quizzing him for information.\n\n\"You know where we are bound?\"\n\n\"I know you are headed out into the Wastes and that is enough for any sensible body to know. I do not think you will be coming back.\"\n\nFelix was discouraged to hear an assessment which so closely concurred with his own. He was also disappointed to learn that the woman had no intention of coming with them on their quest.\n\n\"I take it you are familiar with the place then?\"\n\n\"As familiar as anybody can be who is not sworn to the Ruinous Powers. My family estates border the Troll Country which is as close as any mortal dare dwell to the accursed lands. My father is the March Warden there. We have spent much time battling the followers of Chaos when they try to infiltrate the lands of men.\"\n\n\"It must be an interesting life,\" Felix said ironically.\n\n\"You could say that. I doubt that it is any more interesting than yours though. What brings you aboard this vessel? I must admit I was astonished to see a human, and a good-looking one, where I expected only to find Borek and his people.\"\n\nFelix smiled. It had been a long time since anyone, particularly an attractive woman, had told him he was handsome. He did not let his guard down though. \"I am a friend.\"\n\n\"You are a Dwarf Friend? You must have performed some epic deeds then. Ulric knows there have been few enough of those in history.\"\n\nFelix wondered whether this was true. He had always assumed that it was simply a polite form of address. Now it appeared that it might actually be some form of title. He was about to reply when Makaisson interrupted from behind them.\n\n\"Och, the lad has stood beside Gotrek Gurnisson on many an occasion, lassie. And he had a hand in the cleansing of the Sacred Tombs of Karak Eight Peaks. If that is nae grounds for namin' him a Dwarf Friend ah dinna ken what is! Onyway, noo that ye've woke me up wi yer chatter, ye may as well gimme that wheel. Ah'll tak iver noo.\"\n\nMakaisson stumped over and elbowed Felix from his position at the controls. He gave Felix a broad wink. \"Noo you and the lassie can talk tae yer heart's content.\"\n\nFelix shrugged and turned to smile at the woman. \"Felix Jaeger,\" he said, bowing.\n\n\"Ulrika Magdova,\" she said, smiling back. \"I am pleased to make your acquaintance.\"\n\nThere was a formality about the way she spoke the words which showed she was unaccustomed to them. They were like a polite formula she had been taught for dealing with people from the Empire. He thought that in her own land the greeting would be somewhat different.\n\n\"Please, take a seat,\" he said, feeling a certain stupid formality he wished he could have avoided. They both slumped down with their legs stretched out in the overstuffed dwarfish chairs. Felix could see that his earlier guess was correct and she was almost as tall as he. Looking at her face, he revised his earlier opinion of her appearance. It went from merely beautiful up to stunningly beautiful. His mouth felt suddenly dry.\n\n\"So what are you doing on this craft?\" he asked, just for something to say. She gave him a glance of languid amusement, as if she could read his thoughts exactly.\n\n\"I am travelling home to my father's estates.\"\n\n\"I cannot imagine Borek simply letting somebody on to this ship as a passenger for no reason.\"\n\nShe raised her right hand to her mouth and stroked her lip with its forefinger. Felix could see the fingers were callused like a swordsman's, the nails pared very short. \"My father and Borek are old friends. They fought together on many occasions in my father's youth. He helped guide Borek's last expedition to the edge of the Wastes. He looked after him and your friend Gotrek when they staggered back with the survivors. He was not surprised. He had warned them not to go. They would not listen.\"\n\nFelix stared at her. He had not imagined that any humans had been involved in that last expedition. \"That does not surprise me,\" Felix said ruefully. He possessed considerable experience of just how stubborn dwarfs could be.\n\n\"Some things about it surprised even my father. He had not expected anybody to return from that doomed mission. Few indeed, save the followers of Chaos, ever do.\"\n\n\"How long ago was this mission?\"\n\n\"Before I was born. Over twenty winters ago.\"\n\n\"They have waited a long time to go back then.\"\n\n\"So it would seem. It also seems that they have prepared well. Indeed it was a message from my father to say that he had done what they asked which brought me to Middenheim.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Borek asked my father to make certain preparations on our estate. To collect the black water. To build a tower. To stockpile certain supplies. At the time, they did not make sense, but now that I have seen this ship I think I understand.\"\n\n\"The dwarfs have built a base, a way-station, on your father's land.\"\n\n\"Aye. And paid for it in good dwarfish steel.\"\n\nSeeing Felix's quizzical look she smiled at him, and unsheathed one of her swords, pulling it part way from its scabbard. Felix noticed dwarf runes along the blade. \"We have little use for gold along the Marches of Chaos. Weapons suit us better and the dwarfs are the finest armourers in the world.\"\n\n\"You came a long way from Kislev to Middenheim. That is far for a beautiful young woman travelling on her own.\"\n\n\"Better, Herr Jaeger! I had despaired of ever getting a compliment from you. Men are more forward about such things in Kislev.\"\n\n\"Women too, it seems,\" Felix said in mild surprise.\n\n\"Life is short and winter is long, as they say.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Are you so obtuse?\"\n\nFelix could not help but feel that this conversation was moving out of his control. He had never quite met a woman like this Kislevite before and he wasn't sure he liked it. Imperial women did not behave in quite this way, except perhaps for camp followers and tavern girls, and Ulrika Magdova certainly did not have the manner of either. Or perhaps, he was simply misunderstanding her manner. Maybe this was just the way women behaved in Kislev.\n\nShe spoke to fill the silence. \"I did not travel to Middenheim on my own \u2014 although I could have. I came with a bodyguard of my father's lancers. They departed northward and I waited to return with Borek.\"\n\nFor the first time, she did not meet his gaze. He sensed that she was hiding something and he was not sure what. Certainly there was more going on here than met the eye. Also, for the first time, he started to suspect that she was not quite as confident as her beauty and her boldness had led him to believe. That suddenly made her more approachable and, in a way, more attractive. He smiled at her again and she smiled back, a little ruefully this time. Then she glanced over his shoulder, smoothed her britches with both her hands, and rose to her feet, all the while keeping him fixed with that dazzling smile.\n\nFelix looked over in the direction of her gaze and saw that their other passenger, the sorcerer, had just entered the bridge area. He was looking at them in a puzzled, and Felix thought, perhaps resentful manner. If that was the case, he soon regained control of himself. A look of languid amusement passed over his lean handsome features and he advanced into the room. Ulrika Magdova sauntered past him, pausing only to give him a mildly disdainful glance.\n\n\"Good day, Herr Schreiber. A pleasure talking to you, Felix.\"\n\n\"Good day,\" Felix said weakly, rising just as she vanished from view. The magician threw himself down in the chair she had left.\n\n\"So,\" he said, \"you've met the fair Ulrika. What do you think, eh?\"\n\nIt was an impertinent question from a complete stranger, thought Felix, but then he had heard magicians could be somewhat odd. Then he noticed that the man was smiling and shaking his head like someone enjoying a private joke. White teeth showed against his tanned skin, the animated expression taking years off the wizard's age. Felix guessed that the mage could not be more than ten years older than himself. Suddenly, impulsively, the man stuck out his hand.\n\n\"Maximilian Schreiber, at your service. My friends call me Max.\"\n\n\"Felix Jaeger at yours.\"\n\n\"Felix Jaeger. That's a name I've heard before. There was quite a promising poet of that name. Are you any relation? I read some of his verses in Gottlieb's anthology several years before. Rather liked them, actually.\"\n\nFelix was pleasantly surprised to find that the stranger had heard of him. He cast his mind back to his student days when he had written verse and contributed to various anthologies. That all seemed to have happened to someone else, a long time ago.\n\n\"I wrote those,\" he said.\n\n\"Excellent. A pleasant surprise. Why did you stop writing? Gottlieb's chapbook must be at least three years ago.\"\n\n\"I ran into some problems with the law.\"\n\n\"What were those?\"\n\nSomething about the mage's smooth manner was starting to set Felix's teeth on edge. \"I was expelled from the university for killing a man in a duel. Then there were the Window Tax Riots.\"\n\n\"Oh yes, the riots. So, in addition to being the poet Felix Jaeger, you are also the notorious outlaw Felix Jaeger, henchman to the infamous Gotrek Gurnisson.\"\n\nFelix went white with shock. It had been a long time since he had encountered anyone who had put those two facts together or even known he was an outlaw. The Empire was big and news travelled very slowly. It had been such a long time since he had been anywhere near Altdorf, the scene of that terrible slaughter during the riots. The wizard obviously noticed his expression. His smile became a grin.\n\n\"Don't worry. I am not about to turn you over to the law. I always thought it was an unjust and foolish tax myself. And to tell the truth, I sympathise with your predicament at the university. I was booted out of the Imperial College of Magicians myself, albeit a few years before you began your career of insurrection.\"\n\n\"You were?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. My tutors believed that I showed an unhealthy interest in the subject of Chaos.\"\n\n\"I would have to agree with them, I think. It's a subject in which any interest is unhealthy.\"\n\nA gleam had come into the wizard's eyes and he leaned forward eagerly in his seat. \"I cannot believe that you think that way, Herr Jaeger. That's the kind of short-sightedness I would expert from the wizened greybeards at the college but not from an adventurer like yourself.\"\n\nFelix felt compelled to defend his point of view.\n\n\"I believe I know something of the subject. I have had more experience of fighting Chaos than most.\"\n\n\"Exactly! I, too, have fought against the Dark Powers, my friend, and I have found its minions in some unlikely places. I do not think that I am wrong when I say that it is the greatest single threat to our nation, nay, our world, that currently exists.\"\n\n\"I would agree with you there.\"\n\n\"And that being the case, can it be wrong to study the subject? In order to fight such a powerful foe we must understand it. We must know its strengths and its weaknesses, its goals and its fears.\"\n\n\"Yes, but the study of Chaos corrupts those who engage in it! Many have started down that path with the finest of intentions, only to find themselves enthralled by that thing they sought to fight.\"\n\n\"Now you really do sound like my old tutors! Has it occurred to you that, if you were a servant of Chaos, you would use exactly that argument to discourage any investigation into your works?\"\n\n\"You're not seriously suggesting that your tutors at the Imperial College were\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course not! I am just saying that the servants of Chaos are subtle. You have no idea how subtle they can be. All they would need to do was put the idea into books, spread the rumour, encourage its belief. And, of course, Chaos does corrupt. If you work with warpstone, it will change you. If you perform dark rituals, your soul will be tarnished. I admit there is some truth to this line of argument. However, I don't think that this should stop us from examining Chaos, trying to find ways to prevent its spread, to detect its followers, to blunt its terrifying power. There is a conspiracy of silence which permeates our entire society. It encourages ignorance. It gives our enemies shadows in which to hide, places in which to lurk and plot.\"\n\nFelix had to admit there was something in what Schreiber was saying. To tell the truth, he had often had similar thoughts himself. \"You might be right.\"\n\n\"Might be? Come now, Felix, you know I am right. And so do many other people. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of publishing my opinions in a small pamphlet. The authorities decided that it was heretical and\u2026\"\n\n\"You too became an outlaw.\"\n\n\"That more or less sums it up.\"\n\n\"Why are you aboard this ship?\"\n\n\"Because I continued my researches. I moved from place to place fighting against Chaos where I could, compiling information when I found it, hunting down wicked sorcerers. I have made myself into something of an expert on this subject, and in the end found a refuge at the court of Count Stephan. He is more far-sighted than many of our nobles.\n\n\"He and the Knights of the White Wolf have helped fund my researches. Five years ago I met your friend Borek when he visited the library in the temple. He was most interested when he found out that I believed I had found a way to protect against the worst effects of Chaos. He enlisted me to help protect his airship on its voyage.\"\n\nSuddenly Felix began to understand the scale of the planning which had gone into their quest. It was of an order of magnitude that he had never encountered before. Not only had Borek overseen the building of the vast industrial complex at the Lonely Tower, he had employed Ulrika's father to build an advance base and discovered and engaged this wizard to ward them against Chaos. The old dwarf had not been exaggerating when he claimed this was his life's work. Felix began to wonder what other feats of planning would be revealed as the trip progressed. Still, he was not entirely convinced by Schreiber's claims.\n\n\"You have found a way of protecting this airship against the effects of Chaos?\"\n\n\"There are a number of them ranging from simple runes, to protective enchantments, to basic precautions such as ensuring an adequate supply of uncontaminated food and water. Believe me, Felix, I would not have agreed to aid you unless I believed that there was a good chance you would be safe.\"\n\n\"You are not coming with us then?\"\n\n\"Only to Kislev. Not all the way to Karag Dum.\"\n\nFelix looked at the wizard in surprise.\n\n\"I told you, Felix, I am a scholar. This is my field. I have studied all I could find on this subject. I was quite capable of working out for myself why an expedition of this magnitude is being prepared by a dwarf like Borek. It came as no surprise to me when he told me his goal.\"\n\nSchreiber rose from the chair. \"Speaking of that longbearded scholar, I must go and discuss some things with him now. But I hope to have a chance to talk more with you before this voyage is complete.\"\n\nHe bowed and walked away, but at the doorway he turned. \"I'm glad there is an educated man aboard. I thought I might have to spend this voyage simply chasing the delectable Ulrika. It will be nice to have some enlightened conversation as well.\"\n\nFelix wasn't sure why he found this remark so offensive. Perhaps, he told himself, he was simply jealous. And then he wondered, why did he already feel that way about a woman he had only just met?" + }, + { + "title": "KISLEV", + "text": "Thanquol's palanquin hustled northward along the great tunnel of the Underways. This section of the mighty road that ran beneath the spine of the World's Edge Mountains was almost totally empty. Normally Thanquol would have been nervous, travelling these dangerous corridors with his much reduced bodyguard. He could easily be attacked by orcs, goblins or dwarfish raiding parties, trying to reclaim some part of their ancient domain. However, at this moment, the grey seer was too upset to be nervous.\n\nHe gnawed his tail in despair. He knew from his lackey, Lurk, that the airship had departed from Middenheim and headed north-eastwards. The snivelling wretch had managed to report that they had passed over water, before making landfall again, and that the land below them was starting to look emptier and bleaker all the time. Fortunately for Thanquol, he was a far-travelled skaven of considerable knowledge, and he recognised that the airship's destination could only be the land known to humans as Kislev.\n\nHe had no idea what those foolish dwarfs could possibly want in that barbarous place. Perhaps they had heard rumours of gold or ancient treasure. Although dwarfs were not the race he had made his deepest studies of, Thanquol knew enough about them to guess that this was their most likely goal. Unfortunately he had no idea where this might eventually take them, and he also knew that the airship had travelled much further and much faster than he was capable of pursuing by normal means.\n\nHe was almost tempted to order Lurk to find some means of sabotaging the airship to give him time to catch up. Only one thing prevented him from doing this. In his considerable experience, a doltish lackey like Lurk would do something wrong and either get himself killed or destroy the very airship that Thanquol so desperately wanted to possess. No \u2014 giving such an order was the option of last resort, and Thanquol decided that he would have to be desperate indeed to try it. Before then, he would exhaust every other avenue open to him.\n\nHe considered his options. Perhaps he could contact the Lords of Clan Moulder. Their mighty fortress, Hell Pit, was located in northern Kislev and was the nearest skaven stronghold to the airship's probable destination. To a lesser intellect than Thanquol's, this might have seemed like a wise plan. Potent as he undoubtedly was, even the grey seer was forced to admit capturing the airship single-pawed was almost certainly beyond him. He was going to need help, even if it meant going with downcast tail to the Beastmasters of Clan Moulder. But the thought had also occurred to him that it might not be wise to give them all the details of his scheme, for they might try to seize the airship by themselves. Being the blundering fools they were, they too would doubtless fail without his guidance.\n\nNo, he decided, the best he could do was to scurry north as quickly as possible and hope that something would arise to delay the dwarfs until his arrival. He leaned out the palanquin's window and chittered at his bearers to redouble their efforts. Fearing their master's righteous wrath, they scuttled along more quickly, groaning beneath the weight of their burden and all his sorcerous equipment.\n\nFelix had always thought of Kislev as a land of ice and snow, where winter never lifted, and the folk wandered around constantly wrapped in furs. The land below contradicted this impression quite mightily. It consisted of rolling plains of long grass set amidst thick forests of pine. A moment's consideration told him that this had to be so, for Kislev was a land famed for its horsemen, and it would be difficult for them to be that way if they lived amid endless snowdrifts.\n\nFelix had to admit that, if anything, the sun shone even more brightly than it did on the Empire at the moment. The Kislevite summer might be brief but it was also intense. Felix wondered if this, too, was part of Borek's plan, to come northward before the stormy winds of winter could threaten the airship's progress. It would not have surprised him to discover that this was the case. The ingenuity and skill with which this expedition had been planned was a far cry from his haphazard wanderings with Gotrek. During their travels they had simply decided to go as the whim took them, with only whatever they happened to be carrying at the time to aid them. Obviously this was not typical dwarfish behaviour, except perhaps where Slayers were concerned.\n\nBelow the airship he could see a herd of caribou, startled by the airship's vast shadow, begin to bound away. Hunters rose from their crouches and shaded their eyes to peer up in wonder at the passing vehicle. One of them, braver or more frightened than the rest, cast his spear up at them but it fell a long way short of the vessel and fell point first to stand quivering amidst the long grass.\n\nThey were flying beneath the clouds for a good reason. Watchers peered from every porthole and through the large windows of the command deck. They were nearing their destination and all of them had been ordered to keep their eyes peeled for Ulrika's father's mansion. Makaisson's navigation had brought them to the general area. Now they quartered the landscape seeking the exact spot where they would make their final landfall before heading into the Chaos Wastes.\n\nSo far all they had seen was the occasional hunter and the odd village where smoke drifted lazily skyward from holes in the turfed roofs of the peasants' log huts. Their presence had sent the villagers scurrying away from their harvests to huddle within the village walls, doubtless convinced that the airship was some new manifestation of Chaos come to trouble their land.\n\nFelix was still amazed at how swiftly they had made the trip. A journey that would have taken months overland looked like it was going to take them only a few days at most, and much of that time had been spent searching for the Boyar's mansion in this sea of grass. Truly this engineering of the dwarfs was a most potent form of magic.\n\n\"There!\" he heard Ulrika shout and turned to see her pointing to something in the distance. It lay in the shadows of a distant range of dark and threatening mountains. Felix realised her eyes must be keen. All he could see was a vague smudge of smoke.\n\nMakaisson's hands shifted on the wheel, and the nose of the airship swung around in the direction the woman had indicated. He pushed the altitude lever and they swung down lower and faster, sending flocks of startled birds flapping out of the long grass. As the mountains approached, Felix kept his eyes pinned to the direction Ulrika had indicated. Slowly he saw a large, long hall come into view. To his surprise, beside the mansion house, within the compound's massive walls, was a tall tower, a smaller wooden version of the steel monstrosity which had loomed over the Lonely Tower.\n\nThis, then, was the place where they were going to land. This might well be the last human habitation he would ever see.\n\nUlrika's father was huge, a head taller than Felix and burly as a bear. His beard was long and white, but his head was shaved except for a single topknot. His eyes were the same startling blue as his daughter's, his teeth were yellow. A thick leather tunic encased his torso. Coarse cloth trousers covered his lower body, except where high riding boots covered his legs. A longsword and a shortsword hung from his thick leather belt. A dozen amulets jingled on the iron chains around his neck.\n\nHe strode out to where the dwarfs waited at the foot of the tower. Behind him a row of warriors presented their weapons with ritual formality. He loomed over Ulrika and clasped her to his mighty chest then swept her off her feet and whirled her round and round as if she were a child.\n\n\"Welcome home, daughter of my heart!\" he bellowed.\n\n\"It is good to be here, father. Now put me down and greet your guests.\"\n\nThe old man's gusty laughter boomed out and he stomped over to where the crew of the airship stood waiting. He stopped short of embracing the dwarfs. Instead he bowed low in the dwarfish fashion, showing surprising flexibility for a man of his age and enormous girth.\n\n\"Borek Forkbeard! It is good to see you. I trust you will find all as you requested it.\"\n\n\"I trust I will,\" the old dwarf said, bowing just as low.\n\n\"Gotrek Gurnisson, I bid you welcome also. It has been a long time since you honoured my hall with your presence. I am pleased to see you still carry that axe.\"\n\n\"I am pleased to return, Ivan Petrovitch Straghov,\" Gotrek said in his least surly manner. Felix guessed that the Slayer was almost pleased to see the Kislevite.\n\n\"And who is this? Snorri Nosebiter? I must see that a bucket of vodka is left at your table. Welcome!\"\n\n\"Snorri thinks that would be a good idea.\" One by one all the dwarfs were greeted or introduced and then Ulrika led her father over to where Felix and the wizard stood waiting.\n\n\"And, father, this is Felix Jaeger of Altdorf.\"\n\n\"Pleased to make your acquaintance,\" Felix said, extending his hand. Straghov ignored it as he loomed over Felix, hugged him in welcome and then kissed him once on each cheek. \"Welcome! Welcome!\" he bellowed in Felix's ear, loud enough to threaten deafness. Before Felix could respond, he had been dropped and the old man was doing the same to Schreiber.\n\n\"I thank you for the enthusiasm of your welcome, sir,\" the wizard said when he had regained his breath.\n\nFelix exchanged glances with Ulrika, then looked in wonder over at the row of warriors who lined their way to the hall. Ivan Straghov might look and behave like a barbarian but there could be no doubt that he was a mighty warlord in his own land. A hundred riders stood by as an honour guard. All had hard faces and cold eyes, and all looked like they could use the well-honed weapons they presented to the dwarfs. According to Ulrika there were nine hundred more of these fierce riders who had sworn allegiance to her father. Being March Boyar was obviously an important post. Since it commanded the first line of defence against the hordes of Chaos, Felix guessed that it ought to be.\n\n\"Now we eat!\" boomed Straghov. \"And drink!\"\n\nHuge tables had been set up inside the mansion's walls. Minor functionaries from all around had been invited to feast and marvel at the dwarfish airship. Caribou had been roasted on spits over great fire-pits. Plates were heaped with coarse black bread and cheese. Great flasks of fiery spirit which Snorri identified as vodka were put beside each plate. As promised, a bucket of the stuff was put beside Snorri.\n\nFelix followed the example of the locals and tossed back his tumbler in one swift gulp. It felt like he was swallowing molten metal. A cloud of something acidic seemed to burn the lining of his throat and make its way up to his nostrils, bringing tears to his eyes. He felt like he ought to be breathing fire and it was all he could do to keep himself from spluttering. He guessed that such behaviour would not be good form here however.\n\nHe was glad that he had not done so when he noticed that all eyes watched him to see how he reacted to his first taste of the spirit.\n\n\"You drink like a true winged lancer!\" Straghov bellowed and all the table banged their glasses on the table in agreement. Their host insisted that everyone fill their glasses, then shouted: \"To Felix Jaeger, who comes from the land of our allies, the Empire!\"\n\nOf course, Felix could do nothing less than pledge a return toast to the ancient friendship between his folk and the folk of Kislev. Before long, the dwarfs were joining in too. Felix noticed that a pleasant warmth had settled in his stomach and that his fingers felt slightly numb. The vodka certainly got easier to drink the more glasses he tossed back, and soon he ceased to feel like it was burning his throat.\n\nGreat mounds of food were devoured. Toast after toast was made. Great speeches of welcome and friendship were spoken until darkness fell. Somewhere during the course of the afternoon, Felix lost track of events. His head swimming from the vodka, he was only dimly aware of eating far too much, drinking far too much and joining in the singing of songs whose words he did not know. Some time during the evening he was sure he danced with Ulrika, before she whirled away to dance with Schreiber, and then sometime after that he wandered off to be sick beside the stables.\n\nAfter that his mind blanked completely and great chunks of memory were lost to the vodka and Kislevite hospitality. For the rest of his life he was not sure quite who he spoke to or what he said or how he got to the chamber that was allocated to him. Forever afterwards, however, he was grateful that he did.\n\nFelix awoke the next day feeling like a horse had kicked him in the head. Perhaps one had, he thought; he checked his face for bruises but could find none. He looked around the room and saw that the floor was of packed earth. The mattress was filled with straw and someone had thrown a thick quilt over him. During the night he had drooled on his pillow and a patch of wetness was evident where his head had been. At least, he hoped it was just drool.\n\nHe pulled himself to his feet, and wondered whether at some point during the previous evening he really had challenged Snorri Nosebiter to a wrestling match. He seemed to have a vague recollection of some such thing, or maybe he had just dreamt it. His limbs certainly felt twisted enough for him to have engaged in such a foolish pursuit. Maybe he had.\n\nThat was the worst thing about a really hard drinking session. You could never quite remember what you had said, who you had insulted and to whom you had issued foolish challenges. You simply engaged in insane behaviour. At that moment, he wondered if perhaps it was true that alcohol was a gift from the Dark Gods of Chaos intended to make men mad, as some of the temperance minded cults in the Empire claimed. Right now he didn't care. He just knew that he never, ever intended to drink again.\n\nA knock sounded on the door. Felix threw it open and blinked out into the harsh daylight.\n\n\"Amazing,\" Ulrika said by way of a greeting. \"You are on your feet. I would not have thought it possible after the amount of vodka you consumed last night.\"\n\n\"That impressive, eh?\"\n\n\"All were impressed. Particularly by the way you climbed the airship tower while reciting one of your poems.\"\n\n\"I did what?\"\n\n\"I am only joking. You only climbed the tower. Most people thought you would fall and break your neck, but no\u2026\"\n\n\"I really climbed the tower?\"\n\n\"Of course, don't you remember? You bet Snorri Nosebiter a gold piece that you could. At one point you were going to do it blindfolded but Snorri thought that was an unfair advantage because you would not be able to see the ground and would not be quite so afraid. That was just after you'd lost a silver piece arm wrestling him.\"\n\nFelix groaned. \"What else did I do?\"\n\n\"When we were dancing, you told me I was the most beautiful woman you had ever seen.\"\n\n\"What? I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be! You were very flattering.\"\n\nFelix felt himself starting to blush. It was one thing flattering a pretty woman. It was another having no memory of having done so.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Is that not enough for one night?\" she smiled.\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"So you are ready to go riding then?\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"You told me that you were a great horseman, and you agreed to go riding with me this morning. I was going to show you round the estate. You were very enthusiastic about it last night.\"\n\nFelix pictured himself drunk and talking with this extremely pretty woman. He guessed that if she had offered to show him her father's pig-sties in his inebriated condition he would have shown a creditable amount of enthusiasm for it.\n\nActually, he was certain he would have managed to be enthusiastic about it in any condition except his present one. His hangover made even Ulrika Magdova look less ravishing than the prospect of going back to sleep.\n\n\"I am looking forward to seeing you on horseback. It should be quite an impressive sight.\"\n\n\"I might have exaggerated about my horsemanship.\"\n\n\"You can ride?\"\n\n\"Er \u2014 yes.\"\n\n\"Last night you told me you could ride as well as any Kislevite.\"\n\nFelix groaned again. Had some daemon taken over his tongue while he was under the influence of the vodka? What else had he said? And why had he drunk so much?\n\n\"Ready to go then?\"\n\nFelix nodded. \"Just let me have a wash first.\"\n\nHe strode out into the courtyard. Snorri Nosebiter lay, still slumped over the table, his head encased in a bucket. Gotrek lay snoring by the smouldering remains of one of the fire-pits, his axe clutched comfortingly in his hands. Felix walked over to the water pump, put his head below it and began to work the lever. The cold stream sent a shock jarring along his spine. He puffed and blew and continued to pump, hoping to drive the hangover away by inflicting still greater pain on himself.\n\nHad he really said all those things or was Ulrika Magdova kidding him? He found it all too easy to believe that he had told her she was beautiful. He had thought it often enough over the past few days. He knew how much he had a tendency to run off at the mouth when he was really drunk. On the other hand, it scarcely seemed possible that he had climbed the airship tower while so drunk he could not remember it. It was an act of mad recklessness. No, he decided, it was simply not possible. She had to be joking.\n\nSnorri took his head from the bucket. He looked blearily over at Felix. \"About that gold piece Snorri owes you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Felix uneasily.\n\n\"Snorri will pay you when we get back from the Chaos Wastes.\"\n\n\"That seems reasonable,\" Felix said and hurried off towards the stables.\n\nFelix leaned back in the saddle and rolled his head around to clear the stiffness out of his neck. He looked down from the top of the rise to where the small streams cut across the rolling plain. The land was somewhat marshy down there, and bright birds flickered in and out of the reeds. He thought he saw some frogs splashing into the water. Dragonflies flickered past his face, as did other larger insects which he did not recognise. Some of them had bright metallic coloured carapaces, far more striking than those of any insect he had ever seen before. Was this perhaps some evidence of the nearness of the Wastes, he wondered?\n\nHe looked over at his companion and smiled, glad at long last to be here. At first the ride had seemed like a peculiarly refined form of torture, with the motion of the horse sending spasms of protest through Felix's queasy stomach. He had cursed the woman, his mount, the fresh air and the bright sun, in roughly that order. But the exercise and the sunlight seemed to have at long last worked their spell on him, and sent his hangover back into the dim, dark recesses of his skull. He had found himself beginning to take an interest in the landscape, and even to enjoy the sensation of speed, of the wind on his face and the sun on his skin.\n\nUlrika rode easily, as if born in the saddle. She was a Kislevite noble, so of course she had been riding virtually since she could walk. She had not said a word since they had set out, seemingly content to race along beneath the vast, empty sky until at last they had reached this small hillock and by wordless agreement come to a halt.\n\nBeyond the stream, in the distance, the dark mountains marched threateningly towards the horizon, their huge bulk seemingly carved from the bleak bones of the earth. They looked more desolate than any place he had ever been. No snow marked those rugged peaks, but there was a hint of something else, of an oil-like film whose colours shifted and shimmered in the light of the sun. There was a sinister, threatening air about the mountains, hinting at the fact that beyond them lay the outriders of the Chaos Wastes.\n\n\"What is that pass?\" Felix said, pointing north to the enormous gap which looked as if it had been hacked out of the mountain barrier by some giant's axe.\n\n\"That's Blackblood Pass,\" Ulrika said quietly. \"It's one of the major routes down from the Wastes, and the reason why the Tzarina has placed this outpost here.\"\n\n\"Do the Dark Ones pass this way often?\"\n\n\"You can never tell when they will come or even what they will be. Sometimes they are huge riders in black platemail. Sometimes they are beastmen, with the heads of animals and the weapons of men, but sometimes other twisted deformed things that are even worse. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it. It does not matter whether it's high summer or the depth of winter; they can come at any time.\"\n\n\"I have never been able to fathom the way Chaos works. Perhaps you should talk to Herr Schreiber about it.\"\n\n\"Perhaps but I doubt that even Max's theories could explain it. Best just to keep weapons sharp and the beacons manned, and be ready to fight at any time.\"\n\n\"Beacons?\"\n\n\"Aye, there is a system of beacons stretching back from the pass. When they're lit all the villagers know to flee to their villages and lock the gates, and all the lancers know to muster at my father's house.\"\n\n\"Smoke by day, fire by night,\" Felix murmured.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You live in a frightening land, Ulrika.\"\n\n\"Aye, but it is also beautiful, is it not?\"\n\nHe looked at her and the land beyond and nodded his head. He noticed that her pupils were large in her eyes, and that her lips were slightly parted. She was leaning slightly towards him. Felix knew a cue when he heard one.\n\n\"That it is. As are you.\" He leaned towards her. Their hands met and fingers interlaced. Their lips touched. It was as if an electric shock had passed through Felix, and almost as quickly as it had happened, it was over. Ulrika broke away, and reined her horse about.\n\n\"It's getting late. I will race you back to the mansion,\" she said and turned her mount suddenly and took flight. Feeling more than a little frustrated, Felix set off in pursuit.\n\nLurk scurried along the top of the gondola. He was happier than he had been in a long time. It was dark and the skeleton crew left on the airship were mostly asleep, except for the dwarf on the command deck. The others were down below, drinking and laughing and singing their foolish human songs. There was plenty of food in the hold, and so far no indication that his presence had been noticed. Now that he was starting to feel more relaxed he could indulge the curiosity which was another Skaven trait. He had slunk around the airship, exploring all the nooks and crannies and he had discovered some very interesting things.\n\nThere was a flexible metal tunnel that ran up into the big balloon overhead. It passed right through the body of the gasbag and came out on a small observation deck on top. There was a hatch which led out onto the top of the gasbag. The whole thing was covered in webbing to which you could cling.\n\nAt the very rear of the airship was a chamber containing one of the small flying machines which had helped rout the skaven force during the Battle of the Lonely Tower. There was a huge doorway and a ramp that looked like they were designed to let the flying machine out. If only he knew enough to fly the thing, he could have stolen it and made his way back to Skavenblight a hero. The urge to get behind the controls and start flicking switches and pulling levers had been almost irresistible. He had given the notion serious consideration \u2014 but the grey seer had been very specific during their last communication.\n\nLurk was to do nothing and touch nothing without Thanquol's express instructions. The grey seer's words had been quite insulting, implying that Lurk was an idiot who would most likely do something disastrously wrong without Thanquol's guidance. It was just as well for Thanquol that he was who he was, Lurk decided. Only a sorcerer of Thanquol's ability could get away with talking to Lurk that way.\n\nNo, he was just going to have to sit tight and do nothing until he got his orders. There was nothing more to do except wait." + }, + { + "title": "NORTHWARD", + "text": "Felix joined the crowd of peasants in the courtyard and stared up at the airship. Provisions were being placed aboard the craft, a reminder of the grim fact that all too soon they must leave this place.\n\nFrom the courtyard of the mansion he could see crates, cases and large leather sacks being winched up the tower and then heaved across the gangplank and into the vessel. It looked like the dwarfs intended to take plenty of vodka aboard to supplement their casks of ale, for, as Snorri had pointed out, you could never be too careful about such things. Mostly, though, the provisions were of a more basic nature: smoked and sun-dried caribou meat, hundreds of loaves of black bread, and as many huge round cheeses. Whatever else might happen, Felix doubted that they would starve, unless they spent a very long time in the Chaos Wastes. Of course, starvation was the least of his worries.\n\nHe had noticed the dwarfs were making modifications to their craft. Fine mesh screens had been fitted over the ventilation holes that allowed air to enter the cupola. This was supposed to filter out the mutating dust which rose from the deserts of the Chaos Wastes. Dwarfs in elaborate cat's cradles hung over the side of the airship and made last minute modifications to the engines and rotors.\n\nOther preparations were being made. For the past three days, Max Schreiber had retired to a small tower near the mansion and engaged in some arcane ritual. By night, Felix could sometimes see an eerie glow illuminating the tower windows, and feel the strange prickling of the hairs on the back of his neck that told him magic was being worked. If this bothered any of the others they did not show it. Presumably, Borek had told them it was the wizard's role to help them ward off the evil influence of Chaos, and he appeared to be doing just that. Schreiber himself had told him that this had been left until the last moment because the magic lost its potency over time. The nearer to their final goal he cast the spell, the more time it would last over the Wastes. Felix saw no reason to doubt the magician's expertise in this.\n\nEven as Felix looked up, he could see the engineers clambering along the meshwork on the side of the huge balloon, attaching things that must be jewelled amulets judging by the way they sometimes glittered when the light caught them. He knew that the eyes of the figurehead had been replaced with two oddly glowing gems for he had been up on the bridge of the Spirit of Grungni once or twice to take more lessons from Makaisson in how to fly the airship.\n\nFelix had come to enjoy these lessons and he believed that in an emergency he could most likely pilot the vast airship, although he was still uncertain whether he could land the thing if he was forced to. The banks of smaller levers had turned out to fulfill a multitude of purposes. One of them would release ballast, causing the ship to rise swiftly at need. Another sounded the horns which alerted the crew to some upcoming danger. A third would jettison all the black stuff in the fuel tanks in case of a fire, an eventuality that Makaisson assured him would be just about the worst thing that could happen to the airship.\n\nHe had found himself gaining a great respect for the chief engineer. Makaisson might well be as crazy as Gotrek claimed, but he obviously knew and loved his subject and he had supplied Felix with simple answers to even his most technical questions. He now knew that the airship flew because the gasbags were filled with a substance that was lighter than air, and had a natural tendency to lift up. He knew that black stuff was highly inflammable and might even explode if lit, and that was why it would have to be vented in an emergency.\n\nStill, for the most part life on the Boyar's estate in these warm summer days had been idyllic, and there had been times when he could almost forget the danger which awaited them on their departure. Almost.\n\nA hand fell on his shoulder and a low laugh sounded in his ear.\n\n\"There you are. Tell me, can you use that sword, Herr Jaeger?\" It was Ulrika.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"I've had some practice.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would care to give me a lesson.\"\n\n\"When and where?\"\n\n\"Outside the walls, now.\"\n\n\"You're on.\"\n\nFelix was not quite sure what he expected when he got outside. Ulrika had already unsheathed a blade and was making a few practice cuts in the air. Felix cocked his head to one side and watched her. She moved well, feet wide apart, right foot forward, keeping her balance as she advanced. The sabre gleamed brightly in the sun as she slashed at some imaginary foe.\n\nHe stripped off his cloak and jerkin, and unslung his own blade. It was a longsword, and it had greater length and weight than her weapon. It hissed through the air as he made some practice swipes. Felix moved confidently forward. He was good with a blade and he knew it. In his youth he had excelled in his fencing lessons, and as an adult he had survived many fights. And the Templar's blade he used was the best and lightest he had ever handled.\n\n\"Not with that, fool! With that,\" she said, nodding in the direction of another blade, which lay in a wooden case by the wall.\n\nFelix strode over to where the other sword lay against the wall. He unsheathed it from its scabbard and inspected it. It was another sabre, long and slightly curved. The cutting edge had been dulled which made sense if this was a practice weapon. He tested the weight and balance. It was lighter than his own sword but the grip felt unfamiliar in his hand. He tried a few experimental passes with it.\n\n\"Not what I'm used to,\" he said.\n\n\"Excuses, excuses, Herr Jaeger. My father always said in a fight, you must be able to use whatever weapon comes to hand.\"\n\n\"He is correct. But usually I make sure that the first weapon that comes to hand is my own sword.\"\n\nShe merely smiled at him mockingly, head tilted back, lips slightly open. He shrugged and moved over towards her, the blade held negligently in his right hand.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to do this?\" he asked, staring directly into her eyes, and wondering exactly why they were doing this.\n\nA few of the guards must be thinking the same thing he guessed, for a small crowd had gathered to watch them from the walls.\n\n\"Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"People can get hurt.\"\n\n\"These are practice blades, deliberately blunted.\"\n\n\"Accidents can still happen.\"\n\n\"Are you afraid to fight me?\"\n\n\"No.\" He was going to say he was afraid that he might hurt her, but something told him that this would be the wrong thing to say.\n\n\"You should know that in Kislev we fight to first blood. Usually the loser comes away with a scar.\"\n\n\"I already have many.\"\n\n\"You must show me them some time,\" she smiled.\n\nWhile Felix was still wondering what she meant by this, she lunged. Felix barely managed to leap aside. As it was a slice was taken out of his shirt. Reflex action let him parry the next blow, and before he could even think about it, the action sent his counter hurtling back towards her. She blocked the blow easily, and suddenly their blades were flickering backwards and forwards almost faster than the eye could follow.\n\nAfter a few moments they sprang apart. Neither was breathing hard. Felix realised that the woman was very, very good. Realistically, with his own blade in his hand, he was probably the better swordsman. But fighting at these speeds was mostly a matter of reflex, of a trained response which had been drilled into the fighter so often as to be automatic. In this kind of lightning-fast combat, things happened too quickly for any conscious response. The lighter curved blade was throwing his timing off and giving her the advantage. And that was the last chance he had to think about it for a while, as Ulrika pressed forward with her attack. The guards on the wall cheered her on.\n\n\"Did I tell you I have beaten all my father's guards at sabre practice,\" she said, as he just managed to get his guard up in time to block her swipe. She wasn't kidding about fighting to first blood either. This was not like the sporting duels of his youth, where you fought to display your skills. This was much more like real combat. He supposed it made sense in a way. In a place as deadly as Kislev you did not want to acquire reflexes that would cause you to pull your blows. He knew, for it had taken him many real fights to completely overcome that conditioning.\n\n\"If you had, we wouldn't be doing this,\" he muttered, slashing back at her wildly.\n\n\"And I have beaten all the local noblemen as well.\" Her blow ripped the chest of his shirt and severed a button. Felix wondered if she was playing with him. The guards above jeered at him. \"Since I was fifteen no man has beaten me with the sabre.\"\n\nFelix very much doubted that they had let her win simply to curry favour with her father either. He had fought many men, and she was a lot better than most. His face was flushed and he was panting with effort. He was starting to feel a little angry about the way the guards were applauding his humiliation. He forced himself to concentrate, to keep his breathing easy, to keep to his stance as he had been taught.\n\nHe realised now that he faced another disadvantage. Most of the fighting he had done had very little to do with this formalised style of combat. It had all been in the rough and tumble of melee combat, where you killed your foe in any way that you could and style counted for nothing.\n\nRealising that he would inevitably lose if he continued to fight in this manner, he decided to change his tactics. He blocked her next blow and pushed forward. As they were face to face, he reached forward and grabbed her left arm with his. Using all his strength he jerked hard, and pulled her around. As she went off-balance, he managed to strike her blade from her hand. He let her go and she fell backwards and he brought his blade down so that the point was against her throat.\n\n\"There's a first time for everything,\" he said. The slightest drop of blood trickled down her throat.\n\n\"So it would seem, Herr Jaeger. Best of three, perhaps?\" He saw that she was laughing, and he laughed too.\n\nFelix lay down by the stream near the mansion, looking out across the rolling grasslands, lost in reverie, wondering what was going on between himself and Ulrika. The woman herself stood nearby, holding a short Kislevite composite bow. She stood for a moment, with the bow tensed, in a posture which could not help but reveal her excellent figure, then sent another arrow flashing one hundred strides into the direct centre of the target. It was her third bulls-eye.\n\n\"Well done,\" Felix said.\n\nShe looked over at him. \"This is easy. It would be a far more difficult shot from the back of a galloping horse.\"\n\nFelix wondered if she was trying to impress him. It was hard to tell. She was very different from the other women he had known. She was more forward, more accomplished in the arts of war, more direct. Of course, this was Kislev, where noblewomen often fought alongside their menfolk in battle. He supposed they had to be able to, for this was wild frontier country with the Darkness to the north and wild untamed lands full of orcs to the east. This was a harsh country where every blade was needed. She seemed interested in him, in the way men and women always are interested in each other, but whenever he had pressed his suit she had backed away. It was most frustrating. He felt like the more he saw of the woman, the less he actually understood her.\n\nA shadow fell across him and a hand tapped him lightly on the shoulder. Felix looked up, his train of thought disturbed. Varek stood there, peering short-sightedly into the distance towards Ulrika.\n\n\"What is it?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"My uncle asked me to tell you that our preparations are complete. We will leave tomorrow at dawn.\"\n\nFelix nodded to show his understanding. Varek bowed low to Ulrika and then backed away.\n\n\"What was that?\" she asked.\n\nFelix told her. A cloud passed across her face.\n\n\"So soon,\" she said softly and reached out to touch his face, as if to reassure herself that he was still there.\n\nThe sun sank beneath the horizon. In the darkness, Felix stood on the wall and looked towards the distant mountains. It was still early and a warm breeze blew across the grasslands. The two moons had yet to rise. A strange shimmering glow was visible beyond the northern peaks. The sky was filled with dancing lights, the colour of gold, silver and blood. It was a strange sight, at once captivating and frightening.\n\nFrom below came the sound of musicians tuning their instruments, and cooks bellowing to each other as they prepared the evening feast. Judging from the number of cattle slaughtered and flasks of vodka being produced, Straghov was preparing to give them a right royal send-off.\n\nA slight noise to his left attracted Felix's attention and he realised that he was not alone on the battlements. Gotrek stood there too, gazing into the distance. He seemed rapt and a look of concentration creased his face.\n\n\"That glow \u2014 is it the light of Chaos?\" Felix asked at last.\n\n\"Aye, manling, that it is.\"\n\n\"From here it looks almost beautiful.\"\n\n\"You might think so now but if you went through Blackblood Pass and marched under that sky you would think differently.\"\n\n\"Is it really so bad?\"\n\n\"Worse than I can make it sound. The sands of the deserts are all of strange colours, and the bones of huge animals gleam in the light. The wells are poisonous, the rivers are not of water but other stuff like blood or mucous. The winds drive the dust everywhere. There are ruins that once were the cities of men, elf and dwarf. There are monsters and enemies without number, and they are not troubled by fear or by sanity.\"\n\n\"You lost a lot of people, the last time you were there.\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\n\"What are our chances then?\" Felix wanted to add \"of surviving\", but he knew that would be a meaningless question to ask a Slayer. \"Of reaching Karag Dum?\"\n\nGotrek was silent for a long time. From behind them rose the sound of singing. From the grass beyond the manor house came the sound of night insects. It was so tranquil that Felix found it hard to believe that this was a land on the frontier of an endless war, and that tomorrow they would be passing over the Chaos Wastes, through a country from which they might never return. Standing here in the warm night air, Felix felt like he was going to live forever.\n\n\"In truth, manling, I cannot say. If we went on foot, there would be no chance whatsoever, of that I am certain. With this airship of Makaisson's we might be able to make it.\"\n\nHe shook his head ruefully. \"I do not know. It depends on how accurate Borek's maps are, and how potent Schreiber's spells prove, and whether the engines break down or we run out of fuel or food, or warpstorms\u2026\"\n\n\"Warpstorms?\"\n\n\"Monstrous tempests filled with the power of the Darkness. They can make stone flow like water and turn men into beasts or mutants.\"\n\n\"Why do you want to go back?\" Felix turned to lean against the battlements so that he could get a view of the courtyard behind them.\n\n\"Because we might get to Karag Dum, manling. And if we do, our names will live forever. And if we fail, well, it will be a mighty death.\"\n\nAfter that Felix asked no more questions. Looking down into the courtyard and catching sight of Ulrika in a long bright dress, he did not want to believe that it was possible that he could die.\n\nFelix made his way to the edge of the courtyard. Behind him he could hear the sounds of drinking and dancing. Pipers tootled on instruments which resembled miniature bagpipes; other musicians banged away rhythmically on their hide-covered wooden drums. The smell of roasting meat filled his nostrils, warring with the sharp acrid taint of vodka. From somewhere outside came shouting and grunting and cries of encouragement as the warriors egged on two wrestlers.\n\nHe was not hungry and he was stone cold sober, for he had decided that he could not face another night of drinking, even if it was to be his last night on earth. He was looking for Ulrika but she had vanished earlier, accompanied by two of the peasant women who appeared to be either her maids or her friends, he was not sure which. It was all a bit anti-climactic. Here he was, dressed in his freshly washed and mended clothes, his hair combed and his body washed \u2014 and he could not even find her to steal a kiss. He felt surly and miserable, and more than a little confused. Didn't the girl even care that he was leaving tomorrow? Wouldn't she even talk to him? He was in no mood for the gaiety behind him. He was going to return to his room and sulk. He smiled bitterly as he went, knowing he was being childish and not wanting to do anything about it.\n\nAt the half-open door he paused. His chamber was dark and there was a quiet sound from within. Felix's hand reached for his sword, wondering if this was a robber or some servant of the powers of Chaos which had slithered in from the night under the cover of the merrymaking.\n\n\"Felix, is that you?\" asked a voice that he recognised.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said in a voice suddenly so thick that he had difficulty forcing the words out of his mouth. A light flickered and a lantern was lit. Felix could see a bare arm protruding from beneath the coverlet.\n\n\"I thought you were never going to show up,\" Ulrika said and threw the quilt aside to reveal her long, naked body. Felix rushed to join her on the bed. The scent of her filled his nostrils. Their lips met in a long kiss and this time she did not break away.\n\nThe light of dawn and the crowing of the cockerels woke Felix. He opened his eyes to see that Ulrika lay beside him, propped up on one elbow, studying his face. When she saw that he was awake she smiled a little sadly. He reached up and ran his hand across her cheek, feeling the soft skin of her face beneath his fingers. She caught his hand, and turned it over to kiss the palm of his hand. He laughed and reached out. He drew her down to him, feeling the warmth of her body, happy to be there, happy to be holding her and feeling her heart beat against his naked flesh. He laughed from sheer pleasure, but she shuddered and turned away from him as if she was about to cry.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\"You must go,\" she said.\n\n\"I'll be back,\" he blurted foolishly.\n\n\"No, you will not. No man ever returns from the Wastes. Not sane. Not untouched by Chaos.\"\n\nHe realised then why their lovemaking of the previous evening had possessed such desperate urgency. It was a one night thing, a gift from a woman to a warrior she thought she would never see again. He wondered if that happened a lot here. His happiness vanished but he held her anyway, stroking her hair.\n\nA heavy knock sounded on the door.\n\n\"Time to be away, manling,\" came Gotrek's voice, and it sounded like the voice of doom." + }, + { + "title": "THE CHAOS WASTES", + "text": "Felix felt sadness settle on him like a cloak as he watched the Straghov mansion fall away below the airship. The tiny waving figures slowly receded into the distance and then faded from view entirely as the Spirit of Grungni picked up speed. The mansion dwindled until it was lost in the endless immensity of the rolling grass-covered plains. Felix paced the metal deck restlessly.\n\nHe wondered if he would ever see Ulrika again. She plainly didn't think so, and she was in a better position to know about these things than he was, having lived on the borders of the Chaos Wastes all of her life. It was odd but already he missed her, strange considering he had never even met the woman until a few days before.\n\nFor a swift, dreadful moment, he felt like going to Makaisson and asking him to turn the airship around. He wanted to say that there had been a terrible mistake and he did not want to leave. He found himself wishing he had stayed behind with her, but things had happened so quickly and he had been swept up suddenly once more by the momentum of the dwarfs' quest. Everyone, including her, had seemed to believe he was going, and so he had gone, despite having no real inclination to do so.\n\nIt was typical of how things went in his world. Small events took on a life of their own, and before he knew it, he was caught up in wildly unlikely occurrences far beyond his control. He wondered if everybody's lives were like that and not just his. Did everyone pile tiny decisions upon tiny decisions like a child piling pebbles, only to realise at the last moment that they had built a shifting unstable mountain beneath themselves, and that there was no way off without causing an avalanche?\n\nHe knew that he could not go to the chief engineer and ask him to turn back for a number of reasons. The first and simplest was that Makaisson might not do it, and he would forfeit the respect and goodwill of the crew without gaining anything. The second reason was that he had no idea what reception he would get even if he did turn back. Perhaps what had attracted Ulrika to him was the belief that there was something heroic about his part in the quest, and abandoning it now would mark him as a coward. He knew that the people of this harsh land would want no truck with cowards.\n\nAnd maybe, he was forced to admit, part of him wanted to go on anyway, to see this new place, to find out how it would all end, to measure his courage against a wilderness that caused dismay even to Gotrek. Maybe the way he felt other people might judge him was the way he judged himself. If he abandoned the Spirit of Grungni he would be abandoning his heroic view of himself and retreating into being just like everybody else. Maybe part of him really wanted the fame that the dwarfs aboard the airship craved. He did not know. There were times when his motives confused even himself. They seemed to vary with his moods or his hangovers.\n\nHe just knew that he felt terrible right now \u2014 and that he wanted to see Ulrika again. The mood of gloom seemed to have infected the whole airship. All the dwarfs were quiet and their expressions were pained. Perhaps they felt this unaccountable sadness as well. Or maybe they were simply hungover, for last night every last one of them had drunk like a Marienburg sailor on a spree or, to be nastily exact, dwarfs confronted by a lake of free booze. Felix had to admit that the airship was currently no place for those with a hangover. The deck vibrated visibly and occasionally the whole gondola shook as they passed through clouds and patches of turbulence.\n\nHe pushed his way towards the command deck and saw that it was mostly empty, save for the basic crew needed to fly the ship. He paced moodily over to stand beside Makaisson and looked out the window. The vast stone bulk of the mountains loomed ever closer. He could see that they were headed for Blackblood Pass. It yawned in front of them like the mouth of some great daemon.\n\nSoon they were in the pass itself with the mountains looming all around them, and the lowest of the strange glittering peaks level with the airship. Felix studied them but the glowing, shimmering substance that capped them seemed strangely hard to look at. The eye slid along it like a man tumbling on ice, and he found that he could not really focus on the peaks close up. It was his first indication of how strange Chaos could be. He was sure that it would not be his last.\n\nThe pass itself was rocky and bleak. Here and there oddly shaped boulders had been placed alongside the track, and Felix felt sure that strange, outlandish runes had been carved into them. Noticing that some of them gleamed white, he borrowed a telescope from Makaisson and focused it on them. To his horror he saw that what he had taken to be a chalked symbol was in fact a deformed skeleton chained to the rock. Were they human sacrifices left here by warriors of Chaos, he wondered, or warning markers left by the Kislevites? Either seemed perfectly possible.\n\nVarek appeared beside Felix and maintained an awe-struck silence for a few minutes. Felix knew that the young dwarf shared his mood.\n\n\"Schreiber thinks these mountains shield all of Kislev,\" Varek said eventually.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I talked with him back at the manor house. He has a theory that says that if it wasn't for this range of mountains, the wind would blow all the warpstone dust down from the Chaos Wastes and infect the population with mutation. He says that they would all change and become deformed and subject to the mad whims of the Dark Gods.\"\n\n\"I thought there already were mutants in Kislev. Sigmar knows, I've fought enough of them in the Empire. There cannot be fewer here!\"\n\nVarek looked at Felix and smiled sadly. \"In Kislev they kill anyone who shows the slightest stigmata of mutation \u2014 even babies.\"\n\n\"They do the same in the Empire,\" Felix said, but he knew that wasn't really true. Many parents hid their mutant children and people shielded their mutant relatives. He had encountered such cases in his wanderings. Mutants were not bad people, he thought; they were just suffering from an illness. He shook his head bitterly, knowing that no dwarf and most likely no Kislevite would agree with that conclusion. It was indeed a terrible world.\n\n\"Schreiber claims it would be much worse without these mountains, that they are a natural barrier which prevents most of the dust reaching the lands of men. He says that the strange stuff on the peaks is congealed Dark Magic, the pure stuff of Chaos.\"\n\n\"He has many interesting theories, Herr Schreiber,\" Felix said sourly.\n\n\"He says these are not just theories. He has conducted experiments on animals using warpstone dust.\"\n\n\"Then he is mad. Warpstone is an evil substance. It drives men mad. I have seen it.\"\n\n\"He says he is very careful and shields himself with magic and all manner of protective substances. My uncle believes his theories. It is one reason why there is a layer of lead foil within the hull of this airship.\"\n\n\"I think no good will come to Herr Schreiber in the end.\"\n\n\"I am inclined to agree, Felix, but all the same he could be right. My uncle says it fits with dwarfish lore. Some claim that our people first started building their cities underground during the first great Chaos incursions long ages ago and that the rock shielded us from the taint of Chaos which has affected all other races.\"\n\nHe seemed embarrassed as he said this, as if unsure how Felix would respond to the accusation that his folk were touched by Chaos. From his own experience of travel within the Empire and beyond, however, Felix found it only too easy to believe that it was the case. Humankind gave itself over all too easily to the worship of the Darkness. It was a depressing thought.\n\n\"When we pass beyond these mountains we will be on the very edge of the Realm of Chaos,\" Varek muttered darkly.\n\n\"Do you think that the spells Schreiber wove around the airship will protect us?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"I know nothing of magic, Felix. It is not a subject that many dwarfs know about. My uncle believes that it will, and he is considered wise in these matters.\"\n\n\"A strange man, Herr Schreiber. You know, he asked me to record my impressions of the Wastes in case we made it back.\"\n\n\"Me too. He says it will help with his researches.\"\n\n\"Let us hope then that we return to present him with useful material.\"\n\nVarek smiled. \"Indeed, let us hope so.\"\n\nLurk was worried. Ever since the human wizard had come aboard the airship and begun casting his spells, he had been unable to contact Grey Seer Thanquol. It was a terrible thing, for he knew the skaven sorcerer would blame him for it whatever the real cause. He wanted to do something, but he knew nothing about sorcery. A feeling of helplessness surged in him. With it came a desire to rend and tear, to exorcise his fears by killing something, preferably something weak and helpless. Unfortunately there had been no likely candidates for his fury. The airship was full of well-armed and equipped dwarfs, and Lurk did not have a dozen of his packmates with him to encourage his righteous skaven wrath.\n\nHe had known that he needed to find this outlet for his pent-up energies. He had found it in exploring the airship while most of the dwarfs slept. Once again he had found himself at the promising tunnel opening in the topmost level of the gondola.\n\nSlowly, carefully, he turned the massive handle and felt the lock click open. He pushed upwards with all his strength and saw a ladder running upwards. Wind tugged his fur for a moment and he realised he stood atop the gondola. Looking up he saw the ladder disappeared into a circular opening in the fabric of the gasbag. He pulled himself up through the opening and was immediately surrounded by what appeared to be a mass of monstrous balloons. They were fixed in long rows within the gasbag by fine wires.\n\nQuickly he scurried up the ladder, leaping upwards with the natural agility of a skaven, reassured by the pressing closeness of the gasbags all around him. His keen nostrils twitched and his whiskers bristled. He recognised a faint acrid tang to the air that no human or dwarf would have noticed. He recognised this scent! He had caught hints of it down below in the gondola but that was not where he knew the smell from. No, he had encountered it in the great marshes around Skavenblight where the ratfolk factories poured their chemical by-products into the mud and quicksand. Sometimes huge bubbles would form where the effluent was piped, and when those bubbles broke the surface and popped this particular smell was emitted.\n\nWas it possible that the dwarfs had trapped this gas in these thin balloon-like sacks, and that it was these thousands of sacks which lifted this vessel into the sky? Could it be that the means to create airships was already within skaven paws? Should he tell Grey Seer Thanquol of his suspicions?\n\nHe considered the thought for a moment and then decided against it. It was a ludicrous theory! Surely only the most powerful of sorceries could keep this vessel aloft. That must have been what the human sorcerer was doing back at the human surface-burrow! He must have been recharging the spells that let the airship fly. These gasbags must serve some other purpose. Perhaps they were weapons, like poison gas globes. That, too, seemed unlikely, however, for he had never heard of the marsh gases giving anybody anything worse than a bad headache.\n\nHe scampered all the way to the top of the ladder, noting that various rope walkways ran through the massive balloon to allow access to its innards. This would make a good hiding place if he had to abandon the cargo hold below. When he reached the top of the ladder he emerged into an open crow's nest atop the ship. It seemed to be a kind of observation deck, about the size of a rowing boat. Various strange meters and gauges were set into a large metal box. Heeding Thanquol's words, he did not dare touch them. Standing on a large tripod beside them was a telescope, mounted above a large, multi-barrelled weapon which reminded Lurk of the organ guns he had faced in his battles with humans and dwarfs. Doubtless the weapon was meant to protect the airship in case of attack from above.\n\nOverhead he had a perfect view of the sky. The chill wind whipped his fur, and he sniffed the air. By the Horned Rat! It contained the faintest hint of warpstone! Lurk's fur bristled. If he could find a source of that fabled substance he would be rich beyond his wildest dreams of avarice \u2014 provided Thanquol let him keep some. Perhaps best not to mention the precious Chaos rock to the grey seer before it was absolutely necessary. After all, he could be wrong.\n\nA walkway ran away along the top of this massive structure to other crow's nests at the front and rear of the ship. He realised that he was looking at a row of defensive emplacements similar to this one. It looked like the dwarfs were taking no chances. Was it possible that those rope walkways within the balloon itself led to other weapons in the sides of the airship? He would have to investigate.\n\nHe looked through the eyepiece of the telescope and scanned his surroundings, taking careful note of the enormous mountains with their glittering peaks, and the odd traces of colour in the northern sky. He suddenly felt enormously exposed. This was not the place for a tunnel-dweller like himself. There was too much sky, too much fresh air and the horizon was too far away. He had best return below.\n\nThere you are! The thought was so powerful it truly startled him. Lurk shot bolt upright and his tail stretched to its fullest extent. Where have you been?\n\nNowhere, most understanding of Overlords. Lurk thought carefully. In the airship, as you commanded.\n\nThen our foe-fiends have shielded their ship with sorcery. Incompetent fool-slave, they must have detected your presence!\n\nIt was a terrifying thought, which Lurk prayed most devoutly was not true. He swiftly explained to the mighty voice thundering in his head about the presence of the human sorcerer on the ship, and about how he had enshrouded the cupola in mysterious spells. The silence which followed was so long that Lurk started to believe that Thanquol had lost contact. Just as he was offering up his thanks to the Horned Rat, though, the commanding voice spoke again.\n\nThe man-wizard must have put shieldspells on the shipcraft to protect it from something. The spells are only on the vessel below not where you are. Come to where you are now at the same time each day and I will contact you.\n\nYes, most potent of potentates, Lurk thought back.\n\nLurk hastily scampered back down the ladder. Only on his way back down did he wonder whether the grey seer understood the danger. Perhaps the crows nest would be occupied. Perhaps he would be unable to carry out this order. It was a frightening thought. Lurk wished he had a few underlings present to bully and relieve his frustrations. On the way back down he settled for slashing a few balloons with his claws. They burst, sending rushes of foul but familiar gas into his nostrils.\n\nOnly when he was safely back in his crate did Lurk start to worry what would happen to him if any of the dwarfs noticed the balloons he had burst. Perhaps they would suspect his presence. On the other paw, his natural skaven curiosity also made him wonder what would happen if he burst all of the balloons.\n\nFelix continued to survey the ground beneath them, as he had done for hours. They had reached the very beginnings of the Chaos Wastes now. Below them he could see the first dunes of odd, multicoloured sand beginning to mingle with the bleak rocky plain. The sky ahead was turbulent, filled with shifting clouds of unusual metallic shades. The sun was rarely visible and when it showed its face it looked larger, and redder. It was as if they were not only crossing into a new land, but into an entirely new world. The gems in the eyes of the ship's figurehead glowed brightly, as if whatever spell had been placed upon them was now fully activated.\n\nOnce again the sheer speed of the airship filled Felix with appalled wonder. In the past few hours they had passed over towering mountains, then rolling plains. Those plains had not looked too different from the grasslands of Kislev \u2014 except that when you looked more closely you could see charred ruins where the stones had apparently flowed like water into new and bizarre shapes, and the ponds and lakes shimmered with odd pinks and blues as if tainted by strange chemicals.\n\nAfter the plains had come marshland and then the tundra. The temperature had dropped noticeably and sometimes flurries of crimson snow had battered against the windows, before melting and running down the glass in red droplets which reminded Felix uncomfortably of blood.\n\nEventually these bleak lands had also given way, to a place where nothing grew, a stony plain littered with towering boulders that reminded Felix of ancient menhirs. It seemed to him unlikely that these could have been raised by men, but then you never knew. Sometimes they had passed over small bands of beastmen who had beat their chests and bellowed challenges up at them. On other occasions they had flown above clusters of foraging men, who scattered at their approach. Through the telescope Felix saw that all of them bore the stigmata of mutation. How did they survive in this unhealthy land, he wondered \u2014 trying not to consider the dark tales of cannibalism and necrophagy that were told of the cults of Chaos.\n\nNow they had left even those bleak lands far behind them and were looking down on the shimmering desert. Felix heard the click of Borek's stick on the stone floor as the old dwarf approached, then felt the touch of a leathery hand on his sleeve.\n\n\"Take this amulet and put it on,\" Borek said. \"We have entered the Chaos Wastes proper now, and it will shield you against their influence. Try to keep it at all times against your flesh, for that will transfer its power to you and ward you against the warping emanations of the Dark Magic.\"\n\nFelix accepted the amulet and held it up to the light. A silver chain and casing held a gem the exact shape and colour of a piece of ice, the sort of frozen stalactite he had often seen in winter hanging from the eaves of his father's house. It was a crystal of a type he had never seen before, and as he looked within it he thought that he caught sight of a faint glow.\n\nHe touched the stone, half-expecting it to be frozen, but if anything it felt slightly warm.\n\nHe cocked his head suspiciously and looked down at the old dwarf.\n\n\"This was made for you by Herr Schreiber, wasn't it?\"\n\nBorek beamed gnomishly up at him. \"You do not trust him, do you, Herr Jaeger?\"\n\nFelix shook his head. \"I trust no wizard who has dealings with Chaos.\"\n\n\"That is commendable, I suppose, but also a little foolish.\"\n\n\"I have had some experience of magic and of Chaos.\"\n\nBorek glanced out the windows and smiled ruefully. \"As have I. And let me tell you,. I trust Maximilian Schreiber with my life.\"\n\n\"Good! Because it seems to me that is exactly what you're doing.\"\n\n\"You are stubborn. We dwarfs find that an admirable quality. Yet you are wrong about the wizard. I have known him many years. I have talked with him and travelled with him. I have saved his life and he has saved mine. There is no taint in him.\"\n\nThe quiet tone of authority in the loremaster's voice was more convincing than his words. He felt that the dwarf was probably right, but still\u2026 Felix had grown up in a land where magic and Chaos had often been regarded with horror, and he had some terrible experiences at the hands of sorcerers. It was hard to put aside a lifetime of prejudices. He said as much.\n\nThe loremaster shrugged and then gestured at the gondola that surrounded him. \"Even dwarfs can change, Herr Jaeger, and if anything we are far more bound by tradition and by prejudice than you. This whole airship goes against the traditions of one of our strongest guilds. Yet we have put aside our prejudices because our need is great.\"\n\n\"And you think my need for this amulet is great.\"\n\n\"I think it will be your best protection against Chaos, Herr Jaeger, while its magic lasts. And believe me, you will need protection against Chaos.\"\n\nHe turned and shouted something in rapid dwarfish to Makaisson. It came as a shock to Felix to hear him speaking that harsh guttural tongue. During their travels together all of the dwarfs around him had spoken Reikspiel. At first Felix had thought it was out of politeness, because he was a foreigner and could not understand, but later he had come to realise that it was really down to the peculiarly suspicious dwarfish mind. Yes, they were being polite, but they also regarded their tongue as sacred and secret, and did not want outsiders to learn it. Unless they were completely trustworthy. Of all the humans he knew, only the higher ranks of the priesthood of Sigmar were proficient in the language and they taught it only to their own priests after ordination. Felix guessed that Borek's decision to speak now meant that he had crossed some barrier and that the old dwarf trusted him. He felt obscurely pleased.\n\n\"I was just telling the pilot to take the craft down towards those ruins. I thought I recognised them,\" Borek said.\n\nFelix followed the direction indicated by the loremaster's pointed finger. There were tumbled down buildings and other things among them. He raised the telescope to his eye and saw that they resembled wagons of metal, totally enclosed with only crystal window slots out of which drivers could see, and four more slots in the side through which weapons could be poked. There was a peculiar arrangement of funnels at the back and no yokes to which any beast of burden might be harnessed. Something about them reminded him of Imperial war wagons that had been completely roofed over, and also of the Imperial steam-tanks he had once seen in Nuln.\n\n\"This was our last expedition's first campsite in the Wastes,\" Borek said. \"See where those rusting hulks are? Those were our vehicles. We were attacked here by an enemy warband and drove them off only with great losses. Those cairns there were raised over our dead.\"\n\nFelix realised that the airship had come to a halt over the ruins and that the other dwarfs were crowding the windows and portholes to gaze down on it. They looked down at it with the sort of awe that Felix had seen human pilgrims display when they entered a shrine. In a way, it was worrying evidence of the dangers of the Wastes. In another, it was reassuring, in that it showed that people had come this way before, and that things were not a complete unknown here.\n\nHe looked down on the abandoned vehicles and the empty tombs, and his earlier sadness returned redoubled. Those things had stood there for nearly twenty years and the only other eyes that had looked upon them were those of Chaos worshippers and monsters. He truly wished that he had not come here.\n\n\"Near here are the caves where Gotrek found his axe,\" Borek said softly.\n\n\"Is that so? Was the failure of your expedition the reason why Gotrek became a Slayer?\"\n\n\"No. That happened later\u2026\"\n\nBorek smiled sadly then looked at him, opened his mouth as if to speak, and then, as if realising that he had already said too much, closed it again. Felix wanted to ask more but it came to him that if the old dwarf didn't want to speak there was no way to make him do so.\n\nFelix noticed that he still held the amulet negligently in his hand. The thought struck him that it was undoubtedly true that the old dwarf knew more about these things than he did, and that perhaps he should heed the loremaster's words. He looped the silver chain around his neck and let the stone dangle down inside his shirt. Where it touched his flesh he felt a strange tingling. A shiver passed through him and then was gone, leaving only a warm glow that in no way reassured him.\n\nBorek patted him on the back. \"Good,\" he said. \"Now you are better protected than we ever were in the old days.\"\n\nFelix looked up towards the horizon and offered up a prayer to Sigmar for the souls of the dwarfs down there, and for his own safety. A sudden premonition of doom came to him and did not leave, even after the airship's engines roared to life once more and they began to move forwards, deeper into the Chaos Wastes." + }, + { + "title": "WARPSTORM", + "text": "Felix pressed his nose against the cold glass of the window and for the first time felt truly terrified. The horns calling the crew to battle stations had just sounded, and all the dwarves ran to take up their positions at the guns and engines, leaving Felix to stand idly by, a helpless spectator in this time of fear. He looked down on the eerie landscape below.\n\nThe desert had a wild and terrible beauty. Enormous rock formations towered over the glittering sand like wind eroded statues of monsters. An emerald lake glittered greenly under the crimson sky. By its shores two enormous armies marched towards each other in a tide of flesh and metal.\n\nFelix wondered at his fear. The warriors of Chaos advancing below seemed not at all concerned with the airship overhead. They were far too intent on each other. Only occasionally would a beastman or a Chaos warrior look up at the sky and brandish a weapon. None of the missile weapons they carried appeared to have the range to hit the airship. Makaisson had sounded the alert just to be on the safe side, however, and Felix could not blame him. The numbers and the insane ferocity of the crowd below them were terrifying.\n\nThese were both mighty forces, perhaps the largest armies he had ever seen. Thousands of beastmen surged below, like a sea of hoofed and horned animals grown upright into twisted parodies of men. Felix had fought these followers of Darkness before, but now something about the sheer numbers here made them seem far more terrifying than ever before. Huge banners rose from the midst of the forces, each a twisted parody of the heraldic emblems of his distant homeland. Monstrous men garbed in incredibly ornate black armour marched at the head of each force or rode at its flanks on mutated steeds which dwarfed even the largest of human warhorses.\n\nThere were thousands upon thousands of warriors present. Felix wondered at that. How could this barren landscape support such vast regiments? Obviously there was sorcery at work here. Looking down on these immense armies he recalled the descriptions he had read of the previous incursions of Chaos, during the time of Magnus the Pious, when Praag had been besieged and it seemed like the forces of the Dark Gods were about to sweep away the entire civilised world. They had always seemed faintly unreal to him, with their lurid depictions of daemons, and their enormous hordes of twisted feral things but those armies down there made those hellish visions seem all too plausible. He could easily see those mighty forces crashing through Blackblood Pass and smashing through the lands of men. For the first time he started to truly understand the power of Chaos, and he wondered why it had not yet devoured the world.\n\nWith a roar Felix could hear even above the racket of the airship's engines, the armies closed the distance between them. Felix trained the telescope, focusing on those distant figures, turning them from tiny marionettes into living breathing warriors.\n\nA huge figure garbed in armour of black iron, on which was inscribed redly glowing runes charged his barded warhorse towards a mob of beastmen. This foul knight brandished an enormous battleaxe in each hand. The horse's trappings were fantastically ornate. Its head was shielded by a moulded mask that gave it the features of a daemonic dragon. The armour on its body was segmented like that of a centipede and on each section were numerous discs, carved in the shape of leering daemon masks. The mounted warrior rode full pelt into a band of beastmen. His axe decapitated a foe with each swing. His horse's hooves dashed out the brains of another, and it continued onwards trampling the bodies of the slain into bloody mush. Behind the knight his fellows charged with maniacal fervour towards packs of beastmen that outnumbered them more than twenty to one. They seemed fearless and uncaring of whether they lived or died.\n\nIn another part of the battlefield, monstrous minotaurs armed with axes the size of small trees hacked their way through all that opposed them. They towered over the beastmen the way adults tower over small children, and it seemed to Felix that a beastman had about as much chance of overcoming one as a child had of overcoming a full grown man. Even as Felix watched, one of the bull-headed giants caught a goat-headed thing on its horns and lifted it kicking and screaming from the ground. With a shake of its head, the monster sent its gored victim flying twenty paces to land atop its comrades. The impact sent half a dozen of them sprawling onto the bloody sand. But then, even as Felix watched, the rest of the beastmen swarmed over the minotaur, striking with spears, clambering up its legs, harrying it the way a pack of wild dogs would savage a bear. The massive creature fell and disappeared in a cloud of dust, to be trampled under the beastmen's hooves and impaled on their spears.\n\nWinged humanoids with daemonic features rose like a flock of hideous bats and wheeled over the battlefield. At first Felix feared that they were going to attack the airship and his hands reached for the hilt of his sword but then the hellish flock gave out a hideous, ear-piercing shriek and descended down onto the beastmen hordes. They lashed out with taloned claws and ripped their victims limb from limb with a strength that seemed supernatural, before being lopped into pieces themselves by their frenzied foes.\n\nIn the centre of all this howling madness loomed a gigantic figure clad in the most fantastically ornate armour Felix had ever seen. Every piece of it appeared to moulded with grinning skulls and leering gargoyle faces. The warrior was mounted on a skeletal steed which seemed barely able to sustain its great weight and yet moved with a speed like the wind. In his right hand, the Chaos champion held an enormous scythe; in his left, a banner depicting a throne of skulls whose empty eye-sockets wept tears of blood. The warlord gave instructions to his followers with great sweeping gestures of the scythe and hordes of lesser, black armoured warriors leapt to obey, running to their deaths or to dispatch their foe with a strange savage joy.\n\nFelix had to admit that they were terrifying. He watched aghast at the sheer frenzy with which the combat was fought. He had never seen such insane hatred as these two forces seemed to possess for each other, and suddenly it came to him that here was the reason why the followers of Darkness had yet to overwhelm the world. They were as divided amongst themselves as the nations of men were; more so, in truth. Perhaps then the rumours of rivalry between the Ruinous Powers were true. For this Felix was profoundly grateful, for here was a force that inspired respect and fear.\n\nThere was something disturbing about all this as well. What if the powers were somehow to put aside their rivalry and turn their faces towards the world? What if some mighty warlord was to arise among the forces of Chaos and unite them in one invincible horde? Then the uncountable hosts would march down on Kislev and the lands beyond. Suddenly Straghov's fortress and his thousand lancers seemed pitifully few.\n\nIn a matter of minutes the airship swept over the battle and it dwindled away behind them, lost in the enormous immensity of the endless desert. No matter how vast the warring armies were, this landscape could reduce them to less than the significance of ants. A vast dark gloom obscured the northern horizon. The very sight of it filled him with foreboding. Felix let out his breath in a long sigh and returned to his cabin to sleep.\n\nThe shaking of the airship woke Felix unhappily from a dream of Ulrika. He pulled himself upright just as an enormous crash echoed through the steel corridors, and the whole vessel vibrated as if struck with an enormous hammer. His stomach lurched as the lantern on his wall swung, sending shadows flickering across his chamber. In that brief instant he felt certain he was going to die.\n\nHe pulled himself upright and glanced through the porthole. Outside all was roiling murk. Then there was a flash of incredible green lightning, multiple forks flickering down from above and losing themselves in the gloom. After a few seconds the voice of thunder spoke and the whole ship shook once more. The vibrations cast Felix from his bed and sent him rolling to the floor. As he leapt upright, he banged his head against the low ceiling. The pain sent lights dancing before his eyes and he reached a hand out to grasp the wall and help keep his balance. To his surprise it felt warm.\n\nStruggling to keep his balance on the rocking floor, he shuffled out into the corridor and headed towards the control room. His ears rang with the sound of thunder, and he could barely control the terror which clawed at his guts. This was far worse than any earlier turbulence. It was as if a giant had grasped the airship in its enormous hand and was trying to wrestle it to the ground. He could hear the roar of titanic winds hurtling past the hull. Any moment he thought the vessel would be split like a ripe melon hit by a hammer, and he and everybody else in the vessel would fall tumbling through a thousand strides of storm-tossed air to splatter on the ground below.\n\nIt was the sense of helplessness that was so frightening, the knowledge that there was nothing he could do to prevent any of this happening. There was no way off the Spirit of Grungni except clambering out through the hatches in the roof and leaping to certain death. At least in battle he could do something, wield a sword, smite a foe. Here and now he could do nothing save pray to Sigmar, and he doubted very much, given where they were currently located, that there was anything the God of the Hammer could do to save them. The twenty strides to the control room seemed to take a lifetime and Felix confidently believed that each step might be his last.\n\nArriving at the control room at last, he saw the dwarfs clutching at their control stations like it was their last hope of life. Gotrek stood in the centre, his axe held negligently in one hand, looking almost relaxed, riding the rolling deck with slight adjustments of his stance. No fear showed on his face, just a fixed grin of the sort he normally only revealed in combat. Felix noticed that the runes on his axe blade were glowing redly. Makaisson wrestled with the control wheel, his enormous muscles straining, huge sinews standing out like cables beneath his tattooed flesh. Old Borek was strapped into one of the armchairs, while Varek huddled behind him, a look somewhere between fear and wonderment inscribed on his face. Snorri was nowhere to be seen.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Felix shouted, struggling to make himself heard over the echoes of thunder, the roar of the wind and the scream of the engines. The whole ship shook once more and there was a sickening sensation of being dropped, as if the airship had suddenly lost buoyancy and was falling like a stone towards the earth.\n\n\"Warpstorm, manling!\" Gotrek bellowed. \"The worst I've seen!\"\n\nEerie green lightning flickered once more, the flash illuminated the whole cabin intensely, elongated Makaisson's shadow until it filled the floor, then vanished. The bolt appeared to have flickered only a few hundred yards away. Felix noticed that in its aftermath particles of shimmering dust, like a cloud of strangely coloured fireflies, filled their field of vision as far as the eye could see. Then the blast of thunder almost deafened him and the ship began to drop once more. After a moment the sensation of falling stopped and the airship righted itself like a ship cresting a wave.\n\nFelix scrambled over to the window and looked downwards. Through a gap in the clouds, in the flickering of the lightning, he thought he caught sight of the ground below. It was only a few hundred paces beneath them, dunes of glittering sand rising and tumbling, being driven before the titanic winds like foaming breakers on a storm-tossed sea. The wind shook the huge airship like a terrier shaking a rat. Felix knew that in a few dozen more heartbeats they were going to be driven into the ground, and the vessel was going to buckle and break like a toy boat thrown against a wall by a vicious child.\n\n\"Malakai! We're going to crash!\" he shouted. \"We're almost at the ground!\"\n\n\"Then come ivver here and gae us a hand, laddie. Pull on that altitude stick for all ye're worth. An' keep yer eyes peeled. The instruments hae stopped workin' in this storm.\"\n\nFelix rushed over to stand beside the engineer and pulled on the lever. Normally it would have moved easily but now it appeared to be stuck. Felix braced both his legs and heaved with all his might but still it would not move. The cold metal refused to be shifted. A vision of the airship impacting on the rocky desert below filled Felix's mind and he pulled once more, putting all the strength of fear into his efforts. Sweat ran down his brow. His muscles felt like they were going to erupt through his skin, and he knew that if he kept this up much longer he would burst a blood vessel. It was no use; still the cursed lever would not move.\n\n\"I can't shift it!\" he called.\n\n\"'Tis the wind on the ailerons, laddie. It's fightin' ye. Keep tryin'. Dinna gae up!\"\n\nFelix kept tugging and still nothing happened. He knew they must be mere seconds from disaster and still there was nothing he could do. He offered up a prayer to Sigmar for his soul, knowing that his life was about to end here in the Chaos Wastes. Then suddenly Gotrek was beside him, lending his massive strength to the struggle with the lever. And still it did not move.\n\nGotrek's beard bristled. The veins stood out on his forehead, and then something gave way. At first Felix feared that they had simply bent the stick out of shape but no, it was moving slowly, surely, inexorably backwards. As it did so, the nose of airship tilted skywards. Then it seemed like the airship was being thrown backwards like a galleon caught by a huge breaker. The deck rocked and he and Gotrek lost their footing, and were sent tumbling backwards towards the rear cabin wall. There was a sickening sensation in Felix's churning innards as the airship began to leap uncontrollably skyward and then was dashed downwards again.\n\n\"Hold on tight!\" bellowed Makaisson. \"This is gannae be rough!\"\n\nLurk squirted the musk of fear. He felt his glands void until they were empty and still they tried to keep on spurting. The wind tugged at his pelt, riffling it with a thousand demon fingers.\n\nGlittering warpstone dust filled his mouth and threatened to choke him. He had already swallowed a fair amount of the stuff and a warm glow filled his stomach. His fur stood on end. The roar of thunder almost deafened him. Tears filled his eyes from fear and constant irritation of the onrushing wind. He clutched the rails of the crow's nest with all four paws; his tail was looped round the rails to anchor him in place. He fought to keep himself low within the observation post, yet still the wind threatened to tear him from his place and send him tumbling to his doom. It was almost too much to be borne.\n\nHe cursed the day he had ever left his nice warm burrow in Skavenblight. He cursed Grey Seer Thanquol for his stupid orders. He cursed the stupid dwarfs and their stupid airship and their stupid journey. He cursed everyone and everything he could think of \u2014 except the Horned Rat, towards whom he remembered to send the occasional prayer for his deliverance.\n\nOnly a few minutes ago it had all seemed so quiet. He had climbed from his hiding place in the hold up to the crow's nest to make his daily report to Grey Seer Thanquol. The ship had been vibrating a little but Lurk had become used to its little motions and had paid no attention. But by the time he had reached the observation deck, the movements had become larger, the whole ship was bucking in the air like a crazed horse. But it was only when he had poked his snout through the upper hatch into the crow's nest proper that he noticed that the ship was surrounded by the strangely glowing cloud and its bizarre, multicoloured lightning flashes.\n\nSound skaven prudence had told him that he should retreat below but he had been held in place by one thing: the tingling taste of warpstone dust on his tongue. It held him in place, fascinated. It was the source of much of the grey seer's much-feared power, and quite possibly the source of all magic. He had thought that maybe if he tasted some he, too, might acquire magical powers, but so far there had been no sign of them. By the time he had tried to return below, the accursed dwarfs had sealed the hatches and there was no way he could open them from above. They were locked.\n\nIn frantic fear he had scrambled around inside the gasbag but the strangely shifting balloons had spooked him and he had grown tired of hanging from the ladder. So he had clambered back up to the crow's nest and there the wind had grabbed him. He had only just been able to save himself by seizing the railings and now there was nothing he could do except wait and pray while the airship rocked below him like a raft in a typhoon.\n\nAnother series of thunderclaps made Lurk look up. He saw a series of lightning flashes marching across the sky, coming ever closer. Their unholy brilliance dazzled him. He shut his eyes firmly but he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were about to hit the airship.\n\nHe remembered to send a final curse in the general direction of Grey Seer Thanquol.\n\nFelix, too, saw the line of lightning bolts exploding directly in front of the airship. Makaisson twisted the wheel instinctively trying to avoid being hit, but it was too late. The greenish bolts pummelled the airship. In the instant before the tremendous glare blinded him, Felix had time to notice that the gems on the ship's figurehead blazed bright as the sun. Then the ship shook as if it was about to fly apart and for a long moment Felix saw no more. For a heartbeat the terrible fear that he had been blinded filled him but it passed as his vision slowly returned, and he noticed that everything in the command deck was surrounded by a swiftly fading halo of green.\n\nThe amulet on his chest felt almost hot enough to burn and he felt like ripping it off until the thought struck him that this might not be wise, and that perhaps it was protecting him from the magic of Chaos which had so obviously been contained within the lightning. He saw that the amulet on Gotrek's bare chest was glowing a furious green as it absorbed the halo about him. Then suddenly the ship stopped shaking and the sky around them was clear.\n\nFelix picked himself up and limped over to the window of the command deck. He could still see the green-black clouds of the warpstorm boiling below them. Occasionally the clouds would flash brightly with a glow of witch-light as the lightning sparked again and again. It was like looking down on a peculiar chaotic sea and Felix half-expected to see some enormous monster rise up out of its depths and try and swallow the airship in its jaws.\n\nIt took him a few moments to realise that the drone of the engines had changed. The sound slowly died away, until they made no noise at all. The clouds slowly passed beyond the airship. It began to gently rotate this way and that in the breeze.\n\n\"We've lost power,\" Makaisson muttered. \"This isnae guid.\"\n\nSnorri chose that moment to appear in the cabin. He was yawning widely. \"What was all the noise?\" he asked. \"It woke Snorri up.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE RUINED CITY", + "text": "Felix listened unhappily as the engineers reported back to the command deck in turn, each bearing a tale of woe. It appeared that the warpstorm had caused a great deal of damage. There were rips in the gasbag, the engines had stopped working properly, the rotor blades were bent out of shape and there was some structural damage besides.\n\n\"We'll joost hae tae stop fur repairs,\" Makaisson announced calmly. Looking down through the windows Felix wished he shared the dwarf's confidence. The storm had finally cleared and the sky was its usual overcast mixture of strangely coloured clouds.\n\nBelow them lay the ruins of an enormous city, with not a soul visible in the streets. Such desolation was eerie. The wind whistled mournfully as it stirred the shifting sands which drifted through the abandoned buildings.\n\nThen Felix heard a much more cheering sound: somebody, somewhere had managed to get one of the engines working. Gleefully Makaisson took control of his craft again. He nursed the airship down until it was only a hundred strides above the buildings.\n\n\"We'll moor here. Draup they lines.\"\n\nMooring lines dropped. Felix saw the grapnel hooks on the end of one snag on a tumbled stone wall. It was enough to hold the drifting airship in place.\n\n\"Right, get doon there and secure they hooks! I'll try tae haud her steady up here.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Felix said. \"It might be dangerous.\"\n\n\"Och, yer right, laddie. Gotrek, Snorri, Felix, off ye go and make sure that there's nae wee beastmen lurkin' aboot doon there.\" Felix wished that he hadn't opened his mouth.\n\nFrom the ground the ruins looked even more vast and forbidding than they had from the air. The buildings seemed immeasurably ancient. Huge blocks of stone had been placed atop of each other without the use of mortar. Originally their weight and the precision with which they had been positioned held them in place. It was a style that Felix had seen only once before \u2014 in the ruins he had seen above the ancient underground dwarfhold of Karak Eight Peaks. He said this out loud.\n\n\"This isn't dwarfish workmanship, manling,\" Gotrek sneered. His voice was muffled by the scarf he had wrapped round the lower part of his face to keep out any warpstone dust that might be in the air. Both Snorri and Felix had done the same thing. It seemed descending into madness and mutation did not fit in with the Slayer ideal of a heroic doom. \"Looks like it. Maybe it was copied or perhaps the builders had dwarf advisors but this was not dwarfish work. Stonework is shoddy. The alignment is less than perfect.\"\n\nFelix shrugged. His mail shirt felt heavy on his shoulders but he was glad it was there. In this strange place, the more armour he had the better. Right now he wouldn't have minded a complete suit of plate mail. He glanced around him. The street on which they stood was paved with huge flagstones. On each stone was inscribed an outlandish rune. The wind whispered eerily through the desolation. It was cold and he had the uncanny feeling of being watched.\n\n\"I have never heard of any human cities this far north, and it does not look like elvish work.\"\n\n\"Elvish work!\" Gotrek said contemptuously. \"A contradiction in terms: elves don't work.\"\n\n\"I doubt this was built by beastmen or the warriors of Chaos. It seems too sophisticated for them, and it looks very ancient.\"\n\n\"Looks can be deceiving here in the Chaos Wastes.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"There are all manner of illusions and mirages, and it is said that deep in the Wastes, the Great Powers of Chaos can create and destroy things at their whim.\"\n\n\"Then we'd best hope that we are not so deep in the Wastes.\"\n\n\"Aye.\"\n\nAn eerie wailing call echoed through the ruins, like the shriek of a soul in torment or the cry of a mad thing wandering lost and forlorn through an endless wilderness. Felix spun around and ripped his sword from its scabbard.\n\n\"What was that?\" he asked.\n\n\"I do not know, manling, but doubtless we will find out if it comes closer.\"\n\n\"Snorri hopes it does!\" said the Slayer almost cheerily.\n\nFelix glanced at the rope ladder hanging from the airship's side. He had not enjoyed clambering down it, and he did not look forward to the prospect of climbing up it again, but it was good to know that it was there, just in case they needed to beat a swift retreat. The bizarre call sounded again, closer now, but it was hard to tell exactly.\n\nWith the echoes in these ruins it could be coming from leagues away. Felix consoled himself with the thought that at least it had not been answered. He fingered the amulet on his chest, but it gave no sense of warmth. Perhaps there was no Dark Magic at work here; perhaps it had become overloaded in the warpstorm. He had noticed that none of the gems on the airship's sides were glowing now. That might mean something good or it might mean something bad. Felix did not know enough about magic to be able to tell.\n\nVarek was gesturing them from the opening above. He seemed to want to know whether they were about to secure the airship. Felix shook his head, trying to indicate that the folk above should do nothing till they had ascertained what was making this hideous racket.\n\n\"Should we investigate the shrieking?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Good idea, manling,\" Gotrek said nastily. \"Let's go wandering through these ruins and see how far we can get from the airship. Maybe we should split up too. That way we can cover more ground!\"\n\n\"It was just a suggestion,\" Felix said. \"There's no need to be sarcastic.\"\n\n\"It sounded like a good plan to Snorri,\" the other Slayer said.\n\nJust then, from amidst the ruins, a figure limped into view. It looked like a human but it was so filthy, ragged and unkempt that Felix wasn't sure if this was the case. Around him he sensed a change in the attitude of Snorri and Gotrek. Without them visibly changing position, they seemed to become more wary, ready to strike out in any direction at a moment's notice.\n\nFelix heard a clinking from behind them, and turned his head momentarily to see that the grapnel at the end of mooring line had come loose. The airship was drifting free on the breeze. The vessel's engines chose that moment to sputter and die. He cursed silently to himself as the rope ladder rose out of his reach, then he turned his head and forced himself to concentrate once more on the advancing figure.\n\nHe could see that it was indeed a man. He walked in a shuffling crouch. His hair was so long that it reached his waist. His beard was filthy and dragged almost to the ground. Weeping sores covered his hands and arms where they were exposed. He limped wearily up to where they stood and let out another long wail. He was leaning on a staff that looked like it had been made by lashing together a number of human bones with sinew. A blank-eyed skull glared from its tip.\n\nFelix stared at the man, and met a gaze full of melancholy madness.\n\n\"Begone from my city or I will feed you to my beasts,\" the stranger said eventually. He fingered one of the many verdigrised copper amulets which hung from a chain around his neck. Felix could see that it had been carved into the likeness of a screaming skull.\n\n\"What beasts?\" said Gotrek.\n\n\"Snorri thinks you're a nutter,\" Snorri said.\n\nListen to who's talking, thought Felix.\n\n\"The beasts which fear and worship me,\" the man said. \"The creatures to whom I am a god.\"\n\nFelix looked at the man and felt a surge of fear, knowing that he was mad. On the other hand, he did not want to simply slay the man out of hand just because he was mad. He had obviously been here for some time and it occurred to Felix that the man might have useful knowledge. He thought he had nothing to lose by humouring this lunatic.\n\n\"What is your name, oh mighty one?\" Felix asked, hoping the others would have wit enough to play along with him. It was, he knew, most likely a forlorn hope but he thought he might as well try. The stranger appeared to consider this for a moment.\n\n\"Hans, Hans M\u00fcller \u2014 but you can call me the divine one.\"\n\n\"And what are you doing here, Divine One?\" Felix asked softly. \"You're a long way from anywhere.\"\n\n\"I got lost.\"\n\n\"Take a wrong turning back in Kislev, did you?\" Gotrek asked sarcastically. Felix saw that the Slayer's axe was held ready to strike. There was a faint glow along the runes of the blade. This was usually a very bad sign.\n\n\"No, short one. I am a magician. I was experimenting with certain spells of translocation and something went wrong. I ended up here.\"\n\n\"Short one?\" Gotrek said, a note of menace in his voice.\n\n\"Translocation?\" Felix asked hastily. The fact that the man was a wizard was not making him feel any easier. He had never much cared for sorcerers, having had several bad experiences with them.\n\n\"A method of moving between two points without traversing the lands in between. My theories were at least partially correct. I moved. Fortunately I moved too far and ended up here where the natives recognise my godhood.\"\n\n\"Tell us, oh Divine One, what do you know of Karag Dum?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"The great daemon has returned there,\" Muller said instantly.\n\nAt the mention of daemons, Felix shuddered. In the Chaos Wastes it seemed all too likely that such sinister entities could be present.\n\n\"Daemon?\"\n\n\"The daemon told of in the Prophesy. The Great Destroyer. It awaits only the coming of the Axe Bearer to fulfil its prophesy and its destiny!\"\n\n\"Tell us more,\" Felix said, shuddering.\n\nSeeing Felix's reaction, a strange, furtive look came into the mage's eye. He licked his lips with the tip of a thin pinkish tongue. He looked twisted and cunning and suddenly Felix did not trust him at all.\n\n\"My beasts must be fed,\" the mage said, then made a strange gesture. His hand moved through the air and seemed to gather oddly glowing energies to it. A shimmering sphere of light suddenly surrounded his hand. Even as he made to cast it, Gotrek's axe flashed and severed the hand at the wrist. The sphere of light fell from Muller's outstretched fingers and hit the ground. There was an explosion. A blast of warm air passed over Felix. His flesh tingled and he felt an odd dizziness.\n\nIn a moment he had recovered and the flashing before his eyes calmed down. He was grateful to see that Gotrek and Snorri were still there too, although the wizard had vanished.\n\n\"That was not a very destructive spell,\" Felix said. \"He could not exactly have been a powerful wizard.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure, manling,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Take a look around.\"\n\nFelix did so. The first thing he noticed was that the airship was gone. Then he noticed the roof, the walls, and the peculiar patterns arrayed on the flagstoned floor.\n\n\"Next time we meet a sorcerer, manling,\" said Gotrek, \"let's kill him first and ask questions later.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "They stood in an oddly shaped chamber, in the centre of a large pentagram. At each point of the pentagram was a human skull and within each skull something glowed. A greenish light leaked from the eye-socket of every skull. Overhead was a massive stone roof. The walls of the chamber were carved from the same stones as the rest of the city. Odd-looking luminous moss grew in the cracks between blocks.\n\n\"Where are we?\" whispered Felix. There was something about the atmosphere of this place which made him want to be extremely quiet. An aura of watchfulness, a sense of something old and evil waiting for something to happen. His words echoed away. Under the shadows of the roof something rustled and stirred and Felix sincerely hoped that it was only bats.\n\n\"Snorri has no idea,\" said Snorri loudly. \"Somewhere underground, maybe.\"\n\n\"Let us go and find out,\" said Gotrek, striding towards the edge of the pentagram. As he did so, the chalked lines on the floor began to gleam brightly. The hair on the back of Felix's neck stood on end.\n\n\"No! Wait!\" he shouted.\n\nGotrek strode blithely on. As his foot touched the edge of the pentacle, sparks flew up and he was surrounded by the brilliant glow. The smell of ozone filled the air. In an instant the Slayer was thrown backwards into the centre of the pentagram. It did not even slow him down. He threw himself at the barrier once more \u2014 and once again was tossed back.\n\nAs this happened, Felix watched closely what was happening. Each time the spell took effect, the eyes of the skulls blazed brighter; after Gotrek was thrown backwards, the illumination dimmed.\n\n\"You could try smashing one of those heads,\" Felix suggested. Gotrek did not respond but stomped over to one of the points of the pentacle. His axe flashed downwards, the runes on the blade blazing. The skull smashed into a thousand fragments. A cloud of ectoplasmic vapour rose above it. There was a long, shrieking wail, as of a soul that had been set free after centuries of imprisonment. As the cry subsided, the remaining skulls went dark. Gotrek stepped outside the pentagram easily this time.\n\nA quick inspection revealed that there was only one way out of the chamber. It led down a long ramp into a maze of gloomy corridors. The whole area was lit by glowing gems set in the ceiling. Felix had seen their like before, beneath Karak Eight Peaks.\n\n\"Those do look like dwarf work,\" he said, as they marched down the shadowy corridors.\n\n\"Aye, manling, they do. Maybe the folk of Karag Dum traded with this city.\"\n\n\"Or maybe Karag Dum was plundered by the people here.\"\n\n\"That is an evil thought but it is also a possibility.\"\n\nOnce more they fell silent. Gotrek led them easily through the maze, always moving with confidence, never having to retrace his steps. Felix was amazed by the certainty that the dwarfs showed here, for he knew that if he had been on his own, by now he would have been hopelessly lost.\n\nThe watchful stillness had once more settled over the labyrinth. Felix's flesh crawled. Every so often he stopped to glance back over his shoulder just to make sure that there was nothing coming up behind him. He felt as if a blade might be plunged into his unprotected back at any moment.\n\nAs they hurried on, Felix wondered where the other dwarfs were. He hoped that they had not left without them. The situation at the moment did not look good. The three of them were trapped in a huge maze, without food or water and with no knowledge of exactly where they were. If they made it to the surface, and they were still in the ruined city, then they might be able to attract the attention of the airship. But if it had already gone, then their prospects were bleak. Felix did not look forward to a long trek through the Chaos Wastes in an effort to get home. From what he had witnessed on the journey so far it seemed unlikely that they could survive.\n\nHe pushed these thoughts aside and forced himself to concentrate on his surroundings. The corridor had opened up into a long hallway. Light filtered in from high overhead. Glittering particles of dust shimmered in the beams. The hall itself was many storeys high. On each level was a gallery. A huge ornamental pool, filled with scummy water, took up most of the ground floor of the chamber. In the centre of the pool stood a fountain which had long since ceased to flow. It was a statue carved in the shape of an armoured warrior. The warrior looked human enough, save for the fact that he had an additional arm in which he held some sort of staff.\n\nFelix walked to the edge of the pool and looked in. The water was murky except where little flecks of green light glowed in, like trapped stars. He had seen this stuff before and knew it was warpstone.\n\n\"We won't be drinking this water,\" he muttered, and the thought immediately made him thirsty. And as he thought this, he noticed a distorted reflection in the water. A huge winged shape which grew larger behind him even as he watched.\n\n\"Look out!\" he shouted and threw himself backwards away from the pool. Razor-sharp talons slashed the air where he had stood there moments before. Felix had the fleeting impression of a hideous winged humanoid, much like the ones he had seen flying over the battlefield earlier. Then there was a huge splash as the creature tumbled into the waters of the pool.\n\nFelix had a moment to recover himself and look up. A horde of the winged creatures were emerging onto the galleries set into the walls high above them and throwing themselves into the air. He could hear the flap of their wings and the snapping of their pinions as they took flight. These creatures were not flying silently. The one which attacked him must have glided down from a long way above.\n\n\"Harpies!\" Snorri shouted. \"Good!\"\n\nGotrek looked grim as he brandished his axe. Snorri grinned like a maniac and capered on the spot at the prospect of impending violence. Felix glanced back over at the water where the winged fiend had vanished. There was a great splash and droplets of water soaked his face as the creature broke surface and flexed its water-logged wings. As it attempted to take to the air, it gave an unearthly shriek as a huge tentacle, as thick as a cable and covered in suckers, enfolded the mutant thing and dragged it back below the water. Felix was suddenly very glad that he had not disturbed the water, and then he had no more time for thinking.\n\nThe hellish flock descended. Felix was surrounded by flapping limbs. Their wingbeats drove the awful charnel stench of the creatures everywhere. He ducked a slashing talon, lopped off the attached hand with his counterstroke and caught a quick glimpse of a hideously contorted shrieking face. Quickly he slashed all around him, clearing an area in which he could fight. The dwarfs' battle cries rang in his ears along with the infernal croaking of the harpies.\n\nHe twisted his head trying to see where the Slayers had got to, intending to fight his way towards them. As he did so, he felt a sharp piercing pain in his shoulders. The whole world performed a cartwheel. The thunder of wings filled his ears and the smell of rotten meat filled his nostrils. He had been grabbed by a harpy and was being borne aloft, like a field-mouse being taken back to an owl's nest to feed its fledglings.\n\nThe thing's acceleration was awful. He glanced down and caught a quick glimpse of the battle below. Snorri and Gotrek stood in the eye of a storm of wings. All around them lay the mutilated bodies of dead harpies, but many more came on. Gotrek reached up and grabbed one by its leg, pulled it down and crushed its head with the blade of his axe. Next to him Snorri smashed another's shoulderblade with his hammer. As the crippled beast flopped to the ground, the Slayer beheaded it with his axe.\n\nIn the pool, the water boiled and churned as something truly huge rose to the surface. The thrashings of the entangled harpy died away as more and more tentacles enshrouded it and crushed its life out. An enormous head broke surface. The sight of a circular leechlike maw filled with needle-sharp teeth distracted Felix from his predicament. He had been about to stab upwards at the Harpy and hope that the water below broke his fall \u2014 but now it seemed like that would simply be a case of jumping out of the cookpot and into the fire.\n\nSnorri, seeing what was happening to Felix, cast his hammer straight up at the harpy. Felix flinched as it flew straight and true. There was a sickening crunch as the weapon impacted and suddenly Felix was tumbling downwards towards the pool.\n\n\"No! You idiot!\" he shouted as the turbulent waters grew beneath him and the air whistled past his ears. The thing in the pool looked up with huge, almost human eyes. In that moment it occurred to Felix that the creature might once have been a man warped by the hideous mutating power of Chaos. Then he saw the head turn upwards and the leech like mouth gape wide and in that instant he realised that he was going to die. If the fall didn't kill him then he would be grabbed by those hideous slimy tentacles and dragged into that vast mouth.\n\nHe knew a brief flicker of despair and then an eruption of something like a berserker's fury. If he was going to die, he was going to take the monster with him! He twisted his body to get his feet below him and as he impacted on the monster he drove his sword downward into the creature's rubbery flesh. All the force of his long fall, all of the weight of his body and all the strength of his arms powered the enchanted Templar's blade home. It cut through flesh and speared right into the creature's brain. The tentacles went limp instantly.\n\nThe impact drove all the breath from Felix but he did not feel anything break. The beast's rubbery mass and enormous soft bulk had broken his fall. He swiftly sprang upright and leapt from the thing's head to the edge of the pool, taking great care not to touch the water. Even as he did so, he noticed that Gotrek and Snorri had routed the harpies. The majority of the surviving flock had taken to the air and were swiftly flapping their way out of the Slayers' reach. A glance behind him confirmed that the thing in the pool was already slipping back beneath the surface of the fetid waters.\n\nSnorri bent down and picked up his fallen hammer. He looked up at Felix and grinned. \"Good throw, huh?\" he said.\n\nFelix restrained himself from striking the dwarf with his blade. \"Let's get moving,\" Gotrek said. \"We don't have all day to waste.\"\n\nFelix stopped and rubbed his shoulder. The bruising was painful and the area was tender. Fortunately for him the harpy's claws had not penetrated his flesh, although they had burst some of the chain links and driven the points through the armour's leather under-jerkin and into his arm. They were more like scratches than real wounds. Normally he would have paused to wash and dress them but here in the midst of these Chaos haunted ruins he had no desire to stop \u2014 and even less desire to remove his armoured shirt. To tell the truth, he had not seen any water he would trust here either.\n\nWhile Felix had paused, Gotrek and Snorri had continued onwards up the seemingly endless stairs. He rushed to catch them up, not wanting to be left on his own. The brooding stillness of the place had only intensified since the harpies' attack and he wondered what wicked thing they could possibly encounter next.\n\nHis legs were aching from the constant climbing of steep stairs. They had risen about ten levels. The pool was still visible below them. He stumbled suddenly. A warped skull, humanoid but with goat horns, rattled away from his foot. It had been stripped of all flesh. Felix stooped and picked it up. It was light and cold, dry in his hands. Looking inside he saw score marks along the crown. An image flickered through his mind and he saw one of the harpies reaching inside the severed head to scoop out the brain and devour it. Hastily he tossed the skull away. It fell and clattered among the bones which lay strewn about the gallery.\n\nThey had obviously reached the area where the harpies nested, for there were bones everywhere, cracked for marrow and stripped of all flesh. The skeletons of beastmen, mutants and humans lay mingled with each other. Many of them were fouled with light brown excrement and the stink was awful. Even through the scarf wrapped over his mouth it made Felix want to gag. He wondered how much longer these galleries could go on for, and whether he could go through even one more without vomiting. Why had Muller made his lair here, he wondered? And how had he survived among all these ferocious monsters? Had his magic prevented them from attacking him? Or had he come to some arrangement with the creatures? Felix was forced to acknowledge the fact that he would never know, and in truth, he was not sure he really wanted to. The pacts and alliances that must be needed to survive in a place like this did not bear thinking about \u2014 and that was before you came to consider the question of food and drink.\n\nPerhaps Muller had even been sane when he came here, but had been driven mad by a diet that must have consisted of tainted flesh and warpstone-corrupted water. Felix did not want to consider that this might be the only option open to him and his companions too, if they did not find a way out of here soon. At the moment, death seemed preferable to such an existence but who could tell? Perhaps it would become easier as your brain degenerated and warpstone-inspired madness consumed the mind. Perhaps you might even come to enjoy it. Once more he forced the thought from his head \u2014 and as he did so he realised that the staircase had finally come to an end.\n\nUp ahead Gotrek stood in front of a massive archway. The lintel was covered in a mass of carved daemon heads. They smiled mockingly, bared monstrous fangs, stuck out their tongues. Their expressions were crazed and debauched and full of madness and Felix wondered at the minds which could have carved such things. The archway itself was sealed by an enormous slab of stone inscribed with the twisted characters that Felix had come to associate with the followers of the Dark Powers of Chaos. It was becoming increasingly obvious that this part of the ruined city, at least, had long been home to the slaves of Darkness.\n\nGotrek reached out and pushed the stone but nothing happened. The slab did not budge. Slowly the Slayer applied more and more pressure until the huge muscles swelled and rippled all along his back and arms. Sweat beaded his forehead and his breathing came in ragged gasps. Snorri joined him but even their combined strengths had no effect on the archway. Felix did not even bother to try and help them. There was not enough room for him to squeeze in between them, and anyway, he doubted that his efforts would count for much compared to the amount of force the two dwarfs were bringing to bear.\n\nEventually Gotrek gave up. He stood back and scratched his head with one massive hand. He picked up his axe and looked as if he was considering swinging it at the door but then he simply grinned and reached out to touch one of the leering daemon heads carved on the lintel. He pushed down on the tongue. It moved and as it did so the archway swung open, sending the still-straining Snorri sprawling through it to land flat on his face on the dusty flagstones beyond.\n\n\"No damage done. He landed on his head,\" Gotrek muttered and strode through. With a last glance at the galleries behind them, Felix hastily followed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "They emerged onto a wide flat space open to the sky. Ahead of them was a walled barrier like a battlement. Behind them was a massive wall. Felix strode forward to the barrier and looked down. At once he realised that they were on the penultimate level almost at the very top of a massive ziggurat, for below them were all the lower steps. Close by was a flight of monstrous stairs leading all the way back down to the ground. The stairs also led up to a peak of the pyramid, and Felix hastily climbed them. At the top was a great open ledge. It was old and crumbling and it extended out over a wide expanse of empty air. Felix gingerly walked to the edge and looked down.\n\nA long way below him was the pool in which the monstrous thing had dwelled and all the galleries in which the Chaos harpies had nested. There were chains and manacles along the walled edges of the ledge, and a slow realisation of the platform's function came to him. This was a place of sacrifice. Living victims had once been brought here and then thrown screaming from the ledge to tumble into the pool below, where the dweller in the murky water devoured them. It must have been an unpleasant fate, and Felix wondered about the sanity of those who had devised it.\n\nHad this whole vast ziggurat been built purely with this function in mind? Or it had it once served a different purpose and become corrupted as the foul power of Chaos spread across this ancient land? Was it even possible, as Gotrek had suggested earlier, that this whole structure had been created by whim of one of the Dark Gods or their daemonic servitors?\n\nNone of his thinking was going any way towards finding salvation, Felix decided. They had found the open air but they had no idea where the airship was or how they could locate it. And if they failed to do that they were doomed.\n\nHe turned back from the vertiginous drop and scanned the horizon. Surely, he thought, if the airship was still over the city, it would be visible. He squinted in the strange light filtering through the clouds and tried to concentrate, wishing all the while that he still had the telescope that he had left on the ship. All he could see was the cloud of harpies circling high above them.\n\nThen, to his amazement, far off in the distance, he saw a small dark speck that seemed to be moving in their direction. He prayed fervently to Sigmar that it was the Spirit of Grungni. Then he raced over to the outside edge of the ziggurat's uppermost level and shouted for the dwarfs to come and join him. But even as he did so, he noticed that an enormous horde of beastmen had emerged from the nearby buildings far below and were racing along the streets towards the ziggurat. Over their heads fluttered two harpies, screaming in their foul tongue.\n\nDoubtless they were the things which had attracted the beastmen's attention. Before he could throw himself flat, one of the bestial Chaos worshippers noticed him, for it brandished its spear in the air and pointed with one outstretched arm towards Felix. The whole disgusting horde let out a howl of triumph and began to hurry up the long stairway towards them. Felix cursed his luck and went to join Snorri and Gotrek.\n\nThe two Slayers seemed profoundly indifferent to the fact that several thousand beastmen were racing towards them, too many for even such formidable warriors as themselves to slay.\n\n\"The stairway is a good point to make our stand,\" observed Gotrek. \"Narrow. Not too many of them can get to us at once. Good killing.\"\n\n\"Hardly seems fair,\" Snorri said. \"They'll be tired by the time they get to us. All that running and then all those stairs. Maybe we should go down and meet them halfway.\"\n\n\"They're spawn of Chaos. I will do nothing to oblige them.\"\n\n\"Fair enough. Snorri sees your point.\"\n\nFelix shook his head in despair. He was going to die, and he was going to die in the company of two maniacs. It was too much. He had survived evil magic, the attacks of a tentacled monster and a flock of mutant harpies only to be brought down at the last by a horde of shambling, misshapen monsters, beasts that wore the shape of men.\n\nHe turned his head to the heavens to ask blessed Sigmar to simply smite him down and get it over with when he noticed that the dot in the distance had swollen into the definite outline of the airship. It was heading directly in their direction. Felix looked down the ziggurat again. The beastmen were almost halfway up it. He glanced back at the airship. It was much further away than the beastmen, but it was moving much faster. He hardly dared hope that it would reach them in time.\n\nThe beastmen were well up the steps now, an onrushing tide of twisted flesh, brandishing spears and howling war cries. Felix could distinctly hear the clatter of hooves on the stone stairs. His heart raced. His mouth felt dry. This was almost worse than certain death. Now there was a faint hope that they might get away.\n\nThe airship swept low over the beastmen. Felix could see that the outside had been cleaned and all the engines were working. The rips in the gasbag had been repaired. He would not have believed that it was possible for so much work to be done in so short a time. The dwarfs had certainly been busy. He could see now that the doorways in the side of the ship were open as was the hatch in the bottom. Someone had thrown open the portholes as well, and a rain of black spheres was descending on the onrushing horde. One of them burst in the air sending shrapnel everywhere. Beastmen howled in agony. Felix realised that the dwarfs on the ship were dropping bombs!\n\nMore and more fell tearing great holes in the ranks of the beastmen. The foul Chaos things stopped and howled and shook their weapons at the sky. One or two threw their spears but they fell short, then dropped back into the tightly pressed mass of beastmen, impaling their comrades. For a moment Felix dared to hope that they would be routed by their fear of this awesome apparition above their heads. Then a larger leader-type emerged from the milling throng and shouted at the rest of its force to advance, and the beastmen came on once more. Still, the precious moments of confusion had given the airship time to sail forward until it was almost overhead. Felix could see Varek in the hatchway above him, uncoiling the craft's beloved rope ladder. He let out a long sigh of relief, knowing that he was safe.\n\nThen the airship passed on by him, taking the rope ladder with it. What were they playing at, thought Felix, risking a glance down at the oncoming ranks of beastmen? This was no time for stupid jokes! Then he realised what had happened. The airship still had momentum from its rush to save them. The howling of the engines above him revealed that Makaisson had thrown the craft into reverse and was killing his vessel's speed expertly.\n\nThe Spirit of Grungni now hovered directly over the well in the centre of the ziggurat. Felix turned to the Slayers and bellowed; \"Come on! We must find Karag Dum! That is your destiny!\"\n\nThe Slayers looked at him as if he were mad. He realised that they did actually want to throw away their lives in this pointless battle against superior numbers. Inspiration struck him. \"There is a daemon at Karag Dum! It pollutes sacred dwarf soil. It is your duty to kill it!\"\n\nWell, he thought, he'd done his best to talk the Slayers out of their folly. Now it was time to go. Without looking behind him, he raced up the stairway and out onto the ramp from which sacrifices had been thrown. The ladder dangled right out in the middle of the great central well \u2014 far too far for him to jump out and reach it. Behind him he could hear the roaring of the beastmen. They seemed to be almost upon him. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw Snorri and Gotrek brandishing their weapons defiantly. He knew that it could only be a matter of moments before the horde was upon him.\n\nHe glanced back and saw that the rope ladder was coming back in his direction. Instantly he made his decision. He sheathed his sword, took a flying leap and made a grasp for the ladder. For a moment he had a dizzying sense of the enormous drop beneath him, then his fingers were clutching the rope. The impact felt like it was going to tear his arm from its socket and sent a surge of agony shooting through the shoulder that the harpy had bruised earlier. Somehow, he managed to hold on and then to grasp the swaying ladder with his other hand and begin to pull himself up.\n\nHe risked a glance down and saw that they were running in the direction of the ramp's edge.\n\n\"Snorri! Gotrek!\" he shouted to encourage them.\n\nJust beyond and below them he could see the first of the onrushing beastmen come into view. The Slayers looked up and almost as one reached up and made a grab for the ladder. Both managed to catch hold of it as it went flying by and were pulled off the ziggurat and into the air. Felix caught a view of the great mass of bestial faces glaring up at him as they went soaring past.\n\nA rain of stuff was dropping from the ship now, and Felix realised that Makaisson was jettisoning ballast to enable them to gain height quickly. The sludge and pebbles dropped on the Chaos worshippers. They responded by casting their spears. Reflexively he closed his eyes as the missiles whizzed past his ears, then the beastmen were left far behind on the sacrificial ziggurat and the airship was gaining altitude fast.\n\nLooking back to where they had been he saw an awful thing was happening. Before they had realised their danger, the leaders of the charging beastmen had gone running right off the edge of the ramp and were tumbling out into space. A few of their followers had time to realise what was happening and to give out roars of horror and fear. However, pushed on by the press of bodies behind them, they were being forced off the edge of the ramp and out into the abyss beneath them.\n\nFelix offered up a prayer of thanks to Sigmar for his deliverance and began to pull himself, hand over hand up the ladder and into the Spirit of Grungni. Once safely there, he turned to reach down and helped pull the pair of Slayers up into the airship.\n\n\"Missed a good fight there,\" Snorri said. \"Pity they got the drop on us.\"\n\nFelix gave Snorri a penetrating look. Was it actually possible that the idiot was making a joke, he wondered. In the distance he could still hear the screams of the falling beastmen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "\"How did you find us?\" Felix asked Varek as the ruined city faded into the gloom behind them.\n\n\"After you vanished, we finished the repairs and all the crew we could spare manned the telescopes,\" Varek said. \"We were lucky. We saw a great flock of those winged things rising over the ziggurat in the centre of the city and decided that something must have attracted their attention. We thought even if all we found was your corpses it was worth the effort.\"\n\nFelix realised exactly how lucky they had been. The same thing that had attracted the horde of beastmen had also brought the attention of the airship's crew. He shuddered to think of what might have happened if they had fought with the creatures during the night. They would never have been found." + }, + { + "title": "THE HORDES OF CHAOS", + "text": "Lurk felt peculiar. His skin tingled. His fur itched. He was hungry all the time. Ever since he had been exposed to the warpstone dust during the storm, an odd sickness had convulsed him. He had taken to stealing more and more of the dwarfs' supplies away, and he devoured them all in great orgies of consumption where he simply could not stop himself until all the food was gone. He was just thankful that someone had eventually opened the hatch back into the ship before he started to eat his own tail.\n\nThe effects of all this consumption were starting to show. His muscles had swollen, his tail had grown thicker and he was getting bigger. His head hurt a lot and he found it difficult to think straight. He prayed to the Horned Rat that he had not caught some sort of plague. He remembered his fear when he had fallen sick in Nuln and how that had almost ended his life. If the plague returned now, he had none of the herbal medicines Vilebroth Null had used to preserve his life.\n\nSlowly he pulled himself up the ladder to the crow's nest so that he could make his daily communion with that wretched Thanquol. He was heartily sick of that nagging voice within his head, babbling foolish orders and telling him what to do. Part of his mind knew that he should not be thinking this way, that it was most unwise but he could not bring himself to care. His body ached all over. His vision was blurring and his fur was beginning to fall out in places where monstrous boils were erupting. He decided not to bother about contacting the grey seer. He would return to his burrow and sleep. First though, he would need to eat. He was starting to feel a hankering for a nice bit of plump dwarf flesh.\n\nFelix knocked on the door of Borek's cabin. The metal echoed beneath his knuckles.\n\n\"Come in,\" the dwarf said. Felix opened the door and went in. Borek's cabin was larger than his. The walls were lined with crystal-fronted cabinets containing many books. A table was bolted to the floor in the centre and on it was laid out an ancient map, held in place by four strange looking paperweights of black metal.\n\nNoticing Felix's curiosity, Borek said, \"Magnets.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Those paperweights are magnets. They stick to iron and steel. It's some odd philosophical principle, akin to the one that keeps compass needles pointing northwards. Go ahead: try to pick one up.\"\n\nFelix did as he was told, and felt a resistance that he had not expected. He let go of the metal and it seemed to leap from his hand and adhered to the table with a click. It was typical of the dwarfs' attention to detail, he thought, that they had managed to find a way of keeping maps in place even on such an unstable platform as this airship. He mentioned this fact.\n\n\"It's a power that has been known for a long time. It's used by our navigators on the steamships out of Barak Varr.\" He smiled. \"But I suspect that you are not here to discuss the finer points of furnishing a vessel's cabin\u2026\"\n\nFelix agreed that he was not and he began to speak, telling Borek about what had happened with the sorcerer and his mention of the daemon. The encounter with Muller had made him think. For the first time, he had really begun to take seriously the dreadful possibility that such a thing might exist at Karag Dum. The old dwarf listened, nodding occasionally. When Felix finished, there was a short silence while Borek filled his pipe.\n\n\"How can this be?\" Felix asked. \"How can daemons exist here and not outside the Wastes?\"\n\nBorek looked at him long and hard. \"They can and do exist outside the Wastes. According to our records, many have fought against the armies of the dwarfs.\"\n\n\"Then where are they now?\"\n\n\"Vanished. Who knows why? Who can truly explain the workings of Chaos?\"\n\n\"But surely you have a theory?\"\n\n\"There are many theories, Herr Jaeger. As far as we know, raw magical energy flows much more strongly through the Wastes. It seems most likely that daemons feed on this energy and need it to exist. Beyond the Wastes they can manifest for only a short time before vanishing because magic is weaker. Here in the Realm of Chaos they can manifest themselves for much longer periods because there is more power for them to draw on.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"Schreiber believes there is some sort of disturbance at the very centre of the Wastes which is the source of all magic. According to him, it also warps time and distance in some manner. Many scholars claim that time flows at different rates in different parts of the Wastes, you know. And that the further you go into the Wastes, the more pronounced this effect becomes.\"\n\n\"Why are the fiends not swarming all over us now then?\"\n\n\"Perhaps because we have not gone far enough. I doubt that it is possible for a daemon to exist for long out here, so close to the edge of the Wastes, but I do not know for certain that this is the case. There is a lot I do not know about these matters.\"\n\n\"But you think a daemon still dwells in Karag Dum?\"\n\nBorek laughed grimly. \"It is all too possible. Even as I left there were dire rumours that some dread thing had been summoned and King Thangrim Firebeard and his runemasters marched to meet it. It may be it was trapped there or never left. I do not know. I and my kin escaped the city before those final battles.\"\n\n\"It is not exactly a pleasant thought.\"\n\n\"No, but it is one that we will soon know the answer to. We should reach Karag Dum within the next day or so.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"Then we will see.\"\n\n\"Faster! Quick-quick!\" Grey Seer Thanquol chittered. He was tired and restless from being constantly cooped up inside his palanquin. Such confinement went against all his skaven instincts to get up and scuttle about, but he really had no choice. For the past few days he had done nothing but use communications spells and ride relays of palanquins through the subterranean roadways of the Under-Empire, stopping only long enough to change bearers and palanquins, eating all his meals as he moved on. He had blisters on his rump from sitting so long and he felt like his back was going to be permanently curved.\n\nHis bearers whined their complaints and Thanquol considered blasting one or two apart just to make an example of them, but he knew it would be counter-productive. All he would achieve would be to slow himself down until they reached the next way-station, where he could acquire a change of slaves. Still, he promised himself, once they were there, these whinging lackeys would suffer!\n\nThat is, if he could find the strength. The grey seer felt drained by the strain of having to expend so much power to communicate with Lurk over so long a distance. And now the buffoon was not even responding to his calls. It was so frustrating! He had no idea what had happened. Was Lurk dead? Had the airship crashed in some hideous accident? Was this long chase all for nothing? Surely it could not be, but ever since he had seen that accursed Jaeger, Thanquol had felt a sinking feeling. Where the human and his wretched dwarf companion were concerned, Thanquol was always prepared for the worst. The two of them seemed to have been born only to thwart him.\n\nHe cursed the engineers of Clan Skryre. Why could they not bend their accursed ingenuity to building some improved means of transport through the tunnels of the Under-Empire? Surely they could think of something more effective than simple relays of slave-borne litters! Did they always have to spend their days working out bigger and better weapons? Why not warpstone-powered chariots or traction engines, Thanquol wondered? Or some long-range version of the doomwheel? Surely such things could not be beyond them? If he remembered, he would mention his ideas to the Council of Thirteen in his next report.\n\n\"Faster! Quick! Go-go!\" he urged, his throat hoarse. He needed to get to the northlands soon, he knew, and find out what had happened to that wonderful airship. If only he could get his paws on that, he would never again lack for swift transportation.\n\nAnd when he got there, he vowed, someone was really going to pay for the discomfort he had endured.\n\nFelix lay on the bed in his cabin, staring at the metal ceiling. His head spun with all the things he had learned this day concerning the Realm of Chaos. The world was a great deal more complex than he would ever have thought possible, and it was increasingly obvious to him that his own people still had a lot to learn from the Elder Races.\n\nHe closed his eyes but sleep would not come. He felt tired but also restless. His shoulder still pained him, despite the healing salves which Varek had applied. He knew the area was going to be tender for some time to come. Still, his mail had been repaired by one of Makaisson's apprentices, and it looked better than new.\n\nCursing his lot, he rose from the bed and pulled on his boots. Leaving his chamber, he walked to the airship's rear observation turret. The rearmost bubble of the turret was small and housed an organ gun mounted on a swivel platform. Felix slumped down into its seat and worked the foot pedals that sent it turning first to the left and then to the right. He found the motion oddly relaxing, reminiscent of swinging in a hammock or being in his grandfather's rocking chair.\n\nHe reached up and grasped the handles of the organ gun. This was another of Makaisson's unusual designs. It had grips like a pistol and was fired by pulling a trigger. The whole mechanism of the gun was balanced on a gimbal and could be swivelled up or down, left or right, almost without effort. Felix did not know what the dwarfs expected to attack them flying at such an altitude, but they were obviously taking no chances.\n\nHe gazed out over the land over which they had passed. The sky had darkened into some semblance of night. At least, the clouds were darker above them and there was no suggestion of a sun above. Felix wondered about that. They had reached an area where it seemed no matter how high they climbed the sky was always obscured. He had decided that it was either some form of potent magic or simply that somewhere in the distance, great masses of warpstone dust were being thrown high into the air and driven upwards by powerful winds. The only illumination came from huge fire-pits set in the rough terrain below, craters resembling the bubbling mouths of volcanoes around whose glowing openings twisted figures capered.\n\nAs the airship passed over the fire-pits, it shuddered slightly, caught by the rising current of warm air. This did not frighten Felix as it once had. He had come to find gentle turbulence actually rather soothing. It was strange. The more he flew, the more he had come to regard the sky as being something akin to the sea. The winds were its currents, the clouds something like the waves.\n\nHe wondered if the sea, too, had currents at different levels, the way the winds appeared to move at different speeds at different heights. There was much here for a philosopher to study, he thought yawning, and slipped gently into sleep.\n\nLurk pulled himself slowly and stealthily down the corridors of the ship. The hunger in his stomach was like a living thing clawing and trying to escape. It caused him actual physical pain. Ahead of him, he sensed prey. It did not have the scent of dwarf but of humanity. Lurk did not care. He simply wanted to feel hot red blood gush into his mouth and gorge on chunks of raw, warm meat and a human would suit his purposes just as well as a dwarf.\n\nHe entered the rear chamber and heard the snoring of the figure in front of him. Good! His foolish prey was completely unaware, lost in a swinish slumber the like of which no skaven would ever allow itself to fall into, even if there were no obvious threat of danger. The human's blond-furred head was thrown back, and his neck was bared, as if inviting Lurk's fangs.\n\nLurk tip-toed forward and loomed over the human's sleeping form. Saliva filled his mouth at the prospect of fresh meat. All it would take would be one bite to sever the artery! He would lock his jaws on the human's neck to smother his screams. Another few paces and he would be in a position to strike.\n\nSuddenly Lurk heard footsteps on the ladder leading down from the deck above. Someone was coming! He cursed quietly, knowing that if he attacked now, he would be discovered before he could consume his prey, and that the alarm would be given. Some spark of self-preservation buried deep in his mind told him that this would not be a good idea, so he padded swiftly back down the corridor, returning the way he had come.\n\nFelix woke suddenly at the sound of wary footsteps on the ladder. He was glad to be woken, for he had been having a nightmare in which a giant rat-like thing stalked ever closer to him down a dark, mist-shrouded tunnel. Doubtless it was a bad dream inspired by the beastmen he had seen today. Sigmar knew, they had been monstrous enough to inspire a lifetime of nightmares.\n\nHe looked up to see Varek lowering himself onto the observation deck. He carried his book in one hand and his pen in the other, and he looked a little disappointed to find someone else present, as if he had desired to be alone here.\n\n\"Good evening, Felix,\" he said, forcing a smile.\n\n\"Is it evening?\"\n\n\"Who can tell,\" the dwarf shrugged. \"It's as good a term for it as any in this foul place. The sky is darker and the land is obscured so I suppose it might as well be.\"\n\n\"Then good evening to you, Varek,\" said Felix. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I came here to write up my notes. It's difficult to do when you're sharing a cabin with Gotrek and Snorri.\"\n\n\"I can imagine.\" Felix was suddenly glad that his height and the fact that he was a human had qualified him for his own cabin. It was one of only three single rooms on the entire airship, and Borek and Makaisson had the others. \"What were they doing?\"\n\n\"Gotrek claimed that Snorri had beaten him on a technicality in their last headbutting contest. They were having quite an argument about it. Snorri wanted to have another contest right there and then to settle the matter but I talked them out of it.\"\n\n\"How?\" Felix couldn't imagine this soft-spoken young dwarf talking the pair of Trollslayers out of anything at all.\n\n\"I reminded them that it usually takes about three days for the loser to recover from a headbutting bout and that's assuming nothing serious is broken \u2014 and if that happened one of them would miss out on our arrival in Karag Dum. Assuming that we would arrive on time, of course. That seemed to do the trick. When I left them they were having a vodka drinking contest instead. Hopefully by the time I get back they'll have knocked themselves out with that instead.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't bet on it,\" Felix said.\n\nVarek smiled sadly.\n\n\"Nor would I.\"\n\n\"Don't mind me,\" said Felix. \"I was just taking a nap.\" He made to settle back once more.\n\n\"Before you do, could I just ask you to go over all the details of today's events. I want to make sure I get it all exactly right.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Felix said, and began to go over the story once more, with only slight exaggerations.\n\nFelix woke later, still in the gunnery chair of the organ gun to find one of the engineers sweeping the decks around him. Yawning and stretching, he pulled himself up and decided to go get some breakfast. As he rose he noticed that there was a small band of mounted warriors directly below them, apparently riding in the same direction as the airship was flying.\n\n\"Are they following us?\" he asked, knowing it was a foolish question even as he asked it. While he watched, the black-armoured riders had fallen far behind the swiftly-moving airship.\n\n\"No,\" replied the dwarf, \"but something is surely up. All morning we've been passing over warbands moving in the same direction. It's almost as if they know where we are going and are moving to intercept us.\"\n\n\"That isn't possible,\" said Felix, but in his secret heart he was unsure. After all, who knew what the forces of Chaos were really capable of." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "\"It's getting worse,\" Varek said, continuing to focus the telescope out the window of the command deck. \"There are hundreds more. Now there seems to be more of them ahead of us than there is behind.\"\n\nFelix was forced to agree; even with the naked eye it was obvious. All day they had been passing over bands of beastmen, Chaos warriors and other wicked things. The further they travelled, the more frequent the sightings had become. And all of the followers of Darkness were streaming in the same direction the airship was moving in. It was as if a secret signal had been given and an army was being gathered.\n\n\"I don't like this at all,\" said Felix. \"Can they really know what we're doing? Are they waiting for us?\"\n\n\"I don't think that is very likely,\" Borek said, a little testily. He had slumped back into one of the padded leather command chairs and sat there, stroking his beard meditatively with the fingers of one gnarled hand. \"There is no way they could be aware of our coming. We have no traitors aboard this ship. No one could have known our plans until we set out, and even if they did, they surely could not have sent word faster than we have travelled.\"\n\nThe old dwarf sounded as if he was trying to convince himself. Felix had no difficulty finding flaws in any of his arguments. Schreiber had known about their goal, as had Straghov and any number of his followers. Sorcery could transmit a message even faster than the airship could fly. More simply still, perhaps the Chaos followers had visionaries in their midst who could foresee the future. It sometimes appalled Felix how quickly and easily he could find the dark side of things.\n\n\"And we're assuming they are concerned with us,\" Borek continued. \"There is no proof of that either. Perhaps they have their own reasons for gathering along this route.\"\n\n\"And what could those be?\"\n\n\"I don't know but I'm sure that if it's the case we will find out soon enough.\"\n\nAs the airship flew on, the warbands became larger, as many of the smaller mobs of Chaos worshippers met and banded together to form larger units. In some bands up to a dozen banners could be seen fluttering in the wind.\n\nGrotesque creatures were becoming more common among the creatures below. Felix saw strange warriors, part man, part woman with enormous crab-like claws. They were mounted on loping two-legged creatures with long protruding tongues. As he watched through a telescope from high above, this troop of daemonic cavalry chased down a scattered band of mutants. Their foul steeds shot out their long sticky tongues, grasped their victims and reeled them into their masters' \u2014 or mistresses' \u2014 claws the way certain jungle lizards were supposed to capture flies.\n\nOdd, brightly coloured creatures whose hideously exaggerated faces appeared to emerge directly from the middle of their torsos capered through the bright desert sands. They waved up at the passing airship as if greeting a long lost kinsman and then clutched their sides, rolling around in insane daemonic mirth.\n\nOne enormous black-armoured rider led a pack of twisted hounds across the rocks. His animals had enormous reptilian crests and their skins glowed a bright metallic red. At times Felix felt like he was looking down into scenes dragged from some madman's nightmares, but he could not stop himself from watching all the same.\n\nAhead of them a range of hills rose out of the desert. As they approached, Felix saw that the foothills were merely outriders of a much larger range of towering peaks, tall as anything in the World's Edge Mountains. These hills shimmered with unnatural colours. And for the first time Felix saw something in the Wastes that resembled vegetation.\n\nA forest of monstrous slimy fungi bloomed on the hillsides. Each of the mighty mushrooms was as large as the tallest tree and its canopy was huge enough to shelter a small village. Each was a slightly different sickly shade \u2014 jaundiced yellow, bone white, nausea green \u2014 and each rose towards the sky as if fighting with its fellows for every scrap of light and every inch of space. Some of the fungi had multiple caps, each branching from a central stalk. A vile mucous enshrouded the flesh of the fungal trees and dripped poisonously onto the ground below. All suggested something unnatural and evil, a life that should not exist in any sane world.\n\nHere and there one of the mighty fungal trees had fallen \u2014 or been deliberately felled \u2014 and beastmen and mutants crawled over it, like ants on a rotted log. They consumed the corrupt flesh of the fallen giant and drank its slime. After they ate it, they shouted and fought and engaged in orgies of unspeakable activities, as if the dead thing's substance contained some strange and intoxicating drug.\n\nAs the hills rose before Felix's rapt gaze, they became cleaner and devoid of the unnatural vegetation. Instead more ruins became evident. He spied small forts made from little more than accumulated boulders. Intricately crafted castles with walls shod in steel and brass. Palaces carved from the living rock of the hills. There was no rhyme or reason to it. Near every structure lay skeletons and unburied corpses or gallows from which dangled dead beastmen. The smell of burning and death rose from the hillside. This was an area that had obviously seen a lot of fighting but was now deserted, and as they flew on, it became obvious why.\n\nOver the hills warriors moved en masse, flowing like a turbulent stream down into the roads which passed through the valleys, joining the torrent of Chaos worshippers who travelled on the dusty roads. They rode, they limped, they marched, they crawled, they hopped, they flopped obscenely but they all moved \u2014 and they all had one destination in mind. There could be no doubt now that all the worshippers of Chaos were heading in the same direction that they were themselves \u2014 the distant mountains.\n\nHours went by. The airship passed over a flat plain in the shadow of the hills and still the endless flow moved beneath them. In the centre of the plain, Felix could see that four enormous boulders had been carved into monstrous parodies of the human form. At first he had thought it was a trick of the light, a mirage brought on by the odd shape of the rocks and his own tired eyes but after a while he had realised that this was not true. Each of the mighty stones really had been carved into the shape of what he assumed was one of the Dark Gods of Chaos.\n\nAs he came closer he began to get some idea of the scale of these monumental statues. Each was loftier than the mooring mast at the Lonely Tower. He had heard that some of the peaks on the elves' Islands of Ulthuan had been carved into enormous statues but this was work that must surely dwarf even that. Some awesome magic had been used to reshape the very bones of the earth into these mocking images, and in a moment of wonder and terror Felix came to some understanding of the true might of the Powers of Chaos.\n\nOne of the statues was a huge squatting thing, its sides blotched with boils and cankers. Its leering image spoke of a million years of pestilence and death. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice whispered to Felix the name of Nurgle, Daemon God of Plague.\n\nAnother was shaped into something bird-headed, with enormous wings enfolded round its body. Eerie and unnatural light played around the head, a crown of mystical energy that transmitted the thought that here was an object sacred to Tzeentch, the Architect of Fate, the Changer of Ways.\n\nThe third statue was carved in the shape of a creature not quite man and not quite woman, posed in an attitude at once both lascivious and mocking. Huge caves made blank empty eye sockets. Felix shivered, for somehow he knew this to be a depiction of one of the many aspects of Slaanesh, Lord of Unspeakable Pleasures. He had encountered this Daemon-God's worshippers many times in the past.\n\nThe last took the shape of a massive warrior, bat-winged, armed with sword and whip, face masked by a helmet that obscured all features. There was something in the stance that suggested a creature at once shambling and ape-like, but possessed of enormous physical power. This must be Khorne, the Blood God, Lord of the Throne of Skulls. Felix shivered. Khorne's was a name which had inspired terror since the dawn of time.\n\nAround the feet of these titanic effigies a few worshippers prostrated themselves and threw down offerings but most simply saluted and moved on. Felix had given up on any attempt to count the Chaos worshippers. They numbered in the thousands now. It was like watching an army of ants on the march, and the motives of the horde seemed just as incomprehensible and just as threatening. He was only glad that they were marching away from the lands of men, deeper into the Wastes, although he realised that it would take only one order to turn this great army around and send it scything southward, if a powerful enough leader were to arise.\n\nThe command deck behind Felix was silent save for the throb of the engines, and Felix knew that all the dwarfs present were thinking the same thoughts as he was. All of them had been overcome by the terrible majesty of the army gathered below them.\n\nThe foothills climbed beneath them and now ahead of the airship loomed the true peaks of the range. Beneath them the land looked almost normal, with streams and trees and what might have been goats leaping along the ridges. Was it possible that some parts of the Waste had remained untouched by the warping influence of Chaos? Did some counter-balancing force still strive against its effects? Or was this some trick of the Dark Powers, an innocuous veil drawn over a secret thing even darker and more terrible than anything they had yet witnessed?\n\nMakaisson let out his breath in a long, slow whistle as he pulled levers and turned the great wheel, sending the airship soaring through a long valley which sliced between the brooding black peaks. He had to make constant small adjustments to the controls as he fought against crosswinds and turbulence while threading a path through the winding valley.\n\nThe airship turned almost ninety degrees to the right and ahead of them lay a long vale teeming with the followers of Chaos. Wisps of smoke rose from their cooking fires to form a dark cloud that threatened to obscure their vision. Tens of thousands of beastmen looked up at them curiously. Thousands of Chaos warriors were drawn up within a crazy maze of earthworks. The airship droned steadily down the valley towards the deepening darkness that filled its far end.\n\nEnormous chariots pulled by hideous mutant beasts larger than elephants rose above the mass. Here and there some had tumbled down, some had melted, some had simply been smashed as if by a superior force. Huge t-shaped crosses had been placed among the ranks of tents and blockhouses, and each bore a crucified figure. Some were fresh; others had been reduced to skeletons by the carrion birds.\n\nAhead of them loomed a singularly enormous mountain. Its huge bulk blocked the end of the valley. Its sides were covered in row upon row of broken fortifications. The ground on the mountain's lower slopes was covered by a white plain of bones. The fortifications rose to a citadel atop the mountain's very peak, and it was obvious that a battle had been fought here \u2014 and recently, for smoke still rose from burning buildings and black-armoured warriors moved among the corpses of the recently dead.\n\nA tense silence filled the command deck of the Spirit of Grungni. All of the dwarfs appeared to be holding their breath in amazement and horror. Eventually Borek spoke and his voice came out in a harsh croak.\n\n\"Behold the peak of Karag Dum,\" he said." + }, + { + "title": "KARAG DUM", + "text": "\"Look out!\" Felix shouted. From amidst the teeming hordes below them, one of the Chaos worshippers \u2014 a tall, lean figure robed in black, covered in amulets and wearing a silver helm with curved goat's horns \u2014 had raised an ornate staff to point at them. Sizzling energies crackled around the staffs tip and a bolt of blood red lightning leapt from the ground to the airship. His fellow sorcerers gathered to add their power to the attack, and the fury of the assault intensified until the blaze hurt the eye and the roar of the thunder threatened to deafen Felix.\n\nLightning flashed and crackled all around the Spirit of Grungni. The burnt tin stench of ozone filled the air. It was as if they were trapped in the centre of a thunderstorm all of their own. The gondola trembled and shook. The gemmed eyes of the figurehead blazed and Felix felt the amulet on his chest grow warm. Makaisson wrenched the wheel and tugged the altitude lever and they headed skywards towards the low, overhanging clouds.\n\nThe airship shivered and bucked like a frightened horse, and Felix feared that their magical protection was going to be overcome. Then, as suddenly as the attack had started, it ceased.\n\nNot a moment too soon, as far as Felix was concerned. He looked down on the encamped Chaos army. It seemed that they had crossed some boundary, come too close and so had been attacked. It seemed possible, therefore, that as long as they kept their distance, they would be allowed to fly above the army unmolested. Perhaps the Chaos worshippers had feared an attack from above, thought Felix. Or, just as likely, they were simply mad.\n\nAn appalled silence filled the control room. The dwarfs exchanged shocked glances. Felix crouched down by the window and watched them. Eventually Borek spoke in a low croak.\n\n\"This is not what I expected,\" he said, and the weight of his years showed in his voice. He shook his head. \"This is not possible.\"\n\nGotrek was pale, though whether with fury or some other suppressed emotion Felix could not tell. \"Does the citadel still stand? Are our people still down there?\"\n\nBorek looked up at him with one rheumy eye and shook his head. \"Nothing could withstand the forces of Chaos for two centuries. There can be no one left alive down there.\"\n\nGotrek's knuckles whitened as his grip on his axe tightened. \"Then why is that huge army down there? Why do they lay siege to the dwarfhold? Who are they fighting, if not our kinsfolk?\"\n\n\"I do not know,\" Borek said. \"You saw that army. You saw the devastation in the vale. The dwarfhold could not have withstood such an attack for so long.\"\n\n\"What if they have? What if there are still dwarfs alive down there? It means we have abandoned our kinfolk to the mercies of Chaos for well nigh two centuries. It means we have forsaken our old treaties of alliance with them. It means our nations have not kept faith.\"\n\nBorek picked up his walking stick and tapped its tip on the steel floor. It was the only sound audible save for the hum of the engines. Felix considered their argument. He had to agree with Borek. It seemed hugely unlikely that any citadel could have held out for nearly two hundred years against a siege by the ravaging armies of Chaos, even one held by such tenacious defenders as the dwarfs. Another possible explanation struck him.\n\n\"Isn't it possible,\" he ventured, \"that Karag Dum fell to the forces of Chaos and some warlord of the Dark Powers took it over and used it as his citadel? Perhaps the Chaos worshippers fight among themselves for possession.\"\n\nHe saw that all eyes were upon him. On some faces was written understanding, on some disappointment. It struck him that some of the dwarfs had hoped to find their lost kinsfolk down there, Gotrek included.\n\n\"That seems the most likely explanation,\" Borek said. \"And, if it is true, then there is very little for us to do here. We would be as well to turn this airship around and go home.\"\n\nAgain Felix sensed disappointment in the control room, this time greater than before. These dwarfs had come a long way, made great sacrifices in order to get here, and now their leader was telling them it might all have been in vain. Even so, the dwarfs all nodded their agreement. Except Gotrek.\n\n\"But it is not the only explanation,\" the Slayer said. \"We do not know it is the case for certain.\"\n\n\"True, Gotrek, but what would you have us do?\"\n\n\"Land someone in the citadel! Conduct the expedition into the depths we came to mount. Find out if any of our people yet live down there.\"\n\n\"I take it you are volunteering to do this.\"\n\n\"I am. We can wait until it's dark and then descend on the peak. If I remember your maps, there is a secret passage down from the cliff face. I can enter there and make my way down to the Underhalls.\"\n\n\"Snorri will go too,\" said Snorri. \"Can't let Gotrek grab all the glory. Good chance to smash some Chaos warriors as well.\"\n\n\"I will go too, uncle,\" Varek said suddenly. \"I would like to look upon the home of my ancestors.\"\n\n\"I suppose I'd better go as well. You'll need someone with half a brain down there,\" said another voice. Felix was shocked when he recognised it was his own.\n\n\"Before we do anything, let us take another look at what is going on below,\" said Borek. \"Perhaps then we will have a clearer idea of what is happening.\"\n\nThey took the airship down to just below cloud level and moved in a wide sweep round the mountain. As they did so, it became obvious that it was surrounded by not just one but four enormous armed camps.\n\nEach camp was dedicated to one of the great Powers of Chaos. Over the nearest fluttered the blood red pennants of Khorne. Over another hung the luminous banners of Tzeentch. Over the third, the polychromatic flags of Slaanesh pulsed and changed hue. The slime-dripping flags of Nurgle erupted from the pestilent horde at the fourth camp.\n\nAs they watched, it became obvious that the followers of the powers were wary of each other. Each camp was surrounded by a ditch, not just facing the peak but all around, as if the armies feared attack by each other. Here and there, along the boundaries, Felix was sure that he saw sporadic skirmishes being fought between some warriors.\n\nHe also saw that these camps were the final destination of all the Chaos worshippers which they had seen out in the deserts. They were arriving from all points of the compass and found their way to one or other of the camps. Felix was willing to bet that they were each seeking the camp of their own faction, and going to swell its ranks.\n\nHe supposed there was a certain warped logic to it all \u2014 if the four powers were all rivals and fought with each other as much as they did with anyone else. Given the friction that must exist between their followers it made sense to segregate them and minimise tension. Somehow, though, he could not help but feel that he was missing something.\n\nThen, even as he watched from the safety of the airship, he saw the army of Khorne muster along its border with the army of Slaanesh, and, with a mighty roar, fling itself into battle. It was plain these armies were here to fight with each other, as much as they were to besiege Karag Dum.\n\n\"We will wait for you for as long as we have food and then we will go,\" Borek said solemnly. \"We'll fly high and watch the peak through our telescopes. If you discover anything, make your way back up and fire one of Makaisson's green flares. We will come and get you as quickly as we can.\"\n\nFelix nodded and not for the first time checked the flares he had stuck in his belt. They were still there, along with the other equipment the dwarfs had given him: a compass, an ever-burning lantern that used one of their precious glowstones for illumination, several flasks of water, and another of vodka. He had a small sackful of provisions over his shoulder. He wore his mail coat once more and was glad of it.\n\nAnd not for the first time, too, he asked himself why he was doing this, and once more he discovered that he could not quite formulate a reason. It made much more sense to stick with the airship. At least that way, he could get home even if Gotrek and the others failed. Yet there was more to this than common sense. He and Gotrek had faced countless perils together, and despite the Slayer's quest for death they had always survived. Felix suspected that there was more than luck involved, some kind of destiny even, and that he would have a better chance of escaping alive from the Chaos Wastes in the company of the Slayer than on his own. At least he was trying to convince himself that this was the case.\n\nAnd at the end of the day there was his oath. He had sworn to follow the Slayer and record his doom, and he suspected that enough of dwarfish culture had rubbed off on him for him to take his promise very seriously. He glanced out of the window. Below them he could see the fires of the Chaos camps, and the shadowy figures which moved around them. Occasionally, too, he could hear the sounds of weapon on weapon as a brawl broke out.\n\nIt was night or what passed for it here in the Wastes. They had waited many hours for the sky to darken and eventually their patience had been rewarded. The airship too was dark, all the lights having been extinguished so as not to give away their position. The engines were being run with minimum power so as to make as little noise as possible. Ahead of them loomed the shadowy bulk of the peak. He hoped that Makaisson knew what he was doing and that they weren't going to smash into the mountain. Intellectually he knew that dwarfs could see much better in the dark than humans, but there was a difference between possessing that knowledge and believing it with all his heart, particularly at a moment like this, when his life was at stake.\n\n\"If you discover people still alive and want us to come for you, fire a red flare,\" Borek said. \"Understand?\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Felix said. It would have been difficult not to have. Borek had explained it all to them a dozen times during the long wait. The flares were another of Makaisson's inventions, a variant of the basic rocket which would leave a brilliant trail of a chosen hue behind itself.\n\nThe airship juddered to a halt. Felix knew that this was their signal to go. Gotrek led the way, swinging himself out of the hatch and down the ladder. Snorri followed him, humming happily to himself. Next came Varek. He paused in the opening and gave Felix a nervous grin and then he, too, vanished through the hatch. He had a sack of bombs strapped to his chest and Makaisson's strange gun slung over his shoulder. Felix wished he owned one of the weapons and knew how to use it, but it was too late to learn now. He took a deep breath, exhaled and let himself out onto the ladder.\n\nThe night wind bit into his flesh. It was cold in a way that he would never have expected in the middle of a desert. He told himself to be sensible. They were somewhere far to the north of Kislev. It was bound to be chilly. The ladder swung a little under the weight of the climbers and Felix's stomach lurched.\n\nSigmar, what am I doing here, he asked himself? How did I end up dangling from a flying machine designed by a maniac, hovering over the sides of a mountain on the slopes of which are camped a great army of thousands of Chaos warriors. Well, if nothing else, he told himself, it will be an interesting death. Then he gathered all his courage and continued the descent." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The four of them stood on a ledge close to the peak, under the shadow of a protective wall. Felix glanced up to see the ladder being rolled back into the airship, and the vessel lifting skyward once more out of range of the Chaos horde's sorcerers. He strained his ears to see if he could pick up the sound of any sentries giving the alarm. All he could hear was Snorri humming.\n\n\"Stop that, please,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Sure,\" Snorri said loudly.\n\nFelix fought down the urge to hit him with his sword.\n\n\"This pathway should lead us to the Gate of Eagles,\" Varek murmured.\n\n\"Then let's get going,\" Gotrek said. \"We don't have all night.\"\n\nThey stopped by a monstrous statue of an eagle carved in the face of the rock. Gotrek reached down between the talons of its right claw and depressed a hidden switch. A small opening, just large enough for a dwarf to scramble through, opened in its base. They hurried through. Felix heard another switch click and the dim light of outside vanished behind them.\n\nHe felt Varek tug at his sleeve. They had already agreed that they would not shine any lights until they knew their way was safe. That way there would be nothing to give them away in the darkness. It was all right for the dwarfs, Felix realised, for they really could see in the dark but this plan left him blind and utterly reliant on them for guidance. Perhaps this had not been such a great plan after all. He reached out with his left hand to feel the cold stone of the wall, and then he followed where Varek led.\n\n\"There are many such secret escape routes out,\" Varek whispered. \"They were used as sally ports during sieges.\"\n\n\"What if traitors used them to break into the city,\" Felix asked.\n\n\"No dwarf would ever do such a thing,\" Varek said. Felix could hear genuine shock in the young dwarf's voice that anyone could even suggest such a thing.\n\n\"Quiet back there,\" Gotrek said. \"You want to attract the attention of every beastman and Chaos thing on the mountain?\"\n\n\"That's not a bad idea,\" said Snorri. There was a noise that sounded suspiciously like Gotrek's fist connecting with Snorri's head, then there was silence.\n\nLurk grinned. The pain was over. The long days of sweating and writhing in his makeshift burrow had ended. He no longer felt the pulsing ache in his skull and the wracking agony of every bone in his body being stretched. He had been purified by pain, reshaped by agony. He had been chosen by the Horned Rat, blessed by the Lurker in Unknowable Darkness, the Scurrying Lord of the Pit.\n\nHe knew instinctively that he had changed and that these changes were a sign of his master's favour. The warpstone dust had been merely a catalyst, an agent of change that carried the blessing of his god. He was bigger now, too big to fit into his crate, so large he had to hunker down to squeeze through the corridors. And he was strong. His shoulders were as broad as a rat-ogre's. His chest had become a barrel of muscle. His arms were now thicker than his legs once had been and his legs were pillars of pulsing power.\n\nHe felt like he could bend steel bars with his bare paws and rip through granite with his fangs.\n\nHis teeth were much longer and sharper now. His lower canines protruded like tusks and made it difficult for him to keep his mouth properly closed. Saliva dribbled constantly from the corners of his mouth.\n\nHis skull was heavier and it felt like the bones had erupted through his cheeks to create a mask of hard armour. Large, ram-like horns had emerged from his forehead. At the time they had caused him a splitting headache but now he could see that it was a mark of the Horned Rat's favour, a sign that he had truly been chosen, a blessing that marked him as different, special, superior. All his life he had known he was better than other Skaven, and now, at last, was the proof.\n\nLook at his tail \u2014 so long, so sleek, so supple and crowned with four spikes, a veritable mace of bone. Look at his claws \u2014 so much longer, so much sharper, each the size of a poniard. He had become a living engine of destruction fuelled by the hatred and hunger burning in his heart. He had nothing to fear from a non-entity like Thanquol. When he returned to Skavenblight it would be in absolute triumph. The Council of Thirteen itself would grovel at his feet. He would lead the assembled armies of skavenkind and crush everything that got in his way. The whole world would tremble and be conquered by the invincible, omnipotent Lurk.\n\nBut now he was hungry, and it was time to hunt. He could hear dwarf feet approaching. After listening for a moment, he realised that there was more than one of them. A deep rooted instinct told him that superior numbers were only a good thing when they were on your side. It was not sensible to attack a group of foes. Perhaps, he decided, he would wait a little longer, until there was just the one, and then\u2026 then he would reveal his awesome power." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Felix heard the deep rumble of stone on stone as Gotrek pushed another switch. A gust of foul air passed his face and he guessed that the dwarf had opened another secret door. They moved swiftly forward and Felix heard the opening shift back into place behind them. He was not sure how it was done. He had not heard a second switch being thrown. Perhaps the mechanism was timed. Perhaps there was a pressure plate underfoot. He knew he should wait to ask another time. He might have to find his way back this way on his own, if he became separated from the others.\n\nThere was light up ahead, a dim and distant glow. It was subdued and occasionally it faded, only to return to brightness once more. It was not like the light of a torch, more like that of glowstone or a spell. By its faint illumination, he could now see the squat outlines of the dwarfs ahead of him.\n\nGotrek held up a hand to indicate that they should remain where they were and then moved forward silently alone, with a stealth that Felix would not have guessed he was capable of.\n\nHe was glad that the Slayer seemed to be taking their mission so seriously. It appeared that his need to learn the fate of the inhabitants of Karag Dum was overriding even his desire for a heroic death. And why not, Felix asked himself? The two were not mutually exclusive. If Gotrek wished to be remembered in dwarfish history, surely there would be no better way than being recalled as the saviour of these lost kinsfolk? Or did he have another, more personal motive? Felix knew he would never dare to ask.\n\nHe took another deep breath to calm himself. The air smelled fusty, and there was a hint of rot and something else in it. It was the same sort of scent he remembered in the harpy's lair back in the ziggurat, the rank odour of Chaos beasts. He heard Snorri sniffing and knew that the hammer-wielding Slayer had noticed it too.\n\nGotrek had reached the junction ahead and beckoned for them to follow. They hastened forward until they reached the opening and emerged into another long corridor.\n\nThe flickering light came from glowgems set in the ceiling. Some had been smashed, others removed. Those which had been left behind were cracked and worked only intermittently, sending shadows skittering away into the gloom.\n\nThe stonework reminded Felix of the dwarf architecture he had marvelled at in Karak Eight Peaks. The walls were supported by hewn blocks of basalt. Massive arches supported the high, arching roof. Each was a work of art. The nearest were carved with the likeness of two kneeling dwarfs, facing each other across the corridor, lifting the roof on their backs.\n\nThey must have been beautiful when they were made but they had been vandalised. The faces had been chipped off and parts of the stonework had been scored with blades. It angered Felix that someone could have defaced something into which an artist had placed so much labour.\n\nAs they crept down the corridor, he saw that the destruction was no isolated incident. Every last arch had been ruined in some way. Many had been blackened by fire or scorched by spells. Some looked as if they had been eaten away by acid.\n\nSlowly it dawned on Felix that he was not looking at mere wanton vandalism, but rather the evidence of a battle. A bitter conflict had been fought out in this corridor using all manner of weapons, natural and supernatural. They started to pass skeletons, still clad in armour and clutching weapons in their bony fingers. Some belonged to dwarfs, some to hideously mutated beastmen.\n\n\"Well, we know that the followers of Chaos got in,\" Varek murmured.\n\n\"Aye, and were met with cold steel by stout-hearted dwarfs,\" said Gotrek.\n\n\"But are any of them left alive now?\" Felix muttered.\n\nThe corridors carried them deeper and deeper into the depths. Some sloped downwards. Others brought them to steep stairwells. Everywhere there were signs of old battles. Mummified corpses lay everywhere. An aura of evil brooded over everything. Somewhere in the depths lurked a terrible presence. Felix fought hard to control the fear which had started to gnaw at him, the certainty that \u2014 round the next bend or at the bottom of the next flight of stairs \u2014 they were going to encounter something malign, supernatural and terrible.\n\nGotrek paused in one long hall, lined by titanic statues. Bodies were strewn everywhere but none of them belonged to dwarfs. All were of beastmen or Chaos warriors. One pair of bodies lay with swords through each other's ribs. They had killed each other with simultaneous strokes.\n\nGotrek gazed down on them thoughtfully. \"Here there was a blood-letting between the foul ones.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they fell out over the division of spoils.\"\n\n\"So where is the treasure, Felix?\" Varek asked.\n\n\"Carried away by the victors?\" Felix replied. He looked closer at the corpses and noticed that their insignia were different.\n\n\"Perhaps they followed different powers or rival warlords. Perhaps there was some kind of squabble between the victors.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said Gotrek.\n\n\"Why is it so quiet here?\" Felix asked. \"There was an entire army outside, but we have seen no evidence of anyone since we got in here.\"\n\nGotrek laughed. \"This is one of the ancient dwarfholds, manling. It extends for leagues under the earth. There are hundreds of levels. The total length of the corridors and halls must come to thousands of leagues. You could lose an army the size of the one outside in a small corner of this city.\"\n\n\"Then how are we going to find any survivors which might be here?\"\n\n\"If any dwarf lives on down here, there are certain places where they will be, and we are heading there,\" Varek said.\n\nWith that, they pushed on into the darkness.\n\nIn many more places it was clear that the battles had not been fought between dwarfs and Chaos worshippers but amongst the followers of the Dark Powers themselves. Only occasionally did they come across signs that dwarfs had been involved in any of the warfare. It became increasingly evident from the bodies they found that there had been a war between the forces of Chaos. Here they found signs that the warriors of Slaanesh had fought against the berserk followers of Khorne. There they found evidence that the worshippers of Tzeentch had struggled with the plague-ridden servants of Nurgle. In one large hall, they came across a place where the followers of all four powers had fallen out and slaughtered each other.\n\nFelix found the gloom oppressive. It was depressing to wander through these endless, battle-scarred corridors and find the remains of old battles. He thought of that vast army camped outside. Who did they represent? What were they waiting for? It seemed senseless. He shrugged. Then again, why did that surprise him? The followers of Chaos were not sane as he measured sanity. Perhaps they fought for the unknowable amusement of their Dark Gods. Perhaps they fought for the amusement of the evil thing he sensed down here. Perhaps they, too, were only being allowed to proceed by some whim of whatever thing lurked down here. He wondered if the others felt this same uneasy sense of presence. He could not find the courage to ask them.\n\nAs they passed through gallery after echoing gallery, and chamber after high-ceilinged chamber, it became obvious that Gotrek was right. There was certainly room enough in here to house a dozen armies even if they were all the size of the forces gathered outside. He wondered what it must have been like to dwell here in an underground city like this in its heyday. Even before the followers of Chaos came, it must have been near-empty, for he knew the dwarfs were a dying race and had been so for millennia. Still, there must have been a time when these streets were filled with dwarfs buying and selling, laughing and crying, loving and living and going about their daily business. Now it seemed like a tomb, and the dead bodies of interlopers everywhere seemed like a desecration.\n\nGotrek knelt beside the goat-headed corpse before which he had suddenly paused. It was not like the others they had seen \u2014 it was still warm! Flesh still clung to its bones. Warm black blood formed a pool under it. Nearby lay other beastmen, all just as dead.\n\nFelix squatted for a better look. In life the beastman had not been pretty, and death had not improved its looks. It had the great head of a goat and the body of a man. Its furry legs ended in hooves. Its brow had been branded with the mark of Khorne. Its strange liquid eyes were glazed in death. They stared blankly up at the towering ceiling high overhead. A crossbow shaft protruded from its chest; another stuck out from its gut. One hand still clutched at the missiles which had killed it. The hand was beautifully formed, more like that of a monk than a monster, and Felix thought of how incongruous it looked on that bestial form. The beast stank of wet fur and the excrement and urine that it had released when it died.\n\nGotrek tugged at one of the crossbow bolts. It came free with a hideous sucking sound and a thin trickle of black blood oozed forth from where it had been. Gotrek turned the missile back and forth in his hand, studying it closely with his one good eye. Felix could not see what fascinated him so much about it. It looked well made but hardly any different from any other crossbow bolt he had seen.\n\n\"This is a dwarf weapon,\" Gotrek said eventually, and there was something which might even have been triumph in his voice.\n\n\"How can you tell?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Look at the manufacture, manling. No human ever made a point that fitted so well, or feathered a bolt so perfectly. Also, there are dwarf runes on the tip.\"\n\n\"So you're saying that these beastmen were killed by dwarfs?\"\n\nGotrek shrugged and looked away. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the beastmen found one of the armouries,\" Varek suggested tentatively. He plainly didn't want to contradict Gotrek, and Felix could see that he hoped he was wrong. He wanted for there to be dwarfs down here and still fighting.\n\n\"When have you ever seen a beastman armed with a crossbow?\" Gotrek asked.\n\n\"It might have been a dark warrior.\"\n\n\"Or such a warrior armed that way, for that matter?\"\n\nIt was a fair point. In all of his encounters with the followers of the Dark Powers, Felix had never met one which used such a sophisticated weapon. Of course, that didn't mean there couldn't be a first time. He decided to keep that thought to himself. Instead he asked: \"How will we find these dwarfs then?\"\n\n\"Maybe Snorri should ask those beastmen,\" Snorri suggested from behind them.\n\nFelix's heart skipped a beat when he heard Snorri's words. He turned to look in the direction that the Slayer had indicated. Sure enough, there stood a band of at least twenty beastmen. For a moment, they looked just as surprised as Felix but then they recovered from their shock and raised their spears for the attack.\n\n\"Or maybe we should just kill them,\" Gotrek said, lowering his head and charging.\n\n\"No! Don't!\" shouted Felix \u2014 but already it was too late. Varek had started to turn the crank on his strange looking gun. A hail of bullets tore into the beastmen, killing two and dropping another pair. Howling with rage and frothing with berserk fury, the beastmen charged forward. Felix knew there was nothing for it now but to fight and most likely die in a futile skirmish with the Chaos worshippers. Snorri had obviously decided the same, for he had raised his weapons and begun to move forward as well. With the two Slayers blocking his line of sight, Varek started to move to a new position, hoping to out-flank the beastmen and pour fire into the side of their formation.\n\nFelix drew his blade and raced forward to aid Gotrek and Snorri. Before he could get into action, before the two sides had closed to within twenty strides of each other, a new hail of crossbow bolts hurtled out of the dark and scythed into the beastmen. The missiles fell like a dark rain. Felix saw one dog-headed monstrosity tumble with a bolt through its eye, tears of blood running down its cheek. Its chest was pin-cushioned with bolts even as it dropped. Another clutched its heart and fell, to be trampled below the hooves of its brethren. The beastmen's rush faltered as more and more of them fell. The survivors halted and looked around, desperately trying to see where the attack was coming from.\n\nGotrek, Snorri and Felix crashed into them and went through their line like an axe through rotting wood. Felix felt a shock run up his arm from the impact, then something warm and sticky was running over his hands. He pulled his blade free, kicked his chosen beastman to the ground and stabbed another. His sword took the surprised beastman in the shoulder, glanced up and lopped off an ear. Not waiting to draw his weapon back, he smashed the pommel into his foe's face and felt teeth break in its mouth. The beastman bellowed in pain, before Felix clubbed it down and stabbed it through the heart.\n\nAlmost before it had begun, the fight was over. Overwhelmed by the fury of their foes, the last surviving beastmen turned and fled. Felix could see that Gotrek had slaughtered four of them; their sliced remains lay at his feet. Snorri was jumping up and down on a corpse, happy as a child playing in a sandpit. A burst from Varek's gun chopped down the surviving beastmen even as they fled.\n\nFelix looked around, panting more with reaction to the sudden short combat than from the effort. He wanted to see whoever it was who had aided them and thank them.\n\n\"Be very still!\" said a deep, guttural voice. \"You are inches away from death.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE LAST DWARFS", + "text": "Felix froze. He tried not even to blink his eyes, let alone breathe. He had no doubts that whoever was lurking in the shadows meant what they said, and he had no desire to find his body bristling with crossbow bolts.\n\n\"Are you dwarfs?\" Varek asked, with what Felix thought was more curiosity than common sense.\n\n\"Aye, that we are. The question is: what are you?\"\n\nA massively broad-shouldered dwarf strode into view in front of them. He was garbed in leather armour, huge metal shoulder pads protected his upper torso. A winged helm with cheekguards shielded his face. Slung over his shoulder he carried a crossbow. A heavy warhammer dangled from a loop on his belt. He removed the helmet to peer at them and Felix could see that his face was craggy and his eyes were feverishly bright. His beard was long and black shot through with silver. There was an unnatural leanness about his face such as Felix had never seen in a dwarf before.\n\nHe sauntered around the four of them and inspected them with a casual air that was almost insulting. Felix could tell that Gotrek and Snorri had their tempers barely under control and if something was not done soon, murderous violence would ensue.\n\n\"Two of you look like Slayers,\" the newcomer said. \"One of you has the look of Grungni's folk. The other, the human, must die.\"\n\nAlmost before Felix realised that the dwarf meant him, the newcomer had unslung his crossbow and pointed it directly at his chest. Felix found himself staring at the glittering point of a crossbow bolt.\n\nAs if in slow motion he saw the stranger's finger begin to squeeze the trigger. He knew he could never throw himself aside in time but his muscles tensed for the attempt.\n\n\"Wait,\" Gotrek said softly and there was such a note of command in his voice that the newcomer froze. \"If you harm the manling, you will surely die.\"\n\nThe other dwarf laughed harshly. \"Those are brave words for one who is in no position to back them up. Tell me why should I spare him?\"\n\n\"Because he is a Dwarf Friend and a Rememberer, and if you kill him your name will live long in infamy and will be recorded in the Book of Grudges as a fool and a coward.\"\n\n\"Who are you to speak of the Great Book?\"\n\n\"I am Gotrek, son of Gurni, and if you cross me in this matter I will be your death.\"\n\nThere was cold certainty in the Slayer's voice that commanded belief. Gotrek added something in dwarfish, which caused the newcomer's face to flush and his eyes to widen.\n\n\"So you speak the Old Tongue,\" he said.\n\nFelix heard a shocked murmur from around the hall, and suddenly realised how many other dwarfs were watching them.\n\nIt seemed inconceivable that such a large force could have moved through the tunnels with such stealth. He risked glancing around and saw that several score of lean, weary looking dwarfs had emerged from the gloom. All of them had weapons pointed at the party, and seemed prepared to use them. He could see that their wargear all had the same look, as of something that had been patched and reused many times over.\n\nA brief spirited debate followed in dwarfish between Gotrek and the newcomers. Felix looked over at Varek. \"What is being said?\"\n\n\"These dwarfs think that we are agents of Chaos. They wanted to kill us. Gotrek has told them that we come from outside and that we can help them. Some of them don't believe it and say it is a trick. Their leader says that he cannot risk killing us and that it is a matter for his father, the king himself, to decide.\"\n\nTo Felix this seemed like a very bald summary of what was obviously an impassioned debate. Voices were being raised. Harsh guttural oaths were being sworn. Both Gotrek and the dwarfish leader had spat on the ground in front of each other's feet. It was an odd sensation to know that his very life hung in the balance and that he could neither say nor do anything to influence the decision. He was reminded of being on the airship during the great warpstorm. All he could do now was remind himself that they had survived that, and might survive this.\n\nVarek continued to mutter: \"It is only the fact that we speak the Old Tongue which keeps them from killing us out of hand. They do not want to believe that any follower of Chaos could have learned it. Certainly no dwarf would teach them.\"\n\n\"That's reassuring to know,\" said Felix.\n\nThe argument ended. The dwarf leader turned and spoke to Felix in strongly-accented Reikspiel.\n\n\"I do not know if this tale of flying ships and other wonders is true. I only know that this is too grave a matter for me to decide. Your fate is in the hands of the king, and he will pass judgement on you.\"\n\n\"I still say it's a trick, Hargrim,\" said one of the other dwarfs, an old, miserable-looking fellow with deep set eyes and a beard of pure grey. \"We know that the world outside is ruled by Chaos. There are no other dwarfholds left. We should kill these interlopers, not lead them deeper into our realm.\"\n\n\"You have had your say, Torvald, and my decision stands until the king himself overturns it. If the world has not been overrun by the forces of Chaos, this is indeed momentous news. It may be that we are not the last dwarfs.\"\n\n\"Aye, Hargrim, and it may be that we are fools and dupes of the Dark Powers. But as you say, you are our captain and on your head be it. There will be time enough to kill these outsiders soon, if they prove false.\"\n\n\"The king will know,\" Hargrim said. \"Come! Let us go. We have wasted enough time and I would not want to be caught in these halls if the Terror comes. Bind them and take their weapons.\"\n\nA group of dwarfs broke away from the main body and moved towards them. As they did so, Gotrek stepped forward menacingly.\n\n\"You will take this axe from my cold, dead hands,\" he said softly and with such menace in his voice that the dwarfs froze on the spot.\n\n\"That can be arranged, stranger,\" Hargrim said just as quietly. Gotrek raised his axe and the runes on the blade flashed in the dim light. The closest dwarfs gasped.\n\n\"He bears the weapon of power!\" Torvald gasped, and his voice held horror and wonder. \"It is the Prophesy. Those are the Great Runes. The Terror has returned and the axe of our ancestors has come back to us. The Last Days are upon us.\"\n\nA look of shock once more passed over Hargrim's face and he advanced towards Gotrek, his eyes fixed on the blade of the axe. As he read them, a great look of wonder appeared in his eyes.\n\n\"Where did you get this blade?\" the dwarfish captain asked, then added something in dwarfish.\n\n\"I found it in a cave in the Chaos Wastes many years ago,\" Gotrek replied slowly in Reikspiel. He appeared to be considering whether he should say more, then thought better of it.\n\n\"If you are truly a dwarf then you are favoured by the Ancestor Gods,\" Hargrim said. \"For that is a mighty weapon.\"\n\nGotrek grinned nastily and scratched one of the Trollslayer tattoos on his shaven head meaningfully. \"If the gods favour me, they have shown no great sign of it,\" he said dryly.\n\n\"Be that as it may, such a weapon does not find its way into anyone's hands by chance. You may keep your weapons for now, until the king declares differently.\"\n\nHargrim looked at Gotrek for a long time, and what might have been a thin smile creased his lips. \"It may be as Torvald says, Gotrek Gurnisson. It may be your coming was foretold. The king and his priests will know.\"\n\nHe turned to his troops. \"Come. We have far to go before we can rest, and we do not want to be caught abroad while the Terror stalks the Underhalls.\"\n\nHe glanced back at them over his shoulder. \"Come with us,\" he said. The four comrades moved into place behind him and marched off into the gloom.\n\n\"We will rest here,\" Hargrim said, holding up his hand to indicate that they should halt. At first Felix had no idea why the dwarf captain had chosen this spot. It seemed to be just another ruined hallway, like so many others they had passed through. Eventually, though, he noticed that there was a rune carved low in the corner of the wall, and a jet of water sprayed from the wall into a large cistern. This, at least, would be a place where they could drink.\n\nHargrim barked an order to one of his warriors and the dwarf moved forward. He produced a stone from his leather satchel and dipped it in the water. For a few moments, he stared into the cup and then nodded his head.\n\n\"The water is clear, captain,\" he said.\n\nHargrim noticed Felix's curious glance. \"Sometimes the outsiders poison the wells. Sometimes it contains Chaos stuff that causes madness and mutation. Mikal's runestone contains old enchantments that warn of such things.\"\n\n\"A useful thing to have,\" Felix said.\n\n\"No. An essential thing to have. Without it, sooner or later, we would all die.\"\n\n\"What is this Prophesy of which you spoke?\" Felix asked, determined to at least try and get an answer.\n\n\"It does not concern you,\" Hargrim said bluntly. \"It is for the king to test its truth. Best get some rest while you still may.\"\n\nWearily, the dwarfs threw themselves down to rest, except for four sentries who took up positions at each entrance to the room. Felix noted with approval the four exits from this chamber, so hopefully if danger threatened from any direction they would always have a line of retreat. He walked over and sat down beside Gotrek, Snorri and Varek.\n\nAll three of his companions seemed strangely elated. Felix thought he understood why \u2014 they had found their lost kinsfolk. There were still dwarfs alive in the Underhalls of Karag Dum. In defiance of all probability, a few still lived, even after two hundred years of isolation in the Chaos Wastes.\n\nHe lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, thinking of the journey they had made to get to this isolated place. It had not been easy. They had made their way further and further into the labyrinth of tunnels beneath Karag Dum.\n\nDuring the trip Felix had counted the number of dwarfs around him; there were nearly fifty. All of them wore leather armour and were lightly armed and armoured, very unlike the traditional dwarfish warriors he knew of. It seemed they travelled light and quickly through the halls of what once had been their city, and relied more on stealth and surprise for victory than on the strength of their arms. Tunnel fighters, Varek had called them.\n\nAs they travelled further, Felix came to understand why they were so lightly armoured. They passed through areas where the presence of Chaos was evident and signs of open war between the powers were visible all around. It looked like an insane and ferocious struggle was being fought here in the ruins of the dwarf city. He had asked Hargrim about this, but the dwarf had not replied. There were mysteries here, that was clear. He just needed to find someone who could explain them to him.\n\nWell, there was little sense in worrying about it now. He lay back and stared at the ceiling, wondering what Ulrika was doing now. In moments, he was asleep. The last thing he heard was the scratching of a pen, as Varek recorded the day's events in his book.\n\nAn eerie howling woke Felix from his sleep. It echoed down the great hallways and had penetrated his dreams, jerking him awake. There was something unnatural about the noise, something that evoked primal terrors. The mere sound of it sent shivers of fear running down his spine, and made his legs feel weak.\n\nAll around him the dwarfs had come awake. He could hear the clamour as they reached for their weapons. He glanced around and saw his fear was echoed on every face, save Gotrek and Snorri's.\n\n\"What is it?\" he asked. \"The Terror?\"\n\n\"No,\" Hargrim said. \"It is the hounds.\"\n\n\"What are they?\" Varek asked.\n\n\"You will soon see,\" Hargrim said. He turned and spoke to his followers. \"I want ten volunteers to hold the hounds off, while the rest of us try to win clear.\"\n\nIt was obvious from the expressions on their faces that the dwarfs thought he was asking for volunteers for a suicide mission. Still, more than twenty of them stepped forward.\n\n\"I will stay,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"Snorri too,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"You cannot. I must get you away. King Thangrim must hear your story.\"\n\n\"It might be too late for that,\" Felix said glancing over his shoulder at the northernmost entrance. An enormous beast had leapt through the entrance. Before anyone could react, it ripped off the nearest sentry's arm with a single snap of its jaws and pulled another to the ground and disembowelled him with its claws. The beast moved so swiftly, with almost supernatural grace, that Felix was barely able to follow its actions.\n\nThrough the doorway several more huge beasts bounded. They resembled monstrous dogs with strange reptilian ruffles around their heads and great iron collars around their necks. Their flesh glistened, the colour of blood. Each was bigger than a man. One of them opened its mouth and bayed. As it did so, its mouth distended widely like that of a snake. It looked like it could take off a man's head with a single bite. Something about the daemonic creature made Felix want to turn and flee, screaming for help. He forced himself to stand his ground. He knew that if he ran the beast would simply overtake him and rend his flesh as it had the sentries'.\n\n\"Flesh hounds of Khorne,\" he heard Varek gasp. \"I thought they were only legends.\"\n\n\"Fire at will,\" Hargrim ordered. A hail of crossbow bolts hurtled towards the ravenous beasts. They opened their mouths and bayed mockingly. Most of the bolts simply ricocheted off their flesh and fell to the floor. As far as Felix could see only one had bit home. Varek fired and his bullets had no more effect than the crossbows. The hounds bounded forward, loping with a deceptively long easy stride which covered the ground faster than a horse could run.\n\n\"Stand back,\" Gotrek said and paced out to meet them. None of the dwarfs disobeyed. Felix could tell that they were just as affected by the creatures' supernatural aura as he was. Only Gotrek showed no sign of dismay. Felix noticed that the runes along his axe blade were glowing brighter than he had ever seen them do before. Even so, Felix wondered whether the Slayer would survive. The creatures were so fast and strong. They were upon him almost before he had a chance to realise it. Their huge jaws widened. Their metallic teeth glistened. Their triumphant baying reached a crescendo loud enough to wake the dead.\n\nGotrek's axe flashed forward like a thunderbolt. The first hound's armoured skin smoked and burned where the blade touched. The beast seemed almost to explode as the axe swept though it, cutting it in two, sending innards erupting all over the floor. The Slayer's next stroke impacted on a second hound's collar. Sparks flew as metal met metal. There was a hideous grating screech. The runes on Gotrek's axe glowed as bright as red-hot coals and the collar gave way. The flesh hound's head and neck parted company. The corpse flopped to the ground, molten ichor spilling out onto the floor. Another stroke cleaved a third flesh hound down the middle lengthwise, revealing skeleton and spine and ruptured organs.\n\nSurprised by the fury of the Slayer's attack, the remaining pack pulled back, snarling like wolves at bay. Then, with an eerie intelligence, they returned to the fray. Two flesh hounds attacked the Slayer simultaneously, one from each side. Gotrek dashed one's brains out with the axe and caught the other by the throat even as it leapt. Almost without effort the dwarf held the monstrous creature at arm's length, then he lifted it so high that its hind limbs scrabbled for purchase on empty air. He dropped it. Before it had touched the ground he has smashed through its ribs with the axe.\n\nThe last beast had circled right behind the Slayer and was about to leap on his back. \"Look out!\" yelled Felix but Snorri had already tossed his axe. It bounced from the creature's shoulder but the force of the blow distracted the flesh hound. It gathered its legs beneath it for the spring but even as it took to the air, Gotrek half turned and sent his axe slashing through a bloody arc which crunched through the creature's ribcage and ended in its stomach. The force of the blow flattened the flesh hound into the ground. Gotrek stomped on its neck. There was a hideous sound of grinding vertebrae and then the axe fell once more, ending the monster's unnatural life.\n\nThe corpses of the Chaos creatures started to bubble where they lay. For a moment flesh and bone melted and ran, evaporating like boiling water. Even as Felix watched, they turned into wisps of foul looking vapour which rose towards the ceiling, then disappeared. It was like they had never been there.\n\nFor a moment there was silence, and then the dwarfs burst into cheering and applause. After a few moments they seemed to remember who they were applauding and fell silent.\n\n\"If ever I doubted that was the Axe of Valek, I do so no longer. That was a fight worthy of King Thangrim himself,\" Hargrim said.\n\n\"It was easy,\" Gotrek said and spat upon the floor.\n\n\"We'd best be moving,\" Hargrim said. \"If the hounds were here, their foul master may be near, and however mighty you are, Gotrek Gurnisson, against that you cannot prevail.\"\n\n\"Bring it on and we'll see.\"\n\n\"No! Now more than ever I must bring you before the king. He must hear your tale.\"\n\nAfter the fight with the flesh hounds, Felix noticed a change in the dwarfs' attitude. They seemed to be more accepting of the four comrades, and less suspicious. Even old Torvald contented himself with only an occasional suspicious glance in their direction. They marched on through the endless silent corridors and even Felix could tell that they were descending all the time now. He wondered how long this could continue. After several more hours it seemed to him that they would keep going down until they reached the world's fiery heart but it was not to be.\n\nInstead they stopped in the middle of a long and seemingly featureless corridor. While his troops shielded him from view Hargrim manipulated a hidden switch which opened a small secret doorway. An opening appeared in the wall where none had been before. The dwarf gestured for the four comrades to enter, his face stern.\n\n\"Tread very carefully now. You are on sacred ground and we will kill you at the first sign of treachery.\"" + }, + { + "title": "FIREBEARD", + "text": "Warily, Felix stepped through the entrance. This corridor seemed no different from the rest, save that the glowstones all functioned and the air smelled slightly cleaner. The rest of the warband hastily pushed in behind and the door swung shut behind them. Felix noticed that the dwarfs of Karag Dum relaxed visibly; conversely, Gotrek, Snorri and Varek appeared more excited. He could not tell why. Perhaps because they felt they were getting closer to their goal. It was not a feeling he shared. The long trek through the Underhalls had made him tense and nervous and he just wanted to find a place to lie down and rest.\n\nThis new corridor led into a winding maze of passageways. Every now and again Hargrim stopped and pressed a panel in the wall. He gave no explanation as to why, he simply did it and moved on.\n\nFelix looked at Varek to see if the young dwarf could tell him what was happening.\n\n\"Deadfalls. Pit traps. Defensive works of some sort, most likely,\" the dwarf said quietly, but was silenced by a nasty look from their guardians.\n\nThey passed maybe a dozen sentries at their posts, all of whom looked amazed at the sight of strangers from the outside world. Eventually they entered a monstrously long hall which was plainly inhabited by the dwarfs. This was a huge place with many exits. A well had been sunk deep into the floor in the far end of the chamber. The ceiling was low, with none of the vaulting of the magnificent halls they had passed through en route. A forest of enormous squat pillars propped up the roof. On each pillar was inscribed a strange symbol which hurt Felix's eye when he tried to read it.\n\n\"Runes of Concealment,\" Varek breathed from beside him. \"No wonder this place has survived so long.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Felix said.\n\n\"These runes protect the halls from magical seekings, just as the concealed entrances protect it from normal sight. This place would be all but impossible for one who was not a dwarf to find unaided.\"\n\nFelix could see hooded and cowled dwarf women working at their chores. A few priests strode backwards and forwards, speaking words of comfort and reassurance, patting heads, invoking blessings. There were many warriors, a good number of whom were crippled. Some had hooks. Some stumped around on wooden legs. Some had bandages over their eyes indicating that they were blind. Felix had never seen so many maimed people together in one place before, not even on the beggar-filled streets of Altdorf. It certainly looked like these people had come out on the losing end of a war. Nowhere did he see any children in evidence.\n\n\"So few,\" Varek muttered. \"This was once a great city.\"\n\n\"Welcome to the Hall of the Well. Wait here,\" Hargrim said. \"I will bring news of your coming to the king.\"\n\nThe captain strode off through a huge archway and vanished somewhere into the recesses of the city. Many of those who had been working stopped and stared frankly at them. A few of the crippled beggars came over. One reached out and touched Felix disbelievingly.\n\n\"You are the first human ever to set foot in this citadel,\" he croaked.\n\n\"I am honoured.\"\n\n\"Ha! You may soon be dead,\" the crippled warrior said and turned away. The rest of the crowd moved in. One of the cowled women asked a question in dwarfish. Varek responded. The crowd emitted a collective gasp. One of the women burst into tears.\n\n\"They asked where we had come from,\" said Varek in answer to Felix's unspoken question. \"I told them we had come from across the Wastes, from the kingdom of the dwarfs.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" said another greybeard, and turned and stalked away. It looked like there were tears in his eyes. As they waited, the crowd did not disperse. It surrounded them and stared until Hargrim returned, accompanied by a group of fully armoured warriors, each of whom carried a rune-engraved weapon. The eldritch symbols burned with a mystic light. Felix knew enough about dwarfs by now to tell that these were powerful magical weapons. These longbeards were the best equipped dwarfs Felix had seen since entering Karag Dum. They marched with a precision that would have shamed the Imperial Guard in Altdorf. Their armour gleamed, and they moved with pride and discipline.\n\n\"The king will see you,\" Hargrim said. \"Now you will be judged.\"\n\n\"So we are to meet the legendary Thangrim Firebeard after all,\" Varek said. \"Who would have thought it?\"\n\nGotrek laughed nastily.\n\n\"I have never seen so many rune weapons,\" Varek murmured to Felix. \"Every one of those warriors carries one.\"\n\n\"We collected them from the dead,\" Hargrim said coldly. \"There have been so many dead heroes here.\"\n\nKing Thangrim's hall was vast. Huge statues of dwarf kings stood like sentries against each wall. More of the heavily armoured dwarf warriors stood immobile between the statues. The four newcomers were surrounded by an escort of the king's guard. They were taking no chances of this being an assassination attempt. Their weapons were drawn, and they looked as if they knew how to use them.\n\nA raised dais dominated the far end of the chamber. On the dais was a throne bearing a powerful and majestic figure wearing long robes over heavy armour. Two priests flanked the king. One was a priestess of Valaya. Felix could tell that by the fact that she carried a sacred book. The other was armoured and carried an axe, and Felix wondered if he was a priest of Grimnir, the warrior god.\n\nAs they came closer to the dais Felix got a better look at the dwarfish king. He was old, as old as Borek, but there was nothing feeble about him. He looked like an aged oak, gnarled but still strong. The flesh had fallen from his arms but still there were massive knots of muscle there, and his shoulders were broader even than Snorri's. His hair was long and red, although striped through with white. His beard reached almost to the floor and it, too, was white in places. Piercing eyes glittered in deep-set sockets. Felix knew that this dwarf might be ancient but his mind was still keen.\n\nThe weapon that sat upon the king's knees drew Felix's attention. It was a massive hammer, with a short handle. Runes had been cut into the head and something about them compelled the eye to look. He knew without being told that this was a weapon of awesome power, the legendary Hammer of Fate, which they had come all this way to find.\n\nThe guard parted in front of them to leave a path leading only to the throne. The four comrades advanced. Varek went down on one knee, making florid and elaborate gestures with his right hand. Gotrek and Snorri lounged arrogantly beside him, making no sign of obeisance. Felix decided to err on the side of caution; he bowed low, then knelt beside Varek.\n\n\"You are certainly impertinent enough to be Slayers,\" said the king. His voice was rich and deep and surprisingly youthful coming from that ancient throat. He laughed and his mirth boomed out through the chamber. \"I can almost believe that the cock and bull story you told Hargrim is true.\"\n\n\"No one calls me a liar and lives,\" Gotrek said. The flat menace in his voice caused the guards to raise their weapons in readiness.\n\nThe king raised a mocking eyebrow. \"And few indeed threaten me in my own throne room and live. Still I ask your forgiveness, Slayer, if that is what you be. We are surrounded by the servants of the Dark Powers. Suspicion is only wisdom under such circumstances. And you must admit that we have cause to be suspicious.\"\n\n\"That you have,\" Gotrek admitted.\n\n\"You have come to us claiming that you have voyaged here from the world beyond our walls. I would hear your tale from your own lips before I pass judgement. Tell it to me.\"\n\n\"I claim more than that,\" Varek said suddenly. \"I claim kinship with the folk of Karag Dum. My father was Varig. My uncle was Borek, whom you sent out into the world to seek aid.\"\n\nKing Thangrim smiled cynically. \"If what you say is true it took a long time for Borek to send aid, and you do not represent much of an army. Still, tell your tale.\"\n\nThe king listened attentively while Varek spoke, stopping occasionally to ask confirmation from Gotrek. He told the tale simply and well, and Felix was astonished at the power of his memory. He also noticed that as the dwarfs spoke the priestess of Valaya's eyes never left them, and he remembered that the priestesses were supposed to have the gift of knowing the truth. At the end of the tale, the king turned to the priestess.\n\n\"Well,\" he said.\n\n\"They speak true,\" she replied. There was an audible gasp from the warriors in the chamber. The king raised his hand and scratched his chin through his fine long beard. He considered them for a moment and then smiled grimly.\n\n\"Now tell me, Slayer, how you came by the Axe of Valek,\" said the king.\n\nGotrek's answering smile was as grim as Thangrim's. \"Its owner had no use for it, being dead, so I took it. Do you have a claim upon it?\"\n\n\"The person who carried that blade from here was my son, Morekai. He sought to cross the Wastes and find out if anyone still lived there.\"\n\n\"Then he is dead, Thangrim Firebeard. His corpse lay in a cave on the edges of the Wastes. It lay surrounded by the bodies of twenty slain beastmen.\"\n\n\"There was no one with him? He left here with twenty sworn companions.\"\n\n\"There was only one dwarf. I buried him according to the ancient rites, and being in need of a weapon at the time, I took this one. If it is yours, I will return it to you.\"\n\nThe old king looked down and grief entered his eyes. When he spoke again he sounded as old as he looked. \"So he died alone at the end.\"\n\n\"He died a hero's death,\" Gotrek said. \"He paved his road to the Iron Halls with the bones of his foes.\"\n\nThangrim looked up once more and his smile was almost grateful. \"Keep the blade, Slayer. Such a weapon is not owned. It has its own doom, and it shapes the destiny of its wielder. If it is in your hands now, it is there for a reason.\"\n\n\"As you say,\" Gotrek said.\n\n\"And you have given me much to think on,\" Thangrim said wearily. \"And my apologies for doubting you. Go now. Rest. We will talk again later.\"\n\n\"Prepare apartments for our guests,\" he shouted. \"And feed them of our finest.\"\n\nFelix could not help but notice that there was a note of bitter irony in the king's voice.\n\nFelix stared at the fish suspiciously. It was large and it looked well-cooked, yet there was something odd about it. After a few moment's consideration he realised that it had no eyes. The meat smelled good and everyone else was eating it, yet he kept thinking of the things he had seen in the Wastes, of the mutants and beastmen, and of all the things he had been told about warpstone dust. He just could not bring himself to eat a mutant fish, and he knew there was good reason for this.\n\nBy all accounts it was possible for mutation to be passed on through eating mutated food. It was said that the worst mutants were always cannibals who fed on other mutants. He had no desire to put this theory of mutation being contagious to the test.\n\n\"It's blindfish, manling,\" said Gotrek from across the table. Felix realised that the Slayer must have seen the look on his face and understood what was going through his mind. \"It is naturally this way. Dwarfs have feasted on it since long before the coming of the Darkness. You can eat it.\"\n\n\"It's a delicacy, actually,\" Varek added. \"In the dwarfholds we breed them. They dwell in the deep cisterns. We feed them on mushrooms and insects.\"\n\nSomehow this knowledge did not make the fish seem any more appetising. Unaware of the effect he was having, Varek continued to speak. \"They live in darkness. Some loremasters think that is why they have no eyes. They don't need them. Try some.\"\n\nFelix speared some on his knife and lifted the flesh up for examination. It was white and tender looking and when he tried it, it was delicious. He said so.\n\n\"It can be monotonous,\" said Hargrim, who was sat on the other side of him. \"We live on mushrooms and bugs and blindfish. There are times when I wish I could have something different.\"\n\nFelix dug into his pack and produced a strip of beef jerky. Hargrim looked at it just as suspiciously as Felix had inspected the fish. \"Try some,\" Felix said.\n\nHargrim took some and began to chew. Eventually he managed to swallow. \"Interesting,\" he pronounced carefully.\n\nSnorri laughed. \"Now the blindfish doesn't taste so bad after all, does it? Here try some of this to wash it down.\"\n\nSnorri handed over a flask of Kislevite vodka. Hargrim swigged it down. For a moment, he looked like he might actually cough but then he recovered and smacked his lips and took some more. \"That's better,\" he said.\n\nFelix emptied his pack onto the table. There was waybread and cheese and more jerky. It added to the mushrooms cooked in blindfish oil, the blindfish itself and the jugs of water. \"Help yourself,\" he said.\n\nHargrim did so.\n\nWith the speed the provisions disappeared Felix was glad that Hargrim was the only one of the local dwarfs who had joined them at their table.\n\nFelix looked around the room. It was richly furnished with thick but worn carpets and drapes, fine dwarfish statuary and a merchant's ransom in silver and gold. It was one of the royal apartments. Each of the comrades had been given a similar one. Felix supposed that was one good thing about the casualties the dwarfs had suffered: there was plenty of room. He pushed the thought aside as unworthy and realised that he was getting drunk.\n\n\"I still cannot believe that we have strangers here,\" Hargrim said. From the flush on his face, Felix could tell that the captain was inebriated as well. \"It astonishes me. For so long we thought we were the last dwarfs in the world. We thought Chaos had overrun everywhere else. We sent out messengers and scouts into the wilderness but they never returned. It all seemed so hopeless and now you arrive and tell us that there is a whole world beyond the Wastes, that Chaos was thrown back, that the Empire and Bretonnia and all those other places of legend still exist. It hardly seems possible that others have survived these past twenty years without us knowing it!\"\n\n\"Twenty years?\" spluttered Felix and Varek almost simultaneously.\n\n\"Aye! Why do you look at me that way?\"\n\n\"It has been two hundred years since the last incursion of Chaos!\" Felix said.\n\nHargrim looked at him in astonishment. \"That cannot be!\"\n\n\"Time flows strangely in the Chaos Wastes,\" Varek reminded them.\n\n\"Strangely indeed,\" said Felix, remembering what Borek had told him of the odd powers of the place. Could the Dark Powers warp even the flow of time, he wondered, or was this some strange property that the Wastes themselves possessed?\n\n\"Believe me,\" Varek said to Hargrim, \"Here in Karag Dum only twenty years may have passed but beyond the Wastes it has been centuries, and there Chaos was thrown back.\"\n\n\"How did it happen?\"\n\n\"Magnus the Pious rallied men and dwarfs to his cause, and broke the hordes of Chaos at the Siege of Praag, in Kislev. Eventually the followers of the Dark Ones were driven back to beyond Blackblood Pass.\"\n\n\"And yet no one ever came to relieve us,\" said Hargrim, and he sounded almost bitter.\n\nFelix did not know what to say. \"Everyone thought Karag Dum had fallen. The last reports were of the city being overrun by the hordes of Chaos.\"\n\nGotrek surprised him by speaking. \"No one knew what had happened. The Chaos Wastes had retreated but they had still advanced beyond where they once had been. They always do. Karag Dum was cut off. No one could find a way through. It was tried, believe me. Borek sought long and hard for a way to return.\"\n\n\"I do believe you, Gotrek, son of Gurni, for I have seen the Wastes, looked out from our highest towers, and I know they stretch as far as the eye can see. I have fought the warriors of Chaos and know they are as uncountable as flakes of snow in a blizzard. We have so few warriors that we soon stopped trying to get messengers out. Many were captured and hideously tortured.\"\n\n\"How have you survived?\" Varek asked \u2014 somewhat tactlessly, Felix thought. Still he was glad the young dwarf had asked the question. He wanted to know the answer himself. Hargrim shook his head.\n\n\"With great difficulty,\" he said at last and smiled wearily, \"But that is not a fair answer my friends. The answer is that our foes are divided and we hide and fight them as we may.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Gotrek asked.\n\n\"Tell Snorri about the fighting,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"After the last great siege, when the forces of the Enemy used terrible sorcery to break our walls, we retreated deeper and deeper into the mines, determined to sell our lives dearly and make them pay for every inch of dwarfish territory with blood. Our people divided up into their clans and hosts and made their way to the secret fastnesses we had prepared against such a day.\"\n\n\"Like this one,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Precisely. We retreated under the earth, to places shielded by runes of power, and we emerged into the debated halls to raid and fight and we discovered a strange thing\u2026\"\n\n\"What was that?\" Gotrek asked.\n\n\"We found that the forces of Chaos had fallen out with each other. We did not know then but we found out from captured prisoners that their supreme leader, Skathlok Ironclaw, had been drawn away to a battle in the south, and that his lieutenants, each of whom followed a different power, had fallen into dispute over the spoils.\"\n\n\"When was this?\" asked Varek.\n\nHargrim gave a date in dwarfish which meant nothing to Felix.\n\n\"It was the Imperial Year 2302,\" Varek translated. \"At about the time of the Siege of Praag.\"\n\n\"If this was the case, why did you not drive them from the city?\" asked Gotrek. Hargrim laughed and there was no mirth to his laughter.\n\n\"Because there were still so few of us left, son of Gurni. After the Great Siege we numbered less than five thousand warriors, and those were split between five hidden citadels. Even with the majority of their warriors gone, our foes numbered ten times that and divided though they were, we knew they would unite to fight against us if we emerged in strength. So, over the years, we learned to sally forth in small groups and pick away at our enemies. It was not a good strategy, as we later learned.\"\n\n\"Why?\" asked Felix.\n\n\"Because for every one of their warriors who fell, another one would appear. For every warband we destroyed, two more would come in from the Wastes. But when we lost a warrior we could never replace him. We may have killed twenty for every stout-hearted dwarf we lost, but in the end we had no way of replacing our losses, and they did.\"\n\n\"I can understand this,\" said Felix. \"There are many warriors out in the Wastes, and this is a worthy citadel and would provide them with shelter.\"\n\nHargrim shook his head sadly. \"You do not understand the followers of Chaos at all well, if that is what you think, Felix Jaeger. They came here because there was treasure here \u2014 gold and dwarf-made weapons, and most of all the black steel they covet for the making of their armour and the forging of their foul weapons. They came here because they knew they would find others to fight of their own kind, and thus win glory in the eyes of their insane gods. This place has become a kind of testing ground for the warriors of Chaos, where they can find others to slaughter in order to advance themselves.\"\n\nHargrim's words made sense to Felix. He had occasionally wondered where the Chaos warriors got their weapons. He had seen no sign of foundries or factories or any kind of manufacturing since they entered the Wastes, yet the followers of the Dark Powers must get their gear from somewhere. He had simply assumed that it was the product of sorcery or bartered from renegade human smiths but now he saw another answer. Here at Karag Dum was ore and all the equipment produced by dwarfish industry. If some of the things he had heard were true, this one hold could produce more steel than the whole Empire. He voiced his suspicions at once.\n\n\"You are correct, Felix Jaeger. We tried to destroy all the forges and furnaces and anvils we could not dismantle and carry into the hidden places, but we did not have enough time to get rid of them all. Some were seized by the followers of the Ruinous Powers. Some were repaired using black and incomprehensible magics. Now the mines are worked by hordes of beastmen and mutant slaves, and mage-priests oversee the manufacture of weapons and armour.\"\n\n\"If this place could be retaken, it would be a terrible blow to the powers of Chaos. For where else would they get their weapons?\" Felix said in drunken excitement.\n\n\"Perhaps. Perhaps not,\" Hargrim said. \"The Chaos worshippers must have other mines and other foundries now and empty as Karag Dum now seems it is still well held.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"It is not now as it was in the early days. Many warriors of Chaos have come here and hold their own small fiefdoms. There are entire towns in the Underhalls now which are dedicated to the worship of one of the four Powers of Darkness. They each have their own liege lords and armies. They trade ore, weapons and armour to those outside. They exchange swords for slaves, spearpoints and arrowheads for their disgusting food, armour for magical devices.\"\n\n\"You said there were other dwarf fastnesses in Karag Dum,\" Varek said.\n\n\"Gone now,\" Hargrim said. \"Over the years, they have been wiped out. Those of their people that survived made their way here. Most did not. Many have been hunted down by the Hounds of Khorne as they fled. Others would not come here lest they led the followers of the Terror to our last haven.\"\n\n\"The Terror?\" Felix said.\n\n\"Of that it is best not to speak,\" said Hargrim. \"For it is our doom. When first it came it took the lives of hundreds of stout warriors. Our runemaster gave his life to drive it off. Now that it has returned I doubt that anything can stop it \u2014 although your axe gives me some hope, Gotrek Gurnisson.\"\n\nFelix's heart sank as he saw Gotrek and Snorri exchange glances. He knew that Hargrim had aroused the Slayer's professional interest. Hargrim saw this too and shook his head.\n\n\"Tell me: what do you think King Thangrim is thinking about?\" Felix asked, just to change the subject. \"Do you think it likely that he will send messengers to the outside world.\"\n\n\"I do not know, Felix Jaeger. I think it likely that we will all die here.\"\n\nAfter that there was silence for a minute, and then Gotrek spoke: \"I wish to know more of this creature known as the Terror.\"\n\n\"This does not surprise me,\" Hargrim said, looking up and inspecting the dwarf's tattoos. \"You wish to hunt it?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"That would not be wise.\"\n\n\"It is not a question of wisdom. It is a question of my doom.\"\n\n\"And Snorri's,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"Spoken like true Slayers,\" Hargrim said. \"Very well. I will tell what I know of this fell creature It is a daemon of Chaos, potent and deadly. It was summoned by Skathlok in the last days of the siege and he treated it not as a master treats a servant but as a warrior treats his king. It came upon us at the south-west gate after that was thrown down and none of us could stand against it. It slew a dozen heroes armed with potent rune weapons. It almost slew King Thangrim himself when he faced it in the Hall of Shadows. They exchanged blows for mere moments but it had the mastery. He could not believe its strength.\"\n\nGotrek reached down and grabbed his axe. A gleam had come into his eye. \"It must be strong indeed to withstand the Hammer of Fate.\"\n\n\"Stronger than anything it is, Gotrek Gurnisson. More fell by far than the three orc chieftains of the Red Fang. More dangerous than the three ogre mages of Ventragh Heath. Deadlier even than the dragon Glaugir, for all its poison breath. I speak without boasting when I say I have stood beside my liege as he measured himself against mighty foes, but this vile thing was by far the mightiest. I doubt that in the full pride of his youth, even so great a warrior as Thangrim Firebeard could have overcome it.\"\n\n\"How then was it beaten?\" asked Felix, licking his lips nervously. \"How did you survive to tell us this tale.\"\n\n\"It was not beaten, it was driven off when our high Runesmith Valek smote it with the sacred axe you carry, then invoked the Rune of Unbinding. Such a wound it was that anything but a creature so great would have died instantly. This thing merely withdrew into the deepest depths of the mountain, near its fiery heart. It must have brooded down there for many years, recovering its strength, for now it has returned. As it prophesied.\"\n\n\"Prophesied?\"\n\n\"Even as it disappeared, it told us it would return to be our doom. It told the king that one day it would return and tear out his heart with its claws and devour it before his still-living eyes, and he told Thangrim that this was his doom. And all of us who heard it believed this prophesy, for there was a flat truth in its voice.\"\n\n\"It was a daemon,\" Felix said softly. \"Daemons have been known to lie.\"\n\n\"Aye, but this one gloated as it spoke and we knew that it intended to work our ruin in its own time and way. Some of the warriors even suspect that this is why we have been allowed to survive for so long. And our Runesmith Valek also spoke a prophesy before he died. He told us to fear not, for his axe also would return to us when the Last Days came. Many of us wondered about this prophesy, for how could the axe return to us when it was destined to remain hidden in our fortresses. Then the king's son took the axe and we thought it lost. And lo, you have returned it to us but a score of days after the Terror returned.\"\n\nHe looked meaningfully at Gotrek's axe. \"You can see why your coming has disturbed the king.\"\n\n\"How did Valek invoke this Rune of Unbinding?\" Gotrek asked.\n\n\"I know not. He was a runesmith and knew many secrets. I only know that he summoned its power and it killed him, consuming his life even as it banished the daemon. The axe you bear is old and potent beyond all reckoning. It passed from runesmith to runesmith from the most ancient times. Its full history was passed only from bearer to bearer, but with Valek's death the tale was lost. His son and apprentice fell before him in that final battle. The king's son, Morekai, took it from the runesmith's smouldering corpse and bore it away with him when he tried to cross the Wastes.\"\n\n\"Then without the Rune of Unbinding this creature cannot be beaten?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Who can say. That weapon is potent indeed even without the Rune of Unbinding. Perhaps in the hands of a warrior sufficiently strong\u2026\"\n\n\"Describe this daemon,\" Gotrek said.\n\nHargrim leaned forward drunkenly and rested his chin on his fist. For a moment he smiled a smile empty of all humour. Then he sank into reverie and gazed off into the distance, as if looking once more on a sight he would rather not see.\n\n\"Huge it was,\" he said eventually. \"More than twice the height of a tall man. Vast were its wings. Vast and bat-like, and when it unfurled them there was a crack like thunder. In one hand it bore a terrible whip. In the other an axe emblazoned with evil and eldritch runes that hurt the eye to look upon. Its eyes burned with infernal fire. Horns crowned its bestial head. On its brow was the mark of the Blood God.\"\n\nAs Hargrim spoke, a silence and a chill spread across the chamber. Felix began to have a terrible suspicion that he knew what the dwarf was describing. It was a creature that was hinted at in the old books he had read about the time of Chaos. It was indeed a creature worthy to be known as the Terror.\n\n\"A Blutdrengrik,\" said Gotrek quietly.\n\n\"The Bane of Grung,\" Varek mumbled, tugging nervously at his beard.\n\n\"A Bloodthirster of Khorne,\" Felix whispered, and felt the cold hand of fear touch his spine. He had just named the deadliest, most violent and implacable creature ever to emerge from the nethermost pits of Hell. A daemon second only to the Dark God it served in its mythical powers of destruction. A being which even the mightiest would fear to face.\n\n\"Let's go and kill it,\" said Snorri.\n\n\"Let's have another drink first,\" Felix said, hoping to dissuade the Slayers from this foolish quest for as long as possible." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Felix awoke with that same feeling of disorientation which he had become quite familiar with over the years. He was in a strange place, looking at a strange ceiling and he felt somewhat nauseous. It took him a few moments to get his rebellious mind and stomach under control and to work out where he was. When he managed to do so, he wished he had not.\n\nHe was deep underground in a chamber in a ruined dwarf citadel, somewhere deep in the Chaos Wastes. And he had a hangover. Surely there were few worse fates that could befall a mortal man, he told himself. He pulled himself up off the sumptuous but rather fusty smelling and too short bed, pulled on his boots and strode out into the corridor to find something that would settle his stomach. As he did so, he was greeted by one of the king's armoured guards who informed him that his presence was required in the throne room. Immediately.\n\nFelix realised that he had indeed found a worse fate. Not only was he stuck in this terrible place but he had to face an old and irascible dwarfish tyrant on an empty stomach. Stifling a groan he followed the guard.\n\n\"We cannot leave this place,\" said King Thangrim Firebeard. \"There are too many of us. According to what you have told me there is not enough room in your ship for more than an extra dozen people at most. There are several hundred of my people here. It would be unfair to chose some to go and some to stay.\"\n\nFelix had to admit the old dwarf had a point. He had arrived in the ruler's chamber only to find the others already being grilled by the old despot. Apparently Varek had suggested that the people of Karag Dum should leave their ancestral home. Thangrim had raised a few cogent objections.\n\n\"It would only be a temporary measure, your majesty,\" Varek said. \"Once we had flown those people back to the Lonely Tower we could return with a skeleton crew and take more. We could continue to ferry them back until we had taken everyone. It is possible.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But you have told me that even flying across the Chaos Wastes is perilous. Perhaps your ship will crash.\"\n\n\"Surely, your majesty remaining here with the forces of Chaos pounding upon your doors is more perilous. It is only a matter of time before you are hunted down and destroyed.\" Varek was becoming impassioned and flustered. His eyes were large and round behind the lenses of his glasses.\n\n\"You do not understand, youngling. We have here wives and wounded. We cannot simply abandon them or send them away with but a small escort. You know how perilous the halls are. You have seen them. It would take many warriors to guard them, and there is not enough room on your ship for them and the escort.\"\n\n\"The escort could return to your halls,\" Varek said. \"They are warriors. They have done this before.\"\n\n\"Your point is a fair one but eventually we would have to move our ancestral hoards. These are no small treasures, and not a gold piece or trinket will I leave behind for the despoilers.\"\n\nFelix spoke up for the first time. \"But surely gold means nothing when the lives of your people are concerned, your majesty.\"\n\nEvery dwarf present looked at him as if he was either deranged or profoundly stupid. No one even bothered to answer him. Felix wished the floor would open up and swallow him. He should have known better than to try and make such a rational argument to dwarfs when gold was being discussed.\n\n\"Could we carry away our father's treasures on your one small ship?\" Thangrim asked.\n\n\"From what I have heard about your hoard, may it ever grow and prosper, I doubt it.\"\n\n\"Then how can you expect us to leave this place while we have blood left in our veins?\"\n\n\"Perhaps we could return with more than one airship, great king,\" Varek said. \"Perhaps we could return with enough craft to carry all your people and all your hoard.\"\n\n\"If you could, I would see that you were suitably rewarded. Let me think on what you have said. You may go.\"\n\nVarek rose to go and Felix moved to join him. He felt a vague sense of relief at being about to leave the king's presence \u2014 and at the prospect of getting some food.\n\n\"Thangrim Firebeard,\" Gotrek said. \"I crave a boon.\"\n\n\"Tell me what it is, Gotrek Gurnisson.\"\n\n\"I wish to seek out this creature you call the Terror, and either slay it or find my doom.\"\n\nKing Thangrim smiled down at Gotrek and appeared to consider his request.\n\nAt that moment, however, a distant horn sounded. A few heartbeats later a dwarf raced through the entrance of the throne room and advanced at once to the king. Thangrim gestured for the messenger to come closer and then listened to his whispered words. When the new arrival had finished speaking, his face looked grim indeed.\n\n\"It appears it will not be necessary for you to seek the monster out, Gotrek Gurnisson. It is coming here now \u2014 and it brings with it an army.\"\n\nWonderful, thought Felix, and I haven't even had a chance to grab my last meal." + }, + { + "title": "BLOODTHIRSTER", + "text": "\"The hordes of Chaos come again,\" King Thangrim said. \"Sound the war-horns. We muster for battle.\"\n\nThe king raised himself from his throne and lifted his great warhammer up high. In that moment Felix could see a glittering aura like lightning playing around the head of the weapon. The air was filled with the smell of ozone.\n\nThe king's guard cheered heartily but Felix sensed a deep uneasiness behind their show of courage.\n\n\"This is good,\" Gotrek said.\n\nThis is very bad, thought Felix, contemplating the oncoming hordes of Chaos, led by a daemon of unspeakable power. He wondered how he could ever have thought things were bad when he got up this morning. All he had to worry about then was a hangover. Now he had much worse things to concern himself with.\n\nThe king strode down the steps accompanied by his priests, and made his way out into the hall. His guards fell into step behind him. Outside in the Hall of the Well, dwarf folk were hastily assembling. Warriors rushed out of every entrance. Some buckled on shields and weapons. Others had breastplates half-strapped to their chests and were hastily tightening fastenings as they assembled. As Felix watched, he saw one old warrior jam a helmet onto his head, spit on the floor and make a few practice swipes with his axe. Seeing Felix looking at him, he gave him a thumbs-up sign.\n\nOut of the corner of his eye, Felix saw Hargrim assembling his tunnel fighters. They too were strapping on heavier dwarfish armour. It seemed that the time for stealth was over and now they wanted the heaviest protection they could get. Felix did not blame them. His own chainmail shirt suddenly seemed woefully inadequate when he remembered the vast mass of bestial warriors he had seen during the approach to Karag Dum, and when he thought of the legendary deadliness of the Bloodthirster.\n\nBut what else was there to do but fight? He drew his own enchanted blade from the scabbard and strode over to where Hargrim stood. \"How did they find us?\" he shouted to make himself heard over the din of dwarfs preparing for battle.\n\n\"I know not. Perhaps they found the place where we killed its hounds. Mayhap others of his foul pack found our scent. What does it matter? It is the Prophesy. The Last Day is upon us.\"\n\n\"Try not to be so cheerful,\" Felix said, and glanced around to see where Gotrek, Snorri and Varek were. He could see the Slayers standing near the king. Varek was nowhere to be seen. Felix wondered where he had gone. He realised that whatever happened in this battle, his place was beside his companions. If nothing else, he knew he had no chance of finding his way out of these halls on his own. Any of the others could probably manage it blindfolded.\n\nOn the other hand, he was probably being far too optimistic imagining there would be any chance of escape whatsoever. Snorri and Gotrek would never leave while the Bloodthirster was present, but he doubted that even those two formidable warriors could prevail over so mighty a daemon.\n\n\"Good luck!\" he shouted to Hargrim and raced over to where the Slayers stood.\n\n\"May Grungni, Grimnir and Valaya watch over you, Felix Jaeger,\" Hargrim said and returned to bellowing orders to his troops.\n\nNow from out of the access tunnels came the sounds of battle: the brash echo of horns, the clash of weapons, and the bellowing of something hideous echoed down the corridors. The dwarfs had finished their dispositions and their line of battle was drawn up across the Well Hall. There were certainly more dwarfs here than had defended the Lonely Tower, but that was not a reassuring thought. Compared to the numbers their attackers could summon, they were pitifully few.\n\nFelix looked up to where King Thangrim stood, carried on a shield held by four bearers. \"They have breached the outer gate,\" said the king. \"Our sentries will hold them for a while.\"\n\nLooking beyond Thangrim, Felix could see that the women and those too aged and wounded to fight were disappearing through an entrance he had not seen before. Once the last one had gone through, the doorway was sealed behind them, and it was done so cunningly that no sign of the hidden exit remained.\n\n\"They go to the vaults with our hoard, to wait out the final battle,\" Thangrim said. \"If we are victorious they will be freed. If not, they die.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The vaults can only be opened from the outside,\" Gotrek said. Felix was suddenly glad he had not tried to flee through those doors. He could think of nothing worse than huddling in the gloomy vaults, waiting to die of suffocation or starvation while the battle raged outside. At least out here, he would have some control over his fate, and when death came it would be quick. He hoped.\n\nHe could see Varek returning now. The young dwarf had Makaisson's gun strapped to his chest and carried a bag full of bombs. He moved with a purposefulness that Felix had never seen in him before as he raced up and came to a stop beside Felix.\n\n\"Hold this for a moment,\" Varek said to Felix and handed him the gun. Felix sheathed his sword and took it, surprised by how heavy it was, and by the ease with which Varek had handled it. Varek produced his book and pen, and began to inscribe a few notes on its pages. Seeing Felix's astonished look, he said: \"Just a last explanation. In case someone comes upon this later. Well, we can but hope, eh?\"\n\nFelix forced himself to smile, but it came out shakily. \"I suppose so.\"\n\nIn the distance the clamour reached a peak and then there was a bestial roar of triumph. Felix guessed things had not gone well for the dwarf sentries.\n\nThangrim had started to shout in dwarfish. Felix could not understand a word he was bellowing but the dwarfs seemed to like it. They cheered him mightily, even Gotrek and Snorri. Only Varek did not add his voice to the resounding chorus, for he was too busy writing.\n\nFelix kept his eyes glued to the doorway through which he knew their foes would come. He knew that several hundred crossbow-toting dwarfs were doing the same thing. But still this did not reassure him. He had an oppressive sense of approaching doom. Fear gripped his heart. A shadow lay on his soul. He knew that something terrible was approaching.\n\n\"Bet Snorri kills more beastmen than you, Gotrek,\" said Snorri.\n\nGotrek grunted derisively. \"The manling will kill more beastmen than you,\" Gotrek replied.\n\n\"Want to bet on that, Felix?\" Snorri asked.\n\nFelix shook his head. His mouth was too dry for him to form a response. Terror had started to take root in his mind, a paralysing fear that shook the foundations of his sanity and made him want to find a dark corner in which to hide himself and whimper. Part of his mind told him that this was unnatural, that he should not feel such fear, but it was still hard to fight against it. There was something in that hideous roaring that turned his blood to water.\n\n\"Just remember, Snorri,\" Gotrek said. \"The daemon is mine.\"\n\n\"Depends if Snorri gets to it first,\" said Snorri with a grin.\n\nFelix found he could not bear to look at the entrance anymore so he glanced at Gotrek and Snorri. Even the Slayers were tense, he could tell. Gotrek's knuckles were white from gripping the haft of his axe so tightly. Snorri's hand trembled a little where he clutched his axe. Seeing Felix looking at him, he grinned. He appeared to make an effort to calm himself, and the trembling stopped.\n\n\"Snorri's not worried,\" Snorri said. \"Much.\"\n\nFelix grinned back, knowing how unnatural he must look. He felt like the skin of his face was too tight and as if all his hair was trying to stand on end like a Trollslayer's crest. He was probably pale as death too, he thought.\n\nSuddenly, just for a moment, everything fell silent. In the eerie stillness all Felix could hear was the scratching of Varek's pen. Then even that stopped and Felix felt a tug on his arm and realised that Varek was asking for his gun back. Felix gave it to him, and unsheathed his sword once more.\n\nThe roar which shattered the silence was so loud and so terrifying that Felix almost dropped his blade. He looked up and fought down the urge to soil his britches. The most frightening thing he had ever seen had entered the hall and behind it he could see the leering heads of hundreds of beastmen.\n\nAs he gazed on the creature in wonder and in terror, Felix thought: this is what a daemon looks like. This is the incarnate nightmare which had bedevilled my people since time began.\n\nHe knew now that there was something magical about the terror the thing inspired. It was the unnatural aura of something which had crept forth from the nethermost pits and which no mortal being could help but sense and respond to. In some ways it hurt the eyes simply to look upon the Bloodthirster. Its very appearance told you it was made from no natural substance. The charnel stink of the thing was worse than anything he could have imagined. It reeked of rotting meat and congealed blood and other less describable and far more loathsome things.\n\nIt looked as Hargrim had described it. It was far taller and far heavier than Felix. Vast bat-like wings flexed on its shoulders. It was as muscular as a minotaur. In one hand it held a great coiled whip, in the other a terrifying axe larger than a man's body. Its skin was ruddy red and its face was savage and bestial. And yet of all the Bloodthirster's features, it was its eyes which Felix knew he would never forget.\n\nThey were like pools of infinite darkness out of which a malign and ageless intelligence gazed. Somewhere in those unknowable depths flickered red fires of savage hatred, an insane ferocity that would overthrow the order of the entire universe if it could, in order to try and sate a bloodlust that could never be satisfied. Here was a creature that had looked upon the birth and death of worlds, and might look out on the death of everything. Compared to its life, his own existence was less than the life of a mayfly. Compared to its strength and savagery and cunning, he was less than nothing.\n\nAnd yet looking on, Felix felt his fear start to drain away. After all, embodied terror that it might be, it really was not as bad as he had imagined it would be. It could never be as fearful as the nightmare thing his own brain had been conjuring up mere heartbeats before. It was awe-inspiring, mystical and potent to be sure but he felt now that he had seen it, he could fight it, and glancing at the others he knew that they felt the same. In a way, he was not too sorry to look upon the thing, even if it caused his death. He knew he had now seen something that few men ever would, and there was a certain satisfaction in that. He knew also that he could confront this ultimately fearsome thing and in the end, not be completely daunted.\n\nThen it spoke and the fear returned, redoubled: \"I have come to claim my blood debt, King Thangrim, as I said I would.\"\n\nIts voice was like a brazen horn, and yet there was something in it that suggested the void, and a cold so chilly that it burned. It was as loud as thunder and yet so perfectly pitched that every word carried exactly the minutely calculated freight of hatred that the daemon intended it to. It was the voice of an angry and vengeful demi-god. Felix could tell that the daemon was not speaking in Reikspiel and yet he could still somehow understand its meaning perfectly, and not for a moment did he doubt that the same was true for the dwarfs.\n\n\"You have come to be cast into the pit once more,\" King Thangrim said. His voice was clear and deep and resonant but, compared to the Bloodthirster, he sounded like a rebellious child shrieking defiance at an adult.\n\n\"I will tear out your heart and eat it before your still-living eyes, just as I promised,\" the thing replied. \"And not all your little warriors will save you. For every moment of every hour of every day of every year of my waiting I have looked forward to this day, and now it has arrived.\"\n\nAs the daemon spoke more and more beastmen and black-armoured warriors filtered into the room behind it, yet not a single dwarf fired a bolt or raised a weapon. There was something hypnotic about the creature and something unbearably fascinating about its confrontation with the ancient dwarf king. Felix wanted to shout a warning, to tell the dwarfs to attack, yet he did not. He was held enthralled by the same spell as held them all, while more and more followers of Chaos flowed in. Thangrim looked as if he wanted to reply, but could not. He looked old and weary and beaten before he started.\n\n\"You have lost none of your arrogance, little one, but you are old and feeble now and I\u2026 I am stronger than ever I was.\"\n\n\"You certainly smell that way!\" Gotrek roared suddenly.\n\nThe daemon's burning gaze shot towards the Slayer and Felix quailed as for a moment the thing's eyes rested upon him. It was as if Death itself had looked on him from out of its bony sockets. Felix was astonished that the Slayer managed to hold the daemon's gaze but somehow he did. After a moment he even managed a feral grin and brandished his axe. The runes along the blade blazed brighter than ever Felix had seen them. Gotrek took his thumb and ran it along the blade. A single bead of blood appeared and the Trollslayer flicked it contemptuously in the direction of the daemon.\n\n\"Thirsty?\" he inquired. \"Try that. It will be all you get today.\"\n\n\"I will drink every drop of your blood, and I will crack your skull and devour your few brains, and as I do I will consume your soul. You will learn the true meaning of terror.\"\n\n\"I am learning the true meaning of tedium,\" Gotrek said and laughed a grating laugh. \"Do you intend to bore me to death with your speeches or do you want to come over here and die?\"\n\nFelix was amazed that the Slayer could say anything with that soul-blasting gaze upon him, but somehow Gotrek had managed to speak. And in doing so he had heartened the whole dwarf army. Felix could sense the dwarfs throwing off the influence of the daemon's presence and readying their weapons to fight. Thangrim straightened and raised his hammer and as he did so lightning crackled once more about its head.\n\nAmazingly the daemon smiled, revealing long fangs and a mouth that looked like it could swallow a horse. \"A moment of defiance earns you an eternity of torment. You will have aeons to reflect on your folly. And before you die, consider this. It was you who led me to this secret place.\"\n\nSeeing that Gotrek refused to rise to the bait, the daemon continued: \"That axe and I are linked. Since it wounded me I have always been able to sense its presence, no matter how well it was hidden. I followed its spoor to this place. I thank you for the service you have done me, slave.\"\n\nFelix looked at Gotrek to see how he was taking this. No emotion save implacable hatred showed on the Slayer's face. Felix wondered how Gotrek managed it. His own mind whirled. It seemed that their whole long quest, all the ingenuity which Borek had expended to bring them here, all the dangers they had overcome, had served only to lead this daemon to its final goal. It was a maddening thought that all their efforts had come to this, that they had been caught up in an intricate web of prophesy and doom of which they had known nothing, that they were simply pawns in an aeons-long game played by the Ruinous Powers.\n\nLooking across the narrow gap which separated the two armies, Felix once more felt the sick certainty of defeat. Ranks upon ranks of crooked horned beastmen were drawn up beside the daemon. Row upon row of Chaos warriors stood ready to attack, awesome mystical blades held ready for slaughter. Packs of their terrible hounds bayed hungrily, as if demanding the souls of their prey.\n\nRanked against them was a dwarf host which looked pitifully weak. Around the king's fluttering banner was his guard, all finely decked in the best armour and armed with potent weapons. Between King Thangrim and the daemon stood a line of mighty warriors, each armed with glittering rune-carved blades. Beyond the king, the army's right flank was hidden from him but Felix knew it was made up of units of crossbows and hammer wielders. Here on the left flank were rank upon rank of longbearded veterans armed with hammers and axes. Among them stood Gotrek, Snorri, Varek and himself. Felix offered up a prayer to Sigmar of the Hammer. If the deity heard he gave no sign.\n\nInstead the daemon raised its blade and gave the signal to advance. In a cacophony of drums and braying, brazen horns, the Chaos Horde began to advance; The lean hounds loped ahead of the foot troops ready to rend and tear. The daemon watched with an expression of hideous satisfaction. As the beastmen came on, the dwarfs opened fire with their crossbows, carving a bloody swathe through their inhuman foes.\n\nFelix was almost deafened as Varek opened fire with his gun. The blaze of the rotating muzzles underlit the young dwarf's face as he sent a stream of hot lead out to mow down the oncoming brutes. In the flashes, Varek's twisted face looked no less demonic and hate-filled than the creatures they faced.\n\nKing Thangrim raised his hammer, lightning bolts flickered around it, gigantic shadows flickered away to the edge of the chamber. He whirled it around his head and it seemed to gather power and light as it did so. The runes blazed dazzlingly. Blue sparks rained down all around it. The smell of ozone cut through the stench of the daemonic host.\n\nThe dwarf king released the Hammer of Fate. It hurtled towards the Bloodthirster like a comet, trailing sparks and streams of lightning. Where these fell beastmen fell also, their skin blackened, their fur standing on end. The great warhammer flew straight and true and impacted on the daemon with a sound like a thunderclap. The Bloodthirster bellowed in anguish and stumbled. The dwarf host roared mightily. To Felix's amazement the weapon hurtled back across the chamber, causing beastmen to flinch and duck. The king stretched out his hand and his weapon flew back, like a hawk returning to a falconer's glove after hunting.\n\nFor a moment Felix hoped that the awesome and terrible weapon might have downed the Bloodthirster. But when he dared look his hopes were dashed. Drops of blazing ichor dripped from a wound in the daemon's side and vanished into puffs of poisonous looking smoke where they hit the floor, but it still stood, immensely strong and immensely terrible gazing mockingly at the dwarfs. Its fiery glance silenced their cheers in a moment.\n\n\"If it will not come to us, we will just have to go to it,\" Gotrek said and charged forward to meet the onrushing Chaos horde.\n\n\"Snorri thinks this is a good idea!\" said Snorri, racing after the other Slayer.\n\n\"Wait for me,\" Felix said and loped along cursing beside them. With his longer stride it was easy for him to keep up with the running dwarfs and still have some time to glance around at what was happening. Around them, he could see the whole dwarf army was advancing to meet their oncoming foe.\n\nTactically Felix knew that this was a mistake. The dwarfs should have kept their distance and hammered their foes with crossbow bolts until the last moment. Now they seemed caught up in the general madness of the daemon's presence, overwhelmed by a lust to get to grips with their enemy, hand to hand, breast to breast, to rend and tear and kill at close range. Felix could not blame them. After so many years of being hunted through what had once been their home, they were filled with blazing hatred. In gratifying that hatred, Felix saw they were throwing away their one small tactical advantage.\n\nStill, perhaps it did not matter. They were going to die anyway, and so it might just be best to get it all over with. He gripped his sword with both hands as the first wave of beastmen swept over them, and then there was no more time for thought, only for killing.\n\nA shock passed up Felix's arm as his blade embedded itself in the chest of a dog-headed beastman. The sickening stench of blood and wet fur filled his nostrils as the creature fell against him. He kicked it away and chopped out at another of the foul creatures, severing an artery in its throat. As the thing reached up to try to press the wound shut, Felix worked his blade under its ribcage and up into its heart.\n\nAround him Gotrek and Snorri hacked and chopped and slew. Every time Gotrek smashed down with his axe, a mangled foe fell clutching the bloody ruin of its chest, the amputated stump of its limbs, or tried to staunch the flow of blood that simply could not be stopped. From the corner of his eye, Felix saw Snorri smash forward with a simultaneous blow of both axe and hammer that caught a beastman's head between them. The top of the creature's skull came away, sheared off by the axe and its brains erupted forth in a pulpy grey jelly driven out by the force of the hammer blow.\n\nA deafening bang followed by howls of bestial agony told Felix that Varek had lobbed one of his bombs. A moment later a cloud of acrid smoke filled his field of vision and brought tears to his eyes. He coughed and the sound attracted the attention of another beastman. A monstrous axe shrieked towards him from out of the smoke and he had only just time to raise his blade and parry before it hit. The shock sent tingles of agony shooting up into his shoulder. A moment later a huge hand came out of the gloom and grabbed him by the throat. Sharp nails driven by iron-sinewed fingers bit into his neck. Beads of blood ran down his windpipe.\n\nAs the smoke cleared he saw he had been grabbed by a monstrously muscular beastman. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the beastman's disgusting brothers running closer with spear levelled. Everything started to happen in slow motion. He knew that he was about to die. Frantically, he tried to pull himself clear but the beastman was too strong, and was already drawing back its axe for the killing blow. The tip of its comrade's spear glittered as it came closer. With those awful fingers round his neck Felix could not even call for help from Gotrek or Snorri.\n\nAny second he expected the spear to burst through his ribs or for the axe to descend with skull-smashing force. Knowing he had only moments to live filled Felix with desperate strength and ferocious cunning. Instead of trying to pull away, he suddenly relaxed and stepped forward. His unexpected movement threw his captor momentarily off-balance. Taking advantage of this, Felix swivelled on the spot and threw all his weight into the move, swinging the beastman round and to the side. The Chaos worshipper grunted as the spear which had been aimed at Felix drove right into its back. Its muscles spasmed in agony and its fingers loosened around Felix's neck. Felix stepped back, took careful aim and lopped off its bestial head with one swing.\n\nThe sightless goat's head rolled onto the floor. Black blood gouted towards the ceiling from the stump of the neck, rising in powerful spurts which weakened even as the body tumbled forward onto the floor. The second beastman stood there, holding its newly freed spear, blinking in stupid astonishment as if it could not quite believe that he had just killed its companion. Felix took advantage of his momentary confusion to stab it in the groin and then send his blade ripping upwards, slicing the belly and sending ropy entrails looping to the ground.\n\nFor a moment, he stood in the eye of the storm, surrounded by a swirling vortex of incredible violence. Dwarf fought with beastman. Axe smashed against spear and club. Over to his right he could see Gotrek engaged in combat with two Chaos warriors. The black-armoured giants raced forward, hoping to take the Slayer from either side so that one could strike him while the other held his attention. Gotrek raced towards them, striking the first as he passed, caving in the warrior's breastplate with a blow of astonishing power. The armour did not quite give way, but the blood leaking through the armpits and joins at the waist told of a fatal blow. Instead of halting, the Slayer swept on past, leaving the second warrior to strike uselessly at the spot where he had been. As he did so, Gotrek struck downwards and backwards at his attacker taking his foe through the back of the leg, hamstringing him. As the warrior toppled Gotrek caved in his head and glanced around for more prey without a second thought.\n\nThe Slayer was covered in blood and looked as if he had been working in some hellish butcher's shop. Felix realised that he looked no better. His hands were red and slimy stuff covered his boots. He shook his head and noticed that the Slayer was gesturing a warning to him. Just in time he turned and ducked beneath the blow of a monstrous black armoured figure. His new opponent's sword was enormous and odd runes blazed redly along its length. Felix brought his own blade smashing forward but it rebounded off the man's armour. Demented laughter pealed forth from inside the man's face-concealing helmet. It was as if Felix had merely tickled him. The man slashed forward once more and Felix sprang backwards, out of reach of his blade. Seeing an opening, he hit the man's blade as it passed, adding to its momentum and sending his foe spinning round. As he did so, Felix leapt forward in a shoulder charge, sending his off-balance opponent tumbling to the floor. Before the man could rise, Felix pulled back his helmeted head and ran his blade along the man's leathery throat, severing an artery and leaving the dying Chaos Warrior flopping on the ground like a fish stranded on dry land.\n\nHe had no time to enjoy his triumph. He sensed rather than saw a blow descending on his own exposed skull and tried to leap to one side. His foot slipped on the blood-slick stone and he was only partially successful. A massive club clipped his head and sent him sprawling to the ground. Stars danced before his eyes. Even that glancing blow had come close to driving consciousness from his head. He tried to pull himself to his feet but he suddenly had no control over his limbs. They flopped wildly instead of obeying him. He was vaguely aware of a misshapen figure towering above him and a huge club being raised to dash his brains out.\n\nA sudden weariness overcame Felix. All sound seemed to die away. He was too tired to care and he was not afraid to die. There was nothing he could do now. The club would descend and his life would be over. There was no sense in struggling. Best just to lie back and surrender to the inevitable.\n\nFor a moment only, he felt so helpless. Then he gathered all of his willpower to make one final futile attempt at movement. He knew it was impossible, that in his weakened state he could never get out of the way in time. His shoulders tensed and at any moment he expected to feel agony smash through his brain as the fatal blow connected.\n\nIt never came. Instead, his foe toppled away from him, blood exploding from his back. Gotrek bent over, gripped him by his chain mail vest and hauled him to his feet.\n\n\"Get up, manling. There's still killing to be done!\" The Slayer swung his axe and dropped a beastman with one blow. \"You cannot die till you have witnessed me kill a daemon!\"\n\n\"Where is it?\" Felix asked, still dazed.\n\n\"Over there,\" Gotrek said and pointed with one blood-covered finger.\n\nFelix looked in the direction he had indicated and through a gap in the fury of battle witnessed a scene of momentous courage. Snorri steamed headlong at the daemon and lashed out at it with his axe and hammer. The daemon looked down and laughed mockingly as Snorri's attacks bounced off its hide.\n\n\"Snorri, you idiot!\" Gotrek bellowed. \"Only rune weapons will affect the accursed thing!\"\n\nIf Snorri heard, he gave no sign. He continued to lash ineffectually at the mighty monster, launching a whirlwind of blows that would have dropped a dozen oxen, yet left the daemon unscathed. At last, as if tiring of watching the antics of a jester, the Bloodthirster lashed out almost languidly with its axe. Snorri tried to block, crossing both weapons in front of him, but he had no chance. The haft of his axe and his hammer splintered, and the sheer force of the daemon's blow sent him hurtling across the chamber like a stone launched from a catapult. He went tumbling through the air to land at the feet of King Thangrim, splashing the old dwarf's beard with blood.\n\nThe Bloodthirster ploughed on through the warriors of King Thangrim's elite guard. Its weapons flickered almost too fast for the eye to follow and every time one struck, a dwarf warrior fell. It seemed like no armour could resist those hell-forged weapons. In mere moments, brave warriors were reduced to mewling, dying piles of ragged flesh. Proud armour was rent asunder. Even as Felix watched, the Bloodthirster smashed through a row of dwarfs with its axe, leaving only mangled corpses in its wake. Yet the great daemon was not having things all its own way. The rune weapons of the dwarfs had bitten its flesh in a few places. Smoking ichor dribbled onto the floor as it advanced.\n\nRage blazed in King Thangrim's eyes. His beard bristled. He raised his hammer once more as if in answer to the daemon's challenge and cast it to smash on the daemon's breast. Once more the ancient weapon bit home. Once more daemonic blood spurted forth. Once more the hideous thing staggered \u2014 then grinned and came on with redoubled fury.\n\nNothing could stand in its way. It ploughed through the dwarf king's guards like a battering ram through a rotting doorway. Felix saw that one warrior managed to ram a runic blade into its back before it was aware of him. The blade stuck fast, protruding out from the Bloodthirster's shoulder blades before it turned and lashed out with its whip. Felix had no idea what that infernal lash was made from but it cut through dwarf-forged armour with ease and flayed its targets to the bone. Felix saw skin and muscle part as if slashed with a cleaver, white bone and yellow cartilage suddenly exposed in the dim, guttering light. The whip lashed forward again, spinning its shrieking victim like a top and tugging more flesh from his carcass. Another dwarf strode forward and smote the daemon with a rune-etched hammer. The impact caused the daemon some discomfort, but the swing of its axe decapitated its attacker. All the while it kept lashing its victim. In heartbeats, a bloody, skinned carcass that was not recognisable as a dwarf lay at its feet.\n\n\"How much longer will you hide behind your warriors, little king?\" asked the daemon, and such was the dreadful magic of its voice that the words were audible where Felix stood even above the clamour of battle. The king threw his hammer once more but this time the daemon threw down his whip and caught it with one outstretched claw. The runes blazed along the hammer's head and where it held the weapon the daemon's hand blackened but it reversed the weapon and sent it hurtling back towards the king.\n\nThere was a crack like thunder and the hammer flew too fast for the eye to follow. It crashed into the dwarf king and sent him sprawling to the ground. A groan came from the dwarf army as they saw their leader tumble and fall. The daemon bellowed in triumph. Insane laughter rumbled above the fray and echoed through the hall. The host of Chaos fought on with redoubled fury and everywhere seemed to gain the upper hand over the dwarfs.\n\nThe Bloodthirster strode through the dismayed throng, slaying right and left as it went. The priest of Grimnir went forth to meet it and was disembowelled with a slash of its claw even as his warhammer buried itself in the daemon's flesh. The old priestess of Valaya stood before it. She raised her book as if it were a shield. A glow leapt from the pages and for a moment the daemon paused. Then it laughed once more and brought its axe arcing down, cleaving through the book and the priestess both. Her bisected form fell in two pieces to the floor and the daemon strode forward in triumph to stand above the dying king.\n\n\"Come, manling. Now is the hour of my doom,\" Gotrek said, and made to stride towards the daemon. Nothing could stand in the Slayer's way. Anything that tried to do so died. He was now as much an engine of destruction as the daemon had been. As he moved towards his goal he struck left and right and everywhere he struck beastmen and Chaos warriors fell, cloven by the power of the axe and the arm that drove it.\n\nWith a shrug, Felix strode along behind, resolved to his fate. His head still rang from the glancing blow he had taken, and the scenes of nightmarish carnage all around had taken on an unreal quality.\n\nThere now seemed nothing unlikely about the Slayer's mission. It did indeed seem inevitable that Gotrek would fight with the daemon, and die his heroic death, and that Felix would witness it and die in turn himself. There was no other possibility. Looking around the hall Felix could see that the dwarfs were beaten. Their foes had the upper hand, and the fall of King Thangrim had demoralised them utterly. There was no sign of Snorri or Varek. Felix knew that he was not going to leave this battlefield alive. He might as well do as the Trollslayer wished. He owed the dwarf his life once more, and this was the way to pay the debt.\n\nThe Bloodthirster stood over the recumbent form of the old dwarf king. It drove its axe blade deep into the ancient flagstones so that the weapon stood there quivering. Then it reached down and picked up Thangrim Firebeard with both its claws, as gently as a man might pick up a small child.\n\nFelix ducked the swing of a beastman's axe, lopped his attacker's hand off at the wrist and kept running, leaving the amputee falling to his knees and clutching a bleeding stump. Three Chaos warriors came between Gotrek and the daemon. His axe smashed through the neck of one, opened the stomach of another and buried itself in the groin of a third. The backward swing of the axe toppled them to the floor and left Felix with a clear view of what happened next between the king and his tormentor.\n\nThe Bloodthirster peeled away Thangrim's armour like a man might strip away the peel from an orange. The dwarf managed to lean forward and spat in his tormentor's face. The spittle mingled with the ichor that ran down the daemon's brow and evaporated with a sizzle. Grinning widely, the Bloodthirster pushed its claws into the king's exposed flesh and began to pull outwards. The dwarf's ribcage cracked and flew open like the shell of an oyster, revealing the exposed innards. Blood sprayed across the Bloodthirster as it kept at its unholy work.\n\nIt raised the body to the level of its eyes, holding him easily with one hand. With the other it reached out and tore Thangrim's still-beating heart from his chest, raised it so that the king's wide eyes could see what it was doing. It squeezed the heart. The meat was crushed with an audible squelch. Blood gushed forth and sprayed down into the monster's mouth. Then, like a Bretonnian epicure devouring the flesh of an opened shellfish, it threw back its head and let the heart slide down into its open mouth. All this the king watched with wide, appalled eyes.\n\nThe daemon's throat swelled as it swallowed the whole heart and then it opened its mouth and gave an enormous belch of satisfaction.\n\nIt let the heartless, now dead thing which had once been the proud king of Karag Dum flop to the floor and turned to bellow its triumph to its assembled followers.\n\nFelix had a perfect view of the whole thing, for at that moment he and Gotrek had almost reached the Bloodthirster.\n\n\"I hope you enjoyed your last meal, daemon,\" Gotrek said. \"Now you die.\"\n\nThe daemon looked down at him and smiled. \"Your brain will be my desert,\" it said with terrible certainty.\n\nFor a moment the Slayer and the daemon stood frozen facing each other. Gotrek held his blazing axe poised to strike. A look of near-berserk fury transformed his face into something almost as terrifying as the daemon. The Bloodthirster flexed its wings with an audible snap and gestured mockingly for Gotrek to advance. Felix looked from Gotrek to the daemon to the corpse of Thangrim. He had heard that the brain could still live for moments after the heart ceased to beat. He knew that in Thangrim's case this was true, for it was what the daemon had willed in order to fulfil its unholy oath. Suddenly he was very angry, at the senseless cruelty of the daemon and the insane malignity of all of Chaos. He wanted to take his sword and plunge it into the daemon's breast.\n\nThe long frozen moment ended. Gotrek bellowed his war cry and charged. His axe flashed forward and down and buried itself in the daemon's chest. Blazing ichor belched forth, scorching the dwarf and sending him reeling backward for a moment. He recovered himself well and launched another blow. The Bloodthirster raised its claw to block it and another huge gash appeared in its arm. For a moment, Felix thought that in his fury Gotrek might overwhelm it, but the Bloodthirster stepped back out of the Slayer's reach and made a grasping gesture.\n\nIts huge axe sprang up out of the ground and flew into the daemon's hand in the time it took to blink. For a moment the daemon stood there. Felix could see that it had taken damage. The dwarf guard's sword still protruded from its back. Thangrim's hammer had left deep welts in its flesh, through which broken bones showed. Gotrek's axe had left two gaping wounds from which ichor dripped, smouldering to the floor. From its entire body rose a foul vapour like smoke. At times its outline seemed to waver and go out of focus as if it were not quite there. Then it snapped into being once again, becoming hard-edged and distinct.\n\nAnd it launched itself at the Slayer.\n\nThere was a flurry of blows much too fast for the mortal eye to follow. Felix had no idea how Gotrek survived the encounter but he did, reeling backwards with a great gash across his forehead and claw marks all across his chest. The Bloodthirster bore another great rent on its arm but appeared less damaged than the Slayer.\n\n\"I see you've had enough,\" Gotrek gasped defiantly.\n\nThe daemon laughed and prepared to spring forward once again. Felix steeled himself, knowing now that what he was about to do was suicide. He was going to die. It did not matter, Felix knew that if the Slayer fell, the daemon would overpower him in heartbeats, so he decided to get in his blow while he could. He sprang forward and struck with all his might at the daemon. The Templar Aldred's enchanted blade bit deep into the daemon's flesh. Felix pulled back the sword and tried for a second blow. The daemon turned to face him at the last second and sent him sprawling backwards with a mere buffet of its arm that nearly knocked the life from Felix.\n\nAs its claw made contact, something exploded against Felix's chest, sending a surge of pain flickering right through him. The Templar's blade was sent spinning from his hand. As he fell, he landed on something hard and heavy, and the wind was knocked from his lungs. He could hear what might have been a howl of unearthly agony coming from the Bloodthirster.\n\nGotrek took advantage of the distraction to spring forward and for a moment Felix thought the Slayer was going to be able to take the Bloodthirster. His axe flashed through a ferocious arc and almost connected but the Slayer's wounds slowed him and the daemon leapt aside and avoided the stroke which otherwise would have beheaded it. There followed another flurry of blows that were too fast for the eye to follow. They ended with Gotrek's axe being knocked from his hand. As the dwarf stood there, staggering, barely upright, the Bloodthirster smashed down with a mighty fist, slamming the Slayer to the ground. Gotrek fell prostrate at the daemon's feet. All hope fled from Felix's heart.\n\nHe reached down and tried to push himself upright. Looking down he could see the smouldering remains of Schreiber's amulet on his chest. The daemon's fist must have caught it when it struck him. The amulet had exploded, overloaded by the daemon's sheer power. Still, thought Felix, perhaps it had saved his life. Something had robbed the Bloodthirster's blow of much of its force. He was certain that it should have killed him \u2014 yet it had not.\n\nHe could not find his sword but his fingers clutched something hard and heavy. He realised that it was the Hammer of Fate. He tried to lift it but it would not move. It was not simply that it was too heavy, it was that some force kept it locked in place on the ground like the magnet which held maps in place on the airship.\n\nFelix cursed. They had come so close. The daemon was moving slowly now, breathing hard, ichor dripping from great rents in its flesh, barely able to maintain its form. One more blow would finish the thing, of that he was certain. He heaved until he thought his muscles would crack and still the accursed hammer would not move. It was a magic artefact, intended to be wielded only by dwarf heroes, and it was beyond the strength of mortal man to overcome its magic.\n\nThe Bloodthirster had bent down now over Gotrek, as it had over Thangrim. It reached down and enveloped the fallen Slayer's head with one mighty hand. Slowly it lifted him upwards.\n\nFelix knew what was coming next. The daemon would squeeze the dwarf's head until his skull shattered like a melon, then it would consume his brain and eat his immortal soul. Behind the triumphant daemon he could see the beastmen were crushing the last of the dwarfs' resistance. Varek stood at one of the pillars. The scholar had armed himself with a hammer from somewhere. A wave of frenzied beastmen closed in.\n\n\"Help me, Sigmar of the Hammer,\" Felix howled with a fervour which he had not felt since he was a frightened child. \"Help me, Grungni! Help me Grimnir! Help me, Valaya! Help me! Help me, damn you!\"\n\nAt the invocation of the gods' names, the runes on the hammer flickered and fire leapt back into them. Felix felt the weapon begin to come free of the ground. It was heavy at first but weighed progressively less as he lifted it, as if some other force was lending him the strength to overcome its vast weight. A burning pain shot through Felix's hand where he held the warhammer. He felt sparks scorching his sleeve. The taint of ozone filled his nostrils. The pain almost made him drop the thing. He fought to keep a grip on it while every nerve ending in his hand shrieked with agony. Somehow, he managed to maintain his hold.\n\nFelix knew he would only get one chance. He drew the hammer back for the cast. The daemon sensed the gathering of energies behind it and turned to face him, the Slayer held negligently in one hand, the way a man might hold a broken doll. The terrible eyes rested on Felix and for a moment he felt another surge of that familiar terror. He knew the daemon was about to spring, to rend him limb from limb and he would not be quick enough to stop it. He wrestled down his fear, smiled shyly and decided to try anyway.\n\nThe Bloodthirster dropped Gotrek and sprang, both claws outstretched, its mouth wide open, its fangs bared. Eyes through which hell looked out upon the world glared directly into Felix's soul. Its hideous odour filled his nostrils. The heat of its body radiated across the closing gap. Felix flung the sacred warhammer forward and released it. It hurtled forward like a falling meteor, trailing a comet tail of blazing lightning. It smashed directly into the daemon's head with a noise like a clap of thunder. The force of the impact stopped its headlong rush. It toppled over backwards but only for a moment. The Hammer of Fate glanced off it and flew into the gloom.\n\nSlowly the daemon pulled itself upright. Felix knew now that there was nothing he could do to stop it. Its victory was inevitable. He had done his best, and it had not been enough. He barely had the energy to stand, let alone flee from the creature. His chest was scorched. His hand felt like the flesh was peeling off the bone.\n\nThe Bloodthirster staggered forward, grinning evilly. The look in its ancient eyes told him that it knew what he was thinking and that it mocked his despair. Its enormous shadow fell across him. It flexed its wings, pulling the rune-carved blade free from its back and sending it flying across the chamber. It drew back its claws for the killing blow.\n\n\"Oi! You! I haven't finished with you yet!\" roared Gotrek's voice from behind it.\n\nThe monstrous head of his great, ancient axe suddenly protruded through the Bloodthirster's chest. As it did so, the daemon began to come apart, in a shower of red and gold sparks which transformed into stinking vapour. The thing started to vanish, like a fire burning down before their eyes. Through the fading mist Felix could see the bruised and battered form of the Slayer, barely able to stand upright. Slowly the Bloodthirster faded from view.\n\nBut Felix could still see the daemon's blazing eyes and its last words still echoed inside his head: I will remember you, mortals, and I have all eternity in which to take my vengeance.\n\nWonderful, thought Felix, that's all I need. The enmity of the favoured of Khorne! Still, his heart had lifted. The daemon was gone and the terrible fear that its presence had inflicted had vanished like morning mist in the light of the rising sun. Felix felt a weight fall from his shoulders that he had not even known was there, and a vast sense of relief filled him.\n\nGotrek reeled over to where the Hammer of Fate lay and picked it up. This time the weapon lifted easily and as it did so something strange started to happen. Bolts of lightning flickered between the hammer and the axe, creating a searing electrical arc. As they did so, the Slayer seemed to swell with barely contained power. His crest stood on end above his head. His beard bristled. His eyes blazed with an odd blue light.\n\n\"The gods mock me, manling!\" he roared in a voice that was as audible as a thunderclap. Bitterness twisted his face. \"I came here seeking my doom, and instead brought doom upon this place. Now, someone is going to pay.\"\n\nHe turned and walked back into the fray. The Hammer of Fate left a blurred trail of light behind it as it struck. His ancient, daemon-slaying axe smashed through a Chaos warrior and took a huge chunk out of one of the pillars behind him. An aura of fear surrounded him now, like the one that had surrounded the daemon, and the Chaos worshippers began to back away.\n\nGotrek let out a mighty battle cry and leapt into their midst, and a terrible slaying began. Filled with god-like power by the awesome weapons he held, the Slayer was invincible. His axe sheared through armour and flesh effortlessly; no weapon could stand against it. The hammer sent bolt after bolt of terrifying power out to lash the Chaos warriors like a daemon's whip.\n\nFelix watched appalled at the carnage the Slayer wrought until he saw his blade lying on the floor, forced his hand to grip it, and rushed down into the fray himself. In moments it was over. Dismayed by the fall of their leader, unable to withstand the invincible power of the angry Slayer, the remnants of the Chaos horde turned tail and fled." + }, + { + "title": "AFTERMATH", + "text": "Felix surveyed the Hall of the Well wearily. Corpses lay everywhere, evidence of a battle fought with insane ferocity on one side and unyielding dwarfish determination on the other. Dried blood carpeted the floor. The stench of death filled his nostrils.\n\nHe looked down at where Gotrek lay, pale and still, propped up against one of the pillars which supported the ceiling's roof. His entire chest was swathed in bandages and one arm was held immobile in a sling. Bruises covered the Slayer's head, evident even beneath his tattoos. The grip of the daemon had not been gentle. The fight with the Bloodthirster had come very near to killing the Slayer and the combat afterwards had not helped any. The Slayer's chest barely moved, as he struggled on the borderland between life and death. Not even Varek could say whether he would live or die.\n\nThe young dwarf looked up uncertainly. \"I have done my best for him. The rest is in the lap of the gods. It is a wonder he lives at all. I suspect only the power of the Hammer of Fate kept him alive as long as he was fighting.\"\n\nFelix wondered whether the time had finally arrived when he would have to record the Slayer's doom. It had certainly been an epic battle, all that Gotrek could have wanted for his end. The dwarfs had rallied at the sight of the daemon's banishment. The Chaos horde had lost all heart for the fight as the berserk Slayer ploughed through their midst, armed with his invincible weaponry, violent and deadly as some ancient divinity of war. Such was the slaughter Gotrek had wrought, it must have seemed to the Chaos worshippers that their vile gods had turned against them. In the end, demoralised and panicking, they had turned and fled the hall, leaving the dwarfs triumphant. Only then had Gotrek collapsed.\n\nSuch a victory had been bought at a hideous cost. Felix doubted that more than a score of the dwarfs survived and most of those had been hidden in the Vault when the fighting was on. If not for the power of the hammer and Gotrek's skill with the axe, he doubted that any of them would have lived. And it seemed that the Slayer might yet pay the ultimate price for their victory.\n\nSnorri limped through the dead, favouring his right leg. He did not look much better than Gotrek. His chest had been stitched together with whipcord. It was probably testimony to his awesome dwarfish toughness that he was still alive at all. No human could have survived the Bloodthirster's blow or the loss of blood which followed. A makeshift turban of bandages wrapped round his head made him look like a very short, very broad, and very stupid native of Araby. He whistled happily to himself as he surveyed the red ruin all around. But even he lost some of his cheerfulness when he looked down at Gotrek's recumbent form.\n\n\"Good fight,\" he said softly to no one in particular. Felix was about to disagree. He wanted to say that, in his opinion, there was no such thing as a good fight, there were only those you won and those you lost. Fighting was a dirty, messy, painful and dangerous business, and on the whole he had decided it was something that he would rather avoid.\n\nYet even as he thought this, Felix knew that he was trying to deceive himself. There was a bizarre elation in survival and awful joy to be found in victory, and he was not immune to it. And when he considered the alternatives to victory he found he was forced to agree with Snorri.\n\n\"Yes, it was a good fight,\" he said, though he wondered whether any of those lying dead on the cold stone floor would agree, were they able to speak.\n\nThe effort of talking made his own body ache. He inspected his hand. It was stiff and scorched from where he had held the Hammer of Fate as it discharged its lightning bolts. Even the opiate salves that Varek had applied could not dull the pain entirely. He wasn't entirely sure what magic had protected Thangrim from this sort of thing, but it obviously did not work for humans. Still, it had done its work and he shouldn't really complain about the sloppy way in which the gods had answered his prayers.\n\nLooking at the bandages which bound his hand, he now wondered how he had ever managed to keep fighting \u2014 but really he knew the answer. In the heat of battle, a man could endure pain that would floor him under normal circumstances. He had once seen a man continue to fight for some minutes after taking a wound that eventually killed him. Looking at his hand, he wondered if he would ever be able to wield a blade again. Or even the pen that would be needed to record the Slayer's death.\n\nVarek had assured him that he would, in time, but right now he was not so sure. Still, he supposed, he could always learn to wield a blade left-handed. He tried to draw the Templar's sword from the scabbard with his left hand but it felt all wrong. Still, there was time enough to learn.\n\nHis whole body ached and he wanted simply to lie down and sleep, but there was still much to do. Hargrim and the other dwarfs finished their discussion and strode over to him. Hargrim held the Hammer of Fate in his right hand. Felix noticed somewhat sourly that it had not burned him.\n\n\"We owe you a debt we can never pay, Felix Jaeger,\" Hargrim started. \"You have saved the honour of our people and prevented the sacred warhammer of our ancestors from falling into the hands of our foes.\"\n\nFelix smiled at the dwarf. \"You owe me nothing, Hargrim. The Hammer of Fate saved my life. There is no debt.\"\n\n\"Nobly spoken. Nevertheless, what we have is yours.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I just want to go home,\" Felix said, hoping he did not sound ungrateful.\n\n\"We will leave together,\" Hargrim said. Felix raised an eyebrow. \"There are too few of us now to defend this place, and the Dark Ones surely now know of its location. It is only a matter of time before they return. It is time to take our Book of Grudges and the hammer and what we can carry of our hoard, and leave.\"\n\n\"I believe there is enough room on the Spirit of Grungni, Felix,\" said Varek. He looked on Felix respectfully, as if seeking his approval for the decision. Obviously wielding the Hammer of Fate had given him some status among the dwarfs. \"There are only twenty-two dwarfs of Karag Dum now and if we clear the hold and double up in the cabins there will be space enough.\"\n\n\"I am sure you are correct,\" Felix said.\n\n\"It is imperative that we get the sacred warhammer away from here. And as much of the dwarfhoard as we can carry.\"\n\n\"Of course it is,\" Felix said, looking at the chests the dwarfs were bearing out of the hidden vault. \"But I worry about how we are going to get everything out. We have to find our way through the Chaos worshippers. And we are too weak and too few to fight.\"\n\nHargrim grinned. \"Do not worry about that, Felix Jaeger. There are still many secret paths through Karag Dum which are known only to the dwarfs.\"\n\nFelix looked over at the recumbent Gotrek, who looked far too pale and feeble to be moved. \"What about Gotrek and the other wounded?\" he said. Perhaps they should wait for the Slayer to die and bury him here in the vault along with the other heroes of the battle.\n\n\"When I'm too weak to walk, manling, I will be too weak to live,\" came a voice from the Trollslayer. Gotrek's one good eye slowly opened. They all hurried over as he forced himself upright.\n\n\"Then, by all means, let us get going,\" Felix said happily.\n\nThe Slayer looked around at the field of battle. \"It seems my doom has eluded me yet again,\" he said sourly.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Felix said. \"I'm sure some other doom awaits!\"\n\nThanquol pulled back the curtain of his palanquin and blinked as the unaccustomed light crashed into his retina. He had just emerged from the Underways into the day. The bright summer sun of northern Kislev glared down on him like the watching eye of some pitiless god.\n\nHe looked out into the awesome crater of Hell Pit. Beneath him he could see the enormous fortress of Clan Moulder. A sense of satisfaction filled him. He had driven his exhausted bearers for days to reach his goal.\n\n\"Move quick-quick!\" he ordered the panting slaves. \"We still have a great distance to go!\"\n\nSlowly the bearers stumbled down the slope.\n\nEerie echoes erupted from the oddly sculpted towers. Great beasts roared. The smell of monsters and warpstone made Thanquol's nostrils twitch.\n\nHere he knew he would find the allies he needed to capture the airship and take his inevitable revenge on Gurnisson and Jaeger. Already he could see skaven warriors accompanied by misshapen shambling beasts coming to greet him.\n\nNow, if only he could re-establish contact with his minion Lurk Snitchtongue, things would be well. He wondered what Lurk was up to right now.\n\nLurk was not quite sure what those stupid dwarfs were up to, but he knew that soon the time would be right for him to act. He felt strong and certain that the Horned Rat was with him. Now, he waited only for his opportunity to strike. If the situation called for action, he would not wait. Oh no. He would spring out and overwhelm his foes.\n\nMaybe.\n\nProvided there weren't too many of them." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Shannara 15) Morgawr", + "author": "Terry Brooks", + "genres": [ + "fantasy" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "The figure appeared out of the shadows of the alcove so quickly that Sen Dunsidan was almost on top of it before he realized it was there. The hallway leading to his sleeping chamber was dark with nightfall's shadows, and the light from the wall lamps cast only scattered halos of fuzzy brightness. The lamps gave no help in this instance, and the Minister of Defense was given no chance either to flee or defend himself.\n\n\"A word, if you please, Minister.\"\n\nThe intruder was cloaked and hooded, and although Sen Dunsidan was reminded at once of the Ilse Witch he knew without question that it was not she. This was a man, not a woman \u2014 too much size and bulk to be anything else, and the words were rough and masculine. The witch's small, slender form and cool, smooth voice were missing. She had come to him only a week earlier, before departing on her voyage aboard Black Moclips, tracking the Druid Walker and his company to an unknown destination. Now this intruder, cloaked and hooded in the same manner, had appeared in the same way \u2014 at night and unannounced. He wondered at once what the connection was between the two.\n\nMasking his surprise and the hint of fear that clutched at his chest, Sen Dunsidan nodded. \"Where would you like to share this word?\"\n\n\"Your sleeping chamber will do.\"\n\nA big man himself, still in the prime of his life, the Minister of Defense nevertheless felt dwarfed by the other. It was more than simply size, it was presence, as well. The intruder exuded strength and confidence not usually encountered in ordinary men. Sen Dunsidan did not ask how he had managed to gain entry to the closely guarded, walled compound. He did not ask how he had moved unchallenged to the upper floor of his quarters. Such questions were pointless. He simply accepted that the intruder was capable of this and much more. He did as he was bidden. He walked past with a deferential bow, opened his bedroom door, and beckoned the other inside.\n\nThe lights were lit here, as well, though no more brightly than in the hallway without, and the intruder moved at once into the shadows.\n\n\"Sit down, Minister, and I will tell you what I want.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan sat in a high-backed chair and crossed his legs comfortably. His fear and surprise had faded. If the other meant him harm, he would not have bothered to announce himself. He wanted something that a Minister of Defense of the Federation's Coalition Council could offer, so there was no particular cause for concern. Not yet, anyway. That could change if he could not supply the answers the other sought. But Sen Dunsidan was a master at telling others what they expected to hear.\n\n\"Some cold ale?\" he asked.\n\n\"Pour some for yourself, Minister.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan hesitated, surprised by insistence in the other's voice. Then he rose and walked to the table at his bedside that held the ice bucket, ale pitcher nestled within it, and several glasses. He stood looking down at the ale as he poured, his long silver hair hanging loose about his shoulders save where it was braided above the ears, as was the current fashion. He did not like what he was feeling now, uncertainty come so swiftly on the heels of newfound confidence. He had better be careful of this man, step lightly.\n\nHe walked back to his chair and reseated himself, sipping at the ale. His strong face turned toward the other, a barely visible presence amid the shadows.\n\n\"I have something to ask of you,\" the intruder said softly.\n\nSen Dunsidan nodded and made an expansive gesture with one hand.\n\nThe intruder shifted slightly. \"Be warned, Minister. Do not think to placate me with promises you do not intend to keep. I am not here to waste my time on fools who think to dismiss me with empty words. If I sense you dissemble, I will simply kill you and have done with it. Do you understand?\"\n\nSen Dunsidan took a deep breath to steady himself. \"I understand.\"\n\nThe other said nothing further for a moment, then moved out from the deep shadows to the edges of the light. \"I am called the Morgawr. I am mentor to the Ilse Witch.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" The Minister of Defense nodded. He had not been wrong about the similarities of appearance.\n\nThe cloaked form moved a little closer. \"You and I are about to form a partnership, Minister. A new partnership, one to replace that which you shared with my pupil. She no longer has need of you. She will not come to see you again. But I will. Often.\"\n\n\"Does she know this?\" Dunsidan asked softly.\n\n\"She knows nowhere near as much as she thinks.\" The other's voice was hard and low. \"She has decided to betray me, and for her infidelity she will be punished. I will administer her punishment when I see her next. This does not concern you, save that you should know why you will not see her again. All these years, I have been the force behind her efforts. I have been the one who gave her the power to form alliances like the one she shared with you. But she breaches my trust and thus forfeits my protection. She is of no further use.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan took a long pull on his ale and set the glass aside.\n\n\"You will forgive me, sir, if I voice a note of skepticism. I don't know you, but I do know her. I know what she can do. I know what happens to those who betray her, and I do not intend to become one of them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would do better to be afraid of me. I am the one who stands here in front of you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But the Dark Lady has a way of showing up when least expected. Show me her head, and I will be more than happy to discuss a new agreement.\"\n\nThe cloaked figure laughed softly. \"Well spoken, Minister. You offer a politician's answer to a tough demand. But I think you must reconsider. Look at me.\"\n\nHe reached up for his hood and pulled it away to reveal his face. It was the face of the Ilse Witch, youthful and smooth and filled with danger. Sen Dunsidan started in spite of himself. Then the girl's face changed, almost as if it were a mirage, and became Sen Dunsidan's \u2014 hard planes and edges, piercing blue eyes, silvery hair worn long, and a half smile that seemed ready to promise anything.\n\n\"You and I are very much alike, Minister.\"\n\nThe face changed again. Another took its place, the face of a younger man, but it was no one Sen Dunsidan had ever seen. It was nondescript, bland to the point of being forgettable, devoid of interesting or memorable features.\n\n\"Is this who I really am, Minister? Do I reveal myself now?\" He paused. \"Or am I really like this?\"\n\nThe face shimmered and changed into something monstrous, a reptilian visage with a blunt snout and slits for eyes. Rough, gray scales coated a weathered face, and a wide, serrated mouth opened to reveal rows of sharply pointed teeth. Gimlet eyes, hate-filled and poisonous, glimmered with green fire.\n\nThe intruder pulled the hood back into place, and his face disappeared into the resulting shadows. Sen Dunsidan sat motionless in his chair. He was all too aware of what he was being told. This man had the use of a very powerful magic. At the very least, he could shape-shift, and it was likely he could do much more than that. He was a man who enjoyed the excesses of power as much as the Minister of Defense did, and he would use that power in whatever way he felt he must to get what he wanted.\n\n\"I said we were alike, Minister,\" the intruder whispered. \"We both appear as one thing when in truth we are another. I know you. I know you as I know myself. You would do anything to further your power in the hierarchy of the Federation. You indulge yourself in pleasures that are forbidden to other men. You covet what you cannot have and scheme to secure it. You smile and feign friendship when in truth you are the very serpent your enemies fear.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan kept his politician's smile in place. What was it this creature wanted of him?\n\n\"I tell you all this not to anger you, Minister, but to make certain you do not mistake my intent. I am here to help you further your ambitions in exchange for help you can in turn supply to me. I desire to pursue the witch on her voyage. I desire to be there when she does battle with the Druid, as I am certain she must. I desire to catch her with the magic she pursues, because I intend to take it from her and then to take her life. But to accomplish this, I will need a fleet of airships and the men to crew them.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan stared at him in disbelief. \"What you ask is impossible.\"\n\n\"Nothing is impossible, Minister.\" The black robes shifted with a soft rustle as the intruder crossed the room. \"Is what I ask any more impossible than what you seek?\"\n\nThe Minister of Defense hesitated. \"Which is what?\"\n\n\"To be Prime Minister. To take control of the Coalition Council once and for all. To rule the Federation, and by doing so, the Four Lands.\"\n\nA number of thoughts passed swiftly through Sen Dunsidan's mind, but all of them came down to one. The intruder was right. Sen Dunsidan would do anything to make himself Prime Minister and control the Coalition Council. Even the Ilse Witch had known of this ambition, though she had never voiced it in such a way as this, a way that suggested it might be within reach.\n\n\"Both seem impossible to me,\" he answered the other carefully.\n\n\"You fail to see what I am telling you,\" the intruder said. \"I am telling you why I will prove a better ally than the little witch. Who stands between you and your goal? The Prime Minister, who is hardy and well? He will serve long years before he steps down. His chosen successor, the Minister of the Treasury, Jaren Arken? He is a man younger than you and equally powerful, equally ruthless. He aspires to be Minister of Defense, doesn't he? He seeks your position on the council.\"\n\nA cold rage swept through Sen Dunsidan on hearing those words. It was true, of course \u2014 all of it. Arken was his worst enemy, a man slippery and elusive as a snake, cold-blooded and reptilian through and through. He wanted the man dead, but had not yet figured out a way to accomplish it. He had asked the Ilse Witch for help, but whatever other exchange of favors she was willing to accept, she had always refused to kill for him.\n\n\"What is your offer, Morgawr?\" he asked bluntly, tiring of this game.\n\n\"Only this. By tomorrow night, the men who stand in your way will be no more. No blame or suspicion will attach to you. The position you covet will be yours for the taking. No one will oppose you. No one will question your right to lead. This is what I can do for you. In exchange, you must do what I ask \u2014 give me the ships and the men to sail them. A Minister of Defense can do this, especially when he stands to become Prime Minister.\"\n\nThe other's voice became a whisper. \"Accept the partnership I am offering, so that not only may we help each other now, but we may help each other again when it becomes necessary.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan took a long moment to consider what was being asked. He badly wanted to be Prime Minister. He would do anything to secure the position. But he mistrusted this creature, this Morgawr, a thing not entirely human, a wielder of magic that could undo a man before he had time to realize what was happening. He was still unconvinced of the advisability of doing what he was being asked to do. He was afraid of the Ilse Witch, he could admit that to himself if to no one else. If he crossed her and she found out, he was a dead man, \u2014 she would hunt him down and destroy him. On the other hand, if the Morgawr was to destroy her as he said he would, then Sen Dunsidan would do well to rethink his concerns.\n\nA bird in the hand, it was commonly accepted, was worth two in the bush. If a path to the position of Prime Minister of the Coalition Council could be cleared, almost any risk was worth the taking.\n\n\"What sort of airships do you need?\" he asked quietly. \"How many?\"\n\n\"Are we agreed on a partnership, Minister? Yes or no. Don't equivocate. Don't attach conditions. Yes or no.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan was still uncertain, but he could not pass up the chance to advance his own fortunes. Yet when he spoke the word that sealed his fate, he felt as if he were breathing fire. \"Yes.\"\n\nThe Morgawr moved like liquid night, sliding along the edges of the shadows as he eased across the bedchamber. \"So be it. I will be back after sunset tomorrow to let you know what your end of the bargain will be.\"\n\nThen he was through the doorway and gone.\n\nSen Dunsidan slept poorly that night, plagued by dreams and wakefulness, burdened with the knowledge that he had sold himself at a price that had yet to be determined and might prove too costly to pay. Yet, while lying awake between bouts of fretful sleep, he pondered the enormity of what might take place, and he could not help but be excited. Surely no price was too great if it meant he would become Prime Minister. A handful of ships and a complement of men, neither of which he cared overmuch about \u2014 these were nothing to him. In truth, to gain control of the Federation, he would have obligated himself for much more. In truth, he would have paid any price.\n\nYet it still might all come to nothing. It might prove nothing more than a fantasy given to test his willingness to abandon the witch as an ally.\n\nBut when he woke and while he was dressing to go to the Council chambers, word reached him that the Prime Minister was dead. The man had gone to sleep and never woken, \u2014 his heart stopped while he lay in his bed. It was odd, given his good health and relatively young age, but life was filled with surprises.\n\nSen Dunsidan felt a surge of pleasure and expectation at the news. He allowed himself to believe that the unthinkable might actually be within reach, that the Morgawr's word might be better than he had dared to hope. Prime Minister Dunsidan, he whispered to himself, deep inside, where his darkest secrets lay hidden.\n\nHe arrived at the Coalition Council chambers before he learned that Jaren Arken was dead, as well. The Minister of the Treasury, responding to the news of the Prime Minister's sudden passing, had rushed from his home in response, the prospect of filling the leadership void no doubt foremost in his thoughts, and had fallen on the steps leading down to the street. He had struck his head on the stone carvings at the bottom. By the time his servants had reached him, he was gone.\n\nSen Dunsidan took the news in stride, no longer surprised, only pleased and excited. He put on his mourner's face, and he offered his politician's responses to all those who approached \u2014 and there were many now, because he was the one the Council members were already turning to. He spent the day arranging funerals and tributes, speaking to one and all of his own sorrow and disappointment, all the while consolidating his power. Two such important and effective leaders dead at a single stroke, a strong man must be found to fill the void left by their passing. He offered himself and promised to do the best job he could on behalf of those who supported him.\n\nBy nightfall, the talk was no longer of the dead men, the talk was all of him.\n\nHe sat waiting in his chambers for a long time after sunset, speculating on what would happen when the Morgawr returned. That he would, to claim his end of the bargain, was a given. What exactly he would ask was less certain. He would not threaten, but the threat was there nevertheless: if he could so easily dispose of a Prime Minister and a Minister of the Treasury, how much harder could it be to dispose of a recalcitrant Minister of Defense? Sen Dunsidan was in this business now all the way up to his neck. There could be no talk of backing away. The best he could hope for was to mitigate the payment the Morgawr would seek to exact.\n\nIt was almost midnight before the other appeared, slipping soundlessly through the doorway of the bedchamber, all black robes and menace. By then, Sen Dunsidan had consumed several glasses of ale and was regretting it.\n\n\"Impatient, Minister?\" the Morgawr asked softly, moving at once into the shadows. \"Did you think I wasn't coming?\"\n\n\"I knew you would come. What do you want?\"\n\n\"So abrupt? Not even time for a thank you? I've made you Prime Minister. All that is required is a vote by the Coalition Council, a matter of procedure only. When will that occur?\"\n\n\"A day or two. All right, you've kept your end of the bargain. What is mine to be?\"\n\n\"Ships of the line, Minister. Ships that can withstand a long journey and a battle at its end. Ships that can transport men and equipment to secure what is needed. Ships that can carry back the treasures I expect to find.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan shook his head doubtfully. \"Such ships are hard to come by. All we have are committed to the Prekkendorran. If I were to pull out, say, a dozen \u2014\"\n\n\"Two dozen would be closer to what I had in mind,\" the other interrupted smoothly.\n\nTwo dozen? The Minister of Defense exhaled slowly. \"Two dozen, then. But that many ships missing from the line would be noticed and questioned. How will I explain it?\"\n\n\"You are about to become Prime Minister. You don't have to explain.\" There was a hint of impatience in the rough voice. \"Take them from the Rovers, if your own are in short supply.\"\n\nDunsidan took a quick sip of the ale he shouldn't be drinking. \"The Rovers are neutral in this struggle. Mercenaries, but neutral. If I confiscate their ships, they will refuse to build more.\"\n\n\"I said nothing of confiscation. Steal them, then lay the blame elsewhere.\"\n\n\"And the men to crew them? What sort of men do you require? Must I steal them, as well?\"\n\n\"Take them from the prisons. Men who have sailed and fought aboard airships. Elves, Bordermen, Rovers, whatever. Give me enough of these to make my crews. But do not expect me to give them back again. When I have used them up, I intend to throw them away. They will not be fit for anything else.\"\n\nThe hair stood on the back of Sen Dunsidan's neck. Two hundred men, tossed away like old shoes. Damaged, ruined, unfit for wear. What did that mean? He had a sudden urge to flee the room, to run and keep running until he was so far away he couldn't remember where he had come from.\n\n\"I'll need time to arrange this, a week perhaps.\" He tried to keep his voice steady. \"Two dozen ships missing from anywhere will be talked about. Men from the prisons will be missed. I have to think about how this can be done. Must you have so many of each to undertake your pursuit?\"\n\nThe Morgawr went still. \"You seem incapable of doing anything I ask of you without questioning it. Why is that? Did I ask you how to go about removing those men who would keep you from being Prime Minister?\"\n\nSen Dunsidan realized suddenly that he had gone too far. \"No, no, of course not. It was just that I \u2014\n\n\"Give me the men tonight,\" the other interrupted.\n\n\"But I need time.\"\n\n\"You have them in your prisons, here in the city. Arrange for their release now.\"\n\n\"There are rules about releasing prisoners.\"\n\n\"Break them.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan felt as if he were standing in quicksand and sinking fast. But he couldn't seem to find a way to save himself.\n\n\"Give me my crews tonight, Minister,\" the other hissed softly. \"You, personally. A show of trust to persuade me that my efforts at removing the men who stood in your path were justified. Let's be certain your commitment to our new partnership is more than just words.\"\n\n\"But I \u2014\"\n\nThe other man moved swiftly out of the shadows and snatched hold of the front of the Minister's shirt. \"I think you require a demonstration. An example of what happens to those who question me.\" The fingers tightened in the fabric, iron rods that lifted Sen Dunsidan to the tips of his boots. \"You're shaking, Minister. Can it be that I have your full attention at last?\"\n\nSen Dunsidan nodded wordlessly, so frightened he did not trust himself to speak.\n\n\"Good. Now come with me.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan exhaled sharply as the other released his grip and stepped away. \"Where?\"\n\nThe Morgawr moved past him, opened the bedchamber door, and looked back out of the shadows of his hood. \"To the prisons, Minister, to get my men.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Together, the Morgawr and Sen Dunsidan passed down the halls of the Minister's house, through the gates of the compound, and outside into the night. None of the guards or servants they passed spoke to them. No one seemed even to see them. Magic, Sen Dunsidan thought helplessly. He stifled the urge to cry out for help, knowing there was none.\n\nInsanity.\n\nBut he had made his choice.\n\nAs they walked the dark, empty streets of the city, the Minister of Defense gathered the shards of his shattered composure, one jagged piece at a time. If he was to survive this night, he must do better than he was doing now. The Morgawr already thought him weak and foolish, \u2014 if he thought him useless, as well, he would discard him in an instant. Walking steadily, taking strong strides, deep breaths, Sen Dunsidan mustered his courage and his resolve. Remember who you are, he told himself. Remember what is at stake.\n\nBeside him, the Morgawr walked on, never looking at him, never speaking to him, never evidencing even once that he had any interest in him at all.\n\nThe prisons were situated at the west edge of the Federation Army barracks, close by the swift flowing waters of the Rappahalladran. They formed a dark and formidable collection of pitted stone towers and walls. Narrow slits served as windows, and iron spikes ringed the parapets. Sen Dunsidan, as Minister of Defense, visited the prisons regularly, and he had heard the stories. No one ever escaped. Now and then those incarcerated would find their way into the river, thinking to swim to the far side and flee into the forests. No one ever made it. The currents were treacherous and strong. Sooner or later, the bodies washed ashore and were hung from the walls where others in the prisons could see them.\n\nAs they drew close, Sen Dunsidan mustered sufficient resolve to draw close again to the Morgawr.\n\n\"What do you intend to do when we get inside?\" he asked, keeping his voice strong and steady. \"I need to know what to say if you want to avoid having to hypnotize the entire garrison.\"\n\nThe Morgawr laughed softly. \"Feeling a bit more like your old self, Minister? Very well. I want a room in which to speak with prospective members of my crew. I want them brought to me one by one, starting with a Captain or someone in authority. I want you to be there to watch what happens.\"\n\nDunsidan nodded, trying not to think what that meant.\n\n\"Next time, Minister, think twice before you make a promise you do not intend to keep,\" the other hissed, his voice rough and hard-edged. \"I have no patience with liars and fools. You do not strike me as either, but then you are good at becoming what you must in your dealings with others, aren't you?\"\n\nSen Dunsidan said nothing. There was nothing to say. He kept his thoughts focused on what he would do once they were inside the prisons. There, he would be more in control of things, more on familiar ground. There, he could do more to demonstrate his worth to this dangerous creature.\n\nRecognizing Sen Dunsidan at once, the gate watch admitted them without question. Snapping to attention in their worn leathers, they released the locks on the gates. Inside, the smells were of dampness and rot and human excrement, foul and rank. Sen Dunsidan asked the Duty Officer for a specific interrogation room, one with which he was familiar, one removed from everything else, buried deep in the bowels of the prisons. A turnkey led them down a long corridor to the room he had requested, a large chamber with walls that leaked moisture and a floor that had buckled. A table to which had been fastened iron chains and clamps sat at its center. To one side, a wooden rack lined with implements of torture was pushed against the wall. A single oil lamp lit the gloom.\n\n\"Wait here,\" Sen Dunsidan told the Morgawr. \"Let me persuade the right men to come to you.\"\n\n\"Start with one,\" the Morgawr ordered, moving off into the shadows.\n\nSen Dunsidan hesitated, then went out through the door with the turnkey. The turnkey was a hulking, gnarled man who had served seven terms on the front, a lifetime soldier in the Federation Army. He was scarred inside and out, having witnessed and survived atrocities that would have destroyed the minds of other men. He never spoke, but he knew well enough what was going on and seemed unconcerned with it. Sen Dunsidan had used him on occasion to question recalcitrant prisoners. The man was good at inflicting pain and ignoring pleas for mercy \u2014 perhaps even better at that than keeping his mouth shut.\n\nOddly enough, the Minister had never learned his name. Down here, they called him Turnkey, as if the title itself were name enough for a man who did what he did.\n\nThey passed down a dozen small corridors and through a handful of doors to where the main cells were located. The larger ones held prisoners who had been taken from the Prekkendorran. Some would be ransomed or traded for Free-born prisoners. Some would die here. Sen Dunsidan indicated to the turnkey the one that housed those who had been prisoners longest.\n\n\"Unlock it.\"\n\nThe turnkey unlocked the door without a word.\n\nSen Dunsidan took a torch from its rack on the wall. \"Close the door behind me. Don't open it until I tell you I am ready to come out,\" he ordered.\n\nThen he stepped boldly inside.\n\nThe room was large, damp, and rank with the smells of caged men. A dozen heads turned as one on his entry. An equal number lifted from the soiled pallets on the floor. Other men stirred, fitfully. Most were still asleep.\n\n\"Wake up!\" he snapped.\n\nHe held up the torch to show them who he was, then stuck it in a stanchion next to the door. The men were beginning to stand now, whispers and grunts passing between them. He waited until they were all awake, a ragged bunch with dead eyes and ravaged faces. Some of them had been locked down here for almost three years. Most had given up hope of ever getting out. The small sounds of their shuffling echoed in the deep, pervasive silence, a constant reminder of how helpless they were.\n\n\"You know me,\" he said to them. \"Many of you I have spoken with. You have been here a long time. Too long. I am going to give all of you a chance to get out. You won't be doing any more fighting in the war. You won't be going home \u2014 not for a while. But you will be outside these walls and back on an airship. Are you interested?\"\n\nThe man he had depended upon to speak for the others took a step forward. \"What are you after?\"\n\nHis name was Darish Venn. He was a Borderman who had captained one of the first Free-born airships brought into the war on the Prekkendorran. He had distinguished himself in battle many times before his ship went down and he was captured. The other men respected and trusted him. As senior officer, he had formed them into groups and given them positions, small and insignificant to those who were free men, but of crucial importance to those locked away down here.\n\n\"Captain.\" Sen Dunsidan acknowledged him with a nod. \"I need men to go on a voyage across the Blue Divide. A long voyage, from which some may not return. I won't deny there is danger. I don't have the sailors to spare for this, or the money to hire Rover mercenaries. But the Federation can spare you. Federation soldiers will accompany those who agree to accept the conditions I am offering, so there will be some protection offered and order imposed. Mostly, you will be out of here and you won't have to come back. The voyage will take a year, maybe two. You will be your own crew, your own company, as long as you go where you are told.\"\n\n\"Why would you do this now, after so long?\" Darish Venn asked.\n\n\"I can't tell you that.\"\n\n\"Why should we trust you?\" another asked boldly.\n\n\"Why not? What difference does it make, if it gets you out of here? If I wanted to do you harm, it would be easy enough, wouldn't it? What I want are sailors willing to make a voyage. What you want is your freedom. A trade seems a good compromise for both of us.\"\n\n\"We could take you prisoner and trade you for our freedom and not have to agree to anything!\" the man snapped ominously.\n\nSen Dunsidan nodded. \"You could. But what would be the consequences of that? Besides, do you think I would come down here and expose myself to harm without any protection?\"\n\nThere was a quick exchange of whispers. Sen Dunsidan held his ground and kept his strong face composed. He had exposed himself to greater risks than this one, and he was not afraid of these men. The results of failure to do what the Morgawr had asked frightened him a good deal more.\n\n\"You want all of us?\" Darish Venn asked.\n\n\"All who choose to come. If you refuse, then you stay where you are. The choice is yours.\" He paused a moment, as if considering. His leonine profile lifted into the light, and a reflective look settled over his craggy features. \"I will make a bargain with you, Captain. If you like, I will show you a map of the place we are going. If you approve of what you see, then you sign on then and there. If not, you can return and tell the others.\"\n\nThe Borderman nodded. Perhaps he was too worn down and too slowed by his imprisonment to think it through clearly. Perhaps he was just anxious for a way out. \"All right, I'll come.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan rapped on the door, and the turnkey opened it for him. He beckoned Captain Venn to go first, then left the room. The turnkey locked the door, and Dunsidan could hear the scuffling of feet as those still locked within pressed up against the doorway to listen.\n\n\"Just down the hallway, Captain,\" he advised loudly for their benefit. \"I'll arrange for a glass of ale, as well.\"\n\nThey walked down the passageways to the room where the Morgawr waited, their footsteps echoing in the silence. No one spoke. Sen Dunsidan glanced at the Borderman. He was a big man, tall and broad shouldered, though stooped and thin from his imprisonment, his face skeletal and his skin pale and crusted with dirt and sores. The Free-born had tried to trade for him many times, but the Federation knew the value of airship Captains and preferred to keep him locked away and off the battlefield.\n\nWhen they reached the room where the Morgawr waited, Sen Dunsidan opened the door for Venn, motioned for the turnkey to wait outside, and closed the door behind him as he followed the Borderman in. Venn glanced around at the implements of torture and chains, then looked at Dunsidan.\n\n\"What is this?\"\n\nThe Minister of Defense shrugged and smiled disarmingly. \"It was the best I could do.\" He indicated one of the three-legged stools tucked under the table. \"Sit down and let's talk.\"\n\nThere was no sign of the Morgawr. Had he left? Had he decided all this was a waste of time and he would be better off handling matters himself? For a moment, Sen Dunsidan panicked. But then he felt something move in the shadows \u2014 felt, rather than saw.\n\nHe moved to the other side of the table from Darish Venn, drawing the Captain's attention away from the swirling darkness behind him. \"The voyage will take us quite a distance from the Four Lands, Captain,\" he said, his face taking on a serious cast. Behind Venn, the Morgawr began to materialize. \"A good deal of preparation will be necessary. Someone with your experience will have no trouble provisioning the ships we intend to take. A dozen or more will be needed, I think.\"\n\nThe Morgawr, huge and black, slid out of the shadows without a sound and came up behind Venn. The Borderman neither heard nor sensed him, just stared straight at Sen Dunsidan.\n\n\"Naturally, you will be in charge of your men, of choosing which ones will undertake which tasks...\"\n\nA hand slid out of the Morgawr's black robes, gnarled and covered with scales. It clamped on the back of Darish Venn's neck, and the airship Captain gave a sharp gasp. Twisting and thrashing, he tried to break free, but the Morgawr held him firmly in place. Sen Dunsidan stepped back a pace, his words dying in his throat as he watched the struggle. Darish Venn's eyes were fixed on him, maddened but helpless. The Morgawr's other hand emerged, shimmering with a wicked green light. Slowly the pulsating hand moved toward the back of the Borderman's head. Sen Dunsidan caught his breath. Clawed fingers stretched, touching the hair, then the skin.\n\nDarish Venn screamed.\n\nThe fingers slid inside his head, pushing through hair and skin and bone as if the whole of it were made of soft clay. Sen Dunsidan's throat tightened and his stomach lurched. The Morgawr's hand was all the way inside the skull now, twisting slowly, as if searching. The Captain had stopped screaming and thrashing. The light had gone out of his eyes, and his face had gone slack. His look was dull and lifeless.\n\nThe Morgawr withdrew his hand from the Borderman's head, and it was steaming and wet as it slid back into the black robes and out of sight. The Morgawr was breathing so loudly that Sen Dunsidan could hear him, a kind of rapturous panting, rife with sounds of satisfaction and pleasure.\n\n\"You cannot know, Minister,\" he whispered, \"how good it feels to feed on another's life. Such ecstasy!\"\n\nHe stepped back, releasing Venn. \"There. It is done. He is ours now, to do with as we wish. He is a walking dead man with no will of his own. He will do whatever he is told to do. He keeps his skills and his experience, but he no longer cares to think for himself. A useful tool, Minister. Take a look at him.\"\n\nReluctantly, Sen Dunsidan did so. It was not an invitation, \u2014 it was a command. He studied the blank, lifeless eyes, revulsion turning to horror as they began to lose color and definition and turn milky white and vacant. He moved around the table cautiously, looking for the wound in the back of the Borderman's head where the Morgawr's hand had forced entry. To his astonishment, there wasn't one. The skull was undamaged. It was as if nothing had happened.\n\n\"Test him, Minister.\" The Morgawr was laughing. \"Tell him to do something.\"\n\nSen Dunsidan fought to keep his composure. \"Stand up,\" he ordered Darish Venn in a voice he could barely recognize as his own.\n\nThe Borderman rose. He never looked at Sen Dunsidan or gave recognition that he knew what was happening. His eyes stayed dead and blank, and his face had lost all expression.\n\n\"He is the first, but only the first,\" the Morgawr hissed, anxious now and impatient. \"A long night stretches ahead of us. Go now, and bring me another. I am already hungry for a fresh taste! Go! Bring me six, but bid them enter one by one. Go quickly!\"\n\nSen Dunsidan went out the door without a word. An image of a scaly hand steaming and wet with human matter was fixed in his mind and would not give up its hold on him.\n\nHe brought more men to the room that night, so many he lost count of them. He brought them in small groups and had them enter singly. He watched as their bodies were violated and their minds destroyed. He stood by without lifting a finger to aid them as they were changed from whole men into shells. It was strange, but after Darish Venn, he couldn't remember any of their faces. They were all one to him. They were all the same man.\n\nWhen the room grew too crowded with them, he was ordered to lead them out and turn them over to the turnkey to place in a larger chamber. The turnkey took them away without comment, without even looking at them. But once, after maybe fifty or so, the ruined face and the hard eyes found Sen Dunsidan with a look that left him in tears. The look bore guilt and accusation, horror and despair, and above all unmitigated rage. This was wrong, the look said. This went beyond anything imaginable. This was madness.\n\nAnd yet the turnkey did nothing either.\n\nThe two of them, accomplices to an unspeakable crime.\n\nThe two of them, silent participants in the perpetration of a monstrous wrong.\n\nSo many men did Sen Dunsidan help destroy, men who walked to their doom with nothing to offer in their defense, decoyed by a politician's false words and reassuring looks. He did not know how he managed it. He did not know how he survived what it made him feel. Each time the Morgawr's hand emerged wet and dripping with human life, another feasting complete, the Minister of Defense thought he would run screaming into the night. Yet the presence of Death was so overpowering that it transcended everything else in those terrible hours, paralyzing him. While the Morgawr feasted, Sen Dunsidan watched and was unable even to look away.\n\nUntil finally, the Morgawr was sated. \"Enough for now,\" he hissed, glutted and drunk on stolen life. \"Tomorrow night, Minister, we will finish this.\"\n\nHe rose and walked away, taking his dead with him into the night, shadows on the wind.\n\nThe dawn broke and the day came, but Sen Dunsidan saw none of it. He shut himself away and did not come out. He lay in his roorr and tried to banish the image of the Morgawr's hand. He dozed anc tried to forget the way his skin crawled at the slightest sound of human voice. Queries were made after his health. He was needed in the Council chambers. A vote on the position of Prime Minister was imminent. Reassurances were sought. Sen Dunsidan no longer cared. He wished he had never put himself in this position. He wished he were dead.\n\nBy nightfall, the turnkey was. Even given the harshness of his life and the toughness of his mind, he could not bear what he had witnessed. When no one else was about, he went down into the bowels of the prison and hung himself in a vacant cell.\n\nOr did he? Sen Dunsidan could not be certain. Perhaps it was murder made to look like suicide. Perhaps the Morgawr did not want the turnkey alive.\n\nPerhaps Sen Dunsidan was next.\n\nBut what could he do to save himself?\n\nThe Morgawr came again at midnight, and again Sen Dunsidan went with him into the prisons. This time Dunsidan dismissed the new turnkey and handled all the extraneous work himself. He was numb to it by now, inured to the screams, the wet and steaming hand, the grunts of horror from the men, and the sighs of satisfaction from the Morgawr. He was no longer a part of it, gone somewhere else, somewhere so far away that what happened here, in this place and on this night, meant nothing. It would be over by dawn, and when it was, Sen Dunsidan would be another man in another life. He would transcend this one and leave it behind. He would begin anew. He would remake himself in a way that cleansed him of the wrongs he had done and the atrocities he had abetted. It was not so hard. It was what soldiers did when they came home from a war. It was how a man got past the unforgivable.\n\nMore than 250 men passed through that room and out of the life they had known. They disappeared as surely as if they had turned to smoke. The Morgawr changed them into dead things that still walked, into creatures that had lost all sense of identity and purpose. He turned them into something less than dogs, and they did not even know it. He made them into his airship crews, and he took them away forever. All of them, every last one. Sen Dunsidan never saw any of them again.\n\nWithin days, he had secured the airships the Morgawr had requested and delivered them to fulfill his end of the bargain. Within a week, the Morgawr was gone out of his life, departed in search of the Ilse Witch, in quest of revenge. Sen Dunsidan didn't care. He hoped they destroyed each other. He prayed he would never see either of them again.\n\nBut the images remained, haunting and terrible. He could not banish them. He could not reconcile their horror. They haunted him in his sleep and when he was awake. They were never far away, never out of sight. Sen Dunsidan did not sleep for weeks afterwards. He did not enjoy a moment's peace.\n\nHe became Prime Minister of the Federation's Coalition Council, but he lost his soul." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Now, months later and thousands of miles away off the coast of the continent of Parkasia, the fleet of airships assembled by Sen Dunsidan and placed under the command of the Morgawr and his Mwellrets and walking dead materialized out of the mist and closed on the Jerle Shannara. Standing amidships at the port railing, Redden Alt Mer watched the cluster of black hulls and sails fill the horizon east like links in an encircling chain.\n\n\"Cast off!\" the Rover Captain snapped at Spanner Frew, spyglass lifting one more time to make certain of what he was seeing.\n\n\"She's not ready!\" the burly shipwright snapped back.\n\n\"She's as ready as she's going to get. Give the order!\"\n\nHis glass swept the approaching ships. No insignia, no flags. Unmarked warships in a land where until a few weeks ago there had never been even one. Enemies, but whose? He had to assume the worst, that these ships were hunting them. Had the Ilse Witch brought others besides Black Moclips, ships that had lain offshore until now, waiting for the witch to bring them into the mix?\n\nSpanner Frew was yelling at the crew, setting them in action. With Furl Hawken dead and Rue Meridian gone inland, there was no one else to fill the role of First Mate. No one stopped to question him. They had seen the ships, as well. Hands reached obediently for lines and winches. The tethering line was released, giving the Jerle Shannara her freedom. Rovers began tightening down the radian draws and lanyards, bringing the sails all the way to the tops of the masts, where they could catch the wind and light. Knowing what he would find, Redden Alt Mer glanced around. His crew was eight strong, counting Spanner and himself. Not nearly enough to fully man a warship like the Jerle Shannara, let alone fight a battle against enemies. They would have to run, and run fast.\n\nHe ran himself, breaking for the pilot box and the controls, heavy boots thudding across the wooden decking. \"Unhood the crystals!\" he yelled at Britt Rill and Jethen Amenades as he swept past them. \"Not the fore starboard! Leave it covered. Just the aft and amidships!\"\n\nNo working diapson crystal in the fore port parse tube, so to balance the loss of power from the left he was forced to shut down its opposite number. It would cut their power by a third, but the Jerle Shannara was swift enough even at that.\n\nSpanner Frew was beside him, lumbering toward the mainmast and the weapons rack. \"Who are they?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Black Beard, but I don't think they are friends.\"\n\nHe opened the four available parse tubes and drew down power to the crystals from the draws. The Jerle Shannara lurched sharply and began to rise as ambient light converted to energy. But too slow, the Rover Captain saw, to make a clean escape. The invading ships were nearly on top of them, an odd assortment, all sizes and shapes, none of them recognizable save for their general design. A mix, he saw, mostly Rover built, a few Elven. Where had they come from? He could see their crews moving about the ships' decking, slow and unhurried, showing none of the excitement and fever he was familiar with. Calm in the face of battle.\n\nPo Kelles, aboard Niciannon, flew past the pilot box off the starboard side. The big Roc banked so close to Redden Alt Mer that he could see the bluish sheen of the bird's feathers.\n\n\"Captain!\" the Wing Rider yelled, pointing.\n\nHe was not pointing at the ships, but at a flurry of dots that had appeared suddenly in their midst, small and more mobile. War Shrikes, acting in concert with the enemy ships, warding their flanks and leading their advance. Already they were ahead of the ships and coming fast at the Jerle Shannara.\n\n\"Fly out of here!\" Big Red yelled back at Po Kelles. \"Fly inland and find Little Red! Warn her what's happening!\"\n\nThe Wing Rider and his Roc swung away, lifting swiftly into the misty sky. A Roc's best chance against Shrikes was to gain height and distance. In a short race, the Shrikes had the advantage. Here, they were still too far away. Already, Niciannon was opening the gap between them. With the navigational directions Po Kelles had been given already, he would have no trouble reaching Hunter Predd and Rue Meridian. The danger now was to the Jerle Shannara. A Shrike's talons could rip a sail to shreds. The birds would soon attempt just that.\n\nAlt Mer's hands flew to the controls. Shrikes in league with enemy warships. How could that be? Who controlled the birds? But he knew the answer as soon as he asked himself the question. It would take magic to bring War Shrikes into line like this. Someone, or something, aboard those ships possessed such magic.\n\nThe Ilse Witch? he wondered. Come out from inland, where she had gone to find the others?\n\nThere was no time to ponder it.\n\n\"Black Beard!\" he yelled down to Spanner Frew. \"Place the men on both sides, down in the fighting pits. Use bows and arrows and keep those Shrikes at bay!\"\n\nHis hands steady on the controls, he watched the warships and birds loom up in front of him, too close to avoid. He couldn't get above them or swing around fast enough to put sufficient distance between them. He had no choice. On his first pass, he would have to go right through them.\n\n\"Hold fast!\" he yelled to Spanner Frew.\n\nThen the closest of the warships were on top of them, moving swiftly out of the haze, all bulk and darkness in the early morning gloom. Redden Alt Mer had been here before, and he knew what to do. He didn't try to avoid a collision. Instead, he initiated one, turning the Jerle Shannara toward the smallest ship in the line. The radian draws hummed as they funneled the ambient light into the parse tubes and the diapson crystals turned it to energy, a peculiar, tinny sound. The ship responded with a surge as he levered forward on the controls, tilted the hull slightly to port, and sliced through the enemy ship's foremast and sails, taking them down in a single sweep that left the vessel foundering.\n\nShrikes wheeled about them, but in close quarters they could not come in more than two at a time, and the bowmen fired arrows at them with deadly accuracy, causing injuries and screams of rage.\n\n\"Helm port!\" Big Red shouted in warning as a second vessel tried to close from the left.\n\nAs the crew braced, he swung the wheel all the way about, bringing the rams to bear on this new threat. The Jerle Shannara shuddered and lurched as the parse tubes emitted fresh discharges of converted light, then shot forward across the enemy's stern, raking her decking and snapping off pieces of railing like deadwood. Redden Alt Mer had only a few moments to glance over at the enemy crew. A Mwellret clutched the helm, crouched down in the pilot box to weather the impact of the collision. He gestured and yelled toward his men, but their response was oddly slow and mechanical, as if they were just coming out of a deep sleep, as if further information was needed before action could be taken. Redden Alt Mer watched their faces turn toward him, blank and empty, devoid of emotion or recognition. Eyes stared up at him, as hard and milky white as sea stones.\n\n\"Shades!\" the Rover Captain whispered.\n\nThey were the eyes of the dead, yet the men themselves were still moving around. For a moment, he was so stunned that he lost his concentration completely. Though he had seen other strange things, he had never seen dead men walk. He had not believed he ever would. Yet he was seeing them now.\n\n\"Spanner!\" he shouted down at the shipwright.\n\nSpanner Frew had seen them, as well. He looked at Redden Alt Mer and shook his wooly black head like an angry bear.\n\nThen the Jerle Shannara was past the second ship and lifting above the others, and Alt Mer brought her all the way around and headed her inland, out of the fray. The enemy ships gave chase at once, coming at her from all directions, but they were strung out along the coastline and too far away to close effectively. How had they found her in the first place? he wondered. For a second, he considered the possibility of betrayal by one of his men, but quickly dismissed the idea. Magic, possibly. If whoever commanded this fleet could enslave Shrikes and make the dead come alive, he could find a band of Rovers easily enough. It was more than likely that he had used the Shrikes to track them.\n\nOr she had, if it was the Ilse Witch returned.\n\nHe cursed his ignorance, the witch, and a dozen other imponderables as he flew the airship inland toward the mountains. He would have to turn south soon to stay within his bearings. He could not trust to the shorter overland route. Too much danger of losing the way and missing Little Red and the others. He could not afford to do that, to leave them abandoned to these things that gave pursuit.\n\nA sharp whang! cut through the rush of wind as the amidships radian draw off the port railing broke loose and began to whip about the decking like a striking snake. The Rovers, still crouched in their fighting pits, flattened themselves protectively. Spanner Frew leapt behind the mainmast, taking cover as the loose draw snapped past, then wrapped itself around the aft port line and jerked it free.\n\nAt once the airship began to lose power and balance, both already diminished by the loss of the forward draws, now thrown off altogether by the breaking away of the entire port bank. If the lines were not retethered at once, the ship would circle right back into the enemy ships, and they would all be in the hands of the walking dead.\n\nRedden Alt Mer saw those eyes again, milky and vacant, devoid of humanity, bereft of any sense of the world about them.\n\nWithout stopping to consider, he cut power to the amidships starboard tube and thrust the port lever all the way forward. Either the Jerle Shannara would hold together long enough for him to give them a fighting chance to escape or it would fall out of the sky.\n\n\"Black Beard!\" he yelled down to Spanner Frew. \"Take the helm!\"\n\nThe shipwright lumbered up the steps and into the pilot box, gnarled hands reaching for the controls. Redden Alt Mer took no time to explain, but simply bolted past him down the steps to the decking and forward to the mainmast. He felt exhilarated and edgy, as if nothing he might do was too wild to consider. Not altogether a bad assessment, he decided. Wind, wild and shrieking in his ears, whipped at his long red hair and brilliant scarves. He could feel the airship rocking under him, fighting to maintain trim, to keep from diving. He was impressed. Three draws lost, \u2014 she should already be going down. Another ship wouldn't have lasted this long.\n\nTo his left, the entangled draws snapped and wrenched at each other, threatening to tear loose at any moment. He risked a quick glance over his shoulder. Their pursuers had drawn closer, taking advantage of their troubles. The Shrikes were almost on them.\n\n\"Keep them at bay!\" he shouted down to the Rovers crouched in the fighting pits, but his words were lost in the wind.\n\nHe went up the foremast using the iron climbing pins hammered into the wood, pressing himself against the thick timber to keep from being torn loose and thrown out into the void. His flying leathers helped to protect him, but even so, the wind was ferocious, blowing out of the mountains and toward the coast in a cold, hard rush. He did not look behind him or over at the draws. The dangers were obvious and he could do nothing about them. If the draws worked loose before he got to them, they could easily whip about and cut him in half. If the S hrikes got close enough, they could rip him off his perch and carry him away. Neither prospect was worth considering.\n\nSomething flashed dark ly at the corner of his vision. He caught just a glimpse as it whizzed past. Another whipped by. Arrows. The enemy vessels were close enough that longbows could be brought into play. Perhaps the Mwellrets and walking dead were not proficient with weapons. Perhaps some small part of the luck that had saved him so many times before would save him now.\n\nPerhaps was all he had.\n\nThen he was atop the mast and working his way out along the yardarm to where the renegade draw was fastened topside. He clung to the yardarm with numb, bruised fingers, his strength seeping away in the frigid wind. Below, upturned faces shifted back and forth as men fired arrows at the approaching Shrikes then glanced up at him to check his progress. He saw the worry in those hard faces. Good, he thought. He would hate not to be missed.\n\nA Shrike swept past him from above, screaming. Its talons snatched at his back, and trie flying leathers jerked and tore. A wash of pain rushed through him as the bird's claws ripped into his skin. He wrenched himself sideways and nearly fell, his legs losing their grip so that he was hangin g from the yardarm by his fingers. The sail billowed into him like a balloon, and he lay across it, gathering his strength. While he was buried in the sail, another Shrike swept past but couldn't get close enough. It banked away in frustration.\n\nDon't stop, he told himself through a haze of weariness and pain. Don't quit.\n\nHe crawled back up on the yardarm, then dragged himself to its end, swung out from the spar, and slid down the length of the midships draw to where it had tangled in the aft, his boots clearing the lines as he descended. Battered and worn, but still clinging desperately to both stays, he hollered out to his crew for help. Two of them leapt from the port fighting pits and were beside him in moments, taking hold of the draws and hauling them back toward the parse tubes from which they had broken loose, ignoring the diving Shrikes and the hail of arrows from the pursuing ships.\n\nRedden Alt Mer collapsed on the deck, his back burning with pain and wet with blood.\n\n\"That's more than enough heroics from you, Captain,\" Britt Rill growled, appearing out of nowhere to take hold of one arm and haul him to his feet. \"Down below for you.\"\n\nAlt Mer started to object, but his throat was so dry he couldn't get the words out. Worse, his strength had failed him completely. It was all he could do to stand with Rill's help. He glanced at the other and nodded. He had done what he could. The rest was up to the ship, and he would bet on her in any race.\n\nBelowdecks, Britt Rill helped him off with his flying leathers and began to wash and clean his wounds. \"How bad is it?\" Redden Alt Mer asked, head bent forward, arms resting on his knees, hands clasped, and the whole of him knotted with pain. \"Did it sever the muscles?\"\n\n\"Nothing so bad, Captain,\" the other answered quietly. \"Just a few deep cuts that will give you stories to tell your grandchildren, should you ever have any.\"\n\n\"Not likely.\"\n\n\"Be a blessing for the world, I expect.\"\n\nRill applied salve to the wounds, bound him up with strips of cloth, gave him a long pull from the aleskin strapped to his waist, and left him to decide for himself what he would do next. \"The others will be needing me,\" Rill called back as he went out the cabin door.\n\nAnd me, Alt Mer thought. But he didn't move right away. Instead, he sat there on his bed for several minutes more, listening to the sound of the wind outside the shuttered windows, feeling the movement of the ship beneath him. He could tell from its sway and glide that it was doing what it should, that power was back in sufficient amounts to keep it aloft and moving. But the battle wasn't over yet.\n\nPursuers with magic enough to summon Shrikes and command the walking dead would not give up easily.\n\nHe went topside moments later, his shredded flying leathers pulled back in place. Stepping out into the wind, he cast about momentarily to gauge their position, then moved over to the pilot box to stand next to Spanner Frew. Content to let the shipwright guide them, he didn't ask for the helm. Instead, he spent a few long moments looking back at the clutch of dark shapes that were still in pursuit but beginning to fade into the haze. Even the Shrikes seemed to have given up the chase.\n\nSpanner Frew glanced over at him, took note of his condition, and said nothing. The Rover Captain's look did not encourage conversation.\n\nAlt Mer glanced at the surrounding sky. It was all grayness and mist, with a darker wash north that meant rain approached. Mountains loomed ahead and on both sides as they advanced inland toward the ice fields they must traverse in order to reach Rue and the others.\n\nThen he saw the scattering of dots ahead and off to the starboard where the coastline bent inward in a series of deep coves.\n\n\"Black Beard!\" he said in the other's ear, pulling on his shoulder and pointing.\n\nSpanner Frew looked. Ahead, the dots began to take shape, to grow wings and sails. \"More of them!\" the big man growled, a hint of disbelief in his rough voice. \"Shrikes, as well, if I'm seeing right. How did they get ahead of us?\"\n\n\"The Shrikes know the coastline and cliffs better than we do!\" Alt Mer had to fight to be heard above the wind. \"They've found a way to cut us off. If we stick to our flight line, they'll have us. We have to get further inland, and we have to get there quickly.\"\n\nHis companion glanced around at the mist-shrouded mountains. \"If we fly into these in this mist, we'll end up in splinters.\"\n\nAlt Mer caught his eye and held it. \"We don't have any choice. Give me the wheel. Go forward and signal back whenever you think I need it. Hand signals only. Voices might give us away. Do your best to keep us off the rocks.\"\n\nHaving repaired the broken draws and swept aside the bits of wreckage, the crew was standing by on the lines. Spanner Frew called out to them as he passed, sending them to their stations, warning of what was happening. No one replied. They were schooled in the Rover tradition of keeping faith in those who had the luck. No one had more of it than Redden Alt Mer. They would ride a burning ship into a firestorm if he told them to do so.\n\nHe took a deep breath, glanced once more at the shapes ahead and behind. Too many to evade or to fight. He swung the wheel hard to port toward the bank of mist. He let the airship maintain speed until they were into the soup, then cut back to dead slow, watching the vapor gather and fade, wispy sheets of white wrapping the darker edges of the mountains. If they struck a peak at this height, in this haze, with a third of their power already gone, they were finished.\n\nBut the Shrikes couldn't track them, and their pursuers were faced with the same problem they were.\n\nIt was oddly silent in the mist, in the cradle of the peaks, empty of all sound as the Jerle Shannara glided like a bird. All about them the mountains seemed afloat, dark masses appearing and fading like mirages. Alt Mer read the compass, then put it away. He would have to navigate by dead reckoning and gut instinct, then hope he could get back on course when the mist cleared. If it cleared. It might stay like this even further inland, beyond the mountain peaks. If it did, they were as lost as if they had never had a course to begin with.\n\nHe could just make out Spanner Frew standing at the bow. The big Rover was hunched forward, his concentration riveted on the shifting layers of white. Now and then he would signal by hand \u2014 go left, go right, go slow \u2014 and Redden Alt Mer would work the controls accordingly. The wind whistled past in sudden gusts, then died, baffled by a cliff face or air current. Mist swirled through the peaks, empty and aimless. Only the Jerle Shannara disturbed its ethereal fabric.\n\nThe rain returned, a gathering of dark clouds that turned quickly into a torrent. It engulfed the airship and its crew, soaking them through, shrouding them in dampness and gloom, claiming them as the sea might a sinking ship. Alt Mer, who had weathered worse, tried not to think of the way in which rain distorted shapes and spaces, creating the appearance of obstacles where there were none, giving hints of passage where walls of rock stood waiting. He relied on his instincts rather than his senses. He had been a sailor all his life, \u2014 he knew something of the tricks that wind and water could play.\n\nBehind him, the mist and darkness closed about. There was no sign of their pursuers \u2014 no sign of anything but the sky and the mountains and the shifting rain and mist between.\n\nSpanner Frew came back to stand with him in the pilot box. There was no reason to remain in the bow. The world about them had disappeared into space.\n\nThe shipwright glanced over and gave Redden Alt Mer a fierce smile. The Rover Captain smiled back. There was nothing for either to say.\n\nThe Jerle Shannara sailed on into the gloom." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Heat and light gave way to cool darkness, the odd tingling sensation to numbness, and the present to the past as the Ilse Witch was swept away by the power of the Sword of Shannara. One moment, she was deep underground in the catacombs of Castledown, alone with her enemy, with the Druid Walker, surrounded by the wreckage of another age. In the next, she was gone so far inside herself that she had no sense of where she was. In the blink of an eye, she was transformed from a creature of flesh and blood to nothing more substantial than the thoughts that bore her away.\n\nShe had only a moment to wonder what was happening to her, and then it was done.\n\nShe went alone into the darkness, and yet she was aware of Walker being there with her, not in recognizable form, not even wholly formed, more a shadow, a shade that trailed after her like the flow of her long, dark hair. She could feel the pulse of him in the talisman she gripped like a lifeline. He was only a presence in the ether, but he was with her and he was watching.\n\nWhen she emerged from the darkness, she was in another time and place, one she recognized instantly. She was in the home from which she had been taken as a child. She had thought she would never see it again and yet there it was, just as she remembered it from her childhood, wreathed in the shadows of an approaching dawn, cloaked in silence and danger. She could feel the coolness of the early morning air and smell the pungent scent of the lilac bushes. She recognized the moment at once. She had returned to the morning in which her parents and brother had died and she had been stolen away.\n\nShe watched the events of that morning unfold once more, but this time from somewhere outside herself, as if they were happening to someone else. Again, old Bark was killed when he went out to investigate. Again, the cloaked forms slid past her window in the faint predawn light, moving toward the front doorway. Again, she fled, and again, it was in vain. She hid her brother in the cellar and tried to escape the fate of her parents. But the cloaked forms were waiting for her. She saw herself taken by them as her house burned in a smoky red haze. She watched them spirit her away, unconscious and helpless, into the brightening east.\n\nIt was just as she remembered it. Yet it was different, too. She saw herself surrounded by dark forms huddled in conference as she lay trussed, blindfolded, and gagged. But something was not right. They did not have the look of the shape-shifters she knew to have taken her. Nor was there any sign of the Druid Walker. Had she seen him go past the windows of her home this time as she remembered him doing before? She did not think so. Where was he?\n\nAs if in response to her question, a figure appeared out of the trees, tall and dark and hooded like her captors. He had the look of a Druid, a part of the fading night, a promise of death's coming. He gestured to her captors, brought them close to him momentarily, spoke words she could not hear, then stepped away. In a flurry of activity, her captors squared off like combatants and began to fight with one another. But their struggle was not harsh and brutal, \u2014 it was merely an exercise. Now and then, one would pause to glance at her, as if to measure the effect of this pretense. The cloaked form let it go on for a time, waiting, then suddenly reached down for her, snatched her up, and spirited her away into the trees, leaving the odd scenario behind.\n\nAs he ran, she caught a glimpse of his forearms. They were scaly and mottled. They were reptilian.\n\nHer mind spun with sudden recognition. No!\n\nShe was carried deep into the woods to a quiet place, and the dark-cloaked figure set her down. She watched him reveal himself, and he was not the Druid, as she now knew he would not be, could not be, but the Morgawr. Betrayer! The word shrieked at her. Liar! But he was much worse, of course. He was beyond anything words could describe, anything recognizably human. He was a monster.\n\nShe knew it was the truth she was seeing. She knew it instinctively, even doubting that it could be so. The images drawn on the magic of the Sword of Shannara could not lie. She could feel it in her bones, and it made perfect sense to her. How had she not known it before? How had she let herself become deceived so easily?\n\nYet she was only six years old then, she reminded herself. She was still nothing but a child.\n\nBesieged by emotions that tore through her like hungry wolves, she would have screamed in rage and despair had she been able to do so. But she could not give voice to what she was feeling. She could only watch. The magic of the sword would allow nothing more.\n\nShe heard the Morgawr speak to her, his words soft and cajoling and treacherous. She watched herself slowly come to terms with his lies, to accept them, to believe that he was what he claimed and that she was the victim of a Druid's machinations. She watched him spirit her away aboard his Shrike, deep into his underground lair in the Wilderun. She watched herself close the door on her own prison, a willing fool, a pawn in a scheme she was beginning to understand for the first time. She watched herself begin another life \u2014 a small, misguided child driven by hatred and determination. She watched herself, knowing she would never be the same, helpless to prevent it, to do anything more than despair at her fate.\n\nStill the images continued, spinning themselves out, revealing to her the truth that had been concealed from her all these years. She watched a shape-shifter burrow through the smoking ruins of her home to retrieve her still-living baby brother. She watched him carry her brother away to a solitary fortress that she quickly recognized as Paranor. She saw him give her brother over to the Druid Walker, who in turn took him into the Highlands of Leah to entrust to a kind-faced man and his wife, who had children of their own and a debt to repay. She watched her brother grow in that family, his tiny baby's face changing with the passing of the years, his features slowly becoming recognizable.\n\nShe might have gasped or even cried out as she realized she was looking at the boy who had come to this distant land with Walker, who had confronted her and told her he was Bek. There was no mistaking him. He was the boy she had disbelieved, the boy she had hunted with the caull and almost killed. Bek, the brother she was so certain had died in the fire...\n\nShe could not finish these thoughts, any of them. She could barely force herself to confront them. Nor was there any time for a balanced consideration, for a coming to terms with what she was absorbing. Other images swiftly appeared, a wave of them, inundating her so thoroughly that her chest constricted and her breathing tightened under their crushing weight.\n\nNow the images were ones of her training under the Morgawr, of her long, harsh schooling, of her mastery of self-discipline and her hardening of purpose as she set about learning how to destroy Walker. She saw herself grow from a girl into a young woman, but not with the same freedom of life and spirit that had invested Bek. Instead, she saw herself change from something human into something so like the Morgawr that when all was said and done she was different from him on the outside only, where her skin set her apart from his scales. She had become dark and hate-filled and ruthless in the same way he was. She had embraced her magic's poisonous possibilities with his eagerness and savage determination.\n\nShe watched herself learn to use her magic as a weapon. All of her long, dark experience was replayed for her in numbing, sickening detail. She watched as she maimed and killed those who stood in her way. She watched herself destroy those who dared to confront or question her. She saw herself strip them of their hope and their courage and reduce them to slaves. She saw herself ruin people simply because it was convenient or suited her purpose. The Addershag died so that she could gain power over Ryer Ord Star. Her spy in the home of the Healer at Bracken Clell died so that he could never reveal his connection to her. Allardon Elessedil died so that the voyage the Druid Walker sought to make might not have Elven support.\n\nThere were others, so many she quickly lost count. Most she did not even remember. She watched them appear like ghosts out of the past and watched them die anew. At her hand or by her command, they died all the same. Or if they did not die, they often had the look of men and women who wished they had. She could feel their fear, helplessness, frustration, terror, and pain. She could feel their suffering.\n\nShe who was the Ilse Witch, who had never felt anything, who had made it a point to harden herself against any emotion, began to unravel like an old garment worn too often.\n\nNo more, she heard herself begging. Please! Please!\n\nThe images shifted yet again, and now she saw not the immediate acts she had perpetrated, but the consequences of those acts. Where a father died to serve her needs, a mother and children were left to starve in the streets. Where a daughter was subverted for her use, a brother was inadvertently put in harm's path and destroyed. Where one life was sacrificed, two more were made miserable.\n\nIt did not end there. A Free-born commander broken in spirit and mind at her whim cost his nation the benefit of his courage and left it bereft of leadership for years. The daughter of a politician caught in the middle of a struggle between two factions was imprisoned when her wisdom might have settled the dispute. Children disappeared into other lands, spirited away so that those who obeyed her might gain control over the grief-stricken parents. Tribes of Gnomes, deprived of sacred ground she had claimed for the Morgawr, blamed Dwarves, who then became their enemies. Like the rippling effect of a stone thrown on the still waters of a pond, the results of her selfish and predatory acts spread far beyond the initial impact.\n\nAll the while, she could feel the Morgawr watching from afar, a silent presence savoring the results of his duplicitous acts, his lies and deceits. He controlled her as if she was his puppet, tugged and pulled by the strings he wielded. He channeled her anger and her frustration, and he never let her forget against whom she must direct it. All that she did, she did in expectation of destroying the Druid Walker. But seeing her past now, stripped of pretense and laid bare in brightest daylight, she could not understand how she had been so misguided. Nothing of what she had done had achieved her supposed goals. None of it was justifiable. Everything had been a travesty.\n\nThe shell of self-deception in which she was encased broke under the deluge of images, and for the first time she saw herself for what she was. She was repulsive. She was the worst of what she could imagine, a creature whose humanity had been sacrificed in the false belief that it was meaningless. In sacrifice to the monster she had become, she had given up everything that had been part of the little girl she had once been.\n\nWorst of all was the realization of what she had done to Bek. She had done more than betray him by assuming him dead in the ashes of her home. She had done worse than fail to discover if he might be whom he claimed when he confronted her. She had tried to put an end to him. She had hunted him down and nearly killed him. She had made him her prisoner, taken him back with her to Black Moclips, and given him over to Cree Bega.\n\nShe had abandoned him.\n\nAgain.\n\nIn the silence of the Sword of Shannara's quieting magic, the images faded momentarily, and she was left alone with her truth, with its starkness, with its razor's edge. Walker was still there, still close, his pale presence watching her come to terms with herself. She felt him like a pall, and she could not shake him off. She fought to break free of the tangle of deceits and treacheries and wrongdoings that draped her like a thousand spiderwebs. She struggled to breathe against the suffocating darkness of her life. She could do neither. She was as trapped as her victims.\n\nThe images began again, but she could no longer bear to watch them. Tumbling through the kaleidoscope of her terrible acts, she could not imagine how forgiveness could ever be granted to her. She could not imagine she had any right even to ask for it. She felt bereft of hope or grace. Finding her voice at last, she screamed in a mix of self-hatred and despair. The sound and the fury of it triggered her own magic, dark and swift and sure. It came to her aid in a rush, collided with the magic of the Sword of Shannara, and erupted within her in a fiery conflagration. She felt herself explode in a whirl of images and emotions. Then everything began to spiral off into a vast, depthless void, and she was swept away into clouds of endlessly drifting shadows.\n\nBek Ohmsford stiffened at the sound. \"Did you hear that?\" he asked Truls Rohk.\n\nIt was an unnecessary question. No one could have missed it. They were deep underground now, back within the catacombs of Castledown, searching for Walker. They had come down through the ruins, finding doors once hidden now open and waiting. No longer did the fire threads and creepers protect this domain. No sign of life remained. The world of Antrax was a graveyard of metal skeletons and dead machines.\n\nTruls Rohk, cloaked and hooded even here, looked around slowly as the echo of the scream died away. \"Someone is still alive down here.\"\n\n\"A woman,\" Bek ventured.\n\nThe shape-shifter grunted. \"Don't be too sure.\"\n\nBek tested the air with his magic, humming softly, reading the lines of power. Grianne had passed this way not long ago. Her presence was unmistakable. They were following her in the belief that she would be following Walker. One would lead to the other. If they were quick enough, they could reach both in time. But until now, they had not been so sure that anyone was left alive. Certainly they had found no evidence of it.\n\nBek started ahead again, running his hand through his hair nervously. \"She's gone this way.\"\n\nTruls Rohk moved with him. \"You said you had a plan. For when we find her.\"\n\n\"To capture her,\" Bek declared. \"To take her alive.\"\n\n\"Such ambition, boy. Do you intend to tell me the details anytime soon?\"\n\nBek kept going, taking time to think his explanation through. With Truls, you didn't want to overcomplicate things. The shape-shifter was already prepared to doubt the possibility of any plan working successfully. He was already thinking of ways to kill Grianne before she had a chance to kill him. All that was preventing it was Bek's passionate demand that Truls give his way a chance.\n\n\"She cannot harm us unless she uses her magic,\" he said quietly, not looking over at the other as they walked. He picked his way carefully through collapsed cables and chunks of concrete that had been shaken loose from the ceiling by an enormous blast and a quake that they had felt even aboveground. \"She cannot use her magic unless she can use her voice. If we stop her from speaking or singing or making any sound whatsoever, we can take her prisoner.\"\n\nTruls Rohk slid through the shadows and flickering lights like a massive cat. \"We can accomplish what's needed by just killing her. Give this up, boy. She isn't going to become your sister again. She isn't going to accept what she is.\"\n\n\"If I can distract her, then you can get behind her,\" Bek continued, ignoring him. \"Put your hands over her mouth and muffle her voice. You can do this if we can keep her from discovering you are there. I think it is possible. She will be intent on finding the Druid and dealing with me. She won't be looking for you.\"\n\n\"You dream big dreams.\" Truls Rohk did not sound convinced. \"If this fails, we won't get a second chance. Either one of us.\"\n\nSomething heavy crashed to the floor of the passageway ahead, adding to the mounds of debris already collected. Steam hissed out of broken pipes, and strange smells gathered in niches and slid through cracks in the walls. Within the catacombs, every passageway looked exactly the same. It was a maze, and if they hadn't had Grianne's distinctive aura to track, they would have long since become lost.\n\nBek kept his voice even. \"Walker would want us to do this,\" he ventured. He glanced over at the shape-shifter's dark form. \"You know that to be true.\"\n\n\"What the Druid wants is anyone's guess. Nor is it necessarily the right thing. It hasn't gotten us much of anywhere so far.\"\n\n\"Which is why you chose to come with him on this quest,\" Bek offered quietly. \"Which is why you have gone with him so many times before. Is that right?\"\n\nTruls Rohk said nothing, disappearing back inside himself so that all that remained was his cloaked shadow passing along in the near darkness, more presence than substance, so faint it seemed he might disappear in the blink of an eye.\n\nAhead, the tunnel widened. The damage here was more severe than anything they had encountered so far. Whole chunks of ceiling and wall had fallen away. Shattered glass and twisted metal lay in heaps. Though flameless lamps lit the passageway with pale luminescence, their light barely penetrated the heavy shadows.\n\nA vast and cavernous chamber at the end of the corridor opened onto a pair of massive cylinders whose metal skin was split like overripe fruit. Steam hissed through the wounds like blood leaking from a body. The ends of severed wires flashed and snapped in small explosions. Struts and girders wrenched free of their fastenings with long, slow groans.\n\n\"There,\" Bek said softly, reaching out to touch the other's cloak. \"She's there.\"\n\nNo movement or sound reached out to them, no indication that anyone living waited at the end of the passage amid the massive destruction. Truls Rohk froze momentarily, listening. Then he started ahead, this time leading the way, no longer trusting Bek, taking charge of what might become a deadly situation. The boy followed wordlessly, knowing he was no longer in control, that the best he could hope for was a chance to make things work out the way he thought they should.\n\nA sudden hissing shattered the stillness, the sibilance punctuated by popping and cracking. The sounds reminded Bek of animals feeding on the bones of a carcass.\n\nAs they reached the opening, Truls Rohk moved swiftly into the shadows of one wall, motioning for Bek to stay back. Unwilling to lose contact, Bek retreated perhaps a pace, no more. Flattening himself against the smooth wall, he strained to hear something above the mechanical noises.\n\nThen the shape-shifter faded into a patch of shadow and simply disappeared. Bek knew at once that he was trying to get to Grianne first. Bek charged after him, frightened that he had lost all chance of saving his sister. He breached the rubble at the entrance to the chamber in a rush and stopped.\n\nThe chamber was in ruins, a scrap heap of metal and glass, of shattered creepers and broken machines. Grianne knelt at its center beside a fallen Walker, her head lifting out of the shadow of her dark hair, her pale face caught in a slow flicker of light from a tangle of ruptured wires that sparked and fizzed. Her eyes were open as she stared toward the ceiling, but they did not see. Her hands were fastened securely about the handle of the Sword of Shannara, which rested blade downward against the smooth metal of the floor.\n\nThere was blood on those hands and on that handle and blade. There was blood all over her clothing and on Walker's, as well. There was blood on the floor, pooled in a crimson lake that trickled off into thin rivulets winding their way through the wreckage.\n\nBek stared at the scene in horror. He could not help what he was thinking. Walker was dead and Grianne had killed him.\n\nTo one side, a blade's sharp edge flashed momentarily in the shadows, and from the gathered gloom a deeper darkness eased silently forward.\n\nTruls Rohk had reached the same conclusion." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Hugging each other like frightened children, Ahren Elessedil and Ryer Ord Star made their way through the silent, dust-choked passageways of Castledown toward the city ruins above. The seer was still sobbing uncontrollably, her head bent into the Elven Prince's shoulder, her arms clinging as if she was afraid she might lose him. Leaving Walker had undone her completely, and though Ahren whispered reassurances to her as they went, trying to bring her back to herself, she seemed not to hear him. It was as if by leaving the Druid, she had left the better part of herself. The only indication she gave that she was still present was in the way she flinched when fresh chunks of wall or ceiling gave way or something exploded in the darkening recesses through which they fled.\n\n\"It will be all right, Ryer,\" Ahren kept repeating, even long after it was clear the words had no meaning for her.\n\nStirred by the events of the past few hours, his thoughts were jumbled and uncertain. The effects of the Elfstone magic had worn off, leaving him quieted and at peace again, no longer filled with fire and white rage. He had tucked the stones safely away inside his tunic pocket for when they would be needed again. A part of him anticipated such use, but another part hoped it might never happen. He felt vindicated and satisfied at having recovered them, having successfully summoned up their magic, and having used the blue fire against the hateful machines that had destroyed so many of his friends and companions from the Jerle Shannara. He felt renewed within, as if he had undergone a rite of passage and survived. He had come on this journey not much more than a boy, and now he was a man. It was his odyssey in gaining possession of the Elfstones that lent him this feeling of fresh identity, of new confidence. The experience had been horrific but empowering.\n\nNone of which made him feel any better about what had happened to Walker or what was likely to happen now to them. That Walker was dying when they left him was indisputable. Not even a Druid could survive the sort of wounds he had received. He might last a few minutes more, but there was no chance for him. So now the company, or what remained of it, must continue on without him. But continue to where? Continue for what reason? Walker himself had said that with the death of Antrax the knowledge of the books of magic was lost to them. He had made a choice in destroying the machine, and the choice had cost them any chance of recovering what they had come to find. It was an admission of failure. It was an acknowledgment that their journey had been for nothing.\n\nYet he could not help feeling that somehow this wasn't so, that there was something more to what had transpired than what was immediately obvious.\n\nHe wondered about the others of the company. He knew Bek had been alive when Ryer had fled the Ilse Witch and come back into the ruins to find Walker. The Elven Tracker Tamis had escaped, too. There would be others, somewhere. What must he do to find them? Find them he must, he knew, because without an airship and a crew, they were stranded indefinitely. With the Ilse Witch and her Mwellrets hunting them.\n\nBut he knew what he could do to gain help. He could use the Elfstones, the seeking stones of legend, to find a way to the others. The problem was that using the magic would alert the Ilse Witch to their presence. It would tell her exactly where they were, and she would come for them at once. They couldn't afford to have that happen. Ahren didn't think for a moment that he was a match for the Witch, even with the magic of the Elfstones to aid him. Stealth and secrecy were better weapons to employ just now. But he wasn't sure that stealth and secrecy would be enough.\n\nHe had been navigating the passageways for several hours, lost in his thoughts, when he became aware of the fact that Ryer had stopped crying. He glanced down at her in surprise, but she kept her face buried in his shoulder, pressed against his chest, concealed in the curtain of her long silvery hair. He thought that she might be working her way through her grief and should not be disturbed. He let her be. Instead, he concentrated anew on regaining the surface. The debris that had clogged the lower corridors was not so much in evidence here, as if the explosions had been centered more deeply. The air seemed fresher, and he thought they must be close to breaking free.\n\nHe found he was right. Within only minutes they passed through a pair of metal doors that stood unhinged and ajar, ducked under the collapsed framework, and stepped out into the open. They emerged from the tower into which Walker had disappeared days earlier, there in the center of the deadly maze that had ravaged the remainder of the company. It was night still, but dawn's approach was signaled by a faint lightening along the eastern horizon. Overhead, moonlight flooded out of a cloudless, starlit sky.\n\nAhren stopped just outside the tower entry and looked around cautiously. He could trace the outline of the walls of the maze and discern the clutter of broken creepers and weapons. Beyond, the ruins of the city spread away in a jumble of shattered buildings. No sounds came from that wasteland. It felt as if they were the only living creatures in the world.\n\nBut that was deceptive, he knew. The Mwellrets were still out there, searching for them. He must be very careful.\n\nWith Ryer still clinging to him, he knelt and put his mouth to her ear. \"Listen to me,\" he whispered.\n\nShe went still, then nodded slowly. \"We have to try to find the others \u2014 Bek and Tamis and Quentin. But we have to be very quiet. The Mwellrets and the Ilse Witch will be hunting us. At least, that's what we have to assume. We can't afford to let them catch us. We have to get out of these ruins and into the cover of the trees. Quickly. Can you help me?\"\n\n\"We shouldn't have left him,\" she replied so softly he could barely make out the words. Her fingers tightened on his arms. \"We should have stayed.\"\n\n\"No, Ryer,\" he said. \"He told us to go. He told us there was nothing else we could do for him. He told us to find the others. Remember?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It doesn't matter. We should have stayed. He was dying.\"\n\n\"If we fail to do what he asked of us, if we allow ourselves to be captured or killed, we will have failed him. That makes his dying an even bigger waste.\" His voice was low, but fierce. \"That isn't what he expects of us. That isn't why he sent us away.\"\n\n\"I betrayed him.\" She sobbed.\n\n\"We all betrayed each other at some point on this voyage.\" He forced her head out from his shoulder and lifted her chin so that she was looking at him. \"He isn't dying because of anything we did or failed to do. He is dying because he chose to give up his life to destroy Antrax. He made that choice.\"\n\nHe took a deep breath to calm himself. \"Listen to me. We serve him best now by honoring his last wishes. I don't know what he intended for us, what he thought would happen now that he is gone. I don't know what we've accomplished. But there's nothing more we can do for him beyond getting ourselves out of here and back to the Four Lands.\"\n\nHer pale, drawn face tightened at the harshness of his words, then crumpled like old parchment. \"I cannot survive without him, Ahren. I don't want to.\"\n\nThe Elven Prince reached out impulsively and stroked her fine hair. \"He said he would see you again. He promised. Maybe you should give him the chance to keep that promise.\" He paused, then bent forward and kissed her forehead. \"You say you can't survive without him. If it makes any difference, I don't think I can survive without you. I wouldn't have gotten this far if it hadn't been for you. Don't abandon me now.\"\n\nHe rested his cheek against her temple and held her, waiting for a response. It was a long time coming, but at last she lifted away and placed her small hands against his cheeks.\n\n\"All right,\" she said quietly. She gave him a small, sad smile. \"I won't.\"\n\nThey rose and walked out of the shadow of the black tower and into the maze, then back through the ruins. They kept to the shadows and did not hurry, stopping frequently to listen for sounds that would warn them of danger. Ahren led, holding Ryer Ord Star's hand, the link between them oddly empowering. He had not lied when he told her he still needed her. Despite his recovery of the Elfstones and his successful battle against the creepers, he did not yet feel confident about himself. He had passed out of boyhood, but he was still inexperienced and callow. There were lessons still to be learned, and some of them would be hard. He did not want to face them alone. Having Ryer there to face them with him gave him a confidence he could not entirely explain but knew better than to ignore.\n\nYet he thought he understood at least a part of it. What he felt for the girl was close to love. It had grown slowly, and he was only just beginning to recognize it for what it was. He was not certain how it would resolve itself or even if it would survive another day. But in a world of turmoil and uncertainty, of monsters and terrible danger, it was reassuring to have her close, to be able to ask her advice, just to touch her hand. He drew strength from her that was both powerful and mysterious \u2014 not in the way of magic, but in the way of spirit. Maybe it was as simple as not being entirely alone, of having another person with whom to share whatever happened. But maybe, too, it was as mystical as life and death.\n\nThey walked a long time through the ruins without hearing or seeing anything or anyone. They moved in a southerly direction, back the way they had come, toward the bay in which the Jerle Shannara had once anchored. She was in the hands of the Ilse Witch now, of course \u2014 unless things had changed, which was possible. Things changed quickly in this land. Things changed without warning. Maybe this time they would change in a way that would favor Walker's company rather than the Witch's.\n\nSuddenly Ryer Ord Star drew up short, her slim body rigid and trembling. Ahren turned back to her at once. She was staring into space, into some place he could not see, and her face reflected such dismay that he found himself quickly scanning his surroundings to find its cause.\n\n\"He's dead, Ahren,\" she said in a small, grief-stricken whisper.\n\nShe sank to the ground, crying. Her hand still clutched his, as if that were all that held her together. He knelt beside her, putting his arms about her, holding her close.\n\n\"Maybe he's at peace,\" he said, wondering if that was possible for Walker Boh.\n\n\"I saw him,\" she said. \"In my vision, just now. I saw him being carried by a shade into a green light over an underground lake. He wasn't alone. On the shore were three people. One was Bek, the second a cloaked form I didn't recognize. The third was the Ilse Witch.\"\n\n\"The Ilse Witch was with Bek?\"\n\nHer hand tightened on his. \"But she wasn't doing anything threatening. She wasn't even seeing him. She was just there, physically present, but at the same time she wasn't. She looked lost. Wait! No, that isn't right. She didn't look lost, \u2014 she looked stunned. But that isn't all, Ahren. The vision changed, and she was holding Bek and he was holding her. They were somewhere else, somewhere in the future, I think. I don't know how to explain this, but they were the same person. They were joined.\"\n\nAhren tried to make sense of this. \"One body and one face? The same in that way?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It didn't look like that, but it felt like that. Something happened to connect them. But it was as much a spiritual as a physical joining. There was such pain! I could feel it. I don't know whom it was coming from, who had generated it. Maybe both. But it was released through the connection they formed, and it was a trigger for something else, something that was going to happen after. But I didn't see that, \u2014 I wasn't permitted.\"\n\nAhren thought. \"Well, maybe it has something to do with them being brother and sister. Maybe that was the connection you sensed. Maybe the Ilse Witch discovered it was true, and that was what released all this pain you felt.\"\n\nHer eyes were huge and liquid in the moonlight. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"Do you think Bek and the Ilse Witch are down in Castledown with Walker?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Should we go back and look for them?\"\n\nShe just stared at him, wide-eyed, frightened.\n\nThere was no way to know, of course. It was a vision, and visions were subject to misleading and false interpretations. They revealed truths, but not in terms that were immediately apparent. That was their nature. Ryer Ord Star saw the future better than most. But even she was not permitted to catch more than a glimpse of it, and that glimpse might mean something other than what it suggested.\n\nGoing back for any reason suddenly seemed unthinkable to Ahren, and he abandoned the idea. Instead, they rose and walked on. Frustrated and troubled by the seer's words, Ahren found himself hoping that when she had another vision, she would have one they could do something about. Like finding a way out of their present dilemma, for instance. Visions of other people in other places were of precious little use just now. It was a selfish attitude, and he was immediately ashamed of it. But he couldn't help thinking it nonetheless.\n\nThey continued on. It would be morning soon. If they hadn't reached the shelter of the trees by then, they would be in trouble. They had the remnants of buildings to hide in, but if they were detected, they would be easily trapped. If they kept on after it grew light, they would be left exposed on the open roadways. Ahren didn't know if it made any difference what he did at this point since they were without a destination or a plan for rescue. All he knew to do was to try to find a way to keep out of the hands of the Ilse Witch and the Mwellrets. Or maybe only the latter, if Ryer's vision proved prophetic. Was it possible that Bek had made the witch a prisoner, had found some way to subdue her? He had magic, after all, magic strong enough to shatter creepers. Was it sufficient to overcome the witch, as well?\n\nAhren wished he knew more about what was happening. But he had wished that from the beginning.\n\nThey were close to the edge of the forest when he heard movement ahead. It was soft and furtive, the kind that comes from someone trying not to be discovered. Ahren dropped into a crouch, pulling Ryer down with him. They were deep in the shadows of a wall, so they would not be easily seen. On the other hand, it was slowly growing lighter and they couldn't stay where they were indefinitely.\n\nHe motioned for her to keep silent and follow his lead. Then he rose and began to make his way forward, but more slowly. Moments later, he heard the noise again, a scraping of boots on stone, very close now, and he dropped back into the shadows once more.\n\nAlmost instantly, a Mwellret slid out of the darkness and made its way across the open ground in front of them. There was no mistaking what it was or its intent. It carried a battle-ax in one hand and a short sword strapped about its waist. It was searching for someone. It might not be them, Ahren accepted, but that wouldn't help them if they were found.\n\nHe waited until the ret was out of sight, and started ahead again. Maybe they could get behind it. Maybe there was only the one.\n\nBut as they angled left, away from the first, they encountered a second, this one coming right for them. Ahren ducked back into the cover of a building's roofless shell, then led Ryer across the open floor to another exit. He picked his way carefully over piles of debris, but his boots made small scraping sounds that he could not seem to avoid. Outside again, he scuttled in a crouch to another building, Ryer at his heels, and made his way through. Enough dodging, he hoped, would lose any pursuers.\n\nOutside, he stopped and looked around. Nothing was familiar. He could see the outline of the treetops some distance off, but he had no idea in which direction he had been going or where the Mwellrets were. He listened for sound of them, but heard nothing.\n\n\"There's someone behind us,\" Ryer whispered in his ear.\n\nHe tugged her forward again, making for the cover of the trees, hoping that they could reach it in time. It was steadily growing lighter, the sun just beginning to crest the horizon, leaving the ruins bathed in a dangerous combination of light and shadows that could easily deceive the eyes. Ahren thought he heard a sudden grunt from somewhere close, and he wondered if they had been discovered after all.\n\nMaybe he should use the Elfstones, even if they gave him away. But the magic wasn't any good against rets or any other creatures not motivated by magic. Nor would it respond if he wasn't physically threatened.\n\nHe put his free hand on the handle of his long knife, his only other weapon, hesitating. He was deliberating over what to do when a movement off to his right stopped him. He faded back against a wall with Ryer, holding his breath as a cloaked form shouldered into view through the buildings. He could not make out who it was. Or even what, human or Mwellret. Ryer was pressed so close against him he could feel her breathing. He tightened his grip on her hand, feeling nothing himself of the reassurance he was trying to convey to her.\n\nThen the cloaked form was gone. Ahren exhaled slowly and began to move ahead again. It wasn't far to the trees. Beyond the ruins, only a hundred yards or so away, he could make out limbs and clusters of leaves in the new light.\n\nAs he stepped around the corner of a partially collapsed wall, he glanced back momentarily at Ryer to be certain she was all right. The look in her eyes changed just as he did so, her wariness giving way to outright terror.\n\nQuickly he looked back, but he was too slow. Sudden movement confronted him.\n\nThen everything went black." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "When he saw Truls Rohk move toward his sister, Bek Ohmsford didn't take time to consider the consequences of what he did next. All he knew was that if he failed to act, the shape-shifter would kill her. It didn't matter what the other had promised earlier, in a moment of rational thought, away from the carnage in which they found themselves now. Once Truls saw her kneeling at the side of the fallen Walker, the Sword of Shannara in hand and blood everywhere, that promise might as well have been written on water.\n\nIf Bek had allowed his emotions to get the better of him, perhaps he would have reacted the same way as Truls Rohk. But Bek could see from his sister's face that something was very wrong with her. She was staring skyward, but she wasn't seeing anything. She held the Sword of Shannara, but not as if it was a weapon she had just used. Nor did he think she would rely on the talisman to take the life of the Druid. She would rely on her own magic, the magic of the wishsong, and if she had done so here, there would not be this much blood.\n\nOnce he got past his initial shock, Bek knew there was more to what he was seeing than appearances indicated. But Truls Rohk was behind Grianne and couldn't see her face. Not that it would have mattered, since he was not inclined to feel the same way Bek did. For the shape-shifter, the Ilse Witch was a dangerous enemy and nothing less, and if there was any reason to suspect she might harm them, he wouldn't think twice about stopping her.\n\nSo Bek attacked him. He did so in a reaction born out of desperation, intending to hold the other back without really harming him. But Truls Rohk was so enormously strong that Bek couldn't afford to employ half measures when calling up the power of the wishsong. He hadn't mastered it yet anyway, not in the way that Grianne had, having only just discovered a few months earlier that he even had the use of it. The best he could do was to hope it had the intended effect.\n\nHe sent it spinning out in an entangling web of magic that snared Truls and sent him tumbling head over heels through the wreckage of the chamber. The shape-shifter went down, but he was back up again almost at once, throwing off his concealment, revealing himself instantly, big and dark and dangerous. With the long knife held before him, he rushed Grianne a second time. But Bek knew enough by now to appreciate how strong Truls was, and he had already assumed his first attempt at slowing the shape-shifter would fail. He sent a second wave of magic lancing out, a wall of sound that snared the other and sent him flying backwards. Bek cried out, but he did not think Truls even heard him, so caught up was he in his determination to get at Grianne.\n\nBut Bek reached her first, dropped to his knees, and wrapped his arms about her protectively. She did not move when he did so. She did not respond in any way.\n\n\"Don't hurt her,\" he started to say, turning to find Truls Rohk.\n\nThen something hit him so hard that it knocked him completely free of Grianne and sent him sprawling into the remains of a shattered creeper. Stunned, he dragged himself to his knees. \"Truls...,\" he gasped as he peered over at Grianne helplessly.\n\nThe shape-shifter was bent over her, a menacing shadow, his blade at her exposed throat. \"You haven't the experience for this, boy,\" he hissed at Bek. \"Not yet. But that doesn't make you less of an irritation, I'll give you that. No, don't try to get up. Stay where you are.\n\nHe was silent a moment, tensed and ready as he leaned closer to Bek's sister. Then the knife lowered. \"What's wrong with her? She's in some sort of trance.\"\n\nBek climbed back to his feet in spite of the warning and stumbled over, shaking off the disorienting effects of the blow. \"Did you have to hit me so hard?\"\n\n\"I did if I wanted to be certain you would remember what it meant to use your magic against me.\" The other shifted to face him. \"What were you thinking?\"\n\nBek shook his head. \"Only that I didn't want you to hurt her. I thought you would kill her outright when you saw Walker. I didn't think you could see her face, so you wouldn't know she couldn't hurt us. I just reacted.\"\n\nTruls Rohk grunted. \"Next time, think twice before you do.\" The blade disappeared into the cloak. \"Take the sword out of her hands and see what she does.\"\n\nHe was already bent over the Druid, probing through the blood-soaked robes, searching for signs of life. Bek knelt in front of the unseeing Grianne and carefully pried her fingers loose from the Sword of Shannara. They released easily, limply, and he caught the talisman in his hand as it fell free. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. She did not even blink.\n\nBek laid down the sword and moved Grianne's arms to her sides. She allowed him to do this without responding in any way. She might have been made of soft clay.\n\n\"She doesn't know anything that's happening to her,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"The Druid lives,\" Truls Rohk responded. \"Barely.\"\n\nHe straightened the ragged form and tore strips of cloth from his own clothing to stem the flow of blood from the visible wounds.\n\nBek watched helplessly, appalled by the extent of the damage. The Druid's injuries seemed more internal than external. There were jagged wounds to his chest and stomach, but he was bleeding from his mouth and ears and nose and even his eyes, as well. He seemed to have suffered a major rupture of his organs.\n\nThen abruptly, unexpectedly, the penetrating eyes opened and fixed on Bek. The boy was so startled that for a moment he quit breathing and just stared back at the other.\n\n\"Where is she?\" Walker whispered in a voice that was thick with blood and pain.\n\nBek didn't have to ask whom he was talking about. \"She's right beside us. But she doesn't seem to know who we are or what's going on.\"\n\n\"She is paralyzed by the sword's magic. She panicked and used her own to try to ward it off. Futile. It was too much. Even for her.\"\n\n\"Walker,\" Truls Rohk said softly, bending close to him. \"Tell us what to do.\"\n\nThe pale face shifted slightly, and the dark eyes settled on the other. \"Carry me out of here. Go where I tell you to go. Don't stop until you get there.\"\n\n\"But your wounds \u2014\"\n\n\"My wounds are beyond help.\" The Druid's voice turned suddenly hard and fierce. \"There isn't much time left, shape-shifter. Not for me. Do as I say. Antrax is destroyed. Castledown is dead. What there was of the treasure we came to find, of the books and their contents, is lost.\" The eyes shifted. \"Bek, bring your sister with us. Lead her by the hand. She will follow.\"\n\nBek glanced at Grianne, then back at Walker. \"If we move you...\n\n\"Druid, it will kill you to take you out of here!\" Truls Rohk snapped angrily. \"I didn't come this far just to bury you!\"\n\nThe Druid's strange eyes fixed on him. \"Choices of life and death are not always ours to make, Truls. Do as I say.\"\n\nTruls Rohk scooped the Druid into the cradle of his arms, slowly and gently, trying not to damage him further. Walker made no sound as he was lifted, his dark head sinking into his chest, his good arm folding over his stomach. Bek strapped the Sword of Shannara across his back, then took Grianne's hand and pulled her to her feet. She came willingly, easily, and she made no response to being led away.\n\nThey passed out of the ruined chamber and back down the passageway through which they had come. At the first juncture, Walker took them in a different direction than the one that had brought them in. Bek saw the dark head move slightly and heard the tired voice whisper instructions. The ends of the Druid's tattered robes trailed from his limp form, leaving smears of blood on the floor.\n\nAs they progressed through the catacombs, Bek glanced at Grianne from time to time, but never once did she look back at him. Her gaze stayed fixed straight ahead, and she moved as if she was sleepwalking. It frightened the boy to see her like this, more so than when she was hunting him. She seemed as if she was nothing more than a shell, the living person she had been gone entirely.\n\nTheir progress was slowed now and again by heaps of stone and twisted metal that barred their passage. Once, Truls was forced to lay the Druid down long enough to force back a sheet of twisted metal tightly jammed across their passage. Bek watched the Druid's eyes close against his pain and weariness, saw him flinch when he was picked up again, his hand clawing at his stomach as if to hold himself together. How Walker could still be alive after losing so much blood was beyond the boy. He had seen injured men before, but none who had lived after being damaged so severely.\n\nTruls Rohk was beside himself. \"Druid, this is senseless!\" he snapped at one point, stopping in rage and frustration. \"Let me try to help you!\"\n\n\"You help me best by going on, Truls,\" was the other's weak response. \"Go, now. Ahead still.\"\n\nThey walked a long way before finally coming out into a vast underground cavern that did not look as if it was a part of Castledown, but of the earth itself. The cavern was natural, the rock walls unchanged by metal or machines, the ceiling studded with stalactites that dripped water and minerals in steady cadence through the echoing silence. What little light there was emanated from flameless lamps that bracketed the cavern entry and a soft phosphorescence given off by the cavern rock. It was impossible to see the far side of the chamber, though bright enough to discern that it was a long distance off.\n\nAt the center of the chamber was a huge body of water as black as ink and smooth as glass.\n\n\"Take me to its edge,\" Walker ordered Truls Rohk.\n\nThey made their way along the uneven cavern floor, which was littered with loose rock and slick with damp. Moss grew in dark patches, and tiny ferns wormed through cracks in the stone. That anything could grow down here, bereft of sunlight, surprised Bek.\n\nHe squeezed Grianne's hand reassuringly, an automatic response to the encroachment of fresh darkness and solitude. He glanced at her immediately to see if she had noticed, but her gaze was still directed straight ahead.\n\nAt the water's edge, they stopped. On Walker's instructions, Truls Rohk knelt to lay him down, cradling him so that his head and shoulders rested in the shape-shifter's arms. Bek found himself thinking how odd it seemed, that a creature who was himself not whole, but bits and pieces held together by smoky mist, should be the Druid's bearer. He remembered when he had first met Walker in the Highlands of Leah. The Druid had seemed so strong then, so indomitable, as if nothing could ever change him. Now he was broken and ragged, leaking blood and life in a faraway land.\n\nTears came to Bek's eyes as swiftly as the thought, his response to the harsh realization that death approached. He did not know what to do. He wanted to help Walker, to make him whole again, to restore him to who he had been when they had first met all those months ago. He wanted to say something about how much the Druid had done for him. But all he could do was hold his sister's hand and wait to see what would happen.\n\n\"This is as far as I go,\" Walker said softly, coughing blood and wincing with the pain the movement caused.\n\nTruls Rohk wiped the blood away with his sleeve. \"You can't die on me, Druid. I won't allow it. We've too much more to do, you and I.\"\n\n\"We've done all we're allowed to do, shape-shifter,\" Walker replied. His smile was surprisingly warm. \"Now we must go our separate ways. You'll have to find your own adventures, make your own trouble.\"\n\nThe other grunted. \"Not likely I could ever do the job as well as you. Game-playing has always been your specialty, not mine.\"\n\nBek knelt beside them, pulling Grianne down with him. She let him place her however he wished and did nothing to acknowledge she knew he was there. Truls Rohk edged away from her.\n\n\"I'm done with this life,\" Walker said. \"I've done what I can with it, and I have to be satisfied with that. Make certain, when you return, that Kylen Elessedil honors his father's bargain. His brother will stand with you, \u2014 Ahren's stronger than you think. He has the Elfstones now, but the Elfstones won't make the difference. He will. Remember that. Remember as well what we made this journey for. What we have found here, what we have recovered, belongs to us.\"\n\nTruls Rohk spat. \"You're not making any sense, Druid. What are you talking about? We have nothing to show for what we've done! We've claimed nothing! The Elfstones? They weren't ours to begin with! What of the magic we sought? What of the books that contained it?\"\n\nWalker made a dismissive gesture. \"The magic contained in the books, the magic I spoke of to both Allardon Elessedil and his son, was never the reason for this voyage.\"\n\n\"Then what was?\" Truls Rohk was incensed. \"Are we to play guessing games all night, Druid? What are we doing here? Tell us! Has this all been for nothing? Give us something to hope for! Now, while there's still time! Because I don't think you have much left! Look at you! You're \u2014\"\n\nHe couldn't make himself finish the sentence, biting off the rest of what he was going to say in bitter distaste.\n\n\"Dying?\" Walker spoke the word for him. \"It's all right to say it, Truls. Dying will set me free from promises and responsibilities that have kept me in chains for longer than I care to remember. Anyway, it's only a word.\"\n\n\"You say it, then. I don't want to talk to you anymore.\"\n\nWalker reached up with his good hand and took hold of the other's cloak. To Bek's surprise, Truls Rohk did not pull away.\n\n\"Listen to me. Before I came to this land, before I decided to undertake this voyage, I went into the Valley of Shale, to the Hadeshorn, and I summoned the shade of Allanon. I spoke with him, asking what I could expect if I chose to follow the castaway's map. He told me that of all the goals I sought to accomplish, I would succeed in only one. For a long time, Truls, I thought that he meant I would recover the magic of the books from the Old World. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I thought that was the purpose of this voyage. It wasn't.\"\n\nHis fingers tightened on the shape-shifter's cloak. \"I made the mistake of thinking I could shape the future in the way I sought. I was wrong. Life doesn't permit it, not even if you are a Druid. We are given glimpses of possibilities, nothing more. The future is a map drawn in the sand, and the tide can wash it away in a moment. It is so here. All of our efforts in coming to this land, Truls, all of our sacrifices, have been for something we never once considered.\"\n\nHe paused, his breathing weak and labored, the effort of speaking further too much for him.\n\n\"Then what did we come here for?\" Truls Rohk asked impatiently, still angered by what he was hearing. \"What, Druid?\"\n\n\"For her,\" Walker whispered, and pointed at Grianne.\n\nThe shape-shifter was so stunned that for a moment he could not seem to find anything to say in response. It was as if the fire had gone out of him completely.\n\n\"We came for Grianne?\" Bek asked in surprise, not sure he had heard correctly.\n\n\"It will become clear to you when you are home again,\" Walker whispered, his words almost inaudible, even in the deep silence of the cavern. \"She is your charge, Bek. She is your responsibility now, your sister recovered as you wished she might be. Return her to the Four Lands. Do what you must, but see her home again.\"\n\n\"This makes no sense at all!\" Truls Rohk snapped in fury. \"She is our enemy!\"\n\n\"Give me your word, Bek,\" Walker said, his eyes never leaving the boy.\n\nBek nodded. \"You have it.\"\n\nWalker held his gaze a moment longer, then looked at the shape-shifter. \"And you, as well, Truls. Your word.\"\n\nFor a moment, Bek thought Truls Rohk wasn't going to give it. The shape-shifter didn't say anything, staring at the Druid in silence. Tension radiated from his dark form, yet he refused to reveal what he was thinking.\n\nWalker's fingers kept their death grip on the shape-shifter's cloak. \"Your word,\" he whispered again. \"Trust me enough to give it.\"\n\nTruls Rohk exhaled in a hiss of frustration and dismay. \"All right. I give you my word.\"\n\n\"Care for her as you would for each other,\" the Druid continued, his eyes back on Bek. \"She will not always be like this. She will recover one day. But until then, she needs looking after. She needs you to ward her from danger.\"\n\n\"What can we do to help her wake?\" Bek pressed.\n\nThe Druid took a long, ragged breath. \"She must help herself, Bek. The Sword of Shannara has revealed to her the truth about her life, about the lies she has been told and the wrong paths she has taken. She has been forced to confront who she has become and what she has done. She is barely grown, and already she has committed more heinous wrongs and destructive acts than others will commit in a lifetime. She has much to forgive herself for, even given the fact that she was so badly misled by the Morgawr. The responsibility for finding forgiveness lies with her. When she finds a way to accept that, she will recover.\"\n\n\"What if she doesn't?\" Truls Rohk asked. \"It may be, Druid, that she is beyond forgiveness, not just from others, but even from herself. She is a monster, even in this world.\"\n\nBek gave the shape-shifter an angry glance, thinking that Truls would never change his opinion of Grianne, that to him she would always be the Ilse Witch and his enemy.\n\nThe Druid had a fit of coughing, then steadied. \"She is human, Truls \u2014 like you,\" he replied softly. \"Others labeled you a monster. They were wrong to do so. It is the same with her. She is not beyond redemption. But that is her path to walk, not yours. Yours is to see that she has the chance to walk it.\"\n\nHe coughed again, more deeply. His breathing was so thick and wet that with every breath it seemed he might choke on his own blood. The sound of it emanated from deep in his chest, where his lungs were filling. Yet he lifted himself into a sitting position, freed himself from Truls Rohk's arms, and motioned him away.\n\n\"Leave me. Take Grianne and walk back to the cavern entrance. When I am gone, follow the passageway that bears left all the way to the surface. Seek out the others who still live \u2014 the Rovers, Ahren Elessedil, Ryer Ord Star. Quentin Leah, perhaps. One or two more, if they were lucky. Sail home again. Don't linger here. Antrax is finished. The Old World has gone back into the past for good. The New World, the Four Lands, is what matters.\"\n\nTruls Rohk stayed where he was. \"I won't leave you alone. Don't ask it of me.\"\n\nWalker's head sagged, his dark hair falling forward to shadow his lean face. \"I won't be alone, Truls. Now go.\"\n\nTruls Rohk hesitated, then rose slowly to his feet. Bek stood up, as well, taking Grianne's hand and pulling her up with him. For a moment no one moved, then the shape-shifter wheeled away without a word and started back through the loose rock for the cavern entrance. Bek followed wordlessly, leading Grianne, glancing back over his shoulder to look at Walker. The Druid was slumped by the edge of the underground lake, his dark robes wet with his blood, the slow, gentle heave of his shoulders the only indication that he still lived. Bek had an almost uncontrollable urge to turn around and go back for him, but he knew it would be pointless. The Druid had made his choice.\n\nAt the cavern entrance, Truls Rohk glanced back at Bek, then stopped abruptly and pointed toward the lake. \"Druid games, boy,\" he hissed. \"Look! See what happens now!\"\n\nBek turned. The lake was roiling and churning at its center, and a wicked green light shone from its depths. A dark and spectral figure rose from its center and hung suspended in the air. A face lifted out of the cloak's hood, dusky-skinned and black-bearded, a face Bek, without ever having seen it before, knew at once.\n\n\"Allanon,\" he whispered.\n\nWalker Boh dreamed of the past. He was no longer in pain, but his weariness was so overwhelming that he barely knew where he was. His sense of time had evaporated, and it seemed to him now that yesterday was as real and present as today. So it was that he found himself remembering how he had become a Druid, so long ago that all those who were there at the time were gone now. He had never wanted to be one of them, had never trusted the Druids as an order. He had lived alone for many years, avoiding his Ohmsford heritage and any contact with its other descendants. It had taken the loss of his arm to turn him to his destiny, to persuade him that the blood mark bestowed three hundred years earlier by Allanon on the forehead of his ancestor, Brin Ohmsford, had been intended for him.\n\nThat was a long time ago.\n\nEverything was so long ago.\n\nHe watched the greenish light rise out of the depths of the underground lake, breaking the surface of its waters in shards of brightness. He watched it widen and spread, then grow in intensity as a path from the netherworld opened beneath. It was a languid, surreal experience and became a part of his dreams.\n\nWhen the cloaked figure appeared in the light's emerald wake, he knew at once who it was. He knew instinctively, just as he knew he was dying. He watched with weary anticipation, ready to embrace what waited, to cast off the chains of his life. He had borne his burden of office for as long as he was able. He had done the best he could. He had regrets, but none that gave him more than passing pause. What he had accomplished would not be apparent right away to those who mattered, but it would become clear in time. Some would embrace it. Some would turn away. In either case, it was out of his hands.\n\nThe dark figure crossed the surface of the lake to where Walker lay and reached for him. His hand lifted automatically in response. Allanon's dark countenance stared down, penetrating eyes fixing on him. There was approval in those eyes. There was a promise of peace.\n\nWalker smiled.\n\nAs Bek and Truls Rohk watched, the shade reached Walker's side. Green light played about their dark forms, slicing through them like razors, slashing them with emerald blades. There was a hiss, but it was soft and distant, the whisper of a dying man's breath.\n\nThe shade bent for Walker, the effort strong and purposeful. Walker's hand came up, perhaps to ward it off, perhaps to welcome it, \u2014 it was difficult to tell. It made no difference. The shade lifted him into his arms and cradled him like a child.\n\nThen together they made a slow retreat back across the lake, gliding on air, their dark forms illuminated by shards of light that gathered about them like fireflies. When both were encased in the glow, it closed around completely and they slowly disappeared into its brilliant center until nothing remained but a faint rippling of the lake's dark waters. In seconds, even that was gone, and the cavern was still and empty once more.\n\nBek realized suddenly that he was crying. How much of what Walker had hoped to see accomplished in this life had he lived to witness? Not anything of what had brought him here. Not anything of what he had envisioned of the future. He had died the last of his order, an outcast and perhaps a failure. The thought saddened the boy more than he would have believed possible.\n\n\"It's finished,\" he said quietly.\n\nTruls Rohk's response was surprising. \"No, boy. It's just begun. Wait and see.\"\n\nBek looked at him, but the shape-shifter refused to say anything more. They stood where they were for a few seconds, unable to break away. It was as if they were expecting something more to happen. It was as if something must. But nothing did, and at last they quit looking and began to walk back through the passageways of Castledown to the world above." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Rue Meridian flew Black Moclips through the last hours of night and into the first light of morning before beginning her search of Castledown's ruins. She would have started sooner, but she was afraid to attempt anything complicated until it was light enough to see what she was doing. Airships were complex mechanisms, and flying one alone, even using the controls situated in the pilot box, was no mean feat. Just keeping the vessel airborne required all her concentration. To make out anything in the darkness, she would have had to place herself at the railing, outside the box and away from the controls. She would not have lasted long that way.\n\nShe still had Hunter Predd to help her, but the Wing Rider was not a sailor and knew almost nothing of how airships functioned. He could perform small tasks, but nothing on the order of what would be required if anything went wrong. Besides, he was needed aboard Obsidian if they were to have any real chance of finding the missing members of the company. The Roc's eyes were better than their own, and it had been trained to search for what was lost and needed finding. For now, the giant bird was keeping pace with the airship, staying just off her sails as it wheeled back and forth across the skies, waiting for his master to rejoin him.\n\n'\"No chance of persuading that Federation Commander or any of his crew to help us, I don't suppose,\" Hunter Predd ventured at one point, looking doubtful even as he voiced the possibility.\n\nShe shook her head. \"He says he won't do anything that contradicts his orders, and that includes helping us.\" She brushed back stray strands of her long red hair. \"You have to understand. Aden Kett is a soldier through and through, trained to follow orders, to accept the hierarchy of command. He isn't a bad man, just a misguided one.\"\n\nThey hadn't heard anything from the imprisoned Federation crew since she had locked them away in the storeroom below. Twice she had sent the Wing Rider to check on them, and both times he had reported back that other than muffled conversation, there was nothing to be heard. Apparently the crew had decided that for the time being it was better to wait this business out. She was more than content to let them do so.\n\nStill, it would have been nice to have help. As soon as it was light enough, she planned to send Hunter off on Obsidian in search of Walker, Bek, and the others. In a freewheeling search, he would have a better chance than she would of spotting something. If he was successful, she could bring Black Moclips close enough to pick them up. The risk to the airship was minimal. In daylight, from the safety of the skies, she would be able to see for miles. It was not likely that anything would be able to get close enough to threaten, especially now that she had control of the Ilse Witch's vessel.\n\nOf course, she could not discount the possibility that the witch had other weapons at her disposal, ones that could affect even an airship in flight. The witch was down there somewhere in the ruins, hunting Walker, and they might be unlucky enough to encounter her in their search. Rue Meridian had to hope that Obsidian would spy out any sign of the witch before they got close enough for her to do them any damage. She also had to hope that they would find Bek or Walker or any of the others who still lived before the witch did.\n\nShe yawned and flexed her gloved fingers where they gripped the flying levers. She had been awake for twenty-four hours, and she was beginning to feel the strain. Her wounds, even padded and sealed within her flying leathers, were throbbing painfully, and her eyes were heavy with the need for sleep. But there was no one to relieve her at the controls, so there was no point in dwelling on her deprivations. Maybe she would get lucky and find Bek at first light. Bek could fly Black Moclips. Big Red had taught him well enough. With Bek at the controls, she could get some sleep.\n\nHer thoughts settled momentarily on the boy. No, he was not a boy, she corrected herself quickly. Bek wasn't a boy \u2014 not in any way that mattered. He was young in years, but old already in life experience. Certainly he was more mature than those Federation fools she had been forced to suffer on the Prekkendorran. He was smart and funny, and he exuded genuine confidence. She thought back to their conversations on the flight out from the Four Lands, remembering how they had joked and laughed, how they had shared stories and confidences. Hawk and her brother both had been surprised. They didn't understand the attraction. But her friendship with Bek was different from the ones she was accustomed to, it was grounded in their similar personalities. Bek was like a best friend. She felt she could trust him. She felt she could tell him anything.\n\nShe shook her head and smiled. Bek put her at ease, and that wasn't something many men did. He didn't invite her to be anyone other than who she really was. He didn't expect anything from her. He wasn't looking to compete, wasn't trying to impress. He was a bit in awe of her, but she was used to that. The important thing was that he didn't let it interfere with or intrude on their friendship.\n\nShe wondered where he was. She wondered what had happened to him. Somehow he had fallen into the hands of the Mwellrets and the Ilse Witch, been brought aboard Black Moclips and imprisoned. Then someone had rescued him. Who? Had he really lost his voice, as Aden K.ett had said, or was he just pretending at it? She felt frustrated by her ignorance. She had so many questions and no way to determine the answers without finding Bek first. She did not like to think of him being hunted down there. But Bek was resourceful, able to find his way through dangers that would overwhelm other men. He would be all right until she found him.\n\nHawk would laugh at her, if he were there. He's just a boy, he would say, not making the distinction she had. He's not even one of us, not even a Rover.\n\nBut that didn't matter, of course. Not to her, at least. What mattered was that Bek was her friend, and she could admit to herself, if to no one else, that she didn't have many of these.\n\nShe brushed the matter aside and returned her attention to the task at hand. The first faint streaks of light were appearing in the east, sliding through gaps in the mountains. Within an hour, she would begin her search. By nightfall, perhaps they could be gone from this place.\n\nHunter Predd, who had been absent for a time, reappeared at her elbow. \"I took a quick look below. Nothing happening. Some of them are asleep. There's no sign of any attempt to break out. But I don't like the situation anyway.\"\n\n\"Nor do I.\" She shifted her position to relieve her cramped and aching muscles. \"Maybe Big Red will reach us before the day is out.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" The Wing Rider looked east. \"It's growing light. I should start searching. Will you be all right alone?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Let's find them, Wing Rider. All of them we left behind. Bek, for one, is still alive \u2014 along with whoever saved him from the Mwellrets. We know that much, at least. Maybe a few of the others are down there, as well. Whatever happens, we can't abandon them.\"\n\nHunter Predd nodded. \"We won't.\"\n\nHe went back down out of the pilot box and across the deck to the aft railing. She watched him signal into the night, then lower himself over the side on a rope. Moments later, he flew by aboard Obsidian, giving her a wave of reassurance before disappearing into the gloom. She could just make him out through the fading darkness. Wheeling Black Moclips in the direction he was taking, she moved out of the forested hill country and over the ravaged landscape of the ruins, the airship rocking gently in the wind.\n\nShe glanced down perfunctorily. Everything below looked flat and gray. It would have to grow much lighter before she could hope to see anyone. Even then, she doubted she would have much luck. Any rescue of the missing members of the company from the Jerle Shannara would rely almost entirely on the efforts of the Wing Rider and his Roc.\n\nDon't let us fail them, she thought. Not again.\n\nShe took a deep breath and put her back to the wind.\n\nHunter Predd swung down the rope from the airship railing, his keen eyes picking out Obsidian's sleek shape moving up obediently through the darkness. The Roc drifted into place below him, then rose so that his rider could settle aboard. Once Hunter Predd felt the harness between his legs, he reached down for the grips, released the rope, and with a nudge of his knees sent his carrier winging away.\n\nDawn was a faint gray smudge to the east, but its light was beginning to creep over the landscape. Flying out over the ruins, he could already make out the shattered buildings and debris-strewn roadways, empty and silent. Obsidian would be seeing much more. Even so, this search would not be easy. He had a feeling that Rue Meridian believed that all they needed to do was complete a sweep of the city and they would find anyone who was still alive down there. But Castledown was huge, miles and miles of rubble, and there was every chance that they would fail in their efforts to unmask its secrets. Those they sought must find a way to make themselves known if they were to be discovered other than by chance. To do that, they must be looking skyward in order to see the Roc. It had been almost two weeks since the Jerle Shannara had deposited the missing company on the shores of that bay to make the journey inland. By now, they might well have given up hope of being found. They might not be looking for help at all. They might not be alive.\n\nIt did no good to speculate, of course. He had come with the Rover girl to find whoever still survived, so it was pointless to start throwing up obstacles to their search before they had even begun it. After all( Obsidian had found smaller specks in larger expanses against greater odds. The chances were there, he simply had to make the best of them.\n\nHe flew in widening circles for the duration of the sunrise, searching all the while for movement on the ground, for something that looked a little out of place, for anything that would indicate a foreign presence. As he did so, he found himself thinking back on his decision to make this journey and wondering if he would have been better off staying home. It wasn't just that it had turned out so badly, \u2014 it was that nothing much seemed to have been accomplished for the effort. If it turned out that Walker was dead, then following Kael Elessedil's map would have been for nothing. Worse, it would have cost lives that could have been spared. Wing Riders were strong believers in letting well enough alone, in living their own lives and not messing in the lives of others. It had taken considerable compromise for him to come on this voyage, and it was taking considerable compromise now for him to stick things out. Common sense said he should turn around and fly home, that the longer he stayed, the shorter the odds grew that he would ever leave. Certainly the Rovers must feel the same way. Rovers and Wing Riders were alike, nomads by choice, mercenaries by profession. Their loyalty and sense of obligation could be bought and paid for, but they never let that get in the way of their common sense.\n\nBut he wouldn't leave, of course. He wouldn't abandon those on the ground, no matter the odds, if there was any chance at all that they were still alive. It was just that he couldn't help second-guessing himself, even if it wouldn't make any difference in what he perceived as his commitment to his missing comrades. What if this? What if that? It was the sort of game you played at if you spent enough time alone and in dangerous circumstances. But it was only a game.\n\nThe sun crested the horizon, daylight broke across the land, and the ruins stretched away as silent and empty as before. He glanced back to where Rue Meridian flew Black Moclips, a solitary figure in the pilot box. She was dangerously tired, and he wasn't sure how much longer she could continue to fly the airship alone. It had been an inspired idea to steal the vessel from the Ilse Witch, but it was going to turn into a liability if she didn't get help fast. He wasn't sure at the moment where that help was going to come from. He would give it if he could, but he knew next to nothing about airships. The best he could do was to pluck her off the deck if things got out of hand.\n\nHe caught sight of something odd at the edge of the ruins north, and he swung down for a closer look. He discovered a scattering of bodies, but they were not the bodies of his companions from the Jerle Shannara or even the bodies of any people he had ever encountered. These people had burnished skin and red hair, and they were dressed like Gnomes. He had never seen their like, but they had a tribal look to their garb and he assumed they were an indigenous people. How they had come to this sorry end was a mystery, but it looked as if they had been ripped apart by something extraordinarily powerful. Creepers, perhaps.\n\nHe flew over the still forms for a few moments more, hoping he would spy something that would help him discover what had happened. He thought it might be worth setting down to see if there was any indication that members of the Jerle Shannara had been involved, but decided against it. The information wouldn't do him any good unless he tried to follow up on foot, and that was too dangerous. He glanced over his shoulder to where Black Moclips hovered several hundred feet away, drifting in the wind. He signaled to Rue Meridian to swing by for a look, then began a slow sweep back out over the ruins. The Rover girl could make her own decision about what to do. He would continue on. If nothing else turned up, he would come back later.\n\nHe had barely settled into a fresh glide over the blasted expanse of the city when he caught sight of something flying toward them from the northeast. Obsidian saw it, as well, and gave a sharp cry of recognition.\n\nIt was Po Kelles aboard Niciannon.\n\nRue Meridian had just maneuvered Black Moclips over the collection of dead men at the edge of the ruins and was wondering what to make of it when she glanced back at Hunter Predd and saw the second Wing Rider. She knew it had to be Po Kelles, and she felt fresh hope that his arrival signaled the approach of her brother aboard the Jerle Shannara. With two airships searching, she would have a much better chance of finding Bek and the others. Perhaps she could take on a couple of Rovers to help her fly Black Moclips so that she could catch a few hours of sleep.\n\nShe watched the two riders circle in tandem, talking and gesturing from the backs of their Rocs. Holding her course, she peered back toward the coast, for some sign of the other ship. But there was nothing to be seen as yet, so she returned her attention to the Wing Riders. The discussion had become animated, and the first vague feelings of uneasiness crept through her. Something about the way they communicated, even from a distance, didn't look right.\n\nYou're imagining things, she thought.\n\nThen Hunter Predd broke away from Po Kelles and flew back to where she waited, swinging about to come alongside before dropping down and below the aft railing. Taking hold of the line he had left dangling from before, the Wing Rider swung down off the bird and pulled himself up, hand over hand, until he was back on board. A hand signal to Obsidian sent the Roc wheeling away to take up a position beside them, flying to keep pace.\n\nRue Meridian waited as the Elf hurried over to the pilot box and climbed inside. Even in the faint new light, she could tell that he was upset.\n\n\"Listen to me, Little Red.\" His weathered face was calm, but strained. \"Your brother and the others are flying this way, but they are being chased. A fleet of enemy airships appeared off the coast yesterday at dawn. The Jerle Shannara barely got away from them. She's been flying this way ever since, trying to shake them off. But fast as she is, she can't seem to lose them. They tracked her all through the mountains, all the way inland, even after she'd changed course to go another way entirely, and now they're almost here.\"\n\nEnemy airships? All the way out here, so far from the Four Lands? She took a moment to let the information sink in. \"Who are they?\"\n\nHe made a dismissive gesture with one hand. \"I don't know. No one does. They fly no flag, and their crews act like dead men. They walk around, but they don't seem to see anything. Po Kelles got a close look late yesterday when the Rovers set down to rest, thinking they'd lost them. Not an hour passed, and there they were again. The ones he could see were men, but they didn't act like men. They acted like machines. They didn't look as if they were alive. They were all stiff and empty-eyed, not seeing anything. One thing is certain. They know where they're going, and they don't seem to need a map to find us.\"\n\nShe glanced around at the brightening day and the ruins below, her hopes for continuing the search fading. \"How far away are they?\"\n\n\"Not half an hour. We have to fly out of here. If they catch you in Black Moclips by yourself, you won't stand a chance.\"\n\nShe stared at him without speaking for a moment, anger and frustration blooming inside. She understood the need for flight, but she had never been good at being forced to do anything. Her instincts were to stand and fight, not to run. She hated abandoning yet again those she was searching for, leaving them to an uncertain fate at the hands of not only the Mwellrets and the Ilse Witch, but now this new threat, as well. How long would they last on their own? How long would it be before she could come back and give them any help?\n\n\"How many of them are there?\" she asked.\n\nThe Wing Rider shook his head. \"More than twenty. Too many, Little Red, for us to face.\"\n\nHe was right, of course. About everything. They should break off the search and flee before the intruders caught sight of them. But she could not help feeling that Bek and the others were down there, some of them at least, waiting for help. She could not shake off the suspicion that all that was needed was just a little more time. Even a few minutes might be enough.\n\n\"Tell Po Kelles to take up watch for us,\" she ordered. \"We can look just a little longer before giving up.\"\n\nHe stared at her. She knew she had no right to give him orders, and he was debating whether or not to point that out. She knew, as well, that he understood what she was feeling.\n\n\"The weather is turning, too, Little Red,\" he said softly, pointing.\n\nSure enough. Dark clouds were rolling in from the east, borne by coastal winds, and they looked menacing even from a distance. She was surprised she hadn't noticed them. The air had grown colder, too. A front was moving through, and it was bringing a storm with it.\n\nShe looked back at him. \"Let's try, Wing Rider. For as long as we can. We owe them that much.\"\n\nHunter Predd didn't need to ask whom she was talking about. He nodded. \"All right, Rover girl. But you watch yourself.\"\n\nHe jumped down out of the pilot box and sprinted back across the decking to the aft railing and disappeared over the side. Obsidian was already in place, and in seconds they were winging off to warn Po Kelles. Rue Meridian swung the airship back around toward the ruins, heading in. Already she was searching the rubble.\n\nThen it occurred to her, a sudden and quite startling revelation, that she was flying an enemy airship, and those on the ground wouldn't know who she was. Rather than come out of hiding to reveal themselves, they would simply burrow deeper. Why hadn't she realized this before? Had she done so, perhaps she could have devised a way to make her intentions known. But it was too late now. Maybe the presence of the Wing Rider would reassure anyone looking up that she wasn't the Ilse Witch. Maybe they would understand what she was trying to do.\n\nJust a few minutes more, she kept telling herself. Just give me a few minutes more.\n\nShe got those minutes and then some, but she saw no sign of anyone below. The clouds rolled in and blocked the sun, and the air turned so cold that even though she pulled her cloak tight about her, she was left shivering. The landscape was spotted with shadows, and everything looked the same. She was still searching, still insistent on not giving up, when Hunter Predd swung right in front of her and began to gesture.\n\nShe turned and looked. Two dozen airships had materialized from out of the gloom, black specks on the horizon. One led all the others, the one being chased, and she knew from its shape that it was the Jerle Shannara. Po Kelles was flying Niciannon toward it already, and Hunter Predd was calling to her to tack east and head for the mountains. With a final glance down, she did so. Black Moclips lurched in response to her hard wrench on the steering levers and the surge of full power from the radian draws she sent down to the parse tubes and their diapson crystals. The airship shuddered, straightened, and began to pick up speed. Rue Meridian could hear the shouts and cries of the imprisoned Federation crew, but she had no time for them just now. They had made their choice in this matter, and they were stuck with things as they were, like it or not.\n\n\"Shut up!\" she shrieked, not so much at the men as at the wind that whipped past her ears, taunting and rough.\n\nAt full speed, her anger a catalyst that made her as ready to fight as to flee, she flew into the mountains." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "In the slow, cool hours before sunrise, Quentin Leah buried Ard Patrinell and Tamis. He lacked a digging tool to provide a grave, so he lowered them into the wronk pit and filled it in with rocks. It took him a long time to find the rocks in the darkness and then to carry them, sometimes long distances, to be dropped into place. The pit was large and not easily covered over, but he kept at it, even after he was so weary his body ached.\n\nWhen he was finished, he knelt by the rough mound and said good-bye to them, talking to them as if they were still there, wishing them peace, hoping they were together, telling them they would be missed. An Elven Tracker and a Captain of the Home Guard, star-crossed in every sense of the word \u2014 perhaps they would be united wherever they were now. He tried to think of Patrinell as the Captain was before his changing, a warrior of unmatched fighting skills, a man of courage and honor. Quentin did not know what lay beyond death, but he thought it might be something better than life and that maybe that something allowed you to make up for missed chances and lost dreams.\n\nHe did not cry, he was all done crying. But he was hollowed out and bereft, and he felt a bleakness that was so pervasive it threatened to undo him completely.\n\nDawn was breaking when he stood again, finished at last. He reached down for the Sword of Leah where he had cast it away at the end of his battle, and picked it up again. The bright, dark surface was unmarked save for streaks of blood and grime. He wiped it off carefully, considering it as he did so. It seemed to him that the sword had failed him completely. For all its magic properties, for all that it was touted to have accomplished in its long and storied history, it had proved to be of little use to him here in this strange land. It had not been enough to save Tamis or Ard Patrinell. It had not even been enough to enable him to protect Bek, whom he had sworn to protect no matter what. That Quentin was alive because he had possession of it was of little consolation. His own life seemed to have been purchased at the cost of others. He did not feel deserving of it. He felt dead inside, and he did not know how he could ever feel anything else.\n\nHe put the blade back into its sheath and strapped it across his back once more. The sun was cresting the horizon, and he had to decide what he would do next. Finding Bek was a priority, but to do so he had to leave the concealment of the forest and go back into the ruins of Castledown. That meant risking yet another confrontation with creepers and wronks, and he did not know if he could face that. What he did know was that he needed to be away from this place of death and disappointment.\n\nSo he began walking, watching the shadows about him fade back into the trees as sunlight seeped through the canopy and dappled the forest floor. He dropped down from the hills surrounding Castledown to the level stretches he had abandoned in his flight from the Patrinell wronk two days earlier. Walking made him feel somewhat better. The bleakness in his heart lingered, but something of his loss of direction and purpose disappeared as he considered his prospects. There was nothing to be gained by standing about. What he must do, no matter what it took, was find Bek. It was Quentin's insistence on making the journey that had persuaded his cousin to come with him. If he accomplished nothing else, at least he must see Bek safely home again.\n\nHe believed that Bek was still alive, even though he knew that many others in the company had perished. He believed this because Tamis had been with his cousin before she found Quentin and because in his heart, where instincts sometimes gave insights that eyes could not, he felt nothing had changed. But that didn't mean that Bek wasn't in trouble and in need of help, and Quentin was determined not to let him down.\n\nSome part of him understood that his intensity was triggered by a need to grasp hold of something to save himself. He was aware that if he faltered, his despair would prove overwhelming, his bleakness of heart so complete that he would be unable to make himself move. If he gave way, he was lost. Moving in any direction, seizing on any purpose, kept him from tumbling into the abyss. He didn't know how realistic he was being in trying to find Bek, all alone and unaided by any useful magic, but the odds didn't matter if he could manage to stay sane.\n\nHe was not far from the ruins when he caught sight of an airship flying out ahead of him, distant and small against the horizon. He was so surprised that for a moment he stopped where he was and stared at it in disbelief. It was too far away for him to identify, but he decided at once that it must be the Jerle Shannara searching for the members of the company. He felt fresh hope at this and began walking toward it at once.\n\nBut in seconds the airship had drifted into the haze of a massive bank of clouds coming out of the east and was lost from view.\n\nHe was standing in an open clearing, trying to find it again, when he heard someone call. \"Highlander! Wait!\"\n\nHe turned in surprise, trying to identify the voice, to determine from where the speaker was calling. He was still searching the hills unsuccessfully when Panax walked out of the trees behind him.\n\n\"Where have you been, Quentin Leah?\" the Dwarf demanded, out of breath and flushed with exertion. \"We've been hunting for you all yesterday and last night! It was pure luck that I caught sight of you just now!\"\n\nHe came up to Quentin and shook his hand warmly. \"Well met, Highlander. You look a wreck, if you don't mind my saying. Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Quentin answered, even though he wasn't. \"Who's been looking for me, Panax?\"\n\n\"Kian and I. Obat and a handful of his Rindge. The wronk tore them up pretty thoroughly. The village, the people, everything. Scattered the tribe all over the place, those it didn't kill. Obat pulled the survivors together up in the hills. At one point, they were planning to rebuild their village and go on as before, but no longer. They're not going back. Things have changed.\"\n\nHe stopped suddenly, taking a close look at Quentin's face, finding something in it he hadn't seen before. \"Where's Tamis?\" he asked.\n\nQuentin shook his head. \"Dead. Ard Patrinell, as well. They killed each other. I couldn't save either one.\" His hands were shaking. He couldn't seem to stop them. He stared down, confused. \"We set a trap, Tamis and I. We hid in the forest by a pit and let the wronk find us, thinking we could drop it in. We used a decoy, a trick, to lure it over. It worked, but then it climbed out, and Tamis...\"\n\nHe trailed off, unable to continue, tears coming to his eyes once more, as if he were a child reliving a nightmare.\n\nPanax took Quentin's hands in his own, steadying them, holding on until the shaking stopped. \"You don't look as if you escaped by much yourself,\" he said quietly. \"I expect there wasn't anything you could have done to save either that you didn't try. Don't expect too much of yourself, Highlander. Even magic doesn't always provide the answers we seek. The Druid may have found that out himself, wherever he is. Sometimes, we have to accept that we have limitations. Some things we can't prevent. Death is one.\"\n\nHe let go of Quentin's hands and gripped him by his shoulders. \"I'm sorry about Tamis and Ard Patrinell, truly sorry. I expect they fought hard to stay alive, Highlander. But so did you. I think you owe it to them and to yourself to make that count for something.\"\n\nQuentin looked into the Dwarf's brown eyes, coming back to himself as he did so, able to form a measure of fresh resolve. He remembered Tamis' face at the end, the fierce way she had faced her own death. Panax was right. To fall apart now, to give in to his sadness, would be a betrayal of everything she had fought to accomplish. He took a deep breath. \"All right.\"\n\nPanax nodded and stepped back. \"Good. We need you to be strong, Quentin Leah. The Rindge have been out exploring since early this morning, before dawn. They went into the ruins. Castledown is littered with creepers, none of them functioning. The fire threads are down. Antrax, it seems, is dead.\"\n\nQuentin stared at him, not comprehending.\n\n\"Well and good, you might say, but look over there.\" The Dwarf pointed east to a steadily advancing cloudbank, a huge wall of darkness that stretched across the entire horizon. \"What's coming is a change in the world, according to the Rindge. They have a legend about it. If Antrax is destroyed, the world will revert to what it once was. Remember how the Rindge insisted that Antrax controlled the weather? Well before that time, this land was all ice and snow, bitter cold and barely habitable. It only turned to something warm and green after Antrax changed it eons ago. Now it's changing back. Feel the nip in the air?\"\n\nQuentin hadn't noticed it before, but Panax was right. The air was growing steadily colder, even as the sun rose. There was a brittle snap to it that whispered of winter.\n\n\"Obat and his people are going over the mountains and into Parkasia's interior,\" the Dwarf continued. \"Better weather over there. Safer country. If we don't find another way out of here pretty quick, I think we'd better go with them.\"\n\nSuddenly Quentin remembered the airship. \"I just saw the Jerle Shannara, Panax,\" he said quickly, directing the other's attention toward the front. \"It was visible for a moment, right over there. I saw it while I was standing where you found me, and then I lost it in those clouds.\"\n\nThey stared into the darkness together for a several moments without seeing anything. Then Panax cleared his throat. \"Not that I doubt you on this, but are you sure it wasn't Black Moclips?\"\n\nThe possibility hadn't occurred to Quentin. He was so eager for it to be the Jerle Shannara, he supposed, that he had never stopped to consider that it might be the enemy airship. He had forgotten about their nemesis.\n\nHe shook his head slowly. \"No, I guess I'm not sure at all.\"\n\nThe Dwarf nodded. \"No harm done. But we have to be careful. The witch and her Mwellrets are still out there.\"\n\n\"What about Bek and the others?\"\n\nPanax looked uncomfortable. \"Still no sign. I don't know if we can find them, Highlander. Obat's people still won't go into the ruins. They say it's a place of death even with Antrax gone and the creepers and fire threads down. They say it's cursed. Nothing has changed. I tried to get them to come with me this morning, but after they saw what had happened, they went right back up into the hills to wait.\" He shook his head. \"I guess I don't blame them, but it doesn't help us much.\"\n\nQuentin faced him. \"I'm not leaving Bek, Panax. I'm all done with running away, with watching people die and not doing anything about it.\"\n\nThe Dwarf nodded. \"We'll keep looking, Highlander. For as long as we can, we'll keep searching. But don't get your hopes up.\"\n\n\"He's alive,\" Quentin insisted.\n\nThe Dwarf did not reply, his weathered, bluff face masking his thoughts. His gaze shifted skyward to the north, and Quentin turned to look, as well. A line of black specks had appeared on the horizon, coming down parallel to the storm front, strung out across the morning sky.\n\n\"Airships,\" Panax announced softly, a new edge to his rough voice.\n\nThey watched the specks grow larger and begin to take shape. Quentin could not understand where so many airships had come from, seemingly out of nowhere, all at once. Whose were they? He glanced at Panax, but the Dwarf seemed as confused as he did.\n\n\"Look,\" Panax said, pointing.\n\nThe airship Quentin had seen earlier had reappeared out of the darkness, moving swiftly across the sky east toward the mountains. There was no mistaking it this time, \u2014 it was Black Moclips. A cry for help died on the Highlander's lips, and he froze in place as it passed overhead and receded into the distance. They could see now that it was attempting to cut off another ship, one further ahead. The distinctive rake of the three masts marked it instantly as the Jerle Shannara. The witch and her Mwellrets were in pursuit of the Rovers, and these new airships were chasing both.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Quentin asked, as much of himself as of Panax.\n\nA moment later, the pursuing fleet split into two groups, one going after Black Moclips and the Jerle Shannara, the other breaking off toward the ruins of Castledown. This second group was the smaller of the two, but was commanded by the largest of the airships. In a line, the vessels swung over the ruins, where they prepared to set down.\n\n\"I don't think we should stand out in the open like this,\" Panax offered after a moment.\n\nQuickly, they moved into the cover of the trees, then retreated back up into the hills until they found a vantage point from which they could look down on what was taking place. It didn't take them long to decide that they had made the right decision. Rope ladders had been lowered from the airships, which hovered a dozen feet off the ground, and knots of Mwellrets were climbing down and spreading out. On board the airships, the crews kept their stations.\n\nBut there was something odd about their stance. They stood frozen in place like statues, not moving about, not even talking with one another. Quentin stared at them for a long time, waiting for any sort of reaction at all. There was none.\n\n\"I don't think they're friends,\" Panax declared softly. He paused. \"Look at that.\"\n\nSomething new had been added to the mix \u2014 a handful of creatures that lacked any recognizable identity. They were being placed in slings and lowered by winches from the largest airship, one after the other. They looked a little like humans grown all out of proportion, with massive shoulders and arms, thick legs, and hairy torsos. They hunched forward as they walked, using all four limbs like the apes of the Old World. But their heads had a wolfish look to them, with narrow, sharp snouts, pointed ears, and gimlet eyes. Even at a distance, their features were unmistakable.\n\n\"What are those?\" Quentin breathed.\n\nThe search parties fanned out through the ruins, dozens of Mwellrets in each, armed and armored, a decidedly hostile invader. Secured on lengths of chain and ordered to track, the odd hunched creatures were being used like dogs. Noses to the ground, they began making their way through the rubble in different directions, the Mwellrets trailing. Within the ruins, there was no response from Antrax. No creepers appeared and no fire threads lanced forth. It appeared the Rindge were right about what had happened. But it only made Quentin wonder all the more about Bek.\n\nBurly, dark-skinned Kian appeared suddenly out the trees, moving over to join them. He nodded a greeting to Quentin as he came up, but didn't speak.\n\n\"We've got a problem, Highlander,\" Panax said without looking at him.\n\nQuentin nodded. \"They're searching for us. Eventually, they'll find us.\"\n\n\"All too quickly, I expect.\" The Dwarf straightened. \"We can't stay. We have to get away.\"\n\nQuentin Leah stared down at the searchers as they trickled into the city, tiny figures still, like toys. Quentin understood what Panax was saying, but he didn't want to speak the words aloud. Panax was saying that they had to give up the search for Bek. They had to put as much distance as possible between themselves and whoever was down there hunting them.\n\nHe felt something shrivel up and die inside at the prospect of abandoning Bek yet again, but he knew that if he stayed, he would be found. That would accomplish nothing useful and might result in his death. He tried to think it through. Maybe Bek stood a better chance than Quentin thought. Bek had the use of magic, \u2014 Tamis had told them so. She had seen him use it, a power that could shred creepers. His cousin wasn't entirely helpless. In truth, he might be better off than they were. Maybe he had even found Walker, so that the two of them were together. They might have already fled the ruins and gone into the mountains themselves.\n\nHe stopped himself angrily. He was rationalizing. He was trying to make himself feel better about abandoning Bek, about breaking his promise once more. But he didn't really believe what he was telling himself. His heart wouldn't let him.\n\n\"What do we do?\" he asked finally, resigned to doing the one thing he had sworn he wouldn't.\n\nPanax rubbed his bearded chin. \"We go into the Aleuthra Ark \u2014 those mountains behind us \u2014 with Obat and his people. We go deeper into Parkasia. The airships were flying that way. Maybe we can catch up to one of them. Maybe we can signal it.\" He shrugged wearily. \"Maybe we can manage to stay alive.\"\n\nTo his credit, he didn't say anything about coming back for Bek and the others, or resuming the search somewhere further down the line. He understood that such a thing might not happen, that they might never return to the ruins. He was not about to make a promise he knew he could not keep.\n\nNone of this helped Quentin with his feelings of betrayal, but it was better to be honest about the possibilities than to cling to false hopes.\n\nI'm sorry, Bek, he said to himself.\n\n\"They're coming this way,\" Kian said suddenly.\n\nOne of the search parties had emerged at the edge of the ruins below and found the bodies of the Rindge that the Patrinell wronk had killed two days earlier. Already, the hunched creatures were sniffing the ground for tracks. A wolfish head lifted and looked toward where they crouched in the trees, as if aware of them, as if able to spy them out.\n\nWithout another word, the Dwarf, the Elf, and the Highlander melted into the trees and were gone.\n\nIt took them the better part of an hour to reach the clearing where Obat and his Rindge were assembled. They were high up on the slopes of the hills fronting the Aleuthra Ark, which ran down the interior of Parkasia from northwest to southeast like a jagged spine. The Rindge were a ragged and dispirited-looking group, although not disorganized or unprepared. Sentries had been posted and met the three outlanders long before they reached the main body of Rindge. Weapons had been recovered, so that all the men were armed. But the larger portion of survivors was made up of women and children, some of the latter only babies. There were at least a hundred Rindge and probably closer to two hundred. They had their belongings piled about them, tied up in bundles or stuffed into cloth sacks. Most sat quietly in the shadows, talking among themselves, waiting. In the dappled forest light, they looked like hollow-eyed and uncertain ghosts.\n\nObat came up to Panax and began talking to him immediately. Panax listened, then replied, using the ancient Dwarf tongue he had employed successfully when they had first met. Obat listened and shook his head no. Panax tried again, pointing back in the direction from which they had come. It was clear to Quentin that he was telling Obat about the intruders from the airships. But Obat didn't like what he was hearing.\n\nExasperation written all over his face, Panax turned to the Highlander. \"I told him we have to move quickly, that the belongings must be left behind. As it is, it will take everything we have to move this bunch to safety without having to deal with all this stuff. But Obat says this is all his people have left. They won't leave it.\"\n\nHe turned to Kian. \"Go back up the trail with a couple of the Rindge and keep watch.\"\n\nThe Elven Hunter turned without a word, beckoned a couple of the Rindge to come with him, and disappeared into the trees at a quick trot.\n\nPanax turned back to Obat and tried again. This time he made unmistakable gestures indicating what would happen if the Rindge were too slow in the attempt to escape. His broad face was flushed and angry, and his voice was raised. Obat stared at him, impassive.\n\nWe're wasting time, Quentin thought suddenly. Time we don't have.\n\n\"Panax,\" he said. The Dwarf turned. \"Tell them to pick up their things and start walking. We can't take time to argue about this any longer. Let them find out for themselves whether or not it's worth it to haul their possessions. Set a pace the women and children can follow and go. Leave me a dozen Rindge. I'll see what I can do to slow our pursuers down.\"\n\nThe Dwarf gave him a hard look and then nodded. \"All right, Highlander. But I'm staying, as well. Don't argue the matter. As you say, we don't have time for it.\"\n\nHe spoke quickly to Obat, who turned to his people and began shouting orders. The Rindge assembled at once, belongings in place. Led by a handful of armed men, they set out along a narrow forest path into the hills, moving silently and purposefully. Quentin was surprised at how swiftly they got going. There was no hesitation, no confusion. Everyone seemed to know what to do. Perhaps they had done it before. Perhaps they were better prepared for the move than Panax thought.\n\nIn seconds, the clearing was empty of everyone but Quentin, Panax, and a dozen or so Rindge warriors. Obat had chosen to stay, as well. Quentin wasn't sure this was a good idea, since Obat was clearly the leader of the tribe and losing him might prove disastrous. But it wasn't his decision to make, so he left it alone.\n\nHe turned to look off in the direction of the ruins, wondering how much time they had before the Mwellrets and those hunched creatures discovered them. Perhaps it wouldn't happen as quickly as he feared. There would be other tracks to distract them, other trails to follow. They might choose one that would lead them in another direction entirely. But he didn't believe that for a minute.\n\nHe thought about his failures on his journey from the Highlands of Leah, of his missed opportunities and questionable choices. He had set out with such high hopes. He had thought himself capable of dictating the direction of his life. He had been wrong. In the end, it had been all he could do to stay afloat in the sea of confusion that surrounded him. He could not even determine whom he would use the magic of his vaunted sword to protect. He could use it to help only those whom fate placed within his reach, and maybe not even those.\n\nThe Rindge were among them. He could leave them and go on, because in the end they didn't really have anything to do with him, his reasons for coming to Parkasia, or his promise to Bek. If anything, they were a hindrance. If he was to have any chance at all of catching up to one of the airships and finding a way out of this land, speed might make the difference. But in the wake of his failure to save Tamis or Ard Patrinell or to find Bek, he felt a compelling need to succeed in helping someone. The Rindge were giving him that opportunity. He could not make himself walk away from it. He could not let anyone else be hurt because of him.\n\nHe would do what he could for those he was in a position to help. If helping the Rindge was what fate had given him the chance to do, that would have to be enough.\n\nPanax walked up beside him. \"What happens now, Quentin Leah? How do we stop those things back there from catching up to Obat's people?\"\n\nThe Highlander only wished he knew." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "When Ahren Elessedil regained consciousness, he found himself lying on his side in Castledown's rubble looking at the boots of his captors. His hands were tied behind his back, and his head ached from the blow he had received. Even without having witnessed the particulars, he knew at once what had happened and was awash in despair and frustration. He had stumbled into a Mwellret trap, one set for him as he tried to move through the ruins with Ryer Ord Star. How could he have been so stupid? After what he had gone through to retrieve the Elfstones and escape Castledown, how could he have allowed himself to be caught so completely unawares?\n\nThere wasn't any answer for such questions, of course. Asking them only invited self-recrimination, and there was nothing to be gained from that.\n\nHe blinked against the dryness in his eyes and tried to sit up, but a heavy boot pushed him back again and settled on his chest.\n\n\"Little Elvess sstayss where they are,\" a voice hissed.\n\nHe glanced up at the big Mwellret standing over him and nodded. The boot and the Mwellret moved away a few steps, but the watchful eyes stayed fixed on him. He could see rets standing all about him, maybe a dozen or so, heavy reptilian bodies cloaked against the dawn light, heads bent between heavy shoulders, voices low and sibilant as they conversed among themselves. None of them seemed to be in a hurry to go anywhere or to get anything done. They seemed to be waiting for something. He tried to imagine what it might be. The Ilse Witch, perhaps. She must have gone further into the ruins. Perhaps she had gone underground in search of Walker.\n\nHe thought suddenly of Ryer Ord Star, and from his prone position he scanned as much of the area as he could in an effort to find her. He spotted her finally, seated in an open space, alone and ignored. He stared at her for a long time, waiting to be noticed, but she never looked his way. She kept her gaze lowered, her face shadowed by her long silver hair. She might have had her eyes closed, \u2014 he couldn't tell. She was unfettered, and no Mwellrets stood over her as they did over him. They seemed unconcerned that she might try to escape.\n\nSomething about her situation bothered him. She didn't seem to be a prisoner at all.\n\nHe glanced around further, searching for any other members of the company who might have encountered the same misfortune. But no one else was in evidence, only the two of them. He shifted surreptitiously in an effort to see what else he might have missed from where he lay, but he saw only Mwellrets in the area.\n\nThen he glanced skyward and saw the airships.\n\nHis throat tightened. There were six of them \u2014 no, wait, there were eight \u2014 hanging in the air, not far off the ground at the edge of the ruins, silhouetted against the morning sky. They were close enough that he could see crew members standing about, Mwellrets climbing down rope ladders, and hoists lowering animals that twisted and writhed and grunted loudly. He caught only glimpses of them against the bright sunrise as they slipped over the sides of the airships and disappeared down into the ruins, and he couldn't make out what they were.\n\nMwellrets and airships. He couldn't understand it. Where had they come from, all at once like this? Had the Ilse Witch brought them, keeping them back from Black Moclips, hiding them until they were needed? He tried to reason it through and failed.\n\nHe glanced again at Ryer Ord Star. The seer still hadn't looked up, hadn't changed position, hadn't done anything to evidence that she was even conscious. He wondered suddenly if perhaps she was in a trance, trying to connect to Walker. But the Druid had to be dead by now. He had been dying back there in the extraction chamber, his blood everywhere. Walker had sacrificed himself to destroy Antrax. Even Ryer must realize that she could no longer reach him.\n\nSo what was she doing?\n\nWhy wasn't she tied up like he was?\n\nHe waited for the answers to come, for her to respond to his mental summons, for something to happen that would reveal her condition \u2014 without success.\n\nAll of a sudden, he remembered the Elfstones. He was astonished that he had forgotten about them, that he had somehow failed to remember the one weapon he still had at his disposal. Maybe. He had tucked them into his tunic on fleeing the ruins, in a pocket near his waist. Were they still there? He didn't think he could reach them with his hands tied, but he could at least determine if he had them. The Mwellrets would have searched him for weapons, not for the Stones. They wouldn't even know what they were.\n\nHe glanced about quickly, but no one was looking at him. He rolled onto his other side, moving slowly, trying not to attract attention. He squirmed down against the hard earth, searching for the feel of the Elfstones against his body. He could not find them. His hopes sank. He shifted positions, trying to see if they were somewhere else, but he could not feel them anywhere.\n\nHe was still searching when he heard a mix of heavy footfalls, rough voices, and deep growls. The Mwellret who had pushed him down came over at once and hauled him to his feet with a jerk, standing him upright and propping him against a section of wall.\n\n\"Sseess now what becomess of you, little Elvess,\" he muttered before turning away.\n\nAhren glanced over at Ryer Ord Star. She was on her feet, as well, still alone and still not looking at him. She stood with her arms wrapped about her slender body, looking frail and tiny. Something was going on with her that he didn't understand, and she wasn't doing anything to let him know what it was.\n\nA clutch of Mwellrets strode into the clearing. Two of the burliest held the ends of chains that were fastened to a collar strapped about the neck of one of the most terrifying creatures Ahren had ever seen. The creature tugged and twisted against the collar like a huge dog, grunts and growls emanating from deep within its throat as it did so. Its body was hunched over and heavily muscled. Four human limbs that ended in clawed fingers and massive shoulders were covered in thick black hair. Its torso was so long and sinuous that it allowed the creature to almost double back on itself as it twisted about angrily, trying to bite at the chains. Its head was wolfish, its jaws huge, and its teeth long and dark. It had the look of something bred not just to hunt, but to destroy.\n\nWhen it saw Ahren, it lunged for him, and the Elf pressed back against the building wall in fear.\n\nA tall, black-cloaked figure stepped forward, blocking the creature's path. The beast cringed and backed away.\n\nThe cloaked figure turned and looked at him. Ahren could just make out the other's face. It might have been human once, but now it was covered with gray scales like the rets, flat and expressionless, its green eyes compressed into narrow slits that regarded him with such coldness that he forgot all about the wolf creature.\n\n\"Cree Bega,\" the cloaked figure called, still watching Ahren.\n\nThe Mwellret who had been standing guard over him came at once. Big as he was, he looked small next to the newcomer. Even so, he did not do anything to acknowledge the other's authority, neither bowing nor nodding. He simply stood there, his gaze level and fixed.\n\n\"Cree Bega,\" the other repeated, and this time there was a hint of menace in his voice. \"Why is this Elf still alive?\"\n\n\"He iss an Elesssedil. He hass the power to ssummon the magic of the Elfsstoness.\"\n\n\"You have seen this for yourself?\"\n\nCree Bega shook his head. \"But the sseer tellss me thiss iss sso.\"\n\nAhren felt as if the ground had dropped away beneath him. He glanced quickly at Ryer, but she was still staring blankly.\n\n\"She is the witch's tool,\" the cloaked figure declared softly, looking over at the seer.\n\n\"Her eyess and earss aboard little Elvess sship.\" Cree Bega glanced at Ahren. \"Not anymore. Belongss to uss now. Sservess uss.\"\n\nAhren refused to believe what he was hearing. Ryer Ord Star would never go back to serving their enemies, not after what she had gone through, not after breaking free of the Ilse Witch. She had said she was finished with that. She had sworn it.\n\nStunned, he watched as his captors turned away from him and walked to where the seer stood. Bent close, the cloaked one began speaking to her. The words were too faint for Ahren to hear, but Ryer Ord Star nodded and then replied. The conversation lasted just minutes, but it was clear that some sort of agreement had been reached.\n\nHe moved his elbows down close to his sides, pressing them against his ribs, shifting first one way and then the other, straining at the cords that bound his wrists as he tried to determine if the Elf stones were indeed gone. It seemed they were, \u2014 he could find no trace of their presence.\n\nClose by, the chained beast growled and snapped at him again, trying to break free, all size and teeth and claws as it fought against its restraints. Ahren quit moving and stood as still as he could manage, staring into the creature's eyes. He was surprised to find that they were almost human.\n\nThe cloaked figure walked back across the clearing and stood looking down at him. \"I am the Morgawr,\" he said, his voice soft and strangely warm, as if he sought to reassure Ahren of his friendship. \"Do you know of me?\"\n\nAhren nodded.\n\n\"What is your name?\"\n\n\"Ahren Elessedil,\" he answered, deciding there was no reason to hide it.\n\n\"Youngest son of Allardon Elessedil? Why isn't your brother here?\"\n\n\"My brother wanted me to come instead. He wanted an Elessedil presence, but not his own.\"\n\nThe flat face nodded. \"I am told you can invoke the power of the Elfstones, the ones Kael Elessedil carried on his voyage thirty years ago. Is that so?\"\n\nAhren nodded, disappointment welling up inside him. Ryer Ord Star had betrayed him. He wished he had never trusted her. He wished he had left her behind in the catacombs of Castledown.\n\n\"Where are the Stones now?\" the Morgawr asked.\n\nAhren was so surprised by the question that for a moment he just stared. He had assumed that the Mwellrets had taken them from him when he was captured. Had they failed to do so? Was he mistaken about having them still?\n\nHe had to say something right away, so he said, \"I don't know where they are.\"\n\nIt was the truth, which was all to the good because he could see the Morgawr reading his eyes. The Morgawr knew about the Elfstones, but didn't know where they were. How could that be? Ahren had carried them out of Castledown. They were hidden inside his tunic when he was knocked unconscious. Could Cree Bega have taken them for himself? Could one of the other rets? Would any of them dare to do that?\n\nThe Morgawr touched his face with one scaly finger. \"I am keeping you alive because the seer assures me you will use the Elfstones once I find them. She does not lie, does she?\"\n\nAhren took a deep breath, fighting down his fear and anger. \"No.\"\n\n\"I am mentor to the Ilse Witch. I trained her and schooled her and gave her my protection. But she betrays me. She seeks the magic of Castledown for herself. So I have come to eliminate her. You and the seer will help me find her. She is talented, but she cannot escape the seeking light of the Elfstones. Nor can she avoid her connection to the seer. She established it for the purpose of tracking the Druid and his airship, \u2014 now we will use it, in turn, to track her. One or the other of you will reveal the witch to me. If you provide your help, I will set you free when I am done with her.\"\n\nAhren didn't believe this for a minute, but he held his tongue.\n\nThe gimlet eyes fixed on him. \"You should welcome this offer.\"\n\nAhren nodded. As confused as he was about the disappearance of the Elfstones, he knew what to say. \"I will do what I can.\"\n\nThe Morgawr's finger slid away. \"Good. The Ilse Witch has gone underground to find the Druid. The seer says you left him there, dying. What wards this safehold is dying, too, so we have nothing to fear. You will take us down there.\"\n\nA chill swept through Ahren. He did not want to go back into Castledown for any reason, least of all to help the Morgawr. But he knew that if he refused, he would be made to go anyway, and he would be watched afterwards all the more closely. If they didn't just kill him and have done with it. It was better to do what was asked of him for now, to go along with the Morgawr's wishes. Antrax was dying when Ryer and he had ascended the passageways and would be as dead as Walker by now. What could it hurt to go into the catacombs a final time?\n\nEven so, he was not comfortable with the idea. He glanced at Ryer Ord Star across the way, but she was looking down again, her face lost in the shadow of her long hair. She would have agreed already, of course. By making herself an ally to the Morgawr and the Mwellrets, she would have promised to help them track the Ilse Witch. She had good reason to hate the witch, but not reason enough to bring harm to Ahren and the others of the company of the Jerle Shannara. Didn't she realize that the Morgawr and Cree Bega were no more trustworthy than the witch? He could not believe she had compromised herself so completely.\n\n\"Cut him loose,\" the Morgawr ordered Cree Bega, his silky voice a whisper of comfort and reassurance.\n\nThe Mwellret severed the cords that bound Ahren's wrists, and the Elven Prince rubbed the circulation back into them. Straightening his clothes, he sought one final time to locate the Elfstones. Perhaps they were shoved way down inside his tunic. His hands and fingers ran swiftly down his sides. Nothing. The Elfstones were gone.\n\nThe Morgawr moved away, beckoned for Ahren to follow, motioned Cree Bega toward Ryer, and called out instructions to the other Mwellrets. Ahren went without hesitating, still rubbing his wrists, already thinking of ways he might escape. He would find a way, he promised himself. He would not be part of this business for one moment longer than he had to. He would flee the Morgawr and his rets at the first opportunity and continue his search for his missing friends.\n\nHe glanced wistfully at Ryer Ord Star, who was moving just ahead and still not looking at him. He tried to move over to her, but almost instantly the Morgawr blocked his way.\n\n\"Don't think that because I have released you I am not watching you,\" he said softly, leaning close. \"If you try to escape, if you attempt to flee, if you fail to do as I ask, I will set the caull on you.\"\n\nHe motioned to the wolfish animal that had moved into the forefront of their party, tugging so hard on its chains that it dragged its handlers like dead weights behind it.\n\n\"No secrets, no tricks, no foolish acts, Elven Prince,\" the Morgawr cautioned in his smooth, quiet voice. \"Do you understand?\"\n\nAhren nodded, his eyes riveted on the caull.\n\nThe Morgawr touched Ahren's cheek with that odd caressing motion. \"You don't understand fully. Not yet. But you will. I will see to it that you do.\"\n\nHe moved away again, and Ahren rubbed at his cheek to erase the unpleasant feeling of the scaly touch. He had no idea what he was going to do to escape. Whatever it was, it had better work because he would get only one chance. But he could not imagine where that chance would come from if he did not regain possession of the Elfstones. His memory of what it had been like to wield the magic was still strong. Finding them and invoking their power had transformed him. He had redeemed himself in his own eyes, at least, from his cowardice in the ruins, and in doing so had discovered something of the man he had hoped to become. He had evidenced courage and strength of will, and he did not want to lose those. But without the Elfstones, he was afraid he might.\n\nHis eyes drifted skyward, to where the airships still hovered against the horizon. West, the sky was black and thick with rolling clouds. The temperature was dropping, as well. A storm was coming, and it looked to be severe.\n\nThey were moving deeper into the ruins, back the way they had come. The caull and its handlers led, but Ryer Ord Star and the Morgawr were close behind, whispering back and forth as if kindred with a common goal. Cree Bega shoved at Ahren, urging him to catch up to them, to lend whatever input he might have to give. The Elven Prince put aside his thinking and increased his pace until he was right behind the seer, following in her footsteps, close enough to reach out and touch her.\n\nLook at me, he thought. Say something!\n\nShe did neither. He might not have been there at all, for all the difference his presence made to her. He could not escape the feeling that she was ignoring him deliberately. Was her sense of guilt at betraying him so strong? It seemed as if she was rejecting everything she had tried to become since finding him and was reverting to the creature she had been when in the service of the witch. It felt as if her sense of loyalty had died with Walker. He could not understand that.\n\nThen she was pointing out something in the ruins to the Morgawr, and as the warlock turned to look, she lost her footing and stumbled, careening backwards into Ahren. He caught her without thinking, holding her upright. Without looking at him, she straightened and pushed him away.\n\nIt was over in seconds, and they were moving ahead once more, Ryer Ord Star back beside the Morgawr, Cree Bega and his Mwellrets all about. But in those seconds, when she was pressed up against him, she whispered, so clearly he could not mistake what she said, two words.\n\nTrust me." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Less than a quarter of a mile away Bek Ohmsford crouched in a pool of deep shadows formed by the juncture of two broken walls and waited for Truls Rohk to return. He heard the approach of the Mwellrets and whoever was with them, the sound of their voices and the scrape of their boots carrying clearly in the early morning silence. He had already seen the airships hanging in the distance over the ruins, dark hulls and masts empty of insignia or flags. He had watched them disgorge their Mwellret passengers and creatures like the caull his sister had used to track the shape-shifter and himself. He knew they were in trouble.\n\nTruls Rohk had gone to investigate. He had not returned. Bek's hand tightened about Grianne's, and he glanced over at her to reassure himself that she was all right. Well, to reassure himself that nothing had changed, at least. She was hunched down next to him in the darkness, staring at nothing. He had pulled back her hood to let the light find her face. Her pale skin looked ghostly in the shadows, and her strange blue eyes were empty and fixed. She was compliant to his directions, but unresponsive to anything around her. She did not speak, did not look at him, and did not react to what was happening. He did not know much about the catatonic state, about what it would take to release her from it, but he supposed she was in a great deal of emotional or psychological pain and that was the reason for her condition. She would regain consciousness when she was ready, Walker had said. But after several hours of traveling with and watching her, he was not sure he believed it.\n\n\"Grianne,\" he said softly.\n\nHe reached over with his free hand and touched her cheek, running his finger over her smooth skin. There was no reaction. He wished there was something he could do for her. He could only imagine what it must have been like for her to confront the truth about herself. The magic of the Sword of Shannara had drawn back the veil of lies and deception, letting in the light she had kept out for so many years. To be made to see yourself as you really were when you had committed so many atrocities, so many ugly and terrible acts, would be unbearable. No wonder she had retreated so far into herself. But how were they to help her if she remained there?\n\nNot that Truls Rohk believed they should. The shape-shifter saw her as no different from before, save for the fact that she was helpless and at present not a danger to them. But he also saw her as a sleeping beast. When she awoke, she could easily erupt into a frenzy of murderous rage. There was nothing to say that the magic of the talisman would prevent it, nothing to say that she was any different now from what she had been before. There was no guarantee she would not revert to form. In fact, there was every reason to believe she would.\n\nBek had chosen not to argue the point. On their trek out, winding their way back up the passageways of Castledown to the surface of the ruins, he had kept silent on the matter. Walker had given them their charge \u2014 to care for Grianne at any cost, to see her safely home again, to accept that she was important in some still unknowable way. It didn't matter what Truls Rohk thought of her, \u2014 it didn't matter what he really believed. The Druid had made them promise to ward her, and the shape-shifter had sworn that promise alongside Bek. Like it or not, Truls Rohk was bound by his word.\n\nIn any case, Bek thought it better to let the matter alone. If the Druid, even while dying, had been unable to convince the shape-shifter of Grianne's worth, there was little chance that Bek could now. Not right away, at least. Perhaps time would provide him with a way to do so. Perhaps. Meanwhile, he would have to find a way to stay alive.\n\nHe took a steadying breath and tried to fight down the panic he felt at his dwindling prospects of being able to do so. They had fought their way clear of one trap and now found themselves facing another. Antrax and the creepers and fire threads might be gone, but now a mix of enemy airships and Mwellrets confronted them. That they were allied in some way with his sister was an unavoidable conclusion. It was too big a coincidence to believe they had come all this way for any other reason. Cree Bega would have linked up with the newcomers and advised them of his presence. They would be looking for Bek and for whoever had helped him escape from Black Moclips. If he stayed where he was for much longer, they would find him. Truls had better hurry.\n\nAs if reading his mind, the shape-shifter materialized across the way, sliding into the light like a phantasm, blacker than the shadows out of which he came. Concealing cloak swirling gently with the movement of his body, he crouched next to the boy.\n\n\"We have fresh trouble,\" he announced. \"The airships are commanded by the Morgawr. He's brought Mwellrets, caulls, and some men who look as if they have been turned into wooden toys. Besides the airships we see, at least a dozen more have gone off in pursuit of the Jerle Shannara and Black Moclips.\"\n\n\"Black Moclips?\" Bek shook his head in confusion.\n\n\"Don't ask me, boy. I don't know what happened aboard ship after we escaped, but it seems the rets managed to lose control of her. Someone else got aboard and took her over, sent her skyward, and sailed her right out from under their noses. Good news for us, perhaps. But not soon enough to make a difference just now.\"\n\nThe sounds of their pursuit broke into Bek's thoughts, but he forced himself to stay calm. \"So now they're hunting us, following our tracks or our scent, using these fresh caulls?\"\n\nTruls Rohk laughed. \"You couldn't be more wrong. They don't care about us! It's the witch they're looking for! She's done something to convince the Morgawr she wants the magic for herself \u2014 or at least convinced him she's too dangerous to trust anymore. He's come to take possession of the magic and do away with her. He doesn't realize there isn't any magic to take possession of and the witch has already done away with herself! It's a good joke on him. He's wasting his time and he doesn't even realize it.\"\n\nThe cowled head turned in the direction of Grianne. \"Look at her. She's as dead as if she'd quit breathing. The Druid thinks she has a purpose in all this, but I think his dying blinded him. He wanted something useful to come of all this, something that would give meaning to the lives wasted and the chances lost. But wishing doesn't make it so. When he destroyed Antrax, he destroyed what he had come to find. The Old World books are lost. There isn't anything else. Nothing!\"\n\n\"Maybe we just don't see it,\" Bek ventured quietly. He heard snarls and growls from the approaching caull. \"Look, we have to get out of here.\"\n\n\"Yes, boy, we do.\" The hard eyes peered out from the shadows, reflective stone amid a sea of shifting mist and bits of matter. \"But we don't need to take her.\" He gestured at Grianne. \"Leave her for the Morgawr. Let them do with her what they choose. They won't bother with us if we do. She's what they want.\"\n\n\"No,\" Bek said at once.\n\n\"If we take her, they will keep after us, all the way inland to wherever we run, to wherever we hide. If she could find us earlier, they can find us now. Sooner or later. She's a weight around our necks and not one we need carry.\"\n\n\"We promised Walker we would protect her!\"\n\n\"We promised it so that the Druid could die at peace.\" Truls Rohk spit. \"But it was a fool's promise and given without any cause beyond that. We don't need her. We don't want her. She serves no purpose now and never will. What she is has destroyed her. She isn't coming back, newly born, your sister returned, you're not going to be a happy family reunited. Thinking otherwise is foolish.\"\n\nBek shook his head. \"I'm not leaving her. You do what you want.\"\n\nFor just an instant, Bek thought that Truls Rohk was going to do just that. The shape-shifter went as still as the shadows on a windless night, all dark presence and hidden danger. Bek could feel the tension in him, a sort of singing sound that was more vibration than noise, a cord become taut on a bow drawn back.\n\n\"You persist in being troublesome,\" Truls Rohk whispered. \"Have you no capacity for rational behavior?\"\n\nBek almost laughed at the words, spoken with such seriousness but rife with irony. He shook his head slowly. \"She is my sister, Truls. She doesn't have anyone else to help her.\"\n\n\"She's going to disappoint you. This isn't going to turn out like you think.\"\n\nBek nodded. \"I don't suppose it will. It hasn't so far.\" He kept his eyes locked on the shape-shifter as the sounds of approach intensified. \"Can we go now?\"\n\nTruls Rohk stared at him a moment longer, as if trying to decide. Then he came forward, all blackness even in the early morning light, picked up Grianne like a rag doll, and tucked her under his arm.\n\n\"Try to keep up with me, boy,\" he said. \"Carrying one of you is load enough.\"\n\nHe sprang atop the nearest remnant of wall and began to navigate its length like a tightrope walker in a street fair, crouched low and moving swiftly. The feel of his sister's hand in his a lingering warmth, Bek watched him for a moment, then hurried after.\n\nAhren Elessedil listened with growing concern as the snarls of the caull leading the Morgawr's party deeper into the ruins grew more anxious. Clearly, it had come across something, tracks or scent that it recognized and wanted to pursue. Its handlers had not released it, however. Nor was the Morgawr giving it much attention, \u2014 his focus was on Ryer Ord Star as they walked next to each other, engaged once again in close conversation. What was it she was telling him? The boy was encouraged by her whispered words, but suspicious of her actions. She was asking him to trust her, but doing nothing to warrant it. He had thought she might at least try leading their captors in the wrong direction, \u2014 instead she was taking them the way she had come, directly toward the entrance that led underground to where they had left Walker.\n\nIt appeared she had become the Morgawr's ally in his business, and the Elf was having trouble convincing himself that he should trust her at all.\n\nThey moved more quickly now, navigating the rubble to where the opening led downward into Castledown. Judging from the sounds emanating from the caull, its snout lowered to the ground as it tugged and pulled its handlers ahead, whomever they were tracking had come this way recently. He wondered briefly if it might be their own scent the caull had come across, but that would make the beast a good deal more stupid than the Elf was prepared to believe. Since it was the Ilse Witch the Morgawr was seeking, Ahren had to assume the caull had been given her scent. She could easily have come the same way they had and still managed to miss them in the catacombs.\n\nThey passed through the entry in a cautious knot. Creepers lay in heaps just inside, unmoving. Flameless lamps still burned, casting a weak yellow glow from the passage walls, but the Mwellrets lit torches anyway. The smoky light lent the empty corridors an eerie, shadowy look as the group moved downward into the earth.\n\nSeveral times Ahren thought to make a break for freedom, but fear and common sense kept him from acting on his impulse. He needed a better opportunity, and he needed to know more about what Ryer Ord Star was doing. He needed, as well, to know who had the Elfstones so that he could try to find a way to get them back. He hadn't made a conscious decision on the matter before this, but he knew now, thinking about it, that he wasn't going back to the Four Lands without them. It was ambitious for him to think about getting home at all, but at this point, he couldn't help himself. Thinking about it was all he had to keep his mind off his current predicament, and if he didn't concentrate on something, he was afraid his dwindling courage would collapse completely.\n\nThey walked a long time, back the way Ryer and he had come, following the very same passageways down into the bowels of Castledown. Sporadic sounds rose in the distance, but nothing solid appeared to hinder them. Antrax and Castledown had gone back into time to join the rest of the Old World, dead and lost.\n\nWhen they reached the cavernous chamber where Antrax had housed its power, they found it empty. Walker was gone, though pools of his blood had dried dark and sticky on the metal floor. Twisted chunks of metal and broken cables littered the landscape, and fluids had begun leaking from tanks and lines, cloudy and thick. Excited by the blood and the lingering smells, the caull lunged this way and that, but there were no people to be found. The Morgawr walked around, looking at everything carefully, distancing himself from the rest of the party as he did so. He poked at the creepers, stood close to the massive twin cylinders, and entered the extraction chamber, where he remained alone for a long time. Ahren watched everyone, but particularly Ryer Ord Star. She stood only yards from him, staring off into space. She never glanced in his direction. If she sensed him looking at her, she kept it to herself.\n\nWhen the Morgawr was finished with his examination, he emerged from the extraction chamber, brushing aside Cree Bega with a hiss of impatience. The caull leading the way, its massive body jerking at its chains in frustration, they set off in a new direction. The Ilse Witch had been here, Ahren knew. No one had said so, but the behavior of the Morgawr as he plunged ahead down this new passageway made the conclusion unavoidable. Perhaps they had just missed her. He found himself wondering what had become of Walker. Even if the witch had found him, she wasn't strong enough to move him herself.\n\nHe had his answer not long afterwards. They navigated the maze of empty, ruined corridors until they came to a vast cavern housing an underground lake. Illuminated by the dim phosphorescence that streaked the cavern's rocky walls, a trail of blood led down to the edge of the water, pooled anew on the rocky shore, and disappeared. The surface of the lake was still and perfectly smooth. There was no sign of Walker.\n\nThe Morgawr stood staring out across the lake for a moment, black cloak drawn close about him. No one tried to approach him or dared to speak.\n\n\"Get back from me,\" he told them finally.\n\nThey did so, and Ahren watched as scaly arms emerged from the Morgawr's cloak and began to weave in quick motions, drawing pictures or symbols on the air. A greenish light emanated from the fingertips, leaving trails of emerald fire in their wake. The hush of the empty cavern filled with a whisper of phantom wind, and from the depths of the lake rose a deep, ugly hiss that seemed as much a warning as a response to the Morgawr's conjuring. Still, the warlock continued his efforts, robes whipping about his dark body, spray bursting from the waters in sudden explosions. Faint images began to appear, shades cast upon the darkness by his magic's light, there one moment and gone the next. Ahren could not tell who they were meant to be, he could not even be sure of what his senses were telling him. Once, he thought he heard voices, rough whispers that rose and fell like the lake's dark spray. Once, he was sure he heard screams.\n\nThen the wind increased, and the torches blew out. The Mwellrets dropped back a few paces, closer to the entrance to the cavern. Ahren went with them. Only Ryer Ord Star stood her ground, head lifted, a fierce look on her childlike face as she stared out across the lake into the darkness beyond. She was seeing something, as well, Ahren thought \u2014 maybe the strange images, maybe something else entirely.\n\nFinally, the Morgawr's hands stopped moving, the wind and noise died away, and the lake went still. The Morgawr stepped back from the water's edge and walked to where his rets crouched watchfully at the cavern entrance, motioning for the seer to come with him as he passed her. Dutifully, she turned and followed.\n\n\"The Druid is dead,\" he declared as he came up to them.\n\nHearing someone speak the words gave their truth fresh impact. Ahren caught his breath in spite of himself, and it suddenly felt to him as if whatever hopes he had harbored that a way out of this terrible place, this savage land, might be found, had just been stolen away.\n\nThe Morgawr was looking at him, assessing his reaction. \"Our little Ilse Witch, however, is alive.\" He kept his dangerous eyes fixed on Ahren. \"She's come and gone, and she's not alone. She's with that boy you let escape from Black Moclips, Cree Bega \u2014 and someone else, someone I can't put a name to.\" He paused. \"Can you, Elven Prince?\"\n\nAhren shook his head. He had no idea who Bek might be with if it wasn't Tamis or one of the other Elves.\n\nThe Morgawr came forward and reached out to touch his cheek. The cavern air turned colder with that touch, and its silence deepened. Ahren forced himself to stand his ground, to repress the repulsion and fear that the touch invoked in him. The touch lingered a moment and then withdrew like the sliding away of sweat.\n\n\"They brought the Druid here, down to the water's edge, and left him for the shades of his ancestors to carry off.\" The Morgawr's satisfaction was palpable. \"And so they did, it seems. They bore his corpse away with them, down into the waters of that lake. Walker is gone. All the Druids are gone. After all these years. All of them.\"\n\nHis gaze shifted from Ahren. \"Which leaves us with the witch,\" he whispered, almost to himself. \"She may not be as formidable as she once was, however. There is something wrong with her. I sense it in the way she moves, in the way she lets the other two lead her.\n\nShe isn't what she was. It felt to me, as I studied the traces of her passing, as if she was asleep.\"\n\n\"Sshe dissembless,\" Cree Bega offered softly. \"Sshe sseekss to confusse uss.\"\n\nThe Morgawr nodded. \"Perhaps. She is clever. But what reason does she have to do so? She does not know of my presence yet. She does not know I've come for her. She has no reason to pretend at anything. Nor any reason to flee. Yet she is gone. Where?\"\n\nNo one said anything for a moment. Even the caull had gone silent, crouched on the cavern floor, big head lowered, savage eyes gone to narrow slits as it waited to be told what to do.\n\n\"Perhapss sshe iss aboard the airsship,\" Cree Bega suggested.\n\n\"Our enemies control Black Moclips,\" the Morgawr replied. \"They would seek to avoid her, Cree Bega. Besides, there was no time for her to reach them before they fled from us. No, she is afoot with the boy and whoever goes with him \u2014 his rescuer, from the ship. She is afoot and not far ahead of us.\"\n\nSuddenly he turned again to Ahren, and this time the sense of menace in his voice was so overpowering that it froze the boy where he was.\n\n\"Where are the Elfstones, Elven Prince?\" the warlock whispered.\n\nThe question caught Ahren completely by surprise. He stared at the other wordlessly.\n\n\"You had them earlier, didn't you?\" The words pressed down against the boy like stones. \"You used them back there in that chamber where the Druid was mortally wounded. You were there, trying to save him. Did you think I wouldn't know? I sensed the Elfstone magic at once, found traces of its residue in the smells and tastes of the air. What happened to them, little boy?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Ahren answered, unable to come up with anything better.\n\nThe Morgawr smiled at Cree Bega. \"You searched him?\"\n\n\"Yess, of coursse,\" the Mwellret answered with a shrug. \"Little Elvess did not have them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he hid them from you?\"\n\n\"There wass no time for him to hide them. Hssst. Losst them, perhapss.\"\n\nThe Morgawr took a moment to consider. \"No. Someone else has them.\" His gaze shifted quickly to Ryer Ord Star. \"Our quiet little seer, perhaps?\"\n\nCree Bega grunted. \"Ssearched her, alsso. No sstoness.\"\n\n\"Then our little witch has them. Or that boy she is with.\" He paused. \"Or the Druid carried them down with him into the netherworld, and no one will ever see them again.\"\n\nHe did not seem bothered by that. He did not seem concerned at all. Ahren watched his flat, empty face look off a final time toward the underground lake. Then the sharp eyes flicked back to his.\n\n\"Boy, I have no further need of you.\"\n\nThe chamber went so still that there might have been no one left alive, that even those who stood waiting to see what would happen next had been turned to stone. Ahren could feel the beating of his heart in his chest and the pulsing of his blood in his veins, he could hear the rasp of his breathing in his throat.\n\n\"Perhaps you do,\" Ryer Ord Star said suddenly. They all turned to look at her, but her eyes were fixed on the Morgawr. \"The Druid brought the prince on the journey because his brother the King insisted, but also because the Druid knew something of the prince's worth beyond that. I have seen it in a vision. One day, Ahren Elessedil will be King of the Elves.\"\n\nShe paused. \"Perhaps, with training, he could learn to become your King.\"\n\nAhren had never heard any such speculation, and he certainly didn't like hearing it now, particularly given the twist that the seer was putting to it. He was so shocked he just stared at her, not trying to hide anything of what he was feeling, a mix of emotions so powerful he could barely contain them. Trust me, she had urged him. But what reason did he have for doing so now?\n\nThe Morgawr seemed to consider this, and then he nodded.\n\n\"Perhaps.\" He gestured vaguely toward the girl. \"You seek to demonstrate your worth by sharing what you know, little seer. I approve.\"\n\nHis eyes flicked back to Ahren. \"You will come with me. You will do what you can to help me in my search. Together, we will track our little witch. Wherever she goes, we will find her. This will be over soon enough, and then I will decide what to do with you.\"\n\nHe looked at Cree Bega. \"Bring him.\"\n\nThen he motioned the caull to its feet, gave orders to its handlers, and sent them away into the tunnels once more. He took Ryer Ord Star by the arm and followed, ignoring Ahren. Seeing him rooted in place, Cree Bega clipped the boy across the back of his head and sent him stumbling after the warlock.\n\n\"Little Elvess musst do ass they are told!\" he hissed balefully.\n\nAhren Elessedil, saying nothing, trudged ahead in a sullen rage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Aboard the Jerle Shannara, Redden Alt Mer paused at the aft railing of the airship and looked back at Black Moclips. She was laboring heavily as she tried to outrun the approaching storm, her armored hull tossing and slewing like a heavy branch caught in rapids. The storm was a black wall coming inland off the eastern coast, a towering mass of lightning-laced clouds riding the back of winds gusting at more than fifty knots. Little Red was doing the best she could to sail the airship alone, but it would have been a difficult task under ordinary circumstances. It was an impossible one here. Even if she reached the relative safety of the mountains ahead, there was no guarantee she would be able to find shelter until the storm passed. Landing an airship in the middle of a mountain range, \\vith cliffs and downdrafts to contend with, was tricky business in any case. In the teeth of a storm like this one, it would be extremely dangerous.\n\nBehind Black Moclips, at least a dozen of the enemy airships continued to give chase. He had thought he might lose them with the approach of the storm, but he had been wrong. Since yesterday morning, he had tried everything to shake them, but nothing had worked. Each time he thought he had given them the slip, they had reappeared out of nowhere. They shouldn't have been able to do that. No one should have been able to find him so easily, especially not these ships, with their walking-dead crews and ship-shy Mwellrets.\n\nThey were tracking him somehow, tracking him in a way he hadn't yet been able to identify. He had better do so soon. The repairs to the Jerle Shannara had not been completed before they had been forced to flee the coast, and the strain of having to rely on four of their six parse tubes and diapson crystals, the radian draws reconfigured to allow for the transference of energy, was beginning to tell. The draws were threatening to snap from the additional strain, and the airship's maneuverability was less than he needed. Even though the Jerle Shannara was the faster airship, if something went wrong, their pursuers would be on them before they could make the necessary adjustment.\n\nIt didn't help that no one had slept for more than a couple of hours since yesterday, and everyone was dog-tired. Tired men made mistakes, and if they made one here, it would probably cost them their lives.\n\nHe tested the aft starboard draw, adjusted the tension, and looked back again at Black Moclips. She was struggling to keep up, losing ground at an increasing pace. The Wing Riders flew on either side of her, offering their presence as reassurance, but the Elves were of no help in the sailing of the ship. Po Kelles had flown back to tell him what Little Red had done, and at first Alt Mer had been elated. They had the witch's airship as well as their own, two chances to find a way out of this miserable country. But the convergence of their pursuers and the approach of the storm quickly made him realize that his sister might have seized too big a prize. Without a crew to assist her, she was seriously handicapped in her efforts to sail the captured ship. He would have put a couple of his own crew aboard to help her, but there was no way to do so without docking the airships, \u2014 Rovers were skittish where Rocs were concerned.\n\nA gust of wind howled through the rigging above him, producing a sharp and eerie whine, a wounded animal's cry. The temperature was dropping, as well. If this kept up, there would be snow in the mountains and conditions for flying would become impossible.\n\nHe left the railing and hurried across the aft decking and down to the main deck and the pilot box where Spanner Frew stood like a rock at the helm, guiding the airship ahead with his steady hand.\n\n\"Lines still holding?\" he bellowed as Big Red jumped up beside him in the box.\n\n\"For now \u2014 I don't know for how much longer. We need to get down before that storm catches us!\" They had to shout to be heard over the wind. He glanced over his shoulder at Black Moclips. \"We have to do something to help Little Red. She's game, but as good as she is, she can't go it alone.\"\n\nSpanner Frew's black-bearded face swung about momentarily, then straightened forward again. \"If we could get a line to her, we could tow her.\"\n\n\"Not in this weather \u2014 not with all those airships chasing us. We'd be slowed down, even using her parse tubes to help.\"\n\nThe big man nodded. \"Better get her off there, then! When that storm catches up, chances are pretty good she won't be able to stay aloft. If she starts to go down then, we won't be able to help her.\"\n\nRedden Alt Mer had already come to that conclusion. He wasn't even sure he could manage to keep the Jerle Shannara flying. He toyed briefly with the prospect of changing over to Black Moclips and sailing her instead, since she was in better condition. But the Jerle Shannara was the faster, more maneuverable vessel, and he didn't want to give her up when it was speed and maneuverability that were likely to make the difference in a confrontation with their pursuers. The matter was moot in any case because there wasn't any real chance that he could get everyone off his ship and onto Little Red's with the weather this bad.\n\nHe pursed his lips. Rue was going to be furious if he told her to give up her prize. She might not do it, even knowing how much trouble she was in.\n\nHe looked back again at Black Moclips and beyond to the enemy airships, black dots against the roiling darkness of the storm.\n\n\"How do they keep finding us?\" he snapped at Spanner Frew, suddenly angry at how impossible things had gotten.\n\nThe shipwright shook his head and didn't answer. A new level of frustration crept through Big Red. It was bad enough that they had lost Walker and all those who had gone inland to the ruins. It was bad enough that they had nothing to show for having come all this way and might well return home empty-handed \u2014 if they were able to get home at all. But it was intolerable that these phantom airships continued to harass them like hunting dogs would a fleeing, wounded animal, finding their tracks or their scent where there should be no trace of their passing at all.\n\nThere was nothing he could do about it just now. But he could do something about Little Red. She was not yet recovered from her wounds and couldn't have had much more sleep than they had. She must be near exhaustion from flying Black Moclips alone, trying to manage everything from the pilot box, the wind howling past her like a demon set loose to tear her from the skies. She was a good pilot, almost as good as he was \u2014 and a better navigator. But it wouldn't be enough to save her from this.\n\n\"I'm taking her off, Black Beard!\" he yelled over to the shipwright. \"Drop our speed one quarter and hold steady toward that split in the peaks ahead.\"\n\n\"You want to take her off in a grapple?\" Spanner Frew yelled back.\n\nRedden Alt Mer shook his head. \"It would take too long. She has to come to us. I'll send one of the Wing Riders in.\"\n\nHe jumped down to the main deck, shouting orders at the crew, telling them to find their places at the working parse tubes, to monitor the draws while he ran aft. At the railing, he dug through a wooden box and found the emerald pennant that meant he needed one of them to fly to him.\n\nOf course, the signal wouldn't work if no one was looking. And in a bad storm like this one, they might not be.\n\nHe fastened the pennant's clips to a line and ran the piece of cloth up into the wind, where it snapped and cracked like ice breaking free in the Squirm. Facing back, he watched Black Moclips lurch and buck. Several of her draws had broken loose, and one of her sails was in tatters. She was flying on her pilot's skill and sheer luck.\n\nEven as he watched, she faded farther back in the haze of clouds and mist. The Wing Riders were barely visible, still flying to either side. Their pursuers had disappeared entirely.\n\nRedden Alt Mer pounded his fist on the railing cap. Neither Hunter Predd nor Po Kelles had seen the pennant.\n\n\"Look at me!\" he screamed in frustration.\n\nLost in the howl of the wind, the words blew away from him.\n\nA thousand yards back, so fatigued that she was near collapse, Rue Meridian fought to keep the Jerle Shannara in sight. Her world had narrowed down to this single purpose. Forgotten were her plans for coming inland to the ruins, for finding and rescuing Bek and the others of the company, for trying to salvage something from the disaster this voyage had become, for doing anything but keeping her vessel flying. Though her thoughts were clouded and her mind numb from concentrating on working the controls, she knew she was in trouble. The Jerle Shannara was drawing farther away and the airships pursuing her were drawing closer. Soon, any chance for escape would be lost.\n\nBlack Moclips shuddered anew as the winds preceding the storm buffeted her. The airship lurched sideways and down. The problem was simple enough to diagnose if not to solve. The ambient-light sails had been kept furled during the past few days, and no new power had been gathered for the diapson crystals. No new power was being collected now because she couldn't put up the sails in this storm \u2014 couldn't put them up at all, for that matter, storm or not, by herself. The limited power that remained was being exhausted. Personal attention at the various parse tubes was needed to distribute it more efficiently, but she couldn't leave the controls long enough to attempt that. The best she would do was to try to manipulate things from the pilot box, and while that was possible, it was never intended that an airship be flown by a single person.\n\nShe had a crew, but they were locked up belowdecks, and once she set them free she might as well lock herself up in their place.\n\nThe first flurries of snow blew past her face, and she was reminded again of how far the temperature had fallen. Winter seemed to be descending into a land that hadn't seen such weather in more than a thousand years.\n\nShe tried to coax more speed from the crystals, forcing herself to try a different combination of power allocations, feeling Black Moclips slew and skid on the wind from her efforts, fighting off her growing certainty that nothing she could do would make any difference.\n\nShe was so absorbed in her efforts that she failed to see Hunter Predd soar ahead into the misty gray toward the Jerle Shannara. Po Kelles kept pace with her off to the port side, but she didn't even glance at him. In her struggle to fly Black Moclips, she had all but forgotten the Wing Riders. Then Hunter Predd flew Obsidian right over her bow to catch her attention. She ducked in response to the unexpected movement, then turned as the Roc swung around and settled in off her starboard railing, almost close enough to touch, rocking back and forth with the force of the wind.\n\n\"Little Red!\" Hunter Predd shouted into the wind, his words barely audible.\n\nShe glanced over and waved to let him know she heard.\n\n\"I'm taking you off the ship!\" He waited a moment to let the impact of the words sink in. \"Your brother says you have to come with me. That's an order!\"\n\nAngry that Big Red would even suggest such a thing, she shook her head no at once.\n\n\"You can't stay!\" Hunter Predd shouted, bringing Obsidian in closer. \"Look behind you! They're right on top of you!\"\n\nShe didn't have to look, \u2014 she knew they were there, the airships chasing her. She knew they were so close that if she turned, she could make out the blank faces of the dead men who flew them. She knew they would have her in less than an hour if something didn't happen to change her situation. She knew if they didn't catch her by then, it was only because she had gone down.\n\nShe knew, in short, that her situation was hopeless.\n\nShe just didn't want to admit it. She couldn't bear it, in fact.\n\n\"Little Red!\" the Wing Rider called again. \"Did you hear me?\"\n\nShe looked over at him. He was hunched close to Obsidian's dark neck, arms and legs gripping the harness, safety lines tethering rider and bird. He looked like a burr stuck in the great Roc's feathers.\n\n\"I heard!\" she shouted back.\n\n\"Then get off that ship! Now!\"\n\nHe said it with an insistence that brooked no argument, an insistence buttressed by the knowledge that she must realize the precariousness of her situation as surely as her brother and he did. He stared at her from astride his bird, weathered features scrunched and angry, daring her to contradict him. She understood what he was thinking: if he didn't convince her here and now, it would be too late; already, the Jerle Shannara was nearly out of sight ahead and the storm upon her. She could still do what she chose, but not for very much longer.\n\nShe stared through the tangled, windblown strands of her hair to the airship's controls. Dampness ran down the smooth metal and gleaming wood in twisting rivulets. She studied the way her hands fit on the levers and wheel. She owned Black Moclips now, it belonged to her. She had snatched it away from the thieves who had stolen her own ship. She had claimed it at no small risk to herself, and she was entitled to keep it. No one had a right to take it away from her.\n\nBut that didn't mean she was wedded to it. That didn't mean she couldn't give it up, if she chose. If it was her idea. After all, it was just something made out of wood and metal, not out of flesh and blood. It wasn't possessed of a heart and mind and soul. It was only a tool.\n\nShe looked back at Hunter Predd. The Wing Rider was waiting. She pointed aft and down, then at herself. He nodded and swung away from the ship.\n\nShe snatched up the steering bands and lashed the wheels and levers in place, then hurried down the steps and across the slippery surface of the decking to the main hatchway. She went down in a rush, before she had time to think better of it. She was curiously at peace. The anger she had felt moments earlier was gone. Black Moclips was a fine airship, but it was only that and nothing more.\n\nShe reached the storeroom door where Aden Kett and his Federation crew were locked away and banged on the door. \"Aden, can you hear me?\"\n\n\"I hear you, Little Red,\" the Commander replied.\n\n\"I'm letting you out and giving you back your ship. She's struggling in this storm and needs a full crew to keep her flying. I can't manage it alone. I own her, but I won't let her die needlessly. So that's that. You do what you can for her. All right?\"\n\n\"All right.\" She could tell from the sound of his voice that he was pressed up against the door on the other side.\n\n\"You'll understand if I don't stay around to see how this turns out.\" She wiped at the moisture beading her forehead and dripping into her eyes. \"You might have trouble doing the right thing by me afterwards. I'd hate to see you make a fool of yourself. So after I open this door, I'll be leaving. Do you think you and the others can refrain from giving in to your worst impulses and coming after me?\"\n\nShe heard him laugh. \"Come after you? We've had enough of you, Little Red. We'll all feel better knowing you're off the ship. Just let us out of here.\"\n\nShe paused then, leaning into the door, her face close to the cracks in the boards that formed it. \"Listen to me, Aden. Don't stay around afterwards. Don't try to do the right thing. Forget about your orders and your sense of duty and your Federation training. Take Black Moclips and sail her home as quickly as you can manage it. Take your chances back there.\"\n\nShe heard his boots shift on the flooring. \"Who's out there? We saw the other ships.\"\n\n\"I don't know. No one does, but it isn't anyone you want anything to do with. More than a dozen airships, Aden, but no flags, no insignia, nothing human aboard. Just rets and men who look like they're dead. I don't know who sent them. I don't care. You remember what I said. Fly out of here. Leave all this. It's good advice. Are you listening?\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" he answered quietly.\n\nShe didn't know what else to say. \"Tell Donell that I'm sorry I hit him so hard.\"\n\n\"He knows.\"\n\nShe pushed away from the door and stood facing it again. \"See you down the road, Aden.\"\n\n\"Down the road, Little Red.\"\n\nShe reached for the latch and threw it clear, then turned and bolted up the stairs without looking back. In seconds she was topside again, surprised to find sleet had turned the world white. She ducked her head against the bitter sting of the wind and slush and moved to the aft railing. The rope Hunter Predd had used earlier to climb down to Obsidian was still tied in place and coiled on the deck. She threw the loose end overboard and watched it tumble away into the haze. She could just barely make out the dark contours of the Roc's wings as it lifted into place below.\n\nShe looked back once at Black Moclips. \"You're a good girl,\" she told her. \"Stay safe.\"\n\nThen she was gone into the gloom.\n\nMinutes later, Redden Alt Mer stood at the port railing of the Jerle Shannara and watched his sister pause in her climb up the rope ladder. She had gotten off the Roc all right, taken firm hold of the ladder and started up. But now she hung there with her head lowered and her long red hair falling all around her face, swaying in the wind.\n\nHe thought he might have to go down the ladder and get her.\n\nThinking that, he was reminded suddenly of a time when they were children, and he had gone high up into the top branches of an old tree. Rue, only five years old, had tried to follow, working her way up the trunk, using the limbs of the tree as rungs. But she wasn't strong yet, and she tired quickly. Halfway up, she lost her momentum completely and stopped moving, hanging from the branches of that tree the way she was hanging from the rope ladder now. She was something of a nuisance back then, always tagging along after him, trying to do everything he was doing. He was four years older than she was and irritated by her most of the time. He could have left her where she was on the tree \u2014 had thought he might, actually. Instead, he had turned back and yelled down to her. \"Come on, Rue! Keep going! Don't quit! You can do it!\"\n\nHe could yell those same words down to her now, to the little sister who was still trying to do everything he did. But even as he considered it, she lifted her head, saw him looking at her, and began to climb again at once. He smiled to himself. She came on now without slowing, and he reached out to take her arm, helping her climb over the railing and onto the ship.\n\nImpulsively, he gave her a hug and was surprised when she hugged him back.\n\nHe shook his head at her. \"Sometimes you scare me.\" He looked into her wet face, reading the exhaustion in her eyes. \"Actually, most of the time.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"That's real praise, coming from you.\"\n\n\"Flying Black Moclips all by yourself in a bad piece of weather like you did would scare anyone. It should have scared you, but I suppose it didn't.\"\n\n\"Not much.\" She grinned some more, like the little kid she was inside. \"I took her away from the witch, big brother. Crew and all. It was hard to give her up again. I didn't want to lose her, though.\"\n\n\"Better her than you. We don't need her anyway. It's enough if the witch doesn't have her.\" He gave his sister a small shove. \"Go below and put on some dry clothes.\"\n\nShe shook her head stubbornly. \"I don't need to change clothes just yet.\"\n\n\"Rue,\" he said, a hint of irritation creeping into his voice. \"Don't argue with me about this. You argue with me about everything. Just do it. You're soaked through, \u2014 you need dry clothes. Go change.\"\n\nShe hesitated a moment, and he was afraid she was going to press the matter. But then she turned around and went down through the main hatch to the lower cabins, water dripping from her across the decking.\n\nHe watched her disappear from sight, thinking as she did that no matter how old they grew or what happened to them down the road, they would never feel any differently about each other. He would still be her big brother, \u2014 she would still be his little sister. Mostly, they would still be best friends.\n\nHe couldn't ask for anything better.\n\nWhen she reemerged, the wind was blowing so hard it knocked her sideways. The rain and sleet had stopped, but the air was cold enough to freeze the tiny hairs in her nostrils. She wrapped her great cloak more tightly about her, warm again in dry clothes and boots, and pushed across the deck unsteadily to where her brother and Spanner Frew stood in the pilot box. Ahead, the mountains loomed huge and craggy against the skyline, a massing of jagged peaks and rugged cliffs piled one on top of the other until they faded away into the brume-shrouded distance.\n\nShe climbed into the pilot box, and her brother said at once, \"Put on your safety harness.\"\n\nShe did so, noting that all of the Rover crew on the decks below were strapped in as well, hunched down against the weather, stationed at the parse tubes and connecting draws.\n\nWhen she glanced over her shoulder, she found the world behind had disappeared in a thick, dark haze, taking with it any sign of the pursuing airships.\n\nBig Red glanced over. \"They disappeared sometime back. I don't know if they broke it off because of the weather or to go after Black Moclips. Doesn't matter. They're gone, and that's enough. We've got bigger problems to deal with.\"\n\nSpanner Frew yelled something down to one of the Rovers amidships, and the crewman waved back, moving to tighten a radian draw. Big Red had stripped back all the sails, and the Jerle Shannara was riding bare-masted in the teeth of winds that side-swiped her as badly as they had Black Moclips. Rue saw that the radian draws had been reconfigured, strung away from two of the six parse tubes to feed power to the remaining four. Even those were singing with the vibration of the wind, straining to break free of their fastenings.\n\n\"I left a ship in better shape than this one,\" she declared, half to herself.\n\n\"She'd be in better shape if we hadn't had to leave quite so suddenly to find you!\" Big Red grunted.\n\nThat wasn't true, of course. They would have had to leave in any case to flee the enemy airships, no matter whether or not they were searching for her. Repairs of the sort needed by the Jerle Shannara required that the airship be stationary, and that wasn't going to happen until they could set down somewhere.\n\n\"Any place we can land?\" she asked hopefully.\n\nSpanner Frew laughed. \"You mean in an upright position? Or will a severe slant do?\" His hands worked the steering levers with quick, anxious movements. \"First things first. See those mountains ahead of us, Little Red? The ones that look like a big wall? The ones we're in danger of smashing into?\"\n\nShe saw them. They lay dead ahead, rising across the skyline, barring their way. She glanced sideways and down and saw for the first time how high up they were. Several thousand feet at least \u2014 probably more like five thousand. Even so, they weren't nearly high enough to clear these peaks.\n\n\"Heading ten degrees starboard, Black Beard,\" she heard her brother order. \"That's it. There, toward that cut.\"\n\nShe followed his gaze and saw a break in the peaks. It was narrow, and it twisted out of view at once. It might dead-end into the side of a mountain beyond, in which case they were finished. But Redden Alt Mer could read a passage better than anyone she had ever sailed with. Besides, he had the luck.\n\n\"Brace!\" he yelled down at the crew.\n\nThey shot between the cliffs and into the narrow defile, skimming on the back of a vicious headwind that nearly drove them sideways in the attempt. Beyond, they saw the opening slant right. Spanner Frew threw the wheel over and fed what power he could to keep them steady. The passage narrowed further and cut back left. Rue felt the hair on the back of her neck lift as the massive cliff walls tightened about them like the jaws of a trap. They were so close that she could make out the depressions and ridges on the face of the stone. She could see rodent nests and tiny plants. There was no room to turn around. If the passage failed to run all the way through, they were finished.\n\n\"Steady,\" her brother cautioned to Spanner Frew. \"Slow, now.\"\n\nThe winds had shifted away, and they were no longer being buffeted so violently. The Jerle Shannara canted left in response to Spanner Frew's handling of the controls, sliding slowly through the gap. They rounded a jagged corner, still close enough that Rue could reach out and touch the rock. Ahead, the defile began to widen, and the mountains opened out onto a deep, forested valley.\n\n\"We're through,\" she said, grinning in relief at her brother.\n\n\"But not yet safe.\" His face was tight and set. \"Look ahead. There, where the valley climbs into that second set of peaks.\"\n\nShe did so, brushing away loose strands of her long red hair. There were breaks all through this range, but the movement of the clouds overhead suggested that the winds were much more turbulent than anything they had encountered before. Still, there was nowhere else to go except back, and that was unthinkable.\n\nSpanner Frew glanced over at Big Red. \"Where do we go? That gap on the right, lower down?\"\n\nHer brother nodded. \"Where it might not be so windy. Good eye. But stay hard left to give us room to maneuver when the crosswind catches us.\"\n\nThey navigated the valley through a screen of mist, riding air currents that bucked and jittered like wild horses. The Jerle Shannara shuddered with the blows, but held her course under Spanner Frew's steady hand. Below, the forests were dark and deep and silent. Once, Rue caught sight of a thin ribbon of water where a small river wound along the valley floor, but she saw no sign of animals or people. Hawks soared out of the cliffs, fierce faces set against the light. Behind, the entire sky was lark with the storm they had left on the other side of the mountains. Everywhere else, the horizon was hazy and flat.\n\nRue listened to the svind sing through the taut lines of the vessel. It always seemed to her that the ship was calling to her when she heard that sound, that it was trying to tell her something. She felt that now, and her uneasiness grew.\n\nWhen they reached the far side of the valley, they angled right, toward the draw that her brother had spied earlier, a deep cut in the peaks of the second range that offered clear passage to whatever lay beyond. More mountains, certainly, but perhaps something else, as well. She glanced skyward to where the clouds skittered over the peaks in frightened bursts of energy, blown by winds that channeled down out of the north. Since the weather was all behind them, she realized that these crosswinds must blow like this all the time. They would be dangerous, if that was so.\n\nThe Jerle Shannara lifted through the gap, catching the first rip of crosswind as she did, slewing sideways instantly. Spanner Frew brought her back on course again, keeping her low and down to the left. Ahead, more peaks and cliffs appeared, slabs of stone jutting from the earth like giant's hands lifted in warning. But the defile wormed through them, offering passage, so they continued on. Below, the floor of the canyon rose steadily as the mountains closed about, and they were forced to fly higher.\n\nRue Meridian took a deep breath and held it, feeling the tension radiate through her.\n\n\"Steady, Black Beard,\" she heard her brother say quietly. Then a burst of wind slammed into the airship and sent her spinning sideways for endless, heart-stopping seconds before Spanner Frew was able to bring her back around again.\n\nRue exhaled sharply. Big Red glanced over at her and broke into one of those familiar grins that told her how much he loved this.\n\n\"Hold on!\" he shouted.\n\nThey bucked through the gap's twists and turns like a cork through rapids, knocked this way and that, fighting to stay steady at every turn. The winds thrust at them, then died away, then returned to hammer them again. Once they were blown so hard to starboard that they very nearly struck the cliff wall, only just managing to skip past an outcropping of rock that would have ripped the hull apart. Rue clung to the pilot box railing, her knuckles white with determination, thinking as she did so that this was much worse than what they had encountered coming through the Squirm, ice pillars notwithstanding. At any moment they could lose control completely and be smashed to bits against the rocks.\n\nThey climbed to a thousand feet as the floor of the pass rose ahead, forcing them to gain altitude beyond what Rue knew her brother had hoped would prove necessary, \u2014 the winds at this elevation were too strong and unpredictable.\n\nThen the mountains parted ahead, and far below they saw a vast forest cupped by the fingers of scattered peaks, deep and impenetrable and stretching away into the haze. There would be a landing site there, a place for them to set down and make repairs.\n\nShe had no sooner finished the thought than the aft port radian draw snapped at the masthead and fell away.\n\nAt once, the Jerle Shannara began to lose power and slip sideways. Spanner Frew fought to bring her nose up, but without both aft parse tubes in operation, he lacked the means to do so.\n\n\"I can't right her!\" he grunted in frustration.\n\n\"Mainsail!\" Big Red shouted instantly to the crew.\n\nKelson Riat and another of the Rovers leapt up at once from where they were crouched amidships and began to unfasten the lines and run up the sail. Without the use of the aft parse tubes, Big Red was going to rely on the sails for power. But the crosswinds were vicious, \u2014 there was as much chance as not that they would fill the big sail and carry the airship right into the cliffs like a scrap of paper.\n\n\"Steady, steady, steady...,\" Big Red chanted to Spanner Frew as the shipwright fought to hold the Jerle Shannara in place.\n\nFluttering and snapping, the mainsail went up. Then the wind caught it and drove the airship forward with a lurch. She bucked in the wind's strong grip, and another of the draws snapped and fell away.\n\n\"Shades!\" Redden Alt Mer hissed. He snatched at the wheel as Spanner Frew lost his footing, struck his head on the pilot box railing, and blacked out.\n\nThey were still falling, but they were accelerating toward the gap, as well, the mountains widening on both sides. If they could stay high enough to miss the boulders clustered in the mouth of the pass, they might survive. It was going to be close. Rue willed the Jerle Shannara to lift, begged her silently to level off. But she was still falling, the rocky surface of the pass rising swiftly to meet her.\n\nHer brother threw the levers that fed power to the diapson crystals all the way forward and brought the steering levers all the way back. The airship shuddered anew, lurched, and rose a final time. They surged through the gap, breaking into the clear air above the forest below. But even as they did so, the keel scraped across the boulders beneath them, making a terrible grinding, ripping noise. The Jerle Shannara shuddered and then dipped, the bow coming down sharply, pointing left and toward the forest a thousand feet below. The crosswind returned, sudden and vicious, snatching at the crippled vessel. The mainsail reefed as several of her lines snapped, and the Jerle Shannara plunged downward.\n\nRue Meridan, clinging to both her safety harness and the pilot box railing, thought they were dead. They spiraled down, out of control, the canopy of the trees rising to meet them with dizzying swiftness. Her brother, still struggling to bring the bow up, cursed. Crew members slid along the decking. The safety line broke away on one, and she caught just a glimpse of him as he flew out over the side of the ship and disappeared.\n\nThen the crosswind shifted, ripping along the cliff face and carrying the Jerle Shannara sideways into the rock. Rue had just a moment to watch the cliff wall fly toward them before they struck in a shattering crunch of wood and metal. She lost her grip on both her safety line and the railing and flew into the pilot box control panel. Pain ratcheted through her left arm, and she felt the stitches on her wounded side and leg give. Her safety line snapped, and then she careened into her brother, who was hanging desperately onto the useless steering levers.\n\nA moment later, everything went black." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "As he finished tying off the bandages around Little Red's damaged torso, Redden Alt Mer was thinking things couldn't get any worse. Then Spanner Frew lumbered up the steps to the pilot box and knelt down beside him.\n\n\"We lost all the spare diapson crystals through the tear in the hull,\" he announced sullenly. \"They've fallen somewhere down there.\"\n\nHis gesture made it clear that somewhere down there was the jungle below the wooded precipice on which the Jerle Shannara had finally come to rest, an impenetrable green covering of treetops and vines that spread away from the cliff face for miles.\n\nAlt Mer rocked back on his heels and stared at the shipwright as if he were speaking in a foreign language. \"All of them?\"\n\n\"They were all in one crate. The crate fell out through a hole ripped in the hull.\" Spanner Frew reached up to touch the gash in his forehead, flinching as he did so. \"As if I needed another headache.\"\n\n\"Can we fly with what we have?\"\n\nThe shipwright shook his head. \"We're down to three. We lost the port fore tube and everything with it on landing. What's left might let us fly in calm weather, but it won't get us off the ground. If we try it, we'll just go over the side and into the trees with the crystals.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"The thing of it is, we came through this all right otherwise. We've got the timbers to repair the hole in the hull. We've got spare draws and fastenings. We've got plenty of sail. Even the spars and mast can be fixed with a little time and effort. But we can't go anywhere without those crystals.\" He rubbed his beard. \"How's Little Red?\"\n\nRedden Alt Mer looked down at his sister. She was still unconscious. He had let her sleep while he worked on her injuries, but he thought he'd wake her soon in case she had suffered a concussion. He needed to know, as well, if there was damage inside that he couldn't see.\n\n\"She'll be all right,\" he said with a reassuring smile. He wasn't sure at all, but there was no point in worrying Black Beard unnecessarily. He had enough to concern him. \"Who went over the side?\"\n\n\"Jahnon Pakabbon.\"\n\nBig Red grimaced. A good man. But they were all good men, which is why they had been chosen for the voyage. There wasn't a one he could bear to lose, let alone afford to. He had known Jahnon since they were children. The quiet, even-tempered Rover had a gift for innovation in addition to his sailing skills.\n\n\"All right.\" He forced himself to quit thinking about it, to concentrate on the problem at hand. \"We have to go down there and bring him out. We'll look for the crystals when we do. Choose two men to go with me \u2014 and make sure you're not one of them. I need you to work on the repairs. We don't want to be stranded here any longer than necessary. Those airships with their Mwellrets and walking dead will come looking for us soon enough. I don't intend to be around when they do.\"\n\nSpanner Frew grunted, stood up, and went back down the pilot box steps. The Jerle Shannara was canted to port at a twenty-degree angle perhaps a hundred yards from the precipice, the curved horn of her starboard pontoon lodged in a cluster of boulders. She wasn't in much danger of sliding over the edge, but she was fully exposed to anything flying overhead. Behind her, running back for perhaps another hundred yards, a forested shelf jutted from the cliff face of the mountain on which they had settled. They were lucky to be alive after such a crash, lucky not to have fallen all the way into the jungle below, from which extraction would have been impossible. That the Jerle Shannara had not broken into a million pieces was a testament to her construction and design. Say what you would about Spanner Frew, he knew how to build an airship.\n\nNevertheless, they were trapped, lacking sufficient diapson crystals to lift off, short one more crew member, and completely lost in a strange land. Big Red was normally optimistic about tough situations, but in this particular instance he didn't much care for their chances.\n\nHe glanced skyward, where clouds and mist hung like a curtain across the horizon, hiding what lay farther out in all directions. Nothing was visible but the emerald canopy of the jungle and the tips of a few nearby peaks, leaving him with the unpleasant feeling of being trapped on a rocky island, suspended between gray mist and green sea.\n\n\"Spanner!\" he yelled suddenly. The burly shipwright trudged back over to stand below the box and looked up at him. \"Cut some rolling logs, rig a block and tackle, and let's try to move the ship back into those trees. I don't like being out in the open like this.\"\n\nThe big man turned away without a word and disappeared over the side of the ship. Big Red could hear him yelling anew at the crewmen, laying into them with his shipyard vocabulary. He listened a moment and shook his head. He missed Hawk, who was always a step ahead in knowing what needed to be done. But Black Beard was capable enough, if a bit irksome. Give him some direction and he would get the job done.\n\nRedden Alt Mer turned his attention to his sister. He bent down and gave her a gentle shake. She groaned and turned her head away, then drifted off. He shook her once more, a little more firmly this time. \"Rue, wake up.\"\n\nHer eyes blinked open, and she stared at him. For a moment, she didn't say anything. Then she sighed wearily. \"I've been through this before \u2014 come back from the edge and found you waiting. Like a dream. Still alive, are we?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Though one of us is a little worse for wear.\"\n\nShe glanced down at herself, taking in the bandages wrapped about her torso and leg where the clothing had been cut away, seeing the splint on her arm. \"How bad am I?\"\n\n\"You won't be flying off to rescue anyone for a while. You broke your arm and several ribs. You ripped open the knife wounds on your thigh and side. You banged yourself up pretty good, all without the help of a single Mwellret.\"\n\nShe started to giggle, then grimaced. \"Don't make me laugh. It hurts too much.\" She lifted her head and glanced around, taking in as much as she could, then lay back. \"We don't seem to be flying, so I guess I didn't dream that we crashed. Are we all in one piece?\"\n\n\"More or less. There's damage, but it can be repaired. The problem now is that we can't fly. We lost all our spare diapson crystals through a break in the hull. I have to take a search party down into the valley and find them before we can get out of here.\" He shrugged. \"Thank your lucky stars it wasn't worse.\"\n\n\"I'm busy thanking them that I'm still alive. That any of us are, for that matter.\" She licked her lips. \"Got anything to drink that doesn't come from a stream?\"\n\nHe brought her an aleskin, holding it up for her as she took deep swallows. \"You hurt anywhere I can't see?\" he asked when she was done. \"A little honesty here wouldn't hurt, by the way.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Nothing you haven't already taken care of.\" She wiped her lips and sighed deeply. \"Good. But I'm really tired.\"\n\n\"Then you'd better sleep.\" He arranged the torn bit of sail he had folded under her head for a pillow and tucked in the ragged folds of her great cloak about her arms and legs. \"I'll let you know when something happens.\"\n\nHer eyes closed at once, which was what he had expected, given the strength of the sleeping potion he had dropped into her drink. He took the aleskin and tucked it away in a storage bin to one side of the control panel, out of sight but ready to use if he needed it again. But she wouldn't wake for twelve hours or better, if he'd measured the dosage right. He looked down at her, his little sister, tough as nails and so anxious to demonstrate it she would have insisted on getting up if he hadn't drugged her. She confused him sometimes, the way she was always trying to prove herself, as if she hadn't already done so a dozen times over. But better to be like that, he supposed, than to be content with the way things were. His sister set the standard, and she was always looking to improve on it. He could wish for more like her, but he wouldn t find them no matter how hard he looked. There was only one Little Red.\n\nHe yawned, thought he wouldn't mind a little sleep himself, then walked over to the ship's railing and looked down at Spanner Frew and the others as they placed the rolling logs under the pontoons. The block and tackle was already in place, strapped to a huge old oak fifty yards back with the rope ends clipped to iron pull rings that had been screwed into the aft horns just above the waterline.\n\n\"We could use another pair of hands!\" the shipwright shouted up at Big Red as he took in the slack in the ropes with an audible grunt.\n\nRedden Alt Mer climbed down the ship's ladder and joined the others as they picked up the lead rope, set themselves, and began to heave against the weight of the airship. Even after she had been pulled off the rocks and straightened so that her pontoons were resting on the logs, the Jerle Shannara was difficult to budge. Eventually, Big Red took three others forward and began to rock her. After some considerable effort and harsh words had been expended, she began to move. Once she got rolling, they worked swiftly. Pulling steadily on the ropes, they rotated the rolling logs under her floats as she lumbered backwards until they got her perhaps three dozen yards off the exposed flat and into a mix of trees and bushes.\n\nAfter taking down the block and tackle and unhooking the ropes, Redden Alt Mer ordered Kelson Riat and the big Rover who called himself Rucker Bont to cut some of the surrounding brush and spread it around the decks of the airship as camouflage. It took them only a little while to change her appearance sufficiently that the Rover Captain was satisfied. With all the sails down and the decking partially screened, the Jerle Shannara might look like a part of the landscape, a hummock of rock and scrub or a pile of deadwood.\n\n\"Good work, Black Beard,\" he told Spanner Frew. \"Now see what you can do with that hole in her side while I take a look down below for those crystals.\"\n\nThe big man nodded. \"I've given you Bont and Tian Cross for company.\" He took hold of the Captain's arm and squeezed. \"Little Red and I won't be there to look out for you. Watch yourself.\"\n\nRedden Alt Mer gave him a boyish grin and patted the big, gnarled hand. \"Always.\"\n\nThey went down the cliff face in a line, Big Red in front setting the pace and finding the most favorable route for them to follow. It wasn't a particularly steep or long descent, but a misstep could result in a nasty fall, so the three men were careful to take their time. They used ropes as safety lines where the descent was steepest, \u2014 the other sections, where the slope broadened and there were footholds to be found in the jagged rock, they navigated on their own. It was midafternoon by now, and the hazy light was beginning to darken as the sun slid behind the canopy of clouds and mist. Big Red gave them another three hours at most before it would become too dark to continue the search. There wasn't as much time as he would have liked, but that was the way it went sometimes. You had to make the best of some situations. If they ran out of time today, they would just have to try again tomorrow.\n\nThe climb down took them almost an hour, and by the time they were inside the trees, everything was much darker. The canopy of limbs and vines was so thick that almost no light penetrated to the jungle floor. As a result, the undergrowth wasn't as thick as Big Red had anticipated, so they were able to advance relatively easily. They quickly discovered that they were in a rain forest, the temperature on the valley floor much higher than in the mountains. The air was steamy and damp and smelling of earth and plants. Life was abundant. Ferns grew everywhere, some of them very tall and broad, some tiny and fragile. Though most were green, others were milky white and still others a rust red. Their tiny shoots unfurled like babies' fingers, stretching for the light. Slugs oozed their way across the earth, leaving trails of moisture, sticky and glistening. Butterflies careened from place to place in bright splashes of color, and birds darted through the canopy overhead so fast the eye could barely follow. Now and again, they heard them singing, a mix of songs that seemed to come from everywhere at once.\n\nThe atmosphere was strange and vaguely unsettling, and they could feel the change immediately. The sound of the wind had disappeared. Over everything lay a hush broken only by birdsong and insect buzzes. In the silences between, there was a sense of expectancy, as if everything was waiting for the next sound or movement. They had the unmistakable feeling of being watched by things that they could not see, of eyes following them everywhere.\n\nSome distance in, they stopped while Big Red took a reading on his compass. It would be all too easy to become lost down here, and he wasn't about to let that happen. He had only a vague idea of where to look for Jahnon's body and the missing diapson crystals, so the best they could do was to navigate in that general direction and hope they got lucky.\n\nHe stared off into the hazy distance, thinking for a moment about the direction of his life. He could stand to take a compass reading on that, as well. At best he was drifting, tacking first one way and then another, a vessel with no particular destination in mind. He shouldn't spend a moment of time worrying about becoming lost down here given how lost he was in general. He might argue otherwise \u2014 did so often, in fact \u2014 but it didn't change the truth of things. His life, for as long as he could remember, had consisted of one escapade after the other. Rue had been right about their lives as mercenaries. Mostly, they had been centered on the size of the purse being offered. This was the first time they had accepted a job because they believed there was something more at stake than money.\n\nYet what difference did it make? They were still fighting for their lives, still careening about like ships adrift, still lost in the wider world.\n\nDid Little Red now feel that coming on this voyage was worth it?\n\nHe supposed he was rethinking his own life because of hers. She had been injured twice in the past two weeks, and both times she had come close to being killed. It was bad enough that he risked his own life so freely, \u2014 he shouldn't be so quick to risk hers. True, she was a grown woman and capable of deciding for herself whether or not she wanted to accept that risk. But he also knew she looked up to him, followed after him, and believed unswervingly in him. She always had. Like it or not, that invested him with a certain responsibility for her safety. Maybe it was time to give that responsibility some attention.\n\nThey said he had the luck. But everyone's luck ran out sooner or later. The odds in his case had to be getting shorter. If he didn't find a way to change that, he was going to pay for it. Or worse, Rue was.\n\nThey set off again, working their way through the jungle, and hadn't gone two hundred yards when Tian Cross spied the wooden crate that contained the crystals lying in a deep depression of its own making. Amazingly, the crate was still in one piece, if somewhat misshapen, the nails and stout wire securing it having held it together despite the fall from the precipice.\n\nBig Red bent down to examine it. The crate was maybe two and a half feet on each side and weighed in the neighborhood of two hundred pounds. A strong man could carry it, but not far. He thought about taking out several of the crystals and tucking them into his clothing. But they were heavy and too awkward for that. Besides, he wanted to retrieve them all, not just some. It would take longer to haul out the entire crate, but there was no reason to think that on the long journey home they might not need replacement crystals again.\n\nHe stood up, pulled out the compass, and took another reading.\n\n\"Captain,\" Rucker Bont called over to him.\n\nHe glanced up. The big Rover was pointing ahead. There was a distinct gap in the wall of the jungle where trees and brush were missing and hazy light flooded down through the canopy. It was a clearing, the first they had come across.\n\nHe snapped shut the casing on the compass and tucked the instrument back into his pocket. Something about the break in the jungle roof didn't look right. He made his way through trees and vines for a closer look, leaving the crystals where they were. The other two Rovers followed. The brush was thicker here, and it took them several minutes to reach the edge of the clearing, where they slowed to a ragged halt and, still within the fringe of the trees, peered out in surprise.\n\nA section of the forest had been leveled on both sides of a lazy stream that meandered through the dense undergrowth, its waters so still they were barely moving. Trees had been knocked down, bushes and grasses had been flattened, and the earth torn up so badly it had the look of a plowed field. A hole had been opened in the trees that tunneled back down the length of the stream and disappeared into the mist.\n\nRucker Bont whistled softly. \"What do you suppose did that?\"\n\nBig Red shrugged. \"A storm, maybe.\"\n\nBont grunted. \"Maybe. Could have been wind, too.\" He paused. \"Could also be that something bigger than us lives down here.\"\n\nHis eyes darting right and left watchfully, Big Red walked out of the trees and into the clearing, picking his way across the rutted, scarred earth. The other two waited a moment, then followed. At the clearing's center, he knelt to look for tracks, hoping he wouldn't find any. He didn't, but the ground was so badly churned he couldn't be sure of what he was looking at.\n\nHe glanced up. \"I don't see anything.\"\n\nRucker Bont scuffed his boot in the dirt, glanced over at Tian Cross and then back at Alt Mer. \"Want me to have a look around?\"\n\nBig Red peered down the debris-strewn length of the little stream, down the tunnel that burrowed into the trees. In places the damage was so severe that the stream's banks had collapsed entirely. Tree limbs and logs straddled the stream bed, wooden barriers that stuck out in all directions and smelled of shredded leaves and wood freshly ripped asunder. Everything he was seeing felt wrong for a windstorm or a flood. The damage was too contained, too geometrical, not random enough. Perhaps Bont wasn't as far off the mark as he had thought. This had the look of something done by a very big, very powerful animal.\n\nAware suddenly of a change in the forest, he stood up slowly. The birds and butterflies they had seen in such profusion only minutes ago had disappeared entirely and the jungle had gone very still. His hand strayed to the hilt of his sword.\n\nHe saw Jahnon Pakabbon then, his eyes drawn to the corpse as surely as if it had been pointed out to him. Across the clearing, less than fifty feet away, Pakabbon lay sprawled against a clump of rocks and deadwood. Only he didn't look the way he had when he was alive, and the fall alone wouldn't account for it. His body had been stripped of its flesh and his organs sucked out. His clothes hung on bleached bones. His eyes were missing. His mouth hung open in a soundless scream and seemed to be trying to bite at something.\n\nAt almost the same moment, Redden Alt Mer caught sight of the creature. It was crouched right over Jahnon, as green and brown as the jungle that hid it. He might not have seen it at all if the light hadn't shifted just a touch while he was staring at Pakabbon's corpse. Intent on retrieving the remains of his friend, he might have walked right up to it without knowing it was there. It was so well concealed that even as big as it was \u2014 and it had to be huge from the size of its head \u2014 it was virtually invisible. All that Redden Alt Mer could see of it now was a blunt reptilian snout with lidded eyes and mottled skin that hovered over Jahnon's dead body like a hammer about to fall.\n\nHe never had a chance to warn Rucker Bont and Tian Cross. He never had a chance to do anything. Redden Alt Mer had only just realized what he was looking at when the creature attacked. It catapulted out of the jungle, bursting from its concealment in a flurry of powerful, stubby legs, and seized Tian Cross in its jaws before the Rover knew what was happening. Tian screamed once, and then the jaws tightened, the needle-sharp teeth penetrated, and there was blood everywhere.\n\nIt had been a long time since Redden Alt Mer had panicked, but he panicked now. Maybe it was the suddenness of the creature's attack. Maybe it was the look of it, a lizard of some sort, all crusted and horned, or the sheer size of it, rearing up with Tian Cross's crushed body dangling from its jaws. He had never seen a creature so big move so fast. It had come out of the trees, out of its concealment, with the quickness of a striking snake. He could still see that movement in his mind, could feel the terror it induced rush through him like the touch of hot metal.\n\nDrops of blood sprayed over him as the lizard shook his friend's dead body like a toy.\n\nRedden Alt Mer bolted back through the jungle. He never stopped to think what he was doing. He never even considered trying to help Tian. Some part of him knew that Tian was dead anyway, that there was nothing he could do to help him, but that wasn't why he ran. He ran because he was terrified. He ran because he knew that if he didn't, he was going to die.\n\nRunning was all he could think to do.\n\nAt first, he thought the creature would not follow, too busy with its kill to bother. But within seconds he heard it coming, limbs and brush snapping, leaves and twigs tearing free, the earth shaking with the weight and force of its massive body. It exploded through the jungle like an engine of war set loose. Big Red picked up his pace, even though he had thought he was already running flat out. He darted and dodged through the heavier foliage until he was back where the trees opened up, and then he put on a new burst of speed. He cast aside his cumbersome weapons, useless in any case against such a behemoth. He lightened himself so that he could fly, and still he felt as if he were weighted in chains.\n\nAlt Mer glanced back only once. Rucker Bont was running just as hard, only steps behind, features drained of blood and filled with terror, a mirror of his own. The lizard, thundering after them in a blur of mottled green and brown, jaws open, was right behind.\n\n\"Captain!\" Bont cried out frantically.\n\nAlt Mer heard him scream. The lizard was tearing at him, and the sounds of his friend's dying followed the Rover Captain as he fled.\n\nShades! Shades!\n\nHe never looked back. He couldn't bear to. He could only run and keep running, closing off everything inside but the fear. The fear drove him. The fear ruled him.\n\nHe gained the cliff wall and went up it in a scrambling rush, barely feeling the sharpness of the rock and roughness of the rope as he climbed. Forgotten were the crystals and Jahnon's body. Forgotten were his hopes for a quick exit from this valley. His companions lay dead in the valley below. His weapons lay discarded.\n\nHe gave them no thought. He had no faculty for thinking. He had nothing left inside but a frantic, desperate need to escape \u2014 not so much what pursued him as what he was feeling. His fear. His terror. If he did not escape it, he knew, if he did not run fast enough, it would consume him.\n\nHe gained the heights after endless minutes of climbing through the fading afternoon light and the deepening haze of an approaching nightfall. He never stopped to see if he was being pursued, and it was only as Spanner Frew's big hands reached down to pull him over the lip of the precipice that he realized how quiet it was.\n\nHe looked back in wonder. Nothing was behind him, no sign of the lizard, no indication that anything had ever happened. There was no movement, no sound, nothing. The jungle had swallowed it all and gone as still and calm as the surface of the sea after a storm.\n\nSpanner Frew saw his face, and the light in his own eyes darkened. \"What happened? Where are the others?\"\n\nRedden Alt Mer stared at him, unable to answer. \"Dead,\" he said finally.\n\nHe looked down at his hands and saw that they were shaking.\n\nLater that night, when the others were asleep and he was alone again, he resolved to wake his sister and tell her what he had done. He would tell her not just that he had failed to retrieve the crystals or Jahnon Pakabbon and that the men who had gone into the valley with him were dead, but that he had panicked and run. It would be his first step toward recovery, toward finding a way back from the dark place into which he had fallen. He knew he could not live with himself if he did not find a way to face what had happened. It began with telling Rue, from whom he had no secrets, to whom he confided everything. He would not stint in his telling now, casting himself in the most unfavorable light he could imagine. What he had done was unthinkable. He must confess himself to her and seek absolution.\n\nBut when he rose and went to her and stood looking down, he imagined what that confession would feel like. He could see her face as she listened to his words, changing little by little, reflecting her loss of pride and trust in him, revealing her distaste for his actions. He could see the way her eyes would darken and veil, hiding feelings she had never before experienced, changing everything between them. Rue, the little sister who had always looked up to him.\n\nHe couldn't bear it. He stood there in the shadows without moving, studying her face, letting the moment pass, and then he left.\n\nBack on deck, well away from where the watch stood at the airship's bow looking out toward the dark bowl of the valley, he leaned against the masthead and stared up at the hazy night sky. Glimpses of a half-moon and clusters of stars were visible through breaks in the clouds. He watched the way they came and went, thinking of his feckless courage and uncertain resolve.\n\nAfter a time, he slid down to a sitting position, his back against the roughened timber, and lay his head back. As still as the mast itself, he lost himself in the fury of his bitter self-condemnation, and morning still hours away and redemption still further off, he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Imprisoned in the bowels of the Morgawr's flagship, Ahren Elessedil rode out the storm that had brought down the Jerle Shannara. He was not chained to the wall as Bek had been when held prisoner on Black Moclips a day earlier, but left free to wander about the locked room. The storm had caught up to them as they flew north into the interior of the peninsula, snatching at the airship like a giant's hand, tossing it about, and finally tiring of the game, casting it away. With the room's solitary window battened down and the door secured, he could see nothing beyond the walls of his prison, but Ahren could feel the storm's wrath. He could feel how it attacked and played with the airship, how it threatened to reduce her to a shattered heap of wooden splinters and iron fragments. If it did, his troubles would be over.\n\nIn his darker moments, he thought that perhaps this would be best.\n\nAn unwilling accomplice in the warlock's search for the Ilse Witch, he had been brought aboard by the Morgawr and his Mwellrets after leaving Castledown's ruins and taken directly to his present confinement. A guard had been posted outside, but had disappeared shortly after the storm had begun and not returned.\n\nJust before that, they had brought him some food and water, a small measure of both and only enough to keep him from losing strength entirely. No effort was made to communicate with him. From the way the Morgawr had left things, it was clear that he would be brought out only when it was felt he could be useful in some way.\n\nOr when it was finally time to dispose of him. He held no illusions about that. Sooner or later, promises notwithstanding, that time would come.\n\nRyer Ord Star had disappeared with the warlock, and the Elven Prince still had no clear idea why she had turned against him. He had not stopped pondering the matter, not even during the storm, while he sat braced in a corner of the storeroom, pressed up against a wall between two heavy trusses to keep from being knocked around. She had been the willing tool of the Ilse Witch, and it did not require a great leap of faith to accept that she would take that same path with the Morgawr if she thought it meant the difference between living and dying. Walker was gone, and Walker had provided her with both strength and direction. Without him, she seemed frailer, smaller, more vulnerable \u2014 a wisp of life that a strong wind could blow away.\n\nEven so, Ahren had thought she was his friend, that she had come to terms with what she had done and closed that door behind her. To have her betray him now, to reveal his identity and suggest a use for him to his enemy, was too much to bear. Like it or not, he was left with the unpleasant possibility that she had been lying to him all along.\n\nYet she had clearly mouthed the words trust me to him after they had been made prisoners. Why would she do that if she was not trying to let him know she was still his friend?\n\nWhat sort of deception was she working?\n\nHe thought some more about the Elfstones, as well. He simply could not understand what had happened to them. They had most certainly been in his possession in Castledown. He remembered quite clearly tucking them away in his tunic. He did not think he had lost them since, did not see how that was possible, so someone must have taken them after he had been rendered unconscious. But who? Ryer Ord Star was the logical suspect, but Cree Bega had searched her. Besides, how could she have taken them after the Mwellrets took them prisoner? That left Cree Bega or another of the Mwellrets as suspects, but it would take an act of either supreme courage or foolishness to try to conceal the stones from the Morgawr. Ahren did not think that the Mwellrets would chance it.\n\nHe was still wrestling with his confusion when the storm abated and the ship settled back into a smooth and easy glide through the clearing skies. He could tell the sun had reappeared from the sudden brightening that shone through the chinks in his window shutters, and he could smell the sharp, clean air that always followed a heavy storm. He was standing with his face pushed up against the rough battens, trying to see something besides the brightness, when the lock on his door released with a snap. He turned. A Mwellret entered, mute and expressionless, carrying a tray of food and water. The Mwellret glanced about to make certain that nothing was amiss, then placed the tray on the floor by the entry, backed out, closed the door, and locked it anew.\n\nAhren ate and drank, hungrier and thirstier than he had imagined, and listened to renewed activity on the decks above, the sudden movement of booted feet amid a flurry of shouts and gruff exclamations. The airship tacked several times, swinging about, maneuvering in a series of fits and starts. The ones who sailed her were inexperienced or stiff-handed. Other than to note that they were Southlanders \u2014 Federation conscripts and sailors like the ones who fought on the Prekkendorran \u2014 he had paid no attention to the sailors on being brought aboard earlier. Mostly he had spent his time studying the layout of the decks and corridors he was moved along, thinking that at some point he might have a chance to escape and would need to know his way.\n\nHe closed his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. That hope seemed impossibly naive just now.\n\nA sudden jolt threw him backwards and knocked the tray aside, spilling its contents. A slow grinding of wooden timbers and a screech of metal suggested that they were rubbing up against something big. He sprawled on the floor, as the ship lurched to a stop. He heard more activity overhead. For a moment he thought they were engaged in combat, but then the sounds died away. Yet the movement of the ship had changed, the earlier smooth, easy glide gone, replaced by a stiffer sway, as if the ship was resting against something solid.\n\nThen the door to his prison opened again, and Cree Bega stepped through, followed by two more Mwellrets. The latter crossed to where he sat, hauled him roughly to his feet, and propelled him toward the open door.\n\n\"Comess with uss, little Elvess,\" Cree Bega ordered.\n\nThey took him back up on deck. The sunlight was so bright that at first he was blinded by it. He stood in the grip of the Mwellrets, squinting through the glare at a cluster of figures gathered forward. Most were Mwellrets, but there were Federation sailors, as well. The sailors were slack-jawed, their faces empty of expression. They stood as if in a daze, staring at nothing. Ahren realized that they were still airborne, riding several hundred feet above a canopy of brilliant green forest with the peaks of a mountain range visible off their bow, a rippling stone spine that disappeared into a hazy distance.\n\nThen he saw that they were lashed to a second airship, one he recognized immediately. It was Black Moclips.\n\n\"Besst now to pay closse attention,\" Cree Bega whispered in his ear.\n\nAhren saw Ryer Ord Star then. She was standing beside the Morgawr, almost at the bow, her small figure lost in his shadow. The Morgawr warded her protectively, and she seemed to welcome the attention, glancing up at him regularly, leaning into him as if his presence somehow gave her strength. There was anticipation on her face, though the pale features still bore that ghostly pallor, that look of otherworldliness that suggested she was someplace else altogether. Ahren stared at her, waiting for her to notice him. She never even glanced his way.\n\nAboard Black Moclips, Federation sailors crowded the rail, making secure the fastenings that bound the two ships together. Their uneasy glances were unmistakable. Now and then, those glances would stray to their counterparts aboard the Morgawr's ship, then move quickly away. They saw what Ahren saw in the faces of those who crewed the Mwellret ship \u2014 emptiness and disinterest.\n\nA pair of men had descended from Black Moclips' pilothouse and come forward. The Commander, recognizable by the insignia on his tunic, was a tall, well-built man with short-cropped dark hair. The other, his Mate perhaps, was tall as well, but thin as a rail, and had the seamed, browned face of a man who had spent his life as a sailor. The crew of the Black Moclips looked to them at once for guidance, closing about them in a show of support as they came to the railing. The Morgawr came forward and stood talking to them for a moment, the words too soft for Ahren to make out. Then the broad-shouldered Commander climbed onto the railing and stepped across to the Morgawr's ship.\n\n\"Comess closser, little Elvess,\" Cree Bega ordered. \"Sseess what happenss.\"\n\nThe Mwellrets holding Ahren hauled him forward to where he could hear clearly. He glanced again at Ryer Ord Star, who had dropped back and was standing apart from everyone in the bow, her eyes closed and her face lifted, as if gone into a trance. She was dreaming, he realized. She was having a vision, but no one had noticed.\n\n\"She took you prisoner, commandeered your ship, and escaped \u2014 all of this with no one to help her but a Wing Rider?\" the Morgawr was saying. His rough voice was calm, but there was an unmistakable edge to his words.\n\n\"She is a formidable woman,\" the Federation officer replied, tight-lipped and angry.\n\n\"No more so than your mistress, Commander Aden Kett, and you were quick enough to abandon her. I would have thought twice about doing so in your shoes.\"\n\nKett stiffened. He was staring into the black hole of the other's cowl, clearly intimidated by the dark, invisible presence within, by the other's size and mystery. He was confronted by a creature he now knew to have some sort of relationship to the Ilse Witch, which made him very dangerous.\n\n\"I thought more than twice about it, I assure you,\" he said.\n\n\"Yet you let her escape, and you did not give chase?\"\n\n\"The storm was upon us. I was concerned more for the safety of my ship and crew than for a Rover girl.\"\n\nRue Meridian, Ahren thought at once. Somehow, after the Ilse Witch had gone ashore, Rue had boarded and gotten control of Black Moclips. But where was she now? Where were the rest of the Rovers, for that matter? Everyone had disappeared, it seemed, gone into the ether like Walker.\n\n\"So you have your ship back, but the Rover girl is gone?\" The Morgawr seemed to shrug the matter aside. \"But where is our little Ilse Witch, Commander?\"\n\nAden Kett seemed baffled. \"I've told you already. She went ashore. She never returned.\"\n\n\"This boy who escaped, the one she seemed so interested in when she brought him back to the ship \u2014 what do you think happened to him?\"\n\n\"I don't know anything about that boy. I don't know what happened to either of them. What I do know is that I've had enough of being questioned. My ship and crew are under the command of the Federation. We answer to no one else, especially now.\"\n\nA brave declaration, Ahren thought. A foolish declaration, given what he suspected about the Morgawr. If the Ilse Witch was dangerous, this creature, her mentor, was doubly so. He had come a long way to find her. He had gained control over an entire Federation fleet to manage the task. Mwellrets who were clearly in his thrall surrounded him. Aden Kett was being reckless.\n\n\"Would you go home again, Commander?\" the Morgawr asked him quietly. \"Home to fight on the Prekkendorran?\"\n\nThis time Aden Kett hesitated before speaking, perhaps already sensing that he had crossed a forbidden line. The Mwellrets, Ahren noticed, had gone very still. Ahren could see anticipation on their flat, reptilian faces.\n\n\"I would go home to do whatever the Federation asks of me,\" Kett answered. \"I am a soldier.\"\n\n\"A soldier obeys his commanding officer in the field, and you are in the field, Commander,\" the Morgawr said softly. \"If I ask you to help me find the Ilse Witch, it is your duty to do so.\"\n\nThere was a long silence, and then Aden Kett said, \"You are not my commanding officer. You have no authority over me. Or over my ship and crew. I have no idea who you are or how you got here using Federation ships and men. But you have no written orders, and so I am not obligated to follow your dictates. I have come aboard to speak with you as a courtesy. That courtesy has been exercised, and I am absolved of further responsibility to you. Good luck to you, sir.\"\n\nHe turned away, intent on reboarding Black Moclips. Instantly, the Morgawr stepped forward, his huge clawed hand lunging out of his black robes to seize the luckless Federation officer by the back of his neck. Powerful fingers closed about Aden Kelt's throat, cutting off his futile cry. The Morgawr's other hand appeared more slowly, emerging in a ball of green light as his victim thrashed helplessly. Then, as Ahren Elessedil watched in horror, the Morgawr extended the glowing hand to the back of his prisoner's head and eased it through skin and hair and bone, twisting and turning inside like a spoon. Kett threw back his head and screamed in spite of the grip on his throat, then shuddered once and went still.\n\nThe Morgawr withdrew his hand slowly, carefully. The back of Aden Kelt's skull sealed as he did so, closing as if there had been no intrusion at all. The Morgawr's hand was no longer glowing. It was wet and dripping with brain matter and fluids.\n\nIt was finished in seconds. Aboard Black Moclips, the stunned Federation crew rushed to the railing, but the Mwellrets blocked their way with pikes and axes. Pushing back the horrified Southlanders, the rets swarmed aboard, closing about and rendering them all prisoners. The sole exception was the rail-thin Mate, who hesitated only long enough to see the terrible, blasted look on his Commander's empty face, devoid of life and emotion, stripped of humanity, before going straight to the closest opening on the rail and throwing himself over the side.\n\nThe Morgawr squeezed what was left of Aden Kelt's brain in his hand, pieces dripping onto ihe deck, dampness sliding down his scaly arm.\n\n\"Bring the others now,\" he said softly. \"One by one, so I can savor them.\"\n\nUnable to help himself, tears filling his eyes, Ahren Elessedil renched and threw up.\n\n\"Thiss iss what could happen to little Elvess who dissobey,\" Cree Bega hissed into Ahren's ear. \"Thinkss how it feelss!\"\n\nThen he had the boy dragged belowdecks once more and into his prison.\n\nAt the bow, in the shadow of the curved rams, alone and forgotten while the subjugation of Aden Kell look place, Ryer Ord Star stood with her eyes closed and her mind at rest.\n\nWalker.\n\nThere was no response. Borne aloft by the wind, the smell of the forest filled her nostrils. She could picture the trees, branches spread wide, leaves touching like fingers, a sheller and a home.\n\nWalker.\n\n\u2014 I am here \u2014\n\nAt the sound of his voice, her tension diminished and the peace that always came when he was near began to replace it. Even in death, he was with her, her protector and her guide. As he had promised when he sent her from him out of Castledown, he had come to her again. Not in life, but in her dreams and visions, a strong and certain presence that would lend her the strength she so desperately needed.\n\nHow much longer must I stay here?\n\nIn her mind, the Druid's voice assumed shape and form and became the Druid as he had been in life, looking at her with kindness and understanding.\n\n\u2014 It is not yet time to leave \u2014\n\nI am frightened!\n\n\u2014 Do not be afraid. I am with you and will keep you from harm \u2014\n\nShe kept her eyes closed and her face lifted, feeling the warmth of the sun and the cool of the wind on her skin, but seeing only him. To anyone who looked upon her, to Ahren in particular, who was watching, she seemed a small, fragile creature given over to a fate that only she would recognize when it came for her. She was prepared for that fate, accepting of it, and her features radiated a reassurance that she was ready to embrace it.\n\nHer words, when she spoke them in the silence of her mind, were rife with her need.\n\nI am so lonely. Let me be free.\n\n\u2014 Your task is not yet finished. Grianne has not yet awakened. You must give her time to do so. She must remain free. She must escape the Morgawr long enough to remember \u2014\n\nHow will she do that? How will she find her way back from where she has gone to hide from the truth?\n\nShe knew of Grianne Ohmsford and the Sword of Shannara. She knew what had befallen the Ilse Witch in the catacombs of Castledown. Walker had told her at the time of his first coming, when she was made a prisoner of the Mwellrets with Ahren. He had told her what had transpired and what he needed of her. She was so grateful to see him again, even in another form, in another place, that she would have agreed to anything he asked of her. The soft, familiar voice whispered to her.\n\n\u2014 She will come back when she finds a way to forgive herself. She will come back when she is reborn \u2014\n\nThe seer did not know what this meant. How could anyone forgive themselves for the things the Ilse Witch had done? How could anyone who had lived her life ever be made whole again? Walker spoke again.\n\n\u2014 You must deceive the Morgawr. You must delay his search. You must lead him astray. No other possesses the skills or magic to find her. He, alone, threatens. If he captures her, everything will be lost \u2014\n\nShe felt herself turn cold at the words. What did they mean? Everything? The entire world and all those who lived in it? Could that be possible? Could the Morgawr possess power enough to accomplish such a thing? Why was Grianne Ohmsford's survival so important to whether or not that happened? What could she do to change things, even should she find a way out of her madness and despair?\n\n\u2014 Will you try \u2014\n\nI will try. But I must help Ahren.\n\nFor a moment it was as if he was touching her in the flesh. She watched his hand reach out to grip her shoulder. She felt his fingers close about, warm and solid and alive. She gave a small gasp of surprise and wonder. Oh, Walker!\n\n\u2014 Let the Elven Prince be. Do as you have been told. Do not speak to him. Do not look at him. Do not go near him. Carry through with your deception or everything I have worked for will be ruined \u2014\n\nShe nodded and sighed, still lost in the feel of his hands, of his flesh. She knew what was expected of her. She knew she must act alone and in the best way she could. She wondered anew at his choice of words. Carry through with your deception or everything I have worked for will be ruined. What did that mean? What had he worked for that could be at risk? Why did it matter so to him that she be successful in deceiving the Morgawr? What was so important that she make it possible for Grianne Ohmsford to escape?\n\nThen she saw it. It came to her in a flash of recognition, a truth so obvious that she did not understand how she could have missed it before. Of course, she thought. How could it he anything else? The enormity of her revelation left her so off balance that for a moment she lost her concentration completely and opened her eyes without thinking. The fierce glare of the midday sun was sharp and blinding, and she squeezed her eyes closed again instantly.\n\nToo much light. Too much truth.\n\nHis voice cut through her confusion and her agitation like a gentle breeze.\n\n\u2014 Do as I ask of you. One last time \u2014\n\nI will. I promise. I will find a way.\n\nThen he was gone, and she was alone in the darkness of her mind, his words still lingering in small echoes, his presence still warm against her heart.\n\nWhen she came back to herself again, out of her trance and unlocked from her vision \u2014 opening her eyes again, careful to shade them against the light \u2014 she could hear the screams of the Federation sailors from Black Moclips as the Morgawr fed on their souls." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Bek Ohmsford, Truls Rohk, and the catatonic Grianne escaped the ruins of Castledown just ahead of the searching Mwellrets and their caulls and fled into the surrounding forest. Their pursuers were so close that they could hear them moving through the trees, fanning out like beaters intent on flushing their prey. Their closeness infused Bek with a sense of helplessness that even the reassuring presence of the shape-shifter could not dispel entirely. He had a vision of what it must be like to be an animal tracked by humans and their dogs for sport, though there was nothing of sport in this. Only the movement generated by their flight kept his panic at bay.\n\nThey would not have escaped at all if Truls hadn't taken on the responsibility of carrying Grianne. Lacking any will of her own, she could not have moved at any sort of pace that would have allowed them to stay ahead of their enemies, and it was only the shape-shifter's unexpected decision to carry her that gave them any chance. Even so, with Truls bearing the burden of his sister and Bek running free on his own, they were harassed on all sides for the first two hours of their flight.\n\nWhat gave them a fighting chance in the end was the coming of the same storm that had brought down the Jerle Shannara. It swept in off the coast in a black wall, and when it struck, pursued and pursuers alike were deep in the forest flanking the Aleuthra Ark and there was no hiding from it. It blanketed them in a torrent of rain and wave after wave of rolling thunder. Bolts of lightning struck the trees all around them in blinding explosions of sparks and fire. Bek shouted to Truls that they must take cover, but the shape-shifter ignored him and continued on, not even bothering to glance back. Bek followed mostly because he had no other choice. Darting and dodging through the blasted landscape with the fury of the storm sweeping over them like a tidal wave, they ran on.\n\nWhen they finally stopped, the storm having passed, they were soaked through and chilled to the bone. The temperature had dropped considerably, and the green of the forest had taken on a wintry cast. The skies were still clouded and dark, but beginning to clear where night had faded completely and the silvery dawn of the new day had become visible. The sun was still hidden behind the wall of the storm, but soon it would climb high enough in the sky to brighten the land.\n\nBek was taking deep, ragged breaths as he faced Truls. \"We can't keep up this pace. I can't, anyway.\"\n\n\"Going soft, boy?\" The other's laugh was a derisive bark. \"Try carrying your sister and see how you do.\"\n\n\"Do you think we've lost them?\" he asked, having figured out by now why they had kept going.\n\n\"For the moment. But they'll find the trail again soon enough.\" The shape-shifter put Grianne down on a log, where she sat with limp disinterest, eyes unfocused, face slack. \"We've bought ourselves a little time, at least.\"\n\nBek stared at Grianne a moment, searching for some sign of recognition and not finding it. He felt the weight of her inability to function normally, to respond to anything, pressing down on him.\n\nThey could not afford to have her remain like this if they were to have any chance of escape.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" he asked.\n\n\"Run and keep running.\" Bek could feel Truls Rohk staring at him from out of the black oval of his cowl. \"What would you have us do?\"\n\nBek shook his head and said nothing. He felt disconnected from the world. He felt abandoned, an orphan left to fend for himself with no chance of being able to do so. With Walker gone and the company of the Jerle Shannara dead or scattered, there was no purpose to his life beyond trying to save his sister. If he let himself think about it, which he refused to do, he might come to the conclusion that he would never see home again.\n\n\"Time to go,\" Truls Rohk said, rising.\n\nBek stood up, as well. \"I'm ready,\" he declared, feeling anything but.\n\nThe shape-shifter grunted noncommittally, lifted Grianne back into the cradle of his powerful arms, and set out anew.\n\nThey walked for the remainder of the day, traveling mostly over ground where it was wet enough that their tracks filled in and disappeared behind them and their scent quickly washed away. It was the hardest day Bek could remember having ever endured. They stopped only long enough to catch their breath, drink some water, and eat a little of what small supplies Truls carried. They did not slow their pace, which was brutal. But it was the circumstances of their flight that wore Bek down the most \u2014 the constant sense of being hunted, of fleeing with no particular destination in mind, of knowing that almost everything familiar and reassuring was gone. Bek got through on the strength of his memories of home and family and life before this voyage, memories of Quentin and his parents, of the world of the Highlands of Leah, of days so far away in space and time they seemed a dream.\n\nBy nightfall, they were no longer able to hear their pursuers.\n\nThe forest was hushed in the wake of the storm's passing and the setting of the sun, and there was a renewed peace to the land. Bek and Truls sat in silence and ate their dinner of dried salt beef and stale bread and cheese. Grianne would eat nothing, though Bek tried repeatedly to make her do so. There was no help for it. If she did not choose to eat, he couldn't force her. He did manage to make her swallow a little water, a reflex action on her part as much as a response to his efforts. He was worried that she would lose strength and die if she didn't ingest something, but he didn't know what to do about it.\n\n\"Let her alone\" was the shape-shifter's response when asked for his opinion. \"She'll eat when she's ready to.\"\n\nBek let the matter drop. He ate his food, staring off into the darkness, wrapped in his thoughts.\n\nWhen they were finished, the shape-shifter rose and stretched. \"Tuck your sister in for the night and go to sleep. I'll backtrack a bit and see if the rets and their dogs are any closer.\" He paused. \"I mean what I say, boy. Go to sleep. Forget about keeping watch or thinking about your sister or any of that. You need to rest if you want to keep up with me.\"\n\n\"I can keep up,\" Bek snapped.\n\nTruls Rohk laughed softly and disappeared into the trees. He melted away so quickly that he might have been a ghost. Bek stared after him for a moment, still angry, then moved over to his sister. He stared into her cold, pale face \u2014 the face of the Ilse Witch. She looked so young, her features radiating a child's innocence. She gave no hint of the monster she concealed beneath.\n\nA sense of hopelessness stole over him. He felt such despair at the thought of what she had done with her life, of the terrible acts she had committed, of the lives she had ruined. She had known what she was doing, however misguided in her understanding of matters. She had embraced her behavior and found a way to justify it. To expect her to shed her past as a snake would its skin seemed ludicrous. Truls was probably right. She would never be the child she had been. She would never even come back to being human.\n\nImpulsively, he touched her cheek, letting his fingers stray down the smooth skin. He couldn't even remember her as a child. His image of her was formed solely from his imagination. She remembered him, but his own memory was built on a foundation of wishful thinking and imperfect hope. She looked enough like he did that no small part of his image of her was based on his image of himself. It was a flawed concoction. Thinking of her as he thought of himself was fool's play.\n\nHe reached out and gently drew her against him. She came compliantly, limply, letting him hold her. He imagined what she must feel, trapped inside her mind, unable to break free. Or did she feel anything? Was she conscious at all of what was happening? He pressed his cheek against hers, feeling the warmth of her, sharing in it. He couldn't understand why she invoked such strong feelings in him. He barely knew her. She was a stranger and, until lately, an enemy. Yet what he felt was real and true, and he was compelled to acknowledge it. He would not abandon her, not even if it cost him his own life. He could not. He knew that as surely as he knew that nothing about his life would ever be the same again.\n\nSome part of his sense of responsibility for her, he admitted, was the result of his need to feel useful. His life was spinning out of control. With her, if with no one else, himself included, he was in a position of power. He was her caretaker and protector. She had enemies all about. She was more alone than he was. Accepting responsibility for her gave him a focus that would otherwise be reduced to little more than self-preservation.\n\nHe laid her down on a dry patch of ground beneath the sheltering canopy of a tree that the rains hadn't penetrated, and covered her carefully with her cloak. He stared down at her for a long time, at the clear features and closed eyes, at the pulse in her throat, at her chest rising and falling with each breath. His sister.\n\nThen he stood and stared out into the darkness, tired but not sleepy, his mind working through the morass of his troubles, trying to decide what he might do to help himself and Grianne. Surely Truls would do what he could, but Bek knew it was a mistake to rely too heavily on his enigmatic protector. He had done that before, and it hadn't been enough to keep him safe. In the end, as the shape-shifters in the mountains had warned him he must, he had relied on himself. He had waited for Grianne, confronted her, and changed the course of both their lives.\n\nWhat he could not tell as yet was whether or not the change had been for the better. He supposed it had. At least Grianne was no longer the Ilse Witch, his enemy and antagonist. At least they were together and clear of the ruins and Black Moclips and the Mwellrets. At least they were free.\n\nHe sat down, closed his eyes to rest them, and in moments was asleep. His sleep was deep and untroubled, made smooth by his exhaustion and his willingness to let go of his waking life for just a little while. In the cool, silent blanket of the dark, he was able to make himself believe that he was safe.\n\nHe did not know how long he slept before he woke again, but he was certain of the cause of his waking. It was a voice summoning him from his dreams.\n\n\u2014 Bek \u2014\n\nThe voice was clear and certain, reaching out to him. His eyes opened.\n\n\u2014 Bek \u2014\n\nIt was Walker. Bek rose and stood staring about the empty clearing, the sky overhead clear and bright, filled with thousands of stars, their light a silvery wash over the forest dark. He looked around. His sister slept. Truls Rohk had not returned. He stood alone in a place where ghosts could speak and the truth be revealed.\n\n\u2014 Bek \u2014\n\nThe voice called to him not from the clearing, but from somewhere close by, and he followed the sound of it, moving into the trees. He did not fear for his sister, although he could not explain why. Perhaps it was the certainty that Walker would not summon him if it would put her in peril. Just the sound of the Druid's voice brought a sense of peace to Bek that defied explanation. A dead man's voice giving peace \u2014 how odd.\n\nHe walked only a short distance and found himself in a clearing with a deep, black pond at its center, weeds clustered along the edges and pads of night-blooming water lilies floating their lavender flags through the dark. The smells of the water and the forest mixed in a heady brew suffused with both damp and dry earth, slow decay and burgeoning life. Fireflies blinked on and off all across the pond like tiny beacons.\n\nThe Druid was at the far side of the pond, neither in the water nor on the shore, but suspended in the night air, a transparent shade defined by lines and shadows. His face was hidden in his cowl, but Bek knew him anyway. No one else had exactly that stance and build; Walker in death, even as in life, was distinctive.\n\nThe Druid spoke to him as if out of a deep, empty well.\n\n\u2014 Bek. I am given only a short time to walk free upon this earth before the Hadeshorn claims me. Time slips away. Listen carefully. I will not come to you again \u2014\n\nThe voice was smooth and compelling as it rose from its cavernous lair. It had the feel and resonance of an echo, but with a darker tone. Bek nodded that he understood, then added, \"I'm listening.\"\n\n\u2014 Your sister is my hope, Bek. She is my trust. I have given that trust to you, the living, since I am gone. She must be kept safe and well. She must be allowed to become whole \u2014\n\nBek wanted to say that he was not the one to bear the weight of this responsibility, that he lacked the necessary experience and strength. He wanted to say that it was Truls who would make the difference, \u2014 Bek was acting only as the shape-shifter's conscience in this matter so that Grianne would not be abandoned. But he said nothing, choosing instead to listen.\n\nBut Walker seemed to divine his reluctance.\n\n\u2014 Physical strength is not what your sister needs, Bek. She needs strength of mind and heart. She needs your determination and commitment to see her safely back from where she hides \u2014\n\n\"Hides?\" he blurted out.\n\n\u2014 Deep inside a wall of denial, of darkness of mind, of silence of thought. She seeks a way to accept what she has done. Acceptance comes with forgiveness. Forgiveness begins when she can confront the darkest of her deeds, the one she views as most unforgivable, the one that haunts her endlessly. When she can face that darkest of acts and forgive herself, she will come back to you \u2014\n\nBek shook his head, thinking through what little he knew of the specifics of her life. How could one deed be darker than any other? What one deed would that be?\n\n\"This one deed...,\" he began.\n\n\u2014 Is known only to her, because it is the one she has fixed upon. She alone knows what it is \u2014\n\nBek considered. \"But how long will it take for such a thing to happen? How will it even come about?\"\n\n\u2014 Time \u2014\n\n\u2014 Time we don't have, Bek thought. Time that slips away like night toward day, a certainty of loss that cannot be reversed.\n\n\"There must be something we can do to help!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\u2014 Nothing \u2014\n\nDespair settled through him, pulling down hopes and stealing away possibilities. All he could do, all anyone could do, was to keep Grianne out of the hands of the Morgawr and his Mwellrets. Keep running. Wait patiently. Hope she found a way clear of her prison. It wasn't much. It was nothing.\n\n\"Truls wants to leave her,\" he said quietly, searching for something more upon which to rely. \"What if he does?\"\n\n\u2014 His destiny is not yours. Even if he goes, you must stay \u2014\n\nBek exhaled sharply.\n\n\u2014 Remember your promise \u2014\n\n\"I would never forget it. She is my sister.\" He paused, rubbing at his eyes. \"I don't understand something. Why is she so important to you, Walker? She was your enemy. Why are you trying so hard to save her now? Why do you say she is your hope and trust?\"\n\nShards of moonlight knifed through the transparent form, causing it to shift and change. Below, the waters of the pond rippled gently.\n\n\u2014 When she wakes, she will know \u2014\n\n\"But what if she doesn't wake?\" Bek demanded. \"What if she doesn't come back from where she has hidden inside?\"\n\n\u2014 She will know \u2014\n\nHe began receding into the dark.\n\n\"Walker, wait!\" Bek was suddenly desperate. \"I can't do this! I don't have the skills or experience or anything! How can I reach her? She won't even listen to me when she's awake! She won't tell me anything!\"\n\n\u2014 She will know \u2014\n\n\"How can she know anything if I can't explain it to her?\" Bek charged ahead a few steps, stopping at the edge of the pond. The Druid was fading away. \"Someone has to tell her, Walker!\"\n\nBut the shade disappeared, and Bek was left alone with his confusion. He stood without moving for a long time, staring at the space Walker had occupied, repeating his words over and over, trying to understand them.\n\nShe will know.\n\nGrianne Ohmsford, his sister, the Ilse Witch, mortal enemy of the Druids and of Walker, in particular.\n\nShe will know.\n\nThere was no sense to it.\n\nYet in his heart, where such things reveal themselves like rainbows after thunderstorms, he knew it to be true." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Bek returned to the camp to find Grianne still sleeping and Truls Rohk not yet returned. The position of the stars told him it was after midnight, so he went back to sleep and did not wake again until he felt the shape-shifter's hand resting on his shoulder.\n\n\"Time to go,\" the other said quietly, eyes on the woods behind them.\n\n\"How close are they?\" Bek asked at once. It was first light, the sunrise just a silvery glow east.\n\n\"Still a distance off, but getting closer. They haven't found our trail yet, but they will soon.\"\n\n\"The caulls?\"\n\n\"The caulls. Mutations of humans captured and altered by magic.\" He shifted his gaze back to Bek. \"Your sister's work, I would have said, if she wasn't here with us. So it must be the Morgawr. Wonder where he found his victims.\"\n\nBek sat up quickly. \"Not Quentin or the others? Not the Rovers?\"\n\nTruls Rohk took his arm and pulled him to his feet. \"Don't think about it. Think about staying one step ahead of them. That's worry enough for now.\"\n\nHe walked over to the supplies pack he carried and pulled out some of the bread. Breaking off a piece, he handed it to Bek. \"If you were like me, you wouldn't need this.\" He laughed softly. \"Of course, if you were like me, you wouldn't be in this mess.\"\n\nBek took the bread and ate it. \"Thanks for staying with us,\" he said, nodding toward the still-sleeping Grianne.\n\nThe shape-shifter grunted noncommittally. \"Packs of caulls and Mwellrets are everywhere in these woods, dozens of them. They're not chasing only us, either. I heard the sounds of someone else fighting them off when I went back to scout \u2014 a larger group, somewhere off to our right, heading into the mountains. I didn't have time to see who it was. It probably doesn't bear thinking on, except that maybe it will draw some of the rets away.\"\n\nHe gestured impatiently, a faceless darkness within his hood. \"Enough. Let's be off.\"\n\nHe scooped up Grianne, and they started out once more. They went swiftly and silently through the trees, then Truls moved them into a shallow stream, which they followed for several miles. It was as if they were repeating the events of less than a week ago. They were taking a different path, but traversing the same woods. Again, they were fleeing a hunter possessed of magic and a creature created to track them. Again, they were fleeing the ruins of Castledown, heading inland. Again, they were running away from something and toward nothing.\n\nIronic and darkly comic, but pathetic, as well, Bek thought.\n\nAs the morning slipped away, in spite of his companion's warning not to do so, he found himself speculating on the fate of his missing friends. He could not bear to think of them made over into caulls, not after what they had already endured. An image of Quentin become a snarling animal flashed through his mind. Wouldn't he know if that had happened? Wouldn't he feel it? But he wasn't Ryer Ord Star, so he couldn't be sure. At this point, he couldn't even be certain his cousin was still alive. The wishsong was a powerful magic, but it didn't make him prescient. There was nothing he could know of what happened to anyone but Walker.\n\nHe reflected anew on last night's visit from Walker's shade. He had said nothing of it to Truls. He was not sure why, only that there didn't seem to be any reason for it. If Walker had wanted Truls to hear what he had to say, wouldn't he have appeared to both of them? It was difficult enough dealing with Truls without having to argue over Walker's enigmatic pronouncements. The Druid had been quick enough to let Bek know that his destiny was not tied to that of the shape-shifter. Though they traveled together and for the moment, at least, shared a common cause, that did not mean things wouldn't change. They had changed so often on this journey that Bek knew he could ill afford to take anything for granted. There was nothing in Walker's message that was meant for Truls, nothing that would help or inform him, nothing that would change what they were doing now.\n\nBek didn't like dissembling, and although he could argue that he wasn't doing that here, it was close enough to feel like it.\n\nHis thoughts shifted to his present situation. He wondered if there was any chance at all that one of the Wing Riders would catch sight of them from the skies. He knew how unlikely that was, given the size and depth of this forest. They were like ants down here, all but invisible from above. Only a ground creature like a caull could track them, and that was exactly what they didn't need.\n\nHe pushed away the idea of rescue. He was dreaming, he knew. He was grasping at anything that offered even a semblance of hope. He could not afford such desperation. Determination and perseverance were all that he was allowed.\n\nThey walked all that day and into the next, climbing steadily into the foothills that fronted the mountains. The Mwellrets and their caulls still tracked them, but seemed to draw no closer. Now and again, the Morgawr's airships cruised the skies overhead. They came across no animals or people, no indication that anything lived in these woods but birds and insects. It was an illusion, of course, but it gave Bek a feeling of such loneliness that at times he wondered if there was any hope for them at all. The air had turned steadily colder, and snow clouds ringed the peaks of the mountains. Summer had faded with the destruction of Antrax, and the climate was in flux.\n\nOn the second night, after trying and again failing to persuade Grianne to eat something, Bek confronted Truls Rohk.\n\n\"I don't get the feeling that running away is going to accomplish anything,\" he said. \"Other than to keep us alive for another day.\"\n\nThe other's head was bowed, the black opening to the cowl lowered. \"Isn't that enough, boy?\"\n\n\"Don't call me 'boy' anymore, Truls. I don't like the way it sounds.\"\n\nThe cowl lifted now. \"What did you say?\"\n\nBek stood his ground. \"I'm not a boy, \u2014 I'm grown. You make me sound young and foolish. I'm not.\"\n\nThe shape-shifter went perfectly still, and Bek half expected one of those powerful hands to shoot out, snatch him by his tunic front, and shake him until his bones rattled.\n\n\"Sooner or later, we have to stop running,\" Bek said, forcing himself to continue. \"We tried running last time, and it didn't work. I think we need a better plan. We need somewhere to go.\"\n\nThere was no response. The empty opening of the cowl faced him like a hole in the earth that would swallow him if he stepped too close.\n\n\"I think we ought to go back into the mountains and find the shape-shifters who live there.\"\n\nThe other exhaled sharply. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because they might be able to tell us where we should go. They might help us in some way. They seemed interested in me when they appeared there last time, as if they saw something about me that I didn't. They were the ones who insisted I had to stand up to Grianne. I think they might help us now.\"\n\n\"Didn't they tell you not to come back?\"\n\n\"They saved your life. Maybe it would be different if we went back together.\"\n\n\"Maybe it wouldn't.\"\n\nBek stiffened. \"Do you have a better idea? Are we going to go up into those mountains and try to cross them without knowing what's on the other side? Or are we just going to stay down here in these woods until we run out of trees to hide in? What are we going to do, Truls?\"\n\n\"Lower your voice when you speak to me or you won't have a chance to ask those kinds of questions again!\" The shape-shifter rose and stalked away. \"I'll think about it,\" he mumbled over his shoulder. \"Later.\"\n\nMaybe he did, and maybe he didn't. He was gone all night, out scouting, Bek presumed. But, gone deep inside himself, unreachable, Truls Rohk refused to talk to Bek on returning the next morning. They set out again at daybreak, the skies clear, the air sharp and cool, the sunlight pale and thin. Bek had told Truls not to call him a boy anymore, but in truth he still felt like a boy. He had endured tremendous hardships and confronted terrible revelations about himself, and while the experiences had changed him in many ways, they hadn't made him feel any more capable of dealing with life. He was still hesitant and unsure about himself. He might have the power of the wishsong and the heritage of the Sword of Shannara to fall back on, but none of it gave him a sense of being any more mature. He was still a boy running from the things that frightened him, and if it wasn't for the fact that he knew his sister needed him, he might have fallen apart already.\n\nTruls Rohk's refusal to speak to him, even to acknowledge him, left him feeling more insecure than before. He half believed \u2014 had always half believed \u2014 that the shape-shifter's commitment to look after him was written on the wind. Nothing the other did or said suggested he felt particularly bound to honor that commitment, especially with Walker dead and gone. With one chase leading into another, with the effort of running wearing on the shape-shifter's nerves and nothing good coming from it, Bek felt the distance between himself and Truls growing wider.\n\nOnce, the shape-shifter had told him how much alike they were. It had been a long time since he had spoken in such terms, and Bek was no longer certain that Truls had really meant what he said. He had used Bek to poke needles into Walker, to play at the games they had engaged in for so many years. Nothing suggested to Bek there was anything more to his relationship with the shape-shifter than that.\n\nIt was mean-spirited thinking, but Bek was sullen and depressed enough by now that such thinking came easily. He resented it, regretted it the minute he was finished, but could not seem to help himself. He wanted more from Truls than what he was getting. He wanted the kind of reassurance that came from companionship, the kind he always used to get from Quentin. But Truls Rohk couldn't give him that. There wasn't enough of him that was human to allow for it.\n\nThey walked through the morning without speaking or stopping. It was nearing midday, when the shape-shifter brought them to an unexpected halt. He stood frozen in place, Grianne cradled in his arms as he lifted his head to smell the air.\n\n\"Something's coming,\" he said.\n\nHe pointed ahead, through the trees. They stood in a clearing ringed by old-growth cedars and firs, now high enough up in the foothills that the outlines of the peaks ahead were clearly visible. They were not far from the shape-shifter habitat that Bek had suggested they go to, and the boy thought at first that perhaps the mountain creatures were coming to meet them.\n\nBut Truls did not seem to think so. \"It's tracking us,\" he said quietly, as if trying to make sense of the idea.\n\nIndeed, it made no sense. Whatever it was, it was ahead of them, not behind. It was upwind, as well. It couldn't be following their footprints or their scent.\n\n\"How can that be?\" Bek asked.\n\nBut the shape-shifter was already moving, taking them through the trees, perpendicular to the route they had been following and away from whatever was ahead. They worked through the deep woods, then across a narrow stream, backing down for almost a quarter of a mile before coming ashore again. All the while, Truls Rohk stayed silent, concentrating on what his senses could tell him. When Bek tried to speak, the shape-shifter motioned him silent.\n\nFinally, they stopped on a wooded rise, where the shape-shifter set down Grianne, faced back in the direction they had been heading, then slowly pivoted to his right on a line parallel to the one they had been taking.\n\nHis rough voice was dark and hard. \"It's moving with us, staying just ahead. It's waiting. It's waiting for us to come to it.\"\n\nBek had not missed the repeated use of the pronoun if in reference to whatever tracked them. \"What is it, Truls?\" he asked.\n\nThe shape-shifter stared into the distance for a moment without replying, then said, \"Let's find out.\"\n\nHe picked up Grianne and started toward their stalker. Bek wanted to tell him that this was a bad idea and they should keep moving away. But trying to tell the shape-shifter what to do in this situation would just enrage him. Besides, if whatever tracked them could do so without following their scent or prints, it was not likely to be thrown off by a simple change of direction.\n\nThey moved ahead for a time, listening to the sounds of the forest. Slowly, those sounds died away. Within minutes, the woods had gone silent. Truls Rohk slowed, sliding noiselessly through the trees, stopping now and then to listen before continuing on. Bek stayed close to him, trying to move as quietly as the shape-shifter did, trying to be as invisible.\n\nIn a shallow vale through which a tiny stream meandered, the shape-shifter brought them to a halt. \"There,\" he said, and pointed into the trees.\n\nAt first, Bek saw just a wall of trunks interspersed with clumps of brush and tall grasses. It was dark where they stood, the light shut away by a thick canopy of limbs. The floor of the vale sloped down to the stream, where a patchwork of shadows and hazy light carpeted the forest floor. The air was cold and still, unwarmed by the sun, unstirred by the wind.\n\nThen he saw a shadow that didn't quite fit with everything else, squat and bulky, crouched back by the treeline where the dark trunks masked its features. He stared at it for a long time, and then it moved slightly, shifting position, and he saw the yellow glitter of its eyes.\n\nA moment later, it detached itself from its concealment and padded into view. It was a massive creature, hump shouldered and broad chested, covered with coarse gray hair that stuck out in wild clumps. It had a wolf's head, but the head had mutated into something dreadful. The snout was long and the ears pointed like a wolf's, but the jaws were massive and broad, and when they split wide in a kind of panting grin, they revealed double rows of finger-long serrated teeth. Down on all fours, it moved with a shambling gait, its long forelegs disproportionate to its rear, which were short and powerful and sprouted from hindquarters dropped so low it appeared to be crouching.\n\nIt eased its way down into the vale until it was almost to the stream. There, it stopped, lifted its head, and emitted the most terrible mewling sound Bek had ever heard, a combination of wail and snarl that froze the woods into utter silence.\n\n\"What is it?\" Bek whispered.\n\nTruls Rohk's laugh was low and wicked. \"Your sister's destiny, come back to claim her. That's the thing she made to track us when we fled from her before, the thing the shape-shifters saved me from. I thought it dead and gone, but they must have set it free outside their boundaries. It's a caull, but look at it! It's mutated beyond what even she had intended. It's become something even more monstrous. Bigger and stronger.\"\n\n\"What does it want with us?\" Bek looked at him. \"It tracks us, you said. What does it want?\"\n\n\"It wants her,\" the shape-shifter answered softly. \"It's come for her. See how it looks at her?\"\n\nIt was true. The hard yellow eyes were fixed not on the men, but on the sleeping girl, locked on her as she slept in the shape-shifter's arms \u2014 focused on her with such intensity that its purpose was unmistakable.\n\n\"There's true madness,\" Truls whispered, a hint of wonder in his voice. \"Captured, mutated, driven out, lost. It seeks only one thing. Revenge. For what has been done to it. For what has been stolen. A life. An identity. Who knows what it thinks and feels now? It must have tracked her through the connection of their magic, a joining of kindred. She created it, and it remains connected to her. It must be able to read her pulse or heartbeat. Or the sound of her breathing. Who knows? It sensed her and came.\"\n\nThe caull cried out again, the same high-pitched wail. The skin on the back of Bek's neck prickled and his stomach clenched. He had been afraid before on this journey, but never the way he was now. He couldn't tell if it was the look of the caull, all crooked and bristling, or the sound of its cry, or just the fact of its existence, but he was terrified.\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" he asked, barely able to get the words out.\n\nTruls Rohk snorted derisively. \"We let it have her. She made it, \u2014 let her deal with the consequences.\"\n\n\"We can't do that, Truls! She's helpless!\"\n\nThe other turned on him. \"This might be a good time for some rational thinking on your part, boy.\" He emphasized the word. \"There are so many things waiting to kill your sister that we can't even begin to count them! Sooner or later, one of them will finish the job. All we do by interfering now is to prolong the process. You think you can save her, but you can't. Time to let go of her. Enough is enough!\"\n\nBek shook his head. \"I don't care what you say.\"\n\n\"She is the Ilse Witch! Your sister is dead! Why are you so stubborn about it? Bah, I've had enough of this! You do what you wish, but I'm leaving!\"\n\nBek took a deep, calming breath. \"All right. Leave. You don't owe me anything. It isn't fair to ask you to do more than you have. You've done enough already.\" He looked over at the caull as it hunched down at the edge of the stream. \"I can take care of this.\"\n\nTruls Rohk snorted. \"You can?\"\n\n\"The wishsong was powerful enough to stop Antrax's creepers. It can stop that thing.\" He stepped close to the shape-shifter. \"Give her to me.\"\n\nWithout waiting for the other to respond, he reached in and took Grianne right out of his arms. Cradling her, he stepped away again. \"She's my sister, Truls. No matter what you say.\"\n\nTruls Rohk straightened and looked directly at Bek. \"The wishsong is a powerful magic, Bek Ohmsford. But it isn't enough here. You still haven't mastered it. Your sister proved that to you already. That thing over there will be at your throat before you figure out what's needed.\"\n\nBek looked at the caull and went cold to the bone thinking of how it would feel to have those teeth and claws tearing into him. It would be over quickly, he guessed. The pain would be momentary. Then it would be Grianne's turn.\n\n\"You could do something for me,\" he said to the shape-shifter. \"If you could draw its attention away, just for a moment, I might be able to catch it off guard.\"\n\nTruls Rohk stared at him. Bek couldn't see the shape-shifter's eyes within the dark confines of his cowl, but he could feel the weight of their gaze, hard and certain. For a long moment, Truls didn't speak. He just kept looking at Bek.\n\n\"Don't do this,\" he said finally.\n\nBek shook his head. \"I have to. You know that.\"\n\n\"You won't survive it.\"\n\n\"Then you can do what you wish with my sister, Truls.\" He gave the shape-shifter a defiant look. \"I won't be there to stop you.\"\n\nAnother long silence stole away the seconds. Bek brushed at a stray lock of hair and felt a bead of sweat slide down his forehead. He was hot in spite of the chill in the air. He felt as if he might never be cool again.\n\nThe shape-shifter stood where he was a moment longer, still staring at Bek. \"All right,\" he said finally, his voice harsh and angry. \"I've said what I needed to say. Staying with her is up to you.\" He turned away. \"I'll try to draw its attention. Maybe that will help, but I doubt it. Good luck to you, boy.\"\n\nBek watched as Truls Rohk angled down the gentle slope, moving with the grace and precision of a moor cat. Deformed and ill made, an aberration of nature, he was nevertheless beautiful to watch. Bek could not believe he was really leaving. They had been together since the beginning of the journey west out of the Wolfsktaag. Truls had saved him so many times Bek had lost count, had given him the insights he needed to come to terms with his heritage and his destiny. They had not always agreed on everything, and there had been a degree of mistrust and uncertainty between them, but the alliance had worked. It was shattering now to see that alliance end. Even watching the other go, Bek couldn't believe it was happening. It felt as if the shape-shifter was taking a part of Bek with him. His confidence. His heart.\n\nTruls, he wanted to call out. Don't go.\n\nThe caull swung around to watch the shape-shifter, its powerful body flattened and tensed. Bek lowered Grianne to the ground, placing her carefully behind him before turning back to defend them. When the caull struck, it would do so swiftly. He would have only one chance to stop it.\n\nHe never got even that. Before he could prepare himself, the caull attacked, springing sideways with blinding speed and tearing across the stream and up the slope in a blur of churning legs and gaping jaws. Bek would have been dead an instant later but forTruls Rohk, who moved even faster. So quick that he seemed simply to leave one place and reappear at another, he intercepted the caull from the side, slammed into it, and knocked it sprawling.\n\nThen he was on top of the beast, tearing at it like an animal himself, snarling with such ferocity that for an instant Bek wasn't sure that it was Truls at all. The shape-shifter ripped at the caull using weapons that Bek couldn't see \u2014 weapons he concealed beneath his cloak or perhaps just fashioned out of the mass of raw and jagged bone that comprised his ruined body. Whatever they were, they proved effective. Bits and pieces of the caull's body flew into the air, and blood jetted in dark spurts of inky green. The fighters careened across the vale, locked in combat, joined in purpose, lost in their desperate struggle to kill each other.\n\nBek recovered himself enough to remember to use the wishsong, but he could not think how to use it effectively. Shape-shifter and caull were so tightly fused that there was no opportunity to bring the magic to bear without striking both. Bek darted right and left at the edge of the battle, enveloped by its sound and fury, desperately seeking a way to intervene, unable to do so.\n\n\"Truls!\" he screamed helplessly.\n\nBright fountains of red spurted out of the tangle, the shape-shifter's human blood released from a wound somewhere beneath the concealing cloak, a wound that Bek could not see. He heard Truls snarl in rage and pain, then tear at the caull with renewed fury, bearing it down against the earth. The caull screeched with a sound like metal tearing, writhing and snapping in a flurry of claws and teeth, but it could not break free.\n\nThen Truls Rohk locked his arms about the caull's head and hauled back on its long, thick neck, twisting violently. Bek heard cartilage snap and ligaments tear. The caull shrieked with such fury that the sound matched the howl of the worst storm Bek had ever witnessed, of hurricane winds tearing past windows and walls, of funnel clouds ripping at the earth. The caull heaved upward in one last futile effort to dislodge the shape-shifter, then its head separated from its body and exploded into an unrecognizable ruin.\n\nIn the ensuing silence, cacophonous and empty both at once, Truls Rohk threw down the remains of the body. Still twitching, it fell to the forest floor, dark blood spreading everywhere. The shape-shifter stood over it a moment, bent to the stream to drink and wash, then strode back up the hill to where Bek waited.\n\nWithout pausing for even a second, he reached down and picked up Grianne, lifting her into the cradle of his arms.\n\n\"I changed my mind,\" he said, his voice harsh and broken, his breathing ragged.\n\nThen he set off walking once more, leaving an astonished Bek to follow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "As the day went on and the trio climbed out of the foothills and onto the lower slopes of the mountains, two things became increasingly clear to Bek Ohmsford. First, they had moved into shape-shifter territory. He knew this not because there were boundary markers or signposts or anything that would designate it as such. Having come a different way, he couldn't even be certain he recognized what he was looking at from his previous visit. He knew where he was because he could feel the shape-shifters watching him. He could feel their eyes. It was broad daylight and the sparsely wooded slopes offered few hiding places, so it didn't appear as if anyone was there. Yet they were, he knew, and not far away. He might have questioned this feeling once, but having experienced it not much more than a week earlier \u2014 having felt it so strongly he could barely breathe because the shape-shifters had been right on top of him \u2014 he wasn't questioning it now.\n\nSecond, Truls Rohk was failing. He had come away from his battle with the caull winded and clearly hurt, but seemingly not in any real danger. He had walked strongly for several hours, carrying Grianne and setting a quick pace for Bek to follow. But over the last two hours, with the fading of the afternoon and the approach of nightfall, he had begun to slow, then to stagger, his smooth gait turned into an uneven lurch.\n\n\"I have to rest,\" Bek said finally, in an effort to find out what was going on.\n\nThe shape-shifter continued ahead for another fifty yards, then all but collapsed beside a fallen tree trunk, barely managing to set Grianne down before dropping heavily beside her. He wouldn't have thought to sit close to her before this, \u2014 now, it seemed he could not find the strength to move away.\n\nBek walked up next to him and reached down for the water skin. Truls handed it to him without looking up. A ragged gasping came from inside the cowl, and Bek saw the rise and fall of the shape-shifter's shoulders as he struggled to breathe. Seating himself, he drank from the skin and watched as Truls give a deep, involuntary shudder.\n\nThey sat together without speaking for a long time, looking out over the valley below, listening to the silence.\n\n\"We can camp here,\" Bek said finally.\n\n\"We have to keep moving,\" Truls said, his voice raspy and weak. It didn't even sound like Truls. \"We need to get higher up on the slopes while there's still light.\"\n\nThe cowl lifted, shadowed emptiness facing the boy like a hole dropping away into the earth. \"Do you know where we are?\"\n\nBek nodded. \"In the land of the shape-shifters.\"\n\nA cough racked the other's body, and he doubled over momentarily before straightening again. \"We have to get deep enough in that they'll have no choice, that they'll have to come to us.\"\n\n\"You've decided to ask for their help?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. Another spasm shook his body.\n\n\"Truls, what's wrong?\" Bek asked, leaning close.\n\n\"Get away from me!\" the shape-shifter snapped angrily.\n\nBek moved back. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nFor a moment, there was no response. \"I don't know. I don't feel right. The caull did something to me, but I don't know what. I didn't think those cuts and bites were much, but everything feels like it's breaking down.\" He gave a short, sharp laugh. \"Wouldn't it be a joke on me if I died because of your sister? Protecting her when I don't even like her? The Druid would love that, if he were here!\"\n\nHe laughed again, the sound weak and broken. Then he struggled back to his feet, picked up Grianne, and set off once more.\n\nThey walked on for another hour, the afternoon passing slowly into twilight, the air cooling swiftly to a chill that nipped at Bek's face. Shadows lengthened on the mountainside, dark fingers stretching, and the moon appeared in the sky, rising out of the hazy distance, half-formed and on the wane. Bek looked back the way they had come to see if anyone was following, an impossible attempt in this light, and quickly gave it up. He glanced at their surroundings, searching for the watchers, but the effort yielded nothing. He listened to the silence and was not reassured.\n\nThey reached a shelf of ground that angled back into a deep stand of conifers, and Truls collapsed again. This time he went down without warning, dropping Grianne in a heap, rolling away from her onto his back where he lay gasping for air. Bek rushed over at once, kneeling beside him, but the shape-shifter pushed him away.\n\n\"Leave me alone!\" he snapped. \"See to your sister!\"\n\nGrianne lay sprawled to one side, eyes open and unseeing, body limp. She appeared unhurt as Bek helped her back to a sitting position, straightening her clothing and brushing leaves and twigs from her hair before returning to Truls.\n\n\"I'm done,\" the shape-shifter rasped. \"Finished. Build a fire back in the trees to warm yourself. Wait for them to come.\"\n\nA fire might attract the attention of those who hunted them, but Bek knew that whatever happened now was in the hands of the shape-shifters. No harm would come to them if the spirit creatures didn't wish it \u2014 not in their habitat and not from caulls or Mwellrets or anything else. Truls Rohk knew this, as well. He was counting on it.\n\nBek set about gathering wood to build a fire. It wasn't until he'd set the wood in place that he realized he didn't have any tinder. When he went back to see if Truls had any, the shape-shifter was unconscious. Bek took Grianne to where he had stacked the wood, then returned for Truls, but found him too heavy to move. All those broken and missing body parts, and he still weighed so much. Bek left him and sat with Grianne by the useless wood. He thought about using the wishsong to trigger a fire, but he didn't know how to do that. He sat staring into the night, feeling helpless and alone.\n\nWhere were the shape-shifters?\n\nNight descended, and darkness closed about. The stars appeared overhead and the silence deepened. Soon it was so cold that Bek was shivering. He pulled Grianne close to him, trying to keep them both warm, wondering if they might freeze to death before morning. They were high up on the mountainside, it was too cold already and it was going to get much colder.\n\nOnce, he rose and walked out to where Truls Rohk lay and tried to rouse him. The shape-shifter was awake and breathing, but he did not appear lucid. A terrible heat radiated from his body, as if he was burning with fever. Bek sat with him for a while, trying to think of something he could do. But Truls Rohk's physiology was so different that Bek didn't even know where to begin. In the end, he just spoke quietly to the other, trying to reassure him, to give him some small comfort.\n\nThen Bek returned to Grianne and the waiting.\n\nHe must have dozed off finally, because the next thing he knew he awoke to find the fire burning brightly in front of him and the night air grown warm and comforting. He glanced at Grianne, who sat next to him, awake and staring, unresponsive when he spoke her name. He looked around and saw nothing, stood and looked some more, and still saw nothing.\n\nHe started to walk out toward the edge of the flat to where Truls lay and stopped. A dozen dark shapes blocked his way, massive forms rising before him like great rocks. As he started to back away, more closed about from both sides, huge and menacing, features hidden by the darkness and a sudden mist.\n\nBek stopped where he was and stood his ground. He knew what they were, \u2014 he had been waiting for them. What he didn't know was why they had waited so long to appear.\n\nWhy did you come back?\n\nThe voice was thin and hollow, almost a wail, and it came from all around and not from any single source.\n\n\"My friend is sick.\"\n\nYour friend is dying.\n\nThe words were unexpected, spoken without a trace of emotion or interest. For a moment, Bek could not make himself reply. No, he said to himself. No, that's wrong. That can't be.\n\n\"He's hurt,\" he said. \"Can you help him?\"\n\nThe shadows faded and reappeared in the deep mist like creatures conjured out of imagination. There was that ethereal quality to the shape-shifters, that otherworldliness that defied explanation. They seemed so impermanent that nothing about them was quite real. But Bek remembered how quickly they could change to something hard and deadly.\n\nThe caull has poisoned him. Teeth and claws excreted poison and it seeped into his human half, infecting it. The poison leeches away his strength. When his human half dies, his shape-shifter half will die, as well.\n\n\"Is there an antidote?\" Bek demanded, still trapped in a web of disbelief and shock. \"Do you know of one?\"\n\nThere is no cure.\n\nBek looked around in despair. \"There must be something I can do,\" he said finally. \"I'm not going to just let him die!\"\n\nAs soon as he spoke the words, he knew they were what the shape-shifters had been waiting to hear. He could see them move in response, hear their expectant whispers as they did so. He could feel a change in the air. He thought at once to take back the words, but did not know how to do so and could not have made himself, anyway.\n\nYou were told that halflings have no place in the world. You said that you would make a place for this one. Would you do so now?\n\nBek took a deep breath. \"What are you asking?\"\n\nWould you make a place for your friend? Would you give him a chance to live?\n\nThe voice was coldly insistent, uninterested in argument or reason, in anything but a direct answer to its question. The shape-shifters had gone still again, clustered about like stones. Bek could no longer see or feel the fire. He could no longer remember in which direction it lay. He was shrouded in darkness and enclosed by the spirit creatures, and all he could see of the world was the glitter of the stars overhead.\n\n\"I want to save him,\" he said finally.\n\nHe sensed a murmur of approval and, once again, of expectation. It was the answer they were hoping for, yet one that promised results he did not fully comprehend.\n\nHe must shed his human skin. He must cast it aside forever. He must become like us, all of one thing and none of the other. If he does this, the poison cannot hurt him. He will live.\n\nCast off his human skin? Bek was not sure what he was being told, but it didn't matter. He couldn't dismiss out of hand any offer that might save Truls. \"What do you want me to do?\" he asked.\n\nGive us permission to make him one of us.\n\nBek shook his head quickly. \"I can't do that. I have to ask him if that's what he wants. I don't have the right \u2014\"\n\nHe cannot hear you. He is lost in his sickness. He will die before he can give you an answer. There is no time. You must decide for him.\n\n\"Why do you need my permission?\" Bek was suddenly frantic. \"What difference does it make what I say?\"\n\nThe whispers and movement stopped, and the night went completely still. Bek froze in place and held his breath like a man about to jump from a very high place.\n\nA human must make this choice. It is his human side we would destroy. There is no one else but you. You said you were his friend. You said you would give up your life for him and he would give up his life for you. Should we make a place in the world for him? You must decide.\n\nBek exhaled sharply. \"You have to tell me what will become of him. If I tell you to do this, whatever it is, if I give you my permission, what will become of Truls?\"\n\nThere was a long pause.\n\nHe will become one with us, a part of us.\n\nBek stared. \"What does that mean?\"\n\nWe are one. We are a community. No one of us lives apart from the others. He would be joined.\n\nBek felt every bit a boy in that instant, a boy who had ventured out into the world and gotten himself into such trouble that he would never see home again. He closed his eyes and shook his head. He couldn't do this. He was being asked to save Truls, but he was also being asked to change him irrevocably. By saving Truls, he would transform him into something else completely \u2014 a communal creature, no longer separate and apart, but a part of a whole. What would that be like? Would Truls want this, even to save his life? How could Bek possibly know?\n\nHe stood there, adrift in a sea of profound uncertainty, knowing he was being offered the only choice available and hating that it was his to make. Truls Rohk had never been at peace in the world. He had been an outcast all his life with few friends and no family or home. He was an aberration created through forbidden breeding, a freak of nature that had never belonged. What place there was for him, he had made for himself. Maybe he would be better off changed into one of the spirit creatures, a part of a family and community at last. Maybe he would be happier.\n\nBut maybe not.\n\nBek wanted Truls to live \u2014 wanted it desperately \u2014 but not if the price was too high. How could he measure that?\n\nTell us your decision.\n\nBek closed his eyes. A chance at life was worth any price, too precious to give up for any reason. He could not know how this would turn out, he could not determine what Truls Rohk would do if he were able. He could do for Truls only what Bek would want done for himself in the same situation. He could fall back only on what he believed to be right.\n\n\"Save him,\" he said quietly.\n\nThere was a sudden rush of movement from the shape-shifters, an odd hissing that turned into a sigh. The wall of bodies that had gathered about him opened, and the darkness cleared to reveal the fire still blazing in front of his sister.\n\nGo back to her. Sit with her and wait. When morning comes, take her and go into the mountains. You will find what you are looking for there. Do not fear for your safety. Do not worry about those who follow. They shall not pass.\n\nDark forms changed into the bristling monsters he had seen once before, terrible apparitions that could smash a life with barely a thought, things that existed in nightmares. They hovered close for an instant, their smell washing over him, their raw presence reinforcing the promise they had made.\n\nGo.\n\nHe did as he was told, not yet at peace with himself, unable to gain the reassurance he sought. He could not bear to consider too closely what he had done. He did not want to ponder the result because he was afraid he might recognize something he had not considered and did not want to face. He went back to the warmth and comfort of the fire, seating himself next to Grianne, taking her hands in his and holding them while he stared into the flames. He did not look back at the shape-shifters, did not try to see where they went or what they did. He would not have been able to do so anyway, because his eyes could not penetrate the darkness beyond the firelight.\n\nHe stared instead at Grianne and tried to make himself believe that she had been worth everything that had happened \u2014 that saving her was not a Druid's whim or a brother's false hope, but a necessary act that would result in something more important and far-reaching than the losses it had caused.\n\nAfter a time, he fell asleep. His dreams were vivid and charged with emotion, and they ranged across the length and breadth of his life. In them, Quentin reappeared to him, working on an ash bow, red hair hanging loose and easy, strong face cocky and smiling, laughter bright with reassurance. Coran and Liria looked in on him as he slept, and he could hear them speak of him with ambition and pride. The company of the Jerle Shannara filed past him one by one as he stood at the edge of a forest, and then Rue Meridian stepped away long enough to come over to him and touch his face with cool fingers that swept away thoughts of everything but her.\n\nFinally, Walker stood looking down at him from a castle rampart, from a place that looked vaguely familiar. Truls Rohk stood next to him, then faded into a disembodied voice that whispered to him to be strong, to be steadfast, to remember always how alike they were. He was different than Bek remembered him, and after a moment Bek knew that it was because Truls was no longer a halfling, but a true shape-shifter. He was one with his new family, with his community, with the world that had given him a second chance at life. There was a sense of completion about him, of having found a peace that he had never known before.\n\nBek watched and listened to a box of empty space, to a wall of darkness, hanging on the other's words as if to a lifeline, and the peace that Truls had found settled over him, as well.\n\nWhen he came awake again, it was morning. A misty gray light rose out of the mountain peaks, east where the dawn was breaking. The fire had gone out, the smoking embers turned to dying ashes and charred stumps. He reached out his hand. The ashes were still warm. Beside him, Grianne slept, stretched out upon the ground, her eyes closed and her breathing slow and even.\n\nHe stared down at her a moment, then rose and went to find Truls Rohk.\n\nHe stopped at the edge of the flat where he had left his friend the night before. All that remained was a hooded cloak and a scattering of half-formed bones. Bek knelt and reached down to touch them, lifting the folds of the cloak away, half expecting to find something more. Truls Rohk had seemed so indestructible that it was impossible that this was all that was left of him. Yet there was nothing more. Not even bloodstains were visible on the hard, frost-covered ground.\n\nBek rose and stood looking at the bones and cloak a moment longer. Perhaps most of what Truls Rohk had been, what mattered and had value, had gone on to become a part of what he was now.\n\nHe wondered if the shape-shifters, Truls among them, were watching him. He wondered if he would ever know if he had done the right thing.\n\nHe walked back to the campfire, woke Grianne, took her hands in his, and brought her to her feet. She came willingly, her calm, blank expression empty of emotion, her limp acquiescence sad and childlike. He was all she had left, all that stood between her and random fate. He had become for her the protector he had promised he would be.\n\nHe was not sure he was up to it, only that he must try, that he must do what he could to save them both.\n\nHolding hands like children, they began to climb." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "On the next mountain over from the one that Bek and Grianne were struggling to ascend, Quentin Leah looked up expectantly from his breakfast of bread and cheese as Kian appeared out of the trees below the trailhead and began to climb toward him. Further up, gathered in the copse of fir where they had spent the night, the remnant of Obat's Rindge waited for instructions on where to go next \u2014 all but Obat himself and Panax, who had gone on ahead to scout their way through the passes of the Aleuthra Ark. They had been fleeing the Mwellrets and their tracking beasts for two days, and Quentin had hoped they would not have to flee for a third.\n\n\"They found our trail,\" Kian growled. His dark, square face furrowed as he sank down next to the Highlander and mopped his brow. \"They're coming.\"\n\nHe would not look at Quentin. No one would these days. No one wanted to see what was in his eyes. Not since they found him in the ruins of Castledown. Not since they heard what became of Ard Patrinell.\n\nQuentin understood. He did not feel right about himself anymore either. Everything seemed out of joint.\n\nHe handed the Elven Hunter what was left of his bread and cheese and stared down in frustration. They were sitting on a rugged slope that had the look of a hunched-over Koden, all bristle-backed with conifers and jagged rocks. Forty-eight hours of running had brought them here \u2014 frantic hours spent trying to throw off their pursuers. Nothing had worked, and now, finally, they had been run to earth.\n\nFrom the beginning, when Quentin, Panax, Kian, Obat, and a dozen Rindge had remained behind to slow down the hunt for the tribe, things had gone wrong. As a group, they possessed a lifetime of knowledge of hunting and tracking in wilderness terrain, and each knew a dozen tricks that would slow or stop anyone trying to follow them. They had employed them all. They had started with simple devices intended to create dozens of false trails that would take a hunting dog hours to unravel. But the beasts the rets were using to track them were far superior to dogs, and they separated the real trail from the false with uncanny quickness, coming after Quentin's group almost before they could make their escape. The Rindge next used extracts from plants to create strong scents that would throw off the creatures. That didn't work either. Kian and Panax led them into streams and even one river, using the water to hide their passage, but the tracking beasts found them again anyway.\n\nIn desperation, Obat lured them into a narrow ravine and set fire to the whole of the woods leading up, a strong wind blowing the fire right back down into the faces of the rets. The fire was intended not only to drive their pursuers back, but to obliterate their tracks and scent, as well. That bought them several hours, but in the end the rets and their beasts found them anyway.\n\nFinally, in desperation, Quentin and his companions set an ambush, thinking to kill or disable the tracking beasts. The ambush caught the rets by surprise, and a handful were killed by bows and arrows and blowguns before the remainder had a chance to take cover. The tracking beasts were struck, too, but the projectiles seemed to have almost no effect on them. They shrugged off the barbs as if they were nothing more than bee stings and came after their attackers with astonishing fury. Loosed from their chains, they turned into a pack of savage killers. Quentin had been involved in many hunts over the years, but he had never seen anything like this. The tracking beasts, at least eight of them, had charged through the scrub and over the rocks like maddened wolves, voiceless monsters that vaguely resembled humans evolved into something bigger and more terrible than the gray wolves that hunted the Black Oaks east of Leah.\n\nHaving no other choice, Quentin and his companions stood their ground and fought back. But before anyone could prevent it, three of the Rindge were dead, the beasts covered in their blood. They might have all been killed but for the Sword of Leah, which lit up like a torch, the magic surging down its length in a streak of blue fire. That was when Quentin realized that these beasts had been created out of magic, and that it would take magic to stop them. He killed two of them in a flurry of shrieks and severed limbs before the rest fell back, not defeated or cowed, but wary now of the power of the sword and uncertain whether or not they were meant to continue.\n\nTheir hesitation allowed Quentin and his companions to escape, but use of the sword marked them, as well, it alerted their hunters that at least one among the pursued possessed magic, and that hardened their determination to continue the pursuit. Airships appeared in the skies overhead, and fresh units of Mwellrets and trackers were lowered to the ground to join those already gathered. Quentin couldn't tell how many there were, but it was more than enough to overpower him should he choose to stand and fight again. He couldn't be certain whom the rets thought they were tracking, but it was clear that they were serious about finding out.\n\nThe chase wore on through that first day and all through the second, with the Rindge working their way deeper into the Aleuthra Ark, higher into the rugged peaks, following a trail they knew would eventually take them over the mountains and into the broader grasslands beyond. Quentin was beginning to wonder what good that would do. If their pursuers were this determined, they would be caught sooner or later whether they fled over the mountains or not. If they were to escape, a more permanent solution had to be found, and it had to be found quickly because the women and children that comprised the bulk of the fugitives were tiring.\n\nQuentin was tiring, as well, not so much physically as emotionally. He had lost something in his battle with the Ard Patrinell wronk \u2014 something of the fire that had driven him earlier, something of heart and purpose \u2014 so that now he felt more a shell than a whole person. With so many of the company dead and all the rest scattered and lost, his focus had become blurred. He was helping the Rindge because they needed it and because he didn't know what else to do. It gave him direction, but not passion. He had lost too much to find that again without a dramatic shift in his fortunes.\n\nHe didn't think Panax and Kian were much better off, although they seemed more hardened than he was, more accustomed to the idea of going on alone. Quentin was too young yet, unprepared to have experienced the kind of losses he had just endured, and the losses were affecting him more dramatically. At times, he collapsed inside completely. He saw Tamis again, covered in blood and dying. He saw Ard Patrinell's head, encased in metal and glass, an instant before he smashed it apart. He saw Bek, the way he remembered him in the Highlands, such a long time ago.\n\nHe was haunted and worn and disillusioned, and he could feel himself slipping notch by notch. He cried because he couldn't help himself, trying to mask his tears, to hide his weakness. Chills racked him in bright sunshine. Dark dreams haunted his sleep \u2014 dreams of what hunted him, of what awaited him, of fate and prophecy. He awoke shaking and afraid and went back to sleep cold and empty.\n\nBut he was also the best chance the others had of staying alive, and he was painfully aware of the fact. Without the magic of the Sword of Leah, they had no answer for the magic of the things that pursued them. Quentin might be slipping off the edge, but he could not afford to let go.\n\n\"How much time do we have?\" he asked Kian after a moment.\n\nThe Elf shrugged. \"The Rindge will try to slow them down, but won't succeed. So, maybe an hour, a little more.\"\n\nQuentin closed his eyes. They needed help. They needed a miracle. He didn't think he could give it to them. He didn't know who could.\n\nKian finished the bread and cheese, took a drink from his water skin, and stood. He was coated with dust and debris, and his clothes were torn and streaked with blood. He was a mirror image of Quentin. They were refugees in need of a bath and some real sleep, and they were unlikely to get either anytime soon.\n\n\"We'd better get them up and moving,\" Kian said.\n\nThey went back up the trail to where the Rindge waited. Using gestures and the few Rindge words they had picked up, they got the tribe back on its feet and trudging ahead once more. The Rindge were a dispirited group, not so much because of their weariness as because nothing the men had tried had worked and time was running out. Still, they kept on without complaint, the very young and old, the women and children, all helping one another where help was needed, a people dispossessed from their home of centuries, driven out by forces over which they had no control. They were demonstrating a resolve that Quentin found surprising and heartening, and he took what strength he could from them.\n\nStill, it was not much.\n\nThey had hiked for perhaps an hour when the Rindge rearguard appeared on the run. Their gestures were unmistakable. The Mwellrets and tracking beasts were catching up to them.\n\nAt the same moment, Panax and Obat appeared from the other direction. The Dwarf was excited as he hurried to reach Kian and the Highlander.\n\n\"I think we've found something that will help,\" he said, eyes bright and eager as they shifted from one face to the other. He rubbed vigorously at his thick beard. \"The pass divides up ahead. One fork leads to a thousand-foot drop \u2014 no way around it. The other leads to a narrow ledge with room for maybe two people to pass, but no more. This second trail winds around the mountain, then further up through a high pass that crosses to the other side. Here's what's important. You can get above the second trail by climbing up the mountainside further on and doubling back. There's a spot, perfect for what we need, to trigger an avalanche that will sweep away the pass and anything on it. If we can get the Rindge through before they're caught by the rets, we might be able to start a rockslide that will knock those rets and their beasts right off the trail \u2014 or at least trap them on the other side of where we are.\"\n\n\"How far ahead is this place?\" Kian asked at once.\n\n\"An hour, maybe two.\"\n\nThe Elven Hunter shook his head. \"We don't have that kind of time.\"\n\n\"We do if I stay behind,\" Quentin said at once.\n\nHe spoke before he could think better of it. It was a rash and dangerous offer, but he knew even without thinking it through that it was right.\n\nThey stared at him. \"Highlander, what are you saying?\" Panax asked angrily. \"You can't \u2014\"\n\n\"Panax, listen to me. Let's be honest about this. It's the magic that's attracting them. No, don't say it, don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about \u2014 we both know it's true. We all know it. They want the magic, just like Antrax and its creepers did. If I stay back, I can draw them off long enough for you to get past the place on the mountain where you want to start the slide. It will buy you the time you need.\"\n\n\"It will get you killed, too!\" the other snapped.\n\nQuentin smiled. Now that there were so many of the tracking beasts, he had virtually no chance of withstanding a sustained assault. If he couldn't outrun them \u2014 and he knew he couldn't \u2014 they would be all over him, sword or no. He was proposing to give up his life for theirs, a bargain that didn't bear thinking on too closely if he was to keep it.\n\n\"I'll stay with you,\" Kian offered, not bothering to question the Highlander's logic, knowing better than to try.\n\n\"No, Kian. One of us is enough. Besides, I can do this better alone. I can move more quickly if I'm by myself. You and Panax get the Rindge through. That's more important. I'll catch up.\"\n\n\"You won't live that long,\" Panax said with barely contained fury. \"This is senseless!\"\n\nQuentin laughed. \"You should see your face, Panax! Go on, now. Get them moving. The faster you do, the less time I'll need to spend back here.\"\n\nKian turned away, dark features set. \"Come on, Dwarf,\" he said, pulling at Panax's sleeve.\n\nPanax allowed himself to be drawn away, but he kept looking back at Quentin. \"You don't have to do this,\" he called back. \"Come with us. We can manage.\"\n\n\"Watch for me,\" Quentin called after him.\n\nThen the Rindge were moving ahead again, angling through the trees and up the trail. They wound through boulders and around a bend, and in minutes they were out of sight.\n\nEverything went still. The Highlander stood alone in the center of the empty trail and waited until he could no longer hear them. Then he started back down the way he had come.\n\nIt didn't take Quentin very long to find what he was looking for. He remembered the defile from earlier, a narrow split through a massive chunk of rock that wound upward at a sharp incline and barely allowed passage for one. Quentin knew that if he tried to make a stand in the open, the tracking beasts would overwhelm him in seconds. But if he blocked their way through the split, they could come at him only one at a time. Sooner or later, they would succeed in breaking through by sheer weight of numbers or they would find another way around. But he didn't need to hold them indefinitely, he only needed to buy his companions a little extra time.\n\nThe split in the boulder ran for perhaps twenty-five feet, and there was a widening about halfway through. He chose this point to make his first stand. When he was forced to give way there, he could fall back to the upper opening and try again.\n\nHe glanced over his shoulder. Further back, another two or three hundred yards, was a deep cluster of boulders where he had stashed his bow and arrows. He would make his last stand there.\n\n\"Wish you could see this, Bek,\" he said aloud. \"It should be interesting.\"\n\nThe minutes slipped away, but before too many had passed, he heard the approach of the tracking beasts. They did nothing to hide their coming, made no pretense of concealing their intent. Sharp snarls and grunts punctuated the sound of their heavy breathing, and their raw animal smell drifted on the wind. Further away, but coming closer, were the Mwellrets.\n\nQuentin unsheathed the Sword of Leah and braced himself.\n\nWhen the first of the beasts thrust its blunt head around the nearest bend in the split and saw him, it attacked without hesitating. Quentin crouched low and caught it midspring on the tip of his weapon, spitting it through its chest and pinning it to the earth where it thrashed and screamed and finally died as the magic ripped through it. A second and third appeared almost immediately, fighting to get past each other. He jabbed at their faces and eyes as they jammed themselves up in the narrow opening, and forced them to back away. From behind them, he heard the shouts of the rets and the snarls of other tracking beasts as they tried in vain to break through.\n\nHe fought in the defile for as long as he could, killing two of the creatures and wounding another before he made his retreat. He might have stayed there longer, but he feared that the rets would find a way around. If they trapped him in the defile, he was finished. He had bought as much time as he could at his first line of defense. It was time to fall back.\n\nWith the tracking beasts snapping at him, he backed through the split, then made his second stand at the upper end. Straddling the opening, he bottled up the frantic creatures, refusing to let them through, killing one and wedging it back inside so that the others could not pass it without climbing over. They tore at their dead companion until it was shredded and bloodied, and still they couldn't break free. Quentin fought with a wild and reckless determination, the magic driving through him like molten iron, sweeping away his weariness and pain, his reason and doubt, everything but the feel of the moment and its dizzying sense of power. Nothing could stop him. He was invincible. The magic of the sword buzzed and crackled through his body, and he gave himself over to it.\n\nEven when the Mwellrets got around behind him, he stood his ground, so caught up in the euphoria generated by the magic that he would have done anything to keep it flowing. He drove back this fresh assault, then returned to battling the tracking beasts trying to emerge from the split, intent on doing battle with anything that challenged him.\n\nIt took a deep slash to his thigh to sober him up enough that he finally realized the danger. He turned and ran without slowing or looking back, gaining enough ground to enable him to clamber into the rocks and find his bow and arrows just before his pursuers caught up with him. He was a good marksman, but his pursuers were so close that marksmanship counted for almost nothing. He buried four arrows in the closest burly head before it was finally knocked back, blinded in both eyes and maddened with pain. He wounded two more, slowing them enough that the others could not get past. He shot every arrow he had, killing two of the rets, as well, then threw down the bow and began running once more.\n\nThere was nowhere reasonable left to stand and fight, so he sprinted for the ledge where he hoped Panax, Kian, and the Rindge would be waiting with help. It was a long run, perhaps two miles, and he soon lost track of time and place, of everything but movement. Still infused with the magic of the sword, its power singing in his blood, he found strength he did not know he possessed. He ran so fast that he outdistanced his bulky pursuers, leaving them to scramble over boulders and rock-strewn trails he scaled with ease.\n\nMaybe, just maybe, he would find a way out of this.\n\n\"Leah, Leahl\" he cried out, euphoric and wild-eyed, with reckless disregard for who might hear him. \"Leahl\" he howled.\n\nThey caught up to him finally at the near end of the ledge, forcing him to turn and fight. He stood his ground just long enough to throw them back again, then rushed out onto the ledge. The sweep of the Aleuthra Ark with its massive backdrop of peaks and valleys stretched like a painting across the horizon, somehow not quite real.\n\nThe tracking beasts came at him once more, but they did not have enough room. Two tumbled away, clawing and screaming as they fell. He glanced back down the slope he had just climbed, \u2014 it was crawling with tracking beasts and Mwellrets. How many more could there be? Pressed against the cliff face, he retreated as swiftly as he could, slashing at the closest of his pursuers when they came within reach. He had been clawed and bitten in a dozen places, and the singing of the magic had taken on a high, frantic whine. His stamina and strength were nearly exhausted, \u2014 when they were depleted, the magic of the Sword of Leah would fail, as well.\n\n\"Panax!\" he called frantically, fighting to keep his newfound fear at bay, feeling the euphoria desert him as the brilliance of his blade began to dim.\n\nHe was perhaps a hundred feet out from where he had started, the cliff wall to his left an almost vertical rise, the drop to his right deep and precipitous, when he heard Panax call back to him. He did not look away from his pursuers. They were crowded out onto the ledge behind him, still coming, rage and hunger reflected in their eyes, waiting for him to drop his guard.\n\nThen he heard a rumble of rocks from above, and he turned and ran. He was too slow. The closest of the beasts was on top of him in a heartbeat, claws slashing. He whirled and knocked it backwards, slamming his closed fist into the rock wall with such force that he lost his grip on the sword. Knocked from his hand, it tumbled over the edge of the path and disappeared into the abyss.\n\nHe hesitated then, not quite believing what had just happened, and his hesitation cost him any chance of escape. Rocks and dirt showered down from above, pouring over everything in a thunderous slide that swept across the face of the cliff. Quentin tried to run through it, but he was too late. The avalanche was all around him, tearing away the mountainside, breaking off chunks of the ledge. The tracking beasts and their handlers disappeared in a roar of stone, then a massive section of the trail ahead tore free and was gone.\n\nQuentin flattened himself against the cliff wall and covered his head. The entire mountain seemed to be coming down on top of him. For a moment, he held on, pressed against the stone. Then the avalanche plucked him from his perch like a leaf, and he was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "The Highlander regained consciousness in a sea of mind-numbing blackness and bone-crushing weight. He could smell dust and grit and the raw odor of torn leaves and earth. At first he could not remember what had happened or where he was, and panic's sharp talons pricked at him. But he held fast, forcing himself to be patient, to wait for his mind to clear.\n\nWhen it did, he remembered the avalanche. He remembered being swept over the narrow ledge and into the void, tumbling downward through a rain of rocks and debris, catching onto something momentarily before being torn free, tangling up in scrub thickets, all the while engulfed in a roar that dwarfed the fury of the worst storm he had ever endured. Then darkness had closed about in a wave and everything else disappeared.\n\nHis vision sharpened, and he realized that the avalanche had buried him in a cluster of tree limbs and roots. Through small openings in his makeshift tomb, he saw heavy gray clouds rolling across a darkening sky. He had no idea how much time had passed. He lay without moving, staring at the distant clouds and collecting his thoughts. He should, by all rights, be dead. But the roots and limbs, while trapping him in a jagged wooden cage, had saved him, as well, deflecting boulders that would otherwise have crushed him.\n\nEven so, he was not out of trouble. His ears were ringing, and his mouth and nostrils were dry with dust. Every bone and muscle in his body ached from the pummeling he had received, and he could not tell as yet if he had broken anything in his fall.\n\nWhen he tried to move, he found himself pinned to the ground.\n\nHe listened to the silence, a blanket that cloaked both his stone-encrusted prison and the world immediately outside. There wasn't the smallest rustle of life, not the tiniest whisper, nothing but the ragged sound of his breathing. He wondered if anyone would come looking for him \u2014 if anyone even could. There might be no one left to look. Half the mountain had fallen away, and there was no telling whom it had carried with it. Hopefully, Panax and the Rindge had escaped and the Mwellrets and their tracking beasts had not. But he could not be sure.\n\nHe tried not to think too hard on it, focusing instead on the problem at hand. He forced himself to relax, to take deep breaths, to gather his resources. Carefully, gingerly, he tested his fingers and toes to make certain they were all working \u2014 and still there \u2014 then tested his arms and legs, as well. Amazingly, nothing seemed broken, even though everything hurt.\n\nEncouraged by his sense of wholeness, Quentin set about looking for a way to get free. There was only a little room to move in his cramped prison, but he took advantage of it. He was able to extricate his left leg and both arms through the exercise of a little time, patience, and perseverance, but the right leg was securely wedged beneath a massive boulder. It wasn't crushed, but it was firmly pinned. Try as he might, he could not work it free.\n\nHe lay back again, drenched in sweat. He was aware suddenly of how hot he was, buried in the earth like a corpse, covered over by layers of rock and debris. He was coated with dust and grime. He felt as if he knew exactly what it would be like to be dead, and he didn't care for it.\n\nHe wormed himself into a slightly different position, but the smallness of the space and the immobility of his trapped leg prevented him from doing much. Deep breaths, he told himself. Stay calm. He felt raindrops on his face through the chinks in his prison and saw that the sky had darkened. The rainfall was slow and steady, a soft patter in the stillness. He licked at stray drops that fell on his lips, grateful for the damp.\n\nHe spent a long time after that working with an unwieldy piece of tree limb that he was able to drag within reach and position as a fulcrum. If he could shift the boulder just an inch, he might be able to wriggle free. But from his supine position, he could not get the leverage he needed, and the branch was too long to place properly in any event. Nevertheless, he kept working at it until it grew so dark he could no longer see what he was doing.\n\nHe fell asleep then, and when he woke, it was still dark, but the rain had stopped and the silence had returned. He went back to work with the branch, and it was morning before he gave the task up as impossible. Despair crept through him and he found himself wondering how desperate his situation really was. No one was coming to look for him, \u2014 he would have heard them by now if they were. If he was going to survive, he was going to have to do so on his own. What would that cost him? Would he cut off his leg if there was no other way? Would he give up part of himself if it meant saving his life?\n\nSleep claimed him a second time, and he woke to daylight and sunshine flooding down out of a clear blue sky. He did not give himself time to dwell on the darker possibilities of his situation, but went back to trying to get free. This time, he used a sharp-ended stick to dig away at the rock and earth packed in beneath his leg. If he could tunnel under his leg, he reasoned, he might create enough space to worm loose. It was slow going, the digging often reduced to one pebble, one small chunk of hardened earth at a time. He had to start as far back as his knee and work his way down, inch by painful inch. He had to be careful not to disturb anything that supported the boulder. If it shifted, it would crush his leg and trap him for good.\n\nHe worked all day, ignoring his growing hunger and thirst, the aches in his body, and the heat of his cage. He had come too far and endured too much to die like this. He was not going to quit. He would not give up. He repeated the words over and over again. He made them into a song. He chanted them like a mantra.\n\nIt was almost dark again when he finally worked his leg free, leaving behind most of his pants leg and much of his skin. Immediately, he began digging his way out, burrowing upward through the debris toward the fading light, toward fresh air and freedom. He could not afford to stop and rest. He felt the panic taking over.\n\nNight had fallen, a velvet soft blackness under a starlit sky, when he pulled himself from the rocks and earth and stood again in the open air. He wanted to weep with joy, but would not let himself, afraid that if he broke down, he might not recover. His emotions were raw and jangled from his ordeal, and his mind was not entirely lucid. He glanced around at the jumble of boulders and jutting trees, then upward to the darkened cliffs. In this light he could not determine from where he had fallen. He could tell only where he was, standing at one end of a valley that lay in the shadow of two massive mountains in the middle of the Aleuthra Ark.\n\nIt was cold, and he forced himself to move further down the slope into the trees beyond the avalanche line so that he might find shelter. He found it in a grove of conifers, and he lay down and fell asleep at once.\n\nHe dreamed that night of the missing Sword of Leah, and he woke determined to find it.\n\nIn the daylight, he could see more clearly where he had been and what had happened. The slide that had carried him over the side had torn away much of the mountain below, stripping it of trees and scrub, leveling outcroppings and ledges, and loosening huge sections of cliffside, all of which had tumbled into a massive pile of rubble. Looking up, he could just make out where he had been standing when he had fallen. No trace remained of those with whom he had fled or from whom he had been fleeing.\n\nHe hunted for food and water, finding the latter in a small stream not far from where he had slept, but nothing of the former. Even his woods lore failed to turn up anything edible so high up in the mountains. He gave it up and went back to the slide to search for the Sword of Leah. He had no idea where to look, so for the entire morning he wandered about in something of a daze. The slide was spread out for almost half a mile, and in some places it was hundreds of feet deep. He kept thinking that it was impossible that he was still alive, impossible that he had ridden it out without being crushed. He kept telling himself that his survival meant something, that he was not going to die in this strange land, that he was meant to go home again to the Highlands.\n\nBy midday, the sun was burning out of the sky and the valley was steaming. He was beginning to hallucinate, seeing movement where there wasn't any, hearing the whisper of voices, feeling the presence of ghosts. He went back down into the trees to drink from the stream, then lay down to rest. He woke several hours later, feverish and aching, and went back to searching.\n\nThis time, the ghosts took on recognizable form. As he trudged through the rocks, he found them waiting for him at every turn. Tamis appeared first, rising out of the landscape, healed and new again, short-cropped hair pushed back from her no-nonsense face, eyes questioning his purpose as she stared at him. He spoke her name, but she did not respond. She regarded him for only a moment, as if measuring anew the depth of his commitment and the strength with which he intended to pursue it. Then she faded into the shimmer of the midday heat, into the tangle of the past.\n\nArd Patrinell appeared next, sliding out of the haze as a metal-shrouded wronk, transformed from human into something only partly so. He stared at Quentin, his trapped, doomed eyes begging for release even as he raised weapons to skewer the Highlander. Even knowing the image wasn't real, Quentin flinched from it. Words passed the lips of the Captain of the Home Guard, but they were inaudible behind his glassy face shield, empty of sound and meaning, as insubstantial as his spectre.\n\nThe image shimmered and lost focus, and Quentin dropped into a guarded crouch, closing his eyes to clear his vision, his head, and his mind. When he looked again, Ard Patrinell was gone.\n\nBoth dead, he reminded himself, Tamis and her lover, ghosts lost in the passage of time, never to return in any other form, memories only. He felt himself drawn to them, less a part of his surroundings than before, more ethereal. He was losing himself in the heat, fading away into his imaginings, in need of rest and food and something hard and fast to hold on to. A chance. A promise.\n\nNeither appeared, and his stumbling hunt across the avalanche-strewn landscape yielded nothing of the missing talisman. The afternoon lengthened, and his exhaustion increased. He was not going to find the sword, he knew. He was wasting his time. He should leave this place and go on. But go on to what and to where? Did he have another purpose, now that he was alone and so lost? Was there something further he was meant to do?\n\nHis mind drifted into the past, to the Highlands, where he had spent his youth so carelessly, to the times he had spent hunting and fishing and exploring with Bek. He could see his cousin's face in the air before him, disembodied, but Bek all the same. Where was he now? What had become of him since the ambush in the ruins of Castledown? He had been alive when Tamis had seen him last, but had disappeared since. Bek was as much a ghost as the Tracker and Patrinell.\n\nBut alive, Quentin Leah swore softly. Even missing, even disappeared, Bek was alive!\n\nQuentin found himself kneeling in the rocks, crying, his face buried in his hands, his shoulders heaving. When had he stopped to cry? How long had he been hunched down like this in the rubble?\n\nHe wiped at his eyes, angry and ashamed. Enough of this. No more.\n\nWhen he put his right hand down to push himself back to his feet, his fingers closed about the handle of his sword.\n\nFor a second he was so stunned that he thought he was imagining it. But it was as real as the stone on which he knelt. He forced himself to look down, to see the blade lying next to him, coated with dirt and grime, its pommel nicked and scored, but its incomparable blade as smooth and unmarked as the day it was formed. His fingers tightened their grip, and he brought the weapon around so that he could see it more clearly, so that he could be certain. There was no mistake. It was his sword, his talisman, and his hope reborn.\n\nIt was impossible, of course, that he should have found it. It was a one-in-a-million chance that he would find it at all. He was not a strong believer in providence, in fate's hand reaching out, but there was no other explanation for this miracle.\n\n\"Shades,\" he whispered, the word a rustle of sound in the deep silence of the afternoon heat.\n\nHe took the offered gift as a sign and came back to his feet, infused with new purpose. A wayward spirit not yet ready to cross over to the land of the dead, he began to walk.\n\nDaylight faded quickly to twilight, the sun sliding behind the western rim of the Aleuthra Ark, turning the horizon a brilliant purple and crimson, cloaking the valley in long, deep shadows. The heat faded, and the air turned crisp and raw. The unexpected shift in temperature marked the coming of another storm. Quentin hunched his shoulders and lowered his head as he pushed on through the valley and began to climb where the mountains met and formed a high pass. Clouds that had been invisible before slid into view in thick knots and gathered across the sky. The wind picked up, slow and unremarkable at first before changing to gusts that were both icy and sharp edged.\n\nAhead, where the pass narrowed and twisted out of view, the darkness deepened.\n\nQuentin pressed on. There was no place to stop and no point in doing so. He was too exposed on the slopes to chance resting, what shelter he might find lay on the other side of the pass. He needed food and water, but he was unlikely to find either before morning. Darkness layered the earth, \u2014 roiling storm clouds canopied the sky. Sleet spit at him, icy particles stinging his face as he ducked his head protectively. The wind howled down out of the mountains, rolling off empty slopes, gathering force as it whipped across the valley from the passes and defiles. Trying not to think about how far he still had to go to reach safety, Quentin bent and wavered before the wind's tremendous force.\n\nBy the time he gained the head of the high pass, the sleet had changed to snow, and a carpet twelve inches deep covered the ground he trod. He had strapped the Sword of Leah across his back using a length of cord he found in one pocket, a makeshift that allowed his hands to stay free. He was walking mostly uphill over uneven ground, the wind tearing at him from all sides and shifting rapidly. Light played tricks in the curtain of falling snow, and it was all Quentin could do to maintain his balance. He was still dizzy and feverish, hallucinating from dehydration and lack of food, but he could do nothing about that.\n\nThe ghosts of his past came and went, whispering words that made no sense, gesturing in ways he could not understand. They seemed to want something from him, but he could not tell what it was. Perhaps they simply wanted his company. Perhaps they waited from him to cross over from the world of the living. The idea seemed altogether too possible. If things did not change, they would not have long to wait.\n\nHe had lost his cloak, and so he had nothing to protect himself from the cold. He was shivering badly and afraid he would lose all his body heat before he reached shelter. He had been made strong and tough from his years in the Highlands, but his endurance was not limitless. He hugged himself as he slogged ahead through snow and sleet and cold, trying to hold together in body and spirit both, knowing he had to keep going.\n\nAt the head of the pass, he found something else waiting.\n\nAt first, he wasn't sure if what he was seeing was even real. It was big and menacing, rising out of the rocks beyond, vague and indistinct in the whirl of the storm. It was man-shaped, but something else, as well, the limbs and body not quite right for a human, not quite in proportion. It appeared to him all at once as he crested the pass and walked into a wind howling with such fury that it threatened to tear the clothes from his body. He watched it slide through veils of white snow, then fade away entirely. He moved toward it, drawn to it instinctively, afraid and intrigued both. He had the sword, he told himself. He was not unprepared.\n\nThe shape appeared anew, further in, waited a moment for his approach, then disappeared once more.\n\nThis game of hide-and-seek continued through the pass and down the other side, where the walls of the mountain were thickly grown with conifers and the force of the storm was lessened by their windbreak. He had left the mountain off which he had fallen and was now beginning to ascend the one adjoining it. The trail was narrow and difficult to follow, but the appearance of the ghost ahead kept him focused. He was convinced by now that he was being led, but there seemed no reason for concern. The ghost had not threatened him, \u2014 it did not seem to mean him harm.\n\nHe climbed for a long time, winding his way westward around the mountainside, his path twisting and turning through sprawling stands of huge old trees, deep glades of pine needles dusted with snow, and rocky hillocks slick with dampened moss. The storm's fury had diminished. The snow still fell, but the wind no longer blew the flakes into his face like needles, and the cold seemed less pervasive. Ahead, the shape took on clearer definition, becoming almost recognizable. Quentin had seen that shape before somewhere, moving in the same way, a wraith of the woods in another time and place. But his mind was singing with fatigue, and he could not place it.\n\nNot much farther, he told himself. Not much longer.\n\nPlacing one foot in front of the other, eyes shifting between the ground below and the swirling white ahead, between his own movements and the ghost's, he pushed on.\n\n\"Help me,\" he called out at one point, but there was no response.\n\nNot much farther, he told himself again and again. Just keep going.\n\nBut his strength was failing.\n\nHe went down several times, his legs simply giving way beneath him. Each time, he struggled back to his feet without pausing to rest, knowing that if he stopped, he was finished. Daylight would bring light and warmth and a better chance to survive a sleep. But he could not chance it here.\n\nIn a clearing leading into a deep stand of cedar, he slowed and stopped. He could feel himself leaving his body, rising into the night like a shade. He was finished. Done.\n\nThen the dark shape ahead seemed to transform into something else, not one but two shapes, smaller and less threatening. They came out of the night together, walking hand in hand, angling toward him from his left \u2014 how had they gotten all the way over there? He stared at the new figures in disbelief, again uncertain that what he was seeing was real, that it wasn't some new form of phantasm.\n\nThe figures hesitated as well, as they caught sight of him. He moved toward them, peering through the curtain of snow, through space and time and hallucinations, through fatigue and a growing sense of recognition, until he was close enough to be certain whom he was seeing.\n\nHis voice was parched and ragged as he called out to the one who stood closest and who stared back at him wide-eyed in disbelief.\n\n\"Bek!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Bek Ohmsford's journey over the past two days had not been as eventful as Quentin's, but it had been just as strange.\n\nAfter leaving the shape-shifters, and with Grianne in tow, he had continued into the Aleuthra Ark, the ghost of Truls Rohk an unwelcome guest borne with him. An image of the hooded cloak and scattered bones spread carelessly across the frozen ground lingered in the forefront of his thinking all that first day, a haunting that refused to be banished. He found himself remembering his protector in life, seemingly indestructible, offering his incomparable strength and unshakable reassurance. Though much of the time Truls Rohk had been an invisible presence, he had always kept close watch over Bek, fulfilling his promise to the Druid.\n\nIt seemed impossible that he was really gone. Bek could tell himself that it was so, that there was no mistake, but somehow he kept thinking that Truls would reappear, just as he always had before. He kept looking for Truls to do so. He couldn't help himself. At every turn, in every patch of shadows, Bek thought to find him waiting.\n\nSo that first day passed, a dream in which Bek walked with his catatonic sister and the ghost of his lost friend.\n\nBy nightfall, he was exhausted, having traveled far and rested little. He had given little thought to Grianne, taking for granted her compliance with the hard pace he had set, forgetting entirely that she could not speak and therefore would not complain. Aware suddenly of his failure, he sat her down and examined her feet. They were not blistered, so he turned his attention to feeding her. He had to do it by hand, and even so she was still barely taking anything. Mostly, she drank water, but he was able to get a little mashed cheese and bread down her throat, as well. She did not look different to him, but he could not tell what was going on inside her head. He trailed the tips of his fingers across her cheeks and forehead and kissed her. Her strange eyes stared through him to places he could not see.\n\nHe fed himself then, eating hungrily and drinking some of the ale he had salvaged from Truls' supplies. Night descended in a deep soft blackness, and the sky was awash in stars. He wrapped Grianne in her cloak and sat next to her in the silence, one arm draped about her protectively, his thoughts straying to the past they had lost and the future they might never share. He did not know what to do for her. He kept thinking there must be something that he had not tried, that her catatonia was a condition he could change if he could just figure out what was needed. He knew there was an answer to the puzzle if he could only put his finger on what it was. But the answer he sought would not come.\n\nAfter a time, he sang to her, his voice barely more than a whisper, as if anything more might disturb the night. He sang songs he remembered from his childhood, songs he had sung with Goran and Liria in the Highlands as a child. It all seemed very long ago and far away. He had not been a child for years. He had not been a boy since he had come on this journey with Quentin.\n\nOn impulse, he tried using the wishsong. Perhaps the magic could affect Grianne. It was their strongest connection, the shared heritage of their bloodline. If he could not reach her in any other way, perhaps he could reach her in this. He had not used it this way, but he knew from the history of the Ohmsford family that others before him had. The trick was in finding a chink in the armor of her catatonia, in worming his way past her natural defenses to where she was hiding. If he could reach deep inside, he might be able to let her know he was there.\n\nHe began to sing to her again, nothing more than humming at first, a soft and gentle melody to soothe and comfort. He blended himself with the night, another of its sounds, a natural presence. Slowly, he worked his singing around to something more personal, using words \u2014 her name, his own, their lost family revisited. He kept to memories that he thought would make her smile or at least yearn for what she had lost. He did not use her known name \u2014 Ilse Witch. He used Grianne, and called himself Bek, and he linked them together in an unmistakable way. Brother and sister, family always.\n\nFor a very long time, slowly and patiently, he worked to draw her to him, to find a way inside her mind, knowing it would not be easy, that she would resist. He made himself repeat the same phrases over and over, the ones he thought might trigger a response, giving her a fresh look each time, another reason to reach out for him. He played with color and light, with smell and taste, infusing his music with the feel of the world, with life and its rewards. Come back to me, he sang to her, over and over. Come out from the shadows, and I will help you.\n\nBut nothing succeeded. She stared at the fire, at him, at the night, and did not blink. She looked through the world to an empty place that shielded her from real life, and she would not come away.\n\nFrustrated, weary, he gave it up. He would try again tomorrow, he promised himself. He was convinced that he could do this.\n\nHe lay back, and in seconds he was asleep.\n\nThey climbed higher into the mountains on the following day, finding their path a snake of coiled switchbacks and rugged scrambles. Grianne followed after him compliantly, but had to be hauled over the rougher spots. It was hard going, and the sky west was darkening with the approach of a storm.\n\nAt one point, he heard the roar of a massive slide somewhere deeper in the mountains, and the eastern horizon was left cloudy with dust and debris in the aftermath.\n\nBy nightfall, it had begun to rain. They took shelter beneath the boughs of a massive spruce, lying on a bed of fallen needles that remained warm and dry. As the rain settled in, the temperature fell, spiraling downward with the change in the weather. Bek wrapped Grianne in her cloak and sang to her once more, and once more she stared through him to other places.\n\nHe lay awake much longer this night, listening to the soft patter of the rain and wondering what he was going to do. He had no idea where he had gotten to or where he was going. He was proceeding on faith, on the promise of the shape-shifters that he was moving toward something and not away from everything. He was adrift in the world toward something and not away from everything. He was adrift in the world with his stunned, helpless sister and with his friends and allies scattered or dead. He had one weapon, one talisman, one crutch on which he could lean, but no clear idea of how he might use it. He was so alone that he felt he would never find comfort or peace again.\n\nWhen he slept, it was from exhaustion.\n\nMorning dawned sullen and gray, a reflection of his mood as he rose sluggish and dispirited, and they started out once more. The storm caught up with them at midday, sliding past the high peaks north and curling down along the slopes on which he climbed. He had descended almost a thousand feet earlier, as the trail dipped and curved through a defile that opened deep into the mountain. Now, with the wind picking up and the cold penetrating his bones, he was high on the slopes anew and without suitable shelter. He picked up the pace, pulling Grianne after him with fresh urgency. He did not want to get caught out in the open if it began to snow.\n\nIt did, soon after, but the flakes were large and lazy and the way ahead remained clear. Bek pressed on, descending at a split in the trail, intent on gaining the forested stretches lower down. He did so just as the storm blew out of the high regions in a blinding sheet of sleet and rain. Everything beyond a dozen yards disappeared. The trees turned to phantoms that came and went to either side in the manner of soldiers at march. He held Grianne's hand as tightly as he could, not wanting to chance a separation that might prove permanent.\n\nThe storm worsened, something he had not thought possible. Sleet and rain turned to deep curtains of snow. The snow began to build underfoot, and soon it was approaching twelve inches deep even in the windswept clearings. Visibility lessened further until he was groping from tree to tree. He would have taken shelter if he could have found any, but in the blinding whirl of the blowing snow, everything looked the same.\n\nThen he stumbled and fell and lost his grip on Grianne. In an instant, she was gone. She disappeared in the whiteout, stolen away as surely as his faith in his purpose in coming on this journey. He groped for her, turning first this way and then that, everything white and empty about him, everything the same. He could not find her. Panic overwhelmed him as he grasped at snow flurries and air and empty chances, and he screamed. He screamed not just for his lost sister or his helplessness, but for all the pent-up rage and frustration he had been carrying with him for weeks. He screamed because he had reached the breaking point, and he did not care what happened to him next.\n\nIn that moment, a shape appeared before him, huge and dark, rising up like a behemoth roused from sleep to put an end to his intrusion. He stumbled backwards from it, surprised and terrified. As he did so, his hands brushed against his sister. He pushed his face close to hers to make certain he was not mistaken, calling to her. Her pale, empty features stared back at him. She was kneeling in the snow, docile and unbothered.\n\nTears of relief blinded him as he brought her back to her feet, holding on to her with both hands, then deciding that wasn't enough, wrapping her with his arms. He wiped the tears away with his sleeve and looked for the phantom that had caused him to find her. It was there, just ahead of him, but smaller and moving away. Bek peered after it, sensing something familiar about it, something recognizable. It faded and then reappeared, prowling just at the limits of his vision, expectant and purposeful.\n\nThen suddenly it turned and beckoned him.\n\nAlmost without realizing what he was doing, he obeyed. Both hands clasped tight on Grianne's slender wrist, he started ahead once more into the haze.\n\nWhich is how I found you,\" he finished, passing the aleskin back to Quentin, the pungent liquid warming his throat and stomach as he swallowed. \"I don't know how long I was out there, but my guide stayed just ahead of me the whole way, obviously leading me toward something, keeping me on track. I didn't know where it was taking me, but after a while it didn't matter. I knew who it was.\"\n\n\"Truls Rohk,\" his cousin said.\n\n\"That's what I thought at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Truls is gone. He's become a part of the shape-shifter community, and no longer has a separate identity. Maybe I just want to believe it was him.\" Bek shook his head. \"I don't guess it matters.\"\n\nThey were huddled in a shallow cave hollowed into the side of the mountain. Bek had started a fire, and it burned with little heat, but a steady, insistent flame that illuminated their faces. Grianne sat to one side, staring off into the night, unseeing. Every so often, Quentin looked at her, not quite sure yet what to make of having someone who had tried so hard to kill them sitting so close.\n\nBek watched Quentin take another deep swallow from the aleskin. The color was finally returning to Quentin's frozen body. He had been nearly gone when he had stumbled upon Bek and Grianne. Bek had wasted no time wrapping him in his cloak and finding shelter for them all. The fire and ale had brought Quentin around, and they had spent the last hour exchanging stories about what had happened since the ambush in the ruins of Castledown. They didn't rush it, taking their time, giving themselves a chance to adjust to the idea that the impossible had happened and they had found each other again.\n\n\"I never thought you were dead,\" Bek told his cousin, breaking the momentary silence. \"I never believed it was so.\"\n\nQuentin grinned, a hint of that familiar, cocky smile that marked him so distinctively. \"Me either, about you. I knew when Tamis told me she had left you outside the ruins, that you would be all right. But this business about you having magic, that's another matter. I still can't quite believe it. You're sure you're an Ohmsford?\"\n\n\"As sure as I can be after hearing everything Walker had to say.\" Bek leaned back on his elbows and sighed. \"I suppose I really didn't believe it myself in the beginning. But after that first confrontation with Grianne, feeling the magic come alive inside me and break out like it did, I didn't have the same doubts anymore.\"\n\n\"So she's your sister.\"\n\nBek nodded. \"She is, Quentin.\"\n\nThe Highlander shook his head slowly. \"Well, there's something we'd have never guessed when we started out on this journey. But what are you supposed to do with her now that you know?\"\n\n\"Take her home,\" Bek answered. \"Keep her safe.\" He looked at Grianne a moment. \"She's important, Quentin. Beyond the fact that she's my sister. I don't know how, but she is. Walker was insistent on it, when he was dying and afterwards when he returned as a shade. He knows something about her that he isn't telling me.\"\n\n\"Big surprise.\"\n\nBek smiled.\"! guess that Walker keeping secrets isn't unusual, is it? Maybe there aren't any surprises left for you and me. No real ones, I mean.\"\n\nQuentin exhaled a white plume that lofted into the chilly night. \"I wouldn't be so sure. I'd thought that earlier, and then I found you again. You never know.\" He paused. \"What do you think the chances are that anyone else is alive? Are they all dead, like Walker and Patrinell?\"\n\nBek didn't say anything for a moment. All of the Elves were gone, save Kian and perhaps Ahren Elessedil. Ryer Ord Star might still be alive. The Wing Riders might be out there somewhere. And, of course, there were the Rovers.\n\n\"We saw the Jerle Shannara fly into these mountains,\" Bek ventured. \"Maybe the Rovers are still searching for us.\"\n\nQuentin gave him a hard look. \"Maybe. But if you were Redden Alt Mer in this situation, what would you do \u2014 come looking for us or fly straight back to where you came from?\"\n\nBek thought about it a moment. \"I don't think Rue Meridian would leave us. I think she'd make her brother look.\"\n\nHis cousin snorted. \"For how long? Chased by those Mwellret vessels? Outnumbered twenty to one?\" He shook his head. \"We'd better be realistic about it. They don't have any reason to think we're still alive. They were prisoners themselves, \u2014 they won't want to chance being made prisoners again. They would be fools not to run for it. I wouldn't blame them. I would do the same thing.\"\n\n\"They'll look for us,\" Bek insisted.\n\nQuentin laughed. \"I know better than to try to change your mind, cousin Bek. Funny, though. I'm supposed to be the optimist.\"\n\n\"Things change.\"\n\n\"Hard to argue with that.\" The Highlander looked off into the falling snow and gestured vaguely. \"I was supposed to look out for you, remember? I didn't do much of a job of it. I let us get separated, and then I ran the other way. I didn't even think of looking for you until it was too late. I want you to know how sorry I am that I didn't do a better job of keeping my word.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Bek snapped, an edge to his voice. \"What more were you supposed to do than what you did?\n\nYou stayed alive, and that was difficult enough. Besides, I was supposed to look out for you, as well. Wasn't that the bargain?\"\n\nThey stared at each other in challenge for a moment. Then the tension drained away, and in the way of friends who have shared a lifetime of experiences and come to know each other better than anyone else ever could, they began to grin.\n\nBek laughed. \"Coward.\"\n\n\"Weakling,\" Quentin shot back.\n\nBek extended his hand. \"We'll do better next time.\"\n\nQuentin took it. \"Much better.\"\n\nThe wind shifted momentarily, blowing snow flurries into their faces. They ducked their heads as it whipped about them, and the fire guttered beneath its rush. Then everything went still again, and they looked out into the darkness, feeling their efforts at getting through the day catching up to them, seeping away their wakefulness, nudging them toward sleep.\n\n\"I want to go home,\" Quentin said softly. He looked over at Bek with a pale, worn sadness in his eyes. \"I bet you never thought you'd hear me say that, did you?\"\n\nBek shrugged.\n\n\"I'm worn out. I've seen too much. I've watched Tamis and Patrinell die right in front of me. Some of the other Elves, as well. I've fought so hard to stay alive that I can't remember when anything else mattered. I'm sick of it. I don't even want to feel the magic of the sword anymore. I was so hungry for it. The feel of it, like a fire rushing through me, burning everything away, feeding me.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Bek said.\n\nQuentin looked at him. \"I guess you do. It's too much after a time. And not enough.\" He looked around. \"I thought this would be our great adventure, our rite of passage into manhood, a story we would remember all our lives, that we would tell to our friends and family. Now I don't ever want to talk about it again. I want to forget it. I want to go back to the way things were. I want to go home and stay there.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Bek agreed.\n\nQuentin nodded, looking off again, not saying anything. \"I don't know how to make that happen,\" he continued after a moment. \"I'm afraid now that maybe it can't.\"\n\n\"It can,\" Bek said. \"I don't know how, but it can. I've been thinking about getting back home, about how to take Grianne there, like Walker said I should. It seems impossible, crazy. Walker's gone, so he can't help. Truls Rohk won't be going any farther. Half of everyone I came here with is dead and the other half is scattered. Until I found you, I was all alone. What chance do I have? But you know what? I just tell myself I'll find a way. I don't know what that way is, but I'll find it. I'll walk all the way home if I have to. Right over the Blue Divide. Or fly. Or swim. It doesn't matter. I'll find a way.\n\nHe looked at Quentin and smiled. \"We got this far. We'll get the rest of the way, too.\"\n\nThey were brave words, but they sounded right, necessary, talismans against fear and doubt. Bek and Quentin were still fighting for small assurances, for bits of hope, for tiny threads of courage. The words gave them some of each. Neither wanted to challenge them just now. Look too closely at the battlements, and the cracks showed. That wasn't what they needed. They left the words where they were, undisturbed, an echo in their thoughts, a promise of what they believed might still be.\n\nTaking comfort in the shelter of each other, because in the end it was the best sort of comfort they could hope to find, they went off to sleep.\n\nThe dawn was cloudy and gray, \u2014 a promise of new snow reflected in the colorless canvas of the slowly brightening sky. The temperature had dropped to freezing, and the air was brittle with cold. They ate breakfast with few words exchanged, mustering their resolve. The confidence that had bolstered them the night before had dissipated like fog in sunlight. All about them, the mountains stretched away in an endless alternation of peaks and valleys. Save for the intensity of the light from the sunrise east, the horizons all looked the same.\n\n\"Might as well get going,\" Quentin muttered, standing up and slinging his sword over his shoulder.\n\nBek rose, as well, and did the same with the Sword of Shannara. He barely gave thought to the talisman anymore, it seemed to have served its purpose on this journey and had become something of a burden. He glanced selfconsciously at Grianne, realizing he could say the same about her and most certainly had thought as much more than once.\n\nThinking to cover as much ground as possible before the next storm and not wanting to be caught out in the open again, they set a brisk pace. The frozen ground crunched like old bones beneath their boots, grasses and earth cratering with indentations of their prints. If their pursuers were still tracking them, they would have no trouble doing so. Bek considered the possibility and brushed it aside. The shape-shifters had promised him that his pursuers would not be allowed to follow. There was no reason to think that their protection extended this far, but he was weary and heartsick and needed to believe this one thing if he was to have any peace of mind. So he let himself.\n\nThey trudged on toward midday, following trails that wound through the valleys ahead. The horizons never changed. In the vast mountain coldness, the land seemed empty of life. Once, they saw a bird flying far away. Once, further down in the shadowed woods, they heard some creature cry. Otherwise, there was only silence, deep and pervasive and unbroken.\n\nTime dragged, a dying candle, and Bek's spirits lagged. He found himself wondering if there was any sense to what they were doing, if there was a purpose for going on. He understood that it gave them a goal and that movement kept them alive. But the vastness of the range and the terrible solitude it visited on them gave rise to a growing certainty that they were simply prolonging the inevitable. They were never going to walk out of the mountains. They were never going to be able to find anyone else from the doomed company of the Jerle Shannara. They were trapped in a nightmare world that would deceive them, break them down, and in the end destroy them.\n\nHe was marking out the time that remained to him when a dark speck appeared in the sky to the north, faint and distant. It grew quickly larger, moving swiftly toward them, taking on a familiar look. Recognition flooded through Bek, and the sense of hopelessness that had possessed him only moments earlier fell away like old ashes in a new fire.\n\nBy the time Hunter Predd swung Obsidian down to a flat just ahead of them, one whipcord thin arm raised in greeting, Bek was ready to believe that in spite of what he had told Quentin earlier, there might still be a few surprises left." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "For nearly a week after taking control of Black Moclips, cruising the skies like birds of prey, the Morgawr and his Mwellrets scoured the coastal and mountain regions of Parkasia in search of the Jerle Shannara and the remnants of her company. Their efforts were hampered by the weather, which proved exceedingly arbitrary, changing without warning from sun to rain, either of which was as likely to see high winds and downdrafts as calm air. During the worst of the storms, they were forced to land and anchor for almost twenty-four hours, sheltered in a cove off the coast where bluffs and woods offered protection from an onslaught of sleet and hail that otherwise would have leveled them.\n\nDuring most of this time, Ahren Elessedil languished belowdecks in a storeroom that had been converted to a cell. It was the same room that had housed Bek Ohmsford when he was a prisoner of the Ilse Witch, although Ahren did not know this. The Elven Prince was kept alone and apart from everyone save the rets who brought him food or took him on deck for brief periods of exercise. The Morgawr had moved his personal contingent of Mwellrets onto Black Moclips, preferring its sleeker design and greater maneuverability to that of the larger, more cumbersome warship he had occupied previously. Reduced to mindless shells, sad remnants of better times, the doomed Aden Kett and his men were left to crew her. Cree Bega was given command. The Morgawr occupied the Commander's quarters, and while they sailed in search of the Jerle Shannara, the Elven Prince barely saw him.\n\nHe saw even less of Ryer Ord Star. Her absence fueled his already deep mistrust of her, and he found himself reexamining his feelings. He could not decide whether she had forsaken her promise to him and truly allied herself with the Morgawr or if she was playing a game he did not understand. He wanted to believe it was the latter, but try as he might he could not come to terms with her seeming betrayal of him when he was captured or her clear distancing from him since. She had told him in the catacombs of Castledown that she was no longer in thrall to the Ilse Witch, yet she seemed to have become very much the creature of the Morgawr. She had led the warlock on his search for the Jerle Shannara. She had directed him to Black Moclips. She had stood by while that Federation crew had been systematically reduced to members of the walking dead. She had watched it all as if in a trance, showing nothing of her feelings, as removed from the horror and degradation as if she were absent altogether.\n\nNot once had she tried to make contact with Ahren after they had been brought aboard Black Moclips. Nothing had come of the words she'd whispered days earlier. Trust me. But why should he? What had she done, even once, to earn that trust? On reflection, the words now seemed to have been whispered to gain his confidence, to assure his compliance at a time when he still might have escaped. Now there was no chance. Aboard an airship, hundreds of feet off the ground, there was nowhere for him to go.\n\nNot that he had any chance of getting beyond the door of his cell in the first place, he reminded himself bitterly, even if they were on the ground. Without the missing Elfstones or weapons of any sort to aid him, he had no hope of overpowering his captors.\n\nLocked away as he was, he had not been witness to most of what had happened during the past few days. But he could tell from the slow and steady pace of the airship that they were still searching. Mostly, he could tell from the unchanging routine of his captors that they had found nothing.\n\nHe thought ceaselessly about escape. He imagined it over and over, thinking through the ways in which it could happen, the events that would precipitate it, the ways in which he would react, and the results that would follow. He pictured himself going through the motions \u2014 slipping through the door and down the passageway beyond, climbing the stairs to the decks above, crouching low against the mast, and waiting for a chance to gain the railing and go over the side. But in the end the mechanics always failed him and his chances never materialized.\n\nOne day, shortly after a storm had grounded them for almost twenty-four hours, he was on deck with Cree Bega when he caught sight of Ryer Ord Star standing at the bow. He was surprised to see her again, and for a moment he forgot himself and stared at her with undisguised longing and hope.\n\nCree Bega saw that look and recognized it. Touching Ahren lightly on his shoulder, he said, \"Sspeakss to her, little Elvess. Tellss her of your feelingss.\"\n\nThe words were an open invitation for him to do something foolish. The Mwellret was suspicious of the seer, as much so as Ahren was. Cree Bega had never been persuaded that her alliance with the Morgawr was genuine. He showed it in his attitude toward her, ignoring her for the most part, making no effort to consult her, even while the Morgawr did so. He was waiting, Ahren judged, for her to reveal her treachery.\n\n\"Nothing to ssay, Prince of Elvess?\" Cree Bega mocked, his face bent close, the rank smell of him strong in Ahren's nostrils. \"Wassn't sshe your friend? Issn't sshe sstill?\"\n\nAhren understood the nature of the questions. He hated himself for his uncertainty, but he stayed silent, bearing the weight of the Mwellret's taunts and his own doubts. Anything he did would reveal truths that would hurt either Ryer or himself. If she responded to him, it would suggest a hidden alliance. If she did not, he would be made even more painfully aware of how things between them had changed. He was too vulnerable for anything so raw just now. It would be smarter to wait.\n\nHe turned away. \"You talk to her,\" he muttered.\n\nAnother opportunity arose a day later, when he was summoned to the Morgawr's quarters and, on entering, found the seer standing beside him. She had that distant look again, her face empty of expression, as if she was somewhere else entirely in spirit and only her body was present. The Morgawr asked him again about the members of the company of the Jerle Shannara \u2014 how many had set out, whom they were, where he had last seen them, what their relationship had been to the Druid. He asked again for a head count \u2014 how many were still alive. He had asked the questions before, and Ahren gave him the same answers. It was not hard to do so. Dissembling was not necessary. For the most part, he knew less than the Morgawr. Even about Bek, the Morgawr seemed to know as much as Ahren did. He had read the traces of magic left floating on the air in the catacombs of Castledown and knew that Bek had come and gone. He knew that Ahren's friend was still out there, running from the warlock, hiding his sister.\n\nWhat little the Morgawr hadn't divined, Ryer Ord Star had told him. She had told him everything.\n\nAt times while the Morgawr interrogated Ahren, she seemed to come back from wherever she had gone. Her eyes would shift focus, and her hands twitched at her sides. She would become aware of her surroundings, but only momentarily and then she was gone again. The Morgawr did not seem bothered by this, although it caused Ahren no small amount of discomfort. Why wasn't the warlock irritated by her inattention to what he was saying? Why didn't he suspect that she was deliberately isolating herself?\n\nIt took Ahren a long time to realize what was really happening. She wasn't distancing herself at all. She was very much a part of the conversation, but in a way the Elven Prince hadn't recognized. She was hearing his words and using them to feed her talent. She was turning those words into images of his friends, trying to project visions of them. She was using him in an attempt to track them down.\n\nHe was so stunned by the revelation that for a moment he just stopped talking in midsentence and stared at her. The silence distracted her where his words had not. For a moment, she came back from where her visions had taken her, and she stared back at him.\n\n\"Don't do this,\" he told her softly, unable to conceal his disappointment.\n\nShe did not reply, but he could read the anguish in her eyes. The Morgawr immediately ordered him taken back to his cell, an angry and impatient dismissal. He saw his real use then \u2014 not as a hostage for negotiation or as a puppet King. Those were uses that could wait. The warlock's needs were more immediate. Ahren would serve him better as a catalyst for Ryer Ord Star's visions, as a trigger that would allow her to help find the Ilse Witch and the others who eluded him. Unsuspecting, naive, the boy would help without even realizing he was doing so.\n\nExcept he had realized.\n\nAhren was locked away once more, closed off in the storeroom and left to celebrate in fierce solitude his small victory. He had foiled the Morgawr's attempt to use him. He sat with his back against the wall of the airship and smiled into his prison.\n\nYet his elation faded quickly. His victory was a hollow one. Reality surfaced and crowded out wishful thinking. He was still a prisoner with no hope. His friends were still scattered or dead. He was still stranded in a dangerous, faraway land.\n\nWorst of all, Ryer Ord Star had revealed herself to be his enemy.\n\nIn the Commander's quarters, the Morgawr paced with the restless intensity of a caged animal. Ryer Ord Star felt the tension radiating from him in dark waves of displeasure. It was unusual for him to display such emotion openly, but his patience with the situation was growing dangerously thin.\n\n\"He knows what we are trying to do. Clever boy.\"\n\nShe did not respond. Her thoughts were of Ahren's words and the way he had looked at her. She still heard the anguish in his voice and saw the disappointment in his eyes. Understandably confused and misguided, he had judged her wrongly, and she could do nothing to explain herself. If the situation had been bad before, it was spiraling out of control now.\n\nThe Morgawr stopped in front of the door, his back to her. \"He has become useless to me.\"\n\nShe stiffened, her mind racing. \"I don't need his cooperation.\"\n\n\"He will lie. He will dissemble. He will throw in enough waste that it will color anything good. I can't trust him anymore.\" He turned around slowly. \"Nor am I sure about you, little seer.\"\n\nShe met his gaze and held it, letting him look into her eyes. If he believed she hid something, the game was over and he would kill her now.\n\n\"I've given you nothing but the truth,\" she said.\n\nHis dark, reptilian face showed nothing of what he was thinking, but his eyes were dangerous. \"Then tell me what you have learned just now.\"\n\nShe knew he was testing her, offering her a chance to demonstrate that she was still useful. Ahren had been right about the game they were playing. She was feeding off his words and emotions in response to the Morgawr's questions in an effort to trigger a vision that would reveal something about the missing members of the company of the Jerle Shannara. He had been wrong about her intentions, but there was no way she could tell him that. The Morgawr must believe she could help him find the Ilse Witch. He must not begin to doubt that she was his willing ally in his search, or all of her plans to help Walker would fall apart.\n\nShe took a small step toward the warlock, a conscious act of defiance, a gesture that nearly took her breath away with the effort it cost her. \"I saw the Ilse Witch and her brother surrounded by mountains. They were not alone. There were others with them, but their faces were hidden in shadow. They were walking. I did not see it, but I sensed an airship somewhere close. There were cliffs filled with Shrike nests. One of those cliffs looked like a spear with its tip broken off, sharp edged and thrust skyward. There was the smell of the ocean and the sound of waves breaking on the shore.\"\n\nShe stopped talking and waited, her eyes locked on his. She was telling him of a vision Ahren's words had triggered, but twisting the details just enough to keep him from finding what he sought.\n\nShe held her breath. If he could read the deception in her eyes and find in its shadings the truth of things, she was dead.\n\nHe studied her for a long time without moving or speaking, a stone face wrapped in cloak and shadow.\n\n\"They are on the coast?\" he asked finally, his voice empty of expression.\n\nShe nodded. \"The vision suggests so. But the vision is not always what I think it is.\"\n\nHis smile chilled her. \"Things seldom are, little seer.\"\n\n\"What matters is that Ahren Elessedil's words generated these images,\" she insisted. \"Without them, I would have nothing.\"\n\n\"In which case, I would have no further need of either of you, would I?\" he asked. One hand lifted and gestured toward her almost languidly. \"Or need of either of you if he can no longer be trusted to speak the truth, isn't that so?\"\n\nThe echo of his words hung in the air, an indictment she knew she must refute. \"I do not need him to speak the truth in order to interpret my visions,\" she said.\n\nIt was a lie, but it was all she had. She spoke it with conviction and held the warlock's dark gaze even when she could feel the harm he intended her penetrating through to her soul.\n\nAfter a long moment, the Morgawr shrugged. \"Then we must let him live a little longer. We must give him another chance.\"\n\nHe said it convincingly, but she could tell he was lying. He had made up his mind about Ahren as surely as Ahren had made up his mind about her. The Morgawr no longer believed in either of them, she suspected, but particularly in the Elven Prince. He might try using Ahren once more, but then he would surely get rid of him. He had neither time nor patience for recalcitrant prisoners. What he demanded of this land, of its secrets and magic, lay elsewhere. His disenchantment with Ahren would grow, and eventually it would devour them both.\n\nDismissed from his presence without the need for words, she left him and went back on deck. She climbed the stairs at the end of the companionway and walked forward to the bow. With her hands grasping the railing to steady herself, she stared at the horizon, at the vast sweep of mountains and forests, at banks of broken clouds and bands of sunlight. The day was sliding toward nightfall, the light beginning to fade west, the dark to rise east.\n\nShe closed her eyes when her picture of the world was clear in her mind, and she let her thoughts drift. She must do something to save the Elven Prince. She had not believed it would be necessary to act so soon, but it now seemed unavoidable. That she was committed to Walker's plan for the Morgawr did not require committing Ahren, as well. His destiny lay elsewhere, beyond this country and its treacheries, home in the Four Lands, where his blood heritage would serve a different purpose. She had caught a glimmer of it in the visions she had shared with Walker. She knew it from what the Druid had said as he lay dying. She could feel it in her heart.\n\nJust as she could feel with unmistakable certainty the fate that awaited her.\n\nShe breathed slowly and deeply to calm herself, to muster acceptance of what she knew she must do. Walker needed her to mislead the Morgawr, to slow him in his hunt, to buy time for Grianne Ohmsford. It was not something the Druid had asked lightly, \u2014 it was something he had asked out of desperate need and a faith in her abilities. She felt small and frail in the face of such expectations, a child in a girl's body, her womanhood yet so far away that she could not imagine it. Her seer's mind did not allow for growing up in the ways of other women, \u2014 it was her mind that was old. Yet she was capable and determined. She was the Druid's right hand, and he was always with her, lending his strength.\n\nShe held that knowledge to her like a talisman as she made her plans.\n\nWhen nightfall descended, she acted on them.\n\nShe waited until all of the Mwellrets were sleeping, save the watch and the helmsman. Black Moclips sailed through the night skies at a slow, languorous pace, tracking the edge of the coastline north and east as Ryer Ord Star slipped from her makeshift bed in the lee of the aft decking and made her way forward. Aden Kett and his crew stood at their stations, dead eyes staring. She glanced at them as she passed, but her gaze did not linger. It was dangerous to look too closely at your own fate.\n\nThe airship rocked gently in the cradle of night winds blowing out of the west. The chill brought by the storms had not dissipated, and her breath clouded faintly. Below where they flew, where the tips of the mountain peaks brushed the clouds, snow blanketed the barren slopes. The warmth that had greeted them on their arrival into this land was gone, chased inland by some aberration linked to the demise of Antrax. That science had found a way to control the weather seemed incredible to her, but she knew that in the age before the Great Wars there had been many marvelous achievements that had since disappeared from the world. Yet magic had replaced science in the Four Lands. It made her wonder sometimes if the demise of science was for the better or worse. It made her wonder if the place of seers in the world had any real value.\n\nShe reached the open hatchway leading down into the storerooms and descended in shadowy silence, listening for the sounds of the guard who would be on watch below. Walker would not approve of what she was doing. He would have tried to stop her if he had been able. He would have counseled her to remain safe and concentrate on the task he had given her. But Walker saw things through the eyes of a man seeking to achieve in death what he had failed to achieve in life. He was a shade, and his reach beyond the veil was limited. He might know of the Ilse Witch and her role in the destiny of the Four Lands, of the reasons she must escape the Morgawr, and of the path she must take to come back from the place to which her troubled mind had sent her. But Ryer Ord Star only knew that time was slipping away.\n\nThe passageway belowdecks was shadowed, but she made her way easily through its gloom. She heard snores ahead, and she knew the Mwellret watch was sleeping. The potion she had slipped into his evening ale ration earlier had drugged him as thoroughly as anything this side of death. It had not been all that hard to accomplish. The danger lay in another of the rets discovering the guard to be asleep before she could reach Ahren.\n\nAt the door to his storeroom jail, she took possession of the keys from the sleeping ret and released the lock, all the while listening for the sounds of those who would put an end to her undertaking. She said nothing as she opened the door and slipped inside, a wraithlike presence. Ahren rose to face her, hesitating as he realized who it was, not certain what to make of her appearance. He kept silent, though \u2014 harking to the finger she put to her lips and her furtive movements as she came over to release him from his chains. Even in the dim cabin light, she could see the uncertainty and suspicion in his eyes, but there could be no mistaking her actions. Without attempting to intervene, he let her free him and followed her without argument when she was ready to leave, stepping over the sleeping guard where he was sprawled across the passageway, creeping behind her as she moved back toward the stairs leading up. Black Moclips rocked slowly, a cradle for sleeping men and a drowsy watch. The only sounds were those of the ship, the small, familiar stretchings and tightenings of seams and caulk.\n\nThey went up the stairs and emerged behind the helmsman, flattening themselves against the decking, scooting along the shadow of the aft rise and across to the rail. Wordlessly, she slipped over the side and crossed down the narrow gangway to the starboard pontoon, sliding swiftly to the furthest aft fighting port, a six-foot-deep compartment stacked with pieces of sail and sections of cross beam.\n\nCloaked in deep shadows, she moved to where the pontoon curved upward to form the aft starboard battering ram. She felt along the inside of the structure and released a wooden latch hidden in the surface of the hull. Instantly, a panel dropped down on concealed hinges. She reached inside and drew out a framework of flexible poles to which sections of lightweight canvas had been attached.\n\nShe passed the framework and canvas forward to Ahren, where he crouched at the front of the fighting port, then moved up beside him.\n\n\"This is called a single wing,\" she whispered, her head bent close to his, her long silvery hair brushing the side of his face. \"It is a sort of kite, built to fly one man off a failing airship. Redden Alt Mer had it hidden in the hull for emergencies.\" She reached up impulsively and touched his cheek.\n\n\"You never intended to help him, did you?\" the Elven Prince whispered back, relief and happiness reflected in his voice.\n\n\"I had to save your life and mine, as well. That meant giving your identity away. He would have killed you otherwise.\" She took a deep breath. \"He intends to kill you now. He thinks you're of no further use. I can't protect you anymore. You have to get off the ship tonight.\"\n\nHe shook his head at once, gripping her arm. \"Not without you. I won't go without you.\"\n\nHe said it with such vehemence, with such desperate insistence, that it made her want to cry. He had doubted her and was trying to make up for it in the only way he knew. If it was called for, he would give up his life for hers.\n\n\"It isn't time for me to go yet,\" she said. \"I made a promise to Walker to lead the Morgawr astray in his hunt. He thinks I intend to help, but I give him only just enough to keep him believing so. I'll come later.\"\n\nShe saw the uncertainty in his eyes and gestured sharply toward the single wing. \"Quit arguing with me! Take this and go. Now! Unfold it, tie the harness in place, and lean out from the side with the wings extended. Use the bar and straps at the ends to steer. It isn't hard. Here, I'll help.\"\n\nHe shook his head, his eyes wondering. \"How did you know about this?\"\n\n\"Walker told me.\" She began undoing the straps that secured the framework, shaking it loose. \"He learned about it from Big Red. The rets don't know of it. There, it's ready. Climb up on the edge of the pontoon and strap yourself in!\"\n\nHe did as she instructed, still clearly dazed by what was happening, not yet able to think it through completely enough to see its flaws. She just had to get him off the ship and into the air, and then it would be too late. Things would be decided, insofar as she was able to make it so. That was as much as she could manage.\n\n\"You should come now,\" he argued, still trying to find a way to take her with him.\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. Later. Fly inland from the coast when you get further north. Look for a rain forest in the heart of the mountains. That's where the others are, on a cliff overlooking it. My visions showed them to me.\"\n\nHe shrugged into the shoulder harness, and she cinched it tight across his back. She opened the wing frame so that it would catch the wind and showed him the steering bar and control straps. She glanced over her shoulder every few seconds toward the deck above, but the Mwellrets were not yet looking her way.\n\n\"Ryer,\" he began, turning toward her once more.\n\n\"Here,\" she said, reaching into her thin robes and extracting a pouch. She shoved it into his tunic, deep down inside so that it was snugged away. \"The Elfstones,\" she whispered.\n\nHe stared at her in disbelief. \"But how could you have \u2014\"\n\n\"Go!\" she hissed, shoving him off the side of the pontoon and into space.\n\nShe watched the wind catch the canvas and draw the framework taut. She watched the single wing soar out into the darkness. She caught a quick glimpse of the Elven Prince's wondering face, saw the man he had become eclipse the boy she had begun her journey with, and then he was gone.\n\n\"Good-bye, Ahren Elessedil,\" she whispered into the night.\n\nThe words floated on the air feather-light and fading even as she turned away, alone now for good." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "A hand shook his shoulder gently, and Bek Ohmsford stirred awake. \"If you sleep any longer, people will think you're dead,\" a familiar voice said.\n\nHe opened his eyes and blinked against the sunlight pouring out of the midday sky. Rue Meridian moved into the light, blocking it away, and stared down at him, a hint of irony in the faint twist of her pursed lips. Just seeing her warmed him in a way the sun never could and made him smile in turn.\n\n\"I feel like I'm dead,\" he said. He lay stretched out on the deck of the Jerle Shannara, cocooned in blankets. He took in the railings of the airship and the mast jutting skyward overhead as he gathered his thoughts. \"How long have I been asleep?\"\n\n\"Since this time yesterday. How do you feel?\"\n\nHis memories of the past week flooded back as he considered the question. His flight out of Castledown with Grianne and Truls Rohk. Their struggle to escape the pursuit of the Morgawr and his creatures. The battle with the caull. Truls, dying. Their encounter with the shape-shifters and the lifesaving transformation of his friend. Climbing with Grianne into the mountains, trusting that they would somehow find their way. Finding Quentin after so long, a miracle made possible because of a promise made to a dead man.\n\nAnd then, when it seemed the mountains would swallow them whole, another miracle, as Hunter Predd, searching for the Jerle Shannara's lost children, plucked them off the precipice and carried them away.\n\n\"I feel better than I did when I was brought here,\" Bek said. He took a deep, satisfying breath. \"I feel better than I have in a long time.\" He took a good look at her, noting the raw marks on her face and the splint on her left arm. \"What happened to you? Been wrestling with moor cats again?\"\n\nShe cocked her head. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"You're hurt.\"\n\n\"Cuts and bruises. A broken arm and a few broken ribs. Nothing that won't heal.\" She punched him lightly. \"I could have used your help.\"\n\n\"I could have used yours.\"\n\n\"Missed me, did you?\"\n\nShe tossed the question out casually, as if his answer didn't mean anything. But he knew it did. For just an instant he was convinced it meant everything, that she wanted him to tell her she was important to him in a way that went beyond friendship. It was an improbable and foolish notion, but he couldn't shake it. Anyway, he liked the idea and didn't question it.\n\n\"Okay, I missed you,\" he said.\n\n\"Good.\" She bent down suddenly and kissed his lips. It was just a quick brush followed by a touching of his cheek with, her fingers, and then she lifted away again. \"I missed you, too. Know why?\"\n\nHe stared at her. \"No.\"\n\n\"I didn't think so. I only just figured it out for myself. Maybe with enough time, you will, too. You're pretty good at figuring things out, even for a boy.\" She gave him an ironic, mocking smile, but it wasn't meant to hurt and it didn't. \"I hear you can do magic. I hear you're not who you thought you were. Life is full of surprises.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to explain?\"\n\n\"If you want to.\"\n\n\"I do. But first I want you to tell me how you got all beat up. I want to hear what happened.\"\n\n\"This,\" she said sardonically, and she gestured at the airship. \"This and a lot of other catastrophes.\"\n\nHe lifted himself on one elbow and looked around. The Jerle Shannara's decks stretched away in a jumble of makeshift patches and unfinished repairs. A new mast had been cut and shaped and set in place, he could tell from the new wood and fresh metal banding. Railings had been spliced in and damaged planks in the hull and decks replaced. Radian draws hung limply from cross beams and sails lay half mended. No one was in sight.\n\n\"They've deserted us,\" she advised, as if reading his thoughts.\n\nHe could hear voices nearby, faint and indistinguishable. \"How long have you been here?\"\n\n\"Almost a week.\"\n\nHe blinked in disbelief. \"You can't fly?\"\n\n\"Can't get off the ground at all.\"\n\n\"So we're trapped. How many of us are left?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"A handful. Big Red, Black Beard, the Highlander, you, and me. Three of the crew. The two Wing Riders. Panax and an Elven Hunter. The Wing Riders found them yesterday, not too far from here, with a tribe of natives called Rindge. They're camped at the top of the bluff.\"\n\n\"Ahren?\" he asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Nor the seer. Nor anyone else who went ashore. They're all dead or lost.\" She looked away. \"The Wing Riders are still searching, but so are those airships with their rets and walking dead. It's dangerous to fly anywhere in these mountains now. Not that we could, even if we wanted to.\"\n\nHe looked at the airship, then back at her. \"Where's Grianne? Is she all right?\"\n\nThe smile faded from Rue Meridian's face. \"Grianne? Oh, yes, your missing sister. She's down below, in Big Red's cabin, staring at nothing. She's good at that.\"\n\nHe held her gaze. \"I know that \u2014\"\n\n\"You don't know anything,\" she interrupted, her voice oddly breezy. \"Not one thing.\" She pushed back loose strands of her long red hair, and he could see the dangerous look in her green eyes. \"I never thought I would find myself in a position where I would have to keep that creature alive, let alone look after her. I would have put a knife to her throat and been done with it, but you were raving so loudly about keeping her safe that I didn't have much of a choice.\"\n\n\"I appreciate what you've done.\"\n\nHer lips tightened. \"Just tell me you have a good reason for all this. Just tell me that.\"\n\n\"I have a reason,\" he said. \"I don't know yet how good it is.\"\n\nBek told her everything then, all that had happened since he had left the Jerle Shannara weeks earlier and gone inland with Walker and the shore party. Some she already knew, because Quentin had told her. Some she had suspected. She had guessed at his imprisonment aboard Black Moclips and subsequent escape, but she had not realized the true reason for either. She was skeptical and angry with him, refusing at first to listen to his reasons for saving his sister, shouting at him that it didn't matter, that saving her was wrong, that she was responsible for all the deaths suffered by the company, especially Hawk's.\n\nRue told Bek her story then, relating the details of her imprisonment along with the other Rovers by the witch and her followers, and of her escape and battle aboard the Jerle Shannara, where Hawk had given his life to save hers. She told him of her struggle to regain control of the ship and the freeing of her brother. She told him of her search for Walker and the missing company, which led in turn to her regaining possession of Black Moclips and fleeing inland toward the safety of the mountains as the fleet of enemy airships pursued her. She told her story in straightforward fashion, making no effort to embellish her part in things, diminishing it, if anything.\n\nHe listened patiently, trying with small gestures to encourage and support, but she was having none of it. She hated Grianne to such an extent that she could find no forgiveness in her heart. That she had kept his sister alive at all spoke volumes about her affection for him. Losing Furl Hawken had been a terrible blow, and she held Grianne directly responsible. Rue Meridian refused to let Bek sit by passively, turning her anger and disappointment back on him, insisting that he respond to it. He did so as best he could, even though he was not comfortable doing so. So much had happened to both of them in such a short time that there was no coming to grips with all of it, no making sense of it in a way that would afford either of them any measure of peace. Both had suffered too many losses and were seeking comfort that required different responses from what each was willing to provide. Where the Ilse Witch was concerned, there could be no agreement.\n\nFinally, Bek put up his hands. \"I can't argue this anymore, not right now. It hurts too much to argue with you.\"\n\nShe snorted derisively. \"It hurts you, maybe. Not me. I don't bruise so easily. Anyway, you owe me a little consideration. You owe me a chance to tell you what I think about your sister! You owe it to me to share some of what I feel!\"\n\n\"I'm doing the best I can.\"\n\nShe reached down suddenly and hauled him all the way out of the blankets and shook him hard. \"No, you're not! I don't want you to just sit there! I don't want you to just listen! I want you to do something! Don't you know that?\"\n\nHer red hair had shaken loose of its headband and strands of it were wrapped about her face like tiny threads of blood. \"Don't you know anything?\"\n\nHer eyes had gone wild and reckless, and she seemed on the verge of doing something desperate. She stopped shaking him, instead gripping his shoulders so tightly he could feel her nails through his clothing. She was trying to speak, to say something more, but couldn't seem to make herself do so.\n\n\"I'm sorry about Hawk,\" he whispered. \"I'm sorry it was Grianne. But she didn't know. She doesn't know anything. She's like a child, locked away in her mind, frightened of coming out again. Don't you see, Rue? She had to face up to what she is all at once. That's what the magic of the Sword of Shannara does to you. She had to accept that she was this terrible creature, this monster, and she didn't even know it. Her whole life has been filled with lies and deceits and treacheries. I don't know \u2014 she may never be made whole.\"\n\nRue Meridian stared at him as if he were someone she had never seen. There were tears in her eyes and a look of such anguish on her face that he was stunned.\n\n\"I'm tired, Bek,\" she whispered back. \"I haven't even thought about it until now. I haven't had time for that. I haven't taken time.\" She wiped at her eyes with her sleeve. \"Look at me.\"\n\nHe did so, having never looked away, in truth, but giving her what she needed, trying to find a way to help her recover. He said, \"I just want you to try to...\"\n\n\"Put your arms around me, Bek,\" she said.\n\nHe did so without hesitation, holding her against him, feeling her body press close. She began to cry, soundlessly, her shoulders shaking and her wet face pushing into the crook of his shoulder and neck. She cried for a long time, and he held her while she did, running his hand over her strong back in small circular motions, trying to give some measure of comfort and reassurance. It was so out of character for her to behave like this, so different from anything he had seen from her before, that it took him until she was finished to accept that it was really happening.\n\nShe brushed what remained of the tears from her face and composed herself with a small shrug. \"I didn't know I had that in me.\" She looked at him. \"Don't tell anyone.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I wouldn't do that. You know I wouldn't.\"\n\n\"I know. But I had to say it.\" She stared at him a moment, again with that sense of not knowing exactly who he was, of perhaps meeting him for the first time. \"My brother and the others are down at the edge of the bluff, talking. We can join them when you're ready.\"\n\nHe climbed to his feet, reaching for his boots. \"Talking about what?\"\n\n\"About what it's going to take to get us out of here.\"\n\n\"What is it going to take?\"\n\n\"A miracle,\" she said.\n\nRedden Alt Mer stood at the edge of the cliff face and stared down at the canopy of the Crake Rain Forest, very much the same way he had stared down at it for the previous five days. Nothing at all had changed during that time, save for the level of his frustration, which was rapidly becoming unmanageable. He had considered and reconsidered every option he could think of that would let him bypass the Graak and retrieve the diapson crystals they needed to get airborne again. But each option involved unacceptable risks and little chance of success, so he would toss it aside in despair, only to pick it up and reexamine it when he decided that every other alternative was even worse.\n\nAll the while, time was slipping away. They hadn't been discovered by the airships of the Morgawr yet, but sooner or later they would be. One had passed close enough yesterday for them to identify its dark silhouette from the ground, and even though they hadn't been spotted on that pass they likely would be on the next. If Hunter Predd and Po Kelles were right, there were only one or two this deep into the Aleuthra Ark; the bulk of the fleet was still searching for them out on the coast. When that effort failed to turn them up, the fleet would sail inland. If that happened and they were still grounded, they were finished.\n\nStill, for the first time since the Jerle Shannara had crashed, he had reason to hope.\n\nHe glanced over at Quentin Leah. The Highlander was staring down into the Crake with a puzzled look on his lean, battle-damaged face. The look was a reflection of his inability to imagine what waited down there, having not as yet seen the Graak. No one had, except for himself. That was part of the problem, of course. He knew what they were up against, and although the others \u2014 Rovers and newcomers alike \u2014 might be willing to go down into the rain forest and face it, he was not. What had happened to Tian Cross and Rucker Bont was still fresh in his mind. He did not care to risk losing more lives. He did not want any more deaths on his conscience.\n\nIt was more than that, though. He could admit it to himself, if to no one else. He was afraid. It had been a long time \u2014 so long he could not remember the last occasion \u2014 since he had been frightened of anything. But he was frightened of the Graak. He felt it in his blood. He smelled it on his skin. It visited him in his dreams and brought him awake wide-eyed and shaking. He could not rid himself of it. Watching his men die, seeing them go down under the teeth and claws of that monster, feeling his own death so close to him that he could imagine his bones and blood spattered all over the valley floor, had unnerved him. Though he tried to tell himself his fear was only temporary and would give way to his experience and determination, he could not be sure.\n\nHe knew the only way to rid himself of this feeling was to go down into the Crake and face the Graak.\n\nHe was about to do that.\n\n\"I won't ask you to go with me,\" he said to Quentin Leah without looking at him.\n\n\"He won't ask, but he'll make it plain enough that he expects it,\" Spanner Frew snorted. \"And then he'll find a why to make you end up thinking it was your idea!\"\n\nAlt Mer gave the shipwright a dark look, then smirked in spite of himself. Something about the other amused him even now \u2014 the perpetually dour look, the furrowed brow, the cantankerous attitude, something. Spanner Frew always saw the glass as half-empty, and he was ready and more than willing to share his worldview with anyone close enough to listen.\n\n\"Keep your opinions to yourself, Black Beard,\" he said, brushing a fly from his face. \"Others don't find them so amusing. The Highlander is free to do as he chooses, as are all of us in this business.\"\n\nQuentin Leah was looking better this morning, less ghostly and wooden than the day before when he was brought in with Bek and the witch. Alt Mer was still getting used to the idea of having her around, but he wasn't having as much trouble with it as his sister. Little Red hated the witch, and she was not likely to forgive her anytime soon for Hawk's death. Maybe having Bek back would help, though. She'd been upset at the thought of losing him, more so than by anything for a long time. He didn't understand the affection she felt for Bek, but was quick enough to recognize it for what it was.\n\nHe sighed. At any rate, there were more of them now than there had been three days ago, after Rucker and Tian had died. Down to only six, the Rovers had seen their numbers strengthened since. The Wing Riders had reappeared first, flying out of the clouds on a blustery day in which rain had soaked everything for nearly twelve hours. After that, Po Kelles had found Panax, the Elven Hunter Kian, and those odd-looking reddish people they called Rindge. It had taken the Rindge another two days of travel to reach them, but now they were camped several miles east in a forested flat high in the mountains, concealed from searchers while they waited to see what would happen down here.\n\nTheir leader, the man Panax called Obat, was the one who told them that the valley was called the Crake. He knew about the thing that lived there, as well. Obat hadn't seen it, but when Panax brought him down to talk, and Alt Mer described it, he recognized it right away. He had gotten so excited that it looked as if he might bolt. Hand gestures and a flurry of words that even Panax had trouble translating testified to the extent of Obat's fear. It was clear that whatever anyone else did, neither Obat nor any other Rindge was going near whatever was down there \u2014 \"A Graak,\" Obat told Panax over and over again. The rest of what he said had something to do with the nature of the beast, of its invincibility and domination of mountain valleys like the Crake, where it preyed on creatures who were foolish or unwary enough to venture too close.\n\nKnowing what it was didn't help solve the problem, because Obat had no idea what they could do about the thing. Graaks were to be avoided, never confronted. His information did not aid Alt Mer in any measurable way. If anything, it further convinced him of his helplessness. What was needed was magic of the sort possessed by Walker.\n\nOr by Quentin Leah perhaps, in the form of his sword, a weapon that had been effective against the creepers of Antrax.\n\nBut he could not say anything more to persuade the Highlander to help. If anything, he should advise against it. But then he would have to go into the Crake alone, and he did not think he could do that. Though he was a brave man, his courage had eroded so completely that he felt sick to his stomach even getting close enough to look down into the rain forest. He had concealed his fear from everyone, but it was there nevertheless \u2014 pervasive, inescapable, and debilitating. He couldn't confess it, especially to Little Red. It wasn't that she wouldn't understand or try to help. It was the look he knew he would see in her eyes. He was the brother on whom she had always relied and in whom she took such pride. He could not bear it if she found out that he had run away while his men were dying.\n\nThe Highlander looked over at him. \"All right, I'll go.\"\n\nBig Red exhaled slowly, keeping his face expressionless.\n\n\"I'll go,\" Quentin Leah continued, \"but Bek stays. Whatever magic he's got is new to him, and he doesn't have the experience with it that I do. I won't risk his life.\"\n\nWhatever magic the Highlander possessed was pretty new to him, too, from what the Druid had told Alt Mer. Still, he wasn't about to argue the matter. He would take whatever help he was offered if it meant getting his hands on the diapson crystals. He didn't know what they had accomplished by coming here in the first place, but he didn't think it was much. Mostly, they had succeeded in getting a lot of their friends killed, which was hardly a reason for going anywhere. You didn't have to come all the way here to get killed. His frustration with matters surfaced once more. He would do anything to get out of this place.\n\nBefore he could respond to the Highlander, Rue and Bek Ohmsford walked out of the trees from one side and Panax, having gone off earlier to try to find an easier way down the cliff face, appeared from the other.\n\n\"Morning, young Bek!\" the Dwarf shouted cheerfully on spying him. A grin spread across his square, bluff face, and he gave a wave of one hand. \"Back among the living, I see! You look much better today!\"\n\nBek waved back. \"You look about the same, but that's not something sleep will cure!\"\n\nThey came together at the cliff edge with Spanner Frew, Quentin, and Alt Mer and clasped hands. The Highlander's face had gone dark as he realized what was about to happen and knew he couldn't prevent it. Alt Mer gave a mental shrug. Some things couldn't be helped. At least his sister seemed composed again. Almost radiant. He stared at her in surprise, but she wouldn't look at him.\n\n\"I've scouted the cliff edge all the way out and back,\" Panax informed them, oblivious to the Highlander's look of warning. \"There's a trail further on, not much of one, but enough to give us a way down that doesn't involve ropes. It opens onto a flat, so we'll be able to see what's waiting much better than Big Red could when he dropped into the trees.\"\n\nHe glanced at Bek. \"I forgot. You just woke up. You don't know what's happened.\"\n\n\"About the Graak and the crystals?\" Bek asked. \"I know. I heard all about it on the walk down. When do we leave?\"\n\n\"No!\" Rue Meridian wheeled on him furiously. \"You're not going! You're not healed yet!\"\n\n\"She's right,\" Quentin Leah said, glaring at his cousin. \"What's wrong with you? I just spent weeks worrying that you were dead! I'm not going through that again! You stay up here. Big Red and I can handle this.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Panax growled. \"What about me?\"\n\n\"You're not going either!\" Quentin snapped. \"Two of us is enough to risk.\"\n\nThe Dwarf cocked one eyebrow. \"Have you suddenly gotten so much better at staying alive than the rest of us?\"\n\nBek glared at Quentin. \"What makes you think you have the right to decide if I go or not? I decide what's right for me, not you! Why would I agree to stay up here? What about our promise to look out for each other?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm going if you're going!\" Rue Meridian spat out the words defiantly. \"I'm the one who's done the best job of looking out for everyone so far! You're not leaving me behind! No one's leaving me!\" She shifted her angry gaze from one to the next. \"Which one of you wants to try to stop me?\"\n\nThey were face-to-face now, all of them, so angry they could barely make themselves stop shouting long enough to hear what anyone else was saying. Spanner Frew was quiet, his dark face lowered to hide the grin on his lips, his head shaking slowly from side to side. Alt Mer listened in dismay, wondering when to step in and if it would make any difference if he did.\n\nFinally, he'd heard enough. \"Stop shouting!\" he roared.\n\nThey quit arguing and looked at him, faces red and sweating in the midday heat.\n\nHe shook his head slowly. \"The Druid is dead, so I command this expedition. Both aboard ship and off. That means I decide who goes.\"\n\nHis eyes settled momentarily on Bek \u2014 Bek, who looked taller and stronger than he remembered, more mature. He wasn't a boy anymore, the Rover Captain realized in surprise. When had that happened? He glanced quickly at his sister, suddenly seeing things in a new light. She was staring at him as if she wanted to jump down his throat.\n\nHe looked away again quickly, out over the valley, out to where his fears were centered. He wondered again why he had come all this way. Money? Yes, that was a part of the agreement. But there had been a need to escape the Prekkendorran and the Federation, as well. There had been a need to see a new country, to journey to somewhere he hadn't been. There had been a need for renewal.\n\n\"There's not that many of us left,\" he said, more quietly now. \"Just a handful, and we have to look out for each other. Arguing is a waste of time and energy. Only one thing is important, and that's getting back into the skies and flying out of here.\"\n\nHe didn't wait for their response. \"Little Red, you stay here. If anything happens to me, you're the only one who can fly the Jerle Shannara home again. Bek might try, but he doesn't know how to navigate. Besides, you're all beat up. Broken ribs, broken arm \u2014 if you have to defend yourself down there, you'll be in trouble. I don't want to have to worry about saving you. So you stay.\"\n\nShe was furious. \"You're worried about saving me? Who was it who got you out of the Federation prison? Who was it who...\"\n\n\"Rue.\"\n\n\"... got Black Moclips back from the rets and would have kept her, too, with just a little help? What about Black Beard? Standing there with his head down and his mouth shut, hoping no one will remember he can sail an airship just as well as I can! Don't say a word about it, Spanner! Don't say anything that might help me!\"\n\n\"Rue.\"\n\n\"No! It isn't fair! He can navigate just as well as I can! You can't tell me not to go just because I \u2014\"\n\n\"Rue!\" His voice would have melted iron. \"Four of us are risk enough. You stay.\"\n\n\"Then Bek stays with me! He's injured, too!\"\n\nAlt Mer stared at her. What was she talking about? Bek wasn't her concern. \"Not like you. Besides, we might need his magic.\"\n\nShe glared at him for a moment, and he could see she was on the verge of breaking down. He had never seen her do that, never even seen her come close. For a moment, he reconsidered his decision, realizing that something about this was more important than what her words were telling him.\n\nBut before he could say anything, she wheeled away and stalked back toward the airship, rigid with anger and frustration. \"Fine!\" she shouted over her shoulder. \"Do what you want! You're all fools!\"\n\nHe watched her disappear into the trees, thinking that was that, there was nothing he could do about it. Anyway, his next confrontation was already at hand. If Rue Meridian was angry, Quentin Leah was livid. \"I told you I wouldn't go if Bek went! Did you think I didn't mean it?\" He could barely bring himself to speak. \"Tell him he can't go, Big Red. Tell him, or I'm not going.\"\n\nBek started to speak, but Alt Mer held up his hand to silence him. \"I can't do that, Highlander. I'm sorry things didn't work out the way you wanted, but I can't change that, so threats are meaningless. Bek has the right to decide for himself what he wants to do. So do you. If you don't want to go, you don't have to.\"\n\nThere was a long silence as the Rover and the Highlander stared each other down. There was a dangerous edge to Quentin Leah, as if nothing much mattered to him anymore. Alt Mer couldn't know what Quentin had gone through to get clear of Castledown and find them, but it must have been horrendous and it had left him scarred.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Highlander,\" he said, not knowing what he was sorry about, save for the look he saw in the other's eyes.\n\n\"Quentin,\" Bek interjected quietly, laying one hand on his shoulder. \"Don't let's argue like this.\"\n\n\"You can't go, Bek.\"\n\n\"Of course I can. I have to. We promised to look out for each other from here on, remember? We made that promise only a day or so ago. That meant something to me. It should mean something to you. This is when we have to make it count. Please.\"\n\nQuentin stayed silent for a moment, looking so desperate that Alt Mer wouldn't have been surprised at anything he did. Then Quentin shook his head and put his hand over Bek's. \"All right. I don't like it, but all right. We'll both go.\"\n\nThey stood looking at each another for a moment, aware that Quentin's words had made final their commitment to undertake a task that on balance was far too dangerous even to consider. Yet it was only the latest in a long line, and their decision to take this one, as well, no longer had the edge to it that it might have had once. Gambling with their lives had become commonplace.\n\n\"We'll need a plan,\" Panax said.\n\nBig Red glanced over his shoulder in search of his sister. She was out of sight now, and he wished suddenly that they hadn't left things as they had between them.\n\n\"I have one,\" he said.\n\nThe Dwarf stared down into the leafy depths of the Crake. \"When do we do this?\"\n\nAlt Mer considered. The sun had eased westward, but most of the afternoon light still remained, and the sky was clear. It would not get dark for hours.\n\n\"We do it now,\" he said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Quentin Leah was not in the least mollified by Big Red's and Bek's attempts to justify Bek's foolhardy decision to brave the Graak. It did not matter what reasoning they used, the Highlander could not help feeling that this would end badly. He knew it wasn't his place to tell Bek not to come with them. He knew that none of them thought him any better qualified than they were to judge the nature of the danger they would face. If anyone had the right to do so, in fact, it was Redden Alt Mer, who had already done battle with the creature and lived to tell about it.\n\nNevertheless, Quentin saw himself as the one they should listen to. Panax and Alt Mer were both battle-tested and experienced in the Four Lands, but neither had survived the challenges in Parkasia that he had. He knew more of this world than they did. He had a better feel for it. More to the point, he had the use of magic that they did not, which in all probability was going to make the difference between whether they lived or died.\n\nBek had magic, too, but he had used it sparingly and only on creepers \u2014 on things metal and impersonal \u2014 and he had not done all that much of that. Mostly, he had gotten through because he'd had Truls Rohk to protect him and Walker to advise him. He had not fought against something like the Graak. It was not going to be the same experience for him, and Quentin wasn't at all sure his cousin was ready for it.\n\nAs they made their way along the bluff toward the pathway into the valley, he trailed the others, stewing in silence and thinking about what they were going to do and how best to protect them while they were doing it. If Big Red and two of his most seasoned Rovers had been dispatched so easily, there wasn't much hope that things would change without help from the Sword of Leah. He would use it, of course. He would employ it as he had against the Ard Patrinell wronk. Maybe it would even be enough. But he wasn't sure. He had no idea how strong the Graak was. He knew it was bigger than anything he had ever encountered in the Highlands, and that was cause enough for concern. He could not be certain how well his talisman would protect them until he saw for himself what he was up against. As with all magic, the effectiveness of the sword depended on the strength of the user \u2014 not only physical, but emotional, as well. Once, he had thought himself equal to anything. He had felt the power of the magic race through him like fire, and he hadn't thought there was anything he couldn't overcome.\n\nHe knew better now. He knew there were limits to everything, even the euphoric rush of the magic's summoning and the infusion of its power. Events and losses had drained him of his confidence. He had fought too long and too often to feel eager about this. He was bone-weary and sick at heart. He had watched those around him die too quickly, more often than not helpless to prevent it. He mourned them still \u2014 Tamis and Ard Patrinell, in particular. Their faces haunted him with a persistence that time and acceptance had failed to diminish.\n\nPerhaps that was the problem here, he thought. He was afraid of losing someone else he cared about. Bek, certainly, but Redden Alt Mer and Panax, as well. He did not think he could bear that. Not after what he had been through these past few weeks. Bek and he had agreed only a day ago that they must look out for each other as they had promised, that they needed to do so if they were to get home again safely. But the truth of the matter was that he was the one who should be shouldering the larger share of the burden. He was the older and more experienced. He was physically and emotionally tougher than Bek. It might be true that Bek's magic was the stronger, \u2014 Tamis had made it sound as if it was. But it was the strength of the user that mattered. Although Bek had gotten the Jerle Shannara through the Squirm and had managed to get control of his sister, neither of those achievements was going to help him in a confrontation with the Graak.\n\nQuentin did not deceive himself into thinking that his own strength would prove sufficient for what lay ahead. He thought only that of the two, he had the better chance of getting the job done.\n\nBut there was no way of convincing his three companions that this was so, especially Bek, so he would have to do what he could in spite of them. That meant putting himself at the forefront of whatever danger they encountered and giving the others a chance to escape when escape was the only reasonable option.\n\nGiven the nature of the plan that Big Red had devised, Quentin did not think it would be that difficult for him to arrange. They needed only to get close enough to the crate of diapson crystals to get three or four of them in hand. More would be better, but if recovery of just those few was all they could manage, that would be sufficient. Three would get the Jerle Shannara airborne once more. A lack of spares might prove a problem later on, but staying alive in the here and now was a much bigger and more immediate concern.\n\nSo the four would make for the clearing where the crate lay waiting, searching as they went for any sign of the Graak. With luck, it would have gone elsewhere by now, lured away by its need for food or by some other attraction. If it was gone, this would be easy. If it was lying in wait, then it was up to Quentin and Bek to slow it down long enough for Big Red and Panax to gather up the crystals and regain the trail leading up. Bek had only the magic of the wishsong to rely on, and he was honest enough to admit he was not certain of his command of it, or of its effectiveness. That meant Quentin, who was sure where the Sword of Leah was concerned, was the front line of defense for all of them.\n\nWith that in mind, and unable to press further his demand that his cousin remain behind, he had at least managed to persuade him to stay a few paces back on their advance into the rain forest to give Quentin room to intervene if they were attacked.\n\nNone of which changed the fact that he was feeling much the same way he had felt going into the ruins at Castledown. There had to be more to this business of the Graak than he was seeing. He was missing something. He didn't know what it was, but he knew it was there. His hunting skills and instincts were screaming at him that he was overlooking something obvious.\n\nThey reached the trailhead and started down. The valley swept away below them, a vast carpet of leaves and vines, all tangled in a profusion of greens and browns. From high up, the jungle had the appearance of a bottomless swamp where the unwary could sink and be lost with a single misstep. Even as they descended the switchback trail, Quentin experienced the sense of being swallowed.\n\nHalfway down, Redden Alt Mer stopped and turned back to them. \"We are a pretty good distance away from where we have to go,\" he advised quietly. \"This trail leads us further away from the crystals than the other. When we get to the valley floor, we'll have to backtrack. We'll stick close to the base of the cliff before starting into the trees.\" He pointed. \"Over there, that's about where the crystals were when I was down here before. So we'll turn in where that big tree leans against the cliff face.\"\n\nNo one said anything in response. There was nothing to say.\n\nThey started ahead once more, working their way carefully down the narrow pathway, pressing back against the rock to keep their footing, grasping scrub and grasses for balance. It was difficult going for Quentin because he was wearing his sword strapped across his back and the tip kept snagging on roots and branches. Alt Mer carried a short sword, and Bek carried nothing at all. Only Panax bore a more cumbersome weight in the form of his huge mace, but his squat, stocky form allowed him to better manage the task. Quentin suddenly wished he had thought to bring a bow and arrows, something he could strike out with from a distance. But it was too late to do anything about it now.\n\nOn the valley floor, they angled back along the base of the cliff, moving swiftly and silently through the tall grasses and around trees that grew close against the rocks. The terrain was still open, not yet overgrown by the rain forest, and Quentin could see through the trees for several hundred yards. He watched closely for anything that seemed out of place. But nothing moved and everything pretty much looked like it belonged. The Crake was a wall of foliage that concealed everything in its mottled pattern. Sunlight sprayed its vines and branches in thin streamers, but failed to penetrate with any success. Shadows lay over everything, layered in dusky tones, moving and shifting with the passing of the clouds overhead. It was impossible to be certain what they were seeing. They would be on top of anything hiding out there before they realized what it was.\n\nThey had gone some distance when Big Red held up one hand and pointed into the trees. This was where they would leave the shelter of the cliff wall. Ahead, the trees grew in thick clumps and the vines twisted about them like ropes. Clearings opened at sporadic intervals, large enough to admit something of size. On looking closer, Quentin could see that some of the trees had been pushed aside.\n\nAlt Mer led with Quentin following close behind, Bek third, and Panax trailing. They worked their way in a loose line through a morass of earthy smells and green color, the dampness in the air rising off the soggy earth with the heat, the silence deep and oppressive. No birds flew here. No animals slipped through the shadows. There were insects that buzzed and hummed, and nothing more. Shadows draped the way forward and the way back with the light touch of a snake's tongue. Quentin's uneasiness grew. Nothing about the Crake felt right. They were out of their element, intruders who didn't belong and fair game for whatever lived here.\n\nLess than ten minutes later, they found the remains of one of the Rovers who had come down with Alt Mer six days before. His body lay sprawled among shattered trees and flattened grasses. Little remained but head, bones, and some skin, \u2014 the flesh had been largely eaten away. Most of his clothing was missing. His face was twisted into a grimace of unspeakable horror and pain, a mask bereft of humanity. They went past the dead man quickly, eyes averted.\n\nThen Big Red brought them to a halt, hand raising quickly in warning. Ahead, a crate lay broken open, slats sticking skyward like bones. Quentin could not make out the contents, but assumed they were the diapson crystals. He looked around guardedly, testing the air and the feel of the jungle, searching out any predator that might lie in wait. He had learned to do this in the Highlands as a child, a sensory reading of the larger world that transcended what most men and women could manage. He took his time, casting about in all directions, trying to open himself to what might lie hidden.\n\nNothing.\n\nBut his instincts warned him to be careful, and he knew better than to discount them. Tamis was better at this than I am, he thought. If she were here, she would see what I am missing.\n\nRedden Alt Mer motioned for them to stay where they were, and he stepped from the trees into the clearing and started for the crystals. He moved steadily, but cautiously, and Quentin watched his eyes shift from place to place. The Highlander scanned the jungle wall.\n\nStill nothing.\n\nWhen he reached the remains of the crate, the Rover Captain signaled over his shoulder for the others to join him. Spreading out, they moved across the clearing in a crouch. Quentin and Panax had their weapons drawn, ready for use. When they reached Alt Mer, Panax knelt to help the Rover extract the crystals while Quentin and Bek stood watch. The jungle was a silent green wall, but Quentin felt hidden eyes watching. He glanced at Bek. His cousin seemed oddly calm, almost at peace. Sweat glistened on his forehead, but it was from the heat. He held himself erect, head lifted, eyes casting about the concealment of the trees in a steady sweep.\n\nAlt Mer had extracted two of the crystals and was working on a third when a low hiss sounded from somewhere back in the trees. All four men froze, staring in the direction of the sound. The hiss came again, closer, deeper, and with it came the sound of something moving purposefully.\n\n\"Quick,\" Alt Mer said, handing two of the crystals to Panax. The crystals were less than two feet long, but they were heavy. Panax grunted with the weight of his load as he started away. Big Red extracted the fourth crystal from the crate, making more noise than he intended, but unwilling to work more slowly. The hiss sounded again, closer still. Something was approaching.\n\nWith two crystals cradled in his arms, Big Red backed across the clearing, eyes on the jungle wall. Quentin Leah and Bek flanked him, the Highlander motioning for his cousin to fall back, his cousin ignoring him. The tops of the trees were shaking now, as if a wind had risen to stir them. Quentin had no illusions. The Graak was coming.\n\nThey had gained the shelter of a stand of cedar ringed by scrub brush, perhaps a dozen feet beyond the edge of the clearing, when the monster emerged. It pushed through the trees and vines with a sudden surge, a massive dragon weighing thousands of pounds and measuring more than fifty feet in length. Its body was the color of the jungle and glistened dully where the sunlight reflected off its slick hide. Horns and spikes jutted in clusters from its head and spine, and a thick wattle of skin hung from its throat. Claws the size of forearms dug into the dank earth, and rows of teeth flashed when its tongue snaked from its maw.\n\nSquatting on four stubby, powerful legs, the Graak swung its spiky head left and right in search of what had caught its attention. Alt Mer froze in place, and Quentin and Bek followed his lead. Perhaps the creature wouldn't see them.\n\nThe Graak cast about aimlessly, then began to sniff the ground, long tail thrashing against the foliage. Quentin held his breath. This thing was huge. He had felt how the ground trembled when it lumbered out of the trees. He had seen how it shouldered past those massive hardwoods as if they were deadwood. If they had to do battle with it, they were in a world of trouble.\n\nThe Graak lumbered up to the crystals and sniffed at them, then put one massive foot atop the crate and crushed it. Hissing again, it turned away from them, searching the trees in the opposite direction.\n\nAlt Mer caught Quentin's attention. Now, he mouthed silently.\n\nSlowly, carefully, they began to inch their way backwards. Bek, seeing what they were attempting, did the same. Turned away, sniffing the wind, the Graak remained unaware of them. Don't trip, Quentin thought to himself. Don't stumble. The jungle was so silent he could hear the sound of his own breathing.\n\nThe Graak turned back again, its blunt snout swinging slowly about. As one, they froze. They were far enough back in the trees that they could barely see the creature's head above the tall grasses. Perhaps it couldn't see them either.\n\nThe reptilian eyes lidded, and the long tongue flicked out. It studied the jungle a moment more, then turned and shambled back the way it had come. Within seconds, it was gone.\n\nWhen it was clear to all that it was not coming back right away, they started swiftly through the trees. Quentin was astonished. He had thought they had no chance of escaping undetected. His every instinct had warned against it. Yet somehow the creature had failed to spy them out, and now they were within minutes of reaching the cliff wall and beginning the climb back out.\n\nThey caught up with Panax, who was not all that far ahead yet. The Dwarf nodded wordlessly.\n\n\"That was close!\" Bek whispered with a grin.\n\n\"Don't talk about it,\" Quentin said.\n\n\"You thought it had us,\" the other persisted.\n\nQuentin shot him an angry glance. He didn't like talking about luck. It had a way of turning around on you when you did.\n\n\"Back home,\" Bek said, breathing heavily from his exertion, \"if it was a boar, say, we would have looked for the mate, too.\"\n\nQuentin almost stumbled as he turned quickly to look at him. The mate? \"No,\" he whispered, realizing what he had missed, fear ripping through him. He pushed ahead of Bek, running now to catch up to Redden Alt Mer and Panax. \"Big Red!\" he hissed sharply. \"Wait!\"\n\nAt the sound of his name, the Rover came about, causing the Dwarf to slow and turn, as well, which probably saved both their lives. In the next instant, a second Graak charged out of the trees ahead and bore down on them.\n\nThere was no time to stop and think about what to do. There was only time to respond, and Quentin Leah was already in motion when the attack came. Never breaking stride, he flew past Big Red and Panax, the Sword of Leah lifted and gripped in both hands. The magic was already surging down the blade to the handle and into his hands and arms. He went right at the Graak, flinging himself past the snapping jaws as they reached for him, rolling beneath its belly and coming back to his feet to thrust the sword deep into its side. The magic flared in an explosion of light and surged into the Graak. The monster hissed in pain and rage and twisted about to get its teeth into its attacker. But Quentin, who had learned something about fighting larger creatures in his battles with the creepers and the Patrinell wronk, sidestepped the attack, scrambled out of the Graak's line of sight, and struck at it again, this time severing a tendon in the creature's hind leg. Again the Graak swung about, tearing at the earth with its claws, dragging its damaged rear leg like a club, its tail lashing out wildly.\n\n\"Run!\" Bek yelled to Panax and Big Red.\n\nThey did so at once, bearing the crystals away from the battle and back toward the cliff wall. But Bek turned to fight.\n\nThere was no chance for Quentin to do anything about that. He was too busy trying to stay alive, and the shift of the Graak's body as it sought to pin him to the earth blocked his view of his cousin. But he heard the call Bek emitted, something shrill and rough edged, predatory and dark, born of nightmares known only to him or to those who worked his kind of magic. The Graak jerked its head in response, clearly bothered by the sound, and twisted about in search of the caller, giving Quentin a chance to strike at it again. The Highlander rolled under it a second time and thrust the blade of his talisman deep into the chest, somewhere close to where he thought its heart must be, the magic surging out of him like a river.\n\nThe Graak coughed gouts of dark blood and gasped in shock. A vital organ had been breached. Covered in mud and sweat and smelling of the damp, fetid earth, Quentin rolled free again. Blood laced his hands and face, and he saw that one arm was torn open and his right side lacerated. Somehow he had been injured without realizing it. Trying to stay out of the Graak's line of sight he ran toward its tail, looking for a fresh opening. The Graak was thrashing wildly, writhing in fury as it felt the killing effects of the magic begin to work through it. Another solid blow, Quentin judged, should finish it.\n\nBut then the creature did the unexpected. It bolted for Bek, all at once and without even looking his way first. Bek stood his ground, using the power of the wishsong to strike back, but the Graak didn't even seem to hear it. It rumbled on without slowing, without pause, tearing up the earth with its clawed feet, dragging its damaged hind leg, hissing with rage and madness into the steamy jungle air.\n\n\"Bekl\" Quentin screamed in dismay.\n\nHe flew after the Graak with complete disregard for his own safety, and caught up to the creature when it was only yards away from his cousin. He swung the Sword of Leah with every last ounce of strength he possessed, the magic exploding forth as he severed the tendons of the hind leg that still functioned. The Graak went down instantly, both rear legs immobilized, its useless hindquarters dragging it to an abrupt stop. But as it fought to keep going, to get at Bek, it rolled right into the Highlander, who, unlike Bek, did not have time to get out of the way. Though Quentin threw himself aside as the twisting, thrashing body collapsed, he could not get all the way clear, and the Graak's heavy tail hammered him into the earth.\n\nIt felt as if a mountain had fallen on top of him. Bones snapped and cracked, and he was pressed so far down into the earth that he couldn't breathe. He would have screamed if there had been a way to do so, but his face was buried in six inches of mud. The weight of the Graak rolled off him, then back on again, then off again. He managed to get his head out of the mire, to take a quick breath of air, then to flatten himself as the monster rolled over him yet again, this time missing him as it twisted back on itself in an effort to rise.\n\n\"Quentin, don't move!\" he heard Bek cry out.\n\nAs if he could, he thought dully. The pain was beginning to surge through him in waves. He was a dead man, he knew. No one could survive the sort of damage he had just sustained. He was a dead man, but his body hadn't gotten the message yet.\n\nHands reached under him and rolled him over. The pain was excruciating. \"Shades!\" he gasped as bones grated and blood poured from his mouth.\n\n\"Hang on!\" Bek pleaded. \"Please, Quentin!\"\n\nHis cousin pulled him to his feet, then led him away. Somewhere close by, the Graak was in its death throes. Somewhere not quite so close, its mate was coming. He couldn't see any of this, but he could be sure it was happening. He stumbled on through a curtain of bright red anguish and hazy consciousness. Any moment now, he would collapse. He fought against that with frantic determination. If he went down, Bek would not be able to get him away. If he went down, he was finished.\n\nOh well, he thought with a sort of fuzzy disinterest, he was finished anyway.\n\n\"Sorry, Bek,\" he said, or maybe he only tried to say it, \u2014 he couldn't be sure. \"Sorry.\"\n\nThen a wave of darkness engulfed him, and everything disappeared." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "It was dark when Bek finally emerged from belowdecks on the Jerle Shannara, walked to the bow, and looked up at the night sky. The moon was a tiny crescent directly over the mountain they were backed against, newly formed and barely a presence in the immensity of the sky's vast sweep. Stars sprinkled the indigo firmament like grains of brilliant white sand scattered on black velvet. He had been told once that men had traveled to those stars in the Old World, that they had built and ridden in ships that could navigate the sky as he had the waters of the Blue Divide. It seemed impossible. But then most wonderful things did until someone accomplished them.\n\nHe hadn't been on deck for more than a few moments when Rue Meridian appeared beside him, coming up so silently that he didn't hear her approach and realized she was there only when she placed a hand over his own.\n\n\"Have you slept?\" she asked.\n\nHe shook his head. Sleep was out of the question.\n\n\"How is he?\"\n\nHe thought about it a moment, staring skyward. \"Holding on by his fingernails and slipping.\"\n\nThey had managed to get Quentin Leah out of the Crake alive, but only barely. With Bek's help, he had stumbled to within a hundred yards of the trail before collapsing. By then he had lost so much blood that when they had carried him out they could barely get a grip on his clothing. Rue Meridian knew something of treating wounds from her time on the Prekkendorran, so after tying off the severed arteries with tourniquets, she had stitched and bandaged him as best she could. The patching of the surface wounds was not difficult, nor the setting of the broken bones. But there were internal injuries with which she did not have the skill to deal, so that much of the care Quentin needed could not be provided. Healing would have to come from within, and everyone knew that any chance of that happening here was small.\n\nTheir best bet was to either get him to a healing center in the Four Lands or to find a local Healer. The former was out of the question. There simply wasn't time. As for the latter, the Rindge offered the only possibility of help. Panax had gone to see what they could do, but had returned empty-handed. When a Rindge was in Quentin's condition, his people could do no more for him than the company of the Jerle Shannara could for Quentin.\n\n\"Is he alone?\" Rue asked Bek.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Panax is watching him.\"\n\n\"Why don't you try to sleep for a few hours? There isn't anything more you can do.\"\n\n\"I can be with him. I can be there for him. I'll go back down in just a moment.\"\n\n\"Panax will look after him.\"\n\n\"Panax isn't the one he counts on.\"\n\nShe didn't reply to that. She just stood there beside him, keeping him company, staring up at the stars. The Crake was a sea of impenetrable black within the cup of the mountains, silent and stripped of definition. Bek took a moment to look down at it, chilled by doing so, the memories of the afternoon still raw and terrible, endlessly repeating in his mind. He couldn't get past them, not even now when he was safely away from their cause.\n\n\"You're exhausted,\" she said finally.\n\nHe nodded in agreement.\n\n\"You have to sleep, Bek.\"\n\n\"I left his sword down there.\" He pointed toward the valley.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"His sword. I was so busy trying to get him out that I forgot about it entirely. I just left it behind.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"It won't go anywhere. We can get it back tomorrow, when it's light.\"\n\n\"I'll get it back,\" he insisted. \"I'm the one who left it. It's my responsibility.\"\n\nHe pictured it lying in the earth by the dead Graak, its smooth surface covered with blood and dirt. Had it been broken by the weight of the monster rolling over it, broken as Quentin was? He hadn't noticed, hadn't even glanced at it. A talisman of such power, and he hadn't even thought about it. He'd just thought about Quentin, and he'd done that too late for it to matter.\n\n\"Why don't you stop being so hard on yourself?\" she asked quietly. \"Why don't you ease up a bit?\"\n\n\"Because he's dying,\" he said fiercely, angrily. \"Quentin's dying, and it's my fault.\"\n\nShe looked at him. \"Your fault?\"\n\n\"If I hadn't insisted on going down there with him, if I hadn't been so stubborn about this whole business, then maybe \u2014\n\n\"Bek, stop it!\" she snapped at him. He looked over at her, surprised by the rebuke. Her hand tightened on his. \"It doesn't help anything for you to talk like that. It happened, and no one's to blame for it. Everyone did the best they could in a dangerous situation. That's all anyone can ask. That's all anyone can expect. Let it alone.\"\n\nThe words stung, but no more so than the look he saw in her eyes. She held his gaze, refusing to let him turn away. \"Losing people we love, friends and even family, is a consequence of going on journeys like this one. Don't you understand that? Didn't you understand it when you agreed to come? Is this suddenly a surprise? Did you think that nothing could happen to Quentin? Or to you?\"\n\nHe shook his head in confusion, cowed. \"I don't know. I guess maybe not.\"\n\nShe exhaled sharply and her tone of voice softened. \"It wasn't your fault. Not any more so than it was my brother's or Panax's or Walker's or whoever's. It was just something that happened, a price exacted in consequence of a risk taken.\"\n\nThe consequence of a risk. As simple as that. You took a risk, and the person you were closest to paid the price. He began to cry, all the pent-up frustration and guilt and sadness releasing at once. He couldn't help himself. He didn't want to break down in front of her \u2014 didn't want her to see that \u2014 but it happened before he could find a way to stop it.\n\nShe pulled him against her, enfolding him like an injured child. Her arms came about him and she rocked him gently, cooing soft words, stroking his back with her hand. The hard wooden rods of the splint on her left forearm were digging into his back.\n\n\"Oh, Bek. It's all right. You can cry with me. No one will see. Let me hold you until.\" She pressed him into the softness of her body. \"Poor Bek. So much responsibility all at once. So much hurt. It isn't fair, is it?\"\n\nHe heard some of what she said, but comfort came not from the words themselves but from the sound of her voice and the feel of her arms wrapped about him. Everything released, and she was there to absorb it, to take it into herself and away from him.\n\n\"Just hold on to me, Bek. Just let me take care of you. Everything will be all right.\"\n\nShe had said he owed it to her to share the losses she had suffered. Losses as great as his own. Furl Hawken. Her Rover companions. He was reminded of it suddenly and wanted to give back something of the comfort she was giving to him.\n\nHe recovered his composure, and his arms went around her. \"Rue, I'm sorry...\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, putting her fingers over his mouth, stopping him from saying anything more. \"I don't want to hear it. I don't want you to talk.\"\n\nShe replaced her fingers with her mouth and kissed him. She didn't kiss him softly or gently, but with urgency and passion. He couldn't mistake what was happening or what it meant, and he didn't want to. It took him only a moment, and then he was returning her kiss. When he did, he forgot everything but the heat she aroused in him. Kissing her was wild and impossible. It made him worry that something was wrong, but he couldn't decide what it was because everything felt right. She ran her hands all over him, pushing him up against the ship's railing until he was pinned there, fastening her mouth on his with such hunger that he could scarcely breathe.\n\nWhen she broke away finally, he wasn't sure who was the most surprised. From the look on her face she was, but he knew what he was feeling inside. They stared at each other in a kind of awed silence, and then she laughed \u2014 a low, sudden growl that brought such radiance to her face that he was surprised all over again.\n\n\"That was unexpected,\" she said.\n\nHe couldn't speak.\n\n\"I want to do it some more. I want to do it a lot.\"\n\nHe grinned in spite of himself, in spite of everything. \"Me, too.\"\n\n\"Soon, Bek.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"I think I love you,\" she said. She laughed again. \"There, I said it. What do you think of that?\"\n\nShe reached out with her good arm and touched his lips with her fingers, then turned and walked away.\n\nWhen he went inside the ship to the Captain's quarters to see about Quentin, he was still in shock from his encounter with Rue.\n\nPanax must have seen something in his face when Bek entered the room, because he immediately asked, \"Are you all right?\"\n\nBek nodded. He was not all right, but he had no intention of talking about it just yet. It was too new to share, still so strange in his own mind that he needed time to get used to it. He needed time just to accept that it was true. Rue Meridian was in love with him. That's what she had said. I think I love you. He tried the words out in his mind, and they sounded so ridiculous that he almost laughed aloud.\n\nOn the other hand, the way she had kissed him was real enough, and he wasn't going to forget how that felt anytime soon.\n\nDid he love her in turn? He hadn't stopped to ask himself that. He hadn't even considered it before now because the idea of her reciprocating had seemed impossible. It was enough that they were friends. But he did love her. He had always loved her in some sense, from the first moment he had seen her. Now, kissed and held and told of her feelings, he loved her so desperately he could hardly stand it.\n\nHe forced himself to shift his thinking away from her.\n\n\"How is he doing?\" he asked, nodding toward Quentin.\n\nPanax shrugged. \"The same. He just sleeps. I don't like the way he looks, though.\"\n\nNeither did Bek. Quentin's skin was an unhealthy pasty color. His pulse was faint and his breathing labored and shallow. He was dying by inches, and there was nothing any of them could do about it but wait for the inevitable. Already emotionally overwrought, Bek found himself beginning to cry anew and he turned away selfconsciously.\n\nPanax rose and came over to him. He put one rough hand on Bek's shoulder and gently squeezed. \"First Truls Rohk and now the Highlander. This hasn't been easy,\" he said.\n\nNo.\n\nHis hand dropped away, and he walked over to where Grianne knelt on a pallet in the corner, eyes open as she stared straight ahead. The Dwarf shook his head in puzzlement. \"What do you suppose she's thinking?\"\n\nBek wiped away the last of his tears. \"Nothing we want to know about, I'd guess.\"\n\n\"Probably not. What a mess. This whole journey, from start to finish. A mess.\" He didn't seem to know where else to go with his thoughts, so he went silent for a moment. \"I wish I'd never come. I wouldn't have, if I'd known what it was going to be like.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose any of us would.\" Bek walked over to his sister and knelt in front of her. He touched her cheek with his fingers as he always did to let her know he was there. \"Can you hear me, Grianne?\" he asked softly.\n\n\"I don't know what I'm doing here anymore,\" Panax continued. \"I don't know that there's a reason for any of us being here. We haven't done anything but get ourselves killed and injured. Even the Druid. I didn't think anything would ever happen to him. But then I didn't think anything could happen to Truls, either. Now they're both gone.\" He shook his head.\n\n\"When I get home,\" Bek said, still looking at Grianne's pale, empty face, \"I'll stay there. I won't leave again. Not like this.\"\n\nHe thought again about Rue Meridian. What would happen to her when they got back in the Four Lands? She was a Rover, born to the Rover life, a traveler and an adventurer. She was nothing like him. She wouldn't want to come back to the Highlands and stay home for the rest of her life. She wouldn't want anything to do with him then.\n\n\"I've been thinking about home,\" Panax said quietly. He knelt down beside Bek, his bearded face troubled. \"I never cared all that much for my own. Depo Bent was just the village where I ended up. I have no family, just a few friends, none of them close. I've traveled all my life, but I don't know if there's anything left in the Four Lands that I want to see. Without Truls and Walker to keep me busy, I don't know that there's anything back there for me.\" He paused. \"I think maybe I'll stay here.\"\n\nBek looked at him. \"Stay here in Parkasia?\"\n\nThe Dwarf shrugged. \"I like the Rindge. They're a good people and they're not so different from me. Their language is similar to mine. I kind of like this country, too, except for things like the Graak and Antrax. But the rest of it looks interesting. I want to explore it. There's a lot of it none of us have seen, all of the interior beyond the mountains, where Obat and his people are going.\"\n\n\"You would be trapped here, if you changed your mind. You wouldn't have a way to get back.\" Bek tried the words out on the Dwarf, then grimaced at the way they sounded.\n\nPanax chuckled softly. \"I don't see it that way, Bek. When you make a choice, you accept the consequences going in. Like coming on this journey. Only maybe this time things will turn out a little better for me. I'm not that young. I don't have all that much life left in me. I don't think I would mind finishing it out in Parkasia, rather than in the Four Lands.\"\n\nHow different the Dwarf was from himself, Bek thought in astonishment. Not to want to go home again, but to stay in a strange land on the chance that it might prove interesting. He couldn't do that. But he understood the Dwarf's reasoning. If you had spent most of your life as an explorer and a guide, living outside cities and towns, living on your own, staying here wouldn't seem so strange. How much different were the mountains of the Aleuthra Ark, after all, from those of the Wolfsktaag?\n\n\"Do you think you can manage without me?\" Panax asked, his face strangely serious.\n\nBek knew what Panax wanted to hear. \"I think you'd just get in the way,\" he answered. \"Anyway, I think you've earned the right to do what you want. If you want to stay, you should.\"\n\nThey were nothing without their freedom, nothing without their right to choose. They had given themselves to a common cause in coming with Walker in search of the Old World books of magic, but that was finished. What they needed to do now was to help each other find a way home again, whether home was to be found in the Four Lands or elsewhere.\n\n\"Why don't you get some sleep,\" he said to the Dwarf. \"I'll sit with Quentin now. I want to, really. I need to be with him.\"\n\nPanax rose and put his hand on Bek's shoulder a second time, an act that was meant to convey both his support and his gratitude. Then he walked through the shadows and from the room. Bek stared after him a moment, wondering how Panax would find his new life, if it would bring him the peace and contentment that the old apparently had not. He wondered what it would feel like to be so disassociated from everyone and everything that the thought of leaving it all behind wasn't disturbing. He couldn't know that, and in truth he hoped he would never find out.\n\nHe turned back to Quentin, looking at him as he lay white-faced and dying. Shades, shades, he felt so helpless. He took a deep, steadying breath and exhaled slowly. He couldn't stand this anymore. He couldn't stand watching him slip away. He had to do something, even if it was the wrong thing, so that he could know that at least he had tried. All of the usual possibilities for healing were out of the question. He had to try something else.\n\nHe remembered from the stories of the Druids that the wishsong had the ability to heal. It hadn't been used that way often because it required great skill. He didn't have that skill or the experience that might lend it to him, but he couldn't worry about that here. Brin Ohmsford had used the magic once upon a time to heal Rone Leah. If an Ohmsford had used the magic to save the life of a Leah once, there was no reason an Ohmsford couldn't do so again.\n\nIt was a risky undertaking. Foolish, maybe. But Quentin was not going to live if something wasn't done to help him, and there wasn't anything else left to try.\n\nBek walked over to the bed and sat next to his cousin. He watched him for a moment, then took his hand in his own and held it. He wished he had something more to work with than experimentation. He wished he had directions of some kind, a place to begin, an idea of how the magic worked, anything. But there was nothing of the sort at hand, and no help for it.\n\n\"I'll do my best, Quentin,\" he said softly. \"I'll do everything I can. Please come back to me.\"\n\nThen he called up the magic in a slow unfurling of words and music and began to sing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Because he had never done this before and had no real idea of how to do it now, Bek Ohmsford did not rush himself. He proceeded carefully, taking one small step at a time, watching Quentin closely to make certain that the magic of the wishsong was not having an adverse affect. He called up the magic in a slow humming that rose in his chest where it warmed and throbbed softly. He kept hold of Quentin's hands, wanting to maintain physical contact in order to give himself a chance to further judge if things were going as intended.\n\nWhen the level of magic was sufficient, he sent a small probe into Quentin's ravaged body to measure the damage. Red shards of pain ricocheted back through him, and he withdrew the probe quickly. Fair enough. Investigating a damaged body without adequate self-protection was not a good idea. Shielding himself, he tried again and ran into a wall of resistance. Still humming, he tried coming in through Quentin's mind, taking a reading on what his cousin was thinking. He ran into another blank wall. Quentin's mind seemed to have shut down, or at least it was not giving off anything Bek could decipher.\n\nFor a moment, he was stumped. Both attempts at getting to where he could do some good had failed, and he wasn't sure what he should try next. What he wanted to do was to get close enough to one specific injury to see what the magic could do to heal it. But if he couldn't break down the barriers that Quentin had thrown up to protect himself, he wasn't going to be able to do anything.\n\nHe tried a more general approach then, a wrapping of Quentin in the magic's veil, a covering over of his mind and body both. It had the desired effect, \u2014 Quentin immediately calmed and his breathing became steadier and smoother. Bek worked his way over his cousin's still form in search of entry, thinking that as his body relaxed, Quentin might lower his protective barriers. Slowly, slowly he touched and stroked with the magic, his singing smoothing away wrinkles of pain and discomfort, working toward the deeper, more serious injuries.\n\nIt didn't work. He could not get past the surface of Quentin's body, even when he brushed up against the open wounds beneath the bandages, which should have offered him easy access.\n\nHe was so frustrated that he broke off his attempts completely. Sitting silently, motionlessly beside Quentin, he continued to hold his cousin's hand, not willing to break that contact, as well. He tried to think of what else he could do. Something about the way in which he was approaching the problem was throwing up barriers. He knew he could force his way into Quentin's body, could break down the protective walls that barred his way. But he thought, as well, that the consequence of such a harsh intrusion might be fatal to a system already close to collapse. What was needed was tact and care, a gentle offering to heal that would be embraced and not resisted.\n\nWhat would it take to make that happen?\n\nHe tried again, this time returning to what was familiar to him about the magic. He sang to Quentin as he had sung to Grianne \u2014 of their lives together as boys, of the Highlands of Leah, of family and friends, and of adventures shared. He sang stories to his cousin, thinking to use them as a means of lessening resistance to his ministrations. Now and then, he would attempt a foray into his cousin's body and mind, taking a story in a direction that might lend itself to a welcoming, the two of them friends still and always.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe changed the nature of his song to one of revelation and warning. This is the situation, Quentin, he sang. You are very sick and in need of healing. But you are fighting me. I need you to help me instead. I need you to open to me and let me use the wishsong to mend you. Please, Quentin, listen to me. Listen.\n\nIf his cousin heard, he didn't do anything to indicate it and did nothing to give Bek any further access. He simply lay on his bed beneath a light covering and fought to stay alive on his own terms. He remained unconscious and unresponsive and, like Grianne, locked away where Bek could not reach him.\n\nBek kept at it. He fought to use the magic for the better part of the next hour, maintaining contact through the touching of their hands while trying to heal with his song. He came at the problem from every direction he could imagine, even when he suspected that what he was trying was futile. He attacked with such determination that he completely lost track of everything but what he was doing.\n\nAll to no avail.\n\nFinally, exhausted and frustrated, he gave up. He rocked back, put his face in his hands, and began to sob. All this crying felt foolish and weak, but he was so weary from his efforts that it was an impulsive, unavoidable response. It happened in spite of his efforts to stop it, boiling over in a rush that left him convulsed and shaking. He had failed. There was nothing left for him to try, nowhere else for him to go.\n\n\"Poor little baby boy,\" a voice soothed in his ear, and slender arms came around his neck and pulled him close.\n\nAt first he thought it was Rue Meridian, come down to the cabin when he wasn't looking. But he realized almost before he had completed the thought that it wasn't her voice. Gray robes fell across his face as he twisted his head for a quick look.\n\nIt was Grianne.\n\nHe was so shocked that for a moment he just sat there and let her hold him. \"Little boy, little boy, don't be sad.\" She was speaking not in her adult voice, but with the voice of a child. \"It's all right, baby Bek. Your big sister is here. I won't leave you again, I promise. I won't go away again. I'm so sorry, so sorry.\"\n\nHer hands stroked his face, gentle and soothing. She kissed his forehead as she cooed to him, touching him as if he were a baby.\n\nHe glanced up again, looking into her eyes. She was looking back at him, seeing him for the first time since he had found her in Castledown. Gone were the vacant stare and the empty expression. She had come back from wherever she had been hiding. She was awake.\n\n\"Grianne!\" he gasped in relief.\n\n\"No, no, baby, don't cry,\" she replied at once, touching his lips with her fingers. \"There, there, your Grianne can make it all better. Tell me what's wrong, little one.\"\n\nBek caught his breath. She was seeing him, but not as he really was, only as she remembered him.\n\nHer gaze shifted suddenly. \"Oh, what's this? Is your puppy sick, Bek? Did he eat something bad? Did he hurt himself? Poor little puppy.\"\n\nShe was looking right at Quentin. Bek was so taken aback by this that he just stared at her. He vaguely remembered a puppy from when he was very little, a black mixed breed that trotted around the house and slept in the sun. He remembered nothing else about it, not even its name.\n\n\"No wonder you're crying.\" She smoothed Bek's hair back gently. \"Your puppy is sick, and you can't make him better. It's all right, Bek. Grianne can help. We'll use my special medicine to take away the pain.\"\n\nShe released him and moved to the head of the bed to stand looking down at Quentin. \"So much pain,\" she whispered. \"I don't know if I can make you well again. Sometimes even the special medicine can't help. Sometimes nothing can.\"\n\nA chill settled through Bek as he realized that he might be mistaken about her. Maybe she wasn't his sister at all, but the Ilse Witch. If she was thinking like the witch and not Grianne, if she had not come all the way back to being his sister, she might cure Quentin the way she had cured so many of her problems. She might kill him.\n\n\"No, Grianne!\" he cried out, reaching for her.\n\n\"Uh-uh-uh, baby,\" she cautioned, taking hold of his wrists. She was much stronger than he would have thought, and he could not shake free. \"Let Grianne do what she has to do to help.\"\n\nAlready she was using the magic. Bek felt it wash over him, felt it bind him in velvet chains and hold him fast. In seconds, he was paralyzed. She eased him back in place, humming softly as she moved once more to the head of the bed and Quentin Leah.\n\n\"Poor puppy,\" she repeated, reaching down to stroke the Highlander's face. \"You are so sick, in such pain. What happened to you? You are all broken up inside. Did something hurt you?\"\n\nBek was beside himself. He could neither move nor speak. He watched helplessly, unable to intervene and terrified of what was going to happen if he didn't.\n\nShe was speaking to him again, her voice suddenly older, more mature. \"Oh, Bek, I've let you down so badly. I left you, and I didn't come back. I should have, and I didn't. It was so wrong of me, Bek.\"\n\nShe was crying. His sister was crying. It was astonishing, and Bek would have felt a sense of joy if he hadn't been so frightened that it wasn't his sister speaking. He fought to say something, to stop her, but no words would come out.\n\n\"Little puppy,\" she whispered sadly, and her hands reached down to cup Quentin's face. \"Let me make you all better.\"\n\nThen she leaned down and kissed him gently on the lips, drawing his breath into her body.\n\nRue Meridian was sleeping in a makeshift canvas hammock she had strung between the foremast and the bow railing, lost in a dream about cormorants and puffins, when she felt Bek's hand on her shoulder and awoke. She saw the look on his face and immediately asked, \"What's wrong?\"\n\nIt was a difficult look to decipher. His face was troubled and amazed, both at once, \u2014 it reflected uncertainty mixed with wonder. He appeared oddly adrift, as if he was there almost by accident. Her first thought was that his coming was a delayed reaction to what she had told him hours earlier. She sat up quickly, swung her legs over the side of the hammock, and stood. \"Bek, what's happened?\"\n\n\"Grianne woke up. I don't know why. The magic, maybe. I was using it to try to help Quentin, to heal him the way Brin Ohmsford did Rone Leah once. Or maybe it was when I cried. I was so frustrated and tired, I just broke down.\"\n\nHe exhaled sharply. \"She spoke to me. She called me by name. But she wasn't herself, not grown up, but a child, speaking in a child's voice, calling me 'poor baby boy, little Bek,' and telling me not to cry.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, slow down,\" she said, taking hold of him by his shoulders. \"Come over here.\"\n\nShe led him to the bow and sat him down in the shadow of the starboard ram where the curve of the horn formed a shelter at its joining with the deck. She sat facing him, pulled her knees up to her breast, and wrapped her arms around her legs. \"Okay, tell me the rest. She came awake and she spoke to you. What happened next?\"\n\n\"You won't believe this,\" he whispered, clearly not believing it himself. \"She healed him. She used her magic, and she healed him. I thought she was going to kill him. She called him a puppy \u2014 I guess that's what she thought he was. I tried to stop her, but she did something to me with the magic so that I couldn't move or speak. Then she started on him, and I was sure she meant to help him by killing him, to take away his pain and suffering by taking his life. That's what the Ilse Witch would have done, and I was afraid she was still the witch.\"\n\nRue leaned forward, hugging herself. \"How could she heal him, Bek? He was all broken up inside. Half his blood was gone.\"\n\n\"The magic can do that. It can generate healing. I watched it happen to Quentin. He's not completely well yet. He isn't even awake. But I saw his color change right in front of me. I heard his breathing steady and, afterwards, when I could move again, felt that his pulse was stronger, too. Some of his wounds, the ones you bandaged, have closed completely.\"\n\n\"Shades,\" she whispered, trying to picture it.\n\nHe leaned back into the curve of the horn and looked at the night sky. \"When she was done, she came back over to me and stroked my cheek and held me. I could move again, but I didn't want to interrupt what she was doing because I thought it might be helping her. I spoke her name, but she didn't answer. She just rocked me and began to cry.\"\n\nHis eyes shifted to find hers. \"She kept saying how sorry she was, over and over. She said it would never happen again. Leaving me, she said. She wouldn't leave me like before, not ever. All this in her little girl's voice, her child's voice.\"\n\nHis eyes closed. \"I just wanted to help her, to let her know I understood. I tried to hold her. When I did, she went right back into herself. She quit talking or moving. She quit seeing me. She was just like before. I couldn't do anything to bring her back. I tried, but she wouldn't respond.\" He shook his head. \"So I left her and came to find you. I had to tell someone. I'm sorry I woke you.\"\n\nShe reached out for him, pulled him close, and kissed him on the lips. \"I'm glad you did.\" She stood and drew him up with her. \"Come lie down with me, Bek.\"\n\nShe took him back to the canvas hammock and bundled him into it beside her. She pressed herself against him and wrapped him in her arms. She was still getting used to the idea that he meant so much to her. Her admission of this to him had surprised her, but she'd had no regrets about it afterwards. Bek Ohmsford made her feel complete, it was as if by finding him, she had found a missing part of herself. He made her feel good, and it had been a while since anyone had made her feel like that.\n\nThey lay without moving for a while, without talking, just holding each other and listening to the silence. But she wanted more, wanted to give him more, and she began kissing him. She kissed him for a long time, working her way over his mouth and eyes and nose, down his neck and chest. He tried to kiss her, as well, but she wouldn't let him, wanting everything to come from her. When he seemed at peace, she lay back again, placing his head in the crook of her shoulder. He fell asleep for a time, and she held him while he dreamed.\n\nI love you, Bek Obmsford. She mouthed the words silently. She thought it incredibly odd she should fall in love with someone under such strange circumstances. It seemed inconvenient and vaguely ridiculous. Hawk would have been shocked. He never thought she would fall in love with anyone. Too independent, too tough-minded. She never needed anyone, never wanted anyone. She was complete by herself. She understood his thinking. It was what she had believed, as well, until now.\n\nShe put her hands inside of Bek's clothing and touched his skin. She placed her fingers over his heart. Counting the beats in her head, she closed her eyes and dozed.\n\nWhen she woke again, he was still sleeping. Overhead, the sky was lightening with the approach of dawn.\n\n\"It's almost daylight,\" she whispered in his ear, waking him.\n\nHe nodded into her shoulder. He was silent for a moment, shaking off the last of his sleep. She could feel his breath on her neck and the strength in his arms.\n\n\"When we get back to the Four Lands,\" he began, and stopped. \"When this is all over, and we have to decide where we \u2014\"\n\n\"Bek, no,\" she said gently, but firmly. \"Don't talk about what's going to happen later. Don't worry about it. We're too far away for it to matter yet. Leave it alone.\"\n\nHe went silent again, pressed against her. She brushed back her hair where it had fallen into her face. His eyes followed the movement with interest, and he reached out to help. \"I have to go down into the Crake,\" he said. \"I have to get Quentin's sword back. I want it to be there for him when he wakes up.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"All right.\"\n\n\"Will you look after Grianne for me while I'm gone?\"\n\nShe smiled and kissed him on the lips. \"I can't, Bek.\" She touched the tip of his nose. \"I'm going with you.\"\n\nWhen she said it, Bek panicked. He kept the panic in check on the surface, but inside, where his emotions could pretty much do whatever they wanted to, he was a mess. All he could think about was how afraid he was for her, how frightened that something bad would happen. It had already happened to Quentin, and his cousin had at least had the protection of the Sword of Leah. Rue wore a splint on one arm and had no magic at all. If he agreed to let her come, he would be taking on the responsibility for both of them. He was not sure he wanted to do that right after failing Quentin so miserably.\n\n\"I don't think that is a good idea,\" he told her, not sure what else to say that wouldn't make her furious and even more determined.\n\nShe seemed to consider the merits of his objection, then smiled. \"Do you know what I like most about you, Bek? Not how you look or think, not your laugh or the way you see the world, although I like those things, too. What I really like about you is that you don't ever act as if I'm not just as good as everyone else. You take it for granted that I am, and you treat me with respect. I don't have to fight you for that. I can expect it as a matter of course. I am your equal, I might even be a little better in some ways.\" She paused. \"I wouldn't want to lose that.\"\n\nThere was not much he could say to her after that. So he simply nodded and smiled back, and she kissed him hard to show that she appreciated his understanding. He liked having her kiss him, but it didn't make him feel any better about taking her along.\n\nBut the issue was decided, so they slipped over the side of the ship and walked to the edge of the bluff, followed the precipice to the trailhead, and started down. It was light enough now that they could make out the shapes of the trees and the soft movement of leaves and branches in the slow morning wind. Bek cast about with his magic as they descended, taking no chances on being caught off guard, even if what he was doing somehow alerted the dead Graak's mate. If the mate was anywhere close, he had already decided they would turn right around. Even Little Red couldn't argue with that.\n\nBut fortune smiled on them, and they slipped into the Crake as invisible as wraiths. Bek used the magic of the wishsong to cloak them in the look and feel of the rain forest, choosing images and smells that would not attract a carnivore. Draped in trailers of mist and cooled by the morning wind, they slid through the trees with the ease and freedom of shadows, untroubled by the dangers that on this occasion were elsewhere. They found Quentin's sword muddied but still in one piece beside the body of the dead Graak, retrieved it, and made their way back again. The sun was cresting the jagged line of mountains east when they began their climb back up the trail.\n\nThat was so easy, Bek thought in surprise as they regained the bluff. Why couldn't it have been like that for Quentin? But then, of course, there would have been no reason for Grianne to come awake, and he would not have seen for himself that her responses to pain and suffering were no longer those of the Ilse Witch, but of his sister. He would not have discovered that maybe she could return to him after all when she was ready.\n\nRue Meridian turned to him, a mix of mischievousness and satisfaction mirrored in her green eyes. \"Admit it. That wasn't so bad.\"\n\nHe shook his head and sighed. \"No, it wasn't.\"\n\n\"Remember that the next time you think about doing something dangerous without me.\" She reached out and took hold of the back of his neck with both hands and pulled him close to her. \"If you love me, if I love you, there shouldn't be any question of that ever happening. Otherwise, what we feel for each other isn't real. It doesn't mean anything.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Yes, it does. It means everything.\"\n\nShe grinned, brushing loose strands of her long hair from her face. \"I know. So don't forget it.\"\n\nShe picked up the pace and moved ahead of him. He stared after her, barely able to contain himself. In her words and smile, in everything she said and did, he saw a future that would transcend all his expectations of what he had ever imagined possible. It was only a dream, but wasn't reality conceived in dreams?\n\nHis euphoria peaked and faded in a wash of doubt. It was foolish, he thought, to let himself think like this, to allow his emotions to cloud his reason. Look at where he was. Look at what had befallen him. Where, in all of this, did dreams like his belong? He watched Rue Meridian's stride lengthen and as he did so, felt those dreams slip away, too frail to hold, too insubstantial to grasp. He was drawing pictures in the sand, and the tide was coming in.\n\nWhen they reached the trailhead and walked back toward the Jerle Shannara, they found Redden Alt Mer and his Rovers gathered at the edge of the bluff, looking east. The Wing Riders were flying in from the coast, and they had someone with them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "When the Morgawr found that Ahren Elessedil was gone, he had Ryer Ord Star brought before him. She denied knowing anything about it, but she knew he could read the lie in her eyes and smell it on her breath. Already suspicious of their failure to find any trace of the Jerle Shannara and her crew or of the Ilse Witch and her brother, he wasted no time in deciding that the seer had helped the Elven Prince escape. Whatever usefulness she might have had, she had outlived it.\n\nHe gave her to Cree Bega and his Mwellrets, who stripped her naked and beat her savagely. They broke all her fingers and slashed the soles of her feet. They defiled her until she fainted. When she woke again, they hung her by her wrists from one of the yardarms, lashed her with a rawhide whip, and left her to bake in the midday sun. They gave her no water or clothing and did not treat her wounds. She hung ignored in a haze of pain and thirst that left her ravaged and delirious.\n\nOnly once did the Morgawr speak to her again. \"Use your gift, little seer,\" he advised, standing just below her, touching the wounds on her body with interest. \"Find those I have asked you to find, and I will let you die quickly. Otherwise, I will make sure your agony endures until I find them myself. There are other things I can have done to you, things that will hurt much more than those you have already experienced.\"\n\nShe was barely conscious when he spoke the words, but her reason was not yet gone. She knew that if she gave him what he wanted, if she told him where to find her friends, he would not kill her quickly as he had said, but would do to her what he had done to Aden Kett. He would want that experience, to feed on her mind, a seer's mind, to see what that would feel like. The only reason he had not done so yet was because he was still hoping she would lead him to those he hunted. Damaging her so significantly would prevent her from giving him any further help. His hunger for her could wait a few days. He was patient that way.\n\nThe day drifted toward nightfall. The ropes that held her suspended had cut her wrists almost to the bone. Blood streaked her arms and shoulders. She could no longer feel her hands. Her unprotected body was burned and raw from exposure to wind and sun and throbbed with unrelenting pain.\n\nHer suffering triggered visions, some recognizable, some not. She saw her companions, both living and dead, but could not seem to differentiate between them. They floated in and out of her consciousness, there long enough for her to identify and then gone. Sometimes they spoke, but she rarely understood the words. She felt her mind going as her life drained out of her body, sliding steadily into an abyss of dark, merciful forgetfulness.\n\nWalker, she called out in her mind, begging him to come to her.\n\nNight descended, and the Mwellrets went to sleep, all save the watch and helmsman. No one came to her. No one spoke to her. She hung from the yardarm as she had all day, broken and dying. She no longer felt the pain. It was there, but it was so much a part of her that she no longer recognized it as being out of the ordinary. She licked her cracked lips to keep her mouth from sealing over and breathed the cool night air with relief. Tomorrow would bring a return of the burning sun and harsh wind, but she thought that perhaps by then she would be gone.\n\nShe hoped that Ahren was far away. The Morgawr and his airships had been searching for him all day without success, so there was reason to think that the Elven Prince had escaped. He would be wondering when she would join him, if she would come soon. But she had never intended to leave Black Moclips. Her visions had told her of her fate, of her death aboard this vessel, and she was not foolish enough to believe she could avoid it. Just as Walker had seen his fate in her visions long ago, so she had seen hers. A seer's visions came unbidden and showed what they chose. Like those she advised, Ryer Ord Star could only accept what was revealed and never change it.\n\nBut what she had told the Elven Prince about himself and his own future was the truth, as well, a more promising fate than her own. His future awaited him in the Four Lands, long after she was gone, long after this voyage was a distant memory.\n\nHe would wonder what had become of her, of course. Or perhaps he would know when enough time had passed and she hadn't appeared. He would never know how she had hidden the Elfstones from the Morgawr and the Mwellrets. That secret would remain hers. And Walker's. She had been quick to take them from Ahren when he was felled in the attack, feigning concern for his injury, bending down to shield her movements. She had known she would be searched, and she had slipped the Stones into a crevice in the wall while the Mwellrets were still concentrating on Ahren. A simple ruse, but an effective one. Search her once, and the matter was settled. After that, she had needed only to get aboard Black Moclips before finding a new place of concealment. She had left the Stones hidden until it was time for Ahren to leave.\n\nShe would be lying to herself if she didn't admit that she had thought of giving him the Stones earlier so that he could use them on his captors. But Ahren was new to the magic, and the Morgawr was old, too powerful to be overcome by any save an experienced hand. Only Walker would have stood a chance, and while she wanted to live as much as the next person, she was not prepared to risk Ahren's life and fate on a gamble that would almost surely fail. She had sworn an oath to protect him, to do what she could to redeem herself for the harm she had caused while in the service of the Ilse Witch. No halfway measures were allowed in fulfilling that oath. She had much to atone for, and her death was small payment for her sins.\n\nShe lifted her head out of the tangle of her hair and tasted the night air on her lips. She wanted to die, but could not seem to. She wanted release from her pain, from her helplessness, but could not find it alone. She needed Walker to help her. She needed him to come.\n\nShe drifted in and out of half sleep, always aware that no true sleep would come, that only death would give her rest. She cried for herself and her failures, and she wished she could have grown to be a woman of some worth. In another time and place, in another life, perhaps that would happen.\n\nIt was during the deep sleep hours of early morning, the sky clear indigo and the stars a wash of brightness across the firmament, that he appeared at last, lifting out of the ether in a soft radiant light that bathed her in hope.\n\nWalker, she whispered.\n\n\u2014 I am here \u2014\n\nAhren Elessedil flew north through the night after escaping Black Moclips, his only plan to get as far from the Morgawr as he could manage. He had no clear idea of where he was or where he should be trying to go. He knew he should be looking for a rain forest somewhere in the mountains, but there was no hope of doing that until it got light. He had the stars to guide him, although the stars were aligned differently in this part of the world and partially blocked by the spread of the single wing, so it was difficult to use his navigational knowledge.\n\nNot that he was deterred by this. He was so grateful to be free that his euphoria made every potential problem save being captured again seem solvable. The single wing sped on without difficulty on the back of steady breezes off the Blue Divide. He had worried at first that he might have trouble keeping his carrier aloft, but it proved to be relatively easy to fly. The wing straps allowed him to bank to either side and change direction, and the bar that ran the length of the framework opened and closed vents in the canvas so that he could gain altitude or descend. So long as the winds blew and he stayed away from downdrafts and bad storms, he thought he would be all right.\n\nHe had time to think on his journey, and his thoughts were mostly of Ryer Ord Star. The more he mulled over her situation, the less happy he was. She was playing a dangerous game, and she had no way to protect herself if she was found out. Once the Mwellrets discovered he was missing, she would be the first person they would suspect. Nor was he convinced that she had a way to get off the ship if that happened. Was there a second single wing hidden somewhere aboard the airship? She had told him that she would follow later, but he wasn't sure it was the truth.\n\nHe wished now that he hadn't been so quick to accommodate her. He wished he had forced her to come with him, no matter what she thought Walker wanted from her. He had been so eager to get away that he hadn't pressed the matter. He didn't like what he remembered about the way she had looked at him at the end. It felt final \u2014 as if she already knew she wasn't going to see him again.\n\nShe was a seer, after all, and it was possible that in one of her visions she had seen her own fate. But if she knew what was going to happen, couldn't she act to prevent it? He didn't know, and after a while he quit thinking about it. It was impossible for him to do anything to help until he found the others, and then maybe they could go back for her.\n\nBut in his heart, where such truths have a way of surfacing, he knew it was already too late.\n\nThe sun rose, and he flew on. New light etched the details of the land below, and he began to look for something he recognized. It quickly became apparent to him that his task was impossible. Everything looked the same from up there, and he didn't remember enough about the geography from flying along the coast aboard the Jerle Shannara to know what to look for. He knew he should turn inland toward the mountains, but how far north should he fly before he did that? Ryer Ord Star had told him she was misdirecting the Morgawr at Walker's request, so the coast was the wrong place for him to be. He should be searching for a rain forest. But where? He could see neither the beginning nor the end of the mountains that ran down the spine of the peninsula. Clouds blanketed the peaks and screened away the horizon, giving the impression that the world dropped away five miles in. He couldn't tell how far anything went. He couldn't even be sure of his direction without a compass.\n\nHe could try using the Elfstones. They were seeking stones, and they could find anything that was hidden from the naked eye. But using them would alert the Morgawr, and he had seen enough of the warlock's abilities to know that he could follow magic as a hunter did tracks. Using the Elfstones might bring the warlock down on his friends, as well, should he manage to find them. He didn't think he wanted to bear the responsibility for that, no matter how desperate his own situation.\n\nThe sun brightened, and the last of night's shadows began to fade from the landscape. The air warmed, but was still cold enough that he wished he was wearing something warmer. He hunched his shoulders and turned the single wing farther inland, away from the chilly coastal breezes. Maybe he would spy the rain forest and his friends if he just gave himself a little more time.\n\nHe gave himself the entire day, spiraling inland in ever widening sweeps, searching the sky and ground until his head ached. He found nothing \u2014 no sign of the Jerle Shannara or his friends or a rain forest. He saw barely anything moving, and then only a few hawks and gulls, and once a herd of deer. As the day lengthened and the sun began to slip west, his confidence started to fail. He swept further into the mountains, but the deeper in he went the more confusing things became. He had been flying for eighteen hours with nothing to eat or drink, and he was beginning to feel light-headed. He couldn't remember the last time he had slept. If he didn't find something soon, he would have to land. Once he did that, he wasn't sure he could get airborne again.\n\nHe stayed in the air, flying into the approaching darkness, stubbornly refusing to give up. Soon, he wouldn't be able to see at all. If he didn't land, he would have to fly all night because it was too cloudy for the moon and stars to provide enough light for him to try to set down. Soon, he would have to use the Elfstones. He would have no choice.\n\nHe rolled his shoulders and arched his back to relieve the strain of holding the same position for so long. Dusk settled over the land in deepening layers, and still he flew on.\n\nHe had almost decided to give it up when the Shrikes found him. He was far enough inland that he wasn't expecting them, thinking himself safely away from the danger of coastal birds. But there was no mistaking what they were or that they were coming for him. Hunting him, he thought with a chill. Sent by the Morgawr to track him down and destroy him. He knew it instinctively. They sailed toward him in the silvery glow of the failing sunset, seven of them, long wings and necks extended, hooked beaks lifted like blades.\n\nHe swung away immediately and started downward in a slow glide, unable to make the single wing respond with any greater agility or speed. It was like canoeing in rapids, \u2014 you had to ride the current. Opening the vents all the way would drop him from the skies like a stone. The single wing wasn't designed for quick maneuvers. It wasn't built to flee Shrikes.\n\nHe spiraled toward the land below, toward peaks and cliffs, defiles and ravines, already able to tell that there was nowhere safe to land. But there was no time to worry about it and nothing he could do to change things. The best he could hope for was to get down before the Shrikes reached him. His flight was over. All that remained to be seen was how it would end.\n\nHe was still almost a thousand feet up when the first Shrike swept past him, claws raking the canvas and wood frame, sending him skidding sideways with a sickening lurch. He straightened out and angled sharply away, casting about for the others. If he had been frightened before, he was terrified now. He was helpless up here, strapped into his flimsy flying device, suspended in midair, unable to outrun or hide from his pursuers.\n\nA second Shrike attacked, slamming into the single wing with such force that it jarred Ahren to his bones. He dropped dozens of feet before leveling out, and when he did, the single wing's flight had turned shaky and uneven, and he could hear the flapping of torn canvas.\n\nAll about him, the Shrikes circled, beaks lifted, claws extended, eyes reflecting like pools of hard light in the darkness of their predatory faces.\n\nUse the Elfstones!\n\nBut he couldn't reach them without releasing his grip on the control bar, and if he did that, he might go straight down. He also risked dropping the Stones, fumbling them away as he tried to bring them to bear. Nevertheless, he took the gamble, certain that he was doomed otherwise. He let go of the bar and plunged his right hand into his tunic, tearing open the drawstrings of the pouch to fish out the stones.\n\nInstantly, the single wing went into a steep dive. The Shrikes attacked from everywhere, but the wing was skewing sideways so badly that they were unable to get a grip on it. Shrieking, they dived past Ahren in a flurry of movement, wings whipping the air, talons extended, huge black shadows descending and then lifting away. He closed his eyes to sharpen his concentration, forcing his fingers to find and tighten about the Elfstones, drawing them clear.\n\nHe thrust his hand out in front of him, called up the power of the magic, and sent it sweeping out into the dark in a wall of blue fire.\n\nThe result was unexpected. The magic flooded the air with its sudden brightness, frightening the Shrikes but not harming them. Ahren, however, was sent spinning off into the void, the backlash from the magic nearly collapsing the single wing about his body. Belatedly, he remembered that the magic of the Elfstones was useless against creatures that did not rely on magic themselves. The Shrikes were immune to the power of the only weapon he possessed.\n\nStill clutching the Elfstones, he tried to maneuver downward, diving between cliff faces so sheer that if he struck one, he would slide all the way to its base unimpeded. The Shrikes followed, screaming in frustration and rage, whipping past him in one series of near misses after another, the wake of their passing spinning him around until he could no longer determine where he was.\n\nHe was finished, he knew. He was a dead man. The whirl of land and sky formed a kaleidoscope of indigo and quicksilver, stars and darkness melding as he fought to slow his descent. A strut snapped with the sharpness of broken deadwood. His left wing shuddered and dipped.\n\nThen something bigger than the Shrikes appeared at the corner of his eye, there for only a moment before the single wing spun him a different way. The Shrikes screamed anew, but the sound was different, and the Elven Prince detected fear in it. An instant later they were winging away, their dark shadows fading as quickly as their cries.\n\nSomething huge loomed over him, its shadow blacking out the sky. He tried to look upward to see what it was, but it collided with his single wing, knocking it askew once more, then latched on to the frame. He fought wildly to free it, to regain some control, but the control straps refused to respond or the grapples release.\n\nThe Morgawr! he thought in terror. The Morgawr has found me once more!\n\nThen a second shadow appeared, lifting out of the well of cliffs and valleys in a spread of massive wings and a shining of great, gimlet eyes.\n\n\"Let go, Elven Prince!\" Hunter Predd called out through the haze of shadows, reaching up from Obsidian's back to catch hold of his dangling legs.\n\nAhren quit struggling and did as he was told, releasing first the control straps and then the buckles and ties that secured him to the harness. In a rush of wind and blackness, he slid down into the Wing Rider's arms, scarcely able to believe the other was really there. In a daze, he watched the single wing and its harness tumble away, a tangle of crumpled wreckage.\n\n\"Hold tight,\" Hunter Predd whispered in his ear, rough-bearded face pressing close to his own, strong arms fastening a safety line in place. \"We have a ways to go, but you're safe now.\"\n\nSafe, Ahren repeated silently, gratefully, and began to shake all over.\n\nHunter Predd's strong arms tightened about him reassuringly, and with Po Kelles and Niciannon leading the way, they flew into the night.\n\nMiles away in the same darkness that cloaked the fleeing Wing Riders and the Elven Prince, Ryer Ord Star hung from the yardarm of Black Moclips, swaying gently at the ends of the ropes tied about her wrists. Blood coated her arms from the deep gouges the ropes had made in her flesh, and sweat ran down her face and body in spite of the cool night air, Her pain was all encompassing, racking her slender body from head to toe, rising and falling in steady waves as she waited to die.\n\n\"Walker,\" she begged softly, \"please help me.\" She had called to him all night, but this time he responded. He appeared out of nowhere, suspended in air before her, his dark countenance pale and haunted, but so comforting to her that she would have welcomed it even if it was nothing more than a mirage. Wrapped in his Druid robes, he was a shade come from death's gate, a presence less of this world than the one beyond, yet in his eyes she found what she was seeking.\n\n\"Let me go,\" she whispered, the words thick and clotted in her throat. \"Set me free.\"\n\nHe reached for her with his one good arm, his strong hand brushing against her ravaged cheeks, and his voice was filled with healing.\n\n\u2014 Come with me \u2014\n\nShe shook her head helplessly. \"I cannot. The ropes hold me.\"\n\n\u2014 Only because you cling to them. Release your grip \u2014\n\nShe did so, not knowing how exactly, only knowing that because he said so, she could. She slipped from her bonds as if they were loose cords and stepped out into the air as if she weighed nothing. Her pain and her fear fell away like old clothes she had tossed aside. Her heartache subsided. She stood next to him, and when he reached out a second time, she took his hand in her own. He smiled then and drew her close.\n\n\u2014 Come away \u2014\n\nShe did so, at rest and at peace, redeemed and forgiven, made whole by her sacrifice, and she did not look back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "When he went to look for the Ahren Elessedil shortly after dawn, Bek Ohmsford found him sitting at the stern of the Jerle Shannara. They had been airborne for more than three hours by then, flying south through heavy clouds and gray skies, intent on reaching the coast before nightfall.\n\nThe Elven Prince glanced up at him with tired eyes. He had been asleep for almost twelve hours, but looked haggard even so. \"Hello, Bek,\" he said.\n\n\"Hello, yourself.\" He plopped down next to Ahren, resting his back against the ship's railing. \"It's good to have you back. I thought we might have lost you.\"\n\n\"I thought so, too. More than once.\"\n\n\"You were lucky Hunter Predd found you when he did. I heard the story. I don't know how you did it. I don't think I could have. Flying all that way without food or rest.\"\n\nAhren Elessedil's smile was faint and sad. \"You can do anything if you're scared enough.\"\n\nThey were silent then, sitting shoulder to shoulder, staring down the length of the airship as she nosed ahead through ragged wisps of cloud and mist. The air had a damp feel to it and smelled of the sea. Redden Alt Mer and his Rovers had cut short the repairs to the Jerle Shannara last night, installed the recovered diapson crystals early this morning, and lifted off at first light. The Rover Captain knew that the Morgawr had some control over the Shrikes that inhabited the coastal regions of Parkasia, and he was afraid that the birds that had attacked Ahren would alert the warlock and lead him to them. He could have used another day of work on his vessel, but the risk of staying on the ground any longer was too great. No one was upset with his decision. Memories of the Crake Rain Forest were fresh in everyone's minds.\n\nIn the pilot box, Spanner Frew stood at the helm, his big frame blocking the movements of his hands as he worked the controls. Now and then he shouted orders to one of the Rovers walking the deck, his rough voice booming through the creaking of the rigging, his bearded face turning to reveal its fierce set. There weren't all that many of them left to shout at, Bek thought. He numbered them in his head. Ten, counting himself. Twelve, if you added in the Wing Riders. Out of more than thirty who had started out all those months ago, that was all. Just twelve.\n\nMake that thirteen, he corrected himself, adding in Grianne. Lucky thirteen.\n\n\"How is your sister?\" Ahren asked him, as if reading his mind.\n\n\"Still the same. Doesn't talk, doesn't see me, doesn't respond to anything, won't eat or drink. Just sits there and stares at nothing.\" He looked over at the Elf. \"Except for two nights ago. The night you were rescued, she saved Quentin.\"\n\nHe told Ahren the details as he had done for everyone else, aware that by doing so he was giving hope to himself as much as to them that Grianne might recover, and that when she did, she might not be the Ilse Witch anymore. It remained a faint hope, but he needed to believe that the losses suffered and the pain endured might count for something in the end. Ahren listened attentively, his young face expressionless, but his eyes distant and reflective.\n\nWhen Bek was finished, he said quietly, \"At least you were able to save someone other than yourself. I couldn't even do that.\"\n\nBek had heard the story of his escape from Black Moclips from Hunter Predd. He knew what the Elf was talking about.\n\n\"I don't see what else you could have done,\" Bek said, seeking words that would ease the other's sense of guilt. \"She didn't want to come with you. She had already made up her mind to stay. You couldn't have changed that.\"\n\n\"Maybe. I wish I were sure. I was so eager to get away, to get off that ship, I didn't even think to try. I just let her tell me what to do.\"\n\nBek scuffed his boot against the deck. \"Well, you don't know. She might have gotten away. She might have done what she said she was going to do. The Wing Riders are out looking for her. Don't give up yet.\"\n\nAhren stared off into space, his eyes haunted. \"They won't find her, Bek. She's dead. I knew it last night. I woke up for no reason, and I knew it. I think she realized what was going to happen when she sent me away, but she wouldn't tell me because she knew that if she did, I wouldn't go. She had promised Walker she would stay, and she refused to break her word, even at the cost of her life.\"\n\nHe sounded bitter and confused, as if his realization of that premonition defied logical explanation.\n\n\"I hope you're wrong,\" Bek told him, not knowing what else to say.\n\nAhren kept his gaze directed out toward the misty horizon, above the sweep of the airship's curved rams, and did not reply.\n\nRedden Alt Mer walked down the main passageway belowdecks to the Captain's quarters \u2014 his quarters, once upon a time-searching for his sister. He was pretty sure by now, having walked the upper decks without success, that she had retired once more to the temporary shelter assigned to the wounded Quentin Leah and the unresponsive Grianne Ohmsford. It was the witch Little Red would go to see, to look at and study, to contemplate in a way that bothered him more than he cared to admit. He was feeling better about himself since braving the horrors of the Crake to recover the lost diapson crystals, especially after hearing from Bek how the witch had wakened from her dead-eyed sleep long enough to do the unexpected and use her magic to help heal the Highlander. Big Red was feeling better, but not entirely well. His brush with death in the rain forest had left him hollowed out, and he wasn't sure yet what it would take to fill him up again. Recovering the crystals was a start, but he was still entirely too conscious of his own mortality, and given the nature of his life, that wasn't healthy.\n\nBut for the moment his concern was for his sister. Rue had always been more tightly wound than he was, the cautious one, the captain of her life, determined that she would decide what was best for those she felt responsible for, no matter the obstacles she faced. But, of late, she had begun to show signs of vacillation that had never been apparent before. It wasn't that she seemed any less determined, but that she seemed uncertain what it was she should be determined about.\n\nHer attitude toward the Ilse Witch was such a case. In the beginning, there had been no question in his mind that as soon as she could find a way to do so, Rue would dispose of her. She would do so in a way that would remove all suspicion from herself, especially because of how she felt about Bek, but do it she would. Hawk's death demanded it. Yet something had happened to change her mind, something he had missed entirely, and it was impacting her in a way that suggested a major shift in her thinking.\n\nHe shook his head, wishing he understood what that something was. Since yesterday, when she had returned from the Crake with Bek after completing a mission he would have put a stop to in a minute had he known about it, she had come down here at every opportunity. She had taken up watch over the witch, as if to see what would happen when she woke, as if trying to ascertain what manner of creature she really was. At first, he had thought she was waiting for an opportunity to finish her off. But as time passed and opportunities came and went, he had begun to wonder. This wasn't about revenge for Hawk and the others, \u2014 this was about something else. Whatever it was, he was baffled.\n\nHe pushed open the door to his cabin, and there she was, sitting next to Bek's sister, holding her hand and staring into her vacant eyes. It was such a strange scene that for a moment he simply stood there, speechless.\n\n\"Close the door,\" she said quietly, not bothering to look over.\n\nHe did so, then moved to where she could see him, and knelt at Quentin Leah's bedside for a moment, placing his fingers on the Highlander's wrist to read his pulse.\n\n\"Strong and steady,\" Little Red said. \"Bek was right. She saved Quentin's life, whether she intended to or not.\"\n\n\"Is that what you're doing?\" he asked, standing up again, giving the Highlander a final glance. \"Trying to decide if it was an accident or not?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said.\n\n\"What, then?\"\n\n\"I'm trying to find out where she is. I'm trying to figure out how to reach her.\"\n\nHe stared at her, not quite believing what he was hearing. She was leaning forward as she sat in front of the witch, her face only inches away. There was no fear in her green eyes, no suggestion that she felt at risk. She held Grianne's hands loosely in her own, and she was moving her fingers over their smooth, pale backs in small circles.\n\n\"Bek said she was hiding from the truth about herself, that when the magic of the Sword of Shannara showed her that truth, it was too much for her, so she fled from it. Walker told him that she would come back when she found a way to forgive herself for the worst of her sins. A tall order, even to sort them all out, I'd think.\" She paused. \"I'm trying to see if a woman can reach her when a man can't.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I guess it's possible it might happen that way.\"\n\n\"But you don't know why I have to be the one to find out.\"\n\n\"I guess I don't.\"\n\nShe didn't say anything for a long time, sitting silent and unmoving before Grianne Ohmsford, staring into her strange blue eyes. The Ilse Witch was little more than a child, Alt Mer realized. She was so young that any attempt to define her in terms of the acts she was said to have committed was impossible. In her comatose state, blank-faced and unseeing, she bore a look of complete innocence, as if incapable of evil or wrongdoing or any form of madness. Somehow, they had got it all wrong, and it needed only for her to come awake again to put it right.\n\nIt was a dangerous way to feel, he thought.\n\nShe looked over at him. 'I'm doing it for Bek,\" she said, as if to explain, then quickly turned her attention back to Grianne. \"Maybe because of Bek.\"\n\nAlt Mer moved to where she could no longer see him, doubt clouding his sunburned features. \"Bek doesn't expect this of you. His sister isn't your responsibility. Why are you making her so?\"\n\n\"You don't understand,\" she said.\n\nHe waited for her to say something more, but she didn't. He cleared his throat. \"What don't I understand, Rue?\"\n\nShe let him wait a long time before she answered, and he realized afterwards that she was trying to decide whether to tell him the truth, that the choice was more difficult for her than she had anticipated. \"I'm in love with him,\" she said finally.\n\nHe wasn't expecting that, hadn't considered the possibility for a moment, although on hearing it, it made perfect sense. He remembered her reaction to his decision to take Bek with him into the Crake while leaving her behind. He remembered how she had cared for the boy when Hunter Predd had flown him in from the mountain wilderness, as if she alone could make him well.\n\nExcept that Bek wasn't a boy, as he had already noted days earlier. He was a man, grown up on this journey, changed so completely that he might be someone else altogether.\n\nEven so, he could not quite believe what he was hearing. \"When did this happen?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"But you're sure?\"\n\nShe didn't bother to answer, but he saw her shoulders lift slightly as if to shrug the question away.\n\n\"You don't seem suited to each other,\" he continued, and knew at once that he had made a mistake. Her gaze shifted instantly, her eyes boring into him with unmistakable antagonism. \"Don't get mad at me,\" he said quickly. \"I'm just telling you what I see.\"\n\n\"You don't know who's suited to me, big brother,\" she said quietly, her gaze shifting back to the witch. \"You never have.\"\n\nHe nodded, accepting the rebuke. He sat down now, needing to talk about this, thinking it might take a while, and having no idea what he was going to say. Or should. \"I thought what Hawk thought \u2014 that you were never going to settle on anyone, that you couldn't stand it.\"\n\n\"Well, you were wrong.\"\n\n\"It just seems that your lives are so different. If you hadn't been thrown together on this voyage, your paths would never have crossed. Have you thought about what's going to happen when you get home?\"\n\n\"If I get home.\"\n\n\"You will. Then Bek will go back to the Highlands and you'll go back to being a Rover.\"\n\nShe exhaled sharply, let go of Grianne Ohmsford's hands, and turned to face him. \"We'd better get past this right now. I told you how I feel about Bek. This is new to me, so I'm still finding out what it means. I'm trying not to think too far ahead. But here is what I do know. I'm sick of my life. I've been sick of it for a long time. I didn't like it on the Prekkendorran, and I haven't cared much for it since. I thought that coming on this voyage, getting far away from everything I knew, would change things. It hasn't. I feel like I've been wandering around all these years and not getting anywhere. I want something different. I'm willing to take a look at Bek to see if he can give it to me.\"\n\nRedden Alt Mer held her gaze. \"You're putting a lot on him, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I'm not putting anything on him. I'm carrying this burden all by myself. He loves me, too, Redden. He loves me in a way no one ever has. Not for how I look or what I can do or what he imagines me to be. It goes deeper than that. It touches on connections that words can't express and don't have to. It makes a difference when someone loves you like that. I like it enough that I don't want to throw it away without taking time to see where it leads.\"\n\nShe eased herself into a different position, her physical discomfort apparent, still sore from her wounds, still nursing her injuries. \"I wanted to kill the Ilse Witch,\" she said. \"I had every intention of doing so the moment I got the chance. I thought I owed that much to Hawk. But I can't do it now. Not while Bek believes she might wake up and be his sister again. Not after all he has done to protect her and care for her and give her a chance at being well. I don't have that right, not even to make myself feel good again about losing Hawk.\n\n\"So I've decided to try to do what Bek can't. I've decided to try to reach her, to see where she is and what she hides from, to try to understand what she's feeling. I've decided to let her know someone else cares what happens to her. Maybe I can. But even if I can't, I have to try. Because that's what loving someone requires of you \u2014 giving yourself to something they believe in, even when you don't. That's what I want to do for Bek. That's how I feel about him.\"\n\nShe turned back to Grianne Ohmsford, lifted the girl's hands in her own, and held them anew. \"I keep thinking that if I can help her, maybe I can help myself. I'm as lost as she is. If I can find her, maybe I can find myself. Through Bek. Through feeling something for him.\" She leaned forward again, her face so close to Grianne's that she might have been thinking of kissing her. \"I keep thinking that it's possible.\"\n\nHe stared at her in silence, thinking that he wasn't all that secure himself, that he felt lost, too. All this wandering about the larger world had a way of making you feel disconnected from everything, as if your life was something so elusive that you spent all the time allotted to you chasing after it and never quite catching up.\n\n\"Go away and leave me alone,\" she said to him. \"Fly this airship back to where we came from. Get us safely home. Then we can talk about this some more. Maybe by then we will understand each other better than we do now.\"\n\nHe climbed back to his feet and stood watching her for a moment longer, thinking he should say something. But nothing he could think of seemed right.\n\nResigned to leaving well enough alone, to letting her do what she felt she must, he walked out of the room without a word.\n\nStill sitting with Ahren by the aft railing, Bek Ohmsford glanced over as Redden Alt Mer emerged from the main hatchway and turned to look at him. What he saw in the Rover Captain's face was a strange mix of frustration and wonderment, a reflection of thoughts that Bek could only begin to guess at. The look lasted only a second, and then Alt Mer had turned away, walking over to the pilot box and climbing up to stand beside Spanner Frew, his attention directed ahead into the shifting clouds.\n\n\"I heard that Panax stayed behind,\" Ahren said, interrupting his thoughts.\n\nBek nodded absently. \"He said he was tired of this journey, that he liked where he was and wanted to stay. He said with Walker and Truls Rohk both gone, there was nothing left to go home to. I guess I don't blame him.\"\n\n\"I can't wait to get home. I don't ever want to go away again, once I do.\" The Elf's face twisted in a grimace. \"I hate what's happened here, all of it.\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem to have counted for much, does it?\"\n\n\"Walker said it did, but I don't think I believe him.\"\n\nBek let the matter slide, remembering that Walker had told him that his sister was the reason they had come to Parkasia and returning her safely home was the new purpose of their journey. He still didn't understand why that was so. Forget that he wasn't sure if they could do it or if she would ever come awake again if they did. The reality was that they had come here to retrieve the books of magic and failed to do so. They had destroyed Antrax, so there was some satisfaction in knowing that no one else would end up like Kael Elessedil, but it felt like a high price to pay for the losses they had suffered. Too high, given the broad scope of their expectations. Too high, for what they had been promised.\n\n\"Ryer said I was going to be King of the Elves,\" Ahren said softly. He gave Bek a wry look. \"I can't imagine that happening. Even if I had the chance, I don't think I would take it. I don't want to be responsible for anyone else but me after what's happened here.\"\n\n\"What will you do when you get home?\" Bek asked him.\n\nHis friend shrugged. \"I haven't thought about it. Go away somewhere, I expect. Being home means being back in the Westland, nothing more. I don't want to live in Arborlon. Not while my brother is King. I liked being with Ard Patrinell when he was teaching me. I'll miss him more than anyone except Ryer. She was special.\"\n\nHis lips compressed as tears came to his eyes, and he looked away selfconsciously. \"Maybe I won't go home, after all.\"\n\nBek thought about the dead, about those men and women who had come on this voyage with such determination and sense of purpose. Who would he miss most? He had known none of them when he started out and had become close to all at the end. The absence of Walker and Truls Rohk, because they had been his mentors and protectors, left the biggest void. But the others had been his friends, more so than the Druid and the shape-shifter. He couldn't imagine what his life would be like without them or even what it would be like when he parted company with those who remained. Everything about his future seemed muddled and confused, and it felt to him as if nothing he did would be enough to clear away the debris of his past.\n\nHis gaze drifted along the length of the ship's deck, searching for Rue Meridian. She was the future, or at least as much of it as he could imagine. He hadn't seen much of her since their return from the Crake Rain Forest. There hadn't been time for visiting while they readied the Jerle Shannara for flight, their sense of urgency at the approach of the Morgawr consuming all of their time and energy. But even after setting out, she had kept to herself. He knew she spent much of her time looking in on his sister, and at first he had worried about her intentions. But it seemed wrong of him to mistrust her when she felt about him as she did. It felt small-minded and petty. He thought that she was reconciled to her anger and disappointment at Grianne's presence and no longer thought it necessary to act on them. He thought that because she loved him she would want to help his sister.\n\nSo he left her alone, thinking that when she was ready to come to him again, she would do so. He didn't feel any less close to her because she chose to be alone. He didn't think she cared any less for him for doing so. They had always shared a strong sense of each other's feelings, even in the days when they were first becoming friends on the voyage out. There had never been a need for reassurances. Nothing had changed. Friendship required space and tolerance. Love required no less.\n\nStill, he missed being with her. He knew he could seek her out in Big Red's quarters and she would not be angry with him. But it might be better to let her find her own way with Grianne.\n\n\"Maybe I'll go home, too,\" he whispered to himself.\n\nBut he wasn't as sure about it anymore.\n\nIt was late afternoon when the Wing Riders reappeared, illumined by the red glare of the fading sun. The Jerle Shannara was less than an hour from the coast, and there had been no sign of the Morgawr's airships. With the return of the Wing Riders, Redden Alt Mer intended to turn his vessel south and begin working along the cliffs that warded the south end of the peninsula to where he could set out across the Blue Divide.\n\nHunter Predd brought Obsidian beneath the airship, released his safety harness, caught hold of the lowered rope ladder, and climbed to the aft railing. Alt Mer extended his hand, and the Wing Rider took hold of it and pulled himself aboard. His lean face was ridged with dirt and bathed in sweat. His eyes were hard, flat mirrors that reflected the sunset's bloodred light. He looked around the airship without saying anything, his callused hands flexing within their leather gloves, his arms stretching over his windswept head.\n\n\"We're maybe a day ahead of them,\" he said finally, keeping his voice low enough that no one else could hear. \"They're north of us, strung out along the edge of the mountains and flying inland. They must think we're still there, from the look of things.\"\n\nAlt Mer nodded. \"Good news for us, I'd say.\"\n\nHe held out a water skin, which the Wing Rider accepted wordlessly and drank from until he had emptied it. \"Ran out of water two hours ago.\" He handed it back.\n\n\"It will be dark in another hour. After that, we won't be so easy to track, especially once we get out over the water.\"\n\n\"Maybe. Maybe not. They tracked us easily enough from home and then inland here. The only time they had any real trouble was after you crashed. That doesn't sound like an evasion tactic you want to employ regularly.\"\n\nAlt Mer grunted noncommittally as he looked out over the railing at the darkness behind them, finding phantoms in the movement of the clouds against the mountains. The Wing Rider was right. He had no reason to think they could evade the Morgawr forever. Their best chance lay in putting as much distance between themselves and their pursuers as they could manage. Speed would make the difference as to whether they would escape or be forced to turn and fight. Speed was what the Jerle Shannara offered in quantities that not even Black Moclips could match.\n\n\"One other thing,\" Hunter Predd said, taking his arm and leading him over to the far corner of the aft deck. There was no one else around now. Even Bek and the Elven Prince had gone below. \"We found the seer's body.\"\n\nRedden Alt Mer sighed. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Floating in the ocean some miles west of here. All broken up and cut to pieces. I wouldn't have known she was down there if not for Obsidian. Rocs can see things men can't.\"\n\nHe looked at Alt Mer with his hard, weathered eyes and shook his head. \"You tell young Elessedil about her, if you can manage it. I can't. I've given out all the bad news I care to.\"\n\nHe squeezed Alt Mer's arm hard and walked away. Moments later, he was down the rope and back astride Obsidian, winging away into the darkness. Redden Alt Mer stood alone at the railing and wished he were going with him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Flying through the night, the Jerle Shannara reached the tip of the peninsula at dawn. The Wing Riders had flown ahead to scout for resistance to her passage and had not encountered the Morgawr's airships. With no sign of their pursuers to discourage them, they set out across the Blue Divide for home.\n\nFrom the first, they knew the return would be a journey of more than six months, and that was only if everything went well. Any disruption of their flying schedule, anything that forced them to land, would extend the time of their flight accordingly. So a certain pacing was necessary, and Redden Alt Mer wasted no time in advising those aboard of what that meant. They were down to thirteen in number, and of those, two were incapable of helping the others. Nor could Rue Meridian be expected to do much in the way of physical labor for at least several more weeks. Nor were the Wing Riders of much use in flying the airship, since they were needed aboard their Rocs to forage for food and water and to scout for pursuers.\n\nThat left eight able-bodied men \u2014 Spanner Frew, \u2014 the Rover crew members Kelson Riat, Britt Rill, and Jethen Amenades, \u2014 the Elves Ahren Elessedil and Kian, \u2014 Bek Ohmsford, \u2014 and himself. While Bek would be of great help to the five Rovers in flying the airship, the Elves lacked the necessary skills and experience and would have to be relegated to basic tasks.\n\nIt was a small group to man an airship twenty-four hours a day for six months. For them to manage, they were going to have to be well organized and extraordinarily lucky. Alt Mer could do nothing about the latter, so he turned his attention to the former.\n\nHe set about his task by drawing up a duty roster for the eight men he could rely upon, splitting time between the Elves so that there would never be more than one of them on watch at a time. At least three men were needed to sail the Jerle Shannara safely, so he drew up a rotating schedule of eight-hour shifts, putting two men on the midnight-to-dawn shift when the airship would be mostly at rest. It was not a perfect solution, but it was the best he could come up with. Rue was the only one who complained, but he deflected her anger by telling her that she could handle the navigation, which would keep her involved with sailing the vessel and not relegate her to tender of the wounded.\n\nOn the surface of things, they were in good condition. There was sufficient food aboard to keep them alive for several weeks, and they carried equipment for hunting and fishing to help resupply their depleted stock. Water was a bigger problem, but he thought the Wing Riders would be able to help with their foraging. Weapons were plentiful, should they be attacked. Now that they had replaced the damaged diapson crystals with the ones they had recovered from the Crake, they were able to fly the airship at full power. Since they were aboard the fastest airship in the Four Lands, no other airship, not even Black Moclips, should be able to catch them.\n\nBut things were not always as they seemed. The Jerle Shannara had endured enormous hardship since she had departed Arborlon. She had been damaged repeatedly, had crashed once, and was patched in more places than Alt Mer cared to count. Even a ship built by Spanner Frew could not stand up to a beating like that without giving up something. The Jerle Shannara was a good vessel, but she was not the vessel she had been. If she held together for even half the distance they had to cover, it would be a miracle. It was likely she would not, that somewhere along the way she would break down. The crucial question was how serious the breakdown would be. If it was too serious and took too long to correct, the Morgawr would catch up to them.\n\nRedden Alt Mer was nothing if not realistic, and he was not about to pretend that the warlock would not be able to track them. As Hunter Predd had pointed out, he had managed to do so before, so they had to expect he would be able to do so again. It was a big ocean, and there were an infinite number of courses that they could set, but in the end they still had to fly home. If they failed to take a direct course, they were likely to find the Morgawr and his airships waiting for them when they got there. Getting back to the Four Lands before their enemies would give them a chance at finding shelter and allies. It was the better choice.\n\nSo he addressed the company as Captain and leader of the expedition and made his assignments accordingly, all the while knowing that at best he was staving off the inevitable. But a good airship Captain understood that flying was a mercurial experience, and that routine and order were the best tools to rely on in preparing for it. Bad luck was unavoidable, but it didn't have to find you right away. A little good luck could keep it at bay, and he had always had good luck. Given what the ship had come through to get to this point, he was inclined to think that his streak had not deserted him.\n\nNor did it do so in the weeks ahead. In the course of their travels, they encountered favorable weather with steady winds and clear skies, and they found regular opportunities to forage for food and water. They flew over the Blue Divide without need for slowing or setting down. Radian draws frayed, ambient-light sheaths tore oose, parse tubes required adjustments, and controls malfunctioned, all in accord with Alt Mer's expectations, but none of it was serious and all of it was quickly repaired.\n\nMore important, there was no sign of the Morgawr's airships and no indication that the warlock was tracking them.\n\nAlt Mer kept his tiny crew working diligently at their assigned tasks, and if he felt they needed something more to occupy their time or take their minds off their problems, he found it for them. At first, their collective attitude was dour, a backlash from the hardships and losses suffered on Parkasia. But gradually time and distance began to heal and their spirits to lift. The passing of the days and the acceptance of a routine that was free of risk and uncertainty gave them both a renewed sense of confidence and hope. They began to believe in themselves again, in the possibility of a future safely back in the Four Lands and a life beyond the monstrous events of the past few weeks.\n\nAhren Elessedil emerged a little farther from his despondency each day. That he was damaged was unmistakable, but it seemed to Bek that the damage was repairable and that with time he would find a way to reconcile the loss of Ryer Ord Star. When Ahren learned of her death from Big Red, he seemed to lose heart entirely. He quit taking nourishment and refused to speak. He languished belowdecks and would not emerge. But Bek kept after him, staying close, talking to him even when he would not respond, and bringing him food and water until he started to eat and drink again.\n\nEventually, he began to recover. He no longer sought to blame himself for Ryer's death. He found it hard to speak of her, and Bek kept their conversations away from any mention of the seer. They spoke often of Grianne, who remained unchanged from when they had departed Parkasia, still a statue staring off into space, unresponsive and remote. They discussed what she had done for Quentin and what it meant to her chances for recovery. Ahren was more supportive of her than Bek would have expected, given the trouble she had visited on him, directly and indirectly. But Ahren seemed capable of unconditional forgiveness and infinite grace, and he displayed a maturity that had not been there when they had set out from Arborlon all those months ago. But then, Bek had been no more mature. Boys, both of them, but their boyhood was past.\n\nQuentin continued to improve. He was awake much of the time, if only for short stretches, but he was still weak and unable to leave his bed. It would be weeks yet before he could stand, longer still before he could walk. He remembered almost nothing of what had happened in the Crake or anything of Grianne's healing use of the wishsong. But Bek was there to explain it to him, to sit with him each day, gradually catching small glimpses of the familiar smile and quick wit, finding new reasons with each visit to feel encouraged.\n\nBek spent time with Grianne as well, speaking and singing to her, trying to find a way to reach her, and failing. She had locked herself away again. Nothing he tried would persuade her to respond. That she had come out the first time was mystifying, but that she would not come a second time was maddening. He could think of no reason for it, and his inability to solve the riddle of her became increasingly frustrating.\n\nNevertheless, he kept at it, refusing to give up, certain that somehow he would find a way to break through, convinced that Walker had spoken the truth in prophesying that one day his sister would come back to him.\n\nHe spent stolen time with Rue Meridian, hidden away from the rest of the company, lost in words and touchings meant only for each other. She loved him so hard that he thought each time it ended and they separated that he could not survive letting her go. He thought he was blessed in a way that most men could only dream about, and in the silence of his mind he thanked her for it a hundred times a day. She told him that he was healing her, that he was giving her back her life in a way she had not thought possible. She had been adrift, she said, lost in her Rover wanderings, cast away from anything that mattered beyond the day and the task at hand. That she had found salvation in him was astonishing to her. She confessed she had thought nothing of him in the beginning, that she saw him as only a boy. She thought it important that he was her friend first, and that her deeper love for him was built on that.\n\nShe told him that he was her anchor in life. He told her that she was a miracle.\n\nThey spent their passion and their wonder when the night was dark and the company mostly asleep, and if anyone saw what they were doing, no one admitted to it. Perhaps for those who suspected what was happening, there was a measure of joy to be found in what Bek shared with Rue, an affirmation of life that transcended even the worst misfortunes. Perhaps in that small, but precious joining of two wounded souls, there was hope to be found that others might heal, as well.\n\nSo the days passed, and the Jerle Shannara sailed on, drawing further away from Parkasia and closer to home. Voracious sea birds circled the remains of meals consumed by sleek predators, and schools of krill swam from the wide-stretched jaws of leviathans. Far away on the Prekkendorran, the Races still warred across a plain five miles wide and twenty miles long. Farther away still, creatures of old magic slumbered, cradled in the webbing of their restless dreams and unbreakable prison walls.\n\nBut in the skies above the Blue Divide, the troubles of other creatures and places were as distant as yesterday, and the world below remained a world apart.\n\nBut even worlds apart have a way of colliding. Eight weeks into their journey, with the Four Lands still a long way off, Redden Alt Mer's fabled luck ran out. The sun was bright in the sky and the weather perfect. They were on course for Mephitic, where they hoped to use the Wing Riders to forage for fresh water and game while the airship stayed safely aloft. Alt Mer was at the helm, one of three on duty for the midday shift, with Britt Rill working the port draws and Jethen Amenades the starboard. The other members of the company were asleep below, save Rue Meridian, who was looking after Quentin and Grianne in the Captain's quarters, and Ahren Elessedil, who was weaving lanyards in one of the starboard pontoon fighting stations.\n\nAlt Mer had just taken a compass reading when the port midships draw gave way with a sharp, vibrating crack that caused him to duck instinctively. It whipped past his head, wrapping about the port aft draw and snapping it loose, as well. Instantly, the masts sagged toward the starboard rail, the weight of their sails dragging them down, breaking off metal stays and pieces of crossbars and spars as they did so. Responding to the loss of balance in the sails and failure of power in the port tubes, the airship skewed sharply left. Alt Mer cried out a warning as both Rill and Amenades raced to secure the loose draws, but before he could right the listing vessel, it lurched sharply, twisting downward, sending Rill flying helplessly along the port rail and Amenades over the side.\n\nThey were a thousand feet in the air when it happened; Amenades was a dead man the minute he disappeared into the void. There was no time to dwell on it, so Alt Mer's hands were already flying over the controls as he shouted at Rill to grab something and hold fast. Without bothering to see if the other had done so, he cut power to all but the two forward parse tubes and put the ship into a steep downward glide. He heard the sound of heavy objects crashing into bulkheads and sliding along corridors, and a flurry of angry curses. As the airship finally righted itself, he opened the front end of the forward tubes, reversed power through the ports, and caught the backwash of the wind in the mainsail to bring up her nose.\n\nHolding her steady against the tremors that rocked her, he eased her slowly into the ocean waters and shut her down.\n\nBritt Rill staggered to his feet, Ahren Elessedil climbed from the fighting port, and all the rest poured out through the main hatchway and converged on Alt Mer. He shouted down their questions and exclamations and put them to work on the severed draws, broken stays and spars, and twisted masts. A quick survey under Spanner Frew's sharp-tongued direction revealed that the damage was more extensive than Alt Mer had thought. The problem this time did not lie with something as complicated as missing diapson crystals, but with something more mundane. The aft mast was splintered so badly it could not be repaired and would have to be replaced. To do that they would have to land, cut down a suitable tree, and shape a new mast from the trunk.\n\nThe only forested island in the area was Mephitic.\n\nAlt Mer was as unhappy as he could be on realizing what this meant, but there was no help for it. He dispatched the Wing Riders to retrieve the body of Jethen Amenades, then called the others together to tell them what they were going to have to do. No one said much in response. There wasn't much of anything to say. Circumstances dictated a course of action they would all have preferred to avoid, but could do nothing about. The best they could do was to land far from the castle that housed the malignant spirit creature Bek and Truls Rohk had encountered and hope it could not reach beyond the walls of its keep.\n\nThey made what repairs they could, detaching the draws to the aft parse tubes and reducing their power by one-third. All of a sudden they were no longer the fastest airship in the skies, and if the Morgawr was tracking them, he would quickly catch up. The Wing Riders returned with Amenades, and they weighed him down and buried him at sea before setting out once more.\n\nSetting a course for Mephitic, they limped along for all of that day and the two after, casting anxious glances over their shoulders at every opportunity. But the Morgawr did not appear, and their journey continued uninterrupted until at midday on the fourth day, land appeared on the horizon. It was the island they were seeking, its broad-backed shape instantly recognizable. Green with forests and grassy plains, it shimmered in a haze of damp heat like a jewel set in azure silk, deceptively tranquil and inviting.\n\nFrom his position at the controls in the pilot box, Redden Alt Mer stared at it bleakly. \"Let's make this quick,\" he muttered to himself, and pointed the horns of the Jerle Shannara landward.\n\nThey set down on the broad plain fronting the castle ruins, well back from the long shadow of its crumbling walls. Alt Mer had thought at first to land somewhere else on the island, but then decided that the western plain offered the best vantage point for establishing a perimeter watch against anything that approached or threatened. He assumed that the spirit that lived in the castle could sense their presence wherever they were, and the best they could hope for was that it either couldn't reach them or wouldn't bother trying if they left it alone. He dispatched the Wing Riders to search for food and water, then Spanner Frew, Britt Rill, and the Elven Hunter Kian to locate a tree from which to fashion a new mast. The others were put to work on sentry duty or cleaning up.\n\nBy sundown, everyone was back aboard. The Wing Riders had located a water source, Spanner Frew had found a suitable tree and cut it down, and the thing that lived in the ruins had not appeared. The members of the company, save Quentin and Grianne, sat together on the aft deck and ate their dinner, watching the sunset wash lavender and gold across the dark battlements and towers of the castle, as if making a vain attempt to paint them in a better light. As the sun disappeared below the horizon, the color faded from the stones and night's shadows closed about.\n\nAlt Mer stood looking at the outline of the ruins after the others had dispersed. Kian was scheduled to stand guard, but he sent the Elven Hunter below, deciding to take his place, thinking that on this night he was unlikely to sleep anyway. Taking up a position at the Jerle Shannara's stern, he left responsibility for keeping watch over the Blue Divide to Riat and gave his attention instead to the empty, featureless landscape of Mephitic.\n\nHis thoughts quickly drifted. He was troubled by what he perceived as his failure as Captain of his airship. Too many men and women had died while traveling with him, and their deaths did not rest easy with him. He might pretend that the responsibility lay elsewhere, but he was not the kind of man who looked for ways to shift blame to others. A Captain was responsible for his charges, no matter what the circumstances. There was nothing he could do for those who were dead, but he was afraid that perhaps there was nothing he could do for those who were still alive, either. His confidence had been eroding incrementally since the beginning of their time on Parkasia, a gradual wearing away of his certainty that nothing bad could happen to those who flew with him. His reputation had been built on that certainty. He had the luck, and luck was the most single important weapon of an airship Captain.\n\nLuck, he whispered to himself. Ask Jahnon Pakabbon about his luck. Or Rucker Bont and Tian Cross. Or any of the Elves who had gone inland to the ruins of Castledown and never come back. Ask Jethen Amenades. What luck had Alt Mer given to them? It wasn't that he believed he had done anything to cause their deaths. It was that he hadn't found a way to prevent them. He hadn't kept his people safe, and he was afraid he had lost the means for doing so.\n\nSooner or later, luck always ran out. He knew that. His seemed to have begun draining away when he had agreed to undertake this voyage, so self-confident, so determined everything would work out just as he wanted it to. But nothing had gone right, and now Walker was dead and Alt Mer was in command. What good was that going to do any of those who depended on him if the armor of his fabled luck was cracked and rusted?\n\nStaring at the dark bulk of the ruins across the way, he could not help thinking that what he saw, broken and crumbled and abandoned, was a reflection of himself.\n\nBut his pride would not let him accept that he was powerless to do anything. Even if his luck was gone, even if he himself was doomed because of it, he would find a way to help the others. It was the charge he must give himself, that so long as he breathed, he must get those he captained, those eleven men and women who were left, safely home again. Saving just those few would give him some measure of peace. That one of them was his sister and another the boy she loved made his commitment even more necessary. That all of them were his friends and shipmates made it imperative.\n\nHe was still thinking about this when he sensed a presence at his elbow and glanced over to find Bek Ohmsford standing next to him. He was so surprised to see Bek, perhaps because he had just been thinking of him, that for a moment he didn't speak.\n\n\"It won't come out of there,\" Bek said, nodding in the direction of the castle. His young face bore a serious cast, as if his thoughts were taking him to dark and complex places. \"You don't have to worry.\"\n\nAlt Mer followed his gaze to the ruins. \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Because it didn't come after me when I stole the key the last time we were here. Not past the castle walls, not outside the ruins.\" He paused. \"I don't think it can go outside. It can chase you that far, but no farther. It can't reach beyond.\"\n\nThe Rover Captain thought about it for a moment. \"It didn't bother us when we were searching the ruins, did it? It just used its magic to turn us down blind alleys and blank walls so that we couldn't find anything.\"\n\nBek nodded. \"I don't think it will bother us if we stay out here. Even if we go in, it probably won't interfere if we don't try to take anything.\"\n\nThey stood shoulder to shoulder for a few moments, staring out into the darkness, listening to the silence. A dark, winged shape flew across the lighter indigo of the starlit sky, a hunting bird at work. They watched it bank left in a sweeping glide and disappear into the impenetrable black of the trees.\n\n\"What are you doing out here?\" Alt Mer asked him. \"Why aren't you asleep?\"\n\nHe almost asked why he wasn't with Rue, but Bek hadn't chosen to talk about it, and Alt Mer didn't think it was up to him to broach the subject.\n\nBek shook his head, running his hand through his shaggy hair. \"I couldn't sleep. I was dreaming about Grianne, and it woke me. I think the dream was telling me something important, but I can't remember what. It bothered me enough that I couldn't go back to sleep, so I came up here.\"\n\nAlt Mer shifted his feet restlessly. \"You still can't reach her, can you? Little Red can't either. Never thought she'd even try, but she goes down there every day and sits with her.\"\n\nBek didn't say anything, so Alt Mer let the matter drop. He was growing tired, wishing suddenly that he hadn't been so quick to send Kian off to sleep.\n\n\"Are you upset with me about Rue?\" Bek asked suddenly.\n\nAlt Mer stared at him in surprise. \"Don't you think it's a little late to be asking me that?\"\n\nBek nodded solemnly, not looking back. \"I don't want you to be angry. It's important to both of us that you aren't.\"\n\n\"Little Red quit asking my permission to do anything a long time ago,\" Alt Mer said quietly. \"It's her life, not mine. I don't tell her how to lead it.\"\n\n\"Does that mean it's all right?\"\n\n\"It means...\" He paused, confused. \"I don't know what it means. It means I don't know. I guess I worry about what's going to happen when you get back home and have to make a choice about your lives. You're different people, \u2014 you don't have the same background or life experience.\"\n\nBek thought about it. \"Maybe we don't have to live our old lives. Maybe we can live new ones.\"\n\nAlt Mer sighed. \"You know something, Bek. You can do whatever you want, if you put your mind to it. I believe that. If you love her as much as I think you do \u2014 as much as I know she loves you \u2014 then you'll find your way. Don't ask me what I think or if I'm upset or what I might suggest or anything. Don't ask anyone. Just do what feels right.\"\n\nHe clapped Bek lightly on the shoulder. \"Of course, I think you should become a Rover. You've got flying in your blood.\" He yawned. \"Meanwhile, stand watch for me, since you're so wide awake. I think I need a little sleep after all.\"\n\nWithout waiting for an answer, he walked over to the main hatchway and started down. There was a hint of self-confidence in his step as he did so. One way or another, it would work out for all of them, he promised himself. He could feel it in his bones.\n\nThe company was awake and at work shortly after sunrise, continuing repair efforts on the damaged Jerle Shannara. Using axes and planes, Spanner Frew and the other two Rover crewmen took all morning to shape the mast from the felled tree trunk. It was afternoon before they had hauled it back to the ship to prepare it for the spars and rigging it would hold when it was set in place. The painstaking process required a careful removal of metal clasps and rings from the old mast so that they could be used again, \u2014 the work would not be completed for at least another day. Those not involved were sent out to complete the foraging begun the other day by the Wing Riders, who had been dispatched to make certain the company was still safely ahead of the Morgawr.\n\nThey weren't. By late afternoon, the Wing Riders returned, landed their Rocs close by the airship, and delivered the bad news. The Morgawr's fleet was less than six hours out and coming directly toward them. In spite of everything, the warlock had managed to track them down once more. If the enemy airships continued to advance at their present pace, they would arrive on Mephitic shortly after nightfall.\n\nAnxious eyes shifted from face to face. There was no way that the repairs to the Jerle Shannara could be finished by then. At best, if she tried to flee now, she would be flying at a speed that would allow even the slowest pursuer to catch her within days. The choices were obvious. The company could try to hide or they could stand and fight.\n\nRedden Alt Mer already knew what they were going to do. He had been preparing since the night before, when he had decided that no one else was going to die under his command. Assuming the worst might happen, he had come up with a plan, suggested by something Bek had told him, to counteract it.\n\n\"Gather up everything,\" he ordered, striding through their midst as if already on his way to do so himself. \"Don't leave even the smallest trace of anything that would suggest we were here. Put everything aboard so we can lift off. Hunter Predd, can you and Po Kelles find hiding places for yourselves and your Rocs offshore on one of the atolls? You'll need a couple of days.\"\n\nThe Wing Riders looked at each other doubtfully, then looked at him. \"Where will you be while we're safe and snug on the ground?\" Hunter Predd asked bluntly. \"Up in a cloud?\"\n\nAlt Mer smiled cheerfully. \"Hiding in plain sight, Wing Rider. Hiding right under their noses.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "By the time the Morgawr brought his fleet of airships to within view of Mephitic, darkness had eclipsed the light necessary for a search, so he had them anchor offshore until dawn. His Mwellrets supervised the walking dead who crewed the ships, giving them directions for what was needed before setting themselves at watch against a night attack. Such a thing was not out of the question. His quarry was close ahead, perhaps still on the island, her scent stronger than it had been in days, a dense perfume on the salt-laden air.\n\nThe following morning, when it grew light and he could see clearly, he set out to discover where she had gone. Leaving the remainder of his fleet at anchor, he flew Black Moclips in a slow, careful sweep over the island, searching for her hiding place.\n\nHis mood was no longer as dark and foul as it had been after the seer had died, when he had felt both betrayed and outwitted. The seer had tricked him into following blind leads and useless visions. The Jerle Shannara and her crew had escaped him completely, flying out of Parkasia through the mountains even as he was flying in. With the Ilse Witch safely aboard, they had gotten behind him and turned for home.\n\nHe had known what that meant. The Druid's vessel was the faster ship, much faster than anything the Morgawr commanded, including Black Moclips. He had lost the advantages of surprise and numbers both, and if he did not find a way to turn things around, he risked losing them completely.\n\nBut the Four Lands were a long way off, and fate had intervened on his behalf. Something had happened to slow the Jerle Shannara, allowing him to catch up. Even though she had gotten far ahead of him, he had still been able to track her. She had brought aboard her own doom in the form of the Ilse Witch, and once that was done, her fate was sealed. Just as the little witch had tracked the Druid from the Four Lands through her use of the seer as her spy, so had he tracked her through her use of her magic. The scent of it, layered on the air, was pungent and clear, a trail he could not mistake. For a time, when the witch had escaped into the mountains with her brother, he had lost all track of her. He assumed she had simply ceased using the magic, though that was unlike her.\n\nThen, only days before the Elven Prince had fled and he'd had the seer killed, there had been a resurgence of the use of magic deep in Parkasia's mountains. At the time, intent on following the seer's false visions, he had ignored it. But now he had the Ilse Witch's scent again, so strong there was no need for anything more. Small bursts of it permeated the air through which he flew, sudden fits and starts he could not explain, but could read well enough. Wherever she went, while she remained aboard the Jerle Shannara, he would be able to find her.\n\nHer scent was present now, hanging in a cloud over the island, blown everywhere on the breeze. But did it lead away? Had they gotten off the island just ahead of him? That was what he must discover.\n\nHe cruised Mephitic from end to end, tracking the magic, following its trail. He determined quickly enough that it did not extend beyond the island's broad, low sweep. He felt a wildness building in him, an anticipation bordering on frenzy. They were here still, he had them trapped. He could already taste the witch's life bleeding out of her and into him. He could already imagine the sweetness of its taste.\n\nSo he swept the island carefully, flying low enough to read its details, seeking to uncover their hiding place, thinking that no matter how well they hid themselves, they could not hide the scent of his little witch's magic. They might even abandon their ship, though he could not believe they would be so foolish, but they were his for the taking so long as they kept the witch beside them. If the boy was her brother, as the Morgawr was now certain he must be, there was no question but that they would.\n\nEven so, he could not find them. He searched from the air until his eyes ached and his temper frayed. He put Cree Bega and his Mwellrets at every railing and had them search, as well. They found nothing. They searched until midmorning, and then he brought the rest of the fleet inland and had them fan out and blanket the island from the air. When that failed, he had the Mwellrets disembark and under Cree Bega's command search on foot. He had them comb the forests and even the open grasslands, seeking anything that would indicate the presence of his quarry.\n\nHe had them search everywhere except the castle ruins.\n\nThe ruins presented a problem. Something was alive inside those walls, something birthed of old magic and not made of flesh and blood. In spirit form, it had lived for thousands of years, and it regarded those broken parapets and crumbling towers as its own. The Morgawr had sensed its presence right away and sensed, as well, that it might be as powerful as he was. He was not about to send the Mwellrets stumbling about in its domain unless there was good reason to do so. From the air, he had seen nothing to suggest that his quarry had gotten inside. That they could do so seemed doubtful, but if they had, there should be some sign of them.\n\nThe hunt continued through the remainder of the day without result. The Morgawr was furious. It was impossible that he had been mistaken about the scent of the magic, but even so he went back around in Black Moclips, well off the island, to see if he had misread it somehow. But the results were the same, \u2014 there was no trail leading away. Unless they had found a way to disguise the Ilse Witch's scent \u2014 which they had no reason even to think of doing \u2014 they were still on the island.\n\nBy darkness, he was convinced of it. A tree had been cut down very recently, and shavings indicated that something had been shaped from it. A mast, the Morgawr guessed. A broken mast would explain why they had been forced to slow and why he had been able to catch up to them. The Mwellrets found tracks, as well, deeper into the trees where damp grasses and soft earth left imprints. There were fresh gouges on the plains across from the castle, as well, where an airship might have been moored.\n\nNow there was no doubt in the Morgawr's mind that the Jerle Shannara and her company had been on Mephitic less than a day ago, and unless he was completely mistaken, they were still here.\n\nBut where were they hiding?\n\nIt took him only a moment to decide. They were inside the castle. There was nowhere else they could be.\n\nHe sent his searchers back aboard their ships and had them make a final pass over the dusk-shrouded island before moving back out to sea to drop anchor just offshore. There he set the watch, and while the Mwellrets went about the business of shutting down the airships and settling in for the night, he stood alone in the prow of Black Moclips, thinking.\n\nHe did not yet know what had happened to reunite the Ilse Witch with her brother. He did not know if she was now her brother's ally or simply his prisoner. He had to assume she was the former, although he had no idea how that could have happened. That meant she would have the support of not only her brother, but also the young Elessedil Prince and whoever else was still alive, as well. But she would not have the Druid to protect her, and the Druid was the only one who might have stood a chance against him. The others, even fighting together, were not strong enough. The Morgawr had been alive a long time, and he had fought hard to stay that way. The power of his magic was terrifying, and his skill at wielding it more than sufficient to overcome these children.\n\nStill, he would be careful. They would know he was there by now, and they would be waiting for him. They would try to defend themselves, but that would be hopeless. Most of them would die quickly at the hands of his Mwellrets, leaving the few who possessed the use of magic for him to deal with. A few quick strikes, and it would be over.\n\nYet he wanted his little Ilse Witch alive, so that he could feed on her, so that he could feel her life drain away through his fingertips. He had trained her to be his successor, a mirror image of himself. She had become that, her magic fed by rage and despair. But her ambition and her willfulness had outstripped her caution, and so she was no longer reliable. Better to have done with her than to risk her treachery. Better to make an example of her, one that no one could possibly mistake. Cree Bega and his Mwellrets wanted her gone anyway. They had always hated her. Perhaps they had understood her better than he had.\n\nHis gaze lifted. Tomorrow, he would watch her die in the way of so many others. It would give him much satisfaction.\n\nRadiating black venom and hunger, he stood motionless at the railing and imagined how it would be.\n\nCrouched in the shadow of the crumbling castle walls, only a dozen yards from where the Jerle Shannara lay concealed, Bek Ohmsford watched the dark bulk of an airship pass directly overhead, then swing around and pass back again. It floated over the ruins like a storm cloud.\n\n\"That's Black Moclips,\" Rue whispered in his ear, pressing up against him, her words barely more than a breath of air in the silence.\n\nHe nodded without offering a reply, waiting until the vessel was far enough away that it felt safe to speak. \"He knows we're here,\" he said.\n\n\"Maybe not.\"\n\n\"He knows. He would have moved on by now if he didn't. He searched the entire island and didn't find us, but he knows we're here. He senses it somehow. Tomorrow, he'll search these ruins.\"\n\nThey had been in hiding all day, ever since Redden Alt Mer had taken the Jerle Shannara inside the castle walls. It was a bold gamble, but one that the Rover Captain thought would work. If the creature that lived in the ruins had not bothered with them when they had searched for the key, it might not bother with them now, even if they set the Jerle Shannara down inside one of its numerous courtyards. So long as they did not try to take anything out, it might tolerate their presence long enough for them to deceive the Morgawr.\n\nThere was time to try his plan out before the warlock reached them, and so they did. They had been able to fly the Jerle Shannara into the ruins and set her down in a deeply shadowed cluster of walls and towers. Once anchored, they had stripped her of sails and masts and rigging, leaving her decks bare. When that was done, they had covered her over with rocks and dirt and grasses until from the air, astride a Roc, they could not see her at all and would not have known she was there.\n\nAlt Mer knew they were taking a big chance. If they were discovered, they would have no chance of getting aloft with the masts and rigging and sails dismantled. They would be trapped and most probably killed or captured. But the Rover Captain was counting on something else, as well. When they had tried to penetrate the ruins on their way to Parkasia, the castle's spirit dweller had used its magic to turn them aside. Each new foray took them down blind alleys and dead ends and eventually back outside. If that magic was still in place, it ought to work in the same way against the Morgawr and his rets. When they tried to come inside, they would be led astray and never get past the perimeter walls.\n\nWith luck, it should not come to that. With luck, the Morgawr should determine after a careful sweep of the island that his quarry had eluded him. There should be no reason to search the ruins from the ground if nothing was visible from the air.\n\nBut Bek knew it wasn't going to work out that way. Their concealment had been perfect, but the Morgawr's instincts were telling him that they were still on the island. They were whispering to him that he was missing something, and it wouldn't take him long to determine what it was. He would decide that they must be hiding in the ruins. Tomorrow, he would search them. It might not yield him anything, but if it did, the company of the Jerle Shannara was finished.\n\nWith Rue still pressing close, he leaned back against the cool stone of the old wall. Black Moclips had not returned, and the sky was left bright and open in its wake, a trail of glittering stars shining down through a wash of moonlight. The others of the company were inside the Jerle Shannara, kept there by Redden Alt Mer's strict order not to venture out for any reason. Bek was the sole exception, because an outside perspective was needed in case of an attempted ground approach and Bek was best able to conceal himself from the spirit dweller, should the need arise. Rue was with him because it was understood that wherever Bek went, she went, as well. They had been out there, hiding in the shadows, since early morning. It was time to go inside and get some sleep.\n\nBut Bek's mind was running too fast and too hard to permit him to sleep, his thoughts skipping from consideration of one obstacle to the next, from one concern to another, everything tied up with the dangerous situation facing them and what they might try to do to avoid it.\n\nOne concern, in particular, outstripped the rest.\n\nHe bent close to Rue. \"I don't know what to do about Grianne.\" His lips pressed against her ear, his words a hushed whisper. Voices carried in the empty silence of ruins such as these, beyond even walls of mortar and stone. \"If the Morgawr comes for her, she will have no way to protect herself. She will be helpless.\"\n\nRue leaned her head against him, her hair as soft as spiderwebbing. \"Do you want to try to hide her somewhere besides here?\" she whispered back.\n\n\"No. He'll find her wherever we put her. I have to wake her up.\"\n\n\"You've been trying that for weeks, Bek, and it hasn't worked. What can you do that you haven't already done?\"\n\nHe kissed her hair and put his arms around her. \"Find out what it is that keeps her in hiding. Find out what it will take to bring her out.\"\n\nHe could sense her smile even in the darkness. \"That isn't a new plan. That's an old one.\"\n\nHe nodded, touching her knee in soft reproach. \"I know. But suppose we could figure out what it would take to wake her. We've tried everything we could think of, both of us. But we keep trying in a general way, a kind of blanket approach to bringing her out of her sleep. Walker said she wouldn't come back to us until she found a way to forgive herself for the worst of her wrongs. I think that's the key. We have to figure out what that wrong is.\"\n\nShe lifted her head, her red hair falling back from her face. \"How can you possibly do that? She has hundreds of things to forgive herself for. How can you pick out one?\"\n\n\"Walker said it was the one she believed to be the worst.\" He paused, thinking. \"What would that be? What would she see as her worst wrong? Killing someone? She's killed lots of people. Which one would matter more than the others?\"\n\nRue furrowed her smooth brow. \"Maybe this was something she did when she first became the witch, when she was still young, something that goes to the heart of everything she's done since.\"\n\nHe stared at her for a long time, remembering his dream of the other night. It had been nagging at him ever since, reduced to a vague image, the details faded. It hovered now, just beyond his grasp. He could practically reach out and touch it.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked.\n\n\"I don't know. I think there's something in what you just said that might help, something about her childhood.\" He stared at her some more. \"I have to go down and sit with her. Maybe looking at her, being in the same room for a while, will help.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to come with you?\"\n\nWhen he hesitated, she reached out and cupped his face in her hands. \"Go by yourself, Bek. Maybe you need to be alone. I'll come later, if you need me to.\"\n\nShe kissed him hard, then slipped from his side and disappeared back into the bowels of the airship. He waited only a moment more, still wrestling with his confusion, then followed her inside.\n\nThere was no reason to think that this night would be different from any other, but Bek was convinced by feelings he could not explain that it might be. Nothing he had tried \u2014 and he had tried everything \u2014 had gotten so much as a blink out of Grianne from the moment he had found her kneeling with the bloodied Sword of Shannara grasped in her hands. Only when he broke down in frustration and cried that one time, when he wasn't even trying to make her respond, had she come out of her catatonia to speak with him. She had done so for reasons he had never been able to figure out, but tonight, he thought, he must. The secret to everything lay in connecting the reason for that singular awakening with the wrong she had committed somewhere in her past that she regarded as unforgivable.\n\nHe told Redden Alt Mer what he was going to do and suggested someone else might want to take up watch from one of the taller towers. Alt Mer said he would handle it himself, wished Bek good luck, and went over the side of the airship. Bek stood alone on the empty deck, thinking that perhaps he should ask Rue to help him after all. But he knew he would be doing so only as a way of gaining reassurance that he had done everything he could, should things not work out yet again. It was not right to use her that way, and he abandoned the idea at once. If he failed this night, he wanted it to be on his head alone.\n\nHe went down to the Captain's quarters and slipped through the doorway. Quentin Leah lay asleep in his bed, his breathing deep and even, his face turned away from the single candle that burned nearby. The windows were shuttered and curtained so that no light or sound could escape, and the air in the room was close and stale. Bek wanted to blow out the candle and open the shutters, but he knew that would be unwise.\n\nInstead, he walked over to his sister. She was lying on her pallet with her knees drawn up and her eyes open and staring. She wore her dark robe, but a light blanket had been laid over her, as well. Rue had brushed her hair earlier that day, and the dark strands glimmered in the candlelight like threads of silk. Her fingers were knotted together, and her mouth was twisted with what might have been a response to a deep-seated regret or troublesome dream.\n\nBek raised her to a sitting position, placed her against the bulkhead, and seated himself across from her. He stared at her without doing anything more, trying to think through what he knew, trying to decide what to do next. He had to break down the protective shell in which she had sealed herself, but to do that he had to know what she was protecting herself from.\n\nHe tried to envision it and failed. On the surface, she looked to be barely more than a child, but beneath she was iron hard and remorseless. That didn't just disappear, even after a confrontation with the truth-inducing magic of the Sword of Shannara. Besides, what single act set itself apart from any other? What monstrous wrong could she not bring herself to face after perpetrating so many?\n\nHe sat staring at her much in the same way that she was staring at him, neither of them really seeing the other, both of them off in other places. Bek shifted his thinking to Grianne's early years, when she was first taken from her home and placed in the hands of the Morgawr. Could something have happened then, as Rue had suggested, something so awful she could not forgive herself for it? Was there something he didn't know about and would have to guess at?\n\nSuddenly, it occurred to him that he might be thinking about this in the wrong way. Maybe it wasn't something she had done, but something she had failed to do. Maybe it wasn't an act, but an omission that haunted her. It was just as possible that what she couldn't forgive herself for was something she believed she should have done and hadn't.\n\nHe repeated to himself what she said when she woke on the night she had saved Quentin's life \u2014 about how Bek shouldn't cry, how she was there for him, how she would look after him again, his big sister.\n\nBut she had said something else, too. She had said she would never leave him again, that she was sorry for doing so. She had cried and repeated several times, \"I'm so sorry, so sorry.\"\n\nHe thought he saw it then, the failure for which she had never been able to forgive herself. A child of only six, she had hidden him in the basement, choosing to try to save his life over those of her parents. She had concealed him in the cellar, listening to her parents die as she did so. She had left him there and set out to find help, but she had never gotten beyond her own yard. She had been kidnapped and whisked away, then deceived so that she would think he was dead, too.\n\nShe had never gone back for him, never returned to find out if what she had been told was the truth. At first, it hadn't mattered, because she was in the thrall of the Morgawr and certain of his explanation of her rescue. But over the years, her certainty had gradually eroded, until slowly she had begun to doubt. It was why she had been so intrigued by Bek's story about who he was when they had encountered each other for the first time in the forest that night after the attack in the ruins. It was why she hadn't killed him when she almost certainly would have otherwise. His words and his looks and his magic disturbed her. She was troubled by the possibility that he might be who he said he was and that everything she had believed about him was wrong.\n\nWhich would mean that she had left him to die when she should have gone back to save him.\n\nIt was a failure for which he would never blame her, but for which she might well blame herself. She had failed her parents and then failed him, as well. She had thrown away her life for a handful of lies and a misplaced need for vengeance.\n\nHe was so startled by the idea that it could be something as simple as this that for a moment he could not believe it was possible. Or that it could be something so impossibly wrongheaded. But she did not think as he did, or even as others did. She had come through the scouring magic of the Sword of Shannara to be reborn into the world, tempered by fire he could barely imagine, by truths so vast and inexorable that they would destroy a weaker person. She had survived because of who she was, but had become more damaged, too.\n\nWhat should he do?\n\nHe was frightened that he might be wrong, and if he was, he had no idea of where else to look. But fear had no place in what was needed, and he had no patience with its weakness. He had to try using his new insight to break down her defenses. He had to find out if he was right.\n\nHis choices were simple. He could call on the magic of the wishsong or he could speak to her in his normal voice. He chose the latter. He moved closer to her, putting his face right in front of hers, his hands clasped loosely about her slender neck, tangling in her thick, dark hair.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" he whispered to her. \"Grianne, listen to what I have to say to you. You can hear me. You can hear every word. I love you, Grianne. I never stopped loving you, not once, not even after I found out who you were. It isn't your fault, what was done to you. You can come home, now. You can come home to me. That's where your home is \u2014 with me. Your brother, Bek.\"\n\nHe waited a moment, searching her empty eyes. \"You hid me from the Morgawr and his Mwellrets, Grianne, even without knowing who they were. You saved my life. I know you wanted to come back for me, that you wanted to bring help for me and for our parents. But you couldn't do that. There wasn't any way for you to return. There wasn't enough time, even if the Morgawr hadn't tricked you. But even though you couldn't come back, you saved me. Just by hiding me so that Truls Rohk could find me and take me to Walker, you saved me. I'm alive because of you.\"\n\nHe paused. Had he felt her shiver? \"Grianne, I forgive you for leaving me, for not coming back, for not discovering that I was still alive. I forgive you for all of that, for everything you might have done and failed to do. You have to forgive yourself, as well. You have to stop hiding from what happened all those years ago. It isn't a truth that needs hiding from. It is a truth that needs facing up to. I need you back with me, not somewhere far away. By hiding from me, you are leaving me again. Don't do that, Grianne. Don't go away again. Come back to me as you promised you would.\"\n\nShe was trembling suddenly, but her gaze remained fixed and staring, her eyes as blank as forest lakes at night. He kept holding her, waiting for her to do something more. Keep talking, he told himself. This is the way to reach her.\n\nInstead, he began to sing, calling up the magic of the wishsong almost without realizing he was doing so, singing now the words he had only spoken before. It was an impulsive act, an instinctive response to his need to connect with her. He was so close, right on the verge of breaking through. He could feel the shell in which she had encased herself beginning to crack. She was there, right inside, desperate to reach him.\n\nSo he turned to the language they both understood best, the language peculiar to them alone. The music flowed out of him, infused with his magic, sweet and soft and filled with yearning. He gave himself over to it in the way that music requires, lost in its rhythm, in its flow, in its transcendence of the here and now. He took himself away from where he was and took her with him, back in time to a life he had barely known and she had forgotten, back to a world they had both lost. He sang of it as he would have wanted it to be, all the while telling her he forgave her for leaving that world, for abandoning him, for losing herself in a labyrinth of treacheries and lies and hatred and monstrous acts from which it might seem there could be no redemption. He sang of it as a way of healing, so that she might find in the words and music the balm she required to accept the harshness of the truth about her life and know that as bad as it was, it was nevertheless all right, that forgiveness came to everyone.\n\nHe had no idea how long he sang, only that he did so without thinking of what he was attempting or even of what was needed. He sang because the music gave him a release for his own confused, tangled emotions. Yet the effect was the same. He was aware of her small shivers turning to trembles, of her head snapping up and her eyes beginning to focus, of a sound rising from her throat that approached a primal howl. He could sense the walls she had constructed crumble and feel her world shift.\n\nThen she seized him in such a powerful embrace it did not seem possible that a girl so slender could manage it. She pressed him against her so hard that he could barely breathe, crying softly into his shoulder and saying, \"It's all right, Bek, I'm here for you, I'm here.\"\n\nHe stopped singing then and hugged her back, and in the ensuing silence he closed his eyes and mouthed a single word.\n\nStay." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "She had been hiding in the darkest place she could find, but in the blackness that surrounded her were the things that hunted her. She did not know what they were, but she knew she must not look at them too closely. They were dangerous, and if they caught even the smallest glimpse of her eyes, they would fall on her like wolves. So she stayed perfectly still and did not look at them, hoping they would go away.\n\nBut they refused to leave, and she found herself trapped with no chance to escape. She was six years old, and in her mind she saw the things in the darkness as black-cloaked monsters. They had pursued her for a long time, tracking her with such persistence that she knew they would never stop. She thought that if she could manage to get past them and find her way home to her parents and brother, she would be safe again. But they would not let her go.\n\nShe could remember her home clearly. She could see its rooms and halls in her mind. It hadn't been very large, but it had felt warm and safe. Her parents had loved and cared for her, and her little brother had depended on her to look after him. But she had failed them all. She had run away from them, fled her home because the black things were coming for her and she knew that if she stayed, she would die. Her flight was swift and mindless, and it took her away from everything she knew \u2014 here, to this place of empty blackness where she knew nothing.\n\nNow and again, she would hear her brother calling to her from a long way off. She recognized Bek's voice, even though it was a grown-up's voice and she knew he was only two years old and should not be able to speak more than a few words. Sometimes, he sang to her, songs of childhood and home. She wanted to call out to him, to tell him where she was, but she was afraid. If she spoke even one word, made even a single sound, the things in the darkness would know where she was and come for her.\n\nShe had no sense of time or place. She had no sense of the world beyond where she hid. Everything real was gone, and only her memories remained. She clung to them like threads of gold, shining bright and precious in the dark.\n\nOnce, Bek managed to find her, breaking through the darkness with tears that washed away her hunters. A path opened for her, created out of his need, a need so strong that not even the black things could withstand it. She took the path out of her hiding place and found him again, his heart breaking as he watched his little dog lying injured beside him. She told him she was back, that she would not leave him again, and she used her magic to heal his puppy. But the black things were still waiting for her, and when she felt his need for her begin to wane and the path it had opened begin to close, she was forced to flee back into her hiding place. Without his need to sustain her with its healing power, she could not stay.\n\nSo she hid once more. The path she had taken to him was closed and gone, and she did not know what she could do to open it again. Bek must open it, she believed. He had done so once, he must do so again. But Bek was only a baby, and he didn't understand what had happened to her. He didn't realize why she was hiding and how dangerous the black things were. He didn't know that she was trapped and that he was the only one who could free her.\n\n\"But when you told me you forgave me for leaving you, I felt everything begin to change,\" she told him. \"When you told me how much you needed me, how by not coming back to you I was leaving you again, I felt the darkness begin to recede and the black things \u2014 the truths I couldn't bear to face \u2014 begin to fade. I heard you singing, and I felt the magic break through and wrap me like a soft blanket. I thought that if you could forgive me, after how I had failed you, then I could face what I had done beyond that, all of it, every bad thing.\"\n\nThey were sitting in the darkness where this had all begun, tucked away in a corner of Redden Alt Mer's Captain's quarters, whispering so as not to wake the sleeping Quentin Leah. Shadows draped their faces and masked some of what their eyes would have otherwise revealed, but Bek knew what his sister was thinking. She was thinking he had known what he was doing when he found a way to reach her through the magic of the wishsong. Yet it was mostly chance that he had done so. Or perhaps perseverance, if he was to be charitable about it. He had thought it would take forgiveness to bring her awake. He had been wrong. It had taken her sensing the depth of his need.\n\n\"I just wanted to give you a chance to be yourself again,\" he said. \"I didn't want you to stay locked away inside, whatever the consequences of coming out might be.\"\n\n\"They won't be good ones, Bek,\" she told him, reaching over to touch his cheek. \"They might be very bad.\" She was quiet for a moment, staring at him. \"I can't believe I've really found you again.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it either. But then I can't believe hardly anything of what's happened. Especially to me. I'm not so different from you. Everything I thought true about myself was a lie, too.\"\n\nShe smiled, but there was a hint of bitterness and reproach. \"Don't say that. Don't ever say that. You're nothing like me, save that you didn't know you were an Ohmsford. You haven't done the things that I've done. You haven't lived my life. Be grateful for that. You can look back on your life and not regret it. I will never be able to do that. I'll regret my life for as long as I live. I'll want to change it every day, and I won't be able to do that. All of the things I've done as the Ilse Witch will be with me forever.\"\n\nShe gave him a long, hard look. \"I love you, and I know you love me, too. That gives me hope, Bek. That gives me the strength I need to try to make something good come out of all the bad.\"\n\n\"Do you remember everything that happened now?\" he asked her. \"Everything you did while you were the Ilse Witch?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Everything.\"\n\n\"The Sword of Shannara showed it to you?\"\n\n\"Every last act. All of the things I did because I wanted revenge on Walker. All of the wrongs I committed because I thought I was entitled to do whatever was necessary to get what I sought.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you had to go through that, but not sorry that I got you back.\"\n\nShe pushed her long dark hair out of her pale face, revealing the pain in her eyes. \"There wasn't any hope for me unless I discovered the truth about myself. About you and our parents. About everything that happened to us all those years ago. About the Morgawr, especially. I couldn't be anyone other than who the Morgawr had made me to be \u2014 and who I had made myself to be \u2014 until that happened. I hate knowing it, but it's freeing, too. I don't have to hide anymore.\"\n\n\"There are some things you don't know yet,\" he said. He shifted uncomfortably, trying to decide where to start. \"The people we're traveling with, the survivors of Walker's company, all have reason to hate you. They don't, not all of them anyway, but they have suffered losses because of you. I guess you need to know about those losses, about the harm you've caused. I don't think there's any way to avoid it.\"\n\nShe nodded, her expression one of regret mixed with determination. \"Tell me then, Bek. Tell me all of it.\"\n\nHe did so, leaving nothing out. It took him some time to do so, and while he was speaking, he became aware of someone else entering the room, easing over next to him, and sitting close. He knew without looking who it was, and he watched Grianne's eyes shift to find those of the newcomer. He kept talking nevertheless, afraid that if he looked away, he would not be able to continue. He related his story of the journey to Parkasia, of finding the ruins and Antrax, confronting her, escaping into the mountains and being captured, breaking free of Black Moclips and the rets, coming down into the bowels of Castledown to find that Walker had already tricked her into invoking the cleansing magic of the Sword of Shannara, taking her back into the mountains, and finding their way at last to what remained of the company of the Jerle Shannara.\n\nWhen he had finished, he looked over his shoulder to find Rue. She was staring at Grianne. The look on her face was indecipherable. But the tone of her voice when she spoke to his sister was unmistakable.\n\n\"The Morgawr has come searching for you,\" she said. \"His ships are anchored offshore. In the morning, he will search these ruins. If he finds us, he will try to kill us. What are you going to do about it?\"\n\n\"Rue Meridian.\" His sister spoke the other's name as if to make its owner real. \"Are you one of those who have not forgiven me?\"\n\nLittle Red's eyes were fierce as they held Grianne's. One hand came up to rest possessively on Bek's shoulder. \"I have forgiven you.\"\n\nBut Bek did not miss the bitterness in her voice or the challenge that lay behind it. Forgiveness is earned, not granted, it said. I forgive you, but what does it matter? You still must demonstrate that my forgiveness is warranted.\n\nHe glanced at his sister and saw sadness and regret mirrored on her smooth, pale face. Her eyes shifted to where Rue's hand rested on his shoulder, and the last physical vestiges of the girl of six that she had been for all those days and nights of her catatonia vanished. Her face went hard and expressionless, the mask she had perfected to keep the demons of her life at bay when she was the Ilse Witch.\n\nShe looked back at her brother for just a moment. \"I told you,\" she said to him, \"that the consequences of my waking would not all be good ones.\" She smiled with cold certainty. \"Some will be very bad.\"\n\nThere was a long pause as the two women attempted to stare each other down, each laying claim to something that the other wanted and could never have. A part of a past gone by. A part of a future yet to be. Time and events would determine how much of either they could share, but there was a need for compromise and neither had ever been very good at that.\n\n\"Maybe you should meet the others of the company, as well,\" Bek said quietly.\n\nBeginnings in this situation, he thought, might prove tougher than endings.\n\nAt dawn, they stood together in the shelter of a tower's crumbling turret, Bek and Grianne and Rue, perched on its highest floor so that they could look out across the ruins to where the Morgawr's airships were beginning to stir. By now, Grianne had met all of the ship's company and been received with a degree of acceptance that Bek had not expected. If he was honest about it, Rue had proven to be the most hostile of the company. The two women were locked in some sort of contest that had something to do with him, but about which he understood little. Unable to deflect their mutual disdain, he had settled for keeping them civil.\n\nAcross the broad green sweep of the grasslands, the airships of the Morgawr were visible in the clear pale light of a sunrise that heralded an impossibly beautiful day. Bek saw the sticklike figures of the walking dead, standing at their stations, awaiting the commands that would set them in motion. He saw the first of the Mwellrets, cloaked and hooded against the light, emerging from belowdecks, climbing through the hatchways. Most important of all, he saw the Morgawr, standing at the forward railing of Black Moclips, his gaze, searching, directed toward the ruins where they hid.\n\n\"You were right,\" Grianne said softly, her slight body rigid within her robes. \"He knows we're here.\"\n\nThe others of the company were settled in below, hiding within the hull and pontoons of the Jerle Shannara, waiting to see what would happen. Alt Mer knew of Bek's fears, but he could do nothing about them. The Jerle Shannara could not fly if they did not put up her masts and sails, and the noise alone of doing so would give them away. Even if the Morgawr tried to search the ruins, there was reason to think he would not find them, that the magic of the spirit dweller would refuse him entry and lead him back outside without his even realizing it, just as it had done to Walker. But that was a huge gamble, \u2014 if it failed, they were trapped and outnumbered. Escape would be impossible unless they could overcome their enemies through means that at this point were a mystery.\n\nBek did not feel good about their chances. He did not believe that the Morgawr would be fooled by the magic of the spirit creature. Everything suggested otherwise. The warlock had tracked them this far without being able to see them and with no visible trail to follow. He seemed to know that they were hiding in the ruins. If he could determine all that, he would be quick enough to realize what the spirit dweller was doing to him when he tried to penetrate the ruins and would probably have a way to counteract it.\n\nIf that happened, they would have to face him.\n\nHe glanced at Grianne. She had never answered Rue's question about what she intended to do to stop the Morgawr. In fact, his sister had said almost nothing past greeting those to whom she was introduced. She had not asked them if they had forgiven her, as she had asked Rue. She had not apologized for what she had done to them and to those they had lost. All of the softness and vulnerability that she had evidenced on waking from her sleep was gone. She had reverted to the personality of the Ilse Witch, cold and distant and devoid of emotion, keeping her thoughts to herself, the people she encountered at bay.\n\nIt worried Bek, but he understood it, too. She was protecting herself in the only way she could, by closing off the emotions that would otherwise destroy her. It wasn't that she didn't feel anything or that she no longer believed that she must account for the wrongs she had committed. But if she gave them too much consideration, if she gave her past too great a hold over her present, she would be unable to function. She had survived for many years through strength of will and rigid control. She had kept her emotions hidden. Last night, she had discovered that she could not let go of those defenses too quickly. She was still his sister, but she could not turn away from being the Ilse Witch either.\n\nShe was walking a fine line between sanity and madness, between staying out in the light of the real world and fleeing back into the hiding place she had only just managed to escape.\n\n\"We have to decide what we're going to do if he comes into the ruins and finds us,\" Bek said quietly.\n\n\"He is only one man,\" Rue said. \"None of the others have his magic to protect them. The rets can be killed. I've killed them myself.\"\n\nShe sounded so fierce when she said it that Bek turned to look at her in spite of himself. But when he saw the look on her face he could not bring himself to say anything back.\n\nGrianne had no such problem. \"What you say is true, but the Morgawr is more powerful than any of you or even all of you put together. He is not a man, \u2014 he is not even human. He is a creature who has kept himself alive a thousand years through use of dark magic. He knows a hundred ways to kill with barely a thought.\"\n\n\"He taught you all of them, I expect,\" Rue said without looking at her.\n\nThe words had no visible effect on Grianne, though Bek flinched. \"What can we do to stop him?\" he asked, looking to avoid the confrontation he could feel building.\n\n\"Nothing,\" his sister answered. She turned now to face them both. \"This isn't your fight. It never was. Rue was right in asking me what I intended to do about the Morgawr. He is my responsibility. I am the one who must face him.\"\n\n\"You can't do that,\" Bek said at once. \"Not alone.\"\n\n\"Alone is best. Distractions will only jeopardize my chances of defeating him. Anyone whom I care about is a distraction he will take advantage of. Alone, I can do what is necessary. The Morgawr is powerful, but I am his match. I always have been.\"\n\nBek shook his head angrily. \"Once, maybe. But you were the Ilse Witch then.\"\n\n\"I am the Ilse Witch still, Bek.\" She gave him a quick, sad smile. \"You just don't see me that way.\"\n\n\"She's right about this,\" Rue interrupted before he could offer further argument. \"She has magic honed on the warlock's grinding stone. She knows how to use it against him.\"\n\n\"But I have the same magic!\" Bek snapped, hissing in anger as he sought to keep his voice down. \"What about Ahren Elessedil? He has the power of the Elfstones. Shouldn't we use our magics together? Wouldn't that be more effective than you facing the Morgawr alone? Why are you being so stubborn about this?\"\n\n\"You are inexperienced at using the wishsong, Bek. Ahren is inexperienced at using the Elfstones. The Morgawr would kill you both before you could find a way to stop him.\"\n\nShe walked over to stand beside Rue Meridian, a deliberate act he could not mistake, and turned back to face him. \"Everything that has happened to me is the Morgawr's doing. Everything I lost, I lost because of him. Everything I became, I became because of him. Everything I did, I did because of him. I made the choices, but he dictated the circumstances under which those choices were made. I make no excuses for myself, but I am owed something for what was done. No one can give that back to me. I have to take it back. I have to reclaim it. I can only do that by facing him.\"\n\nBek was incensed. \"You don't have to prove anything!\"\n\n\"Don't I, Bek?\"\n\nHe was silent, aware of how untenable his argument was and how implacable his sister's thinking. She might not have anything to prove to him, but she did to a lot of others. Most important of all, she had something to prove to herself.\n\n\"I won't be whole again until I settle this,\" she said. \"It won't stop if we escape. I know the Morgawr. He will keep coming until he finds a way to destroy me. If I want this matter ended, I have to end it here.\"\n\nBek shook his head in disgust. \"What are we supposed to do while you go out there and sacrifice yourself? Hope for the best?\"\n\n\"Take advantage of the confusion. Even if I am killed, the Morgawr will not emerge unscathed. He will be weakened and his followers will be in disarray. You can choose to face them or escape while they lick their wounds. Either is fine. Talk about it with the others and decide among you.\"\n\nShe leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. \"You have done everything you could for me, Bek. You have no reason to feel regret. I am doing this because I must.\"\n\nShe turned to Rue Meridian. \"I like it that you are not afraid of anyone, even me. I like it that you love my brother so much.\"\n\n\"Don't do this,\" Bek pleaded.\n\n\"Take care of him,\" his sister said to Rue, and without another word or even a single glance back she walked away.\n\nOrdering the rest of the fleet to remain anchored offshore, safely away from any attempts at sabotage, the Morgawr flew Black Moclips over the silver-tipped surface of the Blue Divide to the grassy flats of Mephitic. He landed his vessel and tied her off, leaving Aden Kett and his walking dead on board with a handful of guards to watch over them. Then, tossing a rope ladder over the railing of the starboard pontoon, he took Cree Bega and a dozen of his Mwellrets down off the ship and toward the castle.\n\nThey crossed the grasslands openly and deliberately, making no effort to hide their approach. If the survivors of the Jerle Shannara were hiding within the walls of the ruins, the Morgawr wanted them to see him coming. He wanted them to have time to think about it before he reached them, to let their anticipation build, and with it their fear. The Ilse Witch might not be frightened, but her companions would be. They would know by now how he feasted on the souls of the living. They would know how the Federation crew he had captured aboard Black Moclips had reacted while it was happening and what they looked like afterwards. At least one of them was likely to break down and reveal the presence of the others. That would save him time and effort. It would allow him to conserve his energy for dealing with the witch.\n\nHe told Cree Bega what he wanted. The Mwellrets were to follow his lead. They were not to talk. When they found their quarry, they were to leave the Ilse Witch to him. The others were theirs to do with as they wished. It would be best if they could kill them swiftly or render them unconscious so that they could be carried outside and disposed of.\n\nAbove all, they were to remember that there was something else living in the ruins, a spirit creature possessed of magic and capable of generating tremendous power. If it was aroused or attacked, it could prove extremely dangerous. Nothing was to be tampered with once they were inside, because the creature considered the castle its own and would fight to protect it. It cared nothing for the Jerle Shannara and her crew, however. They were not a part of its realm, and it would not protect them.\n\nHe said all this without being entirely sure it was true. It was possible that he was wrong and that the castle's inhabitant would attack for reasons the Morgawr could not even guess at. But no good purpose was served in telling that to the Mwellrets. All of them were expendable, even Cree Bega. What mattered was that he himself survive, and he had no reason to think that he wouldn't. His magic could protect him from anything. It always had.\n\nHis plan, then, was simple. He would find the witch and kill her, retrieve the books of magic from the airship, and escape. If he could achieve the former and not the latter, it would be enough. With the Druid dead, his little witch was the only one left who might cause him problems later. The books of magic were important, but he could give them up if he had to.\n\nHe began thinking about what it meant to have the last of the Druids gone. Paranor would lie uninhabited and vulnerable \u2014 protected by magic, yes, but accessible nevertheless to someone like himself who knew how to counteract that magic. It was Walker who had kept him at bay all these years. Now, perhaps, what had belonged to the Druids could be his.\n\nThe Morgawr permitted himself a smile. The wheel had come full circle on the Druids. Their time was over. His time was not. He need only dispose of one small girl. Ilse Witch or not, she was still only that.\n\nAhead, the broken-down walls and parapets of the ancient castle reared against the sunrise, stark and bare. His anticipation of what was waiting within compelled him to walk more swiftly to reach them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Grianne Ohmsford walked through the empty corridors and courtyards of the old castle with slow, deliberate steps, giving herself a chance to gather her wits. In spite of what she had allowed Bek and Rue Meridian to believe, her decision to face the Morgawr alone was impulsive and not particularly well thought out. But it was necessary for all the reasons she had given them. She was the one he was looking for, and therefore the one who must confront him. She was the only one who stood a chance against his magic. She had done a lot of harm in her life as the Ilse Witch, and any redemption for her wrongs began with an accounting from the warlock.\n\nShe was still weak from her long sleep, but fueled by anger and determination. The truths about her life hovered right in front of her eyes, images made bright and clear by the magic of the Sword of Shannara, and she could not forget them. They defined her, and knowing what she had been was what made it possible for her to see what she must now become. To complete that journey, she must put an end to the Morgawr.\n\nSilence cloaked her like a shroud, and the ruins bore the aura of a tomb. She smiled at the feeling, so familiar and still welcome, her world as she had known it for so many years. Shadows cast by walls and towers where sunlight could not penetrate spilled across the broken stone and cracked mortar like ink. She walked through those shadows in comfort, the darkness her friend, the legacy of her life. It would never change, she realized suddenly. She would always favor those things that had made her feel safe. She had found a home under conditions that would have destroyed others, had done so when everything she cared for had been taken away and all that was left was her rage, and she knew she would not be able to step away from that past easily.\n\nThat would not change, should she survive this day. Bek envisioned a returning home, a coming together of their new family, a settling into a quiet life. But his vision held no appeal for her and was rooted in dreams that belonged to someone else. Her life would take a different path from his, \u2014 she knew that much already. Hers would never be what he hoped it might, because the reason for her recovery lay not so much with him \u2014 though he had brought her awake when no one else could \u2014 but with the Dark Uncle, the keeper of secrets and the bestower of trusts. With Walker Boh.\n\nDead now, but with her always.\n\nShe began to hum, wrapping herself in the feel of the ruins and the thing that lived within them. It was dormant at present, but as pervasive in its domain as Antrax had been in its. It was everywhere at once, its presence infused in the hard stone and the dead air. She knew from Bek that the way to deceive it was to make it feel as if you belonged. She would begin her efforts to achieve that now. Once she had thoroughly integrated herself, once she was accepted as just another piece of rubble, she would be ready to deal with her enemy.\n\nIt took only a little time and effort to create the skin she needed, the mask she required. She eased herself along the corridors, listening now for the sounds of the Morgawr and his rets. They would have reached the walls and begun looking for a way inside. Her plan for him was simple. She would try to separate him from his followers, to isolate him from their help. If she was to have a chance against him, she must get him alone and keep him that way. Cree Bega and his Mwellrets were no threat to her, but they could become the sort of distraction she had worried Bek and Rue Meridian might become. To win her struggle with the Morgawr, that must not be allowed to happen.\n\nAlready, she was beginning to feel a part of her surroundings, a thing of stone and mortar, of ancient time and dust.\n\nShe shed that part of her that was Grianne Ohmsford and reverted very deliberately to being the Ilse Witch. She became the creature she must to survive, armoring herself against what waited and concealing what was vulnerable. It demanded a shift in thinking, a closing off of feelings and a shutting away of doubt. It required a girding of self for battle. Such prosaic descriptions made her smile, for the truth was much darker and meaner. She was taking a different path from the one she had followed when her purpose in life was to see Walker destroyed, but this path was just as bleak. Killing the Morgawr was killing still. It would not enhance her self-respect. It would not change the past. At best, it would give a handful of those she had wronged a chance at life. That would have to be enough.\n\nShe was glad Bek was not here to see the change happen, for she believed it was reflected in her eyes and voice. It could be contained, but not hidden. Maybe this was how she must always be, split between two selves, required by events and circumstances to be duplicitous and cunning. She could see it happening that way, but there was nothing she could do about it.\n\nThere were sounds ahead now, the echoes of small scrapings and slidings, of heavy boots passing over stone and earth. They were still a long way off, but getting closer. The Morgawr was trying to penetrate the maze. As yet, he had not detected her presence, but it would not take him long. It would be best if she attacked him before he did, while he still thought himself safe. She could wait and see if the magic of the thing in the ruins might confuse the warlock, but it would probably be wasted effort. The Morgawr was too clever to be fooled for long and too persistent to be turned away for good. Redden Alt Mer's plan had been a reasonable one, but not for someone so dangerous.\n\nShe continued to hum softly, the magic concealing her not only from the dweller in the ruins but from those who hunted her, as well. She made her way toward them, sliding through the shadows, watching the open spaces ahead for signs of movement. It would not be long until she encountered them. She breathed slowly and deeply to steady herself. She must be cautious. She must be as silent as the air through which she passed. She must be no more in evidence than would a shade come from the dead.\n\nMost of all, she must be swift.\n\nRedden Alt Mer seemed almost resigned to the inevitability of it when he heard what Grianne Ohmsford had done. Standing on the aft deck of the Jerle Shannara with Bek and Rue, he made no response, but instead stared off into the distance, lost in thought. Finally, he told them to go back on watch and let him know if they saw anything. He did not look ready to summon any of the Rover crew to prepare for an escape should Grianne fail. He did not appear interested in doing anything. He heard them out and then walked away.\n\nHis sister exchanged a quick glance with Bek and shrugged. \"Wait here,\" she said.\n\nShe disappeared below, leaving Bek to contemplate what lay ahead. He stood at the railing of the airship and looked up at the clear blue sky. Britt Rill and Kelson Riat stood together in the bow, talking in low voices. Spanner Frew was fussing with something in the pilot box, working through the heavy boughs they had laid down to hide it from the air. Alt Mer and the others were nowhere to be seen. Everything seemed strangely peaceful. For the moment, it was, Bek thought. No one would come for them right away. Not until the Morgawr had settled things with Grianne.\n\nHe thought about looking in on Quentin, but couldn't bring himself to do so. He didn't want to see his cousin while he was feeling like this. Quentin was smart enough to read his face, and he didn't think that would be such a good thing this morning. If Quentin knew what was happening, he would want to get out of bed and stand with them. He wasn't strong enough for that, and there would be time enough for the Highlander to engage in futile heroics if everything else failed. Best just to let him sleep for now.\n\nRue Meridian reappeared through the hatchway, buckling on her weapons belt with its brace of throwing knives, tucking a third into her boot as she came up to him. \"Ready to go?\" she asked.\n\nHe stared at her. \"Ready to go where?\"\n\n\"After your sister,\" she said. \"You don't think we're going to stand around here doing nothing, do you?\"\n\nNot when she put it that way, he didn't. Without another word, they slipped over the side of the airship and disappeared into the ruins after Grianne.\n\nRedden Alt Mer had been thinking about the company's situation all night. Unable to sleep, he had been reduced to pacing the decks to calm himself. He hated being grounded, all the more so for knowing that he couldn't get airborne again easily and was, essentially, trapped. He was infuriated by his sense of helplessness, a condition with which he was not familiar. Even though it had been his plan to hide in the ruins and hope the Morgawr didn't find them, he found it incomprehensible that he would actually sit there and do nothing while waiting to see if it worked.\n\nWhen Bek's sister awoke, brought out of her catatonia after all these weeks, he knew at once that everything was about to change.\n\nIt wasn't a change he could put a name to, but one he could definitely feel. The Ilse Witch awake, whether friend or enemy or something else altogether, was a presence that would shift the balance of things in some measurable way. To Alt Mer, that she had chosen to go after the Morgawr rather than to wait for the warlock to come to her seemed completely in character. It was what he would have done if he hadn't locked himself in the untenable position of hiding and waiting. The longer he stayed grounded, the more convinced he became that he was making a mistake. This wasn't the way to save either his airship or her passengers. It wasn't the way to stay alive. The Morgawr was too smart to be fooled. Alt Mer would have been better off staying aloft and fighting it out in the air.\n\nNot that he would have stood a chance with that approach either, he conceded glumly. Best to keep things in perspective while castigating oneself for perceived failures.\n\nHe left the airship and climbed the tower into which he had sent Little Red and Bek to keep watch, but they weren't there. Confused by their absence, he looked down into the courtyard where the Jerle Shannara sat concealed, thinking he might spy them. Nothing. He looked off toward the surrounding courtyards and passageways, peering through breaks in the crumbling castle walls.\n\nHe found them then, several hundred yards away, sliding through the shadows, heading toward the front of the keep and the Morgawr.\n\nFor, a second, he was stunned by what he was seeing, realizing that not only had his sister disobeyed him, but she was risking her life for the witch. Or for Bek, but it amounted to the same thing. He wanted to shout to them to get back to the ship, to do what they had been told, but he knew it was a waste of time. Rue had been doing as she pleased for as long as he could remember, and trying to make her do otherwise was a complete waste of time. Besides, she was only doing what he had been thinking he should do just moments earlier.\n\nHe walked to the outer wall of the tower and looked out across the grasslands. The Morgawr and his rets were already inside the castle, and the plains were empty save for Black Moclips, which sat anchored inland perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Beyond, clearly visible against the deep blue of the morning sky, the Morgawr's fleet hovered at anchor offshore.\n\nHe stared at the airships for a moment, at the way they were clustered to protect against a surprise attack, and an idea came to him. It was so wild, so implausible, that he almost dismissed it out of hand. But he couldn't quite let it go, and the longer he held on, the more attractive it seemed. Like a brightly colored snake that would turn on you once it had you hypnotized. Like fire, waiting to burn you to ash if you reached out to touch it.\n\nShades, he thought, he was going to do it.\n\nHe was aghast, but excited, as well, his blood pumping through him in a hot flush as he raced down the tower stairs for the airship. He would have to be quick to make a difference, and even that might not be enough. What he was thinking was insane. But there was all sorts of madness in the world, and at least this one involved something more than just standing around.\n\nHe burst out of the tower, leapt aboard the Jerle Shannara, and headed directly for Spanner Frew. The shipwright looked up from his work, doubt clouding his dark features as he saw the look on the other's face. \"What is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"You're not doing anything important, are you?\" Alt Mer replied, reaching for his sword and buckling it on.\n\nSpanner Frew stared at him. \"Everything I do is important. What do you want?\"\n\n\"I want you to go with me to steal back Black Moclips.\"\n\nThe shipwright grunted in disgust. \"That didn't work so well for Little Red, as I recall.\"\n\n\"Little Red didn't have a good plan. I do. Come along and find out. We'll take Britt and Kelson for company. It should be fun, Black Beard.\"\n\nSpanner Frew folded his burly arms across his chest. \"It sounds dangerous to me.\"\n\nAlt Mer grinned. \"You didn't think you were going to live forever, did you?\" he asked.\n\nThen, seeing the other man's dark brow furrow in response, he laughed.\n\nHe left Ahren Elessedil and Kian to keep watch over the Jerle Shannara and set out with Spanner Frew, Kelson Riat, and Britt Rill for the outside wall of the castle. It didn't occur to him until he was well away from the airship that he might have trouble finding his way back. Not only were the ruins a confusing maze to begin with, but the spirit creature's magic was designed to keep intruders from penetrating beyond the perimeter. But there was no help for it now, and besides, he didn't think he would be coming back anyway.\n\nHe told his companions what he thought they needed to know and no more. He told them that they were going to skirt the ruins to their most inland point, well away from the view of those aboard Black Moclips, then sneak around to the far side of the airship, get aboard, and steal her away. If they could manage it, they would have a fully operational airship in which to make their escape. With luck, the Morgawr would not be able to give chase, and without him, the rest of the fleet would lack the necessary leadership to act.\n\nIt was all an incredible bunch of nonsense, if he thought it through, but since they were already moving to do what he had suggested, there wasn't enough time for much thought on the part of anyone.\n\nHe took them directly to the outer wall, then east and north along their perimeter to a gate that opened almost directly into a heavy stand of trees. He was moving quickly, aware of the fact that the Morgawr could encounter Grianne or Bek and Rue at any time, and once that happened, it might be too late for him to succeed in what he intended. Scooting out from the cover of the walls, the four Rovers gained the trees and worked their way through them until they were across the flats. From there, they followed a shallow ravine that allowed them to creep through the tall grasses until they were less than a hundred yards from their target.\n\nSpanner Frew was huffing noticeably from the effort, but Kelson and Britt were barely winded. Alt Mer lifted his head for a quick look around. They were behind Black Moclips, and the Mwellrets he could see were all facing toward the ruins.\n\n\"Black Beard,\" he said to Spanner Frew, keeping his voice soft. \"Wait here for us. If we don't make it, get back to the airship and warn the others. If we get aboard, come join us.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a response, he slithered out of the ravine into the cover of the grasses and began to crawl toward the airship. Kelson and Britt followed, all of them experienced at sneaking into places they weren't supposed to be. They crossed the open ground quickly, easing through gullies and shallow depressions, pressed close to the ground.\n\nWhen Alt Mer could see the hull of the airship without lifting his head, he paused. The pontoon closest to him blocked their view of the rets on the main deck, but it blocked the rets' view of them, as well. Unless one of the rets came down into the fighting stations and peered over the side, the Rovers were safe. All they had to do now was to find a way to get aboard.\n\nAlt Mer stood up carefully, signaled to the other two men to follow, and started toward the rope ladder. He passed under the hull of the airship, which, anchored by ropes tied fore and aft, floated perhaps two dozen feet off the ground. He paused to study the rope ladder, the easiest way onto the ship, but the one the rets would be quickest to defend. Beckoning Britt and Kelson to him, he whispered for them to move as close to the ladder as they could without being seen and to stand ready to board when he called for them.\n\nThen moving to the bow of the airship, he took hold of the anchor rope and, hand over hand, began to haul himself up.\n\nHe reached the prow at the curve of the rams and peeked over the railing. There were four rets, two at the railing by the rope ladder, one in the pilot box and one aft. The hapless Federation crew stood around like sleepwalkers, staring at nothing, arms hanging limp at their sides. He felt a momentary pang of regret at what had to happen, but there was no way anyone could save them now.\n\nHe took a deep breath, heaved himself over the side, and charged across the deck toward the two closest Mwellrets. He killed the first with a single pass of his long knife, yelling for Britt and Kelson as he engaged the second. Both Rovers appeared up the ladder almost at once, grabbing his antagonist from behind and throwing him down. Alt Mer rushed the pilot box as the third ret snatched up a pike and launched it at him. The pike passed so close to his head that he heard the air vibrate, but he didn't slow. He went up the front of the box with a single bound, vaulted the shield, and was inside before the ret could escape. The ret swung at him with his broadsword in a desperate effort to stop him, but Alt Mer blocked the blow, slid inside the ret's guard, and buried the long knife in his chest.\n\nThe last ret tried to go over the side, but Kelson caught him halfway over the rail and finished him.\n\nThat wasn't so difficult after all, Alt Mer decided, aware that he had been injured in the struggle, both arms bleeding from slashes, his ribs bruised on his left side, and his head light with the blow it had taken from the first ret. He went back down to the deck, hiding the wounds as best he could. He ordered his men to throw the dead rets over the side, then go down the ladder and hide the bodies in the grass. It was a strange order, and they glanced at each other questioningly, but they didn't argue. They were used to doing what he told them to do, and they did so now.\n\nAs soon as they were safely over the side and on the ground, he pulled up the ladder. Then he walked quickly to the anchor ropes, passing the dead-eyed Federation crew, who made no effort to stop him or even to look at him, and cut them both. As the ropes fell away, Black Moclips began to rise.\n\n\"Big Red!\" he heard Spanner Frew call after him, lumbering across the grasslands in a futile effort to catch up. Below, Kelson Riat and Britt Rill were calling up to him, as well, shouting that the ropes were gone, that they couldn't reach him.\n\nThat was the general idea, of course. He didn't need any help with what he intended to do next. The sacrifice of his own life in furtherance of this wild scheme was more than enough.\n\nRedden Alt Mer leaned over the side and waved good-bye." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "She could hear them coming now, the scrape of their footfalls, the hiss of their breathing, and the rustle of their heavy cloaks, the echoes reaching out to her through the silence. Grianne slowed to where her own sounds disappeared completely, lost in the concealment of her wishsong's magic. She disappeared into the stone walls and floors of the ruins, into its towers and parapets. She completed the transformation she had begun earlier, taking on the look and feel of the castle. She disappeared in plain sight.\n\nThe Morgawr had come to find her, but she had found him first. She could feel the magic of the castle dweller working about her, changing the way the corridors opened and closed, shifting doorways and walls to confuse and mislead. It did so in arbitrary fashion, a function of its being that required no more thought than did her breathing. It was not yet aroused to do more, to lash out as it had at Bek and the shape-shifter when they had stolen the key from its hiding place. Thousands of years old, a thing out of the world of Faerie, it slumbered in its lair. If it sensed the presence of the Morgawr and his Mwellrets, or if it sensed her own for that matter, it did so in only the most subliminal way, and was not concerned by it. That would change, she decided, when the time was right. In any arena in which she must do combat, weapons of all sorts were permitted.\n\nShe breathed slowly and evenly to quiet her pulse and her mind and to steady her nerves. She was at her best when she was in control, and if she was to overcome the Morgawr, she must take control quickly. Hesitation or delay would be fatal. Or any show of mercy. Whether or not to kill the Morgawr was not an issue she could afford to debate. Certainly he would be quick enough to kill her \u2014 unless he thought he could render her immobile and feed on her later.\n\nShe shuddered at the thought, never having gotten used to it or quite been able to put aside her fear and revulsion of what it would feel like. She had never thought she would be at risk and so never considered the possibility. It left her chilled and tight inside to do so now.\n\nBut she was still the Ilse Witch, cloaked in a mantle of steely confidence and hardened resolve, and so she choked off her revulsion and clamped down on her fear. The Morgawr had destroyed many creatures in his long lifetime and overcome much magic. But he had never had to face anyone like her.\n\nShe thought of the creatures she had destroyed in her turn and of the magics she had overcome. She did not like thinking of it, but could not help herself. The truths of her life were too recently revealed for her to close them away. One day, she might be able to do so with some of them, perhaps most. For now, she must embrace them and draw what strength she could from the anger they engendered. For now, she must acknowledge their monstrosity and remember that they were the consequence of the Morgawr's treachery. For a little while longer, she must be the creature he had helped create.\n\nFor a little while longer.\n\nThe words had a hollow feel to them, an ephemeral quality that suggested they could be blown away in a single breath.\n\nBut there was no more time for rumination. She spied movement through breaks in the stone walls, the bulky shapes of the Mwellrets sliding past the shadows of the sunless ruins. She moved to intercept them, already laying the groundwork for separating them from the Morgawr, casting her magic in places that would draw his attention long enough for her to do what was needed.\n\nDown through the corridors of broken rock they trudged, the Mwellrets and their dark leader. She could see him now, tall and massive and loathsomely familiar. He walked ahead, pointing the way for Cree Bega and his minions, testing the air for danger, for magic, for signs of her presence. He would already know about the spirit that warded the ruins, and he would be wary of it. His plan would be to find and engage her in single combat. He would expect her to be hiding with the company of the Jerle Shannara. He would not expect her to be hunting him as he was hunting her.\n\nShe used the magic of the wishsong to smooth the path he followed, to give him a sense of ease. It was a subtle effect, but one that, if he detected it, would not disturb him in a place where magic was rife. He knew he was being manipulated by the castle's dweller, and he would expect to be gently prodded in the direction the dweller wished him to go. In his arrogance, he would allow this, thinking he could compensate for it whenever he was ready. He would not suspect that she was there, acting as the dweller's surrogate, manipulating him for her own purposes. By the time he realized the truth, it would be too late.\n\nWhen he neared, she found a place suitable to her intent and stepped back into the shadows to wait.\n\nSeconds later, the Morgawr emerged from one of several corridors leading in, and she used the magic at once to suggest her presence in a chamber further on. He glanced up in response to the faint impression, leaning forward within the covering of his cowl as if to taste the air, sensing something he couldn't see, not quite sure what it was, only that it touched on her. He signaled for the Mwellrets, who were a dozen paces back, to hold up.\n\nCome ahead, she urged him silently. Don't be afraid.\n\nHe slipped into the chamber on cat's paws, little more than a hint of dark movement in shadows that were darker still. He crossed the room in pursuit of her tease, cautious and deliberate, and disappeared down a corridor.\n\nShe left her hiding place and slid along the wall that followed the Morgawr's path, as deliberate and careful as he was, humming steadily, purposefully, keeping herself concealed. She could just hear the soft muttering of the rets behind her, but nothing of the warlock.\n\nWhen she was all the way across the room and next to the corridor beyond, able to see the Morgawr's dark shape ahead, she turned back to the rets. Projecting the warlock's voice into their minds so that it seemed as if he were speaking, she summoned them ahead.\n\nThey came instantly, responding as she knew they would. But once they entered the room, she took them a different way. The ruins were a maze, and there were openings everywhere. She chose one that led away from the Morgawr, but gave the rets the impression they were still following him. Cree Bega's blunt, reptilian face lifted in doubt, gimlet eyes casting about for his leader. But, unable to find him, he continued on, following the thread she had laid out for him, moving steadily further away. Bunched together like cattle, they let themselves be herded into the chute she had chosen for them, and when they were all safely inside, she closed the gate. As quickly as that, the way back disappeared. She threw up a wall of magic that closed it off as surely as if it had never existed. The rets were in a corridor from which they could not escape without breaking through her magic or moving ahead down a series of twists and turns that would take them too long to navigate to be of any help to their leader.\n\nInstantly, she turned into the passageway the Morgawr had taken, spied him turning toward her, and attacked, striking out with every last measure of power she could muster, hurtling it at him like a missile. The magic was a shriek in the silence, hammering into the Morgawr, throwing him back down the corridor and into a wall with such force that the ancient stones shattered from the impact. She went down the corridor in a rush, bursting into the room just in time to watch her handiwork disappear in a whiff of vapor.\n\nIt was only an illusion, she realized at once. It wasn't the Morgawr at all. She had been tricked.\n\nShe turned around to find him standing right behind her.\n\nBek and Rue Meridian heard the explosion from several chambers away while still winding through the maze in a futile effort to catch up with Grianne. The sound was like nothing either of them had ever heard, a sort of metallic scream that set their teeth on edge. But Bek recognized the source instantly, Grianne had invoked the magic of the wishsong. He screamed her name, then charged ahead heedlessly, abandoning any effort at a silent approach, anxious now just to get to where things were happening before it was too late.\n\n\"Bek, stop!\" Rue called after him in dismay.\n\nToo late. Rounding the corner of a twisting passageway hemmed in by walls so tall they left only a sliver of blue sky visible overhead, they ran right into Cree Bega and his Mwellrets. Rushing from opposite directions into a tiny courtyard littered with debris and streaked with shadows, they skidded to a stop. It happened so quickly that the image was still registering in Bek's mind as Rue whipped out both throwing knives and sent them whistling across the short space in a blur of bright metal. Two of the rets died on their feet as the rest charged.\n\nThey would have been finished then, if Bek, watching the massive bodies of the rets bear down on them, had not reacted instinctively to the threat. Calling up his own magic in a desperate response, he sent a wall of sound hurtling into his attackers. It caught up the rets as it had the creepers in the ruins of Castledown and sent them flying. Three got past, breaking in at the edges. Bek had only a moment to catch the glitter of their knife blades, and then they were on top of him.\n\nRue, swift, agile, and lethal, killed the first, ducking under his massive arms and burying her third throwing knife in his throat. She intercepted the second as well, but it bore her backwards, its momentum too great to slow. Bek saw her go down, then lost track as the final assailant crashed into him, knife slicing at his throat. He blocked the blow, screaming at the ret in defiance. His voice was threaded with the wishsong's magic, \u2014 it exploded out of him in automatic response to his fear and anger and shredded the Mwellret's head like metal shards. The ret was dead before he knew what had happened, and Bek was scrambling back to his feet.\n\n\"Rue!\" he called out frantically.\n\n\"Not so loud. I can hear you.\"\n\nShe hauled herself out from under the body of her assailant, but only with some difficulty. Blood covered her, a jagged tear down the front of her tunic and another down her left sleeve. Bek dropped to his knees next to her, shoving the dead Mwellret out of the way. He began searching through her clothing for the wounds, but she pushed him away.\n\n\"Leave me alone. I've broken my ribs again. It hurts just to breathe.\" She swallowed against her pain. \"Bring me my knives. Watch yourself. Some of them might still be alive.\"\n\nHe pulled free the knife buried in the throat of the ret a few feet away, then crossed the courtyard to where the others lay in tangled heaps. The impact of striking the wall had smashed them so badly they were barely recognizable. He stared at them a moment, sickened by the fact that he was responsible for this, that he had killed them. He hadn't seen so many dead men since the attack on the company of the Jerle Shannara in the ruins weeks earlier. He hesitated a moment too long, thinking about the deaths here and there, and was suddenly sick to his stomach. He went down on his knees and retched helplessly.\n\n\"Hurry up!\" Rue called impatiently.\n\nHe retrieved the other two throwing knives, carried them back and gave them to her, and again reached to bind her wounds. \"Leave that to me,\" she said, holding him off.\n\n\"But you're bleeding!\" he insisted.\n\n\"The blood isn't all mine. It's mostly the ret's.\" Her eyes were bright with tears, but her gaze steady. \"I can't go any further hurting like this. You have to go on without me. Find your sister. She needs you more than I do.\"\n\nHe shook his head, suddenly concerned. \"I won't leave you. How bad are you hurt, Rue? Show me.\"\n\nShe set her jaw and shoved at him again. \"Not so bad that I can't get up and thrash you to within an inch of your life if you don't do what I tell you! Go after Grianne, Bek! Right now! Go on!\"\n\nAnother explosion sounded, this one closer, the sound deeper and more ominous than before. Bek looked up in response, fear for his sister reflected in his eyes.\n\n\"Bek, she needs you!\" Rue hissed at him angrily.\n\nHe gave her a final glance, then sprang to his feet and charged ahead into the gloom.\n\nRedden Alt Mer swung the bow of Black Moclips toward the Blue Divide and the Morgawr's fleet, setting his course and locking down the wheel before leaving the pilot box. Down on the deck, he raised all the sails, tightened the radian draws, and checked the hooding shields on the parse tubes, making sure that everything was in good working order and could be controlled from the pilot box. A quick glance over the tips of the ramming horns revealed that nothing had changed ahead. The fleet still lay at anchor, and there was almost no movement on the decks. It was a lapse in judgment and discipline that he would make them pay dearly for.\n\nHe paused for a moment in front of Aden Kelt and looked into the Federation Commander's dead, unseeing eyes. Like Rue, he had admired Kett, thought him a good soldier and a good airship Commander. To see him like this, to see all of them like this, was heartbreaking. Reducing men to puppets, to something less than the lowest animals that walked the earth, bereft of the ability to reason or act independently, was a monstrous evil. He thought he had seen more than enough kinds of evil in his life and wanted no more of this one. Perhaps he could put a stop to it here.\n\nHe went aft to the storage lockers and hauled out two heavy lines of rope and a pair of grappling hooks. Double-looping the lines through the eyes of the hooks, he carried one to each side of the rams and tied off the free ends to mooring cleats. Coiling the lines with the hooks resting on top so that they were ready for use, he went back up into the box.\n\nHe glanced back at the shoreline. Spanner Frew and the Rover crewmen stood at the edge of the bluff, staring after him in what he could only imagine was disbelief. At least they weren't shouting at him to come back, calling unwanted attention to themselves and to him. Maybe they had figured out his plan and were just watching to see what would happen.\n\nFor a moment, he found himself thinking of the Prekkendorran and all the airship raids he had survived under much worse conditions. It heartened him to imagine that he might survive this one, too, even though he couldn't see how that was possible. He looked up at the brilliant morning sky, a depthless blue expanse that seemed to open away forever, and he wished he had more time to enjoy this life that had been so good to him. But that was the nature of things. You got so much time and you made the best of it. In the end, you needed to feel that the choices you had made were mostly the right ones.\n\nHe adjusted his approach to the anchored fleet so that it would appear he intended to pass by them on their port side. The first faint stirrings of life were visible now, a few of the rets moving to the railings to look out at him. They recognized Black Moclips and were wondering why they didn't see any of the Mwellrets or the Morgawr. It helped that Kett's Federation crew was visible, the men ho had taken her ashore, but it would keep them from acting for only a few moments more.\n\nRedden Alt Mer pulled back on the levers to the thrusters. Drawing down power from the light sheaths through all twelve of the radian draws, Black Moclips began to pick up speed.\n\nAhren Elessedil heard the explosion, as well, standing on the deck of the dismantled Jerle Shannara with the Elven Hunter Kian. Save for Quentin Leah, who'd been sedated by Rue Meridian to make certain he stayed quiet, they were alone now on the airship. Quentin had suffered a setback in recent days, his injuries worsening once more after seeming to heal. He did not appear to be in any serious danger, but he was running a fever and had developed a tendency to hallucinate that often provoked loud outcries. So Rue had given him the sleeping potion to help him rest.\n\nBut the explosion might have brought him awake, so Ahren left Kian topside and went belowdecks to see after the Highlander. He wished he didn't have to stay aboard the airship, that he could go out with the others and see what was happening. It was bad enough when Bek and Rue left, but now the Rovers had all disappeared, as well, and with only the taciturn Kian and the sleeping Quentin Leah for company, he felt like he had been deserted.\n\nHe ducked his head into the Captain's quarters long enough to reassure himself that Quentin was all right, then went back down the passageway and upstairs again. Kian was standing at the port railing, looking off into the ruins.\n\n\"See anything?\" Ahren asked him, coming alongside.\n\nKian shook his head. They stood together listening, then heard a second explosion, this one of a deeper sort. There were sounds of fighting, as well, distant but clear, the bright, sharp clang of blades and sudden cries of injured or dying men. More explosions followed, and then silence.\n\nThey waited a long time for something more, but the silence only deepened. The minutes ticked away, sluggish footfalls leading nowhere. Ahren grew steadily more impatient. He had the Elfstones tucked in his tunic and his broadsword belted at his waist. If he had to fight, he was ready. But there would be no fighting so long as he stayed here.\n\n\"I think we should go look for them,\" he said finally.\n\nKian shook his head, his dark face expressionless. \"Someone has to stay with the airship, Elven Prince. We can't leave her unguarded.\"\n\nAhren knew Kian was right, but it didn't make him feel any better. If anything, it made him feel worse. His obligation to the company required him to stay aboard the Jerle Shannara even when it made him feel entirely useless. It wasn't so much that he was anxious to fight, but more that he didn't want to feel as if he wasn't doing his part. It seemed to him that he had failed as a member of this company in every conceivable way. He had failed his friends in the ruins of Castledown when he had run away. He had failed Walker by not being able to recover the Elfstones in time to help him in his battle with Antrax. He had failed Ryer Ord Star by leaving her behind when he escaped Black Moclips and the Morgawr.\n\nHe was particularly bothered by the death of the seer. Big Red had smoothed out the rough parts, but there was no way to soften the impact. Ahren's sense of guilt went unrelieved. He had been in such a rush to escape that he had let himself believe the lie she told him without questioning it. She had sacrificed herself for him, and to his way of thinking it should have been the other way around.\n\nHe sighed with sad resolution. It was too late to change what had happened to her, but not too late to make certain that it didn't happen to someone else. Yet what chance did he have to affect anything stuck back here on the Jerle Shannara while everyone else went off to fight his battles for him?\n\nThere were more explosions, and then a huge grinding sound that rolled through the ruins like an avalanche. The ground shook so heavily that it rocked the airship and sent both Elves careening into the ship's railing, which they quickly grabbed for support.\n\nBlocks of stone tumbled from the battlements and towers of the old castle, and new cracks appeared in the walls and flooring, opening like hungry mouths.\n\nWhen the grinding ended, it was silent again. Ahren stared into the ruins, trying to make sense of things, but there was no way to do that from here.\n\nHe turned to Kian in exasperation. \"I'm going to have a look. Something's happened.\"\n\nKian blocked his way, facing him. \"No, Elven Prince. It isn't safe for you \u2014\"\n\nHe gave a sharp grunt, and his eyes went wide in shock. As Ahren watched in confusion, Kian took two quick steps toward him and toppled over, eyes fixed and staring. Ahren caught him as he fell, lowering him to the ship's decking. The haft of a throwing knife protruded from his back, the blade buried to the hilt.\n\nAhren released him, rushed to the railing and peered over. A Mwellret had hold of the rope ladder and was climbing its rungs. The dark, blunt face lifted into the light, the yellow eyes fixing on Ahren. It was Cree Bega.\n\n\"Little Elvess,\" he purred. \"Ssuch foolss.\"\n\nUnable to believe what was happening, Ahren backed away in horror. He glanced down quickly at Kian, but the Elven Hunter was dead. There was no one else aboard, save Quentin, and the Highlander was too sick to help.\n\nToo late, he thought to cut the ladder away. By then, Cree Bega was climbing onto the deck across from him.\n\n\"Musstn't be frightened of me, little Elvess,\" he hissed. \"Doess little Elvess thinkss I mean them harm?\"\n\nHe stepped over to Kian and pulled out his knife. He held it up as if to examine it, letting the blood run down the smooth, bright blade onto his fingers. His dark tongue slipped out, licking the blood away.\n\nAhren was frantic. He backed all the way to the pilot box before he stopped, fighting to control his terror. He couldn't use the Elfstones, his most powerful weapon, because they only worked to defend against creatures of magic. Nor could he run, because if he ran, Quentin was a dead man. He swallowed hard. He couldn't run anyway, not if he wanted to retain even a shred of self-respect. It was better that he died here and now than flee again, than fail still another time to do what was needed.\n\n\"Givess me what I wantss, little Elvess, and perhapss I will let you live,\" Cree Bega said softly. \"The bookss of magic. Hidess them where, Elven Prince?\"\n\nAhren drew his broadsword. He was shaking so badly he almost dropped it, but he breathed in deeply to steady himself. \"Get off the ship,\" he said. \"The others will be back in minutes.\"\n\n\"Otherss are too far away, foolissh little Elvess. They won't come thiss way in time to ssave you.\"\n\n\"I don't need them to save me.\" He made himself take a step toward the other, away from the pilot box, away from the almost overpowering temptation to run. \"You're the one who's alone.\"\n\nThe Mwellret started toward him, coming slowly, dark face expressionless, movements almost languid. Don't look into his eyes, Ahren reminded himself quickly. If you look into a Mwellret's eyes, be will freeze you in place and cut your throat before you know what is happening.\n\n\"Doess ssomething sseem wrong, little Elvess?\" Cree Bega whispered. \"Afraid to look at me?\"\n\nAhren glanced at the ret in spite of himself, looking into his eyes, almost as if the question required it of him, and in an instant Cree Bega sprang. Ahren slashed at the other in desperation to ward him off, but the Mwellret blocked the blow. The throwing knife sliced across Ahren's chest, cutting through skin and muscle as if they were made of paper. Burning pain flooded through the Elven Prince as he pushed the other away, dropping into a crouch and whipping the sword back and forth to clear a space between them.\n\nCree Bega slid clear, watching him. \"Esscapess uss once perhapss, little Elvess, but not twice. Little sseer made that misstake. Sshall I tell you what we did to her? After the Morgawr gave her to uss? How sshe sscreamed and begged for uss to kill her? Doess that make you ssad?\"\n\nAhren felt a roaring in his ears, a tremendous pressure from the rage he felt building inside, but he would not give way to it because he knew that if he did, he was a dead man. He hated Cree Bega. He hated all the rets, but their leader in particular. Cree Bega was a weight around his neck that would drag him to his death if he didn't cut it loose. The Elven Prince was not the boy he had been even a few weeks ago, and he was not going to let the Mwellret win this contest of wills. He was not going to panic. He was not going to be baited into foolish acts. He was not going to run. If he died, he would do so fighting to defend himself in the way that Ard Patrinell had taught him.\n\nHe went into a defensive stance, calling on his training skills, his concentration steady and absolute. He kept his eyes averted from the ret's, kept himself fluid and relaxed, knowing that Cree Bega would want to make this next pass his last, that the ret would try to kill him quickly and move on. Ahren wondered suddenly why the ret was alone. Others had come into the ruins. Where were they? Where was the Morgawr?\n\nHe edged to his left, trying to put the Mwellret in a position that hemmed him between the railing and the mainmast. Blood ran down Ahren's chest and stomach in a thin sheet and his body burned from the wound he had received, but he forced himself to ignore both. He dropped his blade slightly, suggesting he might not quite know what to do with it, inviting the other to find out. But Cree Bega stayed where he was, turning to follow Ahren's movements without moving away.\n\n\"Sshe died sslowly, little Elvess,\" he hissed at Ahren. \"Sso sslowly, it sseemed sshe would take forever. Doess it bother you that you weren't there to ssave her?\"\n\nAhren went deep inside himself, back in time, back to where he practiced his defensive skills with Patrinell on this very deck, all those long, hot days in the boiling sun. Ahren could see his friend and teacher still, big and rawboned and hard as iron, making the boy repeat over and over the lessons of survival he would one day need to call upon.\n\nThat day had arrived, just as Patrinell had forecast. Fate had chosen this time and place.\n\nCree Bega lunged for him, a smooth, effortless attack that took him to Ahren's left, away from his sword arm and toward his vulnerable side. But Ahren had anticipated that this was how the ret would come at him. Guided by the voice of his mentor whispering in his mind, buttressed by the hours of practice he had endured, and sustained by his determination to acquit himself well, he was ready. He kept his eyes on Cree Bega's knife, squared his body away, angled his sword further down, as if to drop his guard completely, then brought it up again when the other was too far committed to pull back, his blade slipping under Cree Bega's extended arm, cutting through to the bone, and continuing to slide up across his chest and into his neck.\n\nThe Mwellret staggered back, the knife dropping away from his nerveless fingers, clattering uselessly on the wooden deck. A gasp escaped his open mouth, and his blank features tightened in surprise. Ahren followed up instantly, thrusting with his sword, catching Cree Bega in the chest and running him through.\n\nHe yanked his weapon free and stepped away as the other staggered backwards to the railing and hung there. No words came out of his open mouth, but there was such hatred in his eyes that Ahren shrank from them in spite of himself.\n\nHe was still struggling to look away when the other sagged into a sitting position and quit breathing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "If she hadn't already been using the magic of the wishsong to conceal her presence, Grianne Ohsmford would not have survived. The Morgawr was right on top of her when she turned, and his hand shot out to grip and hold her fast. But her defenses were already up, and her magic deflected his effort just enough that it was turned aside. As she jerked away, his blunt nails scraped across her neck, tearing open her skin. She threw up a wall of sound between them, shrieking at him in anger and shock, but his own magic was in place, as well, his black-cloaked form shielded by it, just as it must have been shielded all along. She had thought to catch him off guard when she separated him from the Mwellrets, but he was too experienced. He had created an illusion of himself for her to attack, and she had almost paid the price for her carelessness.\n\nSpinning away from him in a haze of sound and movement, she dropped into a crouch by the far wall, breathing hard. He made no effort to come after her, remaining in place by the chamber entry, watching her, measuring the effect of his appearance.\n\n\"Did you think I wouldn't be expecting you, my little Ilse Witch?\" he asked softly, the words smooth and almost gentle. \"I know you too well for that. I trained you too well to think that you wouldn't come looking for me.\"\n\n\"You lied to me,\" she replied, barely able to contain her rage. \"About the Druid, about my parents and Bek, about my whole life.\"\n\n\"Lies are sometimes necessary to achieve our purposes. Lies make possible what we would otherwise be denied. Do you feel yourself illused?\"\n\n\"I feel myself made into something loathsome.\" She took a tentative step left, looking to find an opening in his defenses. She could feel his power building, swirling all around him like heat off a fire. He would come at her shortly. She had been too slow, too confident, and she had lost the advantage of surprise.\n\n\"You made yourself what you are,\" he told her. \"I merely gave you the opportunity to do so. You were wasting your life anyway. Your father chose to keep you from the Druid, and for that I was grateful. Trying to keep you from me, as well, was a mistake.\"\n\n\"He knew nothing of you! You killed him and my mother for no reason! You stole me away to make me your tool! You used me for your own purposes, and you would have done so forever if I had not discovered the truth!\"\n\nHe gave a small lift of his shoulders as if to disclaim his guilt for anything of which she had accused him. His tall frame bent toward her as if to throw its shadow across her like a net. \"How did the Druid persuade you of the truth, little witch? You never would have believed him before. Or was it your brother who told you?\"\n\nShe did not care to explain anything to him, did not want even to speak with him. She wanted him gone from her life, from the earth she walked, and from her memory as well, were it possible. She hated him with such passion that it seemed to her that in the closeness of their shared space she could smell the stench of him \u2014 not the rankness of body odor, but the putrefaction of evil. Everything about him was so revolting to her that it was impossible to think of doing anything other than distancing herself in any way she could.\n\n\"You shouldn't have come after me,\" she told him, taking another sideways step, building her own magic in response to his.\n\n\"You shouldn't have betrayed me,\" he replied.\n\nThe power of her wishsong was born of earth magic, absorbed from the Elfstones by her ancestor, Wil Ohmsford, and passed on to his descendants. It could do almost anything once mastered by its wielder, from taking life to restoring it. But the Morgawr possessed magic very like it and every bit as powerful. His was rooted in the essence of his being, rather than extracted from the earth. Conceived at his birth in the dark reaches of the Wilderun, he the warlock brother of the witch sisters, Mallenroh and Morag, it had been fueled by his hunger for power and honed by his experiments with living creatures. Twisted by a special form of madness, he had sought for a way to increase the power of his birthright, and by so doing, the years of his life.\n\nHe found that way early on, when he was still quite young, discovering that feeding on the lives of others invested him with their life force. Stealing away their souls increased his vitality and strength, \u2014 it fed his hunger in a way that nothing else could. It was easy enough, he had told the Ilse Witch long ago, once you got over your revulsion for what it required.\n\nAll those years she had tolerated this madness because she thought him her ally in achieving her greatest goal \u2014 the destruction of the Druid Walker. She had known what he was, and still she had allowed herself to be his creature. She had subverted herself for him when reason told her she should not. She had done so in the beginning because it seemed her only choice, \u2014 she was homeless and still a child. But she had matured quickly, and that excuse had long since ceased to be a reasonable one for why she had stayed so long with him, or would be with him still if not for Bek. Nor could she claim that because she was a child, she'd had no other choice but to be what he made her. In truth, she had embraced his efforts freely, adopted his thinking and his ways, and hungered to be a part of his madness, his coveted power. That made her as guilty as he was.\n\n\"I am taking back my life.\" The tension she felt caused her to shiver. \"I am taking back what you stole.\"\n\n\"I let no one take anything from me,\" he replied. \"Your life is mine, and I will give it up when I choose to do so and not before.\"\n\n\"This time the choice is not yours to make.\"\n\nHe laughed softly, a swirl of dark cloth as he gestured disdainfully at her. \"The choice is always mine. Laying claim to your life was good for you, little witch, until you sought power that wasn't yours. You would pretend that you are better than I am, but you are not. You are no freer of guilt, no nobler of purpose, no higher of mind. You are a monster. You are as cold and dark as I. If you think otherwise, you are a fool.\"\n\n\"The difference between us, Morgawr, is not that I think I am better than you. The difference is that I recognize what I am, and I understand how terrible that is. You would go on as you are and not regret it. Even if I am able to change myself, I will look back at what I was and regret it always.\"\n\n\"Your time for regret will be short, then. Your life is almost over.\"\n\nThere was a fresh edge to his voice, one infused with anticipation. He was getting ready to attack. She could feel it in the movement of the air, in its crackle and hiss as the magic he summoned began to break free of its restraints.\n\nAs a result, she wasn't where he expected her to be when he lashed out. She had eased to the side, leaving just a shadow of herself behind to draw him out. Feeling the backwash of the magic's power, watching the whipsaw effect of his fury cause the wall behind her to rupture, she struck back at him with shards that would have ripped him apart had he not already made his own warding motion in response.\n\nTrading ferocious assaults, they quickly turned the chamber into a smoking, debris-clogged furnace, the heat and sound intense and suffocating. But they were more evenly matched than either had expected, and neither could gain the upper hand.\n\nThen the Morgawr simply disappeared. One moment he was there, his great form shadowy and fluid behind a screen of smoke and heat, and the next he was gone. Grianne slid back to her right, not wanting to give him a chance to come at her from another direction. She tested the air, searching for him, but the trail of his body heat told her he had fled from the room.\n\nShe went after him at once. If he was running, his confidence was breaking down. She did not want to give him a chance to recover. A fierce anticipation flooded through her. Maybe now she could put an end to him.\n\nBlack Moclips was closing on the Morgawr's fleet when Redden Alt Mer decided to take a look for something he was already pretty certain wasn't still aboard. He did it on a whim, having not even thought of it until now, remembering it because of something Ahren Elessedil had told him when they had talked about Ryer Ord Star, wanting suddenly to discover if it was true.\n\nSo he climbed down out of the pilot box, the controls locked, the airship on course, and walked past the living dead of the Federation and climbed down into the aft fighting station in the port-side pontoon. He walked back to where the ram began its upward curve, removed a panel on the side of the hull, and peered inside.\n\nThere it was, against all odds, in spite of his certainty it wouldn't be, still in the same condition in which it had been installed, neatly wrapped and ready for use. You never know, he mused.\n\nHe carried it out and laid it on the deck, piecing it together in moments, wondering why he bothered. Because it was there, he supposed. Because he lived in a world where a man's fate was often determined by chance, and he had believed in the importance of chance all his life.\n\nBack in the pilot box, he saw the sail-stripped masts of the Morgawr's fleet begin to loom ahead of him like trees in a winter forest.\n\nA few sails were still unfurled to permit the airships to hover, but most were rolled and cinched. Mwellrets clustered against the railings, peering intently at him as he neared, trying to figure out why Black Moclips was coming back and why they couldn't see the Morgawr or their fellow rets. They were not yet concerned, however. He didn't seem to pose a threat. He wasn't flying directly at them, instead pointing off to their port side and slightly away, as if intending to fly out to sea.\n\nBlack Moclips was traveling very fast now and still picking up speed. She was doing better than thirty knots, flying through the clear morning sky like a missile launched from a catapult, skimming the back of a gentle southerly wind, the ride smooth and easy. Sea birds flew at him and banked away, as if sensing that trouble rode his shoulder, but he only smiled at the thought.\n\nWhen his speed reached forty knots and he was less than a quarter of a mile off the fleet's port side, he went back down to the main deck and threw the heavy ropes and grappling hooks over the side. They swung out and away, trailing the vessel like monstrous fishing hooks. An apt analogy, he thought wryly. He sprinted to the pilot box, seized the controls, opened the starboard tubes, and raked the sails hard to port. Black Moclips swung sharply left, the sudden movement throwing most of the crew sprawling across the deck, where they remained, staring at nothing. Alt Mer ignored them, straightening out the airship and picking up new speed, heading directly for the Morgawr's fleet, the barbed ends of the grappling hooks glinting in the sunlight as they swung back and forth like lures. Aware that they were being attacked, the Mwellrets were racing about like frightened ants now. Sails were being run up, lines fastened in place, and anchors weighed. The Mwellret guards were trying frantically to get their dead-eyed crews to their stations. But in stealing their lives, the Morgawr had also stolen their ability to respond quickly. They weren't going to get under way in time.\n\nBlack Moclips was a brute among Federation warships, not particularly large, but blocky and powerful. She went through the Morgawr's fleet as if it were a stack of kindling, her battering rams and hull snapping off masts like pieces of kindling, the grappling hooks tearing apart sails and shredding lines. Half of the airships lost power immediately and plummeted into the ocean. The rest spun away, damaged and fighting to stay aloft. If they hadn't been so stupid about it, the rets would have put their ships down in the water right away, but they lacked the experience that would have taught them to do so.\n\nThe shock of multiple collisions rattled Black Moclips to her mastheads, tearing huge holes in her hull and collapsing her forward rams. Both grappling hooks had torn free somewhere along the way, leaving entire sections of decking and railing in splinters. Alt Mer was thrown to the back of the pilot box and lost control of the craft completely. He struck his head on the retaining wall, bright splashes of color clouding his vision. But he scrambled up again anyway, hands groping for the steering levers.\n\nIn seconds, he had Black Moclips swinging back around for a second pass. He could see clearly now the damage he had inflicted on the Morgawr's fleet. Airships lay in pieces in the water, some of them burning. Debris and bodies were scattered everywhere. A few survivors clung to the wreckage, but not many. Most were gone. He tried not to think of it. He tried to think instead of the lives he was saving, concentrating on his friends and shipmates and his promise to protect them.\n\nBack toward the remainder of the fleet he sailed, picking up speed as he approached. One or two airships were under way now, and he made for them. His purpose was clear. By the time he was finished, not one of them would be left. He intended to sink them all and leave the Morgawr and whoever was with him stranded on Mephitic.\n\nHe couldn't do this, of course, if there was any chance at all that the ships he was attacking might be repaired. He had to destroy them utterly. He had to decimate them.\n\nThere was only one way to do that.\n\nHe wished Little Red could be here to see this. She would appreciate the simplicity of it. He glanced over his shoulder at the island, but he was too far away now to make out anything clearly. Smoke and ash rose off the damaged fleet in waves, obscuring his view. A dingy gray haze masked the clear blue of the morning sky, and the fresh salt air smelled of burning wood and metal.\n\nHis speed was back up to better than thirty knots as he bore down on the ships still flying. He corrected his course to allow for what he intended, a pass that would take him directly into their midst, but lower down this time. Only one of those remaining had managed to get all her sails up and her anchor weighed, but she was floundering in dead air and smoke. Smoke roiled off the decks of three others.\n\nAlt Mer threw off his cloak and unsnapped his safety line. Mobility was his best ally at this point. He closed down the parse tube exhausts, but locked the thrusters all the way forward to keep drawing down power from the light sheaths. No airship Captain would do this unless he wanted to blow his vessel to pieces. The power generated by the radian draws had to be expelled from the tube exhausts or they would explode and take the airship with them.\n\nNot to mention everything within shouting distance.\n\nHe held Black Moclips on course, letting the power build inside the parse tubes until he could see smoke and fire breaking through the seams. They just need to hold together a little longer, he thought. He took a deep breath to steady himself. The Morgawr's airships loomed right ahead.\n\n\"Time to move on,\" he whispered.\n\nMoments later, Black Moclips tore through the hulls of the remaining airships like an enraged bull through stalks of corn in an autumn field, and exploded in a ball of fire.\n\nBek Ohmsford raced through the ruins after his sister, heedless of the noise he was making because no one could hear him anyway over the sounds of the battle being fought somewhere just ahead. Sharp cracklings and deep booms echoed through the stone corridors of the ancient castle, breaking down centuries-old silence and walls alike, the exchanges of magic powerful enough to cause the earth itself to vibrate beneath his feet. Grianne had found the Morgawr, or it might be the other way around, but the battle between them had begun in either case, and he needed to be a part of it.\n\nExcept that he had no idea what to do once he was, and it was a problem he couldn't afford to delay solving for long. After he found his sister, he was going to have to do something to help her. But what sort of help could he offer? His mastery of the wishsong's power was a poor second to her own. She had already warned him that he stood no chance against the Morgawr, that the warlock's experience and skill were so vast that Bek would be swiftly overwhelmed.\n\nSo what was he going to do that would make a difference? How was he going to avoid being the distraction she had told him she could not afford to have him be?\n\nHe didn't know. He knew only that he couldn't stay behind and let her face the Morgawr alone. He had gone through too much to find and heal her to let something bad happen to her now.\n\nThe sounds ahead quieted, and he slowed in response, listening carefully. He was in a gloom-shrouded part of the castle, its walls towering over him, corridors narrow and high and rooms cavernous. The ceilings were vaulted and multitiered, and the dark shadows they cast were alive with unexplained movement. He eased along one wall, walking softly, once again trying to hide his approach. Smoke rolled through the chambers, and the air had a burnt smell to it.\n\nHe quieted his breathing. Everything was still. What if it was over? What if the Morgawr had won and Grianne was dead? He went cold at the prospect, casting it away from him as he would a poisonous snake, not wanting to touch it. That was not what had happened, he told himself firmly. Grianne was all right.\n\nNevertheless, he moved ahead more quickly, anxious to make certain. He was surprised that the enormity of the struggle hadn't roused the castle's dweller. With so much sound and fury invading its privacy and so much damage inflicted upon its keep, Bek would have thought the spirit furious enough to retaliate. But there was no indication of that happening, nothing in the air to trigger a warning, nothing in the feel of the stone to suggest danger. For whatever reason, the spirit was not responding. Bek found it puzzling. Maybe it was because the spirit reacted only to attempts to take things away, as it had with Bek and Truls. Maybe that was all it cared about \u2014 keeping possession of its treasures. Maybe the fact that the walls and towers that made up its domain were collapsing didn't mean anything to it, no more so than when they crumbled as a result of time's passage.\n\nHe had an idea then, sudden and unexpected, of how he might use his magic against the Morgawr. But he had to find him first, and he sensed that time was running out.\n\nBut finding the warlock did not take him as long as he had expected. The silence was shattered moments later by a rough-edged sound that reverberated through the stone walls, a quick and sudden rending. He went toward it at once, following its echoes as they died away, hearing voices. He reached a break in the walls, and through it saw his sister and the Morgawr locked in combat. The warlock had trapped her and was holding her fast by the sheer force of his magic. She was fighting to break free \u2014 Bek could see the strain on her smooth face \u2014 but she could not seem to bring her magic to bear in a way that would allow her to do so. The Morgawr was squeezing her, crushing her, closing off air and space and light, the darkness he wielded a visible presence as it closed.\n\nBek saw the Morgawr's hand reach for Grianne, stretching the fabric of her protective magic to touch her face. Grianne's head snapped away, and she wrenched at the shackles that had trapped her. The Morgawr was too strong, Bek saw. Even for her, for the Ilse Witch, he was too powerful. His fingers extended, and Bek could see the sudden hunching of his shoulders as he forced his way closer. His intent was unmistakable. He meant to feed on her.\n\nGrianne!\n\nThere was no time left for Bek to think about what he wanted to do, no time for anything but doing it. He threw out the magic of his wishsong in an enveloping cloak that settled over the Morgawr like spiderwebbing, a faint tickling that the warlock barely noticed. But deep within the heart of the ruins, where even the Morgawr could not penetrate, the castle's dweller stirred in recognition. Up from its slumber it surged, fully awake in seconds, sensing all at once that something it had thought lost for good was again within reach. It roared through its crumbling walls, down its debris-strewn corridors, and across its empty courtyards. It paid no heed to the Jerle Shannara or to the living or the dead men who surrounded her or to what was taking place just offshore over the Blue Divide. It paid no heed to anything but the creature that had roused it.\n\nThe Morgawr.\n\nExcept that it didn't see the warlock for what he was. It saw him for what Bek had used the magic of the wishsong to make him appear. It saw him as the boy who had stolen its key weeks earlier, who had teased it with boldness and tricked it with magic.\n\nMostly, it saw him as a thief who still had that key.\n\nThe Morgawr had only a moment to look up from Grianne, to realize that something was terribly wrong, and then the spirit was upon him. It swept into the Morgawr like a whirlwind, ripping him away from his victim, bearing him backwards into the closest wall and pinning him there. The Morgawr shrieked in fury and fought back with his own magic, tearing at the wind, at the air, at the magic of the dweller, mad with rage. Bek screamed through the thunderous roar for Grianne to run, and she gathered herself and started toward him.\n\nThen, almost inexplicably, she turned back.\n\nBracing herself, she threw her own magic at the Morgawr, lending strength to the castle dweller's efforts to crush him. The sound was so terrifying, so wrenchingly invasive, that Bek put his hands over his ears and scrunched up his face in pain. Reptilian face twisting with shock and fury, arms windmilling to gain purchase where there was none to be had, the Morgawr jerked upright as the combined magics ripped through him. For a moment, he held them at bay, girl and spirit both, his dark heart long since turned to stone, his mind to iron. He would not be beaten by such as these, the bright glare of his green eyes seemed to say. Not on this day.\n\nThen the stone behind him cracked wide, and he was thrust inside the fissure. The opening ran deep and long, through multiple tiers of blocks set by its builders centuries ago to form a support wall for towers and ramparts now mostly gone. Thrashing against his imprisonment, the Morgawr fought to escape, but the pressure of the magics that held him fast was enormous.\n\nHe could not break free. Bek could see it on his face and in his eyes. He was trapped.\n\nSlowly, the stone began to seal again. The Morgawr shrieked, striking at it with his magic, chunks of it falling away beneath the sharp edges of his power. But not enough stone could be shredded or slowed, and the gap narrowed. Bit by bit, he was squeezed as he had sought to squeeze Grianne. Little by little, he was crushed more tightly by the dwindling space. Now he could no longer move his arms to gesture, to invoke his spells, to trigger his magic's release. His body twisted frantically, and his shrieking rose to inhuman levels.\n\nWhen the walls closed all the way, the fingers of one hand were still protruding from a tiny crack. They twitched momentarily in the fresh silence that settled over the ruins. When they finally went still, the crack had disappeared and the wall was leaking blood.\n\nThe explosions from land and sea had brought the Wing Riders out of hiding on the distant atoll. They flew their Rocs into the clear morning air and banked toward the dark smudges of smoke rising off the ruins of the ancient castle, then turned again at the sight of more smoke rolling over the waters of the Blue Divide. They caught a glimpse of the Morgawr's freshly smoldering airships and watched in shock as Black Moclips flew into them. Then everything disappeared in a massive explosion that filled the air with fire and smoke and created a shock wave so strong it could be felt miles away.\n\nHunter Predd could not tell what had transpired beyond the obvious. Hiding from the Morgawr had clearly not worked, but the nature of the battle being fought now was hard to judge. Catching sight of Spanner Frew and two of the Rover crew standing at the shore's edge, he banked Obsidian toward them, with Po Kelles and Niciannon following right behind. More explosions sounded, parse tubes giving way to the pressure of overheated diapson crystals as the destruction of the Morgawr's fleet continued. The Wing Riders swept downward to the island, landed close to the Rovers, jumped from their birds, and rushed over.\n\n\"What's happened?\" Hunter Predd asked the shipwright. Seeing the other's dazed look, he took hold of his arm and turned him about forcibly. \"Talk to me!\"\n\nSpanner Frew shook his head in disbelief. \"He flew right into them, Wing Rider. He hooded the crystals, drew down enough power to destroy a dozen airships, and he flew right into them. All by himself, he destroyed them. I can't believe it!\"\n\nHunter Predd knew without having to ask that the shipwright was talking about Redden Alt Mer. He looked out over the Blue Divide into the billowing clouds of smoke. Pieces of airships floated on the water, twisted and blackened. The water itself was on fire. There was no sign of an airship aloft and no sign of life in the water.\n\nHe stood with Po Kelles and the Rovers and stared in silence at the carnage. Big Red had found a way to stop them after all, he thought with a mix of admiration and sadness.\n\n\"Maybe he got out in time,\" he said quietly.\n\nNone of the others replied or even looked at him. They knew the truth of it. No one could survive an explosion like that. Even if you somehow managed to jump clear, the fall would kill you, the fire and the debris would finish you if it didn't.\n\nThey stared out into the heavy clouds of smoke, transfixed. None of them wanted to believe that Redden Alt Mer was really gone. None of them wanted to believe it could end like this.\n\nIt was quiet now, the morning gone still and peaceful. The explosions had stopped, even from the castle behind them. Whatever battles had been fought, they were over. Hunter Predd found himself wondering who had won. Or maybe if anyone had.\n\n\"We'd better see what's happened to the others,\" he said.\n\nThey were just turning away, when something appeared out of the roiling clouds of black smoke. At first, the Wing Rider thought it was a Roc or a War Shrike and wondered where it had come from. But it wasn't the right size and it wasn't flying in the right way. It was something else altogether.\n\n\"Black Beard,\" he whispered softly.\n\nThe flying object began to take shape as it emerged from the haze, slowly becoming recognizable for what it was, floundering badly, but staying aloft.\n\nIt was a single wing.\n\n\"Shades!\" Spanner Frew hissed.\n\nThe man who flew it still had the luck." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "A little more than five months later, the man with the luck and those he had sworn to protect were safely home again. Redden Alt Mer stood at the rail of the Jerle Shannara and stared out into the misty twilight of the Dragon's Teeth, thinking for the first time in weeks of his harrowing escape from the destruction of the Morgawr's fleet, reminded of it suddenly by a hunting bird winging its way in slow spirals through the mist that drifted down out of the mountains. His thinking lasted only a moment. That he had found a way through the fire and smoke and explosive debris still amazed him and didn't bear looking at too closely. Life was a gift you accepted without questioning its generosity or reason.\n\nStill, he would not want to risk his luck like that again. When he returned to the coast and March Brume, he would still fly airships, but he would fly them in safer places.\n\n\"What do you suppose they are talking about?\" Rue asked, leaning close so that her words would not carry.\n\nSome distance off in the gloom, Bek Ohmsford stood with his sister, two solitary figures engaged in a taut, intense discussion. Their argument, pure and simple, transcended the parting that was taking place. Those who watched from the airship, those few who still remained \u2014 Ahren Elessedil, Quentin Leah, Spanner Frew, Kelson Riat, and Britt Rill \u2014 waited patiently to see how it would end.\n\n\"They're talking about the choice she has made,\" he answered quietly. \"The choice Bek can't accept.\"\n\nThey had flown in from the coast yesterday, the Wing Riders Hunter Predd and Po Kelles leaving them there to return home to the Wing Hove, their mission complete, their pledge to provide scouting and foraging for the expedition fulfilled. How invaluable their help had been. It was hard to watch them make that final departure, hard to know they wouldn't still be warding the ship. Some things he got so used to he couldn't imagine life without them. It was like that for Alt Mer with the Wing Riders.\n\nStill, he would see them again. Out along the coast, over the Blue Divide, on calmer days and under better circumstanced.\n\nThey would have returned Ahren Elessedil and the Blue Elfstones to Arborlon and the Elves, then flown the Elven Prince home to face his brother, but for the insistence of Grianne Ohmsford that they come first to the Dragon's Teeth, to the Valley of Shale and the Hadeshorn. She would hear no arguments against it. She owed something to Walker, she told them. She must come to where the dead could be summoned and spoken with, to where the shade of the Druid could tell her the rest of what she must know.\n\nWhen she had told them why, they were stunned into silence. Not even Bek could believe it. Not then and clearly not now.\n\n\"She might be mistaken about this,\" Rue continued obstinately. \"She might be taking on more than was ever intended of her.\"\n\nAlt Mer nodded. \"She might. But none of us thinks so, not even Bek. She was saved for this, made whole by the Sword of Shannara and her brother's love.\" He grimaced. \"I sound almost poetic.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Almost.\"\n\nThey watched in silence again. Bek was gesturing furiously, but Grianne was only standing there, weathering the storm of his anger, calm resolution reflected in her stance and lack of movement. She had made up her mind, Alt Mer knew, and she was not someone who could be persuaded to change it easily. It was more than stubbornness, of course. It was her certainty of her destiny, of what was needed of her, of what was expected. It was her understanding of what it would take for her to gain redemption for the damage she had done to so many lives in so many places for all those years that she had been the Ilse Witch.\n\nWhen this is done, he thought, nothing will be the same again for any of us, our lives will he changed forever. Perhaps the lives of everyone in the Four Lands will be changed, as well. What waited in the days ahead was that compelling \u2014 a new order, a fresh beginning, a reaching into the past to find hope for the future. All these would come about because of what happened here, on this night, in the mountains of the Dragon's Teeth, in the Valley of Shale, at the edge of the Hadeshorn, when Grianne Ohmsford summoned the shade of Walker.\n\nSo she had promised them.\n\nHe found it hard to argue with someone who believed she was meant to be Walker Boh's successor and the next Druid to serve the Four Lands.\n\nBek was having none of it. He had gone through too much in bringing his sister safely home again to let her wander off now, to place herself at risk once more \u2014 at greater risk perhaps than ever.\n\n\"You assume that you are meant to achieve something that even Walker could not!\" he snapped, willing her to flinch in the face of his wrath. \"He could not return for this, could not save himself to make the Druid order come alive. Why do you think it will be any different for you? At least he was not universally despised!\"\n\nHe threw out the last few words in desperation and regretted them as soon as they were spoken. But Grianne did not seem bothered, and she reached out to touch his face gently.\n\n\"Don't be so angry, Bek. Your life does not lie with me in any case. It lies with her.\"\n\nShe glanced toward the Jerle Shannara and Rue Meridian. Stubbornly denying what he knew was true, Bek refused to look. \"My life is not the subject of this discussion,\" he insisted. \"Yours is the one that's likely to be thrown away if you go through with this. Why can't you just come home with me, find a little peace and comfort for a change, not go out and try to do something impossible!\"\n\n\"I don't know yet exactly what it is I am expected to do,\" she answered calmly. \"I only know what was revealed to me through the magic of the Sword of Shannara \u2014 that I am to become the next Druid and will atone for my wrongs by accepting that trust. If through my efforts a Druid Council is formed, as Walker intended that it should be, then the Druids will have a strong presence again in the Four Lands. That was why I was saved, Bek. That was what Walker gave his life for, so that I could make possible the goals he had set for himself but knew he would not live to see fulfilled.\"\n\nShe stepped close to him and placed her slender hands on his shoulders. \"I don't do this out of foolish expectation or selfish need. I do this out of an obligation to make something worthwhile of a wasted life. Look at me, Bek. Look at what I have done. I can't ignore who I am. I can't walk away from a chance to redeem myself. Walker was counting on that. He knew me well enough to understand how I would feel, once the truth was revealed to me. He trusted that I would do what was needed to atone for the harm I have visited on others. How wrong it would be for me to betray him now.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't betray him by becoming who you should have been in the first place if none of this had happened!\"\n\nShe smiled sadly. \"But it did happen. It did, and we can't change that. We have to live with it. I have to live with it.\"\n\nShe put her arms around him and hugged him. He stood rigid in her embrace for a few moments, then little by little, the tension and the anger drained away until at last he hugged her back.\n\n\"I love you, Bek,\" she said. \"My little brother. I love you for what you did for me, for believing in me when no one else would, for seeing who I could be if I was free of the Morgawr and his lies. That won't change, even if everything else in the world does.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to go.\" His words were bitter with disappointment. \"It isn't fair.\"\n\nShe sighed softly, her breath a whisper in his ear. \"I was never meant to come home with you, Bek. That isn't my life, \u2014 it isn't the life I was meant to live. I wouldn't be happy, not after what I have been through. Coran and Liria are your parents, not mine. Their home is yours. Mine lies elsewhere. You have to accept this. If I am to find peace, I have to make amends for the damage I have done and the hurt I have caused. I can do this by following the destiny Walker has set for me. A Druid can make a difference in the lives of so many. Perhaps becoming one will make a difference in mine, as well.\"\n\nHe hugged her tighter to him. He sensed the inevitability of what she was saying, the certainty that no matter how hard he argued against it, no matter what obstacles he presented, she was not going to change her mind. He hated what that meant, the loss of any real chance at a life as brother and sister, as family. But he understood that he had lost most of that years ago, and he couldn't have it back the way it was or even the way it would have been. Life didn't allow for that.\n\n\"I just don't want to lose you again,\" he said.\n\nShe released him and stepped away, her strange blue eyes almost merry. \"You couldn't do that, little brother. I wouldn't allow it. Whatever I do, however this business tonight turns out, I won't ever be far away from you.\"\n\nHe nodded, feeling suddenly as if he were just a boy again, still small and in his sister's care. \"Go on, then. Do what you need to do.\" He gave her a quick smile. \"I'm all argued out. All worn out.\" He looked off into the sunset, which had become a faint silver glow in the gathering dark, and fought back his tears. \"I'm going home, now. I need to go home. I need for this to be over.\"\n\nShe came close once more, so small and frail it seemed impossible that she could possess the kind of strength a Druid would need. \"Then go, Bek. But know that a part of me goes with you. I will not forget you, nor my promise not ever to be too far away.\"\n\nShe kissed him. \"Will you wish me luck?\"\n\n\"Good luck,\" he muttered.\n\nShe smiled. \"Don't be sad, Bek. Be happy for me. This is what I want.\"\n\nShe tightened her dark robes about her and turned away. \"Wait!\" he said impulsively. He unstrapped the Sword of Shannara from where he wore it across his back and handed it to her. \"You'll know what to do with this better than I will.\"\n\nShe looked uncertain. \"It was given to you. It belongs to you.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It belongs to the Druids. Take it back to them.\"\n\nShe accepted the talisman, cradling it in her arms like a baby at rest. \"Good-bye, Bek.\"\n\nIn moments, she had started her climb into the mountains. He stood watching until he could no longer see her, all the while unable to overcome the feeling that he was losing her again.\n\nRue Meridian watched him return to the airship across the broken rock of the barren flats on which they had landed, his head lowered into shadow, fists clenched. Clearly, he was not happy about how things had turned out with his sister. Anger and disappointment radiated from him. Rue knew what he had asked of Grianne and knew, as well, that he had been refused. She could have saved him the trouble, but she supposed he had to find it out for himself. Bek was nothing if not a believer in impossibilities.\n\n\"He looks like a whipped puppy,\" Big Red mused.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"At least we can go home now,\" he continued. \"We're finished here.\"\n\nShe watched Bek approach for a moment longer, then left her brother's side, climbed down the rope ladder, and walked out onto the flats. She didn't think Bek even saw her until she moved to block his way and he looked up to find her standing right in his path.\n\n\"I've been thinking,\" she said. \"About your home, the one you were born in. It wasn't too far from here, was it?\"\n\nHe stared at her.\n\n\"Do you think we could find where it was, if we went looking?\"\n\nHis puzzlement was clear. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Want to try?\"\n\n\"It's only ruins.\"\n\n\"It's your past. You need to see it.\"\n\nHe glanced toward the airship doubtfully.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Not them. They don't have time for such things. It would be just you and me. On foot.\" She let him consider for a moment. \"Think of it as an adventure, a small one, but one for just the two of us. After we find it, we can keep going, walk south through the Borderlands along the Rainbow Lake down to the Silver River, then home to the Highlands. Big Red can fly Quentin to Leah on the Jerle Shannara, then take Ahren on to Arborlon.\"\n\nShe stepped closer, put her arms around him and her face next to his. \"I don't know about you, but I've had enough of airships for a while. I want to walk.\"\n\nHe looked stunned, as if he had been handed a gift he hadn't expected and didn't deserve. \"You're coming with me? To the Highlands?\"\n\nShe smiled and kissed him softly on the mouth. \"Bek,\" she whispered, \"I was never going anywhere else.\"\n\nGrianne Ohmsford spent the larger part of the night climbing into the foothills below the Dragon's Teeth, seeking to reach the Valley of Shale before dawn. She might have had Alt Mer fly her in on the airship, but she wanted time alone before summoning the shade of Walker. Besides, it was easier to say her good-byes now rather than later, particularly to Bek. She knew it would be hard to tell him she wasn't going with him, and it had been. His expectations for her had always been his own and never hers, and it was difficult for him to give them up. He would come to understand, but only in time.\n\nShe found the darkness familiar and comforting, still an old friend after all these years. Wrapped in its protective concealment, given peace by its unbroken solitude, she could think about what she was doing and where she was going; she could reflect on the events that had led her to this place and time. The destruction of the Morgawr had not given her the satisfaction she had hoped for. She would need more than revenge to heal. Her Druid life might provide her with that healing, though she knew it would not do so in the traditional way. It would not soothe and comfort her. It would not erase the past or allow her to forget she had been the Ilse Witch. She was not even assured of the nurturing rest of a good night's sleep. Instead, she would be given an opportunity to balance the scales. She would be given a chance at redemption for an otherwise unbearable past. She would be given a reason for living out the rest of her life.\n\nShe did not know if that would be enough to salvage her damaged psyche, her wounded soul, but it was worth a try.\n\nBy midnight, she was approaching her destination. She had never been here before and did not know the way, but her instincts told her where she needed to go. Or perhaps it was Walker who guided her, reaching out from the dead. Either way, she proceeded without slowing, and found in the simple act of moving forward a kind of peace. She should have been frightened of what waited, she knew one day the fear she could not seem to put a name to would catch up to her, would make itself known. But her feelings now were all of resolution and commitment, of finding a new place in the world and making a new beginning.\n\nWhen she reached the rim of the Valley of Shale, coming upon it quite suddenly through a cluster of massive boulders, she stopped and gazed down into its bowl. The valley was littered with chips of glistening black rock, their shiny surfaces reflecting the moonlight like animal eyes. At the valley's center, the Hadeshorn was a smooth, flat mirror, its waters undisturbed. It was an unsettling place, all silence and empty space, nothing living, nothing but herself. She thought it a perfect place for a meeting with a shade.\n\nShe sat down to wait.\n\nEveryone despises you, Bek had told her. The words had been spoken with the intent of changing her mind, but also to hurt her. They had not succeeded in the former, but had in the latter. Did still.\n\nWith dawn an hour away, she went down into the valley and stood at the edge of the lake. From what she had been shown by the magic of the Sword of Shannara, she understood what had happened to Walker in this place and would happen now to her. There was a power in the presence of the dead that was disconcerting even to her. Shades were beyond the living and yet still held sway over them because of what they knew.\n\nThe future. Its possibilities. Her fate, with all of its complex permutations.\n\nWalker would see what she could not. He would know the choices that awaited her, but would not be able to tell her of their meaning. Knowledge of the future was forbidden to the living because the living must always determine what that future would be. The best the dead could do was to share glimpses of its possibilities and let the living make of them what they would.\n\nShe stared off into the distance, thinking that she didn't care to know the future in any case. She was here to discover if what the magic had shown her was real \u2014 if she was meant to be a Druid, to be Walker's successor, to carry on his work. She had told Bek and the others that she was, but she could not be sure until she heard it from the Druid's shade. She wanted it to be so, \u2014 she wanted to be given a chance at doing something that would matter in a good way, that would help secure the work Walker had begun. She wanted to give him back something for the pain she had caused him. Mostly, she wanted to think that she was useful again, that she could find purpose in life, that things did not begin and end with her time as the Ilse Witch.\n\nShe glanced down at the waters of the Hadeshorn. Poison, the magic of the Sword of Shannara had whispered. But she was poison, too. She bent impulsively to dip her hand into the dark mirror of moonlight and stars but snatched it back as the waters began to stir. At the center of the lake, steam hissed like dragon's breath. It was time. Walker was coming.\n\nShe straightened within the dark folds of her cloak and waited for him.\n\n\"I did not think to see you again, little brother,\" Kylen Elessedil declared, sweeping into the room with his customary brusqueness, not bothering with formalities or greetings, not wasting unnecessary time.\n\n\"Your surprise is no greater than my own,\" Ahren allowed. \"But here I am anyway.\"\n\nIt had been two days since he had said good-bye to Quentin Leah in the Highlands and three since Grianne Ohmsford had walked into the Dragon's Teeth. Afterwards, Ahren had flown west with the Rovers aboard the Jerle Shannara to Arborlon, thinking the whole time of what he would say when this moment came. He knew what was expected of him \u2014 not only by those with whom he had traveled, but also by himself. His was arguably the most important task of all, certainly the most tricky, given the way his brother felt about him. The boy he had been when he had left to follow the tracings of Kael Elessedil's map would not have been able to handle it. It remained to be seen if the man he had become could.\n\nThat he had been met by Elven Home Guard and brought to this small room at the back of the palace, quietly and without fanfare, testified to the fact that his brother still regarded him mostly as a nuisance. Kylen would tolerate his return just long enough to determine if anything more was necessary. The reappearance of Ahren was no cause for celebration absent a recovery of the Elfstones.\n\n\"Where is the Druid?\" his brother asked, getting right to the point. He walked to the curtained windows at the back of the room and looked out through the folds. \"Still aboard ship?\"\n\n\"Gone back into the Dragon's Teeth,\" Ahren answered. It was not a lie exactly, just a shading of the truth. Kylen didn't need to know everything just yet. In particular, he didn't need to know how things stood with the Druids.\n\n\"Were you successful in your efforts on this expedition, brother?\"\n\n\"Mostly, yes.\"\n\nKylen arched an eyebrow. \"I am told you return with less than a quarter of those who went.\"\n\n\"More than that. Some have gone on to their homes. There was no need for them to come here. But, yes, many were lost, Ard Patrinell and his Elven Hunters among them.\"\n\n\"So that of all the Elves who went, you alone survived?\"\n\nAhren nodded. He could hear the accusation in the other's words, but he refused to dignify it with a response. He did not need to justify himself to anyone now, least of all to his brother, whose only disappointment was that even a single Elf had survived.\n\nKylen Elessedil moved away from the window and came over to stand in front of him. \"Tell me, then. Did you find the Elfstones? Do you have them with you?\"\n\nHe could not quite hide the eagerness in his voice or the flush that colored his fair skin. Kylen saw himself empowered by the Elfstones. He did not understand their demands. He might not even realize that they were useless in most of the situations in which he would think to use them. It was the lure of their power that drew him, and the thought of it obscured his thinking.\n\nStill, it was not Ahren's problem. \"I have them. I will give them to you as soon as I am certain we are clear on the terms of the agreement Father and Walker reached.\"\n\nAnger flooded his brother's face. \"It is not your place to remind me of my obligations! I know what my father promised! If the Druid has fulfilled his part of the bargain \u2014 if you have the Elfstones and a share of the Elven magic to give to me \u2014 then it shall be done as Father wished!\"\n\nHis brother made no attempt to hide the fact that he thought everything was intended just for him rather than for the Elven people. Kylen was a brave man and a strong fighter, but too ambitious for his own good and not much of a politician. He would be causing problems with the Elven High Council by now. He would have already angered certain segments of his people.\n\n\"The Elfstones will be yours by the time I leave,\" Ahren said. \"The magic Walker sought to find requires translation and interpretation in order to comprehend its origins and worth. Those Elves who go to become Druids in the forming of the new council can help with that work. Two dozen would be an adequate number to start.\"\n\n\"A dozen will do,\" his brother said. \"You may choose them yourself.\"\n\nAhren shook his head. \"Two dozen are necessary.\"\n\n\"You test my patience, Ahren.\" Kylen glared at him, then nodded. \"Very well, they are yours.\"\n\n\"A full share of the money promised to each of the men and women who went on this expedition must be paid out to the survivors or to the families of the dead.\"\n\nHis brother nodded grudgingly. He was looking at Ahren with something that approached respect, clearly impressed, if not pleased, by his younger brother's poise and determination. \"Anything else? You'll want to keep the airship, I expect.\"\n\nAhren didn't bother answering. Instead, he reached into his pocket, withdrew the pouch containing the Elfstones, and handed it to his brother. Kylen took only a moment to release the drawstrings and dump the Stones into his hand. He stared down wordlessly into their depthless blue facets, an unmistakable hunger in his eyes.\n\n\"Do you need me to tell you how to make the magic work?\" Ahren asked cautiously.\n\nHis brother looked over at him. \"I know more about them than you think, little brother. I made a point of finding out.\"\n\nAhren nodded, not quite understanding, not sure if he wanted to. \"I'll be going, then,\" he said. \"After I gather supplies and talk with those I think might come to Paranor.\" He waited for Kylen to respond, and when he didn't, said, \"Good-bye, Kylen.\"\n\nKylen was already moving toward the door, the Elfstones clutched in his hand. He stopped as he opened it, and looked back. \"Take whatever you need, little brother. Go wherever you want. But, Ahren?\" A broad smile wreathed his handsome face. \"Don't ever come back.\"\n\nHe went out through the door and closed it softly behind him.\n\nIt was dawn off the coast of the Blue Divide, and Hunter Predd was flying on patrol aboard Obsidian. He had slept almost continuously for several days after his return, but because he was restless by nature, he required no more time than that to recover from the hardships of his journey and so was back in the air. He never felt at home anywhere else, even in the Wing Hove, \u2014 he was always anxious to be airborne, always impatient to be flying.\n\nThe day was bright and clear, and he breathed deeply of the sea air, the taste and smell familiar and welcome. The voyage of the Jerle Shannara seemed a long time ago, and his memories of its places and people were beginning to fade. Hunter Predd did not like living in the past, and thus discarded it pretty much out of hand. It was the present that mattered, the here and now of his life as a Wing Rider, of his time in the air. He supposed that was in the nature of his occupation. If you let your mind wander, you couldn't do what was needed.\n\nHe searched the skyline briefly for airships, thinking to spot one somewhere in the distance along the coast, perhaps even one captained by Redden Alt Mer. He thought that of all those he had sailed with, the Rover was the most remarkable. Lacking magic or knowledge or even special skills, he was the most resilient, the one nothing seemed to touch. The man with the luck. Hunter Predd could still see him flying, miraculously unscathed, out of the smoky wreckage of the Morgawr's fleet aboard his single wing. He thought that when nothing else could save you in this world, luck would always do.\n\nSeagulls flew across his path, white-winged darts against the blue of the water. Obsidian gave a warning cry, then wheeled left. He had seen something floating in the water, something his rider had missed. Hunter Predd's attention snapped back to the job at hand. He saw it now, bobbing in the surf, a splash of bright color.\n\nPerhaps it was a piece of clothing.\n\nPerhaps it was a body.\n\nHe felt a catch in his throat, remembering a time that suddenly did not seem so long ago after all.\n\nUsing his hands and knees to guide the Roc, he flew down for a closer look." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Mr. Gunn & Dr. Bohemia", + "author": "Pete Ford", + "genres": [ + "steampunk", + "alternate history" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Bright blue-white lightning flickered against the sheets of rain as Cornelius Gunn glimpsed upward briefly, squinting against the fat raindrops at the low, heavy clouds. A moment later came the crash and crackle of thunder, drowning the droning hum of airship propellers.\n\nGunn pulled the collar of his raincoat up and the brim of his hat down, and increased his pace along the rain-slick cobbles between the brick walls of the tall industrial buildings running the length of the street. Factory workers and clerks hurried along around him, hands in pockets and shoulders hunched against the rain as they headed toward their places of work in that part of Battersea.\n\nA steam carriage passed him on the cobblestone road, going his way, and its wheels splashed ice-cold water over his already-soaked shoes and ankles. Gunn cursed and shook his fist pointlessly at the driver of the carriage as it melted into the gloom.\n\nThunderstorms were unusual at that early hour of the morning, and particularly at that time of the year. Unusual, thought Gunn, but not unheard of, and more frequent these days. According to the Royal Society and their huge calculating engines, it had something to do with the increasing smoke and soot from the burning of coal in the capital.\n\nBabbage, the man who'd invented those engines, had himself examined and validated the sequences created by the statisticians, and had overseen the transcription of the old paper weather records into the form required by the engines.\n\nLord Salisbury\u2014an advocate of the country's incredible progress in the scientific and technical arts\u2014had voiced his concern in the House. He worried about the weather, the filthy condition of the River Thames, and the damage to trees by sulphurous poisons carried in the rain. He claimed those could ultimately cause the public to lose faith in the new industrial revolution and the scientific authorities behind it. He had requested a Royal Commission to find solutions while the situation was still manageable.\n\nThe engines that the Royal Society's scientists used fascinated Gunn, though he'd never seen the machines at work. He'd asked Maynard, his editor, to assign him to the story so he could see one for himself, but Maynard had refused and given it to Gallagher, instead. Gallagher got most of the interesting assignments, leaving Gunn to report on petty burglaries and industrial accidents. It left a sour taste in his mouth.\n\nHe sighed. The story he was following that day was one of the few that held any promise of interest.\n\nA gust of wind blew cold rain against the back of Gunn's neck, and he pulled his collar yet higher. Just ahead, a pair of police constables stood by a couple of portable bollards supporting a heavy rope, blocking an alleyway between two buildings. Passersby gave them curious glances as they hurried along, seeking shelter from the appalling weather.\n\nOne of the constables held a hand up to Gunn as he approached. \"You can't come through here, sir. I'm afraid you'll have to go 'round the long way.\"\n\n\"What happened here?\"\n\nThe policemen looked at each other. The other answered, \"Industrial vandalism. You can't go down there\u2014the wall's been broken through, and it could collapse at any minute. It's not safe.\"\n\nGunn took off a glove, and, after struggling with the buttons of his raincoat, pulled his wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket and flipped it open to show the constable his press card. \"Cornelius Gunn with the Tribune. Is Inspector Jameson here?\"\n\nGunn knew his friend Jameson didn't work small-time breakins.\n\n\"Haven't seen him, sir,\" said the first.\n\n\"Were one of you here when it happened?\"\n\n\"It's my beat, sir, but I wasn't here at the time. I heard a noise and I went along the alley for a look, but whoever did it had already gone.\"\n\nGunn slipped his wallet back inside his jacket and made a mental note of the number, 247, in silver figures on the collar of the policeman's uniform. If the incident followed the pattern, then it was the sixth such crime perpetrated in the last few weeks. Gunn had begun to suspect that some beat coppers might have been paid to avoid particular locations during their nightly rounds. In an attempt to find commonalities, he was making a list of possibilities, but so far he'd found nothing to support his suspicions.\n\nGunn continued, \"Does this look like the others?\"\n\n\"I couldn't say, I'm afraid. I didn't see any of the others.\"\n\nGunn straightened his shoulders and stepped forward, and the other copper moved to unhook the rope from one of the bollards so that he could pass. Gunn suppressed a smile as he walked into the alley, and the copper replaced the rope behind him.\n\n\"Take care, sir,\" the second copper called after him, \"that lot down there could come down around your ears.\"\n\nThe high walls of the alleyway afforded a little shelter from the rain, and Gunn could just make out, fifty yards away, the far end the alley similarly roped off and guarded by two more constables.\n\nRain ran down the wall of deep red bricks and collected into rivulets that streamed from the top of the jagged hole, eight feet high and six wide. Gunn stepped carefully over the mound of rubble and into the workshop beyond, removing his hat once out of the rain.\n\nThe workshop was dark. Gunn found an oil lamp and a box of safety matches on a shelf; a few moments later, he held up the light to examine the room. The floor was a wet mix of cement dust, bits of mortar, and rainwater, and covered with footprints. A heavy workbench that had at one time been set against the outside wall now lay on its back six feet into the room, the wood splintered, shards of glass and metal filings strewn around it.\n\nTools cluttered another bench near the middle of the room, along with bits of wire, and pieces of crystal in various shapes and colours. Gunn noticed a patch of wood that was clear of the brick and mortar powder that dusted every other surface.\n\nHe went back to the hole in the wall and stooped to look closely at the mound of bricks. There were more inside the room than had fallen into the alleyway\u2014the wall had been smashed in from the outside. He picked one up and held it close to the lamp, turning it this way and that in his gloved hand.\n\nHe examined half a dozen of the fallen bricks before stepping back out into the alley and holding the lamp up to the wall around the breach, puzzled. Explosives would have blown rubble across the room, and pickaxes and hammers would have marked the bricks, but Gunn found evidence of neither\u2014just as it had been with the other breakins.\n\nGunn went back into the workshop and performed one last examination of the room. As he lowered the lamp, he noticed something on the floor, and crouched to get a closer look. Two shallow, parallel grooves, a foot long and about four inches apart, were gouged into the stone, as if someone had dragged some titanically heavy piece of equipment across the surface. The gashes had rough edges, as if they'd been made recently.\n\nFinally, he stood, straightening his collar, and left the workshop. As he stepped over the fallen bricks, he felt a rumble and shudder above him, and jumped forward into the alleyway just as another portion of the wall collapsed onto the spot where he'd been standing.\n\nGunn shivered at the close shave, then left to ask more questions of P.C. 247.\n\nGunn flagged down a steam taxi as he walked back the way he came. Climbing inside, he changed his mind about returning to the Tribune's office right away; instead, referring to a sheaf of notes he kept in an inside pocket, he directed the driver to an address on Kingsfield Street, not too far from his present location. There, he took care of business in short order, then asked the driver to take him to Fleet Street.\n\nMr. Maynard, the Tribune's editor, was not happy when Gunn arrived. \"My office, please,\" he said as Gunn hung his coat on the stand next to his desk.\n\nGunn followed his editor and closed the door behind him. He knew what Maynard was about to say.\n\nMaynard sat behind his desk, his eyes boring into him. Gunn defied the urge to look away. \"Where have you been all morning?\"\n\n\"Battersea, sir. I was\u2014\"\n\n\"You were, yet again, wasting time treating a petty burglary as if it was the Great Train Robbery.\"\n\n\"With respect, sir, I learned things that were not in the report that came in on the wire machine.\"\n\n\"But was it something worth reporting, Cornelius? Bearing in mind that this little story won't get more than three inches in the evening edition?\"\n\n\"There's a bigger story here, sir, I just know it.\"\n\nMaynard sighed, and ran his fingers through his hair. \"Cornelius, you're one of our best\u2014but for the purposes of this newspaper, all I need you to do is report the facts. In the time you've been gone, you could have written up half a dozen stories from the wire reports without leaving your desk, just as your colleagues do\u2014a point you ignore deliberately.\" Maynard's eyes went to a sheet of newsprint on his desk, and he waved a dismissive hand at Gunn. \"Go back to work, Cornelius, and leave investigating crimes to the police.\"\n\n\"Do you still think a gang of men with sledgehammers is responsible for the breakins?\" asked Gunn, taking a sip from his pint of bitter. He looked over at Inspector Jameson's short, slightly overweight form.\n\nGunn had sent a message suggesting a discussion over a liquid lunch at a pub near Scotland Yard. It also gave him an excuse to get away from the office\u2014and Mr. Maynard\u2014for a while.\n\nInspector Jameson shifted awkwardly on his barstool and lifted his own glass. \"I take it from your tone you don't agree?\"\n\n\"No, I don't. According to your constable at the scene, there was nobody anywhere near the alley when he walked by ten minutes earlier. By the time he returned, the wall had already been smashed in.\"\n\n\"What's your point?\"\n\n\"They knocked an eight-foot hole through two layers of bricks. They had time to do whatever they'd come to do, then pick up their tools and leave without being observed. How many men would it take to knock a wall through in the few minutes they had?\"\n\n\"I think six men could do it.\"\n\n\"The alleyway is eight feet wide. It was dark, and raining cats and dogs. Could six men swing sledgehammers in those conditions without getting in each other's way?\"\n\nJameson said nothing.\n\n\"Moreover, sledgehammers and pickaxes leave distinctive marks on the bricks. I know, because I paid a visit to a demolition site to find out. There were no such marks on the bricks at the workshop.\"\n\n\"They didn't use those kinds of tools, then.\"\n\nNo point pressing further, he thought. He had made his point, and knew Jameson would come around when he had time to think about it. \"What was taken from the workshop?\"\n\nJameson took another pull from his pint, and savoured it before answering. \"I'm not sure. The owner of the workshop is an inventor\u2014name of Robinson\u2014and his latest contraption was taken. All he would say was that it would have been revolutionary. He wouldn't give me any details, other than a rough description.\"\n\nGunn recalled the clear space he'd seen on the workbench. \"A box, about a foot across.\"\n\n\"I won't even ask how you found that out. He said I wouldn't understand what it was or how it worked even if he explained it. He's probably right.\"\n\n\"Did anyone else know about it?\"\n\n\"Robinson didn't think so. He has his rivals\u2014all these inventor johnnies do\u2014but said he'd been extremely careful.\"\n\nGunn took another sip of his beer and recalled the bits of crystal he'd seen in Robinson's workshop. \"My guess is that it has something to do with light.\" Jameson shrugged and Gunn continued, \"I'd bet your man Robinson was extremely careful only when in the company of those he considered his equals. He said that you wouldn't understand. That tells me he doesn't credit the man in the street with any intelligence.\"\n\n\"So you think he may have let slip some details to someone?\"\n\n\"Perhaps to tradesmen, the people he bought his tools and materials from, yes.\"\n\n\"That's not much of a lead,\" said Jameson, frowning. \"Who knows how many other people might have heard whispers starting that way. We could never track them all down.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"Indeed. What are you going to do next?\"\n\nJameson paused. \"Gunn, I consider you a friend, but I also have to remember that you're a scribbler, and I sometimes wonder if information for your stories is the only reason you cultivate my acquaintance. That's police business, and you know I can't say anything.\"\n\nGunn knew, without even looking, that Jameson was smiling.\n\n\"Do me a favour, would you? Leave this one to me and my lads. We'll get to the bottom of it, and when we do, I promise that you and your rag will be the first to get the details. All right?\"\n\nGunn looked at Jameson, raising an eyebrow. \"Not like you to be offering professional advice, Jameson. Is there something you'd like to tell me?\"\n\nHe shook his head a little too quickly. \"You know as much as I do. I'm just saying that it'll probably turn out to be some group of youngsters stealing stuff to sell along with the lead they strip off of church roofs, and not worth your time and trouble. Especially trouble, from what you've told me about your boss. Not worth getting yourself sacked over.\"\n\nGunn spent the rest of his afternoon at his desk at the Tribune office. First, he wrote a handful of short articles about various assaults and burglaries that Jameson had told him about and got them into the Tribune's engine in time for the evening edition. Then he pored over a map of the city while thinking on an idea he'd had about the workshop attacks. Finally, with little else to do, he spent an hour working on his pet project\u2014the strange disappearance of Doctor Bohemia.\n\nDoctor Bohemia had been an engineer, inventor, and, as was true of many of that ilk, a showman, demonstrating recent discoveries and inventions in front of paying audiences to finance his work. Bohemia had been particularly successful on the stage.\n\nThen, in 1853, Bohemia had dropped out of sight. Gunn had become fascinated by the man after chancing across some handbills from late 1851 advertising his performances, and had made it a personal quest to find out why Bohemia had left the stage, and what had become of him. Something in Gunn's reporter's instinct insisted there was a story to be told.\n\nGunn had found some time to interview the owner of the theatre Bohemia had used for most of his performances, and the man had given him access to his financial records of the period. Bohemia was not his real name, of course, and Gunn had been able to determine he had been in reality a Doctor Magnus Ballard.\n\nThe records had shown the address of a rented apartment in Brentford, but the doctor had moved away in 1853 and left no forwarding address. Gunn was in the process of using the various London directories in the Tribune's library to compile a list of addresses for the name 'Ballard,' with the intention of further investigating the doctor's movements.\n\nOn the list, he drew a line through the address on Kingsfield Street he'd visited that morning; the owner was indeed named Ballard, but had no knowledge of any doctor. Gunn had started with a list of eighty addresses, and so far had eliminated about a quarter of those.\n\nGunn left the office at four as the evening staff began to wander in, picking up a copy of the early evening edition on his way out. He glanced up. The rain had stopped and the sky had brightened somewhat.\n\nHe looked at the front page of the newspaper, then frowned, his lips compressing into a thin line. Folding the paper and shoving it roughly under his arm, he walked down the street in the direction of his home.\n\nHe arrived at 4:30 p.m. The little flat where he lived with his wife was empty, and he assumed that Sophie was out visiting friends. He settled in the parlour with a book while he waited for her to return.\n\nSophie picked up her teacup and took a sip as she looked out of the window of Mrs. Stack's drawing room. The rain had almost stopped, and the sky, though still cloudy, seemed a little brighter. It didn't make her feel any brighter, though.\n\n\"And you, dear\u2014\" Mrs. Stack's voice broke into Sophie's reverie.\n\n\"Hmm?\" she said, turning to Mrs. Stack. She realised she'd been daydreaming while the other ladies\u2014Mrs. Stack, Miss Peacock, and Mrs. Benning\u2014had been talking. They looked at her with disapproval.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Eleanor.\" She placed the cup carefully back on its saucer. \"I'm being quite rude, aren't I?\"\n\n\"You just seem a little out of sorts today, dear. Whatever is the matter?\"\n\nSophie was at a loss for words. The truth was, she really wasn't interested in discussing gardening, or the latest recipes from the Women's Gazette, or the gossip about one society figure or another. But those subjects, and others just as banal and boring, were all Mrs. Stack and her little ladies' circle ever seemed to talk about.\n\nMrs. Stack was like a mother hen when the other ladies were present. Sophie much preferred the times when she and Mrs. Stack were without other company; then she was just Eleanor, and they could talk more informally. Since Sophie and Connie had moved to London, Eleanor was the only friend Sophie had.\n\nOf course, she couldn't say any of this without offending\u2014and Sophie was not the kind to offend. \"Nothing's the matter, Eleanor. I was just wondering whether it might be worth trying one of the other hospitals. For work, I mean.\"\n\nMiss Peacock frowned and looked at Mrs. Benning, who gave a tiny shake of her head, then stiffened when she saw that Sophie had seen the little sign of disfavour.\n\n\"Why on earth would you be thinking of such a thing, dear?\" asked Mrs. Stack. \"Your husband has a good job, and that leaves you free for your own pursuits.\"\n\n\"Unless,\" said Miss Peacock, \"you are in need of additional income\u2014\"\n\n\"Janice!\" Mrs. Stack looked at Miss Peacock sharply. \"We do not discuss personal matters of such a low nature.\"\n\n\"It's quite all right,\" said Sophie. \"It's not a matter of income. It's more to do with helping people.\"\n\n\"The less fortunate, you mean? Well, I believe there are any number of soup kitchens\u2014\"\n\n\"I was a surgical assistant in Africa, Eleanor. And I did the same job in Bristol, in a hospital. But the London hospitals that I've applied to . . . they simply won't consider taking on a woman for such a position. Even someone with my qualifications.\"\n\nMrs. Benning put her teacup down. \"And quite right, too, dear. Of all things! Of course those Bristol hospitals would allow it. We're above that sort of thing here in London. You should be grateful, dear. I know if I were to require the services of a surgeon, I shouldn't be trusting a woman.\"\n\nMrs. Benning's face suddenly turned quite red as she realised what she'd just said. Sophie knew that the older woman's remark should have offended her, but she was past caring what Mother Stack's brood thought. She would contact more hospitals until she found one that wasn't so . . . so eighteenth-century about such things. If that meant travelling to the far reaches of the city to work every day, then that was what she would do.\n\nThe silence in the room was broken by a loud click, followed by a mechanical whirring. Sophie glanced over her shoulder at the big brass clock on the mantelpiece as its gears clunked into position. An instant later, it chimed. It was five-thirty, and she knew Connie would be wondering where she was.\n\n\"Goodness!\" said Mrs. Stack. \"Is that the time already? I should be seeing to Horace's dinner.\"\n\nMrs. Stack insisted on using her machine to call for taxis, then escorted her guests to the door, where they each said their good-byes and left.\n\nAs Sophie rode home in her own taxi, the slight lift in her feelings she'd had at the thought of applying to the other hospitals faded as she thought about what Connie would have to say about it. By the time she arrived at home, she was every bit as miserable as she had been before going to meet with Mrs. Stack's ladies.\n\nIt was almost six and Gunn began to get annoyed. Sophie had mentioned that she'd be going for tea at Eleanor Stack's house, but she should have been home by that hour. He was hungry and dying for a cup of tea, but more than that, he craved some company. He wanted to tell Sophie about his day.\n\nHe dropped his book onto the side table and got up, intending to use their machine to send a message to Mrs. Stack. At that moment, he heard the front door open, and he stepped out into the hallway.\n\nSophie was just closing the front door, and she saw him as she turned. \"Hello, dear.\"\n\nStrands of Sophie's red hair had come loose from her bun as she removed her hat, falling around her shoulders. The softened look it gave her eased his annoyance. She looked tired, but he wasn't about to let that stop him making his point. He was supposed to be master of his own home, damn it all.\n\n\"Hello to you, too. Where have you been?\"\n\nSophie looked at him, her green eyes narrowing slightly. \"Please don't start on me, Connie. I'm really not in the mood.\"\n\n\"Oh? Drinking tea all afternoon with friends is bound to put one in a bad mood, I suppose.\"\n\n\"As it happens, it really has; Eleanor's snooty, stuck-up friends, to be precise. And now I have to make tea and get us something to eat\u2014and I'm really not in the mood to do that, either. So unless you feel like going to the pub for a stale sandwich, I suggest you sit in the parlour and leave me to get on with it.\"\n\n\"Why do you bother with those people, if you dislike them so much?\"\n\n\"Because they're Eleanor's friends, and I don't know anyone else here. It's not like Bristol. I wish we'd never left.\"\n\n\"I've told you a dozen times, Sophie\u2014we're better off here.\" Even as he said it, he knew it wasn't the honest truth. He was better off here, with a stronger chance of advancing his career with the London newspapers than he could have ever hoped for in Bristol. He'd hoped and believed Sophie would grow to like London, but so far, she hadn't. As it was, he felt guilty for dragging her there against her wishes.\n\nBut he had no intention of turning back at that late date.\n\nHe followed her as she walked through to the kitchen, where she turned to him. \"I'm going to be looking for a job. A proper job, in surgery. You'd better hope I find one, because if I don't, I'll be giving some serious thought to going back to Bristol.\" Gunn saw her lip tremble. \"I'll do it, too.\"\n\nHe knew that she would. Sophie wasn't one for false promises. He could see that she was upset, and his instinct was to go to her and hold her, comfort her. Instead, he turned and left, of a mind to go to the pub anyway just to make the point.\n\nHe sat down in the parlour, then almost immediately stood again and paced up and down the small room. Half a minute later, he returned to the kitchen. Sophie was at the stove, her back to him and her shoulders stiff.\n\n\"Look . . .\" he said. She didn't move. He persisted. \"Why don't we go out to eat? Then we could go and see a show. Professor Mooncrow's giving a performance at the Aldwych this evening. We could have dinner and still be there in time.\"\n\nA few seconds passed, then her shoulders slumped. She turned. \"I really don't feel like going anywhere.\"\n\nGunn stiffened and made to leave the room. He'd tried.\n\nSophie caught him by the shoulder. \"No, really, Connie. I'm very tired and I'd rather just stay at home tonight.\"\n\nHe relaxed. Perhaps the crisis was over. \"I'll tell you what. I'll help you look for a job. I can use my machine at the office to get you a list of hospitals to try. I'll even approach some of them myself, if you think it might help.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"What I said stands. If I can't find one . . .\"\n\n\"We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.\"\n\nShe turned back the stove, but not quite quickly enough to conceal a hint of a smile. \"Supper will be tea and toast. I don't feel like doing anything more complicated.\"\n\n\"Six slices for me, then. With jam; I want strawberry jam.\"\n\nThe newspaper lay on the kitchen table in front of Gunn. His report describing the breakin at the workshop in Battersea was on page seven; the front page was dominated by an article by Gallagher about the formation of Lord Salisbury's Royal Commission, accompanied by a sidebar detailing an interview with Mr. Babbage concerning the weather calculation sequences used by the gentlemen of the Royal Society.\n\n\"You shouldn't let it upset you so, Connie,\" said Sophie as she put down the plates of toast and the cups of tea and took her place at the table.\n\n\"I'm not upset, I'm bloody angry. I write a good piece about the Battersea breakin, and it might as well end up on the page before the obituaries. Gallagher writes a dry, boring piece about the weather and gets page one.\"\n\n\"Hush, dear. Eat your toast,\" said Sophie patiently. She'd heard Cornelius' thoughts on the subject many times. \"Gallagher may have got the front page today, but when you work out who's behind all these workshop robberies, it'll be your turn.\"\n\n\"Oh, he didn't just get the front page. Look at this.\" Gunn opened the paper to page two. \"Gallagher's also been reporting on some bank robberies in the city. He gets page two for the latest one. I get page seven for a similar robbery in the industrial quarter.\"\n\n\"Similar?\" Sophie frowned. \"How similar?\"\n\nA light glimmered in Gunn's mind. He read Gallagher's article quickly, then went to the pile of older newspapers that Sophie kept as fire-lighters and shuffled through the stack to find a particular issue from the week before. He quickly located one of Gallagher's earlier stories. The walls of both banks had been broken in by a powerful force\u2014just like the workshops.\n\n\"Very similar,\" he said, excited. \"Too similar to be a coincidence, I think. Banks and workshops are being broken into in the same way, on the same nights. I'll look into that the moment I get back to the office, but I'm convinced there's a connection here. You're a wonder, Sophie.\"\n\n\"Do you think Gallagher may have noticed?\"\n\n\"Ha! Gallagher wouldn't waste his time reading my stories, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"And of course, you don't read his stories, but for much more high-minded reasons.\"\n\n\"Now, now. I don't read his stories because his writing sets my teeth on edge. Here he's written two stories about almost identical crimes with not a single mention of the fact of those commonalities. He gets a story, he writes it down, he moves on to the next story. He's not a reporter. If I could think of a way to make my typing machine stamp out a story from a few basic notes, the result would be indistinguishable from Gallagher's writing.\"\n\n\"What about Mr. Maynard? Do you think he'll see the connection?\"\n\nGunn frowned slightly in thought. \"There, I can't be so sure. He's a busy man. He doesn't get time to read every word we write. But he's far from stupid. If he's read the stories, I'm sure he's worked it out. On the other hand, if he'd noticed I'm sure he would have said something.\"\n\n\"You should tell him anyway.\"\n\nGunn thought about that for a moment. \"Yes, I should. But not yet.\"\n\nSophie looked at him quizzically.\n\n\"I need to make sure of the facts first.\" His face clouded as another thought occurred to him. \"Possibly not even then. If I know Maynard, and I draw attention to the connection between my stories and Gallagher's, he just might give everything to Gallagher. I can't take that chance.\"\n\n\"So what will you do?\"\n\nGunn thought for a long minute while eating before he replied. \"I'll have to do it without letting Maynard or Gallagher find out what I'm up to. Check the facts, find out who's behind it all, and write the story. Once it's written, there'll be nothing left for Gallagher to do. Maynard will have to publish, with my name on the by-line.\"\n\n\"On the front page.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed. On the front page.\" He finished his supper. \"I'll be leaving early in the morning.\"\n\n\"Again,\" said Sophie with a sigh and a slight smile.\n\nThere were three policemen guarding the hole in the wall of the bank in Lombard Street when Gunn arrived. Nearby, two workmen sorted out tools and mixed mortar to repair the damage\u2014work the previous day's heavy rain had prevented.\n\nThe street was hazy with a light fog. The engines of the Weather Office had predicted light showers in the afternoon and evening, so he had slipped into a raincoat and brought along a black umbrella.\n\nHe approached one of the policemen, who eyed him suspiciously. \"Cornelius Gunn with the Tribune.\" He held out his press card. \"Do you mind if I ask you some questions?\"\n\n\"You're a bit slow out the gate, aren't you?\" the copper said as he examined Gunn's credentials. \"All the other papers had their people here yesterday.\"\n\n\"I'm just following up.\" He gestured in the direction of the broken wall. \"I'd like to take a closer look, if I may. It'll only take a minute.\"\n\nThe policeman looked Gunn up and down. \"I'll have to escort you.\"\n\nThe guard led the way to the breach in the wall\u2014the same size as the one he'd seen at Robinson's workshop the day before. As he'd done there, Gunn picked up several of the fallen bricks, studying the ones immediately adjacent to the jagged hole. There were no marks to indicate that sledges or picks had been used\u2014no unusual marks of any kind, in fact\u2014just as Gunn had found at the workshop.\n\nHe stepped through the hole and into the strong room beyond. The room had been cleared of furniture and debris. Gunn turned to look at the wall from the inside. A layer of steel plate three quarters of an inch thick, intended to protect the room from exactly that kind of assault, had been torn, peeled inward like the skin of an orange.\n\nGunn could see scratches and gouges at the ripped edges of the plate, as if someone had used a chisel\u2014half a dozen chisels, in fact\u2014in a frenzied attack, although Gunn suspected that such tools had very little to do with it. He hesitated to think of the raw power required to tear a steel plate as if it were no more than a thick sheet of paper.\n\nGunn walked around the empty room, inspecting the walls and floor as well as he could in the little available light. His shoe scuffed something, and he looked down at a gouge in the metal plate covering the floor\u2014a deep scratch, a foot long, with raised burrs at the edges, had caught the sole of his shoe. Just like Robinson's workshop.\n\nGunn stepped back out through the hole and into the street. \"What was taken?\" he asked the policeman.\n\n\"Several strongboxes containing cash. About ten thousand pounds, they say.\"\n\nGunn whistled. He thanked the policeman and left for the Tribune's office.\n\nSophie thought Eleanor Stack was much nicer when she didn't have her awful friends with her. The little coffee shop Eleanor had recommended was clean, pleasant, and not expensive\u2014not at all good enough for the likes of Mrs. Benning and Miss Peacock. Sophie had no doubt that nothing less than Mivart's at Claridge's Hotel would have satisfied their sophisticated tastes.\n\n\"Almost done, dear? We should be going if we're to find a good spot,\" said Eleanor.\n\nSophie drained the last drop of the excellent coffee and nodded, picking up her handbag and following Eleanor out of the door. They chatted as they walked in the direction of Leicester Square, which was no more than five minutes distant.\n\nA platform stood near the middle, with two long tables running atop the front edge. A portable lectern stood in the narrow gap between the tables. A few dozen people milled around on the cobbled pavement in front of the platform, and a small group of men with notepads stood nearby, pointedly ignoring each other\u2014newspaper people, Sophie knew. She wondered which of them was from Connie's paper.\n\nShe noticed a constable walking slowly along the pavement by the theatre on the far side of the square. Then she spied a second policeman standing behind the platform, and a third rocking on his heels in a shop doorway to her left. She suddenly felt a little apprehensive. Were they expecting trouble?\n\n\"Good,\" said Eleanor, oblivious to the police presence, \"they haven't started yet. Let's get nice and close, shall we? I've been dying to hear what His Lordship has to say.\"\n\n\"As have I,\" said Sophie. They moved into the crowd, finding a gap twenty feet from the platform. A moment later, the clang of a bell in some nearby tower signalled eleven o'clock. \"He should be starting at any moment.\"\n\nOn cue, a tall, handsome, smiling man of about sixty strode to the lectern. He wore a frock coat and a top hat, his brown hair greying at the temples. Sophie recognised Lord Salisbury from the engravings that she'd seen in the papers. Half a dozen men and women followed His Lordship up onto the platform. His entourage, no doubt.\n\nThe small audience applauded. Other people in the square moved closer to see what was happening.\n\n\"Ladies and gentlemen of London,\"\u2014he turned to the group of journalists\u2014\"gentlemen of the press and wire. I am here today to tell you about the wonderful progress the Royal Commission has made in just three days since its formation.\n\n\"As every citizen is aware, the incredible progress of our industrial revolution has brought wealth and improved standards of living to everyone in our great empire\u2014but at a cost. Soot and smoke from the burning of coal have caused unnaturally heavy rains and flooding. Sulphurous gases have turned that rain to an acid that eats away the buildings, kills the grass and trees, and poisons our rivers, killing the fish that so many depend on for food.\n\n\"This cannot go on. The learned people of the Royal Society are unanimous in this. They say if we continue in this way, in twenty years, the Thames will be dead. Our parks and farmland will be desert. Our buildings will be beyond repair.\n\n\"And so a consensus has been reached, and with it comes a plan to put things right before it is too late. New equipment is being designed as I speak to you here today, to remove the soot and smoke and sulphur from the factory chimneys. The government has already agreed in principle to provide factory owners with grants to pay for the installation of this equipment\u2014\"\n\nA man's angry voice came from the crowd to Sophie's right. \"Who's going to pay for it all, then?\"\n\n\"Not me,\" said someone behind her.\n\n\"Let 'im finish!\"\n\n\"The factory owners made this mess\u2014they should pay to clean it up!\"\n\nAngry voices rose all around her, and people jostled each other, pushing back and forth as arguments broke out. On the platform, Lord Salisbury held his hands out to calm the crowd. His lips moved, but Sophie couldn't hear him over the raised voices.\n\nIn front of her, one man raised a clenched fist, shaking it in Lord Salisbury's direction. Another onlooker, seeing this, threw a punch at the heckler.\n\nWithin seconds, fighting had erupted all around her. Sophie whirled to find Eleanor, and as she did, an elbow caught her hard across the bridge of her nose.\n\nSearing pain burst through her skull. Her eyes felt as if they'd been driven back into their sockets. Everything was a blur. Warm wetness coursed down her cheeks and upper lip. Her legs gave way, and she crumpled, dizzy and nauseated. Bodies crushed close, and boots pounded the cobbles inches from her face. Shouts and screams hammered like nails into her ears.\n\nShe felt hands grip her arms as she was lifted and pulled hard to one side. Her head spun; she couldn't get her feet under her, but whoever was holding her didn't allow her to fall.\n\nShe was manhandled into a dark place, and half-pushed, half-guided into a sitting position on a hard bench. The dizziness faded gradually, and with it, the urge to vomit. She was able to focus her eyes again, and she wiped her hand across her face and looked at it. Not blood, she saw with relief; her eyes had been streaming hot tears. She touched her nose, gingerly\u2014it was sore, but thankfully, not broken.\n\nShe became fully aware of her surroundings. She was in the back of a police wagon, from the look of it. It was then that she realised there was someone else in the wagon. Sitting on the bench opposite her, red-faced, was Lord Salisbury.\n\nGunn paced the basement room that housed the Tribune's archive, thinking about what he'd discovered. After two minutes, he forced himself to sit down and relax. Then he took the stairs back to his office slowly and deliberately, for fear of raising Mr. Maynard's suspicions.\n\nBut those thoughts were quashed when he saw Gallagher rushing toward the door, hurriedly donning his hat and coat as he went.\n\nGunn and Maynard almost collided in the office doorway. \"What's happening, sir?\"\n\n\"Lord Salisbury was mobbed in Leicester Square a little while ago. Run along, quick-like, and find out exactly what happened. One of the juniors is there, but I need an experienced man.\"\n\n\"I saw Gallagher running out\u2014\"\n\n\"He's gone to the hospital to get an interview with Salisbury if he can. Now, go. I need statements from the police, shopkeepers, anyone who saw what happened, and I need them quickly so we can get a special edition out in time for the lunchtime crowd.\"\n\nGunn snatched his hat from the coat stand and hurried out.\n\nGunn waved down a steam taxi as he dashed along the street. \"Leicester Square, quick as you can,\" he said to the driver as he slammed the door shut.\n\nThe driver wasted no time, and Gunn was yanked back into the seat as the little vehicle accelerated sharply.\n\nLess than five minutes later, Gunn hopped out of the taxi. He looked around but saw no evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. That wasn't unexpected; the crowd would have evaporated within minutes once any kind of spectacle was over.\n\nA constable on duty paced a slow beat along the pavement. Gunn went up to him and held up his press credentials. \"I was told something happened here a little while ago. Were you here?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Lord Salisbury was here about half an hour ago, up on that platform.\" The copper pointed at a wooden structure draped with cloths near the centre of the square. \"He was talking about what the government's going to do about cleaning up the river and such.\"\n\n\"How big was the crowd?\"\n\n\"Not a very big one, sir, perhaps a hundred people or so.\"\n\n\"I was told Lord Salisbury was mobbed.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't say it was a mobbing, exactly, but people in the crowd started shouting about how long were they going to take and how much it would cost and so forth, and then they started getting a bit rowdy, and the next thing we knew they'd started grabbing tomatoes and apples and things and throwing them at His Lordship.\"\n\n\"What happened next?\"\n\n\"Well, then it was lucky there was a few of us here, because they tried to get up on the platform, but we were able to hold them back while His Lordship's hangers-on got him away safe.\"\n\n\"Was he hurt?\"\n\nThe copper shook his head. \"Not at all. I think I saw him catch a tomato in the phizog, and he probably had a bit of a shaking up, I imagine.\"\n\n\"What about the people? Did you find the ones who started the trouble?\"\n\nThe copper shook his head. \"No, sir, we were too busy watching out for His Lordship. By the time we'd packed him off to hospital, most of the crowd had scarpered.\"\n\nGunn thanked the man and moved on. He'd have to get back to the office without delay if he was to have the piece written in time. He flagged down another taxi and headed back to Fleet Street.\n\nSophie stood at the French windows, watching the rain falling on the huge lawn and flowerbeds of Lord Salisbury's garden. A thrush flew down from one of the trees and landed on the grass, pecked at something there for a moment, then flew off again, holding what looked like a worm in its beak.\n\nHer nose and cheekbones began to throb again, and her eyes threatened to water. The doctor at hospital had told her that nothing was broken\u2014but she'd already known that. She remembered, in Africa, telling young soldiers their minor wounds couldn't be as painful as they claimed. Now she knew better.\n\nShe heard the soft click of the door opening and turned to see Lord Salisbury. She checked her posture. She felt uncomfortable, out of place in His Lordship's house.\n\n\"I've just spoken with my driver. He found your friend Mrs. Stack while we were in hospital and took her home. She told him that she didn't get mixed up in that awful situation and is in perfect health.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Lordship,\" said Sophie. \"That is the correct form of address, isn't it? I don't believe I've met a lord of the realm before.\"\n\nSalisbury smiled. \"I don't stand on ceremony in my own home, Mrs. Gunn. Call me Leo. Is there anyone you'd like me to contact? Your husband, perhaps?\"\n\nSophie shook her head. \"My husband will be working at the moment, and I'm sure I'll be home before he is. There's no need to worry him. I've nothing worse than a bruise, after all.\"\n\nSalisbury invited Sophie to sit in one of the armchairs by the fire, and he sat in the one opposite. \"I shall have my driver take you home. But not until you have a little more colour in your cheeks; you still look rather pale. I've asked Cook to make us a nice cup of tea\u2014that should help. Are you sure you're feeling well?\"\n\n\"I'm still a little shaken, despite the sedative they gave me. But I do feel very much better than I did an hour ago. I'll be perfectly fine, Your . . . Leo.\"\n\nSalisbury nodded, then was silent for a long moment. \"May I ask, what does your husband do for a living?\"\n\n\"He's a journalist for the Tribune.\" Sophie wondered what newspaper a lord would read. The Times, probably, she thought.\n\n\"Ah, the Tribune. Excellent paper.\" Salisbury looked thoughtful for a moment, then he looked straight into Sophie's eyes. \"Gunn\u2014are you telling me your husband is Cornelius Gunn?\"\n\nSophie nodded, smiling that the man would know her husband's name.\n\n\"You must tell him from me that these burglaries he's been reporting on recently have made most fascinating reading. In fact . . . you know, I believe I'd like to tell him myself. Are you and your husband free Friday evening, Mrs. Gunn?\"\n\nThe light showers the Weather Office had predicted turned out to be somewhat heavier than expected, and Gunn's shoes were yet again soaked through by the time he stepped through his front door that evening and furled his inadequate umbrella.\n\nHe was impatient to tell Sophie what he'd found in the archive that morning\u2014but the flat felt empty. \"Sophie?\" he called out, but there was no response.\n\nHe wasn't too concerned; he'd left the office and arrived home a little earlier than he usually did. He changed into dry clothes and tended to the fireplace in the parlour, and was soon sitting comfortably in his favourite armchair, reading a book in front of a cheery blaze.\n\nAn hour and a half passed with still no sign of Sophie, and Gunn began to worry that she was deliberately taking her time to make a point after the earlier upset. His stomach churned at the thought. He really didn't want another argument.\n\nA knock sounded at the door. He dropped the book he'd been trying to concentrate on, and rushed to answer.\n\nOpening the front door, he found Sophie in the company of a chauffeur who held an umbrella over her head to keep off the rain. Both her eyes had been blacked, and a deep purple bruise ran from cheekbone to cheekbone. He bristled. Someone had attacked his wife!\n\n\"Here we are,\" said Sophie to the chauffeur before Gunn could react. \"Thank you.\"\n\nThe young man bowed slightly, then scurried back to the large black steam carriage sitting by the curb.\n\n\"My goodness,\" said Gunn, \"I must have arrived right after the police took you to hospital.\"\n\n\"There's more. Lord Salisbury has invited us to dinner, and I accepted on your behalf.\" Gunn's eyebrows shot up with surprise.\n\n\"He seems interested in the burglaries you've been writing about.\" Sophie stopped and frowned. \"In fact, I have to say that he seemed uncommonly interested, for a few trivial thefts.\" She paused again, shook her head ever so slightly, and turned to look at Gunn again, smiling. \"Perhaps he just likes the way you write. Now, tell me about your day.\"\n\nSophie's story had almost made Gunn forget about his findings in the archive, but now his excitement came back to him. \"I found incontrovertible evidence that Gallagher's bank robberies and the workshop breakins are related. Every one of the four bank robberies happened on the same night as one of the workshop jobs. From what I was able to find out, it looks as if they happened within minutes of each other, even though the locations were up to two miles apart.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"I'm not certain, other than that we appear to have two groups of men working together. What I can't work out is why they'd work that way. It's bizarre. But there's more\u2014another connection that neither I nor Gallagher spotted. When I was looking at one of Gallagher's stories from a few weeks ago, I happened to notice a little article by one of the junior reporters about some noise complaints that the police had received. Apparently someone was flying an airship in the early hours.\"\n\n\"They're not supposed to do that. Are they?\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"No flights over the city between ten at night and five in the morning. I didn't pay the story much mind, but then I noticed a similar story in one of the other papers carrying one of the robbery stories, and it set me to thinking. So I went back over the last few weeks, and I found four noise complaints like that, every one of them happening the same night as one of the breakins.\n\n\"I went to talk to Haynes\u2014he's the junior reporter who wrote the stories\u2014and he confirmed it. There were no similar complaints on other nights, just those. And the locations of the noise reports are all within about a mile of the targets of the robberies that were happening at the time.\"\n\n\"Too much of a coincidence\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014to be a coincidence,\" Gunn finished. \"One of the police reports Haynes was working from said the airship engines sounded military in nature. That made Haynes curious, so he went to see the constable who'd taken the report.\n\n\"The complainant was a veteran who'd served in Africa, and he'd told the copper that the engines on military transport airships have a distinctive undertone because of the armoured cowls around the propellers, and he'd heard the same undertone that night.\"\n\n\"Do you think the military are involved?\" asked Sophie.\n\nGunn shook his head. \"I don't see how that would make any sense. It's possible that the man was mistaken, or that someone else has an airship that happens to use propeller cowls like the army transports. I can see no reason behind any of it. It's a jigsaw puzzle, and I don't think I have all the pieces yet.\"\n\nThe next day, Gunn arrived home from the office and sat, heavily, in his favourite armchair. \"I have had a truly awful day,\" he said to Sophie.\n\n\"Oh, dear. You must tell me.\"\n\n\"It seems that Maynard has had enough of me spending time investigating the workshop breakins, and I had to give all my notes about them to Gallagher. That's my work, and I just had to hand it over as if it meant nothing to me.\"\n\n\"All your notes?\" said Sophie. \"Surely you didn't tell him about the airship?\"\n\nGunn smiled a little. \"No. I hadn't actually committed that information to the engine, and I hadn't written anything down about the timings of the breakins. All I pointed out was the fact that the walls were broken in the same way, and left Gallagher with that.\"\n\n\"But if you're not working on those stories any more, what will you be doing?\"\n\n\"I was given a series of petty burglaries in Brentford to report. Which I did.\" Gunn grinned. \"While I was at it, I noticed that almost every one of them had been executed in the same way, and I recognised the pattern from some burglaries last year. It was light-fingered Freda Parker behind them, I knew it. So while I was at it, I tapped off a note to Jameson to tell him that Parker's been up to her old tricks. I expect tomorrow I'll be reporting that she's been arrested.\"\n\nSophie smiled, then frowned. \"You just can't stop yourself, can you? What will Maynard do if he finds out you did more than just write up the stories? He won't fire you, will he?\"\n\nGunn shrugged. \"His complaint was that I was spending more time investigating than I was sitting at a desk tapping out stories. This time, I did both. He has nothing to complain about. He also can't complain about me spending my own time looking into the workshop breakins.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The other day I was plotting the locations of all the workshops that had been broken into, and it occurred to me to make a list of what was taken. I was looking for a pattern, and I think I may have found it. All of those workshops were being used by lone inventors, the kind who work in secret, thinking they're going to make a fortune from some brilliant idea that nobody else has thought of.\"\n\n\"Crackpots,\" said Sophie.\n\nGunn shrugged. \"In some cases, certainly, although I think these particular victims may have all had ideas with merit, because every one of them has had good ideas in the past\u2014proven inventions that work. That's the point, I think. I suspect that someone wanted these inventors' work because it's useful to them in some way.\"\n\n\"And the fact that their earlier work is known makes them targets, now.\"\n\n\"Precisely. I think our perpetrators have been watching these people because of their histories. It's a bit vague, I know, but I think I may be able to make use of it.\"\n\n\"You're going to try to work out who's next, aren't you?\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I'm going to do. And I'm planning on being there when the next breakin happens.\"\n\nLord Salisbury's steam carriage arrived at the flat at five-thirty precisely. Connie, wearing a new dark suit and top hat, almost stumbled when he caught sight of Sophie in her evening gown of deep flame orange\u2014he'd said it matched her green eyes and copper hair perfectly\u2014and she smiled at him. That was the reaction she'd hoped for.\n\nGunn took Sophie's elbow and guided her to the carriage. She'd used some powder to try to cover the bruise on her face, but she still felt a little self-conscious.\n\nIt was a half-hour drive to Lord Salisbury's townhouse, a large, four-storey affair. Connie took her arm and escorted her, passing beneath the Salisbury coat of arms above the arch around the front door. The door opened ahead of them as they went up the short flight of stone steps. A servant took Connie's hat and coat and Sophie's shawl, and showed them to the drawing room.\n\nThe room was large, filled with warm light from the wide fireplace and from gas lamps on the walls, which were decorated with fabrics of deep green and gold.\n\nLord Salisbury stood by the fire, talking in hushed tones with a tall, distinguished woman. She had a strong jaw and hair the same colour as His Lordship's; the word 'Rubenesque' flitted across Sophie's mind. She knew instinctively that this was Lady Salisbury.\n\n\"Gunn.\" Lord Salisbury, smiling broadly, stepped forward to shake Connie's hand. \"Delighted to meet you at last.\" He turned to Sophie. \"Mrs. Gunn. I'm glad to see you looking well. I trust you've quite recovered?\"\n\n\"Yes, Your Lordship, thank you. Please, call me Sophie.\"\n\nLord Salisbury insisted that they both call him Leo, and introduced his wife, Sandy. He asked, \"Would anyone care for an aperitif?\"\n\nConnie answered, \"Yes, we'd love one, thank you. Please, call me\u2014\"\n\n\"Connie,\" said Sophie. \"His friends just call him Gunn, but I don't think that's very friendly.\"\n\nWhile the drinks were being poured, Sophie noticed an anomaly in the pattern in the wall covering near the curtains, and realised she was looking at tubing that had been painted, not quite perfectly, to match the fabric behind.\n\nLord Salisbury noticed her interest. \"Is something wrong, my dear?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Your\u2014Leo. I couldn't help noticing those tubes by the curtains. Do you have an engine in the house? Your very own engine?\"\n\n\"My goodness, you do have sharp eyes. Yes. I use it for correspondence and in my work, generally, and also for calculating household finances and things of that nature. It also controls the radiators and ventilators to make sure that occupied rooms are maintained at the perfect temperature. It's saved us a small fortune in fuel costs, I can tell you. The day will come when every house in Britain has something similar. Save the country millions.\"\n\nConnie spoke up, \"I read recently that Babbage himself said the days of the mechanical engines are almost at an end.\"\n\n\"Quite true. All those cogs and gears are something of a limitation. Charles\u2014Babbage, that is\u2014was explaining it to me a few weeks ago. We really need to be able to make the things portable, and that means making them much smaller, and resistant to vibration and contamination by dust and dirt. Movable engines could be put aboard airships, boats, sea-skimmers, what have you. The safety record of the underground trains and the trams is first-class. Imagine being able to say the same of airships and cargo boats.\"\n\n\"But a portable engine would still be at risk from, well, just being moved around. Too many parts to get knocked about, and all that.\"\n\nLeo nodded. \"A portable mechanical engine, yes. The real problem is one of engineering. To make a machine half the size, you'd have to be able to engineer the parts to twice the accuracy.\"\n\n\"In other words, the precision of the engineering determines the size of the engine that can be built, and we're already at the limit of that precision.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\" said Leo. \"No pun intended.\"\n\nLady Salisbury\u2014Sandy\u2014gave a little laugh at that. A butler appeared at the door. \"Shall we continue this over dinner?\"\n\nAs they dined, Lord Salisbury explained that engineers all over the country were working on new engine designs using water, electricity, and even steam. They would be faster and lighter than any mechanical engines in existence. Sophie was fascinated, and she could see that Connie was, too.\n\n\"What about Europe? I mean, do we plan on sharing the new technology with our allies?\"\n\n\"That's a good question, Connie,\" said Leo. \"I've always maintained that science is international, and that sharing pure scientific work benefits every nation. Think where we'd be today if Babbage hadn't known about Leibniz's seventeenth-century work in Germany with base-two arithmetic.\n\n\"That was his great insight, you see, and once he'd made the connection\u2014the idea came to him in a dream, apparently\u2014he abandoned the machine that he'd been working on at that time, and instead worked with Boole to develop this new idea. The rest is history, as they say.\n\n\"But the inventions that come from that research . . . ah, now that's a different story. When a British inventor turns the data into tangible machines that can be sold abroad, the nation benefits from that income. It's not in our interests to be giving it away.\n\n\"I'd like to see Britain at the front of the pack when it comes to technology, and by that I mean everything, not just our engines. And if we're to do that, we need first-class engineers and inventors. In my view, the government should do whatever is necessary to ensure that our people are the best in the world.\"\n\n\"Surely the key to that is education?\" Sophie asked. \"We need a first-class education system if we're to have first-class minds, would that not be true?\"\n\n\"Goodness!\" said Sandy. \"That's precisely what Leo has been telling people for years now. Scientists are made, not born.\"\n\n\"Good show, my dear,\" Leo said to Sophie. \"And you've also proved something else I've been saying for years: that the ordinary men\u2014and women\u2014of this country are perfectly capable of understanding the issues. There is nothing that our men can do that our women cannot also do.\"\n\nLeo leaned back in his chair and grinned at Sandy. \"Science, on the other hand, the pure research, is international by its very nature. If only some people in government understood that distinction as well as the two of you.\"\n\nLeo shook his head as he continued.. \"Unfortunately, there are some who insist that we should keep British scientific research for Britain alone. The Secretary of State for War, for example, feels that sharing basic research would weaken the country in the event of a conflict.\n\n\"Apparently, what he has in mind for the next wave of engines is something far removed from improving our transport safety. He wants automated fighting machines to replace the armed forces. Machines designed to kill, efficiently and without remorse or conscience.\"\n\nSophie shuddered. \"That's obscene.\"\n\nLeo nodded, his face grim.\n\nConnie thought back to what Leo said about the international nature of scientific research. \"If Britain keeps its research to itself while the rest of the world shares their discoveries . . .\"\n\n\"You see it, don't you?\" asked Sandy. \"The rest of the world would very soon outpace Britain in basic science, and we could be at the mercy of any power that decided to move against us.\"\n\nAfter dinner, the four returned to the drawing room. Leo offered brandy all round, and they relaxed on the padded leather chairs near the large fireplace.\n\n\"I've been following your stories in the Tribune, Connie,\" said Leo. \"I'm particularly interested in those workshops that have been broken into, but I noticed that you haven't written anything on the subject for a little while.\"\n\nSophie glanced at Connie, wondering what he'd say.\n\n\"My editor decided my time was better spent on other stories.\"\n\n\"That's a shame,\" said Leo. \"Still, I expect you know a lot more than what the readers see in print. I'd be curious to know what you've been able to find out.\"\n\nConnie paused, and Sophie recognized the look on his face as he gathered his thoughts, then cleared his throat. \"Given that I'm not working on those reports anymore, I don't think it would be improper to discuss them. As long as you're not planning to sell the information to one of the Tribune's competitors, that is.\" He grinned at Leo.\n\nLeo and Sandy laughed. \"Quite right.\"\n\nConnie nodded and began to relate the connection between the incidents at the workshops and the banks, and the apparent involvement of an airship.\n\nLeo's face turned quite serious. \"My word. You say this could possibly be a military airship? Whose military, do you think?\"\n\n\"It would be unwise to make assumptions with so little information. This aircraft has only ever been heard, not seen, and only one witness is of the opinion that it is possibly military. Until a reliable witness gets a good look at it, I'd prefer to reserve my judgement. In any case, this is all conjecture. I have a friend who thinks it's just a gang of lads looking for things to sell\u2014and he may be right\u2014and this business with the airship is just coincidence.\"\n\n\"Ah, but wouldn't you like to know for sure? I think you should continue with this line of inquiry.\"\n\nSophie saw from the set of Connie's eyes that he didn't like the way the conversation was turning. He didn't like being told how to do his job\u2014even by a lord. Her insides twisted; she knew that Connie would say something rash if Leo persisted.\n\nBefore Connie could speak, Lady Salisbury called a halt to the proceedings by pointing out the lateness of the hour. \"And you have a meeting early in the morning, Leo.\" Sophie relaxed; a potential disaster had been averted.\n\nLeo looked at the clock and agreed. Reluctantly, thought Sophie, judging by his expression. \"We must invite you back again soon,\" he said as he escorted Connie and Sophie to the entrance hall, and he and Sandy watched from the doorway as they climbed aboard the carriage and departed.\n\n\"What did you think?\" Sophie asked Connie as he opened the front door and they went into their flat.\n\n\"A very interesting evening. I have to admit I was a little nervous at first, but they're both such nice people, I was at ease before I realised it.\"\n\nSophie couldn't help but notice that Connie seemed a little distracted. \"Is something wrong?\"\n\nConnie shook his head. \"I was a little bit bothered by what Leo said. About doing whatever is necessary to make sure Britain stays ahead of the rest of the world in technology.\"\n\n\"It sounded perfectly reasonable to me. Why wouldn't we want to do that?\"\n\n\"Just that phrase: whatever is necessary. It's been used to justify a great number of terrible things over the years.\"\n\n\"You're being too sensitive, Connie. It was just a turn of phrase.\"\n\nConnie shrugged, then smiled at her. \"You're right, of course. It's been a busy week and I'm tired. Forget I said it.\"\n\n\"I did wonder why he seemed so interested in your workshop robberies, though.\"\n\nConnie looked at her. \"A little too interested for my liking. I got the distinct impression that he was fishing for information.\"\n\nSophie thought back to what Leo had said. \"I still think you're reading something into it that isn't really there. But then, if there's one thing I've learned, it's never to ignore your journalist's instincts. They're what make you so good at your job. But now you've got me wondering, and just for once, I hope you're wrong.\"\n\nThe next evening, Connie got ready to watch for the workshop burglars. Sophie laid out the dark clothing she'd picked out for him. According to the Weather Office's engines, it would be dry, but bitter cold that night, so she'd chosen the warmest pieces she could find, and added a few things she'd picked up at a military surplus shop that morning.\n\nShe went to the kitchen to make him some ham and cheese sandwiches, and a large bottle of tea. She placed the provisions in his leather satchel. It was almost time.\n\nWhile she'd been busy, Connie had changed into the dark clothes. \"That navy coat makes you look like a sailor on shore leave,\" she said, grinning, as she went into the parlour.\n\nHe looked tense. She knew he was anxious to get going, and though he hadn't said anything, she was well aware that he was a little worried. \"Are you sure you don't want me to come with you? We could keep each other warm.\"\n\nConnie smiled. \"Quite sure, dear. It could be dangerous, and it'll certainly be very cold.\"\n\nAt last, he'd acknowledged to her that there could be danger. Now she could say something about it, too. She folded her arms across her bosom and, still smiling, raised an eyebrow.\n\nHis eyes narrowed. She could tell he was kicking himself for saying too much, but it was too late now. \"Dangerous in what way, dear?\" she asked, trying to appear nonchalant.\n\n\"Oh, it's not that bad,\" he backtracked. \"If the criminals show up, I'll have to alert the police to stop them. Don't worry, dear. I can do that without being seen, and then the police will take charge and that will be that. And if they do happen to see me, I'll show them a clean pair of heels. Don't worry about me\u2014I'll be perfectly safe.\"\n\n\"If you're not home by five, I'm sending your friend Jameson a message.\" Connie opened his mouth to protest, but she held her hand up to stop him. \"I won't hear a word about it. Now, you said you'd show me exactly where you'll be. Please do, in case I have to get Jameson out looking for you.\"\n\nConnie had left his map opened on the little table, and he pointed to a spot in Battersea. \"Here, where these roads cross. There's a ladder up to the roof of the factory on the southwest corner; that's where I'll be. One of the workshops I think is a target is Culbertson's, here.\" He indicated a spot just to the east of the crossroads. \"And Tweed's is here.\" He moved his finger to a place a little way north. \"I can watch both places from that roof. It's perfect.\"\n\n\"I think you should tell Jameson before you even leave.\"\n\nConnie shook his head. \"No. He's against me doing what he thinks of as police work anyway, and if I call him in, he might very well come along to drag me home.\"\n\nHe felt around in the pocket of the navy coat and pulled out a police-issue whistle. \"If I see anything happening, I'll use this, and every copper within a mile will come running.\"\n\nThere was a tap at the front door; Connie's taxi had arrived. He dropped the whistle back into his pocket, then picked up his sheepskin gloves and put them on.\n\nSophie wished he would accept her help, or Jameson's, for the sake of safety\u2014but she knew him; he would do this his way, and that meant alone. \"You just be careful,\" she said, and kissed him. She followed him out to the hallway and watched him pick up the satchel, and leave.\n\nAs soon as the door closed, she used the machine in the study to request a taxi for herself. She then headed to the bedroom, taking a canvas bag from where she'd hidden it under the bed and tipping the contents out onto the coverlet: a pair of dark brown corduroy trousers, a heavy black sweater, a dark blue woollen work shirt, a blue duffel coat, and a pair of scuffed boots. She'd bought them at the same surplus shop as Connie's things.\n\nThere is nothing that our men can do that our women cannot also do, Leo had said, and in Sophie's mind that included making sure their spouses were safe. She'd be damned if she was going to spend a sleepless night in the flat worrying about Connie.\n\nShe changed quickly. She didn't have a hat, but the coat had a hood she hoped would do just as well, and she wrapped a woollen scarf around her throat for good measure. Picking up Connie's map, she memorised the names of the streets he'd pointed to, then folded it and put it in her pocket, and headed for the front door.\n\nAs a thought occurred to her, she ran back into the room. She retrieved her opera glasses from the dresser drawer, thinking they might help; she wished she'd thought about it earlier so that Connie might have taken his own pair.\n\nThe taxi arrived and Sophie gave the driver the name of the next street south of where Connie had said he would be. She would walk from there.\n\nIt was comfortably warm inside the taxi; a clever little arrangement of tubes and fans took excess heat from the steam engine and directed the warm air into the passenger bay through grilles underneath the seats.\n\nWhen she arrived at her destination, she asked the driver to collect her from that same spot at four-fifteen, and dug into her pocket for money. \"Please be here on time. It's very, very important.\" The taxi pulled away from the curb and disappeared around the corner.\n\nSophie looked around. She stood in an industrial region of the city, and the workers had gone home hours earlier. The street was deserted and silent, a dark trench under a sky of frost and sharp, cold stars, punctuated by pools of light thrown by the gaslights onto the pavements and factory walls. Water in the gutters was frozen into pale sheets, and a sheen of frost sparkled on the lampposts. Her breath turned to icy fog in front of her, and she could feel the frigid air turning her nose and cheeks pink.\n\nAcross the street from where she stood, on the south side, was one of many factory buildings lining the street\u2014but it had a three-storey brick office building attached. She crossed the street and looked up the alleyway leading down one side, and spied a metal ladder bolted to the wall leading to the roof, the bottom rung about ten feet off the ground. Perfect. All she needed was a way to reach it.\n\nAfter a moment, she grew accustomed to the dimness in the alley, and saw a pile of rubbish twenty yards farther along. As she walked closer, she could see it was mostly bits of broken wood. She pushed a few of the pieces to one side and saw the side of a box about three feet square. It would have to do. She dragged it under the ladder, climbed onto it, and, with her boots scrabbling against the brick wall to get what purchase she could, was able to get one foot and then the other onto the ladder.\n\nSophie gave herself half a minute while the aching in her arms subsided, but she knew the longer she waited, the colder her hands would get, and the harder the climb would be. She forced herself up the ladder, then, out of breath, she let herself flop over the low wall and onto the flat surface of the roof.\n\nStaying low, she shuffled to the north side of the roof, and, taking the folding opera glasses from her pocket, peered over the parapet. The glasses enhanced the light as she'd hoped they would, and she could see Connie quite clearly. He was fifty yards away and perhaps six feet below Sophie's level, lying on his stomach at the far edge of the factory roof, presumably watching the streets below. The bag containing his tea and sandwiches sat near his feet, and Sophie wished she'd brought her own refreshments; she was already cold, and hot tea would have been a great comfort.\n\nShe resigned herself to a long, cold few hours. Connie was safe, and she could stay behind the wall, out of sight, checking on him at intervals. As she lowered the opera glasses, she caught a slight movement out of the corner of her eye. She froze, training her eyes in that direction. She thought she saw someone on a factory roof fifty yards to Connie's left, using the slope of the roof to stay out of his line of sight.\n\nSlowly, she raised the opera glasses again to get a better look. There was a man there\u2014a stout man, with muttonchop sideburns, wearing a long black overcoat and a bowler hat\u2014and he was definitely watching Connie. If he'd seen her, he showed no sign.\n\nShe stayed still for two or three minutes, watching the man all the time. Who was he? A concerned citizen who'd seen Connie climbing up onto the roof? Perhaps the man assumed that Connie was a thief. But even as the thought came to mind, she knew that it made no sense\u2014no one in their right mind would follow someone onto a roof to see what they were up to when it was easier and safer to call the police.\n\nUnless the man was himself a policeman. But if that was the case, why was he watching Connie instead of arresting him? That left one option; this man was a criminal as well, perhaps a thief who'd planned to break into one of those buildings. Perhaps he was a lookout working for the men Connie hoped to catch. Sophie tensed at the thought. She was too far away to be of any help if the man decided to attack her husband.\n\nSuddenly, he moved, slipping quietly down the slope of the roof away from Connie, disappearing from sight. Sophie watched until she was sure he'd gone, then turned her attention back to Connie, who still lay in the same position. She saw him shuffle back from the edge of the roof and reach into his bag for his bottle of tea.\n\nShe tried not to panic as she scanned Connie's roof, looking for any sign that the man had made his way up there; she was ready to shout out a warning if that happened, and ready to run for help. But there was no further sign of him, and Sophie forced herself to relax. Her arms trembled, and she realised that she'd been holding the opera glasses in a vice-like grip for several minutes.\n\nOff in the distance, a clock chimed midnight.\n\nWithin an hour, Sophie's fingers and toes had grown numb with cold. She pulled off her gloves and put her hands in her armpits under the coat, and allowed herself to walk around the roof a little, as quietly as she could, to try to get the blood moving in her feet. It helped, but not much.\n\nShe'd seen Connie walking back and forth along the factory roof a few times, swinging his arms around and breathing warmth onto his fingers. He was plainly feeling the cold just as badly as she was.\n\nBy two o'clock, her feet ached to the bones, and she paced the edge of the roof to try to get the feeling back in her toes. As she walked behind the brick structure of the lift winch housing, she found a black metal pipe with a conical rain guard, poking up to waist height through the flat surface of the roof.\n\nAs she passed it, a breath of warm air caught her cheek, and she stopped. She put a hand by the top of the pipe and felt glorious warmth; somewhere down below must have been a boiler, and the pipe was throwing out the excess heat. She took off her gloves and flexed her fingers in the flow of warm air. After a few minutes, she felt almost comfortable again. She only wished that there was some way that she could put her toes into the heat.\n\nShe alternated between watching Connie and visiting the pipe to warm her hands. There was no sign that anything of interest had happened in the streets below Connie's station, and Sophie knew that meant that he'd be returning to that spot the next night; he was convinced the next robbery was imminent.\n\nThe clock in the distance struck four. It was time to go. Sophie eased herself over the parapet, then, after a heart-stopping few moments as she found the top rung with her toes, made her way down. She slid the box back to where she'd found it, knowing that she'd need it the next night, then crossed the street and waited for the taxi to return.\n\nShe arrived home and hurried into the flat. Connie would not be far behind. She changed quickly and bundled the clothes back into the canvas bag, which she returned to its hiding place under the bed. Hurrying back to the parlour, she stoked the fire back to life, and settled in her armchair to catch her breath and wait.\n\nConnie arrived half an hour later. \"I take it nothing happened?\" she asked as he kissed her on the cheek.\n\n\"Not really. But there was someone else there. I got the strangest feeling that he was waiting for the same thing.\" Sophie's heart missed a beat as she thought about the man she'd seen on the roof. Connie sighed as he relaxed into his armchair, yawned, and held his hands closer to the fire.\n\n\"Oh?\" she said, as calmly as she could, \"Where?\"\n\n\"He was in a doorway across the street from Tweed's, staying in the shadows.\"\n\nSophie was mystified. Was Connie talking about the man she'd seen watching him on the roof, or someone else? \"What did he look like?\"\n\nConnie shook his head. \"I couldn't really say. He was too far away and in shadow most of the time. Quite tall, I think, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a long leather coat.\"\n\nSophie tried to stay calm. It didn't sound like the man she'd seen. How many people had been out there that night, watching the workshops and each other? \"Were you warm enough?\"\n\n\"Just about,\" he said, but Sophie knew that wasn't altogether true. \"I could use a nice cup of tea, though, and a few hours in a warm bed. Tomorrow, I think it might be better if I take soup rather than tea. The Weather Office says it's probably going to snow.\"\n\nSnow. Sophie groaned inwardly.\n\nThe snow began to fall just after midnight. Sophie watched Connie on his rooftop to the north. She looked over to where she'd seen the man with the muttonchops the previous evening. Through her new goggles, the scene was bright, an effect of their light-collecting qualities. There was no sign of anyone there.\n\nShe and Connie had spent the morning resting, then Sophie had returned to the surplus shop for some more things. She'd bought Connie warmer, waterproof clothing to help keep the damp off\u2014she had every intention that they would both be as warm and dry as she could manage that night\u2014and a pair of goggles of the type drivers and airmen used: brass-rimmed, with leather padding to keep out the wind and rain, levers on the side to adjust focus and control various filters, and adjustable straps for comfort.\n\nWhile she'd been rummaging around in the shop, she'd happened across several pairs of navigator's binoculars in various states of repair, and picked out the two best pairs she could find. The lightweight brass tubes had tapered hoods on the front to shield the lenses somewhat from rain and sun, and were attached at eye level to a brass and leather headpiece that fitted securely over the ears and behind the head, designed to be worn under a hat if necessary.\n\nThe shopkeeper had assured her the binoculars were air service surplus, not something one would normally be able to buy. They'd be perfect for seeing at night, she knew, and far better than the opera glasses.\n\nConnie had been delighted when she'd shown him the goggles and binoculars and demonstrated how to operate them, just as her father had taught her when she was a little girl. Sophie had made a point of not mentioning how much they'd cost. There on the roof, she considered it money well spent.\n\nShe was glad of the waterproof gloves and hat, and thicker socks. She'd been on the roof for well over an hour, and had felt no need to go to the boiler pipe. She was still nicely warm, dry, and comfortable, despite the snow.\n\nA slight breeze came up, and she heard a thrumming sound. She looked around for its source and saw an open metal pylon that she hadn't noticed before, mounted on top of the lift winch housing. It was secured by thin cables of wound steel secured to the corners of the structure, and she thought they must be making the noise, humming in the breeze.\n\nShe turned back to check on Connie\u2014and dropped down behind the parapet when she saw that he was looking straight at her through his goggles.\n\n\"Sophie!\" he called out in an angry voice. There was no point maintaining the pretence, and she stood up. \"What the devil do you think you're doing?\"\n\nThe thrumming sound suddenly increased, shaking her insides. Her head felt as if it would burst. She covered her ears against the noise, spun around, and looked up sharply. No more than fifty feet above her, almost invisible in the dark and the snow, floated the gondola of an airship.\n\nShe threw a pained look back at Connie, her eyes watering from the agony of the noise. He was shouting something, but she couldn't hear him above the pounding of the airship's propellers. She could see his face, though, and he was angry. Stay there, his lips moved. Then he turned away.\n\nThe airship roared on. Sophie looked in the direction it had gone, but saw nothing. She felt for the lever on the side of her goggles and clicked rapidly through the various filters.\n\nSuddenly, she hit the right setting, and a grainy image emerged in muted shades of colour. The airship was huge\u2014Sophie guessed at least five hundred feet long. Three matte-black, unmarked gas envelopes, in a triangular arrangement, supported the gondola; lights in the portholes blazed like brilliant flares.\n\nConnie had vanished, no doubt already on his way down to ground level to follow the airship on foot. He'd told her to stay put, but she'd come to make sure he was safe, and she wasn't going to abandon that mission. Throwing the bag over her shoulder, she hurried to the ladder.\n\nThe goggles made the view down the side of the building into the shadow-black alleyway as clear as a full-moon night, and she made her way down with ease. She ran from the alley toward the street leading to the crossroads Connie had been watching. The walls of the buildings along the alleyway prevented a clear view of the sky and the airship, but she could still hear the propellers. She wasn't used to running, and a stitch in her side forced her to slacken her pace.\n\nThe tone of the airship's propellers lowered; they'd reduced engine power. A few seconds later, a loud clank sounded out. Then came a thump that she felt as much as she heard, a crash of falling bricks, and the tinkling of shattering glass. She wanted to run, but the stitch was agonising. There came the unmistakable sound of a police whistle\u2014Connie's whistle, she was sure. Holding her side, she reached the crossroads and looked to her right, following the sounds. She stopped, staring in disbelief.\n\nGunn was angry that Sophie had followed him. She could have frozen to death on that roof. Just then, with what appeared to be the criminals' airship upon them, she could get hurt. She should have stayed at home.\n\nHe'd told her to stay where she was. That was the best he could do for the moment. He hurried down the ladder to street level, then ran across the road and toward a side street, in the direction of the sound of the propellers. He knew the side street was there, but he couldn't see it through the snow.\n\nAs he passed by the double doors of Culbertson's workshop, he thought he saw the man from the previous night running in the same direction, disappearing into the thick haze\u2014but he couldn't be sure it wasn't just his imagination making something of a shadow. In any case, the airship was more important. He wanted to see the men breaking down the wall and catch them in the act.\n\nA loud metallic clank echoed off the buildings, and Gunn could tell that, whatever it was, it was on the next street. He turned the corner\u2014and skidded to a stop, stunned.\n\nThirty feet from him was a metal man, crouched down, its hands on the surface of the road. The thing was a monster\u2014nine feet tall, at least, and four wide across the shoulders. The left hand looked something like a boxing glove, while the right ended in a claw.\n\nIt stood, turning to face him. Then it took a step forward. Gunn felt, through his boots, the impact the metal foot made with the road.\n\nGunn froze in place as it came toward him. Its arms came up, glove and claw reaching out.\n\nThe steam-hammer thump of the other foot slamming down onto the road jolted Gunn back to action. He turned and fled, back around the corner.\n\nSnowflakes stung his eyes, blinding him. He couldn't tell which way he was going. Frantic, he scrubbed at his eyes as he ran.\n\nThe thumping was right behind him. Getting faster. Getting closer.\n\nA wall appeared out of the snow. He tried to stop, but the pavement was slick, and he skidded, slamming into the bricks.\n\nHe turned, his back to the wall. There was nowhere to go. The machine was twenty feet away, slowing, but still pacing faster than any man could run. It pulled back its left hand, ready to deliver a punch that would smash him with the power of a train engine.\n\nGunn ducked.\n\nFifty feet from her, a golden giant stood on the pavement next to a smashed wall.\n\nFor an instant, Sophie thought the goggles must have been playing tricks with her eyes. Not a giant, no, and not golden\u2014a machine, man-shaped and huge, made of brass or bronze or copper. It held a wooden box in its claw.\n\nIts head, almost as wide as its shoulders, turned in her direction. The single dark eye that ran from one side of its blank non-face to the other, stared right at her.\n\nThe machine took a step. The ground shook. Another step. By its fourth pace, it was running as fast as a galloping horse, each step a thunderclap.\n\nThere was no way she could outrun it. There was nothing to do, but try.\n\nShe ran. Ten feet to her right, she spied a doorway set into a wall by no more than six inches. Jumping into it, she pressed her back against the wooden door. Her heart raced. The machine was coming to kill her. She didn't want to die, but there was no way she could hope to fight this monster.\n\nIt thundered past her like a train at full speed, no more than a foot away, and vanished into the falling snow. Sophie's vision began to spin, and her legs gave way under her. She slipped down into a heap against the door.\n\nThe street was silent again. Her heart pounded in her ears, her lungs on fire. She needed to get her breath, but more importantly, she had to find Connie. Where is he?\n\nShe looked back up the street. A pile of rubble strewn across the pavement was all that remained of the wall. Next to it stood a tall man in a wide-brimmed hat and a long leather coat\u2014the man Connie had seen the night before\u2014bending low over a mound of dark rags.\n\nWith a start, Sophie realised that the mound of rags was Connie, partially buried under the bricks. The shock forced her to her feet. She tried to run, but her legs were jelly.\n\n\"Connie!\" she screamed. The man in the long coat turned his head sharply at the sound of her voice. He looked at her, then straightened and walked quickly away.\n\nShe didn't care who that man was or why he was there. She could only think of Connie.\n\nConnie was badly hurt, his left hand raw meat and bleeding freely, with a gash in his scalp that had turned his hair into a red mat. As she crouched down over him, his eyes flickered open. He mumbled something incoherent, and then his eyes closed again.\n\nShe tore a strip of fabric from his shredded jacket, knotted it around his bicep, and twisted it tight with a broken bit of wood from the rubble. The flow of blood reduced to a trickle. \"Oh, Connie, Connie,\" she whispered, sobbing. Then the tears came.\n\nShe heard the sound of running footsteps and looked up to see a policeman a few yards away. A second constable arrived, and then a third.\n\nWebster watched the scene below from the roof of a building across the street, careful to avoid being observed. Gunn's wife had seen him the night before\u2014it was only a slight movement in the corner of his eye that had told him that she'd even been there. He sighed to himself. First night on assignment, and he'd been spotted. He must be out of practice.\n\nHe had much to report to his master in the morning. Gunn had been badly\u2014possibly fatally\u2014injured, and as if that hadn't been enough, there was now an unidentified party, a tall man in a long coat. Webster had seen him the night previously, and again that night.\n\nThe police had arrived and milled about the scene. He watched as one of the men led Gunn's wife a few steps away. The other coppers lifted the bricks from Gunn's limp form. A minute later a steam-powered police wagon chuffed its way along the street. It halted, the officers bundled Gunn and his wife inside, then the vehicle moved off, accelerating until it was out of sight.\n\nThe street was empty. Webster was about to leave when he saw the tall man appear from the shadows of an alleyway fifty yards along the road, and walk away. Webster knew that by the time he reached street level, the man would be long gone. He clenched his jaw. Whoever you are, I'll find out what your part is in all this.\n\nSophie sat in the hospital room watching Connie, asleep in the bed. His skin was pale and shiny with perspiration, his breathing shallow. The doctors had stitched the scalp wound. He had numerous other bruises, scratches, and cuts on just about every part of his body.\n\nHis hand had been smashed to pulp. The doctors had had no choice but to amputate. Sophie had been horrified when they'd told her, but she'd seen the damage, and knew they were right.\n\nShe felt the sting of tears yet again. They would come if she let them. He's alive, and he's strong; he'll recover, she told herself.\n\nThere was a tap at the door. It opened, and Inspector Jameson removed his hat as he walked in. \"Good afternoon, Mrs. Gunn.\"\n\n\"Call me Sophie, please. Take a seat, Inspector.\"\n\n\"I came to see what I could do. But first, please, tell me how he's doing.\"\n\n\"He's in shock from the amputation and still under the influence of the anaesthetic. The doctor said he'll be better in the morning.\"\n\n\"Good, good. Now, about his work. I'll go by the Tribune office and talk to his boss. What would you like me to tell him?\"\n\n\"I was going to tell him that Connie's sick. Influenza or something. Lots of people have influenza at this time of year.\"\n\nJameson rubbed his chin. \"I think I'd better tell him that your husband's had an accident. Otherwise he might wonder how a dose of 'flu cost him a hand.\"\n\nSophie looked at Jameson sharply; then, hysterically, her face split into a wide grin, and she laughed heartily. \"You're quite right, of course. I must be more tired than I thought. I'm not thinking clearly.\"\n\n\"You've had a nasty shock, too, and you should be at home resting. Speaking as a friend, it might be better for all concerned if I use my influence to get your husband home. If his boss finds out he's here, it won't take him long to find out he was at the crime scene. If I understand correctly, the way things are at the Tribune at the moment, it could cause a lot of problems.\"\n\n\"He could lose his job.\"\n\n\"Precisely. Go home, and let me deal with this.\"\n\nWebster's contact in the police had provided some useful information. First and foremost, Gunn had survived the night, despite his fear that his injuries had been too serious. He felt relief at the news, though he hardly knew the man.\n\nThere was also some information about Gunn's history and that of his wife. Gunn had no criminal record, unless one counted the theft of some apples from an orchard when he was ten years old. Mrs. Gunn's record was spotless, and her service record from her time in Africa was impressive. And well it should be, with a legend like Gus Fletcher for a father.\n\nWebster flipped through the dozen or so sheets of paper that his machine had stamped out, then dropped them to one side of his desk. There was just one more area of Gunn's life left to look into. Who were his friends, with whom did he associate? Once he discovered the answers to those questions, his assignment would be complete.\n\nHe slumped in his chair and stared at the papers. He supposed he wouldn't get the answers to those questions for a time. Gunn was in no condition to go anywhere.\n\nSophie arrived home and forced herself to make up the fire, thinking that keeping her hands busy might help take her mind off worrying about Connie. It did, a little. She considered eating, but the knot in her stomach was too tight. A cup of hot tea was all she could handle. She sat in the chair by the fire, then after a minute drew up her legs and curled into a ball, as she had when she was a little girl. Sleep was out of the question, despite her mental and physical exhaustion.\n\nThe sound of someone knocking at the front door woke her. She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece, surprised to see it was already almost midnight. Against her expectations, she'd slept for several hours.\n\nShe opened the front door to find Jameson waiting on the step. He removed his hat, and smiled. \"It took some doing, but I persuaded the doctors to release him.\"\n\nHe signalled the constable standing next to the wagon at the curb. \"You may want to step aside, Mrs. Gunn.\"\n\nA minute later, two constables carried the sleeping Connie into the parlour on a stretcher and arranged him gently on the sofa with clean white hospital pillows and a sheet, then withdrew. When they'd gone, a large, middle-aged man in a Savile Row suit, with pince-nez glasses and a short, iron-grey beard, came into the room.\n\nHe was followed by Jameson, who carried Sophie's canvas bag, Connie's leather satchel, and a waxed paper bag. \"My men recovered these from the scene,\" he said, laying them on the floor. He nodded in the direction of the other man. \"This is Doctor Christie, a police surgeon.\"\n\nDoctor Christie straightened from where he'd been stooping over Connie, taking his pulse. \"Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Gunn. Your husband is doing very well, considering what he's been through. Keep him warm and make sure he gets plenty of liquids and rest. I'll come back tomorrow and see how he is.\"\n\nAs the doctor left, Sophie saw him glance at Jameson\u2014and at that instant, the doctor's eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. Jameson's eyes flicked to one side and back to Christie.\n\nWhat was that about? Sophie wondered briefly, then dismissed the thought.\n\nShe opened the bags that Jameson had placed on the floor and rummaged inside. Connie's goggles were missing from his satchel. The paper bag contained Connie's blood-stained clothes and other belongings.\n\n\"Now, then,\" said Jameson, \"the people at hospital have agreed not to speak to anyone about what they've seen today\u2014I told them that it's part of an ongoing investigation that shouldn't be made public\u2014so there's no reason for Maynard, or anyone else at the Tribune, to find out where you and your husband were last night. I spoke to Maynard and everything's in order. As far as he's concerned, there was an accident involving a taxi. No need to worry about any of that. There's just one more thing I need from you.\"\n\n\"Just ask,\" said Sophie, thankful for all the help Jameson had given.\n\n\"I need to get a complete statement about what happened this morning. I would have asked earlier, but under the circumstances, that wasn't possible. I know it's very late, and you must be worn out, but I'd appreciate it if you could spare a few minutes while it's still relatively fresh in your mind.\"\n\nSophie looked at Connie, who breathed evenly. A little colour had returned to his face, and the sheen of perspiration was gone. She turned back to Jameson. \"Of course, but let's talk elsewhere, so we don't disturb Connie.\"\n\nSophie showed Jameson to the kitchen, then returned to the parlour and stoked the fire. She fetched a thick blanket from the linen closet and tucked it around Connie, kissed him on the forehead, and went back to talk with Jameson.\n\nHe took notes as Sophie relayed her story, seemingly entranced as she described the airship she'd seen passing overhead, the man-shaped machine, and the sequence of events from the time she first saw the airship until the policemen arrived. Once the story was told, Jameson sat back in his chair.\n\nHe said nothing for a long minute, then, \"You can't tell anyone about any of this. Not yet, at least.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" asked Sophie, surprised.\n\n\"You have to look at it from my perspective, Sophie. First, the airship with three envelopes. That's a military pattern\u2014a heavy lifter, if I'm not mistaken. You saw no markings to identify it, which puts me in a very awkward spot, because it could be one of ours, in which case our own military would be implicated and I'll have a bunch of Air Marshals breathing down my neck.\n\n\"Or it could be foreign, and that would get me in trouble with the Foreign Office for suggesting that our allies might be responsible, or that our enemies may be planning to start trouble. Either way, you see my problem.\n\n\"As for that machine, we can't say with certainty that it was responsible for the breakin. You didn't actually see it happen, and it was gone by the time my men arrived. The only people who might have actually seen it all are your husband and this mysterious man in the leather coat, who also vanished before my men showed up.\"\n\n\"Are you doubting my word?\"\n\nJameson shook his head vigorously, \"No, no; please don't get the wrong idea, Sophie. I believe you. My problem is that the people I report to will tear me to shreds unless I can provide them with some concrete evidence.\" He stood and finished the last of his tea. \"I'd better be getting along. I'll come by tomorrow, if I may, to see how Gunn's doing.\"\n\n\"By all means, Inspector. I'm sure he'll be glad to see you.\"\n\nWebster had been about to leave his post outside Gunn's flat when a black police wagon appeared, driving slowly from the far end of the street. Curious, he watched and waited. The vehicle pulled up outside the flat, and a man climbed down from the passenger side of the cab.\n\nWebster recognised him, as many people would have; it was Inspector Jameson, the man who'd singlehandedly foiled a modern-day Gunpowder Plot by foreign anarchists. He'd been decorated by the Queen herself, no less.\n\nAs he watched, Jameson went to Gunn's door, leading a small procession of men, carrying a stretcher, into the building. After a minute the other men came out and waited in the wagon.\n\nHalf an hour later, Jameson reappeared and climbed back inside the wagon, which rolled slowly down the street and out of sight.\n\nSo, thought Webster. Jameson and Gunn are . . . what? Friends? Good acquaintances, at least. Why else would Jameson have brought him home in the dead of night?\n\nAs Webster pulled his collar a little higher against the cold and made his way in the direction of his home, he knew his employer would be most interested in that development.\n\nAgony woke Gunn early the next morning. His entire body ached abominably, and he hardly had the energy to move. His left arm was on fire, and when he lifted it, he cried out when he saw he had no left hand\u2014just a swathe of bandages where it should have been.\n\nSophie was asleep in one of the armchairs. She started awake at Gunn's yell, and came to him quickly. Her eyes were red. She'd been crying.\n\n\"What happened?\" his voice grated, but then memory began to return.\n\n\"Quiet, now, you're safe,\" Sophie said, her voice quavering. \"What do you remember, Connie?\"\n\nThe thumping headache made it hard to think, and he was beginning to get nauseated. He fought the feeling down and tried to concentrate.\n\nThe airship. He'd seen the machine coming toward him and run back the way he'd come. He'd become trapped. Then a deafening crash and blinding pain.\n\nHe remembered the shadowy figure of the man in the wide-brimmed hat standing over him, hearing Sophie's voice, and being shaken around in the back of a speeding police wagon; a vague memory of green and white painted walls and the smell of carbolic.\n\n\"There was . . . a metal man\u2014a big machine in the shape of a man. It knocked the wall down. I was too close. The wall fell on me. I think it either didn't know I was there, or it didn't care. I couldn't have stopped it. I think I just got in its way. Ye gods, this hurts.\" He shifted, uncomfortably, and another memory came to him\u2014and with it, a flash of anger. \"I told you to stay at home, and you didn't, and then I told you to stay on that building, and you didn't do that either. You could have been hurt. Must you ignore everything I ask you to do?\"\n\n\"I was there to make sure you were safe\u2014and it's a good thing I was.\"\n\nHe was too tired to stay angry, and despite what he said, he was glad that she'd been there\u2014and not just because she'd saved him from bleeding to death. He wanted to tell her that hearing her voice had meant not being alone in the cold and dark. But what little strength he'd had was gone. He slumped back onto the pillow, exhausted.\n\nSophie stood. \"I'll get you something to eat. Just rest.\"\n\n\"What happened to my hand?\" He already knew the answer.\n\n\"It was crushed too badly. The doctors tried, but they couldn't save it. I'm sorry, Connie.\" She hesitated, as if she was about to say something else, then left the room. He let himself fall back onto the pillow, and looked at his arm, depressed at the prospect of disability. He clenched his jaw, determined not to let the injury rule him. This isn't the Middle Ages. They can do wonders these days, he told himself. The thought lifted his spirits a little.\n\nSophie returned with a tray with tea and a plate of bacon, scrambled eggs and toast. He suddenly realised that he was ravenously hungry, and made short work of it, even with the lack of a hand. He took two of the pills the doctor had left for him, and then the pain subsided. He slept.\n\nSomeone shook his shoulder gently. He woke to see Sophie kneeling by the sofa. \"Wake up, dear. You have a visitor.\"\n\nSophie helped him sit up, arranging the pillows to support his back, then showed a large bearded man wearing pince-nez into the room.\n\n\"Good morning, Cornelius. Do you remember me?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, no. Should I?\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised. You were unconscious most of the time. I'm Doctor Christie. Let's take a look at that arm, shall we?\"\n\nGunn held his arm out and Doctor Christie removed the dressing. Gunn flinched as even the feather-light touch sent searing agony up his arm, as if a red-hot poker had brushed his skin.\n\nWhile inspecting the arm, Doctor Christie nodded with approval. \"The stitches are good and there's no sign of infection. It appears to be healing satisfactorily. I'm going to give your wife a salve that will numb the skin a little. It will help with the pain.\"\n\nHe took off the pince-nez and put them into his breast pocket. \"I specialise in prosthetics, Cornelius. I can give you a new hand, and from the look of this, I don't think I'll have any trouble. We'll have to wait for a few days to let the swelling and bruises go down, and then I can begin work. I'll come back and see you next Monday. Does that suit?\"\n\n\"Yes, Doctor. I'll be here.\"\n\nA short time later, Gunn heard a knock at the front door, and Sophie showed Jameson in.\n\n\"You're looking much better,\" he said, smiling. \"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"I feel like a ton of bricks fell on me and someone cut my hand off. Other than that, I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Connie . . .\" Sophie admonished.\n\n\"Sorry, Jameson. I ache all over and my arm feels like someone's hitting it with a hammer, but I don't feel too bad, considering.\"\n\nJameson nodded. \"Can you tell me what you remember?\"\n\nGunn frowned in thought. \"There was an airship; three envelopes, black as coal. It came from the south, flying very low. I remember thinking at the time that possibly the weather had something to do with the timing of the crimes. The one last week happened in heavy rain, this one in snow. I think it may have been a deliberate tactic, to help conceal the airship from observers on the ground.\"\n\n\"That would make a lot of sense. Go on.\"\n\n\"I belted down the ladder as quick as I could and followed the engine sounds, then this big machine came running toward me, so I ran for it. That's when I got into trouble, when I got trapped against a wall.\"\n\n\"In your opinion, was it an automatic machine?\"\n\nGunn paused to think. \"I'd say not. If you needed an automaton to smash through a wall, why not just build one using a bus or a tram as a starting point? To make one that looks and moves like a man seems to me an excessive amount of effort. No, I think the machine was nothing more than a powered suit of armour. Moving under the control of a man inside it, but endowing him with incredible strength.\" He looked over at Sophie.\n\n\"I agree,\" said Sophie. \"It could walk, it could run, and I assume that the box it was holding was what it was there for, so it was able to recognise it and pick it up. I think that's beyond a simple engine that would fit into a machine that size. There must have been someone inside, driving it.\"\n\nJameson reached into his pocket and pulled out a standard issue Metropolitan Police whistle. \"My men found this on the ground close to where you were injured. Somebody alerted the constables with this. Who?\"\n\nGunn looked at Sophie for an instant, then turned back to Jameson. \"Even if I'd had a police-issue whistle, which I know is quite illegal, I don't know when I would have had time to use it.\"\n\nIt was Jameson's turn to frown. \"That's what I was afraid you might say. If you didn't whistle for the police, and neither did Sophie, then who the hell did?\"\n\n\"The man in the leather coat!\" Sophie exclaimed. Gunn and Jameson looked at her. \"It's the only explanation,\" she said excitedly. \"There was nobody else there.\"\n\nJameson nodded thoughtfully. \"I agree. That makes it all the more important to find this man. I want to know who he is, and what his involvement is in all this.\" He stood to leave, then turned back to face Gunn. \"Remember when I asked you to leave this business to me? This is why. Next time I find you involved, friend or not, I'll have you arrested for your own good. Understand?\"\n\nGunn nodded, and Jameson left.\n\nThere was another knock at the front door. \"My goodness,\" said Sophie, and she put down the book she'd been reading while keeping Gunn company. \"We are popular today.\"\n\n\"I wish we weren't,\" said Gunn grumpily as Sophie left the room. \"I'm supposed to be resting.\"\n\nA moment later Sophie returned, wide-eyed, her face pink. Lord Salisbury followed her into the room. Gunn was stunned.\n\n\"Wonderful to see you both. My dear boy, how are you? I just heard about what happened to you at that workshop. Are you well?\"\n\nGunn didn't know what to say. Lying down on the sofa in pyjamas, he felt awkward and exposed. \"I'm quite well. Despite appearances. Very well,\" he blurted out, embarrassed. He tried to get up but almost fell, unbalanced.\n\n\"Don't get up, please. I just dropped by to give you our best wishes for a speedy recovery. You must come over for tea, both of you, as soon as you're well enough. Now, I'm sorry to leave so quickly, but I'm running late for an appointment.\" And with that, Sophie saw him to the door.\n\nShe still looked rather flustered when she returned. \"Well, that was a surprise.\"\n\n\"Indeed. And now we have another mystery.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"You, Jameson, and I are the only people who know all the details of what happened\u2014and where it happened. So how the devil did His Lordship find out?\"\n\nGunn decided that he'd prefer not to sleep in the parlour for a second night, and settled his aching body in bed.\n\nThe next morning, Doctor Christie visited again to check Gunn's progress and to change his bandages. \"You're healing very well,\" he said. \"As of tomorrow, I'll be delegating this task to a nurse. I'll see you as arranged, on Monday. I'll also give you my code, so you can send me a message if you have concerns in the meantime.\"\n\nAfter Christie had left, Gunn went to the parlour where Sophie was sitting, reading. \"I think I'd like to get out for a while.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? It's freezing cold outside. Do you think you're well enough yet?\"\n\n\"I don't really care. I'm bored, and I'm tired of being stuck indoors. I need some air, even if it's only for a short while. My arm still hurts like the devil, and I think getting out might help take my mind off it for a bit.\"\n\n\"Where would you like to go?\"\n\n\"The Regent's Park. I'd like to see the dynamics again.\"\n\nSophie smiled. \"I thought you'd say that. Let me send for a taxi, then I'll help you dress. And you'll need a sling for your arm.\"\n\nGunn wasn't surprised to see it had snowed overnight. The City's trams had been fitted with rotating sweepers so that they cleared the road as they went along, pushing the snow into even piles along the gutters, and their taxi was able to drive along cleared streets.\n\nThe sun was a watery disc above a thin layer of pale grey cloud, and the air was still. It was rather a pleasant day for the time of year. It was a Wednesday, and with most people being at their places of work, the park was relatively quiet. Gunn saw nannies watching their charges, and a few other people out for a stroll in the brisk air. He counted eight airships, all different sizes and colours, moving in different directions at varying distances and altitudes. One passing overhead cast a faint shadow that moved along the ground off to his right. He looked up, squinting against the wan sunlight, at the airship's silvery envelope.\n\nSophie linked her left arm with his right as they sauntered along, enjoying the scenery and the fresh air, making their way to the Broad Walk.\n\nThe dynamic sculptures were arrayed in two long lines, one on each side of the Walk. Gunn always found them fascinating and he could study them for hours. The third one on the right was a particular favourite of his\u2014it was modelled on a giraffe, made of polished aluminium and brass, with deep blue crystals for eyes, so that it looked like the work of a master jeweller. When it sensed Gunn and Sophie approaching, its neck lowered and its head turned toward them, tilting to one side like a curious dog. The little steam engine that powered its movements vented a white cloud from the machine's nostrils.\n\nGunn knew if he were to move suddenly toward the machine it would move its head up and back sharply, like a startled pup.\n\nHe stepped forward slowly and held out his good hand. Its head drew back a little, paused, and then moved forward so that its nose lay against his hand. Gunn felt the warmth that the steam had passed to the metal.\n\nThey continued wandering along the sculptures, admiring each in turn. There was a metal eagle, three feet tall and perched in a nest of bundled wire on top of a six-foot plinth that would turn its head as if to look at the surroundings, then bend down to peck at nothing, and straighten and stretch its wings at intervals.\n\nAnother display that had always caught Gunn's eye was a set of nested, open metalwork spheres, suspended mid-air by three hidden electromagnets. The spheres would spin and stop, and spin again in another direction, each one moving independently of the others. Gunn often wondered how it was powered, guessing that the spheres were driven by random fluctuations in the magnetic emanations.\n\nThey stopped halfway along the Walk at the cafeteria. \"I'd love something hot to drink,\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Capital idea, dear,\" Gunn agreed, and he led the way inside.\n\nThey found a table inside and ordered a pot of tea. Gunn looked around. He'd always liked the way the walls had been decorated with images of clockwork animals side-by-side with trees and grass; a vision of a future in which Man's modern technology blended perfectly with the natural world. He found the images inspiring.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\" asked Sophie.\n\n\"A little tired. I think perhaps we should go home soon. I wouldn't want to overdo it.\"\n\nSophie was quiet for a moment then said in a low voice, \"Don't look now, but I think we're being watched.\"\n\nGunn stiffened. \"By whom?\"\n\n\"A man who seemed to be looking at the dynamics, but he kept looking at us, too. I wasn't certain, but then I saw him over by the trees when we came in here, and I can still see him out there now.\"\n\nThere was a large mirror on the wall behind Sophie, and when Gunn shifted slightly to his right, he could see what Sophie was seeing. A tall man in a heavy winter coat and a fur hat stood next to one of the trees, thirty yards from the cafeteria. As Gunn looked, the man turned his head toward the cafeteria, and then away again. \"I can see him,\" growled Gunn. \"If he's still there when we're finished, we'll walk that way. If he really is following us, he'll find a reason to move.\"\n\n\"But what if he's dangerous, Connie?\"\n\n\"If he tries anything, I'll tackle him. You start yelling and run back in here.\"\n\nGunn continued to glance at the mirror at intervals while they sipped their tea. The man didn't move.\n\nThey finished their tea and prepared to move on. \"He's still there,\" said Gunn, glancing in the mirror as he made a pretence of adjusting his sling.\n\n\"I know. Are you ready?\"\n\nGunn was as tense as a coiled mainspring. He tried to relax. He hadn't seen the man until Sophie had pointed him out, and it was possible that she was simply wrong. On the other hand . . . he could be one of the criminals who had cost him his hand, there to finish the job by silencing the witnesses. Gunn steeled himself for a fight. \"Quite ready.\"\n\nThey went outside. Sophie linked arms with Gunn and they walked in the man's direction, not looking directly at him, as if they were simply taking a walk to the boating lake.\n\nThe man straightened his hat and pulled his collar up, as if against a breeze, then walked slowly away toward the lake. He gradually increased his pace, and Gunn and Sophie increased theirs to match.\n\n\"It's him!\" Sophie whispered excitedly. \"The man in the leather coat at the workshop!\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"I recognise the way he walks.\"\n\nGunn's legs were on fire; he wasn't yet up to that kind of exertion. \"I can't go any farther like this. I have to slow down.\"\n\n\"We'll lose him,\" said Sophie in a determined tone. She unlinked her arm from his. \"Stay here.\" She continued ahead at a brisk pace. The man was fifty yards away. Gunn wanted to stop her, but he knew she'd go anyway. \"Be careful, Sophie,\" he hissed. He continued, slowly, in the same direction.\n\nSophie walked as quickly as she could. She was less than twenty yards behind the man. He glanced over his shoulder, saw her and increased his stride. He'd almost reached the boat storage sheds at the edge of the lake.\n\nHe looked over his shoulder again as he reached the sheds, and Sophie got a clear look at his face. He was in his fifties, with a short black beard and moustache, both peppered with grey.\n\nHe turned and slipped between the closest two sheds. Sophie broke into a run, cursing herself for her choice in footwear, not caring should anyone see her behaving in such an unladylike way.\n\nShe reached the gap between the sheds where the man had gone, and followed his footsteps.\n\nHe was not in the space between the sheds. She dashed along, emerging from the far end at the water's edge and looked both ways. He had disappeared.\n\nThe man reached the lake and was lost to sight between the storage sheds, then Sophie disappeared from Gunn's line of sight as well. He walked a little faster, forcing himself to ignore the torture in the muscles of his legs.\n\nHe was trying hard not to panic, sure that something awful was about to happen, when Sophie reappeared from between the sheds and hurried back to him. \"He eluded me, somehow, but I got a good look at his face this time, and I'll know him if we see him again.\"\n\n\"Ye gods, don't scare me like that. I was sure he'd got you.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't worry so, dear. But look at you\u2014you're as white as a sheet. We should go home.\"\n\nThey called for a taxi, and as soon as they arrived home, Gunn went to bed, more exhausted than he could remember being in a very long time, and slept like a dead man.\n\nThe next morning, he awoke to find that the weather had turned horrible. Sleet and rain fell from dark, low clouds, blown by gusts of wind, washing away the snow of the previous day. His arm ached terribly, as if the damp and cold had seeped into the bones. He was quite content to stay at home in front of a warming fire while Sophie went shopping.\n\nHe tried to rest, but couldn't take his mind from the encounter with the mysterious man. If he was one of the criminals, then why had he stayed after the machine and the airship had gone? It made no sense. He thought of different scenarios to try to explain the man's presence at the crime scene and the park, but all it did was give him a headache.\n\nHe needed something to take his mind off the question, and the aches and pains. He went to the study, and took out his notes on Doctor Bohemia, settling in to write a little more of his piece about the man.\n\nTwo hours later, he heard the front door open, then a little while later Sophie came into the study with a tray. \"I thought you might like tea. What are you working on?\"\n\n\"The article about the mysterious Doctor Bohemia, but I'm having a devil of a time typing with only one hand.\"\n\n\"I could type while you dictate,\" she offered.\n\n\"I'm not an invalid,\" he said, a little irritated at the suggestion that he couldn't cope. \"I'll have to manage on my own when I get back to work. I might as well get used to it.\" Then he saw the pained expression on Sophie's face, and instantly regretted his response. He took her hand. \"I'm sorry. This damned aching is driving me mad. I don't mean to take it out on you.\"\n\nShe poured a cup of tea and came around to his side of the desk, kissing him on the forehead. \"Don't wear yourself out\u2014oh!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" said Gunn, slightly alarmed.\n\nShe picked up one of the handbills that Gunn had sitting alongside his notes and slid it in front of him.\n\nDOCTOR BOHEMIA PRESENTS Evenings Of Science and Wonder. Demonstrations of Engineering Miracles of our Modern Age. 8pm Every Thursday and Friday in June\u2014at Huffman's Electric Theatre, The Strand.\n\nThe text was framed with line drawings of some of the engineering miracles referred to\u2014an airship, a Babbage Engine, a typing machine. In the top right corner was a drawing of Doctor Bohemia himself, smiling out at the viewer and holding his arms wide as if to say, I give you these things.\n\nSophie pointed at the image of Doctor Bohemia's face. \"That's him! The man we saw yesterday in the park!\"\n\nGunn was stunned. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"I couldn't be more so. It's him, I'm certain of it!\"\n\nGunn flipped a lever on the side of the typing machine and started picking out letters, one-fingered.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Telling Jameson to get over here, quick-like. He needs to see this.\"\n\n\"This is the man we're looking for,\" said Gunn, handing Doctor Bohemia's handbill to Jameson.\n\nJameson put his teacup down and examined the paper, a doubtful frown on his face. \"What on earth makes you think that?\"\n\nSophie was breathless with excitement. \"He was following us yesterday, in The Regent's Park. As soon as I saw him, I just knew it was the same man I'd seen at the workshop. So I chased after him, and I was able to get a good look at his face. Then I saw this paper. I know this is just a silly line drawing, but I'm really very sure.\"\n\nThe look on Jameson's face told Gunn that his friend wasn't convinced. \"Well, it's a lead, I suppose. He shouldn't be too difficult to find.\"\n\n\"There, you're wrong,\" said Gunn. \"He disappeared in fifty-three; that paper's from the year before. I've been trying to find him for nigh on a year now.\"\n\n\"Why, for goodness' sake?\"\n\nGunn shrugged. \"Professional interest. He was very famous, then he vanished. I wanted to know what happened to him.\"\n\n\"How much do you know about him?\"\n\n\"His real name is Ballard. Doctor Magnus Ballard, to be precise.\" Gunn handed a list to Jameson. \"These are the addresses of all the people with the name Ballard that I could find in the Tribune's city directories. I didn't include the ones I've already checked.\"\n\nJameson glanced at the paper, and then put it in his pocket, along with the handbill. \"I'll have some of my men check these. Shouldn't take too long, I wouldn't think. We'll find him.\"\n\n\"Tell them to take care. I don't think he wants to be found, and he might become dangerous if he's cornered.\"\n\n\"If he's done nothing wrong, he has nothing to fear\u2014but I'll tell my men to go with caution all the same.\"\n\n\"There was one other thing,\" Sophie said. Gunn looked at her, curious. \"When you saw Mr. Maynard, did you happen to mention the place where Connie had his accident?\"\n\nJameson looked perplexed. \"Not at all. Why do you ask?\"\n\nGunn explained about Lord Salisbury's visit.\n\n\"That's very curious,\" said Jameson. \"My people wouldn't have told him.\" Then Jameson looked quickly from Sophie to Gunn and back. \"The police, I mean.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"We shall have to tread very carefully. Try to avoid Salisbury until we get to the bottom of this.\" Jameson stood and picked up his hat. \"I'll get back to the Yard, then. I'll send word as soon as we find Ballard. Thanks very much for the tea.\"\n\nSophie showed Jameson out, and came back holding a box about a foot on each side, wrapped in brown paper held with twine.\n\n\"This was on the step,\" she said, and sat on the sofa next to Gunn. He could see GUNN written on the wrapping. So it had been delivered by hand, and there was nothing to indicate where it had come from. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.\n\n\"Open it, then,\" said Gunn. \"Carefully.\"\n\nSophie untied the string and gently tore the paper, exposing a cardboard box. She lifted the lid a little and peeked inside.\n\n\"I don't see anything,\" she said then put the lid to one side. Inside was an object wrapped in thin paper, which Sophie lifted out. She pulled the paper away to reveal Gunn's lost pair of air service goggles.\n\n\"What the\u2014\" said Gunn.\n\n\"Doctor Bohemia\u2014or Ballard; it has to be.\"\n\n\"He's telling us that he knows who we are and where we live. From this moment on, I want every door kept locked and every window shut tight and latched.\"\n\nSophie looked inside the box. \"There's something else,\" she said, and pulled out a card. She glanced at it, frowned, and passed it to Gunn.\n\nThe cafeteria. 5 p.m.\n\nGunn argued with Sophie all the way to The Regent's Park.\n\n\"If he sees us together, he'll run.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Sophie. \"He saw us together yesterday, and he won't be surprised to see us together today.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not take the risk.\"\n\n\"If he'd wanted you alone, he'd have said so on the note.\"\n\n\"I could just as easily say that if he expected both of us, he'd have said that on the note.\" Gunn decided to put his foot down. \"No. I'll be inside the cafeteria and he won't be able to do a thing with people around. It'll be perfectly safe. You wait nearby, and I'll come straight out with it and tell him you're there. If he wants you there, I'll give you a signal. I'll have no more argument over this.\"\n\nSophie went silent, then let out a long breath. \"What will the signal be?\"\n\nGunn thought for a moment. \"I'll hold up both hands,\" he said.\n\nSophie nodded, then her eyes flashed as the penny dropped. \"Oh, you\u2014\" she said, and punched him on the shoulder.\n\nGunn laughed.\n\nThrough the window, Gunn saw Doctor Bohemia sitting at a table, alone. He entered the cafeteria and sat opposite him. Neither said anything. Gunn felt Bohemia's scrutiny, as if to get the measure of him before explaining why he'd summoned him.\n\nGunn took the initiative. \"My wife's outside. She'll call the police if there's any trouble.\"\n\n\"There won't be any trouble,\" said Bohemia. \"It's awfully cold outside. Please ask your wife to join us, if she will.\"\n\nGunn took his handkerchief from his inside pocket; that was the signal. Sophie came in a few seconds later. As soon as she was settled, Bohemia leaned forward, placing his elbows on the tablecloth. \"Why have you been looking for me?\"\n\n\"I'm a reporter. I think you know that.\" Bohemia nodded. \"You disappeared, and I was curious. I thought there might be an interesting story to tell. That's my job. Why did you disappear?\"\n\n\"That's a long and complicated story, and definitely a tale for another time. Why did you follow me to Culbertson's workshop?\"\n\n\"We didn't. I guessed that the workshop might be a target for the criminals responsible for a string of similar robberies. We saw you there, but we didn't know who you were until today . . . Doctor Ballard.\"\n\nBohemia chuckled. \"Ballard was my manager, oh, years ago, when I was on the stage. He's long gone, running a music hall in Birmingham the last time I heard from him. Whatever made you think I was him?\"\n\n\"That's the name that the theatre bookings were made under. I assumed\u2014\"\n\n\"You assumed incorrectly. Bohemia is my real name. It's not the name I was born with\u2013I changed it legally a long time ago. The delusions of youth, eh? I thought being a stage entertainer would make me rich and famous.\"\n\nGunn was becoming irritated by Bohemia's flippancy. \"Let's stick to the point, shall we? I almost died a few nights ago, and you were there. What's your involvement in the crimes at the workshops and banks?\"\n\nBohemia's slight smile vanished, and his tone turned serious. \"Are you suggesting that I'm responsible?\"\n\n\"Aren't you? What were you doing there?\"\n\n\"I was watching and waiting, as you were, and for the same reason\u2014I guessed the workshop might be a target.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to stop those crimes?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Yes, although I have no idea at present of just how the criminal behind them might be stopped.\" He leaned forward again. \"My question for you is: whose side are you on?\"\n\n\"What sides are there, Doctor?\"\n\n\"I'm a patriot, Mr. Gunn. I stand for Queen and Country. My enemy claims to be the same, but we're at opposite ends of a very long line. He would serve his country by plunging it into war. That is not his goal, but it is what will result.\"\n\n\"How, exactly?\"\n\n\"He intends to make Britain the strongest empire in the world by damaging the European countries' ability to compete with British technology. It's even possible that his plans will succeed in achieving that objective, but it will put us at war with all of Europe. The cost will be appalling.\"\n\n\"You're implying that one man is behind all of the crimes.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How is stealing from banks and workshops going to achieve his goal?\"\n\nBohemia looked doubtful for a moment before saying, \"I believe that I've given you enough for the time being. I'll tell you more when I feel that I can trust you. I'll ask you again, Gunn: whose side are you on? Would you sacrifice millions of lives to see a British Empire stretching from here to the Black Sea? You must think about this question. Please give me your arm.\"\n\nGunn paused, perplexed by the sudden change of subject, then offered Bohemia his wounded left arm.\n\nBohemia lifted the edges of the bandages carefully, examining what he could without stripping them off there in the cafeteria. \"You'll be getting a prosthetic, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Gunn, gritting his teeth at the examination, \"a Doctor Christie is seeing me in a few days.\"\n\nBohemia's fingers clenched involuntarily in evident surprise and almost immediately relaxed, but for that instant it was as if Gunn's arm had been gripped with red-hot pliers. He gasped. Bohemia didn't seem to notice. \"Christie's a nincompoop. Don't let him near you. He'll carve up the remaining nerves and weld something useless onto your arm.\"\n\n\"You know Doctor Christie?\" said Sophie, her eyebrows raised in surprise.\n\n\"He was a mature student in my department, a long time ago.\" He looked at Sophie and raised an eyebrow. \"Ah, I see. You thought I was Ballard, so you don't know my true history. My doctorate is in Surgical Engineering, from the University of Southampton. I was Head of Department there for a while, and Christie was a student at that time. He was an awful student then, and he's an awful doctor now.\"\n\n\"Then what\u2014\"\n\n\"If I decide we can help each other, Gunn, and if we can develop a mutual trust, then I will give you your hand. Christie would give you something that looks pretty. I can give you something that you will be able to use. The choice is yours.\" With that, Bohemia pushed back his chair, preparing to leave.\n\n\"Doctor,\" said Sophie, \"I have one more question for you. Did you use Connie's police whistle?\"\n\nBohemia looked into her eyes. \"Yes,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you. Even with the bleeding stopped, he might have frozen to death before I could find help. You probably saved his life.\"\n\nBohemia stood. \"It was the only thing I could do.\" He paused. \"Remember my question. Think about it. I'll be in touch quite soon.\"\n\nWhen the tall man left the cafeteria, Webster followed, but the man looked over his shoulder every few paces and seemed to make a deliberate point of following the path away from the cover of the trees, staying close to the gaslights lining the park roads. Webster couldn't get closer than a hundred yards without taking the risk of being seen. As the man passed beneath one of the lights, Webster recognised him\u2014it was the same man he'd seen leaving Culbertson's.\n\nIntriguing, he thought.\n\nThe man walked all the way to the gates. By the time Webster reached the same point, he had disappeared.\n\nWhen he got back to the cafeteria, he wasn't surprised to see that there was no sign of Mr. and Mrs. Gunn, either.\n\nGunn sat in front of the typing machine, staring at it.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Sophie asked as she placed a cup of tea on the desk.\n\n\"I have to tell Jameson to stop looking for Ballard, since it's no longer necessary. He wouldn't thank me for sending him on a wild goose chase. The question is, what should I tell him? He'll want to know why, and then we'd have to tell him that we found Doctor Bohemia. Or rather, that he found us.\"\n\n\"Why shouldn't we tell Jameson?\"\n\n\"Because the first thing he'll want to do is take Bohemia into custody and question him about the robberies. We can't let that happen. It would destroy any chance of building up Bohemia's trust, and then we'd never find out what he knows about this mysterious enemy.\"\n\nSophie thought for a moment. \"In that case, just tell Jameson he can stop looking for Ballard, and that you'll explain tomorrow over dinner. Invite him over for seven o'clock, and I'll cook something nice. Then we can have good long talk about Doctor Bohemia, and make sure Jameson doesn't do anything rash.\"\n\n\"And if Bohemia finds out that we've told the police? What then?\"\n\n\"Then you tell Bohemia, before he finds out some other way. Say Jameson's a friend and can be trusted. But first, be sure he knows we're on his side, since you and I both know that we are.\"\n\nAfter dinner the following evening, the three settled in the parlour with brandy coffees. Gunn offered Jameson one of the cigars he kept for such occasions\u2014which were infrequent, as Sophie and Gunn rarely had dinner guests\u2014and Sophie sat on the arm of Gunn's chair while Jameson took the other seat.\n\n\"Isn't it about time you got around to the reason you asked me here tonight?\" said Jameson.\n\n\"Yes, it is.\" Gunn made himself comfortable and began. \"We found out two very important things that you need to know. First, it turns out that Doctor Bohemia and Doctor Ballard are not, as we thought, the same person.\"\n\n\"So the man you saw at the workshop, and again in the park, is Doctor Bohemia, and Ballard is someone else entirely?\"\n\n\"Precisely. Ballard has nothing to do with this, and you'd be wasting your time trying to find him.\"\n\n\"Very well. You said two things?\"\n\n\"Yes. Bohemia's involvement with the robberies is the same as my own. We're both trying to find the person responsible.\"\n\n\"How could you possibly know that, Gunn?\" Jameson's eyes narrowed, and then lit up with realisation. \"You've spoken to him, haven't you?\"\n\nGunn nodded. \"He approached us yesterday. We believe him.\"\n\n\"Where can I find him? I'd like to verify that for myself. Ask him a few questions. You know\u2014let me do my job, instead of get yourself into trouble?\"\n\n\"He won't talk to you. In any case, I have no idea where he is. We're waiting for him to contact us.\" He leaned forward in his chair for emphasis. \"You must understand, Bohemia seems to have been following the person behind the crimes for some time. The criminal responsible appears to have access to an incredible array of resources. He has an airship, possibly military, at his disposal, and the machine we saw.\n\n\"Logically, he must have a number of men working for him\u2014enough men to crew an airship, for a start, as well as a ground crew to maintain it. Bohemia's one man up against all that, and I think perhaps it's made him somewhat paranoid.\"\n\n\"In that case, surely he'd be glad of some help from the police?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure he would, but first, we all have to earn his trust. Until then, one wrong move and he might assume that you're working for the wrong people.\"\n\nJameson took a puff of his cigar, then he shook his head, frowning. \"You win. I'll play this your way, and you'd better hope you're not mistaken. What would you like me to do?\"\n\n\"Nothing, for the time being. As I said, he should be contacting us soon. I think Sophie and I will have to tread carefully until we've gained a degree of his confidence. When we're over that hurdle, I'll tell him that you're with us. Then, we can arrange a meeting.\"\n\n\"How long might that be? Remember, I have superiors I have to report to and I can't tell them any of this. They expect to see me making progress.\"\n\n\"Then give them progress. Tell them you're still looking for Ballard, or something.\"\n\nJameson tapped the ash from his cigar into the ashtray. \"Actually, we are. Telling the Chief Inspector that I have my men working on a lead from an anonymous source isn't a problem\u2014it happens all the time\u2014but if I'd called them off there would have been awkward questions. Why I was dropping the only line of inquiry on the say-so of a journalist, for one. So I've left them to it, and I'll continue to do so even though you've told me it's a waste of time. Just don't take too long, and let me know the minute you have something for me.\"\n\nThe next morning, Doctor Christie's nurse, a short, plump middle-aged lady, examined the stump of Gunn's arm. It was far less painful than it had been. \"The swelling is down,\" she said, \"and the bruises have faded. Doctor Christie will be pleased to see that you're healing nicely.\"\n\nGunn didn't answer. After what Bohemia had said, he was determined not to allow Christie to operate on him, but he had no idea how to explain himself. After the nurse left, he voiced his concerns to Sophie.\n\n\"Jameson got Christie involved,\" she said. \"So why don't you ask him to have a word with Christie?\"\n\n\"What should I say? I can hardly tell Jameson that a man he's been chasing as part of an investigation has offered to give me a new hand.\"\n\n\"Just tell him that you've been given a recommendation. You don't have to tell him it's Bohemia. If he presses you, tell him that you're not happy with Christie's reputation.\" She sat down in her armchair. \"You've decided to let Bohemia do it, haven't you?\"\n\nGunn nodded. \"I did a little research over the wires last night, while you were asleep. Bohemia really was Head of Department at Southampton\u2014but not with that name, of course\u2014and he had an excellent reputation as a surgeon. I recognized his picture. I feel that I can trust him, despite his paranoia and brusque manner.\"\n\nSophie nodded. \"I'd like to call the university, as well, but I think it's the right decision. He has a charisma about him. I suppose that's part of why he was such a success as an entertainer.\" She stood and smoothed her dress. \"Now, I have to go out. I promised I'd meet Mrs. Stack for morning coffee. What are you planning to do with yourself today?\"\n\n\"I'll stay here, I suppose. I don't want to miss Bohemia.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. You need some exercise and fresh air. Bohemia said he'd be in touch, and we have no idea how he'll do that or when. And in any case, I'm sure he won't give up just because you weren't at home.\"\n\nGunn sighed. \"You're right, as usual.\" Then he smiled as an idea came to mind. \"I know. I think I'll take a tram over to Bloomsbury and wander the bookshops. I haven't done that in a long while.\"\n\nCyrus West's bookshop is a gem, thought Gunn. It was situated just off Malet Street, and most people unfamiliar with the place would take a glance at the little shop with its tiny bow-fronted window, and pass by. Only inside would one discover that the shop occupied almost the entirety of the four storeys behind and above that inconspicuous door, and was a bibliophile's dream\u2014aisles barely wide enough to move along, shelves running from the floor to the ceiling, filled with old and rare books. Gunn had often spent hours in the shop exploring.\n\nGunn wandered around for something more than an hour, flipping through the pages of old volumes on science, history, geography and a dozen other subjects, then decided to go to the rearmost room on the first floor, where Mrs. West ran a tearoom. He ordered a cup of coffee and a slice of walnut cake, and went to the convenience. When he came out, he saw his coffee and cake waiting for him\u2014and Doctor Bohemia.\n\nThere was nobody else in the room.\n\nBohemia nodded at him as he sat down. \"Well, Mr. Gunn. Do you have an answer to my question?\"\n\nGunn wasn't yet ready to play the man's game. \"You've been following me.\"\n\n\"Of course. Did you expect me to risk my well-being and freedom on the basis of a single meeting?\"\n\nGunn was about to say that he'd as good as decided to put his own health into Bohemia's hands, especially after the research he'd done and hearing Sophie's opinions, but he decided that he needed something more.\n\n\"Have you been watching my wife, too?\"\n\n\"Indeed, I have. I had to assure myself that you didn't go telling our business to others\u2014especially my enemy. Were you in my shoes, I believe you'd do the same.\"\n\nGunn could hardly blame the man for wanting to protect himself. He decided to let it pass.\n\n\"All right. But before I answer your question, Doctor, I'd like more information from you.\" Bohemia nodded again. \"You say the enemy would sacrifice lives to achieve his goal, yet at this moment I'm not clear on your goal, or how far you'd go to achieve it. Until I know, I'm not about to align myself with you.\"\n\n\"Admirable. And do you speak for your wife?\"\n\n\"We are of a mind in this.\"\n\n\"Very well. In that case, know that my intention at this time is simply to stop this despicable enemy before he takes action that might very well plunge this country into a terrible war. Nothing more. As for how far I would go, I would do my utmost to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Does that satisfy you?\"\n\nGunn felt a sense of relief, as if a threshold had been crossed. He realised that he wanted to trust Bohemia. \"Yes. We're with you, Doctor\u2014but don't disappoint us by showing that our faith is misplaced.\"\n\n\"I give you my word. I must say that it will be good to have allies after working alone for so long.\"\n\nGunn sipped his coffee and munched on a bite of coffee cake. \"So, tell me about our enemy, Doctor. Who is he?\"\n\n\"That will take a little time, and this is not the place. Besides, I'm sure your wife will want to be present. I've taken the liberty of arranging a better venue. A taxi will collect you from your home tomorrow morning at two. I suggest dressing warmly.\"\n\n\"Why such an ungodly hour?\"\n\n\"Did you know that someone else, besides myself, has been following you?\"\n\nGunn felt the hairs on his neck prickle. \"No.\"\n\n\"A portly man of about forty, middling height, with dark hair and muttonchops. He was watching your home, and he followed you here. He's been waiting outside in the street since you came in here, presumably on the watch for you to leave.\"\n\n\"I take it you know that because you were watching our flat, too.\"\n\nBohemia nodded. \"Indeed. I was waiting for an opportunity to speak with you. When you left your door I saw him move, and I realised what he was doing. He followed you, and I followed him.\"\n\n\"Could he be the enemy?\"\n\n\"I have no idea, but I have to say that the man has something about him that makes me think of the police.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"I have friends in the police, including one in particular who's quite highly placed. In fact, I believe the man could be a great asset to us. You should consider allowing me to introduce you. But I digress. If there were reason for the police to be watching me, I'm certain my friend would know about it and would have told me.\"\n\n\"Then I'll do what I can to find out who he is. In the meantime, do nothing to alert him that you're aware of him. At the moment, he seems to be simply watching, and I assume he's reporting your movements to someone else. I don't think he represents a threat, at least for now. As for tonight, it'll be difficult for anyone to follow you. You'll understand.\" Bohemia smiled, then stood and left the tearoom.\n\nGunn decided to continue his day the way he'd planned. He spent another hour browsing West's before moving on to another bookshop, and then a third. By the middle of the afternoon he was feeling quite worn out, and took a tram home from Tottenham Court Road.\n\nHe noticed the man Bohemia had described, standing on the tram's rear platform. Do nothing to alert him that you're aware of him, Bohemia had said; Gunn tried to put the man from his mind. He arrived home, stretched out on the sofa, and promptly fell into a deep sleep.\n\nGunn ran his fingers through his hair and yawned as he told Sophie about his day. \"I think we should get some sleep and be ready to leave when the taxi arrives. In my case, more sleep.\"\n\nHe set the typing machine to trigger the alarm clock in the bedroom, and they retired early.\n\nThe alarm went off at half past midnight. Gunn decided to take their goggles in Sophie's bag, just in case. \"I doubt we'll need them, but you never know.\"\n\nAt two o'clock precisely, the expected taxi pulled up quietly to the curb outside, and Gunn and Sophie slipped out of the front door. The driver was an older gentleman, stooped over and wearing the common driver's cap and goggles, and with a woollen scarf across his nose and mouth against the damp, chilly air.\n\nAs they trundled along the street, Gunn slid the dividing glass to one side a few inches. \"Can you tell us where we're going?\" The driver shook his head. Gunn slid the divider closed and settled back in his seat. Sophie shrugged her shoulders at him, and they sat in silence. Gunn watched through the windows, trying to guess their destination.\n\n\"Why did it have to be so late?\" said Sophie, yawning.\n\n\"I'll let Bohemia explain that himself when we see him,\" said Gunn. He didn't want to worry Sophie about being watched.\n\nThe taxi drove on, apparently not in any hurry, turning this way and that along streets both major and minor, but to Gunn it seemed that they were tending in an easterly direction. After about half an hour, he said to Sophie, \"I think we're heading toward the docks.\"\n\n\"The docks. At three in the morning.\"\n\nGunn shuddered. He knew from stories\u2014ones he'd written himself\u2014that after dark, that was a place where your life was worth less than what was in your wallet. He brushed away a trickle of sweat on his brow, and worried that he'd got them both into terrible danger.\n\nHe felt around in his pockets to try to find anything that he might use to defend them, but he knew it was pointless. He might give an attacker a nasty scratch with his house keys; that was all he had.\n\nThe taxi drove on, along a wide street that ran straight as an arrow between warehouses near the river. Abruptly, the driver turned the vehicle and stopped in front of one of the warehouses. He stepped out, slid the warehouse door open, then drove the taxi inside and stopped the engine. The warehouse was as black as pitch. Gunn couldn't see his hand in front of his face.\n\nThe driver had walked away from the taxi. Gunn knew that the goggles the man wore enabled him to see them, while they couldn't see him. He remembered his own in Sophie's satchel, but had no time to retrieve them. He took his keys from his pocket, and was about to open the door when the driver returned, holding a paraffin lantern, and opened the door for them.\n\nGunn positioned himself between the driver and Sophie and kept his eyes on the man, keys firmly in hand, ready to aim for the eyes at the first sign of an attackbut the driver turned his back to them and walked off. Gunn held back, not wanting to get too close, then he and Sophie followed him across the concrete floor, footsteps ringing hollowly in the huge, empty building. The driver led them to an office built against the back wall.\n\nInside, the man lit the gaslights on the wall and extinguished the paraffin lamp. Then he took off his hat and goggles, and unwound the scarf from across his nose and mouth. Gunn started, then realised he should not have been surprised to see their driver was none other than Doctor Bohemia.\n\n\"Doctor Bohemia,\" said Gunn, surprised.\n\n\"At your service, Mr. and Mrs. Gunn. But since we're to be allies, please, call me Harry.\"\n\n\"Why here?\" said Sophie, curious, and a little bit annoyed, \"and why so late?\"\n\n\"I apologise for the late hour, but it made it much easier to ensure that we weren't followed. In this part of the city at this time of night, any other vehicles behind us would have been quite obvious. I'm quite certain the man I told you about was not watching your home.\"\n\n\"What man?\" asked Sophie, alarmed.\n\nGunn clenched his fist, annoyed at Bohemia\u2014Harry\u2014for mentioning it. \"There was a man following me this morning,\" he said reluctantly.\n\n\"What did he look like?\"\n\n\"Average height, a little overweight, dark hair and muttonchops.\"\n\nSophie's eyes went wide. \"That's the same man who was watching you on the roof!\"\n\nGunn and Harry gaped at each other. Gunn looked back at Sophie. \"When?\"\n\n\"The first night you were watching Culbertson's. I saw him watching you, then he left. With all that's gone on, it slipped my mind.\"\n\nHarry rubbed his chin. \"Now that you mention it, I think I saw him, too, in the very same street that same night\u2014the night before the attack. I hadn't known at that time that you were up on the roof, and I assumed that he was just one of the factory owners, working late.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"I plan to find out. First, Gunn, I'd like to know whether you made a decision regarding your hand. That is, are you confident that Christie will give you what you need, or do you trust in my abilities? Or, of course, you may have a third preference.\"\n\n\"I think I'd like to discuss the matter a bit more, Doctor, before I make a decision.\"\n\nHarry stepped toward a second door. \"Absolutely. If you'll step through here, we can begin.\"\n\n\"Begin? Begin what?\"\n\nWithout answering, Harry held the door while Gunn and Sophie went through. The room had no windows, and when Harry closed the door, they were momentarily in complete darkness. Then Gunn heard a click, and the room blazed with brilliant white light from a dozen electric filament bulbs suspended from the ceiling. He heard Sophie's sharp intake of breath as he beheld the impressive sight. Electrical lighting! he thought. Harry certainly likes to bedazzle people.\n\n\"Welcome to my workshop. One of them, at least. Gunn, if you'd lie on the bed over here and put your arm through the screen, I can get started.\"\n\nGunn followed Harry to the narrow bed, and lay down, resting his head on the pillow. To his left was a cloth screen two feet high, suspended from a metal rail, with a vertical slit through it. He rolled up his shirtsleeve, and put his arm through the slit, resting it on a low table on the other side. Harry sat on a low stool behind the screen.\n\nGunn felt searing pain, like a blowtorch on his skin, as the bandages were peeled away\u2014but resisted the instinct to pull his arm back.\n\n\"What are you doing, Harry?\" said Sophie. Gunn looked over and saw her eyes narrow with concern. He began to wonder if this had been a mistake after all.\n\n\"I need to see how the injury is healing. You're quite welcome to come around to this side and watch.\"\n\nHarry continued to work as he spoke. \"I've been a thorn in the enemy's side for some time, and I had to be sure that you aren't working for him, attempting to gain my faith while informing him of my plans. Such things have happened before. I must be truthful\u2014I've researched your histories, to make sure that I could trust you. Consequently, I already knew you, Sophie, had served in the military, with distinction, as a surgical assistant.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" said Gunn, peeved, \"what else do you know?\"\n\n\"I know that your parents live on a farm near Glastonbury, and that you moved to Bristol when you were eighteen, and worked there as a junior reporter. You've worked for several newspapers since then, working your way up to where you are today, a respected journalist at one of the most well-known London papers.\n\n\"I know Sophie's father is General Augustus Fletcher, retired now, and I assume his long and distinguished career was one factor in Sophie's decision to train as a medical officer.\"\n\nSophie nodded at that.\n\n\"Gunn, please be assured that everything I found out is public knowledge, if one knows where to look. I didn't ask questions at your newspaper, I haven't searched out friends and relatives. Regardless, everything I found out I will keep to myself. But I am not apologising for this. You must understand that it was something I had to do for my own security.\"\n\nSophie cleared her throat. \"Then I have something to tell you as well, Doctor. I spoke to a lady at the university, and she remembers you very well\u2014by the name Bohemia, and your birth name, Daneman. She told me you're the best prosthetic surgeon they've ever produced, and certainly one of the best five in the Empire.\"\n\n\"I'm flattered,\" said Harry, his eyebrows raised. \"The last I heard, they were saying I was in the best dozen.\"\n\n\"I also asked her about Doctor Christie\u2014and she confirmed your opinion. She told me she wouldn't trust him to treat her bunions.\"\n\nHarry rested back on his stool. \"I'm rather glad that you spoke to them. We know where we stand. So, to business\u2014I've examined your husband's injury, and it's healing nicely. I said I would give you a new hand, Gunn. Now is the time, if you're willing.\"\n\nGunn's eyes went wide. \"You mean surgery? Here? Now?\"\n\n\"All of my surgical equipment is modern, and in the best and most hygienic condition. I have the most advanced surgical chemicals\u2014you'll barely feel a thing, and the risk of infection is almost nil. The fact is, you're certainly better off if I do it here, than if we used the facilities at a hospital.\"\n\nGunn felt a bead of sweat trickle down beside his eye. \"Why now? What's the hurry?\"\n\n\"First, your arm is at the perfect stage of healing. Another day or two, and I'll be compelled to undo more of that healing than I'd like. Second\u2014if you're to help me against our enemy, you'll need to be fully functional, as soon as possible.\"\n\nGunn looked nervously at Sophie. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"He's not lying about the equipment, or the chemicals. And his reputation is stellar, Connie\u2014he's done this hundreds of times. But it has to be your decision.\"\n\nGunn's mind whirled. He wanted the hand, but he didn't know if he should trust Harry. But then he thought of Christie\u2014and he most definitely didn't want that man anywhere near him.\n\nHe trusted Sophie\u2014and she'd said Harry was one of the best. \"Do it, then\u2014before I change my mind.\"\n\nHarry nodded, and set to work. He turned slightly, and Gunn heard a metallic clank from the other side of the screen. Sophie gasped slightly. \"I'm going to restrain your arm, and you'll feel a pinprick. Don't be alarmed.\"\n\nGunn felt his arm being squeezed in a padded clamp. Then it was securely fastened; he couldn't have moved it if he'd tried. The prick of a needle made him flinch, but the sensation was gone before he truly felt it, and numbness began to work its way toward his elbow.\n\nThe numbness became a warmth that travelled up past his elbow to the shoulder. It spread across his shoulders and down his spine. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation\u2014in fact, it was quite comfortable. Wonderfully comfortable. Gunn began to feel as though he could quite easily fall . ..\n\nGunn's arm felt heavy.\n\nHe opened his eyes, and he knew immediately that he was not in his bedroom. Light shone from somewhere behind him, and he saw reflections from some hollow glass globes hanging from the ceiling above him. He had trouble keeping his eyes on them\u2014they kept sliding to one side. He knew that feeling; he'd been drugged.\n\nIt took him a moment to recognise what the globes were, but then it came to him\u2014they were unlit electric filament lamps.\n\nGunn suddenly remembered where he was and how he'd come to be there. He sat up quickly, and instantly regretted the sudden movement as a wave of nausea made the room spin. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The nausea subsided, and he opened his eyes. Harry and Sophie were sitting on stools at a bench on the other side of the room. Sophie got up and hurried over to his side.\n\nHis arm still felt heavy, as if it had been tied down. He looked at it\u2014he had a mechanical hand attached just above his wrist.\n\nHe stared at it, stupefied by the anaesthetic. Then the cogs meshed, and he understood. His hand. As his wits returned, he felt wonder, and elation. He saw a hint of purple bruising, and a fleck or two of dried blood where flesh met metal. He was surprised at how clean a job Harry had done.\n\nHe looked at it more closely. It was impressive. Polished brass and steel joints on the fingers and wrists gleamed in the light, and through the gaps in the joints he saw tubes and wires of bright gold and glossy deep blue. He could feel the weight of it, but there was little other sensation. \"I don't feel anything.\"\n\n\"Give it time. Let's go and make ourselves comfortable in the office. I keep a rather good brandy, and I'm sure you could use a belt of something about now, am I right? Usually, alcohol isn't advised after surgery, but a small glass won't do any harm.\"\n\nGunn nodded; the dizziness had passed quickly\u2014the modern chemicals were a wonder\u2014and a brandy to calm his nerves would be welcome. Harry and Sophie helped him stand, and supported him as they went back to the office. He settled, heavily, into a leather-padded chair.\n\nHarry took the bottle of brandy and three balloons from a cabinet and poured the drinks, then slid open a desk drawer and took out a small brown paper bag. He passed it to Gunn, who opened it to see a dozen white pills. \"The analgesic I injected you with will wear off in a little while, and when it does, you're going to be in quite a lot of pain for the next few days as the bones weld themselves to the metal.\n\n\"Take two of those pills every four hours. They'll help. Once the pain subsides, you'll feel a tingling sensation as the nerves bind to the wires that control the hand. Most people report itching sensations, and there's nothing you can scratch that will help. You'll just have to grin and bear it, I'm afraid, but it will only persist for a few hours. There's a plant extract painted on the nerve connections to accelerate the binding process, and that's what you'll be feeling while it does its work.\n\n\"By the day after tomorrow, you should be able to flex the joints a little, which you should do to get the nerves accustomed to it. You'll begin to feel things when you touch them with the fingertips. Be careful for a few days when gripping things, because it takes a while to get used to the pressure you can exert without really trying. I had one lady who broke her husband's arm in two places before she got the hang of it.\"\n\n\"I'll be able to use a typing machine?\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"You will and you should\u2014it's excellent for fine motor coordination. A week from now, you'll be able to go back to work.\"\n\n\"Will I be able to play the piano?\"\n\n\"If you think you can catch me out with that old chestnut . . .\" Harry said, grinning.\n\nGunn looked at the hand again, his mind whirling. He had a hand again. He would be able to touch, to feel. \"I don't know how to thank you.\"\n\n\"You can thank me by helping me stop Pendragon.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. I believe the time has come for me to answer your questions.\" Harry paused, evidently gathering his thoughts, then began.\n\n\"In the middle of 1852, I was approached by a man who called himself Pendragon. He knew my reputation as an engineer and inventor, and wanted to know if I would be interested in collaborating with him on a number of design projects. He proceeded to impress me with his ideas for a number of machines based on some rather advanced science, some of which I was familiar with, and some of which I was not, but it became clear very quickly that the man was nothing short of a genius.\n\n\"At first, I was very excited by the prospect of working with him, then shocked to realise that all of his machines were thinly-disguised weapons of terrible power. I wanted nothing to do with that detestable work. I told the fellow to take his plans and leave.\n\n\"That was the last I heard of him for several months. Then I began to hear rumours and hearsay from other scientists and researchers, and it seemed that he had succeeded in recruiting a number of others of my profession, presumably less scrupulous, or, to give them the benefit of the doubt, more gullible. I also began to hear whispers of dangerous and irresponsible experiments being performed. Do you remember the terrible accident in Wimbledon, April of fifty-three?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Gunn. \"Three houses collapsed into a hole that opened in the ground under them. Twelve people died, twenty more were seriously injured. They said the foundations had been laid above an underground stream.\"\n\n\"That was the story that the police and others made public to cover the fact that they didn't know the real cause. The truth was that it was the result of a test of one of Pendragon's weapons, a design I remembered from the plans he'd shown me. I knew I had to do something. I decided to stop Pendragon. That's why I disappeared.\"\n\n\"You did a good job. I've been on your trail for months without any success. Where the devil have you been hiding?\"\n\nHarry waved a hand vaguely. \"Here, and several other places like this that I have around the city. I rarely sleep in the same place for more than three or four nights before moving on.\"\n\nSophie looked at Harry, frowning. \"You've been on the move for all this time, to stay away from just one man?\"\n\n\"One very influential man, with a good number of people in his pay. I've had some success in providing obstacles to him at times, and I've drawn his attention more than once. At first, I suspect he didn't think I could oppose him, but after I'd got in his way a few times, he sent people after me. I've had a number of close shaves. Perhaps I'm being overcautious, but if you were in my position, you'd understand.\"\n\n\"Since we are allies, now,\" said Gunn, \"I suspect that such understanding will come to us quite soon.\"\n\n\"Quite. Now, to change the subject. What did you think about the machine he used to break into Culbertson's?\"\n\nGunn looked to Sophie, then back to Harry. \"We think it's like a suit of armour. There's a man inside.\"\n\n\"That's what I think, too. Pendragon must have two such machines, because he was able to attack two places at once.\"\n\n\"Ye gods, of course he does,\" Gunn exclaimed. \"And he may have more than two.\"\n\n\"True, but if he had more, why attack at most two places at one time? If he had, say, six, he could carry out six attacks at once and move his plans along that much faster. He hasn't done that, which leads me to conclude that he only has two.\"\n\nSophie said, \"So his black airship carries the machines, and lands to drop them off and pick them up when the job's done.\"\n\n\"I don't see how it could be any other way,\" said Gunn.\n\nHarry nodded, and continued. \"I've witnessed two such attacks\u2014the one at Culbertson's workshop, and another at a bank on Lombard Street a few days before\u2014and I have a rough idea of how the machines operate. I've also obtained a list of the items that have been taken from the workshops, and I think I know what Pendragon's looking for.\"\n\n\"I'd like to know how you did that. My contact in the police told me that most of the workshop owners kept that information very close to their chests.\"\n\n\"That's because they were being asked by the police. You have to use a little psychology. These chaps have a different attitude when they're talking to a fellow innovator. They do so like to brag about their brilliance\u2014if you can get them to trust you a little.\"\n\n\"What do you think Pendragon's up to, then?\"\n\n\"Judging by what he's taken, I think he's attempting to refine the design of his armoured machines, and to build more of them. He's stolen designs, prototypes, and materials that would allow him to enhance their speed and power, improve the system of vision they use, and make the armour itself much stronger without significantly increasing the weight.\"\n\n\"What is it that he's taking from the banks?\" asked Sophie.\n\n\"Money, pure and simple. He has to be able to buy raw materials as well as fuel and hydrogen to maintain his airship, and who knows what else.\"\n\n\"It sounds as if he's preparing for something.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"I believe that as soon as he's gathered everything he needs, he'll build an army of those machines, and he'll use them to damage or destroy workshops, laboratories, and factories across Europe. In England, his purpose was to steal, but when he strikes at Europe, his intention will be destruction, using the weapons he showed me. The death toll will be appalling. His aim appears to be to put those countries' capacities for technical innovation behind that of Britain, but the human cost is something I dread to think about.\"\n\nGunn felt a hint of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu\u2014but the drugs still slowed his mind, and the thought evaporated before he could grasp it. \"And those countries will blame us and declare war.\"\n\n\"I think that is a very likely outcome.\"\n\n\"How do we stop him?\"\n\n\"I'll show you. I have another workshop just a few minutes away. Come with me.\" With that, Harry led the way back to the steam carriage.\n\nWhile Gunn and Sophie rode in the back of the carriage, she asked to see his hand.\n\nHe held it up, turning it back and forth in what little light they had.\n\n\"It's rather beautiful,\" she said. \"It reminds me of some of the dynamics in the park. How does it feel?\"\n\n\"I can't feel anything yet.\" There was no sensation below a point about halfway down his forearm. \"It just feels numb, and cold, in a strange way. It's difficult to describe.\"\n\nThe carriage stopped, and Harry got out to open the door of a warehouse similar to the one they'd just left. \"Let's hope he's as good when it comes to stopping Pendragon,\" Gunn said quietly.\n\nOnce the carriage was inside, Harry showed them to a large corrugated metal cabin, set against the inside wall of the building.\n\n\"Why two workshops, Harry?\" said Sophie as they walked across the concrete floor. \"Wouldn't it be more convenient to have everything in one place?\"\n\n\"Yes, it would, but I have several workshops, for my own protection. This way, if Pendragon should find one of them, I don't lose everything. Also, I rarely keep any of these places for more than a few weeks before moving things around.\" He unlocked the door and went inside, and Gunn and Sophie followed.\n\nThis room looked much more like a workshop than the previous building, with heavy workbenches, drilling machines, planes, vices and other tools. Two lathes\u2014one for metal and the other for wood\u2014stood near one wall. Shelves on the other side of the room held raw materials.\n\nGunn saw a row of mechanical limbs, similar in construction to the hand Harry had just given him. \"Harry? Where does my hand get its power? I won't have to stoke it with coal, or something, will I?\"\n\nHarry grinned. \"Of course not. You energise it, Gunn\u2014just by moving about, you drive small clockworks that create electricity. There are devices inside that store the energy until it's needed. They're doing that already, but, of course, you can't use the hand until the nerves have grown into place. Then you'll be able to move it under its own might.\"\n\n\"So, I could use up all that electricity, and I'd have to wait for it to build up again?\"\n\nHarry shook his head. \"The cells can store an incredible amount of energy, Gunn. Quite remarkable, these new ones\u2014from Russia, you know. I don't think you could exhaust them if you tried. None of my other patients have done so.\"\n\nOn one workbench sat a machine that looked something like a tall, open-sided clock, ticking as the gears and switches inside moved in a complicated dance. Every few seconds a gasp of steam escaped toward the ceiling from a vent at the top.\n\n\"What is this, Harry?\" Sophie asked.\n\n\"That's something I work on when I need to take my mind off things. When it's finished, I'm planning to donate it to the dynamic sculpture collection in The Regent's Park.\" He walked down the row of workbenches that ran along one side of the room. \"The things I brought you to see are over here.\"\n\nGunn and Sophie walked over to where Harry stood. Next to the bench was a sturdy wooden tripod supporting a copper sphere the size of a football, with a short tube jutting from one side and two handles on the other. On the bench itself sat a solid-looking box made of dark polished wood, with brass strips laid into the edges and corners, and next to that, a crate holding a dozen bottles made of some black material that reminded Gunn of frosted glass.\n\nHarry began, \"Pendragon has three major resources at his disposal.\"\n\n\"His airship, and the two machines,\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Precisely. If we can destroy or damage any one of those, we can slow down Pendragon's plans and give ourselves more time. We can't do anything to his airship\u2014\"\n\n\"In a populated area, certainly\u2014but if we could attack it before it reached the city's outskirts, why not?\" said Gunn. \"We could find a way to shoot it down.\"\n\n\"There are a number of serious difficulties with doing anything like that. It's a military airship, and as such, it has a number of protective features\u2014armoured envelopes, engines, and propellers, for example. In addition, the triple envelopes of a military transport provide redundancy in that two of the three envelopes can be deflated, and the aircraft will still retain enough buoyancy to stay aloft, provided it's not heavily laden. The only way to bring down such an aircraft is to destroy all three envelopes, and that's something that's rarely been achieved even with the most advanced anti-airship weapons. I don't have anything that could do much more than scratch the paint on a ship of that kind.\"\n\n\"In other words, we can't do it.\"\n\n\"Our own military could bring it down,\" said Sophie, \"or at least disable it. We could tell them. I could talk to my father. He knows a lot of people who would be able to help.\"\n\n\"There, we have another problem, and that is simply that we don't know where Pendragon's airship came from. It may have come from the decommissioning yards on Barry Island\u2014according to my investigations, at least three airships of a similar type have been misplaced from there over the last ten years. Probably, the explanation is nothing more than careless record keeping, but it's possible that at least one has been stolen. Another possibility is that Pendragon has built his own. Many enthusiasts have built small ones for personal use, after all, and they're really not all that complicated. Building a full sized military class airship privately would be more difficult and very expensive, but not impossible by any means.\"\n\nGunn said, \"And then there's the obvious explanation\u2014that the military gave it to him.\"\n\n\"Yes, and that's the one that presents our problem. If the British military provided Pendragon with an airship, then they're the last people we can expect to help us shoot it down.\"\n\n\"What if it's foreign?\" said Sophie. \"What if he's duped the French, or the Germans, into giving him an airship\u2014telling them he's using it to attack English targets to help them?\"\n\n\"That had occurred to me, too. He could be working with any of a dozen countries. The trouble is, we just don't know. If we can find out, prove for certain that it's not British, then we can go to the authorities. Until then, though, we can't take the chance.\"\n\n\"But our own military wouldn't do such a thing.\" Sophie was plainly distraught at the idea.\n\n\"Are you certain of that, Sophie? Remember, Pendragon's goal is British superiority over Europe, at whatever cost. Can you be sure that every general, every admiral, every air marshal, is a right-thinking person like your father, who would be appalled by the very idea?\"\n\nSophie went quiet, frowning. Gunn took her hand and squeezed it. \"We can't attack the airship. That leaves the machines on the ground.\"\n\n\"Correct,\" said Harry. \"As I see it, there are two ways to try to stop the machines. The first is to attack their source of power.\" He placed his hand on the wooden box and lifted the lid, folding the sides down. Inside sat a small device, composed of several metal wheels arranged in a row, with small gears between them, and a hand crank at one end.\n\n\"That's the purpose of this machine.\" Harry turned the hand crank, and the wheels started to turn in opposing directions. Sparks jumped between the rotors, and Gunn became aware of the sharp smell of ozone, and a faint tingling in his left arm. The machine whirled faster and faster, and the electric lights above the benches flickered then went out. Gunn heard the machine slow and stop\u2014presumably Harry had stopped turning the crank\u2014and the lights came back on.\n\n\"It stops electricity?\"\n\n\"It creates a powerful emanation that disrupts the flow of electrical fluid in wires. I'm certain that Pendragon's machines use electricity. Running this machine nearby should have the effect of stopping the transmission of power.\"\n\n\"How close would one have to be?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"I found that once it was cranked all the way up to full charge, it stopped every electrical device within fifty feet, which, I have to say, surprised even me. But I'm not convinced this little thing will be able to disrupt the electrical flow in something as powerful as Pendragon's machines. I was thinking about building a larger one, powered by a steam engine, but, quite simply, I haven't had the time.\"\n\n\"It's still impressive. You said there were two ways to disable the machines.\"\n\n\"Yes. The other is to attack the vision mechanism. Now, you got very close to the machine. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it got very close to you. I assume, therefore, that you got a good look at the faceplate. Am I correct?\"\n\n\"It got very much closer than I would have liked. But yes, I did get a good look. I thought it was probably glass, like a diver's helmet. It was almost black, though. I couldn't see the man inside.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"You're both familiar with the light-augmenting goggles that airship pilots use.\" Gunn and Sophie nodded. \"The machine's faceplate appears to work on the same principles, allowing the man inside to see in a variety of environments, where it would otherwise prove difficult. In particular, the machines are being used at night, in enclosed, shadowed spaces, and with falling rain, snow or thick fog.\"\n\n\"How do we attack it?\"\n\nHarry placed his hand on the tripod-mounted copper sphere. \"Inside this is an extremely powerful lamp, and the tube contains an arrangement of lenses. When it's turned on, it produces a narrow but very intense beam of light.\"\n\n\"I see. Shine it at the machine's faceplate, and it amplifies the bright light further. Would that blind the man inside?\" He rubbed his arm; it had begun to ache badly.\n\n\"You have it,\" said Harry, smiling. \"The machine's helmet would become filled with strong light, and the operator wouldn't be able to see at all. It's also quite possible that overloading the faceplate's workings would destroy it.\" He patted the copper sphere. \"This projector will throw an extremely powerful patch of light, no more than a foot across, at a range of a hundred feet. For the man inside, it would be comparable to looking directly at the sun.\"\n\nGunn looked at the crate of black bottles. \"What about these?\" He wiped the sweat from his brow. His arm felt as if the bones were being crushed in a vice.\n\n\"Those are a last resort. Wax bottles filled with thick black paint, to be thrown at the faceplate to block the operator's vision. The problem with them is you'd need to be quite close to Pendragon's machine. It could be dangerous, and hitting the faceplate of a moving target will be tricky, to say the least.\"\n\n\"So that's our plan, then. Stop the machine, and catch the men responsible red-handed. Call the police. With the crimes public and the evidence in hand, the authorities will have no choice but to stop the conspirators\u2014with military might, if need be.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"Quite so.\"\n\n\"You seem to have thought this all out quite thoroughly, Harry,\" said Sophie, \"which just leaves one question. When do we use these?\"\n\n\"An excellent question. I've observed that Pendragon's attacks have occurred only on those nights when the weather conditions would make it easier for his airship to move unseen. The skies have been clear for the last two nights, but the Weather Office has predicted a thick fog for tomorrow night. I believe that if Pendragon plans a further attack, that is when it will happen.\"\n\n\"If?\" croaked Gunn. The pain had become almost unbearable.\n\n\"As I mentioned, I've compiled a catalogue of the items Pendragon has stolen, and from that, I've determined that he may be close to completing his list of equipment, if he hasn't done so already. If he already has everything he needs, we're all in a great deal of trouble. If, as I suspect, he's building more of his machines, he could be ready in a matter of weeks. We have to hope that he has at least one more attack planned, so that we have a chance to stop him and his men.\"\n\n\"Where will he strike, if he does?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Tweed's laboratory, near Culbertson's, remains a prime target. There's another workshop, Melton's, about a mile from there, which I think may be another target.\"\n\n\"Do you have a plan?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I think I should take you home now. Your husband appears to be suffering quite serious pain.\"\n\nGunn couldn't stand the agony in his arm any longer. Every heartbeat was like a blacksmith's hammer pounding the bones to powder. \"I think your injection is wearing off,\" he said, his voice a rasp.\n\n\"Then let's adjourn, so that you can rest until tomorrow night.\"\n\nHarry drove Gunn and Sophie home and arranged to collect them again the following midnight, then returned to his workshop. He loaded the projector sphere, the electrical disruptor and the paint bottles into the carriage, then wheeled a larger cart from a dark corner of the building and attached it to a hook on the vehicle's tail. He filled the cart with the other materials from the workshop\u2014the prosthetic limbs, the materials he used for construction, and finally, his dynamic sculpture. He would come back for the lathes and other heavy equipment later. By dawn, the building would be empty, its contents distributed between his other workshops.\n\nHe was almost sure he could trust Gunn and his wife, but until he was absolutely certain, he would continue to take precautions to protect himself. The man had lost a hand, and that had to count for something, but Pendragon was dedicated, and would demand similar commitment from his own people. If Gunn was working for Pendragon, he may have considered the loss of a hand a worthwhile sacrifice in aid of his cause.\n\nIf Pendragon attacked the next night, Harry thought, Gunn's and Sophie's actions would reveal their allegiance.\n\nWebster waited in the shadow of a tree close to the Gunns' flat. The fog's chilling dampness seeped gradually through his coat and the layers beneath\u2014Webster was frozen to the bone, and quite thoroughly miserable. Only his determination prevented him from giving up his watch and going home to get warm and dry.\n\nHe saw the glimmer of two brilliant white acetylene carriage lamps through the fog, and then the silhouette of a steam carriage becoming clear. The vehicle pulled up to the curb outside the Gunns' residence, and a moment later the couple got out and hurried up the steps. As they did so, the light from a nearby gas lamp glinted off something that Gunn appeared to be holding in his hand. His left hand, Webster realised. As Gunn opened the door, Webster got a clearer look, and was stunned when he saw that Gunn had a new prosthetic hand. Where the devil did he get that? Webster wondered.\n\nHe turned his attention to the steam carriage and cursed under his breath. He'd asked his employer to provide him with transport, and the request had been denied. Webster had hoped that the Gunns\u2014or more particularly, their friend\u2014would have arrived on foot.\n\nThere was nothing he could do, no way to follow the steam carriage as it rolled away from the curb and down the street. He would have to say something to his employer in the morning, to the effect that he could not do this job properly without the appropriate resources.\n\nThe carriage had gone into the fog and vanished. Webster looked back at the Gunns' flat just in time to see the lights in the parlour go out.\n\nThe next night was long, foggy, and cold. Gunn waited with Sophie on the roof of the building across the street from Melton's engineering workshop, with Harry's electrical disruptor. A mile southwest of their position, Harry watched Tweed's workshop from the factory roof where Gunn had been, with his light-beam projector. Pendragon's airship did not appear.\n\nAs the sun came up, Harry drove them back to the first warehouse.\n\n\"I know it's early in the day, but I think a snort of brandy might get the blood flowing.\" With that, he poured out three measures.\n\n\"What happens next?\" said Sophie. \"Should we watch again tonight?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" said Gunn. \"What does the Weather Office say?\"\n\nHarry went to a compact typing machine on a stand in the corner of the office, and punched a few keys. There was a pause, then the typing head stamped out a line of text. \"They've predicted snow for tonight. Perhaps the fog wasn't sufficient for Pendragon's purposes, in which case snow might make the difference. Given that, I agree that we should stand guard again tonight.\"\n\n\"There was something I noticed,\" said Gunn. \"During the night I saw two or three beat constables.\"\n\n\"I saw the same thing,\" said Harry. \"Not unexpected.\"\n\n\"The night of the Culbertson's attack, I didn't see a single copper.\"\n\n\"What are you thinking, Connie?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"At one time, it occurred to me that perhaps someone was bribing some of the coppers to stay away from certain areas, and I put the idea to Jameson. He told me he knew some of those men personally and that they were honest, trustworthy officers and above that kind of thing.\n\n\"Now, I think I may have the answer. I'm thinking that when the weather is particularly bad\u2014snow, or heavy rain\u2014the policemen aren't walking those parts of their beats that take them very far from the comfort of a public house or something along those lines.\"\n\nHarry cleared his throat. \"In other words, they're in a pub on the east side, warming themselves with a hot toddy, when they should be on patrol in the industrial areas.\"\n\n\"Yes, and it may be that Pendragon is aware of that, in which case perhaps that's another reason why he moves only when the weather is suitable.\"\n\n\"In addition to keeping the airship out of sight,\" Harry finished. \"You know, I think you may very well be right. If I was a policeman on a beat, I know I wouldn't mind so much being out in fog, but rain and snow would be another matter. That makes it all the more likely that tonight will be the night.\"\n\n\"Well done, Connie,\" said Sophie, smiling.\n\n\"Another question occurred to me,\" said Gunn. \"Assuming that Pendragon mounts an attack, and we're able to stop one of his machines, what then? There's a man inside, who probably won't go quietly, and may well be armed\u2014and then the machines themselves are huge and very heavy.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"My thought was that once we saw the airship we'd know the attack was imminent, and at that point, your police whistle would bring assistance. Having said that, I hadn't considered that the man controlling the machine might be armed. We should be better prepared. Tonight, I'll make sure that we each have some way to defend ourselves. As to moving the machine, I hadn't given it any thought. I was planning to make my examinations on the spot, and if possible, remove any interesting components for study.\"\n\n\"If the police will let you,\" said Sophie.\n\n\"We'll cross that bridge if and when we come to it.\" Harry looked at Gunn. \"I think it's time we all got some rest, but first I'd like to see how your arm's coming along. How's the pain?\"\n\nGunn's arm no longer felt as though it was on fire. \"Bearable, at the moment. The pain seems to be fading.\"\n\nHarry looked at the arm and the places where the metal parts met flesh. \"No unusual inflammation, and no sign of infection. It seems to be coming along nicely. Can you feel anything yet?\"\n\nGunn nodded. \"I can feel something when I touch the fingertips. And I found that I can do this,\" he said, holding up both hands. As Sophie and Harry watched, Gunn tried to open and close his left and right hands simultaneously. With his uninjured right hand he made a fist and then spread his fingers; at the same time, the fingers of the mechanical left hand curled a little, then straightened.\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Harry, his smile beaming. \"At this rate, you'll have full function within two or three days.\"\n\n\"I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to that.\"\n\nHarry delivered Gunn and Sophie to their front door. Harry and Gunn looked around casually for any sign of the man with the muttonchops, but there was not a soul in sight. Gunn and Sophie retreated indoors and Harry drove off.\n\nGunn couldn't sleep. The pain in his left arm was bearable, now, but Harry had been right\u2014the itching was abominable. Gunn also, in some strange way, felt a cold, tingling sensation in the metal hand, as if the flesh was coming back to life after having the circulation of blood cut off.\n\nSophie was asleep and breathing softly, a strand of red hair across her cheek. Gunn smiled and gently kissed her forehead, then made his way to the kitchen to make himself some tea. While he was waiting for the kettle to boil, he heard a tapping at the front door.\n\nJameson stood on the step, holding an umbrella against the light snow that had covered the pavement and the road with a thin, fluffy white layer.\n\n\"Jameson. Come inside where it's warm. Care for a cup of tea? I was just making some.\"\n\n\"That would be very welcome,\" said Jameson, shivering a little. He shook the snow from his brolly and closed it, stepping inside.\n\n\"Take a seat in the parlour, then. I'll be with you in a minute.\" Gunn led the way along the hallway.\n\n\"By Jupiter!\" said Jameson, staring at Gunn's shiny metal hand. \"Where on earth did that come from?\"\n\n\"Ah. Therein lies a tale. I'll tell you all about it.\" He ushered Jameson into the parlour and went to the kitchen to finish the tea. He was unsure how much he should tell Jameson, but then decided to hold nothing back, reasoning that he owed it to the man. He'd tell Harry Bohemia in due course, and if Harry didn't like it, well then, he'd have to lump it. It was about time Harry afforded Gunn\u2014and Sophie\u2014a little trust in return for the trust they gave him.\n\nHe carried the tea tray through to the parlour, supporting the weight with his right hand, but allowing himself to steady it with the left. Through the unpleasant tickling, tingling sensations, he fancied that he could feel the wood of the tray against the fingertips.\n\n\"That hand is very impressive. It's a working prosthetic, then? Not just for show?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'm told I should be up to using a typing machine quite soon, in fact.\"\n\nJameson frowned. \"What about Doctor Christie?\"\n\nOh, Law, thought Gunn. He didn't want to upset Jameson by insulting the man's colleague. \"How well do you know Christie?\"\n\n\"I've worked with him for some years. He's not precisely a friend, if that's what you're asking.\"\n\nIt's too early in the day for this, thought Gunn. He decided to take the plunge. \"To be honest, I wasn't too pleased with his reputation as a surgeon. And there's something about his manner that puts me off. I can't say that I trust him.\" There, he thought, I've said it.\n\n\"Since we're being honest, then, you're probably better off.\" Gunn smiled, relieved. Jameson continued, \"Christie's a good man to have in an emergency\u2014he's saved more than one life, stitching up stab wounds and such\u2014but, say, if I needed my appendix out, I'd be looking for someone better.\"\n\n\"All the same, I'm sorry I wasted his time. If he should ask, tell him I had a recommendation that was too good to pass up.\"\n\n\"Whom did you go to, then?\"\n\n\"This,\" said Gunn, holding the hand up, \"is courtesy of Doctor Bohemia.\" He flexed the fingers for effect.\n\nJameson stood sharply. \"Are you insane?\" he spluttered. \"He's involved in these crimes, every copper in London's looking for him, and you're letting him at you like that?\"\n\n\"Calm down, man\u2014you'll wake Sophie. He's not responsible; far from it. He wants me to help him stop the man behind the robberies, a man calling himself Pendragon. Although, I suspect that's not his real name.\"\n\nJameson harrumphed, and sat down, frowning. He was silent for a few seconds as he calmed himself. Then he shook his head in resignation. \"A stage name, perhaps, like Bohemia himself?\"\n\n\"That's quite possible, but I haven't had time to look into it. We've been far too busy.\"\n\n\"Then leave it with me and I'll see what I can find out about him. Busy, you say? Doing what? I was under the impression that you've been recuperating here at home.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"Two nights ago, Bohemia gave me this hand, then last night, we were out on a rooftop waiting for Pendragon to strike. We'll be doing the same thing again, tonight.\"\n\n\"Busy, indeed.\" Jameson frowned, and his jaw clenched. His voice took on a firmer tone. \"You're going to get yourself and your wife into a great deal of trouble. You recall what I said about arresting you for your own protection? That goes for Sophie, too, if you get her involved in all this. Don't make me do that to a lady, Gunn.\"\n\n\"Jameson, you don't understand. This isn't about a handful of men stealing things to sell for a few quid. There's a conspiracy here.\"\n\n\"All the more reason that you should leave this to me. This is a police matter.\"\n\n\"We can't trust the police\u2014present company excepted, of course. There's a possibility that Pendragon's influence reaches into the Home Office\u2014\"\n\nJameson's eyes narrowed. \"I find that hard to believe.\"\n\n\"Pendragon has an airship, machines, and men. Bohemia and I think it likely that those resources were provided by others. People in positions of power. It's possible that those people might be within our own government, even. Until we know who's helping Pendragon, we have to be careful who we tell about all this.\"\n\nJameson whistled. \"That's a very serious charge.\" He shifted in his seat as if uncomfortable, and rubbed his chin. Then he nodded. \"All right, since you won't see sense, but you're not keeping me in the dark this time. I can provide some assistance without word going any higher up my particular ladder.\"\n\n\"And without Bohemia finding out, either. That's important. He won't thank me for bringing the police in behind his back.\"\n\nJameson nodded. \"Mum's the word, then. Now, I can think of half a dozen good men that I trust. I'll have them dress in plain clothes and place themselves around the area where you'll be tonight.\"\n\n\"I don't think that's advisable. If Bohemia sees men loitering he'll suspect something, and if you position them at the places we think are Pendragon's other potential targets, they won't be able to do anything more than raise the alarm. We have equipment that we think might stop Pendragon's machines\u2014but your men won't have any such thing, and I know from personal experience just how dangerous those machines are. You'd be placing your men in harm's way for no good reason.\"\n\nJameson looked disappointed, and Gunn knew his friend was just as eager to help bring Pendragon in as he, Sophie and Bohemia were.\n\n\"I have a better idea. We're going after the machines. You and your men could try to stop the airship.\"\n\nJameson smiled at that, and rubbed his hands together. \"Now you're talking.\"\n\n\"Pendragon uses the airship to land the machines, then fly them out after they've done their work. If you were to put your people in a vehicle and listen out for the airship's engines, they could follow it to the landing point. The airship lands, the machines go off to do their dirty work, and while they're away\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014my men take the airship,\" Jameson finished, grinning with evident excitement at the prospect of action.\n\n\"You'll have to be well prepared. We have no idea how many men the airship might be carrying, and they'll probably be armed.\"\n\n\"Then the objective will be to hold them. If we can disable the aircraft to prevent it from lifting, we can hold them on the ground until we can bring in reinforcements.\"\n\n\"More people you can trust?\"\n\n\"Even if you're correct about a conspiracy, the people involved would have to be at high levels. I don't see how beat bobbies could be a part of such a thing. I can make sure that there are plenty of men in the area. What do you think?\"\n\n\"You know your men, and I trust your judgement. Just don't let them get into a situation where they're laying siege to a group of criminals defending an armoured military airship. Remember, you wouldn't be able to call in military reinforcements\u2014we can't be sure that they're taking orders from the right people.\"\n\n\"Leave that to me.\"\n\n\"Your plan should also include dealing with two large, powerful machines arriving during the proceedings. If we're lucky, Pendragon will only deploy one machine, and if we're very, very lucky we might be able to bring it down. If he decides to go after two targets, you'll have at least one machine to deal with, and the only help I can give you is some information about how you might disable it by blinding the man inside.\"\n\nGunn explained what he and Bohemia had divined about the machine's visual mechanisms. Jameson rubbed his chin in thought. \"The armoury at the Yard has a few things that might suit, I think. The problem is getting anything out without raising eyebrows.\" He looked at Gunn. \"But that's my problem, not yours. Let me see what I can do.\"\n\n\"Then I leave it in your capable hands.\"\n\nThat evening, as they waited for Harry Bohemia to collect them, Gunn heard the machine in his study clatter then ring its little bell to signal that a message had been received. Jameson's men were equipped and would be ready and waiting to move against the airship.\n\nWhen Harry arrived, Gunn and Sophie dashed through the falling snow and hopped into his carriage. The carriage began moving before Gunn had even closed the door, and Harry slid the divider open so that he could talk while he drove.\n\n\"This weather's going to make it difficult to see and signal each other, so I've been considering an alternative plan for tonight. I was going to suggest that instead of lying in wait, we stay in this carriage and listen out for the airship.\"\n\nGunn and Sophie looked sharply at each other. Sophie shook her head, ever so slightly. Gunn knew she was thinking the same thing that he was; they couldn't risk Harry running into Jameson's men.\n\n\"I thought we'd agreed it would be pointless to go after the airship,\" Gunn blurted out.\n\n\"My idea was to follow the airship until it dropped off one of the machines, then follow that machine to its destination.\"\n\nGunn thought quickly and spoke in a rush. \"It won't work. The machine can run as fast as a racehorse. We won't keep up, especially in snow.\"\n\n\"That's a good point.\"\n\nSophie's eyes flashed at Gunn as she spoke. \"Harry, even if we could catch up to the machine, could we unload the equipment in time to use it?\"\n\n\"Another very good point.\" Harry sounded disappointed. \"In that case let's stick to the original plan.\"\n\nGunn looked at Sophie and rolled his eyes. She turned away, shoulders shaking, suppressing a laugh.\n\nThe little carriage rattled on through the snow toward Battersea, and half an hour later, Harry parked the vehicle in the alleyway below the roof from where Gunn and Sophie would stand watch. He opened the small luggage carrier mounted on the rear and pulled out three heavy objects, each wrapped in thick cloth. He kept one for himself and handed the others to Gunn and Sophie.\n\nGunn unwrapped the package and found a compressed-air dart pistol. It was shiny and clean, but the metal and wood on the grip had a patina that told Gunn the pistol had seen quite a bit of use.\n\n\"I was hoping to get something a little more powerful, but these were the best I could do. You do know how to use them, I hope?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Gunn. He'd used something almost identical for vermin control on his parents' farm.\n\nHarry looked at Sophie. \"I couldn't find one more appropriate for a lady. Allow me to\u2014\"\n\nBefore he could finish, she clicked the magazine release with her right thumb and caught the falling magazine in her left hand, then inverted the pistol and pressed the air valve. Air hissed out of the pressure reservoir. Just as quickly, she slid the magazine back into place and pulled it back so it engaged into place with a solid click, then worked the pump built into the grip to pressurise the air tank.\n\n\"Calvert and Ward model eleven,\" she said, \"originally designed in 1840. Point four-one calibre. Six seventy grain darts in the magazine and one in the chamber.\" She flipped a catch on the side of the pistol and the barrel folded down to the grip. She slipped the weapon into a pocket of her jacket, grinning at Harry's open-mouthed expression of surprise. \"When I told my father of my decision to take medical training and serve in Africa, he made it a point to teach his daughter how to protect herself.\"\n\nHarry closed his mouth. \"Of course he did. My apologies, Sophie.\"\n\nGunn and Sophie walked out of the shelter of the alleyway as Harry drove off to his own position. A few minutes later, they were back up on the roof overlooking Melton's workshop. Snow fell in large, wet flakes. Gunn found the chilled air had the effect of reducing the pins and needles in his left hand significantly, and he was able to ignore the itching almost completely.\n\n\"Harry was wrong about the goggles. I can see him perfectly well,\" said Sophie.\n\nGunn followed Sophie's gaze in the direction of Harry's vantage point. He could see the building\u2014and Harry\u2014quite clearly.\n\nSophie turned back to Gunn, and absently ran her fingertips along the metal of his prosthetic hand. \"How much of someone could be replaced like this, Connie? While still remaining human, I mean.\"\n\n\"Did you ever hear about the Russian chess champion, Boris Gorodetski?\"\n\n\"I've heard of him. He played here in London when I was a little girl. Daddy wanted to come down and see him, but he wasn't able to get away. Later on, I seem to remember something about an accident.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"It was no accident. There was a tournament in Riga and Gorodetski beat the Latvian champion, which didn't go down well with the locals. A few days later, he was on a rest day admiring the view from a tower on a cathedral, and a local man accused him of cheating. An argument turned into a struggle, and Gorodetski fell, and landed in the cathedral square.\"\n\n\"Oh, my goodness!\"\n\n\"Indeed. The fall should have killed him, but somehow he survived. His body was devastated, though. Both arms and legs were smashed and had to be amputated, his skull was fractured, most of his ribs shattered, he lost an eye and the use of an ear, and some of his internal organs were ruptured.\"\n\n\"That's terrible, Connie.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was. The Russian government shipped him back to a hospital in Moscow. Nobody expected him to live, and nothing was heard about Gorodetski for quite some time. Then some incredible news came from an agency in Moscow\u2014Gorodetski had made a public appearance at a chess tournament there, and he'd been rebuilt.\"\n\n\"Rebuilt?\" Sophie's mouth was an O of disbelief.\n\n\"New arms and legs,\" said Gunn, holding up his left arm. \"A new eye and ear. Apparently his spine and most of his ribs had been replaced with metal, and the damaged organs removed and replaced with artificial ones.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I'd want to live like that.\"\n\nGunn shrugged. \"I think if it was me and the choice was to live like that or be left to die, I'd give life a chance. At least that way, I could choose to end it later if I really couldn't stand to go on.\"\n\nSophie shivered. \"I don't know that I'd want to go through all that. The surgeries, the pain.\" Then she turned back to face Harry's roof.\n\n\"There is that, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Hush. Do you hear that?\"\n\nGunn listened. He thought he heard a faint vibration in the breeze. Within seconds, it became unmistakeable. He looked off to the south, straining to see through the snow\u2014then saw the silhouette of the triple-enveloped airship.\n\n\"Pendragon's coming.\" He looked across at Harry's roof. Harry had heard the engines too, and was flashing the projector. Gunn waved back to acknowledge, and the flashes stopped. \"Are you ready?\"\n\n\"As ready as I can be,\" said Sophie. She cleared snow from the parapet to make a space, then placed onto it the box containing the electrical disruptor. She opened it. \"I hope the snow doesn't stop this thing working.\"\n\n\"Let's not risk it.\" He took his jacket off and draped it over the opening to keep the snowflakes from falling into the machine's innards.\n\n\"Connie, you'll freeze!\"\n\nHe had to raise his voice over the din of propellers. \"I'll be fine!\"\n\nHe looked up, his hands over his ears against the noise. The airship was almost over them, slipping gracefully through the snowstorm.\n\nSophie shouted, \"What should we do?\"\n\n\"Nothing! All we can do is watch and wait!\"\n\nThe engine noise began to fade as the airship continued north. Gunn dashed to the ledge overlooking the street and looked down, watching for movement from that direction, impatient for action. He glanced behind him and saw Sophie watching for Harry's signal, in case the attack happened at his location. The sound of the airship's engines faded away, leaving behind it only the faint pattering of fat snowflakes.\n\nA minute passed, then another. Gunn paced between the parapet, where he looked down into the street, and Sophie's side of the roof. It's taking too long, he thought, worried that Pendragon's attack was taking place elsewhere. \"Is Harry doing anything?\"\n\n\"I can see him watching the road over there. He hasn't signalled yet.\"\n\nGunn felt the rhythmic thumping of the machine's approach through the soles of his shoes before he heard the machine itself, clumping along the road from the north. \"It's coming!\" he shouted, relieved that they were in the right place after all, and excited at the prospect of some decisive action. His cheeks ached and he realised he was grinning like an idiot. \"Start cranking!\"\n\nThe machine came into sight, running along the road, arms outstretched. From behind him, a whirring noise built up to a high-pitched whine as Sophie cranked the electrical disruptor faster and faster. He ran to the parapet on the south side and waved frantically at Harry. For a moment, there was no response; then he saw Harry's acknowledgement, a quick double flash from the light projector. Gunn knew Harry would come as quickly as he could. Gunn ran back toward the other side of the roof, intending to see what effect, if any, the disruptor was having on the machine.\n\nWithout warning, a lightning bolt of pain shot from his mechanical left hand, up to his shoulder and beyond, into his spine. The impact knocked the wind out of him. He felt as if he'd been hit in the back with a sledgehammer. Gunn couldn't ever remember feeling such agony\u2014even losing his hand hadn't hurt that much.\n\nThe world began to slide and spin, then the strength evaporated from his legs and he collapsed. He couldn't breathe. He felt a strange fluttering sensation from his mechanical hand, and without thinking, he looked at it. Almost absently he saw that it was twitching, the fingers snapping open and shut spastically.\n\n\"Connie!\" he heard Sophie yell, and then she was kneeling by his side. \"What's wrong?\" Gunn gasped for air, unable to speak. \"Talk to me, Connie!\"\n\n\"Can't . . . breathe . . .\" he managed to croak.\n\nSophie's medical training asserted itself. \"You're going to be fine, sweetheart. You're just winded. Let your body go limp, close your eyes.\"\n\nGunn did so, and tried to relax. The pain began to subside.\n\n\"That's good. Try to take a deep breath.\"\n\nHe tried, and was able to take one shallow breath and then another.\n\n\"Again.\"\n\nHe forced himself to relax, and drew in a long, deep breath. He let it out and took another. \"That's better,\" he said in a rough whisper.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. I think the hand may have gone wrong and given me some kind of shock.\"\n\n\"Harry will be here at any moment. We'll ask him.\"\n\nGunn tried to relax, then realised with a start that they were missing the attack, and Sophie wasn't cranking the disruptor. \"Help me up, quick.\" Sophie pulled his arm as he got to his feet.\n\nHe ran to the parapet, and heard the rhythmic thump of the machine's feet against the road to his left. He glanced that way and caught a flash of bronze that vanished as the machine disappeared into the falling snow.\n\nHe looked down. The front of the workshop across the street was smashed in. \"Damn it!\" he cried out. \"We've missed it!\" He clenched his fist and pounded the parapet. All was silent. \"It's all over,\" he fumed. \"We might as well go down.\"\n\nSophie closed up the disruptor and they made their way down to ground level. As they reached the street, Harry arrived in the steam carriage. He braked sharply to a halt and jumped out. He looked at Gunn. \"Heavens, Gunn, you're white as a sheet. What happened?\" He looked at the smashed wall. \"I take it the disruptor didn't work.\"\n\n\"We don't know,\" said Gunn through clenched teeth. He still trembled from the shock, and sweated despite the cold.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nSophie explained. \"Connie had some kind of convulsion. I had to stop to help him. He said the hand did something to him.\"\n\n\"That's not possible,\" Harry said, shaking his head in confusion, then the expression on his face changed to one of wide-eyed horror. \"Oh, no! This is all my fault. I should have realised\u2014\"\n\n\"The disruptor!\" said Sophie.\n\nHarry nodded. \"Precisely. The disruptor would have induced electrical currents in the control wiring\u2014powerful ones, shooting right into the nerves. They're easily irritated, and will remain so while they're bonding to the hand. Once that process is complete, the sensitivity will disappear. It didn't even occur to me. I'm very, very sorry, Gunn.\"\n\n\"Why didn't that happen in your workshop?\" said Gunn, recalling the faint tingle he'd felt at the time.\n\n\"Because I'd only just fitted it to you\u2014the bonding process had barely begun.\" He shook his head. \"You'd better go and rest. I want to take a look at what the machine did.\"\n\nSophie took Gunn's hand and led him to the carriage, while Harry surveyed the damage to the workshop. \"How are you feeling?\" said Sophie, once she and Gunn had settled themselves in the seats.\n\nGunn shuddered, and knew that he suffered from some delayed reaction to the jolt. \"Still a little shaken.\" His voice sounded little more than a hoarse whisper.\n\n\"You're in shock. We'll get home and have a nice hot drink, then I think you need some sleep.\"\n\n\"I think a nip of brandy would help.\" He suddenly felt very tired.\n\nGunn saw Harry come back out through the broken wall, then stop and look upward. He heard the sound of airship engines, and opened the door to peer out. Pendragon's airship was flying back the way it had come.\n\nHarry returned, and stood next to the open carriage door. \"I think we may have squandered our last chance.\"\n\n\"What did you find in there?\" said Gunn, his voice still quavering.\n\n\"A safe designed to hold blueprints and design papers, torn open like a wet cardboard box and emptied.\"\n\n\"What do you mean about this being our last chance, then?\"\n\nHarry frowned, his face a picture of despair. \"I think Pendragon now has all the items he needs to launch his campaign against the European countries. I suspect that waiting for another theft like this will be fruitless.\"\n\nGunn's spirits fell. Their chances of stopping Pendragon had just become almost nil. \"When do you think he'll move against Europe?\"\n\nHarry shook his head weakly. \"That's very difficult to say. I believe he'll spend some time building his forces first. I think he'll want more of those machines ready before he acts. If we're lucky we may have a few weeks of grace, but it could potentially be only a matter of days.\"\n\n\"Then what should we do?\" asked Sophie.\n\n\"I've been thinking about that for quite some time.\" He stood and took a breath, and brushed the snow from his coat. \"For now, I'm taking you home. We'll talk more tomorrow, when we've all had some time to rest.\"\n\nWebster waited in the little steam-powered buggy. He left the engine running, so he could move quickly when the time came\u2014and the heat from the engine kept the vehicle deliciously warm and dry. He looked out at the wet snowflakes making a halo around the nearest street gaslight, and smiled.\n\nHis employer had agreed, at last, to buy Webster a vehicle. Webster had found this little buggy. He had no need to walk around in the cold any more, which pleased him to no end.\n\nTime passed. The sun would rise soon, and there was still no sign of the Gunns. Webster grew drowsy in the warmth, and had to concentrate to stop himself from falling asleep.\n\nHe saw the acetylene lights at the far end of the street and shook himself properly awake. The vehicle dropped Gunn and his wife off at their door. Webster pumped the steam pressure and released the brake. The carriage moved off, and Webster let it get thirty yards ahead before he began to follow.\n\nHis quarry made a turn and went out of sight. Webster took the corner quickly; the carriage was already fifty yards ahead of him and accelerating. The driver must have seen him. Webster pumped up more pressure and pressed the pedal harder. The gap began to close.\n\nThe carriage made a sharp turn into an alleyway between two large houses. Webster cursed. He has to have eyes in the back of his head, he thought as he made the same turn.\n\nHe caught sight of the carriage as it reached the far end and disappeared around the corner. He raced along as fast as he dared, and turned the same way.\n\nThere was no sign of the carriage. He looked down in the hope of finding a trail in the snow, but this was a major road, kept clear by the brushes of the trams that passed along it every few minutes. Webster cursed again, and stopped at the curb.\n\nHe smiled. The mystery man had Webster's respect. It had been a while since he'd been up against someone who seemed to have more than a smattering of intelligence and cunning. Webster loved a challenge.\n\nI'll find you, he thought. This is going to be fun.\n\nAs Gunn and Sophie let themselves into their flat, Gunn heard the sound of a steam carriage coming along the street, and turned. The carriage pulled up at the curb sharply, and Jameson climbed out. Suppressed anger darkened his face. \"We need to talk.\"\n\nGunn nodded and the three went indoors and to the parlour. Sophie stoked the fire back to life.\n\n\"We failed miserably,\" said Gunn, explaining what had happened. \"Did you have better success with the airship?\"\n\nJameson shook his head. His eyes bored into Gunn's, his lips a tight line. \"A man is dead, Gunn.\"\n\nGunn's eyes widened. \"How the devil did that happen?\"\n\nJameson took a deep breath and let it out, evidently trying to calm himself. The man's shoulders slumped a little. \"We'd expected the airship to land on solid ground, but it hovered above the roof of a building, and the machine was winched down from there. We couldn't get high enough to make an effective attack, and we couldn't use the rigging cutter, because the damned airship was too high up for us to get within range.\"\n\n\"Rigging cutter?\" asked Sophie.\n\nGunn answered, \"A machine that throws out a spinning disk with a razor edge. Pirates use them to cut through ropes on boats and airships, to disable them from a distance before they attack.\"\n\nJameson nodded. \"Three of my men managed to get up onto a roof with the cutter, in an attempt to get close enough to use it. Then that big machine came back. I ordered the men to hold position, but I'd split my forces, and it was obvious we didn't have a chance. It took just seconds for the people aboard the airship to hook their machine, and they moved before it had even been winched aboard. That's when we found that one of my men had slipped on the snow and fallen off the roof.\"\n\nGunn heard Sophie take a sudden intake of breath, and Gunn's disappointment at their earlier failure turned to guilt. He shook his head. \"I'm sorry, Jameson. This is all my fault\u2014I shouldn't have got you involved.\"\n\n\"No one is sorrier than I am. Daniel was a good man, and now I'll have to lie to his family about what happened to him.\"\n\nGunn understood what Jameson meant; there was no way Jameson would be able to tell anyone that he'd had men out working on a clandestine operation.\n\n\"I can't maintain any further involvement in this, Gunn. As it is, it's going to be difficult enough to cover up what's happened.\" He got up, picked up his hat, and left.\n\nEarly the next morning, Harry appeared at Gunn's front door. Gunn invited him in\u2014the first time Harry had ever been inside Gunn and Sophie's home.\n\nAs Gunn showed him into the parlour, he couldn't help but notice the grim expression on Harry's face. Sophie joined them.\n\n\"You lied to me, Gunn,\" Harry said. \"There were police on the scene last night, and they were there because of you.\"\n\nGunn couldn't deny it. \"Yes. They were there because I trust the man who led them, and you can trust him too.\"\n\n\"And what about his superiors? Can I trust them? Especially after what I've told you?\"\n\n\"Jameson's superiors don't know anything about what happened last night, and they won't find out from him. As it is, one of his men was killed last night and he's going to have a devil of a time keeping that quiet.\"\n\n\"I don't know how he can possibly keep it quiet. How do you suppose I found out about it? A police constable saw the airship, and your man Jameson's futile attempt on it. That witness wired a report to none other than your own newspaper, and my equipment alerted me. The whole thing will be all over the city within hours.\"\n\nGunn stiffened, surprised by the revelation. \"Unless I can stop it. I have to see Maynard. Immediately.\"\n\nGunn sent a message to Jameson, asking him to meet Harry and himself at the Tribune's offices, then Gunn and Harry left in Harry's vehicle.\n\nAs Harry drove, Gunn glanced at him, eyes narrowed. \"You said you were alerted. What did you mean?\"\n\nHarry's eyes stayed on the road, but his mouth twisted into a grin. \"How do you think I was able to get to the crime scenes so quickly? I have a small engine watching the wires into the newspapers, including your own. Quite illegal, of course, but I have no criminal intent. It signals me if it sees mention of airships, or workshops or banks being broken into. You won't tell anyone, will you?\"\n\nGunn smiled. \"Your secret is safe.\"\n\nJameson waited by the street door of the building when they arrived.\n\n\"What's this all about, Gunn?\"\n\n\"I'm glad you could come, Jameson.\" Gunn indicated Harry. \"This is Doctor Bohemia.\"\n\nJameson extended his hand. \"Inspector Jameson. Glad to make your acquaintance at last, Doctor.\"\n\nHarry looked at Jameson suspiciously, then took his hand. \"You may call me Harry.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" said Gunn, \"time is short.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Harry.\n\nGunn led the way into the building. \"It seems you were observed last night, Jameson. Maynard will print the story unless we can stop him. We have to make sure that we do.\"\n\n\"Do you know who the witness was?\" said Jameson.\n\n\"No, and we need to know that too. We have to make sure that they don't go blabbing the story all over Fleet Street. I may be able to persuade Maynard not to print, but I can't stop the other papers if they get the scent of a story.\"\n\nThe three marched up the stairs and along the corridor toward Maynard's office. Through the open door, they saw Maynard sitting behind his desk, reviewing a proof of a front page. Gunn tapped on the door and Maynard looked up curiously. \"Come in,\" he said. Maynard nodded at Gunn, \"Cornelius.\" He glanced casually at Gunn's missing left hand\u2014then his eyes opened wide at the sight of the metal replacement.\n\n\"Mister Maynard,\" said Gunn, \"may I introduce Inspector Jameson of Scotland Yard, and Doctor Harry Bohemia.\"\n\nMaynard tore his attention away from Gunn's hand. \"What can I do for you, gentlemen?\"\n\nJameson spoke first. \"We understand a person came to this newspaper claiming to have witnessed a rather unusual event in Battersea last night.\"\n\nMaynard nodded. \"A man came to us this morning with a story, yes.\"\n\nJameson stepped toward Maynard, gloved fists on the desk. \"You must not print this story under any circumstance.\"\n\nMaynard leaned back, as if to retreat a little from the inspector. \"I had no plan to print. At least, not immediately.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" asked Gunn firmly.\n\nJameson stepped back, having made his point, and Maynard relaxed a little. He turned to Gunn.\n\n\"Cornelius, you of all people should know that you don't go to press with a story until you've got some kind of verification. In this case, we know that a workshop was broken into in a manner similar to the other robberies that you're well aware of, and that much we can print. However, this man came to us with an improbable story involving airships and mechanical men, and until we can be sure his story is solid, I'm not about to risk the Tribune's reputation for accurate reporting.\"\n\n\"We have that verification,\" said a voice from the doorway. The men turned to see Gallagher standing there. He stepped into the office and turned to face Jameson. \"I spoke to the constable myself. His story is consistent, and I see no reason to doubt it.\"\n\nJameson's face was suddenly inches from Gallagher's. \"Reveal this constable, sir. I require a name.\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" Gallagher began.\n\nMaynard interrupted, \"Don't set the piece for print just yet, Randolph. Please close the door on your way out, would you? There's a good chap.\"\n\nGallagher glared at Jameson, but said nothing. He turned and strode out of the room, closing the door none too gently.\n\nMaynard cleared his throat. \"Would you please explain what this is all about?\"\n\n\"There's a conspiracy, Mister Maynard,\" Harry said calmly, \"that we suspect may have worked its way to high levels of this country's government. Until we know who is involved, we have to be extremely careful. If you print this story, you'll be informing the conspirators that we're aware of them. It may very well provoke them into taking action that we're not prepared for.\"\n\n\"Such as what?\"\n\n\"There's a possibility that the Home Office may be involved. If that's the case, this story may bring Jameson's involvement to their attention, and that would not be a good thing. More importantly, and quite likely in my opinion, officials within the War Office may be a part of the conspiracy, and if that's the case, you'd be tipping them off that their plans may be under threat. I don't know how they might react to that, but there's a good chance that they'll do what they can to accelerate their schedule.\"\n\n\"Not to put too fine a point on it,\" said Jameson, \"but printing the story may very well be aiding an enemy of the Empire.\"\n\n\"Are you planning to have me arrested, Inspector?\" said Maynard.\n\n\"You misunderstand me, sir. I'm simply asking you to consider the interests of your country.\"\n\nMaynard sighed, and faced Gunn. \"You do realise, don't you, that if I suppress the story, Gallagher's quite likely to sell it to another newspaper?\"\n\n\"Would he do that?\" asked Gunn, surprised.\n\n\"It would result in his firing, and he knows it, but that won't stop him if he thinks it would get him a desk at one of our rivals. That's immaterial, though. It would be too late. The story would be out.\"\n\n\"Then let me deal with Mister Gallagher\u2014and see about this witness,\" said Jameson, and Gunn could see that he was seething as he stepped out of the office and closed the door.\n\nGunn turned back to Maynard. \"I can offer you something in return for holding back,\" he said in a conciliatory tone. \"When this is all over\u2014assuming we succeed in stopping these people\u2014you'll have an absolute corker of a story to print, and it will be exclusive to the Tribune.\"\n\nMaynard looked from Gunn to Harry and back, rubbing his chin. Gunn could almost hear the sound of money being counted.\n\n\"What do you say, Mister Maynard?\" said Harry. \"Can we count on your support?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I'll hold back the story, and not only that, I'm going to have a quiet word with some of the other newspaper editors I know.\" Harry stiffened. \"Don't worry,\" said Maynard quickly, \"I won't tell them anything about this. Just a few general things, in the interests of the Empire, you understand. Trust me. In return, the Tribune gets your story.\"\n\n\"With my by-line,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"As you say. Your by-line.\"\n\nHarry returned to Gunn's flat the next morning.\n\n\"I'm sure that Pendragon is done gathering mat\u00e9riel. His next step will be to attack the European countries, to destroy their technical resources.\"\n\n\"How can we stop that?\" asked Sophie. \"How would we even know where to start?\"\n\nHarry shrugged. \"I don't believe we can. This is beyond the limited abilities of three ordinary people. All we might do is warn them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we could try to find out where Pendragon keeps his airship,\" she suggested.\n\nHarry sighed. \"I've tried. It's military grade, so the first places to look would be the air service stations. But there are hundreds of them\u2014it would take months.\"\n\nSophie gave a Mona Lisa smile. \"Don't underestimate what we can do, Harry. But,\" she continued, precluding any questions, \"you were talking about warning Europe. How might we do that?\"\n\n\"We could visit the embassies and consulates, tell them what we know. And hope, for their sakes, that they take heed.\"\n\nGunn nodded. \"There may not be much time. We should start right away, with the French embassy.\"\n\n\"You two can manage,\" said Sophie with her enigmatic smile. \"I have other things to be getting on with.\"\n\nThe French Embassy looked like a ch\u00e2teau that had been lifted bodily from an estate in Bordeaux, and dropped in Knightsbridge. \"Beautiful, isn't it?\" said Harry.\n\nDespite the seriousness of their endeavours, Gunn found himself in good spirits. The pains in his arm had faded to a point where he could ignore them for the most part, which cheered him immensely.\n\nBut Jameson's warning to Gallagher lifted his spirits further still. If so much as a whisper of the Pendragon affair appeared in print, Gallagher would find himself in a cell in the darkest corner of Scotland Yard's basement. It was an empty threat\u2014Jameson could do no such thing without advertising his involvement\u2014but Gallagher hadn't known that, and caved in so quickly that, as Jameson had said, the furniture should have been sucked into the implosion. Gunn couldn't help but laugh as he recounted the story.\n\nThey proceeded into the embassy's foyer, and the young man sitting behind the reception desk nodded in greeting. \"Good morning, gentlemen. How may I help you?\"\n\nGunn opened his mouth to speak, but was forestalled when Harry spouted forth a stream of French, of which Gunn understood not a single word. The receptionist smiled, gave a similarly unintelligible reply, then pressed a button on a wood and metal console at one side of his desk.\n\nHarry smiled and gave a little bow. \"The gentleman here has called for someone to come and collect us, and asked us to take a seat while we wait.\"\n\nGunn led the way to a row of wooden armchairs set against a nearby wall.\n\n\"He said it may take a little while. I rather suspect our business is not the kind of thing they deal with often.\"\n\nGunn knew how slowly the wheels turned in these places, and settled in for a long wait.\n\nAlmost two hours had passed when a young man descended the marble staircase behind the receptionist's desk, and approached them. \"Monsieur Lambert apologises for keeping you waiting,\" he said in a strong French accent. \"This way, if you please, gentlemen.\" He gestured toward the stairs.\n\nGunn and Harry followed the young man up two floors, along a corridor, past elaborate alabaster carvings, and several dark, polished wooden doors with brass handles. Finally, he stopped at one of the doors. \"Please,\" he said, stepping aside to let Harry and Gunn enter first.\n\nThe room was furnished in an opulent style, with a heavy-looking desk near the windows, and matching chairs along every wall. In the centre of the room, a coffee table surrounded by padded leather armchairs rested on a thick red and gold pile rug.\n\nA man of about thirty stood behind the desk, and waved a hand at the chairs facing him. \"Please, sit,\" he said. \"I am Pierre Lambert, secretary to the Ambassador. What is it that I can do for you today?\"\n\nHarry cleared his throat, \"I believe the question is, rather, what can we do for you? Or to be more accurate, what can we do for your great country?\"\n\nLambert frowned slightly. \"Really, Mister\u2014\"\n\n\"Doctor Bohemia.\"\n\n\"Doctor Bohemia. Before you say anything more, I must point out that many people come here attempting to sell us information, or inventions, or equipment and machinery of all kinds. If that is what you intend\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Monsieur Lambert. We have information for you, that is true, but we do not expect any kind of payment.\"\n\n\"What kind of information?\" Lambert asked doubtfully, still frowning.\n\nHarry and Gunn explained Pendragon's plan to destroy the technological capabilities of the European countries. \"We believe the assault will begin with an imminent attack on France,\" Harry concluded.\n\n\"Have you spoken to your police, or the British Foreign Office?\"\n\nGunn answered. \"We have reason to believe that Pendragon is aided by people in the British government. We have no idea how many people are involved, or who they might be, but we can't risk this information falling into the wrong hands.\"\n\nLambert looked from Gunn to Bohemia and back in derision. \"I am not inclined to waste the ambassador's time with such an improbable story. Nevertheless, there are procedures that I am obliged to adhere to, and so I must inform him. However, I will be making my opinion of this matter very clear. Someone will show you out.\"\n\nWebster parked his carriage at the curb and began to follow the two men. He felt uncomfortable doing so in broad daylight. Gunn's friend had a habit of looking over his shoulder every few steps, so Webster had to stay farther back than he would have liked.\n\nThe daytime foot traffic helped with concealment, but also increased the risk that he would lose Gunn and the other man in the crowd. He crossed to the other side of the street, hoping it would decrease his chances of being identified.\n\nGunn and his companion walked through the main gate of the French embassy, and into the building. Webster sighed. He couldn't follow without being seen. Still, he thought, there was only one way in\u2014and out\u2014for visitors. Gunn and his friend would have to leave by the same door. Sooner or later they would part, and Webster could follow Gunn's friend to wherever the man called home. He was as good as certain he'd know the man's identity before the end of the day.\n\nWebster looked up at the cloudy sky, and sniffed. More snow was on the way\u2014he felt it in his bones. He looked back at the embassy gates and decided to move his carriage closer. At the very least, he could stay warm and dry while he waited.\n\n\"That couldn't have gone much worse,\" said Gunn, as they left the French embassy. He looked at the building with disdain as they made their way back to Harry's steam carriage.\n\n\"We shouldn't be surprised at these bureaucratic types. They're mostly just clerks and middlemen, and don't have the authority to make decisions. Our warnings will go through their paper channels, and when the people with the power become aware of what's happening, well, then, perhaps we'll see something done.\"\n\nGunn began to realise just how much worse the interview could have gone later that afternoon when they presented themselves at the Spanish embassy. There, a receptionist listened politely to what they had to say, then pressed a button on his desk. Two uniformed, armed men appeared. They insisted that Gunn and Harry leave the building immediately.\n\nThey proceeded to the German embassy, where an official listened to their story, then asked them to wait. A few minutes later he returned with a sheaf of papers\u2014forms\u2014which he asked them to complete. \"These will be processed by our administrative department, and they will contact you,\" said the official. \"You may call if you do not receive a response within four weeks.\" Harry gave Gunn a look of complete bewilderment. Gunn shrugged his shoulders, and filled out the forms.\n\n\"It's getting late,\" said Harry. \"I suspect the embassies will be closing their doors soon.\"\n\nGunn felt somewhat relieved. It had been a difficult day, and he wanted nothing more than to go home and enjoy Sophie's company.\n\n\"Let's continue this in the morning, then.\"\n\nHe arrived home to find the flat empty, and a note on the mantelpiece.\n\nConnie,\n\nI've left you some things on the stove to warm up for supper. I'll be back by tomorrow evening. I'll explain when I get home. I love you.\n\n[ Sophie ]\n\nGunn's spirits sank further. Whatever Sophie was up to must have had something to do with her inscrutable comment that morning. He wished she'd at least mentioned where she was going; if she got into some kind of trouble, he'd be unable to help. He hoped above all, that she would be safe.\n\nWebster followed the two men from embassy to embassy, then it became plain they were headed back to Gunn's flat. He took an illegal short cut across a narrow footbridge, almost flattening a pedestrian, and was waiting in the shadows when Gunn and his friend arrived at Gunn's home.\n\nWebster was ready. He had stocked his buggy with water and fuel, and stoked its boiler to maximum pressure. He deliberately left his acetylene lamps unlit to avoid revealing his presence. He would not be outrun this time.\n\nGunn went into the flat, and the carriage moved away from the curb. The forecasted snow hadn't yet begun, and the air was clear; Webster allowed the carriage to gain some distance before he released the brake and pushed the pedals. He stayed well back as the carriage trundled on, the driver seemingly unaware of his follower. The plan seemed to be working.\n\nFifteen minutes later, Webster still trailed the other man's vehicle, which moved along at an unhurried pace. Webster was certain he hadn't been seen, and felt that the destination must be near.\n\nThe road ahead curved under an old stone bridge, which carried a minor railway line over the road. The carriage was about to pass under the bridge when it turned sharply to the left and accelerated up a maintenance ramp that led to the train tracks.\n\nDamn, thought Webster. He must have been spotted, after all. He pressed the pedal hard, and turned the buggy up the ramp to follow.\n\nThere was no sign of the carriage anywhere. Webster halted and jumped out, looking along the lines in both directions, even checking over the sides of the bridge. There was no ramp on the other side\u2014no place for the carriage to have gone, other than back down the ramp Webster had just come up, or along the tracks.\n\nWebster climbed back into the buggy, defeated. He began to wonder if Gunn's friend had the power to make himself invisible.\n\nHarry appeared at Gunn's door the next morning. \"Are you ready? I suggest we start with the Italians. Let's hope they're more receptive than the others have been.\"\n\nAs they approached the main gates, Harry raised an eyebrow at something ahead. \"What's going on here?\"\n\nHalf a dozen police constables milled around, stopping people and apparently asking for identification before allowing them onto the embassy grounds. \"That's unusual.\"\n\nHarry drew the vehicle to a halt at the curb. Gunn made to step out, when Harry put a hand on his arm. \"I don't like the look of this, Gunn. Perhaps it's nothing, but we should be ready for anything.\"\n\nGunn agreed; the situation looked suspicious, and he couldn't help thinking it had something to do with him and Harry. For an instant, he considered turning away\u2014but he was curious. And, there was probably nothing to worry about; Harry was just acting his normal paranoid self. They climbed out of the carriage and approached the constables.\n\n\"Good morning, sir. May I see some identification, please?\"\n\nGunn presented his press card. \"What's happened?\"\n\nThe constable ignored Gunn's question, and instead turned to the sergeant by the gatepost. Gunn's stomach knotted. Something was wrong. \"Sergeant Logan?\" said the constable, and the officer walked over to them. The constable passed him Gunn's press card.\n\nGunn looked at Harry, who talked with another policeman a few yards away. Harry wrung his hands, plainly anxious. Trouble was brewing.\n\nSergeant Logan looked up at Gunn. \"Would you come this way, please, sir?\" he asked.\n\nGunn stood firm, and crossed his arms. \"Before I do that, I'd like to know why, please.\"\n\n\"Now, now, sir. We wouldn't want to make a fuss.\"\n\n\"No, we wouldn't,\" he said stubbornly. He turned away from Logan. \"Harry?\" he said loudly. \"We're leaving.\" Harry abruptly walked away from the policeman he'd been talking to.\n\nGunn felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Sergeant Logan. \"I have orders\u2014\"\n\n\"Am I under arrest?\" Gunn interrupted.\n\n\"Yes, sir. Please come with me.\"\n\n\"On what charge?\"\n\n\"All in good time.\" The hair at the back of Gunn's neck prickled. Logan looked at Harry. \"That includes you.\"\n\nGunn saw Harry tense, as if he was about to make a run for it\u2014and he was tempted to do the same. But these were the police, and running would only make things much worse. \"Breathe, Harry,\" he said calmly. Harry's eyes flickered in Gunn's direction nervously, then he relaxed, very slightly.\n\n\"This way, gentlemen, if you please,\" said Logan. The nearby constables moved to escort them.\n\nHarry glanced at Gunn, his face white as paper. \"These policemen are Pendragon's pawns, Gunn,\" he whispered tremulously.\n\nThey followed the sergeant past Harry's carriage to a black police steam wagon. Logan opened the rear doors. \"Inside,\" he said brusquely.\n\nGunn halted. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"To the station in Knightsbridge.\"\n\n\"And what are you planning to do when we get there?\" asked Harry. Gunn saw sweat beading on his brow.\n\n\"You'll be charged.\"\n\nHarry lifted a shaking hand to wipe his face. What has Pendragon done to you? Gunn wondered\u2014and suddenly Harry twisted to one side and stepped forward, as if to bolt.\n\nLogan grabbed Harry's upper arm firmly, a smug grin on his face. \"I can add resisting arrest to the charges, if you like.\"\n\nHarry looked around in a panic. The constables stood behind them in a semicircle, stone-faced, penning them in. Reluctantly, he climbed the steps into the wagon. Gunn turned and gave Logan a scornful look, then followed Harry inside. The sergeant closed the doors behind them with a solid metallic click.\n\nThe wagon lurched away from the curb with a hiss of steam, shuddering as it bumped along the street.\n\nGunn was certain that they were in serious trouble, but he didn't dare say a word to Harry\u2014the man seemed too close to breaking point, as it was. \"Harry, calm down.\" Harry turned to him, eyes wide. \"Logan may be working for the enemy, but he has to pretend to be a proper copper in front of the others. He can't hurt us.\"\n\nHarry took a deep breath, then blew it out, and Gunn thought he looked a little calmer. \"Yes, of course. But we must keep our wits, if we hope to get out of this.\"\n\nGunn hoped what he'd just told Harry was true.\n\nThe wagon continued on its way, then Gunn felt it slow and stop. The doors opened, and Logan led them into the police station. \"These men are under arrest, on a charge of sedition,\" Logan announced to the desk sergeant.\n\n\"Sedition?\" said Gunn. \"What the devil do you mean?\"\n\nLogan turned to him. \"The French ambassador has made a complaint against you. You were at their embassy yesterday, stirring up trouble?\"\n\nGunn fumed.\n\nLogan continued, his eyes fixed on Gunn's. \"And put 'em both down for resisting arrest, too. We all saw the fight they put up, didn't we, lads?\"\n\nGunn heard murmurs of agreement from the other constables and clenched his fists, speechless with anger.\n\nLogan gestured at the constables behind Gunn and Harry, and suddenly they converged on him, grabbing his wrists firmly.\n\n\"Hey!\" he yelled, but it did no good. He and Harry were frog-marched toward a solid metal door. Gunn tripped, landing hard on one knee. The officer behind him yanked him roughly to his feet, and he saw Harry staring open-mouthed at the arrest papers lying on the sergeant's desk. Gunn glanced at them, then his eyes widened with shock: R. Jameson, Inspector.\n\nThe cell had a single bunk and, Gunn noted with distaste, a bucket in a corner intended to serve as a toilet. The door was solid metal, apart from a slot through which food trays could be delivered.\n\nHarry sat on the bunk, red-faced and breathless. \"I warned you. I told you there was something wrong. And you walked us right into a trap!\"\n\nGunn knew Harry was right\u2014but what was done was done. \"Take it easy, Harry. We're in a police station, and Pendragon can't have every copper in the building working for him. I told you\u2014he can't do anything to us while we're here.\"\n\n\"Precisely. So he'll come for us soon. Then we're done for.\"\n\nGunn raised an eyebrow. \"I thought you said you'd been in worse situations.\"\n\n\"Pendragon's tried to kill me before, yes.\"\n\n\"And you lived through it. That shows you're smarter than him\u2014don't forget that. Keep your wits, Harry. We'll get through this.\" Strangely, Gunn found the words comforted him, too.\n\nHarry looked up, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Nothing was said for several minutes, as Harry calmed himself. \"Your friend Jameson's behind this.\"\n\nGunn paced the cell. \"I don't believe it. Not Jameson.\"\n\n\"He must be involved. We both saw his name on that paperwork. It can only mean that he's working for Pendragon. Nothing else makes sense.\"\n\nGunn sat down next to him. \"Perhaps it's just chance. Perhaps the commissioner needed someone to execute the warrants, and picked Jameson at random.\"\n\n\"Logan was the one dispatched to find us at the embassy, so he must have been the one given the warrants. You know as well as I do that if everything here was ship shape, Logan's name would have been on that paperwork\u2014not Jameson's.\"\n\nGunn drummed his fingers on the bed, frustrated. \"Then there's something we're missing. I've known Jameson a long time. He's a good copper and an honourable man. You know the Queen pinned a medal on him? For stopping the same kind of conspiracy that we're up against right now, no less. No\u2014Jameson wouldn't be party to something like this.\"\n\nHarry sighed in defeat\u2014which made Gunn want to grab him by the shoulders and shake some fight back into him\u2014and said, \"People change. I should know. Circumstances change them, or disillusionment, or any of a dozen other things. Look at the facts, man. One way or another, Jameson must be involved.\"\n\n\"You're wrong. When we get out of here, I'll prove it to you.\" Gunn punched the hard, thin mattress. Jameson could not be their enemy.\n\nThey sat in silence. Gunn was grateful for the respite. Harry had raised doubts in his mind\u2014doubts about a man he'd called a friend for a long time\u2014and that made him uncomfortable, and more than a little angry.\n\nAnger wasn't going to get them out of a locked cell, though. He needed a clear head. He took a few deep breaths, and rubbed at the knotted, tense muscles in his neck.\n\n\"Do you suppose the commissioner has something to do with Pendragon?\" he said after a while.\n\n\"Possibly, but given the circumstances, with a foreign ambassador making a complaint, I'd say that he's acted as anyone might expect.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought you'd say.\" Gunn sat heavily on the metal bunk, and a horrifying thought came to him. \"Ye Gods\u2014what will Sophie do when she gets home and we're not there? What if she calls Jameson for help?\"\n\n\"Now who's losing their wits? There's time. As you said, we'll get out of this, and we'll make sure your wife is safe and sound.\"\n\nHours passed. Gunn sat on the floor in the corner of the cell, allowing Harry to sleep on the bunk for a time, then they traded places so Gunn could rest. He tried to come up with ways to get out of the cell, but it was a futile effort\u2014the smell from the bucket turned Gunn's stomach and made it hard to think.\n\nAccording to Gunn's timepiece, he and Harry had been in the cell for almost ten hours when he heard a sound outside the door. As he moved toward it, the slot opened and a tray with two bowls of soup, bread, and cups of water slid in. Gunn took the tray, the slot closed, and the footsteps faded away. Only when silence returned did it occur to him that he should have asked to have the bucket emptied.\n\nJameson looked both ways along the street. It was dusk, and he saw a gasman some way off, using his spark pole to light one of the street's gas lamps. There was nobody else around.\n\nHe turned to an ordinary-looking wooden door set into the brick wall, and took a shiny brass key from his pocket. The key slid smoothly into the lock and opened it with the faintest click. Jameson took one more glance along the street, then slipped inside.\n\nHe stood on the metal catwalk that ran around the interior of the roofless building; above him, the last red rays of the setting sun lit up the clouds.\n\nHe looked over the railing into the black pit below. Jameson found it rather like being inside a brick chimney. The truth wasn't too different; he was inside one of the vents that carried fresh air down into the tunnels of the city's underground railway system.\n\nHe started down the stairs that spiralled down the inside of the vent. After only a few dozen paces, the darkness overwhelmed him, and he had to feel his way, using the handrail as a guide in the dark. He could see neither the steps nor his feet.\n\nA hundred or so feet below street level, the stairs ended at an open maintenance door. Light shone through from the other side. He went through, and into The Void\u2014that's what the workers who had dug the railway tunnel named it. It was a natural cave\u2014a fissure thirty feet wide, and several hundred feet long, which began with a solid rock ceiling twenty feet above Jameson's head, and extended below him, deep into the city's bedrock. He could hear the splash of running water, echoing from somewhere in the blackness.\n\nTo his right, along a makeshift wooden platform, was the end of the railway tunnel\u2014the tunnel that the digging teams had abandoned, when they'd bored their way into The Void. Light came from a couple of dusty gaslights mounted on the walls, left lit for the workmen who maintained the air pumps.\n\nThe designers had chosen another route for the railway, and made use of this one for ventilation. The existence of The Void had been kept quiet. Nobody wanted the people who lived in the houses above to find out that they were living above a huge, empty space.\n\nChristie found The Void the perfect place to hold clandestine meetings. Jameson couldn't fathom why the man didn't just book a private room in a pub, or somewhere a little more civilised, where they could have their discussions in more comfortable surroundings. The man could be insufferably melodramatic at times.\n\nChristie was late, and Jameson wished that he would hurry along. He was hungry and tired, and wanted to get this over with so he could go home. And, if he was frank with himself, The Void gave him the willies. The place was a tomb, quite literally; a man had died down there in the dark\u2014fallen to his end, along with the digging machine that had broken through rock only to find air. The poor man's body had never been recovered.\n\nJameson heard footsteps behind him, and turned to see Christie. \"About time.\"\n\nChristie ignored the comment. \"I have orders for you.\"\n\n\"Orders?\" Jameson snapped. Who on earth does he think he's talking to?\n\n\"Yes, orders. From the Management.\"\n\nJameson was tempted, yet again, to ask who the Management were, but he knew it would be pointless. The organisation worked in small units\u2014each person knew only two or three other members. Even Christie probably had no clue who the people at the very top were.\n\n\"Thanks to you, we finally have Doctor Bohemia, along with the journalist who's been reporting our activities in the gutter press. Your orders,\"\u2014Christie sneered as he accentuated the word\u2014\"are to take them to our facility at the docks, and get rid of them\u2014permanently. And you're to dispose of the reporter's wife, too. It seems she's been getting herself involved, instead of staying at home where she belongs. Understood?\"\n\nJameson's stomach turned over. Murder? Now they want me to commit murder?\n\n\"Is there a problem, Jameson?\"\n\nHe emboldened himself. \"Yes, Christie, there is a problem. You've been after Bohemia all this time, and now you've got him, you don't want to question him or this reporter? Don't you want to find out what they know, or who they might have told? On top of which you want to draw attention by going after the daughter of a famous general. Are you mad, or just plain stupid?\"\n\nChristie's face went red, and he snarled, \"Mind your tongue! We're here to follow orders, not to question policy.\"\n\nAnd look where it's getting us, Jameson thought.\n\nChristie fixed him with a steady gaze. \"We\u2014and that includes you, Jameson\u2014have had enough trouble from Bohemia. He's gotten away from us too many times in the past, and for all you know, he's working on escaping as we speak. The Management has had a belly full of him. Get rid of him and his associates.\"\n\nJameson shrugged to cover his torment. \"You can tell Management my objections, then. When do they want this done?\"\n\n\"As soon as you can. The Management wants them gone before morning.\"\n\nJameson nodded. Christie walked away, then stopped and turned back to Jameson.\n\n\"The Management are most appreciative of your efforts in apprehending Bohemia. But if you want to stay in their good books, I strongly suggest that you don't question them again.\"\n\nSophie arrived home to an empty house. She assumed Connie was with Harry, trying to persuade the Europeans, and made dinner, expecting that he wouldn't be long. Two hours later, she flung the ruined food into the bin, angry at her husband for being so late without letting her know where he was. She went to bed.\n\nAt two in the morning, too angry to sleep, she got out of bed and sat in the parlour. She'd have some harsh words for him, whenever he dared to show his face.\n\nBy four o'clock, she was curled up on the sofa, chewing her fingernails with worry. She was certain that something bad had happened. She considered sending a message to Inspector Jameson, but she knew he wouldn't be at Scotland Yard at that early hour. She paced up and down the little parlour. She wanted to go out and search for Connie, but had no idea of where to begin, and in any case, it was just as likely that he'd return, or send a message, while she was gone. She wanted desperately to do something, but felt there was nothing she could do.\n\nThere was a firm tapping at the door, and she almost jumped out of her skin. She hurried to the door and opened it. Jameson stood there in the lightly falling snow, and she craned her neck to look past him, expecting to see Connie. He wasn't there, and her heart missed a beat\u2014Jameson was there with bad news, she was sure of it.\n\nShe fought the impulse to shake answers out of him. \"Where's Connie? What's happened?\"\n\n\"He's fine. Perfectly safe. I'm here to take you to him. Have you got some warm clothes?\"\n\nSophie's breath caught in her throat. \"Why? Why can't he come home?\"\n\nJameson shook his head. \"It'd save time if I explain on the way.\" He turned slightly, and stepped back, as if expecting her to walk out into the street.\n\nSophie's head whirled with questions, but it was plain that Connie was in some kind of trouble. \"I'll change,\" she said, and left Jameson standing outside while she dashed to her dressing room and threw on the clothes that she'd used during their nighttime vigils. A few minutes later, she followed Jameson to his steam carriage.\n\nThe carriage moved off down the street, into the snow and the darkness.\n\nA faint sound woke Gunn. He lay on the floor, and had no memory of falling asleep. He strained to hear again the sound that had woken him. Harry was asleep on the bunk, breathing softly. Gunn looked at his timepiece; it was just after five in the morning.\n\nThe sound came again\u2014footsteps. He stood quickly, and shook Harry's shoulder gently.\n\n\"What\u2014\"\n\n\"Wake up, Harry. I think they're coming for us.\"\n\nHarry came to instantly, and sat up. Gunn went to the door and half-crouched beside it, ready to take advantage of any chance to escape. He heard the sound of a key being inserted into the lock, and the door swung open.\n\nJameson stood in the doorway. \"There's not much time. Come with me.\" He turned, not waiting for them to follow. Before he could take a step, Harry reached forward and grabbed his collar, yanking him back into the cell. He slammed Jameson against the wall, an arm across his throat.\n\nHarry's face was an inch from Jameson's. \"Are you working for Pendragon?\" he hissed. He pressed Jameson harder against the wall. \"Answer me!\"\n\nGunn, taken aback by Harry's reaction, reached out with his good hand to pull him away\u2014then stopped. He wanted Jameson's answer. \"Why was your name on the arrest papers, Jameson?\" he asked mildly.\n\nJameson gasped, unable to breathe. Harry let go, and Jameson stumbled forward, holding his throat with one hand and steadying himself against the wall with the other. He coughed, then looked at Gunn. \"It would take too long to explain, Gunn. Time you don't have.\" He coughed again, then straightened, and stepped toward the door.\n\nHarry was right, thought Gunn. Jameson is working for the enemy. \"Where are you taking us?\"\n\n\"To be with your wife.\"\n\nThey had no other choice but to stay in the cell, so they followed Jameson up the stairs and along a corridor to a solid looking door, which opened onto a dark alleyway at the rear of the station. Outside, snow fell heavily.\n\nJameson hurried to a carriage parked in the alleyway, and jumped into the driving seat.\n\nGunn took a step, then stopped when he felt Harry's hand on his elbow. Harry leaned forward and spoke in a low voice. \"I don't like this, Gunn. How do we know he's not planning to kill us?\"\n\n\"We don't. But if he is, then Sophie's in danger, too, and I'm not going to let anything happen to her. If he tries anything, I'll be ready.\"\n\n\"Then so shall I.\"\n\nGunn and Harry climbed into the rear seats, and the vehicle began to move.\n\n\"Where's Sophie?\" demanded Gunn.\n\n\"Not far from here,\" said Jameson shortly, \"and perfectly safe.\"\n\nGunn looked out of the window as the carriage sped along alleyways and back streets, but he was unable to see through the snowfall. Very soon, he was completely lost.\n\nTwenty minutes later, they had arrived in a street with market stalls three deep on both sides. The gaslights here burned brightly, and market porters dashed in all directions, pushing handcarts loaded with vegetables and fruit. Gunn recognised the place; they were in Covent Garden.\n\nJameson stopped the carriage at the curb and jumped out, and Gunn and Harry followed suit. If Jameson was planning to kill them, Gunn thought, he would have picked a more secluded place. \"Why are we here, Jameson?\"\n\nJameson didn't answer\u2014his eyes flicked wildly around the market. Then he looked at Gunn. \"Take Sophie, and get out of the city.\"\n\nGunn grabbed of Jameson's lapels. \"Where is she?\"\n\n\"Here, somewhere. I told her to stay hidden and watch out for you.\"\n\nGunn felt a glimmer of hope; Sophie was nearby\u2014if Jameson wasn't betraying them again.\n\n\"Where?\" he shouted into Jameson's face.\n\n\"I told you. Here. I can't help find her\u2014I don't have time.\" He forced Gunn's hands from his clothes, and stepped back. \"The people who arranged your arrest will be looking for you as soon as they realise you've gotten away.\"\n\n\"Who would that be?\"\n\n\"Someone high up. That's all I know. I have to go.\"\n\nJameson moved, but Gunn put his hand on his chest to stop him. \"Why are you helping us now?\"\n\nJameson hesitated, then shook his head. \"I'm trying to prevent a terrible mistake from being made.\" He climbed back into the carriage, and drove off.\n\nIt was bedlam. Market porters\u2014seemingly hundreds of them\u2014pushed barrows of vegetables in all directions, steering around Gunn and Harry as they rushed hither and thither. Customers haggled with salesmen, adding to the general din. Light from the gas lamps was swallowed by the falling snow, doing little to dispel the pre-dawn darkness.\n\nGunn whirled around, looking for any sign of Sophie, with no clear idea of where to even begin. He knew the market covered several acres; she could be anywhere.\n\n\"Jameson's running scared,\" said Harry. \"We should assume he was followed. We need to get away from here\u2014but how are we to find your wife in all this?\"\n\nSophie's voice came from a few feet behind them. \"It's all a matter of having the correct technology at your disposal, Harry.\"\n\nGunn spun around. Sophie wore her cap, heavy jacket and trousers, and as she walked toward Gunn she slipped off the goggles that had made it possible for her to see him and Harry through the gloom. A burst of emotion welled up inside Gunn. He rushed forward and hugged her, then kissed her on the cheek. \"Are you all right, dear?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'm perfectly well,\" she said, smiling. Harry came up behind them, and put his arms round their shoulders, smiling. Sophie laughed, then pushed them away. \"We're attracting attention.\"\n\nGunn looked around and, sure enough, a number of passers-by were frowning at Gunn and Harry apparently hugging a young boy. They separated.\n\n\"Wherever have you been?\" Gunn asked\n\n\"To see Dad,\" Sophie responded. Gunn cocked an eyebrow. \"We'll talk about it later.\"\n\n\"What about Jameson? Did he hurt you?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. But he told me some things.\" She looked around the market. \"We shouldn't talk here, though.\"\n\n\"You're right. We'd better move on.\"\n\n\"Yes, but where?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"I suggest we do as Jameson said\u2014leave the city,\" said Harry.\n\n\"Actually, I think we'd better get out of the country, and we'd better make it quick,\" said Gunn. Harry and Sophie looked at him, curious. He jerked his thumb at a nearby news board emblazoned with the latest headline straight off the wires." + }, + { + "title": "JOURNALIST AND SCIENTIST WANTED FOR TREASON", + "text": "[ Police Instigate Nationwide Search ]\n\n\"Oh, dear Lord,\" said Sophie. Then she frowned. \"Wait a moment. If you were arrested, why are they still looking for you?\"\n\n\"Because our arrest was something less than official,\" said Harry. He glanced again at the board. \"This changes things.\"\n\n\"It certainly does,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"Where would we go?\" said Sophie.\n\nGunn looked at Harry. \"Paris?\"\n\nHarry rubbed his chin. \"France is but a hop across the channel. Paris would be the obvious first target for Pendragon. You're planning on trying to stop him?\"\n\n\"Someone has to, and it's obvious we can't trust the police to do the job. We'll need a vehicle, but no doubt yours has been impounded, Harry.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" said Harry, frowning. Then he beamed as an idea struck him. \"But you underestimate me. Did you think that was the only transport I have at my disposal?\"\n\nWebster looked closely at the fake warrant card, and shook his head. He was about to try something that had very little chance of success, and every chance of getting him into a great deal of trouble. If things went wrong, he'd be on his own\u2014he wouldn't be able to risk exposing his employer by calling for help.\n\nHe put his hand into the pocket and felt the smooth metal of a brass cylinder, careful not to press the button on the end, and slipped the warrant card into his wallet. Then he took a deep breath, and walked calmly up the steps and into the police station.\n\n\"Wright's the name,\" said Webster, flashing the warrant card just long enough for the desk sergeant to get a glimpse, \"Detective Constable Wright. I'm looking for two men who were arrested yesterday outside the Italian embassy.\"\n\n\"Oh, those two,\" said the officer. \"I was here when they were brought in. Cornelius Gunn and Harry Bohemia\u2014you don't forget names like that easily.\" Webster barely managed to mask his elation. At last, he could put a name to Gunn's friend.\n\nThe officer rummaged through a filing drawer behind the desk. \"That's funny. The charge sheets were right here. Hang on for a tick.\" He stood and went through the door behind him.\n\nWebster waited. A minute passed, then another. Then the officer returned, scratching his head. \"I'm sorry, sir, but nobody knows where the paperwork's gone. And I know for a fact that they were taken down to the cells, but they're not there, and there's nothing about that in the logbook.\"\n\n\"So you're saying that there's nothing to say they were ever here,\" said Webster. The officer nodded, running his fingers through his hair.\n\nWebster's mind raced. Someone had spirited Gunn and his friend Bohemia away, and made the paperwork vanish. That someone could only be a police officer\u2014no one else would have that kind of access to the charge sheets or the lockup log. What was the purpose? To save them from the police? Or to deliver them to someone else?\n\nA second officer came through a door behind the desk, and looked Webster in the eye. \"Wright? Detective Constable Wright?\"\n\n\"That's me.\" Webster tensed. Things were about to go down the toilet.\n\n\"I just looked you up on our machine. What's an officer from Surbiton doing all the way down here, asking questions about people he has no business with?\"\n\nTime to leave, thought Webster. He turned on his heel and walked quickly toward the door.\n\n\"Oi!\" the officer shouted, and Webster quickened his pace. He heard footsteps behind him. He slipped his hand into his pocket and took hold of the brass cylinder. In one smooth motion, he pulled it out, pressed the button on the end, and dropped it into a large wire waste-paper basket by the exit. He walked out of the building without slowing his pace.\n\nHe counted under his breath. \"Three . . . two . . . one . . .\"\n\nHe glanced over his shoulder as the smoke grenade detonated with a thump. The officer and the desk sergeant doubled over in fits of coughing on the top step, as smoke assailed their eyes and lungs.\n\nWebster grinned and kept walking. A small crowd of onlookers formed, watching the spectacle. A moment later, he melted into the throng.\n\nJameson returned to The Void and waited for Christie. He felt good, despite being up all night. He'd done what he could for Gunn and Sophie, and for once, he'd been the one to demand a meeting in this awful place. He smiled at the thought of Christie having to drag himself out of his bed before the sun was up.\n\nHe heard footsteps from the direction of the stairs, and looked up. Christie was there\u2014with a tall, thin man he didn't recognize.\n\n\"Who's this?\"\n\nChristie placed a hand on the other man's shoulder. \"This is Proctor, our airship commander.\"\n\n\"You're Jameson?\" said Proctor.\n\n\"I am he.\"\n\n\"So you're the one I have to thank for the advance warning. Because of that, our last expedition was most successful.\"\n\nJameson's temper flared. \"Because of that, a good man is dead. You'd do as well to remember that.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" said Christie in a firm voice. \"Why did you call us here, Jameson?\"\n\n\"Gunn and Bohemia have escaped.\" Jameson suppressed a smile.\n\nChristie's face twisted with anger. \"Damn it! I warned you about him! How in hell did he slip away this time?\"\n\n\"They appear to have had an accomplice. Probably went into the station by the back door, and let them out.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea where they might have gone?\"\n\nJameson shrugged. \"My guess would be that they've left the city by now.\"\n\n\"What about the woman?\"\n\n\"There's been no sign of her. She left London the day before yesterday, and hasn't been seen since.\"\n\nChristie made a fist of his right hand, and slammed it into his left. \"I'll have to inform Management.\"\n\n\"Police forces up and down the country are watching for them. If you want to catch them before they do, you'd better tell Management to get more men on this.\"\n\nChristie's face darkened. \"Who's in charge here, Jameson?\"\n\n\"I'm beginning to wonder,\" said Jameson coolly.\n\nProctor spoke. \"Gunn and Bohemia are no longer of consequence. The plans have been drawn up, and the timetable set. The operation is already in motion. Any that resist will be crushed when our great endeavour rolls over them.\"\n\nJameson looked at Proctor, and a feeling of dismay welled up inside him. He recognized those words. It was the voice of the fanatic.\n\nJameson knew a thing or two about fanatics. He'd arrested a ring of them once, and those arrests had made him famous. And if there was one thing he knew very well, it was that fanatics tended to do whatever they thought their cause demanded, no matter the cost\u2014even to their own comrades. That made them unpredictable and dangerous.\n\nAnd they put this maniac in charge of the airship. Jameson shuddered.\n\nChristie interrupted his thoughts. \"I'll alert Management to get people on the search. Proctor, you get back to the hangar and make preparations for the next phase.\" He looked to Jameson. \"You'd better make sure our people find Gunn and Bohemia before someone else does.\" He stalked off toward the stairs, Proctor following. Jameson was alone.\n\nHe waited a few minutes before making his way out. As he plodded up the stairs, he thought about the changes he'd seen in the organisation. Their goals were the same, and they were still right, in Jameson's view. But the ways they achieved them had metamorphosed over the years. They hurried for results, went to extremes too quickly, and too often. Ordering murders was a case in point. The organisation had lost its way.\n\nHe straightened his back and held his head up. We have to get back on the right path, he thought, and it's up to people like me to stand up and take charge.\n\n\"The police know how you're dressed,\" said Sophie to Gunn and Harry. \"You need clothes that blend in a bit better, and I happen to know just the place. Come on.\" Without waiting for an answer, she strode off. Gunn and Harry caught up with her at a little shop at the edge of the market. \"I came across this place while I was waiting for you.\"\n\nGunn and Harry looked at each other, nonplussed.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" Sophie shooed them into the shop like a mother hen.\n\nHalf an hour later they returned, wearing clothes much like those of the market porters\u2014heavy canvas trousers, thick cotton shirts, woollen jackets, and flat caps to help keep the snow off.\n\nAt Harry's suggestion, they made their way west by tram and steam taxi. Gunn tugged at his cap continually, worried they would be recognised, but the heavy snow hampered visibility\u2014and in any case, the clothes they wore helped them fit in, too. No one on the tram gave them a second glance, and neither did the taxi driver.\n\nGunn asked quietly as they rode along, \"Why didn't you tell me you'd gone to see your father?\"\n\n\"Because I know you. If I'd told you what I was doing, you'd have tried to stop me.\"\n\n\"You could have just asked him about the hangars by wire, you know.\"\n\nSophie frowned and shook her head. \"You know what they say about the wires, Connie. They say the government listens in. Asking Dad for details about military installations . . . I couldn't take that risk.\" She shrugged. \"Anyway, it gave me an excuse to visit. It's been months.\"\n\n\"Did he tell you anything useful?\"\n\nShe patted her bag. \"He wrote it all down.\"\n\n\"What did Jameson tell you?\"\n\n\"Everything\u2014that you'd been arrested because of him, on Pendragon's orders, and he was doing his best to help. He said we can't go back to the flat. They'll be watching for us there. And he gave me cash. A lot of cash, Connie. He said it was Pendragon's money.\"\n\nGunn sighed; Harry had been right\u2014Jameson was working for Pendragon. But then, why had he helped them? \"What the devil is Jameson playing at, I wonder?\"\n\nThe taxi driver dropped them off at an address in the middle of Brentford, and the three waited on the pavement until the vehicle drove out of sight. \"This way,\" said Harry, and he started down the road toward the river.\n\nThey arrived at a large brick building overlooking the water. Harry took a ring of keys from his pocket and opened the street door, closing and locking it behind them. Gunn looked around the small office and the dust-covered furniture. Plainly, no one had been here in quite some time.\n\nHarry walked to another door on the opposite side of the room. \"I have something to show you.\"\n\nGunn and Sophie followed Harry into what must have been the main production floor of a large factory. Light shone through dirty skylights set into the roof. Against the walls, Gunn saw old, rust-covered machines, lined up in a row. Cleaner patches of floor showed where the machines had once stood.\n\nIn the middle sat two objects covered over with canvas sheets\u2014one huge, the other small by comparison. Harry took the corner of the larger sheet and pulled it away, revealing what Gunn thought, at first, to be a large steam engine of the type used to pull road-going freight trains.\n\nIt was big and black, a painted metal box twelve feet high and thirty long, sitting on pneumatic wheels mostly hidden behind the machine's metal plating. At the front, short metal ladders led to an open-sided, covered cab, big enough for three or four men to stand in and move around easily, filled with brass levers, pipes and gauges. At the rear, a luggage rack had been shaped from polished tubes.\n\n\"We're going to drive to Paris in that?\" said Gunn, stunned. \"How the devil do you propose to get it onto a ferry without attracting attention?\"\n\n\"We won't be taking her on any ferry, trust me\u2014in fact, we won't be taking her anywhere, right now. She needs a little work first.\"\n\n\"What's the problem? It is going to get us there, isn't it? It's not going to leave us stranded in the middle of nowhere?\"\n\n\"Oh, do calm down, Gunn. She hasn't been fired up in a while, that's all. She needs fuel and water for the engine, but she also needs to be oiled and cleaned a little, and those things will go much quicker with your help.\"\n\n\"On the subject of fuel and water,\" said Sophie, \"perhaps you two would have better tempers with some breakfast and a cup of tea inside you.\"\n\nGunn had been too preoccupied to think of food, but now that Sophie mentioned it, he realised he was starving.\n\n\"An excellent idea,\" said Harry, \"but I'm afraid all I have is a little stove and a kettle. I don't keep any provisions here.\"\n\n\"I saw a bakery nearby, on the way here,\" said Sophie, \"and I'm sure if there's a bakery, there's probably a grocer's, too. I can get what we need.\"\n\n\"You'll have to take care not to be recognised,\" said Harry.\n\n\"The police aren't looking for Sophie, Harry. Only for us,\" said Gunn, \"but all the same, you should try not to attract attention.\"\n\n\"Don't you worry, Connie. Harry, perhaps you'd better give me the keys.\"\n\nGunn and Harry began stripping down the machine, which Harry had named Bertha, then Sophie returned with some supplies, and made tea and sandwiches, which lifted Gunn's spirits enormously.\n\nGunn and Harry resumed working on Bertha, while Sophie assisted by holding bolts and other parts, and passing tools and oil cans as required.\n\nGunn blinked several times, trying to clear the gritty feeling from his tired eyes, and used his prosthetic hand as a vice to hold a crank firmly. He pressed a cotter pin in with his other thumb. He couldn't see what he was doing clearly, and his thumb slipped and scraped painfully against the edge of the crank. The pin clattered on the concrete floor.\n\nHe cursed, and jammed the injured thumb into the warmth of his left armpit. He looked up at the skylights, then at his timepiece, and was surprised to see that they'd worked through the whole day. He straightened, and gave a mighty yawn. \"The sun's going down,\" he said to Harry as he rubbed his eyes. \"Do you have any lamps?\"\n\nHarry put down the screwdriver he'd been using, and massaged the back of his neck. \"I don't, and in any case, we can't risk showing any lights in here. Someone passing by might think the place is being burgled, and call the police. I never got around to installing blackouts as I did in my other laboratories.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should finish in the morning.\"\n\nHarry sighed and yawned. \"Perhaps we should. Damned shame, though. We're almost finished, and I was hoping to move on under cover of night. Still, neither of us has rested properly, and I, for one, could use a good night's sleep.\"\n\n\"Me, too. I don't suppose you have beds here, do you?\"\n\n\"I've taken care of that,\" Sophie piped up from the office doorway, a little proudly.\n\nGunn went to the office, curious, and Harry followed. Sophie had wiped much of the dust from the furniture, and pushed a desk and chairs to one side to make a space on the floor. Into that space she'd piled canvas, cloth, and any other relatively soft materials she could find to create three makeshift beds. She'd lit the little wood burning stove in the corner, and the room was comfortably warm.\n\n\"I'm afraid it's not much, but it's the best I could do,\" she said.\n\n\"Don't diminish yourself, sweetheart,\" said Gunn. \"This is a splendid job. I'm sure I wouldn't have had a clue what to do, and here you are making the best of things. You're a wonder, Sophie. Isn't she, Harry?\"\n\nHarry beamed. \"It's marvellous. I'd been expecting to sleep on cold concrete tonight. Thank you, Sophie.\"\n\nSophie smiled back. \"Dinner is tea and sandwiches again. When we're done, if you gentlemen would care to leave the room for the sake of a lady's modesty, I'm going to get ready for bed.\"\n\nGunn woke up when someone shook his shoulder, and opened his eyes to see Sophie holding a cup of tea. \"Come on, sleepyhead. Harry's finished Bertha and he's ready to start her up. He's been waiting for you.\"\n\nGunn looked at his timepiece. It was nine in the morning. He'd slept for fifteen hours.\n\nHe carried his tea through to the factory. Harry was in Bertha's cab, tapping a fingernail against a gauge, while Sophie watched from floor level. Gunn heard the roar of a fire in the belly of the machine, and the faint hiss of steam from the boiler valves.\n\n\"Ah, there you are,\" said Harry, smiling. \"You're just in time.\"\n\n\"In time for what?\"\n\n\"Stand well back, and observe.\"\n\nGunn and Sophie stepped back. Harry pulled a lever in the cab. With a hiss of steam and the tapping of mechanical parts, Bertha began to move backward, rolling at less than a walking pace. Harry stopped the machine before it ran into the wall, then pushed the same lever the other way. Bertha rolled forward, and Harry stopped her when she'd reached her original position.\n\n\"That's it?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"It's quite enough to show that she's in working order,\" said Harry, affronted. \"She'll get us where we're going.\"\n\n\"How are you planning on getting us across the English Channel, Harry?\" said Gunn.\n\nHarry grinned and pulled another lever. \"Like this.\"\n\nMetal grated and creaked as the plates covering Bertha's wheels slid up and out of sight. Gunn could now see that Bertha had a hull, complete with a propeller and rudder.\n\nGunn's eyes went wide. \"She's a boat?\"\n\n\"She's a boat as well,\" said Harry proudly, \"and she'll get us to the coast, across the channel, and all the way to Paris.\"\n\n\"When do we leave?\"\n\n\"I still think it best to wait until dusk. She's a little conspicuous to be driving around the city in broad daylight. In any case, as tired as I was last night, I'd forgotten something important we must do before we leave London.\"\n\nThe smaller of the canvas-covered objects turned out to be a steam carriage similar to Harry's other one, but older, with faded paint. It took Harry and Gunn half an hour to get the engine running.\n\nHarry drove the carriage out while Gunn locked up the building. The snow had stopped, but the sky was heavy with dark, grey clouds, promising more to come.\n\nHarry drove them north.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"To collect the disruptor and the other equipment from my workshop in Wembley. If we're going to try to stop Pendragon, we're going to need it when we get to Paris.\"\n\nThe machine in Christie's office rattled and stamped out a line of text, chiming to signal the end of the message. Christie tore off the strip of paper and read it, then lifted the voice receiver and pressed a few keys.\n\nHe heard a click and then a voice. \"Jameson,\" came the voice, made tinny by miles of wire.\n\n\"Jameson, listen. Gunn and Bohemia have been spotted. I'll send you the location. I'm sending my people. You should do the same.\"\n\n\"Bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut, isn't it, Christie? How many people do you think it'll take to grab three people?\"\n\n\"We're not taking any chances this time, and we're not out to grab them. Send heavily armed men, Jameson. Tell them Gunn is dangerous, and they are to shoot first.\"\n\nAt Harry's workshop, Gunn strapped the light projector's tripod to the back of the carriage\u2014everything else was already aboard\u2014and slid the warehouse door open. There was the shrill of a police whistle, and he spun in alarm. Fifty yards away, a black police steam carriage raced toward the warehouse.\n\n\"It's a trap!\" he yelled, running back to the carriage. He jumped into the rear seat next to Sophie, Harry slammed his boot onto the steam pedal, and the vehicle lurched out through the door.\n\n\"Pendragon's pet police must have found this place,\" Harry yelled, cornering sharply. Gunn glanced through the rear window. The black carriage was getting closer.\n\n\"Hold tight,\" said Harry as he turned another corner. Sophie was thrown against Gunn, then fell back into her seat as Harry straightened their course.\n\n\"They're catching up!\" Sophie shouted.\n\n\"Not for long!\" The road ahead of them ran straight. The chuffing of the engine sped up, like a train at full speed, and the carriage rattled over the cobbles. Behind them, the police carriage lost ground.\n\nThe street ahead was clear\u2014then three policemen on horseback appeared from a side street, followed by three more. The men unslung rifles from their shoulders.\n\n\"They're not planning on arresting us,\" Gunn yelled over the noise of the engine.\n\n\"Get down,\" Harry commanded, and Gunn and Sophie hunkered as the carriage swerved left and right. Gunn's stomach twisted as the vehicle almost tipped over, then the wheels banged down as it righted itself and ran straight.\n\nGlass shattered with a bang, and Gunn and Sophie were flung sideways as Harry spun the wheel. Engine noise and the whistling of rushing air filled the cab. Sophie covered her ears.\n\nGunn lifted his head above the seats. The police were lost to sight, but the rear window had been shot out. Sophie brushed broken glass from her clothes as she clambered back up to the seat, and Gunn put a hand on hers and looked into her eyes. She squeezed his hand. \"I'm fine.\"\n\nGunn asked, \"Harry, are you all right?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014it missed me.\" He pointed at the front windscreen, where a hole showed where the bullet had passed. \"I believe we've left them behind.\"\n\n\"No, we haven't,\" yelled Sophie in a panic, pointing ahead. Fifty yards away, an armoured gun carriage, squatting between the warehouses and factories lining the road, aimed its cannon at them.\n\nThe cannon fired. Harry yanked the wheel and the carriage swerved left, toward an open factory door. Gunn felt the wave of the blast shove the carriage forward as the road behind them exploded in flame, dirt, and broken cobblestones.\n\nGunn watched in alarm as Harry steered the racing carriage into the factory and up a ramp that followed the side of the building. There was no way they could avoid hitting the brick wall at the top of the ramp. \"Harry\u2014\" he said, his voice rising with dread.\n\n\"I know! Hold on!\" And he stomped the pedal to the floor.\n\nGunn glanced behind. The gun carriage had appeared at the bottom of the ramp. It fired again. The wall ahead of them exploded, bricks and flame flying in every direction.\n\nThe carriage powered into the fireball\u2014and shot through the hole in the blasted wall. It hit the paved surface of a yard on the other side with a bone-jarring crash. Gunn watched Harry fight with the steering wheel, yanking it left, then right, to keep the carriage upright. He got it under control, and drove out of the yard and turned onto a wide road.\n\nGunn wiped the sweat from his forehead, his heart pounding in his ears, as Harry hunched over the wheel, driving at high speed along alleyways and back roads.\n\nSophie watched the road behind them. \"We've lost them,\" she said, finally, in a quavering voice.\n\nHarry brought them to a halt against the curb, then took a deep breath and let it out with a whoosh. He grinned. \"I could say that I planned that, but I'd be lying. I was hoping to break through the wall\u2014I wasn't expecting their help.\"\n\n\"We could have been killed,\" said Gunn, but he was grinning too.\n\n\"Quite,\" Harry chortled. The chortle became a guffaw, and then he was roaring with laughter, and Gunn, relieved, laughed with him.\n\n\"Don't you ever\u2014ever\u2014do anything like that again!\" Sophie said, slapping Harry's shoulder with an open palm.\n\nHarry's laughter subsided as he wiped the tears from his eyes with a shirtsleeve. Gunn was having trouble getting his breath back.\n\n\"Men,\" said Sophie, shaking her head, but breaking a smile. \"All the same, and quite impossible. Pull yourselves together, both of you. What do we do now?\"\n\nHarry took a deep breath and got himself under control. \"No doubt the police across the city will have received descriptions of us, and how we're travelling, so I'm going to get us back to Brentford along the main roads. We should be lost amongst the other traffic. At least, I hope so.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we'd be better off abandoning this carriage somewhere. If someone happens to see it when we get to Brentford, and they see us go into your factory . . .\"\n\nHalf an hour later, he stopped the carriage halfway back to Brentford, between two similar vehicles on the side of a busy street, and unloaded the equipment. \"I don't think they'll look for a vehicle in a crowded place like this.\"\n\n\"The broken windows might arouse suspicion, don't you think?\" said Gunn as they walked away.\n\n\"Just keep walking, and don't look back,\" said Harry.\n\nThey took a taxi the couple of miles to Brentford, and, as before, walked the rest of the way to the factory, lugging the equipment.\n\nAs he unlocked the door, Harry said, \"I was going to suggest that we get some rest while we wait for dark, but now I'm not so certain.\"\n\nGunn carried the disruptor inside. \"I agree. All it would take is one vigilant citizen to recognise us. Those bogus police could be on the way here as we speak.\"\n\n\"Quite. And my other workshop was found, despite all my precautions. It might only be a matter of time before this one is discovered, too.\"\n\n\"Then we should leave immediately,\" said Sophie, in a take-charge tone. \"You two load that equipment on the rack and get the furnace lit. I'll gather the groceries.\"\n\nHalf an hour later, Gunn slid open the factory's main door, and Harry guided Bertha out. Gunn closed and locked the door, then climbed up into the cab, and the huge vehicle began to roll eastward along the waterfront road.\n\nGunn kept his eye on the people who stared at Bertha as she passed by, and wondered what they thought she was. A freight hauler, perhaps, or a troop carrier\u2014or some eccentric inventor's pet project. He glanced sideways at Harry, and suppressed a grin. At least, he thought, if they're looking at Bertha, they're not looking at us. With luck, they wouldn't be recognised.\n\n\"I'm not worried about that,\" said Harry when Gunn mentioned the thought. \"If we'd been recognised, you can be sure the police would have made themselves evident by now. The farther we get from the centre of the city, the less likely people are to be looking for us, I think.\"\n\nThey reached London's southern outskirts as dusk darkened the sky. \"How long until we get to Dover, Harry?\" asked Sophie. She sat on the cab floor with her back against the warm metal of the furnace, wrapped in a canvas sheet in an attempt to stay comfortable in the open cabin.\n\n\"Perhaps three hours, if the roads are good and we can maintain this pace.\"\n\nGunn thought about that for a moment. \"I hope you're not planning to put Bertha to sea in the dark.\"\n\n\"I don't intend anything so dangerous. No, we'll wait until daybreak before we attempt the crossing. The question worrying me most is how to get Bertha down to the shore. There's only one road between the cliffs, and it goes right by the harbour. We won't be able to avoid being seen, and when we are, we'll be in trouble.\"\n\nGunn grinned. \"You mean, when someone sees us trying to leave the country without the proper documentation and in sight of a major port?\"\n\n\"Precisely. There is an alternative, now that I think about it. Instead of Dover, let's make for Deal. It's a few miles north of Dover, and there are no cliffs\u2014just a beach. There's a harbour, but the place is more of a fishing village. I should be able to get Bertha to the waterline well away from the harbour, and if anyone happens to see us, we'll be away before they realise what we're doing. It would make for a longer crossing, but the risk of running into Pendragon's forces\u2014or the police\u2014would be lessened.\"\n\nAfter what had happened in London, Gunn was in favour of staying as far as possible from Pendragon's people\u2014even if it meant a riskier sea crossing.\n\nThe houses of the London suburbs gave way to the fields and woods of Kent, and after an hour of driving along the quieter\u2014and unlit\u2014roads, Gunn was having trouble seeing in the gathering twilight.\n\n\"You might want to slow down a bit, Harry. Wouldn't want to run into something.\"\n\nHarry leaned forward over the controls, squinting into the darkness. \"You're right. I don't know how much farther I can go on. I can barely see, either.\" He pulled back the steam lever, and Bertha slowed.\n\n\"Does Bertha not have any lights?\" said Gunn.\n\n\"I installed brackets, but I never got around to putting lights on them. She's not much more than a prototype, you see, and I hadn't planned on taking her anywhere in the dark until she'd been thoroughly tested.\"\n\n\"Try the goggles,\" said Sophie, and dug them out of her satchel, handing them to Gunn and Harry. After fiddling with the lever on the side, Gunn was able to see the road ahead clearly.\n\n\"Much better,\" said Harry.\n\n\"How much farther?\" Sophie asked.\n\n\"I'd say another two hours. It's all country lanes and a few villages from here on, so we shouldn't run into any trouble.\"\n\n\"We should stop at the next village with a shop.\" Harry gave her a questioning look. \"I think we should get some blankets,\" she explained, \"for when we have to stop to sleep.\"\n\n\"Good thinking,\" said Harry, \"although I'd envisioned that we might find a nice little country inn.\"\n\nHarry took a detour to a farming village, where, to his disappointment, they found no inn, but Sophie was able to obtain bedding.\n\nThey continued in darkness.\n\nSuddenly, Bertha lurched, and Gunn was thrown sideways and slammed into the bulkhead. He grabbed the door frame to steady himself, as Bertha bumped and shuddered. \"What the devil\u2014?\"\n\nSophie, sitting on the floor, yelped in surprise as she slid toward the door, and grabbed the handle on the fuel store hatch just in time. \"What's going on?\" she yelled, panicked.\n\nHarry grabbed the brake handle, and Bertha jerked to a halt.\n\n\"The road's thick with holes. Even with the goggles, I didn't see them in time. I fear I've taken a wrong turn.\"\n\nSophie stood, went to Gunn's side, and looked out. The track appeared to be more potholes than solid ground. \"Shouldn't we turn back, and try to find the right way?\"\n\nHarry shook his head. \"I have no idea where I might have steered us astray. It could be miles back along the way we came, and I'm not sure we would be able to find it in the dark, goggles or not.\" He sighed. \"It's not wise to try to proceed like this. I fear we have no choice but to wait until morning, for the sake of safety.\"\n\n\"Then I suggest we get away from the road,\" said Gunn. \"Better if we don't take the risk of being seen.\"\n\n\"Sound thinking,\" said Harry.\n\nGunn squinted into the darkness. \"I think there are some trees over there. Perhaps we can get Bertha hidden. Wait here while I look.\"\n\nGunn dropped to the ground and made his way toward the trees he'd seen. The land alongside the road was grassy and dotted with large stones, but he was sure Harry could manage it with care. The trees were not far from where Bertha sat, and turned out to be the edge of a small wood. They were spaced widely enough that the big vehicle would have little trouble getting in and out.\n\n\"Good enough,\" said Harry when Gunn returned. \"Lead on.\"\n\nGunn found a route that avoided some of the larger rocks. Behind him, Harry drove Bertha at a crawl until they reached the trees. Once into the wood, the blackness was almost complete, and even with the goggles, Gunn found it difficult to see.\n\n\"We don't need to go in very far,\" Harry shouted from the cab. Suddenly, a grinding sound came from above. Harry yanked the brake lever again, as Sophie flinched and looked up.\n\n\"Whatever was that?\"\n\n\"It didn't sound good, whatever it was,\" said Gunn. \"I think she hit a branch. Let's hope there's no damage.\" He climbed back up into the cab. \"We'll have to wait until daylight before we can take a proper look. I don't suppose you designed in anything to make it comfortable to sleep in here?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not. We can leave the furnace burning for some warmth, but other than that, we'll just have to manage.\"\n\nChristie read the slip of paper that his machine stamped out, then crumpled it and threw it into the fireplace. He turned back to the machine and tapped in Jameson's code.\n\nJameson's irritated voice came through a moment later. \"What do you want, Christie?\"\n\n\"Message from Management, Jameson. One of our people in Kent spotted Bohemia and the others in a vehicle headed for the coast. They're probably making for Dover, to catch the ferry to France.\"\n\n\"Very interesting, and completely irrelevant. What do you expect me to do about it?\"\n\n\"You can call the police in Dover, and have them watching and ready to arrest them, that's what.\"\n\n\"Oh, really? And how am I supposed to explain to them how I know that's where Bohemia's going, when no one else in the country has a clue?\"\n\n\"I don't care how you do it, Jameson. In the meantime, there's a passenger airship to Dover, leaving in a couple of hours. I'm going down there with my men. I'll contact you when I get there.\"\n\nThe three spent a cold, uncomfortable, and mostly sleepless night, and rose with the sun.\n\n\"Let's see what made that noise,\" said Harry.\n\nGunn climbed up the ladder, and surveyed the top of the vehicle.\n\nBehind the cab, Bertha's top opened to the sky. When they had worked on her the previous day, Harry had explained that while he'd wanted solid sides to prevent prying eyes from seeing Bertha's secrets, closing the roof over would have added unnecessary weight, and made it inconvenient to access the fuel and water tanks. He'd warned Gunn to take care if he ever had to climb up; one misstep and he could end up against the red-hot furnace, or be ground to mincemeat by the pistons and cranks of Bertha's steam engine.\n\nGunn groaned when he saw a thick branch from a nearby tree lodged firmly across the water filler. \"It's worse than I thought, damn it,\" he shouted. \"There's a big branch jammed on the water tank. As if we haven't had enough trouble. I'll see if I can hold it clear while you drive forward.\"\n\nHe crouched down to get both arms under the tree limb. Bracing his back, he used the strength of his legs, and grunted with exertion\u2014but it didn't budge. The branch's natural springiness pushed it down against the tank with more force than he could overcome. \"I can't move the damned thing, Harry,\" he yelled in frustration.\n\nHarry's head appeared at the top of the ladder. \"Oh, my,\" he said, his eyes wide. \"I see what you mean.\"\n\n\"Perhaps if we try together.\"\n\nHarry showed Sophie the controls, then joined Gunn. They grabbed the branch from opposite sides. Gunn pushed upward with his legs as hard as he could, and Harry's face reddened with effort as he did the same. The branch moved upward a handful of inches. \"Now, Sophie!\" Gunn bellowed as loudly as he could manage.\n\nBertha creaked forward. Gunn and Harry shuffled backward unsteadily along the water tank, holding the branch clear until the filler passed under it.\n\n\"That's it,\" said Harry.\n\nGunn relaxed his grip on the branch\u2014and it sprang back, throwing Harry off-balance.\n\nHarry tried to regain his footing, arms windmilling as he struggled. Below him, Bertha's pistons and gears ground ominously.\n\nGunn jumped over the branch and, as Harry tipped back on his heels, grabbed the lapels of his jacket. Harry grabbed Gunn's upper arms instinctively to keep himself from falling back.\n\nFor a moment they were frozen in place, balancing precariously\u2014Gunn's hands grasping at Harry's jacket, his weight hard on his heels; Harry falling backward, clutching Gunn's biceps painfully. Gunn couldn't let go, but he wasn't able to get a firmer grip to drag himself and Harry out of danger.\n\nThere was no time for anything but the first thing that came into his head, insane as it was. He let his feet slide forward, between Harry's legs, deliberately overbalancing backward, and fell back onto the water tank, dragging Harry down on top of him with a grunt.\n\nBertha jerked to a halt. \"Whatever are you two playing at?\" came Sophie's voice. Gunn lifted his head and looked past Harry's shoulder. Sophie regarded them from the ladder, an eyebrow raised.\n\nGunn was still laughing as Harry helped him up, and clapped him on the shoulder, grinning.\n\nJameson stared at the scrap of paper in his hand, and bit his lip in thought. After a moment of indecision, he dialled the code for the hotel in Dover where Christie had settled for the night.\n\nThe hotel's desk clerk answered, and he asked to be connected to Christie's room. Christie's voice came through. \"Jameson?\"\n\nHe got straight to the point. \"Any sign of them?\"\n\n\"No word yet from my men watching the road. Anything from the local police?\"\n\n\"Not a whisper,\" said Jameson. And there won't be anything from that quarter, he thought; he hadn't contacted them as Christie had requested, but he wasn't about to tell him that. \"Listen, Christie. It occurred to me that Bohemia and company might not show up in Dover.\"\n\n\"Oh? Why is that?\"\n\n\"Because they're not daft. They know the police will be watching the ports and the airship stations, so they're hardly likely to go within a mile of any of those.\"\n\n\"You're of a different opinion, I take it?\"\n\n\"If I were in their shoes, I'd look for something less conspicuous. I'd rent a boat, or pay a fishing boat captain to take me across the channel on the quiet.\"\n\nJameson heard Christie clicking his tongue at the other end of the wire. \"You might be right, at that,\" he said after a long moment. \"Assuming you're correct, where would they go?\"\n\nJameson had spent half an hour prior looking at a map and asking himself the same question. Ramsgate, twenty miles or so along the coast from Dover, was a busy fishing port, but not one that had ferries going to France\u2014so there'd be no nosey passport officials. If he were Gunn, he'd go there, and offer a trawler skipper some cash for transport.\n\nJameson didn't want Christie to find Gunn and the others. He didn't want their deaths on his conscience. If he took care of it himself\u2014if he could find Gunn before Christie did, and talk to him\u2014there was a much better chance of resolving this whole business without bloodshed.\n\n\"Are you still there, Jameson?\"\n\n\"Still here. I suggest you watch the harbour at Deal, instead,\" said Jameson. Deal was a tiny place that Jameson had never heard of before he'd seen it on the map. That should divert Christie long enough for Gunn and the others to get away, then Jameson would have more time to make his own plans.\n\n\"Deal it is, then.\"\n\nWhen they arrived at Deal, Harry took a route around the north side of the town, rather than driving along the main street. \"I fear we may have to go to the harbour after all,\" he said.\n\n\"Why?\" said Gunn.\n\n\"I don't want to be stranded in the middle of the English Channel on Bertha's maiden voyage, so we need to fill the water and fuel tanks\u2014but I haven't seen any stores where we can buy what she needs.\"\n\n\"And you think we can get those things at the harbour?\"\n\n\"She can use the same fuel as the fishing boats.\"\n\nSophie frowned. \"Did I hear you say maiden voyage, Harry?\"\n\nGunn winced. \"Do you mean to say that Bertha has never been on the water before?\"\n\nHarry shrugged sheepishly. \"I was planning to test her on the river near the workshop, but other things took my time, and I never did get around to it.\"\n\nGunn covered his face with his hands and groaned. They were about to take a completely untested craft across twenty or thirty miles of open sea.\n\nSophie pressed her lips into a tight line. \"We'd better buy life vests, too.\"\n\nThey reached the waterfront. Ahead, the icy sea washed against the pebble beach where they would cast off. Gunn suppressed a shudder as he envisioned Bertha sinking into the frigid waves.\n\nThey purchased provisions at a shop by the harbour, and Harry and Gunn filled Bertha's water tank from a cistern nearby. A few people stopped to look at the unusual vehicle, and Gunn hoped none of them would make a fuss and draw attention to them. As soon as the tank was filled, Harry drove Bertha away from the harbour, back to the beach. He stopped her on the pebbles, a few dozen feet from where small waves lapped at the shore.\n\n\"Let's make sure everything is secure before we launch,\" said Harry. \"We wouldn't want anything vital falling into the sea.\"\n\nHarry showed them the storage spaces hidden underneath the floor of the cab. They weren't large, but they were deep enough to accommodate their supplies.\n\n\"Are we ready, Harry?\" asked Sophie as Gunn replaced the cover over the last of the compartments.\n\n\"Almost. Gunn, perhaps you'd help me stoke the boiler.\"\n\nGunn and Harry fed the furnace while Sophie stood by the cab's doorway, apparently taking in the view. She turned her head sharply at something he couldn't see. \"Someone's coming.\"\n\nHe went to her, and saw half a dozen men, wearing long camel coats and brown bowlers, descending to the beach from the seafront road. Gunn recognised the face of one of the men. It was the police sergeant, Logan, who had arrested them outside the Italian embassy.\n\nHe turned to Harry quickly. \"We have to go, Harry. Now.\"\n\nHarry slammed the furnace door closed, jumped to the controls, and pushed a lever, hard. Bertha started rolling forward.\n\nThen she stopped. Harry manoeuvred the lever back and forth. Bertha didn't move.\n\nThe men increased their pace. They were no more than a hundred yards away. The sight of another familiar face shocked Gunn: Christie was with them, at the rear. Christie's working for Pendragon, too!\n\nBefore he could say anything, Harry began to panic. He pushed and pulled levers, but to no avail. \"Something's jammed!\" he yelled.\n\nGunn rushed up the ladder and looked down into Bertha's innards. A piece of wood the size of his forearm\u2014part of the branch that they'd cleared that morning\u2014was jammed between two gears. \"Sophie!\" he shouted down into the cab. \"I need your help, quick!\" He dropped down onto his belly.\n\nSophie appeared an instant later. \"Grab my ankles,\" he said. Sophie wasted no time, and a moment later, he hung upside-down, tugging at the mangled piece of wood. He couldn't pull it clear of the gears. He changed hands and grabbed with his prosthetic, using its strength\u2014and the broken branch came free.\n\nThe gears whirled, Bertha lurched forward\u2014and his legs slipped in Sophie's hands. He yelped as he slid down, his face inches from the spinning gears. He thrashed about, trying to find something to hold onto\u2014then Sophie regained her grip, and braced her legs against the metalwork to stop him slipping farther. His hand found a metal pipe, and with a grunt of effort, he pulled himself back up.\n\nHe scrambled to his feet. The men were twenty yards away, with pistols aimed at him and Sophie. He pushed her back down into the cab as they fired, and dove after her head-first as bullets ricocheted off the metal siding.\n\nHarry operated another lever, and Gunn heard clanking and the squeal of metal as the plates over Bertha's wheels retracted, revealing the hull.\n\nThe men stopped firing and ran toward them. The water was ten yards ahead. \"Grab onto something!\" shouted Harry.\n\nBertha accelerated abruptly and pitched Gunn and Sophie backward. Gunn glanced out of the cab as the machine's wheels smashed into the waves, throwing ice-cold salt spray in all directions. As soon as she began to bob back and forth like a boat, Harry worked another control. Bertha's wheels retracted, her propeller whirled, and she shot forward.\n\nGunn looked behind, and saw their pursuers stop at the water's edge. Christie took his hat off and threw it down onto the beach. The other men stood there, watching them. Logan aimed his gun and fired. Gunn pulled his head back as the bullet struck Bertha's side.\n\nBertha was a good hundred yards out, breasting the waves just as a boat should. Gunn risked another look behind. Christie and the other men were retreating up the beach.\n\nHe was about to go to the others, when he caught a glimpse of a portly figure behind a newspaper stand a little way along the seafront road. He shielded his eyes with a hand, and squinted to see more clearly, but the man had disappeared from sight.\n\nGunn kept his eyes on the beach until the ocean spray obscured the view. He went to Harry and Sophie.\n\n\"Christie was there, with the others.\"\n\nSophie's eyes went wide. \"Doctor Christie? But that must mean\u2014\"\n\n\"He's Pendragon's man. And to think, I almost let him at me with a scalpel . . .\"\n\nHarry frowned. \"I can't say I'm surprised\u2014he's just the type\u2014but I wish I'd known sooner. I might have used that information to find Pendragon.\"\n\nGunn ran his fingers through his hair. \"There's more. That man was there again. At least, I think it was him.\"\n\n\"What man?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Bowler hat and muttonchops. Harry, did you ever find out anything about him?\"\n\nHarry shook his head. \"I neglected to mention that the man's followed me several times. Always at night, and always when I was alone, so I wasn't about to risk confronting him. I still have no idea who he might be.\"\n\nGunn's mind whirled. Christie was with Logan and the other fake police\u2014that much was certain. But the man with the muttonchops seemed to be hiding from them. \"I don't think he's with the others. Who the devil can he be?\"\n\n\"I'm sure we'll find out,\" said Harry. \"And I suspect we're in for a nasty surprise when we do.\"\n\nThe little bell on Jameson's machine rang three times. He picked up the microphone. \"Hello?\"\n\nChristie's voice came back. \"You were right about Deal, Jameson.\"\n\nJameson's heart skipped a beat. Gunn had shown up at Deal, after all? Had Christie caught him and the others? Had he murdered them?\n\nBefore he could ask the question, Christie continued. \"We weren't quick enough. Some busybody wasted our time, told us he'd seen Bohemia's vehicle on the other side of the harbour. Then it turned out the damned thing floats. They got away.\"\n\nJameson wanted to breathe a huge sigh of relief, but held back. \"Damn,\" he said half-heartedly, then grimaced, hoping Christie hadn't noticed. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Nothing, until I've informed Management and have new orders. You're to remain available in case you're needed.\"\n\n\"Bertha's not sinking,\" said Gunn, and he gave Sophie a cockeyed smile. \"Yet.\"\n\n\"Don't be like that, dear,\" Sophie chided. \"I think Harry's done a marvellous job.\"\n\nHarry looked at Gunn with a frown\u2014but the wrinkles around his eyes betrayed amusement. \"Thank you, Sophie. Gunn, if you'd care to open the inspection hatch below the furnace door and tell me what you see.\"\n\nGunn opened the hatch and looked around. It opened into the space above the hull, where he saw thin rivulets of water running down the metal plates and pooling in the bottom. \"There's some water coming in,\" he said. \"Just a trickle. Nothing serious.\" He closed the hatch and looked up at Harry, who raised an eyebrow. Sophie was looking out at the sea; Gunn gave Harry a slight shake of his head.\n\n\"To be expected,\" he said. \"The bilge pump will take care of it.\"\n\n\"What's our course?\" said Sophie, standing next to Harry.\n\n\"South for a few miles, to begin with, until I have a feel for how she handles. Then we'll make the crossing.\"\n\nGunn suspected Harry wanted to stay close to the coast until he was sure that the leak wasn't too serious, but said nothing.\n\nHe turned to Harry and Sophie. \"Christie and Logan were in charge of those men, but this time, they weren't in uniform. I suspect Logan is as much a policeman as I am.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"Either way, I think it's a fair bet that he and Christie are working for Pendragon, directly or indirectly.\"\n\nSophie brushed a wind-blown lock of hair from her eyes. \"We can only hope we'll be safe once we reach France.\"\n\n\"Relatively safe, perhaps. Pendragon most likely won't have anyone working for him in the French government or police, but nevertheless, our own police may have alerted their counterparts in France to watch out for us. Not to mention that we'll be entering the country illegally. We'll have to be cautious.\"\n\nSophie looked thoughtful. \"In that case, how far do you think we'll get in Bertha? She rather stands out, and they'll be looking for her.\"\n\n\"You raise a very good point,\" said Harry. \"We'll have to see what we can do as soon as we're back on dry land.\"\n\nSophie tapped at a front tooth with a fingernail, and stared out into space. Gunn left her to her thoughts.\n\nHe looked ahead to the chalk cliffs a few miles away, near Dover. The sea and sky in the distance were dark. \"I think we're heading into bad weather,\" he said.\n\nHarry looked. \"You might be right. I don't like the look of this.\" He surveyed the gauges. \"Let's not wait. Bertha seems to be handling well enough, and she has plenty of steam.\" He adjusted the controls, and Bertha made a slow turn to port.\n\n\"How far is it?\"\n\n\"Twenty-five miles, perhaps. An hour and a half, and we'll be in France.\"\n\nThe time passed slowly. Gunn watched the cliffs recede behind them and become a white line above the horizon before fading into the mist. His jaw ached, and he realised he'd been clenching his teeth, worrying and wondering how long it would be before they'd be able to return home\u2014or if they ever would.\n\nA flicker of lightning off to the west caught his eye, bringing his thoughts back to the present. Ahead, the French coast emerged through the haze. Gunn guessed that the beach was perhaps five or six miles away\u2014just another twenty minutes or so, he thought.\n\nThe dark clouds they'd seen off the English coast approached rapidly, and the light breeze that had been coming from that direction stiffened into a gusting wind. The small swells grew higher, and it wasn't long before they became six-foot waves. Gunn went to Sophie. She gave him a nervous smile in return, but the look in her eyes was one he knew. Heavy rain began ringing against the roof of the cab.\n\n\"She's fighting me,\" said Harry, his voice raised above the wind. \"I'm having trouble steering a straight course.\"\n\n\"Tack across the current,\" shouted Gunn. \"Point her a few degrees south of where we want to land and hold her there.\"\n\nHarry nodded in reply, angling Bertha as Gunn had suggested.\n\nSophie pressed against Gunn's side. \"How far?\"\n\nGunn looked out at the line on the horizon to the east. \"Three miles, perhaps four.\"\n\n\"We're fighting the current and the wind,\" Harry yelled. \"We may be out here for some time yet.\"\n\nSophie took Gunn's hand, and he pulled her close and hugged her. \"We'll get through this, I promise,\" he whispered into her ear. He held her for a long moment as she trembled with cold and fear.\n\n\"Check the bilge again, Gunn!\" said Harry.\n\nGunn opened the hatch and saw a foot of water sloshing around inside the hull. He closed the hatch, and went to where Harry was straining at the rudder controls. \"She's leaking more, Harry,\" he said. \"It looks like the pump isn't working.\"\n\n\"It's working,\" he said, pointing at a gauge, \"but the water's coming in faster than the pump can get it out. I hate to say this, Gunn, but you'd better prepare yourself and your wife in case we have to swim for it.\"\n\n\"She's scared enough as it is, Harry\u2014I'm not saying a word unless I have to.\"\n\n\"All the same, I think we'd better have the life vests on.\"\n\nGunn got them out, handed one to Harry, and helped Sophie with hers. He put his mouth close to her ear. \"Not much farther, sweetheart.\" She took his hand, burying her face in his chest.\n\nThe rain and spray had reduced the visibility to tens of yards, and he had no idea how far they were from the beach. He hoped they were going in the right direction.\n\nThe steam pressure gauge was dropping\u2014and stoking the furnace would be impossible in these conditions. He prayed they'd reach land before the pressure went altogether.\n\nHe felt a thump against Bertha's hull, and dashed to the doorway. \"Land, Harry!\" he yelled. \"Fifty more yards and we've made it!\"\n\nHarry operated the levers, and a few moments later, Gunn hugged a smiling Sophie as Harry drove Bertha through the howling wind and the lashing rain up onto the beach.\n\nThe shore on the French side of the water was much flatter than on the English side, and they were able to see some distance in all directions. Harry drove Bertha southwest along the sand, in what he hoped was the correct direction toward Calais. From there, Gunn knew, there was a major road that would take them to Paris.\n\nAfter a mile or so, Gunn spied a shape a few hundred yards inland from the beach. \"There.\"\n\nHarry squinted through the rain. \"It's a barn. Perhaps that will suit our needs.\"\n\nHarry steered Bertha up the beach, across flat sand and brown grass. As they approached the barn, Gunn could see the large doors at one end were wide open, and the inside was empty. \"Perfect.\"\n\nHarry drove Bertha into the barn. Gunn closed the doors, and Harry started a fire with coal from Bertha's fuel store. Meanwhile, Sophie, using the cab for privacy, stripped off her wet clothes and draped them next to Bertha's still-hot furnace to dry. She covered herself with a dry blanket then joined Gunn and Harry at the fire.\n\nHarry covered a yawn with his hand. \"If you don't mind, I think I'd like to turn in.\"\n\nWe should set a watch, Gunn thought\u2014they were wanted fugitives in a foreign country. But none of them had slept properly in days. He, for one, was prepared to take the risk.\n\nA few minutes later, Gunn heard Harry's snoring from Bertha's opposite side as he climbed under a warm, dry blanket next to an already-sleeping Sophie.\n\nChristie watched the fields of the Kent countryside slip by, two thousand feet below the gondola of the passenger airship. As he watched, the daylight faded, the rain intensified, and the ground was lost to view. He moved back to the rows of padded seats, and settled down to read a newspaper.\n\nLogan was aboard, somewhere, and another man\u2014Granger\u2014who Christie had called on. Granger wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty, and Christie suspected he'd need a man like that when they got to Paris.\n\nManagement's orders were clear. The first priority was to identify primary and secondary targets for Proctor's airship and machines. Christie was also to watch for Bohemia and his friends, since they were likely to show up sooner or later and start making trouble.\n\nA shadow passed over Christie's newspaper, and he looked up to see Granger's scarred face as the man passed and took a seat farther along the row. They ignored each other, maintaining the pretence that they were just ordinary people, travelling on their own business.\n\nChristie went back to his newspaper and smiled at the thought of what he would do to Bohemia if he dared to show his face in Paris.\n\nThey slept undisturbed. During the night, the rain had abated and the wind had dropped, and they woke to a calm but cloudy morning. Gunn made tea and cooked some breakfast, and the three made ready to move on.\n\nGunn wondered what had been going through Sophie's mind the day before; tapping her teeth with a fingernail was a sure sign that she had been pondering an idea. He was about to ask, when she spoke.\n\n\"I was thinking about a time when Dad brought us all to France on holiday, when I was a little girl. There were quite a few people giving stage shows. Rather like Harry's shows, I imagine, but done from the back of a large wagon. And one thing I remember very well is that all the wagons had lovely pictures and things painted on them.\"\n\n\"I know exactly what you mean, Sophie,\" said Harry, smiling and nodding vigorously, \"I've seen them myself. I think that's a capital idea.\"\n\nGunn clapped his hands together, and grinned at Sophie. \"Perfect! We'll need some paint. We can find somewhere to stop near Calais, then walk in and get what we need. Sophie, think about how it might look. It needs to look convincing, and that means making it look French. With luck, no one will give us a second glance.\"\n\nTwo hours later, Harry, relieved to find that he'd picked the correct direction, stopped Bertha behind a stand of trees in a field outside Calais. Gunn stayed behind, since he was the only one of the three who did not speak French, and stood watch while Harry and Sophie went into the town. They returned some time later, carrying bags of supplies, and the three got to work.\n\nBy the time they'd finished, it was almost dark again. Gunn stepped back and admired their handiwork. Bertha's sides now proclaimed that she was carrying Cirque de la Science, or, as Sophie explained, The Travelling Science Show. Gunn nodded in satisfaction and pride. Sophie wiped a paint-spattered hand across her cheek, smearing it with yellow, and he couldn't help grinning at her. She smiled back.\n\n\"Excellent,\" Harry beamed. \"As good a job as I believe I've seen. I suggest a quick meal, then we can be on our way.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"Without lights?\"\n\n\"I have a solution to that problem. You'll see.\"\n\nThey ate, then Harry drove Bertha out onto the road, and a few minutes later, they entered Calais. There were people out and about, and Gunn was pleased to see when they looked at Bertha and saw the display on her side, they looked away with little interest. \"It's working,\" he said to Sophie. \"Well done, dear.\"\n\nThey stopped outside a shop in a main street. \"This won't take long,\" Harry said, and jumped down to the ground. A few minutes later, he returned, carrying two large carbide lamps and a fuel can. \"Help me with these, would you, Gunn.\" It was the work of a few minutes to fit the lamps and light them. \"Wonderful,\" said Harry. \"From memory, Paris is about a hundred and twenty miles, and it's a good road all the way. We'll be there well before dawn.\"\n\nWebster felt a thrill as the big, blue airship came into sight, descending through the cloud layer. He liked travelling on airships; they were quieter than trains, smoother than sea-skimmers, and there was always room to move and time to enjoy a meal and a glass of ale. He wished he had the opportunity to fly more often.\n\nThe picture is getting clearer, he thought as he watched the vessel approach the boarding ramps. The line had been drawn, and, for the most part, he knew on which side the players lay. He frowned as he considered the one thing he couldn't reconcile\u2014the situation between Gunn and Jameson.\n\nPlainly, they fell on opposite sides of that line\u2014and yet, they were friends. Webster couldn't begin to understand it. Jameson had arranged the arrests of Gunn and Bohemia, as well as their escape\u2014and then he'd sent Christie and the others after them at Deal. Had Webster not followed those men and had a chance to delay them a little, the three would probably be dead by now. So, whose side was Jameson on? Could another agency be at work here, a third party? Webster shook his head, and wondered how a simple job could have turned so complicated, so quickly.\n\nThe boarding bell rang, and he made his way up the ramp and onto the airship. He had informed his employer that Paris was Gunn's likeliest destination, and had been instructed to follow.\n\nParis, thought Webster, and smiled as he found a vacant seat on the passenger deck, near the windows. He hadn't been to Paris for quite some time, and he looked forward to seeing the city again, and perhaps dining at a good restaurant the following evening.\n\nThe smile faded as he thought about the more probable outcome\u2014watching Gunn, his wife, and Bohemia from a freezing rooftop.\n\nHe sighed. Nobody had ever said this would be a holiday.\n\nThey arrived in Paris in the early hours of the morning, and Harry drove directly to a hotel he knew well from his days on the stage.\n\nGunn jumped from the cab and stroked Bertha's side in a gesture of appreciation. He noticed Harry, regarding him from the cab with a raised eyebrow. \"She got us here safe and sound. If my doubts and such gave offence, I take it all back.\"\n\nHarry smiled as he descended the steps, and patted Gunn's shoulder. \"No offence taken. I knew she'd show you.\" He helped Sophie as she trod lightly down from the cab. \"Late as it is, we shouldn't have a problem getting rooms here\u2014at least, if they remember me.\"\n\nThey obtained rooms, and after a few hours sleep, made their plans over breakfast. They assumed Pendragon's intention would be to destroy the centres of technology, and Harry knew those were concentrated in the northeastern quarter of the city.\n\n\"The attack may not come for days or weeks,\" said Harry. \"We could be in for a very long wait.\"\n\n\"You're probably right,\" said Gunn, \"but we don't have any idea of Pendragon's state of readiness. For all we know, he could attack tonight. And besides, can you think of anything better to do?\"\n\n\"In a city full of theatres and wonderful restaurants? I'm sure I can. But you're right, of course. We must do what we came here to do. And when we've thwarted Pendragon's ambitions, we should celebrate at the finest restaurant Paris has to offer.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Gunn, smiling.\n\n\"We have a small problem,\" said Sophie. \"We have the money that Jameson gave me, and there's quite a lot\u2014but it's English currency. I don't think we'd be able to change it at a bank without questions being asked.\"\n\n\"I believe I have the solution to that problem,\" said Harry after a few moments' thought. \"I have an old friend in the city who I'm sure will be able to help, and we have the afternoon. Gunn, perhaps you would accompany me.\"\n\nSophie yawned. None of them had gotten enough sleep after the long drive from Calais. \"That's fine,\" she said. \"I could use another hour or two in bed.\"\n\nShe retired upstairs, and Gunn and Harry left the hotel. Harry referred to a pocket-sized map for directions. \"Who's this friend?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"His name's Mainwaring, and he's not really a friend. Gunn, be warned: I have every reason to think that he's working for Pendragon.\"\n\nGunn groaned. He might have known that this wasn't going be easy. \"How is this going to help us, Harry?\"\n\n\"He has access to large sums of money, and I think I can coerce him into providing us with what we need.\"\n\nA short time later, they ascended the steps of a three-storey house in a less than well-to-do area of the city. Piles of rubbish leaned against the bottom of the steps, and Gunn saw that the basement windows were mostly broken. The bricks had been painted a deep green, but the paint was faded and peeling. The front door was in the same condition. Gunn thought Harry must have made a mistake; judging by the condition of this house, Mainwaring couldn't have been at all wealthy.\n\nHarry pulled the doorbell handle. A few moments later, he heard the shuffling of feet against carpet, then a short, fat man, about fifty years old, opened the door. \"Oui?\" he said, then he looked up at Harry's face.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Mainwaring hopped backward a step and ran into the house, surprising Gunn; the man was nimble, belying his looks. Either that, or Harry's appearance had put him in fear of his life. Harry rushed after him through a door down the hallway. Bemused, Gunn closed the front door and followed Harry inside, to where he'd cornered Mainwaring in the kitchen.\n\nMainwaring, his back pressing hard against the stove and his face red and sweating, stared at Harry with an expression of terror. Harry leaned against the wall, smiling, looking completely at ease.\n\nGunn decided to play along and let Harry handle the situation. He placed himself beside Harry and squared his shoulders in an attempt to appear quietly menacing.\n\n\"So good to see you after all these years, Mainwaring,\" said Harry. \"I'm glad you haven't forgotten me.\"\n\n\"Why are you here, Bohemia?\" said Mainwaring in a tremulous voice. \"To kill me?\"\n\nHarry grinned like a predator, teeth bared, his voice smooth as silk. \"Whatever makes you think that? Other than the fact that you make money for people who've tried to kill me a number of times, of course. Give me Pendragon's money, and perhaps I'll let you live.\"\n\nGunn kept his face impassive, but his stomach fluttered with the shock of seeing this side of Harry\u2014then it occurred to him that Pendragon had indeed tried to finish Harry off more than once. Were he in Harry's position, he wasn't sure he would be so restrained.\n\nMainwaring still had his back firmly against the stove. \"Look at this place, Bohemia. Does it look as if I have any money?\"\n\n\"Come, come. I have it on the best authority that you've been working for the Paris underworld, helping them to move stolen art and jewellery, amongst many other things. In return for which they pay you rather handsomely, and most of that money goes to fund Pendragon's activities. So, Mainwaring, where's the money?\"\n\nMainwaring's eyes darted from side to side, as if he was looking for an escape route. \"It's not here. I keep it somewhere else. Somewhere safe.\"\n\nMainwaring didn't deny knowing Pendragon, thought Gunn. Harry was right\u2014the man was, indeed, working for the enemy.\n\n\"Really, man. You can do better than that. Next, you'll be telling me that you keep large amounts of illegally-made and untaxed cash in the bank.\"\n\nHe took a step closer, and Mainwaring forced himself back even harder, cowering. \"What do you suppose those gangsters will do when I tell them that you're helping to finance someone whose plan is to destroy the French way of life? They may be criminals, but they're also patriots, and you know just how protective they are of their country. I think that they'd probably kill you, don't you?\"\n\nHarry took another step; by this time, he was no further than a hand's breadth away from Mainwaring. Gunn saw the man's throat quiver as he gulped.\n\nHarry continued, \"And even if they don't kill you, the flow of money pouring into Pendragon's coffers would certainly dry up. I think we can both guess what Pendragon does with people that he has no further use for.\"\n\nA look of confusion passed over Mainwaring's face. \"If I give you the money, Pendragon will probably kill me.\"\n\n\"And if you don't, my trigger-happy friend here most definitely will.\"\n\nGunn took that as a cue for a menacing gesture, and wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the metal fist of his left, intending to crack his knuckles. But Mainwaring stared open-mouthed at the prosthetic hand\u2014and his red face turned deathly white.\n\nThe man slumped in defeat. He turned to the stove and placed his hands on the corners. With a grunt of exertion he pulled it to one side, revealing a hole in the wall.\n\nMainwaring reached into the hole and pulled out two packages wrapped in dirty brown cloth. He turned and threw the packages at Harry, who caught them deftly. \"That's all I have,\" he spat. \"If you want more, you're out of luck.\"\n\nHarry unwrapped the ends of the packets, and Gunn saw that they were stuffed with French banknotes. He raised his eyes back to Mainwaring. \"I'd say it was a pleasure doing business\u2014but that would be a lie. Give Pendragon my regards.\" He slipped the packages into his overcoat pockets, then turned to Gunn and nodded. Gunn led the way back to the front door, and they left without another word.\n\n\"The anonymous messages might have been a mistake,\" said Sophie. They stood on the roof of the warehouse, across the street from one of three workshops they'd agreed would be a prime target for Pendragon. It was almost midnight, and a thin layer of cloud obscured the stars. The air was cold, but still.\n\nGunn looked over the parapet through his goggles, careful to avoid being seen by the two gendarmes patrolling the street below. \"Keep your voice down, dear,\" he whispered in warning. The two men moved on, giving no sign that they'd heard anything.\n\nWhile Harry and Gunn visited Mainwaring, Sophie hadn't been able to sleep, and instead had gone to a wire office to send messages to as many laboratories and workshops as she could, warning them of an impending attack. Now, the gendarmerie appeared to have increased their presence in the streets.\n\n\"This could impede us quite severely. I'm beginning to think we'd have been better off saying nothing,\" Harry said quietly.\n\nThe two policemen disappeared around a corner.\n\nSophie took Gunn's hand. \"If nothing happens for a few days, the police might assume it was a false alarm and reduce these patrols.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"We can hope so. We can also hope Pendragon doesn't act too soon. For all the increased presence, I fear the police are ill-equipped to deal with such an attack.\"\n\nGunn scanned the streets, counting three more pairs of gendarmes on patrol. The nearest were a good three hundred yards away. He sat down, his back to the parapet. The dart gun he'd secured in his belt dug into his side, and he adjusted it to make it more comfortable.\n\nHarry continued, \"However, at this moment, I'm more concerned about Bertha.\"\n\nGunn turned and peeped over the edge, glancing down into the narrow street behind the building, as he had done every few minutes since they'd settled themselves on the roof. Bertha was there, and so far undisturbed\u2014but she was the largest vehicle on the street, and by far the most noticeable.\n\nHarry had left the furnace lit, and wisps of smoke drifted from her innards\u2014another detail that could draw attention. \"Me, too. It's just a matter of time before one of those coppers wonders why she's there. I move that we abandon this for tonight. We need a better plan.\"\n\n\"I second that,\" said Harry.\n\nThey carried the equipment down the wooden stairs that followed the side of the building, and loaded it all into Bertha's cab. Within a minute, they were on their way.\n\n\"Harry,\" said Sophie and pointed at a barn-like building across the street.\n\nGunn made out a printed sign plastered on the large shutters at the front of the building. \"What does it say?\"\n\nSophie replied, \"It says, French-to-English dictionaries are half-price, and you should buy one.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nHarry snorted, and Sophie elbowed Gunn in the ribs.\n\n\"Of course not, silly. It says that the workshop and adjoining living space are available to rent.\"\n\nChristie operated the bell on the front door of the shabby house. There was no answer\u2014then the door opened a crack, and a red-rimmed eye regarded him.\n\nChristie didn't have time for Mainwaring's childishness. \"Let me in, you fool.\"\n\nThe door opened and Mainwaring looked up at him, his face flushed. His voice quavered. \"What are you doing in Paris?\" He turned and led the way inside, avoiding Christie's gaze.\n\n\"Business,\" he said shortly as he closed the door and followed Mainwaring to the little parlour. \"What's wrong with you?\"\n\nMainwaring sat in an armchair and reached for a bottle, almost dropping it. \"Ah, nothing. Nothing at all.\" Christie noticed that the man's hands trembled as he took a swig from the bottle. Christie caught a glimpse of the label: absinthe.\n\nChristie glanced around the room, wrinkling his nose at the faded, peeling wallpaper and the threadbare furniture, and took a seat in the other armchair. \"A bit early in the day for that, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Mind your own business, Christie. What do you want?\"\n\n\"I've come to collect this month's takings.\"\n\nMainwaring spluttered, spilling a few drops of the drink as he put the bottle down. He coughed again, then got himself under control.\n\nChristie was getting annoyed. \"What the devil's wrong with you, man?\"\n\nMainwaring pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his mouth. \"Where's the usual courier?\" he said.\n\n\"Management left it to me, since I'm here. Just get it, will you? I have more important things to be doing.\"\n\nMainwaring stood, his eyes moving back and forth between Christie and the door. \"Wait here,\" he said, then left the room.\n\nA minute passed, and Christie began to wonder what was taking so long. He got up to find out, and heard rattling sounds coming from the kitchen.\n\nMainwaring was there, straining at a sash window, trying to slide it up in the frame. He turned at the sound of Christie's footsteps, and backed into the corner, a look of terror on his face.\n\n\"What's going on, Mainwaring?\" Christie demanded.\n\n\"The money's gone,\" Mainwaring blurted out. \"Bohemia\u2014\"\n\n\"Bohemia was here?\" Christie shouted. \"You had strict orders. You were to report immediately if you saw him.\"\n\n\"He was here, with another man. He said he'd tell\u2014\"\n\n\"You gave him the money?\"\n\nMainwaring nodded sharply. \"He didn't give me any choice.\"\n\nChristie forced himself to speak calmly. \"Fine,\" he said. \"We'll find them. If they come back, you're to send word without delay.\"\n\nMainwaring nodded quickly, and Christie stalked out.\n\nChristie stormed down the steps of Mainwaring's house and hurried to the steam carriage. He climbed into the back seat next to Logan.\n\n\"Where next?\" asked Granger from the driver's seat.\n\nIt occurred to Christie that Granger was quite tall\u2014about the same height as Bohemia, if a little heavier. Logan, on the other hand, was shorter, with a build similar to Gunn's.\n\n\"Take me back to headquarters.\" The steam carriage started rolling. Christie looked out at Mainwaring's house as they drove by. \"I have a little job for you two.\"\n\nThe scar below Granger's eye wrinkled as he grinned.\n\nLate the following night, Gunn moved Harry's electrical disruptor up to the roof of the warehouse that Sophie had found, and surveyed the area nearby. It was the perfect location\u2014right in the middle of the industrial area, and across the street from a likely target. He could see Harry on the roof of a building fifty yards away.\n\nSophie came up onto the roof and took his hand.\n\n\"Well done finding this place, dear.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I simply kept my eyes open for possibilities.\"\n\nGunn shrugged. \"Well, that makes one of us.\"\n\nHarry reasoned that Pendragon would probably use his machines to steal what he could from the French workshops before destroying them. The alternative was that Pendragon would simply raze the buildings, possibly by bombing them from the airship\u2014in which case, the three of them would be in the middle of a disaster area, and unable to escape or fight back. That possibility terrified Gunn.\n\n\"Another slow, boring night,\" he said, smiling to cover his nervousness.\n\n\"You should have brought a book to read, dear,\" said Sophie. She sat with her back against the parapet, holding a book in her gloved hands.\n\n\"How can you read in this light?\"\n\nSophie looked up at him and tapped the side of her goggles, grinning.\n\nGunn alternated between the goggles and binoculars, scanning the horizon and watching the gendarmes walking their rounds. At about two in the morning, a cold breeze blew in from the north, and he wrapped his coat more tightly around himself. Shortly after that, a light rain began to fall.\n\nSophie put her book away and huddled in the shelter of the parapet, her hat pulled down over her ears. After a short while, Gunn realised that she had fallen asleep, and he watched her with tenderness; she was exhausted, poor thing\u2014and despite that, she'd insisted on standing watch with him, in the cold and damp.\n\nHe thought about carrying her down into the warmth of the building for some proper rest, when he noticed a faint humming sound. He stood and looked around, clicking through the settings on the goggles.\n\nHe looked over at Harry, who had stood up, waving his arms frantically. Gunn waved back, and Harry, seeing him, stabbed his finger toward the north.\n\nPendragon's airship hung in the air, perhaps two miles away, a dark shadow against the clouds. Gunn stepped over to Sophie quickly, and shook her shoulder. She looked up at him, groggy with sleep.\n\n\"It's happening.\"\n\nSophie was on her feet in an instant. \"Where?\" she said, and Gunn pointed out the airship to her. She used her binoculars. \"It's coming right for us, and it's losing height.\"\n\nShe was right; the airship was landing, rather than remaining airborne to drop bombs. He was relieved\u2014Harry had been correct.\n\nThe airship reached ground level, the highest of its three envelopes showing as a rounded, humped shadow above and behind the buildings, about half a mile away. Gunn felt tense and excited, as if he should be doing something, but all he could do was wait.\n\nHe didn't have to wait long. He felt the now-familiar rhythmic thumping through his feet before he heard anything, then one of Pendragon's machines appeared from an alley across the street from Gunn and Sophie.\n\n\"Now, Sophie!\" Gunn shouted, and Sophie turned the handle on the electrical disruptor as hard as she could, winding it up to full power.\n\nThe machine stopped in front of the workshop, pulled back the arm with the boxing-glove hand, and punched through the wall with an impact that shook the roof under Gunn's feet.\n\nIt moved forward\u2014then jerked once, twice, and stopped.\n\n\"It's working!\" Gunn exulted, \"keep it going!\"\n\nHe pulled his dart gun from his belt and scrambled down to street level, glancing at Harry's roof on the way. Harry was nowhere in sight\u2014on his way to assist, probably\u2014but then a second machine came into view, a hundred yards away, with Harry following close behind.\n\nGunn rushed across to where the first machine had stopped. It stood there, inert, and Gunn wondered why the man inside wasn't trying to get out. Gunn watched for movement from the first machine while keeping an eye along the street. Harry was ten yards from the other machine, and he threw one of the bottles. It hit, precisely on target, across the second machine's faceplate.\n\nAs if the man inside had lost control, the machine ran in a zigzag, then smashed into a gaslight pole at the edge of the pavement, flattening it. It hit the wall of a building, lost its balance, and fell. Harry pulled his dart pistol from his belt as he ran up to the fallen machine.\n\nThere was still no sign of activity from the first machine. Then Gunn heard a humming sound, getting louder and higher in pitch. It came from the second machine. Harry backed away from it, then turned and ran.\n\nThe machine exploded, a ball of flame filling the space between the buildings on either side, almost blinding Gunn.\n\n\"Harry!\" he shouted, certain that his friend had been caught in the explosion. He turned his head and hunched his shoulders as bits of hot metal rained down all around him.\n\nThe second machine was gone, leaving just a small pile of mangled metal in the middle of the fire. There was no sign of Harry. Gunn wanted to find him\u2014but if he left his station, the man inside the first machine might escape, and all would have been for nothing. His mind raced; he didn't know what to do.\n\nThen Harry stepped out from an alley where he'd taken shelter, and Gunn grinned in relief. Harry jogged toward him and a moment later was by his side. \"I'll keep my pistol ready, Gunn. You use your hand to get the machine open.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary, gentlemen,\" said an accented voice from behind them. Gunn and Harry whirled round to see eight gendarmes standing there. Gunn hadn't heard them approach.\n\n\"We will manage this situation now.\"\n\nWebster walked all the way from the centre of Paris to the industrial quarter, and for once, he'd been quite content to do so. Even in England, he knew his skills with a steam carriage wouldn't win him any medals, but here . . . they drove on the wrong side of the streets, and their traffic laws seemed to be designed to cause chaos. He'd decided that he was better off on foot.\n\nThe area crawled with police, even at that late hour, and Webster had a devil of a time getting up onto a roof with a decent view without being seen. He watched the sky, and the surrounding buildings. There was no sign of Gunn or Bohemia, but if that was where the attack would take place, they would be near.\n\nHe heard the faint sound of propellers. The airship was coming. If Bohemia and the others were there, they would be heading that way.\n\nQuickly, he checked the street below for police, then hurried down.\n\nHarry explained to Montand, the officer in charge, that the electrical disruptor that Sophie ran nearby was probably the only thing preventing the machine from exploding as the other one had. Montand shouted orders, and within moments, one of his men escorted Sophie down from the roof, while others kept the disruptor running. He gestured at two gendarmes, then turned to the three of them. \"Please go with these men.\"\n\nThe gendarmes escorted them away to a safe place between two buildings, and Gunn saw Harry make a point of positioning himself so he could watch Montand's men working on the machine. A few minutes later, Montand returned. \"The explosive device inside the machine has been disabled.\"\n\n\"I'd like to examine it, if I may,\" said Harry.\n\nMontand looked at him suspiciously, then shook his head. \"Not at this time, I think. Please wait here.\" He walked off.\n\n\"Did Pendragon blow that machine up with his man inside it?\" said Gunn, and Sophie shuddered.\n\n\"I was able to see Montand's men opening the machine. There was no man inside, although there was a space that a man could fit into. But I don't think it was controlled by a calculating engine, either. I'm anxious to know how these machines work.\"\n\nChristie drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair. He seethed with rage, angrier with every minute he was forced to wait. He stood and paced along the row of control harnesses. The humming of the engines vibrated the walls and floor, and the noise added to his irritation.\n\nThe door opened and Proctor came into the room, holding a sheet of paper. \"About time,\" said Christie. \"Where are we?\"\n\n\"Almost clear of the city.\"\n\n\"Land the ship as soon as it's safe, and contact Granger to come and get me.\" He sat down in the chair. \"How did you manage to lose two walkers? Where are they now?\"\n\n\"They ran into unexpected resistance. We were able to destroy one. For some reason, the control box didn't work on the other. We don't know where it is.\"\n\n\"We should assume that it was captured. I'll take a control box with me and see that it's taken care of.\"\n\n\"There's something you should see.\" Proctor handed the paper to Christie.\n\nChristie held the sheet up to the light. It was a photogram, showing an image captured through the viewer of one of the walkers. In the foreground a man was caught, frozen, as he hefted a black object, mid-throw. The man's face was grainy, but clear enough.\n\n\"Bohemia!\" Christie growled in rage. \"I don't suppose the explosion\u2014\" But Proctor was shaking his head. Christie screwed the paper up and threw it at Proctor's face. The man didn't even blink as it bounced off his forehead. \"Damn him! Can we not be rid of this nuisance once and for all?\"\n\n\"You know Management will want this mess cleaned up,\" said Proctor, calmly. \"We'd best get on with it. Use the control box. Find our walker. Bohemia won't be very far away.\"\n\nGunn paced the length of the room and back for the hundredth time. Harry sat in one of the shabby chairs that had been left behind by the previous occupants of the warehouse. Sophie had gone to bed.\n\nHarry shifted in the armchair, plainly just as exasperated as Gunn that Montand had kept them in the warehouse under guard for so long. Gunn dropped into the other armchair with a thump. The skylights in the warehouse roof began to brighten as the sun came up.\n\nGunn heard the street door of the warehouse open and close, and Montand came into the room. About time, thought Gunn.\n\n\"My apologies for the long wait, gentlemen. If you'd be so kind, I'd like to know why you are here, and what you can tell me about the machines.\"\n\nHarry spoke at length about Pendragon and his intentions. Montand listened, taking notes in a small black book. Harry finished, and Montand snapped the book shut.\n\n\"Please remain here,\" he said as he left.\n\n\"How much longer is this going to go on, Harry?\" said Gunn. \"Can't the man see that we're on his side?\"\n\nHarry yawned. \"I'm sure that Montand knows that. Give it time, Gunn\u2014at least we're safe, and I think that at last we may see some official acknowledgement that Pendragon is a threat.\"\n\nMontand returned just before noon. \"Doctor, you are to come with me.\"\n\n\"What's this about?\" said Gunn.\n\nMontand looked at him. \"You and your wife should remain here. Please be patient.\"\n\nHarry shrugged, and followed Montand out.\n\nHarry returned in the middle of the afternoon, plainly excited.\n\n\"Harry! Where have you been?\" exclaimed Gunn. \"Are we in trouble?\"\n\n\"The answer to that would seem to be no, with qualifications.\"\n\n\"Thank goodness you're safe,\" said Sophie. \"We've been worried.\"\n\n\"Nothing to be worried about at all,\" said Harry, smiling. \"Montand took me to the police laboratory. He had instructions to allow me to examine the machine, and it's quite an eye-opener.\"\n\n\"Instructions? From whom?\" said Gunn.\n\nHarry's brow furrowed slightly. \"A good question. He didn't say it outright, but I got the distinct impression that someone in Britain was behind it. We might have friends in high places, after all.\"\n\nGunn and Sophie looked at each other in surprise. \"Whoever could they be?\" said Gunn.\n\n\"I have no idea. Montand wouldn't tell me. But the good news is that he's recalled his men, so we're all free to come and go as we please. I came back for a change of clothes, and I'll be returning to the laboratory to continue working on the machine. You could join me there later, if you wish.\"\n\nGunn raised an eyebrow. \"We'd love to,\" he said, \"but I think I'd like to take Sophie to lunch, first.\"\n\n\"Very good. I'll see you later, then.\"\n\nChristie placed the control box next to him, on the rear seat of the carriage. He turned a knob on its side, then pressed a switch. A little filament light came on, flickered, then went out.\n\n\"Well?\" said Logan from the driver's seat.\n\nChristie frowned. \"It's nearby and has power, but it's not responding.\"\n\nGranger, in the passenger seat, looked in the direction of the police laboratory building across the street.\n\n\"You know what you're looking for?\" said Christie.\n\nLogan and Granger nodded.\n\n\"Good. Tear it out if you have to. If you can't get it, make sure it's destroyed. If Bohemia's there, shoot him in the head.\"\n\n\"You've come at the perfect time,\" said Harry with a grin as Gunn and Sophie entered the laboratory. Harry, accompanied by a young, thin man wearing spectacles, stood next to the partially dismantled machine, which lay on a long table under bright, electric lights. \"This is Herv\u00e9. Montand asked him to assist me.\" Herv\u00e9 nodded at them, then continued inspecting the machine's innards.\n\nHarry lifted a grey metal box out from inside the machine. It was about six inches square and two deep, with wires covered in black fabric leading from one side into the machine's workings.\n\n\"We've been examining this mystery component, and it is definitely not any kind of sequencer. It appears to respond to some form of invisible vibrations that can travel across distances. I believe it receives these vibrations from afar and converts them into electrical messages that control the machine. If I'm correct, it also sends information\u2014specifically, images from the machine's visual system, so the operator can see what the machine is seeing. I suspect the machine was being controlled by someone aboard Pendragon's airship.\"\n\n\"That's incredible,\" said Gunn. \"How far away could the operator be?\"\n\nHarry put the box back down, letting it rest on top of the machine's other workings. \"There's no way to tell by just looking at it, but the fact that Pendragon's airship was never terribly far from the machine's targets indicates that the distance is limited. A mile, perhaps.\"\n\n\"An idea stolen from someone's workshop in London,\" Sophie interjected.\n\n\"No doubt. I also believe that when I disabled the second machine by blinding it, the person controlling it sent a signal that activated the explosives.\"\n\n\"Why would they do that?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"To prevent us dissecting the machine to understand how it works, as we have done. We were lucky, by the way. Montand's man disabled the explosive device in this machine by ripping out some vital connections between that part and the rest of the machine, not just the detonator. Had it not been for that, whoever was controlling it would have been able to try again as soon as the electrical disruptor was stopped.\"\n\nSophie shuddered, and looked at Gunn in dismay. \"In other words, you could have been blown to bits.\"\n\nGunn nodded, his mouth a grim line.\n\nHarry's face paled; he'd only just realised just how serious the situation could have become.\n\n\"It seems that you have things well in hand,\" said Gunn. \"We'll let you get on. I think we'll go back to our headquarters, and I'll collect you later.\"\n\nHarry nodded, regaining his composure. \"I'm sure we'll have made yet more discoveries by then, and I can tell you all about them.\"\n\nGunn shook Herv\u00e9's hand, and he and Sophie made to leave. Then Sophie stopped. \"Do you think Pendragon is still trying to control it now?\"\n\nHarry and Herv\u00e9 smiled. \"We believe he was, indeed. We noted electrical activity for a time, which gave us an important clue as to its purpose. Then it stopped. Pendragon may have realised we had the component in our possession, and that continuing to send signals might give us information about it that he doesn't want us to have.\"\n\nThe hairs on the back of Gunn's neck bristled. \"But that means Pendragon must have been within a mile of here,\" he said. \"If that thing was trying to respond to the signals . . .\"\n\nHarry's eyes went wide, and Herv\u00e9 clapped a hand to his forehead. \"We must get out of here immediately!\" said Harry.\n\nGunn grabbed Sophie's hand and bolted for the door, then heard a gunshot from outside. He dragged Sophie to one side, pushed her into a narrow gap behind a row of tall mahogany filing cabinets, and crammed himself in after her.\n\nThe door burst open and two men rushed in\u2014masked men, wearing dark grey, military-style greatcoats, and wide-brimmed hats. In their gloved hands they held large pistols. One, with a deep scar visible above his mask, aimed at Harry, the other at Herv\u00e9. They fired.\n\nThe gunshots rang out in the enclosed space. Harry and Herv\u00e9 fell.\n\nGunn scrambled forward, raging, intending to fight\u2014but Sophie stopped him, gripping his jacket with white-knuckled hands.\n\nThe man with the scar rushed to the machine, ripped the grey metal box free, and dashed back toward his colleague, when he saw Gunn, jammed behind the cabinets. He stopped, swinging his pistol around to point it at Gunn.\n\nGunn froze. Instinct took control. He raised his arms to defend himself.\n\nThe man fired, and time slowed to a crawl.\n\nThe bullet ricocheted off the metal of his prosthetic hand, sending a hammer blow into his bones. Sparks flew as the bullet recoiled off the filing cabinet\u2014then came a thump as it punched into the second shooter. The man's head jerked back, his hat soaring away. Blood splattered against the wall, and he fell.\n\nThe scarred man spared only a brief glance for his partner, then ran from the room.\n\nGunn, dazed and in shock, looked around the room through the haze of gun smoke. Sophie pushed him out of the way and hurried to where Harry lay. Herv\u00e9 was slumped with his back against the wall, a hole the size of a silver sixpence above his left eye.\n\nGunn stooped by the dead gunman and pulled the cloth mask away. Logan.\n\n\"Connie!\" Sophie cried from where she was crouched next to Harry. Gunn darted to her side, as half a dozen gendarmes ran into the room.\n\nA doctor strode into the room, took one look at Harry, and yelled for assistance. Within seconds, two more policemen rushed in, bundled Harry onto a stretcher, and carried him away at a brisk trot. Gunn and Sophie were escorted outside, where Montand waited in a carriage.\n\nHe raced to hospital, where Gunn was diagnosed with mild shock and given a sedative. Sophie appeared unscathed, but shortly after arriving, her hands began to shake, then she wept hysterically. She was given a dose of the same sedative.\n\nHerv\u00e9 was dead. Montand, who'd gone to ascertain Harry's condition, assured them that the young man certainly hadn't felt a thing. \"The gunman who shot Harry was not as good a marksman as his comrade. The bullet missed his heart. He'll be kept here for a while, but the doctor says he'll live.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about Herv\u00e9,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"So am I. But I'm glad that you made one of these bastards pay. You were lucky for that hand, Monsieur Gunn. It saved your life.\" Montand straightened his uniform. \"The doctor says you're free to leave. I'll assign one of my men to drive you.\"\n\nThe next morning Gunn woke to a faint humming, like the sound of airship engines. He made a pot of coffee and took it to the makeshift parlour, where Sophie sat, reading a book. \"How are you feeling?\" he said.\n\n\"Much better, dear.\"\n\nGunn realised that the sound of airship engines was still present. \"What is all that noise?\"\n\n\"Have a look from the roof. It's rather an impressive sight.\"\n\nCurious, Gunn went to the roof hatch, climbed out, and looked up.\n\nThe humming sound came from an aerial gun platform four or five hundred feet up, consisting of two armoured airship envelopes supporting a flat wooden deck with heavy guns mounted at the corners, tethered to the ground by ropes. The engines he heard drove propellers that kept the platform steady.\n\nGunn was astounded to see that the one above him was just one of at least eight in the vicinity. He hurried down from the roof, worried. \"It looks like they're expecting an attack\u2014and if one comes, we'll be caught in the middle of it. Let me see if I can find out what's happening.\"\n\n\"How are you going to do that?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I'll get a newspaper.\" He kissed Sophie and left.\n\nHe found a newspaper seller a few streets away and returned to the warehouse. On the way, he tried to decipher the front page, but he couldn't understand more than a handful of the words. He gave the paper to Sophie when he arrived back at their headquarters.\n\n\"Montand's done it,\" said Sophie excitedly. \"I must say, the French authorities don't waste any time. The police in every major city in France are on alert. The military has been deployed, and they've put gun platforms up near every centre of technical development and manufacturing, ready to shoot down Pendragon's airship if it comes within a mile.\"\n\n\"The events the other night must have shaken them up quite badly.\"\n\n\"Them, and others. Germany, Switzerland, and Italy are taking similar measures, and most of Europe is on the lookout for Pendragon's airship.\"\n\nGunn felt relieved, and yet at the same time, let down. Pendragon's plans were surely thwarted, but he was still at large. A thought struck him. \"You didn't mention Britain.\"\n\n\"No, I didn't,\" she said, turning the pages of the paper. \"I was hoping this would vindicate you and Harry and allow us to go home, but it seems that you're both still considered traitors. The official British government line is that what happened here the other night was the result of actions by French anarchists, and that you two are in league with them.\"\n\n\"Lies from Pendragon's allies. So we're still stuck here.\"\n\n\"We may not be able to stay here, either,\" said Sophie, and Gunn looked at her. She held the newspaper up for him to see, pointing out a short article low down on one of the inside pages.\n\nGunn recognised one word: Mainwaring. \"What does it say?\"\n\n\"It says Mainwaring is dead, and a witness saw two men leaving his house just before he was found. The police are saying he was murdered. The descriptions of the two men fit you and Harry, somewhat.\"\n\nGunn thought about the panicked state Mainwaring had been in when they'd left him. \"Are they sure he didn't do himself in?\"\n\nSophie re-read the article. \"So, he tied himself to a chair, shot himself in the head, then disposed of the gun.\" She put the paper down and smiled at Gunn, sweetly. \"I know I'm just a silly girl who doesn't know anything, but something tells me it wasn't suicide.\" Her expression turned serious. \"In any case, this happened the day after you and Harry were there. Someone dressed up to look like you, and made a point of being seen. You've been framed, dear.\"\n\n\"It's just a matter of time before the police realise who those descriptions fit.\" Gunn sighed. \"So we have a choice. We can stay here and hang as murderers, or we can go home and hang as traitors.\"\n\n\"You could talk to Montand. He seems a reasonable man.\"\n\n\"Ye gods, we can't do that. He's a high-ranking police officer. He'd have no choice but to detain us for questioning\u2014and with all evidence pointing squarely at me and Harry, we'd swing.\"\n\n\"We could go somewhere else. Germany, perhaps? Weren't you saying that Pendragon would attack Germany sooner or later?\"\n\nGunn suddenly felt anger building up in him. \"No, we're not running any more. Everything we've done so far has been driven by Pendragon, and where's it got us? I lost my hand because of him. We've been forced from our home and branded as traitors to our country. People have been murdered. Harry almost was, too. That gunman had me cowering, ready to have my brains shot out, and no doubt he would have killed you next. It was pure luck that we survived.\n\n\"We got too close to Pendragon and now he's coming for us, and if we run, we'll be shot in the back. I refuse to do things his way anymore. I've damned well had enough of Pendragon and whoever he's working with, and I'm not going to let them kill us without putting up a fight.\"\n\nSophie blinked, astounded. \"What do you think we should do?\"\n\nGunn took a deep breath and let it out slowly, forcing himself to relax. He felt invigorated, clear-headed\u2014and determined. He knew precisely what to do. \"First, we're going to get Harry out of the hospital. Then, we're going back to England.\"\n\n\"Why England? It's not safe.\"\n\n\"Nowhere will be safe for very long. But there's only one place that can possibly be giving Pendragon shelter, and that's England. He operates from there, and that's where we'll find him. We're going after him, before he comes after us again. We're going to find out who he really is, and who's working with him, and we're going to stop them all.\"\n\n\"What about Mainwaring?\"\n\nGunn thought for a moment. At that point, he considered the Mainwaring business trivial compared to Pendragon. \"I'm going to write a letter to Montand explaining about Mainwaring before it gets any worse, but by the time he sees it, we'll be long gone.\"\n\n\"You do know that Montand left some men watching this place, despite what he said, don't you?\"\n\n\"Actually, I did. Uniforms or no, they still look like coppers.\" Gunn tapped a finger against the newspaper. \"I suspect this business has convinced Montand that we've told him the truth, and in any case, his men are probably far too busy fortifying the city against Pendragon. As it is, the men that were watching are gone. I saw no sign of them when I went to get the paper.\"\n\n\"All right, then. When are we going to do all this?\"\n\n\"There's no time like the present.\" Gunn stood. \"Help me pack up just what we need, and we'll load it aboard Bertha. Leave the rest behind. I don't expect we'll be coming back. Then, we're going to the hospital to tell Harry what we're about, and we'll see if we can get him out without being noticed. As soon as we have Harry, we're leaving.\"\n\nThey spent the rest of the morning getting Bertha ready for the trip back to England. Then, Gunn drove the steam carriage to the hospital.\n\nThey found Harry asleep. A faint sheen of perspiration moistened his pale skin, despite which he looked cold. He breathed shallowly, rapidly.\n\n\"The result of the surgery,\" said Sophie quietly. \"We may be better off waiting until tomorrow, for his sake. He needs more rest.\"\n\n\"Waiting for what?\" said Harry, just as quietly. His eyes remained closed.\n\n\"Oh, you . . .\" said Sophie, smiling.\n\nGunn sat on the edge of the bed so that he could speak without being overheard. \"To get you out of here.\" Harry opened his eyes in surprise. \"Don't talk, just listen. Mainwaring is dead, and they're going to think we killed him. We may have given Pendragon a setback, but we can be sure we haven't stopped him. He's still at large, and if we're going to find him, we have to get out of France before the police come after us over Mainwaring. We don't have much time. Are you well enough to travel?\"\n\n\"If I get out of this bed, I'll have a nurse pushing me back in before I can take a step. Come back for me as soon as it's dark. There will only be one nurse on duty, and she won't know I'm gone until the morning. Meet me across the street from the main entrance.\"\n\n\"I brought street clothes,\" said Sophie, holding her satchel.\n\n\"Thank you. They cut mine to pieces, and they've been burned. Leave them in the bedside cabinet.\"\n\nSophie slipped the satchel into the cabinet. \"Get some rest, now. You'll need your strength.\"\n\nGunn paced the war room like a caged beast until the sun sank below the horizon and it was time to move. He went to Bertha and fired the furnace. By the time the steam pressure had built, it was fully dark outside.\n\n\"I never thought I'd say this,\" said Sophie as she climbed into the cab, \"but I think I'll miss this place. It was getting to be quite comfortable.\"\n\n\"I thought you preferred the hotel,\" said Gunn as he studied the various controls. He'd watched Harry operating Bertha enough times, and he felt sure he could drive her without too much difficulty.\n\nSophie shrugged and smiled. \"The hotel was nice, but here, we had everything we really needed, and it was far cheaper.\"\n\n\"The rent's paid for two months. When we've dealt with Pendragon, perhaps we can come back. We should. We'll have earned that celebration dinner we promised ourselves.\"\n\n\"You seem very confident that we'll deal with Pendragon.\"\n\n\"We have to. We can't afford to fail.\" He jumped down from the cab and lit Bertha's carbide lamps, then turned off the warehouse lights, opened the large doors\u2014and there stood Montand, in Bertha's gleam. He was out of uniform, wearing a tan coat over a dark suit.\n\n\"Fallen at the first hurdle,\" groaned Gunn.\n\nMontand walked into the warehouse quickly. He wasted no time on pleasantries. \"Did you kill Mainwaring?\"\n\n\"He was alive when we left him,\" said Gunn, looking Montand in the eye.\n\nMontand addressed them both. \"Nobody can know I was here, understand?\"\n\nGunn nodded.\n\n\"Your descriptions were recognised. Warrants for your arrest are being issued as I speak. You have no more than an hour to get out of Paris, before the men at the city gates receive instructions to stop and search all traffic attempting to leave.\"\n\n\"Has Harry been arrested?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"Not yet. Because he is in my charge, it will be my men who perform that duty. Unfortunately I have been called away on urgent business, and I can't give that order until I return. I can give you half an hour, no more. Get your friend, and get out of Paris.\"\n\n\"Montand?\" said Gunn. \"Why are you doing this?\"\n\n\"Mainwaring is dead. Pendragon is not.\" Montand adjusted his collar, and walked out into the night.\n\nWebster was eating dinner in the dining room of his hotel when a bellboy appeared at his elbow holding a silver platter with an envelope on it.\n\nWebster took a sip of his wine, then slit the envelope with his fish knife and pulled out the folded sheet inside.\n\nDr. Bohemia and Mr. and Mrs. Gunn released. Expect Gunns to retrieve Bohemia and attempt to leave Paris. Destination uncertain.\n\nWebster folded the paper and put it in his pocket. That was that, then. It was time for him to make his travel arrangements. He sighed. He was rather enjoying Paris, despite the cold nights out. He finished his dinner, then asked the desk clerk to book him a place on the morning airship to London.\n\nSophie drove Bertha slowly out onto the street, and Gunn closed and locked the doors behind her. \"Ready?\" he said as he climbed back into the cab.\n\nTwenty minutes later, Gunn drew Bertha to a stop in a side-street a hundred yards from the hospital. \"Watch the pressure gauge,\" he said, pointing the instrument out for Sophie. \"If it drops below that green mark, throw a few bits of coal into the furnace.\"\n\n\"Be quick.\" She kissed his cheek. \"And be careful.\"\n\nGunn made his way to the hospital and looked for Harry on the opposite side of the street. He wasn't there.\n\nMinutes passed with no sign of his friend, then Gunn spotted two gendarmes walking quickly toward the hospital. He tensed but stayed put, not wanting to attract their attention. The police entered the building.\n\nAnother minute passed. Gunn worried that Harry had been apprehended, but decided to wait until he was certain. If the police had arrested him, they'd bring him out through the same door, and Gunn would create a distraction to allow Harry to escape.\n\nGunn noticed another man walking toward the hospital entrance. There was something familiar about him. With a shock, Gunn recognised him as he passed under the lights above the hospital entrance. It was the man with the scar, the man who'd tried to shoot him. There to finish Harry off.\n\nGunn's mind raced. He dashed across the street and down the alley at the side of the hospital building. Harry's room was on the ground floor. He stopped at the first open window he found and glanced inside. The room was empty. He climbed in.\n\nAt the door, he sneaked a look out into the corridor. Nurses, doctors, and visitors wandered the corridors, but he saw no sign of the police, or the man with the scar.\n\nHarry's room was three down. He slipped back out through the window and ran, counting windows, until he reached the right one. He looked in and saw Harry, dressed in the street clothes that Sophie had left for him. Harry was pressed against the wall by the slightly-opened door, peeping out into the corridor through the gap.\n\nGunn tapped at the window, and Harry whirled round. He saw Gunn, hurried to the window, and yanked it open.\n\n\"Thank goodness. The police are here.\"\n\n\"I know\u2014\"\n\nHarry scrambled out of the window and slid it closed behind him. The door opened, and they dropped out of the line of sight.\n\nStaying low, they slunk back along the alley\u2014and stopped when they saw the man with the scar step into view at the far end. \"It's him!\" Harry hissed.\n\nThey crouched in shadow; the man hadn't seen them. Gunn looked behind him to see if there was a way out, but there was nothing but a wall at the far end of the alley.\n\nHe looked back in time to see the man disappear into the open window that he'd used himself. He turned back to Harry. \"We have to run for it!\" he said in a hoarse whisper.\n\nGunn supported Harry, an arm round his waist, as they staggered back to Bertha. Sophie looked at the invalid as Gunn helped him up into the cab. \"How are you feeling?\" she asked.\n\n\"Terrible.\"\n\n\"I put a blanket by the furnace to warm for you. Sit down and get comfortable.\"\n\nHarry smiled. \"Thank you, Sophie. You're a wonder.\" He wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and sat against the back wall of the cab.\n\n\"Montand told us they'd be watching the city gates for us,\" said Gunn, and he saw Harry raise his eyebrows in surprise. \"We'd better get moving.\" He pressed a lever forward, and Bertha began roll along the road in the direction of the nearest gate out of Paris.\n\nGunn despaired when he saw the city's north gate, and a line of vehicles waiting to be searched before they would be let through. \"We're too late.\"\n\n\"Can we turn around?\" Sophie asked.\n\n\"Not without looking suspicious. They're not looking for Bertha, though.\"\n\nHarry looked up from where he was sitting. \"How can you tell?\"\n\n\"The police are stopping everyone, even foot traffic. Not just the large vehicles.\"\n\n\"I don't see how we can get through,\" said Sophie, her face dark. \"They'll stop us.\"\n\nGunn thought for a few moments. \"No, they won't. I have an idea,\" he said.\n\nI must be mad, thought Gunn. He wished he'd had a better idea, but there hadn't been time. He dangled by his left hand, metal fingers hooked over the top edge of the bulkhead that separated Bertha's cab from the machinery behind. Harry hung behind him, arms tight around Gunn's neck, and his feet mere inches above the gears. Gunn sweated freely, and found it difficult to breathe in the heat of Bertha's furnace.\n\nHe felt their combined weight threatening to pull his prosthetic hand off, but Harry had assured him that it would carry at least twice this load. All the same, his flesh and blood shoulder was on fire with pain.\n\nNow it was all up to Sophie.\n\nBertha lurched forward then stopped, sending pain shooting all the way to his artificial fingers. He could hear Sophie talking to the police at the gate, but only made out a few French words over the noise of the engine.\n\nHe heard metal creak as the police lifted the deck plates in the cab, checking the storage spaces, then clanging as they let them drop closed again. Not much longer. Harry wheezed heavily, groaning with pain, and Gunn could feel the man's hold beginning to slip. Harry couldn't take much more of this.\n\nBertha lurched forward again, and Harry almost lost his grasp. Gunn grabbed the sleeve of Harry's jacket with his free hand, trying to stop him falling any farther. \"It's almost over, Harry,\" he said in a hoarse whisper, \"just a few more seconds. Hold on!\"\n\nHarry shifted again, trying to keep himself up, but with every movement, he slid closer to the spinning cranks. Gunn felt Bertha slow to a halt. A moment later Sophie stood above them, reaching down for Harry's arms.\n\n\"The main road to Calais is being watched,\" said Sophie. \"We can't go that way. I suggest heading west. We can get Bertha into the sea near St. Malo.\"\n\nGunn kept his eyes on the road as he drove. As if we haven't had enough trouble. He flexed his shoulder\u2014thankfully, the aching had subsided somewhat. \"Good thinking, dear.\"\n\nSophie continued, \"They're looking for you because of Mainwaring, and what the papers said about you being wanted in Britain.\" She turned to Harry, her eyes narrowing. \"And because something was stolen from the police laboratory in Paris.\"\n\nHarry's eyes went wide as they flicked in Sophie's direction. \"That thing? Surely it can't be that important\u2014\"\n\n\"So you did take something,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"I'll tell you about it later. First, we'd better think about how we can get to the coast.\"\n\n\"I think you should tell us about it right now,\" Gunn said, his voice edged with annoyance.\n\n\"What did you take from the laboratory, Harry?\" Sophie asked firmly.\n\nHarry lifted a deck plate and removed a small canvas bag. He opened it and took out a polished brass cylinder about nine inches long and three in diameter, with grooves and markings along its length.\n\n\"Poor Herv\u00e9 called this Tonnerre. Thunder. I had every intention of returning it once I'd had a look to see what it does.\"\n\nGunn spoke sharply. \"I might have guessed. I knew there was something fishy about you tearing yourself away from the machine just to change your clothes. You were hiding that thing.\"\n\nHarry shrugged. \"There were several of them in the laboratory, and I didn't think they'd miss one for a few hours. I had no idea it was important.\"\n\nSophie asked, \"Have you worked out what it does?\"\n\n\"I haven't had the time.\" He held it up to look closely. \"This slide appears to be some kind of intensity setting. And this switch\u2014\"\n\nThere was a flash of blue-white light. Sophie yelped, and Harry broke into a fit of coughing. Gunn's legs spasmed as a bolt of electricity shot through the soles of his boots. His hands gripped Bertha's metal wheel like a vice as muscles\u2014natural and artificial\u2014contracted involuntarily.\n\nIt lasted for a mere instant. Gunn stared wide-eyed at the dents his metal fingertips had made in the wheel, then steered Bertha sharply to the edge of the road and pulled the brake lever hard, bringing her to a jerking halt. \"What in God's name was that?\" he yelled as he spun round.\n\n\"It was like lightning,\" said Sophie, her voice quavering and her eyes wide.\n\nHarry brought his breathing under control. \"Lightning, indeed, and it appears to have a hair trigger. My apologies. It's a good thing I had it pointed at the deck\u2014Bertha's iron dispersed most of the jolt. Is everyone all right?\"\n\nSophie ignored the question. \"What is that thing?\"\n\n\"It appears to be some kind of electrical stunning weapon.\" He squinted at the controls. \"That was on the lowest setting, and it caused muscle paroxysms. I wonder what it would do at full power?\"\n\n\"Fry us in our boots, probably,\" said Gunn. \"Put the damned thing away before you kill us all.\"\n\nTheir progress the next day was slow, but steady, and Gunn felt that they were making good time. It was late afternoon when he came to a stop.\n\n\"Is something wrong?\" said Harry.\n\n\"There's no more road,\" said Gunn, picking up his map.\n\n\"Whatever do you mean?\" Harry got up and looked out of Bertha's front windows. Twenty yards ahead, the road ended at a sturdy fence. \"Ah. I see,\" he said, and the corner of his mouth lifted. \"Did you take yet another wrong turn?\"\n\nGunn gave Harry a stern look\u2014but his mouth betrayed the beginnings of a smile, too. \"Not as far as I can tell.\" He looked ahead at the fence. \"I think whoever owns that land decided to plough it, and destroyed the road in the process.\"\n\n\"Could we break through?\" Sophie asked Harry.\n\n\"Bertha's powerful enough, but that fence looks well built. We'd do some damage if we were to try.\"\n\n\"I think we should risk it,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"I have to disagree. We're in the middle of nowhere, with no way to repair Bertha if she's damaged. We have no alternative but to turn back and find another road.\"\n\nGunn banged the control panel with a fist, frustrated at another delay. But he knew that Harry was right.\n\nHarry looked up at the sky. \"Nightfall is not far off. I suggest we camp here until morning.\"\n\nJust after dawn, Gunn stoked Bertha's furnace and got her moving. An hour later, they drove through a small town, and Gunn halted Bertha on the far side. Harry and Sophie walked back for supplies while Gunn waited, sitting on an embankment, where he had a good view along the road in both directions.\n\nAn hour or so later, Gunn spotted Harry and Sophie returning along the road, a large bag slung between them. They appeared to be walking as quickly as they could, and Harry kept looking over his shoulder. Gunn hopped down from the embankment, jumped up into Bertha's cab, and made sure she was ready for a quick getaway.\n\nHarry and Sophie threw the bag into the cab and climbed in. Harry was breathless. \"No time to waste, Gunn. Let's go,\" he said.\n\nGunn got Bertha rolling. \"What's happened?\"\n\nSophie answered while Harry got his breath back. \"We were getting some very suspicious looks from a policeman, and we think he was following us while we did our shopping.\"\n\n\"Possibly the man was suspicious of strange faces in his small town,\" said Harry, \"or perhaps the Paris police have sent bulletins out, and we were recognised. Either way, I think we should assume that the police are onto us.\"\n\nGunn pressed the pressure lever forward a little more, coaxing more speed from Bertha.\n\nSophie rummaged through the bag, and pulled out a handful of folded papers. \"We found a good compass, and better maps,\" she said, and laid one flat on the floor of the cab.\n\nGunn watched behind. He saw no sign they were being followed\u2014but he kept Bertha moving at a brisk pace nonetheless.\n\nFor several hours, Sophie followed their progress on the maps and gave Gunn directions while Harry dozed on the floor with his back to the cab wall. He was still weak from his injury and surgery, and the morning's jaunt into the town had drained him.\n\nIn the late afternoon, as Gunn drove Bertha along a road that passed through a forest, Harry spoke up. \"What's that sound?\"\n\n\"What sound?\" said Gunn. He couldn't hear anything over the rhythmic hiss and clank of Bertha's engine.\n\n\"I can hear it, too, Harry,\" said Sophie. \"It sounds like an airship.\"\n\n\"Pendragon's airship?\" said Gunn, feeling exposed and vulnerable.\n\nHarry and Sophie scanned the sky around them. \"Not Pendragon, thank goodness,\" said Harry. \"It's a police craft, following the road about a mile behind us.\"\n\n\"All the way out here?\" said Gunn, surprised. \"We're miles from the nearest large town.\"\n\n\"They must be looking for something,\" said Harry, and then his expression hardened. \"That something can only be us. I fear our suspicious policeman has reported us to his superiors. Can you get us into the trees, quickly, before they see us?\"\n\n\"Not here,\" said Gunn. Ditches ran along the road on either side. He couldn't drive Bertha off the road without overturning her.\n\n\"They're getting closer,\" Sophie warned.\n\nGunn looked frantically for a way off the road. Just ahead, heavy wooden planks had been laid across the ditches on both sides. Gunn wrenched the wheel over, and Bertha rattled across the planks and into the shelter of the trees.\n\nHe braked hard, and the three of them jumped out. Gunn looked up in the direction of the engine sounds, and through the winter-bare branches he made out the silhouette of the aircraft, gliding along fifty feet above the road where Bertha had just been. It was small by airship standards, single-hulled and dark.\n\n\"Can they see us?\" said Sophie.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Harry. \"Don't move.\"\n\nThe airship got closer\u2014then continued past them along the road. The sound of the engines faded. Gunn realised that he'd been holding his breath. \"They missed us.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" said Sophie. She continued to look in the direction that the airship had gone, a frown on her face. \"If they're patrolling this road, they'll be back.\"\n\n\"Let's get a little farther in, then, away from the road. Tomorrow, we should see where this trail goes.\"\n\nThe next morning, they continued along the narrow trail through the forest, cold and uncomfortable, as Bertha lurched and juddered over rocks and ruts, and up hills and down into valleys, and across streams. The rough going forced Gunn to drive Bertha slower than he wished, and that made him nervous; he kept looking over his shoulder, feeling that the police must be close behind.\n\nThe forest gave way to cultivated fields, and the trail widened and became smoother, almost a proper road, running through a wide valley between hills to north and south. Gunn increased Bertha's speed. As soon as he had, he spied a familiar shape in the sky ahead, and slowed Bertha back to a walking pace.\n\nHarry joined Gunn at the controls. \"What's happening?\"\n\n\"Our friends are back.\" Gunn pointed. The airship was about a mile away, moving from south to north across their path.\n\nSophie stood at Gunn's side, watching the airship. \"What do we do?\"\n\nThe nose of the airship turned toward them. Harry's jaw clenched. \"That tears it. They've seen us. Go!\"\n\nGunn shoved the pressure lever forward, rocking back in his boots as Bertha powered ahead.\n\n\"I think they'll try to block our path by landing on the road.\"\n\n\"What do you suggest?\"\n\n\"Let them.\" Gunn and Sophie glared at him. \"As soon as they touch the ground, head across country, toward those hills to the north.\"\n\nGunn looked at the fields to the right of the road. \"Won't they just lift and come after us again?\"\n\n\"Certainly, but it takes time to get an airship aloft. By the time they've caught up to us, we should have made it to the hills. They'll have to fly higher, and the trees will help hide us. If we can keep them at a distance until nightfall, we may be able to escape them.\"\n\n\"Nightfall is a good four hours away,\" said Sophie.\n\n\"If we can get into those trees, I think we have a chance all the same,\" said Gunn. He looked at the airship again. \"You're right, Harry. They're going to land on the road. Find something to hold on to.\"\n\nA quarter of a mile ahead, the airship had slowed to a stop fifty feet directly above the road, and descended slowly. Gunn kept their course until they were two hundred yards from the airship, then one hundred. He slowed Bertha down as if planning to stop. At fifty yards the airship touched down, and Gunn saw the cables that ran from the gondola to the envelopes slacken.\n\nHe yanked the wheel to the right, and at the same time pushed the pressure lever forward. Bertha accelerated, bumping over the edge of the road and onto the flat, open grassland. Harry was caught by surprise and almost fell out of the doorway, just managing to pull himself back in time.\n\nA metallic ping came from Bertha's rear, and then a bang as something hit the cab roof. \"They're shooting at us!\" said Harry, sounding offended that someone would assault Bertha so.\n\n\"Hold tight!\" said Gunn, and he pushed the lever all the way forward. Bertha shot across the lumpy grass.\n\nBertha ran beyond the range of the guns, and the dinging of bullets against her sides ceased. Harry leaned out of the doorway a little way. \"They're still on the ground,\" he shouted.\n\nBertha shuddered as she thumped over rocks and hummocks. At that speed, if she hit something much larger, she would tip over.\n\n\"They're lifting,\" Harry shouted.\n\n\"Just two more minutes,\" said Gunn, leaning on the wheel, as if it would help nudge Bertha along a little faster.\n\nThen he felt Bertha slowing. They'd reached the slope leading up into the trees. He swerved Bertha sharply to the left.\n\nHarry grabbed the door edge to steady himself. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"Tree stumps,\" said Gunn as he jerked Bertha back to the right to avoid another stump just before it exploded, jolting Bertha.\n\n\"They're shooting again,\" yelled Harry.\n\n\"I'd noticed,\" said Gunn, grimacing. It was just a few dozen yards to the trees.\n\n\"They're almost above us,\" Harry shouted, as Gunn swerved around the last few stumps and under the cover of the trees.\n\nHe drove on as fast as he could, snaking a path between the trunks, changing direction every few dozen yards. All the while, he strained his ears, listening for the sound of propellers. He heard nothing.\n\nSophie came to his side, holding onto the control panel as Bertha lurched and bounced over tree roots. \"I think we've left them behind.\"\n\n\"Well done, Gunn,\" said Harry, with a grin.\n\nGunn felt a wave of relief as he pulled the power lever back.\n\nHarry put a hand on his forearm. \"I think we're safe, for the moment, at least. Find somewhere to stop, would you? I must check to make sure the gunfire didn't do any damage.\"\n\nGunn drove them another mile into the forest then stopped Bertha in a space between two large trees. Harry climbed onto the roof to perform his inspection, and Gunn and Sophie jumped down to the ground. Gunn looked up at the tiny patches of sky between the branches of the pines. He could hear the sound of the airship's engines, somewhere off to the east.\n\nHarry climbed down to join them, his expression grim. \"Bad news, I'm afraid,\" he said, shaking his head. \"The water tank has taken a bullet. I can patch it in a flash\u2014a wad of oiled cloth and some wire should do it\u2014but we've lost a lot of water. We should move on, while we still can, and watch for any ponds or streams on the way.\"\n\nThe three climbed back aboard.\n\nIt started raining just before dark, and Gunn reluctantly slowed Bertha down to something less than a walking pace. After another hour of driving, his eyes began to smart with strain so that he could barely see at all, even with the aid of the goggles.\n\n\"I'll take over for a spell, Gunn,\" said Harry.\n\n\"Are you sure you're up to it?\"\n\n\"I feel much better, and in any case, I'm well rested, which is more than can be said of you. You need to sleep, even if it's only for an hour or so.\"\n\n\"All right. Just see that you wake me no later than dawn.\" He made himself comfortable on the floor where he could stay warm in the heat from the furnace, and promptly fell asleep.\n\nGunn woke to his shoulder being shaken, and opened his eyes to see Sophie looking down at him. It was still dark, and raining heavily, and he assumed both Harry and Sophie had become too tired to drive safely.\n\nSophie quickly dispelled that thought. \"Trouble,\" she whispered. Gunn got up and went to where Harry stood at the controls, Sophie at his arm. Gunn saw they'd left the hills and were on flat grassland, moving at a snail's pace.\n\n\"What's happening?\" he said quietly. Sophie said nothing, but instead pointed off to Bertha's left. He saw a light there, and then another. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"We think it's the police,\" Harry answered. \"And we heard barking earlier. They've brought dogs.\"\n\nGunn looked around. Lights, bobbing slightly, as of hand-carried oil lamps, ran in a line across their path. \"Damn. What can we do?\"\n\n\"I don't know that there's very much we can do. If we crank up Bertha's engine to go faster, they'll hear her for sure. And if we stay put, it's only a matter of time before that line reaches us. We could turn around and try to get back into the woods, I suppose.\"\n\n\"How far is it back to the woods?\"\n\n\"Two miles, perhaps three.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"We'd never make it.\" He looked around again at the line of lights, creeping closer with each passing minute. The nearest section of the line was no more than a quarter of a mile away.\n\nThen he saw something. \"Look, there,\" he said, pointing to the northwest.\n\n\"A gap,\" said Sophie. \"Why are they leaving a gap there?\"\n\n\"I don't know. It might be just some lowlying ground. But it might be a chance to get out of this.\" He turned to Harry. \"Take us that way, slowly and quietly.\"\n\nHarry turned Bertha toward the gap in the line. Gunn was thankful for the rain, and the continuous hissing it made in the long grass. It covered the sounds of Bertha's engine, provided they moved very, very slowly. After two or three minutes, Gunn heard a sloshing sound, and Harry slowed Bertha even more. Gunn looked down from the doorway. \"We're in a bog.\"\n\n\"Damn. We'll get stuck for sure if it gets any deeper,\" said Harry.\n\n\"Harry, your brain's addled. Bertha's a boat, remember? Keep going. Twenty yards more, then stop.\"\n\nHarry slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand, and shook his head.\n\nGunn watched from the doorway as they crawled into deeper and deeper water. The water had reached to the level of the axles when Harry brought Bertha to a halt.\n\nHarry took station by the left doorway while Gunn and Sophie watched from the right. The line of lights wobbled unevenly across his view. The nearest end was no more than fifty yards away, and getting closer. Sophie held her breath.\n\nThe nearest lamp came slowly toward them. If Bertha moved now, Gunn knew, the man carrying that light would see them for certain, and the game would be up.\n\nAt thirty yards away, the light stopped moving. Gunn tensed, waiting for the man to shout out. The light moved a little to the left and stopped again, then back to the right. It kept moving, at an angle that opened the distance between it and Bertha.\n\nGunn looked around again. The other lights had mostly passed them by. He turned to watch the straggler, following the light as it bobbed around them and joined the others.\n\nHarry patted Gunn's shoulder lightly. \"Well done,\" he said quietly as he moved back to Bertha's controls. They watched the lights until they'd faded into the rain, then Harry pressed Bertha's levers forward a little way and she began to roll.\n\n\"Not much farther, I think,\" said Harry as Gunn guided Bertha along a muddy farm trail through the pouring rain.\n\nGunn's pulse lurched as Bertha's wheels slipped sideways on the sodden, slimy ground for the hundredth time. Light flickered off to the west, and he smiled. \"Good,\" he said, grimly. \"A thunderstorm. That should keep that airship away for a while.\"\n\nAt last, Bertha rolled down onto a wide beach. Gunn puffed out a big breath of relief and grinned at Sophie and Harry when he saw the waves of the English Channel ahead.\n\nHarry looked at the sky. \"Only an hour or two before dusk. I suggest we wait until morning.\"\n\nSophie nodded. \"I won't argue with that. Connie's about ready to fall down.\"\n\nGunn yawned, and nodded. \"I could sleep on bed of nails.\"\n\nThey slept in the shelter of the cab, and when they woke in the morning, cold and aching, the rain had stopped. Gunn jumped down to the sand to stretch his legs. A stiff breeze blew from the south, chilling the air and lifting spray from the wave tops, but a watery sun shone through a thin layer of cloud. Not the best conditions for taking to sea, thought Gunn, but they could be far worse.\n\n\"I believe we're as ready as we'll ever be,\" said Harry. \"The boiler is up to pressure and the makeshift repair to the water tank seems to be holding firm. My only concern is fuel. We can make for the Channel Islands\u2014we'll be able to get fuel and water there.\"\n\nGunn looked out over the sea to the north. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. They had delayed long enough. \"Well then, I suppose we'd better get about it. Everyone aboard.\"\n\n\"Connie!\" Sophie shouted. He whirled around. Four black steam carriages raced along the beach toward them.\n\n\"It's the police!\" Harry yelled.\n\nThey jumped into the cab and Harry yanked at levers. Bertha began to roll toward the waves. Too slowly, Gunn realised, when two of the police vehicles cut in front of them. Harry swerved to avoid them. They raced along the sand, parallel to the waterline, two vehicles to their left, preventing them from making an escape up the beach; another two to the right, trying to get ahead of them to force them to stop.\n\nA hundred yards ahead, the beach ended at a spit of rocks that cut across their path and jutted into the sea.\n\n\"Harry!\" Gunn shouted. \"Get her in the water!\"\n\nHarry wrenched the wheel and Bertha swerved to the right, slamming into the side of one of the police vehicles, smashing it out of the way. It rolled onto its roof as Bertha flew by. The others braked hard, throwing up sand in all directions, then wheeled round. They shot toward Bertha.\n\nBertha hurtled into the sea, throwing up a wave. Gunn and Sophie were thrown forward as she came to a dead stop. The police carriages stopped at the water's edge, and the policemen climbed out, forming a line behind Bertha, advancing slowly.\n\nGunn grinned despite himself. He looked at Harry.\n\n\"They don't know about Bertha,\" said Sophie from Harry's other side.\n\nHarry glanced over his shoulder, then back at Gunn. He was grinning, too. He pulled a lever, hard, and Bertha's wheels retracted, her propeller whirled, and she shot forward.\n\nThe policemen broke into a run, splashing through knee-deep water, and one dived forward and swam with powerful strokes, grabbing hold of Bertha's doorframe. Harry engaged the propeller, and Bertha jumped forward.\n\nThe swimmer grunted with effort, scrabbling to pull himself aboard against the drag. Gunn dashed to the doorway and lifted a boot over the man's fingers. \"Bad idea,\" he said. The man glared up at Gunn, then scowled and let go, left behind as Bertha picked up speed.\n\n\"We're still in trouble!\" Sophie yelled over the noise of the engine, pointing to the sky.\n\nGunn looked up and spotted the airship above the beach, following them out to sea. \"Damn!\"\n\nHarry shouted above the din. \"If we can get three miles before they catch up, we'll be out of French waters!\"\n\n\"I don't think they care about jurisdiction. They'll start shooting the moment they're in range. We're sitting ducks out here.\"\n\nHarry's jaw clenched. Behind them, the airship gained on them rapidly. He stepped back. \"Take the wheel!\" Gunn grabbed the controls as Harry lifted a deck plate and grabbed the Thunder device.\n\n\"What are you doing, Harry?\" Sophie cried out. \"You can't use that. We're inside a wet metal box!\"\n\n\"We have no other choice. This should warn them to keep their distance.\" Harry replied. \"Don't touch any metal.\" He wedged himself against the edge of the doorway, and Gunn saw him move the slide on the device to the far end of its track. Full power. Gunn let go of the wheel, hoping Bertha would keep a straight course, and braced himself.\n\nThe cab filled with bright light and crackling as lightning shot from the end of the device and streaked, branching and forking, up toward the airship. Gunn's hair stood straight, and he smelled ozone.\n\nThe lightning struck the airship, and threads of blue-white electricity wrapped around its envelope in a net, flickering and moving like a living thing.\n\n\"Oh, my\u2014\" Harry began, a look of fascinated horror on his face.\n\nThe envelope exploded, consumed in an instant as the hydrogen bloomed into a fireball. The gondola hung in the air for a moment, then fell, tipping end over end until it splashed into the sea.\n\nSophie covered her mouth with a hand, and turned away. Gunn's mouth fell open, then he clenched his jaw as horror turned to anger. \"What have you done, Harry? How many men were aboard that ship?\" he said.\n\n\"I didn't\u2014I thought it would just scare them off. I swear to you, Gunn, I didn't know.\" Harry fell to his knees, and vomited into the sea.\n\n\"My intention was to force them to keep their distance, nothing more,\" Harry gasped, his breathing laboured. Still on his knees, he pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped his mouth. He looked at the device, which had fallen to the floor. His face twisted with anger and remorse, and he picked up the weapon and threw it, violently, into the sea.\n\n\"Don't give me that,\" Gunn said angrily. \"You wanted a chance to see what that machine could do, and now all those people are dead.\"\n\n\"What else could I have done? It's the only defence we had.\"\n\n\"We could have kept going until they ran low on fuel, and were forced to turn back.\"\n\n\"They would have started shooting as soon as they were in range. I saw men at the guns, and they were ready to open fire.\"\n\n\"Enough,\" said Sophie. \"I've had it with the pair of you. Harry's right\u2014they would have sunk us rather than let us escape.\"\n\n\"As I\u2014\" Harry began.\n\n\"As for you,\" said Sophie, rounding on him, \"regardless of whether or not there was a choice, I agree with Connie\u2014you didn't seem terribly reluctant to use that awful thing.\"\n\nHarry stood shakily, his face pale. Gunn remained silent, seething.\n\nFinally, Harry let out a breath. \"You're right. I used it because I had to\u2014but also because I wanted to. I let my scientific curiosity get the better of my good judgement. I'm sorry I let that happen.\"\n\nSophie shook her head, and Gunn's ire softened when he saw the grief in her eyes. \"My father would have said that by threatening us, they gave us the right of defence. But I'm not my father.\"\n\nGunn had met Sophie's father. The man was a good soldier, a defender of peace; he didn't start fights, but he knew how to end them, and he knew when diplomacy was fruitless. \"What would he have done?\" Gunn asked.\n\nSophie sighed. \"Under the circumstances\u2014if it was the only means he had\u2014possibly the same thing. And he would be as horrified as I am\u2014as we all are\u2014at the result. But he would have considered the consequences first. He would have done it for the right reasons.\"\n\nHarry looked down at the deck, ashamed. Then he nodded. \"You're right, of course\u2014I should have thought it through. But there wasn't time. If I hadn't done it, they would have sunk Bertha and drowned us.\"\n\nSophie frowned, and opened her mouth to speak, but Harry held up a hand to stop her. \"Please, let me finish. I'm not proud of what I've done, but I still believe it was them, or us. Nevertheless, I promise that in future\u2014should we find ourselves in similar straits\u2014I will do my utmost to prevent fatalities.\"\n\nSophie stared at him, still frowning, then slowly nodded. \"Very well. For now.\"\n\nGunn's anger at Harry subsided, and he was glad that the air had been cleared somewhat. Sophie had her father's diplomatic way of calming troubled waters.\n\nHe tapped the compass, which he'd fixed to Bertha's controls the day before. \"We've been heading directly north since we left the coast. We should pass close by the Channel Islands quite soon.\"\n\n\"We'll have to pass very close,\" said Harry. \"Even in clear weather, from this low vantage we probably won't be able to see more than a dozen miles in any direction.\"\n\nGunn spotted land off to the west shortly after noon and turned Bertha in that direction. He drove Bertha up a beach of sand and pebbles, and they soon found a road. A signpost confirmed that they had landed on the isle of Alderney, less than a mile from the town of Saint Anne.\n\nHarry tapped his clenched fist against the panel, over and over, while staring off into the distance.\n\n\"What's the problem?\" said Gunn.\n\n\"I'm worried. The French want us, and the British want us. And here we are, on an island that is ostensibly British soil and also, if I remember correctly, has a good political relationship with France, owing to its proximity to their shores. We are, most certainly, in the lion's den.\"\n\n\"Then we should get done here and away, as quickly as we can,\" said Sophie. \"The harbour is on the north side of the island. There'll be water and coal for the boats.\"\n\nHarry nodded. \"And, if necessary, we can put to sea right there.\"\n\n\"Then let's do that,\" said Gunn. \"To be honest, I'm past caring whether or not we're seen.\"\n\n\"Quite,\" said Harry. \"Now is a time for action, not stealth.\"\n\nBertha rolled along the waterfront, past men and women working aboard the boats\u2014packing fishing gear, and mending nets. They looked up as Bertha passed, and a handful of them put down what they were doing, and followed along. Gunn made a point of not staring back, as if Bertha was there on everyday business. One of the fishermen pointed at the sign on Bertha's side, and turned to say something to the man next to him.\n\nGunn stopped Bertha at the fuel station, at the nearer end of the harbour wall. Sophie hopped out, and walked quickly into the office to pay for the water and coal, while Gunn and Harry moved Bertha alongside the water tower. Sophie caught up with them, and Harry climbed up on top to fill the tank.\n\n\"They think we're French,\" Gunn said quietly.\n\nHarry nodded as he manhandled the hose from the water tower into Bertha's filler. \"They think we're a travelling show, as intended. Let them continue to think that.\"\n\nSomething caught Gunn's eye; at the back of the small crowd, a man bent to say something to a young boy. The boy ran off.\n\n\"I think we'd best hurry this along.\" He climbed up to help, then moved Bertha to the coal store. As he opened Bertha's fuel hatch, Gunn glanced toward the end of the harbour wall, and saw a stone-built boat ramp. They'd be able to get Bertha directly into the water as soon as they finished loading fuel.\n\nGunn and Harry had only been shovelling coal for a short while, when Sophie yelled from the cab. \"Police, Connie!\"\n\nGunn whirled. A dozen uniformed policemen ran along the harbour wall toward them. He heard the clatter of Harry's coal shovel, dropped his own, and they jumped aboard Bertha. The policemen spread out to form a cordon as they ran. Harry yanked levers to start Bertha moving, and steered toward the boat ramp.\n\nThe men slowed. They think they have us trapped, thought Gunn. Sophie put that idea to rest a moment later. \"They've blocked the ramp!\" she said, pointing. A twenty-foot police boat, with three officers on deck, bobbed broadside on at the foot of the ramp. Someone had warned the police about Bertha, after all.\n\n\"Hold on,\" said Harry, and he pushed the steam lever forward. Bertha built up speed. Gunn caught a glimpse of Sophie grabbing hold of the control panel, and he did the same.\n\n\"Harry\u2014\" said Gunn, in a warning tone.\n\n\"It's the only way!\" said Harry as Bertha flew down the ramp. One of the officers' faces became a picture of open-mouthed shock as Bertha loomed closer, then slammed into the stern quarter of the boat, spinning it ninety degrees. Gunn was thrown forward as bits of wood bounced off the heavy glass of Bertha's front windows.\n\nHarry pulled levers to retract the wheels, then jammed the pressure lever forward. Bertha's engine growled, and her bow came up as she raced away from the harbour.\n\nGunn looked behind and saw the three policemen swimming back to the harbour wall as their crippled boat sank into the oil-slicked water.\n\nWebster arrived home from a pub lunch to find a message waiting for him on his machine.\n\nAgent on Alderney reports G & B sighted, heading for English coast using own transport. Intercept.\n\nThe message was accompanied by reports from his employer's contacts in France. Webster skimmed through them; Gunn, his wife, and Bohemia had been chased by the police across the country to the coast, then escaped an ambush at the last minute. A police airship had been destroyed under mysterious circumstances. A French coastguard boat had picked up the four-man crew, all suffering from exposure, and one man had broken a leg; against all odds, there had been no fatalities.\n\nIntercept, the message had said. He looked at the clock, and wondered how he was supposed to do that. They had their own transport; they could come ashore at almost any point along three hundred miles of coastline.\n\nHe put his coat and hat back on, and headed out.\n\nThe harbour shrank behind them as Harry piloted Bertha forward. Gunn consulted his watch at intervals. He made a mental calculation.\n\n\"If I'm right, we'll make land not long before dark.\"\n\n\"I very much hope that your calculations are correct,\" said Harry. He looked from Gunn to Sophie and back.\n\n\"Is something wrong?\" said Sophie.\n\nHarry frowned, and shook his head gravely. \"It's cloudy; it's going to be black as coal out here once the sun's gone, and attempting a landing in those conditions would be very, very dangerous. We won't know where the shoreline is until we encounter it. We could hit a cliff, or rocks in the shallows could sink us. If, as you say, we arrive before dark, there should be no difficulty. On the other hand, if the sun sets before we can land . . .\"\n\nSophie frowned. \"Life vests, then.\"\n\nGunn looked across the waves and up at the sky, worried. They had a long way to go, and not much time\u2014and in their hurry to leave Alderney, they hadn't taken a full load of coal.\n\n\"Push her as fast as she'll go.\" He threw several more shovels of coal into Bertha's furnace. Harry pressed Bertha's pressure lever all the way forward.\n\nGunn bit his lip in worry as he watched the horizon. The sun had begun to set, and they'd seen no sign of the coast. He wished they could go faster. He noticed a dark spot on the horizon ahead and squinted at it. Then he recognized the shape, and hurried to Harry's side.\n\n\"Harry!\" he shouted over the noise of the engine and the crashing of waves against the hull. Harry looked over, and Gunn pointed ahead.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Harry turned Bertha to port.\n\nSophie frowned. \"What's wrong? Why are we turning?\"\n\n\"There's a coastguard ship, anchored right in our way.\"\n\n\"Have they seen us?\"\n\n\"Let's hope not, or there'll be police waiting for us when we land.\"\n\nHarry shouted over the din. \"I'm taking us around them.\"\n\nSophie looked into Gunn's eyes, frowning again. \"But doesn't that mean\u2014\"\n\nGunn nodded, his mouth tight. \"It means we might not make land before dark.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we should turn back. Hide on Alderney until morning.\"\n\nGunn shook his head firmly. \"No. We're not turning back, damn it all. If we have to land in the dark, we'll manage somehow. If someone's there to stop us, we'll run Bertha right through them if necessary. But we're not turning back, and we're not stopping.\"\n\nThere was a tap at the door of Jameson's office.\n\n\"Come in.\"\n\nThe door opened and Wally Crisp entered. He closed the door behind him. Wally worked in Scotland Yard's information division, down in the basement with the police calculating engines.\n\n\"What can I do for you, Wally?\"\n\nHe sat down in the chair in front of Jameson's desk. \"You asked me to keep an eye open for unusual reports. Something's come in that might fit.\"\n\n\"It might fit, or it does fit?\"\n\nWally shrugged. \"You decide. A coastguard ship off Swanage sighted an unusual vessel heading for the coast. It changed course, apparently to avoid being seen, which naturally made the coastguard suspicious. They've put it on the wire as a probable smuggler.\"\n\nAfter Wally left, Jameson picked up the microphone on his machine and began tapping in Christie's contact code\u2014then stopped himself and put the microphone back. Christie doesn't need to know about this, he thought. Not until I'm sure.\n\nFor the next hour, Gunn kept his eyes on the coastguard ship as Bertha moved in a wide circle to go around it. After a while, Harry said, \"We've returned to our original course. Steam's dropping, though\u2014throw a bit more coal on, would you?\"\n\nGunn opened the fuel store and shovelled coal into the furnace\u2014and despaired when he saw he'd used the last of it. He slammed the store hatch, cursing their terrible luck on Alderney. \"We're in trouble. There's no more coal.\"\n\nHarry sighed. \"This is going to be a very close thing.\"\n\nGunn went back to the starboard door, and he and Sophie resumed watching the coastguard ship for any sign that that they might have been seen.\n\nA while later, he noticed a bright line on the horizon ahead of them. \"I think that's land,\" he shouted, pointing ahead. The bright line was a sandy beach, with low dunes beyond.\n\nHarry grinned. \"I see it. Just a few more miles, I think. Good thing, too\u2014we're almost out of steam.\" He patted the wheel. \"Come on, old girl, you can get us home. I know you can.\"\n\n\"I think we've been seen,\" Sophie shouted, looking behind.\n\nGunn followed her gaze. No more than a couple of miles away, a fast cutter headed directly for them. \"It's the coastguard.\"\n\nHarry's face was grim. \"Steam's almost gone. They're going to catch us.\"\n\nGunn watched the vessel closing the gap. \"Four hundred yards!\"\n\nThe beach was fifty yards ahead.\n\n\"Two hundred!\"\n\nGunn almost lost his balance when Bertha suddenly slowed to less than a walking pace.\n\n\"There's no more steam, Gunn!\"\n\nDamn it all! Gunn thought. \"Do something!\"\n\n\"Open the furnace!\" Sophie yelled. She jumped to the deck plates, yanked one open, and grabbed all the maps. Gunn opened the furnace door just in time for her to throw them in. They caught fire with a roar. Sophie dashed back to the store, seized the folded blankets, and threw them in, as well. Gunn heard the hiss of steam, and felt Bertha pick up speed.\n\nHe glanced out of the door\u2014the boat was fifty yards to Bertha's starboard, intending to get in front of Bertha to cut her off from the beach.\n\nAnd then the cutter jerked to a stop.\n\nGunn couldn't help laughing, and Sophie and Harry looked at him as if he'd gone mad. \"They've run aground!\" he shouted. We might get out of this yet, he thought.\n\nA bumping sound came from Bertha's hull as she touched the sand under the water. Harry engaged the wheels and Bertha rolled slowly up onto the beach, then limped over the dunes. The cutter was lost to sight.\n\nGunn grinned at Harry\u2014then frowned with concern at his pale, sweating face. He looked at Gunn with sunken eyes, then his knees buckled, and Gunn rushed to grab him as he fell. Sophie dashed to Harry's other side, and took his arm.\n\nBertha still rolled forward, and Gunn hurriedly grabbed the wheel while Sophie helped Harry into a sitting position.\n\nHarry croaked, \"We need to get away from here before the men on that cutter get the idea to wade ashore.\"\n\nGunn nodded, and turned back to the controls\u2014just in time for Bertha to stop as the last of the steam gave out. \"We need to find some coal, or wood, or something, and quick,\" he said, engaging the brake. \"Do you have any idea where we are?\"\n\n\"You're a little way from Lulworth Cove,\" came a man's voice. Gunn whirled around to see a stout man with muttonchops and a black overcoat, standing on the sand by the doorway.\n\nGunn stepped into the doorway, placing himself between the man and Sophie. He tensed, ready for a fight. \"Who are you?\" he demanded. \"Why have you been following us?\"\n\nThe man stepped back, his eyes widening in alarm. \"No need for violence, Mr. Gunn. Webster's the name. As to why I've been following you, suffice to say that I've been keeping an eye on you, in part so I can be assured of your safety.\"\n\n\"But why\u2014\" said Sophie from behind Gunn.\n\nThe enigmatic man held his hand up. \"I'll tell you all I know\u2014but not here. I'm sure you're aware that I'm not the only one looking for you, and I strongly advise getting this vehicle away from that coastguard boat, and under cover, as quickly as possible.\" The man turned and pointed off to the northeast. \"There's a railway yard that way. I will wait for you there.\" Webster walked off.\n\nGunn watched Webster, reluctant to take his eyes off the man.\n\n\"Should we trust him?\" said Harry.\n\nSophie stood next to Gunn, watching Webster disappear over the dunes. \"If he was a policeman, he'd have arrested us. And if he worked for Pendragon, he'd probably have tried to kill us. He says he's been helping us. Perhaps he has. I'm prepared to listen to what he has to say for himself, at least.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Gunn in a dubious tone, and he jerked his thumb in the direction of the dunes. \"Come on, then. Let's see if Bertha can run on dry grass and driftwood.\"\n\nBertha breasted the dunes and rolled down into the yard, her acetylene lamps throwing a pool of light ahead of her, illuminating stacks of shiny steel rails and newly-cut wooden sleepers, and two or three passenger carriages left stored there.\n\nWebster waited in the dark. He pointed at one of the large sheds at the side of the yard. \"This one seems to be mostly empty,\" he said as he walked alongside Bertha.\n\nHarry\u2014who had forced himself back up despite Sophie's protests, determined to be the first to confront Webster\u2014pointedly ignored the man, silent and grim-faced as he steered Bertha into the shed. He dropped down to the ground a little shakily, and walked up to Webster, who took a step back. Gunn and Sophie followed. Harry's voice was firm. \"Now, sir, please explain yourself.\"\n\nWebster's tense shoulders relaxed a fraction. \"Gladly, Doctor. Perhaps we could find somewhere to sit?\"\n\nGunn cocked an eyebrow at Sophie, and she stepped to him and took his hand in reassurance. He glanced around the yard, but as far as he could tell, but they were quite alone. He led the way to a stack of sleepers lying near the door, and took a seat on one. The others followed.\n\nHe looked at Webster. \"Tell me, Webster, how did you know that we'd be here, when even we had no idea when and where we'd come ashore?\"\n\nWebster smiled. \"Very simple. Your vehicle was recognised on Alderney and I was notified immediately of the course you'd set, so I had a fair idea of where you'd land. You were still a good way out when I spotted you, then it was just a brisk walk along the beach to keep up. To be honest, I hadn't expected to find you. It was pure luck that I was as close as it turned out.\" He looked around at the walls of the shed. \"You should be safe here. Thanks to my employer, there are a number of bulletins on the wires, reporting sightings of your vehicle on roads to the north and west. That should keep the police distracted for a while.\"\n\n\"Who is your employer, Webster?\" Gunn demanded.\n\n\"Lord Salisbury.\" His tone suggested he was surprised that Gunn hadn't known.\n\nGunn turned sharply to the others, astounded. Harry gave a tiny shake of his head in disbelief. Sophie stared at Webster, eyes wide.\n\nHe turned back to Webster. \"Lord Salisbury? You'll have to do better than that.\"\n\n\"His Lordship will confirm it\u2014but we're well aware that Pendragon knows he's involved, and watches his wires. If you contact him, be sure not to identify yourselves. As for me, I was engaged to help in the fight against our common enemy, and as such, I carry nothing that would connect me with His Lordship, in case I was to be captured, or worse.\"\n\n\"That's very convenient. Let's say it's true. In that case, what's his interest in us?\"\n\n\"His Lordship has been monitoring the conspirators' activities for some time, and he was certain they were behind the burglaries and bank robberies in London. He wanted to be sure that your writings weren't the result of inside knowledge\u2014that you were not involved in the conspiracy.\"\n\nGunn felt offended. \"He doubted me?\"\n\nWebster shrugged. \"Why would he trust you? He hardly knows you. My job was to find out, with certainty, whose side you're on.\"\n\n\"Presumably you've satisfied him of that. Why, then, are you here now?\"\n\n\"We were hoping that you might actually strike a blow against the enemy, and you have\u2014a much more effective blow than we could ever have hoped for. His Lordship can use his influence at higher levels, you see, but he's not able to act directly. He needs people like me\u2014and you. All of you. I was instructed to do what I could to help.\"\n\nWebster shifted on the hard wood of the sleeper. \"You three have caused rather a lot of upset with the French. They're well aware that you helped them with Pendragon's attack in Paris, and they\u2014and most of Europe, in fact\u2014know that they owe you a debt. But they've since linked you to a murder, and they're quite anxious to interview you about that. There's also a matter of stolen French government property, and the destruction of a police airship\u2014it's lucky for you no one was killed in that little incident, or you'd be facing a few more charges.\"\n\nHarry sat up sharply at that. \"Did I hear you correctly? No one died?\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Webster, and Harry, heaving a sigh of relief, beamed at the others. Sophie looked at Gunn, wide-eyed and smiling. Gunn grinned, cheered by the news.\n\nWebster continued. \"As it is, the whole business has become quite a mess, and the French authorities aren't quite sure what to make of it all.\"\n\n\"What about here, in England?\" said Harry.\n\nWebster's forehead wrinkled. \"England is a different story, I'm afraid. Defences have been put in place around the centres of research and production, just as they have been across Europe, and that's all to the good. Your situation is not so bright. His Lordship has known for some time that Pendragon's influence goes to the highest levels of government, so it's no surprise that the police are still looking for you.\n\n\"The treason warrants are still in force. Lord Salisbury and others are doing what they can, but, for the time being, it's in your interests to stay hidden. Don't return to London under any circumstances. Your descriptions and pictures are being circulated across the country, but London, in particular, is on high alert.\"\n\nSophie's voice betrayed her impatience. \"But if Pendragon's plans are in ruins, surely the government must act? Why don't they find out who the traitors in their own departments are and expose them?\"\n\n\"It's not that simple, Mrs. Gunn. At this time, we simply don't know how many people are involved\u2014it could be a handful, or entire departments. Our biggest hurdle is the simple fact that we have little evidence, and no way to identify Pendragon's people. They've been careful\u2014there's nothing that anyone in government has done that couldn't be shown to be justified in one way or another.\"\n\n\"Does anyone know where Pendragon is?\" said Gunn. \"Or for that matter, who he really is?\"\n\nWebster sighed in frustration, and his voice deepened to a growl. \"We're no closer to finding the man behind the name. Whoever he is, we think he must be in England, and most likely somewhere in the south. He's getting support from elements in the military, that much is certain.\"\n\nHe leaned forward to emphasise his next words. \"Listen. You've all done sterling work in foiling Pendragon's immediate plans, but we're sure he will continue to be a danger as long as he remains at large. We have no doubt that he intends to withdraw for a time, to regroup, as it were, and then he'll strike again. One thing that concerns us is he may now see you three as a major obstacle. For that reason, he may target you more directly so you don't jeopardise his future plans.\"\n\nGunn raised an eyebrow. \"Did we really cause him that much trouble?\" Gunn felt rather proud\u2014but at the same time, concerned. Like wasps that had stung a lion, perhaps they were about to be swatted.\n\nWebster turned to him, and smiled. He looked over his shoulder in Bertha's direction. \"Your vehicle is quite unique, and easily identified. I suggest you find some way to cover it, and leave it here.\" He took a notepad and pencil from an inside pocket, scribbled a note, then tore it off and handed it to Harry. \"Go and see this man in Swanage. He can provide you with a more conventional conveyance.\n\n\"The coastguard had assumed your vessel belonged to smugglers, and they didn't make the connection to the three of you. As far as anyone else is concerned, you're still in France, and most people believe you're making for Spain. That ruse should hold for another day or two, and I suggest you make the best use of that time.\" He stood, making ready to leave.\n\n\"Mr. Webster?\" said Sophie, and he stopped. \"Please give my regards to Sandy.\"\n\nWebster nodded. \"The next time I see Her Ladyship, I promise. Good luck, all of you,\" he said, then he walked out into the darkness.\n\nGunn nodded at Sophie. \"Good thought. But it doesn't prove anything.\"\n\nSophie shrugged. \"I thought it might catch him out. Perhaps he's just well-informed. I have to say, I'm inclined to believe him.\"\n\n\"As am I. Harry, what's your thought?\"\n\n\"I agree with Sophie\u2014if he worked for the police, or Pendragon, he'd have no reason to pretend to help. I'm prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.\" He turned to Sophie. \"Do you still have that list of military installations that your father gave you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said Sophie, smiling.\n\n\"Good,\" said Gunn, grinning. \"No disrespect to Mr. Webster, but I think we'll arrange our own transportation. Then, we're going to find Pendragon.\"\n\nJameson scratched his head, bewildered. Every police force from Southampton to Bristol had reported sightings of Gunn, Bohemia, and that unusual vehicle, covering a swathe of southern England a hundred miles and more across.\n\nThere was only one explanation: someone was covering their tracks, deliberately muddying the waters, to help Bohemia and the Gunns to escape.\n\nIf I can't make sense of this mess, he thought, Christie hasn't a hope. With that thought in mind, he addressed the package of reports to Christie, and gave it to a messenger.\n\nGunn wandered around the yard and explored the other sheds, looking for a tarpaulin, or perhaps some canvas, to help hide Bertha from curious eyes, while Harry and Sophie gathered their things and made ready to move on. Gunn's breath fogged in the crisp morning air\u2014but the sun shone in a blue sky, the wind had dropped, and Gunn felt cheered. They were home, in England, and it seemed that they had allies\u2014among them, a lord of the realm, no less\u2014helping them in their endeavours.\n\nOne of the sheds held a collection of old, rusting railway maintenance vehicles. One appeared to be designed specifically to cut tree branches, and another looked like it was intended for nothing more than cleaning rusty railway lines. Most of the vehicles were oddly shaped, with strange tools attached to them. Gunn had no idea what their purposes might be. In a dark corner, he found barrels of machine oil. In another shed, he found a coal store. Gunn opened it up and found several tons of fresh coal\u2014enough to fill Bertha's fuel store many times over.\n\n\"I don't like leaving Bertha here,\" said Harry when Gunn returned to the others, dragging a large sheet of oiled canvas that he'd found.\n\n\"I'm not happy about it either,\" said Gunn. \"Webster's right, though. She does rather stand out.\"\n\nWhile Gunn surveyed the yard, Harry had moved Bertha to the darkest corner of the rail shed. Gunn and Harry stacked a couple of the sleepers against her wheels.\n\nGunn climbed into the cab to gather the few supplies that they would be able to carry. \"I've had a thought, though\u2014\" He heard a thump behind him, and spun round. Harry lay on the ground in a heap.\n\n\"Sophie!\" he called out. Sophie ran to Harry's side.\n\n\"I was worried this would happen.\" She crouched down and felt Harry's neck for a pulse.\n\n\"I'm all right,\" Harry croaked.\n\n\"No, you're not. Keep still.\" She put her hand on his forehead to check for fever, and lifted the edge of the dressing to check the gunshot wound. \"It's not infected,\" she said. \"You've just overdone things. You drove us all the way here from France, when you should have been resting.\"\n\nGunn's brow furrowed. Harry needed rest, but this shed wasn't the place for that. He was anxious to move on and find Pendragon, but he couldn't do it without Harry. It was beginning to look as though they wouldn't be going anywhere for a while.\n\nHarry strained to stand up, but Sophie put a hand on his shoulder, and instead shuffled himself into a sitting position. \"Don't worry about me. We have larger concerns. I'll be fine.\"\n\nSophie stood, shaking her head. \"You'll be fine, just so long as you rest.\" Harry closed his eyes, weary. Sophie turned to Gunn. \"We need to find somewhere I can take care of him properly. The trouble is, he's in no fit state to be walking anywhere. We'll have to risk using Bertha.\"\n\n\"I think you're right. First, I think we should do something to make her less conspicuous.\" He remembered the oil and coal that he'd found. \"I have an idea about that, but I don't think Harry will like it very much.\"\n\n\"Gunn, what the hell have you done?\" Harry shouted. He began to cough. Sophie patted his back, trying to help him get it under control.\n\nGunn had known that Harry would be upset. Bertha was no longer the glossy black box that she had been. The wet remains of burned coal and oil stained the ground around her. The flames had burned away most of Bertha's paint, and Gunn had thrown bucketfuls of cold water onto the hot metal plating.\n\nNow she was a mottled, patchy mix of gunmetal, grey iron, scorched paint and oil soot, already blooming with traces of rust. With a little luck, she'd pass as just another old goods carriage.\n\nHe turned back to Harry. \"It's just on the surface. Just the paint. I was careful to make sure the fire wasn't near any vital parts.\"\n\nHarry's coughing subsided but left him weakened. He groaned. \"You'd better hope you're right about that. If the heat warped any of the drive shafts\u2014\"\n\n\"It hasn't. I checked. When this is all over, I'll paint her myself. But right now, this is the best option I could think of.\"\n\nSophie interjected, \"The sooner we can move him the better. Have you thought about where we might go?\"\n\nGunn nodded. \"I don't see the need to go as far as Swanage. Wareham's just a few miles away.\"\n\n\"Then help me get him aboard.\"\n\nProctor stood on the metal catwalk high up on the side of the hangar wall, filled with pride as he looked down at his airship. From below came the sounds of work\u2014the clanking of tools, the chattering of pump gears. His people were busy getting the aircraft ready for her next flight\u2014filling her tanks with fuel and water, charging the electrical batteries, and hundreds of other tasks.\n\nHe heard boots ringing against the metal of the catwalk, and one of his men handed him a folded paper. It was a message from Christie. The three who had made nuisances of themselves in Paris had, despite Christie's efforts, managed to escape from France, and were now back in England, whereabouts unknown.\n\nProctor frowned. It was possible that they would attempt to locate the hangar. Christie wanted Proctor to double the patrols and put extra men at the gates. Proctor shook his head. He could assign a couple more people to man the gates, but he didn't have anywhere near enough men for double patrols.\n\nBut that was of little concern. The work will continue, because it is righteous work, he thought. There would be setbacks, and there would always be those who opposed them, but they would make no difference in the long run.\n\nIn the grand scheme of things, Bohemia and his friends were insignificant next to the plan\u2014they were ants in the path of an elephant, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.\n\nThe Doctor and the Gunns still hadn't appeared in Swanage, and they'd had plenty of time to get there. Webster was a little annoyed, but not terribly surprised; they'd seen him on several occasions but hadn't known who he worked for\u2014and the truth did seem a little far-fetched. If someone had come to Webster, and told him that they worked for a duke or an earl, he wasn't sure that he'd believe it, either.\n\nToo late now, he thought, as he packed his small bag and made ready to leave the little guest house. Now he'd have to backtrack to Lulworth, and try to pick up their trail from there.\n\nAs he walked to the railway station, he wondered, above all else, why he hadn't had the good sense to drive his steam carriage down from London instead of taking the train.\n\nSophie's father had made a list of military installations across southern England, any of which Pendragon might use as a base of operations. Gunn had decided he and Sophie would start with the three most likely candidates, the closest of which was Shorncliffe Camp, a hundred and fifty miles along the coast to the east, next to the country village of Cheriton.\n\nHarry was too unwell to travel, and he decided to stay in a guest house in Wareham to recuperate. Sophie suggested a code for wire messages, assigning special meanings to certain words\u2014a method her father had told her about, from his war years\u2014and Harry and Gunn thought this was a superb idea. They agreed on a few keywords, then Gunn and Sophie wished Harry farewell, and took a train to Cheriton, where they booked a room using false names.\n\nThe next morning, they arranged a packed lunch, and made their way toward the camp. They sauntered, hand-in-hand, along the wire fence that separated the camp from the path and the beach below. Gunn looked through the fence and across the grass at the huge hangar a thousand yards away, and the smaller buildings alongside it.\n\n\"I don't see anyone around,\" said Gunn.\n\nAfter half a mile, the fence met a corner post and turned to the north.\n\nGunn stopped. \"I think this would be a good spot for an early lunch.\"\n\nSophie led the way to a small copse a little way from the fence. \"These bushes should shelter us from sight. And from the breeze, too.\"\n\nSophie unpacked their picnic basket, while Gunn took out his field glasses from inside his coat. They sat down on the blanket, and Gunn raised the binoculars, aiming them through a gap in the bushes. \"Still no signs of life in there,\" he said, but then he saw a movement near the hangar doors. \"I spoke too soon. Look there.\"\n\nSophie took her own field glasses from the basket. \"It's a guard,\" she said, curious. \"Why's he watching the hangar? He should be at the gate.\"\n\nSophie was right\u2014the man was in uniform, and carrying a rifle. Gunn watched him walk away from them, and then disappear as he turned a corner.\n\n\"Can you see inside?\"\n\nHe saw nothing but darkness through the gap in the hangar doors. \"I can't see a thing.\"\n\nHe scanned the surrounding area, but saw no other guards. Then he checked the smaller buildings. Windows ran along the side of one. Movement.\n\n\"There are people inside that building,\" he said.\n\n\"More guards?\"\n\nGunn shifted to keep the binoculars steady. \"Yes,\" he said after a moment. \"At least a dozen, I think.\"\n\n\"This place does seem to be rather over-manned considering it's supposed to be unused.\" Her cheeks were rosy with excitement. \"I think we might have found what we're looking for.\"\n\nGunn felt a thrill at the thought. Could it be that they'd found Pendragon so quickly? He grinned at Sophie. \"We need to find out what's inside that hangar. It's the only way that we can know for sure.\"\n\nHe surveyed the ground beyond the fence. There was no movement, no sign that they'd been seen. They went back to eating their lunch. Sophie was silent, and he wondered what she was thinking. \"I think I can get in,\" she said after a few minutes.\n\nGunn raised an eyebrow. \"How?\"\n\n\"Using my father's name. They're sure to know it. If I can think of a good reason to be here\u2014military business on his behalf, perhaps\u2014I think they'll let me in.\"\n\n\"Absolutely not. It's far too dangerous. Even if Pendragon has nothing to do with this place, they'd only have to do a little checking to work out that you're my wife, and they'll certainly know my name from the newspapers. And if Pendragon is here . . .\"\n\nShe nodded, looking somewhat crestfallen. \"I suppose you're right. We'd better think of another plan, then.\"\n\nThey packed up their things and carried on walking along the footpath.\n\nThey spent the rest of the morning walking hand-in-hand along the coastal path, then returned to their picnic site on the way back. Gunn wanted to see if he could get a better view of the hangar from another angle.\n\nOn that side of the hangar, a long row of windows ran the length of the structure, just below the roof. Gunn pressed his face against the wire fence. A pale shape moved in one of the windows, then disappeared. Had it been someone's face? At that distance, he couldn't be certain.\n\nSophie took his elbow, and he stepped back. They walked on.\n\n\"That was silly. You might have been seen.\"\n\nGunn shrugged. \"They probably get hikers looking through the fence all the time. It's next to a public footpath, after all.\"\n\nThey made their way back to the boarding house, and went to their room to change.\n\nSophie sat on the edge of the bed, and pulled her shoes off. \"Have you had any thoughts on how we might get inside?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I've been trying, but I can't think of a way that wouldn't be foolishly risky. Whatever plan we're able to concoct, I've decided it's safer if I go alone. For one thing, I couldn't bear it if you got hurt.\" Sophie smiled at that. \"For another, if something happens to me, it'll be up to you to inform Harry.\"\n\nShe stood, and kissed him on the cheek. \"That's assuming we can even come up with a plan,\" she said. \"To be honest, it might be better to wait until Harry gets here. He's certain to think of something.\"\n\nSophie went to the house's office and sent a coded message to Harry, maintaining the guise of being his daughter. After dinner, feeling that they had made good progress, they turned in for an early night.\n\nChristie's machine sounded. He looked at the lights. It was Proctor, on the voice wire. Christie picked up the microphone.\n\n\"I have news,\" said Proctor. \"Gunn and his wife have been seen, outside the fence.\"\n\nChristie was elated. He'd soon have those three out of his way. \"Good. Where are they now?\"\n\n\"Granger followed them. They're staying in town, but it looks as though Bohemia isn't with them.\"\n\n\"They won't be out of contact with him. Cut into their wires, and catch any messages. As soon as you know where he is, let me know. Then you can send some men to bring them in, and we can be rid of them once and for all.\"\n\nThe next morning, Gunn went down to the dining room ahead of Sophie while she dressed, and ordered tea while he waited. Ten minutes later, he'd finished his first cup, and began to wonder what was taking her so long.\n\nAnother five minutes passed, still with no sign of Sophie. Gunn had gone from curiosity to impatience, and now, to worry. He took the stairs two at a time, and hurried to their room.\n\nSophie was gone. Blankets had been dragged off the bed and onto the floor, and the bedside cabinet lay on its side.\n\nHe darted to the bathroom\u2014it was empty, untouched. He whirled back to face the bedroom. He caught a movement in the corner of his eye\u2014the net curtains billowing in the breeze from the wide-open window. Gunn ran to look out into the fenced yard behind the house. There was no one there.\n\nThey've taken Sophie. With that thought, rage welled up inside Gunn. He turned and punched the wall, cracking the plaster, then slumped onto the edge of the bed, defeated. His mind was in turmoil. A hundred questions filled his head: why had they taken her, where had they taken her, what was he going to do? He paced the room, decided to call the police\u2014then, just as quickly, changed his mind.\n\nThis isn't helping, he thought. I have to clear my head.\n\nPendragon is behind this. He and Sophie must have been seen and recognised when they checked the military base, and followed to the boarding house. The fact that Sophie had been taken, and not Gunn, could only mean that she'd be used as leverage to ensure his cooperation, and possibly Harry's, too.\n\nHe still had no idea what to do, and after ten minutes of darting from one ridiculously dangerous idea to another, he realised he should be thinking on a different question: what does Pendragon expect me to do?\n\nNow, Gunn's thoughts became focussed. He'll expect me to summon Harry. Then he'll have us where he wants us.\n\nGunn decided he would play Pendragon's game\u2014or at least, he would appear to. He went to the little office in the boarding house, and sent a message to Harry informing him of what had happened. The last sentence of the message told Harry he should come to their aid as soon as possible\u2014but it included the code word that would tell him he should do no such thing.\n\nGunn played the part of a worried man, waiting for Harry's response or arrival, on the assumption he was being watched. It wasn't much of a stretch\u2014his guts were twisted into a knot with anxiety.\n\nPendragon won't hurt her\u2014she's worth more alive and unharmed. He kept that thought in his mind, and prayed he was right.\n\nHe went to their room, and, after tidying the mess and straightening the bed, tried to rest. It wasn't easy; his mind seethed with plans.\n\nShortly after noon, the owner of the house brought a message. It was from Harry, and told Gunn to stay put until he arrived, which he expected to do the next afternoon\u2014but Harry had included the keyword that meant that the message itself should be disregarded.\n\nA little while later, another message arrived, addressed to Mr. Gunn\u2014care of the fake name that he'd used. The message gave clear instructions: as soon as Dr. Bohemia arrived, he and Gunn were to present themselves at the main gate of the camp. There was no mention of Sophie, no warning against calling the police. The threat was implicit.\n\nPendragon wouldn't expect Harry to arrive for at least another day. That would give Gunn some time. He went to the dining room, where he had a better view of the road in front of the house, and took a table near the front window. He ordered tea, deliberately fidgeting and shuffling his feet, while casting an occasional surreptitious glance out the window.\n\nHe saw what he'd been looking for. Fifty yards along the street, two men in farm-workers' clothes sat on a bench near a steam-powered cart. They looked like field hands taking a break from work, but they glanced in the direction of the boarding house every minute or so. One of them took his cap off to scratch his head; his hairstyle appeared more military than Gunn would have expected for a labourer.\n\nThen, he noticed the distinctive scar on the man's face. It was the man who had shot Harry in Paris, and who had tried to kill Gunn himself. He clenched his fists. After drinking his tea and forcing himself to eat a slice of toast, Gunn returned to his room. He checked through the window, but saw nobody watching that side of the house. He lay on the bed and waited, impatiently, for night to fall.\n\nAs Gunn shinned down the drainpipe, he hoped the clothes he'd chosen would be dark enough. He reached the ground, and pulled again at the blue sweater. It will have to do, he thought.\n\nHe glanced up at the rear wall of the house. The window to their room was the only one showing a glimmer of light\u2014he'd left the little gas lamp burning to maintain the pretence that he was still inside. Sticking to the shadows, he padded to the rear gate, slipped out, and made for the coastal path.\n\nWhen he reached the east side of the base, he put on his goggles and adjusted the levers until they turned the black night into a pale grey. Next, he took out the boot polish he'd liberated from the boarding house and smeared streaks of it across his forehead and cheeks. He'd heard about such things from soldiers who'd served in Africa; silly as it seemed to him at the time, there was no doubt it had saved lives. Gunn knew he was going alone against, potentially, an army. He needed every advantage he could get.\n\nHe crept along the fence slowly, but inside, he was champing at the bit, wanting nothing more than to run and find Sophie. He used a bush for cover, and checked the ground beyond for guards. When he was sure it was clear, he flitted through the long grass to the shelter of a tree. From tree to tree, and bush to bush, he made his way.\n\nAfter a quarter of an hour of slow progress, he reached the point where the fence ran closest to the wall of the hangar. He still had quite a distance to cover; the building was a good two hundred feet from where he stood, and there was nothing but the odd patch of sparse grass in between.\n\nHe hunkered down behind another bush and checked the hangar walls, looking for any way in, other than through the main doors which would certainly be guarded. He spotted a pile of small boxes, and some metal barrels sitting on a wooden pallet, but no doors.\n\nHe looked higher up the wall. Halfway along, he spotted a ladder that began six feet from the ground, and led all the way to the roof, passing between two windows on the way. Fortuitously, the one to the right was slightly open. He'd found his way in\u2014if he could get to the ladder.\n\nHe looked to the left and right; he was alone. As he'd hoped, Pendragon hadn't dared put too many men out in the open, at a base that was ostensibly disused. He took a breath, steeling himself for the next move.\n\nUsing his prosthetic hand, he grabbed the wire at the base of the fence where it had been sunk into the earth, and pulled.\n\nThe hand was stronger than his natural one could ever have been, and the fence, corroded from age and neglect, broke away easily with a loud creak. Certain the noise would have alerted the guards, he quickly yanked the wire up another foot and scrambled under.\n\nHe remained lying there, waiting for the shouts of the sentries, but heard only the breeze. He jumped up and ran for the barrels, and, once there, crouched down next to them. He pushed lightly at the closest barrel. It rocked away from him, empty. Perfect. Pressing his ear to the hangar wall, he heard irregular clanking mixed with a rhythmic rushing that reminded him of steam passing through pipes under high pressure.\n\nThe ladder was thirty or forty feet away. He began to roll the barrel toward it\u2014and stopped before he'd gone a foot. The hollow barrel made an awful racket. He grabbed the rim with his prosthetic fingers and crushed the metal to get a firm grip, wincing at the sound, and carried it the rest of the way.\n\nHe set the barrel upright under the ladder and climbed onto it, then pulled himself up onto the first rung and began climbing toward the open window. He heard a scuffing sound from somewhere below, and froze. A sentry had come around the corner of the hangar, and walked slowly in his direction.\n\nGunn stopped breathing. He was certain the man would see the barrel under the ladder, and know that it hadn't been there before. Gunn was still ten feet from the level of the windows. If he moved, the guard would hear him.\n\nThe man drew level with the barrel.\n\nAnd passed by. Gunn watched his back as he walked on, and started breathing again, as quietly as he could. After another minute, the man turned the far corner and was gone.\n\nGunn was unable to move, petrified with fear of getting caught. I'm no soldier\u2014I'm a reporter, damn it! What chance do I have? His mind filled with dismay and hopelessness. This is folly. I should have waited for Harry, as Pendragon said. He prepared to climb back down the ladder and leave.\n\nThen he had a vision of Sophie, alone and scared, and the image pressed on him like a lead weight. Doing what Pendragon wanted was a sure way of getting them all killed\u2014as he'd told Sophie in Paris. I told her I would fight.\n\nHe grabbed the ladder firmly, and, with new determination, resumed his climb. When his eyes were level with the bottom of the windows, he sneaked a peek. He looked in on an empty corridor, illuminated by gas lamps mounted on the wall at intervals. He pulled the window open a little more and checked both ways along the hallway, then clambered inside and stuffed the goggles into his pocket.\n\nTo the right, a stairway led down to the hangar floor; if he went that way, he'd surely be seen. He went to the left, and made his way quietly. The corridor turned to the right. He poked his head around the corner, and saw it was empty. He padded along quickly.\n\nHe came upon doors on both sides of the corridor; offices, perhaps, or work rooms. Sophie might be behind any one of them. He stopped at the first door and pressed his ear against it, listening for any sign that someone might be on the other side. The noises from the hangar made it difficult to be sure, but he heard nothing.\n\nThere was a click, and he turned\u2014and froze, as a man in a uniform stepped out of a doorway into the corridor, a mere twenty feet away.\n\nHe had his back to Gunn, and stopped to speak to someone in the room. Quickly, Gunn opened the door next to him and slipped through, praying there was no one inside. He closed the door as gently as he could manage. He heard the murmur of the uniformed man's voice. A moment later he heard footsteps in the corridor, getting closer. Gunn braced himself, ready to lash out when the door opened.\n\nThe footsteps faded as the man walked past, and continued on.\n\nGunn took a breath, and turned to survey the room he was in. It was unoccupied, thankfully, and ended at a low railing, instead of a wall. Beyond that, there was featureless grey. He went to the rail\u2014and realised he was looking at the monstrous bulk of Pendragon's triple-enveloped airship.\n\nIt was a leviathan, as long as two soccer fields. Ropes as thick as Gunn's arms anchored the airship to huge hooks on the hangar walls.\n\nGunn's eyes widened, awed by the sheer scale of the thing. He stood at the tail end of the monstrous aircraft. Gigantic control surfaces almost touched the roof of the hangar, two hundred feet above him, and ended far below. How can such a thing float on air? He stared, open-mouthed, at men below him swarming around machinery, like ants. Then he remembered himself, and stepped back from the rail before anyone saw him.\n\nHe took stock of his surroundings, and noticed a grating, set into the ceiling above a desk in the corner. As he went to it, he spotted a similar grate in the floor, and through it, could see the hangar floor. He climbed onto the desk and pushed at the iron grille above. It lifted easily. He grabbed the edge and pulled himself up, high enough to see into the space above.\n\nThere was no one there, and he climbed up the rest of the way. To one side, the airship stretched the length of the hangar; to the other, the corrugated metal hangar wall went up and up, meeting the barely-visible roof in the shadows.\n\nUnder his feet, flimsy-looking wooden ceiling panels stretched across the short end of the hangar, covered in dust and bits of birds' nests. Two rows of grilles, just like the one he'd climbed through, were set into the panels. He placed a foot on the board next to him, testing its strength. It flexed a little, but held his weight. He set out, stepping carefully and as quietly as he could manage, to check the ventilation grilles one by one.\n\nThrough the first one, he saw an empty office; the second was the same. As he reached the third, he heard voices drifting up, but they were too quiet to make out. Through the grille, he saw two men bent over a schematic drawing.\n\nHe took a step toward the next office\u2014and the wooden board under his shoe creaked.\n\n\"What was that?\" The voice came up through the grating. Gunn stopped short, and held his breath.\n\nAnother voice replied. \"Probably just a rat. The place is full of them.\"\n\n\"Rats,\" came the first voice. \"Filthy things. They ought to clean this place out.\"\n\nThe voices went back to their murmuring. Gunn waited for a full minute before tiptoeing on. It took a few minutes to check all of the rooms. All of the inner offices were empty, while about half of those against the hangar wall were occupied.\n\nThere was still no sign of Sophie\u2014she was either not being held in the hangar, or she was in the only other place that Gunn hadn't been: the airship. He had to find a way to get aboard.\n\nHe checked the sides and tail of the aircraft, but saw no catwalks or loading ramps. The only way aboard, he reasoned, had to be from ground level\u2014and if he tried to cross the hangar floor, he'd be seen before he could get anywhere near the ship.\n\nHe considered climbing along one of the tethering ropes and cutting through the outer fabric to make a way in, but he didn't know enough about the internal layout of the airship. If it was at all like any of the passenger craft he'd travelled aboard, he was just as likely to find himself inside a hydrogen chamber, unable to breathe.\n\nA glimmer of blue-white light at the limit of his vision caught his attention; it was coming from the edge of a square patch of darker material on one of the envelopes, near one of the horizontal control surfaces. It must be some kind of inspection hatch.\n\nOne of the ropes anchoring the airship to the hangar walls ran above the offices, passing within twenty feet of him. He hadn't seen it in the dark. He padded over to it, then hesitated, nervous\u2014he was about to attempt something very risky. One slip and he'd end up dead on the hangar floor. Sophie came to the forefront of his mind again, and he steeled himself to move.\n\nHe grabbed the thick rope with both hands, and put his weight into trying to shake it. It didn't move, the airship's mass holding it taut. He got a firm grip, braced his nerves, and stepped off the edge. Moving hand-over-hand, he slowly made his way toward the ship.\n\nIt seemed to take an age, but after a while, he looked behind, and saw he was already more than halfway across. He looked down, and saw a man walking directly underneath him, toward the airship. Gunn swung his arm up, ready to move on\u2014and there, on the rope, sat a huge, black rat, watching him.\n\nHe grabbed at the rope frantically\u2014and bumped the rat with his fingers, knocking it off its perch. He got his hands properly onto the rope and gripped hard, glancing down in time to see the rat land on the man below. The man yelped in surprise as the rat bounced off his shoulder, hit the concrete hangar floor, and ran off.\n\nThe man looked up.\n\nThen he looked back down, brushed his shoulder, and walked off, disappearing beneath the right-side envelope. Gunn breathed a sigh of relief. He'd been hidden in the shadow of the airship, and the man hadn't seen him. Gunn waited for his heart to slow, and moved on.\n\nHe reached the tail plane and grabbed it, hauling himself up. It was firm under his feet, and he stepped quickly to the square of fabric he'd seen. He peered through the narrow gap at the edge. A wooden catwalk led into the airship's innards. There was no one there. No time to hang about, he thought. Quickly, he pulled the flap open and climbed in.\n\nHe paced quickly along the narrow walkway, between the bulging hydrogen cells. Blue light came from cylinders of glass and brass fixed to vertical wooden struts. He dashed up a short flight of steps. At the top, the path went left; Gunn poked his head around the corner, saw the way was clear, and moved on.\n\nHe hurried along the weaving catwalk, checking at every corner and stairway. It was slow going. He was beginning to worry that he'd made a mistake, that Sophie wasn't on the airship after all. But he couldn't be sure until he'd searched the entire aircraft, and he would do that, no matter what it took.\n\nWith that thought in mind, he turned a corner, and heard footsteps coming toward him. He spun around, ready make a run for it\u2014and heard footsteps coming from that way, as well. He was trapped.\n\nHe didn't have time to panic. He dropped over the side, grabbing the wooden edging as he went, and swung down. An instant later, he hung underneath by his fingertips.\n\nThe catwalk jerked up and down as booted feet approached from both directions. They stopped, no more than two feet from where Gunn was hanging.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" said one.\n\n\"They sent me to see what was taking you so long. Have you finished?\"\n\n\"Yes. It was just a stuck valve. All fixed.\"\n\n\"Good. Come on, then.\"\n\nThe men moved\u2014and Gunn's hand blossomed with agony as one of them brought his boot down onto Gunn's fingers. He almost screamed, but he clamped his jaw shut. He lost his grip, and dangled by his left arm.\n\n\"Did you hear that?\" said the first man.\n\n\"Hear what?\"\n\n\"I thought . . . never mind.\"\n\nThe men walked away.\n\nAs soon as they'd gone, he grappled his way up and flopped onto his back. His fingers felt as if they'd been crushed by a mallet, and he massaged them while he caught his breath, then stood, and followed the way the men had gone.\n\nHe came to a wooden platform, ten feet square, with a large hole in the centre. A ladder poked through, bolted to the edge, leading down into a room where two men in metal flying helmets stood at control boards made of metal and glass. One made an adjustment to a control, then moved out of Gunn's line of sight, and the other man followed.\n\nQuietly, Gunn poked his head down into the room. The men had gone\u2014for now.\n\nA drop of sweat trickled down his nose. His hands shook with stress and anticipation\u2014even the prosthetic. He clenched his jaw, took a firm grip on the ladder, and climbed down.\n\nLarge, angled windows on three sides of the room gave a view out into the hangar, and along the rounded undersides of the lower envelopes. All around him, gauges and levers connected to the engines, compressors, control surfaces, and whatever else it took to steer the huge machine around the sky. He was in the airship's control room, at the nose of the gondola, suspended under the envelopes.\n\nA door at the rear of the room led to a long, straight passageway that ran the length of the gondola. There was no sign of the men who had just left. Gunn knew a little about airships; crew cabins would be behind the control room, and cargo spaces below.\n\nBut where is Sophie?\n\nTall wooden cabinets stood on each side of the doorway. Large books\u2014navigation maps\u2014filled the one on the left. The other held four large, beige overcoats\u2014just like the ones the two men he'd seen had been wearing. Metal flying helmets, goggles, and other paraphernalia sat on an upper ledge; the bottom shelf held woollen, anti-spark overshoes. I could have used you earlier, he thought. Better late than never.\n\nGunn slipped on one of the overcoats and jammed his booted feet into a pair of overshoes, then donned a helmet and a pair of goggles. The greasy feeling under his fingertips reminded him he still had bootblack smeared on his face, and he used the sleeve of another overcoat to wipe off the worst of it.\n\nHe rummaged through the other shelves, hoping beyond hope that there might be a weapon\u2014but he hadn't really expected to find any firearms aboard a vessel that was, after all, ninety percent hydrogen by volume. He went out into the passageway.\n\nHe stopped at the first door on the left, and opened it cautiously\u2014if there was anyone the other side, he'd have to trust the disguise would work. The room\u2014a crew cabin\u2014was empty. Gunn closed the door and checked the room on the opposite side\u2014another cabin, a mirror image of the first.\n\nHe continued along the passageway, methodically checking each room. He found ten crew cabins total, as well as a tiny galley, a small bathroom with a toilet, and a room that appeared to be an infirmary. Halfway along the corridor, a flight of stairs led down. Still, he uncovered no trace of Sophie. She has to be aboard, he told himself, she simply has to be.\n\nHe stepped into the infirmary, closed the door and leaned back against the wall, letting his head fall back against the wooden panelling, and closed his eyes. His heart threatened to thump out of his chest. So far, he'd been lucky; it was still well before dawn, and no doubt most of the vessel's crew were still in bed. But that wouldn't last long\u2014the pumping of hydrogen and fuel he'd seen earlier could only mean the airship was being readied for flight. He might have only minutes before the crew arrived.\n\nHis heart had slowed a little. He used the tiny sink to wash his face with cold water, then put the helmet and goggles back on. He returned to the stairs and found another corridor at the bottom. He took a breath, straightened his shoulders, then strode down the corridor toward the stern of the airship.\n\nHe came across a small balcony overlooking a huge cargo space, three storeys high. Below him stood Pendragon's man-shaped machines\u2014eight of them, set in two rows, like a military formation. Men wearing white coats, magnifying goggles on brass headpieces, and protective gloves, worked on the machines' innards.\n\nUniformed guards stood at the edges of the cargo area, armed with large crossbows. One looked up at Gunn as he stood at the balcony. Gunn made a show of yawning, keeping the man in the corner of his vision. The guard stared at him, then looked away. Gunn breathed again, and moved on, trying to appear casual.\n\nHe took a short flight of steps down to a hallway, which ended in three closed doors\u2014one in front of him, and one either side. He went to the door on the right, and, bracing himself, turned the handle.\n\nAt first he thought he'd walked into a featureless, grey fog. Then he realised he was in a room with tarnished metal walls, ceiling, and floor, covered with scratches and dents. More of the strange blue lamps hung on hooks, but only one was lit, faint and flickering. A metal table stood in the middle of the room. A chart table, Gunn realised. This must be a navigation room.\n\nThere was no sign of Sophie. He checked the passageway outside to make sure it was still clear, stepped across to the opposite door, and went in.\n\nThe room was similar in construction, but along the wall stood a row of strange devices. Gunn stepped closer to the first one\u2014it comprised a brass framework eight feet high, with a seat mounted between two hinged brass rods. The rods ended in handgrips, with triggers, switches, and push buttons. The whole thing was topped with a helmet, rather like those used by divers. Heavy leather straps, plainly intended for arms and thighs, had been riveted to the metalwork.\n\nGunn brushed his fingertips against the framework, wondering why it looked so familiar. Then he gasped\u2014Paris, inside the walking machine that Harry had been examining in the police laboratory, just before he'd been shot.\n\nHe took a step back and counted eight identical machines. Gunn realised they were used to control the walking machines from a distance, using some magical technology. Harry was right, he thought. If only he were here to see this.\n\nBut Harry wasn't there, and neither was Sophie. Gunn had to keep looking. He left the room and turned to the last door. He took a breath, then opened it, and stepped inside.\n\nThe room was dark. Gunn removed the stolen goggles, and as his eyes adjusted, he realised he was surrounded by bombs. Grey metal cylinders a yard across and five long, with brass pipes running along the sides, were mounted in racks against the walls. In front of him, two trolleys sat on rails, each with a bomb resting in a cradle on the top. What looked like fins, or wings, stuck out on either side. Flying torpedoes?\n\nHe moved to stand next to one of the carts. The rails ran the length of the room, ending at circular ports set into the far wall. Between them was a metal desk, with various controls lit from behind and labelled with their functions. There were levers for opening the launch ports, switches to engage drive motors and arm warheads, and large red buttons marked Fire.\n\nHe heard a groan, and spun round, crouching. In a shadowy corner of the room, several metal chairs were bolted to the floor\u2014and one was occupied.\n\nA small figure sat, slumped over. In the dark, Gunn couldn't make out details, and the person didn't seem to have noticed him. He took a step forward, and froze when his\u2014her?\u2014head lifted up.\n\n\"Sophie!\" he cried out, and hurried toward her.\n\n\"Connie\u2014\" she said weakly. Then something heavy smashed into the right side of his neck.\n\nThe pain was incredible. His vision blurred, and the room spun as his legs folded under him. He fell to his knees. Someone tore his helmet away and grabbed his hair, yanking his head back. A hand held a piece of fabric across his nose and mouth. It smelled of metal.\n\nThe room spun, faster and faster, and then faded into blackness.\n\nAs Webster rushed along Wareham's main street toward the railway station, he cursed himself again for leaving his steam carriage in London.\n\nBohemia had been at the boarding house, but had checked out that morning. The house's owner had rules about giving out guests' information\u2014Webster snorted, a little disgusted, at how easily the rules had melted away when he'd waved a few banknotes in front of the man's nose. Bohemia had received a message from Cheriton, and had left immediately.\n\nWebster knew there was a military base near Cheriton; he had friends who'd been stationed there, years before. It all makes sense now. It would make a secure base of operations for Pendragon. And if the three of them were looking for him, it would be a place of interest. He had no doubt they were there.\n\nThe last train would be leaving in a matter of minutes. Webster lengthened his stride, then broke into a run.\n\nHarry felt awful. He'd dosed himself up with painkillers, which helped, but the aches and pains had been replaced with a lightheaded feeling and a persistent drowsiness, made worse by the rocking and shaking of a four-hour train journey.\n\nHe looked out again from behind the bushes. Even though it was very late\u2014or very early, depending on how you looked at it\u2014and there was no one nearby, he was certain the guest house was being watched. He worried that if he went inside, he'd be seen and recognised.\n\nIf I were in Gunn's shoes, he thought, I'd try to get to Sophie. Gunn was resourceful. He'd have found a way to leave the house unobserved. Harry should have realised that. Damn these drugs, he thought. He couldn't think clearly.\n\nThe base was to the south. He took a few deep breaths of the cold night air to clear his head, then hurried away into the shadows.\n\nGunn woke, head spinning, as harsh, headache-inducing light flared. It glittered against the polished brass of the bombs, reminding him where he was: aboard the airship, in the weapon room. His stomach churned. He tried to raise his hand, but found that he'd been bound to a chair.\n\n\"It will pass,\" came Sophie's voice. He looked to his right and saw her there, tied to her chair, blinking at the lights that had just been turned on. \"The sick feeling, I mean. It goes away after a little while.\" She looked pale, but she smiled a little when she saw he was awake. He wanted, very much, to reach out and take her hand.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"The guard hit you.\"\n\nGunn's head cleared, little by little. His throat was hoarse, and his mouth tasted like tin. His voice rasped. \"Pendragon's got what he wants. He used you as bait to trap me. So, why aren't we dead? Is he waiting to get Harry, too?\"\n\n\"All in good time,\" came a voice from behind. Gunn tried to twist in his chair to see who'd spoken, but the ropes were too tight. A moment later, a tall, thin man, of about forty stepped around in front of them. He looked at Gunn.\n\n\"As you said, I kept your wife alive to ensure that you joined us\u2014although I'd expected you to follow instructions, rather than make such a dramatic entrance. But that just means that you'll die together, instead of apart.\" He sneered. \"How romantic. As for Doctor Bohemia, my men will have no trouble disposing of him when he arrives.\"\n\nHe dragged over a wooden chair and took a seat, crossing one leg over the other.\n\n\"We will be getting airborne in just a few minutes. We're going to Paris, you see, and I'm going to allow you to live long enough to see the city destroyed. After that, I'm going to kill you both.\"\n\n\"Why not just do it now?\"\n\n\"After all the trouble you've caused? I don't think so. You cost me one of my best men in Paris, and destroyed two of my walkers into the bargain. Now I'm going to have a little vengeance, so there'll be no quick, merciful death. You're going to suffer.\"\n\n\"Your men,\" said Gunn, stunned as realisation dawned. \"Your machines. You're Pendragon.\"\n\nThe man looked at Gunn sharply, and grinned. Then he started laughing. His laughter went on for what seemed like a long time, becoming more and more high-pitched. Like a madman, thought Gunn. Tears appeared in the man's eyes, and he pulled a handkerchief from a pocket and wiped them away as he got himself under control.\n\n\"Oh, dear, oh, dear,\" said the man. \"That's priceless. You still don't understand, do you?\"\n\nIt was irritating, like being taunted by a child, and Gunn seethed inside.\n\n\"Pendragon isn't a person, you idiot. You want to see Pendragon? Look around you. Me, the people who work for me, all the people we've put in place throughout the English government\u2014we are Pendragon. Many people, all with a single, clear goal: to see that England gains its rightful place as the master of this world. As for myself, I am called Proctor. I simply manage the military aspects of Pendragon's plans.\"\n\n\"You're going to take over the world\u2014with a single airship?\"\n\nProctor shook his head. \"Oh, not just an airship. We already have technical superiority. Our weapons will knock the French air defences out of the sky, before this ship is even visible to them. Those platforms will fall in flames before the French even know that they're being attacked. Paris will burn to ashes as an example to the rest of the world of what to expect if they resist.\n\n\"Every nation on this planet will submit to the control of our reformed English government. Those that fight us will be destroyed, utterly and completely, by weapons you can't even begin to imagine. We will soon have new aircraft that will fly so high, our enemies won't even see them. In a few years, we'll be able to go even farther, beyond the atmosphere.\n\n\"Our engineers have designed weapons that can destroy cities. No country on this earth has a chance against us, and they'll very quickly understand that. Ten years from now, the world will be English\u2014one language, one way of thinking. Fifty years from now, not a single person on this planet will be able to imagine how it could ever have been any other way.\"\n\nSophie looked from Proctor to Gunn, eyes wide, mouth open in disbelief. Gunn knew what she was thinking, because it mirrored his own thought: the man is insane.\n\nGunn clenched his jaw. \"You can't win. You might have the more powerful weapons, but when all of Europe unites to fight you, you'll be like one man with a gun against a thousand archers. They'll throw everything they have at you. You don't stand a chance.\"\n\nProctor tilted his head to one side. \"You underestimate us. Don't you think our plans anticipate that? Others will join us, too\u2014every true-blooded Englishman will be with us, once they see what we're doing for them.\"\n\nGunn raised an eyebrow. \"Do you really believe the people will fight a war for you? A war they didn't ask for, and don't want, just so that they can be governed by you? It won't happen. They'll join the fight against you, rather than be ruled by a collection of warmongers.\"\n\nProctor's face twisted, red with anger. He jumped from his chair, and clamped his hands around Gunn's throat. Sophie screamed. Gunn struggled against the ropes, and twisted his head, trying to get free of Proctor's grip, but it was no good. His vision turned red, and he saw stars, and knew he was about to black out.\n\nThen the pressure ceased, and his head lolled forward. Gasping for air, he looked up. Proctor was standing a few feet away, while a guard murmured something to him. Proctor nodded, gave Gunn a look of unadulterated malice, then followed the guard out of the room.\n\nSophie stared at Gunn, wide eyed, her breathing rapid.\n\nGunn coughed, getting his breath back, and he smiled to try to ease her fear. \"I think I touched a raw nerve there.\"\n\nSophie's breathing slowed as she got it back under control. \"We have to get out of here.\"\n\nThey struggled against the ropes binding their wrists to the legs of the chairs.\n\n\"Do you believe him?\" he said, breathless, as he thrashed.\n\n\"About Paris? I don't think we can take the chance that he's wrong, or lying, or just out of his mind, Connie. Tens of thousands of people . . .\"\n\n\"We have to warn them.\"\n\nGunn's straining did no good. The ropes were too tight and too well tied. He stopped, realising he would get nowhere by tugging at bonds that were beyond his strength to break. He took a breath, and pulled lightly against the cords. Proctor\u2014or more likely, the guard who'd subdued Gunn\u2014had thoughtlessly tied the binding around his metal wrist, instead of higher up around his forearm. That gave him an idea.\n\nWith his prosthetic hand, he felt for the seat of the chair, and curled the fingertips around the edge to get a firm grip. He closed the hand, gradually increasing the force. He could feel the hand straining at the point where it met his own flesh and bone.\n\nThe bonds started to give under the intense pressure. The rope around his metal wrist began to separate, fibre by fibre, as the force of the mechanical fingers overcame its strength.\n\nWith a snap, the fibres tore apart, freeing his left hand.\n\nHe worked quickly, untying himself, then he hurried to Sophie.\n\nHe heard a click from behind him. Sophie gasped, and he spun round to see Proctor pointing a crossbow at his face.\n\nGunn sprang at him, swinging his metal hand at the madman's arms. Proctor pulled the trigger as Gunn's hand smashed the weapon away. The bolt shot over Gunn's shoulder, and the bow clattered to the floor as Gunn piled into his enemy, forcing him against the wall.\n\nGunn punched the man in the stomach, and he doubled over\u2014then he straightened sharply, and Gunn's teeth jarred as Proctor's skull smacked into his chin. Gunn stumbled back, his ears ringing, and Proctor paced forward, his face contorted with rage, his arms reaching for Gunn's neck. Then his hands were around Gunn's throat again.\n\nHe felt his eyes popping from their sockets as life was crushed from him. He thrashed at Proctor's chest, and tried to squirm free, but he wouldn't let go\u2014then Gunn's metal hand found the man's windpipe. He held firm and squeezed.\n\nProctor's grip loosened as he tried to pull away, and Gunn pressed his advantage, pushing the man backward until he slammed into one of the bomb trolleys.\n\nProctor kicked at Gunn's shin, sending a lightning bolt of pain into the bone. He lost his grip, then he was thrown backward as Proctor planted a foot firmly into his chest. He landed on the control desk\u2014and flames shot from a nozzle at the tail of the bomb Proctor had fallen against.\n\nGunn glanced at the panel. One of the red buttons had been jammed down when he'd landed on it.\n\nProctor pushed himself at Gunn\u2014and was stopped short. He twisted to see what was holding him; his belt had caught on the bomb's pipework. He tugged at it, but the leather was hooked firmly. He glanced at the jet of fire, and his face went white as he struggled wildly to free himself. \"No!\" he screamed, and he looked at Gunn. \"For pity's sake, man, help\u2014\"\n\nThe flames increased tenfold, and Gunn and Sophie covered their ears against the deafening roar. Gunn saw Proctor's mouth moving, pleading. The trolley pushed forward against its creaking, screeching brakes by the power of the rocket, and metal began to buckle\u2014and the bomb twisted around, its flames turning to point at Sophie.\n\nGunn spun round to the controls, looking frantically for a way to stop the engine. He saw a switch marked Carrier Release, and slapped it with his hand. The bomb shot forward, accelerating along the rails, dragging the screaming Proctor along with it.\n\nThe bomb slammed into the launch doors, then spun ninety degrees and bounced sideways. It jammed itself into the missile rack, tail upwards, smashing Proctor's limp body to pulp.\n\nGunn ran back to Sophie and freed her, then grabbed her in a bone-popping hug.\n\nThey separated, and he glanced at the carnage. Flames from the bomb's engine played against the wall and ceiling, burning the wood and paint. Gunn grabbed Sophie's hand and they ran for the door.\n\nGunn glanced down into the cargo bay, careful not to be seen.\n\n\"If that fire burns the other bombs\u2014\" he began.\n\n\"Nothing will happen unless the warheads are armed. Trust me\u2014my dad's an expert on them. I'm more worried about the gas cells. How long before the fire gets to them?\"\n\n\"Minutes, at most. We have to get off this thing, and we'll never get through those guards. We'll have to go through the control room, the way I got aboard, and get out of the hangar before the whole lot goes up.\"\n\nSophie trembled. He took her hand, and looked into her eyes. \"We'll get through this.\"\n\nThe doubt disappeared from her face, and she smiled a little, confident in him. Her back straightened. \"Yes. We will.\" She nodded in the direction of the cargo bay. \"Perhaps we can create a distraction.\"\n\n\"Good thinking.\" Gunn took hold of one of the blue lights mounted on the wall near the doors. It came free with one good pull, and he threw it as far as he could across the cargo bay.\n\nIt smashed against the wall, and intense blue-white light flared all around it. The guards and the engineers in the bay looked to see what had happened.\n\nGunn and Sophie moved as one, running along the balcony and up the stairs. Below, the lamp began to smoke. A guard looked up to see where it had come from. When he saw Gunn and Sophie, he shouted, and the other guards ran for the steps leading up to the catwalk.\n\nGunn and Sophie darted along the passageway and into the control room. Three men stood there, intent on the various control boards. One turned at the sound of their entrance, and was thrown across a panel as Gunn's left arm slammed into his chest. A second man joined the first as Gunn swept his arm round. The third man thought the better of trying to tangle with the assailant, and ran from the room.\n\n\"Connie!\" said Sophie, and he spun around. She looked out of the windows, wide-eyed. He followed her gaze. The waves of the English Channel crested, a thousand feet below them.\n\nHe heard footsteps hammering up the stairs. \"Up!\" he said, pointing at the ladder in the middle of the room. They scurried up, then galloped astern.\n\n\"I don't . . . want . . . to burn,\" Sophie shouted, between breaths.\n\nGunn stopped between two bulging gas cells.\n\n\"I'd rather we jumped, and took our chances,\" she continued. She put her arms around him and kissed him. \"I love you, Connie.\"\n\n\"I love you too, Sophie,\" he said. He held her, and kissed her in return. If they couldn't escape, at least they'd be together.\n\nBut they'd escape, if there was any way they could. They ran along the catwalk. And then the fire alarms went off.\n\nWebster, watching from the beach, saw the hangar doors open slowly. The rising sun caught the nose of the huge triple-enveloped airship inside. Pendragon had evidently ceased to worry about his vessel being seen during the day. He was getting bolder, and Webster knew that couldn't be a good sign.\n\nThe airship floated out of the hangar, then Webster heard the tone of the engines change as they were fed more power. It turned to the southeast, gaining altitude, and floated over him and out across the water.\n\nHe clenched his fists in despair and frustration; Gunn and his wife had been abducted from their lodgings. Webster had every reason to believe they were aboard that thing, and he was powerless when they most needed help.\n\nIt was time to report to His Lordship. He was about to turn away, when he noticed a glimmer of red-orange light at the bow of the airship's lower starboard side. He looked closer. Fire.\n\nThe flames spread quickly along the envelope, and jumped to the others moments later. They burned away the skin of the airship, exposing the vessel's skeleton. Burning fabric fluttered down, accompanied by darker, larger shapes\u2014the scales of the armour plating.\n\nThe nose of the aircraft dropped as the hydrogen burned away. Within seconds, the entire airship was on fire, and began to fall, faster and faster in the grip of gravity. With a sinking heart, Webster watched the smoking wreckage splash and splatter into the sea.\n\nGunn and Sophie could hear the alarms going off in the gondola below them. Gunn glanced the way they'd come. If they'd been followed, there should have been some sign of their pursuers by now. \"We might get out of this, yet. Come on.\" He turned and ran back toward the control cabin, Sophie on his heels.\n\nGunn was ready to use his metal hand to belt anyone that got in their way, but they reached the ladder without any sign of the crew.\n\nHe dropped down into the control room\u2014and found it deserted. Blinking red and yellow lights surrounded him, and the sounds of bells and buzzers filled the air.\n\nSophie slid down the ladder, and Gunn took her hand. They dashed for the door.\n\nTheir way along the corridor was clear, but they heard shouts and screams as they reached the cargo bay. They stopped short as they came to the railing.\n\nBelow them was chaos. Doors in the sides of the bay had been opened, and the engineers and guards were clustered around them, panicking. As Gunn watched, one jumped out to a certain death. Sophie shook her head in sorrow.\n\nThe floor under their feet tilted, almost tipping them over the rail, and Gunn knew the bow of the airship was sinking. There wasn't much time. \"I'd hoped there would have been lifeboats, or something.\"\n\n\"Don't give up, Connie.\" Then she pointed down into the bay. \"Look.\"\n\nGunn followed her finger, and instantly knew what she was thinking. \"Do you really think\u2014?\"\n\n\"It's that, or drown.\"\n\nThey ran down the stairs and toward the walking machines, scrabbling down the deck as it tilted more and more. The one farthest from them was open, its hatch swinging to one side. A guard stepped out in front of them, ten feet ahead, and raised his crossbow to point it at Gunn's head. Gunn slowed, then changed his mind. He raced forward, lifting his metal left hand, ready to hit the man.\n\nThe guard pulled the trigger.\n\nThe crossbow bolt shot toward Gunn's face\u2014and bounced off his wrist, clattering against the wall. Gunn swung and hit the man across the face. He collapsed as Gunn and Sophie flew past. Gunn grabbed Sophie's hand again as they reached the open machine. He half jumped, half climbed into the machine, pulling her in behind him.\n\nThe deck tilted again, more sharply, this time. He glanced out of one of the open bay doors, and knew they had but seconds before the gondola hit the water. Sophie pressed in tight against him, and he grabbed the machine's hatch and yanked it closed. There was a hiss, and he felt the hatch press itself inward and seal. Then all was silent, except for the sounds of their laboured breathing. He tried to put his arms around Sophie, but there wasn't room to move his elbows.\n\nThe gondola smashed into the sea. Gunn's head slammed back into the leather padding, and Sophie's weight forced the breath from his lungs. He raised his head. The faceplate was inches from his eyes, and he could see through it clearly. Jets of water shot across the bay from both sides through the open doors, blasting loose equipment, and the bodies of the remaining airship crew, across the open space.\n\nSeawater engulfed them. Bodies\u2014some dead, some convulsing as they drowned\u2014floated in front of him, amid bits of broken wood, and flurries of bubbles.\n\nThe gondola creaked and groaned around them as it sank slowly. After what seemed an age, it hit the seabed with a thump. A pair of goggles entwined with a glove drifted toward them, then away, as the gondola gradually tilted back to something close to level.\n\nAnd then everything was still. Sophie pressed close against him, her head against his chest and her arms still around him. He could feel her breathing against his stomach.\n\n\"Sophie?\" he said softly. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I think so. But I can barely move. It's a little bit cramped in here.\"\n\n\"Let's\u2014oof!\" Sophie's shoulder jammed into his stomach.\n\n\"Sorry, dear. Let me just\u2014\" She shifted her arms, and he worked around her, trying to get his arms properly free. His buttocks were on a narrow seat, and his feet had slipped naturally into the contraption's hollow legs when he'd climbed inside. He felt pedals down there\u2014somewhere near the giant machine's knees, but in the right place for a normal man's boots. His shoes slotted into the straps.\n\n\"Ow!\" he said as Sophie's shoe scraped against his shin. But he'd managed to get his arms inside those of the machine, as far as its elbows, and found controls at his fingertips. He pressed them at random until tiny lights came on in front of his face. The machine's limbs came alive. He moved his arm, and the machine's arm followed. \"I think we might survive this, after all.\"\n\nWith some contortions, Sophie got her arms and legs next to Gunn's, inside the mechanical limbs. She rested her toes on his feet, held his wrists in her hands, and pressed her face into his chest. Then she took a deep breath and blew it out. \"That was quite exhausting.\"\n\n\"And painful,\" Gunn groaned, wishing he could reach down and rub his bruised shin. \"Move your feet with mine. You always swore you'd get me to dance one day, sweetheart, but don't you think this is a bit much?\" He could see over her head well enough. He pulled his foot up, and the monster's leg lifted. He took a step forward, then another. One of the other walkers lay on the gondola floor in his path. He swept his arm across, and swatted it aside.\n\nHe stepped out through the open door, and dropped in slow motion to the sea bed. Across the sea floor, sparse kelp strands waved gently, as the water nudged them to and fro. He looked up, and saw the surface of the sea. It was difficult to judge the depth, but he guessed that it was about a hundred feet.\n\nHe looked down. Sophie's eyes were jewels in the dark, looking into his. \"I don't suppose you'd know which way is north, would you?\"\n\nJameson arrived at his office to a ringing machine. Without stopping to take off his hat or coat, he picked up the microphone. It was Christie.\n\n\"Jameson? I've just been told that the airship's been destroyed, and now I've lost contact with the base. Have you any idea what's happening?\"\n\n\"Not a clue, old man.\"\n\nHe heard Christie sigh with frustration at the other end of the wire. \"It's a setback, but there are plenty more airships where that one came from. And it's not all bad news\u2014Gunn and his nosey wife were on the thing when it went up. That just leaves Bohemia. I want you to find him and deal with him, while I find out what's going on.\"\n\nJameson put down the microphone. He opened his desk drawer, and lifted out his revolver and the box of bullets. He loaded the gun, slipped it into his coat pocket, and left.\n\nChristie forced the secret drawer in the bottom of his desk open, hurriedly lifted out bundles of banknotes, and dumped them by the handful into the open briefcase. Stay where you are, Management had told him. You'll be needed when we resume operations.\n\nChristie didn't believe a word of it. He didn't know who the Management were, but he knew what they were. Cowards. The airship was gone, the base overrun by police. Resume operations? He snorted. They'd cut and run to save their own skins, leaving him holding the bag.\n\nThe briefcase was full. He forced it closed, picked it up, and strode to the door.\n\nHe opened it\u2014and stepped back, dropping the briefcase. The muzzle of Jameson's revolver pressed against his forehead.\n\n\"Going somewhere?\" said Jameson as he forced Christie back into his office.\n\n\"What are you playing at, Jameson?\"\n\n\"You have the right to remain silent, and I rather wish you would.\"\n\nChristie backed into his desk. \"If I go down, I'll take you with me.\"\n\nJameson took a step back, but kept the pistol pointed at Christie's head. \"I have no doubt of that, and I'm ready to face the consequences. You know what pains me the most, Christie? The fact that I was part of something that's become the very thing it claimed to be fighting against.\"\n\n\"What are you blathering on about, man?\"\n\n\"When Pendragon started out, it was about keeping the English way of things alive, and showing the world that it's a good way. Honour, and fidelity, and love of country.' That's what they used to say. Now, look at us, Christie. Stealing from our own people. Destroying what doesn't belong to us. Murdering in cold blood.\"\n\n\"We do what's necessary.\"\n\n\"The ends justify the means? I don't believe that. You know, I'd hoped things would change. I thought perhaps a few right-minded people might persuade Management to take us back to the way we used to be. I'm just sorry it took me so long to realise the truth.\"\n\n\"What truth?\"\n\n\"That as long as people like you are involved, that can never happen. You are the poison in my country's blood.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do about it? Shoot me?\"\n\n\"Doctor Ernest Christie, I'm arresting you on charges of treason, conspiracy to commit murder\u2014\"\n\nChristie jumped forward, grabbing the gun with one hand and Jameson's throat with the other. Jameson, thrown off balance, toppled backward. Christie fell forward onto him, pinning him to the floor. Panting with effort, Jameson tried to twist the gun around, but Christie was stronger, and forced it down and away from him.\n\nJameson got his leg under himself and pushed hard. The two men rolled. Jameson was on top for an instant, but Christie pushed again and they rolled farther. Jameson's hand slammed into the wall, and the gun went off. He screamed in agony as the bullet tore through his left boot and shattered the bones of his foot. Christie jumped up, grabbed the briefcase from where it had fallen, and fled.\n\nThe air was getting bad. Gunn took another breath, but it felt thick and moist, and tasted of sweat. He looked at the dial on the air gauge. The needle had dropped another point, and was barely above the red mark. A few more minutes, and they'd start gasping for oxygen\u2014shortly after that, they'd be unconscious.\n\nHe'd been walking along the sea bed for an hour or more, over smooth sand and lumpy, eroded chalk beds, and they still hadn't reached the beach.\n\nHe looked down at Sophie. Talking had become an effort. \"I'm sorry, sweetheart. I think I've been taking us the wrong way.\"\n\nHe heard Sophie wheeze. \"Cornelius Gunn,\" she croaked, \"you, of all people, have been the one who's taught me never to give up hope.\" She took another breath. \"So open this thing, and we can try to swim. We'll probably drown, but if we stay here, we'll definitely asphyxiate.\"\n\nGunn knew she was right. Lack of oxygen had slowed his mind.\n\nHe grasped the hatch handle. \"Take a deep breath.\" She did, and nodded at him. He pushed the handle.\n\nNothing happened. The pressure of the sea held the hatch firmly closed.\n\nThere was only one thing to do. He looked down at Sophie, and wished that he could reach her, and kiss her. \"Close your eyes, sweetheart,\" he said.\n\nHarry felt wretched. He'd seen the airship burn and fall, and had known that Gunn and Sophie must have been behind its destruction. But they'd sacrificed themselves to do it. He'd lost his only friends.\n\nDejected, he absently watched the waves rolling up the beach, collapsing, and falling back. Every so often, he picked up a stone and threw it into the water half-heartedly. He had nothing better to do, until Jameson showed up. Time was wearing on. He would arrive soon. Harry picked himself up, and as he brushed the sand from his trousers, he spotted something moving in the water.\n\nSophie held Gunn's arm as they wandered around the huge ballroom, each carrying a glass of port, mingling with Lord Salisbury's other guests.\n\n\"I've been thinking,\" said Gunn. \"After everything we've been through, I'm not completely sure I want to go back to being just a journalist.\"\n\nSophie nodded, smiling. \"I know what you mean. It does seem rather humdrum, doesn't it? Perhaps we should have a long holiday, to give you time to think.\" Gunn felt Sophie grip his arm, and she stopped. \"Over there,\" she said, a little excited. \"With the walking cane, hiding behind that potted palm.\"\n\nGunn followed her gaze. \"A-ha. I see him. Should we?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nJameson didn't see Gunn until he and Sophie were standing next to him. His eyes widened. \"Gunn,\" he blurted out. \"I was . . . I mean, after everything I put you both through\u2014\"\n\nGunn and Sophie glanced at each other, then back to Jameson. Sophie beamed at him. \"We've talked this all over, and you have our forgiveness\u2014so, please, stop looking so contrite. Anyone can make a bad decision, Inspector, but not everyone gets the chance to make things right. We heard about what you did. Calling the Folkestone police, for one thing. And trying to stop Christie. How is your foot, by the way?\"\n\n\"Gone,\" said Jameson, and he tapped the foot with his cane. He lifted the cuff of the trouser leg an inch or so, revealing bronze and steel. Sophie gasped. \"Thanks to our mutual friend. He told me I won't be needing the walking stick for much longer.\"\n\n\"You couldn't be in better hands. You'll be right as rain in no time\u2014I should know. But wherever have you been?\" asked Gunn.\n\n\"I've been resting.\" Jameson leaned a little closer to Gunn and Sophie, and dropped his voice. \"The truth is, I'm suspended from duty because of my involvement with Pendragon. There's a hearing in a few days, and I don't expect I'll be keeping my job.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that, old boy.\"\n\nSophie placed a hand on his arm. \"Don't worry\u2014things will work out. If there's anything we can do to help, please don't hesitate to ask.\" She looked around. \"Speaking of the doctor, where has he got to?\"\n\n\"I saw him a little while ago,\" said Gunn. \"He's enjoying himself, with all these scientists to talk to. We'll find him soon enough, I'm sure. Any news about Christie?\"\n\nJameson shook his head. \"Disappeared, along with the Secretary of State for War, and half of his staff. We have no doubt they were all part of Pendragon. We've had reports of sightings from Spain, Italy, and even Russia. I don't think we'll ever catch up with them all.\"\n\nLord Salisbury appeared behind Gunn, with Lady Salisbury at his side. He nodded at Jameson, and turned to Gunn. \"How are you two doing?\" he said. \"Quite recovered from your adventure, I hope?\"\n\n\"We're both very well, Your Lordship,\" said Gunn.\n\n\"Quite an incredible story. Webster thought you'd been lost with the airship. He's been in my employ for over twenty years\u2014he was my batman in the army, you know\u2014yet I've never seen the man as relieved as when he found out you both were still alive.\"\n\n\"Please give him our regards when you see him. And our thanks.\"\n\n\"I will. I have just one question for you, Mr. Gunn. I read your story, and I don't understand how you got out of that infernal machine.\"\n\n\"I smashed the faceplate, to let the sea in. With the pressure gone, I was able to open the hatch.\"\n\n\"But you were under a hundred feet of water!\"\n\nSophie shook her head. \"No, we weren't. Connie had been walking the right way all the time, and we were almost at the beach. We just didn't know it.\"\n\nLord Salisbury raised his eyebrows. \"Extraordinary, quite extraordinary.\" He looked around at the crowd, and at the clock on the wall. \"Now, I do believe it's about time to bring this meeting to order. Please excuse us.\" Lord and Lady Salisbury walked off in the direction of the platform at the far end of the room.\n\n\"What is this meeting all about, anyway?\" said Jameson.\n\n\"I think we're about to find out,\" said Gunn.\n\nSalisbury mounted the small platform and stood at the lectern, then rang a small bell. The hubbub of voices dropped to a murmur, then ceased altogether. All eyes focussed on him.\n\n\"Ladies and gentlemen,\" Lord Salisbury began. \"For several years, we've known that the scientific and technical backbone of Europe has been under threat. As many of you may know, my wife and I have coordinated efforts to fight this threat through political action. Recent events have made us all very much aware that the threat has been more far-reaching, and more organised, than we possibly could have known.\n\n\"The identities of many individuals in the group calling itself Pendragon have been exposed, thanks to the courageous actions of several people whom we are honoured to have with us this evening. Pendragon's plans have been set back, one of their airships destroyed, and one of their leaders eliminated. But we must not allow ourselves to be lulled into complacency. Some of those in positions of authority, in government and the military, might remain loyal to Pendragon. I and many others believe that Pendragon will return, sooner or later. We must be ready for them.\n\n\"To that end, I am formally announcing the inception of a new organisation, dedicated to the protection of science, technology, and the very ways of life of the peoples of Europe, against the threats posed by Pendragon and its ilk.\n\n\"You are invited here this evening to become the founding members of this new body\u2014the European Society for the Advancement and Protection of Science and Technology. Please, enjoy the hospitality of my home, and after dinner, I will be available to answer any questions you might have.\"\n\nSalisbury stepped down from the platform amidst thunderous applause.\n\nGunn and Sophie linked arms and followed the crowd as they shuffled toward the dining room. Gunn felt a touch against his elbow, and turned. His jaw dropped at the sight of a familiar face, then his face broke into a wide grin.\n\n\"Montand! What a surprise!\" He took the man's hand and shook it vigorously.\n\nMontand smiled, too. \"Good to see you, Mr. and Mrs. Gunn.\"\n\nSophie leaned forward, smiling, and kissed the policeman's cheek. \"Here to arrest us?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"No, my dear Mrs. Gunn. His Lordship invited me personally, in the spirit of cooperation between our countries, and because of my earlier dealings with him.\"\n\n\"Earlier dealings? You're acquainted with His Lordship, then?\"\n\n\"Until this evening, only through his associate, Mr. Webster. You weren't told of his part in the affair?\"\n\nGunn and Sophie mirrored wide-eyed looks, then Sophie addressed Montand. \"No one has said anything.\"\n\n\"It was Mr. Webster, on His Lordship's behalf, who asked that Doctor Bohemia be granted access to Pendragon's machine, in the hope that weaknesses might be found. Later, Webster convinced me that you had nothing to gain by murdering Mainwaring, and that you had been\u2014in his words\u2014'stitched up'; an interesting phrase. And it was his suggestion to help you escape Paris, before Pendragon made another attempt on your lives.\"\n\nSophie looked at Gunn, open-mouthed in surprise. \"I had no idea. We must thank him.\"\n\n\"I was hoping to meet him here, but I was told he doesn't like to advertise his association with His Lordship too widely\u2014it interferes with his work. I hear you're giving him a false name in the book you're writing, at his request. When can I expect to read it, by the way?\"\n\n\"I'm hoping to finish it quickly, before public interest wanes. In my business, news goes stale quickly. It'll be on the bookstands in two or three weeks, I should think.\"\n\n\"I look forward to it. To be honest, I was asked by my government to make sure it presents the truth.\"\n\nGunn cocked an eyebrow. \"The French police will be shown in the best possible light, of course. Did you have any specific concerns?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014the matter of the police airship that was destroyed. A design flaw, I'm told. These unfounded rumours of a weapon are, of course, just that\u2014rumours. My government has no knowledge of any such device.\" He smiled at Gunn.\n\nGunn grinned. \"You have my assurance\u2014in the spirit of international cooperation, you understand.\"\n\n\"Ah, Cornelius, there you are,\" said Maynard as he approached. \"I owe you a debt, it seems.\"\n\nGunn rubbed his chin, curious, and Sophie held his arm a little tighter. \"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"Your antics have got my reporters wanting to pound pavements, investigating stories. But it's paying off\u2014their stories are better, and sales are booming. Well done. See me in the morning, and I'll tell you about the opening we have for a new science correspondent.\"\n\nAfter dinner, Gunn and Sophie were approached again by Lord Salisbury, and they gladly signed their names as members of the new society. After that, Gunn stepped out to the garden to get some air, while Sophie remained inside to talk to some of the other guests. She'd been positively tickled at the thought of being part of something so important, and couldn't wait to discuss the whole affair with the other members.\n\nGunn wandered about outside, looking up at the stars in the cloudless sky. He heard footsteps crunching in the gravel behind him.\n\n\"Everything all right with you, Gunn?\" said Harry. \"You seem a little out of sorts, if you don't mind me saying so.\"\n\nGunn shook his head. \"What I did on the airship. Killing Proctor. I still feel horrible about it.\"\n\n\"Why? Do you think it wasn't the right thing to do?\"\n\n\"He was pleading for help. I could have tried to save him.\"\n\n\"The way you described it, you had little choice. It was him, or Sophie.\"\n\nCould I not have saved them both? Gunn grimaced, unconvinced.\n\n\"Tell me, did you enjoy doing it? Did it make you feel better?\"\n\n\"No. To be truthful, it made me feel ashamed and dirty.\"\n\n\"I think any normal man would have felt the same.\"\n\n\"I hated him. I hated him for what he'd done to me, and to you, and to Sophie. And because he was about to murder us, out of nothing more than vengeance and spite. I should have knocked him out, tied him up, and done my best to bring him to justice. Instead, I acted as judge, jury, and executioner.\"\n\nHarry shook his head. \"You're being far too hard on yourself, my friend. You know, as well as I, that bringing the man to justice would have been impossible at that time and place. Believe me, Gunn, when I say you did the right thing.\"\n\nGunn said nothing. He and Harry breathed the night air in silence.\n\n\"May I make another observation? It occurred to me that in getting you involved, Proctor set in motion a sequence of events that led to his own destruction. Him. Not you. Call it what you will, Gunn, destiny or fate\u2014an old friend of mine would have called it karma\u2014it all comes down to the same thing.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\"\n\n\"Even in this incredible modern age of science and reason, we are rarely in control of the course of our own lives. There are forces at work in the world that we may never understand, and we ignore that fact at our peril.\"\n\nHarry took an envelope from an inside pocket and held it out to Gunn. \"These are for you and Sophie.\"\n\nHarry's footsteps crunched against the gravel as he went back to the house.\n\n\"There you are,\" said Sophie, smiling as she found him still in the garden. \"You look a little brighter than you have been lately. What's happened?\"\n\nGunn shrugged. \"I just had a little chat with Harry, and he gave me something to think about. And he gave us this.\" He held out the envelope.\n\nSophie opened it. Her eyes went wide. \"Tickets to Paris?\"\n\n\"Harry did say we'd go back and have a little fun, once this was all over. And there's something else in there.\"\n\nSophie took a card from the envelope. She read it aloud. \"Doctor Bohemia presents: Evenings of Modern Magic. He's going back on the stage! Good for him. We must go and see.\"\n\nShe put the card back, and began tapping at a front tooth with a fingernail.\n\n\"What are you thinking, dear?\"\n\nShe looked at him, eyes bright. \"Let's find Harry, and tell him to get packed. We're all going to Paris. Tomorrow. I want to go to the theatre, and have the best dinner, and we'll need new clothes\u2014\"\n\nGunn smiled at her bubbliness. \"But what are we going to use for money, dear? Seashells? Buttons?\"\n\nShe took his hand. \"Nobody ever asked me to hand over Pendragon's money . . .\"\n\nHand in hand, they walked back to the house to find Harry." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "My Dangerous Heart", + "author": "Roxanne Werner", + "genres": [ + "steampunk" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "My Dangerous Heart by Roxanne Werner", + "text": "\"Roshan, wait.\"\n\nHis long strides carried him up the hill, leaving Aarushi far behind. He was eager to inspect the newest batch of sun-crystals.\n\nHe turned and waved from the summit. Aarushi struggled up the last few meters, her sari catching on every twig. She wished women were allowed to wear sensible clothes.\n\n\"Must you charge your crystals at the top of the world?\" She sat and removed a stone from her slipper.\n\nRoshan laughed. \"You wanted to come. And this is hardly the top of the world. Someday I'll take you on an airship to the Himalayas.\"\n\nAarushi made a face. He knew her fear of airships, but it was impossible to stay angry with him. Few people saw this side of Roshan, his face animated with excitement, the curious young boy inside the sober engineer.\n\n\"And charging a crystal has nothing to do with height. I need to place them where they can capture the most sunlight.\" He bent over a rack of crystals. \"The ones on this tray are charged. Would you pack them for me?\"\n\nDeep within each crystal, the fiery glow of a miniature sun pulsed. Aarushi gently placed them in the velvet-lined compartments of a wooden box.\n\nAs Roshan examined the next tray, his face darkened.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Aarushi moved beside him. He didn't need to answer. Even she could see. The centers of these crystals were black and dead.\n\nHe held one up to the sunlight. Tiny fractures radiated through it as though it had exploded from within.\n\n\"I tried a different pattern of facets, thinking if I created larger interior planes the crystal would trap more energy. It should have worked.\"\n\nAarushi examined one. \"Maybe it worked too well.\"\n\n\"Too well?\" He scowled, pointing at the rows of blasted crystals.\n\nHands on her hips, she glared at him. \"You can only stuff so much rice in a sack before the seams burst.\"\n\n\"Seams?\" He stared at the fractured stones. \"Shi-shi, you're a genius! It did work, but I focused too much energy for the size of the crystals.\" He lifted her and spun around, laughing.\n\nAarushi's long black braid streamed out as Roshan twirled her around. She laughed.\n\nThen he stopped and his eyes locked on hers. He set her down, but didn't let go.\n\nHeat rushed over her as he drew her into an embrace and kissed her. Blood pounded through her body. She was a crystal absorbing the energy of Roshan, her sun. Any moment her heart would explode, but she didn't care if it shattered. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him even closer.\n\nAarushi paused before the dining room door and smoothed the folds of her sari. She had taken great care dressing today, not for breakfast with her father, but later for Roshan. Teal was his favorite color, and she knew he would notice. Heat rose to her face as she thought of him. She took a calming breath and stepped inside.\n\nToday was her birthday. Sweet and spicy aromas greeted her, confirming that her father had instructed the staff to prepare her favorite breakfast dishes-mango and papaya relish, scrambled eggs with curry and onions, and hot baked naan.\n\nAarushi approached the table, expecting the usual birthday kiss on the cheek, another engraved gold bangle, and an order for several new outfits from the seamstress. Her father never forgot her birthday, but he had no imagination when it came to celebrating. Once his family obligations were fulfilled, he would return to his business, leaving her to do as she wished for the remainder of the day.\n\nThat was fine with Aarushi because she wanted to find Roshan. That long-ago afternoon on the hilltop, everything had seemed so simple. How would she explain to her father that, for the past year, she had secretly spent her days in the company of his chief engineer? How would they explain that they wished to marry?\n\nShe still remembered the day Roshan arrived perched high atop a mechanical hatti, steam puffing from its bronze trunk. With his golden skin, ebony hair, and dark eyes, he looked like a young rajah poised to conquer.\n\nBut her father had greeted him with a frown. He had expected the university to recommend a seasoned engineer to replace the retiring Maahir, not an untried youth. But when the Maahir reviewed Roshan's credentials and inspected the schematics of his amazing elephanton, he told her father he would not find a more suitable replacement.\n\n\"Aarushi, do you notice anything different?\" her father asked, folding his napkin.\n\nRoused from her reverie, she cast her gaze around the room. Nothing seemed changed. The same rich gold and maroon tapestries hung from the walls. Chests of carved rosewood flanked the diwan piled with overstuffed pillows. Her father's intricately carved ivory chess set sat on a table awaiting the next move.\n\nPuzzled, she turned to face him. Then she saw it. Two silver grooves ran around the circumference of the polished teak table, mother of pearl strips inlaid evenly between them. The design reminded her of a railroad track. Before she could speak, her father smiled and pulled a lever.\n\nThe soft whirr of gears drew her attention to the wall. A panel slid open and a mechanized bridge extended out to the table. With a hiss and a whistle, a miniature silver steam engine puffed out of the opening, crossed the bridge and traveled across the inlaid tracks.\n\nThe train pulled to a stop in front of her, its sparkling engine awaiting her inspection. Intricate floral and bird designs decorated its sides. It pulled a matching coal tender, tank car, and flatbed behind it. Opening the tender, she found it filled with loose tea. A small shovel hung on a hook, no doubt to scoop the leaves into her cup. Turning a spigot on the tank car filled her cup with hot water and she breathed in the delicate aroma. Curious, Aarushi lifted a silver elephant from the flatbed. Cream poured from its trunk as she tipped it. A small barrel on the flatbed contained sugar.\n\n\"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"It's wonderful.\" She marveled at every detail. The train seemed almost magical. Only one person could have designed it, blending beauty and function so perfectly.\n\n\"I must admit I had my doubts when Roshan came to me with the sketches. I thought a young girl would prefer jewelry or clothes. But I don't believe I've ever seen you this excited over one of my presents.\"\n\n\"Oh Father, I love it.\" Aarushi jumped up and threw her arms around him.\n\nHe cleared his throat, embarrassed by the emotional outburst. \"Good, that's settled then. I will have the table and workings packed and ready to take with you.\"\n\nAarushi was busy dreaming of how she would thank Roshan when the words registered. \"Packed? What do you mean? Surely you are not sending me away to school again.\"\n\n\"No, no. Of course not. You're seventeen. It's time you were married.\"\n\n\"Married?\" Butterflies danced in her stomach. Roshan had hinted at a surprise for her birthday. Could he have spoken to her father already?\n\n\"I have arranged a wonderful match for you with Antonio Ruiz, the son of the largest coffee baron in South America. He's already en route on one of the cartel's airships. I expect him any day now. He wanted to be here for your birthday, but was delayed by storms over the Atlantic.\"\n\nAarushi staggered, clutching the back of her chair to keep from falling.\n\n\"Now, now.\" Her father rose and patted her hand, mistaking the response. \"There's nothing to worry about. Your bridegroom will arrive safely. Airships make the crossing all the time. Finish your breakfast. We will discuss it later. Right now, I have business correspondence to attend to. I'm finalizing the merger that will create The Great East/West Caffeine Corporation.\"\n\nHe left the room, closing the door behind him.\n\nAarushi's breakfast sat untouched. She sank down in her chair and ran a finger over the fluted smokestack of the tea train. Roshan created this for me. She pictured him at his workbench, his strong yet gentle hands. When he learned of her father's plans, would he think she'd betrayed him?\n\nHer touch triggered a catch cunningly hidden amid the engravings. A panel popped open. Tucked inside was one of Roshan's \"magic\" crystals. He always laughed when she called them magic, but they were. The crystals heated water without burning wood or coal, providing the steam needed to power his machines.\n\nShe plucked it out and smiled. Instead of a plain crystal, Roshan had charged a heart-shaped ruby. The brilliant engineer with the soul of a poet had captured her heart, as easily as the facets of his crystals captured the energy of the sun. The stone was surprisingly cool on her palm. It needed contact with metal to release the energy trapped within. She pressed it to her lips and knotted it safely in a fold of her sari.\n\nRestless, Aarushi opened the latticework doors and stepped into the garden. The breeze carried the scent of jasmine. A startled peacock squawked and shook its tail at her. Tame parakeets scolded from the tree branches, demanding the breakfast fruits and crumbs she normally shared with them. Her father never came out here; it had been her mother's sanctuary. If only she could speak to her mother now, but she had died when Aarushi was three years old, the victim of a British airship attack.\n\nThe Caffeine Wars had been long and bloody. Indian partisans had thrown out British colonialists to gain control of the tea trade. In the years that followed, the world's addiction to caffeine brought prosperity to her father. But a new kind of war was beginning\u2014a business war as South American coffee growers maneuvered to take their share of the market. Her father was using her as a bargaining chip\u2014a victim, like her mother, in the struggle to control the caffeine market.\n\nAarushi shivered. A cold shadow seemed to pass over her. She scanned the sky. For a moment, she thought an airship floated over the eastern horizon. She blinked, trying to clear her eyes, but the sun blinded her. She must have imagined it. The ship carrying her betrothed would be coming from the west, not the east.\n\n\"Mistress.\" A young boy bowed before her. She recognized him as Roshan's apprentice.\n\n\"Yes, Nadir, what is it?\"\n\nHe glanced around furtively.\n\nImpatient, she snapped. \"No one is here. Do you have a message for me?\"\n\nHe lowered his eyes. \"A pigeon arrived last night from the garden watchman. The chowkidir's message reported trouble in the southeastern fields. My master went to check on it, but has not returned.\"\n\n\"What did the message say?\"\n\n\"The master did not share the message with one so unworthy as myself.\" He bowed even lower. \"But he expected to be back. He requested an early breakfast for the morning. He said he did not want to miss any of,\" the boy hesitated. \"pardon mistress. 'Shi-shi's birthday.'\"\n\nAarushi blushed at the use of her pet name. But the boy had the good sense to keep his gaze lowered, and she recovered her composure.\n\n\"Have you brought word of this to my father?\"\n\n\"No, mistress. I was not allowed to speak with your father.\"\n\n\"I will tell him. Go back to your master's quarters and await his return.\"\n\n\"As you wish, mistress.\" The boy bowed and backed out of the garden.\n\nAarushi knocked on the door of her father's study.\n\n\"Come.\" He glanced up from his desk. \"Ah, daughter, I just sent for you. The airship approaches. Young Ruiz pushed his ship to the limit and will be here for your birthday after all. No storm can keep a brave man from his intended.\"\n\n\"I thought I glimpsed a ship in the east earlier.\" Had it been the southeast? A knot of fear gripped her stomach. Could the trouble Roshan was investigating be an airship?\n\n\"The east? Nonsense, girl. You have no sense of direction. Don Antonio approaches from the west.\"\n\n\"As you say, Father.\" She cast her eyes down. \"I must have confused it with a rumor I heard about a problem in the southeastern fields. Roshan was sent for. Do you know what is wrong?\"\n\n\"Trouble? I heard of no trouble. If the overseer sent for him, it must be one of his infernal mechanical harvesters acting up. Speak no word of this to Don Antonio. Nothing must make him nervous about the merger.\" He put down his fountain pen and blotted the letter he had been writing.\n\n\"But father, Roshan left last night and has not yet returned. Shouldn't you send men out to investigate?\"\n\nHer father's eyes narrowed. \"Since when do the comings and goings of my chief engineer concern you?\"\n\nAarushi lowered her head, fearing what her father would read in her eyes. She gripped the fold of her sari; her hand closed around the small heart-shaped crystal. \"I am sorry, Father. It is not my place to interfere with your business.\"\n\nHe stared at her, about to speak, when a servant rushed in through the doorway.\n\n\"Pardon master, you wished to be informed as soon as the airship was sighted.\"\n\nRoshan adjusted the track on the harvester again. If he could just get the alignment right. He'd spent hours working on the damaged machine and he thought he had it this time. He hand-cranked the mechanism and watched the brass cogs and gears whirr to life.\n\nNayan, the chowkidar, looked over his shoulder. \"Is it working? Sahib Sengupta will not be pleased if it delays the harvest.\"\n\nNo. Aarushi's father would not be pleased with the machine or its designer. Roshan had gambled much on the success of his invention, hoping to prove himself a worthy suitor for Aarushi. He watched the gears mesh seamlessly for a moment, then jam as they hit the last section of track. He flung his wrench to the ground.\n\n\"I'll have to take the harvester back to the workshop and rebuild it.\" He studied the sky. It was already past midday. Aarushi's birthday was slipping away.\n\n\"I will load it onto the hatti for you.\"\n\nRoshan packed up his tools. \"Thank you, Nayan. I want to look over the ground one more time before I leave.\"\n\nRoshan bent to examine the earth closely. The harvester had been hit by something heavy and dragged several meters. Only two animals were large enough to have done such damage, but Roshan did not see any signs of either tiger or elephant. The only footprints were human.\n\nHe searched in widening circles and found a hole in the dirt. \"Nayan, was this here yesterday?\"\n\nNayan hurried over. \"It may have been, but I did not notice. I was too concerned with the machine.\"\n\n\"It looks as though someone put a stake in the ground here. If there were hoof prints, I'd think someone tied up a horse. Did you check the harvest?\"\n\n\"You suspect tea pirates? But why would they break the harvester?\"\n\n\"It doesn't make sense. Count the tea chests in the drying building anyway and if anything is wrong send word to Sahib Sengupta and me. I'm heading back to the main house.\" Roshan mounted the elephanton and slid a charged crystal into the heating chamber. At least one thing still worked properly.\n\nAarushi jumped as the heavy iron anchor crashed into the earth like a cannon ball, tearing the earth until it grabbed. She stood several paces behind her father and watched two deckhands scramble down rope ladders to the fore and aft of the ship. The pilot shouted orders to them from above while they pounded thick metal stakes into the ground and tied down the airship.\n\nShe had not seen an airship since the Caffeine Wars. It swayed and tugged at the mooring lines, a monster out of her earliest nightmares. She closed her eyes and the past roared in her ears. Cannons fired, her mother screamed at her to run, but she couldn't move. Trees crashed around her as Gita dragged her away from her mother's limp body. A scream rose in her throat. She clutched the ruby heart hidden within her sari until the point bit into her palm; the pain forced her back into the present.\n\nWith the ship secured, the tall dark man who had shouted commands from the gondola grabbed a rope and swung himself over the side. He leapt lightly to the ground, removed his goggles, and strode toward them.\n\nIn a single fluid motion, he swept a low bow. \"Se\u00f1or Sengupta, it is an honor to finally meet you. I am Antonio Ruiz, son of Don Pedro Ruiz, with whom you have corresponded. My revered father sends his respects; unfortunately, his health prohibited him from making the lengthy journey himself.\"\n\nAs he rose, his bold gaze traveled slowly up Aarushi's body.\n\nShe flushed. He dared insult her in her father's presence? But her father's back was toward her; his gaze was riveted on the airship.\n\nAntonio raised an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth twitched upwards in an impudent grin. \"Your father's letters did not do you justice, se\u00f1orita.\"\n\nAntonio leaned against one of the white wooden columns on the veranda and smoked a cigar. It was a pleasure he rarely indulged due to the highly flammable gas in his airship. The aromatic smoke put him in a complacent mood as he contemplated the plantation grounds. Soon all of this would be his\u2014not bad for the bastard son of a British airshipman from the East End. How ironic that the features and language of his Spanish mother that had held him back in London served him so well here.\n\nTonight, the greedy fool Sengupta would sign the papers merging his rich tea plantation with Antonio's fictitious coffee cartel, and a date would be set for Antonio's marriage to the daughter. After the ceremony, a tragic accident would remove the old man and the plantation would become Antonio's, his claim supported by both the merger documents and his rights as a husband. Lucky for him, women could not directly inherit land in India.\n\nAntonio smiled. The girl was an unexpected bonus. An exotic jewel dropped in his lap. She must resemble her mother. He would enjoy being married to her. She had spirit. She hadn't hid her disapproval of him. A trip in his airship would set things right. A bit of turbulence and she would be in his arms, clinging to him like all the others.\n\nHe'd been at home in the air since he ran away at the age of twelve. Small for his age, he'd become a monkey rigger on a British airship. Light and nimble, monkey riggers climbed over the metal skeletons of dirigibles, patching and repairing the gas cells. It was dangerous work. Those who didn't fall to their deaths outgrew the job in a year or two. The end of the Caffeine Wars had left him out of a job. Bastards like him were good enough to be monkey riggers, but the Royal Air Corps had no other use for them.\n\nThe dispossessed British tea merchants had no such qualms. He rose quickly among the tea pirates. He earned enough gold smuggling black-market goods out of India through the British-controlled port of Singapore to build his own airship. Light, quick, and agile, he named her the Monkey Rigger. She handled as though she was part of him. He could make her disappear among the clouds or hide her in the glare of the sun.\n\nThe ship's lines creaked, drawing Antonio's attention. Across the lawn, the setting sun bathed the dirigible in a fiery aura. The Monkey Rigger strained against its ropes like a trapped animal.\n\nJealous, darling? We will be off again soon. But tonight I must entertain the se\u00f1orita. It should prove a most interesting dinner.\n\nHe dropped his cigar, ground it out, and strode into the house.\n\n\"Mistress, your father sent me to help you dress for this evening.\"\n\nAarushi turned from the window where she had been watching for Roshan. The servant placed a jewel case and a rich green silk sari on her bed. She recognized the dress from her mother's closet. She opened the case, revealing a matching emerald necklace and earrings. Green\u2014the color of happiness and new beginnings. Wasn't it enough that he had arranged her marriage? Did he expect her to parade in her mother's clothes for the insolent stranger?\n\nShe flung the case on the floor. \"Take these away. I will dress myself for dinner.\"\n\nThe servant bowed and hurriedly backed out the door.\n\nAarushi paced her room like a caged tigress. Where was Roshan? One moment, she feared for his safety; the next, she felt angry. Why wasn't he here when she needed him? She whirled at the sound of a soft footstep.\n\n\"I told you to leave me!\"\n\n\"Is this how you welcome your ayah?\"\n\nHer nursemaid's gentle voice broke Aarushi's defenses.\n\nShe sobbed and threw herself into the ayah's arms. \"Oh, Gita. What will I do?\"\n\n\"There there, child.\" The old woman rocked her and stroked her hair. \"This is no way to behave on your birthday.\"\n\n\"But Gita, father has sold me like a prize bullock.\"\n\n\"A dutiful child knows her parents are wise and accepts their decisions. Your mother and I came here as strangers, obeying her parents' wishes.\"\n\n\"Father is not concerned with me or my future. He thinks only of his business. And what of Roshan?\"\n\n\"Ah, that is the real problem. You have given your heart away without your father's permission. Perhaps you are the one at fault. Give your new suitor a chance and you may find your father is right.\"\n\nStung, Aarushi pulled away. \"You are like a mother to me. I thought you would understand.\"\n\n\"I understand you are a young girl full of romantic dreams. But a parent sees the world differently.\"\n\nAarushi bowed her head. \"Please leave me, Gita. I wish to be alone to reflect on your words and calm myself before dinner.\"\n\nThe old woman smiled and nodded.\n\nWhen Gita left, Aarushi locked her door. She slipped Roshan's ruby heart from the fold of her sari. Taking a pair of brass scissors from her netting basket, she loosened her braid and cut three strands of her thick black hair. She braided them with three strands of gold silk from the basket and used an ivory needle to net a mesh bag around the heart. Attaching a black silk cord, she hung the pendant around her neck. A tiny flame flickered deep within the crystal.\n\nNext, she opened the rosewood chest at the foot of her bed and removed a brilliant red silk sari trimmed with gold zardozi embroidery. Her father wanted her to look impressive. He would get his wish. But she wouldn't be wrapped in his green sari of happiness. No. She would wear red, to match the flame burning in Roshan's heart. Red\u2014the color of Durga the Divine Mother, slayer of evil.\n\n\"Master, I was worried. I expected you back this morning.\"\n\n\"The damage to the harvester was worse than I expected.\" Roshan pulled the discharged crystal from the slot in the elephanton, tossed it to Nadir, and climbed down from the metal beast. \"I will need to rebuild the whole mechanism. Hurry. Help me get it into the workshop. I have just enough time to clean up and find Aarushi.\"\n\nNadir ducked under the elephanton's bronze trunk as the machine's pressure valve released a blast of hot steam.\n\n\"Nadir, you know not to get so near the trunk. I don't need anything else to go wrong today.\"\n\n\"No need to rush. I don't think dinner will be over early tonight, master.\"\n\n\"Because of Aarushi's birthday? Her father doesn't usually make much of it.\" Roshan lifted one end of the harvester while Nadir took the other.\n\nNadir walked backwards to the workshop. \"The big dinner is not for Aarushi. It is in honor of the visitor, the one who arrived on the airship.\"\n\n\"Airship?\" Roshan's brow furrowed as he and Nadir struggled to lift the harvester onto the workbench.\n\n\"I heard the kitchen servants say he flew all the way from South America on it. His father owns a coffee plantation that Sahib Sengupta wishes to merge with. Rumor says the sahib will use Aarushi to seal the bargain.\"\n\nThe heavy machine slid off the workbench and crashed to the floor. Shishi! How could I have been such a fool? I should have spoken to her father months ago. Roshan rushed out the door. If only he wasn't too late.\n\n\"Master?\" Nadir called after him. \"What about the harvester?\"\n\nRoshan didn't answer. He was already across the yard and slipping into the garden at the back of the Sengupta residence. Aarushi and he had met here often. It was one of her favorite places. Hiding in the shadow of a large bodhi tree, he crept toward the dining room doors. Inside, candles blazed upon a table set with fine china and crystal. At the head of the table sat Aarushi's father, deep in conversation with a dark stranger. There was no sign of Aarushi.\n\nSuddenly, the room fell silent. Her father leapt to his feet, his face ashen. The stranger turned and rose, his gaze locked on something beyond Roshan's range of vision.\n\nThen Aarushi entered the room. Roshan had never seen her look so breathtaking. It was as if a flame had floated off one of the candlewicks and taken human form. The stranger approached her like a supplicant, bowed and kissed her hand. He held out the chair next to him.\n\nShe laughed and took a seat across the table, instead.\n\nHer father remained silent. She had eclipsed him. The dinner belonged to her now.\n\nThe stranger raised his wine glass. \"A toast to my bride-to-be on her birthday. May her fiery spirit ever burn so bright.\"\n\nRoshan turned away. He could not watch.\n\n\"Be careful of your wish, sir. You may get burned.\"\n\nAntonio laughed and drained his glass. \"The only thing that is burning is my tongue, se\u00f1orita. Your Indian food is delightfully spicy.\"\n\n\"Try putting the cucumber raita on the chicken samosas to cool your palate.\"\n\nA servant bearing an envelope on a silver tray approached the table.\n\n\"Excuse me.\" Her father removed a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles from his pocket to read the note. \"My time is never my own.\"\n\n\"Is anything wrong?\" asked Antonio.\n\n\"No, nothing important. My overseer informs me a harvester was smashed in our southeastern field. Most likely an elephant passed through, but for some reason my overzealous engineer Roshan asked him to recount the tea chests. He also mentions he found several more holes in the ground, whatever that means. I will speak to Roshan in the morning. I'm sure you're familiar with the minor problems of running a business. No reason to interrupt our dinner.\"\n\nHer father was covering up something. Aarushi felt certain there had been a raid. It was the first flush too, the most expensive harvest of the year. Was Father nervous that it would upset the merger if Ruiz found out they had been hit by tea pirates? Perhaps she could use the news to her advantage.\n\n\"I believe I saw your airship this morning, Don Antonio, as I walked in the garden.\"\n\n\"So, you were looking forward to my arrival?\" Antonio sampled a mouthful of the lamb curry.\n\n\"My father had just informed me of his plans. I must say I was surprised to see you approaching from the east out of the sun. I thought South America was to our west.\"\n\nAntonio choked on his food.\n\nHis reaction startled Aarushi. Was he hiding something too?\n\n\"You have a keen eye, se\u00f1orita. I did come from the east. My crew and I circled around to avoid a storm.\"\n\n\"Ah, storms must be a common hazard. Since you did fly over our eastern fields, perhaps you noticed something that would help our overseer.\"\n\n\"No\u2026I can't say I saw anything remarkable.\"\n\nAarushi felt like she was playing a game where the rules kept changing. His answers seemed evasive. Had he seen the pirate raid? Was he planning to use the information to drive a harder bargain with her father? She decided to try another tack.\n\n\"Your ship seems small to have made the long journey across the ocean. But then, I know so little of airships.\"\n\n\"Pardon my daughter's ignorance, Don Antonio.\" Her father took a sip of wine, turning to correct her like a young child. \"The airships you remember were large because they were warships, Aarushi.\"\n\nAntonio smiled at his host. \"No need to apologize. I find the se\u00f1orita's interest refreshing. I designed the ship myself and would be happy to show it to her. It is built for speed and is lighter and smaller than what she may have seen.\"\n\nAarushi wished her father would stop interfering. He definitely didn't want the conversation to dwell on pirates. She decided to make a bold move.\n\n\"Built for speed? You'd better guard your ship well, Don Antonio. It sounds like something the local tea pirates might want to steal.\"\n\n\"Aarushi!\" Her father waved away a hapless servant attempting to remove his empty plate. \"You have had too much wine. You are speaking nonsense.\"\n\nHer plan wasn't working. The only reactions she was getting were from her father. Don Antonio wasn't worried about the merger. If anything, he seemed to be enjoying himself.\n\nHe smiled at her. \"Would you pass me more of the cucumbers, se\u00f1orita?\"\n\nAs she offered him the bowl, his hand gripped hers, forcing her to look at him. He pitched his question for her ears alone, his grin daring her to answer.\n\n\"Have you ever met a tea pirate, se\u00f1orita?\"\n\nAarushi's hand shook as he released it. Hoping her voice didn't quiver, she whispered. \"Have I, Don Antonio?\"\n\nRoshan wandered out of the garden in a daze. He'd lost Aarushi. Something tugged at his sleeve. He tried to brush it away, but it wouldn't stop.\n\n\"Master, this message came while you were gone.\" Nadir waved a note at him.\n\nHow had he ended up back at the workshop? He pushed past Nadir and kept walking. Nothing mattered.\n\nUnaware of his surroundings, he stumbled along in the twilight until he tripped over a rope and fell to the ground. He raised himself up on his elbows. What was a rope doing in the middle of the lawn? His gaze followed the line up until he saw the gondola of the airship swaying above him. He was about to stand when he heard voices.\n\n\"Did you hear something?\"\n\n\"Stop jumping at shadows, Harry. You afraid a tiger's going to leap up here and eat you? The Captain's got everything under control.\"\n\n\"So you say, Ned. But it's not so easy to get away with murder.\"\n\n\"This will be an accident, not murder. You saw how interested the old man was in the ship. He couldn't hardly take his eyes off it. All Tony has to do is offer him a ride after the wedding. He'll be unsteady from celebrating. A quick push and over he goes. No one will suspect a thing. Tony will console the grieving daughter and take over the plantation. He'll be rich and he'll let us 'steal' tea to sell on the black market and make us all even richer.\"\n\n\"I'll be happy when it's all over. And I still say I heard something down there.\"\n\nRoshan lay still until he heard the men walk to the other side of the ship, their voices fading. Aarushi's intended was a fraud. It was all an elaborate scheme to steal the plantation. He had to stop them, but the moon had already risen. The crew would surely spot him if he tried to cross the lawns. His only chance was to crawl to the tree line while their backs were turned and then circle around the long way, back to his workshop.\n\n\"Don Antonio, let us retire to my study to enjoy a glass of port and a cigar after this fine dinner.\"\n\n\"A wonderful idea, Se\u00f1or Sengupta. We can finish signing the merger documents. My only regret is losing the company of your charming daughter.\" Antonio offered Aarushi his arm and escorted her out of the dining room. When they reached the hall, he bent and kissed her hand. \"Buenas noches, se\u00f1orita.\"\n\nAarushi turned to go up the stairs, but as soon as her father's study door closed she dashed back into the dining room and out through the garden. In a few minutes, she was knocking at Roshan's door, where a sleepy Nadir greeted her.\n\n\"Nadir?\" She glanced over the boy's shoulder, looking for Roshan. \"Hasn't Roshan returned?\"\n\n\"Yes mistress, but he went out again.\"\n\n\"Where? I must see him.\"\n\n\"He did not say. I tried to give him this note from the chowkidar, but he would not take it.\"\n\nAarushi snatched the note from Nadir's hand and read.\n\nIt is as you suspected. Several tea chests were missing from the drying shed. I discovered three more of the strange holes in the ground. They seem to form a rectangle around the area where the harvester was smashed and dragged. But what manner of beast the pirates tied there, I cannot guess. There were no tracks. As you requested, I sent word to Sahib Sengupta.\n\n\u2014Nayan.\n\nHer hands trembled as she finished reading.\n\n\"I will give Roshan the message. Which direction did he go?\"\n\nNadir pointed toward the front lawn. Mind racing, she hurried off, the note still clutched in her hand.\n\nThe smashed harvester and holes made no sense to Nayan, but Aarushi knew exactly what it meant. She had witnessed the airship landing, the heavy anchor crashing to the ground and dragging across the earth, the men scrambling down to pound the stakes in the ground to secure it. She recognized the mysterious beast that left no tracks; it loomed ahead of her. She quickly folded the note at the sound of a husky voice behind her.\n\n\"Se\u00f1orita, an unexpected pleasure. I thought you had retired for the evening.\"\n\n\"So much has happened today. I found I could not sleep.\" How did he sneak up on me? The man moves as quietly as a cat.\n\n\"Then allow me to give you a tour of my ship. Your father and I have completed our business and it is too dangerous for you to be out alone with pirates in the area.\" Antonio smiled and motioned for her to mount the ladder.\n\nAarushi forced a laugh. \"You continue your jest from dinner, Don Antonio. Surely you cannot mean to scare me away.\"\n\nAt the ladder, Aarushi hesitated, paralyzed by her fear of the airship. Every nerve in her body screamed at her to flee.\n\n\"You will not fall, se\u00f1orita. I will be right behind you.\"\n\nDurga, protect me.\n\nRoshan burst into his room and began firing orders.\n\n\"Nadir, put a new crystal in the elephanton and check the water level in the boiler. Have it ready upon my return. I must speak to Sahib Sengupta. And get my pistols from the chest under the bed.\"\n\nHe threw his rumpled shirt on the floor and pulled on a new one. He needed to look presentable or Aarushi's father would never listen to him.\n\nNadir rolled off his bed. \"What is wrong, master? Did the note have urgent news?\"\n\n\"The note? Oh, I forgot about that. Give it to me.\"\n\n\"Didn't you see Mistress Aarushi? She said she would deliver it. She headed toward the air\u2014\"\n\n\"Aarushi went to the airship? Never mind the elephanton, I'll get it myself.\" Roshan scribbled a note. \"Take this to Sahib Sengupta and don't let anyone stop you. Aarushi's in danger. Hurry!\" He stuffed the pistols into his waistband, grabbed a charged crystal from the workbench, and ran out the door.\n\nOddly, Aarushi found being on the airship less menacing than looking at it from below. In fact, it was quite beautiful. Antonio took great pride in his ship, from the polished maple woodwork to the gleaming brass fittings. His cabin contained a four-poster bed hung with heavy damask curtains. The brass spyglass on deck allowed him to survey the entire plantation. Antonio stopped his tour at the center of the ship where, instead of a mast, an open spiral staircase led up into the balloon.\n\n\"Why would anyone go up there? Isn't it full of gas?\" Aarushi asked.\n\n\"No, that's a common misconception. The balloon itself is full of air. The sides are packed with many small hydrogen gas cells. Come see.\"\n\nAarushi mounted the stairs into the belly of the beast. A steel-tube skeleton provided the framework of the dirigible. Hundreds of inflated gas cells lined the walls. A metal catwalk encircled the balloon, giving access to the gasbags. Leather harnesses were attached to pulleys and hung at various stations around the walkway.\n\n\"Those pulleys allow me to reach any of the cells for repair. Otherwise, I would have to employ a young boy called a monkey rigger to climb the framework, a dangerous but necessary job. The hydrogen gas in those cells is highly flammable. I cannot afford any leaks. No open flames are allowed above deck. For safety, the engine that drives the propeller is in a sealed compartment in the hull.\"\n\n\"Your ship seems almost alive, Don Antonio. Allow me to give it a heart, as a token of our future together.\" Aarushi slipped the black silk cord over her head. The ruby heart suspended from it glowed with an inner fire.\n\n\"I have never seen such a gem. You honor me, se\u00f1orita.\"\n\nAarushi tied the cord around one of the metal struts, making sure the charged crystal contacted the metal. Her hand felt the crystal begin to heat immediately. It wouldn't be long before the metal bar would grow hot enough to burn through the adjacent gas cell and ignite the hydrogen within it. The pirate's beast would not make another raid.\n\n\"And now, I am tired. Will you escort me back to the house, Don Antonio?\"\n\n\"Certainly, se\u00f1orita.\"\n\nSuddenly the ship rocked, throwing Aarushi into his arms.\n\n\"Captain, we're under attack. Someone riding a robotic elephant rammed us,\" Ned called from below. A shot rang out.\n\n\"Roshan!\" Aarushi pulled away from Antonio and raced down the spiral stairs, Antonio right behind her. The ship rocked again.\n\nNed swung the ship's bronze cannon around, preparing to fire.\n\n\"No!\" Aarushi screamed, throwing herself at the deckhand. Antonio jerked her back. She struggled against him. \"Don't shoot. He is only a jealous and foolish boy who wanted to marry me. Let me speak to him.\"\n\n\"Hold your fire.\" Antonio let go of Aarushi and allowed her to approach the ship's rail.\n\nRoshan lowered his pistol. \"Shi-shi, this man and his crew are not who you think they are. They are pirates. They plan to murder your father and take over the plantation.\"\n\n\"Roshan, please go back.\" She held his eyes, hoping he would understand her. \"I know you love me, but you must not make up wild stories to try to win me back. I have given my heart to Antonio. Even now it beats within his ship.\"\n\nRoshan stared at her, and then up at the balloon. If he understood her, they had very little time. He pulled a lever causing the elephanton to rear up on its hind legs. \"Shi-shi, jump! Now!\"\n\nShe leaped from the railing, but her sari snagged on a belaying pin. She dangled helplessly from the ship just out of Roshan's reach.\n\nAntonio leaned over to pull her back on board. \"Give me your hand!\"\n\n\"Fire!\" Ned yelled, pointing up at the balloon. \"Abandon ship!\" Without waiting for orders, he grabbed a mooring rope and slid to the ground. Harry followed close behind.\n\nAntonio looked at Aarushi as the first gas cell burst into flame. \"What have you done?\"\n\nRoshan aimed his pistol, but could not fire a shot without hitting Aarushi. He watched in horror as Antonio raised his sword over her.\n\nAarushi screamed. The cutlass flashed, slicing through her sari and dropping her into Roshan's waiting arms.\n\nAntonio turned then and quickly slashed the mooring ropes. Freed, the great ship tore its anchor from the ground and rose into the night. Antonio raised his cutlass and saluted them from the deck. \"Farewell, se\u00f1orita. May your spirit ever burn so bright.\"\n\nFor a moment, the ship hung in the black velvet sky before erupting in a giant fireball and plummeting back to earth.\n\nAarushi buried her face against Roshan's chest. He turned the elephanton away from the fiery wreck and headed back toward the house.\n\nAarushi's father, followed by Nadir and the plantation staff, hurried to meet them.\n\n\"The two deckhands fled into the woods.\" Roshan pointed to the west.\n\n\"Don Antonio?\" her father asked.\n\nRoshan shook his head.\n\nAarushi's father took charge, shouting orders. Men were dispatched to fetch water, put out the fires, and pursue the fugitives.\n\nHigh atop the elephanton, Roshan and Aarushi rode above the chaotic activity surrounding them. Roshan cupped Aarushi's chin and tilted her head up to look at him. Gently, he kissed the tears from her cheeks. Her lips sought his and kissed him back. Surprised at first, he returned her passion, pulling her closer.\n\nReluctantly he climbed off the elephanton and lifted Aarushi down. She clung to him, his protective arm around her. Aarushi's father was watching them. Roshan stepped forward and faced him squarely.\n\n\"Sahib Sengupta, I should have spoken with you months ago. I love Aarushi and wish to marry her. Will you give us your blessing?\"\n\nThe old man embraced him. \"Roshan, I have been an old fool blinded by ambition. You have saved both my life and my daughter's. A father could not wish for a better man to be his son-in-law.\"\n\nRoshan turned to Aarushi and took her hand. \"Aarushi, first ray of the sun, will you give me your dangerous heart to cherish and protect for all of my days?\"\n\nAarushi whispered. \"Roshan, it has always been yours.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Dragons 2) Human, Beware!", + "author": "Gunnarsson, Thorarinn", + "genres": [ + "fantasy" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "The Blue-Haired Child", + "text": "The rift exploded open, the burning edges of space itself peeling back as the Way Between the Worlds expanded wide in the pre-dawn sky. The golden-scaled form of a faerie dragon, illuminated in that yellow glow, shot through the opening pathway between the two universes even as it continued to draw back, and a second followed a moment later. They circled back sharply, spying out the broken, barren landscape in a quick reconnaissance, their keen eyes peering into the midnight shadows among the boulders and ledges of the steep walls of the vast ravine where they had emerged. The morning sun was only just beginning to lighten the eastern sky, but day itself was well over half an hour away. They hoped to be gone from this world by then.\n\nThe Way Between the Worlds continued to peel back until it formed a wide oval over a hundred feet across. A vast form emerged from the void: the long, slender shape of an airship's wooden hull. The bright colors of the canvas stabilizers in her bowsprit and the ribbed fins behind each of her four wide induction vanes were as black as the surrounding night in this dim light. She ran silent as a bird of prey, with only the whistle of the cold wind in her rigging, showing no lights.\n\nThe smaller of the two dragons dropped back to pace the helm deck of the airship, coming up as close behind the stem as she dared. \"All set?\"\n\nPrincess Merridyn of Elura looked up from the helm, where she had been watching the young sorceress Kerie Wold fly the swift airship. She was a tall, graceful woman, not much older than the young girl who stood at the ship's wheels. She stepped away from the helm to stand at the rail. \"All set, Lady Dalvenjah. We seem to have taken no damage coming through into this world. Were we seen?\"\n\n\"No, I think not,\" Dalvenjah answered. She was gliding alongside the airship, matching speed with her lift magic effortlessly. A fine blue magical mist trailed her form. \"We are perhaps two minutes short of the main entrance, but we must remain in the canyon until the last moment. Allan and I will lead you in.\"\n\n\"Lady Tenika is standing watch in the bow,\" Merridyn called after the dragon as she moved ahead.\n\nThe dark shape of a mountain rose before them, although only the keen eyes of the faerie dragons could see it in the dense night of this world. It was a massive block of solid, dark stone, at one time perhaps the molten core of a vast volcano, riddled with round tunnels and passages. Most of the lower passages were closed in by walls of massive stone blocks or gates of heavy iron, turning the hivelike interior of the mountain into a fortress. The faerie dragons knew the way; they had been through here before, several times in the past week, spying out their path.\n\nThey knew of the immense oval passage that opened two-thirds of the way up the towering front face of the mountain fortress. A tunnel opening that had never been secured because of its great height up the featureless, almost vertical face of that portion of the mountain, but large enough that the airship could be landed there. Dalvenjah Foxfire did not know who had built this fortress, a dead race on a dead world. A world that had been dead, dry and barren for untold thousands of years. But she did know who held it now.\n\nAfter a minute or so the two dragons shot out of the deep ravine and began to ascend swiftly toward the fortress, towering vast and dark barely a mile ahead. The airship followed, coming around slowly at first but accelerating swiftly as it entered open air. They might be seen any moment now and the alarm would be up, but they could at least get in before the confusion created by their sudden attack settled. With luck they could get what they came lor before any defense could be organized against them, but there was little hope of that. They had no idea of even where to begin looking, and were dependent upon the considerable magic the two dragons possessed to guide them. Getting back out again would surely be a battle, but there was at least one point in their favor. The defenders were few and widely scattered throughout the wandering tunnels.\n\nThe airship rose quickly in the dark sky. Kerie Wold brought Ihc ship expertly through the opening the dragons indicated and settled it gently on the stone landing just inside, although the twin masts barely cleared the ceiling even when it was resting on its four skids. The faerie dragons were already standing guard to cither side of her bowsprit with their long-bladed swords drawn, alert for guards, while the others lowered the boarding ramp. But there had been no one within the chamber, only a pair of dim lamps for the guards who might pass here on their rounds.\n\n\"Are we discovered?\" Princess Merridyn asked as she hurried to join them. She was a trained and highly skilled sorceress and Veridan Warrior, like all the rest. But no mortal could match the talents of the faerie dragons.\n\n\"No, I think not,\" Dalvenjah answered absently. Her sharp ears were perked, although she employed other senses to scan the massive fortress. \"I feel no changes in the sleepy calm that pervades this place. With any luck, we might not be discovered for some time. Marie and Lady Tenika will stay to guard the ship.\" \"I've got my shotgun!\" Marie Breivik declared indignantly, then hesitated when the dragon turned to glare at her. \"And we will both be very pleased to stay here and guard the ship.\"\n\nThe ease with which she surrendered to the dragon's will demonstrated just how much this business had affected her. Her brother Allan and Rex Barker, her husband-to-be, were both undecided whether to be amused or to feel sorry for her. Then again, she was also on Dalvenjah's turf now.\n\n\"We must move quickly,\" Dalvenjah continued. \"Allan, do you sense Jenny's presence anywhere within this place?\"\n\n\"Yes, very far below,\" the larger, slightly darker-scaled dragon responded. \"He is here as well. And his master, the Emperor Myrkan. He does not yet know that we are here, but he may soon.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I must go to him,\" Dalvenjah said softly, more to herself than the others. She turned to her mate. \"You must find Jenny. You must lead the others to her, and get her out of this place. I must go to him.\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah, you cannot,\" Allan insisted, watching her with deep concern. \"There is no point in doing so. Nothing can bring him back.\"\n\n\"No, nothing can bring him back now,\" Dalvenjah agreed sadly. \"But I must do this, and you know why. The High Priest has stolen countless bodies in the past, but he cannot be allowed to keep the form and the powers of a faerie dragon. I can defeat him, but it must be now.\"\n\nAllan nodded slowly. \"I wish that I could fight this battle at your side, more than any other. But Jenny is our reason for being here.\"\n\nMerridyn laid a hand gently on the female dragon's long, supple neck. \"Do what you must, my friend. We will await you.\" \"That you will not!\" Dalvenjah ordered sharply. \"Find Jenny and get her away from this place and out of this world as quickly as you can. I will follow in my own good time... if I am not here before you. Enough time is wasted already. Hurry! And may fortune be with you.\"\n\nAllan and Merridyn both considered wishing her well in return, but thought better of it. Dalvenjah turned and hurried away, moving swiftly on all fours with her long sword in its sheath on her harness. Allan sat back on his haunches, his emerald eyes shining as he watched her disappear into the shadows which flooded the passages. The others remained silent, knowing what this meant to her. Dalvenjah's brother Karidaejan waited somewhere within this place. And yet Karidaejan had in truth been dead these last two years; only his golden-scaled body lived on, stolen by a being immensely old... and immensely evil.\n\n\"Come. We have little time,\" Allan said as he slipped his own sword into its sheath. \"And stay behind me, since I may use my flame.\"\n\nThe Emperor Aressande Myrkan deftly smoothed the folds of his billowing black robes, checking to see that his face was well hidden within the shadows of the oversized hood. He would allow no one to look upon his true face and form. This was the price of his contrived immortality, that the features of any body he wore soon adapted themselves to reflect his inner nature, consumed as he was with hatred, greed and the destructive touch of raw Dark Magic. Few knew for certain the secret he kept hidden within the Iblds of his robes.\n\nThe only one in all existence he trusted to any great extent\u2014 dared to trust\u2014stood before him now, in the reception room of his private chamber. The High Priest Haldephren was no less evil than his master, but his powers were less and so he always connived to conceal his own evil within a form of deceptive grace and beauty. Now, for the first time in his own considerable existence, the High Priest did not wear a human form, as he had once himself been human, but the sleek body of a Mindijarah, a faerie dragon. He was grace and power in soft scales of burnished gold and a long, stiff crest of sapphire blue. There was a sharp, cunning look to his jewel-green eyes, half-hidden in the shadows of his forward-facing horns, a predatory look which could not have been more alien to the rightful inhabitant of this body.\n\nHaldephren waited patiently as his master seated himself in a massive chair which stood before the back wall. Heavy hangings and carpets of dark colors covered the cold, naked stone from which the chamber had been carved, and two round glowstones gave off a pale, timid light. This place did not lend itself to the High Priest's jaded tastes; he looked upon it as a form of exile. But the Emperor felt peaceful and protected here, an impenetrable fortress in a world without enemies. But not absolutely secure, it would seem.\n\n\"They have come to rescue the child, my lord,\" the High Priest reported simply. The Mindijaran were tiny by draconic standards. And yet, standing on his hind legs with his head thrust forward on its long, slender neck, he remained an imposing sight.\n\n\"Yes, so they have,\" the Emperor remarked, seemingly unconcerned. His voice was a velvety baritone, smooth and disarming. \"Guards have already been dispatched to intercept them. Do not allow that matter to concern you. You must attend to a problem of your own, for she has come as well. Dalvenjah Foxfire is here, and she is determined to deprive you of that which you have stolen.\"\n\nThe High Priest hesitated only a moment. If his first thought had been that he was no match for the faerie sorceress, he would have been correct. But his own conceit could never accept that. He deemed that he possessed too many advantages, especially his belief that she could never strike him. That he, the usurper, commanded the love that she had for the one whose form he now wore. He dipped his head in acknowledgement.\n\n\"It must be a fight to the death,\" the Emperor added almost as a question, as if he doubted such dedication from his chief servant. \"Dalvenjah is at this time our greatest threat. She is organizing enemies against us from throughout the many worlds. The Prophecy is a matter for the future, many years yet to come. Dalvenjah Foxfire must die, now.\"\n\n\"So be it,\" Haldephren agreed in a soft, cold voice. \"So be it. Even if it costs me the body I now wear, it will be worth the price to destroy her. I will always return, while she cannot.\" \"Then hurry, my old friend,\" Emperor Myrkan encouraged him. \"Go to meet her, but in a place of your choosing. For I foresee that you must seize every possible advantage if you hope to defeat her. Keep your pride and hatred under control, for now you must be calm, cold and ruthless.\"\n\n\"That is a lesson which I have learned well through the ages,\" The High Priest said as he dropped to all fours and turned to stalk away.\n\nThe Emperor smiled to himself, a cold, cruel smile of self-satisfaction. He had his doubts that Haldephren could defeat Dalvenjah Foxfire, but that hardly mattered. He had allowed the High Priest to assume the form of a faerie dragon as an experiment, and they had learned much from it. But now was the time to end the experiment, before Haldephren began to think that he could use his growing powers to defeat his old master and become Emperor himself. The High Priest would be returned to a mortal form, and the ancient balance of power that had existed between them would be restored. Ideally, the Emperor preferred that their battle should end in their mutual destruction, and the very real problem that Dalvenjah represented would be solved as well. But however matters turned out, he stood only to gain.\n\nHe could never accept that Haldephren truly did not want to be Emperor, that he was satisfied with his own position as second. From there, the High Priest enjoyed all the privileges and rewards, indulging his decadent whims and immense vanities, and all the more so for the lack of the added responsibilities of rule.\n\nThe Emperor judged others by himself, and he could not imagine a life in which the gaining and keeping of power was not allexclusive. But power was only the first of the High Priest's many lusts." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Dalvenjah Foxfire waged a hopeless battle with her own errant memories. She slipped through the darkened corridors of the ancient structure with all the cunning and caution she could muster, but her thoughts continually strayed, wandering down brighter paths of their own. The memories of her past were infinitely preferable to this horrible present.\n\nHer mind drifted upon the winds of time, returning to events of a distant past. She remembered herself as she had been then, young and insecure, and her earliest memories of her older half-brother. He had been tall and proud, surely the most majestic of all Mindijaran, wise and fearless. By his example, the overly small and very timid dragon that she had been had learned to be clever and brave.\n\nAnd then, suddenly, he was gone.\n\nKaridaejan had taken his secrets with him, leaving Dalvenjah a mystery that she might never solve. Why had Karidaejan gone into that same mortal world where she had been exiled, ten years before her own brief visit? Why had he set into motion the events that had initiated the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons, the circumstances which had led to this very incident? She thought that she might never know, and yet she feared that the answer to that question was vitally important to her ability to know how to read the Prophecy and use it to her own advantage.\n\nThere was a new light in the corridor ahead, a warm, red glow, while most of the tunnels had been dark even to a dragon's keen eyes. It was the heart of the mountain, the core of the ancient volcano, a round passage two hundred feet across. She paused just inside the entrance of the passage for a discreet look about. The fiery interior was still alive; the bottom of the shaft was lost in a fierce glare several hundred feet below, and acid wisps of grey smoke rose through the shaft to the dark sky far above. A catwalk circled the shaft, opening onto several other tunnels on this level, although this main passage was spanned by a broad metal bridge.\n\nHaldephren stood on his hind legs at the far end of the bridge, sword in hand as he watched her calmly and closely. Dalvenjah was not to be hurried. She rose to her own hind legs and stepped out slowly onto the bridge to meet him. The bridge was a good eight feet wide and made of long metal plates that felt warm even beneath her tough feet. The plates were hinged at the ends and held rigid by solid steel shafts, one to either side. Another set of shafts provided siderails, supporting the lower shafts by connecting rods. She carefully noted every detail, wondering why he had selected this place for their battleground. Perhaps he was still thinking in human terms. But she was a dragon, with no reason to fear the heights.\n\nHaldephren stopped a short distance away and watched her with that same intent, almost hungry stare. But her heart was satisfied that this was not her brother Karidaejan, that she could indeed fight him. That cold, cruel look of pure hate, that lust for violence was so alien to the one she had known and loved that he looked to her now be another person altogether, a face that she had never seen. She no longer doubted that she could fight him, even strike him. But still it would be terribly painful.\n\n\"So, you have come,\" he said in a deep, rough voice that also was not Karidaejan's. \"I had thought that not even you would dare to come here.\"\n\n\"Did you leave me any choice?\" Dalvenjah asked in return. \"I think that you underestimate me even yet. I have fought worse enemies than you, and won. I will not hesitate to fight you.\"\n\n\"I think that you underestimate me,\" he countered. \"I am older than you. I am old even by the standards of your own immortal folk, while you are yet just a child. I have been a sorcerer of the Dark for over three thousand years. Jenny is mine, I tell you.\" \"No, that is a lie,\" she hissed coldly. \"Say what you like, I know better. You are not her father.\"\n\n\"That is not quite what I meant, and I will not argue the point with you,\" Haldephren said. \"But Jenny is the key to the Prophecy, and the Prophecy can cut either way depending upon which side of the debate she takes. And the fact remains that she is in our possession now.\"\n\n\"I have come to take her back,\" Dalvenjah answered simply as she lifted her sword. \"Nor will I allow you to keep that which you have stolen. You have held that body only four short years. Have you learned its ways well enough to defeat me?\"\n\n\"We shall see!\" Haldephren declared in a voice sharp with hate as he lunged to the attack.\n\nDalvenjah caught his blade with her own and turned his attack, throwing him back. The two combatants paused a long moment as they prepared themselves for honest battle, calling upon magic to enhance their own strength, speed and agility. Dalvenjah's one disadvantage was in her size; at two hundred and fifty pounds she was small and slight of build for a faerie dragon. Haldephren was much larger of body but not so long of limb for his size, so that he had little more than an extra inch of reach. He certainly did not have her speed or precision, at least not naturally. It remained to be seen which of them was the better when their abilities were magically enhanced.\n\nDalvenjah waited, letting him press the attack. Haldephren responded by driving at her relentlessly, striking blow after blow like lightning while his blade burned with the misty fire of raw magic. Obviously he thought that he could beat her in either speed or endurance. Dalvenjah did not feel threatened but she preferred to deal cautiously. Her chance would come if she waited and, as long as she did not waste her powers as he did, she could afford to wait. But she held her ground subtly, refusing to allow him to force her to retreat from the bridge.\n\nAllan stopped short as he came to the turn in the passage, sensing several mortals in the tunnel just ahead. He peered cautiously around the comer but saw no one, for the passage turned again only a few hundred feet farther on. So far they had avoided any direct confrontation in this maze of tunnels by simply cutting around any presence he sensed. But they were coming into the inhabited regions, and they were due to have a fight on their hands any moment now.\n\n\"They're coming up behind us,\" Kerie Wold warned nervously. She was the youngest of the group.\n\n\"I know it,\" the dragon said softly. \"Fortunately, we are almost there.\"\n\nHe led the way around the comer, proceeding cautiously along the passage beyond. Things were getting tight; he could sense enemies closing in on them both before and behind. Suddenly they heard heavy boots marching along the corridor behind them, echoing loudly in the stone passage. They paused long enough for one quick look back before they turned and ran, hoping to avoid detection one more time before they were forced to fight. Allan rounded the next turn as fast as he could and found himself nose to nose with another party of guards, nearly a score. It was fair to say that both groups were very surprised, the guards most of all, and both did their best to execute a hasty retreat. The soldiers of the Dark had heavy boots, and they reversed course fairly quickly.\n\nAllan was not so lucky. His feet slipped out from beneath him and he fell backwards on his tail. The three mortals, still fleeing the group behind, nearly fell on top of him as they came around the turn in the dim light. The dragon leaped up again in the next instant, scattering all three of them as they did their best to ready their weapons and stand prepared to fight.\n\n\"Stay behind me and watch my back!\" Allan ordered sharply.\n\nAlready the guards ahead were regrouping, drawing their swords and ready either to stand their ground or attack. Some had bows\u2014 Allan's greatest worry. He took a deep breath and sent a fireball straight down the middle of the passage, scattering frantic guards until it detonated near the middle of their group. The explosion rocked the very stone of the mountain itself and sent guards flying, but as the echoes faded away most of their number lay either dead or stunned and definitely singed. Allan had given it all he had, and he looked startled and just a little self-satisfied. He had only been a dragon for a few weeks, and was still getting used to things.\n\n\"Look out!\" Rex warned sharply. \"Behind you! Point that fire of yours in the opposite direction!\"\n\nAllan stuck his head around the corner and let loose two of his second-best fireballs, catching a glance of perhaps a dozen more guards. The three sorceresses had already advanced to meet the handful of survivors from the first group. Their skills enhanced by magic, the Veridan Warriors made quick work of what remained of the soldiers. Rex and the dragon waited until they were done and hurried them on their way, knowing that the reverberating blasts of his fireballs would bring trouble from all comers of the fortress.\n\nThey went some distance without being challenged, but Allan stopped again soon and stood for a long moment casting about for their goal. They were getting very close now, but that made it only that much harder to be exact. He found a wandering ramp leading down. There were no actual levels to the fortress, the passages twisting and rising at random but with chambers and side passages cut at various places.\n\nIt was in this passage that they met another small group of soldiers, this time only five. Allan did his best to stop but once again his feet slipped on the cold, polished stone. Instinctively protecting his folded wings, he slid on his belly down a rather steep length of the ramp, scattering the guards as they stood. Princess Merridyn swore a rather dire oath under her breath and led the others to the attack, taking advantage of the momentary confusion. She cut her way through the shaken defense of the tumbled guards and hurried on to join the dragon, who was just picking himself up. Then they both ducked their heads as Rex let loose with three rapid blasts of his shotgun.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Merridyn asked.\n\n\"Oh yes, I am fine,\" Allan answered impatiently as he brushed the dust from his belly. He turned his head to glare. \"I really wish that he would not do that in these tunnels.\"\n\nRex was just standing there, staring at his gun in disbelief. \"Merciful heavens, I've never shot anyone before,\" he muttered, and sighed heavily. \"Awesome.\"\n\nAllan glanced around, then hurried back up the steps and confiscated the boots from one of the fallen guards. The fit was not good, for dragons had feet which were long but very narrow, and the boots flopped and threatened to fall off. He looked up to see that Rex and Merridyn were watching him appraisingly, while little Kerie was trying hard not to laugh.\n\nHe pushed past them and led the way on down the stairs, the thumps of his loose boots echoing through the length of the tunnel. The ramp ended presently, opening into a larger passage.\n\nHe paused at the entrance and peered warily around the comer. His ears twitched nervously. \"Guards. I was afraid of that. There are at least two dozen guards waiting in the hall outside her door. \" \"Any recommendations?\" Merridyn asked softly, privately surprised that the soldiers had not heard them coming.\n\nAllan sat back on his tail for a long moment, deep in thought, his ears laid back. \"I will cut around them from the other side, so that we may catch them between us. But stay in this passage until I call, for I would not have you caught in my own attack.\" Before Merridyn had a chance to ask him what he had in mind, the dragon abruptly disappeared. He simply faded to invisibility where he stood, boots and all, and was gone. A moment later the guards shouted in surprise and drew their weapons as they pressed eagerly to the attack. Princess Merridyn was about to hazard a quick glance when the hall was suddenly rocked by a series of tremendous explosions, so fierce that they cracked the walls and ceiling of the passage and raised quite a cloud of grey dust. Allan called out both aloud and telepathically, and Merridyn sprang out of the passage with her companions close behind.\n\nHalf of the guards were down already, but the rest were staggering to some attention and seemed ready to renew their attack now that the dragon's fireballs were momentarily exhausted. These were not simple guards but warriors in plate, mail and leather, which had helped them to survive that fiery barrage. The women were themselves only lightly armored, wearing padded leather with vests of mail. But both the main weapon and defense of Veridan Warriors lay in the remarkable speed, strength and endurance granted to them by their magic.\n\nRex, however, had the advantage of technology. In the swords and armor set, a pump-action shotgun made him something to consider. By the time he had run out of shells, he had also run out of targets. He had also made a startling amount of noise.\n\n\"The doctor is in, and the operation was a success,\" Rex remarked as he began slipping new shells into the gun.\n\n\"If you are quite finished, you might come with me,\" Allan remarked drily. \"You and I will collect Jenny. She knows us.\"\n\n\"And so what makes you think that she will recognize that fox's face of yours?\" Rex asked.\n\nHe disappeared with the dragon inside the chamber for well over a minute while the others watched the corridor outside. Allan returned at last, with Rex following close behind guiding before him a small human girl of about nine years. Her vast eyes were dark, but her scruffy mop of hair, once brown, was now a blue so deep that it seemed almost black in the dim light. She looked up at the two mortal sorceresses rather fearfully, although she was reassured by the dragon's presence.\n\n\"Jenny, these are my friends. They are going to help us get out of here,\" Allan told the girl soothingly. Then he lowered himself completely to the floor. \"Can you climb up on my back and hold on tight?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Jenny answered uncertainly as she walked around the dragon's long body, guided by Merridyn. She moved stiffly, almost trancelike as if just awakened from a deep sleep. But she was clearly doing her best to hurry. The Princess lifted her up onto the dragon's back and showed her where to take hold of the straps of Allan's harness.\n\n\"All aboard, kitten?\" Allan asked.\n\n\"Ready!\" Jenny agreed with stoic determination. She was becoming more her old self with each passing moment.\n\n\"You just be ready to jump off if we have to fight,\" Allan warned as he rose carefully to stand on all fours. He bent his head around to look at Merridyn. \"Now we return to the ship as quickly as we can. You must lead, and let the others go behind me. They have been playing with us so far, thinking that they are in control, and we have surprised them. But if they know that we have Jenny, they will do all they can to stop us. They must prevent her escape at any cost.\"\n\nRex stared at him intently, understanding what he was implying. \"Surely she is of too much value to them.\"\n\nThe dragon closed his eyes and shook his head firmly. \"We must have Jenny if the Prophecy is to work in our favor. But they win two ways. The Dark is nearly as strong as long as they can stop her from serving us\u2014any way they can contrive it. But they will have to deal with me to get at her. I am not greatly concerned. Hurry, now.\"\n\nDalvenjah Foxfire held her enemy to the center of the bridge, returning blow for blow with swords that shimmered with misty flames of raw magic. Haldephren no longer pressed his attack with the fury of his initial offensive but he continued to drive at her mercilessly, never allowing her\u2014or himself\u2014even a moment's rest. He did not yet realize that she was easily his match in skill, although she was yet to prove how her magic stood against him. But her sword might have been moving with a will of its own. While her mind was enthralled in the absolute concentration of battle, her thoughts wandered dangerously along paths of their own.\n\nIt hurt her to have to see Karidaejan\u2014or at least Karidaejan's form\u2014again, and it hurt her more to sense the evil thing that now dwelled inside him. Her inner senses were infinitely accurate, and she trusted what she sensed in this matter. Her eyes saw Karidaejan, but it was a different Karidaejan than she had ever known. Her heart knew beyond any doubt that it was not him. All the same, this was all that was left to her of the one who had been her brother. She found it hard enough to fight him. She dreaded the thought that she should have to strike him, even kill him.\n\nHaldephren broke off the attack without warning, drawing back a step. \"So, Dalvenjah Foxfire, do you tire?\"\n\nDalvenjah did not have to feign surprise, for she could not imagine why he had said that. At least it roused her from her own thoughts. \"I tire of this pointless swordplay, I do confess. The time comes to make an end to it.\"\n\n\"My very thought,\" the High Priest agreed as he renewed his attack. \"Flee, Dalvenjah Foxfire, while you yet have the chance. You know that you cannot strike me.\"\n\n\"I do not doubt that I can, or I would not be here,\" she returned. How long had she been at this? Were the others already on their way out? The time had indeed come to be done with this game. Their blades locked and she allowed him to press her slowly back, as if she was folding beneath his strength. Then she drew back suddenly. A faerie dragon's weight was delicately balanced on either side of his hips between body and neck and tail. Even four years in that form had not taught Haldephren enough about being a dragon to avoid that simple trick.\n\nHe was thrust forward by his own weight, nose first toward the ground, although he caught himself before he fell completely over. But it threw him off his guard, leaving him vulnerable for a desperate moment. Dalvenjah's sword bit deep into the shoulder of his left wing, slicing through muscle and tendon at the same time that her magic ripped through his body like lightning. Then, in the same swift movement, she brought her blade over the top of his long neck to strike his right shoulder as well.\n\nHaldephren stumbled back with a sharp cry and stood gasping with pain, staring at her in fear and disbelief. Clearly he had not thought that she really would find the courage to strike him. His wounds were not great; he would fly again in a matter of weeks, with the proper care. But now he was betting his life that she could not finish what she had started. There was no escape for him unless she allowed it.\n\n\"No, you cannot!\" he insisted, panting heavily, dazed with pain and the shock of her magic. \"You must not. Dalvenjah, if you destroy me, I will be gone forever.\"\n\n\"I have no such hope,\" she answered coldly. \"All I can hope to do now is to deprive you of what you have stolen.\"\n\n\"No, Dalvenjah,\" he said, softening and gentling his voice in a crude counterfeit of Karidaejan. \"Think of all that we have been through, and the good things that we have known. Remember the love that we had. If you destroy me, there will be nothing left but your memories. Why do you even want to destroy me, my sister?\" \"No,\" Dalvenjah insisted desperately as tears came to her eyes. But she was not lured by his words. Haldephren had never known the real Karidaejan. He had no access to Karidaejan's memories, and nothing that had been Karidaejan's but his form was a part of him. And so his imitation was far from perfect.\n\n\"You must not do this to me,\" he continued, pleading.\n\n\"No!\" she shouted.\n\nDalvenjah lifted her sword, and the blade burned with magic. Haldephren drew back fearfully, but she did not strike him. Instead she swung the blade fiercely in an arc that shattered the metal rod of the siderail to her right in a shower of sparks, and in the next instant cut the left rail as well. The bridge swayed and dipped dangerously, but it did not fall yet.\n\n\"No! You must not!\" the High Priest declared. Too late he guessed her thoughts. She had damaged his wings so that he could not fly and the shock of her magic had stunned his own powers, leaving him unable even to levitate. Now she would cut the bridge from under him to plunge him into the fires below, sparing herself the necessity of destroying him by her own hand.\n\n\"Lye assanda min, Karidaejan,\" she said softly as she wept.\n\nShe brought her sword down once again in a double arc of flame, cutting the two remaining siderails that supported the floor of the bridge itself. The bridge broke immediately below her, parting in two even halves that fell away. Her broad wings snapped out as she began a slow ascending spiral about the perimeter of the core, but Haldephren fell helpless into the depths. He cried out only once as the bridge parted, a cry of rage and frustration rather than fear. He knew that he did not go to his own death, just the end of the body he now wore. Then he fell silently for what seemed a very long time, while Dalvenjah circled slowly and watched, before he disappeared at last in a sudden flash of flame.\n\nDalvenjah wept in silence as she began the long, spiralling climb up the core of the ancient volcano.\n\nAllan pulled himself to an abrupt halt, this time without falling, while the three sorceresses stood defensively behind him. They had just come around another sharp turn and now stood at the entrance of one of the largest natural chambers they had yet seen within the mountain, a roughly oval room several hundred feet long which had opened along a wide fissure. A wide stone bridge spanned the fissure, and the bridge was guarded.\n\nBut it was no mortal guard that stood facing them on the center of the bridge. It was roughly human in form but broad and shortlegged, its armored body like some immense crab standing manlike, with long plated arms ending in powerful pincers and a tiny head with glowing eyes peering at them from atop wide shoulders. Its entire form glowed with a pale, sickly light, as if it was some misty phantom. All the same, it looked very real and solid. It was much larger even than Allan, standing nearly ten feet tall and perhaps the better part of a ton of hard-shelled flesh.\n\n\"Mercy me!\" Allan exclaimed softly, and lowered himself to the ground. \"Off you go. It looks like I've got a fight on my hands.\"\n\n\"What is that thing?\" Rex asked softly, as if he knew already that he would not like the answer.\n\n\"That is what your people used to call a demon,\" the dragon explained as Jenny climbed off his back, then straightened. \"It is a creature of magic, brought into this world\u2014at least mostly into this world\u2014from a level of existence very different from what you know.\"\n\n\"Your level of existence is rather different from what we know,\" Rex pointed out.\n\n\"What should we do?\" Kerie asked. \"Can we go around it?\"\n\n\"It would follow us, I am sure. And I do not want that thing at my back.\" Allan considered the problem briefly. \"I will fight it, but not with sword. Swords, I fear, would be useless against that thing. I must fight it as a dragon.\"\n\nLeaving the others to guard Jenny, he stepped forward until he stood a few feet short of the base of the bridge. The demon watched him closely but with no outward sign of emotion or even awareness, almost as if it were as mindless as a machine. Allan took a deep breath and released a dense tongue of flame, striking it squarely in its armored chest. The demon only stood its ground, seemingly unconcerned about the fires that surrounded it.\n\nIndeed it was unharmed by his flames. Rex lifted his gun and gave the thing a couple of blasts, but to no better effect. Allan lifted his head to stare at the creature, realizing that he had something of a fight on his hands. But not in the big, loose boots he had appropriated. He slipped off one boot and hurled it with all his strength at the demon's round head. It snatched the boot casually from the air with one pincer and popped the entire thing into its mouth, eating it whole. Allan only stated, bemused.\n\n\"Well, do something!\" Rex said urgently as he stood at the dragon's side. \"Are you waiting for the other shoe to fall?\"\n\nAllan stared at him in disbelief, and they both sat down on the stone floor laughing. \"I cannot believe you said that!\"\n\n\"I do regret it, heart and sole,\" the surgeon answered.\n\n\"Bite your tongue!\"\n\n\"If you clowns don't mind,\" Merridyn called impatiently.\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Allan agreed as he rose, chuckling softly. He stood for a long moment peering intently at the demon, which only stared back in its typical bland manner. Jusl when he had decided that it was not going to press an attack of its own, it began to take slow, ponderous steps forward, raising its powerful pincers. He turned to the Princess. \"You should stand back. Better yet, get Jenny and be ready to run.\"\n\n\"Watch out for yourself,\" Merridyn entreated him as she slipped back to join the others in the shadows of the tunnel entrance.\n\n\"That matter is very much on my mind,\" Allan remarked nervously as he stepped out onto the bridge to meet the demon.\n\nHe stood his ground stoically until the demon stood only six feet away, then spun himself around swiftly. The long, golden whip of his tail caught the monster about its thick ankle and its tip curled around an armored leg. He pulled with all his strength, trying his best to toss the demon over the edge as it fell heavily to the stone bridge. The heavily plated creature was nearly six times his own three hundred pounds, but he succeeded in rolling it over the edge all the same as it fell with a thunderous crash.\n\nBut the demon, seeing its own defeat, meant to take him with it if it could. One massive pincer locked onto his right forearm with irresistible force, pulling him with it at the very moment that it tumbled over the edge of the bridge. Allan cried out in pain and fear, but at the same time he fought with his free hand to release the coil of cable at his belt, flip open the prongs of the clip at its end and toss that over the top of the bridge. Then he followed the demon over the edge before the others could run to his aid.\n\nBy chance the prongs of the clip caught the edge. The twenty-five feet of steel cable played out until it brought Allan up short at the end of the line, attached where the straps of his harness joined. The demon held on, but the shock of its tremendous weight was terrible. Allan gasped with pain as the long bones in his forearm were crushed in the vise of its grip, the serration along the edges of the pincers biting into his flesh. Panting with pain and shock, he reached around left-handed and drew his sword.\n\n\"Dragon!\" Merridyn cried, peering down over the edge of the bridge.\n\nAllan needed no warning. He brought the sword around in a glowing arc to sever at the wrist the other immense pincer that would have closed on his long, unprotected neck. The demon did not bleed; it was as dry inside its shell as a tree, its clear blood flowing like thick sap. He struck again but his leverage was poor, so that his blade only slipped off the tough carapace. He struck lower, snapping off the second pincer at the joint. The demon plunged into the fissure, as silent as it had been throughout their contest.\n\nBut the pincer still held on, almost as if it possessed a will of its own. Allan spread his wings for balance and raised himself with lift magic back to the top of the bridge. Merridyn and Rex were there immediately, taking hold of the heavy claw and pulling it apart until he was free. Kerie stood ready with a length of bandage from their supplies.\n\n\"Hold onto that thing,\" the Princess instructed as she bent to inspect the serration along the inside edges.\n\n\"There was no poison,\" Allan said impatiently, watching as the claw began to evaporate into the very air. \"It does not hurt bad enough. Just wrap me up so that we can get away from here. I will not be much good if we have to fight again. Stand back, now.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Merridyn asked.\n\n\"Because I anticipate saying a few things that might bum your ears,\" he stated, and the others stepped back. He muttered the words of command; his forearm glowed with a blue light, and the broken bones straightened and set themselves. His cry of pain became a string of rather potent words, fortunately all in Mindijari. Rex took the bandage from Kerie and carefully wrapped his arm.\n\nAllan turned to Jenny, who stood close watching with wide eyes. \"Can you walk well enough to keep up? It is not very far, but this dragon might have enough trouble just getting himself there.\"\n\n\"I can do it!\" Jenny declared.\n\n\"Good girl! If we hurry, we can be out of here in a few minutes more.\"\n\nAllan's greatest concern was that the Emperor would send more demons to intercept him, as he must have done when he realized that his mortal servants had failed him. Allan was certain of a few things about the Servants of the Dark that he had only suspected when they had arrived, and he now had a much better idea about what they could and could not do. It gave him hope.\n\nAnd his hope proved correct. Within five minutes they found themselves once again within the chamber where the airship sat just as they had left it. He had been somewhat concerned about what might have become of the ship during their absence, but it appeared unmolested. All except for the scattered remains of a demon's carapace, which were in the later stages of evaporation even as they arrived.\n\n\"Oh, there you are,\" Dalvenjah said, peering over the rail near the bow of the ship, her head extended to the length of her long neck. \"So, you have her. Very good.\"\n\n\"I see that they thought to wreck the ship after all,\" Allan remarked, watching the last of the demon's remains evaporate. \"You seem to have had a better time dealing with yours.\"\n\n\"I am your mate and your instructor in the studies of magic,\" she replied. \"And you are still very new at this. It stands to reason that I know a trick or two that you have not yet learned.\"\n\n\"Not if you were a proper teacher,\" Allan answered, knowing quite well that he was being teased. \"Can we get out of here?\" Princess Merridyn was already lifting Jenny up into Marie's waiting arms on the main deck of the ship, although she paused in climbing the boarding ramp herself to give the injured dragon a boost. Kerie Wold was preparing the airship for flight. Jenny would have liked a closer look at this most unusual ship, but she was already being smothered in Marie's backlog of motherly ministrations. Jenny had already recovered from her two-week abduction by the forces of evil, and absence had apparently not made the heart grown fonder.\n\n\"Is he gone?\" Allan asked cautiously.\n\nDalvenjah closed her eyes and nodded. \"He is gone. But you know that.\"\n\n\"I was aware when it happened,\" he agreed. \"That\u2014I suppose\u2014was not quite the question I meant to ask.\"\n\n\"I understand.\" Dalvenjah paused as the airship backed clear of the chamber, steering slightly into the wind to counter drift until her masts and vanes were clear of the tunnel walls. Kerie accelerated the ship quickly to full speed. Dalvenjah frowned. \"He did not die directly by my hand... at least I contrived to spare myself that. All I can say is that I am glad it is done and over.\"\n\n\"Dragon! What is the meaning of this?\" Marie bellowed, dragging Jenny over to where they stood. \"Look at this child's hair. Now you tell me why they dyed her hair blue.\"\n\n\"It is not dyed,\" Dalvenjah made the mistake of granting a candid answer. \"That is now the true color of her hair.\"\n\nWithout a word of warning, Marie pulled open Jenny's pants and looked inside. Unfortunately, the proof of that test would still have to wait a year or two for puberty. Dalvenjah sat back on her tail and sighed wearily, knowing that she had a fight on her hands. Marie had never said a word to Dalvenjah about turning her brother into a golden-scaled dragon, but she suspected that she would never hear the end of this business about blue hair.\n\nDalvenjah made some odd gesture over Jenny's head, and her hair returned to its original color.\n\n\"That fixes it?\" Marie asked suspiciously.\n\n\"For now,\" Dalvenjah assured her. \"It will grow out. Then she will need something like you use to make your hair blond.\"\n\nMarie glowered for a long moment, but it had no effect on the dragon. She let go of Jenny's arm. The girl ran over to hang onto the rail, looking at the green and blue canvas of the ship's fins and stabilizers.\n\n\"Are you trying to tell me that they've changed her in some way?\" Marie asked quietly.\n\nDalvenjah thought about that, her ears twitching like signal flags. \"Can this discussion wait until we get home?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because you are not going to like the answer.\"\n\nThe airship settled almost gingerly on the ledge outside Dalvenjah's mountain home. It was a small ledge and a rather large airship, with four large vanes ribbed with red and blue canvas. Kerie Wold eased the ship down with an expert hand, and the others began taking in the vanes immediately so that sudden winds would not disturb the vessel. Vajerral, who had not at all liked being left behind, was there immediately. Jenny called out to her in delight and dropped over the rail of the ship even before the ladder could be set out.\n\nDalvenjah's home was indeed her castle. Marie had never known quite what to make of the faerie dragon's contention that she lived in an abandoned mountain fortress that she had converted for her own use, but it was just that. It was hardly Camelot, but it did make a rather sprawling abode even by draconic standards. There were no towers or battlements, just an almost haphazard group of grey stone structures joined together into a single rambling edifice.\n\nThe interior was considerably more comfortable; Dalvenjah had a talent for decorating that was subtly exotic without being imposing. She had adapted the main hall into a type of overgrown den. The cold stone of the walls had been mostly replaced by either paneling or heavy curtains. The back wall had been almost completely replaced by a bank of immense glass windows, leading onto a deep balcony that overhung the cliff itself, looking out across the vastness of the forested valley far below. Marie, at least, was interested to note that dragons had glass for picture windows. She had come expecting medieval squalor, but faerie dragons seemed to enjoy nontechnical prosperity without the benefit of mutual bonds and IRA's. Apparently there was something to be said about old-fashioned hordes.\n\n\"This is where you live?\" Jenny asked as she stared in fascination. There were no chairs or sofas, just firm cushions of immense size and low tables. Rex and Marie took their seats near the two dragons, while the sorceresses disappeared into the kitchen.\n\n\"No, this is the bus station, \" Dalvenjah said as she eased herself onto one of the cushions. \"We are awaiting the next trolley back to your world.\"\n\nJenny deflated like a sad balloon. \"Ah, do we have to go back so soon? We only just got here.\"\n\n\"That will depend upon many things,\" the dragon replied guardedly. \"What do you remember about the ones who took you away? Did they tell you why they brought you there?\"\n\n\"No, not really.\" Jenny frowned, apparently having some trouble remembering the incident. \"The big dragon said a lot of things. He said that he was my father, but I never understood what he meant by that... and I never believed him. He smiled a lot, but... but I always felt like he was going to bite me.\"\n\n\"He was not your father,\" she told the girl firmly. \"And faerie dragons do not bite. Are you afraid that I might bite you?\" Jenny thought about that for a long moment. \"I think that you would spank me, if I did something bad.\"\n\n\"Don't you do something bad, and we will not have to test. that,\" Dalvenjah said, trying to hide a smile. \"Why don't you and Vajerral help the others to prepare our dinner?\"\n\nMarie waited until she had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, then turned back to the dragon. \"What is this business about the big dragon being her father? Does she mean your brother?\"\n\nDalvenjah laid back her ears and sighed sadly. \"She means the High Priest Haldephren. The High Priest and the Emperor are mortal, but they have lived for thousands of years by taking the bodies of others. With Karidaejan, it was the first time that either one of them had taken an immortal form, and I have destroyed that one. What Haldephren meant was that he had once taken the form of the one you knew as James Donner, who was Jenny's father. That was his way into your world... the first time.\"\n\n\"But James Donner died,\" Marie protested.\n\n\"That was his way back out of both that form and your own world,\" she explained. \"At least that is what he said, to make his own claim upon Jenny. I do not know if it is true.\"\n\n\"But it could be?\" Marie asked fearfully.\n\n\"Yes, the possibility does exist,\" Dalvenjah admitted. \"It explains the only part of this business that I do not understand, which is how Jenny came to be the subject of a prophecy from a very different world. Unfortunately, I do know that the Prophecy itself is true. I saw it in my gold dreams. Almost every Mindijaran sorcerer shared that same dream on that same night, but I could not come in time to stop them from taking her.\"\n\n\"Just what is this prophecy exactly?\" Rex interrupted for the first time. \"I know it says something about either their destruction or their return to power.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. \"The blade that cuts both ways. You see, once the High Priest and his Emperor were very powerful indeed, but they fell two thousand years ago and have not returned since. They lack the third, the Consort Darja, who was a warrior sorceress even greater than Haldephren himself. She has never returned to this life as they have, and they cannot bring her back as easily as they keep themselves alive.\"\n\n\"Then Jenny is this Consort?\" Marie asked, too surprised to be properly horrified.\n\n\"No, I really do not think so,\" Dalvenjah explained, her ears laid back. \"I think that Jenny is simply meant to somehow prepare the way. And that is the matter that can decide this business either way. By what happens to Jenny, or perhaps because of Jenny, then the Emperor and the High Priest will either achieve greater power than they have ever held, or else they will be finally destroyed beyond all hope of recovery. But the exact answer is hidden from us even yet.\"\n\nDalvenjah elected to keep the most important question to herself, that of Karidaejan's mysterious part in this affair.\n\n\"Oh, my!\" Marie looked very thoughtful, and very frightened, as she considered all the implications of that. The only possible answer was obvious. She looked up at the dragon. \"You have to protect her.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded. It was better that Marie had thought of that for herself, rather than having it suggested. \"That is a fact. The best that I can do for her is to bring her here, into my own home, even to the extent of making her immortal and a faerie dragon, as I did Allan. That will not stop the Prophecy, but it will make her best able to defend herself. But I would not ask you to agree to that.\"\n\n\"Is there any alternative?\" Marie asked, a good indication of just how desperate she was.\n\n\"She must learn the dragon magic, by any means. I do not doubt that the faerie centaurs are devoted, but their magic is poor and they could hardly drive off another attempt to take Jenny. The only hope I see is for Jenny to remain here, and her command of dragon magic will change her in time, making her immortal in subtle ways.\"\n\nMarie looked very thoughtful for a long moment. \"Then you just might as well make her a dragon. Otherwise she will just be stuck between, a dragon in everything except form.\"\n\nDalvenjah nodded reluctantly. \"That is so, although the choice must be entirely her own. I will protect her the best that I can. But if she is to ever be free of the Prophecy, then the day will eventually come that we will have to fight it and see it through to its end.\"\n\n\"When will that be?\"\n\n\"Not until she is quite grown up, I'm sure.\"\n\nThey were interrupted by the return of the others with their dinner. Marie looked at her own suspiciously. It appeared to be roast beef, large rolls with cheese, and beer. But the cheese was rather sharp, the beer was oddly sweet, and there was no way to know just what manner of beast had been roasted. She elected to keep her mouth shut. With dragons, she thought that she should consider herself lucky that it was cooked. Prime cuts of virgin; which would you like, breast or thigh?\n\nShe realized that she must have been under a worse strain than she had thought. That sounded like the sort of nonsense that Rex was prone to say.\n\nShe glanced over at the dragon. \"Will she ever have a life of her own? I mean, what will she have left when the Prophecy is complete, even if everything goes favorably?\"\n\n\"Her life, I hope,\" Dalvenjah admitted frankly.\n\n\"But the successful completion of the Prophecy is more important than even Jenny's life?\" Marie asked with detached candor.\n\n\"I do not think that Jenny will have to die for the favorable completion of the Prophecy,\" Dalvenjah answered cautiously. \"If she must, then nothing I can do will prevent it. Because I will do everything I can.\"\n\nJenny sat without touching her plate, aware that she was being discussed and that her very life was at stake. She stared back at them both, very wide-eyed with fright.\n\nDalvenjah softened her gaze, appearing more warmly reassuring. \"What of it? Would you like to be a dragon?\"\n\n\"That means I would never be able to go home,\" Jenny said, not making a question of that. She had obviously considered this.\n\n\"That is so,\" Dalvenjah agreed. \"You could visit, but you could never stay. But you would live here always.\"\n\n\"I would like to remain what I am for just a while longer, if you think I could,\" the girl decided surprisingly quickly. \"Maybe when I'm grown up, like Allan was when he became a dragon.\" \"Yes, that can be done,\" Dalvenjah agreed, although she was mystified about the reason why Jenny would be honestly afraid, even terrified, of that suggestion. She would have expected that Jenny would have begged for the chance to be a dragon.\n\nIt was easy enough to let matters stand for now. The Prophecy argued that Jenny would most likely be a dragon before the end.\n\nSo it was that Jenny began the serious study of dragon magic, and to be a Veridan Warrior. The first true Veridan had come from the mortal world of Morin, in the ancient days when the first sorcerers of the Light had by bitter necessity been warriors as well, battling the Dark in their long war with the Alasheran Empire. The Mindijaran had never had any need for swords until they began to have increasing contact with human folk, mortal and immortal, fighting with the weapons that nature had granted them as dragons. They had established a small colony of their kind in Morin some six centuries before, eventually adapting the ways of the Veridan for their own use.\n\nAnd so the years passed swiftly. Jenny was an adept student; far more so than she realized, measuring her progress against the standards of the faerie dragons, creatures of magic. She shared their keen telepathy and their ability to memorize instantly, she mastered their immortal magic with ease, and she could even hold her own with the sword. She enjoyed this way of life, and she never regretted her very limited contact with her own kind. And yet she remained unwilling to become a dragon herself, although she would never explain why.\n\nAccording to the custom of the Mindijaran, Jenny was to be taken into the forest on the night of her fourteenth birthday, where her inner name would be defined. She was growing quickly now, giving clear hints that she would be a tall, long-limbed woman, possessing a noble beauty if just a little large of nose, and her breasts were enlarging quickly. There was no hiding that fact, for she had spent most of her life among the dragons naked as they were.\n\nThat night came late in a spring that was warming quickly to summer, although most mortals would have still thought it chill there in the mountain forests, and the stars were frosty bright. Jenny had flown to the small clearing with the dragons. She did possess the ability to fly, using the same lift magic that made their own flight so swift and effortless, although without wings she lacked much of their speed and precision, and her endurance was very limited. Now, with the formal definition of her inner name, her powers would mature even more swiftly than her lithe body.\n\nAll objects, animate and inanimate, have their inner name, and people of all types, mortal and immortal, have an inner name that is far more intimate and individual than the one they are given at birth. The inner name, at least its sound, was only an instinctive prop that sorcerers used to identify and control the magical nature of objects. But an individual's inner name gave a sorcerer control over the person as well, granting the ability to command that person or to change their very essence to some creature very different.\n\nBut when the inner name was formally defined, it could at that time be set with defenses which hid it against a sorcerer, forbidding its unwarranted use to the harm of that person. All mortal sorcerers set such defenses about their inner names, for they were the most vulnerable to attack. And all immortal folk, whether they studied the higher magic of sorcerers or not, were given the most intricate defenses as well. Ordinarily no dragon could have given a mortal who had studied the dragon magic her inner name, for the dragon would know only that person's inner name as she would have been were she herself a dragon, and immortal. The inner name that Jenny was to be given this night was a counterfeit, incomplete, and not as secure as her true inner name.\n\n\"How long?\" Jenny asked. She had been waiting in the clearing with Allan and Dalvenjah, while Vajerral did her best to wait patiently with respectful solemnity for the occasion. The young dragon was beginning to grow quickly now that she had entered her ninth year; already she outweighed Jenny.\n\n\"Soon now,\" Dalvenjah assured her. She was an exceptional telepath, even for a faerie dragon, and she clearly sensed that Jenny was very anxious about something, even upset. She rubbed her soft cheek against the girl's in a dragon's sign of gentle affection. \"Dear child, what troubles you?\"\n\nJenny shrugged. \"Usually we go to my world for my birthday, and we have a party in the cabin by the lake with my parents and the centaurs.\"\n\n\"We will go tomorrow,\" Allan promised her, knowing how important to her were her two annual visits home. \"For tonight, this is important. This will help protect you from your enemies.\" \"Yes, I know,\" Jenny agreed. \"The Prophecy.\"\n\n\"Do you know the importance of the Prophecy?\" Dalvenjah countered.\n\n\"All I know is that I have always sensed how very important it seems to be to everyone,\" she answered. Her telepathy rivalled that of most of the dragon sorcerers. \"I know that it seems to be & matter of life and death.\"\n\n\"Life and death, but perhaps of whole worlds, if you fail,\" the dragon told her candidly. \"You know much already, but now is the time for you to understand the full nature of the Prophecy. Please sit.\"\n\nJenny seated herself in the dry leaves beneath the trees and Dalvenjah settled herself on her belly to one side, so that they could more comfortably be on one level.\n\n\"A matter of life and death,\" the sorceress mused. \"It began on the night when you were captured, now these five years past. On that night I had a gold dream, for gold enhances the magic of the Mindijaran and I am never without it. For so it is, that at times the dragons may dream the gold dreams and see something of the future. But on that night, every dragon sorcerer who dreamed, throughout any world where they might have been, dreamed the same dream. And on the rare times when that may happen we know it to be a warning, a most important prophecy. Many sorcerers of Morin dreamed the dream as well, for the Prophecy concerns most their world, although it may be of importance to every world where folk of any type dwell.\n\n\"Centuries ago, more than three thousand years, many of the mortal folk of Morin turned to the worship of the Dark, and in turn they were granted much knowledge of Dark sorcery until they came in time nearly to equal the evil of the Dark Dragons. No other folk would dare even to enter their world, for fear that the evil of the Alasheran Empire might spread if its wizard-priests gained knowledge of the Ways Between the Worlds. But the Light came to the good people of Morin in their desperation and they were given the knowledge of the Light Magic and the skills of the Veridan Warriors, and in time they defeated the Empire and destroyed the worship of the Dark in their world.\n\n\"Or so they hoped. For among their many evils, the Emperor and the High Priest learned a type of counterfeit immortality, transferring their spirits into the bodies of new, younger victims. For so long as a coven of the Dark survived with the knowledge to effect this transfer, they could have survived the fall of the Empire. And we know now that they have, that they live even now and plot the reestablishment of the Alasheran Empire and the worship of the Dark.\n\n\"For they too knew of the Prophecy, and they saw a chance to use you to their own ends. The High Priest Haldephren had his spirit transferred into the body of Karidaejan, my brother. Then, with the advantages of a faerie dragon's immortal form, he was able to steal you away from your world. But they moved too soon, and they revealed not only themselves, but the fact that they now have knowledge of opening the Ways Between the Worlds. In that way the return of the Alasheran Empire has become a threat not just to Morin, but to all the worlds. If the Empire should regain its full strength and form an alliance with the Dark Dragons, then all folk of the Light may be lost.\"\n\n\"And I am the key to stopping them?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"The Prophecy says that you and another are important to the final defeat of the Empire, for you and she will find the way to destroy the Emperor and the High Priest for all time, and break the power of the Dark,\" Dalvenjah explained, then paused and sighed with regret. \"But you are the primary key. For the second part of the Prophecy holds that you may be turned to the Dark, and in that way effect the final defeat of the Light.\"\n\n\"But I am dragon-trained, and I work dragon magic,\" Jenny protested. \"I thought that the dragons cannot be corrupted to evil.\"\n\n\"That is true, but only in part,\" she explained. \"The faerie dragons, like all immortal folk, will not turn from their true nature of their own accord, and we are creatures of the Light. The dragon magic will protect you. But you are not a dragon, only trained in the dragon magic, and still Vulnerable. That can be remedied, if you become a dragon.\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"Soon, perhaps. But not yet. I want to go home one more time before that happens.\"\n\nDalvenjah did not pursue the subject. Jenny was as adamant on that subject as ever, whether or not she really understood why.\n\n\"I could never be turned to the Dark,\" Jenny promised, perhaps mostly to herself, but Dalvenjah knew that the Prophecy would come in time to be balanced upon the blade of a sword, ready to fall either way. The girl looked up. \"But one thing I still do not understand. Who is the second?\"\n\n\"When the time is right, your paths will cross.\"\n\nJenny translated that to mean that she had just asked another of those all-important questions which Dalvenjah had no intention of answering. She knew that Dalvenjah knew more on the subject than she was willing to say.\n\nLate in the autumn of her eighteenth year, Jenny was finally allowed to return to her own world to begin her college education. Now that Jenny was finishing her apprenticeship in magic and was quite capable as a Veridan Warrior, Dalvenjah deemed it safe enough for her to return for four years. Jenny knew that this would be her last trip home, at least for more than just a rare visit. She believed that the Prophecy would be upon her before she ever got another chance. Once the Prophecy began to sneak up on her, she knew that she would finally have to face her fears and misgivings and accept Allan's choice, becoming a dragon for her own protection.\n\nThe important question in her life right now was the subject of her major in her college studies. She was looking for subjects that would be most useful to a Mindijaran sorceress. Allan was little help; his higher education from his pre-draconic days had been limited to music. Her mother still chose to believe that she would eventually return to her own world and a fairly normal, quiet and secure life as a financial advisor. Rex recognized the realities of the situation; he dropped occasional hints that medicine would serve Jenny well wherever she went.\n\nJenny was primarily interested in mechanical engineering.\n\nThe one thing that facilitated the matter of transferring Jenny's academic credits was the fact that the government had, in a very distant and discrete manner, been involved in Dr. Rex's Centaur School of Magic from the start. The two FBI agents Wallick and Borelli had not mentioned it at the time, but they had known all about the centaur colony. The advantage of government sanction was that the necessary texts had been imported for Jenny's education, and Allan had guided her studies to a high school equivalency.\n\nAlthough this plan remained a complete secret to the general population, certain elements of the government were quite willing to support the plan to return magic to that world. The entire area about Rex's cabin and the lake was now a sealed wildlife preserve. Faerie centaurs were apparently regarded as wildlife, and their very limited numbers in this world made them an endangered species.\n\nThe three dragons brought Jenny back to the cabin by the lake, what Allan was inclined to refer to as the scene of the crime. Jenny had grown into a tall, almost lanky girl, still so thin and long-legged that she looked taller than she was, so that Allan was able to carry her on his back for the longer flight between the worlds.\n\nThere was quite a party at the cabin in honor of Jenny's return.\n\nThe centaurs and their handful of mortal students were there, as well as the two agents Dave Wallick and Don Borelli. It was considered quite an occasion when the Mindijaran came, especially since the dragons visited only rarely and never stayed long. Their powerful magic was too disruptive to the fragile mortal magic the centaurs were helping their students to discover.\n\nSince they arrived a little early for the party, Rex took the dragons outside for a demonstration of the precision skills of an experienced surgeon. He took with him the most important tools of the trade, his clubs and a couple of balls. The problem was the lack of adequate open space in the forest for driving a decent ball, the best being the partial clearing just uphill from the cabin.\n\n\"The first time I was here, you were engaged in a very different manner of recreation,\" Dalvenjah observed.\n\n\"Because we have since discovered the convenience of formal cohabitation, I now have time for a little golf besides,\" Rex said as he stepped up to bat. \"This is known as addressing the ball.\" \"You expect to send it parcel post?\" she asked.\n\nRex afforded her a brief glance, then hauled back and gave the ball what for. It was a really beautiful drive, except that it sliced rather badly and failed to clear the opening through the trees. By some odd chance, it hit with just enough force to bounce off four trunks until it disappeared into the brush. The dragons had dropped belly to the ground with their hands over their heads.\n\nDalvenjah lifted her head to look about. \"Yes, I do understand. Golf is not unlike billiards.\"\n\nRex glared at his club, giving it an admonishing shake, then turned to the dragon. \"The idea is to get it between the trees. You want to give it a try?\"\n\n\"It looks damned awkward,\" Dalvenjah remarked as she took the club. She had a rather remarkable command of the English language. She looked down at the ball that Rex had set on a tee before her. \"Just what is the objective of this game?\"\n\n\"The one who hits it farthest wins,\" Allan explained. \"You get an extra point for each tree your ball bounces off. Rex is ahead by four points.\"\n\nRex turned to stare at him. \"You know, ever since you were turned into a dragon, you've been a real smartass.\"\n\n\"I quite disagree,\" Dalvenjah quipped. \"He always was.\" Before anyone could speak, Dalvenjah drew back the club and gave the ball everything she had. It was, as she had said, an extremely awkward stance for a dragon. But faerie dragons were also very agile, and tremendously strong for their size. The ball look off like a shot. In fact, it sounded almost like a shot, since her swing had propelled it just beyond the speed of sound. It might have gone the better part of a mile, except that it hit the same tree after only about ten feet. The ball exploded in a shower of bark and the little rubber worms that were packed inside cheap golf balls. The entire tree shook with the impact, and three squirrels fell chittering with fury from the branches. Dalvenjah was left holding a bent club.\n\n\"How many points do I get for each squirrel?\" she asked as she gestured a brief spell over the club, which straightened itself.\n\n\"The idea is to hit the ball several hundred yards and down a hole,\" Rex told her as he took the club.\n\nDalvenjah stared at him. \"How big a hole?\"\n\n\"Just big enough for the ball.\"\n\n\"That does take some skill.\" She turned to stare across the length of the clearing. \"Where is the hole?\"\n\n\"There is none,\" Rex explained.\n\nDalvenjah glared at him. \"Then why the hell did you have me hit the damned ball?\"\n\n\"I wish I knew!\"\n\nRex decided that it was time to cook dinner. Vajerral lit the charcoal grill\u2014for old times' sake\u2014and they were cooking within minutes. It made an interesting contrast to their old days around the cabin. For one thing, it was warm summer rather than the bitter cold of late winter. Vajerral was much larger than she had been during that first visit, now nearly as large as her mother. The most noticeable difference, of course, was that Allan was now a dragon himself, tall, serene and proud, very different from the shy Norwegian-born cellist he had been.\n\nThat time by the lake, waiting for Dalvenjah's last battle with the evil steel dragon Vorgulremik, were pleasant, warmly nostalgic days in Jenny's memories, although one could argue that\u2014 at eighteen\u2014she was too young to be so sentimental. But the fact was that her life had gotten tremendously complicated, even uncertain, almost immediately afterward. She still enjoyed life and delighted in indulging her insatiable curiosity, but the vague but constant threat of the Prophecy had taught her to fear the future.\n\nOther things had also changed considerably, mostly in the company they were keeping these days. The colony of faerie centaurs had grown to over a dozen, two of them of the young and small variety, looking over three dozen mortal students. There was now a regular little community on the other side of the hill from the cabin, although everything had been designed to appear inconspicuous, scattered like a knot of ordinary vacation cottages.\n\n\"Do you really want to return to this world?\" Vajerral asked privately as they waited for dinner. A growing dragon had an appetite like a bear; Jenny had often referred to her as the sky shark. \"What does this place have to recommend it? The reruns of Gilligan's Island?\"\n\n\"It will be a nice change to be among my own kind for a while,\" Jenny answered, glancing at the young dragon slyly. \"And when I come back in four years, you'll have matured enough that I can stand you.\"\n\n\"So, I see.\" Vajerral looked surprised. She rose to leave.\n\n\"Do you realize that you're speaking English?\" Jenny called after her.\n\nThe dragon turned her head to glance back, a look that was hysterically shrewd and self-satisfied. \"Of course. I am quite mature.\"\n\nJenny was careful to hide her amusement. The little dragon was indeed growing up, although she still had a lot to learn. Her amusement faded when she realized that her mother was coming up behind her, deep in conversation with the two older dragons. And that the subject of discussion was herself.\n\n\"There are any number of advantages to keeping her in your world,\" Marie was saying. \"Not the least was my own peace of mind in knowing that her virtue is in no danger. She could hardly lose her virginity to a dragon.\"\n\nJenny lowered her head to hide a very startled and self-conscious blush, and even Dalvenjah was a little fazed. The dragon knew, although not necessarily by personal experience, that a surprising number of things were very possible. She also knew that Jenny had explored such possibilities with a certain polite young dragon. Mindijaran could give such truly magical kisses that other constraints went out the window, and they could usually lay a pretty smooth line on a girl besides.\n\nOf course, Jenny was always willing to try anything, and she was usually one step ahead of the game. She had seduced the dragon.\n\n\"It's time to start letting her learn about such things,\" Allan interceded innocently. \"You don't want her to grow up inhibited.\"\n\nMarie crossed her arms. \"Fat chance! The girl is about as inhibited as a typhoon. That's frankly the least of her problems.\n\nI just wondered if she is going to be safe.\"\n\n\"She really should be quite safe,\" Dalvenjah insisted. \"I very much doubt that the Emperor Myrkan will attempt to capture her now. Besides, she is a well-trained Veridan Warrior, and she has passed her apprenticeship in dragon magic. As long as she keeps her sword at her side at all times, she should not have to fear magical assailants.\"\n\nAllan and Marie both fell silent, turning to look at each other. Allan scratched his head and turned to his mate. \"Jenny cannot wear her sword in this world. No one carries swords here.\" \"Yes, of course.\" Dalvenjah had to think about that for only an instant. \"We will just have to get her a gun. I remember that everyone here carries a gun.\"\n\nDalvenjah watched a few too many westerns during her original visit.\n\nMarie and Dalvenjah went into the house to prepare dinner\u2014 a matter that neither of them was willing to trust completely to the faerie centaurs\u2014and to continue their negotiations, that being the only word to describe their conversation. Marie would think of reasons to worry, and Dalvenjah would assure her that there was no cause for concern. Of course, Marie had never intended to talk Dalvenjah out of allowing Jenny to return. This was her first chance in ten years to spend any real time with her daughter, and it would most likely be her last. Which of course brought up the question of why she was arguing in the first place.\n\nIt was part of her nature.\n\nAllan waited until they were gone, then turned to Jenny. \"He has asked me to say farewell to you for him.\"\n\n\"He?\" Jenny asked. \"He, in big letters? Could you be referring to a certain dragon?\"\n\n\"So just how many dragons have you made love to?\" Allan asked succinctly. \"Not enough to know better, it would seem. But it is too late for that, I suppose. You are caught, and there is only one solution. So there is only one real question. Why are you running away?\"\n\n\"So who says that I'm running away?\" Jenny asked evasively, then shrugged. \"It was easy for you, because it all happened so quick. Dalvenjah Foxfire was ready to go home, and she asked you to join her. She never gave you a minute to think about it. I've had all this time to think about how absolutely final it is, and all the things I'll regret never having done.\"\n\nAllan frowned. \"Is that a reason or an excuse?\"\n\nJenny looked puzzled. \"Isn't that the same difference?\"\n\n\"Not at all. Reasons are the things we know to be true. Excuses are the things we say to satisfy ourselves and others.\"\n\nJenny rolled her eyes. \"That frightens me more than anything, the thought of spending the rest of eternity inflecting deep and esoteric utterances upon everyone I meet. And in achingly precise grammar, at that.\"\n\n\"We should go for a walk by the lake, just you and I... me,\" Allan said, smiling, as he waited for her to join him. \"Actually, Dalvenjah and I were not so different from yourself. It was love at first sight, in that completely magical way that dragons fall in love. She knew it and I knew it, but I was just too frightened and naive to be consciously aware of that fact. I wanted to go home with her so very, very much, and I never could figure out why. More than anything, I was just so relieved to finally understand why I was so miserable to be with her that I could not wait to go. So, do you really like to be miserable?\"\n\n\"No, I don't like feeling miserable,\" Jenny admitted, shuffling along with her hands in her pockets. \"I just don't like feeling trapped, either.\"\n\nAllan stared. \"Trapped? Are you pregnant?\"\n\n\"You know what I mean. Ever since this business began, I've been told that I'll have to become a dragon for my own protection. I don't have any choice, and I'm not asking for much time at all, measured against the life of a dragon. You had all the choice in the world.\"\n\nAllan shook his head firmly. \"I had no more choice than you. Not once the dragon magic binds you to an immortal spirit. Just do not stay away too long. Even a dragon can get impatient with forever, and the bond can break when you are worlds away for very long. Or do you want that bond to break?\"\n\nJenny looked startled, even fearful, but the moment faded quickly into her old uncertainty. \"I don't know what I want. I don't really want for him to go away, but I wish this could have waited until the Prophecy was settled and my life was my own. Perhaps then I could have welcomed it as eagerly as you did. Right now it frightens me, since I don't know what kind of life I'll have under this Prophecy... if any at all. I can't afford the distraction. I don't want to be hurt, and I don't want to see him hurt.\"\n\n\"It seems rather too late for that,\" Allan remarked, struggling with his awkward shape to walk upright on the steep slope. \"I can anticipate having a certain dragon hanging on our doorstep for the next four years, pining away for his one true love. There really is nothing more miserable than a pining dragon, I can tell you.\"\n\nJenny smiled at the thought of a dragon pining for her, and had to admit that Allan probably was not exaggerating by much. She bent to collect a large flat stone from the outer edge of the beach, then gave it a deft flip into the lake. It disappeared in a single enthusiastic plop. She put her hands in her pockets and sighed. \"Nice skinnydipping weather.\"\n\nAllan shook his head firmly. \"Your mother has radar, and she was upset enough even before you had tits. Sometimes I wonder that she never makes an issue of the fact that I wear no clothes.\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Jenny agreed, kicking one large stone into the shallow waves. \"I guess that I need to start practicing mortal habits again.\"\n\nAllan twitched his ears. \"That is the key word, is it not? Mortal. Keep always in mind that you have been a part of the dragon magic for so long that you are no longer mortal, nor can you ever be again. Play if you will, but do not fall in love with one of them. They are less your own kind now than that golden-scaled fellow with the wings who does love you.\"\n\n\"I can hardly forget that,\" she said, kicking idly at the sand. \"There's no one in this world for me, not even in play. I love him too much.\"\n\nAllan was startled, actually surprised to hear her say those words that she had never dared to say before. He was not surprised by the tears in her eyes, or the depth of her emotion. Jenny wore a shell of bright eagerness and girlish charm, and in most ways she really was the person she pretended to be. But she could not hide the truth of her inner self from dragons, who were sensitive to the minds and hearts of others.\n\n\"Have you ever missed this world?\" Jenny asked after a long moment, still looking out across the lake, \"I have broken all ties with this world. You have not,\" Allan answered obliquely. Dragons did that almost as a point of polite conversation, even born-again dragons like Allan Breivik. He considered it time to change the subject. \"Engineering with a biology minor is an interesting combination, but it will serve you well when you are a full sorceress. Have you thought about what you will do and where you will go when you have finished here?\"\n\nJenny shook her head. \"Fulfilling the Prophecy is my business in life and I won't allow myself to think about anything beyond that until it's all done. Until then, I have only two purposes. I prepare myself in any way I can for what is to come, and I enjoy life while I can.\"\n\n\"You are wise,\" Allan agreed vaguely, although he knew better. He knew that Jenny was coming to fear the Prophecy now that her childhood was well behind her.\n\n\"There is just one thing,\" Jenny said, dropping her voice con-spiratorially. She glanced back up the hill toward the cabin, where Dr. Rex prepared burnt offerings beneath a cloud of grey smoke. \"I've never asked about the Prophecy, but I would like to know when I might expect it to begin.\"\n\n\"And what makes you think I know?\" Allan asked cautiously. \"You maintain a unique monopoly on that source of all arcane and esoteric information,\" Jenny pointed out. \"In other words, you're the only person who goes to bed each night with the mysterious Dalvenjah Foxfire.\"\n\n\"I would have it no other way.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"I will not betray Dalvenjah's trust,\" Allan said with a distinct note of finality. Dragons also had an almost instinctive devotion to perfect honor, like Boy Scouts.\n\n\"Oh, be that way!\" Jenny declared. She slipped her hands back in her pockets and stood for a moment, kicking at the sand. Allan saw it coming, and prepared himself. The forecast was for more hard admissions. She shrugged. \"You know, I never said goodbye. Maybe I knew that I would never have the courage to say some things I should. Will you tell him that I love him very much?\"\n\n\"He knows that, I am sure. But it still bears repeating.\" \"Nuts! Let's go for broke, and just scare the piss out of him,\" Jenny declared. \"Tell him that we're mates, no less than you and Dalvenjah. I've got things I have to do first, but if he can wait then I will come back to him. Tell him that when he does see me again, I'll be a dragon.\"\n\n\"That seems a lot to promise, for such a long way off,\" Allan observed.\n\nJenny shrugged. \"You said it yourself. Did I ever have any choice?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Higher Learning", + "text": "When Jenny Barker arrived in Bennasport, the cool, hilly coastal port where she was to study magic with the sorceress Kasdamir Gerran, she arrived in style. She had arrived in the mortal world of Morin the evening before, spending the night at the Academy of Magic in the capital city of Tashira. The airship that brought her down from the Academy was a freighter of considerable size, twice as long as the largest aircraft of her own world. That fact fascinated her all the more when she considered that it was made of wood. The ship settled gingerly for a landing on the stone-paved airship slips near the warehouses, floating down into a pocket of open space between the dark wooden buildings that was hardly any larger than herself.\n\nJenny had watched the landing from the rail, then hurried to collect her bags and guitar case. She did not have a cabin; the flight had only lasted eleven hours, leaving from Tashira that very morning at sunrise. Returning to the deck, she waited while the boarding ramps were set into place. She realized that she looked rather out of place in this late-Renaissance world of magic, dressed as she was in jeans and sneakers and a machine-knit sweater, with two pieces of vinyl Samsonite at hand.\n\nEven more out of place was her companion. Vajerral had grown into a very lithe and powerful dragon, and an exceptionally pretty one. She was only slightly larger than her rather petite mother, very slender and long-limbed of build. She had insisted upon accompanying Jenny into this world and remaining in the role of bodyguard\u2014at least as often as she could\u2014and Dalvenjah had been surprisingly agreeable to that idea.\n\nJenny was not about to complain. It was nice to have a familiar face in a strange world. Even a face like that.\n\n\"Our new home,\" Vajerral said, coming up behind her.\n\nJenny glanced at her. \"This is no place for a dragon.\"\n\n\"I have lived in worse places,\" Vajerral answered succinctly, meaning to imply certain things about the place Jenny came from. \"Besides, I can come and go as I like. You are stuck.\"\n\n\"So, here you are, safe and sound.\"\n\nShe turned to face the captain of the airship, who was also the sorcerer whose magic had provided its lift. He was still young, tall and powerfully built, like the handsome, derring-do captain of a sailing ship from some old movie. He certainly did not look like anyone's idea of a sorcerer, at least not anyone from her world.\n\n\"We'll have your crates stored in the customs warehouse, for you to collect later,\" he told her. \"They'll take good care of your things, especially when I mention the name of your new mistress.\"\n\n\"I would appreciate that,\" Jenny responded, still struggling with the language of this world. Her accent left her even more exotic and out of place.\n\nCarrying her bags gallantly, the captain escorted her down the boarding ramp and even managed to find her a ride. It was a freight wagon instead of a carriage, he explained with regret, although Jenny thought that anything was better than walking. Vajerral, of course, had no bags, only her own small crates of books and other goodies. She was also of the opinion that Hying was better than riding perched on the crates in the back of a wagon for the entire city to stare at her, but that was exactly what she got.\n\nEverything had gone well enough so far. Jenny had made connecting flights in three different worlds, and she still had all of her luggage. That was a considerable amount, since she expected to be staying in this world for the next couple of years at least. Morin, or at least the northern country Elura, was a place quaintly medieval in appearance, perhaps middle nineteenth-century in technology, and Scandinavian in landscape. The dress and custom reminded her quite a lot of Norway, but with a large amount of middle-eastern thrown in. Bennasport itself reminded her a great deal of Bergen, or perhaps Seattle of a century before.\n\nDalvenjah Foxfire had insisted upon this, but Jenny could not for her life imagine why. She had taken her apprentice training from the faerie dragons, and she had enjoyed that. Her last four years had been given to her college education, but then Dalvenjah had insisted that she complete her training in magic with Kasdamir Gerran. Since Jenny was trained in dragon magic, that in itself seemed to make little sense. It was like finishing her pilot training with a truck driver.\n\nJenny had little idea of where her future might lead her. The position of journeyman sorcerer was in some ways more difficult than that of an apprentice. She was no longer just a student; she was expected to do her share of competent work, and not just read and experiment and learn. But her mistress would declare her a full sorceress only when there was nothing more for her to learn. And Lady Kasdamir, according all that Jenny had heard, had a hell of a lot to teach. Jenny could be a journeyman here for years to come. But what choice did she have?\n\nThat ultimately led Jenny back to the real reason for that drastic change in both her training and her life. Dalvenjah always had her own reasons for everything, and Jenny was reminded that she was ultimately getting ready for that main goal in her life, that of facing the Prophecy and defeating the High Priest and the Emperor Myrkan. Since Dalvenjah had arranged this, it must in some way be to Jenny's eventual benefit.\n\nThe fact that she was here was, in part, her own fault. Her four years in college were to have been her last mortal fling before accepting the greater protection offered by the form of a faerie dragon. And to fulfill the promises she had made to a certain dragon to whom she was tied by bonds of love and magic. But she had hesitated yet again and Dalvenjah had been surprisingly agreeable to yet another delay, sending the girl into this world for special magical studies with the sorceress Kasdamir Gerran. Perhaps the dragon knew that the next time the question came up, the Prophecy itself would force Jenny to accept.\n\nThe wagon stopped before a wide wrought-iron gate set in a high brick wall that was half-hidden beneath draped blankets of ivy. Jenny hurried to collect her bags and guitar from the back of the wagon. She had hardly expected to find herself deposited at the entrance to an estate.\n\nJenny stepped through the open gate and stopped short to stare. She knew that the sorceress Kasdamir Gerran was among the most successful in the trade; Jenny's own abilities warranted only the very best teacher to complete her training. But she had never expected this. Many sorcerers had to sell love potions and fortunes to pay the rent, but the Lady Kasdamir dwelled in a mansion which must rival those of local master merchants. The residence itself consisted of a bulky central structure of three stories dominated by a massive tower of at least five, with wings that angled forward from either side, two stories high with turrets at each comer, framing the loop of the paved drive. Behind that were the stables and a dark, bamlike bulk that she thought must house an airship. Sturdy oaks, newly clothed in the fresh green of spring, drew a still, secure cloak over the yard.\n\nSo great was her surprise that she stepped back to the street quickly to check the address a second time. Not only was the number on the polished bronze plate correct, it bore the name of the proper owner as well. All of her previous reservations about this extended visit to a backward world vanished like smoke. This promised to be far more interesting than she had ever anticipated.\n\nJenny almost hesitated when she saw that some manner of party must be taking place behind those well-lit windows; several carriages were pulled up to one side, and a handful of coachmen seated about a game of cards looked up at her in a very appraising manner. She all but ran up the few steps and knocked, then brushed the long, dark hair out of her face as she waited, hair a blue so dark that it looked black in the dim light.\n\n\"Trick or treat!\" Vajerral said over her shoulder.\n\nJenny waved her aside impatiently. \"Go suck your tail.\"\n\nThe door opened after a long moment, the warm, deeply golden light of true oil lamps flooding out into the evening. Jenny's anticipation gave way to curiosity and amazement when she saw that the door was held by a very small and frail-looking old woman dressed in the odd combination of the black jacket and long skirt of an abbess of the Wandserian Nuns and high leather riding boots. Her large, dark eyes were bright and her long, silver hair was braided and bound on the back of her head. The Wandserians were civil if not friendly with the magebom, whom they professed to be demon-spawned, so one would hardly expect to find an abbess of their order answering the door at a sorceress's party. She stared at the caller rather appraisingly for a very long moment before she seemed to come to some decision on the matter.\n\n\"Yes, may I help you?\" the tiny abbess asked in a voice that radiated professional briskness, as if she was the proprietress welcoming a paying customer into her shop. She certainly did not seem surprised to see this odd pair at her door.\n\n\"We've come to see the Sorceress Kasdamir,\" Jenny answered, her usual confidence returning quickly to her own voice. \"I'm Jenny Barker, her new journeyman, and this is Vajerral Foxfire.\" \"How do you do, \" Vajerral added quickly. She saw the wisdom in keeping her own mouth shut.\n\n\"Oh, yes! We've been expecting you.\" The abbess beckoned them in as if welcoming the pair into her own home. \"Well, I'm Dame Tugg, and I've been Lady Mira's housekeeper since she came to make her residence here six years ago. You do know that we have five buildings on five acres of land, including an observatory, the largest private library on the west coast and an enclosed shed for a one-hundred-and-ten-foot airship.\"\n\n\"No, I didn't know that,\" Jenny answered, slipping the pack and guitar off her back as the housekeeper closed the door. She immediately perceived that to have been the wrong answer.\n\n\"Well, there's more going on here than there might seem from the street,\" Dame Tugg declared with slight condescendence for the stupidity of the world at large. \"Lady Mira is a research sorceress, as you surely know. Sorcerers and scientists and scholars of every description come from all over the world to consult with her. When she's not traveling herself, of course.\"\n\n\"Lady Mira?\" Jenny asked. This last part she had indeed already known.\n\n\"As the Sorceress Kasdamir prefers to be called.\"\n\n\"Does she have other students?\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Dame Tugg said in a sharp manner which made the young sorceress feel rather stupid for not knowing something that should have been common knowledge, although Jenny could not imagine how.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she mumbled, daunted by that odd personality despite herself. \"Of course, I come from another world.\" \"Well, you'll learn how things are soon enough,\" the small abbess said, graciously accepting the apology. \"If you will come this way.\"\n\nShe led them into a type of sitting room to one side of the entranceway. In the few scant seconds of silence that followed, they were able to take their first good look about. The place was furnished as richly as the home of some wealthy merchant but in a manner that was more exotic at the same time that it was also more comfortable, with heavy, wooden furniture, rich, dark cloth and leather, and statues and paintings of magical subjects. The whole place was delightfully ostentatious, as if the entire house was designed around a mischievous sense of humor, bordering on gaudy.\n\n\"You may leave your things here while I inform Lady Mira and prepare your rooms,\" Dame Tugg said, although she seemed to be in no hurry to do so. \"You know, this house was built by my older brother about twenty years ago, when his shipping fleet was in its heyday. We came from a very old family, among the first settlers here nearly twenty-two hundred years ago. But my brother was in poor health and wanted to retire to the country, and so he sold the place to Lady Mira. Of course, I had already retired here after thirty years as the abbess of the Abbey of Wayn-got.\"\n\nAnd you refused to budge? Jenny thought to herself. Or did your brother sell you with the place? But, by exercising wizardly patience and firmly biting her tongue, she managed to say nothing.\n\n\"Ah, yes! So you must be my young student and her dragon friend.\"\n\nJenny turned quickly, and knew this woman as the Sorceress Kasdamir by the invisible cloud of latent magic that encircled her like a long cloak. She was not as old as Jenny would have thought for so accomplished a sorceress, surely not much past forty. And she was an elegant woman, in her own remarkable way. She hardly looked elegant, as richly as she was dressed. She was tall, two inches beyond even Jenny's rangy height, with a face that was the model of mature beauty, laughing eyes and an impish smile, and long, red hair tied up behind her head. She sauntered into the room like a sailor in port. And yet she radiated a regal elegance, obviously without trying or even caring, but an elegance that was open and friendly rather than cold and remote.\n\n\"Do see to their rooms, Dame Tugg,\" she said.\n\nDame Tugg nodded once and left without a word. Lady Mira watched her until she was gone before turning back to her protege. \"Dame Tugg is a dear, but I would gladly toss her out on her scrawny ass if I didn't have a weakness for old people. Well, I'm pleased that you made it, if a bit the worse for wear. You look done in.\"\n\n\"Time changes from one world to the next,\" Jenny explained. If she was tired, it was mostly her own fault. She delighted in airships\u2014just as she delighted in almost everything in life\u2014and had spent most of her journey with her head hanging over the rail like a hound in the back of an old truck.\n\n\"Well, that's all safely behind you,\" Lady Mira declared. \"What you look like you could use is a nice, hot bath.... No, you really look like you need something to eat more. Why don't you freshen up just a bit before you join us for a little dinner?\"\n\nVajerral, with the iron fortitude of a dragon, declined the offer and was sent on to join the party. Lady Mira led her new student upstairs, and even carried one of the heavy suitcases herself. They could hear Dame Tugg blathering blissfully to herself not far away, but the talkative housekeeper did not\u2014mercifully\u2014put in an appearance at that time. The room that Jenny was shown as her own was a luxury beyond anything she had ever known in her life, including Dalvenjah's subdued opulence. It was a complete apartment, with a bedroom, study, even a separate bath, richly appointed but in a more sedate manner than Mira's typical flair for the exotic.\n\n\"You just come downstairs when you're ready,\" Mira declared as she sailed out the door to rejoin her guests. \"We'll be waiting for you.\"\n\nJenny was not at all certain that she wanted to be introduced to her mistress's guests, no doubt the cream of Bennasport's high society, at least not this night. But it seemed that she had no choice if she wished to have any dinner, and she thought that she should hurry. She hesitated to think how Vajerral might be enjoying herself at the party.\n\nShe washed the dust off her face and changed quickly into the best clothes she had with her, dark slacks with a loose silvery-white blouse and fashionable boots. She had been warned beforehand to bring only pants; there was a cultural prejudice in the Northlands against skirts and dresses, which were considered to belong to the evil and decadence of the ancient Kingdoms of the Sea and the Alasheran Empire to the south. She glanced at herself briefly in the full-length mirror, her old dislike at seeing her own reflection keeping that inspection brief.\n\n\"Well, what do you think?\" she asked the black-and-white tomcat that had followed her in and had remained behind to watch her dress. Or perhaps he had simply been overcome by a sudden fit of exhaustion, for he had thrown himself down atop a wooden chest. The cat only looked up at her with an expression of droll exasperation for disturbing his rest, and went promptly back to sleep.\n\nJenny suddenly felt faint from the trials of her journey and had to sit down quickly on the edge of the bed. She sighed heavily. \"Oh, my!\"\n\n\"Put your head between your legs.\"\n\nShe looked up to see the cat staring at her, and it suddenly occurred to her that this was no common cat but its mistress's familiar, a spirit of magic in animal form. \"What did you say?\" \"I said, put your head between your legs.\"\n\n\"Oh, very well.\" She did as she was directed with remarkably little difficulty, being a very strong and agile girl. \"Now what?\" \"Now lick your asshole.\"\n\nJenny sat up quickly. \"What!\"\n\n\"Well, it's what I would do, if I were in your position,\" the cat remarked drily.\n\nJenny had never had much contact with familiars. For the moment she was unsure whether or not she was being teased. Leaving the cat to his business, she hurried downstairs. Lady Mira intercepted her at the bottom of the stairs, staring at her appraisingly. Jenny realized that, compared to the heavy materials and baroque enthusiasm of this world, her own attire had a simple and rather futuristic look, as if she had just stepped out of a flying saucer. Her dark blue hair hardly helped matters.\n\n\"My, you are a pretty thing. And Beratric Kurgel said that off-worlders are all homely,\" Mira declared. Then she paused to stare intently. \"What's upset you?\"\n\nJenny laughed. \"Oh, I'm not upset. Just surprised. Your cat says some very peculiar things.\"\n\nMira waved that aside. \"He'sjust a familiar. Pay him no mind.\" Jenny frowned as she followed her new mistress, wondering why Mira was speaking to her so gently. Did these clothes make her look delicate, or had Mira only received some wrong information about her new student? After spending so many years with dragons, Jenny was hardly delicate.\n\nJenny stopped short at the door leading into the spacious dining room. She had never seen such an odd assortment of characters in her life, and considering the company that she had kept most of her life, that was saying quite a lot. Of course, most of the three to four dozen people gathered about the tables in small groups were perfectly ordinary merchants. The rest might have been escapees from some storybook, if not an asylum. But there was a very casual, unprepossessing atmosphere to the gathering. Vajerral was enjoying herself immensely, daintily holding a glass of wine and a sandwich as she appalled a group of ladies with some draconic tale.\n\n\"Listen, everyone!\" Lady Mira held up both hands as she addressed the gathering in a loud voice, commanding imperfect attention. \"I wish to introduce my new joumeywoman, Jenny. She's only just arrived.\"\n\nJenny thought that her embarrassment could not have been more complete, until the entire group actually set down their cups and plates to applaud her entrance. The curious thing was that the cheers actually seemed to be sincere, if not overwhelming. It seemed that being Lady Kasdamir's own student counted for quite a lot. But Mira gave her no time for honest embarrassment, taking her by the arm to lead her right into the center of the group.\n\n\"Here you are, dear child,\" she said as she pushed a plate into Jenny's hands and began piling things on it from the platters and bowls that filled the table. \"You need to eat something right away. I'm sorry that the party tonight was strictly buffet, but you should make out just fine.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm...\" Jenny paused and took a step backwards at the sight of the two Trassek mercenaries, dressed in full armor and carrying bared swords, who had quietly appeared behind each of Mira's shoulders. One was very tall and very thin, with dark hair and eyes, while the other was short and blond but just as thin. Both looked like mere boys, eighteen or nineteen at the most, beardless and almost comically stupid of expression.\n\n\"Oh, pay them no mind,\" Lady Mira said after a quick glance over her shoulder at the pair. \"These are just my Trassek bodyguards, Dooket and Erkin. They understand that they are to serve you as they serve me... hopefully better. Say hello to the nice lady, boys.\"\n\n\"Hello, nice lady,\" they said as one.\n\n\"Ignore them,\" Mira added as she piled the plate to overflowing. \"That should do it for now. Will you have something to drink?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothing stronger than ale, thanks,\" Jenny said as she did her best to balance the plate. \"I don't drink.\"\n\n\"Ale it is,\" Mira said as she took the full mug from Dooket's hand and gave it to her. \"So, how are things going?\"\n\n\"No luck yet, Lady Mira,\" Erkin answered. Dooket was still staring at his empty hand.\n\n\"No luck? Oh, you poor boys,\" She evidently understood what they meant, even if Jenny did not. \"Well, just remember that these are very important people. You simply must keep a hold on yourselves, no matter how hard it is.\"\n\nDooket looked down at his pants. \"I'll keep a hold on it, but how did you know...?\"\n\n\"Bite your tongue!\" Mira declared, although half amused. Jenny finally understood what they were talking about. \"Go wander about and keep your ears open. I can't imagine this crowd getting out of hand, but some of these dear old gentlemen are drinking quite a lot.\"\n\nThe two mercenaries bowed their heads over the curved swords they held at shoulder level and moved off into the crowd. By this time Jenny had decided that the two of them were not so stupid as they first appeared; they were just energetic but inexperienced kids who possessed the rather wry sense of humor that was required of those who served Lady Mira. She caught a glimpse of Dame Tugg, also wandering through the crowd under the ruse of serving drinks from the wide tray she carried. She appeared to be descending upon hapless victims and boring them half to death with banalities.\n\n\"Well, well. The Sorceress Kasdamir Gerran has finally gotten herself a student.\" A woman of about the same age as Mira descended upon them from out of the crowd. She was small and dark, and by nature seemed rather fussy and self-centered. \"It took you long enough to give in to the Academy's demands.\" \"It took this long to find a student worthy of what I intend to teach,\" Mira answered haughtily, although Jenny was beginning to comprehend that this cattiness was only play between two old friends. She turned to her student. \"Jenny, this is Addena Sheld, the finest concert singer on the west coast\u2014although I would never have her hear me say that.\"\n\n\"I never did,\" Addena said. \"How are you, dear girl? Mine is another middle-aged face for you to get used to, since I do an even half of my freeloading here.\"\n\n\"I can afford you both, if that's what you want to know,\" Mira said, blandly condescending. \"What I've never understood is how you could have hung about this place so long without learning any real magic for yourself.\"\n\n\"Have I not?\" Addena demanded in hurt tones.\n\n\"Oh, that's right! You haven't had to ask me for a contraceptive spell in a couple of years now.\"\n\n\"Hm... yes.\" Addena seemed to be at a loss for words. \"Well, why don't I talk to the two of you later?\"\n\n\"When you can think of a few tart comments of your own?\" Mira inquired innocently, but the singer made no response as she disappeared into the crowd. Mira stood for a long moment looking quietly amused. Then she spied someone else she evidently knew well, and descended upon a quiet-looking older man with a long, white beard. \"Ah, Dardles! Up to your old tricks?\"\n\n\"Doing well. Sorceress. Doing well,\" he answered in a thin, raspy voice.\n\n\"So, you're the new journey woman.\"\n\nJenny turned quickly to find a young man standing close\u2014too close behind her. She thought him a young merchant by his dress and manner, or perhaps even the son of a wealthy aristocrat; she was very sure that he was no older than herself. He was handsome enough, but he also radiated a smug conceit that she found repulsive. Her first thought was that she was heading into real trouble. Perhaps she was just skeptical, but she simply could not trust the sincerity of someone who was contemptuous of the one they were also trying to score on.\n\n\"I'm Jenny,\" she offered, momentarily at a loss for what to say.\n\n\"I'm Lon,\" he answered. \"You know, that old sorceress isn't the only one with something to teach you around here.\"\n\n\"Well, you certainly have a lot to leant,\" Jenny said coldly. Her first thought, she realized, was quite correct. Besides, she was telepath enough to know exactly what was on his mind. She took what she hoped was a very subtle step backwards.\n\nLon followed her, and more than made up for lost ground. \"I'm sure that I know some things they don't teach at any school for sorcery. If you would care to come to my classroom, I'll...\" \"You'll get your hands off me right now,\" Jenny told him. He had taken tight hold of both of her upper arms, as if he meant to crush her resistance with a casual display of strength.\n\n\"Hey, don't give me that, little rabbit.\" He laughed, arrogantly amused. \"You say one thing, but I know what you really want.\" Jenny rolled her eyes. \"I really can't believe you said that.\" End of discussion. Jenny had reached the end of her patience. Lon had just reached the end of the line. Whatever happened next happened too quick for anyone to see, except that Lon was suddenly face down on the floor and Jenny was standing over him with his arm pinned behind his back.\n\nVajerral's furry face appeared instantly. \"Good show! Now you skin him, and we'll have a fine supper.\"\n\nJenny said a few choice words\u2014in English, for the sake of privacy. Even Vajerral did not know most of those words.\n\nDooket and Erkin were there immediately. They scooped up the debris in one simple motion and headed for the door, and Jenny never did see Lon again. The guests stared for a moment longer, then returned casually to their previous conversations.\n\n\"Very effective,\" Mira remarked, appearing suddenly behind her. \"But you are going to have to be easier on the guests. That's what I pay those two barbarians good money to do.\"\n\nJenny laughed. \"You certainly know how to throw a party.\" \"Not exactly the first impression that I wanted to make,\" Mira muttered in disgust. \"This is actually fairly tame for one of my parties, but it's still probably a bit much after the journey that you've just been through. Why don't you two collect your plates and cups, and we'll just step outside for a little air?\"\n\nMira led them quickly through the maze of the large house and out the framed-glass doors of the dining room into the well-kept yard. Already night had fallen; the sky was dark and full of bright stars. Mira stopped short on the stone steps leading down into the lower yard and the airship shed and sat down, leaning well back against one of the posts that framed the top of the steps. Jenny sat down well to the other side, setting her plate and mug on the top step beside her, while Vajerral lay down on her belly in the cool grass, her long neck lifted like a snake.\n\n\"I suspect that this was all rather more than you expected,\" Mira began. \"Why, this place is like a madhouse. An obnoxious cat, bodyguards to protect your guests from each other, that blathering old abbess in riding boots... and me.\"\n\n\"No, not you,\" Jenny was quick to assure her new teacher.\n\n\"Do you jest? I know that I take more getting used to than all (he rest. But when most people get to know me, they still think that I'm damned eccentric.\" She shrugged, totally unconcerned with what anyone might think of her. \"Still, you might just find, if you ever do get to know me well enough, that I am in fact a very practical person. I do not believe in anchoring myself to burdensome conceits. I'll make no claims to being a moral person, but I am by no means immoral; I am, quite simply, amoral. I help those people I can, I leave those who do not want my help alone, and I enjoy myself. And that, dear child, is the closest you will ever hear me come to trying to justify myself to anyone.\"\n\n\"I can understand that,\" Jenny conceded. \"Listen, I'm neither shy nor delicate. I helped to fight my first steel dragon when I was only nine years old. I was raised for nine years by faerie dragons. I've been trained in the dragon magic, and I'm a very accomplished Veridan Warrior besides. I have a degree in Engineering, and I'm a member of the Star Trek Fan Club. I've seen it all.\"\n\nMira nodded soberly. \"I suppose you can. Do me one favor. Please just wait until tomorrow before you make up your mind. I've never had a student of my own before, but I will do my best for you. And I'll only teach you magic and other forms of higher education, and never require you to understand or adopt my philosophies of life. Also, you'll find that Dame Tugg has quite enough to keep her busy and out of our affairs. The Trassek twins are really two very good, honest boys who will do anything for you. And even J.T. has his dubious virtues.\"\n\n\"J.T.?\"\n\n\"The cat,\" she explained, certain reservations of her own quite evident. \"His initials stand for Just Trouble, and for reasons that will become quite obvious to you soon enough. What did he say to you anyway?\"\n\n\"Ah. .. you don't want to know,\" Jenny said as she turned with renewed interest to her plate.\n\n\"Try me,\" Mira said as she leaned back against the post to stare up at the stars, smiling with mischievous delight.\n\nJenny hurried downstairs the next morning, wondering if she had slept late. Hardly knowing what else to do, Jenny presented herself at the kitchen for breakfast. Dame Tugg, with an uncharacteristic economy of words, gave her a tray that included a plate for herself, a porcelain pot of hot water for tea and two cups, and instructions for their destination. Lady Mira was in her study, seated at a small round table in a glass-enclosed alcove to one side of the large room. An open book lay on the table before her, but she seemed far more interested in the garden outside, bright flowers of red and deep blue that almost sparkled in the bright morning light.\n\nJenny found that she was apprehensive of this first meeting with her new mistress this morning as she had been for the very first time the night before. Lady Mira put aside the book and indicated for her student to take the only other seat at the table, then poured tea for them both. She measured honey carefully and stirred both cups to almost meticulous perfection, then took a cautious taste of her own and sat back with a loud sigh of contentment. Then she sat up straight, staring at her young student with a curious intensity that Jenny found disconcerting.\n\n\"So, where should we begin?\"\n\nJenny started nervously. \"I can't imagine. Surely Dalvenjah gave you most of the information on my background and training. \" \"Only what she found valuable, although I saw enough to convince me to take you on as my joumeywoman,\" Mira agreed. \"You came recommended very highly by some people whose judgements I trust a great deal. And please do not sit there and look so surprised. There are certain people in this and certain other worlds whose thoughts and judgements I hold in as high a regard as my own, and a few I consider even better.\"\n\n\"What would you like to know?\"\n\nLady Mira seemed quietly appalled, although her student could hardly imagine why. \"Oh, all right. Since you seem to be in such a confessional-\u2014confessory?\u2014mood, why don't you tell me why such a nice girl like yourself hangs about with dragons?\"\n\nJenny looked genuinely surprised. \"Why shouldn't I? Is there something wrong with dragons?\"\n\n\"Dragons are wonderful folk! Faerie dragons are just about the highest and most noble of all the immortal races.\" Mira paused, and leaned forward to regard her shrewdly. \"So why, then, does such a remarkable and august dragon as Dalvenjah Foxfire find you so interesting?\"\n\n\"Oh, Dalvenjah Foxfire is my aunt.\"\n\nLady Mira nearly fell out of her chair.\n\n\"Well, there really is a reasonable explanation, \" Jenny insisted, realizing that what she had said was not entirely reasonable. \"You see, Dalvenjah married my uncle Allan Breivik\u2014my mother's younger brother. Only dragons don't really get married, so I guess they're just shacking up.\"\n\n\"Are you telling me that Dalvenjah Foxfire is married\u2014or perhaps not quite married to a mortal?\"\n\n\"Oh, he wasn't a dragon at the time.\"\n\nThat had not come out quite right. Mira was leaning forward in her chair, her head braced heavily on one arm with the other on her hip, one brow raised in a skeptical fashion as if she had just been offered the movie rights to Roget's Thesaurus.\n\n\"You see, my uncle Allan was a cellist.\"\n\nMira rolled her eyes. \"Oh, that explains it! The lady dragons all just swoon over cellists.\"\n\nJenny cast a puzzled glance at the floor, as if wondering if she would find her brain there. \"Perhaps I should start at the beginning. You see, Dalvenjah was stuck in my world several years ago while she recovered from a broken wing. She went looking for the best wizard she could find, which was my brother. But there were no wizards in my world at that time, so he was working as a cellist. Then they went off into the woods to live in the cabin that was owned by my father, only he wasn't my father at that time. And I guess they must have fallen in love, since she turned him into a dragon and took him home. Let me show you.\"\n\nShe pulled a large wallet from her pocket, one containing money from three different worlds, and flipped open the small group of photographs. \"You see? There are my own parents. And that's Allan and Dalvenjah.\"\n\n\"Yes, I see,\" Mira remarked absently; she seemed far more interested in the process. \"Is this dragon magic?\"\n\n\"No, Polaroid.\" The next picture, that of a handsome male dragon, seemed to embarrass her considerably. \"That's an old friend of mine,\"\n\nMira indicated the next. \"Who is that rather pretty woman?\" Jenny stared. \"Oh, that's Stella Stevens. And that last one is Allan and Dalvenjah with Vajerral when she was still young.\" \"Are you sure they didn't have to get married?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. You see, their daughter Vajerral was already four years old when they first met.\"\n\n\"Well, that's certainly a neat trick!\" Mira looked as if she had just been hit in the head. \"And you were wondering last night that my house was too strange for you?\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"No, you were.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeh.\" Mira shrugged. \"So that's the whole story?\"\n\n\"No, there is the Prophecy.\"\n\n\"Prophecy!\" Mira sat up straight. \"That frigging dragon didn't say a damned thing about a prophecy. Beratric Kurgel told me to never get mixed up in prophecies, and for once I quite agree. Just how did you manage to get tied up with a prophecy, and what is it about?\"\n\n\"Well, it all started just after Dalvenjah and Uncle Allan left, when I was nine years old,\" Jenny explained thoughtfully. \"I was kidnapped by the High Priest Haldephren, who had stolen the body of Dalvenjah's brother. He said that he was my father, and even Dalvenjah isn't sure about that. It seems that, according to prophecy, I'm supposed to either destroy the Emperor and the High Priest forever, or else I'll somehow cause the restoration of the Alasheran Empire.\"\n\n\"Yes, I've heard of the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons. I didn't know that it referred to you.\" Mira looked impressed, and perhaps just a little frightened. The Alasheran Empire was a product of her own world, gone for the past two thousand years and yet still a nightmare of history. Worse yet, the Empire of the South had been reestablished in the past years, growing and prospering rapidly. There was as yet no direct evidence that this was the same Alashera as before, or that the Emperor or the High Priest had returned.\n\n\"I should tell you that I had already spoken with Dalvenjah before I ever agreed to accept you for training,\" Mira continued, tapping her empty teacup absently. \"She talked about you as if you were a dragon, which is perhaps the best she can understand. I do think, now that I know about your involvement in the Prophecy, that Dalvenjah is very concerned about this whole affair. She made no real secret of the fact that she is very worried about you. At the time, I couldn't imagine why.\"\n\n\"Do you believe the Prophecy?\" Jenny asked, somewhat anxiously.\n\nThe sorceress looked rather thoughtful. \"I would prefer not to believe it, maybe because I want to reject any thought of predestination as inexcusable interference in one's personal life. But as a sorceress, I know that you can at times see hints of what is to come. You've been raised all your life to believe that you are the pivotal feature in this all-important prophecy. The question is, do you believe?\"\n\nShe sat for a moment, stirring absently at her tea, while Mira waited with perfect patience and understanding. At last she sighed heavily. \"I know that the Prophecy is true. Right now it has me exactly where I am supposed to be, ready for the beginning of the end. Mostly I want it to be over, so that I can finally have a life of my own. But I know that I'm not ready.\"\n\n\"That's the trick, I guess,\" Mira remarked thoughtfully. \"Obviously the deciding factor is whether or not you turn to the Dark. And that depends upon whether or not you find the purpose you seek in life through the Light, or if you surrender to the temptations of the Dark.\"\n\nJenny started at what seemed to her an accusation. \"But that's just not possible. The Dark doesn't tempt me at all; I'm sure of that. I've always believed that if I do betray our side to the Dark, it will never be intentional. I might do the wrong thing by accident, but never deliberately.\"\n\n\"Hm, I see.\" Mira thought about that for a moment. \"It seems to me that the only way to beat this prophecy of yours is to face it head-on, go after it before it comes to find you. That's the way to use a prophecy to your own advantage, you know. First you discover all you can about it, and that tells you how you can make things turn out the way you want.\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"I'm not so sure. Dalvenjah has always considered the Prophecy to be a very complex and delicate thing.\"\n\n\"It was also Dalvenjah's idea to send you here, to the very home world of the Alasheran Empire, so she obviously means for you to get busy on solving the Prophecy,\" Mira said, obviously very pleased with herself for the way she had figured things out.\n\n\"Is that what you believe?\"\n\n\"No, that's just a guess,\" Mira admitted. \"But I'm not so sure that you are in no danger of falling to the Dark. The Dark Sorcerers reject love for hate, goodness for evil, and they make sex a thing of violence rather than gentle sharing. You're not a virgin, are you?\"\n\n\"Well, no.\" Jenny somehow managed one of the really spectacular blushes of her life. It came easily, since she had the uncomfortable feeling that her mother could hear her. If Marie Barker ever found out certain specifics about Jenny's sex life, someone was going to find that twenty-two was not too old to be spanked. \"Actually, I've sort of promised myself to someone already.\" Mira nodded. \"We would have had to fix that in a hurry, if you had been. You're going into that time of your life when all the magebom come to the realization that there never will be a special prince who will change everything in your life. When you realize that no one will ever come between you and your magic\u2014 that you cannot tolerate the thought of anyone coming between you and your magic\u2014but long before you realize that the conflict comes from your lack of understanding of your own desires.\" Mira paused to take another quick taste of her tea, and frowned. \"What it all comes down to is this. Life in general is rough, our romantic and sexual relationships are even harder to keep in any type of order, and the problems are compounded ten times over for the magebom. Hopefully that makes at least partial sense to you now. Rest assured that, as with all other of the deeper questions of life, the answer will make itself perfectly clear to you at its proper time. And then you will see that the answers to those big questions are actually very simple, since you really knew them all along.\"\n\n\"But that's just the problem,\" Jenny insisted. \"I can't really have a life of my own for as long as I have this prophecy hanging over my head. I don't know when it's going to come, next week or twenty years from now. But when it does come, everything in my life will change. I don't even know if I'll survive. Under the circumstances, I don't dare devote myself to anything, career or personal. I don't want to see things that I've worked for disappear. I don't want to hurt myself or anyone else if things should change, and I don't want to distract myself with the burden of excessive devotions or regret interfering with what I must do.\"\n\nMira looked surprised, almost stunned. \"Well, there is that. But how can you possibly turn your back on life? Don't you realize that you could be creating just as many weaknesses in your defenses by denying the things that everyone needs from life?\" \"I'll try to keep it in mind. I never thought that there was anything lacking in my life. I've always enjoyed myself immensely,\" Jenny said. That was largely the truth; she had learned long ago to simply concentrate on the simple, short-term pleasures. She did recognize something about her mistress's character. Mira was such a devoted hedonist that the thought of denying herself anything was horrifying to her.\n\nShe glanced up at the sorceress. \"Ah, do you mean to send me away?\"\n\nMira stared at her. \"Why would I want to do that?\"\n\nShe shrugged uncertainly. \"I realize that you never counted on this business with the Prophecy. It's rather a lot to take on.\"\n\n\"Oh, piffle!\" Mira declared impatiently. \"If I don't take care of you, who will? Besides, let's stop scaring ourselves by looking so far ahead. All I wanted from you this morning, after all, was only a demonstration of your magic.\"\n\n\"Oh... Well, what?\" Jenny was momentarily at a loss.\n\n\"Something that can show me your mastery of focused concentration,\" Mira said. \"That, I suspect, is where you still have room for considerable improvement, as good as you no doubt already are.\"\n\n\"Yes, I suppose,\" the young sorceress answered, brushing distractedly at her hair. \"I still say that I'm very pleased with my life as it is.\"\n\n\"We shall see,\" Lady Mira remarked as she poured herself another cup of tea, casting a small spell to heat the tepid water. \"You're going to find that the more you learn, the more your magic matures, and the more enjoyment you find in life, the more you are going to want. It's an insidious addiction, but a virtuous one.\"" + }, + { + "title": "High Places", + "text": "The fine lines took shape on the intricately carved pewter dragon, every one of its scales executed in meticulous detail. Only two hours before it had begun as a round lump of raw metal on Jenny's worktable, until she had employed magic and raw concentration to bend and shape the metal cold. It had flowed in only minutes into the general shape of her subject, a flying dragon, wings spread, as he braced himself atop a jagged pinnacle of rock, the whole thing over two feet high. The slow, difficult portion of her work had been in the finished detail, from the fine lines of each scale to the angry glint of real jade in each eye. Finally she had hardened the pewter with an infusion of other alloys and plated it with gold, all the time working the metals at room temperature.\n\nJenny was no more reconciled with the subject of the Prophecy than ever, and Mira's opinions actually did not help. In Mira's eyes, everything was so simple. She believed the meaning of the Prophecy to be obvious. Jenny would eventually decide to fight either for the good guys or the bad guys, and that side would win. The answer, therefore, was for Jenny to take an aggressive stance with the Prophecy, go on the attack against her enemies before she had a chance to be tempted to evil. Jenny's dragon training argued that nothing could be that simple. She felt certain that she could never be tempted to evil, and she was afraid that the real danger she would eventually have to face would be less obvious.\n\nBut for the moment, Jenny was having the time of her life. The faerie dragons were wonderful people, but they were as a rule reserved and cerebral, quiet and noble. In a word, boring. And she had really had quite enough of her own world. There was real adventure here. Forests that stretched across whole continents, and ancient castles, airships and sailing ships. Lady Mira seemed to know half of the Northlands, and she had her nose quite literally in everything that was happening.\n\n\"Well, what do you think?\" she asked absently.\n\nVajerral blinked and began unlimbering herself. She had been serving as the model, and with a exercise of dragonly patience she had somehow avoided any movement for the past two hours. It was so contrary to her nature that Jenny had worried about her mental health. She stretched her arms and legs and long neck, and yawned hugely. Then she turned to look at the sculpture, and stared.\n\n\"That is not me,\" she complained, and blinked. \"That's...\" \"That's none of your business,\" Jenny said sharply.\n\nVajerral yawned again, sitting back on her tail. \"Just what is the purpose of all this procrastination? Why do you not just go home? Then you could be with him.\"\n\n\"We agreed a long time ago that we would never discuss this,\" Jenny said sternly as she began putting away her tools. \"Besides, I think I know now why Dalvenjah sent me here. A mortal world, with an eccentric sorceress and her demented retinue, and one adolescent dragon for company. This must be her idea of hell. She must be trying to make me grateful to go home and become a dragon.\"\n\n\"Dragons do not believe in hell,\" Vajerral remarked. \"Just recycling. Besides, I am enjoying myself immensely.\"\n\n\"She sent you because you like everything, and to be rid of you.\" She paused, entertaining a look of profound consternation. \"That's right. If I died, would I keep coming back as a faerie dragon like the rest of you?\"\n\n\"Yes, but Dalvenjah would consider that method of making a dragon of you only as a final resort.\"\n\n\"Mage Jenny?\" Erkin called at the same moment he knocked loudly on the outer door of her apartment. \"Lady Mira sent me to tell you that Addena Sheld has returned.\"\n\n\"On my way.\"\n\nJenny hurried to change. Addena Sheld was, after all, Lady Mira's best friend, and the singer had been away in the southeast giving recitals almost since the young sorceress's arrival months earlier, combining her own business with some judicious spying that Mira had wanted done.\n\nHer mistress had taken her into town only days earlier, insisting that she acquire at least a few new clothes against the coming of colder weather. She quickly slipped into pants, full-sleeved shirt and vest, all in shades of coordinating blue that complemented her hair. She hurried downstairs to Mira's study, finding the concert singer already discussing her exploits.\n\n\"Well, I'd never seen anything like it! The Kingdoms of the Sea may have been wealthy two thousand years ago, but they've fallen upon the worst poverty since,\" Addena Sheld exclaimed as she judiciously added brandy to the cup of tea that Lady Mira had just handed her. She looked up suddenly as Jenny and Vajerral entered. \"Ah, so there you are, my dears. I am so glad to see that you're still about the place. Your presence adds a note of normalcy to this lunatic asylum of a house. Although Mira never did help you do something about that hair, it seems.\"\n\n\"It's part of her magic, Addena,\" Mira reminded her.\n\nAddena glanced at her suspiciously. \"Just like you think that you have to...\"\n\n\"We don't have to talk about that!\"\n\nJenny took a seat at the table in the alcove of Mira's study. The day had grown darker than ever, and a cold rain gently chattered against the panes where they sat in the glass-enclosed alcove of the study. Vajerral was sitting back on her tail, staring out the window as if dreaming of bright, clear skies.\n\n\"You were telling me about your experiences in the South?\" Mira prompted.\n\n\"Oh, yes.\" Addena took a cautious taste of her tea, made a vile face and added more brandy. \"I just could not believe the changes in the last eight years, that being the last time I had toured in the South. I'd been there only once before, you know, and I had sworn that I'd never go back. It really just didn't pay, you know. I wouldn't have gone now, except that you had asked me to look about. But this time...! My word, it's like they're in some big hurry to catch up with the North, and then some. They certainly made no secret about their wealth, although they are entirely too ostentatious. You know how new wealth tends to be on the gaudy side.\"\n\n\"Yes, you have pointed that out to me often enough,\" Mira remarked succinctly. \"I've often wondered how you know.\" Addena chose to ignore her. \"It's like the ancient times have returned to the Southlands. There were scores of merchant ships and wargalleys in every harbor, but no airships. All the old palaces and forums have been restored and new ones are being built. And the old temples. Now that's the dark side to all of this, and I wouldn't go back to the South for anything. They've rebuilt the old temples, and there are priests and priestesses in black everywhere. Every one of their bright, clean cities has the spookiest feel of anything I've ever known.\"\n\n\"You think that they're worshipping the Dark again?\" Mira asked coldly. Jenny was so surprised that she pulled up a chair and sat down to listen. Twenty-five years earlier, the Alasheran Empire had still been in ruins and the Emperor had been in exile in another world.\n\n\"Mira, you know that I don't pretend to have a hair of talent, but I know for a fact that something bad is going on there,\" Addena said in the most serious voice that the younger sorceress had ever heard her use. \"It's just this feeling in the air, like something cold and predatory is watching you all the time. All the Northlanders who have been going into the South in recent years say that they're calling demons again, and getting results. But all the Southerners, they just look at you in that cold, superior manner, like they're going to get what they want out of you and then rip you apart with their own hands. Murderous, they all are. For all their faddish interest in the refined arts, killing is what seems to interest them most. They've reopened the old games.\" \"Great stars! With people?\"\n\n\"No, not yet. Just with animals now. But they made me go to their games all the time I was there, and I can't recall a game where at least a few people didn't get killed. Accidentally, of course. But the games are vicious enough that they've made that unavoidable.\"\n\nMira nodded sadly. \"That's very much what they say the worship of the Dark does to a person. Beratric Kurgel has suspected that for the last four years, as far as that goes. It seems to me that the time has come for someone to go down there and have a good look about, before it's too late.\"\n\n\"Too late for what?\" Jenny asked, politely ignoring the auspicious name of Beratric Kurgel.\n\n\"Too late to do anything to stop it,\" she explained. \"Elura has had the wealth and the benefit of strong magic since the fall of (he Kingdoms of the Sea, and in the last three centuries we've enjoyed technological advances that should allow us to stay ahead of the South for some time to come. But we've known that they were going to attempt to reestablish the Empire for the last quarter of a century, and we've done nothing I know of to stop them. Tell me, has the Emperor or the High Priest returned?\"\n\nAddena blinked. \"I don't know if the Emperor has returned or not, but they talk about him all the time. If he's not there yet, then he is at least running things from wherever he is, and he will be coming soon. But I heard very little about the High Priest. He has a secretary or minister who is doing his work for him\u2014his secular activities, you might say\u2014but it seems that he is not going to show himself directly for some time yet to come.\"\n\n\"I wonder if Dalvenjah scared him so badly that he's afraid she might come after him again if he shows himself, \" Mira mused. Then she looked up at Addena. \"Tell me everything that happened during your tour in the South. I want to know every smallest clue you have to tell me.\"\n\nAddena feigned extreme reluctance, all the time making it very clear that she would like nothing better than to be the center of attention for the next few hours and relate in detail her successes in the South. Mira made it very clear, however, that this matter was entirely too important, and the singer relented in tolerably good grace. All the same, she did impart her experiences in great detail, concentrating not necessarily on what made a good story but what she thought the sorceress wanted to hear.\n\nJenny paid strict attention as well, although she hardly knew what to make of it. The worship of the Dark had continued to exist, even in the Northlands, and they were eternally about their work preparing for the \"return.\" But times had changed. Life was far less harsh than it had been in ancient times. The old conflicts, the bands of barbarians in the North and the pirate nations of the Far South, were now at peace. Sorcerers now devoted as much of their learning to engineering and the sciences as to magic, thereby increasing the effectiveness of their talents many times over, and this entire world had prospered accordingly. There simply was no longer any need for the worship of the Dark and its promise of quick rewards through the domination of others.\n\nExcept, of course, in the Kingdoms of the Sea. Jenny could see that for herself easily enough, now that she considered it. The North prospered, but the Northlands were rich with resources. The Southlands were rocky, barren islands and coastal stretches bordering rugged mountains. They had very little land suitable for agriculture. There was no timber, no coal and very few metals of any type except for copper. The ancient kingdoms had prospered on copper, but the age of copper was past, diminished by the strength and versatility of Northland steel.\n\nNo, the Kingdoms of the Sea had prospered for only one reason. In their time they had overcome their own deficiencies at the expense of others. They had been nations of overlords, conquering and controlling other lands which did possess the necessary resources, until they had come at last to rule the known world as the Empire of Alashera.\n\nThe emergence of new sorcerers, those who were slaves to no forces but willing supporters of the Light, had broken the control of the Dark Priesthood, which had grown too bloated and secure in its self-belief. Then the Empire itself had collapsed in a matter of a few short years. With its armies devoid of the support of Dark Magic, they had been broken or driven out of the conquered nations with relative ease.\n\nAddena spoke voluntarily for the better part of three hours, and then Mira questioned her for another hour more. Night had come by that time, and with it a rather violent storm. Jenny could sense the restless forces that gathered in the world that night, as if the very discussion of the Dark had summoned its presence, and she was sure that her mistress knew what was happening as well. It seemed that Addena Sheld sensed something as well; she adamantly refused Mira's offer of a carriage home and retired\u2014or retreated\u2014to the upstairs room that was normally reserved as her own.\n\n\"Well, Lady?\" Jenny prompted as she took the empty seat at the table. Her mistress was so distracted that she had not even bidden her friend good-night.\n\n\"Well, she hardly told us anything that we did not already know,\" Mira said. \"Child, they've all known that it would come to this since they rescued you from the Emperor thirteen years ago. But what have they done about it since then?\"\n\n\"The faerie dragons have been preparing for war ever since,\"\n\nVajerral offered. \"I would have thought that the Combined Academy should have acted as the nucleus of our profession.\"\n\n\"Yes, so one would assume,\" Mira declared in a voice that spoke worlds of censure. \"The Academy is a bastion of learning, and as such it fulfills its function extremely well. As a body of responsible leaders in our hallowed profession, it sucks rotten lizard eggs. Those of us who do form an informal body of responsible leaders have been meaning for some time to make a detailed study of the possibilities. As one of the key members of that body, I fear that I must appoint myself that task. It certainly seems that no one else cares to undertake that mission.\"\n\n\"What task?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Why, finding out if the Emperor or the High Priest has indeed returned to our world, and just how strong a presence the Dark really is.\"\n\nVajerral turned to stare, her eyes wide and her ears standing straight up.\n\n\"But why you?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Because I am perhaps the only sorceress of the Light who can get away with it,\" Mira responded, although she did not look at all certain. \"I do have one advantage over my fellows. I'm enough of a hedonist to confuse the Dark Priests long enough to discover what I want and slip away with my life. I hope.\"\n\nJenny frowned, and glanced up at Mira. \"What do you think? Did Addena discover what you sent her to find?\"\n\n\"I didn't give Addena a clue of what to look for,\" Mira said. \"I wanted her to tell me what she saw, not what she may have thought I wanted her to find. Things have changed a lot in the last few years. We know now that both the High Priest and the Emperor were still alive, that they could open the Ways Between the Worlds and that they had some control over the demons they used to summon by battalions. It's time that we stick our noses back into their affairs, discover if either the Emperor or the High Priest is back in Alashera, and if they have made an alliance with the Dark dragons. Dalvenjah was rather worried about that.\" \"Then when do we go?\"\n\n\"As soon as possible, with winter coming on,\" she replied. \"But first, I do want to know all I can about the forces of the Dark. And the living expert on that subject, at least among those of our profession, is my own Master, the Sorcerer Bresdenant.\" Jenny searched her own memory. \"I don't remember him.\"\n\nLady Mira laughed aloud. \"Him? He resides at Coot Hall, the retirement home at the Sanctuary of Ley weld. He should know more than anyone about what we should look for. I also hope that he can give us a few hints about how to protect ourselves from the Dark, if we do happen upon something ugly. I just don't like this business about the calling of the Spirits of the Dark.\"\n\nVajerral had been all but speechless with surprise, and for the last few moments her ears had been twitching as if they were trying to jump right off the top of her head. \"What are you saying? You cannot risk Jenny and her part in the Prophecy for petty spying.\"\n\n\"But this is all a part of the Prophecy,\" Mira explained earnestly. \"It's started now, and the only way Jenny can defeat it is to go out there and fight it.\"\n\nJenny did not know what to think. Logically she knew that Mira was right about taking the offensive with the Prophecy, although she was less certain that this was the way. And she was frightened. She had lived in terror of the Prophecy for half her life, but it had always been easy for her to ignore her fear. Now that particular approach to personal stress management was quickly becoming impossible. Her instinct had always been to indulge her fear, to distance herself from the realities of the Prophecy and delay this confrontation until she felt more certain.\n\nShe liked to tell herself that she would know when the time had come, that she would feel bold and determined and ready to fight. But she knew that the fear and uncertainty would always remain, and that the day would come when she would have to fight the Prophecy despite herself. She knew that she would only grow more afraid with time, not less. For that reason alone, perhaps this was the time to begin.\n\nLady Mira knew that the weather would be clearing by dawn, and she had Dame Tugg and the Trassek twins preparing for their journey that very night. She always made a point of keeping Wind Dragon, her airship, serviced and provisioned for immediate travel, so that it was a simple matter to load a few perishable items and their personal effects. Addena Sheld agreed to accompany them as far as Ley weld, with the understanding that they would return her to Bennasport before they began their journey into the Southlands. She declared that she had no intention of ever returning to the Kingdoms of the Sea. Dame Tugg and J.T. were remaining to watch over the house.\n\nSince this first trip was over friendly lands, Vajerral seized this chance to run a quick errand of her own. She wanted to have more help at hand before they left for the South, and she had departed for a quick visit to her own world that very morning. She expected to return in a few days in the company of an experienced fighting dragon.\n\nWind Dragon was rolled out of her shed at dawn, and the Trassek twins immediately set about preparing her for flight. Wind Dragon was a tiny ship compared to the round-bellied freighters of over six hundred feet, but the young sorceress doubted that she had ever seen a ship that looked more sleek and swift. Sitting on her skids in the open yard, her vanes not yet deployed, she looked like some oceangoing racing schooner with a flat-bottomed hull, almost as if it had been cut off just below the waterline.\n\nJenny had flown on these ships often enough in the past, and so she was able to help ready Wind Dragon for flight. Her four lift vanes, with their spar-ribbed canvas stabilizing sails, were unfurled and locked into place, and the thrust vanes, the largest that Jenny had ever seen on a ship this size, were mounted in the stem. The smaller stabilizer vanes, of the same bright bands of red and blue canvas as the massive main vanes, were unfurled in the long bowsprit, the short securing masts were stepped in the center of the ship between the vanes and the rigging was pulled tight. The ropes and canvas were dampened by the heavy morning dew, but the ship was prepared for flight in little more than a quarter of an hour of brisk work.\n\nErkin and Dooket approached this journey with the same enthusiasm of a couple of boys asked to go on a picnic. Jenny was given to wonder if they even knew the meaning of danger, and just what they would do if matters did get rather serious. Either they were too brave to care, too stupid to care, or else they were simply a pair of complete innocents when it came to the realities of their profession. Addena Sheld boarded the little ship as though she was already having second or third thoughts on the subject. Dame Tugg made no secret of what she thought on the subject; she stood below the bow of the ship to evoke the blessing of St. Gum of the Cows. That only mystified the others, since St. Gum was commonly the protector of whores; Addena took it to be a personal insult. Only Lady Mira seemed unconcerned. She was standing on the helm deck pretending to be a pirate setting sail for the Jade Islands.\n\n\"You just watch out,\" J.T. told his mistress quite seriously. \"There are storms yet in those mountains you mean to cross.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Mira assured him. \" Wind Dragon is as fast as they come. She can keep us ahead of almost anything.\"\n\n\"She's not that fast,\" the cat corrected her.\n\n\"If any storm does catch us, we can pull in the vanes and ride it out.\"\n\n\"Just be careful,\" J.T. repeated himself. \"Well, every minute of clear weather you have counts, so you had better be about your rat-killing.\"\n\nMira joined the travelers who had already boarded the airship and the Trassek twins pulled in the boarding ladder. From that time on the sorceress was in complete control of the ship. There were two large wheels at the pilot's station near the stem, one controlling the vanes that lifted the ship's nose and the other controlling the rudder. But magic alone activated and regulated the lift and thrust vanes that actually got the airship off the ground and moving. She applied lift until she felt Wind Dragon begin to stir restlessly, then moved the ship forward until the bow vanes caught the air and raised her nose gently.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Mira asked her student as the airship slowly gained speed and altitude, her skids barely clearing the trees that bordered the estate. She was already spinning the rudder wheel to bring Wind Dragon around to the south, looking for the first pass through the coastal mountains behind Bennasport.\n\nJenny only nodded. Wind Dragon achieved her cruising speed of forty knots in less than a minute and continued to climb steadily toward the pass. The others, she noticed, were completely unconcerned. Erkin and Dooket were still cranking in the retractable wheels, and even Addena was leaning over the rail near the bow.\n\nTwo hours of travel brought them through the coastal mountains and over relatively open land, although they could already see the greater range of the Northland mountains farther ahead. The sky remained clear and deep blue except for a few thick, white clouds about the peaks, and the air at their altitude was just a bit chill. But already the two sorceresses could sense the storms that would soon be building in those distant mountains, wet, heavy storms full of winds and snow.\n\n\"It'll be a race,\" Mira said, speaking a little loudly to be heard over the wind. \"We'll be heading back into the mountains tonight, about the same time this weather will begin to get thick. We won't be able to make half this speed, and we may not be able to stay in the air all that long either.\"\n\n\"We have to land at night anyway,\" Jenny pointed out. \"You're our only pilot.\"\n\n\"A situation that I mean to correct right now,\" her mistress said. \"Only someone trained in sorcery can fly an airship, but then what are you? Feeding the induction vanes is no great trick, and a couple of hours behind the wheels should give you a good feel for steering.\"\n\nMira had the airship grounded five minutes later, and Jenny found herself at the helm. She would have liked to have protested, but she found that she had no good excuse for not learning to fly this ship. The force-induction vanes operated by channeling the natural forces in the world, providing thrust either to lift the ship or to move it forward, and it was a simple matter for a sorceress of her caliber to work the simple spells that activated the vanes. Steering the ship with the stabilizers was hardly any more difficult, although she would have to be careful to keep the ship in trim, balanced on its lift vanes.\n\nSince the wheels were still retracted, leaving Wind Dragon sitting on her four broad skids, Jenny had to lift the ship straight up, not applying forward thrust until she was well off the ground. And there in the valley, that meant that they first had to get above the trees that bordered the glade where Mira had set them dow'n.\n\n\"Just ease her up,\" Mira urged her. \"Just tickle the lift vanes until we clear the ground.\"\n\nThe magic itself was no problem for Jenny. She thought of raising the ship with her own lift magic, the way she would if she was flying with the dragons. She was wrong on at least two points, the most important being that dragon magic was entirely too rich a fuel for these arcane engines. Wind Dragon went up like a rocket. \"Ease up on her, child,\" Mira urged her a little more firmly. \"I wish to hell I could!\" Jenny declared rather desperately. \"I don't know if I could ease off any more without letting her drop.\" \"I most devoutly wish that you can learn quickly,\" Mira remarked, peering over the side. \"I know that the air thins with altitude, but I don't recall that anyone has ever investigated just how far the process continues.\"\n\nUnfortunately, Jenny knew the answer to that. If the problem was in giving too much power to the lift vanes, then perhaps she could divert some of it to forward thrust. Wind Dragon jumped in a new direction. As it happened, the elevator wheel was spun almost completely around; the airship curved gracefully up and just kept going. It was most likely the first time that an airship had ever executed a complete loop.\n\nBy the time the ship righted itself, Jenny had learned through simple terror how to keep her magic under control. At least only she and Mira had been on deck at that time, and centrifugal force did a lot to keep them there. Mira had been holding on to the rail, while Jenny had entwined her arms and legs in the spokes of the rudder wheel and was still clinging there, upside down. Mira brushed herself off and walked over to spin the wheel, returning her young apprentice to a reasonable attitude.\n\n\"That was definitely not the idea,\" she commented.\n\nJenny disengaged herself from the wheel and returned Wind Dragon to her proper speed and course. Once she began to get the feel of the ship, she actually began to enjoy herself. Airships were never fast compared to the aircraft of her own world, but they had a lot of character.\n\n\"Ah, perfect,\" Mira remarked, peering over the rail at a couple of shepherds staring up from far below. \"Bring the bow up just a little more and she'll climb more smoothly. The idea is to search upward until you find a wind traveling in essentially your same direction and allow that to push you along. Ground winds are often unpredictable.\"\n\n\"What about this?\" Jenny asked as she felt a cold wind at her back.\n\n\"Ah, close enough,\" the sorceress declared, and ran forward a few steps. \"Erkin! Dooket! Hoist the running sails. Let's make all the speed we can, while we can. Helm, full forward thrust!\"\n\n\"Is this a good idea?\" Jenny asked.\n\nMira shrugged. \"I don't know. I've never tried running Wind Dragon all out like this before. Beratric Kurgel has always said that an air schooner like Wind Dragon was made for running, like a fine race horse.\"\n\nThat caused Jenny a certain amount of consternation. Mira evoked the name of Beratric Kurgel regularly, and claimed to consult with that wise and worldly character all the time. But Jenny had never actually seen any such person, nor could J.T. or the twins testify to his existence, although Mira would claim to have spoken with him over tea only days before. However, Jenny had noticed that any plan that Mira was unsure about had been inspired by Beratric Kurgel, and he was responsible for any idea that went wrong.\n\nSome children had make-believe playmates. Kasdamir Gerran had an imaginary scapegoat.\n\nThe two rather versatile mercenaries had both of Wind Dragon's broad, red-and-blue-striped sails unfurled within a couple of minutes. Jenny had her doubts about how much the sails really helped, since the stiff high-level wind was hardly moving any faster than the ship itself. But they were soon hurtling along at fifty knots or more, slightly faster than the airship could have moved without that aid. She did find, to her momentary dismay, that Wind Dragon did have a very different feel to her steering when the wind was blowing over the stabilizers from behind.\n\n\"Well, you seem to be doing just fine,\" Mira remarked as she turned and headed toward her cabin. \"I'll see you people later.\"\n\nShe was gone before Jenny could say a word, with no explanation of how long she intended to be away or what to do in the event of trouble. Knowing that her mistress had been up most of the night preparing for this journey, Jenny suspected that she meant to stay in her bunk a good, long while. As for the latter consideration, there was not much that could be done when an airship got into real trouble. The idea was to avoid it.\n\n\"Pull in the sails!\" Jenny shouted her order, wondering only briefly if she had that authority as a student pilot.\n\nWhether she did or not, the Trassek twins certainly saw the wisdom in that action and set about the task as quickly as they were able in this gale. The winds were too unpredictable to be running with the sails unfurled, which interfered considerably with the steering at the best of times. Jenny needed to be able to ride these fierce winds, not fight them, before they damaged the lift vanes and canvas stabilizers. She was trying to control the ship through a combination of manipulating the lift and forward thrust at the same time she was spinning the rudder wheel before her and the smaller elevator wheel at her side.\n\n\"What can I do?\" Addena asked, shouting over the wind. \"Should I go get Lady Mira?\"\n\n\"She surely knows by now that we need her at the helm,\" Jenny answered with unconscious authority. \"Check on her, all the same. Then take a good look below to make certain that everything is secure.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Bring my jacket,\" she added. The sky was still mostly clear, even though the sun would be setting within minutes. But the cold was increasing much faster than the coming of night could allow, and there was the feel of fine crystals of ice in the air.\n\nThe boys had the sails in a couple of minutes later, loosely tied to their booms to be taken down as time allowed. Now that Wind Dragon was no longer fighting the drag of her own sails, her handling improved tremendously and the situation went from critical to merely cautious very quickly. Jenny felt that she had the ship well under control by the time Lady Mira strolled out onto the helm deck, completely unconcerned.\n\n\"Ah, you do seem to be doing well enough,\" she remarked. \"I'll go attend to the running lights and stand bow watch. Perhaps we can keep in the air for a few hours yet.\"\n\n\"Don't you want to take the helm?\" Jenny asked rather desperately. She obviously felt that she could now afford to be frightened, when only a moment earlier she had not had any choice.\n\n\"We cannot transfer control of the induction vanes in flight,\" Mira told her. \"At least not under the present circumstances. And you don't seem to be having any trouble just now.\"\n\nThe matter appeared to be settled. Lady Mira retired to the bow of the airship and spelled the crystal globes hung to either side of the bowsprit. She aimed their beams into the growing darkness ahead and to either side of the ship and occasionally called back instructions and descriptions of the landscape to the unwilling pilot. Night descended within half an hour and Jenny was flying blind, riding the winds as best she could and steering the ship according to what her mistress told her.\n\nThree hours into the night, Mira decided that they had both had enough and directed Jenny into a deep cut in the mountainside, a flat-bottomed ravine so narrow that the ship might not have fit into it sideways, and barely fit as it was. Jenny was alarmed when she saw the walls of the canyon appeal- out of the misty darkness to either side and heard the occasional thump of treetops against the lower hull.\n\nMira soon found a clearing just large enough to hold the airship\u2014allowing for the crushing of a few saplings\u2014and Jenny brought Wind Dragon down. Settling straight in was no easy task, but the trees prevented a gradual descent. The ravine sheltered the airship from the worst of the wind, but there was still a strong headwind descending through the cut. She had to hold the ship directly over her goal with just enough thrust to counter the effects of the wind and drop slowly to a landing in the darkness below. Erkin and Dooket hurried to fold away the vanes and stabilizers so that sudden gales would be less likely to upset the ship. Wind Dragon rocked slightly on the tightly strung springs in her struts until they were finished.\n\nBy that time, Jenny was completely exhausted. She had been at the helm for twelve hours, the last three of that fighting the mountain winds, entirely too long for her first time. She was inclined to be rather annoyed at her mistress for leaving her there for so long, but she knew now that Mira had completely exhausted herself in some important magic the night before. Indeed, there was still some question about which of them would be in the best condition to resume the flight the next morning. Jenny thought that she could do it, as long as she got something to eat and a warm bed in very short order.\n\n\"We'll share rounds tomorrow,\" Lady Mira assured her, stepping up behind her out of the darkness to help her down from the helm deck to the cabins below.\n\nShe had her student in the galley, stripped of her cold, damp clothes and wrapped in a warm blanket, with a cup of hot tea, a mug of ale and warm bread, cheese and venison at hand while the others were still outside tending the ship. Even Addena, who could be a fussy, self-important performer at any other time, was a willing and silent crewmember on this flight.\n\n\"You did very, very well,\" Mira told her. \"I'm sorry that I couldn't help you more today.\"\n\n\"I know why,\" Jenny said, unconcerned.\n\n\"I made a potentially disastrous presumption based upon my belief that you are an extremely capable person,\" the sorceress continued. \"I should not have done that, whether you came through as well as you did or not. It really would have been best to have waited a day.\"\n\n\"It's done, and I've become an experienced pilot in a hurry,\" Jenny said. \"How much longer?\"\n\n\"Two more days, if the weather turns out as I expect. Starting tomorrow it might take the two of us to fly this ship, one just to sit on the bow and try to navigate the fog and snow in any way that sorcery will allow.\"\n\n\"That probably places me back at the helm again,\" Jenny offered, knowing that her teacher was not about to say that her own talents were best for the task of discovering a way through this mess.\n\nThe next morning brought not just winds and cold but winter storms. Icy fogs and gale-blown snow hid miles of the highlands, and restless winds shook and tugged at the struggling airship. Lady Mira was often reduced to finding their path as best she could in complete blindness, trusting her talent to show her shadowy images of the hidden peaks and cliffs. The running lights would sometimes pierce the storm at the final moment, illuminating a tree or rocky face just in time for Jenny to evade certain impact. The mercenaries probed below the hull with long poles, feeling for the unseen ground or treetops. Addena, her uncharacteristic silence now entering its second day, alternated between watching from the bow with Mira and assisting Jenny in any way she could.\n\nThe storm only worsened as the morning wore on, although it never quite reached the point that either of the sorceresses suggested that they would have to put to ground and ride this out. Probing the mountains at a speed of ten to twenty knots was better than sitting still. But they both agreed that, if either of them felt that they were not doing their best, then they would set down for a rest. They meant to stop for an hour or so at noon under any circumstances.\n\n\"Half speed, Jenny!\" Mira called from the bow. \"The storm is letting up, and we seem to be in fairly open air just now. Some fairly large valley.\"\n\n\"Right, but keep your watch all the same,\" Jenny answered. Increased speed meant that any impact would result in greater damage, and one wrecked vane was enough to send the airship tumbling from the sky.\n\n\"Tea, Addena!\" Mira added.\n\nAddena looked up from her work; she was currently sweeping accumulated snow from the decks. \"Tea? How can you think of tea at a time like this?\"\n\n\"This is the first moment I've had all morning to think about tea, and I need it.\" Mira paused, and turned abruptly back to stare out over the bow. \"Stand to! Something is coming toward us through the storm. Some two things, I should say, and making good time. Boys, I want you to string your longbows and get ready for a fight.\"\n\nJenny sensed it too, and she strained her talent for a better understanding to the point that Wind Dragon began to slow from lack of attention. She knew that something was out there, something of far greater evil than anything that she had sensed in a long time. Something out of the Dark itself. She also did not doubt that they were about to come under attack. The others only looked confused, but the mercenaries hurried below to collect their weapons. Addena accompanied them to find a sword and bow of her own.\n\nThe things were upon them before the warriors returned, two black shapes that passed to either side of the ship at the very edge of the storm, vast forms on broad wings just behind a veil of mist and snow. They circled for another pass just as the Trassek mercenaries arrived on deck. They stopped short and stared in awe and fear. Addena came up behind them, only to cower back from the sight of the strange beings.\n\n\"I've felt that before, in the South,\" she said aloud, perhaps for Mira to hear. \"They're of the Dark!\"\n\n\"I know that,\" the sorceress said impatiently. \"But that still doesn't explain what they are.\"\n\n\"They look like dragons,\" Jenny called from the helm deck. Standing almost in the very stem of the ship, she had been closer than any of them when the two creatures had circled around for their second pass. She had been too preoccupied to feel the intense fright that still had Addena shaking, but she was aware that the hair on the back of her neck was standing on end.\n\n\"What?\" Mira asked incredulously. \"But there are so few evil dragons left in the Northlands. Besides, those... those things had a stink of raw, violent evil about them worse than anything I've ever seen in even the worst of the Dark Dragons.\"\n\n\"I know that, but I also know what they looked like,\" Jenny insisted. Her mistress seemed to be speaking from experience in her observation about Dark Dragons, but she did not consider this the time or place to ask about that.\n\n\"We'd better be ready for a fight, whatever they are/' Mira declared. \"Boys, the two of you had better ready the catapults. Jenny, we need room to run. Head northeast and ascend an additional five hundred feet. Addena, you can forget about that tea for the moment.\"\n\nThe catapults were in fact crossbows of such immense size that even Dooket had some trouble carrying his. The bows themselves were large steel bars like carriage springs, six feet across and so tight that a large, long-handled mechanism had to be used to draw the braided-wire bowstring back for loading. The bolts looked more like spears, five feet long with iron heads that weighed four pounds. There was three mounts built into the rail on each side of the ship, although the mercenaries fitted their weapons into the mounts to either side of the bow where they could more easily follow Mira's directions. Addena had collected a longbow and shield and hurried to the bow to offer their helm some protection. Jenny wondered how much use a concert singer would be in battle, but this was better than nothing. She certainly could not release control of the ship to defend herself.\n\nThe Trassek twins loaded their weapons and stood ready, but the two dark shapes did not return. Lady Mira stood at the bow and probed the storm as best she could, but for the moment all she could detect was a shadow of their presence some distance to the southeast. The snowfall, which had never yet been truly heavy, began to pick up somewhat, driven by a harsh wind. Fortunately the snow was dry and hard, and constant eddies in the wind were continually sweeping it through openings in the rail.\n\n\"Stand ready!\" Mira called a couple of minutes later. \"There's a ship coming toward us through the storm. Jenny, stand by to turn toward them as they approach.\"\n\nJenny could sense the ship as well; force-induction vanes had a very distinctive sound or feel, depending upon how one chose to describe it, to those who were sensitive to the flow of magic. The curious and alarming thing was that both of the evil creatures appeared to be pacing the ship, or perhaps even leading it. There was a sorcerer on board that ship as well, not a very strong one. But the feel of the magic about him, driving his ship, was dark and violent. Mira's words seemed to imply a suspicion that they were about to come under attack from this combined force, and Jenny had to agree.\n\n[ That raised some rather difficult questions of its own, such as what a Dark Sorcerer was doing this far north, where had he acquired an airship, and why did he seem intent upon attacking ]\n\nWind Dragon? Jenny immediately had to wonder if this attack was directed at her.\n\nShe hoped to be able to find a few of those answers, assuming that they won this battle. If it remained a contest of magic, then she and Mira were more than a match for this rather mediocre sorcerer. But there was also the problem of those evil dragons; Wind Dragon'% canvas stabilizers had to be protected from their flames. And she was certain that the other ship would have a company of its own archers. As far as she knew, there had never been a battle between airships before. These ships needed a sorcerer at their helm, and two sorcerers trained in the service of the Light would never fight each other. That meant that there were no proven strategies they could rely upon; they were very much on their own.\n\nA tense minute passed as the enemy ship drew steadily nearer, striving to cut them off. Both of the sorceresses chose to meet the threat rather than run, aware that the two dragons could easily keep them occupied until their ship arrived. The two Dark creatures shot past, silent and evil but seemingly uninterested in engaging in battle themselves. Jenny brought Wind Dragon around sharply, and a few moments later the other ship emerged out of the blowing snow.\n\nThe enemy ship was larger than Wind Dragon by perhaps thirty feet. Her vanes and stabilizers appeared to be no larger, but the ship itself was much wider and deeper in construction, most likely a small freighter rather than a schooner like their own. If it came to a running battle, Wind Dragon did have the advantage of speed and maneuverability. But the other ship also had a couple of dozen archers clearly visible on her deck.\n\n\"What ship?\" Mira called.\n\n\"Blood Hawk, out of Alashera,\" the sorcerer at her helm shouted back. \"What ship?\"\n\n\"Wind Dragon, out of Bennasport.\"\n\n\"Stand to and prepared to be boarded, woman!\"\n\nLady Mira looked rather indignant. \"Stand to and prepare to get your ass whipped, bastard!\"\n\nIf the Dark Sorcerer had any reply to that, it was lost in the wind as the two ships shot past. Jenny could see the two mercenaries standing by at the catapults and she whipped Wind Dragon around as quickly as she could at the same time she increased speed to full, hoping to catch the heavier ship from the side as it labored through its own turn. Addena, well aware of how she would serve best in the battle, moved forward to protect them both with the large shield she carried. At least the Trassek twins were in a combination of plate and mail armor, hopefully enough to guard against the missiles from ordinary longbows. Mira stood at the bow unconcerned; she could guard herself with a warding spell.\n\nJenny's judgement was perfect; the enemy ship appeared out of the white curtain broadside to them and nearly on a level. She brought Wind Dragon's nose up sharply and climbed at full lift and thrust, showing the enemy archers the airship's hardwood hull. The Trasseks waited until they could shoot down from above. They aimed at the helm station but both of their bolts swerved in flight, missing both the Dark Sorcerer and the vulnerable controls to crash through the planks of the deck. Mira loosed a shot from her own longbow, and the spelled arrow did not swerve to avoid the warding spells but struck the sorcerer in the chest. He staggered back and the wheels spun, but he quickly returned to his post. The spelled arrow had been frustrated by very ordinary armor.\n\nAddena rushed to protect Jenny from behind with her shield as a small cloud of arrows followed their own ship. Blood Hawk disappeared again into the storm, but Jenny could sense it turning away to circle around and she quickly leveled out and turned Wind Dragon in the opposite direction, hoping to catch the other ship broadside yet again. In the bow, Lady Mira considered only a moment before she turned to the two bodyguards.\n\n\"Use the exploding bolts, boys,\" she told them.\n\n\"Lady?\" Erkin asked uncertainly.\n\n\"Do it, and hurry,\" she insisted. \"We have no hope otherwise. We can't hide from their arrows forever, and those dragons might attack at any moment.\"\n\nThe Trasseks were still nervous about this. The exploding bolts were Mira's secret weapon, something of her own design, and not yet tested. But they had to do something. The enemy archers were using fire arrows, although their first volley had been frustrated by spelled hardwood and the storm, and the canvas stabilizers had somehow been missed altogether. Addena was still trying to get a flaming arrow off her shield without burning herself.\n\nThe mercenaries hurried to a weapon locker to collect the special bolts, which they loaded quickly into their catapults. The explosive bolts had a small metal canister behind their longer but comparatively lighter barbs. Then Wind Dragon was upon her enemy, the larger ship still struggling through her turn. Jenny brought them around to catch Blood Hawk broadside yet again, while Mira laid aside her bow to concentrate on protecting her own ship, warding away the cloud of fire arrows that rose to meet them.\n\n\"Try for the base of the forward vane!\" she ordered.\n\nDooket and Erkin shot at almost the same instant, and their aim was flawless. Blood Hawk was shaken by two powerful explosions and the forward vane was ripped away, disappearing inside a ball of flames. Lady Mira's knowledge of chemistry and her skill at engineering nearly equalled her command of magic. Unsupported on that quarter, Blood Hawk began to dip slowly in that direction, rolling like a sinking ship. Then her critical balance reached a point of no return and she fell, tumbling in flames and smoke from the snow-filled sky.\n\n\"Fire and flatulatants!\" Mira declared. \"I told Beratric Kurgel that it would work!\"\n\nThe stricken airship crashed unseen on the snow-covered slope and, from the sound, continued to roll some distance down the mountainside. Apparently she did not shatter on impact, even though she must have dropped six hundred feet; airships were built strong and reinforced with magic. Jenny was already bringing Wind Dragon around for a very hasty landing, knowing that the two dragons would probably be upon them at any moment.\n\nShe found an open, level space mostly by chance. Wind Dragon slid across the snow for a short distance until she pulled to a shuddering halt, and her skids sank down at least a foot. Their advantage now lay on the ground, where her own attention and magic would not be involved entirely with keeping the ship in the air. She might not be a match for Lady Mira, but she was still a formidable fighter and two sorceresses were always better than one.\n\nThe dragons attacked moments later, diving toward the ship from opposite directions. Dooket and Erkin were ready, having reloaded their catapults with more of the exploding bolts, apparently assured to their complete satisfaction that the weapons did indeed work. They shot almost as one, again with the same deadly accuracy, but this time to no effect. The bolts passed unhindered through the bodies of the dragons, arcing over to explode somewhere in the storm-shrouded land.\n\n\"Those aren't dragons! Those are winged demons!\" Jenny declared. \"I've seen demons before.\"\n\nShe hurried to join her mistress, using her sword to fend away the cutting whip of a tail, which rang with a sound like very solid steel. They were the ugliest, most alien things that she had ever seen, not at all like the fierce majesty of true dragons. And they seemed to use fear as a weapon, causing the hand that moved sword or shield in defense to hesitate.\n\n\"Jade eyes!\" Mira exclaimed.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Jenny asked as she helped to open the rail and lower the boarding ladder, confused. Faerie dragons had jade eyes, but these demons had eyes like burning rubies.\n\n\"To the wrecked airship,\" the sorceress replied. \"Our only hope of stopping these demons lies somewhere in that wreckage, if we can find it.\"\n\nJenny had no idea what her mistress had in mind, but she did trust that the older sorceress did have some idea of what to do. The problem with fighting demons was that they were creatures of another existence and not entirely real in this one; they were vulnerable to few forms of attack, either mundane or magical, although they could do very real damage. Being demons rather than dragons, they at least lacked fire. Her own education was rather lacking on the subject, which was not surprising, since sorcerers had not had to fight demons on anything like a regular basis in hundreds if not thousands of years. Even Mira professed to have no effective way of dealing with demons and other forces of the Dark, that being the whole point of the first part of their journey. But she did seem to have some way out of their present mess.\n\nJenny had at least some idea of where Blood Hawk lay wrecked in relation to where she had landed Wind Dragon. They could both sense the continued presence of Dark Magic, far weaker than it had been, as if the evil sorcerer still clung tenuously to life somewhere in this storm. At the same time it became obvious that they themselves, and not their airship, were the object of this attack. The demons followed them relentlessly, diving down to lash at their backs and heads with their long, lashing tails. Dooket and Erkin, protected by their armor, turned the attacks time again with sword and shield. The slopes were treacherously steep and hidden beneath drifts often several feet deep, so that they had to force their way forward as best they could.\n\nHalf a mile back along Wind Dragon's path they came upon an especially steep section of the mountainside, and Jenny was sure that this was where Blood Hawk had fallen. A moment later they caught a bitter trace of smoke on the icy wind, and there was no longer any question. This slope was so steep that it had, in effect, merely deflected the airship's fall, preventing its complete destruction as it rolled into the valley below. They could not yet see the ship itself, for the lower portions of the slope disappeared into the dimness and blowing snow, but bits of shattered wood and shredded canvas littered the mountainside.\n\nErkin, growing tired with the ninning battle, suddenly lost his footing and sat down heavily on his shield. He immediately slid off down the snow-covered hillside at an alarming pace, stopping with a loud crash somewhere far below. The others waited in silence for several long seconds, wondering if he had survived.\n\n\"I've found the wreck!\" he called back at last.\n\n\"Well, I'll be screwed,\" Mira muttered in mild amazement. Then she threw herself down on her rump and slid off down the slope as well, although at a more sane pace since she was able to use her legs to slow herself. Dooket and Jenny looked at each other, then shrugged and followed in the same manner. The younger sorceress could have flown, but she had no wish to meet the demons in their own element.\n\nBlood Hawk lay on her side near the bottom of the slope. She had come up hard against a large outcrop of exposed stone, which had almost broken her into two even pieces. She had lost her vanes, masts and bowsprit, and her deck cabins in the course of her fall. Boxes and bales had been lost from her broken hull and lay scattered with several bodies across the slope. Only one form in heavy black clothes lay struggling feebly to one side, and the two demons had come to ground to protect it fiercely.\n\n\"Now what?\" Erkin asked, brushing packed snow and pine needles out of his armor.\n\n\"We've got to kill that sorcerer,\" Mira declared. \"But how? None of us thought to bring our bows.\"\n\n\"Permit me,\" Dooket said gallantly.\n\nWhile the others watched silently, he searched about in the snow until he found a large stone. He tested its weight carefully and then heaved it with both hands toward the dying sorcerer. Jenny doubted that she could have hurled that stone more than a few feet, certainly not the sixty feet to its intended target. It sailed right over the Southerner's head and landed with a heavy thump in the snow at least five feet away.\n\nMuttering obscenities, Jenny stepped forward and stood with her legs braced and both arms held straight out before her. A glow of brilliant blue light surrounded her clenched fists, and a bright beam shot out to strike the nearest of the demons. It was blasted backwards off its claws with a harsh cry of distress, the first sound that either of the creatures had made. Singed and smoking, it leaped into the air, and Jenny repeated the process with the other. Then she seemed to collapse, or at least she had to sit down in a hurry. Erkin prevented her from tumbling over backwards into the snow.\n\nLady Mira rushed forward without hesitation. She paused long enough beside the sorcerer to snatch something from about his neck, then calmly employed her sword to separate him from his head. The demons screamed again, but for the moment they either would not or could not attack. She hurried over to the rock that Dooket had thrown and placed the object on top, revealing it to be a large piece of jade, pulsing with a sickly green light, which had hung about the sorcerer's neck by its golden chain. She fetched a second stone out of the snow and used that to crush the evil talisman. The two demons vanished screaming in flame.\n\n\"You destroyed them?\" Dooket asked.\n\nMira shook her head, panting heavily. \"I just sent them back where they came from. The spells that released them into our world were worked into the stone, which the sorcerer used to control them. That much I have heard about the summoning and control of demons... tricky business! Jenny, are you quite all right?\"\n\n\"Oh, fine,\" she said, brushing her long hair from her face; she still seemed rather disconcerted. She tried to rise and failed, and so she reluctantly allowed Erkin to assist her.\n\n\"Well, we've had quite a day!\" Lady Mira declared briskly. \"But we also need to be on our way, or the storms are going to pin us here for some time. I believe that I'm capable of flying Wind Dragon for the rest of the day.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll be able to fly the ship,\" Jenny assured her. \"I just need to rest a few minutes.\"\n\nMira started to protest, but had to consider that. \"Actually, it will take the two of us to navigate these mountains, so you might as well take the part you feel most comfortable with, steering or scouting. I'd keep us grounded for the rest of the day if I could. Boys, find us a way out of here.\"\n\n\"Going up is going to be harder than coming down,\" Dooket remarked, looking up at the towering slope at their backs.\n\n\"If we can't go up, then we might go around. You two see if you can find an easier way back. I want to have a closer look at this ship.\"\n\nWhile Jenny sat and rested, sheltered from the icy wind by the airship's broken hull, her mistress took a look inside. Mira would occasionally return to the break to toss something out, but she seemed far more interested in gathering evidence than salvage. Her search was hampered by the fact that she was having to walk on the walls of the ship, which made getting through the hatchways nearly impossible. She returned at last, and sat down beside her student with a heavy sigh.\n\n\"It's just as I suspected,\" she said. \"This ship was built in Elura, at Tashira for that matter, and went into freighter service fifteen years ago as the Sea Wind. The Southlanders must have stolen it quite recently and renamed it Blood Hawk. That indicates to me that they don't yet know how to build their own airships.\" \"Why did they attack us?\" Jenny asked.\n\nMira shrugged. \"For the practice, most likely. If they had taken us, we would have been just a small ship lost in a snowstorm. We were lucky, we took no harm, and we know a few things that we didn't know before. We know that the Southerners are getting aggressive, that they will steal our airships and attack others, and that they are summoning demons to serve them.\"\n\n\"I can't say that I'm pleased to know that,\" Jenny remarked dejectedly.\n\n\"Perhaps, but it's better than not knowing that they are doing it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Ale and Old Wizards", + "text": "The Sanctuary of Sorcery at Leyweld was an unimposing quadrangle of buildings in the hills overlooking that modest town. It was hardly the equal of the Academy at Tashira, being barely a quarter of the size of that great center of research and teaching, lacking most obviously the training grounds for young students as well as the construction sheds for airships. And yet, except for that significant difference in size, the two might have almost been patterned after much the same model.\n\nThe Sanctuary filled a few special functions that the Academy could not, as its name suggested. To a small degree, it was a place where sorcerers who had no wish to teach could come to perform special research, although its facilities were limited in that respect compared to the Academy. It was also a place were sorcerers could come for a few weeks to several months of peace and rest, and where those who had fallen victim to ailments of the mind, an occupational hazard, would be cared for in comfort until they were cured, recovered, or died. And it also possessed an entire wing which housed wizards retired after a lifetime of hard work. Sorcerers paid high dues to their guild, but it provided a great deal in return.\n\n\"It's good that we were able to arrive so early,\" Mira declared as the ship descended toward the large building atop the low hill in a clearing of the forest. A small village lay below, about a quarter of a mile away.\n\n\"Why is that?\" Jenny asked, Mira laughed. \"You have to catch Bresdenant during that brief period of the day between the time when he gets up and before he's had enough to drink to get thoroughly stewed.\"\n\nLady Mira brought Wind Dragon down in the yard to one side of the quadrangle, since that seemed a most convenient place to land, without a thought for gaining permission. Her philosophy on that subject had always been that it is easier to get people to go along with something after it was already done. They were still folding away the vanes when someone of authority did come to investigate. He may have even come to protest, although Mira never gave him a chance.\n\n\"Come with me,\" she told Jenny softly as they hurried to the boarding ladder. \"Ah, Bardas, my old friend! We meet again in bad times indeed, but perhaps it is not yet too late.\"\n\n\"Eh?\" The tall, white-haired man paused at the base of the ladder to look up at her questioningly. \"Too late for what?\" \"Just look at this!\" Mira declared. She had not waited for his reply, but had descended the ladder as nimbly as an acrobat. She directed him beneath the ship, while Jenny hurried to follow. \"We were attacked, Bardas! Attacked, and in these very mountains. If not for the skill of my two bodyguards and the quick and capable wits of my journey woman Jenny, my Wind Dragon would be lying wrecked on a snowy mountainside rather than their ship.\" \"Yes, someone sent you a few good fire arrows,\" Bardas remarked, then turned to look at her in open amazement. \"You mean to say that you were attacked by another airship? Do you know who?\"\n\n\"They hailed themselves as Blood Hawk, out of Alashera. And they had two winged demons coursing for them.\"\n\n\"The Dark, then.\" The old man actually seemed satisfied with that answer, either because it laid that question to rest or because it precluded the disagreeable possibility that one of their own sorcerers had piloted an airship against his own kind.\n\n\"But come,\" Mira said suddenly, turning him back toward the building. \"I came all this way to discover what I can about demons and Dark Magic, and it seems that I got a good example on the way. Is Bresdenant well?\"\n\n\"I suppose, but we had better hurry,\" Bardas remarked drily. Apparently Mira had not exaggerated about the old wizard's drinking habits.\n\nCoot Hall, Sanctuary's self-contained retirement home, was the portion of the quadrangle that faced south and slightly east to catch as much as possible of the sun in morning and winter. They hurried up the steps leading directly into the middle of that building, and found themselves immediately inside a well-appointed lobby or sitting room of some size. Jenny was momentarily surprised. She had been expecting older sorcerers and sorceresses of high standing, men and women of quiet dignity and great wisdom. What she found was the strangest, most decrepit-looking assembly of backwoods wizards and witches.\n\n\"Don't let Bresdenant bother you,\" Mira warned her student softly. \"He really is harmless. Even cute, in a crude way.\" \"What?\" Jenny asked, alarmed.\n\n\"You'll see.\"\n\nIndeed she did. Bresdenant was among the youngest of those gathered in this room, although he still looked to be in his late sixties. He was neither short nor tall but rather thin, his clothing undeniably rich but questionably tasteful and terribly loose and wrinkled. His unruly hair was limp and white as snow, as was his short beard, and there was a slightly wild and very impish look to his dark eyes. He had a noticeable shake, especially to his hands, which Jenny would have thought the effects of a stroke or some other ailment if she had not been warned about his drinking. For the moment he was involved in a very animated conversation with one of the hall's serving girls, who was rather impressed with his charms even if she did not seem to have the slightest idea of what he was lecturing her about.\n\nHe paused in mid-sentence and turned to look up at Mira, who was smiling down at him with her own impish smile. He stared at her intently, sitting on the edge of his chair. \"Do I know you?\" \"Of course you do, you old goat,\" she told him patiently. \"I'm the Sorceress Mira. You set your evil hooks in me a little over twenty years ago.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes! Kasdamir!\" he exclaimed in recognition. \"You sure were good in bed!\"\n\n\"You never found out,\" she told him evenly.\n\n\"Oh, yes! No wonder I didn't remember you. Hee, hee!\" His voice was not particularly deep, but it had a gravelly edge to it that made it captivating. And his curious laugh held an infectious charm. He reminded Jenny of her Norwegian Uncle Brent, who delighted in annoying his neighbors by pretending that he was going to sexually molest their cats.\n\nBardas had quietly indicated for the serving girl to be about her work, and now he pulled up chairs for the two guests. \"This is business, Brez. These two sorceresses have come a long way to speak with you. I have to be about my morning duties, so if you'll excuse me.\"\n\n\"Oh? What would I know that anyone would want to hear?\" \"You used to know more about the Dark than any sorcerer in the North,\" Mira said as she took her seat directly across from him. \"There were so many things that you never would teach me, but now I have to know.\"\n\n\"Why? Do you plan to go against the Dark?\" he demanded. \"You know that the Dark has returned,\" she told him. \"You knew that it was out there years ago, growing, but no one wanted to hear that. Well, it's coming to us, now. We fought Servants of the Dark on our way here, and I had to dispatch two winged demons the only way I could.\"\n\n\"Of course they're here,\" Bresdenant declared. \"You didn't have to come all this way to tel! me that. I felt them five days ago. They were way up in the air, and they were hunting. You fought them?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"They had a stolen airship. Jenny was flying my own Wind Dragon when they attacked us in a storm. Jenny outflew them brilliantly, and my two guards were able to bring their ship down by ripping away one of her vanes. But we still had two winged demons to deal with, and the only thing I knew was to find the body of the wizard who controlled them and destroy the jewel that was spelled with the magic that kept them in our world. \" \"That's doing it the hard way,\" Bresdenant said, sitting back in his chair. \"Still, if you were caught unprepared, it was the best you could do.\"\n\n\"What could we have done, if we had been ready?\" Mira asked. The old wizard frowned. \"You were trained a Veridan Warrior, were you not?\"\n\n\"Of course!\" Mira declared with a note of pride.\n\n\"Then you know how to fight demons. Or at least you know how to begin. In the old days all warriors were given weapons spelled with special magic, so that the touch of their blades could reach right into their own level of existence and hurt demons. Sorcerers also knew how to make their own magic to fight the Dark.\"\n\n\"Jenny shot beams of blue light at the demons that scorched them good.\"\n\n\"Did you?\" Bresdenant radiated approval. \"But do you know what it was you did?\"\n\n\"No, not really,\" Jenny answered self-consciously, brushing her long, blue hair away from her face.\n\n\"No, of course not. You acted entirely out of instinct. You've seen the Dark, haven't you? You've never looked close enough to learn any of its secrets, but you know how its magic feels and you know how to make your own magic respond accordingly.\"\n\n\"Yes, I guess so,\" she agreed with great reluctance.\n\n\"You mean that's the answer?\" Mira asked incredulously. \"That's how to fight the Dark directly?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Bresdenant leaned back in his chair with that sense of triumphant satisfaction of a teacher whose student had just made an important discovery. \"To know how to fight the Dark, you have to look deep enough into its ways for your own magic to get some instinctive feel for it. From that time on, your magic is not only able to recognize an enemy, but it knows what to do about it.\"\n\n\"But magic isn't a matter of instinct,\" she protested.\n\n\"It is when you pit Light Magic against the Dark,\" he told her impatiently. \"You also forget all that I ever tried to pound into that thick head of yours. Wizards and witches differ from sorcerers and sorceresses like us in that they do operate far more by instinct than education. Of course, that is also the reason why their magic is so limited. They don't really have the slightest idea of what they're doing. You get better results by guiding your magic.\n\n\"But in fighting Dark Magic, you really can't know what you're doing. If you understood Dark Magic that well, you would belong to the Dark. You let your magic do the fighting for you. Apparently this student of yours has a very good instinct for how to go about that.\"\n\nMira seemed to be somewhat uncomfortable with that idea. As a research sorceress, she had always believed in and supported the theory that all mages benefited from careful training, and that magic worked best when merged with all appropriate sciences. She did not care to have to consider that she possessed any professional prejudices against untrained wizards and instinctive magic, but that appeared to be exactly the case. She had to remind herself to be open-minded on the subject, but this unexpected turn of events had a very bitter taste.\n\n\"Ah, crap!\" Bresdenant declared, noticing her reaction of distaste. \"You know, that's exactly what's wrong with magic these days. All you women took over, and you want everything to run nice and predictable. You've even got the men these days thinking the same way, but I still remember that magic has to come first from the instinct. And that's why you sorceresses don't stand a chance of fighting the Dark.\"\n\n\"We've done well enough so far,\" she reminded him.\n\n\"You were lucky. You were trained all wrong to be able to control the magic you need every time you need it,\"\n\n\"But you trained me.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He recovered quickly. \"That's quite beside the point. You sorceresses have taken Light Magic from a weapon against evil and made it a slave of your precious sciences.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Mira asked coldly.\n\n\"That's right,\" Bresdenant declared. \"You can't name me one important sorceress working today who couldn't benefit from what I'm telling you right now.\"\n\n\"Not Melithen Reid, or Kerie Wold?\" Mira demanded. \"Or what about Deiven or Harlayn? Or even Lady Tenika?\"\n\n\"No, not a one.\"\n\n\"But you trained each and every one of those people,\" she pointed out.\n\nBresdenant considered that for a moment, and shrugged. \"So? Anyone can make mistakes.\"\n\nMira was prepared to launch a major attack when she reconsidered and closed her mouth. She reminded herself that this was not the man that she had known twenty years ago, when she had been a shy, self-effacing journey woman. Bresdenant had always been a self-important, lecherous ass. Now he was only a lonely, half-senile old drunk who would gladly keep her here arguing all day just for the attention and company. It might be doing him some good, but she had all the forces of the Dark and the Kingdoms of the Sea to worry about.\n\n\"That is quite beside the point,\" she told him slowly and sternly. \"The issue will become irrelevant if the Empire is reestablished and the Dark Priesthood drives us back into the arctic wastes. I must be on my way into the South as soon as possible, and I must know anything you can possibly tell me that will be useful to that mission.\"\n\n\"Well, let me think about that.\" Bresdenant rubbed his beard Ihoughtfully, and reached for a mug of fruit juice on the table beside his chair. But Mira leaped up and took the cup from his hand.\n\n\"What is this?\" she demanded, sniffing at it suspiciously. \"Just cherry juice,\" he insisted, looking rather hurt.\n\n\"Cherry juice, my ass!\" Mira declared. \"This is ale. You're still up to your old tricks, it seems, conjuring alcohol out of the sugar in fruit juice. Why do you think you have to drink so much?\" \"Why, to forget.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe considered that, and shrugged. \"I forgot.\"\n\n\"I'm glad that things are working out for you,\" Jenny remarked drily.\n\n\"Ah, about the Dark...\" Mira gently tried to get the conversation back on the subject. She had the suspicion that Bresdenant was trying to avoid the matter. She wondered why he had suddenly gotten so perverse.\n\n\"Oh, you don't want to go into the south,\" he told her suddenly. \"That's a terrible place for a sorceress, if they're worshipping the Dark again. Do you know what they'll do to you, if they catch you?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to let them catch me,\" she informed him. \"I've already got a plan that should keep us out of trouble long enough to discover what we want and get back out again. But I need to know anything you can tell me. What about those spells you mentioned to make weapons that we can use against demons?\" \"Now did I say that?\"\n\n\"You most certainly did.\"\n\n\"Well, it's been a long time, and you must understand that I never actually tried any of this stuff firsthand. I'll have to look .. well, hello there!\"\n\n\"Oh, you're cute!\" Addena Sheld said, tickled with delight, as she stepped up from behind the two sorceresses and sat down on the arm of the old wizard's chair. \"You didn't tell me whether or not you needed me to tell this distinguished older gentleman what I saw.\"\n\n\"Ah... Addena did some judicious sightseeing in the South for me when she was there on tour this summer,\" Lady Mira explained, looking at her friend questioningly. \"Addena Sheld is a very famous concert singer, you know.\"\n\n\"Oh, you don't say!\" Bresdenant radiated excited delight like a rat in a cheese pantry. \"So, are you going to sing for me?\" \"Right now I need for you to sing for me,\" Mira said impatiently, wondering what in the world had possessed Addena to make such an unexpected appearance.\n\n\"Listen, if I tell you all of this, the two of you are going to go running off into the South and get yourself into trouble,\" he told her firmly. \"If what you say is going on down there, then it's no place for a woman.\"\n\n\"I've been there,\" Addena declared reproachfully, in a way that encouraged him not to disagree with her. She knew an old fart when she saw one; she had been forced to deal with enough of his kind in the past. \"As Mira told you, I've already gone south as her spy.\"\n\nMira noticed that Jenny had the same wicked look in her eyes as she had when she had scorched those two demons.\n\n\"Do you really think these two could cavort with the Dark Priesthood and get away with their skins?\" Bresdenant asked her very seriously.\n\n\"You don't know these two as well as I do, \" Addena answered. \"They could probably get away with pretending to be Dark Priestesses.\"\n\n\"Now that's exactly the point.\" He turned to look at the two sorceresses. \"You seem to think that your relative familiarity with the Dark will help you to understand your enemies, hide you from them and perhaps even fight them if you must. But, you see, that's the old trap. To fight the Dark, you must look into the shadows. But once you do, you're easy bait for its true servants. If they get their hands on you, they're going to try to force you over to the Dark. And then you'll find it only too easy to fall, because you have seen the Dark. That's what they used to do with our sorcerers. The very thing that's your advantage is also your disadvantage.\" \"I understand that,\" Lady Mira agreed, although the idea clearly bothered her. And it bothered her more for Jenny's sake. \"But we still have to go.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because if we don't, then they're going to come into our lands after us in their own good time. They've already started... or do you need to see the arrow damage on the bottom of my airship to believe that? We've got to go now, to see what's going on and what those people plan to do, before it's too late for any of us to stop it.\"\n\nBresdenant looked up at Addena, still seated on the arm of his chair. \"Are you going?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath and sighed. \"I've already been, remember? And I will go back, if it will do any good.\"\n\nThe old wizard sat for a long moment, as if trying to reconcile himself to some idea that disagreed with every principle he held true. He sighed heavily. \"Ah, women. They aren't half trained the way they should be, they wouldn't have the slightest idea of what to do in a fight, and they probably don't even know what to look for. But you mean to go, I can see that. And I sure as hell don't see anyone offering to go in your place. I'd go myself, if I... Hell, I'm just an old man. I might as well sit around here all day and learn to do something harmless, like basketmaking or weaving.\"\n\n\"You were weaving when I first knew you twenty years ago,\" Mira remarked with just a hint of mischief.\n\n\"Yes, that's a fact!\" He was as quick as anyone to laugh at his drinking habits. He almost seemed to consider drunkenness the major accomplishment of his life. He paused again, and frowned. \"I've got a book where I've collected all the spells and lore I've run across over the years on how to fight the Dark. A lot of that stuff has come down second-and third-hand from hundreds or even thousands of years ago. And I've never been able to test the accuracy of any of it, you must understand.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Mira agreed. \"Still, it is better than nothing. What can it tell me?\"\n\n\"Oh, any number of things you might find useful. I can recall offhand that it does have spells for forcing skulking demons to reveal themselves, and tests to see if someone belongs to the Dark. It has spells to let you shield yourself from the attacks of demons. It has spells that can be woven into the metal of swords and arrows to allow them to bite into demon flesh. Oh, it has quite a lot of useful little tidbits.\"\n\n\"I need it. But what about magic...?\"\n\n\"Damn it, I've already explained that to you,\" he said impatiently. \"You develop your instincts until your magic knows how to take care of you. Don't you worry about that, though. There are a few hints in the book itself that might make that easier. I don't know. I've never tested it myself. And you really won't know how well you're learning until your magic has to prove itself in battle.\"\n\n\"Why don't we go get that book?\" Addena suggested, then gave Mira a beseeching look that suggested that she did not care to be alone with this old wizard in his room. \"You need to start on it as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Yes, I certainly do,\" Lady Mira agreed as she rose to follow them. Bresdenant, who alone remained seated, looked about in a bewildered manner, suddenly realizing that he was going to have all three females alone in his room and wondering what he was going to do about it. But at that moment the two young mercenaries made their appearance, moving in to stand protectively behind both of the sorceresses. Their attempts at looking grim and hard were laughable, but Bresdenant was in no position to argue. Looking like he had just tasted something terrible, he rose to lead the way.\n\n\"If I had known that we were going to have a damned party, I would have called for more fruit juice,\" he muttered miserably.\n\nLady Mira indicated for the bodyguards to follow behind Addena and the wizard, since she was the one who was placing her head in the lion's mouth for the sake of their mission. Jenny fell in close beside her mistress. \"Just what is going on here?\"\n\n\"I wish I knew,\" Mira answered, seemingly inclined to laugh. \"That old goat was beginning to get obstinate, almost as if he had decided that he wanted us to fail. Then Addena arrived and was perfectly willing to play him for the fool he is, and I have to let her. Letting her keep him too confused and distracted to turn devious is the only way I know to be able to trust what he tells us, and I still don't trust him completely. Having that book will be a big help, and Addena is the only one who has a chance of getting it away from him.\"\n\n\"He doesn't much like me,\" Jenny said, confused. She had always been such an eager, delightful personality that she had never had to deal with that problem.\n\n\"He likes women who are stupid and impressionable, and you are neither one of those. He especially dislikes women who are more intelligent than he is. He doesn't much care for my company right now either, so don't let it worry you.\"\n\nBresdenant had one of the larger apartments in Coot Hall\u2014\n\nJenny was beginning to appreciate that name\u2014consisting of a linlroom, a small kitchen and a front study. Bookshelves lined every wall of that front room and they were packed full, if in a haphazard manner, but half again that many books overflowed the shelves to end up as orphans on the floor, the extra chairs, the vast desk and even the kitchen table. But the books had to battle lor any available space with empty mugs, bits of magical paraphernalia, dirty plates, empty bottles and ordinary trash. The vis-Uors picked their way carefully through this maze, although the mercenaries remained on guard to either side of the door. Mira kicked a wad of paper, which deflected off the wall, and the side of the desk and into the large trash basket. That last item appeared to be the cleanest fixture in the room.\n\n\"You were a slob when I first met you, and you're still a slob,\" Mira remarked under her breath.\n\nJenny looked even less happy. The floor had an odd tendency to crunch as they walked.\n\n\"Oh, do you think you can ever find it?\" Addena asked with innocent consternation. Mira cleared her throat in a rather obvious effort to keep from laughing.\n\n\"Oh, I know it's in here someplace,\" Bresdenant assured her jovially as he forced his way through the undergrowth to the desk. I le happened to glance up at the two guards. \"Where did you get lliose two boys, anyway?\"\n\n\"Oh, they're just my guards,\" Mira answered with her own brand of innocence. \"The Trassek twins, Dooket and Erkin.\" \"Twins?\" the old wizard asked suspiciously. Dooket was very tall and dark, while Erkin was short and blond. But he decided lo avoid arguing the point, fearful of what he might be given as logic for this situation. He began to dig through the upper layers of the desk, then paused to stare at Mira. \"I remember you now! You used to be shorter.\"\n\nJenny and Addena stared at her in surprise, but Mira did her best to pretend that he had not said that. \"What do you mean, you only now recognize me? I was your student for six years.\" \"Yes, but you were barely four and a half feet tall back then,\" he insisted. \"I remember now. They found you doing cheap tricks and performing as a midget clown in a traveling circus, but you had such talent that they convinced you to go to the Academy. My, but you've grown!\"\n\n\"I was just late to get my full growth,\" Mira declared indignantly. Addena had collapsed in helpless laughter atop a pile of books behind the desk; Erkin was biting his tongue, while Dooket stood with his face in the comer behind the door. Only Jenny did not appear amused, although she could not have been more surprised. Mira looked at her, and shrugged. \"I got tired of being so short.\"\n\n\"Oh, I can understand that,\" Jenny agreed. \"Magic does sometimes have its benefits.\"\n\n\"Now, if we could take a look at that book...\"\n\n\"Ah, do you think that you can do something about my nose?\" Jenny interrupted her gently.\n\n\"Your nose is just fine, child,\" Mira assured her, and turned to glare at the wizard. \"If you don't mind.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. Here it is.\" He extracted a large but rather thin book from beneath a stack of papers. Mira made her way to his side as he laid the book out on the table, quickly checking its table of contents. It had the appearance of having been machine-printed, except that the style was very ornate; Bresdenant had, at one time, been very meticulous with his magic.\n\n\"This looks rather impressive,\" she admitted.\n\n\"The work of a lifetime,\" Bresdenant declared proudly. \"No part of this book is pure conjecture except for those parts clearly labeled so. I still have the source material, although a lot of it has to be spelled to translate the original text... and if you can find it.\"\n\n\"Will you let me read through this text?\" Mira asked guardedly. \"They really do need to have that book, considering how important it is for them to know how to fight the Dark,\" Addena added in a rather seductively beseeching tone, moving up close beside the old wizard and holding tightly to his arm. Bresdenant sighed deeply, knowing that he was going to allow himself to be had.\n\n\"Now, I'm not about to take the only copy of this text into the South with me, where it might be lost,\" Mira was quick to point out, although she was surprised to see that Bresdenant probably would have let them have the book. \"I can get paper from Wind Dragon and spell myself a complete copy in a matter of minutes.\" \"Oh, well, you can surely do that,\" Bresdenant agreed pleasantly enough, relieved that he was not going to lose his own copy after all. \"How soon do you want to get started?\"\n\n\"I might as well send Addena after paper right away and get on with it,\" she decided. She did not say that she actually meant to make several complete copies, so that at least one could be sent to the Academy. \"We really do need to be on our way in the morning, but I would like a chance to read through this material lirst.\"\n\n\"Would you like to go with me to get that paper?\" Addena said, taking the hint to get Bresdenant out of his room. \"I'm sure that you would like to see Wind Dragon. She really is the most beautiful airship ever.\"\n\n\"I don't much care for flying,\" Bresdenant said uncertainly as he followed her toward the door.\n\n\"Oh, I didn't mean that we should try to get it up.\"\n\n\"Hee, hee! That's what you think!\"\n\n\"Oh, piffle!\" Mira declared impatiently. \"You always did have a thing for sex.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure. I just never get to use it.\" Bresdenant was so pleased with himself that he tripped in the debris, but Dooket caught him before he hit the ground and returned him to an upright position. He stared up at the giant mercenary thoughtfully, rubbing his beard, then hurried out the door after Addena. Erkin closed it behind him.\n\n\"My word, I..Mira was caught off guard by a loud burst of giggling from the hall, followed by Bresdenant's rather bacchanal laughter. She glanced up at the door. \"And to think, all we have to worry about are demons and the Dark Priesthood.\" \"Will he...?\" Jenny asked nervously.\n\n\"Oh, great stars, no!\" the sorceress declared. \"As far as I've ever been able to tell, he's still a virgin who talks a lot. Why don't the two of you go after them and get that paper? Addena, I trust, knows to keep him away long enough for us to make several copies of this.\"\n\n\"Why do we always got to run your errands?\" Dooket demanded indignantly, and Erkin nodded. \"We're mercenaries.\" \"You are two postpubescent clowns whom I pay better than you deserve to do whatever I tell you,\" she explained patiently. \"Begone.\"\n\n\"Did you hear that, brother?\" Dooket demanded as they turned to leave. \"She called us clowns.\"\n\n\"She ought to know.\"\n\n\"What's a postpubescent, anyway?\"\n\n\"It means you have a beard, brother.\" Erkin paused in the doorway to explain.\n\n\"Oh.\" Dooket made an exaggerated grimace, as if he was forcing a reluctant brain into motion. \"But I've got no beard.\" \"Not on your chin, you dolt,\" Erkin said impatiently. The closing of the door spared the two sorceresses any further nonsense.\n\n\"My word, has the whole world gone mad today?\" Mira demanded as she sat down in the chair, which made a very unusual squeak of protest. She jumped up, brushed something off onto the floor, and sat down again. She checked the contents of the book quickly and turned to the indicated page. \"Yes, here we go. He does have quite a large section on the origins and nature of the Dark and the calling forth of Dark Forces. Although he does indicate that he does not consider the source material to have been absolutely reliable.\"\n\n\"What do you hope to find?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"At this point, anything would be useful. Specifically, I want to know how to recognize agents of the Dark from a safe distance, ways to take some measure of the Dark Forces that are gathered in a specific place, and the ways that the Dark Sorcerers work their magic. And, not incidental to all of that, how to get away with our hides. Why don't you prepare a place where we can assemble five copies of this?\"\n\nThat request fell into the category of things easier said than done, and after some difficulty Jenny had a small table clear enough to lay out the five manuscripts. Dooket and Erkin had returned with all the paper they could find by that time, then retreated to guard the door from the outside so that the two sorceresses could work undisturbed. Mira counted out five sheets and laid them stacked atop the first printed page of the text, then muttered a couple of words with the appropriate gestures. When she picked up the stack of paper, she had five perfect copies of that page.\n\nJenny watched the process with considerable interest. Mira seemed to have a spell for everything, including cabalistic copying and magical fax.\n\n\"Ah, nice,\" she remarked as she handed the pages to her student, who quickly separated them face down into five separate piles. She was already counting out paper for the next page. \"But we do need to hurry. I can imagine what poor Addena is having lo put up with, trying to keep one step ahead of that old fart. I had to put up with it for six years, remember?\"\n\n\"He never caught you?\" Jenny asked as she reached over to receive the second page.\n\n\"Brez is a bother, not a danger,\" she explained. \"He was younger then, but so was I. And a much smaller target than I am now.\"\n\nBy that evening, Mira had determined that the old wizard had either never really understood all that much about the material that he had so carefully collected, or else he had since forgotten the better part of it. She saw now that his earlier avoidance of her questions was due largely to the fact that he simply did not know the answers. That also meant that she and Jenny were very much on their own in the matter of finding the answers they needed in that book. And she hoped that the answers they needed were in that book, since they would have to learn its secrets on their way south.\n\nLady Mira may have hoped for better, but she had honestly expected no more than that. She now had five copies of that very important book neatly bound, one each for herself and her young student, one to remain safely at home, and the last two to be sent on to the Academy. That way all that information would be safe from even the worst of catastrophes, either their failure to return from their mission in the South or the loss of Bresdenant's library to spontaneous combustion.\n\nShe considered the first part of this mission to have been very successful; the rest could only go half as well, and they might just come out of this alive and enlightened. Her first inclination was to get Wind Dragon back in the sky, return Addena to Bennasport, stock the airship for an extended journey and collect J.T., and be on their way to the southern sea. Addena was quick to agree with that idea; she had reached the limit of both her strength and her patience in dealing with Bresdenant.\n\nThe next time she came, Mira meant to bring Dame Tugg with her. Those two strong and extremely peculiar personalities would either murder each other, or marry. And the both of them deserved either fate.\n\nBresdenant surprised them early that evening by paying a visit to Wind Dragon. Addena heard him coming, singing coarsely and telling himself snips of rank jokes, and locked herself in her cabin.\n\n\"Well, I don't suppose that I'll ever see you people again,\" Bresdenant remarked. \"I'll regret that. You're not much, but you're all I've got.\"\n\nMira's brows did calisthenics. \"Really.\"\n\n\"All the same, I will wish you luck in your mission. That book is the best that I can do for you.\"\n\n\"And we appreciate that,\" Mira assured him.\n\n\"Well, I might as well call it a night. It's a night.\" He turned to leave, but paused to look back. \"If you do make it to Alashera, by the way, you might have a look around for the Heart of Flame. \" \"The Heart of Flame was destroyed thousands of years ago,\" Mira said, as if daring him to deny that.\n\n\"So they say,\" Bresdenant answered as he leaned over the rail. \"The Servants of the Dark were supposed to have destroyed it themselves during the fall of Alashera. But, as you read through that book, you'll see that I've cited three references to the Prophecy of Haldephren, the High Priest of Alashera. He claimed to his followers, before they scattered and left him to his death, that his intention was to seal the Heart of Flame within the chambers of Mount Drashand. There it was to lie hidden until some later day, when the Forces of the Dark would again grow in strength and open the chamber for the new priesthood. It just occurred to me to wonder if they've found the damned thing, or if they've even bothered to look.\"\n\n\"I'll make a special point of that,\" Mira promised him. \"Do you think that the Heart of Flame still exists?\"\n\nBresdenant only shrugged. \"I've always thought it possible that the thing still exists, since there was no direct proof of its destruction. I really just don't know. I've never been in the South to have a look for myself, although I always meant to go.\"\n\n\"Will you go with us now?\" Mira asked.\n\nBresdenant thought about it for a long moment, but shook his head. \"I'm getting too old for this type of thing, and flying makes me dizzy.\"\n\nIt's because you're a drunk, Mira thought. But she kept that to herself. Matters were getting more and more complicated at every turn, so that their journey into the South was becoming a larger and more complex task every step along the way. But, since that was the way such matters usually turned out, she was not completely surprised.\n\n\"Is there anything else I should know?\" she asked.\n\n\"Well, ever heard of the Prophecy of Maerildyn?\" Bresdenant offered.\n\nMira was astounded. \"I've heard of Maerildyn, of course, but nothing about her having a prophecy. Just what does the prophecy purport?\"\n\n\"Hell, I don't know!\" Bresdenant declared. \"I don't much Ihink that anyone in the North knows. It dealt with the return of the Empire, and no one seemed to want to think about that. Only traces survive.\"\n\n\"Any hints?\"\n\n\"Just two,\" the wizard said, obviously beginning to enjoy himself, as any true sorcerer would during a scholarly discourse. \"The prophecy is said to deal with the return of the Forces of the Dark, the reestablishment of the Dark Priesthood, and the second rise of the Alasheran Empire. That seems a fairly safe assumption, under the circumstances during which the prophecy was delivered. Of the second part, all we have is a bare fragment of what is supposed to be the original prophecy.\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes upward as he searched through the cluttered library of his memory.\n\n\"Dragons gold and dragons black Seek to gain what each may lack.\n\nWhite and black, red and blue, Fortune hangs between the two.\"\n\n\"White and black is obvious enough,\" Mira mused. \"But red and blue? Do you have any idea?\"\n\nBresdenant shrugged helplessly. \"I have no idea.\"\n\n\"The Empire was coming down on their heads and everyone was busy making prophecies. I guess that they had already called the odds.\" Mira propped her elbows on the table, rested her chin on her hands and rolled her eyes. \"Very well. One more small task in our busy vacation itinerary. Wish you to impart any more gems of information, oh sotted sage?\"\n\nBresdenant spared one of his impish grins. \"Have you ever seen a demon?\"\n\n\"A winged demon?\" she offered, as if asking him not to tell her that things got worse than that.\n\nHe waved that away impatiently. \"The robins of spring, compared to the big beggars I've read about. I'm only glad that I've never seen one, at least not when I was sober.\"\n\n\"That leaves precious little time for sane enlightenment,\" Mira reflected to herself, muttering under her breath. She looked over at him. \"Can we fight them?\"\n\n\"As far as I can tell, yes,\" he agreed, nodding thoughtfully. \"People used to do it quite regularly. With the right weapons and a little experience, it seems that you can meet them on fairly equal terms. Listen, why don't just the three of you stop by my apartment later on for a little party? I can teach you a thing or two about having a good time.\"\n\nBy mutual consent between the two sorceresses and the singer, they declined a generous offer of rooms in Coot Hall for the night. They spent the night in Wind Dragon, and drew in the boarding ramp behind them.\n\n\"More prophecies,\" Jenny muttered to herself. \"I seem to be drawing the damned things like flies. As if the one wasn't really enough.\"\n\n\"Oh, cheer up,\" Mira told her. \"I'm not so sure that we do have more than just the one prophecy. They all seem to be different perspectives of the same thing.\"\n\n\"That's easy for you to say,\" Jenny complained. \"For you, it's just any other professional puzzle. I'm the one who has to put up with blue hair and dire fate.\"\n\n\"You do?\" Mira stared at her intently. \"I'd never noticed.\"\n\nLate during the night, a dark figure slipped from one shadow to another as it made its stealthful way across the yard outside the Sanctuary toward the parked airship. It made a sudden dart across the open, disappearing within the dark recess beneath Wind Dragon's hull. Lady Mira had been obliged to crank down the wheels and move the ship to a more suitable location. Now the furtive figure cut the brake cables to each wheel, then pulled out the blocks under the wheels themselves.\n\nThe little airship began to move slowly, almost lazily, her long, slender bowsprit swinging around as she followed the gentle slope. Because she rolled on inflated nibber tires with shock-absorbing struts, Wind Dragon hardly even shuddered as she stepped gently down off the curb onto the large, flat paving stones of the road leading down toward the village. Fortunately the curb itself was high enough to guide the wheels of the airship. That late at night, no one but an occasional cat observed as the ship lumbered through the very middle of the village.\n\nThe really interesting part came on the far side of the village. The paving stones and the guiding curb suddenly disappeared, and Wind Dragon seemed destined to crash into a stand of trees past a sudden curve in the road. That might have been better, since the ship was moving at hardly more than an indifferent walk and would not have damaged herself to any great extent. As it happened, she chose that particular moment to wander off the road and her right forward wheel truck ran down a wooden road sign. That had the unexpected effect of turning the forward wheels to the right, and the airship just barely managed to negotiate the turn.\n\nNow she began to gain speed slowly and she descended the gentle slope of the portage road that ran alongside the barge tracks, allowing passage for the teams of horses that hauled the empty ore barges back up to the mines from their long journey down to the coast. Slowly she moved off to the left toward the barge tracks. First the left wheels stepped down into the deep stone-lined trough, and then the right ones followed. It was quite a step down, although the ship was still moving along at no more than an uninspired run and her passengers were used to sleeping in a moving airship.\n\nWind Dragon was so small and narrow that her wheels fit almost exactly within the confines of the barge tracks. Now that the way was straight and open, the airship began to gather speed steadily.\n\nJenny awoke early the next morning and stepped out on the central deck for a breath of air. The morning wind seemed oddly brisk, but the air was cool and damp. She took a deep, full breath and released it slowly, and stood at the left rail watching the dark wall of pines whizzing past only a few yards away. Jenny just stood there at the rail watching the forest, which was deep and shadowy with a type of storybook charm, as if the eternal twilight beneath those tall pines hid the little cottages of reticent dwarves and the woodland hunts and banquets of elves. She knew such things from firsthand experience. She took another deep breath and paused.\n\nNow, what is wrong with this picture?\n\n\"Mira!\" she shouted with the impressive clarity and volume of a trained voice as she hurried to the wheel. \"Kasdamir Gerran, you overgrown midget! Get your ass on deck this moment!\"\n\nMira was a good long time in making her appearance on deck, and even then she was wearing nothing except an oversized flannel shirt and carrying a cup of tea in one hand. She yawned hugely. \"What is it, child?\"\n\n\"We're moving!\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Drifting gently along on a sea of dreams, the soft breeze that fills our sail bearing us pleasantly away from that fair land of Morpheus.\" She paused, and stared over the rail. \"Holy shit!\"\n\n\"May I take that to mean that you haven't the slightest idea how we happened into this remarkable situation?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"I hope to kiss a pig.\" Mira hurried to the helm deck, and stopped short. \"The brakes are on.\"\n\n\"We have no brakes,\" Jenny informed her.\n\nMira looked over Jenny's shoulder to check the airspeed indicator. The dial listed up to a hundred knots, to allow for the measurement of headwinds. A very large percentage of the total lay on the wrong side of the pointer. She frowned. \"I wonder how long we've been at it.\"\n\n\"I wonder who put us here,\" Jenny countered. \"I know better than to think that Wind Dragon broke all her cables and jumped her blocks.\"\n\n\"And I know better than to think that Wind Dragon just happened to wander all the way from the Sanctuary, through the middle of a fairly large village and somehow managed to find herself in the barge tracks,\" Mira added, and she was never to know just how wrong she was. \"I can imagine setting us free to wreck, but I just can't figure out why they did this. I wonder what day this is?\"\n\nJenny stared at her. \"What does that matter?\"\n\nMira shrugged. \"Probably nothing, since we're in trouble either way. I was just thinking that the ore barges are rolled down to the port in a single group for two days, unloaded for two days and hauled by teams of horses back up for a journey of five days for reloading. The schedule is designed to insure that all the traffic on the line is always moving in the same direction.\"\n\n\"Land ho!\" Dooket shouted from the bow. \"No, strike that. Water ho!\"\n\nThe two sorceresses peered ahead. They were just corning over the top of a low rise that began a final long, steep run down to the distant coast. The forest ran unbroken right up to the edge of the sea, which was contained in a narrow bay between two long arms of land to either side. There was a town of considerable size at the end of the line, with sailing ships at rest in the harbor. The end of the line was the part that most occupied their attention, since it was no more than five miles ahead and looked to be at least a mile below. The ship's altimeter, operating by air pressure, insisted that they would indeed descend two thousand feet in a very short time. Jenny thought that, by the time they reached the end of this grade, she was going to find out what it was like to drag race a tea clipper.\n\n\"And airships don't have reverse thrust,\" Jenny said to herself. She turned to her mistress'. \"Lady Mira, do you know anything about this port? What happens when we come to the end?\" \"One of two things,\" Mira mused. \"We'll go right through the warehouses, unless the barges stop us first. That depends upon what day it is. Anticipating your next question, there will be no more than a mile of open ground in which we can swing out the vanes and take to the air. On this slope, even our brakes would never stop us now.\"\n\n\"You'll need to take the wheel,\" Jenny told her.\n\n\"I'll be quick,\" Mira promised as she headed toward her cabin. She waved to the two mercenaries on her way. \"Have everything rigged so that we can swing out the vanes and lock them in place as quickly as possible.\"\n\nJenny tried her best to hold the ship to the center of the track, fearful of losing a wheel or even a stnit from rubbing against the curb as their speed rose steadily. She wondered about their chances of surviving this while she watched the twins as they prepared the rigging, working to have the vanes as ready as possible to swing out as soon as they reached a space open enough. The increasing wind of their passage was making their work more and more difficult as Wind Dragon began to scream down that final slope.\n\nMira and Addena both appeared soon enough, suitably attired. Addena hurried to help the boys with the rigging, while the sorceress returned to the helm deck to take the wheel. She expected that Jenny would have gone forward to help with the rigging, but that was as ready as it could be. Instead she returned moments later with two ropes, one coiled over her shoulder while she trailed the other across the deck, and a large grappling hook. She quickly tied one end of the coiled rope to the hook and the other looped around both of the stem bracing bits used to tie up the ship.\n\n\"You'll only wreck us good if you try to stop us at this speed,\" Mira observed, although she made that something of a question.\n\nShe was perfectly aware that the girl knew that quite well.\n\n\"I'm not trying to stop us,\" Jenny said as she continued her work. \"I'm going to try to snag something that will slow us down, maybe buy us more time to get those vanes out.\"\n\nMira said nothing more, and Jenny continued her work. They came at last to the bottom of the slope and leveled out at a speed that they guessed to be on the better side of a hundred knots. Jenny stood, bracing herself against the wind by holding to the rail, the grappling hook in one hand, as she looked forward along the left side of the ship for a likely target. Wind Dragon emerged suddenly from the depths of the forest into a small belt of farmland behind the town, and she had to take the first target she could find.\n\nUnfortunately, it happened to be a small wagon loaded with round bales of straw that had been left right beside the barge track. There was an explosion of yellow straw, and the little wagon leaped right off its axles to follow the airship. It bounced and skipped at the end of the stout rope, smoking thickly almost at once because of friction from the stones before it suddenly burst into a bloom of flames. Wind Dragon began to slow noticeably, although she would still ram herself rather violently into the warehouses only a few hundred yards ahead if she could not get herself off the ground.\n\nJenny had tied the second rope to the first where it trailed out through an opening in the siderail. Now she cut the end of the first rope, and the weight of the wagon pulled the second rope tight. As it did, it gave a very firm tug on several other ropes and all four of Wind Dragon's vanes snapped out straight and firm. The Trassek twins hurried to secure the locking pins at the joints of the vanes and tighten up the remaining lines. Jenny could not release the burning wagon until they did.\n\n\"We've got an open path right through the middle of town,\" Mira reported, both delighted and horrified by what she could see coming. \"There are wide, open avenues to either side of the track. That should give us an extra two hundred yards of running room.\"\n\n\"We're going to need it,\" Jenny shouted back. \"Unless you want to fling this burning wagon right into the middle of the warehouses.\"\n\n\"Damn, this whole town could go,\" Mira muttered.\n\n\"Flight ready!\" Dooket shouted from the central deck.\n\n[ Mira began to apply lift from the levitation vanes, and Wind ]\n\nDragon began to rise steadily from the narrow canyon of two-and three-story buildings lining either side of the track. Jenny leaned over the back rail, watching anxiously until the rope was reaching almost straight down and the burning wagon slowly left the ground. It gave the edge of the roof of the first warehouse a glancing blow, but it did little damage and set no fire.\n\nThe only trouble was that Mira had no control over the ship, since the steering vanes were still retracted. Addena and the Trassek twins hurried to the bowsprit to rig those vanes as Mira took Wind Dragon out over the bay, allowing the ship to lose momentum. Jenny was about to cut the rope when the burning wagon collapsed, scattering flaming debris across the water.\n\nMira's intention was to bring the ship down in the water long enough for the steering vanes to be rigged. Wind Dragon was still moving along at a fair pace about twenty feet above the waves when the grappling hook, still trailing underwater at the end of its tether, suddenly snagged something that was even more reluctant to move than the airship. That brought the line up short, sending Addena and the two young barbarians over the rail and into the water.\n\nFinding her ship standing nearly on end, Mira had to apply full forward thrust as well as levitation to keep Wind Dragon from crashing stem-first into the waves. She was hanging from the forward wheel, staring over her shoulder at the waves below. Then, inexplicably, Wind Dragon gradually began to make headway, rising slowly bow-first into the sky. There was a curious stirring in the dark waters of the bay as some odd, shadowy form began to move toward the surface. The waves parted, and a sunken schooner nearly as large as Wind Dragon herself rose above the vanes. But it would go no farther, since the airship could hardly lift it into the sky.\n\n\"That's one hell of a rope,\" Jenny observed as she cut the knot.\n\nThat was probably not the smartest move, but they really had no choice in the matter. Wind Dragon shot forward as if she had been launched from some immense catapult. A long moment passed before Mira recovered from her surprise enough to reduce thrust and acceleration. The airship arched over in a neat trajectory before crashing back into the water with a rather awesome splash. It was a splash to end all splashes.\n\nMira picked herself up from the deck, dusted herself off, and stood for a long moment waiting to see if her little airship was going to sink. The vanes and rigging were all still intact, and it seemed that the hull had survived the impact through no fault of its own. She walked over to join Jenny at the aft rail, watching their lost members swimming toward them from over a quarter of a mile away.\n\n\"What a distressingly stupid thing to have happen before breakfast,\" Mira remarked to Jenny, who was still speechless. \"What do you say we have some tea before we get back to work?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Wind Dragon", + "text": "Only Lady Mira could pack an airship for an important and dangerous journey and host a party all at the same time. Or so it seemed to Jenny, who had to make frequent trips through the middle of that very party from Mira's study and storerooms to Wind Dragon's shed behind the house. She normally delighted in Mira's parties, and this evening she certainly would rather have been standing around enjoying wine and cheese rather than fetching baskets of supplies out to the airship.\n\nEven Mira found it a bit hard to keep both ends going at once. Ordinarily she could not resist a party, but she had been absolutely entranced with fascination for Bresdenant's book on the Dark. Jenny had to admit that it was all very interesting, but it also made her slightly uneasy. She was even more disconcerted to find that the material all seemed very self-evident to her, while her mistress would have to read the same passage many times and consult other references in her own books before a sudden, startling comprehension would take her by surprise. Jenny's own attempts to explain her own understanding to the older sorceress most often met with failure, since she found it hard to find the right words.\n\n\"Jenny, .child, I think I have it at last!\" Mira declared as her student entered her study, returning from yet another trip out to the airship. \"I think I have that spell of release mastered, the one that sends demons back to wherever they came from. I think I'm ready to try it again.\"\n\n\"What, now?\" Jenny asked apprehensively, pausing at Mira's side to glance down at the book. Her last attempt at working the spell of release on a \"target,\" small pieces of crystal that had been attuned to simulate the otherworld emanations of demons, had caused a yard-square section of the carpet to unravel itself. Fortunately Mira's magic had been able to put the threads back in place again.\n\n\"Yes, now,\" Mira declared impatiently.\n\n\"The practice room?\" Jenny suggested. \"It has a brick floor and only a few furnishings along the walls.\"\n\n\"Oh, very well,\" the sorceress agreed, and with no real reluctance. She had no desire to see what other variations of that spell might do to her study.\n\nJenny noticed that their retreat to the practice room somehow managed to acquire a following. The Trassek twins fell in immediately behind the sorceresses, but that was their duty. Addena noticed that something was up and followed as well, and somehow the entire gathering decided to fall in behind her. Curiosity, according to Mira, was a major cause of accidents, resulted in the wasting of a considerable amount of time, and was the driving force behind most love affairs.\n\nThe practice room was simply a large, empty chamber in the back of the house where members of the household could work to develop or maintain their martial skills... or even a trim waistline. It was mostly open space, with mats and equipment for exercises and room for fencing and broadsword fighting. The observers remained just inside the door, while the sorceresses advanced to the center of the room. Lady Mira bent to place a small, clear crystal on the floor, then stepped back four paces.\n\n\"It's really a matter of translation,\" she explained quietly to her student. \"My last mistake was making 'release' come out more as 'untie' or 'unravel,' since I was wanting to release the spells that bind the demons to this existence. This might work better.\"\n\nJenny only nodded.\n\n\"Forces of the Dark do shrink, turn out and slip away.\n\nStrip thee of thy protection, withdraw to that cold place Whence first it did come.\n\nNaked to this world, ye cannot abide!\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Jenny half-shouted her warning, but it was too late.\n\nThe crystal did not disappear, nor did the sense of otherworldliness that surrounded it. But the magic was not without results. The two sorceresses, caught in the backwash of that spell, felt an icy breeze at their backs. And it was all the more icy to the feel, since they were now both completely naked. Even the pins which had held Mira's long, red hair piled atop her head were gone, so that her hair tumbled over her shoulders. Mira turned to her student with a look that dared her to say a word.\n\n\"A slight miscalculation,\" she declared as she turned and headed toward the door, where two score and more of guests stared in calm, quiet amazement. Since they seemed for the moment too startled to withdraw discreetly, the two sorceresses marched through the small crowd in the most casual manner they could contrive. Mira was blushing slightly, although it was not due to her state of undress.\n\n\"Where did our clothes go?\" Jenny asked softly as they marched through the dining room and headed toward the stairs. Dame Tugg, who was collecting empty glasses, was her usual unruffled self. She appeared to notice nothing. This was actually not a remarkable state of attire for some of Mira's more adventurous parties.\n\n\"I don't know for certain, but I have my suspicions,\" Mira answered. \"I just hope those foul demons enjoy my favorite lounging robe.\"\n\nJenny ran up the stairs and dressed as quickly as she could, intending to hurry back to Mira's study before her mistress might decide to attempt the spell again. She turned to close the door as she left her room, then turned to see the lithe, graceful form of a faerie dragon standing in the dark hall a few yards away. The dragon stood with his ears alert, staring at her in a rather disconcerting fashion, a fascinated yet troubled look, as if something about herself represented a problem to him.\n\nThen Jenny stopped short. It was Kelvandor.\n\nIn all the really weird things that she had done in her life, her curious relationship with Kelvandor had been the worst... and in its way the most wonderful. It was also five years past, a time in her life that she now considered to belong to her childhood. She had been interested in her first sexual experience. At that time there had been only the dragons, and she had believed that Mindijaran thought of their affairs only as play, a society without marriage. And Kelvandor had been mature, adventurous and exciting.\n\nBut there were a few things that she had never considered. One was the telepathic coupling of a perfect match, that love-at-first-sight manner in which Mindijaran most often began their amorous affairs. What she had never understood was why a dragon would find her sexually fascinating, or why she had felt a compulsion to respond. She had not suspected at the time that love was a part of their odd relationship. Nor had she realized until later that Kelvandor had not thought of her as human, but as a fellow creature of magic who was soon to become a dragon like himself. But Jenny had avoided taking draconic form, delaying that act she both feared and desired. Kelvandor had loved her and she had loved him, and she had studiously ducked the question completely. It was a classic misunderstanding.\n\nFor the moment, at least, they were both too surprised by the whole affair to do anything. Except to be polite.\n\n\"It is good to see you again, Jenny,\" the dragon said politely, his voice a deep, warm tenor, full of honest concern.\n\n\"Yeah, you too,\" she answered uncertainly, scurrying to collect her scattered thoughts. Then she saw another dragon come up behind him in the dim light. \"Vajerral! I ought to skin you.\" Vajerral looked profoundly surprised. \"Me? I've been good.\" Jenny regarded her skeptically. \"I am glad to have you back, all the same. Let's go see the Lady.\"\n\nJenny led the way down the stairs to Mira's study, where she paused to knock on the half-open door. Knowing her mistress's habits, she had to wonder if Mira would have taken the time to dress before returning to her study of the book and its elusive incantations. Mira was already dressed for travel and seated at her desk, reading Bresdenant's book with a pot of tea at hand. She looked up at the dragons indifferently.\n\n\"Ah, it's about time that the two of you put in an appearance,\" she said, then peered at the larger dragon closely. \"I say, who's your handsome friend? Your boyfriend?\"\n\n\"No, Jenny's,\" Vajerral answered innocently.\n\nEither Mira failed to notice, considered it a joke, or else she had simply reached the point where nothing surprised her. Jenny, however, nearly melted into the floor.\n\n\"This is Kelvandor,\" Vajerral explained. \"He is a very experienced fighting dragon, and very close to my mother. He knows as much of what is going on as anyone.\"\n\n\"Wonder of wonders, that Dalvenjah Foxfire should tell anyone what's going on with this mess!\" Mira declared, waving her hands. \"Not that I question your choice of companions, but just what is the esteemed Dalvenjah Foxfire doing these days? Anything?\"\n\nVajerral employed one of her ridiculously stupid looks; she had long since discovered stupidity as a device for tactical evasion. \"When I left, she was trying to talk to a dead dragon.\"\n\nMira tried on a stupid look of her own.\n\n\"Well, it's her half-brother Karidaejan,\" Vajerral volunteered when she realized that she would get off scot-free on that one. \"He did something during a visit to Jenny's world years ago, but no one has ever been able to figure out what. Mother thought it could be very important to know.\"\n\n\"I dare say,\" Mira agreed; \"I thought that faerie folk were always reborn soon after they die, and Karidaejan's been gone for years.\"\n\n\"The trick is finding out who he is now,\" the young dragon explained.\n\nMira looked surprised. \"Is he likely to remember?\" \"Normally, no. But this was very important, and there are magical means to protect important memories. Sort of like leaving a note to yourself in your next life.\"\n\nIt seemed like a good time to drop the subject.\n\n\"Vajerral has explained your plan.\" Kelvandor managed to get in his first words. \"Is this still what you intend?\"\n\n\"Yes, more than ever,\" Mira insisted. \"The Empire has already begun to move. We were attacked by a captured airship during our last journey, piloted by a Dark Sorcerer with two demons along just for fun.\"\n\n\"Demons.\" Kelvandor frowned, with a brief glance at Jenny. \"That does make things rather more difficult. Vajerral and I can hold our own against demons, and Jenny as well because of her command of dragon magic. But we must now be prepared for anything. What of the rest of you? Did your journey to visit your former master work out for you?\"\n\n\"We did learn a trick or two. We now have spelled swords, spears and arrows in such a way that they should be damaging to demons,\" Mira answered, and turned to her protege. \"What did we do with those weapons, anyway?\"\n\n\"You had Dooket and Erkin load those weapons on board Wind Dragon over an hour ago,\" Jenny replied.\n\n\"Indeed? Then let us repair forthwith,\" Mira said as she rose. Jenny was interested to note that the appearance of dragons at one of Lady Mira's parties did not seem at all unusual to the guests. That led her to wonder yet again about some of the parties that must have occurred here just prior to her arrival . The sorceress stopped short halfway down the steps to stare intently at some point in that loose gathering of guests.\n\n\"Well, I'll be,\" she muttered in a dire voice. \"Addena took up with that professional athlete after all, and I warned her that he's a hopeless bore. Well, it serves her right.\"\n\nMira marched right through the middle of the party to where Addena stood in conversation with the biggest, most musclebound man that Jenny had ever seen. He was handsome, but Jenny had to agree with her mistress's assertion that he was an accomplished lover\u2014of himself. Addena was at her fawning best, this time with apparent sincerity.\n\n\"Oh, I wouldn't miss the games for anything,\" Addena was saying, not yet aware of their approach. \"You know, I've always excelled at sports, myself.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll say!\" Mira interjected casually. \"You should have seen the sport she was with last night.\"\n\n\"Well... yes...\" Addena sputtered, turning to afford the sorceress an icy stare, and her eye teeth seemed to grow a fraction of an inch. \"Maybe you'll feel better about it when the cramps subside.\"\n\n\"Tacky, Addena,\" Mira remarked as she hurried on her way, well pleased with herself. No one was her equal when it came to puns, barbs and catty remarks, certainly not Addena.\n\nWind Dragon was secure inside her shed behind the house, with every lamp in the place spelled to full brightness to bathe the ship in soft light. The airship had somehow managed to avoid any serious damage during their previous journey. The fact that the brake cables had all been cut and the blocks removed demonstrated that they had enemies who would do anything to stop them. As a result, Mira had ordered Dooket and Erkin to stay with the ship every night.\n\nThe normal store of supplies for an extended journey had already been secured within her holds; the members of the expedition needed only to bring their personal baggage in the morning. Certain things that Jenny had been unsure about, the spelled weapons as well as the special items they might need for fighting demons or Servants of the Dark, still lay on the center deck.\n\n\"Oh, I meant for most of this to go into the special holds,\" Mira said, indicating various boxes and bales.\n\n\"What special holds?\" Vajerral asked innocently.\n\n\"I had some secret compartments built into the interior deck,\" Mira explained as she began directing the dragons up the boarding ladder. It was tricky going; Vajerral managed to get her leg caught between the slats and fell on her back.\n\nThat was enough for Jenny. She turned to walk slowly along the length of the airship. She was annoyed with Vajerral for bringing Kelvandor into this, and with Kelvandor for being his same disarming, ingratiating, delightful self. And mostly with herself, for being so hopelessly foolish.\n\nA large part of her difficulties, she thought, was that she was forever trapped between. Like her uncle Allan, her magic was such that she had never been strictly mortal. Her magical training had only complicated the matter, turning her into a creature of magic, a faerie dragon on the inside but still essentially mortal on the outside. Unable to ever go back, but afraid to go forward.\n\nSo there she was. Training to be a sorceress and in love with a dragon, and unable to do anything about any of it for as long as she had the Prophecy hanging over her head. She paused to check the tread on the tires of Wind Dragon's port forward strut. These people were doing their best, but it was stretching the limits of their technology to turn out even a simple rubber tire. Spending half of a long night running down the length of the barge track, rubbing against the stone curbs, had done them no favors. Mira would have liked to replace the front tires before they left, but there were simply none to be had.\n\nJust what was the problem? Was it that she really did not want to be a dragon? She did not think so. She had known most of her life that she would eventually have to become a dragon for her own protection, and that had never bothered her. She was looking forward to it. It would be nice never having to be the outsider, the odd piece, with Vajerral and her other dragon friends, and to finally enjoy her natural intimacy with Kelvandor. Was she just afraid to make that final decision? Although she disliked having to admit it, that did seem to be the explanation. It meant deciding that she was ready to make the decisions that would shape the rest of her existence, not just in this life but in all her lives to come. And it meant deciding that she was ready to face the Prophecy on her terms.\n\nPerhaps that was the key. Jenny's personal philosophy was to be aware of all the options available to her and to use her options wisely. In a matter as important as the Prophecy, she guarded her options like a miser. Actually becoming a dragon required that she had to surrender one of her most important options.\n\nJenny paused in her absentminded inspection of the forward struts, aware that she was no longer entirely alone. There was a vague magical disturbance in the air behind her that expanded rapidly as a presence began to form behind her. Her first thought was that her enemies had sent a demon after her. She retreated beneath Wind Dragon's bow, ready either to run like hell or call for the dragons to help her, whichever might seem to be the most effective for achieving the desired end of saving her ass.\n\n\"Do not fear.\"\n\nJenny hesitated at the tone of that distant voice. The misty form that was shaping itself in the air before her was not the dark, massive figure of a demon, but slender and golden. The long, graceful limbs and folded wings of a Mindijarah formed from out of the golden haze. It was a male, of the same size and general appearance as Kelvandor but slightly less powerful of build in the chest and shoulders. He stood regarding her intently, his long neck thrust forward, one hand raised in a reassuring gesture.\n\n\"Do not fear,\" he repeated. \"The time has come when you must soon face all the things you fear most, and you must not be afraid.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Jenny asked, seeing that the misty figure was beginning to fade. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Karidaejan...\" the mysterious dragon said, and he was gone.\n\n\"Karidaejan!\" Jenny exclaimed softly to herself, so surprised that she nearly had to sit down.\n\nWell, speak of the devil and he shall appear. Vajerral had said that her mother had been trying to find Karidaejan, to see if he had forced himself to retain any important memories of his visit to Jenny's own world. It was no wonder Dalvenjah had never been able to find him. He had not returned to life in the way of all faerie folk, his magical spirit reborn in a new form. His part in the Prophecy was so important that he had remained between lives until it was done.\n\nBut just what was his part? Jenny knew that he had better things to do than bounce around mouthing vague and esoteric warnings. And yet she had to doubt that there were any great secrets to be had. For all Jenny knew, the High Priest Haldephren had come into her own world, quite probably taking the form of James Donner and fathering her in the process. If she had to guess, Karidaejan had discovered the scheme and had followed into her world to stop it. No one but Karidaejan knew what had happened then, but James Donner had died in an accident.\n\nNor had Karidaejan ever returned, and there had been no hint of his fate until Haldephren had turned up wearing his form. Some things just had a way of adding up. It seemed simple enough, and yet Dalvenjah believed that there was something more. And it seemed that Karidaejan himself had something more to say on the subject. Jenny reminded herself that Karidaejan was Dalvenjah's half-brother. She had never known him herself, but the two of them were probably a pair. Both of them were probably full of their private schemes that they had no intention of sharing until their own good time. She just wished that the two of them would get together and compare notes.\n\nJenny decided to keep the matter of her unexpected meeting with the spirit of Karidaejan entirely to herself. Out of respect for the departed dragon, she was not going to have Mira perform obscure experiments upon his ethereal essence. And she certainly did not want for Vajerral to go running home for Dalvenjah. If Karidaejan had something to say, he was going to tell it to Jenny only in his own good time.\n\nAs it was, the two dragons left immediately on an errand of their own, including the delivery of copies of Bresdenant's book to the dragons at the Academy at Tashira, to rejoin Wind Dragon in flight in a couple of days. Jenny was just as glad to see them go. For one thing, it would give her a chance to get used to the idea of having Kelvandor around before it became permanent. Nor was it too soon to begin thinking about what would come after. She did not need to go all the way to Alashera to know that the Prophecy was already in motion. She had her own personal ghost to tell her that.\n\n\"So, what do you think?\" she asked Vajerral as they stood on Wind Dragon's deck, waiting for Kelvandor. \"Am I finally going to have to give in?\"\n\n\"Soon,\" the dragon answered vaguely. She must have learned that from her mother, whose personal philosophies included never giving anyone a straight answer.\n\n\"Soon?\" Jenny stared at her.\n\n\"Not until after this journey, of course.\"\n\n\"Brilliant deduction,\" Jenny grumbled. \"Do you think that Dalvenjah will be coming to join us?\"\n\n\"She is busy now,\" Vajerral answered vaguely, quite obviously trying to say less than she knew or suspected. \"By the time we return, I think.\"\n\nJenny saw her opening and would have pressed the attack, but they were interrupted at that moment as Kelvandor came on deck from below. She had been thinking about matters a lot since the previous night, and she had realized that Kelvandor's presence was more likely Dalvenjah's bright idea than any thought of Vajerral's. That led her to wonder if Dalvenjah had sent him to her to provide incentive, distraction, or because the sorceress knew that he had his own part to play in the Prophecy.\n\nVajerral took three discreet steps back... and promptly tumbled backwards down the open boarding ramp with a startled cry. Fortunately she rolled down the length of the cargo ramp, rather than hitting the usual boarding ladder that would have ordinarily been in place. Kelvandor stared in quiet fascination, and shrugged. \"Well, that was subtle,\" he commented.\n\n\"The very soul of discretion,\" Jenny agreed.\n\n\"Vajerral and I will be leaving now,\" Kelvandor said rather lamely.\n\nJenny shrugged rather indifferently. \"I will miss you, Isuppose. The magical matchmaker will see to that.\"\n\n\"I am sorry,\" he began hesitantly.\n\nJenny shrugged. \"So, did I ask you to be sorry for anything? Or are you sorry for yourself?\"\n\nKelvandor smiled. \"Never for a moment.\"\n\nHe was doing his best. And yet he looked so miserable and eager, like some immense puppy trying desperately to escape trouble, that Jenny had to smile. She thought that if she had to love against her will, she could not have chosen better. She remembered Dalvenjah and Allan and what the love for a dragon had done for him, how much strength he had gained in the company of that golden lady he held so quietly and incredibly dear.\n\nA girl could do worse. Maybe.\n\n\"You had best be on your way,\" she told him. \"Just hurry back.\"\n\nKelvandor seemed to be beyond words. He stared at her a moment longer as if she represented a puzzle that he did not completely comprehend. Then he turned, leaped atop the siderail and thrust himself into flight. Jenny stood and watched as Vajerral rose into the sky to fall in by his side, and together they wheeled away toward the northeast. She stood and wished that it could have been herself at his side, riding golden wings.\n\n\"Why are you weeping?\" J.T. asked in complete mystification, walking up to stare at her.\n\nJenny shrugged. \"I suppose that I love him.\"\n\nThe cat was clearly stunned. \"Is that any reason to weep?\" She smiled wryly. \"It is, when you can see the future.\"\n\n\"I've got it, dear child!\" Mira declared as she exploded up the steps from the middle deck. Then, to Jenny's profound consternation, she set a spelled crystal on the deck. \"Watch this!\" Jenny did not watch the crystal. Instead she held out her hand as if feeling for rain, scanned the clear and sunny sky for clouds, and tested the wind. J.T., who had been reposed atop the rail, leaped down and streaked away toward other portions of the ship. Mira stopped short to watch this activity, and frowned.\n\n\"Oh, piffle!\" the sorceress stated. \"I've got the damned spell worked out. You're not going to lose your clothes.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" Jenny remained skeptical.\n\nLady Mira did not recite the spell aloud this time, but leaned over the crystal to mutter just a few key words together with several appropriate gestures. Nothing obvious happened to the crystal, but the faint, disquieting sense of magic which surrounded it abruptly vanished. She straightened, quickly felt of her clothes to insure that they were in place, and turned to her student. Jenny was gone. Only her clothes remained in a neat pile on the deck.\n\n\"Mira?\" Jenny's distant shout came from beneath the airship. \"Kasdamir Gerran, I'll get you for this!\"\n\n\"How does it look?\" Mira called from the helm deck, where she stood at the wheels. A rather threatening bank of clouds was slowly moving in from due north, just off Wind Dragon's port stem. She could see it bearing down upon them menacingly every time she glanced over her shoulder.\n\nErkin climbed down from the rigging of the forward mast. Needless to say, the airship was not running under sail in this erratic wind. He turned toward the rear of the ship. \"All clear ahead for the next two miles or so, but after that the land climbs sharply. It looks very rugged, with quite a bit of mist and cloud down to ground level.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, it's still not as bad as we had it last time,\" Mira said to herself, although she was not entirely pleased by that report. She turned to her student. \"Not to worry, though. If it gets too bad, then I could always put you at the wheels.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Jenny was rather alarmed. \"Why would you do that?\" \"That way, if we do get in a fix and lose the ship, I can always blame you!\" the sorceress declared, as if pleased with what seemed to her a perfectly reasonable plan. \"I was only teasing you, of course. I'm a good pilot, but you seem to have a tremendous natural feel for this ship.\"\n\n\"I should have stayed at home,\" J.T. complained as he sat peering through an opening in the rail at the mountains passing far below.\n\nLady Mira glanced at him impatiently. \"What's your problem? Do you need your hairball remedy? You know that every ship needs a cat.\"\n\nHe looked over his shoulder at her. \"There are no rats on airships, and there never have been. They know better. By the way, those dragon friends of yours are coming.\"\n\n\"Oh? How soon?\"\n\n\"Any moment.\" J.T. rose and stretched. \"I think that I'll go below, if it's all the same to you.\"\n\nA sudden, fierce crosswind shook the ship violently and began to force Wind Dragon's nose slowly around toward the south, where rocky slopes rose in threat several miles ahead. Mira spun the rudder wheel, bringing the ship back around. Fighting this stout wind made the ship difficult to handle but, since it was also a following wind, it had the effect of picking up their speed slightly even if they had no running sails out to catch it.\n\n\"Here they come,\" Jenny warned.\n\nKelvandor and Vajerral were angling across the wind to intercept them, their broad wings beating in powerful strokes to thrust themselves forward at a hard pace. Mira glanced up at the dragons only briefly, and a new idea occurred to her.\n\n\"How are they going to land?\" she asked her young student. \"I guess that they could come down here behind the helm, if you swing Wind Dragon around into the wind,\" Jenny suggested.\n\n\"Is that how you would do it, if you were a dragon?\" She was beginning to recognize just how much she could rely upon her young student's quick mind and tremendous attention to detail.\n\n\"I don't really know,\" Jenny answered. \"I can fly very well, but without the benefit of wings\u2014which is not true flight. I just know that it's easier to land Wind Dragon facing into a wind.\" \"Here we go, then!\" Lady Mira declared as she spun the rudder wheel, bringing the airship around hard to starboard until they were facing hard into the wind.\n\nWind Dragon shuttered as she fought the wind. Her ground speed, judging by her shadow on the rocky slopes below, had slowed to a crawl, although her indicated air speed jumped as Mira pushed the ship full speed against the brisk wind. Jenny called for the two mercenaries to assist her, then ran to the very stem of the ship and waved to the dragons as they circled close for a good look at the ship. They appeared to understand what she wanted of them, for they nodded their heads on long, powerful necks in an exaggerated gesture.\n\n\"Stand ready to help pull them on board, but stay clear of their wings,\" she told the mercenaries as they hurried to assist. \"Let them go if they start to fall, since they can save themselves.\" Turning into the wind seemed to have been the answer, allowing Kelvandor to match speed with Wind Dragon slowly as he came up behind the ship. He reached out to grab the rail and used that to pull himself on board agilely, needing no assistance from the others. He moved quickly out of the way, and Vajerral followed him on board a moment later.\n\n\"We were followed!\" she warned. \"Winged demons began to follow us about half an hour ago. And there are airships just ahead. Since they were obviously moving to intercept you, we did not worry about leading the demons to you. It seems better that we make our defense together.\"\n\nJenny rolled her eyes. \"Oh, great! What is it with this airline? They should have three monitors in the terminals. Arrivals, departures and odds. This is worse than the Hindenberg.\"\n\nMira turned to the dragon. \"What the hell is she babbling about?\"\n\nVajerral only shrugged.\n\nLady Mira considered the matter a moment. \"I don't suppose that we have any choice. Boys, go get the catapults ready, and load them up with explosive bolts. Dragons, you two get your tails overboard and do what you can. Remember that their stabilizers are canvas and will bum. Jenny, I need for you to take control of this ship, and let me help the boys with their defenses.\" Jenny stepped forward, obviously reluctant, and took both of the wheels from her mistress. Changing pilots in flight was a very drastic act indeed. Mira released her own control over the induction vanes, and the ship hesitated and began to settle, losing both speed and altitude quickly. Jenny established her own control only an instant later, and Wind Dragon responded immediately. She brought the nose of the ship back up, angling over the rough terrain that rose only a mile or so before them. At that moment another blast of icy wind shook the airship.\n\n\"Is it coincidence that we always seem to run across these people in the middle of a snowstorm?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"J.T.!\" Mira bellowed, and the cat stuck his head above the top of the steps leading up from the main deck a couple of seconds later. \"What of it, old catgut? Is the Dark behind this storm?\" \"They guide the storm towards us, but they did not make it,\" J.T. said. \"That is why their control is not as obvious.\"\n\n\"Can we control it ourselves?\"\n\nJ.T. shifted his ears around, as if listening intently to a very distant voice. \"Perhaps, but that would be difficult.\"\n\n\"Do we even want to?\" Jenny asked. \"They will be using the storm to cover their attack, and they rely upon their winged demons to guide them. But we can dispose of the demons, then use the storm as our own cover. Wind Dragon is most likely a smaller, quicker ship than anything they have.\"\n\n\"A good point,\" Mira agreed. \"Very well. Jenny, you have the helm, and I will organize the counterattack. Lizards, we need for you to get yourselves overboard and lead those demons close enough that we can spell them back to where they came from. Can you hold your own with those monsters?\"\n\n\"We are faster, and we have our flames,\" Kelvandor answered with quiet dignity. \"This should be simple.\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly,\" Mira muttered as she turned to leave. J.T. took one quick look around, determined that he probably would not be needed, and decided that he belonged below.\n\nIt suddenly occurred to Jenny that they might just be in serious trouble. Three airships, with Dark Priests, archers and attendant demons all in unknown quantities, was hardly a casual matter. If they had come up against such a force a week earlier, they probably would not have survived. Would the formidable combination of Mira's weapons and Bresdenant's spells and counterspells make the critical difference?\n\nIt all depended upon how quickly they could dispatch the demons, leaving them free to concentrate their attack on the three airships. She was certain that they could handle either the demons or the airships as separate groups, but both together might be too much for their own rather meager forces. That depended upon whether two faerie dragons could make up for a very big difference in the odds.\n\nA minute passed, and then two, and the leading edge of the storm was upon them. At least there was not much snow with this storm, but an icy mist closed about them with a swiftness that was alarming. Lady Mira, standing in the bow, issued a spell that cleared a pocket of air for several hundred feet around them, so that their enemies could not approach completely unseen. J.T., seized by a sudden fit of responsibility, returned to the helm deck to assist Jenny in locating their enemies in the frosty mist.\n\n\"Here they come!\" Kelvandor called as he suddenly hurtled out of the white haze, circling the ship quickly. \"Demons first, but the airships are right behind them.\"\n\n\"Let's concentrate on getting rid of the demons first,\" Lady Mira ordered. \"Boys, you two go after them with longbows and spelled arrows. I'll do what I can with counterspells. Jenny, do your best to stay clear of their ships, and keep in mind their fire arrows. Dragon, lead those demons in!\"\n\nKelvandor turned and shot away, disappearing abruptly into the curtain of mist. Jenny could now sense the approach of the three airships and angled Wind Dragon up to pass slightly above them, remembering their earlier success in using the hull of their own ship like a vast shield. After a moment they heard the challenging roars of the Mindijaran roll dimly through the fog, followed by the harsh, nerve-grating screams of the demons in answer. By the sound, they were already heading back, and quickly. The three archers readied their bows.\n\nThe dragons shot out of the mist moments later, a cloud of at least a score of winged demons almost on their tails. The archers began shooting immediately and their aim was predictably deadly, but the spelled arrows, while clearly painful to the demons, did not seem especially damaging. Only one demon fell from the sky, pierced by three shafts including one that transfixed its long, plated neck just below its ridged skull. Its black form burst into flames just before it disappeared into the clouds, leaving a thick, oily trail of smoke.\n\nBut the demons were guided by greater intelligence than Jenny would have given them credit for possessing. While the main flock followed the dragons around the stern of the airship and back into the mist, two circled around to attack her. All she could do to defend herself was to wave her sword over her head to fend them away, for she was too involved with keeping Wind Dragon in the sky to work her own counterspells. But they abandoned their assault quickly when long shafts began cutting deep into their armored bodies.\n\nMira rushed up to her side, bearing her own longbow and a large pack of spelled arrows. \"Sorry about that. Our mistake was in failing to recall that we need an archer on the helm deck to protect our pilot.\"\n\n\"How did they know?\" Jenny asked. \"Are they intelligent enough to know that I was vulnerable, or do they recognize me?\"\n\n\"I just don't know.\" Mira glanced quickly to port. \"Here they come again.\"\n\nJenny waited until the very last moment, then angled Wind Dragon up sharply, showing the enemy ships her protective hull just as they emerged from the fog beneath her. The Southern archers held off for the most part, although a few fire arrows streaked upward at the smaller ship. Fighting a stiff, cold wind and dragging their burden of burning rags, all of the arrows arched over too soon and passed well beneath Wind Dragon's hull. The sorceress had a quick look at the enemy ships. Two were middle-sized, heavy freighters not unlike the one they had fought and defeated days earlier.\n\nThe third was a cargo ship of vast size, perhaps five hundred and fifty feet from bowsprit to stern, converted into a flying fortress by the addition of metal plating on her hull and broad shields raised above the two hundred archers who lined the rails of her deck. She also carried several small catapults, although of the type that launched heavy lead balls rather than the more accurate bolts such as Wind Dragon bore. She would be a tough nut to crack for little Wind Dragon and her crew of six\u2014not including the cat. But for the moment the fortress held back from the fight, staying well to one side of the other two ships.\n\n\"Yarg, what a beast!\" Lady Mira declared when she saw that ship, although she did not pause in loading her longbow. Kelvandor and Vajerral returned at that moment, leading the demons on a wild chase between the hulls of the ships.\n\n\"Fight, or run?\" Jenny asked her mistress even before the enemy ships shot past.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Mira asked in return.\n\n\"Fight,\" she decided, already spinning the wheel to bring Wind Dragon back around. \"At least for the moment. The confusion seems to be in our favor, and we need to stay in this open space,\"\n\nMira understood what she meant. She was herself too busy to guide the ship through the clouds as she had on their previous journey, and they knew that rough land was climbing very quickly just ahead of them. The demons were easier to pick off as they dodged around the hulls of the ships; an important point, since several telling shots were required to destroy the tough little monsters. The danger, of course, was from fire arrows. Jenny knew that she would have to keep just enough distance to make the task of the enemy archers difficult.\n\nUnfortunately, her own planning worked against her. What had been a very successful strategy against one ship no longer worked against three. The enemy vessels did not return in a group but scattered to move in on Wind Dragon from three different directions and at different heights. She saw no hope but to run straight through the middle of it before the enemy ships could converge for a concentrated attack.\n\nAt that moment it became obvious that the demons were definitely under some form of direct control. They suddenly broke off their chase after the dragons and descended upon the airship in a furious assault, ignoring the stinging arrows as they concentrated their attack on the helm. Jenny had to duck down behind what cover the two wheels offered, waving her sword over her head. Three of them concentrated on plucking her out of hiding, but Mira came to her defense. She worked the counterspell as quickly as she could, and the demons scattered screaming. But they had not been driven back into their own level of existence, as the spell should have done. She stared at them in mystification as the three demons retreated, still screaming in fury.\n\n\"Lady!\" Jenny said urgently.\n\n\"What..Mira turned to her young student, standing just behind her, and stopped short. \"Oh, my word, I've done it again!\" Jenny was clinging to the rudder wheel, as naked as a belly dancer in a Jade Sea pub. Mira paused a moment to reassure herself that she still had her own clothes.\n\n\"Oh, I can't take you anywhere!\" she exclaimed. \"I'll take the helm so that you can dress yourself.\"\n\n\"No, there's no time,\" Jenny insisted, recovering quickly. She looked up at one of the smaller enemy ships, which was dropping back alongside Wind Dragon just above and about two hundred feet to the right, half hidden in the clouds. \"I'm a winter nudist from way back. You have to defend the ship.\"\n\nMira did not have time to answer. At that moment Kelvandor looped around Wind Dragon's stem on a swift attack run on the enemy ship. He saw Jenny standing naked at the helm and did a startled double take. When he glanced around again he saw that he was on a collision course with the other ship and snapped his wings in powerful backstrokes, but too late. He struck the lower hull headfirst... and clung there. Instead of knocking himself senseless to tumble to his death on the slopes below, he had driven his eighteen-inch horns half their length into the hardwood of the lower hull and was stuck.\n\nJenny immediately cut speed slightly to pace that ship. \"We have to protect him. Once the demons see that he's helpless, they are going to come after him.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Mira agreed as she ran toward the front of the ship. \"We need a diversion.\"\n\nSuddenly another ship emerged out of the clouds, the second smaller vessel, closing in quickly from the left. Wind Dragon was caught between these two adversaries, and Jenny could see that they meant to catch their prey between them, perhaps pulling alongside close enough to board. Rather than force her own ship on ahead of the two, she held back, waiting for the other to pull even.\n\n\"Hold your arrows!\" she called to her crewmembers in the bow. \"Let them come even. I have a plan. Stand by the port catapult.\"\n\nMira apparently trusted that she did have a plan, for she indicated for the Trasseks to hide themselves behind the protection of the siderails. The approaching ship came even with Wind Dragon and matched speed, above and barely a hundred feet out. Her archers, forty at least lining the siderails on the near side of the ship, held their arrows. Jenny locked the wheels in place and ran to the front of the helm deck, leaping up on the rail where she could steady herself with the rigging for the vane immediately below. She wrapped herself in the strongest spell of raw sexuality she could manage as she showed herself to the archers and crew of the enemy ship, her legs spread wide as she stood atop the rail.\n\n\"Hello!\" she called alluringly, at the same time with the very uncomfortable feeling that her mother could somehow see this. \"Hello, boys!\"\n\nThe archers gaped, and one leaped so far out over the rail that he tumbled overboard. But so deep were the others in the thrall of the spell that they did not even notice. Jenny was a young and beautiful woman, her brown body lean and fairly well muscled. But beyond even that, she was one mean sorceress who knew how to turn a spell. The icy wind streaked like cat's claws over her bare skin, whipping her long, dark hair.\n\n\"Now!\" she barely heard Mira order from the bow. \"Don't stare, shoot!\"\n\nJenny was concentrating so hard on her spell of sexuality at the same time she worked to keep Wind Dragon in the air that she did not dare turn to look. Apparently she had done her work too well; Dooket and Erkin, who had never before afforded her a lecherous glance, were caught in the spell as well. She heard Mira swear softly but furiously. A moment later the braided wire of the immense crossbow sung like a guitar string, and the forward vane of the enemy ship exploded into flames.\n\nBut it did not collapse. Jenny remained atop the rail, arching her back to thrust out her breasts as she poured all the magic she could spare into keeping the crew of the enemy ship locked in a fiery enchantment as their vessel began to bum around them. She could hear Mira struggling with the cocking device to load the catapult for another shot. She could see the Dark Sorcerer at the rail, struggling to throw off the effects of her spell, perhaps even preparing a counterattack. Then the damaged vane folded at last, and the burning ship was plunged to sudden death on the rocky slopes hidden far below.\n\nJenny leaped down from the rail just in time to avoid the raking claws of a demon, already exchanging the sexuality spell for the one that had protected her from the biting cold as she hurried back to the wheels. Mira ran the full length of the ship as quickly as she could, sword and shield held aloft to protect her student from a renewed attack by the remaining demons.\n\n\"Sorry to take so long, but I simply could not get that catapult cocked to shoot again,\" Mira said as she ripped the wing of one bold demon with her spelled sword. She smiled grimly. \"Considering the show you were putting on, I'm surprised that it didn't cock itself.\"\n\n\"I hate it,\" Jenny said with disgust as she angled Wind Dragon away from the other ship, swearing in both Norwegian and the language of the Mindijaran.\n\n\"You did what you had to do, and you did it well,\" Mira told her.\n\n\"Lady Mira, the stabilizers are on fire!\" Dooket called from the bow.\n\n\"Oh, damn!\" Mira exclaimed and was off again, already working the spell to still the flames that ate ravenously at the canvas stabilizers. But it was already too late. Jenny felt the wheels go dead in her hands as the control surfaces were destroyed, and then the ropes themselves burned through and snapped. Wind Dragon was not completely helpless. Jenny could still control their altitude with the lift vanes alone, but she could not steer. Their only hope of avoiding a collision would be to fly above any obstacles.\n\n\"Mira, help me set the trim sail!\" she shouted. \"We don't have time to set new stabilizers, not while demons are harassing us, and we certainly cannot land.\"\n\nThe trim sail was a small triangular sail that was sometimes mounted to the back of the rear mast, corresponding to a spanker sail on an oceangoing ship, stretched between a horizontal spar below and an angled spar above. Under certain conditions it was used to augment the regular rudder, but in this case Jenny hoped to make it take the place of the missing rudder. She doubted that the control it gave would be as precise, but anything was better than what she had. As it was, they could not avoid the enemy ship that was slowly advancing from their right except to outrun it, which she was trying to do. Wind Dragon had a tendency to rock and bob at high speeds without her stabilizers.\n\nShe glanced over at the other ship in time to see Kelvandor finally manage to brace all four legs against the lower hull of the ship and pull his horns free with a powerful heave. She turned back to her own crew.\n\n\"Hold on tight!\" she yelled, and gave them to the count of live to brace themselves.\n\nShe abruptly cut speed, allowing the enemy ship to streak past, then poured every scrap of thrust she could find into Wind Dragon's lift vanes. The smaller ship seemed to climb straight up like a rocket; Jenny knew that Wind Dragon had oversized vanes for her size, and she was not weighed down with crew and cargo. They could not lose the Southland ships with this tactic, but they could buy themselves a couple of minutes to rig the trim sail, and perhaps do something about the dozen or so remaining demons as well. Jenny took the ship up to two thousand feet and leveled off, resuming full forward speed.\n\n\"Forget the stabilizers for now!\" she called to Mira. \"Have them get their bows after those demons.\"\n\nMira did not even relay the order, only indicated for the Trassek twins to comply with a brief nod. She joined Mira on the helm deck and, working together, they had the trim sail raised and rigged in little more than a minute. By that time J.T. was laboring backwards up the steps from the main deck, dragging something dark and heavy behind him.\n\n\"Bless you, cat!\" Jenny exclaimed as she hurried to collect the jacket that he had pulled all the way from her cabin. He could only nod, panting heavily, and hurried off again... presumably after trousers.\n\n\"Mira, you must take control of Wind Dragon for a minute,\" Jenny said. \"I'm going to do something about those demons once and for all.\"\n\nThey exchanged control of the ship as they had before, Wind Dragon dropping a few feet before Mira had the vanes in operation. Jenny had pulled on the jacket and hurried to fasten its buttons. Shoes and pants would have to wait, even as cold as it was. Compared to complete nudity in this wind, this was a minor discomfort. She hurried to the very back of the helm deck just as Kelvandor sailed past.\n\n\"Send them in my direction,\" she called to the dragon. He nodded, too far past to shout back his answer, then turned sharply after a small knot of demons not far away.\n\nDemons might possess some native intelligence, Jenny thought. But they had no patience and they did not learn from the mistakes of their fellows. Kelvandor was able to get them to chase him, singularly or in small groups, time after time. And Jenny would dispatch them with ease, using that same counterspell which gave Mira\u2014and indirectly her young student\u2014so much trouble. It seemed that Vajerral also knew the counterspell, dispatching her own share of demons on the wing. Working together, they sent all fifteen of the remaining demons back into their own level of existence in only three minutes of concentrated effort.\n\n\"All done?\" Mira asked. \"Can you take control of Wind Dragon again? J.T. says that those enemy ships are coming up on us in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Let me have it,\" Jenny agreed, and Wind Dragon bounced as they traded control. \"Can we take them? You know that I'm not going to be able to steer this ship anything like I can with a real rudder.\"\n\n\"No, you should be lucky just to hold a straight course.\" Mira considered that for a moment. \"Can we outrun them?\"\n\n\"I doubt it.\" Jenny brought the ship up to full speed, and it immediately began to buck and shake in protest. She allowed their speed to drop back down slightly. \"I'm sorry, Lady. Wind Dragon simply is not that stable without those forward control surfaces.\" \"There's no hope for it, then,\" Mira said, and walked to the forward portion of the helm deck. \"Dooket! Erkin! Come back here and set up two more catapults on the stern. Those enemy ships will be coming at us from behind.\"\n\nThe airship had been more or less riding the wind for the few minutes before they had been able to raise the trim sail, although Mira had been able to hold them on a steady course north by northeast since then. Then Jenny had an idea. After all, what else was the good of being a sorceress with a degree in engineering? She carefully brought Wind Dragon through the tricky and rather dangerous maneuver of reversing course until the ship was pointed directly into the wind. Now the combination of the wind of the airship's passage together with the fitful blasts of the storm itself caused the trim sail to act almost exactly like the rudder of a ship, if less precisely. In that time the two mercenaries had mounted catapults into frames built into the stem siderail, and were already loading the weapons.\n\n\"You're dented!\" Jenny exclaimed, suddenly seeing the deep crease in the plate armor on Dooket's back. \"A demon's tail.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"The mail inside turned the blow. I would say that my attire has fared better in this battle than your own.\"\n\nJenny glanced down, blushing. Then she looked up in alarm, aware that she had been inattentive. \"Ship dead ahead! Ready the catapults!\"\n\nBut it was too late for that. The rear catapults could not be brought about to bear on the enemy ship. Jenny bent every scrap of talent she could spare on the forward catapults, which swung mound in their mountings in response to her distant touch. At that same instant the white curtain of the clouds parted and a vast, dark shape emerged out of the swirling mist as the large airship bore down upon its tiny prey, approaching level with Wind Dragon and turning slightly to pass to starboard. Jenny released the bolts as soon as she felt she had a good shot at the forward vane of the ship that was on her right, but she shot too soon and the bolts swerved away from their target. Too late she realized that there was more than one Dark Sorcerer aboard that ship.\n\nThe immense form of the battleship passed just over Wind Dragon like a dark, threatening cloud. As her vast vanes overlapped over their own, lightly armored soldiers leaped down from that structure into the supporting net of the stabilizer's broad arc. They immediately swarmed up the canvas-covered spars and over (he siderail, while the Trasseks rushed forward to repel this invasion. Mira stood at Jenny's side, ready to defend Wind Dragon's vulnerable helm.\n\nThen, as the larger ship passed, three heavy grapples crashed to the helm deck just behind the two sorceresses and were pulled back along the deck to catch against the siderail. Jenny cut forward thrust before Wind Dragon's, stern was ripped away as the lines went taut. Lady Mira leaped forward to sever the ropes, only to lind that they were sheathed in braided wire and spelled to invulnerability. The enemy ship turned tightly as she passed, and Wind Dragon was whipped around at the end of her tether. Three of the enemy soldiers were thrown to their deaths by that violent jerk, but a dozen more scrambled over her sides.\n\n\"Not on my ship, you don't!\" Mira declared, and rushed to defend the nearest of the short flight of steps leading up from the main deck.\n\nJenny turned away from the battle, waving to Kelvandor as he circled up from below and pointing to the three cables that tied Wind Dragon to her adversary. He nodded and rose above the two ships, then dived to the attack, playing his fiercest flames across each of those cables in turn. Nothing, whether wrapped in steel or spell, could stand for long against dragon flame. When the first cable snapped, Jenny brought one of the two catapults around and released its massive bolt. She had never used a crossbow of any type in her life, but at fifty feet her aim was good enough. The port stern vane folded upward almost as the bolt exploded in flames against the hull, and the immense ship slowly rolled to that side and began to fall. Wind Dragon was pulled after her for an instant, before the smoking cables parted.\n\nWith one problem solved, Jenny turned back to the trim sail with the intention of getting under way before the remaining enemy ship arrived, only to find that she faced five soldiers who had cut around Mira's fierce defense to come up the other stairs. She was no slouch with a sword, having been trained as a Veridan Warrior by the faerie dragons. But at the moment she was distracted by the need to keep Wind Dragon in the air.\n\nJenny augmented her natural speed and strength with all the magic she could spare, pressing the attack. She thrust and ducked with lightning speed, mindful of what would happen to her light sword if she accidentally connected with the powerful swing of a heavy broadsword. She could get past their guard easily enough, but their heavy mail frustrated her time and again. Kelvandor had just landed in the stem and charged into battle, wielding his own sword as only a dragon could, while Dooket and Erkin were swordsmen almost without peer and Mira was raw fury with a blade.\n\nLady Mira dispatched her remaining adversary and turned without a moment's pause to rush to the helm deck, where she joined Kelvandor and her student in sending the Southland soldiers over the rail with little bother. Then she stood, panting as she leaned on her sword, watching as the Trasseks and the dragon made a swift end to what remained of the fight.\n\n\"Yarg, what I wouldn't give for a cup of tea!\" she declared.\n\n\"I'm cold,\" Jenny muttered, in what seemed to her mistress to be a grand understatement.\n\n\"One more?\" Mira asked wearily.\n\n\"A little one. We can't outrun her, not considering the shape Wind Dragon is in. But we can stay ahead for a couple of minutes yet.\"\n\n\"Right. I'll get the rest of your clothes.\" Mira turned to leave the helm deck, pausing at the steps. \"Dooket! Erkin! Get all the catapults ready for battle, and hurry.\"\n\nMira rushed to Jenny's cabin and pulled open both of the drawers under her bunk. A rather startled black-and-white cat lifted his head out of one of the drawers and blinked.\n\n\"What are you doing in there? Hiding?\" she asked suspiciously.\n\n\"Of course not!\" He sniffed haughtily. \"I had climbed inside to get a pair of pants. Then the floor dropped about ten feet and the drawer slammed shut and locked.\"\n\n\"Well, you're missing all the fun,\" Mira told him as she jerked the pants out from under him, sending the cat tumbling.\n\nShe turned to return to the deck and heard the sound of one distant explosion and then another, and assumed that the battle must already be over. She found that she was wrong.\n\nShe could make out the dim form of the enemy ship, slightly larger than her own, at the very edge of the fog. There it hung, apparently content to maintain that distance for the time. Occasional arrows arched through the sky between the two ships and Jenny was having a hard time spelling them away, between keeping Wind Dragon in the air, watching the trim sail and keeping herself from freezing. Multiple spells were difficult to maintain, and she was reaching her limit of endurance.\n\n\"I don't have to ask if both of the boys missed their target,\" Mira said as she stepped out onto the helm deck.\n\n\"They have a second sorcerer on board, and he is deflecting our bolts,\" Jenny said, turning back to her mistress. \"They must have learned...\"\n\nShe suddenly staggered and nearly fell forward, catching herself by the useless elevator wheel. Wind Dragon shuddered in response and began to drop, throwing the others off balance as well, but lift returned and she held steady. Mira picked herself up and rushed to the aid of her student. She took hold of the girl's jacket and spelled it off, so that it instantly came away in her hands. A long arrow transfixed Jenny's left side, the point emerging barely an inch above the upper edge of her pelvic blade.\n\n\"You make too good a target,\" Mira told her as she cast the spell that would deaden the pain. \"If you can keep this ship flying for a minute longer, I'll get that thing out of you and repair the damage.\"\n\nJenny only nodded as she stood holding the wheel, her legs firmly braced. Dooket and Erkin moved in close, protecting the two sorceresses with their shields and their own armored selves. Mira tried to maintain casual indifference, but inside she was scared half to death. She marvelled at her student's strength and endurance, for this was damage that, if left untreated, would almost certainly be fatal in a matter of minutes. Strong men had not survived such wounds even this long. But Jenny kept to her task, and Wind Dragon never faltered.\n\nMira laid her hand gently on the feathered shaft that emerged from one side of Jenny's back, and the arrow vanished as she conjured it away. That was one problem solved, but only a small problem compared to what followed. With the arrow removed, she began to bleed heavily... internally as well as externally, Mira was sure. She worked the complex regenerative spells step by careful step, reassured that this at least was magic she did very well. The bleeding stopped, and the wound began to close. She quickly cleaned away the blood with wet rags that J.T. had brought and helped Jenny to dress, then straightened her back and looked behind at the airship that still followed at the edge of their limited visibility.\n\n\"Why did they not take advantage of our vulnerability these last couple of minutes?\" Mira asked herself. \"Assuming they knew, of course.\"\n\n\"You could have left that thing in me for a few minutes,\" Jenny said tightly.\n\n\"You would not have survived that long,\" the sorceress told her frankly. \"How do you feel? Up to finishing this fight?\"\n\n\"I have no choice, do I?\" Jenny asked. She looked very worn and pale, and she was still holding on to the elevator wheel to steady herself. Still, Mira thought that she might last out this fight on sheer determination, something this young lady had in far greater abundance than she herself knew. Then she would likely pass out in her bunk for the next two days.\n\n\"Boys, I can shield us now,\" Mira declared. \"Did you reload all the catapults? Then go find the replacement spars and canvas for the stabilizers and get to work on that.\"\n\nThe mercenaries hurried on their way, obviously uncertain about climbing out on the bowsprit in armor. J.T. recognized where his own greatest potential lay in this battle and went to assist them. Lady Mira stood for a long moment staring back at the pursuing airship, ignoring the infrequent arrows that now swerved wide to avoid Wind Dragon. At last she weaved a complex spell, then collected her abandoned longbow and released an arrow at the enemy ship. It sped on its way, straight and true, and one of the dim figures standing in her bow disappeared behind the siderail without a sound.\n\n\"Ah, that did it! We can hit them, but they cannot hit us.\" She turned toward Wind Dragon's bow. \"Come on back, boys! We can finish them off quickly now.\"\n\nBut the enemy captain was no fool. He knew exactly what this turn of events meant as well, and he had no intention of tarrying long enough for his former prey to employ their catapults. The other ship suddenly turned away and disappeared into the clouds, and it continued to flee at full speed.\n\n\"We can't let them get away,\" Mira said. \"They'll return home before we get there and tell their superiors.\"\n\n\"They don't know that we are heading there ourselves,\" Jenny pointed out.\n\n\"True, but a tale of the destruction of three of their no doubt limited number of airships by new weapons and magic will create quite a stir,\" Mira said. \"Especially when they say that they were defeated by two women and two boys in a rather small ship.\" \"Help me put this ship about, then. But we must have those stabilizers replaced or we never will catch that ship. We can't run at full speed until we do, let alone fight.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Mira agreed, and turned to the mercenaries. \"Go back and get those stabilizers replaced, and hurry. Where did those dragons disappear to, anyway?\"\n\nThat was a good question. Kelvandor must have gone overboard immediately after the last fight, and he was nowhere to be seen now. And Vajerral had been gone even longer. But Jenny felt certain that they must have been attending to something important, or they would not have been gone for so long. Working together, the two sorceresses managed to get Wind Dragon turned back around and in pursuit of the enemy airship, but the Southlanders had a small advantage in time and distance that they could not yet begin to close. Jenny did not dare force the ship so much that it began to shake and rock, not with two mercenaries and one cat hanging from the bowsprit.\n\n\"The storm is breaking!\" Jenny observed several minutes later. \"The clouds are thinning,\" Mira said. \"The wind is goihg to be with us for a while yet.\"\n\n\"The elevator is working!\" Dooket yelled from the bow. He was often elected spokesman by virtue of having the biggest mouth. \"Give it a try!\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Mira called back.\n\n\"Well, we think so.\"\n\n\"Very reassuring,\" Jenny muttered as she released the lock on the elevator wheel and gave it an experimental spin. The nose of the ship lifted accordingly, and she immediately leveled back out. \"Well done, but we need the rudder as well.\"\n\n\"Coming up!\"\n\n\"It's times like this that I long for the quiet life,\" Jenny said to herself, then turned to her mistress. \"Lady, can I ask you a question?\"\n\n\"What is it, child?\"\n\n\"Have you always had this capacity for getting yourself into trouble, or is this a recent development?\"\n\nMira laughed. \"I've always had a capacity for generating personal disasters that involved only a very few people. These days I seem to be getting more ambitious.\"\n\n\"Your personal disasters must not have been that bad,\" Jenny observed.\n\n\"And why do you say that?\"\n\n\"Because you never seem bitter about it.\"\n\n\"Ask me about that again sometime when we have a couple of days,\" Mira said, and she was quite serious. \"But the point is, I don't dwell on it... and that, by the way, is something I learned the hard way, for the sake of my sanity....\"\n\n\"Land ho!\" Dooket called from the bow.\n\nMira looked up, startled and mystified. \"He must be joking.\" Unfortunately, he was not. The clouds were beginning to thin and break, so that they could clearly see, not two thousand feet ahead, the broken line of a rather steep and rocky ridge. They were perhaps a hundred feet to one side of what appeared to be an inviting pass through an otherwise imposing string of steep, barren peaks. But, with Wind Dragon handling so sluggishly with only the trim sail and elevator, that was a hundred feet too far, and even then the pass was two or three hundred feet above their present altitude.\n\n\"There they go!\" Mira exclaimed, indicating the ship that was slipping through the pass. \"Hard over, Jenny!\"\n\n\"What?\" the younger sorceress demanded increduously.\n\n\"We can make it. I'll pull trim sail, while you bring the nose up to get us through that pass. This is what I get for not sitting in the bow and witching out our way.\"\n\nJenny shrugged and did as she was told, reminding herself that Lady Mira was in command of this ship, owned it, and was entitled to wreck it. Mira brought the sail over and did manage to get the ship turned into the pass, although she had to spell a few blasts of well-aimed wind into the trim sail in order to accomplish this. Jenny was not quite so lucky in getting the ship to climb sufficiently, however. As they entered the pass, she could see that it continued to ascend for several hundred feet even yet. She thought that they should slide into the snow-covered slope about halfway up.\n\n\"I know where we are!\" Dooket declared. He was still hanging by the rigging of the bowsprit as he and Erkin worked on the rudder. \"This is Murker Pass through the Aydun Peaks.\"\n\n\"And there is a road somewhere under that snow!\" Mira agreed excitedly, and turned to her protege. \"If you have to touch down, try to find that road.\"\n\nJenny released the lock on the hub of the rudder wheel, engaging the steering for the forward struts. At the same time Mira hurried to the bow to guide their approach as best she could, and to order the twins and J.T. back on board. The ground was coming up beneath them quickly now and they appeared to be well centered over the road, which was barely visible as an even ribbon of depression across the blanket of snow. Which was just as well, since Jenny could no long work the trim sail by herself. She would have no steering control until they were actually on the ground, and she was doing her best to avoid that.\n\nShe nearly made it. Wind Dragon was almost through the pass when Lady Mira warned of impact, and the front skids bit deep into the snow. The ship shuddered and the nose lifted a little more. Then the back skids settled down as well as the ship slid relatively smoothly across the deep snow, and Jenny found that she could now steer the ship. The only problem was that she could not see ahead. But Mira could and she did her best to guide them on through the pass, ordering full speed when Jenny would have stopped.\n\n\"Rocks ahead!\" she warned. \"Up, up! Take us up five feet.\"\n\n\"Oh, fart!\" Jenny declared as she took Wind Dragon back into the air just briefly, then settled back into the snow. They were safer trying to negotiate this pass on the ground, where she could at least steer.\n\nWind Dragon cleared the pass, which was choked with just enough clouds to make things very tense as they ran blind for a few seconds, then emerged out the other side of the ridge. Jenny marvelled that they were still alive and moving, before she saw that several gentle switchback twists lay in the road ahead. Then she discovered something even more alarming as the ship continued to accelerate very quickly even though she eased off their forward thrust, then cut it completely. Wind Dragon seemed destined to repeat past mistakes.\n\nJenny began to engage the lift vanes, then stopped short when she saw the dark form of the enemy ship dropping down almost on Wind Dragon's stern. They had somehow overrun the other ship in the clouds, perhaps when her commander had cut speed to feel his way blindly through the pass. Now he found himself almost directly over his prey, where he could attack while his own ship was safely above the reach of Wind Dragon's catapults.\n\nLady Mira was just about to order the mercenaries to remove a catapult from its mounting and hold it by hand, but there was no need. The missing members of their party suddenly returned. Dodging arrows, the dragons dived at the enemy ship time and again, playing their deadly flames across her rigging and stabilizers. The enemy vessel was afire in a matter of seconds and it now began to descend slowly until it settled with a heavy crash onto its skids. But her springs somehow survived the impact, and the larger airship now began to close on Wind Dragon, pulled by the weight of her greater size and heavier cargo.\n\n\"Cliff ahead!\" Kelvandor warned as he landed heavily on the back of the helm deck. \"You'll never make the turn. Get back into the air.\"\n\n\"I'm... trying,\" Jenny panted, but she was in pain and clearly at the end of her strength.\n\nShe spun the elevator wheel, and Wind Dragon's nose began to lift as her front skids left the ground. Then she left the road and shot out into open air as the ground fell away beneath her.\n\nShe dipped slightly, then began to climb as the lift vanes took effect. The enemy ship followed a moment later only to nose slowly over, arching a hundred feet out and over six hundred down to crash bow-first into a tumble of massive boulders. It exploded into flaming debris with the force of impact.\n\nA moment later Jenny went limp and fell backwards into Kelvandor's waiting hands. He lifted her gently as Mira hastened to take control of the weaving airship.\n\n\"Courage, cunning and plain dumb luck prevail again,\" she remarked, then glanced over her shoulder. \"How is Jenny?\"\n\n\"The little sorceress seems to have passed out,\" Kelvandor answered. Jenny made a very limp burden in his arms. He stepped back as Vajerral landed on the back of the helm deck, peering at her friend with concern.\n\n\"What has happened?\" she asked, plucking at the tom, bloody jacket.\n\n\"She took an arrow, but I got it out and did what I could to repair the damage. Take her below and place her in her bunk,\" Mira directed. \"We're going to land in a couple of minutes and spend the rest of the day doing something about the worst of our damage.\"\n\n\"This ship will have to be repaired completely before you can take her into the Kingdoms of the Sea,\" Vajerral remarked, looking about at the damage. \"The bowsprit is charred, the siderail over the stem was chewed to pieces by those grapples, and there are arrows stuck in the hull and deck from one end of this shift, to the other.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know,\" Mira agreed reluctantly. \"I suppose that we can lay over a few days at Woody Bog. And Jenny needs the rest even more than this ship needs repairs.\"" + }, + { + "title": "In Country Mirth", + "text": "When Jenny awoke some time later, it was to discover that she was in considerable discomfort. Her head was pounding so intensely that she could actually hear the throbbing. There was a lierce, stabbing pain in her lower back that hurt even more. And her bladder was absolutely about to burst, a pint-sized container forced to hold at least five gallons. Well, she could do something about that, since the ship's head\u2014a silly name if ever she had heard one\u2014was adjacent to her own cabin. Assuming that she was in her own cabin. .. she opened one eye and looked around, and saw that she was.\n\nOnly an emergency like this could have gotten her out of her bunk, the way she felt. She sat up in bed, wondering whether Wind Dragon was still in the air or if it was her own impaired sense of balance that made the bunk sway. She slipped off the side of the bed, steadying herself by holding tightly to the wall, and looked down to find that she was standing in four inches of water.\n\n\"Oh, I had a boo-boo,\" she said to herself, then stared at the lloor with a look of almost painful concentration. \"But if I did ihis, then why do I still need to? Or again?\"\n\nShe shrugged, opened the door, and paid her visit to the privy.\n\nBy the time she finished, her head had cleared enough for her to know that she could not have made this mess. For one thing, it was obviously fresh water, and she was certain that she had a stronger constitution than that. She was also just a little suspicious of the volume. She returned to her cabin, pulled on pants and jacket, and staggered up the stairs to the main deck. She saw Mira standing at the wheels on the helm deck.\n\n\"Lady Mira, we seem to be sinking,\" she announced. \"Sinking?\" Mira looked over the siderail. \"Dear child, we happen to be a thousand feet above dry land, in a clear sky. What do you mean, sinking?\"\n\n\"There's a hand of water standing on the floor downstairs.\" \"Below,\" Mira corrected her absently. \"Erkin, take the wheels and keep us on course. I'll keep the vanes spelled.\"\n\n\"Right, Lady!\" Erkin bounced over to stand by the wheels, looking like a dog that had been invited for a walk.\n\nMira followed her student back to the stairs, and together they descended to the lower deck. Jenny stepped off into the icy water with complete indifference, but her mistress remained on the step just above its level. The pool shifted back and forth in sudden waves as Wind Dragon responded to the changing winds, pouring in and out of cabin doors.\n\n\"I didn't do it,\" Jenny stated flatly.\n\n\"Of course you didn't,\" Mira assured her, wondering what she meant. \"The water tank must have broken open. Are you feeling well, child?\"\n\n\"I hurt like hell,\" she answered. \"And I feel very sleepy and dizzy.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're still half under that sleeping spell I put on you,\" Mira said, and quickly reversed it. \"Better?\"\n\n\"Yes, much. But that seemed to make it hurt more.\"\n\n\"I'll see about that in a minute. If you don't mind that water\u2014 and you obviously don't\u2014then could you go to my cabin in the very stem of the ship, find the drain plug in the deck by the back wall of the room and pull it? Do you feel up to that?\"\n\n\"Oh, right away,\" Jenny agreed, sounding very much her usual self. She attended to the task, moving slowly from the stiffness and pain and for once being careful to avoid splashing herself more than necessary. She disappeared into the rear cabin, and a few seconds later a loud gurgling, slurping sound could be heard.\n\nBut the water level was in no apparent hurry to go down; the drain was rather small.\n\n\"That's done,\" Jenny said as she returned.\n\n\"Sinking, indeed!\" Mira laughed. \"Get yourself out of that water, child. Come up on the deck in the sun, or what's left of it. You've been sick, remember.\"\n\n\"I've been skewered, remember,\" Jenny said, and looked about as they came out on deck. The sun would soon be setting behind them, and the mountains she expected were nowhere to be seen. They were over rolling hills covered by a heavy forest. \"What's left of the sun? Have I slept away the entire afternoon?\"\n\n\"All afternoon and most of the next day, in fact. Sit down.\" Mira indicated the steps, casting one slightly apprehensive glance toward the helm and their temporary pilot. \"It will take a while for the lower deck to drain, and then the boys will have to mop it out. But you're going back to bed at the first opportunity.\" \"Oh, I won't argue with that,\" Jenny insisted. She seated herself on the steps, while Mira leaned back against the siderail. Wind Dragon was a mess, even though the loose debris had been cleared away. \"What do we do now, Lady? Our first stop was supposed to be Woody Bog.\"\n\n\"And we should be able to get repairs there,\" Mira said. \"Lord Araedyr of Kaendon does owe me a favor or two... although he might not remember it quite that way.\"\n\n\"Where are the dragons?\"\n\nMira laughed. \"They are both out patrolling or something. Vajerral seems rather nervous and restless. She either thinks or worries a lot. She worried about you a lot, and Kelly was beside himself\u2014although he tries not to show it. Also, I think that flying, under someone else's power, makes him nervous. He turns up when we land for the night. Now, may I ask you a question?\" \"Oh, certainly,\" Jenny agreed, slightly mystified.\n\n\"You arrived at my house half a year ago with a rather large guitar in a very stout case. I noticed that you brought it with you on this journey. And yet I've never heard you play it.\"\n\n\"That's three statements, not a question,\" Jenny pointed out. \"Will you play it?\" Mira asked evenly, without a hint that she thought that this was anything but a very serious matter.\n\nJenny looked down at her hands, wondering if she still could. \"Do you think I should?\" she asked without looking up. \"You are a person of many rare talents, of which music is only one,\" Mira told her. \"I would not have you turn your back on any talent you possess. You obviously used to play quite a lot, or you wouldn't still be carrying the damned thing around with you.\"\n\n\"I used to,\" Jenny said. \"I never wanted to be a musician the way my uncle Allan used to be, before he took up being a dragon instead, but I always enjoyed it. I guess that I could try.\"\n\n\"Why don't you?\" Mira turned to the bow, where Dooket was standing watch. \"Here, you great, skinny lout. Run below and fetch Jenny's guitar for her. We might have a little music.\" Dooket splashed about in the remaining inch of water for a few moments, then returned to the deck bearing the heavy guitar case. Jenny took it from him reluctantly and laid it carefully on the deck, then opened the lid. The guitar was large, long but slightly narrow of body and long of neck. It had the look of a well-used but well-tended tool of a professional musician.\n\nJenny lifted the guitar gently and held it against her as if to play, then gasped as that motion caused a sharp bite of pain from her wound. She adjusted her hold cautiously. She plucked the key string and adjusted it to pitch, then tuned the others to key. Satisfied, she began to run through a variety of chords, hesitantly at first but with increasing speed and certainty.\n\n\"I seem to remember how this thing works,\" she said. \"Lady?\" Dooket appeared again, this time handing a smaller guitar case to Mira. Jenny had not known that her mistress played, or that she even had an instrument of her own. When Mira took it from the case, Jenny saw that it was of course one of the small guitars of this world, almost like a lute.\n\n\"I'm supposed to be able to do anything, remember,\" Mira told her, mildly amused. She plucked each of the strings in turn and found that they were still in tune; she had obviously played recently. \"Name it.\"\n\n\"What do you know?\" Jenny asked. She had heard much of the music of this world, although she had never played it.\n\n\"Hm... how about this one?\" Mira found her key with some experimentation and began to snatch out the main line of a song.\n\nJenny recognized it almost immediately and began to weave her own themes around it. Then, as they returned again to the main theme, she began to sing. Her deep, warm voice was not as clear as it had once been, but it was still strong. Mira added her own, slightly higher voice to the song as well. It was a song of gentle passion and quiet longing, a song that told no real story but spoke of many things.\n\n\"Why did you ever stop?\" Mira asked softly.\n\nJenny shrugged. \"I guess I just no longer had the time. It seemed to interfere with my other studies. There's always so much that I want to do.\"\n\n\"Watching you in battle, I've come to realize just how clever and inventive you are,\" Mira told her. \"You think all the time, and nothing seems to escape your notice. Vajerral tells me that you're an accomplished artist and musician, and that you've mastered sciences that make us look like barbarians. You are a person of many talents, but you are a sorceress first of all. You can be anything else you wish, but you cannot force that to take the place of your primary obligation to yourself. Once you are sure of your priorities, perhaps you can begin to enjoy music again.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you are right,\" Jenny agreed, although she knew that she would not. The guitar had been a private interest during her college years. Soon she would be a dragon, and dragons could not easily play instruments shaped for human use.\n\nMira set her guitar aside. \"Be true to yourself. You just have the same problem that all talented, ambitious people have. We want to be everything and do everything all at once, but you can't. Just know the one thing you really are in heart and spirit, and let everything else be your diversions.\"\n\n\"Never any time to talk,\" Vajerral said as she joined Jenny on the forward deck, speaking English for the sake of privacy. \"You are feeling well? Stuck like as pig?\"\n\nJenny laughed softly. \"You never could speak English worth a damn.\"\n\n\"Phooey!\" the dragon declared in a remarkable Russian accent. \"Phooey on mortal languages.\"\n\nJenny shook her head helplessly. \"Have you been through the Twilight Zone lately? How are things on Mother Earth?\"\n\n\"I spoke with your mother on the phone two weeks ago. She says that she loves you.\"\n\n\"I know that, although only the experience of long familiarity allows me to recognize that.\"\n\nVajerral just stared at her. \"Too many long words. Wallick has gone away. They sent him to a new place in Mexico.\"\n\nIt took Jenny a moment to realize that she probably meant Albuquerque.\n\nThey spoke together for some time, remembering years past and all the things that they had done together. They had grown up together almost as sisters ever since that first day, thirteen years past, when Jenny had chased Vajerral around the chair in Allan's house. They had seen a lot since then, faerie centaurs and unicorns, wyvems, dwarves and elves, and dragons of every sort. Vajerral's presence had kept Jenny from ever feeling lonely in a world of dragons. They were both in a form of exile from Jenny's world, since the dragon magic they both commanded was so damaging to the fragile natural magic that was being nurtured there.\n\nJenny wondered what had happened to her life, when most of the people she loved were dragons.\n\nThat brought Jenny's thoughts unavoidably back to the subject of the one dragon she was learning to love best. Her heart told her that there was no question. Her mind provided any number of excuses to avoid any commitments, this one especially. And that, she thought, was her whole problem. She was no longer a person, she was a debating team.\n\n\"What is Kelvandor doing here?\" she asked, determined to get at least one straight answer out of a dragon. \"Was this all your own bright little idea, or did Dalvenjah put you up to this?\" \"Oh, my,\" Vajerral muttered, looking away and laying back her ears.\n\n\"Answer me,\" Jenny said sternly. \"We would not want to talk to Dalvenjah about that cute dragon who came to study with your mother and had to go home in a hurry.\"\n\nVajerral's ears stood straight up. \"That was not as bad as the way you and Kelvandor used to carry on.\"\n\n\"I wasn't eleven at the time,\" Jenny reminded her. \"Besides, Dalvenjah already knows about that. I can't be blackmailed. I have no shame.\"\n\nVajerral had no shame, except where Dalvenjah was concerned. She had to think about that for a long moment. \"Dalvenjah and Allan were supposed to come themselves this time, but they are tied up with a problem of their own. Dalvenjah seemed to think that the Emperor has a new stronghold somewhere. Kelvandor really is the best choice to come in their place. Of course, I am sure that Mother was aware of certain... consequences.\"\n\n\"I'll have something to say to Dalvenjah when I do see her,\"\n\nJenny said to herself. It was, of course, an idle threat. No one took Dalvenjah to task. The Devil himself said \"Yes, Ma'am\" to Dalvenjah Foxfire. She frowned. \" At least Kelvandor is keeping a respectful distance, but he's so eager and endearing, and so damned innocent.\"\n\n\"Innocent!\" Vajerral nearly choked to keep from laughing. \"Kelvandor is a scrupulously honest and devoted lover, even for a dragon, and he has always been something of a loner. But he has been around. In fact, he is much older than Mother.\"\n\n\"He is?\" Jenny still had a hard time with dragons and their long lives.\n\n\"He is two hundred and sixty years, at least.\"\n\nJenny frowned. Dragons rounded off their age to the previous decade, at least after their first hundred years. Her first serious relationship, and it did have to be with an older dragon. \"Then I suppose that he's taken a mate before?\"\n\n\"Nothing serious that I ever heard.\"\n\n\"What about yourself?\" Jenny asked.\n\nHer ears standing up straight, Vajerral glanced in either direction before she dipped her head and spoke softly. \"I've been screwing around.\"\n\n\"Oh, ho! Vajerral has a boyfriend,\" Jenny exclaimed. Vajerral was now seventeen, a time of life when a young dragon's thoughts turned to her severe hormonal imbalance. Heaven help Vajerral if she had inherited either her mother's romantic obsessions or her hominess. \"Please tell me it's another dragon.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Good. There's quite enough debauchery in the family.\" Vajerral spent a long moment looking over the rail at the forest far below, her ears laid back. \"What will you do?\"\n\nJenny shrugged. \"I don't know. I can't say no, and I don't feel free to say yes. I don't have the right to ask him to wait, because I don't know how long it will be. And he expects... he deserves an answer soon. What am I going to tell him?\"\n\nVajerral made a helpless gesture. \"What are you going to tell your mother?\"\n\nLady Mira demonstrated that she did indeed have a fine sense of the dramatic as she brought Wind Dragon in for a landing at Woody Bog. She had brought the airship in low over the nearby village of Welliden, nearly tangling with the mast of a river schooner tied up at the dock and almost causing a riot of startled townsfolk and delighted children. She then swooped in low and fast over the fields, disrupting the autumn harvest. All that time, Vajerral raced and sported about the airship's vanes, chasing horses, stealing apples out of the orchard and otherwise showing off. Kelvandor sat quietly on the back of the helm deck and behaved himself.\n\nWoody Bog was the manor house of Lord Araedyr of Kaendon. This land had once been a small kingdom on the shores of a narrow, northwestern branch of the inland sea and was now a district of the constitutional monarchy that had united the Northlands in the single nation of Elura over a hundred years before. Lords and ladies were now legally the equals of all other folk. Many, like Lord Araedyr, were still major landholders and owners of large, prosperous estates, employing large numbers of the local people their ancestors had once ruled and still looked to as leaders of the local community, if their abilities and behavior warranted such respect. One of the advantages of democracy was that gentlemen of title and estate were much easier to ignore.\n\nJenny held mixed feelings about the old nobility. On the one hand she found it terribly quaint and romantic, but she was also the child of a society that held very little tolerance for divine right. In her own opinion, Mira, an untitled, illegitimate former circus midget who happened to do magic very well, deserved to be called Lady far more than most who claimed that name. But Mira obviously thought highly of Lord Araedyr.\n\nWoody Bog deserved at least half its name, since the manor house lay just inside the edge of the dense forest that stretched away north and west toward the distant hills. But the bog was now mostly rich pasture land, with only a remnant of the original swamp along the shores of the river four miles away. The name itself was a thousand-year-old carryover. With the old forest closing in closely about the house, there was not much in the way of open ground to land an airship. But Mira was able to drop Wind Dragon straight down into the pocket of yard behind the house with room to spare.\n\nThe first thing Jenny noticed upon landing was that it was still late summer or early autumn here, pleasantly warm and breezy but not hot. That was especially important to her now, since cold, wet weather bothered her injury, even though nearly all trace of the wound was now gone. The worst damage, of course, had been deep within.\n\n\"Let's go ahead and do a complete disassembly of the rigging,\" Mira directed as they set about closing up the vanes. \"We will be down for a few days, and we need everything out of the way for repairs.\"\n\n\"Permission to come aboard, Captain?\" someone with a smooth, pleasant voice called from beneath the hull.\n\n\"Permission granted!\" Mira called back, and looked around for the Trassek twins. Dooket was already unlatching the boarding ladder in order to drop it down, saving her the need to give that order.\n\nLord Araedyr climbed the ladder as soon as it was down; Jenny had no doubt about who this must be from first sight. He was a most impressive man, in both appearance and manner, which matched the vague thoughts of admiration, warmth and raw lust Jenny sensed from her mistress's thoughts and memories. Araedyr was an older man, at least from the stilted view of the young, with a rough, deeply lined but dashingly handsome face and a full, thick mane of cottony white hair. He was also tall, trim and strikingly broad-shouldered, his body belonging to someone half his sixty or so years. Mira hurried to his side and he took her offered hand with gentle gallantry.\n\n\"They sent word that you were coming,\" he began. His gravelly voice was almost a rich purr, carrying a rather charming trace of the Southlands accent. He stopped before the sorceress and smiled warmly. \"It is good to see you again. You look well.\"\n\n\"The only condition I tolerate,\" Mira answered, as she pulled him forward to make introductions. \"You surely remember my boys. This is my new student, Jenny Barker, her cousin Vajerral Foxfire, and Kelvandor.\"\n\n\"Charmed,\" Vajerral said graciously, bowing fluidly with one hand on her breast. Jenny was suffering through an uncharacteristic fit of shyness.\n\n\"You are all most welcome,\" he assured them grandly. Then he stopped short, having spied Wind Dragon's chewed rear deck and siderail. \"Now that looks like battle damage.\"\n\n\"We had something of an altercation with three Imperial airships on our way through the mountains,\" Mira answered casually.\n\n\"You are right to say Imperial,\" Lord Araedyr remarked, noticing the charred bowsprit. \"There is a newly declared Emperor in Alashera, although not all the Kingdoms of the Sea have formally recognized the full authority of either the Emperor or the Senate. I can only assume that you came out the winner of your 'altercation,' since you are here.\"\n\n\"We possessed certain advantages,\" she explained vaguely.\n\n\"The trouble is that we need to have this damage repaired before we continue on. If the Southlanders see an airship that was obviously damaged in a fight...\"\n\n\"I'll have carpenters get on this as soon as I can get them here,\" he assured her. \"But I suspect that you will need a completely new bowsprit, and we have no one experienced in ship-work.\"\n\n\"No problem. We'll just pull the old one out and have them make an exact copy. The vanes are the main concern on an airship, and those sustained no damage.\"\n\n\"As you say,\" he agreed. Then he stopped before Jenny and bowed gravely, one hand on his chest. \"I am very pleased to make your acquaintance, young sorceress.\"\n\nShe only looked profoundly embarrassed and muttered something inaudible.\n\nJenny stayed behind to assist in securing the ship for an extended stay, deciding that they might just as well remove the forward stabilizers at that time and save that delay when the carpenters arrived. They stripped the rigging completely off the bowsprit and began the process of unstepping the long boom, so that it could be pulled out as soon as a frame and pulley could be raised to lift it out. She stayed to work on the ship alone some time after that, sending the two mercenaries away to discover whatever mischief they could find.\n\nShe liked Woody Bog. There was a peaceful, even happy feel to the place, and such things were very noticeable to telepaths. The climate agreed with her, and she did need the rest. All the same, she was uneasy, very eager for them to be on their way. As much as she hated to admit it, she had no desire to meet any more new people at this time.\n\nJenny climbed down from the ship and stopped short when she saw Kelvandor standing under the stem of the airship, talking quietly with Vajerral as they surveyed the damage. For some reason, she was reminded strongly of the time that they had shared, now five years past. There had been a closeness between them unlike anything two mortals could ever know, and she found that she was tempted to share that seductive spell once again.\n\nKelvandor had been watching her with that same intensity, and now he turned to walk over to join her. \"I have not spoken to you. I hardly know what to say.\"\n\nJenny shook her head. \"You do not have to say anything. I just do not know how to answer.\"\n\n\"Is the answer so difficult?\" he asked, the faintest trace of impatience, even desperation in his voice. \"You must soon become a dragon; Dalvenjah has said that. Then there will be no barrier between us.\"\n\n\"It goes beyond that,\" Jenny insisted, frightened seemingly beyond reason. \"I must stay free of demands and commitments, or I'll face the Prophecy tied to blinding emotions.\"\n\n\"I have not spoken of demands or commitments,\" Kelvandor insisted. \"I know only the pleasure we have shared in each other. \" \"I know,\" Jenny said, turning away.\n\nKelvandor caught her arm before she could flee. \"I would not be the cause of your distress. I will go away, if you want.\" \"No, don't ever leave me,\" Jenny insisted, before she realized the desperation in her own voice. \"Just give me a little more time to think.\"\n\nAnd Kelvandor only stood there, looking up at her apprehensively. But he never spoke a word, chasing betraying thoughts from his mind, meaning for her to make her own decision. She turned and rushed back up the ladder onto the ship, the only piece of home she had in this strange and suddenly frightening place.\n\nJenny lost herself in her work, thinking furiously as she stripped down Wind Dragon's standing rigging. What was it in Kelvandor that caused her such fear? There was no reason for it. And yet she found herself locked in a limbo between pleasure in his company and terror of the thought of sharing something deeper, of exploring that magical link between them. This was nothing new and unexpected. This link had tied their lives together for five years. They had even been lovers, as awkward as that had been.\n\nShe had thought at the time that it had only been play, and now she knew that it very definitely was not. No, she knew what she feared most. She feared the loss of her ability to say no if she thought she must, knowing that she could never send him away once they became that close. She feared that magical link between them, knowing that it would never let her go.\n\n\"Lady Mira, what am I going to do?\" Jenny pleaded as she followed her mistress into the house. Night was falling and dinner was being served, in that order, and their presence was expected if not actually required.\n\n\"Right now, you'll follow me into the dining room, trying your best to avoid looking like a disaster has just befallen you, and at least make a pretense of eating,\" Mira answered her impatiently. \"Then maybe you can tell me what your problem is, and we'll do something about solving it.\"\n\n\"It's Kelvandor,\" Jenny blurted out.\n\nMira stopped short and turned to stare at her. \"What about him?\"\n\n\"I.. I...\"\n\n\"Oh my stars, you don't say!\" Mira looked very perplexed, and just a bit pleased. \"I felt that something was going to happen, but I never foresaw this. I really should invest in a crystal ball. Does he...?\"\n\n\"Well, yes. I'm sure of that.\"\n\n\"And do you...?\"\n\n\"No... well, yes.\" Jenny closed her eyes and sobbed aloud. \"I don't know!\"\n\n\"Piffle, it's not the end of the world,\" Mira declared as she turned and led the way. But she had only gone a few steps when she spied a certain black-and-white cat asleep in a chair in the hall. \"J.T., what are you doing?\"\n\nBy a supreme effort, he managed to lift his head slightly and open one eye enough to glare. \"I'm minding my own business. How about you?\"\n\n\"Pray don't trouble yourself,\" she told him, and started off again. \"What can I tell you? If this is something you do want, then it would do you good.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Jenny asked suspiciously.\n\n\"No, I'm not!\" Mira declared. She was surprised to see Jenny carrying on in this manner, when the girl had always seemed so certain of everything in her life. It did not surprise her to see that, when Jenny did let go, she did it with all the proper theatrics.\n\nFurther discussion was delayed as they entered the dining room. Lady Mira had been required to go in search of her student at the last moment, and so they were both late; the entire table watched them expectantly as they took their seats. As custom dictated, the host sat at the head of the table with his honored guests at his right hand; Mira, by necessity, took the first seat and Jenny the second. Kelvandor sat on his tail beside Jenny, with Vajerral across from him at Mira's side. Mira tried to break the strained silence by immediately reaching for a tray of hot bread, not waiting for Lord Araedyr to pass the first plate.\n\n\"Eat something,\" she hissed in warning to her student as she passed the tray.\n\n\"I'm not hungry,\" Jenny answered petulantly.\n\n\"You'll eat your dinner and you'll like it, or I'll practice that spell that always makes your clothes disappear.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"I'll eat it, but I won't like it.\"\n\n\"Well, did you have a pleasant journey?\" Araedyr asked in a desperate effort to avert social disaster. Mira afforded him a stare that spoke volumes of censure. \"Oh, yes. We have been through that, haven't we?\"\n\n\"Honestly, I don't care to hear that they've begun the process of trying to reestablish the Empire,\" Mira said, leaping like a panther into the conversation on another subject to distract attention from present matters. \"That, and the fact that they have attacked Eluran airships with their own captured ships, indicates to me that they've reached such a level of confidence in their own abilities that they think that there is nothing we can do to stop them. Kaendon used to be a province of the old Empire. Have they put you under any pressure to join their new Empire?\" \"They have inquired politely, if their insufferable haughtiness can be considered polite,\" Araedyr answered, obviously somewhat angered by the memory of the officious manner of the representatives who had visited him. \"Their representative promised vague rewards if Kaendon were to be an early supporter of the Empire. What it comes down to is this. Only the primary city-states have representatives in the Imperial Senate. After that are provincial city-states, which have a voice only in the Imperial Forum, and the Territories, the conquered lands. In the past, Kaendon was only a provincial member of the Empire. If we return now, we can be a primary member and I would have a respected place in the Senate.\"\n\n\"Meaning that they need any support they can get right now,\" Mira assumed. \"Later, when they don't need you as badly, they're not going to give you any more power in their Senate than they can help.\"\n\nAraedyr nodded. \"And if we support Elura, then we are to be treated as conquered territory along with the rest of their enemies... if and when their enemies are defeated. I signified that I intended to remain neutral for the time, with the indication that I wanted some real proof from these upstarts that they really could defy the North and establish their new Empire. My hope was that, to them, this would look like normal caution on my part before casting my lot. My real interest was to put some pressure on them to tip their hand too soon, encouraging them to show their true intentions prematurely. Then, perhaps, the North would have something to work on.\"\n\n\"Ah, a wise course,\" Mira agreed. \"You could have done no better.\"\n\n\"And from what I've been able to discover, the Kingdoms of the Sea agree on only certain points,\" Araedyr added. \"They all seem to have turned to the worship of the Dark, and they are all keeping their borders as tightly closed to rumor as they can. Which is no small trick, at the same time their trade is beginning to flourish. But their structure of power and political alliance is new and incomplete, still very shaky. They do have the unity of all their people, from the merchant princes in their great palaces to the beggars in the streets. My casual spies have been unable to get anything out of them beyond what you already know. You will be hard pressed to discover anything more.\"\n\n\"But what of the Emperor or the High Priest? Have either of them put in an appearance?\" Mira asked.\n\n\"Everything is in the Emperor's name, and his word is heard,\" Araedyr answered. \"But he remains absent, and some minister seems to attend to the High Priest's duties.\"\n\n\"But if they are confiscating airships for their own use, then are they going to let you take Wind Dragon back out again?\" Vajerral asked.\n\n\"That really does not worry me,\" she explained, demonstrating her own lack of concern. \"I have a three-part plan for getting in, discovering what I want, and getting back out again, all the time keeping their suspicions diverted just enough to delay them from taking any countermeasures until it is too late. All it involves is the proper combination of audacity, cunning and heaping mounds of bullshit, served up in the proper combination as the moment requires.\"\n\n\"Meaning that you intend to play it by ear,\" Araedyr concluded. \"Well, if anyone can pull that off, you can.\"\n\n\"I'll take that to be a vote of confidence,\" Mira said with a shrug, and turned her attention to her plate.\n\nDinner was over soon enough, and most of the formal guests retired to the main hall to join members of the household staff and others who lived and worked on the estate as they convened for music, conversation and a variety of entertainments. Mira arrived there in Lord Araedyr's company well ahead of Jenny and the dragons. She found that the Trassek twins had already arrived and were deeply involved in the hunt, stalking a pair of local girls who seemed nice enough and were easily impressed if just a bit simple. .. which helped to explain why they were so easily impressed. She disliked interrupting them, although she was not about to let them know that.\n\n\"You two run out to the ship and bring back both Jenny's guitar and my own,\" she ordered.\n\n\"Ah, Lady, do we have to?\" Erkin whined and wheedled.\n\n\"Yes, go earn your pay.\"\n\n\"Can our friends go with us?\"\n\n\"You can show them the ship afterward,\" she told them. \"If the four of you go now, I can't imagine when or if we'll ever see those guitars. This way, you'll get them here in a hurry.\"\n\n\"She's got us figured out,\" Dooket told his \"little brother,\" and they hurried off to complete their errand.\n\n\"I think we've spoiled her terribly,\" Erkin countered.\n\nMira continued on across the room, having a discreet but very good look about. Kaendon possessed many democratic traditions which had been hundreds of years ahead of their time, such as this hall which was open to everyone regardless of wealth or standing. The Lords of Kaendon had always been a rather informal lot, little impressed with rank\u2014even their own. There was a bright blaze built up in the fireplace at one end, although the nights this far south were only beginning to turn chill. Not more than a score of people had arrived yet, but the evening was still young and the keg of ale had not yet been tapped.\n\nMira leaned herself against a post in a doorway to one side of the fire, surreptitiously watching the evening crowd slowly accumulate. The girls that Dooket and Erkin had cornered were still waiting. She found that to be a mild surprise but a considerable relief, since she preferred not to interfere in their hunting. The boys had been with her just over two years now, and she wondered how much longer they would be around. They were competent warriors and far more mature\u2014at least professionally\u2014than one would suspect from their manner. But there was a big difference between watching over the guests at her parties and the type of work she had for them now.\n\n\"It's nice to see that some things never change,\" Araedyr said as he suddenly appeared behind her, rubbing her shoulders affectionately.\n\n\"I was just contemplating that very subject,\" Mira answered. \"Woody Bog has always amazed me, how a place so big and so full of people can also be so homey. It seems to me that all the rest of the world is changing in a hurry these days.\"\n\n\"Troubled times,\" Araedyr agreed. \"Troubled times. But is this old world changing into something new, or just taking a big step backwards into the dark past? All the same, I was speaking of you. Still the same old Mira. Still with your nose in all the world's business, worrying and worrying.\"\n\n\"When nature gave me this nose, I assumed it to be a sign.\" \"So what are you brooding about tonight, love?\" he asked. \"Those children of yours?\"\n\n\"Hardly children,\" Mira said. \"Jenny is twenty-two, and Kelvandor is pushing hard against two hundred and seventy. I just want for them to have something good this once.\"\n\n\"As I said, some things never change,\" Araedyr said, amused. \"Do you ever think of yourself?\"\n\n\"All the time, I assure you.\"\n\nShe paused, seeing that Jenny and Kelvandor had entered from the door on the far side of the room, so involved in their own conversation and each other that they failed to notice her. They retreated to one side of the fireplace, at the edge of the small crowd gathering there. Mira wondered what they were discussing, and even more what they might be thinking. She wished, and not for the first time, that she possessed her student's rather awesome telepathic abilities.\n\n\"Do you still believe that those two need any help?\" Araedyr asked. \"They seem to me to be doing well enough on their own.\" The Trassek twins entered through that same door a moment later, and Mira hurried to intercept them. She took the larger of the two guitars out of Dooket's hands and presented it to Jenny. \"This seems like a very good night for a little music. Guitar duets, if you please.\"\n\n\"Will you play with me?\" Jenny asked, seeing that Erkin was standing ready with her own guitar.\n\n\"I was contemplating a substitution, if he is willing,\" she said as she handed her guitar to Kelvandor. \"And none of your lame excuses, dragon. I've been told by Vajerral that you play quite well.\"\n\n\"I might just consider it, if Jenny will condescend to take pity with rank amateurs,\" he answered as he took the instrument, holding it to his chest with some difficulty. He plucked the strings experimentally. \"And I do mean rank. What should we play?\"\n\n\"A love song, but something light and hopeful,\" Mira insisted before her student had a chance to reply. \"This is a night for happy songs.\"\n\nJenny was looking up at her suspiciously. \"What have you got on your mind?\"\n\n\"As if you didn't know!\" Mira answered with a shrug and turned to walk away. A judicious retreat seemed to be in order.\n\n\"As it happens, I usually do.\"\n\nMira hurried back to rejoin Araedyr in the shadows along the far wall. The two musicians were plucking at the strings of their instruments with slow, careful determination, as if they were having some trouble coming to an agreement. Already the small crowd was beginning to take some notice, and the evening mood in the hall lightened with new interest and excitement. Dragons were rare enough as visitors, and even more so as musicians. Jenny was at last able to make her point clear to her eager but uncertain partner and their fumbling chords modulated into the opening measures of a song. Then Jenny began to sing, the depth and quality of her voice surprising and impressing Kelvandor to such an extent that he almost allowed his part to falter.\n\n\"Your new student plays like an honest professional,\" Araedyr observed after he had listened attentively through half the song. \"She's descended of the old aristocracy of the Middle Kingdoms, is she not?\"\n\nShe glanced at him questioningly. Jenny's dark blue hair had already been spelled to black, in the event that there were Imperial spies about. \"What makes you suspect that?\"\n\n\"I am only guessing, actually,\" he said. \"But only one group of people I have seen have noses quite like that.\"\n\nMira looked startled and, a moment later, faintly amused, but she made no comment. She just hoped that Jenny never heard, or otherwise perceived, what Lord Araedyr had to say about her nose.\n\nThe two musicians had drawn quite a crowd by the time the first song ended. Jenny was clearly a professional; Mira, who had already played with her, was all the more impressed. So were the locals, to judge by their response. Kelvandor was certainly good enough to get away with playing second guitar with her, and he had not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate his fine tenor.\n\n\"They do perform well together,\" Araedyr remarked, and turned to Mira before she could make some off-color comment that was forestalled between her brain and her tongue. \"We are usually responsible for entertaining ourselves during our nightly sessions, such as we are able. This is indeed a rare treat.\"\n\nThe crowd had been debating some point since the end of that first song, and they were now pulling back the benches to make room. Mira paused a moment to watch. \"What is this? Are we going to have dancing?\"\n\n\"That seems likely,\" Araedyr agreed, then paused a moment. \"Ah, yes! They are bringing out the drums.\"\n\nMira knew from her past visits that the drums were used for the powerful, relentless beat that thundered the time to many of the exuberant local folk dances, some of which were as old as the days of the Alasheran Empire. She had always enjoyed drum dances in the past, although the combination of noise, excitement and the strong southern wine tended to bring on a swift headache. Lord Araedyr might have read her mind, for he suddenly darted away to fetch a bottle and two glasses. They took their seats on a bench in a private comer of the hall where they could watch the dancing from a safe distance.\n\nFour drummers were stationed at the comers of the dance floor and the captain of the manor guard stepped to the center to mark the opening time, each downward stroke of his sword an echoing beat. Two young dancers, both members of the guard, quickly took their places behind him. Arms folded behind their backs, they began the vigorous and complex steps of the dance. Concentration was intense, not just on the part of the participants but also the audience. Mira had always been uncertain whether these energetic dances were entertainment, an art form or an acrobatic performance. Drum dances had long been a favorite of soldiers, especially the elite household guards, providing good training in strength, endurance and dexterity while giving more experienced dancers a chance to show off their hard-earned skills.\n\nThe first pair of dancers surrendered the floor at last and, after a quick but spirited debate between herself and several of the others, Jenny pulled off her shoes and stepped out to the center. Mira's interest and amusement turned to sudden apprehension when she saw four members of the household guard join her, moving with formal, military precision to form a square about the solitary dancer, their long, narrow-bladed swords upraised. As one they knelt and laid their swords on the floor, razor-sharp blades facing up with points touching to form a cross beneath the young sorceress's long legs.\n\n\"Yarg, surely she doesn't mean to do the sword dance!\" Mira protested, and turned to her companion. \"Ary, she can't do this.\" \"She means to try,\" Araedyr said. \"Surely she has done it before.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine.\" Privately, Mira was surprised that her protege knew any of the drum dances. Jenny must have learned some interesting tricks during her years among the dragons. Actually, she had practiced wild acrobatic dances with the best: Jane Fonda.\n\nJenny indicated for the drummers to increase their beat. The watchers muttered with growing excitement and leaned forward tense with anticipation, the concentration becoming almost tangible like a throbbing counterpoint to the drumbeat. Jenny began the dance, arms folded behind her back, dancing between the blades with lightning-quick steps. It was no variant of the sword dance of this world, but it worked.\n\n\"Put a stop to this, before she hurts herself.\"\n\n\"There is no stopping it now,\" Araedyr said sharply, indicating for her to remain silent. \"Nothing must break her concentration until she decides that the dance is done.\"\n\nMira had to admit the logic in that, as little as she liked it. Jenny was doing very well indeed, her every move quick, precise and strongly graceful. Mira's apprehension faded\u2014somewhat\u2014 as she watched in complete fascination, as captivated as everyone else in the room. Then a look of momentary surprise that crossed her face evolved into her usual mischievous grin.\n\n\"Ah, of course!\" she said to herself. \"Bless her, the dear girl is actually showing off for her dragon.\"\n\nAnd when she took a closer look at Kelvandor, she saw that he ploy was working very well at that. He was as captivated by Ihe dance as anyone else in the room, but he also looked very pleased and just a little proud. Mira was just a little pleased and proud herself, enough that she was almost willing to forgive her student for pulling such a dangerous stunt as attempting the sword dance without practicing first. And it was such a daring and impulsive stunt for Jenny, normally so cool and reserved, that her forgiveness was almost complete.\n\nAlmost, but not quite. Mira did approve of unorthodoxies and believed that impulsive behavior was a virtue to be rewarded. She would have to consider the matter as she calmed her nerves over a cup of tea.\n\nThe night was cool and clear, the air fresh and bearing a shadow of the snap of an autumn evening, an indication that summer was passing quickly even this far south. Mira, standing on the wooden deck of a porch behind the house, drank her tea slowly as she reflected that it was indecent for any land to be blessed with perfect weather. Which was not exactly the case; Kaendon did have rare snowfalls about every other winter, and she had not forgotten the hurricanes that threatened the coastal lands far more regularly. Yes, it was important to keep all things in perspective. That made living in cold, wet Bennasport more bearable.\n\nMira paused and set her cup on the wooden rail where she stood, glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder. Jenny had just appeared on the brick-paved lower porch and was quietly making her way up the steps of the deck. Mira wondered why the girl thought she needed to be so stealthful, and if she believed that she really was getting away with anything.\n\n\"You dance superbly, dear child,\" Mira said without turning. \"I might add that you're about as subtle as a tipsy dragon.\"\n\n\"I'm as quiet as J.T.,\" her student protested.\n\n\"That's not saying much. And I was referring to your behavior earlier, not in your manner in stomping up those steps.\"\n\n\"What about my behavior?\" Jenny demanded, feigning surprise and slight indignation.\n\n\"You were most definitely showing off for a certain dragon,\" Mira told her bluntly.\n\n\"Who says that I was showing off?\" Jenny insisted.\n\n\"I say that you were showing off!\" the sorceress declared, refusing to be intimidated. \"Listen to me, young lady. If you've come here to ask my advice, then you are going to have to admit to a few obvious truths.\"\n\n\"Who says that I've come to ask your advice?\"\n\n\"Yarg!\" Mira pantomimed pulling her hair in frustration, and knocked her teacup off the rail in the process. She peered over the rail after it. \"Now see what you've made me do. And I have the suspicion that I'm going to need all the tea I can get tonight. Now, why don't we just get this over with? There are better things we could both be doing tonight.\"\n\n\"You were waiting for me.\" Jenny conjured the teacup back onto the ledge, only without its tea.\n\n\"Of course. Now, I'll start off with providing the answer to a question you might not think to ask. If you didn't love him, then there would be nothing for you to decide. The next question is, how much do you love him?\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"I don't know. I've been looking for those answers all night, and I just cannot find them. It's so hard to decide.\"\n\n\"Is there anything to decide?\" Mira asked. \"Kelvandor is a dragon. How could you possibly make love to him?\"\n\n\"I've... made love to him before,\" Jenny explained softly. \"Oh.\" Mira had to hastily reconsider her arguments\u2014at the same time that she was overwhelmed with fascinated curiosity. She would have given five gold crowns to have seen that. \"But I still don't understand. There is a difference between amorous and romantic, at least in my book, and I must be too much of the former and not enough of the latter. Kelvandor is a faerie dragon and you are...\"\n\nWell, that was an interesting question. Jenny had certainly started life human and quite mortal, but Dalvenjah had warned Mira, long before the girl had ever come into this world, what long familiarity with dragon magic had done to her. She had hardly forgotten that Jenny had taken an arrow in the gut with less harm than most mortals would have had from a slight wound to the arm or leg.\n\nJenny frowned. \"I know that I must become a dragon to play my part in the Prophecy. And that, I suspect, will not be long in coming. My uncle Allan became a dragon for Dalvenjah's sake, and they share a deep, quiet love that I can only describe as magical. I can see a distant glimpse of that when I'm with Kelvandor. But I'm not yet ready to commit myself that fully to him. I need more time.\"\n\nMira nodded in understanding. \"I know that many dragons spend most of their endless lives devoted to a fair number of loves, turning to one or the other as they feel or need. And some mortal folk like myself, who have learned the hard way to be properly circumspect, balance such relationships in our own way. Then, when the day comes that you feel ready to make a permanent commitment, so be it.\"\n\nJenny nodded in mute agreement, but she still did not look completely convinced. She stood for a long moment, leaning on the rail and staring into the dark forest only a short distance beyond. \"Love can be so complex and difficult to understand. What do you think? What is your position with men?\"\n\n\"Usually on the bottom,\" Mira remarked evenly, but with her sly little grin.\n\nJenny rolled her eyes. \"I should have seen that one coming. I should have learned, after half a year, to beware of how I phrase things with you.\"\n\n\"I can't make your decision for you,\" Mira told her sternly. \"I'm not asking you to,\" her student answered. \"Talk to me, Mira. Give me the benefit of your vast experience, and we'll see if any of it takes root. I trust you more than I trust anyone in this world.\"\n\n\"Oh, very well.\" Mira sighed heavily, unaware that the slender wooden rail creaked in warning. \"All right, then. This is the first truth I learned, a long time ago, and it has helped preserve both my perspective and my sanity every time I find myself in 'your situation.' There is no such thing as love. It's an illusion. You can't put it in a bottle or the bank, and it sure as hell don't make the flowers grow. You can do without it. You can get through life just fine, and possibly better, all by yourself. You don't really need anyone, not friends or lovers. Just clients.\"\n\nJenny looked so scandalized that Mira smiled. \"Of course, there is one important thing you do have to keep in mind about love.\" \"And what is that?\" Jenny asked breathlessly.\n\n\"It feels good.\" Mira shrugged helplessly, and shook her head. \"And so, keeping firmly in mind that love is something you can do just as well if not better without, it allows you to keep your perspective and watch out for yourself when you do find yourself involved in affairs of the heart... or the crotch. Keeping your perspective and watching out for your own interests\u2014and your partner's\u2014is the best insurance against something going badly wrong. It helps you get more out of love, and it tells you when the time has come to get out of a bad situation, with a minimum of friction.\"\n\n\"That makes sense,\" Jenny agreed. It all sounded very much like her mistress's curious but effective philosophies.\n\n\"Which brings us to rule number two,\" Mira announced. \"I never allow myself to proceed into a situation where I lose more than my half of the control. I refuse to stay in a bad situation. But I certainly never allow a promising opportunity to slip by. Practical hedonism is the only way to get the most from life.\" Jenny laughed softly. \"And I thought that Addena Sheld was a hopeless flirt.\"\n\n\"She learned from the expert,\" Mira said, pointing to herself. She turned to lean on the rail, and the two of them peered into the night for several long moments.\n\n\"It's easier to be a dragon,\" Jenny continued after a brief moment. \"Male or female, a dragon is a dragon and they are never at odds. But men and women often seem almost like different creatures, and I don't understand men. It just seems that men only care about what they want, like pleasing them is our only interest and purpose.\"\n\n\"It seems that way, I do admit,\" Mira agreed. \"Men are not by nature self-centered assholes, but an inordinate number turn out that way because they have never had to learn better. They don't know that they're missing the best part of love just to satisfy their lust. And there are certainly enough games that women play, so I guess it comes out fairly even in the end. But there is no reason to ever give in to that. You either get what you're entitled to out of a relationship, or you get out.\"\n\n\"You make love sound so transitory,\" Jenny observed.\n\n\"Do I?\" The sorceress looked startled. \"I certainly never meant to imply that. If you ever are lucky enough to find your perfect match, then don't you ever let him get away. It's just been my part to have acquired an impressive string of near misses.\"\n\nShe paused a moment to lift her cup, then looked within it and realized that the rest of her tea had gone over the rail. She sighed heavily. \"Hang me for a nosey old bitch, but I just have to ask. How do you make love to a dragon in the first place?\"\n\n\"Oh, that's not hard,\" Jenny insisted, rather innocently. \"The trick is getting the dragon on his back.\"\n\n\"Well, yes.\" For once in her life, Mira did not want an answer to her question. \"So, what do you think?\"\n\n\"It won't be long until I'll have to become a dragon for my protection,\" Jenny mused, almost to herself. \"It's not as if I'm becoming a dragon to be with him, as my uncle Allan did for Dalvenjah. But I'm afraid to get involved until I'm done with the Prophecy and have a life of my own. Once I become a dragon myself, this whole situation with Kelvandor will become a lot harder to ignore.\"\n\n\"So who says you should ignore it?\" Mira asked. When Jenny turned to stare, she shrugged broadly. \"I mean, what is really going to be different? You're going to have that dragon hanging about as it is. If you just go ahead and get it over, that's one less thing you'll have to worry about.\"\n\nJenny had to think about that for a moment. Mira did make one good point. If the idea was to avoid distraction, Kelvandor already had her distracted enough. If love itself was the distraction, then she was already in love. She was reminded yet again of Allan and Dalvenjah, and how they both seemed to be stronger and more secure for having each other. Of course, theirs was hardly the deep, magical relationship that Dalvenjah and Allan shared. It came down to a question of the better of two evils, having Kelvandor... or not having him. And as Mira said, he was going to be around anyway.\n\n\"I'm going to find another cup of tea before I fade away into the night like a shadow,\" Mira said as she turned back to the door. \"Just be certain that you're not making it more of a problem than it really is.\"\n\nJenny leaned on the rail, looking out into the night at the dark shape of Wind Dragon sitting in the yard beyond. The airship was in a state of partial disassembly, lacking her bowsprit and rigging, as well as the burnt and damaged sections of her deck, rail and hull. The old girl had really taken her lumps in the past couple of weeks. It frightened Jenny just to think about it.\n\n\"She is right.\"\n\nJenny turned sharply at the sound of that deep, soft voice to see the misty form of a golden dragon standing behind her. She relaxed. \"I was wondering when you would turn up again. You are going to have to be a little less mysterious, you know. You could just say what you mean.\"\n\nKeridaejan looked honestly surprised. \"I did not want to frighten you.\"\n\n\"Drifting in and out muttering cryptic messages is your idea of being discreet?\"\n\n\"Well, pardon me for dying,\" the dragon said, turning his head away. \"I was trying to do you a favor. But never mind that. After all I've done for you and this Prophecy, I should want to proceed as I see best.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm sorry,\" Jenny conceded grudgingly, turning back to lean on the rail. \"It just seems like know-it-all dragons have been running my life according to their own secret plans for most of my life.\"\n\n\"Yes, I can imagine that you would find it frustrating.\" Karidaejan was reluctantly mollified. He made vague motions of stroking his scales, a nervous gesture that was defeated by the fact that his physical appearance was an illusion. He sighed heartily. \"You have been patient, even devoted. You deserve to know the truth, and I know things that even Dalvenjah does not dare to suspect. And you deserve to know everything.\"\n\nJenny nodded. \"I've always thought that I could do better for knowing what was going on.\"\n\n\"That just goes to show how much you know.\"\n\nJenny turned to stare. \"You have no intention of telling me a damned thing, do you?\"\n\n\"The time has not yet come,\" he explained. \"You have an important and dangerous task before you. Once that is done, then I will come to you again and explain everything. But at that time you must become a dragon, for your own protection, before it is too late. Your enemies plan to trap you, and you will be betrayed by one you will not expect.\"\n\n\"And you have no intention of telling me who that is?\" Jenny asked as the dragon's misty form began to fade.\n\n\"Not on your life.\"\n\nWith that he was gone. A moment later the door opened and Mira stepped out onto the deck, holding a cup of tea. She blinked in confusion. \"Who are you talking to?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Jewel of the Southern Seas", + "text": "Five days of conscientious labor had Wind Dragon restored to perfect condition. The damage to her woodwork from fire arrows, grapples and the lashing tails of winged demons was repaired to invisibility. The new bowsprit was set into place, the stabilizers were rigged and a new set of replacement stabilizers were made and stored in the hold The water tank was also repaired, along with a careful drying out of the contents of the airship's lower deck. And Jenny was given a new set of clothes to replace what she had lost to rather unusual circumstances.\n\nMira was up before dawn, packing for her move back into her cabin aboard Wing Dragon so that they could be away shortly, but she was interrupted barely halfway through. She was just a little annoyed to discover Erkin knocking on her door, mostly because he was knocking so loudly. She opened it impatiently.\n\n\"Lady Mira, there's a big, Ugly ghost poking around the ship,\" Erkin explained before she had a chance to lecture him.\n\n\"What?\" Mira demanded. \"Oh, piffle! There's no such thing as ghosts.\"\n\n\"Whatever it is, something is out there,\" Erkin insisted, unconvinced. He was, after all, a barbarian. Or what passed for barbarian in this modern age. \"Dooket is keeping an eye on it.\"\n\n\"Oh, let's go have a look,\" she acquiesced. Ghost or not, she was willing to concede that her two mercenaries were level-headed enough to know that they had seen something unusual, even if they had no idea what it was.\n\nThe door across the hall opened and Jenny peered out inquisitively. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"We have a ghost in the ship,\" Erkin told her, perfectly serious. Mira sighed deeply and rolled her eyes, disputing that.\n\n\"Oh.\" Jenny seemed to get the message. \"Mind if I come along?\"\n\n\"The more, the merrier!\" Mira exclaimed. \"Lead on.\"\n\nNow there was one serious misconception being perpetrated, at least on Jenny's part. She knew of only one ghost, and she could not imagine why Karidaejan would be poking about. Any other ghost, perhaps. But not some secretive Mindijarah. She had not heard Erkin's description of the ghost as big and ugly, although she did think that he would know a faerie dragon when he saw one. Even one who had been dead as long as Karidaejan.\n\nThey hurried through the dark, silent manor house and stepped out onto the back porch. The sky was only just beginning to lighten in advance of the rising sun. The grass of the lawn was dark beneath a blanket of dew, and the morning air was cool, heavy and wet. Wind Dragon's vast, dark shape loomed only a short distance away. A dog was barking somewhere, but without any particular urgency or alarm, and everything seemed silent and calm. But in contrast to that sleepy, peaceful scene, there was a vague troubling to the native magic of the world. Mira shuttered despite herself, as if in revulsion from some foul touch.\n\n\"Over there, Lady Mira.\" Jenny indicated to their right.\n\nAt that moment Dooket stepped out of the open door of a storeroom in the comer of the house, near Wind Dragon's stem, and gestured impatiently for them to come. They hurried to join him, and Mira was surprised to note that he actually looked just a little frightened. Since none of their hair-raising adventures of the past two and a half years had ever come close to achieving that effect, she was surprised and mystified.\n\n\"It's in here,\" he whispered hoarsely. \"It glows quite a bit, so you can't miss it.\"\n\n\"Of, piffle!\" Mira declared yet again and she conjured a soft blue ball of light above her head and entered the storeroom boldly. \"There's no such thing as ghosts. Honestly, boys, you surprise me, trying to tell me such an absurd tale. I'll have you know that I'm a trained and competent sorceress, an expert in matters of magic, and I have no patience for superstitious nonsense.\"\n\nJenny kept her mouth firmly closed on the subject.\n\nShe stopped short when something vast and threatening stepped out from behind a stack of crates to block her way. It was well over seven feet tall, so enormous that it barely fit under the ceiling, and it did indeed glow faintly with its own pale, sickly light. In form it seemed like some impossible mixture of man and crab. Its massive body was encased in hard, armored shell, although it walked upright on two short, plated legs and its long, spine-edged arms ended in immense pincers. Its small head seemed to emerge directly from its hunched back, hinged so that it could look to either side only slightly. Two points of white flames marked its small eyes, burning balefully from deep within the shadow of its armored brow. Mira turned to the Trasseks with an impatient gesture.\n\n\"What did I tell you, boys? That's not a ghost. That's a demon,\" she declared, then turned abruptly back to the malevolent monster. \"Yarg!\"\n\nThe demon drew back a massive pincer and took a swipe at them that would have scattered the entire group across the room, except that they had already scattered. Dooket and Erkin stood ready to charge in with their swords, but Mira gestured them away sharply. She did not know if the weapons they carried were those which had been spelled for fighting demons. Then she began working the spell that should have sent the demon back to its own existence.\n\n\"Don't you dare!\" Jenny declared, one hand held protectively over her breasts. Mira turned to stare at her in astonishment and mystification.\n\nIgnoring her mistress, Jenny stepped forward to face the demon, coldly determined, even as it prepared to attack. She gestured toward the monster, one arm aimed level at its plated chest, and a soft blue glow surrounded her closed fist. The demon lunged ponderously forward straight toward her, but a shaft of blue mist shot out from her fist to impact against its thick shell, blasting it backwards against the wall behind with force enough to crack the brick and shake the very foundations of the manor. It stirred weakly and began to rise, but Jenny caught it with a second blast that exploded the monster, casting plated segments across the floor.\n\nA moment later those segments began to dissolve into thick, creeping mist.\n\n\"I do need the practice.\" Mira pretended to sound aggrieved. \"Well, do it when I'm not about,\" Jenny answered, rubbing her closed fist. \"My word, that tingles. So, what do we do now? Was that thing looking for us, or was it only in the neighborhood?\" \"That's a very good question, but I really do not know the answer,\" the sorceress said. \"I don't like the thought that they might be sending demons out to spy upon and intimidate their enemies and possible allies. I like even less the thought that they know who we are and had these things out looking for us. For the sake of our good host and his people, we should get Wind Dragon into the air as soon as possible. Let's get to work, boys.\" \"Right, Lady Mira,\" Dooket and Erkin agreed eagerly, as if nothing had ever happened, and hurried out of the storeroom to attend to the task.\n\nAn hour of hard work found Wing Dragon once again in the sky, and in somewhat less than an hour more the airship passed from the woody coast of Kaendon out over the rolling, white-headed waves of the sea. There was a brisk inshore wind that the ship was forced to climb above to maintain her speed, but the sky was mostly clear and the sun bright and warm. With luck, they would not be caught over water by an autumn storm. Mira kept very much in mind that this was the season for hurricanes, and that an airship was just as vulnerable to such violent weather as any other ship at sea.\n\nBut for now, matters aboard Wind Dragon were quiet enough. Kelvandor was overboard stretching his wings. Jenny stood at the ship's wheels, so lost in her own thoughts that she looked up only every two minutes or so to check the compass for drift. Lady Mira sat on the deck a short distance away, poring over her books with a single-minded interest.\n\nMira looked up at last, peering at her young student intently. \"What great matters are you pondering over there? You're thinking so hard that I can't concentrate on my reading.\"\n\n\"Oh, just thinking,\" Jenny replied with shy evasion, pushing a ribbon of her long, spelled-black hair away from her face. Mira recognized that nervous gesture and thought she knew what it meant.\n\n\"Oh, ho!\" she declared. \"So, how are things going between yourself and the dragon?\"\n\n\"Oh, just fine.\"\n\n\"Just fine? Your enthusiasm overwhelms me.\"\n\nJenny smiled. \"I'm not thinking about Kelvandor. I've got something else on my mind.\"\n\n\"Oh? So what am I, a mind reader?\" Mira inquired.\n\n\"I hate it when people say that to me,\" Jenny muttered with a frown, and sighed deeply. \"Frankly, I'm worried about that demon the boys found. If it was looking for us, then we're flying into a trap.\"\n\n\"Yes, I've thought about that too,\" Mira said, solemnly academic but not particularly concerned. \"I really don't see how they could be looking for us, specifically. They might have sent their demon to spy upon or terrorize Lord Araedyr, since he is holding out on their offer to join the Empire. But, more likely than not, they are just spying out the countryside for airships they can steal for their own use.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course!\" Jenny agreed. \"They have to be coming up with airships somewhere, and airship trade into that region has always been sparse. What did Araedyr have to say?\"\n\n\"What you no doubt suspect,\" Mirareplied. \"A certain number of airships have disappeared on routine flights here in the South. The ships are posted missing, and in two cases war galleys have claimed to have found wreckage. Then, a few weeks later, the same ships are seen flying again under new names as a part of the Imperial sky navy.\"\n\n\"Could they possibly be boarding and commandeering ships in flight?\" Jenny asked dubiously. \"They've attacked us in flight twice, but they seemed far more intent upon destruction than boarding.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't want to try it,\" Mira said. \"I suppose that it is possible to board and capture an airship in flight, as difficult and dangerous as that might be. That sounds like one of Beratric Kurgel's stupid ideas, and how did they capture the first? It seems far easier to capture the airship while it's still on the ground, say the night before, very quietly and secretly. Then they would have had their own crew take the ship out of port and fly it home rather than on to its next destination.\"\n\nJenny glanced over her shoulder to see that Kelvandor was laboring to come up behind the ship. She cut speed somewhat and moved as much as she could out of the way while still keeping hold of both wheels, and Mira discreetly withdrew to the starboard steps down to the middle deck. J.T., coming up the other steps at that moment, took one look and turned tail.\n\n\"Coming through!\" Kelvandor bellowed as he took hold of the rail and thrust himself forward onto the deck, only to trip and crack his chin sharply. He rose and shook his head vigorously. \"Hm. That was an improvement.\"\n\nMira glanced up from her book, affording him one of her droll expressions. \"Sometimes he's so stupid, he even frightens himself. Where have you been, Lizard?\"\n\n\"Having a look about,\" the dragon answered, rubbing his chin. \"But this little ship is making such speed, I cannot range very far for fear of losing you.\"\n\nLady Mira, still seated on the steps, was staring thoughtfully at the dragon. She shook her head slowly. \"You know, we can't just fly into port with a pair of faerie dragons on board.\"\n\nKelvandor stared at her. \"I never thought that we would. Vajerral and I will go overboard as we near the island, to do a little furtive investigating of our own, and generally just hang around in the event you need us for daring rescues. The rest of you can stick your head in the noose, and be safer without us.\"\n\n\"I don't like the way you phrased that, but I believe that would be best,\" Mira agreed. \"But for pity's sake, don't get yourselves caught or do a damned thing that could cast any suspicion on us. I dare say that we'll be in quite enough danger as it is.\"\n\n\"Right... Mom,\" Kelvandor agreed. He was in a playful mood. *\n\nMira rolled her eyes but refrained from answering him. She looked at Jenny, who was quietly attending the helm. \"You've remained completely silent on the subject.\"\n\n\"I just wish I knew what you had in mind, once we arrive,\" her student said frankly.\n\nLady Mira sighed deeply. \"So do I.\"\n\nWind Dragon had stopped for the night on the sands of a small island, and Jenny had gone with Kelvandor and Vajerral up the beach a short distance to do the laundry in a broad stream that emerged from the forest. They were bringing in the laundry that they earlier had hung to dry on a line stretched between two trees. Five days in Kaendon and they had not thought to have their laundry sent out. It was interesting that the dragons agreed to the task of washing clothes, since they were adamant about wearing only what they grew for themselves.\n\nJenny had found a small mirror in one of the pockets of Mira's jacket, and she seemed to have had a morbid fascination with it ever since. Now Jenny had always had something of a compulsive dislike, even fear, of mirrors. She had an intense aversion to seeing her own image, even in those times when she had spelled or dyed her hair black as a matter of necessity, such as the four years she had been in college, and she could not guess why. Now she seemed almost addicted to staring at her own image, as if to make up for those long years of avoidance.\n\nVajerral paused in folding towels to stare over her shoulder, wondering if Jenny was using the mirror for some magical spell. \"What do you see?\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"You know, I've had this face for nearly twenty-four years now, and I have never appreciated it. I have just never thought about it. Is it a pretty face? An intelligent face? A kind face?\"\n\n\"All of those things at once, I am sure,\" Kelvandor was quick to promise her. When love speaks, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Even if the beholder is a dragon, and knows not whereof he speaks. \"A pretty face, above all else. Very beautiful.\"\n\nShe turned to him. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" he said, then laid back his ears uncertainly. \"At least for a human.\"\n\n\"Oh, thanks!\"\n\nVajerral placed a sock on the end of her snout and tossed her head to cause it to swing back and forth. \"Look! An oliphant!\" \"Oh, enough!\" Jenny snatched away the sock and used it to snap the young dragon in the rump.\n\n\"What is an oliphant?\" Kelvandor asked. He was entertaining the rather outrageous vision of a dragon with a long, obscenely limp nose.\n\nJenny glanced into the mirror yet again. \"I was just thinking that soon I will have to become a dragon. There is nothing wrong with being a dragon, I must admit. But I have become rather used to what I am, and I think that I am going to miss it... no matter how much I might enjoy being a dragon.\"\n\n\"Allan always did regret that he never could play his cello,\" Vajerral agreed thoughtfully. Then she saw that Kelvandor was glaring at her, and she remembered which side of the argument she was supposed to take. \"Of course, he does make a very good dragon.\"\n\nJenny was staring at the pair of them, thoughtfully. \"I am beginning to think that you two were exactly the wrong people to talk to about this.\"\n\n\"Look at that!\" Vajerral exclaimed. Trotting on all fours, she hurried across the beach to intercept a curious crawling shell like a horseshoe crab that was being tumbled ashore by the surf.\n\n\"Did you know Keridaejan?\" Jenny asked. She had been thinking about his warning that she would be betrayed by someone she would never suspect. She wondered if he foresaw that as a part of the Prophecy, or if being a ghost gave him a special advantage in being able to sneak about and discover things.\n\n\"Karidaejan was my father,\" Kelvandor answered simply.\n\nJenny stared. \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"Long story,\" he explained. \"All old family history. You see, the Prophecy as you know it actually began before Dalvenjah's own birth less than fifty years ago. She was an orphan of circumstance, surrendered by her mother to apprenticeship at a very early age, unaware of the identity of her own father until she was nearly your age. She's a fighter, a survivor, even by the standards of our own kind.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" Jenny agreed. \"And I know that she lost her first mate.\"\n\n\"It was more than that,\" Kelvandor continued. \"You see, my father was her older half-brother, and also her first true mate. They knew each other only a very short time and yet they loved each other dearly, both as brother and sister and as lovers. And do not stare; that is the way of dragons. But they were also so very much alike that they were not completely comfortable with prolonged company. Then Derjadhan came and stole Dalvenjah's heart. The High Priest was able to get at Keridaejan, and Dalvenjah was forced to slay his body by her own hand. She saw her first two loves die within months of each other, but then she also found Allan. That was why Allan was so good for her; it took her three tries to get it right.\"\n\n\"Then you are a consulting sorcerer, like Dalvenjah?\" Jenny asked, thinking that he wanted to change the subject.\n\n\"In most ways, but not quite,\" Kelvandor explained, considering his words carefully. \"It is, I suppose, a matter of reputation.\n\nDalvenjah is known for solving mysteries, for finding things or figuring out how things happen. I am a troubleshooter, a solver of obvious problems. I do such things as slay evil creatures, negotiate for enemies or perform quests. I also do a good deal of consulting work in matters of landscape engineering, dams and bridges and the like.\"\n\nJenny bent down to pick up a large spiral shell and hold it to her ear. Kelvandor stared at her intently. \"Why are you sticking a shell in .your ear?\"\n\n\"You dragons know nothing about the sea,\" she declared, laughing. \"If you hold one of the larger coiled shells to your ear, you can hear the sea.\"\n\n\"I can do that without the shell,\" Kelvandor muttered as he stepped over to the edge of the surf to collect an especially large shell, and held it to his ear. A large hermit crab reached out with one pincer to grab his ear.\n\nJenny laughed as she gently removed the crab, but Kelvandor only glared. \"You never told me that things live inside.\" \"Begone, foul creatures of Darkness!\" a strong male voice declared from just behind them. \"Unhand that lady!\"\n\nThey all turned sharply, and Jenny saw one of the more amazing sights of a long and eventful career. There, on the very edge of the forest behind them, stood an actual knight in shining aonor. His visor was down and Jenny could see nothing of his features, but he was tall and his voice, a little deep for Errol Flynn, was still well cast for the part. He stood with drawn sword, ready to descend in righteous combat with the two dragons.\n\n\"I say, get your hands off!\"\n\nStartled, Jenny drew back the hand she had on Kelvandor's shoulder; otherwise neither of the two dragons was touching her. Vajerral was standing over a large crab some distance away, her head down and her back beginning to arch. She had inherited her mother's fighting instinct.\n\nJenny was beginning to recover her own composure. \"What do you mean by this? What manner of fool are you, if you don't know that faerie dragons are of the Light?\"\n\n\"One thing I've learned, little lady, is that things are not always what they seem.\" He advanced on Kelvandor, who had to take several steps backwards to avoid getting nasty. \"Shall it be you first, or do we save the best for last?\"\n\nJenny drew the long-bladed sword from Kelvandor's harness and intercepted him. \"You leave that poor dragon alone! He's my boyfriend.\"\n\n\"Honestly, Miss, I'm just trying to defend your virtue,\" the knight said reasonably, then stopped short. They could almost see the whites of his eyes in the shadow of his visor. \"Your boyfriend? Oh, my! I might already be too late to salvage your virtue.\"\n\nKelvandor glared. \"You're starting to get on my nerves.\"\n\nThe knight brought up his sword, and Jenny countered the attack by lifting her own blade. That left the poor fellow at something of a loss. Fighting a dragon to rescue a damsel was one thing, but this damsel was fighting him for possession of the dragon. If anyone should happen by, they might get the idea that he was trying to rescue a dragon from a damsel and that simply would not do at all.\n\nKelvandor decided to put a quick end to the entire question, whipping his tail around to trip the distracted knight. There was one thing that he knew about knights in heavy armor. They went over like a log, and they tended to stay down for the count. Kelvandor relieved him of his weapons, then stood with one hind paw in the middle of the knight's armored chest.\n\n\"Are you prepared to be reasonable?\" Kelvandor asked.\n\n\"I suppose that we might talk about it,\" the knight agreed.\n\nKelvandor stepped back and lifted him, armor and all, with deceptive ease, and the knight pulled off his helmet. He was everything that Jenny would have expected of a knight in shining armor: tall, powerfully built and ruggedly handsome. The only thing that she had not expected was that he was old, at least compared to her Prince Charming image. Actually, he was only in his mid-forties, slightly weatherbeaten but still quite hale and distinguished. Perhaps she had expected that an experienced knight would not have been running around behaving so foolishly, accosting innocent dragons as they folded laundry with their damsels.\n\n\"So, you mean to say that these are real faerie dragons, and that you are not in any danger?\" he asked, drawing himself up sternly. \"Then who, might I ask, are you, what are you doing here and how did you get here?\"\n\n\"I'm a sorceress from off-world,\" Jenny explained, mindful of giving her true name to strangers. \"My friends and I came here aboard the airship Wind Dragon, laid over for the night. My mistress is Lady Mira, a sorceress of some renown. We are on a quest, a spy mission to Alashera.\"\n\n\"Kasdamir Gerran?\" the knight asked incredulously. \"Well, why didn't you say so? Mira's an old friend of mine.\"\n\nJenny sighed. Here we go again.\n\nThe knight swept a surprisingly elegant bow, considering the fact that he was wearing a Toyota. \"I am Sir Remidan Ardont Resmaer-Traytess, Son of Sir Talebaem, Son of Sir Raemard, Defender of the Crown and Knight Errant of the Loyal Order of Stewards, Bearer of the Golden Horn of Valor. My card.\"\n\nJenny glanced at the card. Sure enough, it said all that.\n\n\"Just a moment,\" he turned to the forest immediately behind them. \"Yo! Staemar! Show yourself. We're going to see Mira.\" A white stallion of rather impressive size, decked out in saddle, neck and face armor, and sheets of chain mail hung about its form like draperies, stepped into the opening. \"Mira? That crazy lady?\" \"My word, it's Mr. Ed,\" Jenny muttered to herself. In fact, the voice was curiously the same, only this horse was a tenor. Staemar must have heard her, because he glared at her through the eyeholes in his face armor.\n\nRemidan seemed willing enough to accompany them back to camp, and he was able to see Wind Dragon's masts above the dunes about a quarter of a mile away once he put on a pair of wire-framed glasses. Jenny stared, fascinated to see that suits of armor had pockets. Staemar seemed less willing.\n\n\"These dragons won't eat me, will they?\" he asked uncertainly. Kelvandor looked at him in a very appraising manner for a long moment. \"No, I don't think so.\"\n\nMira and the two barbarians were standing below Wind Dragon's boarding ladder, staring in complete mystification as Jenny and the dragons approached with their unexpected guests. Mira peered very intently at Sir Remidan for a long moment, and then her eyes widened in surprise.\n\n\"Remidan?\" she asked. \"Remidan, it is you. I haven't seen you in years now. Where have you been all that time?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm afraid to say that Staemar and I have been shipwrecked on this island for the past two years,\" Remidan explained. \"I've never been sure, but I've always expected that it was the foul sorceress Queramael who caused me to be stranded here. If she thought that she made an end to me that time, then she is in for quite a surprise indeed.\"\n\n\"Sorceress Queramael?\" Kelvandor asked.\n\n\"A most evil sorceress and self-proclaimed Queen of the Shadow Islands,\" SirRemidan explained, wiping his glasses with a lacy hanky. \"Also a childhood companion of mine. We share a bitter and deadly rivalry that goes back these twenty years and more, and she will stop at nothing to destroy me.\"\n\n\"Why is she so peeved with you?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"He got her pregnant,\" Mira whispered succinctly.\n\n\"Oh.\" Jenny blinked. \"I'd be out for his hide myself.\"\n\n\"It was hardly my fault,\" Remidan explained, his pride ruffled by this distasteful admission. \"It happened during our first great contest, a fierce battle of Dark sorcery against my own finely crafted skills and magical armor. She employed a spell of uncontrollable lust against me, and was then caught in the backwash.\" \"Professional hazards,\" Jenny remarked.\n\n\"That's quite beside the point,\" Sir Remidan continued briskly. \"Your young protege has told me of your quest. I should be honored to accompany you on your noble mission.\"\n\nMira had to think about that for a long moment. Dooket and Erkin were glowering in the background; they obviously did not like the competition. At last she looked at the knight shrewdly. \"This is a secret mission, you know. You'll have to leave your armor and that stupid-looking nag behind. We'll collect them on our way back.\"\n\n\"Under the circumstances, I quite forgive your insults,\" Staemar remarked. \"In fact, I won't mind too much if you never come back, as long as I'm spared a trip to that place. I've heard that they're cannibals.\"\n\n\"The Alasherans are much too proud to eat horses,\" Mira told him. \"I just don't know how I could explain having a horse on an airship. You've been here for two years, you say? Why didn't you eat that horse?\"\n\nRemidan shrugged. \"Never had to.\"\n\nThe travelers found the early afternoon clouds very obliging, even if they did make for rough flying. The broken cover, only just beginning to build into afternoon storms, would allow Wind Dragon to arrive unannounced, or at least unseen long enough to land before the local authorities knew what to do about it. Mira firmly believed that it is far easier to get permission to do what you want if you first go ahead and do it, then ask politely. And she did not want to take the chance that they would be refused permission to land. Jenny privately thought that they were less likely to be attacked if they did not pop in upon the Alasherans as a complete surprise, but she kept that opinion to herself.\n\nThe clouds also presented them the excellent opportunity to set two of their numbers overboard with little risk of being seen. They were approaching the narrow, mountainous peninsula that separated the vast harbor of the city from the open sea to the northeast. Sir Remidan looked like he was beginning to regret his decision to accompany them. He was by no means afraid of the servants of the Dark, but it was rather beneath his dignity to pretend to be one of Mira's barbarian bodyguards... and even more so to have to dress the part. Even worse, he looked suspiciously like a knight of considerable reputation, dignity and rank pretending to be in disguise.\n\n\"Deucedly uncomfortable,\" he remarked to Jenny as they stood together on the helm deck. \"Of course, it's hardly as bad as the time I spent six weeks in the port of Edigan, pretending to be a barmaid.\"\n\nJenny turned to stare at him. \"A barmaid? How did that work out?\"\n\n\"Quite well, actually,\" he explained. \"I was too big to sit on anyone's lap, too damned ugly to make a proper whore, and I still made a tidy profit off the business in tips.\"\n\n\"Serving drinks?\"\n\n\"No, I doubled as a bouncer. Of course, if I had been trying to make a living as a proper harlot, I should have starved.\"\n\n\"Well, we're all ready?\" Mira asked as she bounced up the steps to join them. Kelvandor followed behind, bearing a small pack. \"My good Sir Remidan, do join me over at the rail. I want lo show you something.\"\n\n\"What is that?\" Remidan asked suspiciously, confused and slightly reluctant: They leaned over the rail near the top of the steps Mira had just ascended. \"What would you show me?\"\n\n\"How to mind your own damned business and give Kelvandor a chance!\" she hissed impatiently.\n\n\"Oh...? Oh!\"\n\nKelvandor looked at the odd pair with some amusement, then turned back to Jenny. \"It would be foolish of me to ask you to watch out for yourself. Just promise me that you'll watch out for the rest of this troupe of clowns.\"\n\nJenny tried to keep from laughing aloud; he was unaware of the inside joke. \"I will do my best. We'll get back out of here just as quick as we can. I won't-let Mira loiter.\"\n\nJenny hesitated only a moment, then grabbed him around the neck and gave him the best kiss that he had had\u2014at least from her\u2014in some time. From a dragon's point of view, humans could not kiss worth a damn, but Kelvandor was not about to complain. She leaned close to his ear. \"When we leave here, then I'll have a real surprise for you.\"\n\nKelvandor blinked. \"Sex?\"\n\nMira kept Remidan looking over the rail until Vajerral came up on the helm deck to join them. She was already wearing one of the larger, heavier harnesses that faerie dragons used when transporting packs. Kelvandor began wiggling himself into his own, while Jenny stood ready to help him with the pack.\n\n\"We will stay as close as we dare, so that you can contact us when you need us,\" Kelvandor said as Mira and Jenny attached a large pack of supplies to the straps behind the saddle. He glanced at Jenny. \"Are you certain that you have that much power?\" \"From that distance, I could talk to almost anyone,\" she assured him.\n\nA moment later the airship slipped into the clouds. Lady Mira looked around, then gave the dragon a firm swat on his rump. \"Get yourselves overboard, and be quick about it. And be careful!\"\n\n\"Right, Mom!\" Kelvandor agreed with raw mischief as he thrust himself up and over the rail, disappearing almost instantly into the thick, grey fog.\n\n\"I am not your mother!\" Mira shouted after him, rushing to the rail. She sighed heavily. \"So I'm a dragon's mother. Wonderful thing, being a mother.\"\n\nVajerral stepped forward quickly, placing a reassuring hand on Jenny's shoulder. The young dragon looked very somber. \"Please be very, very careful. Remember what your life means to the fulfillment of the Prophecy, and what the servants of the Dark would do to you if you were again in their power. And remember also how I would grieve should anything happen to you.\"\n\n\"I'll remember,\" Jenny insisted. \"Thank you for everything, especially for your understanding and good wishes.\"\n\nVajerral smiled and clasped her hands firmly, then turned and leaped over the rail to disappear quickly into the clouds. Jenny returned to the wheels and quickly checked their course. Lady Mira had already hurried to the front edge of the helm deck. \"Boys!\"\n\n\"Yes, Lady Mira?\" Dooket and Erkin responded instantly, looking up from their work.\n\n\"We'll be landing in a matter of minutes,\" she told them. \"Get all the spelled weapons and all the exploding bolts for the catapults into the hidden storage lockers. I've opened them for you.\"\n\n\"Right, Mom!\" They agreed eagerly. Mira flinched, and thought that the barbarians listened to more than was good for them.\n\nWind Dragon dropped down from the dark clouds into the bright afternoon sunlight, bold as brass as she ran at almost full speed, her skids barely skimming the bobbing waves. Round-bellied merchant ships crept in and out of port amid the vast bulks of Imperial wargalleys, their hulls ornately carved and decorated with lavish designs and with two and three full decks of long, slender oars stroking the waves. Wind Dragon was a gaudy little thing, with her blue-and-red-striped vanes and stabilizers, although far short of the blatant, even intimidating ostentation of the Imperial vessels. But she was undeniably the center of attention as Jenny, at Mira's direction, took the little ship right through the middle of the harbor, fleetly dodging in and out between the larger oceangoing ships.\n\nAlashera lay cradled in the protective arms of two long folds that reached out from the towering slopes of Mount Drashand, framing either side of the broad harbor. The city itself seemed to be built upon a successive series of irregular shelves, each one reaching back, shorter and shallower, until they filled the long, narrow triangle formed by the branching of the two towering ridges. Fields and pastures crowded tightly where they could in the rugged lower slopes to either side of the city while terraced vineyards clung stubbornly to the more treacherous slopes. The smoking cone of Mount Drashand stood in brooding challenge directly behind the city, her head lifted a mile and more into the clouds and crowned with her own billowing steam. And yet she was only a fraction of the size of the original volcano that had once risen in the dim, unremembered past and then destroyed itself in some incredible violence, leaving only the broken ring of her lower slopes which now enclosed the broad, deep harbor.\n\nThe great city itself lay open in the full radiance of the afternoon sun, as if the fitful thunderstorms which chased about the lower slopes deferred grudgingly to some royal person, not daring to darken her skies or hide her overt splendor from the world. Every building seemed a palace of white marble and bright gold, vast and shining and tastefully immaculate. Alashera was a city of immeasurable wealth, and the inhabitants wanted there to be no mistake about either the riches at their command or their willingness to possess the very best.\n\n\"Great stars, do they charge admission to this place?\" Lady Mira asked breathlessly, awed by garish pretentiousness beyond her fondest dreams. \"Our dear Addena's descriptions hardly begin to do it justice... as if mere words would ever suffice.\"\n\nJenny quietly bit her tongue.\n\n\"And to think that all of this is wasted upon such generally rotten people,\" the sorceress continued, and consulted the rude map of the city that Addena Sheld had somehow procured. \"Straight up the middle of town to that shelf where the two branches of the hills join. That's supposed to be the new Imperial palace, and the Temple of the Dark is built into the mountainside below.\"\n\nJenny was concerned about being shot at, although Mira was not. As she explained, the Alasherans were unlikely to shoot arrows or catapults of any type over their own city. Not for fear of danger to the populace; followers of the Dark considered life to be the cheapest and most easily replenished of commodities. But they did have a high respect for property, at least their own, or anyone else's which could be made their own. They kept a fastidiously tidy community.\n\nWhether Lady Mira's strategies had any effect or not, they climbed street by street toward the back of the city and reached the Imperial palace unmolested. She was determined that they should proceed straight to the palace and present themselves to the highest possible authority. Working their way through the rate's maze of local bureaucracy would have taken more time than they could spare, with no assurance that they would ever come anywhere near the top. Jenny had to agree; she did not have to like it.\n\nThe Imperial palace was a long, rambling structure in white and grey marble that stretched along the shelf formed by a crescentshaped cup in a rather steep section of the hillside. There was no apparent form or logic to its construction, just an ill-assembled string of halls, chambers and wide-stepped entrances which enclosed various paved courts and meticulously manicured lawns. Mira referred to it as two wings in search of a building, and its aimless wanderings amounted to nothing more. It was all shiny new with scattered portions still under construction, which was the case with much of this bright, clean city. The only point of real interest to be seen from outside was the fact that much of the central portion appeared to be built into the cliff face itself, as if the edifice followed unknown ways underground.\n\nIf Mira was tempted to land Wind Dragon on the pale grey flagstones of the court below the wide steps of the main entrance, she restrained her impulse and directed Jenny to a rather plain little stretch of pavement to one side. Not too far to one side, of course. The sorceress wanted it plain that she expected to be treated as an honored guest, with all rights and privileges, not as a servant at the back door. She also had the Trassek twins taking in the vanes and stabilizers the moment they were on the ground, making it plain that she had no intention of leaving until she was good and ready.\n\n\"Here they come,\" Mira warned softly. \"Leave everything to me.\"\n\nJenny refrained from remarking that she had little choice in the matter. A rather small squad of soldiers, not more than an even dozen, were marching in glittering formation toward the little ship. They were immaculate in ornate armor and brightly dyed leathers which seemed more like costumes from the distant past than modem uniforms. The twins spared them one amused glance before returning to their work; honest barbarians were far more efficient in a fight, although barbarians had seldom won wars.\n\nAn official of some undeterminable rank, although certainly not military, trotted along behind this tasteful vanguard. He wore a rich, fashionably cut version of what seemed the local costume, as if the loose, flowing togas of ancient Alashera had been shortened into some manner of oversized tunic and coupled with loose-fitting trousers of the same light material and bright colors. And he was very young, no older than Jenny, tall and thin, although he conducted himself in a very deliberate manner calculated to make him seem older, an air of experience and stem authority so forced that it betrayed its own falseness.\n\nThe guards arranged themselves in two widely spaced lines to either side of an imaginary aisle leading from Wind Dragon's boarding ladder and the boy official took his place at the far end.\n\nMira made some expression of minor surprise which Jenny chose not to try to interpret. It seemed that this was an honor guard to extend formal welcome, not a detail to dispatch trespassers. The Empire, it seemed, extended almost disdainful greetings to a pair of wandering sorceresses.\n\n\"Lady Mira, of the Wind Dragon out of Bennasport. Permission to come aboard is granted.\" The sorceress introduced herself formally. She was forcing the local authority to make the first move by having its young representative meet her in her own territory, stating his own position before she parted from the relative safety of her ship.\n\nThe young emissary seemed to pause only a moment, no obvious thoughts or emotions disturbing the practiced sternness of his features, then started up the ramp in his usual businesslike manner. Mira glanced at her student, with a quick petition to that nameless spirit of good fortune with the quirky sense of humor who watched over her that the girl would be attentive.\n\nHe took one step onto the deck and stood his ground, looking down his long nose at Mira as if using that instrument for sighting his target. \"Lady Mira, I am Chancellor Ellon Bennisjen, representing the government of the Alasheran Empire. I bid you welcome to our land, although, as you are a foreigner, I must inquire as to your business.\"\n\n\"Scholarly research,\" Mira answered without a pause. \"Surely not a matter to concern the Empire itself.\"\n\n\"It became the business of the Empire when you landed your ship almost on the doorstep of the Imperial palace,\" Ellon answered smoothly, although Mira had noticed that his diplomatic manners were rough and awkward. \"Is the nature of your research mundane or arcane?\"\n\n\"Purely mundane,\" she assured him. \"I have been researching the theory that major climatic changes have occurred in the course of recorded history. My student and I have been collecting data from old records from a great many sources, and our search has now led us southward.\"\n\n\"Indeed?\" the young chancellor remarked thoughtfully; at least he could figure out for himself what old records had to do with climatic changes. \"And I take it that your search has led you to the Imperial Archives?\"\n\n\"It has indeed,\" Mira agreed eagerly, and began rubbing in the soothing balm of flattery. \"I need records not just from the longest possible period of time but from the widest possible sources. My research in the South quite naturally begins here, in this the oldest and grandest of civilizations. The Empire of ancient days was flourishing long before there even was a North, and it controlled the known world for many thousands of years. I also suspect the present Empire has tremendous access to a variety of resources.\"\n\n\"Quite logical, of course,\" he agreed sagely, complimenting her in a condescending manner for arriving at what was to him a self-evident conclusion. \"You must first, of course, petition your request to the proper authorities. If you will follow me, we'll see to that immediately.\"\n\nThe little procession of decorative warriors packed itself up without a word and reversed course, this time with the two sorceresses and their own small troop of guards following dutifully behind. The procession entered the Imperial palace through one of the nearer doors and made its way through the seemingly endless series of halls and foyers. The palace was in a far less advanced state of construction on the inside, revealing that much of the exterior was only an ornate shell. Even the finished portions near the center had the look of an empty house, with few furnishings and fewer inhabitants. The rhythmic tread of the honor guard echoed loudly through the polished stone corridors. Mira was constantly finding herself unconsciously falling into time with their step, much to her annoyance.\n\nThe honor guard went its own way at last, and the visitors found themselves deposited in a large and rather stately lobby with the polite request that they wait just a few minutes. Chancellor Ellon disappeared through the largest and most ornately carved of a handful of dark wooden doors, having announced himself to the young officer in decorative armor who served as some manner of secretary.\n\n\"So, what do you think?\" Lady Mira asked as she seated herself on a short sofa well away from any of the doors.\n\n\"I'm not sure what to think,\" Jenny answered as she brushed impatiently at the thick layer of grey dust that had accumulated on the bench. Dust from the construction was settling faster than it could be cleaned away. \"Chancellor Ellon is not telling us the truth by half. What is a chancellor, anyway?\"\n\n\"By Imperial usage, he's the private secretary to some official of high rank.\"\n\nJenny nodded. \"That makes sense. He's not taken us to the 'appropriate authorities,' as he said, but to his own immediate superior.\"\n\n\"I anticipated that already.\"\n\n\"In answer to your second question, Ellon himself does not know what to believe about your story of scholarly research,\" Jenny continued. \"Both he and his master consider it likely that you are here for clandestine reasons of your own. They also believe that you are no match for them, that they will have some sport at your expense and that you will be sent home emptyhanded, frustrated and embarrassed. And don't ask how I knew what your second question would be.\"\n\n\"I already know the answer to that,\" Mira remarked.\n\n\"I know' that you know. To answer your third question, they did not know you were coming until we arrived over the harbor. A description of your ship was transferred quickly, and whoever waits on the other side of that door recognized Wind Dragon from past experience. A small group of soldiers is already giving Wind Dragon a quick inspection, but they don't seem likely to discover anything we have hidden. J.T. is watching them closely.\"\n\n\"Well, so much for questions four and five.\" Mira frowned. \"You seem to be in rare form today. But..\n\n\"I don't know for certain, but here he comes,\" Jenny warned softly as the door opened.\n\nDasjen Valdercon was perhaps the last person Mira wanted to see walk through that door. But when she looked up, her inner hunch warning her too late who it would be, that was exactly who she saw, as big as life. He was a typical Southerner, tall and lean but far from gaunt, with long black hair streaked with grey, and just as handsome as on that last night they had spent together amid the golden canals of the port of Serras. That was a time that was now eight years past; a hundred years in terms of her own busy life. But she feared him just as much as she had then, ten times as much to see him standing in quiet authority in this place. And his cold, dark eyes still awakened in her that same raw, animal lust.\n\nA great many things could tickle her animal lust.\n\n\"Sorceress Kasdamir! So it is you!\" he exclaimed with gentle delight as he executed a courtly bow and kissed her hand. He had always called her by her full name; he knew how she hated it. \"Sweet lady, it is so good to see you again.\"\n\nJenny stared at first one and then the other, then crossed her arms and sat back in her seat with an exasperated sigh.\n\n\"Dasjen, I hardly expected to find you here.\" Mira retreated into flustered confusion to give herself a moment to think\u2014and to do a little digging. \"So what are you up to these days? Court magician for the new Emperor?\"\n\nDasjen laughed politely. \"Imperial secretary of magical training and research is my full title, which indicates that I am expected to provide an actual service for my keep and not just entertainment.\"\n\n\"That does sound very important,\" she observed, looking as impressed as she dared. \"You must be very close to the Emperor's ear.\"\n\n\"You will find this a very practical Empire,\" he assured her importantly; he even bragged romantically. \"We have the saying here, that the militaiy is the right hand of the Empire, magic and science are the left, and that it walks in the boots of trade. You will find that we conduct all necessary business with efficiency and quiet dispatch; it leaves more time for more important affairs. \" Do you have an affair in mind? Mira wanted to ask. But her first question was already answered beyond any doubt; Dasjen Valdercon was the same person she had always known. They were very much alike in curiosity, learning and their command of magic, but in other ways they were opposites. However mercenary she claimed to be, she treated her own magic as a tool to help and serve others; he considered it a key to wealth and power. She did not wonder that he had ended up here, she only wondered why he had to comprise her reception committee. That quirky spirit of fortune might be letting her down.\n\n\"My young assistant tells me that you are studying long-term changes in weather patterns,\" he continued, and chuckled to himself. \"Still the same old Kasdamir. I always was amazed at the wide variety of subjects that could captivate your complete attention. Your wish is granted, dear lady. You may have use of the Imperial library. An assistant will be appointed to help you sift through that rather formidable mass of information.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I do appreciate it greatly.\"\n\n\"All the same, there is a small fee,\" Dasjen warned. \"I ask only that you spare an old friend a few stray moments of your free time. If you and your fair companion...\"\n\n\"Addena. .. Addena Kurgel,\" Jenny answered quickly, having to dig for a false name in a very awkward moment. Her true name was from off-world, and it would have betrayed her as quickly as her blue hair, which Mira had spelled to deep black.\n\n\"I have planned a small gathering for this night,\" Dasjen continued without hesitation. \"I would be honored if the two of you could join me.\"\n\n\"We would be delighted,\" Mira answered graciously.\n\n\"Then I shall send for you at nightfall,\" He said. \"But for now, I fear that duty presses. My assistant will accompany you to your ship, and you shall be shown to suites that we reserve for honored guests.\"\n\nMira did not at all like being separated from Wind Dragon, but she had anticipated that. J.T., who remained scrupulously silent and acted as dumb as he looked, stayed on guard with the ship. Remidan and the Trassek twins would remain with them, fulfilling their roles as bodyguards. The Alasherans did not question that, since personal guards attended all individuals of importance in this land as a necessary precaution.\n\nApparently Valdercon had not exaggerated about their being shown to suites of their own, or at least one suite of such enormous proportions that there were apartments for each sorceress and even a spacious chamber for their guards. It was all richly furnished in light furnishings with flowing, transparent hangings which glided over stone walls or rippled across wide windows, all in colors of white or light pastels. Which was to say that it was hardly gaudy enough to hold Mira's attention for long. But she was momentarily impressed, at least.\n\n\"They reserve this room for uninvited guests?\" she asked as she stood in the center of the room, looking about. She shrugged. \"This must be the off season.\"\n\n\"You knew this Dasjen Valdercon before?\" Jenny inquired. Mira stopped short, looking about suspiciously. \"Is it safe to talk?\"\n\n\"I sense no one near, and no magical devices in this suite.\" \"You are handy,\" Mira remarked, and attended her luggage. \"Yes, I knew him well enough, eight years ago in Serras. I knew that he was leaning toward the Dark then. We played a game, he and I, more dangerous perhaps than I was aware at the time. I know that he plotted my own corruption at the time, but I felt secure that I was in control... at least of myself. But he knew the lust he stirred within me, and he could have used that as a weapon to break my defenses. I would not dare to go to bed with him again. Our stay must be as short as possible.\"\n\n\"Just how high do you suppose he is in the Imperial hierarchy?\" \"He actually avoided answering that question, as much as he pretended to brag,\" she observed as she carried her bags into her room, leaving Jenny to follow. She carelessly tossed the bags onto the vast bed. \"He is very high in the Dark Priesthood, I am sure of that. What impressions did you get?\"\n\n\"That the Emperor is still absent, and that he is relaying his master's orders in that absence,\" Jenny answered, crossing her arms. \"He is far more dangerous than you realize even yet, Lady Mira. Be very careful of him. He is, at this time, the most evil and dangerous man in this entire world.\"\n\n\"I don't like the way he looks at you,\" Sir Remidan growled. Mira turned to stare at him. \"Why, Remidan! I didn't know you cared.\"\n\n\"Well, I have to, don't I?\" he asked. \"I've taken oaths to that effect, and all that rot.\"\n\nJenny peered at him surreptitiously, wondering if he was secretly smitten by more than just knightly oaths. There were knights and then there were nights, and this knight might be interested in working nights. Whether he knew it or not. It seemed that life was full of people who had no idea what they were doing.\n\nMira blinked, then looked at her student thoughtfully. \"I forget that you have met the Emperor and the High Priest before. Would you know them, or sense their presence, if they were here?\" \"That was long ago and I remember nothing clearly, but I'm sure that I would know them on sight, whatever form they wear now,\" Jenny insisted. \"The Emperor may be the same as he was then; I do not know, for he looked very old and corrupt then. The last I saw of the High Priest Haldephren, he was in the body of a faerie dragon. But Dalvenjah insists that she destroyed that body thirteen years ago. He's most likely in human form again this time, but I will know him when I see him.\"\n\nBoth sorceresses had the same impression the moment they stepped into the room. It was full of young, beautiful people richly dressed in Imperial fashion, the short togas and pants such as the men wore and women in gownlike togas which left at least one breast bare. They moved with calculated grace and elegance, selfsuperior and languidly calm. And they were deadly evil, each and every one faithful and favored servants of the Dark. They were, by all appearances, the Imperial court. Or perhaps the lackeys of the High Priest, who was very conscious of his attendant admirers while the Emperor himself was cautious and allowed as few as possible in his presence as he could help. But in the absence of their true masters, they were clearly performing for the favor of Dasjen Valdercon.\n\n\"They really have put on the dog,\" Jenny remarked softly.\n\nMira made a face of disgust. \"My stars! I certainly hope not!\"\n\nNot all were professional lackeys; out of perhaps three score gathered at the single long table, there were two dozen older men and women who were themselves ministers. But that appeared to be the full tally of the true Imperial government; the Senate was a body of limited power, but it was not currently in session and its members were mostly away at home. The ministers were the hands and voices of the Emperor, who shared his authority grudgingly, and they all seemed to look to Valdercon for leadership. They were all so quiet, clam and circumspect that the young lackeys overshadowed their presence entirely.\n\nValdercon himself sat at the head of the table; he had met his two visitors at the door and had conducted them to places of honor, Lady Mira at his left hand with Jenny at his right. The younger sorceress was dressed in the local manner in a long, draped gown of light, frosty blue that had been brought to her room. The color was not her best but she looked astonishingly beautiful in it all the same, with her temporarily black hair brushed full and loose. She copied the manner of the young courtiers but on her own terms, calm and graceful but with an inner nobility and purity that made her shine all the brighter among the shadows of these servants of the Dark.\n\nAll the same, she had to wonder what her mother would think if she saw her dressed this way. Jenny was doing a lot of things these days that her mother would surely feel better not knowing about.\n\nMira was surprised and proud of her protege, although she tried to hide that in their present company. The girl clearly possessed a radiant charm and beauty which she preferred to keep hidden, for she seemed to reflect the immortal side of her nature that she had inherited from her magical training, like some elfin princess. Mira herself made no compromise; she was her usual gaudy self, dressed in some barbarian robe of brightly woven pattern, red silk pants and high-heeled sandals. Unlike her student, she had no intention of baring a breast in deference to local taste. As it was, they made a team who complemented each other well in incongruity.\n\n\"You look as radiant as ever,\" Dasjen told her earnestly. His eye wanted to rove in Jenny's direction, but he kept his attention studiously focused on his former lover. \"Almost one would think that the years could not touch you.\"\n\n\"Oh, you are kind,\" Mira insisted. \"Actually, those last few years and I have been at odds for some time now. They say that they're going to come back some day with a few more of their brothers and give it to me good.\"\n\nJenny bit her tongue. Dasjen Valdercon appeared to appreciate Mira's humor, but the others\u2014who had been sitting silently with their ears cocked in that direction like a roomful of cats\u2014hardly knew what to make of that. Jenny thought that if they did indulge in humor, it would be something much more biting, perhaps turned against others but never themselves.\n\n\"You people are very busy here, \" Mira continued as she studied her plate, attempting to make some sense of what it was or how it had been cooked. \"I don't know when I've seen such industry.\" \"This is a busy time for us,\" Valdercon answered. \"We try to get most of the construction done when the Senate is not in session. You see gathered at this table almost all that remains of the Imperial government, for now and for some months yet to come.\"\n\n\"I assume that the Emperor himself has already departed to some retreat for the season,\" Mira observed with casual innocence.\n\n\"You assume correctly,\" Dasjen answered guardedly.\n\n\"Such a shame. I had rather hoped to catch just a glimpse of him, but I certainly did not expect it. I'm sure that he has no time to spare for unexpected guests.\"\n\n\"Oh, I am remiss!\" Dasjen exclaimed suddenly. \"Lady Kasdamir Gerran and Sorceress Addena Kurgel, may I present Korin Sjeldisan, Lord Minister of the Imperial Navy, and Leridae Felde, Lady Manager of the City of Alashera.\"\n\nThe pair of older officials bowed their heads in polite greeting; Mira was beginning to think that these Southerners must age like granite. She thought that Lord Korin, seated to her left, must be well into his sixties, but like Dasjen he remained handsome, lean and strong, a barrel-chested bull of a man. And Lady Leridae, seated to the other side of Jenny, was at least ten years older than herself, but was slim and shapely in a flowing rose gown which discreetly revealed one breast that remained defiantly firm. Magic could cure a great many sins, even gravity. But neither made any attempt to hide the grey advancing in their hair; indeed, it only served to emphasize their remarkable conditions.\n\n\"Yours is a most beautiful little ship,\" Lord Korin remarked graciously.\n\n\"Oh, thank you,\" Mira responded, flattered. She considered asking if the Imperial Navy was contemplating the use of airships but thought better of it. \"I did see the most lovely and impressive galleys as we came in over the harbor. It goes without saying that your new ships are larger, faster and more efficient than the wargalleys of ancient days.\"\n\n\"Oh, quite,\" he answered, obviously careful of the content of his own replies. \"Our modem ships can sail in one day what the ancient wargalleys sailed in a week. And most have iron frames and ribs.\"\n\n\"Sorceress Addena, are you of the South?\" Lady Leridae inquired, pointedly changing the subject.\n\n\"Oh, no. This is my first journey South,\" Jenny answered a little belatedly, realizing that the woman was speaking to her.\n\n\"I've been in the South many times,\" Mira said quickly, fending off the subject. \"I grew up in the circus.\"\n\n\"The circus, did you say?\" Korin was astonished and perplexed; he must be of the local nobility. \"What ever did you do in the circus?\"\n\n\"I'm a midget.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see,\" Korin said thoughtfully; he obviously did not.\n\nAt that moment the handful of musicians who had silently filed into the room began to tune. One frail young musician gave his recorder a loud squawk, as if to clear it of cobwebs, not six feet behind Mira's unsuspecting ear.\n\n\"Yarg!\" She jumped in fright, and her fork and knife were sent sailing before the eyes of the courtiers. Jenny snatched the fork out of the air deftly, but the knife stuck point-first in the table not two inches from Lady Leridae's hand. Mira had already leaped out of her seat and drawn her sword\u2014she alone at the table was armed\u2014and she seemed about to come to blows with the frightened minstrels. One stout fellow seemed prepared to fend her off with the bow of his viola.\n\n\"Oh, mercy!\" Dasjen muttered in disgust, rolling his eyes and shaking his head slowly. He made an impatient gesture. \"You musicians please remove yourselves somewhat and be about your business. Bring more wine.\"\n\nLooking like a cat with ruffled fur, Mira waited as Lord Korin recovered her upset chair and assisted her in taking her seat. Jenny quietly returned the fork and knife; Leridae, wide-eyed, was still nibbing her hand as if she had indeed taken a wound. Naked, dark-skinned girls hurried to serve wine to the speechless company.\n\n\"Sorry about that,\" Mira said, but she did not appear at all apologetic. \"I just cannot abide people sneaking up behind me.\" Jenny had long since figured out her mistress's game. These people were the barbarians trying to mimic genteel manners, but for all their wealth and fine trappings, their nature was betrayed by the bare-breasted gowns of the women, the young, naked servants\u2014male and female\u2014and the generally disorganized atmosphere of this entire gathering. In the court of Queen Merridyn, dinner guests would not have been left to seat themselves in a haphazard manner, nor would musicians have filed in late to begin tuning after the guests were seated. But Mira pretended to be the violent, ill-mannered barbarian, allowing them the luxury of feeling superior and putting them off their guard.\n\nJenny saw her own part to play, as her mistress's shy, simple student. When handing back the knife, she leaned just a little too far across the wide table.\n\n\"Thank you, dear child,\" Mira said tightly, ignoring for the moment the mess Jenny had made. She turned to Dasjen. \"I don't want to make a mess of your little supper. It reminds me of the lime that we were traveling in the wilds of the arctic wastes. We lost our corkscrew and were forced to live on food and water for several weeks.\"\n\nDasjen chuckled softly. \"Kasdamir, you always were such a wit. But I do not recall you drinking anything stronger than tea.\" \"You never caught me, you mean, \" she answered, then glanced at Jenny and made a half-hearted gesture, as if trying to be discreet. \"Clean yourself up, dear child.\"\n\n\"Oh, my!\" Jenny permitted herself a healthy blush. In leaning well over her plate, she had acquired a large glob of some thick, yellow sauce directly on her bare nipple. She dipped her napkin in her water glass and, taking firm hold of her breast, proceeded to clean it.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Dasjen shifted nervously in his chair, trying not to stare. No one else made that effort. \"Ah... so, what do you think of our city?\"\n\n\"Has all this work been done in the last few years?\" Mira asked in turn.\n\n\"Beginning ten years ago, the old town was systematically leveled and rebuilt,\" Lady Leridae answered with a practiced recitation after a quick glance at Dasjen for permission. This obviously was no secret. \"The work continues at a furious pace, but for the last six years all work has left the confines of the original town and spread into the surrounding hills. Trade is flourishing throughout the Kingdoms of the Sea due to the introduction of modem technology, contemporary magical practices and improved agricultural methods. And Alashera is now, as it was in ancient days, the hub of every major trade route. It is only logical that Alashera should become the capital of commerce and government throughout the South.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Mira said thoughtfully. Will there be a test after dinner? \"You are catching up with the North in a hurry.\"\n\n\"We feel that we are on the verge of surpassing the North,\" Dasjen himself answered, very serious now. \"That is no threat or boast, but a logical prediction of what must be. Elura has the benefit of wood and coal, diverse ores and diverse other resources, and the North shall forever remain strong and prosperous because of that. But the North is also cold and mountainous. Trade between cities is restricted to certain months when the passes are navigable by wagon, and agriculture is even more limited. We foresee that the North shall supply resources to the South at a furious rate in the warmer months, to be stockpiled so that industry may remain at full strength year round.\"\n\n\"Yes, there is some logic in that,\" Mira admitted. \"Except for one valid point. The North has been mass-producing airships for some time, freighters to rival an oceangoing vessel for size and speed, but several times as fast. Ships that are capable of delivering their cargo direct, rather than at some waterfront warehouse of a seacoast town. The strength of the South may be in ocean vessels, but the North has the strength of airships.\" \"Airship transportation will not endure,\" Korin told her in a condescending manner, smiling at obvious foolishness. \"You people have been very lucky so far, but you will soon learn the hard way that airships are unsafe, unreliable and inefficient.\"\n\nDinner ended soon after, and the gathering moved outside to a large moonlit terrace for late-night conversation and dancing to the gentle music of the small band of musicians. This was not a good strategic move for Jenny, since that left her at the mercy of the attentions of Dasjen's young assistant Ellon. She countered this threat by staying well out in the open, between the table of refreshments and the small, bubbling fountain in the center of the terrace. She knew that it would hardly be beneficial to their cause it she was to break Ellon's arm, as much as she was tempted. The dress was something of a hazard in itself; Ellon's hand seemed to have a mind of its own. She decided that if he did make a grab at her bust, she was going to bust him.\n\nMira tried to keep a protective eye on her young student, but she had her hands full with Dasjen\u2014mostly because he often had a handful of her. These people were not discreet.\n\n\"It was the fair goddess Fortune herself who bought you to us,\" Dasjen said as he brought her another drink. That seemed to be his tactic for the night: imbibe and conquer. He was unaware that she could drink a pirate under the table. \"That, and overwhelming curiosity.\"\n\nMira smiled at him, feigning ignorance. \"Actually, it was my pretty little airship.\"\n\nDasjen laughed. \"Lady Kasdamir Gerran, you are a sorceress of many arts and talents, but subtlety is not one of your stronger points. You surely know your history. The Alasheran Empire of two thousand years ago belonged to the Dark. You, and every sorcerer of the North, wonders if our new Empire belongs to the Dark as well. That, I suspect, is your true business here.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is the big question over cocktails these days,\" Mira admitted cautiously, and drained her glass.\n\n\"Then you will be answered,\" he told her. There was not, nor had there been, any hint of threat in his voice. Only amusement. \"We inherit many of our ways and manners from the ancient days. You may have heard that we have opened the games. That is so, but they are a tame shadow of the barbarity of olden times. Our servants are naked, and even our beautiful ladies of the Imperial court bare their breasts. Your own student does not hesitate to do the same. This is not decadence, only an expression of our deep appreciation of all things that are beautiful in life and nature.\n\n\"Our Empire is based upon industry and commerce, not conquest and slavery. Wargalleys fill our port, but they prey only upon the pirates of the petty kingdoms, further opening fair and honest trade and travel. We build our homes like palaces, but because we would leave something of lasting beauty to our descendants for many generations to come. There was much that was good in the ancient Empire, but much that was evil. We eagerly reawaken all that was good, but we shun the evil just as surely as you good people of the North. No, we are not of the Dark. And we welcome this opportunity to prove ourselves.\" Mira was impressed; she knew that he was lying a greasy streak, but he did it most eloquently. She bowed her head slightly. \"If you would, many minds would be set to ease.\"\n\n\"Beginning with your own,\" he said, smiling warmly and reassuringly, and he-gently took her hand. \"You shall stay here as long as you like, and you are free to go wherever you like. We have no secrets, and we will do whatever you request to prove that.\"\n\nMira excused herself as soon as she could with the claim for an early bed after a long day. Dasjen clearly wanted to volunteer his own bed to this worthy cause, but Mira made a hasty retreat. She snatched her student from the jaws of licentiousness and they made a hasty retreat to their rooms.\n\n\"I noticed that you declined to dance with Ellon,\" Mira observed.\n\n\"My mother always told me never to dance with my tits hanging out,\" Jenny answered. \"I'm sure that she had something else in mind, but it seemed to apply to these circumstances.\"\n\n\"Perhaps this won't take much longer,\" Mira said. \"I think that you should sneak out tonight and find those dragons of yours. I'd like to know what they've turned up. Let's hurry, now. Sir Remidan will be fretting so.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Local Intrigues", + "text": "Later that night, a short time after Jenny had gone to bed, she quietly rose again and, without summoning a light, slipped out the window. Her room was three levels above the hard stone walkway below, and that had perhaps been meant to discourage guests from departing in this manner. But that was of no consequence to Jenny. When she leaped out the window, she went up.\n\nFearing guards below, she moved stealthfully along the edge of the roof until she came to a place where a large tree, growing near the side of the building, offered her some concealment in its welcoming shadows. She leaped from the roof and hurtled across ;i hundred feet of open air, landing softly close to the massive imnk. She looked about for guards, then hurried through the landscaped grounds of the Imperial palace. Her enhanced vision found her path easily through the protective shadows of trees and shrubs, her bare feet making scarcely a sound on grass or smooth stone, and her lanky body was clad in loose, dark pants and shirt to hide her in the night.\n\nWhen she came to the edge of the grounds, well to the north where the steep, rugged mountainside encroached, she thrust herself into the night sky and over the wall, coming down in the street beyond. She moved as cautiously as she could, keeping to uninhabited ways as she hurried through the remote edge of the city. The buildings, mostly two-and three-story shops, were dark and silent.\n\nAs she worked her way through the long, deep shadows that filled the streets, the thought of Karidaejan's warning was very much on her mind. She had given it little thought at first. It had seemed inconceivable that any of her companions would betray her, and she had not been in the mood to hear any more prophecies from the mouths of secretive dragons.\n\nBut now she was not so sure. Mira seemed quietly fascinated with this Dasjen Valdercon, and the two of them had apparently spent some time together not so many years past. But Dasjen had a secret only Jenny knew, although she had to think that anyone who knew him as well as Mira claimed to would also have to suspect it. Jenny was still not prepared to consider the idea that Mira would deliberately betray them to their enemies. But she was not so certain about what Mira might inadvertently do in this distracted state. Mira was many things, but she was not a cautious person. Karidaejan had not said that the betrayal would be deliberate.\n\nBut he had also insisted that the betrayer would be the last person Jenny would suspect. Mira was at the top of the suspicion list, which made her the first rather than the last person Jenny suspected. Who, then? Sir Remidan lived for honor and duty, but Jenny also considered him quite capable of doing something stupid. The twins were unlikely to spontaneously do anything of any consequence in their entire lives, good or bad. The two dragons would willingly give their lives to defend Jenny or the Prophecy, which probably sent them to the top of the list of least likely.\n\nJenny paused at the approaching sound of heavy boots on the flat stones that paved the streets, aware that she had been inattentive. She backed into the shadows of a doorway of one shop, peering out into the light. The yellow glare of an oil lantern appeared around the next comer, behind it the black silhouettes of a patrol of three soldiers. With nowhere else to run, Jenny turned her attention to spelling open the lock of the door, then slipped inside the shop. She locked the door again for good measure, remembering from an old movie that policemen were supposed to check the locks of the shops on their beat, then crouched in the shadows until they were past.\n\nJenny remained in hiding for more than a minute longer, giving the patrol plenty of time to clear the immediate area. She finally returned to the door and was about to leave when she became aware that she was not alone. Something large was moving stealthfully down the narrow stairs in the far back comer of the room, and the presence she felt was definitely magical. Did the Alasherans release their demons into the streets at night to guard against spying sorceresses like herself? There was no time to wonder. Jenny looked around and found that she was in the front room of a bakery, complete with a stair-step of shelves before her stacked with cakes and pies.\n\nLacking alternatives, she chose the weapons that were at hand and picked up a large pie. She had always wanted to do this, and it seemed likely to provide enough distraction for her to get out of the shop. When a dark form appeared at the bottom of the steps, she hauled back and let fly.\n\nThe result was rather unexpected. The pie flew straight and true toward its target, the mushy side first. But about halfway through its trajectory, it was intercepted by a blast of magical flames. Where the flames would have deflected the pie from its dire course was never to be known, since it exploded. Sticky goop flew everywhere; Jenny was fortunate enough to have been hiding behind the shelves.\n\nBut there was something familiar about those flames, something that was not at all hard to place for someone who had grown up with dragons. She also knew better than to stand up, for fear that it was trigger-happy Vajerral.\n\n\"Yo, dragon!\" she called in English, which should also help to establish her credentials. \"Vajerral, is that you?\"\n\n\"Jenny?\"\n\nIt was indeed Vajerral. Jenny stood up. The young dragon was standing only a short distance away, with clumps of mutilated meringue and an extraordinarily surprised expression on her face.\n\n\"Well, fancy bumping into you,\" Vajerral remarked. \"This might just be an exceptionally good time to get the hell out of here.\"\n\n\"I am with you,\" Jenny agreed, turning to the door.\n\nA shout from the street sort of put an end to that idea. Jenny had no idea just what type of pie that had been, but it had certainly exploded with a great deal of enthusiasm. They were going to be open for business in a hurry.\n\n\"I came in through a door in the roof,\" Vajerral offered. \"I think that I would like to leave the way I came.\"\n\nVajerral declined to wait for an answer; she was already on her way up the stairs. In Jenny's experience, the young dragon was hardly ever right about anything and could generally be relied upon to exercise the most extraordinary bad judgment. This case seemed to be the exception. Jenny was only three steps behind.\n\n\"What are you doing here, anyway?\" she asked as she followed the dragon up the dark stairs. She could see nothing except a dim grey light far ahead, at least three stories.\n\n\"I was looking for you,\" Vajerral answered. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Looking for you.\"\n\nVajerral stopped short on the stairs and bent her long neck to look back over her shoulder. \"We must stop meeting like this.\"\n\n\"I ought to slay you!\"\n\nThe dragon turned and hurried on. \"Watch out on the roof. It is steep, and the tiles are slick.\"\n\nContrary to her own advice, Vajerral slipped out through the small doorway and stepped out onto the roof, and promptly lost it. Her legs flew out from under her in a rather interesting scrabble, and she tumbled the short distance down to the edge of the roof and away into the darkness of the narrow alley. Jenny observed the less than graceful execution of this maneuver, like a plane shot down the catapult of an aircraft carrier before its engines are running, and made a frantic grab at the only part of the dragon that lingered. Meaning, of course, the end of her long, slender tail.\n\nJenny braced herself, knowing what was to follow, and she was not wrong in her estimation. Vajerral was a small and rather slender dragon, but she was also well muscled from a very active life; she was still a strapping three hundred pounds. Jenny augmented her strength with magic, but it was traction that nearly got her. She slid down the roof and nearly went over the edge herself, saving herself at the last moment by sitting down hard. That left Vajerral swinging like a pendulum, while Jenny wondered how she would ever pick her nose if both of her arms were yanked off, and what would be the use of sleeves?\n\n\"Flap those wings, you rock-headed, lead-assed excuse for a dragon!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"You should look at it from my point of view,\" Vajerral complained. She was head down, hanging in the dark by her tail, and she was wearing an expression that she saved for just such occasions.\n\nAll the same, it seemed like very sound advice. Vajerral managed to get her arms and legs braced against the wall, a move that nearly brought Jenny off the roof a second time, then lifted herself cautiously with long, powerful sweeps of her wings. She was rising slowly in a hover, a difficult feat for any dragon even with the aid of lift magic, and the results of that were just as disastrous. This time Jenny did come off the roof, a dead weight at the end of the dragon's tail... which was an unhandy place to put it. The two of them disappeared into the darkness of the alley.\n\nMoments later, the pair of them shot out of the deeper shadows of the alley and disappeared into the night. Jenny had remembered, almost at the final instant, that she was able to fly using the same lift magic as the dragons possessed.\n\nKeeping to the shadows, they made their way quickly outside the city and across the rugged slopes of the volcanic island to where the dragons had made their secluded camp. Kelvandor emerged from the shallow cave, hardly more than a deep overhang of rock, where they had taken shelter. His ears twitched with concern.\n\n\"So, you found her,\" he said.\n\n\"We found each other,\" Vajerral answered. \"She was already on her way to find us.\"\n\n\"So? Why have you come?\" Kelvandor asked. \"Has there been trouble?\"\n\n\"Nothing is wrong, really,\" she was quick to assure them. \"Things go well, if hardly as expected. We were received as honored guests and treated like royalty. But the evil of that place...\"\n\n\"Gently,\" Vajerral encouraged her. \"What has happened? And speak the Mindijaran language, which no mortal of the Dark should understand.\"\n\n\"The Emperor and the High Priest are apparently absent, but we were met by this minister, Dasjen Valdercon,\" she continued in their own language. \"He seems to be in charge. He is an old friend and former lover of Mira's. She says that she thought him of the Dark then. Everything went just fine through dinner. Later, Valdercon told us that he is aware that we are spies. He says that the Empire had nothing to hide, and he has challenged us to stay on as long as we want, until it is proven to our satisfaction that they are not of the Dark.\"\n\n\"But we know they are,\" Vajerral remarked, laying back her ears. \"Do they think that they can pull that off?\"\n\n\"They seem to think that they can, since so little of the Imperial government is present. Then we will be sent on our way, to spread the misconception that the Empire has no business with the Dark. \" \"Then you are safe enough?\" Kelvandor insisted. \"Already you know that the true Emperor and High Priest are not present, do you not?\"\n\n\"But that is the thing,\" Jenny explained fearfully. She looked up at the dragon anxiously. \"The High Priest Haldephren is here. I remember him from before, and I knew that I would recognize him if ever I saw him, whatever form he wears. There is no question in my mind. Haldephren is masquerading as Dasjen Valdercon, pretending to be his own servant.\"\n\n\"Does he recognize you as well?\" Vajerral asked sternly. She had no intention of permitting Jenny to return to the palace if it meant that she could be identified and captured by the High Priest.\n\n\"I really don't know. His mind is closed to me, but not his strongest emotions. If he has recognized me for who I am, he did not betray himself with delight or pleasure. And yet I could sense his pleasure with the ruse he thinks to perpetrate on Lady Mira. I sense his lust for her as well. And his lust for me is blatant.\n\n\"This is the very part that worries me,\" she continued, and frowned. \"I am afraid that Mira may be, shall we say, quite smitten with Dasjen. She has no idea who he really is, but she is definitely captivated by his charm. Mira is, in many ways, a rather unsophisticated person, and she might not see that he knows how best to manipulate her. Frankly, I do not trust her to be logical even if she did know the danger.\"\n\nShe started to tell them of Karidaejan and his warning, but she thought it best to keep that secret for just a little longer. The two dragons were likely to take the cautious approach and refuse to allow her to return, leaving Mira, Remidan and the boys to save themselves. She felt a moment of guilt, knowing how annoyed she was when the dragons kept their secrets from her. But this was different.\n\nVajerral turned to Kelvandor. \"The map.\"\n\nThe male dragon nodded once and came forward to spread a large map atop the slight curve of a low, fiat boulder. Vajerral summoned the merest fragment of light, enough for the keen eyes of the dragons to see it clearly.\n\n\"We have been busy ourselves,\" Kelvandor said, indicating the map. \"The Empire must have a healthy respect for either airships or Mindijaran, for there are many things hidden on this island, not to be seen easily from the air. We have found them easily enough all the same.\n\n\"Look at this. The Empire makes no effort to hide the might of its traditional navy, and seems inordinately proud of its wargalleys. The things are worthless, easy prey to the dropping of explosives from high above. But here, a quarter of the way around the coast, is a great holding of airships of many types, and most appear to be quite new. We suspect that the Empire is building its own.\"\n\n\"How are they hidden?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"Vineyards,\" he explained. \"There are vast trenches beneath, and great racks bearing vines that can be pulled away. I do not know if there is ever a true frost here, but the vines are rather thin all the same. But we have yet to find what we think to be the construction yards for airships here on this island.\"\n\n\"They do not seem to be using these ships?\" Jenny asked.\n\n\"No. All are sleek military ships, and all are kept in waiting,\" Vajerral said. \"Remember this place well, and avoid it. Do not seek their secrets too hard and ignore what you may see, or they cannot allow you to leave.\"\n\n\"Play stupid?\" Mira asked when Jenny conveyed that warning the next morning. \"I don't know if I can play stupid. I am not naturally equipped. But I agree with the dragons. The plans have changed. They can do the spying, if we do nothing else but keep our hosts occupied.\"\n\nJenny said nothing. She had discussed the subject with Vajerral for some time, and they had decided not to wam Mira that Dasjen Valdercon was in truth the High Priest. They both agreed that Lady Mira might be a sorceress of many talents, but she was a poor actress. They also wanted to have her well away before she learned that she had once been the lover of Haldephren himself.\n\nJenny had so many secrets going at once, she was beginning to think that she would make a very good dragon.\n\n\"So we just let them give us the grand tour until the dragons are finished with their spying, then we make a glorious exit extolling their many virtues,\" Mira continued, and turned. Jenny was still arranging the elaborate folds of a local gown, one of several more gifts that had arrived with their breakfast. She must have made some impression; four of the five left both breasts bare. Not to disappoint her hosts, she wore the least conspicuous of those four, a rose-colored gown. Mira nodded. \"You do look grand. I admire your nerve.\"\n\n\"You would be a real distraction in the blue one,\" Jenny answered.\n\nMira chose to ignore that.\n\n\"Saint Gum protect us!\" J.T. declared as he leaped up on the bed. Dooket had been sent to the ship early to \"check on the cat,\" and to bear the message that J.T. was wanted. He had eaten at his leisure, given himself a spit bath, and made his way unobtrusively into the palace. Jenny glared at him; Gum was the patron saint of whores. Then she hurried to complete her makeup; another morning's gift. She had wore none the night before, nor did she require any.\n\n\"You behave yourself or I'll have you neutered,\" Mira told him sternly. \"I want you to hang around the palace all day and be a cat. Sir Remidan and the twins will watch the ship today; they can keep themselves busy in our absence.\"\n\nJ.T. cocked his head inquisitively. \"What do you mean, be a cat? Do you suggest that I poke my little button nose in all the back rooms and corridors, where you cannot?\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" she agreed. \"If they are worshipping the Dark, and we know they are, then there will be a temple somewhere.\" \"Where should I look?\"\n\n\"In ancient days, the Great Temple of the Dark was inside Mount Drashand itself, and a passage connected it with the Imperial palace. I don't know if the present palace is in the same location, but you can bet that they've reopened the Great Temple. If we cannot find a passage from here, the dragons are going to have to hunt for it down the neck of the volcano itself.\"\n\n\"Got you! Anything else?\"\n\n\"Do you speak the local language?\" J.T. tried to make a face, but cats are impeded by their lack of brows. Mira took that for a no. \"Be on your way, then.\"\n\nJ.T. leaped from the bed and ran from the room, his tail in the air. Mira turned away and walked over to the window to wait. She seemed rather pleased with herself; with a slight change of plans, everything seemed to be going exactly the way they wanted. She certainly did not appear apprehensive. She also had no idea that she was playing her games under the very nose of the High Priest Haldephren himself.\n\n\"Finished!\" Jenny announced a minute later.\n\nMira turned to view the results thoughtfully. Jenny had some experience with the use of makeup. Her intent now was to demonstrate a vague and slightly novice attempt without agitating her natural effect on the sexual instincts of the local males. Aping the courtesans, she had shadowed her eyes heavily, and her brown nipples were now a bright rose.\n\n\"J.T. may have been right,\" Mira observed thoughtfully. \"All the same, I do approve. Can you confuse some of the local boys with teasing hopes while maintaining your distance?\"\n\n\"I never was a flirt,\" Jenny admitted self-consciously. \"But if need and opportunity present themselves, I will do my best.\"\n\n\"Under the circumstances, you might find more opportunity than you wish,\" his mistress observed. \"Let's not keep them waiting.\"\n\nThe day was bright and clear for early winter, even here in the South. Dasjen Valdercon himself met them at the steps, gallantly indicating the way to a large open-air carriage waiting below. He afforded Jenny only one brief lecherous glance before he turned his attention back to Mira, who was herself dressed rather provocatively\u2014at least by Northland standards\u2014-in her own barbaric linery.\n\n\"A grand morning to you both, my beautiful ladies,\" he declared with an elaborate bow. \"I had thought that we might begin with a comprehensive tour of our fair city.\"\n\nIt seemed that he meant to conduct this tour himself, without benefit of a retinue of either guards or courtiers. Dasjen led Mira In the carriage but Jenny hesitated on the steps, suddenly aware I hat Ellon Bennisjen was descending quickly on a course to intercept her and that he was to be her appointed companion. She ilelested him. Dasjen was dangerous and predatory but he was also charming and witty, but his young assistant was a scavenger, cold and hungry and quite mad. He had not been at dinner the night before, but she now foresaw that she would not be free of liiin while they remained.\n\n\"Here's my pretty lady!\" he said as he slipped around her shoulder to stand before her, so close that she had to look up at him. His imitation of his master's charm was half-perfect, lacking only any depth of sincerity. \"My Lord Dasjen thought that you might be lonely.\"\n\n\"I had not anticipated a companion,\" she answered, hiding her revulsion and apprehension in teasing. \"But my mistress seems to be engaged herself, and I feared that this might be lonesome duty.\"\n\n\"I know a cure for any loneliness, day or night,\" Ellon said suggestively.\n\nJenny had to force herself from backing away, and not only in disgust and fear. Ellon was in a twisted manner the most sexual man she had ever met, for all her conscious disgust of him. But she knew that he would take and never give. She was somehow reminded of creatures which killed their mates; here, for the first time, she saw that in the male of any species.\n\nShe knew that Ellon expected her in his bed that night, and then she would belong to the Dark. She was also beginning to think that this whole affair was getting too complicated for words.\n\nFor now, at least, there was no immediate problem. They filed into the carriage to sit in the deep, soft seats across from Mira and Dasjen. While Jenny did have to sit beside Ellon for the rest of the day, he did conduct himself very circumspectly while they were with the others. Although Jenny did also have to endure being discreetly molested by him as opportunities presented themselves. By pure will she forced her fear and misery from her mind, knowing that she could not betray herself to Dasjen Valdercon's suspicions.\n\nThe carriage proceeded to the docks and a quick lesson on the economic philosophy of the Empire. What Dasjen had to say on the subject was essentially the same thing that they had heard before; the real lesson was to be learned from what they saw.\n\n\"I've never seen so many ships,\" Mira observed. Which was the truth; there were over a hundred merchant ships in port at that time, loading and unloading so quickly that the harbor was choked with their Coming and going. \"More of the native population must be employed as stevedores than anything else, with rowers close behind.\"\n\n\"Almost all of our menial labor is performed by slaves, \" Dasjen answered absently, then saw her startled glance and amended himself. \"Criminals condemned for serious crimes, some for life but others only for the term of their punishment.\"\n\n\"You must have...\" quite a lot of criminals, Mira began to say. She caught herself. \"...quite a strong industry to support this trade.\"\n\nDasjen nodded once, gravely. \"That is so. Alashera is, needless to say, a center of development of modem technology. Raw materials come in for the use of industry, and agricultural products as well as items of low technology come in for use of the population.\"\n\nApparently the Empire held a somewhat different idea of high technology than the North. Merchants were always eager to boast of their wares, but most of what was touted for the edification of the two visitors were things they found to be of very common design, although of generally good quality. A very large quantity of ordinary but very well-built and well-designed weapons seemed to be pouring out of the city for all portions of the Empire; nearly every ship, no matter what its cargo, had at least a crate or two of weapons.\n\nTheir morning's expedition was interrupted at one point by the ringing of bells throughout the city. The entire population abruptly fell silent and sank to their knees as they stood, heads bowed... almost cringing, as if they expected to feel the bite of a whip across their offered backs. Even Ellon copied this gesture, with a very fervent, religiously ecstatic look on his face, his eyes closed. But Dasjen only looked angry and impatient. Jenny caught the distinct impression that he had made arrangements for this not to happen, just as he had arranged that the streets be conspicuously empty of the black-robed priests and priestesses they had seen when flying over the day before. There was no doubt that they were seeing the calling of the devoted to a moment of worship to the Dark, and everyone in sight responded with the same intense, eager reverence.\n\n\"Funeral bells.\" He muttered an explanation, hardly seeming to care if they believed him. \"A local merchant ship has been long overdue. The city has awaited news for days, and that news was not good. This is a dangerous season to sail.\"\n\nThe Dark Priesthood might be keeping itself out of sight, but Dasjen could not hide one important item. This beautiful city of his was also replete with temples to the Dark, although none were clearly identified as such and they were all closed and silent. But temples they were, all the same, and there was nothing that Dasjen could do about that. There were no temples of the Light as such, but citadels of learning, from universities and academies of magic to simple village schools. Knowledge and understanding were the tools of the Light; ignorance and fear were the weapons of the Dark.\n\nAnother thing that was obvious enough was the large numbers of soldiers\u2014not constables of law but actual warriors\u2014who endlessly patrolled the streets. Mira thought that there must be an impressive army of infantry, perhaps ten thousand strong, stationed inside the city itself.\n\nThe afternoon was spent in a lengthy ride through the hills about the lower slopes of Mount Drashand, above and to either side of the city. That was uneventful enough to be boring, except for the distraction of the beautiful scenery. Jenny was unable to let her guard down for a moment or Ellon would have his hands somewhere they did not belong. But at the same time she did not want to discourage him with a flat refusal; he was more harmless for his quiet, frustrated infatuation. Mira knew quite well by that time what was happening and she found the subtle advances and even more subtle defenses quietly hilarious, and in that way she at least was amused.\n\nThey dined that night in Dasjen's villa far above the city. It was a small place and very unassuming, a dark, secluded dwelling hidden back among the trees well off the road, with a vast tract of vineyards to the south. But there were also cooks and servants with dinner waiting, and musicians to play, and a respectable garrison of soldiers who seldom spoke but seemed to be everywhere. Both of the sorceresses feared that they were expected to stay the night; but when Mira casually suggested that it was getting late, the carriage was brought and they were returned briskly to the palace.\n\nWhich was just as well for them. J.T. was waiting, and he was not happy. He lay in the middle of Mira's bed, his tail thrashing and snapping, and he gave them a very dirty look. Sir Remidan looked hardly less frustrated as he stood with his arms crossed, looking likely to take matters into his own hands.\n\n\"So, here you are at last,\" he accused. \"You leave me here all day long to do your dirty work, and then you have the nerve to stay out half the night while there's work to be done.\"\n\n\"Calm yourself,\" Mira told him with no concern for his pique. \"It's a good two hours short of midnight yet, and you know it.\"\n\n\"That's exactly the point!\" J.T. declared, leaping up. \"I've found what I think is the entrance of the tunnel leading to the heart of Mount Drashand and the ancient temple.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course!\" Jenny declared, stopping short and looking so thoughtful that both Mira and the cat turned to stare. \"Dasjen and Ellon both were very interested in a quick return to the palace.\"\n\n\"A midnight sacrifice?\" Mira asked herself. She stood for a moment with her head thrown back, holding the bridge of her generous nose with one hand; a rare gesture of hurried concentration. \"But of course. The moon set early tonight; we saw it going down across the harbor on our way back. Dasjen might order the Dark Priesthood to discretion during our visit, but he would not attempt to stop the ordained practices. He wouldn't want to. He is also the highest representative of the Empire in Alashera at the moment, or so we have assumed; he would have to officiate at any important ceremony in the Great Temple of the Dark. Could you not get in there?\"\n\n\"That's what I need you people for!\" J.T. exclaimed, his back arched. \"I don't even know for certain that this is it. There are doors I cannot open, and I waited hours for someone to come through. Then, about an hour ago, it seemed that the entire Imperial government was filing through those doors and not coming back. .. and they all wore black!\"\n\n\"It must be the temple, then,\" Mira told herself.\n\n\"I couldn't get through then... got kicked when I tried to run through,\" The cat continued. \"Now it's quiet again.\"\n\n\"I would have gone with him, but I am followed whenever I leave these rooms,\" Remidan added. \"If you had not come, I would have done something.\"\n\n\"I could go,\" Jenny offered softly.\n\nMira turned to look at her. \"Is that safe? Safe for you in particular, if you know what I mean?\"\n\n\"I do know what you mean, but I am safe,\" her student assured Iter. \"I am not altogether of the Light as you know it, but I reject the Dark even more. Nor do I intend to watch the ceremony, only lake enough of a look down that passage to know beyond any doubt where it leads.\"\n\nMira considered that very carefully, and nodded. \"I don't like sending you, of all people, on to the Great Temple of the Dark, but I also think that you have the best chance of getting in and out again without being seen. You do have something in mind?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Jenny insisted as she shucked her gown in a single swift movement, then hurried over to the dressing table. Sir Remidan, who had been scandalized enough by her attire, now looked about nervously with the beginning of a very boyish blush. The fact was that Jenny had forgotten about him in the excitement of the moment; the faerie centaurs had made an indifferent nudist of her at an early age.\n\nShe dipped a cloth in a bowl of water and began washing the makeup from her face and breasts. \"I know a trick or two that the dragons taught me. I can't take any weapons with me, but nothing mortal will even be aware of my presence. And the idea is to get away without a clue that I was ever there.\"\n\n\"You know what they will do with you, if they catch you,\" her mistress reminded her. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Disappear,\" Jenny insisted as she finished drying her face on a towel. She turned and grinned, and abruptly vanished as she stood. J.T., who had been seated on the edge of the bed, leaped up and swore briefly and brilliantly; even Mira looked impressed. The girl returned after a moment.\n\n\"Yes, I think you can do it,\" Mira agreed. \"Just keep your distance.\"\n\nA minute later Mira opened the door to allow the two spies into the corridor outside, although any watcher would have thought that she was only putting out the cat. J.T. did his best to imitate the nightly wanderings of a true cat, although not so much that he delayed too long in reaching their goal. Jenny followed him closely and silently, her bare feet treading softly on the smooth stone floor with no betraying rustle of clothes to warn of her presence. She had washed off the makeup with its less than subtle scents, and the perfume that she had used with deliberate profuseness had mostly faded.\n\nThey slipped quickly through the still, dark halls to the more central portions of the palace, so far not passing a soul nor even hearing a sound to indicate that the place was even inhabited. For the most part, it was not. The only tight moment came when they found themselves caught on a wide staircase as a troop of guards ascended, making their endless rounds. J.T. slipped deftly through their legs and waited on the steps below, but Jenny did not dare move. The stairs were thickly carpeted and the impressions of her feet were clearly visible in the heavy pile, even if she was not.\n\nShe hopped up on the bannister with the intention of sliding to safety, only to discover something that she had not considered. Bare bottoms did not slide on varnished rails, at least not without protest. Her initial launch propelled her only a few short inches, with the unexpected result of a very loud and incredibly rude noise. The other result was a friction bum to an exceptionally tender portion of her anatomy. She let out a startled squeak and jumped off the rail.\n\n\"What was that?\" the captain of the guard asked.\n\n\"I think I stepped on that cat,\" one of the soldiers answered.\n\n\"So who farted, you or the cat?\"\n\n\"Jenny?\" J.T. called at a whisper when the guards reached the top of the steps.\n\n\"Beside you.\" Her voice came from just above him. \"I hurt myself.\"\n\n\"Is that all?\" the cat asked impatiently. \"Should I kiss it and make it all better?\"\n\nSuch a question asked in perfect innocence required no answer.\n\nThe cat turned and ran down the remaining steps, turning at the bottom to streak away into the shadows of the back portions of the palace. Since much of its east side had been built into the face of the steep mountainside behind, none of the eastern chambers had windows but were in fact underground, although the palace did not cut deep into the mountain. J.T. reported that there were more levels below ground; even the storerooms had simply been cut deeper into the mountain, where temperatures were low and constant.\n\nWell behind the stairs, in the back of the palace, they came upon a short, wide corridor that led quickly to a pair of heavy, double doors. Jenny paused at the doors; at least J.T. assumed that she did, since the doors did not open and he heard no sound of her movements. What he could not see, due to the short stature of felines, were the wide louvered vents set in the shadows above I he door.\n\n\"This leads to the core of the volcano,\" Jenny observed.\n\n\"How do you know that?\" J.T. asked.\n\n\"There is a wind,\" she explained. \"Hot air rises up the neck of the volcano, and it draws cool air after it. There is enough air being drawn through this corridor that it would hold the doors shut if not for the vents.\"\n\n\"Then we are almost there?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. We must be at least two miles from the core at this point. We must hurry if we hope to reach the temple by midnight. In fact, I would prefer to be out by midnight, but I have no hope of that.\"\n\nOne of the two doors swung slowly open of its own accord, or so it seemed. J.T. leaped back, arching his back and hissing, then rushed forward to poke his head through the doorway for a quick look beyond. He slipped through, having seen no one beyond, and Jenny followed, opening the door just enough to squeeze through. The passage beyond was dark, featureless and endless, descending at a noticeable rate, the grey stone tunnel disappearing within a couple of hundred feet into the shadows. The doors closed slowly, silently behind them.\n\n\"Now what?\" J.T. wanted to know.\n\n\"Now we hurry,\" Jenny insisted, although she remained where she was for the moment. She seemed to be looking around. \"As I thought, the wind brings all the dust of the construction through. You can see that many people came through a couple of hours ago, and then just a few more as the dust began to settle again.\"\n\nJenny said no more, and the cat suddenly realized that he had been left behind. He ran to overtake her, only to run nose-first into the back of her leg and bounce back. Shaking his head, he was about to employ a few choice words when he saw what had caught the girl's attention. The tunnel could be seen to end just a hundred feet beyond in a wall of solid stone, without door or passage. As they went on, they saw instead that it turned to the right to open upon a much larger tunnel, this one of vast proportions. It was big enough for two wagons to be drawn abreast; indeed, the smell of horses indicated that it was used for that very purpose. It descended in the opposite direction, rising slightly toward the heart of Mount Drashand but sloping gently toward the harbor, where it gave every indication of leading. And like the smaller tunnel, it was dimly lit by glowstones.\n\n\"We don't have time to explore in both directions tonight.\" Jenny seemed to be arguing with herself. \"Cat, you follow it back down. Try to find every major exit along the way. If my guess is right, it will lead you to some hidden port down at the docks, possibly on the sea itself.\"\n\n\"Yes, I believe so,\" J.T. agreed. There was a modest breeze moving up the tunnel, a breeze wet and heavy with the chill night air right off the sea, and the smell of the harbor.\n\n\"You can surely get yourself out there and come back through the city,\" she continued. \"I'll go on up to the temple, take a quick look around, and come back out here. Watch out for yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm a cat,\" he reminded her succinctly. \"You watch out for yourself. If something were to happen to you, Lady Mira would skin me alive. And then your dragons would skin Lady Mira.\"\n\n\"I'll remember,\" Jenny promised, her soft voice already receding up the gentle slope of the passage. J.T. shrugged\u2014cats have good shoulders for that, but seldom use them\u2014then turned and hurried on his own way.\n\nThe passage up was long and uneventful, for it was now well inside the mountain itself and she expected no chambers or passages to intersect this one until they neared the core. She was lempted to run, except for the betraying slap of her feet against (he smooth stone, and so she kept her pace to a brisk walk. She could have flown, but not even the dragons could lift and maintain invisibility as well for long, and remaining unseen was far more important to her now. She reminded herself forcefully that she could afford to take no chances, that her role in the Prophecy vastly overshadowed even her own need to know the current state of the Great Temple of the Dark.\n\nThe heart of Mount Drashand lay two miles inward even of the palace; her vague mental map of Alashera had been proven true. Such a walk was of no consequence to her except for the time it look, for she could have easily run that distance without difficulty. The members of the Imperial court had not walked this distance; there had been carriages brought to provide their passage, for the smell of horses was fresh and heavy. That meant as well that there would be horses ahead. The beasts did not need to see her to recognize her presence, for they could hear and smell her.\n\nFor herself, Jenny hardly knew what to think. She knew already quite enough of what lay ahead, and she was ambivalent about what else she might leam. She yearned to be free of the Prophecy, to lead a life that was entirely her own for the first time in her own memory. At the same time she dreaded the supreme effort the Prophecy would surely demand of her, the hint of sacrifice she feared. She dreaded the beginning of the end, knowing that she could no longer afford to make a single mistake.\n\nShe paused when she saw the tunnel open into some wide chamber just ahead and listened carefully, but all she heard was the sounds of several horses. Expecting keepers watching over the beasts, she proceeded cautiously and quietly, but there was no one about. The chamber was vast, of size and shape like a large warehouse. Several carriages were parked in a row to one side and horses stood alone in their individual wooden stalls built along the south wall, tended and abandoned. Then it occurred to Jenny that the Great Temple was sacred ground indeed where no one but the sorcerers and servants of its very select coven were permitted, at least during important ceremonies.\n\nThe horses were nervous, restless. Jenny did not blame them. The sense of weight and time pressed down upon her, as if her anxious spirit struggled to support the great mass of the mountain above her. The darkness closed in upon the chamber tightly, slinking on tiger's paws around the desperate vigilance of outnumbered glowstones. There was something vaguely familiar about this place, a feeling that she had been here before.\n\nAnd then she knew. The memory returned to her, thirteen years past, a forgotten memory that forced its way back into her consciousness as clearly as if it had only just occurred. It was not a clear memory, telling nothing specific, just the sense of a place like this but many times as strong, dark and dangerous. Dalvenjah and Allen had come for her then, and they had taken her away from that terrible place where life itself seemed to gasp for breath. This was a lesser den of the Dark, but one she hardly dared to face alone.\n\nAnd it welcomed her. It was not yet consciously aware of her invasion, but it welcomed her all the same, seeking to pull her \\ in, whatever evil will animated this place, turning the heart of the 1 volcano into a thing alive. Or was the force acting upon her will entirely of her own design, that part of her own self that belonged to the Dark and sought its own? She hoped so, for she could easily control the Dark within herself. But she dared not match the strength of her own spirit against the immense, impersonal will of this place.\n\nShe made her way cautiously along the wall farthest from the horses, then slipped along the corridor beyond. The presence grew stronger, for she was not only making her way closer to its heart J but the closeness of walls and ceiling seemed to funnel that force in upon her like the wind which raced down the length of the passage. Now she began to see the trappings of wealth such as she did not remember from that other place. There was a strip of dense carpet on the smooth stone floor, further muffling her footsteps. Her enhanced sight could make clear the designs and symbols inlaid in gold and silver into the stone itself.\n\nAnd all of it very, very old, at least the original work, although it all bore evidence of recent and extensive restoration. The gold and silver was new; the etched designs in the walls were not. This, she thought, was in fact that ancient Great Temple of the Dark. History claimed that it had been destroyed, but she saw now that it had merely been abandoned for the last two thousand years. Or perhaps it had never been abandoned at all, only kept from complete decay by impoverished followers until the fortunes of their master improved and they began to prepare for his return.\n\nThis was one question for which she hoped to find an answer, although that was hardly vital. Of far more importance, at least to her mind, was the question of whether it was coincidence that the followers of the Dark established their greatest strongholds within these live but tamed volcanos, and if so then why. Did they in some way find access to elemental forces stronger and deeper than the Light knew how to command? She had to see the heart of the temple, the core of the volcano. In spite of her promises to Lady Mira and the cat, she was going on.\n\nThe corridor began to branch shortly, once and then again and again, but still the passages turned and wandered like tunnels rather than the straight halls and sharp comers of a true building. Jenny wondered about the purposes of these side corridors and what lay within the closed chambers she could see, their heavy wooden doors locked. Storerooms, or perhaps the cells of resident priests and their novices. Or even a school of Dark Magic, an evil parody of the Academies of the North, but not currently in use from the look of things. Which presented a question in itself; where did the Empire train its Dark sorcerers?\n\nShe came deeper into the heart of the Great Temple, and now the passages did more closely resemble a conventional building in form. She also lost the light breeze which had been her guide for so long, now that it had any number of outlets to the core. But her sense of direction did not fail her, for she now had a more certain guide. She could sense the pulsing heart of the Great Temple just ahead, not more than a few hundred feet away. The place had seemed utterly deserted until now, but she was suddenly aware of a regular rhythm that coursed through the air and the stone itself, a regular, frantic pulse. Drums. She knew then that she had come nearly to the core of Mount Drashand, and that its sorcerer priests were even now practicing their midnight ceremonies.\n\nShe had no fear of the priests, but the conscious, living presence of the temple itself would find her quickly now that she was deep within its own familiar ground. It was preoccupied with its own affairs, drawing in the rich, evil powers evoked by the priests and radiating them forth again like the vile warmth of some sickly flame. But it would sense her own magic the moment she came within its terrible presence, and her only hope in going on rested in her ability to hide her own powers. She belonged to the Light, but she was also trained in the dragon magic, something alien to its hungry, violent nature.\n\nJenny allowed her spell of invisibility to slip, drawing in her talents and calming them to complacency, now becoming magically rather than physically unseen. She hurried on, wanting nothing more than her one quick look before she got herself from this place as quickly as she could, trusting now to the shadows of these dimly lit passages to hide her. She felt naked now like she had never felt in her life, in all her draconic upbringing.\n\nThe passage ended in a pair of doors, and she carefully pushed through to find herself standing on a wide, narrow balcony which overlooked a second balcony or alcove, a long, deep slot cut into the wall of the volcano's wide core. The core itself lay just beyond, falling away quickly from her limited view except for a dim orange glow from far below and drifting clouds of vapors and hot steam that ascended the shaft. Three long, slender tongues of stone leaped out from equal points along the perimeter of the shaft, one just below her, to meet in the very center of the core.\n\nThe tongues of stone supported a thin circular platform that had the look of polished stone. An immense crystal hung suspended above the pit that opened in the center of that platform; three slender posts of stone or dark metal formed the platform to surround the crystal, smaller bits of crystal mounted in the tops of the post that somehow held the larger crystal suspended by some force which interacted between them. The crystal itself was perfect and clear of substance, almost white in its translucence, but in its heart pulsed a light that was blood-red tinged with black. Jenny knew that she looked upon the heart of the temple, a thing that had taken on a life of its own with the centuries of lives and thoughts of the priests who had sacrificed to it.\n\nAnd on the platform itself, the Dark Priests were assembled.\n\nJenny looked closer and saw from the figures atop it that the platform was wider than she had thought, at least a hundred feet across. Drummers lined the perimeter of the platform, endlessly beating the great kettle of the drums before them with a relentless precision which was almost mechanical. A single row of black-robed priests formed a second ring just inside the drummers, and before them perhaps two score young, golden bodies leaped and danced naked to the frantic pulse of drums and raw magic.\n\nThe limp form of victims were lashed to each of the three inner posts of stone, standing in wide pools of their own blood. Their bellies had been opened wide from crotch to ribcage, their organs already ripped free and cast into the fires below. Jenny thought that she could see fear frozen in their dead eyes; they had not been willing victims. They were all male, young and strong and handsome. Dasjen Valdercon, the High Priest Haldephren, stood beside his victims with a long-bladed knife still in one hand as he watched the dancers with a gloating, sated look, himself naked and bathed in blood.\n\nLooking upon this scene, Jenny understood the secret, innermost nature of the Dark, the secret that the sorcerers of the Light had hidden from the world in horror twenty centuries before. For that great crystal was the Heart of Flame that Bresdenant had warned them of, a great repository of Dark forces. Its servants had worshipped it and nourished it for countless years, as it drank in the violent emotions of their sacrifices, the raw, vicious lust of the orgies that would shortly follow, their very souls, until it assumed a counterfeit life and consciousness of its own. It fed upon them, and they fed it willingly, coven after coven tearing out pieces of their souls to abate its insatiable appetite, until it burned them dry... and a new coven would begin again.\n\nAnd Haldephren took part in that feeding, not feeding the Heart of Flame itself but sharing in its feast. He enhanced his own talents through that psychic cannibalism; he was himself a thing not unlike that massive crystal behind him, lesser in scope but greater in personal awareness, wrapped in a living form. Jenny sensed all this beyond any doubt. She understood him now, and she knew now why she feared him. If he had ever been a living man with a mortal soul, that part of him had been burned away long ago\u2014 or perhaps he had left it behind the first time he had taken a new form.\n\nThen she saw Ellon Bennisjen standing near his master, also naked and holding a knife, his young, lean body sleek with blood. And she realized this, too, to her horror, numb as she already was with new terrors: He was no simple chancellor but the favorite of his master. He was here to learn; for him these ceremonies were the lessons that would make him like the Emperor and his own master. Already he was learning to feed as his master Haldephren fed, but as yet he could only taste the powers that sported like whirlwinds in this place.\n\nShe feared him less than she feared his master, but she hated him more. She remembered the murderous hunger within him, the practiced cruelty, and suddenly she could bear this place no longer. The immortal magic that had become infused with her very spirit rejected this place, and the relentless drums seemed likely to burst her head with their thunder. She reeled back, found the doors by chance in her blind haste and slipped through. Then she turned and ran as swiftly and silently as she could, turning her back on the echoing drumbeats, the lust and hunger of death and violent sex.\n\nJenny ran, and as she ran she slipped unnoticed from the vile attention of the Heart of Flame and left its evil behind her. She felt almost as if she had forgotten herself in the eternity of perhaps ten seconds when she had looked upon the Dark, so that now she slowly became aware of her own being and the world around her. Her first returning awareness was that of her left hand lightly following the stone wall, guiding her through the deep shadows, of the beating of her own bare feet on the smooth, cool floor and the soft, sea-tainted breeze that tickled her skin. At that moment she could have wept, with either the horror of what she had seen and felt or else the relief at leaving it behind.\n\nBut she was not allowed that luxury, for she was suddenly aware that she ran from one horror into the embrace of another. She stopped short, sensing the evil thing just ahead of her and knowing it from her own distant past, when Allan had fought such a thing and nearly lost. She wrapped herself in invisibility and shrank back against the wall just as the massive armored form of the demon stepped ponderously around the corner just ahead and paused, filling the generous passage. It was sheathed in its own pale luminescence, and Jenny feared that it could see her in that sickly light. Indeed it did seem aware of her presence, or at least troubled, seeking something it did not yet know but sensed as alien.\n\nThere was no hope to win past the demon. Even had it been of stone, she would had needed to squeeze past its immense form with care. As it was, those powerful pincers could have snapped about her waist and crushed the life out of her in an instant. She retreated, slowly and cautiously, never turning her back on it, and as she receded it became more confused and uncertain, taking a few hesitant steps after her.\n\nThen she found the corridor behind her at last and ran, desperate to cut through the passages ahead of the demon before it could cut her off, even if it was aware of her by now. She hoped not. She could have fought this demon and won; she commanded such magic. Her goal was to escape clear detection altogether, before the demon was certain of her presence, for destroying it would have only told Haldephren beyond any doubt that enemies had penetrated to the heart of the Great Temple itself. And there would be no doubt about what enemies were prowling around these days. The lives of their entire party depended upon her quiet escape.\n\nJenny circled around, leading the demon, until she returned to the main corridor and knew that it was behind her. She paused a moment, probing the path ahead with keen senses. Then she ran, swiftly and silently and very mindful of the fact that she was not out of danger yet.\n\nBy the time she returned to her suite in the palace, all Jenny-wanted to do was to jump in bed, pull the covers over her head, and pretend that it had all never happened. Perhaps, somewhere near dawn, she might finally fall asleep, blit not if she could not forget that she would have to endure Dasjen Valdercon and Ellon Bennisjen the next morning and pretend that her glimpse of them beside the Heart of Flame had never been. She certainly did not expect to find Lady Mira waiting for her, anxious as a mother on her daughter's first date, demanding a full explanation of every moment that had passed. But that, unfortunately, was exactly what she got.\n\nJenny despaired of putting any of it into words, and so she did something that she had never before done with a mortal. Locking her mind to Mira's, she relived those terrible minutes inside the Great Temple, and so Mira saw those images directly from her own memory. The faerie dragons did this regularly and thought nothing of it, and hers was dragon magic.\n\nLady Mira was, needless to say, suitably impressed. In fact, she looked as shaken and repulsed as her student felt. The only thing that Jenny amended from that report was that Dasjen was in fact the High Priest Haldephren. If she had her way, her mistress would not be made aware of that disturbing fact until they were on their way home. Mira paid strict attention, making no comment and asking no question. In the end she had only one thing to say. \"Where did you leave the cat?\" she asked simply.\n\n\"Oh, hell!\" Jenny exclaimed with a very impatient gesture. \"He went the other way when we came to the main passage below the palace. We thought that he would come out somewhere near the harbor. He'll be along later.\"\n\n\"I trust so, since he could not have found the type of trouble you courageously struck your nose into,\" Mira said as she jumped up from the edge of Jenny's bed and began to pace. \"Well, at least we know what we came to find, and more than I had hoped to come away with. Do you think...?\"\n\nShe paused, seeing that Jenny had fallen back on the bed, sound asleep. She chuckled softly and gently pulled the girl up until she was fully on the bed with her head on the pillow, and pulled the cover up around her neck. Mira finished by casting a simple spell, making the appropriate gestures over the girl's head.\n\n\"Pleasant dreams,\" Mira said as she turned to leave, then smiled fondly. \"At least I hope you like them. Some of my favorites.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "What More Can Happen?\n\nJ.T. returned the next morning, looking like something the cat had dragged in. He sat at the door and meowed until Dooket let him in, then staggered across the floor mumbling and cursing in a low voice. He went directly to Mira's room, leaped up on her bed and threw himself down with a loud, weary sigh. Then he opened his eyes and looked up at the sorceress.\n\n\"I'll have baked fish and a bowl of milk, if you please,\" he told her.\n\nMira looked at him quizzically. \"You'll have what the servants brought this morning: fried mutton strips, breakfast rolls and fruit wine.\"\n\n\"Atrocious!\" The cat declared, making a face. \"I'll have a roll and wine.\"\n\nMira looked up at Dooket and Erkin, standing in the door. They nodded briefly and left to prepare a plate. She sat down on the bed beside J.T. \"Are you well? You look done in.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm fine,\" he insisted impatiently. \"What about that girl of yours? Did she make it in safe?\"\n\n\"Here I am,\" Jenny answered for herself, entering from the other door at that moment, still buttoning her shirt. \"I made it in some time ago.\"\n\n\"Real clothes?\" Mira inquired, staring at Jenny's usual pants and shirt which replaced the revealing gowns of the last two days. \"Poor Ellon is going to be beside himself, not to mention Dasjen's disappointment.\"\n\n\"Too bad,\" she said caustically. \"I've realized that these openbreasted gowns are imitative of their ceremonial orgies. Besides, I've had too much of Dasjen's eyes and Ellon's hands as it is.\" \"I don't blame you,\" Mira agreed emphatically, to show that she had never expected that Jenny should have to wear the things. She took the plate that Erkin handed to her and set it before the cat. \"Eat. Enjoy. The boys cut the mutton into tiny little bits for you. But speak.\"\n\n\"Not much to say,\" J.T. reported between a few quick bites. \"That tunnel leads straight to an opening at the waterfront where cargo can be unloaded directly during low tide, although the end of the tunnel floods during high tide. I know. I had to wait. There are actually several openings here at the palace itself, including one not far from where the ship is parked that is immense. There is another group of openings about a third of the way down to the harbor, but I could not get through. I came back through the city and found an Academy. I guess that you could call it that. It is a school for Dark Magic.\"\n\n\"That answers my last question,\" Jenny said. \"I knew that there had to be a school somewhere in the city, since they've moved it out of the Great Temple itself. So we also know that the temple is in use, that the Heart of Flame still exists, and that the Emperor is not here.\"\n\n\"Now that is interesting, since the servants reported that the Emperor has arrived and that we are to be taken into his presence later today,\" Mira mused. \"Not the real Emperor, I am sure. You will have to go back into one of those open-faced gowns, but you will have company this time. They brought three for me so that I can 'choose the one I want to wear for the occasion.' I take that to mean that I had damned well better have one on.\"\n\n\"You do get used to it,\" Jenny assured her.\n\n\"Oh, under other circumstances I would probably enjoy it. I plan to take mine home with me for my next dinner party.\" Mira sat down on the edge of the bed, deep in thought. \"I wonder what the others have discovered? A shame that we could not get in touch with them last night.\"\n\n\"Lady Mira, let's get out of here as soon as we can,\" Jenny insisted. \"We know enough, more than we expected to find. We won't gain anything by staying any longer, not balanced against the danger we are in.\"\n\nMira gave her an appraising look, and she was certain that Jenny was completely earnest... and on the verge of panic. That impressed her more than anything, for she knew that the girl was calmer and far braver than herself. She nodded. \"We will go as soon as gracefully possible. But not today. Now we are stuck with having to go through with our audience with this make-believe Emperor and the welcoming dinner. But I intend to be impressed and cooperative and claim to have seen all I need to see, and with any luck we will be on our way tomorrow.\"\n\n\"No, we really can't get out any sooner,\" Jenny agreed reluctantly. \"But we must be very, very careful. There is tension in the air today, violence and expectation. This entire city is about to explode.\"\n\n\"Now that would be an interesting sight!\" Mira remarked, grinning. \"And I can't think of anything that would do it more good.\"\n\n\"She is right,\" J.T. affirmed. He sat back to wash his face, but he was quite serious. \"Walk like cats.\"\n\n\"Really, Dasjen,\" Mira insisted. \"It's certainly too much trouble for the Emperor to come all the way here just to see us.\" \"Unfortunately you are right,\" Dasjen Valdercon agreed as he courteously assisted her in dismounting from the carriage. \"As much as we wish no misunderstanding between ourselves and the North, the Emperor is a busy man. He has come to attend to his own business. When the Senate is not in session, he is the sole government of the Empire and must be present to attend to his many important duties.\"\n\nThey waited as Ellon offered Jenny the same assistance in stepping down from the carriage. Jenny found many such local customs distasteful, but she endured such things as necessary evils. At least they had been encouraged to attend the reception at the docks in Northern dress; Jenny had no intention of baring herself in public yet again and Mira not once. But the formal reception at the palace later that evening was another matter. Jenny was dressed plainly by local standards in her best pants and tunic, her narrow-bladed sword belted at her waist. Mira wore black pants with a tunic that was a glory of glaring colors in abstract designs... her usual self.\n\nThey walked slowly down the length of the stone pier where the Emperor's ship would tie up, the rough, scarred flagstones now cloaked in carpets of Imperial red. The Emperor's ship had only just arrived in the inner harbor, an immense wargalley with three complete decks of oars and four masts with bright sails, flanked by two ships of identical size and design but less ornate in decoration. Mira frowned and reckoned that the better part of half an hour would pass before the ship was secured at the pier, and heaven only knew how long the Emperor\u2014or his counterfeit\u2014would take in actually departing his ship. That much at least was in their favor. The real Emperor would hurry on no one's account, but this imitation would probably pop out as soon as the plank was thrown down.\n\nAs she thought about it, Mira decided that she preferred that the Emperor and his High Priest were absent during her own visit. She doubted very much that she could be calm and polite in the presence of such evil. .. creatures. She could find no words to describe the revulsion she knew that she would feel for those two on sight.\n\n\"One moment, please,\" Dasjen said graciously, and hurried away to confer with the small delegation of dignitaries who waited nearby. Mira recognized all of the ministers, chancellors and local officials they had met so far, but only half of the resident courtiers\u2014those people whose only function seemed to be to attend ceremonies and look pretty, but who were in fact the principal members of the coven of the Great Temple.\n\nEllon looked at Jenny and started to say something, but bowed his head and hurried after his master. Mira watched him for a moment longer, then stepped closer to her student. \"What do you make of all of this?\"\n\n\"The real Emperor is not on that ship,\" Jenny reported. \"Dasjen is pleased with himself, but Ellon is scared half to death. I suspect that he is planning to do something his master may or may not approve.\"\n\nA large troop of Imperial warriors, resplendent in snapping new leather and polished armor of bronze and silver, rounded the comer from the street to march with mechanized precision along the length of the pier. The two sorceresses withdrew to the back of the pier to give them room, crowding against the stacked boxes and bales. This whole affair might be a glorious farce, but the farce would be carried through in proper form to the smallest detail. The honor guard split into two long lines, their heavy boots keeping time with their pace like drumbeats, loud enough to drown out casual conversation. They halted in the center of the pier, paused for a long moment, and snapped smartly to their right to be facing the galley when it pulled alongside to dock, all without a single spoken command.\n\n\"Yarg, what rude, noisy people!\" Mira exclaimed. \"I'll bet they chew with their mouths open.\"\n\nShe turned to say something to her young protege, but Jenny had abruptly disappeared at some point during the confusion.\n\nMira happened to look back to the small group of the Empire's commanding ministers in time to see the end of some argument between Dasjen Valdercon and his chancellor. Ellon seemed to have won his point; Dasjen gave reluctant consent, then watched with obvious misgivings as Ellon turned and hurried along the pier back to the city. Then Dasjen turned to stride quickly back to where she stood, threading his way through the motionless guards.\n\n\"My, you look worried,\" Mira observed. \"Is there any problem?\"\n\n\"No, I trust not,\" Dasjen answered. \"My chancellor feels that he should return to the palace to insure that the plans for the reception there proceed properly.\"\n\n\"A great deal of fuss, for the off season.\"\n\nHe laughed heartily. \"So it might seem, after the informality of the North. But Elura is old and secure. We are new and young, and we need formalities such as this to form our foundations, our own new traditions. The history and traditions we have inherited from the past are not things that we wish to maintain, nor even recall. Besides, this is only a shadow of the reception that our Emperor would receive if the Senate was in session.\"\n\nOr if it happened to have been the real Emperor. But Mira kept her ungracious thoughts to herself, whether they were true or not, and reminded herself that this was all for her benefit.\n\n\"The past is one subject that I wish to discuss with you,\" she said after a moment. \"Assuming that our meeting with the Emperor goes well\u2014and I see no reason why it should not\u2014then I will declare that I have seen enough to set my own mind at ease. The season is getting on and the weather less predictable, both here and in the North. By your leave, I will be on my way home in the morning.\"\n\nDasjen was obviously dismayed, but he struggled to cover it.\n\n\"So soon, my pet? After all these years, I do admit that I bask in your presence.\"\n\n\"You haven't gotten me to bed yet?\" she assumed, teasing at first, then grew serious. It was the best acting she had ever done. \"That would not be a good idea, I fear. My home and my duty are in the North, and you belong here. Let's not ask for trouble.\" \"I know better than to ask a commitment of you,\" he assured her.\n\n\"You need not,\" Mira told him, turning the blame on herself in gallant self-sacrifice. \"I am the victim of temptations which I cannot afford to contemplate. I never expected to see you again.\n\nI certainly never expected to find you here. But it is my own heart I break, now as I did seven years ago. The fault was never your own, except in being too perfect.\"\n\nMira pulled a silk hanky from the top of her tunic, where it had been stuffed down her bosom, and mopped delicately at her eyes, pleased with herself and blissfully unaware that she was serving up enough ham to feed an army. But Dasjen seemed compelled to buy the whole hog, as long as she continued to stroke his magnificent ego in the process. He gently, graciously took her hand and kissed it lightly.\n\n\"Forgive me, my pet,\" he offered, serious and full of regret. \"I fear that I have misjudged your heart from the start.\"\n\n\"You have done nothing that requires forgiveness. I only hope, when my little ship is riding the dawn winds away from your fair island, that I might be able to forgive myself.\" She paused and turned away with a shuddering sigh. \"Leave me, please, for just a minute. I have no wish to meet your Emperor with tears in these foolish eyes.\"\n\n\"Of course, my pet.\" He gently kissed her hand again before letting it slip from his own, slowly backing away. Then he turned and, with a sigh of vast relief, hurried to rejoin the other ministers at the front of the pier. Mira was a remarkable woman, but he had never contemplated keeping her.\n\nShe waited until he was safely gone, then turned to her bodyguards. There was not the slightest expression to be seen on the young faces of the two barbarians, in spite of the extraordinary scene they had just witnessed. She made a mental note never to play cards with these two.\n\nSir Remidan was obviously moved by the performance.\n\n\"Jenny is in trouble,\" she told them. \"I know it. Don't ask me how; I just know it. Go find her.\"\n\n\"Yes, Lady,\" the twins agreed without hesitation, and departed. Remidan looked like he wanted to go running to a bold rescue, but he seemed to have not the slightest idea how.\n\nMira frowned, suspecting that it was already too late and wishing that this silly charade was over. She could not imagine what danger Jenny could have gotten herself into so quickly, but she suspected that Ellon had something to do with this. He would surely get what he had coming; given half a chance, Jenny was perfectly capable of making short work of him. But Mira wanted to be ready for anything.\n\nJenny came suddenly and completely awake without ever having been aware that she had slept, and knew instantly that she had been caught unprepared by a spell. Her last awareness had been standing on the pier and suddenly sensing Ellon's presence behind her. Now she lay on a smooth stone floor in some warm, dark place, a place where the air itself seemed to hum with the tension of incredible evil. Ellon stood over her now, one hand extended above her face. He had only just finished the final gesture to remove the spell which had held her unconscious and defenseless.\n\n\"Ah, with us again.\" His voice was a velvet purr, a poor imitation of his master's charm and sophistication. \"Very soon, my pet, you will be with us forever.\"\n\n\"I'll fry you to a cinder the moment you touch me,\" she told him, and that was no idle threat. She knew already that she was held by more than physical restraints. She could not turn her magic outward, but no one could violate a sorceress and survive except a far stronger sorcerer. And Ellon was hardly her superior.\n\n\"You will accept me willingly,\" he told her with smooth satisfaction as he leaned over her to stroke loose hairs away from her face. \"You know, I suspect, just who we are. Just now you are held by the coven of the Great Temple of the Dark, and we do recognize our own. Nothing you or your wise mistress can do will ever return you to the Light. But the Dark extends a welcoming hand to orphans like yourself.\"\n\n\"The Dark cannot force me to its will!\" Jenny declared, feeling ihe first tremor of panic. She knew the test he meant to set upon her, and she had no desire to confront it. She distrusted her own resolve.\n\n\"The Dark has no need to coerce or beg,\" he corrected her patiently. \"The Dark offers a sorceress like yourself knowledge and power in exchange for your loyalty. It offers pleasure and contentment in exchange for your devotion. And you will accept because the will is within you to accept.\"\n\n\"That remains to be seen.\"\n\n\"And soon it shall be seen.\" He rose and stepped back, then made a brusque gesture in her direction. \"Take her.\"\n\nPriests in black robes appeared at either side to take her under her arms and lift her effortlessly, her hands still tied securely behind her back in a cruel grip. Priests who were young, handsome of face, large and strong of body. A third caught her bound legs and lifted her up so that they could carry her flat between them as they marched with slow ceremony through the dim passages of brown stone.\n\nJenny looked about as much as she was able, realizing for the first time that she knew exactly where she was. Ellon had told her that she was within the Great Temple, but only now did those words become clear to her. The evil of this place grew by that recognition, becoming heavy and suffocating like the thick sludge of shadows that flowed through the ancient passages. She knew where they were taking her.\n\nLady Mira had warned her often enough that she did not want to be taken alive. Vajerral had imparted that same warning, as if she had ever needed it.\n\nShe was going to the Heart of Flame. The coven would surround her, making her the object of their ceremony as they attacked her resolve with their relentless temptations, making her desire the destruction and the raw, perverted lust they practiced as an art. And the horrible, alien consciousness of the Heart of Flame itself would recognize her for what she was and strip away her defenses. And then, when she was weakest, Ellon would force his body into her own and show her the delight in the very perverse pleasures that repulsed her now. Then she would belong to them, and they would control the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons through her.\n\nJenny knew that she could not hope to resist. Dasjen Valdercon possessed the powers to force access to her inner name, and with that he could command her or reshape her into anything that pleased him. She knew that she could not fight him, the High Priest Haldephren least of all. Every indication was that he was her father, and not even Dalvenjah could ever promise her that he was not.\n\nJenny could not see much, upside down and surrounded as she was by billowing black robes. But she knew when they carried her out onto the wide, deep shelf recessed into the wall of the core of Mount Drashand. Then Ellon led the way as they carried her up the slender tongue of stone that leaped out from the edge of the shelf to support a third of the broad round platform. There the priests untied her, although they held her arms tightly until they had secured her once again to one of the three inner posts which supported the Heart of Flame, her hands held high and wide above her head by the manacles which had held the sacrificial victims the night before. The crystal itself slept not six feet behind her, dim and dusky except for a faint translucent pulse of ruby light within its core.\n\nOnly the cold pillar of stone at her back hid her from its sinister presence, and it was small comfort indeed. She shrank from it with far more fear and loathing than she had ever felt from Ellon Bennisjen or even his master. They might be a threat to her in both body and spirit, but this thing knew only one purpose. It would consume her.\n\n\"There you are, my pet, nice and cozy.\" Ellon continued his pathetic mimicry of his master's geniality. \"Not to worry. The coven will convene as soon as possible. The others assemble at this moment. Then we will be done with this whole uncomfortable affair, and have you down from there.\"\n\nJenny paid him little mind, too consumed with her own thoughts. There had to be a way out of this. Too much was at stake.\n\nPerhaps it was not over yet. Mira was a Veridan Warrior and (he Trassek twins were capable warriors in their own right, but they could not take on the coven of the Great Temple. But add a knight and two Mindijaran and matters would be very different. They were compelled to come for her, valuing her life even above their own. She regretted this turn of events. She should never have come here, exposing herself to even the possibility that allowed this to happen.\n\nHer only consolation was that this was all Mira's big, fat, stinking idea to begin with.\n\n\"Ellon!\" Dasjen Valdercon said sharply as he marched out onto the platform, a black ceremonial robe over the elegant pants and flowing tunic he had worn at the reception. He was by no means pleased. \"What is this foolishness? What have you done?\" \"Master, I trust that I have not erred.\" Ellon was no longer gloating and vain, but humble and circumspect as he bent knee before his master. \"She belongs with us; you have said so yourself.\n\nI know that we can convert her, and I wish to do this thing myself.\n\nI desire her.\"\n\n\"You will have that rare honor, although we will discuss later how you may atone for a greater presumption than you realize even yet,\" Dasjen remarked, already dismissing his young chancellor from his thoughts as he watched Jenny appraisingly. \"A very desirable young lady, yes. She will be turned to the Dark, and you are most worthy of that gentle duty. But after that you will have to be very respectful of her desires.\"\n\nJenny edged back as well as the immobile stone behind her would allow, knowing only too well what he meant. But she was loath to see in his thoughts that he had known all along that he had only been playing his own game with her, just as she had pretended not to recognize him.\n\n\"Ah, you do know exactly what I mean,\" he said with satisfaction, standing close and menacing. \"We have met before, Jenny Breivik, although you were very young and I wore a very different form. But you recognize me all the same, just as I would know you despite the present color of your hair.\"\n\nHe made an impatient gesture over her head, effortlessly stripping her of the spell that had kept her long hair black. In the dim, ruddy light of the core of Mount Drashand, the difference was hardly noticeable. But a few errant strands of hair caught the honest light that filtered down from above, glowing darkly blue.\n\n\"Proof enough, if not for the very feel of your presence,\" Dasjen said, bitter and impatient with the deception. He turned quickly to Ellon and the rest of the coven, gathered as close as they dared. \"Behold, my children! Before you stands Jenny Breivik, the blue-haired child and the important half of the object of the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons. My daughter!\"\n\n\"That was ever a lie!\" Jenny declared hotly.\n\n\"Believe what you want, my child,\" he told her tolerantly. \"Soon enough you will know the truth. The full coven will be gathered any minute now. Then the Heart of Flame will tear away your feeble defenses. You will belong to us, and we will have the other immediately after. You will bring her to us.\"\n\n\"The other?\" Jenny asked, heedless of her own fears for the moment. She was beginning to comprehend that matters were far more complex than she had ever anticipated, and that there were portions of the Prophecy that she had never known. She remembered now Dalvenjah telling her of the other, the second one needed to fulfill the Prophecy.\n\n\"Yes, have you truly not heard the words of the Prophecy of Maerdilyn?\" he asked guardedly, watching her closely. \"Dragons gold and dragons black seek to gain what each may lack. White and black, red and blue, fortune hangs between the two.\"\n\nJenny could not hide her dismay. She knew now exactly what the Prophecy of Maerdilyn meant, the full meaning of the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons.\n\n\"Ah, you do know!\" He savored her discomfort. \"You are the blue, and the blue shall be the bait for the red. Only together could you have defeated either myself or the Emperor. But you will belong to the Dark, and Mira will be dead, both before this day is done.\"\n\nShe turned away from him in pain, from his hot, eager breath on her face. Dalvenjah had known all along. That was her reason for sending Jenny into Lady Mira's keeping. Mira was the second half of the Prophecy, her ignorance of that fact being her primary protection over the years. They had been thrust together for this very reason, blue-haired Jenny and red-haired Mira. She could have wept.\n\nShe was lost.\n\nAt that moment she happened to catch a glimpse of a small black-and-white shape streak across the floor of the ledge to the base of the stone bridge. Mira, Sir Remidan and the Trassek twins followed close behind, swords drawn and ready for battle. Jenny looked but could not see that any of them carried a bow, the one real hope they had of ending her own life and preventing her fall into the Dark. Mira and Remidan had both come intent upon a daring rescue, and the two barbarian bodyguards simply failed to see that the four of them together might not be equal to the task.\n\nDasjen turned almost casually to regard them with droll amusement. He made an impatient gesture, and six of the priests stripped Away their long black robes to reveal strong young men in armor and well armed, sorcerers no doubt trained in their own equivalent of the Veridan. They positioned themselves at the top of the arch of stone, the only way up to the platform. Dasjen stepped to the edge just to one side, serious but unconcerned; as he saw it, the bait was taken and the trap was ready to spring. Ellon held back, sword in hand, still humbled before his master but eager to prove himself.\n\n\"Lady Kasdamir, you tried to deceive me,\" he said in aggrieved tones. \"You bring my daughter to me and you make her pretend to be someone else.\"\n\n\"It's a trap!\" Jenny warned her mistress, and no one made any move to stop her. \"Dasjen Valdercon is really the High Priest Haldephren. He has been here all along.\"\n\n\"No shit!\" Mira was plainly surprised by that bit of news. \"You can't fight him!\" Jenny added. \"Do what you have to do and get away from here.\"\n\n\"Dear child, things are hardly that desperate!\" Mira admonished her. \"Did it not occur to you that your friends would all come running to your rescue?\"\n\nJenny caught the subtle hint, as subtle as Mira ever got, and understood that the sorceress was stalling for just a little more time. She had anticipated this herself, but she had never guessed that things would be so well organized. Mira glanced up briefly into the neck of the volcano, then lifted her sword and stepped forward for battle. Sir Remidan and the twins moved to join her.\n\nThe six guards beside Dasjen drew their own swords and stepped out onto the arch of stone to meet that attack. But Mira's advance was only a ploy, meant to attract the full attention of Dasjen and his followers toward herself and away from the core of Mount Drashand over their own heads. Mira paused a step short of the arch and held her ground, not wishing to fight on the narrow span itself if she could help it. The warriors of the Dark had a similar idea; they advanced quickly to meet her at the base of the bridge.\n\nKelvandor suddenly descended upon that unsuspecting knot of armored guards like a falcon, hurtling down to scatter them from the span with a well-aimed fireball. He circled around quickly and landed lightly on the platform itself a moment later, drawing his long sword. Vajerral quickly circled around to land beside him, completing their line of defense.\n\nKelvandor turned to Jenny, and the manacles that held her wrists snapped open in his large, powerful hands as he forced the catches. She stood for a moment, rubbing her abused wrists, then took the long, narrow sword the dragon drew from his harness to offer her. Dasjen stood for a moment to regard them, examining his own position and reckoning his chances. He commanded the larger force, but for the moment two Mindijaran stood between his forces and Jenny. He saw no immediate chance of either regaining the girl or preventing her rescue. At that moment he needed to generate a little confusion, delaying for time until his own guards arrived, and he was not opposed to sacrificing the entire coven to achieve his ends.\n\n\"Take the rest of our people who are armed and attempt to force those dragons from the platform,\" Dasjen told his chancellor softly. \"I will take these six and rid us of that interfering sorceress.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Ellon agreed, plainly frightened. He had no liking for a real fight. \"What of the girl?\"\n\n\"Slay her if you must, but capture her if you can.\" He cautiously worked his way backwards through the small crowd, then lifted his sword. \"Now!\"\n\nMany of the priests whipped swords out from beneath their robes and rushed the dragons, while those who were unarmed, mostly the naked dancers, retreated quickly to avoid the battle. Dasjen led his smaller group of warriors down the arch of stone to attack the group at the base. Their initial lunge had scattered the four attackers, forcing them off the bridge, even though they lost two of their own number in the attempt.\n\nOne thing became obvious soon enough. The Dark Sorcerers might have been trained similarly to Veridan Warriors but something essential seemed to be lacking. They fought with determination but their magical enhancement barely made them the equals of Dooket and Erkin, two well-trained barbarians. Mira, Jenny and Sir Remidan could make short work of the lot of them, while no mortal could compare to Mindijaran. This battle gave every appearance of being a brief one.\n\nAt least until a troop of two score Imperial guards suddenly erupted from the inner passages of the temple to rush the rather precarious position that Mira and the boys were trying to hold.\n\nVajerral saw no hope for it. She muttered an oath that would have made her mother's ears twitch and leaped from the ledge, gliding down to reinforce their position below. Kelvandor could see that the responsibility for protecting Jenny was now largely his own and assailed the remaining defenders with a vengeance. He did possess two distinct advantages; his enhanced strength was appalling and his thick scales were proof against the sideways blow of any blade, although he was vulnerable against thrusts. Considering the fact that he was wielding a six-foot blade, no one was likely to get that close.\n\nJenny kept one eye on Vajerral and her mistress, and saw that things were not going so well below despite the dragon's help. Dooket and Erkin were back to back and doing their best just to stay alive, while the Imperial guards were pressing in on Mira relentlessly, heedless of their own losses. Sir Remidan was making a very good showing of himself, despite the lack of the armor that he had been obliged to leave on the island.\n\n\"Kelly!\" she shouted, and saw the dragon shift his ears in her direction. \"I can hold my own now. You have to help the others before Mira or the boys get hurt.\"\n\n\"I cannot leave you,\" he protested, bending his neck around briefly to afford her a quick glance.\n\n\"Save Mira!\" Jenny insisted. \"She is the other half of the Prophecy, and she is in far more danger than myself.\"\n\n\"What?\" He turned to stare at her again.\n\n\"Do it!\" she shouted. \"We can hold on here.\"\n\n\"Nuts!\" Kelvandor muttered darkly, and hurled himself toward the side of the platform. A final, powerful sweep of his long tail scattered half of the remaining defenders, sending a couple over the edge.\n\nJenny rushed to the attack, taking advantage of the momentary confusion. There were not above six trained fighters left in the group, although several of the ineffectual courtesans had taken up the weapons of the fallen to add to the confusion. Unfortunately Ellon remained and he was the greatest threat, for Jenny was certain that he was under orders to either capture her or kill her. He now came to the front of the battle, facing Jenny directly. Seeing that his supporters were disappearing around him, he knew that he had to press his remaining advantage while he still possessed one. No help seemed likely to come up the bridge from below for the present.\n\n\"You should have submitted when you had the chance,\" he hissed at her, and his hatred was sincere, no bluff or ploy to unnerve her. \"You have cheated me of my desire, and I mean to make you pay for that. You think that you can defeat me?\"\n\n\"I'm supposed to be good enough to defeat the Dark itself, remember?\"\n\nThat was blasphemy, to his ears at least, and it only infuriated him all the more. He stepped up his attack yet again, pushing himself beyond his limits in his blind hate. Jenny fell back before him, slowly but deliberately leading him out from his supporters toward the center of the platform.\n\nEllon was silent now, his entire existence focused upon the single goal of destroying Jenny. But the young sorceress looked unconcerned; she remained calm and confident, knowing that she would kill him in her own good time. She drew him on, waiting for him to make a fatal mistake, permitting him to think that he was winning.\n\nThen she allowed herself to be tossed back a step after blocking an overhead strike from his heavier blade. Ellon closed eagerly, but he had not reckoned Jenny's cold fury. She ducked under his attack and drove straight into the middle of Ellon Bennisjen and his three remaining supporters, hailing blows and thrusts at Ellon so furiously that the four of them were pushed to the limit fending off her attack. She ignored the guards, striking at Ellon so savagely that she pushed him right through the knot of his defenders.\n\nThe three priests tried to come at her now from behind, attacking her undefended back. But Jenny had not been careless in her fury. She ducked under their blows and caught one in the belly, then turned on the other two. They retreated before her wrath, only to lind themselves trapped between her and the Mindijaran sorceress. Vajerral had been keeping one eye turned in Jenny's direction, and she had come in a hurry when she observed the girl's attack. Ellon only stood with a sorely diminished band of the naked, helpless courtiers, knowing that he could not face the two of them.\n\nThe courtiers scattered, seeing that his presence was no safe place to be at that moment. For Ellon's part, he saw that he would be facing Jenny alone and considered that he still had a chance. He was desperately afraid of death, but his devotion to the Dark remained resolute and he would still give his own life without hesitation just for the chance to take her with him.\n\nEllon raised his sword defensively, and Jenny dealt him a blow that almost flung him backwards off his feet. She battered his defenses again and again, forcing him back near the edge of the platform. Then, when he lifted his sword yet again, she cut in from below to drive her blade deep into his belly. Even as he died, he tried to strike her one last time. She dodged the feeble blow easily and then forced him back by the blade that transfixed him until he stumbled backwards off'the edge of the platform, pulling out her sword as he fell into the fires far below.\n\nIn the need of the moment, Jenny did not even pause. She turned to stare at the pitiful group of courtiers, looking frightened and defenseless as they clustered at the top of the arch. Less than a dozen remained; these were the few who had lacked the courage to take weapons and join the attack, and they certainly had no interest in fighting now. She made a threatening gesture in their direction and they fled down the arch past Dasjen, who had been holding the span from both directions. He stepped back, as much as the narrow passage would allow, looking somewhat bewildered at this turn of events.\n\nPerhaps it was finally beginning to occur to him that he was going to lose this battle.\n\nThe fight below was winding down as well; Dooket and Erkin were assisting Kelvandor in putting a quick end to the remaining score or so of the Imperial guards. Mira quietly walked over to stand at the base of the bridge, looking up at Dasjen. Jenny took her own position at the top. The High Priest stood in the middle of the span, glancing back and forth at the two sorceresses in an indecisive manner. They were at either end of the bridge and he was trapped between. Very much on his mind was the fact that the two of them together were supposed to be a match for the Emperor\u2014more than a match for himself. He made his choice and turned to face Mira, taking a firm grip on his sword; he considered her the easier of the two to defeat, considering the fact that she was firmly mortal and not dragon-trained.\n\n\"Watch him, Lady,\" Jenny quickly warned her mistress. \"He is really the High Priest Haldephren.\"\n\n\"Yes, you told me that,\" Mira said, not greatly perturbed. \"He cannot afford the risk that you might escape,\" the girl added. \"You are the other half of the Prophecy.\"\n\nNow Mira did stop short to stare. \"What?\"\n\n\"Remember what Bresdenant said? White and black, red and blue. That is us, our hair. You are red and I am blue. He knows it. He can defeat the Prophecy by killing you.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Mira frowned, more determined than ever. She afforded the High Priest an icy stare. \"You're stuck between a rock and a hard place, you know.\"\n\n\"All the same, you cannot kill me,\" he reminded her coldly. \"I'll take one of you at least with me, and then I'll come back for the other.\"\n\nDasjen raised his sword and stepped forward to meet her, at the same time calling upon the Heart of Flame to lend him the magic he needed to be certain of his victory. The massive jewel responded, awakening to a blaze of life, extending without hesitation the power he requested. But it never reached him. Jenny stood between and she had intervened, shielding him from that flux of power. He turned to glare at her, knowing at the same time that his position was far more desperate than he had anticipated.\n\nHe turned back to Mira and advanced, with good reason to believe that he could still defeat her on his own. Mira made no move to meet him, but she returned his first strike easily enough and then pressed her advantage. The arch was narrow, steep and treacherous and she was below him, her own swings and thrusts coming up from beneath so that he had to bend or crouch to defend himself against her. He was in no position to strike or thrust at her in return. He retreated before her, hoping to lure her up the arch to the platform where they would be on even ground and he could press his own advantage.\n\nIt was a foolish strategy, and he did not realize his mistake until he heard Jenny step up behind him. He turned swiftly to counter her attack, and Mira's blade cut deep into his unprotected back. Immediately she used the steel blade to channel a charge of destructive magic into him, seeking to blast him not only in body but in soul. She knew how to destroy him, not just this once but for all time. In a last desperate attempt to save that one part of himself that was immortal, he flung himself forward off the blade, collapsing heavily on the arch directly at Jenny's feet.\n\nHe lay there for a moment, panting in pain and fear, then looked up to see that Jenny was about to strike again and finish what her mistress had begun. Seeking his one chance to escape, he threw his sword at her wildly, forcing her to draw back just long enough lor him to thrust himself over the edge of the arch. He fell for several long seconds, and the fires took him into their embrace.\n\n\"A pity,\" Jenny remarked dispassionately. \"With only a little more luck, we could have been rid of him forever.\"\n\n\"This was not the time,\" Vajerral said as she stepped forward to join them. \"Dalvenjah accomplished no more in her own time, lie escaped into the heart of the volcano even then.\"\n\nJenny looked up at her. \"Did you know that Mira was a part of the Prophecy?\"\n\nThe faerie dragon shook her head emphatically. \"I did not, although I imagine that Mother did. She was, after all, the one who sent you to Lady Mira. For my own part, I was opposed to that.\"\n\nMira afforded her a droll expression, but made no further comment. None was needed.\n\n\"I mean no disrespect by that,\" Vajerral assured her. \"I expected no harm to come of it, but I did think at the time that Jenny belonged with us. There were designs that I could not foresee.\" \"I suggest that we get out of here, while we have the chance,\" Kelvandor remarked.\n\n\"That's a fact,\" Jenny agreed with a weary sigh, pushing her blue hair out of her eyes. \"Why don't the two of you start up the volcano? The rest of us must go back for Wind Dragon.\" Vajerral cocked her head, her ears alert. \"Jenny...\"\n\n\"I'll go with the others,\" she said firmly. \"They came all this way to help me, and chance has been kind to us so far. I owe them any help I have to give in getting back out.\"\n\nVajerral considered that only briefly, and nodded. \"I know better than to argue with you. We will await you outside.\"\n\n\"No, get yourselves away from here,\" Mira added suddenly, quite determined. \"This might soon be no safe place for quite a few miles around. You can meet us on that uninhabited island where we left Staemar.\"\n\nThe two dragons spread their broad wings and lifted themselves into the air, their forms surrounded in a pale blue glow. They employed their lift magic to the fullest, levitating more than actually flying to ascend the core of Mount Drashand. The warm air rising up the shaft beneath their wings helped all the more.\n\n\"Ready?\" Mira asked innocently as she turned to descend the arch.\n\n\"Do you have something in mind?\" Jenny asked suspiciously. \"I think you know.\"\n\n\"Be glad that those dragons don't suspect. But I do agree.\" They paused at the base of the arch, finding scraps of cloth from the fallen to clean their swords. They returned to the base of the bridge, standing one to either side with their drawn swords held between them.\n\n\"Ready?\" Mira asked, and Jenny nodded. \"Then strike an arch.\"\n\nA strand of blue flame, glowing like a sliver of lightning, jumped between their blades. Jenny fed it, making it stronger, and then Mira added what she had to contribute, and they slowly stepped back until the blue arch was as thick as a faerie dragon's arm, buzzing and snapping between the blades. They slowly lowered the swords until the base of the bridge was caught between the two blades, and the arch of magic wrapped itself about the slender tongue of stone and ate away at the structure.\n\nThe stone crumbled and split after a long moment, the arch shattering under the weight of the platform it supported. With that one support gone, the platform above bent slowly in their direction until the two remaining legs bent and then fragmented as well. The entire platform broke free and collapsed into the center of the shaft amid the hail of broken stone.\n\nMira did not even pause to watch an instant beyond that point. She sheathed her sword and turned to run, sending the Trassek twins and J.T. running ahead of her while Jenny followed close behind. They quitted the ledge in a hurry and did not stop running until they had slipped through the maze of dark, close corridors that formed the Great Temple itself to reach the vast chamber that held the stables. Mira paused only a moment to catch her breath.\n\n\"Well, that bit of unpleasantness is done,\" she remarked much the same as if they had just finished cleaning the bathrooms. \"We might have a few minutes before the heat shatters the Heart of Flame. J.T., get us out of here and back to the ship. Jenny, follow him closely. Boys, you stay behind me.\"\n\n\"Right, Lady Mira,\" Dooket agreed eagerly. \"We'll bring up your rear.\"\n\nShe turned to afford him her most droll expression. \"Do you think that the two of you can lift it?\"\n\n\"The horses!\" Jenny exclaimed suddenly. There were also two score or so horses saddled for riding who stood in a dejected knot in the center of the chamber; they had no liking for the underground passages.\n\n\"Oh, there's nothing that we can do for them now, child,\" Mira told her compassionately.\n\n\"They're not even proper horses,\" Sir Remidan added. \"They can't talk.\"\n\n\"No, the horses!\" the younger sorceress insisted.\n\n\"Oh, piffle!\" Mira declared to herself with an impatient gesture, then waved to the cat. \"Come back, J.T. We can ride out.\"\n\nJ.T. cared little for the idea, but only a moment later he was seated in a saddle between Jenny's legs. Mira rode ahead, leading the way, while the two barbarians followed close behind. In this way they reached the side passage leading into the palace in only a few short minutes. Which was just as well, for they had just leaped down from their saddles when the first of a series of tremors shook the passage, raising a cloud of grey dust, and the rumble of distant thunder echoed through the stone itself. A moment later the light breeze in that smaller corridor became a sustained rush of wind. The core of Mount Drashand was aflame.\n\n\"It must have worked,\" Mira observed as she paused a moment to look back, as if she could see through miles of rock to the core of the volcano.\n\n\"Knowing what that thing was and the power it possessed, I don't doubt it,\" Jenny told her. \"We're in a fair amount of danger.\"\n\nMira's only acknowledgement of that was to hurry even faster. They entered the palace through the hidden doors behind the stairs, the two halves now flung half-open by the sweep of wind through the passage. For once the vast structure did not seem so vacant; servants and workmen were in the process of a swift and frantic retreat. They did not likely know of the fall of the High Priest or the destruction of the Heart of Flame, but the entire island knew by now that Mount Drashand was about to erupt violently. That was not a comforting prospect, considering their proximity.\n\nJ.T. permitted them only a brief pause to look around before he streaked ahead, leading the way through the chaos of the palace halls. The distant rumblings of the volcano had become a sustained, fitful roar and tremors now shook the island every few seconds. The polished stonework of the palace was cracking and crumbling, so that chips and splinters rained down with every tremor and a cloud of dust filled the passages like thin grey smoke. The entire structure seemed likely to collapse under any additional stress, and the quakes only became steadily worse and more frequent.\n\nSo far they had not been challenged; the guards were as desperate to abandon the palace as the rest. J.T. suddenly came to an interception of corridors and came to an abrupt halt, pausing only a moment before choosing the hall to their left. Only a few steps led them to doors which opened upon the paved square where they had parked Wind Dragon. He stopped short to look around, ears and tail standing straight up in alarm. The airship was nowhere to be seen.\n\n\"Damn them, they took my frigging ship!\" Mira exclaimed in dismay. She turned to look at the clouds of thick, dark brown smoke pouring out of the volcano above them. Already a cloud of grey ash was beginning to darken the afternoon air. \"So now what? We go down with the volcano?\"\n\n\"I think I know where it is,\" J.T. announced as he turned and ran to their left toward a long, high section of well-tended hedge several hundred feet away. Many miles of such tall hedgerows divided the palace grounds, enclosing walkways and quiet gardens.\n\nBut when they rounded the hedge at the far end, they found not the garden they might have expected but a broad ramp leading into some subterranean chamber or passage far below. The ramp was ordinarily covered by the long, narrow leaves of a door which fit over the top, the two halves now standing open. The doors were wood reinforced by metal and covered on the top by some material made to look like paving stone, now propped open by the metal arms of some mechanism in the darkness below.\n\n\"The doors are open!\" J.T. declared, then turned to look up at them. \"I found this on my search of the underground passage. There are several very large chambers cut into the rock below, perhaps warehouses. Wagons of supplies were surely brought up this ramp.\"\n\n\"And they rolled Wind Dragon down the ramp to hide her below?\" Mira asked dubiously. \"We are discussing a very big ramp and a small ship, but this is something of a tight fit even with the masts down.\"\n\n\"We can only look,\" the cat insisted as he trotted down the ramp, his tail standing on end. They had no choice but to follow him.\n\nThe ramp was certainly steep; Mira had to wonder that anyone would try to negotiate several tons of airship through this opening while descending such a steep incline. There was indeed a chamber below, the stone overhead thick enough to sustain the unsupported roof. The chamber itself was vast, poorly lighted by glowstones. The main passage leading from the Great Temple down to the harbor bisected the chamber, dark and suspiciously foggy with brown, acid smoke.\n\nWind Dragon stood in the near half of the chamber, her masts unstepped but otherwise unharmed, although she appeared to have been the center of some activity that had been hastily abandoned with the start of the eruption.\n\nThen, even as they paused at the base of the broad ramp, the mountain was shaken by the most violent tremor yet. They were thrown to the floor by the force of the quake, fearful that the heavy roof of the chamber would come down on them any moment. That held, surprisingly, although the mechanism which raised and lowered the doors on the ramp pulled loose of the wall and fell, pulling one door closed and bringing the other down with it, ripped from its heavy hinges. The tremor lasted for at least half a minute, but Mira leaped up the moment it began to subside.\n\n\"That was the eruption of the volcano,\" she reported absently as she surveyed the damage choking the ramp. \"Yarg, we could never clear that in time, not even with our powers of levitation combined.\"\n\n\"Straight down, then,\" Jenny volunteered. \"J.T. reports that the passage is open all the way down to the sea.\"\n\n\"Was open,\" the older sorceress corrected her. \"Wecan'ttrust it after that last tremor.\"\n\n\"This chamber held,\" Jenny countered. \"The passage has a much smaller ceiling area unsupported, so it probably came through.\"\n\nThere was no arguing with that; Wind Dragon was not going out the way she had come in, and they were going nowhere without Wind Dragon. Mira climbed the boarding ramp after only a brief pause to consider their very limited options, heading straight to the helm deck while the others prepared the ship to travel. There was little to be done; they could not raise and rig the masts or extend the vanes inside the passage, and the ship was fortunately already sitting on her wheels, extended slightly below the skids.\n\nUsing the smaller thrust vanes, Mira began the slow, careful steps of turning the ship so that her length was aimed down the gentle incline of the main passage, leading toward the sea. Her task was complicated by the fact that she could not steer while the full weight of the ship was resting on the wheels, only when the ship was in motion. Jenny had joined her on the helm deck and stood staring up the darkened passage leading into the core of the mountain, alarmed by a distant grumbling, roaring noise. She suddenly knew what it was she heard.\n\n\"Mira, we have to get under way,\" she said. \"The volcano has erupted.\"\n\n\"I was aware of that some time ago,\" the sorceress answered impatiently.\n\n\"Are you aware that lava is rushing down the tube behind us?\" Mira glanced over her shoulder and saw the glowing mass of red and black rushing down the tunnel behind them. She indulged herself with some creative swearing, although she did not pause in her efforts to get the ship turned. Jenny hurried over to assist her in turning the reluctant wheel as the airship began to roll slowly forward yet again. Her long bowsprit missed the comer of the wall by inches as the ship aligned herself with the passage, and Mira began to apply heavy thrust even as she straightened the wheel. There would not have been time for another try; lava was already beginning to fill the chamber behind them.\n\nJenny watched behind, since her mistress was too preoccupied with keeping Wind Dragon to the narrow confines of the passage to look for herself. The lava poured into the chamber even as the ship disappeared out the other side; she could feel it like a dragon's breath following close behind them. It filled the chamber in seconds, the pressure behind the glowing mass enough to shoot it down the tube at a speed that threatened to overtaken them. \"Step on it!\" Jenny exclaimed.\n\nMira stared at the deck. \"Step on what?\"\n\n\"Faster!\" she entreated desperately. \"It's almost on us.\" \"Faster?\" Mira asked herself. \"We're already pushing twenty knots.\"\n\nShe brought their speed up to thirty all the same, and at Jenny's Irantic urging she pushed the vanes to their limit to increase their speed to forty-five knots. At that speed she expected one of the frequent tremors to send the ship sliding into the walls any time, and the stone ceiling of the tunnel streaked past less than two feet above their heads. But they had no choice; it was a matter of fly or fry.\n\n\"Light ahead!\" Dooket called from the bow where he and Erkin were watching. \"Half a mile at most, clear passage all the way!\" \"J.T.!\" Mira bellowed at her loudest. \"Is the end of the passage Hooded with seawater?\"\n\nHe streaked to the rear deck, panting. \"Not at low tide. I don't know what it would be now.\"\n\n\"The false Emperor's ship came in on the rising tide, but there's no telling how things stand with the island shifting and shaking,\" Mira mused. \"If we hit water, it's going to slow us down.\"\n\nFortunately they were gaining on the lava, moving steadily ahead. At that speed they would be coming up on the end of the tunnel in less than a minute. Already they could see the daylight ahead, and the mercenaries in the bow soon reported that they could see waves rolling well up inside the passage itself. They thought that it would be a tight squeeze. Mira was less worried about that than about the prospect of hitting the water at forty-five knots.\n\nWhen Dooket reported water a hundred feet ahead, she cut all thrust from the vanes and began riding the brakes. Wind Dragon slowed quickly, and a moment later the tunnel was filled with a cloud of spray as the wheels entered the water. The sorceress fought the wheel, hoping to steer as best she could as the ship's j wheels lost contact with the solid floor, but the ship slowed even more abruptly under the drag of water flooding over the wheels and skids. She applied thrust again, fighting the pull to keep up some speed, and Wind Dragon shot out the end of the passage into open air just below the wharf, hurtled off the end of the ledge to settle full into the sea with a tremendous splash.\n\nMira brought the thrust of the vanes back up to full, putting as much distance as she could between themselves and the tunnel.\n\nA moment later the lava hit cold water with an explosive rush of steam which flowed up around them like a wet, heavy fog. But the fiery touch of the lava itself missed the ship, carried even farther away by the boiling waves as lava continued to shoot out the tube behind them.\n\n\"We're free!\" Jenny reported as they left the tunnel behind.\n\nMira did not answer at once, pausing for a quick look around. Thick smoke from the volcano was descending upon the entire ] island along with a rain of hot ash and a hail of burning stones. She could hear the cries from the people trapped in the burning J city, see them lining the waterfront. Some had even leaped in I after the few remaining ships; most of the vessels were already I away, both merchant ships and sleek Imperial galleys pulled far ahead by long, desperate oars. The harbor was choked for miles I with the frantic exodus of ships of every size and type. She glanced : over her shoulder for another look at the volcano, sensing that j their greatest danger lay in that direction.\n\n\"She'll blow for sure,\" she said grimly, and turned back to j her scant crew. \"All hands crank up the wheels!\"\n\nDooket and Erkin hurried to attend to the front wheels, while Sir Remidan assisted Jenny with the back wheels.\n\n\"Hold on tight!\" Mira declared when they had finished. \"Once we're under way, start to work on the vanes and stabilizers immediately.\"\n\nTaking firm hold of the rudder wheel, she coaxed full thrust into the drive vanes. The ship shuddered, gaining speed quickly until she slowly, gracefully rose up clear of the water, actually skiing on the skids of her struts, the troubled waves parting in arcs of spray at the base of each of her four broad, stiffly braced struts. Within moments Wind Dragon was leaving even the swiftest of the true ocean ships behind, hurtling along at more than forty knots.\n\n\"It worked,\" Mira said, glancing over the side. \"So, Beratric Kurgel was right. For once.\"\n\n\"We've made it,\" Jenny observed.\n\nMira glanced at her. \"I don't stop worrying about live volcanos until they are a long, long way behind.\"\n\nFor the moment, however, Jenny felt very safe, the safest she had felt in a very long time. All possible dangers lay behind them, not ahead... assuming of course that they did not hit something substantial in the water and knock a strut off Wind Dragon. The airship's flat-bottomed hull would float; they had already proven that. But the shallow draft, top-heavy vessel was far from seaworthy in rough waves. What was not to say that she did any better planing over the water on her struts, but at this rate she might at least avoid trouble before it overtook her.\n\nMira deftly steered Wind Dragon between two Imperial wargalleys that closed to intercept them, a maneuver that was accidental rather than intentional on their part. She could not imagine that the fleeing Alasherans would pause long enough to trouble an airship that was moving too fast for them in the first place, and the fact that neither arrows nor catapults were loosed in their direction seemed to prove the point. After that they were in open ocean surrounded by the wide ring of islands, the better part of three miles from the harbor. There were many other ships even farther out, but too widely spaced to present any problem.\n\nMount Drashand continued to rumble like thunder, ejecting masses of thick, brown smoke and burning stones, some as large as houses, to crash in flames upon the slopes. The entire city was engulfed in flaming ruin. For the time Jenny was too busy helping rig the ship for flight to worry much about the two dragons. She only hoped that the eruption of Mount Drashand would not bring them back to investigate.\n\nAt that moment Mount Drashand exploded. Jenny happened to be looking in that very direction as it happened. For a moment the volcano shot a tremendous column of smoke and flame straight up, and the slopes of the mountain began to fold inward and roll away in immense landslides, stripping away the cone layer by layer. They had all turned to watch by that time, the ship hurtling over the water untended for the moment as Mira leaned against the wheel. In a final convulsion, Mount Drashand collapsed inward upon itself before it exploded upward and outward in a sustained surge that carried the entire island into the troubled sky.\n\nMira swore to herself and turned back to the helm; she was pushing the ship to its best speed, and she wished for more. They were ten miles or more from the former harbor, at least fifteen miles from the center of that blast and possibly more. She hoped that would be enough, because at forty knots Wind Dragon was only going to gain another mile or two before the fiery, ash-laden shock wave of that explosion overtook them. She waved for the crew to join her on the helm deck.\n\n\"Be ready to hold on,\" she told them quickly. \"If I can see the shock wave overtaking us...\"\n\nThat question became academic as a wall of furnace-hot air struck Wind Dragon like an invisible fist of fiery, bone-shaking noise, nearly lifting the ship from the water with a blast like the worst thunderstroke they had ever heard. She turned back and saw the wall of grey ash moving out across the harbor like a vast curtain, but she felt certain that they could outrun at least the worst effects of that. She was more concerned with the flaming boulders thrown out by that explosion, already arching down toward them like burning meteors, trailing billowing grey smoke.\n\n\"Stand by with buckets of water,\" she continued with her amended instructions. \"If we take a hard strike, be ready to go overboard.\"\n\nDooket and Erkin hurried off in search of buckets, but they were interrupted as the first boulder crashed into the sea not half a mile away, so hot that it exploded on contact with a small thunderclap loud enough to be heard over the relentless roar that pursued them. Boulders continued to crash into the sea around them for the next half-minute, most farther away and none so close as to endanger the ship. The hail of smaller stones that Mira had expected, an inescapable hazard, never materialized.\n\nSoon enough it seemed that they were well out of danger. The sky above them was clear, and Wind Dragon still promised to outrun the diminishing wall of burning dust that followed. Mira ordered the boys back to the task of preparing the ship for flight.\n\n\"You knew that this would happen?\" Jenny asked as she paused a moment in her own tasks to join her mistress on the helm deck.\n\n\"I had good reason to suspect,\" Mira told her, looking just a little self-satisfied with her cleverness. \"We're even now in the center of a ring of islands that once formed the fringe of a much larger volcano. A volcano that, in the distant past, exploded with many times the force that we've just witnessed. Mount Drashand was the modem offspring of that ancient volcano, but for two thousand years ago and more the servants of the Dark set the Heart of Flame in its core and that has served like a magical cork ever since. That volcano had a couple of thousand years of serious mischief to catch up on, all of it in one immense bang.\"\n\n\"And the city?\"\n\nMira frowned. \"I can't say that I have no regrets. Tens of thousands just died from my actions. But they were servants of the Dark, one and all, the evil citizens of the capital of the Dark. They would have carried a thousand times that destruction through the known worlds.\"\n\nMira paused, seeing her student stare in disbelief at the destruction behind them. She turned to look, instantly aware of the wall of water that had only just emerged from the grey curtain of roiling ash. It was perhaps five miles behind and closing steadily.\n\n\"Yarg!\" she exclaimed. \"I forgot that the collapse of the island would cause a tidal wave like that. Tsunami, I believe they're called. Boys!\"\n\n\"Ship ahead!\" Erkin called back. \"Imperial galley.\"\n\n\"Ignore it!\" she shouted impatiently. \"Get the vanes out and at least the main rigging in place. We're either airborne in the next minute or else the survivors will be swimming.\"\n\nThey needed no more urging than that. Jenny hurried to assist them, and even J.T. did what he could to pull ropes. They had the vanes folded out within seconds, but enough of the standing rigging had to be in place or they would never bear the weight of the ship. Mira divided her attention between watching their progress and that of the wave that was gaining on them, determined to get them in the air at the last minute no matter what.\n\nShe did not like to see Jenny climbing around on the vanes themselves to assist in the rigging, not with the ship so unstable, but the girl was the lightest and quickest for that task. Jenny also figured that, if anyone risked falling overboard, then it should be herself; she could fly. Indeed, she had no intention of going down with the ship, as hard as it would be for her to abandon the others. She tossed the final ropes to Dooket even as Wind Dragon shot past the Imperial galley, the larger ship laboring forward under frantic oars, doomed already.\n\nMira hazarded a glance back. They were coming to the far side of the ring of islands that marked the boundaries of the ancient volcano, and shallow water compared to the vast depths of the core. That slowed the wave somewhat, but it also began to climb as it found the bottom. Already it towered a hundred feet or more above the sea, overtaking the Imperial ship. The fore part of the wave lifted the galley as if it were a toy, and the main body of the wave sucked it in. Its splintered debris would emerge in the troubled sea after the wave was past.\n\n\"Ready!\" Jenny shouted over the wind as she ran back along the top of the left rear vane, the Trasseks waiting to pull her in.\n\nMira unlocked the elevator wheel and spun it all the way over, at the same time coaxing thrust into the lift vanes. Wind Dragon responded sluggishly, her nose lifting slowly until the entire ship stood poised on her rear skids. The wave rose like a mountain behind her, waiting to swallow her whole. Then the ship was entirely airborne with a final shudder that caught J.T. by surprise as he sat on the rail watching the wall of water; he disappeared overboard with a startled cry, lost in that instant. Wind Dragon continued to climb steadily, rising up the height of the wave even as the spray and cold wind of its thunderous passage closed about her.\n\nAnd with a final surge she climbed above, the crest of the wave passing within three feet of her rear skids. Wind Dragon continued to climb into the afternoon sky on broad canvas wings of blue and red, fiery destruction to her back and the golden light of the descending sun to starboard. Dooket and Erkin returned to the task of completing the rigging while Jenny hauled up a trailing rope, bringing on board a very wet and frightened cat clinging fiercely to its frayed end. And all the while Mira stood at the wheels of her proud ship, grinning like a pregnant monkey." + }, + { + "title": "While the Getting's Good", + "text": "Jenny returned to the helm deck, carrying J.T. wrapped in a towel. She had gone below to dry the cat as well as she could, and to soothe his shattered nerves with something good to eat. He had looked very wet and ragged after his ordeal, shaking with fright and furious with injured dignity. They paused for a long moment to stare back at the rolling grey cloud which marked the destruction of the capital of the Alasheran Empire. Arcs of lightning rippled through and across the creeping bank of clouds and the sound of distant thunder echoed occasionally, although that thunder more than likely marked continued volcanic activity rather than lightning. The prevailing wind carried the worst of the eruption away to the southeast.\n\n\"Not a bad day's work for two itinerant sorceresses,\" Mira remarked without turning away from the wheels.\n\nJenny did not answer, but she thought that the destruction of Alashera was something of which she could never be too proud. Not even when she recalled the place of complete and ruthless evil that it had been.\n\nJ.T. suddenly shifted impatiently in her arms. \"Put me down, please. I want to go fluff my fur in the sun.\"\n\nShe did as he requested, setting him on the deck and watching as he stalked off toward the bow.\n\nMira glanced over her shoulder at the girl. \"Why are you so sad, child? It's not every day that you get to kick the Empire in the knee and get away with it.\"\n\n\"Oh, it has nothing to do with that,\" Jenny insisted. \"It's just that, now that it's all over, I have to go ahead and become a dragon.\"\n\n\"Great stars, whatever for?\" Mira exclaimed in obvious horror, as if she could imagine a fate no less dire... and had not known this herself for the past half year.\n\n\"Any number of reasons, really,\" Jenny explained. \"What it all amounts to is that I must do this for my own protection. I've possessed dragon magic for so long that I'm no longer mortal, but I won't have complete command of my own magic until I do become a dragon. Also, when I do submit to the transformation, my inner name can finally be secured against any attack. No one, not even Emperor Myrkan himself, will be able to command me against my will.\"\n\n\"But you still don't like it,\" Mira pointed out.\n\n\"Not, it's not that at all,\" Jenny insisted. \"There are many advantages to being a dragon. It's my real nature, so I'll actually be a little more at peace with myself. I look forward to it, without regret or reservation.\"\n\n\"Except one.\"\n\n\"Except one,\" she agreed reluctantly, even sadly. \"Why do I feel like I'm losing an old friend?\"\n\nMira scratched her head. \"Who?\"\n\n\"That person I've looked at in the mirror every day for the past twenty-three years,\" Jenny exclaimed, \"Can you imagine the identity crisis involved in turning yourself into .something completely different? I mean, it can be upsetting enough just having a facelift.\"\n\n\"I dare say,\" Mira agreed, nodding slowly. She was trying hard to figure out just what in the hell a facelift could be. \"And then again, there is Kelvandor.\"\n\nJenny nodded. \"Yes, that's upsetting too.\"\n\nA sharp crosswind stirred her long, dark blue hair. She caught an errant handful and stood for a long moment, fondling it between her fingers while she studied the color in the afternoon sun. \"Kelvandor,\" she said to herself, and sighed. \"It used to be that my way of living with the Prophecy was to never try to look beyond its completion. Now I have that dragon waiting to see what comes after, and I don't know if there will be a future for me. I hate commitments. I have so little control over my own life, it's so hard to know the best thing to do.\"\n\n\"It always is,\" Mira told her. \"When it comes time to dump the chamberpots of your heart, you just get it over with and spare everyone the stink.\"\n\nJenny looked up at her suspiciously, but the older sorceress only stood at the wheels with her usual look of patient bliss. She shook her head slowly and smiled. \"Do you waste time pondering these wofds of wisdom, or do you just make it up as you go?\"\n\n\"I make it up as I go, along with the rest of my life,\" Mira responded without the slightest hesitation. \"I ignore the nonessentials, and I refuse to take anything else at all seriously. It saves worry and needless wear on the digestive tract. But I don't know what to tell you, because now I'm sad, too. I suppose this means that you'll be going away.\"\n\n\"I don't think that you're going to be rid of me quite that easily,\" Jenny said. \"You're a part of the Prophecy yourself, remember. I'm afraid that you are going to be on board for the duration.\"\n\nMira shrugged with almost exaggerated indifference. \"Someone has to come .along and keep you out of trouble. Those two dragons obviously can't stop you from doing stupid things.\"\n\nShe had meant that as a joke, but Jenny took it seriously. She stared at the deck, frowning fiercely. \"I never should have put myself at risk in the first place. I never should have gone.\" \"Ah, but the risk proved worthwhile, and we accomplished far more than we had ever hoped. Consider that practice for greater things yet to come.\" Mira paused a moment, and glanced back at her shrewdly. \"Just how much of all that dribble was true, anyway?\"\n\n\"All of it, if I understand what you mean,\" Jenny insisted. \"Dasjen Valdercon was the High Priest Haldephren. And he was when you first met him years ago, if he seemed unchanged to you.\"\n\n\"He was,\" Mira admitted with considerable regret. \"What happened to him? Will he really be back?\"\n\n\"Soon enough. But I don't have to tell you that. You know more about the ancient wars than I do.\" Jenny licked dry lips, and sighed with regret for past memories. \"I remember him from before, when he wore the Mindijaran form of Keridaejan. He seemed exactly the same person then, for all his vast differences of appearance.\"\n\nShe turned and stared over her shoulder for a long moment, watching the ripple of lightning over the rolling banks of grey clouds. She thought of many things past, and of things yet to be in a very uncertain future. She did not believe Haldephren's claim that he was her father, but she could not entirely ignore it either.\n\nThere were many questions in her mind. But she doubted that Vajerral knew those answers, and Dalvenjah would not say. All the same, she very much wanted to see Dalvenjah Foxfire once again.\n\n\"It's not over,\" she said at last. \"I have the terrible suspicion that it has only just started. If the Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons holds true, we will have to face Haldephren again, and the Emperor Aressande Myrkan, and destroy them both. And I've never heard the slightest hint of how we are supposed to accomplish that.\" \"We take it as it comes,\" Mira answered with her usual lack of concern. \"We blundered through this part, and I suspect that we did well enough. Heaven only knows what we can accomplish when we set our minds to it. I do have just one regret, though.\" Jenny turned to look at her mistress. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"That I wasn't consulted about this prophecy business first.\" \"And you think I was?\"\n\nMira glanced over her shoulder. \"You grew up knowing the part you have to play, with time to prepare for it.\"\n\n\"Time to get thoroughly sick of the whole affair,\" Jenny said with considerable disgust. \"I only wish that it was done and over, and that I could finally have a life of my own.\"\n\n\"We'll just take it all as it comes,\" Mira said. \"But there is just one thing I would like to know. Do you suppose that we might possibly be spared a little rest before this affair of prophecies starts up again?\"\n\nLady Mira knew that of all life's questions, many answers are self-evident by the nature of the question, some mysteries are not meant to be known, and some can only be proven in time. She suspected that the latter case applied here.\n\nShe also knew quite well that fate was an untrustworthy friend at best.\n\nDaylight was fading swiftly as Wind Dragon came in low over the waves before settling into the soft sands well up onto the beach. This group of islands, the first that they had passed over since leaving Alashera, showed a fair amount of damage from the waves generated by the destruction of the volcano. Alashera now lay more than a day and a half behind, although the airship had spent the previous night riding out the gentle waves of the open sea. Curiously, the little ship had survived its adventure without sustaining any apparent damage.\n\nEven more surprising, the crew had survived without apparent damage.\n\nThe two dragons glided down for a landing on the beach even before the airship had settled onto the sand, and the horse Staemar raced up to join them while they were still securing the vanes. The dragons were glaring\u2014in the way only dragons could glare\u2014 and Jenny had no wish to face their wrath. Of course, it would be good practice for facing Dalvenjah's wrath. Mira had no such concerns. The older sorceress was still disgustingly pleased with herself.\n\n\"Are you quite finished?\" Kelvandor asked when the two sorceresses finally saw fit to quit the ship.\n\n\"Yes, I think so,\" Mira agreed amiably. \"There didn't seem to be anything left that we could do.\"\n\nJenny just stood behind her, cringing and shifting nervously. She had never destroyed an island before. Mira was so unconcerned about the whole affair, it was easy to assume that she had done this before. Jenny did not consider that entirely outside the realm of possibility. To listen to Dame Tugg talk about it, some of Mira's parties were that raucous.\n\nA fire was lit in the sand and they cooked their dinner outside that night in spite of the fact that Wind Dragon had a complete galley and no one except Mira liked sand in their food. The sky darkened to velvety black and the stars came out bright and clear. The evening wind was soft and cool; autumn had come even to the South.\n\n\"This reminds me of my father's cabin in the mountains. .. heaven only knows why,\" Jenny commented after dinner. \"Late on cool nights like this we would put marshmallows on sticks and roast them over an open fire.\"\n\nSir Remidan stared at her in shock. \"Great stars, woman! That sounds horrible!\"\n\nHe somehow had the idea that marshmallows were a variety of small crab.\n\nVajerral, who alone knew the true nature of the elusive marshmallow, had a hard time not laughing aloud. Mira looked at each of them in turn, concluding with a rather perplexed expression. \"Jenny, why don't you take your dragon for a walk before it gets late?\"\n\nIt seemed like a good idea to Jenny. Not so much because she wanted to be alone with her dragon, but because she was getting heartily tired of the constant company of Lady Mira, her dippy bodyguards and smart-mouthed cat, and a certain self-important knight. There were rare times, usually no more than once a year, when Jenny did spend a few minutes thinking about her home world. Perhaps their recent adventures reminded her of Krakatoa. Then she would come to her senses.\n\nJenny pulled off her boots and took Kelvandor for a long walk along the deep sands of the beach. Late though it was in the year, she had grown up in the mountains of the dragons and had a high tolerance of the cold. Kelvandor walked beside her in silence, as he often was when alone in her company. She had to wonder what he thought about this whole affair, whether he was amused or resentful, or just confused by it all. Whether he honestly accepted her as she was or if he was just waiting for her to become a dragon, a form far more accessible and acceptable to him.\n\nAs it was, Vajerral elected to follow along behind. Jenny watched the two dragons surreptitiously, reviewing in her mind what she thought about faerie dragons in general, those she knew in particular... and what she thought of herself in relation to them. No, there was no question in her mind that this was what she was meant to be. She watched Vajerral sporting at the edge of the surf, the child in her unable to resist the unfamiliar temptations of the sea, and Jenny thought how right and comfortable it would feel to wear that powerful, long-limbed body or dart over the waves on broad wings. Almost she felt that she had ridden golden wings before, in that hazy deja vu that all dragons had of their previous lives.\n\nThat moment of warm belonging faded quickly, replaced by her ever-present doubt. What if that was only a ploy she used to force herself to accept something that quite frankly scared her half to death? She would have to wait and find out what Dalvenjah intended. After all, Dalvenjah had been threatening to turn her into a dragon for nearly fourteen years, but the dragon had always been suspiciously willing to accept any delay. Jenny had to admit that this could just be one more of Dalvenjah's strange, evasive ploys.\n\n\"I wonder what happens now,\" Jenny speculated after some time.\n\nKelvandor bend his long neck to look at her. \"All I know is that we are to meet Dalvenjah now. Whatever she might have in mind, she will not say.\"\n\nJenny stopped to stare at him. \"Do you think that Dalvenjah knows more about the Prophecy than she is willing to admit?\" Kelvandor seemed amused. \"That goes without saying, but she will never share what she knows or suspects. She insists that common knowledge of the Prophecy would defeat it, and I know that she is correct. I do think that the time has come when she will begin to guide you safely through the completion of the Prophecy.\"\n\nHe stopped short, staring into the darkness. \"Jenny! Vajerral! Something is coming.\"\n\nJenny felt it herself but, unlike the dragons, she recognized that curious magical presence immediately. Indicating for the dragons to remain calm and perfectly quiet, she turned to face the low rise leading inward from the beach. The forest beyond was dark and silent, disappearing into the deep shadows of the night just beyond that first fringe of bushes and low trees.\n\nThat familiar golden form took shape quickly, more so than in his previous visits, standing before them only a few paces away. Vajerral held back as if fearful of the unexpected apparition, peering cautiously over the shoulders of her two companions. Kelvandor recognized that strange figure and was plainly startled, taking a small, hesitant step forward.\n\n\"Father,\" he said softly. Jenny glanced at him, moved by the pain and quiet longing in his voice. He had never known what had become of his father.\n\n\"It is very good to see you again, my son,\" Keridaejan responded. \"I am pleased to see that the two of you have reached an understanding based in love and companionship. You are good for each other, and Jenny will need you in days to come.\"\n\nHe turned then to the girl. \"I would suppose that you know why I have come.\"\n\n\"You said that I would have to become a dragon as soon as our mission was over,\" she answered. \"You also said that I would be betrayed by the one I suspect least.\"\n\n\"You may well be, yet,\" he agreed. \"Time is very short, so listen well. You know that Haldephren claims to be your father, and that he and I once met in your world. What have you always supposed from that?\"\n\n\"That he really is my father, and that you followed him to my world to destroy him.\"\n\nKaridaejan nodded sadly. \"Hear now the truth of this matter. It was a necessary part of the Prophecy that a faerie dragon be reborn in mortal form, and left to the fates that have guided this Prophecy, it came to happen. And yet something went wrong, for the chosen one was bom a male and so unsuited to the Prophecy. Even so, he was still a dragon in spirit.\"\n\n\"My uncle Allan?\" Jenny guessed.\n\nHe nodded again. \"That is so. I knew him well, in my own time, although he never knew me for myself but for the one I pretended to be. For I dreamed the gold dreams and so was warned of the mistake, and of the part that was my own to play. I went into your world and took mortal form, and in that form I sired the one who would be the true object of the Prophecy, using my magic to guide her coming so that she would be female. I am your father.\"\n\nIt all made perfect sense. Jenny suddenly felt that she very much needed to sit down, but Kelvandor was there immediately, his strong, supporting hands on her shoulders. She glanced at him, aware that she had suddenly gained a brother. It was a good thing for them both that incest was not applicable to dragons.\n\n\"So you see that nothing was entirely chance,\" Karidaejan continued. \"Not Dalvenjah's meeting with Allan, nor your own meeting with Kelvandor. But you were wrong in your supposition. It was Haldephren who followed me into your world, where I had remained as your secret guardian. I destroyed him then, for it was his body that was found in the wreckage of the automobile. But he was able to overpower me in my mortal form, and so took my own body.\"\n\nJenny frowned. \"Mother said that you died an alcoholic.\" \"Your mother's memories were not entirely accurate. She never suspected my true nature, and it was better that she did not.\" \"She loved you,\" Jenny added, then glanced up at him. \"Or was that only what she was supposed to remember?\"\n\n\"Such memories are too precious ever to be tampered with,\" he told her. \"I loved her, in my own way. It was not simply to watch over you that I stayed as long as I did. That was something I never intended.\"\n\n\"And Dalvenjah...\"\n\n\"Dalvenjah never knew,\" Karidaejan insisted, his manner suddenly becoming more urgent. \"But your time is almost gone. Your enemies are at hand, and you must become a dragon now or you will be betrayed. Come, my child.\"\n\nHe held out his hands to her, ready to begin the transformation. But Jenny hesitated. \"Who? Who is the traitor?\"\n\n\"I cannot answer that,\" he said, desperate now. \"Please, child. Your lime is nearly gone. You must begin the transformation now.\"\n\nJenny took his word for the truth, as if the memory of these things had always been hidden within her mind and heart. For the first time in her life, she was not afraid of becoming a dragon. She stepped forward to join him, reaching out to take his hands.\n\nTheir world suddenly exploded in a flash of blue light. Jenny was hurled several paces by that silent explosion to lie senseless in the damp sand, her motionless form trailing wisps of blue mist that turned to a thick, sickly black before they evaporated into the cool evening air. Kelvandor and Vajerral both lay where they had fallen. Even though the worst of that blast had been aimed at them, they still clung to the very edge of consciousness.\n\nKaridaejan stood where he was, watching them sadly.\n\n\"I warned you that you would be betrayed by the one you would suspect the least,\" he said sadly, and his form began to fade. \"I am so sorry that it had to be me.\"\n\nVajerral had kept her distance from the spirit of Karidaejan, and she had only been stunned. She lifted her head and shook it uncertainly, then opened her eyes. Before her stood a dark figure hidden within the deep folds of a grey robe, stepping slowly forward with one hand raised to stand before the dragon. That long, withered hand began to move in the slow gestures of a silent spell, but Vajerral was too stricken by the earlier spell to resist. Two bright eyes peered out from the depths of the hood, and Vajerral had a momentary glimpse of a face twisted into horrible lines by evil magic, a face that was now as much canine as that of the man it had once been, a demon in mortal flesh.\n\nVajerral reeled under the effects of that more subtle spell, fighting to hold to the edges of consciousness, her limbs seemingly held in invisible bonds. The dark figure turned and walked almost casually over to where Jenny lay sprawled on the beach. He stood over her for a long moment, again working his subtle magic, and the girl's form glowed briefly. Then she stirred and turned over on her back, and he held out a hand to assist her.\n\n\"Welcome back, my pet,\" he said, his voice harsh and threatening even though he spoke softly.\n\n\"My Lord Emperor,\" she answered, looking about uncertainly. \"It has been a very long time.\"\n\n\"Two thousand years and more,\" the Emperor agreed. \"It could not be helped. But come. Haldephren has made rather a mess of things in his ridiculous efforts to bring you back. I was prepared for that, at least. Then the spirit of that dragon tried to betray me in the end, and it was a narrow thing.\"\n\nShe paused, looking back over her shoulder at the dragon, struggling desperately in the sand. She reached to the side of her belt but, finding no sword, dismissed the matter from her mind. The two dark figures turned to walk calmly down the beach to where an immense black shape was drifting gently down to the sand. It was an airship of vast proportions, five times as long as Wind Dragon, its hull dull and dark, with vanes and stabilizers that were as black as night. Running without light or sound, it settled like a black cloud to the beach just long enough for the two passengers to ascend the ramp, then rose to head out over the waves.\n\nVajerral broke free of the spells which held her then, rising and shaking her head briskly a final time, then hurtled herself into the night sky. She shot out over the sea after the departing airship, already half a mile or more away and gaining both height and speed. A ring of fire began to open just ahead of the dark airship, burning back the night until the passage became a vast oval. Fighting the cold winds that poured through the Way Between the Worlds, the airship disappeared down that long, dark tunnel through the void.\n\nMira and Sir Remidan arrived only a moment later, making use of Staemar's long legs to get them there in a hurry. Mira leaped off the horse's back and rushed over to assist Kelvandor, who was only then just beginning to recover from the shock.\n\n\"Kelly, what is it?\" she asked anxiously as she countered the lingering traces of the Dark spell. \"Who was that?\"\n\n\"We were talking with the spirit of Karidaejan,\" Kelvandor answered, still weak and uncertain. He glanced up, seeing that Vajerral was winging down to land. \"Then someone else came. I think it was Emperor Myrkan.\"\n\nMira frowned. \"Where have they taken Jenny?\"\n\n\"I've got Jenny,\" Vajerral insisted as she landed lightly in the sand beside them Mira stopped short. \"I beg your damned pardon?\"\n\n\"I am not entirely sure, but Jenny apparently had the spirit of another entity within her,\" she explained. \"Emperor Myrkan himself had come. He expelled Jenny's spirit from her body, then brought the dormant spirit of the other forward to take her place.\" Then she paused, a distant but vaguely startled look on her face. The others watched her in mystification.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, almost to herself. \"The Consort, the missing part in this puzzle. Dalvenjah wondered if Jenny's part of the Prophecy, at least in that variant in which she serves the Dark, was to somehow prepare the way for the return of the Consort, the sorceress Darja. She was closer to the mark than she thought, it seems. Jenny did more than just prepare the way for Darja's return; she has carried the Consort's dormant spirit for years. They must have placed Darja's spirit within her when they had control of her thirteen years ago.\"\n\n\"That's all very well and quite fascinating, but what about Jenny?\" Mira demanded impatiently. \"Is she dead?\"\n\n\"No, not at all,\" Vajerral assured her. \"When the Emperor expelled her, I got her.\"\n\n\"Yes, you did say that,\" Mira declared. \"Where the hell did you put her?\"\n\n\"Oh, there was only one place I could put her. She is within me.\"\n\nMira was so stunned that she sat down in the sand.\n\n\"Ah, it's very simple, then,\" Sir Remidan exclaimed. \"All we have to do is find a new body for her.\"\n\nThe two dragons just stared at him. Even Staemar stared at him. \"Just a moment, and I'll see how she is.\" Vajerral sat back on her tail and assumed a very distant expression. \"Jenny? Are you there? You are safe now. Please speak to me.\"\n\nShe entertained a brief, errant thought about area codes, and bit her tongue. After a moment she stirred and bent her neck to look down at herself, running her hands over her scales.\n\n\"It worked!\" she exclaimed. \"I really am a dragon.\"\n\nThe she paused, assuming a more serious expression. \"You and I need to have a long talk.\"\n\nShe sat back on her tail, obviously preoccupied. Kelvandor glanced at Mira. The sorceress appeared to be utterly devastated by. this unexpected turn of events. And he knew what she was thinking. Mira had been very, very wrong. She had thought that she understood the Prophecy well enough to control it, to shape the future to her desired ends. She had been so busy thinking that she was having her way that she had been neatly and quite simply outmaneuvered.\n\nSir Remidan was also quite miserable, knowing that he had failed a damsel when she had needed help the most. Kelvandor knew that the shock of his own loss would awaken soon enough. He was a dragon, and as such his initial response was to fly and to fight, to hunt down his enemies and get Jenny back.\n\n\"The only thing now is to find Dalvenjah,\" he said gently. \"She will know, if anyone does, what we can do.\"\n\n\"Yes, Dalvenjah,\" Vajerral agreed, speaking aloud again. \"We will take you to Dalvenjah right away. She'll be able to do something to help you, if anyone can.\"\n\nShe paused for a long moment, her head down.\n\n\"Yes, but what can she do? It's not as if there are bodies just lying around waiting for people to pop into them, and I would really like to have my own back. Can she make me one out of magic?\" The dragon paused again. \"It might well be that she can. If not, we will recover your own. Dalvenjah and Allan are the best of all the faerie dragons. They rescued you once before.\" \"Yes, that's right,\" Mira agreed eagerly.\n\n\"I don't want anyone to risk their lives for my body,\" Jenny spoke again, looking at her. \"Damn! Now I know how Charlie McCarthy felt.\"\n\n\"I do think that we should get back to the ship and get away from here for now,\" Mira continued, recovering her composure but still rather subdued. \"I don't want to be surprised a second time. And just one of you try to walk.\"\n\nVajerral rose to follow the others along the beach, seeming to have little trouble walking but still quite distracted, obviously trying to converse with her new other half. Kelvandor walked at her side, the only one of the group with the size or strength to offer her any real support, while Mira walked at her other side.\n\n\"How are you making out?\" she asked cautiously.\n\n\"The body remains my own, and I am in complete control,\" Vajerral explained. \"Only if I withdraw myself can Jenny control any movement herself.\"\n\n\"Is there any real hope of ever getting me back?\" the dragon suddenly asked herself aloud, and answered. \"We will have to see. Perhaps Dalvenjah can work something out.\"\n\nMira turned to the dragon. \"I don't wish to seem uncaring, but can't the two of you talk to yourself?\"\n\n\"That will take a little practice,\" Vajerral answered. \"Yes, a lot.\"\n\nThey returned quickly to the airship, and Mira had Sir Remidan and the Trassek twins set to work on rigging Wind Dragon for flight. Vajerral was taken below, to the larger hold that was hastily converted into a cabin for the two dragons. The boys gave her one of the assortment of pies that they had acquired during their stay in Alashera, but Jenny detested berry. Erkin remarked that if they had known that the whole island was going to explode they would have stolen the pies. Vajerral was tired from the ordeal and was ready for bed, but Jenny remarked that she was not sleepy. Vajerral politely pointed out that she was not likely to ever be sleepy. They finally worked out an arrangement in which Vajerral slept with her eyes open so that Jenny could read.\n\nThat left only the problem of getting the horse Staemar on board the ship.\n\nMira had Wind Dragon in the sky soon enough. Staemar stood in the exact center of the middle deck, his legs braced wide on the boards and his eyes rolling with fright. Mira was too distracted by her personal guilt and misery to be interested to note that horses had a mortal fear of flying. Kelvandor returned to the helm deck a few minutes later, peering over the back rail. The island was now far behind.\n\n\"Have we lost?\" Mira asked suddenly. \"Was that the meaning of the Prophecy, that Jenny would betray us to the Dark whether she wished it or not?\"\n\nKelvandor shook his head. \"No, it is not over yet. They may be stronger for the return of the Consort Darja, but not greatly. They certainly have not defeated us yet. Remember also that we have hurt them considerably in ways we did not expect. And I will tell you that Dalvenjah and Allan are exploring their own lead in finding the secret stronghold of the enemy. After this defeat, we could move against them quickly and crack them like a nut.\" \"If we're lucky,\" Mira correct him. \"Remember that the Prophecy holds that it's up to Jenny to destroy the Emperor and his pals, and right now she's just a figment of Vajerral's imagination.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"We do have to do something about that.\"\n\n\"Now what?\" Mira asked. \"Can Dalvenjah really get Jenny her body back?\"\n\nKelvandor turned to look at her. \"I do think that there is hope. Jenny does have the prior claim to that body.\"\n\n\"Prior claim?\" Mira asked incredulously. \"What are we going to do, sue them? Besides, if it comes to that, possession is nine-tenths of the law.\"\n\nKelvandor smiled. \"What I mean is that there is a link between Jenny's spirit and her body that can never be broken. Perhaps Dalvenjah will know how to trace that link to its other end, and use it to force the Consort out of a body that is not her own.\" \"I've never heard that the true owner has ever been restored to his rightful body once a Dark Sorcerer has stolen it,\" Mira mused.\n\n\"That is because they are careful that the spirit is released to true death, even though the body survives,\" the dragon explained. \"But Jenny is a faerie dragon and always has been, no matter what form she has worn. Also, Myrkan released Jenny's spirit into the night, and Vajerral was there to intercept her spirit and give it sanctuary within herself. Perhaps that has never happened before. How soon can we return to your home if you and I take turns flying this ship without stop?\"\n\n\"Three days at least,\" Mira replied thoughtfully. \"And then?\" Kelvandor twitched his ears. \"First we get ourselves to the world of the faerie dragons as quickly as we can, and then we must ferret out the proper trail in this mess and make an end to this business.\"\n\nMira seemed content, but Kelvandor knew that it would not be so simple as that. He now demanded a double accounting. The first was for Jenny, whom he counted as his mate. The second was for his father. They had not only destroyed Karidaejan and stolen his body, they had held his spirit captive, even forced him to betray and trap Jenny. Now Kelvandor had two tasks, to win back both Jenny's body and his father's spirit. The Prophecy of the Faerie Dragons was far from complete; there were still too many pieces on the board to consider the game over. Jenny had been betrayed to the Dark, but she was still alive and on their side. And Mira still had yet to play her own part in the Prophecy.\n\nNo, they had not lost yet. But they were a long way from having won, and he feared what else the Prophecy may demand from Jenny before it was done." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Free", + "author": "Joseph R. Lallo", + "genres": [ + "steampunk" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Prologue", + "text": "In a sunless city, a neatly dressed man with a ghostly pallor sat at his desk poring over the assorted paperwork that came with running a city. A starched white shirt, black slacks, and a ruthlessly precise bow tie made up his uniform. The office was not impressive or ostentatious, though it was well stocked with perfectly preserved antique furniture. Each wall was hidden behind rows of books that lined the built-in shelves. If not for the size of the antique desk, and its brass nameplate labeling him Mayor, one would have assumed he was far lower on the bureaucratic ladder.\n\nAmber light flickered from an oil lamp, cutting through the thin purple haze that hung in the air to illuminate his current task. It was a ledger filled with the costs and earnings from various ventures throughout the city. Red ink scattered over the pages in greater and greater proportions. He observed the sliding profits dispassionately and loaded a fountain pen with ink, then opened his bottom drawer to reveal what might have been a typewriter. It was certainly as large as one, made from oak and brass, but the polished mother-of-pearl keys were entirely numeric or arithmetic in nature. He hefted it with some difficulty to his desk and began to punch in the figures from the ledger.\n\nHis calculation device was just rolling its first result to the row of display wheels when he heard a light knock at the door.\n\n\"Mayor Ebonwhite, I have your three o'clock here,\" stated an even voice from the other side of the door.\n\nEbonwhite placed the pen in its stand and flipped open a smaller ledger. He ran his finger down the page and came to the name's proper entry: L. Alabaster. The lines beneath the entry, usually filled with the details of the meeting and whatever useful information was available about the individual, were fairly sparse. No stated itinerary. Ambitious but unremarkable aristocrat from the northwestern territories, southwest of Circa.\n\nHe smoothed down his waxed black mustache, adjusted his spectacles, and raised his voice. \"Send him in.\"\n\nEbonwhite's assistant opened the door to reveal their guest. The man\u2014like Ebonwhite and most other fug folk\u2014was rail thin and paper white; but that was where the similarity to his host ended. Rather than subdued clerical attire, his clothes were vibrant and dashing. He wore a bright white suit, white gloves, a white vest, and a white tie. His hat was a bowler, also white, and with a white band. The buttons were gleaming polished silver, and he carried a white cane with a garish silver head. His facial hair was similarly ostentatious. A blond mustache, waxed like Ebonwhite's but curled at the ends, joined a Van Dyke curled forward at its pointed tip. Most curious of all, the edges of his eyes were rimmed with black makeup, not as a raccoon mask, but as a tiny thin line, like a stage actor trying to draw the eye to his gaze. Topping it all off was, of course, a brilliant-white cape.\n\nHe removed his hat to reveal slicked-back blond hair and bowed theatrically.\n\nMayor Ebonwhite glanced at his appointment book again.\n\n\"Mr. Alabaster?\"\n\n\"Lucius P. Alabaster, at your service,\" he said.\n\nThe man's voice was as brash as his attire, a trilling near-falsetto that managed to turn \"Lucius\" into a four-syllable word. He held his hat with one hand and offered the other for a handshake. The mayor ignored it.\n\n\"Have a seat, Alabaster. I'm rather pressed for time at the moment. If you would be kind enough to state your business so that we can tend to it quickly, I would be most appreciative.\"\n\n\"Of course, Mr. Ebonwhite, of course. I've come, as all decent men do, with a business proposition,\" Alabaster said, settling into a leather chair opposite the desk.\n\n\"Would you care to elaborate? I've made it my purpose to pursue any and all wise avenues of investment. While I am not so boastful to make the claim that I've found every means of fruitful exchange available, I would be rather impressed if you were to present to me something I've not considered.\"\n\n\"Oh, this matter, it is quite clear, is one to which you have turned a blind eye, good sir. But I, in my devilish cleverness, have come to shed light on this dark corner,\" Alabaster began, building up momentum with each word as though he was launching into a spirited monologue. \"And in my ruthless brilliance I shall\u2014\"\n\n\"To the point, sir. Again, I am quite busy. I have a city to run.\"\n\n\"Ah. Ahem.\" Alabaster stood and placed his hat with care onto his head. \"Then perhaps I shall return in six months, when you shall have more leisure time.\"\n\n\"The task of running a city is a constant one, Mr. Alabaster. I very much doubt I shall have any more time to squander on pointless bluster in six months.\"\n\n\"I suspect you shall. Because in five months, there is an election.\"\n\nEbonwhite narrowed his eyes. \"Are you suggesting the people of Fugtown won't see fit to reelect me?\"\n\nAlabaster sat again, removing his hat and eyeing it. Between comments he plucked bits of fuzz and lint from its surface. \"As you say, the task of running a city is a constant one, and such a constant task requires a steady hand. That is even more important for this city. Fugtown is the largest of our cities, and sits abreast of the largest surface settlement of Keystone. In many ways, the policies and decisions set forth by the man in your seat ripple outward to the rest of our society. As goes Fugtown, so goes the fug! And as goes the mayor, so goes Fugtown. You are the closest our little society has to a designated representative with the surface. It would serve us well to weigh your recent navigation before we allow you another few years at the helm.\"\n\nSatisfied with the state of his hat, he replaced it.\n\n\"Now I am not so shortsighted as to treat the acts of just the last few months as the measure of your skill. It is true that as a whole we have flourished under your wise and reasonable leadership. But still, few memories stretch as far backward as mine. For those records with wet ink on the pages of history, your tale is less than glorious. We can begin with your poor diplomacy, making an enemy of the first Calderan to leave her island since before the fug arose. Then there is the matter of the violation of our best-defended stronghold and the theft of some of our most closely defended goods and secrets. And though I would laud your firm hand in deploying the dreadnought to punish such a crime, you were nonetheless the one to lose the dreadnought as a result. To the people of the surface, until that day, we were the gods. And now they've seen us bleed. That is an injury to our people. One that cuts far deeper than even the loss of the dreadnought itself. The dreadnought at least has been replaced, though I'll note it has somewhat questionably been left undeployed. As for the scar left by its destruction, how long will that linger?\"\n\n\"Unless I have missed your rather graceless subtext, you are suggesting my actions regarding the crew of the Wind Breaker have fallen short of expectations.\"\n\n\"Oh, heavens no. I am not saying that at all. Perhaps your first failure to deal with them was a surprise, or even your second. But by now your repeated defeats and missteps are quite in line with expectation.\"\n\n\"Steps have been taken to deal with the Wind Breaker.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Yes. I have no doubt you'll soon have them in your clutches, and then we'll just lock them away in Skykeep and then\u2026\" He covered his mouth in mock embarrassment. \"Oh, but of course they've not just escaped our most secure prison, they've destroyed it, haven't they? If I were you, I would consider seeking aid before that crew costs us any more landmarks.\"\n\n\"Am I to understand that your point, which you are so elegantly avoiding, is that you believe you can deal with the Wind Breaker crew?\"\n\n\"I believe I can, and I believe I must. And it would be my honor to do so, if you would sanction and bankroll such an endeavor.\"\n\n\"Forgive me if I decline. As I've said, we have our own measures in place.\"\n\n\"This crew has run rings around your measures thus far.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they have, but even if they are becoming titans in the eyes of the ignorant, you and I know that they are quite mortal. They are still members of this society\u2014a society that we have carefully crafted to make the fug and its people indispensable\u2014and as such they must play by our rules. The crew is nothing without a ship. A ship is nothing without phlogiston. And we are the only source. I've personally overseen the tightening of controls over the very substance that keeps the Wind Breaker aloft. There is only so much of the stuff in circulation, and when it is used up they will have no choice but to come into our clutches again, at which point we will have them, or they'll wither away, at which point they will cease to be our concern. So thank you, but no. I will not take your generous offer of allowing me to finance a task that in short order will solve itself.\"\n\n\"Now, now,\" Alabaster said, grinning to reveal straight white teeth accented with a single silver incisor. \"It is thinking like that which has fostered the belief that we fug folk are timid and fragile things, too frightened to venture out into the light to deal with things personally.\"\n\n\"I prefer to think of us as unwilling to dirty our hands with pointless tasks.\"\n\n\"Pointless? My good sir, these men killed your own nephews, did they not? Have you no sense of justice? Of revenge? Have you no pride? No dignity?\"\n\n\"I am quite proud, Alabaster. Quite proud of what I've made of this town. And yes, these men and women have injured me in a very personal way by daring to defy me. They have bruised me again and again. I couldn't care less about those idiot nephews of mine, but they did bear my name and they were my brother's sons, so their deaths are another slap in the face. But I am a sensible man, and embargo and sanction are the sensible approaches.\"\n\n\"I would not be so sure. These people are swiftly becoming the stuff of legend. And they can thus only be bested by someone cut from the same cloth. What this calls for is a grand gesture by a grander foe.\"\n\n\"And that would be you? A man my researchers\u2014who are quite thorough, might I add\u2014have only seen fit to describe as 'unremarkable.'\"\n\nAlabaster's face became stern. \"Perhaps you've heard of Ferris Tusk.\"\n\n\"Of course I know Ferris Tusk. He is the whole reason Fugtown stands as the beacon of commerce it is today.\"\n\n\"Precisely. And did he do it by lying idle? By waiting? No! He rose up! He met the surface dwellers face to face! Toe to toe! He burned the libraries, he stole the tools. He put the fear of the fug into the people above.\"\n\n\"Granted. But you, sir, are no Ferris Tusk.\"\n\n\"I'll grant you that as well. But I counter that Ferris Tusk was no one either, until he faced foes such as Admiral Maxwell, or when he achieved such feats as toppling Rigel Tower in Circa's capital! A man is only as big as his foe, and the Wind Breaker crew, they are the ones who shall wipe away the name Ferris Tusk from the hearts and minds of the people and replace it with the magnificent Lucius P. Alabaster!\"\n\nHe finished the proclamation with a flourish, holding his hand aloft and remaining in position as though awaiting a crowd to throw roses.\n\n\"If that will be all, Alabaster. Mr. Fross will see you out,\" Ebonwhite said.\n\nThe mayor drew a line through Alabaster's appointment and resumed clicking at his calculation device.\n\nAlabaster sneered and twisted the end of his mustache.\n\n\"Very well then, Ebonwhite. I suspect I shall hear from you again when you discover your foolproof solution to your little dilemma isn't quite so foolproof as you believe.\"\n\nHe turned, his cape flaring around him as he did, and strutted out the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "A freezing rain began to fall as Alabaster made his way to the top of a nearby mooring tower. Little more than a glorified scaffolding, the tower was a necessary addition to Fugtown. The city itself was the husk of a city that had existed prior to the calamity that brought the fug. Even after many years of redevelopment, barely one in every hundred buildings was inhabited. Most travel now utilized either the ubiquitous airships or the scattered funiculars from the surface, and it was unfeasible to install a full airfield, as ships came and went infrequently enough to make the key points of the city accessible. Thus, near each cluster of populated buildings was a row of mooring towers for personal airships.\n\nAlabaster's ship of choice was as obnoxious in its appearance as he. The envelope, a huge sack filled with phlogiston, was embroidered with his full name in glorious gold on stark white. The gondola slung underneath was a curving, ornate cigar of a shape painted in the same perfect white with golden filigree. A man, dressed in a plum-colored chauffeur uniform, was perched atop the gondola with a broom, scrubbing away a dusting of purple deposited by the fug. Judging by the deep purple stains that had settled onto every other surface, keeping the surface of the airship white must have been a round-the-clock job.\n\n\"Mr. Mallow, let us go,\" Alabaster said curtly.\n\nThe chauffeur deftly hopped to the scaffold and pulled the door open for his employer. \"Mr. Alabaster, I trust things went well?\"\n\n\"Mayor Ebonwhite is the worst of all possible worlds. A damn fool with no vision who has a simple solution to a complex problem,\" he grumbled as he stepped into the gondola.\n\nThe inside of the gondola\u2014even if it was only large enough for Alabaster, his driver, and perhaps a single additional guest\u2014was an order of magnitude more opulent than the entire office of the mayor. Overstuffed seats, cabinets loaded with expensive spirits, and even a hand-cranked music box filled the interior. Mr. Mallow stepped into the gondola and opened the liquor cabinet with one hand while pulling the knot from the mooring line with the other. The vehicle wasn't designed with people of his stature in mind. Standing a head taller than Alabaster and enjoying a lean but comparatively stronger build as well, Mallow was what people in the fug would call a \"grunt.\" Less intellectually gifted, grunts were larger, stronger, and made up the bulk of what passed for the working class beneath the fug. Despite having to stoop slightly when within the gondola, he showed all the dexterity of a juggler as he pulled the door shut, poured a snifter of brandy, set a record on the player, and cranked it in a choreographed dance of domestic servitude. Though the airship rocked at the mercy of the air currents, he didn't spill a drop of brandy; and when his boss was properly situated and seen to, he stepped through a small hatch at the head of the gondola and settled into the pilot's seat.\n\n\"He did not see fit to entrust you with the solution to his problem?\"\n\n\"Of course not, you buffoon. He believes the problem shall solve itself. He's through throwing time or money at it.\"\n\n\"Then you shall be left smiling as the plan blows up in his face, sir.\"\n\n\"No, Mallow, I won't. Because the most infuriating thing is that he is right. Starving these rogues out is well within his ability. His solution is sound. That is why he could not be convinced otherwise. He's a shortsighted fool, but an intelligent shortsighted fool. The worst kind.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 see, sir.\"\n\n\"No you don't, Mallow, because while you are many things, a thinker you are not. However, I do see. And what I see is that the only way to make Ebonwhite see is to take his solution away from him, and each solution after that, until he has no choice but to turn to me. And then,\" he proclaimed, jabbing his finger into the air, \"Lucius P. Alabaster shall have his day!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Mallow. \"Shall I head directly home?\"\n\n\"No, Mallow. Linger for a few moments. I shall pen a message. When I am through, take it to the messenger to deliver in as expedited a manner as he is able. Spare no expense.\" He selected a pen and paper from the small side table. \"The sooner this message finds its recipient, the sooner the sun rises on my new glorious day.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Captain McCulloch West stared down from the deck of the Wind Breaker at the precarious wooden catwalks of the town called Lock. Despite some unpleasant times in this place, it had remained the safest harbor in all Rim for the airship and her crew. An icy wind blew across the deck, curling the misty sea air into a thickening crust of frost on the oak and brass of the deck. Winter was well and truly upon them. It was a terrible time to fly an airship, so much so that it kept many of the other traders from the air. For Captain Mack, all that meant was that there was more money to be earned for the crew bold enough to earn it.\n\nHe pushed back his hat and pulled the dark spectacles from his eyes to rub them clean on a handkerchief, one ear tipped up to listen to his idling turbines.\n\n\"Miss Graus,\" he called.\n\nAt the sound of her name, the ship's engineer popped up from a steamy opening in the deck, wiping grease and sweat from her forehead despite the cold. If one were to imagine an individual as different as humanly possible from the captain, one might settle upon a person like Amanita Graus. She was a young woman, dark of skin and short of stature. Though at present she was in her work clothes, a sturdy outfit of canvas and leather, there remained a subtle elegance to her that clashed with the concentrated gristle that seemed to compose her captain. The clothes were artfully stitched and accented, care given to form as well as function. From the hardy boots with arching, artful stitching to the polished goggles with a butterfly accent, every last patch of her work uniform was a masterful union of art and craft. Even her corset helped to keep the strain from her back as she heaved heavy machinery about.\n\nShe pushed up her goggles, revealing a bit of an inverted raccoon mask of grime-free skin around her eyes, and slipped her wrench into a bandoleer of others. \"Captain?\" she replied.\n\n\"Turbine three sounds like she's grinding a bit,\" he called.\n\nShe tipped her head in imitation of his own gesture.\n\n\"Aye, Captain. Sounds like she's picked up a bit of ice. She'll quiet down once she warms up a bit.\"\n\n\"Don't make claims like that if you're only dreaming them up to keep from having to scurry up the rigging.\"\n\n\"Captain, I'll gladly scurry up the rigging if you'll get someone down here to grease up these bearings and get them back in place.\"\n\n\"What're those bearings for?\"\n\n\"They're part of the primary linkage between the ship's wheel and the turbine manifold.\"\n\n\"And what'll happen if they don't get put to bed proper?\"\n\n\"Once we get to full pressure you won't be able to steer the ship. Valve three will lock up, the whole system will seize, and the port side of the ship will blow off.\"\n\n\"\u2026 I reckon you'd best be the one to put them to bed,\" he said.\n\n\"Aye,\" she replied, slipping her goggles back on and disappearing below the deck again.\n\nMack pushed his hand into his long leather coat and tugged a pocket watch from the vest beneath. \"Fourteen minutes past,\" he muttered.\n\nStowing the watch, he instead pulled a spyglass from his pocket and raised it to his eye.\n\n\"And here comes the crew now. Heaven forbid they show up with time to spare before we shove off.\"\n\nNita poked her head up again. \"Are you talking to me, Captain?\"\n\n\"Just keep at it,\" he snapped.\n\n\"Aye, Captain. Just a bit more and we'll be all set.\"\n\nHe squinted as a figure sprinted along the frosty, crowded pier toward the ship. At a glance one might not know what to make of it. The individual was barely taller than a child and bundled up from head to toe. A bright red stocking cap revealed a flutter of blond hair peeking from beneath it, and a sparkling pair of blue eyes shone in the narrow gap between the cap and the matching scarf wrapped around the rest of the face. The figure wore a heavy leather coat that almost dragged on the ground, its sleeves dangling a good six inches past the hands hidden within. And yet, with barely a distinguishing feature to be seen, anyone familiar with the lunatic moving with reckless abandon across a slippery, rotten walkway thousands of feet above the churning waves would have known precisely who it was.\n\n\"Looks like Lil found what she was after,\" Mack said.\n\nLil skipped the ladder dangling from the bottom of the Wind Breaker's gondola, instead leaping first to the mooring post and then to the mooring line, scurrying up with all the agility of a monkey. As she drew nearer, the eager young deckhand's voice began to rise above the howling wind and hissing machinery.\n\n\"Nita, Nita! They had it!\" Lil crowed as she hopped over the railing and scrambled across the icy deck.\n\nShe skidded sideways across half the deck and snagged the edge of the opening concealing Nita to keep from flying off the other side.\n\n\"I talked to the ol' coot who runs that antique shop, and he said a fella showed up a few days ago with a big stack o' books. There was only one copy of this one, so he sold it to me cheap.\"\n\nNita poked her head up and pushed her goggles up again. \"That's wonderful. Usually when something is rare like that, the shopkeeper can name his price.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's what he thought too, but he obviously ain't never haggled with a Cooper. I told him if there ain't but one, then he ain't never gonna sell but one. And if he ain't never gonna sell but one, he ain't gonna make much money on 'em anyhow, and since I was the only one lookin' to buy one, either he gets what I give him or he gets nothin'. He saw it my way after a bit.\"\n\n\"Lil, Nita's putting the bearings to bed. You leave her be,\" Captain Mack scolded.\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n!\" she said with a crisp salute. She leaned low and whispered. \"You an' me are gonna read through it after supper, right?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. I'm looking forward to it,\" Nita said, swapping out her wrench for a smaller one and ducking away again.\n\n\"Lil, did you get what I sent you for?\"\n\n\"'Course I did, Cap'n!\" she said, clomping to the steps leading up to the helm.\n\nShe slid one of the dangling sleeves up to reveal a dainty hand and unbuttoned one of the side pockets of her coat. After a bit of rummaging, she revealed a bundle wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine. \"Got quite a bit of mail this month, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Good, good. Get it down in the galley and we'll divvy it all up later. Where's the rest of the crew?\"\n\n\"Gunner went wheelin' and dealin' with our usual guy about the phlogiston. Seems like the news ain't good on that one.\"\n\n\"When's the news ever been good for us?\"\n\n\"Well, Butch seems happy with what she picked up from the market. Says the food always keeps better when it's cold. Lots of fresh stuff this time around, not so much pickled and salted. Coop's found some fun stuff too, I hear.\"\n\n\"So long as Coop has his fun, it's all worth it, I reckon,\" Mack rumbled.\n\nHe raised the spyglass again and spotted a few more familiar figures lumbering toward the ship with a good deal less energy. They boarded one by one, sounding off through a brass speaking tube beside the ship's wheel to let the captain know they'd arrived.\n\nNita finished her work on the system and slid the section of deck back into place. Coop, the other deckhand and Lil's elder brother, made his way to the deck and with Nita's help unmoored and hauled in the lines. Though he was a good deal taller and lankier than his sister, the family resemblance in both face and personality was uncanny. The stout ropes crackled and stubbornly refused to coil neatly.\n\n\"Dang it, I hate the winter,\" Coop muttered. \"Ropes freeze solid and I can't hardly do a thing with 'em.\"\n\n\"Whole ship's hangin' kind of low, Cap'n. The envelope's more white than red. I reckon we better shake some of this ice off if we don't want to burn up all the extra coal we took on,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Yep. She's sluggish.\" Captain Mack leaned down to the speaking tube. \"Everyone, to battle stations. Stand by to de-ice.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" replied Coop and Lil, scurrying down through the hatch to the lower decks.\n\n\"Aye, Captain,\" added Nita a moment later after pulling on her plush fur-lined coat.\n\n\"Aye, Captain,\" added a somewhat intellectual voice from across the talking tube. \"Though I would be remiss if I didn't inform you that the mayor of Lock has gently requested we stop 'de-icing' so close to the port.\"\n\n\"Let me ask you this, Gunner. Does he like the goods we've been bringing in from Caldera?\"\n\n\"He does.\"\n\n\"And does he like the money his town's been making by selling them goods?\"\n\n\"He does.\"\n\n\"Then until he feels less gentle about it, he's going to have to put up with how I do business. You about ready down there?\"\n\n\"Ready, Captain.\"\n\nCaptain Mack spun the wheel and felt the ship reel ponderously aside, weighed down by a crust of ice several inches thick in places. The turbines spun up, and the wind washed over the ice-laden envelope. Once he was heading head-on into the wind and out over the sea, Captain Mack leaned low to the speaking tube.\n\n\"All hands brace for de-icing,\" he said. \"Ready one and two. Fire.\"\n\nOn his order, the two angled front cannons of the ship burst forth with a thunderous report. The recoil sent the ship swinging backward and sent a ripple of vibration from stem to stern. The shock cracked the ice away, turning the crust clinging to the deck to powder and shedding vast sheets from the envelope and the hull of the gondola. Like a majestic beast waking from a long winter's sleep, the Wind Breaker shook off its coating of white to reveal the gorgeous colors underneath.\n\nUnlike the garish appearance of Alabaster's vessel, the Wind Breaker was elegant. The envelope was a rich crimson and bore five great turbines of polished brass etched with intricate designs. The gondola was dark-stained oak. Sweeping highlights of gold had been applied with tasteful restraint. Now free of the excess weight, it slipped gracefully through the sky and out over the open sea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Nita Graus wrung her sore fingers as she stowed her shovel. A brief shore leave after a long time at sea typically ended in the same way for all. The crew would gather as soon as their duties were complete to share what they'd learned and what they'd spent their hard-earned wages on in the town. For an airship, though, nothing during the winter was typical. The efficient, albeit bombastic, procedure for shaking off the ice that inevitably accumulated during the time ashore worked wonderfully for the envelope and hull. For the deck on the other hand, it only managed to pulverize the ice. That meant before any leisure time, they had to clear it all off the old-fashioned way: shovels and elbow grease.\n\nTwo long hours of scraping, sweeping, and heaving ice and slush overboard finally finished the job. Nita had the enviable permission of getting down off the deck a minute or two before the others, but it was for the unenviable reason that her shovel had to instead be put to work shoveling coal into the boiler. It traded the bitter cold for stifling, humid heat. Such a harsh swing in such a short time did curious things to the anatomy, not the least of which was cause a sharp stinging pain in her extremities for the first half hour after she was through, and almost comically frizzing her hair.\n\nShe reached the galley just as the rest of the crew filed gratefully in for a well-deserved meal.\n\n\"I swear that ice gets heavier every time,\" Lil muttered wearily, shuffling up to join Nita at the counter at the front of the galley. \"I can't hardly lift my arms.\"\n\nThe bulldog of a woman behind the counter set out a row of mugs and muttered something in a language Nita had yet to hear named. Butch, despite Nita's expectations, was one of the finest cooks and most able medical practitioners she'd ever had the good fortune to meet. She was also quite sweet, though she'd never seen fit to let her face know. With her jowly frown and formidable physique one would imagine Butch to be tough as nails and mean as sin. In reality she was only the former.\n\n\"I can vouch for Lil, Butch. She has been lifting with her knees. It's just awful up there lately,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yeah, see?\" Lil said. \"I don't always ignore what you tell me. Just most of the time.\"\n\nShe snagged the first two cups Butch filled and handed one to Nita. Lil downed hers in one long guzzle, while Nita sipped her own. It was a warm spiced cider, the sort of drink that felt like a glorious fire burning down one's throat to chase out the cold.\n\n\"Mmmm\u2026 I swear, Butch, this cider is the only thing that's kept me alive through his wretched winter,\" Nita said as she took a seat.\n\n\"They don't have winters this bad in Caldera?\" said Coop, trudging in after them and taking his mug of cider.\n\n\"We don't have much of a winter at all. Not compared to this, anyway.\"\n\n\"Honestly, Coop,\" Gunner scolded, \"how many trips to Caldera have we made during the winter? Have you not noticed they never have snow on the ground?\"\n\nGunner was, as his nickname would imply, in charge of munitions on the Wind Breaker. He was the only member of the crew to receive a formal education in a degree-granting institution, and he seldom missed an opportunity to remind his fellow crewmembers of that distinction. They, in turn, seldom missed the chance to remind him that his college education hadn't kept him from blowing off several fingers over the course of his career, nor had it kept him from regularly singeing off his eyebrows. He was skilled with explosives and firearms, but skilled and safe didn't always overlap.\n\n\"I figured we always showed up on a nice day,\" Coop said with a shrug, as though it was an entirely understandable mistake.\n\nGunner shook his head. \"Each day I grow a bit more concerned to know how frequently my life is in your hands.\"\n\n\"Just because I don't spend all my time figurin' things that don't need figurin' doesn't mean I ain't good at my job,\" Coop said.\n\nButch set out the first few plates of that night's meal. This was the one part of her culinary skill set that fell short. Her food was delicious and nutritious. A single bowl of her famous stew was enough to keep the crew working through the sixteen-hour days that were the norm. But she had never really gotten the hang of presentation. Her concoctions all fell into either the \"crispy and brown\" or the \"mushy and brown\" side of the spectrum. Today's meal was a thick soup with a stack of flaky biscuits to go with it.\n\nCoop took his bowl and palmed three biscuits. Before he turned away, a small furry hand with spidery fingers reached out from between two buttons on his shirt and snagged a fourth. The space between the buttons was too small for the biscuit, but that didn't stop the little unseen critter from trying to pull it inside. Finally Coop took a seat and snatched the biscuit away.\n\n\"Nikita, what'd I say about eating while you're tucked away in there? If I end up with crumbs in my britches just one more time, I ain't letting you in there anymore.\"\n\nCoop looked up to find the rest of the crew staring at him. \"I meant my shirt, not my britches,\" he clarified.\n\n\"And you believe that is somehow better, do you?\" Gunner quipped.\n\nCoop unbuttoned his white shirt and stuck his hand inside. A small bulge beneath his shirt stirred, then a creature somewhere between a cat and a monkey crawled out. It had ghostly gray fur, a vaguely bat-like face, a prehensile tail, and cunning hands with a bizarrely long middle finger. The thing managed to be both adorable and hideous in equal measure. It was an aye-aye, one of two on the ship. This one was named Nikita. Ever since her rescue from an unfortunate attempt on her life, she and Coop had become inseparable. It didn't seem to bother the deckhand.\n\n\"All right, all right. Everybody get your plates and settle down,\" said Captain Mack as he entered. \"I've got the wheel propped for course, but I don't trust these winds, so I want to get the meeting done and my belly filled before too much longer. Everyone present?\"\n\n\"Everyone except Wink,\" Lil said, loading up two bowls and plopping down at one of the bolted-down tables beside Nita.\n\nThe captain tilted his head up and bellowed. \"Wink! Get down to the galley, now!\"\n\nIn moments a second aye-aye came skittering through the door and climbed up to the table beside Nikita. The two creatures were quite similar in appearance, though each had their distinctive features. Wink wore an adorable little eye patch and was a bit larger, while Nikita's tail was missing a large tuft of fur near the end where she'd nearly had it cut short during her final moments under the care of her prior \"employers.\" It was also notable that while Nikita's face was perpetually timid when she wasn't tucked away inside Coop's shirt or jacket, Wink had mastered the art of making his tiny face look positively surly.\n\nCaptain Mack loaded up his mug and bowl and leaned against the wall between two of the tables, sipping from each rather than wasting his time on utensils. \"Let's have the reports. How'd everyone do? Gunner?\"\n\n\"Not much good news I'm afraid. I got three canisters of phlogiston, and not one of them is completely full. All told we might have two full ones if we married them up,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Blast it, why didn't you get more?\"\n\n\"There wasn't any more to be had! You know as well as I how much the fuggers have squeezed off the supply. I only got the third canister by underscoring how we were the crew who took down the dreadnought. If it wasn't for our reputation, we'd have run short of phlogiston a month ago.\"\n\n\"How do we look on the inventory?\"\n\n\"After that clash with the wailers we were down to six canisters. This brings us to about eight. At the rate we've been losing the stuff between new gashes and pinpoint leaks, I wouldn't give us more than two more months of staying in the air if we don't find a steady supplier.\"\n\n\"What about the rest?\"\n\n\"Coal isn't a problem. Our stores are brimming with it. We're getting low on burn-slow again, but there's a bit more of it back at the stash. Ammunition is plentiful. As a matter of fact, our munitions supplier threw in an extra case of packed charges and told us to 'down some of them fuggers for me.'\"\n\n\"We're not in the business of killing, we're in the business of trade.\"\n\n\"That's not how most of Rim sees it these days.\"\n\nMack drained his mug and set it down to free up a hand for biscuits. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"I was able to find a lens that might work for\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not interested in that gadget of yours, Gunner.\"\n\n\"Captain, you saw what it did to that scout's envelope.\"\n\n\"I also saw it burn through enough phlogiston to keep us aloft for weeks. Like I said, we're not in the business of killing, so set it aside. Coop, how about you?\"\n\n\"Spent some time in the tavern,\" Coop said.\n\n\"That's nothing to brag about, Coop,\" Lil said.\n\n\"I reckon it is something to brag about, Lil, on account of what I heard while I was there. You now Johnson? Fella with the three teeth and the crooked nose? Anyhow, he said he had some sort of new stuff. Better than phlogiston. Said he'd sell me the recipe if\u2014\"\n\nCaptain Mack rolled his eyes. \"You didn't pay him nothing, did you?\"\n\n\"Nah. I reckon it was best to run it by you first.\"\n\n\"Johnson ever tell you why he only has three teeth and a crooked nose?\"\n\n\"Nah.\"\n\n\"He tried to sell me that story six years ago. The man's been selling that recipe for fifteen years. Next time you see him, you knock out another couple teeth and let him know who told you to do it.\"\n\n\"Sure thing, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"How'd you do with trade?\"\n\n\"Darn good, Cap'n. We took in something like four hundred victors for them dresses Nita gave me. And that fugger booze is still fetching a good price. Oh, Nita, I got my hands on some of that ugly wood you said your folks were on about.\"\n\nNita's face brightened. \"You got some purple gnarlwood! How much?\"\n\n\"Roundabout twenty board feet, I reckon.\"\n\n\"Wonderful. I know at least a dozen carvers who would give their firstborn child for enough gnarlwood to do a decent inlay.\"\n\n\"You Calderan folk do like some strange stuff, Nita.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I could say the same for you Rim folk. Those dresses you've been selling are practice designs by apprentices. If I hadn't asked for them on your behalf, they would have been burned.\"\n\n\"Guess it takes all types,\" Coop said.\n\n\"You all can jaw about the gossip later. I've got to get back to the wheel,\" Mack rumbled. \"Lil, you got the mail. Anything else I need to know about?\"\n\n\"Not as such, Cap'n,\" Lil said.\n\nHe nodded. \"Glinda, we set for food and medicine?\"\n\nThe captain remained the only member of the crew who referred to Butch by her given name, a lingering side effect of their former status as husband and wife. Butch's reply was her usual half rant. Nita only understood every third word, but since Butch made it a habit to say three times as many as she needed to, that was enough to get the gist. Broadly speaking, the answer was a colorfully phrased \"yes\" with a few admonishments about suggesting she didn't know how to fetch such things by now.\n\n\"Fine, fine. Miss Graus, how's the inside of the ship looking?\"\n\n\"Running smooth, Captain,\" Nita said. \"I've finished swapping out all the bearings. A few more valves and seals and the Wind Breaker can start using Calderan replacement parts for most of the key assemblies, so we won't have to worry so much about getting parts second-or thirdhand from the fug folk.\"\n\n\"But we can still use the fug-made parts if we get them.\"\n\n\"Yes, Captain. You'll have the only ship in the sky that can go both ways.\"\n\nCoop and Lil snickered.\n\n\"Settle down, you two. But while we're on you two, how's the education coming along? These two coached up on the boiler yet?\"\n\nLil shrugged a bit, trying to pull her head into the shoulders of her oversize overcoat like a turtle.\n\n\"Well\u2026 Lil's coming along. She can swap ruptured pipes well enough. Coop too.\"\n\n\"Wink could swap pipes. I'm talking about the tricky bits. Turbines, engines, them parts.\"\n\n\"They're\u2026 coming along,\" she said a bit more slowly.\n\n\"So if we ran into the wailers tomorrow and you caught a spike while you were up there getting the turbines spinning again, would Lil or Coop be able to get them spinning again instead?\"\n\n\"Not just yet.\"\n\n\"Then they ain't coming along,\" Mack said. \"Damn it, crew. All these years we had to toe the line the fuggers drew because we couldn't fix our own ship. Now that we've got an engineer on board, you folk should be tripping over each other to learn how to do what she does. If in two more weeks Gunner and Nita are still the only two members of this crew who can keep the engine pumping, then I'm going to have to start thinking about just how much I want to keep the rest of you.\" He thumped down his now-empty bowl. \"That takes care of the inside. Wink, how's the outside?\"\n\nThe patch-wearing aye-aye began to tap one of his long fingers on the table. His official purpose on the ship was as the inspector. Every fug-made ship in the air, and thus every ship in the air, was assigned an inspector to track down leaks and wood rot while the ship was in flight. That was the official reason they were on board. The unofficial reason, and one that only the Wind Breaker crew had discovered, was to spy on the activities of the crews to make sure they'd been obeying the rules set forth by the fug folk. Every time they returned to port, the inspectors would tap out a message, and if any rules were broken, the fug folk would know and take appropriate action. Wink and Nikita were the only two aye-ayes who no longer delivered messages to the fug. Their tapped-out messages nevertheless remained quite effective for everyday communication, even if it was taking a bit of effort to train out some of the linguistic quirks.\n\nNo big leaks in the envelope. Two boards, deck two, starboard, stern, were rotten. Gig was loose. Everything else was good. Butch gave Wink good food now, he tapped.\n\nButch gave Nikita good food too now, Nikita chimed in.\n\n\"Now, Nikita, what'd I say? You ask nice. You too, Wink,\" Coop said.\n\nNikita looked to Coop, then tapped again. Did Coop gave Nikita good food instead?\n\nBoth aye-ayes looked to Coop expectantly.\n\nCoop shrugged. \"Eh, that's halfway there. At least it's sort of a question.\"\n\nHe fished a couple of pieces of breadfruit out of a pocket and handed them to the creatures.\n\n\"I'm impressed,\" Nita said. \"Even last week neither of them knew how to ask questions. If they can figure out present and future tense, they'll be able to speak as well as any of us.\"\n\n\"Maybe they'd be able to teach Coop,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Ain't nobody need to tell me how to talk proper.\"\n\n\"Clearly,\" Gunner said.\n\nCaptain Mack forced down a biscuit and wiped his hands. \"Lil, let's get the mail call over with.\"\n\nLil nodded and pulled the paper bundle from her pocket. She produced a blade from somewhere inside the coat and cut the twine tying the bundle. The package split to reveal a stack of letters and small packages, mostly wrapped in their own paper covering. She shuffled through them, dealing them out into piles.\n\n\"Cooper\u2026 Cooper\u2026 von Cleef\u2026 Cooper\u2026 Heh, there's one for 'The Calderan Girl,' Nita\u2026 And the rest are West,\" Lil said, squinting at the writing. \"I gotta say, a girl could get used to having an address. This is twice in a month I heard from my cousins. I wasn't even sure we had any cousins left.\"\n\n\"Me neither,\" Coop said. \"Shame they all seem to want to borrow money. Guess that's how you find out how much family you got left. Do something that seems like it'd make you rich.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Captain Mack said, scooping up his mail. \"Finish up and get back to your stations. Gunner, I want you on deck with your rifle up and your eyes peeled. You too, Coop. Wink, you're with me. If we're going to be tight on phlogiston, I want to make double sure we spot any raiders or pirates before they spot us. Nita, get down to your room and tighten up the gig. Don't want that dragging in the wind if burn-slow is getting scarce. Glinda, last I checked we were getting low on bandages. Prep some more when the cooking's done.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" the crew replied.\n\nCaptain Mack thumped out of the room and down the hall. After a precisely judged amount of time, conversation continued.\n\n\"Is it just me, or is the captain a bit more\u2026 gruff than usual?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"Sometimes he gets like that. 'Specially during the winter. You stand up on deck at the wheel for as long as he does on days like these and see if you're feeling rosy,\" Lil said.\n\n\"I don't know\u2026 I think there might be more to it. Someone should talk to him.\"\n\n\"I reckon the cap'n being in a sour mood is a good reason to let him be,\" Coop said. \"And I been a part of his crew lots longer than you.\"\n\n\"Back home they teach us an angry person is a person with a problem that needs solving,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Back home they teach us you don't poke a mean dog,\" Lil said. She cleaned her plate and gave Nita a slap on the back. \"Let's get that gig tightened up. Your room's gonna be a mite nippy if that gig's not good and tight. You want I should stow your letters, Coop?\"\n\n\"May as well,\" he said.\n\nThe group finished their meals and set off to their assigned tasks." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\"Well ain't you gonna open it?\" Lil said, rolling up her sleeves and prancing along in front of Nita like a child.\n\n\"We've got work to do, Lil,\" Nita said.\n\n\"We always got work to do, but you ain't always got a letter to open. It ain't like you got family here in Rim that'll be after you for a handout. All your folks are back in Caldera. So open it! Maybe it's from a secret admirer.\" She elbowed Nita and winked. \"Aside from the ones you already got on board.\"\n\nNita pushed open the door to what had become her room on the lowest deck of the Wind Breaker. A powerful gust of wind confirmed what Wink had observed, something was letting a hell of a draft into the room.\n\nIt wasn't the most luxurious of quarters on the ship, that was certain, but it was without a doubt the roomiest. The official name was the \"gig room.\" It was a single room that took up the center third of the deck. Steam pipes fed two potent cranes that held the captain's gig in place. The gig was a small boat, really little more than a raft, that served the dual purpose of ferrying the crew to shore when they moored over relatively open water and hauled cargo up into the belly of the ship. When not in use, it was pressed to the belly to streamline its shape and seal the worst of the weather out of the cargo hatch in the center of the room. Nita had laid claim to one corner of the room, where the steam pipes kept her cozy at night and a hammock rocked her to sleep.\n\nThe forward edge of the gig was pulled down easily six inches, causing the whole boat to rock a bit and funneling the full brunt of the wind up into the room. Sea spray had already formed a patch of frost around the edge of the hatch.\n\n\"Who brought the cargo down this time?\" Nita grumbled, eyeing the mess the constant wind had left of her hammock.\n\n\"This time was Gunner, I think,\" Lil said.\n\nNita frowned and picked up an overturned pot of grease that had been dislodged. \"He owes me a pint of number three axle grease then. And he's cleaning up the last one.\"\n\nShe turned a valve and released steam from the complex network of pipes into the workings of the winch, then pulled the appropriate lever to take the slack out of the chains that held the gig. It rattled into place in a second or two, sealing out the pale light from the outside that had been leaking in. Nita reached up and twisted another knob, this one a transparent tube above her hammock. Gas seeped into the glass capsule, and a bright green light filled the room, the glow of a phlo-light. The fug-made gadgets ran on a minuscule amount of the same gas that filled the envelopes, and tended to be the only light available in the bowels of an airship.\n\n\"There. Job's done. Read the letter,\" Lil said.\n\n\"The job's not done! Look at all the ice that crusted up the workings here,\" she said, looking reproachfully at the winch mechanism as it crackled with frost. \"Now I need to make sure nothing buckled from the temperature swing. And I've got to bleed the lines again to make sure they don't freeze up and clog.\" She shook her head. \"If I'd have known how much harder it is to keep a steam system happy in the cold, I would have thought twice about staying on the crew in the first place.\"\n\n\"Well can you read and work?\"\n\n\"If you want to know what it says so much, then you read it.\"\n\n\"I ain't much for readin' out loud, Nita,\" Lil said. \"Really ain't much for readin' at all.\"\n\n\"Then it can wait.\"\n\nNita took out a wrench and began to loosen a few of the fittings on the winch. She grinned as she saw Lil fidgeting out of the corner of her eye. The impatient deckhand had her arms crossed and was tapping her boot.\n\n\"Do you at least need any help?\" she asked.\n\n\"This has to be done in sequence, one thing at a time. You can do the other one if you want.\"\n\n\"What I want is to hear what your letter says,\" she pouted.\n\n\"Tough,\" Nita replied.\n\n\"\u2026 You sure you don't mind me reading it?\"\n\n\"Like you said, it can't be from someone I know, so it can't very well be something sensitive or personal.\"\n\n\"Well all right. But no laughing if I stutter.\" She tore open the letter. \"'Dear Miss Calderan Lady. I am nine years old. I never met a Calderan Lady before. I want to ask you some\u2026 questions. How come you got skin like that? My daddy says you was born on a volcano. Is that why? Did you get burned?'\" She snickered. \"Don't that beat all? \u2026 That ain't why, is it?\"\n\nNita looked at her flatly.\n\n\"I didn't think so, I was just makin' sure.\"\n\nLil continued to work her way through the substantial list of questions from the young knowledge seeker. As Nita listened, shaking her head at how little the people of Rim knew of Calderans, she hopped down into the gig to get a better angle on the next piece of piping. Her heel caught the edge of something and sent it rattling around the floor of the gig.\n\n\"\u2026 'Daddy says you live on the ground in Caldera. How come you can breath down there? Fuggers live on the ground, and they got different skin too. Daddy says\u2026' This kid's daddy sure does know a little bit about a whole lot. \u2026 What you got there?\"\n\nNita had chased down the mystery object and held it into the light. It was a small metal canister, a bit shorter than Nita's forearm and roughly the same diameter. A purple-stained swatch of paper was tied securely around it. She slipped the loop of string free and unfurled the slip of paper. Her eyes widened as she read it.\n\n\"We need to talk to Captain Mack. He's going to want to know about this\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Coop pulled his coat a little tighter and buttoned an extra button. The sun was beginning to set now, and though Captain Mack had taken the Wind Breaker high enough to be free of the dampness of the sea, all that did was add a sharper bite to the cold and a stiffer wind to contend with. He was dressed in an outfit identical to that of his younger sister Lil. Precisely identical, in fact, because Lil tended to inherit his clothes when he picked up a fresh set. His coat was thus a bit crisper, his knitted cap had fewer holes, and his scarf wasn't so frayed, but otherwise they were a matched set. The clothes did fit Coop properly, though, which mean he'd added a pair of gloves to the mix to keep his hands warm, since they didn't tuck into his sleeves like Lil's did. Completing the ensemble was a long-barreled rifle and a conspicuous bulge beneath the jacket where Nikita was nestled.\n\nHe scanned the horizon. For the moment there was nothing but clear sky in all directions. When he was satisfied, he paced over to the opposite side of the deck, where Gunner stood. The munitions officer was predictably better armed, his own rifle sporting three barrels, a clockwork system ostensibly for reloading it, and a set of optics that was a match for the captain's spyglass. Unlike the common leather trench warn by Coop, Gunner was more or less in uniform, with a sharp gray overcoat with gold and silver trim. He wore a stiff cloth mask over his face and nose in lieu of a scarf, and while Coop was making do with squinting, Gunner wore a pair of goggles with another set of complex optics.\n\n\"Seen anything, Gunner?\" Coop asked, pulling out his pistol and aligning his eye with the sights.\n\n\"Did you hear me raise an alarm?\"\n\n\"Not as such.\"\n\n\"Then that would imply I haven't seen anything.\"\n\n\"I reckon so,\" Coop said with a nod. Coop alternated between eyeing the sights of the rifle and pistol. \"How come I gotta keep fixin' the sights on my pistol, Gunner?\" he asked.\n\n\"Because you fail to understand that the sights of pistols and rifles need different calibrations. If you've 'fixed' your pistol sights again, you've probably spoiled them.\"\n\nAfter a few moments of nothing but howling wind, Coop rested the butt of his rifle on the ground, holstered his pistol, and reached into his pocket. \"So I added a line or two\u2026\" he began.\n\n\"For heaven's sake, Coop. In all the years I've been working with you on this ship, I never thought the thing that would bring me to the brink of throwing you overboard would be poetry.\"\n\n\"You're the only fella on the ship who's good with words and all that, seein' as you spent all that time in that academy of yours. Who else am I going to run this sort of stuff by?\"\n\n\"Ideally no one. You don't honestly think anything you write could even approach the level of beauty and truth that even the most inept Calderan poet would scribble in the margins of his scrap paper, do you?\"\n\n\"Yeah I do, on account of Calderan folk ain't seen the sort of stuff I seen, so they ain't got the same stuff to write about,\" Coop said simply. \"So here's what I got so far. Ahem. I like lookin'. And I like cookin', 'specially when it's pie. Sometimes I reckon, the mornin' sun beckons, fer me to look it straight in the eye. When I see a bird, it churns up these words, and then I'm fixin' to write 'em down. 'Cause eggs in a clutch, an' flowers an' such, are pert near the pertiest things around. What do you think? Reckon Nita will like it?\"\n\n\"I've got to hand it to you, it certainly rhymes. And I wouldn't have expected to hear the word 'beckon' out of you.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I like that one too. Used to be a bit about birds and peckin', but I already got eggs and birds in the other bit. She'll like it though, right? It's got flowers an' such. Womenfolk like flowers an' such.\"\n\n\"You have a penetrating insight into the female mind, Coop.\"\n\n\"Yep! And I know how ladies think, too. I reckon one more bit, maybe about\u2026 something else pretty, and I'll be done. What else is pretty? I got flowers and birds. And pie. You reckon\u2014\"\n\nHis artistic pondering was interrupted by clamoring footsteps from the stairway to the lower decks. Nita burst from below, prompting him to stuff the poem back in his pocket.\n\n\"We'll talk later.\"\n\n\"I will count the moments,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Cap'n! Nita found something you need to see!\" Lil said, bounding up the stairs to the ship's wheel.\n\nCoop paced quickly toward them.\n\n\"You boys stay on watch. It don't take five sets of eyes to look at something,\" Captain Mack said without ever taking his eyes from the horizon.\n\nCoop stopped in his tracks, then paced back to the railing of the ship, but he kept his ears trained on the conversation at the wheel. It wasn't easy hearing conversation over the constant wail of wind, but a few years on an airship has a way of training that particular skill into you.\n\n\"Captain, this was in the gig. As Wink said, it was a bit loose. I think someone must have thrown it in while we were at port in Lock. Or maybe they dropped it in after Gunner finished unloading but before it was hauled up.\"\n\n\"Either way, sounds like I'm going to have a word with you folk about keeping a tight watch on the ship. Now's not the time to be slacking.\"\n\n\"Well sure, Cap'n, but look at it!\" Lil said.\n\nCoop glanced up to see his sister holding a small canister in front of the captain. Mack took it and turned it about.\n\n\"A top-off canister of phlogiston,\" he said, handing it back. \"Looks like one of ours.\"\n\n\"It looks like one of ours, but it isn't,\" Nita said. \"I checked the inventory on board and they're all accounted for. You taught me that the fug folk punch a date and a port code into every one of these canisters so they know where it came from and when. Ours don't have them because we stole them directly from the Fugtown stronghold. But this one doesn't have a date or a code either.\"\n\n\"Could have been scrubbed. Bently and Jameson up in Clifton like to scrub theirs. Keeps the sneaky sorts from figuring out where they been getting their supply and cutting out the middleman.\"\n\n\"I thought that too, but look at it,\" Nita said. \"No grinding or sanding marks. It hasn't been scrubbed. And it's still sealed and heavy enough to be full. Whoever got their hands on this has a source from within the fug.\"\n\n\"I'd say that's a bit of a leap,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"There was a note, Cap'n,\" Lil said, retrieving the scrap of paper and waving it. \"Have a look.\"\n\nMack took one hand from the wheel and snatched the flapping bit of paper. He pinned it skillfully against the wheel to steady it enough to read. \"'Dear Wind Breaker crew. We have all become great fans of your exploits. Rumor has it you are having trouble keeping yourself in phlogiston. Consider this canister a gift, and a sample of what you can expect if you are willing to share your skills with us. Meet us at the base of the northwest mooring tower at Springcrest on the eighth if you are interested. We will be waiting. Your friends, The Well Diggers.'\"\n\n\"What do you think, Cap'n?\" Lil asked.\n\nThe captain handed back the page and held out his hand. Nita gave him the canister again. He hefted it, then glanced over his shoulder. \"Coop, grab a phlo-lantern and run it up here. I want to see how pure this stuff is.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" Coop called back.\n\nHe jogged over to the bit of piping running along the rigging that supported the envelope. It was a phlogiston line, used to pump spare gas into the sack when it inevitably began to get slack. While not being used for that purpose, a bulb of treated glass was screwed into the input valve, such that if any additional light was needed on deck, a twist of the valve would allow the residual gas in the line to illuminate the bulb. He closed the valve good and tight and unscrewed the head to take it to the captain.\n\nMack took the lantern and screwed it onto the opening on the canister, breaking the seal. When he twisted the knob, the bulb illuminated with brilliant green light. Despite its smaller size, it was at least three times as bright as the tube that had lit the gig room.\n\n\"That's some pure stuff, Cap'n. Just as pure as what we got from the heist and a damn-sight purer than what we been getting from the black market,\" Coop said.\n\nThe captain nodded. \"If the wind ain't too hard against us, we'll be able to make Springcrest by the eighth, but only just. I don't know who these Well Diggers are, but if they were trying to make an impression, they made one. I'd say they earned themselves a sit-down to talk shop.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Captain Mack's navigational skill retained its almost uncanny accuracy, as the Wind Breaker was just pulling into port as the sun was setting on the day of their intended meeting. Springcrest had a delightful name, the sort that conjures to mind a pleasant town with friendly people and scenic vistas. As tended to be the case, the name had little to do with the town itself. Most towns on Rim were precarious, sparsely populated little clusters of buildings clinging to the top of the mountainside. The best of them were relatively low and had access to plateaus that could serve as grazing for goats or a few fields for farming. While it did have a flatter-than-normal stretch of mountain to call home, Springcrest was not the best of them. The only reason it existed at all was the white line that was barely visible along one edge of the eastern end of the boardwalk that ran the length of the city. That marked the border between Westrim and its smaller neighbor, Circa. And when it came to borders, nations liked to have a few people nearby to make sure everyone stays on his or her own side.\n\nTo serve this purpose, Springcrest was home to a few dozen airmen for the Westrim military, the entire staff of a small mining company, one goatherd, six goats, and a rather large stockpile of fuel and water. The northwest mooring post was the most remote from the city, jutting far out over the ocean on the off chance someone with an airliner too large for the three main piers would dock at the jerkwater burg. The Wind Breaker pulled into port and found the tower unmanned, with no one eager to rush out across a dozen yards of icy wooden catwalk to man it.\n\n\"Always a fine sign when the ground crew can't be bothered to pull in the lines. Coop, Lil, get down there and tie us up before a crosswind makes the old girl fussy,\" he said, feathering the throttle to keep the Wind Breaker relatively in position.\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" declared both Coopers.\n\n\"Gunner, keep a bead on the catwalk and let me know if anything seems off. Plenty of folk would be pleased as punch to see half our crew defenseless at the end of a rotten pier.\"\n\n\"Aye, Captain. Way ahead of you,\" Gunner said, flipping up the optics on both goggles and gun to get a clear view of the short range.\n\nLil and Coop each dropped down the coils of rope that would secure the Wind Breaker and launched into an inadvisable display of aeronautical acrobatics that most people would pay to watch. The correct thing to do when no ground crew was present was to signal the port and wait until a ground crew was deployed. In an emergency the correct thing to do would be to drop a ladder and lower a single crewmember down to handle the lines one by one. Lil and Coop chose a third option, which was to slide down the mooring lines. Coop, the heavier of the two, was able to heave himself back and forth until he swung near enough to snag the port-side tower. Lil didn't quite have the weight for that. Instead she slid to the midpoint and fished in her coat for a length of cord with a weighted end. She spun it up, let it fly, and in two tries snagged one of the cross-struts of the starboard mooring tower. Once she was properly grappled she hauled herself over and climbed up.\n\nThe two stunts took about the same amount of time and delivered a deckhand to each tower. When lines were as taut as they could manage, Captain Mack let the turbines spin down. At no point was there even the suggestion the port office had been planning to send someone.\n\n\"Coop, Lil! Meet me on the pier,\" Mack called out. He turned to Gunner. \"Gunner, keep an eye on us and call out if anything smells funny. Wink, get down below. And where's Nikita?\"\n\n\"Where do you think she is?\" Gunner said.\n\nMack gritted his teeth and shook his head. \"I ain't never met a boy with so many horses and so few reins.\" He leaned down to the speaking tube. \"Miss Graus, keep the boiler warm. Don't waste too much coal, but keep us ready to move.\"\n\n\"Aye, Captain,\" Nita said. \"Though I have been on the crew for nearly half a year, so I think I know how you like your boiler when you're preparing to meet with some potentially unsavory individuals.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, Miss Graus. And you being such a veteran member of my crew, maybe you'd like to tell me what I expect to hear coming back through this tube when I give an order?\"\n\n\"Aye, Captain.\"\n\n\"And what else?\"\n\n\"And nothing else, Captain.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Graus.\"\n\nCaptain Mack marched down from the wheel and into the bowels of the ship. \"Glinda!\"\n\nButch answered, bellowing through the corridors.\n\n\"Helm's yours. If you hear any gunshots that ain't answered back by Gunner, you get this ship out in open sky and wait for a signal, same as usual.\"\n\nHe didn't wait long enough for a reply, slipping through the various decks into the gig room and dropping the crew ladder. Though Captain Mack was not a young man, and a rope ladder hanging beneath even a moored ship was a devil of a thing to climb, he navigated it like he was born to do so. It wasn't until his boots struck the pier that he wavered, as though his body objected to a floor that didn't shift quite enough with the breeze.\n\nLil and Coop were already beside the ladder by the time he fished a silver tin from an inside pocket of his long coat and plucked a slender brandy-soaked cigar from inside.\n\n\"Coop,\" he said, lighting the cigar and taking a draw, \"how many inspectors we got on our ship?\"\n\n\"Two, Cap'n?\"\n\n\"Not by my count. By my count we got one on the ship and one in your jacket.\"\n\nCoop winced. \"Aye, Cap'n. Forgot to set Nikita aside.\"\n\n\"Yes you did,\" he said, smoke curling from his lips. \"Now personally, I don't mind much what you keep in your jacket, so long as it doesn't interfere with the job you do. But how many inspectors does everyone else think we have.\"\n\n\"None, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"You want I should run up and hand Nikita off?\"\n\n\"No. This being sunset, and us having a deadline, I'd say it's better we get moving. But you keep her quiet, you keep her out of sight, and you keep her still. Stay back when we do our dealings and let me do the talking.\"\n\n\"Like always, Cap'n. Where do you reckon we're to meet these Well Diggers?\"\n\n\"They said the northwest tower, and that's where we are.\"\n\nHe scanned the city. From their distant vantage nearly the entire place was visible. The slope of the mountain was shallow, giving most of the city no more than a yard or so of piling to keep it level. It was more stable than most cities could hope for, and it probably would have been a much larger settlement if not for its low altitude giving it more of a whiff of the fug than most people, crops, and livestock could stomach for long.\n\nThe reason the border between Circa and Rim had been drawn here was that it was the beginning of a long, low stretch of mountain. The gap between peaks was wide enough and ran near enough to sea level to risk dipping down below the surface of the fug. Even now the vast sea of twisting purple mist could be seen spreading off to the south and east. The whole of Rim was little more than a continent-size bowl filled to the brim with the toxic fumes. Here in the city the air had the subtle but undeniable stench of the stuff. Even a dozen feet lower and any surface dweller who wanted to keep breathing would need to do so through a mask more often than not.\n\nAs Captain Mack's eyes came to settle on the only stretch of town hidden in shadow by climbing mountains to the east, a figure stepped out into the light. The stranger, the only other person out and about aside from the Wind Breaker crew themselves, was at least a match for Coop's height. Whoever it was wore layer upon layer of winter clothes. Hoods, scarves, and goggles hid every bit of his or her face. There wasn't an inch of flesh exposed to the cold. Despite the cold-weather gear, the person barely looked bulky. Whatever was hidden beneath those layers was more skin and bone than anything else.\n\n\"Captain West,\" the figure said when it drew near.\n\nIt was a man, his voice clear, and his diction impeccable.\n\nThe captain cast a measuring look and breathed deep, barely suppressing a cough from a cloud of fug that curled around from the east.\n\n\"Would you be the generous would-be benefactor seeking our service?\"\n\n\"One of several. I cannot thank you enough for coming. I wasn't certain you would.\"\n\n\"I wasn't certain of it either, but I must say you made a rather strong argument.\" He puffed at the cigar again, more to overpower the lingering hint of fug than anything else. \"Since there doesn't look to be room under those clothes for enough compensation to make it worth our while, I imagine you've got a place in mind for us to talk shop?\"\n\n\"Indeed I have. I'm not local to the town myself\u2026\"\n\n\"Ain't nobody local to Springcrest,\" Lil said. \"Except maybe some of them goats.\"\n\n\"But I've taken lodging in a spare room of a miner. This way.\"\n\nHe turned and led them toward the town. Coop and Lil kept pace. Without being told, they scanned the surroundings. Coop kept the rifle over his shoulder and one hand on the grip of a pistol at his belt. Lil had no weapon in hand, but if today was like most days, she had at least three knives and a pistol hidden in the endless tangle of hand-me-downs, and wouldn't take more than the blink of an eye to get to them.\n\n\"You sure are a fancy talker, Mister,\" Coop said.\n\n\"Why thank you. My father will be pleased to know my education did not go without notice,\" he said.\n\n\"What do they call you?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Of late I've taken the sobriquet of Digger.\"\n\n\"Does he know you took it?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"He means that's what folks call him, Coop,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Oh. Better that way I reckon. Sobriquet sounds expensive if someone was to take it.\"\n\nAs they walked, they passed by houses shut tight against the cold. If not for the glow of fires and the smell of their smoke, one might have imagined the whole town deserted. Finally they reached a narrow two-story house beside a notch carved into the gray stone of the mountain. Digger fumbled with some keys and unlocked the door. Inside was a cramped entryway with two more locked doors. Digger unlocked the one to the left and revealed a staircase barely wide enough to climb.\n\n\"I've got the room upstairs,\" he said.\n\n\"Coop, you stay down here. Make sure we have our privacy,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Sure thing, Cap'n,\" he said, swinging his rifle down and leaning against the wall.\n\nThe rest of the group continued up the stairs. Digger stopped at the top, where he fiddled with a freshly installed padlock on the door.\n\n\"You're a careful man,\" Digger said, breathing heavily at the effort to climb the stairs.\n\n\"So says the fella who needs three keys to get into his room,\" Mack said.\n\n\"It wasn't a criticism, my good man. Merely an observation.\"\n\nHe clicked the lock open and led them inside. The room was toasty warm thanks to a potbellied stove against the far wall. It was a rather austere, little more than a table, four flimsy wooden chairs, and a rickety bed caked with dust.\n\n\"Have a seat,\" Digger said.\n\n\"I'd just as soon stand until you give me reason to stay long enough to sit.\"\n\n\"Likewise,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Well I certainly hope you don't mind if I do,\" he said.\n\n\"Not my place to say what a man can or can't do in his own home.\"\n\nDigger sat.\n\n\"I'll be plain, Digger. That can of phlogiston is the only reason I'm here. And the knowledge that I might be able to get more like it in a steady supply is the only thing that's liable to keep me here, so if you're interested in retaining my company, I suggest you start with that.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" he cleared his throat, \"it just so happens I've got a source for phlogiston, but\u2014\"\n\n\"''But's' not a word I like to hear so early in a discussion of this sort, Digger. What's your source?\"\n\n\"That's a sensitive matter.\"\n\n\"It's the only matter that matters, so I'd say quit being so sensitive.\"\n\n\"All will be revealed in time, Captain West, but\u2014\"\n\n\"There's that word again, Cap'n,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Indeed it is, Lil.\"\n\nDigger tugged at the loop of scarf around his neck. \"Do I detect a note of distrust in your voice?\"\n\n\"I'm talking to a man selling goods he shouldn't be able to get. A man who tries to deal with his face covered. A man who says he's renting a room with a bed that ain't been slept in. The note of distrust you're detecting ain't nothing to the song you're singing.\"\n\nLil's hand slid into her coat. The captain's hand slid to his belt. Digger glanced back and forth between them.\n\n\"Captain West, what is this all about?\"\n\n\"That's what I'm hoping to determine. Like you say, Digger, I'm a cautious man. I've got plenty of enemies. I'd rather not walk out of this room with one more, but I wouldn't mind walking out with one less, and there're a few ways we can go about that.\"\n\nA conspicuous click came from within Lil's coat. Digger looked to her nervously.\n\n\"So where do we go from here?\" he said.\n\n\"I'd say showing me your face and looking me in the eye would be a good start.\"\n\n\"I fear that might sour relations by a fair margin.\"\n\n\"Judging by the current state of relations, that'd be quite a trick,\" Mack said. \"Let's see that face, or I walk.\"\n\n\"Can you offer me your word your gunwoman won't fire her weapon?\"\n\n\"Can you offer me your word you won't give her a good reason to?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Then let's just say my word's as good as yours. Now let's see that face.\"\n\nDigger slowly raised his hands and pushed back his hood, then began to unwrap the scarves. When the last loop fell free, it revealed stark-white skin on a long, gaunt face. A face that could only have come from the fug.\n\nLil raised her eyebrows, gripped her gun tighter, and looked to Captain Mack. His expression hadn't changed. Instead he leaned back against the wall and puffed slowly on his cigar.\n\n\"Coop,\" Mack called.\n\n\"Yeah, Cap'n?\" he replied.\n\n\"How do things look down there?\"\n\n\"Nothin' much to see, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"You lookin' good and hard?\"\n\n\"Lookin', listenin', and all that good stuff, Cap'n,\" Coop said. \"Nothing came of it so far.\"\n\nCaptain Mack took another slow puff, filling the room with the oddly sweet smell of the cigar.\n\n\"Digger, most of my life, seeing a face like yours would have put me on edge. Because most of my life, folks like you held an awful lot of power over me. I did what you said, followed your rules, or I couldn't keep living the only life I knew how to live. For better or worse, that changed when the good Miss Graus saw fit to join our crew. It's fair to say, for a bit, once I was out from under your thumbs I swung pretty wide in the direction of hostility. I'd thought of all the fug folk I'd wanted to put a bullet in over the years and thought how nice it was that these days I could, if I was so inclined. But then your folk snatched Nita away from me. Locked her up. Lil here too.\"\n\nLil nodded.\n\n\"And I can't say you were the best of hosts. But the folk you locked her up with were a bunch of your own. And I'll be darned if they didn't turn out to have some decent sorts among them. I ain't the kind of man who assumes everyone of a certain type is a certain way. At least, not anymore. For instance, one thing I always thought about fug folk was they got a lot going on upstairs. So it makes me curious to know how you thought this meeting was going to go.\"\n\nA bead of sweat rolled down Digger's face. \"Not much different from this, honestly.\"\n\n\"Then maybe that bit was right.\"\n\n\"I'd hoped I would be able to convince you of the purity of my intentions before I had to reveal myself.\"\n\n\"You lookin' to sell me goods you ought not have isn't what I'm liable to call pure intentions. But, now that we're not hiding anything from each other anymore, I'd say we can start this off the way it should have started off. On your feet.\"\n\nDigger hastily stood. Captain Mack stepped up to face him, looking slightly up to meet the gaze of the taller fug person. He removed the cigar from his mouth and blew the smoke to the side.\n\n\"The name is Captain McCulloch West. This here's my deckhand Chastity Cooper, fella downstairs is my other deckhand, Ichabod Cooper,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Most folk call him Coop, and me Li'l Coop, or just Lil. So if you're lookin' to get our attention, I'd suggest you do the same.\"\n\n\"And what may we call you?\" Captain Mack asked.\n\n\"I'm Fenton\u2026 Albus.\"\n\n\"That pause and the sweat on your brow makes me doubt that particular sobriquet,\" Mack said. \"I thought we weren't hiding anything anymore.\"\n\nLil stepped up and looked at him hard.\n\n\"Fine, fine. I'm Fenton\u2026\" He took a shaky breath. \"Ebonwhite.\"\n\nLil slid the gun from her jacket but hung it low.\n\n\"We ain't had much luck in our dealings with folk bearing that name, Fenton.\"\n\n\"Nor have I, I assure you. We are a large family, as families in the fug go at any rate. Somewhat smaller these days.\"\n\n\"We didn't kill your kin, Fenton.\"\n\n\"You may or may not believe me when I say this, but that doesn't come as a surprise. My cousins were heading for an early grave for a long time. You just happened to help them find it on their own. But back to the matter of my association with the rest of the Ebonwhites. The mayor isn't the patriarch, but he is the favored son. I'm a good deal further down the line. Youngest son of the youngest son. Well\u2026 technically my father and the mayor are both first generation, and thus establishing relative age and relation is complicated, but that is another matter for another time. I worked for the mayor briefly. He didn't appreciate how I did business. Now I spend my time in the fringe of a part of the fug we call The Thicket. Many would call it a greater punishment than being locked away in the Phylactery.\"\n\nHe looked to Lil.\n\n\"If you've been in the Phylactery, you know about the hounds. Bloodthirsty, massive. The Thicket is where we first found them. And they're hardly the worst of the things that lurk there. You'd be astounded by what the fug has made of the simplest woodland creatures\u2026 And for what it's worth, I was telling the truth. The group I've fallen in with has taken to calling me Digger, and I rather like the name.\"\n\n\"All right. So you're the enemy of my enemy. Maybe that makes you better, maybe that makes you worse. But at least now I know what the truth sounds like when it comes out of your mouth.\"\n\nCaptain Mack pulled out a chair, hung his coat on the back, and took a seat. Lil did the same. After a moment, Digger joined them.\n\n\"I must say,\" he said shakily, \"this isn't what I'd expected when I imagined the Wind Breaker crew.\"\n\n\"Oh no? What did you have in mind?\"\n\n\"You should hear the stories they tell about you down there. 'Captain Mack is a raving lunatic. Bloodthirsty. A thing of unbridled rage.' They say you have an endless horde of soldiers, and that your crew were like demonic apes, swinging from rigging and soaring through the air.\"\n\n\"Hey! I'll bet that bit's about me!\" Lil said proudly.\n\n\"I half expected you to breathe fire or shake the ground when you walked. To hear your story told, you are either an archangel descending from above to pay justice upon the unrighteous or the most vile and cold-hearted of killers ever to blight our society.\"\n\n\"I ain't an angel, Digger. And the killer bit only comes when you get on my bad side. Stay off it and you'll find me the reasonable sort. Now let's get down to brass tacks. You being local to the fug, there's no question how you got a fresh can of phlogiston. The only questions now are how many you got, and how much it'll cost us to get them.\"\n\n\"As for your second question, the price will be quite reasonable. To you and anyone else who wants them, provided we can come to an agreement. Though Mayor Ebonwhite doesn't appreciate my methods, I am a business man. And I can see quite a bit of profit to be made charging a fair price to people who are used to a stiff one. But how many cans I can get, and therefore you can get, is another matter. Because the reason I've reached out to you in particular is simple. I need your help securing the source.\" He leaned forward across the table. \"You see, Captain Mack. I won't be simply selling the phlogiston. I'll be making it.\"\n\n\"And I take it securing this source is the sort of task you imagine it would take the Wind Breaker crew to accomplish? A bunch of fire-breathing earth shakers, and high-flying apes.\"\n\n\"More or less.\"\n\n\"Then if you're willing, I'd like to take this discussion to the rest of the crew. If it involves all of us, then it involves all of us. And there are some questions Gunner and Miss Graus are liable to ask that I might overlook.\" He stood. \"Get yourself bundled up. We're going for a walk.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Lucius Alabaster's white ship had taken on a bit of a purple tint after several days of travel, but his home port of Caer Fiona was in sight. It was like most cities in the fug, a small cluster of well-kept buildings within the heart of what had been a much larger settlement before the fug had rolled in and taken the local residents with it. In this case, the majority of the remaining structures were vast, sprawling estates hidden behind wrought iron gates and high stone walls. Pools of green light lit the handful of streets that had any life in them, and here and there a steam-powered carriage trundled along the cobbles. Though what passed for a sky in the fug was black as pitch, it was only just hitting sunset, and much of the business of the city was still being done.\n\n\"Mr. Mallow, I rather think a bit of imbibing is in order after so lengthy a sojourn with so little to show for it. Take us to the tower nearest the Ruby Club,\" Alabaster said, smoothing his mustache against his lip.\n\n\"Already on my way, Mr. Alabaster. As per usual.\"\n\nAlabaster squinted. \"\u2026 As per usual. What precisely are you implying, Mr. Mallow?\"\n\n\"Merely that it is your prerogative to conclude long journeys with a visit to the Ruby.\"\n\n\"Are you suggesting that I am a lush?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"No indeed. It is a well-known fact, proved by the most skilled scientific minds, that deep thought requires steady nerves, and the finest nerve elixirs come diluted in spirits. If I am to ply my trade and work my brilliance at the highest levels, I must partake of these elixirs on rare and appropriate occasions.\"\n\n\"Of course, Mr. Alabaster.\"\n\n\"That's right of course.\"\n\n\"Do you suppose\u2026 I might partake of some elixirs?\"\n\n\"Mallow, you are mercifully simple. Your nerves are unperturbed by the woes of great intellect. The deeper effects of the nerve elixirs would be lost on you. However, as I predict we are on the very cusp of my rise to greatness, I would be willing to allow you to join me for a bit of refreshment. For you, I think, simple spirits will suffice.\"\n\n\"That is very kind of you, Mr. Alabaster.\"\n\nMallow piloted the airship into a berth at a multilevel mooring tower. It was something of a vertical pier, built to accommodate the two-and four-person personal vessels favored by the wealthy residents of the town. He performed a contortionist's act of a dismount, squeezing his long, lanky body through a hatch near the pilot's seat and opening the door for Alabaster, while a small crew of ground workers tied the mooring lines. Alabaster strutted toward the wire cage of the elevator, looking through the ground crew as though they weren't there. When he stepped onto the elevator with Mallow and allowed his manservant to press the button, his gaze fell upon his ship and the grape color it had taken on during the trip.\n\n\"Ugh. Honestly, Mallow. See that my vessel is once again restored to glorious white.\"\n\n\"I shall, sir. If I may offer a suggestion, perhaps it would be wise to change to a darker color in the future. Everyone else favors the dark colors, I think because they don't readily show the stains of the fug.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mallow. But one does not distinguish oneself from the rest of the rabble by doing what others do. If it requires a bit more upkeep to maintain my singular status, then that is merely the cost of superiority.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nThe elevator reached the street, and they paced a short distance to a large, ornate building. In a more typical town, the Ruby Club would have been a tavern or pub. Caer Fiona was almost entirely occupied by the wealthy elite and their servants and staff. Thus, something so crass as an establishment where any simple man could gather, socialize, and purchase alcohol was contemptible. The Ruby Club was exclusive, requiring a recommendation to even be offered membership, and a rather stiff annual fee to retain membership. That every last member of the local gentry had such a membership didn't seem to matter in the least, nor did the fact that said gentry used the place to gather, socialize, and purchase alcohol. The key point was that it cost more than the average man could afford. A man at the door, rather larger than Alabaster and rather smaller than Mallow, greeted them both and allowed them inside.\n\nIf one were to see the inside of the Ruby Club, one would not for a moment mistake it for a common pub. An enormous fireplace stood at one wall, and warm yellow light came from oil lamps scattered about. Thickly padded easy chairs upholstered with red velvet were clustered into small groups, strategically situated to offer the warmth of the fire and encourage but not require socialization with the others who might be seated. There was no bar, instead only a steward standing beside a servant's door. A few tables were set along the wall opposite the fireplace. Some were clear, others were stacked with the accoutrements of the sort of incomprehensible table games the wealthy busy themselves with. The walls themselves were hung with the stuffed heads of assorted creatures. The older, more ragged of them were familiar forest creatures: boar, wolves, deer, and similar. Fresher additions were a good deal more twisted and ferocious, usually covered with pale gray fur and barely recognizable as what they might have been before the fug got ahold of them.\n\nAlabaster took a seat in one of the high-backed easy chairs. It was quite near the fire, and a small brass plaque with his name on it was affixed to top center, as though labeling him while seated.\n\n\"Put in the order, would you, Mr. Mallow?\" Alabaster said, handing off his hat and cane. \"I shall have\u2026 a White Willow Nerve and Mindfulness Tonic. And something for yourself, naturally.\"\n\nMallow set off toward the steward.\n\n\"So, Alabaster,\" said a gruff voice to the left of the fire, \"any luck in your dealings?\"\n\nHe turned to the source of the voice. He was a rare sight among the fug folk, a portly gentleman. Such was the physiology and temperament of the people of the fug that maintaining anything more than a rail-thin physique required a vast overabundance of food, but this fellow had made the effort. He was dressed in a cream-colored uniform more appropriate for an expedition into the wilderness than sitting in polite company. He'd lost a fair amount of the white hair on his head, but made up for it in the form of a walrus-like mustache hanging past both lips.\n\n\"No, Barnum,\" Alabaster said. \"I'm afraid he is even more shortsighted than I'd given him credit for.\"\n\n\"Bah. What's he think then? That we can leave these rabble-rousers to rouse further rabble?\"\n\n\"Well said, Barnum. But no, he believes sanctions shall be sufficient to wither them.\"\n\n\"Bah again. You can leave a white boar in a trap to starve as well, but is that how I caught the devil?\" he said, hiking a thumb at a pig's head the size of a horse's hanging over his chair. \"No! If the beast is worthy of the hunter, the hunter owes the beast a proper hunt!\"\n\n\"Precisely, Barnum. But our friend in Fugtown holds a different opinion on the subject.\"\n\n\"Too much time away from The Thicket. It makes a man soft.\"\n\n\"Yes, Barnum,\" Alabaster said. \"You would be the leading authority on the subject of men being soft.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" murmured Barnum, absorbing the portion of the statement that appeared complimentary and remaining blissfully unaware of any other intimation. \"Well, my boy. Let the man shoulder the consequences of his own foolishness, that's what I say. He'll get his. But the hour is late. I do believe I shall turn in.\"\n\nHe got up and ambled away, leaving only the steward, Alabaster, Mallow, and a simply dressed older gentleman to the left of the fireplace in the establishment. The older gentleman seemed out of place and likely would have been thrown out on his ear if not for the fact he'd been tending the fire in the place for longer than any of the other members could remember. As far as anyone knew, the man was named Tender. That was what everyone called him at the very least.\n\nMallow returned with a tray laden with two shot glasses and two mugs. One glass was filled with clear liquid, the other brown. Both mugs were brimming with ale.\n\n\"Now, Mallow, how many times must I tell you, I do not drink something so coarse as ale. It does not suit an evolved constitution such as mine.\"\n\n\"A thousand apologies, Mr. Alabaster. Of course I'll be happy to\u2014\"\n\n\"I wouldn't mind disposing of the spare mug,\" said Tender. \"If you're willing to spare it.\"\n\nAlabaster made a dismissive gesture. \"It is a low drink for low men. If you don't mind the implications, then by all means.\"\n\nMallow shot the man a hard look, no doubt displeased at not having the second mug for himself, but handed it over. He then turned back to his employer.\n\n\"Mr. Alabaster, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Have a seat, Mallow. I detest having to look up to someone as they speak.\"\n\nMallow paced over to the table games area and borrowed a chair. \"May I ask a question, Mr. Alabaster? I may be a bit thick, but it seems to me if this crew has been causing Mayor Ebonwhite so much trouble, why are you so eager to make it your problem?\"\n\n\"First, Mallow, no, you aren't thick. Barnum is thick. You're merely dim. And second, I want the problem because history remembers the problem solvers. I want the problem for the same reason I want my ship white. Because no one else does. Great men do great deeds. Great men stand apart from the rest. To support my case I point to none other than our most celebrated of figures, the great Ferris Tusk. In our earliest days, when the fug was still finding its feet, it would have been simple for those above to strike us down. Admiral Maxwell would easily have been the man to do it. Dealing with the admiral? That was a problem no one wanted either. But did Tusk turn away? No. He stepped forward. And in single combat, through superior tactics, he bested the foe and opened the door for the grand and glorious status now held by the fug folk.\"\n\n\"But, and forgive me for being dim again, if memory serves, Admiral Maxwell was gunning for the fug folk. The Wind Breaker crew seems content to stay out of the fug these days.\"\n\n\"That point is debatable. They are vile brigands and no one can know the dark plans of their twisted minds. And, moreover, history will not show what their intentions might have been. It will merely show the things they did and the name of the man who was wise and powerful enough to stop them. And I mean for that man to be me.\"\n\n\"Won't that cause trouble? Seems like any time that crew has a mind to dip their toes into the fug, something gets broken or someone gets killed.\"\n\n\"If I seek greatness, I cannot afford to be timid in the face of potential peril. Lives will be lost, certainly. Ideally a great many lives will be lost, because such a crime would make the Wind Breaker crew a still-greater prize.\"\n\n\"You're comfortable with your own people dying because of what you're doing?\"\n\n\"Of course. Immortality through legendary deeds is an end that can justify any expense. If my ambition sets the world aflame and leaves it in ashes, so be it, so long as the ashes spell my name.\"\n\n\"To ambition,\" announced Tender, raising his glass. \"That's what sets a man apart.\"\n\nAlabaster raised his glass. \"At least there is one other man who recognizes it.\"\n\nAlabaster and Tender sipped their drinks. Mallow knocked back the shot in a single swallow.\n\n\"Mallow, when you are through. Head to the messenger and see if I've got any messages waiting. He who strikes with most haste, strikes with most success.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Captain Mack hauled himself up into the gig room, followed by the heavily bundled Digger, then both deckhands.\n\n\"I must tell you, Captain Mack,\" Digger said, \"there are many tales about the Wind Breaker circulating. In exterior appearance, it does not disappoint.\"\n\n\"You can thank Miss Graus for that,\" Mack said.\n\nDigger huffed a bit and caught his breath. \"Will I be meeting her? I've never met, or even seen, a Calderan.\"\n\n\"You'll be meeting her, along with the rest of the crew, directly. Because if I'm going to make a damn fool decision like help you with your damn fool job, I want each member of my crew to have a chance to talk me out of it.\"\n\nHe tromped over to the talking tube beside one of the doors and leaned down to it. \"All crew on board, I want us all in the galley. Usual orders for a meeting like this at shore. And Gunner, I want your hands in your pockets, not on your trigger.\" He stood up again. \"This way.\"\n\n\"May I ask, Captain, why that final order? About the hands in his pockets?\" Digger asked.\n\n\"Just about every member of this crew is likely to have a sour reaction to a face like yours on board without proper explanation, but Gunner's the one liable to leave the biggest hole.\"\n\n\"He would be your soldier?\"\n\n\"Munitions officer.\"\n\nDigger nodded and tightened the scarf, still breathing heavily.\n\n\"Digger, you sure seem to be short of breath all the time,\" Lil said. \"We ain't done nothin' but climbed stairs and climbed ladders.\"\n\n\"The air,\" he huffed, \"is a bit thin up here for me.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well that makes sense, because the air is a bit thick for me down there,\" Coop said.\n\nCaptain Mack led the group to the galley, where Nita was already present. She looked with interest and a dash of distrust at the newcomer and wiped grease from her hands. Gunner arrived at the door as they filed inside.\n\n\"Tell you what, Cap'n. I'm going to go let the little critter out,\" Coop said.\n\nAll eyes turned to Coop with disapproval. He stared vacantly for a moment, then raised his eyebrows in realization.\n\n\"That's to say, uh\u2026 I\u2026\"\n\nDigger glanced about. \"Is this some manner of vernacular to which I am unaccustomed?\"\n\nLil looked at him. \"I ain't sure, but to make things easier, I'm just going to say yes.\"\n\nCoop went and returned rather quickly, and the group settled around the tables. Butch, always the one to see to proper hospitality, put out a kettle and some tea, along with a plate of biscuits from the previous day. A sprinkle of sugar on day-old biscuits had become a tradition of sorts on the Wind Breaker. The concoction tasted better than it had any right to.\n\n\"All right,\" Captain Mack said. \"This here man's called Digger. He's got an offer that's interesting enough to get us here, and to get him on board for the details. Coop and Lil already know this, but when he sheds his gear he's likely to show the rest of you something you don't want to see. Listen up. Until he gives us a reason besides his looks to deny him our good courtesy, we are going to hear him out. Digger, off with the scarves.\"\n\nDigger, with very slow and deliberate motions, removed the scarves and goggles. A stir rolled through the room, but all held their peace.\n\n\"Now you folks all got an opinion about this fella already, I'm sure. I ain't interested in it. What I'm interested in is what he's got to say, and what you've got to say about that. So all of you listen.\"\n\nThe newcomer looked around the room at the suspicious faces.\n\n\"As I imagine all of you have determined, the message that brought you here was delivered on behalf of a group of which I am part.\"\n\n\"I would suggest you limit your discussion to the things that we've not determined,\" Gunner said. \"Because as I'm sure you've determined, we're a bit excitable at the moment.\"\n\n\"Gunner, quiet down. Digger, take them words to heart,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Yes, point taken. First, I'd like to establish just where we stand in terms of commonality of knowledge. Most of what I wish to discuss is completely unknown by surface dwellers, but this crew knows a good deal more than most, so I would hate to cover well-trodden ground unnecessarily.\"\n\n\"Ask,\" Coop said from the doorway.\n\n\"Do any of you know where phlogiston comes from?\"\n\n\"No. By design, I reckon,\" Lil said.\n\n\"That's right. It's a closely guarded secret. If not for my status, I very much doubt even I would know.\"\n\n\"And what status might that be?\" Gunner asked.\n\n\"Status that'll be revealed after he's gained or lost our interest, Gunner. Now keep your mouth shut unless you've got something useful,\" Captain Mack said.\n\nDigger continued. \"I am going to very slowly place my hand in my pocket and very slowly pull it free. I am not drawing a weapon. I am merely fetching something to help illustrate the nature of our potential partnership.\" He slid his hand into his pocket and, when he was not gunned down, took a breath. \"What you are about to see has likely never been seen above the fug. Men have been killed for even bringing it aboard a ship.\"\n\nDigger removed from his pocket a small glass ampule. Inside was a thick liquid that looked like honey, though a white crust clung to the portion exposed to the air inside.\n\n\"This vial contains the substance responsible for all of the successes and all of the failures of the world as we know it. This is the chief ingredient used to make both burn-slow and phlogiston.\"\n\n\"Make phlogiston?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I'd always imagined phlogiston was something that one found, rather than something one made.\"\n\n\"Curiously, you aren't far off. The legend is that phlogiston was found by chance, but found as a result of a natural process that we have since improved. Now, between burn-slow and phlogiston, just about every worthwhile device to come from the fug depends upon this stuff in order to function at the level to which we have become accustomed. We call the stuff 'ichor.' Blood of the gods. Every last canister of phlogiston ever sold or stockpiled, and every brick of burn-slow ever burned, has come from a single well of the stuff in the southeast. We call that well South Pyre. As far as anyone knows, it is the only source of ichor. \u2026 But that's not where this vial came from.\"\n\n\"You found a new well?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Indeed we did. And while I've never been to South Pyre as a point of comparison, I would call the well we've found large by any measure.\"\n\n\"So you're offering to sell us what you've been making off the fresh supply?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Not precisely. We haven't begun producing it yet.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Then what, may I ask, did I find hidden in the gig of our ship?\"\n\n\"As I said, a message was delivered on our behalf. We arranged for a canister to be stolen and delivered to you. This sample is one of precious few that we've been able to secure, and therein lies the first of two reasons we require your assistance.\n\n\"The well is located within The Thicket, which as I've told your captain is home to fug hounds and far worse, all manner of creatures twisted by the fug. But that speaks only to the bulk of The Thicket. Ichor, it would seem, has a similar but far more pronounced effect on the flora and fauna.\"\n\n\"Is it me, or did he start wandering off into a different language at the end there?\" Coop said.\n\n\"He means to say the plants and animals are like fug hounds, only worse,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Indeed. I very much suspect the raw hostility on display by the local wildlife is the reason no one had discovered the well and returned with word of it.\"\n\n\"And where in that do we enter?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"In order to utilize the ichor well, we must secure it. That will mean reaching it, in numbers and alive. We shall then need to defend it long enough to set up both permanent defenses and the rudiments of a facility. And ideally we would do so in a manner not likely to attract attention to the well, since if representatives of the current industry were to become aware of it before it is fortified, we would most certainly lose it to them.\n\n\"As I see it, what the situation requires is combat prowess, subterfuge, and engineering skill in equal measure. If what I have heard of your crew is true, this ship may well be the most concentrated source of all three ever to exist.\"\n\nCoop raised his hand.\n\n\"Subterfuge means sneakiness, Coop,\" Nita explained.\n\nHe and Lil nodded. \"Yep. Then we're that, all right.\"\n\n\"You said there were two reasons you needed us,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Yes. You see, assuming we are able to successfully secure the ichor well, there is still the matter of the manufacturing process. If the knowledge of ichor is silver, the knowledge of how to work it is gold. The process for making phlogiston out of ichor is trivial, but making it efficiently, and in quantity, is another matter. And that's to say nothing of the more complex concoctions like burn-slow. To fully utilize the well to its potential, we need a chemist with experience in the stuff, and as I understand it, there are only two. The first lives and works down in South Pyre. He and his staff are exceptionally well compensated. I wouldn't imagine anything could convince them to join our concern. But the industry is cautious. They know an errant collapse could easily take the lives of the primary chemist and his entire staff, so a backup was trained.\"\n\n\"And he's the one you want?\" Coop said.\n\n\"She, actually. A Dr. Samantha Prist. Because of the sensitivity of her knowledge, she's kept sequestered in a relatively secure and isolated facility. She is essentially a prisoner, and has been denied any opportunity to actually ply the precious trade she has been taught for fear of the knowledge spreading beyond their control. This has filled her with resentment, I'm told. If we were to liberate her, I feel certain she could be coaxed into serving as our primary chemist. To achieve this, we shall need to liberate someone from, in effect, a fug-folk-run prison. I understand you have some experience in that regard.\"\n\n\"And what do we get in exchange for helping you out?\" Lil asked. \"Just permission to buy phlogiston and burn-slow from you?\"\n\n\"Buy it? If you are able to help us begin production, you have my personal word, and at your request a written proclamation stating it, that you shall receive, free of charge, as much phlogiston and burn-slow as you desire for as long as you desire. \u2026 With the understanding that there shall be no resale. We are in this for profit, after all.\"\n\n\"You can take the fugger out of the fug, but you can't take the fug out of the fugger,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"That about all you got to say?\" Captain Mack asked.\n\n\"That, as you might say, is the long and short of it.\"\n\n\"Any questions for him?\" the captain asked his crew.\n\n\"Who exactly is this group you represent?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"We call ourselves the Well Diggers,\" Digger said.\n\n\"That name is a bit on the nose for a secret organization planning to dig a new well. I can see why you need aid in the area of subterfuge,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"How many people are in this organization, and of what sort?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"Thirty, excluding myself. Mostly, er\u2026 workers.\"\n\n\"Grunts you mean,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Yes. They work for me on various projects related to The Thicket. Clearing brush, gathering resources, things of that nature. My primary role is as the local surveyor, which is how I came upon the knowledge of the ichor well in the first place. Also\u2014and I would normally keep this information in the strictest confidence, but in light of present company that would appear to be unnecessary\u2014the bulk of the Well Diggers are formerly inmates in Skykeep. They came to me for employment and protection. It seems it is no secret that I've fallen out of favor with the other\u2026 with the more respected members of the industry. This has made me rather appealing as an ally for those with similar woes.\"\n\nCaptain Mack looked over his crew. \"That about it? Who wants to volunteer to watch this fellow while the rest of us discuss what we should or shouldn't do?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'll watch him,\" Lil said. \"I can't imagine Coop's gonna feel any different than me on the matter, so you can count his vote double.\"\n\n\"Good girl, Lil. Take him to the gig room while we collaborate.\"\n\nLil stood and slapped Digger on the back. \"Come on now. Let's let these folks get to figurin'. And don't try anything silly, because that'd sure make their decision easy.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't dream of acting out of turn. I have as much to lose here as all of you,\" Digger said.\n\n\"A little bit more to lose, if you ask me,\" Lil said.\n\nShe walked him out of the room from behind. When their footsteps disappeared down the hallway, Captain Mack spoke up.\n\n\"All right. I'm sure you all got plenty to say. Now's the time to say it. Gunner, we'll start with you, seeing as how you're the voice of opposition in matters of this sort.\"\n\n\"What do I think? I think a man has come to us seeking precisely the skills we have, and offering precisely the goods we need. And I think that is a bit too convenient for my tastes. Call me superstitious, Captain, but when nothing is ever easy, simplicity where it doesn't belong makes me nervous.\"\n\n\"What he's asking isn't exactly simple, to my ear,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Oh, it's a hell of a job. No one would argue that. But it was served up to us on a silver platter. Too good to be true if you ask me.\"\n\n\"I agree with Gunner on this one,\" Coop said.\n\n\"Now that makes me nervous,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Nothin' that came up out of the fug ever had anything good in mind for us. Especially nothin' with the name Ebonwhite.\"\n\n\"The man's an Ebonwhite?\" Gunner said. \"I can't even see the silver lining for all the red flags on this, Captain.\"\n\n\"Glinda, thoughts?\" Mack said.\n\nButch answered with her usual eloquence, weaving a sentence out of exotic profanities that roughly echoed the sentiments of the others.\n\n\"Nita?\" Mack said.\n\nThe engineer crossed her arms, causing the sash of wrenches to jingle.\n\n\"Captain, you know I came here without preconceptions about the fug folk. They made an impression rather quickly, and it wasn't a positive one. But there were some good people in Skykeep with us. People I might even be inclined to say I trust. I'd surely recognize any of them if I were to meet them, and if any were among those I'd become the most familiar with, I believe we could trust them to vouch for his intentions.\"\n\n\"So is that a vote in favor?\"\n\n\"Perhaps not in favor of the venture as a whole, but at least in favor of further investigation,\" Nita said. \"Nothing ventured, nothing gained.\"\n\nGunner cleared his throat. \"Now, I didn't deal with many of those prisoners except for during the cleanup after, and I'll admit there were better men among them than any other fugger I'd dealt with, but a wolf can easily dress in sheep's clothing for a few minutes. And gaining their council on the matter requires that he be telling the truth about them. Not only that, but to find out the truth of that we'd have to go where he leads us, which is down into a part of the fug we've never been to before. I don't know for certain this is a trap, but it's got damn fine bait, which is usually a good indicator. We don't even know if what he's saying about that ichor substance is true. For all we know he's scraped a bit of tree sap into a vial and made up a, frankly, extremely unlikely story about its properties.\"\n\n\"Then let's ask for a demonstration,\" Nita said. \"He said making phlogiston was trivial. My workshop has plenty of tools, and Gunner is no stranger to working with chemicals. If he can produce any phlogiston at all from the sample he brought, it would at least indicate there was some truth to his claims.\"\n\nGunner leaned on the table in front of him and eyed Nita. \"You just want to see how it's done, don't you?\" he said.\n\nNita smiled. \"Of course I want to see how it's done! What engineer wouldn't want to see? Gunner, you haven't stopped tinkering with that light gun of theirs since you got it. Don't tell me you haven't gotten a taste for their particular brand of ingenuity.\"\n\n\"I've got a taste for it when I'm pointing it at them.\"\n\n\"Well this is our chance to, just maybe, have an awful lot more of it to point with,\" Nita said. \"I'm with all of you. This does sound too good to be true. But sometimes things that sound too good to be true are true anyway. If it turns out to be a scheme, then we've gotten out of worse ones before. And at least this time it'll be coming from in front of us rather than behind us. The question here isn't should we trust him or not. The question is would you rather regret doing something dangerous or regret doing something safe, and I think my history speaks for itself on that issue.\"\n\nCaptain Mack glanced about again. \"Thoughts on this new argument our most junior member of the crew has presented?\"\n\n\"If you paint it like we're taking a gamble, then I ain't never been one to miss a chance at a good bet,\" Coop said. \"I suppose I'm for it.\"\n\nGunner considered his words for a moment. \"If he's able to do with that goop in the vial what he says he can, then I'd say it's at least worth a chance, provided we keep our eyes open the entire time for the inevitable double cross.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you all feel that way. Because we were going to do it regardless, but things go smoother when we're all tugging the line in the same direction,\" Captain Mack said. \"Let's go see if this fella can work some magic and set some minds a bit more at ease.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Digger stood in the gig room, looking a bit uncertain about what to make of Lil. She'd taken a seat on Nita's hammock and was swinging her feet, smirking at the fug person.\n\n\"You sure look funny with that little narrow head of yours sticking out of all them clothes. I wonder why fug folk are always so skinny.\"\n\n\"It is just the way we are,\" Digger said. \"If you don't mind the observation, you are smaller than I'd expected. A few of the former inmates told stories about you and Nita. I'm having a hard time imagining someone of your stature making fools of trained guards to the degree they described.\"\n\n\"It don't take much of a finger to pull a trigger,\" Lil said. \"And the way I figure it, being little's come in more handy than anything else.\"\n\n\"If you'll also excuse the observation, you have a\u2026 curious way about you. I'm not certain if you are a friend, or if you're waiting for a chance to shoot me.\"\n\n\"No reason I can't be one until I'm the other,\" Lil said. She glanced at a book tucked behind a belt that held it to the wall near the hammock. \"Say, I been meaning to ask someone from the fug this. You folk get into anything artsy down there?\"\n\n\"Artsy?\"\n\n\"Yeah, you know. Music, paintin', storytellin'. Pretty stuff. I know you make them cameras, but I can't imagine there's much down there worth taking pictures of, it being so dark.\"\n\n\"I'm partial to theater, myself.\"\n\n\"Oh. I was sort of hopin' for something I could maybe buy or borrow to show off.\"\n\n\"We've worked out a way to share theater. It's related to that camera you're familiar with. There's more development to be done on that front, but it is a remarkable effect if you get a chance to see it. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"Nita here,\" Lil said, patting the hammock. \"She and the folk back where she came from are all about stuff like that. I'm always trying to find things she might like. I worry that, being up here with us all the time, she might get to thinkin' she'd rather be home. I want her to be happy, you know? Because one of these day's we'll all learn to do her job like she's been learning to do ours, and we all know how to do each other's, mostly. And when that happens, she and us'd be square and she could hop off the Wind Breaker crew and stay home.\n\n\"That's why I bought her this book. It's the one book I can remember my mama readin' to us. Just kid stuff, rhymes and stuff, but there's lots of pictures. I guess she's been reading it, but I ain't seen her reading it. Her being the engineer and me being a deckhand, most days us getting time to spare that lines up with each other just ain't in the cards.\n\n\"But the details of what me and Nita do or don't find the time to do together isn't the point of the matter, Digger. The question is, do you know of any doodads and such that'd interest her? Artsy stuff. And tinkery too.\"\n\nDigger furrowed his brow. \"It isn't a matter of expertise for me, but I'll certainly put some thought into it if our association extends beyond this initial meeting.\"\n\n\"If this 'association' doesn't extend beyond 'this initial meeting,'\" she said, imitating his diction, \"then you're not gonna be keeping anything in mind at all. Because that'd mean we've reckoned you're trying to trick us, and like I said, it don't take much of a finger to pull a trigger.\"\n\nShe smiled sweetly and kicked her feet, not a hint of malice in her expression and no inkling that anything she'd said was out of the ordinary.\n\n\"You are a very disconcerting individual, Miss Cooper,\" he said.\n\n\"So I been told,\" Lil said.\n\nThe door opened and Coop, Nita, Gunner, and Mack entered. Lil hopped to her feet and stepped over to them.\n\n\"Has a decision been reached?\" Digger asked. Though there was a clear attempt, he had little success hiding the nervousness in his voice.\n\n\"Not just yet,\" Captain Mack said. \"One bit more. Call it a sign of good faith.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"You said it was trivial to make phlogiston from ichor, correct?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Trivial enough that you could do it with what we have here and what you have there?\"\n\n\"It isn't precisely my area of expertise.\"\n\nGunner crossed his arms.\n\n\"Seems like you got a lot of areas that ain't your expertise, Digger,\" Lil said.\n\n\"However, in expectation of the request for a demonstration, I had the fellow most familiar with the simplest form of the procedure give me some instructions.\"\n\nHe reached into his pocket. Before his hand reached bottom, Gunner, Coop, and Lil had their guns pointed at him, cocked and ready.\n\n\"You really ought to announce that sort of thing before you do it, Digger,\" Coop said.\n\n\"At what point in this potential partnership am I likely to be permitted to access my own pockets without prior announcement?\" Digger said, a flicker of anger flavoring his anxiety.\n\n\"Once it stops being potential,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Plus two or three days for good measure,\" Lil added.\n\n\"Well I'm going to remove a slip of paper and a small jar from this pocket, and then I'm going to retrieve the ichor sample from the other.\"\n\n\"Do it slow,\" Coop said.\n\nDigger revealed the described items and flipped open the piece of paper.\n\n\"It appears I shall require a double boiler, some glassware, and a pair of crucible tongs. We shall also need access to a reasonably well-ventilated workspace.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "In Fugtown, Mayor Ebonwhite approached the bottom of a substantial mound of paperwork. Running the affairs of the city was a substantial job, and one that had grown more substantial under his tenure. He was a man of exacting requirements, and he'd seldom found a subordinate capable of rising to them. Furthermore, while running Fugtown was task enough for anyone, he'd expanded his influence well beyond it. These days little went on beneath the fug that he did not consider his concern. He was a man with a great hunger for control, and it grew more ravenous by the day.\n\nHe was signing off on a request to construct a pair of new dry docks when a knock on his door broke his concentration.\n\n\"Mr. Fross?\" Ebonwhite said.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"I trust it is a very, very pressing message that has motivated you to interrupt me at this hour.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Then enter.\"\n\nMr. Fross pushed open the door. Mayor Ebonwhite's personal assistant was not a distinctive man by fug standards. Tall, slender, and slightly stooped, he dressed in dark colors and perpetually wore a vest. His hair was black against his white skin, and of late he'd been keeping his long, gaunt face clean-shaven. He held a small folder of pages.\n\n\"Would you like to read them yourself, or shall I summarize?\"\n\n\"Does it warrant perusal past the summary?\"\n\n\"Unlikely, there wasn't much to learn, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"Then summarize. I've still got a fair amount of matters to see to.\"\n\nHe opened the folder. \"You'd asked us too look further into Mr. Alabaster, as you were unsatisfied with the depth of your current knowledge. He operates out of Caer Fiona, which is at the edge of The Thicket. We've seldom had occasion to keep surveillance upon locations so far north and east, so our agents there are stretched rather thin. As you suspected, however, Alabaster has had a few somewhat suspect activities recently. First, a summary of what we've found of his history.\"\n\n\"Quickly, Mr. Fross.\"\n\n\"Alabaster operates no significant industry directly. Most of his wealth was inherited from his father, who had accumulated it during the cleanup efforts following the initial arrival of the fug. This allowed him to lay claim to some significant real estate, which made him a small fortune when sold some years later. Alabaster himself has maintained the fortune and grown it through some sensible investment. He has a small stake in nearly every local business concern, either by holding the title to their land or owning a portion of the business itself.\"\n\n\"Meaning,\" Ebonwhite broke in, \"he has intimate knowledge of the activities of each local business and, if he is at all intelligent, influence over the local workforce.\"\n\n\"That is my estimation as well.\"\n\n\"This would make him ideally suited to filling the gaps in our intelligence network in the region. If he'd approached me with that offer, I might have accepted it. Foolish that he instead came seeking work as a problem solver.\"\n\n\"To that end, sir, the only other significant information we were able to ascertain was that he has made some rather sizable donations to various educational and labor organizations. He's been ordering some low-grade silverware from North Circa in medium-size quantities through Precipice, and he commissioned the construction of a personal conveyance, the one that ferried him here and back. That is the only officially commissioned ship, but the variety and quantity of materials acquired for its construction is vastly in excess of requirements for such a vessel. We believe he is arming himself.\"\n\n\"Arming himself,\" Ebonwhite said. \"To what degree?\"\n\n\"Perhaps a small collection of scout-type ships or one larger combat vessel.\"\n\n\"So nothing that might threaten even the most outlying people under my protection.\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"I take from this that he is genuine in his interest in clashing with the Wind Breaker and her crew.\"\n\n\"That is a reasonable assessment.\"\n\n\"The man is a glory-seeking fool, and he seems set on feeding himself to the very wolves we are trying to starve. That is the sort of person likely to spoil many carefully weighed plans. What is the most recent information regarding the whereabouts of the Wind Breaker?\"\n\n\"There was a sighting of it heading north.\"\n\n\"If I recall correctly, this time of the month would see them returning to that island the captain purchased, then their trip back to Caldera. That would imply south and west, not north.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"So it is possible he's already set out the bait for his trap, whatever it might be\u2026 A scheme is playing out, and by virtue of the remoteness of its backdrop, it is doing so without my knowledge. Listen carefully, Fross. I want you to monitor any requests and shipments of things the Wind Breaker may need. Phlogiston, replacement parts, burn-slow, things of that nature. If an unusual quantity is headed in the direction of Alabaster or his holdings, I want to know immediately. He knows I plan to overcome the Wind Breaker by choking off its vital supplies. He may attempt to feed them enough phlogiston to make them a continued threat until I seek his aid.\"\n\nHe frowned and steepled his fingers. \"Select an agent, one who is skilled and as near to being incorruptible as we have in our employ, and send him north. If Alabaster isn't completely inept, he will no doubt be aware that we've sent him, and that will encourage him, but it can't be helped. I need eyes on what that fool might be doing.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"There's nothing I find more frustrating than finding a man who might be useful, but who prefers to be put to a different use,\" he said, shaking his head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Digger was clearly out of his element, handling the tongs as though they would bite him and watching anxiously as the water in the boiler rose past a simmer. It wasn't anything more complex than a bowl of water with an empty bowl set atop it and a burner set below, but he may as well have been handling a bomb with a short fuse from his apparent anxiety. The venue for the demonstration, thanks to the requirement for ventilation, was the gig room with the gig lowered a few inches. In order to spare Nita's corner any damage, they were working on the opposite side, and the crew had formed a quarter circle around the demonstration. The only person absent was Butch, who seldom saw the need to leave the galley.\n\n\"Would you like any help?\" Nita asked. \"You don't seem comfortable with the tools of the trade.\"\n\n\"My role thus far in any of the industries to which I've put my hand has always been administrative,\" Digger said, looking over his instructions. \"Unfortunately, this next portion is one that requires the hand of a fug person such as myself. First, some warnings. Ichor, in all but the smallest quantities, is phenomenally poisonous. It should not be consumed, inhaled, or allowed to touch unprotected flesh.\"\n\n\"Should we be wearing our masks?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"The instructions suggest the fumes will not be an issue, though there may be some spattering when heated.\"\n\nThe upper pot of the small double boiler was dancing, steam spurting from beneath its rim. Each rattle and spurt caused Digger to jump.\n\n\"If you'll excuse the observation, Digger, I don't think you've got the temperament for this venture,\" Nita said.\n\nDigger cracked the top of the vial containing the ichor and set the whole container into the upper bowl. He then opened the small glass jar and took back the tongs.\n\n\"I must again request that you all keep your distance. This paper has been treated with a solution of condensed fug. It is for purposes of illustration. As I'm sure you are all aware, the two key attributes of phlogiston are its exceptionally lighter-than-air nature and the illumination it produces when it comes into contact with the fug. I am instructed to hold it over the warming ichor.\" He did so. \"When the ichor reaches the proper temperature, a stream of compounds shall issue forth. The fug-treated swatch shall illuminate in the presence of phlogiston.\"\n\nFor a few moments, all waited while the heat slowly filtered into the mysterious substance. Digger's anxiousness, if it was not already exceptionally apparent, showed in the increasing shakiness of the tongs.\n\n\"About how long is this liable to take?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"I don't know. I've never performed the demonstration before. Until the well is secured, ichor is too precious to be squandered without good reason. The instructions claim the first sign of the reaction will be a cracking of the crust on the top of the ichor.\"\n\nThe substance obligingly chose that moment to begin. A small tinkling crackle came from the pot. Then came a curl of green gas that swept up and brushed against the swatch of paper, causing it to flash brilliant green.\n\n\"As our most chemically inclined crewmember, I must say that while I am intrigued, I am not impressed by this demonstration, Captain,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"I was hoping for something a mite more\u2014\" the captain began.\n\nBefore his hopes could be articulated, the ichor decided to rise to the occasion. A sharp snap sent fragments of white crystal scattering from the pot. Then came more phlogiston. Not an errant wisp, but a veritable spout. The green gas belched fourth nearly as wide as the opening of the pot, flitting up past the swatch of treated paper. The light from it was just short of blinding. The crew turned away and Digger flinched, dropping it into the pot where it flashed still brighter and brought with it a burst of heat before dying away.\n\nWith the light gone, the crew watched the phlogiston spread across the ceiling, seeking out every crack and crevice and filtering away. When the rush of gas finally finished nearly a minute later, all that was left behind in the boiler was a handful of small white crystals, some broken glass, and a black stain.\n\n\"That\u2026 was a fair distance on the other side of my hopes and expectations,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Would you fine ladies and gentlemen then consider this venture to be worthy of your investment and risk?\" Digger said.\n\nThere was a general murmur to the affirmative.\n\n\"I'd say we're done with the ifs and we're on to the hows and whens, Digger,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Ah\u2026\" Digger said, shakily setting down the tongs and fumbling with the burner. \"Good, good. Because those are matters I'm much more comfortable discussing.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of that for you,\" Nita said. \"A shaky hand with a burner like this is liable to start a blaze.\"\n\n\"I thank you,\" Digger said. \"Naturally, as you've included your crew in the decision-making process, from this point forward I would be remiss if I didn't do the same for my collaborators. It is my recommendation that we go our separate ways for now, meeting up once again at a location within the fug, which I've recorded right\u2026\" He paused. \"I am going to fetch a slip of paper from an inside pocket. Please do not interpret this as an act of aggression.\"\n\n\"The man's learning,\" Gunner said.\n\nDigger produced the page with the directions and presented it to Captain Mack. \"To provide you with time to supply yourselves and prepare for a trip into the fug, I would suggest meeting again in two days. That will also provide me time to travel to the meeting site. We have not been able to acquire an airship for our cause, so travel has been rather uncomfortably achieved by way of steam carts along the old roads.\"\n\n\"Just as well. If you want to keep working with us, all you folks ought to stay off airships entirely. Nothing that happens on a fugger airship stays secret for long,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"True enough. To that end, when you come I would recommend measures be taken to ensure stealth. I know you have a reputation of somehow escaping the watchful eye of my people, but it is now doubly important that you not be seen approaching the meeting place because, were you to be seen, it would reveal both of us. In your case I have no doubt that you can fight off the martial intent of any local contingent of Fugtown or its allies, but the Well Diggers, I assure you, cannot.\"\n\n\"We'll be discreet,\" Captain Mack said. \"Coop, drop the ladder and see Digger to his door. I'll see you all in the galley in twenty minutes to discuss preparations.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" Coop said.\n\nHe kicked down the ladder and did Digger the favor of climbing down to secure the bottom for his own descent. When the newcomer was out of earshot, the captain looked to his crew.\n\n\"Twenty minutes,\" Captain Mack repeated. \"Bring your questions, concerns, and other such thoughts, because one way or another we'll be setting our course by the time we bed down.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "The rest of the crew filed off to prepare for the forthcoming discussion, leaving Lil and Nita alone in the gig room.\n\n\"That was sure something, wasn't it?\" Lil said.\n\n\"It certainly was. That was as near to magic as I'm willing to admit exists,\" Nita said. \"I know a few people back home who would dearly love to be able to conjure such an effect on stage for the delight of the audience.\"\n\nShe picked up the bowl and wafted the air above it for a sniff. \"Oh my\u2026\" She coughed. \"That stinks terribly of the fug.\"\n\n\"He had that paper strip in there.\"\n\n\"There's no sign of it. And I swear the smell is stronger now than when he first revealed it. I wonder what that's about.\"\n\n\"I suppose you can ask him, if we go through with it,\" Lil said. She glanced over to Nita's hammock. \"I see you got that book I bought by your bed there.\"\n\n\"Of course! It's a delightful collection of stories. And some fine and colorful prints as well.\"\n\n\"I really liked lookin' at them when I was little. Ma and Pa weren't much for readin', so I only know about half the stories.\" She took a breath and whistled between her teeth. \"Twenty minutes. Seems like that's about as long as we've had to ourselves except for eating and sleeping since they sprung us from Skykeep.\"\n\n\"Captain Mack has been pushing us rather hard,\" Nita said, picking up the tongs and using them to stir at the shards of glass and crystal in the pot. \"Until this moment I've only had a passing interest in chemistry. But seeing the great force of that reaction and its small size, I almost wonder if it might do a better job than steam at pushing pistons.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know about that,\" Lil said, scuffing the floor with the toe of her boot. \"Like I was saying, we haven't had too much time to chat and such, so much work to be done. But I know you've been fixing up the workings of the ship so they're easier to keep up and such, right?\"\n\n\"That's right. I'm nearly through, too.\"\n\n\"And after that, you'll finish teaching us how to keep it up?\"\n\n\"Yes. It should be much simpler. If Captain Mack gives us the time, I don't imagine it will take more than a few weeks.\"\n\nLil nodded. \"And then?\"\n\n\"And then you'll be able to look after yourselves.\"\n\n\"And what'll be next for you?\"\n\n\"I hadn't put much thought into it yet. I suppose that's one of my faults, not looking more than a few steps ahead.\"\n\nLil nodded again, a hopeful smile coming to her face. \"Aw heck, Nita. That ain't no kind of fault. Most folk can't see more than a few steps ahead anyway. Seems to me trying to think ahead further than that is a waste of time, since the place you're planning to set your next step might not look anything like what you were expecting. I say focus on what's right in front of you and don't worry about what's ahead unless you have to. You never know what sort of happy things will come along that'd make those plans seem foolish anyway.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Planning for one's future is something most of my teachers tried to hammer into me back in school. Captain Mack has been putting a lot of thought into his future.\"\n\n\"Has he?\" Lil said.\n\nNita looked to her. \"Oh, come now, Lil. The captain has been having us ferry all our goods back and forth to Laylow Island from where we'd stashed it near Caldera. And you know our business in Lock was about its purchase, right?\"\n\nLil furrowed her brow. \"I'd not, uh, paid that much mind. But I suppose I remember some talk about that, on account of the amount of money involved. What's that got to do with his future, though? I reckon that's just because he ain't ever been one for squatting. The only reason he felt comfortable stowing our things on that island near you is most folk don't even dare head out that far, from hereabouts or Caldera. I figured Laylow was just a place we could moor up and unload from time to time without feeling like we're stepping on toes.\"\n\n\"I imagine you haven't paid much mind to this either, since it is mostly on display in his office and I'm called in there far more often than you, but he's spent a great deal of time working on figures and finance lately. He's got a buying list up on his wall. There's all sorts of lumber and other items on it.\"\n\n\"We've traded in that stuff before\u2026\"\n\n\"Lil, he bought the island, and now I'd say he's planning to build a home on it. Captain Mack is getting ready to retire. I'm sure he is going to share his plans with the rest of us once he gets closer to the goal.\"\n\nNita continued to stir through the pot and thus missed Lil's face dropping at the brief feeling of relief crushed by near panic.\n\n\"You, uh\u2026 you need me for anything right now?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Not at the moment. Why?\" Nita asked, turning toward her.\n\nLil turned away and headed for the door before Nita could look her in the eye. \"I just got some things I need to see to before we have our big meeting about what we're fixin' to do,\" she said quickly.\n\nShe didn't wait for Nita to reply, hurrying instead to the stairs that would lead her most directly to her room, or what passed for it. She reached the closet-size recess in a hallway that she shared with her brother and threw the curtain aside, plopping down onto her hammock and fixing her eyes on the wooden ceiling. Pinned to it was a photograph Nita had taken the time to make during one of their trips to Caldera, a grainy black-and-white representation of the whole crew. It was a rare occasion when they'd even managed to get Captain Mack and Butch to step off the Wind Breaker and onto the mainland.\n\nLil gritted her teeth and turned to the wall. \"Dang it, Lil, how simple are you? You're spending all this time worrying Nita's going to leave and you don't take the time to notice that everyone's fixin' to move on.\"\n\nA bit of motion caught her attention. A lump under the blanket on Coop's bed was moving. The edge of it toward the door lifted up slightly, then dropped quickly again. Lil's mouth curled a bit in a grin, and she reached out to slide the curtain shut. As soon as they had what passed for privacy on the Wind Breaker, the blanket slipped up to reveal Nikita. The little creature turned its large red eyes to Lil and hopped to the hammock beside her.\n\n\"Well aren't you the good little inspector,\" she said, lifting the creature onto her lap and stroking her under the chin. \"Sneaking and spying just like you been taught to. The stranger ain't about right now, so you don't have to hide no more for a bit.\"\n\nNikita reached over and drummed her long finger on Lil's hand. Both Wink and Nikita were more than capable of communicating by tapping out the code the other members of the crew had learned. Only Nikita seemed to have picked up the quirk of tapping her message directly on the person she wished to talk to when it wasn't meant for everyone. The little inspector had developed a taste for private conversation.\n\nLil was sad, Nikita tapped.\n\n\"Now, now. What've we been trying to teach you?\"\n\nLil is sad.\n\n\"That's better. And I don't know if sad's quite right, but I sure ain't happy.\"\n\nLil told Nikita\u2026 Nikita paused. Why is Lil sad?\n\n\"Now you're learning!\" Lil said, giving Nikita another scratch. \"Now, as for what you asked\u2026 you remember what it was you did before you joined us on the crew?\"\n\nNikita remembered. Nikita wished Nikita forgot.\n\n\"It wasn't a good time, was it? And when Coop scooped you up, all hurt like you were, and brought you on the Wind Breaker for Butch to patch up, he wasn't just saving you from your injuries, was he? He was saving you from the dead end of a life you were heading down. Well, Cap'n Mack did the same for me and Coop. We were goatherds. Not too good at it, neither. But as lousy as we were at that, it was a fair bit better than we were at anything else we put our minds to. Then a bad storm came and caused the fug to spill over our land. Took the whole herd. Almost took us with them. But the cap'n scooped us up. And like you, he wasn't just scooping us up out of our peril. He was giving us something better. I never done nothing in my life as well as I done this job. And I never had anyone stick around with me as long as I stuck around with these folks. You know Nita, right?\"\n\nNita gave\u2026 gives Nikita good food. Very good food.\n\n\"That's her. You critters sure do love them macaroons she gets. Anyhow, she was never supposed to be part of this crew. Sort of wormed her way on, rather than gettin' plucked up like Coop and me. And that meant she wasn't meant to stay on this crew, but because she got us on the bad side of the fuggers, she agreed to stick around until we could handle ourselves without her and without them. We're just about there now. And that means she'd be within her rights to take her leave and head back home. You ain't seen much of her home, Nikita, but it's a wonderful place. No one in their right mind with the means to live there would live anywhere else.\n\n\"The thing is, I got used to having the folks I like best being all around me. And she's most definitely one of the folks I like best. I was all in a tizzy wondering what I would do if she left. Now I find out the cap'n might be hanging it up. The one dang thing in my life that I've been any good at is about to dry up, and I ain't had mind enough to take notice.\" She sighed. \"Anyhow, that's what's got me wearing this sour face.\"\n\nIt is all right, Lil. Lil is smart and Coop is smart. Nikita will stay with Coop and Lil.\n\nLil reached up and loosened a belt on the wall that held some of her effects and pulled free a small box. From inside she pulled out a bit of breadfruit.\n\n\"You're a sweet little thing, Nicky,\" she said, giving the creature the treat. \"And you're learning to talk real good. Now same rules with this as any other thing you hear on this ship. Don't go telling nobody what I said.\"\n\nNikita nodded.\n\n\"There's a good girl,\" Lil said, lying back on the hammock.\n\nNikita curled atop her. Lil stroked the little creature and put her mind to work." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "The twenty minutes passed and the group found itself once more in the galley. Butch boiled up some coffee.\n\n\"I trust we all put these last few minutes to good use mulling over what we saw and what it means for our future?\" Captain Mack said.\n\nHis crew nodded in response.\n\n\"Good. Gunner, I'll hear from you first,\" he said.\n\n\"I still don't trust the fellow has anyone's best interests at heart but his own\u2014\" Gunner began.\n\n\"I wouldn't begrudge him that, because I'd say that's so of us all.\"\n\n\"\u2014but it is clear there is at least some truth to his claims.\"\n\n\"Some truth?\" Lil said. \"Did you see the phlogiston that gunk spat out? That was a half a canister, easy, and all he had to do was heat it up!\"\n\n\"He suggested there were even more efficient ways to produce the stuff, and therefore even greater potential yields,\" Nita added.\n\n\"But just because he has proved where phlogiston comes from, it doesn't mean this well he described is real. And even if it is, there's still the chance it exists merely as an admittedly tantalizing lure to a trap we have all already been expecting.\"\n\n\"A trap we're all expecting is just about the best trap we can hope for,\" Lil said. \"And if we're quick, we can probably snatch the bait before it springs. And if it ain't a trap, same result, except we don't have to be so quick.\"\n\n\"The fella seems a decent sort, as fug folk go,\" Coop said. \"Heck, he seems the decent sort as regular folk go. A little too smart for easy conversation, maybe. And scared out of his britches about having to deal with us, but that's just sensible. Knowing what he knows about us and what we done, I'd be a mite nervous dealing with us, too. This could be a double cross sure. But I don't reckon he's the one who'll do it. Even if he is an Ebonwhite.\"\n\n\"I'm still not fond of that. We've encountered three Ebonwhites thus far. We robbed one after he saw fit to milk us dry of all of our money and condemn Nita's mother to a slow death because there wasn't enough money in curing her. The other two got themselves killed in prison trying to do the same to Lil and Nita. It sets a poor precedent to dealings with the family, wouldn't you agree?\" said Gunner.\n\n\"The best way to make determinations about a man's character is to spend some time with the fella,\" Lil said.\n\nGunner crossed his arms. \"And the best way to avoid the machinations of a man of poor character is to avoid him entirely and be mindful of where to find him. The fug folk in general and the Ebonwhites in particular are too dangerous to be taken lightly. And I am speaking as a man who willfully handles unstable ordnance during his leisure hours.\"\n\n\"Nita? Care to give your impression on the situation?\" Captain Mack asked.\n\n\"To be perfectly frank, Captain, after that display, I'd be willing to dive into the fug knowing full well it was a trap, just to learn a bit more about this stuff and what other wonders it can work. Both Gunner and I have pored over the pages we unearthed during the heist of the storehouse, and while we've learned a great deal about the workings of their technology, not a scrap of information anywhere in the volumes we stole even suggested anything like this. If there are wonders like that to be uncovered, those alone would be worth the risk.\"\n\n\"Admirable though it is to pursue something for the joy of learning alone, that's not what we're after in this.\"\n\n\"If you wouldn't call it too much of an overstep, Cap'n, I think I know how we should handle this,\" Lil said.\n\n\"I'm all ears, Lil.\"\n\n\"We agree to the plan. We meet him where we said we would, and we follow through like we're all dedicated and such. We keep our eyes open, but as bad as things might look, we stick with them at least as long as it takes to find out where this ichor well is. By then we should have a pretty good read on the situation. If things look good, we go through with the plan, no one the wiser about what we might have been planning otherwise. If we decide it stinks, then we make our own trip to the ichor well, pump up a couple barrels of the stuff, and hightail it back to Laylow or that place near Caldera and set down until Nita and Gunner here can work out how to make our own phlogiston.\n\n\"No matter how things turn out, we got enough to keep our envelope nice and full for years, and that means we can keep the crew together and in the air for a long time to come.\"\n\nLil looked to the rest of the crew. Mack did the same.\n\n\"Its source notwithstanding, the plan is sound,\" Gunner allowed.\n\nCoop gave Lil a slap to the back. \"That's my sister doing some world-class figuring. Next thing you know she'll be takin' the wheel while the cap'n sleeps.\"\n\n\"I agree. I think it is a very sound approach,\" Nita said. \"I might amend, if it is our plan to attempt to do our own preparation of phlogiston, it might be helpful to have a word with this chemist they are after. As while we've seen the creation of the gas, we've not seen what it takes to make burn-slow. And the warnings of the danger of ichor are reason enough to investigate the substance carefully before we begin working with it.\"\n\n\"Agreed. So we'll take this enterprise as far as its midpoint. Bend the ear of the chemist, make our way to the well, and start preparations for a defense and harvest of the stuff. At that time, if we suspect they are meaning to do us dirty, we'll do them dirty first, and it won't be anything they didn't earn. And if they earn better, then we'll have partners in a place we never expected to have them. As Digger suggested, the next two days had best be spent preparing. We need to be ready for a lengthy stay in the fug, or at the very least several shorter ones. We'll need to be armed, not just for fighting men but for fighting whatever manner of beasts we might find, and other airships in the worst case. We'll need to be ready to spring someone from a prison, or something like it. And we'll need room in our hold for ferrying supplies and bringing back one hell of a load of phlogiston and burn-slow, because if things go as well as they might, you'd better believe we are going to make our first taste of their hospitality enough to fill our bellies, just in case we don't get another taste.\n\n\"If we overstoke, and the wind is with us, we can get to Keystone and back again before the time comes for our meeting. That's where we're headed.\"\n\n\"We might have some difficulties there,\" Gunner said. \"That's right outside Fugtown and thus well within the influence of the most worrisome of the Ebonwhites.\"\n\n\"It can't be helped. That's the only place local that will fill all our needs for sale and purchase. Do I need to hand out individual orders, or do we all know our piece?\"\n\n\"I think we can manage,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Then get to them. Gunner, you're on the wheel. I need to close my eyes for a few hours.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "After watching the Wind Breaker depart, and giving his nerves time to settle, Digger locked up his rented room and paced into the mines. Within a shaft that was no longer being worked stood a wire-caged elevator, and though the rest of the tunnel was neglected and ignored, its machinery was well oiled. He gave a good hard tug to a line beside the elevator, then stepped inside. A few moments later a distant grind rang out below him and the elevator began to descend. A minute into the descent it plunged down into a purple cloud of mist that was the reason for the abandonment of the mine. The crew had punched through to natural caves that were saturated with the fug.\n\nA chemical coldness spread across his skin, easing his anxiety in the same way the shade of a familiar tree can provide respite from the summer's heat. Though a fug person was able to breathe and interact above its surface and the same could not be said of a surface dweller below it, Digger had never once felt comfortable or at ease when out from beneath the sheltering blanket of fug.\n\nThe rails and workings of the elevator were fresher beneath the fug and built with more precision. This was because they were the work of the fug folk themselves. Springcrest was one of only a handful of places where the miners had been imprudent enough to open a path to the fug, Lock being another. As such they offered the only means aside from an airship for fug folk to access the surface dwellers without climbing gear. Though the fug folk seldom had reason to have discreet dealings with the surface, maintaining the means to do so was valuable.\n\nNearly five minutes after he'd stepped onto the elevator, it reached the bottom. A shack had been built around the base of the rails, and inside was a taller, more sturdily built fug person in mining gear.\n\n\"So, how did it go? Did they show up?\" the man said, with all the enthusiasm of a child asking about the circus that was in town.\n\n\"They did. My hands are still shaking. It was an imposing lot.\"\n\n\"Imposing, sure, but a fun lot. You get to meet Lil and Nita?\" he asked.\n\n\"I got the meet them all, Kent, but most of my direct dealings were with Lil, the captain and\u2026 I believe the name was Coop?\"\n\n\"Oh sure. Fun lot, all of them. They agree?\"\n\n\"I believe we shall see them all, at least once more, at the indicated meeting place.\"\n\n\"Oh, they'll see it through. Like I said. A great lot. If they could take down the Phylactery, they can tackle this, no trouble.\"\n\n\"Again, having met them, they certainly seem vicious enough for the task. It's\u2026 off-putting, Kent. One moment they appear simple but civil. The next, weapons are raised and they seem cheerful at the chance to draw blood.\"\n\n\"They ain't in it for the blood, Digger. My only dealings were as one of the inmates they set free when they brought the prison down. If they'd wanted to, they could have killed the lot of us. They took careful pains not to, and even patched up the ones who were tossed about too much. I'd hate to be on their wrong side, or between them and what they've set their minds to, but they don't kill except those who've earned it and those who work for those who've earned it.\"\n\n\"I'll make no argument with your assessment of their formidable nature, though owing to your history with them, I would hope if they do rendezvous with us, you will speak to my trustworthiness.\"\n\n\"They didn't seem like they trusted you?\"\n\n\"As you say, they are more than willing to murder those who have earned the targets painted upon their backs. I would not be the first Ebonwhite to bear that distinction, or even the third. Their estimations of my character are justifiably skewed.\"\n\n\"I been working with you near since I got set free, Ebonwhite, and I still only understand every third word you say. But I'll do my best to set their minds at ease about you.\"\n\n\"How have things progressed in my absence? Any unforeseen difficulties?\" Digger asked, pacing toward the door of the shack.\n\n\"Nothing unforeseen, no. We saw every one of them coming. First, guns and things of that sort have been easy enough to get, but ammunition has been in short supply. We're pretty thin on volunteers for either the gathering of our chemist or the expedition into The Thicket. For the chemist, most of the folks I shared the prison with aren't keen on showing their faces in a place where they might be recognized and returned to\u2026 wherever they're putting folks like us now that the Phylactery is down. I don't imagine you need me to describe the reasons for not wanting to travel past the posted roads in The Thicket. The sound alone from what lurks among those trees is liable to test a man's resolve.\"\n\n\"It's a wonder we were able to get any samples of the ichor at all. What happened to that\u2026 Louis gentleman who brought these back, and who completed the map to the place?\"\n\n\"He set off on another trip to the well, seeking more samples, so he said.\"\n\n\"When do you expect him to return?\"\n\n\"Four days ago. Or more accurately, not at all.\"\n\n\"Good heavens\u2026 has he any next of kin to inform?\"\n\n\"I don't think a man with next of kin would have made the first trip, let alone the second.\"\n\n\"I hate to sound uncaring, but\u2014\"\n\n\"We've got copies of the map. Donald, one of the fellows unlucky enough to be on the first expedition and lucky enough to get back, vouches for the accuracy.\"\n\n\"Excellent. And the other preparations?\"\n\n\"Plenty of raw materials. Lumber, steel, brass, pipes, valves, and such. We can build a fortress, if the wildlife can be persuaded to leave us be long enough to do it.\"\n\n\"And the machinery? For mechanized defenses?\"\n\n\"Loads of bits and pieces, like I said. And most of us made our wages in shipyards and factories. We can build from plans just fine, but there aren't any designers and inventors among us, so there would be the issue of who might provide the instructions. But if what Lil said about Nita and Gunner is true, passable designs should be forthcoming.\"\n\n\"We are placing a good deal of confidence in these people.\"\n\n\"Digger, I'll say this to you, and then I'll be on my way, because two days is barely time enough to finish up the tasks ahead. I know what it's like to be a friend to these folks. And we've all heard what it's like to be an enemy to them. Of the two, I'm keen on being the first and pray nightly that I never become the second.\"\n\nKent turned and packed off into the darkness, lit by the lamp on his helmet.\n\n\"That doesn't quite set my concerns to rest, Kent,\" Digger said.\n\n\"It wasn't meant to, Digger.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Hours into the hardening night, Gunner remained at the helm. As ever, he was sharply dressed, his heavy clothes coordinated and ornamented as a member of the military, even if his present position was firmly civilian. Lil was on watch, and both Nikita and Wink had joined her. Each was huddled within the coils of hose that fed the turbine on either side of the envelope's underside. The steam running through them kept each nest toasty warm, though from their expressions when they glanced down, the wind still chilled them a bit.\n\nLil paced up to the wheel and lingered in the dim glow of the phlo-light that kept Gunner from working in complete darkness. She had her rifle at her shoulder and was bundled even more thoroughly than Digger had been.\n\n\"Look at 'em up there, Gunner. All huddled and shivering with every gale. You reckon we could make something for 'em to wear?\"\n\nGunner looked at Lil. \"We didn't worry about that during the several prior winters Wink had to endure as our inspector.\"\n\n\"That's before the little bugger turned out to be a such a grumpy little sweetheart. Plus he's got his little friend. Puts a special light on something, having to see it happen twice at once.\"\n\n\"You already coddle and cuddle them. Now you'll dress them up?\"\n\n\"If it'll make 'em more comfy, why not?\" She turned to the bow of the ship. \"So how's the navigation going?\"\n\n\"We are following the shoreline south, Lil. It isn't a puzzle. Put the land on the port side and continue until Keystone presents itself. It is more of a test of endurance than anything else, which is probably why the captain entrusted it to me.\"\n\n\"How's the Wind Breaker handle these days?\"\n\n\"Like a proper ship, and has been ever since Nita joined the crew.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Ever since Nita joined the crew\u2026\" Lil said quietly to herself.\n\n\"What was that?\" Gunner asked.\n\n\"Just thinkin' out loud.\"\n\n\"Better that way than not at all, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Gunner\u2026 the, uh\u2026 the cap'n bought that island, right? Laylow?\"\n\n\"He did. Or at least he's set down the initial payment and hasn't missed any subsequent ones.\"\n\n\"Why do you figure he did?\"\n\n\"The man is in his declining years, Lil. I imagine it is for his retirement.\"\n\n\"You reckoned that too, huh? Nita said the same thing.\"\n\n\"Like navigation at present, it isn't a puzzle.\"\n\n\"I hadn't worked it out, myself.\"\n\n\"This doesn't surprise me.\"\n\n\"When do you reckon the cap'n's going to hang up his hat?\"\n\n\"His share of what we've got, plus what we've got left to earn, is just enough for the full cost of the island. But our primary income being trade, there's still the matter of exchanging those goods for items that could be used to balance the debt with the city of Lock. If it could be achieved in less than two years, I would be quite impressed. He'll also need to construct a home, though I suppose with enough additional income that could happen while the payments are being made, provided trustworthy labor could be found.\"\n\n\"What do you reckon happens after that?\"\n\n\"He moves in, puts his feet up, and actually sleeps for the first time in forty years, I would imagine.\"\n\n\"\u2026 And what happens to us?\"\n\n\"I haven't a clue, Lil. That would depend on a number of decisions the captain would have to make. The Wind Breaker is his ship, after all. If it continues to operate under another captain, or if he sells it to an interested party, or perhaps trades it to the bank to expedite the purchase of the island, all occurs at Captain Mack's behest.\"\n\n\"But any way you weigh it\u2026 we ain't the same crew no more,\" Lil said. In spite of her best efforts, her voice trembled.\n\nGunner looked to her. \"Is something wrong, Lil?\"\n\n\"Let's suppose Cap'n says he's hanging it up, and he's getting rid of the Wind Breaker.\"\n\n\"Of all possibilities, I think that's the least likely.\"\n\n\"Even so. If the Wind Breaker crew gets broke up, where do you reckon you'll land?\"\n\n\"I am a classically trained munitions officer from West Circa Academy. I've got more than a decade of capable, if not decorated, service. I'm sure any venture private or military would be happy to have me.\"\n\n\"Even with you threatening to blow the side off the ship twice a month with your tinkering on this and that?\"\n\n\"\u2026 I imagine I'll need to curtail my more ambitious experiments.\"\n\n\"And Butch\u2026 she's a good cook and a good doc. She'd be able to get a job anyplace too. I reckon Cap'n would keep Wink. But then there's me and Coop. We ain't winnin' any prizes. Folk won't be trippin' over themselves to take us on.\"\n\n\"You follow orders with reckless enthusiasm, the both of you. You'll have no trouble finding work.\"\n\n\"Even so!\" Lil snapped. \"It won't be with this crew. This thing we got. This little, heck\u2026 this family we put together, would be all torn up and parted out like a busted-up boiler stripped for parts. And yeah, maybe every part will find a place and keep on spinning and doing its work. But it ain't the same boiler no more.\"\n\n\"Crews change. This isn't my first ship, and I didn't have any illusions on it being my last.\"\n\n\"It is my first ship, and I sure expected it to be my last.\"\n\n\"No sense worrying about it now, Lil. Judging from the challenge we've all agreed to take on, the idea of us all having to go our separate ways in a few years is rather optimistic. For all we know, our ship could be minus a few members in a week.\"\n\n\"Aw, we'll come through this just fine. \u2026 You been\u2026 you been the one getting the most direct education from Nita about how to tinker with the boiler and turbines and such.\"\n\n\"I have, in relative terms. It would be a more equitable split if you, Coop, or anyone else aboard showed even a fraction of the interest and capacity as I have.\"\n\n\"Didn't she chase you out of the boiler room two weeks ago yelling something about overpressure or similar?\"\n\n\"She is highly protective of the systems and unwilling to permit me the leeway to uncover any potential martial applications to her modifications.\"\n\n\"So you reckon she's not liable to hand the care of the boiler over to you anytime soon, do you?\"\n\n\"I swear, Lil. This is by a wide margin the most inquisitive I've ever seen you. If you'd had this same zeal for knowledge in the past few months, you would be the one preparing to take Nita's task from her. What does it matter to you? Eventually we'll all learn it.\"\n\n\"And then she'll be on her way,\" she said, her voice trembling again.\n\n\"Egad, Lil. You sound nearly as troubled at the suggestion of our engineer leaving as at the thought of the whole crew disbanding.\"\n\n\"She's my friend, Gunner. And the only lady we ever had on this crew near my age. And her leaving isn't something that's maybe going to happen next year or maybe the one after. Her days with us are numbered. I feel it in my bones.\"\n\n\"Has she announced her intention to leave?\"\n\n\"She said she doesn't know yet, but you and I both know it would take a dang fool to willingly stay in this sort of life when you been raised expecting the sort of life she left behind. She's here out of obligation and maybe out of gratitude, but neither of those is cause for a life of flitting about for a girl too pretty and too smart for such.\"\n\nGunner looked to her again. \"I'm not entirely certain what worries you more. The thought of her staying or the thought of her going.\"\n\n\"Neither's a rosy outcome. One's good for me and bad for her, and the other's the other way round.\"\n\n\"What can I say, Lil? Ignorance is bliss. Your present vexation is evidence at least of wisdom finally breaching your thus far impenetrable defenses.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, if this is wisdom, you can keep it.\"\n\n\"I should point out, the sources of your concern are Nita and Captain Mack. Have you brought your concerns to either?\"\n\n\"I already told you, I talked to Nita, and that's how I know she ain't decided.\"\n\n\"But have you discussed your feelings on the subject with either?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Don't you think that's worth doing?\"\n\n\"Ornery as the cap'n is right now, and with all the doing that's to be done, you reckon now's a proper time to bother him with such?\"\n\n\"No. But I wouldn't have wanted you to bother me with it, and that hasn't stopped you. And how does that factor in to your decision to leave Nita in the dark?\"\n\n\"Aw heck, I don't know.\" She pulled her coat tighter. \"Air's got a nasty bite to it this evening. I'm going in to fetch some hot cider. You want any?\"\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\n\"All right. Oh, and just so we're clear, just because I talked about all this with you doesn't mean you can go running your mouth to other folk about it.\"\n\n\"Nothing could be further from my intention.\"\n\nLil made her way from the deck. Gunner shook his head. After a moment or two, a light tapping along the rigging over his head drew his attention.\n\n\"Nikita?\" he said.\n\nLil told me not to\u2026 tell anyone what she told you.\n\nHe furrowed his brow and set his eyes on the flickering lights set atop the taller mountains.\n\n\"She told the inspector. She told the inspector before she told me. I don't know what it says about that girl that she'd tell her woes to a creature. Or what it says about me that I was the second choice,\" he muttered. \"And I certainly don't know what it says about me that I'm irritated by the idea of being runner up to Nikita in that regard. \u2026 What I wouldn't give for a wailer attack right about now\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Perhaps it was because the most organized of their enemies had their attentions elsewhere, or perhaps it was because the growing reputation of the crew had given the majority of their disorganized enemies pause, but the journey to Keystone and back had been uneventful. The reaction of the locals had been evenly split between awed reverence of the crew and their exploits and vicious anger at the complications those exploits had heaped upon their lives. Money and goods, however, hold no grudges, and even the most irritable of shopkeepers had been willing to part with the supplies they required when a fair price was offered. For the most part\u2026\n\n\"Shame we couldn't get our hands on some burn-slow. Between the trip down and the trip back, it don't look good,\" Coop said from the lookout position on the starboard side.\n\n\"Yes, Coop. I worked the numbers and saw the inventory. I know we're coming up short. That's what this whole endeavor is intended to set straight, or weren't you paying attention?\"\n\n\"Just idle talk, Cap'n,\" Coop said sheepishly.\n\n\"Idle talk is talk I ain't got time for at present, Coop, so keep it to yourself.\"\n\nThe setting sun marked the end of the second day of travel, and they were pulling up to a feature of the Westrim coastline called Indigo Falls. It was a low, narrow valley leading nearly to the sea. The valley was carved by a river that now trickled with inky blackness down the mountainside, staining it deep purple. Layered atop this waterfall was a second one, formed by the fug itself, which poured in a steady stream through the valley and onto the sea there.\n\nIt was a handy landmark for navigation, but for the bold or those interested in avoiding observation it had a different purpose. The relative abundance of the fug on the seaward side of the valley made it undesirable for surface settlement, and the relative thinness of the fug on the inland side made it undesirable for fug settlement. This left it almost entirely unobserved, and thus anyone wishing to enter the fug quietly could do so through the valley with little threat of being seen. It was also just a few hours southwest of their intended rendezvous with the Well Diggers.\n\nCaptain Mack steadied the wheel with his knee and pulled his well-worn fug mask from the pocket of his overcoat. In the past he'd had to wear it when handling things like the repair of his ship and the acquisition of fug-made supplies during trips to Fugtown. Lately the uses had been more varied but less frequent.\n\n\"We're about to enter the fug,\" he said, leaning low to the speaking tube. \"Masks on, and sound off when they are secured so we can enter.\"\n\nOne by one the crew replied over the speaking tubes, their voices slightly muffled by the filtering apparatus.\n\n\"I want all of you up here on lookout, except Gunner and Glinda. Gunner I want ready to load the fore guns. Glinda I want ready to treat casualties. The rest I want with your eyes peeled for any sign of fuggers on land or in the air. Hostile or otherwise, I want to know if anyone down there sees us. Because if we're walking into the jaws of a trap, this is the first chance they'll get to spring it or, failing that, to tip their hand to their intentions.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" came the chorus of replies.\n\n\"You ever been to this place, Cap'n? This place they're having us meet?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"What'd I say about idle talk, Coop?\" Mack rumbled.\n\n\"It ain't idle. I wonder if there's hills or trees or such like. Or if it's one of them old towns they took to living in the center of. It'd be useful to know if we're going to have to find a spot to moor up, and how far we're liable to be traipsing on foot.\"\n\n\"All right, Coop. So it isn't idle talk. It's just foolish talk. Of course I haven't been here before. This is a place secret even to the other fuggers, so you suppose they invited me for tea some evening or another? And if they had, don't you suppose you'd know, you being on my crew for all these years?\"\n\n\"Could've been from before\u2026\" Coop said quietly.\n\n\"What's that?\" Mack snapped.\n\n\"Just idle talk, Cap'n. I'll quiet down.\"\n\nThe crew filed to the deck and took up positions at the railing. Captain Mack reached into his coat to retrieve his cigar tin. The next of his smokes had nearly been lit when he remembered the mask that would prevent him from enjoying it. He cursed quietly to himself, then tore it in half and loosened his mask enough to shove the wad of soaked tobacco into his cheek. He turned to find his crew faithfully at their stations.\n\n\"None of you ever guided the Wind Breaker through a pass this narrow, have you?\"\n\n\"No, Cap'n,\" Coop said. \"You always take the wheel for narrow bits like this.\"\n\n\"Who wants to step up? Learn how to do it?\"\n\n\"Why, Cap'n?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"Because I'm asking. How do I like the jobs divided up across my crew?\"\n\n\"Everybody knows how to do everything, but each crewmember knows his piece best,\" Coop said.\n\n\"And my piece is the guiding of the ship, and of the crew. And it seems that's the one bit I haven't passed around near as much as I ought to. So someone step up and put your hands to the wheel so you can learn the way to do this part.\"\n\n\"Why don't you do it, Nita?\" Lil said.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know\u2026\" Nita said.\n\n\"That might not be the best idea, Lil,\" Gunner said. \"This would be a poor way to start her education in earnest, since a wrong move could be rather disastrous.\"\n\n\"Well seems right then, don't it? Since Nita's the one that'd need to fix it if it busted, seems like her being the one to bust it is only fair.\"\n\n\"Miss Graus, step up,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Captain, I'm not sure\u2014\" Nita began.\n\n\"It isn't up for debate anymore. Step up.\"\n\nThe engineer climbed the steps to the helm. The captain stepped back and let her take the wheel.\n\n\"Widen up those legs in case she fights you,\" Mack said. \"Thanks to your tuning, it don't happen much anymore, but it happens, and you don't want her to throw you. You'll want to take her up just a touch. The valley's narrower than the fug makes it look.\"\n\nNita took a hand from the wheel and turned a valve. Above her the mechanism that piped phlogiston in and out of the envelope increased the mixture just a bit more.\n\n\"It's moving sideways, Captain,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Good you spotted it. Not always easy to notice. That's crosswind. The turbines only handle thrust, yaw, and a bit of pitch. When wind comes from the side, you have to turn a bit to compensate. We run an eight-spoke wheel. A hair less than two spokes starboard for this kind of wind.\"\n\nShe adjusted the wheel. Her breathing was shaky.\n\n\"You nervous, Miss Graus? If so, I do believe this would be the first time I've seen that particular sight.\"\n\n\"It's just the first time I've felt the work of my engineering actually at my fingertips.\"\n\n\"It gets to be intoxicating, Miss Graus. These days the only sort of intoxication I can properly enjoy.\"\n\nThe ship moved closer to the valley, Nita adjusting the wheel in an attempt to keep it centered.\n\n\"You'll want to back off the throttle, and mind the pitch change when you do. You don't want the darkness in the fug to sneak up on you, so get the lights on now.\"\n\nThe controls, at least, she didn't need to be told how to operate. In the course of her refit of the ship to be more easily maintained she'd done a fair amount of work on them and knew just what each of them did and how.\n\nShe held steady as the face of the cliff drew closer.\n\n\"What do you reckon you'll have to do when you take her into the valley?\"\n\n\"Avoid hitting the walls of the valley?\" Nita offered.\n\n\"And how best to you reckon you'll achieve that?\"\n\nNita watched the valley draw nearer. \"I would need to keep it moving straight.\"\n\nHe chewed the cigar in his mouth. \"True enough.\"\n\n\"If I'm missing something, tell me. I just put a polish on those turbines; I'd hate to have to buff out any fresh scrapes or hammer out any dents.\"\n\n\"If I wanted to steer the ship myself, I'd have my hands on the wheel.\"\n\nHer eyes darted as they drew near enough for the fug to start to pour onto the deck.\n\n\"\u2026 The crosswind!\" she realized. \"There won't be any crosswind in the valley.\"\n\nNita started to straighten the ship, but Captain Mack caught the wheel. \"You want to be pivoting as we slide in. Any sooner and you'll strike the wall in the direction of the wind, any later and you'll strike the wall toward the wind. How many spokes off center are you?\"\n\n\"Um\u2026\"\n\n\"That will become valuable information in a moment, Miss Graus.\"\n\n\"Two spokes.\"\n\n\"Get ready to pull her four spokes to port then, and then two spokes to starboard.\"\n\nWind whistled across the cliff face as they began to slide inside.\n\n\"Four spokes, Miss Graus.\"\n\nShe spun the wheel and the ship began to shift. It seemed to lurch toward the far wall.\n\n\"Two spokes.\"\n\nNita adjusted the heading just as the momentum of their turn tapered out. The ship continued its slide. Its outermost turbine brushed the valley wall enough to knock some gravel free.\n\n\"Steady as she goes. It widens a bit from here.\"\n\nThe engineer took a few more shaky breaths and squinted into the thick purple mist, tinted almost black by the green lights hung beneath the nose of the ship. Once they were clear of where the fug met the clean air, it thinned somewhat, and the fading glow of the sunset completely vanished, filtered out by the blanket of fug through which they traveled.\n\n\"Any other specific orders, Captain?\"\n\n\"If you go far wrong, I'll shout the corrections. Piloting a ship is about the feel, and you won't get the feel with me shouting in your ear.\"\n\nShe gripped the wheel tight and did her best to keep the ship on course. At its narrowest the valley offered five feet of clearance on either side, which sounded like more than enough until the wheel was in one's hands. It was quite straight, too. Even so, three times the turbines scraped the wall and twice the captain called out a spoke this way or that. A few minutes later the ship slid into the open, no harm for the journey but for a few bright scrapes and a badly shaken engineer.\n\n\"That'll do it for now, Miss Graus. That's the worst of flying a ship. Learn to read the wind, read the stars, and read a map and the only thing I'll have on you is forty years behind the wheel.\" He raised his voice. \"And as for the rest of you. Shame on you huddling so close. You were liable to upset the balance for Nita and send the whole ship pitching forward.\"\n\nHe and Nita turned to find Gunner, Lil, and Coop standing close to the helm, where they had gathered to anxiously watch Nita's inaugural time behind the wheel. She stepped down, allowing the captain to take the wheel again. When his back was turned, Nita gave Lil a halfhearted shove to the arm.\n\n\"What was that all about, volunteering me like that?\" Nita whispered, a smirk showing in her eyes and robbing the tone of its teeth.\n\n\"Don't tell me you never wondered what it was like to fly the Wind Breaker.\"\n\n\"Maybe I did, but you didn't have to toss me into the flames on my first try!\"\n\n\"Oh, like that's not how you go about all your business, Nita. You're a jump-with-both-feet kind of girl.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but not when other people's lives hang on it.\"\n\nThey each turned to the side of the ship. Though they intended to keep a lookout for ships, there wasn't anything to see. After early afternoon and continuing until late morning, the fug was little more than an inky void. A ship would be visible, if at all, thanks to the green glow of its lights. If the crew didn't wish to be seen and thus ran with no lights at all, the best hope they'd have would be the flicker of lights from within. If anyone was going to warn them of approaching ships, then it would be the inspectors. Once again perched in their nests against the belly of the envelope, their bat-like ears were turned to the darkness. Trained to pick out the tapping of the claws of one of their own at more than a mile away, the shudder of a boiler at ten times that distance would be like a stampede.\n\n\"Anyhow,\" Lil said, \"now you know how to do that. So that's one more way you're fit for the crew.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but fair's fair. When I have to climb up and tend to the turbines for the damage they sustained thanks to your volunteering of me, you'll be the one doing the tending right along with me.\"\n\n\"Aw heck, Nita. It ain't like nobody but me and Coop is even willing to climb up there with you to hand you wrenches and such anyway. That's no bother.\"\n\n\"No, no. You'll be the one using the wrenches.\"\n\n\"You sure that's a good idea?\"\n\n\"It's as good an idea as putting me at the helm during that little maneuver.\"\n\n\"That's enough talk,\" Captain Mack rumbled. \"Eyes and ears open. I'm shutting off the lights and taking us low, so the ship shall require my full attention.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "In almost complete darkness, with neither landmark nor sky to offer guidance, navigation within the fug was difficult. Finding a meeting place that, crucially, could not be found by anyone else was even more trying. Even with the skill of Captain Mack at the wheel, it took them until nearly midnight before something distinctive enough to be their destination presented itself in the gloom.\n\nThe landscape in this part of the fug was mostly deserted. Though the Wind Breaker's crew had spent more time unsupervised beneath the fug than any right-minded group should have, they'd spent much of their time too high to see the ground or in the reclaimed husks of precataclysm cities. Open country was something they'd seen only fleetingly. It was eerie and depressing. What a few generations ago would have been a rolling field of emerald grass now appeared as a crunchy dry expanse of black and ashy gray. Trees were gnarled and free of leaves, their bark stained by the fug. The one thing that indicated life at all was a small cottage and a scattering of small steam carts, the sort normally used to ferry goods within a city but retrofitted to carry a half-dozen passengers each.\n\nEven as standing deadwood, the roots of the trees ran deep, so Lil and Coop used them to moor the Wind Breaker before all but Butch and the inspectors climbed down the ladder. Lil and Coop sported their rifles, as well as whatever smaller weapons could be reasonably concealed beneath their coats. Captain Mack had his usual sidearm hung at his belt. Only Nita was unarmed, instead holding a lantern. Gunner had chosen a different sort of weapon.\n\n\"Gunner,\" Nita said, \"not that I'm not in awe of your innovative design, but are you certain that thing will even fire?\"\n\nGunner raised his weapon, which looked like someone had grafted a small wagon wheel to the body of a revolver in place of its usual cylinder.\n\n\"Oh, it will fire. I've tested it extensively. What's more, it will fire thirty-six times before I need to reload,\" Gunner said. \"And the intimidation factor is not to be ignored.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but how long does it take you to reload?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Four minutes. But that is entirely beside the point. By the time I need to reload, all potential assailants in the area will be dead, injured, or wisely seeking cover.\"\n\n\"Plus he could probably clock them in the head with that thing. And holding it up is liable to keep that arm good and strong,\" Coop observed.\n\n\"You sure you don't want a gun, Nita?\" Lil asked. \"I got a little one I keep in my boot I could borrow you.\"\n\n\"I'd rather not. I've not taken the time to become proficient with them. I'd be as likely to hurt one of you as whoever I was targeting. A good heavy wrench has served me well enough in the past. Also, this being our first proper meeting with the Well Diggers, diplomatically it seems like at least a few of us should be relatively unarmed as a showing of good will.\"\n\n\"Or poor judgment,\" Gunner said.\n\nThe group crunched along the dry grass until the glow of the lantern fell upon the door of the cabin. It was a curious sight for a building within the fug, as it was new construction rather than a reclaimed property. Well-seasoned wood, standing dead for many years, had been roughly shaped into a sturdy but simple structure with no windows and a door heavy enough to turn away a battering ram.\n\nCaptain Mack stepped up to the door. The muffled sound of murmuring voices through it indicated there was a crowd within. Mack rapped on the door. The subdued voices became silent.\n\n\"Who's there?\" replied a voice within.\n\n\"Who-all do you think is here?\" Lil shouted back, her sudden voice causing the whole group to flinch.\n\n\"Lil\u2026\" Captain Mack rumbled.\n\n\"What? They invited us, didn't they? It isn't like anyone else is liable to be knocking.\"\n\nThe door opened. Nita held her lantern high to reveal no less than four people clustered to peer out the door. All faces had the long, pale, gaunt features of fug folk. The foremost among them was Digger.\n\n\"Did you come alone?\" he asked.\n\n\"Who would we bring?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"Coop\u2026\" Captain Mack snapped.\n\n\"It ain't our fault they're asking dopey questions, Cap'n,\" Lil defended.\n\n\"Until matters specifically concern you,\" Gunner said, \"I suggest you let the captain conduct the business at hand.\"\n\n\"Come inside, quickly,\" Digger said.\n\nHe swung the door open and ushered them inside. The interior of the cottage was as plain as the outside. Almost the entire space was taken up by a single room, and with the addition of the Wind Breaker crew, there were nearly twenty people, which was a half-dozen more than the room could comfortably hold.\n\nWhen the door was shut again, the Well Diggers and the Wind Breaker crew took a silent moment to measure their counterparts. It was a formidable group. Aside from Digger, there were only two other of the scrawnier type of fug person, what Lil called \"white-collar types.\" The rest were the taller, somewhat more muscled workers who went by the name \"grunts.\"\n\n\"I would like to thank you for taking the extreme risk in coming here,\" Digger said. \"Am I correct in assuming you'd not have done so if you weren't interested in helping us with our tasks?\"\n\n\"Let's say I'm willing to discuss it further,\" Captain Mack said. \"And I want to make one thing clear. No secrets of any kind. If we're to help you, we need to know everything you know. Much as a few pleasantries would be called for, this being our introduction and such, we ain't fond of long stays in the fug. So for the sake of getting through it quick, I'd like to divide the labor a bit.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" Digger said. \"Your crew is infinitely more expert in such matters. We shall proceed according to your preference.\"\n\n\"Fine. Now as I was made to understand it, this job comes in two parts. One involves finding this well of yours and putting up some walls. The other involves liberating and coaxing this chemist to our cause. Nita here'll hear what needs to be said about the building. Whoever knows what's got to be done, pair up with her and let her know. I'll do the listening when it comes to the prison break. Who volunteers?\"\n\nAnother short silence.\n\n\"Permission to speak, Captain?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"Granted.\"\n\n\"I'll admit, I haven't had the chance to develop an eye for fug person faces, but I do recognize a few of you from my unpleasant time within Skykeep. Do any of you know Donald or Kent, also former inmates at Skykeep?\"\n\nNo clear answer came, but the half-heard muttering implied an affirmative.\n\n\"I'm sure they can vouch for the quality of our character.\"\n\n\"They have,\" barked one man. \"Talk you lot up so much I'm through listening. No one could be the way those two describe.\"\n\n\"Bludo, please,\" Digger scolded.\n\n\"I see. I don't blame you if you are nervous upon meeting us for the first time. I had my doubts about them when I first met them. And that was before their reputation became quite so remarkable. Maybe things would go a bit more smoothly if you were to ask us a few questions, to set your minds at ease.\"\n\nAfter a moment, a hand raised.\n\n\"Yes?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"You're the engineer?\" asked one of the unfamiliar grunts.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How'd you learn if not from us?\"\n\n\"I'm from Caldera. Engineering is not kept a secret there.\"\n\nBludo spoke up again. \"I don't believe you are an engineer. And what's more, I don't believe what they say about you lot and the dreadnought. I worked on the dreadnought, and seeing as I have the ship you lot came in, it is a load of rubbish to say you took down that beast without a hundred more just like it.\"\n\n\"As it happens, sir, I took the ship down personally.\"\n\n\"Now I know this is all a load of rubbish.\"\n\n\"Would you like me to explain?\"\n\n\"And hear you tell another tale? Not likely. I say we wasted our time putting our trust in this\u2014\"\n\nNita raised her voice. \"I was correcting a pipe rupture in the primary phlogiston pressure regulator when a vertical ship-to-ship grappler lodged in our hull. It caused a forty-degree backward pitch that sent me tumbling onto the dreadnought from above. After bouncing off the primary load envelope and tangling in the retention rigging I reached the main deck, whereupon I worked my way down to the primary boiler. After vigorously applying a number six open-ended trith spanner to the head of the engineer, I opened the firebox and dropped in a fully tensioned quarter-size Calderan coil box. A few minutes of direct heat caused the frame of the coil box to buckle and explosively released the coil tension. This pierced the pressure tank of the boiler. The resulting out-pressure sheared the central hull of the dreadnought's gondola and propelled the largest intact portion of the boiler directly through the main deck and the primary load envelope above. The venting of the phlogiston caused a complete loss of load capacity.\"\n\nShe cleared her throat.\n\n\"And that was that.\"\n\n\"Anyone else got any questions as to Nita's credentials?\" Lil said with a sparkle in her eye.\n\nA new man raised his hand. \"You with the big gun. Where did you get that?\"\n\n\"I made it,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"\u2026 Could you make another?\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" Captain Mack said. \"Enough bandying about. Let's get to planning, or else we'll be on our way. Miss Graus on that side, myself on this one.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "The room divided itself among the two members of the crew, with Nita gathering the lion's share of the group. This wasn't a surprise. From what little she knew of the way the fug folk structured their society, the grunts did almost all the menial labor, and thus for a task that tended toward construction, they would be more knowledgeable and more comfortable\u2014though the relative silence and lingering stares of most of the group suggested there may have been ulterior motives for their choosing her side of the room over the captain's.\n\n\"Where exactly is the ichor well?\" Nita asked. \"Not in terms of coordinates, but in terms of the surrounding land.\"\n\n\"Mostly it's underground. There's sort of an open shaft, the rubble leads down into a shallow cave, and the ichor flows along its bottom.\"\n\n\"I assume we'll only need to fortify the rim of the pit then? Plus a bit of leeway around each side?\"\n\n\"More than a bit of leeway. We'll need a safe place to work and live, more or less.\"\n\n\"How big is the pit?\"\n\n\"Not big. A couple of yards.\"\n\n\"And what will we need to enclose in the fence?\"\n\n\"Room for twenty or thirty people, a pump house, a couple of boilers for power. A place to do the refining, and some storage. Oh, and a good, tall mooring tower, eventually.\"\n\n\"One hundred yards by eighty then, for the fence?\"\n\n\"That's roundabout the figures we had in mind.\"\n\n\"Say, fifteen feet high?\"\n\n\"Better if it was thirty.\"\n\n\"Isn't that a bit excessive?\"\n\n\"Some of the things we're hoping to keep out can jump higher than fifteen feet.\"\n\n\"\u2026 I see\u2026 Thirty feet tall then. And double reinforced. Barbed-wire top. Cargo gates at the center of the short sides and personnel gates at twenty-yard intervals?\"\n\n\"Meets with our thinking, roughly.\"\n\n\"Defenses. Armed guards?\"\n\n\"Something more substantial. If the industry comes knocking, they'll be riding in ships that'd take a fair number of shots, even with our rifles, for armed guards to stop.\"\n\n\"Antiship guns then. Fl\u00e9chette guns. Mounted on, say, every fifth support tower for the wall?\"\n\n\"We planned for every third.\"\n\n\"You'll need steam, then. To run them. As well as the pumps and assorted other machinery. Is there a supply of water?\"\n\n\"There's a spring.\"\n\n\"What of the materials then?\"\n\n\"We've got the guns, some ammunition, most of the raw metal, and the parts for four or five boilers. Bludo managed to snag the parts for a steam shovel too. Lumber can come from The Thicket. And, of course, we've plenty of strong backs to sling shovels and swing hammers.\"\n\n\"It seems to me you've got matters well in hand,\" Nita said. \"We'll just be loading the goods into the Wind Breaker and helping you do the building.\"\n\n\"Not so easy as that. It's a flashy ship you've got there, even if it wasn't already a famous one. And even if it wasn't even flashy, this job is as good as ruined if someone sees us coming down into The Thicket from the air. We need to move wholly unseen, and that means under cover of The Thicket itself.\"\n\n\"By land.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Do you have steam carts?\"\n\n\"Three of them. That's where we'll be scavenging most of the boiler parts from, once we're through with them. Fully loaded, and each dragging unpowered carts that are also fully loaded, we can just about get all the materials where they need to go in one trip. But that's not the hard part either. The hard part is getting there alive.\"\n\n\"Because of the beasts of The Thicket.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"What sort of threats can we expect?\"\n\n\"You never having been to The Thicket, nothing I say can properly conjure to mind what we're liable to run into. But this'll get you started. Imagine the most vicious or most bizarre creature you've ever seen. Now imagine you'd only ever seen it in a nightmare. Now imagine describing it to a child. The beast that haunts the child's nightmares the next night is what The Thicket would make of that creature.\"\n\n\"I see. Wild animals are often frightened by fire. Can we keep them at bay in that way?\"\n\n\"It frightens off the small creatures, at first. The big ones, it just makes curious. Same goes for loud noises, evidently.\"\n\n\"I see\u2026\" she said, stroking her chin.\n\n\"Maybe we should be talking to one of the fellows with the guns for this bit?\"\n\n\"No, no. I've never met a problem that was a match for a properly trained engineer plying her trade. Has anyone got a bill of materials? A list of the items we'll be carrying along? That'll give me an idea of what we've got to work with.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "On the other side of the room, matters were being handled differently. Digger and the other white-collars of the group were handling things on the Well Digger side of the discussion. Captain Mack handled the Wind Breaker side. At the moment Digger's partner was doing the talking. He was a shorter, more crisply dressed fug person with dark, bushy eyebrows that seemed three sizes too large for his long, hollow face.\n\n\"What we would have you do, Captain West, is approach the facility from the south, as it is least guarded from that side,\" said Digger's partner. \"You will not under any circumstances use force of any kind. You will, in fact, approach the academy at a distance not less than\u2014\"\n\nCaptain Mack turned to Digger. \"What's this fella's name?\" he asked.\n\n\"I was not through with your instructions, Captain West, and I'll thank you not to interrupt.\"\n\n\"His name is Lester Clear.\"\n\nThe captain turned to Lester. \"Lester, you ever worked with an airship captain before?\"\n\n\"Prior to my arrival in The Thicket I was in charge of the dispatch of as many as fifteen scout vessels and messenger ships at a time. So yes, Captain West, I am quite familiar with the means to deliver orders to airmen.\"\n\n\"I reckon you didn't quite take my meaning, Lester. I didn't ask if any captains had worked for you. I asked if any had worked with you. But the answer still applies.\"\n\n\"I hardly see the distinction.\"\n\n\"The distinction is, tall though you are, you ain't in a position to be looking down your nose at me when you talk.\"\n\n\"You are a hired gun, and will be acting under my employ, so I shall address you in whatever means I desire. Now back to the\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Lester,\" Captain Mack snapped, \"you ain't hiring a gun. You're getting help from a crew. The guns are just what my crew holds on to to make sure folks don't try to do anything any more foolish than treat the people you came seeking help from like they're at your beck and call. You ain't doing the talking for your side anymore.\"\n\n\"I've carefully outlined a precise\u2014\"\n\n\"Coop, if Lester here feels the need to run his mouth past this point, dissuade him.\"\n\n\"That mean I should give him a fat lip, Cap'n?\" Coop said.\n\n\"That would do the job well enough.\"\n\n\"I cannot abide this rough treatment of\u2014\" Lester began.\n\n\"It ain't got rough yet, but it's about to be if you don't cool it,\" Coop said.\n\nLester's mouth hung aghast for a moment, but he wisely didn't use it for any further orders.\n\n\"\u2026 How would you like to proceed?\" Digger said.\n\n\"Let's start with where your chemist is being kept, and what sort of place it is,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Her location is Fadewell Academy. There she is ostensibly a professor, but one of history rather than chemistry. In reality she spends her time researching.\"\n\n\"It being an academy, I reckon there're students about?\"\n\n\"There are, but it is a very exclusive academy. Six professors, twenty-five students. It is also exceptionally well fortified to, again ostensibly, keep out those who would partake of an education without the proper fee.\"\n\n\"I ain't never heard of someone trying to steal a learnin', Cap'n,\" Lil said.\n\n\"No, I don't imagine you have\u2026\" Lester fumed.\n\n\"You know, for someone who's seems like he ought to be smart, you sure don't pick up on things too quick,\" Coop said, pushing up his sleeve and advancing.\n\nThree of the grunts behind Lester stirred and stepped forward.\n\n\"Coop, we'll give him two more. At least Lester here is acting the way we come to expect from fuggers, which is comfortable in a way. Keep going, Digger.\"\n\n\"I have the exact location here, as well as a rough rendering of the academy grounds,\" Digger said. He paused. \"May I retrieve it?\"\n\n\"Go ahead.\"\n\nDigger pulled a folded sheet from his pocket. It was drawn with a rather precise layout of the grounds, complete with guard patrol routes.\n\n\"Samantha Prist's private quarters are here. Her laboratory is here, and her classroom is here. She is not permitted to leave academy grounds without an escort and is seldom permitted to do even that. As such she can be found in any of these three places, or walking the grounds, at any time of day.\n\n\"It so happens we have a man in our midst who is familiar with the woman and might convince her of the wisdom of joining our cause. It would conceivably make the task a good deal easier if you were to take this man with you to act as an intermediary.\"\n\n\"And who might that be?\"\n\n\"That might be, and in fact is, me,\" said Lester.\n\n\"Should I count that, Cap'n?\" Coop said.\n\n\"Not that one, no. And if Lester is indeed the man for the task, I don't believe his presence will make the task simpler at all,\" Captain Mack said. \"In fact, quite the opposite. Lester here does not strike me as the sort who is keen to collaborate in a civil fashion.\"\n\n\"As if you would have any sense of what is civil,\" Lester said.\n\n\"That we'll count, Coop,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Sure thing, Cap'n. By my figurin', that leaves you with just one left, Lester.\"\n\n\"I'm genuinely impressed you were able to make that calculation with any accuracy.\"\n\nCoop grinned. \"And that'll do it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"Having ridden one of those steam carts, I've found them to have more than enough excess capacity to do as I've proposed, even while pulling the train of cargo,\" Nita said. \"And I\u2026 oh lovely\u2026\"\n\nShe stepped back in time to avoid a tangle of three grunts, Coop in the center, and Lil piled on top, as they stumbled through the crowded room and bashed into the far wall. That was the last clearly discernible action that occurred before the entire room dissolved into utter chaos. Voices rose to shouts, treating the crew to a host of brand new profanities that seemed to be native to the fug. Fists, elbows, knees, and feet were flying without any regard to where they might land. Nita slid one of the smaller wrenches from her sash, but Captain Mack appeared beside her, grabbing her by the back of her coat and dragging her back into the corner.\n\nHe turned to face her, planting his hands on either wall and serving as a levy against the overflowing hostilities.\n\n\"I'd just as soon see you keep out of this particular part of the negotiation, Miss Graus,\" he shouted over the din. \"But if you choose to partake, no weapons. This room's a boiler and this tussle's the valve. It might burn a bit, but there's nothing to do but let the steam finish venting. You start swinging something less friendly than a fist and things are liable to get worse in a hurry.\"\n\n\"Aye, Captain.\"\n\nThe moment he removed his hands from the wall, whatever force of will had kept the battle from absorbing them completely evaporated, and both Captain Mack and Nita were pulled into the melee. Fistfights were not Nita's strong suit, and if not for the mask on her face and the heavy winter clothes, she'd probably have earned more than a few bruises from the act. Few situations are better suited to teach quick lessons than a close-quarters brawl, though, and by the end she was delivering as many lumps as she was taking.\n\nAt the end of almost precisely five minutes, as though someone had rung a bell to end the round, the groups began to separate to their neutral corners. Coop had taken the worst of it, his cheek quickly swelling. Lil's ear was bleeding from what looked suspiciously like tooth marks. Gunner's eyebrow, or the space that would have been occupied by one if it hadn't been recently burnt away yet again, was bleeding. Captain Mack had no visible injuries, though his wheezing suggested he'd taken a few blows to the midsection. Nita felt some sore spots, but the exhilaration of the experience hadn't subsided enough to allow her the clarity to properly identify them.\n\nWhen he caught his breath, Captain Mack spoke. \"Nita, you make any progress toward a plan of action?\"\n\n\"We were just hammering out the details,\" Nita said, wavering a bit on her feet.\n\n\"Digger, your group happy with what they've seen and heard so far?\"\n\n\"I, uh\u2026\"\n\n\"Happy?! These ruffians attempted to murder me,\" broke in Lester, \"and it was through only the combined force of our own laborers that they were turned away!\"\n\nDigger raised his hands, one to Lester and one to the captain. He looked to Captain Mack. \"If I may?\"\n\n\"By all means.\"\n\nDigger turned to Lester. \"If these men and women were interested in murder or any other permanent recompense for your vile words, I don't believe you would be standing here to accuse them of such. You'll note each member of the crew is heavily armed yet not a shot was fired by either side. I would consider that evidence of admirable restraint. If you would show similar restraint with your tongue, then I think this venture might have a chance at success.\"\n\n\"I couldn't have said it better myself, Digger,\" Mack said.\n\nLester failed to take Digger's advice. \"I doubt their capacity to contribute in any regard. Look at the pummeling they've taken from just our meager force. What then could we expect if they were to take on the full brunt of the industry?\"\n\n\"If you take a census of injuries, I think you'll find an equal distribution on all sides. As there are five of them and fourteen of us, simple math would imply they can, in the vernacular, give it three times as hard as they get it. And if the industry were to arrive, I'm sure the crew would not withhold usage of their pistols, which would further tip the balance of power in their favor.\"\n\n\"Fine. In raw brute force they may be an asset. But you assured me their engineer would be an asset as well, and what has she produced?\"\n\n\"To be honest, Lester,\" said Bludo, who seemed loathe to be speaking in the Wind Breaker crew's favor, \"she's proposed we hook the mounted defense guns up to the boilers of the steam carts while we're on the road. And apply the barbed wire and fencing to the outside of them. Make something of a set of rolling forts against the wildlife.\"\n\n\"Heck yeah, Nita! A fl\u00e9chette gun'll cut through anything that forest could throw at us,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Interesting\u2026\" Gunner said. \"A rolling gun platform\u2026\"\n\n\"That's preposterous! I've never heard of such a thing. It couldn't possibly work!\"\n\n\"With a bit of tinkering,\" said Bludo, \"I think it might.\"\n\n\"Whose side are you on, Lester?\" Coop said. \"Trying to convince your own folk against the help they went looking for?\"\n\n\"Surely I'm not the only one thinking that nothing I've seen here today in any way qualifies these people to help,\" Lester sputtered.\n\nHis statement earned him only blank stares.\n\n\"Well then I suppose I'm overruled\u2026\" he fumed, his arms crossed.\n\nOne grunt stepped up to Coop. \"Where'd you learn to hit like that?\"\n\n\"Say one too many things in a bar up in Keystone and you'll see someone throw a punch like that. Take one too many punches like that you'll learn to throw it back or regret not learning,\" Coop said.\n\n\"And this one,\" remarked another grunt in reference to Lil. \"Let that one loose in The Thicket and its bears will come running for shelter.\"\n\n\"You lay your hands on one Cooper, you got to tussle with us both. Them's the rules,\" Lil said, puffing up her chest. \"And I'll give you all this. Not one of you boys hits any softer than a Westrim mule. And I admire you not holding back when going toe to toe with a lady. Speaking of\u2014Nita, you take any lumps?\"\n\n\"I think a few people tried to strike my ribs and back. Considering the sash full of wrenches I'm wearing, I imagine it was the ones with bloody knuckles right now.\"\n\n\"You got a good crew, Digger,\" said Captain Mack. \"Strong and spirited. Anyone need patching up? We've got a fine medic back on the ship.\"\n\nAn excess of pride or a legitimate ruggedness among the crew kept their hands from rising.\n\n\"Excellent. Now that we've all proved ourselves, maybe we can get to the root of our problems.\"\n\nThe Well Diggers and the Wind Breaker crew once again divided into their designated brainstorming groups. Nita marveled at how the outburst of hostility seemed to leave the room completely free of tension. She never would have imagined an out and out brawl would have been precisely what the situation called for. That Captain Mack did know explained how he'd managed to remain a captain for so many years. Every day she learned there was more to that man than she'd realized." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "The Ruby Club door swung open to reveal Lucius Alabaster in his radiant-white outfit.\n\n\"Nerve tonics, my good men! All around!\" he proclaimed.\n\nThe grand gesture would have been more generous if the room contained anyone beside Tender and the steward.\n\n\"What seems to be the source for such frivolity?\" asked Tender, fanning himself with his bowler hat after being startled by the proclamation.\n\n\"My day of recognition is at hand, that is what! Mallow, see to my friend in this triumphant time.\"\n\nHis manservant stepped inside. \"Er\u2026 what'll you have, Tender?\"\n\n\"I suppose I'll have to sample this nerve tonic of yours to see what the fuss is about,\" Tender said.\n\nMallow nodded and paced inside as Alabaster took his seat.\n\n\"I've seen not one but two fine signs of my machinations bearing fruit, good sirs,\" Alabaster said, plopping down and twirling his mustache with both hands. \"The first, I received a message just three minutes ago from an agent in my employ that an agent in the good Mayor Ebonwhite's employ has appeared in our midst. The first time, might I add, that he has seen fit to show the slightest interest in our forsaken little corner of the fug. And why? What could have drawn the interest of the most powerful man of our times? The answer, my gentleman, is Lucius P. Alabaster!\"\n\n\"I don't know that I would be in quite so celebratory a mood if I'd earned the interest of Ebonwhite. He has the means to make a life rather unpleasantly complex.\"\n\n\"Feh, I say. Feh, bah, and a thousand such scoffs! Ebonwhite knows not with whom he trifles! That, no doubt, is the reason for his interest. To determine the nature of my genius. And he shall soon learn that he not only needs to know my name, but that it needs to be on his lips, such that he might call it in this, his hour of need. Because the second message was to inform me that certain complicating factors have beset his own plans. And that very shortly his hated rivals from above, the bloody-handed slayers of his dragon and topplers of his dungeon, cannot simply be starved away. They must be dealt with. And who more capable than I to do the dealing?!\"\n\nTender glanced to Mallow, who was already returning with three shots. \"Forgive my denseness, but was I supposed to make sense of that?\" Tender said. \"His rivals cannot be starved away?\"\n\n\"No, good Tender. Few but myself have the wisdom and foresight to understand the intricacies of my schemes. But suffice it say that before the month is out, I expect to be at once an employee and credible rival of Ebonwhite. And my name shall be on the lips of all who speak of great men and great minds.\"\n\nHe took his drink in hand and downed it. Mallow and Tender did the same.\n\n\"Truth be told, my plans are soon to be quite vigorously in motion. And as they can only remain so in my absence for so long, I shall need to take my leave. My date with destiny is nigh. And I shan't be tardy.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "After several hours of plotting, the Wind Breaker crew retired to the ship. Captain Mack piloted far enough away from the meeting place to conceal its location, then emerged from the fug to take some grateful breaths of unfiltered air. After letting the lingering pockets of fug dissipate, they gathered in the galley. Captain Mack left Coop at the wheel while they ate. In a rare appearance out from behind the counter, Butch shuttled from table to table, muttering reprimands and applying ointments.\n\n\"You should've seen the other guy, Butch,\" Lil said, wincing as her ear was treated. \"I put my boot to more than a few. And they're only lucky I had this mask on, or you can be darn sure I'd've found out what fugger tastes like after they took a bite of me.\"\n\n\"Fine, fine,\" Captain Mack said. \"We can compare scars after. The important thing is we've got our tasks now. So let's divide things up and lay them out. Nita, what came of your figuring?\"\n\n\"In terms of the engineering, it's a straightforward job. Actually a great deal like what I'm accustomed to as a free-wrench in Caldera. A fence to keep man and beast out. Some mining equipment and whatever equipment will be needed to refine the ichor. With the workers we've got, provided their head count was accurate and their hearts are in it, under normal circumstances I'd say the defenses could be up in a week. The mine would be ready in two, but they'd probably take their time after getting the walls up, because\u2026 well, circumstances aren't normal. They impressed upon me, repeatedly, that The Thicket will not be obliging to our task. It turns out the fug hasn't kept all plants and animals from thriving. There are thorn bushes with cruel barbs, and animals they've declined to describe beyond great size and hideous appearance.\n\n\"I've proposed we outfit their steam carts to run the weapons that will eventually be mounted on the walls, and armor them similarly. It should add protection without adding weight, since every bit of the offensive and defensive equipment and more will be reused upon arrival.\"\n\n\"Fine work. How much of our crew would you need to get it done?\"\n\n\"Naturally I would need to be a part of the job from beginning to end. I would also prefer to have at least one member of the Wind Breaker crew to help coordinate.\"\n\n\"If you only need one, you can have your pick of everyone but Gunner. I'll need him with me. That Lester character would have us believe he's going to strut in and strut out with his chemist in tow, but my own assessment is to expect a good deal more excitement than that. Stealthy or not, that stretch of fug is situated midway between three fug cities I know of, let alone the many I no doubt don't know of. That means shipments. And shipments mean patrols and security. I don't count on us getting there and back without shots fired. And if it comes to that, in air or on the ground, I want Gunner with me,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"I'd have picked Lil anyway. No offense, Gunner.\"\n\n\"None taken, though take plentiful notes on the construction of those war wagons. A contraption like that has a future,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh no. Those wagons are coming apart just as soon as we arrive. And those are for defense, not offense.\"\n\n\"If it uses ammunition, it's good for both,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Let's not make plans for things that ain't been made yet. We should all set eyes on the next step,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"And what's that, Cap'n?\" Lil said.\n\nButch supplied the answer in an irritated grumble.\n\n\"Glinda's right. Let's get us a fair distance away, then make sure we're all patched up right. From there it'll be up north, as near to the edge of that forest of theirs as they're willing to let us get. Nita and Lil stay behind and get the group ready to venture into the woods. Then the rest of the crew and that Lester character load up and head to Fadewell Academy to get their chemist one way or the other.\"\n\n\"I'm not keen on us splitting up, Cap'n,\" Lil said. \"While I'm voting that it's not a trap, it's just as likely it is one now as it was before, and with us up north and without the ship and the rest of you to watch us, things could go wrong quick.\"\n\n\"Then you watch each other's backs. And you keep some things in mind, second only to your own safety. You find out where that well is, you find out if it is real, and you be sure that you can find it again. That's our insurance against treachery.\"\n\n\"And if the treachery takes you before you return to us?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"Then you get clear of them before they do the same to you, and you find out what happened to us. Simple as that. You both got good heads on your shoulders, and you're members of the Wind Breaker crew. Together I don't imagine there's anything in the fug more formidable than that.\"\n\n\"I ain't about to disagree with that, Cap'n, but how are we liable to find out if the rest of you have come to ill? Or if you need our help? Or if you got something you need us to know, or to do, how are we supposed to find that out? There's the matter of communication, is what I'm getting at.\"\n\n\"Don't think that hasn't crossed my mind, Lil.\" He tapped his knuckles on the wall in a rapid pattern. \"Near as we know, there's only one fugger alive today who knows we've figured out their code and that we know what the inspectors are really used for. That being the woman who filled in some of the last pieces for you girls back in Skykeep. They haven't changed their codes, and that's further proof of their ignorance. So far it's served us well enough for the fuggers to think we killed our inspector, and that's why they haven't received any reports on us. This might be reason enough to risk abandoning that.\"\n\nWink and Nikita, answering the tapped-out call, scurried into the room and onto the table, looking expectantly at the captain.\n\n\"I want you girls to take one of the aye-ayes with you. Hide it as best you can, not that you're liable to have much success at it. Not knowing where you are, I can't be sure we'll be able to get a message to you one way or another. But having one inspector with you and one with us, at least there's a means to do it. Half a plan is better than none.\" He looked to the creatures. \"Wink, Nikita, I know with those ears of yours you've heard every word of what I said, whether I meant for you to hear it or not. So I put it to you. These girls are going down in the fug and into The Thicket. I want one of you to go with them and listen for anything they might need to hear. Which of you wants to be the one?\"\n\nThe two inspectors exchanged glances and began to drum out messages on the table to one another. When they reached an agreement, Nikita looked to the captain.\n\nI do not want to leave Coop. But Coop wants Lil to be safe. Nikita will help keep Lil safe.\n\n\"So be it,\" the captain said. \"Scurry off with you, back to the watch.\"\n\nButch held up a hand, stopping them before they could leave, and fished into her apron to reveal two treats. The aye-ayes eagerly snatched them before hurrying off.\n\n\"You're fixing to spoil them,\" Captain Mack said.\n\nButch nudged him and pointed to his shirt.\n\n\"I'd just as soon wait until the ladies weren't present to see to that bit, Glinda.\"\n\n\"You ain't got nothing we ain't seen before,\" said Lil. \"And vice versa with us. Because I don't like the way Nita here is sittin'. I think she took some shots to the kidneys.\"\n\nAfter Butch reiterated her order, Captain Mack relented and opened his coat, then unbuttoned his shirt. Lil didn't seem bothered at all by it. Nita averted her gaze. This having been the first time she'd seen the captain without a shirt, and only the second time without his coat, her brief glimpse at his gray-haired chest was her first real indicator of his physique. The man was formidable for one in his advanced years, and checkered with scars and burns. Several fresh bruises added color to his otherwise pale flesh.\n\n\"Oof. You took some wallops, eh Cap'n?\" Lil said.\n\n\"Nothing that I won't forget after a good night's sleep.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but when's the last time you had one of those?\"\n\n\"My health isn't the subject, Lil. Matter of fact, if the two of you are set to be spending days at a time under the fug, your health is hard on my mind. Miss Graus, you ever take the time to work out how the masks work?\"\n\n\"Yes. They're rather simple,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Confident you could repair one if pressed?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Good. When you two go under, I want you each to pick out the two best masks we've got to take with you, and the next two as backups besides. And then there's the matter of how you're to eat and drink in a place where you can't breathe.\"\n\n\"I reckon we can make do with holding our breath long enough to take a bite,\" Lil said. \"But if you got food that'll keep a week or two, I'd be much obliged if you'd send that down with us, Butch. While it's fair to say I'm curious what them fuggers eat when they ain't locked up, having had what they eat when they are locked up ain't made me optimistic of its quality.\"\n\nButch completed her ministrations on the captain, and gave him a short lecture and sharp slap on the head to motivate him to avoid further injury in the future. Thus delivered, she left him to button his shirt and turned to Lil. The deckhand pulled up her shirt to reveal a midriff remarkably unmarred by the brawl. Nita again averted her eyes quickly. Butch nodded and motioned for Lil to lower her shirt.\n\n\"Took most of my shots to the head, Butch. Like usual. Guess because it's so near to hand and elbow height for the folks I usually get into fights with,\" Lil said, tucking her shirt back in.\n\nThe ship's cook and doctor turned her attention to Nita, the last of her patients present. As she probed lightly at the Calderan's head and neck, Gunner stood.\n\n\"I've got to take inventory of our munitions. We were in a hurry when doing the loading, so the grape and standard shot aren't sorted the way I'd prefer, and there are charges to pack.\"\n\nCaptain Mack nodded. \"Keep to the usual mix on them charges, Gunner. Now's not the time to be toying with the powder.\"\n\n\"As you order, Captain, though I'll say that I'm at the very cusp of producing a mix that is entirely smokeless. That could be tactically valuable in open-air combat, as well as close quarters with firearms.\"\n\n\"This job calling for little or none of either, I would call that a low priority, Gunner.\" He stood as well. \"I'm off to relieve Coop of the wheel.\"\n\n\"Well sure, Cap'n. It's been darn near a half hour since you left him. I'm sure he's wondering if we'd forgotten about him,\" Lil said.\n\nThe captain ignored the jab and trudged out the door, leaving only Butch, Lil, and Nita behind. Butch's probing prompted a wince from Nita. This brought the immediate and direct attention of the medic, who made it clear in no uncertain terms that Nita was to reveal the source of the discomfort.\n\nShe shed her coat, then began to undo the lacing of her corset. A subtle rosiness came to her cheeks when she finally removed it and all that remained was her leather-and-canvas top, which she began to undo.\n\n\"As little privacy as there is on this ship and as long as you been on it, you still blush whenever you've got to show anything more than face, arm, and ankles,\" Lil said.\n\n\"That, I think, is what's taken the most getting used to and what I'll least miss about this ship.\"\n\n\"What you'll least miss\u2026\" Lil said. She shook herself and forced a grin. \"You coming down off what I'd guess is your first fistfight. You that's been shot at and fell off one ship onto another. You that's been locked up and busted out of a fug prison. You'd least miss having to pull up your shirt in a room where other folk might see? Plenty of fun to be had with your shirt off, you know.\"\n\n\"Lil!\" Nita scolded with a smile and an extra flush of her cheeks as she removed her shirt.\n\n\"Hey, if you're learning that from me, you ain't near as worldly as I made you for.\" Lil turned to give Nita a bit of privacy, but not before taking note of what the removal of her shirt had revealed. \"You folk from Caldera make sure even the bits of clothes that don't show are fancy, huh. Maybe I should get me some of them lacy things. Not that I'd have much use for clothes like that, you and me being built so different and all.\"\n\nButch turned and slapped Lil, still turned away, on the back of her head lightly like she was a disobedient dog.\n\n\"Ouch! You just got through treating me, Butch. Don't go making any new lumps; I got plenty of old ones,\" Lil said, ducking her head down.\n\nNita, her cheeks still rosy as Butch continued her examination, tried to return to the former topic. \"The rest of my time here, even the worst of it, has been an adventure. Granted some parts of the adventure are of the sort I wouldn't gladly repeat, I've had more proper excitement, and I feel I've done more genuine good in these last few months than I ever did at home.\"\n\nNita winced as Butch found a sore spot just beside her navel, but she continued.\n\n\"My job at home is fulfilling, even important. But if I wasn't doing it, someone else would be, and the world would spin on regardless. With you folks I've done a few things that maybe I shouldn't be strictly proud of, but I've nonetheless done things that I'd wager needed to be done and wouldn't have been done besides. And I've made loads more friends in the process. I've seen things my people might never have seen. So I\u2014\"\n\nHer sincere words were interrupted by a form stepping through the curtained door of the galley.\n\n\"I'm all done up at the wheel Butch and I\u2014oh heck!\" said Coop, barging in and catching the briefest of glimpses of Nita's examination before turning his head and covering his eyes. He began to stutter through an apology and missed the doorway three times before finally scurrying from the room.\n\nLil snorted. \"All right. I reckon I can see why you might find the quarters a little close and informal like.\"\n\nButch shouted something at Coop and instructed Lil to stand guard at the door.\n\n\"I sure am sorry about that, Miss Graus. I wasn't thinkin' and just charged in. I didn't reckon on you having them particular bits bein' inspected and such, but you rest assured, I'm going to set my mind to other things and just push what I saw right out of my head. Not that I saw much of anything mind you. And that's not to say that there wasn't much to see, just that I didn't get a good look is all. Not that what I saw wasn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Coop, I think you better hurry along before you get that foot so deep in your mouth you can't climb the stairs,\" Lil said.\n\nButch muttered something under her breath and then applied ointment to the one significant bruise Nita had received. Once the treated area was beneath a bandage, Nita quickly began to cover up again.\n\n\"Just the one bruise? How'd you get so lucky?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Wrenches across the chest, wrenches across the back, and the support struts in the corset. The tools of the trade are practically a suit of armor,\" Nita said, shakily closing up her shirt and lacing the corset back in place.\n\n\"Heh\u2026 You got\u2026 maybe you got a spare one of them corsets I can borrow? Me being in fistfights a mite more than you, I could probably use a little more help in that regard.\"\n\nNita laughed. \"You know, I got more than a few snide comments back on Caldera when I explained the corset was to help take the strain off my back when load lifting. I can't even imagine what they'd think if you were to don one to help you in a scuffle.\"\n\n\"Sounds to me like some of your folk don't have much of a mind for the practical.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026 ladies?\" Coop called from down the hall. \"You all decent in there now? Only I ain't ate yet, and Butch ain't seen to my face.\"\n\n\"Decent enough, Coop,\" Nita said.\n\nHe approached the door and entered the room, his eyes held low and his hand formed into a visor to shield them.\n\n\"I am awful sorry, Miss Graus. That was just me not thinkin', which is something I'm liable to do, but you got my word as a Cooper I ain't done it on purpose and I ain't never doin' it ever again.\"\n\n\"It's all right, Coop. It was a mistake, I understand,\" Nita said, fanning her face as the blush finally began to fade.\n\n\"I ain't never seen you more ladylike than this. All in a tizzy and aflutter like that,\" Lil giggled.\n\nNita sighed. \"Let's just see to those masks.\"\n\nThe two women stepped out the door and into the hall. When they were clear, Coop finally raised his head and glanced after them.\n\n\"I gotta finish up that poem\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Two days later, the Wind Breaker crept up to a cottage that was strangely similar to the last meeting place. It matched in design, was built of similarly new materials, and as they approached, rumbled with the same din of voices. If not for the significantly greater density of lifeless trees in the area, one could almost imagine the crew had somehow found its way to the original meeting place again by mistake.\n\nLil peered at the structure from the heavily loaded gig as it was lowered down from the Wind Breaker, Nita by her side. \"You reckon they just build those by the dozen, or did they take the last one to pieces and move it here?\" she mused.\n\n\"If so, I've got to admire the dedication to the cause to construct entirely new buildings expressly to do dealings with us,\" Nita said.\n\nNita adjusted her coat and cinched her mask up a bit tighter. She and Lil were clearly ready for a long expedition. Each was layered with clothes, even more so than they had been. Lil's long jacket was now draped with a few extra scarves and a backpack, and a rifle and twin pistols were evident. The mass of clothing and equipment quite effectively hid the snuggled little lump that was Nikita tucked well away. Nita carried a shoulder bag and wore her wrench sashes over the coat instead of under. She reached up with her gloved hand and pulled one of a pair of loops that ran over her shoulders affixing a massive purple-hued wrench head that took up the whole of her back.\n\n\"I can't believe you're toting that big, fancy wrench of yours along,\" Lil said. \"We're going to be traipsing about on foot and you decided to strap on who knows how much extra weight.\"\n\n\"I never go anywhere that might have work to be done without the monkey toe. Poor is the engineer who leaves a tool behind that can easily be carried, Lil.\"\n\n\"I reckon you and me have different ideas of what's easy to carry then.\"\n\nThe gig struck the ground, crunching into a few inches of snow. This being the fug, the snow had a faint purple tint and was likely poisonous, but that didn't stop it from giving the dimly lit surroundings an oddly whimsical look. Icicles that resembled garnet and amethyst hung from the curled black branches of the nearby trees, and even the scarce light made everything twinkle with indigo and puce.\n\n\"This is eerily majestic,\" Nita said as she stepped out of the gig and took in her surroundings.\n\n\"That's true. Spoils it some that if you was to catch one of these flakes on your tongue, it'd taste like the fug and probably kill you,\" Lil said.\n\n\"There are frogs back home that are the same way. Brilliantly colored but deadly even to touch. Curious how nature does such things\u2026\"\n\nThe door of the cottage opened, and out from within walked a handful of fug folk. They were heavily armed and layered with warm clothes, but there was little doubt these were the same individuals from the other day, as they still bore the injuries they'd received during the introductory brawl. Lil gripped her rifle.\n\n\"I gotta say, seeing that many fuggers coming at me with rifles and the like is enough to put my nerves on edge,\" Lil whispered. \"I haven't quite got the hang of considering these folk friends.\"\n\n\"This stuff need to be unloaded?\" asked Bludo as he approached.\n\n\"Yep. We got some ammo, some bits and pieces that Nita here needs for whatever it is she's planning with them carts of yours, and some food and water for us,\" Lil said.\n\nBludo and several of the others gathered around and heaved the crates and packages from the gig, doing so with little effort. When they finished clearing the gig, Lester appeared in the doorway of the cabin. He was dressed rather differently than the rest. While the grunts were outfitted with cold-weather work gear, Lester was wearing a black overcoat over a three-piece suit. A long red scarf was wrapped about his neck, earmuffs looped around behind his head, and the whole ensemble was completed with a top hat. In one gloved hand he carried an overnight bag, and in the other a cane. He almost looked like someone heading out to take in a show at the local theater, though the large white bandage on his left cheek from the blow he'd taken during the brawl spoiled the effect somewhat.\n\n\"Well ain't you all gussied up for a night on the town?\" Lil said, placing her rifle on one shoulder and the other hand on her hip.\n\n\"If you recall,\" Lester said, \"it is my task to convince our chemist to come along. I shall not achieve that goal if dressed like a ruffian or coarse laborer. Miss Prist is a civilized, refined woman and should be greeted by a similarly civilized and refined man,\" Lester said.\n\n\"Just so long as you don't mistake this trip for a pleasure cruise while Nita and me are trudging through this forest of yours doing real work,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Where are your carts? I'd like to see what it will take to modify them before we get moving,\" Nita said to Bludo.\n\n\"Over behind the cabin. We've got them all stripped down for you,\" he said.\n\nLil and Nita paced along behind him as he led the way. Once they were out from under the Wind Breaker, Lil glanced up to the top deck and waved to Captain Mack.\n\n\"So long, Cap'n! See you when we're all set!\" Lil said.\n\n\"You girls take care now,\" Captain Mack said, making the well-wish sound more like an order. \"And you boys be gentlemen. If I come back here and I find you been otherwise, it'll mean bad things for you.\"\n\nLester stepped onto the gig and promptly fell over backward as it was yanked from the ground and began to retract. \"A word of warning would not have been out of place, you troglodytes!\" he barked.\n\n\"I'm guessing you're trying to insult me or some such,\" called Coop from the controls of the winch. \"But the joke's on you, because I don't know what that means, so it don't bother me none at all.\"\n\nHe finished winching in the gig, and a pair of grunts helpfully tugged the mooring lines free of the trees to which they'd been tied. Nita turned and caught the eyes of the captain as he took the ship up. He looked irritable, but that was nothing new. Captain Mack usually looked irritable. As a seasoned member of the crew, though, she'd learned to interpret the different flavors of irritation. This one was as near to fear as she'd ever seen on his face. This was clearly unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory for him.\n\nThe thick fug quickly swallowed the Wind Breaker as it drifted skyward, and the thick, heavy air soon hid even the sound of its engines. It wasn't until the familiar hum of the turbines she maintained had faded entirely that Nita realized how comforting that sound had become for her, and how worrisome it was to be left in the fug surrounded by relative strangers without a means of escape. She swallowed hard and dragged a deep breath through her mask, then hurried to catch up with the others.\n\nSure enough, behind the cabin the three steam carts they'd been promised were present and stripped down to the barest of essentials for operation. This meant only a frame, some linkages for steering, the various components of a steam engine, and the associated fuel and water supplies were left. Piled beside each one were the spare parts that had been removed and the mass of equipment that would be loaded onto them when the time came to leave. Nita paced around them, looking them over. Two were in decent repair, though one was notably not. The frame between the front and rear wheels on the left side was quite crooked. It had the look of having been far worse and subsequently hammered back into the rough shape it ought to be. In the center of the mangled section was a scattering of silvery scratches where the oxidation and black paint had been scraped free.\n\nNita knelt beside the cart and ran her hands across the damage. \"What happened here?\" she asked.\n\n\"That's where Louis was,\" said a familiar voice. \"Now he's underground. The poor sod.\"\n\nLil and Nita turned to find a grunt looking woefully at the damage. The deckhand practically tackled him to the ground when she realized who he was.\n\n\"Donald! I was wondering when you'd show your face!\" Lil said. \"Is Kent around?\"\n\n\"Still inside. I fink he's tracing out our paf or somefing,\" Donald said.\n\n\"I want all of you folks to come over here and shake this man's hand, and Kent, too. Because them two are the ones that taught me there were some decent fug folk. If not for them, I might have gone to my grave thinking the lot of you were like the mayor back in Fugtown.\"\n\n\"What exactly happened here, Donald?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"That there's the cart we used to do our first survey. That's where somefing got ahold of us.\"\n\n\"You're telling me a creature did that?\" Nita said.\n\nHe nodded. \"Don't know what it was. Don't fink anyone got a good look at it, since the rest of the folk wif me just called it 'what the hell is that fing?'\"\n\nNita eyed the damage again and did the mental math of working out what size creature it would take to cause such destruction.\n\n\"I imagine we should get started on fortifying these carts then\u2026\"\n\n\"Nita, Lil!\" said Digger.\n\nThey turned to the doorway. He was just emerging, and his face was the very picture of relief. He had a few bruises from the brawl but had gotten off easy.\n\n\"I'm so glad you decided to come. I confess I was not confident, after our last encounter, that you would return to complete the mission.\"\n\n\"We keep our promises. Sorry about your jaw, by the way,\" Lil said. \"You shouldn't've tried to pull me off those three over there when they were beating on Coop.\" She hiked her thumb at a cluster of rather badly bruised grunts.\n\n\"A lesson learned quite thoroughly, I assure you.\"\n\n\"Are you coming along on this part of the mission?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"I'm afraid I wouldn't be much use. My skills are largely diplomatic and administrative. I've had only the most cursory education in technical matters, and no education at all on the subjects of wilderness hiking and big-game hunting. I would be a liability as part of the expedition, and furthermore I shall be needed here to coordinate the follow-up expedition to bring the chemist to the site, provided she is successfully gathered.\"\n\n\"Oh, they'll get her. Even if they have to tie her up and drag her,\" Lil said.\n\nNita finished sizing up the cart and looked to the dozen or so grunts in attendance. \"How many of you have ever worked on equipment like this?\"\n\nEight people raised their hands. Lil grinned and raised her hand as well.\n\n\"Okay. What we're going to do here is very simple. Watch closely, and when I'm through I'm sure you can do the same modifications on the other carts yourselves. We're going to tap into this line here, the vent feed for overpressure on the output of the steam engine. With some minor adjustments to the regulator we should be able to operate the guns by opening the vent valve. So you'll need pipe cutters, a bender, a threader, and some number four copper piping. If you've got a braising torch, that would be ideal as well. Are we all set? Then let's begin.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Lester clambered up to the top deck of the Wind Breaker just as Gunner and Coop were finished reeling in the mooring lines. A surprised and confounded look was plastered on his face.\n\n\"Something wrong, Lester?\" Coop said, clapping the dust away from his hands.\n\n\"I\u2026 I believe I must have missed some part of the ship,\" Lester said.\n\n\"What were you looking for?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"The guest quarters.\"\n\nCoop laughed. \"Guest quarters. Listen to this highfalutin fella lookin' for guest quarters.\"\n\n\"Where am I intended to stay, if not in guest quarters?\"\n\n\"Lil and Nita are off ship, so that leaves two bunks empty. You can either sleep in the gig room where Nita usually sleeps, or bunk up with me in Lil's hammock. Except I'm not going to let you bunk up with me, so that just leaves the gig room.\"\n\n\"Surely you don't mean that drafty mass of greasy machinery on the lowest deck!\"\n\n\"Pretty sure I do.\"\n\n\"That room is not fit for man or beast!\"\n\n\"So far it's been a lady sleeping in there, so I reckon you're right. But you'll do fine.\"\n\n\"How long shall this journey take?\"\n\n\"Three days down, however long it takes down there, and three days back. Normally it would be more like two days each way, but Cap'n needs to take it slow so folks don't notice us coming and going.\"\n\n\"I thought your crew had some sort of means to avoid detection entirely. As far as I know, yours is the only ship the industry doesn't have moment-to-moment knowledge of.\"\n\n\"The industry? That what you folks call the fuggers who're running things?\"\n\n\"Informally, I suppose. Down here the haves and have-nots are defined by their capacity to engage in manufacturing and commerce. You either run an industry or you work for one who does. But that is not the issue at hand. The issue is how you've evaded detection thus far, and why it seems you've waited until it would be a direct inconvenience to me to suddenly lose this talent.\"\n\n\"You being a fugger, and your question being how do we keep secrets from fuggers, I reckon you'll understand if I don't answer that.\"\n\nLester muttered angrily and turned for the stairs.\n\n\"Coop,\" Captain Mack said, \"we're covered up here for lookouts. For the rest of this trip, you'll be keeping an eye on Lester.\"\n\n\"Keeping an eye on me? Are you insinuating I am not trustworthy?\"\n\n\"Whether you are trustworthy or not, I don't trust you,\" Captain Mack said. \"So Coop here will be keeping an eye on you. And Coop, get him to help you stoke the firebox.\"\n\n\"You would have me work?\"\n\n\"We are down a deckhand and an engineer, Lester. If you don't pull some weight, three days is a rosy estimate,\" Captain Mack said. \"And to be honest, if you don't pull the weight, you're just weighing us down, and dead weight gets jettisoned on this ship.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Was that a threat?\"\n\n\"I ain't a man for threats, Lester. That's just ship policy.\"\n\n\"I will not be a lackey to you. You are hired help, do you understand? As far as I am concerned you are merely a ferry to get me to the academy.\"\n\n\"Are you refusing to work as a member of this crew?\" Captain Mack asked.\n\n\"Categorically, emphatically, and without reservation.\"\n\n\"Coop.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" Coop said.\n\nThe deckhand snapped into motion. He didn't have malice or anger on his face as he advanced toward Lester, which was perhaps why Lester didn't react immediately. He didn't think to even step away until Coop had planted his shoulder into Lester's midsection and hoisted him from the ground.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing?\"\n\n\"Dropping the dead weight, like the cap'n said we would,\" Coop said. \"Weren't you listening?\"\n\n\"Stop! You lunatics, stop!\" Lester cried, struggling but making little headway against the determined deckhand as he toted him to the railing.\n\n\"I thought I'd been clear, Lester.\"\n\n\"Fine! You madman! I'll work!\"\n\n\"Drop him, Coop,\" the captain said.\n\n\"On the deck or off it?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"On.\"\n\nCoop dumped Lester to the slick planks of the deck. The fug man scrambled backward away from him.\n\n\"You would have done it. You really would have killed me!\"\n\n\"You wouldn't be the first member of the crew we had to unload. That 'industry' of yours has made things a mite trying for us on the surface. Decisions like that are what have kept this ship in the air. Coop, take him down and get him shoveling.\"\n\nCoop motioned for the stairs, then plodded off behind him.\n\n\"Don't worry too much about being able to get to sleep, Lester. When you're through working, waking up will be the tricky bit.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "After several hours of tinkering, Nita was learning some very important lessons about working in the fug. Lifting heavy pieces of metal made for sweaty work even in the winter, and the icy chill combined with the chemical sting of fug seeping through her clothes made the process profoundly uncomfortable. Likewise, once she was out of breath the mask she wore made it difficult to get enough air to keep going. If she'd not spent the last few months mostly at high altitude, and thus adapted to much thinner air, she might have passed out. Even so, her chest ached with the effort of dragging each breath through the filters, and twice she had to stop herself from thoughtlessly removing the mask. The thin mist had a terrible way of hiding the fine details of whatever she was working on, and the green phlo-light if anything made it worse.\n\nOn the other hand, though, the grunts were marvelous workers. Those who'd raised their hands as having worked with boilers in the past were quick to pick up on what she was working at. Without the need for a mask, they were huffing and puffing much less, and they had the brawn to move with ease some of the materials that were a struggle for her. With their help the work had gone quickly. There were just a few more finishing touches to put on the first cart, and the grunts themselves had begun work on the others.\n\n\"We're going to want to swap this piece here for a valve with a stiffer tension,\" Nita said, gesturing with the tip of the screwdriver she held.\n\n\"Why?\" asked Kent, who had taken the lead when it came to distributing instructions to the other work crews.\n\n\"This whole assembly is going to shudder violently when the gun fires,\" Nita said. \"A valve this loose is liable to vibrate open under those stresses.\"\n\n\"Sure, granted,\" he said. \"But why not just up the tension on this one? This is a variable lock-out model.\" He rubbed away a bit of grease to reveal a small hole. \"Right for tight, left for loose.\"\n\n\"Fascinating\u2026 Quite a clever innovation. I've never noticed that in any of the equipment I've worked on up on the Wind Breaker.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"We keep the best stuff down here.\"\n\nNita pulled a pouch open on her belt and selected an appropriate-size screwdriver. After a few twists, she tested the stiffness of the valve.\n\n\"That'll do it. Lil, get a chain of fl\u00e9chettes fed into the chamber and let's do a test.\"\n\n\"Can do,\" Lil said.\n\nThe deckhand climbed over the walls of the improved cart and hopped to the ground. As much as Nita claimed it was intended only for defense, she'd managed to construct quite an intimidating vehicle. The cargo platform was clear, but leaning out from it and extending five feet up and two feet out was a fortified wall, topped with barbed wire and crisscrossed with metal struts. It would take several minutes with a sledgehammer and crowbar to even make a dent in the armor without having access to the fasteners on the inside. Mounted at either side of the driver's seat, one atop the boiler and the other serving as a counterweight for it, was a scratch-built seat and a mounted fl\u00e9chette gun. These guns, provided by the fug folk themselves, were almost twice the size of the ones that had so dutifully defended the Wind Breaker from raider attacks in the past. The cart no longer looked like a vehicle. It was more like a fortress with wheels.\n\nLil rummaged through a crate and found a coiled-up string of foot-long metal spikes, then jogged around to the crew and cargo door at the rear of the vehicle. It was merely a full wall that had been hinged at the bottom to convert to a ramp.\n\n\"I forgot how heavy these things were,\" Lil said. \"I'm used to the hollow ones we use on the envelopes and such.\"\n\nNita fed the end of the roll into the receiver of the gun, dropped the rest in the bin, and looked up. \"Who wants to do the honors?\" she asked.\n\nAll twelve of the workers clambered for the chance, but the winner, thanks to proximity and initiative, was Lil. She'd hopped into the gunner seat before Nita had even finished asking.\n\n\"Let's see. What am I going to shoot\u2026\" Lil said, cracking her knuckles and leaning to look down the barrel. \"Anyone attached to that tree over there?\"\n\n\"You folk up there get attached to trees, do you?\" Donald asked as he levered a wall into place on one of the other carts.\n\n\"The ones up top are still growing. Figured you might want to hold on to the ones you got,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Wait until you get to The Thicket. You'll see what's still growing down here.\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah. Jabber, jabber. Can I shoot it or not?\"\n\n\"Go to it,\" Kent said. \"I'm eager to see if this thing works.\"\n\nLil pulled a few levers, and little puffs of steam jutted from vents as the seat rotated. \"This one here's the safety, right?\" she said, squinting through the haze.\n\n\"That's right,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Take this, ya lousy tree!\" Lil crowed.\n\nShe pulled the trigger. An almost musical sequence of squeaks, rattles, and hisses accelerated to an earsplitting din as a few moments of having the trigger held consumed three feet of chain and sent the spikes hurtling toward the tree at a startling speed. The force of the gun was enough to drive five of them entirely into the wood of the tree, and the handful that were off center actually punched clear through. The shudder of the gun as she fired it was bone-rattling and threatened to throw Lil from the seat as it rocked the cart back and forth on its springy suspension.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Lil said. \"Kind of hard to handle that kickback.\"\n\n\"It won't be a problem once we've got the cargo loaded,\" Nita said. \"That will give the whole vehicle a lot more stability under force. Does anyone need any help or instruction finishing the modifications on the others?\"\n\n\"We're not doing this as a perfect match, right? We're putting guns front of the cart on this one, rear on the other one, and sides on the other, right?\" said Bludo.\n\n\"That's right,\" Lil said, hopping down from the seat. \"Us traveling in one big line, putting guns on the front of the second one is liable to make the folks in front nervous, and so on all the way back.\"\n\n\"Then we might need help working the angles on these connectors and supports.\"\n\n\"I think I can work that for you,\" Kent said. \"Let's not overwork these ladies on their first day.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Absolutely. From the looks of those eyes, you're fit to drop. I'm surprised you haven't already. Even some of our folks are eager for a break. In fact\u2026 Digger!\"\n\n\"Yes?\" called their leader from within the cabin.\n\n\"We're just about ready for a break out here. That suit the schedule?\"\n\nThe door opened and Digger paced out. Ink stained one hand that still clutched a pen. The other hand held a stack of pages. Having spent his time inside, he wasn't quite so well bundled up as the others, so the cold hit him like a hammer, stumbling him for a moment. He paced out far enough to inspect the work.\n\n\"My word, you're practically through with the modifications. That's twice as far along as I'd imagined we'd get today. Yes, yes. By all means, take your meals.\"\n\n\"You heard him, boys! Lunch break!\"\n\n\"What're you up to in there, Digger?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Paperwork. Though heading a subversive group substantially cuts down on the bureaucracy, there's still the matter of organizing, inventory, and the like. I daresay it results in more paperwork, as I've got to burn anything with names on it after I'm through, for if the cabin is discovered, I cannot risk my records revealing the roster of our little organization.\"\n\n\"I reckon the sort of fella who learns to get ink on his hands tends to find ways to keep getting ink on his hands,\" Lil said. \"Same goes for blood, I've noticed.\"\n\n\"One works to one's strengths,\" Digger said.\n\nThe grunts began to gather into little clusters, plopping down on the half-finished chassis of armored carts or the unpowered cargo carts in lieu of chairs. Each of them seemed to have their own flask on their belts, but Donald ducked into the cabin and returned with a burlap sack. One by one he handed out what looked like small loaves of dark brown bread, one per worker. When he was through, he and Kent approached Digger, Lil, and Nita.\n\n\"You need one too? Or you got your own?\" Donald asked, holding out a loaf to Lil.\n\n\"We got our own, but\u2026 what is it?\" she said, intrigued. \"I'd sniff it, if I could.\"\n\n\"This is nothing special. 'Stock bread' I fink they call it. We just call it 'brown.' Been living on three loaves of brown a day since forever.\"\n\n\"But what is it? Besides brown.\"\n\n\"Lunch.\"\n\nNita chuckled.\n\n\"Donald, anyone ever tell you you're not the brightest fella in the fug?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Not more than once,\" he said, giving her a shove to the shoulder that, if not for the playful smile on his face, would have been the prelude to another brawl.\n\n\"Standard provisions for workers,\" Digger explained. \"It's a dense bread with bits of meat mixed into the dough. And stock instead of water while it's being made. I'd not had it prior to being moved to The Thicket, but it has rather grown on me.\"\n\nHe accepted the loaf Donald offered. Lil plopped down on the ground beside the cabin and leaned against it, crossing her legs such that they disappeared into the bottom of her long coat. She then fished a bundle wrapped in brown paper out of one of the cavernous pockets. Nita took a seat next to her and fetched her own first meal, and each pulled a jar of amber liquid from an inside pocket. Using their laps as tables, they each unwrapped the paper to find one large pastry and three small biscuits each.\n\n\"What've you got there?\" Donald said, eyeing the meal.\n\n\"This here's what I always called 'stew pie,'\" Lil said, holding up the large pastry. \"It's like stew that's thick enough not to drip, wrapped up in dough. Sort of a pot pie without the pot. And these are just some biscuits.\"\n\n\"Those aren't biscuits.\"\n\n\"Yes they\u2026 oh. Are you like them from Circa, who call cookies biscuits?\"\n\n\"What's a cookie?\"\n\n\"I guess so. Here, educate yourself,\" she said, handing him one of the biscuits. \"Down here you call cookies biscuits and you eat 'em for dessert and such. Up there we call biscuits biscuits and we eat 'em with butter and gravy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Go ahead. Have a bite of heaven.\"\n\nDonald sniffed curiously at the flaky concoction, then popped it in his mouth. \"\u2026 If that's what you folk eat up there\u2026 I fink maybe I can see my way clear to visiting now and then.\"\n\n\"Just in Westrim, now,\" Lil said. \"In Circa you ask for biscuits and you get sweet crumbly things like down here.\"\n\nNita took a deep breath and loosened the belt securing her mask. She slid it down and took a big bite of her stew pie, then held the mask in place and huffed out a breath to clear the fug from inside.\n\n\"How'd that work?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"It is going to quickly become tiresome\u2026 but it's workable.\"\n\n\"Bah. You've taken a tremendous risk and are enduring terrible conditions to help us. The least we can do is ease your suffering during meal times,\" Digger said. \"Kent, run inside and get the large sample.\"\n\nThe grunt climbed to his feet and entered the cabin.\n\n\"I'm sorry, but what exactly can you do to help us?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"As I've said, we barely know more about ichor than you do. Most of what we know comes thirdhand from people who knew people who knew people who made deliveries to and from South Pyre. And\u2026 without getting too deeply into details, the circumstances of South Pyre make it difficult to handle pure ichor without taking special measures. So we've been learning quite a bit just by having some of the substance to study.\"\n\nKent returned. In his hand was a small stoppered jar with perhaps three healthy spoonfuls of ichor inside. In this quantity it looked even more like honey, and the dim golden glow was haunting in its beauty. It looked like someone had ladled out a bit of the sunset and stored it for later.\n\nHe set the jar on the ground and pulled the stopper. At first nothing happened, but gradually the air above the opening began to clear. Over the course of a few seconds, picking up speed as it went, the bubble of clarity pushed back the fug until there was a void perhaps ten feet in diameter.\n\nThe grunts and Digger backed away the same way one might retreat to shade as the clouds parted on a hot day. At the edge of the clearing, the fug took on a slightly thicker quality, forming a sort of translucent curtain of mist wrapped around the cleared air.\n\n\"Go ahead. Remove the masks. In its pure form, ichor seems to vigorously repel the fug. No doubt that's why it's seldom handled in that form in South Pyre.\"\n\nNita blinked her eyes. While she'd become accustomed to the constant, subtle sting while working, there was no doubt the sting subsided the moment the clear void pushed past her. She hesitantly took the mask from her face and ventured a tiny sniff. There was still the strong scent of fug, but no more so than what she had to endure for the first few minutes after the Wind Breaker surfaced from a few hours immersed in it. She took a slow breath and released it.\n\n\"Remarkable!\" Nita said. \"I'm not sure I'd trust it for the full meal, since a good hard breeze would sweep all the clean air away, but that's quite a trick.\"\n\n\"I would offer to allow you to eat in the cabin where the wind won't disturb the 'fresh' air, but I've got a few men working in there preparing navigational aids and the like and it might be a distraction for them to have to cope with a lack of fug. But in the future, I'm sure placing the jar in your tent will do nicely.\"\n\n\"This whole job just got a whole lot easier to swallow. You're not half-bad, Digger,\" Lil said.\n\n\"I strive to accommodate.\"\n\nNita moved the jar to between herself and Lil, where it would take a stiff gust for the fug to reach them in dangerous quantities, and munched happily. Slowly, the nearby fug folk wandered off, nearly as repelled by the fresh air as surface folk were by the chemical smell of the fug.\n\n\"I guess privacy is one of the little bonuses that'll come with this sort of thing,\" Lil whispered.\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Nita said.\n\n\"\u2026 Nobody's watching from over there. Anyone on the other side of me watching?\"\n\n\"It looks like they're mostly minding their own business. Why?\"\n\n\"Nikita's been tapping me. She's awful hungry.\"\n\nLil casually palmed one of her biscuits and reached inside her coat as if to scratch an itch. Her coat was fluffed up enough by sitting down that Nikita's movements inside were barely perceptible.\n\n\"I ought to say, she's said something that's got me a little worried.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"About an hour ago, when I went off to answer the call of nature, I let her do the same. She tapped out a message on a stone. Said she smelled and heard another inspector somewhere.\"\n\nNita tried to keep her face steady. \"But there aren't any airships here. And we made it clear there shouldn't be.\"\n\n\"I know it, but Nikita seemed pretty sure. And they've got pretty good ears, remember.\"\n\n\"Did she say where?\"\n\n\"She couldn't tell. Just that it was close.\"\n\n\"We have to find it\u2026 and find out who brought it.\"\n\n\"You think maybe the whole thing's blown?\"\n\n\"I don't want to believe that. Partially because, as you pointed out, these seem like a decent bunch. Partially because there's not very much we can do if this is proof of a trap.\"\n\n\"Sure there is. If we decide things are getting dicey, we'll just steal one of them carts.\"\n\n\"And then what? We barely know where we are.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but problems are usually easier to solve when you've got more firepower.\"\n\n\"\u2026 There's some logic to that.\"\n\n\"Darn right. I learned that from Gunner.\"\n\n\"Why am I not surprised about that?\" Nita took a bite and chewed it slowly. \"Okay\u2026 after the break it will be time to start loading up the first cart. Can Nikita hear me in there?\"\n\n\"\u2026 She says yes.\"\n\n\"Can she try to communicate with the other one quietly? Can she ask where it is?\"\n\n\"\u2026 She's tapping now\u2026 She says it says it is in a dark box.\"\n\n\"Well that narrows it down\u2026 Okay, that means it's part of the cargo somewhere. While we're loading, everyone pay attention. The sooner we find that box, the sooner we'll know what happened and what to do next.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "\"Okay,\" Lil said, heaving a breath, \"you boys gotta slow down. You're making me look bad.\"\n\nLoading the carts had been a slow process because it had to be done with care. Even with so much of the cargo strapped to the outside of the carts to fortify them, there was barely enough room to bring everything they intended to bring. Digger, in a questionably helpful decision, had taken it upon himself to direct the others where to load each piece of equipment. This provided the workers with ample time to rest and also allowed Digger to have a full manifest of the contents of each cart.\n\nLil hefted a box into place and leaned against it. In truth, she was being a bit dramatic in her claims of fatigue. The day had been exhausting to be sure. Her chest ached and her head throbbed from having to draw breath through the mask. But compared to the air while they were in transit, even filtered through the mask it felt like she was breathing soup, much thicker and more substantial. She was slow to lose her breath and quick to catch it. But the frequent breaks gave Nikita a chance to deliver messages and listen closely. At first Lil had been worried things would be unpleasant or difficult for the little creature, tucked away as she was while the day's work progressed, but it quickly became clear that being carried around by Coop in much the same fashion had given her a particular skill at coping and flourishing in such a state. Every so often she would release her grasp on Lil's shirt and tap out a message to her. Much of the rest of the time she was simply silent and snuggled close. Considering how warm and toasty she was under the jacket, Lil was starting to feel jealous.\n\nJust as Lil grabbed the edge of the next box to lift it, Nikita tapped a frenzied message.\n\nThe inspector is near. It is very near.\n\n\"Is it now\u2026\" Lil said quietly.\n\nShe looked over the box. It was just a simple crate, maybe a foot and a half cubed. The only thing that distinguished it from the rest was an apparent lack of care in its construction, as the slats each had a marginally larger gap between them than in the other such crates. Lil peered through one of the gaps, then slipped out her knife and probed it. Just inside there was a layer or two of tightly woven black mesh, keeping her from spying anything inside. The Wind Breaker crew had learned a few tricks from Nikita and Wink, though. Lil reached down and tapped out a message with her knuckle.\n\nIf you were in this box, you responded, she tapped, using the stilted syntax the inspectors had been taught.\n\nThis one was in the box, came the reply.\n\n\"What's wrong, Lil?\" asked Nita.\n\nThe engineer gave a knowing glance. Lil returned it. This was certainly the box they were looking for.\n\nIf Nita had been the one to discover the box, or the captain or Gunner for that matter, a slow, subtle investigation as to the details of its presence and who was responsible for it might have begun. The Coopers, however, were far more direct than that.\n\n\"Hey Mr. Inventory,\" Lil called, thumping the top of the box, \"what're you packin' a critter for?\"\n\n\"A critter?\" Digger replied, confusion apparent on his face. He paced over and looked at an inventory label that had been hastily pasted on the side of the crate. \"According to my manifest, this is under 'infrastructure and inspection apparatus.' That was part of a rather large gathering of cargo we were able to\u2026 ahem\u2026 acquire shortly before your arrival. I've got nothing here about a 'critter' of any kind.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure there's a critter in here,\" Lil said. \"Mind if I pop it open to see what's what?\"\n\n\"No harm in a little visual confirmation,\" Digger said.\n\nLil wedged her knife under the edge of the crate's lid and deftly levered it open. Digger, Lil, Nita, and two of the nearby grunts peered inside. An aye-aye, and a rather portly one at that, huddled in the bottom of the crate. Beside it was a half-eaten wad of some unrecognizable foodstuff and a damp sponge. Though to a trained eye the creatures could be quite expressive, one didn't need any training to see that this creature was miserable. Nonetheless it averted its eyes and tapped its claws against the floor of the crate.\n\nThey told this one where the main pole was. This one did not reported, it said, stretching its limited language skills to their limits.\n\nLil felt Nikita begin to tap out a reply, but she touched her hand to her jacket to quiet her.\n\n\"Oh, an inspector!\" Digger said, clearly pleased. \"Delightful. This is a tremendous boon!\"\n\n\"Why exactly is this a tremendous boon?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Because now we shall have thorough inspections without risking our own people for the purpose, clearly,\" Digger said.\n\n\"This seems to be a surprise to you,\" Nita said.\n\n\"I was unaware we'd been able to secure one.\"\n\n\"Are you sure we need it?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"We can certainly use it,\" Digger said.\n\n\"Maybe so, but we'll have to keep it alive during the journey. That means days more. I don't see food or water enough in that crate to keep it alive that long. And if I've understood your concerns, keeping ourselves alive is going to be task enough without caring for a creature we'd not planned for.\"\n\n\"Yeah. And besides. I can understand having one of these assigned to an airship,\" Lil said. \"Something rots through on one of those, you fall a thousand feet into the ocean or smash open on the land. This inspector is going to be responsible for what? Tapping on a few walls?\"\n\n\"Plenty of big factories and the like all over the fug have inspectors. If we're hoping to set up something that can take on the other industries down in the south, I say we keep the thing. Don't know when we'll be able to find another,\" said Bludo.\n\nThe other fug folk rumbled with approval.\n\n\"This is a sign of legitimacy. A tremendous windfall for our cause,\" Digger said.\n\nLil and Nita scanned the faces of those in attendance. All were either confused, pleased, or disinterested with this development.\n\n\"So who's going to take care of it? Any of you folk got any experience with that?\" Lil asked.\n\nDigger looked about. When none of his men were forthcoming, he turned back to Lil and Nita.\n\n\"As seasoned members of an airship crew, I imagine at least one of you must have had some sort of experience in the matter. They are standard issue to all airships, are they not? Mandatory, if memory serves. Oh! But then they say you've killed yours, is that right?\"\n\n\"That's right, they say that,\" Lil said.\n\n\"But prior to that, you must have had some experience.\"\n\n\"Look, if the question is do I know how to look after one of these critters, the answer is yes. If the question is would I mind looking after this critter, the answer is heck yes I mind, because that wasn't part of the deal. I joined up to help Nita here hammer on them carts, then do some exploring, and help you folk help us folk get some much needed phlogiston. Nowhere in that plan was there any talk of me being nursemaid to a little critter.\"\n\n\"I genuinely apologize. Surely the requirements aren't so taxing. Perhaps you could instruct one of the others in the proper means.\"\n\n\"Or maybe we could just leave it here.\"\n\n\"I suppose, if it is truly a sticking point for you, we could do so, but the facility will be operating on a skeleton crew for the foreseeable future. A dedicated full-time inspector that works for no more than food and water would allow us to be considerably more efficient.\"\n\nLil crossed her arms. \"I don't like when plans change. It makes me ornery. And all you folks with bruises that match my knuckles ought to know you don't want an ornery Cooper floating about if you can avoid it.\"\n\nNita turned to Digger. \"Let me talk to her. She gets like this sometimes. A moment of privacy if you would?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" he said.\n\n\"Askin' me to see to the little critter,\" Lil muttered under her breath as Nita led her a short distance away.\n\nWhen they were out of earshot, Lil whispered to Nita. \"What do you think? Think if I keep play acting I'm all upset, they'll let us leave it?\"\n\n\"You're overplaying the part a bit, if you don't mind the criticism. But I don't think it's worth the effort of alienating yourself and burning through the good will you've earned.\"\n\n\"You don't believe that little bugger just happened to be part of the cargo they stole. It's a spy, plain as day.\"\n\n\"There's little doubt of that. But I think you'll agree, none of the fug folk seem upset at its discovery. It if this was deceit, surely the person responsible would have shown some reaction.\"\n\n\"Could be they didn't know. Could be someone planted it, and they're finding out same as us.\"\n\n\"That would be a terrible gamble. The creature could have starved to death before we discovered it, and then all of its surveillance would have been for naught.\"\n\n\"Then it could be that fug folk are top of the heap, bar none when it comes to lying through their teeth with a smile on their faces. Except for a few folk we met since we arrived at Skykeep, I never spoke to one fugger who wouldn't put a knife in my back as soon as look at me.\"\n\n\"And if that is the case, then I have no doubt whoever smuggled it this far would have no trouble smuggling farther. Better that we keep an eye on it. We've been able to reason with Wink and Nikita. Perhaps we can reason with this one too. Even if we can't, having it with us will require the person or people responsible for planting it to take it away in order to put it to use, and then we'll know who we are up against.\"\n\nLil tipped her head back and forth. \"Fair enough. But you're doing the tending, then. I already got one to take care of. And we ain't keeping this one are we?\"\n\n\"I don't imagine we will.\"\n\n\"Good. Wink's fine, and Nikita's a sweetheart, but if we keep this up, the ship'll be overrun.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\"\n\n\"All right then. Let's get back to it,\" Lil said. She spun on her heel and raised her voice. \"Fine! We'll keep the little critter with us. But I ain't happy. You folk spring any more surprises like that and I ain't gonna be so obliging. Nita here'll be doing the looking after. Now let's get the rest of these boxes loaded!\"\n\nNita walked to the crate and slowly reached for the aye-aye. It scampered to the far corner of the crate but didn't put up a fight as she lifted it. As aye-ayes go, this one was quite heavy. At least half again as heavy as Wink. He seemed to go limp when lifted in some sort of passive resistance to being handled. She maneuvered him until he finally clung to her side, staring up at her distrustfully.\n\nDigger approached. \"Nita?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Your partner seems a bit\u2026 volatile.\"\n\n\"You hadn't made that determination from the scuffle at the last meeting?\"\n\n\"I suppose that was an indication, but some level of provocation was undeniably to blame. But\u2026 I'm not sure how to put this delicately\u2026 can she be trusted with the rest of the crew? She brought both rifle and pistol, and she seemed rather proficient with that larger mounted weapon. We here in the fug have justifiably roused the ire of the surface dwellers for quite some time. She's not likely to take this expedition as an opportunity to take out her frustrations, is she?\"\n\n\"Between the heist, the dreadnought, and Skykeep, I'm quite sure her thirst for destruction has been quenched. She can be trusted to do her job, don't worry.\"\n\n\"I've always wondered why you killed your inspector. Not you specifically, of course, but your crew. I suppose I'd always assumed you were a ravening bunch of bloodthirsty pirates, capable of anything.\" He raised his hand in placation. \"Not to offend you, of course.\"\n\n\"How could I possibly be offended by a statement like that?\" Nita said sternly.\n\n\"Don't get me wrong! What I'm trying to say is that what I've seen of you has led me to believe the crew is a bit saner than that\u2026\"\n\nA short outburst from near one of the mostly loaded carts drew their attention. Lil had climbed onto the very top of the pile to help haul one of the long, heavy struts onto the cart. Her light frame and the weight of the strut required an act of combined acrobatics and contortion to cantilever it into place. The final tug actually required her to hang from the bottom of the strut and plant her boots against the barbed top of the wall to drag it into place. Some silver coins were changing hands between the grunts. Lil hooked her legs over the strut and hung down to accept a handful of her own.\n\n\"Told you I could do it. Don't you ever bet against Lil Cooper!\"\n\n\"\u2026 Perhaps not saner, but more measured,\" Digger said. \"The point being, simply disposing of an inspector seems a frivolous and bloodthirsty act for a group who seems to have reasons for everything they do.\"\n\n\"Digger, the fug is full of secrets. No doubt over our time in collaboration I'll find my way to a question that you simply can't bring yourself to answer. When that time comes, if it isn't crucial to the success of the job you would have us do, I will allow you your privacy. On this point, I'll ask you to do me the same courtesy.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\" He took a deep breath. \"It appears we shall have the final materials loaded within the hour. That means very shortly you and I will part ways. Bludo and I will remain behind to organize a second crew for when the chemist arrives. Kent shall be acting foreman in my absence. He's handled things well in my absence in the past. You will be the one handling your side of things, won't you?\"\n\n\"I believe we'll be dividing the tasks. I'm fair bit handier with a wrench than she. She's more capable in matters best served by\u2026 volatility.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026 Yes, playing to strengths. Quite wise.\" He cleared his throat. \"Would you be comfortable discussing broad strokes of the plan moving forward, or should Lil be present?\"\n\n\"If something requires her attention, I'll fetch her.\"\n\n\"Good, good. If I understand correctly, the journey to the ichor well should take three to five days. That makes for a round trip of, at worst, ten days. A return trip would arrive five days later. There is plenty of water available along the way, and The Thicket has very good hunting, but you've got twenty days of provisions, by my accounting. When you arrive, after an appropriate period of refueling and recuperation, I've asked that two of my men return on one of these carts to resupply and report upon the status of the project. If all goes without difficulty with the rest of your crew, by the time the resupply carts arrive here, we will have the chemist. And thus, provided the prognosis from those responsible for the supply run is good, we will be able to transport the chemist to the facility in time for defenses and harvesting equipment to be completed. Then it will simply be a matter of having her guide you through the creation of the refinement of the ichor. Does that meet with your approval?\"\n\n\"It sounds a bit optimistic with regard to the timetable, but I see no problem with it as long as you are comfortable if things are running behind.\"\n\n\"We shall adjust as necessary.\"\n\n\"And am I correct in assuming that the completion and activation of the defenses will make you more comfortable with the concept of the Wind Breaker arriving directly?\"\n\nDigger hesitated.\n\n\"With the number of guns you'd have us install, you should be able to fend off a fairly substantial attack from ground or air. So the discovery of your source wouldn't be much of a threat any longer.\"\n\n\"I would just as soon avoid any direct contact with the site by air.\"\n\n\"So when everything is operational, you would have Lil and I trek out through The Thicket by land again? And how shall we receive our initial payment and any subsequent resupplies, if not directly by air?\"\n\n\"We've not\u2026 fully completed that portion of the plan. It being contingent on the successful application of our current plan, it seemed more prudent to devote our time and energy to establishing the necessary infrastructure.\"\n\n\"For you, certainly. But while my captain is a good man, he is not helping you out of the goodness of his heart. So now that you've got our aid and your plans are on the verge of being carried out, this would be a good time to explain just how you intend to hold up your end of the bargain.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course. We've discussed a number of potential means to establish a supply line to you. The stranglehold the industry has on most surface ports means conducting our business in any of the more notable cities would end poorly for us. It has been suggested, however, that in the process of securing the lumber for the construction of the ichor well fortifications, a landing pad of sorts could be established. Something far enough away from the well to avoid endangering its discovery. There we could keep a small stockpile of burn-slow and phlogiston, and conduct our business with you.\"\n\n\"You do realize one of the reasons you sought our help was our ability to travel undetected. You trust the Wind Breaker to ferry your chemist about, but not to pick up the payment for doing so.\"\n\n\"This is not a matter of trust,\" Digger said. \"It is simple reality. The more often something approaches from above, the greater chance there is it will be seen by others. And until we have had time to grow and thrive from the proper utilization of the ichor, even with defenses that under your supervision shall no doubt be peerless, we cannot guarantee the continuity of the supply line. Miss Graus, please, if you've got superior recommendations, I am eager to hear them. But some compromises simply must be made.\"\n\nNita crossed her arms and mulled over the plan.\n\n\"The timeline worries me a bit in that, again assuming the rest of the crew performs as expected, you'll have the chemist on her way, and if all is ideal, we'll be loading ourselves onto a cart and heading back here. That leaves the rest of the crew waiting six to ten days for us to arrive.\"\n\n\"Will that be a problem?\"\n\n\"As Lil has illustrated, the Wind Breaker crew has a habit of getting into trouble when left to their own devices,\" she said. \"Couldn't they deliver the chemist directly and pick us up?\"\n\n\"Again, we can't risk it.\"\n\n\"We aren't talking about repeated trips in and out to resupply. We're talking about a single arrival and departure.\"\n\n\"I just don't feel comfortable with that.\"\n\nNita narrowed her eyes slightly. \"It seems like we are the ones doing most of the compromising on this job.\"\n\n\"Miss Graus, I must respectfully disagree. By even speaking with you we have put ourselves in terrible danger of reprisal by those in power. By providing you with even the single canister we already have, we've violated a very strict embargo. And by making this deal, let alone laying claim to a previously unknown ichor well, we are by most measures traitors to our own people. Every last one of these men and women, if their actions are discovered, will be pariahs at best and fugitives at worst if we don't succeed. I owe it to them to take every reasonable precaution, and many that to you may seem unreasonable. And again, not to offend you, but the relationship between our people is mutual in its hostility. I have as many reasons to distrust you as you have to distrust me. It is possible neither of our motives is entirely clean. I can appreciate you suspect me, or even all of us, of subterfuge. I would be a fool not to adopt a similarly pragmatic approach toward your plans.\"\n\nNita smirked. \"I can respect that. And as neither of us stands to gain anything if we don't reach the ichor well, unless you've got any other points to discuss, I should lend a hand.\"\n\n\"By all means,\" Digger said.\n\nThe engineer walked toward the other workers. As she did, she muttered quietly to the chubby little creature clinging to her coat.\n\n\"It seems like everyone is keeping an eye on everyone. I'm beginning to understand why Caldera cut off contact with this continent so long ago. The environment isn't conducive to friendly discourse.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Only three days had passed on the Wind Breaker, but to look at Lester one would have imagined it had been months. Coal dust had worked its way into the fine lines in his paper-white face, seeming to make a lifetime of wrinkles appear overnight. And then there was the matter of his clothes.\n\n\"I honestly don't understand how you can stand to dress in this way,\" Lester muttered, tugging with blistered fingers at the sleeves of an ill-fitting white shirt.\n\nHe was dressed in one of Coop's outfits, which was a shade too broad in the shoulder and hip and a few inches too short for Lester; but as there was nothing in the fug person's wardrobe that would stand up to more than a few hours of proper work, the borrowed clothes were the only option.\n\nLester gasped like the fish out of water he was and tugged a piece of rag from his pocket to mop his brow. Most of his time had been spent in the boiler room, shoveling coal, cleaning soot from this or that, and watching gauges dance between green and red.\n\n\"I don't know why the only clothes you brought were them fancy things. If that was the right sort of thing to wear up here, we'd all be wearing it.\"\n\n\"Regardless of the suitability of my clothes, you people wear white shirts and work with coal! Surely you would be better served by a black wardrobe.\"\n\n\"Cap'n likes us to look snappy. Black's for funerals. And once you're used to it, getting the coal out of the shirts ain't so bad. But we're supposed to be shoveling, not flapping our jaws about laundry.\"\n\n\"Would you please give me a moment to catch my breath before you begin to crack the whip yet again, sir?!\" he snapped.\n\n\"How come you need so much time to catch your breath?\"\n\n\"Because of the altitude, sir. I've told you repeatedly.\"\n\n\"We ain't that high up. Barely above the fug.\"\n\n\"Still a good deal higher than I'd ever hoped to be, thank you very much.\"\n\nCoop, as had been the case for the duration of his unwilling partnership with Lester, picked up the slack.\n\n\"Couple things, Lester,\" he said between shovelfuls into the firebox, \"first, if you folk would be a little looser with the burn-slow, there wouldn't be half as much shoveling.\"\n\n\"A point which I believe we are endeavoring to address with this journey.\"\n\n\"And second, how the heck did you get mixed up in this? That Digger fella at least seems to have sort of a stake in this mess, and seems kind of decent. You're about as 'fug' a fella as I ever met.\"\n\n\"I imagine that was intended as an insult.\"\n\n\"Only if acting like the rest of these folk is the sort of thing you take for a slight.\"\n\n\"As it happens, I have a tremendous amount invested in this venture. The sum total of my remaining wealth in fact.\"\n\n\"You put money up for this?\"\n\n\"Yes. Unlike the lawless skies, down in the fug we cannot simply steal everything we want. The vast majority of the equipment that has made this venture possible has come at my own personal expense.\"\n\n\"So you're only in it for the money? That ain't exactly heroic.\"\n\n\"And I suppose your motives are saintly?\"\n\n\"Heck no, but we ain't talking about me, we're talking about you.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. My motives are monetary. Do you have any idea why the fug folk you think of, when you can be troubled to think at all, are referred to by us as 'the industry'?\"\n\n\"I reckon that's just the name for them. You're the Well Diggers, they're the industry.\"\n\n\"No. It isn't so tightly organized as that. The simple fact is, since so little grows beneath the fug, and there are so few of us in total, anyone with any power at all derives it directly from whatever industry they run. Mayor Ebonwhite may have some symbolic political power, but what truly fuels his influence is the width and breadth of his business dealings. He has his fingers in everything from shipping to manufacturing, and his brothers are half owners and operators of South Pyre.\"\n\n\"And you want to be just like them folk, do you?\"\n\n\"What I want is for my time and efforts to bear fruit. I have no love for the industry. Nor, I suspect, do the individual members of that loose-knit group have any love for one another. If I'm being completely honest, my ideal outcome isn't to return to them and join their ranks, but to rise to a suitable level of success in spite of them, such that I can rub it in their faces.\"\n\nCoop checked the temperature gauge.\n\n\"That'll about do it. Lucky it took you so long to catch your breath, you were still chasing after it when the job got done.\"\n\n\"Certain hands are better suited to certain tasks.\"\n\n\"If that means you're willing to admit you're lousy at shoveling, then I'll agree.\"\n\n\"Shoveling is not a skill I've cultivated. Shoveling is not, I would contend, a skill at all.\"\n\n\"Then explain how you're lousy at it and I ain't.\"\n\n\"In my long life I've never once had to shovel before, and I would say that is proof of a life well lived.\"\n\n\"I say if you'd shoveled before, you probably wouldn't be so lousy at it now. And how long a life have you had anyway? You don't seem that old.\"\n\n\"I'm seventy-nine.\"\n\nCoop took a step back. \"You're pulling my leg.\"\n\n\"Not at all. I celebrated my seventy-ninth birthday a few days before the circumstances that placed me near The Thicket, in fact.\"\n\n\"I take it back then, you're a pretty decent hand at a shovel for a man at death's door.\"\n\n\"I'm by no means at death's door\u2026 You really don't know anything about us in the fug, do you?\"\n\n\"Old is old, what's the fug got to do with it?\"\n\n\"Fug folk are profoundly long lived, by surface standards. I'm considered rather young within my circle. Most of my associates are over a hundred years old. In fact, most fug folk are precisely one hundred forty-nine, six months, and I believe twelve days old.\"\n\n\"\u2026 I can't quite wrap my head around that.\"\n\n\"It was at that time that the 'calamity' that immersed most of Rim in fug occurred.\"\n\n\"So you folk all sort of crawled up out of whatever hole it came out of?\"\n\n\"Crawled out of\u2026 you are so penetratingly dim I honestly cannot distinguish sarcasm from legitimate ignorance.\"\n\n\"\u2026 So you folk didn't crawl out of a hole.\"\n\n\"No, we didn't crawl out of a hole! All first-generation fug folk, of whom the vast majority still live today, began their lives as surface dwellers. The fug literally made us what we are. It altered our complexion and physique, and for many enhanced our intellect, but it also cost us nearly all of our women. Coupled with the fact most of the women who remain seem unable to bear children, the second generation, of which I am a part, is much smaller.\"\n\n\"That's wild,\" Coop said. \"Kind of makes me wonder why the fuggers are all so bent on making us pay through the teeth for everything. Them having been us before all this.\"\n\n\"We choose not to dwell on the shameful fact of our ancestral status as former members of your race.\"\n\n\"Still, you folk have a lot more to you than I reckoned.\"\n\n\"Oh. What did you 'reckon' there was to us?\"\n\n\"Bunch of pale folk who like to keep the rest of us on a nice short leash.\"\n\n\"A jaundiced assessment.\"\n\n\"A what now?\"\n\nAny attempted vocabulary lesson that might have followed was interrupted by the captain's voice echoing through the speaking tube.\n\n\"We're just about three hours from that academy of yours, Lester. If you were planning on being gussied up in your finery to entice that chemist of yours away from her gilded cage, now's the time to get to it,\" said Captain Mack.\n\nLester threw the shovel down and marched for the door. \"At last this interminable journey is at least nearing its midpoint.\"\n\n\"Hey now, Lester, you pick that shovel up and hang it proper,\" Coop said.\n\n\"But your captain just said\u2014\"\n\n\"Cap'n said we got three hours. I don't reckon it takes you that long to tie a tie and all that. You ain't never going to learn to use a shovel proper if you don't treat it right.\"\n\nLester sneered. \"You are enjoying this, aren't you? Finally finding yourself in a position to make demands on a fug person as opposed to the other way around.\"\n\n\"I'm just trying to teach you to be a proper deckhand. It don't make no difference to me what else you reckon I'm up to. I ain't got time to plot and plan and be all sneaky like when I'm feeling ornery. You'll know when I'm sore with you because you'll catch another couple of knuckles to the chin. Now hang up the shovel, and then you can put on that snappy suit of yours and go out courting chemists.\"\n\nLester stooped over and snatched the shovel from the ground, hanging it with exaggerated care on the hook beside the door. \"There. Does that meet with your satisfaction?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\nThe fug person muttered under his breath and stalked away.\n\n\"Make sure you hang that shirt and them trousers up too!\" Coop called after him before placing his own shovel on its hook." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "A few minutes prior to reaching the location the Well Diggers claimed they would find the academy, Captain Mack took the ship down into the fug and the crew gathered on the main deck. Lester was the last to arrive, dressed once more in an outfit better suited to viewing the premiere of an opera than an act of espionage. Captain Mack tightened his filter mask a bit and glanced at his temporary crewmember.\n\n\"Lester, come up here,\" he said.\n\nThe fug man reluctantly climbed the short flight of steps that separated the helm from the rest of the main deck. \"Yes, Captain West?\"\n\n\"You folk, and by that I mean the Well Diggers, seem to be thoughtful sorts, but seeing as how much is on the line for this, you'll excuse me if I feel obliged to double-check that proper plans have been made. You'll be arriving on foot from outside. That the sort of thing they're likely to allow?\"\n\n\"I've actually spent some time here as a student, Captain. I've got papers indicating my identity, and they have a policy of allowing alumni to revisit the grounds as often as they desire.\"\n\n\"And what'll you tell them if they ask how you got here?\"\n\n\"I shall inform them I have a personal valet who dropped me off and shall return at the appointed time to fetch me.\"\n\n\"They liable to ask why you came wandering in out of the darkness instead of being dropped right at their door?\"\n\n\"I shall tell them that my valet is an inept fool who cannot pilot the ship properly.\"\n\n\"Try not to smile too much when you say that,\" Captain Mack said. \"I won't ask you how you plan to convince the lady. A man's entitled to his secrets of his wiles with the fairer sex. But once you convince Dr. Prist to join the cause, how will you get her back to the ship?\"\n\n\"I'll speak to her overseers and request that we be given the opportunity for a short constitutional, with myself as her chaperon.\"\n\n\"\u2026 And on the off chance they don't oblige the request of a stranger to wander off with the woman they're keeping an eye on, what's your backup plan?\"\n\n\"I'll instead suggest that they allow us to walk with an additional chaperon of their choosing, at which point you will incapacitate the chaperon and we will be on our way.\"\n\nCaptain Mack considered his words. \"Head on down to the gig room and stand in the gig. We'll winch you down when we get close so you don't have to scuff your fancy shoes climbing the ladder. Since it's not for the unskilled, Coop here will do the mooring.\"\n\nLester nodded to the captain and headed below decks. When he was out of sight, Captain Mack addressed his crew without looking.\n\n\"Gunner, get one of them fancy rifles of yours with the good sights. The fug being what it is, I don't imagine they'll be much good, but better than nothing. Keep an eye on the man. Coop, when you're done mooring, give Lester time enough to get some distance between you, then shadow him. Out of sight to both him and anyone else. Confidant as he might be that they'll let him take their prisoner, I'd feel safer with plans C and D in place when A and B fail on him.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" Coop said.\n\n\"I had anticipated precisely that order, Captain, and I have just the rifle,\" Gunner said.\n\nHe stepped to the railing and untied a few lashings that were holding a long case there. Inside the case was a rifle as long and thin as a javelin. A trio of thin struts ran from grip to tip, stiffening the barrel, which might otherwise sag under its own weight. At the base, in place of a common sight or even his typical complex optics, was something that looked like a full-size telescope. All around it were assorted gauges and calibration screws.\n\n\"If you've been finding the time to patch together abominations like that, I haven't been keeping you busy enough,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"The rifle itself is designed for long-range accuracy. I've got wind gauges and\u2014\"\n\n\"That doesn't concern me, Gunner.\"\n\n\"No, Captain, I imagine not, but the sights should concern you greatly. You see, it turns out Caldera makes some fine colored crystal. Through Nita, I commissioned a few sets of lenses in various colors\u2014\"\n\n\"If there's a part of this that's relevant, I would suggest you cut to it.\"\n\n\"I found a lens that makes anything lit with green\u2014which is to say almost everything lit with phlo-light\u2014exceptionally visible. It should let me see things otherwise hidden by the fug in much greater detail.\"\n\n\"You've made a special sight for the fug. Why couldn't you start with that?\"\n\n\"Because occasionally I find it worthwhile to illustrate my own ingenuity, since no one else seems obliged to.\"\n\nHe clicked through a wheel of colored lenses at the front of the telescope and took aim. From the captain's point of view, he was targeting a hazy green point at the very limits of visibility.\n\n\"What do you see?\"\n\n\"Half-dozen buildings\u2026 ornamental wrought iron fence. Spikes at the top, but they look dull. Only about fifteen feet tall. Shouldn't be a problem for Coop.\"\n\n\"How many guards?\"\n\n\"We're approaching from the north. The main gate looks like it is at the center of the west fence. From the size, probably not more than two guards there. I've got what looks like a patrol walking along the courtyard in the center, and there is a small gate on this side with a guard. Possibly a matching one on the south wall.\"\n\n\"Five guards at best guess?\" Captain Mack said. \"Not much of a defense. Wink!\"\n\nYes, came the tapped reply from his hiding place among the rigging overhead.\n\n\"Any messages being tapped in or out that I should know about?\"\n\nNo tapping.\n\n\"You let me know the moment you hear anything.\"\n\nI do that always.\n\nHe adjusted the wheel and flipped a lever to ease the ship toward the ground.\n\n\"See that you keep at it. Either Lester is doing a terrible job of helping us, or he's doing an excellent job of pretending to be an idiot. Either way, I don't want any surprises.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Lester paced along the poorly maintained cobblestone rode toward the main entrance of the academy. He'd spent so much of his life within the cities of the fug, and traveling between them via low-altitude airship, that he'd forgotten there were roads between the cities. He mused briefly on the number of artifacts from the precalamity times that might still find use on occasion, but there was little time for such idle thought. He had a task to do.\n\nThe gate ahead was an elegant, sculpted affair. An arch above it had Fadewell Academy emblazoned in gold. Pipes ran near the top of the fence, each feeding a phlo-light made to resemble an oil lamp.\n\n\"It is a fine thing to return to proper society,\" he said with a smile.\n\nHe straightened his bow tie and doffed his bowler hat to the two grunts in academy attire standing to either side of the gate.\n\n\"Hello, gentleman!\" Lester said, popping his hat back on. \"At long last, Lester Clear has returned to the hallowed grounds of his alma mater.\"\n\nEach grunt looked him over, thoroughly unimpressed.\n\n\"You been in a fight, sir?\" asked the taller of the two.\n\nLester felt his bruised cheek. \"Ah\u2026 A bit of clumsiness on my part. Stumbled into a doorjamb. May I enter and walk the grounds? Visit a few of my old professors?\"\n\n\"You walk here to do that?\" asked the second guard.\n\n\"No, heavens no. I came by airship. Personal airship, might I add. The blasted fool at the helm almost killed us trying to set down. We're way off in the trees.\"\n\n\"We didn't see no lights.\"\n\n\"No\u2026 no you wouldn't have. There's a problem with the lights on the whole ship. Hence the bruise you see. That's why I stumbled. Can't see a bloody thing.\"\n\nA grin flickered across his face. That was a rather clever bit of improvisation. Something to be proud of.\n\n\"You have your student card?\" asked the shorter guard.\n\n\"Of course. I carry it with pride, wherever I go.\"\n\nHe handed over the card. A bead of sweat rolled down his brow, despite the icy cold. It was absurd, obviously. He was an alumnus of this fine establishment. Yet he felt oddly as though his intentions would somehow be revealed by close scrutiny of the card itself. This life of subterfuge was not for him. Better to return to administration just as soon as the ichor well was established and operational.\n\n\"Lester Clear,\" read the first guard.\n\n\"Yes, as I said.\"\n\nThe second guard fumbled in the pocket of his overcoat and pulled out a medium-size book that in his hands seemed like it was made for a child. He thumbed through the pages, looking over the lists of names and dates within.\n\n\"Here, yeah. Lester Clear. Didn't graduate.\"\n\n\"But I did attend. The finest few months of my life.\"\n\nThe grunts peered at him, long and hard. It was possible this was going to be more difficult than he had imagined." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Coop hustled along the ground, breathing heavily through his mask. He wasn't worried about being seen. A few years on a creaky ship trying to move in and out of a room without disturbing his sister had taught him to step lightly when he needed to. The dark brown leather of his overcoat may as well have been black when illuminated by the green light. And even if he'd been dressed in blazing white, there simply wasn't anyone to see him. The academy may have had a sturdy fence and a few armed guards on the grounds, but a prison it was not. The patrols were terribly plotted out and infrequent. During his approach he'd kept his eyes locked on the roving guards whenever they were visible between the two tall buildings he assumed were dormitories, and they rarely saw fit to even look toward the fence. They may as well have been sleepwalking for all the good they were doing.\n\nMore troubling would have been the windows of the buildings themselves. If it was true that there weren't more than a few dozen students in this academy, each one must have had his or her own apartment, because each of the two tallest buildings comprised three stories with three windows per floor on the broad side facing him. That would have been a tremendous number of potential witnesses to raise the alarm. Fortunately even fug folk didn't find the black void of the field surrounding the academy to be much to look at. Most flickered with amber light, and all had their curtains and drapes drawn.\n\nThe guards at the main gate were still considering whether or not Lester deserved to be admitted to the academy grounds, which was ample distraction for Coop to make his move. He scrambled up the fence with little effort, then performed a rather tricky vault over the top to avoid the pointed top. He hung there briefly, thinking over his next move. Finally he shifted hand over hand along the fence until he came to the corner of the dormitory where a sturdy downspout ran from the roof. He pushed off the wall and pivoted in midair, latching on to the pipe when he reached it.\n\nA loud, hollow ring ran along the pipe as he collided with it. Distantly, he heard a curious comment and the half-motivated footsteps of a guard jogging over to investigate. By the time the man had reached the alley between the dorms and rounded the corner to look where the sound may have come from, Coop was out of sight. The roof was mildly sloped and covered by icy slate shingles. That made for a treacherous surface to walk on, but no more so than the main deck of the Wind Breaker after a few good hours of freezing mist. He moved with slow care to the peak of the roof and eased himself to his belly, trying to take in the surroundings and puzzle out where they might be holding this chemist of theirs.\n\n\"Should have sent Gunner down here. He's been to an academy. Probably he'd know where they stow the teachers when they ain't using them,\" he muttered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Despite the presence of the appropriate paperwork, the guards had yet to decide if they should let Lester in.\n\n\"Now see here, gentlemen. There really is no reason for this. If I didn't know better, I would suspect you were purposely drawing out this humiliating process simply to prolong the appearance of authority over me,\" Lester said. \"But it has gone on long enough! I demand to be allowed entrance, as is my right as an alumnus!\"\n\nBoth guards weathered the tirade with quiet patience, as though it was far from their first.\n\n\"Are you even listening to me?!\" Lester fumed.\n\n\"Fine, fine,\" muttered the taller of the two guards. \"Welcome back to Fadewell.\" He opened the gate.\n\n\"It is about time.\"\n\nLester marched through the gate, brushing his shoulders and straightening his overcoat.\n\nThe interaction with the guards had so thoroughly irritated him that it had pushed any anxiety about his mission entirely out of his mind. He paced along the perimeter of the central courtyard, clenching his fists and running through the list of remaining tasks.\n\n\"Let me see now. As memory serves, there are two dormitories, the first for students, the second for faculty. It is early evening now, so the classes should have only recently ended. Miss Prist should therefore be in the faculty dining hall, her personal laboratory, or her dormitory for the evening. If those ruffians hadn't delayed me, I could have no doubt spoken to her already. Really, what is it about little, insignificant peons who feel it necessary to lord their situational superiority over those who in all other circumstances rightfully hold the position of authority? People really ought to learn how a properly functioning society works\u2026\"\n\nLester walked past the two dorms on one side and a central stage of a sort on the other. The stage had the look of something temporary, likely set up for a speech or perhaps a dramatic performance. A long, low building with arched windows lay behind the courtyard. The inside was warmly lit, and through the windows he could see a mostly open interior that resembled a small restaurant. He stepped up to the door and pushed it open. Just inside the door a crisply dressed fug man with the same scrawny build as Lester stood in the doorway leading from the foyer to the main dining room. The sight of him, coupled with the rush of warmth and the smell of proper, dignified cuisine, brought a smile to his face. This was a tiny taste of the life he'd had shamefully little time to grow accustomed to. Any learning institution that staffed its dining hall with a m\u00e2itre'd was the sort of place he belonged.\n\nThe sharply dressed member of the staff raised a white-gloved hand, gesturing for Lester to stop. \"May I help you, sir?\" he asked in a mildly wheezy voice.\n\n\"Yes, thank you. I'm looking for one of the professors, a Miss Prist.\"\n\n\"As you do not appear to be a member of the current class or the staff, before we progress, would you please state the nature of your visit?\"\n\n\"I am an alumnus,\" he said, presenting the card.\n\nThe m\u00e2itre'd took the well-worn piece of paper and held it to a candle atop his podium. After the flickering light revealed a complex watermark, he handed it back and took on a mildly more respectful tone.\n\n\"Welcome back, Master Clear. Dr. Prist takes her meals promptly at 8 p.m. She will thus not arrive for forty-five minutes. Would you like to be seated? I would be pleased to inform you when she arrives.\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid I've got some people waiting for\u2026\"\n\nHe paused, taking another whiff of the aroma surrounding him. In the dining room, there were people engaged in polite and intelligent debate, and even the tinkling sound of a harp. It was precisely the sort of environment he'd been raised to perceive as paradise.\n\n\"\u2026 Yes\u2026 yes, I believe I shall have a table, please. Send the sommelier to the table when I am seated as well.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "For the first fifteen minutes of his time in the campus restaurant, Lester's mind nagged him periodically about the Wind Breaker crew and the time-critical nature of the mission. That was three glasses of wine and two plates of braised eels ago.\n\n\"Some more rye toast points and a freshening of my Vouvray, if you wouldn't mind,\" Lester said as a waiter approached his table.\n\n\"Of course, sir,\" said the waiter with the utter lack of sincerity only available to those tasked with serving the extremely rich.\n\nJust as the waiter turned to leave, the door opened and a woman stepped inside. She was dressed in a suitably academic fashion: a simple gray dress with some darker gray embroidery across the bodice, hem, and sleeves, topped with a furred wrap. Her build was slender and delicate, shorter by a hair than most of the fug men around her but still quite tall by human standards. She had a long face, hollow cheeks, and a short, sharp nose. Her expression was certainly dignified, but whereas dignity seemed so often to be coupled with a distant and cold disposition, even at first glance there was a quality of interest and curiosity to her.\n\nLester found himself transfixed by her. That she was the woman he was tasked with collecting was reason enough, but the simple fact that she was a fug woman at all would have drawn the eye to her upon first arrival.\n\n\"Oh! Hello there!\" Lester said, loudly enough to illustrate to all in attendance that the alcohol had begun to do its work. \"Miss Prist! Here! Have a seat! I've been looking for you!\"\n\nShe flinched lightly at the outburst, then squinted through the haze of pipe smoke, candle smoke, and fug.\n\n\"Oh! Er\u2026 hello,\" she said, stepping uncertainly toward him as two members of the restaurant staff swooped in to collect her wrap. \"I am terribly sorry, but do I know you?\"\n\n\"I'm sure you don't remember me,\" Lester said, pulling her chair out for her and dusting it with his napkin. \"I was fortunate enough to briefly partake of your class during my time here as a student. I was only able to maintain enrollment for a few months before circumstances elsewhere required my attention, but you made quite an impression on me.\"\n\n\"I see. Well, I'm pleased to hear it.\" She took a seat, and a menu was set before her. \"So, er\u2026\"\n\n\"Lester Clear, Miss Prist. At your service.\" He returned to his seat.\n\n\"Dr. Prist, actually,\" she said gently. \"So Mr. Clear, what brings you to the campus again?\"\n\nLester glanced rather obviously about, then lowered his voice to what he likely interpreted as a whisper, but was in fact a normal speaking voice.\n\n\"As a matter of fact, I've recently been given the opportunity to engage in a fascinating new business venture, and there is a place in it for you.\"\n\n\"Really? I am very sorry to inform you, sir, but the circumstances of my employment are such that I am quite unlikely to be given an opportunity to aid you.\"\n\n\"There are ways around any circumstance, no matter how unfortunate. All I ask, Miss Prist, is that you allow me to bend your ear with my proposal and leave the rest to be solved by some employees of mine. But please, place your order. We shall speak as we dine. I've got all the time in the world.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "The clock ticked steadily onward, with Lester showing little in the way of motivation when it came to getting to the point of his sales pitch, while he ran his mouth and attempted to finesse and charm Dr. Prist. The attempts lacked subtly, but were also so thoroughly free of finesse and charm that Dr. Prist seldom noticed that he'd even made the effort.\n\nWhile he worked, the steady flow of alcohol keeping him blissfully oblivious of his lack of success, the Wind Breaker crew watched from their various vantages and waited. Gunner and Mack kept vigil from the deck through optics, burning slowly through a small but not insignificant portion of their load of coal. For Coop, this meant lying prone on the icy roof of a dormitory, watching the guards trudge through the slush. Another man might have come close to madness spending so much time holding perfectly still and waiting, but in this as in so many parts of his chosen career, his simplicity was nothing but an asset. A man without much mind to spare has little trouble keeping it from wandering. It simply wouldn't know where to go.\n\nNearly two hours after their arrival, as Coop gazed over the largely empty courtyard and mused over the next line of his poem, something in the sky caught his attention. He huddled lower and squinted, trying to make it out. At first he assumed it was an airship, because what else would be in the sky, but it didn't look at all like an airship ought to. As it drew closer, emerging out of the mist and into the light, details became clearer but no easier to understand. It seemed to be white, or perhaps the same shade of green as the lights, and when it drew near enough, he noticed lettering on the side.\n\n\"\u2026 Who the hell is Lucky-us P. Alabaster? \u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "\"What do you make of that ship?\" Captain Mack rumbled, gazing at Alabaster's vessel as it settled down a short distance from the main gate.\n\n\"Could be a three-seater luxury vessel. With that color scheme I wouldn't place it as a representative of any official authority. Lucius P. Alabaster\u2026 What fool would write his name on the side of his ship?\" Gunner said.\n\n\"An idiot with too high an opinion of himself.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the circus is in town. Or a traveling theater? It is certainly flamboyant enough.\"\n\n\"I don't like it. The timing stinks to high heaven, and even if it is a coincidence, someone that strange is going to put the guards on edge and ain't going to make things any easier. What are our men up to?\"\n\n\"Still nothing new. The last interesting event was when Lester had words with the guards and entered the eatery at the far side of the entrance. Coop is still on the roof of one of the taller buildings. He's looking rather interested in the new arrival as well. Forgive the observation, but Coop is not our best man when it comes to dealing with the unexpected in a subtle and tactful manner.\"\n\n\"He can handle himself.\"\n\n\"Oh, I have no doubt he'll come out of this alive. But if the past serves as any indication, when he's left unsupervised his solutions usually leave a proportionately larger number of those involved bleeding.\"\n\n\"It wouldn't break my heart if Lester got a few new scars out of this. But if that chemist gets hurt or killed, we've got problems.\" He pocketed the spyglass. \"Keep your sights on them. I'm going to tie on the quick-release ropes for the mooring lines. I don't imagine we'll be leaving this place in anything but a hurry, and without Lil and Coop on board, that'll be a problem. Be ready to take the wheel, just in case I'm not through before Coop starts shooting.\"\n\n\"Aye, Captain,\" Gunner said. \"I don't suppose this would be an appropriate time for me to point out that this is precisely the sort of thing I was expecting to happen when we got involved in this mad scheme.\"\n\n\"If this had gone smooth from beginning to end, that would've made me nervous,\" the captain said. \"What sort of shot have you got loaded in the forward cannons?\"\n\n\"One and one. Standard shot port, grape shot starboard.\"\n\n\"Good man. I've got a sneaking suspicion them guns won't be quiet for too much longer.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "The guards observed the white ship with dull confusion as a small anchor dropped from its hind end and dug into the soil beside the road. Their confusion grew when the door opened and Mallow kicked out a rope ladder. As he scurried down to steady the bottom, Alabaster stood at the open door and addressed the guards.\n\n\"Gentlemen! At long last your illustrious benefactor has arrived to tour the grounds!\" he said, raising his cane.\n\nEach guard looked to the other then back to Alabaster. The oddly dressed newcomer climbed down the ladder with surprising aplomb and approached them.\n\n\"While I'm certain you would prefer me to have sent word of my forthcoming visit such that you could prepare a more appropriate welcome, I'm afraid circumstances forbade such formality. Time, you see, is of the essence.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Who're you?\" asked the taller of the guards.\n\n\"Who am I\u2026 Who am I?\" Alabaster turned to Mallow, who was fighting with a mooring line and trying to find a place to tie it. \"Egad, Mallow, I'm beginning to wonder why I bothered to have my name gloriously emblazoned upon my conveyance if the common rabble are unwilling to actually read it!\"\n\nHe thrust his cane at the envelope of his craft. \"The name is Lucius P. Alabaster! Now as I've said, would you kindly let me in so that I can go about my very important and time-sensitive business?\"\n\nAfter gazing at the envelope, one of the guards consulted his book.\n\n\"What is all this now? What are you after in that book of yours?\" Alabaster snapped.\n\n\"We've got to see if you're an approved visitor,\" he explained.\n\n\"Approved\u2026 Oh really now, that's too much. I'm Lucius P. Alabaster! \u2026 Of the Lucius P. Alabaster Center for the Advancement of Chemical and Alchemical Arts?!\"\n\nThe guards gave one another the customary silent glance before the shorter one remarked, \"What's the name of that new building they broke ground on last month?\"\n\nHis partner scratched his head. \"I guess that might be the Alabaster building.\"\n\n\"Look in the back of the book under 'donors.'\"\n\nAlabaster tapped his foot and stroked his waxed beard. \"I imagine I ought to be pleased. If you give so thorough a screening to the philanthropist who has helped to fund your very institution, one can only imagine how difficult it would be for a criminal or other interloper to gain unlawful entry.\"\n\n\"Here. I found him. He's on this add-in slip here. For\u2026 'Platinum Contributors'\u2026\"\n\nBoth guards opened their eyes wide.\n\n\"And so the realization dawns,\" Alabaster said.\n\n\"I apologize, Mr. Lucius Alabaster\u2026\" began a guard.\n\n\"Lucius P. Alabaster,\" he corrected.\n\n\"Right, sir. They only print the book once a year. All the other bits get added in, and they don't tell us about the endowments and\u2014\"\n\n\"Please, please, my dear gentlemen. You needn't worry yourselves. Is it true that you've failed to treat one of the men responsible for paying your salary with the respect and reverence he deserves? Yes, certainly. But you can be pleased to learn that your transgressions, which would normally be sufficient to inspire me to crush you each under the sheer weight of my influence, are today at best secondary to a more pressing concern. So, you can assuage my vengeance in two ways. The second is to help my long-suffering manservant Mallow to moor my ship, as he seems to be having trouble with your lackluster docking facilities. The first would be to answer me a pair of simple questions: Have you had any unexpected arrivals recently, and if so, where might I find those who arrived?\"\n\n\"We did let an old alum in. Not two hours ago. I don't know just where he went. He didn't seem to be the sort who needed to be supervised.\"\n\n\"It is that degree of shamefully poor intuition that has no doubt mired you and your colleague in this menial position. Open the gate, sir, and I shall seek him out personally. And while I would not think to distract you from the task of helping my valet, I will require the aid of some of your facility's other security staff, as the players in the scheme I believe I shall shortly uncover are no minor adversaries.\"\n\nThe guards, now fearful for their continued employment, snapped quickly to their tasks.\n\n\"Oi! You and you! Over here. All of you, over here! We've got a Very Important Person!\" the taller guard barked to his fellow security personnel inside. \"Platinum donor! Full platinum treatment on this one!\"\n\nFrom the reaction of those members of staff within earshot, one would have thought a fire bell had sounded. Every last guard rushed to the gate to be at the service of Alabaster. This brought a wide smile to his face, and he happily strutted onto the academy grounds.\n\n\"Let me begin by saying I am displeased by the lack of progress on the building I so graciously endowed. When I donated the funds, I'd imagined important discoveries would be rolling out the door by the bushel. And yet you of course drag your feet. What you need, my friends, is a mind to guide you. A mastermind perhaps. And there is no mind more masterful than that of Lucius P. Alabaster. But enough of where you have fallen short of expectations. Now I must make you aware of something that you could not have anticipated. Somewhere, lurking in the darkness of our glorious fug, are our greatest foes. I speak of course of the elusive Wind Breaker and its crew!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Coop, like all other residents and staff of the academy, had been watching with confusion and interest. Thanks to Alabaster's almost operatic vocal projection, every last word was crystal clear. In the beginning, Coop was as bemused as the rest of the people. At the mention of the Wind Breaker, his attitude sharply shifted.\n\n\"Well, Lester, you've had two hours to do whatever fug folk do,\" he muttered to himself, slinking down to the far side of the roof to jog recklessly along out of sight of the courtyard. \"Time to actually get the job done.\"\n\nHe jumped the alleyway between the two dorms, ignoring the shouts of dismay and confusion that burst out from the residents of the rooms below as his footfalls disturbed them, and quickened his pace. By the time he reached the opposite side of the roof, he wasn't so much running as controlling his slide along the frozen shingles. The next roof was some sort of storage shed, a full two stories shorter, so he dropped to his back and slid off the edge of the dormitory roof, grabbing the gutter as he did. A full-grown man wasn't the sort of load the architects had designed for when they affixed the gutter, so he popped three brackets free and nearly went plummeting to the ground when he put his weight on it. The gutter swung a good two feet away from the edge of the roof, but the return swing brought him near enough to grab the drainpipe and slide down enough to hop to the shed. From there it was a jump and tumble to the rear of the facility, where frosty ground undisturbed by footprints assured him he would not be likely to run into any guards.\n\n\"I know we're after a lady,\" he muttered to himself. \"Only seen two of them, and one went into the same place as Lester. If he didn't come out, probably it wasn't that one. I think I seen the other one milling about through the windows of this place\u2026\"\n\nThe building he felt confident would hold his quarry was at the opposite corner of the academy from the shed he'd dropped down to. That was handy, because the path of disruption and destruction he'd left in his journey had drawn its fair share of interest from students and staff alike. Alabaster's arrival and pontification had kept their attention reasonably well, and the worst of his stunts had been on the unobserved side of the buildings, but once he'd abandoned stealth for speed he'd started the clock on his own discovery. More than likely they'd find and follow his trail within a few minutes, but he'd be long gone by then. That was the nice part about his philosophy of infiltration. If he was fast enough, he could serve as his own distraction.\n\nUnlike the dorms, which were tall and densely built, the building he stalked behind now was much more open and ornamental in design. Large windows on all sides gave a good view into the dimly lit interior. The back door looked to be a service entrance, and the room beyond was pitch black. He thrust his heel against the door, delivering the full momentum of his run into a single kick, which burst the door open. He barely lost a step as he slid inside and slammed the door shut behind him.\n\n\"All right\u2026 Prist\u2026 I forget the first name. Can't be too many Prists,\" he murmured, squinting in the darkness.\n\nHe was in a mudroom of sorts, a tiny closet of a place lined with coat hooks and boots. The door at the other end of the room was not locked, so he eased it open and peered within.\n\nCoop hadn't spent much time in a proper school, and hadn't even seen a laboratory, so what he found beyond was utterly bizarre to him. Much of the interior of the building was open. Rather than rooms, it had flimsy dividers with open doorways separating out sections. Lab benches stacked with burners and glassware were arranged into grids, stations for each of the students to work.\n\nThere were three people in the building, and with no proper walls to separate out the floor, it was a testament to the utter flamboyance of Alabaster that Coop's forceful entry didn't draw their attention. Even now they practically had their noses pressed against the glass to watch the lunatic who was shouting orders and directing guards to search buildings.\n\nUnfortunately Coop's eyes must have failed him when he was spying on the building because none of the three lingering staff members in the building were female, and thus were not the eagerly sought Dr. Prist. This was, however, certainly her place of either business or pleasure. As he crept low along the floor, the third door he passed was labeled with a placard: Dr. Samantha Prist.\n\nHer own section of the floor was different from the others. It was barely a quarter the size, but that tiny space was stuffed with perhaps twice as much equipment and literature. Every spare inch was piled with delicate glass tubing or covered with shelves heavy with thick books.\n\nCoop's decidedly nonstrategic mind worked over the options. He was after the woman herself, but his luck had been pressed quite hard already. Chances were already good either one of the three people along the courtyard windows would lose interest soon and run the risk of spotting him, or else the back door would come bursting open as a guard reached the end of his footprints. He had precious few moments of privacy left before this mission shifted from sneaking to shooting.\n\n\"Heck,\" he whispered to himself, \"these folk love to write things down. I reckon Gunner or Nita could probably work out what this chemist lady can do if they had a few of these books.\"\n\nHe pulled a burlap sack from a pocket of his overcoat and shook it out. The content of the books was utterly incomprehensible to him, with letters used where he would have expected numbers, and fancy letters he didn't recognize mixed in with others, so Coop used different criteria. The more colorful the pictures the better.\n\nAs he flipped through what he reasoned was the last book he'd be able to carry while still being able to make his escape, a grainy black-and-white photograph fluttered out from between two pages. He snatched it up. In the past, photographs had been a fine product for them to buy and sell. Those photographs usually depicted women in various levels of undress, and Coop, having little other experience with such things, imagined they must all focus on that subject matter. What he found instead looked to be a graduation picture of sorts. It was a young fug woman smiling. That was a rare sight in two ways. First because the fug folk he'd spent most of his time dealing with seldom offered up much more than a smug grin. Second because he'd met only one other fug woman before. In the photograph, she held a hand-lettered diploma with her name.\n\n\"That's Dr. Prist?\" he said. \"But that's the lady that walked in where Lester was an hour and a half ago\u2026 I'm going to have to have a word with him\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "In the cafeteria, over an hour of Lester's wiles had failed to convince Dr. Prist, but his determination had yet to falter. What did falter was his focus. In his attempt to keep the specifics of his plan shrouded in mystery, he'd managed to fill the whole of the conversation with such vague nonsense that even he didn't seem to know what he was talking about.\n\n\"Have you considered, perhaps, that there might be ways that my business savvy and your chemical expertise might achieve a synergy? All research needs funding, after all, and any fruitful research is bound to have value if properly marketed and developed,\" Lester said.\n\n\"That's undoubtedly true, but there is really only one area of research I am interested in, and that precise avenue of research is quite adequately funded here.\"\n\n\"I see, I see. But don't you feel\u2026 limited in this place?\"\n\n\"I'm\u2026 well treated,\" she said, her sunny disposition wavering a bit as irritation showed through. \"I'm not entirely comfortable with the area of instruction I've been offered. And a bit more experimentation and a bit less theory would be nice. But due to circumstances I am prohibited from discussing, that's not a possibility until I'm elevated to a higher position.\"\n\n\"Suppose I had the capacity to\u2026 create a new position in my own organization. One that would give you access to the materials to experiment as you've proposed. Would that\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mr. Clear. But do you hear that?\"\n\n\"If you'd allow me to finish my proposal, I\u2014\"\n\n\"There seems to be some sort of commotion outside,\" she said, craning her neck and shifting her head to try to see between the small gathering of people who had clustered near the window.\n\nLester tried to regain her interest, but her curiosity got the better of her and she stood to join the others at the window. He reluctantly did so as well.\n\n\"Probably some sort of\u2026 hazing or some such for the incoming class. I seem to remember quite a bit of that during my time here.\"\n\n\"Bah. The new class began weeks ago. This looks like a security drill. Though that oddly dressed fellow doesn't look familiar. Whatever it is, we'll know soon enough. He seems to be coming this way. What fun!\"\n\nLester watched Alabaster march up to the cafeteria, flanked by two guards. When they reached the door he stood and directed the security men to open it, then entered.\n\n\"Attention. Someone among you is not as he seems\u2026\" Alabaster said, stirring the air with his cane.\n\nIllustrating an acute lack of resolve in the face of potential exposure, Lester swallowed hard, looked nervously about, and took a step back. As was the case for Coop, the larger-than-life presence of Alabaster was enough to prevent most of those on hand from noticing. Everyone but Alabaster himself. He locked eyes with Lester, who, if it was possible, became an even starker shade of white as the hot sting of fear flared in his belly.\n\n\"And I believe that fellow is just the man I am after. Gentlemen, if you would?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I don't\u2026 what is this? This is absurd!\" Lester objected, backing away a few steps before turning to run.\n\nHe stumbled over a chair in his haste. Before he could recover, the guards were upon him. Each seized an arm and hoisted his feet from the floor.\n\n\"Stop this! You have the wrong man! This is an outrage!\" Lester cried.\n\n\"What is this about, Mr. Clear?\" Dr. Prist asked.\n\n\"And you must be the radiant Miss Prist,\" Alabaster said, pacing up to her and removing his hat to bow.\n\n\"Dr. Prist, actually. Have we met?\" she said, offering her hand.\n\n\"Only in my dreams and machinations, madam. You are a large and quite crucial cog in the scheme that shall earn me my place in history. Come this way, if you would?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't think so. The lengthy conversation I've had with Mr. Clear here, though enriching, has kept me from completing my meal. If I wait any longer\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, tut tut, Miss Prist. You say you've had a long talk with this man? As may not be generally known, but like so many secrets is quite well known to me, you are possessed of some very important, very privileged knowledge. Knowledge meant to be kept from our enemies; and as I'll soon reveal, Mr. Clear is most certainly one of our enemies. Now I am afraid I must insist.\"\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"I don't know who you are but\u2014\"\n\n\"Lucius P. Alabaster, my dear. And though I have no doubt you are going to make a claim at this point that you've offered no information of a sensitive type to this gentleman, I would not expect an intellect such as yours to be capable of identifying the subtle means through which devious malefactors such as Mr. Clear operate. You may believe you've said little, but I am quite certain you've said too much.\"\n\n\"An intellect such as mine?! Now see here, Mr. Alabaster, I'll have you know\u2014\"\n\n\"Gentlemen\u2026\" Alabaster said, turning for the door.\n\nTwo more guards rushed in and took Dr. Prist by the arms as well. They followed the charismatic mastermind as he stepped back outside, where the whole of the student body and most of the staff had now assembled to observe the bizarre scene that was unfolding.\n\n\"Mr. Clear, what have you gotten me into?\" Dr. Prist called.\n\n\"I assure you, I could not have foreseen this outcome!\" Lester said.\n\nAlabaster led the whole assembly to the center of the courtyard, visibly gleeful all the while at being the center of attention and source of all authority at the moment. Once he'd reached the center of his stage, he turned to address the masses and raised his voice to be heard by all.\n\n\"Ladies and gentleman of Fadewell Academy, I implored one of our wealthiest and most influential leaders, Mayor Ebonwhite, to contract me for my services with regard to a terrible plan currently in the works by our fiercest enemies. Lamentably, Ebonwhite saw fit to ignore my pleas, but out of a sense of duty and honor I have chosen to take action regardless. The full width and breadth of the machinations of our enemies are far too sensitive to be generally known, but to prove to you good people the truth of my claims, I shall now question this traitor to our cause and society.\"\n\nHe turned to Lester and held his cane out. \"If I heard correctly, you are named Lester Clear, correct?\"\n\n\"Yes! But I assure you, you have the wrong\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Clear, when did you arrive at Fadewell?\"\n\n\"Just a few hours ago. But\u2014\"\n\n\"And how did you arrive?\"\n\n\"I've told the guards, I have a valet who\u2014\"\n\n\"A likely story. But you've come from the north. Near The Thicket, haven't you? And I have a vested interest in all major ports and docks in that area. No one by the name Lester Clear, or anyone else besides standard shipping and message delivery, has traveled via formal means in seven days. It is thus revealed that you are lying. And who, may I ask, is known to travel both through and around our lands without notice or regard for our laws and our ways? Who could quietly deposit you here, to attempt to lure away one of our valued academics? The Wind Breaker crew!\"\n\nAn angry rumble rolled through the crowd.\n\n\"The Wind Breaker crew!\" Dr. Prist yelped. \"Those murderers?! I would never dream of associating with them. Mr. Clear, you are a contemptible cad to have attempted to embroil me in their schemes!\"\n\n\"That's not true! It simply isn't true!\"\n\n\"And I further suggest\u2014affirm, even\u2014that if they were the ones to deliver you to this place, then even as we speak, one or more of their agents is lurking in the shadows, awaiting their opportunity to do to this precious academy precisely what they've done to some of our other landmarks and points of civic pride.\"\n\nNow a murmur of fear, approaching panic, flavored the voice of the crowd. The wave of concern seemed only to encourage Alabaster, who spied the platform in the center of the courtyard and strutted up the steps to better address the crowd. He motioned for the guards to haul both Dr. Prist and Clear along with him.\n\n\"But fear not, good people! Though these monsters no doubt circle among us, sharks ready to fill out calm waters with the feathery tendrils of our lifeblood, you are not defenseless against them. In the spirit of the gone but not forgotten Ferris Tusk, I, Lucius P. Alabaster, am here to pit myself fearlessly against those who would do our people harm. The Wind Breaker crew may be the greatest threat to our people yet to arise, that is true. It takes a great man to tackle so daunting a threat, but I am equal to the task!\"\n\nHe stalked up to Lester and jabbed a finger in his face.\n\n\"I know that your wretched cohorts are near, Mr. Clear. Perhaps near enough to hear these words.\" He turned and marched back. \"So hear me now, Wind Breaker crew! I will find you, wherever you hide! And when I find you, I shall not kill you. No, not immediately. A swift death is too good for criminals such as yourselves. First I shall destroy your vessel. And when it is but a smoking hulk festering in some forgotten field, I shall dredge it up and install it where all can see, a glorious monument to my triumph over you! Then I shall take the rest of you and drag you in chains to Fugtown itself, where you shall be presented before the mayor for all to see. Then and only then, when your shame and defeat is known and observed by all who care to see it, shall you be killed. And you shall stand\u2014or more accurately you shall fall\u2014as an example for your kind that despite recent failings, the grand and glorious people of the fug are not to be trifled with. And there is nothing, nothing that you can do about it! So turn your cowardly\u2014\"\n\nThe monologue was showing no signs of stopping, but was brought to a swift and sudden end by an earsplitting report. A sound like thunder echoed off the walls of the academy buildings. The crowd, as though reacting to a coordinated cue, dropped to the ground. Both guards, lacking the training and discipline of proper soldiers, released their captives and leaped from the stage. Only Alabaster remained standing, frozen in his grand posture. He turned his wide-eyed gaze to his shoulder, where the pristine white fabric was sullied by a growing shock of red.\n\n\"There he is!\" called someone from the crowd.\n\nEyes turned first to the source of the exclamation, then in the direction he was pointing. A masked figure, his long coat flowing in the wind as he sprinted with twin pistols raised, was Coop. The crowd dissolved into a screaming flood. Alabaster's words had done a remarkable job of underscoring the terrible threat the Wind Breaker presented. When those words seemed to summon up a member of the crew like a demon, it was more than they could stand. In moments the only people remaining on or around the stage were Mr. Clear, Dr. Prist, and Alabaster. The latter was only now coming to terms with what had occurred.\n\n\"I\u2026 I've been shot!\" he said, more aghast that such an injustice could have occurred than in pain from the result.\n\nA second shot rang out. Sprinting as he was, Coop wasn't able to strike his target or anything near it, but the sound was enough to convince Alabaster to take cover as well. He leaped from the stage and scurried off after the crowd. A second later, Coop reached the stage and bounded up the steps.\n\n\"What is wrong with you? Are you a maniac?\" Lester growled.\n\n\"He said he was fixing to kill me and the rest of the crew. I reckon that's reason enough to take a shot at him. Gunner was right though, I think I mucked up my sights again. This is the lady we're after, right?\"\n\n\"The lady you are after\u2026 You do know this man!\" Dr. Prist said, backing away slowly. \"You, Mr. Clear, are a monster. And you've seen fit to feed me to your equally monstrous cohorts!\"\n\n\"You folk sure do talk fancy in these parts,\" Coop said, scratching his head with one of his guns. \"I hate to rush a lady, but if this fella had two hours to convince you and didn't make much headway, I don't imagine I'll have much more luck. So I'm going to have to ask you to come along so we can talk you into it along the way, Doctor.\"\n\nDr. Prist crossed her arms and turned away. \"I shan't go anywhere with enemies of our people, and nothing you can do will convince me otherwise.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Coop said.\n\nHe ducked down and wrapped an arm around her legs, tipping her over his shoulder and then standing again.\n\n\"Is that your plan? You're simply going to grab her like a sack of potatoes and run off with her?\" Lester said, raising his voice over her wails of dismay.\n\n\"You had your chance to do something more clever and it didn't work,\" Coop said, hefting her once as she released a startled squeal. \"Now we're doing it the easy way. Follow me.\"\n\nBounding down the steps, carrying his struggling load with a practiced ease, Coop commented, \"Fug ladies are a tall drink of water. But there ain't much to 'em. The doctor ain't much heavier than Lil.\"\n\n\"Do you make it a habit of carrying women about?\" Lester called, rushing to catch up with Coop as they ran for the main gate.\n\n\"Just Lil. When she's been drinking she gets ornery. Every so often I have to tote her out of a saloon before she starts slugging folk.\"\n\nDespite his heavy load, Coop remained a step faster than Lester as they closed the distance between the stage and the main gate. Alabaster's presence had disrupted the normal operation of the academy sufficiently that only a single guard remained at his post. The man hastily pushed the gate shut. He fumbled with a large lock and key. Coop fired a warning shot that quite effectively discouraged that activity and sent the guard running for cover, but not before the first of two locks had been secured. The running deckhand turned the shoulder not burdened with a screaming woman toward the gate and clashed with it, but the gate barely budged.\n\nHe and Clear turned to see a handful of guards approaching, pistols in hand.\n\n\"Just what do you expect to do now?\" Lester said.\n\n\"I reckon it'll sort itself out,\" Coop said, attempting to aim while Dr. Prist struggled.\n\n\"Sort itself out? Sort itself out?!\" Lester raved.\n\nThree small shots rang out from far beyond the fence. One by one the pistols jerked from the hands of the guards. Then came a much louder report and the corner of the fence to their left exploded into shards.\n\n\"Things sort themselves out when you got a crew keeping an eye on you,\" Coop said.\n\nThey dashed for the ruins the Wind Breaker's cannon blast had made of the fence. A short distance beyond, and directly between the escaping men and their freedom, was Alabaster's personal ship. Mallow had finally managed to wrangle and moor it. His distraction with that task made him the only person in a two-mile radius who didn't notice the chaos in the academy from the cannon fire. He was only now folding up the retractable steps and shutting the door. When he turned to head toward the gate and aid his employer, he instead came face to face with a winded deckhand with a woman over his shoulder and a gun in his hand.\n\nCoop shoved the barrel of his weapon into Mallow's chest. \"Anything tricky I ought to know about how to start this thing?\" he asked, gesturing with his head for Lester to pull open the door.\n\n\"Who are you? What's going on here?\"\n\nThe deckhand answered by cocking the pistol with his thumb. Mallow wisely raised his hands and backed away from the door. \"The throttle sticks on the low end, and you'll want to keep the temperature gauge on the high side or the turbines are very sluggish!\" he advised hastily.\n\n\"Much obliged. Don't go running off, I got one last thing for you,\" Coop said.\n\nLester got the door open and the stairs deployed. Coop dumped Dr. Prist inside and climbed in after her.\n\n\"I trust you know how to fly a contraption like this,\" Lester said.\n\n\"I can usually get one going roughly where I want it to go. Never one this fancy, though.\"\n\nCoop climbed into the pilot's compartment and stuck his head out a moment later. \"That fella still out there?\" he asked.\n\n\"If you mean the man you threatened, he appears to be backing slowly away with his hands raised.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said, disappearing for a moment, then reappearing with an aye-aye held by the scruff of its neck. \"Toss this critter to him, would you? I don't like flying with these buggers on board no more.\"\n\nHe handed off the ship's inspector to Lester, who immediately lost control of it. The creature scrambled up his arm and latched on to his head, terrified of the sudden intrusion. Lester gibbered incomprehensibly, then tore it free and hurled it out the door. It struck Mallow square in the face and swiftly made its displeasure known.\n\nMallow's cries of surprise and confusion as the furry tornado of claws and teeth enveloped his head were soon swallowed by the roar of the turbines as Coop plopped into the seat and boosted the throttle. A long, low creak filled the gondola of the airship. It was straining against the freshly secured mooring ropes.\n\n\"You can't believe you shall get away with this!\" Dr. Prist said, her wits slowly returning as she sat shakily on the floor of the opulent cabin, just in front of Alabaster's easy chair. \"The guards are already taking up their weapons. You'll never get this ship untied before they arrive.\"\n\n\"I ain't planning on untying anything, Doctor,\" Coop said.\n\nHe left the pilot's compartment with the throttle at full, then leaned out the open door with a gun. Three quick shots later the ropes snapped and the airship lurched forward.\n\nCoop turned back to the others.\n\n\"We'll meet up with the Wind Breaker in a bit. Cap'n'll want to make sure there ain't any scout ships or gunships lurking about to take any shots at us,\" he explained. \"Oh, and thank you kindly, Doc, for not trying to kick me out the door just then.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 I assure you I failed to do so only because my mind is not so thoroughly adjusted to violence as yours.\"\n\n\"Still, much obliged.\"\n\n\"Just get to the controls! As horrid as I'm sure your plans for me are, I just as soon survive this flight.\"\n\n\"Will do, Doc.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "The Thicket had painted an entirely new picture of the fug for Lil and Nita. First and foremost among their observations was the utter darkness of it. The fug was dim on the brightest days and black at most other times, but at least there was a sky overhead. The first half of the day, their journey had been through an endless graveyard of skeletal trees, but when they found their way to the stretch of land that earned the region its name, things changed markedly. Something wholly different from anything either Lil or Nita had ever seen took the place of the husks of oak and elm. They had the same overall shape of oak trees, but the leaves were sharp, jagged things. They looked like their leaves, tired of being eaten by woodland creatures, had grown claws to defend themselves. The bark of the trees was smooth and silvery, with an odd oily sheen. They grew thick and stout, gnarled roots running near the surface and making the ground treacherous, while the branches arched high and interwove overhead into a dense canopy. Thorny vines wrapped around and wove between every stretch of tree sturdy enough to support them. Not a whisper of the weak glow of day filtered through the canopy of leaf and vine. The darkness was so complete that the glow from within the firebox\u2014barely visible in the seams between the door\u2014was comparatively glaring.\n\nEach of the fug folk had told stories of near misses with the wildlife, and few were nothing less than chilling. Thus far their three days of travel had turned up no direct encounters, but Nita didn't need to be convinced that this was a living place. Distant rumbles, certainly the warning calls of beasts, rolled through the forest. That she could hear them at all over the rhythmic hiss of the steam engine and the cacophonous rattle of the rigid carts traversing the uneven ground suggested the creatures responsible were either very large or very loud. Smaller things chittered unseen among the branches overhead, and seldom did they travel more than a few minutes without a set of large, vigilant eyes catching the glow of their phlo-lights in the distance.\n\nNita and Lil had found their way to the controls of the rearmost cart in the caravan. It was something of the runt of the litter. When modifying and improving the carts for the journey, there hadn't been enough worthwhile parts to make all of them fully functional, so the one they now piloted had been stripped down a bit. That reduced its power, but to offset this shortfall they'd not attached any trailers to tow. Aside from allowing it to keep pace with the others, the lack of a train of unpowered platforms behind it meant they could keep a watch on the very rear of the group and target anything approaching from behind. To further decrease the load, Nita and Lil were the cart's only passengers. At the moment, Nita drove and Lil sat beside her on lookout.\n\n\"This here is just about as far from the open air as I think I've ever been,\" Lil observed with a shiver. \"I don't like having this much between me and the sky. Feels awful.\"\n\n\"That's funny,\" Nita said. \"It was making me rather homesick.\"\n\nLil shot her a doubtful look. \"I ain't seen much of Caldera up close, but every inch of it was prettier than this. If nothing else, you've got loads of sun and color.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you've never been in the steamworks. For the last few years I've spent my days working in claustrophobic tunnels carved out of an active volcano. It's close, it's dark. The air is heavy with strong smells. Every moment of every day you're assaulted by the sound of rattling machinery\u2026 Really, the only thing missing right now is oppressive heat.\"\n\n\"And you're missing that, are you?\" Lil said, an eyebrow raised.\n\n\"Well you miss the sky right now, don't you? Biting cold, howling wind. Churning your stomach with constant rocking and swinging?\"\n\n\"Aw, that stuff ain't so bad. At least it's got a great view.\"\n\nA voice called out from farther ahead in the convoy, drawing their attention.\n\n\"Eyes to the left! Weapons hot!\" barked the forward lookout.\n\nLil and Nita turned and scanned the ground. The darkness was nearly complete on that side, and if there was a threat, it wasn't obvious.\n\n\"You see anything?\" Lil asked, climbing into the gunner's seat.\n\n\"Nothing. In fact\u2026 I don't even see any eye-shine out there. \u2026 Something scared off the nearby creatures\u2026\"\n\n\"That suits me.\" Lil twisted the knobs to feed steam to the gun and adjusted her goggles. \"I always like having one big thing to shoot at instead of a bunch of small ones. Big things are slower and easier to hit.\"\n\n\"I suppose that's one way to look at it\u2026 I suppose that's the sort of lesson you learn from stories like 'The Boastful Bullfrog.'\"\n\nLil looked to Nita, her eyes lighting up. \"'The Boastful Bullfrog'! That's from the book I got you! You have been reading it. I forgot to ask.\"\n\n\"Of course. It's a nice little book, and with some very interesting woodcuts.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you like it. I ain't sure we read the same story, though. How'd you get that out of that story?\"\n\n\"The bullfrog puffs itself up more and more until it's so big that the eagle gets him instead of the little frogs. Sometimes it's better to be little and fast than big and strong. A useful moral.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Me and Coop got a different moral out of that story.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Bullfrogs is funny lookin', mostly.\"\n\nThe caravan crept forward, those ahead picking up the pace as much as the uneven ground would allow. Now that their attentions were heightened, they began to notice other worrying changes in their surroundings. The subtle but constant sound of local wildlife had silenced. The only sound beyond the rattle of the carts was the creaking of branches in the wind. It felt like the whole forest was bracing itself for whatever was to come next.\n\nSomething snapped in the trees, and all eyes shot to the source. Nita leaned quickly aside to grasp the grip of the phlo-light and shift it upward. Her light converged with the others from farther ahead, focusing on a tree a hundred yards away, barely visible in the dim night and through the low branches of the trees between. A form was hidden among the thorny branches. The details weren't clear, but two eyes the size of fists caught the light and shone like emeralds. The eyes squinted and a chilling noise rolled through the forest. It was a deep resonant chatter, like something echoing up out of a cave or out of a nightmare.\n\nThe beast shifted among the branches, causing the whole tree to sway. A crust of purple ice crackled away and sprinkled to the ground. Even without seeing the whole creature, there was something predatory about the motion. It was preparing to pounce.\n\n\"\u2026 Oh heck\u2026\" Lil said, her eyes wide behind her goggles.\n\nShe was the first to fire, and the very moment she squeezed the trigger, chaos erupted. Lil's assessment hadn't been entirely sound, because while the thing was large, it was by no means slow. As spikes filled the air, issuing forth from all three steam-powered fl\u00e9chette guns, the thing flashed out of the trees. It was not frightened by the guns, and despite the sheer mass of ordnance whistling through the air, not a single spike met its mark. Spikes traced lines across the ground, conjuring bursts of sparkling snow and dust where they struck. Just ahead of them, moving with terrifying speed, was the creature. It didn't stand still long enough for Nita to get a good look at it, sprinting instead toward the center of the convoy. Whatever the thing was, it was long and lithe, moving in great bounding leaps that covered the distance between them faster than seemed possible.\n\nNot until it was barely ten yards away did a spike finally strike. A furious chatter erupted and it turned, instantly shifting from moving toward the convoy to running along it from the center and moving toward the rear. As it drew nearer, it was all Nita could do to track the thing with the light. It was a knot of muscles wrapped in short slate-gray fur, flexing and springing with each stride. She could only make out brief glimpses as it streaked by\u2014a short and powerful muzzle, chisel-like teeth, oddly small ears\u2014but most out of place was the long tail trailing behind. It was fluffy and lush, like something a wealthy dowager would wear to the theater.\n\nThe monster flashed by the cart, catching two more spikes from Lil's gun before it sprang up into the trees and vanished from sight.\n\n\"What in the world is that thing?!\" Nita asked, trying to keep the cart on course after the others while still sweeping the trees with her light.\n\n\"Whatever it is, it's a nimble little devil. Gotta reload. Keep your eyes peeled.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best. Keeping this thing under control.\"\n\nLil vaulted from the gun seat and dug through a crate teetering atop the rest of the cargo.\n\n\"Dang it. I know they just gave us a fresh belt from the ammo cart this morning. Where is it?\"\n\n\"The open-top crate, in the corner there. Hurry! I see motion again.\"\n\n\"Got it! Loading up!\"\n\nShe pulled a tightly coiled canvas belt from the crate and leaped back into the seat. Three deft motions clicked the roll in place, and she pivoted the gun to the tree the monster had vanished into.\n\n\"Anybody see it?\" Lil bellowed.\n\nSix people answered back, their voices drowning each other out.\n\n\"One at a time, fellas.\"\n\nThey answered again, but this time far more vigorously. Nita glanced forward to find every free hand in the group pointing in the same direction. To their left, motion rippled through the trees. Here and there a glimpse of fur revealed itself among the branches. Even moving through the treetops, the thing was easily outpacing the carts.\n\n\"I've got a bead on it. Here we go,\" Lil announced.\n\nShe pulled the trigger and her gun began to devour the fresh belt of spikes. Years of shooting at raiders had made her better than most at tracking a moving target from atop a vehicle. Two or three spikes struck the creature, as evidenced by renewed chitters and chatters of anger and fear. The motion slowed a bit and veered away. For a brief and precious moment it seemed they might have scared the beast off.\n\nThat moment vanished with an earsplitting trill. Lil flinched and covered her ears. The sound, uncannily like a steam whistle, roared with painful intensity from her weapon. She reached for the valve to cut off the steam supply, but the damage was done. The creature stopped and turned, diving from the trees with purpose and bounding toward the shrill sound.\n\n\"Lil! Lil!\" Nita screamed.\n\nIt was no use. She couldn't even hear herself over the whistle. Lil finally cut the supply to her weapon off and raised her eyes to find the beast upon them. It struck the side of the cart hard, giving Nita her first good look at the thing as near as it had ever been to stationary. In size and overall shape, the nearest point of reference she had was a wildcat, but it wasn't quite right. The fur seemed too long for that, the body too rounded. The head, similarly, was all wrong, too elongated, and with long, curving teeth with flat ends. Two spikes were visible sticking through its pelt in the center of dark stains.\n\nIf Lil's reflexes had been a fraction of a moment slower, she would have been beneath the beast's dexterous claws. Alas, though she was able to spring from the chair of the gun, when the animal struck the cart it was nearly enough to topple the overloaded vehicle. The pitching to the side didn't manage to dislodge the well-secured cargo, but it sent Lil tumbling over the edge.\n\nShe rolled to a stop and the beast leaped from the back of the cart and bounded toward her. Nita wrenched a brake lever into place, bringing her cart grinding to a halt. Ahead, the other carts were curving aside, bringing themselves into position to target the creature as it stalked toward her slowly recovering crewmate. Each cart's gunner perched in its seat, fingers ready to fire as soon as the motion steadied enough to offer some accuracy.\n\n\"Don't shoot! You'll hit Lil!\" Nita cried.\n\nWithout waiting for a reply from the others, she sprang into action. She scrambled across the cargo and reached down to the controls for the gun, twisting the valve to maximum pressure. This brought the whistling sound back in all its deafening intensity. The monster behind them turned from Lil, who was just beginning to climb to her feet. She groped for her pistol, and a very shaken but apparently unharmed Nikita was crawling from within her coat.\n\nNita jumped down from the cart and noticed two things that Lil, in very short order, noticed as well. The first was that the pistol was missing from her belt. It had bounced free of its holster and now lay among the deep purple foliage just on the other side of the beast before her. The second realization came when she tried to take a deep breath. One of the buckles of her mask had broken, and thus a small gap had opened between her face and the mask. Her deep breath pulled in a stinging dose of fug that doubled her over in an agonizing cough.\n\nThe monster charged past Nita, ignoring her in favor of the blaring whistle the gun had become. She reached her ailing friend and tugged a length of cord from a pouch on her belt, fumbling a bit with her gloves to help cinch the mask tight to Lil's face.\n\n\"Why ain't they shooting?\" Lil said once she was able to get a clean breath.\n\n\"I told them not to. They might have hit you.\"\n\n\"Well why ain't they shooting now?\"\n\nThey both turned to see the creature perched atop the cart. It had its jaws locked around the gun, straining to tear it free.\n\n\"I think they're afraid to hit the cargo.\"\n\n\"Where's the sense in that?\" Lil growled, stroking Nikita once before opening her jacket to let her crawl back inside. \"What good is saving the cargo if you don't live to put it to use?\"\n\nThe whistle came to a sudden end as the beast put a tooth through the supply line. Scalding steam rushed to fill its mouth, and the monster threw its head back and released the loudest screech yet. The sound alone was enough to shake ice from the trees and instantly robbed Nita, Lil, and likely the rest of the crew of their hearing.\n\nA dull hiss chased away any hint of sound as Nita's ears coped with the din. The lights of the other carts were all focused on the beast as it bounded from the cart and into the trees again, leaving the Wind Breaker crewmembers alone in the darkness.\n\nNita scanned the trees while Lil felt along the ground where she'd last seen her pistol before the lights trailed away from them. Each was yelling instructions to the other, completely unheard.\n\nFinally the light drifted back, initially to Nita's relief. Then her frazzled mind latched on to a simple fact that chilled her to the bone. The lights were following the monster, and if the pool of illumination was trending toward them\u2026\n\nJust as her fingers closed around one of the heftier wrenches in her sash, she felt an impact on her back. A weight forced her to the ground and squeezed the air from her lungs. The sashes and harnesses tightened and she felt something pin her legs to the earth. The thing was on top of her, making a concerted effort to pull her apart.\n\nFor better or worse, it lost its grip on her legs first and yanked her into the air. Her hearing was beginning to return, and the first thing to break through was the high-pitched screech of tooth on metal as the beast clamped ever tighter on to the massive wrench head that she kept faithfully strapped to her back.\n\nNita shut her eyes and tried to ignore being shaken like a rag doll by a ravening creature, focusing instead on unfastening and removing the only tool for the current job. It was a standard fixed wrench on one end but extended to a two-foot-long spike on the other side. She pulled it free and thrust it blindly behind her. The one good part of facing a massive beast was that it was a large target and difficult to miss. The sharp handle sank deep into the monster's flesh, and it released her to screech again. She struck the ground with a thud, and the next sound she heard was the six short barks of Lil's pistol emptying into the beast's face.\n\nThe accumulation of injuries were finally enough to convince the thing that whatever it wanted from the convoy, it wasn't worth the effort. As quickly as it had come, the monster bounded into the distance.\n\nLil pulled Nita from the ground and rushed her to their cart. As they climbed on, the rest of the crew began to fire spikes at the retreating beast for good measure. The crewmates' vehicle still spouted steam from the damage it had received, and a length of the barbed wire had been dislodged from the improvised armor, but the rest was relatively intact. Lil followed the steam pipe leading to the gun until she found a valve that could shut it off while Nita disengaged the brake and slung dirt with the wheels before launching after the rapidly departing convoy.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Nita called.\n\n\"What?!\" Lil answered, making her way unsteadily to Nita's side.\n\n\"I said are you all right? Are you hurt?\"\n\n\"I'm fine. You're the one who got shaken by that panther-bear-thing! You've got holes all up and down the back of your coat, but I don't see blood.\"\n\n\"I'm fine. It latched on to the monkey toe. Heh. And you questioned my decision to bring it along.\"\n\n\"Darn good thing you did. And that you brought that shiv, too.\"\n\n\"What, the thing I stabbed that monster with? That's not a shiv. That's a podger spanner with a drift pin.\"\n\n\"Whatever you call it, it does a fine job of poking holes in folks.\" Her lips pulled into a sneer behind her mask as she glanced ahead. \"And speaking of poking holes in folks, you reckon there's any chance at all this whole mess was just bad luck?\"\n\n\"I would be profoundly amazed if that gun malfunction was anything but sabotage. Do you think you can manage getting the spike out of the barrel?\"\n\n\"Way ahead of you,\" Lil said, crawling over to the gun and working at the steaming hot barrel. She levered open the breech and slid out the spike. \"Well that settles it.\"\n\nShe returned to Nita's side and showed what she'd discovered. Rather than the stout, heavy solid spikes that made up their ammunition stores, it was a hollow tube with a sharpened end.\n\n\"It was loaded in backward, too. No wonder it made such a racket,\" she said. \"Seein' how that thing came a-running back just as soon as this started singing its song, I'd say whoever slipped this in our ammo belt knew what it would do. So what do you suppose? Someone just hates us? Wants us dead? Heaven knows we've given the fuggers plenty of reason over the last few months.\"\n\n\"Granted, Lil. But they need our help. Why kill us before we're through with the job at hand?\"\n\n\"Not so much anymore, right? We're nearly there. And these folk can build just fine.\"\n\n\"Bolting some guns to some carts is simple enough, but there's a good deal of work to be done that we've only scratched the surface of when it comes to design. We've got to assemble whole boilers, modify them for operation with\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, so there's more to do. So this was more about how much they hate us than how much they need us.\"\n\n\"\u2026 I'm not so sure it isn't both. They sabotaged the gun. Of the two of us, you're the only one who's used the gun. Getting the refinery fortified and functional relies more heavily on me than you.\"\n\n\"So the best of both worlds. Kill the ornery one and keep the smart one.\"\n\nLil tugged off one glove and flipped open the cylinder of her revolver. She dumped the casings out and one by one loaded fresh bullets from an inside pocket of her seemingly endless coat.\n\n\"What are you planning?\" Nita said warily.\n\n\"I'm planning on getting some answers. Is it one of these fuggers that wants me dead or all of them. Are we actually heading somewhere, or is this all a roundabout way of getting rid of me and hoping the rest of the crew will chalk it up to bad luck? Because all I seen so far is dark, thorn trees, and weird critters. None of this ichor stuff they've got us after. I'm startin' to think it was all a lie.\"\n\n\"And just how do you expect to get your answers?\"\n\nShe clicked the cylinder in place. \"I'll ask real nice. Get up real close on this next train of carts here.\"\n\n\"Wait. You're going to do it now? You're not even going to wait until we stop?\"\n\n\"The gun's broke. Ain't much for me to do till we fix it. We ain't gonna fix it till we stop, and we ain't gonna stop till that thing we shot full of holes is far enough behind us to not be able to change its mind about leaving us be. I'm liable to get impatient twiddling my thumbs all that time. Besides, in my experience, the quicker you show a body who they ought not meddle with, the quicker they don't do it again.\"\n\n\"Any chance I can talk you out of it?\"\n\n\"Not likely.\"\n\n\"Can I at least convince you to leave Nikita behind? No sense putting her through another bit of excitement if we can avoid it.\"\n\n\"Oh, sure thing.\" She tugged her coat open and looked down at the frightened creature clinging to her. \"Hop along, darlin'. Mommy has some business to tend to. Your other mommy will take care of you.\"\n\nNikita, moving quickly to avoid spending any more time in the cold than she had to, crawled from Lil's coat to Nita's. Once the creature was safely stowed away, Lil crawled onto the barbed-wire-laden front wall of the cart, standing with unnerving steadiness atop the precarious perch as the cart rumbled across the uneven ground.\n\nNita dialed up the speed gradually, closing the gap between her cart and the end of the train dragged by the cart ahead. When she was ready, about three feet farther away than Nita would have expected, Lil sprang from the top of the wall and nimbly snagged the rear of the cargo cart ahead. From there the defenses barely slowed her as she scrambled onto the teetering mound of secured cargo and moved toward the unwitting focuses of her wrath.\n\nWith her crewmate delivered, Nita backed off the throttle a bit and tried to keep an eye on Lil. The chances were better than average that in short order the convoy would bring itself to a sudden stop to deal with the chaos Lil was certain to cause. After a moment, she became aware of a tapping within her coat. It was Nikita.\n\nWhy do Coop and Lil do these things?\n\nNita sighed. \"Because if the Coopers didn't do that sort of thing, they wouldn't be the Coopers.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Lil made her way easily across the rattling trail of carts. The armored walls, with the one recent exception, had done a fine job of keeping the local wildlife at bay. It would have taken considerably more to dissuade a motivated member of the Wind Breaker crew. An army might not have been enough to do the job. She wasn't making any effort to avoid being seen. An attack from a forest monster was more than enough to keep the eyes of the fug folk on the surrounding trees. After hopping the couplings between three heavily laden carts, Lil climbed onto the steam contraption responsible for doing the pulling. There were six fug folk on board, Kent among them.\n\n\"Hello, boys!\" Lil said, bracing herself atop the wall.\n\nHer coat fluttered in the wind, and one gloved hand gripped her pistol with its hammer cocked and the barrel held high. The other hand held firm to the top of the wall. Though she was barely two thirds the height of the shortest man in the cart, she more than made up for her size with the fire in her eyes. They gleamed with a potent mix of madness and purpose, and if not for the mask, the fug folk would have seen an exhilarated grin.\n\n\"What in blazes?!\" Kent said, stumbling back. \"What are you doing?! I thought you were back with Nita.\"\n\n\"Oh, I was. But I got curious, and I just can't sit still when I got questions floating around in my head. So help me set some of that at ease, will you? First off, is it just me you all want dead, or both of us?\"\n\n\"Calm down, Lil,\" Kent said, as the others began to anxiously reach for their weapons.\n\n\"Oh, I'm calm. I always try to be calm when there's shootin' to do. Otherwise my hands get all shaky and I end up wasting bullets.\"\n\n\"No one wants you dead, Lil,\" Kent said.\n\n\"That true?\" she asked, raising her voice and sweeping her eyes across the others. \"Me and Kent here got more of a history than me and the rest of you, so him I'm liable to believe, but the rest of you seem awful quiet on the subject. Maybe the question's too hard. Okay, here's an easier one. Who was the one that portioned out the ammo this morning? Because I got a bone to pick regarding the quality. It was a bit noisy.\"\n\nNo one said a word, but one fug person who had never bothered to introduce himself reached subtly for his gun.\n\n\"If I was you, I'd either draw that pistol or leave it be. You keep teasing at grabbing it and I'm liable to make your mind up for you,\" she said.\n\nKent stepped between them. \"Lil, calm down. We only just survived an attack a moment ago. We're all on edge. Why don't we\u2014\"\n\n\"Who's 'we'? Because I don't know about you, but from where I was lookin' it wasn't you folk who just survived an attack, it was me and Nita. And thanks so much for all the help while we were down there getting torn up.\"\n\n\"We thought you were done for! No one's ever survived on foot when one of those things are around,\" remarked the would-be gunman.\n\n\"Uh-huh. So that's how you fellas work? You know how many times my crew went toe to toe with something no one ever came back from? If you boys are the sort to give up on someone just because saving them doesn't seem likely, I ain't sure I'm keen on collaborating.\"\n\n\"Put the gun away and we'll talk about whatever it is we can do to set you at ease,\" Kent said.\n\n\"Folks tend to be more obliging when I've got the gun out. And if you want me at ease, answer my questions, and they better be honest answers. First one up: Which one of you passed out the ammo the morning?\"\n\n\"If I answer, what exactly are you going to do?\" Kent asked.\n\n\"Just about the same thing I'll do if you don't answer, only to someone else.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to rat out one of our own if you're going to pull that trigger before hearing out what might have to be said. So you just\u2014\"\n\n\"It was Branca!\" yelped one of the smaller fug folk.\n\nKent shot him a sharp look.\n\n\"I'm not going to let that crazy surface lady shoot me for trying to keep a secret.\"\n\n\"Sensible fella, that one,\" Lil said. \"There being only one more train of carts, I figure I've got a bit more climbing to reach the culprit. Pull up closer so I can hop along.\"\n\n\"Don't do it,\" Kent said.\n\n\"Kent, you and me been through a bit together, so I'm not eager to put a bullet in you, but you're working hard to change my mind on that.\"\n\n\"This is too important a job and we're too deep into it to let it fall apart because you got a wrong idea in your head.\"\n\n\"Then put some right ideas in my head, Kent. Give me some sort of proof any of this is on the level.\"\n\n\"You've seen the ichor, the demonstration.\"\n\n\"I seen Coop make a ball disappear during a shell game, too. Could be the only difference between the two is I know how Coop did the trick. You folk are smart. You could pull some stunt to make what I saw happen look like it was happening when it wasn't. I ain't seen or heard one thing so far that couldn't have been double talk and parlor tricks. You want me to put this gun back? Show me something that proves what we're after is really there.\"\n\nKent's brow furrowed in combined frustration and concentration. Then he raised his nose and took a sniff.\n\n\"All right. Seems like luck is with us. You're about to see for yourself we're telling the truth, because we're just about to get there.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's awful convenient.\"\n\n\"It's three days and a bit more since we left, which is about how long we said it would take. That isn't convenience, that's just sticking to a schedule.\"\n\n\"And how exactly do you know we're just about to get there?\"\n\n\"I can smell it. You know how the fug is thickest and densest right where it meets the surface air?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"To our noses, it's not just thicker there, it's got a sharper smell. And the smell around here is pretty sharp and getting sharper.\"\n\n\"What's that got to do with anything? We ain't heading for the surface.\"\n\n\"It's hard to explain.\"\n\n\"Give it a try.\"\n\n\"You know how that bottle of ichor chases the fug out of that tent you girls share?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"A whole well of the stuff chases it out of a whole stretch of the forest. From what I heard, it's a pretty wide swath.\"\n\n\"Seems like that's the sort of thing we'd be able to see.\"\n\n\"It's a wall of deep purple haze hidden in a thick fog of deep purple haze. You can't see it for the same reason no one's spotted it from above for all these years. It blends in perfectly.\"\n\nLil narrowed her eyes. \"All this is just about perfect for me to not be able to prove what you're saying is true or not.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to\u2014\" Kent blurted. He paused and regained his composure. \"Look. Maybe you're right. Maybe there's someone here who wanted you dead. But maybe they acted now because they knew I wouldn't be able to prove what I'm saying, and they expect you to lose your temper and kill someone, which would give each of us reason enough to kill you.\"\n\nShe knitted her brow. \"That would be like a fugger. To tie folks up in knots with all sorts of different twisty plans and such\u2026 How long is it supposed to take?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I've never been there. Maybe five minutes? They say the bigger beasts always linger nearby, and we just ran into a pretty big one.\"\n\n\"Five minutes of me sitting here with the six of you getting antsy on account of me having my gun out? Not likely.\"\n\n\"You could put your gun away.\"\n\n\"Even less likely.\"\n\nLil stared off ahead for a moment, gun still held ready but not angled to threaten anyone in particular.\n\n\"I'm not sure I like you thinking this much. What are you planning?\" Kent said.\n\n\"I don't know. I'm not usually the one making plans. But there being one of me and six of you is something I ain't too happy about at the moment. That's six chances for one of you to get lucky if you make a move\u2026\" Her eyes drifted down. \"Ah, that'll do 'er.\"\n\nShe lowered her gun, causing those nearest to its line of fire to lurch out of the way. Rather than aiming at any one of them, she leveled the barrel at a large and clearly marked box peeking out from beneath a canvas tarp.\n\nAs the realization of her new target swept through the six other passengers on the cart, each reacted as though the pistol was pointed squarely at his head. She was pointing directly at a crate of explosives earmarked for blasting out bits of the well.\n\nWhen she was sure she had their attention, she placed her finger lightly on the trigger.\n\n\"That ought to keep you all honest. And if any of you feels the need to scratch your nose or the like, I suggest you do it nice and slow. Wouldn't want me to get startled roundabout now\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Lucius P. Alabaster reclined in an overstuffed chair in a small, comfortable office. Mallow was tending to him like a mother hen. Already he'd swaddled the gunshot wound with a truly excessive amount of bandages, and it was time for the obligatory moistened washcloth applied to the forehead. Though the injury was a grazing shot, the immaculate white of his suit was marred by blobs of bright red that made the wound seem infinitely worse.\n\n\"This is\u2026 an inauspicious beginning to my legendary career,\" moaned Alabaster. \"My personal ship stolen. My body broken and my ego bruised.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, sir.\" Mallow set down the medical supplies and began to pour out a snifter of brandy that he'd found in a cabinet beside the desk. \"You came face to face with a member of the Wind Breaker crew. No, you did battle with a crewmember. And you've come away alive and breathing. As a matter of fact, you remained here, and he left. I call that a retreat. And thus I would label you the victor.\"\n\n\"Oh Mallow. Occasionally I wonder why I retain you as my manservant, and then you illustrate your truly first-rate sycophancy. I am not so weak-minded to succumb to such shallow stroking of my ego. Most of the general public, however, shan't know better, so from this point forward that is the tale we shall tell.\"\n\nThere was a rapid, panicked knock at the door.\n\n\"Mr. Alabaster is not seeing anyone right now!\" Mallow barked.\n\n\"My dear sir, this is my office.\"\n\n\"Let him in, Mallow.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" he said, snapping to the task and answering the door.\n\nIn rushed a man dressed in a well-worn tweed suit with scuffed leather patches over the elbows. His face was plastered with the very specific flavor of desperation that occurs when the individual with absolute power within a facility suddenly loses control. Alabaster smiled when he saw the look. For him, it was an endlessly useful look. To a man like the dean, the need for order surpassed even his thirst for authority and control. The chaos had left a vacuum, and despite his position at the center of that chaos, Alabaster was ready, willing, and able to take the position of \"sound and stable mind.\"\n\n\"Mr. Alabaster, are you aware of what precisely has occurred?\" the dean asked.\n\n\"Intimately, sir.\"\n\n\"Professor Prist was not a mere educator, sir. She was delivered by representatives within South Pyre for my specific shepherdship! I can't imagine what those murderous thieves might want with her, but they've absconded with a very valuable woman.\"\n\n\"Yes, Dean. As I earlier suggested, I'm quite aware of the details of the situation. More so than you by a fair margin.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do, sir?\"\n\n\"I am pleased that you've asked. Are there any vehicles within the academy that can deliver me and my servant to Caer Fiona?\"\n\n\"I am afraid not. Students and staff reside on campus. Once a fortnight a Fugtown shuttle arrives, but that won't be here for another nine days. And airships with various food and sundries arrive monthly, but we've just been resupplied.\"\n\n\"Glorious\u2026\" Alabaster said.\n\nHe took a sip from his snifter.\n\n\"\u2026 Is that my brandy?\" the dean said, glancing at the glass, then the bottle. A whisper of his authority returned to his expression.\n\n\"Focus on the issue at hand, Dean. Can I assume that messengers arrive with at least a marginally greater frequency?\"\n\n\"Once every two days. The next is expected tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"Ah, excellent. Then I shall require assorted stationary such that I may pen and address two messages. One to my employees to request rescue from this isolated den of education, and one to inform Mayor Ebonwhite what has transpired here.\"\n\n\"Mayor Ebonwhite?! Must we? This will reflect very poorly upon both myself and my institution.\"\n\n\"Do you suppose that you could conceal the theft of what you've so aptly described as a 'very valuable woman' from the best-informed man in our exceptionally well-informed society? Indeed, the man has eyes everywhere. It would not push us far at all into the realm of impossibility to suggest that he already knows of these developments.\"\n\n\"\u2026 I suppose.\"\n\n\"You suppose correctly. And thus is it not more sensible to act responsibly? Mayor Ebonwhite will surely appreciate the proper conduct and integrity of a man in your position choosing not to hide from his inevitable wrath. More importantly, by alerting him to the details, he may just find it wise to finally take the steps necessary to actively eliminate the Wind Breaker and its crew, rather than trust mere attrition to fell the beasts that continue to cut their bloody swath across our land and its people.\"\n\n\"Actively eliminate them? But if the stories are to be believed, these maniacs were able to destroy the dreadnought on their first clash! What more fearsome weapon could be levied against them?\"\n\nAlabaster grinned and set down the glass. \"Why, my good sir, I should think the answer to that question is clear. The one man who has faced them and lived to tell the tale. The one man who has stood tall while the Wind Breaker scurried away. The one man with the towering intellect and an iron resolve capable of overcoming their animal cruelty and disregard for civility, rule, and law. The man who stands before you.\" He sprang to his feet and thrust his finger high. \"Lucius P. Alabaster!\"\n\nWhen the exhilaration of his self-aggrandizement was through, his eyes widened in pain. His gesture had unfortunately utilized the injured arm and thus earned him a searing pain and a fresh bit of bleeding. Despite this, he managed to stifle any profanity or yelps of agony. Instead he pointed to the door with the other arm.\n\n\"Now go! Fetch me the means to compose the messages that will with a few strokes seal the doom of our common foe and my own reputation for generations to come!\"\n\nThe dean hurried to the task, spurred by sheer force of personality to obey the larger-than-life figure who had taken over his office. When the man was gone, Alabaster slumped into the chair again, clutching at the injury while Mallow readied yet another layer of bandages.\n\n\"Those fiends have injured my proclamation arm. The savages. How can a man expect to stir the spirits of the rank and file if he can't gesticulate properly?\" he grumbled, reaching aside to retrieve the brandy and sip at it. \"For that, and for absconding with among other things my supply of decent brandy, they shall be made to pay.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "\"Captain, far be it from me to speak out of turn, but I believe we are long overdue to establish a proper docking procedure,\" grunted Gunner.\n\nHis comment was likely motivated by the inordinate amount of time spent attempting to properly capture and secure Ebonwhite's stolen vessel to the Wind Breaker in some way. Neither ship was properly designed for the task. Each had its gondola slung relatively close to its envelope, which meant that the large buoyant sacks that kept them in the air also collided to keep them separated when attempting to transfer crew. Coop's piloting skills, barely adequate for getting the stolen ship under control let alone precisely maneuvering it, did not help matters. At the helm of the small, sleek, and nimble vessel he was extremely heavy handed. Nearly a dozen times he'd slammed the smaller ship into the larger one at various speeds. The damage was largely cosmetic, but each such clash sent the two airships bounding away from each other and required the entire delicate ballet to begin again.\n\n\"My career's been spent trying to prevent folks from latching on to us. I ain't about to set my mind to finding ways to make it easier,\" Captain Mack called in return. \"You've got enough slack on that grappler to spear the gondola and haul it in. We've done it before.\"\n\n\"The Coopers are the grappling experts.\"\n\n\"You've had an awful lot of practice today. If that academy had so much as a scout or a spike gun, we'd have been done for fifteen minutes ago. I'm through pressing my luck. Get that thing grappled. Now!\"\n\n\"I am open to suggestions, Captain. That thing is made for speed and, as near as I can determine, to show off. There's nothing for the grappler to bite into that won't tear off like it was made of paper.\"\n\n\"Did I ask you for excuses?\" Captain Mack asked.\n\n\"No, Captain, but I felt they were relevant, since it would be rather anticlimactic for this mission if I were to punch a grappler through the chest of our chemist because the wall beside her was too flimsy for the hook to grip.\"\n\n\"Gunner!\" called Coop.\n\nGunner glanced to the hatch of Alabaster's ship to see Coop climbing out and hauling himself into the rigging connecting it to the envelope.\n\n\"What's the hold up?\" he called.\n\n\"I'm attempting to grapple without killing any of you.\"\n\n\"I'm sick of waiting for you. I got an idea.\"\n\n\"Ideas aren't your strong suit, Coop.\"\n\n\"And grappling ain't yours. But like I said, I'm sick of waiting. Cap'n, I'm going to take this thing up over the Wind Breaker. Try to keep moving about the same speed. Gunner, clear the mooring line off the port winch. I'll be down in a bit.\"\n\n\"Down in a\u2026 that insane idiot\u2026\"\n\nGunner let the grappling hook launcher swing loose. He knew that Coop had a very simple mind. If the goal was to get a rope tied between the two ships, he would take the most direct path to success he could manage. When it came to the Coopers, that path almost always led directly downward at inadvisable speeds. That left only one obvious choice, and there wouldn't be any time to waste if he decided to put that ludicrous plan into action.\n\nUnder Nita's direction, the Wind Breaker had recently gained a pair of mooring winches. Formerly the stout ropes that tied the ship to docks, piers, and pylons were hauled in by hand. As their activities so often necessitated fast arrivals and faster departures, their engineer had rigged up a fairly simple series of linkages, gears, and belts to power the winches. It added a bit of weight to the ship, something the captain wasn't fond of. It had been suggested that the reverse gear be abandoned to save weight and complexity, but Nita had stood her ground. As Gunner flipped the appropriate lever and spun the valve, he silently acknowledged the foresight. The well-used reel whined and smoked a bit, uncoiling chaotically as it spun up to speed.\n\nGunner tried to split his attention between the hazardous whipping lines and the portside of the envelope. The highly visible stolen ship vanished from view, rising overhead. A few seconds later the mooring winch was clear\u2014though surrounded by the tangled heap of its former contents. A rattling sound drew his eyes back to the portside rigging, but there was nothing to see.\n\n\"Over here! Clear that other winch!\" called a voice overhead.\n\nHe turned to find Coop clambering down the rigging on the opposite side of the ship. He had leaped from Alabaster's ship with its line tied to his waist, and was now climbing down from above in the role of \"human anchor.\"\n\n\"You said port side!\" Gunner called back, rushing to the other winch and tugging at the controls.\n\n\"The wind changed my mind,\" Coop said, sliding down the outside of the rigging.\n\nThe gusting wind had caught the smaller vessel and was carrying it off and away.\n\n\"Faster, Gunner. There ain't much slack on this thing,\" Coop said when he reached the deck.\n\n\"Is it even worth asking if you left anyone at the helm of that thing?\"\n\n\"Only folks on board are Lester and the doctor. They ain't got the nerve to leave the controls be until we're tied up proper.\"\n\n\"What you call lack of nerve, most would call the presence of good sense.\"\n\nThe second winch spun up to speed and launched its line into disorderly mounds as both crewmen watched the pilot-less ship drift farther away. Coop leaned against the weight of the rope as it began to tug him toward the railing.\n\n\"Why's that line so short?\" Gunner said. \"And frayed\u2026\"\n\n\"I had to shoot it free during my escape.\"\n\n\"Guns aren't toys, Coop.\"\n\n\"You're one to talk.\"\n\nA gust of wind dragged him across the deck and slammed him into the railing.\n\n\"Didn't think this through, I s'pose\u2026\" Coop said, struggling against the mass of the smaller ship and the force of the wind.\n\n\"Wouldn't have done you any good, Coop. You aren't equipped for it,\" Gunner blurted as he tugged the loose end of their mooring line free from the mess and hastily fashioned a loop.\n\nCoop managed two shaky steps forward before another gust yanked him fully off his feet and over the railing. In his desperate flailing, his fingers snatched the loop and dragged the rope after him.\n\nGunner watched helplessly as loop after loop of disorderly line whipped straight and dragged over the railing. There were ways to heap cords such that they could be pulled freely without tangling. Dumping them haphazardly from a powered winch was not one of them. In normal circumstances there would have been plenty of slack to allow Coop to tie line-to-line. The pile of looped rope, on the other hand, could snag and tangle at any moment.\n\nCoop dangled from the end of the frayed mooring line, his deft hands forming the unwieldy mooring cable into a complex hitch. Gunner couldn't take any steps to save his fellow crewman until he was certain the rope was affixed in a way that wouldn't use Coop's body as the weak link in a mooring chain. As such, he was left to watch Coop's handling of his predicament. Bizarrely, despite the precariousness of his position, Coop didn't seem harried or even particularly anxious. Gunner suspected Coop's fabled stupidity was such that he simply lacked the spare wits to worry about his impending doom when something as complex as knot-tying was occupying his thoughts.\n\nCourage and stupidity are remarkably interchangeable.\n\nJoining ropes from end to middle rather than end to end didn't make for the strongest of knots, but the end of Alabaster' ship's mooring rope was occupied by a deckhand. He looped and tightened as quickly as his precarious situation would allow. The knot was at least mostly tied when luck ran out and the Wind Breaker's rope hit a snag. Loops cinched tight into a hopeless rat's nest. It wrenched from the deck and tore away a section of railing, but when it drew taut Coop's knot held, leaving him to dangle beneath the join in the two ropes.\n\nThe Wind Breaker gondola swung violently to the side, but both the captain and Gunner barely stumbled.\n\n\"Coop!\" Gunner called.\n\n\"Yeah, Gunner?\" the deckhand replied, working now to untie himself.\n\n\"You broke the railing. If you survive this mission, Nita's going to give you an earful.\"\n\nCoop finished untying himself and began to work his way toward the Wind Breaker deck. \"That wasn't a bit she used that fancy Calderan wood for, was it?\"\n\n\"It was.\"\n\n\"Dang it\u2026\"\n\n\"Look on the bright side. Maybe your stupidity will get you killed before then.\"\n\n\"Not with my luck.\" He flipped down onto the deck and went to work managing the disaster the mooring line had become. \"Either way. Let's get this fancy ship pulled tight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Several long minutes of the frustrating process of untangling rope as thick as their wrists under load passed, and finally the ornate ship was lashed a few feet from the deck. Such an arrangement was less than ideal, and in no way resembled anything a proper engineer would have designed. Envelopes were pressed tightly to one another, and bringing the smaller ship's gondola near enough for its passengers/prisoners to disembark meant hauling it until it was dangling at greater than forty-five degrees. From there Coop climbed the lashings, affixed a ladder between deck and gondola, and levered the door open.\n\n\"All right, you two, out, so I can get this whole mess tucked away a bit better,\" he said, straddling the exit hatch.\n\nHe'd not quite made his way through the full order before a pair of screeching voices attempted to drown both him and each other out with the sheer magnitude of their outrage.\n\n\"\u2014absolute lummox would do such dangerous and ham-handed things so far from the ground? I've got half a mind to teach you a lesson about torturing your collaborators with your utter lunacy and\u2014\" Lester growled.\n\n\"\u2014don't know what you've got in mind, you scoundrels and cads, but you'll get nothing from me! I will not be intimidated by your beastly tactics! So you may as well\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey! Shut it!\" Coop barked.\n\nThe suddenness of the outburst coaxed them into silence, if only briefly.\n\n\"Do yourself a favor and take a look out that starboard window there.\"\n\nThey turned.\n\n\"There's nothing to see,\" Lester said.\n\n\"Not quite. It's a bit dark, but a thousand feet or so away is trees and rocks and such. Behind me is the Wind Breaker. You got two choices. You can get out the starboard side, or you can get out the port side.\"\n\n\"You would shove us overboard and send us plummeting to the ground?!\" Lester said.\n\n\"I ain't pushing nobody. But in a bit we're going to siphon the phlogiston out of that envelope there, and if you're still in here when we do that, you'll start tumbling about, and these hatches here ain't strong enough to stand on, usually. Especially not for a fancy delicate thing like this one. So one way or another you're probably going to end up outside the ship. Since we got use for the two of you yet, I'd prefer you get out now. Cap'n would be awful sore with me if we got you this close and then you went splat.\"\n\n\"You have a ghastly way with words, sir,\" Dr. Prist said, her face managing to become a bit more pale as he described their predicament.\n\n\"Didn't mean to startle you, Doctor, but I been off ship for a few hours and I'm itching for a proper meal. When my belly's empty, I can get a bit short with folk. So, you folk want out now, or are you keen to take your chances with getting shaken up while we start working on the envelope?\"\n\n\"\u2026 I suppose boarding your ship is marginally less distasteful than the fatal fall,\" Dr. Prist said shakily.\n\n\"Glad to hear it. If you'll just give me your hand, the ladder's shimmying a bit. Might be dangerous for someone who ain't got her air legs yet.\"\n\nDr. Prist reluctantly offered her hand. Coop took firm hold and tugged her as gently as possible through the hatch. Rather than dropping her to her feet, he simply threw her across his shoulders and began to descend toward the ship. She objected and struggled, but only briefly, as the moment she opened her eyes she was treated to the view beneath the ladder, which was primarily an inky void. As outrageous as her indelicate treatment might have been, she was intelligent enough to know that now was not the place and time to voice such concerns. After a mercifully brief trip over the yawning abyss, Coop set her down on the deck and returned to fetch Lester.\n\nIf she'd known she was destined to be traversing the unsteady decks of assorted airships today, she likely would have dressed differently. Her skirt caught the wind, billowing out like a sail and making it rather difficult to preserve her modesty. Similarly her boots, which had a high and rather fashionable heel, weren't overly stable on the uneven and pitched surfaces of the deck. Matters were made worse by the fact that her mind quite reasonably assumed the deck she was stepping onto would be level, but the awkward docking maneuver had forced it to list steeply to port. Thus, her first step sent her stumbling clumsily off balance.\n\nGunner, predicting her unsteadiness, stepped into her path and gave her something relatively solid to grab on to.\n\n\"Oh! Ahem. My apologies,\" she said, pushing herself away and trying to steady herself.\n\nOwing to her race, Dr. Prist was a head taller than Gunner, but for her, that was not the most striking difference between them. Her interactions with surface folk had thus far been limited to Coop moments earlier, whose long, lean build was much closer to a fug person's than Gunner's. The armory officer, hardly a brutish mound of muscle, was nevertheless much more broadly built than anyone Dr. Prist had yet encountered. Even the grunts she'd had occasion to work with were comparatively stretched out. To her eye, Gunner was positively barrel-chested and thick. It was an oddly intriguing physique for her, much more powerful than she was accustomed to. That was sufficient to make it oddly difficult to gather her thoughts.\n\n\"Not a problem, Doctor,\" Gunner said, his eyes still lingering on Coop while he fetched Lester. \"Are you well? Do you need any medical treatment?\"\n\n\"I\u2026 ahem\u2026\" She wrangled her skirt against the wind. \"I am quite well, thank you. I would not dare subject myself to the butchers you barbarians must call physicians, besides.\"\n\n\"The fact our medic is also a butcher is entirely incidental,\" he said.\n\n\"\u2026Your medic is actually a butcher\u2026\" she said quietly, her eyes a bit wide. \"\u2026 You don't\u2026 eat your wounded, do you?\"\n\n\"Butch is a better cook than that. She wouldn't use substandard provisions like us.\"\n\nCoop returned to the deck and dumped Lester unceremoniously to the ground.\n\n\"Do you idiots want to kill us? Are you truly so\u2014\"\n\n\"Mouth shut, Mr. Clear,\" Captain Mack growled. \"The lot of you, get up here. Seems like things didn't go to plan down there. I want explanations.\"\n\nCoop yanked Lester to his feet. Gunner somewhat more gently guided Dr. Prist, and the group made their way up the half flight of steps to the helm.\n\n\"I'll take the short version, Coop.\"\n\n\"We showed up. Lester went inside what I reckon was a restaurant. Two hours later this fancy fella showed up and started stirring things up. Said he knew we were there. I decided not to hang around too long, so I tried to find the doctor. Turns out she was in there with Lester. Got some of her books, though.\"\n\n\"Suits me, Coop. Go see to that ship. Save the phlogiston, and strap the gondola on good and tight. Might be some parts we can use before we cut it free.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Mr. Clear, Dr. Prist. Two hours is a long time. I trust you two had time to come to an agreement?\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"I\u2026 er\u2026\" Lester stammered.\n\n\"Come to an agreement regarding what?\" Dr. Prist said, tapping her foot and glaring at Lester. \"As I recall, you were dancing about some sort of a business proposition.\"\n\n\"Two hours and you were still dancing about?\" rumbled the captain.\n\n\"A proposed partnership is not the sort of thing one should approach indelicately.\"\n\n\"Dr. Prist, these fellas found themselves a new ichor well, and they want you to help them put it to use.\"\n\n\"A new ichor well,\" Dr. Prist said, her eyes sparkling briefly before skepticism tempered her reaction. \"Surely you're lying. If there was another source of ichor besides South Pyre, it would have been found by the proper industry. I'm frankly disgusted that someone would have even revealed the existence of ichor to you and your kind\u2026\"\n\n\"Show her the sample you got, Mr. Clear.\"\n\n\"Sample!\" she said, turning to Lester. \"You've got a sample of ichor?!\"\n\n\"I hope it hasn't been broken by these ruffians\u2026\" he said, reaching into an inner pocket of his now badly rumpled suit.\n\nThe very instant the faint amber gleam of his remaining sample jar could be seen, Dr. Prist practically attacked him, stepping forward and snatching the thick glass container. It was much larger than the one Digger had used for his demonstration, containing perhaps a teaspoon of the stuff rather than a few drops. Dr. Prist held it up, tipping the jar side to side to watch the honey-thick goo flow slowly.\n\n\"My heavens\u2026\" she breathed reverently. \"I've\u2026 I've only ever worked with samples three times before\u2026 And they were half this size. More precious than gold\u2026\"\n\nHer fingers, shaking as much from excitement as from cold, twisted the lid and raised the jar. The fug rushed away from the opening, leaving a small bubble of fresh air billowing and bulging against the wind. She positioned her nose near the opening and angled herself such that the wind would waft a measure of the scent past her flaring nostrils.\n\n\"It\u2026 it is genuine\u2026 I'd know that scent in my dreams. Where did you get this? You must tell me.\"\n\n\"That is entirely classified, so\u2014\" Lester said.\n\n\"Someplace in The Thicket. We've got crew on the way there now. Plan is to secure it and start making phlogiston and such,\" the captain said.\n\n\"I would have expected a greater degree of discretion from you,\" Lester grumbled.\n\n\"If I was you, Mr. Clear, I'd hold that tongue of mine. Because in a minute I'll be asking you some questions, and I wouldn't want you to use up all your breath complaining.\"\n\n\"So there's more. You're sure there's more?\" Dr. Prist said.\n\n\"I had my doubts before. And this fancy ship showing up looking for us specific makes me doubt it more, but that's the story we been fed. Supposing there is, our hope is you'd be willing to help these folk make the most of it, and sell us our share of your wares.\"\n\n\"May I ask you some questions?\" she said, for the life of her looking as though she was locked in a heroic struggle with her own conscience.\n\n\"Ask,\" Mack said.\n\n\"Will you kill me if I don't?\"\n\n\"I don't see much use in that.\"\n\n\"So if I were to say no, I would simply be free to go?\"\n\n\"As free as you were before we showed up, which I understand wasn't much to brag about. Likely your people would want to have a word with you, what with you setting foot on this ship and making it back sill breathing.\"\n\n\"Is it true what they say about you and your crew?\"\n\n\"Ain't sure what they say, but like as not it's true. A crew like us, you don't need to make much up to make us seem as bad as they'd have us seem.\"\n\n\"Did your people destroy the dreadnought?\"\n\n\"We did. Them trying to kill us, it seemed the thing to do.\"\n\n\"And the Phylactery. You killed everyone inside and destroyed it?\"\n\n\"Destroyed it, sure. Didn't kill the inmates. Again, didn't seem much reason to. Just as well, as some of the better folk from the prison are doing the heavy lifting for this ichor well venture.\"\n\n\"Did you burn those schools?\"\n\n\"I suppose they did see clear to make up a thing or two.\"\n\n\"Is it true you have a Calderan prisoner on board?\"\n\n\"Never a prisoner, and not on board. She's slinging wrenches with the rest of the folk hoping to dig that well. That's about as many questions as we've got time for, Doctor. There ain't too many places down here where we could drop you off without having to dodge spikes, so the longer you wait to decide you want off the ship, the longer a walk you've got ahead of you.\"\n\nShe chewed her lip and gazed at the substance oozing in the container. Lester, at this point, felt it prudent to end his brief silence.\n\n\"I realize this crew is not as sophisticated as myself or the bulk of our culture, Miss Prist, but\u2014\"\n\nHer head snapped to him. \"Mr. Clear, I am Dr. Prist. As unsophisticated as you've observed this crew to be, my title is something none of them have failed to acknowledge and you have not once utilized. To be perfectly honest, I'm not overly impressed with your tactics in attempting to recruit me. Captain\u2026 I'm sorry, what is your name?\"\n\n\"Captain McCulloch West.\"\n\n\"Captain West, even if his infamy is deserved, has at least been straightforward and frank in his discourse, whereas you spent the better part of two hours prevaricating and discussing this vague 'partnership' and 'endeavor' without ever brushing on specifics. Did it not occur to you that as a scientist the real point of interest for the potentially traitorous enterprise you would have me engage in would be the academic value of working with this impossibly unattainable substance?\"\n\n\"It\u2026 I didn't\u2026\"\n\n\"This is literally the substance that has made every aspect of our society possible. The possibilities, Mr. Clear. Phlogiston, burn-slow. I'm convinced these are just the beginning.\" She turned to Captain Mack. \"You are\u2026 confound it, the rumors and legends I've been told would have me believe you are nothing short of the devil. And thus you are asking me to sell my soul\u2026\"\n\nShe closed the jar and clutched it close.\n\n\"Captain West, this could well be the one thing on this blasted planet I'd be willing to sell my soul for.\" For a few seconds, she fought a mighty battle in her mind. When she came to a decision, one could see it in her eyes. \"I'll need equipment,\" she said.\n\n\"Gunner, take the doctor below decks and show her what we've got. Keep an eye on her. If Nita's taught us anything, we'd be safer with a wild animal loose in the ship than a clever sort with an eye for mischief.\"\n\nGunner nodded and took her hand, steadying her as he led her down toward the lower decks.\n\nLester turned to follow. \"Thank you very much, Miss\u2014\"\n\nShe shot him a sharp look.\n\n\"\u2014Dr. Prist. You won't regret this.\"\n\n\"You're not going anywhere just yet, Mr. Clear. I've got some questions for you as well,\" said Captain Mack.\n\n\"For me?\"\n\nHe pointed at the white ship, which Coop was now siphoning the phlogiston from. \"Explain that.\"\n\n\"What, the ship?\"\n\n\"Anything else you reckon needs explaining more than that?\"\n\n\"It wasn't my idea to steal it.\"\n\n\"I ain't concerned about it being stolen. What's got me curious is why the fella who brought it knew we were here.\"\n\n\"Why would you ask me that? Surely you don't think I had something to do with it!\"\n\n\"He's a fugger, you're a fugger. The only folk who should've known we were heading here were my folk and your folk. I don't reckon Coop or Gunner would be liable to let someone else know we were coming, so that just leaves you folk.\"\n\n\"Even associating with you and your people is an offense that would easily have been punishable with exile to Skykeep if you'd not blown it to bits. Why would I risk discussing our plans with anyone outside our organization?\"\n\n\"Because being the man who helped snare the Wind Breaker crew'd be looking at one hell of a reward at the end of the day, I reckon.\"\n\n\"If you are seeking to attach simple greed to an act, then you are vastly underestimating the profit to be gained from creating even a minor competitor to South Pyre in terms of resource production. Every last one of us stands to gain fortunes upon fortunes if we can establish phlogiston production alone. With burn-slow\u2014\"\n\n\"That's all well and good if there's actually an ichor well, but if that's a lie, then the only money or favor to be made is by ratting us out.\"\n\n\"But you've seen the ichor drawn from the well!\"\n\n\"I seen stuff you an your chemist call ichor. No telling where it came from. Could easily be the old well.\"\n\n\"If I wished to see you captured, why would I even risk being nearby when it happened? And for that matter, why would I entrust your capture to one ridiculous little vessel piloted by what looked like a ringleader at a circus.\"\n\n\"You being a coward is something I'm more liable to believe. But that still leaves us with the fact that there's still at least one traitor in your group. Best case would've been if it was you. A bullet would've solved the problem then. If it ain't you, it means the girls are probably traipsing through a forest with a dozen potential traitors. That's a recipe for blood. Maybe ours, more likely yours.\"\n\n\"More likely?\"\n\n\"We been on the lookout for treachery since the start. It'll be mighty hard to catch them girls by surprise. But that doesn't set my mind at ease much. If all the folks down there with them are traitors, it could be more than they can handle, and if only a few are traitors, it's liable to make things uncomfortable.\"\n\nA loud snap rang out over the deck. Captain Mack turned to find the gondola of Alabaster's ship swinging rather more quickly than he would have liked from beside the ship to below it. Enough phlogiston has been drained from the envelope that it was no longer able to remain aloft. The knots and slings that affixed it to the Wind Breaker, each of which were tied with a good deal more care than the hasty capture of the mooring lines, allowed it to swing down beneath rather than crash into the side. It was not a gentle maneuver by any means. The sudden weight shift caused the whole ship to lurch to the side. Captain Mack rocked lightly, reflexively absorbing the motion with his knees. Lester, less experienced in the ways of the sky, ended up flat on his back.\n\n\"Coop! Keep both ships in one piece, will you?\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n. Sorry, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Get that gondola slung proper under the gig, then get inside and start searching it.\"\n\n\"What for, Cap'n?\"\n\n\"If plans are leveled against us, there may be some sign of that somewhere in there. I want that thing cleaned out. But sling it proper first. Much as I hate having a bright, visible eyesore like that strapped on, at least it's good and streamlined. Shouldn't slow us too much if we align it proper.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Samantha Prist walked unsteadily through the corridors of the ship. Gunner had one hand on her shoulder, partially to keep her from doing anything inadvisable, but mostly to keep her on her feet. The sudden motion of the ship would have sent her stumbling into the wall, and though she probably would have been well served by steadying herself along the way with a hand to the wall, she was utterly unwilling to take so much as a finger from the jar of ichor clutched to her chest like a religious artifact.\n\n\"I find it rather unlikely that you'll have the proper equipment to perform even the most cursory of analysis on this substance. It is delicate, exacting work. I'm told your crew isn't beyond throwing crewmen overboard for lack of room and resources, let alone equipment,\" she said.\n\n\"I suppose you'll need flasks and burners? Perhaps a pressure vessel with an integrated gauge?\" Gunner said.\n\n\"\u2026 Those would be quite useful, yes. And a high-precision thermometer.\"\n\nThey reached the curtain-lined section of the ship that made up the crew quarters. Gunner pulled aside the curtain to his own.\n\nSamantha took a sharp breath as she saw the veritable armory hanging from his walls. Everything from polished, ornate swords to cobbled-together monstrosities, scorched and discolored from their overabundance of firepower. She backed away. Still she gripped the jar, shielding it as if it were a child in need of defense.\n\nGunner stepped inside and flipped open a large chest in the corner of his quarters. At first sight of the contents, Dr. Prist's eyes widened. The chest was filled to the brim with carefully secured and more or less immaculate labware. He flipped open a pouch and slid out a long rectangular tool made from polished metal and delicate glass.\n\n\"Would a candy thermometer do?\" he asked, presenting it to her.\n\nShe raised an eyebrow. \"It\u2026 it will, actually. How did you get all of this? It appears to be fug-made.\"\n\n\"Cost me a fair amount to get my hands on it a few years back. You folk seem willing to part with very nearly anything for enough money. Of course, since then we got five more sets during the heist. Two survived the escape.\"\n\n\"Why do you have it?\"\n\n\"One of the things that doesn't seem to be available at any price is anything but the most pathetic of munitions. So I'm forced to cook up my own powder and explosives. You'd be surprised what you can manage with a strong constitution, a steady hand, and a little burn-slow.\"\n\n\"I assure you, I would not be surprised. What surprises me is that you know such a thing.\"\n\nHe thumped a thick and well-read set of books stowed on a shelf beside the chest. \"Another trophy from the heist. Though I worked out the broad strokes through trial and error.\"\n\nShe glanced at his hand and noticed for the first time that it lacked the full complement of fingers. \"So I see\u2026 Would you mind setting up the pressure kettle over that number three burner there? Put it at the third notch. Have you any distilled water?\"\n\n\"Of course. But if I'm to let you use my equipment, I'll have to know what you've got in mind.\"\n\n\"I need to measure its primary product yields and transition points. If this is indeed from a new well, it could have different levels of impurity, and that could greatly change the necessary conditions to refine it. As you say, a bit of trial and error will be necessary. Ideally I shall retain all my digits. Perhaps most importantly for all involved, any difference at all from the established values would be a strong indicator that a previously undiscovered ichor well has been found.\"\n\nGunner selected the equipment she requested and began to attach it to mounting rods, which slipped through strategically placed holes drilled in his fold-down desktop. Dr. Prist directed him, indicating what should be raised or lowered. To her credit, she did so without assuming the condescending, supervisory tone that was so often the default for fug folk dealing with surface dwellers. This either spoke well of her social graces, or else suggested she was too thoroughly focused on the task at hand to pay attention to such matters of discourse.\n\n\"Fine. That's fine. A pipette, please.\"\n\nHe selected one and attempted to hand it to her, but she was still clutching the jar protectively.\n\n\"Is there likely to be any rough maneuvering in the short term?\"\n\n\"That isn't the sort of thing we plan ahead of time.\"\n\n\"This is precise work. I'm not certain I can be trusted to perform it in such unsteady conditions.\"\n\n\"Spend a few years on an airship and you'll do just fine at it. I've dosed burn-slow with saltpeter quite precisely in the middle of a storm without much mishap.\"\n\nShe glanced to the equipment, then at the jar. \"If you follow my instructions very carefully, do you believe you can perform the elements of this experiment that will require precise dexterity?\"\n\n\"That raises a few questions.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Can you trust me with that goop that you seem to value more than life itself, and can I trust you not to attempt anything regrettable while I am occupied with your instructions?\"\n\n\"You are concerned about me doing something to you? You people are the infamous ones!\"\n\nGunner looked at her flatly. \"Ignoring the simple fact that self-defense would be my aim in your position, just what sort of a reputation do you suppose you folk have among us in the mountains?\"\n\n\"Whatever do you mean?\"\n\n\"Oh, they had you secreted far from reality, eh? Where do we start with this procedure?\"\n\nShe huffed. \"Light the burner and half fill the kettle with distilled water. And while you're at it, explain what you meant by that childish little jab.\"\n\nHe measured out the water. \"I suppose it comes as a surprise to you, but being in a stranglehold is something we above the fug aren't terribly fond of. It's led us to develop quite a grudge while you sit in your little hole and reap the fruits of our labors.\"\n\n\"We reap the fruits of your labors. The life you've all chosen to live wouldn't be possible without the products of our innovation. You should count yourself lucky that we have been able to hone our skills sufficiently to keep you supplied.\"\n\n\"And in exchange you charge ruinous prices and take every step necessary to keep us from producing any of these precious supplies or even maintaining our own ships. Are we raising this to a boil?\"\n\n\"No, no. Just below. Put in the thermometer. I'll tell you when,\" she said quickly. \"Your crew is evidence enough of why it is crucial we don't share our technology with you. Look at the recklessness and cruelty you are capable of with even the scraps of our knowledge. There are so few of us and so many of you, in order for there to be any semblance of a balance of power we must exert some level of control.\"\n\n\"Is that how you justify it? Did you come up with that on your own, or do they teach that in schools?\"\n\n\"And what of your rigid and nonsensical claims of victimhood? Are they a product of your education? \u2026 Just a bit more and then ready the pipette. You'll be putting in one small drop.\"\n\n\"You control the flow of vital materials and happily let whole cities wither and die if they cannot meet your prices. Are you going to tell me that we should be kissing your feet for your graciousness?\"\n\nShe unscrewed the lid and presented the jar to him, squinting as it once again chased the fug from the room. \"Quickly. These fumes are as unpleasant for me as the fug is for you.\"\n\nHe dosed out the drops under her watchful gaze. The moment the pipette was free, she clamped the lid back on and the fug began to seep back in.\n\n\"You can stir it a bit, then remove the thermometer and clamp on the kettle lid with all valves shut. We'll check the smallest relief valve once with each notch on the pressure gauge. Phlogiston should come first. Standard samples will bear it at the third notch. \u2026 Good. For now we wait. And while I'll admit your existence, as you've described it, does seem rather unpleasant, your record utterly ignores the unfathomable misfortune we've experienced in the fug.\"\n\n\"And what misfortune is that?\"\n\n\"Really now\u2026 we experienced the calamity.\"\n\n\"So did we!\"\n\n\"No. You observed the calamity. We experienced it. Granted, few of us remember it, but ours were the cities laid low by the arrival of the fug. The people taken by the rolling clouds of fug did not merely vanish, you know\u2026 Those cities may be empty now, but not in the beginning. Open the valve now, just slightly.\"\n\nHe did as she suggested, to very little effect. From the sour expression and the scrunch of her nose, she could smell something that wasn't making it through his mask, but no sign of phlogiston.\n\n\"Close it up again. It seems your ichor is indeed different. It might be a shade more difficult to process. I don't suppose you've got any masks to spare. The fumes are rather strong right now.\"\n\nGunner wordlessly fetched a mask from a hook beside the entrance and handed it to her.\n\n\"You say you don't remember the calamity?\"\n\n\"Before my time,\" she said.\n\n\"Stands to reason. It was hundreds of years ago, after all. I know you fug folk are long lived, but surely not that long lived.\"\n\n\"It has actually been one hundred forty-nine years since the calamity. The sesquicentennial is in a few months. And though I say it is before my time, it is by no means beyond the lifetime of the bulk of our populace. I just happen to be a part of the very small second generation of fug folk. \u2026 The pressure is rising quickly. Let's test that valve again.\"\n\nHe twisted the valve and was rewarded with a lance of brilliant green as phlogiston hissed from the nozzle.\n\n\"Ah, excellent, wonderful,\" Dr. Prist crowed.\n\nShe very carefully secured the jar to the table beneath one of the convenient leather straps scattered about its surface, then slipped a small pad and pencil from a fold of her dress and took note.\n\n\"We'll twist the valve a bit until the pressure stays steady. Bleed off the phlogiston and then close the valve again for the next step.\"\n\nIt was a delicate adjustment, but Gunner did so rather easily. \"So it's true then. You fug folk are indeed formerly human.\"\n\n\"Of course we are! What did you think? We crawled out of a hole one day?\"\n\n\"Have you been talking to Coop? I'd rather assumed you were altered by the fug, but I'm a bit more academic than many of the people of Rim. Crawling out of a hole is one of the kinder theories in ready circulation. But if most of the residents of the fug are somehow still alive since the calamity, then why do you claim most don't remember it?\"\n\n\"Get a beaker ready for this next stage, and a tube. You'll want to collect the result, or at least prevent it from leaking everywhere. And the transition from human to fug person is not a gentle one. Most suffered the same unpleasant fate as any of you might experience if left to the mercy of the fug without your masks. Even for those of us who survive, the physical changes are quite painful, withering our physiques in some cases, enhancing them in others, and altering our complexions. The change is deeply debilitating, rendering many unable to care for themselves for days or weeks in the worst case. But as you've no doubt noticed, there are mental alterations as well. Many of us have had our intellects vastly enhanced, and that alteration is no less destructive.\n\n\"In the worst case, people were left wholly without memory. Many had to relearn the language. Most were merely stripped of their experiential memory. They were left to rediscover who they were, forgetting even their names. More than a few succumbed to madness. Only a handful has any memory at all their time before the fug. It was eventually decided that a line should be drawn before the fug and after. The first generation chose new names, laid their old lives to rest. If you ever find yourself visiting Fugtown without vandalism or thievery in mind, you might visit the western edge of town. The three graveyards. The first, filled to capacity, marks the resting place of those taken by the calamity. The third is where the current residents are inhumed when they pass. The second is filled with empty graves bearing the original names of those who formed the local first generation. It is really quite a haunting place.\"\n\nGunner looked at the chemist. Her eyes had a distant, introspective look he'd never seen in a fug person.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. \"The pressure is just about right. The beaker please, Mister\u2026 heavens, we've not been introduced either. Gunner, was it?\"\n\n\"Guy von Cleef. Gunner certainly for preference.\"\n\n\"The beaker, quickly, Mr. von Cleef. And keep it away from the burner. What comes out next is what we call 'pyrum.' It is what makes burn-slow burn, and in its unaltered state it isn't nearly so gradual in its combustion.\"\n\nIt took two more notches on the pressure gauge before a gray vapor worked its way down the tube, condensing along the way into a hazy liquid that seemed to be thinner than water. The vapor tapered off after just a few seconds, producing no more than a few drops of the stuff.\n\n\"That's a very good yield,\" she said. \"It appears your ichor source will have proportionately greater pyrum-to-phlogiston ratio, at least by a small amount. You'll want to be very careful with that. It is exceptionally volatile.\"\n\nHe held it up to the glow of his phlo-light, suddenly quite interested. \"Really now. We shall have to discuss that in greater detail.\"\n\nAfter fetching a rubber stopper and stowing the beaker safely, he turned to her again. \"So I suppose that is all?\"\n\n\"No. Two more steps. There's a final gaseous product, and then there are the solids, which should be left behind. Based on the variances we've observed, I believe two more pressure notches will be necessary before we see the final product. If so, that's very good news. It is a wider margin, which will greatly reduce the precision necessary to extract the primary products without triggering the production of the third.\"\n\n\"When we were recruited for this ichor well scheme, only phlogiston and burn-slow were listed as products of ichor. You're suggesting there are others?\"\n\n\"Indeed, but you'd never know it from the way the South Pyre team treats the process. One is treated as though it isn't a product at all, and the solids are generally discarded as unwanted byproducts. I understand they are reluctant to part with even a fraction of the products, despite the fact we've already seen three valuable medicines come from processing these 'byproducts.' Knowing the wonders achieved by the other ichor products, it is criminal not to fully explore the chemically complex remnants of the primary reactions.\"\n\n\"Knowing what I know of fug folk\u2014which in light of present conversation is a good deal less than I thought\u2014I suspect it is yet another form of information control.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"I'd never heard of ichor before this ridiculous enterprise. No real surprise, since you fug folk would prefer we didn't know anything about what goes on below the surface. So your South Pyre people jealously guarding the contents of their kettles for fear of the rest of you learning too much of their business makes sense.\"\n\n\"You believe we would hide that sort of thing from each other?\"\n\n\"\u2026 You were as good as held prisoner in an academy.\"\n\n\"My expertise is rare, and I was sequestered to ensure the safety of the knowledge.\"\n\n\"If one is frightened information is likely to be lost, it is safer to share that information, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nShe crossed her arms. \"If the information was generally known, it would be far more likely that it would slip from our fingers and into those of the surface dwellers. And we've already discussed the wisdom of keeping secrets from you.\"\n\n\"Believe that if you like. But tell me, what do you know about inspectors?\"\n\n\"Inspectors? Oh. Those little creatures. They\u2026 tap on things. Check for rot and such. Why would you ask?\" she said, her confusion at the question clearly genuine.\n\n\"No reason,\" he said.\n\n\"Remove the tube now and get ready to open the valve fully and stifle the burner. You'll want to keep your hands away from the opening as well.\"\n\nOn her mark, he twisted the valve. A jet of dense purple gas escaped with terrific force. The blast, thanks to its ferocity, was brief, but the residual cloud of the stuff that billowed and mixed with the haze around them was unmistakable.\n\n\"That was fug,\" he said sharply\n\n\"Yes. And it was produced precisely at the point I'd predicted. Once the kettle cools, you'll want to\u2014\"\n\n\"You're telling me that fug is a product of ichor.\"\n\n\"Yes. Clearly. What do you suppose caused the calamity?\" she said matter-of-factly as she scribbled down some notes.\n\nGunner snatched her pencil. \"You know how the calamity happened?\"\n\n\"Well, as I've said, no one who survived has any memory of it, and there were no survivors near the event itself, but we've determined what happened, certainly. As we've seen here, ichor renders into its different products at different temperatures. The second, pyrum, burns at a very high temperature. At some point, something must have heated the surface of the ichor enough to generate pyrum, which then ignited, producing a continuous reaction. That's why it is called South Pyre. It still burns to this day, producing a constant flow of both phlogiston and fug, and fueling its own flame with pyrum. We harvest the former, of course, and bottle it for utilization and sale.\"\n\n\"How difficult would it be to cause that to occur at the new ichor well?\"\n\n\"It depends upon how exposed it is, but dropping a gas lantern or a hot coal would probably be enough.\"\n\n\"And what would happen if this second well were to ignite?\"\n\n\"It depends on the size, but likely there would be an exceptional increase in fug production. It would probably raise the fug level a few hundred feet.\"\n\n\"There are dozens of towns that are a few hundred feet from the average level.\"\n\n\"I don't think there is much to worry about. If the well hasn't ignited naturally by now, I can't imagine there is much risk.\"\n\n\"A whole team, including two members of our crew, is on their way to set up the beginnings of a facility there. It will be steam powered, and thus there will be plenty of fire.\"\n\n\"A bit of care is all it takes to avoid an ignition.\"\n\n\"They won't know to take care. And I'm not convinced ignition isn't the aim of some of the people involved.\"\n\n\"Mr. von Cleef, we are not monsters.\"\n\n\"Maybe not as a rule, but as an exception? There are always monsters. And this one needs only light a match and toss it in a hole to murder thousands. A simple lunatic would do that as a lark. And you people actually have a proper reason to do it, since it would expand your holdings.\"\n\n\"You're suggesting my people might justify the senseless destruction of dozens of your cities.\"\n\n\"You not having been to the surface much, you wouldn't know it, but ever since our run-in with the dreadnought, there's been a change. There are those who feel as though we made the devil bleed that day. You've all locked things firmly down, done your best to remind us you're the ones calling the shots, but plenty of our people have come to view you as a bit toothless. If this new well could help you expand your realm just that much more and prove once and for all that your hands are always about our throats, I don't doubt there are those among you who would gladly take the opportunity.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Without agreeing with you, I will allow that it is probably best if we reach your people as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"Yes. We're talking to the captain. Now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\"This is turning out to be an awful long five minutes, Kent,\" Lil said, her pistol still pointed resolutely at the explosives.\n\n\"Just a few moments more! Just look how thick the fug's gotten.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. You're sure good at excuses. You planning to make excuses for whoever it was tried to kill us too? That what passes for a lawyer in the fug? Fella who makes up the best excuses. \u2026 Though I suppose that's what passes for a lawyer in our parts too\u2026\"\n\n\"I knew it was a mistake getting these people involved!\" barked one of the other fug folk. \"They're madmen, the lot of them!\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Lil snapped. \"I'm a madwoman, thanks very much.\"\n\n\"You don't think she's actually going to let us live, do you? These people aren't heroes! They're just lunatics who want to kill as many fug folk as possible. If they weren't on Skykeep when it went down, they'd have let it smash into the ground with all of us!\"\n\nLil glanced wearily to Kent. \"You fixin' to make excuses for him too? Because he's doing a fine job of making me think he might've been in on rigging the gun.\"\n\n\"She's just one woman! If one of us tackles her, we can get the gun away from her before she fires, and then she's done for!\"\n\n\"You better be awful sure about that,\" Lil said, lowering the pistol to touch the lid of the crate of explosives. \"Seein' how things'll go for you if you're wrong.\"\n\n\"Look, just look!\" Kent urged.\n\nAhead, the train of cargo carts pulled by the foremost of their convoy wholly vanished into a wall of fug too thick to see through. Lil grinned.\n\n\"Looks like it's about to get dark,\" she said, raising an eyebrow. The corners of her eyes crinkled with an unseen grin, and she glanced to the jumpiest of the fug folk in the cart. \"Guess this is your chance coming up. If you've got the nerve.\"\n\nTheir cart trundled onward, rattling across the ground. The chemical chill of the fug-drenched air grew stronger. Even having had to endure it for days, the potency of the sensation was almost more than Lil could bear. Her eyes began to sting, but she tugged at the strap for her goggles with her free hand and kept her gaze trained on the fugger who seemed all-too-eager to see her blink.\n\nTotal darkness swept across the cart. The fug was so thick now that the phlo-light may as well have been extinguished. Over the hiss of the engine and the clatter of the wheels, she could just hear the sound of someone scrambling across the cargo toward her. As mad as the fug folk believed her to be, Lil wasn't interested in blowing herself to pieces if it could be avoided. As her mind was well suited to split-second strategic brilliance, she instead skipped the pesky \"planning\" stage and simply acted on intuition. She dropped to her back, flattening against the uneven cargo. From the sound of his scrambling, her would-be assailant couldn't see any better than she could.\n\nA boot came down heavily upon her midsection. It was more of a misplaced step than a kick, but it was still more than enough to knock the wind from her. She wrapped her free arm around the leg and rolled sharply to the side, overbalancing the blindly flailing fugger. He cried out and pitched over, tumbling off the edge of the cart. If she'd not held tight, he would almost certainly have dropped between their cart and the ones trailing and fallen victim to a not-entirely-undeserved fate. Instead she kept her grip, and he instead struck the barbed-wire-topped railing. It was unpleasant, but at least not fatal.\n\nThe chill of the fug dropped away, and the green of their light rushed in again. It seemed brighter than before, though Lil was a bit preoccupied with the struggling attacker dangling off the wall of the cart. It wasn't until she considered pulling the mask from her face to give the man a bite on the calf that she realized how clear the air was. The Well Digger at the controls pulled a sharp left, clearing the path for Nita's cart, and released the pressure in the engine until his whole cargo train rolled to a stop.\n\nLil let go of the leg she'd been holding, dropping her hapless opponent to the ground, where he yelped painfully and uttered a few choice words.\n\n\"Oh, stifle it. You earned that and more,\" Lil said.\n\nShe raised her goggles to find the anticipated stinging sensation absent and took in her new surroundings. The place was\u2026 bizarre. A dome of dense purple fog hung over them, several hundred yards in diameter and a few dozen yards tall. Stiff wind deformed and stirred the very edge of the clearing, but for the most part it was a safe and stable shelter from the toxic fumes. The trees here were enormous, even compared to those in the densest parts of The Thicket. Their growth was unnatural, somehow. The trucks were thin and extremely long, relatively free of branches except for at the very tops where they vanished into the clouds of fug. Stubbier undergrowth\u2014bushes and other brush\u2014increased sharply in both quantity and hardiness the closer to the center they grew. Around the middle it was an uninterrupted mass of purple leaves and maroon thorns. At the very center, however, there was no brush and not a single tree. Instead the thick thorn-vines curled downward and dangled into a pit almost ten yards across. From Lil's vantage she could only see the opposite edge of the pit, but that was enough for her to notice the golden light that dimly smoldered within.\n\n\"Well heck. There's a well after all,\" she said.\n\nLil hesitantly put her fingers to the bit of cord that had been used to repair her mask and undid the knot, letting the breathing apparatus slide away from her mouth. Instead of the searing bite of fug-laden air, the experimental breath she took was clean and pure. Ichor did an astounding job of chasing away the fug. Even the residual vapor that clung to their clothes whenever they surfaced out of the fug was visibly streaming toward the edge of the dome, forming thin threads of purple that curled from every surface and every person until the last of the fug was gone.\n\nThe deckhand treated herself to three deep and cleansing breaths, reveling in the simple joy of filling her lungs without having to drag the air through a complex filtering system. For the first time since they'd dipped down from the surface for this mission, she smelled something besides the fumes that made it through her mask. The foliage had a sickly sweet smell, syrupy and cloying. And then there was the ichor. She'd gotten a tiny whiff during the demonstration, but this was different. It was a spicy aroma, and warm. It reminded Lil a bit of when Butch would make rum cake and fill the galley with the potent scent of the high-proof booze she reserved for the purpose. It was pleasant in its way, though the smell was somewhat tempered by its intermingling with the smell of a dozen hardworking fug folk and humans who had not had a proper bath for the better part of a week.\n\nShe blinked tears from her eyes. They weren't tears of emotion, but rather an attempt by her body to take full advantage of the comparatively clean air to wash away the lingering effects of the fug. When her vision was restored, she found all six of the fug folk from her cart staring at her uncertainly, and a handful from other carts had begun to gather. For her, having a pistol in her hand and having one or more people nearby who had clearly been at the receiving end of a well-deserved tumble was nothing unusual, but the Well Diggers did not share that opinion. Words filtered in harsh whispers between those men on her cart and the ones from others.\n\n\"Now, now, now. Before your buddies start telling fibs about what's been going on, let me lay it plain,\" Lil announced. \"You all saw and heard what happened there. Near as I can figure, someone decided they were sick of us and wanted to feed us to the critters in the forest, so they rigged up some ammo that'd jam our gun and make us real interesting to that big ugly thing we just shot up. Didn't work, no thanks to most of you, but I'm a mite peeved at the attempt anyhow. Now if these boys here are to be believed, Branca was the one who handed out the ammo.\"\n\nLil squinted and swept her eyes across the fug folk assembled before her. The potential culprit caught her eye as she tried to step behind a crewmate.\n\n\"There she is,\" Lil said brightly, pointing her pistol and beginning to stride forward.\n\nThe fug folk in her line of fire wisely separated, leaving Branca to back uncertainly against the cart behind her.\n\n\"I-I don't know what you think happened, but you're wrong.\"\n\n\"Am I now?\" Lil asked, getting closer. \"Funny because I'm pretty sure that gun started screeching like a banshee right about halfway through the belt of ammo you handed us. And then a big ball of fur and teeth tried to make a snack of me for being so close to the sound. You telling me I was daydreaming all that?\"\n\n\"It was a mistake! An honest mistake!\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure about that,\" called a voice from the edge of the fug-free area.\n\nAll eyes but Lil's turned to the source. As the final member of the convoy, Nita had guided her lightly loaded, moderately damaged cart inside. While Lil had been sampling the air and making her accusations, Nita had been busy with other tasks. She hopped down from the cart with a clattering bundle of canvas and metal under one arm and a single spike in the other hand.\n\n\"It's a tube fl\u00e9chette. This weighs a third what the other spikes do, and they come in special sabots to allow them to fire. I can't imagine anyone loading an ammo belt could make that mistake.\"\n\n\"These things are loaded by machines! From a hopper!\" said Branca, hands up and eyes wide as Lil backed her against the cart behind her. \"Someone could have just tossed the wrong sort of spike in the bin. Simple as that! How could I have known it happened? It was just bad luck that you got the defective belt.\"\n\n\"So how do you explain this?\" Nita asked.\n\nShe tossed the ammo belt on the ground between Lil and Branca. A large star, drawn in yellow chalk, marked the leading end of the belt.\n\n\"That doesn't prove anything! What does a star prove?\"\n\n\"Huh,\" Lil said, looking at the mark. \"Silly me, didn't think twice about that when I loaded up this morning.\"\n\n\"I wonder if any of the other belts have stars,\" Nita said.\n\nBranca glanced back and forth. If she was hoping to see one of the other fuggers rise to her defense, she was sorely disappointed. None of the other Well Diggers seemed happy about what was going on, certainly, but a distinct tone of confusion and suspicion was beginning to color their faces. Kent in particular was glaring at her.\n\n\"Stark, go fetch the other ammo crates, will you?\"\n\n\"You aren't taking their word for this, are you?\" Branca said.\n\n\"No, I'm not taking their word. I'm checking for myself,\" Kent said. \"That make you nervous?\"\n\n\"These are bandits! Maniacs!\"\n\n\"Yeah, but you knew that going into this mess,\" Lil said. She looked to the others. \"She have anything to say against it before?\"\n\n\"You weren't pointing a gun at me, accusing me of being a traitor before!\" Branca countered.\n\nThe fug man Kent called Stark dropped a half-empty case of fl\u00e9chette belts on the ground, startling Branca. Fortunately for her, Lil wasn't so quick to flinch or the deckhand might have pulled the trigger. He popped the lid off and began to dig through, piling belt after belt on the ground. None were similarly marked. When the case was empty, he slid another crate from the back of a cart. This one had its lid askew, and the contents were churned up and poorly packed. After clearing the disorderly top layer, he revealed a second layer with only one belt missing. Beside the empty spot were two more belts marked with the same star. He selected one and unfurled it across the ground. One spike stuck out like a sore thumb. He tugged it free to reveal a matching hollow tube, loaded backward and without a sabot.\n\nLil looked Branca in the eye. \"Another rigged belt, and tucked away in a separate box so no one else gets it by mistake? You better get real creative with this excuse.\"\n\nBranca glanced about again. Now the suspicion was plastered across each and every face.\n\n\"Come to think of it,\" Kent said, \"you made quite a fuss about being the one in charge of the ammo when we were dividing up the jobs\u2026\"\n\n\"I don't have to explain myself to you people!\" Branca snapped.\n\n\"If I do what I'm itching to do, you won't have to explain anything to anyone ever again, fugger,\" Lil rumbled, pressing her gun into the traitor's ribs.\n\n\"Lil,\" Kent interjected, \"I know you want to shoot her, and I'm not so sure she doesn't deserve it, but you putting a hole in one of us is liable to make things tense from here on, and there's plenty more work to be done. Seeing as how that squirrel that attacked you isn't too far off, and it isn't the only one, do you think you can hold off on this bit until we've got camp laid out a little better?\"\n\nLil didn't take her gun or her eyes off Branca. \"Did you say that critter was a squirrel? I thought it was a sort of a fancy bear or some such.\"\n\n\"No, no. That was a squirrel,\" Kent said. \"At least, that's what you get when you pitch a squirrel into the fug near an ichor well, I suppose.\"\n\n\"You don't want to see what the fug does to a bear\u2026\" Stark added, eyes distant and voice wavering like he was at that moment reliving his last such encounter.\n\n\"\u2026 Yeah, I'd say we ought to get some walls up,\" Lil said, sagely. \"After we get this traitor here tied up so she don't get up to any more mischief.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "\"This fella sure does like his name,\" observed Coop as he ransacked the inside of the stolen ship.\n\nThrough a complex sequence of lashings and unlashings, Gunner and Coop had lowered Alabaster's gondola and aligned its crew hatch roughly with their own. They'd then slung a rope ladder between the two and had been transferring anything of value into their own cargo area. A few feet of frigid wind separated the two vessels, but that didn't seem to bother Coop in the slightest, nor Gunner, who was observing from the cargo hold/gig room/Nita's quarters.\n\n\"He's got handkerchiefs and pads of paper with his name. His pens all have his name. He's got it on the desk here. You'd think he was afraid he'd forget,\" Coop continued.\n\n\"You've got more important jobs than criticizing the man's obvious egotism and narcissism,\" Gunner called from above.\n\n\"I ain't doing none of that. I'm saying the man's full of himself is all.\"\n\n\"Yes. I see. Entirely different.\"\n\n\"Ain't you supposed to be watching that doctor we snagged?\"\n\n\"She and Lester are having a chat with the captain. To the woman's credit, she seems rather reasonable for a fug person.\"\n\n\"I think she's just got the same sort of mind as Nita's got.\"\n\n\"And what exactly do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"Just that once she starts to sink her teeth into something, she's liable to forget the bits around it that she don't like.\"\n\nA loud smash rang out from within the gondola.\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"He had glass doors on this one cabinet here. What sort of fella puts glass doors on a cabinet in an airship?\"\n\n\"I would imagine the same sort who would emblazon his name on the side of a stark-white ship.\"\n\n\"Hang on\u2026 I got a big black book here. Leather and that fancy gold stuff on the edge. The first page says\u2026 ask\u2026 ask-end\u2026 it's got lots of big, long words.\"\n\n\"Give it to me,\" Gunner said, bending down.\n\nCoop heaved himself up to sit on the edge of the hatch and handed the thick volume up to Gunner. It was indeed a rather elegant tome. At a glance one might have imagined it was a holy book, or perhaps the registry at a particularly fine hotel. Gunner flipped to the first page and began to read aloud. \"'Ascendancy Toward Greatness: An Autobiographical Record of the Rise of Lucius P. Alabaster.'\"\n\n\"What's that mean?\"\n\n\"It's his personal journal.\"\n\n\"Why didn't he just write that?\"\n\n\"Because the man clearly appreciates pointlessly flaunting his academia at every opportunity.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah? I s'pose that's the sort of thing they teach to college types.\"\n\n\"What are you implying?\"\n\n\"That you and him like to point out to regular folk that they're regular folk and you ain't. What's the book say?\"\n\n\"It's\u2026 rather voluminous. There are dates at the top of each entry.\" He flipped through several dozen pages entirely covered with thin, sprawling script. \"The last entry is from yesterday morning. \u2026 'A thought occurs. As I endure the grueling final hours of this interminable flight toward Fadewell Academy and the first public evidence of my genius, I realize that, though impeccable in both taste and presentation, the power of this vessel leaves something to be desired. If I recall correctly, and naturally my unaccountable brilliance comes part and parcel with flawless recollection, the Wind Breaker is said to be quite ably equipped for swift voyage. As enticing as it is to retain its broken husk as a trophy signifying my great conquest when the plan reaches fruition, perhaps I would be better served to lay claim to it, and to embark upon my well-earned celebrity and simultaneously famous and infamous endeavors riding atop the very chariot that once conveyed\u2026'\"\n\nGunner flipped ahead. \"The man takes three pages to say he wants to steal the Wind Breaker.\"\n\n\"Is that what he was working at? With all that talk of trophies and husks I couldn't make heads or tails of it all.\"\n\n\"I think we've got what we need here. The good news is, the man's ego is such that he couldn't help but brag to himself about what a genius he is.\" He flipped through a few more pages. \"The bad news is, he's clearly got the money to make himself a thorn in our sides, and he's long-winded enough that finding anything useful in this is going to be agony. Get up here. We've got to get this up to the captain. There's no doubt, whatever this is, the whole ichor well fiasco was a plan of which we were a part.\"\n\n\"Hold on. I found where he keeps his booze,\" Coop said.\n\n\"This is more important than alcohol, Coop.\"\n\n\"It's two-hunnerd-year-old Caer Agathi Special Reserve. Three whole bottles and most of another.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Bring it along, but hurry up. I'll meet you on deck.\"\n\nGunner turned and headed for the door. Despite the cramped corridors and dim lights, he knew the ship well enough to navigate it with barely a glance up from the pages of the book he held before him. He tried to read quickly, skimming across the page to pluck out the useful information buried in self-aggrandizing and purple prose. Names and locations began to emerge, but most were meaningless to him.\n\nWhen the fug had claimed the lowlying cities, it wiped away their names along with their people. He could look at an old map and see a hundred hamlets and towns with names he knew from the history books, but most of those places had since been renamed or utterly forgotten. One of the many things they'd liberated some months ago during their heist at a Fugtown warehouse had been a small stack of maps, but he'd not bothered to learn the names. Foolishly he'd believed his business within the fug was through. And even if he'd memorized the geography beneath the purple haze, the less he knew about the people, the happier he was. In the beginning it was out of raw hatred of their cruelty and control. Since then he'd learned there were a precious few fug folk who actually behaved decently, but that only encouraged him to work even harder at ignoring them. The only thing worse than having a race of people you universally hate is knowing that there are some of them who haven't earned that hate.\n\nJust as he reached the top of the last set of stairs and stepped out into the whipping wind of the deck, he found a phrase he'd been hoping for. There, with three underlines and six exclamation points, was a simple sentence: They've found a new ichor well!\n\n\"Captain!\" Gunner called. \"We've got something.\"\n\n\"It better be something that can point me in a direction a mite more useful than 'north,'\" the captain called without looking.\n\nCaptain Mack was standing, as always, at the helm. Lester and Dr. Prist were standing before him. The captain's chivalry had clearly gotten the better of him, as his heavy leather coat now hung about the shoulders of the doctor. He must have been freezing, but to look at his face one would think he'd simply browbeaten the cold wind into leaving him alone.\n\n\"That remains to be seen,\" Gunner said, joining them at the helm. \"This Lucius P. Alabaster seems to have kept a journal of his plans.\"\n\n\"Not coded or anything?\"\n\n\"No. I've only spent a minute or two reading his entries, but I'm already convinced the idiot would never have imagined he'd be caught. He's such a blowhard, finding anything useful is going to be a chore, but he certainly knows about the ichor well. According to the date, he's known about it since before we took down Skykeep.\"\n\nDr. Prist pulled the coat a bit tighter and furrowed her brow. \"I don't understand. Wasn't that months ago?\"\n\n\"Yes it was,\" Gunner said.\n\n\"Then he's had ample time to inform the phlogiston industry of it, or, failing that, to do as the Well Diggers of yours are hoping to do and claim it for his own. Why wouldn't he have acted immediately?\"\n\n\"The only thing I care about right now is where our people are and who they ought to be watching out for,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"I'm reading as quickly as I can, Captain,\" Gunner said. \"Let me see\u2026 '\u2026unaccountable brilliance of my machinations\u2026 golden bait awaiting a trap to be fashioned and sprung'\u2026 Ah! 'If these imbeciles are to be believed, navigation within The Thicket is not conducive to determining locations with precision. Even less so than in the rest of the fug. They say they could easily find the well again, but giving coordinates sufficient to send airships for proper development and commerce will require a well-financed expedition of several months, or a means to send some sort of signal from within the fug, which could be viewed from above. Naturally I have no intention of financing a proper expedition. The size of\u2014'\"\n\n\"If there's a point to this, save your breath and skip to it,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Alabaster seems quite opposed to getting to the point. This may be it. 'Obviously the blood needs to be on someone else's hands. That black sheep of an offshoot of the Ebonwhite clan seems the right mix of administrative and subversive. I shall have those dolts drip-feed him information about the well. He'll no doubt set about claiming it himself. When he finds it, a signal can be sent. That Bludo character seems convinced the well is somewhere along the North Circa to Precipice trade route. I'll arrange some shipments on the appropriate dates, and a signal can be sent to pinpoint the place.'\"\n\n\"North Circa to Precipice is a long route without much payoff. Special orders are just about the only way anyone makes that trip direct.\"\n\n\"Captain, this journal is littered with mentions of us. He is obsessed. The only name that comes up more often than Wind Breaker in the pages I've read is Ferris Tusk.\"\n\n\"Tusk\u2026 He worships the man, no doubt. The man who crippled the surface\u2026\"\n\n\"In a way\u2026 but it seems more like he's grooming himself to become the new Tusk.\"\n\n\"Wait just one moment,\" Lester said. \"Are you suggesting that somehow this entire enterprise has been orchestrated by some well-heeled manipulator?\"\n\n\"I don't need to suggest it, Lester. It's all right here in his own copious words,\" Gunner said.\n\nThe shivering fug man clenched his fists tightly. \"Blast it! Blast it and confound it! This was to be my moment! My ticket to the life I deserved! It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity! I've debased myself and endured the whims of you ruffians for nothing! Nothing at all!\"\n\nHe stomped angrily about the helm, raving about the injustice of it all. Captain Mack cast a weary glance at Dr. Prist.\n\n\"Is this the usual for you folk? Living your life like the world owes you something?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is\u2026 well, if I'm perfectly honest, that particular form of ambition and aspiration is not entirely uncommon among my countrymen. Among the intellectual set and the industry there is a rather firm pressure to succeed and the expectation of success, owing to our frequently superior cognitive skills.\"\n\n\"\u2026 the raw potential, and with my investment savvy and marketing acumen I could have turned it into an empire. We all would have been wealthy! This is an outrage! A tragedy! I\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut it!\" barked Captain Mack. \"I got people down there with folk working for this Alabaster fella. So unless you know a way to help us find where they are, you can clam up, or we're throwing you overboard.\"\n\nLester's mouth hung open briefly, but he wisely chose to forgo further comment.\n\n\"There's plenty of talk of traps and plans levied against us, Captain,\" said Gunner. \"If we do find the well, the chances are good we'll be walking into something.\"\n\n\"And now we know that, which gives us a leg up. You keep reading that book. Maybe you can find out what he's got in store. But before you do, go check the guns. I want grape shot in all of them, and get the valves set to feed these deck guns. Once you're through, get Lester to help go through that book. Since he seems so angry about Alabaster, maybe the chance to foil his plans will get him to stop moping.\"\n\nLester broke in: \"Oh yes, I assure you, even if it means memorizing every last word in that book and reciting it back to you, I shall find a way to prevent this opportunist from snatching away the well that would make me my fortune.\"\n\nGunner, visibly irritated with once again being saddled with Lester, led the furious fug man below decks. Along the way he passed Coop, who was on his way back up.\n\n\"I miss anything good, Cap'n?\" Coop asked.\n\n\"Alabaster knows about the well. Everything with the Well Diggers is his doing. Bludo's one of his men.\"\n\n\"Is he? Glad I got some slugs in during that brawl then.\"\n\n\"More like than not we're heading into a trap, so I want your eyes open, and be ready to unload them guns into anything that looks like it means us mischief.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n,\" Coop said.\n\nThe deckhand hurried off to his own assignment, leaving Dr. Prist with the captain.\n\n\"This is all\u2026 rather unfortunate.\"\n\n\"Nothing we didn't expect going into it. Ain't never had a deal with you folk go another way than this.\"\n\n\"I feel obliged to defend my race. But at present I am rather at a loss for how to do so.\"\n\n\"Don't trouble yourself on my account. I been alive long enough to know every rule gets broke from time to time. Just because most fug folk we meet'd sooner put a leash around our necks and start yelling commands don't mean you're the same.\"\n\n\"If you don't mind me asking, what is your plan for me now?\"\n\n\"I ain't lost hope that this well plan can't be salvaged, and you're a part of that. If things go sour\u2026 so long as you don't give us reason to feel different, I can see clear to dropping you wherever you want to go, within reason.\"\n\nShe paused and crossed her arms, causing the coat to crinkle and shift. \"This has been a rather unique experience thus far. On one hand, you and the rest of your crew have lived up to my expectations. You are crude and brusque. You are violent and impulsive. But on the other hand you aren't what I'd imagined at all. In your own way you're\u2026 almost gentlemanly. And even if you are rough around the edges, there is a cleverness to even the slowest among you.\"\n\n\"That's giving Coop a bit more credit than he deserves, I reckon. But you never met a finer deckhand. And his sister's just as good. You ain't met her yet. By now she's at the well. Either in a trap, on her way into a trap, or on her way out of one, if things are going the way the seem to be.\"\n\n\"That von Cleef fellow, the man you call Gunner\u2014he's actually rather brilliant, in a deranged sort of way.\"\n\n\"Not brilliant enough to keep all his fingers.\"\n\n\"Having caught a glimpse of the concoctions he's devised, I'd say the fact that he's kept his head is rather a surprise. In my university days, they referred to that 'burn-fast' explosive he's so fond of as 'the devil's candle.' I believe my instructor called it 'entirely theoretical' and 'not a theory worth pursuing for those wishing to avoid an early grave.'\"\n\n\"Gunner's never been one to let good sense get in the way of a good explosive.\"\n\n\"Rather an admirable trait. At a distance. If not for the fact you'd likely use them against my own people, I'd actually be intrigued to collaborate with him. He's a stubborn, wrongheaded brute, but he's got some interesting ideas about oxidizers.\" She cleared her throat. \"I understand the two women who went on the well expedition\u2026 one of them is the Calderan?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I've heard some rumors about her.\"\n\n\"Seems you folk spend a lot of time jawing about us.\"\n\n\"They say she's the one who fixes your engine. I'm no engineer, but from the glimpses I've seen, she's been keeping your ship in good repair.\"\n\n\"Not to offend, Doctor, but I ain't one for idle chitchat. Especially not when I'm at the wheel. And especially not about a woman who could end up dead if we don't figure out how to get to her.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. Perhaps I can offer my observations in hopes of solving the puzzle of finding the well. On general principle, I would prefer if your people weren't killed, but more selfishly the concrete discovery of the well\u2014and keeping it out of the hands of the industry\u2014is more or less my only chance of working with ichor personally.\"\n\n\"If you've got ideas, I'm all ears.\"\n\n\"Let us see\u2026 the fug density effect at the threshold of its repulsion would render it little more than a dense cloud of purple from above. Perhaps if it was in a field and the sun were particularly bright, that would make it easily visible from afar, but in The Thicket it would blend quite well with the foliage. Simply looking would do no good. \u2026 Alabaster's plan was for those within to signal passing airships. I imagine it is the sound of the airship that would prompt them to trigger whatever flare or other signal they might have in mind. Do you think if you were to pass, they would simply signal you?\"\n\n\"Could be. Of course, could be them girls already worked out what's what and took care of the people who were going to do the signaling. If they did it quick enough, they might not know to send the signal. And even if they did know that was the plan, they wouldn't do it. Keeping the well a secret until it's properly defended is a part of the plan.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026 yes. Oddly, if they succeed in their task, it would make your task more difficult. A pity then that it can't work the other way 'round. You signaling them somehow. Of course, that's preposterous to suggest. You'd need to know where to signal them, you'd need a means to do so. All manner of flaws with that plan.\"\n\nThe captain's usually gruff and impassive face shifted slightly. To Dr. Prist's untrained eye, there was no change at all, but had one of the other members of the crew been present, they would have known it as the moment of epiphany. He reached down and twisted a knob. Machinery above them sputtered and ground to life, pumping additional phlogiston into their envelope and causing the airship to climb steeply.\n\n\"What are you up to?\" Dr. Prist said, gazing curiously at the workings above her.\n\n\"It's darn difficult to do any precise navigation beneath the fug. I've got to surface long enough to get a good look at the sky and work out how to get on that trade route. If we work the turbines hard, we could probably line up on it in half a day. Coop!\"\n\n\"Yeah, Cap'n?\" Coop called back while he fiddled with the valves running to one of the deck guns.\n\n\"Go rouse Wink. He's probably curled up by the boiler.\"\n\n\"Er\u2026\" Coop said, glancing surreptitiously from side to side. \"Who's Wink, Cap'n?\"\n\n\"Just get him,\" the captain barked.\n\n\"Okay, Cap'n. But he might take some convincing, on account of how he knows he don't exist too.\"\n\n\"You tell him he's ordered to report to the deck.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Wink? Is there a member of the crew I've not met?\"\n\n\"There is, Doctor. By design, seeing as how you're liable to have some questions I ain't keen on answering once he shows up and starts following orders. But since this is the best idea out of a bad set, I ain't got much in the way of options.\"\n\nThey were climbing quickly now, so much so that Dr. Prist felt her ears pop, and the chill to the air was getting ever sharper. The rigging creaked and protested as the overloaded ship pitched skyward.\n\n\"Captain, please remember we've got Alabaster's ship strapped to our belly,\" said Gunner, his voice echoing through the speaking tube. \"We aren't as maneuverable as we might be.\"\n\n\"Gunner, that ain't near the worst part of what I've got planned, so save your advice until you know the lot of it,\" Captain Mack said.\n\nAmid the groan of struggling turbines and torquing struts, a light skittering sound approached. Wink appeared as if from nowhere, hopping up onto the support for the ship's wheel and casting a distrustful glance at Dr. Prist.\n\n\"Oh my! Is that\u2026 is that an inspector? Heavens, they said you killed yours.\"\n\n\"Seems you're learning not to believe everything you hear, Doctor,\" the captain said. \"Wink, about how close do we need to be for Nikita to hear you doing your tapping?\"\n\nNikita on a ship and Wink on a ship, Nikita could heard from very far. Nikita not on a ship and Wink not on a ship, Nikita could not heard from very far, tapped the creature, its lack of recent practice showing in its stilted wording.\n\n\"You'll be here on the Wind Breaker, tapping on the main pole.\"\n\nCaptain said never tapped on the main pole.\n\n\"Well the cap'n's saying different now. How close for Nikita to hear it?\"\n\n\"Are you\u2026 do you think you are talking to the beast?\" Dr. Prist asked.\n\nMore than feet, less than miles.\n\n\"So a mile then, maybe a bit more.\"\n\nNot much more. And Wink couldn't heard Nikita answer from that far if she didn't tapped on a pole.\n\n\"All right. You get yourself down to Glinda and get yourself a bellyful. You got a long day of tapping to do. When you get back up here, I'll give you the message.\" He leaned down to his speaking tube. \"Glinda, I'm sending Wink down. You give him whatever he wants to eat and plenty of it. And send up something for me. Coffee, too. Ain't much sleep in our future.\"\n\nWink scampered off, leaving Dr. Prist with a puzzled look on her face.\n\n\"What is this all about, Captain?\"\n\n\"I ain't too pleased you saw what you did, but he's going to be drumming away at the main pole there for a day, so it ain't like I'd be able to hide him anymore. That said, I sure ain't going to lay it plain for you. You've got a good head on your shoulders. Shouldn't take you long to work it out.\"\n\nHe leaned low again to the speaking tube. \"Everyone, here's the plan. I let the cat out of the bag with Wink. He's going to be drumming out a message while we trace along a trade route Gunner dug up in Alabaster's book. That's liable to bring us a lot of attention, so everyone be on high alert.\"\n\nButch's unmistakable voice came blaring angrily out of the tube.\n\n\"Well I didn't order you to stay in the galley, now did I? You want an update, talk to Gunner. He's liable to know more than me about the details, him having the book. The important part is, if Wink gets through to Nikita, we can find the girls and warn them. We're mired pretty deep in a scheme, but we been in worse and come out safe. Just everyone keep your eyes and ears open, and don't be shy about pulling any triggers.\"\n\nHe finished his rally call just as the Wind Breaker breached through the top of the fug. Indigo streamers of the toxic gas twisted and pulled away, stripping away the chemical sting from the still-icy air. It was the early hours of dawn, and though the sun wasn't strong in the sky yet, Dr. Prist squinted and shielded her eyes.\n\nThe magnificent vista that served as the call to the sky for so many finally spread out around them once more. To the east the rising sun painted the sky yellow, gold, orange, and red. Above, the color deepened to purple and black, with the moon just slipping from the sky and the brightest of the stars fading. Far to the west and nearer to the north, hints of the mountains that almost perfectly circled the continent could be seen. Tiny lights twinkled there, marking cities clinging to the peaks.\n\n\"My heavens\u2026\" Dr. Prist said, shuffling aside until the shadow of some rigging shaded her somewhat. \"Is this what you endure during your long journeys?\"\n\n\"This is our reward for our life in the air,\" Captain Mack said, slipping the mask from his face to take a long-overdue deep breath.\n\n\"Reward, bah!\" She wavered, dizzy, and put her fingers to her lips. \"Everything is so stark and bright. And so sprawling. I feel adrift. Unanchored. It's\u2026 it's profoundly unsettling. I think I'm going to be ill.\"\n\n\"If you're going to make an offering, do it over the side. Right about now we could use the luck.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I don't understand\u2026\"\n\n\"An old airship tradition. If the sky's making your head spin, may as well head downstairs and work with Gunner and Lester. We won't be on the surface for long. Then you can have your black skies and toxic soup back.\"\n\nShe nodded and shakily headed for the stairs.\n\n\"If you don't mind, Doctor, leave the coat.\"\n\n\"Oh. Yes, yes certainly. Thank you very much for its use.\"\n\nShe slid the heavy coat from her shoulders and handed it over to the captain, who donned it in between adjustments to his heading. He dug his hand into his pocket and made good use of the fresh air by selecting a brandy-soaked cigar from its tin and striking a match. The way he performed the whole task while still wrangling a ship that was overburdened and lopsided was something akin to a plate spinner hard at work.\n\nCoop reappeared shortly after with a plate of small, dense cakes and a steaming tin cup.\n\n\"Butch had this all ready for you, Cap'n. Sometimes I think she knows what you'll be doing before you do.\"\n\n\"Spend a few years married to someone and they start doing that,\" Mack said.\n\nThe cakes and coffee joined smoking and navigation in his complex juggling of tasks, but none seemed at all impaired by the presence of the others.\n\n\"With that gondola on our belly, we're about nine hours out from the trade route we're after. Another three hours from where that Thicket of theirs starts. If I've got it figured right, it'll be two or three days to cover that whole distance.\"\n\n\"Seems pretty slow, Cap'n,\" Coop said.\n\n\"Strapping another ship to yours'll do that.\"\n\n\"You reckon we ought to cut it off?\"\n\nHe puffed his cigar. \"On one hand, that'd speed us up from here to The Thicket, but it'll take us near six hours to strip it clean. Once we get there, cutting it free won't help much since we'll have to take it slow to give Wink a chance to deliver the message and Nikita the chance to get it back. That and, since this is one of the longer shots we decided to take, we can't afford to cut that ship loose until we've cleaned it out and found every scrap of what it can teach us. And we can't be sure Alabaster ain't the sort who'd bargain away our people for his ship, if they're prisoners by now.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Get all your deep breathing done in a hurry, and get yourself something to eat while you don't need the mask. First glimpse we get of another ship, we're going under.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n.\" He turned to take his leave, but turned back. \"You, uh\u2026 you think Nita and them are okay?\"\n\n\"They survived being locked up together in a prison with a couple dozen fuggers. This ought to be nothing for them.\"\n\nCoop grinned and nodded. \"All the same, maybe next time we gotta split up, we don't put them together. Lil and Nita ain't got very good luck.\"\n\nThe captain gave a noncommittal grunt.\n\n\"Oh, and Cap'n, Butch said you ought to get some sleep.\"\n\n\"Can she keep the Wind Breaker on a straight line down in the fug with a strong crosswind?\"\n\n\"I don't reckon so.\"\n\n\"Can anyone else on this crew?\"\n\n\"No, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Then I'm staying at the wheel. Get your food, Coop.\"\n\n\"Aye, Cap'n.\"\n\nThe captain gulped down the last cake and tugged a simple, well-used pocket watch from his vest. A glance at the time and one at the sun did the work of half a dozen charts and navigational tools. All of that information translated down into twists of valves and turns of the wheel. His lifetime of experience forced all of these enormously complex tasks\u2014each often the dedicated duty of an entire crewmember on a larger ship\u2014into the back of his mind, as automatic as breathing or blinking. This gave him the mixed blessing of bearing the full weight of the situation without distraction. Another skill, one learned far later in life, was the ability to push this aside as well. Of course he was concerned for the safety of his distant crewmembers. Of course he worried that this whole gamble may have cost him more than he could afford to lose. But those were concerns for later. Right now, the task was to find the well, and to do it safely. Nothing else could be done until he'd achieved this task, and thus he wouldn't spare another thought to the rest of the journey until he was through with this step." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "In the mayor's office in Fugtown, Mayor Ebonwhite stared intently at the message recently set before him. It was a priority delivery, sent for at least a portion of its trip via relayed tap-codes between the inspectors of various ships in the fug and surface fleets. Messages of that sort were exceptionally costly for individuals to send, so much so that even those in the fug tended not to be aware of the option unless they were particularly wealthy. That the message came from Alabaster was almost certainly meant as a heavy-handed reminder that he was a man of means and extravagance. Ebonwhite read over the message again, vague disbelief in his voice.\n\n\"'To my esteemed colleague, Mayor Ebonwhite. If you've not been made aware, it seems a certain chemist has been kidnapped by our mutual enemies, the Wind Breaker crew. It is regrettable that you did not see fit to hire me to neutralize them, as I just so happened to be present when the capture occurred. One might chalk such a meeting up to good fortune or exceptional intuition. Had I been in your employ, I might have equipped myself properly to dispatch them and this terrible tragedy could have been averted. Now, it seems, they are in possession of one of the few individuals with intimate knowledge of how to generate phlogiston and burn-slow. I shudder to think of what their plans for this woman may be. Perhaps your plans to starve them may yet prove ill-conceived.'\"\n\nEbonwhite pinched the bridge of his nose and set the page down.\n\n\"The message is charged by the word and Alabaster still sees fit to blather on,\" he muttered before raising his voice. \"Mr. Fross, would you come in here, please?\"\n\nThe door opened before the request had finished echoing. Fross entered, pen and paper in hand. \"Have you any requests, Mayor?\"\n\n\"I may. First, have we received any information from our northern agent regarding Alabaster's activities?\"\n\n\"Nothing yet, sir. His most recent report detailed a small epidemic of delays and misdirections, which he attributes to individuals in Alabaster's employ impeding his investigation. I have prepared a list of said individuals for your review. Has something occurred that compounded your concerns regarding Alabaster?\"\n\n\"The man was on hand to witness the capture of South Pyre's reserve chemist. He would have me believe it is a coincidence. Or rather, he would have me believe he would have me believe such a thing.\"\n\n\"Complex tactics, sir.\"\n\n\"No, Fross. Transparent as my office window. He has as much as confessed to his involvement. There are manipulations afoot. The man believes he can twist the wills of both myself and the Wind Breaker crew. The fool couldn't hope to take on either of us individually and yet he imagines he can take us both simultaneously. It bothers me that I've not worked out the specifics of his plan, but one thing is clear. He is critically overestimating his own skill. My own plans for the Wind Breaker were not grand enough for him and were too likely to succeed. This message is evidence that he is attempting to sabotage them. Dr. Samantha Prist, given the proper materials, could produce those resources I wish to deny the Wind Breaker. And now they have her. Clearly Alabaster would have me believe that the crew intends to fill their own needs through her prowess. But to do so, they would require ichor. There is but one source.\" He leaned back in his chair. \"Have we acquired the rye?\"\n\n\"We have, sir. It was difficult to find but rather inexpensive. We have three bottles. Shall I fetch one?\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nFross stepped away, leaving Ebonwhite to glare at the message for a few moments longer. When he returned, it was with a thick glass bottle bearing a poorly printed label. Fross splashed a bit into a shot glass and presented it to Ebonwhite, who took it in hand and regarded it with interest.\n\n\"As I understand it, this is the only spirit Captain West drinks.\" He took a sip, then grimaced. \"The man is a masochist.\" He set the glass down. \"We've not received any indication that the Wind Breaker or its crew are heading south?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\nEbonwhite hissed a breath.\n\n\"They need ichor. There's but one place to acquire it. Samples don't even leave South Pyre, let alone anything in large enough quantity to be of aid to them. They could certainly attempt an assault on the Pyre. It seems almost perfectly tailored to their list of conquests. I'd suggest greater security there, but I very much doubt any steps could be taken to bolster the security already in place. And yet\u2026 if this is all the result of the misguided machinations of Alabaster, he would have himself in position to strike. Where is he now?\"\n\n\"He summoned a vessel to return him to Caer Fiona. If he hasn't yet reached it, he will be there in a day or two.\"\n\n\"North\u2026 Entirely in the wrong direction to observe or combat a South Pyre assault\u2026 Blast it\u2026 Though it turns my stomach to play into his scheme, Alabaster holds the cards. Until we can determine the details of his plan, we have no choice but to mire ourselves in it. At the very least it will enable us to have people on hand when something goes wrong.\"\n\n\"You are certain?\"\n\n\"Entirely. A man like Alabaster wouldn't dare take his final step without a blasted audience. Draft a message to him. Wording is not important. Simply inform him that I am formally acquiring his services to deal with the Wind Breaker crew. And from this point forward we are dedicating all available resources to observing his activities, even at the expense of observing the Wind Breaker crew directly. He's at least established a capacity to 'predict' their activity. If we follow him, we follow them.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"How quickly do you imagine that message can be in Alabaster's hands?\"\n\n\"Rather swiftly. Caer Fiona is home to a recently established high-priority message station.\"\n\n\"\u2026 Is it now?\"\n\n\"Indeed, one of several investments made by Alabaster in the months leading up to his initial visit with you.\"\n\n\"Caer Fiona is not a terribly key city, Fross. Rather remote from even its local industrial interests. Not a valuable place for inspector-facilitated communication.\"\n\n\"Another bit of vanity?\" Fross suggested.\n\n\"Or a bit of planning\u2026 Alabaster, it seems, may be aware of the greater utility of our inspectors. I am not overly pleased with such sensitive information resting in the hands of such a volatile individual. Steps shall have to be taken at our earliest opportunity to preemptively seal the inevitable information leak Alabaster is to become. But that is a matter for future consideration. Deliver the message, Fross. That will be all for now.\"\n\nFross hurried off to perform the required tasks. Ebonwhite picked up the shot glass and turned it in the light of the lamp.\n\n\"I truly hope this fool either succeeds long enough for me to take the reins and finish matters or else fails soon enough that he doesn't end up handing that crew something we can't take back\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Lucius P. Alabaster shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The passenger compartment of his current vessel was markedly similar to the ship he'd recently had stolen, though each individual feature was marginally less luxurious.\n\n\"Poor foresight, Alabaster,\" he muttered to himself. \"Inexcusable. From this point forward, the prototype shall be upgraded to match the final version and serve as a backup.\"\n\n\"What's that, sir?\" Mallow called from the pilot's cabin.\n\nOne of the finishing touches that had not been applied to this ship was the door separating his personal chamber from the pilot's chamber. The always attentive Mallow therefore interpreted every half-heard comment as a potential order.\n\n\"Nothing, Mallow, you great nincompoop. I'm engaging in conversation with the one and only person on board who is capable of intelligent discourse. Myself!\"\n\nHe glanced out the window, which was shamefully without a curtain, and saw one of the two escorts he'd arranged for.\n\n\"Tell me, Mallow, have the escorts spotted our quarry yet? \u2026 Mallow, I'm speaking to you!\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, sir. What were you saying?\"\n\n\"Has the Wind Breaker been spotted!\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Mmm\u2026 they should be heading north. I suppose their stealth is one of their more celebrated skills.\"\n\n\"What was that, sir?\"\n\n\"Nothing, you great boob!\"\n\n\"Sorry, sir.\"\n\n\"Henceforth, if I require you, I shall\u2026 yes\u2026 I shall tap my glass, thusly.\" He picked up his brandy snifter and gave it a flick.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nAlabaster flicked it again.\n\n\"\u2026 Was that another demonstration, or do you need me right now, sir?\"\n\n\"Did I say I would demonstrate it again?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Then that would imply I am attempting to put the policy to practice! I swear to you, if your penetrating idiocy were any more complete, I would be forced to hire a second manservant to help you remember how to breathe!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir. What did you want, sir?\"\n\n\"How long until we arrive?\"\n\n\"Just a few minutes. I can see the lights in the Ruby Club windows from here.\"\n\n\"Brilliant. I'll be able to have a proper meal at last. I feared I would waste away being forced to subsist on the gruel that passes for common sustenance these days.\"\n\n\"There should be a physician waiting for you at the Ruby Club to see to your arm, sir. I hope it is not, er, vexing you too terribly.\"\n\n\"It is a searing pain that would no doubt cripple a conventional man, but through sheer strength of will I shall endure it, Mallow.\"\n\nThe ship rumbled forward on turbines weaker by a third than those in the proper vehicle. That much, at least, Alabaster didn't know to complain about, and in truth it didn't alter things too terribly, as the lack of modern amenities made for a much sleeker, lighter ship. In no time they were approaching the mooring tower.\n\nMallow opened the doors to the pilot's compartment, which sent an icy breeze through the interior. He kicked the mooring line down and called orders to the crew below.\n\n\"Don't bother too much about cinching it up tight, fellas. This rig's heading back to dry dock for a refit to match the other one. \u2026 You know, the other one! The stupi\u2026 uh\u2026 the stupendous white one!\"\n\n\"Would you finish your prattling and close the blasted doors, you ninny!\" Alabaster barked. He stood and began to stalk in a circle in what little space there was. \"Surely Ferris Tusk did not have to cope with such setbacks and irritations. But then, so often the brilliance of great achievement casts so blinding a light that the dull glow of the impediments that preceded it are lost. Yes. Yes I have no doubt the exploits of Ferris Tusk were littered with the blunderings of small-minded nitwits. Knowing that, it makes the achievements history does record all the more impressive to me\u2026\"\n\n\"You should sit down, sir.\"\n\n\"\u2026When my story is written, I shall be sure that these pitfalls and travails are properly cataloged. They shall serve as the rising action to my forthcoming climax.\"\n\n\"They're taking in the slack on the lines. Things'll get rough soon.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mallow, you buffoon. This is not my first landing. I am quite familiar with\u2014gah!\"\n\nHis assurance was cut short as the mooring line drew taut and the swaying of the ship came to a sudden stop. As he'd not yet taken his pilot's advice, Alabaster was thrown against the wall of the gondola, thumping his injured arm quite forcefully. The resulting outburst lacked his usual eloquence, though it was rather effective at illustrating his dismay.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir. Entirely my fault, sir.\"\n\n\"Clearly,\" he growled. \"I'll tell you this. That Wind Breaker man who wielded the weapon\u2026 Mr. Cooper, if I am correct\u2026 his death shall be a personal project for me. Yes. It shall require all my considerable creativity. Something with insects, I believe. Small ones. In great quantity.\"\n\nA few moments of work from the ground crew pulled the ship to a steady, solid berth. Alabaster babied his injured arm as he pulled on his heavier coat. The wound had once again begun to trickle blood thanks to its rough treatment. Due to the theft of the vessel that had taken them to the academy, the many bags and trunks filled with the personal effects Alabaster deemed crucial were missing, so Mallow was free to trot along beside his employer. He opened doors, tipped crew and staff, and weathered a constant low-grade tirade.\n\nThe sound, smell, and warmth of the fire crackling in the hearth of the Ruby Club washed over them when they finally stepped through the door and stomped the slush from their shoes. The hour was late, and thus even the steward had retired for the evening. Only Tender, who seemed never to leave his post, was present to welcome them.\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Alabaster. Always a pleasure,\" he said, jabbing at the fire with a poker until he'd moved the freshest of the logs into the proper position. \"You look as though you've had a rough go of it.\"\n\n\"Mr. Tender, you cannot conceive of my misfortunes. I am unbathed, wounded, unrested. I have been forced to subsist on mere scraps. I have had my irreplaceable possessions torn from me by brigands, and I have been forced to travel on the barest framework of a vehicle rather than the masterpiece to which I have become accustomed. Lesser men would not have survived such events. But Lucius P. Alabaster is, of course, equal to the task.\"\n\nHe plopped into his designated chair and slumped down, his hat slipping over his eyes. \"Mallow, fetch the physician. I'll also have a tall glass of tonic and some manner of roasted meats to rebuild my strength.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Mallow said, jumping to the task.\n\nTender stood and approached a small box on the mantel. \"I'm sorry to say I may have something here to add to your woes.\"\n\n\"Naturally. Great men can always expect such things\u2026 What is it this time? Has the sun been snuffed out? Are the oceans threatening to spill over the mountains and drown the fug?\"\n\n\"Whatever it is, it's got the mayor of Fugtown's address as a return,\" Tender said, pulling an envelope from the box and delivering it to Alabaster. \"The message just came in a few hours ago. Priority. An envelope like that seldom contains good news.\"\n\n\"The mayor\u2026\" Alabaster said quietly, taking the envelope and gazing at its hand-lettered addresses. When the facts filtered through his layers of exhaustion and self-pity, he sat bolt upright and pushed up his hat. \"The mayor! Ah-ha! Even that stubborn fool couldn't ignore my utter brilliance forever!\"\n\n\"That's the first time I've seen someone in this club happy to get a message from the mayor.\"\n\n\"That is because you've never seen a mind such as mine at work! And thus you've never seen a masterful bit of manipulation and machination come to fruition before. What I hold in my hand is, indeed, the invitation to my own grandest achievement!\"\n\nHe shredded the envelope and unfolded its contents. The page was written with a precise hand, each letter positioned in its own box of a printed grid. It was a strange bit of stationary familiar to anyone who had received a priority dispatch. The absurd cost and relative unavailability of such a mode of communication meant that the list of those who had received one was very short.\n\n\"There, you see, Tender? And these other fools who so seldom occupy the chairs at the Ruby Club thought me a madman for financing the installation of a priority message center in our little village, but this is evidence that it was a prudent sum well spent.\"\n\n\"Good news?\"\n\n\"The best of news! Written with the mayor's spiritless and bland language, of course, but the man can be excused for lacking the Alabaster panache. Ahem. 'As you appear to have significant and inexplicable insight into the actions and motions of the Wind Breaker, I have decided to seek your aid in neutralizing them as a threat. Henceforth all reasonable actions and expenses associated with Lucius P. Alabaster's efforts to capture and/or provide proof of death for the Wind Breaker crew shall be underwritten and sanctioned by Fugtown. Please act quickly, and always with the safety of the fug people foremost in your mind.' There, you see! Our society's most powerful man has, in not so many words, begged me to rescue him from the tyranny of the surface folk!\"\n\n\"Interesting\u2026 I've worked here for over a hundred years, and this might be the first time I've heard of anyone here taken on as an outside contractor by the more impressive members of the industry.\"\n\n\"That's because I've only been alive for seventy years, my good sir, and thus it was not until this moment that you'd seen my properly matured intellect put to its full use.\"\n\n\"How did you do it?\"\n\n\"By means that would confound a simple mind such as yours, sir, but fear not! I daresay you'll be reading of my exploits in great detail before the year is out, for I shall in very short order be the most lauded man in all the fug. I shall be sure to inform those taking record of my actions to render them in words small enough for all to understand.\"\n\nAlabaster looked over the note to see if there was any further indication of his achievement.\n\n\"The man didn't leave much time to spare. Had he dragged his feet any further, I might have been too busy rescuing his constituents to even receive his formal request for me to do so. We've reached the point where my plans are quite swiftly in motion, and once started they cannot be stopped. To that end, have you any other messages for me?\"\n\n\"None. What you have there is the only message, priority or not, that we've received since you left.\"\n\n\"I shall have to send Mallow to my manor\u2026 By now I would have liked to have received some indication of the motions of the more hidden elements of my schemes.\"\n\n\"Just what sort of plans are you working at?\"\n\n\"Again, you may read of them in the history books. Just count yourself lucky to have been present at this momentous occasion. Today is the day the finest man of an era finally stepped into the limelight.\" He looked about. \"Where is that Mallow? Blast him and his dillydallying. You then. Tender. Fetch me stationary. I have dispatches to send. My agents can only be trusted to act autonomously for so long. And I must amass my forces. The timing is crucial to reap the greatest reward from this operation.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "The looming threat of attack from abominations is a remarkable motivator to perform a thorough job quickly. Eleven fug folk and two humans threw themselves headlong into the task of raising at least a cursory set of defenses. Here and there, with increasing frequency as the work rolled on, the glint of large green eyes could be seen at the edge of the clearing, stoking the flames of urgency. The need for speed is also a fine recipe for innovation. The plan had been to fell trees, mill them into lumber, and use them for fence posts and lookout towers. Now faced with trees obligingly and relatively free of lower branches, the decision was made to simply string reel after reel of barbed wire between them, weaving a makeshift fence to keep the smaller creatures at bay in hours rather than days. Better fences could follow, provided the improvised ones did their job.\n\nAs illustrated by their encounter with what Lil was still reluctant to believe was a fug-squirrel, there was a need to defend against creatures that might attack from above. The barbed wire around the trunks of the trees would go a long way toward dissuading them from climbing, but there wasn't nearly enough wire to reach all the way to where the branches interwove. There was no obvious solution that didn't seem to be a hopeless engineering challenge or utterly insane. It was therefore helpful that Nita and Lil were present, as their respective areas of expertise seemed to be hopeless engineering challenges and utter insanity.\n\n\"Oof\u2026 the air's getting a little fuggy up here,\" Lil said, squinting a bit.\n\nStill wrapped in her heavy coat, she had scaled one of the trees that had been called into service as part of their improvised fence. She'd locked her legs around one of the final branches below the churning dome of fug and was taking a brief break in her hours-long task. In one hand she held a saw, sticky with sap. Her other hand was tucked into her coat, where she was stroking Nikita.\n\n\"You brought your mask, didn't you?\" huffed Nita from the other side of the tree.\n\n\"Well sure, but I was just getting used to not needing it. I ain't eager to start sucking breath through that pile of junk again anytime soon.\"\n\n\"Fortunately, this is the last tree, so after this we can head back down and stay down for a while.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you what. Nikita sure is loving it up here.\"\n\nLil mopped some sweat from her forehead. Despite the icy temperatures, the hard work and layers of clothing had her close to overheating. It didn't seem to bother Nikita in the slightest, who had taken up residence in Lil's coat just as soon as they'd climbed the first tree far enough to escape the prying eyes of the fug folk below. The toasty interior of Lil's coat combined with the privacy of the tree and the proximity to her second favorite person were heavenly to the little beast.\n\n\"All right, back to it,\" Lil said.\n\nShe stepped off the branch, relying upon the bite of her heavy boots into the gnarled, vine-wrapped tree trunk that was not so unlike the rigging she'd been climbing aboard the Wind Breaker for so many years. Once she was in position, she dug the saw into the branch and went to work. She couldn't manage much of a stroke with the saw thanks to the awkward angle, but she was industrious and was soon making plenty of sawdust.\n\n\"So, no branches means it'll be harder for one of them monster things to jump from one tree to another, right?\"\n\n\"That's the idea,\" Nita said. \"I'm hoping it'll mean they have to attack from the ground.\"\n\n\"What's with your bit then?\"\n\nNita stopped hammering at an improvised cable hoop and leaned aside to talk.\n\n\"The thing that tried to take a bite out of me looked like it could probably jump a long way, so we've got to be ready if one makes it this far. Since they clearly seem attracted to high-pitched noises, I rigged some whistles to some canisters and signal rockets, then wired up these igniters. If something gets up high enough to touch these wires, a noisemaker will streak off into the trees and send it galloping away. Hopefully it won't come back, but if it does, we'll at least know where it was.\"\n\n\"Gosh dang it, you're a smart one,\" Lil said.\n\n\"It's funny. Back home the supervisors weren't fond of my tendency to use what was lying around to solve the problems at hand.\"\n\n\"Sounds like they ain't never spent any time on an airship. On the Wind Breaker if a problem don't get solved with what's lying around, a problem don't get solved.\"\n\n\"All the same. It'll be good to get back to work where I won't have to rig up an impromptu ladder by hammering fl\u00e9chettes into the trunk of a tree.\"\n\nLil stopped sawing. \"You\u2026 uh\u2026 you planning on getting back to a job like that?\"\n\nNita finished hammering and set about threading the trip wire, which had been whistling in the wind as it dangled between her belt and the previous tree.\n\n\"You and Gunner are pretty close to being able to do the emergency repairs you might need, and you can always swing by Caldera for anything major. Mother got her medicine and is recovering nicely. Our deal is nearly at its end.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but, you know\u2026 that doesn't mean you have to go. I'm sure the cap'n would keep you on. Heh. You know. If you asked real nice.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"\u2026 It's just that\u2026 not so long ago you were saying you don't think too many steps ahead.\"\n\n\"Since then I've put my mind to it a bit. I think it's time to go.\"\n\n\"\u2026 But\u2026 don't you like being part of the crew? Getting into all these fun scrapes and then getting out.\"\n\n\"That sad part is that I do like it. I've been having the time of my life.\"\n\n\"Why's that sad? And why stop if you're having the time of your life?\"\n\n\"Lil, I'm clinging to a thorn tree, stringing a makeshift noisemaker-equipped rocket while at the bottom of a sea of toxic gas. I've been pushing my luck hard. Eventually it is going to run out. My brother and sister are always eager to find out what I've been doing, but my mother\u2026 the look in her face when I leave. She's never sure if I'll come home again. And as far as she's concerned, it is her fault I'm out here. If the worst happens, she'll never forgive herself.\"\n\n\"You know we wouldn't let something happen to you. I been doing this for years and I ain't died once.\"\n\n\"I can feel the wind blowing through the holes bitten through my jacket by a monster, Lil.\"\n\n\"Exactly. You got through that just fine. How much worse could it get?\"\n\nHaving finished her task, Nita leaned aside to look her friend in the eye. Lil had a weak smile on her face as though it was all in good fun. Her eyes told a different story. They spoke of fear and desperation. They were pleading.\n\n\"Lil, what's wrong?\"\n\n\"What's wrong? My world is fixing to fall apart, that's what's wrong.\"\n\n\"It's not your whole world, Lil. And it's not forever. You'll still see me from time to time. I'm just going to go back home.\"\n\n\"Oh sure. I understand. Because you got a home. You got a family to worry about you. Not me. Mom's been gone for years. Dad too. So what've I got? A couple cousins I don't see for years at a time, and when I do see them it's with their hands out? Nope. Everyone I got is on the Wind Breaker. I ain't even had a home since Cap'n Mack first picked us up.\"\n\n\"It's just me. You'll still have the rest.\"\n\n\"Sure, but for how long? Cap'n's not gettin' any younger, and he's got that island now. When he goes, Butch's liable to go too. Gunner only sticks around because of the cap'n. Give him the chance and he'll get back to a proper navy. With the things we've been doing, ain't no ship in the Circa fleet would pass on a chance to snap him up. And that leaves what? Me and Coop with no ship.\"\n\n\"If that's the case, then what good will me staying around do?\"\n\n\"If you stay around, then you'll still be around. It'll mean things ain't started to crumble yet. And if they do crumble, maybe at least you'll still be there. And I think maybe that'd be enough for me.\"\n\n\"Lil, it'll never be safe enough out here for my mother\u2014\"\n\n\"We ain't talkin' about your mother, Nita,\" Lil snapped. \"We're talking about us. About the whole crew. What if she weren't the problem? What if she was fine with it? What if no one cared what you did? Seems like all the big things you do are for somebody else. Forget about everybody. Your folks, the cap'n, Coop, me, everybody. What if this was just you? What do you want to do?\"\n\nNita looked Lil in the eye. She wanted to answer. It should have been simple. But the deeper into herself she looked, the less certain she was. Her rescue came in the form of a soft but insistent tapping from within Lil's jacket.\n\nI hear the other inspector.\n\nLil glared at Nita for a moment more, then turned one ear to the worksite below.\n\n\"All I hear is a load of hammering and sawing and such. You sure?\"\n\nYes.\n\n\"What's he saying?\"\n\nReport forwarded to Inspector Lucius P. Alabaster. Reply intended only for Inspector 58978. We have reached the well. Two crewmembers are present. Both survived. This message was sent at 4:23 a.m., seven days after the previous message.\n\n\"Dang it,\" Lil said, twisting to glance down. \"Branca is still tied up. Is that thing tapping away on its own?\"\n\n\"And who is it tapping to?\" Nita asked.\n\nThere is a ship high and far, Nikita explained. I can hear that too.\n\n\"Is it close enough to hear what the other fella is saying?\" Lil asked.\n\nYes. The ship inspector is repeating it back now.\n\n\"It would seem there may be more than one traitor in this group,\" Nita said.\n\n\"I'm starting to think there ain't nothing but traitors.\"\n\nLil growled and kicked the mostly sawed tree limb, causing it to snap free and plummet to the ground. She then looked sharply at Nita. \"And don't think this lets you off the hook for that answer. Only probably next time we won't jaw about it while we're up in a tree. Now let's go find out what's what.\"\n\nThe deckhand descended the tree with her usual recklessness, dropping as much as climbing. Nita took a bit more care, finishing the last few adjustments of her own task and then descending along the makeshift ladder of hammered spikes. By the time she reached the ground, Lil had already stalked over to the woman who still had her hands tied. After sitting on the cold ground at the end of her short tether for an entire night while the others worked, she was far too stiff and sluggish to get up in time to avoid Lil's wrath. Not that she would have been able to go anywhere.\n\n\"All right, Branca, spit it out,\" Lil demanded, snatching the woman by the collar and attempting to hoist her to her feet.\n\nThe size disparity meant that Lil instead ended up pulling herself down toward the informant, but the effect was the same.\n\n\"What? What do you want from me now? Come to kill me for some other imagined crime?\"\n\n\"I come to let you know we're onto you. Who else here is working with you?\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Someone's taken the cage containing the inspector we discovered while we were loading,\" Nita said from behind her. \"We left it locked up, right here. None of the other goods from this area have been touched.\"\n\n\"Maybe it ran off,\" Kent offered, hefting a sledge to his shoulder and approaching the disruption.\n\n\"The cage is missing. Did it drag that off behind it?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"Either someone comes clean about who took that critter, or I'm gonna start handing out black eyes until I hear what I want to hear,\" Lil announced.\n\n\"Now, now. Let's calm down,\" Kent said.\n\n\"I'm sick o' you telling me to calm down when I got reason to be angry. And you got reason to be angry too, because this time it ain't about someone trying to kill us, it's about someone giving up the location of this here bonanza you got.\"\n\n\"What? How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Because we got\u2026\" Lil paused and looked to Nita.\n\nNita looked back with a raised eyebrow.\n\n\"Dang it, dang it, dang it!\" Lil said, stomping one foot as a punctuation on the outburst. \"Cap'n ain't gonna like it, but I'm tired of losing arguments I could have won if not for secrets I gotta keep!\"\n\nShe whisked her jacket open with an exhibitionistic flourish. This revealed a rather startled Nikita to the rest of the gathering crowd of workers. The initial reaction, as was frequently the case when Lil acted, was confusion.\n\n\"If you've got the inspector tucked in your shirt, why are you making a fuss about it being missing?\"\n\n\"Can't you folk tell the difference between your own critters? This ain't your inspector. We got our own.\"\n\nKent scratched his head. \"I don't follow.\"\n\n\"See? This is why I shouldn't've trusted you folk to know if you could trust each other or not. Fuggers never trust each other.\" Lil scooped her arm down to gather up Nikita. \"Come here, darlin'. We know something about these inspectors you folk down here ain't just been keeping from us, but you've been keeping it from each other, mostly. These critters are smart. And they can talk, in a way. That's what half of that tappin' is about. And right now that fat one you folk were so happy about having along and we were so angry about having along is tap-tap-tapping out a message to some ship way up yonder. Now maybe that ship has been following us and we just ain't heard it. Or maybe it's just a trade ship or messenger or something that wandered near enough for the critter to hear. It don't much matter, because it already said what it had to say, and if that ship heard it, then folk are going to be able to find this place right quick.\" She looked down. \"Which way is that ship headed, darlin'?\"\n\nNikita pointed.\n\n\"West. Back the way we came,\" Lil observed. \"For all we know that ship's headed right to Mayor Ebonwhite or someone just as bad who's gonna send a string of ships to take all of this away from you folks.\"\n\n\"This is all a little\u2026 dubious there, Lil,\" Kent said.\n\n\"You want proof, just watch.\" She looked to Nikita. \"Where'd you hear that tapping? Can you smell him too?\"\n\nYes, Nikita tapped.\n\nThe inspector extended a scrawny arm and pointed with her spidery middle finger at a half-finished gantry that would soon bridge the gap of the pit and form the beginnings of a crane to start harvesting buckets of ichor. Lil bounded over to it and scrambled up the side, climbing the cross-struts like a ladder until she reached the top. Once there she began throwing items aside, pitching hammers and bags of bolts off the top.\n\n\"Nita, I think your friend there's lost it. Maybe the fug's gotten to her.\"\n\n\"I assure you, she's quite sane. At least no less so than when I met her. In all honestly she's been showing remarkable self-control through this,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Ah-ha!\" Lil proclaimed.\n\nShe threw a canvas cover off the gantry and hoisted up the purloined crate that had been hidden beneath.\n\n\"Here's the aye-aye-turned rat,\" Lil said.\n\nLil opened the crate and pulled the creature free. Once she'd maneuvered it to cling to her side, she began to climb down the structure.\n\n\"Well I'll be\u2026 she found it just by that inspector thing pointing it out\u2026\" Kent said quietly.\n\n\"You\u2026 you don't really believe any of this nonsense she's saying,\" remarked Stark as he ran up to Nita and Kent. \"Inspectors are just stupid creatures who knock around looking for rotten wood. Everyone knows that.\"\n\n\"Aren't you the man Lil said tried to tackle her on the way to the well?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"She was brandishing a gun and threatening to blow us all up. It was the sensible thing to do!\"\n\n\"And weren't you working on the gantry construction?\" Kent said, his own suspicion growing.\n\n\"Five of us were working on the gantry!\"\n\n\"No sense guessing and accusing when we can ask someone who makes a living watching folks and snitching on them,\" Lil said, pacing up to them. \"What do you say, Lardo? Who's the one who told you to do the snitching?\"\n\nThe chubby creature peered up at Lil, then out at the anxiously\u2014if somewhat incredulously\u2014watching group. Nikita tapped out a few encouraging comments. Finally the inspector dubbed Lardo extended a hand, pointing with his own middle finger at Stark.\n\nAll eyes turned to the accused.\n\n\"Y-you don't really believe this! She could have\u2026 she probably trained it! Yeah! Trained it to point at who she tells it to point at! You could train a dog to do that. She's just trying to turn us on each other.\"\n\n\"We're kind of stuck in the middle of the forest with you folk. Seein' as how we'd have a hell of a time finding our way out without one of you folk at the wheel, I ain't eager to see folk start getting killed. But seems to me you and Branca there ain't really part of the team.\"\n\n\"What was the message that thing was supposed to have delivered?\" Kent asked.\n\n\"'Report forwarded to Inspector Lucius P. Alabaster. Reply intended only for Inspector 58978. We have reached the well. Two crewmembers are present. Both survived.' Then it gave the current time and date,\" Nita said.\n\n\"What good would that do?\"\n\n\"If there was an airship overhead, and Nikita there says there was, then even if it was just passing by, with the timing of the message and the knowledge of that ship's route, a person could get a reasonably close estimate of where we are in the forest right now.\"\n\n\"If that's true\u2026\" Kent said.\n\n\"It isn't true!\" cried Branca from the ground. \"They're manipulating us! They want to turn us on each other one by one! What they're saying is ridiculous!\"\n\n\"We've already established you wanted to kill us,\" Nita said, resisting the urge to punctuate the observation with a kick. \"That you would speak out in defense of another accused helps our argument, not yours.\"\n\n\"Yeah. So quit your yelling or you'll get the first of them black eyes I was promising\u2026\" Lil tipped her head to the side. \"Actually, do fug folk get black eyes? Oh, yeah, that fella over there still has his from that brawl back when we were talking specifics with the cap'n.\"\n\n\"Listen. I know it's a bit much to swallow. I was the one who worked it out in the first place, and I think I was only able to accept it because these things are new to me and it wasn't any more absurd than a continent mired in poison. But let's set aside how we got this information for now. What else do we know? Does anyone know this Alabaster person?\"\n\n\"He's a\u2026 what do you call it? One of those sorts who makes his money off other folks' business,\" Kent said.\n\n\"A freeloader?\" Lil said.\n\n\"No\u2026 investor, that's it. Spreads his money around like fertilizer and gets fat off what grows. You spend much time in the northwest parts of the fug, you'll probably find your way to one end or the other of a string he's got dangling from his bank account. Probably if you dig deep enough every last one of us has been working for him at one time or another.\"\n\n\"Is he someone we should worry about?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"You know my rule. If it's in the fug, worry about it unless you have a reason not to, not the other way around,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Him being the investor type, if he really did get that message mentioning a well, he's liable to want to claim it for himself and make heaps of money off it,\" Kent said.\n\n\"Has he got the resources to make that happen?\"\n\n\"No doubt.\"\n\n\"Then that's a problem.\"\n\n\"That's assuming this is all true,\" said Stark.\n\n\"Keep denying it, pal. You're really convincing us you ain't a rat,\" Lil said.\n\n\"Again, let us focus on other things,\" Nita said. \"We suspect Branca and Stark. Have they worked for Alabaster in the past?\"\n\n\"Like I said, most of us have, if you dig deep enough,\" Kent said.\n\n\"Fine, then is there a connection between the two of them?\"\n\nHe scratched his head. \"Not that I\u2026 hang on a tick\u2026 What's that fella's name? The one with the stupid hat. Left him back with Digger\u2026 Bludo! That's the fella. He's the one who recruited both of them. Made a pretty strong argument at the time.\"\n\nAt the mention of the recruiter, a flash of concern came across the faces of both Stark and Branca.\n\n\"You folk ain't played much poker down here, have you?\" Lil said with a grin.\n\n\"I think we've got to entertain the possibility that this Bludo character and anyone he handpicked might be working for Alabaster,\" Nita said. \"Are there any other Well Diggers he picked out?\"\n\n\"Me,\" came a voice from beside one of the munitions carts.\n\nAll eyes turned to a fug woman who was very tall, even by fug standards. She'd kept quiet and mostly to herself during the whole journey. She had a precise and elegant weapon, a fug-made rifle, and stood with a wide stance and a steady grip. From her vantage, any member of the Well Diggers who made a move against her could easily be picked off.\n\n\"Nerys!\" Kent barked.\n\n\"Aw, dang it! Both fug women on the crew are rats! And here I was starting to think maybe it was just the fug men who were evil as a rule,\" Lil moaned, seemingly more bothered by the identity of the remaining traitor than her weapon.\n\n\"I don't know how these surface dwellers figured it out, but what they said is true. These inspectors can deliver messages, and we were instructed to deliver one just as soon as we arrived. Not that it matters,\" said Nerys.\n\n\"Because if Bludo's working for Alabaster, then the man's known roundabout where this place is for weeks,\" Kent said.\n\n\"So there's no sense resisting. This whole well was going to be an Alabaster concern in a few weeks anyway, so anyone with weapons, drop them. We're all going to go forward according to plan. Build this place up, get it running.\"\n\n\"Why should we do that?\" growled Kent. \"One member of the industry is as bad as another. If I wanted someone else holding the reins of my destiny, I'd've stuck around in the coal mine.\"\n\n\"Because if you do a good and proper job getting this well running, Alabaster will make it worth your while. And if you don't, I'll put a bullet in your brain.\"\n\n\"See, that's a lousy thing to threaten. You can't keep a gun on us all the whole time we're working, and you can't get the work done if you kill us all,\" Lil said.\n\n\"I would shut my mouth if I were you,\" said the latest traitor. \"You're the one person Alabaster said he specifically wanted dead. You weren't supposed to survive that lure we gave you. Technically Alabaster wanted the Calderan alive, but I'd have considered her an acceptable loss.\"\n\n\"Jabber jabber jabber,\" Lil said, casually pulling her coat shut and stuffing her hands in her pockets. \"Like I said before. Pull the trigger or don't. You won't be the first person to shoot at me, and you sure ain't gonna be the last. And as soon as you pull that trigger, regardless of who you hit, the rest of us are going to bum-rush you. If they know what's good for them anyway.\"\n\n\"Stark, untie Branca and the two of you grab guns.\"\n\n\"Before you do that, Stark, you probably ought to take a look at my right hand.\"\n\nStark and the others flicked their gaze where she'd indicated and discovered she was gripping her pistol, and it was pointed directly at him.\n\n\"Bit of a standoff we've got here,\" Lil said.\n\nIt was unsettling how truly calm and composed the deckhand seemed in the center of this precarious situation. It was a long way from the bundle of anxiety she'd been just minutes before when she feared the breakup of the ship's crew. The utter lack of fear had a bizarre effect on those around her. It was subtle, but as the only person not stretched to the limit, the overall feeling was that she must be in a position of control. This simple fact was almost certainly the only reason the rifle had not yet been fired.\n\n\"You're going to lose this one, you realize,\" Lil said. \"My gun's lighter than yours. Your arms are going to get tired first. You're just lucky we didn't start this chat with my gun already pointing at you, or you'd already be bleeding. It's the turn from Stark here to you that'd give you your chance.\"\n\nLil continued to observe the two threats without any evident concern while everyone else remained perfectly still, too worried even to breathe. Slowly, Nita began to drum her fingernails on the handle of one of her wrenches.\n\n\"And that assumes I ain't got any other tricks up my sleeve,\" Lil said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "A few minutes passed with very little change in the vicinity of the well. Branca was still bound, Stark was still holding his ground, and Lil was still brandishing her weapon without any indication of concern. The one thing that had escalated was the uncertainty and agitation of Nerys, who clearly felt she ought to be the one calling the shots.\n\n\"I am through playing your games, Cooper. You will lower your weapon and do as I say!\" she cried.\n\n\"Quit yelling. You've had a rifle pointed at me for a while now, Nerys. Do you really think the only reason I ain't done what you said is because you ain't asking loud enough?\" Lil said.\n\n\"Nerys, I think we all know that the only way this is going to end without blood is if you lower that gun and listen to reason,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Who says I want things to end without blood. You two are monsters! How many fug folk have you killed?\"\n\nLil tipped her head in thought. \"I don't keep score of that sort of stuff. Gunner does. When he shows up you can ask him. I know it ain't near as many fuggers as surface folk though. Wailers, raiders, and pirates like them are the folk we usually shoot at. And only when they shoot first. Cap'n hates wasting ammunition. How many folk you killed?\"\n\n\"\u2026 None.\"\n\n\"That's another reason you might not want to point a gun at me.\"\n\nNita tapped her fingers a few more times. Lil tapped her own in response.\n\n\"All right, Nerys, I'm just about sick of all this posturing and such. By my count, you got one gun and three things to shoot at.\"\n\n\"There's just the two of you.\"\n\nLil flashed a smile. \"Wrong.\"\n\nShe snapped her fingers and fell backward. At the same moment, Nita dove to one side and Nikita burst from beneath Lil's jacket. Nerys pulled the trigger of her rifle, but having been wound steadily tighter by the events of the prior few minutes, she wasn't nearly in the right state of mind to adjust her aim quickly or accurately. Her first round struck the dirt, raising a cloud of dust and gravel.\n\nNita scrambled toward one of the carts, moving in a crouching run. Lil rolled aside and kicked her legs up, rolling back onto her shoulders and springing back to her feet. Nikita, her fur standing on end and her enormous eyes wide with fear, skittered under a cart.\n\nNerys's panic was evident on her face, but she retained enough sanity to keep her rifle pointed roughly in Lil's direction. On the surface this seemed like a sound decision, as Lil was the one with the pistol. The fug woman hadn't factored Lil's nimbleness into the equation, however. She managed a second and third shot with the repeater rifle, but neither came anywhere near the sprightly deckhand. All the wild shots managed to do was send the rest of the fug folk running for cover. Even Stark, who ostensibly should have been attempting to tackle either of the Wind Breaker's crewmembers, chose the better part of valor and ran for his life.\n\nIf Nerys had been looking in the appropriate direction, she would have seen a frenzied ball of fluff streaking toward her from under a cart. Instead she only noticed Nikita when the aye-aye had scurried up her leg and sunk a set of chisel-like teeth into her thigh. She screamed, and if the barrel of the rifle would have been short enough, she's probably would have pumped a round into her own leg. Instead she took one hand from her weapon to claw at the attacking creature. She scarcely had time to wrap her fingers around Nikita's crooked tail before Nita struck her from the side in a flying tackle. The three of them tumbled across the ground.\n\nNita, who lacked the reach advantage but made up for it in weight and leverage, came out on top when the tumble finished. Nerys reached aside and pulled a knife from her belt, but Nita caught her wrist. They struggled against one another for control of the weapon, but it didn't last long.\n\n\"Drop the knife or you'll be breathing through a new hole in your head, Nerys,\" Lil ordered breathlessly.\n\nThe traitorous fug woman glanced aside and found the muzzle of Lil's pistol mere inches from her face. She wisely let the knife fall to the ground.\n\n\"Now everybody just calm down,\" Lil said. \"We're all going to put down our guns and\u2014\"\n\n\"Both of you! You drop your weapons!\" raved Stark.\n\nThey turned to find him standing beside one of the carts, now armed with a rifle of his own from the substantial armory that the expedition had brought along. Lil then looked past him and grinned again.\n\n\"Pff. Took you long enough,\" she said.\n\nStark turned to see who Lil was talking to and received the full brunt of a sucker punch, courtesy of Kent. The blow dropped Stark like a sack of potatoes, and left Kent shaking his hand.\n\n\"You've got a hard head, Stark,\" he said, flexing his fist.\n\n\"Good to know at least one of you folk doesn't want us dead,\" Lil said, keeping her pistol trained on Nerys while Nita quickly bound her hands.\n\nThe tension, having reached its boiling point, slowly simmered down again and the rest of the Well Diggers took stock of the situation. Branca, Nerys, and Stark were gathered together and plopped down in the center of a tight circle formed by the remaining members of the expedition. Nita, Lil, and Kent stood at one end of the ring. The rest bunched rather uncertainly at the other side, watching the girls with roughly the same caution as they had watched the creature that had attacked during the trip.\n\n\"I'm sorry about all that. I had no idea about any of this,\" Kent said.\n\n\"You don't got to waste too much breath trying to convince me you didn't know something, Kent. That thick head of yours was one of the first things I worked out about you back at that Ph'lack'try. I reckon that's why you were palling around with Donald. He's even thicker.\"\n\n\"I suppose I deserve that\u2026 Now, we need to chat about this\u2026\" He looked to Nikita. \"\u2026 inspector nonsense.\"\n\n\"It's real simple. These critters tap out messages to each other, who tap them out to other critters, until they get to someone who knows what to do with whatever it is they say.\"\n\n\"They talk by tapping\u2026\" Kent said.\n\n\"How they do it isn't the important part. The important part is they've been spying on all of us and most of you for as long as they've been on ships, and now a creature on a ship that passed overhead is carrying a message about where we are,\" Nita said. \"Add to that the fact that we've got three traitors to your cause tied up here and at least one back at the headquarters, it seems likely this Alabaster person is going to take swift and decisive action to keep the well from slipping through his fingers.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I mean, we've all heard of Alabaster, but he's only ever been a name on a page. Not the sort who'd hatch a scheme.\"\n\n\"Everybody's gotta start sometime.\"\n\n\"Imagine for a moment he was someone to hatch a scheme. What sort of resources could he be expected to bring to bear?\" Nita asked.\n\n\"Oh, well, he's all over shipping, so he'd have plenty of airships to choose from. Ever since you folk stole from that Fugtown warehouse, every ship's been loaded up with extra weapons.\"\n\n\"Yeah, we noticed,\" Lil said.\n\n\"And like I said, he's got an interest\u2014that's to say, he's got money\u2014in just about every place to earn a living in these parts. So he's got plenty of folks to order around, if he was so inclined to order people around.\"\n\n\"The man has, in effect, a fleet and an army. And you don't consider him a particular threat?\" Nita said.\n\n\"You've got to see things the way we see them. Anybody with two coins to rub together down here in the fug is planting them in some business or another. What could be said about Alabaster could be said about any of the folks who laze about in the cities down here. Everyone invests money in everyone else. I suppose that's why we don't do much fighting between each other. There isn't much good in fighting with your business partner, and everyone's a partner at some level.\"\n\n\"Peace through mutual greed,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Probably they'd say mutual ambition, but one's as good as another,\" Kent said.\n\n\"From what I seen, different folk are greedy in different ways. Maybe this is a fella who's got enough money, and now he's after something else.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Fame? Power? Whatever else a body could get from a big hole full of stuff it used to be you could only get from one place? Point is, that's the sort of fella who'd come with guns a-blazing to ruin all our plans for this place.\"\n\n\"Captain Mack once sagely observed that, despite their claims to the contrary, the one thing all fug folk want above all else isn't money, it's control. That's why they refused to sell me the medicine for my mother. Once taken, it would cure her, and that wasn't enough for them. They would have wanted to dangle it over me forever. The same way they dangle the phlogiston and burn-slow over us,\" Nita said.\n\n\"That doesn't wash. They already control this stuff. If Alabaster were to get his hands on it, all he'd be doing is helping the other people in the industry keep control,\" said Kent.\n\nLil chimed in. \"Maybe that's what he's after then. Maybe this is his way in to the table with the big boys. Or maybe it don't matter, because the fella already put a bunch of his lackeys that we know about into your little team here, and he got them to tell him right where we are, so he's obviously interested. And since I had my heart set on us getting the fuel and phlogiston you folks promised us in exchange for our help, I sure as heck ain't gonna let him come and take it away. So we got a fight on the way that we gotta be ready to win.\"\n\nKent scratched his head, then turned to the others. \"What do you boys think? Original plan was to get the walls up, then drop some pumps down and start pulling this stuff up. If Alabaster's on his way, it'll be all defenses and as much offense as we can muster. That last bit's a real problem. We've got the guns from the three powered carts, plus the parts to build a few more, but I'd figured on them mostly being used to scare off any of the larger critters that might've given us trouble. We haven't got the ammunition to turn back a full-scale attack. The way Digger had it worked out, we'd get this refinery up on a shoestring and rely on the industry not knowing where we are until we scraped together the time and money to harden it up, bunker-style. I'm not even sure how we're going to use what we've got against airships. This pea soup hanging over us is going to make it impossible to aim at them. One scout with a few bombs'd be all it'd take to make mincemeat out of the lot of us.\"\n\n\"You leave the thinking to Nita here,\" Lil said, slapping the engineer on the back. \"She's smart enough to work out how to make this all work for what we need it for.\"\n\nNita ran her gloved hand over her head and released a slow breath. \"This is really more of a problem for Gunner, but I've worked with him long enough. Maybe some of his brand of inventiveness has rubbed off on me. If I understand the situation correctly, the issues are visibility, air superiority, accuracy, and firepower.\"\n\n\"Heh. Yeah. That's it. All we have to do is solve all those problems. Simple,\" Kent said.\n\n\"If you look at it as a whole, certainly it can seem hopeless, but each little step is simple enough, and if every step is simple, then the whole problem is simple. Now obviously, regardless of our solution, we'll need the guns operational.\"\n\nKent turned to the others. \"You three. Get cracking on the guns. No one sleeps until they're all up and tested.\"\n\n\"That's one aspect of firepower. We'll need fuel for the boilers as well. The coal we've got won't last long.\"\n\n\"Those branches you girls cut down will hold us for a bit. And we were looking to clear out these little trees and the brush. We can burn them too.\"\n\n\"Good. Good.\"\n\nNita paced over to the edge of the well and peered down. It was very deep, and not perfectly vertical, but the amber glow of the mysterious substance was clearly visible about twenty feet from the surface. Toward the bottom of the well, and entirely encrusting the surface of the ichor itself, a layer of translucent crystal had formed. Nita picked up a sizable rock and tossed it down. When it struck, the crust shattered like glass and the thick luminescent substance oozed through the cracks.\n\nShe looked to Kent. \"It was demonstrated to us that all it takes is a bit of heat to make phlogiston out of this stuff. Does anyone here know how to make burn-slow or anything else out of it?\"\n\n\"Nope. It was news to me you could even do that,\" Kent said.\n\n\"Still. Phlogiston gives us options,\" Nita said.\n\nShe rummaged through a crate and selected something they'd called \"the sample bucket.\" It was little more than a small container on a long chain, intended to be used to haul up ichor for their initial production until a proper pump could be installed. Tossing it into the well and hauling it back quickly rewarded her with a pint or so of ichor. Even in the short trip from the well to the surface it had begun to crust over with the thin crystal.\n\n\"Here, careful with that,\" Kent said, stepping back. \"That stuff doesn't do any good to us fug folk.\"\n\n\"Hey, that's something, right?\" Lil said. \"We could just douse the folk attacking us with this stuff.\"\n\nKent crossed his arms and looked at her sternly. \"What goes up comes down, Lil. And I don't think any of us are keen on being there when this stuff lands.\"\n\n\"So don't get hit,\" Lil said with a shrug.\n\n\"No, he's right, Lil. We can't hope to win if we're dodging our own attacks,\" Nita said.\n\nShe walked toward the edge of the dome in the fug cleared by the presence of the well. After only a few yards it was visibly bulging outward, pushed away by the influence of the substance.\n\n\"This works at quite a distance,\" Nita observed.\n\n\"Yeah. If there's enough of it, anyway,\" Kent said.\n\n\"\u2026 Okay. I don't have the whole solution, but I've got enough to act. We're going to need a few jars of this stuff. The pipes were wrapped in burlap, right? We'll need that too. A layer or two across the top of a jar should keep this from sloshing out and being a problem, but should still let it push back the fug. And then we'll need to get the kettles up so we can make some phlogiston. At least\u2026 five full canisters, if we can manage. I'll need all the canvas we used to secure the cargo, and as much from the tents as we can spare. Plenty of rope, too\u2026\"\n\n\"That's my girl!\" Lil said.\n\n\"What are you planning?\" Kent asked.\n\n\"I think if we can\u2014\" Nita began to explain.\n\n\"You'll know what she's planning once we're done getting it ready. No sense jawing about it when we could be working. Now let's go!\"\n\n\"Oh, one last thing,\" Nita said. \"Nikita! I need you to listen for ships. If it's a small one headed west, send a message to Wink. Lil, cook up a message to Captain Mack that will give him a chance at finding us. The same one as the traitors sent if you can't come up with something better.\"\n\nI will do that, Nikita tapped.\n\n\"Me too,\" Lil said. \"Now let's all get moving. This fight ain't gonna win itself.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Time began to creep by, with eyes across Rim peering anxiously to the skies above and around them. For the Wind Breaker crew, the hours they'd expected to spend reaching the trade route stretched into over a day. Fugger traffic perpetually threatened to reveal them, forcing retreat and evasion no less than seven times. Their water reserves ran low and had to be replenished. Fate itself seemed to be dead set against them reaching their destination. Better than thirty hours after they'd begun their journey, they finally reached the North Circa to Precipice route and began their search.\n\nIn Fugtown, the mayor busied himself with the affairs of the city, but bit by bit the consequences of his hiring of Alabaster began to trickle onto his desk. Alabaster was requesting funds and requisitioning ammunition and weapons. Reports of his activities, and requests for confirmation, clogged the inspector-delivered messages, stretching the clandestine system of communication to its limit.\n\nThe Well Diggers worked hard, piecing together ten fl\u00e9chette guns and mounting them on hastily erected pylons. Five boilers were coaxed into operation, a steam shovel pieced together, and trenches dug. Their barbed-wire-woven walls were reinforced where possible; a heavy gate was added to allow crew in and out during rare trips for resources from the surrounding forest. Every moment and every last scrap of resources was put to the best use they could muster, and whenever a task couldn't benefit from all available hands, those who drew the longest straw took the chance to rest, if only for a few moments.\n\nIn Caer Fiona, Alabaster bolstered his forces and made his plans. Every hour on the hour he had Mallow visit his personally funded messenger to see if any messages bearing his name had come through. When finally Mallow returned with the cryptic message in hand, Alabaster was fully equipped and ready to set sail for his destiny." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Alabaster marched the deck of a ferocious ship. It lacked the size and apocalyptic firepower of the fabled dreadnought, but in many ways it was more impressive. Twice the size of the Wind Breaker, it was a triumph of design. Gondola and envelope were both wedge shaped, forming something that resembled a stout flying blade. Both port and starboard edges of the ship were lined with a row of deck guns on top and cannons set into the deck below. On the belly were four yawning ports, ready to dispense bombs at the order of the captain. It was an aptly named \"destroyer.\" There were a handful of such vessels in the loosely organized military that patrolled the sky beneath the fug, and this one had formerly bore the uninspired name Destroyer 3. Shortly after its arrival, Alabaster had demanded a rechristening. The recently dried paint on the side of the ship now proclaimed it The Fist of Alabaster.\n\nThe raw power of the ship's turbines kept it slicing through the air with enough speed to leave the deck at the mercy of a constant staggering wind. Nevertheless, Alabaster insisted upon wearing his chosen uniform, a gleaming-white bowler hat, a matching cape, and a silver-tipped cane. Somehow the man managed to look smug and arrogant despite having to hold his hat to his head with an injured arm and periodically enduring slaps to the face from his cape. To look at him, one would imagine he had already won the battle that lay ahead. By his side, dressed in a more sensibly designed but still garishly purple outfit, hovered Mallow.\n\n\"I tell you something, Mallow. It is nothing short of inspiring to see the sort of power that is wielded by the mere mention of Mayor Ebonwhite's name. Waving a certified correspondence with his moniker is sufficient to conjure, as if from nothing, this wondrous ship of war complete with crew.\"\n\n\"If you were to ask me, sir, this ship is merely insurance. Your own ships would have had this battle handled,\" Mallow said.\n\n\"Yes, yes. Obsequiousness noted, Mallow.\" He gestured aside.\n\nStruggling to keep up with the destroyer on either side flew smaller ships of less overtly warlike design. Two were simple messenger ships bearing recently installed deck guns. The other two were larger and more heavily armed, but still little more than escort ships. All of them combined couldn't deliver the ordnance that could be volleyed forth from just the port-side weapons of the destroyer.\n\n\"I have no doubt that my makeshift militia would have risen to the challenge, but I think it is only fitting that an occasion as momentous as this be marked with the gravitas a ship of this sort brings to such matters. Yes. Yes, I believe the first purchase I make once the return on investment begins to flow will be a ship like this. Perhaps not so austere and artless, mind you. I'll commission something more stylistically suited to my sensibilities. But a predator to be sure\u2026\"\n\nMallow glanced to the bow of the ship, where the helmsman was signaling.\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Alabaster, I believe we are approaching the site.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" he said, looking about to see nothing but the dark-purple canopy of The Thicket made nearly black by the green light of their sweeping phlo-lights. \"Rather a mundane setting for so glorious an event. I had hoped the backdrop would be suitably epic in its scope and grandeur. It is bothersome that the Wind Breaker hasn't yet made its appearance. I suppose I may have overestimated them. Bah, offsetting misfortunes, nothing more. We shall snatch up those members of the crew present at the site and use them as bait to lure the others to a grander venue. Problems solved.\"\n\n\"Inspired, sir,\" Mallow said.\n\n\"Yes, it is.\"\n\nAlabaster stepped up to the elevated deck at the bow and raised his voice, projecting in a rather operatic manner to address the full crew. \"I have been informed that our destination is scant minutes away. Now that we are so near, I feel it is safe to reveal to you the nature of our target. You will find it below us. I am told it shall be rather difficult to identify, but an oddly rounded section of thicker-than-average fug is what we are hoping to spot. Once we reach it, we will take up positions surrounding it. I shall address those huddled within the obscuring cloud and entreat upon them to surrender themselves. We shall then deploy the mercenaries I've hired to clear away any who do not show the good sense to surrender. Of special interest is a pair of women, one a Calderan and one a Westrimmer. Each is a member of the hated Wind Breaker crew. The Westrimmer can die, though she would not be without use were she to survive. But it is preferable the Calderan be taken alive. She, perhaps secondary only to the site itself, is the greatest prize of this endeavor, if only for her uniqueness and rarity in these parts.\"\n\n\"Ho!\" called one of the gunners, pointing down.\n\nAnother gunner swung the powerful phlo-light in the direction of his gesture. The thick mound of haze revealed itself, completely opaque to the light but undeniably unlike anything else they'd seen in their journey.\n\n\"Ah! Wonderful. Precisely on cue!\" Alabaster said, marching to the railing to peer down. \"Downright theatrical in its arrival. Oh Captain! You may slow the ship. Keep it just beyond the edge and as low as the trees will allow, then cut your engines such that I might address these traitorous and villainous swine more clearly. Mallow, fetch the megaphone, would you? And hold my cane.\"\n\nThe eager manservant produced a large, cone-shaped contraption from a nearby case. Like virtually all Alabaster's possessions, it was perfectly white, save for the lettering of his name emblazoned across the side.\n\nThe Fist of Alabaster throttled down its turbines and coasted to a stop just short of the target. Each of the other escorts broke off and took up positions around its edge. Crewmen prepared themselves for a brief but intense battle. Alabaster stepped to the bow of the destroyer and gazed down at the odd formation of repelled fug below.\n\n\"So\u2026 that is what destiny looks like. Again, a bit mundane, but beautiful in what it represents, if not in what it is\u2026 Ahem.\" He held up the megaphone. \"Attention below. My name is Lucius P. Alabaster, and under the authority bestowed upon me by my own inarguable genius and the sanctioning of Mayor Ebonwhite, I now address the misguided Well Diggers and nefarious Wind Breaker crew. You have operated with impunity for far too long. But, though you are resourceful and ruthless, I want you to now understand that your success is the result exclusively of good fortune.\"\n\nAs he spoke, he waved his injured arm, twice nearly losing his hat. Despite his intended audience's inability to see it, and the poorly hidden impatience of the crew around him, Alabaster simply could not bring himself to make the speech anything less than a performance.\n\n\"Your good fortune in having not crossed paths with myself, the brilliant Lucius P. \u2014\"\n\nA distant chatter and hiss cut his proclamation short. A trio of spikes darted out of the churning dome of haze below. None came close to the target.\n\n\"What is the preoccupation with interrupting my oratory by shooting at me?\" Alabaster said. \"I feel certain there was a time when arch nemeses afforded each other the courtesy of their attention at least until a full ultimatum had been issued.\"\n\n\"From the sound of it, they've got a fairly potent fl\u00e9chette gun down there,\" observed the captain from his post a few steps behind Alabaster.\n\n\"What possible concern could that be for you? And I have been assured that this destroyer can take everything short of a cannonball without so much as batting an eye.\"\n\n\"Envelope and gondola are spike-resistant, but the same can't be said for the crew,\" he said.\n\n\"A matter of exceptionally little concern, as they cannot see us.\"\n\nOne of the crewmen called out. \"Eyes down! Flares!\"\n\nAlabaster turned to see a ball of brilliant green light rising out of the blanket of thickened fug. As it drifted higher, clearing the densest layers of purple, his squinting eyes could just make out the source of the light. It was a makeshift balloon, a poor imitation of an airship's envelope. Made from the wrong sort of material, it didn't have a weave tight enough to keep the phlogiston in. Most of the cloth had been smeared with an oddly glossy substance that seemed to make up for this, but scattered areas that had strategically been left dry streamed thin jets of the gas. When it mixed with the fug it became intensely luminescent, bathing the whole area with light brighter than day.\n\n\"Evasive action. Get us out of that light,\" the captain ordered.\n\n\"You will hold your position,\" Alabaster demanded, stabbing his finger at the captain. \"Light is the least of the reasons they couldn't see us. That soupy fug hanging atop them\u2026\"\n\nWhat happened next rendered even Alabaster speechless. A wave of purple vapor rushed past him. When the inky cloud was gone, it left behind air perfectly clear and fresh. He turned from the captain and raised his eyes to the still-rising flare balloons. They were visible now as bright pools of green cast against the blanket of thick fug that lay above them instead of below. Each flare balloon stopped as it hit the end of a tether rope, and dangling partway down each rope was a burlap-topped jar filled with ichor. One by one, similar balloons rose up and expanded the void in the fug upward with their own jars of the fug-phobic substance.\n\nNow the site below them was perfectly visible, and the Well Diggers had been busy. The gantry over the ichor well itself had been fully erected, and all the carts had been fully dismantled. Their boilers were now sunk into a protective trench along the south side of the facility and linked through a rather intricate network of tubes, pipes, and valves. Spinning wheels and interlocking gears moved with blurring speed, driving the gimbals for ten deck guns. Each pair of guns had a single operator moving twin guns in tandem and pivoting to aim at the well-lit targets.\n\nAlabaster's arm was still held high from his angry order to the captain when the first of the spikes began to strike their targets. Three of the five gun pairs were focused on the destroyer. Resounding thumps echoed through the hull as lines of spikes dotted its belly. Gunners along the port and starboard turned their guns to return fire.\n\nTwenty long seconds of fire and return fire passed before Alabaster snapped back into his usual state of relentless self-satisfaction. Though the railings of the ship were prickled with spikes, little actual damage was being done. The larger and ostensibly more sensitive target of the envelope had been pierced in a few places, leaking bright streams of phlogiston. Without any fug to react with, the gas remained dull and unlit, seeming to underscore what little effect the attacks were having. Most spikes simply thumped into the taut skin of the envelope with a hollow sound and fell back to the ground below.\n\n\"Hah! Hahaha! I knew it would be worthless to resist! The Fist of Alabaster is more than a match for your cobbled-together defenses!\" he barked into the megaphone. \"Your only hope to survive is for us to show you mercy, and your only hope for mercy is for you to give up!\"\n\n\"Your ships are taking heavy damage, Alabaster,\" said the captain.\n\nHe peered across the void in the fug. Though only facing two sets of guns, all four of the ships were approaching critical damage. One of them sagged toward the ground, its envelope barely intact enough to stay in the air. Two others vented steam from damaged conduits, and the last drifted in tight circles, one turbine locked at full while the other failed to spin.\n\n\"You addle-minded amateurs! Leave the air combat to The Fist of Alabaster! Land yourselves on the east side to avoid crossfire and begin the land offensive!\"\n\nHe lowered the megaphone. From his position of relative safety, he wasn't able to determine what the gunners on the destroyer were aiming at, but it was clear they were all firing downward.\n\n\"Captain, just what are your gunners doing?\"\n\n\"Standard ground-combat training. They are targeting the soldiers, the mounted guns, and the boilers.\"\n\n\"This is not standard combat, you fool. Have them fire at these contraptions they are using to clear the air. Without those they shall be unable to target us and we shall be free of their return fire.\"\n\n\"We also will be unable to\u2014\"\n\n\"I am in command of this mission, Captain. Now follow my orders.\"\n\nThe captain tightened his jaw but delivered the correction to his men. Alabaster paced away from the railing and shook his head. \"\u2026 It is as though I am commanding children.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "On the ground, it was nothing short of a war zone. The destroyer alone doubled their firepower, and the smaller ships meant attacks were at least initially coming from all angles. The time they'd had to prepare hadn't been much, but they'd used it well. A long trench dug with the steam shovel on the north half of the facility served as cover for Nita and the others, and another to the south provided at least a measure of protection for the boilers. Two other foxholes of sorts to the east and west stored equipment. To protect those brave or unlucky enough to be manning the guns, some of the armor that had protected the carts during the journey had been bolted into shields. That left only one member of the group wholly without cover.\n\n\"Lil, damn it, you get back here!\" Nita screamed.\n\nThe deckhand had argued for almost the entirety of their preparations that someone ought to serve as a \"runner\" during the battle. Ammunition would need to be delivered, messages would need to be exchanged, and since she'd spent so much time as a deckhand, she was the woman for the job. Nita had put her foot down about it. Lil agreed to stay safe with the others, then ignored the promise just as soon as the first spikes were fired.\n\nShe sprinted low to the ground, belts of spikes over each shoulder. Puffs of dirt rose up behind her as two different guns traced lines of spikes just a few paces off target. Above her the shouted commands of Alabaster finally coaxed the guns away from targeting her, providing her the luxury of abandoning her serpentine dodges in favor of straight lines.\n\nLil dove forward and slid into the trench, then sprang to her feet.\n\n\"What did I tell you?!\" Nita said. \"We had an agreement.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. You can be sore at me after. I ain't got no new holes in me. Everybody fine in here?\"\n\n\"Some scrapes from flying debris, but nothing serious,\" Nita said.\n\nLil surveyed the faces of the others in the trench. \"Where's Kent?\"\n\n\"The far end of the trench there. He caught a good angle and has been firing with the rifle.\"\n\n\"Good. Glad we're all in one piece. Here's what's going on out there. Boiler number three took a couple of good shots, we're going to have to choke off the firebox or it'll blow. That means the guns on the south side are going to lose some range. What's-his-face on the northeast side is getting low on spikes and\u2014\"\n\nA bright flash drew their attention to one of the tethered flare balloons. It had been struck and now drifted down and to the east. The fug rushed back in, and the edge obscured their view of one of the ailing scout ships.\n\n\"\u2026 And pretty soon that all ain't gonna matter because we ain't gonna see what we're shootin' at again,\" Lil finished.\n\n\"That idiot shouting orders sounded like he was commanding the smaller ships to land and attack from the ground to the east, so we'll have plenty to fire at and won't need much range,\" Nita said.\n\nAnother flare died out and drifted off, now shrouding half the destroyer behind the fug.\n\n\"At least that'll give us something to do until that destroyer decides to drop its bombs,\" Lil said.\n\n\"If they wanted to bomb this place, they would have done so by now,\" Nita countered.\n\n\"Sure, but the more of a fight we put up, the better them bomb bay doors are going to start looking.\"\n\n\"We worry about the things we can fix. Now, it doesn't look like we did much damage with the spike guns.\"\n\n\"Against a destroyer, I didn't reckon we would,\" Lil said. \"If I'd've known they'd send something that big, I'd've told the gunners to leave off it entirely and take down the little ones. Heck, if I'd've known they'd send something that big, I'd've said we should hightail it and come back with cannons or some such.\"\n\n\"Things always seem clearer with the benefit of hindsight,\" Nita said. \"I think we've got enough phlogiston and gear to send up two more ichor flares. At this rate they won't last long, though. We'll need to save them until they can do the most good.\"\n\nThe last of the flares broke free of its tether and blew away, shrinking the ichor well's region of fresh air back down to its original size. The spike guns continued to fire, but with considerably less accuracy. The airships traced aimless lines across the facility. Here and there a lucky shot would clang against a hastily shielded piece of equipment or wander a little too close to the trench. The Well Digger gunners had a slightly better go of it, as the damage done to the airships meant every little leak to the envelope created a piercing glow that was faintly visible even through the curtain of purple.\n\nA short time later the glow of the smaller airships faded from view on the east side, and a few moments after that the whine of their turbines dropped away until they were lost behind the louder rumble of the idling destroyer.\n\n\"What do you reckon happens next?\" Lil asked in the relative peace.\n\n\"I reckon they wait until we run out of spikes, and then they do whatever they please,\" grunted Kent. He squinted to the west. \"Provided those things don't pick us apart first.\"\n\nThe women turned to match his gaze and saw a flash of eye-shine beyond the western wall.\n\n\"One problem at a time, Kent. Now why ain't you shooting?\" Lil asked.\n\n\"Only one box of bullets left and no clear shots. No sense just making a racket and giving them something to shoot at.\"\n\nLil wiped her face and placed her palm on her pistol.\n\n\"All this not shooting's getting me antsy,\" she said. \"I can hear 'em just rumbling there, just over the wall. Hey, ain't we got explosives?\"\n\n\"They're set up with a trip wire by the main entrance, in case they brought a vehicle that could break through.\"\n\n\"Well they ain't done that, and I know Gunner'd never let me hear the end of it if he found out I got shot full of holes by a bunch of fuggers while I had a whole crate of blasting charges sitting there unused.\"\n\nKent blinked. \"\u2026 If you get killed, how is he going to give you an earful\u2026\"\n\n\"Aw, he'd figure it out. He'd never miss a chance to give a good lecture. Nita, can't you rig up a catapult or some such so we can huck that crate at the airship?\"\n\n\"If I had a few hours and some practice shots to hone my aim, maybe. But\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, I know that look. That's the look you get when you figure out how to fix something. I'm gonna go get the crate.\"\n\nLil scrambled at the edge of the trench, but Nita caught her by the hem of the jacket and pulled her back.\n\n\"No, Lil. That's not what I need. Head over and get the canisters of phlogiston we've got left, and both of the flare balloons.\"\n\n\"Won't be but two shakes,\" Lil said, dashing along the trench.\n\n\"What're you working at?\" Kent asked.\n\n\"Think I know a way to use that crate of explosives, but it's a long shot.\"\n\n\"Of course it is. After all the long shots we've had to hit, I was hoping maybe there'd be a sure thing or two lurking around the corner.\"\n\nNita tugged a tool-roll from beneath her coat and unfurled it. She selected a pair of sheers and a bit of measuring cord, then set about measuring out a few lengths of rope. Around the time she made the third cut, a frenzied ball of fluff bounded up the far end of the trench and desperately drummed out a message.\n\nNita flashed a smile. \"It's about time\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "The captain stood at the helm, making slow adjustments to the ship's orientation and shuttling it about slightly.\n\n\"Must you reposition this behemoth so frequently? Surely your gunners would have greater luck in their targeting if you were to hold it still,\" Alabaster said.\n\n\"With that blanket upon them again, my gunners haven't got a chance of targeting anything, because there's nothing to see or hear down there. Something that was not an issue while the air between us was still clear. Of course, you saw fit to solve that problem,\" the captain rumbled. \"With your Ebonwhite-mandated overruling of my orders.\"\n\n\"It was the prudent decision.\"\n\n\"And would you care to explain why the prudent decision is not now to simply level the whole of the facility with a few well-placed bombs?\"\n\n\"Because there exists in that facility both persons and items of immeasurable value to me. And moreover because I've told you to keep the bomb bay doors shut, and as you've personally observed, my orders supersede yours at this time.\"\n\n\"So what would you have me do?\"\n\n\"Wait. My men are approaching on foot. They'll have the facility secured soon enough.\"\n\n\"Your men will be shredded by those spike guns before they reach the walls.\"\n\n\"If so, then it is merely an additional layer to the tale of my eventual victory. A hard-fought and costly victory is always a more stirring one when told after the fact.\"\n\nThe captain's expression grew more stern. \"I am glad you are on my ship.\"\n\n\"Oh, Captain, your tone and borderline insubordination indicate otherwise.\"\n\n\"If you're willing to sacrifice four ships of men to make for a better story later, I'm glad to be commanding the ship you are on, because one would assume even you wouldn't sacrifice yourself.\"\n\n\"Of course I wouldn't. What use is there in fame among your peers and infamy among your foes if you do not live at least long enough to bask in such?\" He held his hat a bit more firmly as the wind gusted. \"I wonder if it might be time to address the traitors again\u2026\"\n\nA distant thump echoed across the treetops.\n\nThree of the crew bellowed \"Cannon fire!\" just as the attack met its mark. A handful of projectiles struck The Fist of Alabaster. Two sent clouds of splinters bursting from the aft end of the main deck. The rest smacked hard into the sturdy envelope. Only one punched through to send a lance of green light feathering skyward.\n\n\"Bring us around. Starboard cannons loaded with grape. Lights in the direction of the shot and fire as soon as you've got a solution.\"\n\n\"The spyglass, Mallow,\" Alabaster said eagerly.\n\nHe exchanged the megaphone for the small telescope his manservant offered and began to follow the lights.\n\n\"It must be the Wind Breaker. It must be\u2026\" Alabaster said with an uncharacteristic hush in his voice. \"Oh glorious day! I shall have my moment of battle against them. I shall see my victory in full!\"\n\nThe ship swung wide, pivoting and sliding sideways through the air as it attempted to bring its weapons to bear on the apparent source of the attack. A second thump rang out but brought little more than the whistle of projectiles flying wide of their targets. The captain wrestled with the wheel to get the ship more or less stationary. He managed to arrest the ship's listing and drifting, but not before the destroyer strayed substantially over the roiling fog-screen that concealed the Well Diggers.\n\nPhlo-lights focused their beams and swept in a coordinated search, cutting deep into the thinner haze of the fug over the rest of the forest. One beam caught something, and the others shifted to the distant object. It was indeed the Wind Breaker, its red envelope barely visible. Bits of polished brass glinted here and there in the darkness, but the one glaring point of visibility was the white ship strapped to its belly.\n\nAlabaster's eyes widened when he saw it.\n\n\"Those barbarous trolls. Look what they've done to my ship! Oh, they shall be made to pay dearly for this. Fire upon them, Captain, but endeavor to ground the ship, not destroy it. If I am correct, there is a valuable individual aboard. And moreover I relish the opportunity to gloat over the survivors and parade them about the fug as my trophies.\"\n\n\"At this range we'll be lucky to hit them at all. I make no promises about picking my shots to be nonfatal.\" The captain leaned down to his speaking tube. \"Starboard cannons? Status?\"\n\n\"Charges packed, standard shot nearly loaded,\" came the reply.\n\n\"Fire when ready!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "\"A destroyer. They had to bring a destroyer along,\" Captain Mack grumbled.\n\nDespite his gripe being about something that could quite easily blast him and his crew out of the sky, his complaint was no more vigorous than if he wasn't particularly happy with that night's choice of meal. To balance his remarkable calm, Lester was beside himself with panic, clinging to the base of the rigging and bellowing at the top of his lungs.\n\n\"A destroyer?! Why would you even fire! You can't hope to win!\"\n\n\"Wink! You get that message through to Nikita?\" he called into the rigging above.\n\nWink tapped. Nikita answered.\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"What did it say?! Oh, never mind that. What does it matter? What good will it do, your crew on the ground knowing we've arrived? What could they hope to do?\"\n\n\"Gunner, speak up. I got a fugger up here running his mouth,\" Mack said into his tube.\n\n\"Port cannon loaded, standard shot, extra charge. Heading to starboard now.\"\n\nLester yelped as the simultaneous roar of the destroyer's full starboard armaments shook the air. The low whistle of nearby barely off-target rounds suggested the next salvo could be the last.\n\n\"When you're through, load the aft cannon and then get up on deck guns. We ain't gonna win this with cannonballs,\" Mack said.\n\n\"You're bloody well right you won't win it with cannonballs! The destroyer has a reinforced hull, a triple-layer envelope, and inner chambers to prevent full rupture! Even if you score a direct hit to the envelope, you'll barely hobble the ship!\"\n\n\"The dreadnought had all that and a hell of a lot more, and word is they still ain't found all the pieces. A load of armor makes for sluggish maneuvering, and if I remember right, one thing a destroyer ain't got is gunners for up top. We go high, they can't get us.\"\n\n\"But you'll have to close all the distance between you. They'll be firing again in moments!\"\n\n\"Then you'd best keep your mouth shut and quit distracting me.\"\n\nAfter what seemed like nowhere near enough time to load a cannon, Gunner appeared on deck, bearing his long-barreled rifle.\n\n\"Gunner, I said deck guns, not a rifle.\"\n\n\"All due respect, Captain, a destroyer is going to shrug off a few spikes. If we're going to do any good at this range, we need more precision than that.\"\n\n\"In this soup, you reckon you can manage precision?\"\n\nHe steadied himself against the railing, took aim, and flipped a colored lens in front of the sight. A grin crept across his face. \"We shall have our answer momentarily, Captain.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "\"Haha!\" Alabaster laughed gleefully. \"I should have brought a camera. A moment this delicious ought to be immortalized in the medium of photography! How much longer until you've sent that ship to the ground, Captain?\"\n\n\"Less than a minute.\"\n\n\"Glorious! Time enough for what I've got in mind!\" He hurried to the railing, batting aside some of the spikes that had been lodged there. \"Mallow! Take the spyglass and give me the megaphone once more! Yes, excellent. Ahem. Attention! Well Diggers and Wind Breakers. You no doubt have fought this pointless battle for so long only out of the distant hope that the legendary Wind Breaker itself would come from above, carried on the wings of avenging angels, to strike us down and sweep you to safety! I take no small amount of delight in informing you that your beloved ship has arrived, and when next you hear these cannons fire, it will finally and irrevocably earn its place in history as the first great victory of Lucius P. Alabaster!\"\n\n\"Well said, sir,\" said Mallow.\n\n\"Of course it was well said. I said it. I am, if nothing else, a man destined for greatness. And there is no such thing as a great man who lacks the capacity for great words.\" He gazed down. \"They've ceased firing their guns. My words alone have all but beaten them. I've crushed their spirits in a way mere violence never could. I wonder, if I were to listen closely, do you think I might hear the cries of anguish when those below hear their savior blotted from the sky?\"\n\nHe leaned over the railing, now that the scattered whistle of flying spikes seemed to have fallen away, and cupped a hand to his ear. It was merely a gesture, of course. He'd not truly expected to hear anything over the rumble of the destroyer's engines. He did, however, expect to hear the report of the destroyer's cannons as they unloaded toward the Wind Breaker. Instead, he heard the soft crack and plink of sounds he couldn't easily identify, followed by the shouts of crewmen.\n\n\"Blast it, Captain, what is happening now?\" he demanded with the air of a petulant child.\n\nA pressure gauge beside the captain shattered, then the second of three spotters' telescopes burst into fragments of fragile metal.\n\n\"We're taking sharpshooter fire,\" the captain said, stepping into the lee of a support beam for some semblance of cover. \"How the hell are they getting shots off with that degree of precision at this range?\"\n\n\"What does it matter? Just fire the cannons and be done with them!\" Alabaster said.\n\n\"We're down to one ranged spotter.\"\n\nThe final spotter's telescope took a bullet.\n\n\"\u2026 And now none. We haven't a prayer of hitting them with the cannons now until they're practically on top of us.\"\n\n\"Feh. A fine excuse for your own incompetence. If there was concern of sharpshooter fire, you should have attacked sooner.\"\n\n\"There wasn't concern of sharpshooter fire, no one should have been able to aim at this distance in this light!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "\"They're blind, Captain,\" Gunner said, clicking open the breech of his rifle. \"But I'm fresh out of cartridges for this. I knew I should have packed a few extra shells.\"\n\n\"If you had your way, Gunner, our cargo hold would be nothing but packed shells.\"\n\n\"At this moment, I think you would agree it would be quite useful. That's the extent of the weapons we can safely deploy at this range without risk of hitting those on the ground. And there is a tremendous amount of distance to cover before we're in position to move something more potent. What are the ground forces going to do until then?\"\n\n\"We've got good people down there, Gunner,\" Captain Mack said. \"They'll do their part until we can do ours.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Alabaster stood impatiently at the railing, waiting for the next opportunity to gloat. It was a considerable testament to the towering ego he effortlessly displayed, despite the death and destruction all around him, that he managed to behave as though the greatest injustice was that his eventual glory was being delayed.\n\nFrom his vantage at the edge of the deck, however, he did catch a glimpse of a new pool of green light rising toward them.\n\n\"Oh, bother. This again? Captain, they seem to have launched another of those flares. Just below us this time.\"\n\n\"I'll deal with it when the Wind Breaker has been destroyed,\" the captain said.\n\n\"Yes, yes. At your leisure. It has already been made quite clear that nothing the fools beneath us can muster can be of any threat.\"\n\nTwo balloons, each belching plumes of phlogiston that illuminated the whole of the deck, bumped into the belly of the destroyer's gondola and began to drag upward. They came to a stop just as the balloons themselves peeked up over the railing of the deck. The crew squinted at the bright light.\n\n\"Damn it, they must be tangled on the port cannons. Someone fetch a gaff and shove them off,\" the captain ordered.\n\nA deckhand scrambled to obey the order, and Alabaster resumed his somewhat theatric listening to the unseen sorrow below. The smile on his face faded as he realized there was a sound he'd not heard before.\n\n\"What\u2026 what is that sizzling sound?\" he muttered.\n\nHe leaned a bit farther and shielded his eyes as best he could from the painful brightness of the flares. Just beneath them he spied a crate. The sound appeared to be coming from\u2026\n\n\"A fuse?!\" Alabaster gasped. \"A bomb! They've sent up a bomb!\"\n\nAlabaster and Mallow sprinted away from the railing. They hadn't even crossed half the deck when the crate of explosives detonated. The sound instantly robbed him of his hearing, and the blast rocked the whole of the destroyer viciously to the side. It was a swift enough motion to knock every last crewman on the deck from their feet. Alabaster hit the deck hard. As his head spun and a dull hiss of slowly returning hearing filled his head, the deck began to tip further. A sizable portion of the ship had been blown away. Much of the port side was damaged. All but two of the heavy cannons lining that side of the craft broke free of their mounts and plummeted to the forest floor along with a handful of the crewmen and much of the ammunition. Thus lightened, the ship was no longer balanced. The return swing from the blast continued farther and farther, the reduced half of the gondola rising higher than the rest.\n\nBy the time the swing reached its peak, the deck was nearing a forty-five-degree pitch. Alabaster had begun to slide toward the starboard railing along with Mallow and two of the deckhands. The blast had shaken free a barrel of tar, which struck the railing ahead of them, splintering it. Alabaster was the next to strike it, followed by Mallow. The deckhands proved to be the straws that broke the camel's back, and the whole of the struggling heap of fug folk pitched off the edge and into the canopy of the trees below. They bashed painfully down into the branches, snapping through the thinner ones and bouncing off the stouter limbs, all the while being scoured by thorny vines.\n\nAlabaster came to a stop just barely above the blanket of thickened fug concealing the ichor well. He peered up through the broken branches and past the others who had fallen with him. Dazed and confused, he saw the ship overhead, bits of debris and fractured decking still dangling from the up-tilted end of the gondola. Flames were beginning to spread at the edge of the blast damage.\n\n\"Y-you cowards!\" he slurred, indignant the first state of mind to assert itself after the explosion. \"You come back here! I am Lucius P. Alabaster! Mayor Ebonwhite will not be pleased to learn you abandoned his sanctioned representative! M-mallow! Help me to my feet.\"\n\nThe only reply was a groan from a few branches up.\n\n\"\u2026 Lazy\u2026 Lout\u2026\"\n\nHe rolled sluggishly and clutched at the branch supporting him. When he was somewhat more steady, he glanced down to the mostly obscured stretch of tree beneath him, then glared at the liberal coating of tar staining the hem of his cape.\n\n\"Will the indignity never cease\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "A cheer rose up from the Well Diggers as debris from their attack continued to rain down, forming a trail leading toward the wall. Lil and Nita, fresh from lighting the fuse and cutting the tether on their hastily improvised aerial mine, crouched at the edge of the trench and watched the bright green of the damaged envelope and the dull yellow of the burning deck through the dense blanket overhead.\n\n\"Well heck!\" Lil said. \"We should've done that right at the start!\"\n\n\"Do you suppose that took care of the destroyer?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Depends on who's calling the shots. A good cap'n'll get them fires out and start shuffling ballast pretty quick. Course, with the Wind Breaker inbound, that ship ain't long for this world.\"\n\nNita took a breath. \"Good. Because I'm seeing an awful lot of steam venting from the other trench. I've got to go do some service before we have an explosion of our own.\"\n\nA weak, pathetic chatter came from a gun on the east side of their defenses.\n\n\"That gun ain't sounding too good neither. And if he's shooting, that means we got something coming from that side. Probably whoever was on them ships that dropped down.\" Lil took out her pistol and spun the chamber. \"No rest for the wicked I suppose.\"\n\nThe members of the Wind Breaker crew parted company, one heading for the east wall, one headed for the south trench. Nita pushed the odd thump of stray cannonballs striking the earth from her mind. Worrisome as it might be to have a massive ship overhead with only marginal control, the looming threat of boiler failure was her main concern, and she couldn't afford to be distracted.\n\nWhen she slid into the boiler trench, she found her work cut out for her. Three of the five boilers had taken at least some damage from the fl\u00e9chette guns of the destroyer and smaller ships. The heavy cast iron kettles shrugged off the attacks with little more than a shiny scratch to show for it, but the less sturdy pipes and valves weren't quite so lucky. Steam belched from two of the main pipes, bleeding pressure from the system and hamstringing the efforts of the gunners to keep them safe. She'd done her best to build in redundancy where she could, but time and resources left her with little flexibility. To fix this problem she was going to have to improvise, which tended to be exciting when it involved scalding water vapor and random gunfire.\n\nShe slid down her goggles and scrambled out of the trench, heading instead to a smaller hole dug to contain some odds and ends they weren't quite so dedicated to defending.\n\n\"You! Are you mad! What sort of a monster are you!\" cried a series of voices from a few yards away.\n\nThe voices belonged to Alabaster's moles. The Well Diggers weren't so cruel as to leave them out in the open, but neither were they so kind as to keep them in the same trench as the less traitorous among the group. A happy balance of punishment and mercy had been to stow them with the replacement parts for the boilers.\n\n\"Just give in!\" Branca pleaded. \"If you keep fighting, they're bound to kill us all!\"\n\n\"At least untie us! Let us take cover for ourselves!\" Nerys said.\n\n\"I could do that,\" Nita said. \"But I think you'd rather me fix that pipe rupture before this whole half of the camp fills with scalding steam and boiling water.\"\n\nNita revealed a pipe cuff from the mound of debris and hauled herself back out into the open.\n\n\"This is horrid! It is torture to leave us here! Deplorable treatment! And I suppose you fancy yourself a hero,\" Branca said. \"You are merely violent hooligans!\"\n\nAt the edge of the site, the first shots of the ground troops began to ring out. It was clear they had either been instructed or had chosen on their own to target the boilers, because of the dozen or so shots taken, no less than five ricocheted off the top of one of the kettles.\n\n\"I'm sorry I can't stay and listen to you lecture me about how violent we all are, but I've got to stop the people on your side from killing us all,\" Nita said, dashing for the boiler trench." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Chaos had consumed the destroyer. The flames were slowly spreading inward to the exposed lower decks, and the unbalanced load left the craft unstable. Turbines on either side of the envelope and across its belly put the ship into a spin about its new center of mass. It was all the captain could do to keep some semblance of order among his crew.\n\n\"The throttle is jammed. Someone in the boiler room cut pressure to turbines two and four. And someone give me status on the fire in the hold and any crew loss,\" he cried.\n\nHis first mate answered, \"We lost five in the blast. Two more out the hole it left during the recoil. And two more off the deck. Plus Alabaster and his servant.\"\n\n\"Alabaster is overboard? Seems some good came of it\u2026\"\n\n\"The fire is mostly under control. We'll have it out soon, but the armory officer says he's afraid it'll hit the powder room and bomb bay before then.\"\n\nThe captain and his mate stumbled to the side as the ship pitched farther. \"Adjusting the engines won't do it. We need to lighten the load. Since Alabaster is no longer here to object, and our cannons are pointed down\u2026\" He leaned down to his speaking tube. \"Starboard cannons, fire on my mark. Staggered solution. And shift all bombs as ballast. We'll lighten this load and straighten ourselves yet!\"\n\nHe watched the treetops slide by beneath the ship as its uncontrolled spin continued. When the starboard side of the ship was roughly aligned with the obscured site below, he issued the order.\n\n\"Fire!\"\n\nThe cannons fired off one by one, alternating fore and aft. Even with this precaution, the recoil of each blast nudged the ship into a steeper and steeper pitch. Any crewmen not already braced had to scramble to a railing or strut. There was some doubt, as the cannons continued to fire, that the ship would be able to hold together. One thing was certain, though. If this was their final attack, it would be one those on the surface wouldn't soon forget." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Lil, Kent, and the three Well Diggers not manning the guns had the good fortune of being clustered at the east wall, hunkered behind cover and taking what shots they could at the mercenaries approaching through the trees. If they'd been closer to the center of the site, the cannon attack would certainly have been the end of them. The thunderous report of the cannons firing was punishing enough, shaking the trees and shattering the lenses of the phlo-lights on the west side. The destroyer's weapons, large even for ship-to-ship battle, were practically siege weapons. Even if they had built their stronghold into a fortress, it wouldn't have lasted long against the rounds The Fist of Alabaster slung forth. At such a short distance, each cannonball gouged a crater into the earth. Shattered projectiles and kicked-up dirt and stone sprayed in all directions with deadly force.\n\nUntil now they had been lucky. Foresight and proper use of cover and armor had spared the Well Diggers any real injuries. That was no longer so. One of the spike guns took a direct hit, destroyed along with its operator. Two men, one not two paces from Lil, took bits of debris across their faces, shoulders, and arms. And still the cannons roared.\n\nThe deckhand scanned the clearing they'd made for themselves, peering through the billowing columns of dust, and spotted Nita. The engineer had scrambled from the trench containing the boilers and was dashing madly for the relative safety of the spare-parts bunker. As insane as it seemed to be to abandon the boiler trench in the midst of a barrage, the second-to-last cannonball proved the wisdom of the decision. It struck the edge of boiler two, rupturing it and sending a rush of steam and debris in all directions. Pieces of cast iron scythed through the air, skipped across the ground, and clashed with other boilers. A chain reaction destroyed two more boilers and sent a third rocketing into the sky. A wall of white steam and black soil rushed across the war zone. Lil screamed as she saw it overtake Nita a few yards from the well.\n\n\"No!\" Lil screeched.\n\nHer mind ceased to have any say in her actions as her heart and body took the initiative. She threw down her pistol\u2014an unwanted weight and encumbrance for a hand that she might need to pull Nita to safety. She tore away her coat\u2014it would only slow her. In three strides she was at full speed, sprinting across ground barely visible through the settling dust and thinning steam.\n\nShe slid to a stop where she'd last seen Nita and called her name. The ground was thick with a slurry of loose stone and simmering water. Lil's heart pounded in her chest as she searched with growing desperation. Then her eyes caught a glimpse of motion. She dove for the mound of pulverized stone and clawed at it.\n\n\"Nita! Nita, hold on, I'm coming!\" she called out, scooping away more of the mounded gravel that had been solid rock before the onslaught began.\n\nFinally her fingers brushed a leather and fur coat. She clutched an arm and pulled the fallen figure upright. Nita threw her head back, first in a gasp, then in a scream.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Lil asked urgently.\n\n\"J-just get to the trench,\" Nita wheezed.\n\n\"Get us to the trench, more like,\" Lil huffed. \"I ain't leaving you out here to take a cannonball to the backside after the job you did of dodging the last set.\"\n\nLil crouched and pulled Nita's arm around her neck. When she stood, hoisting Nita upright, the engineer hissed in pain again.\n\n\"What's hurt?\"\n\n\"My ankle. I can't move it.\"\n\nLil glanced down and spied a left foot that wasn't quite at the angle nature intended.\n\n\"Aw heck,\" Lil said, working as best she could to keep the weight off the afflicted limb. \"That ain't nothin'. I did that once, jumping down onto a pier that was farther than I thought it was. Butch'll fix you up fine. Plus, from now on you'll know if it's aching, that it's going to rain.\"\n\nA bullet stuck the soil a few paces back. Both Lil and Nita turned to the impact, then to the east wall. The mercenaries had reached it. Without the boilers, the fl\u00e9chette guns were useless. The Well Diggers did their best to ward them off with rifles of their own, but they were thoroughly outmanned and could scarcely risk a moment to aim before retreating to their cover again.\n\n\"We're going to move a little faster now, Nita. You just lean right on me. We'll get to the trench just fine.\"\n\nNita looked to the other side. \"The gunmen aren't our only concern\u2026\"\n\nLil turned and spotted a glimmer near the edge of the fresh air. The eye-shine from at least six beasts glinted among the trees beyond the barbed wire. Already the fence had been damaged in places. Thanks to their size, the fence as it was had only been a mild deterrent to the larger creatures of The Thicket when it was intact. With the snapped wires here and there and the broken gate, if the creatures decided they wanted to enter, it would be difficult to convince them otherwise.\n\n\"Leave it to the fug to whip up a monster that runs toward explosions and such. Come on, Nita. Almost there.\"\n\nThey limped along, trying to stay as low as they could in hopes of presenting a smaller target to the mercenaries that were swiftly approaching the damaged main gate. Though the pain was evident on her face and in her motions, Nita did not seem frightened. If anything, she seemed to be deep in thought. Finally they reached the trench and Lil helped Nita inside as smoothly as possible. The two of them and a terrified Nikita were the only ones safely inside, the rest of the crew either injured or doing their best to hold off the surface troops.\n\nLil propped Nita against the wall and looked her over. Though the leg was the most glaring injury, it was hardly the only one. The back of Nita's coat smoldered. Streaks of blood mixed with the smears of mud and grease on her dark skin. If not for the layers of leather and canvas, Nita could easily have been killed by anything from the steam to the debris. Lil plucked a shard of wood from the side of Nita's jacket. It was as long as her hand and had bitten deep into the layers of clothing, but it hadn't pierced the tough leather and bracing of her corset.\n\n\"I guess I understand why you dress the way you do,\" Lil said, smiling weakly. \"I really gotta get me one of them corsets.\"\n\n\"I'll have to\u2026 ah\u2026 get you one the next time I go home.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026\" Lil said. \"And once we get you home again, you ain't leaving. You were right. Livin' like this ain't a recipe for livin' very long. I ain't letting something like this happen to you again. You holding together all right at least? Anything you need me to do?\"\n\n\"You've done more than enough.\"\n\n\"Okay. You sit tight, Nita. I\u2026 I left my dang pistol. I gotta go get it.\"\n\n\"One pistol isn't going to do this, Lil,\" Nita said, gritting her teeth and easing herself to an emptied ammunition case to have a better vantage.\n\n\"Well I gotta do something.\"\n\nNita glanced at the trees they'd strung the barbed wire between, then shifted her eyes to the tops of the fences.\n\n\"I have an idea.\" She grimaced as her ankle throbbed. \"It's not the most sane idea I've come up with.\"\n\n\"That's fine. The crazy ones seem to work better anyways.\"\n\n\"It might leave us with an even bigger problem.\"\n\n\"Big problems are great. They're harder to miss, so you don't have to spend all your time trying to figure them out.\"\n\n\"Okay, listen closely\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "\"I don't like that squealing!\" Captain Mack said. \"Sounds like turbine one is working on seizing up!\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's what it sounded like when number four locked up last month,\" Coop said, dangling from the rigging and trying to make his way up the side of the envelope.\n\n\"We didn't take any spikes. That's just bad maintenance.\"\n\n\"Well we ain't had Nita on board.\" He reached the edge of the envelope and stared up at the noisy, rattling engine.\n\n\"You and Gunner were supposed to take on her duties.\"\n\n\"Sorry, Cap'n. You had me digging through that fancy ship and babysitting Lester here so\u2014\"\n\n\"Did I ask you for excuses?\"\n\n\"No, Cap'n.\"\n\nLester, still clinging to the base of the rigging, interjected, \"Can you please take this seriously!\"\n\n\"Would you prefer panic? Because it seems you've got that aspect well handled,\" Gunner said, lining up the deck gun he was manning for a short burst of spikes.\n\n\"It wasn't my idea to be kept up here while you maniacs did battle! Why couldn't I stay in the galley with Miss Prist?\"\n\n\"Because Dr. Prist doesn't much like you, Lester, which makes it unanimous. Get that turbine working, Coop. This steering is getting sluggish.\"\n\n\"I'm on it, Cap'n.\"\n\n\"Just how is that idiot supposed to fix a turbine while it is running? He didn't even bring any tools!\" Lester said.\n\n\"Yeah I did! I brung this here persuader,\" Coop called from his unseen vantage above.\n\n\"What is a persuader?\" Lester asked.\n\nHis answer came in the form of a sequence of loud, clumsy clanks and thumps. After five good shots, the rattling died down and the turbine spun up to the proper speed. A moment later, Coop slid down the rigging and hopped onto the deck.\n\n\"I'm getting dang good at this engineerin',\" he said, flipping a hammer and catching it before tucking it into his belt.\n\nThe captain peered ahead at the destroyer, which was slowly righting itself. Flames still licked at the bottom of the ship where the gaping hole left by Nita's improvised mine had done its damage, but not nearly as many as there should have been. The crew had worked quickly and efficiently. In a few more minutes, despite the severe damage, the destroyer could be battle-ready again. That simply wouldn't do.\n\n\"We're almost over them. Gunner, get ready,\" Captain Mack said.\n\n\"Aye, Captain.\" He pulled a rather substantial knife from his boot. \"You realize with the frequency you've been using this tactic, it could well be called the West Maneuver.\"\n\n\"Suits me fine,\" Captain Mack said. \"They don't name something after a cap'n who didn't put it to proper use.\"\n\n\"Just what are you planning?\" Lester asked.\n\n\"To return something we borrowed,\" Coop explained." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "On the destroyer, the main deck had reverted to an almost level pitch. The captain continued to bark orders, eyeing the instruments on the helm to direct his men.\n\n\"Three more degrees. Move another bank of bombs. That should compensate. What is the status on the enemy ship?\"\n\n\"It is directly above us, Captain. The spotters got a good look at it. Only basic deck weapons and cannons. There is a mid-size ancillary craft and a small gig. No room for dropped armaments. No weapons with sufficient force to breach our envelope.\"\n\n\"I don't care. Set a north heading at least two hundred yards past the edge of that hazy patch. I don't want to risk the ground forces sending up another mine, and I've heard stories about Captain West. I don't trust that man out of our sight. In fact\u2026\" He called to a trio of deckhands. \"You three, to the maintenance walk. One of you go to the edge of the envelope. The rest, space yourselves to relay messages. I want moment-to-moment descriptions of the Wind Breaker's actions until they are back in weapons range.\"\n\nThe deckhands, with clear reluctance, obeyed their orders. They shakily made their way up the rigging, taking up relay positions and weaving legs and arms through to keep themselves steady as the ship lurched into motion.\n\n\"Report!\"\n\nThe messages worked their way slowly back from the man at the top.\n\n\"It seems they are having some payload issues. One of the ships is\u2026 what? \u2026 Oh dear lord!\"\n\nFurther clarification for the outburst was not required, as mere moments later the envelope bowed outward, dislodging two of the deckhands, and then ruptured. A sleek white ship burst through the bottom and drove itself into the deck. Steam pipes burst, boards ruptured, and amid the blinding glare of nearly all the phlogiston pouring out at once, the captain caught a brief glimpse of the name Alabaster painted on the ship that the Wind Breaker had used as a weapon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "The green ball of light rushing skyward and the deafening crunch of wood and metal succumbing to the ship-to-ship impact was enough to draw the attention of friend and foe alike in the ichor well site. Hidden away on the other side of the blanket of haze, it wasn't clear what precisely had happened, but the sheer size of the flash meant it could only have been the destroyer's destruction.\n\nKent, hunkered behind cover and struggling to reload his rifle from his dwindling stock of ammunition, shook his head. \"I don't know how they did it. But I know they did it. I'm damn glad they're on my side,\" he said.\n\n\"If they don't hurry, I don't think it'll do much good,\" said one of the other Well Diggers, a man called Fesk.\n\n\"There's always the chance they'll listen to reason,\" Kent said.\n\nA bullet ricocheted off the mound of struts that had served as their cover thus far, but the angle from the gate was such that the first mercenary to break inside would be able to pick them off. If something wasn't done soon, things would end quickly and poorly for Kent and the men with him.\n\n\"Hey! Hey!\" Kent called as the gate began to rattle. \"Think about this! That's your destroyer that just got taken down. The folks calling the shots and paying the fees just went with it. The job's through! What are you risking your lives for?\"\n\nThe gate rattled harder, three more mercs joining in.\n\n\"Are you listening! You aren't going to get paid!\" Kent called out.\n\nFor people like these, the appeal to the wallet was always more effective than the appeal to mercy or principle.\n\n\"Shut your mouth!\" called one of the mercenaries. \"We've got contracts. We're to secure this patch of dirt. We can do it with you dead or you surrendering. Dead's easier.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2026 that's about how I thought this would go,\" Kent said.\n\nThe next voice anyone heard was Lil's distant bellow.\n\n\"You all better back away from that gate! That goes for folks on both sides. If you don't clear out, you're going to be awful sorry!\"\n\nAll eyes turned to her. It was telling that even the hardened mercenaries had quickly learned that this diminutive young woman, if she was from the Wind Breaker crew, was nothing to be trifled with. The deckhand had scaled one of the trees that had been called into service as a fence post. One hand held tight to the last limb before the air began to thicken into the toxic soup that covered the rest of the continent. The other clutched a pair of wire cutters.\n\n\"She's unarmed. Someone take her out!\" ordered the lead mercenary.\n\nA few rifles turned in her direction, but she deftly pivoted around to the back of the tree before they could fire. A moment later she reappeared, now clutching a bizarre contraption: a long, thin cylinder with a canister at the tip and wires dangling from either side.\n\n\"You were warned. This is on you now,\" Lil called.\n\nShe took one of the wires in her teeth and gave it a yank. Smoke drifted from the near end of the gadget as she aligned it with them. Then a bright yellow flare sent the thing firing toward the gate. The rocket began squealing out a high-pitched whistle along the way, and to Lil's dismay, fell well short of the gate. Instead it fizzled out and dropped to the ground two yards on the inside of the fence, still dumping the compressed contents of the canister out through a jury-rigged noisemaker to produce a near-deafening tone.\n\nThe lead mercenary called something out, but over the sound of the noisemaker no one could make it out. His next, far more motivated remark, came through loud and clear.\n\n\"What the hell are those?!\"\n\nFour beasts, each varying somewhat in size and appearance but all roughly reminiscent of the so-called fug-squirrels, stalked from the forest beside them. From this distance and with the lingering brightness of the destroyer's vented envelope, Lil could see the twisted resemblance these monsters had with the woodland creatures they had been before the fug had done its grim work. They certainly moved with the same bounding agility, driven in a leaping gait by powerful legs onto cunning little paws. The only differences were that those cunning paws could easily tear a man apart, and the earth trembled with each leap.\n\nIt had taken mere moments for the creatures that had been lingering just beyond the walls, drawn by the noise of battle, to converge at the main gate. Something about the high pitch or the volume of the whistle seemed to drive them mad. They seemed to not even notice the mercenaries themselves, ignoring the scattering crowd as they approached. Two monsters reared on their hind legs and clawed at the gate, easily shearing through the steel cable with their chisel-like teeth. Another bounded to the stoutest tree nearby and leaped over the fence. The last, to its dismay, chose to scale the fence itself and learned just how unpleasant the barbed wire could be. Regardless, the gate soon gave way and the monsters viciously clawed and stomped at the lure, shattering it.\n\nThe mercenaries, confronted with the menace of mountain-lion-size beasts in an evident frenzy, did the only rational thing and put their rifles to use. A more steady mind might have reasoned that the monsters hadn't yet acknowledged their existence, and thus it might be best to retreat to a better defensible position first. The Well Diggers and Wind Breaker crew certainly took this approach, diving for whatever trench was nearest and most intact and topping off the ammunition in their weapons. Thus, as they unloaded their weapons into the monsters, the mercenary attacks did little more than get the beasts' attention. All four charged from within the walls. The two mercenaries nearest to the gate met with a fate terrifying enough to finally convince the others to scatter. Their retreat was too little too late, doing little more than catching the eyes of the other monsters, who eagerly gave chase.\n\nKent and the others crouched in the trench, clutching their weapons and trying to ignore the stomach-turning sounds of the mercenaries getting their comeuppance. He turned to those with him, and for the first time since the fl\u00e9chette guns had gone silent, took a head count.\n\n\"Okay. Looks like we've got\u2026 did we lose Benson? Roger too? And who's hurt\u2026\"\n\n\"I'm bleeding pretty bad,\" Fesk said. \"And Lou's going to have scars.\"\n\n\"Anyone know where the traitors are?\"\n\n\"Don't know, and don't particularly care,\" Fesk said.\n\n\"Seeing how much damage they did, and how much they could do if they got their hands on some weapons, I care.\"\n\nA pained voice answered, \"They're behind some repair parts and pipes. I think they were clear of the blast when the steam explosions went.\"\n\nThe Well Diggers peered down the dim length of the trench to spy Nita, still sitting where Lil had left her. She was bent over, fumbling with gloved hands to tie a makeshift splint from some rope, some canvas, and two appropriately sized wrenches from her sash. Peeking out from within her jacket was Nikita, who had recently taken refuge there. The inspector Lil had dubbed Lardo was huddled against the wall beside her.\n\n\"Nita! You okay? What happened to your leg?\" Kent asked, moving with the rest of the group toward her.\n\n\"I wasn't clear of the blast when the boilers went. I got caught in a wave of slurry.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you're still alive,\" he said.\n\n\"Believe it or not, this is what I do for a living. This isn't the first time I've had to run from a steam explosion. Just the first time I've had to do it while people were firing rifles at me.\"\n\n\"Boy, that sure ain't pretty what's going on out there,\" said Lil, dropping down into the trench beside them.\n\nHer sudden appearance startled the Well Diggers enough for one of them to involuntarily fire his weapon into the ground.\n\n\"Good heavens, Lil. Are you working to get killed? Strung as tight as we are, you can't just pop up like that.\"\n\n\"You reckon I should have just hung out in the trees while a bunch of squirrel things are romping about? I got news for you, Kent. Squirrels climb trees.\"\n\n\"They also dig in the ground,\" Nita added.\n\n\"Oh\u2026 yeah\u2026 for hidin' nuts and stuff\u2026 Well, heck. Where do you hide from a squirrel?\"\n\n\"That wouldn't be a problem if you hadn't fired off a lure right inside the camp!\"\n\n\"Oh, well shucks, I'm sorry. I suppose I should have just let them soldier boys shoot you all full of holes while I tried to work out how far that rocket was liable to fire. You try firing a rocket by hand. It ain't made for sharpshootin'.\"\n\n\"Now we don't even have a gate!\" remarked Fesk.\n\n\"You mean the one the squirrels bit through quicker than you could blink, or the one the mercenaries were fixin' to break down in two or three blinks? A real loss to the cause that was.\"\n\n\"It was better than nothing!\"\n\n\"Not by much!\"\n\n\"Quiet!\" Nita hissed. \"The gunfire stopped.\"\n\nAll in the trench shut their mouths and listened. It was eerie. The sound of screaming and rifles had silenced. Now the only sound was the distant crackle of what was probably the smoldering remains of the The Fist of Alabaster, the hum of some airship engines, and their own panicked breathing.\n\n\"Anybody want to have a look?\" Lil asked. \"\u2026 Don't everybody volunteer at once, now.\"\n\nNone of the fug folk moved, until finally Kent lowered his rifle and approached the wall.\n\n\"This is what I get for ending up in charge of you lot\u2026\" he said.\n\nHe straightened up a bit until he was just able to see over the edge of the trench.\n\n\"What do you see?\" Lil asked.\n\nHe dropped back down. \"It's hard to tell with all this smoke and steam hanging over the camp, but I see a bit of good news and a bit of bad news. Good news is, the squirrels took care of our soldier problem. Bad news is, the soldiers did not take care of our squirrel problem. They're looking bloody and angry. Even money says they'll either limp away to lick their wounds or come looking to dig up a few more nuts to make the whole clash worth their while.\"\n\n\"How many bullets you all got? My pistol's still laying somewhere over by the east wall,\" Lil said.\n\nKent and the others popped their weapons open and turned out their pockets.\n\n\"Looks like\u2026 fifteen or so between us.\"\n\n\"Aw heck. With them critters already so full of holes, fifteen bullets should be plenty.\"\n\n\"For these maybe. But no gate and barely any bullets isn't going to leave us in a good position to survive the next few days.\"\n\n\"So you reckon it's better to die today saving bullets for tomorrow?\" She tipped her head to the side, listening closely. \"Lucky for you the cavalry's arrived.\"\n\nThey peered up and saw the belly of the Wind Breaker's gondola break through the fug. It was not quite centered over the well, with its starboard side roughly aligned with the trench. Gunner appeared at the rail and quickly assessed the situation. He manned the fl\u00e9chette gun and dispatched the first of the beasts. The others, perhaps at the sight of one of their own finally falling, scrambled back through the gate and into the distance.\n\n\"You keep that gun trained on the gate,\" Captain Mack bellowed, his voice raised loud enough for those on the ground to just barely hear him. \"I don't know what those were, but if I ever see one again, I don't want to have to see it for long.\"\n\n\"Aye, Captain. Agreed,\" Gunner called out.\n\n\"Lil, Nita! You down there?\" Captain Mack called out.\n\n\"Sure are, Cap'n,\" Lil called in reply. \"Nita's hurt, and a couple of the Well Diggers.\"\n\n\"We'll get Glinda ready. The gig's a bit fouled. Are you folk going to be able to climb a ladder?\"\n\n\"Might be tricky for Nita.\"\n\n\"Seems this whole mess was a trap. And looks like it sprang. You folks had a run in with some fella named Lucius Alabaster?\"\n\n\"Lucius P. Alabaster!\" cried a slightly unhinged voice.\n\nThe voice came from near the center of the site. The Well Diggers popped up and looked to the central pit. A figure in purple, the much disheveled Mallow, stood with a small pistol and a pained look on his face. Beside him, almost invisible in his dingy white outfit enshrouded by the lingering steam, was Alabaster. In the chaos of the squirrel attack and the rest of the combat, he and his manservant must have found their way to the ground. For once his garish outfit had served him well in concealing him as he moved, though with the greater threat of the beasts and soldiers to worry about, the two men would have had to work hard to draw any attention at all.\n\nThe mastermind of the entire plan raised a hand and flicked the end off a small black cylinder. A short, piercing-bright flame burst forth from the end, illuminating his maddened face.\n\n\"This all ends now! Drop your weapons! You are beaten!\" he said, holding the lit flare out over the edge of the pit.\n\n\"You sure about that?\" Lil said, snatching Kent's rifle and raising it toward him.\n\n\"Lil, lower that weapon,\" Captain Mack ordered.\n\n\"\u2026 Aye, Cap'n\u2026\" Lil said, reluctantly lowering the rifle. \"But why ain't I shooting this fella who tried to kill all of us and ain't got nothing but a fancy candle?\"\n\n\"Oh, you wish to know? You wish to peer into the infinite brilliance of my machinations? Do you even suppose that you could comprehend\u2014\"\n\nDr. Prist appeared at the railing of the Wind Breaker as the speech began and gasped. \"You must stop him! If he is able to light the ichor, then\u2014\" she began.\n\n\"You will shut your mouth, or I will drop the flare right now, Dr. Prist!\" he cried, eyes wide with fury. \"This is my ultimatum to deliver and you shall not steal my moment! That is the problem with you. With all of you. You do not know your place. Your place is at my beck and call! Your place is to obey my commands! Your place is under my heel. And I shall now do my best to tell you why.\n\n\"Some of you may be familiar with South Pyre by now. The source of all the phlogiston, all the pyrum, and all the fug for the continent.\"\n\n\"What? You folk have been making the fug?\" Lil said.\n\n\"Oh yes\u2026 yes quite efficiently. The truth of the catastrophe is not known, of course. Perhaps it was a purposeful act, someone who knew what wondrous thing would come to pass if the world were to be bathed in the elixir that created my race. Perhaps it was a simple accident, or even the act of a god, the work of lightning, or a wildfire. Regardless. One pyre, burning bright for over a century, has made the world what it is today. And if I were to drop this flare into the pit, there would be two.\"\n\n\"So? The lowland is already drowned in the stuff. What's a little more?\" Lil taunted.\n\n\"What's a little more? Do you suppose the fug has only risen to its current level out of respect? Out of kindness? It has risen that high because that is as far as a single source of fug can achieve. With another source, it will rise higher. Not much, perhaps, but enough. Enough to wipe out whole towns, to kill, or at least leave homeless, thousands of you surface dwellers. So you would do well to do as I say.\"\n\nAlabaster's eyes swept to the Well Diggers.\n\n\"And as for you, my useful little tools. The ones who so wonderfully played into my plot and made all of this possible. You may think to yourself, what do I care of the surface? What do I care of their homes and their lives? What is to stop me from eliminating this genius and once again seizing control of the precious well?\"\n\nLil gave Kent a sideways glance. \"You better not be thinking that.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026 yes he and the others had best not. Because one of the places certain to be claimed would be the Midland Plateaus. The breadbasket of our continent. The crops there would wither. The livestock would die. Slowly but surely, people would starve above and below the fug. What I hold in my hand is not a simple flare. Not a fancy candle as you so densely stated. I hold the very fate of the world.\"\n\nMallow looked to him.\n\n\"You\u2026 you're telling me you could kill everyone by dropping that flare?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, Mallow. I've asked not to be interrupted.\"\n\n\"You didn't say that at the beginning, sir.\"\n\n\"Oh, am I to clear the minutia of my machinations with my minions now?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can, in good conscience, continue to support you, sir.\"\n\n\"Now is not the time for independent thought or, for that matter, a conscience of any kind, Mallow. You are with me or you are against me.\"\n\n\"Then I am against you, sir.\"\n\nThe manservant turned the pistol to face him.\n\n\"Must you be so penetratingly dim? If you shoot me, the flare falls and the world dies. Why do you suppose they haven't fired?\"\n\n\"\u2026\"\n\n\"Back away with the rest of them, you great boob.\"\n\nMallow paused, then somewhat dejectedly lowered the weapon and stepped away.\n\n\"Your idiocy never ceases to amaze me.\"\n\nNita stood, somewhat unsteadily.\n\n\"Easy,\" Lil said.\n\nThe Calderan tapped her leg, and Nikita, who had been cowering within her jacket, subtly climbed down and held tight to Lil's leg.\n\n\"Nikita says Wink told her the captain's got a plan. We have to keep Alabaster talking,\" Nita whispered.\n\n\"Shouldn't be tough,\" Lil said.\n\n\"You there! Are you really so dim that you cannot pay attention to the greatest mind of your time while he speaks to you?\" Alabaster barked.\n\n\"Are you though? The greatest mind of our time? Because it seems you've forgotten about me,\" Nita said. She leaned hard on Lil and Kent to boost herself up out of the trench and walked in slow, painful steps toward him.\n\n\"And what have I forgotten about you? The injured engineer who made the Wind Breaker the wonderful nemesis I have been waiting for.\"\n\n\"I don't care how much the fug rises. It will never reach Caldera. What motivation do I have not to grapple with you?\"\n\n\"You are a hobbling invalid. I am unconcerned. And even if you were able-bodied and might be a credible threat to me, do you think the rest of these people, who would see their world destroyed by any failed attempt to stop me, would stand idle while you made a disastrous attempt? They would sooner kill you than allow you to take that risk.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they would. But I knew I was taking my life into my own hands when I joined this crew. Maybe I'm ready to die. And even if I can't stop you, at least I'm free to speak truth of your madness. What do you believe you can do? You can't actually order us to do anything but stay away from you, because you hold only one card, and once played, the power is gone.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you are wrong! You believe this is about control. That I wish to be in charge\u2026 and that is a lofty goal, to be sure. With this flare in my hand no one\u2014save perhaps you\u2014can openly defy me. The heads of all great industries, Mayor Ebonwhite, and everyone above and below the surface must do as I say. It is intoxicating, and it has the capacity to make me the wealthiest man in all the world. \u2026 But that is not my aim\u2026 It was never my aim.\"\n\n\"What then?\" she said, still limping ever so slowly closer as the Wind Breaker drifted overhead. \"What is your aim?\"\n\n\"Is it not obvious? From this moment forward, I have already won. If I succeed and claim the world as my own, then I am the greatest man of my era, no question. \u2026 But if I fail? If I choose to drop this flare and end the world, then I am the most infamous man of all time. More infamous than Mayor Ebonwhite. More infamous than Ferris Tusk. The world is mine already! I hold it in my hand, right here! And at my mere whim I can snuff it like a candle. The people of the surface will flee, first to higher ground, then to those islands that will still be free from the fug. Islands like yours. And they will carry with them words of my deeds. And when the war is fought, it shall be written that I was the cause. And when the last breath of society is drawn, it shall be my name that is on its lips. I shall be the single most important figure in all of history! And I shall have done it all with nothing more than this simple flare!\"\n\nHe held the burning stick aloft and descended into positively demented laughter. The humans and fug folks in attendance watched with fear and a dash of wonder at the raw insanity that must be to blame for such a mindset. Then, one by one, their eyes began to drift upward. Had Alabaster not been reveling so thoroughly in the culmination of his plan, he might have noticed. Instead he was utterly transfixed by his own genius, attempting between breaths to properly articulate his glee.\n\n\"I should drop it right now! Yes! If I were to drop it now, and start the long inevitable slide toward destruction, it would assure that no one could ever eclipse me. And surely that is the fate I've earned through my brilliance\u2026\"\n\nA faint whistling, like a bit of string spinning through the air, drifted down from above. Somehow, it was this sound that finally pulled him from his fixation. He looked up to see a one-eyed aye-aye, tied into a harness at the end of a long rope, swinging in a wide and precise arc toward the flare he held high. Alabaster acted quickly, pulling it out of the path of the swinging inspector.\n\n\"Ah! Ah-ha! Did you think I would be taken in by so puerile a ruse?\" he raved, watching the aye-aye swing uselessly past. \"I'm am Lucius P. Alabaster! I cannot be out-thought!\"\n\nHis taunting of the swinging lesser primate would likely have continued if not for a minor oversight on his part suddenly becoming apparent. In his split second move to pull the flare free of Wink's swing, he brought it well within Nita's reach. She took both the flare and the fist clutching it in one hand and pulled it sharply, yanking Alabaster off balance. He stumbled toward her and received a well-timed wrench to the side of his head.\n\nAlabaster crumbled to the ground, his grip loosening enough to leave Nita holding his potentially apocalyptic flare. She threw it clear of the pit, then painfully crouched beside him.\n\n\"I've seen a lot of madness since I joined this crew. I've seen obsession, blind greed, megalomania\u2026 but you, Mr. Alabaster\u2026\"\n\n\"Lee-oo-see-us P. Alabaster,\" he said slowly, managing to overenunciate his name even despite being at the brink of unconsciousness.\n\n\"You, Lucius P. Alabaster, are utterly unique.\" She sighed. \"Or at least I genuinely hope you are. Because I don't think the world could survive having two of you.\"\n\nThe job done, whatever mix of dedication and adrenaline had allowed her to push the pain of her ankle aside subsided and she nearly fell. Lil was there to catch her. The deckhand slid herself smoothly under Nita's arm and steadied her, then walked her toward the Wind Breaker's gig, which was already lowering.\n\n\"Give 'im a kick in the ribs for me, would you?\" Lil said as Well Diggers rushed past to deal with the delirious Alabaster.\n\nShe turned to face Nita as best she could while continuing the role of makeshift crutch.\n\n\"That was one heck of a wallop you handed him. I gotta ask. Do they teach that sorta thing back at that steamworks of yours? Because you sure do a lot of whomping with those things.\"\n\n\"It isn't a formal class, but the more martial aspects of free-wrenching come in handy more often in Caldera than you'd expect. We're artists. Artists are spirited.\"\n\nNita sat heavily on the edge of the gig and watched as the worst injured of the men were loaded on to be hauled up. There were three Well Diggers who wouldn't retain the title of survivor for very long without swift medical attention.\n\n\"Hang in there, fellas,\" Lil said. \"We got a medic up there who could sew a whole new fugger together out of spare parts if she had to, so patching you three up'll be no sweat,\" Lil said before turning to Nita. \"Of course, with folks who need so much patching, it might be a bit before she can get to you.\"\n\n\"That's fine\u2026 I've been hurt worse\u2026\" She leaned a bit more heavily on Lil, less out of need for support and more out of simple relief.\n\nThe gig cranked up to the belly of the Wind Breaker. Butch, Gunner, and Coop were already on hand, ready to deal with the wounded.\n\n\"There you are, you li'l runt, you,\" Coop said, yanking Lil up and giving her a bear hug. \"You two just can't keep out of mischief, can you?\"\n\n\"Us girls know how to have a good time is all. Help me get Nita here up to the galley though. She had a bit more fun than she can stand.\"\n\n\"Sure thing,\" Coop said, \"unless you need me, Butch.\"\n\nButch dismissed him and revealed a needle and thread, much to the dismay of the man about to receive treatment.\n\nCoop helped Lil with Nita as far as the first speaking tube, then leaned into it. \"We got 'em, Cap'n. Full crew complement again.\"\n\n\"Everyone in one piece?\" Mack asked.\n\n\"Yeah, but a few of them pieces need fixin'.\"\n\n\"Fine. Good to hear it. Let's get the wounded tended to quick as possible. There's four ships out there somewhere I'd like to put to bed. Near as I can tell, they ain't got much in the way of crews, but now would be a lousy time for surprises.\"\n\nAs they attempted to navigate with three people side by side in a ship with hallways barely wide enough for one, Nita tipped her head to the side and listened.\n\n\"Coop\u2026 would you care to tell me why it sounds as though someone has been beating on turbine one\u2026\"\n\n[ Epilogue ]\n\nSeveral weeks had passed, and the Well Diggers and Wind Breaker crew had used them wisely. The first several days were tense, as the threat of additional attacks from man or beast loomed large in their minds. Mallow\u2014now eager to underscore his abandonment of Alabaster and his cause now that the depths of the mastermind's lunacy had been revealed\u2014was quick to assure all that Alabaster had specifically kept the location and even existence of the ichor well secret. Even the crew of the destroyer was not informed of where they were going or what they would find there until they had arrived. Considering the source of this assurance, the Well Diggers were slow to embrace it. Nevertheless, days rolled by and the only threat came from the wildlife. An awful lot can be salvaged from a wrecked destroyer and four scout ships. Those parts went into a more permanent wall and a better defense system. Once the camp was in a state that could weather the occasional curious squirrel, the Wind Breaker began to make careful, stealthy runs to fetch supplies and crew. Now, though it looked a bit cobbled together, the place was at the very cusp of full functionality.\n\nNita sat on a cot in the cozy little bunkhouse they had erected. A potbellied stove, formerly of Alabaster's ship and sturdy enough to have survived the ship's destruction intact, made the place nice and warm. Comfortable as it was, Nita had been spending an awful lot of time there with little to do while the others worked feverishly at the facility's construction. She leaned aside and grabbed her crutches from where they hung beside the bed, then hauled herself to her feet. The moment the heavy cast on her left ankle thumped to the ground, Lil's head poked in the door.\n\n\"You supposed to be up?\" she said.\n\nNita smirked. \"What are you doing? Hovering over me like a hawk just waiting to catch me?\"\n\n\"I reckon I got to do that, what with Butch sayin' it'll be another three weeks at least before that foot's all healed up, and what with you havin' your mind set on not listenin' to her.\" Lil stepped into the bunkhouse and began to guide Nita back to her cot. \"You keep hobbling around on it and it'll be ten weeks.\"\n\n\"I'm still a member of the crew, Lil. I've still got a job to do. We're behind on the pipe run from\u2014\"\n\nLil pushed Nita to sit down, then plopped down next to her. \"Nope, we ain't behind on nothin'. Gunner and I got the kettles all piped up two hours ago. That big boiler from the one ship we tore up is warming up now. And since I don't hear no pipes bursting or folk screaming, I reckon we did it right. And Coop's installing them safety what's-its between there and the refinery.\"\n\n\"Really\u2026\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yep. I reckon having you here to tell us what to do, but not having you there able to do it for us if we had something else that needed doing, gave us the kick in the pants we needed to finish learning the ins and outs of all this. It really ain't so hard. I still ain't got much of a clue how it all works, or how you manage to build new bits of it. But putting the pieces together ain't too tough.\"\n\n\"I told you. General maintenance is simple.\"\n\n\"Simple if someone hammers it into your head for a couple of weeks. So anyway, you just sit here and relax. Ain't nobody out there that needs you for nothing important. Just let that ankle heal up and\u2014\"\n\nCoop stuck his head in the door. \"Nita, Cap'n wants you over in the refinery.\"\n\nLil glared at him. \"Dang it, Coop! I just got her sat back down!\"\n\n\"Cap'n wants her. Says Dr. Prist's just about ready to start up that brick-packer gadget Nita and her rigged up.\"\n\n\"Oh, excellent! I'd forgotten it was the new piping we were waiting for,\" Nita said, standing up again.\n\nLil grumbled. \"Now I know why Butch is always so surly. Us folk are the worst patients.\"\n\nNita got her crutches situated and began to make her way out the door, with Coop and Lil sticking close in case there was even the possibility she might stumble. They crunched along a fresh snow that still twinkled in the air under the glow of the phlo-lights. Keeping the place lit was something that had to be balanced against keeping it hidden, so the lights weren't nearly as bright as they could be. The result was a subdued, almost intimate lighting for such an industrial place. The light caught the flakes as they fell, making the periwinkle-stained ice crystals seem dark indigo. It was oddly beautiful, though the frigid nip to the air did motivate them to pick up the pace a little.\n\nThey moved through what had become something of a boomtown. Freshly milled lumber mixed with salvaged wood to build brand new buildings. Networks of pipe and belts ran between them, and the Well Diggers hustled to and fro to hammer in a new plank here or tighten up a timing pulley there.\n\n\"Look at all if it,\" Nita said with a smile. \"This is truly making me homesick for the steamworks in Caldera.\"\n\n\"We'll get you there soon as we can, darlin',\" Lil said, the barest hint of regret coloring her expression. \"You done more than you had any cause to for us, and it's just about time you traded them air legs for land legs again before you end up losing one.\"\n\n\"Not so long ago you were dead set against the thought of me leaving.\"\n\n\"Not so long ago you didn't need to use no crutches.\"\n\n\"What's this about Nita leavin'?\" Coop said, slowly catching up on the topic.\n\n\"Pay attention, Coop. You remember the deal. Nita here got us on the wrong side of the fug folk, so she stuck around until we could sort out our own repairs. We got that all covered now. And even if we didn't, we got these Well Digger folks we can deal with now. Couple engineers in the group, or at least near enough to do what we need.\"\n\n\"What's that got to do with Nita leaving? She's on the crew.\"\n\n\"She's finished her tour, Coop. She's earned her ticket back home.\"\n\n\"But\u2026 she's on the crew. A body don't leave this crew except if they get killed or get kicked out. And she ain't done neither.\"\n\nHis confusion was genuine, as though he'd been told Nita had decided to start breathing water. His brain couldn't comprehend that a decision such as hers was even possible.\n\n\"We'll talk about it later, Coop.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he said, effortlessly dropping the concern from his mind. \"So, Nita. I, uh\u2026 I been working on this poem. From way back.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. That's right, I do remember you mentioning that.\"\n\n\"Right, so, I finished it, I think. You reckon you want to hear it?\"\n\n\"Of course, Coop.\"\n\n\"I ain't even got to read it or nothin'. It's all up here,\" he said, tapping his head.\n\n\"I like lookin'. And I like cookin',\n\n'specially when it's pie.\n\n\"Sometimes I reckon, the mornin' sun beckons\n\nfer me to look it straight in the eye.\n\n\"When I see a bird, it churns up these words,\n\nand then I'm fixin' to write 'em down.\n\n\"'Cause eggs in a clutch, an' flowers an' such\n\nare pert near the pertiest things around.\n\n\"Singers that sing, painters paintin' things,\n\nand storytellers tellin' stories too,\n\n\"Ain't none do as good, as a single glance would,\n\nso long as that glance was at you.\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"So. What'd you think?\" he said.\n\n\"It's lovely, Coop,\" Nita said, trying her best not to sound like she was giving a child a pat on the head.\n\n\"Ha! I told Gunner you'd like it. He was saying folks from Caldera spend their whole lives writing just one poem. This here only took me a couple of months.\"\n\n\"You did fine work. My brother in particular will be delighted to hear it.\"\n\n\"You just make sure folks know it was ol' Coop who wrote that, and he wrote it for you. \u2026 You're the 'you' I was glancin' at in that last bit there.\" He looked aside and raised his voice. \"Hey, Gunner! She liked it! I told you she would. This poem stuff is easy!\"\n\n\"I'm sure she did,\" Gunner called back, his tone quite at odds with his words.\n\n\"So, Nita, you think\u2026 maybe\u2026 one of these days we might could\u2026 spend a day, you know\u2026 talkin' about poems and art and such? Once we head back to Keystone in a few weeks.\"\n\n\"She's heading home, Coop. Don't you remember?\" Lil said.\n\n\"Home? But she's a member of the crew,\" he said, confused anew.\n\nLil covered her eyes. \"Never mind, Coop. We're just about here.\"\n\nThe group made their way onto the gravel path leading to the main refinery building. It was the largest and most solidly built of the buildings, a long narrow hall that even from the outside looked like an assembly line with a building wrapped around it. Pipes ran out from a stout metal cover they had erected over the pit to eliminate any risk of accidentally bringing about the scenario Alabaster had so eagerly sought\u2014and which in retrospect had very nearly been caused by their unwittingly dangerous use of explosives during the battle. The pipes continued into the building, and a small glass window on the primary pipe showed a slow but steady flow of the radiant golden substance for which so much blood had been spilled.\n\nWhen they stepped inside the building, the fug folk flare for industry became instantly apparent. There was not an ounce of the artistic flare that one might find in a typical Calderan construction or the general slapdash nature that tended to result from the constructions of surface dwellers. Everything was austere and efficient, laid out in precise routes of pipes and tubes, each over well-placed burners or emptying into scrupulously clean vats and tubs. On her feet at the center of the building, looking over the entire venture with the air of a general reviewing her troops, stood Dr. Prist. The past few weeks had made her a very different woman. Gone was the simple but stately dress she'd worn at the academy. She now wore a darker outfit. It was still a dress, oddly, but made from the same material as the overalls worn by the rest of the crew. On top of it was a rubber apron, joined by shoulder-length rubber gloves. Rather than the typical goggles worn by most of the others, she had a face shield that may or may not have been cut from the curve of a large beaker and fashioned with leather and brass into something rather elegant.\n\n\"Dr. Prist, it's been a while since I was inside. You've really made something of this place.\"\n\n\"Mmm?\" the doctor said, drawn suddenly from her thoughts. \"Oh, yes! Your people and these diggers have done a fine job. I believe this chemical stack I've designed will certainly increase the yield, or at least maintain a similar one with reduced complexity.\"\n\nShe tapped at a small glass nozzle and slid a beaker under it. With a twist of a valve, a thin stream of liquid gold drizzled down.\n\n\"I've really been able to achieve a very high degree of purity. Not nearly what they purport to achieve at South Pyre, mind you, but\u2026 well, give me time! Oh! But you're here to see the brick packer. We were just about to activate it.\"\n\nShe paced along a long modular sequence of machines. Nita looked upon it in wonder. In point of fact, she was intimately familiar with the mechanical aspect of the equipment, if not the chemical processes. She'd helped to design it, but her additions to the project had been largely in spoken recommendations or scribbled notes. The ever-vigilant Lil had kept her out of the work areas for the most part. Seeing what had been done with the place was like seeing something fall out of her imagination and into reality.\n\n\"This is where we store the pyrum. Note the insulation and isolation. We wouldn't want that to catch fire. Here is where the ash is stored, and we're experimenting with some sticky gum from the bushes here in The Thicket to replace the wax that's usually used. Wood chips and sawdust are here, a bit of coal dust here, and of course, here are the forms.\" Dr. Prist clapped her hands together and turned to Nita. \"I must say I was rather\u2026 concerned when I learned that through no fault of my own I had become embroiled in some sort of plot involving the Wind Breaker. But this\u2026 this glorious facility\u2026 I would have had to wait years to have a chance to work with this remarkable substance. And to build something from scratch? To attempt new ideas? I might never have had the chance.\"\n\n\"Flip the switch, Doctor,\" said Captain Mack as he walked in from the far door. \"You done fine work here, and I can appreciate you're proud, but the sooner we've got a cargo-hold full of this stuff the quicker we can be out of your hair and on our way back with some of them goods you're after.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. Of course. Er, Kent, if you would? We'll just do the one tray, so push the lever all the way up when the sweeper arm is returning.\"\n\nKent, barely visible on the other side of the long assembly line among an array of switches and valves, nodded once and put his weight on a lever. A trio of pumps shuddered on and began to pipe a thick gray paste into a grid of brick-size voids that looked like something out of a factory bakery. The nozzles hitched upward and shut off in a little bit of automated choreography, leaving a curl of paste at the end of one brick before beginning another. The same elegant motion repeated across the whole of the pan, then the nozzles retracted and a wooden slat slid across the tops of the pans, wiping off the excess.\n\nAs instructed, Kent switched it off when the process was through.\n\n\"And there we have eighteen five-pound bricks of my own recipe for burn-slow. It isn't quite the equal for the South Pyre stuff. Mine isn't so dense, and it leaves a bit more resin in the firebox when it is through, but it burns just as long. A few minutes to cool, then wrapped in paper and they are yours and more to follow. All of this will be automated of course, once we get the new parts\u2026\"\n\nShe continued to speak, but the words went unheard by the captain, who stepped forward and stared down at the tray of fuel. His face was impassive, but those who knew him could see the emotion lurking just below the surface. In the days since the fug folk had begun limiting the supply of the stuff, the Wind Breaker had not had more than fifty pounds of burn-slow at any given time. They were finishing most trips with their last brick of the stuff in the firebox, and twice had been forced to limp to a port on coal alone. The fuel in front of him would have cost them more than a month's worth of their earnings, and finding it would have been anything but certain. What lay before him now wasn't just fuel. It was freedom. It was the lifeblood of his ship and his career.\n\n\"It works beautifully, Dr. Prist,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Thanks in no small part to your recommendations. I look forward to your proposal of performing the motion on the trays rather than the nozzles.\"\n\nA new voice rose over the din of the machinery as it whirred down. \"Oh! So the first test has gone well, I see.\"\n\nThey turned to find Digger, the organizer of the little group. He'd arrived along with the first round of supplies. Considering the danger he would be in, and thus the group would be in, if he were to be captured, he decided a bit of hands-on leadership from within The Thicket was called for.\n\n\"As Dr. Prist says, we are all great admirers of your ingenuity, Miss Graus. You don't work quite to the level of\u2026 precision that we are accustomed to, but your ideas are refreshingly innovative and quite reliable. I don't suppose you could be coerced into staying on as our engineer\u2026\"\n\n\"Hey! She's ours, and she ain't even going to be that for too much longer, so you just keep your coercing to yourself,\" Lil said.\n\n\"I really should be going home after this,\" Nita said with a nod.\n\n\"Of course. And that is entirely your right. Come, if you would, I'd like you to have a look at something we've been tinkering with.\"\n\nNita nodded and followed where he led. For the first few steps, Lil continued in her role of living crutch, but she paused.\n\n\"Coop, you reckon you can help her on your own for a bit?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Coop said.\n\nLil watched them continue on their way. When they were out of earshot, and the rest of the Well Diggers had returned to their tasks, Lil turned to the captain.\n\n\"Cap'n?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lil.\"\n\n\"I know I ain't usually the sort to ask too many questions but\u2026 aw heck, there're some things that are running my mind ragged.\"\n\nHe looked at her, a bit more intently.\n\n\"I was talking to Gunner, and he was saying how, what with you having that island you bought from them folk at Lock and\u2026 look, just lay it to me plain. Are you lookin' to hang it up?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"When were you gonna say so?\" she said angrily.\n\n\"I didn't reckon I needed your permission.\"\n\n\"And that's another thing,\" Lil fumed. \"You been meaner than a hungry dog lately. If I was looking at the end of a nice long career like yours, I'd be lookin' forward to kickin' my feet up, not snappin' at folks and generally bein' miserable.\"\n\nHe glared at her briefly, but then his expression softened. \"No, Lil, you wouldn't. You'd think you would. But pretty soon you'd get to thinking about how you only ever knew how to do just the one thing, and now you were going to have to set it aside. And at the same time you'd be worried how you came this close and then things started aligning against you. You'd start to think how you were either going to win the fight or lose the fight, and either way the fight'd end, and fightin's all you ever done.\"\n\n\"If you don't want to quit, then don't quit. You still got a lot of years in you.\"\n\n\"No. Not good ones, Lil. You don't want a man who ain't his best at the wheel of any ship. Better to hang it up than take the Wind Breaker and the rest of you down with me when I finally run short of luck.\"\n\nLil crossed her arms. \"You ain't doing me and Coop any favors. Once you take off the cap'n's hat, we're pretty much adrift.\"\n\n\"No you ain't.\"\n\n\"Yeah we are!\" she snapped. \"No cap'n, no Wind Breaker. No Wind Breaker, no crew. I like my life right where it is, and now Nita's headin' out. You're not long for it either. And then we're off to find our own way, and there ain't no way that'll hold a candle to this one.\"\n\n\"You're free to settle down on the island. It's plenty big for that. But you won't. For the same reason settling down ain't putting a smile on my face. For the same reason you're wasting your tears weeping over Nita going home again.\"\n\n\"Wasting my tears?\"\n\n\"She's heading home. Maybe she even thinks it's for good. But if she makes it long enough for that ankle of hers to heal up, it'll be a miracle. The reason this crew works is because we all got a dose of the same madness. You, me, Butch, Coop, Gunner, Nita? We all got the sky in our blood now. The ground won't ever be enough for long. Nita'll be back. She'll be back in the sky again just as soon as she can be. And she'll be looking for a crew like this one. And that means she'll be back with us. Because there ain't but one crew like the Wind Breaker crew.\"\n\n\"\u2026 You mean it, Cap'n?\"\n\n\"Mean it? Ain't nothing to mean about, Lil. I know it. Now once Nita's through, round up the crew and let's get to loading. I want to get into the sky before our luck runs dry.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Deep in the remnants of a used-up mine, a defeated and dejected Lucius P. Alabaster lay in a cell, staring at the ceiling. He was alone, the first prisoner in the deepest section of a prison that was hastily contracted to replace Skykeep. Stripped of his garish white garb, he was dressed now as a common prisoner. His face was blank, his eyes distant. When there came a knock at the bars, he barely shifted his gaze.\n\n\"Mr. Alabaster?\" asked a familiar voice.\n\nAlabaster turned his head and squinted at his visitor. \"\u2026 Tender?\" he said, confused by the presence of the simply dressed employee of his old club.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Alabaster. I've got some messages for you. You've been away from the club for some time.\"\n\n\"Away from the club\u2026 I have no place in the Ruby Club anymore, Tender. That place is reserved for visionaries and luminaries. I am undeserving of its hallowed halls.\"\n\n\"It's a place for louts and has-beens, Alabaster. You'll fit in just as before.\"\n\nAlabaster continued, the words not having penetrated his self-pity. \"Why didn't they kill me, Tender? That at least would have been a fitting end for one who had come so near to greatness. Let me live on as one of the titans of the fug that those 'heroes' of the surface have had to slay along their journey. Don't leave me to fester within the walls of a hole in the ground. I cannot even have the dignity of a berth within Skykeep because the blasted Wind Breaker snatched it from the sky!\"\n\nTender tossed the envelopes through the bars and leaned his back against them, drawing his pocket watch to check the time.\n\n\"You're right, of course. They should have killed you. Keeping the location of the ichor well a secret would have served them quite well.\"\n\n\"The ichor well\u2026 What do you know about that?\"\n\n\"But then, it's only natural they would have assumed you'd spread the word about it. It seems the only things you're good at are being the center of attention and running your mouth. Killing you wouldn't have solved anything in that case. Maybe it would have made them feel better, but that captain of theirs is a shrewd fellow. I'd wager he knew the worst thing he could do to you is leave you to rot and fade, alone and forgotten. Maybe with a bit of torture from Mayor Ebonwhite thrown in. He's on the way, by the way. And none too happy you've not told him all the details of that 'plan' of yours yet.\"\n\n\"I don't know who you are, but I don't like your tone. That plan you dismiss held the very world at its mercy. And it is for that reason that I've kept the details a secret. It should be revealed a triumph or not at all! I would have surpassed even the great Ferris Tusk in my infamy.\"\n\n\"Ferris Tusk\u2026\" Tender said, shaking his head. \"If you are going to idolize a man, at least do it for the proper reasons. 'He destroyed Rigel Tower' and 'He bested Admiral Maxwell.' Those were the least of his achievements. The coarsest, most ham-handed events in an otherwise remarkable campaign. Do you honestly believe the achievement was knocking down a stronghold? The achievement was stripping the surface of the confidence and infrastructure to make its own equipment. The achievement was bribing, negotiating, and manipulating the proper figures to keep the damage from being repaired. You want to run the world, Alabaster? The word is subtlety. Learn it.\"\n\n\"You aren't\u2026 you couldn't possibly be\u2026\"\n\n\"One thing you managed, though, is to bring to light something that had concerned me for some time. The Wind Breaker is a capable crew, certainly. But they were toeing the line just as carefully as the rest of the surface until one little change. Amanita Graus. The Calderan. As far as my machinations reached, I could never solve the Calderan Problem. Foolish me, I honestly thought after all this time they would remain content, tucked away in their little paradise without any notion to tinker with the balance I'd so carefully installed. But obviously that was flawed thinking. And so we must solve the Calderan Problem.\"\n\n\"We?\"\n\n\"Yes. As I've said. Running your mouth and being the center of attention are your primary skills. Misdirection appeals to me. So Lucius P. Alabaster shall remain at large. The Well Diggers can continue their endeavor undisturbed, at least until Ebonwhite's blind probing can stumble upon them again. For what I've got in mind, a well-equipped Wind Breaker shall serve as a valuable piece in the game.\"\n\n\"The Well Diggers won't remain undisturbed. Though I've not spoken of the place, surely Mallow or one of the other survivors will have told of the location by now.\"\n\n\"There were no other survivors. I saw to that. Mallow is in my employ now. He's a fine employee, and quite able to remain silent for the proper price, it turns out.\"\n\nA brief cry of pain and a sickening thud echoed down the hall. Tender\u2014or more accurately Tusk\u2014snapped his watch shut.\n\n\"Punctual as always. That is my signal to take my leave. It seems the incomparable Lucius P. Alabaster is about to escape. We'll be in touch, Lucius, just as soon as I've worked out how best to deal with that pesky Calderan Problem\u2026\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Ring of Fire Anthology 3) Ring of Fire III", + "author": "Eric Flint", + "genres": [ + "alternate history", + "time travel", + "Europe", + "short stories" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Upward Mobility by Charles E. Gannon", + "text": "[ June 1634 ]\n\n\"We are almost at the border of Grantville, Herr Miro.\"\n\nEstuban Miro tried to nod an acknowledgement, but the motion was lost amidst the greater swayings and jouncings imparted by the wagon's passage across yet another set of muddy ruts. Miro had heard of the wonderful roads in and around Grantville, of their many improvements, but this was not one of those major thoroughfares. Political unrest in Franconia had peaked in the past few months, prompting the regional teamsters to give it a wide berth. Ultimately, that had meant a final approach on this narrow, twisting pike that pushed into Grantville out of Hersfeld, well to the west.\n\nDespite the presumed safety of the route, the driver had been slightly more alert the last few miles. Just south of the light forest that hemmed in this modest lane, the road from troubled Suhl wound its way north into Grantville. Indeed, according to the driver, even along this pike, recent reports of\u2014\n\nThere were sudden, sharp noises in the brush. Cracking branches and the unmistakable rustling of rapid, even violent motion. Miro's hand went to his dagger, a move which prompted the driver to scrabble for the rude ox prod cum cudgel that he kept at his side.\n\nAs Miro tracked the approaching noise, he noticed a small glade just beyond the treeline to the east. This was an excellent ambush point for bandits, particularly since the slight dogleg in this stretch of the road hid it from both its east and west continuations.\n\nThe low brush seemed to burst outward at them; Miro drew his dagger, went into a crouch\u2014and froze. A small, wooly ram\u2014a merino?\u2014leaped out into the roadway. Right behind it\u2014generating a much larger explosion of sundered underbrush\u2014was an equally immature ram of much less prepossessing appearance. The horns of both animals were small and ineffectual, but evidently spring had awakened their nascent rutting aggression. Or at least it had so affected the pursuer, who made up for his lack of comeliness with an inversely proportionate allotment of spunk. Charging stoutly, he routed the other ruminant eastward. Then, with what seemed a singularly defiant\u2014and self-satisfied\u2014glance at the wagon and its occupants, the unbecoming ramlet trotted further westward along the road.\n\nAnother commotion in the underbrush augured further drama: a boy\u2014perhaps nine years old\u2014broke free of the clutching foliage in a thrashing tumble of leaves and limbs. He jumped up and swore vehemently: \"Heugabel!\" Ignoring the wagon and its occupants, his searching gaze found the young ram's receding rump. The boy's mouth opened wide; invective streamed out: \"Ess-oh-Essen, du verdammten scheisskopf! Komm' doch hier! Schnell!\" And, the sound of his further exhortations dwindling along with his spare form, the boy\u2014and his wooly charge\u2014were lost to sight.\n\nThe wagoneer shook his head. \"Here, around Grantville, ist all-vays trubble. Even der rams are rebellisch... 'rebelyus,' I tink ist die Englisch wort.\" He shook his head again. \"All-vays trubble.\"\n\nMiro shrugged and carefully resheathed his dagger. Trouble, he supposed, was in the eye of the beholder. Miro had begun his journey to Grantville by debarking upon the shadiest wharves of Genoa, then heading north to begin his transalpine journey via Chiavenna. That newly open city had been tense: still patrolled by various Hapsburg detachments, this gateway to the Valtelline had lately become a hotbed of suspicion and intrigue.\n\nOf course, Italy in general was tense. The anti-Spanish restiveness in Naples was increasing steadily. Rome had been simmering higher as Philip of Spain became increasingly impatient with Urban VIII's \"irresolute stance\" toward heretical faiths. And with Galileo's much-anticipated trial approaching...Estuban Miro had simply been glad to leave Italy when he did. As a marrano\u2014a \"hidden Jew\" of Iberian origin\u2014any region in which both Spanish truculence and religious intolerance were on the rise was a region he preferred avoiding.\n\nHis transalpine journey had been slow (as he had been warned), but not particularly arduous: the light, intermittent snows of spring had been far less trouble than the run-off from the post-winter melt. The passes weren't the only messy parts of Switzerland, though: tariffs, tolls, and other administrative pilferings mired every border between the cantonments. Once beyond the alps in Konstanz, his travel choices had been either an armed caravan through still-embattled and bandit-ridden Swabia, or a barge up the Rhine and over on the Main to Frankfurt. And thence by wagon, and occasional cart, to\u2014well, to this very spot on the road.\n\nThe trees diminished on either side of the lane as it neared a more substantial east-west road. The driver pointed to the northeast, where the land seemed to jump up with an eerie suddenness: the famed rampart that was an artifact of the Ring of Fire. \"Grantville,\" he announced. And with a shake of his head, he predictably amended, \"Trubble.\"\n\nMiro smiled. For the driver, the growing cluster of strange buildings and strange customs would certainly define \"trouble.\" But for Estuban Miro, it simply meant \"new and different.\"\n\nAnd that, in turn, meant \"opportunity.\"\n\n[ July 1634 ]\n\nDon Francisco Nasi rose and proferred his right hand as Miro entered. The reputed spymaster's shake was not perfunctory, but it was brief.\n\nSitting in unison with his host, Estuban noted that this office, like every other he had seen in Grantville, was spartan by Mediterranean standards. Indeed, it was austere by any standards of the world outside the borders of this strange town, even considering that this small room was merely Nasi's occasional \"satellite office\": his duties were now in Magdeburg.\n\nDon Francisco evidently eschewed small talk: \"I'm sorry we could not meet earlier. My work for the Congress of Copenhagen was quite time consuming. Tell me, how are you enjoying Grantville, so far?\"\n\n\"It is full of wonders, mysteries, and puzzlements. I had heard the tales, of course, even seen some of the books. But it does not prepare one for...all of this.\"\n\nNasi almost smiled. \"Yes, it can be a bit overwhelming. Perhaps that is why you have not yet called upon my brothers or cousins? After all, it is not every day that a relative from the Mediterranean arrives in Grantville.\"\n\nMiro managed not to smile: Nasi was tactful, but wasted little time. \"It would not have been appropriate, Don Francisco. It was best that I made my presence generally known in town so that you might\u2014assess me\u2014first.\"\n\n\"'Assess you'?\" Don Francisco repeated mildly.\n\n\"Of course: to determine if I am whom I claim to be.\"\n\nNasi spread his hands in dismay. \"But you could no doubt furnish us with letters of introduction from your many commercial contacts. Or from your own father, my father's nephew\u2014\" and he stopped when he saw Miro's widening smile.\n\nMiro shifted into Hebrew as he asked: \"My father is your father's nephew? Hmm: shall I trace the entwined branches of our family trees, Reb Francisco? My father is your father's first cousin once removed, not his nephew. Joaquin Nasi is your grandfather through his son\u2014your father\u2014Mendo. Joaquin is my great-grandfather through his daughter Ana, my grandmother. But this proves little: any clever impostor would think to memorize our family tree.\"\n\nDon Francisco smiled, responded in the same language. \"Perhaps\u2014but not many could recite it so concisely and certainly as that, cousin. And I doubt any impostors would be able to mimic that Mallorquin accent so well, as well as the small linguistic quirks of Palma's xuetas.\"\n\nMiro answered Nasi's smile with one of his own. \"You have a keen ear, Don Francisco.\" Even other marranos usually failed to discern his origins as a son of Mallorca's Jewish\u2014or xueta\u2014community. Even when Estuban allowed his home dialect to emerge.\n\nNasi leaned forward, all business again\u2014but now, with a decidedly sympathetic undercurrent. \"So tell me: why do you have no letters of recommendation? As I hear it, you have contacts in Venice\u2014\"\n\nMiro waved a negating hand. \"Impossible. Seeking their attestations would have compromised my family in Palma.\"\n\nOne of Nasi's eyebrows elevated. \"How so?\"\n\nMiro shifted to Spanish, and adopted the bearing and diction of a true hidalgo. \"Don Francisco, I was not just any marrano. No one outside of the xueta community in Palma knew I was a Jew. No one. The marranos I dealt with in Portugal thought me a Spaniard. And I never undertook any action, or entered into any relationship, that connected me with other marranos\u2014including my own family. That is why I have not been back to the Balearics in eight years.\"\n\nDon Francisco leaned back, and despite his legendarily imperturbable demeanor, his mouth hung open a little. \"Eight years?\"\n\nMiro nodded. \"I went on my first trading voyage when I was seventeen. My father decided I had a gift for commerce and for navigating the various social complexities that it implies for us marranos. So at nineteen, it was decided that I was to be withdrawn from activity beyond the xueta community. I disappeared, insofar as the outside world was concerned.\"\n\nDon Francisco nodded, understanding. \"So you could emerge with a different identity, six years later, groomed to pass as a hidalgo and to operate as one in all regards, down to the smallest detail. And all the records of your community's hidden holdings, accounts, contacts\u2014?\"\n\nMiro tapped his temple. \"All up here. Never written down, not one bit of it.\"\n\n\"And your credentials were never questioned?\"\n\nMiro kept his shrug modest. \"Why would they be? I never attended a court, I never went to a ball, I never proposed a joint family venture, I never wooed a gentleman's daughter. My purpose\u2014and my activities\u2014were purely business, and my demeanor and speech were my bona fides.\"\n\n\"So, given your extreme separation, how did you manage to function as a factor for the xuetas in Palma?\"\n\n\"By working as a cargo broker only, and by making sure that my terminal clients in the Mediterranean were non-Jews who had a record of preferring to do business with the xuetas of Palma. I was able to impose terms on most transactions which made it inevitable that they would be brought\u2014advantageously\u2014to my community. Whose merchants would know, by a variety of codes, that it was I who had sent the deal to them. The money I made as a broker and speculator was, however, the source of our greatest gains, and I funneled both my profits, and my community's, into separate accounts in Venice. My family and friends access theirs through a lawyer who specializes in handling confidential transactions in the Rialto.\"\n\nNasi frowned. \"And you left your position\u2014why?\"\n\n\"Firstly, many excellent opportunities in the Mediterranean were compromised when the Nasis departed en masse from the Ottoman Empire.\" He allowed himself a smile at Don Francisco's raised eyebrows. \"I do not criticize your decision; indeed, have I not made the same one myself? But the regional consequences were undeniable: the marrano business networks that you managed in the Mediterranean faltered when your direct control dissipated.\n\n\"Besides, the trade in the Mediterranean is changing and as it does, it attracts new scrutiny. Any determined attempt to track where my trades ultimately resolve would reveal a suspiciously high percentage of them ending quite favorably in the hands of the xuetas of Palma. Not that I am particularly worried about the Spanish government: Olivares' hordes of auditors and investigators have troubles enough without worrying about small fish such as myself. Besides, they would only discover that I am facilitating trade upon which they grow ever more dependent, as their failures in war and diplomacy mount.\"\n\nNasi nodded. \"So, since exposing your past did not threaten you personally, your primary fear was for how it might impact your community.\"\n\n\"Exactly. I was particularly worried by a group of broadly inquisitive Portuguese nationalists that I knew: they would have found me extremely useful against their Spanish occupiers. Even though attempts at directly extorting me would have been fruitless, the related knowledge of how we xuetas have been manipulating trade would been decisive leverage against my community.\"\n\nNasi steepled his fingers. \"Our old Ottoman masters might have seen a similar advantage in coercing you to become their confidential agent\u2014and not just with regard to the Spanish, but all the European nations of the Mediterranean.\n\nMiro nodded. \"So, to protect my community, I left my life as a broker quickly, unannounced\u2014and with no time or opportunity to access my own funds in Venice.\"\n\n\"And now you hope to go into business in Grantville?\"\n\n\"That is my hope. Although I am open to opportunities involving an official position, as well.\"\n\nEvidently Don Francisco heard the subtle inquiry; he shook his head\u2014sadly, Miro thought: \"Had you arrived two years ago...\" Nasi shrugged. \"But now, if I tried to\u2014to find a place\u2014for you, there would be strong accusations of nepotism. And let us speak truth: what credentials, besides your claims of who you are and what you have done, do I have of your abilities and accomplishments?\"\n\n\"None whatsoever.\" Miro smiled and stood. \"My regards to your family.\"\n\n[ August 1634 ]\n\nWhile he waited for the bank's chief officer, Se\u00f1or\u2014no, \"Mister\"\u2014Walker, to finish guiding an elderly lady through a lien agreement, Estuban Miro considered his unusual situation. He was, by any reasonable assessment, a relatively affluent man, yet all his money was trapped in a Venetian bank. Radio was, unfortunately, no answer to his predicament. Even if access had not been highly restricted, no responsible bank would transmit or receive confidential instructions through these devices, since their nonofficial operations were expressly excluded from any assurances of secrecy.\n\nSo he would have to endure the to-and-fro tedium of exchanging bonded letters with Venice. The first several would be necessary to establish his identity, achieved through a multi-tiered set of codes and checks. Next would come detailed financial instructions, and finally, the actual transfer of credit to the bank here in Grantville. Even if he was fortunate, it would be at least four months before any of his assets\u2014other than his emergency stash\u2014became available.\n\nSo here he sat, waiting to see if there was a way to parlay his remaining travel monies into real estate. If the bank was willing to extend him any credit whatsoever, it might allow him to buy a humble property in which he himself could live while subsisting upon the meager rents generated by boarders. The plan elicited a small grin: the price of his newfound freedom was, evidently, a life of penurious humility. His old, Talmud-spouting neighbor in Palma would have found much to appreciate in this pass of events.\n\nHowever, it wasn't the frugality of the investment that irked Miro: it was the wrongness of it. There was a new kind of business booming here in Grantville, which was the epicenter of an expanding trade in information and credit-based (or as some called it, \"liquid\") finance. In all the known world, only Venice and Amsterdam had possessed primitive precursors of this kind of fluid commercial network. And of course they\u2014and so many others\u2014had now assiduously studied and selectively adapted the vast array of up-time financial instruments for the specific needs of their rapidly altering markets.\n\nThese trends were spawning a peculiar kind of economy, particularly in Grantville: here, the power of the up-timer bourse was not vested in traditional accumulations of common goods, coin, and land, but in a far-flung network of high-value, and often rare, equipment, information, and expertise. Interestingly, many of the most lucrative contracts involving the transfer of these \"new goods\" resembled the contraband trade. The freight was extremely low-volume, high-value, and required maximum security: the most common examples were bonds, contracts, bank notes, correspondence, research, copied up-time books, sometimes gems and specie. And in addition to safe transport, these objects also wanted rapid transport: it seemed that a constant challenge in this new economy was that its crucial assets were always needed in too many places at precisely the same time. And that, Miro knew, was the key to a whole new kind of wealth: anyone who could figure a way to swiftly and safely move these key resources from one nexus of need to another would become a very rich man, indeed.\n\nBut how to do it? Airplanes possessed the obvious, needed characteristics\u2014but, just as obviously, were not a practical answer at all. Regularly chartering airplanes was as completely out of the question as was owning them. Those few that existed were already overtaxed, and those in private hands seemed to spend half of their working hours commandeered by the government or its confidential agents. Furthermore, the airplane's need of specialized infrastructure\u2014airfields, prepositioned fuel and maintenance caches, repair personnel and ground crew\u2014made the establishment of a broad, commercial network based upon these rare and complex vehicles something far beyond his capacity for investment, even if all his Venetian resources were at his fingertips...\n\nBut they were not, and that lack echoed the very problem he sought to solve: if only there was a faster way to transfer the funds, to access his remote capital for a timely local investment...\n\nMiro caught movement from the corner of his eye: Coleman Walker was finally heading his way, the banker's elderly customer now being escorted to her safe deposit box by a teller. However, before Walker crossed half the distance, his subordinate\u2014an eager, but somewhat disheveled looking fellow named Marlon Pridmore\u2014rose and snared his manager with an eager, urgent phrase. Behind, the elderly lady reemerged from the vault, evidently in some dither of uncertainty, her eyes scanning intently for her implicit savior, Mr. Walker.\n\nMiro, sensing a further delay in the offing, edged closer\u2014and heard Marlon Pridmore gushing: \"So we've got the burner running at peak efficiency now, even with alternate fuels.\" Walker, facing slightly away from Pridmore, rolled exasperated eyes as his employee burbled on: \"I tell you, Coleman, that balloon of mine is going to soar...\"\n\nBy which time the little old lady had returned: she scooped her desperate arm through Walker's, who allowed himself to be drawn away with an apologetic glance.\n\nWhich Miro hardly saw. All he could see was the radiant glee of the ballooning enthusiast who stood before him, albeit now somewhat sheepishly.\n\n\"Sorry, sir\u2014I just get carried away when I'm talking about the balloon I'm building.\" Pridmore looked away guiltily. \"Other folks can get pretty tired hearing about it.\"\n\n\"Not me,\" Miro averred flatly. \"Tell me more.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Pridmore did just that. In excruciating detail. Miro estimated that he had understood about one third of Pridmore's discursis, possessed a vague conceptual appreciation of a second third, and was absolutely baffled by the rest. But he also knew that none of that mattered: what mattered was that Mr. Marlon Pridmore\u2014an indifferently skilled bank officer\u2014might be able to construct a working balloon. Or, in Estuban Miro's mind, a commercially viable form of air transport.\n\nPridmore was wrapping up: \"I'm actually amazed you can follow all this, Mr. Miro, particularly without any drawings or models to show you. Understanding a blimp is easier when you can see it.\"\n\n\"Well, then: may I see it?\"\n\nPridmore, like a proud father being asked to display his newborn child, beamed mightily. \"Why, sure you can! Whenever you want.\"\n\nMiro rose. \"How about now?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "The ride to Pridmore's house was not long, and was the first Miro had ever taken in an up-time automobile. But he almost failed to notice the marvels of this conveyance, so focused were this thoughts.\n\nBalloons. He had read a little about them in the library already. They were not fast in terms of absolute velocity\u2014certainly not in comparison to airplanes\u2014but, like airplanes, balloons recognized few obstacles. Because the sky was their home, they flew as straight as the crow, rather than crawling as crooked as the tortoise. And for them, airfields were not required: a network of the simple support facilities would be easy enough to set up in communities located at the right intervals. And the operation of a blimp was, in comparison to piloting an airplane, almost laughably simple: it was the difference between manning a rowboat on a fishpond and steering a three-masted merchantman through treacherous reefs.\n\nAnd bandits and toll collectors could only stare up and wonder what small treasures might be nestled in the gondola above them, seemingly close overhead, but for all practical purposes, as distant from their greedy hands as the wealth of Prester John's fabled kingdom.\n\nPridmore's balloon turned out to be a surprisingly simple device. Large when inflated\u2014it would measure 150 feet in length, and 60 in girth\u2014it became so small when deflated that it would easily fit in its own, longboat-sized, wicker gondola. Two engines\u2014up-time devices once used to propel small, two-wheeled vehicles\u2014provided the motive force that pushed the floating lozenge through the air. Close beneath the bag\u2014or \"envelope\"\u2014of the vehicle was what Pridmore called a \"burner\"\u2014a special torch which sent new hot air upwards to keep the canvas inflated. Miro found himself deeply impressed by the elegance and practicality of the whole vehicle.\n\nOr at least, of its many unassembled pieces: they lay about the master ballooner's small barn in what almost looked like disarray, the envelope itself still a pile of unsewn strips. Miro gestured toward the gear: \"It seems that you have a long way to go before your airship is ready, Mister Pridmore.\"\n\nMarlon\u2014who was also called \"Swordfish,\" for reasons having to do with an obscure pun on piscine nomenclature\u2014nodded sadly. \"Yeah, got a ways to go with this ol' girl. Just me and Bernard doing the work. A few other folks pitch in\u2014when they have the time.\"\n\n\"Can you not hire more workers?\"\n\nPridmore stared sideways at him. \"On my salary? Not hardly. I'm lucky to have a week where I get twenty hours to work on her.\" He sighed and stared longingly at the somewhat chaotic collection of airship components. \"Not like I haven't had offers, though.\"\n\nMiro turned to face Pridmore. \"To what offers are you referring?\"\n\n\"Well, there was a bunch of Venetian fellows who came out here just last week. Said they had come all the way from Italy just to learn how to build aircraft\u2014any aircraft. But none of the airplane firms wanted 'em: they've got more staff and apprentices than they can pay, right now, and these Venetian fellas didn't have any prior experience with up-time machines. So they wound up coming here. They were plenty interested but couldn't stick around: said they needed a salary more than knowledge, so they left. Can't say as how I blame them. Last I heard, they were trying to scrape enough dollars together just to get back to Venice.\"\n\nMiro began walking to the barn door; Pridmore looked up, surprised, and trotted after. \"Where are you goin', Mr. Miro?\"\n\n\"If you would be so good as to drive me back to town, Mr. Pridmore, I have some new business to conduct there.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "An hour from closing time, the tubular door chimes sounded, causing Nicolo Peruzzi to look up from securing the display case in the front room of Roth, Nasi, & Partners, Jewelry Sales and Lapidary Services. His first instinctual hope was that it might be a customer, but one glance made him conclude otherwise.\n\nHe had seen this fellow before\u2014a handsome, saturnine man of about thirty years with a hint of the hidalgo about him. And today he seemed more Mephistophelean than usual. Perhaps it was because he entered the store alone, and Peruzzi was\u2014uncharacteristically\u2014without nearby employees. Perhaps it was because of the fellow's careful backward glance into street, as if checking to ensure that he was neither followed nor under observation. Or perhaps it was because of the long, straight dagger he produced as soon as the door had closed behind him.\n\nPeruzzi's hand went to the large button under the rear lip of the display case and remained there, quite taut. Was this fellow\u2014named Miro?\u2014really going to rob him? In broad daylight? It was known that, although Miro was a wealthy man, he was struggling financially, still separated from his funds in Venice. But had he really become so desperate? And so stupid? Did he really think he would get more than a mile from the store before the police\u2014?\n\nBut Miro smiled at Peruzzi and pointed with his finger\u2014not the dagger: \"May I borrow that small\u2014do you say, 'screwdriver'?\u2014please?\"\n\nWordlessly, and now as thoroughly baffled as he had been terrified, Peruzzi complied.\n\nMiro used the screwdriver to wedge up the brass band that secured the narrow neck of the pommel to the end of the dagger's grip. Then, exerting pressure in the opposite direction, he levered the pommel off the hilt. As it fell into Miro's hand, Nicolo saw that it was hollow\u2014and that, nestled inside, were two rubies and an emerald, the latter of a most prodigious size.\n\nSometime later\u2014seconds? minutes?\u2014Nicolo Peruzzi realized that he had been staring at the green stone, and that his jaw had been hanging slack. As he closed it with an embarrassed snap, Miro smiled faintly and said: \"I am told that up-time gem-cutting techniques can dramatically increase the value of these stones. What share of the emerald would you charge to undertake this service for me?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The Venetians were not hard to find in the Thuringen Gardens. In the first place, there were nine of them. In the second place, they had obviously been nursing well-watered wine and a few pretzels for a very long time. In the third place, they wore the morose expressions of the underemployed.\n\nMiro sat down without invitation. \"May I buy the table a round of drinks?\"\n\nFrom that moment on, no invitations were needed. Nor credentials. Nonetheless, Estuban Miro provided a (strategically edited) review of his assets, prospects, and immediate interests: to wit, constructing an airship. He ended by staring hard at the one who seemed to be the group's leader, a fellow named Franchetti. \"Can you build it?\"\n\n\"What? Signor Pridmore's airship?\" Franchetti shrugged. \"Our conversation with him never went so far. After all, we came here to build air-o-planes.\"\n\n\"Airplanes,\" Miro corrected him.\n\n\"Si: air-o-planes. But we learned that we did not have the skills for that work. Or the knowledge. And for every up-timer who could teach us, there are a hundred, maybe a thousand, down-timers who want to learn. And it is a long process\u2014made longer if one does not read English.\"\n\n\"Or does not read at all,\" grumbled his beefiest partner.\n\n\"Si: this is true. The balloon\u2014that would be easier. But Signor Pridmore, he does the work himself; he has no way to pay us. And we must eat.\"\n\n\"And, I fear, go home,\" added another sadly, watching a bevy of jeans-clad young women, recent high school grads, swaying past, the denim evidently painted on their hips.\n\nMiro kept his eyes upon Franchetti's. \"If Signor Pridmore were to let you watch him at his work, and explain his procedures as he did so, do you think you could learn to build it?\"\n\nThe Venetian shrugged. Among the French, that gesture would have meant, \"it simply cannot be done.\" Among Italians, it meant \"of course it can be done.\" His words matched the motion: \"Yes, the balloon is not so difficult, I think. We have the right kind of skills. Sails, wheel locks, ships, dyes, even clocks\u2014one or more of us have had a hand in crafting all these things in Venice. The work we saw Signor Pridmore doing\u2014the physical tasks\u2014appeared simple enough. But what to do, and why, and in what order?\" He shook his head. \"Of this, we have only a small understanding.\"\n\n\"Or no understanding,\" put in the beefiest one again. Miro decided that this large brooding fellow\u2014apparently named Bolzano\u2014could not be a bad sort: he was too forthright about his own cognitive limitations.\n\nThe wiry leader went on. \"But together, we could learn to copy what he does. Particularly if he will take the time to explain each action and its purpose.\"\n\nMiro allowed himself the luxury of a small smile. \"That, I think, can be arranged,\" he said, producing a purse that attracted the eyes of the Venetians like a magnet attracts iron filings.\n\n[ October 1634 ]\n\nMarlon Pridmore clapped an encouraging hand down on Franchetti's narrow shoulder. The Venetian foreman nodded gratitude and withdrew to study the burner yet again. \"They're clever guys, most of them,\" Pridmore averred with a nod as he came to stand beside Miro. \"Hardly need all the tutoring you're paying me to give them. They'll build you a fine balloon, sure enough.\"\n\n\"They have an excellent teacher.\"\n\nPridmore looked abashed and very, very proud. \"Aw, I jus'\u2014\"\n\n\"You have taught them as no one else could. Their progress is extraordinary.\" Yes, Miro added to himself, so extraordinary that they are already outpacing you, Marlon. Not that there was any surprise in that; a handful of part-time enthusiasts were no match for nine artisans working full time. But that speed of construction had a price\u2014nine salaries worth, to be exact. So Miro had to use his limited funds as efficiently as possible, which gave him no choice but to complete his own airship before Pridmore's. But one particular difficulty had begun to loom large: \"Mr. Pridmore, I am concerned about our engines.\"\n\n\"What about them? Don't they work?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014I mean, I believe so. But they are not the same as yours. They are\u2014what is the term?\u2014'lawn-mower' engines. And this is where the understanding of my men is so very limited. Is there any chance that they could receive some special tutoring in regards to these engines? That, for an additional consideration, you might guide them through\u2014?\"\n\n\"An additional consideration? Don Estuban, your weekly fee for my services is plenty enough as it is. But I'll tell you what: some of the real small-engine experts are over at Kelly Aircraft. And Kelly always needs extra money. So if you could push a few hundred at him\u2014\"\n\n\"It will be as you say. And if you will be so kind as to be my intermediary to Mr. Kelly, I believe it is only right that you receive fifteen percent of the fee I will give him. This is your 'finder's fee' principle, yes?\"\n\n\"Well, yes\u2014but maybe you could help me with something else, instead.\"\n\n\"If I can, I will.\"\n\n\"Well, it's like this: to make the canvas really hold the air, I need to coat it with a blend of different substances. And one of them is pretty hard to get, up here.\"\n\n\"Oh? And what is that?\"\n\n\"Gum arabic. I'm telling you, with a few gallons of that stuff, I could\u2014\"\n\n\"I believe I have a connection for that substance, Mr. Pridmore. And I think he owes me enough old favors that it can be made available at a very reasonable price.\"\n\nPridmore's gleeful expression made his answer redundant. \"Not a problem, Don Estuban. Hell, I was worried that I might not be able to afford enough\u2014or maybe any\u2014gum arabic. So this is great news, just great.\"\n\n\"I am happy to be of service,\" said Miro with a small bow, and a smaller smile.\n\n\"Not as pleased as I am for your help, Don Estuban.\"\n\nStaring at the engines, Miro straightened and let his smile expand. \"I assure you, Mr. Pridmore, the pleasure is all mine.\"\n\n[ December 1634 ]\n\nFrancisco Nasi watched Piazza reading the report. \"Miro's airship is already closer to completion than Pridmore's. Much closer.\"\n\n\"Mmmm-hmmm,\" Piazza subvocalized.\n\n\"He's very good at what he does.\"\n\n\"Pridmore?\"\n\n\"No: Miro.\"\n\n\"You mean, building airships?\"\n\nNasi sighed; every time he made one of his brief returns to Grantville, Piazza seemed to take a subtle delight in becoming marginally more obtuse. \"No, Ed: I mean Miro is very good at getting information, managing relationships, coordinating disparate operations and drawing upon widely divergent resources.\"\n\nEd put down the report. \"What are you saying?\"\n\nNasi shrugged. \"I'm saying that you might want to consider Miro's capabilities in the context of a more\u2014permanent\u2014relationship with this government.\"\n\n\"You mean, as a spy?\"\n\n\"No. As an intelligence officer. Maybe even chief of intelligence, eventually.\"\n\nPiazza put aside his glasses: it was an exasperated gesture. \"Francisco, we've already got one of those.\" He stared meaningfully at Grantville's resident spymaster.\n\n\"For now, yes. But Mike anticipates that when his time as prime minister is over, he is likely to relocate, and my own interests might take me in the same direction.\"\n\n\"Oh, so we're back to the imminent Prague exodus again....\"\n\n\"Ed, I understand you don't welcome the thought of it, much less the actuality, but I have a duty there\u2014not just to the USE, but to my people. Sooner or later, I must\u2014\" He sent a desultory wave toward the east. Toward Prague.\n\nPiazza made a sound that resembled \"Umhh-grumpff\" and looked at the reports on Miro's airship project again. \"So you think he could do your job?\"\n\nFrancisco shrugged. Was it his merchant's instinct not to \"hard sell\" Miro\u2014or a sense of pride\u2014that kept him from simply answering \"yes\"? Instead he said, \"His mind is nimble, highly adaptive, but also capable of sustained focus. He speaks and writes six languages. He is a trained observer of nuances, including social ones\u2014such as those required to construct and to live an assumed identity for almost ten years. He has extraordinary knowledge of one of our most urgent intelligence areas, having unparalleled familiarity with waters, ports, and markets of the Mediterranean. And he learns very, very quickly.\"\n\n\"So you've been watching him? And he's reliable?\"\n\n\"Yes, to both.\"\n\n\"Do you think he knows you're watching him?\"\n\n\"Of course he knows. As I said, he's very good at what he does.\"\n\n[ January 1635 ]\n\nMarlon Pridmore walked around the large barn that Miro had rented, staring at the neatly arranged airship components at its center.\n\n\"You know, I would have been happy to do this without the extra\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Pridmore, please. It is the least I could offer. Your presence here is of immense help to us.\"\n\nPridmore snorted out a laugh. \"Really? Hell, I wish my shop looked so good\u2014or I was so far along.\" He started walking again, eyeing the rows of empty fuel tanks professionally. \"Giving yourself a lot of operating range, eh?\"\n\n\"Or more payload over shorter distances\u2014and at higher speeds.\"\n\nPridmore stopped. \"How high a speed?\"\n\n\"It is our objective to be able to operate at thirty-five mph.\"\n\nPridmore started, then glanced back at the envelope. \"Thirty-five mph? Then you're building it wrong.\"\n\nMiro felt a stab of panic deep in his bowels, but gave no sign of it. \"Wrong in what way?\"\n\n\"Well, you need a keel and a nose-frame; you can't just have an unsupported bag.\"\n\nMiro's response was the most routine sentence he used when discussing balloons with Marlon Pridmore. \"I don't understand: what do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, if you try to get an unsupported hot air envelope up to 35 mph, it's going to deform on you.\"\n\nMiro felt an incipient frown and kept it off his face. \"Can you explain that to me...erm, visually?\"\n\n\"Oh, sure. You've seen soap bubbles, right?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And they stay round as they float through the air, right?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But what happens if you blow too hard on them\u2014either with the wind or against it?\"\n\nMiro thought for a second, then nodded. \"Their shape begins to stretch, to warp. They can't really be pushed very hard without, without\u2014\"\n\n\"We would call it 'being deformed by atmospheric drag.' It's the same with a loose-bag blimp; there's only so fast you can go before the 'nose' of the bag starts dimpling and buckling: the air inside can't hold the shape against the pressure generated by the air friction on the outside.\"\n\n\"So you need a...an 'internal skeleton' to help it keep its shape.\"\n\n\"Right. In this case, you don't need more than a keel and a nose-cone\u2014sort of like a spine with an underslung umbrella at the front.\"\n\n\"I see. And you would know how to make this?\"\n\n\"Why, sure. And Kelly will have some good tips for you, too. Better, maybe.\"\n\n\"This is most helpful: please, let me compensate you for your advice.\"\n\n\"You already do compensate me for my advice. Damn, your money is helping me far more than my advice is helping you.\"\n\nMiro smiled as he opened his purse. \"Trust me when I insist that you are quite mistaken in that assumption, Mr. Pridmore; quite mistaken, indeed.\"\n\n[ March 1635 ]\n\nDespite the bitter wind that drove the cold rain sideways into every pedestrian's face, Francisco Nasi waved broadly at Miro and crossed the street toward him.\n\nMiro waved back and smiled. He had not seen much of Nasi over the last five months. Mike Stearns'\u2014and Ed Piazza's\u2014spymaster extraordinaire was usually in Magdeburg, often closeted for marathon meetings, and sometimes \"traveling on business\" to places about which only one thing was known: they were far away from Grantville. In consequence, Miro had had few opportunities to converse with Nasi again\u2014and whenever he did so, Miro sensed\u2014what? A shadow of guilt? A hint of regret?\n\nMiro took Francisco's extended hand, noted the same slightly melancholy smile. \"How are you, Don Francisco?\"\n\n\"I'm freezing, so my senses still function. And you, Don Estuban?\" Nasi's use of his full, correct title was code, but its message was quite clear: Nasi had learned that Miro's Venetian funds had finally arrived, were more considerable than even he had guessed, and\u2014most importantly\u2014were the proof positive that the xueta was exactly who he had claimed to be almost eight months earlier.\n\n\"I am well enough, Don Francisco. And my project is nearing completion.\" As if you didn't already know that.\n\n\"Excellent. But it must be very absorbing. We don't see much of you in town.\"\n\n\"But how would you know if I'm in town, Don Francisco? Your presence here seems much rarer than mine.\"\n\n\"Touch\u00e9. But I have much family here, and they are my eyes and ears. On the streets, in the restaurants, elsewhere\u2014\"\n\nElsewhere. By which you mean, \"the synagogue.\"\n\nNasi looked up the street at nothing in particular. \"I have regretted that the circumstances of your arrival made it impossible to\u2014to welcome you, as was proper. As is traditional.\"\n\nMiro proferred a small bow. \"You had no choice, Don Francisco. Your official responsibilities must trump all other considerations.\"\n\n\"Yes. But only for as long as they must.\" Nasi put out his hand to say farewell, opened his mouth, waited a long moment before speaking. \"You have no family here. And a seder alone is no seder at all.\" Then Nasi smiled faintly, released Miro's hand, and, hunching over, hurried off into the cold.\n\nMiro looked after him: it had not been, strictly speaking, an invitation. But that would no doubt change when Estuban Miro made his appearance in the almost-repaired synagogue this coming Shabbat.\n\nHe trusted that the spitting rain hid any other moisture that might have made his eyes blink so quickly. To sit and pray in a synagogue once again. To share a seder once again. To hear and speak Hebrew. To be a Jew in something other than name and memory only. To reclaim his life after nine long years.\n\nEstuban stared up into the cold rain and felt suddenly warm, felt his soul rise with the promise of his almost-ready airship.\n\n[ April 1635 ]\n\nFranchetti angled the props upward a bit, driving the blimp toward the ground. Then he cut the engines, and pulled hard on the lead ground line.\n\nThe forward bow of the gondola pushed into the soft loam, and the night-time noises hushed; the moon stared down, bright and indifferent.\n\nAs the rest of the Venetians swarmed the craft\u2014affixing new lines, tossing in some ballast, opening flaps\u2014Franchetti hopped out, followed by Bolzano, his beefy assistant in all things. \"I am an aviator!\" Franchetti cried. \"I have flown like the birds!\"\n\nMiro smiled. \"Excellent work, Franchetti\u2014and you must not breathe a word of it.\"\n\n\"But Don Estuban\u2014\"\n\n\"This is as we agreed, Franchetti. Would you take away Signor Pridmore's joy at being the 'first' to fly in a balloon? After all he has done to help us build the Swordfish?\"\n\nFranchetti looked like a truant child. \"No, you are right, Don Estuban\u2014but did we not finish first? Long before him? And look at her! Is she not beautiful?\"\n\nNow sagging slightly in the moonlight, her abbreviated ribs showing, Miro thought the airship looked more akin to an emaciated maggot. \"She is beautiful indeed, Franchetti\u2014and I promise, in the future, you will be able to tell everyone that you were the first test pilot\u2014for the next airship we build.\"\n\nFranchetti stared at him. \"The next\u2014? So we are not done? Then why did you say that this was our final week of pay?\"\n\n\"Because now we change how you will be paid, Franchetti. I have been thinking that the master craftsmen who build my airships should also have the option to have part ownership in them. Of course, not all will want that. However, for those who do\u2014\"\n\nBut Franchetti was out of the gondola in a single leap and, landing with his arms around Miro, planted a sweaty kiss on each of the xueta's well-shaven cheeks. \"I will be an aviator!\" he shouted loudly into the night sky.\n\nSo loudly that Miro harbored a faint worry that Marlon Pridmore might have heard\u2014and might have lost the joy of thinking himself the first to fly one of the airships he had designed.\n\n[ May 1635 ]\n\nFrancisco Nasi's desk was almost bare, and the contents of his \"courtesy office\" were now mostly in boxes. Nasi was bound to depart within a few months, and the process of relocation was already underway. But right now, his attention was very much riveted on the report in front of him. \"I notice that President Piazza's agents picked up this man Bolzano just a day after you passed word to me that we keep an eye out for him, heading south. What I'm wondering is: why?\"\n\n\"Why what, Francisco?\"\n\n\"Why you wanted the local authorities advised to pick him up. And how you knew he was a confidential agent for 'other interests.'\"\n\nMiro shrugged. \"The answer to the second is also the answer to the first. Bolzano started out as self-deprecating, unskilled illiterate, only worried about securing a salary. But during the process of constructing the Swordfish, he proved to be a quick study, dedicated, resourceful. And when I offered extended contracts with better terms to all my workers, he demurred, pleading urgent business in Padua. Nonsense. He had to return south to report to his real employers, and so had to decline the permanent position\u2014which was wholly out of character for the role he had opted to play up here.\"\n\n\"Well, you were right\u2014although it seems he was not working directly for any government. Only a factotum for parties unnamed. But why did you recommend that President Piazza hold him in custody, Estuban?\"\n\n\"Firstly, Francisco, I suggested it to you.\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014and my responsibilities here are finished. I no longer have power in this matter.\"\n\nMiro decided not to look as dubious as he might have. \"Yes\u2014that's what all the official documents say. But it seems to me that President Piazza has asked you to, well, 'watch over' me this far, so I surmised that he might ask you to oversee this final related incident. Just as a means of ensuring a smooth transition, of course.\"\n\nNasi did not blink or move for five full seconds. Then he said, almost without moving his lips: \"I have certain\u2014discretionary allowances\u2014regarding the resolution of your current project. But let us return to the topic: why did you request that Bolzano be held?\"\n\n\"First tell me this: why have you elected to do so? My suggestion certainly isn't justifiable grounds for detaining a foreign national, is it?\"\n\nNasi shifted uncomfortably in his chair. \"You know it's not.\"\n\n\"Then I was right to guess that\u2014for a little while, at least\u2014Grantville's own intelligence 'brotherhood' would like to keep my balloon a secret.\"\n\n\"Well...yes. So far as it's possible, since the Venetians spoke openly about what they were doing. But most everyone thinks they are still building the first balloon, not the second.\"\n\n\"Yes; that was why I suggested you find and detain Bolzano. Not to protect the knowledge of how to make an airship; that will be common knowledge, soon enough\u2014particularly since this design is so simple. But Bolzano might also have informed others that we already had a working balloon.\"\n\n\"Yes, about that\u2014\"\n\nEstuban let himself smile. \"It's about Italy, isn't it?\"\n\nNasi's face became completely expressionless. \"How do you know?\"\n\n\"News like that travels quickly; by tomorrow at the latest, everyone in Grantville will know that there will soon be an anti-pope, and that Urban is missing.\" Miro smiled wider. \"Or is he? Because if Urban isn't missing\u2014if, instead, someone wanted to fly him out from a spot where there was no airfield, or fly in a special security team and their equipment\u2014I suspect it might be very helpful to have a balloon to expedite that kind of mission.\"\n\n\"So you can do it? You can fly to Northern Italy?\"\n\n\"I can lift three thousand pounds over the Alps and arrive in Brescia four to eight days after we start out. The journey would be in four legs. Leg one is to N\u00fcrnberg. Then to Biberach. Then across the Bodensee up to Chur in the Grissons cantonment. Then south over the Valtelline and onto the Northern Italian plain. Each leg is a three-hour trip, give or take. Assuming that we must arrange support at the endpoint of each leg, we should be able to make a flight every two or three days. If the support could be arranged ahead of time,\"\u2014Miro looked through the wall in the direction of the radio room\u2014\"we could perform a flight a day.\"\n\n\"So we\u2014that is, President Piazza\u2014could have a team on-site in four days?\"\n\n\"If you consider Brescia 'on-site,' then, yes: if the weather permits, four days. Assuming that President Piazza\u2014or even higher authorities\u2014can arrange the necessary support.\"\n\n\"And what kind of support will you need?\"\n\nMiro wondered, given the carefully rehearsed diction of that question, if it had been originally anticipated by Nasi, or Piazza, or Stearns\u2014or maybe all three. \"At each endpoint, we need a place to store the balloon\u2014which, given its segmented keel, folds down to fifty feet long and twenty wide. And we need enough fuel on site\u2014ethanol, methanol, lamp oil, fish oil\u2014for the balloon's next flight.\"\n\n\"Sounds simple.\"\n\n\"Oh, it is\u2014which is why I already have twelve transport contracts for when I begin commercial flights.\"\n\n\"Twelve? Already?\"\n\nMiro nodded. \"Six out of Venice, one from Lubeck, two from Amsterdam, one from Prague, two from Brussels.\"\n\n\"And you are carrying\u2014?\"\n\n\"A fair number of passengers, particularly diplomats and specialists. Lots of documents: data, research copies, bonds, certificates, and contracts of all sorts. Some specie, some spice, some lenses, even some gemstones and pearls. Low weight, high value. My rates are steep, but the transport is fast, safe, and almost entirely tariff-and toll-free.\"\n\n\"And could you carry a\u2014a 'special cargo' for President Piazza, first?\"\n\n\"Of course; here's the rate sheet.\"\n\nNasi studied it, blanched, and then looked a bit like a penniless farmer confronting a burly amtman. \"Estuban\u2014I can't\u2014I don't think the government here can pay these charges.\"\n\nMiro nodded, watching Nasi closely: another second and the spymaster might start mentioning how President Piazza might need to \"nationalize a key asset\u2014such as your balloon\u2014for the duration of the crisis.\" Probably not, but why risk having the deal move in that direction? By claiming poverty, Nasi had inadvertently given Miro the initiative: \"Let's keep the operating expenditures equal to my costs, Francisco: just have the president\u2014or your successor\u2014pay for the fuel and the crew. Besides, what's more important to me than your government's money is your government's political influence.\"\n\n\"What kind of influence?\"\n\n\"The kind that would allow my airship company to become a government partner in bulk purchasing and shipment of various kinds of fuel. The kind of influence that would help us get support facilities established in the cities we'd be servicing directly. The kind of influence that reduces or eliminates certain tariffs or taxes. In short, nothing that needs to come out of a president's\u2014or a spymaster's\u2014always overburdened operations budget.\" And Miro smiled.\n\nFrancisco smiled back. \"To quote a fine, if sentimental, movie I just saw, I suspect that President Piazza may consider this 'the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'\"\n\nMiro nodded. \"Casablanca. See? I'm acclimating. And none too soon, for today I am truly embarking upon the American Dream.\"\n\nFrancisco frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nEstuban feigned surprise. \"Why, I have attained what every person in Grantville is pursuing! Today, as my financial prospects promise to rise with my airship, its seems that I have literally achieved 'upward mobility.'\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Four Days on the Danube by Eric Flint ]" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "The first notice Rita had that something was amiss was on the startling side. The front door to the small apartment in Ingolstadt's military headquarters that she and her husband Tom had just finished settling into was blown in by an explosion. A splinter from the door sliced open her left arm just below the shoulder. Another splinter flew into her side and stuck there like a pin, just above the hip.\n\nThe blast itself sent her stumbling back. She tripped and fell into the fireplace. Where her dress caught fire.\n\nA man came through the door on the heels of the explosion. He had a wheel-lock pistol in his hand which he leveled at her and fired.\n\nThat was pretty much the low point of the evening. Luckily for Rita, the door hadn't been completely blown off the hinges. Half of it was still hanging in the entrance and a jagged edge caught the man's sleeve as he brought up the gun. His aim was thrown off and the bullet went into the fireplace instead of Rita's chest.\n\nSqualling with fear and anger, Rita scrambled out of the fireplace. She started slapping at her dress to extinguish the flames licking at the hem. Then, seeing that her assailant was bringing out another pistol, she left off trying to extinguish the flames and turned instead toward the mantelpiece. Her husband Tom kept his shotgun up there.\n\nShe wouldn't make it, she realized despairingly. By the time she\u2014\n\nAnother crash drew her head around. Tom had burst in from their bedroom. The front room of the apartment doubled as a dining area. Tom disarmed the gunman by the simple expedient of driving the dining table across the floor into the man's hip.\n\nTom Simpson was a former football lineman. If anything, the years since the Ring of Fire and his military service had put still more meat and muscle on his immense frame. And he certainly hadn't lost any strength. The table smashed into the assailant like a battering ram, smashing his hip and slamming him into the door frame. His eyes rolled up and he slumped into the room unconscious.\n\nNow that he was out of the doorway, Rita could see another assailant coming right behind. This one had a pistol also.\n\n\"Watch out, Tom!\" she shouted, as she brought the shotgun to bear.\n\nRita had been raised a country girl, the daughter and sister of coal miners. She'd been handling firearms since she'd gotten a .22 rifle for her eighth birthday and had been hunting pheasant and quail with a shotgun since she was ten.\n\nThat had been a 20 gauge, of course, suitable for a small girl. But she'd graduated to a 12 gauge long since.\n\nTom had the gun loaded for war, not hunting. The heavy slug punched the man back with a hole in his chest. If he wasn't dead already, he would be soon\u2014and either way, he was out of the action.\n\nA third man stood behind him in the corridor, a look of surprise on his face. He had his dying companion half-supported with one arm while he tried to bring his own pistol to bear with the other.\n\nRita pumped in another round. Since she didn't have a clear shot at the man's center mass, she aimed at his head instead. Later, she'd realize that she could have taken the much easier center mass shot. At that range, a solid slug fired from a 12 gauge would have blown right through the man standing in front. But this was her first gunfight\u2014and it was a mistake even experienced gunmen probably would have made.\n\nThe head shot missed, not surprisingly. But the man she'd fired at, who was also not thinking clearly, frantically pushed his dying comrade aside so he could bring up his own pistol and fire.\n\nAnd miss. The shot went completely wild, in fact, striking the wall of the corridor and never even making it into the room Rita was standing in.\n\nNow she had a center mass shot. She pumped in another round and fired.\n\nAnd missed. Her intended target, at least\u2014but the shot went high and struck her opponent on the side of the head. A chunk of his skull was torn off and the corridor was splattered with blood and brains all the way to the outside entrance another fifteen feet further down the corridor. The man spun completely around, dropping his pistol, and then collapsed on top of his companion.\n\nRita jacked in another round. The next thing she knew, she was doused with cold water.\n\n\"Hey!\" she squealed, spinning around to face this new attack. Just in time, she managed not to point the shotgun at her husband.\n\n\"Don't move, dammit,\" Tom growled. \"You're on fire.\" He had the faucet running in the basin and the saucepan under it. A couple of seconds later, he threw half the contents over her dress.\n\nLooking down, she saw that there were still some flames flickering along one edge.\n\nAnd her leg hurt. She'd been burned, she realized.\n\n\"Ow,\" she said.\n\nTom took the time with the third panful to lift up the hem of her dress and carefully pour the water over the still-burning and smoldering spots, instead of just splashing it on her.\n\n\"You'd better see to your wounds and change clothes,\" he said, setting the pan down on the table he'd used to disable the first assailant.\n\nWho, for his part, issued a groan.\n\nTom leaned over, lifted the man to his feet with one hand, slammed the back of his head against the door jamb again, then let him slump to the ground.\n\nThis impact was far more savage than the first. The man would be unconscious for hours. If he wasn't dead\u2014Tom was in a quiet fury and he was very strong.\n\n\"I've got to go see what's happening, hon,\" he said, reaching for the jacket of his uniform hanging by the door.\n\nFor the first time, Rita realized there was a cacophony of shouts and gunfire coming from outside. It sounded like the whole city was under attack.\n\nIt finally dawned on her that this hadn't been a house invasion by criminals.\n\n\"What do you think...?\"\n\nNow, Tom was buckling the holster with his sidearm around his waist. He'd had that hanging by the door also.\n\n\"At a guess, the Bavarians are attacking.\"\n\n\"But how'd they\u2014\"\n\n\"Get in? Treachery, I figure. Has to have been, as many as there are from the sounds of it.\"\n\nHis gun holstered, Tom stepped forward, reached out and plucked out the splinter above her hip. That was her first realization that it was there.\n\n\"That's probably nothing to worry about,\" Tom said. \"It's hardly even bleeding, from the looks of your dress. But you'd better see to your arm.\"\n\nFor a moment, he seemed to be dancing back and forth, obviously torn by indecision. Rita shook her head.\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" she said. \"Go see to your men.\"\n\nA moment later, he was gone. After giving the corridor a wary glance, Rita put the shotgun back on the mantelpiece and drew her left arm across her chest to get a better look at the wound.\n\nIt was bleeding a fair amount, but she didn't think it was really all that serious. The proverbial \"minor flesh wound\"\u2014except that now it was starting to hurt, damn it all.\n\nThey had some first aid supplies in a small chest in the bedroom. It was under the bed, since there wasn't much room in the apartment and the kit wasn't something they expected to be needing regularly. She went in, knelt down and looked under the bed. Not to her surprise, she discovered that the first aid kit had faithfully obeyed the Iron Law of Anything Put Under A Bed. By whatever mysterious means, it had migrated to the very center.\n\nSo, an already torn, dirty and blood-stained dress got a bit more wear and tear on it, while she half-crawled under the bed to drag out the kit. By the time she got it out, she was worried enough that she almost gave up the effort halfway through. The sounds of fighting from outside were unmistakable now. That was a pitched battle being waged out there, with rifles and grenades\u2014even an occasional cannon shot\u2014not some sort of raid or minor incursion.\n\nWith the kit finally in hand, she hurried to the apartment's basin. The military housing had running water, even if it didn't have electricity. Fortunately, there was enough light being shed by the fire and the two lamps in the room for her to start working on her wounds.\n\nThe one on her side proved to be minor, sure enough. The dress itself had absorbed most of the impact. But the wound on her arm was a different matter. Once she washed it off and could see the damage clearly, she winced. That gash was big enough and deep enough that it ought to be closed with stitches. But there was no way she would be able to manage that herself, one-handed. She'd just have to be satisfied with a pressure dressing. She wasn't worried about blood loss, as such. But without stitches, she'd wind up with a pretty nasty scar on her upper arm. She tried to console herself with the thought that sleeveless dresses weren't in fashion in the year 1636 anyway.\n\nThere was a small bottle of concentrated alcohol in the first aid kit. She used that to sterilize the wound\u2014which really hurt\u2014and then started awkwardly wrapping some (theoretically) sterile cloth around it.\n\nSounds coming from the corridor drew her attention away from the task. She snatched the shotgun off the mantelpiece.\n\nHearing female voices, she relaxed a bit. There was far too much fighting going on for there to be any enemy camp followers moving around. Then, recognizing one of the voices, she relaxed completely.\n\n\"In here, Willa!\" she shouted. \"I'm alone, and there's no danger!\"\n\nShe glanced down at the two dead men in the corridor. \"Well, no immediate danger, anyway,\" she added.\n\nA few seconds later, the shapes of three middle-aged women appeared in the corridor. They minced their way across the two bodies, taking care not to step on them.\n\nTheir gingerly manner had nothing to do with squeamishness. The nickname given to Willa Fodor, Maydene Utt and Estelle McIntire was \"the Three Auditors of the Apocalypse.\" Tenderhearted, they were not. But they were also no longer lithe and athletic girls, if they ever had been, and the sprawled corpses in the narrow hallway were not minor obstructions.\n\nFodor was the first one into the room, followed by Utt. As her sister-in-law Estelle came in, Maydene knelt down and checked the pulse of the third assailant whom Tom had smashed into the doorjamb, then reached behind his head.\n\n\"Well, he's with the Lord,\" she announced. \"Or wherever. What d'you do? Hit him with a train? The whole back of his skull's caved in.\"\n\n\"Uh... Tom slammed him into the door. He was really pissed.\"\n\nGrunting, Utt heaved herself back on her feet. She was a big woman. Not fat, particularly, just very heavily built. \"Well, I guess a really-pissed Tom Simpson will pass for a pretty good train imitation. Where is he now?\"\n\nRita nodded toward the door. \"Out there, somewhere. He left to see what was happening.\"\n\nBy then, Estelle had come up to look at Rita's arm.\n\n\"Hold still,\" she commanded. After a quick examination, she said: \"You got a needle and thread in that first aid kit?\"\n\nRita was tempted to say no. Sorely tempted. McIntire was about as skinny as her sister-in-law was hefty, but they shared the same temperament. It was the sort of middle-aged female Appalachian temperament for which phrases like quit your whining and stop being a baby came trippingly off the tongue. Estelle would sew up the wound without worrying much about minor issues like agony.\n\n\"You got medical training...?\" Rita ventured, half-hoping she might fend the woman off.\n\nEstelle sniffed. \"Who needs medical training for something like this? I've been sewing up torn clothes since I was six.\" She turned her head. \"Mary, give me a hand.\"\n\nFor the first time, Rita realized that two other people had followed the three auditors into the room. The one to whom Estelle had spoken was Willa Fodor's niece, Mary Tanner Barancek. The girl had graduated from high school a year and half earlier and had gone to work in Dr. Gribbleflotz's laboratories in Jena. Some sort of clash with her boss had led her to quit and she'd come down to the Oberpfalz to work for her aunt. She had some sort of dignified-sounding down-timer job title, but she was really a combination gofer and clerk.\n\nThe man standing next to her, on the other hand, had a job that actually matched the title. Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler was the private secretary for the Upper Palatinate's new administrator, Christian I of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler. He'd held the same position for the previous administrator, Ernst Wettin, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, before Wettin had been reassigned to Saxony.\n\nB\u00f6cler was a certain type of German official, by now quite familiar to Rita after four and a half years in the seventeenth century.\n\nPhysically, he was unprepossessing. He was in his mid-twenties. On the short side, fattish\u2014not obese, just plump\u2014with a pug nose, brown eyes, and a prematurely receding hairline. The hair itself was that indefinite shade of gray-brown that so often signaled a prematurely receding youth.\n\nWith respect to his skills, he was very competent. As you'd expect from a man who'd gotten his position because of those skills, not because of any great social standing. He'd been born in a small town in Franconia whose name Rita couldn't remember. His father had been a Lutheran pastor; his grandfather, the down-time equivalent of a high-school principal. A respectable family, certainly, but not a high-placed one.\n\nIn short, the sort of fellow you'd want at your side to keep track of the complex details of a political and commercial negotiation. Not the sort of fellow you particularly wanted at your side in the middle of a city that was being overrun by enemy soldiers.\n\nWhile Rita had been contemplating these matters in order to avoid thinking about the proximate future, Estelle McIntire had been preparing that future with Mary Barancek's assistance.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said, \"this going to hurt a little.\"\n\nThe needle went in.\n\n\"Ow!\" Rita squealed.\n\n\"Don't be a baby. It's just a few stitches.\"\n\nAgain.\n\n\"Owowowowow!\"\n\n\"Oh, quit whining.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Tom found his commanding officer dead in his quarters, just a block away. The door to the apartment had been blown in by the same sort of explosion that had destroyed Tom's own. Colonel Friedrich Engels' body was sprawled across the floor of his living room, half-dressed, with at least two gunshot wounds that Tom could see at a glance. The floor was covered with drying blood. A pistol was lying near the colonel's body that Tom recognized as belonging to Engels. It was a wheel lock and the mechanism hadn't been engaged. Obviously, the attack had come so quickly that Engels had been roused from sleep but hadn't had time to arm the weapon.\n\nReluctantly, partly because he didn't much like the idea of getting his boots soaked in his commander's blood but mostly because he was pretty sure what he was going to find, Tom stepped over Engels' body and went into the bedroom. As he'd expected, Engels' wife Hilde was dead too. Her body was sprawled across the bed. Her neck had a deep gash in it and the bedding was blood-soaked.\n\nTheir year-old daughter, who slept in a cradle against the wall, had also been murdered. Also with a sword, at a guess.\n\nDoing his best to control his fury, Tom hurried out of the apartment. He was now certain that the enemy\u2014whoever it was, but it almost had to be the Bavarians\u2014had launched a well-planned and coordinated assault on the city. There was no way they could have managed something like this without the aid of traitors, including traitors in the military.\n\nTom and Engels had worried about that, but there hadn't seemed to be much they could do about it at the moment. Tom's artillery unit was the only one made up entirely of volunteers, mostly recruited by the CoCs in Magdeburg and the State of Thuringia-Franconia. The rest of the soldiers in the regiment were the men left behind by the Swedish general B\u00e1ner when he left for Saxony with most of his army. Those soldiers were all mercenaries except for the Jaegers and boatmen\u2014the River Rats, as they were called\u2014recruited by Ernst Wettin while he'd been the administrator of the Oberpfalz. Clearly enough, a number of them had been persuaded to switch their allegiance to Duke Maximilian.\n\nOnce he was back out on the street, he could hear the sounds of fighting all over the city. He was sorely tempted to return to his quarters and help Rita make her escape, but he had duties of his own. With Engels dead, Tom was now the commanding officer of the regiment\u2014or whatever portions of it, at least, had not defected to the Bavarians.\n\nThe one unit he was sure of were his own artillerymen. He'd have to start there. He set off at a run toward their barracks against Ingolstadt's eastern wall." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\"What do we do now?\" asked Estelle McIntire, once she'd finished sewing up Rita's wound and had sterilized it once again. \"Sit tight here? Go somewhere? If so, where?\"\n\n\"And if we do decide to go somewhere,\" added Maydene Utt, \"everybody better be really well-dressed. We're in January, not June. January in the Little Ice Age, mind you. Right now, at a guess, the temperature isn't any higher than fifteen degrees out there\u2014Fahrenheit, I don't hold with that Centigrade crap.\"\n\nEveryone looked at each other, gauging their mutual willingness and ability to brave the conditions of a January night in the middle of Germany. In the Little Ice Age, as Maydene had so kindly pointed out.\n\nThey'd almost certainly have to venture out into the countryside, too. Rita had no idea what the military situation looked like, but she was pretty sure it was dire. Tom had told her of his and Friedrich's worries over the loyalty of many of the garrison troops. It looked as if the worst of those fears had come true, and if so she didn't think there was much chance Colonel Engels and her husband could hold the city.\n\nShe said as much, ending with, \"I don't think we have a lot of choice. I think if we try to hole up here we'll just wind up getting captured. After that...well, it's likely to get awfully ugly.\"\n\nShe didn't see any reason to dwell on the details. She and Mary Tanner Barancek were young women. Both of them were good-looking, too, to make things worse\u2014but that probably didn't make much difference if Ingolstadt was sacked. Troops running amok were anything but discriminate. All five of the women were likely to be assaulted. The one man among them, Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler, would get slaughtered out of hand.\n\nTheir one chance was the fact that all of them were up-timers except B\u00f6cler. Most down-time rulers and military commanders were leery of infuriating Americans for no good purpose, which the brutalization of five American women would certainly do. All the more so since one of them was Mike Stearns' sister.\n\nBut...\n\nFirst of all, the commanders of this attack probably wouldn't even learn what was happening to the women until it was too late to stop it. Troops sacking a city were no more discriminate about getting official permission to commit atrocities than they were to commit them in the first place.\n\nAnd secondly, Maximilian of Bavaria was one of the exceptions. The duke had made quite clear in times past that he held up-timers in no high regard, to put it mildly.\n\n\"I really don't think there's any choice,\" she repeated. \"We've got to get out of the city.\"\n\nEstelle and Willa grimaced. Maydene, stoic as ever, shrugged her shoulders. \"I don't disagree. But we'll need some horses, or at least a wagon. There's no way we can manage for very long on foot once we get into the countryside. We're still hours from dawn. At that, we're lucky there's a moon out.\"\n\n\"What about the Pelican?\" said Mary.\n\nEveryone turned to look at her.\n\n\"Is it still here?\" asked Willa uncertainly.\n\n\"And even if it is,\" added Estelle, \"would it carry all of us?\"\n\nMary nodded vigorously. \"It'd carry all of us\u2014easy. And, uh, yeah. It's still here.\" She paused, seeming to avoid her aunt Willa's gaze. \"Well. At least, it was this morning.\"\n\nFodor glared at her. \"I told you to stay away from him!\"\n\nEven under the circumstances, as dire as they were, Rita couldn't help but choke out a laugh. Fodor shifted the glare onto her.\n\n\"Give it up, Willa,\" Rita said, shaking her head. \"Trying to keep nineteen-year-old girls from chasing after boys has been a lost cause since the Stone Age.\"\n\n\"He's not a boy! He's at least ten years older than she is.\"\n\n\"He is not!\" countered Mary hotly. \"Stefano's only twenty-six.\"\n\n\"Seven years is still too much! Especially when he's Latin.\"\n\nMaydene looked exasperated. \"Is that 'Latin' as in Eye-talian, Willa? Like a lot of the population of Grantville? In fact, if I recall correctly, wasn't your high school boyfriend Matt Difabri?\"\n\n\"He was Italian-American,\" Fodor said, defensively. \"That Franchetti guy is Italian-Italian. It's not the same thing.\"\n\n\"Can we please concentrate on what's important?\" said Estelle. \"Worry about Mary's love life later. If that contraption can get us all out of here, I'm for using it.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" said Rita forcefully. \"And there's no time to lose. By now, Stefano is bound to be trying to get up in the air. We've got to catch him before he does.\"\n\nShe gave the apartment a quick survey, to see if there was anything she wanted to take with her. The walkie-talkie radio, of course, which was also perched on the mantelpiece. Hopefully that would enable her to get in touch with Tom, since his unit had a radio also. Beyond that...\n\nThere was a fair number of personal items she'd hate to lose, but she sternly suppressed the urge to snatch them up. Besides the radio, there was really only one thing important.\n\n\"Mary, give me a hand,\" she said, hurrying into the bedroom. Once there, she began emptying the chest of drawers against one of the walls. Her clothes got piled onto the bed, Tom's got pitched unceremoniously onto the floor. No one, not even Maydene, was big enough to fit into her husband's clothes.\n\nAs she did so, she pointed to a corner. There was an old suitcase there, that Tom had had with him when the Ring of Fire came and had held onto ever since. \"Use the suitcase. Skip the underclothes but cram it full of whatever will help keep us warm.\"\n\nMaydene wouldn't fit into Rita's clothes, and she didn't think B\u00f6cler probably would either. But there was no help for it.\n\nWell...\n\nMaydene stuck her head in. \"Can I help?\"\n\n\"Yes. Grab the blankets off the bed and roll them up. We'll need them, I figure.\"\n\nLess than a minute later, the suitcase was packed and Utt had the blankets over her shoulder. Rita headed for the front door, stopped, and raced back into the bedroom. Tom kept a box of shotgun shells in the drawer of the little table next to the bed. She shoved it into the capacious pockets of the heavy jacket she'd put on and went back into the living room. After stuffing the walkie-talkie into one of her pockets and picking up the shotgun that she'd left leaning against the wall, she went into the corridor. As the rest of the party followed, she took the time to reload the weapon.\n\n\"Is anyone else armed?\" she asked.\n\n\"Me,\" said Estelle. Looking back, Rita saw that McIntire had pulled a revolver out from somewhere. The gun looked like a small cannon. Rita thought it was probably one of her husband Crawford's guns. He had a big collection of them and was partial to heavy calibers, as she recalled.\n\nThe weapon looked too big for Estelle, but Rita knew there'd be no point in saying anything on the subject. Besides, even if the woman lost the revolver after firing it, her first shot would hit the target. McIntire was the sort of person who'd handle killing the same way she'd handled sewing up a wound. If it needs to be done, just do it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Once they were out in the street, the sounds of fighting were much louder. They seemed to be concentrated toward the eastern side of the city. That was where Tom's artillery unit had its barracks. The unit quartered next to them was a mercenary force, but it was under the command of Bruno von Eichelberg, a young man from a modest noble family in Brunswick whom Tom and Friedrich Engels had been on good terms with. Rita thought it was unlikely that Eichelberg's unit had participated in whatever treachery was underway.\n\nShe was tempted for a moment to head that way, but stifled the impulse. She and her party would just get in the way and be a distraction for Tom. The best way she could help her husband under these circumstances was simply to get herself out of the city.\n\nThe Pelican was hangared just outside the city walls near the northwest gate. She set off in that direction, with her shotgun held at the ready. Estelle came right behind her with the revolver, followed by the three other women. Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler brought up the rear.\n\nThe scholar and clerk seemed to be holding up well, a bit to Rita's surprise and certainly to her relief. He was a studious young man, straightlaced to the point of being something of a prig. But he hadn't gotten badly rattled at any point, and had even had the presence of mind to pick up one of the assailants' pistols and the ammunition pouch he'd had on his belt. Rita had no idea if B\u00f6cler knew how to use the weapon, but the fact that he'd thought to take it was a good sign in itself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "There was only one incident along the way. As they came around a corner, they found a couple of soldiers breaking into a shop. One of them was smashing in the window with the butt of his musket while his companion watched.\n\nAs was more often the case than not with seventeenth-century soldiers, neither of them was wearing a uniform. So Rita had no way of knowing offhand which side they were on. But she figured the act of vandalism and presumed looting was a good enough indication and she didn't dare hesitate for long.\n\nRemembering the wild misses in the earlier gunfight, though, she controlled herself enough to aim carefully before she fired. The man she aimed at was the one watching, not the one smashing the window, since she figured he was the one who'd be able to react more quickly. He was standing perhaps thirty feet away and not looking anywhere near her. She took a breath, aimed, and squeezed the trigger.\n\nHe went down as if he'd been hit by a truck. At close enough range where marksmanship wasn't a big issue, it was hard to beat slugs fired out of a 12 gauge. They had all the stopping power of heavy caliber seventeenth-century muskets but without the slow rate of fire.\n\nIn a hurry, but doing her best not to move frantically, Rita pumped in another round and aimed again. Luckily, the remaining soldier was either dim-witted or\u2014quite likely\u2014too drunk to react quickly. He wasn't even looking at her. He was staring down at his companion, who was now sprawled against the wall of the building.\n\nShe fired. And...almost missed, even at that range. Her shot did strike the soldier's musket, however. The bullet not only knocked the weapon out of his hand but some sort of ricochet struck him in the face. From the minimal damage done, it was probably a small piece of the firing mechanism or possibly just a splinter from the stock.\n\nBut the soldier was startled enough to clasp his face with his hands rather than deal with her. She jacked in another round. Not trusting her reactions\u2014she had to be practically afloat in adrenaline\u2014she strode forward a few steps, almost running, until she was no more than six feet away from him.\n\nThe soldier's hands came down from a bloody face. His mouth was wide open as he stared at her. She fired. At his chest, and this time the bullet struck where she wanted it to. The soldier was knocked off his feet and back into the window he'd been smashing, taking what was left of the glass mostly with him.\n\nRita did her best to blank out the horror from her mind as she reloaded. She'd never killed anyone before tonight, and now she'd killed no fewer than four men. She'd never even been in a gunfight, for that matter, except for the escape from the Tower of London. But she hadn't been directly involved in the fighting there.\n\nMaydene came up to her. \"You all right?\" she asked softly.\n\nRita nodded. \"Right enough.\" She'd probably have some bad reactions later, but there was no time to worry about that now.\n\nThe shotgun reloaded, she set off again. \"Let's go, folks.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Hearing another burst of gunfire, Stefano Franchetti was distracted from his work with the airship's burners. Nervously, he glanced in the direction the gunfire was coming from. Insofar as he could determine the direction, at least, which he couldn't with any precision. There was a three-quarter moon in the sky, but he still couldn't see very far. A line of trees at the edge of the clearing where they'd set up the airship station impeded his view of Ingolstadt.\n\nThe State of Thuringia-Franconia had leased one of the blimps built by Estuban Miro in order to carry out a thorough survey of Thuringia, Franconia and the Oberpfalz. They'd wanted Filippo Franchetti for a pilot, but since he was Miro's foreman he'd declined and offered his nephew Stefano in his stead. As it was, Miro was simply breaking even on the operation. The rates he normally charged were far higher than the SoTF would have been willing to pay. He'd cut them drastically in the interests of maintaining good relations with the authorities.\n\nThe man placed in charge of the project was Hank Siers, an independent engineer who'd been trained as a surveyor. Three young women who'd recently graduated from the geological survey program connected to the SoTF's State Technical College in Grantville had also come along. Those were Dina Merrifield, Bonnie Weaver and Amanda Boyd.\n\nStefano heard more gunfire, accompanied by the sound of at least one cannon firing.\n\nWhere were Hank Siers and the girls?\n\nNo, young women, he reminded himself. American females had odd quirks, one of them being that the older women liked to be called girls and the young ones resented it.\n\nAs always with up-timers, there were exceptions to this rule as there seemed to be to all rules concerning them. They were the most perverse people in existence. It was worth your very life, he'd been told, to refer to the famous Melissa Mailey as a \"girl\" in her presence. He'd also been told\u2014was there any coherence to American customs?\u2014that the young up-time women who were most famous for their free-spirited ways like the equally well-known Julie Sims and the rapidly-gaining-notoriety Denise Beasley, apparently had no objection at all to being called girls.\n\nThe four Americans had left the airship station that morning to obtain some supplies in Ingolstadt. They'd been planning to spend the night inside the city at one of the inns. They needed fuel, mostly, but they'd also wanted food. The girls\u2014no, women\u2014had quickly grown tired of the staples that Hank Siers had insisted on bringing. So had Stefano. Siers' idea of suitable provender for a geological survey consisted of crackers, dried meat and vegetables which had been subjected to some sort of \"preserving\" process that didn't bear close examination.\n\nWhy? Stefano didn't know for sure, but from idle remarks dropped by Siers it seemed the American thought that an airship survey of Franconia and the Oberpfalz was somehow similar to an expedition to the Arctic. As if Stefano couldn't land the ship almost any time they wanted at any one of the hundreds of well-provendered towns and villages that dotted the German countryside!\n\nStefano would have ascribed Siers' eccentricities to his advanced age, except that the American engineer wasn't more than forty years old. Bonnie Weaver had told him, a bit sarcastically\u2014well, more than a bit\u2014that Siers was hopelessly addicted to romantic adventure twaddle.\n\n\"I've been to his house a few times,\" she'd told him, \"since he likes to hold seminars around his kitchen table. Says it's quieter than the school, which is true enough. Practically every square foot of wall space is covered with bookshelves. At least a third of them hold books about exploration. It drives his girlfriend Mina David nuts.\"\n\nThe thought of Bonnie Weaver provided some distraction from his current anxieties, but only at the cost of raising new ones. It was bad enough for any young man to find himself caught between two girls\u2014no, women\u2014even if neither of them was an up-timer. When both of them were American, the situation was one which Hank Siers liked to call \"fraught with peril.\"\n\nThe engineer was fond of such florid phrases. Bonnie said that if he wrote anything besides dry survey reports Siers would redefine the expression \"purple prose.\" After she'd explained the term, Stefano had had his doubts. So far as he could tell\u2014keeping in mind that his education was fairly good but mostly informal and oriented toward practical matters\u2014his seventeenth century was the era which had more or less defined purple prose to begin with.\n\nBonnie ought to know that, too. She belonged to the Baptist church, an up-time sect that she claimed already existed in this world but which Stefano had never heard of until he encountered Americans. Apparently, in this day and age it was still confined to England.\n\nSomewhat against his will\u2014it might be better to say, against his spiritual will but in accordance with his interest in things of the flesh\u2014he had once attended a Baptist sermon with Bonnie, at her invitation.\n\nPurple prose, indeed. Thankfully, his own Catholic church mostly used Latin for such purposes. Latin was a language which Stefano could read, with some difficulty, but the difficulty was enough that he could ignore whatever the priest was saying unless he really wanted to pay attention.\n\nWhich he usually didn't. Had anyone questioned him on the subject, Stefano would have insisted he was a pious Catholic. But, in truth, he didn't think much about religious matters.\n\nIn that regard, he was closer to the Baptist woman than he was to Mary Tanner Barancek. Bonnie Weaver's attitude toward religion seemed quite relaxed. Mary, on the other hand, while she shared Stefano's own Catholic faith\u2014the odd up-time version of it, anyway\u2014was far more devout than he was. She'd told him that she'd even considered becoming a nun on several occasions.\n\nShe hadn't explained her decision not to take that course, but Stefano was pretty sure it was because Mary would have had difficulty adhering to the demands of chastity, and had enough sense to know it. The girl\u2014young woman\u2014was...attracted to men. And the reverse was certainly true.\n\nBest to leave it at that, he thought. Stefano was already on perilous ground without adding to the risks by thinking about it.\n\nAnother burst of gunfire came from Ingolstadt. Where were the Americans? Stefano's concern was for himself as well as for them. He couldn't get the airship ready to fly on his own. They'd deflated the balloon after they arrived in Ingolstadt, as they normally did when they were stopping somewhere for any significant stretch of time. The sheer mass involved in getting the balloon reinflated was just too much for one person to handle in any reasonable amount of time.\n\nFor that matter, even if he could get the blimp aloft on his own he couldn't really handle it safely. The airship was designed to be flown by a minimum of two people, and a crew of three was better.\n\nWhere were they?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Hank Siers was lying next to a pile of rubble, from which his companions had just pulled him out. The building he'd taken shelter behind had been collapsed by an exploding cannon shell. His leg was broken and he was unconscious, but he was still alive and otherwise unhurt, so far as Bonnie Weaver could tell.\n\nOf course, that assessment was based on nothing more substantial than a two-week class in first aid that Bonnie had taken a couple of years earlier. For all she knew, Hank was bleeding internally, had all sorts of internal damage, and was even now exhibiting plain and unmistakable symptoms of said injuries that she was too ignorant to recognize.\n\n\"How is he?\" asked Dina Merrifield. She and Bonnie were the same age, had grown up together, and had been in the same classes in school. In short, they knew each other as well as people in a small town do who are acquaintances rather than friends\u2014but very closely acquainted. Closely enough that Bonnie didn't see any point in pretending to know more than she did.\n\n\"I don't really know, Dina, to be honest. I'm sure his leg's broken, although\u2014thank God\u2014it's not a compound fracture. He probably has a concussion, too.\"\n\nAmanda Boyd came around the corner of the building\u2014what was left of it, rather. She'd gone to see if there were any signs that enemy soldiers were moving around in the area.\n\n\"I can't see anybody, except a couple of women hurrying to get into a building. So far as I can tell, the fighting is still at least a quarter of a mile away.\"\n\nThat wasn't really much comfort. A man could walk a quarter of a mile in five minutes. But soldiers in combat wouldn't move that quickly, Bonnie told herself, unless they had specific reasons to know that a target was nearby.\n\nStill, she didn't think they had more than half an hour of safety. That gave them barely enough time to get out of the town and reach the airship, with a wounded and unconscious man to carry.\n\nHank was no lightweight, either. It would take all three of them to carry him, even if they could jury-rig some sort of stretcher.\n\nThe thought of a stretcher concentrated her mind and helped her to control the incipient panic. One thing at a time. We need something to make a stretcher from.\n\nAs it turned out, Dina had been thinking along the same lines. \"There was a wheelbarrow back there, where they were doing construction. And some wood we could make a splint from.\"\n\n\"Fitting a man as big as Siers into a wheelbarrow isn't going to be easy,\" Bonnie said dubiously.\n\nAmanda shrugged. \"I saw a picture once of something like twelve guys who crammed themselves into a VW. And I don't see where we've got an alternative, Bonnie, unless we just leave him here. Ain't no way we're gonna carry this fat asshole.\"\n\nAmanda didn't get along well with Siers. Partly that was because of her age\u2014she was two years younger than Bonnie and Dina, just shy of twenty\u2014and partly it was because Amanda was edgy and didn't get along with a lot of people. Being fair, although Bonnie herself wouldn't go so far as to call Hank an asshole, he certainly wasn't one of her favorite people, either. He was a fussy and overbearing boss, just for starters.\n\nDina straightened up. \"She's right. I'll go get it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "She was back in less than five minutes. It took them at least that long to fit a splint onto the surveyor's leg. Bonnie, who did the work of setting the broken bone, could only hope she'd done it right. If she hadn't, Hank would probably walk with a limp for the rest of his life. But she was beginning to fear that might be the least of his problems. Hank was still unconscious. Not even the pain of having a broken bone reset had aroused him. She didn't think that was normal, even for a man who'd been knocked out and almost certainly had a concussion.\n\nThen, it took another two or three minutes to get Hank into the wheelbarrow and positioned in such a way that he wouldn't fall out\u2014entirely, anyway; at least a third of him wasn't actually in the wheelbarrow\u2014and enough of his weight was distributed properly so that they could pick up the handles.\n\nAt that, it would take two of them, one on each handle, to move him. The third woman would rotate so they'd each get some rest.\n\nThey'd need it, too. Bonnie didn't know exactly how much Hank weighed. She'd have said two hundred pounds or so. Now, straining at one of the handles as they trundled toward the gate that led out of the town in the direction of the airfield, she revised her estimate upward.\n\n\"Like. I. Said.\" Amanda was on the other handle while Dina led the way ahead of them. \"Fat. Asshole.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "As he got close to the barracks, Tom was relieved to find that his artillery unit was apparently still intact and, judging from the noise, fighting back with considerable spirit. The unit was officially a company\u2014a \"battery,\" in the artillery's parlance\u2014but it was way oversized because the men assigned to Ingolstadt's defensive guns had been incorporated into it. Instead of two hundred men, Tom had almost four hundred under his command. That was more than a third of the total strength of the Danube Regiment.\n\nNot all of them would have been at the barracks when the fighting broke out. But he probably still had close to three hundred soldiers available in his artillery unit, and he'd picked up a couple of infantry companies on his way to the barracks. The companies belonged to the 2nd Battalion, whose commanding officer had been murdered in his sleep also. The two captains in charge of them had no idea where the rest of the battalion was, nor what had happened to the 1st Battalion.\n\nTom didn't know the answer to that question either. But he was pretty sure the 1st Battalion had defected to the Bavarians. That would explain how the enemy had managed to pour into Ingolstadt the way they had. Units from that battalion had been in charge of several of the city's gates. They would have let in assassination teams first, to target the regiment's still-loyal officers, and then opened the gates for the Bavarian forces who were camped nearby.\n\nTom and Colonel Engels had both been worried about the reliability of the soldiers in that battalion, but there hadn't been much they could do about it given the political situation. Reliable units in the regular army\u2014meaning volunteers, in this context, not mercenaries\u2014were now mostly in Poland or Bohemia. And with a new prime minister, the few such units which were still stationed in the USE itself were not likely to be assigned to the Danube Regiment.\n\nThe officers and enlisted men in the 1st Battalion were Italian mercenaries, almost to a man. Italy provided a large percentage of Europe's professional soldiers. They were valued for their courage and skills\u2014nobody made wisecracks about Italian armies in the seventeenth century\u2014but were notoriously prone to switching sides if presented with the right inducement.\n\nTom stopped while still just out of sight of the barracks. Behind him, he could hear the sounds of a hundred and fifty men coming to a ragged halt. More ragged than usual. The companies were missing at least a fourth of their men and officers.\n\nThe two company commanders came up to join him. \"What do you want to do, sir?\" asked Captain Conrad Fischer.\n\nTom had been pondering the problem. With a firefight going on, they couldn't go directly to the barracks. Even with a moon out, the visibility wasn't good enough for the men in the barracks to distinguish easily between friend and foe at a distance. In this dim lighting, the field-gray uniforms of the USE regulars would be hard to tell apart from the more nondescript clothing and gear worn by the Bavarians\u2014even leaving aside the problem that, if Tom was right, a fair number of the enemy were USE defectors wearing the same uniform.\n\nIf the artillerymen saw a mass of soldiers charging toward them, they'd assume they were enemies and open fire. And that fire would be pretty devastating. By now, forted up in their barracks and the arsenal which directly adjoined it, the regiment's artillery units would have their cannons in position and loaded with canister. The somewhat desultory gunfire Tom could hear was not the noise produced by a frontal charge. The Bavarians would have tried that once, been driven off, and were now settling down to what amounted to a siege.\n\nIt couldn't last forever, of course. Eventually, they'd bring up their own artillery. But at least until dawn, the Bavarians were stymied.\n\n\"Nothing for it,\" he muttered.\n\n\"What was that, sir?\" asked Erhard Geipel, the other captain.\n\nTom shook his head. \"Just talking to myself. We don't have any choice. We'll have to attack the enemy from the rear\u2014well, more likely the flank\u2014and drive them off. Until and unless we do that, there's no way we can join the artillerymen.\"\n\n\"They'll just fire on us,\" agreed Fischer. \"But we may be outnumbered, sir.\"\n\n\"We almost certainly are,\" Tom said grimly. \"The Bavarians would have sent at least a battalion to seize the artillery barracks.\"\n\nHe was using \"battalion\" in a generic sense, not the precise meaning that the term had in the USE army. Like most armies of the day, the Bavarian forces were composed largely of mercenaries. A good number of them would be Italians, and not more than a third would have come from Bavaria itself. Mercenaries were organized into companies\u2014another generic term\u2014which were of whatever size their commanders could put together, ranging from less than a hundred to close to a thousand.\n\nTom was convinced that part of the reason many seventeenth-century armies liked crude formations like tercios was because the rigidity of the formation compensated to some extent for the irregularities of the units that actually made them up. But in a free-for-all melee like this sort of street fighting after a successful assault on a city, he knew the Bavarian commander, whoever he was, would have simply dispatched one of his larger \"companies\" to take the artillery barracks.\n\nThat meant Tom and his two understrength companies were going to be attacking a force that was at least twice as large as they were.\n\nSo be it. They didn't have any other option, so far as he could see. Hopefully, the much-ballyhooed \"advantage of surprise\" would turn out to be all it was cracked up to be." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Seeing motion in the shadows of the street ahead of them, Rita pressed herself against the wall of a building and gestured with her hand to tell the people following her to stop. She could hear the slight scuffling of their feet but didn't think anyone else could if they weren't within ten yards. The motion she'd spotted had been at least twice that far away, just past an intersection.\n\nShe tried to figure out what to do. They were now close to the gate that led out of the city toward the airfield. That made it tempting to just charge ahead, and deal with whatever they ran across. But the shadows were very dark. There was only one street lamp in sight and that was next to a door twenty yards or so down a cross street. Rita couldn't really see anything now. The motion she'd spotted had stopped. For all she knew, a whole squad of Bavarian soldiers was waiting in ambush.\n\nBehind her, Mary whispered something. Rita couldn't make out the words but she was pretty sure Mary had asked one of the other women what was holding everything up\u2014as if any of them knew either!\n\nFor a moment, she considered firing a shot into the shadows. Just to see what happened, basically. It was quite possible that the motion she'd seen had been nothing more than a street mongrel scurrying for cover.\n\nBut that would be insane. The motion could also have been caused by a frightened child.\n\n\"Oh, fuck it,\" she muttered. Rita turned and handed her shotgun to Maydene, who'd been following right behind her. \"If anybody shoots me, kill him, will you?\"\n\nShe turned back around and strode out into the street. In for a penny, in for a pound. She might as well make herself as visible as possible.\n\nIn the same spirit, not knowing what else to say, she shouted: \"Hey, you!\"\n\nA second or so later, she got a response.\n\n\"Rita, is that you?\"\n\nThat had to be Dina Merrifield. Nobody else she knew could manage to speak Amideutsch with that much of a twang. Dina was from southern West Virginia, where people's speech had a much more Appalachian accent than they did in Grantville.\n\n\"Oh, thank God!\" another woman exclaimed. Rita thought that was probably Bonnie Weaver.\n\nA woman came into the light cast by the distant street lamp. As she'd guessed, it was Bonnie.\n\n\"Boy, are you the proverbial sight for sore eyes,\" Weaver said. \"We heard you coming but didn't know who you were. We ran across a Bavarian patrol a few minutes ago, but we managed to hide from them. At least, I think they were Bavarian even though their uniforms looked like ours. I don't know who else would be attacking Ingolstadt.\"\n\nThey were probably traitors rather than Bavarians, Rita thought. But this was not the time and place to share her suspicions and guesses on that subject.\n\n\"Who else is with you?\" she asked Bonnie. \"And where's the Pelican?\"\n\nBonnie gestured behind her. \"It's at the airfield. Stefano should have it ready to fly by now, even working on his own. All we've got to do is get there\u2014but we've got a problem. Hank was hurt pretty badly.\"\n\n\"Can he walk?\"\n\n\"Hell, Rita, he's not even conscious. We've got him in a wheelbarrow we found, but we're not making much progress any longer. We're pretty well worn out.\"\n\nGiven Siers' size, Rita wasn't surprised. \"Well, we can spell you on that chore.\"\n\nBy now, all of her people had come out into the street. So had Amanda Boyd and\u2014sure enough\u2014Dina Merrifield.\n\nB\u00f6cler came forward. \"I will handle the wheelbarrow. I am not doing anything else and I am not much use with firearms.\"\n\nUncertainly, Rita stared at him. The secretary wasn't even five and half feet tall. He had pretty wide shoulders for a man his size, but a good part of his bulk looked to be fat rather than muscle.\n\nBonnie had obviously been thinking along the same lines. \"Ah...Hank Siers is awfully heavy.\"\n\nB\u00f6cler shrugged. \"So I will be very tired by the time we reach the Pelican. But I will be able to rest then. I am not much use with airships either.\"\n\nThe gunfire that Rita could hear had become rather desultory and all of it was now coming from the direction of the artillery barracks. She was pretty sure that her husband's unit was the only one still putting up a fight. They were probably well-fortified and the Bavarians had stopped trying to take the barracks with a frontal assault. They'd be settling in for a siege and waiting until they could bring up some cannons.\n\nSuddenly the sounds of intermittent gunshots was replaced by a cacophony. That was the sound of hundreds of guns being fired mixed in with the sound of men shouting. Here and there she could hear the clap of grenades, too.\n\nShe felt a surge of hope. That might be Tom, leading a charge to relieve the siege of the barracks.\n\nThe hope was short-lived, of course. Tom could easily get killed in the next few minutes.\n\nBut that thunderclap of battle also gave them their best opportunity to get out of the city. Any enemy patrols would be drawn toward the sound.\n\n\"Let's go,\" she said. B\u00f6cler left immediately, heading toward the shadows where the wheelbarrow was located. Rita turned to Weaver. \"Bonnie, stay on top of Johann Heinrich, will you? I think he's overestimating his strength and endurance. And you know what men are like in front of a bunch of women.\"\n\nBonnie grinned. \"Yeah, he'll refuse to admit he can't handle it until he collapses and we've got to carry two of the silly bastards. Neither one of whom would ever grace the covers of GQ or Esquire.\"\n\nRita chuckled. \"God, can you remember a world where they published magazines like that? Do you miss it much?\"\n\n\"Not the magazines. I sure as hell miss the plumbing, though, any time I venture out of Grantville. Wait'll you see what passes for toilet facilities on a seventeenth-century airship.\"\n\n\"Gah.\"\n\n\"You did bring your own toilet paper, I hope. No? Boy, are you in for a treat.\"\n\n\"Gah.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Tom never remembered much afterward about the assault that drove off the Bavarians besieging the artillery barracks. The light thrown by a three-quarter moon only seems bright when everything is calm and peaceful. In the chaos of a battle, there were shadows everywhere and all colors were leached out. You could detect motion clearly, and that was about it.\n\nThat might have been a blessing. Tom still had vivid memories of his first real battle, when he and Heinrich Schmidt had driven off an assault on Suhl by Wallenstein's mercenaries almost four years earlier. The horror hadn't stemmed from the fighting itself. There hadn't been much of that, since they'd been firing at an enemy in the open from behind good fieldworks. The end result had been a lot closer to a massacre than what you could really call a battle. Afterward, the field had been carpeted with bodies. And blood; and intestines; and brains; and some things whose identity Tom had never been sure about and didn't want to be.\n\nThere wasn't so much of that tonight. Not because it wasn't there but because you couldn't see it very well. Fighting in the darkness, by the light of a moon and the flashes of gunfire and grenades, all a man had time for was motion. Once an enemy went down, you ignored him. The blood spreading out from his body blended into the cobblestones. Everything was a shade of gray, and blood was no different.\n\nThere were drawbacks to that, of course. Twice he slipped and fell, when his foot skidded on something wet\u2014and, in one case, horridly squishy. But who could say? In that sort of melee, the falls might even have saved his life, when bullets passed through space he no longer occupied.\n\nHis one clear memory was that of an enemy soldier rising from the street, as he neared the last corner before the barracks. The man had probably slipped and fallen himself. He must have fired his gun and hadn't had time to reload\u2014or he simply panicked. He came up screeching, thrusting his arquebus forward as if it were a spear and catching Tom in the stomach. If the weapon had been a spear, the blade would have sunk into him at least six inches. As it was, the gun barrel just knocked some of the wind out of him and left a nasty bruise.\n\nNot all of his wind, though; not even most of it. Tom's torso was massive, and most of the mass was hard muscle. He didn't feel any pain and didn't even realized he'd been bruised until afterward. He just grunted\u2014a very pronounced sort of \"oof!\"\u2014and struck back in reflex.\n\nThat instinctive reaction was not the best response, all things considered, since he held his pistol in his hand and the blow was mostly delivered by his knuckles. Against a lobsterstail helmet, too, not a mere skull.\n\nThat did hurt. But as strong as Tom was, the blow knocked his opponent back down onto the street. He was dazed, and his weapon slid out of his hands.\n\nBefore Tom could decide what to do, a pikehead came from behind him, thrusting forward just past his elbow. He was almost deafened by the screech of the soldier wielding it, who was now standing right next to him as he skewered the man lying on the cobblestones.\n\nNight battles aren't much suited for taking prisoners. Tom would probably have decided to kill the man himself, in another second or two.\n\nHe took a moment to look around, the first time he'd had a chance to do so since he ordered the charge. And was relieved to see that the much-vaunted virtues of surprise had real substance. Everywhere he looked, the enemy was running away.\n\nAt least, he assumed they were the enemy. Some of them were wearing the same USE uniform that his own men were wearing. Traitors from the 1st Battalion, he figured. The rest, the ones in more nondescript clothing, would be the Bavarian mercenaries.\n\nHe fought down the temptation to order a pursuit. If there were any chance of winning a real victory here, he would have given the order. But even before he launched the charge, he'd come to realize that Ingolstadt was lost.\n\nTom wasn't the only commander who'd used the factor of surprise tonight. Duke Maximilian of Bavaria had done so also, and done so to much greater effect. Tom had taken a barracks; the duke had taken a city. There was simply no way Tom would be able to drive the Bavarians back out of Ingolstadt with the forces that remained to him. All he could do now was try to lead an organized retreat out of the city and salvage as much of the regiment as he could.\n\nCaptain Geipel came up to him, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb. \"One of my sergeants says he's established contact with the artillerymen in the barracks. But they're distrustful since they don't know him and\u2014just as you guessed\u2014a number of the regiment's units have turned traitor.\"\n\n\"I'll talk to them.\" Tom started toward the corner Geipel had been pointing out, with the captain walking alongside him. \"You and Fischer get your companies back into order. We're heading out as soon as we can get the artillerymen moving.\"\n\n\"Where to, sir?\" Geipel's question sounded a bit apprehensive.\n\n\"Don't worry, Captain. I don't propose to attack the Bavarians with what little we've got. We're leaving the city altogether.\"\n\nGeipel nodded, his expression obviously relieved. He'd never served under Major Simpson before, so he'd had no idea whether the American officer was reckless or not.\n\nOnce he got to the corner, Tom gingerly stuck his head out far enough to see the barracks. \"This is Major Simpson!\" he shouted.\n\nAfter a moment, a voice shouted back: \"What's your mother's maiden name?\"\n\nTom frowned. That wasn't a question a down-timer would normally think of; not, at least, as a security question. Seventeenth-century German women did not adopt their husband's last name when they got married. In the here and now, that custom was mostly restricted to England.\n\nBut Tom himself was the only up-timer in the Danube Regiment. There were three Americans in the TacRail unit that had been stationed in Ingolstadt, but they'd left the city a couple of months earlier in order to work on a rail line leading north from Regensburg. So who...\n\nThe answer came to him almost at once. In the months he'd been in Ingolstadt, Bobby Lloyd McDougal had made friends with one of the artillery units. He'd probably been gossiping.\n\nThe sergeant in command of that unit was David Steinbach. \"My mother's maiden name was Forbes, Sergeant Steinbach! Now quit playing games or I'll use you to demonstrate American football! You'll be the playing field!\"\n\nHe heard a distant laugh. \"All right, Major, come on!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "From there, things went quickly. The artillerymen were every bit as eager to get out of Ingolstadt as all the other soldiers in what was left of the regiment. The only hang-up was that the heavy artillery units wanted to salvage their twelve-pounders.\n\nThat idea was impractical to the point of lunacy. Artillerymen were not entirely sane on the subject of their guns. The twelve-pounders had been taken off their carriages in preparation for placing them as defensive guns on the walls. It would take at least an hour of hard labor just to get them remounted. And then how would they haul the carriages? Guns that size needed to be drawn by large teams of horses. There weren't enough horses in the stables adjoining the barracks for the purpose. In fact, there were barely enough to salvage the six-pounders, which would be a lot more useful in the field anyway.\n\nThat would have been true even in summertime. In midwinter, hauling big guns across the countryside would be extraordinarily taxing on men and animals alike. As it was, they were lucky there'd been no large snowfalls for the past few weeks. A moderate snowfall had struck Thuringia and Franconia a few days ago, but it hadn't come this far south. The roads would be icy but still manageable for lighter field guns.\n\nTom managed to quell them soon enough. In the meantime, artillerymen less subject to madness went about the business of getting the six-pounders ready to go. Within twenty minutes, they were done.\n\nIt took another fifteen minutes to load the wagons available with as much ammunition as possible. Begrudgingly, Tom set aside three of the wagons to carry enough food for a couple of days. Three, if he imposed tight rationing. He hated to cut back on ammunition since they might be in for a lot of desperate fighting soon. But it would be foolish to assume he could get any supplies from the countryside until they got a fair distance from Ingolstadt. Once he was well into the Oberpfalz, he was confident he could obtain supplies from local towns and villages. The province was loyal to the USE and hostile to Duke Maximilian. It also had a large and active Committee of Correspondence.\n\nHe also decided not to take the artillery's main radio. The device was powerful enough to transmit in voice anywhere in central Europe, at least during the evening window. But it was inoperative at the moment, due to a minor problem of some sort, so he couldn't use it tonight. The radiomen assured him they could get it fixed within a day or two, but the radio was too heavy to carry except in a wagon, because of the batteries, and on the fragile side. It would slow them down and might break again anyway.\n\nThey didn't really need it. He'd bring a small Morse-code-only radio that could be carried in a backpack. With one of those radios, he could transmit a brief signal to Bamberg that would tell Ed Piazza and Heinrich Schmidt everything essential. They'd have the bulk of the State of Thuringia-Franconia's National Guard on the march within twenty-four hours.\n\nHe also took the company's walkie-talkie. He'd been in such a rush that he'd forgotten to tell Rita to take the unit he kept in their home. He could only hope she'd thought of it herself.\n\nFor a moment, his fears for his wife surfaced, chittering for his attention. Savagely, he drove them under. He had no time for that now. The Bavarians could launch a counterattack at almost any time. He was pretty sure the only reason the enemy commander hadn't already gotten one underway was because many of his soldiers were running wild, as often happened when a city was being sacked. Especially in a night attack, where maintaining control was harder than usual.\n\nThe inhabitants of the city were going to pay a savage price for the 1st Battalion's defection tonight. But there was nothing Tom could do about that, so he pushed the matter out of his mind also. For now, at least. In the future, hopefully, there'd be a reckoning\u2014and it would be a harsh one, if he had any say in the matter. He had no use for the duke of Bavaria and even less use for traitors who took his silver.\n\nThe commander of the artillery battery came over to him. That was Captain Martin Kessler, from the Thuringian town of Langenwolschendorf. He was accompanied by the two infantry captains, Geipel and Fischer, and Bruno von Eichelberg. Tom had been pleased to see that the young captain from Brunswick had remained faithful to his oath. Von Eichelberg's company of mercenaries was undersized, barely a hundred men, but they were veterans. Between them, his artillerymen, and the two companies from the 2nd Battalion, he now had well over five hundred men under his command.\n\n\"We're ready to go, Major,\" said Kessler. \"We've spiked all the guns we're not taking and the big radio is destroyed. Are you sure about leaving the food and gunpowder, though?\"\n\nNormal practice, in addition to spiking the guns\u2014better still, if they'd been next to the river, pitching them in afterward\u2014would have been to destroy all the food and gunpowder they were leaving behind. But the only quick way to do that was to blow up the powder or set the whole barracks on fire, and the artillery barracks were right inside Ingolstadt. Nothing but city streets separated them from residences and places of business. Tom didn't think the food and gunpowder was important enough to kill citizens of his own nation in order to deny it to the enemy.\n\nIf he hadn't been so pressed to get out of the city quickly, he would have had the gunpowder casks opened and the contents spread all over the foodstuffs. Then, for good measure, soaked everything in water, wine and any other liquids available. That wouldn't completely destroy either, but it would go a long way in that direction and certainly create a time-consuming mess for the Bavarians to deal with. But they were just too short of time.\n\n\"No, we'll leave them as is.\" He fought down the urge to look around for himself. Unless junior officers gave you reason not to trust them, you had to take their word for things like this or you'd undermine morale.\n\nInstead, he just nodded. \"Let's go, then. Bruno, what's the situation at the gate?\"\n\nShortly after the fighting started, a few squads of artillerymen had seized the nearby gate that led out of the city walls to the east. That had been easy enough, since the gate was held by a platoon of still-loyal soldiers. As soon as Tom had driven off the enemy besieging the barracks, he'd ordered von Eichelberg to send most of his mercenaries to bolster the gate's defenders.\n\n\"Everything's quiet, sir,\" replied von Eichelberg. \"According to the last report, at least.\"\n\nThat report would have been carried by a mounted adjutant. There were a handful of them attached to the artillery units. The USE army still didn't have enough radios to provide them to many units smaller than battalions, unless they had special duties like the artillery. Most down-time officers weren't really comfortable with the gadgets, anyway. So almost every unit larger than a company had at least one mounted adjutant ready to serve as a courier.\n\nTom motioned for the radio operator to come over to him. \"Let's go then,\" he said.\n\nIt would take a few minutes to get hundreds of men with their wagons, guns, and other gear moving. Tom had enough time to send a message to Bamberg.\n\nThe radioman unlimbered his equipment. Once he was ready to start transmitting, Tom gave him the message:\n\nBavarians over-running Ingolstadt. Colonel Engels murdered. City cannot be held. Withdrawing what remains of regiment into countryside.\n\nHe wondered if there would be ever be a follow-on message. There was no way to know yet. Within a day or two, Tom and all of his men might share the same fate as the colonel who had once commanded them.\n\nWell, no. Whatever else, they wouldn't be murdered in their sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Once he realized who was coming\u2014that had been a tense few seconds, until he recognized the women\u2014Stefano was immensely relieved. Before they'd even arrived at the airship, he'd already begun deploying the envelope.\n\nTrying to, rather. It really wasn't a job for just one person.\n\nDina Merrifield and Amanda Boyd hurried over to help.\n\n\"Where is Hank?\" Stefano asked, trying not to sound exasperated. The help of the girls\u2014no, women\u2014was appreciated, but neither Dina nor Amanda was large. Siers was big and there was quite a bit of muscle under the fat. That muscle would be useful at the moment.\n\nThankfully, it had been a cold and dry January night, with a clear sky. In damp conditions, the envelope had a nasty habit of absorbing moisture which not only reduced the lift but made it more difficult to deploy.\n\n\"He's hurt,\" Dina said. \"Broken leg, we think, and he's still unconscious.\"\n\nStefano broke off from the work long enough to look at the other people who were now arriving. A small man he didn't know was struggling with a wheelbarrow, heavily loaded with...\n\nSure enough, Hank Siers. He looked more dead than alive, although that might be an effect of the moonlight. One of his legs had been bound up in some sort of crude splint.\n\nBonnie Weaver was with him. Behind them came another group of women. He recognized all of them. The wife of the American artillery officer\u2014she was also the sister of the former prime minister\u2014was bringing up the rear, with a shotgun in her hands and a very fierce look on her face.\n\nMary Tanner Barancek was there, he was relieved to see. He was less relieved\u2014considerably less\u2014to see that her fearsome aunt was with her, along with the two women she seemed inseparable from. The three of them were something called \"auditors.\" Stefano wasn't sure what the term signified, but he knew that a number of people viewed their comings and goings with considerable trepidation. They were police officials of some sort, apparently.\n\nMary came over to help also. Within a short time, the envelope was ready and Stefano began the process of filling it with air driven by the fan that would maintain pressure in the envelope during flight. This air was cold, not hot, and would not provide enough lift for the craft to actually fly. But it would fill out the envelope and get it prepared for the hot air to come.\n\nThat process was finished in a few minutes. While the envelope was filling out, Stefano used the time to operate the control surfaces and engine tilts to make sure they were functioning properly. Then he lit the pilot lights for the burners.\n\nNow came the moment Stefano had been dreading. As soon as they were ignited, the burners would light up the entire area. The flames would be bright and visible even in broad daylight. At night, despite the moon in the sky, they would be like beacons.\n\nBut there was no help for it. They'd just have to hope they could fill the envelope with hot air and lift off the ground before anyone came out from Ingolstadt to investigate." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Slowly and carefully, as a man will when he's worn out, Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler lowered the handles of the wheelbarrow until the weight had settled firmly on the braces. Then, finally letting go, he staggered backward a couple of steps. He might have fallen, except that Bonnie Weaver came up quickly and steadied him.\n\n\"Easy, fella,\" she said. \"It's done. Don't hurt yourself now.\"\n\nHe grimaced, thinking of the damage he'd already inflicted upon himself. By tomorrow, his muscles would be aching all over. B\u00f6cler was stronger than he looked, but his life was mostly a sedentary one.\n\nThe worst would be his hands, though. He dreaded to look at them. He hadn't stopped once during the journey and he was quite sure he had a number of blisters.\n\nWeaver had figured out as much herself. \"Let me see your hands,\" she said. He held them up, unresisting. May as well learn the worst now, he supposed. She took them in her own and gently turned them over so she could see the palms.\n\nHe heard a little indrawn hiss and saw her wince. \"Let's go over to the light,\" she said. \"I can't see well enough just by the moon.\"\n\nFranchetti had the burners going by now, and the flames were very bright. Once they got near, Weaver resumed her inspection of his hands.\n\n\"Well, I won't lie to you, Herr B\u00f6cler. I'll see if I can find some salve and bandages. But even if I can, your hands are going to hurt like the dickens before too long.\"\n\nThe term \"dickens\" was unknown to him, one of the many English words that slid in and out of Amideutsch according to the whim of the speaker. No German dialect was standard in this day; Amideutsch less than any. But the meaning was clear enough.\n\nHe shrugged. The gesture was minimal, since she was still holding his hands. \"The problem should only be temporary.\" He smiled, a bit ruefully. \"I was not planning to do any more writing for a while, anyway.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Writing? I know you have a reputation for being meticulous, Herr B\u00f6cler, but I can't imagine there's any point in keeping records for a while. The Bavarians will already be turning everything upside down and inside out.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I was thinking of my book, not the province's records.\"\n\nShe cocked her head and raised an eyebrow quizzically. \"Book?\"\n\nB\u00f6cler realized he was speaking too freely. He was usually quite reserved, especially in the presence of women, but Bonnie Weaver had a relaxed and friendly manner that invited casual intimacy. Between that and his own exhaustion, he was being less guarded that he should be.\n\n\"What book?\" she repeated.\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"I am...ah. Well, it is an ambition mostly. So far I have a great deal of notes, but nothing I suppose you could properly call a book.\"\n\n\"That's how most books get written, I figure. What's it about?\"\n\n\"It's a book on history.\" He'd hoped he could leave it at that, but the expression on Weaver's face made it clear she expected a fuller explication. \"A record of our own times,\" he added.\n\n\"Good luck with that! I remember Ms. Mailey saying in class once that it was impossible to analyze human events dispassionately until at least two centuries have gone by\u2014and not always, even then. Anything more recent than that, according to her, was just current events. She said that with a sniff, as if the term was synonymous with gossip. She didn't teach current events, of course. That was taught by Dwight Thomas, who doubled as our driver's education teacher.\" She smiled. \"They didn't get along real well. Being fair to Mr. Thomas, he was a pretty good driver's ed teacher.\"\n\nB\u00f6cler had no intention whatsoever of asking the formidable Mailey woman her opinion on his book project. Or anything else. She was the sort of person his father and grandfather would both urge him to avoid at all costs. His father was a Lutheran pastor; his grandfather, a school director. Neither was a profession noted for taking risks.\n\nThankfully, Weaver seemed willing to let the matter drop. B\u00f6cler really didn't like to discuss his book with anyone. Some of that was his natural reticence. Most of it was the reluctance of an unpublished author to discuss his ambitions openly. The printing press was less than two centuries old, but it had already been well established that the phrase \"unpublished author\" was a ridiculous oxymoron.\n\nJohann Heinrich B\u00f6cler had a horror of looking ridiculous. In that, as in many things, he was a faithful son and grandson.\n\nWeaver looked away, toward the work being done to ready the airship. The envelope was now beginning to fill out completely, as the hot air produced by the burners did its work.\n\nThe moon was almost directly behind her, so her profile was well-illuminated. She had a short, blunt nose, above lips that were slightly imbalanced. Her lower lip was thin; the upper, rather fleshy. Her chin was round, as were her cheeks. Like B\u00f6cler himself, Weaver was someone who would constantly tend to be plump.\n\nHer figure, also well-illuminated, was much like her face. Not obese, certainly; but not at all slim, either. She was attractive, in a modest sort of way, but not a woman anyone would consider a beauty. Or even particularly pretty.\n\nB\u00f6cler felt a sudden, powerful attraction to the American. He was taken completely off-guard. What had triggered that impulse?\n\nHe was a bit alarmed, too. He was only twenty-five years old. A rich man's son or a nobleman would contemplate marriage at such an early age, but someone from Johann Heinrich's modest origins would not be able to sustain a household until he was in his late twenties or early thirties. He had no business getting interested in a woman yet. Any woman, much less an up-timer.\n\nThe thought of pursuing a mere dalliance never even occurred to him. A considerable number of people\u2014most people, truth be told\u2014thought B\u00f6cler was a prude. But at least he could claim the virtues of prissiness as well the vices. He was not a man who would toy with anyone's affections." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Bonnie Weaver wasn't thinking of the man next to her at all. Her concentration was on the man tending the burner that was filling the airship's envelope.\n\nStefano Franchetti. Slender, dapper in a commoner's sort of way, quick-witted; altogether charming.\n\nHe reminded her a lot of Larry Wild. The reminder drew her to him and repelled her at the same time.\n\nBonnie and Larry hadn't exactly been involved, but they'd been very close to it when the Ostend War started and he went off to fight the Danish fleet attacking Wismar. He'd been killed in that battle, when his rocket boat attacked the enemy ships.\n\nFoolishly, in hindsight, Bonnie had probed hard and long to find out exactly how he'd been killed. When she finally learned, she wished she hadn't. Cut in half\u2014literally, cut in half\u2014by a cannonball. They never found any part of his body. The upper half had been sent flying into the sea, where it would have long ago been eaten by sea life. The lower half had stayed in the rocket boat, but the boat itself had blown up a short time later when it rammed one of the Danish warships.\n\nOctober 7, 1633. More than two years had gone by since then, but she still had nightmares about it sometimes; even flashbacks to something she'd never actually seen.\n\nThe worst of it was that she couldn't grieve properly. It wasn't as if she'd lost a husband or a fianc\u00e9 or even an established boyfriend. Just...a possibility, forever gone. She still wondered what might have happened between them. Not just from time to time, either, but often. She was beginning to fear she'd developed an obsession over his memory.\n\nHearing a sound next to her, Bonnie turned her head and saw that B\u00f6cler had a tight expression on his face. That had been him, issuing a little hiss of pain. What was she doing, mooning over a dead man and his Italian doppelganger when she had an injured man to tend to?\n\nThere was a first aid kit in the gondola, she remembered. She'd never looked inside it, but it had to hold bandages and some sort of salve or unguent. Bandages, for sure.\n\nThe problem was that the envelope had been inflated enough to come completely off the ground. Stefano and Amanda and Dina were scurrying around with last minute preparations. This was the worst possible time for her to start rummaging around inside the gondola. She wasn't even in it yet.\n\nHer thoughts must have shown in her face, because B\u00f6cler cleared his throat and said, \"There is nothing you can do for me at the moment. Once we are in the air, we can see if there are medical supplies in the...what do you call it? The part that looks almost like a boat and hangs underneath the huge balloon?\"\n\n\"Gondola. It's called the gondola.\" She gave another smile. \"And you'd do better to call the inflated part the envelope instead of the balloon, or you're likely to get a long lecture from Stefano on the profound metaphysical distinction between a dirigible airship and a pitiful balloon, subject to the mercy of the winds.\"\n\nHe smiled back. It was quite a nice smile, she thought. Much less stiff-upper-lip than his personality seemed to be.\n\nThen, again, maybe the smile was the reality and the personality just the appearance. It was always a mistake to judge people too quickly. Whatever else, she'd learned one thing about the short, stout Franconian secretary tonight. He was a very steady man. Reliable in a crisis, and not given to either panic or self-pity. She knew plenty of people with more charming externalities who were a lot less solid.\n\n\"We're ready to go!\" hollered Dina. \"Hurry up!\"\n\nYou didn't want to dally when it came time to board an airship that used hot air instead of hydrogen. It was lifted and lowered by adjusting the heat produced by the burners, not by dropping a lot of ballast. Each passenger who came aboard added to the weight, which required more heat\u2014which, if you overdid it, ran the risk of lifting too far while another person was trying to climb aboard.\n\nThe long dimension of the envelope had been aligned to face into the wind, and there was a bow line anchored to a tree stump that kept the ship fairly steady. But \"fairly steady\" is one thing, once a person is in a gondola; something quite a bit more challenging, when you're trying to get into it in the first place.\n\nUnder normal conditions on a proper airfield this wouldn't be so much a problem, because there would be half a dozen groundspeople who'd be holding the gondola down with ropes. Not to mention that they'd almost always be working in broad daylight.\n\nIt dawned on Bonnie that she'd given no thought at all to the problem of getting Hank Siers aboard. The surveyor was still unconscious.\n\nStefano sprang over the side of the gondola and landed lightly on the ground, by now almost six feet below the rail. He was a lithe and agile man.\n\nNot a big one, unfortunately, nor a particularly strong one. With Willa and Maydene's help, he was now trying to get Hank into the gondola, and...\n\nWas not going to manage it. Bonnie hurried over, with B\u00f6cler right behind her.\n\nOnce there, she and the secretary lent a hand to the effort.\n\nStill no success. The problem wasn't simply Hank's mass, it was the height of the gondola. Dina had replaced Stefano at the burner\u2014she was more-or-less the expedition's designated copilot\u2014and was trying to lower the airship as much as she could. But, at best, that still meant trying to hoist more than two hundred pounds of dead weight over a railing that was never less than five feet off the ground.\n\n\"Use me as a stool,\" B\u00f6cler said. He got down on hands and knees, right beside the gondola. \"Quickly, please.\"\n\nStefano didn't hesitate for more than a second before he stood on B\u00f6cler's back. \"Pass him up to me.\"\n\nAs stated, the proposition was absurd. Franchetti was barely more than half the size of Siers. But with four women pushing from below and using Stefano as a combination hoist and ramp\u2014Amanda and Rita were pulling from above, too\u2014they managed to get it done.\n\nBonnie helped Johann Heinrich back on his feet.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" she asked. She was genuinely worried. He had to have taken something of a beating down there in the final frenzied push to get Siers into the gondola.\n\nHe took a deep breath. A bit of a shaky breath, too. \"I have been better, at times in the past. But worse also. It's not as bad as being bitten by a horse. Or kicked by a horse, which is still worse.\"\n\nShe stared at him. Northern West Virginia had been a rural sort of place, especially a small town like Grantville. But the truth was that Bonnie, like many people in the area, didn't really have any more experience with horses than a resident of Manhattan.\n\nOr hadn't, at least, until the Ring of Fire planted them all in the seventeenth century. But even then, Bonnie\u2014also like many people in Grantville\u2014still didn't have much experience with horses. You could get pretty far by walking, when you got right down to it. And didn't have to negotiate with a creature six or seven times bigger than you were in order to do it.\n\n\"You were bitten by a horse?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. They're quite vicious animals, actually. I look forward to the day when we can all ride in automobiles everywhere and put horses in the zoo. Or, better yet, in the larders. The meat's tasty, if you slaughter the animals before they get too old.\"\n\n\"You've eaten a horse?\"\n\n\"Not often. The meat's too expensive unless you get the flesh from horses slaughtered late in life. And that's no good except in sauerbraten. I've heard the Bavarians make a good sausage out of horse meat too, but I've never tasted it.\"\n\nIt was their turn to get into the gondola, everyone else having already gone aboard. That was an awkward process. Neither of them was slender and B\u00f6cler had the further handicap of hands which were now almost useless. But with the help of the people pulling from above and a complete disregard for dignity, they managed the task.\n\nAs soon as they were in the gondola, Franchetti increased the output of the burners. At his order, Dina cast off the anchor line. They began rising immediately.\n\nPanting a little from the exertion and half-sprawled on the floor of the gondola, Bonnie went back to staring wide-eyed at the secretary. \"You ate a horse. Was that, like, a revenge thing?\"\n\nB\u00f6cler frowned. \"For the horse who bit me? And the one who kicked me? Of course not. They're simply brutes, Ms. Weaver. I'd have to ask my father\u2014he's a parson\u2014but I believe seeking to wreak vengeance on dumb animals would be frowned upon by the Lord. Viewed severely, in fact.\"\n\nHe sounded for all the world like a man discussing the temperament of his department boss instead of the Almighty.\n\nSo. Steady, solid, seemingly unflappable. Add severely practical to the list, too." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Hearing the door open, General von Lintelo turned to see who was entering the chamber in Ingolstadt's Rathaus that he'd seized for his headquarters. To his surprise, the officer coming in was Colonel Caspar von Schnetter. He hadn't expected him back so soon.\n\n\"Simpson seems to have escaped, sir,\" said von Schnetter. \"His wife also. The cavalry unit I sent to investigate found all three of the men assigned to that task dead. All of them in or near the door, which had been smashed in. Somehow, the Americans must have gotten a warning.\"\n\n\"By their radio?\" asked one of the other cavalry officers in the room. That was Major Johann Adam Weyhel von Eckersd\u00f6rfer, usually known simply as Weyhel.\n\nVon Lintelo had to put a stop to that immediately. Even the Americans' enemies\u2014perhaps especially their enemies\u2014had a bad habit of ascribing near-magical powers to the up-timers' technology.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" he said firmly. \"The assassins simply bungled, that's all. What happened to them afterward, Colonel? The American couple, I mean.\"\n\nVon Lintelo already knew the answer to that question. In light of the latest developments, it was quite obvious. But he was a firm believer in the tried and tested method of reminding subordinates of their flaws and shortcomings.\n\nVon Schnetter hesitated. \"Ah...I don't really know, General. Perhaps...\"\n\n\"Again, nonsense!\" von Lintelo boomed. \"It's obvious that Simpson managed to rejoin his artillery unit\u2014which would account, of course, for their success in driving off your attack on the barracks.\"\n\nThe \"your\" was a collective pronoun, in this case. Von Schnetter hadn't been personally in charge of that mission. In point of fact, none of the officers in the room had been assigned to the mission. But they were part of von Lintelo's staff, the staff had clearly bungled, and since these were the officers present at the moment they would be the ones to receive his chastisement.\n\nThe general, a devout Catholic, did not share the Protestant superstitions about Biblical texts. But there was no denying the wisdom in the Proverbs, one of which was: He that spares his rod hates his son. That applied just as much to subordinate officers as it did to children.\n\nVon Schnetter flushed a little. But, of course, made no protest. Timon von Lintelo was one of Bavaria's most prestigious figures, and not just in the military. He was a member of Duke Maximilian's privy council as well as holding the rank of major general. It was a measure of the duke's trust that he had placed von Lintelo in charge of retaking Ingolstadt.\n\nA charge which von Lintelo had not failed, even if his success had a few ragged edges.\n\nSpeaking of which...\n\n\"And where is the artillery unit now, Colonel?\"\n\n\"Ah... They seem to have left the city, General.\"\n\n\"Escaped you, in other words.\"\n\nVon Schnetter said nothing. After a moment, von Lintelo decided to relent a little. The colonel had not been directly in charge, after all.\n\n\"Never mind, Caspar. What's done is done.\"\n\n\"I could lead a pursuit, sir,\" said Johann von Troiberz, one of the cavalry officers present.\n\nThe man's tone was obsequious. Von Lintelo had no objection to that, but in von Troiberz's case the fawning habits were tied to a man in whom the general had no great confidence. If he decided to launch a pursuit after the American officer and his artillery company, von Lintelo would give the assignment to Lorenz M\u00fcnch von Steinach. Colonel M\u00fcnch was as much of a sycophant as von Troiberz, but he was also a lot more competent.\n\nBut it was a bad idea, to begin with. \"They made their escape through the eastern gate, I assume?\" he said. The artillery barracks were located very near to it.\n\nVon Schnetter nodded. \"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"In that case\"\u2014he looked at von Troiberz\u2014\"I have better use for the cavalry. We need to send every cavalry unit available to the north, to Amberg. At first light.\"\n\nSeeing the expressions on the faces of several of his subordinates, von Lintelo sighed loudly with exasperation. \"I don't propose to seize the city, gentlemen. Not now, before we've taken Regensburg. But the heirs to the duchy are being held there. They need to be rescued.\"\n\nHe nodded toward yet another cavalry officer in the room, Captain Heinrich Benno von Elsenhaim. \"Von Elsenhaim has been preparing the mission. All of you cavalry commanders should discuss the details with him. Now, please, there's no time to lose. Colonel M\u00fcnch, I'm placing you in charge of the expedition.\"\n\nThe cavalrymen began collecting around von Elsenhaim in a corner. The general turned back to von Schnetter. \"Are there any other problems I need to be made aware of?\"\n\n\"Ah...\" Whenever he thought he might have bad news to report, von Schnetter seemed incapable of speaking without that annoying preliminary noise.\n\n\"What is it now, Colonel?\" The general made no effort to disguise his irritation. He rarely did, when dealing with subordinates.\n\n\"Nothing specific, sir. But... We don't have as much control of the troops as I'd like.\"\n\nVon Lintelo stared at him. Von Schnetter had been an officer long enough\u2014more than long enough\u2014to know the realities.\n\n\"Of course we don't,\" he snapped. \"They're in the middle of sacking a city\u2014which, I remind you, I gave them express permission to do if they succeeded in taking Ingolstadt. The legitimate spoils of war.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know. But...\"\n\nAnother officer came into the chamber. Also an unexpected one\u2014Captain Johann Heinrich von Haslang, whom von Lintelo had sent to find out what had happened with regard to the airship. That hadn't been more than five minutes ago! He couldn't possibly have any news this soon.\n\n\"I think you'd better see this for yourself, General,\" said von Haslang. He pointed to one of the windows on the northern side of the room. \"It's quite visible from there.\"\n\nVon Lintelo went over to the window and looked down at the city. The chamber was on the third floor of the Rathaus, so he had a good view of the square below.\n\nThere was nothing to see, beyond some soldiers plundering a shop.\n\n\"Up in the sky, sir. You can see it clearly in the moonlight.\" Captain von Haslang came next to him and pointed up and to the left.\n\nThe general saw the object immediately. Even at what was clearly a considerable distance, the airship seemed enormous. The moonlight glistened off one of its flanks, as if it were a leviathan that had just leapt from the sea.\n\nVon Lintelo had seen diagrams of the things, but had never actually seen one in person. It was...impressive.\n\nAlso infuriating.\n\n\"What happened?\" he demanded. \"My orders were clear. I wanted that airship seized at once.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Who was in charge?\"\n\n\"Von der Felt, sir. As you instructed.\"\n\nVon Lintelo glared at him, and then glared at the airship. He had, in fact, specifically placed Captain Andreas von der Felt in charge. The former Catholic League officer was a reliable man. But he didn't appreciate the near-insolence involved in being reminded of it by von Haslang.\n\nSo, he shifted the issue. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"I don't kn\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course you don't know! I specifically assigned you to find out what happened and here you are, back again almost immediately with no explanation. You won't find out anything here, Captain. Attend to your duty.\"\n\nAfter von Haslang left, the general went back to glaring at the airship. There would be no way to capture it now, of course. Or even destroy it. The craft was already at least a thousand feet high, beyond the range of any gun except cannons\u2014and no cannon was designed to fire almost straight up.\n\nThat was something that would have to be attended to, as soon as possible. Realistically, there was no way Bavaria would be able to match their enemy's capabilities in the air in the foreseeable future. That would have been true even if they'd succeeded in taking the airship. Von Lintelo would urge the duke to devote resources to developing guns which could strike down aircraft instead. Such guns were quite possible, he'd been told.\n\nThe general's foul mood didn't last for long. Every campaign has its shortcomings. Taken as a whole, however, this campaign had succeeded splendidly. Ingolstadt was theirs again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "When Captain von Haslang finally found Captain Andreas von der Felt, he still had no answers. The captain's body was cold\u2014ice cold, as you'd expect in the middle of a clear night in January\u2014and the first signs of rigor mortis were setting in. He'd been dead for hours. His body was half-sprawled against the wall of a shop that had been broken into. A general store, from the looks, which sold foodstuffs and other items. Von Haslang was pretty sure the captain had been dragged there from somewhere else, though, judging from the trail of blood leading out into the street. That was where he'd probably been struck down.\n\nThe cause of death needed no explanation. There was a big hole in his forehead and the back of his skull was missing. A gunshot had caused that, obviously. From the huge size of the entry wound, von Haslang would normally have assumed the captain had been struck by a canister ball. But that was most unlikely. Who would be firing a cannon in this vicinity? It was almost all the way across the city from the artillery barracks.\n\nAt a guess, the captain\u2014damned idiot\u2014had been breaking into the shop when someone inside fired on him with an antique arquebus, the type of huge gun designed to be fired from wagons or with a forkrest. They were often called by the French term arquebus \u00e0 croc. The weapons weren't much use on a modern battlefield but, passed down generation to generation, they'd serve a shopkeeper well enough.\n\nDrawing his wheel-lock pistol, von Haslang climbed into the shop through the smashed window. The shop itself was dark, but there was a gleam of light coming from somewhere in the back. He headed that way.\n\nBefore he got more than ten feet, he tripped over something on the floor and barely managed to keep from falling. Squatting down and investigating in the darkness with his free hand, he discovered another dead body. He'd stumbled over one of the man's legs.\n\nAfter a few more seconds of groping, he found a big arquebus lying next to the man. That confirmed his guess as to what had happened. The captain\u2014damned idiot\u2014had led his men into a plundering expedition instead of attending to his duty; he'd been shot dead by the shop's owner; his men had fired back and killed the owner. Then they'd dragged their commander's body out of the street and placed him against the wall of the shop.\n\nAnd then what?\n\nHe rose and resumed his slow progress toward the light. As he got near, he saw that the light was spilling from the floor above. What he'd seen from a distance was the crack in the door that led to the stairwell.\n\nSlowly and carefully, making no sound, he opened the door enough to pass through. Then, waited for a few seconds, listening for any noise coming from above.\n\nNothing. That he could detect, anyway. There was quite a bit of noise filtering into the shop from the street outside. A city being sacked is anything but quiet. Whatever noise might be coming from above was drowned out.\n\nBut von Haslang didn't think there was any. He had a sense for such things, from his years of war. Whatever had happened in this shop was over. The whole place had a dead feel to it.\n\nHe went up the stairs, still moving slowly and carefully. Once on the landing, he spent another few seconds listening.\n\nStill nothing. He started moving from room to room. As was often the case with small shops, these were the personal living quarters of the shopkeeper and his family.\n\nThe family was all dead, too. A wife, at a guess; two sons of teenage years; a girl perhaps eight years old. The boys had been killed immediately, shot dead. The woman and her daughter would have died later, after much torment. They'd both had their throats cut.\n\nSeveral empty bottles of liquor were lying about. Those would have been looted from the shop below. The few possessions of the family had also been ransacked, not that there would have been much to steal.\n\nDespite the empty bottles, the killers hadn't been completely drunk. Soldiers sacking a city didn't usually murder the women they raped. Their men, yes, as a rule; but they'd keep the women for concubines. This had been done to eliminate witnesses.\n\nNot witnesses to the atrocity itself. Duke Maximilian and General von Lintelo would be quite indifferent to that matter, and any of their soldiers would know it. But they wouldn't be indifferent to gross dereliction of duty\u2014and these men had been given an important mission. At which they'd failed completely, because of their own lust and greed.\n\nFor that, they'd hang\u2014if they were found out.\n\nBut would they be? Did anyone besides Captain Andreas von der Felt know which soldiers he'd taken with him? Anyone, at least, whose word could be taken as good coin.\n\nProbably...not. Von der Felt was well-known for committing atrocities, and such officers transmitted their attitudes to their men. Captain von Haslang strongly disapproved, and his reasons were military as well as moral. Units which behaved in that manner invariably became coarsened, and the coarseness spread over time into all areas of their conduct. Who in their right mind would take the word of a murderer, rapist, arsonist and torturer for anything?\n\nNot he, for sure. Not even General von Lintelo would.\n\nSo, the guilty men would probably go undetected and unpunished. And an important mission had failed in the process.\n\nThe colonel sighed, slid the pistol back in his belt, and headed back down the stairs. He was beginning to get a bad feeling about this whole campaign\u2014and he was a man who trusted his instincts." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Tom and his soldiers got out of the city without any problem. He even had time to order the gate destroyed, after making sure no civilians would be caught in the blast. That was a pointless gesture, perhaps. By the time the USE army or the SoTF's National Guard could get back to Ingolstadt, the Bavarians would have had plenty of time to repair the damage. But blowing up the gate made Tom feel better anyway.\n\nIt made his troops feel better, too. They gave an impromptu cheer when the explosives went off.\n\n\"We'll be back, you bastards!\" shouted one soldier.\n\nAnd that was the key to it. Destroying the gate wasn't a pointless act of vandalism, it was a statement. A symbol, you might say. The Bavarians had taken Ingolstadt, yes. But they wouldn't keep it.\n\nNow, though, Tom had to make a difficult decision. Where should he take his rump regiment?\n\nThere were only two viable options: retreat north to Amberg, the capital of the province, or march down the Danube to Regensburg.\n\nAmberg was the safest destination. The city was garrisoned by a full regiment. The regiment was a mercenary unit, but Tom didn't think there was much likelihood it had been suborned also. Most of the soldiers in Amberg's garrison had been recruited in the Upper Palatinate, many of them from nearby towns. They'd been stationed in the capital long enough to develop ties with the local population, too. The chances that they'd agree to betray Amberg on behalf of the Bavarians were slight to the point of being nonexistent. Duke Maximilian had a reputation for savagery.\n\nAmberg was well-fortified, too. With Tom's men added to the existing garrison, they'd be able to withstand any Bavarian siege long enough for Heinrich Schmidt to come down from the State of Thuringia-Franconia with most of the National Guard.\n\nRegensburg was a riskier proposition. On the positive side, there was no chance at all that the garrison at Regensburg had turned traitor. That was the Iron Regiment, a unit of the regular USE army made up entirely of volunteers, most of them also recruited in this province. It was one of the few such regiments that hadn't been sent into Poland or Bohemia.\n\nRegensburg was also well-fortified, but the defenses had a weakness because the city was right on the Danube. Most of Regensburg was on the south bank of the river, with just a small and not-well-protected enclave on the north. The enclave wasn't even legally part of Regensburg, but was a separate town. Tom couldn't remember the name of it. That town couldn't be held against a large and determined enemy, but losing it wouldn't by itself threaten Regensburg. The Danube was wide enough at that point to require a great stone bridge to get across, and the bridge could be easily defended.\n\nExcept in winter. The river froze over, enabling enemy troops to cross without using the bridge or needing the use of boats. Doing so had dangers of its own\u2014no soldier likes to cross an iced-over river against enemy fire\u2014and there were occasional thaws that might weaken the ice. But it made Regensburg's bridge less of a defensive barrier than it was most of the year.\n\nTom decided he had enough time to try reaching Bamberg on the radio. This was really a decision that should be made by the president of the SoTF and his top officers. They'd known for months that if hostilities broke out with Bavaria again, the brunt of the fighting would have to be borne by the province's National Guard. Between the war with Poland and the domestic turmoil in the USE itself, the only units of the nation's army that would be available were the troops Tom had pulled out of Ingolstadt and the Iron Regiment in Regensburg.\n\nBut...\n\nNothing. No reception at all. Small radios like this one were chancy at any distance, except during the evening and morning windows. Tom could only hope that his original message had been received.\n\nHe'd have to make the choice himself. The road they were on, coming out of the east gate, was the road to Regensburg. If he decided to march for Amberg, he had to cross over now to the northern route. He couldn't delay the decision. The next road they'd encounter which would enable them to head for Amberg didn't intersect this road for another ten miles down the river. By then, they'd have covered about a fourth of the distance to Regensburg anyway. They'd do better to just keep going than try to backtrack.\n\nThere were several small roads before then, but they wouldn't be of any use. Five hundred men with their gear\u2014even infantry, much less artillery\u2014could not march down narrow country lanes without slowing down almost to a crawl. Tom couldn't afford to dawdle. The Bavarians had cavalry; he didn't. The enemy commander had probably lost control of his troops tonight, but he'd have them back under control by the end of the day tomorrow.\n\nHe decided to go for Regensburg. That was a riskier decision for his own forces, but Tom was pretty sure that the Bavarians would try to seize Regensburg before they tried to penetrate further into the Oberpfalz. If they held Regensburg as well as Ingolstadt, they'd control both of the main crossings of the Danube along the border between Bavaria and the USE. They wouldn't have to worry that a sudden attack by the USE would get large numbers of troops across the river that could threaten their own rear and cut their supply trains.\n\nThe Iron Regiment would be hard pressed to hold Regensburg on their own against the full weight of the Bavarian army. But with the help of what was left of the Danube Regiment and its guns, they'd have a real chance. They didn't need to hold for long, after all. Tom had been part of the staff planning for this eventuality. General Schmidt could get a full division of the National Guard down to the Danube within a week. Ten days, at the latest, if the independent little principality of N\u00fcrnberg got stubborn and refused to let the SoTF march its soldiers through their territory.\n\nHe turned to give the order to his immediate subordinates, who had gathered around him once he called the halt to use the radio. To his surprise, he discovered that none of them were paying any attention to him at all. They were all gawking at the moon, it seemed like.\n\nThat was annoying. It was just a three-quarter moon, no different from the same sight that came every month. Tom was normally an even-tempered officer, but there'd been enough stress tonight to put him on edge. He was about to make a sarcastic remark when a peculiar gleam caught his eye.\n\nWhen he looked up at the sky himself, he immediately understood what had drawn his officers' attention. They weren't looking at the moon\u2014in fact, they weren't even looking close to it. They were looking at an airship flying northwest of the city.\n\nThat was the Pelican, if Tom remembered what Rita had told him. The airship was carrying out a survey of the region and had arrived in Ingolstadt yesterday. He'd forgotten all about it. Luckily for them, they'd obviously managed to get airborne again before the Bavarians could seize their craft.\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"Gentlemen, if I could have your attention.\"\n\nHis officers immediately turned away from the sight of the airship, several of them with slightly sheepish expressions.\n\n\"I've decided to make for Regensburg,\" he said. \"That will almost certainly be the next target for the Bavarians. We and our guns\u2014especially the guns\u2014would be a big help for the Iron Regiment. Does anyone have any questions? Any problems you can see that you'd like to raise?\"\n\nMost of the officers shook their heads. Bruno von Eichelberg, though, had an intent look on his face. \"Does that airship have a radio, Major? If it does, it would give us superb reconnaissance. We could use that badly, come tomorrow. The Bavarians will be able to send out cavalry patrols everywhere and all we've got to match them are a handful of couriers.\"\n\nTom shook his head. \"No, unfortunately, it doesn't. I'm not guessing, either. Rita went over to pay a visit yesterday after they landed and spent an hour or two with them. She told me Dina Merrifield and Amanda Boyd were complaining about the absence of a radio, which they thought was plain stupid. Apparently the expedition commander insisted on loading the airship with enough foodstuffs to fly to the South Pole and back, so there wasn't...\"\n\nHe didn't finish the sentence, struck by a sudden thought. He'd forgotten about the Pelican\u2014but what if Rita hadn't?\n\nIt was a long shot, but you never knew. He looked around for the radioman and saw him standing ready just a few feet away. Tom had given him the walkie-talkie to put in his backpack.\n\nHe held out his hand. \"The walkie-talkie, please, Corporal Baier.\"\n\nThe corporal set down the pack and rummaged in it for a few seconds before coming up with the device and handing it to Tom.\n\n\"Rita, are you on the other end?\" he asked. \"Rita, Rita. Repeat: are you on the other end of this thing? Rita, come in. This is Tom. Over.\"\n\nA few seconds went by, that seemed much longer than they actually were. Then, when he'd just about given up hope, Rita's voice came through.\n\n\"Tom? Tom! Is that really you? Never mind, stupid question. Where are you? Uh, over.\"\n\n\"Looking right at you, babe,\" he replied, almost laughing with relief. \"Right up at you, I should say. Me and my soldiers\u2014what's left of us\u2014are out of the city and on the road to Regensburg not more than a mile from Ingolstadt. We can see the Pelican clearly in the sky. Over.\"\n\nBelatedly, it occurred to Tom that he was simply assuming Rita was on the airship. She might be transmitting from the ground herself, after all.\n\nBut she didn't correct him, so apparently she was. \"Hold on, I'll look.\" She was off the air for a few seconds. \"No, dammit, I can't see you. The moonlight's just not bright enough and I guess we're up pretty high. Over.\"\n\n\"You're not really all that close, either.\" He hesitated for an instant. \"Uh...what are your plans? Over.\"\n\n\"We don't really have any. Get out of Ingolstadt was about as far as it went. We were thinking about flying to Amberg, but Stefano\u2014he's the pilot\u2014thinks that's going to be a problem. We don't have much fuel because they weren't able to refuel in Ingolstadt, and he says the wind is blowing the wrong way. He's not sure we can make it before we run out of fuel. Then he says we're at the mercy of the winds. Over.\"\n\nVon Eichelberg had that intent look on his face again. \"Isn't there gasoline in Regensburg?\"\n\nTom held up a hand to interrupt him, nodding and talking into the walkie-talkie at the same time.\n\n\"There's plenty of gas in Regensburg, Rita. They're storing it up for the spring, when they hope to get that ironclad working again.\"\n\nWorking for the first time, would probably be a better way to put it. The small ironclad in question had been designed entirely by down-timers, whose enthusiasm had outrun their experience. The thing was so top-heavy it almost capsized the one and only time it had been put in the river, and was so awkward that the oars which were supposed to drive it through the water couldn't compete with the current. It was lying up in drydock to be fitted with an up-time engine as soon as a suitable one became available. But, hope springing eternal, the enthusiasts had somehow managed to sweet-talk the powers-that-be into providing them with several barrels of gasoline.\n\n\"And we could sure use your help while we're trying to get there ourselves,\" he added. \"We've got no scouting capabilities worth talking about and within a day the Bavarian cavalry will be all over the place. Over.\"\n\n\"Hold on a minute, hon. I've got to talk it over. Uh. Over.\"\n\nShe was off the air for about a minute before she came back on. Tom was surprised, actually. He'd figured Hank Siers would make a fuss and it would take Rita at least five minutes to bully him into it.\n\nThat she'd succeed, he didn't doubt at all. When his wife wanted to be, she was pretty ferocious.\n\n\"Okay, Tom. We're on. Stefano thinks it's a good idea and so does everybody else. What do you want us to do? Exactly, I mean. Over.\"\n\nShe made no mention at all of Siers. Tom wondered what had happened to him. Had the surveyor been killed?\n\nBut that wasn't something he needed to worry about tonight. Tom studied the distant airship for a few seconds, wishing he knew more about the devices than he did. How easy were they to land and take off? And what did they need in the way of space and facilities?\n\nFor sure, they'd need plenty of space. The Pelican was as long as half a football field, and at least fifteen yards wide. There was no way it could land in a small meadow.\n\nVon Eichelberg and his men had been stationed in Ingolstadt longer than Tom himself. So Tom turned back to him.\n\n\"Is there any large open area in the next few miles?\" He pointed up at the Pelican. \"It needs to be big enough for the airship to land. Say, a minimum of a hundred yards.\"\n\nThe young mercenary captain pursed his lips thoughtfully. After a moment, he said: \"Two, that I can think of. Luckily, the nearest one is the largest.\"\n\nHe turned and pointed toward the Danube. \"It's a big clearing alongside the river, perhaps two miles downstream from here. We could be there in an hour.\"\n\nThat was pushing it, Tom thought. In an hour, a man could walk two miles quite easily. Five hundred men, with six-pounders and supply wagons? In the middle of the night, to boot, with just moonlight to guide them? He thought they'd be doing well if they made it within two hours.\n\nStill, that would get them to the clearing before dawn, which was what mattered. The Bavarians wouldn't be sending out any large cavalry force until morning.\n\nHe got back on the walkie-talkie. \"How much room do you have in that thing? Can you carry another man, with\u2014\"\n\nHe looked at Corporal Baier, quickly gauging the weight of the radioman himself as well as that of the equipment he carried.\n\n\"Say, two hundred and twenty-five pounds, all told. Over.\"\n\nRita's answer came immediately. \"You're not talking about yourself, obviously. Yeah, I'm pretty sure, especially because we can subtract my weight from the equation. Your guy gets on, I get off. That brings it down to a net gain of less than a hundred pounds. Hold on, I'll check with Stefano.\"\n\nTom winced. He'd been afraid she'd come up with that alternative. With thousands of Bavarians running wild, he wanted his wife to stay right where she was\u2014way, way, way too high for the bastards to get to her.\n\nRita came back on the air. \"No problem, as long as we make the switch. Stefano says the Pelican could handle at least two more people\u2014if we weren't low on fuel. But he says we've got enough to land and take off with an additional hundred pounds or so. Where do you want us to set down? Over. No, wait\u2014don't tell me, tell Dina. She's the copilot and she'll double as the navigator. I'll put her on.\" A couple a seconds later: \"Oops. Forgot. Over.\"\n\nTom would have handed his walkie-talkie to von Eichelberg, since he was the one who'd actually be providing the directions. But he didn't think the Brunswick captain was familiar with the device. He'd show him how to use it after they were done here, but for now he'd keep serving as the intermediary.\n\nWhile he waited for Dina Merrifield to come on the air, he contemplated some of his wife's personal characteristics. There'd been a good reason he'd thought she could bully Hank Siers within five minutes.\n\nHe foresaw some difficult times ahead. In about...two hours." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "By the time the rendezvous was made, Tom had figured out what to do. He and Rita\u2014and von Eichelberg, whenever further directions were needed\u2014had stayed in regular contact throughout those two hours. Once she told him about Hank Siers' condition, the solution to his problem was obvious.\n\nThe key was getting enough weight removed from the Pelican to be able to add Corporal Baier and his radio to the gondola without endangering the airship because of its fuel shortage.\n\nAnd...voila! The surveyor weighed almost twice as much as his wife did. And was useless aboard the Pelican because he was still unconscious. And\u2014could it get any better?\u2014badly needed medical attention, which Tom could provide since they'd brought the regiment's ambulance along with its doctor.\n\nTrue, the doctor wasn't exactly a medical titan. Dr. James Nichols, he was not. In fact, the soldiers usually referred to him as \"the surgeon\"\u2014which was not a prestigious title in the here and now\u2014because what he mostly did was amputate limbs and extract teeth. He also served as the regiment's dentist, a trade whose principal tool in the here and now was a pair of pliers.\n\nBut he knew and followed the principles of sanitation and sterilization, and however meager his skills they were better than anything they had aboard the Pelican.\n\nWell... That was pushing it, so he'd better leave that argument aside. Rita was a very good practical nurse in her own right, and had quite a bit of experience at it. During their long captivity in the Tower of London, she'd wound up being the prison's de facto medical expert. The Yeoman Warders had credited her with keeping several of their children alive when disease struck, and they were probably right.\n\nStill, she didn't need to deal with Siers. There wasn't much anyone could do for him now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\"You want to put Hank in a wagon?\"\n\n\"Hey, hon, it's an ambulance,\" Tom protested.\n\n\"It's a fucking wagon with a red cross painted on it\u2014except you never even got around to painting on the cross. Don't bullshit me, Tom. This is just a scheme to keep me on the Pelican.\" Rita turned and pointed at the airship, which was tethered to a tree not far away in the clearing. A number of soldiers were helping to keep it down and steady with ropes.\n\n\"You see that?\" she demanded. \"It's not a wagon.\" Her hand made a gliding motion. \"Flies right through the air, as gentle as you please. And you want to take a man with a bad concussion\u2014maybe worse!\u2014off that best-ride-you-could-ask-for and put him in a fucking wagon? On seventeenth-century roads? Are you fucking nuts?\"\n\nWhen his wife got agitated, she tended to lapse into the Appalachian patois of her not-so-far-back youth. This ran heavily toward short Anglo-Saxon terms, which perhaps lent support to the theory that Appalachian speech was closer to Elizabethan English than any other dialect had been in the twentieth century.\n\nOr maybe hillbillies just liked to cuss a lot. The habit had been a source of trouble when Rita first met Tom's very blueblood parents.\n\nRita crossed her arms. Tom was familiar with that gesture. Alas.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"N. O. Absolutely not. Siers stays on the Pelican.\"\n\nA third party intervened. \"If I might interrupt...\"\n\nTurning, Tom saw that the speaker was the province administrator's secretary, Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler. Tom hadn't even been aware the man was standing nearby. The three middle-aged auditors were with him, along with Bonnie Weaver.\n\nTom didn't know the man very well, but any interruption was welcome. \"Sure, what is it?\"\n\nB\u00f6cler gave Rita an apologetic glance. \"I agree with your wife that Herr Siers should remain on the Pelican. Truthfully, it would be much safer for him. But I also think, for the same reason, that it would be foolish for her to leave that safety. She should also remain aboard the airship.\"\n\nWell. It turned out he was a splendid fellow. Who knew?\n\nRita was glowering at him. \"Why should I be any safer than anyone else?\"\n\nB\u00f6cler made a face. \"Mrs. Simpson\u2014please. You must be realistic about these things.\" Now he gave Tom an apologetic glance. \"Meaning no disrespect, Major, but the key political factor here is that your wife is also the sister of General Stearns. Short of recapturing the two young heirs to Bavaria now in Amberg, Duke Maximilian could have no better hostage than she.\"\n\nHe was right, Tom realized immediately. He hadn't even considered that. Rita was so unpretentious that no one who knew her thought of her as a \"big cheese.\" And like most up-timers, even years after the Ring of Fire, Tom didn't really think of holding people hostage as a political tactic. Kidnapping was just a crime, dammit.\n\nBut in the seventeenth century, as had been true for at least a millennium in Europe, holding high-ranked captives for ransom or blackmail was considered business-as-usual.\n\nBut then, why...\n\nRita had seen the same flaw in the logic. \"That's bullshit, Heinrich!\" she snapped at B\u00f6cler. \"You came in right after it happened, so you should know. Those guys who broke into our home weren't trying to take me hostage. The first thing the bastards did when they came through the door was try to shoot me.\"\n\n\"That happened in the heat of the moment, when they'd just smashed through the door,\" countered B\u00f6cler. \"I think they expected to find you in bed, not standing right in front of them. That first shot was probably fired in reflex. Thereafter, of course, since you were shooting back with the shotgun, they had no choice but to try to kill you.\"\n\nThe secretary spread his hands. \"A great deal depends on the instructions the assassins were given, which we don't know. In particular, were they offered a share of the ransom? If they were, then they'd have had a keen incentive in keeping you alive. But Duke Maximilian is just as well-known for his penny-pinching as his ruthlessness. They probably weren't offered any such incentive, so they had no great reason not to simply murder you.\"\n\nIt made sense. Tom had been there himself, and remembered the chaos and fury of that brief gunfight. Unless the assassins had been tightly focused on the goal of capturing Rita, their natural fighting instincts would have overridden everything else.\n\nAnd, regardless, B\u00f6cler's general point remained valid. Rita had no business getting down on the ground where she could be captured.\n\nFrom the fact that she was now just silently glaring at the secretary, Tom knew that Rita understood it herself. She could be stubborn beyond belief, but she also had a very strong sense of duty.\n\nStill, he hesitated to say anything. In the foul mood she was in, she'd lash out at him if he did.\n\nThankfully, B\u00f6cler stepped into the breach again. \"Of course, we do need to lighten up the airship. But I can take care of that problem. I don't weigh as much as Herr Siers, but I certainly weigh more than you do.\"\n\nAt a guess, the secretary probably weighed at least one hundred and eighty pounds. He might even be pushing two hundred. He was on the short side, but thickly-proportioned.\n\n\"One\u2014or all of us\u2014could get off also,\" said Maydene Utt. \"There's no use for auditors on board the Pelican.\"\n\nShe sounded a bit uncertain. Tom was more than a bit alarmed. He had no use for three auditors either, down here on the ground. He and his troops would be undertaking a forced march over the next two days. Granted that middle-aged Appalachian women were almost invariably tougher than they looked, they still weren't accustomed to that sort of exertion.\n\nBonnie Weaver stepped into the breach, this time. \"That's silly, Maydene. You and Willa and Estelle are almost fifty years old.\" Fodor started to protest something but Bonnie drove right over her. \"And the three of you have been on horseback for the last two years\u2014no, it must be three, now. When was the last time you walked as much as half a mile?\"\n\nShe made a wry face. \"Me, on the other hand, I'm scared of horses. So I walk everywhere. And I weigh more than any of you except Maydene. So we can lighten the airship further by putting me on the ground too. Between me and Heinrich, that more than makes up for adding the corporal and his radio equipment.\"\n\nTom was a bit dubious at the prospect of having Bonnie along on the march, but only a bit. Like every military force of the day that had been in one place for a while, the Danube Regiment had collected camp followers. Women, mostly, who were either married to one of the soldiers or pretended to be. They doubled as cooks and laundresses for the unit; and, in some cases, prostitutes. There were at least two hundred of them along on this march, including several dozen children. If they could keep up\u2014which they surely could, with the incentive of staying out of Duke Maximilian's clutches\u2014then Bonnie should be able to as well. She was on the plump side, true. But that was due to genetics, not sedentary habits. She was a vigorous sort of person, as you'd expect from someone who'd chosen to become a surveyor.\n\n\"What time do you think it is?\" asked Willa Fodor. She was squinting to the east, trying to see if she could spot any signs of the dawn arriving. \"My watch doesn't work any more.\"\n\nNeither did Tom's. He hadn't worn a watch in more than a year, since the battery finally died. By then, four years after the Ring of Fire, silver oxide batteries\u2014the very few that were left\u2014cost a small fortune. It hadn't seemed worth the expense, especially since the new battery would eventually die also. With a handful of exceptions, the only up-time watches that were still functional were old-fashioned wind-up watches. And there weren't all that many of those.\n\nHappily, there had already been a primitive watchmaking industry in Europe when the Americans arrived, which quickly began adapting the designs in up-time encyclopedias. The balance spring and balance wheel designed by Huygens in the late seventeenth century in the up-timers' universe were well within their capabilities. Within two or three years, a fairly large number of pocket watches were available in much of Europe.\n\nThey were expensive, of course, and up-timers tended to scorn them. The watches weren't nearly as accurate as the timepieces Americans were used to.\n\nB\u00f6cler dug into his coat pocket and came out with one. He flipped open the lid and tilted the watch so he could see the face by the light of the moon. \"It's almost five o'clock in the morning,\" he said.\n\nSeeing everyone staring at him, he smiled slightly. \"No, of course I can't afford such a device on my salary. Duke Ernst gave it to me as a gift, when he left for Saxony.\"\n\nHe put it back in its pocket. \"I have tested it against American electronic timers. It is accurate within ten minutes every day. I have to keep adjusting it, naturally.\"\n\nThe sun would be rising in a couple of hours, then. They still weren't more than four miles from Ingolstadt. Tom wanted to get five or six miles away before making camp, if at all possible. But he'd stop sooner if they found a good place to set up defensive fieldworks. It wouldn't be long before the Bavarian cavalry found them and they had to start fighting.\n\nThe men needed some sleep, too, even if only for two or three hours. And something to eat.\n\nVon Eichelberg had been reading his mind, apparently. He'd make a superb staff officer. \"There is a very good place to set up camp about a mile farther down the river, Major,\" he said. \"Thick forest comes almost to the river, creating a bottleneck. With your guns, we could hold off five or six times our number.\"\n\nTom nodded. \"Let's be about it, then.\" He turned to Rita. \"You're in charge up there, hon. If it looks like you're in any danger of running out of fuel, head for Regensburg immediately. I'm hoping you'll be able to scout for us all the way, but it's not worth the risk. If you lose power, the winds will probably blow you into Bavaria or Austria.\"\n\nIt was tempting to send the Pelican to Regensburg right now. They could refuel and, thereafter, could provide the regiment with reconnaissance without having to worry about losing power.\n\nBut that presupposed that \"refueling\" was a simple, cut-and-dried matter, which it certainly wouldn't be. By the time the relevant authorities could consult with each other, wrangle over everything relevant authorities could invariably find to wrangle about\u2014you could get a headache just thinking about it\u2014the regiment would probably have arrived in Regensburg and made it all a moot point.\n\nRita gave him a quick hug. A moment later, she was headed back toward the Pelican. The three female auditors and Corporal Baier followed her.\n\nTom looked at Bonnie and Johann Heinrich. \"Do you two have anything you need to get off the airship? If you do, you'd better move quickly.\"\n\nThe two of them looked at each other, then simultaneously shook their heads.\n\n\"No,\" said Bonnie. \"We were in such an all-fired hurry to get out of the inn when the fighting started that we didn't take anything with us.\" She nodded toward the secretary. \"He's been staying in the same inn and came with us.\"\n\nB\u00f6cler shrugged. \"I regret not taking some additional clothing, but other than that, there really wasn't anything in my room worth bringing. Administrator Christian sent me here to compile records on a number of routine matters. The Bavarians are welcome to plunder the lot\u2014the very great lot\u2014and take it back to Munich. Perhaps they'll die of boredom as they study the files. I came very close to doing so myself.\"\n\nSo B\u00f6cler had a sense of humor, too. Who knew?\n\nCertainly not Bonnie Weaver. The expression on her face, looking at him, was positively startled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The next morning, Captain Johann Heinrich von Haslang wasn't any happier than he'd been the night before. If anything, his misgivings about the campaign were growing.\n\nThere were a number of things troubling him. To begin with, as he'd foreseen, there would be no serious effort made to track down the culprits who had caused the failure of the expedition to capture the airship. When he'd reported his findings to von Lintelo, the general had shrugged irritably and said, \"These things happen when a city is taken. Assign a reliable sergeant to see what he can find out. I have more important work for you.\"\n\nAssign a reliable sergeant was a meaningless phrase, applied to this task. What was one sergeant supposed to do? If he wasn't from the same mercenary company as the perpetrators, he would have no idea where to start his investigation. If he was from that company, acting essentially on his own, he'd be too wary of stirring up animosity toward himself to do anything but a perfunctory investigation.\n\nSo, not only would a vicious crime go unpunished, but the discipline of the troops would degenerate still further. But there was nothing Captain von Haslang could do about it, so he put the matter aside and concentrated on the new orders he was getting from the general.\n\nThose were...also not to his liking.\n\nThe one pleasant note was that he would be working under the command of Colonel von Schnetter again. He and Caspar were old friends, and got along well professionally as well as personally. So far as von Haslang was concerned, Colonel von Schnetter was the best field grade officer in General von Lintelo's whole army.\n\nThe assignment itself was straightforward, too\u2014always a blessing in military campaigns led by generals like von Lintelo, who thought of themselves as superb military strategists. In Johann Heinrich's experience, the phrase superb military strategist meant a general whose plans were invariably too complex and intricate and made too little allowance for the predictably unpredictable mishaps that all military campaigns were subject to. There might be some exceptions to that rule, but the Bavarian commander was not one of them.\n\nOn this occasion, however, the mission was clear and simple: Pursue the USE forces that had escaped the city, presumably under the command of Major Tom Simpson, and either capture or destroy them.\n\nSo far, so good. But thereafter, everything turned sour.\n\nThe first problem was that von Lintelo was not giving them a large enough force to do the job properly. All told, they'd have fifteen hundred men to overcome an enemy force that was probably no more than a third that size\u2014but consisted mostly of artillery. Well-equipped artillery, at that. Two of Colonel von Schnetter's adjutants had investigated the barracks and reported that Simpson's artillery unit had taken all of their six-pounders and four-pounders with them, along with plenty of powder and shot. They'd spiked the heavier ordinance and done a surprisingly good job of damaging the rest of their supplies before they left.\n\nThey'd have done a still better job if they'd simply blown up the barracks, of course. Presumably, they hadn't done so because Simpson was reluctant to inflict casualties on the nearby civilian population. Many officers might\u2014no, certainly would\u2014interpret that as weakness on Simpson's part. They'd think he was either a pewling neophyte or just too tenderhearted to make war his business.\n\nBut Captain von Haslang suspected otherwise. That act of merciful restraint was also what you'd expect from an opponent who was coldly determined to recapture the city someday\u2014and quite confident that he would. The American major's ability to rally his troops so quickly and effectively and lead a successful retreat\u2014one of the most difficult maneuvers of all in war\u2014certainly did not indicate a fumbling, uncertain novice.\n\nSuch a commander wouldn't panic, when pursuit caught up with him. He'd position his men behind good fieldworks and take a stand. With the guns he had, he'd inflict a lot of damage on his enemy before he was driven under.\n\nTo make things still worse, most of the companies von Lintelo had assigned to them were infantry companies!\n\nFor a pursuit? In Captain von Haslang's professional opinion, that practically constituted criminal negligence.\n\nInitially, in fact, von Lintelo had assigned them nothing but infantry units. After Colonel von Schnetter protested vigorously, the general had at least given them an explanation\u2014which was unusual for him.\n\n\"I need all the cavalry I can muster to send to Amberg,\" von Lintelo said. \"Above all else, we must rescue the heirs to the duchy!\"\n\nRescue the heirs to the duchy. There was another phrase that begged for a coherent translation.\n\nDuke Maximilian was childless himself, so the heir to the throne was\u2014had been\u2014his younger brother Albrecht. But the uproar that resulted when the duke's betrothed, the Austrian archduchess Maria Anna, fled before the wedding, caused a rupture between Maximilian and his brother. Who, with his wife and three sons, had also fled Bavaria.\n\nOr tried to. Duke Maximilian and his soldiers caught up with them and in the fracas that followed, Albrecht's wife Mechthilde and his oldest son Karl Johann Franz had both been killed\u2014Mechthilde at the duke's own hand.\n\nAlbrecht had become separated from his two other sons. He eventually managed to escape and had been given exile in Prague by Wallenstein. The tutor for his two younger sons, the Jesuit priest Johannes Vervaux, had managed to smuggle the boys out of Bavaria by a different route. They'd found exile in the United States of Europe; in Amberg, specifically, the capital of the province of the Oberpfalz. There was still a Jesuit school there, where the boys could continue their Catholic education.\n\nThankfully, the USE's formal stance of religious toleration and freedom was actually practiced in the Upper Palatinate. The province adjoined and was heavily dependent upon the State of Thuringia-Franconia, the province of the USE which, along with Magdeburg, took the principles very seriously. So there was no immediate danger of a forced conversion of the two boys\u2014who, since their father had been outlawed, were now Maximilian's only heirs.\n\nIn short, rescue the heirs to the duchy meant bringing back to the custody of their uncle two boys who'd seen him slay their own mother and had placed their father under a death penalty. So that one of them could eventually succeed him as the duke of Bavaria.\n\nSuch were the established principles of aristocratic and royal inheritance, as ridiculous as the results might sometimes seem.\n\nBut what made the project itself ridiculous was that it had no chance at all of succeeding, anyway. So why waste the time and efforts of good cavalry units, who could be put to much better use bringing down Simpson and his men?\n\nEven before the Ring of Fire, von Haslang was skeptical that such a mission would have succeeded. In essence, a large force of cavalry was being tasked with racing to a city at least fifty miles away, measuring as men and horses travel. In midwinter. They could not possibly arrive in less than a day and a half, and more likely two or three.\n\nThen, upon arriving, they were to assault a well-fortified city garrisoned by a full regiment\u2014with no artillery at their own disposal\u2014in order to reach and capture two boys being held in a school within.\n\nNot...impossible, in the old days. But very close to it.\n\nToday? Almost five years after the Ring of Fire? Did Duke Maximilian and General von Lintelo think there had been no radio in Ingolstadt? Or, even if the attempt to reach Amberg had failed initially, that the retreating artillery unit didn't have a portable radio with them with which they could try again?\n\nAnd even if by some near-magic luck the cavalry did manage to reach Amberg before a warning arrived, what then? They couldn't possibly break into the city in time to prevent the boys from being spirited away again. Von Lintelo was sending no more than five thousand cavalrymen to Amberg. The capital of the Oberpfalz was not a small town, and the surrounding terrain was hilly and wooded. There was no chance they could encircle the city and invest it tightly before any number of people could escape.\n\nThat would be true even if the means of escape were restricted to horse and foot. But they weren't. For the love of God, von Lintelo had seen the airship in the sky over Ingolstadt last night with his own eyes.\n\nNor was that the only airship at the enemy's disposal. Leaving aside any airplanes which could only land at the airfield outside of Amberg's city walls, the State of Thuringia-Franconia was home to a fleet of no fewer than four dirigibles. They could only hope that all of those airships were out of the province at the moment, having flown somewhere to the north.\n\nFinally\u2014it failed only this!\u2014the one and only cavalry company that von Lintelo had finally agreed to provide them was the one commanded by Colonel Johann von Troiberz. Who was probably the most incompetent field grade officer in the Bavarian forces and certainly the most obnoxious." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "As it happened, all but one of Estuban Miro's fleet of airships was out of the State of Thuringia-Franconia that morning. But the one that was in the province was right where it needed to be\u2014at the Bamberg airfield, fueled up and ready to go.\n\n\"I've got an important mission for you, Estuban,\" said Ed Piazza, the president of the province. He nodded toward the third man present in his office, General Heinrich Schmidt, one of the top officers in the SoTF's National Guard. \"Heinrich and his staff can fill you in on the operational details later. But the gist of it is that I need you\u2014or Franchetti, rather\u2014to take the Albatross down to Amberg and get the two young Bavarian dukes out of there. Better bring their Jesuit tutor, too.\"\n\nMiro looked at Schmidt, and then back at Piazza. \"And bring them here? Or take them to Magdeburg?\"\n\nHe didn't bother pointing out that the boys could be flown just as easily to Prague as to Magdeburg, where they could be reunited with their father. The equations of power were what they were. So long as the USE had custody of Albrecht's sons, they had some leverage over the man who might very well become Bavaria's next duke without having to wait for Maximilian to die a natural death.\n\n\"Bring them back here,\" said Piazza. He didn't elaborate on his reasons for choosing Bamberg over the nation's capital. Given the near-civil war that had erupted within the USE, the SoTF's president probably saw no reason to give up any assets, even if he didn't have any immediate use for them himself.\n\nAs a technical exercise, the project was perfectly manageable. Bamberg had an airfield outside the city walls which could handle dirigibles as well as airplanes. But in a pinch, an airship could be brought into the city itself. The market square was big enough to land one of the Swordfish-class airships like the Albatross or the Pelican. Doing so in strong winds would be difficult, though. But the weather today looked good, and Miro presumed that Piazza wanted this mission undertaken immediately.\n\nThe news of the Bavarian attack on Ingolstadt had already spread throughout the city, but Miro knew very few of the details. Of course, it was quite possible that no one knew many details yet.\n\n\"Do we know if the Bavarians are sending an expedition to Amberg?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, they are.\" That came from Heinrich Schmidt. The thick-chested young general had a cold grin on his face. \"And if you're wondering how we know, you'll be pleased to hear that your Pelican escaped the city last night. With Rita Simpson on board, as well as your survey crew.\"\n\nThat was a relief. Estuban had been worried about what might have happened to Stefano and the airship.\n\n\"They've decided to remain in the area, serving Major Simpson and what survives of the Danube Regiment as scouts, while they try to reach safety in Regensburg.\"\n\nHe didn't bother to ask Miro\u2014who was, after all, the proprietor of the Pelican and Stefano Franchetti's employer\u2014whether or not he approved. Estuban was not surprised. He'd already learned that Americans and those like Schmidt who shared their view of things took a very expansive attitude toward the use of private resources in times of crisis. They called it \"nationalization.\" Being fair, plenty of down-time rulers did much the same thing\u2014and the Americans eventually returned the property and recompensed the owners for its use, which any number of kings and dukes neglected to do.\n\nEstuban had already figured out that the smart thing for him to do was to be very cooperative at such times. Indeed, he satisfied himself with simply billing the government for his expenses, not seeking a profit from such work at all.\n\nNot a direct profit, rather. Indirectly, eventually...ah, the possibilities were endless. The up-timers also had an appropriate name for that. \"Most favored nation status.\" Estuban saw no reason that term couldn't be used expansively as well. \"Most favored company status\" had a nice ring to it, he thought.\n\n\"In that case,\" he said, \"I think it would be wise to plan on bringing more gasoline to Regensburg. If it's not carrying anything else except the necessary crew, any Swordfish-class dirigible can haul five barrels of gasoline in a single trip. We could operate both airships out of the city, with that much fuel. Not just now but throughout the crisis.\"\n\nSchmidt and Piazza looked at each other. Then, the gazes of both men got a bit unfocused as they considered all the many military possibilities that would open up if the SoTF had what amounted to its own air force.\n\n\"Oh, splendid,\" said Schmidt. His grin widened while somehow not gaining any warmth at all.\n\n\"How soon can you leave?\" asked Piazza.\n\nEstuban pondered the question for a moment. \"I am tempted to say within an hour, but it might require two. The flight itself, depending on the winds, will take somewhere between an hour and a half and three hours.\"\n\nThe SoTF's president nodded. \"Either way, you'd get there well before nightfall. Would you have enough time to fly back?\"\n\nMiro shrugged. \"Perhaps not. But if the Bavarians are already investing the city\u2014very unlikely, I'd think\u2014and the situation was too critical to wait until morning, we'd simply take off. Then it all depends on the winds. That's what the Pelican chose to do last night, after all.\"\n\nAn airship the size of the Albatross, even with a minimal crew and all cargo space devoted to extra gasoline, couldn't fly for very many hours without refueling. The problem wasn't the engines, it was the fuel needed to keep the burners going. That was the great advantage of hydrogen over hot air designs, in addition to the greater buoyancy\u2014you could fly much greater distances before having to refuel. Estuban had chosen the more primitive but safer hot air design for his fleet because the ships were only intended for short-distance runs. And it was much easier to stockpile gasoline supplies where needed than make sure hydrogen would always be available.\n\nBut if the winds were light and there was no need to reach an exact destination\u2014nor any way to find it easily, in the dark\u2014it was usually possible to keep an airship like the Albatross afloat until daybreak. Nothing was certain, of course.\n\nUp-timers often had difficulty accepting that reality. They had come from a world in which air transport was a safer form of travel than any. But this world was in the very dawn of the aviation era. Nothing was certain, once you left the ground\u2014and casualties were heavy.\n\nEstuban loved it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "To Tom's surprise, the Bavarians didn't attack them until late in the afternoon\u2014and then, it was no more than a brief skirmish between a cavalry patrol and two platoons from Geipel's company. From what Tom could tell, the cavalry unit seemed to have stumbled upon the platoons by accident.\n\n\"There's a large force of infantry coming after you,\" Rita told him that evening. \"I figure at least a thousand men. But they've already camped for the night. I don't see how they could catch up to you until tomorrow afternoon.\"\n\nBy then, Tom would be within fifteen miles of Regensburg. That distance could be covered in a day, with one long hard march. That assumed they didn't have to stop and fight, of course, which was probably wishful thinking.\n\n\"All told, I think there's another five hundred or so cavalry on your tail,\" she continued. \"They're a lot closer, but they're hard to count because they're scattered all over east Jesus. I can't for the life of me figure out what their commanding officer thinks he's doing. Over.\"\n\n\"They're probably foraging,\" Tom replied. \"We haven't been leaving anything behind for them.\"\n\nHe was feeling a little guilty about that, but only a little. His troops were taking all the foodstuffs they could find as they marched down the Danube, and burning everything behind them. That wasn't much, in midwinter, but it was enough to keep his men and\u2014most important of all\u2014their horses going. They hadn't been able to bring much fodder with them when they left Ingolstadt. If they lost the horses, they lost their cannons, and without those guns they didn't have much chance of fighting off a force as big as the one pursuing them.\n\nThat was hard on the population, of course. But if Tom's soldiers hadn't taken the stuff, the Bavarians would have. At least the Danube Regiment was passing out promissory notes for it. What was probably more important, from the immediate standpoint of people living in the towns and villages they passed through, was that Tom's rump regiment provided them with an escort. Refugees were now streaming away from the Bavarian onslaught, but these were the only ones who had military protection.\n\nA lot of the refugees were coming out of Ingolstadt itself, according to Rita, some of whom were being savaged by Bavarian cavalry as they tried to flee. Her voice had been tight when she reported that; taut with anger.\n\nTom's own fury was near a boiling point. It was a near-constant struggle to keep his temper under control. The Bavarians were clearly making no effort to restrain their troops. The reports he got from Rita on the Pelican kept reminding him of the horror that the collapse of the Danube Regiment had allowed to spill over the inhabitants of Ingolstadt and stretches of the Oberpfalz near or on the Danube.\n\nSome of his rage was sublimated guilt. Whatever the reasons might be, in the end he and Colonel Engels had been responsible for the regiment. He was by no means blind to that reality. But most of Tom's anger was not directed at himself. It was not even directed at Duke Maximilian. The ruler of Bavaria had only been able to suborn the 1st Battalion because of the political crisis produced in the USE by the actions of the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna. So far as Tom was concerned, every murder, every mutilation, every rape, every act of arson and every theft committed by Bavarian soldiers could be laid at the feet of that bastard.\n\nNot that he was giving Maximilian or his commanding officers a pass, either. There was no excuse for the conduct of their troops. The mayhem being inflicted on USE civilians went far beyond the occasional atrocities and excesses that were an inevitable feature of war. These soldiers hadn't simply been set loose, they'd obviously been given the green light to run wild by Bavaria's leaders.\n\nWhy? Tom wondered. Even in narrowly military terms, the policy made little sense to him. The Bavarians were not nomadic raiders, who simply intended to return to the steppes with their booty. Duke Maximilian planned to seize the Oberpfalz\u2014as much of it as he could grab, at least\u2014in in order to use its assets. So what was the point of ravaging the area? Of all those assets, the human resources were far and away the most valuable. Leaving aside the people being killed, there was now a flood of refugees heading north, east and west. There were close to a thousand such people being shepherded ahead of them by his own troops.\n\nHe hadn't been able to spare much time\u2014no time at all, really\u2014for the needs of those people. Fortunately, Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler had taken charge of that task. Some initial prodding from Bonnie Weaver had been necessary, because B\u00f6cler didn't think of himself as an \"authority.\" Partly that was his youth, partly that was his modest origins; but mostly, Tom suspected, it was just the man's personality. The provincial administrator's secretary was one of those people whose natural relationship to the world's affairs was that of an observer more than a participant.\n\nThat didn't necessarily mean such people were incompetent, however, whenever they set their minds to a practical task. Often they were not, and in some cases that same detachment made them very good at such work. They were more objective about the decision that needed to be made, and less prone to letting their own aspirations and ambitions influence them unduly.\n\nHow good would B\u00f6cler be at such an assignment? Tom had no idea. But he was pretty sure they'd know within a day or two. This column of people moving down the Danube might be going slowly, but so did a pressure cooker." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "By the time they made camp for the night, Bonnie had already come to a conclusion on that subject. Once again, pudgy little Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler was proving to be a man of greater substance than he looked.\n\nTrue, he fussed a lot. Unflappable under pressure, steady at all times...well, no. He tended to get agitated, he talked a lot, and he dithered back and forth before coming to a decision. But he always did come to a decision, and he didn't dither for long. And insofar as the fussing and talking was concerned, that might well be an asset under these conditions. He was dealing with large numbers of frightened, uncertain and often confused people. His willingness to talk with them, once his authority was established, probably helped to calm them down.\n\nEven in the seventeenth century, Germans tended to be a law-abiding folk. They were not particularly orderly, though\u2014Bonnie had never seen a trace of the automatic obedience ascribed to Germans in the folk mythology of her own universe\u2014and they were quite willing to argue with the powers-that-be. At the drop of a hat, in fact. But that those powers existed legitimately was not something they disputed. They just felt keenly that they had a right to be consulted before they were commanded to do something, and they were always sensitive to issues of fairness.\n\nB\u00f6cler's authority derived from his status as the personal secretary of Christian I of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, the imperially-appointed administrator of the Oberpfalz. The fact that he'd served in the same post for the previous administrator bolstered his status also. Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had been a popular figure in the province. \"A fair-minded man,\" was a phrase you heard often when people spoke of him.\n\nB\u00f6cler had that sense of fairness also. Perhaps that was his detachment at work, but Bonnie couldn't do more than guess at that. She still barely knew the man, although working with him in such close proximity and under such severe conditions was drastically speeding up a process that would normally have taken months, given his reserved nature. By late morning, at his invitation, she'd started calling him Heinz. That nickname was not used by many people who knew the secretary.\n\nHeinz would have been a disaster as a politician. Glad-handing, back-slapping\u2014the thought of him kissing babies was downright hysterical\u2014these were not his skills, to put it mildly. But he was conscientious and he listened to people. So, with few exceptions, his decisions were accepted with good grace, even by people who had wanted a different one.\n\nThose were usually people who just wanted to rest for a while, something that Heinz never allowed them to do until the army itself halted the march and began making camp. Then, Heinz chivvied his charges relentlessly, insisting that they had to help the soldiers set up the camp. Not until that was done\u2014yes, that included digging latrines; of course it did!\u2014would he allow the civilians to finally rest.\n\nBut he'd been chivvying the cooks and sutlers just as relentlessly, so when the time finally came when labors could cease, there was food ready\u2014and he saw to it that it was fairly distributed. He did not eat himself until he was sure that everyone else had been fed.\n\nHe was quite a guy, actually, in his own sort of way. Bonnie realized he was growing on her. And was surprised again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Captain von Haslang was in a much fouler mood than the American woman two miles downstream, whom he'd never met and whose name he didn't even know. The day's pursuit\u2014by now he was using the term derisively\u2014had been a disaster from daybreak to sundown.\n\nThe retreating force was doing a very good job of destroying everything behind them. (So much, if further evidence was needed, for the absurd notion that Major Simpson was a fumbling novice.) In some places, where the conditions were suitable, they'd felled trees across the road. And not one bridge spanning the occasional smaller streams that entered the Danube was left intact.\n\nWorst of all, the enemy hadn't simply destroyed the bridges. The first one that Colonel von Schnetter's soldiers had come across had seemed in fine shape\u2014until they crossed over it and discovered it had been mined. Eight men were killed in the explosion and twice as many badly wounded.\n\nThereafter, the enemy had simply brought down the bridges, figuring that the surprise wouldn't work twice. But they left other mines hidden alongside the road. Given the hurried manner in which the mines had been designed and laid, the Bavarian troops spotted and disarmed all but one of them before any damage was done. The single mine they missed had been set well to the side and only injured one man when it went off, and him not badly.\n\nBut that didn't really matter, because the mines were doing the critical task for the enemy\u2014they were drastically slowing down the pursuers.\n\nThe pursuing infantry, that was to say. If the cavalry had been doing their job properly, they'd have been constantly harassing the enemy\u2014which would have accomplished the same task of delaying the opponent's movements. All other things being equal, a mostly-infantry force should be able to overtake an enemy that was primarily made up of artillery units.\n\nAnd why wasn't the cavalry doing its job? Because its donkey of a commander, Colonel Johann von Troiberz, had sent his men all over the countryside\u2014everywhere, it seemed, except in the vicinity of the retreating Danube Regiment.\n\n\"Foraging,\" he claimed. And stubbornly kept claiming, no matter how angrily Colonel von Schnetter demanded that he bring the cavalry units back into the pursuit. The claim was either a lie\u2014nothing but a fig leaf for looting\u2014or, which might even be worse, an attempt to cover up gross negligence or outright corruption.\n\nIt was true enough that cavalry\u2014infantry too, for that matter\u2014needed to forage from the countryside if they undertook a long march that outstripped the ability of the supply train to keep up. But that should not be necessary on the very first day. Any experienced cavalry unit with even half-competent officers had enough sense to load their mounts with ten to fifteen pounds of hay and a bit of oats or bran.\n\nIt was conceivable that von Troiberz was that much of a bungler. The officers he surrounded himself with were not much if any better. But von Haslang was almost certain that the real reason von Troiberz's cavalry had set out with no supplies for their horses was because their commander\u2014probably in cabal with his top subordinates\u2014had sold those supplies on the black market.\n\nWhatever the explanation, von Schnetter and von Haslang were pursuing a well-led enemy with nothing more than infantry companies. Even if they did manage to catch up with them, the ensuing battle would be ferocious. Without cavalry to threaten and tear at the enemy's flanks, they'd be forced to launch frontal assaults in the face of field guns that would certainly be loaded with canister.\n\nVon Haslang had even considered\u2014it was quite possible his commander had done the same\u2014that it might be wisest to simply slack off a bit in the pursuit. Stay on the heels of the Danube Regiment but let them make their escape into Regensburg. A siege of Regensburg was going to be necessary, in any event. While there was no doubt the addition of Simpson's forces would strengthen the defense, that was a problem for a later day.\n\nA sound from above distracted him. The enemy airship had returned and was again passing over the Bavarian column. It was no more than five hundred feet from the ground, but that was enough to put them out of range of infantry firearms. Effective fire, at any rate. It was conceivable that if a volley were fired at it, one or two bullets might strike the thing. But at that height, even if it struck the small boatlike appendage that held the passengers, it would hardly do much damage.\n\nThe contraption made a surprising racket. Von Haslang hadn't expected that. From a distance, the dirigible's flight seemed serene and effortless. But up close, the engines that drove the fans that propelled it forward were extraordinarily loud.\n\nThe distraction was brief. Captain von Haslang went back to his grim thoughts and prognostications, now made all the worse for the irritating noise yammering at his ears." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "That very moment, as it happened, Rita was looking down on Captain von Haslang\u2014or rather, at the small group of mounted officers at the front of the Bavarian column, among whom he was riding. At that height, even with up-turned faces not hidden by hats, it was impossible to distinguish individual persons. And it wouldn't have mattered if she could. She'd never met the captain, or, indeed, any of the Bavarian officers.\n\nShe'd never met Duke Maximilian either, for that matter. But she could probably have recognized him at close range, because she'd seen a good likeness of him in a portrait.\n\nNot that she'd want to be in close range of the man. By all accounts she'd ever heard, Bavaria's ruler was as cold and deadly as a viper.\n\nThe Pelican had just returned from its first refueling stop at Regensburg. That had gone quite smoothly, much more so than Rita had expected and certainly more smoothly than she'd feared. Not only had there been no quarrels, but the city's authorities had already had barrels of fuel brought out to the airfield. It seemed that the administrator of the Oberpfalz and the president of the SoTF had both sent radio messages to Regensburg instructing the city's officials to do everything possible to aid Major Simpson and his one-craft air force.\n\nEven that might not have done the trick, by itself. German city officials could set the world standard for narrow-minded parochialism, in Rita's experience. But General Schmidt had also gotten on the radio and explained that:\n\nA. If Regensburg did not provide Major Simpson with sufficient aid and assistance\u2014in a timely and efficient manner\u2014then Major Simpson would almost certainly run into severe difficulties and setbacks in his attempt to save his regiment from the depredations of the Bavarians. Who set the world standard for wickedness, in the general's professional military opinion.\n\nB. That being so, General Schmidt himself\u2014now already marching his National Guard division to come to the assistance of Regensburg\u2014would have no choice but to divert his troops in order to rescue Major Simpson. Who, by then, would be engaged in a desperate last stand against that selfsame Bavarian wickedness.\n\nC. In which case, Duke Maximilian, a man whose wickedness was only matched by his cunning, would immediately launch the most furious assaults upon Regensburg, intending to seize the city while it remained lightly defended. In which project he would almost certainly succeed, since the relieving force under General Schmidt was unfortunately preoccupied rescuing Major Simpson from the predicament he had been placed in by the slothful and selfish behavior of the authorities of the very same city about to fall into the hands of Bavarian wickedness.\n\nD. Which wickedness, he reminded the officials listening to his radio message, had been demonstrated not five years earlier in the unspeakably barbaric sack of Magdeburg, carried out largely by troops on Maximilian's payroll.\n\nSo there they were, three full barrels of gasoline, ready to be loaded as soon as the Pelican was tethered. With six more barrels, they were assured, already on their way to the airfield.\n\nRita didn't wait for those next barrels. Stefano told her that they now had enough fuel for the burners and engines to stay in operation another day. So she ordered him to fly back to the location of the Danube Regiment.\n\nThat location had moved a few miles downstream, but only a few. Being married to a soldier, Rita had been abstractly aware that large military forces other than cavalry units\u2014and those also, more often than not\u2014simply could not and did not move quickly across a countryside. But seeing the phenomenon for herself at first hand drove home that reality in a way that listening to Tom talking with fellow officers never had.\n\nThe problem began with the very term that people used to refer to the process. They would say that an army \"marched.\"\n\nMarched. The word brought up images of parades, or newsreels Rita had seen of GIs during World War II passing through a bombed-out French or German town. No longer in formation, just walking. But unless they were moving carefully because there were enemy troops in the immediate vicinity, they were still making quite rapid progress. A person in good physical condition, like a young soldier, can easily walk two miles in an hour, even carrying a heavy pack, and maintain that rate for hours. They can move fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five miles in a day.\n\nBut that presupposed, first of all, twentieth-century macadamized roads. Wide roads, at that. Rita didn't usually think of up-time two-lane country roads as being \"wide,\" but compared to the roads that existed in central Europe in 1636 they were practically boulevards. A standard up-time lane measured somewhere between ten and twelve feet, which made a two-lane road somewhere between twenty and twenty-four feet wide\u2014not even counting whatever shoulders might exist. Half a dozen men could comfortably march abreast on that sort of road. Place them in rows spaced six feet apart\u2014again, a very comfortable distance\u2014and you could fit an entire regiment of a thousand men in a stretch of road that was less than a quarter of a mile long.\n\nAnd those World War II-era newsreels usually only showed the infantrymen, or perhaps the armored fighting vehicles. They rarely showed everything else that was needed to keep an army marching, such as the long line of trucks carrying all the necessary supplies, equipment and ammunition. You saw the quickly-moving teeth of an army, not the massive tail that came behind it\u2014a tail which was itself mechanized and therefore able to move pretty quickly.\n\nNone of that applied here. The road that Tom's men and the refugees were traveling on that ran more-or-less alongside the north bank of the Danube was no more than ten feet wide and often narrower than that. It was not macadamized. In fact, it was rarely even a gravel road. Most of it was just a dirt road. Hardened by the passage of many feet and hooves and wagon wheels over the years, to be sure, but still just a dirt road.\n\nAnd now, in mid-January, very often covered in thin ice and snow. The ice and snow didn't last long, of course, with hundreds of people and livestock moving over it. No, it melted and started turning a dirt road into a mud road, at least in patches.\n\nThings weren't helped any, of course, by the fact that Tom had decided to put the refugees ahead of the army so his soldiers could provide them with some protection from the pursuing Bavarians. But, in truth, that probably wasn't slowing them down all that much. There simply wasn't any way to move some fifteen hundred people and close to two hundred horses, mules and oxen at anything faster than a crawl.\n\nFrom high in the air, the army and its accompanying crowd of refugees made Rita think of a giant caterpillar inching its way down the Danube. Just as with a caterpillar, the center would expand as the soldiers in the rear pressed against the refugees ahead of them, forcing some of the refugees to move off the road. Then the officers would order a halt while the refugees were able to move a little farther, and the whole process repeated itself.\n\nThe situation would have been horrendous if the enemy cavalry had been doing what it should have been doing, moving ahead of the column and tearing at its flank. But the cavalry was still nowhere to be seen. Not from the ground, at least. From her vantage point two thousand feet in the air, Rita could see cavalry units moving about in the distance. But the closest cluster of Bavarian horsemen she could spot was at least half a mile from the river.\n\nShe wondered why the Bavarian commander, whoever he might be, was tolerating the state of affairs. If she'd been in his position, she'd have blown her stack by now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Colonel von Schnetter blew his stack no fewer than four times before the sun finally set that day. He kept his mounted adjutants racing all over the landscape, bearing orders\u2014first, firm; then, stern; then, peremptory; then, furious and profane\u2014to the cavalry commander, demanding that he leave off his so-called \"foraging\" and attend to his proper duties.\n\nColonel Johann von Troiberz ignored each and every one of those orders. He didn't refuse to obey, he simply made no response at all. He was able to do that because the orders given by General von Lintelo had not specifically placed von Troiberz under von Schnetter's command. Most likely, the general had simply assumed that the cavalry commander would have the sense of a goose\u2014or, more to the point, wasn't desperately trying to cover up the fact that he'd sold off his cavalry unit's supplies.\n\nVon Troiberz had done that the day before the assault on Ingolstadt began. He knew that the assault was predicated on treachery and was primarily planned as an infantry affair. Thereafter, his cavalrymen would have access to the city's resources and could surely obtain replacements for vanished supplies within a couple of days. So he calculated that he could safely sell off the supplies before the assault began. Who pays attention to such things as hay and oats?\n\nHe hadn't considered the possibility that he might be ordered into an immediate cavalry action to pursue enemy soldiers who had managed to escape the city. That had been a tense moment, when he realized what might be in the offing at von Lintelo's staff meeting after the successful seizure of Ingolstadt. But von Troiberz had acted quickly\u2014he was still patting himself on the back for it\u2014and immediately volunteered his own force for the mission. Secure in his knowledge that von Lintelo had an inexplicable dislike for him and always favored one of his pets. So he wouldn't be given the mission anyway.\n\nThen, to his horror, von Lintelo had set forth his intention to send all the cavalry units available on a raid on Amberg. Von Troiberz had simply not considered the fact\u2014perhaps obvious, in retrospect\u2014that the unsettled state of Bavaria's line of succession would result in a cavalry expedition being sent north immediately. He was not, as an up-timer might put it, the sharpest pencil in Bavaria's military box. He was a lot closer to the eraser end of that spectrum.\n\nThankfully\u2014the only useful thing the annoying fellow had ever done, so far as von Troiberz was concerned\u2014Colonel von Schnetter insisted that he needed cavalry assistance, after von Lintelo placed him in charge of pursuing the retreating enemy. The general had eventually agreed and given the assignment of \"assisting\" the infantry to von Troiberz.\n\nSuch a vague and uncertain word, \"assisting.\" Truly delightful, the way its borders and boundaries wandered about.\n\nIt was still a very awkward situation for von Troiberz to be placed in, of course, but far better\u2014far, far better\u2014than if he'd been assigned to participate in a raid on Amberg under the direct command of von Lintelo's most favored officers. He'd have been in trouble almost immediately. As it was, von Troiberz figured he could fend off the pestiferous infantry colonel's demands for at least two days. That would give his men enough time to plunder what they needed immediately from the countryside.\n\nThose so-called \"commands\" were nothing of the sort, anyway. Given that von Troiberz and the infantry colonel were of equal rank and the fact that the general had never specified the command arrangement, von Schnetter's \"orders\" were legally nothing more than requests.\n\nVery rude requests, to boot. The man could be quite insufferable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Night finally fell, on that first day. Tom thought it had probably been the longest day in his life. It had certainly been the most harrowing.\n\nTwo thousand feet above him, as she tried to get to sleep, his wife Rita thought exactly the same. And she was afraid she'd have the nightmares to prove it. Throughout the day, she'd been getting periodic flashbacks to the gunfights of the night just passed. The most upsetting was the look on the face of the soldier whom she'd shot dead outside the broken shop window.\n\nHe'd been young, barely more than a boy. At the very end, just before she pulled the trigger, he'd obviously understood that he was about to die.\n\nThat look...\n\nIt hadn't been so much an expression of despair as one of sorrow, for the things he would now never see, never do, never know, never feel. Rita was quite certain that she would carry that memory with her for all her days on earth, however many they might prove to be. She could live to be a hundred, and would never forget the man whom she'd severed from whatever days might have been his." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Not far from her in the gondola, on the other hand, Stefano Franchetti and Mary Tanner Barancek were having a very pleasant evening. They were engaged in the sort of lively conversation that young people think is dazzling beyond belief\u2014no greater conversation had been held anywhere on the planet since Socrates questioned his guests\u2014because every sentence, every phrase, seemed loaded with suggestion and invitation.\n\nThe conversation was all the more dazzling for the fact that Mary's grim aunt and her two fellow Furies were no longer on board the Pelican. They had been dropped off in Regensburg when the airship made its refueling stop earlier in the day. Rita had pointed out that there was really no purpose in the three auditors staying aboard, and the Pelican could use the extra lift provided by their departure to carry more fuel. Willa had been reluctant, but finally agreed when Maydene stated\u2014quite bluntly\u2014that there was not much opportunity for premarital coitus in the gondola of an active airship, especially with Rita not more than ten feet away from the youngsters in question. Estelle then weighed in by pointing out\u2014just as bluntly\u2014that even if such activity did take place, the girl was now of legal age and she'd hardly be the first country bumpkin to get screwed by a slick fellow of the Latin persuasion. She'd survive." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Bonnie Weaver and Heinz B\u00f6cler did not get to sleep until much later in the evening. The secretary stayed up for hours, checking with everyone in the refugee camp to make sure that they'd gotten something to eat and that no one, especially children and the elderly, was going to spend the night in freezing conditions. Those people who were short of blankets or other sorts of bedding got some loaned to them by people who were in better shape. On their own, they might or might not have made such offers, but the combination of B\u00f6cler's quiet persistence and his ever-ready notebook turned the trick. No one doubted for a moment that if the province administrator's personal secretary said he would keep accurate records of who had lent what to whom, it would surely be done and done properly.\n\nIn the event, Bonnie wound up keeping most of those records. She accompanied Heinz on his rounds and figured out early on that it made more sense for him to concentrate on wheedling people and for her to do his bookkeeping for him. It wasn't that he was a better wheedler than she was. Actually, he was rather inept at it. But he was extraordinarily persistent, long past the point where Bonnie herself would have stalked off in disgust at someone's recalcitrance and pigheaded selfishness.\n\nSo, she let him wheedle and cajole and harass and pester, while she wielded the magic pen. That worked because Heinz always introduced her as his secretary, which apparently satisfied the proprieties. It turned out that maintaining a clear and precise chain of bureaucracy was every bit as essential in Heinz's line of work as maintaining a clear and precise chain of custody was for police work.\n\nWho knew?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "The second day was a carbon copy of the first, for all intents and purposes. Two small armies kept moving slowly down the Danube. They were of approximately equal size, fifteen hundred people in each. But two-thirds of the leading army consisted of civilians, where the entire pursuing force was made up of infantrymen.\n\nFor whatever reason, however, the following army was moving no faster than the one it was pursuing. Hour after hour, now two days in a row, it remained about a mile behind. Close enough to make the fact of a pursuit obvious, but not so close\u2014not once\u2014as to make it necessary for Tom to break off the march and arrange his men into a defensive formation.\n\nThat was odd, on the face of it. Very odd, in fact. No large body of people could move quickly under these conditions, that was a given. Still, the pursuing force was made up of men in fit condition\u2014well, mostly\u2014and carrying nothing more than muskets and backpacks, with a supply train bringing up the rear. In contrast, a very large percentage of the fifteen hundred people ahead of them were composed of elderly people, children, the ill\u2014there were two very visibly pregnant women in the mix, even. Not to mention carts and wagons of all sorts including field guns and caissons. You'd think they'd have been able to move at least a little bit faster.\n\nBy the evening of the second day, when they made camp for the night again, Tom was pretty sure he knew what was happening. And he'd had all day to decide what to do in response.\n\nSo, he assembled a war council of his top officers, to which he also summoned the leaders of his (very unofficial) air force.\n\nThe suspicion privately entertained by some that he'd done so in order to see his wife again was actually quite unfair\u2014as was proven by the fact that, once the meeting was over, Rita got back into the Pelican and flew off.\n\nStefano Franchetti's uncle Filippo attended the council as well. The Albatross had successfully spirited away the two young Bavarian heirs from Amberg the day before. Actually, they'd done it in plain sight at the airfield and in broad daylight because the Bavarian cavalry was still a good two days away. At Ed Piazza's request, once Filippo brought the boys to Bamberg, Estuban Miro had agreed to send the Albatross down to the Danube to provide whatever assistance it could to Major Simpson and its sister airship.\n\nWhen Tom finished explaining his plan, the reaction of his officers was stalwart and supportive. The reaction of the two Franchettis was enthusiastic. That of Rita, uncertain. That of Heinz B\u00f6cler, dubious. That of Bonnie Weaver, agitated.\n\nThe officers were stalwart and supportive because they were soldiers and, besides, the plan didn't require them to do anything.\n\nThe Franchettis were enthusiastic because they foresaw their future fame. Their sure and certain place in the history, since they would fall into the blessed category of \"The Men Who First...\"\n\nRita was uncertain because she didn't know enough about the issues involved.\n\nThe provincial secretary was dubious because he was a dubious man by nature.\n\nBonnie was agitated because she'd not only taken some chemistry courses but, in her days hanging around with Larry Wild and his friends, had picked up a fair amount of knowledge on the subject. And because Tom wanted to put her in charge of the technical side of the project.\n\n\"You need to add styrofoam to the gasoline to make decent napalm,\" she protested. \"Where are we going to find that much styrofoam? I doubt if there's even much left in Grantville, these days.\"\n\n\"You can substitute soap or sugar, can't you?\"\n\nBonnie frowned. \"Well...I remember Larry and the guys talking about it. They wanted to try, naturally\u2014boys! But they never got around to it. Besides, I don't know what kind of soap and I think it's supposed to be powdered sugar and that's a lot trickier than it sounds. There's probably enough sugar in Regensburg, now that they're making it from sorghum around Freyburg, but very little of it will be powdered. And it's pretty expensive, no matter how it comes. Who's going to pay for it?\"\n\nThat last question was silly, and Bonnie knew it. She had a tendency to starting jabbering when she got uneasy. Talk first, think later. In time of war\u2014this happened up-time, too\u2014governments got very heavy-handed in the way they handled critical war supplies. And they got to define the term \"critical war supplies\" in the first place. If King Louis XIV could proclaim himself the state, any state could certainly claim the status of a dictionary.\n\nTom waited patiently until the little flood of protest ebbed. \"Bonnie, nobody's expecting military-grade napalm. Napalm is basically just thickened, jellied gasoline. The sugar, even if it isn't powdered, is bound to help in that direction. Soap is probably even better, if you liquefy it first. I'd suggest mixing in some fine sawdust, too. The worst that happens is that we get functional firebombs that aren't any better than big Molotov cocktails. For what I want, I think that'd be enough right there.\"\n\nHe turned back to Rita. He'd begun the council by asking her and Stefano a number of questions about the Bavarian cavalry dispositions.\n\n\"I'm a lot more concerned about getting the target right. You're sure about that village?\"\n\nHis wife shrugged. \"No, of course I'm not 'sure.' But that's where the largest bunch of cavalry spent last night, and whenever we've flown by there today it looks as if there are plenty of them hanging around. They're obviously planning to spend tonight there also. I think that's where they set up their headquarters. But who knows? They might pack up and leave tomorrow.\"\n\nThe Bavarian cavalry had taken over a village about a mile from the river. It had been a big village, with a sizeable inn and stables. All the inhabitants had already fled, so Tom didn't have to worry about civilian casualties.\n\nTom stuck a finger under the collar of his shirt and scratched an itch, thinking about Rita's cautions. She was certainly right that nothing was certain, but it was just human nature for people to get attached to creature comforts. It was the middle of January\u2014in the Little Ice Age, no less, as Americans always insisted on reminding everyone. Any soldier, even those in highly disciplined elite units, would prefer being billeted in a village house or tavern room than sleeping on the ground wrapped in nothing better than a blanket.\n\nAnd everything he'd seen about these cavalrymen indicated they were very far from being highly disciplined elite troops. He was now all but certain that the cavalrymen had been deliberately shirking their duties\u2014and the infantry units had delayed their own pursuit out of sheer anger. Were they supposed to bear all the casualties? Which were likely to be steep if they attacked artillery without cavalry support.\n\nThat's what the commander of those infantrymen had apparently been asking himself. And the answer he'd come up with was \"no,\" at least so far. Whether that was because he was a mercenary and those troops were his working capital that he didn't want to waste, or because he genuinely cared for the well-being of his men, or simply because he was peevish, Tom had no idea.\n\nNor did it matter. All that mattered, for the next two days, was making sure the Bavarian cavalry stayed out of the picture. Two days from now, they'd have reached Regensburg and could thumb their noses at anyone pursuing them.\n\nThat Bavarian cavalry wasn't much good to begin with, the way it looked to Tom. So let's see how they'd stand up to this world's first-ever aerial incendiary carpet bombing. Even allowing for the fact that the terms \"incendiary\" and \"carpet\" were gross exaggerations, Tom didn't think they'd stand up well. Not well at all.\n\n\"We'll do it,\" he announced, his mind finally made up. \"Bonnie, are you willing to give it a try?\"\n\nShe spread her hands. \"Yeah, sure.\"\n\nHe nodded and turned to B\u00f6cler. \"Heinrich, I want you to go with her.\"\n\nThe secretary started to protest. \"But the refugees\u2014\"\n\nTom held up his hand. \"They're fine. You've already got things well enough organized there. They can manage on their own for the next two days. The real danger to them now is that we won't reach Regensburg at all.\"\n\nB\u00f6cler frowned. \"But why do you want to send me to Regensburg?\"\n\n\"Because you're a top-notch organizer. Bonnie isn't\u2014no offense, Bonnie, but you're not\u2014and besides, she's got to concentrate on the technical side of making the bombs.\" A charming analogy came to him, and he couldn't help but smile. \"She's Oppenheimer, you're General Groves.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\" That came from B\u00f6cler. Bonnie Weaver was staring at Tom as if he'd just grown horns.\n\n\"Never mind,\" Tom said. \"Up-time analogy. Something called the Manhattan Project. Bonnie, explain it to him\u2014\"\n\n\"Oppenheimer?\" Bonnie demanded. \"I've got a high school diploma! With a B-minus grade point average!\"\n\nRita started laughing.\n\n\"\u2014when the two of you have a spare moment. The thing is, Heinrich, you're only going to have a few hours to put together a lot of bombs. You'll have to organize people to get it done. Find suitable bomb cases\u2014I figure by now Regensburg has got to have started producing small barrels that can hold gasoline. Big glass jars would work too, if they've got decent lids, but that's probably asking for pie in the sky.\"\n\nGlassmakers in the seventeenth century could do phenomenal work, but they weren't really set up yet to mass produce things like Mason jars. Such containers in the here and now were mostly pottery. Speaking of which...\n\n\"See if you can find big clay pots and something to plug them with. That should work too. But probably the trickiest part of the work will be coming up with suitable fuses.\"\n\nHe stuck a big finger almost under the secretary's nose and waggled it in a warning gesture. Then, for good measure, waggled it under Bonnie's nose.\n\n\"But don't get too fancy! I don't want to risk having one of these things going off in the gondolas. If the best you can come up with is just a fuse you light at the last minute, when you're shoving the bomb over the side, that'll do.\"\n\nB\u00f6cler was frowning again, but the expression this time was simply that of a man pondering a challenge. \"How many bombs do you want?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" He turned to Filippo Franchetti. \"How many do you figure you can handle in a couple of airships? Figure each bomb will be about this size\"\u2014his hands sketched out in midair a roughly spherical object about the size of a two-gallon jug\u2014\"and will weigh somewhere around twenty pounds.\"\n\n\"It will be three airships,\" Franchetti said, almost idly, scratching his chin as he contemplated the problem. \"We just got word from Bamberg before we landed. The Petrel has returned from Amsterdam. Don Estuban is sending it down to join us tomorrow morning. He told me to tell you the ship is at your disposal for the duration of the crisis, as are the Pelican and the Albatross.\"\n\nApparently, Miro had decided to use the crisis as an opportunity to rack up lots and lots of brownie points with the SoTF's administration. He was certainly racking them up with Tom himself, even though he'd never met the man.\n\n\"The problem is not the weight,\" Franchetti said. \"It's the space needed\u2014as well as the need to handle them safely. Two men to fly the ship, two men to handle the bombs, one man to choose the times and the places to drop the bombs.\"\n\nStefano cleared his throat. \"Some of those tasks do not require men, uncle.\" He held up his hands in a vigorous gesture, as a man might protest any suggestion of heretical leanings. \"Yes, yes, certainly to manage the bombs themselves! But Dina Merrifield and Mary Barancek have already helped fly the Pelican.\"\n\nHe now bestowed a solemn nod at Rita. \"And I am quite sure that Mrs. Simpson would make a splendid...ah...what is the term I want?\"\n\n\"Bombardier,\" Tom suggested.\n\n\"Fucking moron,\" was his wife's countersuggestion. \"What else can you call someone who tosses lit firebombs from a flimsy hot air balloon?\"\n\n\"Dirigible,\" said the Franchettis, sternly and simultaneously.\n\nRita shook her head. \"Well, at least one historical question is now answered. Fucking geeks can be found in any time and place.\"\n\nTom had learned long ago that when his wife started using Appalachian patois in every other sentence it was time to wrap up the discussion. Before the patois began appearing in every sentence. Then, every clause.\n\nHe clapped his hands. \"All right, it's settled. Mr. Franchetti\"\u2014that was directed at Filippo\u2014\"I figure your airship should lead the bombing run. So it's probably best that Rita transfer now from the Pelican to the Albatross. She's the best person to guide the run and serve as the lead bombardier. Bonnie and Heinrich can transfer into your ship also, since it's your turn to make the refueling run to Regensburg. You can drop them off in the city.\"\n\nHe turned to the young nephew, striving mightily to keep a straight face. \"Stefano, that'll leave you with Mary Barancek as your bombardier. I know she's awfully young, but I think she can handle the job.\"\n\nStefano beamed. \"Oh, certainly!\"\n\nTom was no slouch himself, when it came to racking up brownie points. He turned now to Bonnie and B\u00f6cler. \"Any further questions?\"\n\nThey looked at each other. After a moment, Bonnie shrugged. \"Probably a thousand. But we'll manage. We work pretty well together.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "She thought about that, most of the way to Regensburg.\n\nIt was quite true, actually. They did work together well. Got along well, too.\n\nThe rest of the way into Regensburg, she spent contemplating the fact that for the first time since Larry Wild died, she found herself interested in a man who didn't remind her of Larry in the least, teeniest, itsiest, littlest bit.\n\nThat was probably mentally healthy, she figured, although she wasn't sure.\n\nShe giggled, then. B\u00f6cler, who'd been standing next to her in the gondola throughout the trip, raised his eyebrows. \"What has amused you?\"\n\nShe put her hand over her mouth, to cover the grin. \"Oh, nothing,\" she mumbled. \"Just a stray thought.\"\n\nIt was funny, but there were too many up-time referents for her to be able to explain the humor clearly to Heinz. Had anyone told her, back in her West Virginia days, that the time would come when she'd wonder where she could find a shrink, she'd have told them they were crazy.\n\nBut it was true, nonetheless. Up-timers now even had a saying about it. The Ring of Fire changed us all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "The third day went much like the first two. Two small armies moving slowly down the Danube, keeping the same steady distance. Hundreds of cavalrymen charging hither and yon across the landscape\u2014everywhere except where the armies marched\u2014plundering everything they could get their hands on.\n\nWhich wasn't much. That landscape had been picked pretty clean. If a cavalry platoon caught a chicken, they deemed it a great prize and a cause for celebration. They would hold the celebration immediately, roasting the chicken on a spit while consuming a bottle of very bad wine they'd looted from a neighboring village. As ravening plunderers went, these fellows were definitely bottom feeders." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "By then, although Colonel von Schnetter had said nothing openly to him, it was quite obvious to Captain von Haslang that the infantry commander had decided to let the Danube Regiment make its escape. He would follow them closely all the way to Regensburg, for the sake of appearances, but he would make no effort to bring the enemy to battle. He would not subject his own men to the casualties of a frontal assault on prepared artillery, with no cavalry support. If General von Lintelo broke into one of his tempers over the matter, let him place the blame where it rightly belonged\u2014on the cavalry scoundrels and their own commander, Colonel von Troiberz.\n\nVon Haslang had no objection. Neither to the substance of the issue, nor to the colonel's tactical judgment. Insofar as the substance was concerned, he too saw no reason their own men should suffer because of a general's carelessness and a cavalry officer's dereliction.\n\nAs for the tactics...\n\nIf Colonel von Troiberz had been one of von Lintelo's favorites, this would be a risky maneuver. The general would almost certainly then bring his wrath down on Colonel von Schnetter\u2014and, the general being the sort of man he was, on von Schnetter's staff as well. Happily, von Lintelo held Colonel von Troiberz in no high regard either. That was the reason he'd given him this assignment, almost as an afterthought, instead of including his unit in the more important mission to Amberg.\n\nSo, most likely, von Lintelo's fury would come down on the cavalry, who richly deserved it. But it probably wouldn't be that great a fury anyway, since it had also been obvious that von Lintelo didn't view capturing the escaped fragments of the Danube Regiment as a particularly important matter.\n\nHe might come to regret that judgment. Captain von Haslang's own assessment of the enemy commander had steadily grown over the past two and half days. Given that a siege of Regensburg now seemed inevitable, he'd be a lot happier if Major Simpson and his men weren't part of the defending force.\n\nBut, like Colonel von Schnetter, he didn't think it was worth the casualties to prevent that from happening. If a man sought perfection, he should find a different trade than that of a professional soldier." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "To her great relief, Bonnie found that her new assignment was not as hard as she'd thought it would be. (For years thereafter, whenever confronted with a quandary, she would throw up her hands and exclaim \"Oppenheimer!\") That was true for three reasons:\n\nFirst, Heinz B\u00f6cler turned out to be far better in his General Groves persona than she was when she tried to imitate a world-class nuclear physicist like Oppenheimer. Within less than an hour after their arrival in Regensburg, he had the city's officials and guild masters eating out of the palm of his plump little hand.\n\nHow he managed that was something of a mystery to Bonnie. It was certainly not due to his dazzling personality. Heinz was a pleasant enough fellow, but he possessed about as much in the way of social charm as you'd expect from a man raised by a parson, educated to be a clerk, and filled with the ambition to write a history book.\n\nHer guess was that Heinz fit, to a T, every pompous city official and stuffed-shirt guildmaster's notion of what the personal secretary of a provincial administrator should be like. So, oddly enough, it was his very lack of charisma that lent him great authority.\n\nThe second factor working in her favor was Brick Bozarth. Bonnie had completely forgotten\u2014if she'd ever known at all, which she probably hadn't\u2014that the State of Thuringia-Franconia had sent Bozarth to Regensburg back in 1634. The man served as one of the SoTF's semi-official trade representatives and consuls to the Oberpfalz.\n\nBozarth's precise position in the SoTF's bureaucracy was never clear to Bonnie. The middle-aged ex-miner had nothing more than a high school diploma, so far as his education was concerned. In his days as a coal miner, he'd operated a continuous mining machine\u2014a skill that was about as useful, in the here and now, as knowing how to pilot a submarine. She suspected that his main qualification for his post was simply the fact that was a member of the United Mine Workers.\n\nIn the period after the Ring of Fire, Mike Stearns had leaned very heavily on the membership of his union local to provide him with a ready-made cadre. Those days were over now. Mike himself had left for Magdeburg and the man who succeeded him to serve as the province's president, Ed Piazza, was not and had never been a coal miner.\n\nBy then, though, certain social customs had become rooted in the State of Thuringia-Franconia. The same customs didn't hold much sway elsewhere in the United States of Europe. Being a UMWA member in Magdeburg province, for instance, was certainly respectable\u2014even admirable\u2014but gave a man no particular status in political terms.\n\nIn the governing circles of the SoTF and its surrounding officialdom, on the other hand, membership in the UMWA had much the same informal prestige and ability to open doors that being a Harvard or Yale graduate had provided back up-time. That hadn't been due to the supposedly superb education one received at those Ivy League schools, no matter what people claimed. That education was certainly excellent, but so was the education a person could get at MIT or the University of California, or any number of top universities in America, public as well as private. Indeed, in many fields, the education someone could get outside of the Ivy League was quite a bit better.\n\nNo, the real cachet that having an Ivy League degree had given people back up-time was social, not educational. Being a graduate of Harvard or Yale put you in the right old boys' networks. Being a UMWA member did much the same in the SoTF.\n\nThankfully, Bozarth had not taken his post to be a sinecure. Being fair, very few UMWA people did. They might not necessarily be the best person for a job, but they almost always carried out those jobs with the same blue-collar work ethic that they'd taken into coal mines.\n\nSo, as soon as Bonnie explained her needs to him, Bozarth knew exactly where, how and from whom those needs could be met. He knew Regensburg very well by now, especially that part of Regensburg that was involved in what he considered \"useful work.\"\n\nBrick defined that term the way coal miners do. If you knew how to make something or fix something or grow something, you were a stout fellow. If you were a parson, you were regarded with respect but otherwise dismissed as being of no practical use. If you were a lawyer, you were automatically under a cloud of suspicion.\n\nThe third factor working in her favor was just blind luck. The first item Brick brought to her to try out as an additive to the gasoline was a tub of soap. It turned out that Regensburg had a soap manufacturer\u2014the German term was \"Seifensieder\"; literally, soap-boiler\u2014and he had plenty of his product available.\n\nThe standard soap of the time in the Germanies was a lye soap. You could also find some scented olive oil bar soaps from Italy, but they were an expensive luxury item. The lye soap came in the form of a semi-liquid soft soap, rather than being hardened into bars. In other words, absolutely perfect for Bonnie's purposes.\n\nThe first batch of napalm she mixed up worked like a charm. Being a firm believer in the principle if it ain't broke, don't fix it, Bonnie saw no point in going any further\u2014to the great disappointment of the commercial factor in Regensburg who controlled the town's sugar supply and had briefly imagined great riches were in store for him.\n\nIt was just as well. She found out later from people in Grantville who'd done the experiments back in the early days that sugar was a poor cousin to soap, in the \"hey, guys, let's make some napalm!\" department.\n\nThe bomb cases were easy. The city's cooper could provide her with barrels, but those were too big for the actual bombs. On the other hand, they made great containers to mix the batches. The result, which had the consistency of fresh-made pudding, could then be easily poured into jugs that held about three gallons. There were plenty of such jugs available in a town the size of Regensburg.\n\nThe end result was a bomb that didn't weigh more than twenty-five pounds, something that even one man could handle easily enough.\n\nThat left the fuses. Bonnie dithered back and forth between using gunpowder fuses and the even simpler device of rags soaked in gasoline. Both methods worked\u2014but which would work best when the bomb was dropped from a height of several hundred yards? She had no way of testing that short of the time-consuming method of taking them up in one of the airships.\n\nIn the end, Heinz solved the quandary for her, in his inimitable fashion. For a man whose great ambition was to become an historian, perhaps the world's most impractical profession, he had a surprisingly wide pragmatic streak.\n\n\"There is no danger of an explosion, from either type of fuse?\" he asked. \"If you light it too soon, I mean, and it burns down into the bomb before you want it to.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. These things aren't really bombs. They're basically great big Molotov cocktails. They don't blow up, they just shatter when they hit the ground. The napalm goes flying everywhere and sticks to everything\u2014and the lit fuse sets it on fire.\"\n\n\"Then use both,\" he said. \"Stick one kind of fuse on one side of the sealed lid, and the other across from it. Light them both, drop the bomb. One of them has to work.\"\n\nShe gave him a quick hug and set about giving the orders. So she didn't see the look of surprise that came to B\u00f6cler's face, followed by a look of pleasure, followed by a look of consternation." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "By early afternoon, she had enough bombs to load up both the Pelican and the Albatross. The Petrel had arrived in the area also, by now, but it was flying over the Danube at the moment keeping an eye on the movements of the Bavarian troops below.\n\nGiven how easy the whole process had turned out to be, Bonnie decided it made more sense to transfer the final stages of the bomb-making from Regensburg to the field. Tom Simpson and his people were now within ten miles of Regensburg. The airships had found a suitable landing area about three miles farther down the Danube. It was on the north bank, fortunately, since the south bank was in Bavarian territory. She'd bring enough napalm there in barrels to provide the Petrel with a full load of bombs. And there'd be enough left over to fill quite a few more jugs. She figured at least one of the airships could carry out a second bombing run, if Major Simpson decided to do so.\n\nSo, off they went. By now, Bonnie was starting to take flying by dirigible almost for granted. She was even enjoying it.\n\nExcept for the incredible racket. Having four un-muffled lawnmower engines yammering at close range was enough to drive you crazy after a while. The noise was so bad that whenever they needed to use the radio or the walkie-talkie they had to shut off the engines and just let the ship drift for a while.\n\nBut Heinz had thought of that, too. He'd found linen and had it soaked in some kind of wax. Little strips of it rolled up and stuffed in your ears made pretty decent ear plugs.\n\nThe airship crews clapped him on the back. Bonnie gave him another hug. Not a quick one, either." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "It did not occur to Johann Heinrich B\u00f6cler, then or ever, that it was peculiar for a man headed back to a war zone to spend the entire time worrying about anything else.\n\nBut, such was his nature. His background, training and personal inclination led him to be fatalistic on the subject of death and dismemberment. Not so at all, on the subject of right and proper conduct.\n\nWhat was he to do? By now, his attraction to the American woman was undeniable. Indeed, it was getting feverish. He was having thoughts\u2014images, even\u2014that he was quite sure his father would declare unseemly. His grandfather, should he discover, would be furious.\n\nThey were unseemly thoughts. But he could not stop having them.\n\nIf the woman in question had been uninterested, Heinz was sure he could have brought himself under control. Unfortunately\u2014well, also delightfully\u2014she very clearly was not. That last hug, especially, had born no resemblance at all to the sort of hugs one occasionally got from a particularly affectionate and free-spirited sister, aunt or cousin.\n\nThe fact remained that he was still too young to consider marriage. These past days had been eventful and stimulating; certainly. He would even allow that they had been exciting. But soon enough, the real world would intrude\u2014say better, return to normal. And he would go back to being a modestly paid secretary who was still some years away from having accumulated enough in the way of assets and income to sustain a household.\n\nWhat was he to do?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Tom decided to launch the bombing raid just before sundown. By then, the cavalrymen staying in the targeted village would be settling in for the night. Most of them, anyway. But there would still be enough light for the airship's bombardiers to see the targets easily. Even with a clear sky and moonlight, he didn't think they could do so very well after nightfall.\n\nSo, he stopped the march an hour earlier in the day than he'd stopped the previous two days, and spent the extra time setting up fieldworks to guard the camp. He wasn't sure how the Bavarians would react to the bombing. He didn't think they'd retaliate with an attack, because the infantry were the only ones really in position to launch such an attack and they weren't going to be the target of the bombing.\n\nBut you never knew. Relying too much on your own assessment of an enemy's intentions was a military error that probably dated back to Cro-Magnon times. Naw, those guys won't do nothing tonight so we may as well get some sleep. And so perishes another little band of hunter-gatherers...\n\nHe didn't use all of his men for that purpose, though. Earlier in the day, once Bonnie explained her plans to him over the radio, he sent Bruno von Eichelberg and his mercenary company on a forced march down the river. Their assignment was to meet up with the Pelican and the Albatross at the landing area the airship crews had selected and provide them with a guard unit. Tom didn't know yet if he would want to carry out a second bombing run, but he might. So he'd approved Bonnie's plan to set up an impromptu combination airfield and bomb-making facility.\n\nAnd, again, you never knew. There was certainly no way that the Bavarian infantry could get down there tonight or tomorrow morning. And he didn't think it was likely at all that a cavalry unit would either. There had always been at least one airship in the sky above them since early morning. They could keep an eye out for any enemy troop movements within miles, and they'd reported no cavalry any closer than half a mile upstream. But you couldn't rule out the possibility that some stray cavalry had gone unspotted and were now well down the river. If even a small number of cavalrymen came across the airships on the ground and unprotected, there'd be an outright slaughter.\n\nAnd now, there was nothing left to do but wait." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\"What do you think, Heinrich?\" asked Colonel von Schnetter. He passed the telescope he'd been using to Captain von Haslang. The two of them were sitting on their horses atop a small rise near the river bank, studying the fieldworks the Danube Regiment was putting up a half mile or so downstream. From here, they had a good view.\n\n\"Can you think of any reason they made camp earlier today, and are taking the time to create fieldworks?\"\n\nVon Haslang didn't reply for a few seconds, while he studied the enemy's activity through the glass. Then, passing it back to his commander, he got a slight smile on his face. He and von Schnetter had known each other for years and this was not the first time they'd worked together. The colonel's use of his given name was a subtle indicator that his friend wanted a frank and private discussion.\n\n\"Not really, Caspar. It's not as if you've given them any reason to expect an assault.\"\n\nVon Schnetter took the eyeglass and slid it back into the case he kept attached to his saddle. He had the same slight smile also.\n\n\"No, I haven't. And as I'm sure you're figured out by now, I have no intention of attacking them. That American major\u2014and it's him, for a certainty; did you see the size of the bastard?\u2014has shown himself to be altogether too competent for my taste. Any attack we launched with no cavalry to work at their flanks would be a bloodbath. We'd probably win, in the end, because we outnumber them three-to-one. But that's more of a butcher's bill than I'm willing to pay with good troops who've been left in the lurch by swine and...\"\n\nHe let the end of the sentence trail off. The \"swine,\" of course, referred to von Troiberz. Von Haslang was quite sure that if his colonel had completed the thought, the \"and\" would have been followed by a very unfavorable reference to General von Lintelo.\n\nHe had gotten a good look at the commander of the enemy force. Just now, and also the day before when he and von Schnetter had studied their opponent making camp from another rise in the landscape. The colonel's eyepiece was superb. He'd only been able to afford it because he came from a wealthy family.\n\nIt was conceivable, of course, that the Danube Regiment had two officers as huge as the one they'd been looking at. But it was not likely. The Simpson fellow was rather famous, all across the Germanies. So was his admiral father, but in the case of the son the fame came entirely from his physique, not his accomplishments. That would begin to change, of course, as a result of his exploits over the past few days.\n\nIt was said that the young American major had engaged in an up-time sport that required immense men. \"Feetball,\" it was called, if von Haslang remembered right. He was not clear with regard to the details of the game. His image of it, had he laid it before an up-timer, would have resulted in smiles, perhaps even laughter. Von Haslang's conception of \"feetball\" bore a much closer resemblance to mass sumo wrestling than the actual American sport.\n\nBut the details were irrelevant. Von Haslang would hate to confront that man in a physical clash, armed with anything but a gun. And now that he'd experienced three days of maneuvering against him, he'd want to fire the gun at a distance.\n\nHe and von Schnetter went back to looking at the distant enemy fieldworks.\n\n\"Make camp for the night, sir?\" von Haslang asked, figuring that the moment for informality had passed.\n\n\"Yes, please see to it, Captain. We'll not be launching any attacks.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Colonel Johann von Troiberz was planning no attacks of his own that night, either. Not even an attack on the virtue of the woman sharing his bed, since that virtue had fallen many years earlier. Not to him, but to a different officer.\n\nHe thought he was the second Bavarian officer for whom she'd become a concubine. In actual fact, he was the fifth, but the woman in question had never seen any need to enlighten the colonel on the matter. Men were always bothered by such details.\n\nAfter von Troiberz fell asleep, Ursula Gerisch stared at the ceiling. It was the sort of ceiling that she'd become familiar with, since she'd cast her lot with von Troiberz.\n\nThe ceiling belonged to one of the rooms in the sort of inn you ran across in large German villages. \"Large,\" in this instance, was a term partly defined by the mere fact that the village had an inn, that was more than just a front room in a villager's house that provided drink and food purely for the locals.\n\nNeedless to say, the room was neither large nor well-furnished. It was certainly not luxurious. There was a bed\u2014not large; not comfortable\u2014and a nightstand, one chair, and a chamber pot.\n\nThe chamber pot had not been washed lately. So much was obvious.\n\nShe tried to remember how she'd wound up in this state of affairs. She was still well short of thirty years old. She couldn't even claim the excuse of desperately poor origins. Her father had been a tanner in a small town in Swabia\u2014a trade that paid rather well, although you had to put up with the terrible stench.\n\nIt had begun with excitement, she recalled. Soldiers passing through town, a handsome young lieutenant. Ursula herself, bored. And she truly hated the stink of the tannery.\n\nTo this day, she liked to imagine that first liaison would have worked out well in the end. But the unfortunate young lieutenant had been serving under Ernst von Mansfeld at the disastrous battle of the Dessau Bridge, where the Protestants were crushed by Wallenstein. He'd vanished in the course of that battle. Presumably killed, but you never really knew. He might have just run off and decided to keep running. Whatever had happened, she'd never seen him again.\n\nThe second officer had not been exciting at all. A fat colonel in late middle-age, whose wife had died and whose career had stalled out. But he'd been a decent enough man, and she'd been desperate. Then, a year later, the colonel's heart had failed. He'd left no provision for her in his will, despite his promises. Everything had gone to his own children.\n\nBack on the streets again. She'd worked those just long enough to find another officer. Another lieutenant. Also, alas, another unfortunate. In this case, not a casualty of bullet and sword but a casualty of the still deadlier combination of getting stinking drunk and climbing onto a horse.\n\nThen, finally, a stroke of luck. Not much, but some. A captain this time, in his mid-thirties and in good enough health that she could expect some considerable years with him. As a concubine, to be sure, not a wife. The hopes Ursula had once had of eventually getting married and raising a family had died of neglect and malnutrition, somewhere along the way. But the captain was faithful enough that she didn't really fear he'd desert her for another woman or give her some sort of horrid disease.\n\nHe was something of a mean bastard, though, with a hot temper. He beat her from time to time. Life was far from perfect.\n\nWorse than the beatings was the temper itself. The day came when he mistook the ease of beating a concubine with beating another officer. Unlike the concubine, the officer had a sword\u2014and, as it turned out, was considerably more proficient in its use than the man who'd struck him.\n\nThey buried the captain's arm in the same coffin that held the rest of his body. The cut had taken it right off, after which he'd bled to death.\n\nLuckily for Ursula\u2014well, it had seemed lucky at the time\u2014Colonel von Troiberz had attended the funeral and took it upon himself to comfort the not-exactly-a-widow after the ceremony concluded.\n\nThat had been three years ago. Her life had been a slow but steady slide downhill ever since.\n\nThe colonel did not beat her. That was his one virtue. So far as Ursula could determine, his only virtue.\n\nOtherwise, von Troiberz was an unpleasant man in every particular. He had no sense of humor, no capacity for joy. He smiled maybe once a week. Laughed, perhaps once a month.\n\nHe had no capacity for any sort of pleasure, for that matter, except ones deriving from spite and greed.\n\nPetty spite and petty greed. The man lacked style and verve even in his vices and sins.\n\nMostly, von Troiberz was a sullen man, riddled with resentments and envies. He drank constantly. And then spent his few sober hours coming up with schemes that might save him from the consequences of other schemes he'd come up with while drunk. She knew perfectly well the reason he'd spent the last three days dragging her around this miserable countryside in January was because he was desperately trying to cover up one of his thefts.\n\nThe drinking also made him incapable in bed but that was not a problem, so far as Ursula was concerned. On the now-rare occasions when the colonel did choose to engage in sexual activity, the result was brief and would have left her completely unsatisfied except that she began the coupling with no such expectations anyway. Somewhere along the way, her hopes that sex would at least be enjoyable had also died a natural death. The causes, again, being neglect and malnutrition.\n\nThe biggest problem was that Colonel von Troiberz stank, most of the time\u2014and Ursula had begun this life in the first place because she hated bad smells.\n\nHe bathed once a year, at most, not counting the occasions he fell into a creek or stumbled into a pond while inebriated. But that didn't help because such bodies of water were usually smelly in their own right, not to mention the result of the time he'd fallen into a latrine.\n\nHe was flatulent. He had bad breath.\n\nNo, terrible breath. Even the food he preferred was nasty-smelling. His favorite meat was pickled pork, his favorite vegetables were onions, and his favorite herb was garlic.\n\nHis favorite drink was cheap korn made from rye taken with cheap beer. When he could afford it, he drank cheap schnapps made from apples. When he was short of money, he settled for cheap wine. All of it smelled bad to Ursula. Being fair to the colonel, all liquor smelled bad to her, even the expensive kind. She herself did not drink liquor except for an occasional glass of wine on celebratory occasions, and then only because it was expected of her.\n\nHe had no favorite flower. What was far worse was that he disliked flowers altogether\u2014he claimed they made him sneeze and made him itch\u2014and so he forbade her from putting any in their rooms. Even though she loved flowers and had ever since she was a child.\n\nLying in the bed staring at the ceiling, Ursula started to weep. No loud sobbing\u2014the last thing she wanted to do was wake up von Troiberz\u2014just tears, oozing slowly from her eyes. Eventually she would wipe them off, but not for a while. She was too tired. She was always too tired now. She could barely summon the energy to cook and do the laundry.\n\nThe colonel didn't want much of the first, since he usually ate in taverns, and he wanted almost none of the other. His clothing was as filthy and bad-smelling as he was, and there wasn't much point in her washing them because within a day he'd have them covered again with spilled liquor and food; within three days, vomit; and within a week, the condition of his breeches and underclothes didn't bear thinking about.\n\nEvery day seemed to pass in gray colors. She was losing her hopes for simple contentment as surely as she'd lost her hopes for marriage, for children, for joy, for pleasure. She'd begun to think about suicide, from time to time. So far the residue of her Catholic upbringing kept her shying away from the idea. But she thought that eventually her faith would die also. She felt like a walking corpse, stumbling toward a grave that she simply hadn't seen yet.\n\nBut she would see it some day, she knew. Probably before she saw her thirtieth birthday.\n\nShe knew her birthday, at least. Many people didn't. February 11th, less than a month from now.\n\nShe wouldn't be able to celebrate it, though. Von Troiberz disliked birthdays also, even his own. She wasn't sure why. She thought it was probably because the colonel had lost whatever capacity he'd ever had to enjoy a day just because it was a day to enjoy. And so he found it irritating to have others expecting him to celebrate. So might a man who has lost all sense of taste react when people urge him to eat a cake.\n\nIf she wasn't too tired, maybe she'd be able to have her own private little celebration. Just by herself. There still wouldn't be any flowers she could pick yet, though. Even the crocus wouldn't come up until March.\n\nShe'd often wished her birthday had been in April or May. Maybe then her life would have turned out differently. She liked to think so, anyway. There was still some small, not-quite-dead-and-buried part of Ursula Gerisch's soul that thought most of her life's trajectory had been the result of misfortune and happenstance. Not all, no; she accepted that she bore some of the guilt. But on her best days she thought\u2014well, mostly she just wondered\u2014about someday being able to find a new course for herself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "A peculiar sound coming from somewhere outside finally penetrated her bleak thoughts. Ursula realized that she'd been hearing it for some time but hadn't paid attention. It had gotten quite loud, by now.\n\nShe found a clean portion of the bedding and wiped the tears from her face. Then she rose from the bed and went to the window.\n\nThe sight beyond, in the glow of sunset\u2014even in January, it seemed warm\u2014was the most wonderful she could remember seeing in years. The one thing in the past three days that had brought some happiness to her was seeing those incredible flying machines in the sky.\n\nThey were so big! Yet not frightening. Not to her, at least. Many of the soldiers were scared by them, but she wasn't. Where they saw monsters in the air, she saw gigantic puppies.\n\nShe liked puppies. She liked dogs, too. They smelled nice to her, even if some people didn't think so.\n\nShe'd have kept a dog except the colonel didn't like dogs either.\n\nAnd now there were three of them! All at once, in a line, one behind the other. She'd only seen one at a time, up until now.\n\nThey were coming in her direction, too\u2014right at her, it seemed. And because they were approaching from the west, the setting sun lit up their huge, swollen bellies. She could easily see the boats that hung below them, with their noisy machines that apparently made them fly. She could even see people clearly, looking over the side of the boats.\n\nThey were quite low, she suddenly realized, much lower than she'd ever seen one of them come down before. They couldn't be more than six or seven hundred feet high, maybe even less.\n\nSuddenly, for the first time in years, Ursula was filled with excitement. She had to see them better! From outside, not through a small grimy window. It was a cheap window, too, which made everything look distorted.\n\nShe glanced at the colonel. Von Troiberz was sprawled on the bed, snoring heavily. He'd come to bed drunk, as he usually did. Nothing would wake him up except the clap of doom.\n\nSplendid. If he were awake, he'd undoubtedly forbid her to go outside. Moving quickly, Ursula put on her clothes and shoes, wrapped a cloak around her, and left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "In less than a minute she was outside. But the tavern door opened into a small courtyard surrounded by buildings. She couldn't see any of the ships from here. So, she hurried through the gate and out onto the village's main street.\n\nBut the street was narrow and the buildings alongside it just as tall. Frustrated, she looked around and saw a meadow in the distance, perhaps twenty yards beyond the last building. She could get there in a couple of minutes, if she hurried. The soil would probably be icy, but she had good shoes. It was the one piece of apparel she owned that the colonel had been willing to spend some money on." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "She got there in a minute and half. Looking up, she saw that the first ship\u2014they were huge, now, huge\u2014had come right overhead.\n\nThis was so marvelous! For the first time since childhood, she started jumping up and down with glee, clapping her hands.\n\nThen, frowned. Not worried yet, just puzzled. Why were they dropping things from the boats? They looked like jugs or some sort of pottery.\n\nUnderstanding came, and she made a small moue of disgust. Thank God she'd gotten out of the village! It was going to stink in a few seconds.\n\nShe was a little sad, though. A little upset, too. She wouldn't have thought that people who could do such a wondrous thing as fly through the air would be so petty and spiteful that they'd drop their chamberpots on their enemies.\n\nUrsula couldn't help but giggle, though\u2014and then realized that might be the first time she'd done that in years, too.\n\nColonel Johann von Troiberz was in for a rude awakening. He was about to get shat upon by leviathans." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Ursula was wrong. Colonel von Troiberz did not get a rude awakening.\n\nHe didn't wake up at all. The tavern was one of the first buildings hit by the firebombs and it was hit by no fewer than four of them\u2014two dropped by the Albatross, and one from each of the airships that followed in the bombing run. Within less than five minutes, the building was an inferno. Von Troiberz had been so drunk when he fell asleep that he died of smoke inhalation without ever regaining consciousness.\n\nMost of the soldiers in that building died. Only five made it out alive, and two of them died immediately thereafter when the eaves of the tavern collapsed on them while they were still in the courtyard.\n\nThe very worst casualties were inflicted on the soldiers two buildings over. There were eleven of them crowded into that house. It had been the \"party house,\" where those soldiers went who were in the mood to carouse\u2014and they'd started carousing before noon. Only one survived and he suffered horrible burns that left him badly scarred.\n\nWithin fifteen minutes, the entire village was on fire. Almost three dozen cavalrymen had been killed, twice that many injured\u2014and the stables were burning too. Luckily for the horses, a sober and conscientious sergeant had raced about unlocking all the doors in time for most of the beasts to escape.\n\nHaving made their escape, though, the horses were in no mood to stay in the vicinity of the holocaust. They scattered across the countryside, leaving all but nine cavalrymen stranded on foot.\n\nIn January. In the Little Ice Age. As night was falling. Most of them without having had time to don heavy clothing. A number of them bootless. And with nowhere nearby to spend the night indoors that wasn't smoldering.\n\nSome of the men just wandered off, but most of them gathered together near the village when the fires began dying down. Their commanding officer was nowhere to be seen, and neither were the two captains who had been with them. Of the officers who'd been in the village, only three lieutenants were left.\n\nAfter some discussion, they agreed that the best course of action was to join Colonel von Schnetter's infantry. Insofar as they knew where that camp was located, a subject on which there was considerable dispute. The lieutenants, in particular, were quarrelsome men. In the end, three different parties went their separate ways.\n\nOne of the parties found the camp. Another eventually stumbled across a deserted village two miles away before any of them had died, although some wound up losing toes to frostbite.\n\nThe third party died of exposure. The last man went at three o'clock in the morning." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Watching this all unfold from above, Rita was aghast. She'd had no idea\u2014never once imagined\u2014that the bombing run would have such horrific success. She'd thought that most of the bombs would miss entirely, first of all. Some would hit the target, certainly, but few enough that by the time the fires really began spreading most of the men down there would have been able to escape.\n\nShe hadn't even thought about the horses. Americans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have understood how deadly it could be for a man to be stranded in winter without a horse. But she'd come from the end of the twentieth. \"Being stranded\" meant running out of gas and hitching a ride with the next car to come by. In a rural area like Grantville, people would usually stop for you. Especially in winter.\n\nWhat had thrown her off, again, had been watching too many newsreels. She'd seen documentary footage that depicted bombing runs from World War II and the Korean War and the Vietnam War and Operation Desert Storm. Planes moving hundreds of miles an hour when they dropped their bombs; the trajectory of those bombs themselves covering a great distance before they finally hit the ground.\n\nIt was amazing any of them hit anything they were aimed at. And those bombs had been military-grade high explosives or incendiaries, vastly more powerful than the ones Bonnie Weaver had jury-rigged. By the time of the Iraq-Kuwait war, some of them had been guided munitions. But even as far back as World War II, she knew, the bombers had some kind of superb bombsights.\n\nHer bombsights had been her eyes, looking down over the lip of the gondola, while two of Franchetti's crewmen held a bomb on the same lip, waiting for her signal.\n\nWhat she hadn't considered, until the bombs started hitting, was that her bombing platform was almost stationary. She'd told Franchetti to maintain just enough power to keep the airship from drifting. Both of the airships that followed her after the Albatross unloaded all its bombs had done the same.\n\nAnd none of it had taken very long. Once Rita saw that the bombs really didn't need to be \"aimed\" at all, she'd told the crewmen to just start pitching them over the side as fast as they could.\n\nAnother deadly factor had been her decision to make the run at a much lower altitude that the airships normally flew over enemy troops. At her husband's insistence, the airships had stayed at least two thousand feet high most of the time. They never dropped below a thousand feet.\n\nBut Rita had decided, just this once and to hell with what Tom said about it afterward, that they'd come in not more than the length of two footfall fields over the target. That was still within range of seventeenth-century musket fire, technically speaking. But at two hundred yards the fire would be wildly inaccurate. Besides, although Rita didn't know the exact formulas, she knew from things her husband had said that smoothbore round shot lost its muzzle velocity much faster than rifled bullets did. She figured that even if a bullet fired from a musket six hundred feet down did manage to hit the envelope or even the gondola, it probably wouldn't be moving fast enough to do a lot of damage. Barring a really lucky shot, anyway.\n\nIn the event, only two cavalrymen shot at them, and both of them used wheel-lock pistols. She had no idea where those bullets wound up going. Nowhere close, for sure.\n\nThis was just a massacre. She felt sick to her stomach." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Once she stopped screaming and brought her panic under control, Ursula got up and looked around. She had to get up because in her frenzied race away from the inferno the village had become, she'd eventually tripped on something and sprawled flat on the ground.\n\nShe'd come a long way from the village, she realized. At least a quarter of a mile. She wasn't sure. She hadn't been thinking about anything except get away! get away!\n\nShe looked up. Now, the things in the sky did look like monsters to her. You could still see all of them very clearly, since the sun hadn't fully gone down yet. Its red hemisphere glowed above the western skyline.\n\nShe stood there for a while, gasping to regain her breath and trying to figure out what to do. Going back to the village was...unthinkable.\n\nBut where else? She looked around, more slowly this time, and realized she was the only person in sight.\n\nShe was cold, she suddenly realized. Very cold. The temperature was already below freezing. Within a few hours no one would be able to survive out here without some way to stay warm better than a coat and a pair of shoes. Even a good pair of shoes.\n\nNoise drew her attention back to the sky. The first of the airships had turned and was now coming...\n\nRight at her.\n\nShe screamed and started running again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "\"What do you think is happening, sir?\" von Haslang asked the colonel. Von Schnetter lowered the eyeglass and shook his head. \"It's too far away to see much. Something is burning, though. A whole village, I think, as bright as it is even from here.\"\n\nBoth of them now looked above the glow in the distance. The airships in the sky were quite visible, even this far away.\n\n\"Do you think...?\"\n\nVon Schnetter sighed. \"I don't know, Heinrich. But...it could be, yes.\"\n\nHe looked around at their own camp. \"Better make preparations, Captain. Just in case we have to move suddenly.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Tom Simpson was even farther away. But because of the radio, he didn't have to wonder what had happened.\n\nWhat he was starting to wonder about, though, was how much more his wife could take. There'd been a ragged edge to her voice that he'd never heard before.\n\nThere were a lot of ways in which Rita resembled her older brother Mike, but other ways in which they were not alike at all. One big difference was that Mike Stearns\u2014as nice a guy as he was, and Tom would vouch for that\u2014also had a ruthless side to him. As wide and deep as the Mississippi, sometimes.\n\nRita just plain didn't. She was the sort of person for whom healing and nurturing came easily and killing did not.\n\nAt all.\n\nTom was starting to worry that she was going to come out of all this with a lot more scars\u2014and a lot worse ones\u2014than the one left on her arm by a splinter from an exploding door.\n\nShe hadn't fired the first bullet. But she'd fired some of the ones that came after, including a gigantic bullet that had just taken out dozens of men and the whole village they'd been in." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "\"Look there!\" said one of the Albatross's crewmen. His first name was Luca, but Rita couldn't remember his last name. It wasn't Franchetti but she thought he was somehow related to the Franchettis. Like most up-time businesses had been in a small town like Grantville, seventeenth-century companies were usually family affairs. The families got pretty big, too.\n\nLuca was leaving over the rail of the gondola, pointing at something on the ground ahead of them. Rita went over and looked herself.\n\nAt first she didn't see anything. It was now getting dark down on the ground, if not up here where the last of the sun was still visible.\n\nAfter a few seconds she spotted a flash of movement that drew her eyes. It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing.\n\n\"It's a woman, I think,\" said Luca. \"Hard to tell from here.\"\n\nRita thought the figure on the ground was a woman herself. She didn't know why, exactly. You really couldn't distinguish body shapes from this far up, much less facial features. It was winter, too, when people wore bulky clothing.\n\nBut something, whatever subtlety of movement or posture, led her to think Luca was right.\n\nHe shook his head. \"She might make it through the night, if she can find one of the abandoned villages and get inside. Probably not, though.\"\n\nRita stared at him. Then, down at the woman below.\n\nThat was a woman, she was almost sure now. But even if it wasn't, that person certainly wasn't a Bavarian cavalryman.\n\n\"Fuck that,\" she muttered. She turned to Franchetti. \"Take the Albatross down, Filippo. All the way to the ground.\" She pointed to the figure herself. \"We'll pick her up. We've got room and plenty of weight allowance, now that the bombs have all been dropped.\"\n\n\"But...signora...\"\n\n\"Oh, stop worrying! There's nobody else down there. Not within half a mile, at the very least. We've got plenty of time to get down, pick her up, and get back in the air before anyone'll be able to come at us.\"\n\n\"But... signora...\"\n\n\"Just fucking do it!\"\n\nShe took a deep, ragged breath. \"Please, Filippo.\" She had tears in her eyes. \"I am so sick of killing people.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "In the end, what saved Ursula's life was her own despair.\n\nShe ran from the monster. Ran and ran for a while. But it kept pursuing her, coming closer and closer to the ground.\n\nEventually, partly from exhaustion but mostly from too many years of seeing her hopes all scraped away, she just stopped. Then, sat on the ground, holding her knees. Ignoring the cold seeping into her buttocks. Just waited for her death, the way prey run to the ground waits for the predator." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "If she'd kept running, she could have escaped the Albatross. It was dark now and she could have slipped away into the shadows any number of times, if she'd been thinking clearly.\n\nRita had almost given up hope herself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "The monster had the face of a young woman. Ursula hadn't expected that.\n\nQuite a pretty one. Black hair, blue eyes. The color was very clear, even in twilight. A slender build, she thought, although it was hard to be sure. She was wearing a peculiar, puffy sort of jacket.\n\nThe monster extended her hand. \"Come on, girl,\" she said. \"It's time to go.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Some time later, looking out at the moon from the gondola, Ursula finally spoke.\n\n\"I'm flying,\" she said, wonderingly. \"I'm really flying.\"\n\nA while later, she added, \"Away.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "On the fourth and final day, the Bavarian infantry made no effort to close with the Danube Regiment. In fact, by late morning they'd let the distance between the marching armies stretch to two miles. By mid-afternoon, to three miles.\n\nColonel von Schnetter's couriers had come across several survivors of the bombing raid and two of them had been to see the village ruins themselves. So the infantry commander had a pretty good idea of what had happened.\n\nThe ever-growing distance between his forces and those of Major Simpson's were no longer due to simple caution, but outright worry. His infantry was moving more slowly down the Danube because he needed to be sure, at all times, that he could get the men away from the river if the need arose. Airships that could destroy a village could also destroy a tightly-packed infantry column.\n\nVon Schnetter was no longer concerned about General von Lintelo's reaction to the events of these past four days. First, because Colonel von Troiberz had certainly died in the fire\u2014and who better to take the blame for disaster than a man already dead? Second, because not even von Lintelo was so thick-headed as not to understand that the introduction of these infernal airships onto battlefields created many new problems.\n\nAnd third, because he had better things to do than fret over a general's possible peeves. Such as spend his time discussing new tactical possibilities with his friend and trusted aide, Captain von Haslang.\n\nIt was quite pleasant, actually, that last day's march down the Danube. Vigorous conversations with an intelligent man were one of life's high points. Even when the subject was grim." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Twice, Tom almost ordered another bombing run. Not because of bloodlust, or because he feared that the pursuing Bavarians posed a threat any longer. They were making it very clear that they had no intention of fighting before he reached Regensburg. You could almost call them an escort of sorts, in this final stretch.\n\nNo, it was because he too was beginning to consider tactical options in the light of new developments, and had started discussing them with his own trusted aides.\n\n\"It'd be interesting to see,\" pointed out Bruno von Eichelberg, \"how an infantry column marching down a road handles an attack from the air.\"\n\nBoth times, what stopped him was his wife's face. Rita was slender almost to the point of being skinny. Now, though, she was looking downright gaunt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Every night since the first, the nightmares had brought Rita awake. Sweating, frightened, tight of breath. Always that same boy's face.\n\nThis morning, though, she'd been able to look at a woman's face that she thought might start easing her soul.\n\nShe could hope so, anyway." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "When the Danube Regiment entered Regensburg, they discovered that a parade was expected. Right through the town to the square. Where apparently speeches would be inflicted upon them.\n\nAh, well. Even tired soldiers respond to applause. And they were getting a lot of it. An awful lot." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "\"This was mostly Heinz's idea,\" Bonnie told Rita. They were watching the parade from one of the stands set up on the side of the square. Overhead, the Pelican came into view. The crowd in the square burst into cheers again.\n\n\"You know what city officials are like,\" she continued. \"I swear, frogs have more imagination. All they could talk about\u2014fuss and fuss and fuss about\u2014was where they would find enough billets for all these additional soldiers. But Heinz set 'em straight. 'First we make them welcome,' he said, and wouldn't take no for an answer. As usual.\"\n\nThere was a certain tone in her voice. Proud, you might call it. Proprietary, too." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "B\u00f6cler was watching the festivities from the officials' stand. He would have much preferred to be with Bonnie Weaver. Mostly because he liked being around her, but partly because he wouldn't be at the center of everyone's attention. He disliked that rather intensively, he'd come to discover.\n\nHe'd also come to understand some things about his former employer, Ernst of Saxe-Weimar, that had been unclear to him before, as well as gaining a better understanding of the advantages that Caesar and Thucydides had had, when they turned themselves to the historian's trade.\n\nThe front ranks of the Danube Regiment entered the square. At the fore marched the figure of Major Simpson. Impossible to miss, of course.\n\nThe cheers erupted again.\n\nOr Xenophon. B\u00f6cler had read the Anabasis. But he decided he should read it again. He thought he'd get more out of it now. He was quite sure he would, in fact.\n\nHe looked toward Bonnie. She was standing next to the major's wife, and, as it happened, she was looking in his direction.\n\nShe waved at him, very cheerily.\n\nAnxiety, in the midst of celebration. Doubt, where certainty also tread.\n\nThe cautions were all in the Bible, of course. He'd known that for years, although he hadn't understood them so well until these past few days.\n\nIn his own way, he too had been marching upcountry.\n\nAnd still was.\n\nWhat was he to do?" + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Algernon Blackwood.json b/Algernon Blackwood.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..44e903a2dec0e52640d8f1fa9ca46419af2ee9da --- /dev/null +++ b/Algernon Blackwood.json @@ -0,0 +1,2367 @@ +[ + { + "title": "Collected Works of Algernon Blackwood", + "author": "Algernon Blackwood", + "genres": [ + "fantasy", + "horror" + ], + "tags": [ + "short stories" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Rabbits by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "Jimbo's governess ought to have known better\u2014but she didn't. If she had, Jimbo would never have met with the adventures that subsequently came to him. Thus, in a roundabout sort of way, the child ought to have been thankful to the governess; and perhaps, in a roundabout sort of way, he was. But that comes at the far end of the story, and is doubtful at best; and in the meanwhile the child had gone through his suffering, and the governess had in some measure expiated her fault; so that at this stage it is only necessary to note that the whole business began because the Empty House happened to be really an Empty House\u2014not the one Jimbo's family lived in, but another of which more will be known in due course.\n\nJimbo's father was a retired Colonel, who had married late in life, and now lived all the year round in the country; and Jimbo was the youngest child but one. The Colonel, lean in body as he was sincere in mind, an excellent soldier but a poor diplomatist, loved dogs, horses, guns and riding-whips. He also really understood them. His neighbours, had they been asked, would have called him hard-headed, and so far as a soft-hearted man may deserve the title, he probably was. He rode two horses a day to hounds with the best of them, and the stiffer the country the better he liked it. Besides his guns, dogs and horses, he was also very fond of his children. It was his hobby that he understood them far better than his wife did, or than any one else did, for that matter. The proper evolution of their differing temperaments had no difficulties for him. The delicate problems of child-nature, which defy solution by nine parents out of ten, ceased to exist the moment he spread out his muscular hand in a favourite omnipotent gesture and uttered some extraordinarily foolish generality in that thunderous, good-natured voice of his. The difficulty for himself vanished when he ended up with the words, \"Leave that to me, my dear; believe me, I know best!\" But for all else concerned, and especially for the child under discussion, this was when the difficulty really began.\n\nSince, however, the Colonel, after this chapter, mounts his best hunter and disappears over a high hedge into space so far as our story is concerned, any further delineation of his wholesome but very ordinary type is unnecessary.\n\nOne winter's evening, not very long after Christmas, the Colonel made a discovery. It alarmed him a little; for it suggested to his cocksure mind that he did not understand all his children as comprehensively as he imagined.\n\nBetween five o'clock tea and dinner\u2014that magic hour when lessons were over and the big house was full of shadows and mystery\u2014there came a timid knock at the study door.\n\n\"Come in,\" growled the soldier in his deepest voice, and a little girl's face, wreathed in tumbling brown hair, poked itself hesitatingly through the opening.\n\nThe Colonel did not like being disturbed at this hour, and everybody in the house knew it; but the spell of Christmas holidays was still somehow in the air, and the customary order was not yet fully re-established. Moreover, when he saw who the intruder was, his growl modified itself into a sort of common sternness that yet was not cleverly enough simulated to deceive the really intuitive little person who now stood inside the room.\n\n\"Well, Nixie, child, what do you want now?\"\n\n\"Please, father, will you\u2014we wondered if\u2014\"\n\nA chorus of whispers issued from the other side of the door:\n\n\"Go on, silly!\"\n\n\"Out with it!\"\n\n\"You promised you would, Nixie.\"\n\n\"...if you would come and play Rabbits with us?\" came the words in a desperate rush, with laughter not far behind.\n\nThe big man with the fierce white moustaches glared over the top of his glasses at the intruders as if amazed beyond belief at the audacity of the request.\n\n\"Rabbits!\" he exclaimed, as though the mere word ought to have caused an instant explosion. \"Rabbits!\"\n\n\"Oh, please do.\"\n\n\"Rabbits at this time of night!\" he repeated. \"I never heard of such a thing. Why, all good rabbits are asleep in their holes by now. And you ought to be in yours too by rights, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"We don't sleep in holes, father,\" said the owner of the brown hair, who was acting as leader.\n\n\"And there's still a nour before bedtime, really,\" added a voice in the rear.\n\nThe big man slowly put his glasses down and looked at his watch. He looked very savage, but of course it was all pretence, and the children knew it. \"If he was really cross he'd pretend to be nice,\" they whispered to each other, with merciless perception.\n\n\"Well\u2014\" he began. But he who hesitates, with children, is lost. The door flung open wide, and the troop poured into the room in a medley of long black legs, flying hair and outstretched hands. They surrounded the table, swarmed upon his big knees, shut his stupid old book, tried on his glasses, kissed him, and fell to discussing the game breathlessly all at once, as though it had already begun.\n\nThis, of course, ended the battle, and the big man had to play the part of the Monster Rabbit in a wonderful game of his own invention. But when, at length, it was all over, and they were gathered panting round the fire of blazing logs in the hall, the Monster Rabbit\u2014the only one with any breath at his command\u2014looked up and spoke.\n\n\"Where's Jimbo?\" he asked.\n\n\"Upstairs.\"\n\n\"Why didn't he come and play too?\"\n\n\"He didn't want to.\"\n\n\"Why? What's he doing?\"\n\nSeveral answers were forthcoming.\n\n\"Nothing in p'tickler.\"\n\n\"Talking to the furniture when I last saw him.\"\n\n\"Just thinking, as usual, or staring in the fire.\"\n\nNone of the answers seemed to satisfy the Monster Rabbit, for when he kissed them a little later and said good-night, he gave orders, with a graver face, for Jimbo to be sent down to the study before he went to bed. Moreover, he called him \"James,\" which was a sure sign of parental displeasure.\n\n\"James, why didn't you come and play with your brothers and sisters just now?\" asked the Colonel, as a dreamy-eyed boy of about eight, with a mop of dark hair and a wistful expression, came slowly forward into the room.\n\n\"I was in the middle of making pictures.\"\n\n\"Where\u2014what\u2014making pictures?\"\n\n\"In the fire.\"\n\n\"James,\" said the Colonel in a serious tone, \"don't you know that you are getting too old now for that sort of thing? If you dream so much, you'll fall asleep altogether some fine day, and never wake up again. Just think what that means!\"\n\nThe child smiled faintly and moved up confidingly between his father's knees, staring into his eyes without the least sign of fear. But he said nothing in reply. His thoughts were far away, and it seemed as if the effort to bring them back into the study and to a consideration of his father's words was almost beyond his power.\n\n\"You must run about more,\" pursued the soldier, rubbing his big hands together briskly, \"and join your brothers and sisters in their games. Lie about in the summer and dream a bit if you like, but now it's winter, you must be more active, and make your blood circulate healthily,\u2014er\u2014and all that sort of thing.\"\n\nThe words were kindly spoken, but the voice and manner rather deliberate. Jimbo began to look a little troubled, as his father watched him.\n\n\"Come now, little man,\" he said more gently, \"what's the matter, eh?\" He drew the boy close to him. \"Tell me all about it, and what it is you're always thinking about so much.\"\n\nJimbo brought back his mind with a tremendous effort, and said, \"I don't like the winter. It's so dark and full of horrid things. It's all ice and shadows, so\u2014so I go away and think of what I like, and other places\u2014\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" interrupted his father briskly; \"winter's a capital time for boys. What in the world d'ye mean, I wonder?\"\n\nHe lifted the child on to his knee and stroked his hair, as though he were patting the flank of a horse. Jimbo took no notice of the interruption or of the caress, but went on saying what he had to say, though with eyes a little more clouded.\n\n\"Winter's like going into a long black tunnel, you see. It's downhill to Christmas, of course, and then uphill all the way to the summer holidays. But the uphill part's so slow that\u2014\"\n\n\"Tut, tut!\" laughed the Colonel in spite of himself; \"you mustn't have such thoughts. Those are a baby's notions. They're silly, silly, silly.\"\n\n\"Do you really think so, father?\" continued the boy, as if politeness demanded some recognition of his father's remarks, but otherwise anxious only to say what was in his mind. \"You wouldn't think them silly if you really knew. But, of course, there's no one to tell you in the stable, so you can't know. You've never seen the funny big people rushing past you and laughing through their long hair when the wind blows so loud. I know several of them almost to speak to, but you hear only wind. And the other things with tiny legs that skate up and down the slippery moonbeams, without ever tumbling off\u2014they aren't silly a bit, only they don't like dogs and noise. And I've seen the furniture\"\u2014he pronounced it furchinur\u2014\"dancing about in the day-nursery when it thought it was alone, and I've heard it talking at night. I know the big cupboard's voice quite well. It's just like a drum, only rougher...\"\n\nThe Colonel shook his head and frowned severely, staring hard at his son. But though their eyes met, the boy hardly saw him. Far away at the other end of the dark Tunnel of the Months he saw the white summer sunshine lying over gardens full of nodding flowers. Butterflies were flitting across meadows yellow with buttercups, and he saw the fascinating rings upon the lawn where the Fairy People held their dances in the moonlight; he heard the wind call to him as it ran on along by the hedgerows, and saw the gentle pressure of its swift feet upon the standing hay; streams were murmuring under shady trees; birds were singing; and there were echoes of sweeter music still that he could not understand, but loved all the more perhaps on that account...\n\n\"Yes,\" announced the Colonel later that evening to his wife, spreading his hands out as he spoke. \"Yes, my dear, I have made a discovery, and an alarming one. You know, I'm rarely at fault where the children are concerned\u2014and I've noted all the symptoms with unusual care. James, my dear, is an imaginative boy.\"\n\nHe paused to note the effect of his words, but seeing none, continued:\n\n\"I regret to be obliged to say it, but it's a fact beyond dispute. His head is simply full of things, and he talked to me this evening about tunnels and slippery moonlight till I very nearly lost my temper altogether. Now, the boy will never make a man unless we take him in hand properly at once. We must get him a governess, or something, without delay. Just fancy, if he grew up into a poet or one of these\u2014these\u2014\"\n\nIn his distress the soldier could only think of horse-terms, which did not seem quite the right language. He stuck altogether, and kept repeating the favourite gesture with his open hand, staring at his wife over his glasses as he did so.\n\nBut the mother never argued.\n\n\"He's very young still,\" she observed quietly, \"and, as you have always said, he's not a bit like other boys, remember.\"\n\n\"Exactly what I say. Now that your eyes are opened to the actual state of affairs, I'm satisfied.\"\n\n\"We'll get a sensible nursery-governess at once,\" added the mother.\n\n\"A practical one?\"\n\n\"Yes, dear.\"\n\n\"Hard-headed?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And well educated?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And\u2014er\u2014firm with children. She'll do for the lot, then.\"\n\n\"If possible.\"\n\n\"And a young woman who doesn't go in for poetry, and dreaming, and all that kind of flummery.\"\n\n\"Of course, dear.\"\n\n\"Capital. I felt sure you would agree with me,\" he went on. \"It'd be no end of a pity if Jimbo grew up an ass. At present he hardly knows the difference between a roadster and a racer. He's going into the army, too,\" he added by way of climax, \"and you know, my dear, the army would never stand that!\"\n\n\"Never,\" said the mother quietly, and the conversation came to an end.\n\nMeanwhile, the subject of these remarks was lying wide awake upstairs in the bed with the yellow iron railing round it. His elder brother was asleep in the opposite corner of the room, snoring peacefully. He could just see the brass knobs of the bedstead as the dying firelight quivered and shone on them. The walls and ceiling were draped in shadows that altered their shapes from time to time as the coals dropped softly into the grate. Gradually the fire sank, and the room darkened. A feeling of delight and awe stole into his heart.\n\nJimbo loved these early hours of the night before sleep came. He felt no fear of the dark; its mystery thrilled his soul; but he liked the summer dark, with its soft, warm silences better than the chill winter shadows. Presently the firelight sprang up into a brief flame and then died away altogether with an odd little gulp. He knew the sound well; he often watched the fire out, and now, as he lay in bed waiting for he knew not what, the moonlight filtered in through the baize curtains and gradually gave to the room a wholly new character.\n\nJimbo sat up in bed and listened. The house was very still. He slipped into his red dressing-gown and crept noiselessly over to the window. For a moment he paused by his brother's bed to make sure that he really was asleep; then, evidently satisfied, he drew aside a corner of the curtain and peered out.\n\n\"Oh!\" he said, drawing in his breath with delight, and again \"oh!\"\n\nIt was difficult to understand why the sea of white moonlight that covered the lawn should fill him with such joy, and at the same time bring a lump into his throat. It made him feel as if he were swelling out into something very much greater than the actual limits of his little person. And the sensation was one of mingled pain and delight, too intense for him to feel for very long. The unhappiness passed gradually away, he always noticed, and the happiness merged after a while into a sort of dreamy ecstasy in which he neither thought nor wished much, but was conscious only of one single unmanageable yearning.\n\nThe huge cedars on the lawn reared themselves up like giants in silver cloaks, and the horse-chestnut\u2014the Umbrella Tree, as the children called it\u2014loomed with motionless branches that were frosted and shining. Beyond it, in a blue mist of moonlight and distance, lay the kitchen-garden; he could just make out the line of the high wall where the fruit-trees grew. Immediately below him the gravel of the carriage drive sparkled with frost.\n\nThe bars of the windows were cold to his hands, yet he stood there for a long time with his nose flattened against the pane and his bare feet on the cane chair. He felt both happy and sad; his heart longed dreadfully for something he had not got, something that seemed out of his reach because he could not name it. No one seemed to believe all the things he knew in quite the same way as he did. His brothers and sisters played up to a certain point, and then put the things aside as if they had only been assumed for the time and were not real. To him they were always real. His father's words, too, that evening had sorely puzzled him when he came to think over them afterwards: \"They're a baby's notions... They're silly, silly, silly.\" Were these things real or were they not? And, as he pondered, yearning dumbly, as only these little souls can yearn, the wistfulness in his heart went out to meet the moonlight in the air. Together they wove a spell that seemed to summon before him a fairy of the night, who whispered an answer into his heart: \"We are real so long as you believe in us. It is your imagination that makes us real and gives us life. Please, never, never stop believing.\"\n\nJimbo was not quite sure that he understood the message, but he liked it all the same, and felt comforted. So long as they believed in one another, the rest did not matter very much after all. And when at last, shivering with cold, he crept back to bed, it was only to find through the Gates of Sleep a more direct way to the things he had been thinking about, and to wander for the rest of the night, unwatched and free, through the wonders of an Enchanted Land.\n\nJimbo, as his father had said, was an imaginative child. Most children are\u2014more or less; and he was \"more,\" at least, \"more\" than his brothers and sisters. The Colonel thought he had made a penetrating discovery, but his wife had known it always. His head, indeed, was \"full of things,\"\u2014things that, unless trained into a channel where they could be controlled and properly schooled, would certainly interfere with his success in a practical world, and be a source of mingled pain and joy to him all through life. To have trained these forces, ever bursting out towards creation, in his little soul,\u2014to have explained, interpreted, and dealt fairly by them, would perhaps have been the best and wisest way; to have suppressed them altogether, cleaned them out by the process of substitution, this might have succeeded too in less measure; but to turn them into a veritable rout of horror by the common method of \"frightening the nonsense out of the boy,\" this was surely the very worst way of dealing with such a case, and the most cruel. Yet, this was the method adopted by the Colonel in the robust good-nature of his heart, and the utter ignorance of his soul.\n\nSo it came about that three months later, when May was melting into June, Miss Ethel Lake arrived upon the scene as a result of the Colonel's blundering good intentions. She brought with her a kind disposition, a supreme ignorance of unordinary children, a large store of self-confidence\u2014and a corded yellow tin box.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Miss Lake Comes\u2014And Goes by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nThe conversation took place suddenly one afternoon, and no one knew anything about it except the two who took part in it: the Colonel asked the governess to try and knock the nonsense out of Jimbo's head, and the governess promised eagerly to do her very best. It was her first \"place\"; and by \"nonsense\" they both understood imagination. True enough, Jimbo's mother had given her rather different instructions as to the treatment of the boy, but she mistook the soldier's bluster for authority, and deemed it best to obey him. This was her first mistake.\n\nIn reality she was not devoid of imaginative insight; it was simply that her anxiety to prove a success permitted her better judgment to be overborne by the Colonel's boisterous manner.\n\nThe wisdom of the mother was greater than that of her husband. For the safe development of that tender and imaginative little boy of hers, she had been at great pains to engage a girl\u2014a clergyman's daughter\u2014who possessed sufficient sympathy with the poetic and dreamy nature to be of real help to him; for true help, she knew, can only come from true understanding. And Miss Lake was a good girl. She was entirely well-meaning\u2014which is the beginning of well-doing, and her principal weakness lay in her judgment, which led her to obey the Colonel too literally.\n\n\"She seems most sensible,\" he declared to his wife.\n\n\"Yes, dear.\"\n\n\"And practical.\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"And firm and\u2014er\u2014wise with children.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\n\"Just the sort for young Jimbo,\" added the Colonel with decision.\n\n\"I trust so; she's a little young, perhaps.\"\n\n\"Possibly, but one can't get everything,\" said her husband, in his horse-and-dog voice. \"A year with her should clean out that fanciful brain of his, and prepare him for school with other boys. He'll be all right once he gets to school. My dear,\" he added, spreading out his right hand, fingers extended, \"you've made a most wise selection. I congratulate you. I'm delighted.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad.\"\n\n\"Capital, I repeat, capital. You're a clever little woman. I knew you'd find the right party, once I showed you how the land lay.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "The Empty House, that stood in its neglected garden not far from the Park gates, was built on a point of land that entered wedgewise into the Colonel's estate. Though something of an eyesore, therefore, he could do nothing with it.\n\nTo the children it had always been an object of peculiar, though not unwholesome, mystery. None of them cared to pass it on a stormy day\u2014the wind made such odd noises in its empty corridors and rooms\u2014and they refused point-blank to go within hailing distance of it after dark. But in Jimbo's imagination it was especially haunted, and if he had ceased to reveal to the others what he knew went on under its roof, it was only because they were unable to follow him, and were inclined to greet his extravagant recitals with \"Now, Jimbo, you know perfectly well you're only making up.\"\n\nThe House had been empty for many years; but, to the children, it had been empty since the beginning of the world, since what they called the \"very beginning.\" They believed\u2014well, each child believed according to his own mind and powers, but there was at least one belief they all held in common: for it was generally accepted as an article of faith that the Indians, encamped among the shrubberies on the back lawn, secretly buried their dead behind the crumbling walls of its weedy garden\u2014the \"dead\" provided by the children's battles, be it understood. Wakeful ears in the night-nursery had heard strange sounds coming from that direction when the windows were open on hot summer nights; and the gardener, supreme authority on all that happened in the night (since they believed that he sat up to watch the vegetables and fruit-trees ripen, and never went to bed at all), was evidently of the same persuasion.\n\nWhen appealed to for an explanation of the mournful wind-voices, he knew what was expected of him, and rose manfully to the occasion.\n\n\"It's either them Redskins aburyin' wot you killed of 'em yesterday,\" he declared, pointing towards the Empty House with a bit of broken flower-pot, \"or else it's the ones you killed last week, and who was always astealin' of my strorbriz.\" He looked very wise as he said this, and his wand of office\u2014a dirty trowel\u2014which he held in his hand, gave him tremendous dignity.\n\n\"That's just what we thought, and of course if you say so too, that settles it,\" said Nixie.\n\n\"It's more'n likely, missie, leastways from wot you describes, which it is a hempty house all the same, though I can't say as I've heard no sounds, not very distinct that is, myself.\"\n\nThe gardener may have been anxious to hedge a bit, for fear of a scolding from headquarters, but his cryptic remarks pleased the children greatly, because it showed, they thought, that they knew more than the gardener did.\n\nThus the Empty House remained an object of somewhat dreadful delight, lending a touch of wonderland to that part of the lane where it stood, and forming the background for many an enchanting story over the nursery fire in winter-time. It appealed vividly to their imaginations, especially to Jimbo's. Its dark windows, without blinds, were sometimes full of faces that retreated the moment they were looked at. That tangled ivy did not grow over the roof so thickly for nothing; and those high elms on the western side had not been planted years ago in a semicircle without a reason. Thus, at least, the children argued, not knowing exactly what they meant, nor caring much, so long as they proved to their own satisfaction that the place was properly haunted, and therefore worthy of their attention.\n\nIt was natural they should lead Miss Lake in that direction on one of their first walks together, and it was natural, too, that she should at once discover from their manner that the place was of some importance to them.\n\n\"What a queer-looking old house,\" she remarked, when they turned the corner of the lane and it came into view. \"Almost a ruin, isn't it?\"\n\nThe children exchanged glances. A \"ruin\" did not seem the right sort of word at all; and, besides, was a little disrespectful. Also, they were not sure whether the new governess ought to be told everything so soon. She had not really won their confidence yet. After a slight pause\u2014and a children's pause is the most eloquent imaginable\u2014Nixie, being the eldest, said in a stiff little voice: \"It's the Empty House, Miss Lake. We know it very well indeed.\"\n\n\"It looks empty,\" observed Miss Lake briskly.\n\n\"But it's not a ruin, of course,\" added the child, with the cold dignity of chosen spokesman.\n\n\"Oh!\" said the governess, quite missing the point. She was talking lightly on the surface of things, wholly ignorant of the depths beneath her feet, intuition with her having always been sternly repressed.\n\n\"It's a gamekeeper's cottage, or something like that, I suppose,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, no; it isn't a bit.\"\n\n\"Doesn't it belong to your father, then?\"\n\n\"No. It's somebody else's, you see.\"\n\n\"Then you can't have it pulled down?\"\n\n\"Rather not! Of course not!\" exclaimed several indignant voices at once.\n\nMiss Lake perceived for the first time that it held more than ordinary importance in their mind.\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" she said. \"What is its history, and who used to live in it?\"\n\nThere came another pause. The children looked into each others' faces. They gazed at the blue sky overhead; then they stared at the dusty road at their feet. But no one volunteered an answer. Miss Lake, they felt, was approaching the subject in an offensive manner.\n\n\"Why are you all so mysterious about it?\" she went on. \"It's only a tumble-down old place, and must be very draughty to live in, even for a gamekeeper.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Come, children, don't you hear me? I'm asking you a question.\"\n\nA couple of startled birds flew out of the ivy with a great whirring of wings. This was followed by a faint sound of rumbling, that seemed to come from the interior of the house. Outside all was still, and the hot sunshine lay over everything. The sound was repeated. The children looked at each other with large, expectant eyes. Something in the house was moving\u2014was coming nearer.\n\n\"Have you all lost your tongues?\" asked the governess impatiently.\n\n\"But you see,\" Nixie said at length, \"somebody does live in it now.\"\n\n\"And who is he?\"\n\n\"I didn't say it was a man.\"\n\n\"Whoever it is\u2014tell me about the person,\" persisted Miss Lake.\n\n\"There's really nothing to tell,\" replied the child, without looking up.\n\n\"Oh, but there must be something,\" declared the logical young governess, \"or you wouldn't object so much to its being pulled down.\"\n\nNixie looked puzzled, but Jimbo came to the rescue at once.\n\n\"But you wouldn't understand if we did tell you,\" he said, in a slow, respectful voice. His tone held a touch of that indescribable scorn heard sometimes in a child's tone\u2014the utter contempt for the stupid grown-up creature. Miss Lake noticed, and felt annoyed. She recognised that she was not getting on well with the children, and it piqued her. She remembered the Colonel's words about \"knocking the nonsense out\" of James' head, and she saw that her first opportunity, in fact her first real test, was at hand.\n\n\"And why, pray, should I not understand?\" she asked, with some sharpness. \"Is the mystery so very great?\"\n\nFor some reason the duty of spokesman now devolved unmistakably upon Jimbo; and very seriously too, he accepted the task, standing with his feet firmly planted in the road and his hands in his trousers' pockets.\n\n\"You see, Miss Lake,\" he began gravely, \"we know such a lot of Things in there, that they might not like us to tell you about them. They don't know you yet. If they did it might be different. But\u2014but\u2014you see, it isn't.\"\n\nThis was rather crushing to the aspiring educator, and the Colonel's instructions gained additional point in the light of the boy's explanation.\n\n\"Fiddlesticks!\" she laughed, \"there's probably nothing at all in there, except rats and cobwebs. 'Things,' indeed!\"\n\n\"I knew you wouldn't understand,\" said Jimbo coolly, with no sign of being offended. \"How could you?\" He glanced at his sisters, gaining so much support from their enigmatical faces that he added, for their especial benefit, \"How could she?\"\n\n\"The gard'ner said so too,\" chimed in a younger sister, with a vague notion that their precious Empty House was being robbed of its glory.\n\n\"Yes; but, James, dear, I do understand perfectly,\" continued Miss Lake more gently, and wisely ignoring the reference to the authority of the kitchen-garden. \"Only, you see, I cannot really encourage you in such nonsense\u2014\"\n\n\"It isn't nonsense,\" interrupted Jimbo, with heat.\n\n\"But, believe me, children, it is nonsense. How do you know that there's anything inside? You've never been there!\"\n\n\"You can know perfectly well what's inside a thing without having gone there,\" replied Jimbo with scorn. \"At least, we can.\"\n\nMiss Lake changed her tack a little\u2014fatally, as it appeared afterwards.\n\n\"I know at any rate,\" she said with decision, \"that there's nothing good in there. Whatever there may be is bad, thoroughly bad, and not fit for you to play with.\"\n\nThe other children moved away, but Jimbo stood his ground. They were all angry, disappointed, sore hurt and offended. But Jimbo suddenly began to feel something else besides anger and vexation. It was a new point of view to him that the Empty House might contain bad things as well as good, or perhaps, only bad things. His imagination seized upon the point at once and set to work vigorously to develop it. This was his way with all such things, and he could not prevent it.\n\n\"Bad Things?\" he repeated, looking up at the governess. \"You mean Things that could hurt?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" she said, noting the effect of her words and thinking how pleased the Colonel would be later, when he heard it. \"Things that might run out and catch you some day when you're passing here alone, and take you back a prisoner. Then you'd be a prisoner in the Empty House all your life. Think of that!\"\n\nMiss Lake mistook the boy's silence as proof that she was taking the right line. She enlarged upon this view of the matter, now she was so successfully launched, and described the Inmate of the House with such wealth of detail that she felt sure her listener would never have anything to do with the place again, and that she had \"knocked out\" this particular bit of \"nonsense\" for ever and a day.\n\nBut to Jimbo it was a new and horrible idea that the Empty House, haunted hitherto only by rather jolly and wonderful Red Indians, contained a Monster who might take him prisoner, and the thought made him feel afraid. The mischief had, of course, been done, and the terror in his eyes was unmistakable, when the foolish governess saw her mistake. Retreat was impossible: the boy was shaking with fear; and not all Miss Lake's genuine sympathy, or Nixie's explanations and soothings, were able to relieve his mind of its new burden.\n\nHitherto Jimbo's imagination had loved to dwell upon the pleasant side of things invisible; but now he had been severely frightened, and his imagination took a new turn. Not only the Empty House, but all his inner world, to which it was in some sense the key, underwent a distressing change. His sense of horror had been vividly aroused.\n\nThe governess would willingly have corrected her mistake, but was, of course, powerless to do so. Bitterly she regretted her tactlessness and folly. But she could do nothing, and to add to her distress, she saw that Jimbo shrank from her in a way that could not long escape the watchful eye of the mother. But, if the boy shed tears of fear that night in his bed, it must in justice be told that she, for her part, cried bitterly in her own room, not that she had endangered her \"place,\" but that she had done a cruel injury to a child, and that she was helpless to undo it. For she loved children, though she was quite unsuited to take care of them. Her just reward, however, came swiftly upon her.\n\nA few nights later, when Jimbo and Nixie were allowed to come down to dessert, the wind was heard to make a queer moaning sound in the ivy branches that hung over the dining-room windows. Jimbo heard it too. He held his breath for a minute; then he looked round the table in a frightened way, and the next minute gave a scream and burst into tears. He ran round and buried his face in his father's arms.\n\nAfter the tears came the truth. It was a bad thing for Miss Ethel Lake, this little sighing of the wind and the ivy leaves, for the Djin of terror she had thoughtlessly evoked swept into the room and introduced himself to the parents without her leave.\n\n\"What new nonsense is this now?\" growled the soldier, leaving his walnuts and lifting the boy on to his knee. \"He shouldn't come down till he's a little older, and knows how to behave.\"\n\n\"What's the matter, darling child?\" asked the mother, drying his eyes tenderly.\n\n\"I heard the bad Things crying in the Empty House.\"\n\n\"The Empty House is a mile away from here!\" snorted the Colonel.\n\n\"Then it's come nearer,\" declared the frightened boy.\n\n\"Who told you there were bad things in the Empty House?\" asked the mother.\n\n\"Yes, who told you, indeed, I should like to know!\" demanded the Colonel.\n\nAnd then it all came out. The Colonel's wife was very quiet, but very determined. Miss Lake went back to the clerical family whence she had come, and the children knew her no more.\n\n\"I'm glad,\" said Nixie, expressing the verdict of the nursery. \"I thought she was awfully stupid.\"\n\n\"She wasn't a real lake at all,\" declared another, \"she was only a sort of puddle.\"\n\nJimbo, however, said little, and the Colonel likewise held his peace.\n\nBut the governess, whether she was a lake or only a puddle, left her mark behind her. The Empty House was no longer harmless. It had a new lease of life. It was tenanted by some one who could never have friendly relations with children. The weeds in the old garden took on fantastic shapes; figures hid behind the doors and crept about the passages; the rooks in the high elms became birds of ill-omen; the ivy bristled upon the walls, and the trivial explanations of the gardener were no longer satisfactory.\n\nEven in bright sunshine a Shadow lay crouching upon the broken roof. At any moment it might leap into life, and with immense striding legs chase the children down to the very Park gates.\n\nThere was no need to enforce the decree that the Empty House was a forbidden land. The children of their own accord declared it out of bounds, and avoided it as carefully as if all the wild animals from the Zoo were roaming its gardens, hungry and unchained." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "One immediate result of Miss Lake's indiscretion was that the children preferred to play on the other side of the garden, the side farthest from the Empty House. A spiked railing here divided them from a field in which cows disported themselves, and as bulls also sometimes were admitted to the cows, the field was strictly out of bounds.\n\nIn this spiked railing, not far from the great shrubberies where the Indians increased and multiplied, there was a swinging gate. The children swung on it whenever they could. They called it Express Trains, and the fact that it was forbidden only added to their pleasure. When opened at its widest it would swing them with a rush through the air, past the pillars with a click, out into the field, and then back again into the garden. It was bad for the hinges, and it was also bad for the garden, because it was frequently left open after these carnivals, and the cows got in and trod the flowers down. The children were not afraid of the cows, but they held the bull in great horror. And these trivial things have been mentioned here because of the part they played in Jimbo's subsequent adventures.\n\nIt was only ten days or so after Miss Lake's sudden departure when Jimbo managed one evening to elude the vigilance of his lawful guardians, and wandered off unnoticed among the laburnums on the front lawn. From the laburnums he passed successfully to the first laurel shrubbery, and thence he executed a clever flank movement and entered the carriage drive in the rear. The rest was easy, and he soon found himself at the Lodge gate.\n\nFor some moments he peered through the iron grating, and pondered on the seductiveness of the dusty road and of the ditch beyond. To his surprise he found, presently, that the gate was moving outwards; it was yielding to his weight. One thing leads easily to another sometimes, and the open gate led easily on to the seductive road. The result was that a minute later Jimbo was chasing butterflies along the green lane, and throwing stones into the water of the ditch.\n\nIt was the evening of a hot summer's day, and the butterflies were still out in force. Jimbo's delight was intense. The joy of finding himself alone where he had no right to be put everything else out of his head, and for some time he wandered on, oblivious of all but the intoxicating sense of freedom and the difficulty of choosing between so many butterflies and such a magnificently dirty ditch.\n\nAt first he yielded to the seductions of the ditch. He caught a big, sleepy beetle and put it on a violet leaf, and sent it sailing out to sea; and when it landed on the farther shore he found a still bigger leaf, and sent it forth on a voyage in another direction, with a cargo of daisy petals, and a hairy caterpillar for a bo'sun's mate. But, just as the vessel was getting under way, a butterfly of amazing brilliance floated past insolently under his very nose. Leaving the beetle and the caterpillar to navigate the currents as best they could, he at once gave chase. Cap in hand, he flew after the butterfly down the lane, and a dozen times when his cap was just upon it, it sailed away sideways without the least effort and escaped him.\n\nThen, suddenly, the lane took a familiar turning; the ditch stopped abruptly; the hedge on his right fell away altogether; the butterfly danced out of sight into a field, and Jimbo found himself face to face with the one thing in the whole world that could, at that time, fill him with abject terror\u2014the Empty House.\n\nHe came to a full stop in the middle of the road and stared up at the windows. He realised for the first time that he was alone, and that it was possible for brilliant sunshine, even on a cloudless day, to become somehow lustreless and dull. The walls showed a deep red in the sunset light. The house was still as the grave. His feet were rooted to the ground, and it seemed as if he could not move a single muscle; and as he stood there, the blood ebbing quickly from his heart, the words of the governess a few days before rushed back into his mind, and turned his fear into a dreadful, all-possessing horror. In another minute the battered door would slowly open and the horrible Inmate come out to seize him. Already there was a sound of something moving within, and as he gazed, fascinated with terror, a shuddering movement ran over the ivy leaves hanging down from the roof. Then they parted in the middle, and something\u2014he could not in his agony see what\u2014flew out with a whirring sound into his face, and then vanished over his shoulder towards the fields.\n\nJimbo did not pause a single second to find out what it was, or to reflect that any ordinary thrush would have made just the same sound. The shock it gave to his heart immediately loosened the muscles of his little legs, and he ran for his very life. But before he actually began to run he gave one piercing scream for help, and the person he screamed to was the very person who was unwittingly the cause of his distress. It was as though he knew instinctively that the person who had created for him the terror of the Empty House, with its horrible Inmate, was also the person who could properly banish it, and undo the mischief before it was too late. He shrieked for help to the governess, Miss Ethel Lake.\n\nOf course, there was no answer but the noise of the air whistling in his ears as his feet flew over the road in a cloud of dust; there was no friendly butcher's cart, no baker's boy, or farmer with his dog and gun; the road was deserted. There was not even the beetle or the caterpillar; he was beyond reach of help.\n\nJimbo ran for his life, but unfortunately he ran in the wrong direction. Instead of going the way he had come, where the Lodge gates were ready to receive him not a quarter of a mile away, he fled in the opposite direction.\n\nIt so happened that the lane flanked the field where the cows lived; but cows were nothing compared to a Creature from the Empty House, and even bulls seemed friendly. The boy was over the five-barred gate in a twinkling and half-way across the field before he heard a heavy, thunderous sound behind him. Either the Thing had followed him into the field, or it was the bull. As he raced, he managed to throw a glance over his shoulder and saw a huge, dark mass bearing down upon him at terrific speed. It must be the bull, he reflected\u2014the bull grown to the size of an elephant. And it appeared to him to have two immense black wings that flapped at its sides and helped it forward, making a whirring noise like the arms of a great windmill.\n\nThis sight added to his speed, but he could not last very much longer. Already his body ached all over, and the frantic effort to get breath nearly choked him.\n\nThere, before him, not so very far away now, was the swinging gate. If only he could get there in time to scramble over into the garden, he would be safe. It seemed almost impossible, and behind him, meanwhile, the sound of the following creature came closer and closer; the ground seemed to tremble; he could almost feel the breath on his neck.\n\nThe swinging gate was only twenty yards off; now ten; now only five. Now he had reached it\u2014at last. He stretched out his hands to seize the top bar, and in another moment he would have been safe in the garden and within easy reach of the house. But, before he actually touched the iron rail, a sharp, stinging pain shot across his back;\u2014he drew one final breath as he felt himself being lifted, lifted up into the air. The horns had caught him just behind the shoulders!\n\nThere seemed to be no pain after the first shock. He rose high into the air, while the bushes and spiked railing he knew so well sank out of sight beneath him, dwindling curiously in size. At first he thought his head must bump against the sky, but suddenly he stopped rising, and the green earth rushed up as if it would strike him in the face. This meant he was sinking again. The gate and railing flew by underneath him, and the next second he fell with a crash upon the soft grass of the lawn\u2014upon the other side. He had been tossed over the gate into the garden, and the bull could no longer reach him.\n\nBefore he became wholly unconscious, a composite picture, vivid in its detail, engraved itself deeply, with exceeding swiftness, line by line, upon the waxen tablets of his mind. In this picture the thrush that had flown out of the ivy, the Empty House itself, and its horrible, pursuing Inmate were all somehow curiously mingled together with the black wings of the bull, and with his own sensation of rushing\u2014flying headlong\u2014through space, as he rose and fell in a curve from the creature's horns.\n\nAnd behind it he was conscious that the real author of it all was somewhere in the shadowy background, looking on as though to watch the result of her unfortunate mistake. Miss Lake, surely, was not very far away. He associated her with the horror of the Empty House as inevitably as taste and smell join together in the memory of a certain food; and the very last thought in his mind, as he sank away into the blackness of unconsciousness, was a sort of bitter surprise that the governess had not turned up to save him before it was actually too late.\n\nMoreover, a certain sense of disappointment mingled with the terror of the shock; for he was dimly aware that Miss Lake had not acted as worthily as she might have done, and had not played the game as well as might have been expected of her. And, somehow, it didn't all seem quite fair." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Jimbo had fallen on his head. Inside that head lay the mass of highly sensitive matter called the brain, on which were recorded, of course, the impressions of everything that had yet come to him in life. A severe shock, such as he had just sustained, was bound to throw these impressions into confusion and disorder, jumbling them up into new and strange combinations, obliterating some, and exaggerating others. Jimbo himself was helpless in the matter; he could exercise no control over their antics until the doctors had once again reduced them to order; he would have to wander, lost and lonely, through the comparative chaos of disproportioned visions, generally known as the region of delirium, until the doctor, assisted by mother nature, restored him once more to normal consciousness.\n\nFor a time everything was a blank, but presently he stirred uneasily in the grass, and the pictures graven on the tablets of his mind began to come back to him line by line.\n\nYet, with certain changes: the bull, for instance, had so far vanished into the background of his thoughts that it had practically disappeared altogether, and he recalled nothing of it but the wings\u2014the huge, flapping wings. Of the creature to whom the wings belonged he had no recollection beyond that it was very large, and that it was chasing him from the Empty House. The pain in his shoulders had also gone; but what remained with undiminished vividness were the sensations of flight without escape, the breathless race up into the sky, and the swift, tumbling drop again through the air on to the lawn.\n\nThis impression of rushing through space\u2014short though the actual distance had been\u2014was the dominating memory. All else was apparently oblivion. He forgot where he came from, and he forgot what he had been doing. The events leading up to the catastrophe, indeed everything connected with his existence previously as \"Master James,\" had entirely vanished; and the slate of memory had been wiped so clean that he had forgotten even his own name!\n\nJimbo was lying, so to speak, on the edge of unconsciousness, and for a time it seemed uncertain whether he would cross the line into the region of delirium and dreams, or fall back again into his natural world. Terror, assisted by the horns of the black bull, had tossed him into the borderland.\n\nHis last scream, however, had reached the ears of the ubiquitous gardener, and help was near at hand. He heard voices that seemed to come from beyond the stars, and was aware that shadowy forms were standing over him and talking in whispers. But it was all very unreal; one minute the voices sounded up in the sky, and the next in his very ears, while the figures moved about, sometimes bending over him, sometimes retreating and melting away like shadows on a shifting screen.\n\nSuddenly a blaze of light flashed upon him, and his eyes flew open; he tumbled back for a moment into his normal world. He wasn't on the grass at all, but was lying upon his own bed in the night nursery. His mother was bending over him with a very white face, and a tall man dressed in black stood beside her, holding some kind of shining instrument in his fingers. A little behind them he saw Nixie, shading a lamp with her hand. Then the white face came close over the pillow, and a voice full of tenderness whispered, \"My darling boy, don't you know me? It's mother! No one will hurt you. Speak to me, if you can, dear.\"\n\nShe stretched out her hands, and Jimbo knew her and made an effort to answer. But it seemed to him as if his whole body had suddenly become a solid mass of iron, and he could control no part of it; his lips and his hands both refused to move. Before he could make a sign that he had understood and was trying to reply, a fierce flame rushed between them and blinded him, his eyes closed, and he dropped back again into utter darkness. The walls flew asunder and the ceiling melted into air, while the bed sank away beneath him, down, down, down into an abyss of shadows. The lamp in Nixie's hands dwindled into a star, and his mother's anxious face became a tiny patch of white in the distance, blurred out of all semblance of a human countenance. For a time the man in black seemed to hover over the bed as it sank, as though he were trying to follow it down; but it, too, presently joined the general enveloping blackness and lost its outline. The pain had blotted out everything, and the return to consciousness had been only momentary.\n\nNot all the doctors in the world could have made things otherwise. Jimbo was off on his travels at last\u2014travels in which the chief incidents were directly traceable to the causes and details of his accident: the terror of the Empty House, the pursuit of its Inmate, the pain of the bull's horns, and, above all, the flight through the air.\n\nFor everything in his subsequent adventures found its inspiration in the events described, and a singular parallel ran ever between the Jimbo upon the bed in the night-nursery and the other emancipated Jimbo wandering in the regions of unconsciousness and delirium." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The darkness lasted a long time without a break, and when it lifted all recollection of the bedroom scene had vanished.\n\nJimbo found himself back again on the grass. The swinging gate was just in front of him, but he did not recognise it; no suggestion of \"Express Trains\" came back to him as his eyes rested without remembrance upon the bars where he had so often swung, in defiance of orders, with his brothers and sisters. Recollection of his home, family, and previous life he had absolutely none; or at least, it was buried so deeply in his inner consciousness that it amounted to the same thing, and he looked out upon the garden, the gate, and the field beyond as upon an entirely new piece of the world.\n\nThe stars, he saw, were nearly all gone, and a very faint light was beginning to spread from the woods beyond the field. The eastern horizon was slowly brightening, and soon the night would be gone. Jimbo was glad of this. He began to be conscious of little thrills of expectation, for with the light surely help would also come. The light always brought relief, and he already felt that strange excitement that comes with the first signs of dawn. In the distance cocks were crowing, horses began to stamp in the barns not far away, and a hundred little stirrings of life ran over the surface of the earth as the light crept slowly up the sky and dropped down again upon the world with its message of coming day.\n\nOf course, help would come by the time the sun was really up, and it was partly this certainty, and partly because he was a little too dazed to realise the seriousness of the situation, that prevented his giving way to a fit of fear and weeping. Yet a feeling of vague terror lay only a little way below the surface, and when, a few moments later, he saw that he was no longer alone, and that an odd-looking figure was creeping towards him from the shrubberies, he sprang to his feet, prepared to run unless it at once showed the most friendly intentions.\n\nThis figure seemed to have come from nowhere. Apparently it had risen out of the earth. It was too large to have been concealed by the low shrubberies; yet he had not been aware of its approach, and it had appeared without making any noise. Probably it was friendly, he felt, in spite of its curious shape and the stealthy way it had come. At least, he hoped so; and if he could only have told whether it was a man or an animal he would easily have made up his mind. But the uncertain light, and the way it crouched half-hidden behind the bushes, prevented this. So he stood, poised ready to run, and yet waiting, hoping, indeed expecting every minute a sign of friendliness and help.\n\nIn this way the two faced each other silently for some time, until the feeling of terror gradually stole deeper into the boy's heart and began to rob him of full power over his muscles. He wondered if he would be able to run when the time came, and whether he could run fast enough. This was how it first showed itself, this suggestion of insidious fear. Would he be able to keep up the start he had? Would it chase him? Would it run like a man or like an animal, on four legs or on two? He wished he could see more clearly what it was. He still stood his ground pluckily, facing it and waiting, but the fear, once admitted to his mind, was gaining strength, and he began to feel cold and shivery. Then suddenly the tension came to an end. In two strides the figure came up close to his side, and the same second Jimbo was lifted off his feet and borne swiftly away across the field.\n\nHe felt quite unable to offer the least resistance, and at the same time he felt a sense of relief that something had happened at last. He was still not sure that the figure was unkind; only its shape filled him with a feeling that was certainly the beginning of real horror. It was the shape of a man, he thought, but of a very large and ill-constructed man; for it certainly had moved on two legs and had caught him up in a pair of tremendously strong arms. But there was something else it had besides arms, for a kind of soft cloak hung all round it and wrapped the boy from head to foot, preventing him seeing his captor properly, and at the same time filling his body with a kind of warm drowsiness that mitigated his active fear and made him rather like the sensation of being carried along so easily and so fast.\n\nBut was he being carried? The pace they were going was amazing, and he moved as easily as a sailing boat, and with the same swinging motion. Could it be some animal like a horse after all? Jimbo tried to see more, but found it impossible to free himself from the folds of the enveloping substance, and meanwhile they were swinging forward at what seemed a tremendous pace over fields and ditches, through hedges, and down long lanes.\n\nThe odours of earth, and dew-drenched grass, and opening flowers came to him. He heard the birds singing, and felt the cool morning air sting his cheeks as they raced along. There was no jolting or jarring, and the figure seemed to cover the ground as lightly as though it hardly touched the earth. It was certainly not a dream, he was sure of that; but the longer they went on the drowsier he became, and the less he wondered whether the figure was going to help him or to do something dreadful to him. He was now thoroughly afraid, and yet, strange contradiction, he didn't care a bit. Let the figure do what it liked; it was only a sort of nightmare person after all, and might vanish as suddenly as it had arrived.\n\nFor a long time they raced forward at this great speed, and then with a bump and a crash they stopped suddenly short, and Jimbo felt himself let down upon the solid earth. He tried to free himself at once from the folds of the clinging substance that enveloped him, but, before he could do so and see what his captor was really like, he heard a door slam and felt himself pushed along what seemed to be the hallways of a house. His eyes were clear now and he could see, but the darkness had come down again so thickly that all he could discover was that the figure was urging him along the floor of a large empty hall, and that they were in a dark and empty building.\n\nJimbo tried hard to see his captor, but the figure, dim enough in the uncertain light, always managed to hide its face and keep itself bunched up in such a way that he could never see more than a great, dark mass of a body, from which long legs and arms shot out like telescopes, draped in a sort of clinging cloak. Now that the rapid motion through the air had ceased, the boy's drowsiness passed a little, and he began to shiver with fear and to feel that the tears could not be kept back much longer.\n\nProbably in another minute he would have started to run for his life, when a new sound caught his ears and made him listen intently, while a feeling of wonder and delight caught his heart, and made him momentarily forget the figure pushing him forward from behind.\n\nWas it the wind he heard? Or was it the voices of children all singing together very low? It was a gentle, sighing sound that rose and fell with mournful modulations and seemed to come from the very centre of the building; it held, too, a strange, far-away murmur, like the surge of a faint breeze moving in the tree-tops. It might be the wind playing round the walls of the building, or it might be children singing in hushed voices. One minute he thought it was outside the house, and the next he was certain it came from somewhere in the upper part of the building. He glanced up, and fancied for one moment that he saw in the darkness a crowd of little faces peering down at him over the banisters, and that as they disappeared he heard the sound of many little feet moving, and then a door hurriedly closing. But a push from the figure behind that nearly sent him sprawling at the foot of the stairs, prevented his hearing very clearly, and the light was far too dim to let him feel sure of what he had seen.\n\nThey passed quickly along deserted corridors and through winding passages. No one seemed about. The interior of the house was chilly, and the keen air nipped. After going up several flights of stairs they stopped at last in front of a door, and before Jimbo had a moment to turn and dash downstairs again past the figure, as he had meant to do, he was pushed violently forward into a room.\n\nThe door slammed after him, and he heard the heavy tread of the figure as it went down the staircase again into the bottom of the house. Then he saw that the room was full of light and of small moving beings.\n\nCuriosity and astonishment now for a moment took the place of fear, and Jimbo, with a thumping heart and clenched fists, stood and stared at the scene before him. He stiffened his little legs and leaned against the wall for support, but he felt full of fight in case anything happened, and with wide-open eyes he tried to take in the whole scene at once and be ready for whatever might come.\n\nBut there seemed no immediate cause for alarm, and when he realised that the beings in the room were apparently children, and only children, his rather mixed sensations of astonishment and fear gave place to an emotion of overpowering shyness. He became exceedingly embarrassed, for he was surrounded by children of all ages and sizes, staring at him just as hard as he was staring at them.\n\nThe children, he began to take in, were all dressed in black; they looked frightened and unhappy; their bodies were thin and their faces very white. There was something else about them he could not quite name, but it inspired him with the same sense of horror that he had felt in the arms of the Figure who had trapped him. For he now realised definitely that he had been trapped; and he also began to realise for the first time that, though he still had the body of a little boy, his way of thinking and judging was sometimes more like that of a grown-up person. The two alternated, and the result was an odd confusion; for sometimes he felt like a child and thought like a man, while at others he felt like a man and thought like a child. Something had gone wrong, very much wrong; and, as he watched this group of silent children facing him, he knew suddenly that what was just beginning to happen to him had happened to them long, long ago.\n\nFor they looked as if they had been a long, long time in the world, yet their bodies had not kept pace with their minds. Something had happened to stop the growth of the body, while allowing the mind to go on developing. The bodies were not stunted or deformed; they were well-formed, nice little children's bodies, but the minds within them were grown-up, and the incongruity was distressing. All this he suddenly realised in a flash, intuitively, just as though it had been most elaborately explained to him; yet he could not have put the least part of it into words or have explained what he saw and felt to another.\n\nHe saw that they had the hands and figures of children, the heads of children, the unlined faces and smooth foreheads of children, but their gestures, and something in their movements, belonged to grown-up people, and the expression of their eyes in meaning and intelligence was the expression of old people and not of children. And the expression in the eyes of every one of them he saw was the expression of terror and of pain. The effect was so singular that he seemed face to face with an entirely new order of creatures: a child's features with a man's eyes; a child's figure with a woman's movements; full-grown souls cramped and cribbed in absurdly inadequate bodies and little, puny frames; the old trying uncouthly to express itself in the young.\n\nThe grown-up, old portion of him had been uppermost as he stared and received these impressions, but now suddenly it passed away, and he felt as a little boy again. He glanced quickly down at his own little body in the alpaca knickerbockers and sailor blouse, and then, with a sigh of relief, looked up again at the strange group facing him. So far, at any rate, he had not changed, and there was nothing yet to suggest that he was becoming like them in appearance at least.\n\nWith his back against the door he faced the roomful of children who stood there motionless and staring; and as he looked, wild feelings rushed over him and made him tremble. Who was he? Where had he come from? Where in the world had he spent the other years of his life, the forgotten years? There seemed to be no one to whom he could go for comfort, no one to answer questions; and there was such a lot he wanted to ask. He seemed to be so much older, and to know so much more than he ought to have known, and yet to have forgotten so much that he ought not to have forgotten.\n\nHis loss of memory, however, was of course only partial. He had forgotten his own identity, and all the people with whom he had so far in life had to do; yet at the same time he was dimly conscious that he had just left all these people, and that some day he would find them again. It was only the surface-layers of memory that had vanished, and these had not vanished for ever, but only sunk down a little below the horizon.\n\nThen, presently, the children began to range themselves in rows between him and the opposite wall, without once taking their horrible, intelligent eyes off him as they moved. He watched them with growing dread, but at last his curiosity became so strong that it overcame everything else, and in a voice that he meant to be very brave, but that sounded hardly above a whisper, he said:\n\n\"Who are you? And what's been done to you?\"\n\nThe answer came at once in a whisper as low as his own, though he could not distinguish who spoke:\n\n\"Listen and you shall know. You, too, are now one of us.\"\n\nImmediately the children began a slow, impish sort of dance before him, moving almost with silent feet over the boards, yet with a sedateness and formality that had none of the unconscious grace of children. And, as they danced, they sang, but in voices so low, that it was more like the mournful sighing of wind among branches than human voices. It was the sound he had already heard outside the building.\n\n\u2003\"We are the children of the whispering night,\n\n\u2003Who live eternally in dreadful fright\n\n\u2003Of stories told us in the grey twilight\n\n\u2003By\u2014nurserymaids!\n\n\u2003We are the children of a winter's day;\n\n\u2003Under our breath we chant this mournful lay;\n\n\u2003We dance with phantoms and with shadows play,\n\n\u2003And have no rest.\n\n\u2003We have no joy in any children's game,\n\n\u2003For happiness to us is but a name,\n\n\u2003Since Terror kissed us with his lips of flame\n\n\u2003In wicked jest.\n\n\u2003We hear the little voices in the wind\n\n\u2003Singing of freedom we may never find,\n\n\u2003Victims of fate so cruelly unkind,\n\n\u2003We are unblest.\n\n\u2003We hear the little footsteps in the rain\n\n\u2003Running to help us, though they run in vain,\n\n\u2003Tapping in hundreds on the window-pane\n\n\u2003In vain behest.\n\n\u2003We are the children of the whispering night,\n\n\u2003Who dwell unrescued in eternal fright\n\n\u2003Of stories told us in the dim twilight\n\n\u2003By\u2014nurserymaids!\"\n\nThe plaintive song and the dance ceased together, and before Jimbo could find any words to clothe even one of the thoughts that crowded through his mind, he saw them moving towards a door he had not hitherto noticed on the other side of the room. A moment later they had opened it and passed out, sedate, mournful, unhurried; and the boy found that in some way he could not understand the light had gone with them, and he was standing with his back against the wall in almost total darkness.\n\nOnce out of the room, no sound followed them, and he crossed over and tried the handle of the door. It was locked. Then he went back and tried the other door; that, too, was locked. He was shut in. There was no longer any doubt as to the Figure's intentions; he was a prisoner, trapped like an animal in a cage.\n\nThe only thought in his mind just then was an intense desire for freedom. Whatever happened he must escape. He crossed the floor to the only window in the room; it was without blinds, and he looked out. But instantly he recoiled with a fresh and overpowering sense of helplessness, for it was three storeys from the ground, and down below in the shadows he saw a paved courtyard that rendered jumping utterly out of the question.\n\nHe stood for a long time, fighting down the tears, and staring as if his heart would break at the field and trees beyond. A high wall enclosed the yard, but beyond that was freedom and open space. Feelings of loneliness and helplessness, terror and dismay overwhelmed him. His eyes burned and smarted, yet, strange to say, the tears now refused to come and bring him relief. He could only stand there with his elbows on the window-sill, and watch the outline of the trees and hedges grow clearer and clearer as the light drew across the sky, and the moment of sunrise came close.\n\nBut when at last he turned back into the room, he saw that he was no longer alone. Crouching against the opposite wall there was a hooded figure steadily watching him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Shocks of terror, as they increase in number, apparently lessen in effect; the repeated calls made upon Jimbo's soul by the emotions of fear and astonishment had numbed it; otherwise the knowledge that he was locked in the room with this mysterious creature beyond all possibility of escape must have frightened him, as the saying is, out of his skin.\n\nAs it was, however, he kept his head in a wonderful manner, and simply stared at the silent intruder as hard as ever he could stare. How in the world it got in was the principal thought in his mind, and after that: what in the world was it?\n\nThe dawn must have come very swiftly, or else he had been staring longer than he knew, for just then the sun topped the edge of the world and the window-sill simultaneously, and sent a welcome ray of sunshine into the dingy room. It turned the grey light to silver, and fell full upon the huddled figure crouching against the opposite wall. Jimbo caught his breath, and stared harder than ever.\n\nIt was a human figure, the figure, apparently, of a man, sitting crumpled up in a very uncomfortable sort of position on his haunches. It sat perfectly still. A black cloak, with loose sleeves, and a cowl or hood that completely concealed the face, covered it from head to foot. The material of the cloak could not have been very thick, for inside the hood he caught the gleam of eyes as they roamed about the room and followed his movements. But for this glitter of the moving eyes it might have been a figure carved in wood. Was it going to sit there for ever watching him? At first he was afraid it was going to speak; then he was afraid it wasn't. It might rise suddenly and come towards him; yet the thought that it would not move at all was worse still.\n\nIn this way the two faced each other for several minutes until, just as the position was becoming simply unbearable, a low whisper ran round the room: \"At last! Oh! I've found him at last!\" Jimbo was not quite sure of the words, though it was certainly a human voice that had spoken; but, the suspense once broken, the boy could not stand it any longer, and with a rush of desperate courage he found his voice\u2014a very husky one\u2014and moved a step forward.\n\n\"Who are you, please, and how did you get in?\" he ventured with a great effort.\n\nThen he fell back against the wall, amazed at his own daring, and waited with tightly-clenched fists for an answer. But he had not to wait very long, for almost immediately the figure rose awkwardly to its feet, and came over to where he stood. Its manner of moving may best be described as shuffling; and it stretched in front of it a long cloaked arm, on which the sleeve hung, he thought, like clothes on a washing line.\n\nHe breathed hard, and waited. Like many other people with strong wills and sensitive nerves, Jimbo was both brave and a coward: he hoped nothing horrid was going to happen, but he was quite ready if it should. Yet, now that the actual moment had come, he had no particular fear, and when he felt the touch of the hand on his shoulder, the words sprang naturally to his lips with a little trembling laugh, more of wonder perhaps than anything else.\n\n\"You do look a horrid... brute,\" he was going to say, but at the last moment he changed it to \"thing,\" for, with the true intuition of a child, he recognised that the creature inside the cloak was a kind creature and well disposed towards him. \"But how did you get in?\" he added, looking up bravely into the black visage, \"because the doors are both locked on the outside, and I couldn't get out?\"\n\nBy way of reply the figure shuffled to one side, and, taking the hand from his shoulder, pointed silently to a trap-door in the floor behind him. As he looked, he saw it was being shut down stealthily by some one beneath.\n\n\"Hush!\" whispered the figure, almost inaudibly. \"He's watching!\"\n\n\"Who's watching?\" he cried, curiosity taking the place of every other emotion. \"I want to see.\" He ran forward to the spot where the trap-door now lay flush with the floor, but, before he had gone two steps, the black arms shot out and caught him. He turned, struggling, and in the scuffle that followed the cloak shrouding the figure became disarranged; the hood dropped from the face, and he found himself looking straight into the eyes, not of a man, but of a woman!\n\n\"It's you!\" he cried, \"YOU\u2014!\"\n\nA shock ran right through his body from his head to his feet, like a current of electricity, and he caught his breath as though he had been struck. For one brief instant the sinister face of some one who had terrified him in the past came back vividly to his mind, and he shrank away in terror. But it was only for an instant, the twentieth part of an instant. Immediately, before he could even remember the name, recognition passed into darkness and his memory shut down with a snap. He was staring into the face of an utter stranger, about whom he knew nothing and had no feelings particularly one way or another.\n\n\"I thought I knew you,\" he gasped, \"but I've forgotten you again\u2014and I thought you were going to be a man, too.\"\n\n\"Jimbo!\" cried the other, and in her voice was such unmistakable tenderness and yearning that the boy knew at once beyond doubt that she was his friend, \"Jimbo!\"\n\nShe knelt down on the floor beside him, so that her face was on a level with his, and then opened both her arms to him. But though Jimbo was glad to have found a friend who was going to help him, he felt no particular desire to be embraced, and he stood obstinately where he was with his back to the window.\n\nThe morning sunshine fell upon her features and touched the thick coils of her hair with glory. It was not, strictly speaking, a pretty face, but the look of real human tenderness there was very welcome and comforting, and in the kind brown eyes there shone a strange light that was not merely the reflection of the sunlight. The boy felt his heart warm to her as he looked, but her expression puzzled him, and he would not accept the invitation of her arms.\n\n\"Won't you come to me?\" she said, her arms still outstretched.\n\n\"I want to know who you are, and what I'm doing here,\" he said. \"I feel so funny\u2014so old and so young\u2014and all mixed up. I can't make out who I am a bit. What's that funny name you call me?\"\n\n\"Jimbo is your name,\" she said softly.\n\n\"Then what's your name?\" he asked quickly.\n\n\"My name,\" she repeated slowly after a pause, \"is not\u2014as nice as yours. Besides, you need not know my name\u2014you might dislike it.\"\n\n\"But I must have something to call you,\" he persisted.\n\n\"But if I told you, and you disliked the name, you might dislike me too,\" she said, still hesitating.\n\nJimbo saw the expression of sadness in her eyes, and it won his confidence though he hardly knew why. He came up closer to her and put his puzzled little face next to hers.\n\n\"I like you very much already,\" he whispered, \"and if your name is a horrid one I'll change it for you at once. Please tell me what it is.\"\n\nShe drew the boy to her and gave him a little hug, and he did not resist. For a long time she did not answer. He felt vaguely that something of dreadful importance hung about this revelation of her name. He repeated his question, and at length she replied, speaking in a very low voice, and with her eyes fixed intently upon his face.\n\n\"My name,\" she said, \"is Ethel Lake.\"\n\n\"Ethel Lake,\" he repeated after her. The words sounded somehow familiar to him; surely he had heard that name before. Were not the words associated with something in his past that had been unpleasant? A curious sinking sensation came over him as he heard them.\n\nHis companion watched him intently while he repeated the words over to himself several times, as if to make sure he had got them right. There was a moment's hesitation as he slowly went over them once again. Then he turned to her, laughing.\n\n\"I like your name, Ethel Lake,\" he said. \"It's a nice name\u2014Miss\u2014Miss\u2014\" Again he hesitated, while a little warning tremor ran through his mind, and he wondered for an instant why he said \"Miss.\" But it passed as suddenly as it had come, and he finished the sentence\u2014\"Miss Lake, I shall call you.\" He stared into her eyes as he said it.\n\n\"Then you don't remember me at all?\" she cried, with a sigh of intense relief. \"You've quite forgotten?\"\n\n\"I never saw you before, did I? How can I remember you? I don't remember any of the things I've forgotten. Are you one of them?\"\n\nFor reply she caught him to her breast and kissed him. \"You precious little boy!\" she said. \"I'm so glad, oh, so glad!\"\n\n\"But do you remember me?\" he asked, sorely puzzled. \"Who am I? Haven't I been born yet, or something funny like that?\"\n\n\"If you don't remember me,\" said the other, her face happy with smiles that had evidently come only just in time to prevent tears, \"there's not much good telling you who you are. But your name, if you really want to know, is\u2014\" She hesitated a moment.\n\n\"Be quick, Eth\u2014Miss Lake, or you'll forget it again.\"\n\nShe laughed rather bitterly. \"Oh, I never forget. I can't!\" she said. \"I wish I could. Your name is James Stone, and Jimbo is 'short' for James. Now you know.\"\n\nShe might just as well have said Bill Sykes for all the boy knew or remembered.\n\n\"What a silly name!\" he laughed. \"But it can't be my real name, or I should know it. I never heard it before.\" After a moment he added, \"Am I an old man? I feel just like one. I suppose I'm grown up\u2014grown up so fast that I've forgotten what came before\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not grown up, dear, at least, not exactly\u2014\" She glanced down at his alpaca knickerbockers and brown stockings; and as he followed her eyes and saw the dirty buttoned-boots there came into his mind some dim memory of where he had last put them on, and of some one who had helped him. But it all passed like a swift meteor across the dark night of his forgetfulness and was lost in mist.\n\n\"You mustn't judge by these silly clothes,\" he laughed. \"I shall change them as soon as I get\u2014as soon as I can find\u2014\" He stopped short. No words came. A feeling of utter loneliness and despair swept suddenly over him, drenching him from head to foot. He felt lost and friendless, naked, homeless, cold. He was ever on the brink of regaining a whole lot of knowledge and experience that he had known once long ago, ever so long ago, but it always kept just out of his reach. He glanced at Miss Lake, feeling that she was his only possible comfort in a terrible situation. She met his look and drew him tenderly towards her.\n\n\"Now, listen to me,\" she said gently, \"I've something to tell you\u2014about myself.\"\n\nHe was all attention in a minute.\n\n\"I am a discharged governess,\" she began, holding her breath when once the words were out.\n\n\"Discharged!\" he repeated vaguely. \"What's that? What for?\"\n\n\"For frightening a child. I told a little boy awful stories that weren't true. They terrified him so much that I was sent away. That's why I'm here now. It's my punishment. I am a prisoner here until I can find him\u2014and help him to escape\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, I say!\" he exclaimed quickly, as though remembering something. But it passed, and he looked up at her half-bored, half-politely. \"Escape from what?\" he asked.\n\n\"From here. This is the Empty House I told the stories about; and you are the little boy I frightened. Now, at last, I've found you, and am going to save you.\" She paused, watching him with eyes that never left his face for an instant.\n\nJimbo was delighted to hear he was going to be rescued, but he felt no interest at all in her story of having frightened a little boy, who was himself. He thought it was very nice of her to take so much trouble, and he told her so, and when he went up and kissed her and thanked her, he saw to his surprise that she was crying. For the life of him he could not understand why a discharged governess whom he met, apparently, for the first time in the Empty House, should weep over him and show him so much affection. But he could think of nothing to say, so he just waited till she had finished.\n\n\"You see, if I can save you,\" she said between her sobs, \"it will be all right again, and I shall be forgiven, and shall be able to escape with you. I want you to escape, so that you can get back to life again.\"\n\n\"Oh, then I'm dead, am I?\"\n\n\"Not exactly dead,\" she said, drying her eyes with the corner of her black hood. \"You've had a funny accident, you know. If your body gets all right, so that you can go back and live in it again, then you're not dead. But if it's so badly injured that you can't work in it any more, then you are dead, and will have to stay dead. You're still joined to the body in a fashion, you see.\"\n\nHe stared and listened, not understanding much. It all bored him. She talked without explaining, he thought. An immense sponge had passed over the slate of the past and wiped it clean beyond recall. He was utterly perplexed.\n\n\"How funny you are!\" he said vaguely, thinking more of her tears than her explanations.\n\n\"Water won't stay in a cracked bottle,\" she went on, \"and you can't stay in a broken body. But they're trying to mend it now, and if we can escape in time you can be an ordinary, happy little boy in the world again.\"\n\n\"Then are you dead, too?\" he asked, \"or nearly dead?\"\n\n\"I am out of my body, like you,\" she answered evasively, after a moment's pause.\n\nHe was still looking at her in a dazed sort of way, when she suddenly sprang to her feet and let the hood drop back over her face.\n\n\"Hush!\" she whispered, \"he's listening again.\"\n\nAt the same moment a sound came from beneath the floor on the other side of the room, and Jimbo saw the trap-door being slowly raised above the level of the floor.\n\n\"Your number is 102,\" said a voice that sounded like the rushing of a river.\n\nInstantly the trap-door dropped again, and he heard heavy steps rumbling away into the interior of the house. He looked at his companion and saw her terrified face as she lifted her hood.\n\n\"He always blunders along like that,\" she whispered, bending her head on one side to listen. \"He can't see properly in the daylight. He hates sunshine, and usually only goes out after dark.\" She was white and trembling.\n\n\"Is that the person who brought me in here this morning at such a frightful pace?\" he asked, bewildered.\n\nShe nodded. \"He wanted to get in before it was light, so that you couldn't see his face.\"\n\n\"Is he such a fright?\" asked the boy, beginning to share her evident feeling of horror.\n\n\"He is Fright!\" she said in an awed whisper. \"But never talk about him again unless you can't help it; he always knows when he's being talked about, and he likes it, because it gives him more power.\"\n\nJimbo only stared at her without comprehending. Then his mind jumped to something else he wanted badly to have explained, and he asked her about his number, and why he was called No. 102.\n\n\"Oh, that's easier,\" she said, \"102 is your number among the Frightened Children; there are 101 of them, and you are the last arrival. Haven't you seen them yet? It is also the temperature of your broken little body lying on the bed in the night nursery at home,\" she added, though he hardly caught her words, so low were they spoken.\n\nJimbo then described how the children had sung and danced to him, and went on to ask a hundred questions about them. But Miss Lake would give him very little information, and said he would not have very much to do with them. Most of them had been in the House for years and years\u2014so long that they could probably never escape at all.\n\n\"They are all frightened children,\" she said. \"Little ones scared out of their wits by silly people who meant to amuse them with stories, or to frighten them into being well behaved\u2014nursery-maids, elder sisters, and even governesses!\"\n\n\"And they can never escape?\"\n\n\"Not unless the people who frightened them come to their rescue and run the risk of being caught themselves.\"\n\nAs she spoke there rose from the depths of the house the sound of muffled voices, children's voices singing faintly together; it rose and fell exactly like the wind, and with as little tune; it was weird and magical, but so utterly mournful that the boy felt the tears start to his eyes. It drifted away, too, just as the wind does over the tops of the trees, dying into the distance; and all became still again.\n\n\"It's just like the wind,\" he said, \"and I do love the wind. It makes me feel so sad and so happy. Why is it?\"\n\nThe governess did not answer.\n\n\"How old am I really?\" he went on. \"How can I be so old and so ignorant? I've forgotten such an awful lot of knowledge.\"\n\n\"The fact is\u2014well, perhaps, you won't quite understand\u2014but you're really two ages at once. Sometimes you feel as old as your body, and sometimes as old as your soul. You're still connected with your body; so you get the sensations of both mixed up.\"\n\n\"Then is the body younger than the soul?\"\n\n\"The soul\u2014that is yourself,\" she answered, \"is, oh, so old, awfully old, as old as the stars, and older. But the body is no older than itself\u2014of course, how could it be?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" repeated the boy, who was not listening to a word she said. \"How could it be?\"\n\n\"But it doesn't matter how old you are or how young you feel, as long as you don't hate me for having frightened you,\" she said after a pause. \"That's the chief thing.\"\n\nHe was very, very puzzled. He could not help feeling it had been rather unkind of her to frighten him so badly that he had literally been frightened out of his skin; but he couldn't remember anything about it, and she was taking so much trouble to save him now that he quite forgave her. He nestled up against her, and said of course he liked her, and she stroked his curly head and mumbled a lot of things to herself that he couldn't understand a bit.\n\nBut in spite of his new-found friend the feeling of over-mastering loneliness would suddenly rush over him. She might be a protector, but she was not a real companion; and he knew that somewhere or other he had left a lot of other real companions whom he now missed dreadfully. He longed more than he could say for freedom; he wanted to be able to come and go as he pleased; to play about in a garden somewhere as of old; to wander over soft green lawns among laburnums and sweet-smelling lilac trees, and to be up to all his old tricks and mischief\u2014though he could not remember in detail what they were.\n\nIn a word, he wanted to escape; his whole being yearned to escape and be free again; yet here he was a wretched prisoner in a room like a prison-cell, with a sort of monster for a keeper, and a troop of horrible frightened children somewhere else in the house to keep him company. And outside there was only a hard, narrow, paved courtyard with a high wall round it. Oh, it was too terrible to think of, and his heart sank down within him till he felt as if he could do nothing else but cry.\n\n\"I shall save you in time,\" whispered the governess, as though she read his thoughts. \"You must be patient, and do what I tell you, and I promise to get you out. Only be brave, and don't ask too many questions. We shall win in the end and escape.\"\n\nSuddenly he looked up, with quite a new expression in his face. \"But I say, Miss Cake, I'm frightfully hungry. I've had nothing to eat since\u2014I can't remember when, but ever so long ago.\"\n\n\"You needn't call me Miss Cake, though,\" she laughed.\n\n\"I suppose it's because I'm so hungry.\"\n\n\"Then you'll call me Miss Lake when you're thirsty, perhaps,\" she said. \"But, anyhow, I'll see what I can get you. Only, you must eat as little as possible. I want you to get very thin. What you feel is not really hunger\u2014it's only a memory of hunger, and you'll soon get used to it.\"\n\nHe stared at her with a very distressful little face as she crossed the room making this new announcement; and just as she disappeared through the trap-door, only her head being visible, she added with great emphasis, \"The thinner you get the better; because the thinner you are the lighter you are, and the lighter you are the easier it will be to escape. Remember, the thinner the better\u2014the lighter the better\u2014and don't ask a lot of questions about it.\"\n\nWith that the trap-door closed over her, and Jimbo was left alone with her last strange words ringing in his ears." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "It was not long before Jimbo realised that the House, and everything connected with it, spelt for him one message, and one only\u2014a message of fear. From the first day of his imprisonment the forces of his whole being shaped themselves without further ado into one intense, single, concentrated desire to escape.\n\nFreedom, escape into the world beyond that terrible high wall, was his only object, and Miss Lake, the governess, as its symbol, was his only hope. He asked a lot of questions and listened to a lot of answers, but all he really cared about was how he was going to escape, and when. All her other explanations were tedious, and he only half-listened to them. His faith in her was absolute, his patience unbounded; she had come to save him, and he knew that before long she would accomplish her end. He felt a blind and perfect confidence. But, meanwhile, his fear of the House, and his horror for the secret Being who meant to keep him prisoner till at length he became one of the troop of Frightened Children, increased by leaps and bounds.\n\nPresently the trap-door creaked again, and the governess reappeared; in her hand was a small white jug and a soup plate.\n\n\"Thin gruel and skim milk,\" she explained, pouring out a substance like paste into the soup plate, and handing him a big wooden spoon.\n\nBut Jimbo's hunger had somehow vanished.\n\n\"It wasn't real hunger,\" she told him, \"but only a sort of memory of being hungry. They're trying to feed your broken body now in the night-nursery, and so you feel a sort of ghostly hunger here even though you're out of the body.\"\n\n\"It's easily satisfied, at any rate,\" he said, looking at the paste in the soup plate.\n\n\"No one actually eats or drinks here\u2014\"\n\n\"But I'm solid,\" he said, \"am I not?\"\n\n\"People always think they're solid everywhere,\" she laughed. \"It's only a question of degree; solidity here means a different thing to solidity there.\"\n\n\"I can get thinner though, can't I?\" he asked, thinking of her remark about escape being easier the lighter he grew.\n\nShe assured him there would be no difficulty about that, and after replying evasively to a lot more questions, she gathered up the dishes and once more disappeared through the trap-door.\n\nJimbo watched her going down the ladder into the black gulf below, and wondered greatly where she went to and what she did down there; but on these points the governess had refused to satisfy his curiosity, and every time she appeared or disappeared the atmosphere of mystery came and went with her.\n\nAs he stared, wondering, a sound suddenly made itself heard behind him, and on turning quickly round he saw to his great surprise that the door into the passage was open. This was more than he could resist, and in another minute, with mingled feelings of dread and delight, he was out in the passage.\n\nWhen he was first brought to the house, two hours before, it had been too dark to see properly, but now the sun was high in the heavens, and the light still increasing. He crept cautiously to the head of the stairs and peered over into the well of the house. It was still too dark to make things out clearly; but, as he looked, he thought something moved among the shadows below, and for a moment his heart stood still with fear. A large grey face seemed to be staring up at him out of the gloom. He clutched the banisters and felt as if he hardly had strength enough in his legs to get back to the room he had just left; but almost immediately the terror passed, for he saw that the face resolved itself into the mingling of light and shadow, and the features, after all, were of his own creation. He went on slowly and stealthily down the staircase.\n\nIt was certainly an empty house. There were no carpets; the passages were cold and draughty; the paper curled from the damp walls, leaving ugly discoloured patches about; cobwebs hung in many places from the ceiling, the windows were more or less broken, and all were coated so thickly with dirt that the rain had traced little furrows from top to bottom. Shadows hung about everywhere, and Jimbo thought every minute he saw moving figures; but the figures always resolved themselves into nothing when he looked closely.\n\nHe began to wonder how far it was safe to go, and why the governess had arranged for the door to be opened\u2014for he felt sure it was she who had done this, and that it was all right for him to come out. Fright, she had said, was never about in the daylight. But, at the same time, something warned him to be ready at a moment's notice to turn and dash up the stairs again to the room where he was at least comparatively safe.\n\nSo he moved along very quietly and very cautiously. He passed many rooms with the doors open\u2014all empty and silent; some of them had tables and chairs, but no sign of occupation; the grates were black and empty, the walls blank, the windows unshuttered. Everywhere was only silence and shadows; there was no sign of the frightened children, or of where they lived; no trace of another staircase leading to the region where the governess went when she disappeared down the ladder through the trap-door\u2014only hushed, listening, cold silence, and shadows that seemed for ever shifting from place to place as he moved past them. This illusion of people peering at him from corners, and behind doors just ajar, was very strong; yet whenever he turned his head to face them, lo, they were gone, and the shadows rushed in to fill their places.\n\nThe spell of the Empty House was weaving itself slowly and surely about his heart.\n\nYet he went on pluckily, full of a dreadful curiosity, continuing his search, and at length, after passing through another gloomy passage, he was in the act of crossing the threshold of an open door leading out into the courtyard, when he stopped short and clutched the door-posts with both hands.\n\nSome one had laughed!\n\nHe turned, trying to look in every direction at once, but there was no sign of any living being. Yet the sound was close beside him; he could still hear it ringing in his ears\u2014a mocking sort of laugh, in a harsh, guttural voice. The blood froze in his veins, and he hardly knew which way to turn, when another voice sounded, and his terror disappeared as if by magic.\n\nIt was Miss Lake's voice calling to him over the banisters at the top of the house, and its tone was so cheerful that all his courage came back in a twinkling.\n\n\"Go out into the yard,\" she called, \"and play in the sunshine. But don't stay too long.\"\n\nJimbo answered \"All right\" in a rather feeble little voice, and went on down the passage and out into the yard.\n\nThe June sunshine lay hot and still over the paved court, and he looked up into the blue sky overhead. As he looked at the high wall that closed it in on three sides, he realised more than ever that he was caught in a monstrous trap from which there could be no ordinary means of escape. He could never climb over such a wall even with a ladder. He walked out a little way and noticed the rank weeds growing in patches in the corners; decay and neglect left everywhere their dismal signs; the yard, in spite of the sunlight, seemed as gloomy and cheerless as the house itself.\n\nIn one corner stood several little white upright stones, each about three feet high; there seemed to be some writing on them, and he was in the act of going nearer to inspect, when a window opened and he heard some one calling to him in a loud, excited whisper:\n\n\"Hst! Come in, Jimbo, at once. Quick! Run for your life!\"\n\nHe glanced up, quaking with fear, and saw the governess leaning out of the open window. At another window, a little beyond her, he thought a number of white little faces pressed against the glass, but he had no time to look more closely, for something in Miss Lake's voice made him turn and run into the house and up the stairs as though Fright himself were close at his heels. He flew up the three flights, and found the governess coming out on the top landing to meet him. She caught him in her arms and dashed back into the room, as if there was not a moment to be lost, slamming the door behind her.\n\n\"How in the world did you get out?\" she gasped, breathless as himself almost, and pale with alarm. \"Another second and He'd have had you\u2014!\"\n\n\"I found the door open\u2014\"\n\n\"He opened it on purpose,\" she whispered, looking quickly round the room. \"He meant you to go out.\"\n\n\"But you called to me to play in the yard,\" he said. \"I heard you. So of course I thought it was safe.\"\n\n\"No,\" she declared, \"I never called to you. That wasn't my voice. That was one of his tricks. I only this minute found the door open and you gone. Oh, Jimbo, that was a narrow escape; you must never go out of this room till\u2014till I tell you. And never believe any of these voices you hear\u2014you'll hear lots of them, saying all sorts of things\u2014but unless you see me, don't believe it's my voice.\"\n\nJimbo promised. He was very frightened; but she would not tell him any more, saying it would only make it more difficult to escape if he knew too much in advance. He told her about the laugh, and the gravestones, and the faces at the other window, but she would not tell him what he wanted to know, and at last he gave up asking. A very deep impression had been made on his mind, however, and he began to realise, more than he had hitherto done, the horror of his prison and the power of his dreadful keeper.\n\nBut when he began to look about him again, he noticed that there was a new thing in the room. The governess had left him, and was bending over it. She was doing something very busily indeed. He asked her what it was.\n\n\"I'm making your bed,\" she said.\n\nIt was, indeed, a bed, and he felt as he looked at it that there was something very familiar and friendly about the yellow framework and the little brass knobs.\n\n\"I brought it up just now,\" she explained. \"But it's not for sleeping in. It's only for you to lie down on, and also partly to deceive Him.\"\n\n\"Why not for sleeping?\"\n\n\"There's no sleeping at all here,\" she went on calmly.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"You can't sleep out of your body,\" she laughed.\n\n\"Why not?\" he asked again.\n\n\"Your body goes to sleep, but you don't,\" she explained.\n\n\"Oh, I see.\" His head was whirling. \"And my body\u2014my real body\u2014\"\n\n\"Is lying asleep\u2014unconscious they call it\u2014in the night-nursery at home. It's sound asleep. That's why you're here. It can't wake up till you go back to it, and you can't go back to it till you escape\u2014even if it's ready for you before then. The bed is only for you to rest on, for you can rest though you can't sleep.\"\n\nJimbo stared blankly at the governess for some minutes. He was debating something in his mind, something very important, and just then it was his Older Self, and not the child, that was uppermost. Apparently it was soon decided, for he walked sedately up to her and said very gravely, with her serious eyes fixed on his face, \"Miss Lake, are you really Miss Lake?\"\n\n\"Of course I am.\"\n\n\"You're not a trick of His, like the voices, I mean?\"\n\n\"No, Jimbo, I am really Miss Lake, the discharged governess who frightened you.\" There was profound anxiety in every word.\n\nJimbo waited a minute, still looking steadily into her eyes. Then he put out his hand cautiously and touched her. He rose a little on tiptoe to be on a level with her face, taking a fold of her cloak in each hand. The soul-knowledge was in his eyes just then, not the mere curiosity of the child.\n\n\"And are you\u2014dead?\" he asked, sinking his voice to a whisper.\n\nFor a moment the woman's eyes wavered. She turned white and tried to move away; but the boy seized her hand and peered more closely into her face.\n\n\"I mean, if we escape and I get back into my body,\" he whispered, \"will you get back into yours too?\"\n\nThe governess made no reply, and shifted uneasily on her feet. But the boy would not let her go.\n\n\"Please answer,\" he urged, still in a whisper.\n\n\"Jimbo, what funny questions you ask!\" she said at last, in a husky voice, but trying to smile.\n\n\"But I want to know,\" he said. \"I must know. I believe you are giving up everything just to save me\u2014everything; and I don't want to be saved unless you come too. Tell me!\"\n\nThe colour came back to her cheeks a little, and her eyes grew moist. Again she tried to slip past him, but he prevented her.\n\n\"You must tell me,\" he urged; \"I would rather stay here with you than escape back into my body and leave you behind.\"\n\nJimbo knew it was his Older Self speaking\u2014the freed spirit rather than the broken body\u2014but he felt the strain was very great; he could not keep it up much longer; any minute he might slip back into the child again, and lose interest, and be unequal to the task he now saw so clearly before him.\n\n\"Quick!\" he cried in a louder voice. \"Tell me! You are giving up everything to save me, aren't you? And if I escape you will be left alone\u2014quick, answer me! Oh, be quick, I'm slipping back\u2014\"\n\nAlready he felt his thoughts becoming confused again, as the spirit merged back into the child; in another minute the boy would usurp the older self.\n\n\"You see,\" began the governess at length, speaking very gently and sadly, \"I am bound to make amends whatever happens. I must atone\u2014\"\n\nBut already he found it hard to follow.\n\n\"Atone,\" he asked, \"what does 'atone' mean?\" He moved back a step, and glanced about the room. The moment of concentration had passed without bearing fruit; his thoughts began to wander again like a child's. \"Anyhow, we shall escape together when the chance comes, shan't we?\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, darling, we shall,\" she said in a broken voice. \"And if you do what I tell you, it will come very soon, I hope.\" She drew him towards her and kissed him, and though he didn't respond very heartily, he felt he liked it, and was sure that she was good, and meant to do the best possible for him.\n\nJimbo asked nothing more for some time; he turned to the bed where he found a mattress and a blanket, but no sheets, and sat down on the edge and waited. The governess was standing by the window looking out; her back was turned to him. He heard an occasional deep sigh come from her, but he was too busy now with his own sensations to trouble much about her. Looking past her he saw the sea of green leaves dancing lazily in the sunshine. Something seemed to beckon him from beyond the high wall, and he longed to go out and play in the shade of the elms and hawthorns; for the horror of the Empty House was closing in upon him steadily but surely, and he longed for escape into a bright, unhaunted atmosphere, more than anything else in the whole world.\n\nHis thoughts ran on and on in this vein, till presently he noticed that the governess was moving about the room. She crossed over and tried first one door and then the other; both were fastened. Next she lifted the trap-door and peered down into the black hole below. That, too, apparently was satisfactory. Then she came over to the bedside on tiptoe.\n\n\"Jimbo, I've got something very important to ask you,\" she began.\n\n\"All right,\" he said, full of curiosity.\n\n\"You must answer me very exactly. Everything depends on it.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nShe took another long look round the room, and then, in a still lower whisper, bent over him, and asked:\n\n\"Have you any pain?\"\n\n\"Where?\" he asked, remembering to be exact.\n\n\"Anywhere.\"\n\nHe thought a moment.\n\n\"None, thank you.\"\n\n\"None at all\u2014anywhere?\" she insisted.\n\n\"None at all\u2014anywhere,\" he said with decision.\n\nShe seemed disappointed.\n\n\"Never mind; it's a little soon yet, perhaps,\" she said. \"We must have patience. It will come in time.\"\n\n\"But I don't want any pain,\" he said, rather ruefully.\n\n\"You can't escape till it comes.\"\n\n\"I don't understand a bit what you mean.\" He began to feel alarmed at the notion of escape and pain going together.\n\n\"You'll understand later, though,\" she said soothingly, \"and it won't hurt very much. The sooner the pain comes, the sooner we can try to escape. Nowhere can there be escape without it.\"\n\nAnd with that she left him, disappearing without another word into the hole below the trap, and leaving him, disconsolate yet excited, alone in the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "With every one, of course, the measurement of time depends largely upon the state of the emotions, but in Jimbo's case it was curiously exaggerated. This may have been because he had no standard of memory by which to test the succession of minutes; but, whatever it was, the hours passed very quickly, and the evening shadows were already darkening the room when at length he got up from the mattress and went over to the window.\n\nOutside the high elms were growing dim; soon the stars would be out in the sky. The afternoon had passed away like magic, and the governess still left him alone; he could not quite understand why she went away for such long periods.\n\nThe darkness came down very swiftly, and it was night almost before he knew it. Yet he felt no drowsiness, no desire to yawn and get under sheets and blankets; sleep was evidently out of the question, and the hours slipped away so rapidly that it made little difference whether he sat up all night or whether he slept.\n\nIt was his first night in the Empty House, and he wondered how many more he would spend there before escape came. He stood at the window, peering out into the growing darkness and thinking long, long thoughts. Below him yawned the black gulf of the yard, and the outline of the enclosing wall was only just visible, but beyond the elms rose far into the sky, and he could hear the wind singing softly in their branches. The sound was very sweet; it suggested freedom, and the flight of birds, and all that was wild and unrestrained. The wind could never really be a prisoner; its voice sang of open spaces and unbounded distances, of flying clouds and mountains, of mighty woods and dancing waves; above all, of wings\u2014free, swift, and unconquerable wings.\n\nBut this rushing song of wind among the leaves made him feel too sad to listen long, and he lay down upon the bed again, still thinking, thinking.\n\nThe house was utterly still. Not a thing stirred within its walls. He felt lonely, and began to long for the companionship of the governess; he would have called aloud for her to come only he was afraid to break the appalling silence. He wondered where she was all this time and how she spent the long, dark hours of the sleepless nights. Were all these things really true that she told him? Was he actually out of his body, and was his name really Jimbo? His thoughts kept groping backwards, ever seeking the other companions he had lost; but, like a piece of stretched elastic too short to reach its object, they always came back with a snap just when he seemed on the point of finding them. He wanted these companions very badly indeed, but the struggling of his memory was painful, and he could not keep the effort up for very long at one time.\n\nThe effort once relaxed, however, his thoughts wandered freely where they would; and there rose before his mind's eye dim suggestions of memories far more distant\u2014ghostly scenes and faces that passed before him in endless succession, but always faded away before he could properly seize and name them.\n\nThis memory, so stubborn as regards quite recent events, began to play strange tricks with him. It carried him away into a Past so remote that he could not connect it with himself at all, and it was like dreaming of scenes and events that had happened to some one else; yet, all the time, he knew quite well those things had happened to him, and to none else. It was the memory of the soul asserting itself now that the clamour of the body was low. It was an underground river coming to the surface, for odd minutes, here and there, showing its waters to the stars just long enough to catch their ghostly reflections before it rolled away underground again.\n\nYet, swift and transitory as they were, these glimpses brought in their train sensations that were too powerful ever to have troubled his child-mind in its present body. They stirred in him the strong emotions, the ecstasies, the terrors, the yearnings of a much more distant past; whispering to him, could he but have understood, of an infinitely deeper layer of memories and experiences which, now released from the burden of the immediate years, strove to awaken into life again. The soul in that little body covered with alpaca knickerbockers and a sailor blouse seemed suddenly to have access to a storehouse of knowledge that must have taken centuries, rather than a few short years, to acquire.\n\nIt was all very queer. The feeling of tremendous age grew mysteriously over him. He realised that he had been wandering for ages. He had been to the stars and also to the deeps; he had roamed over strange mountains far away from cities or inhabited places of the earth, and had lived by streams whose waves were silvered by moonlight dropping softly through whispering palm branches...\n\nSome of these ghostly memories brought him sensations of keenest happiness\u2014icy, silver, radiant; others swept through his heart like a cold wave, leaving behind a feeling of unutterable woe, and a sense of loneliness that almost made him cry aloud. And there came Voices too\u2014Voices that had slept so long in the inner kingdoms of silence that they failed to rouse in him the very slightest emotion of recognition...\n\nWorn out at length with the surging of these strange hosts through him, he got up and went to the open window again. The night was very dark and warm, but the stars had disappeared, and there was the hush and the faint odour of coming rain in the air. He smelt leaves and the earth and the moist things of the ground, the wonderful perfume of the life of the soil.\n\nThe wind had dropped; all was silent as the grave; the leaves of the elm trees were motionless; no bird or insect raised its voice; everything slept; he alone was watchful, awake. Leaning over the window-sill, his thoughts searched for the governess, and he wondered anew where she was spending the dark hours. She, too, he felt sure, was wakeful somewhere, watching with him, plotting their escape together, and always mindful of his safety...\n\nHis reverie was suddenly interrupted by the flight of an immense night-bird dropping through the air just above his head. He sprang back into the room with a startled cry, as it rushed past in the darkness with a great swishing of wings. The size of the creature filled him with awe; it was so close that the wind it made lifted the hair on his forehead, and he could almost feel the feathers brush his cheeks. He strained his eyes to try and follow it, but the shadows were too deep and he could see nothing; only in the distance, growing every moment fainter, he could hear the noise of big wings threshing the air. He waited a little, wondering if another bird would follow it, or if it would presently return to its perch on the roof; and then his thoughts passed on to uncertain memories of other big birds\u2014hawks, owls, eagles\u2014that he had seen somewhere in places now beyond the reach of distinct recollections...\n\nSoon the light began to dawn in the east, and he made out the shape of the elm trees and the dreadful prison wall; and with the first real touch of morning light he heard a familiar creaking sound in the room behind him, and saw the black hood of the governess rising through the trap-door in the floor.\n\n\"But you've left me alone all night!\" he said at once reproachfully, as she kissed him.\n\n\"On purpose,\" she answered. \"He'd get suspicious if I stayed too much with you. It's different in the daytime, when he can't see properly.\"\n\n\"Where's he been all night, then?\" asked the boy.\n\n\"Last night he was out most of the time\u2014hunting\u2014\"\n\n\"Hunting!\" he repeated, with excitement. \"Hunting what?\"\n\n\"Children\u2014frightened children,\" she replied, lowering her voice. \"That's how he found you.\"\n\nIt was a horrible thought\u2014Fright hunting for victims to bring to his dreadful prison\u2014and Jimbo shivered as he heard it.\n\n\"And how did you get on all this time?\" she asked, hurriedly changing the subject.\n\n\"I've been remembering, that is half-remembering, an awful lot of things, and feeling, oh, so old. I never want to remember anything again,\" he said wearily.\n\n\"You'll forget quick enough when you get back into your body, and have only the body-memories,\" she said, with a sigh that he did not understand. \"But, now tell me,\" she added, in a more serious voice, \"have you had any pain yet?\"\n\nHe shook his head. She stepped up beside him.\n\n\"None there?\" she asked, touching him lightly just behind the shoulder blades.\n\nJimbo jumped as if he had been shot, and uttered a piercing yell.\n\n\"That hurts!\" he screamed.\n\n\"I'm so glad,\" cried the governess. \"That's the pains coming at last.\" Her face was beaming.\n\n\"Coming!\" he echoed, \"I think they've come. But if they hurt as much as that, I think I'd rather not escape,\" he added ruefully.\n\n\"The pain won't last more than a minute,\" she said calmly. \"You must be brave and stand it. There's no escape without pain\u2014from anything.\"\n\n\"If there's no other way,\" he said pluckily, \"I'll try,\u2014but\u2014\"\n\n\"You see,\" she went on, rather absently, \"at this very moment the doctor is probing the wounds in your back where the horns went in\u2014\"\n\nBut he was not listening. Her explanations always made him want either to cry or to laugh. This time he laughed, and the governess joined him, while they sat on the edge of the bed together talking of many things. He did not understand all her explanations, but it comforted him to hear them. So long as somebody understood, no matter who, he felt it was all right.\n\nIn this way several days and nights passed quickly away. The pains were apparently no nearer, but as Miss Lake showed no particular anxiety about their non-arrival, he waited patiently too, dreading the moment, yet also looking forward to it exceedingly.\n\nDuring the day the governess spent most of the time in the room with him; but at night, when he was alone, the darkness became enchanted, the room haunted, and he passed into the long, long Gallery of Ancient Memories." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "A week passed, and Jimbo began to wonder if the pains he so much dreaded, yet so eagerly longed for, were ever coming at all. The imprisonment was telling upon him, and he grew very thin, and consequently very light.\n\nThe nights, though he spent them alone, were easily borne, for he was then intensely occupied, and the time passed swiftly; the moment it was dark he stepped into the Gallery of Memories, and in a little while passed into a new world of wonder and delight. But the daytime seemed always long. He stood for hours by the window watching the trees and the sky, and what he saw always set painful currents running through his blood\u2014unsatisfied longings, yearnings, and immense desires he never could understand.\n\nThe white clouds on their swift journeys took with them something from his heart every time he looked upon them; they melted into air and blue sky, and lo! that \"something\" came back to him charged with all the wild freedom and magic of open spaces, distance, and rushing winds.\n\nBut the change was close at hand.\n\nOne night, as he was standing by the open window listening to the drip of the rain, he felt a deadly weakness steal over him; the strength went out of his legs. First he turned hot, and then he turned cold; clammy perspiration broke out all over him, and it was all he could do to crawl across the room and throw himself on to the bed. But no sooner was he stretched out on the mattress than the feelings passed entirely, and left behind them an intoxicating sense of strength and lightness. His muscles became like steel springs; his bones were strong as iron and light as cork; a wonderful vigour had suddenly come into him, and he felt as if he had just stepped from a dungeon into fresh air. He was ready to face anything in the world.\n\nBut, before he had time to realise the full enjoyment of these new sensations, a stinging, blinding pain shot suddenly through his right shoulder as if a red-hot iron had pierced to the very bone. He screamed out in agony; though, even while he screamed, the pain passed. Then the same thing happened in his other shoulder. It shot through his back with equal swiftness, and was gone, leaving him lying on the bed trembling with pain. But the instant it was gone the delightful sensations of strength and lightness returned, and he felt as if his whole body were charged with some new and potent force.\n\nThe pains had come at last! Jimbo had no notion how they could possibly be connected with escape, but Miss Lake\u2014his kind and faithful friend, Miss Lake\u2014had said that no escape was possible without them; and had promised that they should be brief. And this was true, for the entire episode had not taken a minute of time.\n\n\"ESCAPE, ESCAPE!\"\u2014the words rushed through him like a flame of fire. Out of this dreadful Empty House, into the open spaces; beyond the prison wall; out where the wind and the rain could touch him; where he could feel the grass beneath his feet, and could see the whole sky at once, instead of this narrow strip through the window. His thoughts flew to the stars and the clouds...\n\nBut a strange humming of voices interrupted his flight of imagination, and he saw that the room was suddenly full of moving figures. They were passing before him with silent footsteps, across the window from door to door. How they had come in, or how they went out, he never knew; but his heart stood still for an instant as he recognised the mournful figures of the Frightened Children filing before him in a slow procession. They were singing\u2014though it sounded more like a chorus of whispering than actual singing\u2014and as they moved past with the measured steps of their sorrowful dance, he caught the words of the song he had heard them sing when he first came into the house:\u2014\n\n\u2003\"We hear the little voices in the wind\n\n\u2003Singing of freedom we may never find.\"\n\nJimbo put his fingers into his ears, but still the sound came through. He heard the words almost as if they were inside himself\u2014his own thoughts singing:\u2014\n\n\u2003\"We hear the little footsteps in the rain\n\n\u2003Running to help us, though they run in vain,\n\n\u2003Tapping in hundreds on the window-pane.\"\n\nThe horrible procession filed past and melted away near the door. They were gone as mysteriously as they had come, and almost before he realised it.\n\nHe sprang from the bed and tried the doors; both were locked. How in the world had the children got in and out? The whispering voices rose again on the night air, and this time he was sure they came from outside. He ran to the open window and thrust his head out cautiously. Sure enough, the procession was moving slowly, still with the steps of that impish dance across the courtyard stones. He could just make out the slow waving arms, the thin bodies, and the white little faces as they passed on silent feet through the darkness, and again a fragment of the song rose to his ears as he watched, and filled him with an overpowering sadness:\u2014\n\n\u2003\"We have no joy in any children's game,\n\n\u2003For happiness to us is but a name,\n\n\u2003Since Terror kissed us with his lips of flame.\"\n\nThen he noticed that the group was growing smaller. Already the numbers were less. Somewhere, over there in the dark corner of the yard, the children disappeared, though it was too dark to see precisely how or where.\n\n\"We dance with phantoms, and with shadows play,\" rose to his ears.\n\nSuddenly he remembered the little white upright stones he had seen in that corner of the yard, and understood. One by one they vanished just behind those stones.\n\nJimbo shivered, and drew his head in. He did not like those upright stones; they made him uncomfortable and afraid. Now, however, the last child had disappeared and the song had ceased. He realised what his fate would be if the escape were not successful; he would become one of this band of Frightened Children; dwelling somewhere behind the upright stones; a terrified shadow, waiting in vain to be rescued, waiting perhaps for ever and ever. The thought brought the tears to his eyes, but he somehow managed to choke them down. He knew it was the young portion of him only that felt afraid\u2014the body; the older self could not feel fear, and had nothing to do with tears.\n\nHe lay down again upon the hard mattress and waited; and soon afterwards the first crimson streaks of sunrise appeared behind the high elms, and rooks began to caw and shake their wings in the upper branches. A little later the governess came in.\n\nBefore he could move out of the way\u2014for he disliked being embraced\u2014she had her arms round his neck, and was covering him with kisses. He saw tears in her eyes.\n\n\"You darling Jimbo!\" she cried, \"they've come at last.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" he asked, surprised at her knowledge and puzzled by her display of emotion.\n\n\"I heard you scream to begin with. Besides, I've been watching.\"\n\n\"Watching?\"\n\n\"Yes, and listening too, every night, every single night. You've hardly been a minute out of my sight,\" she added.\n\n\"I think it's awfully good of you,\" he said doubtfully, \"but\u2014\"\n\nA flood of questions followed\u2014about the upright stones, the shadowy children, where she spent the night \"watching him,\" and a hundred other things besides. But he got little satisfaction out of her. He never did when it was Jimbo, the child, that asked; and he remained Jimbo, the child, all that day. She only told him that all was going well. The pains had come; he had grown nice and thin, and light; the children had come into his room as a hint that he belonged to their band, and other things had happened about which she would tell him later. The crisis was close at hand. That was all he could get out of her.\n\n\"It won't be long now,\" she said excitedly. \"They'll come to-night, I expect.\"\n\n\"What will come to-night?\" he asked, with querulous wonder.\n\n\"Wait and see!\" was all the answer he got. \"Wait and see!\"\n\nShe told him to lie quietly on the bed and to have patience.\n\nWith asking questions, and thinking, and wondering, the day passed very quickly. With the lengthening shadows his excitement began to grow. Presently Miss Lake took her departure and went off to her unknown and mysterious abode; he watched her disappear through the floor with mingled feelings, wondering what would have happened before he saw her again. She gave him a long, last look as she sank away below the boards, but it was a look that brought him fresh courage, and her eyes were happy and smiling.\n\nTingling already with expectancy he got into the bed and lay down, his brain alive with one word\u2014ESCAPE.\n\nFrom where he lay he saw the stars in the narrow strip of sky; he heard the wind whispering in the branches; he even smelt the perfume of the fields and hedges\u2014grass, flowers, dew, and the sweet earth\u2014the odours of freedom.\n\nThe governess had, for some reason she refused to explain, taken his blouse away with her. For a long time he puzzled over this, seeking reasons and finding none. But, while in the act of stroking his bare arms, the pains of the night before suddenly returned to both shoulders at once. Fire seemed to run down his back, splitting his bones apart, and then passed even more quickly than before, leaving him with the same wonderful sensations of lightness and strength. He felt inclined to shout and run and jump, and it was only the memory of the governess's earnest caution to \"lie quietly\" that prevented his new emotions passing into acts.\n\nWith very great effort he lay still all night long; and it was only when the room at last began to get light again that he turned on his side, preparatory to getting up.\n\nBut there was something new\u2014something different! He rested on his elbow, waiting. Something had happened to him. Cautiously he sat on the edge of the bed, and stretched out one foot and touched the floor. Excitement ran through him like a wave. There was a great change, a tremendous change; for as he stepped out gingerly on to the floor something followed him from the bed. It clung to his back; it touched both shoulders at once; it stroked his ribs, and tickled the skin of his arms.\n\nHalf frightened, he brought the other leg over, and stood boldly upright on both feet. But the weight still clung to his back. He looked over his shoulder. Yes! it was trailing after him from the bed; it was fan-shaped, and brilliant in colour. He put out a hand and touched it; it was soft and glossy; then he took it deliberately between his fingers; it was smooth as velvet, and had numerous tiny ribs running along it.\n\nSeizing it at last with all his courage, he pulled it forward in front of him for a better view, only to discover that it would not come out beyond a certain distance, and seemed to have got caught somehow between his shoulders\u2014just where the pains had been. A second pull, more vigorous than the first, showed that it was not caught, but fastened to his skin; it divided itself, moreover, into two portions, one half coming from each shoulder.\n\n\"I do believe they're feathers!\" he exclaimed, his eyes almost popping out of his head.\n\nThen, with a sudden flash of comprehension, he saw it all, and understood. They were, indeed, feathers; but they were something more than feathers merely. They were wings!\n\nJimbo caught his breath and stared in silence. He felt dazed. Then bit by bit the fragments of the weird mosaic fell into their proper places, and he began to understand. Escape was to be by flight. It filled him with such a whirlwind of delight and excitement that he could scarcely keep from screaming aloud.\n\nLost in wonder, he took a step forward, and watched with bulging eyes how the wings followed him, their tips trailing along the floor. They were a beautiful deep red, and hung down close and warm beside his body; glossy, sleek, magical. And when, later, the sun burst into the room and turned their colour into living flame, he could not resist the temptation to kiss them. He seized them, and rubbed their soft surfaces over his face. Such colours he had never seen before, and he wanted to be sure that they really belonged to him and were intended for actual use.\n\nSlowly, without using his hands, he raised them into the air. The effort was a perfectly easy muscular effort from the shoulders that came naturally, though he did not quite understand how he accomplished it. The wings rose in a fine, graceful sweep, curving over his head till the tips of the feathers met, touching the walls as they rose, and almost reaching to the ceiling.\n\nHe gave a howl of delight, for this sight was more than he could manage without some outlet for his pent-up emotion; and at the same moment the trap-door shot open, and the governess came into the room with such a bang and a clatter that Jimbo knew at once her excitement was as great as his own. In her hands she carried the blouse she had taken away the night before. She held it out to him without a word. Her eyes were shining like electric lamps. In less than a second he had slipped his wings through the neatly-made slits, but before he could practise them again, Miss Lake rushed over to him, her face radiant with happiness.\n\n\"Jimbo! My darling Jimbo!\" she cried\u2014and then stopped short, apparently unable to express her emotion.\n\nThe next instant he was enveloped, wings and all, in a warm confusion of kisses, congratulations and folds of hood.\n\nWhen they became disentangled again the governess went down on her knees and made a careful examination; she pulled the wings out to their full extent and found that they stretched about four feet and a half from tip to tip.\n\n\"They are beauties!\" she exclaimed enthusiastically, \"and full grown and strong. I'm not surprised they took so long coming.\"\n\n\"Long!\" he echoed, \"I thought they came awfully quickly.\"\n\n\"Not half so quickly as they'll go,\" she interrupted; adding, when she saw his expression of dismay, \"I mean, you'll fly like the wind with them.\"\n\nJimbo was simply breathless with excitement. He wanted to jump out of the window and escape at once. The blue sky and the sunshine and the white flying clouds sent him an irresistible invitation. He could not wait a minute longer.\n\n\"Quick,\" he cried, \"I can't wait! They may go again. Show me how to use them. Oh! do show me.\"\n\n\"I'll show you everything in time,\" she answered. There was something in her voice that made him pause in his excitement. He looked at her in silence for some minutes.\n\n\"But how are you going to escape?\" he asked at length. \"You haven't got\"\u2014he stopped short.\n\nThe governess stepped back a few paces from him. She threw back the hood from her face. Then she lifted the long black cloak that hung like a cassock almost to her ankles and had always enveloped her hitherto.\n\nJimbo stared. Falling from her shoulders, and folding over her hips, he saw long red feathers clinging to her; and when he dashed forward to touch them with his hands, he found they were just as sleek and smooth and glossy as his own.\n\n\"And you never told me all this time?\" he gasped.\n\n\"It was safer not,\" she said. \"You'd have been stroking and feeling your shoulders the whole time, and the wings might never have come at all.\"\n\nShe spread out her wings as she spoke to their full extent; they were nearly six feet across, and the deep crimson on the under side was so exquisite, gleaming in the sunlight, that Jimbo ran in and nestled beneath the feathers, tickling his cheeks with the fluffy surface and running his fingers with childish delight along the slender red quills.\n\n\"You precious child,\" she said, tenderly folding her wings round him and kissing the top of his head. \"Always remember that I really love you; no matter what happens, remember that, and I'll save you.\"\n\n\"And we shall escape together?\" he asked, submitting for once to the caresses with a good grace.\n\n\"We shall escape from the Empty House together,\" she replied evasively. \"How far we can go after that depends\u2014on you.\"\n\n\"On me?\"\n\n\"If you love me enough\u2014as I love you, Jimbo\u2014we can never separate again, because love ties us together for ever. Only,\" she added, \"it must be mutual.\"\n\n\"I love you very much,\" he said, puzzled a little. \"Of course I do.\"\n\n\"If you've really forgiven me for being the cause of your coming here,\" she said, \"we can always be together, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't remember, but I've forgiven you\u2014that other you\u2014long ago,\" he said simply. \"If you hadn't brought me here, I should never have met you.\"\n\n\"That's not real forgiveness\u2014quite,\" she sighed, half to herself.\n\nBut Jimbo could not follow this sort of conversation for long; he was too anxious to try his wings for one thing.\n\n\"Is it very difficult to use them?\" he asked.\n\n\"Try,\" she said.\n\nHe stood in the centre of the floor and raised them again and again. They swept up easily, meeting over his head, and the air whistled musically through them. Evidently, they had their proper muscles, for it was no great effort, and when he folded them again by his side they fell into natural curves over his arms as if they had been there all his life. The sound of the feathers threshing the air filled him with delight and made him think of the big night-bird that had flown past the window during the night. He told the governess about it, and she burst out laughing.\n\n\"I was that big bird!\" she said.\n\n\"You!\"\n\n\"I perched on the roof every night to watch over you. I flew down that time because I was afraid you were trying to climb out of the window.\"\n\nThis was indeed a proof of devotion, and Jimbo felt that he could never doubt her again; and when she went on to tell him about his wings and how to use them he listened with his very best attention and tried hard to learn and understand.\n\n\"The great difficulty is that you can't practise properly,\" she explained. \"There's no room in here, and yet you can't get out till you fly out. It's the first swoop that decides all. You have to drop straight out of this window, and if you use the wings properly they will carry you in a single swoop over the wall and right up into the sky.\"\n\n\"But if I miss\u2014?\"\n\n\"You can't miss,\" she said with decision, \"but, if you did, you would be a prisoner here for ever. HE would catch you in the yard and tear your wings off. It is just as well that you should know this at once.\"\n\nJimbo shuddered as he heard her.\n\n\"When can we try?\" he asked anxiously.\n\n\"Very soon now. The muscles must harden first, and that takes a little time. You must practise flapping your wings until you can do it easily four hundred times a minute. When you can do that it will be time for the first start. You must keep your head steady and not get giddy; the novelty of the motion\u2014the ground rushing up into your face and the whistling of the wind\u2014are apt to confuse at first, but it soon passes, and you must have confidence. I can only help you up to a certain point; the rest depends on you.\"\n\n\"And the first jump?\"\n\n\"You'll have to make that by yourself,\" she said; \"but you'll do it all right. You're very light, and won't go too near the ground. You see, we're like bats, and cannot rise from the earth. We can only fly by dropping from a height, and that's what makes the first plunge rather trying. But you won't fall,\" she added, \"and remember, I shall always be within reach.\"\n\n\"You're awfully kind to me,\" said Jimbo, feeling his little soul more than ever invaded by the force of her unselfish care. \"I promise you I'll do my best.\" He climbed on to her knee and stared into her anxious face.\n\n\"Then you are beginning to love me a little, aren't you?\" she asked softly, putting her arms round him.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said decidedly. \"I love you very much already.\"\n\nFour hundred times a minute sounded a very great deal of wing-flapping; but Jimbo practised eagerly, and though at first he could only manage about twice a second, or one hundred and twenty times a minute, he found this increased very soon to a great deal more, and before long he was able to do the full four hundred, though only for a few minutes at a time.\n\nHe stuck to it pluckily, getting stronger every day. The governess encouraged him as much as possible, but there was very little room for her while he was at work, and he found the best way to practise was at night when she was out of the way. She told him that a large bird moved its wings about four times a second, two up-strokes and two down-strokes; but a small bird like a partridge moved its wings so rapidly it was impossible for the eye to distinguish or count the strokes. A middle course of four hundred suited his own case best, and he bent all his energies to acquire it.\n\nHe also learned that the convex outside curve of wings allowed the wind to escape over them, while the under side, being concave, held every breath. Thus the upward stroke did not simply counterbalance the downward and keep him stationary. Moreover, she showed him how the feathers underlapped each other so that the downward stroke pressed them closely together to hold the wind, whereas in the upward stroke they opened and separated, letting the air slip easily through them, thus offering less resistance to the atmosphere.\n\nBy the end of a week Jimbo had practised so hard that he could keep himself off the floor in mid-air for half an hour at a time, and even then without feeling any great fatigue. His excitement became intense; and, meanwhile, in his body on the nursery bed, though he did not know it, the fever was reaching its crisis. He could think of nothing else but the joys of flying, and what the first, awful plunge would be like, and when Miss Lake came up to him one afternoon and whispered something in his ear, he was so wildly happy that he hugged her for several minutes without the slightest coaxing.\n\n\"It's bright and clear,\" she explained, \"and Fright will not come after us, for he fears the light, and can only fly on dark and gloomy nights.\"\n\n\"So we can start\u2014?\" he stammered joyfully.\n\n\"To-night,\" she answered, \"for our first practice-flight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "To enter the world of wings is to enter a new state of existence. The apparent loss of weight; the ability to attain full speed in a few seconds, and to stop suddenly in a headlong rush without fear of collapse; the power to steer instantly in any direction by merely changing the angle of the body; the altered and enormous view of the green world below\u2014looking down upon forests, seas and clouds; the easy voluptuous rhythm of rising and falling in long, swinging undulations; and a hundred other things that simply defy description and can be appreciated only by actual experience, these are some of the delights of the new world of wings and flying. And the fearful joy of very high speed, especially when the exhilaration of escape is added to it, means a condition little short of real ecstasy.\n\nYet Jimbo's first flight, the governess had been careful to tell him, could not be the flight of final escape; for, even if the wings proved equal to a prolonged effort, escape was impossible until there was somewhere safe to escape to. So it was understood that the practice flights might be long, or might be short; the important thing, meanwhile, was to learn to fly as well as possible. For skilled flying is very different to mere headlong rushing, and both courage and perseverance are necessary to acquire it.\n\nWith rare common sense Miss Lake had said very little about the possibility of failure. Having warned him about the importance of not falling, she had then stopped, and the power of suggestion had been allowed to work only in the right direction of certain success. While the boy knew that the first plunge from the window would be a moment fraught with the highest danger, his mind only recognised the mere off-chance of falling and being caught. He felt confidence in himself, and by so much, therefore, were the chances of disaster lessened.\n\nFor the rest of the afternoon Jimbo saw nothing of his faithful companion; he spent the time practising and resting, and when weary of everything else, he went to the window and indulged in thrilling calculations about the exact height from the ground. A drop of three storeys into a paved courtyard with a monster waiting to catch him, and a high wall too close to allow a proper swing, was an alarming matter from any point of view. Fortunately, his mind dwelt more on the delight of prospective flight and freedom than on the chances of being caught.\n\nThe yard lay hot and naked in the afternoon glare and the enclosing wall had never looked more formidable; but from his lofty perch Jimbo could see beyond into soft hayfields and smiling meadows, yellow with cowslips and buttercups. Everything that flew he watched with absorbing interest: swift blackbirds, whistling as they went, and crows, their wings purple in the sunshine. The song of the larks, invisible in the sea of blue air sent a thrill of happiness through him\u2014he, too, might soon know something of that glad music\u2014and even the stately flight of the butterflies, which occasionally ventured over into the yard, stirred anticipations in him of joys to come.\n\nThe day waned slowly. The butterflies vanished; the rooks sailed homewards through the sunset; the wind dropped away, and the shadows of the high elms lengthened gradually and fell across the window.\n\nThe mysterious hour of the dusk, when the standard of reality changes and other worlds come close and listen, began to work its subtle spell upon his soul. Imperceptibly the shadows deepened as the veil of night drew silently across the sky. A gentle breathing filled the air; trees and fields were composing themselves to sleep; stars were peeping; wings were being folded.\n\nBut the boy's wings, trembling with life to the very tips of their long feathers, these were not being folded. Charged with excitement, like himself, they were gathering all their forces for the supreme effort of their first journey out into the open spaces where they might touch the secret sources of their own magical life.\n\nFor a long, long time he waited; but at last the trap-door lifted and Miss Lake appeared above the floor. The moment she stood in the room he noticed that her wings came through two little slits in her gown and folded down close to the body. They almost touched the ground.\n\n\"Hush!\" she whispered, holding up a warning finger.\n\nShe came over on tiptoe and they began to talk in low whispers.\n\n\"He's on the watch; we must speak very quietly. We couldn't have a better night for it. The wind's in the south and the moon won't be up till we're well on our way.\"\n\nNow that the actual moment was so near the boy felt something of fear steal over him. The night seemed so vast and terrible all of a sudden\u2014like an immense black ocean with no friendly islands where they could fold their wings and rest.\n\n\"Don't waste your strength thinking,\" whispered the governess. \"When the time comes, act quickly, that's all!\"\n\nShe went over to the window and peered out cautiously, after a while beckoning the child to join her.\n\n\"He is there,\" she murmured in his ear. Jimbo could only make out an indistinct shadowy object crouching under the wall, and he was not even positive of that.\n\n\"Does he know we're going?\" he asked in an awed whisper.\n\n\"He's there on the chance,\" she muttered, drawing back into the room. \"When there's a possibility of any one getting frightened he's bound to be lurking about somewhere near. That's Fright all over. But he can't hurt you,\" she added, \"because you're not going to get frightened. Besides, he can only fly when it's dark; and to-night we shall have the moon.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid,\" declared the boy in spite of a rather fluttering heart.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" was all she said.\n\nAt last, then, the moment had come. It was actually beside him, waiting, full of mystery and wonder, with alarm not far behind. The sun was buried below the horizon of the world, and the dusk had deepened into night. Stars were shining overhead; the leaves were motionless; not a breath stirred; the earth was silent and waiting.\n\n\"Yes, I'm ready,\" he whispered, almost inaudibly.\n\n\"Then listen,\" she said, \"and I'll tell you exactly what to do: Jump upwards from the window ledge as high as you can, and the moment you begin to drop, open your wings and strike with all your might. You'll rise at once. The thing to remember is to rise as quickly as possible, because the wall prevents a long, easy, sweeping rise; and, whatever happens, you must clear that wall!\"\n\n\"I shan't touch the ground then?\" asked a faint little voice.\n\n\"Of course not! You'll get near it, but the moment you use your wings you'll stop sinking, and rise up, up, up, ever so quickly.\"\n\n\"And where to?\"\n\n\"To me. You'll see me waiting for you above the trees. Steering will come naturally; it's quite easy.\"\n\nJimbo was already shaking with excitement. He could not help it. And he knew, in spite of all Miss Lake's care, that Fright was waiting in the yard to catch him if he fell, or sank too near the ground.\n\n\"I'll go first,\" added the governess, \"and the moment you see that I've cleared the wall you must jump after me. Only do not keep me waiting!\"\n\nThe girl stood for a minute in silence, arranging her wings. Her fingers were trembling a little. Suddenly she drew the boy to her and kissed him passionately.\n\n\"Be brave!\" she whispered, looking searchingly into his eyes, \"and strike hard\u2014you can't possibly fail.\"\n\nIn another minute she was climbing out of the window. For one second he saw her standing on the narrow ledge with black space at her feet; the next, without even a cry, she sprang out into the darkness, and was gone.\n\nJimbo caught his breath and ran up to see. She dropped like a stone, turning over sideways in the air, and then at once her wings opened on both sides and she righted. The darkness swallowed her up for a moment so that he could not see clearly, and only heard the threshing of the huge feathers; but it was easy to tell from the sound that she was rising.\n\nThen suddenly a black form cleared the wall and rose swiftly in a magnificent sweep into the sky, and he saw her outlined darkly against the stars above the high elm tree. She was safe. Now it was his turn.\n\n\"Act quickly! Don't think!\" rang in his ears. If only he could do it all as quickly as she had done it. But insidious fear had been working all the time below the surface, and his refusal to recognise it could not prevent it weakening his muscles and checking his power of decision. Fortunately something of his Older Self came to the rescue. The emotions of fear, excitement, and intense anticipation combined to call up the powers of his deeper being: the boy trembled horribly, but the old, experienced part of him sang with joy.\n\nCautiously he began to climb out on to the window-sill; first one foot and then the other hung over the edge. He sat there, staring down into black space beneath.\n\nFor a minute he hesitated; despair rushed over him in a wave; he could never take that awful jump into emptiness and darkness. It was impossible. Better be a prisoner for ever than risk so fearful a plunge. He felt cold, weak, frightened, and made a half-movement back into the room. The wings caught somehow between his legs and nearly flung him headlong into the yard.\n\n\"Jimbo! I'm waiting for you!\" came at that moment in a faint cry from the stars, and the sound gave him just the impetus he needed before it was too late. He could not disappoint her\u2014his faithful friend. Such a thing was impossible.\n\nHe stood upright on the ledge, his hands clutching the window-sash behind, balancing as best he could. He clenched his fists, drew a deep, long breath, and jumped upwards and forwards into the air.\n\nUp rushed the darkness with a shriek; the air whistled in his ears; he dropped at fearful speed into nothingness.\n\nAt first everything was forgotten\u2014wings, instructions, warnings, and all. He even forgot to open his wings at all, and in another second he would have been dashed upon the hard paving-stones of the courtyard where his great enemy lay waiting to seize him.\n\nBut just in the nick of time he remembered, and the long hours of practice bore fruit. Out flew the great red wings in a tremendous sweep on both sides of him, and he began to strike with every atom of strength he possessed. He had dropped to within six feet of the ground; but at once the strokes began to tell, and oh, magical sensation! he felt himself rising easily, lightly, swiftly.\n\nA very slight effort of those big wings would have been sufficient to lift him out of danger, but in his terror and excitement he quite miscalculated their power, and in a single moment he was far out of reach of the dangerous yard and anything it contained. But the mad rush of it all made his head swim; he felt dizzy and confused, and, instead of clearing the wall, he landed on the top of it and clung to the crumbling coping with hands and feet, panting and breathless.\n\nThe dizziness was only momentary, however. In less than a minute he was on his feet and in the act of taking his second leap into space. This time it came more easily. He dropped, and the field swung up to meet him. Soon the powerful strokes of his wings drove him at great speed upwards, and he bounded ever higher towards the stars.\n\nOverhead, the governess hovered like an immense bird, and as he rose up he caught the sound of her wings beating the air, while far beneath him, he heard with a shudder a voice like the rushing of a great river. It made him increase his pace, and in another minute he found himself among the little whirlwinds that raced about from the beating of Miss Lake's great wings.\n\n\"Well done!\" cried the delighted governess. \"Safe at last! Now we can fly to our heart's content!\"\n\nJimbo flew up alongside, and together they dashed forward into the night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "There was not much talking at first. The stress of conflicting emotions was so fierce that the words choked themselves in his throat, and the desire for utterance found its only vent in hard breathing.\n\nThe intoxication of rapid motion carried him away headlong in more senses than one. At first he felt as if he never would be able to keep up; then it seemed as if he never would get down again. For with wings it is almost easier to rise than to fall, and a first flight is, before anything else, a series of vivid and audacious surprises.\n\nFor a long time Jimbo was so dizzy with excitement and the novelty of the sensation that he forgot his deliverer altogether.\n\nAnd what a flight it was! Instead of the steady race of the carrier pigeon, or of the rooks homeward bound at evening, it was the see-saw motion of the wren's swinging journey across the lawn; only heavier, faster, and with more terrific impetus. Up and down, each time with a rise and fall of twenty feet, he careered, whistling through the summer night; at the drop of each curve, so low that the scents of dewy grass rose into his face; at the crest of it, so high that the trees and hedges often became mere blots upon the dark surface of the earth.\n\nThe fields rushed by beneath him; the white roads flashed past like streaks of snow. Sometimes he shot across sheets of water and felt the cooler air strike his cheeks; sometimes over sheltered meadows, where the sunshine had slept all day and the air was still soft and warm; on and on, as easily as rain dropping from the sky, or wind rushing earthwards from between the clouds. Everything flew past him at an astonishing rate\u2014everything but the bright stars that gazed calmly down overhead; and when he looked up and saw their steadfastness it helped to keep within bounds the fine alarm of this first excursion into the great vault of the sky.\n\n\"Gently, child!\" gasped Miss Lake behind him. \"We shall never keep it up at this rate.\"\n\n\"Oh! but it's so wonderful,\" he cried, drawing in the air loudly between his teeth, and shaking his wings rapidly like a hawk before it drops.\n\nThe pace slackened a little and the girl drew up alongside. For some time they flew forward together in silence.\n\nThey had been skirting the edge of a wood, when suddenly the trees fell away and Jimbo gave a scream and rose fifty feet into the air with a single bound. Straight in front of him loomed an immense, glaring disc that seemed to swim suddenly up into the sky above the trees. It hung there before his eyes and dazzled him.\n\n\"It's only the moon,\" cried Miss Lake from below.\n\nJimbo dropped through the air to her side again with a gasp.\n\n\"I thought it was a big hole in the sky with fire rushing through,\" he explained breathlessly.\n\nThe boy stared, full of wonder and delight, at the huge flaming circle that seemed to fill half the heavens in front of him.\n\n\"Look out!\" cried the governess, seizing his hand.\n\nWhish! whew! whirr! A large bird whipped past them like some winged imp of darkness, vanishing among the trees far below. There would certainly have been a collision but for the girl's energetic interference.\n\n\"You must be on the look-out for these night-birds,\" she said. \"They fly so unexpectedly, and, of course, they don't see us properly. Telegraph wires and church steeples are bad too, but then we shan't fly over cities much. Keep a good height, it's safer.\"\n\nThey altered their course a little, flying at a different angle, so that the moon no longer dazzled them. Steering came quite easily by turning the body, and Jimbo still led the way, the governess following heavily and with a mighty business of wings and flapping.\n\nIt was something to remember, the glory of that first journey through the air. Sixty miles an hour, and scarcely an effort! Skimming the long ridges of the hills and rushing through the pure air of mountain tops; threading the star-beams; bathing themselves from head to foot in an ocean of cool, clean wind; swimming on the waves of viewless currents\u2014currents warmed only by the magic of the stars, and kissed by the burning lips of flying meteors.\n\nFar below them the moonlight touched the fields with silver and the murmur of the world rose faintly to their ears, trembling, as it were, with the inarticulate dreams of millions. Everywhere about them thrilled and sang the unspeakable power of the night. The mystery of its great heart seemed laid bare before them.\n\nIt was like a wonder-journey in some Eastern fairy tale. Sometimes they passed through zones of sweeter air, perfumed with the scents of hay and wild flowers; at others, the fresh, damp odour of ploughed fields rose up to them; or, again, they went spinning over leagues of forest where the tree-tops stretched beneath them like the surface of a wide, green sea, sleeping in the moonlight. And, when they crossed open water, the stars shone reflected in their faces; and all the while the wings, whirring and purring softly through the darkness, made pleasant music in their ears.\n\n\"I'm tired,\" declared Jimbo presently.\n\n\"Then we'll go down and rest,\" said his breathless companion with obvious relief.\n\nShe showed him how to spread his wings, sloping them towards the ground at an angle that enabled him to shoot rapidly downwards, at the same time regulating his speed by the least upward tilt. It was a glorious motion, without effort or difficulty, though the pace made it hard to keep the eyes open, and breathing became almost impossible. They dropped to within ten feet of the ground and then shot forward again.\n\nBut, while the boy was watching his companion's movements, and paying too little attention to his own, there rose suddenly before him out of the ground a huge, bulky form of something\u2014and crash\u2014he flew headlong into it.\n\nFortunately it was only a haystack; but the speed at which he was going lodged his head several inches under the thatch, whence he projected horizontally into space, feet, arms, and wings gyrating furiously. The governess, however, soon released him with much laughter, and they dropped down into the fallen hay upon the ground with no worse result than a shaking.\n\n\"Oh, what a lark!\" he cried, shaking the hay out of his feathers, and rubbing his head rather ruefully.\n\n\"Except that larks are hardly night-birds,\" she laughed, helping him.\n\nThey settled with folded wings in the shadow of the haystack; and the big moon, peeping over the edge at them, must have surely wondered to see such a funny couple, in such a place, and at such an hour.\n\n\"Mushrooms!\" suddenly cried the governess, springing to her feet. \"There must be lots in this field. I'll go and pick some while you rest a bit.\"\n\nOff she went, trapesing over the field in the moonlight, her wings folded behind her, her body bent a little forward as she searched, and in ten minutes she came back with her hands full. That was undoubtedly the time to enjoy mushrooms at their best, with the dew still on their tight little jackets, and the sweet odour of the earth caught under their umbrellas.\n\nSoon they were all eaten, and Jimbo was lying back on a pile of hay, his shoulders against the wall of the stack, and his wings gathered round him like a warm cloak of feathers. He felt cosy and dozy, full of mushrooms inside and covered with hay and feathers outside. The governess had once told him that a sort of open-air sleep sometimes came after a long flight. It was, of course, not a real sleep, but a state in which everything about oneself is forgotten; no dreams, no movement, no falling asleep and waking up in the ordinary sense, but a condition of deep repose in which recuperation is very great.\n\nJimbo would have been greatly interested, no doubt, to know that his real body on the bed had also just been receiving nourishment, and was now passing into a quieter and less feverish condition. The parallel always held true between himself and his body in the nursery, but he could not know anything about this, and only supposed that it was this open-air sleep that he felt gently stealing over him.\n\nIt brought at first strange thoughts that carried him far away to other woods and other fields. While Miss Lake sat beside him eating her mushrooms, his mind was drawn off to some other little folk. But it was always stopped just short of them. He never could quite see their faces. Yet his thoughts continued their search, groping in the darkness; he felt sure he ought to be sharing his adventures with these other little persons, whoever they were; they ought to have been sitting beside him at that very moment, eating mushrooms, combing their wings, comparing the length of their feathers, and snuggling with him into the warm hay.\n\nBut they obstinately hovered just outside his memory, and refused to come in and surrender themselves. He could not remember who they were, and his yearnings went unsatisfied up to the stars, as yearnings generally do, while his thoughts returned weary from their search and he yielded to the seductions of the soothing open-air sleep.\n\nThe moon, meanwhile, rose higher and higher, drawing a silver veil over the stars. Upon the field the dews of midnight fell silently. A faint mist rose from the ground and covered the flowers in their dim seclusion under the hedgerows. The hours slipped away swiftly.\n\n\"Come on, Jimbo, boy!\" cried the governess at length. \"The moon's below the hills, and we must be off!\"\n\nThe boy turned and stared sleepily at her from his nest in the hay.\n\n\"We've got miles to go. Remember the speed we came at!\" she explained, getting up and arranging her wings.\n\nJimbo got up slowly and shook himself.\n\n\"I've been miles away,\" he said dreamily, \"miles and miles. But I'm ready to start at once.\"\n\nThey looked about for a raised place to jump from. A ladder stood against the other side of the haystack. The governess climbed up it and Jimbo followed her drowsily. Hand in hand they sprang into the air from the edge of the thatched roof, and their wings spread out like sails to catch the wind. It smote their faces pleasantly as they plunged downwards and forwards, and the exhilarating rush of cool air banished from the boy's head the last vestige of the open-air sleep.\n\n\"We must keep up a good pace,\" cried the governess, taking a stream and the hedge beyond in a single sweep. \"There's a light in the east already.\"\n\nAs she spoke a dog howled in a farmyard beneath them, and she shot upwards as though lifted by a sudden gust of wind.\n\n\"We're too low,\" she shouted from above. \"That dog felt us near. Come up higher. It's easier flying, and we've got a long way to go.\"\n\nJimbo followed her up till they were several hundred feet above the earth and the keen air stung their cheeks. Then she led him still higher, till the meadows looked like the squares on a chess-board and the trees were like little toy shrubs. Here they rushed along at a tremendous speed, too fast to speak, their wings churning the air into little whirlwinds and eddies as they passed, whizzing, whistling, tearing through space.\n\nThe fields, however, were still dim in the shadows that precede the dawn, and the stars only just beginning to fade, when they saw the dark outline of the Empty House below them, and began carefully to descend. Soon they topped the high elms, startling the rooks into noisy cawing, and then, skimming the wall, sailed stealthily on outspread wings across the yard.\n\nCautiously dropping down to the level of the window, they crawled over the sill into the dark little room, and folded their wings." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "The governess left the boy to his own reflections almost immediately. He spent the hours thinking and resting; going over again in his mind every incident of the great flight and wondering when the real, final escape would come, and what it would be like. Thus, between the two states of excitement he forgot for a while that he was still a prisoner, and the spell of horror was lifted temporarily from his heart.\n\nThe day passed quickly, and when Miss Lake appeared in the evening, she announced that there could be no flying again that night, and that she wished instead to give him important instruction for the future. There were rules, and signs, and times which he must learn carefully. The time might come when he would have to fly alone, and he must be prepared for everything.\n\n\"And the first thing I have to tell you,\" she said, exactly as though it was a schoolroom, \"is: Never fly over the sea. Our kind of wings quickly absorb the finer particles of water and get clogged and heavy over the sea. You finally cannot resist the drawing power of the water, and you will be dragged down and drowned. So be very careful! When you are flying high it is often difficult to know where the land ends and the sea begins, especially on moonless nights. But you can always be certain of one thing: if there are no sounds below you\u2014hoofs, voices, wheels, wind in trees\u2014you are over the sea.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said the child, listening with great attention. \"And what else?\"\n\n\"The next thing is: Don't fly too high. Though we fly like birds, remember we are not birds, and we can fly where they can't. We can fly in the ether\u2014\"\n\n\"Where's that?\" he interrupted, half afraid of the sound.\n\nShe stooped and kissed him, laughing at his fear.\n\n\"There is nothing to be frightened about,\" she explained. \"The air gets lighter and lighter as you go higher, till at last it stops altogether. Then there's only ether left. Birds can't fly in ether because it's too thin. We can, because\u2014\"\n\n\"Is that why it was good for me to get lighter and thinner?\" he interrupted again in a puzzled voice.\n\n\"Partly, yes.\"\n\n\"And what happens in the ether, please?\" It still frightened him a little.\n\n\"Nothing\u2014except that if you fly too high you reach a point where the earth ceases to hold you, and you dash off into space. Weight leaves you then, and the wings move without effort. Faster and faster you rush upwards, till you lose all control of your movements, and then\u2014\"\n\nMiss Lake hesitated a moment.\n\n\"And then\u2014?\" asked the fascinated child.\n\n\"You may never come down again,\" she said slowly. \"You may be sucked into anything that happens to come your way\u2014a comet, or a shooting star, or the moon.\"\n\n\"I should like a shooting star best,\" observed the boy, deeply interested. \"The moon frightens me, I think. It looks so dreadfully clean.\"\n\n\"You won't like any of them when the time comes,\" she laughed. \"No one ever gets out again who once gets in. But you'll never be caught that way after what I've told you,\" she added, with decision.\n\n\"I shall never want to fly as high as that, I'm sure,\" said Jimbo. \"And now, please, what comes next?\"\n\nThe next thing, she went on to explain, was the weather, which, to all flying creatures, was of the utmost importance. Before starting for a flight he must always carefully consider the state of the sky, and the direction in which he wished to go. For this purpose he must master the meaning and character of the Four Winds and be able to recognise them in a moment.\n\n\"Once you know these,\" she said, \"you cannot possibly go wrong. To make it easier, I've put each Wind into a little simple rhyme, for you.\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" he said eagerly.\n\n\"The North Wind is one of the worst and most dangerous, because it blows so much faster than you think. It's taken you ten miles before you think you've gone two. In starting with a North Wind, always fly against it; then it will bring you home easily. If you fly with it, you may be swept so far that the day will catch you before you can get home; and then you're as good as lost. Even birds fly warily when this wind is about. It has no lulls or resting-places in it; it blows steadily on and on, and conquers everything it comes against\u2014everything except the mountains.\"\n\n\"And its rhyme?\" asked Jimbo, all ears.\n\n\u2003\"It will show you the joy of the birds, my child,\n\n\u2003You shall know their terrible bliss;\n\n\u2003It will teach you to hide, when the night is wild,\n\n\u2003From the storm's too passionate kiss.\n\n\u2003For the Wind of the North\n\n\u2003Is a volleying forth\n\n\u2003That will lift you with springs\n\n\u2003In the heart of your wings,\n\n\u2003And may sweep you away\n\n\u2003To the edge of the day.\n\n\u2003So, beware of the Wind of the North, my child,\n\n\u2003Fly not with the Wind of the North!\"\n\n\"I think I like him all the same,\" said Jimbo. \"But I'll remember always to fly against him.\"\n\n\"The East Wind is worse still, for it hurts,\" continued the governess. \"It stings and cuts. It's like the breath of an ice-creature; it brings hail and sleet and cold rain that beat down wings and blind the eyes. Like the North Wind, too, it is dreadfully swift and full of little whirlwinds, and may easily carry you into the light of day that would prove your destruction. Avoid it always; no hiding-place is safe from it. This is the rhyme:\n\n\u2003\"It will teach you the secrets the eagles know\n\n\u2003Of the tempests' and whirlwinds' birth;\n\n\u2003And the magical weaving of rain and snow\n\n\u2003As they fall from the sky to the earth.\n\n\u2003But an Easterly wind\n\n\u2003Is for ever unkind;\n\n\u2003It will torture and twist you\n\n\u2003And never assist you,\n\n\u2003But will drive you with might\n\n\u2003To the verge of the night.\n\n\u2003So, beware of the Wind of the East, my child,\n\n\u2003Fly not with the Wind of the East.\"\n\n\"The West Wind is really a very nice and jolly wind in itself,\" she went on, \"but it's dangerous for a special reason: it will carry you out to sea. The Empty House is only a few miles from the coast, and a strong West Wind would take you there almost before you had time to get down to earth again. And there's no use struggling against a really steady West Wind, for it's simply tireless. Luckily, it rarely blows at night, but goes down with the sun. Often, too, it blows hard to the coast, and then drops suddenly, leaving you among the fogs and mists of the sea.\"\n\n\"Rather a nice, exciting sort of wind though,\" remarked Jimbo, waiting for the rhyme.\n\n\u2003\"So, at last, you shall know from their lightest breath\n\n\u2003To which heaven each wind belongs;\n\n\u2003And shall master their meaning for life or death\n\n\u2003By the shout of their splendid songs.\n\n\u2003Yet the Wind of the West\n\n\u2003Is a wind unblest;\n\n\u2003It is lifted and kissed\n\n\u2003By the spirits of mist;\n\n\u2003It will clasp you and flee\n\n\u2003To the wastes of the sea.\n\n\u2003So, beware of the Wind of the West, my child,\n\n\u2003Fly not with the Wind of the West!\"\n\n\"A jolly wind,\" observed Jimbo again. \"But that doesn't leave much over to fly with,\" he added sadly. \"They all seem dangerous or cruel.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she laughed, \"and so they are till you can master them\u2014then they're kind, only one that's really always safe and kind is the Wind of the South. It's a sweet, gentle wind, beloved of all that flies, and you can't possibly mistake it. You can tell it at once by the murmuring way it stirs the grasses and the tops of the trees. Its taste is soft and sweet in the mouth like wine, and there's always a faint perfume about it like gardens in summer. It is the joy of this wind that makes all flying things sing. With a South Wind you can go anywhere and no harm can come to you.\"\n\n\"Dear old South Wind,\" cried Jimbo, rubbing his hands with delight. \"I hope it will blow soon.\"\n\n\"Its rhyme is very easy, too, though you will always be able to tell it without that,\" she added.\n\n\u2003\"For this is the favourite Wind of all,\n\n\u2003Beloved of the stars and night;\n\n\u2003In the rustle of leaves you shall hear it call\n\n\u2003To the passionate joys of flight.\n\n\u2003It will carry you forth in its wonderful hair\n\n\u2003To the far-away courts of the sky,\n\n\u2003And the breath of its lips is a murmuring prayer\n\n\u2003For the safety of all who fly.\n\n\u2003For the Wind of the South\n\n\u2003Is like wine in the mouth,\n\n\u2003With its whispering showers\n\n\u2003And perfume of flowers,\n\n\u2003When it falls like a sigh\n\n\u2003From the heart of the sky.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" interrupted Jimbo, rubbing his hands, \"that is nice. That's my wind!\"\n\n\u2003\"It will bear you aloft\n\n\u2003With a pressure so soft\n\n\u2003That you hardly shall guess\n\n\u2003Whose the gentle caress.\"\n\n\u2003\"Hooray!\" he cried again.\n\n\u2003\"It's the kindest of weathers\n\n\u2003For our red feathers,\n\n\u2003And blows open the way\n\n\u2003To the Gardens of Play.\n\n\u2003So, fly out with the Wind of the South, my child,\n\n\u2003With the wonderful Wind of the South.\"\n\n\"Oh, I love the South Wind already,\" he shouted, clapping his hands again. \"I hope it will blow very, very soon.\"\n\n\"It may be rising even now,\" answered the governess, leading him to the window. But, as they gazed at the summer landscape lying in the fading light of the sunset, all was still and resting. The air was hushed, the leaves motionless. There was no call just then to flight from among the tree-tops, and he went back into the room disappointed.\n\n\"But why can't we escape at once?\" he asked again, after he had given his promise to remember all she had told him, and to be extra careful if he ever went out flying alone.\n\n\"Jimbo, dear, I've told you before, it's because your body isn't ready for you yet,\" she answered patiently. \"There's hardly any circulation in it, and if you forced your way back now the shock might stop your heart beating altogether. Then you'd be really dead, and escape would be impossible.\"\n\nThe boy sat on the edge of the bed staring intently at her while she spoke. Something clutched at his heart. He felt his Older Self, with its greater knowledge, rising up out of the depths within him. The child struggled with the old soul for possession.\n\n\"Have you got any circulation?\" he asked abruptly at length. \"I mean, has your heart stopped beating?\"\n\nBut the smile called up by his words froze on her lips. She crossed to the window and stood with her back to the fading light, avoiding his eyes.\n\n\"My case, Jimbo, is a little different from yours,\" she said presently. \"The important thing is to make certain about your escape. Never mind about me.\"\n\n\"But escape without you is nothing,\" he said, the Older Self now wholly in possession. \"I simply wouldn't go. I'd rather stay here\u2014with you.\"\n\nThe governess made no reply, but she turned her back to the room and leaned out of the window. Jimbo fancied he heard a sob. He felt a great big heart swelling up within his little body, and he crossed over beside her. For some minutes they stood there in silence, watching the stars that were already shining faintly in the sky.\n\n\"Whatever happens,\" he said, nestling against her, \"I shan't go from here without you. Remember that!\"\n\nHe was going to say a lot more, but somehow or other, when she stooped over to kiss his head\u2014he hardly came up to her shoulder\u2014it all ran suddenly out of his mind, and the little child dropped back into possession again. The tide of his thoughts that seemed about to rise, fast and furious, sank away completely, leaving his mind a clean-washed slate without a single image; and presently, without any more words, the governess left him and went through the trap-door into the silence and mystery of the house below.\n\nSeveral hours later, about the middle of the night, there came over him a most disagreeable sensation of nausea and dizziness. The ground rose and fell beneath his feet, the walls swam about sideways, and the ceiling slid off into the air. It only lasted a few minutes, however, and Jimbo knew from what she had told him that it was the Flying Sickness which always followed the first long flight.\n\nBut, about the same time, another little body, lying in a night-nursery bed, was being convulsed with a similar attack; and the sickness of the little prisoner in the Empty House had its parallel, strangely enough, in the half-tenanted body miles away in a different world." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Since the night when Jimbo had nearly fallen into the yard and risked capture, Fright, the horrible owner of the house, had kept himself well out of the way, and had allowed himself to be neither seen nor heard.\n\nBut the boy was not foolish enough to fall into the other trap, and imagine, therefore, that He did not know what was going on. Jimbo felt quite sure that He was only waiting his chance; and the governess's avoidance of the subject tended to confirm this supposition.\n\n\"He's disappeared somewhere and taken the children with him,\" she declared when he questioned her. \"And now you know almost as much as I do.\"\n\n\"But not quite!\" he laughed mischievously.\n\n\"Enough, though,\" she replied. \"We want all our energy for escape when it comes. Don't bother about anything else for the moment.\"\n\nDuring the day, when he was alone, his thoughts and fancies often terrified him; but at night, when he was rushing through the heavens, the intense delight of flying drove all minor emotions out of his consciousness, and he even forgot his one great desire\u2014to escape. One night, however, something happened that brought it back more keenly than ever.\n\nHe had been out flying alone, but had not gone far when he noticed that an easterly wind had begun to rise and was blowing steadily behind him. With the recent instructions fresh in his head, he thought it wiser to turn homewards rather than fight his way back later against a really strong wind from this quarter. Flying low along the surface of the fields so as to avoid its full force, he suddenly rose up with a good sweep and settled on the top of the wall enclosing the yard.\n\nThe moonlight lay bright over everything. His approach had been very quiet. He was just about to sail across to the window when something caught his eye, and he hesitated a moment, and stared.\n\nSomething was moving at the other end of the courtyard.\n\nIt seemed to him that the moonlight suddenly grew pale and ghastly; the night air turned chilly; shivers began to run up and down his back.\n\nHe folded his wings and watched.\n\nAt the end of the yard he saw several figures moving busily to and fro in the shadow of the wall. They were very small; but close beside them all the time stood a much larger figure which seemed to be directing their movements. There was no need to look twice; it was impossible to mistake these terrible little people and their hideous overseer. Horror rushed over the boy, and a wild scream was out in the night before he could possibly prevent it. At the same moment a cloud passed over the face of the moon and the yard was shrouded in darkness.\n\nA minute later the cloud passed off; but while it was still too dark to see clearly, Jimbo was conscious of a rushing, whispering sound in the air, and something went past him at a tremendous pace into the sky. The wind stirred his hair as it passed, and a moment later he heard voices far away in the distance\u2014up in the sky or within the house he could not tell\u2014singing mournfully the song he now knew so well:\u2014\n\nWe dance with phantoms and with shadows play.\n\nBut when he looked down at the yard he saw that it was deserted, and the corner by the little upright stones lay in the clear moonlight, empty of figures, large or small.\n\nShivering with fright, he flew across to the window ledge, and almost tumbled into the arms of the governess who was standing close inside.\n\n\"What's the matter, child?\" she asked in a voice that trembled a little.\n\nAnd, still shuddering, he told her how he thought he had seen the children working by the gravestones. All her efforts to calm him at first failed, but after a bit she drew his thoughts to pleasanter things, and he was not so certain after all that he had not been deceived by the cunning of the moonlight and the shadows.\n\nA long interval passed, and no further sign was given by the owner of the house or his band of frightened children. Jimbo soon lost himself again in the delights of flying and the joy of his increasing powers.\n\nMost of all he enjoyed the quiet, starlit nights before the moon was up; for the moon dazzled the eyes in the rarefied air where they flew, whereas the stars gave just enough light to steer by without making it uncomfortable.\n\nMoreover, the moon often filled him with a kind of faint terror, as of death; he could never gaze at her white face for long without feeling that something entered his heart with those silver rays\u2014something that boded him no good. He never spoke of this to the governess; indeed, he only recognised it himself when the moon was near the full; but it lay always in the depths of his being, and he felt dimly that it would have to be reckoned with before he could really escape for good. He took no liberties when the moon was at the full.\n\nHe loved to hover\u2014for he had learned by this time that most difficult of all flying feats; to hold the body vertical and whirr the wings without rising or advancing\u2014he loved to hover on windless nights over ponds and rivers and see the stars reflected in their still pools. Indeed, sometimes he hovered till he dropped, and only saved himself from a wetting by sweeping up in a tremendous curve along the surface of the water, and thus up into the branches of the trees where the governess sat waiting for him. And then, after a little rest, they would launch forth again and fly over fields and woods, sometimes even as far as the hills that ran down the coast of the sea itself.\n\nThey usually flew at a height of about a thousand feet, and the earth passed beneath them like a great streaked shadow. But as soon as the moon was up the whole country turned into a fairyland of wonder. Her light touched the woods with a softened magic, and the fields and hedges became frosted most delicately. Beneath a thin transparency of mist the water shone with a silvery brilliance that always enabled them to distinguish it from the land at any height; while the farms and country houses were swathed in tender grey shadows through which the trees and chimneys pierced in slender lines of black. It was wonderful to watch the shadows everywhere spinning their blue veil of distance that lent even to the commonest objects something of enchantment and mystery.\n\nThose were wonderful journeys they made together into the pathways of the silent night, along the unknown courses, into that hushed centre where they could almost hear the beatings of her great heart\u2014like winged thoughts searching the huge vault, till the boy ached with the sensations of speed and distance, and the old yellow moon seemed to stagger across the sky.\n\nSometimes they rose very high into freezing air, so high that the earth became a dull shadow specked with light. They saw the trains running in all directions with thin threads of smoke shining in the glare of the open fire-boxes. But they seemed very tiny trains indeed, and stirred in him no recollections of the semi-annual visits to London town when he went to the dentist, and lunched with the dreaded grandmother or the stiff and fashionable aunts.\n\nAnd when they came down again from these perilous heights, the scents of the earth rose to meet them, the perfume of woods and fields, and the smells of the open country.\n\nThere was, too, the delight, the curious delight of windy nights, when the wind smote and buffeted them, knocking them suddenly sideways, whistling through their feathers as if it wanted to tear them from their sockets; rushing furiously up underneath their wings with repeated blows; turning them round, and backwards and forwards, washing them from head to foot in a tempestuous sea of rapid and unexpected motion.\n\nIt was, of course, far easier to fly with a wind than without one. The difficulty with a violent wind was to get down\u2014not to keep up. The gusts drove up against the under-surfaces of their wings and kept them afloat, so that by merely spreading them like sails they could sweep and circle without a single stroke. Jimbo soon learned to man\u0153uvre so that he could turn the strength of a great wind to his own purposes, and revel in its boisterous waves and currents like a strong swimmer in a rough sea.\n\nAnd to listen to the wind as it swept backwards and forwards over the surface of the earth below was another pleasure; for everything it touched gave out a definite note. He soon got to know the long sad cry from the willows, and the little whispering in the tops of the poplar trees; the crisp, silvery rattle of the birches, and the deep roar from oaks and beech woods. The sound of a forest was like the shouting of the sea.\n\nBut far more lovely, when they descended a little, and the wind was more gentle, were the low pipings among the reeds and the little wayward murmurs under the hedgerows.\n\nThe pine trees, however, drew them most, with their weird voices, now far away, now near, rising upwards with a wind of sighs.\n\nThere was a grove of these trees that trooped down to the waters of a little lake in the hills, and to this spot they often flew when the wind was low and the music likely, therefore, to be to their taste. For, even when there was no perceptible wind, these trees seemed always full of mysterious, mournful whisperings; their branches held soft music that never quite died away, even when all other trees were silent and motionless.\n\nBesides these special expeditions, they flew everywhere and anywhere. They visited the birds in their nests in lofty trees, and exchanged the time of night with wise-eyed owls staring out upon them from the ivy. They hovered up the face of great cliffs, and passed the hawks asleep on perilous ledges; skimmed over lonely marshes, frightening the water-birds paddling in and out among the reeds. They followed the windings of streams, singing among the meadows, and flew along the wet sands as they watched the moon rise out of the sea.\n\nThese flights were unadulterated pleasure, and Jimbo thought he could never have enough of them.\n\nHe soon began to notice, too, that the trees emanated something that affected his own condition. When he sat in their branches this was very noticeable. Currents of force passed from them into himself. And even when he flew over their crests he was aware that some woods exhaled vigorous, life-giving forces, while others tired and depleted him. Nothing was visible actually, but fine waves seemed to beat up against his eyes and thoughts, making him stronger or weaker, happy or melancholy, full of hope and courage, or listless and indifferent.\n\nThese emanations of the trees\u2014this giving-forth of their own personal forces\u2014were, of course, very varied in strength and character. Oaks and pines were the best combination, he found, before the stress of a long flight, the former giving him steadiness, and the latter steely endurance and the power to steer in sinuous, swift curves, without taking thought or trouble.\n\nOther trees gave other powers. All gave something. It was impossible to sit among their branches without absorbing some of the subtle and exhilarating tree-life. He soon learned how to gather it all into himself, and turn it to account in his own being.\n\n\"Sit quietly,\" the governess said. \"Let the forces creep in and stir about. Do nothing yourself. Give them time to become part of yourself and mix properly with your own currents. Effort on your part prevents this, and you weaken them without gaining anything yourself.\"\n\nJimbo made all sorts of experiments with trees and rocks and water and fields, learning gradually the different qualities of force they gave forth, and how to use them for himself. Nothing, he found, was really dead. And sometimes he got himself into strange difficulties in the beginning of his attempts to master and absorb these nature-forces.\n\n\"Remember,\" the governess warned him more than once, when he was inclined to play tricks, \"they are in quite a different world to ours. You cannot take liberties with them. Even a sympathetic soul like yourself only touches the fringe of their world. You exchange surface-messages with them, nothing more. Some trees have terrible forces just below the surface. They could extinguish you altogether\u2014absorb you into themselves. Others are naturally hostile. Some are mere tricksters. Others are shifty and treacherous, like the hollies, that move about too much. The oak and the pine and the elm are friendly, and you can always trust them absolutely. But there are others\u2014!\"\n\nShe held up a warning finger, and Jimbo's eyes nearly dropped out of his head.\n\n\"No,\" she added, in reply to his questions, \"you can't learn all this at once. Perhaps\u2014\" She hesitated a little. \"Perhaps, if you don't escape, we should have time for all manner of adventures among the trees and other things\u2014but then, we are going to escape, so there's no good wasting time over that!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "But Miss Lake did not always accompany him on these excursions into the night; sometimes he took long flights by himself, and she rather encouraged him in this, saying it would give him confidence in case he ever lost her and was obliged to find his way about alone.\n\n\"But I couldn't get really lost,\" he said once to her. \"I know the winds perfectly now and the country round for miles, and I never go out in fog\u2014\"\n\n\"But these are only practice flights,\" she replied. \"The flight of escape is a very different matter. I want you to learn all you possibly can so as to be prepared for anything.\"\n\nJimbo felt vaguely uncomfortable when she talked like this.\n\n\"But you'll be with me in the Escape Flight\u2014the final one of all,\" he said; \"and nothing ever goes wrong when you're with me.\"\n\n\"I should like to be always with you,\" she answered tenderly, \"but it's well to be prepared for anything, just the same.\"\n\nAnd more than this the boy could never get out of her.\n\nOn one of these lonely flights, however, he made the unpleasant discovery that he was being followed.\n\nAt first he only imagined there was somebody after him because of the curious vibrations of the very rarefied air in which he flew. Every time his flight slackened and the noise of his own wings grew less, there reached him from some other corner of the sky a sound like the vibrations of large wings beating the air. It seemed behind, and generally below him, but the swishing of his own feathers made it difficult to hear with distinctness, or to be certain of the direction.\n\nEvidently it was a long way off; but now and again, when he took a spurt and then sailed silently for several minutes on outstretched wings, the beating of distant, following feathers seemed unmistakably clear, and he raced on again at full speed more than terrified. Other times, however, when he tried to listen, there was no trace of this other flyer, and then his fear would disappear, and he would persuade himself that it had been imagination. So much on these flights he knew to be imagination\u2014the sentences, voices, and laughter, for instance, that filled the air and sounded so real, yet were actually caused by the wind rushing past his ears, the rhythm of the wing-beats, and the tips of the feathers occasionally rubbing against the sides of his body.\n\nBut at last one night the suspicion that he was followed became a certainty.\n\nHe was flying far up in the sky, passing over some big city, when the sound rose to his ears, and he paused, sailing on stretched wings, to listen. Looking down into the immense space below, he saw, plainly outlined against the luminous patch above the city, the form of a large flying creature moving by with rapid strokes. The pulsations of its great wings made the air tremble so that he both heard and felt them. It may have been that the vapours of the city distorted the thing, just as the earth's atmosphere magnifies the rising or setting of the moon; but, even so, it was easy to see that it was something a good deal larger than himself, and with a much more powerful flight.\n\nFortunately, it did not seem this time to be actually on his trail, for it swept by at a great pace, and was soon lost in the darkness far ahead. Perhaps it was only searching for him, and his great height had proved his safety. But in any case he was exceedingly terrified, and at once turned round, pointed his head for the earth, and shot downwards in the direction of the Empty House as fast as ever he could.\n\nBut when he spoke to the governess she made light of it, and told him there was nothing to be afraid of. It might have been a flock of hurrying night-birds, she said, or an owl distorted by the city's light, or even his own reflection magnified in water. Anyhow, she felt sure it was not chasing him, and he need pay no attention to it.\n\nJimbo felt reassured, but not quite satisfied. He knew a flying monster when he saw one; and it was only when he had been for many more flights alone, without its reappearance, that his confidence was fully restored, and he began to forget about it.\n\nCertainly these lonely flights were very much to his taste. His Older Self, with its dim hauntings of a great memory somewhere behind him, took possession then, and he was able to commune with nature in a way that the presence of the governess made impossible. With her his Older Self rarely showed itself above the surface for long; he was always the child. But, when alone, Nature became alive; he drew force from the trees and flowers, and felt that they all shared a common life together. Had he been imprisoned by some wizard of old in a tree-form, knowing of the sunset and the dawn only by the sweet messages that rustled in his branches, the wind could hardly have spoken to him with a more intimate meaning; or the life of the fields, eternally patient, have touched him more nearly with their joys and sorrows. It seemed almost as if, from his leafy cell, he had gazed before this into the shining pools with which the summer rains jewelled the meadows, sending his soul in a stream of unsatisfied yearning up to the stars. It all came back dimly when he heard the wind among the leaves, and carried him off to the woods and fields of an existence far antedating this one\u2014\n\nAnd on gentle nights, when the wind itself was half asleep and dreaming, the pine trees drew him most of all, for theirs was the song he loved above all others. He would fly round and round the little grove by the mountain lake, listening for hours together to their sighing voices. But the governess was never told of this, whatever she may have guessed; for it seemed to him a joy too deep for words, the pains and sweetness being mingled too mysteriously for him ever to express in awkward sentences. Moreover, it all passed away and was forgotten the moment the child took possession and usurped the older memory.\n\nOne night, when the moon was high and the air was cool and fragrant after the heat of the day, Jimbo felt a strong desire to get off by himself for a long flight. He was full of energy, and the space-craving cried to be satisfied. For several days he had been content with slow, stupid expeditions with the governess.\n\n\"I'm off alone to-night,\" he cried, balancing on the window ledge, \"but I'll be back before dawn. Good-bye!\"\n\nShe kissed him, as she always did now, and with her good-bye ringing in his ears, he dropped from the window and rose rapidly over the elms and away from earth.\n\nThis night, for some reason, the stars and the moon seemed to draw him, and with tireless wings he mounted up, up, up, to a height he had never reached before. The intoxication of the strong night air rose into his brain and he dashed forward ever faster, with a mad delight, into the endless space before him.\n\nMile upon mile lay behind him as he rushed onwards, always pointing a little on the upward slope, drunk with speed. The earth faded away to a dark expanse of shadow beneath him, and he no longer was conscious of the deep murmur that usually flowed steadily upwards from its surface. He had often before risen out of reach of the earth noises, but never so far that this dull reverberating sound, combined of all the voices of the world merged together, failed to make itself heard. To-night, however, he heard nothing. The stars above his head changed from yellow to diamond white, and the cold air stung his cheeks and brought the water to his eyes.\n\nBut at length the governess's warning, as he explored these forbidden regions, came back to him, and in a series of gigantic bounds that took his breath away completely, he dropped nearer to the earth again and kept on at a much lower level.\n\nThe hours passed and the position of the moon began to alter noticeably. Some of the constellations that were overhead when he started were now dipping below the horizon. Never before had he ventured so far from home, and he began to realise that he had been flying much longer than he knew or intended. The speed had been terrific.\n\nThe change came imperceptibly. With the discovery that his wings were not moving quite so easily as before, he became suddenly aware that this had really been the case for some little time. He was flying with greater effort, and for a long time this effort had been increasing gradually before he actually recognised the fact.\n\nAlthough no longer pointing towards the earth he seemed to be sinking. It became increasingly difficult to fly upwards. His wings did not seem to fail or weaken, nor was he conscious of feeling tired; but something was ever persuading him to fly lower, almost as if a million tiny threads were coaxing him downwards, drawing him gradually nearer to the world again. Whatever it was, the earth had come much closer to him in the last hour, and its familiar voices were pleasant to hear after the boundless heights he had just left.\n\nBut for some reason his speed grew insensibly less and less. His wings moved apparently as fast as before, but it was harder to keep up. In spite of himself he kept sinking. The sensation was quite new, and he could not understand it. It almost seemed as though he were being pulled downwards.\n\nJimbo began to feel uneasy. He had not lost his bearings, but he was a very long way from home, and quite beyond reach of the help he was so accustomed to. With a great effort he mounted several hundred feet into the air, and tried hard to stay there. For a short time he succeeded, but he soon felt himself sinking gradually downwards again. The force drawing him was a constant force without rise or fall; and with a deadly feeling of fear the boy began to realise that he would soon have to yield to it altogether. His heart beat faster and his thoughts turned to the friend who was then far away, but who alone could save him.\n\nShe, at least, could have explained it and told him what best to do. But the governess was beyond his reach. This problem he must face alone.\n\nSomething, however, had to be done quickly, and Jimbo, acting more as the man than as the boy, turned and flew hurriedly forward in another direction. He hoped this might somehow counteract the force that still drew him downwards; and for a time it apparently did so, and he flew level. But the strain increased every minute, and he looked down with something of a shudder as he realised that before very long he would be obliged to yield to this deadly force\u2014and drop!\n\nIt was then for the first time he noticed a change had come over the surface of the earth below. Instead of the patchwork of field and wood and road, he saw a vast cloud stretching out, white and smooth in the moonlight. The world was hidden beneath a snowy fog, dense and impenetrable. It was no longer even possible to tell in what direction he was flying, for there was nothing to steer by. This was a new and unexpected complication, and the boy could not understand how the change had come about so quickly; the last time he had glanced down for indications to steer by, everything had been clear and easily visible.\n\nIt was very beautiful, this carpet of white mist with the silver moon shining upon it, but it thrilled him now with an unpleasant sense of dread. And, still more unpleasant, was a new sound which suddenly broke in upon the stillness and turned his blood into ice. He was certain that he heard wings behind him. He was being followed, and this meant that it was impossible to turn and fly back.\n\nThere was nothing now to do but fly forwards and hope to distance the huge wings; but if he was being followed by the powerful flyer he had seen a few nights before, the boy knew that he stood little chance of success, and he only did it because it seemed the one thing possible.\n\nThe cloud was dense and chill as he entered it; its moisture clung to his wings and made them heavy; his muscles seemed to stiffen, and motion became more and more difficult. The wings behind him meanwhile came closer.\n\nHe was flying along the surface of the mist now, his body and wings hidden, and his head just above the level. He could see along its white, even top. If he sank a few more inches it would be impossible to see at all, or even to judge where he was going. Soon it rose level with his lips, and at the same time he noticed a new smell in the air, faint at first, but growing every moment stronger. It was a fresh, sweet odour, yet it somehow added to his alarm, and stirred in him new centres of uneasiness. He tried vainly to increase his speed and distance the wings which continued to gain so steadily upon him from behind.\n\nThe cloud, apparently, was not everywhere of the same density, for here and there he saw the tops of green hills below him as he flew. But he could not understand why each green hill seemed to have a little lake on its summit\u2014a little lake in which the reflected moon stared straight up into his face. Nor could he quite make out what the sounds were which rose to his ears through the muffling of the cloud\u2014sounds of tumultuous rushing, hissing, and tumbling. They were continuous, these sounds, and once or twice he thought he heard with them a deep, thunderous roar that almost made his heart stop beating as he listened.\n\nWas he, perhaps, over a range of high mountains, and was this the sound of the tumbling torrents?\n\nThen, suddenly, it came to him with a shock that the ordinary sounds of the earth had wholly ceased.\n\nJimbo felt his head beginning to whirl. He grew weaker every minute; less able to offer resistance to the remorseless forces that were sucking him down. Now the mist had closed over his head, and he could no longer see the moonlight. He turned again, shaking with terror, and drove forward headlong through the clinging vapour. A sensation of choking rose in his throat; he was tired out, ready to drop with exhaustion. The wings of the following creature were now so close that he thought every minute he would be seized from behind and plunged into the abyss to his death.\n\nIt was just then that he made the awful discovery that the world below him was not stationary: the green hills were moving. They were sweeping past with a rushing, thundering sound in regular procession; and their huge sides were streaked with white. The reflection of the moon leaped up into his face as each hill rolled hissing and gurgling by, and he knew at last with a shock of unutterable horror that it was THE SEA!\n\nHe was flying over the sea, and the waters were drawing him down. The immense, green waves that rolled along through the sea fog, carrying the moon's face on their crests, foaming and gurgling as they went, were already leaping up to seize him by the feet and drag him into their depths.\n\nHe dropped several feet deeper into the mist, and towards the sea, terror-stricken and blinded. Then, turning frantically, not knowing what else to do, he struck out, with his last strength, for the upper surface and the moonlight. But as he did so, turning his face towards the sky he saw a dark form hovering just above him, covering his retreat with huge outstretched wings. It was too late; he was hemmed in on all sides.\n\nAt that moment a huge, rolling wave, bigger than all the rest, swept past and wet him to the knees. His heart failed him. The next wave would cover him. Already it was rushing towards him with foaming crest. He was in its shadow; he heard its thunder. Darkness rushed over him\u2014he saw the vast sides streaked with grey and white\u2014when suddenly, the owner of the wings plucked him in the back, mid-way between the shoulders, and lifted him bodily out of the fog, so that the wave swept by without even wetting his feet.\n\nThe next minute he saw a dim, white sheet of silvery mist at his feet, and found himself far above it in the sweet, clean moonlight; and when he turned, almost dead with terror, to look upon his captor, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of\u2014the governess.\n\nThe sense of relief was so great that Jimbo simply closed his wings, and hung, a dead weight, in the air.\n\n\"Use your wings!\" cried the governess sharply; and, still holding him, while he began to flap feebly, she turned and flew in the direction of the land.\n\n\"You!\" he gasped at last. \"It was you following me!\"\n\n\"Of course it was me! I never let you out of my sight. I've always followed you\u2014every time you've been out alone.\"\n\nJimbo was still conscious of the drawing power of the sea, but he felt that his companion was too strong for it. After fifteen minutes of fierce flight he heard the sounds of earth again, and knew that they were safe.\n\nThen the governess loosened her hold, and they flew along side by side in the direction of home.\n\n\"I won't scold you, Jimbo,\" she said presently, \"for you've suffered enough already.\" She was the first to break the silence, and her voice trembled a little. \"But remember, the sea draws you down, just as surely as the moon draws you up. Nothing would please Him better than to see you destroyed by one or the other.\"\n\nJimbo said nothing. But, when once they were safe inside the room again, he went up and cried his eyes out on her arm, while she folded him in to her heart as if he were the only thing in the whole world she had to love." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "One night, towards the end of the practice flights, a strange thing happened, which showed that the time for the final flight of escape was drawing near.\n\nThey had been out for several hours flying through a rainstorm, the thousand little drops of which stung their faces like tiny gun-shot. About two in the morning the wind shifted and drove the clouds away as by magic; the stars came out, at first like the eyes of children still dim with crying, but later with a clear brilliance that filled Jimbo and the governess with keen pleasure. The air was washed and perfumed; the night luminous, alive, singing. All its tenderness and passion entered their hearts and filled them with the wonder of its glory.\n\n\"Come down, Jimbo,\" said the governess, \"and we'll lie in the trees and smell the air after the rain.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" added the boy, whose Older Self had been whispering mysterious things to him, \"and watch the stars and hear them singing.\"\n\nHe led the way to some beech trees that lined a secluded lane, and settled himself comfortably in the top branches of the largest, while the governess soon found a resting-place beside him. It was a deserted spot, far from human habitation. Here and there through the foliage they could see little pools of rain-water reflecting the sky. The group of trees swung in the wind, dreaming great woodland dreams, and overhead the stars looked like a thousand orchards in the sky, filling the air with the radiance of their blossoms.\n\n\"How brilliant they are to-night,\" said the governess, after watching the boy attentively for some minutes as they lay side by side in the great forked branch. \"I never saw the constellations so clear.\"\n\n\"But they have so little shape,\" he answered dreamily; \"if we wore lights when we flew about we should make much better constellations than they do.\"\n\n\"The Big and Little Child instead of the Big and Little Bear,\" she laughed, still watching him.\n\n\"I'm slipping away\u2014\" he began, and then stopped suddenly. He saw the expression of his companion's eyes, which were looking him through and through with the most poignant love and yearning mingled in their gaze, and something clutched at his heart that he could not understand.\n\n\"\u2014not slipping out of the tree,\" he went on vaguely, \"but slipping into some new place or condition. I don't understand it. Am I\u2014going off somewhere\u2014where you can't follow? I thought suddenly\u2014I was losing you.\"\n\nThe governess smiled at him sadly and said nothing. She stroked his wings and then raised them to her lips and kissed them. Jimbo watched her, and folded his other wing across into her hands; he felt unhappy, and his heart began to swell within him; but he didn't know what to say, and the Older Self began slowly to fade away again.\n\n\"But the stars,\" he went on, \"have they got things they send out too\u2014forces, I mean, like the trees? Do they send out something that makes us feel sad, or happy, or strong, or weak?\"\n\nShe did not answer for some time; she lay watching his face and fondling his smooth red wings; and, presently, when she did begin to explain, Jimbo found that the child in him was then paramount again, and he could not quite follow what she said.\n\nHe tried to answer properly and seem interested, but her words were very long and hard to understand, and after a time he thought she was talking to herself more than to him, and he gave up all serious effort to follow. Then he became aware that her voice had changed. The words seemed to drop down upon him from a great height. He imagined she was standing on one of those far stars he had been asking about, and was shouting at him through an immense tube of sky and darkness. The words pricked his ears like needle-points, only he no longer heard them as words, but as tiny explosions of sound, meaningless and distant. Swift flashes of light began to dance before his eyes, and suddenly from underneath the tree, a wind rose up and rushed, laughing, across his face. Darkness in a mass dropped over his eyes, and he sank backwards somewhere into another corner of space altogether.\n\nThe governess, meanwhile, lay quite still, watching the limp form in the branches beside her and still holding the tips of his red wings. Presently tears stole into her eyes, and began to run down her cheeks. One deep sigh after another escaped from her lips; but the little boy, or the old soul, who was the cause of all her emotion, apparently was far away and knew nothing of it. For a long time she lay in silence, and then leaned a little nearer to him, so as to see his full face. The eyes were wide open and staring, but they were looking at nothing she could see, for the consciousness cannot be in two places at the same time, and Jimbo just then was off on a little journey of his own, a journey that was but preliminary to the great final one of all.\n\n\"Jimbo,\" whispered the girl between her tears and sighs, \"Jimbo! Where have you gone to? Tell me, are they getting ready for you at last, and am I to lose you after all? Is this the only way I can save you\u2014by losing you?\"\n\nThere was no answer, no sign of movement; and the governess hid her face in her hands and cried quietly to herself, while her tears dropped down through the branches of the tree and fell into the rain-pools beneath.\n\nFor Jimbo's state of oblivion in the tree was in reality a momentary return to consciousness in his body on the bed, and the repaired mechanism of the brain and muscles had summoned him back on a sort of trial visit. He remembered nothing of it afterwards, any more than one remembers the experiences of deep sleep; but the fact was that, with the descent of the darkness upon him in the branches, he had opened his eyes once again on the scene in the night-nursery bedroom where his body lay.\n\nHe saw figures standing round the bed and about the room; his mother with the same white face as before, was still bending over the bed asking him if he knew her; a tall man in a long black coat moved noiselessly to and fro; and he saw a shaded lamp on a table a little to the right of the bed. Nothing seemed to have changed very much, though there had probably been time enough since he last opened his eyes for the black-coated doctor to have gone and come again for a second visit. He held an instrument in his hands that shone brightly in the lamplight. Jimbo saw this plainly and wondered what it was. He felt as if he were just waking out of a nice, deep sleep\u2014dreamless and undisturbed. The Empty House, the Governess, Fright and the Children had all vanished from his memory, and he knew no more about wings and feathers than he did about the science of meteorology.\n\nBut the bedroom scene was a mere glimpse after all; his eyes were already beginning to close again. First they shut out the figure of the doctor; then the bed-curtains; and then the nurse moved her arm, making the whole scene quiver for an instant, like some huge jelly-shape, before it dipped into profound darkness and disappeared altogether. His mother's voice ran off into a thin trickle of sound, miles and miles away, and the light from the lamp followed him with its glare for less than half a second. All had vanished.\n\n\"Jimbo, dear, where have you been? Can you remember anything?\" asked the soft voice beside him, as he looked first at the stars overhead, and then from the tracery of branches and leaves beneath him to the great sea of tree-tops and open country all round.\n\nBut he could tell her nothing; he seemed dreamy and absent-minded, lying and staring at her as if he hardly knew who she was or what she was saying. His mind was still hovering near the border-line of the two states of consciousness, like the region between sleeping and waking, where both worlds seem unreal and wholly wonderful.\n\nHe could not answer her questions, but he evidently caught some reflex of her emotions, for he leaned towards her across the branches, and said he was happy and never wanted to leave her. Then he crawled to the end of the big bough and sprang out into the air with a shout of delight. He was the child again\u2014the flying child, wild with the excitement of tearing through the night air at fifty miles an hour.\n\nThe governess soon followed him and they flew home together, taking a long turn by the sea and past the great chalk cliffs, where the sea sang loud beneath them.\n\nThese lapses became with time more frequent, as well as of longer duration; and with them the boy noticed that the longing to escape became once again intense. He wanted to get home, wherever home was; he experienced a sort of nostalgia for the body, though he could not remember where that body lay. But when he asked the governess what this feeling meant, she only mystified him by her answers, saying that every one, in the body or out of it, felt a deep longing for their final home, though they might not have the least idea where it lay, or even to be able to recognise, much less to label, their longing.\n\nHis normal feelings, too, were slowly returning to him. The Older Self became more and more submerged. As he approached the state of ordinary, superficial consciousness, the characteristics of that state reflected themselves more and more in his thoughts and feelings. His memory still remained a complete blank; but he somehow felt that the things, places, and people he wanted to remember, had moved much nearer to him than before. Every day brought them more within his reach.\n\n\"All these forgotten things will come back to me soon, I know,\" he said one day to the governess, \"and then I'll tell you all about them.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you'll remember me too then,\" she answered, a shadow passing across her face.\n\nJimbo clapped his hands with delight.\n\n\"Oh,\" he cried, \"I should like to remember you, because that would make you a sort of two-people governess, and I should love you twice as much.\"\n\nBut with the gradual return to former conditions the feelings of age and experience grew dim and indefinite, his knowledge lessened, becoming obscure and confused, showing itself only in vague impressions and impulses, until at last it became quite the exception for the child-consciousness to be broken through by flashes of intuition and inspiration from the more deeply hidden memories.\n\nFor one thing, the deep horror of the Empty House and its owner now returned to him with full force. Fear settled down again over the room, and lurked in the shadows over the yard. A vivid dread seized him of the other door in the room\u2014the door through which the Frightened Children had disappeared, but which had never opened since. It gradually became for him a personality in the room, a staring, silent, listening thing, always watching, always waiting. One day it would open and he would be caught! In a dozen ways like this the horror of the house entered his heart and made him long for escape with all the force of his being.\n\nBut the governess, too, seemed changing; she was becoming more vague and more mysterious. Her face was always sad now, and her eyes wistful; her manner became restless and uneasy, and in many little ways the child could not fail to notice that her mind was intent upon other things. He begged her to name the day for the final flight, but she always seemed to have some good excuse for putting it off.\n\n\"I feel frightened when you don't tell me what's going on,\" he said to her.\n\n\"It's the preparations for the last flight,\" she answered, \"the flight of escape. He'll try to prevent us going together so that you should get lost. But it's better you shouldn't know too much,\" she added. \"Trust me and have patience.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's what you're so afraid of,\" he said, \"separation!\" He was very proud indeed of the long word, and said it over several times to himself.\n\nAnd the governess, looking out of the window at the fading sunlight, repeated to herself more than to him the word he was so proud of.\n\n\"Yes, that's what I'm so afraid of\u2014separation; but if it means your salvation\u2014\" and her sentence remained unfinished as her eyes wandered far above the tops of the trees into the shadows of the sky.\n\nAnd Jimbo, drawn by the sadness of her voice, turned towards the window and noticed to his utter amazement that he could see right through her. He could see the branches of the trees beyond her body.\n\nBut the next instant she turned and was no longer transparent, and before the boy could say a word, she crossed the floor and disappeared from the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Now that he was preparing to leave it, Jimbo began to realise more fully how things in this world of delirium\u2014so the governess sometimes called it\u2014were all terribly out of order and confused. So long as he was wholly in it and of it, everything had seemed all right; but, as he approached his normal condition again, the disorder became more and more apparent.\n\nAnd the next few hours brought it home with startling clearness, and increased to fever heat the desire for final escape.\n\nIt was not so much a nonsense-world\u2014it was too alarming for that\u2014as a world of nightmare, wherein everything was distorted. Events in it were all out of proportion; effects no longer sprang from adequate causes; things happened in a dislocated sort of way, and there was no sequence in the order of their happening. Tiny occurrences filled him with disproportionate, inconceivable horror; and great events, on the other hand, passed him scathless. The spirit of disorder\u2014monstrous, uncouth, terrifying\u2014reigned supreme; and Jimbo's whole desire, though inarticulate, was to escape back into order and harmony again.\n\nIn contrast to all this dreadful uncertainty, the conduct of the governess stood out alone as the one thing he could count upon: she was sure and unfailing; he felt absolute confidence in her plans for his safety, and when he thought of her his mind was at rest. Come what might, she would always be there in time to help. The adventure over the sea had proved that; but, childlike, he thought chiefly of his own safety, and had ceased to care very much whether she escaped with him or not. It was the older Jimbo that preferred captivity to escape without her, whereas every minute now he was sinking deeper into the normal child state in which the intuitive flashes from the buried soul became more and more rare.\n\nMeanwhile, there was preparation going on, secret and mysterious. He could feel it. Some one else besides the governess was making plans, and the boy began to dread the moment of escape almost as much as he desired it. The alternative appalled him\u2014to live for ever in the horror of this house, bounded by the narrow yard, watched by Fright listening ever at his elbow, and visited by the horrible Frightened Children. Even the governess herself began to inspire him with something akin to fear, as her personality grew more and more mysterious. He thought of her as she stood by the window, with the branches of the tree visible through her body, and the thought filled him with a dreadful and haunting distress.\n\nBut this was only when she was absent; the moment she came into the room, and he looked into her kind eyes, the old feeling of security returned, and he felt safe and happy.\n\nOnce, during the day, she came up to see him, and this time with final instructions. Jimbo listened with rapt attention.\n\n\"To-night, or to-morrow night we start,\" she said in a quiet voice. \"You must wait till you hear me calling\u2014\"\n\n\"But sha'n't we start together?\" he interrupted.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" she replied. \"I'm doing everything possible to put him off the scent, but it's not easy, for once Fright knows you he's always on the watch. Even if he can't prevent your escape, he'll try to send you home to your body with such a shock that you'll be only 'half there' for the rest of your life.\"\n\nJimbo did not quite understand what she meant by this, and returned at once to the main point.\n\n\"Then the moment you call I'm to start?\"\n\n\"Yes. I shall be outside somewhere. It depends on the wind and weather a little, but probably I shall be hovering above the trees. You must dash out of the window and join me the moment you hear me call. Clear the wall without sinking into the yard, and mind he doesn't tear your wings off as you fly by.\"\n\n\"What will happen, though, if I don't find you?\" he asked.\n\n\"You might get lost. If he succeeds in getting me out of the way first, you're sure to get lost\u2014\"\n\n\"But I've had long flights without getting lost,\" he objected.\n\n\"Nothing to this one,\" she replied. \"It will be tremendous. You see, Jimbo, it's not only distance; it's change of condition as well.\"\n\n\"I don't mind what it is so long as we escape together,\" he said, puzzled by her words.\n\nHe kept his eyes fixed on her face. It seemed to him she was changing even as he looked at her. A sort of veil lifted from her features. He fancied he could see the shape of the door through her body.\n\n\"Oh, please, Miss Lake\u2014\" he began in a frightened voice, taking a step towards her. \"What is the matter? You look so different!\"\n\n\"Nothing, dearest boy, is the matter,\" she replied faintly. \"I feel sad at the thought of your\u2014of our going, that's all. But that's nothing,\" she added more briskly, \"and remember, I've told you exactly what to do; so you can't make any mistake. Now good-bye for the present.\"\n\nThere was a smile on her face that he had never seen there before, and an expression of tenderness and love that he could not fail to understand. But even as he looked she seemed to fade away into a delicate, thin shadow as she moved slowly towards the trap-door. Jimbo stretched out his arms to touch her, for the moment of dread had passed, and he wanted to kiss her.\n\n\"No!\" she cried sharply. \"Don't touch me, child; don't touch me!\"\n\nBut he was already close beside her, and in another second would have had his arms round her, when his foot stumbled over something, and he fell forward into her with his full weight. Instead of saving himself against her body, however, he fell clean through her! Nothing stopped him; there was no resistance; he met nothing more solid than air, and fell full length upon the floor. Before he could recover from his surprise and pick himself up, something touched him on the lips, and he heard a voice that was faint as a whisper saying, \"Good-bye, darling child, and bless you.\" The next moment he was on his feet again and the room was empty. The governess had gone through the trap-door, and he was alone.\n\nIt was all very strange and confusing, and he could not understand what was happening to her. He never for a moment realised that the change was in himself, and that as the tie between himself and his body became closer, the things of this other world he had been living in for so long must fade gradually away into shadows and emptiness.\n\nBut Jimbo was a brave boy; there was nothing of the coward in him, though his sensitive temperament made him sometimes hesitate where an ordinary child with less imagination would have acted promptly. The desire to cry he thrust down and repressed, fighting his depression by the thought that within a few hours the voice might sound that should call him to the excitement of the last flight\u2014and freedom.\n\nThe rest of the daylight slipped away very quickly, and the room was full of shadows almost before he knew it. Then came the darkness. Outside, the wind rose and fell fitfully, booming in the chimney with hollow music, and sighing round the walls of the house. A few stars peeped between the branches of the elms, but masses of cloud hid most of the sky, and the air felt heavy with coming rain.\n\nHe lay down on the bed and waited. At the least sound he started, thinking it might be the call from the governess. But the few sounds he did hear always resolved themselves into the moaning of the wind, and no voice came. With his eyes on the open window, trying to pierce the gloom and find the stars, he lay motionless for hours, while the night wore on and the shadows deepened.\n\nAnd during those long hours of darkness and silence he was conscious that a change was going on within him. Name it he could not, but somehow it made him feel that living people like himself were standing near, trying to speak, beckoning, anxious to bring him back into their own particular world. The darkness was so great that he could see only the square outline of the open window, but he felt sure that any sudden flash of light would have revealed a group of persons round his bed with arms outstretched, trying to reach him. The emotion they roused in him was not fear, for he felt sure they were kind, and eager only to help him; and the more he realised their presence, the less he thought about the governess who had been doing so much to make his escape possible.\n\nThen, too, voices began to sound somewhere in the air, but he could not tell whether they were actually in the room, or outside in the night, or only within himself\u2014in his own head:\u2014strange, faint voices, whispering, laughing, shouting, crying; fragments of stories, rhymes, riddles, odd names of people and places jostled one another with varying degrees of clearness, now loud, now soft, till he wondered what it all meant, and longed for the light to come.\n\nBut besides all this, something else, too, was abroad that night\u2014something he could not name or even think about without shaking with terror down at the very roots of his being. And when he thought of this, his heart called loudly for the governess, and the people hidden in the shadows of the room seemed quite useless and unable to help.\n\nThus he hovered between the two worlds and the two memories, phantoms and realities shifting and changing places every few minutes.\n\nA little light would have saved him much suffering. If only the moon were up! Moonlight would have made all the difference. Even a moon half hidden and misty would have put the shadows farther away from him.\n\n\"Dear old misty moon!\" he cried half aloud to himself upon the bed, \"why aren't you here to-night? My last night!\"\n\nMisty Moon, Misty Moon! The words kept ringing in his head. Misty Moon, Misty Moon! They swam round in his blood in an odd, tumultuous rhythm. Every time the current of blood passed through his brain in the course of its circulation it brought the words with it, altered a little, and singing like a voice.\n\nLike a voice! Suddenly he made the discovery that it actually was a voice\u2014and not his own. It was no longer the blood singing in his veins, it was some one singing outside the window. The sound began faintly and far away, up above the trees; then it came gradually nearer, only to die away again almost to a whisper.\n\nIf it was not the voice of the governess, he could only say it was a very good imitation of it.\n\nThe words forming out of the empty air rose and fell with the wind, and, taking his thoughts, flung them in a stream through the dark sky towards the hidden, misty moon:\n\n\u2003\"O misty moon,\n\n\u2003Dear, misty moon,\n\n\u2003The nights are long without thee;\n\n\u2003The shadows creep\n\n\u2003Across my sleep,\n\n\u2003And fold their wings about me!\"\n\nAnd another silvery voice, that might have been the voice of a star, took it up faintly, evidently from a much greater distance:\n\n\u2003\"O misty moon,\n\n\u2003Sweet, misty moon,\n\n\u2003The stars are dim behind thee;\n\n\u2003And, lo, thy beams\n\n\u2003Spin through my dreams\n\n\u2003And weave a veil to blind me!\"\n\nThe sound of this beautiful voice so delighted Jimbo that he sprang from his bed and rushed to the window, hoping that he might be able to hear it more clearly. But, before he got half-way across the room, he stopped short, trembling with terror. Underneath his very feet, in the depths of the house, he heard the awful voice he dreaded more than anything else. It roared out the lines with a sound like the rushing of a great river:\n\n\u2003\"O misty moon,\n\n\u2003Pale misty moon,\n\n\u2003Thy songs are nightly driven,\n\n\u2003Eternally,\n\n\u2003From sky to sky,\n\n\u2003O'er the old, grey Hills of Heaven!\"\n\nAnd after the verse Jimbo heard a great peal of laughter that seemed to shake the walls of the house, and rooted his feet to the floor. It rolled away with thundering echoes into the very bowels of the earth. He just managed to crawl back to his mattress and lie down, when another voice took up the song, but this time in accents so tender, that the child felt something within him melt into tears of joy, and he was on the verge of recognising, for the first time since his accident, the voice of his mother:\n\n\u2003\"O misty moon,\n\n\u2003Shy, misty moon,\n\n\u2003Whence comes the blush that trembles\n\n\u2003In sweet disgrace\n\n\u2003O'er half thy face\n\n\u2003When Night her stars assembles?\"\n\nBut his memory, of course, failed him just as he seemed about to grasp it, and he was left wondering why the sound of that one voice had brought him a moment of radiant happiness in the midst of so much horror and pain. Meanwhile the answering voices went on, each time different, and in new directions.\n\nBut the next verse somehow brought back to him all the terror he had felt in his flight over the sea, when the sound of the hissing waters had reached his ears through the carpet of fog:\n\n\u2003\"O misty moon,\n\n\u2003Persuasive moon,\n\n\u2003Earth's tides are ever rising;\n\n\u2003By the awful grace\n\n\u2003Of thy weird white face\n\n\u2003Leap the seas to thy enticing!\"\n\nThen followed the voice that had started the horrid song. This time he was sure it was not Miss Lake's voice, but only a very clever imitation of it. Moreover, it again ended in a shriek of laughter that froze his blood:\n\n\u2003\"O misty moon,\n\n\u2003Deceiving moon,\n\n\u2003Thy silvery glance brings sadness;\n\n\u2003Who flies to thee,\n\n\u2003From land or sea,\n\n\u2003Shall end\u2014his\u2014days\u2014in\u2014MADNESS!\"\n\nOther voices began to laugh and sing, but Jimbo stopped his ears, for he simply could not bear any more. He felt certain, too, that these strange words to the moon had all been part of a trap\u2014a device to draw him to the window. He shuddered to think how nearly he had fallen into it, and determined to lie on the bed and wait till he heard his companion calling, and knew beyond all doubt that it was she.\n\nBut the night passed away and the dawn came, and no voice had called him forth to the last flight.\n\nHitherto, in all his experiences, there had been only one absolute certainty: the appearance of the governess with the morning light. But this time sunrise came and the clouds cleared away, and the sweet smells of field and air stole into the little room, yet without any sign of the governess. The hours passed, and she did not come, till finally he realised that she was not coming at all, and he would have to spend the whole day alone. Something had happened to prevent her, or else it was all part of her mysterious \"plan.\" He did not know, and all he could do was to wait, and wonder, and hope.\n\nAll day long he lay and waited, and all day long he was alone. The trap-door never once moved; the courtyard remained empty and deserted; there was no sound on the landing or on the stairs; no wind stirred the leaves outside, and the hot sun poured down out of a cloudless sky. He stood by the open window for hours watching the motionless branches. Everything seemed dead; not even a bird crossed his field of vision. The loneliness, the awful silence, and above all, the dread of the approaching night, were sometimes more than he seemed able to bear; and he wanted to put his head out of the window and scream, or lie down on the bed and cry his heart out. But he yielded to neither impulse; he kept a brave heart, knowing that this would be his last night in prison, and that in a few hours' time he would hear his name called out of the sky, and would dash through the window to liberty and the last wild flight. This thought gave him courage, and he kept all his energy for the great effort.\n\nGradually, once more, the sunlight faded, and the darkness began to creep over the land. Never before had the shadows under the elms looked so fantastic, nor the bushes in the field beyond assumed such sinister shapes. The Empty House was being gradually invested; the enemy was masquerading already under cover of these very shadows.\n\nVery soon, he felt, the attack would begin, and he must be ready to act.\n\nThe night came down at last with a strange suddenness, and with it the warning of the governess came back to him; he thought quakingly of the stricken children who had been caught and deprived of their wings; and then he pulled out his long red feathers and tried their strength, and gained thus fresh confidence in their power to save him when the time came." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "With the full darkness a whole army of horrors crept nearer. He felt sure of this, though he could actually see nothing. The house was surrounded, the courtyard crowded. Outside, on the stairs, in the other rooms, even on the roof itself, waited dreadful things ready to catch him, to tear off his wings, to make him prisoner for ever and ever.\n\nThe possibility that something had happened to the governess now became a probability. Imperceptibly the change was wrought; he could not say how or when exactly; but he now felt almost certain that the effort to keep her out of the way had succeeded. If this were true, the boy's only hope lay in his wings, and he pulled them out to their full length and kissed them passionately, speaking to the strong red feathers as if they were living little persons.\n\n\"You must save me! You will save me, won't you?\" he cried in his anguish. And every time he did this and looked at them he gained fresh hope and courage.\n\nThe problem where he was to fly to had not yet insisted on a solution, though it lay always at the back of his mind; for the final flight of escape without a guide had never been even a possibility before.\n\nLying there alone in the darkness, waiting for the sound of the voice so longed-for, he found his thoughts turning again to the moon, and the strange words of the song that had puzzled him the night before. What in the world did it all mean? Why all this about the moon? Why was it a cruel moon, and why should it attract and persuade and entice him? He felt sure, the more he thought of it, that this had all been a device to draw him to the window\u2014and perhaps even farther.\n\nThe darkness began to terrify him; he dreaded more and more the waiting, listening things that it concealed. Oh, when would the governess call to him? When would he be able to dash through the open window and join her in the sky?\n\nHe thought of the sunlight that had flooded the yard all day\u2014so bright it seemed to have come from a sun fresh made and shining for the first time. He thought of the exquisite flowers that grew in the fields just beyond the high wall, and the night smells of the earth reached him through the window, wafted in upon a wind heavy with secrets of woods and fields. They all came from a Land of Magic that after to-night might be for ever beyond his reach, and they went straight to his heart and immediately turned something solid there into tears. But the tears did not find their natural expression, and Jimbo lay there fighting with his pain, keeping all his strength for the one great effort, and waiting for the voice that at any minute now might sound above the tree-tops.\n\nBut the hours passed and the voice did not come.\n\nHow he loathed the room and everything in it. The ceiling stretched like a white, staring countenance above him; the walls watched and listened; and even the mantelpiece grew into the semblance of a creature with drawn-up shoulders bending over him. The whole room, indeed, seemed to his frightened soul to run into the shape of a monstrous person whose arms were outstretched in all directions to prevent his escape.\n\nHis hands never left his wings now. He stroked and fondled them, arranging the feathers smoothly and speaking to them under his breath just as though they were living things. To him they were indeed alive, and he knew when the time came they would not fail him. The fierce passion for the open spaces took possession of his soul, and his whole being began to cry out for freedom, rushing wind, the stars, and a pathless sky.\n\nSlowly the power of the great, open Night entered his heart, bringing with it a courage that enabled him to keep the terrors of the House at a distance.\n\nSo far, the boy's strength had been equal to the task, but a moment was approaching when the tension would be too great to bear, and the long pent-up force would rush forth into an act. Jimbo realised this quite clearly; though he could not exactly express it in words, he felt that his real hope of escape lay in the success of that act. Meanwhile, with more than a child's wisdom, he stored up every particle of strength he had for the great moment when it should come.\n\nA light wind had risen soon after sunset, but as the night wore on it began to fail, dropping away into little silences that grew each time longer. In the heart of one of these spells of silence Jimbo presently noticed a new sound\u2014a sound that he recognised.\n\nFar away at first, but growing in distinctness with every dropping of the wind, this new sound rose from the interior of the house below and came gradually upon him. It was voices faintly singing, and the tread of stealthy footsteps.\n\nNearer and nearer came the sound, till at length they reached the door, and there passed into the room a wave of fine, gentle sound that woke no echo and scarcely seemed to stir the air into vibration at all. The door had opened, and a number of voices were singing softly under their breath.\n\nAnd after the sounds, creeping slowly like some timid animal, there came into the room a small black figure just visible in the faint starlight. It peered round the edge of the door, hesitated a moment, and then advanced with an odd rhythmical sort of motion. And after the first figure came a second, and after the second a third; and then several entered together, till a whole group of them stood on the floor between Jimbo and the open window.\n\nThen he recognised the Frightened Children and his heart sank. Even they, he saw, were arrayed against him, and took it for granted that he already belonged to them.\n\nOh, why did not the governess come for him? Why was there no voice in the sky? He glanced with longing towards the heavens, and as the children moved past, he was almost certain that he saw the stars through their bodies too.\n\nSlowly they shuffled across the floor till they formed a semicircle round the bed; and then they began a silent, impish dance that made the flesh creep. Their thin forms were dressed in black gowns like shrouds, and as they moved through the steps of the bizarre measure he saw that their legs were little more than mere skin and bone. Their faces\u2014what he could see of them when he dared to open his eyes\u2014were pale as ashes, and their beady little eyes shone like the facets of cut stones, flashing in all directions. And while they danced in and out amongst each other, never breaking the semicircle round the bed, they sang a low, mournful song that sounded like the wind whispering through a leafless wood.\n\nAnd the words stirred in him that vague yet terrible fear known to all children who have been frightened and made to feel afraid of the dark. Evidently his sensations were being merged very rapidly now into those of the little boy in the night-nursery bed.\n\n\u2003\"There is Someone in the Nursery\n\n\u2003Whom we never saw before;\n\n\u2003\u2014Why hangs the moon so red?\u2014\n\n\u2003And he came not by the passage,\n\n\u2003Or the window, or the door;\n\n\u2003\u2014Why hangs the moon so red?\u2014\n\n\u2003And he stands there in the darkness,\n\n\u2003In the centre of the floor.\n\n\u2003\u2014See, where the moon hangs red!\u2014\n\n\u2003Someone's hiding in the passage\n\n\u2003Where the door begins to swing;\n\n\u2003\u2014Why drive the clouds so fast?\u2014\n\n\u2003In the corner by the staircase\n\n\u2003There's a dreadful waiting thing:\n\n\u2003\u2014Why drive the clouds so fast?\u2014\n\n\u2003Past the curtain creeps a monster\n\n\u2003With a black and fluttering wing;\n\n\u2003\u2014See, where the clouds drive fast!\u2014\n\n\u2003In the chilly dusk of evening;\n\n\u2003In the hush before the dawn;\n\n\u2003\u2014Why drips the rain so cold?\u2014\n\n\u2003In the twilight of the garden,\n\n\u2003In the mist upon the lawn,\n\n\u2003\u2014Why drips the rain so cold?\u2014\n\n\u2003Faces stare, and mouth upon us,\n\n\u2003Faces white and weird and drawn;\n\n\u2003\u2014See, how the rain drips cold!\u2014\n\n\u2003Close beside us in the night-time,\n\n\u2003Waiting for us in the gloom,\n\n\u2003\u2014O! Why sings the wind so shrill?\u2014\n\n\u2003In the shadows by the cupboard,\n\n\u2003In the corners of the room,\n\n\u2003\u2014O! Why sings the wind so shrill?\u2014\n\n\u2003From the corridors and landings\n\n\u2003Voices call us to our doom.\n\n\u2003\u2014O! how the wind sings shrill!\"\u2014\n\nBy this time the dreadful dancers had come much closer to him, shifting stealthily nearer to the bed under cover of their dancing, and always between him and the window.\n\nSuddenly their intention flashed upon him; they meant to prevent his escape!\n\nWith a tremendous effort he sprang from the bed. As he did so a dozen pairs of thin, shadowy arms shot out towards him as though to seize his wings; but with an agility born of fright he dodged them, and ran swiftly into the corner by the mantelpiece. Standing with his back against the wall he faced the children, and strove to call out for help to the governess; but this time there was an entirely new difficulty in the way, for he found to his utter dismay that his voice refused to make itself heard. His mouth was dry and his tongue would hardly stir.\n\nNot a sound issued from his lips, but the children instantly moved forwards and hemmed him in between them and the wall; and to reach the window he would have to break through this semicircle of whispering, shadowy forms. Above their heads he could see the stars shining, and any moment he might hear Miss Lake's voice calling to him to come out. His heart rose with passionate longing within him, and he gathered his wings tightly about him ready for the final dash. It would take more than the Frightened Children to hold him prisoner when once he heard that voice, or even without it!\n\nWhether they were astonished at his boldness, or merely waiting their opportunity later, he could not tell; but anyhow they kept their distance for a time and made no further attempt to seize his feathers. Whispering together under their breath, sometimes singing their mournful, sighing songs, sometimes sinking their voices to a confused murmur, they moved in and out amongst each other with soundless feet like the shadows of branches swaying in the wind.\n\nThen, suddenly, they moved closer and stretched out their arms towards him, their bodies swaying rhythmically together, while their combined voices, raised just above a whisper, sang to him\u2014\n\n\u2003\"Dare you fly out to-night,\n\n\u2003When the Moon is so strong?\n\n\u2003Though the stars are so bright,\n\n\u2003There is death in their song;\n\n\u2003You're a hostage to Fright,\n\n\u2003And to us you belong!\n\n\u2003Dare you fly out alone\n\n\u2003Through the shadows that wave,\n\n\u2003When the course is unknown\n\n\u2003And there's no one to save?\n\n\u2003You are bone of our bone,\n\n\u2003And for ever His slave!\"\n\nAnd, following these words, came from somewhere in the air that voice like the thunder of a river. Jimbo knew only too well to whom it belonged as he listened to the rhyme of the West Wind\u2014\n\n\u2003\"For the Wind of the West\n\n\u2003Is a wind unblest,\n\n\u2003And its dangerous breath\n\n\u2003Will entice you to death!\n\n\u2003Fly not with the Wind of the West, O child,\n\n\u2003With the terrible Wind of the West!\"\n\nBut the boy knew perfectly well that these efforts to stop him were all part of a trap. They were lying to him. It was not the Wind of the West at all; it was the South Wind! That at least he knew by the odours that were wafted in through the window. Again he tried to call to the governess, but his tongue lay stiff in his mouth and no sound came.\n\nMeanwhile the children began to draw closer, hemming him in. They moved almost imperceptibly, but he saw plainly that the circle was growing smaller and smaller. His legs began to tremble, and he felt that soon he would collapse and drop at their feet, for his strength was failing and the power to act and move was slowly leaving him.\n\nThe little shadowy figures were almost touching him, when suddenly a new sound broke the stillness and set every nerve tingling in his body.\n\nSomething was shuffling along the landing. He heard it outside, pushing against the door. The handle turned with a rattle, and a moment later the door slowly opened.\n\nFor a second Jimbo's breath failed him, and he nearly fell in a heap upon the floor. Round the edge of the door he saw a dim huge figure come crawling into the room\u2014creeping along the floor\u2014and trailing behind it a pair of immense black wings that stretched along the boards. For one brief second he stared, horror-stricken, and wondering what it was. But before the whole length of the creature was in, he knew. It was Fright himself! And he was making steadily for the window!\n\nThe shock instantly galvanised the boy into a state of activity again. He recovered the use of all his muscles and all his faculties. His voice, released by terror, rang out in a wild shriek for help to the governess, and he dashed forward across the room in a mad rush for the window. Unless he could reach it before the other, he would be a prisoner for the rest of his life. It was now or never.\n\nThe instant he moved, the children came straight at him with hands outstretched to stop him; but he passed through them as if they were smoke, and with almost a single bound sprang upon the narrow window-sill. To do this he had to clear the head and shoulders of the creature on the floor, and though he accomplished it successfully, he felt himself clutched from behind. For a second he balanced doubtfully on the window ledge. He felt himself being pulled back into the room, and he combined all his forces into one tremendous effort to rush forward.\n\nThere was a ripping, tearing sound as he sprang into the air with a yell of mingled terror and exultation. His prompt action and the fierce impetus had saved him. He was free. But in the awful hand that seized him he had left behind the end feathers of his right wing. A few inches more and it would have been not merely the feathers, but the entire wing itself.\n\nHe dropped to within three feet of the stones in the yard, and then, borne aloft by the kind, rushing Wind of the South, he rose in a tremendous sweep far over the tops of the high elms and out into the heart of the night.\n\nOnly there was no governess's voice to guide him; and behind him, a little lower down, a black pursuing figure with huge wings flapped heavily as it followed with laborious flight through the darkness." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "But it was the sound of something crashing heavily through the top branches of the elms that made the boy realise he was actually being followed; and all his efforts became concentrated into the desire to put as much distance as possible between himself and the horror of the Empty House.\n\nHe heard the noise of big wings far beneath him, and his one idea was to out-distance his pursuer and then come down again to earth and rest his wings in the branches of a tree till he could devise some plan how to find the governess. So at first he raced at full speed through the air, taking no thought of direction.\n\nWhen he looked down, all he could see was that something vague and shadowy, shaking out a pair of enormous wings between him and the earth, move along with him. Its path was parallel with his own, but apparently it made no effort to rise up to his higher level. It thundered along far beneath him, and instinctively he raised his head and steered more and more upwards and away from the world.\n\nThe gap at the end of his right wing where the feathers had been torn out seemed to make no difference in his power of flight or steering, and he went tearing through the night at a pace he had never dared to try before, and at a height he had never yet reached in any of the practice flights. He soared higher even than he knew; and perhaps this was fortunate, for the friction of the lower atmosphere might have heated him to the point of igniting, and some watcher at one of earth's windows might have suddenly seen a brilliant little meteor flash through the night and vanish into dust.\n\nAt first the joy of escape was the only idea his mind seemed able to grasp; he revelled in a passionate sense of freedom, and all his energies poured themselves into one concentrated effort to fly faster, faster, faster. But after a time, when the pursuer had been apparently outflown, and he realised that escape was an accomplished fact, he began to search for the governess, calling to her, rising and falling, darting in all directions, and then hovering on outstretched wings to try and catch some sound of a friendly voice.\n\nBut no answer came, either from the stars that crowded the vault above, or from the dark surface of the world below; only silence answered his cries, and his voice was swallowed up and lost in the immensity of space almost the moment it left his lips.\n\nPresently he began to realise to what an appalling distance he had risen above the world, and with anxious eyes he tried to pierce the gaping emptiness beneath him and on all sides. But this vast sea of air had nothing to reveal. The stars shone like pinholes of gold pricked in a deep black curtain; and the moon, now rising slowly, spread a veil of silver between him and the upper regions. There was not a cloud anywhere and the winds were all asleep. He was alone in space. Yet, as the swishing of his feathers slackened and the roar in his ears died away, he heard in the short pause the ominous beating of great wings somewhere in the depths beneath him, and knew that the great pursuer was still on his track.\n\nThe glare of the moon now made it impossible to distinguish anything properly, and in these huge spaces, with nothing to guide the eye, it was difficult to know exactly from what direction the sound came. He was only sure of one thing\u2014that it was far below him, and that for the present it did not seem to come much nearer. The cry for help that kept rising to his lips he suppressed, for it would only have served to guide his pursuer; and, moreover, a cry\u2014a little thin, despairing cry\u2014was instantly lost in these great heavens. It was less than a drop in an ocean.\n\nOn and on he flew, always pointing away from the earth, and trying hard to think where he would find safety. Would this awful creature hunt him all night long into the daylight, or would he be forced back into the Empty House in sheer exhaustion? The thought gave him new impetus, and with powerful strokes he dashed onwards and upwards through the wilderness of space in which the only pathways were the little golden tracks of the starbeams. The governess would turn up somewhere; he was positive of that. She had never failed him yet.\n\nSo, alone and breathless, he pursued his flight, and the higher he went the more the tremendous vault opened up into inconceivable and untold distances. His speed kept increasing; he thought he had never found flying so easy before; and the thunder of the following wings that held persistently on his track made it dangerous for him to slacken up for more than a minute here and there. The earth became a dark blot beneath him, while the moon, rising higher and higher, grew weirdly bright and close. How black the sky was; how piercing the points of starlight; how stimulating the strong, new odours of these lofty regions! He realised with a thrill of genuine awe that he had flown over the very edge of the world, and the moment the thought entered his mind it was flung back at him by a voice that seemed close to his ear one moment, and the next was miles away in the space overhead. Light thoughts, born of the stars and the moon and of his great speed, danced before his mind in fanciful array. Once he laughed aloud at them, but once only. The sound of his voice in these echoless spaces made him afraid.\n\nThe speed, too, affected his vision, for at one moment thin clouds stretched across his face, and the next he was whirling through perfectly clear air again with no vestige of a cloud in sight. The same reason doubtless explained the sudden presence of sheets of light in the air that reflected the moonlight like particles of glittering ice, and then suddenly disappeared again. The terrific speed would explain a good many things, but certainly it was curious how creatures formed out of the hollow darkness, like foam before a steamer's bows, and moved noiselessly away on either side to join the army of dim life that crowded everywhere and watched his passage. For, in front and on both sides, there gathered a vast assembly of silent forms more than shadows, less than bodily shapes, that opened up a pathway as he rushed through them, and then immediately closed up their ranks again when he had passed. The air seemed packed with living creatures. Space was filled with them. They surrounded him on all sides. Yet his passage through them was like the passage of a hand through smoke; it was easy to make a pathway, but the pathway left no traces behind it. More smoke rushed in and filled the void.\n\nHe could never see these things properly, face to face; they always kept just out of the line of vision, like shadows that follow a lonely walker in a wood and vanish the moment he turns to look at them over his shoulder. But ever by his side, with a steady, effortless motion, he knew they kept up with him\u2014strange inhabitants of the airless heights, immense and misty-winged, with veiled, flaming eyes and silent feathers. He was not afraid of them; for they were neither friendly nor hostile; they were simply the beings of another world, alien and unknown.\n\nBut what puzzled him more was that the light and the darkness seemed separate things, each distinctly visible. After each stroke of his wings he saw the darkness sift downwards past him through the air like dust. It floated all round him in thinnest diaphanous texture\u2014visible, not because the moonlight made it so, but because in its inmost soul it was itself luminous. It rose and fell in eddies, swirling wreaths, and undulations; inwoven with starbeams, as with golden thread, it clothed him about in circles of some magical primordial substance.\n\nEven the stars, looking down upon him from terrifying heights, seemed now draped, now undraped, as if by the sweeping of enormous wings that stirred these sheets of visible darkness into a vast system of circulation through the heavens. Everything in these oceans of upper space apparently made use of wings, or the idea of wings. Perhaps even the great earth itself, rolling from star to star, was moved by the power of gigantic, invisible wings!...\n\nJimbo realised he had entered a forbidden region. He began to feel afraid.\n\nBut the only possible expression of his fear, and its only possible relief, lay in his own wings\u2014and he used them with redoubled energy. He dashed forward so fast that his face begun to burn, and he kept turning his head in every direction for a sign of the governess, or for some indication of where he could escape to. In the pauses of the wild flight he heard the thunder of the following wings below. They were still on his trail, and it seemed that they were gaining on him.\n\nHe took a new angle, realising that his only chance was to fly high; and the new course took him perpendicularly away from the earth and straight towards the moon. Later, when he had out-distanced the other creature, he would drop down again to safer levels.\n\nYet the hours passed and it never overtook him. A measured distance was steadily kept up between them as though with calculated purpose.\n\nCurious distant voices shouted from time to time all manner of sentences and rhymes in his ears, but he could neither understand nor remember them. More and more the awful stillness of the vast regions that lie between the world and the moon appalled him.\n\nThen, suddenly, a new sound reached him that at first he could not in the least understand. It reached him, however, not through the ears, but by a steady trembling of the whole surface of his body. It set him in vibration all over, and for some time he had no idea what it meant. The trembling ran deeper and deeper into his body, till at last a single, powerful, regular vibration took complete possession of his whole being, and he felt as though he was being wrapped round and absorbed by this vast and gigantic sound. He had always thought that the voice of Fright, like the roar of a river, was the loudest and deepest sound he had ever heard. Even that set his soul a-trembling. But this new, tremendous, rolling-ocean of a voice came not that way, and could not be compared to it. The voice of the other was a mere tickling of the ear compared to this awful crashing of seas and mountains and falling worlds. It must break him to pieces, he felt.\n\nSuddenly he knew what it was,\u2014and for a second his wings failed him:\u2014he had reached such a height that he could hear the roar of the world as it thundered along its journey through space! That was the meaning of this voice of majesty that set him all a-trembling. And before long he would probably hear, too, the voices of the planets, and the singing of the great moon. The governess had warned him about this. At the first sound of these awful voices she told him to turn instantly and drop back to the earth as fast as ever he could drop.\n\nJimbo turned instinctively and began to fall. But, before he had dropped half a mile, he met once again the ascending sound of the wings that had followed him from the Empty House.\n\nIt was no good flying straight into destruction. He summoned all his courage and turned once more towards the stars. Anything was better than being caught and held for ever by Fright, and with a wild cry for help that fell dead in the empty spaces, he renewed his unending flight towards the stars.\n\nBut, meanwhile, the pursuer had distinctly gained. Appalled by the mighty thunder of the stars' voices above, and by the prospect of immediate capture if he turned back, Jimbo flew blindly on towards the moon, regardless of consequences. And below him the Pursuer came closer and closer. The strokes of its wings were no longer mere distant thuds that he heard when he paused in his own flight to listen; they were the audible swishing of feathers. It was near enough for that.\n\nJimbo could never properly see what was following him. A shadow between him and the earth was all he could distinguish, but in the centre of that shadow there seemed to burn two glowing eyes. Two brilliant lights flashed whenever he looked down, like the lamps of a revolving lighthouse. But other things he saw, too, when he looked down, and once the earth rose close to his face so that he could have touched it with his hands. The same instant it dropped away again with a rush of whirlwinds, and became a distant shadow miles and miles below him. But before it went, he had time to see the Empty House standing within its gloomy yard, and the horror of it gave him fresh impetus.\n\nAnother time when the world raced up close to his eyes he saw a scene of a different kind that stirred a passionately deep yearning within him\u2014a house overgrown with ivy and standing among trees and gardens, with laburnums and lilacs flowering on smooth green lawns, and a clean gravel drive leading down to a big pair of iron gates. Oh, it all seemed so familiar! Perhaps in another minute the well-known figures would have appeared and spoken to him. Already he heard their voices behind the bushes. But, just before they appeared, the earth dropped back with a roar of a thousand winds, and Jimbo saw instead the shadow of the Pursuer mounting, mounting, mounting towards him. Up he shot again with terror in his heart, and all trembling with the thunder of the great star-voices above. He felt like a leaf in a hurricane, \"lost, dizzy, shelterless.\"\n\nVoices, too, now began to be heard more frequently. They dropped upon him out of the reaches of this endless void; and with them sometimes came forms that shot past him with amazing swiftness, racing into the empty Beyond as though sucked into a vast vacuum. The very stars seemed to move. He became part of some much larger movement in which he was engulfed and merged. He could no longer think of himself as Jimbo. When he uttered his own name he saw merely a mass of wind and colour through which the great pulses of space and the planets beat tumultuously, lapping him round with the currents of a terrific motion that seemed to swallow up his own little personality entirely, while giving him something infinitely greater...\n\nBut surely these small voices, shrill and trumpet-like, did not come from the stars! these deep whispers that ran round the immense vault overhead and sounded almost familiarly in his ears\u2014\n\n\"Give it him the moment he wakes.\"\n\n\"Bring the ice-bag... quick!\"\n\n\"Put the hot bottle to his feet IMMEDIATELY!\"\n\nThe voices shrieked all round him, turning suddenly into soft whispers that died away somewhere among his feathers. The soles of his feet began to glow, and he felt a gigantic hand laid upon his throat and head. Almost it seemed as if he were lying somewhere on his back, and people were bending over him, shouting and whispering.\n\n\"Why hangs the moon so red?\" cried a voice that was instantly drowned in a chorus of unintelligible whispering.\n\n\"The black cow must be killed,\" whispered some one deep within the sky.\n\n\"Why drips the rain so cold?\" yelled one of the hideous children close behind him. And a third called with a distant laughter from behind a star\u2014\n\n\"Why sings the wind so shrill?\"\n\n\"Quiet!\" roared an appalling voice below, as if all the rivers of the world had suddenly turned loose into the sky. \"Quiet!\"\n\nInstantly a star, that had been hovering for some time on the edge of a fantastic dance, dropped down close in front of his face. It had a glaring disc, with mouth and eyes. An icy hand seemed laid on his head, and the star rushed back into its place in the sky, leaving a trail of red flame behind it. A little voice seemed to go with it, growing fainter and fainter in the distance\u2014\n\n\"We dance with phantoms and with shadows play.\"\n\nBut, regardless of everything, Jimbo flew onwards and upwards, terrified and helpless though he was. His thoughts turned without ceasing to the governess, and he felt sure that she would yet turn up in time to save him from being caught by the Fright that pursued, or lost among the fearful spaces that lay beyond the stars.\n\nFor a long time, however, his wings had been growing more and more tired, and the prospect of being destroyed from sheer exhaustion now presented itself to the boy vaguely as a possible alternative\u2014vaguely only, because he was no longer able to think, properly speaking, and things came to him more by way of dull feeling than anything else.\n\nIt was all the more with something of a positive shock, therefore, that he realised the change. For a change had come. He was now sudden by conscious of an influx of new power\u2014greater than anything he had ever known before in any of his flights. His wings now suddenly worked as if by magic. Never had the motion been so easy, and it became every minute easier and easier. He simply flashed along without apparent effort. An immense driving power had entered into him. He realised that he could fly for ever without getting tired. His pace increased tenfold\u2014increased alarmingly. The possibility of exhaustion vanished utterly. Jimbo knew now that something was wrong. This new driving power was something wholly outside himself. His wings were working far too easily. Then, suddenly, he understood: His wings were not working at all!\n\nHe was not being driven forward from behind; he was being drawn forward from in front.\n\nHe saw it all in a flash: Miss Lake's warning long ago about the danger of flying too high; the last song of the Frightened Children, \"Dare you fly out alone through the shadows that wave, when the course is unknown and there's no one to save?\" the strange words sung to him about the \"relentless misty moon,\" and the object of the dreadful Pursuer in steadily forcing him upwards and away from the earth. It all flashed across his poor little dazed mind. He understood at last.\n\nHe had soared too high and had entered the sphere of the moon's attraction.\n\n\"The moon is too strong, and there's death in the stars!\" a voice bellowed below him like the roar of a falling mountain, shaking the sky.\n\nThe child flew screaming on. There was nothing else he could do. But hardly had the roar died away when another voice was heard, a tender voice, a whispering, sympathetic voice, though from what part of the sky it came he could not tell\u2014\n\n\"Arrange the pillows for his little head.\"\n\nBut below him the wings of the Pursuer were mounting closer and closer. He could almost feel the mighty wind from their feathers, and hear the rush of the great body between them. It was impossible to slacken his speed even had he wished; no strength on earth could have resisted that terrible power drawing upwards towards the moon. Instinctively, however, he realised that he would rather have gone forwards than backwards. He never could have faced capture by that dreadful creature behind. All the efforts of the past weeks to escape from Fright, the owner of the Empty House, now acted upon him with a cumulative effect, and added to the suction of the moon-life. He shot forward at a pace that increased with every second.\n\nAt the back of his mind, too, lay some kind of faint perception that the governess would, after all, be there to help him. She had always turned up before when he was in danger, and she would not fail him now. But this was a mere ghost of a thought that brought little comfort, and merely added its quota of force to the speed that whipped him on, ever faster, into the huge white moon-world in front.\n\nFor this, then, he had escaped from the horror of the Empty House! To be sucked up into the moon, the \"relentless, misty moon\"\u2014to be drawn into its cruel, silver web, and destroyed. The Song to the Misty Moon outside the window came back in snatches and added to his terror; only it seemed now weeks ago since he had heard it. Something of its real meaning, too, filtered down into his heart, and he trembled anew to think that the moon could be a great, vast, moving Being, alive and with a purpose...\n\nBut why, oh, why did they keep shouting these horrid snatches of the song through the sky? Trapped! Trapped! The word haunted him through the night:\n\n\u2003Thy songs are nightly driven,\n\n\u2003From sky to sky,\n\n\u2003Eternally,\n\n\u2003O'er the old, grey hills of heaven!\n\n\u2003Caught! Caught at last! The moon's prisoner, a captive in her airless caves; alone on her dead white plains; searching for ever in vain for the governess; wandering alone and terrified.\n\n\u2003By the awful grace\n\n\u2003Of thy weird white face.\n\nThe thought crazed him, and he struggled like a bird caught in a net. But he might as well have struggled to push the worlds out of their courses. The power against him was the power of the universe in which he was nothing but a little, lost, whirling atom. It was all of no avail, and the moon did not even smile at his feeble efforts. He was too light to revolve round her, too impalpable to create his own orbit; he had not even the consistency of a comet; he had reached the point of stagnation, as it were\u2014the dead level\u2014the neutral zone where the attractions of the earth and moon meet and counterbalance one another\u2014where bodies have no weight and existence no meaning.\n\nNow the moon was close upon him; he could see nothing else. There lay the vast, shining sea of light in front of him. Behind, the roar of the following creature grew fainter and fainter, as he outdistanced it in the awful swiftness of the huge drop down upon the moon mountains.\n\nAlready he was close enough to its surface to hear nothing of its great singing but a deep, confused murmur. And, as the distance increased, he realised that the change in his own condition increased. He felt as if he were flying off into a million tiny particles\u2014breaking up under the effects of the deadly speed and the action of the new moon-forces. Immense, invisible arms, half-silver and half-shadow, grew out of the white disc and drew him downwards upon her surface. He was being merged into the life of the moon.\n\nThere was a pause. For a moment his wings stopped dead. Their vain fluttering was all but over...\n\nHark! Was that a voice borne on the wings of some lost wind? Why should his heart beat so tumultuously all at once?\n\nHe turned and stared into the ocean of black air overhead till it turned him dizzy. A violent trembling ran through his tired being from head to foot. He had heard a voice\u2014a voice that he knew and loved\u2014a voice of help and deliverance. It rang in shrill syllables up the empty spaces, and it reached new centres of force within him that touched his last store of courage and strength.\n\n\"Jimbo, hold on!\" it cried, like a faint, thin, pricking current of sound almost unable to reach him through the seas of distance. \"I'm coming; hold on a little longer!\"\n\nIt was the governess. She was true to the end. Jimbo felt his heart swell within him. She was mounting, mounting behind him with incredible swiftness. The sound of his own name in these terrible regions recalled to him some degree of concentration, and he strove hard to fight against the drawing power that was seeking his destruction.\n\nHe struggled frantically with his wings. But between him and the governess there was still the power of Fright to be overcome\u2014the very Power she had long ago invoked. It was following him still, preventing his turning back, and driving him ever forward to his death.\n\nAgain the voice sounded in the night; and this time it was closer. He could not quite distinguish the words. They buzzed oddly in his ears... other voices mingled with them... the hideous children began to shriek somewhere underneath him... wings with eyes among their burning feathers flashed past him.\n\nHis own wings folded close over his little body, drooping like dead things. His eyes closed, and he turned on his side. A huge face that was one-half the governess and the other half the head gardener at home, thrust itself close against his own, and blew upon his eyelids till he opened them. Already he was falling, sinking, tumbling headlong through a space that offered no resistance.\n\n\"Jimbo!\" shrieked a voice that instantly died away into a wail behind him.\n\nHe opened his eyes once more\u2014for it was that loved voice again\u2014but the glare from the moon so dazzled him that he could only fancy he saw the figure of the governess, not a hundred feet away, struggling and floundering in the clutch of a black creature that beat the air with enormous wings all round her. He saw her hair streaming out into the night, and one wing seemed to hang broken and useless at her side.\n\nHe was turning over and over, like a piece of wood in the waves of the sea, and the governess, caught by Fright, the monster of her own creation, drifted away from his consciousness as a dream melts away in the light of the morning... From the gleaming mountains and treeless plains below Jimbo thought there rose a hollow roar like the mocking laughter of an immense multitude of people, shaking with mirth. The Moon had got him at last, and her laughter ran through the heavens like a wave. Revolving upon his own little axis so swiftly that he neither saw nor heard anything more, he dropped straight down upon the great satellite.\n\nThe light of the moon flamed up into his eyes and dazzled him.\n\nBut what in the world was this?\n\nHow could the moon dwindle so suddenly to the size of a mere lamp flame?\n\nHow could the whole expanse of the heavens shrink in an instant to the limits of a little, cramped room?\n\nIn a single second, before he had time to realise that he felt surprise, the entire memory of his recent experiences vanished from his mind. The past became an utter blank. Like a wreath of smoke everything melted away as if it had never been at all. The functions of the brain resumed their normal course. The delirium of the past few hours was over.\n\nJimbo was lying at home on his bed in the night-nursery, and his mother was bending over him. At the foot of the bed stood the doctor in black. The nurse held a lamp, only half shaded by her hand, as she approached the bedside.\n\nThis lamp was the moon of his delirium\u2014only he had quite forgotten now that there had ever been any moon at all.\n\nThe little thermometer, thrust into his teeth among the stars, was still in his mouth. A hot-water bottle made his feet glow and burn. And from the walls of the sick-room came as it were the echoes of recently-uttered sentences: \"Take his temperature! Give him the medicine the moment he wakes! Put the hot bottle to his feet... Fetch the ice-bag... Quick!\"\n\n\"Where am I, mother?\" he asked in a whisper.\n\n\"You're in bed, darling, and must keep quite quiet. You'll soon be all right again. It was the old black cow that tossed you. The gardener found you by the swinging gate and carried you in... You've been unconscious!\"\n\n\"How long have I been uncon\u2014?\" Jimbo could not manage the whole word.\n\n\"About three hours, darling.\"\n\nThen he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when he woke long after it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something\u2014some dim memory\u2014that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of deep sleep.\n\nBut the old nurse, watching every movement, waiting upon the child's very breath, had caught the question, and she answered soothingly in a whisper\u2014\n\n\"Oh, Miss Lake died a few days after she left here,\" she said in a very low voice. \"But don't think about her any more, dearie! She'll never frighten children again with her silly stories.\"\n\n\"DIED!\"\n\nJimbo sat up in bed and stared into the shadows behind her, as though his eyes saw something she could not see. But his voice seemed almost to belong to some one else.\n\n\"She was really dead all the time, then,\" he said below his breath.\n\nThen the child fell back without another word, and dropped off into the sleep which was the first step to final recovery." + }, + { + "title": "The Education of Uncle Paul by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "\u2002...I stand as mute\n\n\u2002As one with full strong music in his heart Whose fingers stray upon a shattered lute.\n\n\u2014ALICE MEYNKLL.\n\nAll night the big liner had been plunging heavily, but towards morning she entered quieter water, and when the passengers woke, her rising and falling over the great swells was so easy that even the sea-sick women admitted the relief.\n\n'Land in sight, sir! We shall see Liverpool within twenty hours now, barring fog.'\n\nThe friendly bathroom steward passed the open door of Stateroom No. 28, and the big, brown-bearded man in the blue serge suit who was sitting, already dressed, on the edge of the port-hole berth, started as though he had been shot, and ran up on deck without waiting to finish tying the laces of his india-rubber shoes.\n\n'By Jove!' he said, as he thundered along the stuffy passages of the rolling vessel, and 'By Gad!'\n\nHe emerged on the upper deck in the sunlight, having nearly injured several persons in his impetuous journey, and, taking a great gulp of the salt air with keen satisfaction, he crossed to the side in a couple of strides, the shoe-laces clicking against the deck as he went.\n\n'Twenty years ago,' he muttered, 'when I was barely out of my teens. And now!'\n\nThe big man was distinctly excited, though 'moved' perhaps is the better word, seeing that the emotion was a little too searching, too tinged with sadness, to include elation. He plunged both hands into his coat pockets with a violence that threatened to tear the bottoms out, and leaned over the railing.\n\nFar away a faint blue line, tinged delicately with green, rose out of the sea. He saw it instantly, and his throat tightened unexpectedly, almost like a reflex action. For, about that simple little blue line on the distant horizon there was something strangely seizing, something absolutely arresting. The sight of it was a hundred times more poignant than he had imagined it would be; it touched a thousand springs of secret life in him, and a mist rose faintly before his eyes.\n\nPaul Rivers had not realised that his emotion would be so intense; but from that instant everything on the ship, otherwise familiar and rather boring, looked different. A new sense of locality came to him. The steamer became strange and new; he 'recognised' bits of it as though he had just-come aboard a ship known aforetime. It was no longer the steamer that was merely crossing the Atlantic; it was the boat that was bringing him home. And there, trimming the horizon in a thin ribbon of most arresting beauty, was the coast-line of the first Island.\n\n'But it seems so much more solid\u2014and so much more real than I expected!'\n\nThough it was barely seven o'clock a few early passengers were already astir, and he made his way back again to the lower deck and thence climbed up into the bows. He wished to be alone. Another man, apparently from the steerage, was there before him, leaning over the rail and peering fixedly under one hand at the horizon. The saloon passenger took up his position a few feet farther on and stared hard. He, too, stared with the eyes of memory, now grown a little dim. The air was fresh and sweet, fragrant of long sea distances; there was a soft warmth in it too, for it was late April and the spring made its presence known even on the great waters where there was nothing to hang its fairy banners on.\n\n'So that's land! That's the Old Country!'\n\nThe words dropped out of their own accord; he could not help himself. The sky seemed to come down a little closer, with a more familiar and friendly touch; the very air, he fancied, had a new taste in it,\u2014a whiff of his boyhood days\u2014a smell of childhood and the things of childhood\u2014ages ago, it seemed, in another life. The huge ship rose and fell on the regular, sweeping swells, and sea-birds from the land already came out to meet her. He easily imagined that the thrills in the depths of his own being somehow communicated themselves to the mighty vessel that tore the seas asunder in her great desire to reach the land.\n\n'Twenty years,' he repeated aloud, oblivious of his neighbour, 'twenty years since I last saw it!'\n\n'And it's gol-darned nearer fifty since I seen it,' exclaimed a harsh voice just behind him.\n\nHe turned with a start. The steerage passenger beside him, he saw, was an old man with a rough, grey face, and hair turning white; the hand that shaded his eyes was thick and worn; there was a heavy gold ring on the little finger, and the dirty cuff of a dark flannel shirt tumbled, loosely and unbuttoned, over the very solid wrist. The face, he noticed, at a second glance, was rugged, beaten, scored, the face of a man who had tumbled terribly about life, battered from pillar to post; and it was only the light in the hard blue eyes\u2014eyes still fixed unwaveringly on the distant line of the land\u2014that redeemed it from a kind of grim savagery. Beaten and battered, yes! Yet at the same time triumphant. The atmosphere of the man proclaimed in some vibrant fashion beyond analysis that he had failed in all he undertook\u2014failed from stupidity rather than character, and always doggedly beginning over again with the same lack of intelligence\u2014but yet had never given in, and never would give in.\n\nIt was not difficult to reconstruct his history from his appearance; or to realise his feelings as he saw the Old Country after fifty years\u2014a returned failure. Although the voice had vibrated with emotion, the face remained expressionless and unmoved; but down both cheeks large tears ran slowly, in sudden jerks, to drop with a splash upon the railing. And Paul Rivers, after his intuitive fashion, grasped the whole drama of the man with a sudden completeness that touched him with swift sympathy. At the same time he could not help thinking of rain-drops running down the face of a statue. He recognised with shame that he was conscious of a desire to laugh.\n\n'Fifty years! That's a long time indeed,' he said kindly. 'It's half-a-century.'\n\n'That's so, Boss,' returned the other in a dead voice that betrayed Ireland overlaid with acquired American twang and intonation; 'and I guess now I'll never be able to stick it over here. Jest see it\u2014and then git back again.'\n\nHe kept his eyes fixed on the horizon, and never once turned his head towards the man he was speaking to; only his lips moved; he did not even lift a finger to brush off the great tears that fell one by one from his cheeks to the deck. He seemed unconscious of them; as though it was so long since those hard eyes had melted that they had forgotten how to do it properly and the skin no longer registered the sensation of the trickling. The tears continued to fall at intervals; Paul Rivers actually heard them splash.\n\n'I went out steerage,' the man continued to himself, or to the sea, or to any one else who cared to listen, 'and I come back steerage. That's my trouble. And now'\u2014his eye shifted for a fraction of a second and watched a huge wave go thundering by\u2014' I'm grave-huntin', I guess. And that's about the size of it. Jest see it and\u2014git back again!'\n\nThe first-class passenger made some kind and appropriate reply\u2014words with genuine sympathy in them\u2014and then, getting no further answer, found it difficult to continue the conversation. The man, he realised, had only wanted a peg to hang his emotion on. It had to be a living peg, but any other living peg would do equally well, and before long he would find some one in the steerage who would listen with delight to the flood that was bound to come. And, presently, he took his departure to his own quarters where the sailors, with bare feet, were still swabbing the slippery decks.\n\nA couple of hours later, after breakfast, he leaned over the rail and again saw the man on the steerage deck, and heard him talking volubly. The tears were gone, but the smudges were still visible on the cheeks, where they had traced a zigzag pattern. He was telling the history of his fifty years' disappointments and failures to one and all who cared to listen.\n\nAnd, apparently, many cared to listen. The man's emotion was real; it found vigorous expression. The sight of the old, loved shore, not seen for half-a-century, but the subject of ten thousand yearnings, had been too much for him. He told in detail the substance of these ten thousand dreams\u2014ever one and the same dream, of course\u2014and in the telling of it he found the relief his soul sought. He got it all out; it did him a world of good, saving his inner being from a whole army of severe mental fevers and spiritual pains. The man revelled in a delirium of self-expression, and in so doing found sanity and health for his overburdened soul.\n\nAnd the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck.\n\nIt was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man's passion, and its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying need of his.whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence.\n\n'Lucky devil!' he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to his cabin for the field-glasses; 'he knows how to get it out\u2014and does get it out! while I\u2014with my impossible yearnings and my absurd diffidence in speaking of them to others\u2014I haven't got a single safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can't get it out of me\u2014all this ocean in my heart and soul\u2014not a drop, not even a blessed tear!'\n\nHe laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror.\n\n'Even my appearance is against me,' he went on with mournful humour; 'I look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God's world!'\n\nHe bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail.\n\n'What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run and sing? Yet I know\u2014though I can never tell it to another\u2014what so many do not know! Who could ever believe that that man'\u2014he pointed to himself in the glass, laughing\u2014' wants above all else in life, above wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is Reality\u2014which is God?'\n\nA flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.\n\n'I know, for instance,' he went on, the strange flush of enthusiasm rising into his eyes, 'that the pine-trees hold wind in their arms as cups hold rare wine, and that when it spills I hear the exquisite trickling of its music\u2014but I can't tell any one that! And I can't even put the wild magic of it into verse or music. Or even into conduct,' he concluded with a laugh, 'conduct that's sane, that is. For, if I could, I should find what I'm for ever seeking behind all life and behind all expressions of beauty\u2014I should find the Reality I seek!'\n\n'I've no safety-valves,' he added, swinging the glasses round by their strap to the imminent danger of various articles of furniture, 'that's the long and short of it. Like a giraffe that can't make any sound at all although it has the longest throat in all creation. Everything in me accumulates and accumulates. If only'\u2014and the strange light came back for a second to his brown eyes\u2014'I could write, or sing, or pray\u2014live as the saints did, or do something to\u2014to express adequately the sense of beauty and wonder and delight that lives, like the presence of a God, in my soul!'\n\nThe lamp in his eyes faded slowly and he sat back on the little cabin sofa, screwing and unscrewing his glasses till it was surprising that the thread didn't wear out. And as he screwed, a hundred fugitive pictures passed thronging through his mind; moments of yearning and of pain, of sudden happiness and of equally sudden despondency, vivid moods of all kinds provoked by the smallest imaginable fancies, as the way ever was with him. For the moods of the sky were his moods; the swift, coloured changes of sea and cloud were mirrored in his heart as with all too impressionable people, and he was for ever trying to seize the secret of their loveliness and to give it form\u2014in vain. Like many another mystical soul he saw the invisible foundations of the visible world\u2014longed to communicate it to others\u2014found he couldn't\u2014then suffered all the pain and fever of repression that seeks in vain for adequate utterance. Too shy to stammer his profound yearnings to ears that would not hear, and, never having known the blessed relief of a sympathetic audience, he perforce remained choked and dumb, the only mitigation he knew being that loss of self which follows prolonged contemplation. In his contemplation of Nature, for instance, he would gaze upon the landscape, the sky, a tree or flower, until their essential beauty passed into his own nature. For the moment he felt with these things. He was them. He took their qualities literally into himself, He lost his ordinary personality by changing its centre, merging it into those remoter phases of consciousness which extended from himself mysteriously to include the landscape, the sky, the tree, the flower. For him everywhere in Nature there was psychic energy. And it was difficult to say which was with him the master passion: to find Reality\u2014God\u2014through Nature, or to explain Nature through God.\n\nThen the busy faces of America, now left behind after twenty years, gradually receded, and others, dimly seen through mist, rose above the horizon of his thoughts. And among them he saw that two stood forth with more clearness than the rest. One of these was Dick Messenger, the friend of his boyhood, now dead but a few years; and the other, the face of his sister, Margaret, whom Dick had left a widow, and whose children he would now see for the first time at their country home in the South of England.\n\nThe 'Old Country!' He repeated the words softly to himself, weaving it like a coloured thread through all his reverie. He had lived away long long enough to understand the poignant magic that lies in the little phrase, and to appreciate the seizing and pathetic beauty lying along that faint blue line of sea and sky.\n\nAnd presently he took his field-glasses again and went up on deck and hid himself in the bows alone. Leaning over the bulwarks he took the scented wind of spring full in the face, and watched with a curious exhilaration the huge rollers, charging and bellowing like wild bulls of the sea as the ship drew nearer and nearer to the coast, plunging, leaping, and thundering as she moved." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "\u2002'Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud, there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a bull's-eye at his belt.' \u2014R. L. S.\n\nThe case of Paul Rivers after all was very simple, though perhaps in some respects uncommon. Circumstances\u2014to sum it up roughly\u2014had so conspired that the most impressionable portion of his character\u2014half of his mind and most of his soul, that is\u2014had never found utterance. He had never discovered the medium that could carry forth into the relief of expression all the inner turmoil and delight of a soul that was very much alive and singularly in touch with the simple and primitive forces of the world.\n\nIt was not, as with the returned emigrant, grief that he felt, but something far more troublesome: Joy. For the beauty of the world, of character as of nature, laid a spell upon him that set his heart in the glow and fever of an inner furnace, while the play of his imagination among the 'common' things of life which the rest of the world apparently thought dull set him often upon the borders of an ecstasy whereof he found himself unable to communicate one single letter to his fellow - beings. Thus, in later years, and out of due season, he was afflicted and perplexed by a luxuriant growth that by rights should have been harvested before he was twenty-five; and a great part of him had neglected to grow up at all.\n\nThis result was due to no fault\u2014no neglect, that is\u2014of his own, but to circumstances and temperament combined. It explains, however, why, after twenty years in the backwoods of America, he saw the coast of the Old Country with a deep emotion that was not all delight, but held something also of dismay.\n\nLeft an orphan, with his younger sister, at an: early age, the blundering of trustees had forced him out into the world before his first term at Cambridge was over, and after various vicissitudes he had found his way to America and had been drawn into the lumber trade. Here his knowledge and love of trees\u2014it was a veritable passion with him\u2014soon resulted in a transfer from the Minneapolis office to the woods, and after an interesting apprenticeship, he came to hold an important post in which he was strangely at home. He was appointed to the post of 'Wood Cruiser'\u2014forest-traveller, commis voyageur of the primeval woods. His duties, well paid too, were to survey, judge, mark, and report upon the qualities and values of the immense timber limits owned by his Company. And he loved the work. It was a life of solitude, but a life close to Nature; borne in his canoe down swift wilderness streams; meeting the wild animals in their secret haunts; becoming intimate with dawns and sunsets, great winds, the magic of storms and stars, and being initiated into the profound mysteries of the clean and haunted regions of the world.\n\nAnd the effect of this kind of life upon him\u2014especially at an age when most men are busy learning more common values in the strife of cities\u2014was of course significant. For here, in this solitary existence, the beauty of the world, virgin and glorious, struck the eyes of his soul and nearly blinded them.\n\nHis whole being threw itself inwards upon his thoughts, and outwards upon what fed his thoughts\u2014the wonder of Nature. Even as a boy he had been mystically minded, a poet if ever there was one, though a poet without a lyre; but at school he had chanced to come under the influence of masters who had sought to curb the exuberance of his imagination, so that he started into life with the rooted idea that it was something of a disgrace for a man to be too sensitive to beauty, and to possess a vivid and coloured imagination was almost a thing to be ashamed of.\n\nThis view of his only 'silver talent,' moreover, was never permitted by the nature of his life to alter. His early American experiences stiffened it into a conviction which he yet despised. The fires ran hidden, if unchecked. Had he dwelt in cities, they might have suffered total extinction perhaps, but! here, in the heart of the free woods, they speedily rose to the surface again and flamed. He grew up singularly unspoilt, the shyness of the original nature utterly unconnected, the stores of a poetic imagination accumulating steadily, but always unuttered.\n\nFor his sole companions all these years when he had any at all were the 'Bosses' of the lumber camps he inspected, the 'Cookee' who looked after his stew-pot in the 'home-shack,' and the half-breed Indian who accompanied him in the stern-seat of the bark canoe during the month-long trips about the wilderness: these\u2014with the animals, winds, stars, and the forms of beauty his imagination for ever conjured out of them.\n\nFor twenty years he lived thus, knowing all the secrets of the woods and streams. In the summer he never slept under cover at all, so that even in sleep he understood, through closed eyelids, the motions of the stars behind the tangled network of branches overhead. In winter his snow-shoes carried him into the heart of the most dazzling scenes imaginable\u2014the forest lying under many feet of snow with a cloudless sun lifting it all into an appearance of magic that took the breath away. Moreover, the fierce spring, when the streams became impassable floods, and the autumn, with a flaming glory of gold and scarlet unknown anywhere else in the world, he knew as intimately as the dryads themselves.\n\nAnd all these moods became the intimate companions of his life, taking the place of men and women. He came to personify Nature as a matter of course.\n\nWithout knowing it, too, the place of children was taken somehow by the wild animals. He knew them all. He surprised them in their haunts in the course of his silent journeys into the heart of their playgrounds; and his headquarters\u2014a one-story shanty on the height of land between his two chief 'limits'\u2014was never without a tamed baby bear, a young moose to draw him on his snow-shoes with the manners of a well-bred pony, and a dozen other animals reclaimed from savagery and turned by some mysterious system of his own into real companions and confidants.\n\nAnd the only books he read in the long winter nights, besides a few modern American novels that puzzled and vaguely distressed him, were Blake, his loved Greek plays, and the Bible.\n\nHe rarely saw a woman. Sides of his nature that ought to have developed under the influences of normal life at home lay dormant altogether, or were filled as best might be by his intercourse with Nature. He wrote few letters. After Dick Messenger died, the formal correspondence he kept up at long intervals with his sister\u2014Dick's widow\u2014hardly deserved the name of letters. Great slabs of him, so' to speak, stopped growing up, sinking down into the subconscious region to await conditions favourable for calling them to the surface again, and eventually coming to life\u2014this was his tragic little secret\u2014at a time when they were long overdue.\n\nTo the end of life he remained shy, shy in the sense that most of his thoughts and emotions he was afraid to reveal to others; with the shyness, too, of the utterly modest soul that cannot believe the world will give it the very things it has most right to claim, yet never dares to claim. And to the end Nature never lifted the spell laid upon him during those twenty years of initiation in her solitudes. To see the new moon tilting her silver horns in the west; to hear the wind rustling in high trees, like old Indians telling one another secrets of the early world; and to see the first stars looking down from the height of sky through spaces of watery blue\u2014these, and a hundred other things that the majority seemed to ignore, were to him a more moving and terrible delight than anything he could imagine. For him such things could never be explained away, but remained living and uncorrected to the end.\n\nThus when, at forty-five, he inherited the fortune of his aunt (which he had always known must one day come to him), he returned to England with the shy, bursting, dream-laden heart of a boy, young as only those are young whom life has kept clean and sweet in the wilderness; and the question that sprang to life in his heart when he saw the blue line of coast was a vague wonder as to what would become of his full-blooded dreams when tested by the conventional English life that he remembered as a boy. To whom could he speak of his child-like yearning after God; of his swift divinations, his passionate intuitions into the very things that the majority put away with childhood? What modern priest\u2014so he felt, at least\u2014what befuddled mystic, could possibly enter into the essential nature of these cravings as he did, or understand, without a sneer, the unspoilt passions of a man who had never 'grown up'?\n\n'I shall be out of touch with it all,' he thought as he stood there in the bows and watched the blue line grow nearer, 'utterly out of touch. What shall I find to say to the men of my own age\u2014I, who stopped growing up twenty years ago? How shall I ever link on with them? Children are the only things I can talk to, and children!'\u2014he shrugged his shoulders and laughed\u2014'children will find me out at once and give me away to the others.'\n\n'Dick's children, though, may be different!' came the sudden reflection. 'Only\u2014I've had nothing to do with children for such ages. Dick had real imagination. By George,'\u2014and his eyes glowed a moment\u2014' what if they took after him!\"\n\nAnd for the fiftieth time, as he pictured the meeting with his stranger sister, his heart sank, and he found refuge in the knowledge that he had not altogether burned his boats behind him. For he had been wise in his generation. He had arranged with his Company, who were only too glad of the chance of keeping his services, that he should go to England on a year's leave, and that if in the end he decided to return he should have a share in the business, while still continuing the work of forest-inspection that he loved.\n\n'I'm nothing but a wood-cruiser. I shall go back. In the big world I might lose all my vision!'\n\nAnd, having lived so long out of the world, he now came back to it with this simple, innocent, imaginative heart of a great boy, a boy still dreaming, for all his five-and-forty years. Fully realising that something was wrong with him, that he ought to be more sedate, more cynical, more prosaic and sober, he yet could not quite explain to himself wherein lay the source of his disability. His thoughts stumbled and blundered when he tried to lay his finger on it, with the only result that he felt he would be 'out of touch' with his new work not knowing exactly how or why.\n\n'It's a regular log-jam,' he said, using the phraseology he was accustomed to, 'and I'm sorry for the chap that breaks it.'\n\nIt never occurred to him that in this simple thrill that Nature still gave him he possessed one of the greatest secrets for the preservation of genuine youth; indeed, had he understood this, it would have meant that he was already old. For with the majority such dreams die young, brushed rudely from the soul by the iron hand of experience, whereas in his case it was their persistent survival that lent such a childlike quality to his shyness, and made him secretly ashamed of not feeling as grown-up as he realised he ought to feel.\n\nPaul Rivers, in a word, belonged to a comprehensible though perhaps not over common type, and one not often recognised owing to the elaborate care with which its 'specimens' conceal themselves from the world under all manner of brave disguises. He was destitute of that nameless quality that constitutes a human being, not mature necessarily, but grown up. Sources of inner enthusiasm that most men lose when life brings to them the fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, had kept alive; and though on the one hand he was secretly ashamed of the very simplicity of his great delights, on the other hand he longed intensely for some means by which he could express them and relieve his burdened soul.\n\nHe envied the emigrant who could let fall hot tears on the deck without further ado, while at the same time he dreaded the laughter of the world into which he was about to move when they learned the cause of the emotions that produced them. A boy at forty-five! A dreamer of children's dreams with fifty in sight\u2014and no practical results!\n\nThese were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "He welcomed it, because for years it had been the one remaining link with the life of his old home\u2014these formal epistles that reached him at long intervals; and he dreaded it, because he knew it would contain a definite invitation of an embarrassing description.\n\n'She's bound to ask me,' he reflected as he opened it in his cabin; 'she can't help herself. And I am bound to accept, for I can't help myself either.' He was far too honest to think of inventing elaborate excuses. 'I've got to go and spend a month with her right away whether I like it or not.'\n\nIt was not by any means that he disliked his sister, for indeed he hardly knew her; after all these years he barely remembered what she looked like, the slim girl of eighteen he had left behind. It was simply that in his mind she stood for the conventional life, so alien to his vision, to which he had returned.\n\nHe would try to like her, certainly. Very warm impulses stirred in his heart as he thought of her\u2014his only near relative in the world, and the widow of his old school and Cambridge friend, Dick Messenger. It was in her handwriting that he first learned of Dick's love for her, as it was in hers that the news of his friend's death reached him\u2014after his long tour\u2014two months old. The handwriting was a symbol of the deepest human emotions he had known. And for that reason, too, he dreaded it.\n\nHe never realised quite what kind of woman she had become; in his thoughts she had always remained simply the girl of eighteen\u2014grown up\u2014married. Her letters had been very kind and gentle, if in the nature of the case more and more formal. She became shadowy and vague in his mind as the years passed, and more and more he had come to think of her as wholly out of his own world. Reading between the lines it was not difficult to see that she attached importance to much in life that seemed to him unreal and trivial, whereas the things that he thought vital she never referred to at all. It might, of course, be merely restraint concealing great depths. He could not tell. The letters, after a few years, had become like formal government reports. He had written fully, however, to announce his home-coming, and her reply had been full of genuine pleasure.\n\n'I don't think she'll make very much of me,' was the thought in his mind whenever he dwelt upon it. 'I'm afraid my world must seem foreign\u2014unreal to her; the things I know rubbish.'\n\nSo, in the privacy of his cabin, his heart already strangely astir by the emotion of that blue line on the horizon, he read his sister's invitation and found it charming. There was spontaneous affection in it.\n\n'We shall fix things up between us so that no one would ever know.' He did not explain what it was 'no one would ever know,' but went on to finish the letter. He was to make his home with her in the country, he read, until he decided what to do with himself. The tone of the letter made his heart bound. It was a real welcome, and he responded to it instantly like a boy. Only one thing in it seriously disturbed his equanimity. Absurd as it may seem, the fact that his sister's welcome included also that of the children, had a subtly disquieting effect upon him.\n\n...for they are dying to see you and to find out for themselves what the big old uncle they have heard so much about is really like. All their animals are being cleaned and swept so as to be ready for your arrival, and, in anticipation of your stories of the backwoods, no other tales find favour with them any more.\n\nAn expression of perplexity puckered his face. 'I declare, I'm afraid of those children\u2014Dick's children!' he thought, holding the open letter to his mouth and squinting down the page, while his eyebrows rose and his forehead broke into lines. 'They'll find out what I am. They'll betray me. I shall never be able to hold out against them. 'He knew only too well how searching was the appeal that all growing and immature life made to him. It touched the very centre of him that had refused to grow up and that made him young with itself. 'I can no more resist them than I could resist the baby bears, or that little lynx that used to eat out' of my hand.' He shrugged his big shoulders, looking genuinely distressed. 'And then every one will know what I am\u2014an overgrown boy\u2014a dumb poet\u2014a dreamer of dreams that bear no fruit!'\n\nHe was not morbidly introspective. He was merely trying to face the little problem squarely. He got up and staggered across the cabin, steadying himself against the rolling of the ship in front of the looking-glass.\n\n'Big Old Uncle!'\n\nHe stuffed the letter into his pocket and surveyed himself critically. Big he certainly was, but that other adjective brought with it a sensation of weariness that had never yet troubled him in his wilderness existence. He was only a little, just a very little, on the shady side of forty-five, but to the children he might seem really old, aged and to his sister, who was considerably his junior, as elderly, \"and perhaps in need of the comforts of the elderly. He squared his shoulders and looked more closely into the glass. There, opposite to him, stood a tall, dignified man in a blue suit, with a spotless linen collar and a neat tie passing through a gold ring, instead of the unkempt fellow he was accustomed to in a flannel shirt, red handkerchief and big sombrero hat pulled over his eyes; a man weighing the best part of fifteen stones, lean, well-knit, vigorous, and nearly six feet three in his socks. A pair of brown eyes, kindly brown eyes he thought, met his own questioningly, and a brown beard\u2014yes, it was still brown\u2014covered the lower part of the face. He put up a hand to stroke it, and noticed that it was a strong, muscular hand, sunburnt but well kept, with neat finger-nails, and a heavy signet ring on one finger. It brushed across the rather deep lines on the bronzed forehead, without brushing them away, however, and then travelled higher to the rough parting in the dark-brown hair, and the hair, he noticed, was brushed in a particular way evidently, a way he thought no one would notice but himself and the lumber-camp barber who first taught him, so as to cover up a few places where the wind made little chilly feelings in winter-time under his fur cap.\n\nOld? No, not old yet\u2014but \"getting on\" was a gentler phrase he could not deny, and there were certainly odd traces where the crows had walked on his skin while he slept in the forest, and had hopped up even to the corners of his eyes to see if he were really asleep. There were other lines, too\u2014lines of exposure, traced by wind and sun, and one or two queer marks that are said only to come from prolonged hardship and severest want. For he had known both sides of the wilderness life, and on his long journeys Nature had not always been kind to him.\n\nHe stared for a long time at his reflection in the glass, lost in reverie. This coming back to England after so many years was like looking at a picture of himself as he was when he had left; it furnished him with a ready standard of comparison; the changes of the years stood out very sharply, as though they had come about in a single night.\n\nYes, his face and figure had aged a good deal. He admitted it. And when he frowned he had distinctly an appearance of middle age. This, of course, was the absurd part of it, for in spirit he had remained as young as he was at twenty, as enthusiastic, hopeful, spontaneous as ever, just as much in love with the world, and just as full of boyhood's dreams as when he went to Cambridge. And in his eyes still burned the strange flames that sought to pierce behind the veil of appearances.\n\n'And those children will find it out and make me look ridiculous before I've been there a week!' he exclaimed again, sitting down on his bunk with a crash as the steamer gave a sudden lurch; 'and then where shall I be, I'd like to know?'\n\nHe lay on his back for an hour thinking out a plan of action. For, of course, he decided that he must go; only\u2014he must go disguised. And he spent hours inventing the disguise, and more hours perfecting it. For the first time in his life he would adopt a distinct attitude, and, having carefully thought out the attitude he intended to adopt by way of disguise, he buckled it on like armour and fastened it very securely indeed to his large person.\n\nHe would be kind; he would even meet the children half-way, kiss them if necessary at stated times, in a stated way, and perhaps occasionally unbend a little as opportunity served and circumstances permitted. But never must he forget, or allow them to forget, that he was a stiff and elderly man, a little grim and gruff, sometimes even severe and short-tempered, and never to be trifled with at any time, or under any conditions.\n\nOver the tenderer emotions he must keep especial watch; these were a direct channel to his secrets, and once the old unsatisfied enthusiasms escaped, there was no saying what might happen. The thought frightened him, for the pain involved might be very great indeed.\n\nWith people of his own age, he realised, the danger would be less. Silence and reserve cover a multitude of shortcomings. But children, he knew, had a simple audacity, a merciless penetration, that no mere pose could ever withstand. And this he felt intuitively, knowing nothing of children, but being taught by these very qualities in himself. Like little animals they would soon find the direct channel to his heart unless well guarded, and come tumbling along it without delay. And then!\n\nSo Paul Rivers left London the very next day, glad in many ways to think that he had this haven of refuge to go to from the noisy horror of the huge strange city; yet with a sinking of his heart lest his true self should be discovered, and held up to scorn.\n\nMoreover, the strange part of it was that as he sped down through the smiling green country that spring afternoon, armed from head to foot in the rigid steel casings of his disguise, he seemed to hear a faint singing deep within him, a singing that belonged to the youngest part of him and yet sprang from that which was vastly ancient, but as to the cause of which he was so puzzled that, in his efforts to analyse it, he forgot about his journey altogether, and was nearly carried past the station where he had to get out." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "\u2002'No man worth his spiritual salt can ever become really entangled in locality.' \u2014A. H. L.\n\nThe house, like the description of himself in the letter, was big and old. It consisted of three rambling wings, each added at a different period to an original farmhouse, and was thus full of unexpected staircases, sudden rising passages, and rooms of queer shapes. It resembled, indeed, the structure of a mind that has grown by chance and not by system, and was just as difficult for a stranger to find his way in.\n\nIt stood among pine-woods, at the foot of hills that ran on another five miles to drop their chalk cliffs abruptly into the sea. Where the lawns stopped on one side and the kitchen-garden on the other began an expanse of undulating heather-land, dotted with pools of brown water and yellow with patches of gorse and broom. Here rabbits increased and multiplied; sea-gulls screamed and flew, using some of the more secluded ponds for their annual breeding places; foxes lived happily, unhunted and very bold; and the dainty hoof-marks of deer were sometimes found in the sandy margins of the freshwater springs.\n\nIt was beautiful country, a bit of wild England, out of the world as very few parts of it now are, and haunted by a loveliness that laid its spell on the heart of the returned exile the moment he topped the hill in the dog-cart and saw it spread out before him like a softly coloured map. The scenery from the train window had somehow disheartened him a little, producing a curious sense of confinement, almost of imprisonment, in his mind: the neat meadows holding wooden cattle; the careful boundaries of ditch and hedge; the five-barred gates, strong to enclose, the countless notices to warn trespassers, and the universal network of barbed wire. Accustomed as he was to the vast, unhedged landscapes of a primitive country, it all looked to him, with its precise divisions, like a toy garden, combed, washed, swept\u2014exquisitely cared for, but a little too sweet and perfumed to be quite wholesome. Only tame things, he felt, could enjoy so gentle a playground, and the call of his own forests\u2014for this really was what worked in him\u2014sang out to him with a sterner cry.\n\nBut this view from the ridge pleased him more: there were but few hedges visible; the eye was led to an open horizon and the sea; an impression of space and freedom rose from the hills and moorlands. Here his thoughts, accustomed to deal with leagues rather than acres, could at least find room to turn about in. And although the perfume that rose to his nostrils was like the perfume of flowers preserved by some artificial process rather than the great clean smells of a virgin world such as he was used to, it was nevertheless the smell of his boyhood, and it moved him powerfully. Odour is the one thing that is impossible to recall in exile. Sights and sounds the imagination can always reconstruct after a fashion, but odour is too elusive. It rose now to his nostrils as something long forgotten, and swept him with a wave of memory that was extraordinarily keen.\n\n'That's a smell to take me back twenty-five years,' he thought, inhaling the scent of the heather. He caught his breath sharply, uncertain whether it was pain or pleasure that predominated. A profound yearning, too fugitive to be seized, too vague to be definitely labelled, stirred in the depths of him as his eye roamed over the miles of sunlight and blue shadow at his feet; again something sang within him as he gazed over the long ridges of heathland sprinkled with silvery pools, and bearing soft purple masses of pine-woods on their sides as they melted away through haze to the summer sea beyond.\n\nOnly when his gaze fell upon the smoke rising from the grey stone roof of the house nestling far below did the joy of his emotion chill a little. A vague sense of alarm and nervousness touched him as he wondered what that grey old building might hold in store for him.\n\n'It's silly, I know,' his thought ran, 'but I feel like a lost sheep here. It's Nature that calls me, not people. I don't know how I shall get on in this chess-board sort of a country. They'll never care for the things that I care for.'\n\nFor a moment a sort of panic came over him. He could almost have turned and run. Vaguely he felt that he was an unfinished, uncouth article in a shop of dainty china. He sent the dog-cart on ahead, and walked down the hill-side towards the house, thinking, thinking\u2014wondering almost why he had ever consented to come, and already conscious of a sense of imprisonment. He was still impressionable as a boy, with sharp, fleeting moods like a boy's.\n\nThen, quite suddenly it seemed, he had walked up the drive and passed through the house, and a figure moved across a lawn to meet him. The first sight of his sister he had known for twenty years was a tall woman in white serge, with a prim, still girlish figure and a quiet, smiling face, moving graciously through patches of sunshine between flower-beds of formal outline. There was no spontaneous rush of welcome, no gush, or flood of questions. He felt relieved. With a flash, too, he realised that her dominant note was still grief for her lost husband. It was written all over her.\n\nInstantly, however, shyness descended upon him like a cloud. The scene he had rehearsed so often in imagination vanished before the reality. He slipped down inside himself, as his habit sometimes was, and watched the performance curiously, as though he were a spectator of it instead of an actor.\n\nHe saw himself, hot and rather red in the face, walking awkwardly across the lawn with both hands out, offering his bearded face clumsily to be kissed. And it was kissed, first on one cheek, then on the other, calmly, soberly, delicately. He felt the tingling of it for a long time afterwards. That kiss confused him ridiculously.\n\nAt first he could think of nothing to say except the form of address he always used to the Bosses of the lumber camps\u2014'How's everything up your way?'\u2014which he felt was not quite the most suitable phrase for the occasion. Then his sister spoke, and quickly set him more at his ease.\n\n'But you don't look one little bit like an American, Paul!'\n\nHe gazed at her in admiration, just as he might have gazed at a complete stranger. The soft intonation of her voice was a keen delight to him. And her matter-of-fact speech put his shyness to flight.\n\n'Of course not,' he replied, leaving out her name after a second's hesitation, 'but my voice, I guess\"\n\n'Not a bit either,' she repeated, surveying him very critically. 'You look like a sailor home from the sea more than anything else.' She wore a wide garden hat of Panama straw, charmingly trimmed with flowers. Her face beneath it, Paul thought, was the most refined and exquisitely delicate he had ever seen. It was like chiselled porcelain. He thought of Hank Davis's woman at Deep Bay Camp\u2014whose face he used to think wonderful rather\u2014and it suddenly seemed by comparison to have been chopped with a blunt axe out of wood.\n\nThey moved to the long chairs upon the lawn, and her brother realised for the first time that his boots were enormous, and that his Minneapolis clothes did not sit upon him quite as they might have done He trod on a corner of a geranium bed as they went crushing an entire plant with one foot. But his sister appeared not to notice it.\n\n'It's an awful long time, M\u2014Margaret,' he stammered as they went.\n\nThey both sat down and turned to stare at each other. It was, of course, idle to pretend that after so long an absence they could feel any very profound affection. Dick, he realised quickly with a flash of intuition, was the truer link. And, on the whole it was all much easier than he had expected. His mind began to work very quickly in several directions at once. The beauty of the English garden in its quiet way touched him keenly, stirring in him little whirls of inner delight, fugitive but wonderful. Only a portion of him, after all, went out to his sister 'I believe you expected a Red Indian, or a bear,' he said at length.\n\nShe laughed gently, returning his stare of genuine admiration. 'One couldn't help wondering a little, Paul dear,\u2014after so many years\u2014could one? 'She always said 'one' instead of the obvious personal pronoun. 'You had no beard, for instance, when you left?'\n\n'And more hair, perhaps!'\n\n'You look splendid. I shall be proud of you!'\n\nPaul blushed furiously. It was the first compliment ever paid to him by a woman.\n\n'Oh, I feel all right,' he stammered. 'The healthy life in the woods, open air, and constant moving keep a fellow \"fixed-up\" to concert pitch all the time. I've never once\u2014consulted a doctor in my life.' He was careful to keep the slang out. He felt he managed it admirably. He said 'consulted.'\n\n'And you wrote such nice letters, Paul. It was dear of you.'\n\n'I was lonely,' he said bluntly. And after a pause he added, 'I got all yours.'\n\n'I'm so glad.' And then another pause. In which fashion they talked on for half an hour, each secretly estimating the other\u2014wondering a little why they did not feel all kind of poignant emotions they had rather expected to feel. It was a perfectly natural scene between a brother and sister who had grown up entirely apart, who were quite honest, who were utterly different types, and who yet wished to hold to one another as the nearest blood ties they possessed. They skimmed pleasantly and, so far as he was concerned, more and more easily, over the surface of things. Her talk, like her letters, was sincere, simple, shallow; it concealed no hidden depths, he felt at once. And by degrees, even in this first conversation, crept a shadow of other things, so that he realised they were in reality leagues apart, and could never have anything much in common below the pleasant surface relations of life.\n\nYet, even while he sheered off, as oil declines from its very nature to mingle with water, he felt genuinely drawn to her in another way. She was his own sister; she was his nearest tie; and she was Dick's widow. They would get along together all right; they would be good friends.\n\n'Twenty years, Margaret.'\n\n'Twenty years, Paul.'\n\nAnd then another pause of several minutes during which something that was too vague to be a real thought passed like a shadow through his mind. What could his friend Dick have seen in her that was necessary to his life and happiness\u2014Dick Messenger, who was scholar, poet, thinker-who sought the everlasting things\u2014God? He instantly suppressed it as unworthy, something of which he was ashamed, but not before it had left a definite little trace in his imagination.\n\n'So at last, Paul, you've really come home,' she resumed; 'I can hardly believe it,\u2014and are going to settle down. You are a rich man.'\n\n'Aunt Alice did her duty,' he laughed. He ignored the reference to settling down. It vaguely displeased him. 'It's for you as well as me,' he added, meaning the money. 'I want to share with you whatever you need.'\n\n'Not a penny,' she said quickly; 'I have all I need. I live with my memories, you know. I am only so glad for your sake,\u2014after all your hard life out there.'\n\n'The life wasn't hard; it was rather wonderful,' he said simply. 'I liked it.'\n\n'For a time perhaps; but you must have had curious experiences and lived with very rough people in those\u2014lumber camp places you wrote about.'\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders. 'Simple kind of men, but very decent, very genuine. Few signs of city polish, I admit, but then you know I never cared for frills, Margaret.'\n\n'Frills!' she exclaimed, without any expression on her face. 'Of course not. Still, I am very glad you have left it all. The life must often have been unsuitable and lonely; one always felt that for you. You can't have had any of the society that one's accustomed to.'\n\n'Not of that kind,' he put in hurriedly with a short laugh, 'but of other kinds. I struck a pretty good crowd of men on the whole.'\n\nShe turned her face slightly away from him; her eyes, he divined, had been fixed for a moment on his hands. For the first time in his life he realised that they were large and rough and brown. Her own were so pale and dainty\u2014like china hands, glossy and smooth\u2014and the gold bangle on her thin wrist looked as though every second it must slip over her fingers. His own hands disappeared swiftly into the pockets of his coat.\n\nShe turned to him with a gentle smile. 'Anyhow,' she said, 'it is simply too delightful to know that you really are here at last. It must seem strange to you at first, and there are so many things to talk over\u2014such a lot to tell. I want to hear all your plans. You'll get used to us after a bit, and there are lots of nice people in the neighbourhood who are dying to meet you.'\n\nHer brother felt inclined to explain that he had no wish to interfere with their 'dying '; but, instead, he returned her smile. 'I'm a poor hand at meeting people, I'm afraid,' he said. 'I'm not as sociable as I might be.'\n\n'But you'll get over that. Of course, living so long in the backwoods makes one unsociable. But we'll try and make you happy and comfortable. You have no idea how very, very glad I am that you've come home.'\n\nPaul believed her. He leaned over and patted her hand, and she smiled frankly and sweetly in his face. She was a very shadowy sort of personality, he felt. If he blew hard she might blow away altogether, or disappear like a soap-bubble.\n\n'I'm glad too, of course,' he replied. 'Only at my age, you know, it's not easy to tackle new habits.'\n\n'No one could take you for a day more than thirty-five,' she said with truth; 'so that shall be our own little private secret. You look quite absurdly young.'\n\nThey laughed together easily and naturally. Paul felt more at home and soothed than he had thought possible. It had not been in the least formidable after all, and for the first time in his life he knew a little of that enervating kind of happiness that comes from being made a fuss of. As there was still a considerable interval before tea, they left their chairs and strolled through the garden, and as they went, the talk turned upon the past, and his sister spoke of Dick and of all he had meant to do in the world, had he lived. Paul heard the details of his sudden death for the first time. Her voice and manner were evidence of the melancholy she still felt, but her brother's heart was deeply stirred; he asked for all the particulars he had so often wondered about, and in her quiet, soothing tone, tinged now with tender sadness, she supplied the information. Clearly she had never arisen from the blow. She had worshipped Dick without understanding him.\n\n'Death always frightens me, I think,' she said with a faint smile. 'I try not to think about it.'\n\nShe passed on to speak of the children, and told him how difficult she found it to cope with them\u2014she suffered from frequent headaches and could not endure noise\u2014and how she hoped when they were a little older to be more with them. Mademoiselle Fleury, meanwhile, was such an excellent woman and was teaching them all they should know.\n\n'Though, of course, I keep a close eye on them so far as I am able,' she explained, 'and only wish I were stronger.'\n\nThey sauntered through the rose-garden and down the neat gravel paths that led to the wilder parts of the grounds where the rhododendron bushes stood in rounded domes and masses. It was very peaceful, very beautiful. He trod softly and carefully. The hush of centuries of cultivation lay over it all. Even the butterflies flew gently, as to the measure of a leisurely dance that deprecated undue animation. Paul caught his thoughts wandering to the open spaces of untamed moorland he had seen from the hill-top. More and more, as his sister's personality revealed itself, he got the impression that she lived enclosed like the wooden cows he had seen from the train, in a little green field, with precise and neatly trimmed borders. Strong emotions, as all other symptoms of plain and vigorous life, she shrank from. There were notice-boards set about her to warn trespassers, stating clearly that she did not wish to be let out. Yet in her way she was true, loving, and sweet\u2014only it was such a conventional way, he felt.\n\nLeaving the world of rhododendron bushes behind them, they came to the beginning of a pine-wood leading to the heather-land beyond. There was a touch of primitive wildness here. The trees grew straight and tall, filling the glade, and a stream ran brawling among their roots.\n\n'This is the Gwyle,' she said, as they entered the shade, 'it was Dick's favourite part of the whole grounds. I rarely come here; it's dark even in summer, and rather damp and draughty, I always think.'\n\nPaul looked about him and drew a long breath. The air was strong with open-air scents of earth and bark and branches. Far overhead the tufted pines swayed, murmuring to the sky; the ground ran away downhill, becoming broken up and uneven; nothing but dark, slender stems rose everywhere about him, like giant seaweeds, he thought, rising from the pools of a deep sea. And the soft wind, moving mysteriously between the shadows and the sunlight, completed the spell. He passed suddenly\u2014willy-nilly, as his nature would have it\u2014into that mood when the simplest things about him turned their faces upwards so that he caught their eyes and their meaning; when the well-known and common things of the world shone out and revealed the infinite. Something in this quiet pine-wood that was mighty, and utterly wonderful, entered his soul, linking him on at a single stroke with the majesty of the great spirit of the earth. What lay behind it? What was its informing spirit? How and where could it link on so intimately with his soul? And could it not be a channel, as he always felt it must be, to the God behind it? Beauty seized him by the throat and made him tremble.\n\nThis sudden rush came over him, sea-like. His moods were ever like the sea, some strange touch of colour shifting the entire key. Something, too, made him feel lonely and oppressed. He, who was accustomed to space in bulk\u2014the space the stars and winds live in\u2014had come to this little, parcelled-out place. He felt clipped already. He turned to the shadowy personality beside him, the boyish impulse bursting its way out. After all, she was his own sister; he could reveal himself to no one if not to her.\n\n'By Gosh, Margaret,' he cried, 'this is the real thing. This wood must be alive and haunted just as the James Bay forests are. It's simply full of wonder.' 'It's the Gwyle wood,' she said quietly. 'It's usually rather damp. But Dick loved it.'\n\nHer brother hardly heard what she said. 'Listen,' he said in a hushed tone; 'do you hear the wind up there aloft? The trees are talking. The wood is full of whispers. There's no sound in the world like that murmur of a soft breeze in pine branches. It's like the old gods sighing, which only their true worshippers hear! Isn't it fine and melancholy? Margaret, d'you know, it goes through me like a fever.'\n\nHis sister stopped and stared at him. She wore a little frightened expression. His sudden enthusiasm puzzled her evidently.\n\n'It's the Gwyle wood,' she repeated mechanically. 'It's very pretty, I think. Dick always thought so too.'\n\nHer brother, surprised at his own rush of ready words, and already ashamed of the impulse that had prompted him to reveal himself, fell into silence.\n\n'Nature excites me sometimesI he said presently. 'I suppose it's because I've known nothing else.'\n\n'That's quite natural, I'm sure, Paul dear,' she rejoined, turning to lead the way back to the sunshine of the open garden; 'it's very pretty; I love it too. But it rather alarms me, I think, sometimes.' 'Perhaps the natural tendency in solitude is to personify nature, and make it take the place of men and women. It has become a profound need of my being certainly.' He spoke more quietly, chilled by her utter absence of comprehension.\n\n'In its place I think it is ever so nice. But, Paul, you surprise me. I had no idea you were clever like that.' She was perfectly sincere in what she said.\n\nHer brother blushed like a boy. 'It's my foolishness, I suppose, Margaret,' he said with a shy laugh. 'I am certainly not clever.'\n\n'Anyhow, you can be foolish or clever here to your heart's content. You must use the place as though it were your own exactly.'\n\n'Thank you, Margaret.'\n\n'Only I don't think I quite understand all those things,' she added vaguely after a pause. 'Nixie talks rather like that. She has all poor Dick's ideas and strange fancies. I really can't keep up with her at all.'\n\nPaul stiffened at the reference to the children; he remembered his attitude. Already he had been guilty of a serious lapse from his good intentions.\n\n'She comes down to this wood far too much, and I'm sure it's not quite healthy for her. I always forget to speak to Mile. Fleury.' Then she turned to him and smiled. 'But they are all so excited about your coming. They will simply devour you.'\n\n'I'm a poor hand at children, I'm afraid,' he said, falling back upon his usual formula, 'but, of course, I shall be delighted to see them.'\n\nShe gathered up her white skirts about her trim ankles and led the way out of the wood, her brother following and thinking how slim and graceful she was, and what a charming figure she made among the rose-trees. He got the impression of her as something unreal and shadowy, a creature but half alive. It would hardly have surprised him to see her suddenly flit off into mist and sunshine and disappear from view, leaving him with the certainty that he had been talking with a phantasm of a dream. Between himself and her, however, he realised now, there was a gulf fixed. They looked at one another as it were down the large end of a telescope, and talked down a long-distance telephone that changed all their words and made the sense unintelligible and meaningless. The scale of values between them had no common denominator. Yet he could love her, and he meant to.\n\nThey crossed the lawns and went through the French window into the cool of the drawing-room, and while he was sipping his first cup of afternoon English tea, struggling with a dozen complex emotions that stirred within him, there suddenly darted across the lawn a vision of flying children, with a string of animals at their heels. They swept out of some laurel shrubberies into the slanting evening sunlight, and came to a dead stop on the gravel path in front of the window.\n\nTheir eyes met. They had seen him.\n\nThere they stood, figures of suddenly arrested motion, staring at him through the glass. 'So that's Uncle Paul!' was the thought in the mind of each. He was being inspected, weighed, labelled. The meeting with his sister was nothing compared to this critical examination, conducted though it was from a distance.\n\nBut it lasted only a moment. With a sudden quietness the children passed away from the window towards another door round the corner, and so out of sight.\n\n'They've gone up to get tidy before coming to see you,' explained his sister; and Paul used the short respite to the best possible advantage by collecting his thoughts, remembering his 'attitude and disguise,' and seeing to it that his armour was properly fastened on, leaving no loopholes for sudden attack. He retired cautiously to the only place in a room where a shy man feels really safe\u2014the mat before the fireplace. He almost wished for his gun and hunting-knife. The idea made him laugh.\n\n'They already love you,' he heard his sister's gentle whispering voice, 'and I know you'll love them too. You must never let them annoy you, of course.'\n\n'They're your children\u2014and Dick's,' he answered quietly. 'I shall get on with them famously, I'm sure.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "\u2002I kiss you and the world begins to fade.\n\n\u2002Land of Hearts Desire.\u2014YEATS.\n\nA few minutes later the door opened softly, and a procession, solemn of face and silent of foot, marched slowly into the room. The moment had come at last for his introduction, and, by a single stroke of unintentional diplomacy, his sister did more to winning her brother's shy heart than by anything else she could possibly have devised. She went out.\n\n'They will prefer to make your acquaintance by themselves,' she said in her gentle way, 'and without any assistance from me.'\n\nThe procession advanced to the middle of the room and then stopped short. Evidently, for them, the departure of their mother somewhat complicated matters. They had depended upon her to explain them to their uncle. There they stood, overcome by shyness, moving from one foot to another, with flushed and rosy faces, hair brushed, skin shining, and eyes all prepared to laugh as soon as somebody gave the signal, but not the least knowing how to begin.\n\nAnd their uncle faced them in similar plight, as, for the second time that afternoon, shyness descended upon him like a cloud, and he could think of nothing to say. His size overwhelmed him; he felt like an elephant. With a sudden rush all his self-possession deserted him. He almost wished that his sister might return so that they should be brought up to him seriatim, named just as Adam named the beasts, and dismissed\u2014which Adam did not do\u2014with a kiss. It was really, of course\u2014and he knew it to his secret mortification\u2014a meeting on both sides of children; they all felt the shyness and self-consciousness of children, he as much as they, and at any moment might take the sudden plunge into careless intimacy, as the way with children ever is.\n\nMeanwhile, however, he took rapid and careful note of them as they stood in that silent, fidgety group before him, with solemn, wide-open eyes fixed upon his face.\n\nThe youngest, being in his view little more than a baby, needs no description beyond the fact that it stared quite unintelligently without winking an eye. Its eyes, in fact, looked as though they were not made to close at all. And this is its one and only appearance.\n\nStanding next to the baby, holding its hand, was a boy in a striped suit of knickerbockers, with a big brown curl like a breaking wave on the top of his forehead; he was between eight and nine years old, and his names\u2014for, of course, he had two\u2014were Richard Jonathan, shortened, as Paul learned later, into Jonah. He balanced himself with the utmost care in the centre of a particular square of carpet as though half an inch to either side would send him tumbling into a bottomless abyss. The fingers not claimed by the baby travelled slowly to and fro along the sticky line of his lower lip.\n\nClose behind him, treating similarly another square of carpet, stood a rotund little girl, slightly younger than himself, named Arabella Lucy. There was a touch of audacity in her eyes, and an expression about the mouth that indicated the imminent approach of laughter. She had been distinctly washed and brushed-up for the occasion. Her face shone like a polished onion skin. She had the same sort of brown hair that Jonah considered fashionable, and her name for all common daily purposes was Toby.\n\nThe eldest and most formidable of his tormentors, standing a little in advance of the rest, was Margaret Christina, shortened by her father (who, indeed, had been responsible for all the nicknames) into Nixie. And the name fitted her like a skin, for she was the true figure of a sprite, and looked as if she had just stepped out of the water and her hair had stolen the yellow of the sand. Her eyes ran about the room like sunshine from the surface of a stream, and her movements instantly made Paul think of water gliding over pebbles or ribbed sand with easy and gentle undulations. Flashlike he saw her in a clearing of his lonely woods, a creature of the elements. Her big blue eyes, too, were full of wonder and pensive intelligence, and she stood there in a motherly and protective manner as though she were quite equal to the occasion and would presently know how to act with both courage and wisdom.\n\nAnd Nixie, indeed, it was, after this prolonged and critical pause, who commenced operations. There was a sudden movement in the group, and the next minute Paul was aware that she had left it and was walking slowly towards him. He noticed her graceful, flowing way of moving, and saw a sunburnt arm and hand extended in his direction. The next second she kissed him. And that kiss acted like an electric shock. Something in her that was magical met its kind in his own soul and, flamelike, leaped towards it. A little tide of hot life poured into him, troubling the deeps with a momentary sense of delicious bewilderment.\n\n'How do you do, Uncle Paul,' she said; 'we are very glad you have come\u2014at last.'\n\nThe blood ran ridiculously to his head. He found his tongue, and pulled himself sharply together.\n\n'So am I, dear. Of course, it's a long way to come\u2014America.' He stooped and bestowed the necessary kisses upon the others, who had followed their leader and now stood close beside him, staring like little owls in a row.\n\n'I know,' she replied gravely. 'It takes weeks, doesn't it? And mother has told us such a lot about you. We've been waiting a very long time, I think,' she added as though stating a grievance.\n\n'I suppose it is rather a long time to wait,' he said sheepishly. He stroked his beard and waited.\n\n'All of us,' she went on. She included the others in this last observation by bending her head at them, and into her uncle's memory leaped the vision of a slender silver birch-tree that grew on the edge of the Big Beaver Pond near the Canadian border. She moved just as that silver birch moved when the breeze caught it.\n\nHer manner was very demure, but she looked so piercingly into the very middle of his eyes that Paul felt as though she had already discovered everything about him. They all stood quite close to him now, touching his knees; ready, there and then, to take him wholly into their confidence.\n\nAn impulse that he only just managed to control stirred in him and a curious pang accompanied it. He remembered his 'attitude,' however, and stiffened slightly.\n\n'No, it only takes ten days roughly from where I've come,' he said, leaving the mat and dropping into a deep arm-chair a little farther off. 'The big steamers go very fast, you know, nowadays.'\n\nTheir eyes remained simply glued to his face. They switched round a. few points to follow his movement, but did not leave their squares of carpet.\n\n'Madmerzelle said'\u2014it was Toby, n\u00e9e Arabella Lucy, speaking for the first time\u2014' you knew lots of stories about deers and wolves and things, and would look like a Polar bear for us sometimes.'\n\n'Oh yes, and beavers and Indians in snowstorms, and the roarer boryalis,' chimed in Jonah, giving a little hop of excitement that brought him still closer. 'And the songs they sing in canoes when there are rapids,' he added with intense excitement. 'Madmizelle sings them sometimes, but they're not a bit the real thing, because she hasn't enough bass in her voice.'\n\nPaul bit his lip and looked at the carpet. Something in the atmosphere of the room seemed to have changed in the last few minutes. Jolly thrills ran through him such as he knew in the woods with his animals sometimes.\n\n'I'm afraid I can't sing much,' he said, 'but I can tell you a bear story sometimes\u2014if you're good.' He added the condition as an afterthought.\n\n'We are good,' Jonah said disappointedly,' almost always.'\n\nAgain that curious pang shot through him. He did not wish to be unkind to them. He pulled back his coat-sleeve suddenly and showed them a scar on his arm.\n\n'That was made by a bear,' he said, 'years ago.'\n\n'Oh, look at the fur!' cried Toby.\n\n'Don't be silly! All proper men have hair on their arms,' put in Jonah. 'Does it still hurt, Uncle Paul?' he asked, examining the place with intense interest.\n\n'Not now. We rolled down a hill together head over heels. Such a big brute, too, he was, and growled like a thunderstorm; it's a wonder he didn't squash me. I've got his claws upstairs. I think, really, he was more frightened than I was.'\n\nThey clapped their hands. 'Tell us, oh, do tell us!'\n\nBut Nixie intervened in her stately fashion, leaning over a little and stroking the scar with fingers that were like the touch of leaves.\n\n'Uncle Paul's tired after coming such a long way,' she said gravely with sympathy. 'He hasn't even unpacked his luggage yet, have you, Uncle?'\n\nPaul admitted that this was the case. He made the least possible motion to push them off and clear a space round his chair.\n\n'Are you tired? Oh, I'm so sorry,' said Jonah.\n\n'Then he ought to see the animals at once,' decided Toby, 'before they go to bed,'\u2014she seemed to have a vague idea that the whole world must go to bed earlier than usual if Uncle Paul was tired\u2014 'or they'll be awfully disappointed.' Her face expressed the disappointment of the animals as well as her own; her uncle's fatigue had already taken a second place. 'Oughtn't he?' she added, turning to the others.\n\nPaul remembered his intention to remain stiffly grown up.\n\nHe made a great effort. Oh, but why did they tug and tear at his heart so, these little fatherless children? And why did he feel at once that he was in their own world, comfortably 'at home' in it? Did this world of children, then, link on so easily and naturally with the poet's region of imagination and wonder in which he himself still dwelt for all his many years, bringing him close to his main passion\u2014to know Reality?\n\n'Of course, I'll come and say good-night to them before they turn in,' he decided kindly, letting Nixie and Toby take his hands, while Jonah followed in the rear to show that he considered this a girl's affair yet did not wholly disapprove.\n\n'Hadn't we better tell your mother where we're going?' he asked as they started.\n\n'Oh, mother won't mind,' came the answer in chorus. 'She hardly ever comes up to the nursery, and, besides, she doesn't care for the animals, you see.'\n\n'They're rather 'noying for mother,' Nixie added by way of explanation. She decapitated many of her long words in this way, and invariably omitted difficult consonants.\n\nIt was a long journey, and the explanations about the animals, their characteristics, names, and habits, occupied every minute of the way. He gathered that they were chiefly cats and kittens, to what number he dared not calculate, and that puppies, at least one parrot, a squirrel, a multitude of white mice, and various larger beasts of a parental and aged description, were indiscriminately all mixed up together. Evidently it was a private menagerie that he was invited to say good-night to, and the torrent of outlandish names that poured into his ears produced a feeling of confusion in his mind that made him wonder if he was not turning into some sort of animal himself, and thus becoming free of their language.\n\nIt was the beginning of a very trying ordeal for him, this being half pulled, half shoved along the intricate passages of the old house; now down a couple of unexpected steps that made him stumble; now up another which made him trip; through narrow doorways, where Jonah had the audacity to push him from behind lest he should stick half-way; and, finally, at full speed, the girls tugging at his arms in front, down a long corridor which proved to be the home-stretch to the nursery.\n\n'I was afraid we'd lost the trail,' he gasped. 'It's poorly blazed.' 'Oh, but we haven't got any tails to lose,' laughed Toby, misunderstanding him. 'And they wouldn't blaze if we had.'\n\n'Look out, Nixie! Not so fast! Uncle Paul's losing his wind as well as his trail,' shouted Jonah from the rear. And at that moment they reached the door of the nursery and came to an abrupt halt, Paul puffing like a lumberman.\n\nIt was impossible for him to remain sedate, but he did the next best thing\u2014he remained silent.\n\nThen Jonah, pushing past him, turned the handle, and he was ushered, still panting, into so typical a nursery-schoolroom that the scenes of his forgotten boyhood rushed back to him with a vividness that seemed to destroy the passage of time at a single stroke. The past stood reconstructed. The actual, living mood of his own childhood rose out of the depths of blurred memories and caused a mist to rise before his eyes. An emotion he was utterly unable to define shook his heart.\n\nThe room was filled with the slanting rays of the setting sun, and the air from the open windows smelt of garden trees, lawns, and flower-beds. Sea and heather, too, added their own sharper perfumes. It caught him away for a moment\u2014oh, that strange power of old perfumes\u2014to the earliest scenes of his own life, the boyhood in the gardens of Kent before America had claimed him. And then the details of the room itself became so insistent that he almost lost his head and turned back without more ado into a boy of fifteen.\n\nHe looked swiftly about him. There was the old-fashioned upright piano against the wall, the highly coloured pictures hanging crooked on the wall, the cane chairs, the crowded mantelpiece, the high wire fender before the empty grate, the general atmosphere of toys, untidiness and broken articles of every sort and kind\u2014and, above all, the figures of these excited children all bustling recklessly about him with their glowing and expectant faces.\n\nThere was Toby, her blue sash all awry, running busily about the room; and Nixie, now in sunshine, now in shadow, with her hair of yellow sand and her blue dreaming eyes that saw into the Beyond; and little Jonah, moving about somewhat pompously to prepare the performance that was to follow. It all combined to produce a sudden shock that swept down upon him so savagely, that he was within an ace of bolting through the door and making his escape into safer quarters.\n\nThe False Paul, that is, was within an ace of running away with all his elaborate armour, and leaving the True Paul dancing on the floor, a child among children, a spirit of impulse, enthusiasm and imagination, laughing with the sheer happiness of his perpetual youth.\n\nIt was a dangerous moment; he was within measurable distance of revealing himself. For a moment his clothes felt far too large for him; and only just in time did he remember his 'attitude,' and the danger of being young when he really was old, and the absurdity of being anything else than a large, sedate man of forty-five. Only he wished that Nixie would not watch him so appealingly with those starry eyes of hers... and look so strangely like the forms that haunted his own wild forests and streams on the other side of the Atlantic.\n\nHe stiffened quickly, drew himself up, and turned to give his elderly attention to the chorus of explanation and introduction that was already rising about him with the sound and murmur of the sea.\n\nSomething was happening.\n\nFor the floor of the room, he now perceived, had become suddenly full of movement, as though the carpet had turned alive. He felt a rubbing against his legs and ankles; with a soft thud something leaped upon the table and covered his hand with smooth, warm fur, uttering little sounds of pleasure at the same time. On the top of the piano, a thing he had taken for a heap of toys rose and stretched itself into an odd shape of straight lines and arching curves. From the window-sill, where the sun poured in, a round grey substance dropped noiselessly down upon the carpet and advanced with measured and calculated step towards him; while, from holes and hiding-places undivined, three or four little fluffy things, with padded feet and stiff pointing tails, shot out like shadows and headed straight for a row of saucers that he now noticed for the first time against the farther wall. The whole room seemed to fill with soft and graceful movement; and, mingled with the voices of the children, he caught a fine composite murmur that was soothing as the sound of flowing wind and water.\n\nIt was the sound and the movement of many animals.\n\n'Here they are,' said a voice\u2014'some of them. The others are lost, or out hunting.'\n\nFor the moment Paul did not stop to ask how many 'others' there were. He stood rigidly still for fear that if he moved he might tread on something living.\n\nThere came a scratching sound at the door, and Toby dashed forward to open it.\n\n'Silly, naughty babies!' she cried, nearly tumbling over the fender in her attempt to seize two round bouncing things that came tearing into the room like a couple of yellow puddings. 'Uncle Paul has come to see you all the way from America! And then you're late like this! For shame!'\n\nWith a series of thuds and bangs that must have bruised anything not unusually well padded, the new arrivals, who looked for all the world like small fat bears, or sable muffs on short brown legs with feet of black velvet, dashed round the room in a mad chase after nothing at all. A hissing and spitting issued from dark corners and from beneath various pieces of furniture, but the two balls confined their attentions almost at once to the honoured guest. They charged up against his legs as though determined to upset his balance\u2014this mountain of a man\u2014and then careered clumsily round the room, knocking over anything small enough that came in their way, and behaving generally as though they wanted to clear the whole place in the shortest possible time for their own particular and immediate benefit.\n\nNext, lifting his eyes for a moment from this impetuous attack, he saw a brilliantly coloured thing behind bars, standing apparently on its head and looking upside-down at him with an expression of undisguised and scornful amusement; while not far from it, in a cage hanging by the cuckoo clock, some one with a tail as large as his body, shot round and round on a swinging trapeze that made Paul think of a midget practising in a miniature gymnasium.\n\n'These are our animals, you see, Uncle Paul,' Jonah announced proudly from his position by the door. There was a trace of condescension in his tone.\n\n'We have lots of out-of-door animals as well, though,' Toby hastened to explain, lest her uncle should be disappointed.\n\n'I suppose they're out of doors?' said Paul lamely. 'Of course they are,' replied Jonah; 'in the stables and all about.' He turned to Nixie, who stood quietly by her uncle's side in a protective way, superintending. Nixie nodded corroboration.\n\n'Now, we'll introduce you\u2014gradgilly,' announced Toby, stooping down and lifting with immense effort the large grey Persian that had been sleeping on the window-sill when they came in,' She held it with great difficulty in her arms and' hands, but in spite of her best efforts only a portion of it found actual support, the rest straggling away like a loosely stuffed bolster she could not encompass.\n\nIt was evidently accustomed to being dealt with thus in sections, for it continued to purr sleepily, blinking its large eyes with the usual cat-smile, and letting its head fall backwards as though it suddenly desired to examine the ceiling from an entirely fresh point of view. None of its real attention, of course, was given to the actual proceeding. It merely suffered the absurd affair\u2014absent-mindedly and with condescension. Its whiskers moved gently.\n\n'What's its name?' he asked kindly.\n\n'Her name,' whispered Nixie.\n\n'We call her Mrs. Tompkyns, because it's old now,' Toby explained, ignoring genders.\n\n'After the head-gardener's gra'mother,' Nixie explained hastily in his ear; 'but we might change it to Uncle Paul in honour of you now, mightn't we?' 'Mrs. Uncle Paul,' corrected Jonah, looking on with slight disapproval, and anxious to get to the white mice and the squirrel.\n\n'It would be a pity to change the name, I think,' Paul said, straightening himself up dizzily from the introduction, and watching the splendid creature fall upon its head from Toby's weakening grasp, and then march away with unperturbed dignity to its former throne upon the window-sill. 'I feel rather afraid of Mrs. Tompkyns,' he added; 'she's so very majestic.'\n\n'Oh, you needn't be,' they cried in chorus. 'It's all put on, you know, that sort of grand manner. We knew her when she was a kitten.'\n\nThe object-lesson was not lost upon him. Of all creatures in the world, he reflected as he watched her, cats have the truest dignity. They absolutely refuse to be laughed at. No cat would ever betray its real self, yet here was he, a grown-up, intelligent man, vacillating, and on the verge already of hopeless capitulation.\n\n'And what's the name of these persons?' he asked quickly, turning for safety to Nixie, who had her arms full of a writhing heap she had been diligently collecting from the corners of the room.\n\n'Oh, that's only Mrs. Tompkyns' family,' exclaimed Jonah impatiently; 'the last family, I mean. She's had lots of others.'\n\n'The last family before this was only two,' Nixie told him. 'We called them Ping and Pong. They live in the stables now. But these we call Pouf, Sambo, Spritey, Zezette, and Dumps\u2014'\n\n'And the next ones,' Toby broke in excitedly, 'we're going to call with the names on the engines when we go up to London to see the dentist.'\n\n'Or the names of the Atlantic steamers wouldn't be bad,' said Paul.\n\n'Not bad,' Jonah said, with lukewarm approval; 'only the engines would be much better.'\n\n'There may not be any next ones,' opined Toby, emerging from beneath a sofa after a frantic, but vain, attempt to catch something alive.\n\nJonah snorted with contempt. 'Of course there will. They come in bunches all the time, just like grapes and chestnuts and things. Madmizelle told me so. There's no end to them. Don't they Uncle Paul?'\n\n'I believe so,' said the authority appealed to extracting his finger with difficulty from the teeth and claws of several kittens.\n\nThere came a lull in the proceedings, the majority of the animals having escaped, and successfully concealed themselves among what Toby called 'the furchinur.' Paul was still following a prior train of reflection.\n\n'Yes, cats are really rather wonderful creatures, he mused aloud in spite of himself, turning instinctively in the direction of Nixie. 'They possess a mysterious and superior kind of intelligence.'\n\nFor a moment it was exactly as if he had tapped his armour and said, 'Look! It's all sham!'\n\nThe child peered sharply up in his face. There was a sudden light in her eyes, and her lips were parted. He had not exactly expected her to answer, but somehow or other he was not surprised when she did. And the answer she made was just the kind of thing he knew she would say. He was annoyed with himself for having said so much.\n\n'And they lead secret little lives somewhere else, and only let us see what they want us to see. I knew you understood really? She said it with an elfin smile that was certainly borrowed from moonlight on a mountain stream. With one fell swoop it caught him away into a world where age simply did not exist. His mind wavered deliciously. The singing in his heart was almost loud enough to be audible.\n\nBut he just saved himself. With a sudden movement he leaned forward and buried his face in the pie of kittens that nestled in her arms, letting them lose their paws for a moment in his beard. The kittens might understand, but at least they could not betray him by putting it into words. It was a narrower escape than he cared for.\n\n'And these are the Chow puppies,' cried Jonah, breathless from a long chase after the sable muffs. 'We call them China and Japan.'\n\nPaul welcomed the diversion. Their teeth were not nearly so sharp as the kittens', and they burrowed with their black noses into his sleeves. So thick was their fur that they seemed to have no bones at all; their dark eyes literally dripped laughter.\n\nWith an effort he put on a more sedate manner.\n\n'You got a lot of beasts,' he said.\n\n'Animals,' Nixie corrected him. 'Only toads, rats, and hedgehogs are beasts. And, remember, if you're rude to an animal, as Mademoiselle Fleury was once, it only 'spises you\u2014and then 'I beg their pardon,' he put in hurriedly; 'I quite understand, of course.'\n\n'You see it's rather important, as they want to like you, and unless you respect them they can't, can they?' she finished earnestly.\n\n'I do respect them, believe me, Nixie, and I appreciate their affection. Affection and respect must always go together.'\n\nThe children were wholly delighted. Paul had completely won their hearts from the very beginning. The parrot, the squirrel, and the white mice were all introduced in turn to him, and he heard sundry mysterious allusions to 'the owl in the stables,' 'Juliet and her two kids,' to say nothing of dogs, ponies, pigeons, and peacocks, that apparently dwelt in the regions of outer space, and were to be reserved for the morrow.\n\nThe performance was coming to an end. Paul was already congratulating himself upon having passed safely, if not with full credit, through a severe ordeal, when the door opened and a woman of about twenty-five, with a pleasant face full of character and intelligence, stood in the doorway. A torrent of French instantly broke loose on all sides. The woman started a little when she perceived that the children were not alone.\n\n'Oh, Mademoiselle, this is Uncle Paul,' they cried, each in a different fashion. 'This is our Uncle Paul! He's just been introduced to the animals, and now he must be introduced to you.'\n\nPaul shook hands with her, and the introduction passed off easily enough; the woman was charming, he saw at the first glimpse, and possessed of tact. She at once took his side and pretended to scold her charges for having plagued and bothered him so long. Evidently she was something more to them than a mere governess. The lassitude of his sister, no doubt, gave her rights and responsibilities.\n\nBut what impressed Paul when he was alone\u2014for her simple remark that it was past bedtime was followed by sudden kisses and disappearance\u2014was the remarkable change that her arrival had brought about in the room. It came to him with a definite little shock. It was more than significant, he felt.\n\nAnd it was this: that the children, though obviously they loved her, treated her as some one] grown up and to be obeyed, whereas himself, he now realised, they had all along treated as one of themselves to whom they could be quite open and natural. His 'attitude' they had treated with respect, just as he had treated the attitude of the animals with respect, but at the same time he had been made to feel one of themselves, in their world, part and parcel of their own peculiar region. There had been nothing forced about it whatever. Whether he I liked it or not they accepted him. His 'attitude' was not regarded seriously. It was not regarded at all. And this was grave.\n\nHe was so simple that he would never have thought of this but for the entrance of the governess. Her arrival threw it all into sharp relief. Clearly the children recognised no barrier between themselves and him; he had been taken without parley straight into their holy of holies. Nixie, as leader and judge, had carried him off' at once.\n\nAnd this was a very subtle and powerful compliment that made him think a great deal. He would either have to drop his armour altogether or make it very much more effective.\n\nIndeed, it was the immediate problem in his mind as he slowly made his way downstairs to find his sister on the lawn, and satisfy her rather vague curiosity by telling her that the children had introduced him to the animals, and that he had got on famously with them all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "\u2003Oh! Fairies, take me out of this dull world\n\n\u2003For I would ride with you upon the wind,\n\n\u2003Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,\n\n\u2003And dance upon the mountains like a flame!\n\n\u2003Land of Heart's Desire.\u2014YEATS.\n\nPaul went early to bed that night. It was his first night in an English country home for many years; strange forces were at work in him. His introduction to the children, his meeting with Nixie especially, had let loose powers in his soul that called for sober reflection; and he felt the need of being alone.\n\nAnother thing, too, urged him to seek the solitude of his chamber, for after dinner he had sat for a couple of hours with his sister, talking over the events and changes of the long interval since they had met,\u2014the details that cannot be told in letters, the feelings that no one writes. And he came upstairs with his first impression of her character slightly modified. She had more in her than he first divined. Beneath that shadowy and silken manner he had caught traces of distinct purpose. For one thing she was determined to keep him in England.\n\nHe had told her frankly about his arrangement with the lumber Company, explaining that he regarded his present visit in the light of a holiday. 'I suppose that is\u2014er\u2014wise of you,' she said, but she had not been able to conceal her disappointment. She asked him presently if he really wanted to live all his life in such a place, and what it was in English life, or civilised, conventional life, that he so disliked, and Paul, feeling distinctly uncomfortable\u2014for he loathed, giving pain\u2014had answered evasively, with more skill than he knew, \"Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.\" I suppose my treasure\u2014the only kind I know\u2014is out there in the great woods, Margaret.'\n\n'Paul, are you married, then?' she asked with a start; and when he laughed and assured her most emphatically that he was not, she looked exceedingly puzzled and a little shocked too. 'Are you so very fond of this\u2014er\u2014treasure, then?' she asked point blank in her softest manner, 'and is she so\u2014I mean, can't you bring her home and acknowledge her?' And after his first surprise when he had gathered her meaning, it took him a long time to explain that there was no woman concerned at all, and that it was entirely a matter of his temperament.\n\n'Everybody makes his own world, remember,' he laughed, 'and its size depends, I suppose, upon the power of the imagination.'\n\n'Then I fear one's imagination is a very poor one,' she said solemnly, 'or else I have none at all. I cannot pretend to understand your tastes for trees and woods and things; but you're exactly like poor Dick in that way, and I suppose one must be really clever to be like that.'\n\n'A year is a long time, Margaret,' he said after a pause, to comfort her. 'Much may happen before it's over.'\n\n'I hope so,' she had answered, standing behind his chair and stroking his head. 'By that time you may have met some one who will reconcile you to\u2014to staying here\u2014a little longer.' She patted his head as though he were a Newfoundland dog, he thought. It made him laugh.\n\n'Perhaps,' he said.\n\nAnd, now in his room, before the candles were lighted, he was standing by the open window, thinking it all over. Of women, of course, he knew little or nothing; to him they were all charming, some of them wonderful; and he was not conscious that his point of view might be considered by a man of the world\u2014of the world that is little, sordid, matter-of-fact\u2014distinctly humorous. At forty-five he believed in women just as he had believed in them at twenty, only more so, for nothing had ever entered his experience to trouble an exquisite picture in his mind. They stood nearer to God than men did, he felt, and the depravity of really bad women he explained by the fact that when they did fall they fell farther. The sex-fever, so far as he was concerned, had never mounted to his brain to obscure his vision.\n\nHe only knew\u2014and knew it with a sacred wonder that was akin to worship\u2014that women, like the angels, were beyond his reach and beyond his understanding. Comely they all were to him. He looked up to them in his thoughts, not for their reason or strength, but for the subtlety of their intuition, their power of sacrifice, and last but not least, for the beauty and grace of their mere presence in a world that was so often ugly and unclean.\n\n'The flame\u2014the lamp\u2014the glory\u2014whatever it may be called\u2014keeps alight in their faces,' he loved to say to himself, 'almost to the end. With men it is gone at thirty\u2014often at twenty.'\n\nAnd his sister, for all her light hold on life, and the strain in her that in his simplicity he regarded as rather 'worldly,' was no exception to the rule. He thought her entirely good and wonderful, and, perhaps, so far as she went, he was not too egregiously mistaken. He looked for the best in everybody, and so, of course, found it.\n\n'Only she will never make much of me, or I of her, I'm afraid,' he thought as he leaned out of the window, watching the scented darkness. 'We shall get along best by leaving each other alone and being affectionate, so to speak, from a distance.'\n\nAnd, indeed, so far he had escaped the manifold seductions by which Nature seeks to attain her great object of perpetuating the race. As a potential father of many sons he was of course an object of legitimate prey; but his forest life had obviated all that; his whole forces had turned inwards for the creation of the poet's visions, and Nature in this respect, he believed, had passed him by. So far as he was aware there was no desire in him to come forth and perform a belated duty to the world by increasing its population. It was the first time any one had even suggested to him that he should consider such a matter, and the mere idea made him smile.\n\nGradually, however, these thoughts cleared away, and he turned to other things he deemed more important.\n\nThe night was still as imaginable; odours of earth and woods were wafted into the room with the scent of roses. Overhead, as he leaned on his elbow and gazed, the stars shone thickly, like points of gold pricked in a velvet curtain. A lost wind stirred the branches; he could distinguish their solemn dance against the constellations. Orion, slanting and immense, tilted across the sky, the two stars at the base resting upon the shoulder of the hill, and far off, in the deeps of the night, the murmur of the pines sounded like the breaking of invisible surf.\n\nSomething indescribably fresh and wild in the taste of the air carried him back again across the ocean. The ancient woods he knew so well rose before the horizon's rim, swimming with purple shadows and alive with a continuous great murmur that stretched for a hundred leagues. The picture of those desolate places, lying in lonely grandeur beneath the glitter of the Northern Lights, with a thousand lakes echoing the laughter of the loons, came seductively before his inner eye. The thought of it all stirred emotions profound and primitive, emotions too closely married to instincts, perhaps, to be analysed; something in him that was ancestral, possibly pre-natal. There was nothing in this little England that could move him so in the same fashion. His thoughts carried him far, far away...\n\nThe faint sound of a church clock striking the hour\u2014a sound utterly alien to the trend of his thoughts\u2014brought him back again to the present. He heard it across many fields, fields that had been tilled for centuries, and there could have been no more vivid or eloquent reminder that he was no longer in a land where hedges, church bells, notice-boards, and so forth were not. He came back with a start, and a sensation almost akin to pain. He felt cramped, caught, caged. The tinkling church bells annoyed him.\n\nHis thoughts turned, with a sudden jerk, as it were, to the undeniable fact that he had been trying to go about in a disguise, with a clumsy mask over his face, so that he might appear decently grown up in his new surroundings.\n\nA pair of owls began to hoot softly in the woods, answering one another like voices in a dream, and just then the lost wind left the pine branches and died away into the sky with a swift rush as of many small wings. In the sudden pool of silence that followed, he fancied he could hear across the dark miles of heathland the continuous low murmur of the sea.\n\nThe beauty of night, as ever, entered his soul, but with a joy that was too solemn, too moving, to be felt as pleasure. It touched something in him beyond the tears of either pain or delight: something that held in it a mysterious wonder so searching, so poignant, as to be almost terrible.\n\nHe caught his breath and waited... The great woods of the world, mountains, the sea, stars, and the crying winds were always for him symbols of the gateways into a mightier and ideal region, a Beyond-world where he found rest for his yearnings and a strange peace. They were his means of losing himself in a temporary heaven.\n\nAnd to-night it was the beauty of an English scene that carried him away; and this in spite of his having summoned the wilder vision from across the seas. Already the forces of his own country were insensibly at work upon an impressionable mind and temperament. The very air, so sweetly scented as he drew it in between his lips, was charged with the subtly - working influences of the 'Old Country.' A new web, soft but mighty, was being woven about his spirit. Even now his heart was conscious of its gossamer touch, as his dreams yielded imperceptibly to a new colour.\n\nHe followed vaguely, curiously, the leadings of delicate emotions that had been stirred in him by the events of the day. Symbols, fast - shifting, protean, passed in suggestive procession before his mind's eye, in the way that symbols ever will\u2014in a poet's heart. He thought of children, of the children, and of the extraordinarily fresh appeal they had made to him. Children: how near they, too, stood to the great things of life, and all the nearer, perhaps, for not being aware of it. How their far-seeing eyes and their simple, unlined souls pointed the way, like Nature, to the ideal region of which he was always dreaming: to Reality, to God.\n\nAll real children knew and understood; were ready to offer their timid yet unhesitating guidance, and without question or explanation.\n\nHad, then, Nixie and her troupe already taken him prisoner? And were the soft chains already twined about his neck?...\n\nPaul hardly acknowledged the question definitely to himself. He was merely dreaming, and his dreams, rising and falling like the tides of a sea, bore him to and fro among the shoals and inlands of the day's events. The spell of the English June night was very strong upon him, no doubt, for presently a door opened somewhere behind him, and the very children he was thinking about danced softly into the room. Nixie came up close and gazed into his very eyes, and again there began that odd singing in his heart that he had twice noticed during the day. An atmosphere of magic, shot with gold and silver, came with the child into the room.\n\nFor the fact was\u2014though he realised it only dimly\u2014the Fates were now making him a deliberate offer. Had he not been so absorbed, he would have perceived and appreciated the delicacy of their action. As a rule they command, whereas now they were only suggesting.\n\nIt was really his own heart asking. Here, in this rambling country house under the hills, was an opportunity of entering the region to which all that was best and truest in him naturally belonged. The experience might prove a stepping-stone to a final readjustment of his peculiar being with the normal busy world of common things. Here was a safety-valve, as he called it, a channel through which he might express much, if not all, of his accumulated stores. The guides, now fast asleep in their beds, had sent out their little dream-bodies to bring the invitation; they were ready and waiting.\n\nAnd he, thinking there under the stars his queer, long thoughts, bred in years of solitude, dallied with the invitation, and\u2014hesitated. The inevitable pain frightened him\u2014the pain of being young when the world cries that you are old; the pang of the eternal contrast when the world would laugh at what seemed to it a foolish fantasy of youth\u2014a pose, a dream that must bring a bitter awakening! He heard the voices but too plainly, and shrank quickly from the sound.\n\nBut Nixie, standing there beside him with such gentle persistence, certainly made him waver... The temptation to yield was strong and seductive... Yet, when the faint splendour of the summer moonrise dimmed the stars near the horizon, and the pines shone tipped with silver, he found himself borne down by the sense of caution that urged no revolutionary change, and advised him to keep his armour tightly buckled on in the disguise he had adopted.\n\nHe would wait and see\u2014a little longer, at any rate; and meanwhile he must be firm and stern and dull; master of himself, and apparently normal.\n\nHe walked to the dressing-table and lit his candles, and, as he did so, caught a picture of himself in the glass. There was a gleam of subdued fire in his eyes, he thought, that was not naturally there. Something about him looked a little wild; it made him laugh.\n\nHe laughed to think how utterly absurd it was that a man of his size and age, and\u2014But the idea refused to frame himself in language\u2014He did not know exactly why he laughed, for at the same time he felt sad. With him, as with all other children, tears and laughter are never far apart. It would have been just as intelligible if he had cried.\n\nBut when the candles were out and he was in bed, and the stars were peeping into the darkened room, the memory of his laughter seemed unreal, and the sound of it oddly remote.\n\nFor, after all, that laughter was rather mysterious. It was not the Outer Paul laughing at the Inner Paul. It was the Inner Paul laughing with himself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\u2002'The imaginative process may be likened to the state of reverie.' \u2014ALISON.\n\nThe psychology of sleep being apparently beyond all intelligible explanation, it was not surprising that he woke up next morning as though he had gone to bed without a single perplexity. He remembered none of the thoughts that had thronged his brain a few short hours before; perhaps they had all slipped down into the region of submerged consciousness, to crop out later in natural, and apparently spontaneous, action.\n\nAt any rate he remembered little enough of his troubles when he woke and saw the fair English sun streaming in through the open windows. Odours of woods and dew-drenched lawns came into the room, and the birds were singing with noise enough to waken all the country-side. It was impossible to lie in bed. He was up and dressed long before any servant came to call him.\n\nDownstairs he found the house in darkness; doors barred and windows heavily shuttered as though the house had expected an attack. Not a soul was stirring. The air was close and musty. The idea of having to strike a match in a 'country' house at 6 A.M. somehow oppressed him. Not knowing his way about very well yet, he stumbled across the hall to find a door, and as he did so something soft came rubbing against his legs. He put his hand down in the darkness and felt a furry, warm body and a stiff upright tail that reached almost to his knees. The thing began to purr.\n\n'I declare!' he exclaimed; 'Mrs. Tompkyns!' and he struck a match and followed her to the drawing-room door. A moment later they had unfastened the shutters of the French window\u2014Mrs. Tompkyns assisting by standing on her hind legs and tapping the swinging bell\u2014and made their way out on to the lawn.\n\nThe sunshine came slanting between the cedar and lay in shining strips on the grass. Everything glistened with dew. The air was sweet and fresh as it only is in the early hours after the dawn. Very faintly, as though its mind was not yet made up, the air stirred among the bushes.\n\nPaul's first impulse was to waken the entire household so that they might share with him this first glory of the morning. 'Probably they don't know how splendid it is!' The thought of the sleeping family, many of them perhaps with closed windows, missing all the wonder, was a positive pain to him. But, fortunately for himself, he decided it might be better not to begin, his visit in this way.\n\n'I guess you and I, Mrs. Tompkyns, are the only people about,' he said, looking down at the beautiful grey creature that sniffed the air calmly at his feet. 'Come on, then. Let's make a raid together on the woods!'\n\nHe threw a disdainful glance at the sleeping house; no smoke came from the chimneys; most of the upper windows were closed. A delicious fragrance stole out of the woods to meet him as he strolled across the wet lawn. He felt like a schoolboy doing something out of bounds.\n\n'You lead and I follow,' he said, addressing his companion in mischief.\n\nAnd at once his attention became absorbed in the animal's characteristic behaviour. Obviously it was delighted to be with him; yet it did not wish him to think so, or, if he did think so, to give any sign of the fact. Nothing could have been plainer. First it crept along by the stone wall delicately, with its body very close to the ground as though the weight of the atmosphere oppressed it; and when he spoke, it turned its head with an affectation of genuine surprise as though it would say, 'You here! I thought I was alone.' Then it sat down on the gravel path and began to wash its face and paws till he had passed, after which\u2014when he was not looking, of course\u2014it followed him condescendingly, sniffing at blades of grass en route without actually touching them, and flicking its tail upwards with sudden, electric jerks.\n\nPaul understood in a general way what was expected of him. He watched it surreptitiously, pretending to examine the flowers. For this, he knew, was the great Cat Game of elaborate pretence. And Mrs. Tompkyns, true adept in the art, played up wonderfully, and incidentally taught him much about the ways and methods of simple disguise; it advanced stealthily when he wasn't looking; it stopped to wash, or gaze into the air, the moment he turned. It was very shy, and very affected, and very self-conscious. Inimitable was the way it kept to all the little rules of the game. It walked daintily down the path after him, shaking the dew from its paws with a rapid, quivering motion. Then, suddenly arching its back as though momentarily offended\u2014at nothing\u2014it stared up at him with an expression that seemed to question his very existence. 'I guess I ought to fade away when you look at me like that!' was his thought.\n\n'I'm here. I'm coming, Mrs. Tompkyns,' he felt constrained to remark aloud before going forward again. 'The grand morning excites my blood just as much as it excites your own.'\n\nIt seemed necessary to assert his presence. No intelligent person can be conceited long in the presence of a cat. No living creature can so sublimely 'ignore.' But Paul was not conceited. He continued to watch it with delight.\n\nOne very important rule of the game appeared to be that plenty of bushes were necessary by way of cover, so that it could pretend it was not really coming farther than the particular bush where it was hiding at the moment. Instinctively, he never made the grave mistake of calling it to follow; and though it never trotted alongside, being always either behind or in front of him, the presence of the cat in his immediate neighbourhood provided all sorts of company imaginable. It had also provided him with an opportunity to play the hero.\n\nThen, suddenly, the calm and peace of the morning was disturbed by a scene of strange violence. Mrs. Tompkyns, with spread legs, dashed past him at a surprising speed and flew up the trunk of a big tree as though all the dogs in the county were at her heels. From this position of vantage she looked back over her shoulder with hysterical and frightened eyes. There was a great show of terror, a vast noise of claws upon the bark. No actress could have created better the atmosphere of immediate danger and alarm.\n\nPaul had an instinctive flair for this move of the game. He made a great pretence of running up to save the cat from its awful position, but of course long before he got there she had dropped laughingly to earth again, having thus impressed upon him the value of her life.\n\n'A question of life or death that time, I think, Mrs. Tompkyns,' he said soothingly, trying to stroke her back. 'I wonder if the head-gardener's grandmother after whom you were named ever did this sort of thing. I doubt it!'\n\nBut the creature escaped from him easily. For no one is ever caught in the true Cat Game. It scuttled down the path at full speed in a sort of canter, but sideways, as though a violent wind blew it and desperate resistance was necessary to keep on its feet at all. After that its self-consciousness seemed to disappear a little. It behaved normally. It stalked birds that showed, however, no fear of its approach. It sniffed the tips of leaves. It played baby-fashion with various invisible companions; and finally it vanished in a thick jungle of laurels to hunt in savage earnest, and left Paul to his own devices. Like all its kind, it only wished to prove how charming it could be, in order to emphasise later its utter independence of human sympathy and companionship.\n\n'If you must go, I suppose you must,' he laughed, 'and I shall try to enjoy myself without you.'\n\nHe strolled on alone and lost himself in the pine-wood that flanked the back lawn, stopping finally by a gate that led to the world of gorse and heather beyond. The brilliant patches of yellow wafted perfumes to his nostrils. Far in the distance a blue line hinted where the sea lay; and over all lay the radiance of the early morning. The old spell was there that never failed to make his heart leap. And, as he stood still, the cuckoo flitted, invisible and mischievous, from tree to tree, calling with its flute-like notes,\u2014\n\n\u2003Sung beyond memory,\n\n\u2003When golden to the winds this world of ours\n\n\u2003Waved wild with boundless flowers;\n\n\u2003Sung in some past where wildernesses were,\n\n\u2014and his thoughts went roaming back to the great woods he had left behind, woods where the naked streams ran shouting and lawless, where the trees had not learned self-consciousness, and where no little tame folk trotted on velvet feet through trim and scented gardens.\n\nAnd the virgin glory of the morning entered into him with that searching sweetness which is almost suffering, just as a few hours before the Night had bewitched him with the mystery of her haunted caverns. For the beauty of Nature that comes to most softly, with hints, came to him with an exquisite fierce fever that was pain,\u2014with something of the full-fledged glory that burst upon Shelley\u2014and to bear it, unrelieved by expression, was a perpetual torment to him.\n\nBut, after long musing that led he scarcely knew where, Paul came back to himself\u2014and laughed. Laughter was better than sighing, and he was too much of a child to go long without the sense of happiness coming uppermost. He lit his pipe\u2014that most delicious of all, the pipe before breakfast\u2014and wandered out into the sea of yellow gorse, thinking aloud, laughing, talking to himself.\n\nSomething in the performance of Mrs. Tompkyns awakened the train of thought of the night before. The sublime acting of the animal\u2014he dared not call it 'beast'\u2014linked him on to the children's world. They, too, had a magnificent condescension for the mere grown-up person. But he\u2014he was not grown up. It made him sigh and laugh to think of it. He was a great, over-grown child, playing with gorgeously coloured dreams while the world of ordinary life passed him by.\n\nThe animals and the children linked on again, of course, with the region of fantasy and make-believe, the world of creation, the world of eternity, the world where thoughts were alive, and strong belief was a creative act.\n\n'That's where I still belong,' he said aloud, picking his way among the waves of yellow sea, 'and I shall never get out till I die, my visions unexpressed, my singing dumb.' He laughed and threw a stone at a bush that had no blossoms. 'Oh, if only I knew how to link on with the normal world of fact without losing the other! To turn all these seething dreams within me to some account. To show them to others!'\n\nHe ran and cleared a low gorse-bush with a flying jump.\n\n'That would be worth living for,' he continued, panting; 'to make these things real to all the people who live in little cages. By Jove, it would open doors and windows in thousands of cages all over the world, besides providing me with the outlet I must find some day or\u2014' he sprang over a ditch, slipped, and landed head first into prickles\u2014'or explode!' he concluded with a shout of laughter that no one heard but the cuckoos and the yellow-hammers. Then he fell into a reverie, and his thoughts travelled farther still\u2014into the Beyond.\n\nQuickly recovering himself, and picking up his pipe, he went on towards the house; and, as he emerged from the pine copse again, the sound of a gong, ringing faintly in the distance, brought him back to earth with a shock almost as abrupt as the ditch. Mrs. Tompkyns appeared simultaneously, wearing an aspect of pristine innocence, admirably assumed the instant she caught sight of him.\n\n'Fancy your being out here!' was the expression of her whole person, 'and coming, too, in just as the gong sounds!'\n\n'Breakfast, I suppose!' he observed. And she trotted behind him like a dog. For all her affectations of superiority she wanted her milk just as much as he wanted his coffee.\n\nHe walked into the dining-room, through the window, stiffening as he did so with the resolution of the night before. His armour fitted him tightly. Little animals, children, the too searching calls of Nature, occult, symbolic, magical\u2014all these must be sternly resisted and suppressed in the company of others. The danger of letting his imagination loose was too alarming. The ridicule would overwhelm him. In the eyes of the world he now lived in he would seem simply mad. The risk was impossible.\n\nLike the Christian Scientists, he felt the need of vigorous affirmation: 'I am Paul Rivers. I am a grown-up man. I am an official in a lumber Company. I am forty-five. I have a beard. I am important and sedate.'\n\nThus he fortified himself; and thus, like the persuasive Mrs. Tompkyns on the lawn, he imagined that he was deceiving both himself\u2014and those who were on the watch!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "And a little child shall lead them.\n\nA week passed quickly away and found Paul still in his sister's house. The country air agreed with him, and he went for long walks over the heathery hills and down to the sea. The little private study provided for him,\u2014remembering Mrs. Tompkyn's example, he made a brave pretence of having reports to write to his lumber Company\u2014was admirable for his work. As a place of retreat when he felt temptation too strong upon him, or danger was near at hand, he used it constantly. He scented conditions in advance very often, though no one probably would have suspected it of him.\n\nOnce or twice he lunched out with neighbours, and sometimes people motored over to tea; companionship and society were at hand if he wanted them. And books of the kind he loved stood in precious rows upon the shelves of Dick's well-stored library. Here he browsed voraciously.\n\nHis sister, meanwhile, showed tact hardly to be expected of her. She tried him tentatively with many things to see if he liked them, but she made no conspicuous plans for him, and took good care that he was left entirely to his own devices. A kind of intelligent truce had established itself between them\u2014these two persons who lived in different worlds and stared at one another with something like astonishment over the top of a high wall. Moreover, her languid interest in life made no claims upon him; there was pleasant companionship, gentle talks, and genuine, if thinly coloured, affection. He felt absolutely free, yet was conscious of being looked after with kindness and discretion. She managed him so well, in fact, that he hardly realised he was being managed at all.\n\nHe fell more easily than he had thought possible into the routine of the uneventful country life. From feeling 'caged' he came to feel 'comfortable.' June, and the soft forces of the summer, purred about him, and almost without knowing it he began to purr with them.\n\nFor his superabundant energy he found relief in huge walks, early and late, and in all manner of unnecessary and invented labours of Hercules about the place. Thus, he dammed up the little stream that trickled harmlessly through the Gwyle pine-wood, making a series of deep pools in which he bathed when the spirit moved him; he erected a gigantic and very dangerous see-saw for the children (and himself) across a fallen trunk; and, by means of canvas, boards, and steps, he constructed a series of rooms and staircases in a spreading ilex-tree, with rope railings and bells at each 'floor' for visitors, so that even the gardeners admitted it was the most wonderful thing they had ever set eyes upon in a tree.\n\nWith the children he was, however, careful to play the part he had decided to play. He was kind and good-natured; he spent a good deal of time with them daily; he even submitted periodically to be introduced all over again to the out-of-door animals, but he went through it all soberly and deliberately, and flattered himself that he was quite successful in presenting to them the 'Uncle Paul' whom it was best for his safety they should know.\n\nHeart-searchings and temptations he had in plenty, but came through the ordeal with flying colours, and by the end of the first week he was satisfied that they accepted him as he wished\u2014sedate, stolid, dull, and 'grown up.'\n\nYet, all the time, there was something that puzzled him. Under the leadership of Nixie the children played up almost too admirably. It was almost as though he had called them and explained everything in detail. In spite of himself, they seemed somehow or other to have got into his confidence, so that he felt his pretence was after all not so effective as he meant it to be.\n\nEven\u2014nay, especially\u2014the way he was 'accepted' by the animals was suspicious\u2014for nothing can be more eloquent of the true relations between children and a grown-up than the terms they permit their animals to have towards him\u2014and this easy acceptance of himself as he pretended to be constituted the most wearing and subtle kind of attack he could possibly conceive. He felt as if the steel casings of his armour were changing into cardboard; soon they would become mere tissue-paper, and then turn transparent and melt away altogether.\n\n'They seem to think it's all put on, this stiffness of mine,' he thought more than once. f Perhaps they're playing a sort of game with me. If once they find out I'm only acting\u2014whew!' he whistled low\u2014' the game is up at once! I must keep an eye peeled!'\n\nConsequently he kept that eye peeled; he made more use of his private study, and so often gave the excuse of having reports to write that, had it been true, his lumber Company would have been obliged to double its staff in order to read them.\n\nYet, even in the study, he was not absolutely safe.\n\nThe children penetrated there too. They knocked elaborately\u2014always; but with the knock he invariably realised a roguish pair of eyes and a sly laugh on the other side of the door. It was like knocking on his heart direct. He always said\u2014in a bored, unnatural tone:\n\n'Oh, come in, whoever it is I' knowing quite well who it was. And, then, in they would come\u2014one or the other of them. They slipped in softly as shadows, like the coming of dusk, like stray puffs of wind, fragrant and summery, or like unexpected rays of light as the sun walked round the house in the afternoon. And when they were gone\u2014swiftly, like the sun dipping behind a cloud\u2014lo, the room seemed cold and empty again.\n\n'Oh, they're up to something, they're up to something,' he said wisely to himself. with a sigh. 'They're laying traps for me, bless their little insolences!'\n\nAnd the more he thought about it, the more certain he felt that Nixie, Jonah, and Toby were simply playing the Cat Game\u2014pretending to accept his attitude because they saw he wished it. Only, less occult and intelligent than the cat, they sometimes made odd little slips that betrayed them.\n\nFor instance, one evening Jonah penetrated into the study to say good-night, and brought the Chow puppies, China and Japan, with him. Their tails curled over their backs like wire brushes; their vigorous round bodies, for ever on the move, were all he could manage. Having been duly kissed, the child waited, however, for something else, and at length, receiving no assistance from his uncle, he lifted each puppy in turn on to the table.\n\n'You, Uncle, please hold them; 'can't,' he explained.\n\nAnd, rather grimly, Paul tried to keep the two wriggling bodies still, while Jonah then came up a little closer to his chair.\n\n'They have reports to write too, to their lumber-kings,' he said, his face solemn as a gong\u2014using a phrase culled heaven knows where. 'So will you please see that they don't make blots either.'\n\n'But how did you know there were such things as lumber-kings?' Paul asked, surprised.\n\n'I didn't know. They knew,' with a jerk of his head toward the struggling puppies, who hated the elevation of the table and the proximity of Paul's bearded face. 'They said you told them.'\n\nThere was no trace of a smile in his eyes; nothing but the earnest expression of the child taking part in the ponderous make-believe of the grown-up. Paul felt that by this simple expedient his reports and the safety they represented had been reduced in a single moment to the level of a paltry pretence.\n\nHe blushed. 'Well, tell them to run after their tails more, and think less,' he said.\n\n'All right, Uncle Paul,' and the boy was gone, grave as any judge.\n\nAnd Toby, her small round face still shining like an onion skin, had a different but equally effective method of showing him that he belonged to their world in spite of his clumsy pretence. She gave him lessons in Natural History. One afternoon when a brightly-coloured creature darted across the page of his book, and he referred to it as a 'beetle,' she very smartly rebuked him.\n\n'Not beetle, but beetie, that one,' she corrected him.\n\nHe thought at first this was merely a child's abbreviation, but she went on to instruct him fully, and he discovered that the ordinary coleopterist has a great deal yet to learn in the proper classification of his species.\n\n'There are beetles, and beedles, and beeties,' she explained standing by his chair on the lawn, and twiddling with his watch-chain. 'Beeties are all bright-coloured and little and very pretty\u2014like ladybirds.'\n\n'And beedles?'\n\n'Oh, b-e-e-e-d-d-dles,' pronouncing the word heavily and slowly, 'are the stupid fat ones in the road that always get run over. They're always sleepy, you see, but quite nice, oh, quite nice,' she hastened to add lest Paul should dislike them from her description.\n\n'And all the rest are beetles, I suppose, just ordinary beetles?' he asked.\n\n'Beetles,' she said, with the calmness of superior knowledge, 'are fast, black things that scuttle about kitchens. Horrid and crawly! Now you know them all!'\n\nShe ran off with a burst of laughter upon that face of polished onion skin, and left her uncle to reflect deeply upon this new world of beetles.\n\nThe lesson was instructive and symbolic, though the choice of subject was not as poetic as might have been. With this new classification as a starting-point, the child, no doubt, had erected a vast superstructure of wonder, fun, beauty, and\u2014why not?\u2014truth! For children, he mused, are ever the true idealists. In their games of make-believe they create the world anew\u2014in six minutes. They scorn measurements, and deal directly with the eternal principles behind things. With a little mud on the end of a stick they trace the course of the angels, and with the wooden-blocks of their building-boxes they erect the towering palaces of a universe that shall never pass away.\n\nYet what they did, surely he also did! His world of imagination was identical with theirs of make-believe. Was, then, the difference between them one of expression merely?...\n\nToby came thundering up and fell upon him from nowhere.\n\n'Uncle Paul,' she said rather breathlessly.\n\n'Yes, dear,' he made answer, still thinking upon beedles and beeties.\n\n'On the path down there by the rosydandrums there's a beedle now\u2014a big one with horns\u2014if you'd like to see it.'\n\n'Oh! By the rhododendrons, you mean?' 'Yes, by the rosydandrums,' she repeated. 'Only we must be quick or he'll get home before we come.'\n\nHe was far more keen to see that \"beedle\" than she was. Yet for the immediate safety of his soul he refused.\n\nNixie it was, however, who penetrated furthest into the fortress. She came with a fearless audacity that fairly made him tremble. She had only to approach for him to become aware how poorly his suit of armour fitted.\n\nBut she was so gentle and polite about it that she was harder to withstand than all the others put together. She was slim and insinuating in body, mind and soul. Often, before he realised what she was talking about, her slender little fingers were between the cracks of his breast-plate. For instance, after leaving Toby and her \"beedle,\" he strolled down to the pinewood and stood upon the rustic bridge watching the play of sunlight and shadow, when suddenly, out of the very water it seemed, up rose a veritable water-sprite\u2014hatless and stockingless\u2014Nixie, the ubiquitous.\n\nShe scrambled lightly along the steep bank to his side, and leaned over the railing with him, staring at their reflections in the stream.\n\n'I declare you startled me, child!' Paul exclaimed.\n\nHer eyes met his in the running reflection beneath them. Of course, it may have been merely the trick of the glancing water, but to him it seemed that her expression was elfin and mischievous.\n\n'Did I\u2014really ', Uncle Paul?' she said after a long silence, and without looking up. But woven through the simple words, as sunlight is woven through clearing mist, he divined all the other meanings of the child's subtle and curious personality. It amounted to this\u2014she at once invited, nay included, him in her own particular tree and water world: included him because he belonged there with her, and she simply couldn't help herself. There was no favour about it one way or the other.\n\nThe compliment\u2014the temptation\u2014was overwhelming. Paul shivered a little, actually shivered, as he stood beside her in the sunshine. For several minutes they leaned there in silence, gazing at the flowing water.\n\n'The woods are very busy\u2014this evening,' she said at length.\n\n'I'm sure they are,' he answered, before he quite realised what he was saying. Then he pulled himself together with an effort.\n\n'But does Mile. Fleury know, and approve\u2014?' he asked a little stiffly, glancing down at her bare legs and splashed white frock.\n\n'Oh, no,' she laughed wickedly, 'but then Mile, only understands what she sees with her eyes! She is much too mixed-up and educated to know all this kind of thing! 'She made a gesture to include the woods about them. 'Her sort of knowledge is so stuffing, you know.'\n\n'Rather,' he exclaimed. 'I would far sooner know the trees themselves than know their Latin names.'\n\nIt slipped out in spite of himself. The next minute he could have bitten his tongue off. But Nixie took no advantage of him. She let his words pass as something taken for granted.\n\n'I mean\u2014it's better to learn useful things while you can,' he said hurriedly, blushing in his confusion like a child.\n\nNixie peered steadily down into the water for several minutes before she said anything more.\n\n'Either she's found me out and knows everything,' thought Paul; 'or she hasn't found me out and knows nothing.' But which it was, for the life of him, he couldn't be certain.\n\n'Oh,' she cried suddenly, looking up into his face, her eyes, to Paul's utter amazement, wet with tears, 'Oh! how Daddy must have loved you!'\n\nAnd, before he could think of a word to say, she was gone! Gone into the woods with a fluttering as of white wings.\n\n'So apparently I am not too mixed-up and educated for their exquisite little world,' he reflected, as soon as the emotion caused by her last words had subsided a little; 'and the things I know are not of the \"stuffing \"kind!'\n\nIt all made him think a good deal\u2014this attitude the children adopted towards his attitude, this unhesitating acceptance of him in spite of all his pretence. But he still valiantly maintained his studied aloofness of manner, and never allowed himself to overstep the danger line. He never forgot himself when he played with them, and the stories he told were just what they called \"ornary\" stories, and not tales of pure imagination and fantasy. The rules of the game, finely balanced, were observed between them just as between himself and Mrs. Tompkyns.\n\nYet somehow, by unregistered degrees and secretly, they loosened the joints of his armour day by day and hour by hour." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "\u2002'All the Powers that vivify nature must be children, for all the fairies, and gnomes, the goblins, yes, and the great giants too, are only different sizes and shapes and characters of children.' \u2014GEORGE MACDONALD.\n\nIt was a week later, and Paul was smoking his evening pipe on the lawn before dinner. His sister was in London for a couple of days. Mile. Fleury had gone to the dentist in the neighbouring town and had not yet returned. The children, consequently, had been running rather wild.\n\nThe sun had barely disappeared, when the full moon, rising huge and faint in the east, cast a silvery veil over the gardens and the wood. The night came treading softly down the sky, passing with an almost visible presence from the hills to the motionless trees in the valley, and then sinking gently and mysteriously down into the very roots of the grass and flowers.\n\nDuring the day there had been rain\u2014warm showers alternating with dazzling sunshine as in April\u2014and now the earth, before going to sleep, was sending out great wafts of incense. Paul sniffed it in with keen enjoyment.\n\nThe odour of burning wood floated to him over the tree tops, hanging a little heavily in the moist atmosphere; he thought of a hundred fires of his own making\u2014elsewhere, far away! 'And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain,' he murmured.\n\nHe wandered down to the Larch Gate, so called by the children because the larches stood there about the entrance of the wood like the porch of some forest temple. He halted, listening to the faint drip-drip of the trees, and as he listened, he thought; and his thoughts, like stones falling through a deep sea, sank down into the depths of him where so little light was that no words came to give them form or substance.\n\nOverhead, the blue lanes of the sky down which the sunlight had poured all day were slowly softening for the coming of the stars; and in himself the plastic depths, he felt, were a-stirring, as though some great change that he could not alter or control were about to take place in him. He was aware of an unwonted undercurrent of excitement in his blood. It seemed to him that there was 'something afoot,' although he had no evidence to warrant the suspicion.\n\n'Something's up to-night,' he murmured between the puffs of his pipe. 'There's something in the air!'\n\nHe blew a long whiff of smoke and watched it melt away over a bed of mignonette among the blue shadows where the dusk gathered beneath the ilex trees. There, for a moment, his eye followed it, and just as it sifted off into transparency he became aware with a start of surprise that behind the bushes something was moving. He looked closer.\n\n'It's stopped,' he muttered; 'but only a second ago it was moving\u2014moving parallel with myself.'\n\nPaul was well accustomed to watching the motions of wild creatures in the forest; his eye was trained like the eye of an Indian. The gloom at first was too dense for anything to differentiate itself from their general mass, but after a short inspection his sight detected little bits of shadow that were lighter or darker than other little bits. The moving thing began to assume outline.\n\n'It's a person!' he decided. 'It's somebody watching\u2014watching me!'\n\nHe took a step forward, and the figure likewise advanced, keeping even pace with him. He went faster, and the figure also went faster; it moved very silently, very softly, 'like an Indian,' he thought with admiration. Behind the Blue Summer-house, where they sometimes had tea on wet days, it disappeared.\n\n'There are no cattle-stealers, or timber-sneaks in this country,' he reflected, 'but there are burglars. Perhaps this is a burglar who knows Margaret is away and thinks\u2014'\n\nHe had not time to finish what the burglar thought, for at that moment, at the top of the Long Walk, where the moonlight already lay in a patch, the figure suddenly dashed out at full speed from the cover of the bushes, and he beheld, not a burglar, but\u2014a little girl in a blue frock with a broad white collar, and long, black spindle legs.\n\n'Nixie, my dear child!' he exclaimed. 'But aren't you in bed?'\n\nIt was a stupid question of course, and she did not attempt to answer it, but came up close to him, picking her way neatly between the flower-beds. The moon gleamed on her shiny black shoes and on her shiny yellow hair; over her summer dress she wore a red cloak, but it was open and only held to her by two thin bands about the neck. Under the:! hood he saw her elf-like face, the expression grave, but the eyes bright with excitement, and she moved softly over the grass like a shadow, timidly, yet without hesitation. A small, warm hand stole into his.\n\nPaul put his pipe, still alight, into his pocket like a naughty boy caught smoking, and turned to face her.\n\n'Pon my soul, Nixie, I believe you really an a sprite!'\n\nShe let go his hand and sprang away lightly over the lawn, laughing silently, her hood dropping off so that her hair flew out in a net to catch the moonlight, and for an instant he imagined he was looking at running water, swift and dancing; but the very next second she was back at his side again, the red hood replaced, the cloak gathered tightly about her slim person, feeling for his big hand again with both of her own.\n\n'At night I am a sprite,' she whispered laughing, 'and mind I don't bewitch you altogether!'\n\nShe drew him gently across the lawn, choosing the direction with evident purpose, and he, curiously and suddenly bereft of all initiative, allowed her to do as she would.\n\n'But, please, Uncle Paul,' she went on with vast gravity, 'I want you to be serious now. I've something to say to you, and that's why I'm not in bed when I ought to be. All the other Sprites are about too, you know, so be very careful how you answer.'\n\nThe big man allowed himself to be led away. He felt his armour dropping off in great flakes as he went. No light is so magical as in that mingled hour of sun and moon when the west is still burning and the east just a-glimmer with the glory that is to come. Paul felt it strongly. He was half with the sun and half with the moon, and the gates of fantasy seemed somewhere close at hand. Curtains were being drawn aside, veils lifting, doors softly opening. He almost heard the rush of the wind behind, and tasted the keen, sweet excitement of another world.\n\nHe turned sharply to look at his companion. But first he put the hood back, for she seemed more human that way.\n\n'Well, child!' he said, as gruffly as he could manage, 'and what is it you have stayed up so late to ask me?'\n\n'It's something I have to say to you, not to ask, she replied at once demurely. There was a delicious severity about her.\n\nAfter a pause of twenty seconds she tripped round in front of him and stared full into his face. He felt as though she cried 'Hands up' and held a six-shooter to his head. She pulled the trigger that same moment.\n\n'Isn't it time now to stop writing all those Reports, and to take off your dressing-up things?' she asked with decision.\n\nPaul stopped abruptly and tried to disengage his hand, but she held him so tightly that he could not escape without violence.\n\n'What dressing-up things are you talking about?' he asked, forcing a laugh which, he admitted himself, sounded quite absurd.\n\n'All this pretending that you're so old, and don't know about things\u2014I mean real things\u2014our things.'\n\nHe searched as in a fever for the right words\u2014words that should be true and wise, and safe\u2014but before he could pick them out of the torrent of sentences that streamed through his mind, she had gone on again. She spoke calmly, but very gravely.\n\n'We are so tired of helping to pretend with you; and we've been waiting patiently so long. Even Toby knows it's only 'sguise you put on to tease us.'\n\n'Even Toby?' he repeated foolishly, avoiding her brilliant eyes.\n\n'And it really isn't quite fair, you know. There are so very few that care\u2014and understand\u2014'\n\nThere came a little quaver in her voice. She hardly came up to his shoulder. He felt as though a whole bathful of happiness had suddenly been upset inside him, and was running about deliciously through his whole being\u2014as though he wanted to run and dance and sing. It was like the reaction after tight boots\u2014collars\u2014or tight armour\u2014and the blood was beginning to flow again mightily. Nothing could stop it. Some keystone in the fabric of his being dropped or shifted. His whole inner world fell into a new pattern. Resistance was no longer possible or desirable. He had done his best. Now he would give in and enjoy himself at last.\n\n'But, my dear child\u2014my dear little Nixie\u2014'\n\n'No, really, Uncle, there's no good talking like that,' she interrupted, her voice under command again, though still aggrieved, 'because you know quite well we're all waiting for you to join us properly\u2014our Society, I mean\u2014and have our a'ventures with us\u2014'\n\nShe called it 'aventures.' She left out all consonants when excited. The word caught him sharply. Nixie had wounded him better than she knew.\n\n'Er\u2014then do you have adventures?' he asked.\n\n'Of course\u2014wonderful.'\n\n'But not\u2014er\u2014the sort\u2014er\u2014I could join in?'\n\n'Of course; very wonderful indeed aventures. That's what Daddy used to call them\u2014before he went away.'\n\nIt was Dick himself speaking. Paul imagined he could hear the very voice. Another, and deeper, emotion surged through him, making all the heartstrings quiver.\n\nHe turned and looked about him, still holding the child tightly by the hand...\n\nBehind him he heard the air moving in the larches, combing out their long green hair; the pampas grass rustled faintly on the lawn just beyond; and from the wood, now darkening, came the murmur of the brook. On his right, the old house looked shadowy and unreal. There stood the chimneys, like draped figures watching him, with the first stars peeping over their hunched shoulders. Dew glistened on the slates of the roof; beyond them he saw the clean outline of the hill, darkly sweeping up into the pallor of the sunset. There, too, past the wall of the house, he saw the great distances of heathland moving down through crowds of shadows to the sea. And the moon was higher. 'There's seats in the Blue Summer-house,' the voice beside him said, with insinuation as well as command.\n\nHe found it impossible to resist; indeed, the very desire to resist had been spirited away. Slowly they made their way across the silvery patchwork of the lawn to the door of the Blue Summer-house. This was a tumble-down structure with a thatched roof; it had once been blue, but was now no colour at all. Low seats ran round the inside walls, and as Paul stood at the dark entrance he perceived that these seats were already occupied; and he hesitated. But Nixie pulled him gently in.\n\n'This is a regular Meeting,' she said, as naturally as though she had been wholly innocent of a part in the plot. 'They've only been waiting for us. Please come in.' She even pushed him.\n\n'It may be regular, but it is most unexpected,' he said, breathless rather, and curiously shy as he crossed the threshold and peered round at the silent faces about him. Eyes, he saw, were big and round and serious, shining with excitement. Clearly it was a very important occasion. He wondered what an 'irregular 'meeting would be like.\n\n'We waited till mother was away,' explained a candid voice, speaking with solemnity from the recesses.\n\n'And till Madmerzelle had to go to the dentist and stay to tea,' added another.\n\n'So that it would be easier for you to come,' concluded Nixie, lest he should think all these excuses were only on their own account.\n\nShe led him across the cobbled floor to a wooden arm - chair with crooked and shattered legs, and persuaded him to sit down. He did so.\n\n'There was some sense in that, at any rate,' he remarked irrelevantly, not quite sure whether he referred to the children, or Mademoiselle, or the chair, and landing at the same instant with a crash upon the rickety support which was much lower than he thought it was. The joints and angles of the wood entered his ribs. He lost all memory of how to be sedate after that. He began to enjoy himself absurdly.\n\nSilvery laughter was heard, followed immediately by the sound of rushing little feet as a dozen small shadows shot out into the moonlight and tore across the lawn at top speed. China and Japan he recognised, and a cohort of furry creatures in their rear.\n\n'Now you've frightened them all away,' exclaimed the voice that had spoken first.\n\n'Doesn't matter,' replied the other, who evidently spoke with authority; 'Uncle Paul was in before they left. They saw the introduction. That's enough. So now,' it added with decision, 'if you're quite ready we'd better begin.'\n\nPaul grasped by this time that he was the central figure in some secret ceremony of the children, that it was of vital importance to them, as well as a profound compliment to himself. The animals formed part of it so long as they could be persuaded to stay. Their own rituals, however, were so vastly more wonderful and dignified\u2014especially the Ritual of the Cats\u2014that they were somewhat contemptuous, and had escaped at the earliest opportunity. It was, of course, his formal initiation into their world of make-believe and imagination. He stood before them on the floor of this tumbled-down Blue Summer-house in the capacity of the Candidate. Strange chills began to chase one another down his long spine. A shy happiness swept through him and made him shiver. 'Can they possibly guess,' he wondered, 'how far more important this is to me than to them?'\n\n'Are you ready then?' Nixie asked again.\n\n'Quite ready,' he replied in a deep and tremulous voice.\n\n'Go ahead then,' said the voice of decision.\n\nA little bell rang, manipulated by some invisible hand in the darkness, and Nixie darted forward and drew a curtain that bore a close resemblance to a carriage rug across the doorway, so that only the faintest gleam of moonlight filtered through the cracks on either side. Then the owner of the voice of authority left his throne on the back wall and stepped solemnly forward in the direction of the candidate. Paul recognised Jonah with some difficulty. He tripped twice on the way.\n\nThe stumbling was comprehensible. On his head he wore a sort of mitre that on ordinary occasions was evidently used to keep the tea hot on the schoolroom table; for it was beyond question a tea-cosy. A garment of variegated colours wrapped his figure down to the heels and trailed away some distance behind him. It was either a table-cloth or a housemaid's Sunday dress, and it invested him with a peculiar air of quaint majesty. He might have been King of the Gnomes. On his hands were large leathern gauntlets\u2014very large indeed; and with loose fingers whose movements were clearly difficult to control, he grasped a stick that once may have been a hunting crop, but now was certainly a wand of office.\n\nIn front of Paul he came to a full stop, gathering his robes about him.\n\nHe made a little bow, during which the mitre shifted dangerously to one side, and then tapped the candidate lightly with the wand on the head, shoulders, and breast.\n\n'Please answer now,' he said in a low tone, and then went backwards to his seat against the wall. His robe of office so impeded him that he was obliged to use the wand as a common walking-stick. Once or twice, too, he hopped.\n\n'But you've forgotten to ask it,' whispered Nixie from the door where she was holding up the curtains with both hands. 'He's got nothing to answer.'\n\nQuickly correcting his mistake, Jonah then stood up on his seat and said, rather shyly, the following lines, evidently learned by heart with a good deal of trouble:\u2014\n\n\u2003You've applied to our Secret Society,\n\n\u2003Which is full of unusual variety,\n\n\u2003And, in spite of your past,\n\n\u2003We admit you at last,\n\n\u2003But\u2014we hope you'll behave with propriety.\n\n'Now, stand up and answer, please,' whispered Nixie. 'Daddy made all this up, you know. It's your turn to answer now.'\n\nPaul rose with difficulty. At first it seemed as if the chair meant to rise with him, so tightly did it fit; but in the end he stood erect without it, and bowing to the President, he said in solemn tones\u2014and the words came genuinely from his heart:\n\n'I appreciate the honour done to me. I am very grateful indeed.'\n\n'That's very good, I think,' Nixie whispered under her breath to him.\n\nThen Toby advanced, climbing down laboriously from her perch on the broken bench, and stalked up to the spot just vacated by her brother. She, too, was suitably dressed for the occasion, but owing to her diminutive size, and the fact that she did not reach up to the patch of moonlight, it was not possible to distinguish more than the white cap pinned on to her hair. It looked like a housekeeper's cap. She, too, carried a wand of office. Was it a hunting crop or poker, Paul wondered?\n\nToby, then, with much more effort than Jonah, repeated the formula of admission. She got the lines a little mixed, however:\u2014\n\n\u2003You've applied to our Secret Society,\n\n\u2003Which is full of unusual propriety,\n\n\u2003And, in spite of your past,\n\n\u2003We admit you at last,\n\n\u2003But we hope you'll behave with variety.\n\n'I will endeavour to do so,' said Paul, replying with a low bow.\n\nWhen he rose again to an upright position, Nixie was standing close in front of him. One arm still held up the curtains, but the other pointed directly into his face.\n\n'Your 'ficial position in the Society,' she said in her thin, musical little voice, also repeating words learned by heart, 'will be that of Recording Secretary, and your principal duties to keep a record of all the Aventures and to read them aloud at Regular Meetings. Any Meeting anywhere is a Regular Meeting. You must further promise on your living oath not to reveal the existence of the Society, or any detail of its proceedings, to any person not approved of by the Society as a whole.'\n\nShe paused for his reply.\n\n'I promise,' he said.\n\n'He promises,' repeated three voices together. There was a general clatter and movement in the summer-house. He was forced down again into the rickety chair and the three little officials were clambering upon his knees before he knew where he was. All talked breathlessly at once.\n\n'Now you're in properly\u2014at last!'\n\n'You needn't pretend any more'\n\n'But we knew all along you were really trying hard to get in?'\n\n'I really believe I was,' said he, getting in a chance remark.\n\nThey covered him with kisses.\n\n'We never thought you were as important as you pretended,' Jonah said; 'and your being so big made no difference.'\n\n'Or your beard, Uncle Paul,' added Toby.\n\n'And we never think people old till they're married,' Jonah explained, putting the mitre on his uncle's head.\n\n'So now we can have our aventures all together,' exclaimed Nixie, kissing him swiftly, and leaping off his knee. The other two followed her example, and suddenly\u2014he never quite understood how it happened so quickly\u2014the summer-house was empty, and he was alone with the moonlight. A flash of white petticoats and slender black legs on the lawn, and lo, they were gone!\n\nOn the gravel path outside sounded a quick step. Paul started with surprise. The very next minute Mile. Fleury, in her town clothes and hat, appeared round the corner.\n\n'Ow then!' she exclaimed sharply, 'the little ones zey are no more 'ere? Mr. Rivairs...!' She shook her finger at him.\n\nPaul tried to look dignified. For the moment, however, he quite forgot the tea-cosy still balanced on his head.\n\n'Mademoiselle Fleury,' he said politely, 'the children have gone to bed.'\n\n'It is 'igh time that they are already in bed, only I hear their voices now this minute,' she went on excitedly. 'They 'ide here, do they not?'\n\n'I assure you, Mademoiselle, they have gone to bed,' Paul said. The woman stared at him with amazement in her eyes. He wondered why. Then, with a crash, something fell from the skies, hitting his nose on the way down, and bounding on to the ground.\n\n'Oh, the mitre!' he cried with a laugh, 'I clean forgot it was there.' He kicked it aside and stared with confusion at his companion. She looked very neat and trim in her smart town frock. He understood now why she stared so, and his cheeks flamed crimson, though it was too dark for them to be seen.\n\n'Meester Reevairs,' she said at length, the desire to laugh and the desire to scold having fought themselves to a standstill, so that her face betrayed no expression at all, you lead zem astray, I think.'\n\n'On the contrary, it is they who lead me,' he said self-consciously. 'In fact, they have just deprived me of my very best armour'\n\n'Armour!' she interrupted, 'Armoire! Ah! They 'ide upstairs in the cupboard,'\u2014and she turned to run.\n\n'Do not be harsh with them,' he cried after her, 'it is all my fault really. I am to blame, not they.'\n\n\"Arsh! Oh no!' she called back to him. 'Only, you know, if your seester find them at this hour not in bed'\n\nPaul lost the end of the sentence as she turned the corner of the house. He gathered up the remnants of the ceremony and followed slowly in her footsteps.\n\n'Now, really,' he thought, 'what a simple and charming woman! How her eyes twinkled! And how awfully nice her voice was!' He flung down the rugs and wands and tea-cosy in the hall. 'Out there,' with a jerk in the direction of the Atlantic Ocean, 'the whole camp would make her a Queen.'\n\nAltogether the excitement of the last hour had been considerable. He felt that something must happen to him unless he could calm down a bit.\n\n'I know,' he exclaimed aloud, 'I'll go and have a hot bath. There's just time before dinner. That'll take it out of me.' And he went up the front stairs, singing like a boy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "\u2002'Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.' \u2014BLAKE.\n\nFor some days after that Paul walked on air. Incredible as it may seem to normally constituted persons, he was so delighted to have found a medium in which he could in some measure express himself without fear of ridicule, that the entire world was made anew for him. He thought about it a great deal. He even argued in his muddled fashion, but he got no farther that way. The only thing he really understood was the plain fact that he had found a region where his companions were about his own age, with his own tastes, ready to consider things that were real, and to let the trivial and vulgar world go by.\n\nThis was the fact that stared him in the face and made him happy. For the first time in his life he could play with others. Hitherto he had played alone.\n\n'It's a safety-valve at last,' he exclaimed, using his favourite word. 'Now I can let myself go a bit.\n\nThey will never laugh; on the contrary, they'll understand and love it. Hooray!'\n\n'And, remember,' Nixie had again explained to him, 'you have to write down all the aventures. That's what keeping the records means. And you must read them out to us at the Meetings.'\n\nAnd he chuckled as he thought about it, for it meant having real Reports to write at last, reports that others would read and appreciate.\n\nThe aventures, moreover, began very quickly; they came thick and fast; and he lived in them so intensely that he carried them over into his other dull world, and sometimes hardly knew which world he was in at all. His imagination, hungry and untamed, had escaped, and was seeking all it could devour.\n\nIt was a hot afternoon in mid-June, and Paul was lying with his pipe upon the lawn. His sister was out driving. He was alone with the children and the smaller portion of the menagerie,\u2014smaller in size, that is, not in numbers; cats, kittens, and puppies were either asleep, or on the hunt, all about them. And from an open window a parrot was talking ridiculously in mixed French and English.\n\nThe giant cedars spread their branches; in the limes the bees hummed drowsily; the world lay a scented garden around him, and a very soft wind stole to and fro, stirring the bushes with sleepy murmurs and making the flowers nod.\n\nChina and Japan lay panting in the shade behind him, and not far off reposed the big grey Persian, Mrs. Tompkyns. Regardless of the heat, Pouf, Zezette, and Dumps flitted here and there as though the whole lawn was specially made for their games; and Smoke, the black cat, dignified and mysterious, lay with eyes half-closed just near enough for Paul to stroke his sleek, hot sides when he felt so disposed. He\u2014Smoke that is\u2014blinked indifferently at passing butterflies, or twitched his great tail at the very tip when a bird settled in the branches overhead; but for the most part he was intent upon other matters\u2014matters of genuine importance that concerned none but himself.\n\nA few yards off Jonah and Toby were doing something with daisies\u2014what it was Paul could not see; and on his other side Nixie lay flat upon the grass and gazed into the sky. The governess was\u2014where all governesses should be out of lesson-time\u2014elsewhere.\n\n'Nixie, you're sleeping. Wake up.'\n\nShe rolled over towards him. 'No, Uncle Paul, I'm not. I was only thinking.'\n\n'Thinking of what?'\n\n'Oh, clouds and things; chiefly clouds, I think.' She pointed to the white battlements of summer that were passing very slowly over the heavens. 'It's so funny that you can see them move, yet can't see the thing that pushes them along.' 'Wind, you mean?'\n\n'H'mmmmm.'\n\nThey lay flat on their backs and watched. Nixie made a screen of her hair and peered through it. Paul did the same with his fingers.\n\n'You can touch it, and smell it, and hear it,' she went on, half to herself, 'but you can't see it.'\n\n'I suspect there are creatures that can see the wind, though,' he remarked sleepily.\n\n'I 'spect so too,' she said softly. 'I think I could if I really tried hard enough. If I was very, oh very kind and gentle and polite to it, I think'\n\n'Come and tell me quietly,' Paul said with excitement. 'I believe you're right.'\n\nHe scented a delightful aventure. The child turned over on the grass twice, roller fashion, and landed against him, lying on her face with her chin in her hands and her heels clicking softly in the air.\n\nShe began to explain what she meant. 'You must listen properly because it's rather difficult to explain, you know'; he heard her breathing into his ear, and then her voice grew softer and fainter as she went on. Lower and lower it grew, murmuring like a distant mill-wheel, softer and softer; wonderful sentences and words all running gently into each other without pause, somewhere below ground. It began to sound far away, and it melted into the humming of the bees in the lime trees... Once or twice it stopped altogether, Paul thought, so that he missed whole sentences... Gaps came, gaps filled with no definite words, but only the inarticulate murmur of summer and summer life...\n\nThen, without warning, he became conscious of a curious sinking sensation, as though the solid lawn beneath him had begun to undulate. The turf grew soft like air, and swam up over him in green waves till his head was covered. His ears became muffled; Nixie's voice no longer reached him as something outside himself; it was within\u2014curiously running, so to speak, with his blood. He sank deeper and deeper into a delicious, soothing medium that both covered and penetrated him.\n\nThe child had him by the hand, that was all he knew, then\u2014a long sliding motion, and forget-fulness.\n\n'I'm off,' he remembered thinking, 'off at last into a real aventure!'\n\nDown they sank, down, down; through soft darkness, and long, shadowy places, passing through endless scented caverns, and along dim avenues that stretched, for ever and ever it seemed, beneath the gloom of mighty trees. The air was cool and perfumed with earth. They were in some underworld, strangely muted, soundless, mysterious. It grew very dark.\n\n'Where are we, Nixie?' He did not feel alarm; but a sense of wonder, touched delightfully by awe, had begun to send thrills along his nerves. Her reply in his ear was like a voice in a tiny trumpet, far away, very soft. 'Come along! Follow me!'\n\n'I'm coming. But it's so dark.'\n\n'Hush,' she whispered. 'We're in a dream together. I'm not sure where exactly. Keep close to me.'\n\n'I'm coming,' he repeated, blundering over the roots beside her; 'but where are we? I can't see a bit.'\n\n'Tread softly. We're in a lost forest\u2014just before the dawn,' he heard her voice answer faintly.\n\n'A forest underground? You mean a coal measure?' he asked in amazement.\n\nShe made no answer. 'I think we're going to see the wind,' she added presently.\n\nHer words thrilled him inexplicably. It was as if\u2014in that other world of gross values\u2014some one had said, 'You're going to make a million!' It was all hushed and soft and subdued. Everything had a coating of plush.\n\n'We've gone backwards somewhere\u2014a great many years. But it's all right. There's no time in dreams.'\n\n'It's dreadfully dark,' he whispered, tripping again.\n\nThe persuasion of her little hand led him along over roots and through places of deep moss. Great spaces, he felt, were about him. Shadows coated everything with silence. It was like the vast primeval forests of his country across the seas. The map of the world had somehow shifted, and here, in little England, he found the freedom of those splendid scenes of desolation that he craved. Millions of huge trees reared up about them through the gloom, and he felt their presence, though invisible.\n\n'The sun isn't up yet,' she added after a bit. He held her hand tightly, as they stumbled slowly forward together side by side. He began to feel extraordinarily alive. Exhilaration seized him. He could have shouted with excitement.\n\n'Hush!' whispered his guide, 'do be careful. You'll upset us both.' The trembling of his hand betrayed him. 'You stumble like an om'ibus!'\n\n'I'm all right. Go ahead!' he replied under his breath. 'I can see better now!'\n\n'Now look,' she said, stopping in front of him and turning round.\n\nThe darkness lifted somewhat as he bent down to follow the direction of her gaze. On every side, dim and thronging, he saw the stems of immense trees rising upwards into obscurity. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them. His eyes followed their outline till the endless number bewildered him. Overhead, the stars were shining faintly through the tangled network of their branches. Odours of earth and moss and leaves, cool and delicate, rose about them; vast depths of silence stretched away in every direction. Great ferns stood motionless, with all the magic of frosted window-panes, among their roots. All was still and dark and silent. It was the heart of a great forest before the dawn\u2014prehistoric, unknown to man.\n\n'Oh, I wonder\u2014I wonder 'began Paul, groping about him clumsily with his hands to feel the way.\n\n'Oh, please don't talk so loud,' Nixie whispered, pinching his arm; 'we shall wake up if you do. Only people in dreams come to places like this.'\n\n'You know the place?' he exclaimed with increasing excitement. 'So do I almost. I'm sure this has all happened before, only I can't remember'\n\n'We must keep as still as mice.'\n\n'We are\u2014still as mice.'\n\n'This is where the winds sleep when they're not blowing. It's their resting-place.'\n\nHe looked about him, drawing a deep breath. 'Look out; you'll wake them if you breathe like that? whispered the child.\n\n'Are they asleep now?'\n\n'Of course. Can't you see?'\n\n'Not much\u2014yet!'\n\n'Move like a cat, and speak in whispers. We may see them when they wake.'\n\n'How soon?' 'Dawn. The wind always wakes with the sun. It's getting closer now.'\n\nIt was very wonderful. No words can describe adequately the still splendour of that vast forest as they stood there, waiting for the sunrise. Nothing stirred. The trees were carved out of some marvellous dream-stuff, motionless, yet conveying the impression of life. Paul knew it and recognised it. All primeval woods possess that quality\u2014trees that know nothing of men and have never heard the ringing of the axe. The silence was of death, yet a sense of life that is far beyond death pulsed through it. Cisterns of quiet, gigantic, primitive life lay somewhere hidden in these shadowed glades. It seemed the counterpart of a man's soul before rude passion and power have stirred it into activity. Here all slept potentially, as in a human soul. The huge, sombre pines rose from their beds of golden moss to shake their crests faintly to the stars, awaiting the coming of the true passion\u2014the great Sun of life, that should call them to splendour, to reality, and to the struggle of a bigger life than they yet knew, when they might even try to shake free from their roots in the hard, confining earth, and fly to the source of their existence\u2014the sun.\n\nAnd the sun was coming now. The dawn was at hand. The trees moved gently together, it seemed. The wood grew lighter. An almost imperceptible shudder ran through it as through a vast spider's web.\n\n'Look!' cried Nixie. His simple, intuitive little guide was nearer, after all, to reality than he was, for all his subtle vision. 'Look, Uncle Paul!'\n\nHis attempt to analyse wonder had prevented his seeing it sooner, but as she spoke he became aware that something very unusual was going forward about them. His skin began to tickle, and a strange sense of excitement took possession of him.\n\nA pale, semi-transparent substance he saw hung everywhere in the air about them, clinging in spirals and circles to the trunks, and hanging down from the branches in long slender ribbons that reached almost to the ground. The colour was a delicate pearl-grey. It covered everything as with the softest of filtered light, and hung motionless ins the air in painted streamers of thinnest possible vapour.\n\nThe silken threads of these gossamer ribbons dropped from the sky in millions upon millions. They wrapped themselves round the very star-beams, and lay in sheets upon the ground; they curled themselves round the stones and crept in among the tiniest crevices of moss and bark; they clothed the ferns with their fairy gauze. Paul could even feel them coiling about his hair and beard and eyelashes. They pervaded the entire scene as light does. The colour was uniform; whether in sheets or ribbons, it did not vary in shade or in degree of transparency. The entire atmosphere was pervaded by it, frozen into absolute stillness.\n\n'That's the winds\u2014all that stuff,' Nixie whispered, her voice trembling with excitement. 'They're asleep still. Aren't they awful and wonderful?'\n\nAs she spoke a faint vibration ran everywhere through the ribbons. Involuntarily he tightened his grasp on the child's hand.\n\n'That's their beginning to wake,' she said, drawing closer to him, 'like people moving in sleep.'\n\nThe vibration ran through the air again. It quivered as reflections in the surface of a pool quiver to a ghost of passing wind. They seated themselves on a fallen trunk and waited. The trees waited too; as gigantic notes in a set piece, Paul thought, that the coming sun would presently play upon like a hand upon a vast instrument. Then something -moved a few feet away, and he jumped in spite of himself.\n\n'Only Jonah,' explained his guide. 'He's asleep like us. Don't wake him; he's having a dream too.'\n\nIt was indeed Jonah, wandering vaguely this way and that, disappearing and reappearing, wholly unaware, it seemed, of their presence. He looked like a gnome. His feet made no sound as he moved about, and after a few minutes he lost himself behind a big trunk and they saw him no more. But almost at once behind him the round figures of China and Japan emerged into view. They came, moving fast and busily, blundering against the trees, tumbling down, and butting into everything that came in their path as though they could not see properly. Paul watched them with astonishment.\n\n'They're only half asleep, and that's why they see so badly,' Nixie told him. 'Aren't they silly and happy?'\n\nBefore he could answer, something else moved into their limited field of vision, and he was aware that a silent grey shadow was stalking solemnly by. All dignity and self- confidence it was; stately, proud, sure of itself, in a region where it was at home, conscious of its power to see and move better than any one else. Two wide-open and brilliant eyes, shining like dropped stars, were turned for a moment towards them where they sat on the log and watched. Then, silent and beautiful, it passed on into the darkness beyond, and vanished from their sight.\n\n'Mrs. Tompkyns!' whispered Nixie. 'She saw us all right!'\n\n'Splendid!' he exclaimed under his breath, full of admiration.\n\nNixie pinched his arm. A change had come about in the last few minutes, and into this dense forest the light of approaching dawn began to steal most wonderfully. A universal murmuring filled the air.\n\n'The sun's coming. They're going to wake now!' The child gave a little shiver of delight. Paul sat up. A general, indefinable motion, he saw, was beginning everywhere to run to and fro among the hanging streamers. More light penetrated every minute, and the tree stems began to turn from black to purple, and then from purple to faint grey. Vistas of shadowy glades began to open up on all sides; every instant the trees stood out more distinctly. The myriad threads and ribbons were astir.\n\n'Look!' cried the child aloud; 'they're uncurling as they wake.'\n\nHe looked. The sense of wonder and beauty moved profoundly in his heart. Where, oh where, in all the dreams of his solitary years had he seen anything to equal this unearthly vision of the awakening winds?\n\nThe winds moved in their sleep, and awoke.\n\nIn loops, folds, and spirals of indescribable grace they slowly began to unwrap themselves from the tree stems with a million little delicate undulations; like thin mist trembling, and then smoothing out the ruffled surface of their thousand serpentine eddies, they slid swiftly upwards from the moss and ferns, disentangled themselves without effort from roots and stones and bark, and then, reinforced by countless thousands from the lower branches, they rose up slowly in vast coloured sheets towards the region of the tree tops.\n\nAnd, as they rose, the silence of the forest passed into sound\u2014trembling and murmuring at first, and then rapidly increasing in volume as the distant glades sent their voices to swell it, and the note of every hollow and dell joined in with its contributory note. From all the shadowy recesses of the wood they heard it come, louder and louder, leaping to the centre like running great arpeggios, and finally merging all lesser notes in the wave of a single dominant chord\u2014the song of the awakened winds to the dawn.\n\n'They're singing to the sun,' Nixie whispered. Her voice caught in her throat a little and she tightened her grasp on his big hand.\n\n'They're changing colour too,' he answered breathlessly. They stood up on their log to see.\n\n'It's the rate they go does that,' she tried to explain. She stood on tiptoe.\n\nHe understood what she meant, for he now saw that as the wind rose in ribbons, streams and spirals, the original pearl-grey changed chromatically into every shade of colour under the sun.\n\n'Same as metals getting hot,' she said. 'Their colour comes 'cording to their speed.'\n\nMany of the tints he found it impossible to name, for they were such as he had never dreamed of. Crimsons, purples, soft yellows, exquisite greens and pinks ran to and fro in a perfect deluge of colour, as though a hundred sunsets had been let loose and were hunting wildly for the West to set in. And there were shades of opal and mother-of-pearl so delicate that he could only perceive them in his bewildered mind by translating them into the world of sound, and imagining it was the colour of their own singing.\n\nFar too rapidly for description they changed their protean dress, moving faster and faster, glowing fiercely one minute and fading away the next, passing swiftly into new and dazzling brilliancies as the distant winds came to join them, and at length rushing upwards in one huge central draught through the trees, shouting their song with a roar like the sea.\n\nSuddenly they swept up into the sky\u2014sound, colour and all\u2014and silence once more descended upon the forest. The winds were off and about their business of the day. The woods were empty. And the sun was at the very edge of the world.\n\n'Watch the tops of the trees now,' cried Nixie, still trembling from the strange wonder of the scene. 'The Little Winds will wake the moment the sun touches them\u2014the little winds in the tops of the trees.'\n\nAs she spoke, the sun came up and his first rays touched the pointed crests above them with gold; and Paul noticed that there were thousands of tiny, slender ribbons streaming out like elastic threads from the tips of all the pines, and that these had only just begun to move. As at a word of command they trooped out to meet the sunshine, undulating like wee coloured serpents, and uttering their weird and gentle music at the same time. And Paul, as he listened, understood at last why the wind in the tree-tops is always more delicately sweet than any other kind, and why it touches so poignantly the heart of him who hears, and calls wonder from her deepest lair.\n\n'The young winds, you see,' Nixie said, peering up beneath her joined hands and finding it difficult to keep her balance as she did so. 'They sleep longer than the others. And they're not loose either; they're fastened on, and can only go out and come back.'\n\nAnd, as he watched, he saw these young winds fly out miles into the brightening sky, making lines of flashing colour, and then tear back with a whirring rush of music to curl up again round the twigs and pine needles.\n\n'Though sometimes they do manage to get loose, and make funny storms and hurricanes and things that no one expects at all in the sky.'\n\nPaul was on the point of replying to this explanation when something struck against his legs, and he only just saved himself from falling by seizing Nixie and risking a flying leap with her from the log. 'It's that wicked Japan again,' she laughed, clambering back on to the tree.\n\nThe puppy was vigorously chasing its own tail, bumping as it did so into everything within reach. Paul stooped to catch it. At the same instant it rose up past his very nose, and floated off through the trees and was lost to view in the sky.\n\nNixie laughed merrily. 'It woke in the middle of its silly little dream,' she said. 'It was only half-asleep really, and playing. It won't come back now.'\n\n'All puppies are absurd like that'\n\nBut he did not finish his profound observation about puppies, for his voice at that moment was drowned in a new and terrible noise that seemed to come from the heart of the wood. It happened just as in a children's fairy tale. It bore no resemblance to the roar the winds made; there was no music in it; it was crude in quality\u2014angry; a sound from another place.\n\nIt came swiftly nearer and nearer, increasing in volume as it came. A veil seemed to spread suddenly over the scene; the trees grew shadowy and dim; the glades melted off into mistiness; and ever the mass of sound came pouring up towards them. Paul realised that the frontiers of consciousness were shifting again in a most extraordinary fashion, so that the whole forest slipped off into the background and became a dim map in his memory, faint and unreal\u2014and, with it, went both Nixie and himself. The ground rose and fell under their feet. Her hand melted into something fluid and slippery as he tried to keep his hold upon it. The child whispered words he could not catch. Then, like the puppy, they both began to rise.\n\nThe roar came out to meet them and enveloped them furiously in mid air.\n\n'At any rate, we've seen the wind!' he heard the child's voice murmuring in his beard. She rose away from him, being lighter, and vanished through the tops of the trees.\n\nAnd then the roar drowned him and swept him away in a whirling tempest, so that he lost all consciousness of self and forgot everything he had ever known...\n\nThe noise resolved itself gradually into the crunching sounds of the carriage wheels and the clatter of horses' hoofs coming up the gravel drive.\n\nPaul looked about him with a sigh that was half a yawn. China and Japan were still romping on the lawn, Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke were curled up in hot, soft circles precisely where they had been before, Toby and Jonah were still busily engaged doing 'something with daisies' in the full blaze of the sunshine, and Nixie lay beside him, all innocence and peace, still gazing through the tangle of her yellow hair at the slow-sailing clouds overhead.\n\nAnd the clouds, he noticed, had hardly altered a line of their shape and position since he saw them last.\n\nHe turned with a jump of excitement.\n\n'Nixie,' he exclaimed, 'I've seen the wind!'\n\nShe rolled over lazily on her side and fixed her great blue eyes on his own, between two strands of her hair. From the expression of her brown face it was possible to surmise that she knew nothing\u2014and everything.\n\n'Have you?' she said very quietly. 'I thought you might.'\n\n'Yes, but did I dream it, or imagine it, or just think it and make it up?' He still felt a little bewildered; the memory of that strangely beautiful picture-gallery still haunted him. Yonder, before the porch, the steaming horses and the smart coachman on the box, and his sister coming across the lawn from the carriage all belonged to another world, while he himself and Nixie and the other children still stayed with him, floating in a golden atmosphere where Wind was singing and alive.\n\n'That doesn't matter a bit,' she replied, peering at him gravely before she pulled her hair over both eyes. 'The point is that it's really true! Now,' she added, her face completely hidden by the yellow web, 'all you have to do is to write it for our next Meeting\u2014write the record of your Aventure'\n\nAnd read it out? 'he said, beginning to understand. The yellow head nodded. He felt utterly and delightfully bewitched.\n\n'All right,' he said; 'I will.'\n\n'And make it a very wonderful indeed Aventure,' she added, springing to her feet. 'Hush! Here's mother!'\n\nPaul rose dizzily to greet his sister, while the children ran off with their animals to other things.\n\n'You've had a pleasant afternoon, Paul, dear?' she asked.\n\n'Oh, very nice indeed 'His thoughts were still entangled with the wind and with the story he meant to write about it for the next Meeting.\n\nShe opened her parasol and held it over her head.\n\n'Now, come indoors,' he went on, collecting himself with an effort, 'or into the shade. This heat is not good for you, Margaret.' He looked at her pale, delicate face. 'You're tired too.'\n\n'I enjoyed the drive,' she replied, letting him take her arm and lead her towards the house. 'I met the Burdens in their motor. They're coming over to luncheon one day, they said. You'll like him, I think.'\n\n'That's very nice,' he remarked again, 'very nice. Margaret,' he exclaimed suddenly, ashamed of his utter want of interest in all she was planning for him, 'I think you ought to have a motor too. I'm going to give you one.'\n\n'That is sweet of you, Paul,' she smiled at him. 'But really, you know, one likes horses best. They're much quieter. Motors do shake one so.'\n\n'I don't think that matters; the point is that it's really true,' he muttered to himself, thinking of Nixie's judgment of his Aventure.\n\nHis sister looked at him with her expression of faint amusement.\n\n'You mustn't mind me,' he laughed, planting her in a deck-chair by the shade of the house; 'but the truth is, my mind is full just now of some work I've got to do\u2014a report, in fact, I've got to write.'\n\nHe went off into the house, humming a song. She followed him with her eyes.\n\n'He is so strange. I do wish he would see more people and be a little more normal.'\n\nAnd in Paul's mind, as he raced along the passage to his private study in search of pen and paper, there ran a thought of very different kind in the shape of a sentence from the favourite of all his books:\n\n'Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\u2002'It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor bard) in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor.' \u2014R. L. S.\n\nNow that his first Aventure was an accomplished fact, and that he was writing it out for the Meeting, Paul carried about with him a kind of secret joy. At last he had found an audience, and an audience is unquestionably a very profound need of ever human heart. Nixie was helping him to expression.\n\n'I'll write them such an Aventure out of that Wind - Vision,' he exclaimed, 'that they'll fairly shiver with delight. And if they shiver, why shouldn't all the children in the world shiver too?'\n\nHe no longer made the mistake of thinking trivial; if he could find an audience of children a about the world, children known or unknown, to whom he could show his little gallery of pictures what could be more reasonable or delightful? What could be more useful and worth doing than to show the adventuring mind some meaning in all the beauty that filled his heart? And the Wind-Vision might be a small\u2014a very small, beginning. It might be the first of a series of modern fairy tales. The idea thrilled him with pleasure. 'A safety-valve at last!' he cried. 'An audience that won't laugh!'\n\nFor, in reality, there was also a queer motherly quality in him which he had always tried more or less successfully to hide, and of which, perhaps, he was secretly half ashamed\u2014a feeling that made him long to give of his strength and sympathy to all that was helpless, weary, immature.\n\nHe went about the house like a new man, for in proportion as he allowed his imagination to use its wings, life became extraordinarily alive. He sang, and the world sang with him. Everything turned up little smiling faces to him, whispering fairy contributions to his tale.\n\n'The more I give out, the more I get in,' he laughed. 'I declare it's quite wonderful,' as though he had really discovered a new truth all for himself. New forces began to course through his veins like fire. As in a great cistern tapped for the first time, this new outlet produced other little cross-currents everywhere throughout his being. Paul began to find a new confidence. Another stone had shifted in the fabric of his soul. He moved one stage nearer to the final pattern that it had been intended from the beginning of time he should assume.\n\nA world within a world began to grow up in the old grey house under the hill, one consisting of Nixie and her troupe, with Paul trailing heavily in the rear, very eager; and the other, of the grownup members of the household, with Mile. Fleury belonging to neither, yet in a sense belonging to both. The cats and animals again were in the former\u2014an inner division of it, so that it was like a series of Chinese boxes, each fitting within the next in size.\n\nAnd this admission of Paul into the innermost circle produced a change in the household, as well as in himself. After all, the children had not betrayed him; they had only divined his secret and put him right with himself. But this was everything; and who is there with a vestige of youth in his spirit that will not understand the cause of his mysterious exhilaration?\n\nOutwardly, of course, no definite change was visible in the doings of the little household. The children said little; they made no direct reference to his conversion; but the change, though not easily described, was felt by all. Paul recognised it in every fibre of his being. Every one, hi noticed, understood by some strange freemasonry that he had been initiated, for every one, he fancied, treated him a little differently. It was natural that the children should give signs of increased admiration and affection for their huge new member, but there was no obvious reason why his sister, and the servants, and the very animals into the bargain should regard him with a strain of something that hesitated between tolerance and tenderness.\n\nIf truth were told, they probably did nothing of the sort; it was his own point of view that had changed. His imagination was responsible for the rest; yet he felt as though he had been caught into the heart of a great conspiracy, and the silent, unobtrusive way every one played his, her, or its part contrived to make him think it was all very real indeed.\n\nThe cats, furry and tender magicians that they are, perhaps interpreted the change more skilfully and easily than any one else. Without the least fuss or ceremony they made him instantly free of their world, and the way their protection and encouragement were extended to him in a hundred gentle ways gave him an extraordinarily vivid impression that they, too, had their plans and conferences just as much as the children had. They made everything seem alive and intelligent, from the bushes where they hunted to the furniture where they slept. They brought the whole world, animate and inanimate, into his scheme of existence. Everything had life, though not the same degree of life. It was all very subtle and wonderful. He, and the children, and the cats, all had imagination according to their kind and degree, and all equally used it to make the world haunted and splendid. Formerly, for instance, he had often surprised Mrs. Tompkyns going about in the passages on secret business of her own, perhaps not altogether good, yet looking up with an assumption of innocence that made it quite impossible to chide or interfere. (It was, of course, only an assumption of innocence. A cat's eyes are too intent and purposeful for genuine innocence; they are a mask, a concealment of a thousand plans.) But now, when he met her, she at once stopped and sent her; tail aloft by way of signal, and came to rub against his legs. Her eyes smiled\u2014that pregnant, significant smile of the feline, shown by mere blinking of the lids\u2014and she walked slowly by his side with arched back, as an invitation that he might\u2014nay, that he; should\u2014accompany her.\n\nOn her great, dark journeys he might not of course yet go, but on the smaller, less important expeditions he was welcome, and she showed it plainly every time they met. He was led politely to numerous cupboards, corners, attics, and cellars, whose existence he had not hitherto suspected. There were wonderful and terrible places among the book-shelves and under massive pieces of furniture which she showed to him when no one was about; and she further taught him how to sit and stare for long periods until out of vacancy there issued a series of fascinating figures and scenes of strange loveliness. And he, laughing, obeyed. All this, and much else besides, they taught him cleverly.\n\nSome of them, too, came to visit him in his own quarters. They came into his study, and into his bedroom, and one of them\u2014that black, thick-haired fellow called Smoke\u2014the one with the ghostly eyes and very furry trousers\u2014even took to tapping at his door late at night (by standing on tip-toe he could just reach the knob), and thus established the right to sleep on the sofa or even to curl up on the foot of the bed.\n\nAnd all that the kittens, the puppies, and the out-of-door animals did to teach him as an equal is better left untold, since this is a story and not a work on natural history.\n\nMlle. Fleury, the little French governess, alone seemed curiously out of the picture. She made difficulties here and there, though not insuperable ones. The fact was, he saw, that she was not properly in either of the two worlds. She wanted to be in both at once, but, from the very nature of her position, succeeded in getting into neither; and to fall between two worlds is far more perplexing than to fall between two stools. Paul made allowances for her just as he might have made allowances for an over-trained animal that had learned too many human-taught tricks to make its presence quite acceptable to its own four-footed circle. The charming little person\u2014he, at least, always thought her voice and her manners and her grace charming after a life where these were unknown\u2014had to! justify herself to the grown-up world where his sister belonged, as well as to the world of the children whom she taught. And, consequently, she was often compelled to scold when, perhaps, her soul cried out that she should bless.\n\nHis heart always hammered, if ever so slightly, when he made his way, as he now did more and more frequently, to the schoolroom or the nursery. Schoolroom-tea became a pleasure of almost irresistible attractions, and when it was over and the governess was legitimately out of the way, Nixie sometimes had a trick of announcing a Regular Meeting to which Paul was called upon to read out his latest 'Aventure.'\n\n'Hulloa! Having tea, are you?' he exclaimed, looking in at the door one afternoon shortly after the wind episode. This feigned surprise, which deceived nobody, he felt was admirable. It was exactly the way Mrs. Tompkyns did it.\n\n'Come in, Uncle Paul. Do stay. You must stay,' came the chorus, while Mile. Fleury half smiled, half frowned at him across the table. 'Here's just the stodgy kind of cake you like, with jam and honey!'\n\n'Well,' he said hesitatingly, as though he scorned such things, while Mademoiselle poured out a cup, and the children piled up a plate for him. He stayed, as it were, by chance, and a minute later was as earnestly engaged with the cake and tea as if he had come with that special purpose.\n\n'It's all very well done,' was his secret thought. 'It's exactly the way Mrs. Tompkyns manages all her most important affairs.'\n\n'Nous avons r\u00e8union apr\u00e9s,' Jonah informed the governess presently with a very grave face. The young woman glanced interrogatively at Paul.\n\n'Oui, oui,' he said in his Canadian French, 'c'est vrai. R\u00e9union r\u00e9gulaire.'\n\n'Mais qu'elle id\u00e9e, donc!'\n\n'Il est le pr\u00e9sident,' said Toby indignantly, pointing with a jam sandwich.\n\n'Voila vous \u00eates!' he exclaimed. 'There you are! Je suis le pr\u00e9sident!' and he helped himself to more cake as though by accident.\n\nFor five seconds Mile. Fleury kept her face. Then, in spite of herself, her lips parted and a row of white teeth appeared.\n\n'Meester Reevairs, you spoil them,' she said, 'and I approve it not. Mais, voyons donc! Quelles manier\u00e9s!' she added as Sambo and Pouf passed from Toby's lap on to the table and began to sniff at the water cress... 'Non, \u00e7a c'est trop fort!' She leaned across to smack them back into propriety.\n\n'Abominable,' Paul cried,' abominable tout a fait.'\n\n'Alwaze when you come such things 'appen.'\n\n'Pas mon faute,' he said, helping to catch Pouf.\n\n'They are deeficult enough without that you make them more,' she said.\n\n'Uncle Paul doesn't know his genders,' cried Jonah; 'hooray!'\n\n'Ma faute,' he corrected himself, pronouncing it 'fote.'\n\nThen Toby, struggling with Smoke, whose nose she was trying to force into a saucer of milk which he did not want, upset the saucer all over her dress and the table, splashing one and all. Jonah sprang up and knocked his chair over backwards in the excitement. Mrs. Tompkyns, wakening from her sleep upon the piano stool, leaped on to the notes of the open keyboard with a horrible crash. A pandemonium reigned, all talking, laughing, shouting at once, and the governess scolding. Then Paul trod on a kitten's tail under the table and extraordinary shrieks were heard, whereupon Jonah, stooping to discover their cause, bumped his head and began to cry. Moving forward to comfort him, Paul's sleeve caught in the spout of the teapot and it fell with a clatter among the cups and plates, sending the sugar-tongs spinning into the air, and knocking the milk-jug sideways so that a white sea flooded the whole tray and splashed up with white spots on to Paul's cheeks.\n\nThe cumulative effect of these disasters reached a culminating point, and a sudden hush fell upon the room. The children looked a trifle scared. Paul, with milk drops trickling down his nose, blushed and looked solemn. Very guilty and awkward he felt. Mile. Fleury in fluent, rattling French explained her view of the situation, at first, however, without effect. At such moments mere sound and fury are vain; subtle, latent influences of the personality alone can calm a panic, and these the little person did not, of course, possess.\n\nTo Paul the whole picture appeared in very vivid detail. With the simplicity of the child and the larger vision of the man he perceived how closely tears and laughter moved before them; and it really pained him to see her confused and rather helpless amid all the debris. She was pretty, slim, and graceful; futile anger did not sit well upon her.\n\nThere she stood, little more than a girl herself, staring at him for a moment speechless, the dainty ruffles of her neat grey dress sticking up about her pretty throat, he thought, like the bristles of an enraged kitten. The hair, too, by her ears and neck suddenly seemed to project untidily and increased the effect. The sunlight from the window behind her spread through it, making it cloud-like.\n\n'C'est tout mon\u2014ma fote,' he said, stretching out both hands impulsively, 'tout!' in his villainous Quebec French. 'Scold me first, please.'\n\nThere was milk on his left eyebrow, and a crumb of cake in his beard as well. The governess stared at him, her eyes still blazing ominously. Her lips quivered. Then, fortunately, she laughed; no one really could have done otherwise. And that laugh saved the situation. The children, who had been standing motionless as statues awaiting their doom, sprang again into life. In a trice the milk had been moped up, the tongs replaced, and the tea-pot put to bed under its ornamented cosy.\n\n'I forgeeve\u2014this time,' she said. 'But you are vairy troublesome.'\n\nIn future, none the less, she forgave always; her hostility, never quite sure of itself, vanished from that moment.\n\n'Blue Summer'ouse,' whispered Jonah in his ear, 'and bring your Wind-Vision to read to us at the Meeting.'\n\n'But not too much Wind-Vision, please, Meester Reevairs,' she said, overhearing the whisper. 'They think of nothing else.'\n\nPaul stared at her. The thought in his mind was that she ought to come too, only he knew the children would not approve.\n\n'Then I must moderate their enthusiasm,' he said gravely at last.\n\nMlle. Fleury laughed in his face. 'You are worst of ze lot, I know\u2014worst of all. Your Aventures and plays trouble all their lesson-time.'\n\n'It is my education,' he said, as Jonah tugged at his coat from behind to get him out of the room. 'You educate them; they educate me; I improve slowly. Voila!'\n\n'But vairy slowly, n'est-ce pas? And you make up all such exp\u00e9riences like ze Wind-Vision to fill their minds.'\n\nNixie had told him that all their aventures filtered through to her, and that she kept a special cahier in her own room, where she wrote them all out in her own language. 'Another soul, perhaps, looking about for a safety-valve,' he thought swiftly.\n\n'But, Mademoiselle, why not translate them into French? That's a good idea, and excellent practice for them.'\n\n'Per'aps,' she laughed, 'per'aps we do that. C'est une idee au moins.'\n\nShe wanted so much, it was clear, to come into their happy little world of imagination and adventure. He realised suddenly how lonely her life might be in such a household.\n\n'You write them, and I will correct them for you,' he said.\n\n'Come on, do come on, Uncle,' cried the voices urgently from the door. The children were already in the passage. The little governess looked rather wistfully after them, and on a sudden impulse Paul did a thing he had never before done in his life. He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers, but so boyishly, and with such simple politeness and sincerity that there was hardly more in the act than if Jonah had done the same to Nixie in an aventure of another sort.\n\n'Au revoir then,' he said laughingly; 'chacun a son devoir, don't they? And now I go to do mine.'\n\nHis sentence was somewhat mixed. He just had time to notice the pretty blush of confusion that spread over her face, and to hear her laugh. 'You are weecked children\u2014vairy weecked\u2014and you, Meester Reevairs, the biggest of all,' when Nixie and Jonah had him by the hand and they were off out of the house to their Meeting in the Blue Summer-house.\n\nThus Mile. Fleury ceased to be a difficulty in the household so far as his proceedings with the children were concerned. On the contrary, she became a helpful force, and often acted as a sort of sentry, or outpost, between one world and the other. Herself, she never came into their own private region, but hovered only along the borders of it. For though little over twenty years of age, she was French, and she understood exactly how much interest she might allow herself to take in the Society without endangering her own position,\u2014or theirs\u2014or his. She knew that she could not enter their world freely and still maintain authority in the other; but, meanwhile, she managed Paul precisely as though he were one of her own charges, and saw to it that he did nothing which could really be injurious to the responsibilities for which she was answerable.\n\nThus Paul, thundering along with his belated youth, enjoyed himself more and more, while he enjoyed, also learned, marked, and read." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "It haunted him a good deal, this Vision of the Winds. Now he never heard the stirring of the woods without thinking of those delicately brilliant streamers flying across the sky.\n\nThe satisfaction of spinning a fairy tale out of it for the children's Society was only equalled by the pleasure of the original inspiration. Here, too, was a means of expressing himself he had never dreamed of; the relief was great. Moreover, it brought him into close touch with the inexhaustible reservoirs which children draw upon for their endless world of Make-Believe, and he understood that the child and the poet live in the same region. His feet were now set upon that secret path trodden by the feet of children since the world began; and, for all his burden of years, there was no telling where it might lead him. For the springs of perennial youth have their sources in that region\u2014the youth of the spirit, with the constant flow of enthusiasm, the touch of simple, ever-living beauty, and the whole magic of vision. No one with imagination can ever become blas\u00e9, perhaps need ever grow old in the true sense.\n\nBy this means he might at last turn his accumulated stores to some useful account. The great geysers of imagination that dry up too soon with the majority might keep bubbling for ever; and provided the pipes kept open for smaller visions, they might with time become channels for inspiration of a still higher order. His audience might grow too.\n\n'I'm getting on,' he observed to Nixie a few days later; 'getting on pretty well for an old man!'\n\n'I knew you would,' she replied approvingly. 'Only you wasted a lot of time over it. When you came you were so old that Toby thought you were going to die, you know?\n\n'So bad as all that, was it?'\n\n'H'mmmmm,' she nodded, her blue eyes faintly troubled; 'quite!'\n\nPaul took her on his knee and stared at her. The world of elemental wonder came quite close. There was something of magic about the atmosphere of this child's presence that made it possible to believe anything and everything. She embodied exquisitely so many of his dreams\u2014those dreams of God and Nature he had lived with all those lonely years in Canadian solitudes.\n\n'You know, I think,' he said slowly as he watched with delight the look of tender affection upon her face, 'that, without knowing it, you're something of a little magician, Nixie. What do you, think?'\n\nBut she only laughed and wriggled on his knee.\n\n'Am I really?' she said presently. 'Then what are you, I wonder?'\n\n'I used to be a Wood Cruiser,' he replied gravely; 'but what I am now it's rather difficult to say. You ought to know,' he added, 'as you're the magician who's changing me.'\n\n'I've not changed you,' she laughed. 'I only found you out. The day you came I saw you were simply full of our things\u2014and that you'd be a sort of Daddy to us. And we shall want a lot more Aventures, please, as soon as ever you can write them out.'\n\nShe was off his knee and half-way to the house the same second, for the voice of Mile. Fleury was heard in the land. He watched her flitting through the patches of sunshine across the lawn, and caught the mischievous glance she turned to throw at him as she disappeared through the open French window\u2014a vision of white dress, black legs, and flying hair. And only when she was gone did his heavier machinery get to work with the crop of questions he always thought of too late.\n\n'A beginning, at any rate!' he said to himself, thinking of all the things he was going to write for them. 'Only I wish we were all in camp out there among the cedars and hemlocks on Beaver Creek, instead of boxed up in this toy garden where there are no wild animals, and you mayn't cut down trees for a big fire, and there are silly little Notice Boards all over the place about trespassers being prosecuted...'\n\nThe thought touched something in the centre of his being. He travelled; laughing and sighing as he went. 'My wig!' he thought aloud, 'but it's really extraordinary how that child brings those big places over here for me, and makes them seem alive with all kinds of things I could never have dreamed of\u2014alone!'\n\n'Paul, dear, what are you thinking about, here all by yourself\u2014and without a hat on too, as usual? If the gardeners hear you talking aloud like this they will think\u2014! Well, I hardly know quite what they will think!'\n\n'Something Blake said\u2014to be honest,' he laughed, turning to his sister who had come silently down the path, dressed, as on the day he had first seen her, in white serge with a big flower-hat. Languid she looked, but delicate and wholly charming; she wore brown garden gauntlets over hands and wrists, and a red parasol she held aloft, shed a becoming pink glow upon her face.\n\n'Maurice Blake! 'she exclaimed. 'Joan's cousin with the big farm on the Downs? But you don't know him!'\n\n'Not that Blake,' he laughed again; I and Joan, if you mean Joan Nicholson, Dick's niece who took up that rescue work, or something, in London, I have never seen in my life.'\n\n'Then it's a book you mean\u2014one of those books you are always poring over in the library,' she murmured half reproachfully.\n\n'One of Dick's books, yes,' he replied gently, linking his arm through hers and leading the way in the direction of the cedars. 'One of my \"treasures,\"' he added slyly, 'that you once shamelessly imagined to be in petticoats.'\n\nShe rather liked his teasing. The interests they shared were uncommonly small, perhaps, and the coinage of available words still smaller. Yet their differences never took on the slightest 'edge.' A genuine affection smoothed all their little talks.\n\n'You do read such funny old books, Paul,' she observed, as though somewhere in her heart lurked a vague desire to make him more modern. 'Don't you ever try books of the day\u2014novels, for instance?' She had one under her arm at the moment. He took it to carry for her.\n\n'I have tried,' he admitted, a little ashamed of his backwardness, 'but I never can make out what they're driving at\u2014half the time. What they described has never happened to me, or come into my world. I don't recognise it all as true, I mean\u2014' He stopped abruptly for fear he might say something to wound her. 'One can always learn, though, and widen one's world, can't one? After all, we are all in the same world, aren't we?'\n\nHe realised the impossibility of correcting her; the invitation to be sententious could not catch him; his nature was too profound to contain the prig.\n\n'Are we?' he said gently.\n\n'Oh, I think so\u2014more or less, Paul. There's only one nice world, at least.' She arranged her hat and parasol to keep the sun off, for she was afraid of the sun, even the shy sun of England.\n\nHe pulled out the deck chair for her, and opened it.\n\n'Here,' she said pointing, 'if you don't mind, dear; or perhaps over there where it looks drier; or just there under that tree, perhaps, is better still. It's more sheltered, and there's less sun, isn't there?'\n\n'I think there is, yes,' he replied, obeying her. The phrase 'there's less sun' seemed to him so neatly descriptive of the mental state of persons without imagination.\n\n'She'll come here for her summer holidays soon,' his sister resumed, going back to Joan. 'She works very hard at that \"Home\" place in town, and Dick always liked her to use us here as if the place were her own. I promised that.' She dropped gracefully into the wicker chair, and Paul sat down for a moment beside her on the grass. 'He spent a lot of capital, you know, in the thing and made her superintendent or something. She has a sort of passion for this rescuing of slum children, and, I believe, works herself to death over it, though she has means of her own. So you will be nice to her when she comes, won't you, and look after her a bit? I do what I can, but I always feel I'm rather a failure. I never know what to talk to her about. She's so dreadfully in earnest about every thing.'\n\nPaul promised. Joan sounded rather attractive, to tell the truth. He remembered something, too, of the big organisation his old friend had founded in London for the rescue and education of waif-boys. A thrill of pride ran through him, and close at its heels a secret sense of shame, that he himself did nothing in the great world of action\u2014that his own life was a mass of selfish dreaming and refined self-seeking, that all his yearning for God and beauty was after all, perhaps, but a spiritual egoism. It was not the first time this thought had come to trouble and perplex. Of late\u2014especially since he had begun to find these safety-valves of self-expression, and so a measure of relief\u2014his mind had turned in the direction of some bigger field to work in outside self, perhaps more than he quite knew or realised.\n\n'Paul,' his sister interrupted his reflections, after a prolonged fidgeting to make herself comfortable so that the parasol should shade her, the hat not tickle her, and the novel open easily for reading; 'you are happy here, aren't you? You're not too dull with us, I mean?'\n\n'It's quite delightful, Margaret,' he answered at once. 'In one sense I have never been so happy in my life.' He looked straight at her, the sun catching his brown beard and face. 'And I love the children; they're just the kind of companions I need.'\n\n'I'm so glad, so glad,' she said genuinely. 'And it's very kind and good-natured of you to be with them such a lot. You really almost fill Dick's place for them.' She sighed and half closed her eyes. 'Some day you may have children of your own; only you would spoil them quite atrociously, I'm sure.'\n\n'Am I spoiling yours?' he asked solemnly.\n\n'Dreadfully,' she laughed; 'and turning little Mademoiselle's head into the bargain.'\n\nIt was his turn to burst out laughing. 'I think that young lady can take care of herself without difficulty,' he exclaimed; 'and as for my spoiling the children, I think it's they who are spoiling me!'\n\nAnd, presently, with some easy excuse, he left her side and went off into the woods. Margaret watched him charge across the lawn. A perplexed expression came into her face as she picked up her novel and settled down into the cushions, balancing the red parasol over her head at a very careful angle. Admiration was in her glance, too, as she saw him go. Evidently she was proud of her brother\u2014proud that he was so different from other people, yet puzzled to the verge of annoyance that he should be so.\n\n'What a strange creature he is,' was her some-, what indefinite reflection; 'I thought but one Dick could exist in the world! He's still a boy\u2014not a day over twenty-five. I wonder if he's ever been in love, or ever will be? I think\u2014I hope he won't; he's rather nice as he is after all.'\n\nShe sighed faintly. Then she dipped again into her novel, wherein the emotions, from love down-; wards, were turned on thick and violent as from] so many taps in a factory; got bored with it looked on to the last chapter to see what happened; to everybody; and, finally\u2014fell asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "\u2003To me alone there came a thought of grief:\n\n\u2003A timely utterance gave that thought relief,\n\n\u2003And I again am strong:\n\n\u2003I hear the echoes through the mountains throng,\n\n\u2003The winds come to me from the fields of sleep,\n\n\u2003And all the earth is gay...\n\n\u2014Ode, W. W.\n\nFor the rest of the day Paul was in peculiarly good spirits; he went about the place full of bedevilment of all kinds, to the astonishment of the household in general and of his sister in particular. The oppressive heat seemed to have no effect upon him. There was something in the air that excited him, and he was very busy getting rid of the excitement.\n\nWith bedtime came no desire to sleep. 'I feel all worked-up, Margaret,' he said as he lit her candle in the hall. 'I think it must be an \"aventure\" coming,'\u2014though, of course, she had no idea what he meant.\n\n'There's thunder about,' she replied. 'It's been so very close all day.'\n\n'Sleep well,' Paul said when he left her at the top of the stairs; and the last thing he heard as he went down the long winding passage to his bedroom in the west wing was her voice faintly assuring him 'One always does here, I'm glad to say.'\n\nOnce inside, and the door shut, he gave himself up to his mood. It was a mood apparently that came from nowhere. A soft and mysterious excitement, all delicious, stirred in the depths of his being, rising slowly to the surface. Perhaps it was growing-pains somewhere in the structure of his personality, engineered subconsciously by his imagination; perhaps only 'weather.' He always followed the barometer like a strip of dried seaweed.\n\nBut on this particular night something more than mere 'weather' was abroad; his nerves sent a succession of swift faint warnings to his brain. To begin with, the night herself claimed definite attention. Some nights are just ordinary nights; others touch the soul and whisper 'I am the night. Look at me. Listen!'\n\nHe obeyed the summons and went to the window, leaning out as his habit was. The darkness pressed up in a solid wall, charged to the brim with mysteries waiting to reveal themselves. No trees were visible, no outline of moor or hill or garden. The sky was pinned down to the horizon more tightly than usual\u2014keeping back all manner of things. Very little air crept beneath the edges, so that the atmosphere was oppressive. The day had been cloudless, but with the sunset whole continents of vapour had climbed upon the hills of the evening wind, driven slowly by high currents that had not yet come near enough the earth to be heard and felt.\n\nHe coughed\u2014gently. The least noise, he felt, would shatter some soft and delicate structure that rose everywhere through the darkness\u2014some web-like shadow-scaffolding that reared upwards, supporting the night.\n\n'Something's going to happen,' he said low to himself. 'I can feel it coming.'\n\nHe became very imaginative, enjoying his mood enormously, letting it act as a mental purge. Aventures that he would discover for the next Meeting swept through him. The stress and fever of creative fancy, stirred by the deep travailing of the elements behind that curtain of night, was upon him. Then, sleep being far away, he went to the writing-table, where Nixie's deft hands had everything prepared, lit a second candle, and began to write.\n\n'I'll write \"How I climbed the Scaffolding of the Night,\" 'he murmured; 'for I feel it true within me. I feel as if I were part of the night\u2014part of all this beautiful soft darkness.'\n\nBut, before he had written a dozen lines, he stopped and fell to listening again, staring past the steady candle-flames out into the open. The stillness was profound. A single ivy-leaf rattled sharply all by itself on the wall outside his window. He felt as if that leaf tapped faintly upon his own brain. By a curious process known only to the poetic temperament, he passed on to feel with everything about him\u2014as though some portion of himself actually merged in with the silence, with the perfumes of trees and garden, with the voice of that little tapping leaf. And, in proportion as he realised this, he transferred the magic of it to his tale. He found the words that fitted his conception like a natural skin. He knew in some measure the satisfaction and relief of expression.\n\n'A year ago\u2014a month ago,' he thought with delight, 'this would have been impossible to me. Nixie has taught me so much already!'\n\nWhat he really wanted, of course, were the living, flaming words of poetry. But this he knew was denied him; perhaps the fire of inspiration did not burn steadily enough; perhaps the intellectual foundation was not there. At any rate, he could only do his best and struggle with the prose, and this he did with intense pleasure.\n\nAfter a time he laid his pen down and fell to thinking again\u2014the kind of reverie that dramatises a mood before the inner vision. And another inspiration came upon him with its sudden little glory; he realised vividly that within himself a region existed where all that he desired might find fulfilment; where yearnings, dreams, desires might come true. There existed this inner place within where he might visualise all he most wished for into a state of reality. The workshop of the creative imagination was its vestibule...\n\nWhether or not he could put it into words for others to realise was merely a question of craft...\n\nHe must have sat thinking in this way much longer than he knew, for the candles had burnt down quite low when at length he bestirred himself with a mighty yawn and rose to go to bed. But hardly had he begun to unfasten his crumpled black tie when something made him pause.\n\nFar away, through the hush that covered the world, that 'something' was astir\u2014coming swiftly nearer. He stepped back into the middle of the room and waited. Smoke, the sleeping black cat on the sofa, sat up and waited too. Looking about it with brilliant green eyes, wide open, and whiskers twitching backwards and forwards, it understood even better than he did that a change in all that world of darkness had come to pass. The animal stared alternately at the window and the door.\n\nFor another minute the stillness held supreme. Then, from the silent reaches beyond, this new sound came suddenly close, dropping down through leagues of night. It began with a faint roar in the chimney; a tree outside uttered a soft, rushing cry; a thousand leaves, instead of one, rattled on the wall.\n\nA Messenger, running headlong through the darkness, was calling aloud a warning as it ran, for all to understand who could. And, among the few who were awake and understood, 'Paul and his four-footed companion were certainly the first.\n\nA sudden movement of the vast fabric of darkness came next. That scaffolding of shadows trembled, as though the same moment it would fall and let in\u2014Light. In front of the bow window the muslin curtain that so long had hung motionless, now bellied out slowly into the room. The movement, mysterious and suggestive, claimed attention significantly. Paul and Smoke, watching it, exchanged glances. Then, with a long, sighing sound, it floated back again to its original position. It hung down straight and still as before.\n\nBut in that moment something had entered the room. Borne by this messenger of the coming storm, this stray Wind had left its warning\u2014and was gone!\n\nSmoke leapt softly down and padded over to sniff the curtain, and having done so, blinked up at Paul with eloquent eyes, and sat back to wait and\u2014wash! No apparatus of speech ever said more plainly 'Look out! Something's coming! Better be prepared as I am!'\n\nAnd something did come\u2014almost the same minute. The forces that had so Jong been trying to upset the tent of darkness, did upset it, and from one uplifted corner there rushed down upon the world a blue-white sheet of light that was utterly gorgeous. For one instant trees, moor, hill leaped into vivid outline. The hands that held the sheet of brilliance shook it from the four corners, and all the sky shook with it; and, immediately after, the scaffolding of night fell with a prodigious crash, as the true storm, following upon its herald, descended with a hundred thunders and the roar of ten hundred trumpets.\n\nThe true wind rushed headlong into the room and extinguished both candles. Smoke rubbed against Paul's feet in the darkness, thoroughly aroused; but Paul himself stood still, as the thrill and splendour of it all entered his heart and filled him with delight. Thunder, lightning, wind\u2014all passed mysteriously into his blood till he was almost conscious of a desire to add the sound of his own voice and shout aloud. The excitement of the elemental forces swept into himself. He understood now the signs of preparation that had been going forward in him during the day.\n\nSplendid sensations, the most splendid he ever knew, raced to and fro in his being, till it almost seemed as if his consciousness transferred itself to the tempest. Surely, that great wind tore out of his heart, that lightning sprang from his brain, that river of rain washed, not merely out of the sky, but out of himself. The edges of his personality became fluid and melted off into the very nature of the elements. 'Now,' he exclaimed aloud, pacing to and fro while Smoke followed him in the darkness and tried to play with the bows on his pumps, 'had I but the means of expression, what a message I could give to the world, of beauty, splendour, power!' He laughed in his excitement. 'If only the strings of my poor instrument had been tuned!'\n\nSighing a little to himself at the thought, he went to the window. The first fury of the storm had passed; there was a sudden deep lull broken only by the rushing drip of rain; he smelt the wet foliage and soaking grass. Close to the window, it chanced, there was a dead tree, and in its leafless branches, outlined sharply by the lightning against the black sky, he traced what seemed the huge letters of some elemental alphabet; and at that moment, the returning wind passed through them like a hand on giant strings. It drew forth a wonderful sound in response, a sound that pierced as a two-edged sword to the centre of his being. It was a true singing wind\u2014a Wind of Inspiration.\n\nAnd, as he heard it, the great wave that fought for utterance rose within him and began to force and tear its way out in spite of everything. Words came pouring through him\u2014like the stammering of torn strings upon a fiddle\u2014clipped wings trying to fly\u2014sparks streaming towards flame yet never achieving it. Similes and metaphors rushed, mixed and headlong, through his mind. In a moment he had dashed across the floor; the candles were again alight; and Paul, pencil in hand, was sitting at the table before a sheet of blank foolscap, the storm crashing about him, and Smoke watching him calmly with eyes full of expectant wonder.\n\nAnd then was enacted a little drama\u2014tragedy if ever there was one\u2014that must often enough take place in the secret places of the world's houses, where the dumb poet seeks to transfer his genuine passion into the measure of halting and inadequate verse. Poignantly dramatic the spectacle must be, though never witnessed mercifully by an audience of more than one. Paul wrote fast, setting the words down almost as they came. It was that little passionate Wind of Inspiration that was the cause of all the trouble. Smoke jumped up on the table to watch the motion of the pencil across the paper. For some reason he hardly thought it worth while to play with it:\n\n\u2003The Winds of Inspiration blow,\n\n\u2003Yet pass me ever by;\n\n\u2003And songs God taught me long ago,\n\n\u2003Unuttered burn and\u2014die.\n\nHe read the verse over, and with an impatient motion altered 'burn 'into 'fade.' Then he shook his head and continued:\n\n\u2003From all the far blue hills of heaven\n\n\u2003The dews of beauty rain;\n\n\u2003Yet unto me no drops are given\n\n\u2003To quench the ancient pain.\n\nHe scratched out 'ancient' and wrote over the top 'undying.' Then he scratched out 'undying 'and put 'ancient' back in its place. This time Smoke stretched out a long black paw with a velvet end to it and gave the pencil a deliberate dab. Paul either ignored, or did not notice it; but Smoke left the paw thrust forward upon the paper so as to be ready for the next dab.\n\n\u2003I know the passion of the night,\n\n\u2003Full of all days unborn,\u2014\n\n\u2003Full of the yearning of the light\n\n\u2003For one undying Morn.\n\nSmoke caught the tip of the pencil with a swift and accurate stroke, and the 'M' of ' Morn' was provided with an irregular tail Paul had not intended. Very quickly, however, without further interruption, he wrote on to the end.\n\n\u2003Above the embers of my heart,\n\n\u2003Waiting the Living Breath;\n\n\u2003The sparks fly listlessly apart\u2014\n\n\u2003Then circle to their death.\n\n\u2003Dead sparks that gathered ne'er to flame,\n\n\u2003Nor felt the kiss of fire!\n\n\u2003Dead thoughts that never found the name\n\n\u2003To spell their deep desire!\n\n\u2003Is then this instrument so poor\n\n\u2003That it may never sound\n\n\u2003Songs that must pass for evermore\n\n\u2003Unuttered and uncrowned?\n\n\u2003O soul that fain would'st steal heaven's fire,\n\n\u2003Who clipped thy golden wings?\n\n\u2003Who made so passionate a lyre,\n\n\u2003Then never tuned the strings?\n\n\u2003The Winds of Inspiration blow,\n\n\u2003Yet pass me ever by;\n\n\u2003And songs God taught me long ago,\n\n\u2003Lost in the silence\u2014die.\n\nHe rose from the table with a gesture of abrupt impatience and read the entire effusion through from beginning to end. First he laughed, then he sighed. He wondered for a moment how it was that so little of his passion had crept into the poor words. He crumpled up the paper and tossed it into the drawer; and then, blowing out the candles, moved over to the big arm-chair and dropped down into it. Again, as he sat there, his thoughts fell to dramatising his mood. He imagined that region within himself where all might come true, and all yearnings find adequate expression. The idea got more and more mingled with the storm. He pictured it to himself with extraordinarily vivid detail.\n\n'There is such a place, such a state,' he murmured, 'and it is, it must be accessible.'\n\nHe heard the clock in the stables\u2014or was it the church\u2014strike the quarter before midnight.\n\nAs he sat in the big chair, Smoke left the table and curled up again on the mat at his feet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "\u2002'Vision or imagination is a representation of what actually exists, really and unchangeably. He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light, than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.' \u2014W. B.\n\nIt was Smoke who first drew his attention to something near the door by 'padding' slowly across the carpet and staring up at the handle. Paul's eyes, following him, perceived next that the brass knob was silently turning. Then the door opened quickly and on the threshold stood\u2014Nixie. The open door made such a draught that the twenty winds tearing about inside the room almost lifted the mat at his feet. Behind her he saw the shadowy outline of a second figure, which he recognised as Jonah.\n\n'Shut the door\u2014quick!' he said, but they had done so and were already beside him almost before the words were out of his mouth. In spite of the darkness a very faint radiance came with them that he could distinguish their faces plainly; and his amazement on seeing them at all at this late hour was instantly doubled when he perceived further that they were fully dressed for going out. At the same time, however, so deep had he been in his reverie, and so strongly did the excitement of it yet linger in his blood, that he hardly realised how wicked they were to be parading the house at such a time of the night, and that his obvious duty was to bundle them back to bed. In a strange, queer way they almost seemed part of his dream, part of his dramatised mood, part of the region of wonder into which his thoughts had been leading him. Moreover, he felt in some dim fashion that they had come with a purpose of great importance.\n\n'It's awfully late, you know,' he exclaimed under his breath, peering into their faces through the darkness.\n\n'But not too late, if we start at once,' Jonah whispered. For a moment Paul had almost thought that they would melt away and disappear as soon as he spoke to them, or that they would not answer at all. But now this settled it; these were no figures in a dream. He felt their hands upon his arms and neck; the very perfume of Nixie's hair and breath was about him. She was dressed, he noticed, in her red cloak with the hood over her head, and her eyes were popping with excitement. The expression on her face was earnest, almost grave. He saw the faint gleam of the gold buckle where the shiny black belt enclosed her little waist.\n\n'If we start at once, I said,' repeated Jonah in a nervous whisper, pulling at his hand. Paul started to his feet and began fumbling with his black tie, feeling vaguely that either he ought to tie it properly or take it off altogether, and that it was a sort of indecent tinsel to wear at such a time. But he only succeeded in pricking his finger with the pin sticking out of the collar. He felt more than a little bewildered, if the truth were told.\n\n'I'll do that for you,' Nixie said under her breath; and in a twinkling her deft fingers had whipped the strip of satin from his neck.\n\n'You don't want a tie where we're going,' she laughed softly.\n\n'Or a hat either,' added Jonah. 'But I wish you'd hurry, please.'\n\n'I'd better put on another coat or a dressing-gown, or something,' he stammered.\n\n'Coat's best,' Jonah told him, and in a moment he had changed into a tweed Norfolk jacket that lay upon the chair.\n\nThey pulled him towards the door, Nixie holding one hand, Jonah the other, and Smoke following so closely at his heels that he almost seemed to be prodding him gently forward with his velvet padded boots. Paul understood that tremendous forces, elemental in character like the wind and rain and lightning, somehow added their immense suasion to the little hands that pulled his own. He made no resistance, but just allowed himself to go; and he went with a wild and boyish delight tearing through his mind.\n\n'Are we going out then?' he asked, 'out of doors?'\n\n'What's the exact time, the very exact time?' Nixie asked hurriedly, ignoring his question; and though Paul had looked a few minutes before they came in, he had quite forgotten by now. She helped herself to his watch, burrowing under his coat to find it, and peering closely to read the position of the hands.\n\n'Five minutes to twelve!' she exclaimed, addressing Jonah in excited whispers. 'Oh, I say! We must be off at once, or we shall miss the crack altogether. Come on, Uncle, or your life won't be safe a minute.'\n\n'Then what will it be a month, I should like to know?' he laughed as he was swept along through the darkness, not knowing what to say or think.\n\n'The crack! The crack! Quick, or we shall miss it!' cried the children in the same sentence, urging him heavily forward.\n\n'What crack? Where are we going to? What does it all mean?' he asked breathlessly, trying to avoid treading on their toes and the toes of Smoke who flew beside them with tail held swiftly aloft as though to guide them.\n\nThey brought him up with a sudden bump just outside the door, and Nixie turned up a serious face to explain, while Jonah waited impatiently in front of them.\n\n'Quick! 'she whispered, 'listen and I'll tell you. We're going to find the crack between Yesterday and To-morrow, and then\u2014slip through it.'\n\nHis heart leaped with excitement as he heard.\n\n'Go on,' he cried. 'Tell me more!'\n\n'You see, Yesterday really begins just after Midnight when To-day ends'; she said, 'and Tomorrow begins there too.'\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'After Midnight, To-morrow jumps away again a whole day, and is as far off as ever. That's the nearest you can get to To-morrow.'\n\n'I see.'\n\n'And Yesterday, which has been a whole day away, suddenly jumps up close behind again. So that Yesterday and To-morrow,' she went on, eager with excitement, 'meet at Midnight for a single second before flying off to their new places. Daddy told us that long ago.'\n\n'Exactly. They must.'\n\n'But now the world is old and worn. There's a tiny little crack between Yesterday and To-morrow. They don't join as they once did, and, if we're very quick, we can find the crack and slip through'\n\n'Bless my Timber Limits! 'he exclaimed; 'what a glorious notion!'\n\n'And, once inside there, there's no time, of course,' she went on, more and more hurriedly. 'Anything may happen, and everything come true.'\n\n'The very region 'was thinking about just now! 'thought Paul. 'The very place! I've found it!'\n\n'Do hurry up, oh do! 'put in Jonah with a loud whisper that echoed down the corridor, for his patience was at length exhausted by all this explanation. 'You are so slow getting started.'\n\n'Ready!' cried Paul and Nixie in the same breath.\n\nThey were off! Down the dark and silent stairs on tiptoe, through the empty halls, past the hat-racks and the stuffed deer heads that grinned down upon them from the walls, along the stone passage to the kitchen region, where the row of red fire-buckets gleamed upon the shelves, and so, past the ghostly pantry, to the back door. This they found open, for Jonah had already run ahead and unlocked it. Another minute and they had crossed the yard by the stables, where the pump stood watching them like a figure with an outstretched arm, and soon were well out on to the lawn at the back of the house. The rain had ceased, but the wind caught them here with such tremendous blows and shouting that they could hardly hear themselves speak, and had to keep closely together in a bunch to make their way at all. It was pitch dark and the stars were hidden. Paul stumbled and floundered, treading incessantly on the toes of the more nimble children. Smoke ran like a black shadow, now in front, now behind.\n\n'We're nearly there,' Nixie cried encouragingly, as he made a false step and landed with a crash in the middle of some low laurel bushes. 'But do be more careful, Uncle, please,' she added, helping him out again.\n\n'There's the clock striking!' Jonah called, a little in front of them. 'We're only just in time!'\n\nPaul recovered himself and pulled up beside them under the shadows of the big twin cedars that stood like immense sentries at the end of the lawn. He came rolling in, swaying like a ship in a heavy sea. And, as he did so, the sound of a church bell striking the hour came to their ears through the terrific uproar of the elements, blown this way and that by the wind.\n\nIt was midnight striking.\n\nAt the same instant he heard a peculiar sharp sound like whistling\u2014the noise wind makes tearing through a narrow opening.\n\n'The crack, the crack!' cried his guides together. 'That's the air rushing. It's coming. Look out!' They seized him by the hands.\n\n'But I shall never get through,' shouted Paul, thinking of his size for the first time.\n\n'Yes you will,' Nixie screamed back at him above the roar. 'Between the sixth and seventh strokes, remember.' The fifth stroke had already sounded. The wind caught it and went shrieking into the sky.\n\nSix! boomed the distant bell through the night. They held his hands in a vice.\n\nThere was a sound like an express train tearing through the air. A quick flash of brilliance followed, and a long slit seemed to open suddenly in the sky before them, and then flash past like lightning. Nixie tugged at one hand, and Jonah tugged at the other. Smoke scampered madly past his feet.\n\nA wild rush of wind swept him along, whistling in his ears; there was a breathless and giddy sensation of dropping through empty space that seemed as though it could never end\u2014and then Paul suddenly found himself sitting on a grassy bank beside a river, Nixie and Jonah on either side of him, and Smoke washing his face in front of them as though nothing in the whole world had ever happened to disturb his equanimity. And a bright, soft light, like the light of the sun, shone warmly over everything.\n\n'Only just managed it,' Nixie observed to Jonah. 'He is rather wide, isn't he?'\n\n'Everybody's thin somewhere,' was the reply.\n\n'And the crack is very stretchy'\u2014she added,\u2014 luckily.'\n\nPaul drew a long breath and stretched himself.\n\n'Well,' he said, still a little breathless and dizzy, 'such things were never done in my day.' 'But this isn't your day any more,' explained Nixie, her blue eyes popping with laughter and mischief, 'it's your night. And, anyhow, as I told you, there's no time here at all. There's no hurry now.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "'The imagination is not a state; it is the human existence itself.' \u2014W. B.\n\nPaul, looking round, felt utterly at peace with himself and the world; at rest, he felt. That was his first sensation in the mass. He recovered in a moment from his breathless entrance, and a subtle pleasure began to steal through his veins. It seemed as if every yearning he had ever known was being ministered to by competent unseen Presences; and, obviously, the children and the cats\u2014Mrs. Tompkyns had somehow managed to join Smoke\u2014felt likewise, for their countenances beamed and blinked supreme contentment.\n\n'Ah!' observed Jonah, sitting contentedly on the grass beside him. 'This is the place.' He heaved a happy little sigh, as though the statement were incontrovertible.\n\n'It is,' echoed Paul. And Nixie's eyes shone like blue flowers in a field of spring.\n\n'The crack's smaller than it used to be though,' he heard her murmuring to herself. 'Every year it's harder to get through. I suppose something's happening to the world\u2014or to people; some change going on'\n\n'Or we're getting older,' Jonah put in with pro-founder wisdom than he knew.\n\nPaul congratulated himself upon his successful entrance. He felt something of a dog! The bank on which he lay sloped down towards a river fledged with reeds and flowers; its waters, blue as the sky, flowed rippling by, and a soft wind, warm and] scented, sighed over it from the heart of the summer. On the opposite shore, not fifty yards across, a grove of larches swayed their slender branches lazily in the sun, and a little farther down the banks he saw a line of willows drooping down to moisten their tongue-like leaves. The air hummed pleasantly with insects; birds flashed to and fro, singing as they flew; and, in the distance, across miles of blue meadowlands, hills rose in shadowy outline to the sky. He feasted on the beauty of it all, absorbing it through every sense.\n\n'But where are we?' he asked at length, 'because a moment ago we were in a storm somewhere?' He turned to Nixie who still Jay talking to herself contentedly at his side. 'And what really happens here? 'he added with a blush. 'I feel so extraordinarily happy.'\n\nThey lay half-buried among the sweet-scented grasses. Jonah burrowed along the shore at some game of his own close by, and the cats made a busy pretence of hunting wild game in a dozen places at once, and then suddenly basking in the sun and washing each other's necks and backs as though wild-game hunting were a bore.\n\n'Nothing 'xactly\u2014happens, she answered, and her voice sounded curiously like wind in rushes\u2014'but everything\u2014is.\n\nIt seemed to him as though he listened to some spirit of the ages, very wise with the wisdom of eternal youth, that spoke to him through the pretty little mouth of this rosy-faced child.\n\n'It's like that river,' she went on, pointing to the blue streak winding far away in a ribbon through the landscape, 'which flows on for ever in a circle, and never comes to an end. Everything here goes on always, and then always begins again.'\n\nFor the river, as Paul afterwards found out, ran on for miles and miles, in the curves of an immense circle, of which the sea itself was apparently nothing but a widening of certain portions.\n\n'So here,' continued the child, making a pattern with daisies on his sleeve as she talked, 'you can go over anything you like again and again, and it need never come to an end at all. Only,' she added, looking up gravely into his face, 'you must really, really want it to start with.'\n\n'Without getting tired?' he asked, wonderingly.\n\n'Of course; because you begin over and over again with it.' 'Delightful!' he exclaimed, 'that means a place of eternal youth, where emotions continually renew themselves.'\n\n'It's the place where you find lost things,' she explained, with a little puzzled laugh at his foolish long words, 'and where things that came to! no proper sort of end\u2014things that didn't come true, I mean, in the world, all happen and enjoy them\u2014' selves'\n\nHe sat up with a jerk, forgetting the carefully arranged daisies on his coat, and scattering them all 'over the grass.\n\n'But this is too splendid!' he cried. 'This is what I've always been looking for. It's what I was thinking about just now when I tried to write a poem and couldn't.'\n\n'We found it long ago,' said the child, pointing to Jonah and Mrs. Tompkyns, Smoke having mysteriously disappeared for the moment. 'We' live here really most of the time. Daddy brought; us here first.'\n\n'Things life promised, but never gave, here come to full fruition,' Paul murmured to himself. 'You: mean,' he added aloud, 'this is where ideals that have gone astray among the years may be found again, and actually realised? A kingdom of heaven within the heart? 'He was very excited, and forgot for the moment he was speaking to a child.\n\n'I don't know about all that,' she answered, with a puzzled look. 'But it is life. We live-happily-ever-after here. That's what I mean.'\n\n'It all comes true here?'\n\n'All, all, all. All broken things and all lost things come here and are happy again,' she went on eagerly; 'and if you look hard enough you can find 'xactly what you want and 'xactly what you lost. And once you've found it, nothing can break it or lose it again.'\n\nPaul stared, understanding that the voice speaking through her was greater than she knew.\n\n'And some things are lost, we think,' she added, 'simply because they were wanted\u2014wanted very much indeed, but never got.'\n\n'Yet these are certainly the words of a child,' he reflected, wonder and delight equally mingled,' and of a child tumbling about among great spiritual things in a simple, intuitive fashion without knowing it.'\n\n'All the things that ought to happen, but never do happen,' she went on, picking up the scattered daisies and making the pattern anew on a different part of his coat. 'They all are found here.'\n\n'Wishes, dreams, ideals?' he asked, more to see what answer she would make than because he didn't understand.\n\n'I suppose that's the same thing,' she replied. 'But, now please Uncle Paul, keep still a minute or I can't possibly finish this crown the daisies want me to make for them.' Paul stared into her eyes and saw through them to the blue of the sky and the blue of the winding river beyond; through to the hills on the horizon, a deeper blue still; and thence into the softer blue shadows that lay over the timeless land buried in the distances of his own heart, where things might indeed come true beyond all reach of misadventure or decay. For this, of course, was the real land of wonder and imagination, where everything might happen and nothing need grow old. The vision of the poet saw... far\u2014far...\n\nAll this he realised through the blue eyes of the child at his side, who was playing with daisies and talking about the make-believe of children. His being swam out into the sunshine of great distances, of endless possibilities, all of which he might be able afterwards to interpret to others who did not see so far, or so clearly, as himself. He began to realise that his spirit, like the endless river at his feet, was without end or beginning. Thrills of new life poured into him from all sides.\n\n'And when we go back,' he heard the musical little voice saying beside him, 'that church will be striking exactly where we left it\u2014the sixth stroke, I mean.'\n\n'Of course; I see!' cried Paul, beginning to realise the full value of his discovery, 'for there's no time here, is there? Nothing grows old.'\n\n'That's it,' she laughed, clapping her hands, 'and you can find all the lost and broken things you want, if you look hard and\u2014really want them.'\n\n'I want a lot,' he mused, still staring into the little wells of blue opposite; 'the kind that are lost because they've never been \"got,\" 'he added with a smile, using her own word.\n\n'For instance,' Nixie continued, hanging the daisies now in a string from his beard, 'all my broken things come here and live happily\u2014if I broke them by accident; but if I broke them in a temper, they are still angry and frighten me, and sometimes even chase me out again. Only Jonah has more of these than I have, and they are all on the other side of the river, so we're quite safe here. Now watch,' she added in a lower voice, 'Look hard under the trees and you'll see what I mean perhaps. And wish hard, too.'\n\nPaul's eyes followed the direction of her finger across the river, and almost at once dim shapes began to move to and fro among the larches, starting into life where the shadows were deepest. At first he could distinguish no very definite forms, but gradually the outlines grew clearer as the forms approached the edges of the wood, coming out into the sunshine.\n\n'The ghosts! The ghosts of broken things!' cried Jonah, running up the bank for protection. 'Look! They're coming out. Some one's thinking about them, you see!'\n\nPaul, as he gazed, thought he had never seen such an odd collection of shapes in his life. They stalked about awkwardly like huge insects with legs of unequal length, and with a lop-sided motion that made it impossible to tell in which direction they meant to go. They had brilliant little eyes that flashed this way and that, making a delicate network of rays all through the wood like the shafts of a hundred miniature search-lights. Their legs, too, were able to bend both forwards and backwards and even sideways, so that when they appeared to be coming towards him they really were going away; and the strange tumbling motion of their bodies, due to the unequal legs, gave them an appearance that was weirdly grotesque rather than terrifying.\n\nIt was, indeed, a curious and delightful assortment of goblins. There were dolls without heads, and heads without dolls; milk jugs without handles, china teapots without spouts, and spouts without china teapots; clocks without hands, or with cracked and wounded faces; bottles without necks; broken cups, mugs, plates, and dishes, all with gaping slits and cracks in their anatomy, with half their faces missing, or without heads at all; every sor of vase imaginable with every sort of handle unimaginable; tin soldiers without swords or helmets, china puppies without tails, broken cages, knives without handles; and a collection of basins of all sizes that would have been sufficient to equip an entire fleet of cross-channel steamers: altogether a formidable and pathetic army of broken creatures.\n\n'What in the world are they trying to do?' he asked, after watching their antics for some minutes with amazement.\n\n'Looking for the broken parts,' explained Jonah, who was half amused, half alarmed. 'They get out of shape like that because they pick up the first pieces they find.'\n\n'And you broke all these things?' The boy nodded his head proudly. 'I recker-nise most of them,' he said, 'but they're nearly all accidents. I said \"sorry \"for each one.'\n\n'That, you see,' Nixie interrupted, 'makes all the difference. If you break a thing on purpose in a temper, you murder it; but the accidents come down here and feel nothing. They hardly know who broke them. In the end they all find their pieces. It's the heaven of broken things, we call it. But now let's send them away.'\n\n'How?' asked Paul.\n\n'By forgetting them,' cried Jonah.\n\nThey turned their faces away and began to think of other things, and at once the figures began to fade and grow dim. The lights went out one by one. The grotesque shapes melted into the trees, and a minute later there was nothing to be seen but the slender larch stems and the play of sunlight and shadow beneath their branches. 'You see how it works, at any rate,' Nixie said. 'Anything you've lost or broken will come back if you think hard enough\u2014nice things as well as nasty things\u2014but they must be real, real things, and you must want them in a real, real way.'\n\nIt was, indeed, he saw, the region where thoughts come true.\n\n'Then do broken people come here too?' Paul asked gravely after a considerable pause, during which his thoughts went profoundly wandering.\n\n'Yes; only we don't happen to know any. But all our dead animals are here, all the kittens that had to be drowned, and the puppies that died, and the collie the Burdens' motor killed, and Birthday, our old horse that had to be shot. They're all here, and all happy.'\n\n'Let's go and see them then,' he cried, delights with this idea of a heaven of broken animals.\n\nIn a moment they were on their feet and away over the springy turf, singing and laughing in the sunshine, picking flowers, jumping the little brooks that ran like crystal ribbons among the grass, Nixie and Jonah dancing by his side as though they springs in their feet and wings on their shoulder More and more the country spread before them like a great garden run wild, and Paul thought he never seen such fields of flowers or smelt such perfumes in the wind.\n\n'What's the matter now?' he exclaimed, Jonah stopped and began to stare hard at an acre of lilies of the valley by the way.\n\n'He's calling some things of his own,' Nixie answered. 'Stare and think\u2014and they'll all come. But we needn't bother about him. Come along!' And he only had time to see the lilies open in an avenue to make way for a variety of furry, four-legged creatures, when the child pulled him by the hand and they were off again at full speed across the fields.\n\nA sound of neighing made him turn round, and before he could move aside, a large grey horse with a flowing tail and a face full of gentle beneficence came trotting over the turf and stopped just behind him, nuzzling softly into his shoulder.\n\n'Nice, silly-faced old thing,' said Nixie, running up to speak to it, while a brown collie trotted quietly at her heels. A little further off, peeping up through a tangled growth of pinks and meadow-sweet, he saw the faces of innumerable kittens, watching him with large and inquisitive eyes, their ears just topping the flowers like leaves of fur. Such a family of animals Paul thought he had never even dreamed of.\n\n'This is the heaven of the lost animals,' Nixie cried from her seat on the back of the grey horse, having climbed up by means of a big stone. On her shoulder perched a small brown owl, blinking in the light like the instantaneous shutter of a photographic camera. It had fluffy feathers down to its ankles like trousers, and was very tame. 'And they are always happy here and have plenty to eat and drink. They play with us far better here than outside, and are never frightened. Of course, too, they get no older.'\n\nPaul climbed up behind her on the horse's back.\n\n'Now we're off! 'he cried; and with Jonah and a dozen animals at their heels, they raced off across the open country, holding on as best they could to mane and tail, laughing, shouting, singing, while the wind whistled in their ears and the hot sun poured down upon their bare heads.\n\nThen, suddenly, the horse stopped with a jerk that sent them sprawling forward upon his neck. He turned his head round to look at them with a comical expression in his big, brown eyes. Paul slid off behind, and Nixie saved herself by springing sideways into a bed of forget-me-nots. The owl fluttered away, blinking its eyes more rapidly than ever in a kind of surprised fury, shaking out its fluffy trousers, and Jonah arrived panting with his dogs and rabbits and puppies.\n\n'Come,' exclaimed Nixie breathlessly, 'he's had enough by now. No animal wants people too long. Let's get something to eat.'\n\n'And I'll cook it,' cried the boy, busying himself with sticks and twigs upon the ground. 'We'll have stodgy-pudding and cake and jam and oyster-patties, and then more stodgy-pudding again to finish up with.'\n\nPaul glanced round him and saw that all the animals had disappeared\u2014gone like thoughts forgotten. In their place he soon saw a column of blue smoke rising up among the fir trees close behind him, and the children flitting to and fro through it looking like miniature gypsies. The odour of the burning wood was incense in his nostrils.\n\n'But can't I see something too\u2014something of my own?' he asked in an aggrieved tone.\n\nNixie and Jonah looked up at him with surprise. 'Of course you can,' they exclaimed together. 'Just stare into space as the cats do, and think, and wish, and wait. Anything you want will come\u2014with practice. People you've lost, or people you've wanted to find, or anything that's never come true anywhere else.'\n\nThey went on busily with their cooking again, and Paul, lying on his back in the grass some distance away, sent his thoughts roaming, searching, deeply calling, far into the region of unsatisfied dreams and desires within his heart...\n\nFor what seemed hours and hours they wandered together through the byways of this vast, enchanted garden, finding everything they wished to find, forgetting everything they wished to forget, amusing themselves to their heart's content; till, at last, they stood together on a big boulder in the river where the spray rose about them in a cloud and painted a rainbow above their heads.\n\n'Get ready! Quick,' cried Jonah. 'The Crack's coming!'\n\n'It's coming!' repeated Nixie, seizing Paul's hand and urging him to hold very tight.\n\nHe had no time to reply. There was a rushing sound of air tearing through a narrow opening. The sky grew dark, with a roaring in his ears and a sense of great things flying past him. Again came the sensation of dropping giddily through space, and the next minute he found himself standing with the two children upon the lawn, darkness about them, and the storm howling and crashing over their heads through the branches of the twin cedars.\n\n'There's the clock still striking,' Nixie cried. 'It's only been a few seconds altogether.'\n\nHe heard the church clock strike the last six strokes of midnight.\n\nFor some minutes he realised little more than that he felt rather stiff and uncomfortable in his bedroom chair, and that he was chilly about the legs. Outside the wind still roared and whistled, making the windows rattle, while gusts of rain fell volleying against the panes as though trying to get in. A roll of distant thunder came faintly to his ear. He stretched himself and began to undress by the light of a single candle. On the table lay a sheet of paper headed 'How I climbed the Scaffolding of the Night,' and he read down the page and then took his pen and wrote the heading of something else on another sheet: 'Adventure in the Land between Yesterday and To-morrow.' With a mighty yawn he then blew out his candle and tumbled into bed.\n\nAnd with him, for all the howling of the elements, came a strange sense of peace and happiness. Out of the depths rose gradually before his inner eye in a series of delightful pictures the scenes he had just left, and he understood that the pathway to that country of dreams fulfilled and emotions that never die, lay buried far within his own being.\n\n'Between Yesterday and To-morrow' was to be the children's counterpart of that timeless, deathless region where the spirit may always go when hunted by the world, fretted by the passion of unsatisfied yearnings, plagued by the remorseless tribes of sorrow and disaster. There none could follow him, just as none\u2014none but himself\u2014could bring about its destruction. For he had found the mystical haven where all lost or broken things eternally reconstruct themselves.\n\nThe 'Crack,' of course, may be found by all who have the genuine yearning to recreate their world more sweetly, provided they possess at the start enough imagination to repay the trouble of training\u2014also that Wanderlust of the spirit which seeks ever for a resting-place in the great beyond that reaches up to God.\n\nPaul as yet had but discovered the entrance, led by little children who dreamed not how wondrous was the journey; but the rest would follow. For it is a region mapped gradually out of a thousand impulses, out of ten thousand dreams, out of the eternal desires of the soul. It is not discovered in a day, nor do the ways of entrance always remain the same. A thousand joys contribute to its fashioning, a thousand frustrated hopes describe its boundaries, and ten thousand griefs bring slowly, piece by piece, the material for its construction, while every new experience of the soul, successful or disastrous, adds something to its uncharted geography. Slowly it gathers into existence, becoming with every sojourn more real and more satisfying, till at length from the pain of all possible disillusionment the way opens to the heart of relief, to the peaceful place of hopes renewed, of purposes made fruitful and complete.\n\nAnd from this deathless region, too, flow all the forces of the soul that make for hope, enthusiasm, courage, and delight. The children might call it 'Between Yesterday and To-morrow,' and find their little broken dreams brought back to life; but Paul understood that its rewards might vary immensely according to the courage and the need of the soul that sought it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "\u2002'But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you.' \u2014YEATS.\n\nThus, led delicately by the animals and the children, and guided to a certain extent, too, by the curious poesy of his own soul, Paul Rivers came gradually into his own. Once made free of their world, he would learn next that the process automatically lade him free of his own. This simple expedient of having found an audience did wonders for him, for it not only loosened his tongue and his pen, but it all the deeper parts of him running into speech, id the natural love and poetry of the man began to produce a delightful, if somewhat extraordinary, harvest.\n\nHe understood\u2014none better\u2014that fantasy, unless rooted in reality, leads away from action and tends to weakness and insipidity; but that, grounded in the common facts of life, and content with idealising the actual, it might become an important factor for good, lending wings to the feet and lifting the soul over difficult places. His education advanced by leaps and bounds. And in some respects he showed himself possessed of a wisdom that could only have belonged to him because at heart he was still a child, and the ordinary 'knowledge of the world' had not come to spoil him in his life of solitude among the trees.\n\nFor instance, that 'Between Yesterday and Tomorrow' bore some curious relation to reverie and dreams, he dimly discerned, yet, with this simple and profound wisdom of his, he refused to pry too closely into the nature of such relationship. He did not seek to reduce the delightful experience to the little hard pellet of an exact fact. For that, he felt, would be to lose it. Exact knowledge, he knew, was often merely a great treachery, and 'fact' a dangerous weapon that deceived, and might even destroy, its owner. If he analysed too carefully, he might analyse the whole thing out of existence altogether, and such a contingency was not to be thought of for a single moment.\n\nMoreover, the attitude of the children confirmed his own. They never referred to their adventures until he had given them form and substance in his reports as recording secretary of the society. No word passed their lips until they had heard them read out, and then they talked of nothing else. During the day they maintained a sublime ignorance of his 'aventures of the night,' as though nothing of the kind had ever happened; and this tended still further to relegate it all to a region untouched by time, beyond the reach of chance, beyond the destruction of mere talk, eternal and real in the great sense.\n\nMeanwhile, as this hidden country he had discovered yielded to exploration, becoming more and more mapped out, and its springs of water tapped, Paul was conscious that the power from these vital sources began to modify his character, and to enlarge his outlook upon life. Imagination, released and singing, provides the greatest of all magics\u2014belief in one's self. The rivers of feeling carve their own channels, which are ever the shortest way to the ocean of fulfilment. The effects spread gradually to the remotest corner of his being.\n\nOne rainy day he found himself alone in the schoolroom with Nixie, for it was Saturday afternoon, and Mile. Fleury had carried off Jonah and Toby in their best clothes, and to their acute dismay, to have tea with the children\u2014they were dull children\u2014at the vicarage.\n\nDressed in blue serge, with a broad white collar over her shoulders and a band of gold about her waist that matched the colour of her hair, she darted about the room with her usual effect of brightness, so that he found himself continually thinking the sun had burst through the clouds. She was busily arranging cats and kittens in various positions in which they showed no inclination to remain, till the performance had somewhat the air of the old-fashioned game of 'general post.' Paul sat lazily at the ink-stained table, dividing his attentions between watching the child's fascinating movements and pecking idly into the soft wood with his little gold penknife.\n\n'Aren't you very glad we found you out so soon, Uncle Paul?' she asked suddenly, looking up at him over a back of glossy and wriggling yellow fur. 'Aren't you very glad indeed, I mean?'\n\nHe went on picking at the soft ditches between the ridges of dirty brown without answering for a moment.\n\n'Yes,' he said presently, in the slow manner of a man who weighs his words; 'very glad indeed. It's increased my interest in life. It's made me happier, and healthier, and wealthier, and all the rest of it\u2014and wiser too.' He bent, frowning, over the ditches.\n\n'It was all your own fault, you know, that we didn't get you sooner. Oh, years ago\u2014ever so many.'\n\n'But I was in the backwoods, Nixie.'\n\n'That made no difference,' she answered promptly. 'If you had written to us, as mother often asked, we should have noticed at once what you were.'\n\n'How could that possibly be?' he objected, still without looking up.\n\n'Of course!' was the overwhelming reply.\n\n'Oh, come now,' he said, staring at her solemnly over the table; 'I admit your penetration is pretty keen, but I doubt that'\n\nShe returned his gaze with an expression of grave, almost contemptuous surprise, tossing her hair back impatiently with a jerk from her face. She had finally established the kittens, Zezette and Sambo, in a sleepy heap just where she wanted them on the top of the squirrel's cage.\n\n'But, Uncle,' she exclaimed, 'between yesser-dayantomorrow you can meet people even after they've gone altogether. So America wouldn't have been difficult. How can you think such things?'\n\nNot knowing exactly how it was he could think such things, Paul made no immediate reply.\n\n'Anyhow,' she resumed, 'it didn't take long once you were here. We saw in a second in the drawing-room what you were\u2014the day you arrived.'\n\n'But I acted so well! I'm sure now I behaved\u2014'\n\n'You behaved just like Jonah,' she interrupted him with swift decision, '\u2014only bigger!'\n\nPaul laughed to himself. His inquisitor shot across the room to establish Pouf, another kitten, on the piano top. She moved lightly, with a dancing motion that flung her hair behind her through the air, again producing the effect of a sunlight gleam. Paul continued to destroy the table with his blunt penknife, chuckling inwardly at the figure he must have cut that summer afternoon in the 'drawinroom' before these mercilessly observant eyes.\n\n'You stood about shyly just like him and Toby\u2014in lumps,' she went on presently, 'saying things in a sudden, jerky way\u2014'\n\n'In lumps! 'cried Paul. 'That's a nice way to talk to your Uncle!'\n\nNixie burst out laughing. 'Oh, I don't mean that quite,' she explained; 'but you stood about as you found it hard to balance, and were afraid to move off the mat. Just as Jonah does at a party when he's shy. I copied you exactly when I got upstairs.'\n\n'Did I indeed? Did you indeed, I mean? 'said he, wondering whether he ought to feel offended or pleased at the picture.\n\n'Yes, rather,' declared the child emphatically, darting up with Pouf who had definitely rejected the top of the piano, and planting it on the table under his nose, where it immediately sat down, purring loudly and staring into his face. 'I should think you did! You see, Pouf says so too; he's purring his agreement. Listen to him! That's fur language.'\n\nHe listened as he was bid, gazing first into the green eyes of the kitten that opened so wide the} seemed to have no lids at all, and then into the mischievous blue eyes of his other tormentor, decided that on the whole he felt pleased. Then I wasted a lot of time,' he observed presently, 'about joining, I mean\u2014coming into your world.'\n\n'H'mmmm, you did.'\n\n'Only, remember, you were all very young when I was in America' weren't you?' he added by way of excuse.\n\nNixie nodded her head approvingly.\n\n'And you, 'expect,' she replied thoughtfully, 'were too hard then. I hadn't thought of that. You might never have squeezed through the Crack, mightn't you? You're much softer now,' she decided after a second's reflection, 'ever so much softer!'\n\n'I have improved, I think,' he admitted, blushing like a pleased schoolboy. 'I am decidedly softer!'\n\nHe made a violent dig with his penknife, breaking down the hard barrier between two ditches, where-,upon Pouf, thinking the resultant splinter was a plaything specially contrived for its happiness, opened its eyes wider than ever, and stretched out a paw that looked huge compared with the splinter and the penknife. Paul put the weapon away, and Pouf fixed its eyes intently on the pocket where it had vanished, leaving its paw absent-mindedly lying on the splinter which it had already wholly forgotten. It purred louder than ever, trying to give the impression that it was really a big cat.\n\nOutside the rain fell softly. A blue-bottle buzzed noisily about the room, banging the ceiling and the walls as though it were exceedingly angry. Through the open window floated the smell of the English garden soaked in rain, odours of soused trees and: lawns, and wet air\u2014exquisitely fragrant.\n\nA hush fell over the room; only the purring of the kittens broke it. Paul thought it was the most soothing sound in the whole world; something-began to purr within himself. His head, and Nixie's head, and little Pouf's head\u2014all lay very close together over that schoolroom table, each full of its own busy dreams. These queer, gentle talks' with the child were very delightful to him, all his. shyness and self-consciousness gone, and the spirit of true wonder, simple and profound, awake in his\" heart.\n\nTogether, for a long time, they listened in silence to these sounds of purring and breathing and the murmur of rain falling outside: deep, velvety breathing it was, almost inaudible. Everything in life, Paul caught himself reflecting, tragedy or comedy, goes on against a background of this deep, hidden, purring sound of life. Breathing is the first manifestation of life; it is the music of the world, the soft, continuous hum of existence. His thoughts travelled far...\n\n'Yes, on the whole,' he muttered at length in-consequently, 'I think I may consider myself softer than before\u2014kinder, gender, more alive!' But neither Nixie, nor Pouf, nor, for that matter, Sambo and Zezette either, paid the smallest attention to his remark; he was soon lost again in further reflections.\n\nIt was the child's voice that presently recalled him.\n\n'Uncle Paul,' she said very softly, her mind still busy with thoughts of her own, 'do you know that sometimes I have heard the earth breathing too\u2014akchilly breathing?'\n\nPaul, coming back from a long journey, turned and gazed at the eager little face beside him in silence.\n\n'The earth is alive, I'm sure,' she went on with an air of great mystery. 'It breathes and whispers,: and even purrs; sometimes it cries. It's a great body, alive\u2014just like you and the other stars.'\n\n'Nixie!'\n\n'They are all bodies, though; heavenly bodies, Daddy called them. Only we, I suppose, are too small to see it that way perhaps.'\n\nPaul listened, stroking Pouf slowly. The child's voice was low and somewhat breathless with the excitement of what she was saying. She believed every word of it intensely. Only a very small part of what she was thinking found expression in her words. Her ideas beckoned her beyond; and mere words could not overtake them at her age.\n\n'The earth,' she went on, seeing that he did not laugh, 'is somebody's big round body rolling down the sky. It simply must be. Daddy always said that a fly settling on our bodies didn't know we were alive, so we can't understand that the earth is alive either. Only I know it. Oh! 'she cried out with sudden enthusiasm, 'how I would love to hear its real out-loud voice. What a t'riffic roar it must be. I only wish my ears were further.'\n\n'Sharper, you mean.'\n\n'But, all the same, I have heard it breathing,' she added more quietly, lifting Pouf suddenly and wrapping its sleeping body round her neck like a boa, 'just like this.' She put her head on one side, so that her cheek was against the kitten's lips, and] the faint stream of its breathing tickled her ear.' Only the breathing of the earth is much, ever sol much, longer and deeper. It's whole months long.'\n\nPaul was listening now with his undivided attention. He was being admitted to the very heart of an imaginative child's world, and the knowledge of it charmed him inexpressibly. His eyes were almost as bright, his cheeks as pink with excitement, as her own. Only he must be very careful indeed. The least mistake on his part would close the door.\n\n'Months, Nixie?'\n\n'Oh, yes, a single breath is months long,' she whispered, her eyes growing in size, and darkening with wonder and awe. 'Pouf lies on me and breathe twice to my once, but I breathe millions of times ever so many millions\u2014as I lie on the earth's body,' And it breathes in and out just as Pouf and I do. Winter is breathing in, and summer is breathing out, you see.'\n\n'So the equinoctial gales are the changes from one breath to the other?' he put in gravely.\n\n'I hadn't thought about the\u2014the gales,' she said, putting her face closer and lowering her voice, 'but I know that in the summer I often hear the earth breathing out\u2014'specially on still warm nights when everything lies awake and listens for it.'\n\n'Then do, 'Things really listen as we do?' he asked gently.\n\n'Not 'xactly as we do. We only listen in one place\u2014our ears. They listen all over. But they're alive just the same, though so much quieter. Oh, Uncle Paul, everything is alive; everything, I know it!' She fixed a searching look on him. 'You knew that, didn't you?'\n\nThere was a trace of real surprise and disappointment in her voice.\n\n'Well,' he answered truthfully, 'I had often and often thought about it, and wondered sometimes\u2014whether'\n\nBut the child interrupted him almost imperiously. He realised sharply how the knowledge that the years bring\u2014little, exact, precise knowledge\u2014may kill the dreams of the naked soul, yet give nothing in their place but dust and ashes. And, by the same token, he recognised that his own heart was still untouched, unspoiled. The blood leaped and ran within him at the thought.\n\n'The winds, too, are alive,'\u2014she spoke with a solemn excitement that made her delicate face flush as though a white fire glowed suddenly beneath the] skin and behind the charming eyes\u2014' they run about, and sleep, and sing, and are full of voices. The wind has hundreds of voices\u2014just like insects: with such a lot of eyes.' (Even her strange simile, did not make him smile, so real was the belief and enthusiasm of her words.) 'We (with scorn) have only one voice; but the wind can laugh and cry at! the same time!'\n\n'I've heard it,' he put in, secretly thrilled.\n\n'I know its angry voice as well as its pretended-angry voice, when it's very loud but means nothing in particular. Its baby-voice, when it comes through the keyhole at night, or down the chimney, or just outside the window in the early morning, and tells me all its little very-wonderful-indeed aventures, makes me so happy I want to cry and laugh at once.'\n\nShe paused a moment for breath, dimly conscious, perhaps, that her description was somewhat confused. Her excitement somehow communicated itself to Pouf at the same time, for the kitten suddenly rose up with an arched back and indulged in a yawn that would have cracked the jaws of any self-respecting creature. After a prolonged stare at Paul, it proceeded inconsequently to wash itself with an air that plainly said, 'You won't catch me napping again. 'want to hear this too.'\n\nPaul, meanwhile, stared at the child beside him, thinking that the gold-dust on her hair must surely come from her tumbling journeys among the stars, and wondering if she understood how deeply she saw into the heart of things with those dreamy blue eyes of hers.\n\n'Listen, Nixie, you fairy-child, and I'll tell you something,' he said gently, 'something you will like very much'; and, while she waited and held her breath, he whispered softly in her ear:\n\n\u2003Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:\n\n\u2003The soul that rises in us, our life's star\n\n\u2003Hath had elsewhere its setting,\n\n\u2003And cometh from afar:\n\n\u2003Not in entire forgetfulness,\n\n\u2003And not in utter nakedness,\n\n\u2003But trailing clouds of glory do we come\n\n\u2003From God who is our home" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "\u2002'And snatches of thee everywhere Make little heavens throughout a day.' \u2014ALICE MEYNELL.\n\n'That's very pretty, I think,' she said politely, staring at him, with a little smile, half puzzled. The music of the words had touched her, but she evidently did not grasp why he should have said it. She waited a minute to see if he had really finished, and then went on again with her own vein of thought.\n\n'Then please tell me, Uncle,' she asked gravely, with deep earnestness, 'what is it people lose when they grow up?'\n\nAnd he answered her with equal gravity, speaking seriously as though the little body at his side were habited by an old, discriminating soul.\n\n'Simplicity, I think, principally\u2014and vision,' he said. 'They get wise with so many little details called facts that they lose the great view.'\n\nThe child watched his face, trying to understand. After a pause she came back to her own thinking\u2014the sphere where she felt sure of herself. 'They never see things properly once they're grown up,' she said sadly. 'They all walk into a fog, I believe, that hides all the things we know, and stuffs up their eyes and ears. Daddy called it the cotton-wool of age, you know. Oh, Uncle, I do hope,' she cried with the sudden passion of the child, 'I do hope I shall never, never get into that horrid fog. Ton haven't, and I won't, won't, won't!' Her voice rose to a genuine cry. Then she added with a touch of child-wonder that followed quite naturally upon the outburst, 'How did you ever stop yourself, I wonder!'\n\n'I lived with the fairies in the backwoods,' he answered, laughing softly.\n\nShe stared at him with complete admiration in her blue eyes.\n\n'Then I shall grow up 'xactly like you,' she said, 'so that I can always get out of the cage just as you do, even if my body is big.'\n\n'Every one's thin somewhere,' Paul said, remembering her own explanation. 'And the Crack into Yesterday and To-morrow is always close by when it's wanted. That's the real way of escape.'\n\nShe clapped her hands and danced, shaking her hair out in a cloud and laughing with happiness. Paul took her in his arms and kissed her. With a gesture of exquisite dignity, such as animals show when they resent human interference, the child tumbled back into her chair by the table, an expression of polite boredom\u2014though the faintest imaginable\u2014in her eyes. Many a time had he seen the kittens behave exactly in the same way.\n\n'But how do you know all these things, Nixie, and where do all your ideas come from?' he asked.\n\n'They just come to me when I'm thinking of nothing in particular. They float into my head of their own accord like ships, little fairy ships, I; suppose. And I think,' she added dreamily after a] moment's pause, 'some of them are trees and flowers whispering to me.' She put her face close to his I own across the table, staring, into his very brain with her shining eyes. 'Don't you think so too, Uncle?'\n\n'I think I do,' he answered honestly.\n\n'Though some of the things I hear,' she went on,' 'I don't understand till a long time afterwards.'\n\n'What kind of things, for instance?'\n\nShe hesitated, answering slowly after a pause:\n\n'Things like streams, and the dripping of rain, and the rustling of wet leaves, perhaps. At the time. I only hear the noise they make, but afterwards, when I'm alone, doing nothing, it all falls into words anc stories\u2014all sorts of lovely things, but very hard to remember, of course.'\n\nShe broke off and smiled up into his face with charm that he could never have put into words. 'You'll grow up a poet, Nixie,' he said.\n\n'Shall I really? But I could never find the rhymes\u2014simply never.' 'Some never do,' he answered; 'and some\u2014the majority, I think\u2014never find the words even!'\n\n'Oh, how dreadful! 'she exclaimed, her face clouding with a pain she could fully understand. 4 Poets who can't talk at all. I should think they would burst.'\n\n'Some of them nearly do,' he exclaimed, hiding a smile; 'they get very queer indeed, these poor poets who cannot express themselves. I have known one or two.'\n\n'Have you? Oh, Uncle Paul!' Her tone expressed all the solemn sympathy the world could hold.\n\nHe nodded his head mysteriously.\n\nThe child suddenly sat up very erect. An idea of importance had come into her head.\n\n'Then I wonder if Pouf and Smoke, and Zezette and Mrs. Tompkyns are like that,' she cried, her face grave as a hanging judge\u2014'poets who can't express themselves, and may burst and get queer! Because they understand all that sort of thing\u2014scuttling leaves and dew falling, and tickling grasses and the dreams of beeties, and things we never hear at all. P'raps that's why they lie and listen and think for such ages and ages. I never thought of that before.'\n\n'It's quite likely,' he replied with equal solemnity.\n\nNixie sprang to her feet and flew round the room from chair to chair, hugging in turn each kitten, and asking it with a passionate earnestness that was very disturbing to its immediate comfort in life: 'Tell me, Pouf, Smoke, Sambo, this instant! Are you all furry little poets who can't tell all your little furry poems? Are you, are you, ARE YOU?'\n\nShe kissed each one in turn. 'Are you going to burst and get queer?' She shook them all till, mightily offended, they left their thrones and took cover sedately under tables and sofas well out of' reach of this intimate and public cross-examination. And there they sat, looking straight before them, as though no one else existed in the entire world.\n\n'I believe they are, Uncle.'\n\nA silence fell between them. Under the furniture, safe in their dark corners, the cats began to purr again. Paul got up and strolled to the open window that looked out across lawns and shrubberies to the fringe of oaks and elms that marked the distant hayfields. The rain still fell gently, silently\u2014a fine, scented, melancholy rain; the rain of a minor key. Tinged with a hundred delicate odours from fields and trees\u2014ghostly perfumes far more subtle than the perfumes of flowers\u2014the air seemed to brush the surface of his soul, dropping its fragrance down into his heart like the close presence of remembered friends.\n\nThe evening mode invaded him softly, soothingly; and out of it, in some way he scarcely understood, crept something that brought a vague disquiet in its train. A little timid thought stole to the threshold of his heart and knocked gently upon the door of its very inmost chamber. And the sound of the knocking, faint and muffled though it was, woke echoes in this secret chamber that proclaimed in a tone of reproach, if not almost of warning, that it was still empty and unfurnished. A deep, infinite yearning, and a yearning that was new, stirred within him, then suddenly rose to the surface of his mind like a voice calling to him from far away out of mist and darkness.\n\n'If only I had children of my own...!' it called; and the echo whispered afterwards 'of my very own, made out of my very thoughts...!'\n\nHe turned to Nixie who had followed, and now leaned beside him on the window-sill.\n\n'So the language of wind and trees and water you translate afterwards into stories, do you?' he asked, taking up the conversation where they had left it. It was hardly a question; he was musing aloud as he gazed out into the mists that gathered with the dusk. 'It's all silent enough now, at any rate there's not a breath of air moving. The trees are dreaming\u2014dreaming perhaps of the Dance of the Winds, or of the love-making of the snow when their leaves are gone and the flakes settle softly on the bare twigs; or perhaps dreaming of the humming of the sap that brings their new clothes with such 'a rush of glory and wonder in the spring' Again the child looked up into his face with shining eyes. The magic of her little treasured beliefs had touched the depths of him, and she felt that they were in the same world together, without pretence and without the barriers of age. She was radiantly happy, and rather wonderful into the bargain, a fairy if ever there was one.\n\n'They're just thinking,' she said softly.\n\n'So trees think too?'\n\nShe nodded her head, leaning her chin on her hands as she gazed with him into the misty air.\n\n'I wonder what their thoughts are like,' he said musingly, so that she could take it for a question or not as she chose.\n\n'Like ours\u2014in a way,' she answered, as though speaking of something she knew beyond all question, 'only not so small, not so sharp. Our thoughts prick, I think, but theirs stroke, all running quite smoothly into each other. Very big and wonderful-indeed thoughts\u2014big as wind, I mean, and wonderful as sky or distance. And the streams\u2014the streams have long, winding thoughts that run down their whole length under water'\n\n'And the trees, you were saying,' he said, seeing that her thought was wandering.\n\n'Yes, the trees,' she repeated, 'oh! yes, the trees are different a little, I think. A wood, you see, may have one big huge thought all at once.\n\n'All at once!' 'I mean all at the same time, every tree thinking the same thought for miles. Because, if you lie in a wood, and don't think yourself, but just wait and wait and wait, you gradgilly get its great thought and know what it's thinking about exactly. You feel it all over instead of\u2014of'\n\n'Instead of getting a single little sharp picture in your mind,' Paul helped her, grasping the wonder of her mystical idea.\n\n'I think that's what I mean,' she went on. 'And it's exactly the same with everything else\u2014the sea, and the fields, and the sky\u2014oh! and everything in the whole world.' She made a sweeping gesture with her arm to indicate the universe.\n\n'Oh, Nixie child!' he cried, with a sudden enthusiasm pouring over him from the strange region where she had unknowingly led him, 'if only I could take you out to the big woods I know across the sea, where the trees stretch for hundreds of miles, and the moss is everywhere a foot thick, and the whole forest is such a conspiracy of wonder and beauty that it catches your heart away and makes you breathless with delight! Oh, my child, if only you could hear the thoughts and stories of woods like that\u2014woods untouched since the beginning of the world!'\n\n'Take me! Take me! Uncle Paul, oh! take me!' she cried as though it were possible to start next day. 'These woods are such little woods, and I know all their stories.' She danced round him with a wild and eager delight.\n\n'Such stories, yes, such stories,' Paul continued, his face shining almost as much as hers as he thought of his mighty and beloved forests.\n\n'Please tell me, take me, tell me!' she cried. 'All, all, all! Quick!'\n\n'I can't. I never understood them properly; only the old Indians know them now,' he said sadly, leaning out of the window again with her. 'They are tales that few people in this part of the world could understand; in a language old as the wind, too, and nearly forgotten. You see, the trees and different there. They stand in thousands\u2014pine, hemlock, spruce, and cedar\u2014mighty, very tall, very straight, very dark, pouring day and night their great balsam perfumes into the air so that their stories and their thoughts are sweet as incense and very mysterious.'\n\nNixie took the lapels of his coat in her hands and stared up into his face as though her eyes would pop out. She looked through his eyes. She saw these very woods he was speaking of standing in dim shadows behind him.\n\n'No one ever comes to disturb their lives, and few of them have ever heard the ringing of the axe. Only giant moose and caribou steal silently beneath their shade, and Indians, dark and soft-footed as things of their own world, make camp-fires among their roots. They know nothing of men and cities and trains, and the wind that sings through their branches is a wind that has never tasted chimney-pots, and hot crowds, and pretty, fancy gardens. It is a wind that flies five hundred miles without taking breath, with nothing to stop its flight but feathery tree-tops, brushing the heavens, and clean mountain ridges thrusting great shoulders to the stars. Their thoughts and stories are difficult to understand, but you might understand them, I think, for the life of the elements is strong in your veins, you fairy daughter of wind and water. And some day, when you are stronger in body\u2014not older though, mind, not older\u2014I shall take you out there so that you may be able to learn their wonder and interpret it to all the world.'\n\nThe words tore through him in such curious, impersonal fashion, that he hardly realised he was giving utterance to a longing that had once been his own, and that he was now seeking to realise vicariously in the person of this little poet-girl beside him. He stroked her hair as she nestled up to him, breathing hard, her eyes glistening like stars, speechless with the torrent of wonder with which her big uncle had enveloped her.\n\n'Some day,' she murmured presently, 'some day, remember. You promise?'\n\n'I promise.'\n\n'And\u2014and will you write that all out for me, please?' 'All what?'\n\n'About the too-big woods and the too-old language and the winds that fly without stopping, and the stories'\n\n'Oh, oh!' he laughed; 'that's another matter! I 'Yes, oh you must, Uncle! Make a story of it\u2014an aventure. Write it out as a very wonderful-indeed adventure, and put you and me in it! She forgot the touch of sadness and clapped her hands with delight. 'And then read it out at a Meeting, don't you see?'\n\nAnd in the end Paul promised that too, making a great fuss about it, but in his heart secretly pleased and happy.\n\n'I'll try,' he said, with portentous gravity.\n\nThe child stared up at him with the sure knowledge in her eyes that between them they held the key to all that was really worth knowing.\n\nHe stooped to kiss her hair, but before he could do so, with a laugh and a dancing step he scarcely heard, she was gone from his side and half-way down the passage, so that he kissed the empty air.\n\n'Bless her mighty little heart!' he exclaimed straightening himself up again. 'Was there eve such a teacher in the world before?'\n\nHe became aware that the world held power gentle yet immense, that were urging him in directions hitherto undreamed of. With such a fairy guide! he might find\u2014he was already finding\u2014not merely safety-valves of expression, but an outlet into the bargain for his creative imagination.\n\n'And a little child shall lead them,' he murmured in his beard, as he went slowly down the passage to his room to dress for dinner. Again he felt like singing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "\u2002'The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing standing in the way.' \u2014W. B.\n\nThus, gradually, the grey house under the hills changed into a palace; the garden stretched to I include the stars; and Paul, the retired Wood Cruiser, walked in a world all new and brilliant. For to find the means of self-expression is to build the foundations of spiritual health, and an ideal companionship, unvexed by limitations of sense, holds potentialities that can change earth into heaven. His accumulated stores of imagination found wings, and he wrote a series of Aventures that delighted his audience while they healed his own soul.\n\n'I wish they'd go on for ever and ever,' observed Toby solemnly to her brother. 'Perhaps they do really, only.'\n\n'Of course they do,' Jonah said decisively, 'but Uncle Paul only tells bits of them to us\u2014bits that you can understand.'\n\nToby was too much in earnest to notice the masculine scorn. 'He does know a lot, doesn't he?' she said.\n\n'Do you think he sees up into heaven? They're not a bit like made-up aventures.' She paused, deeply puzzled; very grave indeed.\n\n'He's a man, of course,' replied Jonah. 'Men know big things like that.'\n\n'The Aventures are true,' Nixie put in gently.\n\n'That's why they're so big, and go on for ever and ever.'\n\n'It's jolly when he puts us in them too, isn't it?' said Jonah, forgetting the masculine pose in his interest. 'He puts me in most,' the boy added proudly.\n\n'But I do the funniest things,' declared Toby, slightly aggrieved. 'It was me that rode on the moose over the tree-tops to the North Pole, and understood all it said'\n\n'That's nothing,' cried her brother, making a huge blot across his copy-book. 'He had to get me to turn on the roarer boryalis.'\n\n'Nixie's always leader, anyhow,' replied the child, losing herself for a moment in the delight of that tremendous blot. She often borrowed Nixie in this way to obliterate Jonah when her own strength was insufficient.\n\n'Of course she is,' was the manly verdict. 'She knows all those things almost as well as Uncle Paul. Don't you, Nixie?'\n\nBut Nixie was too busy cleaning up his blot with bits of torn blotting-paper to reply, and the arrival of Mile. Fleury put an end to the discussion for the moment.\n\nAnd Paul himself, as the big child leading the littler children, or following their guidance when such guidance was clear, accepted his new duties with a happy heart. His friendship with them all grew delightfully, but especially, of course, his friendship with Nixie. This elemental child slipped into his life everywhere, into his play, as into his work; she assumed the right to look after him; with charming gravity she positively mothered him; and Paul, whose life hitherto had known little enough of such sympathy and care, simply loved it.\n\nIf her native poesy won his imagination, her practical interest in his welfare and comfort equally won his heart. The way she ferreted about in his room and study, so serious, so thoughtful, attending to so many little details that no one else ever thought of,\u2014all this came into his life with a seductive charm as of something entirely new and strange to him. It was Nixie who always saw to it that his ink-pot was full and his quill pens trimmed; that flowers had no time to fade upon his table; and that matches for his pipes never failed in the glass match-stands. He used up matches, it seemed, almost by the handful.\n\n'You're far worse than Daddy used to be,' she reproved him. 'I believe you eat them.' And when he assured her that he did nothing of the sort, she only shook her head darkly, and said she couldn't understand then what he did with them all.\n\nA hundred services of love and kindness she did for him that no one else would have thought of. On his mantelpiece she put mysterious little bottles of medicine.\n\n'For nettle-stings and scratches,' she explained. 'Your poor hands are always covered with them both when you've been out with us. 'And it was she, too, who bound up his fingers when wounds were more serious, and saw to it that he had a clean rag each day till the sore was healed. She put the new red riband on his straw hat after it fell (himself with it) into the Gull Pond; and one service especially that earned her his eternal respect was to fasten his evening black tie for dinner. This she did every night for him. Such tasks were for magical fingers only. He had never yet compassed it himself. He would run to the nursery to say good-night, and Nixie, looking almost unreal and changeling in her white nightgown, with her yellow hair top-knotted quaintly for sleep, would deftly trim and arrange the strip of satin that he never could manage properly himself. It was a regular little ritual, Toby watching eagerly from the bed across the room.\n\n'You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Uncle Paul,' she said another time, holding up a mysterious garment, 'I never saw such holes\u2014never!' And then she darned the said socks with result that were picturesque if not always entirely satisfactory. And once she sewed the toes so tightly 'across with her darning that he could not get his foot into them. She allowed no one else to touch; them, however. Little the child guessed that while she patched his clothes, she wove his life afresh at the same time.\n\nAnd with all the children he took Dick's place more and more. His existence widened, filled up; he felt in touch with real things as of old in the woods; the children replaced the trees.\n\nBut it was Nixie in particular who crept close to his unsatisfied heart and tied him to her inner life with the gossamer threads of her sand-coloured hair. This elfin little being, with her imagination and tenderness, brought to him something he had never known before, never dreamed of even; a perfect companionship; a companionship utterly unclouded.\n\nAnd the other children understood it; there was no jealousy; it was not felt by them as favouritism. Natural and right it seemed, and was.\n\n'You must ask Nixie,' Jonah would say in reply to any question concerning his uncle's welfare or habits. 'She's his little mother, you know.'\n\nFor, truth to tell, they were born, these two, in the same corner of the world of fantasy, bred under the same stars, and fathered by the same elemental forces. But for the trick of the years and the accident of blood, they seemed made for one another ideally, eternally.\n\nThings he could speak of to no one else found in her a natural and easy listener. To grown-ups he had never been able to talk about his mystic longings; the very way they listened made such things instantly seem foolish. But Nixie understood in her child-way, not because she was sympathetic, but because she was in and of them. He was merely talking the language of her own world. He no longer felt ashamed to 'think aloud.' Most people were in pursuit of such stupid, clumsy things\u2014fame, money, and other complicated and ugly things\u2014but this child seemed to understand that he cared about Realities only; for, in her own simple way, this was what she cared about too.\n\nTo talk with her cleared his own mind, too, in a way it had never been cleared before. He came to understand himself better, and in so doing swept away a great deal of accumulated rubbish; for he found that when his thought was too confused to make clear to her, it was usually false, wrong\u2014not real.\n\n'I can't make that out,' she would say, with a troubled face. 'I suppose, I'm not old enough yet.' And afterwards Paul would realise that it was himself who was at fault, not the child. Her instinct was unerring; whereas he, with those years of solitude behind him, sometimes lost himself in a region where imagination, self-devouring, ran the risk of becoming untrue, possibly morbid. Her wholesome little judgments brought sanity and laughter.\n\nFor, like other mystical temperaments, what he sought, presumably, was escape from himself, yet not\u2014and herein he differed healthily from most of his kidney\u2014so much from his Real Inner Self, as from its outer pettiness and limitations. True, he sought union with something larger and more perfect, and in so far was a mystic; but this larger 'something,' he dimly understood, was the star of his own soul not yet emancipated, and in so far he remained a man of action. His was the true, wholesome mysticism; hysteria was not\u2014as with most\u2014its chief ingredient. Moreover, this other, eternal part of him touched Eternity. To be identified with it meant to be identified with God, but never for one instant to lose his own individuality.\n\nAnd to express himself through the creative imagination, to lose his own smallness by interpreting beauty, he had always felt must be a halfway house to the end in view. His inability, therefore, to find such means of expression had always meant something incalculably grave, something that hindered growth. But now this child Nixie, in some extraordinary yet utterly simple fashion, had come to show him the way. It was wonderful past finding out. He hardly knew himself how it had come about. Yet, there she was, ever by his side, pointing to ways that led him out into expression.\n\nNo woman could have done it. His two longings, he came to realise, were actually one: the desire to express his yearnings grew out of the desire to find God.\n\nAnd so it was that the thought of her growing up was horrid to him. He could not bear to think of her as a young woman moving in a modern world where she would lose all touch with the elemental forces of vision and simplicity whence she drew half her grace and wonder. Already for him, in some mystical fashion of spiritual alchemy, she had become the eternal feminine, exquisitely focussed in the little child. With the advance of years this must inevitably pass from her, as she increased the distance from her source of inspiration.\n\n'Nixie, you must promise never to grow up,' he would say, laughing.\n\n'Because Aventures stop then, don't they?' she asked.\n\n'Partly that,' he answered.\n\n'And I should get tired, like mother; or stupid, like the head gardener,' she added. 'I know. But I don't think I ever shall, somehow. I think I am meant to be always like this.'\n\nThe serious way she said this last phrase escaped him at the time. He remembered it afterwards, however.\n\nIt was so delightful, too, to read out his stories and aventures to her; they laughed over there and her criticisms often improved them vastly. He even read her his first poem without shyness, and they discussed each verse and talked about 'stealing Heaven's fire,' and the poor 'sparks' that never grew into flames. The 'kiss of fire' she thought' must be wonderful. She also asked what a 'lyre was. They made up other verses together too. But though they laughed and she asked odd questions, on the whole she grasped the sadness of the poem perfectly.\n\n'Let's go and cry a bit somewhere,' she remarked quietly, her eyes very wistful. 'It helps it out! awfully, you know.'\n\nHe reminded her, however, of a sage remark of Toby's, to the effect that when men grew beards they lost the power to cry. Quick as a flash, then, she turned with one of her exquisite little bits of unconscious poetry.\n\n'Let's go to the Gwyle then, and make the stream cry for us instead,' she said gravely, with a profound sympathy, 'because everybody's tears must get into the water some time\u2014and so to the sea, mustn't they?'\n\nAnd on their way, what with jumping ditches and flower-beds, they forgot all about the crying. On the edge of the woods, however, she raced up again to his side, her blue eyes full of a new wonder. 'I know that wind of inspiration that your poetry said never blew for you,' she cried. 'I know where it blows. Quick! I'll show you!' The pace made him pant a bit; he almost regretted he had mentioned it. 'I know where it blows, we'll catch it, and you shall see. Then you can always, always get it when you want it.'\n\nAnd a little farther on, after wading through deep bracken, they stopped, and Nixie took his hand. 'Come on tiptoe now,' she whispered mysteriously. 'Don't crack the twigs with your feet.' And, smiling at this counsel of perfection, he obeyed to the best of his ability, while she pretended not to notice the series of explosions that followed his tread.\n\nIt was a curve in the skirts of the wood where they found themselves; a small inlet where the tide of daylight flowed against the dark cliffs of the firs, and then fell back. The thick trees held it at bay so that only the spray of light penetrated beyond, as from advancing waves. 'Thus far and no farther,' very plainly said the pine trees, and the sunshine lay there collected in the little hollow with the delicious heat of all the summer. It was a corner hitherto undiscovered by Paul; he saw it with the pleasure of a discovery.\n\nAnd there, set brightly against the sombre background, stood the slender figure of a silver birch tree, all sweet and shining, its branches sifting the sunshine and the wind; while behind it, standing forth somewhat from the main body of the wood, a pine, shaggy and formidable, grew close as though; to guard it. The picture, with its striking contrast? needed no imagination to make it more appealing,. It was patent to any eye.\n\n'That's my tree,' said Nixie softly, with both arms linked about his elbow and her cheek laid against the sleeve of his coat. 'My fav'rite tree. And that's where your winds of inspiration blow that: you said you couldn't catch. So now you can always! come and hear them, you see.'\n\nPaul entered instantly into the spirit of her dream. The way her child's imagination seized upon inanimate objects and incorporated them into the substance of her own life delighted him, for it was also his own way, and he understood it.\n\n'Then that old pine,' he answered, pointing to the other, 'is my tree. See! It's come out of the wood to protect the little birch.'\n\nThe child ran from his side and stood close to them. 'Yes, and don't you see,' she cried, her eyes popping with excitement, 'this is me, and that's you!' She patted the two trunks, first the birch and then the pine. 'It's us! I never thought of that before, never! It's you looking after me and taking care of me, and me dancing and laughing round you all the time!' She ran back to his side and hopped up to plant a kiss in his beard. He quite forgot to correct her a'venturous grammar. 'Of course,' he cried, 'so it is. Look! The branches touch too. Your little leaves run up among my old needles!'\n\nNixie clapped her hands and ran to and fro, laughing and talking, on errands of further discovery, while Paul sat down to watch the scene and think his own thoughts. It was just the picture to appeal strongly to him. At any time the beauty of the tree would have seized him, but with no one else could he have enjoyed it in the same way, or spoken of his enjoyment. While Nixie flitted here and there in the sunshine, the little birch behind her bent down and then released itself with a graceful rush of branches as the pressure of the wind passed. Against the blue sky she tossed her leafy hands; then, with a passing shiver, stood still.\n\n'I wonder,' ran his thought, 'why poets need invent Dryads when such an incomparable revelation lies plain in one of the commonest of trees like this?' And, at the same moment, he saw Nixie dart past between the fir trees and the birch, as though the very Dryad he was slighting had slipped out to chide him. Her hair spread in the sunshine like leaves. In the world of trees here, surely, was the very essence of what is feminine caught and imprisoned. Whatever of grace and wonder emanate from the face and figure of a young girl to enchant and bewitch here found expression in the silver stem and branches, in the running limbs so slender, in the twigs that bent with their cataracts of flying hair. Seen against the dark pinewood, this little birch tree laughed and danced; over that silver skin ran, positively, smiles; from the facets of those dainty leaves twinkled mischief and the joys of innocence. Here, in a word, was Nixie herself in the terms of tree-dom; and, as he watched, the wind swept out the branches towards him in a cluster of rustling leaves,\u2014and at the same instant Nixie shot laughing to his side.\n\nFor a second he hardly knew whether it was the child or the silver birch that nestled down beside him and began to murmur in his ear.\n\n'This is it, you see,' she was saying; 'and there's your wind of inspiration blowing now.'\n\n'We shall have to alter the first verse then,' he said gravely:\n\n'The winds of inspiration blow,\n\nYet never pass me by.'\n\n'Of course, of course,' she whispered, listening half to her uncle, half to the rustle in the branches. 'And now,' she added presently, 'you can always come and write your poetry here, and it will be very-wonderfulindeed poetry, you see. And if you leave a bit of paper on the tree you'll find it in the morning covered with all sorts of things in very fine writing\u2014oh, but very very fine writing, so small that no one can see it except you and me. One of the Little Winds we saw, you know, will twine round it and leave marks. And the big pine is you and the birch is me, isn't it?' she ended with sudden conviction.\n\nThe game, of course, was after her own heart. Up she sprang then suddenly again, picked a spray of leaves from a hanging branch, and brought it back to him.\n\n'And here's a bit of me for a present, so that you can't ever forget,' she said with a gravity that held no smile. And she fastened it with much tugging and arranging in his buttonhole. 'A bit of my tree, and so of me.'\n\n'Then I might leave a bit of paper in the water too,' he remarked slyly on their way home, 'so as to get the thoughts of the stream.'\n\n'Easily,' she said, 'only it must be wrapped up in something. I'll get Jonah's sponge-bag and lend it you. Only you must promise faithfully to return it in case we go to the seaside in the summer.'\n\n'And perhaps some of those tears we were talking about will stick on it and leave their marks before they go on to the sea,' he suggested.\n\n'Oh, but they'd be too sad,' she answered quickly. 'They're much better lost in the sea, aren't they?'\n\nThus the poetry in his soul that he could not utter, he lived. Without any conscious effort of the imagination, the instant Nixie, or the thought of her, stood beside him\u2014lo, he was in Fairyland. It was so real that it was positively bewildering.\n\nAnd the rest of that quiet household, without knowing it, contributed to its reality. For, to begin with, the place was delightfully 'out of the world'; and, after that, the gradations between the two regions seemed so easy and natural: the shadowy personality of his sister; the dainty little French governess flitting everywhere with her plaintive voice in the wake of the elusive children; then the children themselves\u2014Jonah, the mischievous; Toby with her shining face of onion-skin; and, last of all, the host of tumbling animals, the mysterious cats, the kittens, all fluff and wonder; and the whole of it set amid the scenery of flowers, hills, and sea. It was impossible to tell exactly where the actual threshold lay, this shifting, fluid threshold dividing the two worlds; but there can be no question that Paul passed it day by day without the least difficulty, and that it was Nixie who knew all the quickest short-cuts.\n\nAnd to all who\u2014since childhood\u2014have lived in Fairyland and tasted of its sweet innocence and loveliness, comes sooner or later the desire to transfer something of these qualities to the outer world. Paul felt this more and more as the days passed. The wish to beautify the lives of others grew in him with a sudden completeness that proved it to have been there latent all the time. Through the voices of Nixie, Jonah, and Toby, as it were, he heard the voices\u2014those myriad, faint, unhappy voices\u2014of the world's neglected children a-calling to him: 'Tell us the Aventures too!'\u2014'Take us with you through 'that Crack!'\u2014' Show us the Wind, and let us climb with you the Scaffolding of Night.'\n\nAnd Paul, listening in his deep heart, began to understand that Nixie's education of himself was but a beginning: all unconsciously that elfin child was surely becoming also his inspiration. This first lesson in self-expression she had taught him was like the trickle that would lead to the bursting of the dam. The waters of his enthusiasms would presently pour out with the rush of genuine power behind them. What he had to say, do, and live\u2014all forms of self-expression\u2014were to find a larger field of usefulness than the mere gratification of his personal sense of beauty.\n\nAs yet, however, the thought only played dimly to and fro at the back of his mind, seeking a way of escape. The greater outlet could not come all at once. The germ of the desire lay there in secret development, but the thing he should do had not yet appeared.\n\nSo, for the time being, he continued to live in Fairyland and write Aventures.\n\nIt was really incalculable the effect of enchantment this little yellow-haired girl cast upon him\u2014hard to believe, hard to realise. So true, so exquisite was it, however, that he almost came to forget her age, and that she was actually but a child. To him she seemed more and more an intimate companion to the soul who had existed always, and that both he and she were ageless. It was their souls that played, talked, caressed, not merely their minds or bodies In her flower-like little figure dwelt assuredly an old and ripened soul; one, too, it seemed to him sometimes, that hardly belonged to this work at all.\n\nThere was that about their relationship which made it eternal\u2014it always had been somewhere it always would be\u2014somewhere. No confinings of flesh, no limitations of mind and sense no conditions of mere time and space, could lay their burden upon it for long. It belonged most sweetly to the real things which are conditionless.\n\nMoreover, one of the chief effects of the work of Faery, experts say, is that Time is done away with; emotions are inexhaustible and last for ever continually renewing themselves; the Fairies dance for years instead of only for a night; their minds and bodies grow not old; their desires, and the objects of their desires, pass not away.\n\n'So, unquestionably,' said Paul to himself from time to time as he reflected upon the situation, 'I am bewitched. I must see what there is that I can do in the matter to protect myself from further depredations!'\n\nYet all he did immediately, so far as can be ascertained among the sources of this veracious history, was to collect the 'Aventures' already written and journey with them one fine day to London, where he had an interview of some length 'with a publisher\u2014Dick's publisher. The result, at any rate, was\u2014the records prove it\u2014that sometime afterwards he received a letter in which it was plainly stated that 'the success of such a book is hard to predict, but it has qualities, both literary and imaginative, which entitle it to a hearing'; and thus that in due course the said 'Aventures of a Prisoner in Fairyland' appeared upon the bookstalls. For the publishers, being the foremost in the land, took the high view that seemed almost independent of mercenary calculations; and it is interesting to note that the years justified their judgment, and that the 'Aventures' may now be found upon the table of every house in England where there dwells a true child, be that child seven or seventy.\n\nAnd any profits that Paul collected from the sale went, not into his own pocket, but were put aside, as the sequel shall show, for a secret purpose that lay hidden at this particular stage of the story among the very roots of his heart and being. The summer, meanwhile, passed quickly away, and August melted into September, finding hint? still undecided about his return to America.\n\nFor the rest, there was no hurry. There was another six months in which to make up his mind'; Meanwhile, also, he made frequent use of the 'Crack,' and the changes in his soul went rapidly forward." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "\u2003There was a Being whom my spirit oft\n\n\u2003Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft,\n\n\u2003In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn,\n\n\u2003Upon the fairy isles of sunny lawn,\n\n\u2003Amid the enchanted mountains, and the caves\n\n\u2003Of divine sleep, and on the air-like waves\n\n\u2003Of wonder-level dream, whose tremulous floor\n\n\u2003Paved her light steps;\u2014on an imagined shore\n\n\u2003Under the grey beak of some promontory\n\n\u2003She met me, robed in such exceeding glory,\n\n\u2003That I beheld her not\n\n\u2014Epipsychidion\n\nOne afternoon in late September he made his way alone across the hills. Clouds blew thinly over a sky of watery blue, driven by an idle wind the roses had left behind. It seemed a day strayed from out the summer that now found itself, thrilled and a little confused, in the path of autumn\u2014and summer had sent forth this soft wind to bring it back to the fold.\n\nThe 'Crack' was always near at hand on such a day, and Paul slipped in without the least difficulty. He found himself in a valley of the Blue Mountains hitherto unknown, and, so wandering, came presently to a bend of the river where the sand stretched smooth and inviting.\n\nFor a moment he stopped to watch the slanting waves and listen, when to his sudden amazement he saw upon the shore, half concealed by the reeds near the bank\u2014a human figure. A second glance showed him that it was the figure of a young girl, lying there in the sun, her bare feet just beyond reach of the waves, and her yellow hair strewn about the face so as to screen it almost entirely from view. A white dress covered her body; she was slim, he saw, as a child. She was asleep.\n\nPaul stood and stared.\n\n'Shall I wake her?' was his first thought. But his second thought was truer: 'Can I help waking her?' And then a third came to him, subtle and inexplicable, yet scarcely shaping itself in actual language: 'Is she after all a stranger?'\n\nFlying memories, half-formed, half-caught, ran curiously through his brain. What was it in the turn of the slender neck, in the lines of the little mouth, just visible where he stood, that seemed familiar? Did he not detect upon that graceful figure lying motionless in repose some indefinable signature that recalled his outer life? Or was it merely that fancy played tricks, and that he reconstructed a composite picture from the galleries of memory, with the myriad expression and fugitive magic of dream or picture\u2014ideal figures he had conjured with in the past and set alive in some inner frame of his deepest thoughts? He was conscious of a delicious bewilderment. A singular emotion stirred in his heart. Yet the face and figure he sought utterly evaded him.\n\nThen, the first sharp instinct to turn aside passed. He accepted the adventure. Stooping down for a stone, he flung it with a noisy splash into the river. The girl opened her eyes, threw her hair back in a cloud, and sat up.\n\nAt once a wave of invincible shyness descended upon Paul, rendering words or action impossible; he felt ridiculously embarrassed, and sought hurriedly in his mind for ways of escape. But, before any feasible plan for undoing what was already done suggested itself, he became aware of a very singular thing\u2014the face of the girl was covered! He could not see it clearly. Something, veil-like and misty, hung before it so that his eyes could not focus properly upon the features. The recognition he had half anticipated, therefore, did not come.\n\nAnd this helped to restore his composure. It was, in any case, futile to pretend he did not see her. For one thing, he realised that she was staring at him just as hard as he was staring at her. The very next instant she rose and came across the hot sand towards him, her hair flying loose, and both hands outstretched by way of greeting. Again, the half-recognition that refused to complete itself swept j confusingly over him.\n\nBut this spontaneous and unexpected action had an immediate effect upon him of another kind. His embarrassment vanished. What she did seemed altogether right and natural, and the beauty of the girl drove all minor emotions from his mind. His whole being rose in a wave of unaffected delight, and almost before he was aware of it, he had stepped forward and caught both her hands in his own.\n\nThis strange golden happiness at first troubled his speech.\n\n'But surely I know you!' he cried. 'If only I could see your face!'\n\n'You ought to know me,' she replied at once with a laugh as of old acquaintance, 'for you have. called for me often enough, I'm sure!' Her voice was soft; curiously familiar accents rang in it; yet, as with the face, he knew not whose it was.\n\nShe looked up at him, and though he could not make out the features, he discerned the expression they wore\u2014an expression of peace and confidence. The girl trusted him delightfully.\n\n'Then what hides you from me?' he insisted.\n\nShe answered him so low that he hardly caught the words. Certainly, at the moment he did not understand them, for happiness still confused him. 'The body,' she murmured; 'the veil of the body.'\n\nShe returned the firm and equal pressure of his hands, and allowed him to draw her close. Their faces approached, and he looked searchingly down upon her, trying to pierce the veil in vain. The hot sunshine fell in a blaze upon their uncovered heads. The next moment the girl raised her lips to his, and almost before he knew it they had kissed.\n\nYet that kiss seemed the most natural thing in the world; at a stroke it killed the last vestige of shyness. Youth ran in his veins like fire.\n\n'Now, tell me exactly who you are, please,' he cried, standing back a little for an inspection, but still holding her hands. They swung out at arm's length like children.\n\n'I think first you should tell me who you are,' she laughed. 'I want to be a mystery a little longer. It's so much more interesting!'\n\nLeaning backwards with her hair tumbling down her neck, she looked at him out of eyes that he half imagined, half knew. Laughter and gentleness played over her like sunlight. Standing there, framed against the reeds of the river bank, with the blue waters behind and the wind and sky about her head, Paul thought that never till this moment had he understood the whole magic of a woman's beauty. Yet at the same time he somehow divined that she was as much child as woman, and that something of eternal youthfulness mingled exquisitely with her suggestion of maturity.\n\n'Of course,' he laughed in return, like a boy in mid-mischief, 'that's your privilege, isn't it? My name, then, is'\n\nBut there he stuck fast. It seemed so foolish to give the name he owned in that other tinsel world; it was merely a disguise like a frock-coat or evening dress, or the absurd uniform he had once assumed to deceive the children with. He almost felt ashamed of the name he was known by in that world!\n\n'Well?' she asked slyly, 'and have you forgotten it quite?'\n\n'I'm the Man who saw the Wind, for one thing,' he said at length; 'and, after that, well\u2014I suppose I'm the man who's been looking for you without knowing it all his life! Now do you know me?' he concluded triumphantly.\n\n'You foolish creature! Of course I know you!'\n\nShe came closer; the sunshine and the odour of the flowers seemed to come with her. 'It's you who couldn't find me! I've been waiting for you to claim me ever since\u2014either of us can remember.'\n\nA queer, faint rush of memory rose upon him from the depths\u2014and was gone. For an instant it seemed that her face half cleared.\n\n'Then, in the name of beauty,' he cried, starting forward, 'why can't I see your face and eyes? Why do I only see you partly?'\n\nShe hesitated an instant and drew back; she lowered her eyes\u2014he felt that\u2014and the voice dropped very low again as she answered: 'Because, as yet, you only know me\u2014partly.'\n\n'As through a glass, darkly, you mean?' he said, half grave, half laughing.\n\nThe girl took both his hands and pressed them silently for a moment.\n\n'When you know me as I know you,' she whispered softly, 'then\u2014we shall know one another\u2014see one another\u2014face to face. But even now, in these few minutes, you have come to know me better than you ever did before. And that is something, isn't it?'\n\nShe moved quite close, passing her hands down his bronzed cheeks and shaking his head playfully as one might do to a loved child.\n\n'You take my breath away!' gasped the delighted man, too bewildered in his new happiness to let the strangeness of her words perplex him long. 'But, tell me again,' he added, slowly releasing himself, 'how it is that you know me so well? Tell me again and again!'\n\nShe replied demurely, standing before him like a teacher before a backward pupil. 'Because I have always watched, studied, and loved you\u2014from within yourself. It was not my fault that you failed to know me when I spoke. Perhaps, even now, you would not have found me unless\u2014in certain ways\u2014through the children\u2014you had begun to come into your own'\n\nPaul interrupted her, taking her in his arms, while she made no effort to escape, but only laughed. 'And I'll take good care I never lose you again after this! 'he cried.\n\n'You know, I wasn't really asleep just now on the sand,' she told him a little later. 'I heard you coming all the time; only I wanted to see if you would pass me by as you always did before.'\n\n'It's very odd and very wonderful,' he said, 'but I never noticed you till to-day.'\n\n'And very natural,' she added under her breath, so low that he did not hear.\n\nAnd Paul, moving beside her, murmured in his beard, 'If she's not my Ideal, set mysteriously somehow into the framework of one I already love\u2014I swear I don't know who she is!'\n\nThey made their way along the sandy shores of the river, the waves breaking at their feet, the wind singing among the reeds; never had the sunlight seemed so brilliant, the day so wonderful and kind. All nature helped them; playing their great game as if it was the only game worth playing in the whole world\u2014the game loved from one eternity to another.\n\n'So the children have told you about me, have they?' he whispered into the ear that came just level with his lips.\n\n'And all you love, as well. Your dreams and thoughts more than anything else\u2014especially your thoughts. You must be very careful with those; they mould me; they make me what I am. If you didn't think nicely of me\u2014verynicelyindeed\u2014'\n\n'But I shall always think nicely, beautifully, of you,' he broke in eagerly, not noticing the familiar touch of language.\n\n'You have so far, at any rate,' she replied, 'for the yearning and desire of your imagination have created me afresh.' And he discerned the smile upon her veiled face as one may see the sun only through troubled glass, yet know its warmth and brilliance.\n\n'Then it is because you are part and parcel of my inner self that you seem so real and intimate and\u2014true?' he asked passionately.\n\n'Of course. I am in your very blood; I beat in your heart; I understand your every passion and emotion, because I am present at their birth. The most fleeting of your dreams finds its reflection in me; your spirit's faintest aspiration runs through me like a trumpet call; and, now that you have found me, we need never, we can never, separate!'\n\nThe passion of her words broke over his heart like a wave. He felt himself trembling.\n\n'But it is all so swift and wonderful that it makes me almost afraid\u2014afraid it cannot last,' he objected, knowing all the time that his words were but a common device to make his pleasure the more real.\n\n'If only, oh, if only I could carry you away with me into that outer world!'\n\nShe laughed deliciously in his face. 'It is from that very \"outer world \"that you have carried me-in here she told him softly, 'for I am always with you.' And with the words came that fugitive trick of voice and gesture that made him certain he knew her\u2014then was gone again. 'In the house with your sister and the children,' she continued; 'when you write your Aventures and your verses; in your daily round of duties, small and great; and when you lie down at night\u2014ah 'especially then\u2014I curl up beside you in your heart, and fly with you through all your funny dreamland, and wake your dear eyes with a kiss so soft you never know it. In your early morning rambles, as in your reveries of the dusk, '. never leave you\u2014because I cannot. All day long I am beside you, though you little realise my presence. I share half your pleasures and all your pains. And in return you hand over to me half that soul whose unuttered prayers have thus created me afresh for your salvation.'\n\n'But it must be my own voice speaking,' he cried inwardly, satisfied and happy beyond belief. 'It is the words of my own thoughts that I hear!'\n\n'Because I am your own thoughts speaking,' she replied instantly, as though he had uttered aloud. 'I lie, you see, behind your inmost thoughts!'\n\nThey walked through sunny meadows, picking their way among islands of wild flowers. There was no sound but the murmur of wind and river, and the singing of birds. Fleecy clouds, here and there in the blue, hung cool and white, watching them. The whole world, Paul felt, listened without shyness.\n\n'And so it is that you love me without shyness,' she went on, marvellously linking in with his thought; 'I am intimate with you as your own soul, and our relations are pure with the purity that was before man. There can be no secrets between us, or possibility of secrets, for your most hidden dreams are also mine. So mingled with your ultimate being am I, in fact, that sometimes you dare not recognise me as separate, and all that appears on the surface of your dear mind must first filter through myself. Why!' she cried, with a sudden rush of mischievous laughter, 'I even know what you are made of; why your queer heart has never been able to satisfy itself\u2014to \"grow-up,\" as you call it; and all about this endless desire you have to find God, which is really nothing but the search to find your true inner Self.'\n\n'Tell me! tell me!' he cried.\n\n'Besides the sun,' she went on with a strange swiftness of words, 'there's the wind and the rain in you; yes, and moon and stars as well. That's why the fire and restlessness of the imagination for ever tear you. No mere form of expression can ever satisfy that, but only increase it; for it means your desire to know reality, to know beauty, to know your own soul; to know\u2014God! Your blood has kinship with those tides that flow through all space, even to the gates of the stars; dawns and; sunsets, moonrise and meteors haunt your thoughts with their magic lights; wild flowers of the fields? and hillside nod beside you while you sleep; and the winds, laughing and sighing, lift your dreams? upon vast wings and flash with them beyond the edges of the universe!'\n\n'Stop,' he cried with passion, 'you are telling all my secrets.'\n\n'I am telling them only to myself,' she laughed, 'and therefore to you. For I know all the fevers of your soul. The wilderness calls you and the great woods. You are haunted by the faces of the world's forgotten places. Your imagination plays with the lightning about the mountain tops, and seeks primeval forests and the shores of desolate seas...'\n\nPaul listened spellbound while she put some of the most intangible of his fancies into the language of poetry. Yet she spoke with the quiet simplicity of true things. The man felt his soul shake with delight to hear her. Again and again, while she spoke, the feeling came to him that in another moment her face must clear and he would know her; yet the actual second of recognition never appeared. The girl's true identity continued to evade him. The enticing uncertainty added enormously to her charm. It evoked in him even the sense of worship.\n\n'And this shall be the earnest of our ideal companionship,' she whispered, holding up a spray of leaves which she proceeded to fasten into the buttonhole of his coat; 'the symbol by which you shall always know me\u2014the sign of my presence in your heart.'\n\nThe top of her head, as she bent over the task, was on a level with his lips, and when he stooped to kiss it the perfumes of the earth\u2014flowers, trees, wind, water\u2014rose about her like a cloud. Her hair was hot with sunshine, all silken with the air of summer. They were one being, growing out of the earth that he loved\u2014the old, magical, beautiful earth that fed so great a part of his secret life from perennial springs.\n\nAs she drew away again from his caress he glanced down and saw that what she had pinned into his coat was a little cluster of leaves from the branch of a silver birch tree.\n\n'Then I, too, shall give you a sign,' he said, 'that shall mean the same as yours.' And he picked a twig of pine needles from a tree beside them and twined it through a coil of her hair. Then, seizing her hands, he swung her round in a dance till they fell upon the river bank at last, tired out, and slept the sleep of children.\n\nAnd after that, for a whole day it seemed, they wandered through this summer landscape, following the river to its source in the mountains, and then descending on the farther side to the shores of a blue-rimmed sea.\n\n'There are the ships,' she cried, pointing to the shining expanse of water; 'and, see, there is our ship coming for us.'\n\nAnd as she stood there, laughing with excitement like a child, a barque with painted figure-head and I brown sails yielding to the wind, came towards them! over the waves, the bales of fruit upon her decks 'scenting the air, the smell of rope and tar and salty f wood enticing them to distance and adventure, Through the cordage the very sound of the wind I called to them to be off.\n\n'So at last we start upon our long, long voyage together,' she said mysteriously, blushing with pleasure, and leading him down towards the ship.\n\n'And where are we to sail to?' he asked; for the flap of the sails and the waves beating against the sides made resistance impossible. The sea-smells were in his nostrils. He glanced down at the veiled face beside him.\n\n'First to the Islands of the Night,' she whispered so low that not even the wind could carry it away; 'for there we shall be alone.'\n\n'And then?'\n\n'And then to the Islands of Delight,' she murmured more softly still; 'for there we shall find the lost children of the world\u2014our children, and so be happy with them ever after, like the people in the fairy tales.'\n\nWith something like a shock he realised that some one else was walking beside him, talking of things that were real in a very different sense. He had been out walking longer than he knew, and had reached the house again. The autumnal mist already drew its gauze curtains about the old building. The smoke rose in straight lines from the chimneys, melting into dusk. That other place of sunshine and flowers had faded\u2014sea, ship, islands, had all sunk beneath the depths within him. And this other person had been saying things for some minutes...\n\n'I don't believe you've been listening to a single word, Paul. You stand there with your eyes fixed on vacancy, and only nod your head and grunt.'\n\n'I assure you, Margaret, dear,' he stammered, coming to the surface as from a long swim under water, 'I rarely miss anything you say. Only the Crack came so very suddenly. You were saying that Dick's niece was coming to us\u2014Joan\u2014er\u2014Thingumybob, and\u2014'\n\n'So you heard some of it,' she laughed quietly, relenting. 'And I hope the Crack you speak about is in your head, not in mine.'\n\n'It's everywhere,' he said with his grave humour.\n\n'That's the trouble, you see; one never knows\u2014'\n\nThen, seeing that she was looking anxiously at the walls of the house and at the roof, he dropped his teasing and came back to solid earth again. 'And how soon do you expect her?' he asked in his most practical voice. 'When does she arrive upon the scene?'\n\n'Why, Paul, I've already told you twice! You really are getting more absent-minded every day. Joan comes to-morrow, or the day after\u2014she's to telegraph which\u2014and stays here for as long as she can manage\u2014a fortnight or so, I expect. She works herself to death, I believe, in town with those poor children, and I want her to get a real rest before she goes back.'\n\n'Waifs, aren't they?' he asked, picking up the thread of the discourse like a thing heard in a dream, 'lost children of the slums?'\n\n'Yes. You'll see them for yourself probably, as she has some of them down usually for a day in the country. One can be of use in that way\u2014and it's so nice to help. Dick, you know, was absorbed in the scheme. You will help, won't you, when the time comes?'\n\nHe promised; and they went in together to tea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "'THIS is him,' cried Jonah breathlessly, pointing with a hand that wore ink like a funeral glove. 'I've got him this time. Look!' And he waved a half-sheet of paper in his uncle's face.\n\n'I've made one too\u2014oh, a beauty!' echoed Toby; 'and I haven't made half such a mess as you.' Three of her fingers were in mourning. A crape-like line running from the nose to the corner of the mouth, lent her a certain distinction. She, too, waved a bit of paper in the air.\n\n'Mine's the real Jack-of-the-Inkpot though, isn't he, Uncle Paul?' exclaimed the boy, leaving the schoolroom table, and running up to show it.\n\n'They're all real\u2014as real as your awful fingers,' decreed Paul.\n\nHe had been explaining how to make the figure of the Ink Sprite that leaves blots wherever he goes, blackens penholders and fingers, and leaves his crawly marks across even the neatest page of writing. Two blots and a line\u2014then fold the paper. Open it again and the ink has run into the semblance of an outlandish figure with countless legs and arms, and a fantastic head; something between a spider, a centipede, and a sprite.\n\n'It's Jack-of-the-Inkpot,' he told them. 'Half the time he does his dirty work invisibly, and if he touches blotting paper\u2014he vanishes altogether.'\n\nJonah skipped about the room, waving his hideous creation in the air. Toby, in her efforts to make a still better one, almost climbed into the inkstand. Nixie sat on the window-sill, dangling her legs and looking on.\n\n'Very little ink does it,' explained Paul, frightened at the results of his instruction. 'You needn't pour it on! He works with the smallest possible material, remember!' His own ringers were no longer as spotless as they might have been.\n\n'Look!' shouted Jonah, standing on a chair and ignoring the rebuke. 'There he goes\u2014just like a black spider flying!' He let his half-sheet drop through the air, ink running down its side as it fell, while Toby watched with the envy of despair.\n\nPaul pounced upon the wriggling figure just in time to prevent further funeral trappings. He turned it face downwards upon the blotting paper.\n\n'Oh, oh!' cried the children in the same breath; 'it's drank him up!'\n\n'Drunk him up,' corrected Paul, relieved by the success of his manoeuvre. 'His feet touched the blotting-paper, you see.'\n\nA pause followed. 'You promised to tell us his song, please,' observed Nixie from her perch on the window-sill.\n\n'This is it, then,' he answered, looking round at the smudged and solemn faces, instantly grown still. 'To judge by appearances you know this Sprite better than I do!\n\n\u2003I dance on your paper,\n\n\u2003I hide in your pen,\n\n\u2003I make in your ink-stand\n\n\u2003My black little den;\n\n\u2003And when you're not looking\n\n\u2003I hop on your nose,\n\n\u2003And leave on your forehead\n\n\u2003The marks of my toes.\n\n\u2003When you're trying to finish\n\n\u2003Your \"i \"with a dot,\n\n\u2003I slip down your finger\n\n\u2003And make it a blot;\n\n\u2003And when you're so busy\n\n\u2003To cross a big \"T,\"\n\n\u2003I make on the paper\n\n\u2003A little Black Sea.\n\n\u2003I drink blotting-paper,\n\n\u2003Eat penwiper-pie,\n\n\u2003You never can catch me,\n\n\u2003You never need try!\n\n\u2003I hop any distance,\n\n\u2003I use any ink!\n\n\u2003I'm on to your fingers\n\n\u2003Before you can wink.'\n\nPaul's back was to the door. He was in the act of making up a new verse, and declaiming it, when he was aware that a change had come suddenly over the room. It was manifest from the faces of the children. Their attention had wandered; they were looking past him\u2014beyond him.\n\nAnd when he turned to discover the cause of the distraction he looked straight into the grey eyes of a woman\u2014grave-faced, with an expression of strength and sweetness. As he did so the opening words of verse four slipped out in spite of themselves:\u2014\n\n\u2003'I'm the blackest of goblins,\n\n\u2003I revel in smears\u2014'\n\nHe smothered the accusing statement with a cough that was too late to disguise it, while the grey eyes looked steadily into his with a twinkle their' owner made no attempt to conceal. The same instant the children rushed past him to welcome her.\n\n'It's Cousin Joan! 'they cried with one voice, and dragged her into the room.\n\n'And this is Uncle Paul from America began Nixie.\n\n'And he's crammed full of sprites and things, and sees the wind and gets through our Crack, and \u2014and climbs up the rigging of the Night' cried Jonah, striving to say everything at once before his sisters.\n\n'And writes the aventures of our Secret S'iety,' Toby managed to interpolate by speaking very fast indeed.\n\n'He's Recording Secre'ry, you see,' explained Nixie in a tone of gentle authority that brought order into the scene. 'Cousin Joan, you know,' she added, turning gravely to her uncle, 'is Visiting I'spector.'\n\n'Whose visits, however, are somewhat rare, I fear,' said the new arrival, with a smile. Her voice was quiet and very pleasant. 'I hope, Mr. Rivers, you are able to keep the Society in better order than I ever could.'\n\nThe introduction seemed adequate. They shook hands. Paul somehow forgot the signs of mourning he wore in common with the rest.\n\n'Cousin Joan has a real Society in London, of course,' Nixie explained gravely, 'a Society that picks up real lost children.'\n\n'A-filleted with ours, though,' cried Jonah proudly.\n\n'Affiliated, he means,' explained Nixie, while everybody laughed, and the boy looked uncertain whether to be proud, hurt, or puzzled, but in the end laughing louder than the rest.\n\nWhen Paul was alone a few minutes later, the children having been carried off shouting to receive the presents their 'Cousin' always brought them on her rare visits from London, he was conscious first of a curious sense of disappointment. That strong-faced woman, grave of expression, with the low voice and the rather sad grey eyes, he divined was the cause; though, for the moment, he could not trace the feeling to any definite detail. In his mind he still saw her standing in the doorway\u2014a woman no longer in her first youth, yet comely with a delicate, strong beauty that bore the indefinable touch of high living. It was peculiar to his intuitive temperament to note the spirit before he! became aware of physical details; and this woman had left something of her personality behind her. She had spoken little, and that little ordinary; had done nothing in act or gesture that was striking. He did not even remember how she was dressed, beyond that she looked neat, soft, effective. Yet, there it was; something was in the room with him that had not been there before she came.\n\nAt first he felt vaguely that his sense of disappointment had to do with herself. Not that he had expected anything dazzling, or indeed had given her consciously any thought at all. The male creature, of course, hearing the name of a girl he is about to meet, instinctively conjures up a picture to suit her name. He cannot help himself. And Joan Nicholson, apart from any deliberate process of thought or desire on his part, hardly suited the picture that had thus spontaneously formed in his mind. The woman seemed too big for the picture. He had seen her, perhaps, hitherto, only through his sister's eyes. It puzzled him. About her, mysteriously as an invisible garment, was the atmosphere of things bigger, grander, finer than he had expected; nobler than he quite understood.\n\nAh, now, at last, he was getting at it. The vague sense of disappointment was not with her; it was with himself. Tested by some new standard her mere presence had subtly introduced into the room\u2014into his intuitive mind\u2014he had become suddenly dissatisfied with himself. His play with the children, he remembered feeling, had seemed all at once insignificant, unreal, almost unworthy\u2014compared to another larger order of things her presence had suggested, if not actually revealed.\n\nThus, in a flash of vision, the truth came to him. It was with himself and not with her that he was disappointed. He recalled scraps of the conversation. It was, after all, nothing Joan Nicholson had said; it was something Nixie had said. Nixie, his little blue-eyed guide and teacher, had been up to her wizard tricks again, all unconsciously.\n\n'Cousin Joan has a real Society in London, you know\u2014a Society that picks up real lost children?\n\nThat was the sentence that had done it. He felt certain. Combined with the spiritual presentment of the woman, this apparently stray remark had dropped down into his heart with almost startling effect\u2014like the grain of powder a chemist adds to his test tube that suddenly changes the colour and nature of its contents. As yet he could not determine quite what the change meant; he felt only that it was there\u2014disappointment, dissatisfaction with himself.\n\n'Cousin Joan has a real Society.' She was in earnest.\n\n'Real lost children'\u2014perhaps potential Nixies, Jonahs, Tobys, all waiting to be 'picked up.'\n\nThe thoughts ran to and fro in him like some one with a little torch, lighting up corners and recesses of his soul he had so far never visited. For thus it sometimes is with the chemistry of growth. The changes are prepared subconsciously for a long while, and then comes some trivial little incident\u2014a chance remark, a casual action\u2014and a match is set to the bonfire. It flames out with a sudden rush. The character develops with a leap; the soul has become wiser, advanced, possessed of longer, clearer sight.\n\nPaul was certainly aware of a new standard by which he must judge himself; and, for all the' apparent slightness of its cause, a little reflection will persuade of its truth. Real, inner crises of a soul are often produced by causes even more negligible.\n\nThe desire, always latent in him, to be of some use in the world, and to find the things he sought by losing himself in some Cause bigger than personal ends, had been definitely touched. It now rose to the surface and claimed deliberate attention.\n\nWhat in the world did it matter\u2014thus he reflected while dressing for dinner\u2014whether his own personal sense of beauty found expression or not? Of what account was it to the world at large, the world, for instance, that included those 'lost children 'who needed to be 'picked up'? To what use did I he put it, except to his own gratification, and the passing pleasure of the children he played with? Were there no bigger uses, then, for his imagination, uses nobler and less personal?...\n\nThe thoughts chased one another through his mind in some confusion. He felt more and more dissatisfied with himself. He must set his house in order. He really must get to work at something real!\n\nOther thoughts, too, played with him while he struggled with his studs and tie. For he noticed suddenly with surprise that he was taking more trouble with his appearance than usual. That black tie always bothered him when he could not get the help of Nixie's fingers, and usually he appeared at the table with the results of carelessness and despair plainly visible in its outlandish shape. But to-night he tied and re-tied, determined to get it right. He meant to look his best.\n\nYet this process of beautifying himself was instinctive, not deliberate. It was unconscious; he did not realise what he had been about until he was half-way downstairs. And then came another of those swift, subtle flashes by which the soul reveals herself\u2014to herself. This 'dressing-up,' what was it for? For whom? Certainly, he did not care a button what Joan Nicholson thought of his persona appearance. That was positive. Then, for whom and for what, was it? Was it for some one else Had the arrival of this 'woman' upon the scene somehow brought the truth into sudden relief?\n\nA delightful, fairy thought sped across his mine with wings of gold, waving through the dusk of hi soul a spray of leaves from a silver birch-tree that he I knew, and disappearing into those depths of consciousness where feelings never clothe themselves in precise language. A line of poetry swam up and took its place mysteriously\u2014\n\nMy heart has thoughts, which, though thine eyes hold mine,\n\nFlit to the silent world and other summers,\n\nWith wings that dip beyond the silver seas.\n\nCould it be, then, that he had given his heart so utterly, so exquisitely, into the keeping of a little child?...\n\nAt any rate, before he reached the drawing-room, he understood that what he had been so busy dressing up was not anything half so trumpery as his mere external body and appearance. It was his interior person. That black tie, properly made for once, was an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; only, having forgotten, or possibly never heard the phrase, he could not make use of it! 'It's that little, sandy-haired witch after all!' he thought to himself. 'Joan's coming\u2014a woman's coming\u2014has made me realise it. I must behave my best, and look my best. It's my soul dressing up for Nixie, I do declare!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Persons with real force of purpose carry about with them something that charges unconsciously the atmosphere of others. Paul 'felt' this woman. The first impact of her presence, as has been seen, came almost as a shock. The 'shocks,' however, did not continue\u2014as such. Her influence worked in him underground, as it were.\n\nShe slipped easily and naturally into the quiet routine of the little household in the Grey House under the hill, till it seemed as if she had been there always. Margaret had insisted at once that there could be no 'Missing' and 'Mistering'; Dick's niece must be Joan, and her brother Paul; and the more familiar terms of address were adopted without effort on both sides.\n\nThe children helped, too. They were all in the same Society, and before a week had passed she had heard all the 'aventures,' and entered into the discovery of new ones, even contributing some herself with a zest that delighted, Paul, and made him feel wholly at his ease with her. It was all real to her; she could not otherwise have shown an interest; for sham had no part in her nature, and her love for these fatherless children was as great as his own, and similar in kind.\n\n'You have given their \"Society \"a new lease of life,' she told him; 'you are an enormous addition to it.'\n\n'Enormous\u2014yes! 'he laughed.\n\n'Enormously useful at the same time,' she laughed in return, 'because you not only increase their imagination; you train it, and show them how to Use it.'\n\n'To say nothing of the indirect benefits I receive myself,' he added.\n\nAnd, after a pause, she said: 'For myself, too, it's the best kind of holiday I could possibly have. To come down here into all this, straight from my waifs in London, is like coming into that Crack-land you have shown them. I wish\u2014I wish I could introduce it all to my big sad world of unwashed urchins. They have so few chances.' A sudden flash of enthusiasm ran over her face like sunlight. 'Perhaps, when they come down here next week for a day's outing, we might try!\u2014if you will help me, that is?' She looked up. Something in the simple words touched him; her singleness of aim stirred the depths in him.\n\nHe promised eagerly.\n\n'When it's out,' she added presently, 'I'm going to give copies of your book of aventures to some of them. A good many will understand'\n\n'You shall have as many as you can use,' he put in quickly, with a thrill of pleasure he hardly understood. 'I'm only too delighted to think they could be of any use\u2014any real use, I mean.'\n\nThere was something in the simple earnestness of this woman, in the devotion of her life to an unselfish Cause, that increased daily his dissatisfaction with himself. She never said a word that suggested self-sacrifice. A call had come to her, turning her entire life into an instrument for helping others\u2014others who might never realise enough to say, 'Thank you'\u2014and she had accepted it. Now she lived it, that was all. The Scheme that had provided the call, too, was Dick's. It was all conceived originally in that big practical, imaginative heart of the one intimate friendship he had known. Moreover, it concerned children, lost children. The appeal to the deepest in himself was thus reinforced in several ways. More and more, beside this quiet, determined woman, with her singleness of aim and her practical idealism, his own life seemed trivial, cheap, selfish. She had found a medium of expression, self-expression, compared to which his own mind was insignificant.\n\nFrom the 'Man who splashed on the Deck' to Joan Nicholson was a far cry; as far almost as from the amoeba to the dog\u2014yet both the man and the woman knew the relief of Outlet. And, now, he too was learning in his own time and place the same truth. Nixie had brought him far. Joan, perhaps, was to bring him farther still.\n\nYet there was nothing about her that was very unusual. There are scores and scores of unmarried women like her sprinkled all along the quiet ways of life, noble, unselfish, unrecognised, often, no doubt, utterly unappreciated, turning the whole current of their lives into work for others\u2014the best they can find. The ordinary man who, for the mother of his children seeks first of all physical beauty, or perhaps some worldly standard of attractiveness, passes them by. Their great force, thus apparently neglected by Nature for her more obvious purposes, runs along through more hidden channels, achieving great things with but little glory or reward. To Paul, who knew nothing of modern types, and whose knowledge of women was abstract rather than concrete, she appeared, of course, simply normal. For all women he conceived as noble and unselfish, capable naturally of sacrifice and devotion. To him they were all saints, more or less, and Joan Nicholson came upon the scene of his life merely as an ordinarily presentable specimen of the great species he had always dreamt about.\n\nBut it was the first time he had come into close contact with a living example of the type he had always believed in. Here was a woman whose interests were all outside herself. The fact thrilled and electrified him, just as the peculiar nature of her work made a powerful and intimate appeal to his heart.\n\nAs the days passed, and they came to know or another better, she told him frankly about the small beginnings of her work, and then how Dick's idea had caught her up and carried her away to where she now was.\n\n'There was so much to be done, and so much help needed, that at first,' she admitted, 'my own little efforts seemed absurd; and then he showed me that if everybody talked like that nothing would ever be accomplished. So I got up and tried. It was something definite and practical. I let my bigger dreams go\u2014'\n\n'Well done,' he interrupted, wondering for a moment what those 'bigger dreams' could have been.\n\n'and chose the certainty. And I have never regretted it, though sometimes, of course, I am still tempted\u2014'\n\n'That was fine of you,' he said. He realised vaguely that she would gladly, perhaps, have spoken to him of those 'other dreams,' but it was not quite clear to him that his sympathy could be of any avail, and he did not know how to offer it either. To ask direct questions of such a woman savoured to his delicate mind of impertinence.\n\n'There was nothing \"fine \"about it,' she laughed, after an imperceptible pause; 'it was natural, that's all. I couldn't help myself really. Human suffering has always called to me very searchingly. Au fond, you see, it was almost selfishness.'\n\nHe suddenly felt unaccountably small with this slip of a woman at his side, tired, overworked, giving all her best years so gladly away, and even in her 'holidays' thinking of her work more than of herself. He noticed, too, the passing flames that lit fires in her eyes and illumined her entire face sometimes when she spoke of her London waifs. Pity and admiration ran together in his thoughts, the latter easily predominating.\n\n'But you must make the most of your holiday,' he said presently; 'you will use up your forces too soon\u2014'\n\n'Perhaps,' she laughed, 'perhaps. Only I get restless with the feeling that I'm wanted elsewhere. There's so little time to do anything. The years pass so quickly\u2014after thirty; and if you always wait till you're \"quite fit,\" you wait for ever, and nothing gets done.'\n\nPaul turned and looked steadily at her for a moment. A sudden beauty, like a white and shining fire, leaped into her face, flashed about the eyes and mouth, and was gone. Paul never forgot that look to the end of his days.\n\n'By Jove,' he said, 'you are in earnest!'\n\n'Not more than others,' she said simply; 'not as much as many, even, I'm afraid. A good soldier goes on fighting whether he's \"fit \"or not, doesn't he?'\n\n'He ought to,' said Paul\u2014humbly, for some reason he could hardly explain.\n\nThey had many similar talks. She told him a great deal about her rescue work in London, and he, for his part, became more and more interested. From a distance, meanwhile, his sister observed them curiously,\u2014though nothing that was in Margaret's thoughts ever for a single instant found its way either into his mind or Joan's. It was natural, of course, that Margaret, the reader of modern novels, should have formed certain conclusions, and perhaps it would have been the obvious and natural thing for Joan and Paul to have fallen in love and been happy ever afterwards with children of their own. It would also, no doubt, have been 'artistic,' and the way things are made to happen in novels.\n\nBut in real life things are not cut always so neatly to measure, and whether real life is artistic or not as a whole cannot be judged until the true, far end is known. For the perspective is wanting; the scale is on a vaster loom; and of the threads that weave into the pattern and out again, neither end nor beginning are open to inspection.\n\nThe novels Margaret delighted in, with their hotch-potch of duchesses and valets, Ministers of State and footmen, libertines and snobs, while doubtless portraying certain phases of modern life with accuracy, could in no way prepare her for the Pattern that was being woven beneath her eyes by the few and simple characters in this entirely veracious history. And it may be assumed, therefore, that Joan had come into the scenery of Paul's life with no such commonplace motive\u2014since the high Gods held the threads and wove them to their own satisfaction\u2014as merely to marry off the hero.\n\nAnd if Paul did not fall in love with Joan Nicholson, as he might, or ought, to have done, he at least did the next best thing to it. He fell head over ears in love with her work. And since love seeks ever to imitate and to possess, he cast about in his heart for means by which he might accomplish these ends. Already he possessed her secret. Now he had only to imitate her methods.\n\nHe was finding his way to a bigger and better means of self-expression than he had yet dreamed of; while Nixie, the dea ex machina, for ever flitted on ahead and showed the way.\n\nIt remained a fairy-tale of the most delightful kind. That, at least, he realised clearly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Among the branches of the ilex tree, whose thick foliage rose like a giant swarm of bees at the end of the lawn, there were three dark spots visible that might have puzzled the most expert botanist until he came close enough to examine them in detail. The fact that the birds avoided the tree at this particular hour of the evening, when they might otherwise have loved to perch and sing, hidden among the dense shiny leaves, would very likely have furnished a clue, and have suggested to him\u2014if he were a really intelligent man of science\u2014that these dark spots were of human origin.\n\nIn the order in which they rose from the ground towards the top they were, in fact, Toby, Joan Nicholson, Paul, Nixie and, highest of all, Jonah. Paul felt safer in the big fork, Joan in the wide seat with the back. In the upper branches Jonah perched, singing and chattering. Toby hummed to herself happily nearer the ground, and Nixie, her legs swinging dizzily over a serpentine branch immediately above Paul's head, was really the safest of the lot, though she looked ready to drop at any moment.\n\nThey were all at rest, these wingless human birds, in the tree where Paul had long ago made seats and staircases and bell-ropes.\n\nI 'wish the wind would come,' said Nixie. 'It would make us all swing about.'\n\n'And Jonah would lose his balance and bring the lot of us down like ripe fruit,' said Paul.\n\n'On the top of Toby at the bottom,' added Joan.\n\n'But my house is well built,' Paul objected, 'or it would never have held such a lot of visitors as it did yesterday.'\n\n'Look out! I'm slipping!' cried Jonah suddenly overhead. 'No! I'm all right again now,' he added a second later, having thoroughly alarmed the lodgers on the lower floors, and sent down a shower of bark and twigs.\n\n'It's certainly more solid than your \"Scaffolding of Night,\" Joan observed mischievously as soon as the shower was past; 'though, perhaps, not quite as beautiful.' And presently she added, 'I think I never saw boys enjoy themselves so much in my life. They'll remember it as long as they live.'\n\n'It was your idea,' he said.\n\n'But you carried it out for me!'\n\nThey were resting after prolonged labours that had been, at the same time, a prolonged delight. At three o'clock that afternoon, after twenty-four hours of sunshine among woods and fields, the party of twenty urchins had been seen safely off the premises into the London train. Two large brakes had carried them to the station, and the gardens of the grey house under the hill were dropping back again into their wonted peace and quiet.\n\nThere is nothing unusual\u2014happily\u2014in the sight of poor town-children enjoying an afternoon in the country; but there was something about this particular outing that singled it out from the majority of its kind. Paul had entered heart and soul into it, and the combination of woods, fields, and running water had made possible certain details that are not usually feasible.\n\nMargaret had given Paul and her cousin carte blanche. They had planned the whole affair as generals plan a battle. The children had proved able lieutenants; and the weather had furnished the sun by day and the moon by night, to show that it thoroughly approved. For it was Paul's idea that the entire company of boys should camp out, cook their meals over wood fires in the open, bathe in the pools he had contrived long ago by damming up the stream, and that not a single minute of the twenty-four hours should they be indoors or under cover.\n\nWith a big barn close at hand in case of necessity, and with four tents large enough to hold five apiece, erected at the far end of the Gwyle woods, where the stream ran wide and full, he had no difficulty in providing for all contingencies. Each boy had brought a little parcel with his things for the night; and blankets, bedding of hay and pillows of selected pine branches\u2014oh, he knew all the tricks for making comfortable sleeping-quarters in the woods!\u2014were ready and waiting when the party of urchins came upon the scene.\n\nAnd every astonished ragamuffin had a number pinned on to his coat the moment he arrived, and the same number was to be found at the head of his place in the tent. Each tent, moreover, was under the care of a particular boy who was responsible for order; while, midway in the camp, by the ashes of the fire where they had roasted potatoes and told stories till the moonlight shamed them into sleep, Paul himself lay all night in his sleeping-bag, the happiest of the lot, sentinel and guardian of the troop.\n\nThe place for the main fire, where meals were cooked, had been carefully chosen beforehand, and wood collected by the busy hands of Nixie & Co. The boys sat round it in a large ring; and Paul in the middle, stirring the stew he had learned to make most deliciously in his backwoods life, ladled it out into the tin plates of each in turn, while Joan saw to the bread and cake, and watched the huge kettle of boiling water for tea that swung slowly from the iron tripod near by. And that circle of happy urchin faces, seen through the blue smoke against the background of crowding tree stems, flushed with the hours of sunshine, the mystery of happiness in all their eyes, remained a picture in Paul's memory to the end of his life. The boys, certainly, were not all good, but. they were at least all merry. They forgot for the time the heat of airless brick lanes and the clatter of noisy traffic. The perfumes of the wood banished the odour of ill-ventilated rooms. Dark shadows of the streets gave place to veils of a very different kind, as the rising moon dropped upon their faces the tracery of pine branches. And, instead of the roar of a city that for them meant hardship, often cruelty, they heard the singing of birds, the rustle of trees, and the murmur of the stream at their very feet.\n\nAnd Paul, as he paced to and fro softly between the sleeping crew, the tents all ghostly among the trees, had long, long thoughts that went with him into his sleeping-bag later and mingled with dreams that were more inspired than he knew, and destined to bear a great harvest in due course...\n\nThe branches of big forest trees shifted noiselessly forwards from the scenery that lay ever in the background of his mind, and pressed his eyelids gently into sleep. With feathery dark fingers they brushed the surface of his thoughts, leaving the perfume of their own large dreams about his pillow. The shadowy figures that haunt all ancient woods peered at him from behind a million stems and, while they peered, beckoned; whispering to his soul the secrets of the wilderness, and renewing in him the sources of strength, simplicity, and joy they had erstwhile taught him.\n\nAll that afternoon he had spent with the romping boys, organising their play, seeing to it that they enjoyed utter freedom, yet did no mischief. Joan seconded him everywhere, and Nixie flitted constantly between the camp and the source of supplies in the kitchen. And, to see their play, came as a revelation to him in many ways. While the majority were content to shout and tumble headlong with excess of animal spirits let loose, here and there he watched one or two apart, all aghast at the beauty they saw at close quarters for the first time; dreaming; apparently stunned; drinking it all in with eyes and ears and lips; feeling the moss and branches as others feel jewels and costly lace; and on some of the little faces an expression of grave wonder, and of joy too deep for laughter.\n\n'This ain't always 'ere, is it, Guv'nor?' one had asked. And another, whom Paul watched fingering a common fern for a long time, looked up presently and inquired if it was real\u2014'because it isn't 'arf as pretty as what we use!' He was the son of a scene-shifter at an East End theatre.\n\nAnd a detail that made peculiarly keen appeal to his heart, a detail not witnessed by Joan or the children, was the morning ablutions in the stream when the occupants of each tent in turn, went into the water soon after sunrise, their pinched bodies streaked by the shadow and sunlight of the dawn their laughter and splashing filling the wood with unwonted sounds. Soap, towels, and water in plenty Water perfumed from the hills! Faces flushed am almost rosy after the sleep in the open, and the inexhaustible draughts of air to fan them dry again.\n\nAnd then the eager circle for breakfast, hatless eyes all fixed upon the great stew-pot where he mixed the jorum of porridge! And the noise\u2014for noise, it must be confessed, there was\u2014as the; smothered it in their tin plates with quarts of mill hot from the cow, and busily swallowed it.\n\n'You took them straight into the Crack, you know,' Joan said from her seat below.\n\n'Everything came true,' Nixie's voice was heard overhead among the branches.\n\nJonah clattered down past them and scampered across the lawn with Toby at his heels, for their bedtime was close at hand. The other three lay there, half hidden, a little longer, while the shadow crept down from the hills and gathered underneath They could no longer see each other properly. For a time there was silence, stirred only by the fain rustle of the ilex leaves. Each was thinking long deep thoughts. 'Next week,' said Joan quietly, as though to herself, 'the other lot will come. Your sister's as good as gold about it all.'\n\nThen, after a pause, Nixie's voice dropped down to them again:\n\n'And had some of them really never seen a wood before?' she asked. 'Fancy that! When I grow up I shall have a big wood made specially for them\u2014the \"Wood for Lost Children \"I shall call it. And you'll see about the tents and cooking, won't you, Uncle Paul? Or, perhaps,' she added, 'by that time I shall know how to make a real proper stew and porridge, and be able to tell them stories round the fire as you did. Don't you think so?'\n\n'I think you know most of it already,' he answered gently. 'It seems to me somehow that you have always known all the important things like that.'\n\n'Oh, do you really? How splendid if I really did!' There was a slight break in her voice\u2014ever so slight. 'I should so dreadfully like to help\u2014if I could. It's so slow getting old enough to do anything.'\n\nPaul turned his head up to her. It was too dim to see her body lying along the bough, but he could just make out her eyes peering down between the dark of the leaves, a yellow mist where her hair was, and all the rest hidden. Very eerie, very suggestive it was, to hear this little voice amid the dusk of the branches, putting his own thoughts into words. Were those tears that glistened in the round pools of blue, or was it the reflection of sunset and the coming stars that filtered past her through the thinning tree-top? Again he thought of that silver birch standing under the protection of the shaggy pine.\n\n'Sing us something, Nixie,' rose the voice of Joan from below.\n\n'What shall I sing?'\n\n'That thing about the two trees Uncle Paul made up.'\n\n'But he hasn't given me the tune yet!'\n\n'The tune's still lost,' murmured the deep voice from the shadows of the big fork. 'I must go into the Crack and find it. That's where I found the words, at least 'The sound of his voice melted away.\n\n'Of course,' Joan was heard to say faintly, 'all lost things are in there, aren't they?'\n\nAnd then something queer happened that was never explained. Perhaps they all slipped through the Crack together; or perhaps Nixie's funny little singing voice floated down to them through such a filter of listening leaves that both words and tune were changed on the way into something sweeter than they actually were in themselves.\n\n\u2003Who told the Silver Birch tree\n\n\u2003The stories that we made?\n\n\u2003And how can she remember\n\n\u2003The very games we played?\n\n\u2003Who told her heart of silver\n\n\u2003That, almost from her birth,\n\n\u2003The roots of that old Pine tree\n\n\u2003Had sought hers under earth?\n\n\u2003For always when the wind blows\n\n\u2003Her hair about the wood,\n\n\u2003It blows across my eyes too\n\n\u2003Her pictured solitude.\n\n\u2003And then Aventures gather\n\n\u2003On little hidden feet,\n\n\u2003And mystery and laughter\n\n\u2003The magic things repeat.\n\n\u2003For, O my Silver Birch tree,\n\n\u2003Full half the 'things' we do,\n\n\u2003We did\u2014or e'er you sweetened\n\n\u2003The starlight and the dew!\n\n\u2003They stood there, all in order,\n\n\u2003Ready and waiting even,\n\n\u2003Before the sunlight kissed you,\n\n\u2003Or you, the winds of heaven.\n\n\u2003Who told you, then, O Birch Tree,\n\n\u2003The 'Ventures that we play?\n\n\u2003And how can you remember\n\n\u2003The wonder\u2014and the Way?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "\u2003Panthea. Look, sister, where a troop of spirits gather\n\n\u2003Like flocks of cloud in spring's delightful weather,\n\n\u2003Thronging in the blue air!\n\n\u2003Ione And see! More come.\n\n\u2003Like fountain-vapours when the winds are dumb,\n\n\u2003That climb up the ravines in scattered lines.\n\n\u2003And hark! Is it the music of the pines?\n\n\u2003Is it the lake? Is it the waterfall?\n\n\u2003Panthea. 'Tis something sadder, sweeter far than all.\n\n\u2014Prometheus Unbound.\n\n'IT'S all very well for you two to play at being trees,' the voice of Joan was heard to object, 'but I should like to know what part I'\n\n'Hush! Hush! I hear them coming,' Nixie said quickly with a new excitement.\n\nShe had apparently floated up higher into the ilex to the place vacated by Jonah. Her voice had a ring of the sky in it.\n\n'Come up to where I am, and we can all see. They're rising already'\n\n'Who\u2014what's rising?' called Joan from below; 'I'm not!'\n\n'There's something up, I expect,' said Paul quickly. 'I'll help you.' He knew by the child's voice there was aventure afoot. 'Give me your hand, Joan. And put your feet where I tell you. We're all in the Crack, remember, so everything's possible.'\n\n'Undoubtedly something's up, but it's not me y I'm afraid,' she laughed.\n\n'Hush! Hush! Hush!' Nixie's voice reached them from the higher branches. 'Talk in whispers, please, or you'll frighten them. And be quick. They're rising everywhere. Any minute now they may be off and you'll miss them'\n\nJoan and Paul obeyed; though in his record of the aventure he never described the details of their ascent. A few minutes later they were perched beside the child near the rounded top of the ilex.\n\n'It's fearfully rickety,' Joan said breathlessly.\n\n'But there's no danger,' whispered Nixie,' because this is an evergreen tree, and it doesn't go with the others.'\n\n'How\u2014\"Go with the others?\" 'asked the two in the same breath.\n\n'Trees,' answered the child. 'They're emigrating. Look! Listen!'\n\n'Migrating,' suggested Paul.\n\n'Of course,' Nixie said, poking her head higher to see into the sky. 'Trees go away south in the autumn just like birds\u2014the real trees; their insides, I mean, 'Their spirits,' Paul explained in his lowest whisper to Joan.\n\n'That's why they lose their leaves. And in the spring they come back with all their new blossoms and things. If they find nicer places in the south, they stay, that's all. They\u2014die. Listen\u2014you can hear them going!'\n\nHigh up in that still autumn sky there ran a sweet and curious sound, difficult to describe. Joan thought it was like the rustle of countless leaves falling: the tiny tapping noise made by a dying leaf as it settles on the ground\u2014multiplied enormously; but to Paul it seemed that sudden, dream-like whirr of a host of birds when they wheel sharply in mid-air\u2014heard at a distance. There was no question about the distance at any rate.\n\n'Are they just the trees of our woods, then?' asked Joan in a whisper that held delight and awe, 'or?'\n\nThe child laughed under her breath. 'Oh, no,' was the reply, 'all the South of England below a certain line meets here. This is one of the great starting-places. It's just like swallows collecting on the wires. Some big tree, higher than the rest, gives a sign one night\u2014and then all the other woods flock in by thousands. Uncle Paul knew that! 'There was a touch in her voice of something between scorn and surprise.\n\n'Did you, Uncle Paul?' Joan asked. He fidgeted in his precarious perch. 'I write the Record of it all, so I ought to,' he answered evasively.\n\nAnd high up in the autumn sky, now darkening, ran on that curious sweet sound. Across the heavens, silvery in the coming moonlight, they saw long feathery clouds drawn thinly from north to south, known commonly as mares' tails.\n\n'Those are the tracks they follow,' whispered Nixie. 'Look! Now you can see them\u2014some of them!'\n\nHer voice was so thrilled that it startled them. But for the fact that they were in the Crack where nothing can be ever 'lost,' both Paul and Joan might have lost their hold and their seats\u2014to say nothing of their lives\u2014and crashed downwards through the branches of that astonished ilex tree. Instead, they turned their eyes upwards and stared.\n\nThey looked out over the world of tree-tops. On all sides rose Something in a silent tempest, almost too delicate for words\u2014something that touched the air with a Presence, swift and wonderful\u2014then was gone. With it went the faint music as of myriad wheeling birds, too small for sight. And through the sky ran a vast fluttering of green. They saw the coming stars, as it were, through immense transparencies of green, stained here and there with the washed splendours of wet and dying leaves\u2014the greens, yellows, aye, and the reds too, of autumn. For a few passing seconds the night was positively robed with the spirit-hues of the dying year, rising rapidly in the sheets of their dim glory.\n\n'They're off!' murmured Nixie. 'It's the first flight. We are lucky!'\n\nFar overhead the pathways of fleecy cloud were tinged with pale yellow as when the moon looks sometimes mistily upon the earth\u2014tinged, then suddenly white and silvery as before.\n\nThey collect\u2014Paul drew upon the child's account for his Record\u2014far over-seas upon some lonely strand or headland, and then swarm inland, sometimes following their companions, the birds, sometimes leading them. In countless thousands they go, yet for all their numbers never causing more than a passing tremble of the air. Their armies add, perhaps, a shadow to the night, a new tint to the clouds that veil the moon; or, if owing to stress of autumn weather, they start with the daylight, then the sunset gains a strange new wonder that puzzles the heart with its beauty, and makes unimaginative people write foolish letters to the newspapers. Their speed makes it difficult to catch even the slightest indication of their flight; the sky is touched with glory, there is a reflection in the river or the sea\u2014and they are gone! Or, perhaps, from the evergreens that stay behind, often fringing the coast, the wind bears a message of farewell, wondrous sweet; or some late birds, delaying their own departure, wake in the branches and sing in little bursts of passion the joy of their own approaching escape.\n\nAnd when they return, each tree in the order of its leaving, and according to its times and needs, they bring with them all the essential glory of southern climes, and the magic of spring is due as much to the tales and memories they have collected to talk about, as to the clear brilliance of the new dresses with which they come to clothe their old bodies at home.\n\nThe Record of the Aventure, as Paul wrote it faithfully from the child's description, makes curious and instructive reading, and the loneliness of the stalwart evergreens who remain behind to face the winter brought a pathos into the tale that all lovers of trees will readily appreciate, and may be read by them in the published account.\n\nYet to Paul and Joan, to each according to temperament and cast of mind, the little Aventure brought thoughts of a more practical bearing. To him, especially, in the escape of the tree-spirits\u2014of their 'insides,' as Nixie intuitively phrased it\u2014he divined an allegory of the temporary escape of the little army of city waifs. Those boys, old in face as they were cramped in body, had enjoyed, too, a migration that clothed them for a time, outwardly and inwardly, with some passing beauty which they could take back to London with them just as the trees come back with the freshness of the spring.\n\nAnd this thought led necessarily to others. The little migration of their bodies from town was important enough; but what of their minds and souls? What chance of escape was there for these?\n\nThe conclusions are obvious enough; they need no elaboration. He had already learned from Joan of their sufferings. His heart burned within him. It was all mixed up in his queer poetic mind with the swift vision of the Tree Spirits, and with the picture of Joan, Nixie, and the other children perched like big berries in that astonished ilex tree. In due season both berries and dreams must ripen. He was beginning to see the way.\n\n'They're gone already,' Nixie interrupted his long reverie in a whisper; 'and to-night there'll be great rains to wash away all the signs. To-morrow morning, you'll see, half the trees will be bare.'\n\nAnd high in the heavens, incredibly high and faint it seemed, ran the curious sweet sound, driven farther and farther into the reaches of the night, till at last it died away altogether.\n\n'Gone,' murmured Joan, 'gone!' The beauty of it touched her voice with sadness. 'I wish we could go like that\u2014as beautifully, as quietly, as easily!'\n\n'Perhaps we do,' Paul thought to himself.\n\n'I think we do,' Nixie said aloud. 'Daddy did, I'm sure. I shall, too, I think\u2014and then come back in the spring, p'rhaps.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "See where the child of heaven, with winged feet,\n\nRuns down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.\n\nPrometheus Unbound.\n\nVery often in life, when the way seems all prepared for joy, there comes instead an unexpected time of sadness that makes all the preparation seem useless and of no purpose. Those coloured threads, whose ends and beginnings are not seen, weave this unexpected twist in the pattern, and one knows the bitterness that asks secretly, What can be the use of efforts thus rendered apparently null and void at a single stroke? forgetting the roots of faith that are thereby strengthened, and shutting the eyes to the glory of the whole pattern, which it is always the endeavour of the imagination to body forth.\n\nAnd so it seemed to Paul a few weeks later when he returned to England from America, where he had been to settle up his affairs. For he had decided to sever his connection with the Lumber Company, and to devote his life henceforward to battling against the wrongs and sufferings of childhood. The call had come to him with no uncertain voice. Nixie had unintentionally sown the seeds; Joan had deliberately watered them; his own liberated imagination girded its loins to go forth as a labourer to the harvest.\n\nThen, coming back with the joy of this approaching labour in his heart, the veil of great sadness descended upon his newly-opening life and set him in the midst of a dreadful void, a blank of pain and loneliness that nothing seemed able to fill. Nixie went from him. The Hand that gilds the stars, and touched her hair with the yellow of the sands, drew her also away. Just when her gentle companionship had justified itself for him as something ideally charming that should last always, a breath of wintry wind passed down upon that grey house under the hill, and, lo, she was gone\u2014gone like the spirit of her little birch tree from the cruelties of December.\n\nHe was in time to say good-bye\u2014nothing more; in time to see the awful shadow fall silently upon the wasted little face, and to feel the cold of eternal winter creep into the thin hand that lay to the last within his own. Not a single word did he utter as he sat there beside the bed, choked to the brim with feelings that never yet have known the words to clothe them. That cold entered his own heart too, and numbed it.\n\nNixie it was that spoke, though she, too, said little enough. The lips moved feebly. He lowered his head to catch the last breath. 'I shall come back,' he heard faintly, 'just as the trees do in the spring!'\n\nThe voice was in his ear. It sank down inside him, entering his very soul. For a moment it sang there\u2014then ceased for ever. With eyes dry and burning, he buried his head in the tangle of yellow hair upon the pillow, and when a moment later he raised them again to speak the words of comfort to his weeping sister, Nixie was no longer there to hear him or to see.\n\n'I shall come back in the spring\u2014just as the trees do.'\n\nAnd so she died, leaving Paul behind in that sea of loneliness whose waves drown year by year their thousands and tens of thousands\u2014the vast army that know not Faith. Her blue eyes, so swiftly fading, were on his to the last. It seemed to him that for a moment he had seen God. And perhaps he had; for Nixie assuredly was close to divine things, and he most certainly was pure.\n\nSad things are best faced squarely, very squarely indeed; dealt with; and then\u2014deliberately forgotten. In this way their strength, and the beauty that invariably lies within like a hidden kernel, may be appropriated and their bitterness destroyed. But such platitudes are easily said or written, and at first, when Nixie left him, Paul felt as though the world lay for ever broken at his feet. What this elfin child had done for him must appear to some exaggerated, to many, incredible; for the relationship between them had somehow been touched with the splendour and tenderness of a world unknown to the majority. The delicate intimacy between their souls, as between souls of a like age, is difficult to realise outside the region of fantasy. Yet it had existed: in her with a simple, childlike joy that asked no questions; in him, with an attempt at analysis that only made it closer and more dear. What Paul had been to her was a secret she had taken away with her; what she had been to him, however, was to remain a most precious memory, and at the same time a source of strength and happiness that was to prove eternal.\n\nNot, however, in the manner that actually came about\u2014and, at first, not realised by him in any manner whatsoever.\n\nFor, at first, he found himself alone, horribly alone. What her little mystical heart of poetry had taught him is hard to name. Expression, of course, in its simpler form, and the joy of a sympathetic audience; but more than that. In all fine women lies hidden 'the child '\u2014the simple vision that pierces\u2014and perhaps in Nixie he had divined, and ideally reconstructed for himself, the 'fine woman'! Who can say? A dream so rich and tender can never be caught in a mere net of words. The truth lay buried in the depths of his being, to strengthen and to bless; and some few others may divine its presence there as well as himself perhaps. The only thing he understood clearly at the moment was that he had been robbed of an intimate little friend who had crept into every corner of his heart, and that\u2014he was most terribly alone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "\u2003Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,\n\n\u2003Donnez vos mains magiciennes;\n\n\u2003Pour me guider par les chemins\n\n\u2003Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,\n\n\u2003Vos mains d'lnfante dans les miennes.\n\n\u2014From Les Unes et les Autres.\n\nThere is nothing to be gained by dwelling upon sadness; the details of Paul's suffering may be left to the imagination. It was characteristic of him that he sought instinctively, and without cant, for the Reality that lay behind his pain; and Reality\u2014though seas of grief may first be plunged through to find it\u2014is always Joy. For love is joy, and joy is strength, and both are aspects of the great central Reality of the life of the soul. The child was so woven into the strands of his inmost being that her going seemed, as it were, to draw out with her these very strands\u2014drew them out away from himself towards\u2014towards what? He hardly knew how to name it. The word 'God' rarely passed his lips: towards 'Reality,' then; towards the deep things he had sought all his life.\n\nPart of himself, however, the child had taken away with her. He passed more and more away from the things of the world, though these had never yet held him with any security in their mesh. Nixie had gone ahead, that was all. Before long, as years measure time at least, he would follow her. She might even come back, Mike the trees in the spring,' to tell him of the way.\n\nHis great longing, unexpressed, had always been to know something of the Beyond\u2014to see into the heart of things; not by the uninspired methods of an unsavoury spiritualism, or the artificial forcing-house of an audacious Magic; but by some inner, as yet undetermined, way in his own heart. For he had always clung to the secret belief that there must be some interior way of finding 'Reality,' some process, simple, piercing, profound, that would have authority for himself, if not for all the world. In the heart of all true mystics some such Faith is ingrained. They are born with it. It is ineradicable\u2014lived, but rarely spoken.\n\nAnd the root of this belief it was that Nixie had unknowingly watered and fed. Her going seemed suddenly to have coaxed it almost into flower. His need of the great, satisfying Companion that knows no shadow of turning was incalculably quickened thereby. Love and Nature were the veils that screened the Beyond so thinly that he could almost see through them; and to both these mysteries the child had led him better than she knew.\n\nThe energy of his mystical yearnings suddenly increased a hundredfold. Whether these remain within to poison, or go out to bless, depends, of course, upon the nature of the heart that feels them. Paul, fortunately for himself, had found ways of expression; he was always provided now with the safety of an outlet. And, for the immediate moment, the path was clear enough, and very simple. He was to comfort the mother that mourned her; himself that mourned her; the puzzled little brother and sister, and even the army of more or less disconsolate four-footed friends that missed her presence vaguely, and haunted the door of her room with the strange instinct that there must still be caresses for them within, and that for the moment she was merely hiding.\n\nIt was Smoke, the furry black fellow, however, always her favourite and his own, participant in all their old Aventures, who brought him a strange comfort by secret ways that no man understands. For Smoke asked no questions. He knew; and though he missed her in all their games, and meals, and undertakings of every kind, in house or garden, he showed no obvious symptoms of grief as a dog might have shown. And sometimes he was positively uncanny: he behaved almost as though he still saw her.\n\nThe others, however,\u2014! With most of them out of sight was out of mind. The kittens, now growing up, purred and played as of old in the schoolroom, and the Chow puppies, China and Japan, more like yellow puddings than ever, tore about the house, tumbling and thudding, as though they had never known their little two-legged elfin playmate. The household dropped back into the old routine; Margaret, sadder, less alive than before, pressed down by her new grief into the semblance of a vision; and the children, hushed and pale, but gradually yielding to the stress of bursting life which at that age has no long acquaintance with grief.\n\nIt was winter, and the woods and gardens were so altered that the usual corners of play and mischief were unrecognisable. 'Out-ov-doors' was dead, the sunshine unreal, the darkness hovering close even on the clearest day. The haunts that Paul and Nixie knew were too much changed, mercifully for him, who often sought them none the less, to remind him keenly. The little silver birch tree that danced in summer before the skirts of the fir wood was bare and shivering in the winds. Behind it, however, unchanged and shaggy, still stood the dark sheltering pine, steady among the blasts.\n\nAnd Paul, meanwhile, beyond the smaller sphere of his immediate duties in the grey house under the hill, took up with all the enthusiasm he could spare from sorrow the work among the lost waifs. As has been seen, he found the complete organisation ready to hand. And, to his great satisfaction, he found, as he became familiar with the detail, that it was work suited to the best that was in him. He was the right man in the right place.\n\nMoreover, it was Dick's scheme, and to lose himself in it was to get into touch again delightfully with the great friendship of his youth. Nixie, too, who had meant when she grew up to provide a Wood for Lost Children, seemed ever pushing him forward from behind. Thus his zeal never lessened, and he lost himself in others to some purpose.\n\nThe test of time, of course, proved this. At the moment, however, it can only be known by the trick of 'looking at the last chapter'\u2014which is unlawful, as well as logically impossible. And, before he got so far, he had first learned another profound truth: that only he who carries in his heart a great sorrow, borne alone, can know the mystery of interior Vision, inspiring and truly marvellous, which comes from a blessing so singularly disguised as pain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\u2003I feel, I see\n\n\u2003Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears,\n\n\u2003Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.\n\n\u2014Prometheus Unbound.\n\nThe readjustment of self\u2014the renewal\u2014that follows upon great bereavement having thus been faced courageously, Paul threw himself into his work with energy. Every Friday night he came down to the house under the hill, and every Monday morning he returned to London. But the details of the work, beyond the fact that their fulfilment blessed both himself and those for whom he laboured, are not essential to the story of what followed. For the history of Paul's education is more than anything else a history of Aventures of the inner life. Outwardly, his existence was quiet and uneventful.\n\nAlmost immediately with the disappearance of his little friend, for instance, he discovered that the region through the Crack\u2014the land betweenyesser-dayandtomorrow\u2014became more real, more extraordinarily real, than ever before. The entrances now seemed everywhere and always close; it was the ways of exit that were difficult to find. He lived in it. Even in London he moved among those fields of flowers, and the winter gloom that depressed the majority only enhanced the bright sunshine that lay about his path. His thoughts were continually following the windings of the river to the far horizon; and the horizon, too, was wider, more enticing and mysterious, more suggestive than ever of that blue sea beyond where he had sailed with that other Companion.\n\nThe land became mapped out and known with an intimacy that must seem little short of marvellous to those who have never even dreamed of the existence of so fair a country. For, the truth was, his Companion, who was now his guide and leader, had suddenly revealed herself.\n\nIt came about a few days after the funeral\u2014when the emptiness and hush of sorrow that lay over the house found its exact spiritual correspondence in the silence and sense of desolation that filled his own heart. He was in his bedroom, battling with that loneliness in loneliness which at the first had threatened to overwhelm him. He had just left his sister's side, having soothed her with what comfort he could into the sleep of weariness and exhaustion. By the open window, as so often before, he stood, staring into the damp winter night. Smoke moved restlessly to and fro behind him, sometimes sitting down to wash, sometimes jumping on the bed and sofa as though to search for something it could never find. Mrs. Tompkyns, who had scratched at the door a few minutes before, for the first time in her life, and for reasons known to none but herself and her black companion, lay at last curled up before the fire.\n\nThe room was filled with a soft presence, once silvery and fragrant, but now draped with the newly woven shadows that rendered it invisible. The invasion was irresistible. His heart ached. He knew quite well that his own soul, too, was being measured for its garment of shadow\u2014garment that, unlike ordinary clothes, fits better and closer with every year. He was in that dangerous mood when such measurements are made only too easily, and the lassitude of grief accepts the trying-on with a kind of soft, almost pleasurable, acquiescence\u2014when, sharply and suddenly, a sound was audible outside the window that instantly galvanised him into a state of resistance. The night, hitherto still as the grave, sighed in response to a rising wind. And through his being at the same moment ran the answering little Wind of Inspiration some one had taught him to find always when he sought it.\n\nAnd the sound brought comfort. It was as though an invisible hand had reached down inside him and touched the source of joy!\n\nPaul turned quickly. Mrs. Tompkyns was awake on the mat. Smoke rubbed against his legs. On the table, where he had spread them a few minutes before, were the black tie, the mended socks, the unused bottle for nettle stings and scratches, and beside them the faded spray of birch leaves, now withered and shrivelled. And, as he looked, the wind entered the room behind him, and he saw that the brown branch turned half over towards him. It rattled faintly as it moved. He was just in time to rescue it from Smoke, who saw in the sound and movement an invitation to play. He pinned it out of reach upon the wall over the mantelpiece.\n\nAnd it was just as he finished, that this sound of wind sighing through the dripping and leafless trees outside was followed by another sound\u2014one that he recognised... There was a rush and a leap, a swift, whistling roar\u2014and the next second he found himself among the sunny fields of flowers that he knew, and heard the water lapping at his feet... through the Crack!\n\n'Everybody's thin somewhere, was what he almost expected to hear; but what he did hear was another sentence, followed by merry and delicious laughter: 'Everybody can be happy somewhere!'\n\nAnd close in front of him, rising, it seemed, out of the reeds and waves and yellow sands, stood\u2014that veiled Companion whom he knew to be a part of himself.\n\nShe was turned away from him so that he could not see her face, yet he instantly divined a movement of her whole body towards him. Something within himself rushed out to meet her halfway. His life stirred mightily. The thrill of discovery came close. The next second his arms were about her and she was looking straight into his eyes.\n\nBut her own eyes were no longer veiled; her laughing face was clear as the day; the figure that he held so close was Nixie, child and woman. If ever it can be possible for two beings to melt into one, it was possible then. Each possessed the other; each slipped into the other.\n\n'Face to face at last!' he heard himself cry. 'Bless your little fairy heart! Why in the world didn't I guess you sooner?'\n\nA flame of happiness sped through him, and grief ran away utterly. The sense of loss that had numbed his soul vanished. And when she only answered him by the old mischievous laughter, he asked again: 'But how did you disguise yourself so well\u2014your voice, and everything?\n\nEven if your face was veiled I ought to have recognised you! It's too wonderful!'\n\n'It was you who disguised me!' she replied, standing up close in front of him, and playing with his waistcoat buttons as of old. 'Your thoughts about me got twisted\u2014sometimes. You thought too much. You should have felt only.'\n\n'They never shall again,' he exclaimed.\n\n'They never can. We are face to face now.' Paul turned to look again more closely. He saw her with extraordinary detail and vividness. It was indeed Nixie, but Nixie exactly as he had always wanted her, without quite knowing it himself; at least, without acknowledging it. No gulf of age was there to separate them now. She was the perfect Companion, for he had made her so. He smoothed her hair as they turned to walk by the river, and he caught the old childish perfume of it as it spread untidily over his shoulder, her eyes like dropped stars shining through it.\n\n'Isn't it awfully jolly?' she whispered: 'we can have twice as many aventures now, and you can go on writing them for Jonah and Toby just the same as before, only faster.'\n\nHe felt her hand steal into his; his heart became most strangely merged with hers. He had known a similar experience in Canadian forests, when the beauty of Nature had sometimes caught him up till he scarcely felt himself distinct enough from it to realise that he was separate. He now knew himself as close to her as that. It was exquisite and yet so simple that a little child might have felt it\u2014without perplexity. Perhaps it was precisely what children always did feel towards what they loved, animate or inanimate.\n\n'But how is it you can come so close?' he asked though he fancied that he thought, rather than spoke, the question.\n\n'Because, in the important sense, you are still a child,' he caught the answer, 'and always have been, and always will be.'\n\nThe whole world belonged to him. In the midst of the sea of sorrow he had discovered the little island of happiness.\n\n'We never can lose each other\u2014now!' he said.\n\n'As long as you think about me,' she answered. 'Please always think hard, very hard indeed thoughts. Through the Crack you can find everything that's lost.'\n\n\"And we're through the Crack now.'\n\n'Rather!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\u2003...Straightway I was 'ware,\n\n\u2003So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move\n\n\u2003Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair;\n\n\u2003And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,\n\n\u2003'Guess now who holds thee?'\u2014' Death,' I said. But there\n\n\u2003The silver answer rang\u2014'Not Death, but Love.'\n\n\u2014E. B. B.\n\n...It was only when the sky grew dark and the shadow of clouds fell over that sunny landscape that he realised he was still standing half dressed beside a dying fire, and that through the open window behind him the cold night air brought discomfort that made him shiver. He drew the curtains, lit a candle, spoke a soft word or two to the curled-up forms of Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke, who were far too busy in their own Crack-land to trouble about replying, and so finally got into bed.\n\nHe felt happier, strangely comforted. The wings of memory and phantasy, withdrawing softly, left a soothed feeling in his heart. In that region of creative imagination known as the 'Crack' he always found peace and at least a measure of joy. Until sleep should come to captain his forces, he deliberately turned the current of his thoughts to the work he was about to take up in London. Nixie, Joan, Dick\u2014all helped him. His will erected an iron barrier against the insidious attacks of sadness\u2014the disease which strikes at the roots of effort. He would dream his dreams, but also, he would do his work...\n\nThe shadows thickened about the house, crowding from the heart of winter. The fire died down. The room lay still. It was between one and two o'clock in the morning, when silence in the country is a real silence, and the darkness weighs. Chasing Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns down the winding corridors of dream\u2014Paul slept.\n\nA faint sound in the room a little later made him stir in his sleep and smile. His lips moved, as though in that land of dreams where he wandered some one spoke to him and he answered. Then the sound was repeated, and he woke with a start, sat up in bed, and stared hard into the darkness.\n\nThe fire was quite out; nothing was visible but the dim frame of the window on his right where he had forgotten to draw the curtains. A glimmer of light revealed the sash. Thinking it must be the winter dawn, he was about to lie down again and resume his slumbers, when the sound that had first wakened him again made itself audible.\n\nA slight shiver ran down his spine, for the sound seemed to bring over some of the wonder of his dreams into that dark and empty room. Then, with a tiny revelation of certainty, the knowledge came that he was wide awake, and that the sound was close in front of him. Moreover, he knew at once that it was neither Smoke nor Mrs. Tompkyns. It was a sound, deliberately produced, with conscious intelligence behind it. And it shot through him with the sweetness of music. It was like a breath of wind that rustled through a swinging branch\u2014of a birch tree; as though such a branch waved to and fro softly above his head.\n\nHis first idea was that some one was in the room, and had taken down the spray of withered leaves from the wall; and he strained his eyes in the direction of the mantelpiece, trying to pierce the darkness. In vain, of course. All he could distinguish was that something moved gently to and fro like a spot of light\u2014almost like a fire-fly, yet white\u2014about the room.\n\nFrom some deep region of sleep where he had just been, the atmosphere of dream was still, perhaps, about him. Yet this was no dream. There was somebody in the room with him, somebody alive, somebody who wished to claim his attention\u2014who had already spoken to him before he woke. He knew it unmistakably; he even remembered what had been said to him while yet asleep! 'How can you go on sleeping when I am here, trying to get at you?' It was just as if the words still trembled on the air. Confusedly, scarcely aware what he did, yet already thrilling with happiness, his lips formed an answer:\n\n'Who are you? What is it you want?'\n\nThere was a pause of intense silence, during which his heart hammered in his temples. Then a very faint whisper gathered through the darkness:\n\n'I promised...'\n\nThe point of light wavered a little in the air, then came low and seemed to settle on the end of the bed. Into the clear and silent spaces of his lonely soul there swam with it the presence of some one who had never died, and who could never die.\n\n'Is that you?' The name seemed incredible, for this was no Aventure through the Crack, yet he uttered it after an imperceptible moment of hesitation 'Nixie?'\n\nEven then he could not believe an answer would be forthcoming. The light, however, moved slightly, and again came the faint tones of a voice, a singing voice:\n\n'Of course it is!' There was a curious suggestion of huge distance about it, as though it travelled like an echo across vast spaces. 'I'm here, close beside you; closer than ever before.'\n\nHe heard the words with what can only be described as a spiritual sensation\u2014the peace and gratitude that follow the passion of strong prayer, of prayer that believes it will be heard and answered. 'You know now\u2014don't you?' continued the tiny singing voice, 'because I've told you.'\n\n'Yes,' he answered, also very low, 'I know now.' For at first he could think of nothing else to say. A huge excitement moved in him. Those invisible links of pure aspiration by which the soul knits herself inwardly to God seemed suddenly tightened in the depths of his being. He understood that this was a true thing, and possible.\n\n'You've come back\u2014like the trees in the spring,' he whispered stammeringly, after another pause, gazing as steadily as he could at the point of clear light so close in front of him.\n\n'The real part of me,' she explained; 'the real part of me has come back.'\n\n'The real part,' he echoed in his bewilderment. He began to understand.\n\nBut even then it all seemed too utterly strange and wonderful to be true; and a subtle confirmation of the child's presence that followed immediately only added at first to his increasing amazement. For both Smoke and Mrs. Tompkyns, he became aware, had jumped up softly upon the foot of the bed, and were sitting there, purring loudly with pleasure, close beneath the fleck of light. And their action made him seek the further confirmation of his own senses. He leaned forwards, hesitating in his bewilderment between the desire to find the matches and the desire to touch the speaker with his hands. But even in that darkness his intention was divined instantly. The light slid away like a wee torch carried on wings.\n\n'No, Uncle Paul,' whispered the voice farther off, 'not the matches. Light makes it more difficult for me.' He sank back against the pillows, frightened at the reality of it all. The old familiar name, too, 'Uncle Paul,' was almost more than he could bear.\n\n'Nixie!' he stammered, and then found it impossible to finish the sentence.\n\nThen she laughed. He heard her silvery laughter in the room, exactly as he had heard it a hundred times before, spontaneous, mischievous, and absolutely natural. She was amused at his perplexity, at his want of faith; at the absurd difficulty he found in believing. He lay quite still, breathing hard, wondering what would come next; still trying to persuade himself it was all a dream, yet growing gradually convinced in spite of himself that it was not.\n\n'And don't come too near me,' he heard her voice across the room. 'Never try and touch me, I mean. Think of me at your centre. That's the real way to get near.'\n\nVery slowly then, after that, he began to accept the Supreme Aventure. He talked. He asked questions, though never the obvious and detailed sort of questions it might have been expected he would ask. For it was now borne in upon him, as she said, that only her real part had come back, and that only his real part, therefore, was in touch with her. It was, so to speak, a colloquy of souls in which physical and material things had no interest. His very first question brought the truth of this home to him with singular directness. He asked her what the tiny light was that he saw moving to and fro like a little torch.\n\n'But I didn't know there was a light,' she answered. 'Where I am it is all light! I see you perfectly. Only\u2014you look so young, Uncle Paul! Just like a boy! About my own age, I mean.'\n\nAnd it is impossible to describe the delight, the mystical rapture that came to him as he heard her. The words, 'Where I am it is all light,' brought with them a sudden sense of reality that was too convincing for him to doubt any longer. From her simple description he recognised a place that he knew. But, at the same time, he understood that it was no place in the ordinary sense of the word, but rather a state and a condition. He himself in his deepest dreams had been there too. That light had sometimes in brief moments of aspiration shone for him. And the curious sense of immense distance that came so curiously with her tiny voice came because there was really no distance at all. She was no longer conditioned by space or time. Those were limitations of life in the body, temporary scales of measurement adopted by the soul when dealing with temporary things. Whereas Nixie was free.\n\nA sense of happiness deep as the sea, of peace, bliss, and perfect rest that could never know hurry or alarm, surged through him in a tide. He thought, with a thrill of anticipation, of the time when his own eyes would be opened, and he should see as clearly as she did. But instantly the rebuke came.\n\n'Oh! You must not think about that,' she said with a laugh; 'you have a lot to do first, a lot more aventures to go through!'\n\nAs she spoke the light slid nearer again and settled upon the foot of the bed. His thoughts were evidently the same as spoken words to her. She knew all that passed in his mind, the very feelings of his heart as well. This was indeed companionship and intimacy. He remembered how she had told him all about it in the Crack weeks ago, before he realised who she was, and before he knew her face to face. And at the same moment he noticed another curious detail of her presence, namely, that the little torch\u2014for so he now called it to himself\u2014in passing before the mirror produced no reflection in the glass. Yet, if his eyes could perceive it, there ought to have been a refraction from the mirror as well\u2014a reflection! Did he then only perceive it with his interior vision? Was his spiritual sight already partially opened?\n\n'That's your 'terpretation of me\u2014inside yourself,' he caught her swift whisper in reply, for again she heard his thought; and he almost laughed out aloud with pleasure to notice the long word decapitated as her habit always was on earth. 'In your thoughts I'm a sort of light, you see.'\n\nThe explanation was delightful. He understood perfectly. The thought of Nixie had always come to him, even in earthly life, in the terms of brightness. And his love marvelled to notice, too, that she still had the old piercing vision into the heart of things, and the characteristically graphic way of expressing her meaning.\n\nThe purring of the cats made itself audible. They were both 'kneading' the bed-clothes by his feet, as happy as though being stroked.\n\n'No, they don't see,' she explained the moment the thought entered his mind; 'they only feel that I'm here. Lots of animals are like that. It's the way dogs know 'sti'ctively if a person's good or bad.'\n\nOh, how the animals after this would knit him to her presence! No wonder he had already found comfort with them that no human being could give... The thought of his sister flashed next into his brain\u2014the difficulty of helping her.\n\n'I tried to get at her before I came here to you,' he heard, 'but her room was all dark. It was like trying to get inside a cloud. She's cold and shadowy\u2014and ever such a long way off. It's diff'cult to explain.' 'I think I understand,' he whispered.\n\n'You can get closer than I can.'\n\n'I'll try.'\n\n'Of course. You must.'\n\nIt was Nixie's happiness that seemed so wonderful and splendid to him. Her voice almost sang; and laughter slipped in between the shortest sentences even. Brightness, music, and pure joy were about her like an atmosphere. He was breathing a rarefied air, cool, scented, and exhilarating. He had already known it when playing with the children and enjoying their very-wonderful-indeed aventures; only now it was raised to a still higher power. In its very essence he knew it.\n\n'Toby and Jonah are with me the moment they sleep,' she continued, ever following his least thought. 'The instant their bodies fold up they shoot across here to me. Toby comes easiest. She's a girl, you see. And Daddy's here too'\n\n'Dick? 'he cried, memory and affection surging through him with a sudden passion.\n\n'Of course. You've thought about him so much. He says you've always been close to each other'\n\nThe voice broke off suddenly, and the torch of light moved to and fro as though agitated. Paul heard no sound, and saw no sign, but again, into the clear and silent spaces of his soul, now opened so marvellously, so blessedly to receive, there swam the consciousness of another Presence. There was a long pause, while memory annihilated all the intervening years at a single stroke...\n\nHis mind was growing slightly confused with it all. His mortal intelligence wearied and faltered a little with the effort to understand how time and; distance could be thus destroyed. He was not yet free as these others were free.\n\n'How is it, then, that you can stay?' he asked presently, when the light held steady again. By 'you' he meant 'both of you.' Yet he did not say it. This was what seemed so wonderful in their perfect communion; words really were not necessary. Afterwards, indeed, he sometimes wondered whether he actually spoke at all.\n\n'I was going on\u2014at first,' came the soft answer, 'when I heard something calling me, and found I couldn't. I had something to do here.'\n\n'What?' he ventured under his breath.\n\n'You!' She laughed in his face, so to speak. 'You, of course. Part of you is in me, so I couldn't go on without you. But when you are ready, and have done your work, we'll go on together. Daddy is waiting, too. Oh, it's simply splendid\u2014a very-splendid-indeed aventure, you see! 'Again she laughed through that darkened room till it seemed filled with white light, and the light flooded his very soul as he heard her.\n\n'You will wait, Nixie? 'he asked.\n\n'I must wait. Both of us must wait. We are all together, you see.' And, after another long pause, he asked another question:\n\n'This work, then, that keeps me here?'\n\n'Your London boys, of course. There's no one in the whole world who can do it so well. You've been picked out for it; that's what really brought you home from America!' And she burst out into such a peal of laughter that Paul laughed with her. He simply couldn't help himself. He felt like singing at the same time. It was all so happy and reasonable and perfect.\n\n'You've got the money and the time and the 'thusiasm,' she went on; 'and over here there are thousands and millions of children all watching you and clapping their hands and dancing for joy. I've told them all the Aventures you wrote, but they think this is the best of all\u2014the London-Boys-Aventure'!'\n\nHe felt his heart swell within him. It seemed that the child's hair was again about his eyes, her slender arms clasping his neck, and her blue eyes peering into his as when she begged him of old in the nursery or schoolroom for an aventure, a story.\n\n'So you'll never give it up, will you, Uncle Paul?' she sang, in that tiny soft voice through the darkness.\n\n'Never,' he said.\n\n'Promise?'\n\n'Promise,' he replied. The thought of those 'thousands and millions' of children watching his work from the other side of death was one that would come back to strengthen him in the future hours of discouragement that he was sure to know.\n\nAnd much more she told him besides. They talked, it seemed, for ever\u2014yet said so little. Into mere moments\u2014such was the swift and concentrated nature of their intimacy\u2014they compressed hours of earthly conversation; for his thoughts were heard and answered as soon as born within him, and a whole train of ideas that the lips ordinarily stammer over in difficult detail crowded easily into a single expression\u2014a thought, a desire, a question half uttered, and then a reply that comprehended all. There was no labour or weariness, no sense of effort.\n\nMoreover, when at length he heard her faint whisper, 'Now I must go,' it conveyed no sense of departure or loss. She did not leave him. It was more as though he closed a much-loved book and replaced it in his pocket. The pictures evoked do not leave the mind because the cover is closed; they remain, on the contrary, to be absorbed by the heart Nixie's silvery presence was in him; he would always feel her now, even when his thoughts seemed busy with outer activities.\n\nThe little torch flickered and was gone; but as Paul gazed into the darkness of the room he knew that the light had merely slipped down deep into himself to burn as an unfailing beacon at the centre of his soul. And then it was that he realised other curious details for the first time. Some of the more ordinary faculties of his mind, it seemed, had been in suspension during the amazing experience, while others had been exalted as in trance. For it now came to him that he had actually seen her\u2014with a clearness that he had never known before. That torch lit up her little form as a lantern lights up a person holding it in darkness. Just as he had felt all the sweet and essential points of her personality, so also he had been vividly aware of her figure in the terms of sight\u2014eyes, hair, sunburned little hands, and twinkling feet. Her very breath and perfume even!\n\nIf the working of his ordinary senses had been in abeyance so that he hardly knew the hunger for common sight and touch, he now realised that it was because they had been replaced by these higher senses with their keener, closer satisfaction. And this intimate knowledge of her was as superior to the ordinary methods as flying is to crawling\u2014or, better still, as a draught of water in the throat is to dipping the fingers in the cup.\n\nFor who, indeed, shall define the standard of reality? And who, when the senses are such sorry reporters, shall declare with authority that one thing is false and could not happen, and another is true and actually did happen? Experiences of the transcendental order are, perhaps, beyond the power of precise words to describe, for they are not common enough to have become incorporated into the language of a race. And words are clumsy and inadequate symbols at best. The deepest thoughts, as the deepest experiences, ever evade them. It is difficult to convey the sense of fierce reality the presence of Nixie brought to him. It flooded and covered him; spread through and over him like light; entered into his essential being to cherish and to feed, just as the body assimilates earthly nourishment. He absorbed her. She nourished while she blessed him.\n\nShe had told him the secret: to think centrally. He now began to understand how much nearer he could be to others by thinking strongly of them than by walking at their side. Physical touch is distant compared to the subtle intimacy of the desiring mind. The mystical conception of union with God came home to him as something practically possible.\n\nYet when he got up a few minutes later to write down the conversation as he remembered it, the mere lighting of the candle, the noise of the match, the dipping of his pen in the ink\u2014all contrived somehow to bring him down to a lower order of things that dimmed most strangely the memory of what had just passed. Most of what he had heard escaped him. He could not frame it into words. All he could recapture is what has been here set down so briefly and baldly.\n\nIt then seemed to him\u2014the thought laboured to and fro in his mind as he got back into bed and sleep came over him\u2014that it was only the Higher Self in him that had been in communication with the child. The eternal part of him had talked with the eternal part of her. In the body, however, this was commonly submerged. Her presence had temporarily evoked it. It now had returned to its Throne at the core of his being.\n\nAll that he remembered of the colloquy was the little portion that, as it were, had filtered through into his normal self. The rest, the main part, however, was not lost. He had absorbed it. If he could not recall the actual words and language, he understood\u2014it was his last thought before sleep caught him\u2014that its results would remain for ever.\n\nAnd those who have known similar experiences will understand without more words. The rest will never understand. Perhaps, after all, the best and purest form of memory is\u2014results.\n\n\u2003...Ne son gia morto; e ben ch'albergo cangi,\n\n\u2003resto in te vivo, ch'or mi vedi e piangi,\n\n\u2003se l'un nell' altro amante si trasforma.\n\nAnd one of the clearest impressions that remained next morning when he woke was that he had actually seen her. The reality of it increased with the daylight instead of faded. While he dressed he sang to himself, until it occurred to him that his signs of joy might be misunderstood by any of the household who heard; and then he stopped singing and moved about the room, smiling and contented.\n\nSomething of the radiance of that little white torch still seemed in the air. The heavy gloom of the chill December morning could not smother it. Something of it remained too about him all day like a halo; looking out of his eyes; communicable, as it were, from the very surface of his skin to all with whom he came in contact. His sister, especially, and the children felt the comfort of his presence. They followed him about from room to room; they clung close; they were instinctively aware that peace and strength emanated from him, though little guessing the real source of his serene and tranquil atmosphere.\n\nFor, of course, he told no one of what had happened. During the day, indeed, it lay in him submerged and unassertive, like the presence of some great glowing secret, feeding the sources of energy for all his little outward duties and activities, yet never claiming individual attention itself. Only with the fall of night, when the doings of the day were instinctively laid aside like a garment no longer required, did it again swim up upon him out of the depths, and speak.\n\n'Now!' he heard the tiny singing voice, 'we can be alone. Your body's tired. I can get closer to you.'\n\n'I've felt you by me all day, though,' he said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.\n\n'Of course,' came the answering whisper, soft as moonlight, 'because I never left you for a single moment. I was in everything you did\u2014in your very words. Once or twice, I even got into mother too, through you and made her feel better. Wasn't that splendid?'\n\nPaul longed to give the child one of his old hugs\u2014to feel her little warm and sunny body pressed against his own. Instead, her laughter echoed suddenly all about the room.\n\n'That's impossible now! 'he heard. 'I'm ever so much closer this way. You'll soon get used to it, you know!'\n\nThis spontaneous laughter was the music to which all their talks were set. He laughed too, and blew the candles out.\n\n'I tried very hard to say the true things,' he murmured, referring to her remark about comforting his sister.\n\n'I know you did. That's how I got into her\u2014through you. You must go on and on trying. In the end we'll get her all soft and happy again. She'll feel me without knowing it.'\n\nSuddenly it struck him that, although the room was dark, he did not see the light of the little torch as before. He missed it. He was just going to ask why it was absent when the child caught his thought and replied of her own accord:\n\n'Because it's spread all over now, instead of being just a point. You are in it, I mean. There's light everywhere about you now, and I see you much clearer than last time.'\n\nThe explanation described exactly what he felt himself.\n\n'Let them in, please,' Nixie suddenly interrupted his thoughts again. 'They're both coming up the stairs. It was very naughty of you to forget them, you know.'\n\nAfter a moment of puzzled hesitation he understood what she meant, and was out of bed and across the floor. He did not wait to light a candle, but opened the door and stood there waiting in the darkness. Almost at once two soft, furry things brushed past his feet as Smoke, followed by Mrs. Tompkyns, marched into the room, uttering that curious sharp sound of pleasure which is something between a purr and a cry. They disappeared among the shadows beyond the fireplace, and Paul sprang back into bed again pleased that they were there, yet annoyed with himself for having forgotten them.\n\n'But it was my fault really' she laughed. 'I've been with them out in the garden, and they've only just got in through the pantry window. My presence excites them awfully. Oh, it's all right,' she added quickly, in reply to his further thought; 'Barker's very late to-night doing the silver. But he'll shut the window before he goes.'\n\nIt was his turn to laugh. She had caught his thought about the window almost before it reached the surface of his mind. Moreover, he found that both Mrs. Tompkyns and Smoke had very cold wet soles under their padded little feet.\n\nIn this way, most strangely, sweetly, naturally, even the trivial details of their daily life as they had always known it together, intermingled with the talk that was often very earnest, mystical, and pregnant with meanings. It was in every sense a continuation of their former relationship, touched on her side with a greater knowledge\u2014almost as though she had suddenly developed to the point she might have reached in time upon the earth; on his side, with a delicate sense of accepting guidance from some one with greater privileges than himself, who had come back on purpose to help and inspire him.\n\nFor more and more it seemed to partake of the nature of genuine inspiration. Speech came direct and swift as thought, without hesitation or stammering as in the flesh. She told him many things, often quaintly enough expressed, but that yet seemed to hold the kernel of deep truths. There had never been the least break in their companionship, it seemed.\n\n'I knew all this before,' she said, after a singular exchange of questions and answers about the nature of communion with invisible sources of mood and feeling, 'only I suppose my brain had not got big enough, or whatever it was, to tell it. Like your poets you used to tell me about who couldn't find their rhymes, perhaps.'\n\nAnd her laughter flowed about him in a rippling flood that instantly woke his own. They always laughed. They felt so happy. It was a communion between old souls that surely had bathed deeply in the experiences of life before they had become imprisoned in the particular bodies known as Paul Rivers and Margaret Christina Messenger.\n\nHe became convinced, too, more and more that she really did not speak at all\u2014that no actual sound set the waves of air in motion\u2014but that she put her words into him in the form of thoughts, and that he it was, in order to grasp them clearly, who clothed them with the symbols of sound and language. It was essentially of the nature of inspiration. She blew the ideas into his heart and mind.\n\nAnd many things that he asked her were undoubtedly little more than his own thoughts, half-formed and vague, lying in the depths of him.\n\n'Then, over there, where you now are, is it\u2014more real? Are you, as it were, one stage nearer to the great Reality? What's it like?'\n\n'It's through the real \"Crack,\" I think,' she answered. 'Everything is here that I imagined\u2014but really imagined\u2014on earth. And people who imagined nothing, or wanted only the world, find very little here.'\n\n'Then is the change very great?'\n\n'It doesn't seem to me like a change at all. I've been here before for visits. Now I've come to stay, that's all!'\n\n'You yourself have not changed?'\n\nShe roared with laughter, till he felt that his question was really absurd.\n\n'Of course not! How can I change? I'm always Nixie, wherever I am!'\n\n'But you feel different?' he insisted.\n\n'I feel better,' she answered, still laughing. 'I feel awfully jolly.' Then after a long pause he asked another question. It was really a question he was always asking in one form or another, only he had never yet put it so directly perhaps. He whispered it from a grave and solemn heart:\n\n'Are you nearer to\u2014God, do you think?'\n\nIt was a word he rarely used. In his conversations with the child on earth he had never once used it. She waited a long time before replying. Instinctively, very subtly, it came to him that she did not know exactly what he meant.\n\n'I'm in and with Everything there is\u2014Everywhere,' she said softly. 'And I couldn't possibly be nearer to anything than I am.'\n\nMore than that she could not explain, and Paul never asked similar questions again. He understood that they were really unanswerable.\n\nAnd it was the same with other thoughts, thoughts referring to the fundamental conditions of temporal existence, that is. Nothing, for instance, made time and space seem less real than the way she answered questions involving one or other. Out of curiosity he had gone to the trouble of reading up other records of spirit communion\u2014the literature (saving the mark) of Spiritualism brims over with them\u2014and he had asked her some question with regard to the detailed geography there given.\n\n'But there's no place at all where I am,' the child laughed. 'I am just here. There was no place really in our Aventures, was there? Place is only with you on earth!'\n\nAnd another time, talking of the 'future' when he should come to join herself and Dick at the close of his earthly pilgrimage, she said between bursts of the merriest laughter he had ever known: 'But that's now! already! You come; you join us; we are all together\u2014always!'\n\nAnd when he insisted that he could not possibly be in two places at once, and reminded her that she had already told him she was 'waiting' for his arrival, the only reply he could get was this jolly laughter, and the assurance that he was 'awfully muddled and c'fused 'and would 'never understand it that way!'\n\nThe main thing these 'silent' conversations taught him seemed to be that Death brings no revolutionary change as regards character; the soul does not leap into a state much better or much worse than it knew before; the opportunities for discipline and development continue gradually just as they did in the body, only under different conditions; and there is no abrupt change into perfection on the one hand, or into desolation on the other. He gathered, too, that these 'conditions' depended very largely upon the kind of life\u2014especially the kind of thought\u2014that the personality had indulged on earth. The things that Nixie 'imagined' and yearned for, she found.\n\nHis communion with her became, as time passed, more frequent and more real, and soon ceased to confine itself only to the quiet night hours. She was with him all day long, whenever he needed her. She guided him in a thousand unimportant details of his life, as well as in the bigger interests of his work in London with his waifs. And in murky London she was just as close to him as in the perfumed stillness of the Dorsetshire garden, or in the retirement of his own chamber...\n\nAnd one singular feature of their alliance was that it continued even in sleep. For, sometimes, he would wake in the morning after what had been apparently a dreamless night, yet later in the day there would steal over him the memory of a long talk he had enjoyed with the child during the hours of so-called unconsciousness. Dreams, forgotten in the morning, often, of course, return in this fashion during the day. There is nothing new or unusual in it. Only with him it became so frequent that he now rose to the day's work with a delightful sense of anticipation: 'Perhaps later in the day I shall remember! Perhaps we have been together all night!'\n\nAnd in this connection he came to notice two things: first, that after these nights together, at first forgotten, he woke wonderfully refreshed, blessed, peaceful in mind and body; and secondly, that what recalled the conversation later was always contact with some object or other that had been associated with the child. Thus\u2014the picturesquely-mended socks, the medicine bottle for scratches, or the spray of birch leaves, now preserved between the pages of his Blake, never failed in this latter respect.\n\nIt was curious, too, how the alliance persisted and fortified itself during the repose of the body; as though, during sleep, the eternal portion of himself with which the child communed, enjoyed a greater measure of freedom. It recalled the closing lines of a sonnet he had always admired, though his own experience was true in a literal sense hardly contained, probably, in the heart of the poetess:\n\n\u2003But when sleep comes to close each difficult day,\n\n\u2003When night gives pause to the long watch I keep,\n\n\u2003And all my bonds I needs must loose apart,\n\n\u2003Must doff my will as raiment laid away\u2014\n\n\u2003With the first dream that comes with the first sleep\n\n\u2003I run, I run, I am gathered to thy heart.\n\nHe filled a book with these talks as the years passed, though to give them in more detail could serve little purpose but to satisfy a possible curiosity. They had value and authority for himself, but for the majority might seem to contain little sense, or even coherence. They expressed, of course, his own personal interpretation of life and the universe. And this was quite possibly poetic, queer, fantastic\u2014for others. Yet it was his own. He had learned his own values in his own way, and was now engaged in sorting them out with Nixie's fairy help to guide him. And all souls that find themselves probably do likewise. The strength and blessing they shed about them as a result is beneficial, but the close details of the process by which they have 'arrived' can only seem to the world at large unintelligible, possibly even ridiculous; and this late interior blossoming of Uncle Paul, though it actually happened, must seem to many a tissue of dreams knit together with a strange fantastic nonsense." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "\u2003Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,\n\n\u2003Donnez vos mains surnaturelles;\n\n\u2003Pour me conduire aux lendemains\n\n\u2003Donnez vos yeux, donnez vos mains,\n\n\u2003Vos mains comme deux roses freles.\n\nAnd thus, as the region where he met and held communion with the freed child seemed to draw deeper and deeper into his interior being, the reality and value of the experience increased.\n\nThat there was some kind of definite external link, however, was equally true; for the cats, as well as certain other of the animals, most certainly were aware sometimes of her presence. They showed it in many and curious ways. But it was distinctly a shock to Paul to learn one day from his sister that queer stories were afoot concerning himself; that some of the simple country folk declared they had seen 'Mr Rivers walking with a young lady that was jest like Miss Nixie, only taller,' who disappeared, however, the moment the observer approached. And the way the household felt her presence was, perhaps, not less remarkable, for more than one of the servants gave notice because the house had become 'haunted,' and there had been seen a 'smallish white figure, shiny and dancing,' in his bedroom, or going down the corridor towards his study.\n\nPerhaps the glamour of his vivid creative thought had cast its effect upon these untrained imaginations, so that his vision was temporarily communicated to them too. Or, perhaps, they had actually seen what they described. But, whatever the explanation may be, the effect upon himself was to increase, if that were possible, the reality of the whole occurrence...\n\nAnd when the spring came round again with its charged memories of perfume, and sight, and the singing of its happy winds; when the tree-spirits returned to their garden haunts, all flaming with the beauty of new dresses gathered over-seas; when the silver birch tree combed out her glittering hair to the sun and shook her leaves in the very face of that old pine tree\u2014then Paul felt in himself, too, the rejuvenation that was going forward in all the world around him. He tasted in his heart all the regenerative forces that were bursting into form and energy with the spring, and knew that the pain and desolation he had felt temporarily in the winter were only spiritual growing-pains and the passing distress of a soul forging its way outwards through development to the best possible Expression it could achieve.\n\nFor Nixie came back, too, gay and glorious like the rest of the world\u2014sometimes dressed in blossoms of lilac or laburnum, sometimes with skirts of daisies and feet resting upon the Little Winds, sometimes with the soft hood of darkness over her head, the cloak of night about her shoulders, the stars caught all shivering in her hair, and dusk in the deeps of her eyes...\n\nHis life became 'inner' in the best sense\u2014a Life within a Life; not given over to useless dreaming, but ever drawing from the inner one the sustenance that provided the driving force for the outer one: the mystic as man of action!\n\nThe Wind of Inspiration blew for him now always, and steadily; but it was no longer the little wind that stirred the measure of his personal emotion into stammering verse, but the big, eternal wind that 'blew the stars to flame,' and at the same time impelled him irresistibly along the path of High A'venture to the Joss of Self in work for others...\n\n'Then why is it we are in the body\u2014and spend so much time there?' he asked in one of those intimate and mysterious conversations he held with the child to the very end of his life. 'Why need the soul descend to such clumsy confinings?'\n\nFor their talk was very close now about 'real things,' and neither found any difficulty in the words of question or answer.\n\n'To get experience that can only be got through the pains of limitation,' the answer sang within him, as he lay there upon the lawn beneath the cedars, absorbing the spring beauty. 'Everything is doing the same thing everywhere\u2014from Smoke, Mrs. Tompkyns and Madmerzelle, right up to you, me, Daddy, and the waifs! They all have a bit of Reality in them working upwards to God. Even stones and plants and trees are learning experiences they could learn only in those particular forms\u2014'\n\n'I know it! Of course, I know it!' Paul interrupted, with a rush of joy in his heart he could not restrain; 'but go on and tell me more, for I love to hear your little voice say it all.'\n\n'It's only, perhaps, that the stones are learning patience and endurance; the flowers sweetness; the trees strength and comfort; and the rivers joy. Later they change about, so that in the end each 'Bit of Reality' has gathered all possible experiences in nature before it passes on into men and women.\n\n'Think, Uncle Paul, of the joy of a stone, who after centuries of patience and endurance, cramped and pressed down, knows suddenly the freedom of wind and sea! Of the restlessness of flame that, after ages of leaping unsatisfied to the sky, learns the repose of a tree, moved only by the outside forces of wind and rain! And think of the delight of all these when they pass still further upwards and reach the stage of consciousness in animals and men\u2014and in time enter the region of development where I\u2014where you and I, and all we knew and loved, continue together, ever climbing, fighting, learning' It was curious. Afterwards he could never remember the way she ended the sentence. For the life of him he could not write it down. Definite recollection failed him, together with the loss of the actual words. Only the general sense remained in such a way as to open to his inner eye a huge vista of spiritual endeavour and advance that left him breathless and dizzy when he contemplated it, but at the same time charged most splendidly with courage and with hope.\n\n'Then the pains of limitation,' he remembered asking, 'the anguish of impossible yearnings that vainly seek expression\u2014these are symptoms of growth that in the end may produce something higher and nobler?'\n\n'Must! 'he heard the answer amid a burst of happy laughter, as though from where she stood it were possible to look back upon earthly pangs and see them in the terms of joy; 'just like any other suffering! Like the stress of heat and pressure that turns common clay into gems'\n\nHe interrupted her swiftly, high hopes crowding through his spirit like the rush of an army.\n\n'Then the life in us all\u2014the \"Bits of Reality \"in you and me\u2014have passed through all possible forms in their huge upward journey to reach our present stage?' He stammered amid a multitude of golden memories, half captured.\n\n'Of course. Uncle Paul, of course!' he caught deep, deep within him the silvery faint reply. 'And your love and sympathy with trees, winds, hills, with all Nature, even with animals'\u2014again her laughter ran out to him like a song\u2014'is because you passed long ago through them all, and half remember. You still feel with them, and your imagination for ever strives to reconstruct the various beauty known in each stage. You remember in the depths of you the longings of every particular degree\u2014even of the time when your soul was less advanced, and groping upwards as your London waifs grope even now. This is why your sympathy with them, too, is deep and true. You half remember.'\n\n'And Death,' he whispered, trembling with the joy of infinite spiritual desire.\n\nThe answer sank down into him with the Little Wind that stirred the cedars overhead, or else rose singing up from the uttermost depths of his listening heart\u2014to the end of his days he never could tell which.\n\n'What you call Death is only slipping through the Crack to a great deal more memory, and a great deal more power of seeing and telling\u2014towards the greatest Expression that ever can be known. It is, I promise you faithfully, Uncle Paul, nothing but a verywonderfulindeed Aventure, after all!'\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Human Chord by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nAs a boy he constructed so vividly in imagination that he came to believe in the living reality of his creations: for everybody and everything he found names\u2014real names. Inside him somewhere stretched immense playgrounds, compared to which the hay-fields and lawns of his father's estate seemed trivial: plains without horizon, seas deep enough to float the planets like corks, and \"such tremendous forests\" with \"trees like tall pointed hilltops.\" He had only to close his eyes, drop his thoughts inwards, sink after them himself, call aloud and\u2014see.\n\nHis imagination conceived and bore\u2014worlds; but nothing in these worlds became alive until he discovered its true and living name. The name was the breath of life; and, sooner or later, he invariably found it.\n\nOnce, having terrified his sister by affirming that a little man he had created would come through her window at night and weave a peaked cap for himself by pulling out all her hairs \"that hadn't gone to sleep with the rest of her body,\" he took characteristic measures to protect her from the said depredations. He sat up the entire night on the lawn beneath her window to watch, believing firmly that what his imagination had made alive would come to pass.\n\nShe did not know this. On the contrary, he told her that the little man had died suddenly; only, he sat up to make sure. And, for a boy of eight, those cold and haunted hours must have seemed endless from ten o'clock to four in the morning, when he crept back to his own corner of the night nursery. He possessed, you see, courage as well as faith and imagination.\n\nYet the name of the little man was nothing more formidable than \"Winky!\"\n\n\"You might have known he wouldn't hurt you, Teresa,\" he said. \"Any one with that name would be light as a fly and awf'ly gentle\u2014a regular dicky sort of chap!\"\n\n\"But he'd have pincers,\" she protested, \"or he couldn't pull the hairs out. Like an earwig he'd be. Ugh!\"\n\n\"Not Winky! Never!\" he explained scornfully, jealous of his offspring's reputation. \"He'd do it with his rummy little fingers.\"\n\n\"Then his fingers would have claws at the ends!\" she insisted; for no amount of explanation could persuade her that a person named Winky could be nice and gentle, even though he were \"quicker than a second.\" She added that his death rejoiced her.\n\n\"But I can easily make another\u2014such a nippy little beggar, and twice as hoppy as the first. Only I won't do it,\" he added magnanimously, \"because it frightens you.\"\n\nFor to name with him was to create. He had only to run out some distance into his big mental prairie, call aloud a name in a certain commanding way, and instantly its owner would run up to claim it. Names described souls. To learn the name of a thing or person was to know all about them and make them subservient to his will; and \"Winky\" could only have been a very soft and furry little person, swift as a shadow, nimble as a mouse\u2014just the sort of fellow who would make a conical cap out of a girl's fluffy hair\u2026 and love the mischief of doing it.\n\nAnd so with all things: names were vital and important. To address beings by their intimate first names, beings of the opposite sex especially, was a miniature sacrament; and the story of that premature audacity of Elsa with Lohengrin never failed to touch his sense of awe. \"What's in a name?\" for him, was a significant question\u2014a question of life or death. For to mispronounce a name was a bad blunder, but to name it wrongly was to miss it altogether. Such a thing had no real life, or at best a vitality that would soon fade. Adam knew that! And he pondered much in his childhood over the difficulty Adam must have had \"discovering\" the correct appellations for some of the queerer animals\u2026.\n\nAs he grew older, of course, all this faded a good deal, but he never quite lost the sense of reality in names\u2014the significance of a true name, the absurdity of a false one, the cruelty of mispronunciation. One day in the far future, he knew, some wonderful girl would come into his life, singing her own true name like music, her whole personality expressing it just as her lips framed the consonants and vowels\u2014and he would love her. His own name, ridiculous and hateful though it was, would sing in reply. They would be in harmony together in the literal sense, as necessary to one another as two notes in the same chord\u2026.\n\nSo he also possessed the mystical vision of the poet. What he lacked\u2014such temperaments always do\u2014was the sense of proportion and the careful balance that adjusts cause and effect. And this it is, no doubt, that makes his adventures such \"hard sayings.\" It becomes difficult to disentangle what actually did happen from what conceivably might have happened; what he thinks he saw from what positively was.\n\nHis early life\u2014to the disgust of his Father, a poor country squire\u2014was a distressing failure. He missed all examinations, muddled all chances, and finally, with \u00a350 a year of his own, and no one to care much what happened to him, settled in London and took any odd job of a secretarial nature that offered itself. He kept to nothing for long, being easily dissatisfied, and ever on the look out for the \"job\" that might conceal the kind of adventure he wanted. Once the work of the moment proved barren of this possibility, he wearied of it and sought another. And the search seemed prolonged and hopeless, for the adventure he sought was not a common kind, but something that should provide him with a means of escape from a vulgar and noisy world that bored him very much indeed. He sought an adventure that should announce to him a new heaven and a new earth; something that should confirm, if not actually replace, that inner region of wonder and delight he reveled in as a boy, but which education and conflict with a prosaic age had swept away from his nearer consciousness. He sought, that is, an authoritative adventure of the soul.\n\nTo look at, one could have believed that until the age of twenty-five he had been nameless, and that a committee had then sat upon the subject and selected the sound best suited to describe him: Spinrobin\u2014Robert. For, had he never seen himself, but run into that inner prairie of his and called aloud \"Robert Spinrobin,\" an individual exactly resembling him would surely have pattered up to claim the name.\n\nHe was slight, graceful, quick on his feet and generally alert; took little steps that were almost hopping, and when he was in a hurry gave him the appearance of \"spinning\" down the pavement or up the stairs; always wore clothes of some fluffy material, with a low collar and bright red tie; had soft pink cheeks, dancing grey eyes and loosely scattered hair, prematurely thin and unquestionably like feathers. His hands and feet were small and nimble. When he stood in his favorite attitude with hands plunged deep in his pockets, coat-tails slightly spread and flapping, head on one side and hair disordered, talking in that high, twittering, yet very agreeable voice of his, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that here was\u2014well\u2014Spinrobin, Bobby Spinrobin, \"on the job.\"\n\nFor he took on any \"job\" that promised adventure of the kind he sought, and the queerer the better. As soon as he found that his present occupation led to nothing, he looked about for something new\u2014chiefly in the newspaper advertisements. Numbers of strange people advertised in the newspapers, he knew, just as numbers of strange people wrote letters to them; and Spinny\u2014so he was called by those who loved him\u2014was a diligent student of the columns known as \"Agony\" and \"Help wanted.\" Whereupon it came about that he was aged twenty-eight, and out of a job, when the threads of the following occurrence wove into the pattern of his life, and \"led to something\" of a kind that may well be cause for question and amazement.\n\nThe advertisement that formed the bait read as follows:\u2014\n\n\"WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale,\"\u2014and the address.\n\nSpinrobin swallowed the bait whole. \"Unworldly\" put the match, and he flamed up. He possessed, it seemed, the other necessary qualifications; for a thin tenor voice, not unmusical, was his, and also a smattering of Hebrew which he had picked up at Cambridge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language. Courage and imagination he lumped in, so to speak, with the rest, and in the gilt-edged diary he affected he wrote: \"Have taken on Skale's odd advertisement. I like the man's name. The experience may prove an adventure. While there's change, there's hope.\" For he was very fond of turning proverbs to his own use by altering them, and the said diary was packed with absurd misquotations of a similar kind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "A singular correspondence followed, in which the advertiser explained with reserve that he wanted an assistant to aid him in certain experiments in sound, that a particular pitch and quality of voice was necessary (which he could not decide until, of course, he had heard it), and that the successful applicant must have sufficient courage and imagination to follow a philosophical speculation \"wheresoever it may lead,\" and also be \"so far indifferent to worldly success as to consider it of small account compared to spiritual knowledge\u2014especially if such knowledge appeared within reach and involved worldly sacrifices.\" He further added that a life of loneliness in the country would have to be faced, and that the man who suited him and worked faithfully should find compensation by inheriting his own \"rather considerable property when the time came.\" For the rest he asked no references and gave none. In a question of spiritual values references were mere foolishness. Each must judge intuitively for himself.\n\nSpinrobin, as has been said, bit. The letters, written in a fine scholarly handwriting, excited his interest extraordinarily. He imagined some dreamer-priest possessed by a singular hobby, searching for things of the spirit by those devious ways he had heard about from time to time, a little mad probably into the bargain. The name Skale sounded to him big, yet he somehow pictured to himself an ascetic-faced man of small stature pursuing in solitude some impossible ideal. It all attracted him hugely with its promise of out-of-the-way adventure. In his own phrase it \"might lead to something,\" and the hints about \"experiments in sound\" set chords trembling in him that had not vibrated since the days of his boyhood's belief in names and the significance of names. The salary, besides, was good. He was accordingly thrilled and delighted to receive in reply to his last letter a telegram which read: \"Engage you month's trial both sides. Take single ticket. Skale.\"\n\n\"I like that 'take single ticket,'\" he said to himself as he sped westwards into Wales, dressed in his usual fluffy tweed suit and anarchist tie. Upon his knees lay a brand new Hebrew grammar which he studied diligently all the way to Cardiff, and still carried in his hands when he changed into the local train that carried him laboriously into the desolation of the Pontwaun Mountains. \"It looks as though he approved of me already. My name apparently hasn't put him off as it does most people. Perhaps, through it, he divines the real me!\"\n\nHe smoothed down his rebellious hair as he neared the station in the dusk; but he was surprised to find only a rickety little cart drawn by a donkey sent to meet him (the house being five miles distant in the hills), and still more surprised when a huge figure of a man, hatless, dressed in knickerbockers, and with a large, floating grey beard, strode down the platform as he gave up his ticket to the station-master and announced himself as Mr. Philip Skale. He had expected the small, foxy-faced individual of his imagination, and the shock momentarily deprived him of speech.\n\n\"Mr. Spinrobin, of course? I am Mr. Skale\u2014Mr. Philip Skale.\"\n\nThe voice can only be described as booming, it was so deep and vibrating; but the smile of welcome, where it escaped with difficulty from the network of beard and moustaches, was winning and almost gentle in contradistinction to the volume of that authoritative voice. Spinrobin felt slightly bewildered\u2014caught up into a whirlwind that drove too many impressions through his brain for any particular one to be seized and mastered. He found himself shaking hands\u2014Mr. Skale, rather, shaking his, in a capacious grasp as though it were some small indiarubber ball to be squeezed and flung away. Mr. Skale flung it away, he felt the shock up the whole length of his arm to the shoulder. His first impressions, he declares, he cannot remember\u2014they were too tumultuous\u2014beyond that he liked both smile and voice, the former making him feel at home, the latter filling him to the brim with a peculiar sense of well-being. Never before had he heard his name pronounced in quite the same way; it sounded dignified, even splendid, the way Mr. Skale spoke it. Beyond this general impression, however, he can only say that his thoughts and feelings \"whirled.\" Something emanated from this giant clergyman that was somewhat enveloping and took him off his feet. The keynote of the man had been struck at once.\n\n\"How do you do, sir? This is the train you mentioned, I think?\" Spinrobin heard his own thin voice speaking, by way, as it were, of instinctive apology that he should have put such a man to the trouble of coming to meet him. He said \"sir,\" it seemed unavoidable; for there was nothing of the clergyman about him\u2014bishop, perhaps, or archbishop, but no suggestion of vicar or parish priest. Somewhere, too, in his presentment he felt dimly, even at the first, there was an element of the incongruous, a meeting of things not usually found together. The vigorous open-air life of the mountaineer spoke in the great muscular body with the broad shoulders and clean, straight limbs; but behind the brusqueness of manner lay the true gentleness of fine breeding.\n\nAnd even here, on this platform of the lonely mountain station, Spinrobin detected the atmosphere of the scholar, almost of the recluse, shot through with the strange fires that dropped from the large, lambent, blue eyes. All these things rushed over the thrilled little secretary with an effect, as already described, of a certain bewilderment, that left no single, dominant impression. What remained with him, perhaps, most vividly, he says, was the quality of the big blue eyes, their luminosity, their far-seeing expression, their kindliness. They were the eyes of the true visionary, but in such a personality they proclaimed the mystic who had retained his health of soul and body. Mr. Skale was surely a visionary, but just as surely a wholesome man of action\u2014probably of terrific action. Spinrobin felt irresistibly drawn to him.\n\n\"It is not unpleasant, I trust,\" the other was saying in his deep tones, \"to find some one to meet you, and,\" he added with a genial laugh, \"to counteract the first impression of this somewhat melancholy and inhospitable scenery.\" His arm swept out to indicate the dreary little station and the bleak and lowering landscape of treeless hills in the dusk.\n\nThe new secretary made some appropriate reply, his sense of loneliness already dissipated in part by the unexpected welcome. And they fell to arrangements about the luggage. \"You won't mind walking,\" said Mr. Skale, with a finality that anticipated only agreement. \"It's a short five miles. The donkey-cart will take the portmanteau.\" Upon which they started off at a pace that made the little man wonder whether he could possibly keep it up. \"We shall get in before dark,\" explained the other, striding along with ease, \"and Mrs. Mawle, my housekeeper, will have tea ready and waiting for us.\" Spinrobin followed, panting, thinking vaguely of the other employers he had known\u2014philanthropists, bankers, ambitious members of Parliament, and all the rest\u2014commonplace individuals to a man; and then of the immense and towering figure striding just ahead, shedding about him this vibrating atmosphere of power and whirlwind, touched so oddly here and there with a vein of gentleness that was almost sweetness. Never before had he known any human being who radiated such vigor, such big and beneficent fatherliness, yet for all the air of kindliness something, too, that touched in him the sense of awe. Mr. Skale, he felt, was a very unusual man.\n\nThey went on in the gathering dusk, talking little but easily. Spinrobin felt \"taken care of.\" Usually he was shy with a new employer, but this man inspired much too large a sensation in him to include shyness, or any other form of petty self-consciousness. He felt more like a son than a secretary. He remembered the wording of the advertisement, the phrases of the singular correspondence\u2014and wondered. \"A remarkable personality,\" he thought to himself as he stumbled through the dark after the object of his reflections; \"simple\u2014yet tremendous! A giant in all sorts of ways probably\u2014\" Then his thought hesitated, floundered. There was something else he divined yet could not name. He felt out of his depth in some entirely new way, in touch with an order of possibilities larger, more vast, more remote than any dreams his imagination even had yet envisaged. All this, and more, the mere presence of this retired clergyman poured into his receptive and eager little soul.\n\nAnd very soon it was that these nameless qualities began to assert themselves, completing the rout of Spinrobin's moderate powers of judgment. No practical word as to the work before them, or the duties of the new secretary, had yet passed between them. They walked along together, chatting as equals, acquaintances, almost two friends might have done. And on the top of the hill, after a four-mile trudge, they rested for the first time, Spinrobin panting and perspiring, trousers tucked up and splashed yellow with mud; Mr. Skale, legs apart, beard flattened by the wind about his throat, and thumbs in the slits of his waistcoat as he looked keenly about him over the darkening landscape. Treeless and desolate hills rose on all sides. A few tumbled-down cottages of grey stone lay scattered upon the lower slopes among patches of shabby and forlorn cultivation. Here and there an outcrop of rock ran skywards into somber and precipitous ridges. The October wind passed to and fro over it all, mournfully singing, and driving loose clouds that seemed to drop weighted shadows among the peaks." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "And it was here that Mr. Skale stopped abruptly, looked about him, and then down at his companion.\n\n\"Bleak and lonely\u2014this great spread of bare mountain and falling cliff,\" he observed half to himself, half to the other; \"but fine, very, very fine.\" He exhaled deeply, then inhaled as though the great draught of air was profoundly satisfying. He turned to catch his companion's eye. \"There's a savage and desolate beauty here that uplifts. It helps the mind to dwell upon the full sweep of life instead of getting dwarfed and lost among its petty details. Pretty scenery is not good for the soul.\" And again he inhaled a prodigious breastful of the mountain air. \"This is.\"\n\n\"But an element of terror in it, perhaps, sir,\" suggested the secretary who, truth to tell, preferred his scenery more smiling, and who, further, had been made suddenly aware that in this somber setting of bleak and elemental nature the great figure of his future employer assumed a certain air of grandeur that was a little too awe-inspiring to be pleasant.\n\n\"In all profound beauty there must be that,\" the clergyman was saying; \"fine terror, I mean, of course\u2014just enough to bring out the littleness of man by comparison.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, yes,\" agreed Spinrobin. His own insignificance seemed peculiarly apparent at that moment in contrast to Mr. Skale who had become part and parcel of the rugged landscape. Spinrobin was a lost atom whirling somewhere outside on his own account, whereas the other seemed oddly in touch with it, almost merged and incorporated into it. With those deep breaths the clergyman absorbed something of this latent power about them\u2014then gave it out again. It broke over his companion like a wave. Elemental force of some kind emanated from that massive human figure beside him.\n\nThe wind came tearing up the valley and swept past them with a rush as of mighty wings. Mr. Skale drew attention to it. \"And listen to that!\" he said. \"How it leaps, singing, from the woods in the valley up to those gaunt old cliffs yonder!\" He pointed. His beard blew suddenly across his face. With his bare head and shaggy flying hair, his big eyes and bold aquiline nose, he presented an impressive figure. Spinrobin watched him with growing amazement, aware that an enthusiasm scarcely warranted by the wind and scenery had passed into his manner. In his own person, too, he thought he experienced a birth of something similar\u2014a little wild rush of delight he was unable to account for. The voice of his companion, pointing out the house in the valley below, again interrupted his thoughts.\n\n\"How the mountains positively eat it up. It lies in their very jaws,\" and the secretary's eyes, traveling into the depths, made out a cluster of grey stone chimneys and a clearing in the woods that evidently represented lawns. The phrase \"courage and imagination\" flashed unbidden into his mind as he realized the loneliness of the situation, and for the hundredth time he wondered what in the world could be the experiments with sound that this extraordinary man pursued in this isolated old mansion among the hills.\n\n\"Buried, sir, rather,\" he suggested. \"I can only just see it\u2014\"\n\n\"And inaccessible,\" Mr. Skale interrupted him. \"Hard to get at. No one comes to disturb; an ideal place for work. In the hollows of these hills a man may indeed seek truth and pursue it, for the world does not enter here.\" He paused a moment. \"I hope, Mr. Spinrobin,\" he added, turning towards him with that gentle smile his shaggy visage sometimes wore, \"I hope you will not find it too lonely. We have no visitors, I mean; nothing but our own little household of four.\"\n\nSpinrobin smiled back. Even at this stage he admits he was exceedingly anxious to suit. Mr. Skale, in spite of his marked peculiarities, inspired him with confidence. His personal attraction was growing every minute; that vague awe he roused probably only increased it. He wondered who the \"four\" might be.\n\n\"There's nothing like solitude for serious work, sir,\" replied the younger man, stifling a passing uneasiness.\n\nAnd with that they plunged down the hillside into the valley, Mr. Skale leading the way at a terrific pace, shouting out instructions and warnings from time to time that echoed from the rocks as though voices followed them down from the mountains. The darkness swallowed them, they left the wind behind; the silence that dwells in the folded hills fell about their steps; the air grew less keen; the trees multiplied, gathering them in with fingers of mist and shadow. Only the clatter of their boots on the rocky path, and the heavy bass of the clergyman's voice shouting instructions from time to time, broke the stillness. Spinrobin followed the big dark outline in front of him as best he could, stumbling frequently. With countless little hopping steps he dodged along from point to point, a certain lucky nimbleness in his twinkling feet saving him from many a tumble.\n\n\"All right behind there?\" Mr. Skale would thunder.\n\n\"All right, thanks, Mr. Skale,\" he would reply in his thin tenor,\n\n\"I'm coming.\"\n\n\"Come along, then!\" And on they would go faster than before, till in due course they emerged from the encircling woods and reached the more open ground about the house. Somehow, in the jostling relations of the walk, a freedom of intercourse had been established that no amount of formal talk between four walls could have accomplished. They scraped their dirty boots vigorously on the iron mat.\n\n\"Tired?\" asked the clergyman, kindly.\n\n\"Winded, Mr. Skale, thank you\u2014nothing more,\" was the reply. He looked up at the square mass of the house looming dark against the sky, and the noise his companion made opening the door\u2014the actual rattle of the iron knob did it\u2014suddenly brought to him a clear realization of two things: First, he understood that the whole way from the station Mr. Skale had been watching him closely, weighing, testing, proving him, though by ways and methods so subtle that they had escaped his observation at the time; secondly, that he was already so caught in the network of this personality, vaster and more powerful than his own, that escape if he desired it would be exceedingly difficult. Like a man in a boat upon the upper Niagara river, he already felt the tug and suction of the current below\u2014the lust of a great adventure drawing him forward. Mr. Skale's hand upon his shoulder as they entered the house was the symbol of that. The noise of the door closing behind him was the passing of the last bit of quiet water across which a landing to the bank might still have been possible.\n\nFaint streamers from the dark, inscrutable house of fear reached him even then and left their vague, undecipherable signatures upon the surface of his soul. The forces that vibrated so strangely in the atmosphere of Mr. Skale were already playing about his own person, gathering him in like a garment. Yet while he shuddered, he liked it. Was he not already losing something of his own insignificant and diminutive self?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "The clergyman, meanwhile, had closed the heavy door, shutting out the darkness, and now led the way across a large, flagged hall into a room, ablaze with lamp and fire, the walls lined thickly with books, furnished cozily if plainly. The laden tea table, and a kettle hissing merrily on the hob, were pleasant to look upon, but what instantly arrested the gaze of the secretary was the face of the old woman in cap and apron\u2014evidently the housekeeper already referred to as \"Mrs.\" Mawle\u2014who stood waiting to pour out tea. For about her worn and wrinkled countenance there lay an indefinable touch of something that hitherto he had seen only in pictures of the saints by the old masters. What attracted his attention, and held it so arrestingly, was this singular expression of happiness, aye, of more than mere happiness\u2014of joy and peace and blessed surety, rarely, if ever, seen upon a human face alive, and only here and there suggested behind that mask of repose which death leaves so tenderly upon the features of those few who have lived their lives to noblest advantage.\n\nSpinrobin caught his breath a little, and stared. Aged and lined as it unquestionably was, he caught that ineffable suggestion of radiance about it which proclaimed an inner life that had found itself and was in perfect harmony with outer things: a life based upon certain knowledge and certain hope. It wore a gentle whiteness he could find only one word to describe\u2014glory. And the moment he saw it there flashed across him the recognition that this was what Mr. Skale also possessed. That giant, athletic, vigorous man, and this bent, worn old woman both had it. He wondered with a rush of sudden joy what produced it;\u2014whether it might perhaps one day be his too. The flame of his own spirit leapt within him.\n\nAnd, so wondering, he turned to look at the clergyman. In the softer light of fire and lamp his face had the appearance of forty rather than sixty as he had first judged; the eyes, always luminous, shone with health and enthusiasm; a great air of youth and vitality glowed about him. It was a fine head with that dominating nose and the shaggy tangle of hair and beard; very big, fatherly and protective he looked, a quite inexpressible air of tenderness mingled in everywhere with the strength. Spinrobin felt immensely drawn to him as he looked. With such a leader he could go anywhere, do anything. There, surely, was a man whose heart was set not upon the things of this world.\n\nAn introduction to the housekeeper interrupted his reflections; it did not strike him as at all out of the way; doubtless she was more mother than domestic to the household. At the name of \"Mrs.\" Mawle (courtesy-title, obviously), he rose and bowed, and the old woman, looking from one to the other, smiled becomingly, curtseyed, put her cap straight, and turned to the teapot again. She said nothing.\n\n\"The only servant I have, practically,\" explained the clergyman, \"cook, butler, housekeeper and tyrant all in one; and, with her niece, the only other persons in the house besides ourselves. A very simple m\u00e9nage, you see, Mr. Spinrobin. I ought to warn you, too, by-the-by,\" he added, \"that she is almost stone deaf, and has only got the use of one arm, as perhaps you noticed. Her left arm is\"\u2014he hesitated for a fraction of a second\u2014\"withered.\"\n\nA passing wonder as to what the niece would be like accompanied the swallowing of his buttered toast and tea, but the personalities of Mr. Skale and his housekeeper had already produced emotions that prevented this curiosity acquiring much strength. He could deal with nothing more just yet. Bewilderment obstructed the way, and in his room before dinner he tried in vain to sort out the impressions that so thickly flooded him, though without any conspicuous degree of success. The walls of his bedroom, like those of corridor and hall, were bare; the furniture solid and old-fashioned; scanty, perhaps, yet more than he was accustomed to; and the spaciousness was very pleasant after the cramped quarters of stuffy London lodgings. He unpacked his few things, arranged them with neat precision in the drawers of the tallboy, counted his shirts, socks, and ties, to see that all was right, and then drew up an armchair and toasted his toes before the comforting fire. He tried to think of many things, and to decide numerous little questions roused by the events of the last few hours; but the only thing, it seems, that really occupied his mind, was the rather overpowering fact that he was\u2014with Mr. Skale and in Mr. Skale's house; that he was there on a month's trial; that the nature of the work in which he was to assist was unknown, immense, singular; and that he was already being weighed in the balances by his uncommon and gigantic employer. In his mind he used this very adjective. There was something about the big clergyman\u2014titanic.\n\nHe was in the middle of a somewhat jumbled consideration about \"Knowledge of Hebrew\u2014tenor voice\u2014courage and imagination\u2014unworldly,\" and so forth, when a knock at the door announced Mrs. Mawle who came to inform him that dinner was ready. She stood there, a motherly and pleasant figure in black, and she addressed him in the third person. \"If Mr. Spinrobin will please to come down,\" she said, \"Mr. Skale is waiting. Mr. Skale is always quite punctual.\" She always spoke thus, in the third person; she never used the personal pronoun if it could be avoided. She preferred the name direct, it seemed. And as Spinrobin passed her on the way out, she observed further, looking straight into his eyes as she said it: \"and should Mr. Spinrobin have need of anything, that,\" indicating it, \"is the bell that rings in the housekeeper's room. Mrs. Mawle can see it wag, though she can't hear it. Day or night,\" she added with a faint curtsey, \"and no trouble at all, just as with the other gentlemen\u2014\"\n\nSo there had been other gentlemen, other secretaries! He thanked her with a nod and a smile, and hurried pattering downstairs in a neat blue suit, black silk socks and a pair of bright new pumps, Mr. Skale having told him not to dress. The phrase \"day or night,\" meanwhile, struck him as significant and peculiar. He remembered it later. At the moment he merely noted that it added one more to the puzzling items that caused his bewilderment." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Before he had gone very far, however, there came another\u2014crowningly perplexing. For he was halfway down the darkened passage, making for the hall that glimmered beyond like the mouth of a cave, when, without the smallest warning, he became suddenly conscious that something attractive and utterly delicious had invaded the stream of his being. It came from nowhere\u2014inexplicably, and at first it took the form of a naked sensation of delight, keen as a thrill of boyhood days. There passed into him very swiftly something that satisfied. \"I mean, whatever it was,\" he says, \"I couldn't have asked or wanted more of it. It was all there, complete, supreme, sufficient.\" And the same instant he saw close beside him, in the comparative gloom of the narrow corridor, a vivid, vibrating picture of a girl's face, pale as marble, of flower-like beauty, with dark voluminous hair and large grey eyes that met his own from behind a wavering net of eyelashes. Down to the shoulders he saw her.\n\nErect and motionless she stood against the wall to let him pass\u2014this slim young girl whose sudden and unexpected presence had so electrified him. Her eyes followed him like those of a picture, but she neither bowed nor curtseyed, and the only movement she made was the slight turning of the head and eyes as he went by. It was extraordinarily effective, this silent and delightful introduction, for swift as lightning, and with lightning's terrific and incalculable surety of aim, she leapt into his heart with the effect of a blinding and complete possession.\n\nIt was, of course, he realized, the niece\u2014the fourth member of the household, and the first clear thought to disentangle itself from the resultant jumble of emotions was his instinctive wonder what her name might be. How was this delightful apparition called? This was the question that ran and danced in his blood. In another minute he felt sure he would discover it. It must begin (he felt sure of that) with an M.\n\nHe did not pause, or alter his pace. He made no sign of recognition. Their eyes swallowed each other for a brief moment as he passed\u2014and then he was pattering with quick, excited steps down the passage beyond, and the girl was left out of sight in the shadows behind him. He did not even turn back to look, for in some amazing sense she seemed to move on beside him, as though some portion of her had merged into his being. He carried her on with him. Some sweet and marvelous interchange they had undergone together. He felt strangely blessed, soothed inwardly, made complete, and more than twice on the way down the name he knew must belong to her almost sprang up and revealed itself\u2014yet never quite. He knew it began with M, even with Mir\u2014but could get nothing more. The rest evaded him. He divined only a portion of the name. He had seen only a portion of her form.\n\nThe first syllable, however, sang in him with an exquisitely sweet authority. He was aware of some glorious new thing in the penetralia of his little spirit, vibrating with happiness. Some portion of himself sang with it. \"For it really did vibrate,\" he said, \"and no other word describes it. It vibrated like music, like a string; as though when I passed her she had taken a bow and drawn it across the strings of my inmost being to make them sing\u2026.\"\n\n\"Come,\" broke in the sonorous voice of the clergyman whom he found standing in the hall; \"I've been waiting for you.\"\n\nIt was said, not complainingly nor with any idea of fault-finding, but rather\u2014both tone and manner betrayed it\u2014as a prelude to something of importance about to follow. Somewhat impatiently Mr. Skale took his companion by the arm and led him forwards; on the stone floor Spinrobin's footsteps sounded light and dancing, like a child's. The clergyman strode. At the dining room door he stopped, turning abruptly, and at the same instant the figure of the young girl glided noiselessly towards them from the mouth of the dark corridor where she had been waiting.\n\nHer entry, again, was curiously effective; like a beautiful thought in a dream she moved into the hall, and into Spinrobin's life. Moreover, as she came wholly into view in the light, he felt, as positively as though he heard it uttered, that he knew her name complete. The first syllable had come to him in the passageway when he saw her partly, and the feeling of dread that \"Mir\u2014\" might prove to be part of \"Miranda,\" \"Myrtle,\" or some other enormity, passed instantly. These would only have been gross and cruel misnomers. Her right name\u2014the only one that described her soul\u2014must end, as it began, with M. It flashed into his mind, and at the same moment Mr. Skale picked it off his very lips.\n\n\"Miriam,\" he said in deep tones, rolling the name along his mouth so as to extract every shade of sound belonging to it, \"this is Mr. Spinrobin about whom I told you. He is coming, I hope, to help us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "At first Spinrobin was only aware of the keen delight produced in him by the manner of Skale's uttering her name, for it entered his consciousness with a murmuring, singing sound that continued on in his thoughts like a melody. His racing blood carried it to every portion of his body. He heard her name, not with his ears alone but with his whole person\u2014a melodious, haunting phrase of music that thrilled him exquisitely. Next, he knew that she stood close before him, shaking his hand, and looking straight into his eyes with an expression of the most complete trust and sympathy imaginable, and that he felt a well-nigh irresistible desire to draw her yet closer to him and kiss her little shining face. Thirdly\u2014though the three impressions were as a matter of fact almost simultaneous\u2014that the huge figure of the clergyman stood behind them, watching with the utmost intentness and interest, like a keen and alert detective eager for some betrayal of evidence, inspired, however, not by mistrust, but by a very zealous sympathy.\n\nHe understood that this meeting was of paramount importance in Mr.\n\nSkale's purpose.\n\n\"How do you do, Mr. Spinrobin,\" he heard a soft voice saying, and the commonplace phrase served to bring him back to a more normal standard of things. But the tone in which she said it caused him a second thrill almost more delightful than the first, for the quality was low and fluty, like the gentle note of some mellow wind instrument, and the caressing way she pronounced his name was a revelation. Mr. Skale had known how to make it sound dignified, but this girl did more\u2014she made it sound alive. \"I will give thee a new name\" flashed into his thoughts, as some memory-cell of boyhood discharged its little burden most opportunely and proceeded to refill itself.\n\nThe smile of happiness that broke over Spinrobin's face was certainly reflected in the eyes that gazed so searchingly into his own, without the smallest sign of immodesty, yet without the least inclination to drop the eyelids. The two natures ran out to meet each other as naturally as two notes of music run to take their places in a chord. This slight, blue-eyed youth, light of hair and sensitive of spirit, and this slim, dark-skinned little maiden, with the voice of music and the wide-open grey eyes, understood one another from the very first instant their atmospheres touched and mingled; and the big Skale, looking on intently over their very shoulders, saw that it was good and smiled down upon them, too, in his turn.\n\n\"The harmony of souls and voices is complete,\" he said, but in so low a tone that the secretary did not hear it. Then, with a hand on a shoulder of each, he half pushed them before him into the dining room, his whole face running, as it were, into a single big smile of contentment. The important event had turned out to his entire satisfaction. He looked like some beneficent father, well pleased with his two children.\n\nBut Spinrobin, as he moved beside the girl and heard the rustle of her dress that almost touched him, felt as though he stood upon a sliding platform that was moving ever quicker, and that the adventure upon which he was embarked had now acquired a momentum that nothing he could do would ever stop. And he liked it. It would carry him out of himself into something very big\u2026.\n\nAnd at dinner, where he sat opposite to the girl and studied her face closely, Mr. Skale, he was soon aware, was occupied in studying the two of them even more closely. He appeared always to be listening to their voices. They spoke little enough, however, only their eyes met continually, and when they did so there was no evidence of a desire to withdraw. Their gaze remained fastened on one another, on her part without shyness, without impudence on his. That Mr. Skale wished for them an intimate and even affectionate understanding was evident, and the secretary warmed to him on that account more than ever, if on no other.\n\nIt surprised him too\u2014when he thought of it, which was rarely\u2014that a girl who was perforce of humble origin could carry herself with an air of such complete and natural distinction, and prove herself so absolutely \"the lady.\" For there was something about her of greater value than any mere earthly rank or class could confer; her spirit was in its very essence distinguished, perfectly simple, yet strong with a great and natural pride. It never occurred to her soul to doubt its own great value\u2014or to question that of others. She somehow or other made the little secretary feel of great account. He had never quite realized his own value before. Her presence, her eyes, her voice served to bring it out. And a very curious detail that he always mentions just at this point is the fact that it never occurred to him to wonder what her surname might be, or whether, indeed, she had one at all. Her name, Miriam, seemed sufficient. The rest of her\u2014if there was any other part of her not described by those three syllables\u2014lay safely and naturally included somewhere in his own name. \"Spinrobin\" described her as well as himself. But \"Miriam\" completed his own personality and at the same time extended it. He felt all wrapped up and at peace with her. With Philip Skale, Mrs. Mawle and Miriam, he, Robert Spinrobin, felt that he naturally belonged as \"one of the family.\" They were like the four notes in the chord: Skale, the great bass; Mawle, the mellow alto; himself and Miriam, respectively, the echoing tenor and the singing soprano. The imagery by which, in the depths of his mind, he sought to interpret to himself the whole singular business ran, it seems, even then to music and the analogies of music.\n\nThe meal was short and very simple. Mrs. Mawle carved the joint at the end of the table, handed the vegetables and looked after their wants with the precision of long habit. Her skill, in spite of the withered arm, was noteworthy. They talked little, Mr. Skale hardly at all. Miriam spoke from time to time across the table to the secretary. She did not ask questions, she stated facts, as though she already knew all about his feelings and tastes. She may have been twenty years of age, perhaps, but in some way she took him back to childhood. And she said things with the simple audacity of a child, ignoring Mr. Skale's presence. It seemed to the secretary as if he had always known her.\n\n\"I knew just how you would look,\" she said, without a trace of shyness, \"the moment I heard your name. And you got my name very quickly, too?\"\n\n\"Only part of it, at first\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh yes; but when you saw me completely you got it all,\" she interrupted. \"And I like your name,\" she added, looking him full in the eye with her soft grey orbs; \"it tells everything.\"\n\n\"So does yours, you know.\"\n\n\"Oh, of course,\" she laughed; \"Mr. Skale gave it to me the day I was born.\"\n\n\"I heard it,\" put in the clergyman, speaking almost for the first time.\n\nAnd the talk dropped again, the secretary's head fairly whirling.\n\n\"You used it all, of course, as a little boy,\" she said presently again; \"names, I mean?\"\n\n\"Rather,\" he replied without hesitation; \"only I've rather lost it since\u2014\"\n\n\"It will come back to you here. It's so splendid, all this world of sound, and makes everything seem worth while. But you lose your way at first, of course; especially if you are out of practice, as you must be.\"\n\nSpinrobin did not know what to say. To hear this young girl make use of such language took his breath away. He became aware that she was talking with a purpose, seconding Mr. Skale in the secret examination to which the clergyman was all the time subjecting him. Yet there was no element of alarm in it all. In the room with these two, and with the motherly figure of the housekeeper busying about to and fro, he felt at home, comforted, looked after\u2014more even, he felt at his best; as though the stream of his little life were mingling in with a much bigger and worthier river, a river, moreover, in flood. But it was the imagery of music again that most readily occurred to him. He felt that the note of his own little personality had been caught up into the comforting bosom of a complete chord\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "\"Mr. Spinrobin,\" suddenly sounded soft and low across the table, and, thrilled to hear the girl speak his name, he looked up quickly and found her very wide-opened eyes peering into his. Her face was thrust forward a little as she leaned over the table in his direction.\n\nAs he gazed she repeated his name, leisurely, quietly, and even more softly than before: \"Mr. Spinrobin.\" But this time, as their eyes met and the syllables issued from her lips, he noticed that a singular after-sound\u2014an exceedingly soft yet vibrant overtone\u2014accompanied it. The syllables set something quivering within him, something that sang, running of its own accord into a melody to which his rising pulses beat time and tune.\n\n\"Now, please, speak my name,\" she added. \"Please look straight at me, straight into my eyes, and pronounce my name.\"\n\nHis lips trembled, if ever so slightly, as he obeyed.\n\n\"Miriam\u2026\" he said.\n\n\"Pronounce each syllable very distinctly and very slowly,\" she said, her grey eyes all over his burning face.\n\n\"Mir\u2026 i\u2026 am,\" he repeated, looking in the center of the eyes without flinching, and becoming instantly aware that his utterance of the name produced in himself a development and extension of the original overtones awakened by her speaking of his own name. It was wonderful\u2026 exquisite\u2026 delicious. He uttered it again, and then heard that she, too, was uttering his at the same moment. Each spoke the other's name. He could have sworn he heard the music within him leap across the intervening space and transfer itself to her\u2026 and that he heard his own name singing, too, in her blood.\n\nFor the names were true. By this soft intoning utterance they seemed to pass mutually into the secret rhythm of that Eternal Principle of Speech which exists behind the spoken sound and is independent of its means of manifestation. Their central beings, screened and limited behind their names, knew an instant of synchronous rhythmical vibration. It was their introduction absolute to one another, for it was an instant of naked revelation.\n\n\"Spinrobin\u2026.\"\n\n\"Miriam\u2026.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "\u2026A great volume of sound suddenly enveloped and caught away the two singing names, and the spell was broken. Miriam dropped her eyes; Spinrobin looked up. It was Mr. Skale's voice upon them with a shout.\n\n\"Splendid! splendid!\" he cried; \"your voices, like your names, are made for one another, in quality, pitch, accent, everything.\" He was enthusiastic rather than excited; but to Spinrobin, taking part in this astonishing performance, to which the other two alone held the key, it all seemed too perplexing for words. The great bass crashed and boomed for a moment about his ears; then came silence. The test, or whatever it was, was over. It had been successful.\n\nMr. Skale, his face still shining with enthusiasm, turned towards him.\n\nMiriam, equally happy, watched, her hands folded in her lap.\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" exclaimed the clergyman, half rising in his chair, \"how mad you must think us! How mad you must think us! I can only assure you that when you know more, as you soon shall, you will understand the importance of what has just taken place\u2026.\"\n\nHe said a good deal more that Spinrobin did not apparently quite take in. He was too bewildered. His eyes sought the girl where she sat opposite, gazing at him. For all its pallor, her face was tenderly soft and beautiful; more pure and undefiled, he thought, than any human countenance he had ever seen, and sweet as the face of a child. Utterly unstained it was. A similar light shone in the faces of Skale and Mrs. Mawle. In their case it had forged its way through the more or less defiling garment of a worn and experienced flesh. But the light in Miriam's eyes and skin was there because it had never been extinguished. She had retained her pristine brilliance of soul. Through the little spirit of the perplexed secretary ran a thrill of genuine worship and adoration.\n\n\"Mr. Skale's coffee is served in the library,\" announced the voice of the housekeeper abruptly behind them; and when Spinrobin turned again he discovered that Miriam had slipped from the room unobserved and was gone.\n\nMr. Skale took his companion's arm and led the way towards the hall.\n\n\"I am glad you love her,\" was his astonishing remark. \"It is the first and most essential condition of your suiting me.\"\n\n\"She is delightful, wonderful, charming, sir\u2014\"\n\n\"Not 'sir,' if you please,\" replied the clergyman, standing aside at the threshold for his guest to pass; \"I prefer the use of the name, you know. I think it is important.\"\n\nAnd he closed the library door behind them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "For some minutes they sat in front of the fire and sipped their coffee in silence. The secretary felt that the sliding platform on which he was traveling into this extraordinary adventure had been going a little too fast for him. Events had crowded past before he had time to look squarely at them. He had lost his bearings rather, routed by Miriam's beauty and by the amazing way she talked to him. Had she lived always inside his thoughts she could not have chosen words better calculated to convince him that they were utterly in sympathy one with the other. Mr. Skale, moreover, approved heartily. The one thing Spinrobin saw clearly through it all was that himself and Miriam\u2014their voices, rather\u2014were necessary for the success of the clergyman's mysterious experiments. Only, while Miriam, little witch, knew all about it, he, candidate on trial, knew as yet\u2014nothing.\n\nAnd now, as they sat opposite one another in the privacy of the library, Spinrobin, full of confidence and for once proud of his name and personality, looked forward to being taken more into the heart of the affair. Things advanced, however, more slowly than he desired. Mr. Skale's scheme was too big to be hurried.\n\nThe clergyman did not smoke, but his companion, with the other's ready permission, puffed gently at a small cigarette. Short, rapid puffs he took, as though the smoke was afraid to enter beyond the front teeth, and with one finger he incessantly knocked off the ashes into his saucer, even when none were there to fall. On the table behind them gurgled the shaded lamp, lighting their faces from the eyes downwards.\n\n\"Now,\" said Mr. Skale, evidently not aware that he thundered, \"we can talk quietly and undisturbed.\" He caught his beard in a capacious hand, in such a way that the square outline of his chin showed through the hair. His voice boomed musically, filling the room. Spinrobin listened acutely, afraid even to cross his legs. A genuine pronouncement, he felt, was coming.\n\n\"A good many years ago, Mr. Spinrobin,\" he said simply, \"when I was a curate of a country parish in Norfolk, I made a discovery\u2014of a revolutionary description\u2014a discovery in the world of real things, that is, of spiritual things.\"\n\nHe gazed fixedly over the clutched beard at his companion, apparently searching for brief, intelligible phrases. \"But a discovery, the development of which I was obliged to put on one side until I inherited with this property the means and leisure which enabled me to continue my terrific\u2014I say purposely terrific\u2014researches. For some years now I have been quietly at work here absorbed in my immense pursuit.\" And again he stopped. \"I have reached a point, Mr. Spinrobin\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" interjected the secretary, as though the mention of his name touched a button and produced a sound. \"A point\u2014?\"\n\n\"Where I need the assistance of some one with a definite quality of voice\u2014a man who emits a certain note\u2014a certain tenor note.\" He released his beard, so that it flew out with a spring, at the same moment thrusting his head forward to drive home the announcement effectively.\n\nSpinrobin crossed his legs with a fluttering motion, hastily. \"As you advertised,\" he suggested.\n\nThe clergyman bowed.\n\n\"My efforts to find the right man,\" continued the enthusiast, leaning back in his chair, \"have now lasted a year. I have had a dozen men down here, each on a month's trial. None of them suited. None had the requisite quality of voice. With a single exception, none of them could stand the loneliness, the seclusion; and without exception, all of them were too worldly to make sacrifices. It was the salary they wanted. The majority, moreover, confused imagination with fancy, and courage with mere audacity. And, most serious of all, not one of them passed the test of\u2014Miriam. She harmonized with none of them. They were discords one and all. You, Mr. Spinrobin, are the first to win acceptance. The instant she heard your name she cried for you. And she knows. She sings the soprano. She took you into the chord.\"\n\n\"I hope indeed\u2014\" stammered the flustered and puzzled secretary, and then stopped, blushing absurdly. \"You claim for me far more than I should dare to claim for myself,\" he added. The reference to Miriam delighted him, and utterly destroyed his judgment. He longed to thank the girl for having approved him. \"I'm glad my voice\u2014er\u2014suits your\u2014chord.\" In his heart of hearts he understood something of what Mr. Skale was driving at, yet was half-ashamed to admit it even to himself. In this twentieth century it all seemed so romantic, mystical, and absurd. He felt it was all half-true. If only he could have run back into that great \"mental prairie\" of his boyhood days it might all have been quite true.\n\n\"Precisely,\" continued Mr. Skale, bringing him back to reality, \"precisely. And now, before I tell you more, you will forgive my asking you one or two personal questions, I'm sure. We must build securely as we go, leaving nothing to chance. The grandeur and importance of my experiments demand it. Afterwards,\" and his expression changed to a sudden softness in a way that was characteristic of the man, \"you must feel free to put similar questions to me, as personal and direct as you please. I wish to establish a perfect frankness between us at the start.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Skale. Of course\u2014er\u2014should anything occur to me to ask\u2014\" A momentary bewilderment, caused by the great visage so close to his own, prevented the completion of the sentence.\n\n\"As to your beliefs, for instance,\" the clergyman resumed abruptly, \"your religious beliefs, I mean. I must be sure of you on that ground. What are you?\"\n\n\"Nothing\u2014I think,\" Spinrobin replied without hesitation, remembering how his soul had bounced its way among the various creeds since Cambridge, and arrived at its present state of Belief in Everything, yet without any definite label. \"Nothing in particular. Nominally, though\u2014a Christian.\"\n\n\"You believe in a God?\"\n\n\"A Supreme Intelligence, most certainly,\" was the emphatic reply.\n\n\"And spirits?\"\n\nSpinrobin hesitated. He was a very honest soul.\n\n\"Other life, let me put it,\" the clergyman helped him; \"other beings besides ourselves?\"\n\n\"I have often felt\u2014wondered, rather,\" he answered carefully, \"whether there might not be other systems of evolution besides humanity. Such extraordinary Forces come blundering into one's life sometimes, and one can't help wondering where they come from. I have never formulated any definite beliefs, however\u2014\"\n\n\"Your world is not a blind chaos, I mean?\" Mr. Skale put gravely to him, as though questioning a child.\n\n\"No, no, indeed. There's order and system\u2014\"\n\n\"In which you personally count for something of value?\" asked the other quickly.\n\n\"I like to think so,\" was the apologetic reply. \"There's something that includes me somewhere in a purpose of very great importance\u2014only, of course, I've got to do my part, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Good,\" Mr. Skale interrupted him. \"And now,\" he asked softly, after a moment's pause, leaning forward, \"what about death? Are you afraid of death?\"\n\nSpinrobin started visibly. He began to wonder where this extraordinary catechism was going to lead. But he answered at once: he had thought out these things and knew where he stood.\n\n\"Only of its possible pain,\" he said, smiling into the bearded visage before him. \"And an immense curiosity, of course\u2014\"\n\n\"It does not mean extinction for you\u2014going out like the flame of a candle, for instance?\"\n\n\"I have never been able to believe that, Mr. Skale. I continue somewhere and somehow\u2014forever.\"\n\nThe cross-examination puzzled him more and more, and through it, for the first time, he began to feel dimly, ran a certain strain of something not quite right, not permissible in the biggest sense. It was not the questions themselves that produced this odd and rather disquieting impression, but the fact that Mr. Skale was preparing the ground with such extraordinary thoroughness. This conversation was the first swell, as it were, rolling mysteriously in upon him from the ocean in whose deeps the great Experiment lay buried. Forces, tidal in strength, oceanic in volume, shrouded it just now, but he already felt them. They reached him through the person of the clergyman. It was these forces playing through his personality that Spinrobin had been aware of the first moment they met on the station platform, and had \"sensed\" even more strongly during the walk home across the mountains.\n\nBehind the play of these darker impressions, as yet only vague and ambiguous, there ran in and out among his thoughts the vein of something much sweeter. Miriam, with her large grey eyes and silvery voice, was continually peeping in upon his mind. He wondered where she was and what she was doing in the big, lonely house. He wished she could have been in the room to hear his answers and approve them. He felt incomplete without her. Already he thought of her as the melody to which he was the accompaniment, two things that ought not to be separated.\n\n\"My point is,\" Mr. Skale continued, \"that, apart from ordinary human ties, and so forth, you have no intrinsic terror of death\u2014of losing your present body?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" was the reply, more faintly given than the rest. \"I love my life, but\u2014but\u2014\" he looked about him in some confusion for the right words, still thinking of Miriam\u2014\"but I look forward, Mr. Skale; I look forward.\" He dropped back into the depths of his armchair and puffed swiftly at the end of his extinguished cigarette, oblivious of the fact that no smoke came.\n\n\"The attitude of a brave man,\" said the clergyman with approval. Then, looking straight into the secretary's blue eyes, he added with increased gravity: \"And therefore it would not be immoral of me to expose you to an experiment in which the penalty of a slip would be\u2014death? Or you would not shrink from it yourself, provided the knowledge to be obtained seemed worth while?\"\n\n\"That's right, sir\u2014Mr. Skale, I mean; that's right,\" came the answer after an imperceptible pause.\n\nThe result of the talk seemed to satisfy the clergyman. \"You must think my questions very peculiar,\" he said, the sternness of his face relaxing a little, \"but it was necessary to understand your exact position before proceeding further. The gravity of my undertaking demands it. However, you must not let my words alarm you.\" He waited a moment, reflecting deeply. \"You must regard them, if you will, as a kind of test,\" he resumed, searching his companion's face with eagle eyes, \"the beginning of a series of tests in which your attitude to Miriam and hers to you, so far as that goes, was the first.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's all right, Mr. Skale,\" was his inadequate rejoinder; for the moment the name of the girl was introduced his thoughts instantly wandered out to find her. The way the clergyman pronounced it increased its power, too, for no name he uttered sounded ordinary. There seemed a curious mingling in the resonant cavity of his great mouth of the fundamental note and the overtones.\n\n\"Yes, you have the kind of courage that is necessary,\" Mr. Skale was saying, half to himself, \"the modesty that forgets self, and the unworldly attitude that is essential. With your help I may encompass success; and I consider myself wonderfully fortunate to have found you, wonderfully fortunate\u2026.\"\n\n\"I'm glad,\" murmured Spinrobin, thinking that so far he had not learned anything very definite about his duties, or what it was he had to do to earn so substantial a salary. Truth to tell, he did not bother much about that part of it. He was conscious only of three main desires: to pass the unknown tests, to learn the nature of Mr. Skale's discovery, with the experiment involved, and\u2014to be with Miriam as much as possible. The whole affair was so unusual that he had already lost the common standards of judging. He let the sliding platform take him where it would, and he flattered himself that he was not fool enough to mistake originality for insanity. The clergyman, dreamer and enthusiast though he might be, was as sane as other men, saner than most.\n\n\"I hope to lead you little by little to what I have in view,\" Mr. Skale went on, \"so that at the end of our trial month you will have learned enough to enable you to form a decision, yet not enough to\u2014to use my knowledge should you choose to return to the world.\"\n\nIt was very frank, but the secretary did not feel offended. He accepted the explanation as perfectly reasonable. In his mind he knew full well what his choice would be. This was the supreme adventure he had been so long a-seeking. No ordinary obstacle could prevent his accepting it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "There came a pause of some length, in which Spinrobin found nothing particular to say. The lamp gurgled; the coals fell softly into the fender. Then suddenly Mr. Skale rose and stood with his back to the grate. He gazed down upon the small figure in the chair. He towered there, a kindly giant, enthusiasm burning in his eyes like lamps. His voice was very deep, his manner more solemn than before when he spoke.\n\n\"So far, so good,\" he said, \"and now, with your permission, Mr. Spinrobin, I should like to go a step further. I should like to take\u2014your note.\"\n\n\"My note?\" exclaimed the other, thinking he had not heard correctly.\n\n\"Your sound, yes,\" repeated the clergyman.\n\n\"My sound!\" piped the little man, vastly puzzled, his voice shrill with excitement. He dodged about in the depths of his big leather chair, as though movement might bring explanation.\n\nMr. Skale watched him calmly. \"I want to get the vibrations of your voice, and then see what pattern they produce in the sand,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, in the sand, yes; quite so,\" replied the secretary. He remembered how the vibrations of an elastic membrane can throw dry sand, loosely scattered upon its surface, into various floral and geometrical figures. Chladni's figures, he seemed to remember, they were called after their discoverer. But Mr. Skale's purpose in the main, of course, escaped him.\n\n\"You don't object?\"\n\n\"On the contrary, I am greatly interested.\" He stood up on the mat beside his employer.\n\n\"I wish to make quite sure,\" the clergyman added gravely, \"that your voice, your note, is what I think it is\u2014accurately in harmony with mine and Miriam's and Mrs. Mawle's. The pattern it makes will help to prove this.\"\n\nThe secretary bowed in perplexed silence, while Mr. Skale crossed the room and took a violin from its case. The golden varnish of its ribs and back gleamed in the lamplight, and when the clergyman drew the bow across the strings to tune it, smooth, mellow sounds, soft and resonant as bells, filled the room. Evidently he knew how to handle the instrument. The notes died away in a murmur.\n\n\"A Guarnerius,\" he explained, \"and a perfect pedigree specimen; it has the most sensitive structure imaginable, and carries vibrations almost like a human nerve. For instance, while I speak,\" he added, laying the violin upon his companion's hand, \"you will feel the vibrations of my voice run through the wood into your palm.\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Spinrobin. It trembled like a living thing.\n\n\"Now,\" continued Mr. Skale, after a pause, \"what I first want is to receive the vibrations of your own voice in the same way\u2014into my very pulses. Kindly read aloud steadily while I hold it. Stop reading when I make a sign. I'll nod, so that the vibrations of my voice won't interfere.\" And he handed a notebook to him with quotations entered neatly in his own handwriting, selected evidently with a purpose, and all dealing with sound, music, as organized sound, and names. Spinrobin read aloud; the first quotation from Meredith he recognized, but the others, and the last one, discussing names, were new to him:\u2014\n\n\u2003\"But listen in the thought; so may there come\n\n\u2003Conception of a newly-added chord,\n\n\u2003Commanding space beyond where ear has home.\n\n\"Everything that the sun shines upon sings or can be made to sing, and can be heard to sing. Gases, impalpable powders, and woolen stuffs, in common with other non-conductors of sound, give forth notes of different pitches when played upon by an intermittent beam of white light. Colored stuffs will sing in lights of different colors, but refuse to sing in others. The polarization of light being now accomplished, light and sound are known to be alike. Flames have a modulated voice and can be made to sing a definite melody. Wood, stone, metal, skins, fibers, membranes, every rapidly vibrating substance, all have in them the potentialities of musical sound.\n\n\"Radium receives its energy from, and responds to, radiations which traverse all space\u2014as piano strings respond to sounds in unison with their notes. Space is all a-quiver with waves of radiant energy. We vibrate in sympathy with a few strings here and there\u2014with the tiny X-rays, actinic rays, light waves, heat waves, and the huge electromagnetic waves of Hertz and Marconi; but there are great spaces, numberless radiations, to which we are stone deaf. Some day, a thousand years hence, we shall know the full sweep of this magnificent harmony.\n\n\"Everything in nature has its name, and he who has the power to call a thing by its proper name can make it subservient to his will; for its proper name is not the arbitrary name given to it by man, but the expression of the totality of its powers and attributes, because the powers and attributes of each Being are intimately connected with its means of expression, and between both exists the most exact proportion in regard to measure, time, and condition.\"\n\nThe meaning of the four quotations, as he read them, plunged down into him and touched inner chords very close to his own beliefs. Something of his own soul, therefore, passed into his voice as he read. He read, that is to say, with authority.\n\nA nod from Mr. Skale stopped him just as he was beginning a fifth passage. Raising the vibrating instrument to his ear, the clergyman first listened a moment intently. Then he quickly had it under his chin, beard flowing over it like water, and the bow singing across the strings. The note he played\u2014he drew it out with that whipping motion of the bow only possible to a loving expert\u2014was soft and beautiful, long drawn out with a sweet singing quality. He took it on the G string with the second finger\u2014in the \"fourth position.\" It thrilled through him, Spinrobin declares, most curiously and delightfully. It made him happy to hear it. It was very similar to the singing vibrations he had experienced when Miriam gazed into his eyes and spoke his name.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Mr. Skale, and laid the violin down again. \"I've got the note. You're E flat.\"\n\n\"E flat!\" gasped Spinrobin, not sure whether he was pleased or disappointed.\n\n\"That's your sound, yes. You're E flat\u2014just as I thought, just as I hoped. You fit in exactly. It seems too good to be true!\" His voice began to boom again, as it always did when he was moved. He was striding about, very alert, very masterful, pushing the furniture out of his way, his eyes more luminous than ever. \"It's magnificent.\" He stopped abruptly and looked at the secretary with a gaze so enveloping that Spinrobin for an instant lost his bearings altogether. \"It means, my dear Spinrobin,\" he said slowly, with a touch of solemnity that woke an involuntary shiver deep in his listener's being, \"that you are destined to play a part, and an important part, in one of the grandest experiments ever dreamed of by the heart of man. For the first time since my researches began twenty years ago I now see the end in sight.\"\n\n\"Mr. Skale\u2014that is something\u2014indeed,\" was all the little man could find to say.\n\nThere was no reason he could point to why the words should have produced a sense of chill about his heart. It was only that he felt again the huge groundswell of this vast unknown experiment surging against him, lifting him from his feet\u2014as a man might feel the Atlantic swells rise with him towards the stars before they engulfed him forever. It seemed getting a trifle out of hand, this adventure. Yet it was what he had always longed for, and his courage must hold firm. Besides, Miriam was involved in it with him. What could he ask better than to risk his insignificant personality in some gigantic, mad attempt to plumb the Unknown, with that slender, little pale-faced Beauty by his side? The wave of Mr. Skale's enthusiasm swept him away deliciously.\n\n\"And now,\" he cried, \"we'll get your Pattern too. I no longer have any doubts, but none the less it will be a satisfaction to us both to see it. It must, I'm sure, harmonies with ours; it must!\"\n\nHe opened a cupboard drawer and produced a thin sheet of glass, upon which he next poured some finely powdered sand out of a paper bag. It rattled, dry and faint, upon the smooth, hard surface. And while he did this, he talked rapidly, boomingly, with immense enthusiasm.\n\n\"All sounds,\" he said, half to himself, half to the astonished secretary, \"create their own patterns. Sound builds; sound destroys; and invisible sound-vibrations affect concrete matter. For all sounds produce forms\u2014the forms that correspond to them, as you shall now see. Within every form lies the silent sound that first called it into view\u2014into visible shape\u2014into being. Forms, shapes, bodies are the vibratory activities of sound made visible.\"\n\n\"My goodness!\" exclaimed Spinrobin, who was listening like a man in a dream, but who caught the violence of the clergyman's idea none the less.\n\n\"Forms and bodies are\u2014solidified Sound,\" cried the clergyman in italics.\n\n\"You say something extraordinary,\" exclaimed the commonplace Spinrobin in his shrill voice. \"Marvelous!\" Vaguely he seemed to remember that Schelling had called architecture \"frozen music.\"\n\nMr. Skale turned and looked at him as a god might look at an insect\u2014that he loved.\n\n\"Sound, Mr. Spinrobin,\" he said, with a sudden and effective lowering of his booming voice, \"is the original divine impulsion behind nature\u2014communicated to language. It is\u2014creative!\"\n\nThen, leaving the secretary with this nut of condensed knowledge to crack as best he could, the clergyman went to the end of the room in three strides. He busied himself for a moment with something upon the wall; then he suddenly turned, his great face aglow, his huge form erect, fixing his burning eyes upon his distracted companion.\n\n\"In the Beginning,\" he boomed solemnly, in tones of profound conviction, \"was\u2014the Word.\" He paused a moment, and then continued, his voice filling the room to the very ceiling. \"At the Word of God\u2014at the thunder of the Voice of God, worlds leaped into being!\" Again he paused. \"Sound,\" he went on, the whole force of his great personality in the phrase, \"was the primordial, creative energy. A sound can call a form into existence. Forms are the Sound-Figures of archetypal forces\u2014the Word made Flesh.\" He stopped, and moved with great soft strides about the room.\n\nSpinrobin caught the words full in the face. For a space he could not measure\u2014considerably less than a second, probably\u2014the consciousness of something unutterably immense, unutterably flaming, rushed tumultuously through his mind, with wings that bore his imagination to a place where light was\u2014dazzling, white beyond words. He felt himself tossed up to Heaven on the waves of a great sea, as the body of strange belief behind the clergyman's words poured through him\u2026. For somewhere, behind the incoherence of the passionate language, burned the blaze of a true thought at white heat\u2014could he but grasp it through the stammering utterance.\n\nThen, with equal swiftness, it passed. His present surroundings came back. He dropped with a dizzy rush from awful spaces\u2026 and was aware that he was merely\u2014standing on the black, woolly mat before the fire watching the movements of his new employer, that his pumps were bright and pointed, his head just level with a dark marble mantelpiece. Dazed, and a trifle breathless he felt; and at the back of his disordered mind stirred a schoolboy's memory that the Pythagoreans believed the universe to have been called out of chaos by Sound, Number, and Harmony\u2014or something to that effect\u2026. But these huge, fugitive thoughts that tore through him refused to be seized and dealt with. He staggered a little, mentally; then, with a prodigious effort, controlled himself\u2014and watched." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Mr. Skale, he saw, had fastened the little sheet of glass by its four corners to silken strings hanging from the ceiling. The glass plate hung, motionless and horizontal, in the air with its freight of sand. For several minutes the clergyman played a series of beautiful modulations in double-stopping upon the violin. In these the dominating influence was E flat. Spinrobin was not musical enough to describe it more accurately than this. Only, with greater skill than he knows, he mentions how Skale drew out of that fiddle the peculiarly intimate and searching tones by which strings can reach the spiritual center of a man and make him respond to delicate vibrations of thoughts beyond his normal gamut\u2026.\n\nSpinrobin, listening, understood that he was a greater man than he knew\u2026.\n\nAnd the sand on the glass sheet, he next became aware, was shifting, moving, dancing. He heard the tiny hissing and rattling of the dry grains. It was uncommonly weird. This visible and practical result made the clergyman's astonishing words seem true and convincing. That moving sand brought sanity, yet a certain curious terror of the unknown into it all.\n\nA minute later Mr. Skale stopped playing and beckoned to him.\n\n\"See,\" he said quietly, pointing to the arrangement the particles of sand had assumed under the influence of the vibrations. \"There's your pattern\u2014your sound made visible. That's your utterance\u2014the Note you substantially represent and body forth in terms of matter.\"\n\nThe secretary stared. It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small circles round the base.\n\n\"So that's my note\u2014made visible!\" he exclaimed under his breath. \"It's delightful; it's quite exquisite.\"\n\n\"That's E flat,\" returned Mr. Skale in a whisper, so as not to disturb the pattern; \"if I altered the note, the pattern would alter too. E natural, for instance, would be different. Only, luckily, you are E flat\u2014just the note we want. And now,\" he continued, straightening himself up to his full height, \"come over and see mine and Miriam's and Mrs. Mawle's, and you'll understand what I meant when I said that yours would harmonize.\" And in a glass case across the room they examined a number of square sheets of glass with sand upon them in various patterns, all rendered permanent by a thin coating of a glue-like transparent substance that held the particles in position.\n\n\"There you see mine and Miriam's and Mrs. Mawle's,\" he said, stooping to look. \"They harmonize most beautifully, you observe, with your own.\"\n\nIt was, indeed, a singular and remarkable thing. The patterns, though all different, yet combined in some subtle fashion impossible of analysis to form a complete and well-proportioned Whole\u2014a design\u2014a picture. The patterns of the clergyman and the housekeeper provided the base and foreground, those of Miriam and the secretary the delicate superstructure. The girl's pattern, he noted with a subtle pleasure, was curiously similar to his own, but far more delicate and waving. Yet, whereas his was floral, hers was stellar in character; that of the housekeeper was spiral, and Mr. Skale's he could only describe as a miniature whirlwind of very exquisite design rising out of apparently three separate centers of motion.\n\n\"If I could paint over them the color each shade of sound represents,\"\n\nMr. Skale resumed, \"the tint of each timbre, or Klangfarbe, as the Germans call it, you would see better still how we are all grouped together there into a complete and harmonious whole.\"\n\nSpinrobin looked from the patterns to his companion's great face bending there beside him. Then he looked back again at the patterns. He could think of nothing quite intelligible to say. He noticed more clearly every minute that these dainty shapes of sand, stellar, spiral, and floral, stood to one another in certain definite proportions, in a rising and calculated ratio of singular beauty.\n\n\"There, before you, lies a true and perfect chord made visible,\" the clergyman said in tones thrilling with satisfaction, \"\u2014three notes in harmony with the fundamental sound, myself, and with each other. My dear fellow, I congratulate you, I congratulate you.\"\n\n\"Thank you very much, indeed,\" murmured Spinrobin. \"I don't quite understand it all yet, but it's\u2014it's extraordinarily fascinating and wonderful.\"\n\nMr. Skale said nothing, and Spinrobin drifted back to his big armchair. A deep silence pervaded the room for the space of several minutes. In the heart of that silence lay the mass of direct and vital questions the secretary burned, yet was afraid, to ask. For such was the plain truth; he yearned to know, yet feared to hear. The Discovery and the Experiment of this singular man loomed already somewhat vast and terrible; the adjective that had suggested itself before returned to him\u2014\"not permissible.\"\u2026 Of Mr. Skale himself he had no sort of fear, though a growing and uncommon respect, but of the purpose Mr. Skale had in view he caught himself thinking more and more, yet without obvious reason, with a distinct shrinking almost amounting to dismay. But for the fact that so sweet and gentle a creature as Miriam was traveling the same path with him, this increased sense of caution would have revealed itself plainly for what it was\u2014Fear\u2026.\n\n\"I am deeply interested, Mr. Skale,\" he said at length, breaking first the silence, \"and sympathetic too, I assure you; only\u2014you will forgive me for saying it\u2014I am, as yet, still rather in the dark as to where all this is to lead\u2014\" The clergyman's eyes, fixed straight upon his own, again made it difficult to finish the sentence as he wished.\n\n\"Necessarily so, because I can only lead you to my discovery step by step,\" replied the other steadily. \"I wish you to be thoroughly prepared for anything that may happen, so that you can deal intelligently with results that might otherwise overwhelm you.\"\n\n\"Overwhelm\u2014?\" faltered his listener.\n\n\"Might, I said. Note carefully my use of words, for they are accurately chosen. Before I can tell you all I must submit you, for your own sake, to certain tests\u2014chiefly to the test of Alteration of Form by Sound. It is somewhat\u2014er\u2014alarming, I believe, the first time. You must be thoroughly accustomed to these astonishing results before we dare to approach the final Experiment; so that you will not tremble. For there can be no rehearsal. The great Experiment can only be made once\u2026 and I must be as sure as possible that you will feel no terror in the face of the Unknown.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Spinrobin listened breathlessly. He hesitated a moment after the other stopped speaking, then slewed round on his slippery chair and faced him.\n\n\"I can understand,\" he began, \"why you want imagination, but you spoke of courage too? I mean,\u2014is there any immediate cause for alarm? Any personal danger, for instance, now?\" For the clergyman's weighty sentences had made him realize in a new sense the loneliness of his situation here among these desolate hills. He would appreciate some assurance that his life was not to be trifled with before he lost the power to withdraw if he wished to do so.\n\n\"None whatever,\" replied Mr. Skale with decision, \"there is no question at all of physical personal injury. You must trust me and have a little patience.\" His tone and manner were exceedingly grave, yet at the same time inspired confidence.\n\n\"I do,\" said Spinrobin honestly.\n\nAnother pause fell between them, longer than the rest; it was broken by the clergyman. He spoke emphatically, evidently weighing his words with the utmost care.\n\n\"This Chord,\" he said simply\u2014yet, for all the simplicity, there ran to and fro behind his words the sense of unlawful and immense forces impending\u2014\"I need for a stupendous experiment with sound, an experiment which will lead in turn towards a yet greater and final one. There is no harm in your knowing that. To produce a certain transcendent result I want a complex sound\u2014a chord, but a complete and perfect chord in which each note is sure of itself and absolutely accurate.\"\n\nHe waited a moment. There was utter silence about them in the room.\n\nSpinrobin held his breath.\n\n\"No instrument can help me; the notes must be human,\" he resumed in a lower voice, \"and the utterers\u2014pure. For the human voice can produce sounds 'possessing in some degree the characteristics not only of all musical instruments, but of all sounds of whatever description.' By means of this chord I hope to utter a certain sound, a certain name, of which you shall know more hereafter. But a name, as you surely know, need not be composed of one or two syllables only; a whole symphony may be a name, and a whole orchestra playing for days, or an entire nation chanting for years, may be required to pronounce the beginning merely of\u2014of certain names. Yours, Robert Spinrobin, for instance, I can pronounce in a quarter of a second; but there may be names so vast, so mighty, that minutes, days, years even, may be necessary for their full utterance. There may be names, indeed, which can never be known, for they could never be uttered\u2014in time. For the moment I am content simply to drop this thought into your consciousness; later you shall understand more. I only wish you to take in now that I need this perfect chord for the utterance in due course of a certain complex and stupendous name\u2014the invocation, that is, of a certain complex and stupendous Force!\"\n\n\"I think I understand,\" whispered the other, afraid to interrupt more.\n\n\"And the difficulty I have experienced in finding the three notes has been immense. I found Mrs. Mawle\u2014alto; then Miriam I found at birth and trained her\u2014soprano; and now I have found you, Mr. Spinrobin, and my chord, with myself as bass, is complete. Your note and Miriam's, soprano and tenor, are closer than the relations between the other notes, and a tenor has accordingly been most difficult to find. You can now understand the importance of your being sympathetic to each other.\"\n\nSpinrobin's heart burned within him as he listened. He began to grasp some sweet mystical meaning in the sense of perfect companionship the mere presence of the girl inspired. They were the upper notes in the same chord together, linked in a singing and harmonious relation, the one necessary to the other. Moreover, in the presence of Mr. Skale and the housekeeper, bass and alto in the full chord, their completeness was still more emphasized, and they knew their fullest life. The adventure promised to be amazingly seductive. He would learn practically the strange truth that to know the highest life Self must be lost and merged in something bigger. And was this not precisely what he had so long been seeking\u2014escape from his own insignificance?\n\n\"And\u2014er\u2014the Hebrew that you require of me, Mr. Skale?\" he asked, returning to practical considerations.\n\n\"Our purposes require a certain knowledge of Hebrew,\" he answered without hesitation or demur, \"because that ancient language and the magical resources of sound are profoundly linked. In the actual sounds of many of the Hebrew letters lies a singular power, unguessed by the majority, undivined especially, of course, by the mere scholar, but available for the pure in heart who may discover how to use their extraordinary values. They constitute, in my view at least, a remnant of the original Chaldaean mysteries, the lore of that magic which is older than religion. The secret of this knowledge lies in the psychic values of sound; for Hebrew, the Hebrew of the Bahir, remains in the hierarchy of languages a direct channel to the unknown and inscrutable forces; and the knowledge of mighty and supersensual things lies locked up in the correct utterance of many of its words, letters and phrases. Its correct utterance, mark well. For knowledge of the most amazing and terrible kind is there, waiting release by him who knows, and who greatly dares.\n\n\"And you shall later learn that sound is power. The Hebrew alphabet you must know intimately, and the intricate association of its letters with number, color, harmony and geometrical form, all of which are but symbols of the Realities at the very roots of life. The Hebrew alphabet, Mr. Spinrobin, is a 'discourse in methods of manifestation, of formation.' In its correct pronunciation lies a way to direct knowledge of divine powers, and to conditions beyond this physical existence.\"\n\nThe clergyman's voice grew lower and lower as he proceeded, and the conviction was unavoidable that he referred to things whereof he had practical knowledge. To Spinrobin it was like the lifting of a great veil. As a boy he had divined something of these values of sound and name, but with the years this knowledge had come to seem fantastic and unreal. It now returned upon him with the force of a terrific certainty. That immense old inner playground of his youth, without boundaries or horizon, rolled up before his mental vision, inviting further and detailed discovery.\n\n\"With the language, qua language,\" he continued, \"you need not trouble, but the 'Names' of many things you must know accurately, and especially the names of the so-called 'Angels'; for these are in reality Forces of immense potency, vast spiritual Powers, Qualities, and the like, all evocable by correct utterance of their names. This language, as you will see, is alive and divine in the true sense; its letters are the vehicles of activities; its words, terrific formulae; and the true pronunciation of them remains today a direct channel to divine knowledge. In time you shall see; in time you shall know; in time you shall hear. Mr. Spinrobin,\" and he thrust his great head forwards and dropped his voice to a hushed whisper, \"in time we shall all together make this Experiment in sound which shall redeem us and make us as Gods!\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" gasped the secretary, swept off his feet by this torrent of uncommon and mystical language, and passing a moist hand through his feathery hair. He was not entirely ignorant, of course, of the alleged use of sound in the various systems of so-called magic that have influenced the minds of imaginative men during the history of the world. He had heard, more or less vaguely, perhaps, but still with understanding, about \"Words of Power\"; but hitherto he had merely regarded such things as picturesque superstitions, or half-truths that lie midway between science and imagination. Here, however, was a man in the twentieth century, the days of radium, flying machines, wireless telegraphy, and other invitations towards materialism, who apparently had practical belief in the effective use of sound and in its psychic and divine possibilities, and who was devoting all of his not inconsiderable powers of heart and mind to their actual demonstration. It was astonishing. It was delightful. It was incredible! And, but for the currents of a strange and formidable fear that this conception of Skale's audacious Experiment set stirring in his soul, Spinrobin's enthusiasm would have been possibly as great as his own.\n\nAs it was he went up to the big clergyman and held out his hand, utterly carried away by the strangeness of it all, caught up in a vague splendor he did not quite understand, prepared to abandon himself utterly.\n\n\"I gather something of what you mean,\" he said earnestly, \"if not all; and I hope most sincerely I may prove suitable for your purpose when the time comes. As a boy, you know, curiously enough, I always believed in the efficacy of names and the importance of naming true. I think,\" he added somewhat diffidently, looking up straight into the luminous eyes above him, \"if you will allow me to say so, I would follow you anywhere, Mr. Skale\u2014anywhere you cared to lead.\"\n\n\"'Upon him that overcometh,'\" said the clergyman in that gentle voice he sometimes used, soft as the voice of woman, \"'will I write my new name\u2026.'\"\n\nHe gazed down very searchingly into the other's eyes for a minute or two, then shook the proffered hand without another word. And so they separated and went to bed, for it was long past midnight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "In his bedroom, though excitement banished sleep in spite of the lateness of the hour, he was too exhausted to make any effective attempt to reduce the confusion of his mind to order. For the first time in his life the diary-page for the day remained blank. For a long time he sat before it with his pencil\u2014then sighed and put it away. A volume he might have written, but not a page, much less a line or two. And though it was but eight hours since he had made the acquaintance of the Rev. Philip Skale, it seemed to him more like eight days.\n\nMoreover, all that he had heard and seen, fantastic and strained as he felt it to be, possibly even the product of religious mania, was nevertheless profoundly disquieting, for mixed up with it somewhere or other was\u2014truth. Mr. Skale had made a discovery\u2014a giant one; it was not all merely talk and hypnotism, the glamour of words. His great Experiment would prove to be real and terrible. He had discovered certain uses of sound, occult yet scientific, and if he, Spinrobin, elected to stay on, he would be obliged to play his part in the d\u00e9nouement. And this thought from the very beginning appalled while it fascinated him. It filled him with a kind of horrible amazement. For the object the clergyman sought, though not yet disclosed, already cast its monstrous shadow across his path. He somehow discerned that it would deal directly with knowledge the saner judgment of a commonplace world had always deemed undesirable, unlawful, unsafe, dangerous to the souls that dared attempt it, failure involving a pitiless and terrible Nemesis.\n\nHe lay in bed watching the play of the firelight upon the high ceiling, and thinking in confused fashion of the huge clergyman with his thundering voice, his great lambent eyes and his seductive gentleness; of his singular speculations and his hints, half menacing, half splendid, of things to come. Then he thought of the housekeeper with her deafness and her withered arm, and that white peace about her face; and, lastly, of Miriam, soft, pale beneath her dark skin, her gem-like eyes ever finding his own, and of the intimate personal relations so swiftly established between them\u2026.\n\nIt was, indeed, a singular household thus buried away in the heart of these lonely mountains. The stately old mansion was just the right setting for\u2014for\u2014\n\nUnbidden into his mind a queer, new thought shot suddenly, interrupting the flow of ideas. He never understood how or whence it came, but with the picture of all the empty rooms in the corridor about him, he received the sharp unwelcome impression that when Mr. Skale described the house as empty it was really nothing of the sort. Utterly unannounced, the uneasy conviction took possession of him that the building was actually\u2014populated. It was an extraordinary idea to have. There was absolutely nothing in the way of evidence to support it. And with it flashed across his memory echoes of that unusual catechism he had been subjected to\u2014in particular the questions whether he believed in spirits,\u2014\"other life,\" as Skale termed it. Sinister suspicions flashed through his imagination as he lay there listening to the ashes dropping in the grate and watching the shadows cloak the room. Was it possible that there were occupants of these rooms that the man had somehow evoked from the interstellar spaces and crystallized by means of sound into form and shape\u2014created?\n\nSomething freezing swept into him from a region far beyond the world. He shivered. These cold terrors that grip the soul suddenly without apparent cause, whence do they come? Why, out of these rather extravagant and baseless speculations, should have emerged this sense of throttling dread that appalled him? And why, once again, should he have felt convinced that the ultimate nature of the clergyman's great experiment was impious, fraught with a kind of heavenly danger, \"unpermissible?\"\n\nSpinrobin, lying there shivering in his big bed, could not guess. He only knew that by way of relief his mind instinctively sought out Miriam, and so found peace. Curled up in a ball between the sheets his body presently slept, while his mind, intensely active, traveled off into that vast inner prairie of his childhood days and called her name aloud. And presumably she came to him at once, for his sleep was undisturbed and his dreams uncommonly sweet, and he woke thoroughly refreshed eight hours later, to find Mrs. Mawle standing beside his bed with thin bread and butter and a cup of steaming tea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "For the rest, the new secretary fell quickly and easily into the routine of this odd little household, for he had great powers of adaptability. At first the promise of excitement faded. The mornings were spent in the study of Hebrew, Mr. Skale taking great pains to instruct him in the vibratory pronunciation (for so he termed it) of certain words, and especially of the divine, or angelic, names. The correct utterance, involving a kind of prolonged and sonorous vibration of the vowels, appeared to be of supreme importance. He further taught him curious correspondences between Sound and Number, and the attribution to these again of certain colors. The vibrations of sound and light, as air and ether, had intrinsic importance, it seemed, in the uttering of certain names; all of which, however, Spinrobin learnt by rote, making neither head nor tail of it.\n\nThat there were definite results, though, he could not deny\u2014psychic results; for a name uttered correctly produced one effect, and uttered wrongly produced another\u2026 just as a wrong note in a chord afflicts the hearer whereas the right one blesses\u2026.\n\nThe afternoons, wet or fine, they went for long walks together about the desolate hills, Miriam sometimes accompanying them. Their talk and laughter echoed all over the mountains, but there was no one to hear them, the nearest village being several miles away and the railway station\u2014nothing but a railway station. The isolation was severe; there were no callers but the bi-weekly provision carts; letters had to be fetched and newspapers were neglected.\n\nArrayed in fluffy tweeds, with baggy knickerbockers and heavily-nailed boots, he trotted beside his giant companion over the moors, somewhat like a child who expected its hand to be taken over difficult places. His confidence had been completely won. The sense of shyness left him. He felt that he already stood to the visionary clergyman in a relationship that was more than secretarial. He still panted, but with enthusiasm instead of with regret. In the background loomed always the dim sense of the Discovery and Experiment approaching inevitably, just as in childhood the idea of Heaven and Hell had stood waiting to catch him\u2014real only when he thought carefully about them. Skale was just the kind of man, he felt, who would make a discovery, so simple that the rest of the world had overlooked it, so tremendous that it struck at the roots of human knowledge. He had the simple originality of genius, and a good deal of its inspirational quality as well.\n\nBefore ten days had passed he was following him about like a dog, hanging upon his lightest word. New currents ran through him mentally and spiritually as the fires of Mr. Skale's vivid personality quickened his own, and the impetus of his inner life lifted him with its more violent momentum. The world of an ordinary man is so circumscribed, so conventionally molded, that he can scarcely conceive of things that may dwell normally in the mind of an extraordinary man. Adumbrations of these, however, may throw their shadow across his field of vision. Spinrobin was ordinary in most ways, while Mr. Skale was un-ordinary in nearly all; and thus, living together in this intimate solitude, the secretary got peeps into his companion's region that gradually convinced him. With cleaned nerves and vision he began to think in ways and terms that were new to him. Skale, like some big figure in story or legend, moved forward into his life and waved a wand. His own smaller personality began to expand; thoughts entered unannounced that hitherto had not even knocked at the door, and the frontiers of his mind first wavered, then unfolded to admit them.\n\nThe clergyman's world, whether he himself were mad or sane, was a real world, alive, vibrating, shortly to produce practical results. Spinrobin would have staked his very life upon it\u2026.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, he made love openly\u2014under any other conditions, outrageously\u2014to Miriam, whose figure of soft beauty moving silently about the house helped to redeem it. She rendered him quiet little services of her own accord that pleased him immensely, for occasionally he detected her delicate perfume about his room, and he was sure it was not Mrs. Mawle who put the fresh heather in the glass jars upon his table, or arranged his papers with such neat precision on the desk.\n\nHer delicate, shining little face with its wreath of dark hair, went with him everywhere, hauntingly, possessingly; and when he kissed her, as he did now every morning and every evening under Mr. Skale's very eyes, it was like plunging his lips into a bed of wild flowers that no artificial process had ever touched. Something in him sang when she was near. She had, too, what he used to call as a boy \"night eyes\"\u2014changing after dusk into such shadowy depths that to look at them was to look beyond and through them. The sight could never rest only upon their surface. Through her eyes, then, stretched all the delight of that old immense play-ground\u2026 where names clothed, described, and summoned living realities.\n\nHis attitude towards her was odd yet comprehensible; for though his desire was unquestionably great, it was not particularly active, probably because he knew that he held her and that no aggressive effort was necessary. Secure in the feeling that she belonged to him, and he to her, he also found that he had little enough to say to her, never anything to ask. She knew and understood it all beforehand; expression was uncalled for. As well might the brimming kettle sing to the water \"I contain you,\" or the water reply \"I fill you!\"\n\nOnly this was not the simile he used. In his own thoughts from the very beginning he had used the analogy of sound\u2014of the chord. As well might one note feel called upon to cry to another in the same chord, \"Hark! I'm sounding with you!\" as that Spinrobin should say to Miriam, \"My heart responds and sings to yours.\"\n\nAfter a period of separation, however, he became charged with things he wanted to say to her, all of which vanished utterly the moment they came together. Words instantly then became unnecessary, foolish. He heard that faint internal singing, and his own resonant response; and they merely stayed there side by side, completely happy, everything told without speech. This sense of blissful union enwrapped his soul. In the language of his boyhood he had found her name; he knew her; she was his.\n\nYet sometimes they did talk; and their conversations, in any other setting but this amazing one provided by the wizardry of Skale's enthusiasm, must have seemed exquisitely ludicrous. In the room, often with the clergyman a few feet away, reading by the fire, they would sit in the window niche, gazing into one another's eyes, perhaps even holding hands. Then, after a long interval of silence Mr. Skale would hear Spinrobin's thin accents:\n\n\"You brilliant little sound! I hear you everywhere within me, chanting a song of life!\"\n\nAnd Miriam's reply, thrilled and gentle:\n\n\"I'm but your perfect echo! My whole life sings with yours!\"\n\nWhereupon, kissing softly, they would separate, and Mr. Skale would cover them mentally with his blessing.\n\nSometimes, too, he would send for the housekeeper and, with the aid of the violin, would lead the four voices, his own bass included, through the changes of various chords, for the vibratory utterance of certain names; and the beauty of these sounds, singing the \"divine names,\" would make the secretary swell to twice his normal value and importance (thus he puts it), as the forces awakened by the music poured and surged into the atmosphere about them. Whereupon the clergyman would explain with burning words that many a symphony of Beethoven's, a sonata of Schumann's, or a suite of Tschaikovsky's were the Names, peaceful, romantic or melancholy, of great spiritual Potencies, heard partially by these masters in their moments of inspirational ecstasy. The powers of these Beings were just as characteristic, their existence just as real, as the simpler names of the Hebrew angels, and their psychic influence upon the soul that heard them uttered just as sure and individual.\n\n\"For the power of music, my dear Spinrobin, has never yet by science or philosophy been adequately explained, and never can be until the occult nature of sound, and its correlations with color, form, and number is once again understood. 'Rhythm is the first law of the physical creation,' says one, 'and music is a breaking into sound of the fundamental rhythm of universal being.' 'Rhythm and harmony,' declares Plato, 'find their way into the secret places of the soul.' 'It is the manifestation,' whispers the deaf Beethoven, 'of the inner essential nature of all that is,' or in the hint of Leibnitz, 'it is a calculation which the soul makes unconsciously in secret.' It is 'love in search of a name,' sang George Eliot, nearer in her intuition to the truth than all the philosophers, since love is the dynamic of pure spirit. But I,\" he continued after a pause for breath, and smiling amid the glow of his great enthusiasm, \"go beyond and behind them all into the very heart of the secret; for you shall learn that to know the sounds of the Great Names and to utter their music correctly shall merge yourself into the heart of their deific natures and make you 'as the gods themselves\u2026!'\"\n\nAnd Spinrobin, as he listened, noticed that a slight trembling ran across the fabric of his normal world, as though it were about to vanish and give place to another\u2014a new world of divine things made utterly simple. For many things that Skale said in this easy natural way, he felt, were in the nature of clues and passwords, whose effect he carefully noted upon his secretary, being intended to urge him, with a certain violence even, into the desired region. Skale was testing him all the time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "And it was about this time, more than half way through the trial month, that the clergyman took Spinrobin, now become far more than merely secretary, into his fuller confidence. In a series of singular conversations, which the bewildered little fellow has reported to the best of his ability, he explained to him something of the science of true names. And to prove it he made two singular experiments: first he uttered the true name of Mrs. Mawle, secondly of Spinrobin himself, with results that shall presently be told.\n\nThese things it was necessary for him to know and understand before they made the great Experiment. Otherwise, if unprepared, he might witness results that would involve the loss of self-control and the failure, therefore, of the experiment\u2014a disaster too formidable to contemplate.\n\nBy way of leading up to this, however, he gave him some account first of the original discovery. Spinrobin asked few questions, made few comments; he took notes, however, of all he heard and at night wrote them up as best he could in his diary. At times the clergyman rose and interrupted the strange recital by moving about the room with his soft and giant stride, talking even while his back was turned; and at times the astonished secretary wrote so furiously that he broke his pencil with a snap, and Mr. Skale had to wait while he sharpened it again. His inner excitement was so great that he almost felt he emitted sparks.\n\nThe clue, it appears, came to the clergyman by mere chance, though he admits his belief that the habits of asceticism and meditation he had practiced for years may have made him in some way receptive to the vision, for as a vision, it seems, the thing first presented itself\u2014a vision made possible by a moment of very rapid hypnosis.\n\nAn Anglican priest at the time, in charge of a small Norfolk parish, he was a great believer in the value of ceremonial\u2014in the use, that is, of color, odor and sound to induce mental states of worship and adoration\u2014more especially, however, of sound as uttered by the voice, the human voice being unique among instruments in that it combined the characteristics of all other sounds. Intoning, therefore, was to him a matter of psychic importance, and it was one summer evening, intoning, in the chancel, that he noticed suddenly certain very curious results. The faces of two individuals in the congregation underwent a charming and singular change, a change which he would not describe more particularly at the moment, since Spinrobin should presently witness it for himself.\n\nIt all happened in a flash\u2014in less than a second, and it is probable, he holds, that his own voice induced an instant of swift and passing hypnosis upon himself; for as he stood there at the lectern there came upon him a moment of keen interior lucidity in which he realized beyond doubt or question what had happened. The use of voice, bell, or gong, has long been known as a means of inducing the hypnotic state, and during this almost instantaneous trance of his there came a sudden revelation of the magical possibilities of sound-vibration. By some chance rhythm of his intoning voice he had hit upon the exact pitch, quality and accent which constituted the \"Note\" of more than one member of the congregation before him. Those particular individuals, without being aware of the fact, had at once responded, automatically and inevitably. For a second he had heard, he knew, their true names! He had unwittingly \"called\" them.\n\nSpinrobin's heart leaped with excitement as he listened, for this idea of \"Naming True\" carried him back to the haunted days of his childhood clairvoyance when he had known Winky.\n\n\"I don't quite understand, Mr. Skale,\" he put in, desirous to hear a more detailed explanation.\n\n\"But presently you shall,\" was all the clergyman vouchsafed.\n\nThe clue thus provided by chance he had followed up, but by methods hard to describe apparently. A corner of the veil, momentarily lifted, had betrayed the value that lies in the repetition of certain sounds\u2014the rhythmic reiteration of syllables\u2014in a word, of chanting or incantation. By diving down into his subconscious region, already prepared by long spiritual training, he gradually succeeded in drawing out further details piece by piece, and finally by infinite practice and prayer welding them together into an intelligible system. The science of true-naming slowly, with the efforts of years, revealed itself. His mind slipped past the deceit of mere sensible appearances. Clair-audiently he heard the true inner names of things and persons\u2026.\n\nMr. Skale rose from his chair. With thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and fingers drumming loudly on his breast he stood over the secretary, who continued making frantic notes.\n\n\"That chance discovery, then, made during a moment's inner vision,\" he continued with a grave excitement, \"gave me the key to a whole world of new knowledge, and since then I have made incredible developments. Listen closely, Mr. Spinrobin, while I explain. And take in what you can.\"\n\nThe secretary laid down his pencil and notebook. He sat forward in an attitude of intense eagerness upon the edge of his chair. He was trembling. This strange modern confirmation of his early Heaven of wonder before the senses had thickened and concealed it, laid bare again his earliest world of far-off pristine glory.\n\n\"The ordinary name of a person, understand then, is merely a sound attached to their physical appearance at birth by the parents\u2014a meaningless sound. It is not their true name. That, however, exists behind it in the spiritual world, and is the accurate description of the soul. It is the sound you express visibly before me. The Word is the Life.\"\n\nSpinrobin surreptitiously picked up his pencil; but the clergyman spied the movement. \"Never mind the notes,\" he said; \"listen closely to me.\" Spinrobin obeyed meekly.\n\n\"Your ordinary outer name, however,\" continued Mr. Skale, speaking with profound conviction, \"may be made a conductor to your true, inner one. The connection between the two by a series of subtle interior links forms gradually with the years. For even the ordinary name, if you reflect a moment, becomes in time a sound of singular authority\u2014inwoven with the finest threads of your psychical being, so that in a sense you become it. To hear it suddenly called aloud in the night\u2014in a room full of people, in the street unexpectedly\u2014is to know a shock, however small, of increased vitality. It touches the imagination. It calls upon the soul built up around it.\"\n\nHe paused a moment. His voice boomed musically about the room, even after he ceased speaking. Bewildered, wondering, delighted, Spinrobin drank in every word. How well he knew it all.\n\n\"Now,\" resumed the clergyman, lowering his tone unconsciously, \"the first part of my discovery lies in this: that I have learned to pronounce the ordinary names of things and people in such a way as to lead me to their true, inner ones\u2014\"\n\n\"But,\" interrupted Spinrobin irrepressibly, \"how in the name of\u2014?\"\n\n\"Hush!\" cried Skale quickly. \"Never again call upon a mighty name\u2014in vain. It is dangerous. Concentrate your mind upon what I now tell you, and you shall understand a part, at least, of my discovery. As I was saying, I have learned how to find the true name by means of the false; and understand, if you can, that to pronounce a true name correctly means to participate in its very life, to vibrate with its essential nature, to learn the ultimate secret of its inmost being. For our true names are the sounds originally uttered by the 'Word' of God when He created us, or 'called' us into Being out of the void of infinite silence, and to repeat them correctly means literally\u2014to\u2014speak\u2014with\u2014His\u2014Voice. It is to speak the truth.\" The clergyman dropped his tone to an awed whisper. \"Words are the veils of Being; to speak them truly is to lift a corner of the veil.\"\n\n\"What a glory! What a thing!\" exclaimed the other under his breath, trying to keep his mind steady, but losing control of language in the attempt. The great sentences seemed to change the little room into a temple where sacred things were about to reveal themselves. Spinrobin now understood in a measure why Mr. Skale's utterance of his own name and that of Miriam had sounded grand. Behind each he had touched the true name and made it echo.\n\nThe clergyman's voice brought his thoughts back from distances in that inner prairie of his youth where they had lost themselves.\n\n\"For all of us,\" he was repeating with rapt expression in his shining eyes, \"are Sounds in the mighty music the universe sings to God, whose Voice it was that first produced us, and of whose awful resonance we are echoes therefore in harmony or disharmony.\" A look of power passed into his great visage. Spinrobin's imagination, in spite of the efforts that he made, fluttered with broken wings behind the swift words. A flash of the former terror stirred in the depths of him. The man was at the heels of knowledge it is not safe for humanity to seek\u2026.\n\n\"Yes,\" he continued, directing his gaze again upon the other, \"that is a part of my discovery, though only a part, mind. By repeating your outer name in a certain way until it disappears in the mind, I can arrive at the real name within. And to utter it is to call upon the secret soul\u2014to summon it from its lair. 'I have redeemed thee; I have called thee by name.' You remember the texts? 'I know thee by name,' said Jehovah to the great Hebrew magician, 'and thou art mine.' By certain rhythms and vibratory modulations of the voice it is possible to produce harmonics of sound which awaken the inner name into life\u2014and then to spell it out. Note well, to spell it,\u2014spell\u2014incantation\u2014the magical use of sound\u2014the meaning of the Word of Power, used with such terrific effect in the old forgotten Hebrew magic. Utter correctly the names of their Forces, or Angels, I am teaching you daily now,\" he went on reverently, with glowing eyes and intense conviction; \"pronounce them with full vibratory power that awakens all their harmonics, and you awaken also their counterpart in yourself; you summon their strength or characteristic quality to your aid; you introduce their powers actively into your own psychical being. Had Jacob succeeded in discovering the 'Name' of that 'Angel' with whom he wrestled, he would have become one with its superior power and have thus conquered it. Only, he asked instead of commanded, and he found it not\u2026\"\n\n\"Magnificent! Splendid!\" cried Spinrobin, starting from his chair, seizing with his imagination potently stirred, this possibility of developing character and rousing the forces of the soul.\n\n\"We shall yet call upon the Names, and see,\" replied Skale, placing a great hand upon his companion's shoulder, \"not aloud necessarily, but by an inner effort of intense will which sets in vibration the finer harmonics heard only by the poet and magician, those harmonics and overtones which embody the psychical element in music. For the methods of poet and magician, I tell you, my dear Spinrobin, are identical, and all the faiths of the world are at the heels of that thought. Provided you have faith you can\u2014move mountains! You can call upon the very gods!\"\n\n\"A most wonderful idea, Mr. Skale,\" faltered the other breathlessly, \"quite wonderful!\" The huge sentences deafened him a little with their mental thunder.\n\n\"And utterly simple,\" was the reply, \"for all truth is simple.\"\n\nHe paced the floor like a great caged animal. He went down and leaned against the dark bookcase, with his legs wide apart, and hands in his coat pockets. \"To name truly, you see, is to evoke, to create!\" he roared from the end of the room. \"To utter as it should be uttered any one of the Ten Words, or Creative Powers of the Deity in the old Hebrew system, is to become master of the 'world' to which it corresponds. For these names are still in living contact with the realities behind. It means to vibrate with the powers that called the universe into being and\u2014into form.\"\n\nA sort of shadowy majesty draped his huge figure, Spinrobin thought, as he stood in semi-darkness at the end of the room and thundered forth these extraordinary sentences with a conviction that, for the moment at least, swept away all doubt in the mind of his listener. Dreadful ideas, huge-footed and threatening, rushed to and fro in the secretary's mind. He was torn away from all known anchorage, staggered, dizzy and dismayed; yet at the same time, owing to his adventure-loving temperament, a prey to some secret and delightful exaltation of the spirit. He was out of his depth in great waters\u2026.\n\nThen, quite suddenly, Mr. Skale came swiftly over to his side and whispered in accents that were soothing in comparison:\n\n\"And think for a moment how beautiful, the huge Words by which God called into being the worlds, and sent the perfect, rounded bodies of the spheres spinning and singing, blazing their eternal trails of glory through the void! How sweet the whisper that crystallized in flowers! How tender the note that fashioned the eyes and face, say, of Miriam\u2026.\"\n\nAt the name of Miriam he felt caught up and glorified, in some delightful and inexplicable way that brought with it\u2014peace. The power of all these strange and glowing thoughts poured their full tide into his own rather arid and thirsty world, frightening him with their terrific force. But the mere utterance of that delightful name\u2014in the way Skale uttered it\u2014brought confidence and peace.\n\n\"\u2026 Could we but hear them!\" Skale continued, half to himself, half to his probationer; \"for the sad thing is that today the world has ears yet cannot hear. As light is distorted by passing through a gross atmosphere, so sound reaches us but indistinctly now, and few true names can bring their wondrous messages of power correctly. Men, coarsening with the materialism of the ages, have grown thick and gross with the luxury of inventions and the diseases of modern life that develop intellect at the expense of soul. They have lost the old inner hearing of divine sound, and but one here and there can still catch the faint, far-off and ineffable music.\"\n\nHe lifted his eyes, and his voice became low and even gentle as the glowing words fell from his heart of longing.\n\n\"None hear now the morning stars when they sing together to the sun; none know the chanting of the spheres! The ears of the world are stopped with lust, and the old divine science of true-naming seems lost forever amid the crash of engines and the noisy thunder of machinery!\u2026 Only among flowers and certain gems are the accurate old true names still to be found!\u2026 But we are on the track, my dear Spinrobin, we are on the ancient trail to Power.\"\n\nThe clergyman closed his eyes and clasped his hands, lifting his face upwards with a rapt expression while he murmured under his breath the description of the Rider on the White Horse from the Book of the Revelations, as though it held some inner meaning that his heart knew yet dared not divulge: \"And he had a Name written, that no man knew but he himself. And he was clothed in a vesture dipped in blood: and his Name is called The Word of God\u2026 and he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written,\u2014'King of Kings and Lord of Lords\u2026.'\"\n\nAnd for an instant Spinrobin, listening to the rolling sound but not to the actual words, fancied that a faintly colored atmosphere of deep scarlet accompanied the vibrations of his resonant whisper and produced in the depths of his mind this momentary effect of colored audition.\n\nIt was all very strange and puzzling. He tried, however, to keep an open mind and struggle as best he might with these big swells that rolled into his little pool of life and threatened to merge it in a vaster tide than he had yet dreamed of. Knowing how limited is the world which the senses report, he saw nothing too inconceivable in the idea that certain persons might possess a peculiar inner structure of the spirit by which supersensuous things can be perceived. And what more likely than that a man of Mr. Skale's unusual caliber should belong to them? Indeed, that the clergyman possessed certain practical powers of an extraordinary description he was as certain as that the house was not empty as he had at first supposed. Of neither had he proof as yet; but proof was not long in forthcoming." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "\"Then if there is so much sound about in all objects and forms\u2014if the whole universe, in fact, is sounding,\" asked Spinrobin with a na\u00efve impertinence not intended, but due to the reaction of his simple mind from all this vague splendor, \"why don't we hear it more?\"\n\nMr. Skale came upon him like a boomerang from the end of the room. He was smiling. He approved the question.\n\n\"With us the question of hearing is merely the question of wavelengths in the air,\" he replied; \"the lowest audible sound having a wavelength of sixteen feet, the highest less than an inch. Some people can't hear the squeak of a bat, others the rumble of an earthquake. I merely affirm that in every form sleeps the creative sound that is its life and being. The ear is a miserable organ at best, and the majority are far too gross to know clair-audience. What about sounds, for instance, that have a wavelength of a hundred, a thousand miles on the one hand, or a millionth part of an inch on the other?\"\n\n\"A thousand miles! A millionth of an inch?\" gasped the other, gazing at his interlocutor as though he was some great archangel of sound.\n\n\"Sound for most of us lies between, say, thirty and many thousand vibrations per second\u2014the cry of the earthquake and the cricket; it is our limitation that renders the voice of the dewdrop and the voice of the planet alike inaudible. We even mistake a measure of noise\u2014like a continuous millwheel or a river, say\u2014for silence, when in reality there is no such thing as perfect silence. Other life is all the time singing and thundering about us,\" he added, holding up a giant finger as though to listen. \"To the imperfection of our ears you may ascribe the fact that we do not hear the morning stars shouting together.\"\n\n\"Thank you, yes, I quite see now,\" said the secretary. \"To name truly is to hear truly.\" The clergyman's words seemed to hold a lamp to a vast interior map in his mind that was growing light. A new dawn was breaking over the great mental prairie where he wandered as a child. \"To find the true name of anything,\" he added, \"you mean, is to hear its sound, its individual note as it were?\" Incredible perspectives swam into his ken, hitherto undreamed of.\n\n\"Not 'as it were,'\" boomed the other, \"You do hear it. After which the next step is to utter it, and so absorb its force into your own being by synchronous vibration\u2014union mystical and actual. Only, you must be sure you utter it correctly. To pronounce incorrectly is to call it incompletely into life and form\u2014to distort and injure it, and yourself with it. To make it untrue\u2014a lie.\"\n\nThey were standing in the dusk by the library window, watching the veil of night that slowly covered the hills. The flying horizons of the moors had slipped away into the darkness.\n\nThe stars were whispering together their thoughts of flame and speed. At the back of the room sat Miriam among the shadows, like some melody hovering in a musician's mind till he should call her forth. It was close upon the tea hour. Behind them Mrs. Mawle was busying herself with lamps and fire. Mr. Skale, turning at the sound of the housekeeper, motioned to the secretary to approach, then stooped down and spoke low in his ear:\n\n\"With many names I had great difficulty,\" he whispered. \"With hers, for instance,\" indicating the housekeeper behind them. \"It took me five years' continuous research to establish her general voice-outline, and even then I at first only derived a portion of her name. And in uttering it I made such errors of omission and pronunciation that her physical form suffered, and she emerged from the ordeal in disorder. You have, of course, noticed her disabilities\u2026. But, later, though only in stammering fashion, I called upon her all complete, and she has since known a serene blessedness and a sense of her great value in the music of life that she never knew before.\" His face lit up as he spoke of it. \"For in that moment she found herself. She heard her true name, God's creative sound, thunder through her being.\"\n\nSpinrobin, feeling the clergyman's forces pouring through him like a tide at such close proximity, bowed his head. His lips were too dry to frame words. He was thinking of the possible effects upon his own soul and body when his name too should be \"uttered.\" He remembered the withered arm and the deafness. He thought, too, of that slender, ghostly figure that haunted the house with its soft movements and tender singing. Lastly, he remembered his strange conviction that somewhere in the great building, possibly in his own corridor, there were other occupants, other life, Beings of unearthly scale waiting the given moment to appear, summoned by utterance.\n\n\"And you will understand now why it is I want a man of high courage to help me,\" Skale resumed in a louder tone, standing sharply upright; \"a man careless of physical existence, and with a faith wholly beyond the things of this world!\"\n\n\"I do indeed,\" he managed to reply aloud, while in his thoughts he was saying, \"I will, I must see it through. I won't give in!\" With all his might he resisted the invading tide of terror. Even if sad results came later, it was something to have been sacrificed in so big a conception.\n\nIn his excitement he slipped from the edge of the windowsill, where he was perched, and Mr. Skale, standing close in front of him, caught his two wrists and set him upon his feet. A shock, like a rush of electricity, ran through him. He took his courage boldly in both hands and asked the question ever burning at the back of his mind.\n\n\"Then, this great Experiment you\u2014we have in view,\" he stammered, \"is to do with the correct uttering of the names of some of the great Forces, or Angels, and\u2014and the assimilating of their powers into ourselves\u2014?\"\n\nSkale rose up gigantically beside him. \"No, sir,\" he cried, \"it is greater\u2014infinitely greater than that. Names of mere Angels I can call alone without the help of any one; but for the name I wish to utter a whole chord is necessary even to compass the utterance of the opening syllable; as I have told you already, a chord in which you share the incalculable privilege of being the tenor note. But for the completed syllables\u2014the full name\u2014!\" He closed his eyes and shrugged his massive shoulders\u2014\"I may need the massed orchestras of half the world, the chorused voices of the entire nation\u2014or in their place a still small voice of utter purity crying in the wilderness! In time you shall know fully\u2014know, see and hear. For the present, hold your soul with what patience and courage you may.\"\n\nThe words thundered about the room, so that Miriam, too, heard them. Spinrobin trembled inwardly, as though a cold air passed him. The suggestion of immense possibilities, vague yet terrible, overwhelmed him again suddenly. Had not the girl at that moment moved up beside him and put her exquisite pale face over his shoulder, with her hand upon his arm, it is probable he would then and there have informed Mr. Skale that he withdrew from the whole affair.\n\n\"Whatever happens,\" murmured Miriam, gazing into his eyes, \"we go on singing and sounding together, you and I.\" Then, as Spinrobin bent down and kissed her hair, Mr. Skale put an arm round each of them and drew them over to the tea table.\n\n\"Come, Mr. Spinrobin,\" he said, with his winning smile, \"you must not be alarmed, you know. You must not desert me. You are necessary to us all, and when my Experiment is complete we shall all be as gods together. Do not falter. There is nothing in life, remember, but to lose oneself; and I have found a better way of doing so than any one else\u2014by merging ourselves into the Voice of\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Skale's tea has been standing more than ten minutes,\" interrupted the old housekeeper, coming up behind them; \"if Mr. Spinrobin will please to let him come\u2014\" as though it was Spinrobin's fault that there had been delay.\n\nMr. Skale laughed good-humouredly, as the two men, suddenly in the region of teacups and buttered toast, looked one another in the face with a certain confusion. Miriam, sipping her tea, laughed too, curiously. Spinrobin felt restored to some measure of safety and sanity again. Only the strange emotion of a few moments before still moved there unseen among them.\n\n\"Listen, and you shall presently hear her name,\" the clergyman whispered, glancing up at the other over his teacup, but Spinrobin was crunching his toast too noisily to notice the meaning of the words fully." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "The Stage Manager who stands behind all the scenes of life, both great and small, had prepared the scene well for what was to follow. The sentences about the world of inaudible sound had dropped the right kind of suggestion into the secretary's heart. His mind still whirred with a litter of half-digested sentences and ideas, however, and he was vividly haunted by the actuality of truth behind them all. His whole inner being at that moment cried \"Hark!\" through a hush of expectant wonder.\n\nThere they sat at tea, this singular group of human beings: Mr. Skale, bigger than ever in his loose housesuit of black, swallowing his liquid with noisy gulps; Spinrobin, nibbling slippery morsels of hot toast, on the edge of his chair; Miriam, quiet and mysterious, in her corner; and Mrs. Mawle, sedate, respectful in cap and apron, presiding over the teapot, the whole scene cozily lit by lamp and fire\u2014when this remarkable new thing happened. Spinrobin declares always that it came upon him like a drowning wave, frightening him not with any idea of injury to himself, but with a dreadful sense of being lost and shelterless among the immensities of a transcendent new world. Something passed into the room that made his soul shake and flutter at the center.\n\nHis attention was first roused by a sound that he took, perhaps, to be the wind coming down from the hills in those draughts and gusts he sometimes heard, only to his imagination now it was a peopled wind crying round the walls, behind whose voice he detected the great fluid form of it\u2014running and colored. But, with the noise, a terror that was no ordinary terror invaded the recesses of his soul. It was the fear of the Unknown, dreadfully multiplied.\n\nHe glanced up quickly from his teacup, and chancing to meet Miriam's eye, he saw that she was smiling as she watched him. This sound, then, had some special significance. At the same instant he perceived that it was not outside but in the room, close beside him, that Mr. Skale, in fact, was talking to the deaf housekeeper in a low and carefully modulated tone\u2014a tone she could not possibly have heard, however. Then he discovered that the clergyman was not speaking actually, but repeating her name. He was intoning it. It grew into a kind of singing chant, an incantation.\n\n\"Sarah Mawle\u2026 Sarah Mawle\u2026 Sarah Mawle\u2026\" ran through the room like water. And, in Skale's mouth, it sounded as his own name had sounded\u2014different. It became in some significant way\u2014thus Spinrobin expresses it always\u2014stately, important, nay, even august. It became real. The syllables led his ear away from their normal signification\u2014away from the outer toward the inner. His ordinary mental picture of the mere letters SARAHMAWLE disappeared and became merged in something else\u2014into something alive that pulsed and moved with vibrations of its own. For, with the outer sound there grew up another interior one, that finally became separate and distinct.\n\nNow Spinrobin was well aware that the continued repetition of one's own name can induce self-hypnotism; and he also knew that the reiteration of the name of an object ends by making that object disappear from the mind. \"Mustard,\" repeated indefinitely, comes to have no meaning at all. The mind drops behind the mere symbol of the sound into something that is unintelligible, if not meaningless. But here it was altogether another matter, and from the torrent of words and similes he uses to describe it, this\u2014a curious mixture of vividness and confusion\u2014is apparently what he witnessed:\n\nFor, as the clergyman's resonant voice continued quietly to utter the name, something passed gradually into the appearance of the motherly old housekeeper that certainly was not there before, not visible, at least, to the secretary's eyes. Behind the fleshly covering of the body, within the very skin and bones it seemed, there flowed with steady splendor an effect of charging new vitality that had an air of radiating from her face and figure with the glow and rush of increased life. A suggestion of grandeur, genuine and convincing, began to express itself through the humble domestic exterior of her everyday self; at first, as though some greater personage towered shadowy behind her, but presently with a growing definiteness that showed it to be herself and nothing separate. The two, if two they were, merged.\n\nHer mien, he saw, first softened astonishingly, then grew firm with an aspect of dignity that was unbelievably beautiful. An air of peace and joy her face had always possessed, but this was something beyond either. It was something imposing, majestic. So perilously adjusted is the ludicrous to the sublime, that while the secretary wondered dumbly whether the word \"housekeeper\" might also in Skale's new world connote \"angel,\" he could have laughed aloud, had not the nobility of the spectacle hinted at the same time that he should have wept. For the tears of a positive worship started to his eyes at the sight.\n\n\"Sarahmawle\u2026 Sarahmawle\u2026.\" The name continued to pour itself about him in a steady ripple, neither rising nor falling, and certainly not audible to those deaf old ears that flanked the vigorous and unwrinkled face. \"Youth\" is not the word to describe this appearance of ardent intensity that flamed out of the form and features of the housekeeper, for it was something utterly apart from either youth or age. Nor was it any mere idealization of her worn and crumpled self. It was independent of physical conditions, as it was independent of the limitations of time and space; superb as sunshine, simple as the glory that had sometimes touched his soul of boyhood in sleep\u2014the white fires of an utter transfiguration.\n\nIt was, in a word, as if the name Skale uttered had summoned to the front, through all disguising barriers of flesh, her true and naked spirit, that which neither ages nor dies, that which the eyes, when they rest upon a human countenance, can never see\u2014the Soul itself!\n\nFor the first time in his life Spinrobin, abashed and trembling, gazed upon something in human guise that was genuinely sublime\u2014perfect with a stainless purity. The mere sight produced in him an exaltation of the spirit such as he had never before experienced\u2026 swallowing up his first terror. In his heart of hearts, he declares, he prayed; for this was the natural expression for an emotion of the volume and intensity that surged within him\u2026.\n\nHow long he sat there gazing seems uncertain; perhaps minutes, perhaps seconds only. The sense of time's passage was temporarily annihilated. It might well have been a thousand years, for the sight somehow swept him into eternity\u2026. In that tearoom of Skale's lonely house among the mountains, the warmth of an earthly fire upon his back, the light of an earthly oil-lamp in his eyes, holding buttered toast in exceedingly earthly fingers, he sat face to face with something that yet was not of this earth, something majestic, spiritual and eternal\u2026 visible evidence of transfiguration and of \"earth growing heaven\u2026.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "It was, of course, stupid and clumsy of Spinrobin to drop his teacup and let it smash noisily against the leg of the table; yet it was natural enough, for in his ecstasy and amazement he apparently lost control of certain muscles in his trembling fingers\u2026. Though the change came gradually it seemed very quick. The volume of the clergyman's voice grew less, and as the tide of sound ebbed the countenance of the housekeeper also slowly altered. The flames that a moment before had burned so whitely there flickered faintly and were gone; the glory faded; the splendor withdrew. She even seemed to dwindle in size\u2026. She resumed her normal appearance. Skale's voice ceased.\n\nThe incident apparently had occupied but a few moments, for Mrs. Mawle, he realized, was gathering the plates together and fitting them into the spaces of the crowded tea-tray with difficulty\u2014an operation, he remembered, she had just begun when the clergyman first began to call upon her name.\n\nShe, clearly, had been conscious of nothing unusual. A moment later, with her customary combination of curtsey and bow, she was gone from the room, and Spinrobin, acting upon a strange impulse, found himself standing upright by the table, looking wildly about him, passing his hand through his scattered hair, and trying in vain to utter words that should relieve his overcharged soul of the burden of glory and mystery that oppressed it.\n\nA pain, profoundly searching, pierced his heart. He thought of the splendors he had just witnessed, and of the joy and peace upon those features even when the greater wonder withdrew. He thought of the power in the countenance of Skale, and of the shining loveliness in the face of Miriam. Then, with a blast of bitterest disappointment, he realized the insignificance of his own self\u2014the earthiness of his own personality, the dead, dull ordinariness of his own appearance. Why, oh, why, could not all faces let the soul shine through? Why could not all identify themselves with their eternal part, and thus learn happiness and joy? A sense of the futile agony of life led him with an impassioned eagerness again to the thought of Skale's tremendous visions, and of the great Experiment that beckoned beyond. Only, once more the terror of its possible meaning dropped upon him, and the little black serpents of fear shot warningly across this brighter background of his hopes.\n\nThen he was aware that Miriam had crossed the room and stood beside him, for her delicate and natural perfume announced her even before he turned and saw. Her soft eyes shining conveyed an irresistible appeal, and with her came the sense of peace she always brought. She was the one thing at that moment that could comfort and he opened his arms to her and let her come nestling in against him, both hands finding their way up under the lapels of his coat, all the exquisite confidence of the innocent child in her look. Her hair came over his lips and face like flowers, but he did not kiss her, nor could he find any words to say. To hold her there was enough, for the touch of her healed and blessed him.\n\n\"So now you have seen her as she really is,\" he heard her voice against his shoulder; \"you have heard her true name, and seen a little of its form and color!\"\n\n\"I never guessed that in this world\u2014\" he stammered; then, instead of completing the sentence, held her more tightly to him and let his face sink deeper into the garden of her hair.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" she answered, and then peered up with unflinching look into his eyes, \"for that is just how I see you too\u2014bright, splendid and eternal.\"\n\n\"Miriam!\" It was as unexpected as a ghost and as incredible. \"Me\u2026?\"\n\n\"Of course! You see I know your true name. I see you as you are within!\"\n\nSomething came to steady his swimming brain, but it was only after a distinct effort that he realized it was the voice of Mr. Skale addressing him. Then, gradually, as he listened, gently releasing the girl in order to turn towards him, he understood that what he had witnessed had been in the nature of a \"test\"\u2014one of those tests he had been warned would come\u2014and that his attitude to it was regarded by the clergyman with approval.\n\n\"It was a test more subtle than you know, perhaps, Mr. Spinrobin,\" he was saying, \"and the feelings it has roused in you are an adequate proof that you have come well through it. As I knew you would, as I knew you would,\" he added, with evident satisfaction. \"They do infinite credit both to yourself and to our judgment in\u2014er\u2014accepting you.\"\n\nA wave of singular emotion seemed to pass across the room from one to the other that, catching the breathless secretary in its tide, filled him with a high pride that he had been weighed and found worthy, then left him cold with a sudden reaction as he realized after some delay the import of the words Mr. Skale was next saying to him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "\"And now you shall hear your own name called,\" boomed the clergyman with enthusiasm, \"and realize the beauty and importance of your own note in the music of life.\"\n\nAnd while Spinrobin trembled from head to toe Mr. Skale bore down upon him and laid a hand upon his shoulder. He looked up into the clergyman's luminous eyes. His glance next wandered down the ridge of that masterful nose and lost itself among the flowing strands of the tangled beard. At that moment it would hardly have surprised him to see the big visage disappear, and to hear the Sound, of which it was the visible form, slip into his ears with a roar.\n\nBut side by side with the vague terror of the unknown he was conscious also of a smaller and more personal pang. For a man may envy other forms, yet keenly resent the possible loss or alteration of his own. And he remembered the withered arm and the deafness.\n\n\"But,\" he faltered, yet ashamed of his want of courage, \"I don't want to lose my present shape, or\u2014come back\u2014without\u2014\"\n\n\"Have no fear,\" exclaimed the other with decision. \"Miriam and myself have not been experimenting in vain these three weeks. We have found your name. We know it accurately. For we are all one chord, and as I promised you, there is no risk.\" He stopped, lowering his voice; and, taking the secretary by the arm with a fatherly and possessive gesture, \"Spinrobin,\" he whispered solemnly, \"you shall learn the value and splendor of your Self in the melody of the Universe\u2014that burst of divine music! You shall understand how closely linked you are to myself and Mrs. Mawle, but, closest of all, to Miriam. For Miriam herself shall call your name, and you shall hear!\"\n\nSo little Miriam was to prove his executioner, or his redeemer. That was somehow another matter. The awe with which these experiments of Mr. Skale's inspired him ebbed considerably as he turned and saw the appealing, wistful expression of his other examiner. Brave as a lion he felt, yet timid as a hare; there was no idea of real resistance in him any longer.\n\n\"I'm ready, then,\" he said faintly, and the girl came up softly to his side and sought his face with a frank innocence of gaze that made no attempt to hide her eagerness and joy. She accepted the duty with delight, proudly conscious of its importance.\n\n\"I know thee by name and thou art mine,\" she murmured, taking his hand.\n\n\"It makes me happy, yet afraid,\" he replied in her ear, returning the caress; and at that moment the clergyman who had gone to fetch his violin, returned into the room with a suddenness that made them both start\u2014for the first time. Very slightly, with the first sign of that modesty which comes with knowledge he had yet noticed in her, or felt conscious of in himself, she withdrew, a wonderful flush tinging her pale skin, then passing instantly away.\n\n\"To make you feel absolutely safe from possible disaster,\" Mr. Skale was saying with a smile, \"you shall have the assistance of the violin. The pitch and rhythm shall be thus assured. There is nothing to fear.\"\n\nAnd Miriam, equally smiling with confidence, led her friend, perplexed and entangled as he was by the whole dream-like and confusing puzzle\u2014led him to the armchair she had just vacated, and then seated herself at his feet upon a high footstool and stared into his eyes with a sweet and irresistible directness of gaze that at once increased both his sense of bewilderment and his confidence.\n\n\"First, you must speak my name,\" she said gently, yet with a note of authority, \"so that I may get the note of your voice into myself. Once or twice will do.\"\n\nHe obeyed. \"Miriam\u2026 Miriam\u2026 Miriam,\" he said, and watched the tiny reflection of his own face in her eyes, her \"night-eyes.\" The same moment he began to lose himself. The girl's lips were moving. She had picked up his voice and merged her own with it, so that when he ceased speaking her tones took up the note continuously. There was no break. She carried on the sound that he had started.\n\nAnd at the same moment, out of the corner of his eye, he perceived that the violin had left its case and was under the clergyman's beard. The bow undulated like a silver snake, drawing forth long, low notes that flowed about the room and set the air into rhythmical vibrations. These vibrations, too, carried on the same sound. Spinrobin gave a little uncontrollable jump; he felt as if he had uttered his own death-warrant and that this instrument proclaimed the sentence. Then the feeling of dread lessened as he heard Mr. Skale's voice mingling with the violin, combining exquisitely with the double-stopping he was playing on the two lower strings; for the music, as the saying is, \"went through him\" with thrills of power that plunged into unknown depths of his soul and lifted him with a delightful sense of inner expansion to a state where fear was merged in joy.\n\nFor some minutes the voice of Miriam, murmuring so close before him that he could feel her very breath, was caught in the greater volume of the violin and bass. Then, suddenly, both Skale and violin ceased together, and he heard her voice emerge alone. With a little rush like that of a singing flame, it dropped down on to the syllables of his name\u2014his ugly and ridiculous outer and ordinary name:\n\n\"ROBERTSPINROBIN\u2026 ROBERTSPINROBIN\u2026\" he heard; and the sound flowed and poured about his ears like the murmur of a stream through summer fields. And, almost immediately, with it there came over him a sense of profound peace and security. Very soon, too, he lost the sound itself\u2014did not hear it, as sound, for it grew too vast and enveloping. The sight of Miriam's face also he lost. He grew too close to her to see her, as object. Both hearing and sight merged into something more intimate than either. He and the girl were together\u2014one consciousness, yet two aspects of that one consciousness.\n\nThey were two notes singing together in the same chord, and he had lost his little personality, only to find it again, increased and redeemed, in an existence that was larger.\n\nIt seemed to Spinrobin\u2014for there is only his limited phraseology to draw from\u2014that the incantation of her singing tones inserted itself between the particles of his flesh and separated them, ran with his blood, covered his skin with velvet, flowed and purred in the very texture of his mind and thoughts. Something in him swam, melted, fused. His inner kingdom became most gloriously extended\u2026.\n\nHis soul loosened, then began to soar, while something at the heart of him that had hitherto been congealed now turned fluid and alive. He was light as air, swift as fire. His thoughts, too, underwent a change: rose and fell with the larger rhythm of new life as the sound played upon them, somewhat as wind may rouse the leaves of a tree, or call upon the surface of a deep sea to follow it in waves. Terror was nowhere in his sensations; but wonder, beauty and delight ran calling to one another from one wave to the next, as this tide of sound moved potently in the depths of his awakening higher consciousness. The little reactions of ordinary life spun away from him into nothingness as he listened to a volume of sound that was oceanic in power and of an infinite splendor: the creative sound by which God first called him into form and being\u2014the true inner name of his soul.\n\n\u2026Yet he no longer consciously listened\u2026 no longer, perhaps, consciously heard. The name of the soul can sound only in the soul, where no speech is, nor any need for such stammering symbols. Spinrobin for the first time knew his true name, and that was enough.\n\nIt is impossible to translate into precise language this torrent of exquisite sensation that the girl's voice awakened. In the secret chambers of his imagination Spinrobin found the thoughts, perhaps, that clothed it with intelligible description for himself, but in speaking of it to others he becomes simply semi-hysterical, and talks a kind of hearty nonsense. For the truth probably is that only poetry or music can convey any portion of a mystical illumination, otherwise hopelessly incommunicable. The outer name had acted as a conductor to the inner name beyond. It filled the room, and filled some far vaster space that opened out above the room, about the house, above the earth, yet at the same time was deep, deep down within his own self. He passed beyond the confines of the world into those sweet, haunted gardens where Cherubim and Seraphim\u2014vast Forces\u2014continually do sing. It floated him off his feet as a rising tide overtakes the little shore-pools and floats them into its own greatness, and on the tranquil bosom of these giant swells he rose into a state that was too calm to be ecstasy, yet too glorious to be mere exaltation.\n\nAnd as his own little note of personal aspiration soared with this vaster music to which it belonged, he felt mounting out of himself into a condition where at last he was alive, complete and splendidly important. His sense of insignificance fled. His ordinary petty and unvalued self dropped away flake by flake, and he realized something of the essential majesty of his own real Being as part of an eternal and wonderful Whole. The little painful throb of his own limited personality slipped into the giant pulse-beat of a universal vibration.\n\nIn his normal daily life, of course, he lost sight of this Whole, blinded by the details seen without perspective, mistaking his little personality for all there was of him; but now, as he rose, whirling, soaring, singing in the body of this stupendous music, he understood with a rush of indescribable glory that he was part and parcel of this great chord\u2014this particular chord in which Skale, Mrs. Mawle and Miriam also sang their harmonious existences\u2014that this chord, again, was part of a vaster music still, and that all, in the last resort, was a single note in the divine Utterance of God.\n\nThat is, the little secretary, for the first time in his existence, saw life as a whole, and interpreted the vision so wondrous sweet and simple, with the analogies of sound communicated to his subliminal mind by the mighty Skale. Whatever the cause, however, the fine thing was that he saw, heard, knew. He was of value in the scheme. In future he could pipe his little lay without despair.\n\nMoreover, with a merciless clarity of vision, he perceived an even deeper side of truth, and understood that the temporary discords were necessary, just as evil, so-called, is necessary for the greater final perfection of the Whole. For it came to him with the clear simplicity of a child's vision that the process of attuning his being to the right note must inevitably involve suffering and pain: the awful stretching of the string, the strain of the lifting vibrations, the stress at first of sounding in harmony with all the others, and the apparent loss of one's own little note in order to do so\u2026\n\nThis point he reached, it seems, and grasped. Afterwards, however, he entered a state where he heard things no man can utter because no language can touch transcendental things without confining or destroying them. In attempting a version of them he merely becomes unintelligible, as has been said. Yet the mere memory of it brings tears to his blue eyes when he tries to speak of it, and Miriam, who became, of course, his chief confidant, invariably took it upon herself to stop his futile efforts with a kiss." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "So at length the tide of sound began to ebb, the volume lessened and grew distant, and he found himself, regretfully, abruptly, sinking back into what by comparison was mere noise. First, he became conscious that he listened\u2014heard\u2014saw; then, that Miriam's voice still uttered his name softly, but his ordinary, outer name, Robertspinrobin; that he noticed her big grey eyes gazing into his own, and her lips moving to frame the syllables, and, finally, that he was sitting in the armchair, trembling. Joy, peace, wonder still coursed through him like flames, but dying flames. Mr. Skale's voice next reached him from the end of the room. He saw the fireplace, his own bright and pointed pumps, the tea table where they had drunk tea, and then, as the clergyman strode towards him over the carpet, he looked up, faint with the farewell of the awful excitement, into his face. The great passion of the experience still glowed and shone in him like a furnace.\n\nAnd there, in that masterful bearded visage, he surprised an expression so tender, so winning, so comprehending, that Spinrobin rose to his feet, and taking Miriam by the hand, went to meet him. There the three of them stood upon the mat before the fire. He felt overwhelmingly drawn to the personality of the man who had revealed to him such splendid things, and in his mind stirred a keen and poignant regret that such knowledge could not be permanent and universal, instead of merely a heavenly dream in the mind of each separate percipient. Gratitude and love, unknown to him before, rose in his soul. Spinrobin, his heart bursting as with flames, had cried aloud, \"You have called me by my name and I am free!\u2026 You have named me truly and I am redeemed!\u2026\" And all manner of speech, semi-inspirational, was about to follow, when Mr. Skale suddenly moved to one side and raised his arm. He pointed to the mirror.\n\nSpinrobin was just tall enough to see his own face in the glass, but the glimpse he caught made him stand instantly on tiptoe to see more. For his round little countenance, flushed as it was beneath its fringe of disordered feathery hair, was literally\u2014transfigured. A glory, similar to the glory he had seen that same evening upon the face of the housekeeper, still shone and flickered about the eyes and forehead. The signature of the soul, brilliant in purity, lay there, transforming the insignificance of the features with the grandeur and nobility of its own power.\n\n\"I am honored,\u2014too gloriously honored!\" was the singular cry that escaped his lips, vainly seeking words to express an emotion of the unknown, \"I am honored as the sun\u2026 and as the stars\u2026!\"\n\nAnd so fierce was the tide of emotion that rose within him at the sight, so strong the sense of gratitude to the man and girl who had shown him how his true Self might contain so great a glory, that he turned with a cry like that of a child bewildered by the loss of some incomprehensible happiness\u2014turned and flung himself first upon the breast of the big clergyman, and then into the open arms of the radiant Miriam, with sobs and tears of wonder that absolutely refused to be restrained." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "The situation at this point of his amazing adventure seems to have been that the fear Spinrobin felt about the nature of the final Experiment was met and equalized by his passionate curiosity regarding it. Had these been the only two forces at work, the lightest pressure in either direction would have brought him to a decision. He would have accepted the challenge and stayed; or he would have hesitated, shirked, and left.\n\nThere was, however, another force at work upon which he had hardly calculated at the beginning, and that force now came into full operation and controlled his decision with margin and to spare. He loved Miriam; and even had he not loved her, it is probable that her own calm courage would have put him to shame and made him \"face the music.\" He could no more have deserted her than he could have deserted himself. The die was cast.\n\nMoreover, if the certainty that Mr. Skale was trafficking in dangerous and unlawful knowledge was formidable enough to terrify him, for Miriam, at least, it held nothing alarming. She had no qualms, knew no uneasiness. She looked forward to the end with calmness, even with joy, just as ordinary good folk look forward to a heaven beyond death. For she had never known any other ideal. Mr. Skale to her was father, mother and God. He had brought her up during all the twenty years of her life in this solitude among the mountains, choosing her reading, providing her companionship, training her with the one end in view of carrying out his immense and fire-stealing purpose.\n\nShe had never dreamed of any other end, and had been so drilled with the idea that this life was but a tedious training-place for a worthier state to come, that she looked forward, naturally enough, with confidence and relief to the great Experiment that should bring her release. She knew vaguely that there was a certain awful danger involved, but it never for one instant occurred to her that Mr. Skale could fail. And, so far, Spinrobin had let no breath of his own terror reach her, or attempted ever to put into her calm mind the least suggestion that the experiment might fail and call down upon them the implacable and destructive forces that could ruin them body and soul forever. For this, plainly expressed, was the form in which his terror attacked him when he thought about it. Skale was tempting the Olympian powers to crush him.\n\nIt was about this time, however, as has been seen from a slight incident in the last chapter, that a change began to steal, at first imperceptibly, then obviously, over their relations together. Spinrobin had been in the house three weeks\u2014far longer, no doubt, than any of the other candidates. There only remained now the final big tests. The preliminary ones were successfully passed. Miriam knew that very soon the moment would come for him to stay\u2014or go. And it was in all probability this reflection that helped her to make certain discoveries in herself that at first she did not in the least understand.\n\nSpinrobin, however, understood perfectly. His own heart made him intuitive enough for that. And the first signs thrilled and moved him prodigiously. His account of it all is like no love story that has ever been heard, for in the first place this singular girl hardly breathed about her the reality of an actual world. She had known nothing beyond the simple life in this hollow of the hills on the one hand, and on the other the portentous conceptions that peopled the region of dream revealed by the clergyman. And in the second place she had no standards but her own instincts to judge by, for Mrs. Mawle, in spite of her devotion to the girl, suffered under too great disabilities to fill the place of a mother, while Mr. Skale was too lost in his vast speculations to guide her except in a few general matters, and too sure of her at the same time to reflect that she might ever need detailed guidance. Her exceedingly natural and wholesome bringing-up on the one hand, and her own native purity and good sense on the other, however, led her fairly straight; while the fact that Spinrobin, with his modesty and his fine aspirations, was a \"little gentleman\" into the bargain, ensured that no unlawful temptation should be placed in her way, or undue pressure, based upon her ignorance, employed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "They were coming down one afternoon from the mountains soon after the test of calling his name, and they were alone, the clergyman being engaged upon some mysterious business that had kept him out of sight all day. They did not talk much, but they were happy in each other's company, Spinrobin more than happy. Much of the time, when the ground allowed, they went along hand in hand like children.\n\n\"Miriam,\" he had asked on the top of the moors, \"did I ever tell you about Winky\u2014my little friend Winky?\" And she had looked up with a smile and shaken her head. \"But I like the name,\" she added; \"I should like to hear, please.\" And he told her how as a boy he had invoked various folk to tease his sister, of whom Winky was chief, but in telling the story he somehow or other always referred to the little person by name, and never once revealed his sex. He told, too, how he sat all night on the lawn outside his sister's window to intercept the expected visit.\n\n\"Winky,\" she said, speaking rather low, \"is a true name, of course. You really created Winky\u2014called Winky into being.\" For to her now this seemed as true and possible as it had seemed to himself at the age of ten.\n\n\"Oh, I really loved Winky,\" he replied enthusiastically, and was at the same moment surprised to feel her draw away her hand. \"Winky lived for years in my very heart.\"\n\nAnd the next thing he knew, after a brief silence between them, was that he heard a sob, and no attempt to smother it either. In less than a second he was beside her and had both her hands in his. He understood in a flash.\n\n\"You precious baby,\" he cried, \"but Winky was a little man. He wasn't a girl!\"\n\nShe looked up through her tears\u2014oh, but how wonderful her grey eyes were through tears!\u2014and made him stand still before her and repeat his sentence. And she said, \"I know it's true, but I like to hear you say it, and that's why I asked you to repeat it.\"\n\n\"Miriam,\" he said to her softly, kneeling down on the heather at her feet, \"there's only one name in my heart, I can tell you that. I heard it sing and sing the moment I came into this house, the very instant I first saw you in that dark passage. I knew perfectly well, ages and ages ago, that one day a girl with your name would come singing into my life to make me complete and happy, but I never believed that she would look as beautiful as you are.\" He kissed the two hands he held. \"Or that she\u2014would\u2014would think of me as you do,\" he stammered in his passion.\n\nAnd then Miriam, smiling down on him through her tears, bent and kissed his feathery hair, and immediately after was on her knees in front of him among the heather.\n\n\"I own you,\" she said quite simply. \"I know your name, and you know mine. Whatever happens\u2014\" But Spinrobin was too happy to hear any more, and putting both arms round her neck, he kissed the rest of her words away into silence.\n\nAnd in the very middle of this it was that the girl gently, but very firmly, pushed him from her, and Spinrobin in the delicacy of his mind understood that for the first time in her curious, buried life the primitive instincts had awakened, so that she knew herself a woman, and a woman, moreover, who loved." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Thus caught in a bewildering network of curiosity, fear, wonder, and\u2014love, Spinrobin stayed on, and decided further that should the clergyman approve him he would not leave. Yet his intimate relations now with Miriam, instead of making it easier for him to learn the facts, made it on the other hand more difficult. For he could not, of course, make use of her affection to learn secrets that Mr. Skale did not yet wish him to know. And, further, he had no desire to be disloyal either to him. None the less he was sorely tempted to ask her what the final experiment was, and what the 'empty' rooms contained. And most of all what the great name was they were finally to utter by means of the human chord.\n\nThe emotions playing about him at this time, however, were too complicated and too violent to enable him to form a proper judgment of the whole affair. It seems, indeed, that this calmer adjudication never came to him at all, for even to this day the mere mention of the clergyman's name brings to his round cheeks a flush of that enthusiasm and wonder which are the enemies of all sober discrimination. Skale still remains the great battering force of his life that carried him off his feet towards the stars, and sent his imagination with wings of fire tearing through the Unknown to a goal that once attained should make them all four as gods." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "And thus the affair moved nearer to its close. The theory and practice of molding form by means of sound was the next bang at his mind\u2014delivered in the clergyman's most convincing manner, and, in view of the proofs that soon followed, an experience that seemed to dislocate the very foundations of his visible world, deemed hitherto secure enough at least to stand on.\n\nHad it all consisted merely of talk on Mr. Skale's part the secretary would have known better what to think. It was the interludes of practical proof that sent his judgment so awry. These definite, sensible results, sandwiched in between all the visionary explanation, left him utterly at sea. He could not reconcile them altogether with hypnotism. He could only, as an ordinary man, already with a bias in the mystical direction, come to the one conclusion that this overwhelming and hierophantic man was actually in touch with cisterns of force so terrific as to be dangerous to what he had hitherto understood to be\u2014life. It was easy enough for the clergyman, in his optimistic enthusiasm, to talk about their leading to a larger life. But what if the experiment failed, and these colossal powers ran amok upon the world\u2014and upon the invokers?\n\nMoreover\u2014chief anxiety of all\u2014what was this name to be experimented with? What was the nature of this force that Skale hoped to invoke\u2014so mighty that it should make them \"as gods,\" so terrible that a chord alone could compass even the first of its stupendous syllables?\n\nAnd, further, he was still haunted with the feeling that other \"beings\" occupied certain portions of the rambling mansion, and more than once recently he had wakened in the night with an idea, carried over from dreams possibly, that the corridor outside his bedroom was moving and alive with footsteps. \"From dreams possibly,\" for when he went and peered shivering through the narrow crack of the half-opened door, he saw nothing unusual. And another time\u2014he was awake beyond question at the moment, for he had been reading till two o'clock and had but just extinguished the candle\u2014he had heard a sound that he found impossible to describe, but that sent all the blood with a swift rush from the region of his heart. It was not wind; it was not the wood cracking with the frost; it was not snow sliding from the slates outside. It was something that simultaneously filled the entire building, yet sounded particularly loud just outside his door; and it came with the abrupt suddenness of a report. It made him think of all the air in the rooms and halls and passages being withdrawn by immense suction, as though a gigantic dome had been dropped over the building in order to produce a vacuum. And just after it he heard, unmistakably, the long soft stride of Skale going past his door and down the whole length of the corridor\u2014stealthily, very quickly, with the hurry of anxiety or alarm in his silence and his speed.\n\nThis, moreover, had now happened twice, so that imagination seemed a far-fetched explanation. And on both occasions the clergyman had remained invisible on the day following until the evening, and had then reappeared, quiet and as usual, but with an atmosphere of immense vibratory force somehow about his person, and a glow in his face and eyes that at moments seemed positively colored.\n\nNo word of explanation, however, had as yet been forthcoming of these omens, and Spinrobin waited with what patience he could, meanwhile, for the final test which he knew to be close upon him. And in his diary, the pages usually left blank now because words failed him, he wrote a portion of Anone's cry that had caught his memory and expressed a little of what he felt:\n\n\u2026for fiery thoughts Do shape themselves within me, more and more, Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills, Like footsteps upon wool\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "It was within three days of the expiration of his trial month that he then had this conversation with the clergyman, which he understood quite well was offered by way of preparation for the bigger tests about to come. He has reported what he could of it; it seemed to him at the time both plausible and absurd; it was of a piece, that is, with the rest of the whole fabulous adventure.\n\nMr. Skale, as they walked over the snowy moors in the semi-darkness between tea and dinner, had been speaking to him about the practical results obtainable by sound-vibrations (what he already knew for that matter), and how it is possible by fiddling long enough upon a certain note to fiddle down a bridge and split it asunder. From that he passed on to the scientific fact that the ultimate molecules of matter are not only in constant whirring motion, but that also they do not actually touch one another. The atoms composing the point of a pin, for instance, shift and change without ceasing, and\u2014there is space between them.\n\nThen, suddenly taking Spinrobin's arm, he came closer, his booming tone dropping to a whisper:\n\n\"To change the form of anything,\" he said in his ear, \"is merely to change the arrangement of those dancing molecules, to alter their rate of vibration.\" His eyes, even in the obscurity of the dusk, went across the other's face like flames.\n\n\"By means of sound?\" asked the other, already beginning to feel eerie.\n\nThe clergyman nodded his great head in acquiescence.\n\n\"Just as the vibrations of heat-waves,\" he said after a pause, \"can alter the form of a metal by melting it, so the vibrations of sound can alter the form of a thing by inserting themselves between those whirling molecules and changing their speed and arrangement\u2014change the outline, that is.\"\n\nThe idea seemed fairly to buffet the little secretary in the face, but Mr. Skale's proximity was too overpowering to permit of very clear thinking. Feeling that a remark was expected from him, he managed to ejaculate an obvious objection in his mind.\n\n\"But is there any sound that can produce vibrations fine and rapid enough\u2014to\u2014er\u2014accomplish such a result?\"\n\nMr. Skale appeared almost to leap for pleasure as he heard it. In reality he merely straightened himself up.\n\n\"That,\" he cried aloud, to the further astonishment and even alarm of his companion, \"is another part of my discovery\u2014an essential particular of it: the production of sound-vibrations fine and rapid enough to alter shapes! Listen and I will tell you!\" He lowered his voice again. \"I have found out that by uttering the true inner name of anything I can set in motion harmonics\u2014harmonics, note well, half the wave length and twice the frequency!\u2014that are delicate and swift enough to insert themselves between the whirling molecules of any reasonable object\u2014any object, I mean, not too closely or coherently packed. By then swelling or lowering my voice I can alter the scale, size or shape of that object almost indefinitely, its parts nevertheless retaining their normal relative proportions. I can scatter it to a huge scale by separating its molecules indefinitely, or bring them so closely together that the size of the object would be reduced to a practical invisibility!\"\n\n\"Re-create the world, in fact!\" gasped Spinrobin, feeling the earth he knew slipping away under his feet.\n\nMr. Skale turned upon him and stood still a moment. The huge moors, glimmering pale and unreal beneath their snow, ran past them into the sky\u2014silent forms corresponding to who knows what pedal notes? The wind sighed\u2014audible expression of who shall say what mighty shapes?\u2026 Something of the passion of sound, with all its mystery and splendor, entered his heart in that windy sigh. Was anything real? Was anything permanent?\u2026 Were Sound and Form merely interchangeable symbols of some deeper uncataloged Reality? And was the visible cohesion after all the illusory thing?\n\n\"Re-mold the whole universe, sir!\" he roared through the darkness, in a way that made the other wish for the touch of Miriam's hand to steady him. \"I could make you, my dear Spinrobin, immense, tiny, invisible, or by a partial utterance of your name, permanently crooked. I could overwhelm your own vibrations and withdraw their force, as by suction of a vacuum, absorbing yourself into my own being. By uttering the name of this old earth, if I knew it, I could alter its face, toss the forests like green dust into the sea, and lift the pebbles of the seashore to the magnitude of moons! Or, did I know the true name of the sun, I could utter it in such a way as to identify myself with its very being, and so escape the pitiful terrors of a limited personal existence!\"\n\nHe seized his companion's arm and began to stride down the mountainside at a terrific pace, almost lifting Spinrobin from his feet as he did so. About the ears of the panting secretary the wild words tore like bullets, whistling a new and dreadful music.\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" he shouted through the night, \"at the Word of Power of a true man the nations would rush into war, or sink suddenly into eternal peace; the mountains be moved into the sea, and the dead arise. To know the sounds behind the manifestations of Nature, the names of mechanical as well as of psychical Forces, of Hebrew angels, as of Christian virtues, is to know Powers that you can call upon at will\u2014and use! Utter them in the true vibratory way and you waken their counterpart in yourself and stir thus mighty psychic powers into activity in your Soul.\"\n\nHe rained the words down upon the other's head like a tempest.\n\n\"Can you wonder that the walls of Jericho fell flat before a 'Sound,' or that the raging waves of the sea lay still before a voice that called their Name? My discovery, Mr. Spinrobin, will run through the world like a purifying fire. For to utter the true names of individuals, families, tribes and nations, will be to call them to the knowledge of their highest Selves, and to lift them into tune with the music of the Voice of God.\"\n\nThey reached the front door, where the gleam of lamps shone with a homely welcome through the glass panels. The clergyman released his companion's arm; then bent down towards him and added in a tone that held in it for the first time something of the gravity of death:\n\n\"Only remember\u2014that to utter falsely, to pronounce incorrectly, to call a name incompletely, is the beginning of all evil. For it is to lie with the very soul. It is also to evoke forces without the adequate corresponding shape that covers and controls them, and to attract upon yourself the destructive qualities of these Powers\u2014to your own final disintegration and annihilation.\"\n\nSpinrobin entered the house, filled with a sense of awe that was cold and terrible, and greater than all his other sensations combined. The winds of fear and ruin blew shrill about his naked soul. None the less he was steadfast. He would remain to bless. Mr. Skale might be violent in mind, unbalanced, possibly mad; but his madness thundered at the doors of heaven, and the sound of that thundering completed the conquest of his admiration. He really believed that when the end came those mighty doors would actually open. And the thought woke a kind of elemental terror in him that was not of this world\u2014yet marvelously attractive." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "That night the singular rushing sound again disturbed him. It seemed as before to pass through the entire building, but this time it included a greater space in its operations, for he fancied he could hear it outside the house as well, traveling far up into the recesses of the dark mountains. Like the sweep of immense draughts of air it went down the passage and rolled on into the sky, making him think of the clergyman's suggestion that some sounds might require airwaves of a hundred miles instead of a few inches, too vast to be heard as sound. And shortly after it followed the great gliding stride of Mr. Skale himself down the corridor. That, at least, was unmistakable.\n\nDuring the following day, moreover, Mr. Skale remained invisible. Spinrobin, of course, had never permitted himself to search the house, or even to examine the other rooms in his own corridor. The quarters where Miriam slept were equally unknown to him. But he was quite certain that these prolonged periods of absence were spent by the clergyman in some remote part of the rambling building where there existed isolated, if not actually secret, rooms in which he practiced the rituals of some dangerous and intrepid worship. And these intimidating and mysterious sounds at night were, of course, something to do with the forces he conjured\u2026.\n\nThe day was still and windless, the house silent as the grave. He walked about the hills during the afternoon, practicing his Hebrew \"Names\" and \"Words\" like a schoolboy learning a lesson. And all about him the slopes of mountain watched him, listening. So did the sheet of snow, shining in the wintry sunlight. The clergyman seemed to have put all sound in his pocket and taken it away with him. The absence of anything approaching noise became almost oppressive. It was a Silence that prepares. Spinrobin went about on tiptoe, spoke to Miriam in whispers, practiced his Names in hushed, expectant tones. He almost expected to see the moors and mountains open their deep sides and let the Sounds of which they were the visible shape escape awfully about him\u2026.\n\nIn these hours of solitude, all that Skale had told him, and more still that he divined himself, haunted him with a sense of disquieting reality. Inaudible sounds of fearful volume, invisible forms of monstrous character, combinations of both even, impended everywhere about him. He became afraid lest he might stumble, as Skale had done, on the very note that should release them and bring them howling, leaping, crashing about his ears. Therefore, he tried to make himself as small as possible; he muffled steps and voice and personality. If he could, he would have completely disappeared.\n\nHe looked forward to Skale's return, but when evening came he was still alone, and he dined t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate with Miriam for the first time. And she, too, he noticed, was unusually quiet. Almost they seemed to have entered the world of Mrs. Mawle, the silent regions of the deaf. But for the most part it is probable that these queer impressions were due to the unusual state of Spinrobin's imagination. He knew that it was his last night in the place\u2014unless the clergyman accepted him; he knew also that Mr. Skale had absented himself with a purpose, and that the said purpose had to do with the test of Alteration of Forms by Sound, which would surely be upon him before the sun rose. So that, one way and another, it was natural enough that his nerves should have been somewhat overtaxed.\n\nThe presence of Miriam and Mrs. Mawle, however, did much to soothe him. The latter, indeed, mothered the pair of them quite absurdly, smiling all the time while she moved about softly with the dishes, and doing her best to make them eat enough for four. Between courses she sat at the end of the room, waiting in the shadows till Miriam beckoned to her, and once or twice going so far as to put her hand upon Spinrobin's shoulder protectively.\n\nHis own mind, however, all the time was full of charging visions. He kept thinking of the month just past and of the amazing changes it had brought into his thoughts. He realized, too, now that Mr. Skale was away, something of the lonely and splendid courage of the man, following this terrific, perhaps mad, ideal, day in day out, week in week out, for twenty years and more, his faith never weakening, his belief undaunted. Waves of pity, too, invaded him for the first time\u2014pity for this sweet girl, brought up in ignorance of any other possible world; pity for the deaf old housekeeper, already partially broken, and both sacrificed to the dominant idea of this single, heaven-climbing enthusiast; pity last of all for himself, swept headlong before he had time to reflect, into the audacious purpose of this violent and headstrong super-man.\n\nAll manner of emotions stirred now this last evening in his perplexed breast; yet out of the general turmoil one stood forth more clearly than the rest\u2014his proud consciousness that he was taking an important part in something really big at last. Behind the screen of thought and emotion which veiled so puzzlingly the truth, he divined for the first time in his career a golden splendor. If it also terrified him, that was only his cowardice\u2026. In the same way it might be splendid to jump into Niagara just above the falls to snatch a passing flower that seemed more wonderful than any he had seen before, but\u2014!\n\n\"Miriam, tomorrow is my last day,\" he said suddenly, catching her grey eyes upon him in the middle of his strange reflections. \"Tonight may be my last night in this house with you.\"\n\nThe girl made no reply, merely looking up and smiling at him. But the singing sensation that usually accompanied her gaze was not present.\n\n\"That was very nearly\u2014a discord,\" she observed presently, referring to his remark. \"It was out of tune!\" And he realized with a touch of shame what she meant. For it was not true that this was his last evening; he knew really that he would stay on and that Mr. Skale would accept him. Quick as a flash, with her simple intuition, she felt that he had said this merely to coax from her some sign of sympathy or love. And the girl was not to be drawn. She knew quite well that she held him and that their fate, whatever it might be, lay together.\n\nThe gentle rebuke made him silent again. They sat there smiling at one another across the table, and old Mrs. Mawle, sitting among the shadows at the far end of the room, her hands crossed in front of her, her white evening cap shining like a halo above her patient face, watched them, also smiling. The rest of the strange meal passed without conversation, for the great silence that all day had wrapped the hills seemed to have invaded the house as well and laid its spell upon every room. A deep hush, listening and expectant, dropped more and more about the building and about themselves.\n\nAfter dinner they sat for twenty minutes together before the library fire, their toes upon the fender, for, contrary to her habit, Miriam had not vanished at once to her own quarters.\n\n\"We're not alone here,\" remarked Spinrobin presently, in a low voice, and she nodded her head to signify agreement. The presence of Mr. Skale when he was in the house but invisible, was often more real and tremendous than when he stood beside them and thundered. Some part of him, some emanation, some potent psychic messenger from his personality, kept them closely company, and tonight the secretary felt it very vividly. His remark was really another effort to keep in close touch with Miriam, even in thought. He needed her more than ever in this sea of silence that was gathering everywhere about him. Gulf upon gulf it rose and folded over him. His anxiety became every moment more acute, and those black serpents of fear that he dreaded were not very far away. By every fiber in his being he felt certain that a test which should shake the very foundations of his psychical life was slowly and remorselessly approaching him.\n\nYet, though he longed to speak outright and demand of Miriam what she knew, and especially that she should reveal the place of the clergyman's concealment and what portent it was that required all this dread and muted atmosphere for its preparation, he kept a seal upon his lips, realizing that loyalty forbade, and that the knowledge of her contempt would be even worse than the knowledge of the truth.\n\nAnd so in due course she rose to go, and as he opened the door for her into the hall, she paused a moment and turned towards him. A sudden inexplicable thrill flashed through him as she turned her eyes upon his face, for he thought at first she was about to speak. He has never forgotten the picture as she stood there so close to his side, the lamplight on her slim figure in its white silk blouse and neat dark skirt, the gloom of the unlit hall and staircase beyond\u2014stood there an instant, then put both her arms about his neck, drew him down to her, and kissed him gently on both cheeks. Twice she kissed him, then was gone into the darkness, so softly that he scarcely heard her steps, and he stood between the shadows and the light, her perfume still lingering, and with it the sweet and magical blessing that she left behind. For that caress, he understood, was the innocent childlike caress of their first days, and with all the power of her loving little soul in it she had given him the message that he craved: \"Courage! And keep a brave heart, dear Spinny, tonight!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Spinrobin lingered a while in the library after Miriam was gone, then feeling slightly ill at ease in the room now that her presence was withdrawn, put the lights out, saw that the windows were properly barred and fastened, and went into the hall on his way to bed.\n\nHe looked at the front door, tried the chain, and made sure that both top and bottom bolts were thrown. Why he should have taken these somewhat unusual precautions was not far to seek, though at the moment he could not probably have explained. The desire for protection was awake in his being, and he took these measures of security and defense because it sought to express itself, as it were, even automatically. Spinrobin was afraid.\n\nUp the broad staircase he went softly with his lighted candle, leaving the great hall behind him full to the brim with shadows\u2014shadows that moved and took shape. His own head and shoulders in monstrous outline poured over the walls and upper landings, and thence leaped to the skylight overhead. As he passed the turn in the stairs, the dark contents of the hall below rushed past in a single mass, like an immense extended wing, and settled abruptly at his back, following him thence to the landing.\n\nOnce there, he went more quickly, moving on tiptoe, and so reached his own room halfway down. He passed two doors to get there; another two lay beyond; all four, as he believed, being always locked. It was these four rooms that conjured mightily with his imagination always, for these were the rooms he pictured to himself, though without a vestige of proof, as being occupied. It was from the further ones\u2014one or other of them\u2014he believed Mr. Skale came when he had passed down the corridor at two in the morning, stealthily, hurriedly, on the heels of that rush of sound that made him shake in his bed as he heard it.\n\nIn his own room, however, surrounded by the familiar and personal objects that reminded him of normal life, he felt more at home. He undressed quickly, all his candles alight, and then sat before the fire in the armchair to read a little before getting into bed.\n\nAnd he read for choice Hebrew\u2014Hebrew poetry, and on this particular occasion, the books of Job and Ezekiel. For nothing had so soothing and calming an effect upon him as the mighty yet simple imagery of these sonorous stanzas; they invariably took him \"out of himself,\" or at any rate out of the region of small personal alarms. And thus, letting his fancy roam, it seems, he was delighted to find that gradually the fears which had dominated him during the day and evening disappeared. He passed with the poetry into that region of high adventure which his nature in real life denied him. The verses uplifted him in a way that made his recent timidity seem the mere mood of a moment, or at least negligible. His memory, as one thing suggested another, began to give up its dead, and some of Blake's drawings, seen recently in London with prodigious effect, began to pass vividly before his mental vision.\n\nThe symbolism of what he was reading doubtless suggested the memory. He felt himself caught in the great invisible nets of wonder that forever swept the world. The littleness of modern life, compared to that ancient and profound spirit which sought the permanent things of the soul, haunted him with curious insistence. He suffered a keen, though somewhat mixed realization of his actual insignificance, yet of his potential sublimity could he but identify himself with his ultimate Self in the region of vision\u2026. His soul was aware of finding itself alternately ruffled and exalted as he read\u2026 and pondered\u2026 as he visualized to some degree the giant Splendors, the wonderful Wheels, the spirit Wings and Faces and all the other symbols of potent imagery evoked by the imagination of that old Hebrew world\u2026.\n\nSo that when, an hour later, pacified and sleepy, he rose to go to bed, this poetry seems to have left a very marked effect upon his mind\u2014mingled, naturally enough, with the thought of Mr. Skale. For on his way across the floor, having adjusted the fire-screen, he distinctly remembered thinking what a splendid \"study\" the clergyman would have made for one of Blake's representations of the Deity\u2014the flowing beard, the great nose, the imposing head and shoulders, the potentialities of the massive striding figure, surrounded by a pictorial suggestion of all the sound-forces he was forever talking about\u2026.\n\nThis thought was his last, and it was without fear of any kind. Merely, he insists, that his imagination was touched, and in a manner perfectly accountable, considering the ingredients of its contents at the time.\n\nAnd so he hopped nimbly into bed. On the little table beside him stood the candle and the copy of the Hebrew text he had been reading, with its parallel columns in the two languages. His Jaeger slippers were beneath the chair, his clothes, carefully folded, on the sofa, his collar, studs and necktie in a row on the top of the mahogany chest of drawers. On the mantelpiece stood the glass jar of heather, filled that very day by Miriam. He saw it just as he blew out the candle, and Miriam, accordingly, was the last vision that journeyed with him into the country of dreams and sweet forgetfulness.\n\nThe night was perfectly still. Winter, black and hard, lay about the house like an iron wall. No wind stirred. Snow covered the world of mountain and moor outside, and Silence, supreme at midnight, poured all her softest forces upon the ancient building and its occupants. Spinrobin, curled up in the middle of the big four-poster, slept like a tired baby." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "It was a good deal later when somewhere out of that mass of silence rose the faint beginnings of a sound that stirred first cautiously about the very foundations of the house, and then, mounting inch by inch, through the hall, up the staircase, along the corridor, reached the floor where the secretary slept so peacefully, and finally entered his room. Its muffled tide poured most softly over all. At first only this murmur was audible, as of \"footsteps upon wool,\" of wind or drifting snow, a mere ghost of sound; but gradually it grew, though still gentle and subdued, until it filled the space from ceiling unto floor, pressing in like water dripping into a cistern with ever-deepening note as its volume increased. The trembling of air in a big belfry where bells have been a-ringing represents best the effect, only it was a trifle sharper in quality\u2014keener, more alive.\n\nBut, also, there was something more in it\u2014something gong-like and metallic, yet at the same time oddly and suspiciously human. It held a temper, too, that somehow woke the \"panic sense,\" as does the hurried note of a drum\u2014some quick emotional timbre that stirs the sleeping outposts of apprehension and alarm. On the other hand, it was constant, neither rising nor falling, and thus ordinarily, it need not have stirred any emotion at all\u2014least of all the emotion of consternation. Yet, there was that in it which struck at the root of security and life. It was a revolutionary sound.\n\nAnd as it took possession of the room, covering everything with its garment of vibration, it slipped in also, so to speak, between the crevices of the sleeping, unprotected Spinrobin, coloring his dreams\u2014his innocent dreams\u2014with the suggestion of nightmare dread. Of course, he was too deeply wrapped in slumber to receive the faintest intimation of this waking analysis. Otherwise he might, perhaps, have recognized the kind of primitive, ancestral dread his remote forefathers knew when the inexplicable horror of a tidal wave or an eclipse of the sun overwhelmed them with the threatened alteration of their entire known universe.\n\nThe sleeping figure in that big four-poster moved a little as the tide of sound played upon it, fidgeting this way and that. The human ball uncoiled, lengthened, straightened out. The head, half hidden by folds of sheet and pillowcase, emerged.\n\nSpinrobin unfolded, then opened his eyes and stared about him, bewildered, in the darkness.\n\n\"Who's there? Is that you\u2014anybody?\" he asked in a whisper, the confusion of sleep still about him.\n\nHis voice seemed dead and smothered, as though the other sound overwhelmed it. The same instant, more widely awake, he realized that his bedroom was humming.\n\n\"What's that? What's the matter?\" he whispered again, wondering uneasily at the noise.\n\nThere was no answer. The vague dread transferred itself adroitly from his dream-consciousness to his now thoroughly awakened mind. It began to dawn upon him that something was wrong. He noticed that the fire was out, and the room dark and heavy. He realized dimly the passage of time\u2014a considerable interval of time\u2014and that he must have been asleep several hours. Where was he? Who was he? What, in the name of mystery and night, had been going on during the interval? He began to shake all over\u2014feverishly. Whence came this noise that made everything in the darkness tremble?\n\nAs he fumbled hurriedly for the matchbox, his fingers caught in the folds of pillowcase and sheet, and he struggled violently to get them clear again. It was while doing this that the impression first reached him that the room was no longer quite the same. It had changed while he slept. Even in the darkness he felt this, and shuddering pulled the blankets over his head and shoulders, for this idea of the changed room plucked at the center of his heart, where terror lay waiting to leap out upon him.\n\nAfter what seemed five minutes he found the matchbox and struck a light, and all the time the torrent of sound poured about his ears with such an effect of bewilderment that he hardly realized what he was doing. A strange terror poured into him that he would change with the room. At length the match flared, and while he lit the candle with shaking fingers, he looked wildly, quickly about him. At once the sounds rushed upon him from all directions, burying him, so to speak, beneath vehement vibrations of the air that rained in upon him\u2026. Yes, the room had indeed changed, actually changed\u2026 but before he could decide where the difference lay the candle died down to a mere spark, waiting for the wick to absorb the grease. It seemed like half an hour before the yellow tongue grew again, so that he finally saw clearly.\n\nBut\u2014saw what? Saw that the room had horribly altered while he slept, yes! But how altered? What in the name of all the world's deities was the matter with it? The torrent of sound, now growing louder and louder, so confused him at first, and the dancing patchwork of light and shadow the candle threw so increased his bewilderment, that for some minutes he sought in vain to steady his mind to the point of accurate observation.\n\n\"God of my Fathers!\" cried Spinrobin at last under his breath, and hardly knowing what he said, \"if it's not moving!\"\n\nFor this, indeed, was what he saw while the candle flame burned steadily upon a room that was no longer quite recognizable.\n\nAt first, with the natural exaggeration due to shock, he thought the whole room moved, but as his powers of sight came with time to report more truly, he perceived that this was only true of certain things in it. It was not the ceiling that poured down in fluid form to meet a floor ever gliding and shifting forward into outlandish proportions, but it was certain objects\u2014one here, another there\u2014midway between the two that, having assumed new and unaccustomed outlines, lent to the rest of the chamber a general appearance of movement and an entirely altered expression. And these objects, he perceived, holding tightly to the bedclothes with both hands as he stared, were two: the dark, old-fashioned cupboard on his left, and the plush curtains that draped the window on his right. He himself, and the bed and the rest of the furniture were stationary. The room as a whole stood still, while these two common and familiar articles of household furnishing took on a form and an expression utterly foreign to what he had always known as a cupboard and a curtain. This outline, this expression, moreover, if not actually sinister, was grotesque to the verge of the sinister: monstrous.\n\nThe difficulty of making any accurate observation at all was further increased by the perplexity of having to observe two objects, not even on the same side of the room. Their outlines, however, Spinrobin claims, altered very slowly, wavering like the distorted reflections seen in moving water, and unquestionably obeying in some way the pitch and volume of the sound that continued to pour its resonant tide about the room. The sound manipulated the shape; the connection between the two was evident. That, at least, he grasped. Somebody hidden elsewhere in the house\u2014Mr. Skale probably, of course, in one of his secret chambers\u2014was experimenting with the \"true names\" of these two \"common objects,\" altering their normal forms by inserting the vibrations of sound between their ultimate molecules.\n\nOnly, this simple statement that his clearing mind made to itself in no way accounted for the fascination of horror that accompanied the manifestation. For he recognized it as the joy of horror and not alone the torment. His blood ran swiftly to the rhythm of these humming vibrations that filled the space about him; and his terror, his bewilderment, his curious sense of elation seemed to him as messengers of far more terrific sensations that communicated to him dimly the rushing wonder of some aspect of the Unknown in its ultimate nature essentially beautiful.\n\nThis, however, only dawned upon him later, when the experiment was complete and he had time to reflect upon it all next day; for, meanwhile, to see the proportions he had known since childhood alter thus before his eyes was unbelievably dreadful. To see your friend sufficiently himself still to be recognizable, yet in essentials, at the same time, grotesquely altered, would doubtless touch a climax of distress and horror for you. The changing of these two things, so homely and well-known in themselves, into something that was not themselves, involved an idea of destruction that was worse than even death, for it meant that the idea in the mind no longer corresponded to the visible object there before the eyes. The correspondence was no longer a true one. The result was a lie.\n\nTo describe the actual forms assumed by these shifting and wavering bodies is not possible, for when Spinrobin gives the details one simply fails to recognize either cupboard or curtain. To say that the dark, lumbering cupboard, standing normally against the wall down there in the shadows, loomed suddenly forward and upward, bent, twisted, and stretched out the whole of one side towards him like a misshapen arm, can convey nothing of the world of new sensations that the little secretary felt while actually watching it in progress in that haunted chamber of Skale's mansion among the hills. Nor can one be thrilled with the extraordinary sense of wonder that thrilled Spinrobin when he saw the faded plush curtain hang across the window in such a way that it might well have wrapped the whole of Wales into a single fold, yet without extending its skirts beyond the actual walls of the room. For what he saw apparently involved contradictions in words, and the fact is that no description of what he saw is really possible at all.\n\n\"Hark! By thunder!\" he exclaimed, creeping out of bed with sheer stress of excitement, while the sounds poured up through the floor as though from cellars and tunnels where they lay stored beneath the house. They sang and trembled about him with the menaces of a really exquisite alarm. He moved cautiously out into the center of the room, not daring to approach too close to the affected objects, yet furiously anxious to discover how it was all done. For he was uncommonly \"game\" through it all, and had himself well in hand from beginning to end. He was really too excited, probably, to feel ordinary fear; it all swept him away too mightily for that; he did not even notice the sting of the hot candle-grease as it fell upon his bare feet.\n\nThere he stood, plucky little Spinny, steady amid this shifting world, master of his soul amid dissolution, his hair pointing out like ruffled feathers, his blue eyes wide open and charged with a speechless wonder, his face pale as chalk, lips apart, jaw a trifle dropped, one hand in the pocket of his dressing-gown, and the other holding the candle at an angle that showered grease upon the carpet of the Rev. Philip Skale as well as upon his own ankles. There he stood, face to face with the grotesque horror of familiar outlines gone wrong, the altered panorama of his known world moving about him in a strange riot of sound and form. It was, he understood, an amazing exhibition of the transforming power of sound\u2014of sound playing tricks with the impermanence and the illusion of Form. Skale was making his words good.\n\nAnd behind the scenes he divined, with a shudder of genuine admiration, the figure of the master of the ceremonies, somehow or other grown colossal, as he had thought of him just before going to sleep\u2014Philip Skale, hidden in the secret places of the building, directing the operations of this dreadful aspect of his revolutionary Discovery\u2026. And yet the thought brought a measure of comfort in its train, for was he not also himself now included in the mighty scheme?\u2026 In his mind he saw this giant Skale, with his great limbs and shoulders, his flowing, shaggy beard, his voice of thunder and his portentous speculations, and, so doing, felt himself merged in a larger world that made his own little terrors and anxieties of but small account. Once again the sense of his own insignificance disappeared as he realized that at last he was in the full flood of an adventure that was providing the kind of escape he had always longed for.\n\nInevitably, then, his thought flew to Miriam, and as he remembered her final word to him a few short hours ago in the hall below, he already felt ashamed of the fear with which he had met the beginning of the \"test.\" He instantly felt steeped instead in the wonder and power of the whole thing. His mind, though still trembling and shaken, came to rest. He drew, that is, upon the larger powers of the Chord.\n\nAnd the interesting thing was that the moment this happened he noticed a change begin to come over the room. With extraordinary swiftness the tide of vibration lessened and the sound withdrew; the humming seemed to sink back into the depths of the house; the thrill and delight of his recent terrors fled with it. The air gradually ceased to shake and tremble; the furniture, with a curious final shiver as of spinning coins about to settle, resumed its normal shape. Once more the room, and with it the world, became commonplace and dull. The test apparently was over. He had met it with success.\n\nSpinrobin, holding the candle straight for the first time, turned back towards the bed. He caught a passing glimpse of himself in the mirror as he went\u2014white and scattered he describes his appearance\u2026. He climbed again into bed, blew the candle out, put the matchbox under his pillow within easy reach, and so once more curled himself up into a ball and composed himself to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "But he was hardly settled\u2014there had not even been time to warm the sheets again\u2014when he was aware that the test, instead of being over, was, indeed, but just beginning; and the detail that conveyed this unwelcome knowledge to him, though small enough in itself, was yet fraught with a crowded cargo of new alarms. It was a step upon the staircase, approaching his room.\n\nHe heard it the instant he lay still in bed after the shuffling process known generally as \"cuddling down.\" And he knew that it was approaching because of the assistance the hall clock brought to his bewildered ears. For the hall clock\u2014a big, dignified piece of furniture with a deep note\u2014happened just then to strike the hour of two in the morning, and there was a considerable interval between the two notes. He first heard the step far below in the act of leaving the flagged hall for the staircase; then the clock drowned it with its first stroke, and perhaps a dozen seconds later, when the second stroke had died away, he heard the step again, as it passed from the top of the staircase on to the polished boards of the landing. The owner of the step, meanwhile, had passed up the whole length of the staircase in the interval, and was now coming across the landing in a direct line towards his bedroom door.\n\n\"It is a step, I suppose,\" it seems he muttered to himself, as with head partially raised above the blankets he listened intently. \"It's a step, I mean\u2026?\" For the sound was more like a light tapping of a little hammer than an actual step\u2014some hard substance drumming automatically upon the floor, while yet moving in advance. He recognized, however, that there was intelligence behind its movements, because of the sense of direction it displayed, and by the fact that it had turned the sharp corner of the stairs; but the idea presented itself in fugitive fashion to his mind\u2014Heaven alone knows why\u2014that it might be some mechanical contrivance that was worked from the hall by a hand. For the sound was too light to be the tread of a person, yet too \"conscious\" to be merely a sound of the night operating mechanically. And it was unlike the noise that the feet of any animal would make, any animal that he could think of, that is. A four-footed creature suggested itself to his mind, but without approval.\n\nThe puzzling characteristics of the sound, therefore, contradictory as they were, left him utterly perplexed, so that for some little time he could not make up his mind whether to be frightened, interested or merely curious.\n\nThis uncertainty, however, lasted but a moment or two at the most, for an appreciable pause outside his door was next followed by a noise of scratching upon the panels, as of hands or paws, and then by the shuffling of some living body that was flattening itself in an attempt to squeeze through the considerable crack between door and flooring, and so to enter the room.\n\nAnd, hearing it, Spinrobin this time was so petrified with an instantaneous rush of terror, that at first he dared not even move to find the matches again under his pillow.\n\nThe pause was dreadful. He longed for brilliant light that should reveal all parts of the room equally, or else for a thick darkness that should conceal him from everything in the world. The uncertain flicker of a single candle playing miserably between the two was the last thing in the world to appeal to him.\n\nAnd then events crowded too thick and fast for him to recognize any one emotion in particular from all the fire of them passing so swiftly in and out among his hopelessly disorganized thoughts. Terror flashed, but with it flashed also wonder and delight\u2014the audacity of unreflecting courage\u2014and more\u2014even a breathless worship of the powers, knowledge and forces that lifted for him in that little bedroom the vast Transparency that hides from men the Unknown.\n\nIt is soon told. For a moment there was silence, and then he knew that the invader had effected an entrance. There was barely time to marvel at the snake-like thinness of the living creature that could avail itself of so narrow a space, when to his amazement he heard the quick patter of feet across the space of boarded flooring next the wall, and then the silence that muffled them as they reached the carpet proper.\n\nAlmost at the same second something leaped upon his bed, and there shot swiftly across him a living thing with light, firm tread\u2014a creature, so far as he could form any judgment at all, about the size of a rabbit or a cat. He felt the feet pushing through sheets and blankets upon his body. They were little feet; how many, at that stage, he could not guess. Then he heard the thud as it dropped to the floor upon the other side.\n\nThe panic terror that in the dark it would run upon his bare exposed face thus passed; and in that moment of intense relief Spinrobin gripped his soul, so to speak, with both hands and made the effort of his life. Whatever happened now he must have a light, be it only the light of a single miserable candle. In that moment he felt that he would have sacrificed all his hopes of the hereafter to have turned on a flood of searching and brilliant sunshine into every corner of the room\u2014instantaneously. The thought that the creature might jump again upon the bed and touch him before he could see, gave him energy to act.\n\nWith dashes of terror shooting through him like spears of ice, he grabbed the matchbox, and after a frenzied entanglement again with sheets and pillow-case, succeeded in breaking four matches in quick succession. They cracked, it seemed to him, like pistol shots, till he half expected that this creature, waiting there in the darkness, must leap out in the direction of the sound to attack him. The fifth lit, and a moment later the candle was burning dimly, but with its usual exasperating leisure and delay. As the flare died down, then gradually rose again, he fairly swallowed the room with a single look, wishing there were eyes all over his body. It was a very faint light. At first he saw nothing, heard nothing\u2014nothing alive, that is.\n\n\"I must act! I must do something\u2014at once!\" he remembered thinking. For, to wait meant to leave the choice and moment of attack to this other\u2026.\n\nCautiously, and very slowly, therefore, he wriggled to the edge of the bed and slid over, searching with his feet for slippers, but finding none, yet not daring to lower his eyes to look; then stood upright with a sudden rush, shading the candle from his eyes with one hand and peering over it.\n\nAs a rule, in moments of overwhelming emotion, the eyes search too eagerly, too furiously, to see properly at all; but this does not seem to have been the case with Spinrobin. The shadows ran about like water and the flickering of the candle-flame dazzled, but there, opposite to him, over by the darkness of the dead fireplace, he saw instantly the small black object that was the immediate cause of his terror. Its actual shape was merged too much in the dark background to be clearly ascertainable, but near the top of it, where presumably the head was, the candle-flame shone reflected in two brilliant points of light that were directed straight upon his face, and he knew that he was looking into the eyes of a living creature that was not the very least on the defensive. It was a living creature, aggressive and unafraid.\n\nFor perhaps a couple of minutes\u2014or was it seconds only?\u2014these two beings with the breath of life in them faced one another. Then Spinrobin made a step cautiously in advance; lowering his candle he moved towards it. This he did, partly to see better, partly to protect his bare legs. The idea of protection, however, seems to have been merely instinct, for at once this notion that it might dash forward to attack him was merged in the unaccountable realization of a far grander emotion, as he perceived that this \"living creature\" facing him was, for all its diminutive size, both dignified and imposing. Something in its atmosphere, something about its mysterious presentment there upon the floor in its dark corner, something, perhaps, that flashed from its brilliant and almost terrible eyes, managed to convey to him that it was clothed with an importance and a significance not attached normally to the animal world. It had \"an air.\" It bore itself with power, with value, almost with pride.\n\nThis incongruous impression bereft him of the sensations of ordinary fear, while it increased the sources of his confusion. Yet it convinced. He knew himself face to face with some form of life that was considerable in the true sense\u2014spiritually. It exercised a fascination over him that was at the moment beyond either explanation or belief.\n\nAs he moved, moreover, the little dark object also moved\u2014away from him, as though resenting closer inspection. With action\u2014again unlike the action of any animal he could think of, and essentially dignified\u2014both rapid and nicely calculated, it ran towards the curtains behind. This appearance of something stately that went with it was indefinable and beyond everything impressive; for how in the world could such small proportions and diminutive movements convey grandeur? And again Spinrobin found it impossible to decide precisely how it moved\u2014whether on four legs or on two.\n\nKeeping the two points of light always turned upon him, it shot across the floor, leaped easily upon a chair, passed with a nimble spring from this to a table by the wall, still too much in obscurity to permit a proper view; and then, while the amazed secretary approached cautiously to follow its movements better, it crawled to the edge of the table, and in so doing passed for the first time full across the pale zone of flickering candlelight.\n\nSpinrobin, in that quick second, caught a glimpse of flying hair, and saw that it moved either as a human being or as a bird\u2014on two legs.\n\nThe same moment it sprang deftly from the high table to the mantelpiece, turned, stood erect, and looked at him with the whole glare of the light upon its face; and Spinrobin, bereft of all power of intelligible sensation whatever, saw to his unutterable distress that it was\u2014a man. The dignity of its movements had already stirred vaguely his sense of awe, but now the realization beyond doubt of its diminutive human shape added a singularly acute touch of horror; and it was the combination of the two emotions, possibly, that were responsible also for the two remarkable impulses of which he was first conscious: first, a mad desire to strike and kill; secondly, an imperious feeling that he must hide his eyes in some act or other of worship!\n\nAnd it was then he realized that the man was\u2014Philip Skale!\n\nMr. Skale, scarcely a foot high, dressed as usual in black, flowing beard, hooked nose, lambent, flashing eyes and all, stood there upon the mantelpiece level with his secretary's face, not three feet separating them, and\u2014smiled at him. He was small as a Tanagra figure, and in perfect proportion.\n\nIt was unspeakably terrible." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "\"Of course\u2014I'm dreaming,\" cried Spinrobin, half aloud, half to the figure before him. He searched behind him with one hand for solid support. \"You're a dream thing. It's some awful trick\u2014God will protect me\u2014!\"\n\nMr. Skale's tiny lips moved. \"No, no,\" his voice said, and it sounded as from a great distance. \"I'm no dream thing at all, and you are wide awake. Look at me well. I am the man you know\u2014Philip Skale. Look straight into my eyes and be convinced.\" Again he smiled his kindly, winning smile. \"What you now see is nothing but a result of sounding my true name in a certain way\u2014very softly\u2014to increase the cohesion of my physical molecules and reduce my visible expression. Listen, and watch!\"\n\nAnd Spinrobin, half stupefied, obeyed, feeling that his weakening knees must in another moment give way and precipitate him to the floor. He was utterly unnerved. The onslaught of terror and amazement was overwhelming. For something dreadful beyond all words lay in the sight of this man, whom he was accustomed to reverence in his gigantic everyday shape, here reduced to the stature of a pygmy, yet compelling as ever, terrific even when thus dwarfed. And to hear the voice of thunder that he knew so well come to him disguised within this thin and almost wailing tone, passed equally beyond the limits of what he could feel as emotion or translate into any intelligible words or gesture.\n\nWhile, therefore, the secretary stood in awful wonder, doing as he was told simply because he could do nothing else, the figure of the clergyman moved with tiny steps to the edge of the mantelpiece, until it seemed as though he meant in another moment to leap on to his companion's shoulder, or into his arms. At the edge, however, he stopped\u2014the brink of a precipice, to him!\u2014and Spinrobin then became aware that from his moving lips, doll-like though bearded, his voice was issuing with an ever-growing volume of sound and power.\n\nVibrations of swiftly-increasing depth and wave-length were spreading through the air about him, filling the room from floor to ceiling. What the syllables actually uttered may have been he was too dazed to realize, for no degree of concentration was possible to his mind at all; he only knew that, before his smarting eyes, with this rising of the voice to its old dominant inflexion, the figure of Mr. Philip Skale grew likewise, indescribably; swelled, rose, spread upwards and outwards, but with the parts ever passing slowly in consistent inter-relation, from minute to minute. He became, always in perfect proportion, magnified and extended. The growing form, moreover, kept pace exactly, and most beautifully, with the increasing tide of sonorous vibration that flooded himself, its utterer and the whole room.\n\nSpinrobin, it seems, had just sufficient self-control left to realize that this sound was similar in quality to that which had first awakened him and caused the outlines of the furniture to alter, when the sight of Mr. Skale's form changing thus terribly before his eyes, and within the touch of his very hand, became too much for him altogether\u2026.\n\nWhat precisely happened he never knew. The sounds first enveloped him, then drove him backwards with a sense of immense applied resistance. He collapsed upon the sofa a few feet behind him, as though irresistibly pushed. The power that impelled him charged vehemently through the little room till it seemed the walls must burst asunder to give it scope, while the sounds rose to such a volume that he figured himself drowned and overpowered by their mighty vibrations as by the storm swells of the Atlantic. Before he lost them as sound he seems thus to have been aware of them as moving waves of air\u2026. The next thing he took in was that amid the waste of silence that now followed his inability to hear, the figure of Philip Skale towered aloft towards the ceiling, till it seemed positively to occupy all the available space in the room about him.\n\nHad he dropped upon the floor instead of upon the sofa it is probable that at this point Spinrobin would have lost consciousness, at any rate for a period; but that sofa, which luckily for his bones was so close behind, galvanized him sharply back into some measure of self-control again. Being provided with powerful springs, it shot him up into the air, whence he relapsed with a series of smaller bounds into a normal sitting posture. Still holding the lighted candle as best he could, the little secretary bounced upon that sofa like a tennis ball. And the violent motion shook him into himself, as it were. His tottering universe struggled back into shape once more. He remembered vaguely that all this was somehow a test of his courage and fitness. And this thought, strengthened by a law of his temperament which forced him to welcome the sweet, mad terror of the whole adventure, helped to call out the reserves of his failing courage.\n\nHe bounced upon his feet again\u2014those bare feet plastered with candle grease\u2014and, turning his head, saw the clergyman, of incredible stature, yet still apparently increasing, already over by the door. He was turning the key with a hand the size\u2014O horror!\u2014of Spinrobin's breast. The next moment his vast stooping body filled the entire entrance, blotting out whole portions of the walls on either side, then was gone from the room.\n\nLeaving the candlestick on the sofa, his heart aflame with a fearful ecstasy of curiosity, he dashed across the floor in pursuit, but Mr. Skale, silently and with the swiftness of a river, was already down the stairs before he had covered half the distance.\n\nThrough the framework of the door Spinrobin saw this picture:\n\nSkale, like some awful Cyclops, stood upon the floor of the hall some twenty feet below, yet rearing terrifically up through the well of the building till his head and shoulders alone seemed to fill the entire space beneath the skylight. Though his feet rested unquestionably upon the ground, his face, huge as a planet in the sky, rose looming and half lighted above the banisters of this second storey, his tangled locks sweeping the ceiling, and his beard, like some dark river of hair, flowing downwards through the night. And this spreading countenance of cloud it was, hanging in the semi-darkness, that Spinrobin saw turn slowly towards him across the faint flicker of the candlelight, look straight down into his face, and smile. The great mouth and eyes unquestionably smiled. And that smile, for all its vast terror, was beyond words enchanting\u2014like the spread laughter of a summer landscape.\n\nAmong the spaces of the immense visage\u2014reminding him curiously of his boyhood's conception of the Creator\u2014Spinrobin lost himself and grew dizzy with a deadly yet delicious faintness. The mighty tenderness, the compassion, the splendor of that giant smile overpowered him and swallowed him up.\n\nFor one second, in dreadful silence, he gazed. Then, rising to meet the test with a courage that he felt might somehow involve the alteration if not the actual destruction of his own little personality, but that also proved his supreme gameness at the same time, he tried to smile in return\u2026. The strange and pitiful attempt upon his own face perhaps, in the semi-obscurity, was not seen. He only remembers that he somehow found strength to crawl forward and close the door with a bang, though not the strength to turn the key and lock it, and that two seconds later, having kicked the candle over and out in his flying leap, he was in the middle of the bed under a confused pile of sheets and blankets, weeping with muffled sobs in the darkness as though his heart must burst with the wonder and terror of all he had witnessed.\n\nFor, to the simple in heart, at the end of all possible stress and strain of emotion, comes mercifully the blinding relief of tears\u2026.\n\nAnd then, although too overcome to be able to prove it even to himself, it was significant that, lying there smothered among the bedclothes, he became aware of the presence of something astonishingly sweet and comforting in his consciousness. It came quite suddenly upon him; the reaction he experienced, he says, was very wonderful, for with it the sense of absolute safety and security returned to him. Like a terrified child in the darkness who suddenly knows that its mother stands by the bed, all-powerful to soothe, he felt certain that some one had moved into the room, was close beside him, and was even trying to smooth his pillow and arrange the twisted bedclothes.\n\nHe did not dare uncover his face to see, for he was still dominated by the memory of Mr. Skale's portentous visage; but his ears were not so easily denied, and he was positive that he heard a voice that called his name as though it were the opening phrase of some sweet, childhood lullaby. There was a touch about him somewhere, it seemed, of delicate cool hands that brought with them the fragrance as of a scented summer wind; and the last thing he remembered before he sank away into welcome unconsciousness was an impression, fugitive and dreamlike, of a gentle face, unstained and pale as marble, that bent above his pillow, and, singing, called him away to forgetfulness and peace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "And several hours later, when he woke after a refreshing sleep to find Mrs. Mawle smiling down upon him over a tray of steaming coffee, he recalled the events of the night with a sense of vivid reality that if possible increased his conviction of their truth, but without the smallest symptom of terror or dismay. For the blessing of the presence that had soothed him into sleep lay still upon him like a garment to protect. The test had come and he had not wholly failed.\n\nWith something approaching amusement, he watched the housekeeper pick up a candlestick from the middle of the floor and put his Jaeger slippers beneath the chair, having found one by the cupboard and the other over by the fireplace.\n\n\"Mr. Skale's compliments and Mr. Spinrobin is not to hurry himself,\" he heard her saying, as she put the tray beside the bed and went out of the room. He looked at his watch and saw that it was after ten o'clock.\n\nHalf an hour later he was dressed and on his way downstairs, conscious only of an overwhelming desire to see Mr. Skale, but to see him in his normal and fatherly aspect again. For a strain of worship mingled oddly with his devouring curiosity, and he was thirsty now for the rest of the adventure, for the complete revelation of the Discovery in all its bearings. And the moment he saw the clergyman in the hall he ran towards him, scarcely realizing what it was he meant to say or do. Mr. Skale stretched out both hands to meet him. His face was alight with pleasure.\n\nBut, before they could meet and touch, a door opened and in slipped Miriam between them; she, too, was radiant, and her hands outstretched.\n\n\"Me first, please! Me first!\" she cried with happy laughter, and before Spinrobin realized what was happening, she had flung her arms about his neck and kissed him.\n\n\"You were splendid!\" she whispered in his ear, \"and I am proud of you\u2014ever so proud!\"\n\nThe next minute Skale had him by the hands.\n\n\"Well done! well done!\" his voice boomed, while he gazed down into his face with enthusiastic and unqualified approval. \"It was all magnificent. My dear little fellow, you've got the heart of a god, and, by Heavens, you shall become as a god too! For you are worthy!\" He shook him violently by both hands, while Miriam looked eagerly on with admiration in her wide grey eyes.\n\n\"I'm so glad, so awfully glad\u2014\" stammered the secretary, remembering with shame his moments of vivid terror. He hardly knew what he said at the moment.\n\n\"The properties of things,\" thundered the clergyman, \"as you have now learned, are merely the 'muffled utterances of the Sounds that made them.' The thing itself is its name.\"\n\nHe spoke rapidly, with intense ardor and with reverence. \"You have seen with your own eyes a scientific proof of my Discovery on its humblest level\u2014how the physical properties of objects can be manipulated by the vibratory utterance of their true names\u2014can be extended, reduced, glorified. Next you shall learn that spiritual qualities\u2014the attributes of higher states of being\u2014can be similarly dealt with and harnessed\u2014exalted, intensified, invoked\u2014and that the correct utterance of mighty Names can seduce their specific qualities into your own soul to make you mighty and eternal as themselves, and that to call upon the Great Names is no idle phrase\u2026. When the time comes, Spinrobin, you shall not shrink, you shall not shrink\u2026.\" He flung his arms out with a great gesture of delight.\n\n\"No,\" repeated Spinrobin, yet aware that he felt mentally battered at the prospect, \"I shall not shrink. I think\u2014now\u2014I can manage\u2014anything!\"\n\nAnd then, watching Miriam with lingering glance as she vanished laughing up the staircase, he followed Mr. Skale into the library, his thoughts tearing wildly to and fro, swelling with delight and pride, thrilling with the wonder of what was yet to come. There, with fewest possible sentences, the clergyman announced that he now accepted him and would, therefore, carry out the promise with regard to the bequeathal of his property to him in the event of any untoward circumstances arising later. He also handed to him in cash the salary for the \"trial month,\" together with a check for the first quarter in advance. He was beaming with the satisfaction he felt at having found at last a really qualified helper. Spinrobin looked into his face as they shook hands over the bargain. He was thinking of other aspects he had seen of this amazing being but a few hours before\u2014the minute, the colossal, the changing-between-the-two Skales\u2026.\n\n\"I'm game, Mr. Skale,\" he said simply, forgetting all his recent doubts and terrors.\n\n\"I know you are,\" the clergyman replied. \"I knew it all along.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "The first thing Spinrobin knew when he ran upstairs to lock away the money in his desk was that his whole being, without his directing it, asked a question of momentous import. He did not himself ask it deliberately. He surprised his sub-consciousness asking it:\n\n\"WHAT IS THIS NAME THAT PHILIP SKALE FOREVER SEEKS?\"\n\nIt was no longer mere curiosity that asked it, but that sense of responsibility which in all men of principle and character lies at the root of action and of life. And Spinrobin, for all his little weaknesses, was a man of character and principle. There came a point when he could no longer follow blindly where others led, even though the leader were so grand an individual as Philip Skale. This point is reached at varying degrees of the moral thermometer, and but for the love that Miriam had wakened in his heart, it might have taken much longer to send the mercury of his will so high in so short a time. He now felt responsibility for two, and in the depths of his queer, confused, little mind stirred the thought that possibly after all the great adventure he sought was only the supreme adventure of a very wonderful Love.\n\nHe records these two questions at this point, and it is only just to himself, therefore, to set them down here. To neither was the answer yet forthcoming.\n\nFor some days the routine of this singular household followed its normal course, the only change being that while the secretary practiced his Hebrew names and studied the relations between sound, color, form and the rest, he kept himself a little better in hand, for Love is a mighty humanizer and holds down the nose upon the grindstone of the wholesome and practical values of existence. He turned, so to speak, and tried to face the matter squarely; to see the adventure as a whole; to get all round it and judge. It seems, however, that he was too much in the thick of it to get that bird's-eye view which reduces details to the right proportion. Skale's personality was too close, and flooded him too violently. Spinrobin remained confused and bewildered; but also unbelievably happy.\n\n\"Coming out all right,\" he wrote shakily in that gilt-edged diary. \"Beginning to understand why I'm in the world. Am just as important as anybody else\u2014really. Impossible explain more.\" His entries were very like telegrams, in which a man attempts to express in a lucid shorthand all manner of things that the actual words hardly compass. And life itself is not unlike some mighty telegram that seeks vainly to express, between the extremes of silence and excess, all that the soul would say\u2026.\n\n\"Skale is going too far,\" perhaps best expresses the daily burden of his accumulating apprehension. \"He is leading up to something that makes me shrink\u2014something not quite legitimate. Playing with an Olympian fire that may consume us both.\" And there his telegram stopped; for how in the world could he put into mere language the pain and distress involved in the thought that it might at the same time consume Miriam? It all touched appalling depths of awe in his soul. It made his heart shake. The girl had become a part of his very self.\n\nVivid reactions he suffered, alternating with equally vivid enthusiasms. He realized how visionary the clergyman's poetical talk was, but the next minute the practical results staggered him again, as it were, back into a state of conviction. For the poetry obscured his judgment and fired his imagination so that he could not follow calmly. The feeling that it was not only illogical but insane troubled him; yet the physical effects stared him in the face, and to argue with physical results is waste of time. One must act.\n\nYet how \"act?\" The only way that offered he accepted: he fell back upon the habits of his boyhood, read his Bible, and at night dropped humbly upon his knees and prayed.\n\n\"Keep me straight and pure and simple, and bless\u2026 Miriam. Grant that I may love and strengthen her\u2026 and that my love may bring her peace\u2026 and joy\u2026and guide me through all this terror, I beseech Thee, into Truth\u2026.\"\n\nFor, in the beauty of his selfless love, he dared not even admit that it was love; feeling only the highest, he could not quite correlate his sweet and elevated passion with the common standards of what the World called love. The humility of a great love is ever amazing.\n\nAnd then followed in his prayers the more cowardly cry for ordinary protection from the possible results of Skale's audacity. The Love of God he could understand, but the Wrath of God was a conception he was still unemancipated enough to dread; and a dark, portentous terror that Skale might incur it, and that he might be dragged at its heels into some hideous catastrophe, chased him through the days and nights. It all seemed so unlawful, impious, blasphemous\u2026.\n\n\"\u2026 And preserve us from vain presumptions of the heart and brain, I pray Thee, lest we be consumed\u2026. Please, O God, forgive the insolence of our wills\u2026 and the ignorant daring of our spirit\u2026. Permit not the innocent to suffer for the guilty\u2026 and especially bless\u2026 Miriam\u2026.\"\n\nYet through it all ran that exquisite memory of the calling of his true name in the spaces of his soul. The beauty of far-off unattainable things hovered like a star above his head, so that he went about the house with an insatiable yearning in his heart, a perpetual smile of wonder upon his face, and in his eyes a gleam that was sometimes terror, sometimes delight.\n\nIt was almost as if some great voice called to him from the mountaintops, and the little chap was forever answering in his heart, \"I'm coming! I'm coming!\" and then losing his way purposely, or hiding behind bushes on the way for fear of meeting the great invisible Caller face to face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "And, meanwhile, the house became for him a kind of Sound-Temple as it were, protected from desecration by the hills and desolate spaces that surrounded it. From dawn to darkness its halls and corridors echoed with the singing violin, Skale's booming voice, Miriam's gentle tones, and his own plaintive yet excited note, while outside the old grey walls the air was ever alive with the sighing of the winds and the ceaseless murmur of falling water. Even at night the place was not silent. He understood at last what the clergyman had told him\u2014that perfect silence does not exist. The universe, down to its smallest detail, sings through every second of time.\n\nThe sounds of nature especially haunted him. He never heard the wind now without thinking of lost whispers from the voice of God that had strayed down upon the world to sweeten and bewilder the hearts of men\u2014whispers a-search for listeners simple enough to understand. And when their walks took them as far as the sea, the dirge of the waves troubled his soul with a kind of distressing exaltation that afflicted the very deeps of his being. It was with a new comprehension he understood his employer's dictum that the keynote of external nature was middle F\u2014this employer who himself possessed that psychic sense of absolute pitch\u2014and that the roar of a city, wind in forest trees, the cry of trains, the rushing of rivers and falling water, Niagara itself, all produced this single utterance; and he loved to sing it on the moors, Miriam laughing by his side, and to realize that the world, literally, sang with them.\n\nBehind all sounds he divined for the first time a majesty that appalled; his imagination, glorified by Skale, instantly fell to constructing the forms they bodied forth. Out of doors the flutes of Pan cried to him to dance: indoors the echoes of yet greater music whispered in the penetralia of his spirit that he should cry. In this extraordinary new world of Philip Skale's revelation he fairly spun.\n\nIt was one thing when the protective presence of the clergyman was about him, or when he was sustained by the excitement of enthusiasm, but when he was alone, at his normal level, timid, yet adventurous, the too vivid sense of these new things made him tremble. The terrifying beauty of Skale's ideas; the realization in cold blood that all forms in the world about him were silently a-singing, and might any moment vanish and release their huge bodies into primal sounds; that the stones in the road, the peaked hills, the very earth herself might alter in shape before his eyes: on the other hand, that the viewless forces of life and death might leap into visibility and form with the calling of their names; that himself, and Skale, and Mrs. Mawle, and that pale fairy girl-figure were all enmeshed in the same scheme with plants, insects, animals and planets; and that God's voice was everywhere too sublimely close\u2014all this, when he was alone, oppressed him with a sense of things that were too intimate and too mighty for daily life.\n\nIn these moments\u2014so frequent now as to be almost continuous\u2014he preferred the safety of his ordinary and normal existence, dull though it might be; the limited personality he had been so anxious to escape from seemed wondrous sweet and comforting. The Terror of the approaching Experiment with this mighty name appalled him.\n\nThe forces, thus battling within his soul, became more and more contradictory and confused. The outcome for himself seemed to be the result of the least little pressure this way or that\u2014possibly at the very last moment, too. Which way the waiting Climax might draw him was a question impossible to decide." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "And then, suddenly, the whole portentous business moved a sharp stage nearer that hidden climax, when one afternoon Mr. Skale came up unexpectedly behind him and laid a great hand upon his shoulder in a way that made him positively jump.\n\n\"Spinrobin,\" he said, in those masterful, resonant tones that shamed his timidity and cowardice, \"are you ready?\"\n\n\"For anything and everything,\" was the immediate reply, given almost automatically as he felt the clergyman's forces flood into his soul and lift him.\n\n\"The time is at hand, then,\" continued the other, leading his companion by the arm to a deep leather sofa, \"for you to know certain things that for your own safety and ours, I was obliged to keep hidden till now\u2014first among which is the fact that this house is not, as you supposed, empty.\"\n\nPrepared as he was for some surprising announcement, Spinrobin nevertheless started. It was so abrupt.\n\n\"Not empty!\" he repeated, eager to hear more, yet quaking. He had never forgotten the nightly sounds and steps in his own passage.\n\n\"The rooms beyond your own,\" said Skale, with a solemnity that amounted to reverence, \"are occupied\u2014\"\n\n\"By\u2014\" gasped the secretary.\n\n\"Captured Sounds\u2014gigantic,\" was the reply, uttered almost below the breath.\n\nThe two men looked steadily at one another for the space of several seconds, Spinrobin charged to the brim with anxious questions pressing somehow upon the fringe of life and death, Skale obviously calculating how much he might reveal or how little.\n\n\"Mr. Spinrobin,\" he said presently, holding him firmly with his eyes, \"you are aware by this time that what I seek is the correct pronunciation of certain names\u2014of a certain name, let us say, and that so complex is the nature of this name that no single voice can utter it. I need a chord, a human chord of four voices.\"\n\nSpinrobin bowed.\n\n\"After years of research and experiment,\" resumed the clergyman, \"I have found the first three notes, and now, in your own person, has come my supreme happiness in the discovery of the fourth. What I now wish you to know, though I cannot expect you to understand it all at first, is that the name I seek is broken up into four great divisions of sound, and that to each of these separate divisions the four notes of our chord form introductory channels. When the time comes to utter it, each one of us will call the syllable or sound that awakens the mighty response in one of these immense and terrific divisions, so that the whole name will vibrate as a single chord sung perfectly in tune.\"\n\nMr. Skale paused and drew deep breaths. This approach to his great experiment, even in speech, seemed to exhaust him so that he was obliged to call upon reserves of force that lay beneath. His whole manner betrayed the gravity, the reverence, the mingled respect and excitement of\u2014death.\n\nAnd the simple truth is that at the moment Spinrobin could not find in himself sufficient courage to ask what this fearful and prodigious name might be. Even to put ordinary questions about the four rooms was a little beyond him, for his heart beat like a hammer against his ribs, and he heard its ominous drum sounding through both his temples.\n\n\"And in each of the rooms in your corridor, ready to leap forth when called, lie the sounds or voices I have captured and imprisoned, these separate chambers being sheeted and prepared\u2014huge wax receptacles, in fact, akin to the cylinders of the phonograph. Together with the form or pattern belonging to them, and the color, there they lie at present in silence and invisibility, just as the universe lay in silence and invisibility before the word of God called it into objective being. But\u2014know them and they are mine.\"\n\n\"All these weeks\u2014so close to me,\" whispered Spinrobin, too low for Skale to notice.\n\nThen the clergyman leaned over towards him. \"These captured sounds are as yet by no means complete,\" he said through his beard, as though afraid to admit it; \"for all I have of them really is their initial letters, of their forms the merest faint outlines, and of their colors but a first suggestion. And we must be careful, we must be absolutely wise. To utter them correctly will mean to transfer to us the qualities of Gods, whereas to utter falsely may mean to release upon the surface of the world forces that\u2014\" He shrugged his great shoulders and an ashen pallor spread downwards over the face to the very lips. The sentence remained unfinished; and its very incompleteness left Spinrobin with the most grievous agony of apprehension he had yet experienced.\n\n\"So that, if you are ready, our next step shall be to show you the room in which your own particular sound lies,\" added Mr. Skale after a long pause; \"the sound in the chord it will be your privilege to utter when the time comes. For each of us will utter his or her particular letter, the four together making up the first syllable in the name I seek.\"\n\nMr. Skale looked steadily down into the wide blue eyes of his companion, and for some minutes neither of them spoke.\n\n\"The letter I am to utter,\" repeated the secretary at length; \"the letter in some great name?\"\n\nMr. Skale smiled upon him with the mighty triumph of the Promethean idea in his eyes.\n\n\"The room,\" he muttered deeply and softly, \"in which it lies waiting for you to claim it at the appointed time\u2026 the room where you shall learn its color, become attuned to its great vibratory activity, see its form, and know its power in your own person.\"\n\nAgain they looked long into one another's eyes.\n\n\"I'm game,\" murmured Spinrobin almost inaudibly; \"I'm game, Mr. Skale.\" But, as he said it, something in his round head turned dizzy, while his thoughts flew to Miriam and to the clergyman's significant phrase of a few minutes ago\u2014\"we must be careful, we must be absolutely wise.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "And the preparation the clergyman insisted upon\u2014detailed, thorough and scrupulous\u2014certainly did not lessen in Spinrobin's eyes the gravity of the approaching ordeal. They spent two days and nights in the very precise and punctilious study, and utterance, of the Hebrew names of the \"angels\"\u2014that is, forces\u2014whose qualities were essential to their safety.\n\nAlso, at the same time, they fasted.\n\nBut when the time came for the formal visit to those closed rooms, of which the locked doors were like veils in a temple, Spinrobin declares it made him think of some solemn procession down ancient passageways of crypt or pyramid to the hidden places where inscrutable secrets lay. It was certainly thrilling and impressive. Skale went first, moving slowly with big strides, grave as death, and so profoundly convinced of the momentous nature of their errand that an air of dignity, and of dark adventure almost majestic, hung about his figure. The long corridor, that dreary December morning, stretched into a world of shadows, and about half-way down it he halted in front of a door next but one to Spinrobin's room and turned towards his companion.\n\nSpinrobin, in a mood to see anything, yet striving to hide behind one of those \"bushes,\" as it were, kept his distance a little, but Mr. Skale took him by the arm and drew him forward to his side. Slowly he stooped, till the great bearded lips were level with his ear, and whispered solemnly:\n\n\"Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see\u2014and hear God.\"\n\nThen he turned the key and led the way inside.\n\nBut apparently there were double doors, for they found themselves at first in a cupboard-like space that formed a tiny vestibule to the room itself; and here there was light enough to see that the clergyman was taking from nails on the wall two long garments like surplices, colored, so far as Spinrobin could make out, a deep red and a deep violet.\n\n\"For our protection,\" whispered Skale, enveloping himself in the red one, while he handed the other to his companion and helped him into it. \"Wear it closely about your body until we come out.\" And while the secretary struggled among the folds of this cassock-like garment, that was several feet too long for his diminutive stature, the clergyman added, still with a gravity and earnestness that impressed the imagination beyond all reach of the ludicrous:\n\n\"For sound and color are intimately associated, and there are combinations of the two that can throw the spiritual body into a condition of safe receptivity, without which we should be deaf and blind even in the great Presences themselves.\"\n\nTrivial details, presenting themselves in really dramatic moments, may impress the mind with extraordinary aptness. At this very moment Spinrobin's eyes noticed in the corner of wall and door a tiny spider's web, with the spider itself hanging in the center of its little net\u2014shaking. And he has never forgotten it. It expressed pictorially exactly what he felt himself. He, too, felt that he was shaking in midair\u2014as in the center of a web whose strands hung suspended from the very stars.\n\nAnd the words, spoken in that slow deep whisper, filled the little space in which the two men stood, and somehow completed for Spinrobin the sense of stupendous things adequately approached.\n\nThen Mr. Skale closed the outer door, shutting out the last feeble glimmer of day, at the same moment turning the handle of the portal beyond. And as they entered the darkness, Spinrobin, holding up his violet robe with one hand to prevent tripping, with the other caught hold of the tail of the flowing garment in front of him. For a second or two he stopped breathing altogether." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "On the very threshold a soft murmur of beauty met them; and, as plainly as though the darkness had lifted into a blaze of light, the secretary at once realized that he stood in the presence of something greater than all he had hitherto known in this world. He had managed to find the clergyman's big hand, and he held it tightly through a twisted corner of his voluminous robe. The inner door next closed behind them. Skale, he was aware, had again stooped in the darkness to the level of his ear.\n\n\"I'll give you the sound\u2014the note,\" he heard him whisper. \"Utter it inwardly\u2014in your thoughts only. Its vibrations correspond to the color, and will protect us.\"\n\n\"Protect us?\" gasped Spinrobin with dry lips.\n\n\"From being shattered and destroyed\u2014owing to the intense activity of the vibrations conveyed to our ultimate physical atoms,\" was the whispered reply, as the clergyman proceeded to give him under his breath a one-syllable sound that was unlike any word he knew, and that for the life of him he has never been able to reproduce since.\n\nMr. Skale straightened himself up again and Spinrobin pictured him standing there twice his natural size, a huge and impressive figure as he had once before seen him, clothed now with the double dignity of his strange knowledge. Then, advancing slowly to the center of the room, they stood still, each uttering silently in his thoughts the syllable that attuned their inner beings to safety.\n\nAlmost immediately, as the seconds passed, the secretary became aware that the room was beginning to shake with a powerful but regular movement. All about him had become alive. Vitality, like the vitality of youth upon mountain tops, pulsed and whirled about them, pouring into them the currents of a rushing glorious life, undiluted, straight from the source. In his little person he felt both the keenness of sharp steel and the vast momentum of a whole ocean. Thus he describes it. And the more clearly he uttered in his thoughts the sound given to him by his leader, the greater seemed the influx of strength and glory into his heart.\n\nThe darkness, meanwhile, began to lift. It moved upwards in spirals that, as they rose, hummed and sang. A soft blaze of violet like the color of the robe he wore became faintly visible in the air. The chamber, he perceived, was about the same size as his own bedroom, and empty of all furniture, while walls, floor, and ceiling were draped in the same shade of violet that covered his shoulders; and the sound he uttered, and thought, called forth the color and made it swim into visibility. The walls and ceiling sheeted with wax opened, so to speak, their giant lips.\n\nMr. Skale made a movement and drew him closer. He raised one arm into the air, and Spinrobin, following the motion, saw what at first he imagined to be vast round faces glimmering overhead, outlined darkly against the violet atmosphere. Mr. Skale, with what seemed a horrible audacity, was reaching up to touch them, and as he did so there issued a low, soft, metallic sound, humming and melodious, that dropped sweetly about his ears. Then the secretary saw that they were discs of metal\u2014immense gongs swinging in midair, suspended in some way from the ceiling, and each one as Skale touched it emitted its beautiful note till all combined together at length into a single chord.\n\nAnd this chord, though Spinrobin talks whole pages in describing it, apparently brought in its train the swell and thunder of something beyond,\u2014the far sweetness of exquisite harmonics, thousands upon thousands, inwoven with the strands of deeper notes that boomed with colossal vibrations about them. And, in some fashion that musical people will understand, its gentler notes caught up the sound that Spinrobin was uttering in his mind, and took possession of it. They merged. An extraordinary volume, suggesting a huge aggregation of sound behind it\u2014in the same way that a murmur of wind may suggest the roar of tempests\u2014rose and fell through the room, lifted them up, bore them away, sang majestically over their heads, under their feet, and through their very minds. The vibrations of their own physical atoms fell into pace with these other spiritual activities by a kind of sympathetic resonance.\n\nThe combination of power and simplicity was what impressed him most, it seems, for it resembled\u2014resembled only\u2014the great spiritual simplicity in Beethoven that rouses and at the same time satisfies the profoundest yearnings of the soul. It swept him into utter bliss, into something for once complete. And Spinrobin, at the center of his glorified yet quaking little heart, understood vaguely that the sound he uttered, and the sound he heard, were directly connected with the presence of some august and awful Name\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Suddenly Mr. Skale, he was aware, became rigid beside him. Spinrobin pressed closer, seeking the protective warmth of his body, and realizing from the gesture that something new was about to happen. And something did happen, though not precisely in the sense that things happen in the streets and in the markets of men. In the sphere of his mind, perhaps, it happened, but was none the less real for that.\n\nFor the Presence he had been aware of in the room from the moment of entrance became then suddenly almost concrete. It came closer\u2014sheeted in wonder inscrutable. The form and body of the sounds that filled the air pressed forward into partial visibility. Spinrobin's powers of interior sight, he dimly realized, increased at the same time. Vast as a mountain, as a whole range of mountains; beautiful as a star, as a whole heaven of stars; yet simple as a flower of the field; and singing this little song of pure glory and joy that he felt was the inmost message of the chord\u2014this Presence in the room sought to push forward into objective reality. And behind it, he knew, lay the stupendous urgency and drive of some power that held the entire universe in its pulses as easily as the ocean holds a shoal of minnows\u2026.\n\nBut the limits of realization for him were almost reached. Spinrobin wanted to close his eyes, yet could not. He was driven along with the wave of sound thus awakened and forced to see what was to be seen. This time there was no bush behind which he could screen himself. And there, dimly sketched out of the rhythmical vibrations of the seething violet obscurity, rose that looming Outline of wonder and majesty that clothed itself about them with a garment as of visible sound. The Unknown, suggesting incredible dimensions, stood at his elbow, tremendously draped in these dim, voluminous folds of music and color\u2014very fearful, very seductive, yet so supremely simple at the same time that a little child could have understood without fear.\n\nBut only partially there, only partially revealed. The ineffable glory was never quite told. Spinrobin, amid all the torrent of words in which he sought later to describe the experience, could only falter out a single comprehensible sentence: \"I felt like stammering in intoxication over the first letter of a name I loved\u2014loved to the point of ecstasy\u2014to the point even of giving up my life for it.\"\n\nAnd meanwhile, breathless and shaking, he clung to Skale, still murmuring in his heart the magic syllable, but swept into some region of glory where pain and joy both ceased, where terror and delight merged into some perfectly simple form of love, and where he became in an instant of time an entirely new and emancipated Spinrobin, driving at full speed towards the ultimate sound and secret of the universe\u2014God." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "He never remembered exactly how he got out of the room, but it always seemed as though he dropped with a crash from some enormous height. The sounds ceased; the gongs died into silence; the violet faded; the quivering wax lay still\u2026. Mr. Skale was moving beside him, and the next minute they were in the narrow vestibule between the doors, hanging up ordinary colored surplices upon ordinary iron nails.\n\nSpinrobin stumbled. Skale caught him. They were in the corridor again\u2014cold, cheerless, full of December murk and shadows\u2014and the secretary was leaning against the clergyman's shoulder breathless and trembling as though he had run a mile." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "\"And the color of my sound is a pale green,\" he heard behind him in tones as sweet as a muted violin string, \"while the form of my note fits into yours just like a glove. Dear Spinny, don't tremble so. We shall always be together, remember, you and I\u2026.\"\n\nAnd when, turning, he saw Miriam at his side, radiant with her shining little smile of welcome, the relief was so great that he took her in his arms and would not let her go. She drew him tenderly away downstairs, for the clergyman, it seemed, was still busy with something in the room, and had left them\u2026.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" she said softly, making him sit down beside her on the sofa, \"I know the rush of pain and happiness it brings. It shifts the whole key of your life, doesn't it? When I first went into my 'room' and learned the letter I was to utter in the Name, I felt as if I could never come back to ordinary things again, or\u2014\"\n\n\"What name?\" interrupted Spinrobin, drawing sharply away from her, and the same second amazed at the recklessness that had prompted the one question he dreaded.\n\nThe inevitable reaction had come. He realized for the first time that there was an alternative. All the passion of battle was upon him. The terrific splendors of Skale's possible achievement dazzled the very windows of his soul, but at the same time the sweet uses of normal human life called searchingly to him from within. He had been circling about this fight for days; at last it was unexpectedly upon him. He might climb to Skale's impossible Heaven, Skale's outrageous Heaven\u2026 on the wings of this portentous experience, or\u2014he might sink back into the stream of wholesome and commonplace life, with a delicious little human love to companion him across the years, the unsoiled love of an embryonic soul that he could train practically from birth. Miriam was beside him, soft and yielding, ready, doubtless, to be molded for either path.\n\n\"What name?\" he repeated, holding his breath once the words were out.\n\n\"The name, of course,\" she answered gently, smiling up into his eyes. \"The name I have lived to know and that you came here to learn, so that when our voices sing and utter it together in the chord we shall both become\u2014\"\n\nSpinrobin set his mouth against her own to stop her speech. She yielded to him with her whole little body. Her eyes smiled the great human welcome as she stared so closely into his.\n\n\"Shall become\u2014what we are not now,\" he cried fiercely, drawing his face back, but holding her body yet more closely to him. \"Lose each other, don't you see? Don't you realize that?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" she said faintly, \"find each other\u2014you mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014if all goes well!\" He spoke the words very low. For perhaps thirty seconds they stared most searchingly into each other's eyes, drawing slightly apart. Very slowly her face, then, went exceedingly pale.\n\n\"If\u2014all goes well\" she repeated, horrified. Then, after a pause, she added: \"You mean\u2014that he might make a mistake\u2014or\u2014?\"\n\nAnd Spinrobin, drinking in the sweet breath that bore the words so softly from her lips, answered, measuring his words with ponderous gravity as though each conveyed a sentence of life or death, \"If\u2014all\u2014goes\u2014well.\"\n\nShe watched him with something of that utter clinging mother-love in her eyes that claims any degree of suffering gladly rather than the loss of her own\u2014passionately welcoming misery in preference to loss. She, too, had divined the alternative.\n\nThen, kissing his cheeks and eyes and lips, she untied his arms from about her neck and ran, blushing furiously, from the room. And with her went doubt, for the first time\u2014doubt as to the success of the great experiment\u2014doubt as to their Leader's power." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "And while Spinrobin still sat there, trembling with the two passions that tore his soul in twain\u2014the passion to climb forbidden skies with Skale, and the passion to know sweet human love with Miriam\u2014there came thundering into the room no less a personage than the giant clergyman, straight from those haunted rooms. Pallor hung about his face, but there was a light radiating through it\u2014a high, luminous whiteness\u2014that made the secretary think of his childhood's pictures of the Hebrew prophet descending from Mount Sinai, the glory of internal spheres still reflected upon the skin and eyes. Skale, like a flame and a wind, came pouring into the room. The thing he had remained upstairs to complete had clearly proved successful. The experiment had moved another stage\u2014almost the final one\u2014nearer accomplishment.\n\nThe reaction was genuinely terrific. Spinrobin felt himself swept away beyond all power of redemption. Miriam and the delicious human life faded into insignificance again. What, in the name of the eternal fires, were a girl's lips and love compared to the possibilities of Olympian achievement promised by Skale's golden audacities? Earth faded before the lights of heaven. The whole tide of human emotion was nothing compared to a drop of this terrible salt brine from seas in unknown stars\u2026. As usual Skale's personality caught him up into some seventh heaven of the soaring imagination.\n\n\"Spinrobin, my glorious companion in adventure,\" thundered the clergyman, \"your note suits perfectly the chord! I am delighted beyond all words. You chime with amazing precision and accuracy into the complex Master-Tone I need for the proper pronunciation of the Name! Your coming has been an inspiration permitted of Him who owns it.\" His excitement was profoundly moving. The man was in earnest if ever man was. \"We shall succeed!\" And he caught him in his arms. \"For the Name manifests the essential attributes of the Being it describes, and in uttering it we shall know mystical union with it\u2026. We shall be as Gods!\"\n\n\"Splendid! Splendid!\" exclaimed Spinrobin, utterly carried away by this spiritual enthusiasm. \"I will follow you to the end\u2014\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "The words were scarcely out of his mouth when framed in the doorway, delicate and seductive as a witch, again stood Miriam, then moved softly forward into the room. Her face was pale as the grave. Her little, delicate mouth was set with resolution. Clearly she had overheard, but clearly also she had used the interval for serious reflection.\n\n\"We cannot possibly\u2014fail, can we?\" she asked, gliding up like a frightened fawn to the clergyman's side.\n\nHe turned upon her, stern, even terrible. So relentless was his swift appearance, so implacable in purpose, that Spinrobin felt the sudden impulse to fly to her assistance. But instantly his great visage broke into a smile like the smile of thunderous clouds when unexpectedly the sun breaks through, then quickly hides itself again.\n\n\"Everywhere,\" he roared, \"true things are great and clean\u2026. Have faith\u2026 have faith\u2026.\" And he looked upon them both as though his eyes would sweep from their petty souls all vestige of what was afraid and immature. \"We all are\u2014pure\u2026 we all are true\u2026 each calls his note in singleness of heart\u2026 we cannot fail!\"\n\nAnd just here Spinrobin, a little beyond himself with excitement probably, pattered across the room to his giant leader's side and peered up into his visage. He stood on tiptoe, craning his neck forwards, then spoke very low:\n\n\"I have the right, we have the right\u2014for I have earned it\u2014to be taken now fully into confidence, and to know everything\u2014everything,\" came the words; and the reply, simple and immediate, that dropped back upon him through all that tangle of ragged beard was brief and to the point:\n\n\"You have. Listen, then\u2014\" And he led them both by the hand like two children towards the sofa, and then, standing over them, began to speak." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "\"I seek,\" he said slowly and gravely, \"the correct utterance of a certain mighty and ineffable name, and in each of those four rooms lies a letter of its first syllable. For all these years of research\"\u2014his voice dropped suddenly\u2014\"have only brought me to that\u2014the first syllable. And the name itself is composed of four, each more mighty than the last.\"\n\nA violent trembling ran over both listeners. Spinrobin, holding a cold little hand in his, dreaded unuttered sentences. For if mere letters could spell so vast a message, what must be the meaning of a whole syllable, and what the dire content of the completed name itself!\n\n\"Yes,\" Skale went on with a reverence born of profoundest awe, \"the captured sounds I hold are but the opening vibrations of this tremendous name, and the task is of such magnitude that absolute courage and absolute faith are essential. For the sounds are themselves creative sounds, and the consequences in case of faulty utterance might be too appalling to contemplate\u2014\"\n\n\"Creative!\" fell from the little man on the sofa, aghast at the possibility. Yet the one burning question that lay trembling just behind his lips dared not frame itself in words, for there was something in Mr. Skale's face and manner that rendered the asking of it not yet possible. The revelation of the name must wait.\n\n\"Even singly, as you saw, their power is terrific,\" he went on, ignoring the pathetic interruption, \"but united\u2014as we shall unite them while each of us utters his letter and summons forth the entire syllable by means of the chord\u2014they will constitute a Word of Power which shall make us as Gods if uttered correctly; if incorrectly, shall pour from this house to consume and alter the surface of the entire world with the destructive tempest due to mispronunciation and a lie.\"\n\nMiriam nestled closer into her companion's side. There was otherwise no sign outwardly of the emotions that surged through the two little figures upon the sofa.\n\n\"And now\u2014now that you have this first syllable complete?\" faltered a high and sharing tenor voice.\n\n\"We must transfer it to a home where it shall wait in silence and in safety until we have also captured the other remaining three.\" Skale came forward and lowered his mouth to his companions' ears. \"We shall transfer it, as you now understand, by chanting the four letters. Our living chord will summon forth that first syllable into visible form and shape. Our four voices, thus trained and purified, each singing a mighty letter, shall create the astounding pattern of the name's first syllable\u2014\"\n\n\"But the home,\" stammered Spinrobin; \"this home where it shall await the rest?\"\n\n\"My rooms,\" was the reply, \"can contain letters only, for a whole syllable I need a larger space. In the crypt-like cellars beneath this house I have the necessary space all ready and prepared to hold this first syllable while we work upon the second. Come, and you shall see!\"\n\nThey crossed the hall and went down the long stone passage beyond the dining room till they reached a swinging baize door, and so came to the dark stairs that plunged below ground. Skale strode first, Spinrobin following with beating heart; he held Miriam by the hand; his steps, though firm enough, made him think of his efforts as a boy when treading water for solid ground out of his depth." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Cold air met them, yet it was neither dank nor unpleasant as air usually is that has never tasted sunlight. There was a touch of vitality about it wholly remarkable. Miriam pressed closer. Every detail, every little incident that brought them nearer to the climax was now interpreted by these two loving children as something that might eventually spell for them separation. Yet neither referred to it directly. The pain of the ultimate choice possessed them deep within.\n\n\"Here,\" exclaimed the clergyman in a hushed tone that yet woke echoes on all sides, while he lit a candle and held it aloft, \"you see the cellar vaults all ready for the first great syllable when our chord shall bring it leaping down from the rooms upstairs. Here will reside the pattern of the name's opening syllable till we shall have accomplished the construction of the others.\"\n\nAnd like some august master of forbidden ceremonies, looking twice his natural size as the shadows played tricks with his arms and shoulders, merging his outline into walls and ceiling, Skale stood and looked about him.\n\nSpaces stretched away on all sides as in the crypt of a cathedral, most beautifully and harmoniously draped with the separate colors of the four rooms, red, yellow, violet and green; immense gongs, connected apparently with some intricate network of shining wires, hung suspended in midair beneath the arches; rising from the floor were gigantic tuning forks, erect and silent, immediately behind which gaped artificial air-cavities placed to increase the intensity of the respective notes when caught; and in the dim background the clergyman pointed out an elaborate apparatus for quickly altering the temperature of the air, and another for the rapid production of carbonic acid gas, since by means of a lens of carbonic acid gas sound can be refracted like light, and by changing the temperature of the air that conveys it, sound can be bent, also like a ray of light, in any desired direction. The whole cellar seemed in some way to sum up and synthesize the distinctive characteristics of the four rooms. Over it all, sheeting ceiling and walls, lay the living and receptive wax. Singularly suggestive, too, was the appearance of those huge metal discs, like lifeless, dark faces waiting the signal to open their bronze lips and cry aloud, ready for the advent of the Sound that should give them birth and force them to proclaim their mighty secret. Spinrobin stared, silent and fascinated, almost expecting them to begin there and then their dreadful and appalling music.\n\nYet the place was undeniably empty; no ghost of a sound stirred the gorgeous draperies; nothing but a faint metallic whispering seemed to breathe out from the big discs and forks and wires as Skale's voice, modulated and hushed though it was, vibrated gently against them. Nothing moved, nothing uttered, nothing lived\u2014as yet.\n\n\"Destitute of all presence, you see it now,\" whispered the clergyman, shading the candle with one huge hand; \"though before long, when we transfer our great captured syllable down here, you shall know it alive and singing with a thousand thunders. The Letters shall not escape me. The gongs and colors correspond exactly. They will retain both the sounds and the outlines\u2026 and the wax is sensitive as the heart of a child.\" And his big face shone quite dreadfully as the whole pomp and splendor of his dream come true set fire to his thoughts.\n\nBut Spinrobin was glad when at length they turned and moved slowly again up the stone steps and emerged into the pale December daylight. That dark cellar, wired, draped, waxed and be-gonged, awaiting its mighty occupant, filled his mind with too vast a sensation of wonder and anticipation for peace.\n\n\"And for the syllables to follow,\" Skale resumed when they were once more in the library, \"we shall want spaces larger still. There are great holes in these hills\"\u2014stretching out an arm to indicate the mountains above the house\u2014\"and down yonder in the heart of those cliffs by the sounding sea there are caverns. They are far, but the distance is of no consequence. They will serve us well. I know them. I have marked them. They are ready.\"\n\nHe swept his beard to and fro with one hand. Spinrobin already saw those holes and caverns in the terms of sound and color.\n\n\"And\u2014for the entire name\u2014when completed?\" he asked, knowing that the question was but a feeble substitute for that other one he burned to ask, yet dared not allow his lips to utter. Skale turned and looked at him. He raised his hands aloft. His voice boomed again as of old.\n\n\"The open sky!\" he cried with enthusiasm; \"the vault of heaven itself! For no solid structure exists in the world, not even the ribs of these old hills, that could withstand the power of that\u2014of that eternal and terrific\u2014\"\n\nSpinrobin leapt to his feet. The question swept from his lips at last like a flame. Miriam clung to his arm, trying in vain to stop him.\n\n\"Then tell me,\" he cried aloud, \"tell me, you great blasphemer, whose is the Name that you seek to utter under heaven\u2026 and tell me why it is my soul faints and is so fearfully afraid?\"\n\nMr. Skale looked at him for a moment as a man might look at some trifling phenomenon of life that puzzled yet interested him. But there was love in his eyes\u2014love, and the forgiveness of a great soul. Spinrobin, afraid at his own audacity, met his eyes recklessly, while Miriam peered from one to the other, perplexed and questioning.\n\n\"Spinrobin,\" said the clergyman at length, in a voice turned soft and tender with compassion, \"the name I seek\u2014this awful name we may all eventually utter together, completely formed\u2014is one that no living man has spoken for nigh two thousand years, though all this time the search has been kept alive by a few men in every age and every country of the world. Some few, they say\u2014ah, yes, 'they say'\u2014have found it, then instantly forgotten it again; for once pronounced it may not be retained, but goes utterly lost to the memory on the instant. Only once, so far as we may know\"\u2014he lowered his voice to a hushed and reverent whisper that thrilled about them in the air like the throbbing of a string\u2014\"has it been preserved: the Prophet of Nazareth, purer and simpler than all other men, recovered the correct utterance of the first two syllables, and swiftly\u2014very swiftly\u2014phonetically, too, of necessity,\u2014wrote them down before the wondrous memory had time to fade; then sewed the piece of parchment into his thigh, and hence 'had Power' all his life.\n\n\"It is a name,\" he continued, his tone rising to something of its old thunder, \"that sounds like the voice of many waters, that piles the ocean into standing heaps and makes the high hills to skip like little lambs. It is a name the ancient Hebrews concealed, as Tetragrammaton, beneath a thousand devices, the name, they said, that 'rusheth through the universe,' to call upon which\u2014that is, to utter correctly\u2014is to call upon that name which is far above all others that can be named\u2014\"\n\nHe paused midway in the growing torrent of his speech and lifted his companion out of the sofa. He set him upon his feet, holding both his hands and peering deep into his eyes\u2014those bewildered yet unflinching blue eyes of the little man who sought terrific adventure as an escape from insignificance\u2014\n\n\"\u2014to know which,\" he added, in a sudden awed whisper, \"is to know the ultimate secrets of life and death, and to read the riddle of the world and the soul\u2014to become even as itself\u2014Gods.\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly, and again that awful, flaming smile ran over his face, flushing it from chin to forehead with the power of his burning and tremendous belief.\n\nSpinrobin was already weeping inwardly, without sound. He understood at last, only too well, what was coming. Skale's expression held the whole wild glory, and the whole impious audacity of what seemed his blasphemous spiritual discovery. The fires were alight in his eyes. He stooped down lower and opened wide his capacious arms. The next second, Spinrobin, Miriam, and Mrs. Mawle, who had unexpectedly come upon them from behind, were gathered all together against his breast. His voice then dropped suddenly to a tiny whisper of awful joy that seemed to creep from his lips like some message too mighty to be fully known, and half lost itself among the strands of his beard.\n\n\"My wonderful redeemed children, notes in my human chord,\" he whispered over their heads, \"it is the Name that shall make us as God, for it is none other than the Name that rusheth through the universe\"\u2014his breath failed him most curiously for an instant\u2014\"the NAME OF THE ALMIGHTY!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "A certain struggling incoherence is manifest in Spinrobin's report of it all, as of a man striving to express violent thoughts in a language he has not yet mastered. It is evident, for instance, as those few familiar with the \"magical\" use of sound in ceremonial and the power that resides in \"true naming\" will realize, that he never fully understood Skale's intended use of the chord, or why this complex sound was necessary for the utterance of the complex \"Name.\"\n\nMoreover, the powers concealed in the mere letters, while they laid hold upon his imagination, never fully entered his understanding. Few minds, it seems, can conceive of any deity as other than some anthropomorphic extension of themselves, for the idea is too greatly blinding to admit human thought within a measurable distance even of a faintest conception. The true, stupendous nature of the forces these letters in the opening syllable clothed, Spinrobin unquestionably never apprehended. Miriam, with her naked and undefiled intuitions, due to utter ignorance of worldly things from birth, came nearer to the reality; but then Miriam was now daily more and more caught up into the vortex of a sweet and compelling human love, and in proportion as this grew she feared the great experiment that might\u2014so Spinrobin had suggested\u2014spell Loss. Gradually dread closed the avenues of her spirit that led so fearfully to Heaven; and in their place she saw the dear yet thorny paths that lay with Spinny upon the earth.\n\nThey no longer, these two bewildered loving children, spoke of one another in the far-fetched terminology of sound and music. He no longer called her his \"brilliant little sound,\" nor did she respond with \"you perfect echo\"; they fell back\u2014sign of a gradual concession to more human things\u2014upon the gentler terminology, if the phrase may be allowed, of Winky. They shared Winky between them\u2026 though neither one nor other of them divined yet what Winky actually meant in their just-opening lives.\n\n\"Winky is yours,\" she would say, \"because you made him, but he belongs to me too, because he simply can't live without me!\"\n\n\"Or I without you, Little Magic,\" he whispered, laughing tenderly. \"So, you see, we are all three together.\"\n\nHer face grew slightly troubled.\n\n\"He only pays me visits, though. Sometimes I think you hide him, or tell him not to come.\" And far down in her deep grey eyes swam the first moisture of rising tears. \"Don't you, my wonderful Spinny?\"\n\n\"Sometimes I forget him, perhaps,\" he replied gravely, \"but that is only when I think of what may be coming if\u2014the experiment succeeds\u2014\"\n\n\"Succeeds?\" she exclaimed. \"You mean if it fails!\" Her voice dropped instinctively, and they looked over their shoulders to make sure they were alone.\n\nHe came up very close to her and spoke in her small pink ear. \"If it succeeds,\" he whispered, \"we go to Heaven, I suppose; if it fails we stay upon the earth.\" Then he stood off, holding her hands at arm's length and gazing down upon her. \"Do you want to go to Heaven?\" he asked very deliberately, \"or to stay here upon the earth with me and Winky\u2014?\"\n\nShe was in his arms the same second, laughing and crying with the strange conflict of new and inexplicable emotions.\n\n\"I want to be with you here, and forever. Heaven frightens me now. But\u2014oh, Spinny, dear protecting thing, I want\u2014I also want\u2014\" She broke off abruptly, and Spinrobin, unable to see her face buried against his shoulder, could not guess whether she was laughing or weeping. He only divined that something in her heart, profound as life itself, something she had never been warned to conceal, was clamoring for comprehension and satisfaction.\n\n\"Miriam, tell me exactly. I'm sure I shall understand\u2014\"\n\n\"I want Winky to be with us always\u2014not only sometimes\u2014on little visits,\" he heard between the broken breathing.\n\n\"I'll tell him\u2014\"\n\n\"But there's no good telling him,\" she interrupted almost fiercely, \"it is me you must tell\u2026.\"\n\nSpinrobin's heart sank within him. She was in pain and he could not quite understand. He pressed her hard against him, keeping silence.\n\nPresently she lifted her face from his coat, and he saw the tears of mingled pain and happiness in her eyes\u2014the eyes of this girl-woman who knew not the common ugly standards of life because no woman had ever told them to her.\n\n\"You see, Winky is not really mine unless I have some share in making him too,\" she said very softly. \"When I have made him too, then he will stay forever with us, I think.\"\n\nAnd Spinrobin, beginning to understand, knowing within him that singular exultation of triumphant love which comes to a pure man when he meets the mother-to-be of his firstborn, lowered his own face very reverently to hers, and kissed her on the cheeks and eyes\u2014saying nothing, and vaguely wondering whether the awful name that Skale sought with so much thunder and lightning, did not lie at that very moment, sweetly singing its divinest message, between the contact of this pair of youthful lips, the lips of himself and Miriam." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "And Philip Skale, meanwhile, splendid and independent of all common obstacles, thundered along his tempestuous mad way, regardless and ignorant of all signs of disaffection. The rest of that week\u2014a week of haunting wonder and beauty\u2014was devoted to the carrying out of the strange program. It is not possible to tell in detail the experience of each separate room. Spinrobin does it, yet only succeeds in repeating himself; and, as has been seen, his powers failed even in that first chamber of awe. The language does not exist in which adventures so remote from normal experience can be clothed without straining the mind to the verge of the unintelligible. It appears, however, that each room possessed its color, note and form, which later were to issue forth and combine in the even vaster pattern, chord and outline which should include them all.\n\nEven the thought of it strained the possibilities of belief and the resources of the imagination\u2026. His soul fluttered and shrank.\n\nThey continued the processes of prayer and fasting Skale had ordained as the time for the experiment drew near, and the careful vibratory utterance of the \"word\" belonging to each room, the vibrations of which threw their inner selves into a condition of safe\u2014or comparatively safe\u2014receptivity. But Spinrobin no longer said his prayers, for the thought that soon he was to call upon the divine and mighty name in reality prevented his doing so in the old way of childhood\u2014nominally. He feared there might come an answer.\n\nHe literally walked the dizzy edge of precipices that dropped over the edge of the world. The incoherence of all this traffic with sound and name had always bewildered him, even to the point of darkness, whereas now it did more, it appalled him in some sense that was monstrous and terrifying. Yet, while weak with terror when he tried to face the possible results, and fevered with the notion of entering some new condition (even though one of glory) where Miriam might no longer be as he now knew her, it was the savage curiosity he felt that prevented his coming to a definite decision and telling Mr. Skale that he withdrew from the whole affair.\n\nThen the idea grew in his mind that the clergyman was obsessed by some perverted spiritual force, some \"Devil\" who deceived him, and that the name he sought to pronounce was after all not good\u2014not God. His thoughts, fears, hopes, all became hopelessly entangled, through them one thing alone holding clear and steady\u2014the passionate desire to keep Miriam as she was now, and to be with her forever. His mind played tricks with him too. Day and night the house echoed with new sounds; the very walls grew resonant; the entire building, buried away among these desolate hills, trembled as though he were imprisoned within the belly of some monstrous and gigantic fiddle.\n\nMr. Skale, too, began to change, it seemed. While physically he increased, as it were, with the power of his burning enthusiasm, his beard longer and more ragged, his eyes more luminous, and his voice shaking through the atmosphere almost like wind, his personality, in some curious fashion, seemed at the same time to retire and become oddly tinged with a certain remoteness from reality. Spinrobin once or twice caught himself wondering if he were not after all some legendary or pagan figure, some mighty character of dream or story, and that presently he, Spinrobin, would awake and write down the most wonderful vision the world had ever known. His imagination, it will be seen, was affected in more ways than one\u2026.\n\nWith a tremendous earnestness the clergyman went about the building, down the long dark corridors and across the halls, his long soft strides took him swiftly everywhere; his mere presence charged with some potent force that betrayed itself in the fire of his eyes and the flush of his cheeks.\n\nSpinrobin thought of him as some daring blasphemer, knocking at a door in the sky. The sound of that knocking ran all about the universe. And when the door opened, the heavens would roll back like an enormous, flat curtain\u2026.\n\n\"Any moment almost,\" Skale whispered to him, smiling, \"the day may be upon us. Keep yourself ready\u2014and\u2014in tune.\"\n\nAnd Spinrobin, expecting a thunderclap in his sleep, but ever plucky, answered in his high-pitched voice, \"I'm ready, Mr. Philip Skale, I'm ready! I'm game too!\" when, truthfully speaking, perhaps, he was neither one nor other.\n\nHe would start up from sleep in the nighttime at the least sound, and the roar of the December gales about the house became voices of portent that conveyed far more than the mere rushing of inarticulate winds\u2026.\n\n\"When the hour comes\u2014and it is close at hand\u2014we shall not fail to know it,\" said Skale, pallid with excitement. \"The Letters will be out upon us. They will live! But with an intense degree of exuberant life far beyond what we know as life\u2014we, in our puny, sense-limited bodies!\" And the scorn in his voice came from the center of his heart. \"For what we hear as sound is only a section,\" he cried, \"only a section of sound-vibrations\u2014as they exist.\"\n\n\"The vibrations our ears can take are very small, I know,\" interpolated Spinrobin, cold at heart, while Miriam, hiding behind chairs and tables that offered handy protection, watched with mingled anxiety and confidence, knowing that in the last resort her adorable and \"wonderful Spinny\" would guide her aright. Love filled her heart, ousting that other portentous Heaven!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "And then Skale announced that the time was ready for rehearsals.\n\n\"Let us practice the chord,\" he said, \"so that when the moment comes suddenly upon us, in the twinkling of an eye, in the daytime or in the night, we shall be prepared, and each shall fly to his appointed place and utter his appointed note.\"\n\nThe reasons for these definite arrangements he did not pretend to explain, for they belonged to a part of his discovery that he kept rigidly to himself; and why Spinrobin and Miriam were to call their notes from the corridor itself, while Skale boomed his great bass in the prepared cellar, Mrs. Mawle chanting her alto midway in the hall, acting as a connecting channel in some way, was apparently never made fully clear. In Spinrobin's imagination it was very like a practical illustration of the written chord, the notes rising from the bass clef to the high soprano\u2014the cellar to the attic, so to speak. But, whatever the meaning behind it, Skale was exceedingly careful to teach to each of them his and her appointed place.\n\n\"When the Letters move of themselves, and make the first sign,\" he repeated, \"we shall know it beyond all doubt or question. At any moment of the day or night it may come. Each of you then hasten to your appointed place and wait for the sound of my bass in the cellar. There will be no mistake about it; you will hear it rising through the building. Then, each in turn, as it reaches you, lift your voices and call your notes. The chord thus rising through the building will gather in the flying Letters: it will unite them; it will summon them down to the fundamental master-tone I utter in the cellar. The moment the Letter summoned by each particular voice reaches the cellar, that voice must cease its utterance. Thus, one by one, the four mighty Letters will come to rest below. The gongs will vibrate in sympathetic resonance; the colors will tremble and respond; the finely drawn wires will link the two, and the lens of gas will lead them to the wax, and the record of the august and terrible syllable will be completely chained. At any desired moment afterwards I shall be able to reawaken it. Its phonetic utterance, its correct pronunciation, captured thus in the two media of air and ether, sound and light, will be in my safe possession, ready for use.\n\n\"But\"\u2014and he looked down upon his listeners with a dreadful and impressive gravity that yet only just concealed the bursting exultation the thought caused him to feel\u2014\"remember that once you have uttered your note, you will have sucked out from the Letter a portion of its own terrific life and force, which will immediately pass into yourself. You will instantly absorb this, for you will have called upon a mighty name\u2014the mightiest\u2014and your prayer will have been answered.\" He stooped and whispered as in an act of earnest prayer, \"We shall be as Gods!\"\n\nSomething of cold splendor, terribly possessing, came close to them as he spoke the words; for this was no empty phrase. Behind it lay the great drive of a relentless reality. And it struck at the very root of the fear that grew every moment more insistent in the hearts of the two lovers. They did not want to become as gods. They desired to remain quietly human and to love!\n\nBut before either of them could utter speech, even had they dared, the awful clergyman continued; and nothing brought home to them more vividly the horrible responsibility of the experiment, and the results of possible failure, than the few words with which he concluded.\n\n\"And to mispronounce, to utter falsely, to call inaccurately, will mean to summon into life upon the world\u2014and into the heart of the utterer\u2014that which is incomplete, that which is not God\u2014Devils!\u2014devils of that subtle Alteration which is destruction\u2014the devils of a Lie.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "And so for hours at a time they rehearsed the sounds of the chord, but very softly, lest the sound should rise and reach the four rooms and invite the escape of the waiting Letters prematurely.\n\nMrs. Mawle, holding the bit of paper on which her instructions were clearly written, was as eager almost as her master, and as the note she had to utter was practically the only one left in the register of her voice, her deafness provided little difficulty.\n\n\"Though when the letters awake into life and cry aloud,\" said Skale, beaming upon her dear old apple-skinned face, \"it will be in tones that even the deaf shall hear. For they will spell a measure of redemption that shall destroy in a second of time all physical disabilities whatsoever\u2026.\"\n\nIt was at this moment Spinrobin asked a question that for days had been hovering about his lips. He asked it gravely, hesitatingly, even solemnly, while Miriam hung upon the answer with an anxiety as great as his own.\n\n\"And if any one of us fails,\" he said, \"and pronounces falsely, will the result affect all of us, or only the utterer?\"\n\n\"The utterer only,\" replied the clergyman. \"For it is his own spirit that must absorb the forces and powers invoked by the sound he utters.\"\n\nHe took the question lightly, it seemed. The possibility of failure was too remote to be practical." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "But Spinrobin was hardly prepared for the suddenness of the denouement. He had looked for a longer period of preparation, with the paraphernalia of a considerable, even an august ceremony. Instead, the announcement came with an abrupt simplicity that caught him with a horrid shock of surprise. He was taken wholly unawares.\n\n\"The only thing I fear,\" Mr. Skale had confided to them, \"is that the vibrations of our chord may have already risen to the rooms and cause a premature escape. But, even so, we shall have ample warning. For the deaf, being protected from the coarser sounds of earth, are swift to hear the lightest whispers from Heaven. Mrs. Mawle will know. Mrs. Mawle will instantly warn us\u2026.\"\n\nAnd this, apparently, was what happened, though not precisely as Mr. Skale had intended, nor with the margin for preparation he had hoped. It was all so swift and brief and shattering, that to hear Spinrobin tell it makes one think of a mass of fireworks that some stray spark has sent with blazing explosion into the air, to the complete loss of the calculated effect had they gone off seriatim as intended.\n\nAnd in the awful stress of excitement there can be no question that Spinny acted out of that subconscious region of the mind which considers and weighs deeds before passing them on to the surface mind, translating them into physical expression and thinking itself responsible for the whole operation. The course he adopted was thus instinctive, and, since he had no time to judge, blameless.\n\nNeither he nor Miriam had any idea really that their minds, subconsciously, were already made up. Yet only that morning he had been talking with her, skirting round the subject as they always did, ashamed of his doubts about success, and trying to persuade her, and, therefore, himself, that the path of duty lay in following their leader blindly to the very end.\n\nHe had seen her on the stairs ahead of him, and had overtaken her quickly. He drew her down beside him, and they sat like two children perched on the soft-carpeted steps.\n\n\"It's coming, you know,\" he said abruptly, \"the moment's getting very close.\"\n\nHe felt the light shudder that passed through her into himself. She turned her face to him and he saw the flush of excitement painted in the center of the usually pale cheeks. He thought of some rare flower, delicately exotic, that had sprung suddenly into blossom from the heart of the bleak December day, out of the very boards whereon they sat.\n\n\"We shall then be as gods,\" he added, \"filled with the huge power of those terrific Letters. And that is only the beginning.\" In himself he was striving to coax a fading enthusiasm, and to pour it into her. Her little hand stole into his. \"We shall be a sort of angel together, I suppose. Just think of it\u2026!\" His voice was not as thrilling as it ought to have been, for very human notes vibrated down below in the part he tried to keep back. He saw the flush fade from her cheeks, and the pallor spread. \"You and I, Miriam\u2014something tremendous together, greater than any other man and woman in the whole world. Think of it, dear baby; just think of it\u2026!\"\n\nA tiny frown gathered upon her forehead, darkening the grey eyes with shadows.\n\n\"But\u2014lose our Winky!\" she said, nestling against his coat, her voice singularly soft, her fingers scratching gently the palm of his hand where they lay.\n\n\"Hush, hush!\" he answered, kissing her into silence. \"We must have more faith. I think everything will be all right. And there is no reason why we should lose our Winky,\" he added, very tenderly, smothering the doubt as best he could, \"although we may find his name changed. Like the rest of us, he will get a 'new name' I suppose.\"\n\n\"Then he won't be our Winky any longer,\" she objected, with a touch of obstinacy that was very seductive. \"We shall all be different. Perhaps we shall be too wonderful to need each other any more\u2026. Oh, Spinny, you precious thing my life needs, think of that! We may be too wonderful even to care!\"\n\nSpinrobin turned and faced her. He tried to speak with authority and conviction, but he was a bad actor always. He met her soft grey eyes, already moist and shining with a tenderness of love beyond belief, and gazed into them with what degree of sternness he could.\n\n\"Miriam,\" he said solemnly, \"is it possible that you do not want us to be as gods?\"\n\nHer answer came this time without hesitation. His pretended severity only made her happy, for nothing could intimidate by a hair's breadth this exquisite first love of her awakening soul.\n\n\"Some day, perhaps, oh, my sweet Master,\" she whispered with trembling lips, \"but not now. I want to be on earth first with you\u2014and with our Winky.\"\n\nTo hear that precious little voice call him \"sweet Master\" was almost more than he could bear. He made an effort, however, to insist upon this fancied idea of \"duty\" to Skale; though everything, of course, betrayed him\u2014eyes, voice, gestures.\n\n\"But we owe it to Mr. Skale to become as gods,\" he faltered, trying to make the volume of his voice atone for its lack of conviction.\n\nAnd it was then she uttered the simple phrase that utterly confounded him, and showed him the new heaven and new earth wherein he and she and Winky already lived.\n\n\"I am as God now,\" she said simply, the whole passion of a clean, strong little soul behind the words. \"You have made me so! You love me!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "The same moment, before they could speak or act, Skale was upon them from behind with a roar.\n\n\"Practicing your splendid notes together!\" he cried, thundering down the steps past them, three at a time, clothed for the first time in the flowing scarlet robe he usually wore only in the particular room where his own \"note\" lived. \"That's capital! Sing it together in your hearts and in your souls and in your minds; and the more the better!\"\n\nHe swept by them like a storm, vanishing through the hall below like some living flame of fire. They both understood that he wore that robe for protection, and that throughout the house the heralds of the approaching powers of the imprisoned Letters were therefore already astir. His steps echoed below them in the depths of the building as he descended to the cellar, intent upon some detail of the appalling consummation that drew every minute nearer.\n\nThey turned and faced one another, breathless a little. Tenderness and terror shone plainly in their eyes, but Spinrobin, ever an ineffectual little man, and with nothing of the \"Master\" really in his composition anywhere, found no word to speak. That sudden irruption of the terrific clergyman into their intimate world had come with an effect of dramatic and incalculable authority. Like a blast of air that drives the furnace to new heat and turns the metal white, his mind now suddenly saw clear and sure. The effect of the incident was too explosive, however, for him to find expression. Action he found in a measure, but no words. He took Miriam passionately into his arms as they stood there in the gathering dusk upon the staircase of that haunted and terrible building, and Miriam it was who found the words upon which they separated and went quietly away to the solitude each needed for the soul.\n\n\"We'll leave the gods alone,\" she said with gentle decision, yet making it seem as though she appealed to his greater strength and wisdom to decide; \"I want nothing but you\u2014you and Winky. And all you really want is me.\"\n\nBut in his room he heard the vibrations of the clergyman's voice rising up through the floor and walls as he practiced in the cellar the sounds with which the ancient Hebrews concealed the Tetragrammaton: YOD\u2014HE\u2014VAU\u2014HE: JEHOVAH\u2014JAHVE\u2014of which the approaching great experiment, however, concerned itself only with the opening vibrations of the first letter\u2014YOD\u2026.\n\nAnd, as he listened, he hesitated again\u2026 wondering after all whether Miriam was right." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "It was towards the end of their short silent dinner that very night\u2014the silence due to the fact that everybody was intently listening\u2014when Spinrobin caught the whisper of a singular faint sound that he took first to be the rising of wind. The wind sometimes came down that way with curious gulps from the terraces of the surrounding moors. Yet in this sound was none of that rush and sigh that the hills breed. It did not drop across the curves of the world; it rose from the center.\n\nHe looked up sharply, then at once realized that the sound was not outside at all, but inside\u2014inside the very room where he sat facing Skale and Miriam. Then something in his soul recognized it. It was the first wave in an immense vibration.\n\nSomething stretched within him as foam stretches on the elastic side of a heaped Atlantic roller, retreated, then came on again with a second gigantic crest. The rhythm of the huge sound had caught him. The life in him expanded awfully, rose to far summits, dropped to utter depths. A sense of glowing exaltation swept through him as though wings of power lifted his heart with enormous ascendancy. The biggest passions of his soul stirred\u2014the sweetest dreams, yearnings, aspirations he had ever known were blown to fever heat. Above all, his passion for Miriam waxed tumultuous and possessed him.\n\nMr. Skale dropped his fruit knife and uttered a cry, but a cry of so peculiar a character that Spinrobin thought for a moment he was about to burst into song. At the same instant he stood up, and his chair fell backwards with a crash upon the floor. Spinrobin stood up too. He asserts always that he was lifted up. He recognized no conscious effort of his own. It was at this point, moreover, that Miriam, pale as linen, yet uttering no sound and fully mistress of herself, left her side of the table and ran round swiftly to the protection of her lover.\n\nShe came close up. \"Spinny,\" she said, \"it's come!\"\n\nThus all three were standing round that dinner table on the verge of some very vigorous action not yet disclosed, as people, vigilant and alert, stand up at a cry of fire, when the door from the passage opened noisily and in rushed Mrs. Mawle, surrounded by an atmosphere of light such as might come from a furnace door suddenly thrown wide in some dark foundry. Only the light was not steady; it was whirling.\n\nShe ran across the floor as though dancing\u2014the dancing of a child\u2014propelled, it seemed, by an irresistible drive of force behind; while with her through the opened door came a roaring volume of sound that was terrible as Niagara let loose, yet at the same time exquisitely sweet, as birds or children singing. Upon these two incongruous qualities Spinrobin always insists.\n\n\"The deaf shall hear\u2014!\" came sharply from the clergyman's lips, the sentence uncompleted, for the housekeeper cut him short.\n\n\"They're out!\" she cried with a loud, half-frightened jubilance; \"Mr. Skale's prisoners are bursting their way about the house. And one of them,\" she added with a scream of joy and terror mingled, \"is in my throat\u2026!\"\n\nIf the odd phrase she made use of stuck vividly in Spinrobin's memory, the appearance she presented impressed him even more. For her face was shining and alight, radiant as when Skale had called her true name weeks before. Flashes of flame-like beauty ran about the eyes and mouth; and she looked eighteen\u2014eternally eighteen\u2014with a youth that was permanent and unchanging. Moreover, not only was hearing restored to her, but her left arm, withered for years, was in the act of pointing to the ceiling, instinct with vigorous muscular life. Her whole presentment was splendid, intense\u2014redeemed.\n\n\"The deaf hear!\" repeated Skale in a shout, and was across the room with the impetus of a released projectile. \"The Letters are out and alive! To your appointed places! The syllable has caught us! Quick, quick! If you love your soul and truth\u2026 fly!\"\n\nDeafening thunders rushed and crashed and blew about the room, interpenetrated everywhere at the same time by that searching strain of sweetness Spinrobin had first noticed. The sense of life, running free and abundant, was very remarkable. The same moment he found his hand clasped, and felt himself torn along by the side of the rushing clergyman into the hall. Behind them \"danced\" Mrs. Mawle, her cap awry, her apron flying, her elastic-side boots taking the light, dancing step of youth. With quick, gliding tread Miriam, still silent, was at his heels. He remembers her delicate, strange perfume reaching him faintly through all the incredible turmoil of that impetuous exit.\n\nIn the hall the roar increased terrifically about his ears. Skale, in his biggest booming voice, was uttering the names of Hebrew \"angels\"\u2014invoking forces, that is, to his help; and behind him Mrs. Mawle was singing\u2014singing fragments apparently of the \"note\" she had to utter, as well as fragments of her own \"true name\" thus magically recovered. Her restored arm gyrated furiously, her tripping youth spelt witchery. Yet the whole madness of the scene came to Spinrobin with a freezing wind of terror; for about it was a lawless, audacious blasphemy, that must surely win for itself a quite appalling punishment\u2026.\n\nYet nothing happened at once\u2014nothing destructive, at least. Skale and the housekeeper, he saw, were hurriedly robing themselves in the red and yellow surplices that hung from nails in the hall, and the instinct to laugh at the sight was utterly overwhelmed when he remembered that these were the colors which were used for safety in their respective \"rooms.\"\u2026 It was a scene of wild confusion and bewilderment which the memory refuses to reproduce coherently. In his own throat already began a passionate rising of sound that he knew was the \"note\" he had to utter attempting to escape, summoned forth automatically by these terrible vibrating Letters in the air. A cataract of sound seemed to fill the building and made it shake to its very foundations.\n\nBut the hall, he saw, was not only alive with \"music,\" it was ablaze with light\u2014a white and brilliant glory that at first dazzled him to the point of temporary blindness.\n\nThe same second Mr. Skale's voice, storming its way somehow above the tumult, made itself heard:\n\n\"To the rooms upstairs, Spinrobin! To the corridor with Miriam! And when you hear my voice from the cellar\u2014utter! We may yet be in time to unite the Letters\u2026!\"\n\nHe released the secretary's hand, flinging it from him, and was off with a bounding, leaping motion like an escaped animal towards the stone passage that led to the cellar steps; and Spinrobin, turning about himself like a top in a perfect frenzy of bewilderment, heard his great voice as he disappeared round the corner:\n\n\"It has come upon me like a thief in the night! Before I am fully prepared it has called me! May the powers of the Name have mercy upon my soul\u2026!\" And he was gone. For the last time had Spinrobin set his eyes upon the towering earthly form of the Rev. Philip Skale." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "Then, at first, it seems, the old enthusiasm caught him, and with him, therefore, caught Miriam, too. That savage and dominant curiosity to know clutched him, overpowering even the assaults of a terror that fairly battered him. Through all the chaos and welter of his dazed mind he sought feverishly for the \"note\" he had to utter, yet found it not, for he was too horribly confused. Fiddles, sand-patterns, colored robes, gongs, giant tuning-forks, wax-sheeted walls, aged-faces-turned-young and caverns-by-the-sea jostled one another in his memory with a jumble of disproportion quite inextricable.\n\nNext, impelled by that driving sense of duty to Skale, he turned to the girl at his side: \"Can you do it?\" he cried.\n\nUnable to make her voice heard above the clamor she nodded quickly in acquiescence. Spinrobin noticed that her little mouth was set rather firmly, though there was a radiance about her eyes and features that made her sweetly beautiful. He remembers that her loveliness and her pluck uplifted him above all former littlenesses of hesitation; and, seizing her outstretched hand, they flew up the main staircase and in less than a minute reached the opening of the long corridor where the rooms were.\n\nHere, however, they stopped with a gasp, for a hurricane of moving air met them in the face like the draught from some immense furnace. Again the crest of a wave in the colossal sound-vibration had caught them. Staggering against the wall, they tried again and again to face the tempest of sound and light, but the space beyond them was lit with the same unearthly brilliance as the hall, and out of the whole long throat of that haunted corridor issued such a passion of music and such a torrent of gorgeous color, that it seemed impossible for any aggregation of physical particles\u2014least of all poor human bodies\u2014to remain coherent for a single instant before the concentrated onslaught.\n\nYet, game to the inmost core of his little personality, and raised far above his normal powers by the evidence of Miriam's courage and fidelity, he struggled with all his might and searched through the chambers of his being for the note he was ordained to utter in the chord. The ignominy of failure, now that the great experiment was full upon him\u2014failure in Miriam's eyes, too\u2014was simply impossible to contemplate. Yet, in spite of every effort, the memory of that all-important note escaped him utterly, for the forces of his soul floundered, helpless and disheveled, before the too mighty splendors that were upon him at such close quarters. The sounds he actually succeeded in emitting between dry and quivering lips were pitiful and feeble beyond words.\n\nDown that living corridor, meanwhile, he saw the doors of the four rooms were gone, consumed like tissue paper; and through the narrow portals there shouldered forward, bathed in light ineffable, the separate outlines of the Letters so long imprisoned in inactivity. And with their appearance the sounds instantly ceased, having overpassed the limits of what is audible to human ears. A great stillness dropped about them with an abrupt crash of utter silence. For a \"crash\" of silence it was\u2014all-shattering.\n\nAnd then, from the categories of the incomprehensible and unmanifest, \"something\" loomed forth towards them where, limp and shaking, they leaned against the wall, and they witnessed the indescribable operation by which the four Letters, whirling and alive, ran together and melted into a single terrific semblance of a FORM\u2026 the sight of which entered the heart of Spinrobin and threatened to split it asunder with the joy of the most sublime terror and adoration a human soul has ever known.\n\nAnd the whole gigantic glory of Skale's purpose came upon him like a tempest. The magnificent effrontery by which the man sought to storm his way to heaven again laid its spell upon him. The reaction was of amazing swiftness. It almost seemed as though time ceased to operate, so instantaneously did his mood pass from terror to elation\u2014wild, ecstatic elation that could dare anything and everything to share in the awful delight and wonder of Skale's transcendent experiment.\n\nAnd so, forgetting himself and his little disabilities of terror and shrinking, he sought once again for the note he was to utter in the chord. And this time he found it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "Very faintly, yet distinctly audible in the deep stillness, it sounded far away down in the deeps of his being. And, with a splendid spiritual exultation tearing and swelling in his heart, he turned at once triumphantly to Miriam beside him.\n\n\"Utter your note too!\" he cried. \"Utter it with mine, for any moment now we shall hear the command from the cellar\u2026. Be ready\u2026!\"\n\nAnd the FORM, meanwhile, limned in the wonder of an undecipherable or at least untranslatable geometry, silently roaring, enthroned in the undiscoverable colors beyond the spectrum, swept towards them as he spoke.\n\nAt the same instant Miriam answered him, her exquisite little face set like a rock, her marble pallor painted with the glory of the approaching splendors. Just when the moment of success was upon them; when the flying Letters were abroad; when all the difficult weeks of preparation were face to face with the consummation; and when any moment Skale's booming bass might rise from the bowels of the building as the signal to utter the great chord and unite the fragments of the first divine syllable; when Spinrobin had at last conquered his weakness and recovered his note\u2014then, at this decisive and supreme moment, Miriam asserted herself and took the reins of command.\n\n\"No,\" she said, looking with sudden authority straight into his eyes, \"no! I will not utter the note. Nor shall you utter yours!\" And she clapped her little hand tight upon his mouth.\n\nIn that instant of unutterable surprise the two great forces of his life and personality met together with an explosive violence wholly beyond his power to control. For on the one hand lay the fierce enticement of Skale's heaven, with all that it portended, and on the other the deep though temporarily submerged human passion of his love for the girl. Miriam's sudden action revealed the truth to him better than any argument. In a flash he realized that her choice was made, and that she was in entire and final revolt against the whole elaborate experiment and all that it involved. The risk of losing her Spinny, or finding him changed in some condition of redemption where he would no longer be the little human thing she so dearly loved, had helped her to this final, swift conclusion.\n\nWith her hand tight over his lips, and her face of white decision before him, he understood. She called him with those big grey eyes to the sweet and common uses of life, instead of to the heights of some audacious heaven where they might be as gods with Philip Skale. She clung to humanity. And Spinrobin, seeing her at last with spiritual eyes fully opened, knew finally that she was right.\n\n\"But oh,\" he always cries, \"in that moment I knew the most terrible choice I have ever had to make, for it was not a choice between life and death, but a choice between two lives, each of infinite promised wonder. And what do you think it was that decided me, and made me choose the wholesome, humble life with little Miriam in preference to the grandeur of Skale's vast dream? What do you think?\" And his face always turns pink and then flame-colored as he asks it, hesitating absurdly before giving the answer. \"I'll tell you, because you'd never guess in this world.\" And then he lowers his voice and says, \"It was the delicious little sweet perfume of her fingers as she held them over my lips\u2026.!\"\n\nThat delicate, faint smell was the symbol of human happiness, and through all the whirlwind of sound and color about him, it somehow managed to convey its poignant, searching message of the girl's utter love straight into his heart. Thus curiously out of proportion and insignificant, indeed, are sometimes the decisive details that in moments of overwhelming experience turn the course of life's river this way or that\u2026.\n\nWith a single wild cry in his soul that found no audible expression, he gave up the unequal struggle. He turned, and with Miriam by his side, flew down the corridor from the advent of the Immensity that was upon them\u2014from the approach of the escaping Letters." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "How Spinrobin found his way out of that sound-stricken house remains an unsolved mystery. He never understood it himself; he remembers only that when they reached the ground floor the vibrations of Skale's opening bass note had already begun. Its effect, too, was immediately noticeable. For the roar of the escaping Letters, which upstairs had reached so immense a volume as to be recognized only in terms of silence, now suddenly grew in a measure harnessed and restrained. Their vibration became reduced\u2014down closer to the sixteen-foot wavelength which is the limit of human audition. They were being leashed in by the summoning master-tone. They grew once more audible.\n\nOn the rising swirl of sound the two humans were swept down passages and across halls, as two leaves are borne by a tempest, and after frantic efforts, in which Spinrobin bruised his body against doors and walls without number, he found himself at last in the open air, and at a considerable distance from the house of terror. Stars shone overhead. He saw the outline of hills. Breaths of cool wind fanned his burning skin and eyes.\n\nBut he dared not turn to look or listen. The music of that opening note, now rising through the building from the cellar, might catch him and win him back. The chord in which himself and Miriam were to have uttered their appointed tones, even half-told, was still mighty to overwhelm. Its effect upon the Letters themselves had been immediate.\n\nThe feeling that he had proved faithless to Skale, unworthy of the great experiment, never properly attuned to this fearful music of the gods\u2014this was forgotten in the overmastering desire to escape from it all into the safety of common human things with Miriam. Setting his course ever up the hills, he ran on and on, till breath failed him utterly and he was obliged to stop for lack of strength. And it was only then he realized that the whole time the girl had been in his arms. He had been carrying her.\n\nPlacing her on the ground, he caught a glimpse of her eyes in the darkness, and saw that they were still charged with the one devouring passion that had made the sacrifice of Skale and of all her training since birth inevitable. Soft and glowing with her first knowledge of love, her grey eyes shone like stars newly risen.\n\n\"Come, come!\" he whispered hoarsely; \"we must get as far as possible\u2014away from it all. Across the hills we shall find safety. Once the splendors overtake us we are lost\u2026.\"\n\nSeizing her by the hand, they pressed on again, the ocean of sound rising and thundering behind them and below.\n\nWithout knowing it, he had taken the path by which the clergyman had brought him from the station weeks ago on the day of his first arrival. With a confused memory, as of a dream, he recognized it. The ground was slippery with dead leaves whose odor penetrated sharply the air of night. Everywhere about him, as they paused from time to time in the little open spaces, the trees pressed up thickly; and ever from the valley they had just left the increasing tide of sound came pouring up after them like the roar of the sea escaping through doors upon the surface of the world.\n\nAnd even now the marvelous, enticing wonder of it caught him more than once and made him hesitate. The sense of what he was giving up sickened him with a great sudden yearning of regret. The mightiness of that loved leader, lonely and unafraid, trafficking with the principalities and powers of sound, and reckoning without misgiving upon the cooperation of his other \"notes\"\u2014this plucked fearfully at his heartstrings. But only in great tearing gusts, so to speak, which passed the instant he realized the little breathless, grey-eyed girl at his side, charged with her beautiful love for him and the wholesome ambition for human things.\n\n\"Oh! but the heaven we're losing\u2026!\" he cried once aloud, unable to contain himself. \"Oh, Miriam\u2026 and I have proved unworthy\u2026 small\u2026!\"\n\n\"Small enough to stay with me forever and ever\u2026 here on the earth,\" she replied passionately, seizing his hand and drawing him further up the hill. Then she stopped suddenly and gathered a handful of dead leaves, moss, twigs and earth. The exquisite familiar perfume as she held it to his face pierced through him with a singular power of conviction.\n\n\"We should lose this,\" she exclaimed; \"there's none of this\u2026 in heaven! The earth, the earth, the dear, beautiful earth, with you\u2026 and Winky\u2026 is what I want!\"\n\nAnd when he stopped her outburst with a kiss, fully understanding the profound truth she so quaintly expressed, he smelt the trees and mountains in her hair, and her fragrance was mingled there with the fragrance of that old earth on which they stood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "The rising flood of sound sent them charging ahead the same minute, for it seemed upon them with a rush; and it was only after much stumbling and floundering among trees and boulders that they emerged into the open space of the hills beyond the woods. Actually, perhaps, they had been running for twenty minutes, but to them it seemed that they had been running for days. They stood still and looked about them.\n\n\"You shall never regret, never, never,\" Miriam whispered quickly. \"I can make you happier than all this ever could,\" and she waved her arm towards the house below. \"And you know it, my little Master.\"\n\nBut before he could reply, or do more than place an arm about her waist to support her, something came to pass that communicated its message to their souls with an incalculable certainty neither could explain. Perhaps it was that distance enabled them to distinguish between the sounds more clearly, or perhaps their beings were still so intimately connected with Skale that some psychic warning traveled up to them across the night; but at any rate there then came about this sharp and sudden change in the quality of the sound-tempest round them that proclaimed the arrival of an exceedingly dramatic moment. The nature of the rushing, flying vibrations underwent alteration. And, looking one another in the eyes, they realized what it meant.\n\n\"He's beginning\u2026\" faltered Spinrobin in some skeleton of a voice.\n\n\"Skale has begun to utter\u2026!\" He said it beneath his breath.\n\nDown in the cellar of that awful house the giant clergyman, alone and undismayed, had begun to call the opening vibration of the living chord which was to gather in this torrent of escaping Letters and unite them in temporary safety in the crypts of the prepared vault. For the first time in eighteen hundred years the initial sound of the \"Name that rusheth through the universe\"\u2014the first sound of its opening syllable, that is\u2014was about to thunder its incalculable message over the earth.\n\nCrouching close against each other they stood there on the edge of the woods, the night darkly smothering about them, the bare, open hills lying beyond in the still sky, waiting for the long-apprehended climax\u2014the utterance of the first great syllable.\n\n\"It will make him\u2026 as God,\" crashed the thought through Spinrobin's brain as he experienced the pangs of the fiercest remorse he had ever known. \"Even without our two notes the power will be sublime\u2026!\"\n\nBut, through Miriam's swiftly-beating heart, as she pressed closer and closer: \"I know your true name\u2026 and you are mine. What else in heaven or earth can ever matter\u2026?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Skale had indeed begun to utter. And to these two bewildered children standing there alone with their love upon the mountain, it seemed that the whole world knew.\n\nThose desolate hills that rolled away like waves beneath the stars; the whispering woods about them; the distant sea, eternally singing its own note of sadness; the boulders at their feet; the very stars themselves, listening in the heart of night\u2014one and all were somehow aware that a portion of the great Name which first called them into being was about to issue from the sleep of ages once again into manifestation\u2026.Perhaps to quicken them into vaster life, perhaps to change their forms, perhaps to merge them all back into the depths of the original \"word\" of creation\u2026 with the roar of a dissolving universe\u2026.\n\nThrough everything, from the heart of the hidden primroses below the soil to the center of the huge moors above, there ran some swift thrill of life as the sounds of which they were the visible expression trembled in sympathetic resonance with the opening vibrations of the great syllable.\n\nPhilip Skale had begun to utter. Alone in the cellar of that tempest-stricken house, already aware probably that the upper notes of his chord had failed him, he was at last in the act of calling upon the Name that Rusheth through the Universe\u2026 the syllable whose powers should pass into his own being and make him as the gods\u2026.\n\nAnd, first of all, to the infinite surprise of these two listening, shaking lovers, the roaring thunders that had been battling all about them, grew faint and small, and then dropped away into mere trickles of sound, retreating swiftly down into the dark valley where the house stood, as though immense and invisible leashes drew them irresistibly back. One by one the Letters fled away, leaving only a murmur of incredibly sweet echoes behind them in the hills, as the master-sound, spoken by this fearless and audacious man, gathered them into their appointed places in the cellar.\n\nBut if they expected stupendous things to follow they were at first singularly disappointed. For, instead of woe and terror, instead of the foundering of the visible universe, there fell about the listening world a cloak of the most profound silence they had ever known, soft beyond conception. The Name was not in the whirlwind. Out of the heart of that deathly stillness it came\u2014a small, sweet voice, that was undeniably the voice of Philip Skale, its awful thunders all smoothed away. With it, too, like a faint overtone, came the yet gentler music of another voice. The bass and alto were uttering their appointed notes in harmony and without dismay.\n\nEverywhere the sound rose up through the darkness of great distance, yet at the same time ran most penetratingly sweet, close beside them in their very ears. So magically intimate indeed was it, yet so potentially huge for all its soft beginning, that Spinrobin declares that what he heard was probably not the actual voices, but only some high liberated harmonics of them.\n\nThe sounds, moreover, were not distinguishable as consonants and vowels in the ordinary sense, and to this day remain for him beyond all reach of possible reproduction. He did not hear them as \"word\" or \"syllable,\" but as some incalculably splendid Message that was too mighty to be taken in, yet at the same time was sweeter than all imagined music, simple as a little melody \"sweetly sung in tune,\" artless as wind through rustling branches.\n\nAnd, moreover, as this small, sweet voice ran singing everywhere about them in the darkness of hills and woods, Spinrobin realized, with a whole revolution of wonder sweeping through him, that the sound, for all its gentleness, was at work vehemently upon the surface of the landscape, altering and shifting the pattern of the solid earth, just as the sand had wreathed into outlines at the sound of his own voice weeks ago, and as the form of the clergyman had changed at the vibrations of the test night.\n\nThe first letters of the opening syllable of this divine and magical name were passing over the world\u2026 shifting the myriad molecules that composed it by the stress and stir of its vast harmonics\u2026 changing the pattern.\n\nBut this time the change was not dreadful; the new outline, even before he actually perceived it, was beautiful above all known forms of beauty. The outer semblance of the old earth appeared to melt away and reveal that heart of clean and dazzling wonder which burns ever at its inmost core\u2014the naked spirit divined by poets and mystics since the beginning of time. It was a new heaven and a new earth that pulsed below them in response to the majesty of this small sweet voice. All nature knew, from the birds that started out of sleep into passionate singing, to the fish that stirred in the depths of the sea, and the wild deer that sprang alert in their wintry coverts, scenting an eternal spring. For the earth rolled up as a scroll, shaking the outworn skin of centuries from her face, and suffering all her rocky structure to drop away and disclose the soft and glowing loveliness of an actual being\u2014a being most tenderly and exquisitely alive. It was the beginning of spiritual vision in their own hearts. The name had set them free. The blind saw\u2014a part of God\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "And then, in Spinrobin's heart, the realization of failure\u2014that he was not in his appointed place, following his great leader to the stars, clashed together with the splendor of his deep and simple love for this trembling slip of a girl beside him.\n\nThe thought that God, as it were, had called him and he had been afraid to run and answer to his name overpowered his timid, aching soul with such a flood of emotion that he found himself struggling with a glorious temptation to tear down the mountainside again to the house and play his appointed part\u2014utter his note in the chord even thus late. For the essential bitterness and pain that lies at the heart of all transitory earthly things\u2014the gnawing sense of incompleteness and vanity that touches the section of transitory existence men call \"life,\" met face to face with this passing glimpse of reality, timeless and unconditioned, which the sound of the splendid name flashed so terrifically before his awakened soul-vision,\u2014and threatened to overwhelm him.\n\nIn another instant he would have yielded and gone; forgotten even Miriam, and all the promised sweetness of life with her half-planned, when something came to pass abruptly that threw his will and all his little calculations into a dark chaos of amazement where, by a kind of electrically swift reaction, he realized that the one true, possible and right thing for him was this very love he was about to cast aside. His highest destiny was upon the unchanged old earth\u2026 with Miriam\u2026 and Winky\u2026.\n\nShe turned and flung her arms round his neck in a passion of tears as though she had divined his unspoken temptation\u2026 and at the same time this awful new thing was upon them both. It caught them like a tempest. For a disharmony\u2014a discord\u2014a lying sound was loose upon the air from those two voices far below.\n\n\"Call me by my true name,\" she cried quickly, in an anguish of terror; \"for my soul is afraid\u2026. Oh, love me most utterly, utterly, utterly\u2026 and save me!\"\n\nUnnerved and shaking like a leaf, Spinrobin pressed her against his heart.\n\n\"I know you by name and you are mine,\" he tried to say, but the words never left his lips. It was the love surging up in his tortured heart that alone held him to sanity and prevented\u2014as it seemed to him in that appalling moment\u2014the dissolution of his very being and hers.\n\nFor Philip Skale had somewhere uttered falsely.\n\nA darting zigzag crack, as of lightning, ran over the giant fabric of vibrations that covered the altering world as with a flood\u2026 and sounds that no man may hear and not die leaped awfully into being. The suddenness and immensity of the catastrophe blinded these two listening children-souls. Awe and terror usurped all other feelings\u2026 but one. Their love, being born of the spirit, held supreme, insulating them, so to speak, from all invading disasters.\n\nPhilip Skale had made a mistake in the pronunciation of the Name.\n\nThe results were dreadful and immediate, and from all the surface of the wakening world rose anguished voices. Spinrobin started up, lifting Miriam into his arms. He spun dizzily for a moment between boulders and trees, giving out a great wailing cry, unearthly enough had there been any to hear it. Then he began to run wildly through the thick darkness. In his ear\u2014for her head lay close\u2014he heard her dear voice, between the sobs of collapse, calling his inner name most sweetly; and the sound summoned to the front all in him that was best and manly.\n\n\"My sweet Master, my sweet Master!\"\n\nBut he did not run far. About him on every side the night lifted as though it were suddenly day. He saw the summits of the bleak mountains agleam with the reflection of some great light that rushed upon them from the valley. All the desolate landscape, hesitating like some hovering ocean between the old pattern and the new, seemed to hang suspended amid the desolation of the winter skies. Everything roared. It seemed the ground shook. The very bones of the woods went shuddering together; the hills toppled; and overhead, in some incredible depths of space, boomed sounds as though the heavens split off into fragments and hurled the constellations about the vault to swell these shattering thunders of a collapsing world.\n\nThe Letters of that terrible and august Name were passing over the face of the universe\u2014distorted because mispronounced\u2014creative sounds, disheveled and monstrous, because incompletely and incorrectly uttered.\n\n\"Put me down,\" he heard Miriam cry where she lay smothered in his arms, \"and we can face everything together, and be safe. Our love is bigger than it all and will protect us\u2026.\"\n\n\"Because it is complete,\" he cried incoherently in reply, seizing the truth of her thought, and setting her upon the ground; \"it includes even this. It is a part of\u2026 the Name\u2026 correctly uttered\u2026 for it is true and pure.\"\n\nHe heard her calling his inner name, and he began forthwith to call her own as they stood there clinging to one another, mingling arms and hair and lips in such a tumult of passion that it seemed as though all this outer convulsion of the world was a small matter compared to the commotion in their own hearts, revolutionized by the influx of a divine love that sought to melt them into a single being.\n\nAnd as they looked down into the valley at their feet, too bewildered to resist these mighty forces that stole the breath from their throats and the strength from their muscles, they saw with a clearness as of day that the House of Awe in which their love had wakened and matured was passing away and being utterly consumed.\n\nIn a flame of white fire, tongued and sheeted, streaked with gulfs of black, and most terribly roaring, it rose with a prodigious crackling of walls and roof towards the sky. Volumes of colored smoke, like hills moving, went with it; and with it, too, went the forms\u2014the substance of their forms, at least, of their \"sounds\" released\u2014of Philip Skale, Mrs. Mawle, and all the paraphernalia of gongs, drapery, wires, sheeted walls, sand-patterns, and the preparations of a quarter of a century of labor and audacious research. For nothing could possibly survive in such a furnace. The heat of it struck their faces where they stood even here high upon the hills, and the currents of rising wind blew the girl's tresses across his eyes and moved his own feathery hair upon his head. The notes of those leaping flames were like thunder.\n\n\"Watch now!\" cried Miriam, though he divined the meaning from the gesture of her free hand rather than actually heard the words.\n\nAnd, leaning their trembling bodies against a great boulder behind them, they then saw in the midst of the conflagration, or hovering dimly above it rather, the vast outlines of the captured sounds\u2014the Letters\u2014escaping back again into the womb of eternal silence from which they had been with such appalling courage evoked. In forms of dazzling blackness they passed upwards in their chariots of flame, yet at the same time passed inwards in some amazing kind of spiral motion upon their own axes, vanishing away with incredible swiftness and beauty deep down into themselves\u2026 and were gone.\n\nRealizing in some long-forgotten fashion of childhood the fearful majesty of the wrath of Jehovah, yet secretly undismayed because each felt so gloriously lost in their wonderful love, the bodies of Miriam and Spinrobin dropped instinctively upon their knees, and, still tightly clasped in one another's arms, bowed their foreheads to the ground, touching the earth and leaves.\n\nBut how long they rested thus upon the heart of the old earth, or whether they slept, or whether, possibly, the inevitable reaction to all the overstrain of the past hours led them through a period of unconsciousness, neither of them quite knew. Nor was it possible for them to have known, perhaps, that the lonely valley sheltering the House of Awe, running tongue-like into these desolate hills, had the unenviable reputation of trembling a little in sympathy with any considerable shock of earthquake that came to move that portion of the round globe from her sleep. Of this they knew as little, no doubt, as they did of the ill-defined line of demarcation between experiences that are objective, capable of being weighed and measured, and those that are subjective, taking place\u2014though with convincing authority\u2014only in the sphere of the mind\u2026.\n\nAll they do know, and Spinrobin tells it with an expression of supreme happiness upon his shining round face, is that at length they stirred as they lay, opened their eyes, turned and looked at one another, then stood up. On Miriam's hair and lashes lay the message of the dew, and in her clear eyes all the soft beauty of the stars that had watched over them.\n\nBut the stars themselves had gone. Over the hills ran the colored feet of the dawn, swift and rosy, touching the spread of heathery miles with the tints of approaching sunrise. The tops of the leafless trees stirred gently with a whisper of wind that stole up from the distant sea. The birds were singing. Over the surface of the old earth flew the magical thrill of life. It caught these two children-lovers, sweeping them into each other's arms as with wings.\n\nOut of all the amazing tempest of their recent experiences emerged this ever-growing splendor of their deep and simple love. The kindly earth they had chosen beckoned them down into the valley; the awful heaven they had rejected smiled upon them approvingly, as the old sun topped the hills and peeped upon them with his glorious eye.\n\n\"Come, Miriam,\" breathed Spinrobin softly into her little ear; \"we'll go down into another valley\u2026 and live happily together forever and ever\u2026.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she murmured, blushing with the rosiness of that exquisite winter's dawn; \"\u2026 you and I\u2026 and\u2026 and\u2026\"\n\nBut Spinrobin kissed the unborn name from her lips. \"Hush!\" he whispered, \"hush!\"\n\nFor the little \"word\" between these two was not yet made flesh. But the dawn-wind caught up that \"hush\" and carried it to the trees and undergrowth about them, and then ran thousand-footed before them to whisper it to the valley where they were going.\n\nAnd Miriam, knowing the worship and protection in his delicate caress, looked up into his face and smiled\u2014and the smile in her grey eyes was that ancient mother-smile which is coeval with life. For the word of creation flamed in these two hearts, waiting only to be uttered." + }, + { + "title": "The Centaur by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "\u2002\"We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.\" \u2014WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe\n\n\u2002\"\u2026 A man's vision is the great fact about him. Who cares for Carlyle's reasons, or Schopenhauer's, or Spencer's? A philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character, and all definitions of the Universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it.\" \u2014Ibid\n\n\"There are certain persons who, independently of sex or comeliness, arouse an instant curiosity concerning themselves. The tribe is small, but its members unmistakable. They may possess neither fortune, good looks, nor that adroitness of advance-vision which the stupid name good luck; yet there is about them this inciting quality which proclaims that they have overtaken Fate, set a harness about its neck of violence, and hold bit and bridle in steady hands.\n\n\"Most of us, arrested a moment by their presence to snatch the definition their peculiarity exacts, are aware that on the heels of curiosity follows\u2014envy. They know the very things that we forever seek in vain. And this diagnosis, achieved as it were en passant, comes near to the truth, for the hallmark of such persons is that they have found, and come into, their own. There is a sign upon the face and in the eyes. Having somehow discovered the 'piece' that makes them free of the whole amazing puzzle, they know where they belong and, therefore, whither they are bound: more, they are definitely en route. The littlenesses of existence that plague the majority pass them by.\n\n\"For this reason, if for no other,\" continued O'Malley, \"I count my experience with that man as memorable beyond ordinary. 'If for no other,' because from the very beginning there was another. Indeed, it was probably his air of unusual bigness, massiveness rather,\u2014head, face, eyes, shoulders, especially back and shoulders,\u2014that struck me first when I caught sight of him lounging there hugely upon my steamer deck at Marseilles, winning my instant attention before he turned and the expression on his great face woke more\u2014woke curiosity, interest, envy. He wore this very look of certainty that knows, yet with a tinge of mild surprise as though he had only recently known. It was less than perplexity. A faint astonishment as of a happy child\u2014almost of an animal\u2014shone in the large brown eyes\u2014\"\n\n\"You mean that the physical quality caught you first, then the psychical?\" I asked, keeping him to the point, for his Irish imagination was ever apt to race away at a tangent.\n\nHe laughed good-naturedly, acknowledging the check. \"I believe that to be the truth,\" he replied, his face instantly grave again. \"It was the impression of uncommon bulk that heated my intuition\u2014blessed if I know how\u2014leading me to the other. The size of his body did not smother, as so often is the case with big people: rather, it revealed. At the moment I could conceive no possible connection, of course. Only this overwhelming attraction of the man's personality caught me and I longed to make friends. That's the way with me, as you know,\" he added, tossing the hair back from his forehead impatiently,\"\u2014pretty often. First impressions. Old man, I tell you, it was like a possession.\"\n\n\"I believe you,\" I said. For Terence O'Malley all his life had never understood half measures." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "\u2002\"The friendly and flowing savage, who is he? Is he waiting for civilization, or is he past it, and mastering it?\" \u2014WHITMAN\n\n\u2002\"We find ourselves today in the midst of a somewhat peculiar state of society, which we call Civilization, but which even to the most optimistic among us does not seem altogether desirable. Some of us, indeed, are inclined to think that it is a kind of disease which the various races of man have to pass through\u2026.\n\n\u2002\"While History tells us of many nations that have been attacked by it, of many that have succumbed to it, and of some that are still in the throes of it, we know of no single case in which a nation has fairly recovered from and passed through it to a more normal and healthy condition. In other words, the development of human society has never yet (that we know of) passed beyond a certain definite and apparently final stage in the process we call Civilization; at that stage it has always succumbed or been arrested.\"\n\n\u2014EDWARD CARPENTER, Civilization: Its Cause and Cure\n\nO'Malley himself is an individuality that invites consideration from the ruck of commonplace men. Of mingled Irish, Scotch, and English blood, the first predominated, and the Celtic element in him was strong. A man of vigorous health, careless of gain, a wanderer, and by his own choice something of an outcast, he led to the end the existence of a rolling stone. He lived from hand to mouth, never quite growing up. It seemed, indeed, that he never could grow up in the accepted sense of the term, for his motto was the reverse of nil admirari, and he found himself in a state of perpetual astonishment at the mystery of things. He was forever deciphering the huge horoscope of Life, yet getting no further than the House of Wonder, on whose cusp surely he had been born. Civilization, he loved to say, had blinded the eyes of men, filling them with dust instead of vision.\n\nAn ardent lover of wild outdoor life, he knew at times a high, passionate searching for things of the spirit, when the outer world fell away like dross and he seemed to pass into a state resembling ecstasy. Never in cities or among his fellow men, struggling and herded, did these times come to him, but when he was abroad with the winds and stars in desolate places. Then, sometimes, he would be rapt away, caught up to see the tail-end of the great procession of the gods that had come near. He surprised Eternity in a running Moment.\n\nFor the moods of Nature flamed through him\u2014in him\u2014like presences, potently evocative as the presences of persons, and with meanings equally various: the woods with love and tenderness; the sea with reverence and magic; plains and wide horizons with the melancholy peace and silence as of wise and old companions; and mountains with a splendid terror due to some want of comprehension in himself, caused probably by a spiritual remoteness from their mood.\n\nThe Cosmos, in a word, for him was psychical, and Nature's moods were transcendental cosmic activities that induced in him these singular states of exaltation and expansion. She pushed wide the gateways of his deeper life. She entered, took possession, dipped his smaller self into her own enormous and enveloping personality.\n\nHe possessed a full experience, and at times a keen judgment, of modern life; while underneath, all the time, lay the moving sea of curiously wild primitive instincts. An insatiable longing for the wilderness was in his blood, a craving vehement, unappeasable. Yet for something far greater than the wilderness alone\u2014the wilderness was merely a symbol, a first step, indication of a way of escape. The hurry and invention of modern life were to him a fever and a torment. He loathed the million tricks of civilization. At the same time, being a man of some discrimination at least, he rarely let himself go completely. Of these wilder, simpler instincts he was afraid. They might flood all else. If he yielded entirely, something he dreaded, without being able to define, would happen; the structure of his being would suffer a nameless violence, so that he would have to break with the world. These cravings stood for that loot of the soul which he must deny himself. Complete surrender would involve somehow a disintegration, a dissociation of his personality that carried with it the loss of personal identity.\n\nWhen the feeling of revolt became sometimes so urgent in him that it threatened to become unmanageable, he would go out into solitude, calling it to heel; but this attempt to restore order, while easing his nature, was never radical; the accumulation merely increased on the rebound; the yearnings grew and multiplied, and the point of saturation was often dangerously near. \"Some day,\" his friends would say, \"there'll be a bursting of the dam.\" And, though their meaning might be variously interpreted, they spoke the truth. O'Malley knew it, too.\n\nA man he was, in a word, of deep and ever-shifting moods, and with more difficulty than most in recognizing the underlying self of which these outer aspects were projections masquerading as complete personalities.\n\nThe underlying ego that unified these projections was of the type touched with so sure a hand in the opening pages of an inspired little book: The Plea of Pan. O'Malley was useless as a citizen and knew it. Sometimes\u2014he was ashamed of it as well.\n\nOccasionally, and at the time of this particular \"memorable adventure,\" aged thirty, he acted as foreign correspondent; but even as such he was the kind of newspaper man that not merely collects news, but discovers, reveals, creates it. Wise in their generation, the editors who commissioned him remembered when his copy came in that they were editors. A roving commission among the tribes of the Caucasus was his assignment at the moment, and a better man for the purpose would have been hard to find, since he knew beauty, had a keen eye for human nature, divined what was vital and picturesque, and had, further, the power to set it down in brief terms born directly of his vivid emotions.\n\nWhen first I knew him he lived\u2014nowhere, being always on the move. He kept, however, a dingy little room near Paddington where his books and papers accumulated, undusted but safe, and where the manuscripts of his adventures were found when his death made me the executor of his few belongings. The key was in his pocket, carefully ticketed with a bone label. And this, the only evidence of practical forethought I ever discovered in him, was proof that something in that room was deemed by him of value\u2014to others. It certainly was not the heterogeneous collection of second-hand books, nor the hundreds of unlabeled photographs and sketches. Can it have been the MSS. of stories, notes, and episodes I found, almost carefully piled and tabulated with titles, in a dirty kitbag of green Willesden canvas?\n\nSome of these he had told me (with a greater vividness than he could command by pen); others were new; many unfinished. All were unusual, to say the least. All, too, had obviously happened to himself at some period of his roving career, though here and there he had disguised his own part in them by Hoffmann's device of throwing the action into the third person. Those told to me by word of mouth I could only feel were true, true for himself at least. In no sense were they mere inventions, but arose in moments of vision upon a structure of solid events. Ten men will describe in as many different ways a snake crossing their path; but, besides these, there exists an eleventh man who sees more than the snake, the path, the movement. O'Malley was some such eleventh man. He saw the thing whole, from some kind of inner bird's-eye view, while the ten saw only limited aspects of it from various angles. He was accused of adding details, therefore, because he had divined their presence while still below the horizon. Before they emerged the others had already left.\n\nBy which I mean that he saw in commonplace events the movement of greater tides than others saw. At one remove of time or distance\u2014a minute or a mile\u2014he perceived all. While the ten chattered volubly about the name of the snake, he was caught beyond by the beauty of the path, the glory of the running glide, the nature of the forces that drove, hindered, modified.\n\nThe others reasoned where the snake was going, its length in inches and its speed per second, while he, ignoring such superficial details, plunged as it were into the very nature of the creature's being. And in this idiosyncrasy, which he shared with all persons of mystical temperament, is exemplified a certain curious contempt for Reason that he had. For him mere intellectuality, by which the modern world sets such store, was a valley of dry bones. Its worship was a worship of the form. It missed the essential inner truth because such inner truth could be known only by being it, feeling it. The intellectual attitude of mind, in a word, was critical, not creative, and to be unimaginative seemed to him, therefore, the worst form of unintelligence.\n\n\"The arid, sterile minds!\" he would cry in a burst of his Celtic enthusiasm. \"Where, I ask ye, did the philosophies and sciences of the world assist the progress of any single soul a blessed inch?\"\n\nAny little Dreamer in his top-floor back, spinning by rushlight his web of beauty, was greater than the finest critical intelligence that ever lived. The one, for all his poor technique, was stammering over something God had whispered to him, the other merely destroying thoughts invented by the brain of man.\n\nAnd this attitude of mind, because of its interpretative effect upon what follows, justifies mention. For to O'Malley, in some way difficult to explain, Reason and Intellect, as such, had come to be worshipped by men today out of all proportion to their real value. Consciousness, focused too exclusively upon them, had exalted them out of due proportion in the spiritual economy. To make a god of them was to make an empty and inadequate god. Reason should be the guardian of the soul's advance, but not the object. Its function was that of a great sandpaper which should clear the way of excrescences, but its worship was to allow a detail to assume a disproportionate importance.\n\nNot that he was fool enough to despise Reason in what he called its proper place, but that he was \"wise\" enough\u2014not that he was \"intellectual\" enough!\u2014to recognize its futility in measuring the things of the soul. For him there existed a more fundamental understanding than Reason, and it was, apparently, an inner and natural understanding.\n\n\"The greatest Teacher we ever had,\" I once heard him say, \"ignored the intellect, and who, will ye tell me, can by searching find out God? And yet what else is worth finding out\u2026? Isn't it only by becoming as a little child\u2014a child that feels and never reasons things\u2014that any one shall enter the kingdom\u2026? Where will the giant intellects be before the Great White Throne when a simple man with the heart of a child will top the lot of 'em?\"\n\n\"Nature, I'm convinced,\" he said another time, though he said it with puzzled eyes and a mind obviously groping, \"is our next step. Reason has done its best for centuries, and gets no further. It can get no further, for it can do nothing for the inner life which is the sole reality. We must return to Nature and a purified intuition, to a greater reliance upon what is now subconscious, back to that sweet, grave guidance of the Universe which we've discarded with the primitive state\u2014a spiritual intelligence, really, divorced from mere intellectuality.\"\n\nAnd by Nature he did not mean a return to savagery. There was no idea of going backwards in his wild words. Rather he looked forwards, in some way hard to understand, to a state when Man, with the best results of Reason in his pocket, might return to the instinctive life\u2014to feeling with\u2014to the sinking down of the modern, exaggerated intellectual personality into its rightful place as guide instead of leader. He called it a Return to Nature, but what he meant, I always felt, was back to a sense of kinship with the Universe which men, through worshipping the intellect alone, had lost. Men today prided themselves upon their superiority to Nature as beings separate and apart. O'Malley sought, on the contrary, a development, if not a revival, of some faultless instinct, due to kinship with her, which\u2014to take extremes\u2014shall direct alike the animal and the inspired man, guiding the wild bee and the homing pigeon, and\u2014the soul toward its God.\n\nThis clue, as he called it, crystallized so neatly and so conclusively his own mental struggles, that he had called a halt, as it were, to his own intellectual development\u2026. The name and family of the snake, hence, meant to him the least important things about it. He caught, wildly yet consistently, at the psychic links that bound the snake and Nature and himself together with all creation. Troops of adventurous thoughts had all his life \"gone west\" to colonize this land of speculative dream. True to his idea, he \"thought\" with his emotions as much as with his brain, and in the broken record of the adventure that this book relates, this strange passion of his temperament remains the vital clue. For it happened in, as well as to, himself. His Being could include the Earth by feeling with her, whereas his intellect could merely criticize, and so belittle, the details of such inclusion.\n\nMany a time, while he stretched credulity to a point, I have heard him apologize in some such way for his method. It was the splendor of his belief that made the thing so convincing in the telling, for later when I found the same tale written down it seemed somehow to have failed of an equal achievement. The truth was that no one language would convey the extraordinary freight that was carried so easily by his instinctive choice of gestures, tone, and glance. With him these were consummately interpretative." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "Before the age of thirty he had written and published a volume or two of curious tales, all dealing with extensions of the personality, a subject that interested him deeply, and one he understood because he drew the material largely from himself. Psychology he simply devoured, even in its most fantastic and speculative forms; and though perhaps his vision was incalculably greater than his power of technique, these strange books had a certain value and formed a genuine contribution to the thought on that particular subject. In England naturally they fell dead, but their translation into German brought him a wider and more intelligent circle. The common public unfamiliar with Sally Beauchamp No. 4, with H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Smith, or with Dr. Hanna, found in these studies of divided personality, and these singular extensions of the human consciousness, only extravagance and imagination run to wildness. Yet, none the less, the substratum of truth upon which O'Malley had built them, lay actually within his own personal experience. The books had brought him here and there acquaintances of value; and among these latter was a German doctor, Heinrich Stahl. With Dr. Stahl the Irishman crossed swords through months of somewhat irregular correspondence, until at length the two had met on board a steamer where the German held the position of ship's doctor. The acquaintanceship had grown into something approaching friendship, although the two men stood apparently at the opposite poles of thought. From time to time they still met.\n\nIn appearance there was nothing unusual about O'Malley, unless it was the contrast of the light blue eyes with the dark hair. Never, I think, did I see him in anything but that old grey flannel suit, with the low collar and shabby glistening tie. He was of medium height, delicately built, his hands more like a girl's than a man's. In towns he shaved and looked fairly presentable, but once upon his travels he grew beard and moustache and would forget for weeks to have his hair cut, so that it fell in a tangle over forehead and eyes.\n\nHis manner changed with the abruptness of his moods. Sometimes active and alert, at others for days together he would become absent, dreamy, absorbed, half oblivious of the outer world, his movements and actions dictated by subconscious instinct rather than regulated by volition. And one cause of that loneliness of spirit which was undoubtedly a chief pain in life to him, was the fact that ordinary folk were puzzled how to take him, or to know which of these many extreme moods was the man himself. Uncomfortable, unsatisfactory, elusive, not to be counted upon, they deemed him: and from their point of view they were undoubtedly right. The sympathy and above all the companionship he needed, genuinely craved too, were thus denied to him by the faults of his own temperament. With women his intercourse was of the slightest; in a sense he did not know the need of them much. For one thing, the feminine element in his own nature was too strong, and he was not conscious, as most men are, of the great gap of incompleteness women may so exquisitely fill; and, for another, its obvious corollary perhaps, when they did come into his life, they gave him more than he could comfortably deal with. They offered him more than he needed.\n\nIn this way, while he perhaps had never fallen in love, as the saying has it, he had certainly known that high splendor of devotion which means the losing of oneself in others, that exalted love which seeks not any reward of possession because it is itself so utterly possessed. He was pure, too; in the sense that it never occurred to him to be otherwise.\n\nChief cause of his loneliness\u2014so far as I could judge his complex personality at all\u2014seemed that he never found a sympathetic, truly understanding ear for those deeply primitive longings that fairly ravaged his heart. And this very isolation made him often afraid; it proved that the rest of the world, the sane majority at any rate, said No to them. I, who loved him and listened, yet never quite apprehended his full meaning. Far more than the common Call of the Wild, it was. He yearned, not so much for a world savage, uncivilized, as for a perfectly natural one that had never known, perhaps never needed civilization\u2014a state of freedom in a life unstained.\n\nHe never wholly understood, I think, the reason why he found himself in such stern protest against the modern state of things, why people produced in him a state of death so that he turned from men to Nature\u2014to find life. The things the nations exclusively troubled themselves about all seemed to him so obviously vain and worthless, and, though he never even in his highest moments felt the claims of sainthood, it puzzled and perplexed him deeply that the conquest over Nature in all its multifarious forms today should seem to them so infinitely more important than the conquest over self. What the world with common consent called Reality, seemed ever to him the most crude and obvious, the most transient, the most blatant un-Reality. His love of Nature was more than the mere joy of tumultuous pagan instincts. It was, in the kind of simple life he craved, the first step toward the recovery of noble, dignified, enfranchised living. In the denial of all this external flummery he hated, it would leave the soul disengaged and free, able to turn her activities within for spiritual development. Civilization now suffocated, smothered, killed the soul. Being in the hopeless minority, he felt he must be somewhere wrong, at fault, deceived. For all men, from a statesman to an engine-driver, agreed that the accumulation of external possessions had value, and that the importance of material gain was real\u2026. Yet, for himself, he always turned for comfort to the Earth. The wise and wonderful Earth opened her mind and her deep heart to him in a way few other men seemed to know. Through Nature he could move blind-folded along, yet find his way to strength and sympathy. A noble, gracious life stirred in him then which the pettier human world denied. He often would compare the thin help or fellowship he gained from ordinary social intercourse, or from what had seemed at the time quite a successful gathering of his kind, with the power he gained from a visit to the woods or mountains. The former, as a rule, evaporated in a single day; the other stayed, with ever growing power, to bless whole weeks and months.\n\nAnd hence it was, whether owing to the truth or ignorance of his attitude, that a sense of bleak loneliness spread through all his life, and more and more he turned from men to Nature.\n\nMoreover, foolish as it must sound, I was sometimes aware that deep down in him hid some nameless, indefinable quality that proclaimed him fitted to live in conditions that had never known the restraints of modern conventions\u2014a very different thing to doing without them once known. A kind of childlike, transcendental innocence he certainly possessed, na\u00eff, most engaging, and\u2014utterly impossible. It showed itself indirectly, I think, in this distress under modern conditions. The multifarious apparatus of the spirit of Today oppressed him; its rush and luxury and artificiality harassed him beyond belief. The terror of cities ran in his very blood.\n\nWhen I describe him as something of an outcast, therefore, it will be seen that he was such both voluntarily and involuntarily.\n\n\"What the world has gained by brains is simply nothing to what it has lost by them\u2014\"\n\n\"A dream, my dear fellow, a mere dream,\" I stopped him, yet with sympathy because I knew he found relief this way. \"Your constructive imagination is too active.\"\n\n\"By Gad,\" he replied warmly, \"but there is a place somewhere, or a state of mind\u2014the same thing\u2014where it's more than a dream. And, what's more, bless your stodgy old heart, some day I'll get there.\"\n\n\"Not in England, at any rate,\" I suggested.\n\nHe stared at me a moment, his eyes suddenly charged with dreams. Then, characteristically, he snorted. He flung his hand out with a gesture that should push the present further from him.\n\n\"I've always liked the Eastern theory\u2014old theory anyhow if not Eastern\u2014that intense yearnings end by creating a place where they are fulfilled\u2014\"\n\n\"Subjectively\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course; objectively means incompletely. I mean a Heaven built up by desire and intense longing all your life. Your own thought makes it. Living idea, that!\"\n\n\"Another dream, Terence O'Malley,\" I laughed, \"but beautiful and seductive.\"\n\nTo argue bored him. He loved to state his matter, fill it with detail, blow the heated breath of life into it, and then leave it. Argument belittled without clarifying; criticism destroyed, sealing up the sources of life. Any fool could argue; the small, denying minds were always critics.\n\n\"A dream, but a damned foine one, let me tell you,\" he exclaimed, recovering his brogue in his enthusiasm. He glared at me a second, then burst out laughing. \"Tis better to have dhreamed and waked,\" he added, \"than never to have dhreamed at all.\"\n\nAnd then he poured out O'Shaughnessy's passionate ode to the Dreamers of the world:\n\n\u2003We are the music-makers,\n\n\u2003And we are the dreamers of dreams,\n\n\u2003Wandering by lone sea-breakers,\n\n\u2003And sitting by desolate streams;\n\n\u2003World-losers and world-forsakers,\n\n\u2003On whom the pale moon gleams;\n\n\u2003Yet we are the movers and shakers\n\n\u2003Of the world forever, it seems.\n\n\u2003With wonderful deathless ditties\n\n\u2003We build up the world's great cities,\n\n\u2003And out of a fabulous story\n\n\u2003We fashion an empire's glory;\n\n\u2003One man with a dream, at pleasure,\n\n\u2003Shall go forth and conquer a crown;\n\n\u2003And three with a new song's measure\n\n\u2003Can trample an empire down.\n\n\u2003We, in the ages lying\n\n\u2003In the buried past of the earth,\n\n\u2003Built Nineveh with our sighing,\n\n\u2003And Babel itself with our mirth;\n\n\u2003And o'erthrew them with prophesying\n\n\u2003To the old of the new world's worth;\n\n\u2003For each age is a dream that is dying,\n\n\u2003Or one that is coming to birth.\n\nFor this passion for some simple old-world innocence and beauty lay in his soul like a lust\u2014self-feeding and voracious." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "\u2002\"Lonely! Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?\" \u2014THOREAU\n\nMarch had passed shouting away, and April was whispering deliciously among her scented showers when O'Malley went on board the coasting steamer at Marseilles for the Levant and the Black Sea. The mistral made the land unbearable, but herds of white horses ran galloping over the bay beneath a sky of childhood's blue. The ship started punctually\u2014he came on board as usual with a bare minute's margin\u2014and from his rapid survey of the thronged upper deck, it seems, he singled out on the instant this man and boy, wondering first vaguely at their uncommon air of bulk, secondly at the absence of detail which should confirm it. They appeared so much bigger than they actually were. The laughter, rising in his heart, however, did not get as far as his lips.\n\nFor this appearance of massive bulk, and of shoulders comely yet almost humped, was not borne out by a direct inspection. It was a mental impression. The man, though broad and well-proportioned, with heavy back and neck and uncommonly sturdy torso, was in no sense monstrous. It was upon the corner of the eye that the bulk and hugeness dawned, a false report that melted under direct vision. O'Malley took him in with attention merging in respect, searching in vain for the detail of back and limbs and neck that suggested so curiously the sense of the gigantic. The boy beside him, obviously son, possessed the same elusive attributes\u2014felt yet never positively seen.\n\nPassing down to his cabin, wondering vaguely to what nationality they might belong, he was immediately behind them, elbowing French and German tourists, when the father abruptly turned and faced him. Their gaze met. O'Malley started.\n\n\"Whew\u2026!\" ran some silent expression like fire through his brain.\n\nOut of a massive visage, placid for all its ruggedness, shone eyes large and timid as those of an animal or child bewildered among so many people. There was an expression in them not so much cowed or dismayed as \"un-refuged\"\u2014the eyes of the hunted creature. That, at least, was the first thing they betrayed; for the same second the quick-blooded Celt caught another look: the look of a hunted creature that at last knows shelter and has found it. The first expression had emerged, then withdrawn again swiftly like an animal into its hole where safety lay. Before disappearing, it had flashed a wireless message of warning, of welcome, of explanation\u2014he knew not what term to use\u2014to another of its own kind, to himself.\n\nO'Malley, utterly arrested, stood and stared. He would have spoken, for the invitation seemed obvious enough, but there came an odd catch in his breath, and words failed altogether. The boy, peering at him sideways, clung to his great parent's side. For perhaps ten seconds there was this interchange of staring, intimate staring, between the three of them\u2026 and then the Irishman, confused, more than a little agitated, ended the silent introduction with an imperceptible bow and passed on slowly, knocking absent-mindedly through the crowd, down to his cabin on the lower deck.\n\nIn his heart, deep down, stirred an indescribable sympathy with something he divined in these two that was akin to himself, but that as yet he could not name. On the surface he felt an emotion he knew not whether to call uneasiness or surprise, but crowding past it, half smothering it, rose this other more profound emotion. Something enormously winning in the atmosphere of father and son called to him in the silence: it was significant, oddly buried; not yet had it emerged enough to be confessed and labeled. But each had recognized it in the other. Each knew. Each waited. And it was extraordinarily disturbing.\n\nBefore unpacking, he sat for a long time on his berth, thinking\u2026.trying in vain to catch through a thunder of surprising emotions the word that might bring explanation. That strange impression of giant bulk, unsupported by actual measurements; that look of startled security seeking shelter; that other look of being sure, of knowing where to go and being actually en route,\u2014all these, he felt, grew from the same hidden cause whereof they were symptoms. It was this hidden thing in the man that had reached out invisibly and fired his own consciousness as their gaze met in that brief instant. And it had disturbed him so profoundly because the very same lost thing lay buried in himself. The man knew, whereas he anticipated merely\u2014as yet. What was it? Why came there with it both happiness and fear?\n\nThe word that kept chasing itself in a circle like a kitten after its own tail, yet bringing no explanation, was Loneliness\u2014a loneliness that must be whispered. For it was loneliness on the verge of finding relief. And if proclaimed too loud, there might come those who would interfere and prevent relief. The man, and the boy too for that matter, were escaping. They had found the way back, were ready and eager, moreover, to show it to other prisoners.\n\nAnd this was as near as O'Malley could come to explanation. He began to understand dimly\u2014and with an extraordinary excitement of happiness.\n\n\"Well\u2014and the bigness?\" I asked, seizing on a practical point after listening to his dreaming, \"what do you make of that? It must have had some definite cause surely?\"\n\nHe turned and fixed his light blue eyes on mine as we paced beside the Serpentine that summer afternoon when I first heard the story told.\n\nHe was half grave, half laughing.\n\n\"The size, the bulk, the bigness,\" he replied, \"must have been in reality the expression of some mental quality that reached me psychically, producing its effect directly on my mind and not upon the eyes at all.\" In telling the story he used a simile omitted in the writing of it, because his sense of humor perceived that no possible turn of phrase could save it from grotesqueness when actually it was far from grotesque\u2014extraordinarily pathetic rather: \"As though,\" he said, \"the great back and shoulders carried beneath the loose black cape\u2014humps, projections at least; but projections not ugly in themselves, comely even in some perfectly natural way, that lent to his person this idea of giant size. His body, though large, was normal so far as its proportions were concerned. In his spirit, though, there hid another shape. An aspect of that other shape somehow reached my mind.\"\n\nThen, seeing that I found nothing at the moment to reply, he added:\n\n\"As an angry man you may picture to yourself as red, or a jealous man as green!\" He laughed aloud. \"D'ye see, now? It was not really a physical business at all!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "\u2002\"We think with only a small part of the past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act.\" \u2014HENRI BERGSON\n\nThe balance of his fellow-passengers were not distinguished. There was a company of French tourists gong to Naples, and another lot of Germans bound for Athens, some business folk for Smyrna and Constantinople, and a sprinkling of Russians going home via Odessa, Batoum, or Novorossisk.\n\nIn his own stateroom, occupying the upper berth, was a little round-bodied, red-faced Canadian drummer, \"traveling\" in harvest-machines. The name of the machine, its price, and the terms of purchase were his universe; he knew them in several languages; beyond them, nothing. He was good-natured, conceding anything to save trouble. \"D'ye mind the light for a bit while I read in bed?\" asked O'Malley. \"Don't mind anything much,\" was the cheery reply. \"I'm not particular; I'm easy-going and you needn't bother.\" He turned over to sleep. \"Old traveler,\" he added, his voice muffled by sheets and blankets, \"and take things as they come.\" And the only objection O'Malley found in him was that he took things as they came to the point of not taking baths at all, and not even taking all his garments off when he went to bed.\n\nThe Captain, whom he knew from previous voyages, a genial, rough-voiced sailor from Sassnitz, chided him for so nearly missing the boat\u2014\"as usual.\"\n\n\"You're too late for a seat at my taple,\" he said with his laughing growl; \"it's a pidy. You should have led me know py telegram, and I then kepd your place. Now you find room at the doctor's taple howefer berhaps\u2026!\"\n\n\"Steamer's very crowded this time,\" O'Malley replied, shrugging his shoulders; \"but you'll let me come up sometimes for a smoke with you on the bridge?\"\n\n\"Of course, of course.\"\n\n\"Anybody interesting on board?\" he asked after a moment's pause.\n\nThe jolly Captain laughed. \"'Pout the zame as usual, you know. Nothing to stop ze ship! Ask ze doctor; he knows zooner than me. But, anyway, the nice ones, they get zeazick always and dizappear. Going Trebizond this time?\" he added.\n\n\"No; Batoum.\"\n\n\"Ach! Oil?\"\n\n\"Caucasus generally\u2014up in the mountains a bit.\"\n\n\"God blenty veapons then, I hope. They shoot you for two pfennig up there!\" And he was off with his hearty deep laugh and rather ponderous briskness toward the bridge.\n\nThus O'Malley found himself placed for meals at the right hand of Dr. Stahl; opposite him, on the doctor's left, a talkative Moscow fur-merchant who, having come to definite conclusions of his own about things n general, was persuaded the rest of the world must share them, and who delivered verbose commonplaces with a kind of pontifical utterance sometimes amusing, but usually boring; on his right a gentle-eyed, brown-bearded Armenian priest from the Venice monastery that had sheltered Byron, a man who ate everything except soup with his knife, yet with a daintiness that made one marvel, and with hands so graceful they might almost have replaced the knife without off offence. Beyond the priest sat the rotund Canadian drummer. He kept silence, watched the dishes carefully lest anything should escape him, and\u2014ate. Lower down on the opposite side, one or two nondescripts between, sat the big, blond, bearded stranger with his son. Diagonally across from himself and the doctor, they were in full view.\n\nO'Malley talked to all and sundry whom his voice could reach, being easily forthcoming to people whom he was not likely to see again. But he was particularly pleased to find himself next to the ship's doctor, Dr. Heinrich Stahl, for the man both attracted and antagonized him, and they had crossed swords pleasantly on more voyages than one. There was a fundamental contradiction in his character due\u2014O'Malley divined\u2014to the fact that his experiences did not tally as he wished them to do with his beliefs, or vice versa. Affecting to believe in nothing, he occasionally dropped remarks that betrayed a belief in all kinds of things, unorthodox things. Then, having led the Irishman into confessions of his own fairy faith, he would abruptly rule the whole subject out of order with some cynical phrase that closed discussion. In this sarcastic attitude O'Malley detected a pose assumed for his own protection. \"No man of sense can possibly accept such a thing; it is incredible and foolish.\" Yet, the biting way he said the words betrayed him; the very thing his reason rejected, his soul believed\u2026.\n\nThese vivid impressions the Irishman had of people, one wonders how accurate they were! In this case, perhaps, he was not far from the truth. That a man with Dr. Stahl's knowledge and ability could be content to hide his light under the bushel of a mere Schiffsarzt required explanation. His own explanation was that he wanted leisure for thinking and writing. Bald-headed, slovenly, prematurely old, his beard stained with tobacco and snuff, under-sized, scientific in the imaginative sense that made him speculative beyond mere formulae, his was an individuality that inspired a respect one could never quite account for. He had keen dark eyes that twinkled, sometimes mockingly, sometimes, if the word may be allowed, bitterly, yet often too with a good-humored amusement which sympathy with human weaknesses could alone have caused. A warm heart he certainly had, as more than one forlorn passenger could testify.\n\nConversation at their table was slow at first. It began at the lower end where the French tourists chattered briskly over the soup, then crept upwards like a slow fire o'erleaping various individuals who would not catch. For instance, it passed the harvest-machine man; it passed the nondescripts; it also passed the big light-haired stranger and his son.\n\nAt the table behind, there was a steady roar and buzz of voices; the Captain was easy and genial, prophesying to the ladies on either side Of him a calm voyage. In the shelter of his big voice even the shy found it easy to make remarks to their neighbors. Listening to fragments of the talk O'Malley found that his own eyes kept wandering down the table\u2014diagonally across\u2014to the two strangers. Once or twice he intercepted the doctor's glance traveling in the same direction, and on these occasions it was on the tip of his tongue to make a remark about them, or to ask a question. Yet the words did not come. Dr. Stahl, he felt, knew a similar hesitation. Each, wanting to speak, yet kept silence, waiting for the other to break the ice.\n\n\"This mistral is tiresome,\" observed the doctor, as the tide of talk flowed up to his end and made a remark necessary. \"It tries the nerves of some.\" He glanced at O'Malley, but it was the fur-merchant who replied, spreading a be-ringed hand over his plate to feel the warmth.\n\n\"I know it well,\" he said pompously in a tone of finality; \"it lasts three, six, or nine days. But once across the Golfe de Lyons we shall be free of it.\"\n\n\"You think so? Ah, I am glad,\" ventured the priest with a timid smile while he adroitly balanced meat and bullet-like green peas upon his knife-blade. Tone, smile, and gesture were so gentle that the use of steel in any form seemed incongruous.\n\nThe voice of the fur-merchant came in domineeringly.\n\n\"Of course. I have made this trip so often, I know. St. Petersburg to Paris, a few weeks on the Riviera, then back by Constantinople and the Crimea. It is nothing. I remember last year\u2014\" He pushed a large pearl pin more deeply into his speckled tie and began a story that proved chiefly how luxuriously he traveled. His eyes tried to draw the whole end of the table into his circle, but while the Armenian listened politely, with smiles and bows, Dr. Stahl turned to the Irishman again. It Vas the year of Halley's comet and he began talking interestingly about it.\n\n\"\u2026 Three o'clock in the morning\u2014any morning, yes\u2014is the best time,\" the doctor concluded, \"and I'll have you called. You must see it through my telescope. End of this week, say, after we leave Catania and turn eastwards\u2026\"\n\nAnd at this instant, following a roar of laughter from the Captain's table, came one of those abrupt pauses that sometimes catch an entire room at once. All voices hushed. Even the merchant, setting down his champagne glass, fell silent. One heard only the beating of the steamer's screw, the rush of water below the port-holes, the soft scuffle of the stewards' feet. The conclusion of the doctor's inconsiderable sentence was sharply audible all over the room\u2014\n\n\"\u2026 crossing the Ionian Sea toward the Isles of Greece.\"\n\nIt rang across the pause, and at the same moment O'Malley caught the eyes of the big stranger lifted suddenly and fixed upon the speaker's face as though the words had summoned him.\n\nThey shifted the same instant to his own, then dropped again to his plate. Again the clatter of conversation drowned the room as before; the merchant resumed his self-description in terms of gold; the doctor discussed the gases of the comet's tail. But the swift-blooded Irishman felt himself caught away strangely and suddenly into another world. Out of the abyss of the subconscious there rose a gesture prophetic and immense. The trivial phrase and that intercepted look opened a great door of wonder in his heart. In a second he grew \"absent-minded.\" Or, rather, something touched a button and the whole machinery of his personality shifted round noiselessly and instantaneously, presenting an immediate new facet to the world. His normal, puny self-consciousness slipped a moment into the majestic calm of some far larger state that the stranger also knew. The Universe lies in every human heart, and he plunged into that archetypal world that stands so close behind all sensible appearances. He could neither explain nor attempt to explain, but he sailed away into some giant swimming mood of beauty wherein steamer, passengers, talk, faded utterly, the stranger and his son remaining alone real and vital. He had seen; he could never forget. Chance prepared the setting, but immense powers had rushed in and availed themselves of it. Something deeply buried had flamed from the stranger's eyes and beckoned to him. The fire ran from the big man to himself and was gone.\n\n\"The Isles of Greece\u2014\" The words were simple enough, yet it seemed to O'Malley that the look they summoned to the stranger's eyes ensouled them, transfiguring them with the significance of vital clues. They touched the fringe of a mystery, magnificent and remote\u2014some transcendent psychical drama in the 'life of this man whose \"bigness\" and whose \"loneliness that must be whispered\" were also in their way other vital clues. Moreover, remembering his first sight of these two upon the upper deck a few hours before, he understood that his own spirit, by virtue of its peculiar and primitive yearnings, was involved in the same mystery and included in the same hidden passion.\n\nThe little incident illustrates admirably O'Malley's idiosyncrasy of \"seeing whole.\" In a lightning flash his inner sense had associated the words and the glance, divining that the one had caused the other. That pause provided the opportunity\u2026. If Imagination, then it was creative imagination; if true, it was assuredly spiritual insight of a rare quality.\n\nHe became aware that the twinkling eyes of his neighbor were observing him keenly. For some moments evidently he had been absent-mindedly staring down the table. He turned quickly and looked at the doctor with frankness. This time it was impossible to avoid speech of some kind.\n\n\"Following those lights that do mislead the morn?\" asked Dr. Stahl slyly. \"Your thoughts have been traveling. You've heard none of my last remarks!\"\n\nUnder the clamor of the merchant's voice O'Malley replied in a lowered tone:\n\n\"I was watching those two half-way down the table opposite. They interest you as well, I see.\" It was not a challenge exactly; if the tone was aggressive, it was merely that he felt the subject was one on which they would differ, and he scented an approaching discussion. The doctor's reply, indicating agreement, surprised him a good deal.\n\n\"They do; they interest me greatly.\" There was no trace of fight in the voice. \"That should cause you no surprise.\"\n\n\"Me\u2014they simply fascinate,\" said O'Malley, always easily drawn. \"What is it? What do you see about them that is unusual? Do you, too, see them 'big'?\" The doctor did not answer at once, and O'Malley added, \"The father's a tremendous fellow, but it's not that\u2014\"\n\n\"Partly, though,\" said the other, \"partly, I think.\"\n\n\"What else, then?\" The fur-merchant, still talking, prevented their being overheard. \"What is it marks them off so from the rest?\"\n\n\"Of all people you should see,\" smiled the doctor quietly. \"If a man of your imagination sees nothing, what shall a poor exact mind like myself see?\" He eyed him keenly a moment. \"You really mean that you detect nothing?\"\n\n\"A certain distinction, yes; a certain aloofness from others. Isolated, they seem in a way; rather a splendid isolation I should call it\u2014\"\n\nAnd then he stopped abruptly. It was most curious, but he was aware that unwittingly in this way he had stumbled upon the truth, aware at the same time that he resented discussing it with his companion\u2014because it meant at the same time discussing himself or something in himself he wished to hide. His entire mood shifted again with completeness and rapidity. He could not help it. It seemed suddenly as though he had been telling the doctor secrets about himself, secrets moreover he would not treat sympathetically. The doctor had been \"at him,\" so to speak, searching the depths of him with a probing acuteness the casual language had disguised.\n\n\"What are they, do you suppose: Finns, Russians, Norwegians, or what?\" the doctor asked. And the other replied briefly that he guessed they might be Russians perhaps, South Russians. His tone was different. He wished to avoid further discussion. At the first opportunity he neatly changed the conversation.\n\nIt was curious, the way proof came to him. Something in himself, wild as the desert, something to do with that love of primitive life he discussed only with the few who were intimately sympathetic toward it, this something in his soul was so akin to a similar passion in these strangers that to talk of it was to betray himself as well as them.\n\nFurther, he resented Dr. Stahl's interest in them, because he felt it was critical and scientific. Not far behind hid the analysis that would lay them bare, leading to their destruction. A profound instinctive sense of self-preservation had been stirred within him.\n\nAlready, mysteriously guided by secret affinities, he had ranged himself on the side of the strangers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "\u2002\"Mythology contains the history of the archetypal world. It comprehends\n\n\u2002Past, Present, and Future.\"\n\n\u2014NOVALIS, Flower Pollen, Translated by U.C.B.\n\nIn this way there came between these two the slight barrier of a forbidden subject that grew because neither destroyed it. O'Malley had erected it; Dr. Stahl respected it. Neither referred again for a time to the big Russian and his son.\n\nIn his written account O'Malley, who was certainly no constructive literary craftsman, left out apparently countless little confirmatory details. By word of mouth he made me feel at once that this mystery existed, however; and to weld the two together is a difficult task. There nevertheless was this something about the Russian and his boy that excited deep curiosity, accompanied by an aversion on the part of the other passengers that isolated them; also, there was this competition on the part of the two friends to solve it, from opposing motives.\n\nHad either of the strangers fallen seasick, the advantage would have been easily with Dr. Stahl\u2014professionally, but since they remained well, and the doctor was in constant demand by the other passengers, it was the Irishman who won the first move and came to close quarters by making a personal acquaintance. His strong desire helped matters of course; for he noticed with indignation that these two, quiet and inoffensive as they were and with no salient cause of offence, were yet rejected by the main body of passengers. They seemed to possess a quality that somehow insulated them from approach, sending them effectually \"to Coventry,\" and in a small steamer where the travelers settle down into a kind of big family life, this isolation was unpleasantly noticeable.\n\nIt stood out in numerous little details that only a keen observer closely watching could have taken into account. Small advances, travelers' courtesies, and the like that ordinarily should have led to conversation, in their case led to nothing. The other passengers invariably moved away after a few moments, politely excusing themselves, as it were, from further intercourse. And although at first the sight of this stirred in him an instinct of revolt that was almost anger, he soon felt that the couple not merely failed to invite, but even emanated some definite atmosphere that repelled. And each time he witnessed these little scenes, there grew more strongly in him the original picture he had formed of them as beings rejected and alone, hunted by humanity as a whole, seeking escape from loneliness into a place of refuge that they knew of, definitely at last en route.\n\nOnly an imaginative mind, thus concentrated upon them, could have divined all this; yet to O'Malley it seemed plain as the day. With the certitude, moreover, came the feeling, ever stronger, that the refuge they sought would prove to be also the refuge he himself sought, the difference being that whereas they knew, he still hesitated.\n\nYet, in spite of this secret sympathy, imagined or discovered, he found it no easy matter to approach the big man for speech. For a day and a half he merely watched; attraction so strong excited caution; he paused, waiting. His attention, however, was so keen that he seemed always to know where they were and what they were doing. By instinct he was aware in what part of the ship they would be found\u2014for the most part leaning over the rail alone in the bows, staring down at the churned water together by the screws, pacing the after-deck in the dusk or early morning when no one was about, or hidden away in some corner of the upper deck, side by side, gazing at sea and sky. Their method of walking, too, made it easy to single them out from the rest\u2014a free, swaying movement of the limbs, a swing of the shoulders, a gait that was lumbering, almost clumsy, half defiant, yet at the same time graceful, and curiously rapid. The body moved along swiftly for all its air of blundering\u2014a motion which was a counterpart of that elusive appearance of great bulk, and equally difficult of exact determination. An air went with them of being ridiculously confined by the narrow little decks.\n\nThus it was that Genoa had been made and the ship was already half way on to Naples before the opportunity for closer acquaintance presented itself. Rather, O'Malley, unable longer to resist, forced it. It seemed, too, inevitable as sunrise.\n\nRain had followed the mistral and the sea was rough. A rich land-taste came about the ship like the smell of wet oaks when wind sweeps their leaves after a sousing shower. In the hour before dinner, the decks slippery with moisture, only one or two wrapped-up passengers in deck-chairs below the awning, O'Malley, following a sure inner lead, came out of the stuffy smoking-room into the air. It was already dark and the drive of mist-like rain somewhat obscured his vision after the glare. Only for a moment though\u2014for almost the first thing he saw was the Russian and his boy moving in front of him toward the aft compasses. Like a single figure, huge and shadowy, they passed into the darkness beyond with a speed that seemed as usual out of proportion to their actual stride. They lumbered rapidly away. O'Malley caught that final swing of the man's great shoulders as they disappeared, and, leaving the covered deck, he made straight after them. And though neither gave any sign that they had seen him, he felt that they were aware of his coming\u2014and even invited him.\n\nAs he drew close a roll of the vessel brought them almost into each other's arms, and the boy, half hidden beneath his parent's flowing cloak, looked up at once and smiled. The saloon light fell dimly upon his face. The Irishman saw that friendly smile of welcome, and lurched forward with the roll of the deck. They brought up against the bulwarks, and the big man put out an arm to steady him. They all three laughed together. At close quarters, as usual again, the impression of bulk had disappeared.\n\nAnd then, at first, utterly unlike real life, they said\u2014nothing. The boy moved round and stood close to his side so that he found himself placed between them, all three leaning forward over the rails watching the phosphorescence of the foam-streaked Mediterranean.\n\nDusk lay over the sea; the shores of Italy not near enough to be visible; the mist, the hour, the loneliness of the deserted decks, and something else that was nameless, shut them in, these three, in a little world of their own. A sentence or two rose in O'Malley's mind, but without finding utterance, for he felt that no spoken words were necessary. He was accepted without more ado. A deep natural sympathy existed between them, recognized intuitively from that moment of first mutual inspection at Marseilles. It was instinctive, almost as with animals. The action of the boy in coming round to his side, unhindered by the father, was the symbol of utter confidence and welcome.\n\nThere came, then, one of those splendid and significant moments that occasionally, for some, burst into life, flooding all barriers, breaking down as with a flaming light the thousand erections of shadow that close one in. Something imprisoned in himself swept outwards, rising like a wave, bringing an expansion of life that \"explained.\" It vanished, of course, instantly again, but not before he had caught a flying remnant that lit the broken puzzles of his heart and left things clearer. Before thought, and therefore words, could overtake, it was gone; but there remained at least this glimpse. The fire had flashed a light down subterranean passages of his being and made visible for a passing second some clue to his buried primitive yearnings. He partly understood.\n\nStanding there between these two this thing came over him with a degree of intelligibility scarcely captured by his words. The man's qualities\u2014his quietness, peace, slowness, silence\u2014betrayed somehow that his inner life dwelt in a region vast and simple, shaping even his exterior presentment with its own huge characteristics, a region wherein the distress of the modern world's vulgar, futile strife could not exist\u2014more, could never have existed. The Irishman, who had never realized exactly why the life of Today to him was dreadful, now understood it in the presence of this simple being with his atmosphere of stately power. He was like a child, but a child of some pre-existence utterly primitive and utterly forgotten; of no particular age, but of some state that antedates all ages; simple in some noble, concentrated sense that was prodigious, almost terrific. To stand thus beside him was to stand beside a mighty silent fire, steadily glowing, a fire that fed all lesser flames, because itself close to the central source of fire. He felt warmed, lighted, vivified\u2014made whole. The presence of this stranger took him at a single gulp, as it were, straight into Nature\u2014a Nature that was alive. The man was part of her. Never before had he stood so close and intimate. Cities and civilization fled away like transient dreams, ashamed. The sun and moon and stars moved up and touched him.\n\nThis word of lightning explanation, at least, came to him as he breathed the other's atmosphere and presence. The region where this man's spirit fed was at the center, whereas today men were active with a scattered, superficial cleverness, at the periphery. He even understood that his giant gait and movements were small outer evidences of this inner fact, wholly in keeping. That blundering stupidity, half glorious, half pathetic, with which he moved among his fellows was a physical expression of this psychic fact that his spirit had never learned the skilful tricks taught by civilization to lesser men. It was, in a way, awe-inspiring, for he was now at last driving back full speed for his own region and\u2014escape.\n\nO'Malley knew himself caught, swept off his feet, momentarily driving with him\u2026.\n\nThe singular deep satisfaction of it, standing there with these two in the first moment, he describes as an entirely new sensation in his life\u2014an awareness that he was \"complete.\" The boy touched his side and he let an arm steal round to shelter him. The huge, bearded parent rose in his massiveness against his other shoulder, hemming him in. For a second he knew a swift and curious alarm, passing however almost at once into the thrill of a rare happiness. In that moment, it was not the passengers or the temper of Today who rejected them; it was they who rejected the world: because they knew another and superior one\u2014more, they were in it.\n\nThen, without turning, the big man spoke, the words in heavy accented English coming out laboriously and with slow, exceeding difficulty as though utterance was a supreme effort.\n\n\"You\u2026 come\u2026 with\u2026 us?\" It was like stammering almost. Still more was it like essential inarticulateness struggling into an utterance foreign to it\u2014unsuited. The voice was a deep and windy bass, merging with the noise of the sea below.\n\n\"I'm going to the Caucasus,\" O'Malley replied; \"up into the old, old mountains, to\u2014see things\u2014to look about\u2014to search\u2014\" He really wanted to say much more, but the words lay dead or beyond reach.\n\nThe big man nodded slowly. The boy listened.\n\n\"And yourself\u2014?\" asked the Irishman, hardly knowing why he faltered and trembled.\n\nThe other smiled; a beauty that was beyond all language passed with that smile across the great face in the dusk.\n\n\"Some of us\u2026 of ours\u2026\" he spoke very slowly, very brokenly, quarrying out the words with real labor, \"\u2026 still survive\u2026 out there\u2026. We\u2026 now go back. So very\u2026 few\u2026 remain\u2026. And you\u2014come with us\u2026\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "\u2002\"In the spiritual Nature-Kingdom, man must everywhere seek his peculiar territory and climate, his best occupation, his particular neighborhood, in order to cultivate a Paradise in idea; this is the right system\u2026. Paradise is scattered over the whole earth, and that is why it has become so unrecognizable.\"\n\n\u2014NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.\n\n\u2002\"Man began in instinct and will end in instinct. Instinct is genius in\n\n\u2002Paradise, before the period of self-abstraction (self-knowledge).\"\n\n\u2014Ibid\n\n\"Look here, old man,\" he said to me, \"I'll just tell you what it was, because I know you won't laugh.\"\n\nWe were lying under the big trees behind the Round Pond when he reached this point, and his direct speech was so much more graphic than the written account that I use it. He was in one of his rare moments of confidence, excited, hat off, his shabby tie escaping from the shabbier grey waistcoat. One sock lay untidily over his boot, showing bare leg.\n\nChildren's voices floated to us from the waterside as though from very far away, the nursemaids and perambulators seemed tinged with unreality, the London towers were clouds, its roar the roar of waves. I saw only the ship's deck, the grey and misty sea, the uncouth figures of the two who leaned with him over the bulwarks.\n\n\"Go on,\" I said encouragingly; \"out with it!\"\n\n\"It must seem incredible to most men, but, by Gad, I swear to you, it lifted me off my feet, and I've never known anything like it. The mind of that great fellow got hold of me, included me. He made the inanimate world\u2014sea, stars, wind, woods, and mountains\u2014seem all alive. The entire blessed universe was conscious\u2014and he came straight out of it to get me. I understood things about myself I've never understood before\u2014and always funked rather;\u2014especially that feeling of being out of touch with my kind, of finding no one in the world today who speaks my language quite\u2014that, and the utter, God-forsaken loneliness it makes me suffer\u2014\"\n\n\"You always have been a lonely beggar really,\" I said, noting the hesitation that thus on the very threshold checked his enthusiasm, quenching the fire in those light-blue eyes. \"Tell me. I shall understand right enough\u2014or try to.\"\n\n\"God bless you,\" he answered, leaping to the sympathy, \"I believe you will. There's always been this primitive, savage thing in me that keeps others away\u2014puts them off, and so on. I've tried to smother it a bit sometimes\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you?\" I laughed.\n\n\"'Tried to,' I said, because I've always been afraid of its getting out too much and bustin' my life all to pieces:\u2014something lonely and untamed and sort of outcast from cities and money and all the thick suffocating civilization of today; and I've only saved myself by getting off into wildernesses and free places where I could give it a breathin' chance without running the risk of being locked up as a crazy man.\" He laughed as he said it, but his heart was in the words. \"You know all that; haven't I told you often enough? It's not a morbid egoism, or what their precious academic books so stupidly call 'degenerate,' for in me it's damned vital and terrific, and moves always to action. It's made me an alien and\u2014and\u2014\"\n\n\"Something far stronger than the Call of the Wild, isn't it?\"\n\nHe fairly snorted. \"Sure as we're both alive here sittin' on this sooty London grass,\" he cried. \"This Call of the Wild they prate about is just the call a fellow hears to go on 'the bust' when he's had too much town and's got bored\u2014a call to a little bit of license and excess to safety-valve him down. What I feel,\" his voice turned grave and quiet again, \"is quite a different affair. It's the call of real hunger\u2014the call of food. They want to let off steam, but I want to take in stuff to prevent\u2014starvation.\" He whispered the word, putting his lips close to my face.\n\nA pause fell between us, which I was the first to break.\n\n\"This is not your century! That's what you really mean,\" I suggested patiently.\n\n\"Not my century!\" he caught me up, flinging handfuls of faded grass in the air between us and watching it fall; \"why, it's not even my world! And I loathe, loathe the spirit of today with its cheap-jack inventions, and smother of sham universal culture, its murderous superfluities and sordid vulgarity, without enough real sense of beauty left to see that a daisy is nearer heaven than an airship\u2014\"\n\n\"Especially when the airship falls,\" I laughed. \"Steady, steady, old boy; don't spoil your righteous case by overstatement.\"\n\n\"Well, well, you know what I mean,\" he laughed with me, though his face at once turned earnest again, \"and all that, and all that, and all that\u2026. And so this savagery that has burned in me all these years unexplained, these Russian strangers made clear. I can't tell you how because I don't know myself. The father did it\u2014his proximity, his silence stuffed with sympathy, his great vital personality unclipped by contact with these little folk who left him alone. His presence alone made me long for the earth and Nature. He seemed a living part of it all. He was magnificent and enormous, but the devil take me if I know how.\"\n\n\"He said nothing\u2014that referred to it directly?\"\n\n\"Nothing but what I've told you,\u2014blundering awkwardly with those few modern words. But he had it in him a thousand to my one. He made me feel I was right and natural, untrue to myself to suppress it and a coward to fear it. The speech-center in the brain, you know, is anyhow a comparatively recent thing in evolution. They say that\u2014\"\n\n\"It wasn't his century either,\" I checked him again.\n\n\"No, and he didn't pretend it was, as I've tried to,\" he cried, sitting bolt upright beside me. \"The fellow was genuine, never dreamed of compromise. D'ye see what I mean? Only somehow he'd found out where his world and century were, and was off to take possession. And that's what caught me. I felt it by some instinct in me stronger than all else; only we couldn't talk about it definitely because\u2014because\u2014I hardly know how to put it\u2014for the same reason,\" he added suddenly, \"that I can't talk about it to you now! There are no words\u2026. What we both sought was a state that passed away before words came into use, and is therefore beyond intelligible description. No one spoke to them on the ship for the same reason, I felt sure, that no one spoke to them in the whole world\u2014because no one could manage even the alphabet of their language.\n\n\"And this was so strange and beautiful,\" he went on, \"that standing there beside him, in his splendid atmosphere, the currents of wind and sea reached me through him first, filtered by his spirit so that I assimilated them and they fed me, because he somehow stood in such close and direct relation to Nature. I slipped into my own region, made happy and alive, knowing at last what I wanted, though still unable to phrase it. This modern world I've so long tried to adjust myself to became a thing of pale remembrance and a dream\u2026.\"\n\n\"All in your mind and imagination, of course, this,\" I ventured, seeing that his poetry was luring him beyond where I could follow.\n\n\"Of course,\" he answered without impatience, grown suddenly thoughtful, less excited again, \"and that's why it was true. No chance of clumsy senses deceiving one. It was direct vision. What is Reality, in the last resort,\" he asked, \"but the thing a man's vision brings to him\u2014to believe? There's no other criterion. The criticism of opposite types of mind is merely a confession of their own limitations.\"\n\nBeing myself of the \"opposite type of mind,\" I naturally did not argue, but suffered myself to accept his half-truth for the whole\u2014temporarily. I checked him from time to time merely lest he should go too fast for me to follow what seemed a very wonderful tale of faerie.\n\n\"So this wild thing in me the world today has beggared and denied,\" he went on, swept by his Celtic enthusiasm, \"woke in its full strength. Calling to me like some flying spirit in a storm, it claimed me. The man's being summoned me back to the earth and Nature, as it were, automatically. I understood that look on his face, that sign in his eyes. The 'Isles of Greece' furnished some faint clue, but as yet I knew no more\u2014only that he and I were in the same region and that I meant to go with him and that he accepted me with delight that was joy. It drew me as empty space draws a giddy man to the precipice's edge. Thoughts from another's mind,\" he added by way of explanation, turning round, \"come far more completely to me when I stand in a man's atmosphere, silent and receptive, than when by speech he tries to place them there. Ah! And that helps me to get at what I mean, perhaps. The man, you see, hardly thought; he felt.\"\n\n\"As an animal, you mean? Instinctively\u2014?\"\n\n\"In a sense, yes,\" he replied after a momentary hesitation. \"Like some very early, very primitive form of life.\"\n\n\"With the best will in the world, Terence, I don't quite follow you\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't quite follow myself,\" he cried, \"because I'm trying to lead and follow at the same time. You know that idea\u2014I came across it somewhere\u2014that in ancient peoples the senses were much less specialized than they are now; that perception came to them in general, massive sensations rather than divided up neatly into five channels:\u2014that they felt all over so to speak, and that all the senses, as in an overdose of hashish, become one single sense? The centralizing of perception in the brain is a recent thing, and it might equally well have occurred in any other nervous headquarters of the body, say, the solar plexus; or, perhaps, never have been localized at all! In hysteria patients have been known to read with the finger-tips and smell with the heel. Touch is still all over; it's only the other four that have got fixed in definite organs. There are systems of thought today that still would make the solar plexus the main center, and not the brain. The word 'brain,' you know, never once occurs in the ancient Scriptures of the world. You will not find it in the Bible\u2014the reins, the heart, and so forth were what men felt with then. They felt all over\u2014well,\" he concluded abruptly, \"I think this fellow was like that. D'ye see now?\"\n\nI stared at him, greatly wondering. A nursemaid passed close, balancing a child in a spring-perambulator, saying in a foolish voice, \"Wupsey up, wupsey down! Wupsey there!\" O'Malley, in the full stream of his mood, waited impatiently till she had gone by. Then, rolling over on his side, he came closer, talking in a lowered tone. I think I never saw him so deeply stirred, nor understood, perhaps, so little of the extreme passion working in him. Yet it was incredible that he could have caught so much from mere interviews with a semi-articulate stranger, unless what he said was strictly true, and this Russian had positively touched latent fires in his soul by a kind of sympathetic magic.\n\n\"You know,\" he went on almost under his breath, \"every man who thinks for himself and feels vividly finds he lives in a world of his own, apart, and believes that one day he'll come across, either in a book or in a person, the Priest who shall make it clear to him. Well\u2014I'd found mine, that's all. I can't prove it to you with a pair of scales or a butcher's meat-axe, but it's true.\"\n\n\"And you mean his mere presence conveyed all this without speech almost?\"\n\n\"Because there was no speech possible,\" he replied, dropping his voice to a whisper and thrusting his face yet closer into mine. \"We were solitary survivors of a world whose language was either uncreated or\"\u2014he italicized the word\u2014\"forgotten\u2026.\"\n\n\"An elaborate and detailed thought-transference, then?\"\n\n\"Why not?\" he murmured. \"It's one of the commonest facts of daily life.\"\n\n\"And you had never fully realized it before, this loneliness and its possible explanation\u2014that there might exist, I mean, a way of satisfying it\u2014till you met this stranger?\"\n\nHe answered with deep earnestness. \"Always, old man, always, but suffered under it atrociously because I'd never understood it. I had been afraid to face it. This man, a far bigger and less diluted example of it than myself, made it all clear and right and natural. We belonged to the same forgotten place and time. Under his lead and guidance I could find my own\u2014return\u2026.\"\n\nI whistled a long soft whistle, looking up into the sky. Then, sitting upright like himself, we stared hard at one another, straight in the eye. He was too grave, too serious to trifle with. It would have been unfair too. Besides, I loved to hear him. The way he reared such fabulous superstructures upon slight incidents, interpreting thus his complex being to himself, was uncommonly interesting. It was observing the creative imagination actually at work, and the process in a sense seemed sacred. Only the truth and actuality with which he clothed it all made me a little uncomfortable sometimes.\n\n\"I'll put it to you quite simply,\" he cried suddenly.\n\n\"Yes, and 'quite simply' it was\u2014?\"\n\n\"That he knew the awful spiritual loneliness of living in a world whose tastes and interests were not his own, a world to which he was essentially foreign, and at whose hands he suffered continual rebuff and rejection. Advances from either side were mutually and necessarily repelled because oil and water cannot mix. Rejected, moreover, not merely by a family, tribe, or nation, but by a race and time\u2014by the whole World of Today; an outcast and an alien, a desolate survival.\"\n\n\"An appalling picture!\"\n\n\"I understood it,\" he went on, holding up both hands by way of emphasis, \"because in miniature I had suffered the same: he was a supreme case of what lay so deeply in myself. He was a survival of other life the modern mind has long since agreed to exile and deny. Humanity stared at him over a barrier, never dreaming of asking him in. Even had it done so he could not by the law of his being have accepted. Outcast myself in some small way, I understood his terrible loneliness, a soul without a country, visible and external country that is. A passion of tenderness and sympathy for him, and so also for myself, awoke. I saw him as chieftain of all the lonely, exiled souls of life.\"\n\nBreathless a moment, he lay on his back staring at the summer clouds\u2014those thoughts of wind that change and pass before their meanings can be quite seized. Similarly protean was the thought his phrases tried to clothe. The terror, pathos, sadness of this big idea he strove to express touched me deeply, yet never quite with the clarity of his own conviction.\n\n\"There are such souls, d\u00e9pays\u00e9es and in exile,\" he said suddenly again, turning over on the grass. \"They do exist. They walk the earth today here and there in the bodies of ordinary men\u2026 and their loneliness is a loneliness that must be whispered.\"\n\n\"You formed any idea what kind of\u2014of survival?\" I asked gently, for the notion grew in me that after all these two would prove to be mere revolutionaries in escape, political refugees, or something quite ordinary.\n\nO'Malley buried his face in his hands for a moment without replying. Presently he looked up. I remember that a streak of London black ran from the corner of his mouth across the cheek. He pushed the hair back from his forehead, answering in a manner grown abruptly calm and dispassionate.\n\n\"Don't ye see what a foolish question that is,\" he said quietly, \"and how impossible to satisfy, inviting that leap of invention which can be only an imaginative lie\u2026? I can only tell you,\" and the breeze brought to us the voices of children from the Round Pond where they sailed their ships of equally wonderful adventure, \"that my own longing became this: to go with him, to know what he knew, to live where he lived\u2014forever.\"\n\n\"And the alarm you said you felt?\"\n\nHe hesitated.\n\n\"That,\" he added, \"was a kind of mistake. To go involved, I felt, an inner catastrophe that might be Death\u2014that it would be out of the body, I mean, or a going backwards. In reality, it was a going forwards and a way to Life.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "And it was just before the steamer made Naples that the jolly Captain unwittingly helped matters forward a good deal. For it was his ambition to include in the safe-conduct of his vessel the happy-conduct also of his passengers. He liked to see them contented and of one accord, a big family, and he noted\u2014or had word brought to him perhaps\u2014that there were one or two whom the attitude of the majority left out in the cold.\n\nIt may have been\u2014O'Malley wondered without actually asking\u2014that the man who shared the cabin with the strangers made some appeal for re-arrangement, but in any case Captain Burgenfelder approached the Irishman that afternoon on the bridge and asked if he would object to having them in his stateroom for the balance of the voyage.\n\n\"Your present gompanion geds off at Naples,\" he said. \"Berhaps you would not object. I think\u2014they seem lonely. You are friendly with them. They go alzo to Batoum?\"\n\nThis proposal for close quarters gave him pause. He knew a moment or two of grave hesitation, yet without time to analyze it. Then, driven by a sudden decision of the heart that knew no revision of reason, he agreed.\n\n\"I had better, perhaps, suggest it to see if they are willing,\" he said the next minute, hedging.\n\n\"I already ask him dat.\"\n\n\"Oh, you have! And he would like it\u2014not object, I mean?\" he added, aware of a subtle sense of half-frightened pleasure.\n\n\"Pleased and flattered on the contrary,\" was the reply, as he handed him the glasses to look at Ischia rising blue from the sea.\n\nO'Malley felt as though his decision was somehow an act of self-committal, almost grave. It meant that impulsively he accepted a friendship which concealed in its immense attraction\u2014danger. He had taken the plunge.\n\nThe rush of it broke over him like a wave, setting free a tumult of very deep emotion. He raised the glasses automatically to his eyes, but looking through them he saw not Ischia nor the opening the Captain explained the ship would make, heading that evening for Sicily. He saw quite another picture that drew itself up out of himself\u2014was thrown up, rather, somewhat with violence, as upon a landscape of dream-scenery. The lens of passionate yearning in himself, ever unsatisfied, focused it against a background far, far away, in some faint distance that was neither of space nor time, and might equally have been past as future. Large figures he saw, shadowy yet splendid, that ran free-moving as clouds over mighty hills, vital with the abundant strong life of a younger world\u2026. Yet never quite saw them, never quite overtook them, for their speed and the manner of their motion bewildered the sight\u2026.\n\nMoreover, though they evaded him in terms of physical definition he knew a sense of curious, half-remembered familiarity. Some portion of his hidden self, uncaught, unharnessed by anything in modern life, rose with a passionate rush of joy and made after them\u2014something in him untamed as wind. His mind stood up, as it were, and shouted \"I am coming.\" For he saw himself not far behind, as a man, racing with great leaps to join them\u2026 yet never overtaking, never drawing close enough to see quite clearly. The roar of their tramping shook the very blood in his ears\u2026.\n\nHis decision to accept the strangers had set free in his being something that thus for the first time in his life\u2014escaped\u2026. Symbolically in his mind this Escape had taken picture form\u2026.\n\nThe Captain's voice was asking for the glasses; with a wrench that caused almost actual physical pain he tore himself away, letting this herd of Flying Thoughts sink back into the shadows and disappear. With sharp regret he saw them go\u2014a regret for long, long, far-off things\u2026.\n\nTurning, he placed the field-glasses carefully in that fat open hand stretched out to receive them, and noted as he did so the thick, pink fingers that closed about the strap, the heavy ring of gold, the band of gilt about the sleeve. That wrought gold, those fleshy fingers, the genial gutteral voice saying \"T'anks\" were symbols of an existence tamed and artificial that caged him in again\u2026.\n\nThen he went below and found that the lazy \"drummer\" who talked harvest-machines to puzzled peasants had landed, and in his place an assortment of indiscriminate clothing belonging to the big Russian and his son lay scattered over the upper berth and upon the sofa-bed beneath the port-hole." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "\u2002\"For my own part I find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior consciousness being possible. I doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using the very letter of Fechner's conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved, and from which, when the threshold lowers or the valve opens, information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us.\"\n\n\u2014WILLIAM JAMES, A Pluralistic Universe\n\nAnd it was some hours later, while the ship made for the open sea, that he told Dr. Stahl casually of the new arrangement and saw the change come so suddenly across his face. Stahl stood back from the compass-box whereon they leaned, and putting a hand upon his companion's shoulder, looked a moment into his eyes. With surprise O'Malley noted that the pose of cynical disbelief was gone; in its place was sympathy, interest, kindness. The words he spoke came from his heart.\n\n\"Is that true?\" he asked, as though the news disturbed him.\n\n\"Of course. Why not? Is there anything wrong?\" He felt uneasy. The doctor's manner confirmed the sense that he had done a rash thing. Instantly the barrier between the two crumbled and he lost the first feeling of resentment that his friends should be analyzed. The men thus came together in unhindered sincerity.\n\n\"Only,\" said the doctor thoughtfully, half gravely, \"that\u2014I may have done you a wrong, placed you, that is, in a position of\u2014\" he hesitated an instant,\u2014\"of difficulty. It was I who suggested the change.\"\n\nO'Malley stared at him.\n\n\"I don't understand you quite.\"\n\n\"It is this,\" continued the other, still holding him with his eyes. He said it deliberately. \"I have known you for some time, formed-er\u2014an opinion of your type of mind and being\u2014a very rare and curious one, interesting me deeply\u2014\"\n\n\"I wasn't aware you'd had me under the microscope,\" O'Malley laughed, but restlessly.\n\n\"Though you felt it and resented it\u2014justly, I may say\u2014to the point of sometimes avoiding me\u2014\"\n\n\"As doctor, scientist,\" put in O'Malley, while the other, ignoring the interruption, continued in German:\u2014\n\n\"I always had the secret hope, as 'doctor and scientist,' let us put it then, that I might one day see you in circumstances that should bring out certain latent characteristics I thought I divined in you. I wished to observe you\u2014your psychical being\u2014under the stress of certain temptations, favorable to these characteristics. Our brief voyages together, though they have so kindly ripened our acquaintance into friendship\"\u2014he put his hand again on the other's shoulder smiling, while O'Malley replied with a little nod of agreement\u2014\"have, of course, never provided the opportunity I refer to\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah\u2014!\"\n\n\"Until now!\" the doctor added. \"Until now.\"\n\nPuzzled and interested the Irishman waited for him to go on, but the man of science, who was now a ship's doctor, hesitated. He found it difficult, apparently, to say what was in his thoughts.\n\n\"You refer, of course, though I hardly follow you quite\u2014to our big friends?\" O'Malley helped him.\n\nThe adjective slipped out before he was aware of it. His companion's expression admitted the accuracy of the remark. \"You also see them\u2014big, then?\" he said, quickly taking him up. He was not cross-questioning; out of keen sympathetic interest he asked it.\n\n\"Sometimes, yes,\" the Irishman answered, more astonished. \"Sometimes only\u2014\"\n\n\"Exactly. Bigger than they really are; as though at times they gave out\u2014emanated\u2014something that extended their appearance. Is that it?\"\n\nO'Malley, his confidence wholly won, more surprised, too, than he quite understood, seized Stahl by the arm and drew him toward the rails. They leaned over, watching the sea. A passenger, pacing the decks before dinner, passed close behind them.\n\n\"But, doctor,\" he said in a hushed tone as soon as the steps had died away, \"you are saying things that I thought were half in my imagination only, not true in the ordinary sense quite\u2014your sense, I mean?\"\n\nFor some moments the doctor made no reply. In his eyes a curious steady gaze replaced the usual twinkle. When at length he spoke it was evidently following a train of thought of his own, playing round a subject he seemed half ashamed of and yet desired to state with direct language.\n\n\"A being akin to yourself,\" he said in low tones, \"only developed, enormously developed; a Master in your own peculiar region, and a man whose influence acting upon you at close quarters could not fail to arouse the latent mind-storms\"\u2014he chose the word hesitatingly, as though seeking for a better he could not find on the moment,\u2014\"always brewing in you just below the horizon.\"\n\nHe turned and watched his companion's face keenly. O'Malley was too impressed to feel annoyance.\n\n\"Well\u2014?\" he asked, feeling the adventure closing round him with quite a new sense of reality. \"Well?\" he repeated louder. \"Please go on. I'm not offended, only uncommonly interested. You leave me in a fog, so far. I think you owe me more than hints.\"\n\n\"I do,\" said the other simply. \"About that man is a singular quality too rare for language to have yet coined its precise description: something that is essentially\"\u2014they had lapsed into German now, and he used the German word\u2014\"unheimlich.\"\n\nThe Irishman started. He recognized this for truth. At the same time the old resentment stirred a little in him, creeping into his reply.\n\n\"You have studied him closely then\u2014had him, too, under the microscope?\n\nIn this short time?\"\n\nThis time the answer did not surprise him, however.\n\n\"My friend,\" he heard, while the other turned from him and gazed out over the misty sea, \"I have not been a ship's doctor\u2014always. I am one now only because the leisure and quiet give me the opportunity to finish certain work, recording work. For years I was in the H\u2014\"\u2014he mentioned the German equivalent for the Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re\u2014\"years of research and investigation into the astonishing vagaries of the human mind and spirit\u2014with certain results, followed later privately, that it is now my work to record. And among many cases that might well seem\u2014er\u2014beyond either credence or explanation,\"\u2014he hesitated again slightly\u2014\"I came across one, one in a million, let us admit, that an entire section of my work deals with under the generic term of Urmenschen.\"\n\n\"Primitive men,\" O'Malley snapped him up, translating. Through his growing bewilderment ran also a growing uneasiness shot strangely with delight. Intuitively he divined what was coming.\n\n\"Beings,\" the doctor corrected him, \"not men. The prefix Ur-, moreover, I use in a deeper sense than is usually attached to it as in Urwald, Urwelt, and the like. An Urmensch in the world today must suggest a survival of an almost incredible kind\u2014a kind, too, utterly inadmissible and inexplicable to the materialist perhaps\u2014\"\n\n\"Paganistic?\" interrupted the other sharply, joy and fright rising over him.\n\n\"Older, older by far,\" was the rejoinder, given with a curious hush and a lowering of the voice.\n\nThe suggestion rushed into full possession of O'Malley's mind. There rose in him something that claimed for his companions the sea, the wind, the stars\u2014tumultuous and terrific. But he said nothing. The conception, blown into him thus for the first time at full strength, took all his life into its keeping. No energy was left over for mere words. The doctor, he was aware, was looking at him, the passion of discovery and belief in his eyes. His manner kindled. It was the hidden Stahl emerging.\n\n\"\u2026 a type, let me put it,\" he went on in a voice whose very steadiness thrilled his listener afresh, \"that in its strongest development would experience in the world today the loneliness of a complete and absolute exile. A return to humanity, you see, of some unexpended power of mythological values\u2026.\"\n\n\"Doctor\u2026!\"\n\nThe shudder passed through him and away almost as soon as it came. Again the sea grew splendid, the thunder of the waves held voices calling, and the foam framed shapes and faces, wildly seductive, though fugitive as dreams. The words he had heard moved him profoundly. He remembered how the presence of the stranger had turned the world alive.\n\nHe knew what was coming, too, and gave the lead direct, while yet half afraid to ask the question.\n\n\"So my friend\u2014this big 'Russian'\u2014?\"\n\n\"I have known before, yes, and carefully studied.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "\u2002\"Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will as these transcend mechanical motion?\"\n\n\u2014HERBERT SPENCER, First Principles\n\nThe two men left the rail and walked arm in arm along the deserted deck, speaking in lowered voices.\n\n\"He came first to us, brought by the keeper of an obscure hotel where he was staying, as a case of lapse of memory\u2014loss of memory, I should say, for it was complete. He was unable to say who he was, whence he came, or to whom he belonged. Of his land or people we could learn nothing. His antecedents were an utter blank. Speech he had practically none of his own\u2014nothing but the merest smattering of many tongues, a word here, a word there. Utterance, indeed, of any kind was exceedingly difficult to him. For years, evidently, he had wandered over the world, companionless among men, seeking his own, finding no place where to lay his head. People, it seemed, both men and women, kept him at arm's-length, feeling afraid; the keeper of the little hotel was clearly terrified. This quality he had that I mentioned just now, repelled human beings\u2014even in the Hospital it was noticeable\u2014and placed him in the midst of humanity thus absolutely alone. It is a quality more rare than\"\u2014hesitating, searching for a word\u2014\"purity, one almost extinct today, one that I have never before or since come across in any other being\u2014hardly ever, that is to say,\" he qualified the sentence, glancing significantly at his companion.\n\n\"And the boy?\" O'Malley asked quickly, anxious to avoid any discussion of himself.\n\n\"There was no boy then. He has found him since. He may find others too\u2014possibly!\" The Irishman drew his arm out, edging away imperceptibly. That shiver of joy reached him from the air and sea, perhaps.\n\n\"And two years ago,\" continued Dr. Stahl, as if nothing had happened, \"he was discharged, harmless\"\u2014he lingered a moment on the word, \"if not cured. He was to report to us every six months. He has never done so.\"\n\n\"You think he remembers you?\"\n\n\"No. It is quite clear that he has lapsed back completely again into the\u2014er\u2014state whence he came to us, that unknown world where he passed his youth with others of his kind, but of which he has been able to reveal no single detail to us, nor we to trace the slightest clue.\"\n\nThey stopped beneath the covered portion of the deck, for the mist had now turned to rain. They leaned against the smoking-room outer wall. In O'Malley's mind the thoughts and feelings plunged and reared. Only with difficulty did he control himself.\n\n\"And this man, you think,\" he asked with outward calmness, \"is of\u2014of my kind?\"\n\n\"'Akin,' I said. I suggest\u2014\" But O'Malley cut him short.\n\n\"So that you engineered our sharing a cabin with a view to putting him again\u2014putting us both\u2014under the microscope?\"\n\n\"My scientific interest was very strong,\" Dr. Stahl replied carefully. \"But it is not too late to change. I offer you a bed in my own roomy cabin on the promenade deck. Also, I ask your forgiveness.\"\n\nThe Irishman, large though his imaginative creed was, felt oddly checked, baffled, stupefied by what he had heard. He knew perfectly well what Stahl was driving at, and that revelations of another kind were yet to follow. What bereft him of very definite speech was this new fact slowly awakening in his consciousness which hypnotized him, as it were, with its grandeur. It seemed to portend that his own primitive yearnings, so-called, grew out of far deeper foundations than he had yet dreamed of even. Stahl, should he choose to listen, meant to give him explanation, quasi-scientific explanation. This talk about a survival of \"unexpended mythological values\" carried him off his feet. He knew it was true. Veiled behind that carefully chosen phrase was something more\u2014a truth brilliantly discovered. He knew, too, that it bit at the platform-boards upon which his personality, his sanity, his very life, perhaps, rested\u2014his modern life.\n\n\"I forgive you, Dr. Stahl,\" he heard himself saying with a deceptive calmness of voice as they stood shoulder to shoulder in that dark corner, \"for there is really nothing to forgive. The characteristics of these Urmenschen you describe attract me very greatly. Your words merely give my imagination a letter of introduction to my reason. They burrow among the foundations of my life and being. At least\u2014you have done me no wrong\u2026.\" He knew the words were wild, impulsive, yet he could find no better. Above all things he wished to conceal his rising, grand delight.\n\n\"I thank you,\" Stahl said simply, yet with a certain confusion. \"I\u2014felt I owed you this explanation\u2014er\u2014this confession.\"\n\n\"You wished to warn me?\"\n\n\"I wished to say 'Be careful' rather. I say it now\u2014Be careful! I give you this invitation to share my cabin for the remainder of the voyage, and I urge you to accept it.\" The offer was from the heart, while the scientific interest in the man obviously half hoped for a refusal.\n\n\"You think harm might come to me?\"\n\n\"Not physically. The man is gentle and safe in every way.\"\n\n\"But there is danger\u2014in your opinion?\" insisted the other.\n\n\"There is danger\u2014\"\n\n\"That his influence may make me as himself\u2014an Urmensch?\"\n\n\"That he may\u2014get you,\" was the curious answer, given steadily after a moment's pause.\n\nAgain the words thrilled O'Malley to the core of his delighted, half-frightened soul. \"You really mean that?\" he asked again; \"as 'doctor and scientist,' you mean it?\"\n\nStahl replied with a solemn anxiety in eyes and voice. \"I mean that you have in yourself that 'quality' which makes the proximity of this 'being' dangerous: in a word that he may take you\u2014er\u2014with him.\"\n\n\"Conversion?\"\n\n\"Appropriation.\"\n\nThey moved further up the deck together for some minutes in silence, but the Irishman's feelings, irritated by the man's prolonged evasion, reached a degree of impatience that was almost anger. \"Let us be more definite,\" he exclaimed at length a trifle hotly. \"You mean that I might go insane?\"\n\n\"Not in the ordinary sense,\" came the answer without a sign of annoyance or hesitation; \"but that something might happen to you\u2014something that science could not recognize and medical science could not treat\u2014\"\n\nThen O'Malley interrupted him with the vital question that rushed out before he could consider its wisdom or legitimacy.\n\n\"Then what really is he\u2014this man, this 'being' whom you call a 'survival,' and who makes you fear for my safety. Tell me exactly what he is?\"\n\nThey found themselves just then by the doctor's cabin, and Stahl, pushing the door open, led him in. Taking the sofa for himself, he pointed to an armchair opposite." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "\u2002\"Superstition is outside reason; so is revelation.\" \u2014OLD SAYING\n\nAnd O'Malley understood that he had pressed the doctor to the verge of confessing some belief that he was ashamed to utter or to hold, something forced upon him by his out-of-the-way experience of life to which his scientific training said peremptorily \"No.\" Further, that he watched him keenly all the time, noting the effect his words produced.\n\n\"He is not a human being at all,\" he continued with a queer thin whisper that conveyed a gravity of conviction singularly impressive, \"in the sense in which you and I are accustomed to use the term. His inner being is not shaped, as his outer body, upon quite\u2014human lines. He is a Cosmic Being\u2014a direct expression of cosmic life. A little bit, a fragment, of the Soul of the World, and in that sense a survival\u2014a survival of her youth.\"\n\nThe Irishman, as he listened to these utterly unexpected words, felt something rise within him that threatened to tear him asunder. Whether it was joy or terror, or compounded strangely of the two, he could not tell. It seemed as if he stood upon the edge of hearing something\u2014spoken by a man who was no mere dreamer like himself\u2014that would explain the world, himself, and all his wildest cravings. He both longed and feared to hear it. In his hidden and most secret thoughts, those thoughts he never uttered to another, this deep belief in the Earth as a conscious, sentient, living Being had persisted in spite of all the forces education and modern life had turned against it. It seemed in him an undying instinct, an unmovable conviction, though he hardly dared acknowledge it even to himself.\n\nHe had always \"dreamed\" the Earth alive, a mothering organism to humanity; and himself, via his love of Nature, in some sweet close relation to her that other men had forgotten or ignored. Now, therefore, to hear Stahl talk of Cosmic Beings, fragments of the Soul of the World, and \"survivals of her early life\" was like hearing a great shout of command to his soul to come forth and share it in complete acknowledgment.\n\nHe bit his lips, pinched himself, stared. Then he took the black cigar he was aware was being handed to him, lit it with fingers that trembled absurdly, and smoked as hard as though his sanity depended on his finishing it in a prescribed time. Great clouds rose before his face. But his soul within him came up with a flaming rush of speed, shouting, singing\u2026.\n\nThere was enough ash to knock off into the bronze tray beside him before either said a word. He watched the little operation as closely as though he were aiming a rifle. The ash, he saw, broke firmly. \"This must be a really good cigar,\" he thought to himself, for as yet he had not been conscious of tasting it. The ash-tray, he also saw, was a kind of nymph, her spread drapery forming the receptacle. \"I must get one of those,\" he thought. \"I wonder what they cost.\" Then he puffed violently again. The doctor had risen and was pacing the cabin floor slowly over by the red curtain that concealed the bunk. O'Malley absent-mindedly watched him, and as he did so the words he had heard kept on roaring at the back of his mind.\n\nAnd then, while silence still held the room,\u2014swift, too, as a second although it takes time to write\u2014flashed through him a memory of Fechner, the German philosopher who held that the Universe was everywhere consciously alive, and that the Earth was the body of a living Entity, and that the World-Soul or Cosmic Consciousness is something more than a picturesque dream of the ancients\u2026.\n\nThe doctor came to anchor again on the sofa opposite. To his great relief he was the first to break the silence, for O'Malley simply did not know how or where to begin.\n\n\"We know today\u2014you certainly know for I've read it accurately described in your books\u2014that the human personality can extend itself under certain conditions called abnormal. It can project portions of itself, show itself even at a distance, operate away from the central covering body. In exactly similar fashion may the Being of the Earth have projected portions of herself in the past. Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival\u2026 a survival of a hugely remote period when her Consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity\u2026 forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds\u2026.\"\n\nAnd then, suddenly, as though he had been deliberately giving his imagination rein yet now regretted it, his voice altered, his manner assumed a shade of something colder. He shifted the key, as though to another aspect of his belief. The man was talking swiftly of his experiences in the big and private hospitals. He was describing the very belief to which he had first found himself driven\u2014the belief that had opened the door to so much more. So far as O'Malley could follow it in his curiously excited condition of mind, it was little more or less than a belief he himself had often played lovingly with\u2014the theory that a man has a fluid or etheric counterpart of himself which is obedient to strong desire and can, under certain conditions, be detached\u2014projected in a shape dictated by that desire.\n\nHe only realized this fully later perhaps, for the doctor used a phraseology of his own. Stahl was telling calmly how he had been driven to some such belief by the facts that had come under his notice both in the asylums and in his private practice.\n\n\"\u2026That in the amazingly complex personality of a human being,\" he went on, \"there does exist some vital constituent, a part of consciousness, that can leave the body for a short time without involving death; that it is something occasionally visible to others; something malleable by thought and desire\u2014especially by intense and prolonged yearning; and that it can even bring relief to its owner by satisfying in some subjective fashion the very yearnings that drew it forth.\"\n\n\"Doctor! You mean the 'astral'?\"\n\n\"There is no name I know of. I can give it none. I mean in other words that it can create the conditions for such satisfaction\u2014dream-like, perhaps, yet intense and seemingly very real at the time. Great emotion, for instance, drives it forth, explaining thus appearances at a distance, and a hundred other phenomena that my investigations of abnormal personality have forced me to recognize as true. And nostalgia often is the means of egress, the channel along which all the inner forces and desires of the heart stream elsewhere toward their fulfillment in some person, place, or dream.\"\n\nStahl was giving himself his head, talking freely of beliefs that rarely found utterance. Clearly it was a relief to him to do so\u2014to let himself be carried away. There was, after all, the poet in him side by side with the observer and analyst, and the fundamental contradiction in his character stood most interestingly revealed. O'Malley listened, half in a dream, wondering what this had to do with the Cosmic Life just mentioned.\n\n\"Moreover, the appearance, the aspect of this etheric Double, molded thus by thought, longing, and desire, corresponds to such thought, longing, and desire. Its shape, when visible shape is assumed, may be various\u2014very various. The form might conceivably be felt, discerned clairvoyantly as an emanation rather than actually seen,\" he continued.\n\nThen he added, looking closely at his companion, \"and in your own case this Double\u2014it has always seemed to me\u2014may be peculiarly easy of detachment from the rest of you.\"\n\n\"I certainly create my own world and slip into it\u2014to some extent,\" murmured the Irishman, absorbingly interested; \"\u2014reverie and so forth; partially, at any rate.\"\n\n\"'Partially,' yes, in your reveries of waking consciousness,\" Stahl took him up, \"but in sleep\u2014in the trance consciousness\u2014completely! And therein lies your danger,\" he added gravely; \"for to pass out completely in waking consciousness, is the next step\u2014an easy one; and it constitutes, not so much a disorder of your being, as a readjustment, but a readjustment difficult of sane control.\" He paused again. \"You pass out while fully awake\u2014a waking delusion. It is usually labeled\u2014though in my opinion wrongly so\u2014insanity.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of that,\" O'Malley laughed, almost nettled. \"I can manage myself all right\u2014have done so far, at any rate.\"\n\nIt was curious how the r\u00f4les had shifted. O'Malley it was now who checked and criticized.\n\n\"I suggest caution,\" was the reply, made earnestly. \"I suggest caution.\"\n\n\"I should keep your warnings for mediums, clairvoyants, and the like,\" said the other tartly. He was half amazed, half alarmed even while he said it. It was the personal application that annoyed him. \"They are rather apt to go off their heads, I believe.\"\n\nDr. Stahl rose and stood before him as though the words had given him a cue he wanted. \"From that very medium-class,\" he said, \"my most suggestive 'cases' have come, though not for one moment do I think of including you with them. Yet these very 'cases' have been due one and all to the same cause\u2014the singular disorder I have just mentioned.\"\n\nThey stared at one another a moment in silence. Stahl, whether O'Malley liked it or no, was impressive. He gazed at the little figure in front of him, the ragged untidy beard, the light shining on the bald skull, wondering what was coming next and what all this bewildering confession of unorthodox belief was leading up to. He longed to hear more about that hinted Cosmic Life\u2026 and how yearning might lead to its realization.\n\n\"For any phenomena of the s\u00e9ance-room that may be genuine,\" he heard him saying, \"are produced by this fluid, detachable portion of the personality, the very thing we have been speaking about. They are projections of the personality\u2014automatic projections of the consciousness.\"\n\nAnd then, like a clap of thunder upon his bewildered mind, came this man's amazing ultimatum, linking together all the points touched upon and bringing them to a head. He repeated it emphatically.\n\n\"And in similar fashion,\" concluded the calm, dispassionate voice beside him, \"there have been projections of the Earth's great consciousness\u2014direct expressions of her cosmic life\u2014Cosmic Beings. And of these distant and primitive manifestations, it is conceivable that one or two may still\u2014here and there in places humanity has never stained\u2014actually survive. This man is one of them.\"\n\nHe turned on the two electric lights behind him with an admirable air of finality. The extraordinary talk was at an end. He moved about the cabin, putting chairs straight and toying with the papers on his desk. Occasionally he threw a swift and searching glance at his companion, like a man who wished to note the effect of an attack.\n\nFor, indeed, this was the impression that his listener retained above all else. This flood of wild, unorthodox, speculative ideas had been poured upon him helter-skelter with a purpose. And the abruptness of the climax was cleverly planned to induce impulsive, hot confession.\n\nBut O'Malley found no words. He sat there in his armchair, passing his fingers through his tumbled hair. His inner turmoil was too much for speech or questions\u2026 and presently, when the gong for dinner rang noisily outside the cabin door, he rose abruptly and went out without a single word. Stahl turned to see him go. He merely nodded with a little smile.\n\nBut he did not go to his stateroom. He walked the deck alone for a time, and when he reached the dining room, Stahl, he saw, had already come and gone. Halfway down the table, diagonally across, the face of the big Russian looked up occasionally at him and smiled, and every time he did so the Irishman felt a sense of mingled alarm and wonder greater than anything he had ever known in his life before. One of the great doors of life again had opened. The barriers of his heart broke away. He was no longer caged and manacled within the prison of a puny individuality. The world that so distressed him faded. The people in it were dolls. The fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the tourists and the rest were mere automatic puppets, all made to scale\u2014petty scale, amazingly dull, all exactly alike\u2014tiny, unreal, half alive.\n\nThe ship, meanwhile, he reflected with a joy that was passion, was being borne over the blue sea, and this sea lay spread upon the curved breast of the round and spinning earth. He, too, and the big Russian lay upon her breast, held close by gravity so-called, caught closer still, though, by something else besides. And his longings increased with his understanding. Stahl, wittingly or unwittingly, had given them an immense push forwards." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "\u2002\"In scientific terms one can say: Consciousness is everywhere; it is awake when and wherever the bodily energy underlying the spiritual exceeds that degree of strength which we call the threshold. According to this, consciousness can be localized in time and space.\" \u2014FECHNER, Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode\n\nThe offer of the cabin, meanwhile, remained open. In the solitude that O'Malley found necessary that evening he toyed with it, though knowing that he would never really accept.\n\nLike a true Celt his imagination took the main body of Stahl's words and ensouled them with his own vivid temperament. There stirred in him this nameless and disquieting joy that wrought for itself a Body from material just beyond his thoughts\u2014that region of enormous experience that ever fringes the consciousness of imaginative men. He took the picture at its face value, took it inside with his own thoughts, delighted in it, raised it, of course, very soon to a still higher scale. If he criticized at all it was with phrases like \"The man's a poet after all! Why, he's got creative imagination!\" To find his own intuitions endorsed, even half explained, by a mind of opposite type was a new experience. It emphasized amazingly the reality of that inner world he lived in.\n\nThis explanation of the big Russian's effect upon himself was terrific, and that a \"doctor\" should have conceived it, glorious. That some portion of a man's spirit might assume the shape of his thoughts and project itself visibly seemed likely enough. Indeed, to him, it seemed already a \"fact,\" and his temperament did not linger over it. But that other suggestion fairly savaged him with its strange grandeur. He played lovingly with it.\n\nThat the Earth was a living being was a conception divine in size as in simplicity, and that the Gods and mythological figures had been projections of her consciousness\u2014this thought ran with a magnificent new thunder about his mind. It was overwhelming, beautiful as Heaven and as gracious. He saw the ancient shapes of myth and legend still alive in some gorgeous garden of the primal world, a corner too remote for humanity to have yet stained it with their trail of uglier life. He understood in quite a new way, at last, those deep primitive longings that hitherto had vainly craved their full acknowledgment. It meant that he lay so close to the Earth that he felt her pulses as his own. The idea stormed his belief.\n\nIt was the Soul of the Earth herself that all these years had been calling to him.\n\nAnd while he let his imagination play with the soaring beauty of the idea, he remembered certain odd little facts. He marshaled them before him in a row and questioned them: The picture he had seen with the Captain's glasses\u2014those speeding shapes of beauty; the new aspect of a living Nature that the Russian's presence stirred in him; the man's broken words as they had leaned above the sea in the dusk; the curious passion that leaped to his eyes when certain chance words had touched him at the dinner-table. And, lastly, the singular impression of giant bulk he produced sometimes upon the mind, almost as though a portion of him\u2014this detachable portion molded by the quality of his spirit as he felt himself to be\u2014emerged visibly to cause it.\n\nVaguely, in this way, O'Malley divined how inevitable was the apparent isolation of these two, and why others instinctively avoided them. They seemed by themselves in an enclosure where the parent lumberingly, and the boy defiantly, disported themselves with a kind of lonely majesty that forbade approach.\n\nAnd it was later that same night, as the steamer approached the Lipari Islands, that the drive forward he had received from the doctor's words was increased by a succession of singular occurrences. At the same time, Stahl's deliberate and as he deemed it unjustifiable interference, helped him to make up his mind decisively on certain other points.\n\nThe first \"occurrence\" was of the same order as the \"bigness\"\u2014 extraordinarily difficult, that is, to confirm by actual measurement.\n\nIt was ten o'clock, Stahl still apparently in his cabin by himself, and most of the passengers below at an impromptu concert, when the Irishman, coming down from his long solitude, caught sight of the Russian and his boy moving about the dark after-deck with a speed and vigor that instantly arrested his attention. The suggestion of size, and of rapidity of movement, had never been more marked. It was as though a cloud of the summer darkness moved beside them.\n\nThen, going cautiously nearer, he saw that they were neither walking quickly, nor running, as he had first supposed, but\u2014to his amazement\u2014were standing side by side upon the deck\u2014stock still. The appearance of motion, however, was not entirely a delusion, for he next saw that, while standing there steady as the mast and life-boats behind them, something emanated shadow-like from both their persons and seemed to hover and play about them\u2014something that was only approximately of their own outer shapes, and very considerably larger. Now it veiled them, now left them clear. He thought of smoke-clouds moving to and fro about dark statues.\n\nSo far as he could focus his sight upon them, these \"shadows,\" without any light to cast them, moved in distorted guise there on the deck with a motion that was somehow rhythmical\u2014a great movement as of dance or gambol.\n\nAs with the appearance of \"bigness,\" he perceived it first out of the corner of his eye. When he looked again he saw only two dark figures, motionless.\n\nHe experienced the sensation a man sometimes knows on entering a deserted chamber in the nighttime, and is aware that the things in it have just that instant\u2014stopped. His arrival puts abrupt end to some busy activity they were engaged in, which begins again the moment he goes. Chairs, tables, cupboards, the very spots and patterns of the wall have just flown back to their usual places whence they watch impatiently for his departure\u2014with the candle.\n\nThis time, on a deck instead of in a room, O'Malley with his candle had surprised them in the act: people, moreover, not furniture. And this shadowy gambol, this silent Dance of the Emanations, immense yet graceful, made him think of Winds flying, visible and uncloaked, somewhere across long hills, or of Clouds passing to a stately, elemental measure over the blue dancing-halls of an open sky. His imagery was confused and gigantic, yet very splendid. Again he recalled the pictured shapes seen with his mind's eye through the Captain's glasses. And as he watched, he felt in himself what he called \"the wild, tearing instinct to run and join them,\" more even\u2014that by rights he ought to have been there from the beginning\u2014dancing with them\u2014indulging a natural and instinctive and rhythmical movement that he had somehow forgotten.\n\nThe passion in him was very strong, very urgent, it seems, for he took a step forward, a call of some kind rose in his throat, and in another second he would have been similarly cavorting upon the deck, when he felt his arm clutched suddenly with vigor from behind. Some one seized him and held him back. A German voice spoke with a guttural whisper in his ear.\n\nDr. Stahl, crouching and visibly excited, drew him forward a little. \"Hold up!\" he heard whispered\u2014for their India rubber soles slithered on the wet decks. \"We shall see from here, eh? See something at last?\" He still whispered. O'Malley's sudden anger died down. He could not give vent to it without making noise, for one thing, and above all else he wished to\u2014see. He merely felt a vague wonder how long Stahl had been watching.\n\nThey crouched behind the lee of a boat. The outline of the ship rose, distinctly visible against the starry sky, masts, spars, and cordage. A faint gleam came through the glass below the compass-box. The wheel and the heaps of coiled rope beyond rose and fell with the motion of the vessel, now against the stars, now black against the phosphorescent foam that trailed along the sea like shining lace. But the human figures, he next saw, were now doing nothing, not even pacing the deck; they were no longer of unusual size either. Quietly leaning over the rail, father and son side by side, they were guiltless of anything more uncommon than gazing into the sea. Like the furniture, they had just\u2014stopped!\n\nDr. Stahl and his companion waited motionless for several minutes in silence. There was no sound but the dull thunder of the screws, and a faint windy whistle the ship's speed made in the rigging. The passengers were all below. Then, suddenly, a burst of music came up as some one opened a saloon port-hole and as quickly closed it again\u2014a tenor voice singing to the piano some trivial modern song with a trashy sentimental lilt. It was\u2014in this setting of sea and sky\u2014painful; O'Malley caught himself thinking of a barrel-organ in a Greek temple.\n\nThe same instant father and son, as though startled, moved slowly away down the deck into the further darkness, and Dr. Stahl tightened his grip of the Irishman's arm with a force that almost made him cry out. A gleam of light from the opened port-hole had fallen about them before they moved. Quite clearly it revealed them bending busily over, heads close together, necks and shoulders thrust forward and down a little.\n\n\"Look, by God!\" whispered Stahl hoarsely as they moved off. \"There's a third!\"\n\nHe pointed. Where the two had been standing something, indeed, still remained. Concealed hitherto by their bulk, this other figure had been left. They saw its large, dim outline. It moved. Apparently it began to climb over the rails, or to move in some way just outside them, hanging half above the sea. There was a free, swaying movement about it, not ungainly so much as big\u2014very big.\n\n\"Now, quick!\" whispered the doctor excited, in English; \"this time I find out, sure!\"\n\nHe made a violent movement forward, a pocket electric lamp in his hand, then turned angrily, furiously, to find that O'Malley held him fast. There was a most unseemly struggle\u2014for a minute, and it was caused by the younger man's sudden passionate instinct to protect his own from discovery, if not from actual capture and destruction.\n\nStahl fought in vain, being easily overmatched; he swore vehement German oaths under his breath; and the pocket-lamp, of course unlighted, fell and rattled over the deck, sliding with the gentle roll of the steamer to leeward. But O'Malley's eyes, even while he struggled, never for one instant left the spot where the figure and the \"movement\" had been; and it seemed to him that when the bulwarks dipped against the dark of the sea, the moving thing completed its efforts and passed into the waves with a swift leap. When the vessel righted herself again the outline of the rail was clear.\n\nDr. Stahl, he then saw, had picked up the lamp and was bending over some mark upon the deck, examining a wide splash of wet upon which he directed the electric flash. The sense of revived antagonism between the men for the moment was strong, too strong for speech. O'Malley feeling half ashamed, yet realized that his action had been instinctive, and that another time he would do just the same. He would fight to the death any too close inspection, since such inspection included also now\u2014himself.\n\nThe doctor presently looked up. His eyes shone keenly in the gleam of the lamp, but he was no longer agitated.\n\n\"There is too much water,\" he said calmly, as though diagnosing a case; \"too much to permit of definite traces.\" He glanced round, flashing the beam about the decks. The other two had disappeared. They were alone. \"It was outside the rail all the time, you see,\" he added, \"and never quite reached the decks.\" He stooped down and examined the splash once more. It looked as though a wave had topped the scuppers and left a running line of foam and water. \"Nothing to indicate its exact nature,\" he said in a whisper that conveyed something between uneasiness and awe, again turning the light sharply in every direction and peering about him. \"It came to them\u2014er\u2014from the sea, though; it came from the sea right enough. That, at least, is positive.\" And in his manner was perhaps just a touch to indicate relief.\n\n\"And it returned into the sea,\" exclaimed O'Malley triumphantly. It was as though he related his own escape.\n\nThe two men were now standing upright, facing one another. Dr. Stahl, betraying no sign of resentment, looked him steadily in the eye. He put the lamp back into his pocket. When he spoke at length in the darkness, the words were not precisely what the Irishman had expected. Under them his own vexation and excitement faded instantly. He felt almost sheepish when he remembered his violence.\n\n\"I forgive your behavior, of course,\" Stahl said, \"for it is consistent\u2014splendidly consistent\u2014with my theory of you; and of value, therefore. I only now urge you again\"\u2014he moved closer, speaking almost solemnly\u2014\"to accept the offer of a berth in my cabin. Take it, my friend, take it\u2014tonight.\"\n\n\"Because you wish to watch me at close quarters.\"\n\n\"No,\" was the reply, and there was sympathy in the voice, \"but because you are in danger\u2014especially in sleep.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause before O'Malley said anything.\n\n\"It is kind of you, Dr. Stahl, very kind,\" he answered slowly, and this time with grave politeness; \"but I am not afraid, and I see no reason to make the change. And as it's now late,\" he added somewhat abruptly, almost as though he feared he might be persuaded to alter his mind, \"I will say good-night and turn in\u2014if you will forgive me\u2014at once.\"\n\nDr. Stahl said no further word. He watched him, the other was aware, as he moved down the deck toward the saloon staircase, and then turned once more with his lamp to stoop over the splashed portion of the boards. He examined the place apparently for a long time.\n\nBut O'Malley, as he went slowly down the hot and stuffy stairs, realized with a wild and rushing tumult of joy that the \"third\" he had seen was of a splendor surpassing the little figures of men, and that something deep within his own soul was most gloriously akin with it. A link with the Universe had been subconsciously established, tightened up, adjusted. From all this living Nature breathing about him in the night, a message had reached the strangers and himself\u2014a message shaped in beauty and in power. Nature had become at last aware of his presence close against her ancient face. Henceforth would every sight of Beauty take him direct to the place where Beauty comes from. No middleman, no Art was necessary. The gates were opening. Already he had caught a glimpse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "In the stateroom he found, without surprise somehow, that his new companions had already retired for the night. The curtain of the upper berth was drawn, and on the sofa-bed below the opened port-hole the boy already slept. Standing a moment in the little room with these two close, he felt that he had come into a new existence almost. Deep within him this sense of new life thrilled and glowed. He was shaking a little all over, not with the mere tremor of excitement, however, but with the tide of a vast and rising exultation he could scarce contain. For his normal self was too small to hold it. It demanded expansion, and the expansion it claimed had already begun. The boundaries of his personality were enormously extending.\n\nIn words this change escaped him wholly. He only knew that something in him of an old unrest lay down at length and slept. Less acute grew those pangs of starvation his life had ever felt\u2014the ache of that inappeasable hunger for the beauty and innocence of some primal state before thick human crowds had stained the world with all their strife and clamor. The glory of it burned white within him.\n\nAnd the way he described it to himself was significant of its true nature. For it vans the analogy of childhood. The passion of a boy's longing swept over him. He knew again the feelings of those early days when\u2014\n\nA boy's will is the wind's will,\n\nAnd the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,\n\n\u2014when all the world smells sweet and golden as a summer's day, and a village street is endless as the sky\u2026.\n\nThis it was, raised to its highest power, that dropped a hint of explanation into that queer heart of his wherein had ever burned the strange desire for primitive existence. It was the Call, though, not of his own youth alone, but of the youth of the world. A mood of the Earth's consciousness\u2014some giant expression of her cosmic emotion\u2014caught him. And it was the big Russian who acted as channel and interpreter.\n\nBefore getting into bed, he drew aside the little red curtain that screened his companion, and peered cautiously through the narrow slit. The big occupant of the bunk also slept, his mane-like hair spread about him over the pillow, and on his great, placid face a look of peace that seemed to deepen with every day the steamer neared her destination. O'Malley gazed for a full minute and more. Then the sleeper felt the gaze, for suddenly the eyelids quivered, moved, and lifted. The large brown eyes peered straight into his own. The Irishman, unable to turn away in time, stood fixed and staring in return. The gentleness and power of the look passed straight down into his heart, filled him to the brim with things their owner knew, and confirmed that appeasement of his own hunger, already begun.\n\n\"I tried\u2014to prevent the\u2014interference,\" he stammered in a low voice.\n\n\"I held him back. You saw me?\"\n\nA huge hand stretched forth from the bunk to stop him. Impulsively he seized it with both his own. At the first contact he started\u2014a little frightened. It felt so wonderful, so mighty. Thus might a gust of wind or a billow of the sea have thrust against him.\n\n\"A messenger\u2014came,\" said the man with that laborious slow utterance, and deep as thunder, \"from\u2014the\u2014sea.\"\n\n\"From\u2014the\u2014sea, yes,\" repeated O'Malley beneath his breath, yet conscious rather that he wanted to shout and sing it. He saw the big man smile. His own small hands were crushed in the grasp of power. \"I\u2014understand,\" he added in a whisper. He found himself speaking with a similar clogged utterance. Somehow, it seemed, the language they ought to have used was either forgotten or unborn. Yet whereas his friend was inarticulate perhaps, he himself was\u2014dumb. These little modern words were all wrong and inadequate. Modern speech could only deal with modern smaller things.\n\nThe giant half rose in his bed, as though at first to leap forward and away from it. He tightened an instant the grasp upon his companion's hands, then suddenly released them and pointed across the cabin. That smile of happiness spread upon his face. O'Malley turned. There the boy lay, deeply slumbering, the clothes flung back so that the air from the port-hole played over the bare neck and chest; upon his face, too, shone the look of peace and rest his father wore, the hunted expression all gone, as though the spirit had escaped in sleep. The parent pointed, first to the boy, then to himself, then to this new friend standing beside his bed. The gesture including the three of them was of singular authority\u2014invitation, welcome, and command lay in it. More\u2014in some incomprehensible way it was majestic. O'Malley's thought flashed upon him the limb of some great oak tree, swaying in the wind.\n\nNext, placing a finger on his lips, his eyes once more swept O'Malley and the boy, and he turned again into the little bunk that so difficultly held him, and lay back. The hair flowed down and mingled with the beard, over pillow and neck, almost to the shoulders. And something that was enormous and magnificent lay back with him, carrying with it again that sudden atmosphere of greater bulk. With a deep sound in his throat that was certainly no actual word and yet more expressive than any speech, he turned hugely over among the little, scanty sheets, drew the curtain again before his face, and returned into the world of\u2014sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "\u2002\"It may happen that the earthly body falls asleep in one direction deeply enough to allow it in others to awaken far beyond its usual limits, and yet not so deeply and completely as to awaken no more. Or, to the subjective vision there comes a flash so unusually vivid as to bring to the earthly sense an impression rising above the threshold from an otherwise inaccessible distance. Here begin the wonders of clairvoyance, of presentiments, and premonitions in dreams;\u2014pure fables, if the future body and the future life are fables; otherwise signs of the one and predictions of the other; but what has signs exists, and what has prophecies will come.\" \u2014FECHNER, Buchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode\n\nBut O'Malley rolled into his own berth below without undressing, sleep far from his eyes. He had heard the Gates of ivory and horn swing softly upon their opening hinges, and the glimpse he caught of the garden beyond made any question of slumber impossible. Again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind flying over the long hills, while the name that should describe them ran, hauntingly splendid, along the mysterious passages of his being, though never coming quite to the surface for capture.\n\nPerhaps, too, he was glad that the revelation was only partial. The size of the vision thus invoked awed him a little, so that he lay there half wondering at the complete surrender he had made to this guidance of another soul.\n\nStahl's warnings ran far away and laughed. The idea even came to him that Stahl was playing with him: that his portentous words had been carefully chosen for their heightening effect upon his own imagination so that the doctor might study an uncommon and extreme \"case.\" The notion passed through him merely, without lingering.\n\nIn any event it was idle to put the brakes on now. He was internally committed and must go wherever it might lead. And the thought rejoiced him. He had climbed upon a pendulum that swung into an immense past; but its return swing would bring him safely back. It was rushing now into that nameless place of freedom that the primitive portion of his being had hitherto sought in vain, and a fundamental, starved craving of his life would know satisfaction at last. Already life had grown all glorious without. It was not steel engines but a speeding sense of beauty that drove the ship over the sea with feet of winged blue darkness. The stars fled with them across the sky, dropping golden leashes to draw him faster and faster forwards\u2014yet within\u2014to the dim days when this old world yet was young. He took his fire of youth and spread it, as it were, all over life till it covered the entire world, far, far away. Then he stepped back into it, and the world herself, he found, stepped with him.\n\nHe lay listening to the noises of the ship, the thump and bumble of the engines, the distant droning of the screws under water. From time to time stewards moved down the corridor outside, and the footsteps of some late passenger still paced the decks overhead. He heard voices, too, and occasionally the clattering of doors. Once or twice he fancied some one moved stealthily to the cabin door and lingered there, but the matter never drew him to investigate, for the sound each time resolved itself naturally into the music of the ship's noises.\n\nAnd everything, meanwhile, heard or thought, fed the central concern upon which his mind was busy. These superficial sounds, for instance, had nothing to do with the real business of the ship; that lay below with the buried engines and the invisible screws that worked like demons to bring her into port. And with himself and his slumbering companions the case was similar. Their respective power-stations, working in the subconscious, had urged them toward one another inevitably. How long, he wondered, had the spirit of that lonely, alien \"being\" flashed messages into the void that reached no receiving-station tuned to their acceptance? Their accumulated power was great, the currents they generated immense. He knew. For had they not charged full into himself the instant he came on board, bringing an intimacy that was immediate and full-fledged?\n\nThe untamed longings that always tore him when he felt the great winds, moved through forests, or found himself in desolate places, were at last on the high road to satisfaction\u2014to some \"state\" where all that they represented would be explained and fulfilled. And whether such \"state\" should prove to be upon the solid surface of the earth, objective; or in the fluid regions of his inner being, subjective\u2014was of no account whatever. It would be true. The great figure that filled the berth above him, now deeply slumbering, had in him subterraneans that gave access not only to Greece, but far beyond that haunted land, to a state of existence symbolized in the legends of the early world by Eden and the Golden Age\u2026.\n\n\"You are in danger,\" that wise old speculative doctor had whispered, \"and especially in sleep!\" But he did not sleep. He lay there thinking, thinking, thinking, a rising exaltation of desire paving busily the path along which eventually he might escape.\n\nAs the night advanced and the lesser noises retired, leaving only the deep sound of the steamer talking to the sea, he became aware, too, that a change, at first imperceptibly, then swiftly, was stealing over the cabin. It came with a riot of silent Beauty. At a loss to describe it with precision, he nevertheless divined that it proceeded from the sleeping figure overhead and in a lesser pleasure, too, from the boy upon the sofa opposite. It emanated from these two, he felt, in proportion as their bodies passed into deeper and deeper slumber, as though what occurred sometimes upon the decks by an act of direct volition, took place now automatically and with a fuller measure of release. Their spirits, free of that other world in sleep, were alert and potently discharging. Unconsciously, their vital, underlying essence escaped into activity.\n\nGrowing about his own person, next, it softly folded him in, casing his inner being with glory and this crowding sense of beauty. This increased manifestation of psychic activity reached down into the very core of himself, like invisible fingers playing upon an instrument. Notes\u2014powers\u2014in his soul, hitherto silent because none had known how to sound them, rose singing to the surface. For it seemed at length that forms of some intenser life, busily operating, moved to and fro within the painted white walls of that little cabin, working subtly to bring about a transformation of himself. A singular change was fast and cleverly at work in his own being. It was, he puts it, a silent and irresistible Evocation.\n\nNo one of his senses was directly affected; certainly he neither saw, felt, nor heard anything in the usual acceptance of the terms; but any instant surely, it seemed that all his senses must awake and report to the mind things that were splendid beyond the common order. In the crudest aspect of it, he felt as though he extended and grew large\u2014that he dreaded to see himself in the mirror lest he might witness an external appearance of bigness which corresponded to this interior expansion.\n\nFor a long time he lay unresisting, letting the currents of this subjective tempest play through and round him. Entrancing sensations of beauty and rapture came with it. The outer world seemed remote and trivial, the passengers unreal\u2014the priest, the voluble merchant, the jovial Captain, all spun like dead things at the periphery of life; whereas he was moving toward the Center. Stahl\u2014! the thought of Dr. Stahl, alone intruded with a certain unwelcome air of hindrance, almost as though he sought to end it, or call a halt. But Stahl, too, himself presently spun off like a leaf before the rising wind\u2026\n\nAnd then it was that an external sense was tapped, and he did hear something. From the berth overhead came a faint sound that made his heart stand still, though not with common fear. He listened intently. The blood tearing through his ears at first concealed its actual nature. It was far, far away; then came closer, as a waft of wind brings near and carries off again a sound of bells in mountains. It fled over vales and hills, to return a moment after with suddenness\u2014a little louder, a little nearer. And with it came an increase of this sense of beauty that stretched his heart, as it were, to some deep ancient scale of joy once known, but long forgotten\u2026\n\nAcross the cabin, the boy moved uneasily in his sleep.\n\n\"Oh, that I could be with him where he now is!\" he cried, \"in that place of eternal youth and eternal companionship!\" The cry was instinctive utterly; his whole being, condensed in the single yearning, pressed through it\u2014drove behind it. The place, the companionship, the youth\u2014all, he knew, would prove in some strange way enormous, vast, ultimately satisfying forever and ever, far out of this little modern world that imprisoned him\u2026\n\nAgain, most unwelcome and unexplained, the face of Stahl flashed suddenly before him to hinder and interrupt. He banished it with an effort, for it brought a smaller comprehension that somehow involved\u2014fear.\n\n\"Curse the man!\" flamed in anger across his world of beauty, and the violence of the contrast broke something in his mind like a globe of colored glass that had focused the exquisiteness of the vision\u2026. The sound continued as before, but its power of evocation lessened. The thought of Stahl\u2014Stahl in his denying aspect\u2014dimmed it.\n\nGlancing up at the frosted electric light, O'Malley felt vaguely that if he turned it out he would somehow yet see better, hear better, understand more; and it was this practical consideration, introduced indirectly by the thought of Stahl, that made him realize now for the first time that he actually and definitely was\u2014afraid. For, to leave his bunk with its comparative, protective dark, and step into the middle of a cabin he knew to be alive with a seethe of invisible charging forces, made him realize that distinct effort was necessary\u2014effort of will. If he yielded he would be caught up and away, swept from his known moorings, borne through high space out of himself. And Stahl with his cowardly warnings and belittlements set fear, thus, in the place of free acceptance. Otherwise he might even have come to these long blue hills where danced and raced the giant shapes of cloud, singing while\u2026.\n\n\"Singing!\" Ah! There was the clue! The sound he heard was singing\u2014faint, low singing; close beside him too. It was the big man, singing softly in his sleep.\n\nThis ordinary explanation of the \"wonder-sound\" brought him down to earth, and so to a more normal feeling of security again. He stepped cautiously from the bed, careful not to let the rings rattle on the rod of brass, and slowly raised himself upright. And then, through a slit of the curtain, he\u2014saw. The lips of the big sleeper moved gently, the beard rising and falling very slightly with them, and this murmur that he had thought so far away, came out and sang deliriously and faint before his very face. It most curiously\u2014flowed. Easily, naturally, almost automatically, it poured softly forth, and the Irishman at once understood why he had first mistaken it for an echo of wind from distant hills. The imagery was entirely accurate. For it was precisely the singing cry that wind makes in a keyhole, in a chimney, or passing idly over the sweep of grassy hills. Exactly thus had he often listened to it swishing through the crannies of high rocks, tuneless yet searching. In it, too, there lay some accent of a secret, dim sublimity, deeper far than any other human sound could touch. The terror of a great freedom caught him, a freedom most awfully remote from the smaller personal existence he knew Today\u2026 for it suggested, with awe and wonder, the kind of primitive utterance that was before speech or the development of language; when emotions were still too vague and mighty to be caught by little words, but when beings, close to the heart of their great Mother, expressed the feelings, enormous and uncomplex, of the greater life they shared as portions of her\u2014projections of the Earth herself.\n\nWith a crash in his brain, O'Malley stopped. These thoughts, he suddenly realized, were not his own. An attack of unwonted sensations stung and scattered his mind with a rush of giant splendor that threatened to overwhelm him. He was in the very act of being carried away; his sense of personal identity menaced; surrender well-nigh already complete.\n\nAnother moment, especially if those eyes opened and caught him, and he would be beyond recall in the region of these other two. The narrow space of that little cabin was charged already to the brim, filled with some overpowering loveliness of wild and simple things, the beauty of stars and winds and flowers, the terror of seas and mountains; strange radiant forms of gods and heroes, nymphs, fauns and satyrs; the fierce sunshine of some Golden Age unspoiled, of a stainless region now long forgotten and denied\u2014that world of splendor his heart had ever craved in vain, and beside which the life of Today faded to a wretched dream.\n\nIt was the Urwelt calling\u2026.\n\nWith a violent internal effort, he tore his gaze from those eyelids that fortunately opened not. At the same moment, though he did not hear them, steps came close in the corridor, and there was a rattling of the knob. Behind him, a movement from the berth below the port-hole warned him that he was but just in time. The Vision he was afraid as yet to acknowledge drew with such awful speed toward the climax.\n\nQuickly he turned away, lifted the hook of the cabin door, and passed into the passage, strangely faint. A great commotion followed him out: father and son both, it seemed, suddenly upon their feet. And at the same time the sound of \"singing\" rolled into the body of a great hushed chorus, as it were of galloping winds that filled big valleys far away with a gust of splendor, faintly roaring in some incredible distance where no cities were, nor habitations of men; with a freedom, too, that was majestic and sublime. Oh! the terrific gait of that life in an open world!\u2014Golden to the winds!\u2014uncrowded!\u2014The cosmic life\u2014!\n\nO'Malley shivered as he heard. For an instant, the true grain of his inner life, picked out in flame and silver, flashed clear. Almost\u2014he knew himself caught back.\n\nAnd there, in the dimly-lighted corridor, against the paneling of the cabin wall, crouched Dr. Stahl\u2014listening. The pain of the contrast was vivid beyond words. It seemed as if he had passed from the thunder of organs to hear the rattling of tin cans. Instantly he understood the force that all along had held him back: the positive, denying aspect of this man's mind\u2014afraid.\n\n\"You!\" he exclaimed in a high whisper. \"What are you doing here?\" He hardly remembers what he said. The doctor straightened up and came on tiptoe to his side. He moved hurriedly.\n\n\"Come away,\" he said vehemently under his breath. \"Come with me to my cabin\u2014to the decks\u2014anywhere away from this\u2014before it's too late.\"\n\nAnd the Irishman then realized that his face was white and that his voice shook. The hand that gripped him by the arm shook too.\n\nThey went quickly along the deserted corridor and up the stairs, O'Malley making no resistance, moving in a kind of dream. He has a fleeting recollection of an odor, sweet and slightly pungent as of horses, in his nostrils. The wind of the open decks revived him, and he saw to his amazement that the East was brightening. In that cabin, then, hours had been compressed into minutes.\n\nThe steamer had already slipped by the Straits of Messina. To the right he saw the cones of Etna, shadowy in the sky, calling across the dawn to Stromboli their smoking brother of the Lipari. To the left over the blue Ionian Sea the lights of a cloudless sunrise rose softly above the world.\n\nAnd the hour of enchantment seized and shook him anew. Somewhere, across those faint blue waves, lay the things that he so passionately sought. It was the very essence of their loveliness and wonder that had charged down between the walls of that stuffy cabin below. For every morning still, at dawn, the tired world knows again the splendors of her youth; and the Irishman, shuddering a little in his sacred joy, felt that he must burst his bonds and fly to join the sunrise and the sea. The yearning, he was aware, had now increased a thousandfold: its fulfillment was merely delayed.\n\nHe passed along the decks all slippery with dew into Dr. Stahl's cabin, and flung himself on the broad sofa to sleep. Sleep, too, came at once; he was profoundly exhausted; and, while he slept, Stahl watched over him, covering his body with a thick blanket." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 116", + "text": "\u2002\"It is a lovely imagination responding to the deepest desires, instincts, cravings of spiritual man, that spiritual rapture should find an echo in the material world; that in mental communion with God we should find sensible communion with nature; and that, when the faithful rejoice together, bird and beast, hill and forest, should be not felt only, but seen to rejoice along with them. It is not the truth; between us and our environment, whatever links there are, this link is wanting. But the yearning for it, the passion which made Wordsworth cry out for something, even were it the imagination of a pagan which would make him 'less forlorn,' is natural to man; and simplicity leaps at the lovely fiction of a response. Just here is the opportunity for such alliances between spiritualism and superstition as are the daily despair of seekers after truth.\" \u2014Dr. VERRALL\n\nAnd though he slept for hours the doctor never once left his side, but sat there with pencil and notebook, striving to catch, yet in vain, some accurate record of the strange fragmentary words that fell from his lips at intervals. His own face was aflame with an interest that amounted to excitement. The very hand that held the pencil trembled. One would have said that thus somewhat a man might behave who found himself faced with confirmation of some vast, speculative theory his mind had played with hitherto from a distance only.\n\nToward noon the Irishman awoke. The steamer, still loading oranges and sacks of sulfur in the Catania harbor, was dusty and noisy. Most of the passengers were ashore, hurrying with guidebooks and field-glasses to see the statue of the dead Bellini or watch the lava flow. A blazing, suffocating heat lay over the oily sea, and the summit of the volcano, with its tiny, ever-changing puff of smoke, soared through blue haze.\n\nTo Stahl's remark, \"You've slept eight hours,\" he replied, \"But I feel as though I'd slept eight centuries away.\" He took the coffee and rolls provided, and then smoked. The doctor lit a cigar. The red curtains over the port-holes shut out the fierce sun, leaving the cabin cool and dim. The shouting of the lightermen and officers mingled with the roar and scuttle of the donkey-engine. And O'Malley knew perfectly well that while the other moved about carelessly, playing with books and papers on his desk, he was all the time keeping him under close observation.\n\n\"Yes,\" he continued, half to himself, \"I feel as if I'd fallen asleep in one world and awakened into another where life is trivial and insignificant, where men work like devils for things of no value in order to accumulate them in great ugly houses; always collecting and collecting, like mad children, possessions that they never really possess\u2014things external to themselves, valueless and unreal\u2014\"\n\nDr. Stahl came up quietly and sat down beside him. He spoke gently, his manner kind and grave rather. He put a hand upon his shoulder.\n\n\"But, my dear boy,\" he said, the critical mood all melted away, \"do not let yourself go too completely. That is vicious thinking, believe me. All details are important\u2014here and now\u2014spiritually important, if you prefer the term. The symbols change with the ages, that is all.\" Then, as the other did not reply, he added: \"Keep yourself well in hand. Your experience is of extraordinary interest\u2014may even be of value, to yourself as well as to\u2014er\u2014others. And what happened to you last night is worthy of record\u2014if you can use it without surrendering your soul to it altogether. Perhaps, later, you will feel able to speak of it\u2014to tell me in detail a little\u2014?\"\n\nHis keen desire to know more evidently fought with his desire to protect, to heal, possibly even to prevent.\n\n\"If I felt sure that your control were sufficient, I could tell you in return some results of my own study of\u2014certain cases in the hospitals, you see, that might throw light upon\u2014upon your own curious experience.\"\n\nO'Malley turned with such abruptness that the cigar ash fell down over his clothes. The bait was strong, but the man's sympathy was not sufficiently of a piece, he felt, to win his entire confidence.\n\n\"I cannot discuss beliefs,\" he said shortly, \"in the speculative way you do. They are too real. A man doesn't argue about his love, does he?\" He spoke passionately. \"Today everybody argues, discusses, speculates: no one believes. If you had your way, you'd take away my beliefs and put in their place some wretched little formula of science that the next generation will prove all wrong again. It's like the N rays one of you discovered: they never really existed at all.\" He laughed. Then his flushed face turned grave again. \"Beliefs are deeper than discoveries. They are eternal.\"\n\nStahl looked at him a moment with admiration. He moved across the cabin toward his desk.\n\n\"I am more with you than perhaps you understand,\" he said quietly, yet without too obviously humoring him. \"I am more\u2014divided, that's all.\"\n\n\"Modern!\" exclaimed the other, noticing the ashes on his coat for the first time and brushing them off impatiently. \"Everything in you expresses itself in terms of matter, forgetting that matter being in continual state of flux is the least real of all things\u2014\"\n\n\"Our training has been different,\" observed Stahl simply, interrupting him. \"I use another phraseology. Fundamentally, we are not so far apart as you think. Our conversation of yesterday proves it, if you have not forgotten. It is people like yourself who supply the material that teaches people like me\u2014helps me to advance\u2014to speculate, though you dislike the term.\"\n\nThe Irishman was mollified, though for some time he continued in the same strain. And the doctor let him talk, realizing that his emotion needed the relief of this safety-valve. He used words loosely, but Stahl did not check him; it was merely that the effort to express himself\u2014this self that could believe so much\u2014found difficulty in doing so coherently in modern language. He went very far. For the fact that while Stahl criticized and denied, he yet understood, was a strong incentive to talk. O'Malley plunged repeatedly over his depth, and each time the doctor helped him in to shore.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said Stahl at length in a pause, \"the greatest difference between us is merely that whereas you jump headlong, ignoring details by the way, I climb slowly, counting the steps and making them secure. I deny at first because if the steps survive such denial, I know that they are permanent. I build scaffolding. You fly.\"\n\n\"Flight is quicker,\" put in the Irishman.\n\n\"It is for the few,\" was the reply; \"scaffolding is for all.\"\n\n\"You spoke a few days ago of strange things,\" O'Malley said presently with abruptness, \"and spoke seriously too. Tell me more about that, if you will.\" He sought to lead the talk away from himself, since he did not intend to be fully drawn. \"You said something about the theory that the Earth is alive, a living being, and that the early legendary forms of life may have been emanations\u2014projections of herself\u2014detached portions of her consciousness\u2014or something of the sort. Tell me about that theory. Can there be really men who are thus children of the earth, fruit of pure passion\u2014Cosmic Beings as you hinted? It interests me deeply.\"\n\nDr. Stahl appeared to hesitate.\n\n\"It is not new to me, of course,\" pursued the other, \"but I should like to know more.\"\n\nStahl still seemed irresolute. \"It is true,\" he replied at length slowly, \"that in an unguarded moment I let drop certain observations. It is better you should consider them unsaid perhaps: forget them.\"\n\n\"And why, pray?\"\n\nThe answer was well calculated to whet his appetite.\n\n\"Because,\" answered the doctor, bending over to him as he crossed over to his side, \"they are dangerous thoughts to play with, dangerous to the interests of humanity in its present state today, unsettling to the soul, shaking the foundations of sane consciousness.\" He looked hard at him. \"Your own mind,\" he added softly, \"appears to me to be already on their track. Whether you are aware of it or not, you have in you that kind of very passionate desire\u2014of yearning\u2014which might reconstruct them and make them come true\u2014for yourself\u2014if you get out.\"\n\nO'Malley, his eyes shining, looked up into his face.\n\n\"'Reconstruct\u2014make them come true\u2014if I get out'!\" he repeated stammeringly, fearful that if he appeared too eager the other would stop. \"You mean, of course, that this Double in me would escape and build its own heaven?\"\n\nStahl nodded darkly. \"Driven forth by your intense desire.\" After a pause he added, \"The process already begun in you would complete itself.\"\n\nAh! So obviously what the doctor wanted was a description of his sensations in that haunted cabin.\n\n\"Temporarily?\" asked the Irishman under his breath.\n\nThe other did not answer for a moment. O'Malley repeated the question.\n\n\"Temporarily,\" said Stahl, turning away again toward his desk, \"unless\u2014the yearning were too strong.\"\n\n\"In which case\u2014?\"\n\n\"Permanently. For it would draw the entire personality with it\u2026.\"\n\n\"The soul?\"\n\nStahl was bending over his books and papers. The answer was barely audible.\n\n\"Death,\" was the whispered word that floated across the heavy air of that little sun-baked cabin.\n\nThe word if spoken at all was so softly spoken that the Irishman scarcely knew whether he actually heard it, or whether it was uttered by his own thought. He only realized\u2014catching some vivid current from the other man's mind\u2014that this separation of a vital portion of himself that Stahl hinted at might involve a kind of nameless inner catastrophe which should mean the loss of his personality as it existed today\u2014an idea, however, that held no terror for him if it meant at the same time the recovery of what he so passionately sought.\n\nAnd another intuition flashed upon its heels\u2014namely, that this extraordinary doctor spoke of something he knew as a certainty; that his amazing belief, though paraded as theory, was to him more than theory. Had he himself undergone some experience that he dared not speak of, and were his words based upon a personal experience instead of, as he pretended, merely upon the observation of others? Was this a result of his study of the big man two years ago? Was this the true explanation of his being no longer an assistant at the H\u2014hospital, but only a ship's doctor? Had this \"modern\" man, after all, a flaming volcano of ancient and splendid belief in him, akin to what was in himself, yet ever fighting it?\n\nThoughts raced and thundered through his mind as he watched him across the cigar smoke. The rattling of that donkey-engine, the shouts of the lightermen, the thuds of the sulfur-sacks\u2014how ridiculous they all sounded, the clatter of a futile, meaningless existence where men gathered\u2014rubbish, for mere bodies that lived amid dust a few years, then returned to dust forever.\n\nHe sprang from his sofa and crossed over to the doctor's side. Stahl was still bending over a littered desk.\n\n\"You, too,\" he cried, and though trying to say it loud, his voice could only whisper, \"you, too, must have the Urmensch in your heart and blood, for how else, by my soul, could you know it all? Tell me, doctor, tell me!\" And he was on the very verge of adding, \"Join us! Come and join us!\" when the little German turned his bald head slowly round and fixed upon the excited Irishman such a cool and quenching stare that instantly he felt himself convicted of foolishness, almost of impertinence.\n\nHe dropped backwards into an armchair, and the doctor at the same moment let himself down upon the revolving stool that was nailed to the floor in front of the desk. His hands smoothed out papers. Then he leaned forward, still holding his companion's eyes with that steady stare which forbade familiarity.\n\n\"My friend,\" he said quietly in German, \"you asked me just now to tell you of the theory\u2014Fechner's theory\u2014that the Earth is a living, conscious Being. If you care to listen, I will do so. We have time.\" He glanced round at the shady cabin, took down a book from the shelf before him, puffed his black cigar and began to read.\n\n\"It is from one of your own people\u2014William James; what you call a 'Hibbert Lecture' at Manchester College. It gives you an idea, at least, of what Fechner saw. It is better than my own words.\"\n\nSo Stahl, in his turn, refused to be \"drawn.\" O'Malley, as soon as he recovered from the abruptness of the change from that other conversation, gave all his attention. The uneasy feeling that he was being played with, coaxed as a specimen to the best possible point for the microscope, passed away as the splendor of the vast and beautiful conception dawned upon him, and shaped those nameless yearnings of his life in glowing language." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 117", + "text": "The shadows of the September afternoon were lengthening toward us from the Round Pond by the time O'Malley reached this stage of his curious and fascinating story. It was chilly under the trees, and the \"wupsey-up, wupsey-down\" babies, as he termed them, had long since gone in to their teas, or whatever it is that London babies take at six o'clock.\n\nWe strolled home together, and he welcomed the idea of sharing a dinner we should cook ourselves in the tiny Knightsbridge flat. \"Stewpot evenings,\" he called these occasions. They reminded us of camping trips together, although it must be confessed that in the cage-like room the \"stew\" never tasted quite as it did beside running water on the skirts of the forest when the dews were gathering on the little gleaming tent, and the wood-smoke mingled with the scents of earth and leaves.\n\nPassing that grotesque erection opposite the Albert Hall, gaudy in the last touch of sunset, I saw him shudder. The spell of the ship and sea and the blazing Sicilian sunshine lay still upon us, Etna's cones towering beyond those gilded spikes of the tawdry Memorial. I stole a glance at my companion. His light blue eyes shone, but with the reflection of another sunset\u2014the sunset of forgotten, ancient, far-off scenes when the world was young.\n\nHis personality held something of magic in that silent stroll homewards, for no word fell from either one of us to break its charm. The untidy hair escaped from beneath the broad-brimmed old hat, and his faded coat of grey flannel seemed touched with the shadows that the dusk brings beneath wild-olive trees. I noticed the set of his ears, and how the upper points of them ran so sharply into the hair. His walk was springy, light, very quiet, suggesting that he moved on open turf where a sudden running jump would land him, not into a motor-bus, but into a mossy covert where ferns grew. There was a certain fling of the shoulders that had an air of rejecting streets and houses. Some fancy, wild and sweet, caught me of a faun passing down through underbrush of woodland glades to drink at a forest pool; and, chance giving back to me a little verse of Alice Corbin's, I turned and murmured it while watching him:\n\n\u2003What dim Arcadian pastures\n\n\u2003Have I known,\n\n\u2003That suddenly, out of nothing,\n\n\u2003A wind is blown,\n\n\u2003Lifting a veil and a darkness,\n\n\u2003Showing a purple sea\u2014\n\n\u2003And under your hair, the faun's eyes\n\n\u2003Look out on me?\n\nIt was, of course, that whereas his body marched along Hill Street and through Montpelier Square, his thoughts and spirit flitted through the haunted, old-time garden he forever craved. I thought of the morrow\u2014of my desk in the Life Insurance Office, of the clerks with oiled hair brushed back from the forehead, all exactly alike, trousers neatly turned up to show fancy colored socks from bargain sales, their pockets full of cheap cigarettes, their minds busy with painted actresses and the names of horses! A Life Insurance Office! All London paying yearly sums to protect themselves against\u2014against the most interesting moment of life. Premiums upon escape and freedom!\n\nAgain, it was the spell of my companion's personality that turned all this paraphernalia of the busy, modern existence into the counters in some grotesque and rather sordid game. Tomorrow, of course, it would all turn real and earnest again, O'Malley's story a mere poetic fancy. But for the moment I lived it with him, and found it magnificent.\n\nAnd the talk we had that evening when the stew-pot was empty and we were smoking on the narrow-ledged roof of the prison-house\u2014for he always begged for open air, and with cushions we often sat beneath the stars and against the grimy chimney-pots\u2014that talk I shall never forget. Life became constructed all anew. The power of the greatest fairy tale this world can ever know lay about me, raised to its highest expression. I caught at least some touch of reality\u2014of awful reality\u2014in the idea that this splendid globe whereon we perched like insects peeping timidly from tiny cells, might be the body of a glorious Being\u2014the mighty frame to which some immense Collective Consciousness, vaster than that of men, and wholly different in kind, might be attached.\n\nIn the story, as I found it later in the dusty little Paddington room, O'Malley reported, somewhat heavily, it seemed to me, the excerpts chosen by Dr. Stahl. As an imaginative essay, they were interesting, of course, and vitally suggestive, but in a tale of adventure such as this they overweight the barque of fancy. Yet, in order to appreciate what followed, it seems necessary for the mind to steep itself in something of his ideas. The reader who dreads to think, and likes his imagination to soar unsupported, may perhaps dispense with the balance of this section; but to be faithful to the scaffolding whereon this Irishman built his amazing dream, I must attempt as best I can some pr\u00e9cis of that conversation." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 118", + "text": "\u2002\"Every fragment of visible Nature might, as far as is known, serve as part in some organism unlike our bodies\u2026. As to that which can, and that which cannot, play the part of an organism, we know very little. A sameness greater or less with our own bodies is the basis from which we conclude to other bodies and souls\u2026. A certain likeness of outward form, and again some amount of similarity in action, are what we stand on when we argue to psychical life. But our failure, on the other side, to discover these symptoms is no sufficient warrant for positive denial. It is natural in this connection to refer to Fechner's vigorous advocacy.\" \u2014F.H. BRADLEY, Appearance and Reality\n\nIt was with an innate resistance\u2014at least a stubborn prejudice\u2014that I heard him begin. The earth, of course, was but a bubble of dried fire, a huge round clod, dead as mutton. How could it be, in any permissible sense of the word\u2014alive?\n\nThen, gradually, as he talked there among the chimney-pots of old smoky London, there stole over me this new and disquieting sense of reality\u2014a strange, vast splendor, too mighty to lie in the mind with comfort. Laughter fled away, ashamed. A new beauty, as of some amazing dawn, flashed and broke upon the world. The autumn sky overhead, thick-sown with its myriad stars, came down close, sifting gold and fire about my life's dull ways. That desk in the Insurance Office of Cornhill gleamed beyond as an altar or a possible throne.\n\nThe glory of Fechner's immense speculation flamed about us both, majestic yet divinely simple. Only a dim suggestion of it, of course, lay caught in the words the Irishman used\u2014words, as I found later, that were a mixture of Professor James and Dr. Stahl, flavored strongly with Terence O'Malley\u2014but a suggestion potent enough to have haunted me ever since and to have instilled meanings of stupendous divinity into all the commonest things of daily existence. Mountains, seas, wide landscapes, forests,\u2014all I see now with emotions of wonder, delight, and awe unknown to me before. Flowers, rain, wind, even a London fog, have come to hold new meanings.\n\nI never realized before that the mere size of our old planet could have hindered the perception of so fair a vision, or her mere quantitative bulk have killed automatically in the mind the possible idea of her being in some sense living. A microbe, endowed with our powers of consciousness, might similarly deny life to the body of the elephant on which it rode; or some wee arguing atom, endowed with mind and senses, persuade itself that the monster upon whose flesh it dwelt were similarly a \"heavenly body\" of dead, inert matter; the bulk of the \"world\" that carried them obstructing their perception of its Life.\n\nAnd Fechner, as it seems, was no mere dreamer, playing with a huge poetical conception. Professor of Physics in Leipsic University, he found time amid voluminous labors in chemistry to study electrical science with the result that his measurements in galvanism are classic to this day. His philosophical work was more than considerable. \"A book on the atomic theory, classic also; four elaborate mathematical and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics (many persons consider Fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books); a volume on organic evolution, and two works on experimental \u00e6sthetics, in which again Fechner is thought by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science,\" are among his other performances\u2026. \"All Leipsic mourned him when he died, for he was the pattern of the ideal German scholar, as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life, a modest, genial, laborious slave to truth and learning\u2026. His mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized crossroads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men, and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective. Patientest observation, exactest mathematics, shrewdest discrimination, humanest feeling, flourished in him on the largest scale, with no apparent detriment to one another. He was in fact a philosopher in the 'great' sense.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said O'Malley softly in my ear as we leaned against the chimneys and watched the tobacco curl up to the stars, \"and it was this man's imagination that had evidently caught old Stahl and bowled him over. I never fathomed the doctor quite. His critical and imaginative apparatus got a bit mixed up, I suspect, for one moment he cursed me for asking 'suspicious questions,' and the next sneered sarcastically at me for boiling over with a sudden inspirational fancy of my own. He never gave himself away completely, and left me to guess that he made that Hospital place too hot to hold him. He was a wonderful bird. But every time I aimed at him I shot wide and hit a cloud. Meantime he peppered me all over\u2014one minute urging me into closer intimacy with my Russian\u2014his cosmic being, his Urmensch type\u2014so that he might study my destruction, and half an hour later doing his utmost apparently to protect me from him and keep me sane and balanced.\" His laugh rang out over the roofs.\n\n\"The net result,\" he added, his face tilted toward the stars as though he said it to the open sky rather than to me, \"was that he pushed me forwards into the greatest adventure life has ever brought to me. I believe, I verily believe that sometimes, there were moments of unconsciousness\u2014semi-consciousness perhaps\u2014when I really did leave my body\u2014caught away as Moses, or was it Job or Paul?\u2014into a Third Heaven, where I touched a bit of Reality that fairly made me reel with happiness and wonder.\"\n\n\"Well, but Fechner\u2014and his great idea?\" I brought him back.\n\nHe tossed his cigarette down into the back-garden that fringed the Park, leaning over to watch its zigzag flight of flame.\n\n\"Is simply this,\" he replied, \"\u2014'that not alone the earth but the whole Universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, is everywhere alive and conscious.' He regards the spiritual as the rule in Nature, not the exception. The professorial philosophers have no vision. Fechner towers above them as a man of vision. He dared to imagine. He made discoveries\u2014whew!!\" he whistled, \"and such discoveries!\"\n\n\"To which the scholars and professors of today,\" I suggested, \"would think reply not even called for?\"\n\n\"Ah,\" he laughed, \"the solemn-faced Intellectuals with their narrow outlook, their atrophied vision, and their long words! Perhaps! But in Fechner's universe there is room for every grade of spiritual being between man and God. The vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body. He believes passionately in the Earth Soul, he treats her as our special guardian angel; we can pray to the Earth as men pray to their saints. The Earth has a Collective Consciousness. We rise upon the Earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree. Sometimes we find our bigger life and realize that we are parts of her bigger collective consciousness, but as a rule we are aware only of our separateness, as individuals. These moments of cosmic consciousness are rare. They come with love, sometimes with pain, music may bring them too, but above all\u2014landscape and the beauty of Nature! Men are too petty, conceited, egoistic to welcome them, clinging for dear life to their precious individualities.\"\n\nHe drew breath and then went on: \"'Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth to so many sense-organs of her soul, adding to her perceptive life so long as our own life lasts. She absorbs our perceptions, just as they occur, into her larger sphere of knowledge. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world were closed, for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease.'\"\n\n\"Go on,\" I exclaimed, realizing that he was obviously quoting verbatim fragments from James that he had since pondered over till they had become his own, \"Tell me more. It is delightful and very splendid.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"I'll go on quick enough, provided you promise me one thing: and that is\u2014to understand that Fechner does not regard the Earth as a sort of big human being. If a being at all, she is a being utterly different from us in kind, as of course we know she is in structure. Planetary beings, as a class, would be totally different from any other beings that we know. He merely protests at the presumption of our insignificant human knowledge in denying some kind of life and consciousness to a form so beautifully and marvelously organized as that of the earth! The heavenly bodies, he holds, are beings superior to men in the scale of life\u2014a vaster order of intelligence altogether. A little two-legged man with his cocksure reason strutting on its tiny brain as the apex of attainment he ridicules. D'ye see, now?\"\n\nI gasped, I lit a big pipe\u2014and listened. He went on. This time it was clearly a page from that Hibbert Lecture Stahl had mentioned\u2014the one in which Professor James tries to give some idea of Fechner's aim and scope, while admitting that he \"inevitably does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him.\"\n\n\"Ages ago the earth was called an animal,\" I ventured. \"We all know that.\"\n\n\"But Fechner,\" he replied, \"insists that a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal\u2014'a being whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life.'\"\n\n\"An inhabitant of the ether\u2014?\"\n\n\"You've hit it,\" he replied eagerly. \"Every element has its own living denizens. Ether, then, also has hers\u2014the globes. 'The ocean of ether, whose waves are light, has also her denizens\u2014higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit,' sensitive to the slightest pull of one another's attraction: beings in every way superior to us. Any imagination, you know,\" he added, \"can play with the idea. It is old as the hills. But this chap showed how and why it could be actually true.\"\n\n\"This superiority, though?\" I queried. \"I should have guessed their stage of development lower than ours, rather than higher.\"\n\n\"Different,\" he answered, \"different. That's the point.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" I watched a shooting star dive across our thick, wet atmosphere, and caught myself wondering whether the flash and heat of that hurrying little visitor produced any reaction in this Collective Consciousness of the huge Body whereon we perched and chattered, and upon which later it would fall in finest dust.\n\n\"It is by insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances,\" rushed on the excited O'Malley, \"that he makes the picture of the earth's life so concrete. Think a moment. For instance, our animal organization comes from our inferiority. Our need of moving to and fro, of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies, shows only our defect.\"\n\n\"Defect!\" I cried. \"But we're so proud of it!\"\n\n'\"What are our legs,'\" he laughed, \"'but crutches, by means of which, with restless efforts, we go hunting after the things we have not inside ourselves? The Earth is no such cripple; why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue, have limbs analogous to ours? What need has she of arms, with nothing to reach for? Of a neck with no head to carry? Of eyes or nose, when she finds her way through space without either, and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to guide their movements on her surface, and all their noses to smell the flowers she grows?'\"\n\n\"We are literally a part of her, then\u2014projections of her immense life, as it were\u2014one of the projections, at least?\"\n\n\"Exactly. And just as we are ourselves a part of the earth,\" he continued, taking up my thought at once, \"so are our organs her organs. 'She is, as it were, eye and ear over her whole extent\u2014all that we see and hear in separation she sees and hears at once.'\" He stood up beside me and spread his hands out to the stars and over the trees and paths of the Park at our feet, where the throngs of men and women walked and talked together in the cool of the evening. His enthusiasm grew as the idea of this German's towering imagination possessed him.\n\n\"'She brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface, and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life.'\"\n\nHe leaned over the parapet and drew me to his side. I stared with him at the reflection of London town in the sky, thinking of the glow and heat and restless stir of the great city and of the frantic strivings of its millions for success\u2014money, power, fame, a few, here and there, for spiritual success. The roar of its huge trafficking beat across the night in ugly thunder to our ears. I thought of the other cities of the world; of its villages; of shepherds among the lonely hills; of its myriad wild creatures in forest, plain, and mountain\u2026\n\n\"All this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!\" I murmured.\n\n\"All this,\" he replied softly, as the sound of the Band beyond the Serpentine floated over to us on our roof; \"\u2014the separate little consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of men, animals, flowers, insects\u2014everything.\" He again opened his arms to the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew glistened on the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow moon rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted them\u2014subconsciously.\n\n\"And all our subconscious sensations are also hers,\" he added, catching my thought again; \"our dreams but half divined, our aspirations half confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and our\u2014prayers.\"\n\nAt the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two minds joined, each knowing the currents of the other's thought, and both caught up, gathered ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a Consciousness far bigger than either. It was like a momentary, specific proof of what he urged\u2014a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it was amazingly uplifting.\n\n\"Every form of life, then, is of importance,\" I heard myself thinking, or saying, for I hardly knew which. \"The tiniest efforts of value\u2014even the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile.\"\n\n\"Even the failures,\" he whispered, \"\u2014the moments when we do not trust her.\"\n\nWe stood for some moments in silence. Presently, with a hand upon my shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the chimney-stack.\n\n\"And there are some of us,\" he said gently, yet with a voice that held the trembling of an immense joy, \"who know a more intimate relationship with their great Mother than the rest, perhaps. By the so-called Love of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material gain\u2014to that 'unrest which men miscall delight,'\u2014primitive children of her potent youth\u2026 offspring of pure passion\u2026 each individual conscious of her weight and drive behind him\u2014\" His words faded away into a whisper that became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought somehow continued itself in my own mind.\n\n\"The simple life,\" I said in a low tone; \"the Call of the Wild, raised to its highest power?\"\n\nBut he changed my sentence a little.\n\n\"The call,\" he answered, without turning to look at me, speaking it into the night about us, \"the call to childhood, the true, pure, vital childhood of the Earth\u2014the Golden Age\u2014before men tasted of the Tree and knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb lay down together and a little child could lead them. A time and state, that is, of which such phrases can be symbolical.\"\n\n\"And of which there may be here and there some fearful exquisite survival?\" I suggested, remembering Stahl's words.\n\nHis eyes shone with the fire of his passion. \"Of which on that little tourist steamer I found one!\"\n\nThe wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across the arid wastes of Bayswater and the North-West. It also came from the mountains and gardens of this lost Arcadia, vanished for most beyond recovery\u2026.\n\n\"The Hebrew poets called it Before the Fall,\" he went on, \"and later poets the Golden Age; today it shines through phrases like the Land of Heart's Desire, the Promised Land, Paradise, and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality and riot the inner thought\u2026.\"\n\nThe hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men floated to us from the pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the opening of Sloane Street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors, and pedestrians. The two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in their brains reeled out of sight. A big policeman followed slowly. The night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly\u2014the stream of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where they sought to lose themselves\u2014to forget the pressure of the bars that held them\u2014to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of happiness! All so sure they knew the way\u2014yet hurrying really in the wrong direction\u2014outwards instead of inwards; afraid to be\u2014simple\u2026.\n\nWe moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither of us found anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder indoors again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O'Malley begged me to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We sat by the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 119", + "text": "Some of Fechner's reasons for thinking the Earth a being superior in the scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage that lingered chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring German's joy in dwelling upon her perfections\u2014later, too, of his first simple vision. Though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the beauty of the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even that dingy Insurance Office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest daily tasks with the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over many a difficult weary time of work and duty.\n\n\"'To carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers\u2014being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. Think of her beauty\u2014a shining ball, sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain tops. Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her all at once\u2014all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face\u2014a peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil\u2014a veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.'\n\n\"She needs, as a sentient organism,\" he continued, pointing into the curtain of blue night beyond the window, \"no heart or brain or lungs as we do, for she is\u2014different. 'Their functions she performs through us! She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors\u2026. Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us, obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.'\n\n\"And then,\" whispered the Irishman, seeing that I still eagerly listened, \"give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. Note its simplicity, and the authority of its conviction:\n\n\"'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,\u2014only to find them nowhere.'\"\n\nFire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger through the night, broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the men drowned his last words\u2026.\n\nLife became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. Even if belief failed, in the sense of believing\u2014a shilling, it succeeded in the sense of believing\u2014a symphony. The invading beauty swept about us both. Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort.\n\n\"Come,\" said O'Malley softly, interrupting my dream of hope and splendor, \"let us walk together through the Park to your place. It is late, and you, I know, have to be up early in the morning\u2026 earlier than I.\"\n\nAnd presently we passed the statue of Achilles and got our feet upon the turf beyond\u2014a little bit of living planet in the middle of the heavy smothering London town. About us, over us, within us, stirred the awe of that immense idea. Upon that bit of living, growing turf we passed toward the Marble Arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge Body\u2014the physical expression of a grand angelic Being, alive, sentient, conscious. Conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves who walked\u2026 a Being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood, and\u2014loved us as a mother her own offspring\u2026. \"To whom men could pray as they pray to their saints.\"\n\nThe conception, even thus dimly and confusedly adumbrated, brought a new sense of life\u2014terrific and eternal. All living things upon the earth's surface were emanations of her mighty central soul; all\u2014from the gods and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women of Today who have forgotten it.\n\nThe gods\u2014!\n\nWere these then projections of her personality\u2014aspects and facets of her divided self\u2014emanations now withdrawn? Latent in her did they still exist as moods or Powers\u2014true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest? Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature?\n\nWas this the giant truth that Stahl had built on Fechner?\n\nEverything about us seemed to draw together into an immense and towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep of open park\u2014the looming and overwhelming beauty of one of these very gods survived\u2014Pan, the eternal and the splendid\u2026 a mood of the Earth-life, a projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air, the passion of the night, the thrill of an august, extended Mood.\n\nAnd the others were not so very far behind\u2014those other little parcels of Earth's Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and labeled \"gods\"\u2026 and worshipped\u2026 so as to draw their powers into themselves by ecstasy and vision\u2026\n\nCould, then, worship now still recall them? Was the attitude of even one true worshipper's heart the force necessary to touch that particular aspect of the mighty total Consciousness of Earth, and call forth those ancient forms of beauty? Could it be that this idea\u2014the idea of \"the gods\"\u2014was thus forever true and vital\u2026? And might they be known and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form?\n\nI only know that as we walked home past the doors of that dingy Paddington house where Terence O'Malley kept his dusty books and papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped into my mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. His words I have forgotten, or how he made such speculations worth listening to at all. Yet, I hear them singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and often when that conflict comes 'twixt duty and desire that makes life sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory comes to lift with strength far greater than my own. The Earth can heal and bless." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 120", + "text": "Slowly, taking life easily, the little steamer puffed its way across the Ionian Sea. The pyramid of Etna, bluer even than the sky, dominated the western horizon long after the heel of Italy had faded, then melted in its turn into the haze of cloud and distance. No other sails were visible.\n\nWith the passing of Calabria spring had leaped into the softness of full summer, and the breezes were gentle as those that long ago fanned the cheeks and hair of Io, beloved of Zeus, as she flew southwards toward the Nile. The passengers, less lovely than that fair daughter of Argos, and with the unrest of thinner adventure in their blood, basked lazily in the sun; but the sea was not less haunted for those among them whose hearts could travel. The Irishman at any rate slipped beyond the confines of the body, viewing that ancient scene as she had done, from above. His widening consciousness expanded to include it.\n\nCachalots spouted; dolphins danced, as though still to those wild flutes of Dionysus; porpoises rolled beneath the surface of the transparent waves, diving below the vessel's sides but just in time to save their shiny noses; and all day long, ignoring the chart upon the stairway walls, the tourists turned their glasses eastwards, searching for a first sight of Greece.\n\nO'Malley, meanwhile, trod the decks of a new ship. For him now sea and sky were doubly peopled. The wind brought messages of some divine deliverance approaching slowly, the heat of that pearly, shining sun warmed centers of his being that hitherto the world kept chill. The land toward which the busy steamer moved he knew, of course, was but the shell from which the inner spirit of beauty once vivifying it had long since passed away. Yet it remained a clue. That ancient loveliness, as a mood of the earth's early consciousness, was buried, not destroyed. Eternally it still flamed somewhere. And, long before the days of Greece, he knew, it had existed in yet fuller and more complete manifestation: that earliest, vastly splendid Mood of the earth's soul, too mighty for any existence that the history of humanity can recall, and too remote for any but the most daringly imaginative minds even to conceive. The Urwelt Mood, as Stahl himself admitted, even while it called to him, was a reconstruction that to men today could only seem\u2014dangerous.\n\nAnd his own little Self, guided by the inarticulate stranger, was being led at last toward its complete recapture.\n\nYet, while he crawled slowly with the steamer over a tiny portion of the spinning globe, feeling that at the same time he crawled toward a spot upon it where access would be somehow possible to this huge expression of her first Life\u2014what was it, phrased timidly as men phrase big thoughts today, that he really believed? Even in our London talks, intimate as they were, interpreted too by gesture, facial expression, and\u2014silence, his full meaning evaded precise definition. \"There are no words, there are no words,\" he kept saying, shrugging his shoulders and stroking his untidy hair. \"In me, deep down, it all lies clear and plain and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that throve before language existed. If you cannot catch the picture from my thoughts, I give up the whole dream in despair.\" And in his written account, owing to its strange formlessness, the result was not a little bewildering.\n\nBriefly stated, however\u2014that remnant, at least, which I discover in my own mind when attempting to tell the story to others\u2014what he felt, believed, lived, at any rate while the adventure lasted, was this:\u2014\n\nThat the Earth, as a living, conscious Being, had known visible projections of her consciousness similar to those projections of our own personality which the advanced psychologists of today now envisage as possible; that the simple savagery of his own nature, and the poignant yearnings derived from it, were in reality due to his intimate closeness to the life of the Earth; that, whereas in the body the fulfillment of these longings was impossible, in the spirit he might yet know contact with the soul of the planet, and thus experience their complete satisfaction. Further, that the portion of his personality which could thus enter this heaven of its own subjective construction, was that detachable portion Stahl had spoken of as being \"malleable by desire and longing,\" leaving the body partially and temporarily sometimes in sleep, and, at death, completely. More,\u2014that the state thus entered would mean a quasi-merging back into the life of the Earth herself, of which he was a partial expression.\n\nThis closeness to Nature was today so rare as to be almost unrecognized as possible. Its possession constituted its owner what the doctor called a \"Cosmic Being\"\u2014a being scarcely differentiated from the life of the Earth Spirit herself\u2014a direct expression of her life, a survival of a time before such expressions had separated away from her and become individualized as human creatures. Moreover, certain of these earliest manifestations or projections of her consciousness, knowing in their huge shapes of fearful yet simple beauty a glory of her own being, still also survived. The generic term of \"gods\" might describe their status as interpreted to the little human power called Imagination.\n\nThis call to the simple life of primal innocence and wonder that had ever brimmed the heart of the Irishman, acknowledged while not understood, might have slumbered itself away with the years among modern conditions into atrophy and denial, had he not chanced to encounter a more direct and vital instance of it even than himself. The powerfully-charged being of this Russian stranger had summoned it forth. The mere presence of this man quickened and evoked this faintly-stirring center in his psychic being that opened the channel of return. Speech, as any other explanation, was unnecessary. To resist was still within his power. To accept and go was also open to him. The \"inner catastrophe\" he feared need not perhaps be insuperable or permanent.\n\n\"Remember,\" the doctor had said to him at the end of that last significant conversation, \"this berth in my stateroom is freely at your disposal till Batoum.\" And O'Malley, thanking him, had shaken off that restraining hand upon his arm, knowing that he would never make use of it again.\n\nFor the Russian stranger and his son had somehow made him free.\n\nBetween that cabin and the decks he spent his day. Occasionally he would go below to report progress, as it were, by little sentences which he divined would be acceptable, and at the same time gave expression to his own growing delight. The boy, meanwhile, was everywhere, playing alone like a wild thing; one minute in the bows, hat off, gazing across the sea beneath a shading hand, and the next leaning over the stern-rails to watch the churning foam that drove them forwards. At regular intervals he, too, rushed to the cabin and brought communications to his parent.\n\n\"Tomorrow at dawn,\" observed the Irishman, \"we shall see Cape Mattapan rising from the sea. After that, Athens for a few hours; then coasting through the Cyclades, close to the mainland often.\" And glancing over to the berth, while pretending to be busy with his steamer-trunk, he saw the great smile of happiness break over the other's face like a sunrise\u2026.\n\nFor it was clear to him that with the approach to Greece, a change began to come over his companions. It was noticeable chiefly in the father. The joy that filled the man, too fine and large to be named excitement, passed from him in radiations that positively seemed to carry with them a physical extension. This, of course, was purely a clairvoyant effect upon the mind\u2014O'Malley's divining faculty visualized the spiritual traits of the man's dilating Self. But, nevertheless, the truth remained that\u2014somehow he increased. He grew; became interiorly more active, alive, potent; and of this singular waxing of the inner spirit something passed outwards and stood with rare dignity about his very figure.\n\nAnd this manifestation of themselves was due to that expansion of the inner life caused by happiness. The little point of their personalities they showed normally to the world was but a single facet, a tip as it were of their whole selves. More lay within, beyond. As with the rest of the world, a great emotion stimulated and summoned it forth into activity nearer the surface. Clearly, for these two Greece symbolized a point of departure of a great hidden passion. Something they expected lay waiting for them there. Guidance would come thence.\n\nAnd, by reflection perhaps as much as by direct stimulation, the same change made itself felt in himself. Joy caught him\u2014the joy of a home-coming, long deferred\u2026.\n\nAt the same time, the warning of Dr. Stahl worked in him, if subconsciously only. He showed this by mixing more with the other passengers. He chatted with the Captain, who was as pleased with his big family as though he had personally provided the weather that made them happy; with the Armenian priest, who was eager to show that he had read \"a much of T'ackeray and Keeplin\"; and especially with the boasting Moscow merchant, who by this time \"owned\" the smoking-room and imposed his verbose commonplaces upon one and all with authoritative self-confidence in six languages\u2014a provincial mind in full display. The latter in particular held him to a normal humanity; his atmosphere breathed the wholesome thickness of the majority of humankind\u2014ordinary, egoistic, with the simplicity of the uninspiring sort. The merchant acted upon him as a sedative, and that day the Irishman took him in large doses, allopathically, for his talk formed an admirable antidote to the stress of that other burning excitement that, according to Stahl, threatened to disintegrate his personality.\n\nThough hardly in the sense he intended, the fur-merchant was entirely delightful\u2014engaging as a child; for, among other marked qualities, he possessed the unerring instinct of the snob which made him select for his friends those whose names or position might glorify his banal insignificance\u2014and his stories were vivid pictorial illustrations of this useful worldly faculty. O'Malley listened with secret delight, keeping a grave face and dropping in occasional innocent questions to heighten the color or increase the output. Others in the circle responded in kind, feeling the same chord vibrating in themselves. Even the priest, like a repeating-gun, continually discharged his little secret pride that Byron had occupied a room in that Venetian monastery where he lived; and at last O'Malley himself was conscious of an inclination to report his own immense and recently discovered kinship with a greater soul and consciousness than his own. After all, he reflected with a deep thrill while he listened, the desire of the snob was but a crude and simple form of the desire of the mystic:\u2014to lose one's little self in a Self which is greater!\n\nThen, weary of them all and their minute personal interests, he left the smoking-room and joined the boy again, running absurd races with him from stern to bow, playing hide-and-seek among the decks, even playing shuffle-board together. They sweated in the blazing sun and watched the dance of the sea; caught the wind in their faces with a shout of joy, or with pointing fingers followed the changing outlines of the rare, soft clouds that sailed the world of blue above them. There was no speech between them, and both felt that other things, invisible, swift, and spirit-footed, whose home is just beyond the edge of life as the senses report life, played wildly with them. The smoking-room then, with its occupants so greedy for the things that money connotes\u2014the furs, champagne, cigars, and heavy possessions that were symbols of the personal aggrandizement they sought and valued\u2014seemed to the Irishman like a charnel-house where those about to die sat making inventories in blind pride of the things they must leave behind.\n\nIt was, indeed, a contrast of Death and Life. For beside him, with that playing, silent boy, coursed the power of transforming loveliness which had breathed over the world before her surface knew this swarming race of men. The life of the Earth knew no need of outward acquisition, possessing all things so completely in herself. And he\u2014he was her child\u2014O glory! Joy passing belief!\n\n\"Oh!\" he cried once with passion, turning to the fair-haired figure of youth who stood with him in the bows, meeting the soft wind,\u2014\"Oh, to have heard the trees whispering together in the youth of the world, and felt one of the earliest winds that ever blew across the cooling seas!\"\n\nAnd the boy, not understanding the words, but responding with a perfect naturalness to the emotion that drove them forth, seized his hand and with an extraordinarily free motion as of flying, raced with him down the decks, happy, laughing, hair loose over his face, and with a singular action of the shoulders as though he somehow\u2014cantered. O'Malley remembered his vision of the Flying Shapes\u2026.\n\nToward the evening, however, the boy disappeared, keeping close to his father's side, and after dinner both retired early to their cabin.\n\nAnd the ship, meanwhile, drew ever nearer to the haunted land." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 121", + "text": "\u2002\"Privacy is ignorance.\" \u2014JOSIAH ROYCE\n\nSomewhat after the manner of things suffered in vivid dreams, where surprise is numbed and wonder becomes the perfect password, the Irishman remembers the sequence of little events that filled the following day.\n\nYet his excitement held nothing of the vicious fling of fever; it was spread over the entire being rather than located hotly in the brain and blood alone; and it \"derived,\" as it were, from tracts of his personality usually unstirred, atrophied indeed in most men, that connected him as by a delicate network of feelers with Nature and the Earth. He came gradually to feel them, as a man in certain abnormal conditions becomes conscious of the bodily processes that customarily go on in himself without definite recognition.\n\nStahl could have told him, had he cared to seek the information, that this fringe of wider consciousness, stretching to the stars and winds and earth, was the very part that had caused his long unrest and yearning\u2014the part that knew the Earth as mother and sought the sweet and savage freedom of what he called with the poverty of modern terms\u2014primitive. The channels leading toward a state of Cosmic Consciousness, one with the Earth Life, were being now flushed and sluiced by the forces emanating from the persons of his new companions.\n\nAnd as this new state slowly usurped command, the readjustment of his spiritual economy thus involved, caused other portions of himself to sink into temporary abeyance. While it alarmed him, it was too delicious to resist. He made no real attempt to resist. Yet he knew full well that the portion sinking thus out of sight was what folk with such high pride call Reason, Judgment, Common Sense!\n\nIn common with animal, bird, and insect life, all intimately close to Nature, he began to feel as realities those subtle currents of the Earth's personality by which the seals know direction in the depths of a thousand-mile sea, by which the homing pigeons blaze trails through space, birds fly south, the wild bees know their pathways, and all simple life, from the Red Indian to the Red Ant, acknowledges the viewless guidance of the mother's enveloping heart. The cosmic life ran through his being, lighting signals, offering service, more\u2014claiming leadership.\n\nWith it, however, came no loss of individuality, but rather a powerful increase of life by means of which for the first time he dreamed of a fuller existence which should eventually harmonize and combine the ancient simplicity of soul that claimed the Earth, with the modern complexity which, indulged alone, rendered the world so ugly and insignificant\u2026! He experienced an immense, driving push upon what Bergson has called the \u00e9lan vital of his being.\n\nThe opening charge of his new discovery, however, was more than disconcerting, and it is not surprising that he lost his balance. Its attack and rush were overwhelming. Thus, it was a kind of exalted speculative wonder lying behind his inner joy that caused his mistakes. He had imagined, for instance, that the first sight of Greece would bring some climax of revelation, making clear to what particular type of early life the spirits of his companions conformed; more, that they would then betray themselves to one and all for what they were in some effort to escape, in some act of unrestraint, something, in a word, that would explain themselves to the world of passengers, and focus them upon the doctor's microscope forever.\n\nYet when Greece showed her first fair rim of outline, his companions still slept peacefully in their bunks. The anticipated d\u00e9nouement did not appear. Nothing happened. It was not the mere sight of so much land lying upon the sea's cool cheek that could prove vital in an adventure of such a kind. For the adventure remained spiritual. O'Malley had merely confused two planes of consciousness. As usual, he saw the thing \"whole\" in that extraordinary way to which his imagination alone held the key; and hence his error.\n\nYet the moment has ever remained for him one of vital, stirring splendor, significant as life or death. He remembers that he was early on deck and saw the dawn blow up softly from behind the islands with a fresh, salt wind that blew at the same time like music into his very heart. Golden clear it rose; and just below, like the petals of some vast, archetypal flower that gave it birth, the low blue hills of coast and island opened magically into blossom. The rocky cliffs of Mattapan slipped past; the smooth, bare slopes of the ancient shore-line followed; treeless peaks and shoulders, abrupt precipices, summits and ridges all exquisitely rosy and alive. He had seen Greece before, yet never thus, and the emotion that invaded every corner of his larger consciousness lay infinitely deeper than any mere pseudo-classical thrill he had known in previous years. He saw it, felt it, knew it from within, instead of as a spectator from without. This dawn-mood of the Earth was also his own; and upon his spirit, as upon her blue-crowned hills, lay the tide of high light with its delicate swift blush. He saw it with her\u2014through one of her opened eyes.\n\nThe hot hours the steamer lay in the Piraeus Harbor were wearisome, the noise of loading and unloading cargo worse even than at Catania. While the tourist passengers hurried fussily ashore, carrying guidebooks and cameras, to chatter among the ruined temples, he walked the decks alone, dreaming his great dream, conscious that he spun through leagues of space with the great Being who more and more possessed him. Beyond the shipping and the masts collected there from all the ports of the Mediterranean and the Levant, he watched the train puffing slowly to the station that lay in the shadow of Theseus' Temple, but his eyes at the same tune strained across the haze toward Eleusis Bay, and while his ears caught the tramping feet of the long Torchlight Procession, some power of his remoter consciousness divined the forms of hovering gods, expressions of his vast Mother's personality with which, in worship, this ancient people had believed it possible to merge themselves. The significant truths that lay behind the higher Mysteries, degraded since because forgotten and misinterpreted, trooped powerfully down into his mind. For the supreme act of this profound cult, denied by a grosser age that seeks to telephone to heaven, deeming itself thereby \"advanced,\" lay in the union of the disciple with his god, the god he worshipped all his life, and into whose Person he slipped finally at death by a kind of marriage rite.\n\n\"The gods!\" ran again through his mind with passion and delight, as the letter of his early studies returned upon him, accompanied now for the first time by the in-living spirit that interpreted them. \"The gods!\u2014Moods of her giant life, manifestations of her spreading Consciousness pushed outwards, Powers of life and truth and beauty\u2026!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 122", + "text": "And, meanwhile, Dr. Stahl, sometimes from a distance, sometimes coming close, kept over him a kind of half-paternal, half-professional attendance, the Irishman accepting his ministrations without resentment, almost with indifference.\n\n\"I shall be on deck between two and three in the morning to see the comet,\" the German observed to him casually toward evening as they met on the bridge. \"We may meet perhaps\u2014\"\n\n\"All right, doctor; it's more than possible,\" replied O'Malley, realizing how closely he was being watched.\n\nIn his mind at the moment another sentence ran, the thought growing stronger and stronger within him as the day declined:\n\n\"It will come tonight\u2014come as an inner catastrophe not unlike that of death! I shall hear the call\u2014to escape\u2026.\"\n\nFor he knew, as well as if it had been told to him in so many words, that the sleep of his two companions all day was in the nature of a preparation. The fluid projections of themselves were all the time active elsewhere. Their bodies heavily slumbered; their spirits were out and alert. Summoned forth by those strange and radiant evocative forces that even in the dullest minds \"Greece\" stirs into life, they had temporarily escaped. Again he saw those shapes of cloud and wind moving with swift freedom over the long, bare hills. Again and again the image returned. With the night a similar separation of the personality might come to himself too. Stahl's warning passed in letters of fire across his inner sight. With a relief that yet contained uneasiness he watched his shambling figure disappear down the stairway. He was alone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 123", + "text": "\"To everything that a man does he must give his undivided attention or his Ego. When he has done this, thoughts soon arise in him, or else a new method of apprehension miraculously appears\u2026.\n\n\"Very remarkable it is that through this play of his personality man first becomes aware of his specific freedom, and that it seems to him as though he awaked out of a deep sleep as though he were only now at home in the world, and as if the light of day were breaking now over his interior life for the first time\u2026. The substance of these impressions which affect us we call Nature, and thus Nature stands in an immediate relationship to those functions of our bodies which we call senses. Unknown and mysterious relations of our body allow us to surmise unknown and mysterious correlations with Nature, and therefore Nature is that wondrous fellowship into which our bodies introduce us, and which we learn to know through the mode of its constitutions and abilities.\"\n\n\u2014NOVALIS, Disciples at Sa\u00efs. Translated by U.C.B.\n\nAnd so, at last, the darkness came, a starry darkness of soft blue shadows and phosphorescent sea out of which the hills of the Cyclades rose faint as pictures of floating smoke a wind might waft away like flowers to the sky.\n\nThe plains of Marathon lay far astern, blushing faintly with their scarlet tamarisk blossoms. The strange purple glow of sunset upon Hymettus had long since faded. A hush grew over the sea, now a marvelous cobalt blue. The earth, gently sleeping, manifested dreamily. Into the subconscious state passed one half of her huge, gentle life.\n\nThe Irishman, responding to the eternal spell of her dream-state, experienced in quite a new way the magic of her Night-Mood. He found it more difficult than ever to realize as separate entities the little things that moved about through the upper surface of her darkness. Wings of silver, powerfully whirring, swept his soul onwards to another place\u2014toward Home.\n\nAnd the two worlds intermingled oddly. These little separate \"outer things\" going to and fro so busily became as symbols more or less vital, more or less transparent. They varied according to their simplicity. Some of them were channels that led directly where he was going; others, again, had lost all connection with their vital source and center of existence. To the former belonged the sailors, children, the tired birds that rested on the ship as they journeyed northwards, swallows, doves, and little travelers with breasts of spotted yellow that nested in the rigging; even, in a measure, the gentle, brown-eyed priest; but to the latter, the noisy, vulgar, beer-drinking tourists, and, especially, the fur-merchant\u2026. Stahl, interpreter and intermediary, hovered between\u2014incarnate compromise.\n\nEscaping from everybody, at length, he made his way into the bows; there, covered by the stars, he waited. And the thing he waited for\u2014he felt it coming over him with a kind of massive sensation as little local as heat or cold\u2014was that disentanglement of a part of his personality from the rest against which Stahl had warned him. That portion of his complex personality in which resided desire and longing, matured during these many years of poignant nostalgia, was now slowly and deliberately loosening out from the parent center. It was the vehicle of his Urwelt yearnings; and the Urwelt was about to draw it forth. The Call was on its way.\n\nHereabouts, then, near the Isles of Greece, lay a channel to the Earth's far youth, a channel for some reason still unclosed. His companions knew it; he, too, had half divined it. The increased psychic activity of all three as they approached Greece seemed explained. The sign\u2014would it be through hearing, sight, or touch?\u2014would shortly come that should convince.\n\nThat very afternoon Stahl had said\u2014\"Greece will betray them,\" and he had asked: \"Their true form and type?\" And for answer the old man did an expressive thing, far more convincing than words: he bent forwards and downwards. He made as though to move a moment on all fours.\n\nO'Malley remembered the brief and vital scene now. The word, however, persistently refused to come into his mind. Because the word was really inadequate, describing but partially a form and outline symbolical of far more,\u2014a measure of Nature and Deity alike.\n\nAnd so, as a man dreading the entrance to a great adventure that he yet desires, the Irishman waited there alone beneath the cloud of night\u2026. Soft threads of star-gold, trailing the sea, wove with the darkness a veil that hid from his eyes the world of crude effects. All memory of the casual realities of modern life that so distressed his soul, fled far away. The archetypal world, soul of the Earth, swam close about him, enormous and utterly simple. He seemed alone in some hollow of the night which Time had overlooked, and where the powers of sea and air held him in the stretch of their gigantic, changeless hands. In this hollow lay the entrance to the channel down which he presently might flash back to that primal Garden of the Earth's first beauty\u2014her Golden Age\u2026 down which, at any rate, the authoritative Call he awaited was to come\u2026. \"Oh! what a power has white simplicity!\"\n\nWings from the past, serene and tranquil, bore him toward this ancient peace where echoes of life's brazen clash today could never enter. Ages before Greece, of course, it had flourished, yet Greece had caught some flying remnant ere it left the world of men, and for a period had striven to renew its life, though by poetry but half believed. Over the vales and hills of Hellas this mood had lingered bravely for a while, then passed away forever\u2026 and those who dreamed of its remembrance remain homeless and lonely, seeking it ever again in vain, lost citizens, rejected by the cycles of vainer life and action that succeeded.\n\nThe Spirit of the Earth, yes, whispered in his ears as he waited covered by the night and stars. She called him, as though across all the forests on her breast the long sweet winds went whispering his name. Lying there upon the coils of thick and tarry rope, the Urwelt caught him back with her splendid passion. Currents of Earth life, quasi-deific, gentle as the hands of little children, tugged softly at this loosening portion of his Self, urging his very lips, as it were, once more to the mighty Mother's breasts. Again he saw those cloud-like shapes careering over long, bare hills\u2026 and almost knew himself among them as they raced with streaming winds\u2026 free, ancient comrades among whom he was no longer alien and outcast, including his two companions of the steamer. The early memory of the Earth became his own; as a part of her, he shared it too.\n\nThe Urwelt closed magnificently about him. Vast shapes of power and beauty, other than human, once his comrades thus, but since withdrawn because denied by a pettier age, moved up, huge and dim, across the sham barriers of time and space, singing the great Earth-Song of welcome in his ears. The whisper grew awfully\u2026. The Spirit of the Earth flew close and called upon him with a shout\u2026!\n\nThen, out of this amazing reverie, he woke abruptly to the consciousness that some one was approaching him stealthily, yet with speed, through the darkness. With a start he sat up, peering about him. There was dew on his clothes and hair. The stars, he saw, had shifted their positions.\n\nHe heard the surge of the water from the vessel's bows below. The line of the shore lay close on either side. Overhead he saw the black threads of rigging, quivering with the movement of the ship; the swaying mast-head light; the dim, round funnels; the confused shadows where the boats swung\u2014and nearer, moving between the ropes and windlasses, this hurrying figure whose approach had disturbed him in his gorgeous dream.\n\nAnd O'Malley divined at once that, though in one sense a portion of his dream, it belonged outwardly to the same world as this long dark steamer that trailed after him across the sea. A piece of his vision, as it were, had broken off and remained in the cruder world wherein his body lay upon these tarry ropes. The boy came up and stood a moment by his side in silence, then, stooping to the level of his head, he spoke:\u2014\n\n\"Come,\" he said in low tones of joy; \"come! We wait long for you already!\"\n\nThe words, like music, floated over the sea, as O'Malley took the outstretched hand and suffered himself to be led quickly toward the lower deck. He walked at first as in a dream continued after waking; more than once it seemed as though they stepped together from the boards and moved through space toward the line of peaked hills that fringed the steamer's course so close. For through the salt night air ran a perfume that suggested flowers, earth, and woods, and there seemed no break in the platforms of darkness that knit sea and shore to the very substance of the vessel." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 124", + "text": "The lights in the saloon were out, the smoking-room empty, the passengers in bed. The ship seemed entirely deserted. Only, on the bridge, the shadow of the first officer paced quietly to and fro. Then, suddenly, as they approached the stern, O'Malley discerned anther figure, huge and motionless, against the background of phosphorescent foam; and at the first glance it was exactly as though he had detached from the background of his mind one of those Flying Outlines upon the hills\u2014and caught it there, arrested visibly at last.\n\nHe moved along, fairly sure of himself, yet with a tumult of confused sensations, as if consciousness were transferring itself now more rapidly to that portion of him which sought to escape.\n\nLeaning forward, in a stooping posture over the bulwarks, wrapped in the flowing cape he sometimes wore, the man's back and shoulders married so intimately with the night that it was hard to determine the dividing line between the two. So much more of the deck behind him, and of the sky immediately beyond his neck, was obliterated than by any possible human outline. Whether owing to obliquity of disturbed vision, tricks of shadow, or movement of the vessel between the stars and foam, the Irishman saw these singular emanations spread about him into space. He saw them this time directly. And more than ever before they seemed in some way right and comely\u2014true. They were in no sense monstrous; they reported beauty, though a beauty cloaked in power.\n\nAnd, watching him, O'Malley felt that this loosening portion of himself, as once before in the little cabin, likewise began to grow and spread. Within some ancient fold of the Earth's dream-consciousness they both lay caught. In some mighty Dream of her planetary Spirit, dim, immense, slow-moving, they played their parts of wonder. Already they lay close enough to share the currents of her subconscious activities. And the dream, as she turned in her vast, spatial sleep, was a dream of a time long gone.\n\nHere, amid the loneliness of deserted deck and night, this illusion of bulk was more than ever before outwardly impressive, and as he yielded to the persuasion of the boy's hand, he was conscious of a sudden wild inclination to use his own arms and legs in a way he had never before known or dreamed of, yet that seemed curiously familiar. The balance and adjustment of his physical frame sought to shift and alter; neck and shoulders, as it were, urged forward; there came a singular pricking in the loins, a rising of the back, a thrusting up and outwards of the chest. He felt that something grew behind him with a power that sought to impel or drive him in advance and out across the world at a terrific gait; and the hearing of his ears became of a sudden intensely acute. While his body moved ordinarily, he knew that a part of him that was not body moved\u2014otherwise, that he neither walked, ran, nor stepped upon two feet, but\u2014galloped. The motion proclaimed him kin with the flying shapes upon the hills. At the heart of this portion which sought to detach itself from his central personality\u2014which, indeed, seemed already half escaped\u2014he cantered.\n\nThe experience lasted but a second\u2014this swift, free motion of the escaping Double\u2014then passed away like those flashes of memory that rise and vanish again before they can be seized for examination. He shook himself free of the unaccountable obsession, and with the effort of returning to the actual present, the passing-outwards was temporarily checked. And it was then, just as he held himself in hand again, that glancing sideways, he became aware that the boy beside him had, like his parent, also changed\u2014grown large and shadowy with a similar suggestion of another splendid outline. The extension already half accomplished in himself and fully accomplished in the father, was in process of accomplishment in the smaller figure of the son. Clothed in the emerged true shape of their inner being they slowly revealed themselves. It was as bewildering as watching death, and as stern and beautiful.\n\nFor the boy, still holding his hand, loped along beside him as though the projection that emanated from him, grown almost physical, were somehow difficult to manage.\n\nIn the moment of nearer, smaller consciousness that yet remained to him, O'Malley recalled the significant pantomime of Dr. Stahl two days before in the cabin. It came with a rush of fire. The warning operated; his caution instantly worked. He dropped the hand, let the clinging fingers slip from his own, overcome by something that appalled. For this, surely, was the inner catastrophe that he dreaded, the radical internal dislocation of his personality that involved\u2014death. The thing that had happened, or was happening to these other two, was on the edge of fulfillment in himself\u2014before he was either ready or had decided to accept it.\n\nAt any rate he hesitated; and the hesitation, shifting his center of consciousness back into his brain, checked and saved him. A confused sense of forces settling back within himself followed; a kind of rush and scuttle of moods and powers: and he remained temporarily master of his being, recovering balance and command. Twice already\u2014in that cabin-scene, as also on the deck when Stahl had seized him\u2014the moment had come close. Now, again, had he kept hold of the boy's grasp, that inner transformation, which should later become externalized, must have completed itself.\n\n\"No, no!\" he tried to cry aloud, \"for I'm not yet ready!\" But his voice rose scarcely above a whisper. The decision of his will, however, had produced the desired result. The \"illusion,\" so strangely born, had passed, at any rate for the time. He knew once more the glory of the steadfast stars, realized that he walked normally upon a steamer's deck, heard with welcome the surge of the sea below, and felt the peace of this calm southern night as they coasted with two hundred sleeping tourists between the islands and the Grecian mainland\u2026. He remembered the fur-merchant, the Armenian priest, the Canadian drummer\u2026.\n\nIt seemed his feet half tripped, or at least that he put out a hand to steady himself against the ship's long roll, for the pair of them moved up to the big man's side with a curious, rushing motion that brought them all together with a mild collision. And the boy laughed merrily, his laughter like singing half completed. O'Malley remembers the little detail, because it serves to show that he was yet still in a state of intensified consciousness, far above the normal level. It was still \"like walking in my sleep or acting out some splendid dream,\" as he put it in his written version. \"Half out of my body, if you like, though in no sense of the words at all half out of my mind!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 125", + "text": "What followed he relates with passion, half confused. Without speaking the big Russian turned his head by way of welcome, and O'Malley saw that the proportions of it were magnificent like a fragment of the night and sky. Though too dark to read the actual expression in the eyes, he detected their gleam of joy and splendor. The whole presentment of the man was impressive beyond any words that he could find. Massive, yet charged with swift and alert vitality, he reared there through the night, his inner self now toweringly manifested. At any other time, and without the preparation already undergone, the sight might almost have terrified; now it only uplifted. For in similar fashion, though lesser in degree, because the mold was smaller, and hesitation checked it, this very transformation had been going forward within himself.\n\nThe three of them leaned there upon the rails, rails oddly dwindled now to the size of a toy steamer, while thus the spirit of the dreaming Earth swam round and through them, awful in power, yet at the same time gentle, winning, seductive as wild flowers in the spring. And it was this delicate, hair-like touch of delight, magical with a supreme and utterly simple innocence, that made the grandeur of the whole experience still easily manageable, and terror in it all unknown.\n\nThe Irishman stood on the outside, toward the vessel's stern, next him the father, beyond, the boy. They touched. A current like a river in flood swept through all three.\n\nHe, too, was caught within those visible extensions of their personalities; all again, caught within the consciousness of the Earth. Across the sea they gazed together in silence\u2014waiting.\n\nIt was the Oro passage, where the mainland hills on the west and the Isle of Tenos on the east draw close together, and the steamer passes for several miles so near to Greece that the boom of surf upon the shore is audible. That night, however, the sea lay too still for surf; it whispered softly in its sleep; and in its sleep, too, listened. They heard its multitudinous rush of voices as the surge below raced by\u2014a giant frieze in which the phosphorescence painted dancing forms and palely luminous faces. Unsubstantial shapes of foam held hands in continuous array below the waves, lit by soft-sea-lanterns strung together along the steamer's sides.\n\nYet it was not these glimmering shapes the three of them watched, thus intently silent. The lens of yearning focused not in sight. Down the great channel at whose opening they stood, leading straight to the Earth's old central heart, the message of communion would not be a visual one. The sensitive fringe of their stretched personalities, contacting thus actually the consciousness of the planet-soul, would quiver to a reaction of another kind. This point of union, already affected, would presently report itself, unmistakably, yet not to the eyes. The increased acuteness of the Irishman's hearing\u2014a kind of interior hearing\u2014quickly supplied the key. It was that all three\u2014listened.\n\nSome primitive sound of Earth would presently vibrate through their extended beings with an authoritative sweet thunder not to be denied. By a Voice, a Call, the Earth would tell them that she heard; that lovingly she was aware of their presence in her heart. She would call them, with the voice of one of their own kind.\n\nHow strange it all was! Enormous in conception, enormous in distance, scope, stretch! Yet so tiny, intimate, sweet! And this vast splendor was to report itself by one of the insignificant little channels by which men, locked in cramped physical bodies, interpret the giant universe\u2014a trivial sense-impression! That so terrible a communication could reach the soul via the quivering of a wee material nerve was on a par with that other grave splendor\u2014that God can exist in the heart of a child.\n\nThus, dimly, yet with an authority that shakes the soul, may little human hearts divine the Immensities that travel with a thunder of great glory close about their daily life. Through regions of their subliminal consciousness, which transcends the restricted physical expression of it called personality as the moisture of the world transcends a drop of water, deific presences pass grandly to and fro.\n\nFor here, to this wild-hearted Irishman with the forbidden strain of the Urmensch in his blood, came the sharp and instant revelation that the Consciousness is not contained skin-tight around the body. It spread enormously about him, remote, extended; and in some distant tract of it this strange occurrence took place. The idea of distance and extension, of course, were merely intellectual concepts, like that of Time. For what happened, happened near and close, beside, within his actual physical person. That physical person, with its brain, however, he realized, was but a fragment of his total Self. A broken piece of the occurrence filtered through from beyond and fell upon the deck at his feet. The rest he divined, seeing it whole. Only the little bit, however, has he found the language to describe.\n\nAnd that for which all three listened was already on the way. Forever it had been \"happening,\" yet only reached them now because they were ready and open to it. Events upon the physical plane, he grasped, represented the last feeble expression of things that had happened interiorly with a vaster power long ago\u2014and are ever happening still. This Sound they listened for, coming from the Spirit of the Earth, lay ever close to men's ears, divinely sweet and splendid. It seemed born somewhere in the heart of the blue gloom that draped the hills of Greece. Thence, across the peaked mountains, stretched the immense pipe of starry darkness that carried it toward them as along a channel. Made possible of approach by the ancient passion of beauty that Greece once knew, it ran down upon the world into their hearts, direct from the Being of the Earth.\n\nWith a sudden rush, it grew nearer, swelling with a draught of sound that sucked whole spaces of sky and sea and stars with it. It emerged. They heard, all three.\n\nAbove the pulse and tremble of the steamer's engines, above the surge and gurgle of the sea, a cry swept toward them from the shore. Long-drawn, sweetly-penetrating, yet with some strident accent of power and command, this voice of Earth rushed upon them over the quiet water\u2014then died away again among the mountains and the night. Its passage through the sky was torrential. The whole pouring flood of it dipped back with abrupt swiftness into silence. The Irishman understood that but an echo of its main volume had come through.\n\nA deep, convulsive movement ran over the great body at his side, and at once communicated itself to the boy beyond. Father and son straightened up abruptly as though the same force lifted both; then stretched down and forwards over the bulwarks. They seemed to shake themselves free of something. Neither spoke. Something utterly overwhelming lay in that moment. For the cry was at once of enchanting sweetness, yet with a deep and dreadful authority that overpowered. It invited the very soul.\n\nA moment of silence followed, and the cry was then repeated, thinner, fainter, already further away. It seemed withdrawn, sunk more deeply into the night, higher up, too, floating away northwards into remoter vales and glens that lay beyond the shore-line. Though still a single cry, there were distinct breaks of utterance in it this time, as of words. It was, of a kind\u2014speech: a Message, a Summons, a Command that somehow held entreaty at its heart.\n\nAnd this time the appeal in it was irresistible. Father and son started forwards as though deliberately pulled; while from himself shot outwards that loosening portion of his being that all the evening had sought release. The vehicle of his yearnings, passionately summoned, leaped to the ancient call of the Earth's eternally young life. This vital essence of his personality, volatile as air and fierce as lightning, flashed outwards from its hidden prison where it lay choked and smothered by the weights and measures of modern life. For the beauty and splendor of that far voice wrung his very heart and set it free. He knew a quasi-physical wrench of detachment. A wild and tameless glory fused the fastenings of ages.\n\nOnly the motionless solidity of the great figure beside him prevented somehow the complete escape, and made him understand that the Call just then was not for all three of them, especially not for himself. The parent rose beside him, massive and stable, secure as the hills which were his true home, and the boy broke suddenly into happy speech which was wild and singing.\n\nHe looked up swiftly into his parent's steady visage.\n\n\"Father!\" he cried in tones that merged half with the wind, half with the sea, \"it is his voice! Chiron calls\u2014!\" His eyes shone like stars, his young face was alight with joy and passion.\u2014\"Go, father, you, or\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped an instant, catching the Irishman's eyes upon his own across the form between them.\n\n\"\u2014or you!\" he added with a laughter of delight; \"you go!\"\n\nThe big figure straightened up, standing back a pace from the rails. A low sound rolled from him that was like an echo of thunder among hills. With slow, laborious distinctness it broke off into fragments that were words, with great difficulty uttered, but with a final authority that rendered them command.\n\n\"No,\" O'Malley heard, \"you\u2014first. And\u2014carry word\u2014that we\u2014are\u2014on the way.\" Staring out across the sea and sky he boomed it deeply. \"You\u2014first. We\u2014follow\u2014!\" And the speech seemed to flow from the entire surface of his body rather than from the lips alone. The sea and air mothered the syllables. Thus might the Night herself have spoken.\n\nChiron! The word, with its clue of explanation, flamed about him with a roar. Was this, then, the type of cosmic life to which his companions, and himself with them, inwardly approximated\u2026?\n\nThe same instant, before O'Malley could move a muscle to prevent it, the boy climbed the rails with an easy, vaulting motion that was swift yet oddly spread, and dropped straight down into the sea. He fell; and as he fell it was as if the passage through the air drew out a part of him again like smoke. Whether it was due to the flying cloak, or to some dim wizardry of the shadows, there grew over him an instantaneous transformation of outline that was far more marked than anything before. For as the steamer drew onwards, and the body thus passed in its downward flight close beneath O'Malley's eyes, he saw that the boy was making the first preparatory motions of swimming,\u2014movements, however, that were not the horizontal sweep of a pair of human arms, but rather the vertical strokes of a swimming animal. He pawed the air.\n\nThe surprise of the whole unexpected thing came upon him with a crash that brought him back effectually again into himself. That part of him, already half emerged in similar escape, now flashed back sheath-like within him. The inner catastrophe he dreaded while desiring it, had not yet completed itself.\n\nHe heard no splash, for the ship was high out of the water, and the place where the body met the sea already lay far astern; but when the momentary arrest of his faculties had passed and he found his voice to cry for help, the father turned upon him like a lion and clapped a great, encompassing hand upon his mouth.\n\n\"Quiet!\" his deep voice boomed. \"It is well\u2014and he\u2014is\u2014safe.\"\n\nAnd across the huge and simple visage ran an expression of such supreme happiness, while in his act and gesture lay such convincing power, that the Irishman felt himself overborne and forced to acknowledge another standard of authority that somehow made the whole thing right. To cry \"man overboard,\" to stop the ship, throw life-buoys and the rest, was not only unnecessary, but foolish. The boy was safe; it was well with him; he was not \"lost\"\u2026\n\n\"See,\" said the parent's deep voice, breaking in upon his thoughts as he drew him to one side with a certain vehemence, \"See!\"\n\nHe pointed downwards. And there, between them, half in the scuppers, against their very feet, lay the huddled body upon the deck, the arms outstretched, the face turned upwards to the stars." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 126", + "text": "The bewilderment that followed was like the confusion which exists between two states of consciousness when the mind passes from sleep to waking, or vice versa. O'Malley lost that power of attention which enables a man to concentrate on details sufficiently to recall their exact sequence afterwards with certainty.\n\nTwo things, however, stood out and he tells them briefly enough: first, that the joy upon the father's face rendered an offer of sympathy ludicrous; secondly, that Dr. Stahl was again upon the scene with a promptness which proved him to have been close at hand all the time.\n\nIt was between two and three in the morning, the rest of the passengers asleep still, but Captain Burgenfelder and the first officer appeared soon after and an orderly record of the affair was drawn up formally. The depositions of the father and of himself were duly taken down in writing, witnessed, and all the rest.\n\nThe scene in the doctor's cabin remains vividly in his mind: the huge Russian standing by the door\u2014for he refused a seat\u2014incongruously smiling in contrast to the general gravity, his mind obviously brought by an effort of concentration to each question; the others seated round the desk some distance away, leaving him in a space by himself; the scratching of the doctor's pointed pen; the still, young outline underneath the canvas all through the long pantomime, lying upon a couch at the back where the shadows gathered thickly. And then the gust of fresh wind that came in with a little song as they opened the door at the end, and saw the crimson dawn reflected in the dewy, shining boards of the deck. The father, throwing the Irishman a significant and curious glance, was out to join it on the instant.\n\nSyncope, produced by excitement, cause unknown, was the scientific verdict, and an immediate burial at sea the parent's wish. As the sun rose over the highlands of Asia Minor it was carried into effect.\n\nBut the father's eyes followed not the drop. They gazed with rapt, intent expression in another direction where the shafts of sunrise sped across the sea toward the glens and dales of distant Pelion. At the sound of the plunge he did not even turn his eyes. He pointed, gathering O'Malley somehow into the gesture, across the \u00c6gean Sea to where the shores of north-western Arcadia lay below the horizon, raised his arms with a huge sweep of welcome to the brightening sky, then turned and went below without a single word.\n\nFor a few minutes, puzzled and perhaps a little awed, the group of sailors and ship's officers remained standing with bared heads, then disappeared silently in their turn, leaving the decks to the sunrise and the wind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 127", + "text": "But O'Malley did not immediately return to his own cabin; he yielded to Dr. Stahl's persuasion and dropped into the armchair he had already occupied more than once, watching his companion's preparations with the lamp and coffeepot.\n\nWith his eyes, that is, he watched, staring, as men say, absent-mindedly; for the fact was, only a little bit of him hovered there about his weary physical frame. The rest of him was off somewhere else across the threshold\u2014subliminal: below, with the Russian, beyond with the traveling spirit of the boy; but the major portion, out deep in space, reclaimed by the Earth.\n\nSo, at least, it felt; for the circulation of blood in his brain ran low and physical sensation there was almost none. The driving impulse upon the outlying tracts of consciousness usually submerged had been tremendous.\n\n\"That time,\" he heard Stahl saying in an oddly distant voice from across the cabin, \"you were nearly\u2014out\u2014\"\n\n\"You heard? You saw it all?\" he murmured as in half-sleep. For it was an effort to focus his mind even upon simple words.\n\nThe reply he hardly caught, though he felt the significant stare of the man's eye upon him and divined the shaking of his head. His life still pulsed and throbbed far away outside his normal self. Complete return was difficult. He felt all over: with the wind and hills and sea, all his little personal sensations tucked away and absorbed into Nature. In the Earth he lay, pervading her whole surface, still sharing her vaster life. With her he moved, as with a greater, higher, and more harmonious creation than himself. In large measure the cosmic instincts still swept these quickened fringes of his deep subconscious personality.\n\n\"You know them now for what they are,\" he heard the doctor saying at the end of much else he had entirely missed. \"The father will be the next to go, and then\u2014yourself. I warn you before it is too late. Beware! And\u2014resist!\"\n\nHis thoughts, and with them those subtle energies of the soul that are the vehicles of thought, followed where the boy had gone. Deep streams of longing swept him. The journey of that spirit, so singularly released, drew half his forces after it. Thither the bereaved parent and himself were also bound; and the lonely incompleteness of his life lay wholly now explained. That cry within the dawn, though actually it had been calling always, had at last reached him; hitherto he had caught only misinterpreted echoes of it. From the narrow body it had called him forth. Another moment and he would have known complete emancipation; and never could he forget that glorious sensation as the vital essence tasted half release. Next time the process should complete itself, and he would\u2014go!\n\n\"Drink this,\" he heard abruptly in Stahl's grating voice, and saw him cross the cabin with a cup of steaming coffee. \"Concentrate your mind now upon the things about you here. Return to the present. And tell me, too, if you can bring yourself to do so,\" he added, stooping over him with the cup, \"a little of what you experienced. The return, I know, is pain. But try\u2014try\u2014\"\n\n\"Like a little bit of death, yes,\" murmured the Irishman. \"I feel caught again and caged\u2014small.\" He could have wept. This ugly little life!\n\n\"Because you've tasted a moment of genuine cosmic consciousness and now you feel the limitations of normal personality,\" Stahl added, more soothingly. He sat down beside him and sipped his own coffee.\n\n\"Dispersed about the whole earth I felt, deliciously extended and alive,\" O'Malley whispered with a faint shiver as he glanced about the little cabin, noticing the small windows and shut door. \"Upholstery\" oppressed him. \"Now I'm back in prison again.\"\n\nThere was silence for a moment. Then presently the doctor spoke, as though he thought aloud, expecting no reply.\n\n\"All great emotions,\" he said in lowered tones, \"tap the extensions of the personality we now call subconscious, and a man in anger, in love, in ecstasy of any kind is greater than he knows. But to you has come, perhaps, the greatest form of all\u2014a definite and instant merging with the being of the Earth herself. You reached the point where you felt the spirit of the planet's life. You almost crossed the threshold\u2014your extension edged into her own. She bruised you, and you knew\u2014\"\n\n\"'Bruised'?\" he asked, startled at the singular expression into closer hearing.\n\n\"We are not 'aware' of our interior,\" he answered, smiling a little, \"until something goes wrong and the attention is focused. A keen sensation\u2014pain\u2014and you become aware. Subconscious processes then become consciously recognized. I bruise your lung for instance; you become conscious of that lung for the first time, and feel it. You gather it up from the general subconscious background into acute personal consciousness. Similarly, a word or mood may sting and stimulate some phase of your consciousness usually too remote to be recognized. Last night\u2014regions of your extended Self, too distant for most men to realize their existence at all, contacted the consciousness of the Earth herself. She bruised you, and via that bruise caught you up into her greater Self. You experienced a genuine cosmic reaction.\"\n\nO'Malley listened, though hardly to the actual words. Behind the speech, which was in difficult German for one thing, his mind heard the rushing past of this man's ideas. They moved together along the same stream of thought, and the Irishman knew that what he thus heard was true, at any rate, for himself. And at the same time he recognized with admiration the skill with which this scientific mystic of a Schiffsarzt sought to lead him back into the safer regions of his normal state. Stahl did not now oppose or deny. Catching the wave of the Celt's experience, he let his thought run sympathetically with it, alongside, as it were, guiding gently and insinuatingly down to earth again.\n\nAnd the result justified this cunning wisdom; O'Malley returned to the common world by degrees. For it was enchanting to find his amazing adventure explained even in this partial, speculative way. Who else among his acquaintances would have listened at all, much less admitted its possibility?\n\n\"But, why in particular me?\" he asked. \"Can't everybody know these cosmic reactions you speak of?\" It was his intellect that asked the foolish question. His whole Self knew the answer beforehand.\n\n\"Because,\" replied the doctor, tapping his saucer to emphasize each word, \"in some way you have retained an almost unbelievable simplicity of heart\u2014an innocence singularly undefiled\u2014a sort of primal, spontaneous innocence that has kept you clean and open. I venture even to suggest that shame, as most men know it, has never come to you at all.\"\n\nThe words sank down into him. Passing the intellect that would have criticized, they nested deep within where the intuition knew them true. Behind the clumsy language that is, he caught the thought.\n\n\"As if I were a saint!\" he laughed faintly.\n\nStahl shook his head. \"Rather, because you live detached,\" he replied, \"and have never identified your Self with the rubbish of life. The channels in you are still open to these tides of larger existence. I wish I had your courage.\"\n\n\"While others\u2014?\"\n\nThe German hesitated a moment. \"Most men,\" he said, choosing his words with evident care, \"are too grossly organized to be aware that these reactions of a wider consciousness can be possible at all. Their minute normal Self they mistake for the whole, hence denying even the experiences of others. 'Our actual personality may be something considerably unlike that conception of it which is based on our present terrestrial consciousness\u2014a form of consciousness suited to, and developed by, our temporary existence here, but not necessarily more than a fraction of our total self. It is quite credible that our entire personality is never terrestrially manifest.'\" Obviously he quoted. The Irishman had read the words somewhere. He came back more and more into the world\u2014correlated, that is, the subconscious with the conscious.\n\n\"Yet consciousness apart from the brain is inconceivable,\" he interposed, more to hear the reply than to express a conviction.\n\nWhether Stahl divined his intention or not, he gave no sign.\n\n\"'We cannot say with any security that the stuff called brain is the only conceivable machinery which mind and consciousness are able to utilize: though it is true that we know no other.'\" The last phrase he repeated: \"'though it is true that we know no other.'\"\n\nO'Malley sank deeper into his chair, making no reply. His mind clutched at the words \"too grossly organized,\" and his thoughts ran back for a moment to his daily life in London. He pictured his friends and acquaintances there; the men at his club, at dinner parties, in the parks, at theatres; he heard their talk\u2014shooting\u2014destruction of exquisite life; horses, politics, women, and the rest; yet good, honest, lovable fellows all. But how did they breathe in so small a world at all? Practical-minded specimens of the greatest civilization ever known! He recalled the heavy, dazed expression on the faces of one or two to whom he had sometimes dared to speak of those wider realms that were so familiar to himself\u2026.\n\n\"'Though it is true that we know no other,'\" he heard Stahl repeating slowly as he looked down into his cup and stirred the dregs.\n\nThen, suddenly, the doctor rose and came over to his side. His eyes twinkled, and he rubbed his hands vigorously together as he spoke. He laughed.\n\n\"For instance, I have no longer now the consciousness of that coffee I have just swallowed,\" he exclaimed, \"yet, if it disagreed with me, my consciousness of it would return.\"\n\n\"The abnormal states you mean are a symptom of disorder then?\" the Irishman asked, following the analogy.\n\n\"At present, yes,\" was the reply, \"and will remain so until their correlation with the smaller conscious Self is better understood. These belligerent Powers of the larger Consciousness are apt to overwhelm as yet. That time, perhaps, is coming. Already a few here and there have guessed that the states we call hysteria and insanity, conditions of trance, hypnotism, and the like, are not too satisfactorily explained.\" He peered down at his companion. \"If I could study your Self at close quarters for a few years,\" he added significantly, \"and under various conditions, I might teach the world!\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" cried the Irishman, now wholly returned into his ordinary self. He could think of nothing else to say, yet he meant the words and gave them vital meaning. He moved across to another chair. Lighting a cigarette, he puffed out clouds of smoke. He did not desire to be caught again beneath this man's microscope. And in his mind he had a sudden picture of the speculative and experimenting doctor being \"requested to sever his connection\" with the great Hospital for the sake of the latter's reputation. But Stahl, in no way offended, was following his own thoughts aloud, half speaking to himself.\n\n\"\u2026For a being organized as you are, more active in the outlying tracts of consciousness than in the centers lying nearer home,\u2014a being like yourself, I say, might become aware of Other Life and other personalities even more advanced and highly organized than that of the Earth.\"\n\nA strange excitement came upon him, making his eyes shine. He walked to and fro, O'Malley watching him, a touch of alarm mingled with his interest.\n\n\"And to think of the great majority that denies because they are\u2014dead!\" he cried. \"Smothered! Undivining! Living in that uninspired fragment which they deem the whole! Ah, my friend,\"\u2014and he came abruptly nearer\u2014\"the pathos, the comedy, the pert self-sufficiency of their dull pride, the crass stupidity and littleness of their denials, in the eyes of those like ourselves who have actually known the passion of the larger experience\u2014! For all this modern talk about a Subliminal Self is woven round a profoundly significant truth, a truth newly discovered and only just beginning to be understood. We are much greater than we know, and there is a vast subconscious part of us. But, what is more important still, there is a super-consciousness as well. The former represents what the race has discarded; it is past; but the latter stands for what it reaches out to in the future. The perfect man you dream of perhaps is he who shall eventually combine the two, for there is, I think, a vast amount the race has discarded unwisely and prematurely. It is of value and will have to be recovered. In the subconsciousness it lies secure and waiting. But it is the super-consciousness that you should aim for, not the other, for there lie those greater powers which so mysteriously wait upon the call of genius, inspiration, hypnotism, and the rest.\"\n\n\"One leads, though, to the other,\" interrupted O'Malley quickly. \"It is merely a question of the swing of the pendulum?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" was the laconic reply.\n\n\"They join hands, I mean, behind my back, as it were.\"\n\n\"Possibly.\"\n\n\"This stranger, then, may really lead me forward and not back?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" again was all the answer that he got.\n\nFor Stahl had stopped short, as though suddenly aware that he had said too much, betraying himself in the sudden rush of interest and excitement. The face for a moment had seemed quite young, but now the flush faded, and the light died out from his eyes. O'Malley never understood how the change came about so quickly, for in a moment, it seemed, the doctor was calm again, quietly lighting one of his black cigars over by the desk, peering at him half quizzingly, half mockingly through the smoke.\n\n\"So I urge you again,\" he was saying, as though the rest had been some interlude that the Irishman had half imagined, \"to proceed with the caution of this sane majority, the caution that makes for safety. Your friend, as I have already suggested to you, is a direct expression of the cosmic life of the earth. Perhaps, you have guessed by now, the particular type and form. Do not submit your inner life too completely to his guidance. Contain your Self\u2014and resist\u2014while it is yet possible.\"\n\nAnd while he sat on there, sipping hot coffee, half listening to the words that warned of danger while at the same time they cunningly urged him forwards, it seemed that the dreams of childhood revived in him with a power that obliterated this present day\u2014the childhood, however, not of his mere body, but of his spirit, when the world herself was young\u2026. He, too, had dwelt in Arcady, known the free life of splendor and simplicity in some Saturnian Reign; for now this dream, but half remembered, half believed, though eternally yearned for\u2014dream of a Golden Age untouched by Time, still there, still accessible, still inhabited, was actually coming true.\n\nIt surely was that old Garden of innocence and joy where the soul, while all unvexed by a sham and superficial civilization of the mind, might yet know growth\u2014a realm half divined by saints and poets, but to the gross majority forgotten or denied.\n\nThe Simple Life! This new interpretation of it at first overwhelmed. The eyes of his soul turned wild with glory; the passion that o'er-runs the world in desolate places was his; his, too, the strength of rushing rivers that coursed their parent's being. He shared the terror of the mountains and the singing of the sweet Spring rains. The spread wonder of the woods of the world lay imprisoned and explained in the daily hurry of his very blood. He understood, because he felt, the power of the ocean tides; and, flitting to and fro through the tenderer regions of his extended Self, danced the fragrance of all the wild flowers that ever blew. That strange allegory of man, the microcosm, and earth, the macrocosm, became a sudden blazing reality. The feverish distress, unrest, and vanity of modern life was due to the distance men had traveled from the soul of the world, away from large simplicity into the pettier state they deemed so proudly progress.\n\nOut of the transliminal depths of this newly awakened Consciousness rose the pelt and thunder of these magical and enormous cosmic sensations\u2014the pulse and throb of the planetary life where his little Self had fringed her own. Those untamed profundities in himself that walked alone, companionless among modern men, suffering an eternal nostalgia, at last knew the approach to satisfaction. For when the \"inner catastrophe\" completed itself and escape should come\u2014that transfer of the conscious center across the threshold into this vaster region stimulated by the Earth\u2014all his longings would be housed at last like homing birds, nested in the gentle places his yearnings all these years had lovingly built for them\u2014in a living Nature! The fever of modern life, the torture and unrest of a false, external civilization that trained the brain while it still left wars and baseness in the heart, would drop from him like the symptoms of some fierce disease. The god of speed and mechanism that ruled the world today, urging men at ninety miles an hour to enter a Heaven where material gain was only a little sublimated and not utterly denied, would pass for the nightmare that it really was. In its place the cosmic life of undifferentiated simplicity, clean and sweet and big, would hold his soul in the truly everlasting arms.\n\nAnd that little German doctor, sitting yonder, enlightened yet afraid, seeking an impossible compromise\u2014Stahl could no more stop his going than a fly could stop the rising of the Atlantic tides.\n\nOut of all this tumult of confused thought and feeling there rose then the silver face of some forgotten and passionate loveliness. Apparently it reached his lips, for he heard his own voice murmuring outside him somewhere across the cabin:\u2014\n\n\"The gods of Greece\u2014and of the world\u2014\"\n\nYet the instant words clothed it, the flashing glory went. The idea plunged back out of sight\u2014untranslatable in language. Thrilled and sad, he lay back in his chair, watching the doctor and trying to focus his mind upon what he was saying. But the lost idea still dived and reared within him like a shining form, yet never showing more than this radiant point above the surface. The passion and beauty of it\u2026! He tried no more to tie a label of modern words about its neck. He let it swim and dive and leap within him uncaught. Only he understood better why, close to Greece, his friends had betrayed their inner selves, and why for the lesser of the two, whose bodily cage was not yet fully clamped and barred by physical maturity, escape, or return rather, had been possible, nay, had been inevitable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 128", + "text": "Stahl, he remembers, had been talking for a long time. The general sense of what he said reached him, perhaps, but certainly not many of the words. The doctor, it was clear, wished to coax from him the most intimate description possible of his experience. He put things crudely in order to challenge criticism, and thus to make his companion's reason sit in judgment on his heart. If this visionary Celt would let his intellect pass soberly and dissectingly upon these flaming states of wider consciousness he had touched, the doctor would have data of real value for his own purposes.\n\nBut this discriminating analysis was precisely what the Irishman found impossible. His soul was too \"dispersed\" to concentrate upon modern terms and phrases. These in any case dealt only with the fragments of Self that manifested through brain and body. The rest could be felt only, never truly described. Since the beginning of the world such transcendental experiences had never been translatable in the language of \"common\" sense; and today, even, when a few daring minds sought a laborious classification, straining the resources of psychology, the results were little better than a rather enticing and suggestive confusion.\n\nIn his written account, indeed, he gives no proper report of what Stahl tried to say. A gaping hiatus appears in the manuscript, with only asterisks and numbers that referred to pages of his tumbled notebooks. Following these indications I came across the skeletons of ideas which perhaps were the raw material, so to say, of these crude and speculative statements that the German poured out at him across that cabin\u2014blocks of exaggeration he flung at him, in the hope of winning some critical and intelligible response. Like the structure of some giant fairy-tale they read\u2014some toppling scaffolding that needed reduction in scale before it could be focused for normal human sight.\n\n\"Nature\" was really alive for those who believed\u2014and worshipped; for worship was that state of consciousness which opens the sense and provides the channel for this singular interior realization. In very desolate and lonely places, unsmothered and unstained by men as they exist today, such expressions of the Earth's stupendous, central vitality were still possible\u2026. The \"Russian\" himself was some such fragment, some such cosmic being, strayed down among men in a form outwardly human, and the Irishman had in his own wild, untamed heart those same very tender and primitive possibilities which enabled him to know and feel it.\n\nIn the body, however, he was fenced off\u2014without. Only by the disentanglement of his primitive self from the modern development which caged it, could he recover this strange lost Eden and taste in its fullness the mother-life of the planetary consciousness which called him back. This dissociation might be experienced temporarily as a subliminal adventure; or permanently\u2014in death.\n\nHere, it seemed, was a version of the profound mystical idea that a man must lose his life to find it, and that the personal self must be merged in a larger one to know peace\u2014the incessant, burning nostalgia that dwells in the heart of every religion known to men: escape from the endless pain of futile personal ambitions and desires for external things that are unquenchable because never possible of satisfaction. It had never occurred to him before in so literal and simple a form. It explained his sense of kinship with the earth and nature rather than with men\u2026.\n\nThere followed, then, another note which the Irishman had also omitted from his complete story as I found it\u2014in this MS. that lay among the dust and dinginess of the Paddington back-room like some flaming gem in a refuse heap. It was brief but pregnant\u2014the block of another idea, Fechner's apparently, hurled at him by the little doctor.\n\nThat, just as the body takes up the fact of the bruised lung into its own general consciousness, lifting it thereby from the submerged, unrealized state; and just as our human consciousness can be caught up again as a part of the earth's; so, in turn, the Planet's own vast personality is included in the collective consciousness of the entire Universe\u2014all steps and stages of advance to that final and august Consciousnss of which they are fragments, projections, manifestations in Time\u2014GOD.\n\nAnd the immense conception, at any rate, gave him a curious, flashing clue to that passionate inclusion which a higher form of consciousness may feel for the countless lesser manifestations below it; and so to that love for humanity as a whole that saviors feel\u2026.\n\nYet, out of all this deep flood of ideas and suggestions that somehow poured about him from the mind of this self-contradictory German, alternately scientist and mystic, O'Malley emerged with his own smaller and vivid personal delight that he would presently himself\u2014escape: escape under the guidance of the big Russian into some remote corner of his own extended Being, where he would enjoy a quasi-merging with the Earth-life, and know subjectively at least the fruition of all his yearnings.\n\nThe doctor had phrased it once that a part of him fluid, etheric or astral, malleable by desire, would escape and attain to this result. But, after all, the separation of one portion of himself from the main personality could only mean being conscious it: another part of it\u2014in a division usually submerged.\n\nAs Stahl so crudely put it, the Earth had bruised him. He would know in some little measure the tides of her own huge life, his longings, loneliness, and nostalgia explained and satisfied. He would find that fair old Garden. He might even know the lesser gods." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 129", + "text": "That afternoon at Smyrna the matter was officially reported, and so officially done with. It caused little enough comment on the steamer. The majority of the passengers had hardly noticed the boy at all, much less his disappearance; and while many of them landed there for Ephesus, still more left the ship next day at Constantinople.\n\nThe big Russian, though he kept mostly to his own cabin, was closely watched by the ship's officers, and O'Malley, too, realized that he was under observation. But nothing happened; the emptied steamer pursued her quiet way, and the Earth, unrealized by her teeming freight so busy with their tiny personal aims, rushed forwards upon her glorious journey through space.\n\nO'Malley alone realized her presence, aware that he rushed with her amid a living universe. But he kept his new sensations to himself. The remainder of the voyage, indeed, across the Black Sea via Samsoun and Trebizond, is hazy in his mind so far as practical details are concerned, for he found himself in a dreamy state of deep peace and would sometimes sit for hours in reverie, only reminded of the present by certain pricks of annoyance from the outer world. He had returned, of course, to his own stateroom, yet felt in such close sympathy with his companion that no outward expression by way of confidence or explanation was necessary. In their Subconsciousness they were together and at one.\n\nThe pricks of annoyance came, as may be expected, chiefly from Dr. Stahl, and took the form of variations of \"I told you so.\" The man was in a state of almost anger, caused half by disappointment, half by unsatisfied curiosity. His cargo of oil and water would not mix, yet he knew not which to throw overboard; here was another instance where facts refused to tally with the beliefs dictated by sane reason; where the dazzling speculations he played with threatened to win the day and destroy the compromise his soul loved.\n\nThe Irishman, however, did not resent his curiosity, though he made no attempt to satisfy it. He allowed him to become authoritative and professional, to treat him somewhat as a patient. What could it matter to him, who in a few hours would land at Batoum and go off with his guide and comrade to some place where\u2014? The thought he could never see completed in words, for he only knew that the fulfillment of the adventure would take place\u2014somewhere, somehow, somewhen\u2014in that space within the soul of which external space is but an image and a figure. What takes place in the mind and heart are alone the true events; their outward expression in the shifting and impermanent shapes of matter is the least real thing in all the world. For him the experience would be true, real, authoritative\u2014fact in the deepest sense of the word. Already he saw it \"whole.\"\n\nFaith asks no travelers' questions\u2014exact height of mountains, length of rivers, distance from the sea, precise spelling of names, and so forth. He felt\u2014the quaint and striking simile is in the written account\u2014like a man hunting for a pillar-box in a strange city\u2014absurdly difficult to find, as though purposely concealed by the authorities amid details of street and houses to which the eye is unaccustomed, yet really close at hand all the time\u2026.\n\nBut at Trebizond, a few hours before Batoum, Dr. Stahl in his zealous attentions went too far; for that evening he gave his \"patient\" a sleeping-draught in his coffee that caused him to lie for twelve hours on the cabin sofa, and when at length he woke toward noon, the Customs officers had been aboard since nine o'clock, and most of the passengers had already landed.\n\nAmong them, leaving no message, the big Russian had also gone ashore. And, though Stahl may have been actuated by the wisest and kindest motives, he was not quite prepared for the novel experience with which it provided him\u2014namely, of hearing an angry Irishman saying rapidly what he thought of him in a stream of eloquent language that lasted nearly a quarter of an hour without a break!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 130", + "text": "Although Batoum is a small place, and the trains that leave it during the day are few enough, O'Malley knew that to search for his friend by the methods of the ordinary detective was useless. It would have been also wrong. The man had gone deliberately, without attempting to say good-bye\u2014because, having come together in the real and inner sense, real separation was not possible. The vital portion of their beings, thought, feeling, and desire, were close and always would be. Their bodies, busy at different points of the map among the casual realities of external life, could make no change in that. And at the right moment they would assuredly meet again to begin the promised journey.\n\nThus, at least, in some fashion peculiarly his own, was the way the Irishman felt; and this was why, after the first anger with his German friend, he resigned himself patiently to the practical business he had in hand.\n\nThe little incident was characteristically revealing, and shows how firmly rooted in his imaginative temperament was the belief, the unalterable conviction rather, that his life operated upon an outer and an inner plane simultaneously, the one ever reacting upon the other. It was as if he were aware of two separate sets of faculties, subtly linked, one carrying on the affairs of the physical man in the \"practical\" world, the other dealing with the spiritual economy in the subconscious. To attend to the latter alone was to be a useless dreamer among men, unpractical, unbalanced; to neglect it wholly for the former was to be crassly limited, but half alive; to combine the two in effective co-operation was to achieve that high level of a successful personality, which some perhaps term genius, some prophet, and others, saint. It meant, at any rate, to have sources of inspiration within oneself.\n\nThus he spent the day completing what was necessary for his simple outfit, and put up for the night at one of the little hotels that spread their tables invitingly upon the pavement, so that dinner may be enjoyed in full view of one of the most picturesque streams of traffic it is possible to see.\n\nThe sultry, enervating heat of the day had passed and a cool breeze came shorewards over the Black Sea. With a box of thin Russian cigarettes before him he lingered over the golden Kakhetian wine and watched the crowded street. Knowing enough of the language to bargain smartly for his room, his pillows, sheets, and samovar, he yet could scarcely compass conversation with the strangers about him. Of Russian proper, besides, he heard little; there was a Babel of many tongues, Armenian, Turkish, Georgian, explosive phrases of Swanetian, soft gliding Persian words, and the sharp or guttural exclamations of the big-voiced, giant fellows, all heavily armed, who belonged to the bewildering tribes that dwelt among the mountains beyond. Occasionally came a broken bit of French or German; but they strayed in, lost and bizarre, as fragments from some distant or forgotten world.\n\nDown the pavement, jostling his elbows, strode the constant, gorgeous procession of curious, wild, barbaric faces, bearded, with hooked noses, flashing eyes, burkas flowing; cartridge-belts of silver and ivory gleaming across chests in the glare of the electric light; bashliks of white, black, and yellow wool upon the head, increasing the stature; evil-looking Black Sea knives stuck in most belts, rifles swung across great supple shoulders, long swords trailing; Turkish gypsies, dark and furtive-eyed, walking softly in leather slippers\u2014of endless and fascinating variety, many colored and splendid, it all was. From time to time a droschky with two horses, or a private carriage with three, rattled noisily over the cobbles at a reckless pace, stopping with the abruptness of a practiced skater; and officers with narrow belted waists like those of women, their full-skirted cloaks reaching half-way down high boots of shining leather, sprang out to pay the driver and take a vacant table at his side; and once or twice a body of soldiers, several hundred strong, singing the national songs with a full-throated vigor, hoarse, wild, somehow half terrible, passed at a swinging gait away into the darkness at the end of the street, the roar of their barbaric singing dying away in the distance by the sea where the boom of waves just caught it.\n\nAnd O'Malley loved it all, and \"thrilled\" as he watched and listened. From his hidden self within something passed out and joined it. He felt the wild pulse of energetic life that drove along with the tumult of it. The savage, untamed soul in him leaped as he saw; the blood ran faster. Sitting thus upon the bank of the hurrying stream, he knew himself akin to the main body of the invisible current further out; it drew him with it, and he experienced a quickening of all his impulses toward some wild freedom that was mighty\u2014clean\u2014simple.\n\nCivilian dress was rare, and noticeable when it came. The shipping agents wore black alpaca coats, white trousers, and modern hats of straw. A few ship's officers in blue, with official caps gold-braided, passed in and out like men without a wedding garment, as distressingly out of the picture as tourists in check knickerbockers and nailed boots moving through some dim cathedral aisle. O'Malley recognized one or two from his own steamer, and turned his head the other way. It hurt. He caught himself thinking, as he saw them, of Stock Exchanges, two-penny-tubes, Belgravia dinner parties, private views, \"small and earlies,\" musical comedy, and all the rest of the dismal and meager program. These harmless little modern uniforms were worse than ludicrous, for they formed links with the glare and noise of the civilization he had left behind, the smeared vulgarity of the big cities where men and women live in their possessions, wasting life in that worship of external detail they call \"progress\"\u2026\n\nA well-known German voice crashed through his dream.\n\n\"Already at the wine! These Caucasian vintages are good; they really taste of grapes and earth and flowers. Yes, thanks, I'll join you for a moment if I may. We only lie three days in port and are glad to get ashore.\"\n\nO'Malley called for a second glass, and passed the cigarettes.\n\n\"I prefer my black cigars, thank you,\" was the reply, lighting one. \"You push on tomorrow, I suppose? Kars, Tiflis, Erzerum, or somewhere a little wilder in the mountains, eh?\"\n\n\"Toward the mountains, yes,\" the Irishman said. Dr. Stahl was the only person he could possibly have allowed to sit next him at such a time. He had quite forgiven him now, and though at first he felt no positive welcome, the strange link between the two men quickly asserted itself and welded them together in that odd harmony they knew in spite of all differences. They could be silent together, too, without distress or awkwardness, sure test that at least some portion of their personalities fused.\n\nAnd for a long time they remained silent, watching the surge and movement of the old, old types about them. They sipped the yellow wine and smoked. The stars came out; the carriages grew less; from far away floated a deep sonorous echo now and then of the soldiers singing by their barracks. Sometimes a steamer hooted. Cossacks swung by. Often some wild cry rang out from a side street. There were heavy, unfamiliar perfumes in the air. Presently Stahl began talking about the Revolution of a few years before and the scenes of violence he had witnessed in these little streets, the shooting, barricades, bombs thrown into passing carriages, Cossacks charging down the pavements with swords drawn, shouting and howling. O'Malley listened with a part of his mind at any rate. The rest of him was much further away\u2026. He was up among the mountain fastnesses. Already, it seemed, he knew the secret places of the mist, the lair of every running wind\u2026.\n\nTwo tall mountain tribesmen swaggered past close to their table; the thick grey burkas almost swept their glasses. They walked magnificently with easy, flowing stride, straight from the hips.\n\n\"The earth here,\" said O'Malley, taking advantage of a pause in the other's chatter, \"produces some splendid types. Look at those two; they make one think of trees walking\u2014blown along bodily before a wind.\" He watched them with admiration as they swung off and disappeared among the crowd.\n\nDr. Stahl, glancing keenly at him, laughed a little.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said; \"brave, generous fellows too as a rule, who will shoot you for a pistol that excites their envy, yet give their life to save one of their savage dogs. They're still\u2014natural,\" he added after a moment's hesitation; \"still unspoiled. They live close to Nature with a vengeance. Up among the Ossetians on the high saddles you'll find true Pagans who worship trees, sacrifice blood, and offer bread and salt to the nature-deities.\"\n\n\"Still?\" asked O'Malley, sipping his wine.\n\n\"Still,\" replied Stahl, following his example.\n\nOver the glasses' rims their eyes met. Both smiled, though neither quite knew why. The Irishman, perhaps, was thinking of the little city clerks he knew at home, pigeon-breasted, pale-faced, under-sized. One of these big men, so full of rushing, vigorous life, would eat a dozen at a sitting.\n\n\"There's something here the rest of the world has lost,\" he murmured to himself. But the doctor heard him.\n\n\"You feel it?\" he asked quickly, his eyes brightening. \"The awful, primitive beauty\u2014?\"\n\n\"I feel\u2014something, certainly,\" was the cautious answer. He could not possibly have said more just then; yet it seemed as though he heard far echoes of that voice that had been first borne to his ears across the blue \u00c6gean. In the gorges of these terrible mountains it surely sounded still. These men must know it too.\n\n\"The spell of this strange land will never leave you once you've felt it,\" pursued the other quietly, his voice deepening. \"Even in the towns here\u2014Tiflis, Kutais\u2014I have felt it. Hereabouts is the cradle of the human race, they say, and the people have not changed for thousands of years. Some of them you'll find\"\u2014he hunted for a word, then said with a curious, shrugging gesture, \"terrific.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2014\" said the Irishman, lighting a fresh cigarette from the dying stump so clumsily that the trembling of the hand was noticeable.\n\n\"And akin most likely,\" said Stahl, thrusting his face across the table with a whispering tone, \"to that\u2014man\u2014who\u2014tempted you.\"\n\nO'Malley did not answer. He drank the liquid golden sunshine in his glass; his eyes lifted to the stars that watched above the sea; between the surge of human figures came a little wind from the grim, mysterious Caucasus beyond. He turned all tender as a child, receiving as with a shock of sudden strength and sweetness a thousand intimate messages from the splendid mood of old Mother-Earth who here expressed herself in such a potent breed of men and mountains.\n\nHe heard the doctor's voice still speaking, as from a distance though:\u2014\n\n\"For here they all grow with her. They do not fight her and resist. She pours freely through them; there is no opposition. The channels still lie open;\u2026 and they share her life and power.\"\n\n\"That beauty which the modern world has lost,\" repeated the other to himself, lingering over the words, and wondering why they expressed so little of what he really meant.\n\n\"But which will never\u2014can never come again,\" Stahl completed the sentence. There was a wistful, genuine sadness in his voice and eyes, and the sympathy touched the inflammable Celt with fire. It was ever thus with him. The little man opposite, with the ragged beard, and the bald, domed head gleaming in the electric light, had laid a card upon the table, showing a bit of his burning heart. The generous Irishman responded like a child, laying himself bare. So hungry was he for comprehension.\n\n\"Men have everywhere else clothed her fair body with their smothering, ugly clothing and their herded cities,\" he burst out, so loud that the Armenian waiter sidled up, thinking he called for wine. \"But here she lies naked and unashamed, sweet in divinity made simple. By Jove! I tell you, doctor, it burns and sweeps me with a kind of splendid passion that drowns my little shame-faced personality of the twentieth century. I could run out and worship\u2014fall down and kiss the grass and soil and sea\u2014!\"\n\nHe drew back suddenly like a wounded animal; his face turned scarlet, as though he knew himself convicted of an hysterical outburst. Stahl's eyes had changed even as he spoke the flaming words that struggled so awkwardly to seize his mood of rapture\u2014a thought the Earth poured through him for a moment. The bitter, half-mocking smile lay in them, and on the lips the cold and critical expression of the other Stahl, skeptic and science-man. A revulsion of feeling caught them both. But to O'Malley came the thought that once again he had been drawn\u2014was being coaxed for examination beneath the microscope.\n\n\"The material here,\" Stahl said presently, with the calm tones of a dispassionate diagnosis, \"is magnificent as you say, uncivilized without being merely savage, untamed, yet far from crude barbarism. When the progress of the age gets into this land the transformation will be grand. When Russia lets in culture, when modern improvements have developed her resources and trained the wild human forces into useful channels\u2026.\"\n\nHe went on calmly by the yard, till it was all the Irishman could do not to dash the wine-glass in his face.\n\n\"Remember my words when you are up in the lonely mountains,\" he concluded at length, smiling his queer sardonic smile, \"and keep yourself in hand. Put on the brakes when possible. Your experience will thus have far more value.\"\n\n\"And you,\" replied O'Malley bluntly, so bluntly it was almost rudeness, \"go back to Fechner, and try to save your compromising soul before it is too late\u2014\"\n\n\"Still following those lights that do mislead the morn,\" Stahl added gently, breaking into English for a phrase he apparently loved. They laughed and raised their glasses.\n\nA long pause came which neither cared to break. The streets were growing empty, the personality of the mysterious little Black Sea port folding away into the darkness. The wilder element had withdrawn behind the shuttered windows. There came a murmur of the waves, but the soldiers no longer sang. The droschkys ceased to rattle past. The night flowed down more thickly from the mountains, and the air, moist with that malarial miasma which makes the climate of this reclaimed marsh whereon Batoum is built so unhealthy, closed unpleasantly about them. The stars died in it.\n\n\"Another glass?\" suggested Stahl. \"A drink to the gods of the Future, and till we meet again, on your return journey, eh?\"\n\n\"I'll walk with you to the steamer,\" was the reply. \"I never care for much wine. And the gods of the Future will prefer my usual offering, I think\u2014imaginative faith.\"\n\nThe doctor did not ask him to explain. They walked down the middle of the narrow streets. No one was about, nor were there lights in many windows. Once or twice from an upper story came the faint twanging of a balalaika against the drone of voices, and occasionally they passed a little garden where figures outlined themselves among the trees, with the clink of glasses, laughter of men and girls, and the glowing tips of cigarettes.\n\nThey turned down toward the harbor where the spars and funnels of the big steamers were just visible against the sky, and opposite the unshuttered window of a shop\u2014one of those modern shops that oddly mar the town with assorted German tinware, Paris hats, and oleographs indiscriminately mingled\u2014Stahl stopped a moment and pointed. They moved up idly and looked in. From the shadows of the other side, well hidden, an armed patrol eyed them suspiciously, though they were not aware of it.\n\n\"It was before a window like this,\" remarked Stahl, apparently casually, \"that I once in Tiflis overheard two mountain Georgians talking together as they examined a reproduction of a modern picture\u2014B\u00f6cklin's 'Centaur.' They spoke in half whispers, but I caught the trend of what they said. You know the picture, perhaps?\"\n\n\"I've seen it somewhere, yes,\" was the short reply. \"But what were they saying?\" He strove to keep his voice commonplace and casual like his companion's.\n\n\"Oh, just discussing it together, but with a curious stretched interest,\" Stahl went on. \"One asked, 'What does it say?' and pointed to the inscription underneath. They could not read. For a long time they stared in silence, their faces grave and half afraid. 'What is it?' repeated the first one, and the other, a much older man, heavily bearded and of giant build, replied low, 'It's what I told you about'; there was awe in his tone and manner; 'they still live in the big valley of the rhododendrons beyond\u2014' mentioning some lonely uninhabited region toward Daghestan; 'they come in the spring, and are very swift and roaring\u2026.You must always hide. To see them is to die. But they cannot die; they are of the mountains. They are older, older than the stones. And the dogs will warn you, or the horses, or sometimes a great sudden wind, though you must never shoot.' They stood gazing in solemn wonder for minutes\u2026till at last, realizing that their silence was final, I moved away. There were manifestations of life in the mountains, you see, that they had seen and knew about\u2014old forms akin to that picture apparently.\"\n\nThe patrol came out of his shadows, and Stahl quickly drew his companion along the pavement.\n\n\"You have your passport with you?\" he asked, noticing the man behind them.\n\n\"It went to the police this afternoon. I haven't got it back yet.\" O'Malley spoke thickly, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. How much he welcomed that casual interruption of the practical world he could never explain or tell. For the moment he had felt like wax in the other's hands. He had dreaded searching questions, and felt unspeakably relieved. A minute more and he would have burst into confession.\n\n\"You should never be without it,\" the doctor added. \"The police here are perfect fiends, and can cause you endless inconvenience.\"\n\nO'Malley knew it all, but gladly seized the talk and spun it out, asking innocent questions while scarcely listening to the answers. They distanced the patrol and neared the quays and shipping. In the darkness of the sky a great line showed where the spurs of the Lesser Caucasus gloomed huge and solemn to the East and West. At the gangway of the steamer they said good-bye. Stahl held the Irishman's hand a moment in his own.\n\n\"Remember, when you know temptation strong,\" he said gravely, though a smile was in the eyes, \"the passwords that I now give you: Humanity and Civilization.\"\n\n\"I'll try.\"\n\nThey shook hands warmly enough.\n\n\"Come home by this steamer if you can,\" he called down from the deck. \"And keep to the middle of the road on your way back to the hotel. It's safer in a town like this.\" O'Malley divined the twinkle in his eyes as he said it. \"Forgive my many sins,\" he heard finally, \"and when we meet again, tell me your own\u2026.\" The darkness took the sentence. But the word the Irishman took home with him to the little hotel was the single one\u2014Civilization: and this, owing to the peculiar significance of intonation and accent with which this bewildering and self-contradictory being had uttered it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 131", + "text": "He walked along the middle of the street as Stahl had advised. He would have done so in any case, unconsciously, for he knew these towns quite as well as the German did. Yet he did not walk alone. The entire Earth walked with him, and personal danger was an impossibility. A dozen ruffians might attack him, but none could \"take\" his life.\n\nHow simple it all seemed, yet how utterly beyond the reach of intelligible description to those who have never felt it\u2014this sudden surge upwards, downwards, all around and about of the vaster consciousness amid which the sense of normal individuality seemed but a tiny focused point. That loss of personality he first dreaded as an \"inner catastrophe\" appeared to him now for what it actually was\u2014merely an extinction of some phantasmal illusion of self into the only true life. Here, upon the fringe of this wonder-region of the Caucasus, the spirit of the Earth still manifested as of old, reached out lovingly to those of her children who were simple enough to respond, ready to fold them in and heal them of the modern, racking fevers which must otherwise destroy them\u2026. The entire sky of soft darkness became a hand that covered him, and stroked him into peace; the perfume that wafted down that narrow street beside him was the single, enveloping fragrance of the whole wide Earth herself; he caught the very murmur of her splendid journey through the stars. The certitude of some state of boundless being flamed, roaring and immense, about his soul\u2026.\n\nAnd when he reached his room, a little cell that shut out light and air, he met that sinister denial of the simple life which, for him at least, was the true Dweller on the Threshold. Crashing in to it he choked, as it were, and could have cried aloud. It gripped and caught him by the throat\u2014the word that Stahl\u2014Stahl who understood even while he warned and mocked and hesitated himself\u2014had flung so tauntingly upon him from the decks\u2014Civilization.\n\nUpon his table lay by chance\u2014the Armenian hotel-keeper had evidently unearthed it for his benefit\u2014a copy of a London halfpenny paper, a paper that feeds the public with the ugliest details of all the least important facts of life by the yard, inventing others when the supply is poor. He read it over vaguely, with a sense of cold distress that was half pain, half nausea. Somehow it stirred his sense of humor; he returned slowly to his normal, littler state. But it was not the contrast which made him smile; rather was it the chance juxtaposition of certain of the contents; for on the page facing the accounts of railway accidents, of people burned alive, explosions, giant strikes, crumpled air-men and other countless horrors which modern inventions offered upon the altar of feverish Progress, he read a complacently boastful leader that extolled the conquest of Nature men had learned by speed. The ability to pass from one point to another across the skin of the globe in the least possible time was sign of the development of the human soul.\n\nThe pompous flatulence of the language touched bathos. He thought of the thousands who had read both columns and preened themselves upon that leader. He thought how they would pride themselves upon the latest contrivance for speeding their inert bodies from one point to another \"annihilating distance\"; upon being able to get from suburbia to the huge shops that created artificial wants, then filled them; from the pokey villas with their wee sham gardens to the dingy offices; from dark airless East End rooms to countless factories that pour out semifraudulent, unnecessary wares upon the world, explosives and weapons to destroy another nation, or cheapjack goods to poison their own\u2014all in a few minutes less than they could do it the week before.\n\nAnd then he thought of the leisure of the country folk and of those who knew how to be content without external possessions, to watch the sunset and the dawn with hearts that sought realities; sharing the noble slowness of the seasons, the gradual growth of flowers, trees, and crops, the unhurried dignity of Nature's grand procession, the repose-in-progress of the Mother-Earth.\n\nThe calmness of the unhastening Earth once more possessed his soul in peace. He hid the paper, watching the quiet way the night beyond his window buried it from sight\u2026\n\nAnd through that open window came the perfume and the mighty hand of darkness slowly. It seemed to this imaginative Irishman that he caught a sound of awful laughter from the mountains and the sea, a laughter that brought, too, a wave of sighing\u2014of deep and old-world sighing.\n\nAnd before he went to sleep he took an antidote in the form of a page from that book that accompanied all his travels, a book which was written wholly in the open air because its message refused to come to the heart of the inspired writer within doors, try as he would, the \"sky especially containing for me the key, the inspiration\u2014\"\n\nAnd the fragment that he read expressed a little bit of his own thought and feeling. The seer who wrote it looked ahead, naming it \"After Civilization,\" whereas he looked back. But they saw the same vision; the confusion of time was nothing:\u2014\n\n\u2003In the first soft winds of spring, while snow yet lay on the ground\u2014\n\n\u2003Forth from the city into the great woods wandering,\n\n\u2003Into the great silent white woods where they waited in their beauty and majesty\n\n\u2003For man their companion to come:\n\n\u2003There, in vision, out of the wreck of cities and civilizations,\n\n\u2003Slowly out of the ruins of the past\n\n\u2003Out of the litter and muck of a decaying world,\n\n\u2003Lo! even so\n\n\u2003I saw a new life arise.\n\n\u2003O sound of waters, jubilant, pouring, pouring\u2014O hidden song in the hollows!\n\n\u2003Secret of the Earth, swelling, sobbing to divulge itself!\n\n\u2003Slowly, building, lifting itself up atom by atom,\n\n\u2003Gathering itself round a new center\u2014or rather round the world old\n\n\u2003center once more revealed\u2014\n\n\u2003I saw a new life, a new society, arise.\n\n\u2003Man I saw arising once more to dwell with Nature;\n\n\u2003(The old old story\u2014the prodigal son returning, so loved,\n\n\u2003The long estrangement, the long entanglement in vain things)\u2014\n\n\u2003The child returning to its home\u2014companion of the winter woods once more\u2014\n\n\u2003Companion of the stars and waters\u2014hearing their words at first-hand\n\n\u2003(more than all science ever taught)\u2014\n\n\u2003The near contact, the dear dear mother so close\u2014the twilight sky\n\n\u2003and the young tree-tops against it;\n\n\u2003The few needs, the exhilarated radiant life\u2014the food and population\n\n\u2003question giving no more trouble;\n\n\u2003No hurry more, no striving one to over-ride the other:\n\n\u2003\u2026man the companion of Nature.\n\n\u2003Civilization behind him now\u2014the wonderful stretch of the past;\n\n\u2003Continents, empires, religions, wars, migrations\u2014all gathered up in him;\n\n\u2003The immense knowledge, the vast winged powers\u2014to use or not to use\u2014\u2026\n\nAnd as he fell asleep at length it seemed there came a sound of hushed huge trampling underneath his window, and that when he rose to listen, his big friend from the steamer led him forth into the darkness, that those shapes of Cloud and Wind he now so often saw, companioned them across the heights of the night toward some place in the distant mountains where light and flowers were, and all his dream of years most exquisitely fulfilled\u2026.\n\nHe slept. And through his sleep there dropped the words of that old tribesman from the wilderness: \"They come in the spring\u2026 and are very swift and roaring. They are older, older than the stones. They cannot die\u2026 they are of the mountains, and you must hide.\"\n\nBut the dream-consciousness knows no hiding; and though memory failed to report with detail in the morning, O'Malley woke refreshed and blessed, knowing that companionship awaited him, and that once he found the courage to escape completely, the Simple Life of Earth would claim him in full consciousness.\n\nStahl with his little modern \"Intellect\" was no longer there to hinder and prevent." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 132", + "text": "\u2003\"Far, very far, steer by my star,\n\n\u2003Leaving the loud world's hurry and clamor,\n\n\u2003In the mid-sea waits you, maybe,\n\n\u2003The Isles of Glamour, where Beauty reigns.\n\n\u2003From coasts of commerce and myriad-marted\n\n\u2003Towns of traffic by wide seas parted,\n\n\u2003Past shoals unmapped and by reefs uncharted,\n\n\u2003The single-hearted my isle attains.\n\n\u2003\"Each soul may find faith to her mind,\n\n\u2003Seek you the peace of the groves Elysian,\n\n\u2003Or the ivy twine and the wands of vine,\n\n\u2003The Dionysian, Orphic rite?\n\n\u2003To share the joy of the Maenad's leaping\n\n\u2003In frenzied train thro' the dusk glen sweeping,\n\n\u2003The dew-drench'd dance and the star-watch'd sleeping,\n\n\u2003Or temple keeping in vestal white?\n\n\u2003\"Ye who regret suns that have set,\n\n\u2003Lo, each god of the ages golden,\n\n\u2003Here is enshrined, ageless and kind,\n\n\u2003Unbeholden the dark years through.\n\n\u2003Their faithful oracles yet bestowing,\n\n\u2003By laurels whisper and clear streams flowing,\n\n\u2003Or the leafy stir of the Gods' own going,\n\n\u2003In oak trees blowing, may answer you!\"\n\n\u2014From PEREGRINA'S SONG\n\nFor the next month Terence O'Malley possessed his soul in patience; he worked, and the work saved him. That is to say it enabled him to keep what men call \"balanced.\" Stahl had\u2014whether intentionally or not he was never quite certain\u2014raised a tempest in him. More accurately, perhaps, he had called it to the top, for it had been raging deep down ever since he could remember, or had begun to think.\n\nThat the earth might be a living, sentient organism, though too vast to be envisaged as such by normal human consciousness, had always been a tenet of his imagination's creed. Now he knew it true, as a dinner-gong is true. That deep yearnings, impossible of satisfaction in the external conditions of ordinary life, could know subjective fulfillment in the mind, had always been for him poetically true, as for any other poet: now he realized that it was literally true for some outlying tract of consciousness usually inactive, termed by some transliminal. Spiritual nostalgia provided the channel, and the transfer of consciousness to this outlying tract, involving, of course, a trance condition of the usual self, indicated the way\u2014that was all.\n\nAgain, his mystical temperament had always seen objects as forces which from some invisible center push outwards into visible shape\u2014as bodies: bodies of trees, stones, flowers, men, women, animals; and others but partially pushed outwards, still invisible to limited physical sight at least, either too huge, too small, or too attenuated for vision. Whereas now, as a result of Stahl and Fechner combined, it flamed into him that this was positively true; more\u2014that there was a point in his transliminal consciousness where he might \"contact\" these forces before they reached their cruder external expression as bodies. Nature, in this sense, had always been for him alive, though he had allowed himself the term by a long stretch of poetic sympathy; but now he knew that it was actually true, because objects, landscapes, humans, and the rest, were verily aspects of the collective consciousness of the Earth, moods of her spirit, phases of her being, expressions of her deep, pure, passionate \"heart\"\u2014projections of herself.\n\nHe pondered lingeringly over this. Common words revealed their open faces to him. He saw the ideas behind language, saw them naked. Repetition had robbed them of so much that now became vital, like Bible phrases that too great familiarity in childhood kills for all subsequent life as meaningless. His eyes were opened perhaps. He took a flower into his mind and thought about it; really thought; meditated lovingly. A flower was literally projected by the earth so far as its form was concerned. Its roots gathered soil and earth-matter, changing them into leaves and blossoms; its leaves again, took of the atmosphere, also a part of the earth. It was projected by the earth, born of her, fed by her, and at \"death\" returned into her. But this was its outward and visible form only. The flower, for his imaginative mind, was a force made visible as literally as a house was a force the mind of the architect made visible. In the mind, or consciousness of the Earth this flower first lay latent as a dream. Perhaps, in her consciousness, it nested as that which in us corresponds to a little thought\u2026. And from this he leaped, as the way ever was with him, to bigger \"projections\"\u2014trees, atmosphere, clouds, winds, some visible, some invisible, and so to a deeper yet simpler comprehension of Fechner's thundering conception of human beings as projections. Was he, then, literally, a child of the Earth, mothered by the whole magnificent planet\u2026? All the world akin\u2014that seeking for an eternal home in every human heart explained\u2026? And were there\u2014had there been rather\u2014these other, vaster projections Stahl had adumbrated with his sudden borrowed stretch of vision\u2014forces, thoughts, moods of her hidden life invisible to sight, yet able to be felt and known interiorly?\n\nThat \"the gods\" were definitely knowable Powers, accessible to any genuine worshipper, had ever haunted his mind, thinly separated only from definite belief: now he understood that this also had been true, though only partially divined before. For now he saw them as the rare expressions of the Earth's in the morning of her life. That he might ever come to know them close made him tremble with a fearful joy, the idea flaming across his being with a dazzling brilliance that brought him close to that state of consciousness termed ecstasy. And that in certain unique beings, outwardly human like his friend, there might still survive some primitive expression of the Earth-Soul, lesser than the gods, and intermediate as it were, became for him now a fact\u2014wondrous, awe-inspiring, even holy, but still a fact that he could grasp.\n\nHe had found one such; and Stahl, by warnings that fought with urging invitation at the same time, had confirmed it.\n\nIt was singular, he reflected, how worship had ever turned for him a landscape or a scene enchantingly alive. Worship, he now understood, of course invited \"the gods,\" and was the channel through which their manifestation became possible to the soul. All the gods, then, were accessible in this interior way, but Pan especially\u2014in desolate places and secret corners of a wood\u2026. He remembered dimly the Greek idea of worship in the Mysteries: that the worshipper knew actual temporary union with his deity in ecstasy, and at death went permanently into his sphere of being. He understood that worship was au fond a desire for loss of personal life\u2014hence its subtle joy; and a fear lest it be actually accomplished\u2014whence its awe and wonder.\n\nSome glorious, winged thing moved now beside him; it held him by the hand. The Earth possessed him; and the whole adventure, so far as he can make it plain, was an authoritative summons to the natural, Simple Life.\n\nFor the next month, therefore, O'Malley, unhurrying, blessed with a deeper sense of happiness than he had ever known before, dismissed the \"tempest\" from his surface consciousness, and set to work to gather the picturesque impressions of strange places and strange peoples that the public liked to read about in occasional letters of travel. And by the time May had passed into June he had moved up and down the Caucasus, observing, learning, expanding, and gathering in the process through every sense\u2014through the very pores of his skin almost\u2014draughts of a new and abundant life that is to be had there merely for the asking.\n\nThat modification of the personality which comes even in cities to all but the utterly hidebound\u2014so that a man in Rome finds himself not quite the same as he was in London or in Paris a few days before\u2014went forward in him on a profounder scale than anything he had known hitherto. Nature fed, stimulated and called him with a passionate intimacy that destroyed all sense of loneliness, and with a vehement directness of attack that simply charged him to the brim with a new joy of living. His vitality, powers, even his physical health, stood at their best and highest. The country laid its spell upon him, in a word; and if he expresses it thus with some intensity it was because life came to him so. His record is the measure of his vision. Those who find exaggeration in it merely confess thereby their own smaller capacity of living.\n\nHere, as he wandered to and fro among these proud, immense, secluded valleys, through remote and untamed forests, and by the banks of wild rivers that shook their flying foam across untrodden banks, he wandered at the same time deeper and ever deeper into himself, toward a point where he lost touch with all that constituted him \"modern,\" or held him captive in the spirit of today. Nearer and ever nearer he moved into some tremendous freedom, some state of innocence and simplicity that, while gloriously unrestrained, yet knew no touch of license. Dreams had whispered of it; childhood had fringed its frontiers; longings had even mapped it faintly to his mind. But now he breathed its very air and knew it face to face. The Earth surged wonderfully about him.\n\nWith his sleeping-bag upon a small Caucasian horse, a sack to hold his cooking things, a pistol in his belt, he wandered thus for days, sleeping beneath the stars, seeing the sunset and the dawn, drenched in new strength and wonder all the time. Here he touched deeper reaches of the Earth that spoke of old, old things, that yet were still young because they knew not change. He walked in the morning of the world, through her primal fire and dew, when all was a first and giant garden.\n\nThe advertised splendors of other lands, even of India, Egypt, and the East, seemed almost vulgar beside this country that had somehow held itself aloof, unstained and clean. The civilization of its little towns seemed but a coated varnish that an hour's sun would melt away; the railway, crawling along the flanks of the great range, but a ribbon of old iron pinned on that, with the first shiver of those giant sides, would split and vanish.\n\nHere, where the Argonauts once landed, the Golden Fleece still shone o' nights in the depths of the rustling beech woods; along the shores of that old Phasis their figures might still be seen, tall Jason in the lead, erect and silvery, passing o'er the shining, flowered fields upon their quest of ancient beauty. Further north from this sunny Colchian strand rose the peak of Kasbek, gaunt and desolate pyramid of iron, \"sloping through five great zones of climate,\" whence the ghost of Prometheus still gazed down from his \"vast frozen precipice\" upon a world his courage would redeem. For somewhere here was the cradle of the human race, fair garden of some Edened life before the \"Fall,\" when the Earth sang for joy in her first, golden youth, and her soul expressed itself in mighty forms that remain for lesser days but a faded hierarchy of visioned gods.\n\nA living Earth went with him everywhere, with love that never breathed alarm. It seemed he felt her very thoughts within himself\u2014thoughts, however, that now no longer married with a visible expression as shapes.\n\nAmong these old-world tribes and peoples with their babble of difficult tongues, wonder and beauty, terror and worship, still lay too deeply buried to have as yet externalized themselves in mental forms as legend, myth, and story. In the blood ran all their richness undiluted. Life was simple, full charged with an immense delight. At home little cocksure writers in little cocksure journals, pertly modern and enlightened, might dictate how far imaginative vision and belief could go before they overstepped the limits of an artificial schedule; but here \"everything possible to be believed was still an image of truth,\" and the stream of life flowed deeper than all mere intellectual denials.\n\nA little out of sight, but thinly veiled, the powers that in this haunted corner of the earth, too strangely neglected, pushed outwards into men and trees, into mountains, flowers, and the rest, were unenslaved and intensely vital. In his blood O'Malley knew the primal pulses of the world.\n\nIt was irresistibly seductive. Whether he slept with the Aryan Ossetians upon the high ridges of the central range, or shared the stone huts of the mountain Jews, unchanged since Bible days, beyond the Suram heights, there came to all his senses the message of that Golden Age his longings ever sought\u2014the rush and murmur of the Urwelt calling.\n\nAnd so it was, about the first week in June that lean, bronzed, and in perfect physical condition, this wandering Irishman found himself in a little Swanetian hamlet beyond Alighir, preparing with a Georgian peasant-guide to penetrate yet deeper into the mountain recesses and feed his heart with what he found of loneliness and beauty.\n\nThis region of Imerethia, bordering on Mingrelia, is smothered beneath an exuberance of vegetation almost tropical, blue and golden with enormous flowers, tangled with wild vines, rich with towering soft beech woods, and finally, in the upper sections, ablaze with leagues of huge rhododendron trees in blossom that give whole mountain-sides the aspect of a giant garden, flowering amid peaks that even dwarf the Alps. For here the original garden of the world survives, run wild with pristine loveliness. The prodigality of Nature is bewildering, almost troubling. There are valleys, rarely entered by the foot of man, where monstrous lilies, topping a man on foot and even reaching to his shoulder on horseback, have suggested to botanists in their lavish luxuriance a survival of the original flora of the world. A thousand flowers he found whose names he had never heard of, their hues and forms as strangely lovely as those of another planet. The grasses alone in scale and mass were magnificent. While, in and out of all this splendor, less dense and voluminous only than the rhododendron forests, ran scattered lines of blazing yellow\u2014the crowding clusters of azalea bushes that scented the winds beyond belief.\n\nBeyond this region of extravagance in size and color, there ran immense bare open slopes of smooth turf that led to the foot of the eternal snowfields, with, far below, valleys of prodigious scale and steepness that touched somehow with disdain all memory of other mountain ranges he had ever known.\n\nAnd here it was this warm June evening\u2014June 15th it was\u2014while packing his sack with cheese and maize-flour in the dirty yard of a so-called \"post-house,\" more hindered than helped by his Georgian guide, that he realized the approach of a familiar, bearded figure. The figure emerged. There was a sudden clutch and lift of the heart\u2026 then a rush of wild delight. There stood his Russian steamer-friend, part of the scale and splendor, as though grown out of the very soil. He occupied in a flash the middle of the picture. He gave it meaning. He was part of it, exactly as a tree or big grey boulder were part of it.\n\n\"Seasons and times; Life and Fate\u2014all are remarkably rhythmic, metric, regular throughout. In all crafts and arts, in all machines, in organic bodies, in our daily occupations everywhere there is rhythm, meter, accent, melody. All that we do with a certain skill unnoticed, we do rhythmically. There is rhythm everywhere; it insinuates itself everywhere. All mechanism is metric, rhythmic. There must be more in it than this. Is it merely the influence of inertia?\"\n\n\u2014NOVALIS, Translated by U.C.B.\n\nNotwithstanding the extent and loneliness of this wild country, coincidence seemed in no way stretched by the abrupt appearance; for in a sense it was not wholly unexpected. There had been certain indications that the meeting again of these two was imminent. The Irishman had never doubted they would meet. But something more than mere hints or warnings, it seemed, had prepared him.\n\nThe nature of these warnings, however, O'Malley never fully disclosed. Two of them he told to me by word of mouth, but there were others he could not bring himself to speak about at all. Even the two he mentioned do not appear in his written account. His hesitation is not easy to explain, unless it be that language collapsed in the attempt to describe occurrences so remote from common experience. This may be so, although he grappled not unsuccessfully with the rest of the amazing adventure. At any rate I could never coax from him more than the confession that there were other things that had brought him hints. Then came a laugh, a shrug of the shoulders, an expression of confused bewilderment in eyes and manner and\u2014silence.\n\nThe two he spoke of I report as best I can. On the roof of that London apartment-house where so many of our talks took place beneath the stars and to the tune of bustling modern traffic, he told them to me. Both were consistent with his theory that he was becoming daily more active in some outlying portion of his personality\u2014knowing experiences in a region of extended consciousness stimulated so powerfully by his strange new friend.\n\nBoth, moreover, brought him one and the same conviction that he was no longer\u2014alone. For some days past he had realized this. More than his peasant guide accompanied him. He was both companioned and\u2014observed.\n\n\"A dozen times,\" he said, \"I thought I saw him, and a dozen times I was mistaken. But my mind looked for him. I knew that he was somewhere close.\" He compared the feeling to that common experience of the streets when a friend, not known to be near, or even expected, comes abruptly into the thoughts, so that numberless individuals may trick the sight with his appearance before he himself comes suddenly down the pavement. His approach has reached the mind before his mere body turns the corner. \"Something in me was aware of his approach,\" he added, \"as though his being were sending out feelers in advance to find me. They reached me first, I think\"\u2014he hesitated briefly, hunting for a more accurate term he could not find\u2014\"in dream.\"\n\n\"You dreamed that he was coming, then?\"\n\n\"It came first in dream,\" he answered; \"only when I woke the dream did not fade; it passed over into waking consciousness, so that I could hardly tell where the threshold lay between the two. And, meanwhile, I was always expecting to see him at every turn of the trail almost; a little higher up the mountain, behind a rock, or standing beside a tree, just as in the end I actually did see him. Long before he emerged in this way, he had been close about me, guiding, waiting, watching.\"\n\nHe told it as a true thing he did not quite expect me to believe. Yet, in a sense, his sense, I could and did believe it. It was so wholly consistent with the tenor of his adventure and the condition of abnormal receptivity of mind. For his stretched consciousness was in a state of white sensitiveness whereon the tenderest mental force of another's thought might well record its signature. Acutely impressionable he was all over. Physical distance was of as little, or even of less, account to such forces as it is to electricity.\n\n\"But it was more than the Russian who was close,\" he added quietly with one of those sentences that startled me into keen attention. \"He was there\u2014with others\u2014of his kind.\"\n\nAnd then, hardly pausing to take breath, he plunged, as his manner was, full tilt into the details of this first experience that thrilled my hedging soul with an astonishing power of conviction. As always when his heart was in the words, the scenery about us faded and I lived the adventure with him. The cowled and hooded chimneys turned to trees, the stretch of dim star-lit London Park became a deep Caucasian vale, the thunder of the traffic was the roaring of the snow-fed torrents. The very perfume of strange flowers floated in the air.\n\nThey had been in their blankets, he and his peasant guide, for hours, and a moon approaching the full still concealed all signs of dawn, when he woke out of deep sleep with the odd sensation that it was only a part of him that woke. One portion of him was in the body, while another portion was elsewhere, manifesting with ease and freedom in some state or region whither he had traveled in his sleep\u2014where, moreover, he had not been alone.\n\nAnd close about him in the trees was\u2014movement. Yes! Through and between the scattered trunks he saw it still.\n\nWith eyes a little dazed, the active portion of his brain perceived this processing movement passing to and fro across the glades of moonlight beneath the steady trees. For there was no wind. The shadows of the branches did not stir. He saw swift running shapes, vigorous yet silent, hurrying across the network of splashed silver and pools of black in some kind of organized movement that was circular and seemed not due to chance. Arranged it seemed and ordered; like the regulated revolutions of a set and whirling measure.\n\nPerhaps twenty feet from where he lay was the outer fringe of what he discerned to be this fragment of some grand gamboling dance or frolic; yet discerned but dimly, for the darkness combined with his uncertain vision to obscure it.\n\nAnd the shapes, as they sped across the silvery patchwork of the moon, seemed curiously familiar. Beyond question he recognized and knew them. For they were akin to those shadowy emanations seen weeks ago upon the steamer's after-deck, to that \"messenger\" who climbed from out the sea and sky, and to that form the spirit of the boy assumed, set free in death. They were the flying outlines of Wind and Cloud he had so often glimpsed in vision, racing over the long, bare, open hills\u2014at last come near.\n\nIn the moment of first waking, when he saw them clearest, he declares with emphasis that he knew the father and the boy were among them. Not so much that he saw them actually for recognition, but rather that he felt their rushing presences; for the first sensation on opening his eyes was the conviction that both had passed him close, had almost touched and called him. Afterwards he searched in vain among the flying forms that swept in the swift succession of their leaping dance across the silvery pathways. While varying in size all were so similar.\n\nHis description of them is confused a little, for he admits that he could never properly focus them in steady sight. They slipped with a melting swiftness under the eye; the moment one seemed caught in vision it passed on further and the next was in its place. It was like following a running wave-form on the sea. He says, moreover, that while erect and splendid, their backs and shoulders seemed prolonged in hugeness as though they often crouched to spring; they seemed to paw the air; and that a faint delicious sound to which they kept obedient time and rhythm, held that same sweetness which had issued from the hills of Greece, blown down now among the trees from very far away. And when he says \"blown down among the trees,\" he qualifies this phrase as well, because at the same time it came to him that the sound also rose up from underneath the earth, as if the very surface of the ground ran shaking with a soft vibration of its own. Some marvelous dream it might have been in which the forms, the movement, and the sound were all thrown up and outwards from the quivering surface of the Earth itself.\n\nYet, almost simultaneously with the first instant of waking, the body issued its call of warning. For, while he gazed, and before time for the least reflection came, the Irishman experienced this dislocating conviction that he himself was taking part in the whirling gambol even while he lay and watched it, and that in this way the sense of division in his personality was explained. The fragment of himself within the brain watched some other more vital fragment\u2014some projection of his consciousness detached and separate\u2014playing yonder with its kind beneath the moon.\n\nThis sense of a divided self was not new to him, but never before had he known it so distinct and overwhelming. The definiteness of the division, as well as the importance and vitality of the separated portion, were arrestingly novel. It felt as though he were completely out, or to such a degree, at least, that the fraction left behind with the brain was at first only just sufficient for him to recognize his body at all.\n\nYonder with these others he felt the wind of movement pass along his back, he saw the trees slip by, and knew the very contact of the ground between the leaps. His movements were natural and easy, light as air and fast as wind; they seemed automatic, impelled by something mighty that directed and contained them. He knew, too, the sensation that others pressed behind him and passed before, slipped in and out, and that through the whole wild urgency of it he yet could never make an error. More\u2014he knew that these shifting forms had been close and dancing about him for a time not measurable merely by the hours of a single night, that in a sense they were always there though he had but just discovered them. His earlier glimpses had been a very partial divination of a truth, immense and beautiful, that now dawned quite gorgeously upon him all complete.\n\nThe whole world danced. The Universe was rhythmical as well as metrical.\n\nFor this amazing splendor showed itself in a flash-like revelation to the freed portion of his consciousness, and he knew it irresistibly because he himself shared it. Here was an infinite joy, naked and unashamed, born of the mighty Mother's heart and life, a joy which, in its feebler, lesser manifestations, trickles down into human conditions, though still spontaneously even then, so pure its primal urgency, as\u2014dancing.\n\nThe entire experience, the entire revelation, he thinks, can have occupied but a fraction of a second, but it seemed to smite the whole of his being at once with the conviction of a supreme authority. And close behind it came, too, that other sister expression of a spontaneous and natural expression, equally rhythmical\u2014the impulse to sing. He could have sung aloud. For this puissant and mysterious rhythm to which all moved was greater than any little measure of their own. Surging through them, it came from outside and beyond, infinitely greater than themselves, springing from something of which they were, nevertheless, a living portion. From the body of the Earth it came direct\u2014it was in fact a manifestation of her own vibrating life. The currents of the Earth pulsed through them.\n\n\"And then,\" he says, \"I caught this flaming thought of wonder, though so much of it faded instantly upon my full awakening that I can only give you the merest suggestion of what it was.\"\n\nHe stood up beside me as he said it, spreading his arms, as so often when he was excited, to the sky. I caught the glow of his eyes, and in his voice was passion. He spoke unquestionably of something he had intimately known, not as men speak of even the vividest dreams, but of realities that have burned the heart and left their trails of glory.\n\n\"Science has guessed some inkling of the truth,\" he cried, \"when it declares that the ultimate molecules of matter are in constant vibratory movement one about another, even upon the point of a needle. But I saw\u2014knew, rather, as if I had always known it, sweet as summer rain, and close in me as love\u2014that the whole Earth with all her myriad expressions of life moved to this primal rhythm as of some divine dancing.\"\n\n\"Dancing?\" I asked, puzzled.\n\n\"Rhythmical movement call it then,\" he replied. \"To share the life of the Earth is to dance and sing in a huge abundant joy! And the nearer to her great heart, the more natural and spontaneous the impulse\u2014the instinctive dancing of primitive races, of savages and children, still artless and untamed; the gamboling of animals, of rabbits in the meadows and of deer unwatched in forest clearings\u2014you know naturalists have sometimes seen it; of birds in the air\u2014rooks, gulls, and swallows; of the life within the sea; even of gnats in the haze of summer afternoons. All life simple enough to touch and share the enormous happiness of her deep, streaming, personal Being, dances instinctively for very joy\u2014obedient to a greater measure than they know\u2026. The natural movement of the great Earth-Soul is rhythmical. The very winds, the swaying of trees and flowers and grasses, the movement of the sea, of water running through the fields with silver feet, of the clouds and edges of the mist, even the trembling of the earthquakes,\u2014all, all respond in sympathetic motions to this huge vibratory movement of her great central pulse. Ay, and the mountains too, though so vastly scaled their measure that perhaps we only know the pauses in between, and think them motionless\u2026. The mountains rise and fall and change; our very breathing, first sign of stirring life, even the circulation of our blood, bring testimony; our speech as well\u2014inspired words are ever rhythmical, language that pours into the poet's mind from something greater than himself. And not unwisely, but in obedience to a deep instinctive knowledge was dancing once\u2014in earlier, simpler days\u2014a form of worship. You know, at least, how rhythm in music and ceremonial uplifts and cleans and simplifies the heart toward the greater life\u2026. You know, perhaps, the Dance of Jesus\u2026.\"\n\nThe words poured from him with passion, yet always uttered gently with a smile of joy upon the face. I saw his figure standing over me, outlined against the starry sky; and, deeply stirred, I listened with delight and wonder. Rhythm surely lies behind all expression of life. He was on the heels of some simple, dazzling verity though he phrased it wildly. But not a tenth part of all he said could I recapture afterwards for writing down. The steady, gentle swaying of his body I remember clearly, and that somewhere or other in the stream of language, he made apt reference to the rhythmical swaying of those who speak in trance, or know some strange, possessing gust of inspiration.\n\nThe first and natural expression of the Earth's vitality lies in a dancing movement of purest joy and happiness\u2014that for me is the gist of what remains. Those near enough to Nature feel it. I myself remembered days in spring\u2026 my thoughts, borne upon some sweet emotion, traveled far\u2026.\n\n\"And not of the Earth alone,\" he interrupted my dreaming in a voice like singing, \"but of the entire Universe. The spheres and constellations weave across the fields of ether the immense old rhythm of their divine, eternal dance\u2026!\"\n\nThen, with a disconcerting abruptness, and a strange little wayward laugh as of apology for having let himself so freely go, he sat down beside me with his back against the chimney-stack. He resumed more quietly the account of this particular adventure that lay 'twixt dream and waking:\n\nAll that he described had happened in a few seconds. It flashed, complete, authoritative and vivid, then passed away. He knew again the call and warning of his body\u2014to return. For this consciousness of being in two places at once, divided as it were against himself, brought with it the necessity for decision. With which portion should he identify himself? By an act of will, it seemed, a choice was possible.\n\nAnd with it, then, came the knowledge that to remain \"out\" was easier than to return. This time, to come back into himself would be difficult.\n\nThe very possibility seemed to provide the shock of energy necessary for overcoming it; the experience alarmed him; it was like holding an option upon living\u2014like a foretaste of death. Automatically, as it were, these loosened forces in him answered to the body's summons. The result was immediate and singular; one of these Dancing outlines separated itself from the main herd, approached with a sudden silent rush, enveloped him for a second of darkness and confusion, losing its shape completely on the way, and then merged into his being as smoke slips in and merges with the structure of a tree.\n\nThe projected portion of his personality had returned. The sense of division was gone. There remained behind only the little terror of the weak flesh whose summons had thus brought it back.\n\nThe same instant he was fully awake\u2014the night about him empty of all but the silver dreaming of the moon among the shadows. Beside him lay the sleeping figure of his companion, the bashlik of lamb's wool drawn closely down about the ears and neck, and the voluminous black burka shrouding him from feet to shoulders. A little distance away the horse stood, munching grass. Again he noted that there was no wind, and the shadows of the trees lay motionless upon the ground. The air smelt sweet of forest, soil, and dew.\n\nThe experience\u2014it seemed now\u2014belonged to dreaming rather than to waking consciousness, for there was nothing about him to confirm it outwardly. Only the memory remained\u2014that, and a vast, deep-coursing, subtle happiness. The smaller terror that he felt was of the flesh alone, for the flesh ever instinctively fought against such separation. The happiness, though, contained and overwhelmed the fear.\n\nYes, only the memory remained, and even that fast fading. But the substance of what had been, passed into his inmost being: the splendor of that would remain forever, incorporated with his life. He had shared in this brief moment of extended consciousness some measure of the Mother's cosmic being, simple as sunshine, unrestrained as wind, complete and satisfying. Its natural expression was rhythmical, a deep, pure joy that drove outwards even into little human conditions as dancing and singing. He had known it, too, with companions of his kind\u2026\n\nMoreover, though no longer visible or audible, it still continued somewhere close. He was blessedly companioned all the time\u2014and watched. They knew him one of themselves\u2014these brother expressions of her cosmic life\u2014these Urwelt beings that Today had no external, bodily forms. They waited, knowing well that he would come. Fulfillment beckoned surely just beyond\u2026" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 133", + "text": "\u2003\"\u2026 And then suddenly,\u2014\n\n\u2003While perhaps twice my heart was dutiful\n\n\u2003To send my blood upon its little race\u2014\n\n\u2003I was exalted above surety,\n\n\u2003And out of Time did fall.\"\n\n\u2014LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, Poems and Interludes\n\nThis, then, was one of the \"hints\" by which O'Malley knew that he was not alone and that the mind of his companion was stretched out to find him. He became aware after it of a distinct guidance, even of direction as to his route of travel. The \"impulse came,\" as one says, to turn northwards, and he obeyed it without more ado. For this \"dream\" had come to him when camped upon the slopes of Ararat, further south toward the Turkish frontier, and though all prepared to climb the sixteen-thousand foot summit, he changed his plans, dismissed the local guide, and turned back for Tiflis and the Central Range. In the wilder, lonelier mountains, he felt strongly, was where he ought to be.\n\nAnother man, of course, would have dismissed the dream or forgotten it while cooking his morning coffee; but, rightly or wrongly, this divining Celt accepted it as real. He held an instinctive belief, that in dreams of a certain order the forces that drive behind the soul at a given moment, may reveal themselves to the subconscious self, becoming authoritative in proportion as they are sanely encouraged and interpreted. They dramatize themselves in scenes that are open to intuitive interpretation. And O'Malley, it seems, possessed, like the Hebrew prophets of old, just that measure of judgment and divination which go to the making of a true clear-vision.\n\nPacking up kit and dunnage, he crossed the Georgian Military Route on foot to Vladikavkaz, and thence with another horse and a Mohammedan Georgian as guide, Rostom by name, journeyed via Alighir and Oni up a side valley of unforgettable splendor toward an Imerethian hamlet where they meant to lay-in supplies for a prolonged expedition into the uninhabited wilderness.\n\nAnd here, the second occurrence he told me of took place. It was more direct than the first, yet equally strange; also it brought a similar authority\u2014coming first along the deep mysterious underpaths of sleep\u2014sleep, that short cut into the subconscious.\n\nThey were camped among low boxwood trees, a hot dry night, wind soft and stars very brilliant, when the Irishman turned in his sleeping-bag and abruptly woke. This time there was no dream\u2014only the certainty that something had wakened him deliberately. He sat up, almost with a cry. It was exactly as though he heard himself called by name and recognized the voice that spoke it. He looked quickly round. Nothing but the crowding army of the box-trees was visible, some bushy and round, others straggling in their outline, all whispering gently together in the night. Beyond ran the immense slopes, and far overhead he saw the gleaming snow on peaks that brushed the stars.\n\nNo one was visible. This time no flying figures danced beneath the moon. There was, indeed, no moon. Something, however, he knew had come up close and touched him, calling him from the depths of a profound and tired slumber. It had withdrawn again, vanished into the night. The strong certainty remained, though, that it lingered near about him still, trying to press forwards and outwards into some kind of objective visible expression that included himself. He had responded with an effort in his sleep, but the effort had been unsuccessful. He had merely waked\u2026 and lost it.\n\nThe horse, tethered a few feet away, was astir and troubled, straining at the rope, whinnying faintly, and Rostom, the Georgian peasant, he saw, was already up to quiet it. A curious perfume passed him through the air\u2014once, then vanished; unforgettable, however, for he had known it already weeks ago upon the steamer. And before the gardened woods about him smothered it with their richer smells of a million flowers and weeds, he recognized in it that peculiar pungent whiff of horse that had reached him from the haunted cabin. This time it was less fleeting\u2014a fine, clean odor that he liked even while it strangely troubled him.\n\nKicking out of his blankets, he joined the man and helped to straighten out the tangled rope. Rostom spoke little Russian, and O'Malley's knowledge of Georgian lay in a single phrase, \"Look sharp!\" but with the aid of French the man had learned from shooting-parties, he gathered that some one had approached during the night and camped, it seemed, not far away above them.\n\nThough unusual enough in so unfrequented a region, this was not necessarily alarming, and the first proof O'Malley had that the man experienced no ordinary physical fear was the fact that he had left both knife and rifle in his blankets. Hitherto, at the least sign of danger, he changed into a perfect arsenal; he invariably slept \"in his weapons\"; but now, even in the darkness, the other noted that he was unarmed, and therefore it was no attempt at horse-stealing or of assault upon themselves he feared.\n\n\"Who is it? What is it?\" he asked, stumbling over the tangle of string-like roots that netted the ground. \"Natives, travelers like ourselves, or\u2014something else?\" He spoke very low, as though aware that what had waked him still hovered close enough to overhear. \"Why do you fear?\"\n\nAnd Rostom looked up a moment from stooping over the rope. He stepped a little nearer, avoiding the animal's hoofs. In a confused whisper of French and Russian, making at the same time the protective signs of his religion, he muttered a sentence of which the other caught little more than the unassuring word that something was about them close\u2014something \"m\u00e9chant.\" This curious, significant word he used.\n\nThe whispered utterance, the manner that went with it, surely the dark and lonely setting of the little scene as well, served to convey the full suggestion of the adjective with a force the man himself could scarcely have intended. Something had passed by, not so much evil, wicked, or malign as strange and alien\u2014uncanny. Rostom, a man utterly careless of physical danger, rising to it, rather, with delight, was frightened\u2014in his soul.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" O'Malley asked louder, with an air of impatience assumed. The man was on his knees, but whether praying, or merely struggling with the rope, was hard to see. \"What is it you're talking about so foolishly?\" He spoke with a confidence he hardly felt himself.\n\nAnd the involved reply, spoken with lips against the earth, the head but slightly turned as he knelt, again smothered the words. Only the curious phrase came to him\u2014\"de l'ancien monde\u2014quelque-chose\u2014\"\n\nThe Irishman took him by the shoulders. Not meaning actually to shake him, he yet must have used some violence, for the fact was that he did not like the answers and sought to deny some strong emotion in himself. The man stood up abruptly with a kind of sudden spring. The expression of his face was not easily divined in the darkness, but a gleam of the eyes was clearly visible. It may have been anger, it may have been terror; vivid excitement it certainly was.\n\n\"Something\u2014old as the stones, old as the stones,\" he whispered, thrusting his dark bearded face unpleasantly close. \"Such things are in these mountains\u2026. Mais oui! C'est moi qui vous le dis! Old as the stones, I tell you. And sometimes they come out close\u2014with sudden wind. We know!\"\n\nHe stepped back again sharply and dropped upon his knees, bowing to the ground with flattened palms. He made a repelling gesture as though it was O'Malley's presence that brought the experience.\n\n\"And to see them is\u2014to die!\" he heard, muttered against the ground thickly. \"To see them is to die!\"\n\nThe Irishman went back to his sleeping-bag. Some strange passion of the man was deeply stirred; he did not wish to offend his violent beliefs and turn it against himself in a stupid, scrambling fight. He lay and waited. He heard the muttering of the deep voice behind him in the darkness. Presently it ceased. Rostom came softly back to bed.\n\n\"He knows; he warned me!\" he whispered, jerking one hand toward the horse significantly, as they at length lay again side by side in their blankets and the stars shone down upon them from a deep black sky. \"But, for the moment, they have passed, not finding us. No wind has come.\"\n\n\"Another\u2014horse?\" asked O'Malley suggestively, with a sympathy meant to quiet him.\n\nBut the peasant shook his head; and this time it was not difficult to divine the expression on his face even in the darkness. At the same moment the tethered animal again uttered a long whinnying cry, plaintive, yet of pleasure rather than alarm it seemed, which instantly brought the man again with a leap from the blankets to his knees. O'Malley did not go to help him; he stuffed the clothes against his ears and waited; he did not wish to hear the peasant's sentences.\n\nAnd this pantomime went on at intervals for an hour or more, when at length the horse grew quiet and O'Malley snatched moments of unrefreshing sleep. The night lay thick about them with a silence like the silence of the sky. The boxwood bushes ran together into a single sheet of black, the far peaks faded out of sight, the air grew keen and sharp toward the dawn on the wave of wind the sunrise drives before it round the world. But to and fro across the Irishman's mind as he lay between sleep and dozing ran the feeling that his friends were close, and that those dancing forms of cosmic life to which all three approximated had come near once more to summon him. He also knew that what the horse had felt was something far from terror. The animal instinctively had divined the presence of something to which it, too, was remotely kin.\n\nRostom, however, remained keenly on the alert, much of the time apparently praying. Not once did he touch the weapons that lay ready to hand upon the folded burka\u2026 and when at last the dawn came, pale and yellow, through the trees, showing the outlines of the individual box and azalea bushes, he got up earlier than usual and began to make the fire for coffee. In the fuller light which soon poured swiftly over the eastern summits and dropped gold and silver into the tremendous valley at their feet, the men made a systematic search of the immediate surroundings, and then of the clearings and more open stretches beyond. In silence they made it. They found, however, no traces of another camping-party. And it was clear from the way they went about the search that neither expected to find anything. The ground was unbroken, the bushes undisturbed.\n\nYet still, both knew. That \"something\" which the night had brought and kept concealed, still hovered close about them.\n\nAnd it was at this scattered hamlet, consisting of little more than a farm of sorts and a few shepherds' huts of stone, where they stopped two hours later for provisions, that O'Malley looked up thus suddenly and recognized the figure of his friend. He stood among the trees a hundred yards away. At first the other thought he was a tree\u2014his stalwart form the stem, his hair and beard the branches\u2014so big and motionless he stood between the other trunks. O'Malley saw him for a full minute before he understood. The man seemed so absolutely a part of the landscape, a giant detail in keeping with the rest\u2014a detail that had suddenly emerged.\n\nThe same moment a great draught of wind, rising from depths of the valley below, swept overhead with a roaring sound, shaking the beech and box trees and setting all the golden azalea heads in a sudden agitation. It passed as swiftly as it came. The peace of the June morning again descended on the mountains.\n\nIt was broken by a wild, half-smothered cry,\u2014a cry of genuine terror.\n\nFor O'Malley had turned to Rostom with some word that here, in this figure, lay the explanation of the animal's excitement in the night, when he saw that the peasant, white as chalk beneath the tangle of black hair that covered his face, had stopped dead in his tracks. His mouth was open, his arms upraised to shield; he was staring fixedly in the same direction as himself. The next instant he was on his knees, bowing and scraping toward Mecca, groaning, hiding his eyes with both hands. The sack he held had toppled over; the cheese and flour rolled upon the ground; and from the horse came that long-drawn whinnying of the night.\n\nThere was a momentary impression\u2014entirely in the Irishman's mind, of course,\u2014that the whole landscape veiled a giant, rushing movement that passed across it like a wave. The surface of the earth, it seemed, ran softly quivering, as though that wind had stirred response together with the trembling of the million leaves\u2026 before it settled back again to stillness. It passed in the flash of an eyelid. The earth lay tranquil in repose.\n\nBut, though the suddenness of the stranger's arrival might conceivably have startled the ignorant peasant, with nerves already overwrought from the occurrence of the night, O'Malley was not prepared for the violence of the man's terror as shown by the immediate sequel. For after several moments' prayer and prostration, with groans half smothered against the very ground, he sprang impetuously to his feet again, turned to his employer with eyes that gleamed wildly in that face of chalk, cried out\u2014the voice thick with the confusion of his fear\u2014\"It is the Wind! They come; from the mountains they come! Older than the stones they are. Save yourself\u2026. Hide your eyes\u2026 fly\u2026!\"\u2014and was gone. Like a deer he went. He waited neither for food nor payment, but flung the great black burka round his face\u2014and ran.\n\nAnd to O'Malley, bereft of all power of movement as he watched in complete bewilderment, one thing seemed clear: the man went in this extraordinary fashion because he was afraid of something he had felt, not seen. For as he ran with wild and leaping strides, he did not run away from the figure. He took the direction straight toward the spot where the stranger still stood motionless as a tree. So close he passed him that he must almost have brushed his very shoulder. He did not see him.\n\nThe last thing the Irishman noted was that in his violence the man had dropped the yellow bashlik from his head. O'Malley saw him stoop with a flying rush to pick it up. He seemed to catch it as it fell.\n\nAnd then the big figure moved. He came slowly forward from among the trees, his hands outstretched in greeting, on his great visage a shining smile of welcome that seemed to share the sunrise. In that moment for the Irishman all was forgotten as though unknown, unseen, save the feelings of extraordinary happiness that filled him to the brim." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 134", + "text": "\u2002\"The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, 'Those who are free throughout the world.' They are free, and they make free. An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author. I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to that degree that he forgets the authors and the public, and heeds only this one dream, which holds him like an insanity, let me read his paper, and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism.\" \u2014EMERSON\n\nTo criticize, deny, perhaps to sneer, is no very difficult or uncommon function of the mind, and the story as I first heard him tell it, lying there in the grass beyond the Serpentine that summer evening, roused in me, I must confess, all of these very ordinary faculties. Yet, as I listened to his voice that mingled with the rustle of the poplars overhead, and watched his eager face and gestures, it came to me dimly that a man's mistakes may be due to his attempting bigger things than his little critic ever dreamed perhaps. And gradually I shared the vision that this unrhyming poet by my side had somehow lived out in action.\n\nInner experience for him was ever the reality\u2014not the mere forms or deeds that clothe it in partial physical expression.\n\nThere was no question, of course, that he had actually met this big, inarticulate Russian on the steamer; that Stahl's part in the account was unvarnished; that the boy had fallen on the deck from heart disease; and that, after an interval, chance had brought O'Malley and the father together again in this valley of the Central Caucasus. All that was as literal as the superstitious terror of the Georgian peasant. Further, that the Russian possessed precisely those qualities of powerful sympathy with the other's hidden longings which the subtle-minded Celt had been so quick to appropriate\u2014this, too, was literal enough. Here, doubtless, was the springboard whence he leaped into the stream of this quasi-spiritual adventure with an eagerness of fine, whole-hearted belief which must make this dull world a very wonderful place indeed to those who know it; for it is the visioned faculty of correlating the commonest event with the procession of august Powers that pass ever to and fro behind life's swaying curtain, and of divining in the most ordinary of yellow buttercups the golden fires of a dropped star.\n\nAgain, for Terence O'Malley there seemed no definite line that marked off one state of consciousness from another, just as there seems no given instant when a man passes actually from sleep to waking, from pleasure to pain, from joy to grief. There is, indeed, no fixed threshold between the states of normal and abnormal consciousness. In this stranger he imagined a sense of companionship that by some magic of alchemy transformed his deep loneliness into joy, and satisfied his passionate yearnings by bringing their subjective fulfillment within range. To have found acceptance in his sight was thus a revolutionary fact in his existence. While a part of my mind may have labeled it all as creative imagination, another part recognized it as plainly true\u2014because his being lived it out without the least denial.\n\nHe, at any rate, was not inventing; nor ever knew an instant's doubt. He simply told me what had happened. The discrepancies\u2014the omissions in his written account especially\u2014were simply due, I feel, to the fact that his skill in words was not equal to the depth and brilliance of the emotions that he experienced. But the fact remains: he did experience them. His fairy tale convinced.\n\nHis faith had made him whole\u2014one with the Earth. The sense of disunion between his outer and his inner self was gone.\n\nAnd now, as these two began their journey together into the wilder region of these stupendous mountains, O'Malley says he realized clearly that the change he had dreaded as an \"inner catastrophe\" simply would mean the complete and final transfer of his consciousness from the \"without\" to the \"within.\" It would involve the loss only of what constituted him a person among the external activities of the world today. He would lose his life to find it. The deeper self thus quickened by the stranger must finally assert its authority over the rest. To join these Urwelt beings and share their eternal life of beauty close to the Earth herself, he must shift the center. Only thus could he enter the state before the \"Fall\"\u2014that ancient Garden of the World-Soul, walled-in so close behind his daily life\u2014and know deliverance from the discontent of modern conditions that so distressed him.\n\nTo do this temporarily, perhaps, had long been possible to him\u2014in dream, in reverie, in those imaginative trances when he almost seemed to leave his body altogether; but to achieve it permanently was something more than any such passing disablement of the normal self. It involved, he now saw clearly, that which he had already witnessed in the boy: the final release of his Double in so-called death.\n\nThus, as they made their way northwards, nominally toward the mighty Elbruz and the borders of Swanetia, the Irishman knew in his heart that they in reality came nearer to the Garden long desired, and to those lofty Gates of horn and ivory that hitherto he had never found\u2014because he feared to let himself go. Often he had camped beneath the walls, had smelt the flowers, heard the songs, and even caught glimpses of the life that moved so gorgeously within. But the Gates themselves had never shone for him, even against the sky of dream, because his vision had been clouded by alarm. They swung, it had seemed to him before, in only one direction\u2014for those who enter: he had always hesitated, lost his way, returned\u2026. And many, like him, make the same mistake. Once in, there need be no return, for in reality the walls spread outwards and\u2014enclose the entire world.\n\nCivilization and Humanity, the man of smaller vision had called out to him as passwords to safety. Simplicity and Love, he now discovered, were the truer clues. His big friend in silence taught him. Now he knew.\n\nFor in that little hamlet their meeting had taken place\u2014in silence. No actual speech had passed. \"You go\u2014so?\" the Russian conveyed by a look and by a movement of his whole figure, indicating the direction; and to the Irishman's assenting inclination of the head he made an answering gesture that merely signified compliance with a plan already known to both. \"We go, together then.\" And, there and then, they started, side by side.\n\nThe suddenness of this concerted departure only seemed strange afterwards when O'Malley looked back upon it, for at the time it seemed as inevitable as being obliged to swim once the dive is taken. He stood upon a pinnacle whence lesser details were invisible; he knew a kind of exaltation\u2014of loftier vision. Small facts that ordinarily might fill the day with trouble sank below the horizon then. He did not even notice that they went without food, horse, or blankets. It was reckless, unrestrained, and utterly unhindered, this free setting-forth together. Thus might he have gone upon a journey with the wind, the sunshine, or the rain. Departure with a thought, a dream, a fancy could not have been less unhampered.\n\nThe only detail of his outer world that lingered\u2014and that, already sinking out of sight like a stone into deep water\u2014was the image of the running peasant. For a moment he recalled the picture. He saw the man in the act of stooping after the fallen bashlik. He saw him seize it, lift it to his head again. But the picture was small\u2014already very far away. Before the bashlik actually reached the head, the detail dipped into mist and vanished\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 135", + "text": "It was spring\u2014and the flutes of Pan played everywhere. The radiance of the world's first morning shone undimmed. Life flowed and sang and danced, abundant and untamed. It bathed the mountains and that sky of stainless blue. It bathed him too. Dipped, washed, and shining in it, he walked the Earth as she lay radiant in her early youth. The crystal presence of her everlasting Spring flew laughing through a world of light and flowers\u2014flowers that none could ever pluck to die, light that could never fade to darkness within walls and roofs.\n\nAll day they wound easily, as though on winged feet, through the steep belt of box and beech woods, and in sparkling brilliant heat across open spaces where the azaleas shone; a cooling wind, fresh as the dawn, seemed ever to urge them forwards. The country, for all its huge scale and wildness, was park-like; the giant, bushy trees wore an air of being tended by the big winds that ran with rustling music among their waving foliage. Between the rhododendrons were avenues of turf, broad-gladed pathways, yet older than the moon, from which a thousand gardeners of wind and dew had gone but a moment before to care for others further on. Over all brimmed up some primal, old-world beauty of a simple life\u2014some immemorial soft glory of the dawn.\n\nCloser and closer, deeper and deeper, ever swifter, ever more direct, O'Malley passed down toward the heart of his mother's being. Along the tenderest pathways of his inner being, so wee, so soft, so simple that for most men they lie ignored or overgrown, he slipped with joy a little nearer\u2014one stage perhaps\u2014toward Reality.\n\nPan \"blew in power\" across these Caucasian heights and valleys.\n\n\u2003Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!\n\n\u2003Piercing sweet by the river!\n\n\u2003Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!\n\n\u2003The sun on the hill forgot to die,\n\n\u2003And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly\n\n\u2003Came back to dream on the river\n\nIn front his big leader, no longer blundering clumsily as on that toy steamer with the awkward and lesser motion known to men, pressed forward with a kind of giant sure supremacy along paths he knew, or rather over a trackless, pathless world which the great planet had charted lovingly for his splendid feet. That wind, blowing from the depths of valleys left long since behind, accompanied them wisely. They heard, not the faint horns of Elfland faintly blowing, but the blasts of the Urwelt trumpets growing out of the still distance, nearer, ever nearer. For leagues below the beech woods poured over the enormous slopes in a sea of soft green foam, and through the meadow spaces they saw the sweet nakedness of running water, and listened to its song. At noon they rested in the greater heat, sleeping beneath the shadow of big rocks; and sometimes traveled late into the night, when the stars guided them and they knew the pointing of the winds. The very moonlight then, that washed this lonely world with silver, sheeting the heights of snow beyond, was friendly, half divine\u2026 and it seemed to O'Malley that while they slept they were watched and cared for\u2014as though Others who awaited had already come halfway out to meet them.\n\nAnd ever, more and more, the passion of his happiness increased; he knew himself complete, fulfilled, made whole. It was as though his Self were passing outwards into hundreds of thousands, and becoming countless as the sand. He was everywhere; in everything; shining, singing, dancing\u2026. With the ancient woods he breathed; slipped with the streams down the still darkened valleys; called from each towering summit to the Sun; and flew with all the winds across the immense, untrodden slopes. About him lay this whole spread being of the flowered Caucasus, huge and quiet, drinking in the sunshine at its leisure. But it lay also within himself, for his expanding consciousness included and contained it. Through it\u2014this early potent Mood of Nature\u2014he passed toward the Soul of the Earth within, even as a child, caught by a mood of winning tenderness in its mother, passes closer to the heart that gave it birth. Some central love enwrapped him. He knew the surrounding power of everlasting arms." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 136", + "text": "\u2003\"Inward, ay, deeper far than love or scorn,\n\n\u2003Deeper than bloom of virtue, stain of sin,\n\n\u2003Rend thou the veil and pass alone within,\n\n\u2003Stand naked there and know thyself forlorn.\n\n\u2003Nay! in what world, then, spirit, vast thou born?\n\n\u2003Or to what World-Soul art thou entered in?\n\n\u2003Feel the Self fade, feel the great life begin.\n\n\u2003With Love re-rising in the cosmic morn.\n\n\u2003The Inward ardor yearns to the inmost goal;\n\n\u2003The endless goal is one with the endless way;\n\n\u2003From every gulf the tides of Being roll,\n\n\u2003From every zenith burns the indwelling day,\n\n\u2003And life in Life has drowned thee and soul in Soul;\n\n\u2003And these are God and thou thyself art they.\"\n\n\u2014F.W.H. MYERS. From \"A Cosmic Outlook\"\n\nThe account of what followed simply swept me into fairyland, yet a Fairyland that is true because it lives in every imaginative heart that does not dream itself shut off from the Universe in some wee compartment all alone.\n\nIf O'Malley's written account, and especially his tumbled notebooks, left me bewildered and confused, the fragments that he told me brought this sense of an immense, sweet picture that actually existed. I caught small scenes of it, set in some wild high light. Their very incoherence conveyed the gorgeous splendor of the whole better than any neat ordered sequence could possibly have done.\n\nClimax, in the story-book meaning, there was none. The thing flowed round and round forever. A sense of something eternal wrapped me as I listened; for his imagination set the whole adventure out of time and space, and I caught myself dreaming too. \"A thousand years in His sight\"\u2014I understood the old words as refreshingly new\u2014might be a day. Thus felt that monk, perhaps, for whose heart a hundred years had passed while he listened to the singing of a little bird.\n\nMy practical questions\u2014it was only at the beginning that I was dull enough to ask them\u2014he did not satisfy, because he could not. There was never the least suggestion of the artist's mere invention.\n\n\"You really felt the Earth about and in you,\" I had asked, \"much as one feels the presence of a friend and living person?\"\n\n\"Drowned in her, yes, as in the thoughts and atmosphere of some one awfully loved.\" His voice a little trembled as he said it.\n\n\"So speech unnecessary?\"\n\n\"Impossible\u2014fatal,\" was the laconic, comprehensive reply, \"limiting: destructive even.\"\n\nThat, at least, I grasped: the pitifulness of words before that love by which self goes wholly lost in the being of another, adrift yet cared for, gathered all wonderfully in.\n\n\"And your Russian friend\u2014your leader?\" I ventured, haltingly.\n\nHis reply was curiously illuminating:\u2014\n\n\"Like some great guiding Thought within her mind\u2014some flaming motif\u2014interpreting her love and splendor\u2014leading me straight.\"\n\n\"As you felt at Marseilles, a clue\u2014a vital clue?\" For I remembered the singular phrase he had used in the notebook.\n\n\"Not a bad word,\" he laughed; \"certainly, as far as it goes, not a wrong one. For he\u2014it\u2014was at the same time within myself. We merged, as our life grew and spread. We swept things along with us from the banks. We were in flood together,\" he cried. \"We drew the landscape with us!\"\n\nThe last words baffled me; I found no immediate response. He pushed away the plates on the table before us, where we had been lunching in the back room of a dingy Soho restaurant. We now had the place to ourselves. He drew his chair a little nearer.\n\n\"Don't ye see\u2014our journey also was within,\" he added abruptly.\n\nThe pale London sunlight came through the window across chimneys, dreary roofs, courtyards. Yet where it touched his face it seemed at once to shine. His voice was warm and eager. I caught from him, as it were, both heat and light.\n\n\"You moved actually, though, over country\u2014?\"\n\n\"While at the same time we moved within, advanced, sank deeper,\" he returned; \"call it what you will. Our condition moved. There was this correspondence between the two. Over her face we walked, yet into her as well. We 'traveled' with One greater than ourselves, both caught and merged in her, in utter sympathy with one another as with herself\u2026\"\n\nThis stopped me dead. I could not pretend more than a vague sympathetic understanding with such descriptions of a mystical experience. Nor, it was clear, did he expect it of me. Even his own heart was troubled, and he knew he spoke of things that only few may deal with sanely, still fewer hear with patience.\n\nBut, oh, that little room in Greek Street smelt of forests, dew, and dawn as he told it,\u2014that dear wayward Child of Earth! For \"his voice fell, like music that makes giddy the dim brain, faint with intoxication of keen joy.\" I watched those delicate hands he spread about him through the air; the tender, sensitive lips, the light blue eyes that glowed. I noted the real strength in the face,\u2014a sort of nobility it was\u2014his shabby suit of grey, his tie never caught properly in the collar, the frayed cuffs, and the enormous boots he wore even in London\u2014\"policeman boots\" as we used to call them with a laugh.\n\nSo vivid was the picture that he painted! Almost, it seemed, I knew myself the pulse of that eternal Spring beneath our feet, beating in vain against the suffocating weight of London's bricks and pavements laid by civilization\u2014the Earth's delight striving to push outwards into visible form as flowers. She flashed some scrap of meaning thus into me, though blunted on the way, I fear, and crudely paraphrased.\n\nYes, as he talked across the airless gloom of that little back room, in some small way I caught the splendor of his vision. Behind the words, I caught it here and there. My own wee world extended. My being stretched to understand him and to net in fugitive fragments the scenes of wonder that he knew complete.\n\nPerhaps his larger consciousness fringed my own to \"bruise\" it, as he claimed the Earth had done to him, so that I glimpsed in tinier measure an experience that in himself blazed whole and thundering. It was, I must admit, exalting and invigorating, if a little breathless; and the return to streets and omnibuses painful\u2014a descent to ugliness and disappointment. For things I can hardly understand now, even in my own descriptions of them, seemed at the time quite clear\u2014or clear-ish at any rate. Whereas normally I could never have compassed them at all.\n\nIt taught me: that, at least, I know. In some spiritual way I quickened to the view that all great teaching really comes in some such curious fashion\u2014via a temporary stretching or extension of the \"heart\" to receive it. The little normal self is pushed aside to make room, even to the point of loss, in order to contain it. Later, the consciousness contracts again. But it has expanded\u2014and there has been growth. Was this, I wondered, perhaps what mystics speak of when they say the personal life must slip aside, be trampled on, submerged, before there can be room for the divine Presences\u2026?\n\nAt any rate, as he talked there over coffee that grew cold and cigarette smoke that made the air yet thicker than it naturally was, his words conveyed with almost grandeur of conviction this reality of a profound inner experience. I shared in some faint way its truth and beauty, so that when I saw it in his written form I marveled to find the thing so thin and cold and dwindled. The key his personal presence supplied, of guidance and interpretation, of course was gone.\n\n\u2003\"Why, what is this patient entrance into Nature's deep resources\n\n\u2003But the child's most gradual learning to walk upright without bane?\n\n\u2003When we drive out, from the cloud of steam, majestical white horses,\n\n\u2003Are we greater than the first men who led black ones by the mane?\"\n\n\u2014E.B. BROWNING\n\nThe \"Russian\" led.\n\nO'Malley styled him thus to the end for want of a larger word, perhaps\u2014a word to phrase the inner and the outer. Although the mountains were devoid of trails, he seemed always certain of his way. An absolute sense of orientation possessed him; or, rather, the whole earth became a single pathway. Her being, in and about their hearts, concealed no secrets; he knew the fresh, cool water-springs as surely as the corners where the wild honey gathered. It seemed as natural that the bees should leave them unmolested, giving them freely of their store, as that the savage dogs in the aouls, or villages, they passed so rarely now, should refrain from attack. Even the peasants shared with them some common, splendid life. Occasionally they passed an Ossetian on horseback, a rifle swung across his saddle, a covering burka draping his shoulders and the animal's haunches in a single form that seemed a very outgrowth of the mountains. But not even a greeting was exchanged. They passed in silence; often very close, as though they did not see these two on foot. And once or twice the horses reared and whinnied, while their riders made the signs of their religion\u2026. Sentries they seemed. But for the password known to both they would have stopped the travelers. In these forsaken fastnesses mere unprotected wandering means death. Yet to the happy Irishman there never came a thought of danger or alarm. All was a portion of himself, and no man can be afraid of his own hands or feet. Their convoy was immense, invisible, a guaranteed security of the vast Earth herself. No little personal injury could pass so huge defense. Others, armed with a lesser security of knives and guns and guides, would assuredly have been turned back, or had they shown resistance, would never have been heard to tell the tale. Dr. Stahl and the fur-merchant, for instance\u2014\n\nBut such bothering little thoughts with their hard edges no longer touched reality; they spun away and found no lodgment; they were\u2014untrue; false items of some lesser world unrealized.\n\nFor, in proportion as he fixed his thoughts successfully on outward and physical things, the world wherein he now walked grew dim: he missed the path, stumbled, saw trees and flowers indistinctly, failed to hear properly the call of birds and wind, to feel the touch of sun; and, most unwelcome of all,\u2014was aware that his leader left him, dwindling in size, dropping away somehow among shadows far behind or far ahead.\n\nThe inversion was strangely complete: what men called solid, real, and permanent he now knew as the veriest shadows of existence, fleeting, unsatisfactory, false.\n\nTheir dreary make-believe had all his life oppressed him. He now knew why. Men, driving their forces outwards for external possessions had lost the way so utterly. It truly was amazing. He no longer quite understood how such feverish strife was possible to intelligent beings: the fur-merchant, the tourists, his London friends, the great majority of men and women he had known, pain in their hearts and weariness in their eyes, the sad strained faces, the furious rush to catch a little pleasure they deemed joy. It seemed like some wild senseless game that madness plays. He found it difficult to endow them, one and all, with any sense of life. He saw them groping in thick darkness, snatching with hands of shadow at things of even thinner shadow, all moving in a wild and frantic circle of artificial desires, while just beyond, absurdly close to many, blazed this great living sunshine of Reality and Peace and Beauty. If only they would turn\u2014and look within\u2014!\n\nIn fleeting moments these sordid glimpses of that dark and shadow-world still afflicted his outer sight\u2014the nightmare he had left behind. It played like some gloomy memory through a corner of consciousness not yet wholly disentangled from it. Already he burned to share his story with the world\u2026! A few he saw who here and there half turned, touched by a flashing ray\u2014then rushed away into the old blackness as though frightened, not daring to escape. False images thrown outward by the intellect prevented. Stahl he saw\u2026 groping; a soft light of yearning in his eyes\u2026 a hand outstretched to push the shadows from him, yet ever gathering them instead\u2026. Men he saw by the million, youth still in their hearts, yet slaving in darkened trap-like cages not merely to earn a competency but to pile more gold for things not really wanted; faces of greed round gambling-tables; the pandemonium of Exchanges; even fair women, playing Bridge through all a summer afternoon\u2014the strife and lust and passion for possessions degrading every heart, choking the channels of simplicity\u2026. Over the cities of the world he heard the demon Civilization sing its song of terror and desolation. Its music of destruction shook the nations. He saw the millions dance. And mid the bewildering ugly thunder of that sound few could catch the small sweet voice played by the Earth upon the little Pipes of Pan\u2026 the fluting call of Nature to the Simple Life\u2014which is the Inner.\n\nFor now, as he moved closer to the Earth, deeper ever deeper into the enfolding moods of her vast collective consciousness, he drew nearer to the Reality that satisfies. He approached that center where outward activity is less, yet energy and vitality far greater\u2014because it is at rest. Here he met things halfway, as it were, en route for the outer physical world where they would appear later as \"events,\" but not yet emerged, still alive and breaking with their undischarged and natural potencies. Modern life, he discerned, dealt only with these forces when they had emerged, masquerading at the outer rim of life as complete embodiments, whereas actually they are but partial and symbolical expressions of their eternal prototypes behind. And men today were busy at this periphery only, touch with the center lost, madly consumed with the unimportant details that concealed the inner glory. It was the spirit of the age to mistake the outer shell for the inner reality. He at last understood the reason of his starved loneliness amid the stupid uproar of latter-day life, why he distrusted \"Civilization,\" and stood apart. His yearnings were explained. His heart dwelt ever in the Golden Age of the Earth's first youth, and at last\u2014he was coming home.\n\nLike mud settling in dirty water, the casual realities of that outer life all sank away. He grew clear within, one with the primitive splendor, beauty, grace of a fresh world. Over his inner self, flooding slowly the passages and cellars, those subterranean ways that honeycomb the dim-lit foundations of personality, this tide of power rose. Filling chamber after chamber, melting down walls and ceiling, eating away divisions softly and irresistibly, it climbed in silence, merging all moods and disunion of his separate Selves into the single thing that made him comprehensible to himself and able to know the Earth as Mother. He saw himself whole; he knew himself divine. A strange tumult as of some ecstasy of old remembrance invaded him. He dropped back into a more spacious scale of time, long long ago when a month might be a moment, or a thousand years pass round him as a single day\u2026.\n\nThe qualities of all the Earth lay too, so easily contained, within himself. He understood that old legend by which man the microcosm represents and sums up Earth, the macrocosm in himself, so that Nature becomes the symbol and interpreter of his inner being. The strength and dignity of the trees he drew into himself; the power of the wind was his; with his unwearied feet ran all the sweet and facile swiftness of the rivulets, and in his thoughts the graciousness of flowers, the wavy softness of the grass, the peace of open spaces and the calm of that vast sky. The murmur of the Urwelt was in his blood, and in his heart the exaltation of her golden Mood of Spring.\n\nHow, then, could speech be possible, since both shared this common life? The communion with his friend and leader was too profound and perfect for any stammering utterance in the broken, partial symbols known as language. This was done for them: the singing of the birds, the wind-voices, the rippling of water, the very humming of the myriad insects even, and rustling of the grass and leaves, shaped all they felt in some articulate expression that was right, complete, and adequate. The passion of the larks set all the sky to music, and songs far sweeter than the nightingales' made every dusk divine.\n\nHe understood now that laborious utterance of his friend upon the steamer, and why his difficulty with words was more than he could overcome.\n\nLike a current in the sea he still preserved identity, yet knew the freedom of a boundless being. And meanwhile the tide was ever rising. With this singular companion he neared that inner realization which should reveal them as they were\u2014Thoughts in the Earth's old Consciousness too primitive, too far away, too vital and terrific to be confined in any outward physical expression of the \"civilized\" world today\u2026. The earth shone, glittered, sang, holding them close to the rhythm of her gigantic heart. Her glory was their own. In the blazing summer of the inner life they floated, happy, caught away, at peace\u2026 emanations of her living Self." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 137", + "text": "The valleys far below were filled with mist, cutting them off literally from the world of men, but the beauty of the upper mountains grew more and more bewilderingly enticing. The scale was so immense, while the brilliant clearness of the air brought distance close before the eyes, altered perspective, and robbed \"remote\" and \"near\" of any definite meaning. Space fled away. It shifted here and there at pleasure, according as they felt. It was within them, not without. They passed, dispersed and swift about the entire landscape, a very part of it, diffused in terms of light and air and color, scattered in radiance, distributed through flowers, spread through the sky and grass and forests. Space is a form of thought. But they no longer \"thought\": they felt\u2026. O, that prodigious, clean, and simple Feeling of the Earth! Love that redeems and satisfies! Power that fills and blesses! Electric strength that kills the germ of separateness, making whole! The medicine of the world!\n\nFor days and nights it was thus\u2014or was it years and minutes?\u2014while they skirted the slopes and towers of the huge Dykh-Taou, and Elbrous, supreme and lonely in the heavens, beckoned solemnly. The snowy Kochtan-Taou rolled past, yet through, them; Kasbek superbly thundered; hosts of lesser summits sang in the dawn and whispered to the stars. And longing sank away\u2014impossible.\n\n\"My boy, my boy, could you only have been with me\u2026!\" broke his voice across the splendid dream, bringing me back to the choking, dingy room I had forgotten. It was like a cry\u2014a cry of passionate yearning.\n\n\"I'm with you now,\" I murmured, some similar rising joy half breaking in my breast. \"That's something\u2014\"\n\nHe sighed in answer. \"Something, perhaps. But I have got it always; it's all still part of me. Oh, oh! that I could give it to the world and lift the ache of all humanity\u2026!\" His voice trembled. I saw the moisture of immense compassion in his eyes. I felt myself swim out into universal being.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" I stammered half beneath my breath, \"perhaps some day you may\u2026!\"\n\nHe shook his head. His face turned very sad.\n\n\"How should they listen, much less understand? Their energies drive outwards, and separation is their God. There is no 'money in it'\u2026!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 138", + "text": "\"Oh! whose heart is not stirred with tumultuous joy when the intimate Life of Nature enters into his soul with all its plenitude,\u2026 when that mighty sentiment for which language has no other name than Love is diffused in him, like some powerful all-dissolving vapor; when he, shivering with sweet terror, sinks into the dusky, enticing bosom of Nature; when the meager personality loses itself in the overpowering waves of passion, and nothing remains but the focal point of the incommensurable generative Force, an engulfing vortex in the ocean?\"\n\n\u2014NOVALIS, Disciples at Sa\u00efs. Translated by U.C.B.\n\nEarly in the afternoon they left the bigger trees behind, and passed into that more open country where the shoulders of the mountains were strewn with rhododendrons. These formed no continuous forest, but stood about in groups some twenty-five feet high, their rounded masses lighted on the surface with fires of mauve and pink and purple. When the wind stirred them, and the rattling of their stiff leaves was heard, it seemed as if the skin of the mountains trembled to shake out colored flames. The air turned radiant through a mist of running tints.\n\nStill climbing, they passed along broad glades of turfy grass between the groups. More rapidly now, O'Malley says, went forward that inner change of being which accompanied the progress of their outer selves. So intimate henceforth was this subtle correspondence that the very landscape took the semblance of their feelings. They moved as \"emanations\" of the landscape. Each melted in the other, dividing lines all vanished.\n\nTheir union with the Earth approached this strange and sweet fulfillment.\n\nAnd so it was that, though at this height the vestiges of bird and animal life were wholly gone, there grew more and more strongly the sense that, in their further depths and shadows, these ancient bushes screened Activities even more ancient than themselves. Life, only concealed because they had not reached its plane of being, pulsed everywhere about their pathway, immense in power, moving swiftly, very grand and very simple, and sometimes surging close, seeking to draw them in. More than once, as they moved through glade and clearing, the Irishman knew thrills of an intoxicating happiness, as this abundant, driving life brushed past him. It came so close, it glided before his eyes, yet still was viewless. It strode behind him and before, peered down through space upon him, lapped him about with the stir of mighty currents. The deep suction of its invitation caught his soul, urging the change within himself more quickly forward. Huge and delightful, he describes it, awful, yet bringing no alarm.\n\nHe was always on the point of seeing. Surely the next turning would reveal; beyond the next dense, tangled group would come\u2014disclosure; behind that clustered mass of purple blossoms, shaking there mysteriously in the wind, some half-veiled countenance of splendor watched and welcomed! Before his face passed swift, deific figures, tall, erect, compelling, charged with this ancient, golden life that could never wholly pass away. And only just beyond the fringe of vision. Vision already strained upon the edge. His consciousness stretched more and more to reach them, while They came crowding near to let him know inclusion.\n\nThese projections of the Earth's old consciousness moved thick and soft about them, eternal in their giant beauty. Soon he would know, perhaps, the very forms in which she had projected them\u2014dear portions of her streaming life the earliest races half divined and worshipped, and never quite withdrawn. Worship could still entice them out. A single worshipper sufficed. For worship meant retreat into the heart where still they dwelt. And he had loved and worshipped all his life.\n\nAnd always with him, now at his side or now a little in advance, his leader moved in power, with vigorous, springing gestures like to dancing, singing that old tuneless song of the wind, happier even than himself.\n\nThe splendor of the Urwelt closed about them. They drew nearer to the Gates of that old Garden, the first Time ever knew, whose frontiers were not less than the horizons of the entire world. For this lost Eden of a Golden Age when \"first God dawned on chaos\" still shone within the soul as in those days of innocence before the \"Fall,\" when men first separated themselves from their great Mother.\n\nA little before sunset they halted. A hundred yards above the rhododendron forest, in a clear wide space of turf that ran for leagues among grey boulders to the lips of the eternal snowfields, they waited. Through a gap of sky, with others but slightly lower than himself, the pyramid of Kasbek, grim and towering, stared down upon them, dreadfully close though really miles away. At their feet yawned the profound valley they had climbed. Halfway into it, unable to reach the depths, the sun's last rays dropped shafts like rivers slanting. Already in soft troops the shadows crept downwards from the eastern-facing summits overhead.\n\nOut of these very shadows Night drew swiftly down about the world, building with her masses of silvery architecture a barrier that rose to heaven. These two lay down beside it. Beyond it spread that shining Garden\u2026only the shadow-barrier between.\n\nWith the rising of the moon this barrier softened marvelously, letting the starbeams in. It trembled like a line of wavering music in the wind of night. It settled downwards, shaking a little, toward the ground, while just above them came a curving inwards like a bay of darkness, with overhead two stately towers, their outline fringed with stars.\n\n\"The Gateway\u2026!\" whispered something through the mountains.\n\nIt may have been the leader's voice; it may have been the Irishman's own leaping thought; it may have been merely a murmur from the rhododendron leaves below. It came sifting gently through the shadows. O'Malley knew. He followed his leader higher. Just beneath this semblance of an old-world portal which Time could neither fashion nor destroy, they lay upon the earth\u2014and waited. Beside them shone the world, dressed by the moon in silver. The wind stood still to watch. The peak of Kasbek from his cloudy distance listened too.\n\nFor, floating upwards across the spaces came a sound of simple, old-time piping\u2014the fluting music of a little reed. It drew near, stopped for a moment as though the player watched them; then, with a plunging swiftness, passed off through starry distance up among the darker mountains. The lost, forsaken Asian valley covered them. Nowhere were they extraneous to it. They slept. And while they slept, they moved across the frontiers of fulfillment.\n\nThe moon-blanched Gate of horn and ivory swung open. The consciousness of the Earth possessed them. They passed within." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 139", + "text": "\u2003\"For of old the Sun, our sire,\n\n\u2003Came wooing the mother of men,\n\n\u2003Earth, that was virginal then,\n\n\u2003Vestal fire to his fire.\n\n\u2003Silent her bosom and coy,\n\n\u2003But the strong god sued and press'd;\n\n\u2003And born of their starry nuptial joy\n\n\u2003Are all that drink of her breast.\n\n\u2003\"And the triumph of him that begot,\n\n\u2003And the travail of her that bore,\n\n\u2003Behold they are evermore\n\n\u2003As warp and weft in our lot.\n\n\u2003We are children of splendor and flame,\n\n\u2003Of shuddering, also, and tears.\n\n\u2003Magnificent out of the dust we came,\n\n\u2003And abject from the spheres.\n\n\u2003\"O bright irresistible lord!\n\n\u2003We are fruit of Earth's womb, each one,\n\n\u2003And fruit of thy loins, O Sun,\n\n\u2003Whence first was the seed outpour'd.\n\n\u2003To thee as our Father we bow,\n\n\u2003Forbidden thy Father to see,\n\n\u2003Who is older and greater than thou, as thou\n\n\u2003Art greater and older than we.\"\n\n\u2014WILLIAM WATSON, \"Ode in May\"\n\nVery slowly the dawn came. The sky blushed rose, trembled, flamed. A breath of wind stirred the vapors that far below sheeted the surface of the Black Sea. But it was still in that gentle twilight before the actual color comes that O'Malley found he was lying with his eyes wide open, watching the rhododendrons. He may have slept meanwhile, though \"sleep,\" he says, involving loss of consciousness, seemed no right description. A sense of interval there was at any rate, a \"transition-blank,\"\u2014whatever that may mean\u2014he phrased it in the writing.\n\nAnd, watching the rhododendron forest a hundred yards below, he saw it move. Through the dim light this movement passed and ran, here, there, and everywhere. A curious soft sound accompanied it that made him remember the Bible phrase of wind \"going in the tops of the mulberry trees.\" Hushed, swift, elusive murmur, it passed about him through the dusk. He caught it next behind him and, turning, noticed groups upon the slopes,\u2014groups that he had not seen the night before. These groups seemed also now to move; the isolated scattered clusters came together, merged, ran to the parent forest below, or melted just beyond the line of vision above.\n\nThe wind sprang up and rattled all the million leaves. That rattling filled the air, and with it came another, deeper sound like to a sound of tramping that seemed to shake the earth. Confusion caught him then completely, for it was as if the mountain-side awoke, rose up, and shook itself into a wild and multitudinous wave of life.\n\nAt first he thought the wind had somehow torn the rhododendrons loose from their roots and was strewing them with that tramping sound about the slopes. But the groups passed too swiftly over the turf for that, swept completely from their fastenings, while the tramping grew to a roaring as of cries and voices. That roaring had the quality of the voice that reached him weeks ago across the \u00c6gean Sea. A strange, keen odor, too, that was not wholly unfamiliar, moved upon the wind.\n\nAnd then he knew that what he had been watching all along were not rhododendrons at all, but living, splendid creatures. A host of others, moreover, large ones and small together, stood shadowy in the background, stamping their feet upon the turf, manes tossing in the early wind, in their entire mass awful as in their individual outline somehow noble.\n\nThe light spread upwards from the east. With a fire of terrible joy and wonder in his heart, O'Malley held his breath and stared. The luster of their glorious bodies, golden bronze in the sunlight, dazed the sight. He saw the splendor of ten hundred velvet flanks in movement, with here and there the uprising whiteness of a female outline that flashed and broke above the general mass like foam upon a great wave's crest\u2014figures of incomparable grace and power; the sovereign, upright carriage; the rippling muscles upon massive limbs, and shoulders that held defiant strength and softness in exquisite combination. And then he heard huge murmurs of their voices that filled the dawn, aged by lost thousand years, and sonorous as the booming of the sea. A cry that was like singing escaped him. He saw them rise and sweep away. There was a rush of magnificence. They cantered\u2014wonderfully. They were gone.\n\nThe roar of their curious commotion traveled over the mountains, dying into distance very swiftly. The rhododendron forest that had concealed their approach resumed its normal aspect, but burning now with colors innumerable as the sunrise caught its thousand blossoms. And O'Malley understood that during \"sleep\" he had passed with his companion through the gates of ivory and horn, and stood now within the first Garden of the early world. All frontiers crossed, all barriers behind, he stood within the paradise of his heart's desire. The Consciousness of the Earth included him. These were early forms of life she had projected\u2014some of the living prototypes of legend, myth, and fable\u2014embodiments of her first manifestations of consciousness, and eternal, accessible to every heart that holds a true and passionate worship. All his life this love of Nature, which was worship, had been his. It now fulfilled itself. Merged by love into the consciousness of the Being loved, he felt her thoughts, her powers, and manifestations of life as his own.\n\nIn a flash, of course, this all passed clearly before him; but there was no time to dwell upon it. For the activity of his companion had likewise become suddenly tremendous. He had risen into complete revelation at last. His own had called him. He was off to join his kind.\n\nThe transformation came upon both of them, it seems, at once, but in that moment of bewilderment, the Irishman only realized it first in his leader.\n\nFor on the edge of the advancing sunlight first this Cosmic Being crouched, then rose with alert and springing movement, leaping to his feet in a single bound that propelled him with a stride of more than a man's two limbs. His great sides quivered as he shook himself. A roar, similar to that sound the distance already swallowed, rolled forth into the air. With head thrown back, chest forward, too, for all the backward slant of the mighty shoulders, he stood there, grandly outlined, pushing the wind before him. The great brown eyes shone with the joy of freedom and escape\u2014a superb and regal transformation.\n\nUrged by the audacity of his strange excitement, the Irishman obeyed an impulse that came he knew not whence. The single word sprang to his lips before he could guess its meaning, much less hold it back.\n\n\"Lapithae\u2026!\" he cried aloud; \"Lapithae\u2026!\"\n\nThe stalwart figure turned with an awful spring as though it would trample him to the ground. A moment the brown eyes flamed with a light of battle. Then, with another roar, and a gesture that was somehow both huge and simple, he seemed to rise and paw the air. The next second this figure of the Urwelt, come once more into its own, bent down and forward, leaped wonderfully\u2014then, cantering, raced away across the slopes to join his kind. He went like a shape of wind and cloud. The heritage of racial memory was his, and certain words remained still vividly evocative. That old battle with the Lapithae was but one item of the scenes of ancient splendor lying pigeon-holed in his mighty Mother's consciousness. The instant he had called, the Irishman himself lay caught in lost memory's tumultuous whirl. The lonely world about him seemed of a sudden magnificently peopled\u2014sky, woods, and torrents.\n\nHe watched a moment the fierce rapidity with which he sped toward the mountains, the sound of his feet already merged in that other, vaster tramping, and then he turned\u2014to watch himself. For a similar transformation was going forward in himself, and with the happiness of wild amazement he saw it. Already, indeed, it was accomplished. All white and shining lay the sunlight over his own extended form. Power was in his limbs; he rose above the ground in some new way; the usual little stream of breath became a river of rushing air he drew into stronger, more capacious lungs; likewise his bust grew strangely deepened, pushed the wind before it; and the sunshine glowed on shaggy flanks agleam with dew that powerfully drove the ground behind him while he ran.\n\nHe ran, yet only partly as a man runs; he found himself shot forwards through the air, upright, yet at the same time upon all fours brandishing his arms he flew with a free, unfettered motion, traversing the surface of the mother's mind and body. Free of the entire Earth he was.\n\nAnd as he raced to join the others, there passed again across his memory faintly\u2014it was like the little memory of some physical pain almost\u2014the picture of the boy who swam so strangely in the sea, the picture of the parent's curious emanations on the deck, and, lastly, of those flying shapes of cloud and wind his inner vision brought so often speeding over long, bare hills. This was the final fragment of the outer world that reached him\u2026.\n\nHe tore along the mountains in the dawn, the awful speed at last explained. His going made a sound upon the wind, and like the wind he raced. Far beyond him in the distance, he saw the shadow of that disappearing host spreading upon the valleys like a mist. Faintly still he caught their sound of roaring; but it was his own feet now that made that trampling as of hoofs upon the turf. The landscape moved and opened, gathering him in\u2026.\n\nAnd, hardly had he gone, when there stole upon the place where he had stood, a sweet and simple sound of music\u2014the little piping of a reed. It dropped down through the air, perhaps, or came from the forest edge, or possibly the sunrise brought it\u2014this ancient little sound of fluting on those Pipes men call the Pipes of Pan\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 140", + "text": "\u2003\"Here we but peak and dwindle\n\n\u2003The clank of chain and crane,\n\n\u2003The whirr of crank and spindle\n\n\u2003Bewilder heart and brain;\n\n\u2003The ends of our endeavor\n\n\u2003Are wealth and fame,\n\n\u2003Yet in the still Forever\n\n\u2003We're one and all the same;\n\n\u2003\"Yet beautiful and spacious\n\n\u2003The wise, old world appears.\n\n\u2003Yet frank and fair and gracious\n\n\u2003Outlaugh the jocund years.\n\n\u2003Our arguments disputing,\n\n\u2003The universal Pan\n\n\u2003Still wanders fluting\u2014fluting\u2014\n\n\u2003Fluting to maid and man.\n\n\u2003Our weary well-a-waying\n\n\u2003His music cannot still:\n\n\u2003Come! let us go a-maying,\n\n\u2003And pipe with him our fill.\"\n\n\u2014W.E. HENLEY\n\nIn a detailed description, radiant with a wild loveliness of some forgotten beauty, and of necessity often incoherent, the Irishman conveyed to me, sitting in that dreary Soho restaurant, the passion of his vision. With an astonishing vitality and a wealth of deep conviction it all poured from his lips. There was no halting and no hesitation. Like a man in trance he talked, and like a man in trance he lived it over again while imparting it to me. None came to disturb us in our dingy corner. Indeed there is no quieter place in all London town than the back room of these eating-houses of the French Quarter between the hours of lunch and dinner. The waiters vanish, the \"patron\" disappears; no customers come in. But I know surely that its burning splendor came not from the actual words he used, but was due to definite complete transference of the vision itself into my own heart. I caught the fire from his very thought. His heat inflamed my mind. Words, both in the uttered and the written version, dimmed it all distressingly.\n\nAnd the completeness of the transference is proved for me by the fact that I never once had need to ask a question. I saw and understood it all as he did. And hours must have passed during the strange recital, for toward the close people came in and took the vacant tables, the lights were up, and grimy waiters clattered noisily about with plates and knives and forks, thrusting an inky carte du jour beneath our very faces.\n\nYet how to set it down I swear I know not. Nor he, indeed. The notebooks that I found in that old sack of Willesden canvas were a disgrace to any man who bid for sanity,\u2014a disgrace to paper and pencil too!\n\nAll memory of his former life, it seems, at first, had fallen utterly away; nothing survived to remind him of it; and thus he lost all standard of comparison. The state he moved in was too complete to admit of standards or of critical judgment. For these confine, imprison, and belittle, whereas he was free. His escape was unconditioned. From the thirty years of his previous living, no single fragment broke through. The absorption was absolute.\n\n\"I really do believe and know myself,\" he said to me across that spotted table-cloth, \"that for the time I was merged into the being of another, a being immensely greater than myself. Perhaps old Stahl was right, perhaps old crazy Fechner; and it actually was the consciousness of the Earth. I can only tell you that the whole experience left no room in me for other memories; all I had previously known was gone, wiped clean away. Yet much of what came in its place is beyond me to describe; and for a curious reason. It's not the size or splendor that prevent the telling, but rather the sublime simplicity of it all. I know no language today simple enough to utter it. Far behind words it lies, as difficult of full recovery as the dreams of deep sleep, as the ecstasy of the religious, elusive as the mystery of Kubla Khan or the Patmos visions of St. John. Full recapture, I am convinced, is not possible at all in words.\n\n\"And at the time it did not seem like vision; it was so natural; unstudied, unprepared, and ever there; spontaneous too and artless as a drop of water or a baby's toy. The natural is ever the unchanging. My God! I tell you, man, it was divine!\"\n\nHe made about him a vehement sweeping gesture with his arm which emphasized more poignantly than speech the contrast he felt here where we sat\u2014tight, confining walls, small stifling windows, chairs to rest the body, smothering roof and curtains, doors of narrow entrance and exit, floors to lift above the sweet surface of the soil,\u2014all of them artificial barriers to shut out light and separate away from the Earth. \"See what we've come to!\" it said plainly. And it included even his clothes and boots and collar, the ridiculous hat upon the peg, the unsightly \"brolly\" in the dingy corner. Had there been room in me for laughter, I could well have laughed aloud." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 141", + "text": "For as he raced across that stretch of splendid mountainous Earth, watching the sunrise kiss the valleys and the woods, shaking the dew from his feet and swallowing the very wind for breath, he realized that other forms of life similar to his own were everywhere about him\u2014also moving.\n\n\"They were a part of the Earth even as I was. Here she was crammed to the brim with them\u2014projections of her actual self and being, crowded with this incomparable ancient beauty that was strong as her hills, swift as her running streams, radiant as her wild flowers. Whether to call them forms or thoughts or feelings, or Powers perhaps, I swear, old man, I know not. Her Consciousness through which I sped, drowned, lost, and happy, wrapped us all in together as a mood contains its own thoughts and feelings. For she was a Being\u2014of sorts. And I was in her mind, mood, consciousness, call it what you best can. These other thoughts and presences I felt were the raw material of forms, perhaps\u2014Forces that when they reach the minds of men must clothe themselves in form in order to be known, whether they be Dreams, or Gods, or any other kind of inspiration. Closer than that I cannot get\u2026. I knew myself within her being like a child, and I felt the deep, eternal pull\u2014to simple things.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 142", + "text": "And thus the beauty of the early world companioned him, and all the forgotten gods moved forward into life. They hovered everywhere, immense and stately. The rocks and trees and peaks that half concealed them, betrayed at the same time great hints of their mighty gestures. Near him, they were; he moved toward their region. If definite sight refused to focus on them the fault was not their own but his. He never doubted that they could be seen. Yet, even thus partially, they manifested\u2014terrifically. He was aware of their overshadowing presences. Sight, after all, was an incomplete form of knowing\u2014a thing he had left behind\u2014elsewhere. It belonged, with the other limited sense-channels, to some attenuated dream now all forgotten. Now he knew all over. He himself was of them.\n\n\"I am home!\" it seems he cried as he ran cantering across the sunny slopes. \"At last I have found you! Home\u2026!\" and the stones shot wildly from his thundering tread.\n\nA roar of windy power filled the sky, and far away that echoing tramping paused to listen.\n\n\"We have called you! Come\u2026!\"\n\nAnd the forms moved down slowly from their mountainous pedestals; the woods breathed out a sigh; the running water sang; the slopes all murmured through their grass and flowers. For a worshipper, strayed from the outer world of the dead, stood within the precincts of their ancient temple. He had passed the Angel with the flaming sword those very dead had set there long ago. The Garden now enclosed him. He had found the heart of the Earth, his mother. Self-realization in the perfect union with Nature was fulfilled. He knew the Great At-onement." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 143", + "text": "The quiet of the dawn still lay upon the world; dew sparkled; the air was keen and fresh. Yet, in spite of all this vast sense of energy, this vigor and delight, O'Malley no longer felt the least goading of excitement. There was this animation and this fine delight; but craving for sensation of any kind, was gone. Excitement, as it tortured men in that outer world he had left, could not exist in this larger state of being; for excitement is the appetite for something not possessed, magnified artificially till it has become a condition of disease. All that he needed was now contained within himself; he was at-ease; and, literally, that unrest which men miscall delight could touch him not nor torture him again.\n\nIf this were death\u2014how exquisite!\n\nAnd Time was not a passing thing, for it lay, he says, somehow in an ocean everywhere, heaped up in gulfs and spaces. It was as though he could help himself and take it. That morning, had he so wished, could last forever; he could go backwards and taste the shadows of the night again, or forward and bask in the glory of hot noon. There were no parts of things, and so no restlessness, no sense of incompleteness, no divisions.\n\nThis quiet of the dawn lay in himself, and, since he loved it, lay there, cool and sweet and sparkling for\u2014years; almost\u2014forever." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 144", + "text": "Moreover, while this giant form of Urwelt-life his inner self had assumed was new, it yet seemed somehow familiar. The speed and weight and power caused him no distress, there was no detail that he could not manage easily. To race thus o'er the world, keeping pace with an eternal dawn, was as simple as for the Earth herself to spin through space. His union with her was as complete as that. In every item of her being lay the wonder of her perfect form\u2014a sphere. It was complete. Nothing could add to it.\n\nYet, while all recollection of his former, pettier self was gone, he began presently to remember\u2014men. Though never in relation to himself, he retained dimly a picture of that outer world of strife and terror. As a memory of illness he recalled it\u2014dreadfully, a nightmare fever from which he had recovered, its horror already fading out. Cities and crowds, poverty, illness, pain and all the various terror of Civilization, robbed of the power to afflict, yet still hung hovering about the surface of his consciousness, though powerless to break his peace.\n\nFor the power to understand it vanished; no part of him knew sympathy with it; so clearly he now saw himself sharing the Earth, that a vague wonder filled him when he recalled the mad desires of men to possess external forms of things. It was amazing and perplexing. How could they ever have devised such wild and childish efforts\u2014all in the wrong direction?\n\nIf that outer life were the real one how could any intelligent being think it worth while to live? How could any thinking man hold up his head and walk along the street with dignity if that was what he believed? Was a man satisfied with it worth keeping alive at all? What bigger scheme could ever use him? The direction of modern life today was diametrically away from happiness and truth.\n\nPeace was the word he knew, peace and a singing joy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 145", + "text": "He played with the Earth's great dawn and raced along these mountains through her mind. Of course the hills could dance and sing and clap their hands. He saw it clear. How could it be otherwise? They were expressions of her giant moods\u2014what in himself were thoughts\u2014phases of her ample, surging Consciousness\u2026.\n\nHe passed with the sunlight down the laughing valleys, spread with the morning wind above the woods, shone on the snowy peaks, and leaped with rushing laughter among the crystal streams. These were his swift and darting signs of joy, words of his singing as it were. His main and central being swung with the pulse of the Earth, too great for any telling.\n\nHe read the book of Nature all about him, yes, but read it singing. He understood how this patient Mother hungered for her myriad lost children, how in the passion of her summers she longed to bless them, to wake their high yearnings with the sweetness of her springs, and to whisper through her autumns how she prayed for their return\u2026!\n\nInstinctively he read the giant Page before him. For \"every form in nature is a symbol of an idea and represents a sign or letter. A succession of such symbols forms a language; and he who is a true child of nature may understand this language and know the character of everything. His mind, becomes a mirror wherein the attributes of natural things are reflected and enter the field of his consciousness\u2026. For man himself is but a thought pervading the ocean of mind.\"\n\nWhether or not lie remembered these stammering yet pregnant words from the outer world now left behind, the truth they shadowed forth rose up and took him\u2026 and so he flowed across the mountains like a thing of wind and cloud, and so at length came up with the stragglers of that mighty herd of Urwelt life. He joined them in a river-bed of those ancient valleys. They welcomed him and took him to themselves." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 146", + "text": "For the particular stratum, as it were, of the Earth's enormous Collective Consciousness to which he belonged, or rather that part and corner in which he was first at home, lay with these lesser ancient forms. Although aware of far mightier expressions of her life, he could not yet readily perceive or join them. And this was easily comprehensible by the analogy of his own smaller consciousness. Did not his own mind hold thoughts of various kinds that could not readily mingle? His thoughts of play and frolic, for instance, could not combine with the august and graver sentiments of awe and worship, though both could dwell together in the same heart. And here apparently, as yet, he only touched that frolicsome fringe of consciousness that knew these wild and playful lesser forms. Thus, while he was aware of other more powerful figures of wonder all about him, he never quite achieved their full recognition. The ordered, deeper strata of her Consciousness to which they belonged still lay beyond him.\n\nYet everywhere he fringed them. They haunted the entire world. They brooded hugely with a kind of deep magnificence that was like the slow brooding of the Seasons; they rose, looming and splendid, through the air and sky, proud, strong, and tragic. For, standing aloof from all the rest, in isolation, like dreams in a poet's mind, too potent for expression, they thus knew tragedy\u2014the tragedy of long neglect and loneliness.\n\nSeated on peak and ridge, rising beyond the summits in the clouds, filling the valleys, spread over watercourse and forest, they passed their life of lonely majesty\u2014apart, their splendor too remote for him as yet to share. Long since had Earth withdrawn them from the hearts of men. Her lesser children knew them no more. But still through the deep recesses of her further consciousness they thundered and were glad\u2026 though few might hear that thunder, share that awful joy\u2026.\n\nEven the Irishman\u2014who in ordinary life had felt instinctively that worship which is close to love, and so to the union that love brings\u2014even he, in this new-found freedom, only partially discerned their presences. He felt them now, these stately Powers men once called the gods, but felt them from a distance; and from a distance, too, they saw and watched him come. He knew their gorgeous forms half dimmed by a remote and veiled enchantment; knew that they reared aloft like ancient towers, ruined by neglect and ignorance, starved and lonely, but still hauntingly splendid and engaging, still terrifically alive. And it seemed to him that sometimes their awful eyes flashed with the sunshine over slope and valley, and that wherever they rested flowers sprang to life.\n\nTheir nearness sometimes swept him like a storm, and then the entire herd with which he mingled would stand abruptly still, caught by a wave of awe and wonder. The host of them stood still upon the grass, their frolic held a moment, their voices hushed, only deep panting audible and the soft shuffling of their hoofs among the flowers. They bowed their splendid heads and waited\u2014while a god went past them\u2026. And through himself, as witness of the passage, a soft, majestic power also swept. With the lift of a hurricane, yet with the gentleness of dew, he felt the noblest in himself irresistibly evoked. It was gone again as soon as come. It passed. But it left him charged with a regal confidence and joy. As in the mountains a shower of snow picks out the highest peaks in white, tracing its course and pattern over the entire range, so in himself he knew the highest powers\u2014aspirations, yearnings, hopes\u2014raised into shining, white activity, and by these quickened splendors of his soul could recognize the nature of the god who came so close." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 147", + "text": "And, keeping mostly to the river-beds, they splashed in the torrents, played and leaped and cantered. From the openings of many a moist cave others came to join them. Below a certain level, though, they never went; the forests knew them not; they loved the open, windy heights. They turned and circulated as by a common consent, wheeling suddenly together as if a single desire actuated the entire mass. One instinct spread, as it were, among the lot, shared instantly, conveying to each at once the general impulse. Their movements in this were like those of birds whose flight in coveys obeys the order of a collective consciousness of which each single one is an item\u2014expressions of one single Bird-Idea behind, distributed through all.\n\nAnd O'Malley without questioning or hesitation obeyed, while yet he was free to do as he wished alone. To do as they did was the greatest pleasure, that was all.\n\nFor sometimes with two of them, one fully-formed, the other of lesser mold\u2014he flew on little journeys of his own. These two seemed nearer to him than the rest. He felt he knew them and had been with them before. Their big brown eyes continually sought his own with pleasure. It almost seemed as if they had all three been separated long away from one another, and had at last returned. No definite memory of the interval came back, however; the sea, the steamer, and the journey's incidents all had faded\u2014part of that world of lesser insignificant dream where they had happened. But these two kept close to him; they ran and danced together\u2026.\n\nThe time that passed included many dawns and nights and also many noons of splendor. It all seemed endless, perfect, and serene. That anything could finish here did not once occur to him. Complete things cannot finish. He passed through seas and gulfs of glorious existence. For the strange thing was that while he only remembered afterwards the motion, play, and laughter, he yet had these other glimpses here and there of some ordered and progressive life existing just beyond. It lay hidden deeper within. He skimmed its surface; but something prevented his knowing it fully. And the limitation that held him back belonged, it seemed, to that thin world of trivial dreaming he had left behind. He had not shaken it off entirely. It still obscured his sight.\n\nThe scale and manner of this greater life faintly reached him, nothing more. It may be that he only failed to bring back recollection, or it may be that he did not penetrate deeply enough to know. At any rate, he recognized that this sudden occasional passing by of vast deific figures had to do with it, and that all this ocean of Earth's deeper Consciousness was peopled with forms of life that obeyed some splendid system of progressive ordered existence. To be gathered up in this one greater consciousness was not the end\u2026. Rather was it merely the beginning\u2026.\n\nMeantime he learned that here, among these lesser thoughts of the great Mother, all the Pantheons of the world had first their origin\u2014the Greek, the Eastern, and the Northern too. Here all the gods that men have ever half divined, still ranged the moods of Her timeless consciousness. Their train of beauty, too, accompanied them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 148", + "text": "\u2002I cannot half recall the streams of passionate description with which his words clothed these glowing memories of his vision. Great pictures of it haunt the background of my mind, pictures that lie in early mists, framed by the stars and glimmering through some golden, flowered dawn. Besides the huge outlines that stood breathing in the background like dark mountains, there flitted here and there strange dreamy forms of almost impossible beauty, slender as lilies, eyes soft and starry shining through the dusk, hair flying past them like a rain of summer flowers. Nymph-like they moved down all the pathways of the Earth's young mind, singing and radiant, spring blossoms in the Garden of her Consciousness\u2026. And other forms, more vehement and rude, urged to and fro across the pictures; crowding the movement; some playful and protean; some clothed as with trees, or air, or water; and others dark, remote, and silent, ranging her deeper layers of thought and dream, known rarely to the outer world at all.\n\n\u2002The rush and glory of it all is more than my mind can deal with. I gather, though, O'Malley saw no definite forms, but rather knew \"forces,\" powers, aspects of this Soul of Earth, facets she showed in long-forgotten days to men. Certainly the very infusoria of his imagination were kindled and aflame when he spoke of them. Through the tangled thicket of his ordinary mind there shone this passion of an uncommon loveliness and splendour.\n\n\u2002\"The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things, so much the more is snatched from inevitable time.\"\n\n\u2014RICHARD JEFFERIES\n\nIn the relationship that his everyday mind bore to his present state there lay, moreover, a wealth of pregnant suggestion. The bridge connecting his former \"civilized\" condition with this cosmic experience was a curious one. That outer, lesser state, it seemed, had known a foretaste sometimes of the greater. And it was hence had come those dreams of a Golden Age that used to haunt him. For he began now to recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had known\u2014beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men overlook it altogether.\n\nHe understood now why the thrill had been so wonderful. He saw clearly why those moments of ecstasy he had often felt in Nature used to torture him with an inexpressible yearning that was rather pain than joy. For they were precisely what he now experienced when the viewless figure of a god passed by him. Down there, out there, below\u2014in that cabined lesser state\u2014they had been partial, but were now complete. Those moments of worship he had known in woods, among mountains, by the shores of desolate seas, even in a London street, perhaps at the sight of a tree in spring or of a pathway of blue sky between the summer clouds,\u2014these had been, one and all, tentative, partial revelations of the Consciousness of the Soul of Earth he now knew face to face.\n\nThese were his only memories of that outer world. Of people, cities, or of civilization apart from these, he had no single remembrance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 149", + "text": "Certain of these little partial foretastes now came back to him, like fragments of dream that trouble the waking day.\n\nHe remembered, for instance, one definite picture: a hot autumn sun upon a field of stubble where the folded corn-sheaves stood; thistles waving by the hedges; a yellow field of mustard rising up the slope against the sky-line, and beyond a row of peering elms that rustled in the wind. The beauty of the little scene was somehow poignant. He recalled it vividly. It had flamed about him, transfiguring the world; he had trembled, yearning to see more, for just behind it he divined with an exulting passionate worship this gorgeous, splendid Earth-Being with whom at last he now actually moved. In that instant of a simple loveliness her consciousness had fringed his own\u2014had bruised it. He had known it only by the partial channels of sight and smell and hearing, but had felt the greater thing beyond, without being able to explain it. And a portion of what he felt had burst in speech from his lips.\n\nHe was there, he remembered, with two persons, a man and woman whose name and face, however, he could not summon, and he recalled that the woman smiled incredulously when he spoke of the exquisite perfume of those folded corn-sheaves in the air. She told him he imagined it. He saw again the pretty woman's smile of incomprehension; he saw the puzzled expression in the eyes of the man; he heard him murmur something prosaic about the soul, about birds, too, and the prospects of killing hundreds later\u2014sport! He even saw the woman picking her way with caution as though the touch of earth could stain or injure her. He especially recalled the silence that had followed on his words that sought to show them\u2014Beauty\u2026. He remembered, too, above all, the sense of loneliness among men that it induced in himself.\n\nBut the memory brought him a curious, sharp pain; and turning to that couple who were now his playmates in this Garden of the Earth, he called them with a singing cry and cantered over leagues of flowers, wind, and sunshine before he stopped again. They leaped and danced together, exulting in their spacious Urwelt freedom\u2026 want of comprehension no longer possible." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 150", + "text": "The memory fled away. He shook himself free of it. Then others came in its place, another and another, not all with people, blind, deaf, and unreceptive, yet all of \"common,\" simple scenes of beauty when something vast had surged upon him and broken through the barriers that stand between the heart and Nature. Such curious little scenes they were. In most of them he had evidently been alone. But one and all had touched his soul with a foretaste of this same nameless ecstasy that now he knew complete. In every one the Consciousness of the Earth had \"bruised\" his own.\n\nUtterly simple they had been, one and all, these partial moments of blinding beauty in that lesser, outer world:\u2014A big, brown, clumsy bee he saw, blundering into the petals of a wild flower on which the dew lay sparkling\u2026. A wisp of colored cloud driving loosely across the hills, dropping a purple shadow\u2026. Deep, waving grass, plunging and shaking in the wind that drew out its underworld of blue and silver over the whole spread surface of a field\u2026. A daisy closed for the night upon the lawn, eyes tightly shut, hands folded\u2026. A south wind whispering through larches\u2026. The pattering of summer rain upon young oak leaves in the dawn\u2026. Fingers of long blue distance upon dreamy woods\u2026. Anemones shaking their pale and starry little faces in the wind\u2026. The columned stillness of a pine-wood in the dusk\u2026. Young birch trees mid the velvet gloom of firs\u2026. The new moon setting in a cloud of stars\u2026. The hush of stars in many a summer night\u2026. Sheep grazing idly down a sun-baked hill\u2026. A path of moonlight on a lake\u2026. A little wind through bare and wintry woods\u2026. Oh! he recalled the wonder, loveliness, and passion of a thousand more!\n\nThey thronged and passed, and thronged again, crowding one another:\u2014all golden moments of revelation when he had caught glimpses of the Earth, and her greater Moods had swept him up into herself. Moments in which a god had passed\u2026.\n\nThese were his only memories of that outer world he had left behind: flashes of simple beauty.\n\nWas thus the thrill of beauty then explained? Was loveliness, as men know it, a revelation of the Earth-Soul behind? And were the blinding flash, the dazzling wonder, and the dream men seek to render permanent in music, color, line and language, a vision of her nakedness? Down there, the poets and those simple enough of heart to stand close to Nature, could catch these whispered fragments of the enormous message, told as in secret; but now, against her very heart he heard the thunder of the thing complete. Now, in the glory of all naked bodily forms,\u2014of women, men and children, of swift animals, of flowers, trees, and running water, of mountains and of seas,\u2014he understood these partial revelations of the great Earth-Soul that bore them, gave them life. For one and all were channels for her loveliness. He saw the beauty of the \"natural\" instincts, the passion of motherhood and fatherhood\u2014Earth's seeking to project herself in endless forms and variety. He understood why love increased the heart and made it feel at one with all the world." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 151", + "text": "Moreover in some amazing fashion he was aware that others from that outer world beside himself had access here, and that from this Garden of the Earth's deep central personality came all the inspiration known to men. He divined that others were even now drawing upon it like himself. The thoughts of the poets went past him like thin flames; the dreams of millions\u2014mute, inexpressible yearnings like those he had himself once known\u2014streamed by in pale white light, to shoot forward with a little nesting rush into some great Figure\u2026 and then return in double volume to the dreaming heart whence first they issued. Shadows, too, he saw, by myriads\u2014faint, feeble gropings of men and women seeking it eagerly, yet hardly knowing what they sought; but, above all, long, singing, beautiful tongues of colored flame that were the instincts of divining children and of the pure in heart. These came in rippling floods unerringly to their goal, lingered for long periods before returning. And all, he knew, were currents of the great Earth Life, moods, thoughts, dreams\u2014expressions of her various Consciousness with which she mothered, fed, and blessed all whom it was possible to reach. Their passionate yearning, their worship, made access possible. Along the tenderest portions of her personality these latter came, as by a spread network of infinitely delicate filaments that extended from herself, deliciously inviting\u2026.\n\nThe thing, however, that remained with him long after his return to the normal state of lesser consciousness was the memory of those blinding moments when a god went past him, or, as he phrased it in another way, when he caught glimpses of the Earth\u2014naked. For these were instantaneous flashes of a gleaming whiteness, a dazzling and supreme loveliness that staggered thought and arrested feeling, while yet of a radiant simplicity that brought\u2014for a second at least\u2014a measure of comprehension.\n\nHe then knew not mere partial projections. He saw beyond\u2014deep down into the flaming center that gave them birth. The blending of his being with the Cosmic Consciousness was complete enough for this. He describes it as a spectacle of sheer glory, stupendous, even terrifying. The refulgent majesty of it utterly possessed him. The shock of its magnificence came, moreover, upon his entire being, and was not really of course a \"sight\" at all. The message came not through any small division of a single sense. With a massed yet soaring power it shook him free of all known categories. He then fringed a region of yet greater being wherein he tasted for a moment some secret comprehension of a true \"divinity.\" The deliverance into ecstasy was complete.\n\nIn these flashing moments, when a second seemed a thousand years, he further understood the splendor of the stage beyond. Earth in her turn was but a Mood in the Consciousness of the Universe, that Universe again was mothered by another vaster one\u2026 and the total that included them all was not the gods\u2014but God.\n\nThe litter of disordered notebooks filled to the covers with fragments of such beauty that they almost seem to burn with a light of their own, lies at this moment before me on my desk. I still hear the rushing torrent of his language across the spotted table-cloth in that dark restaurant corner. But the incoherence seems only to increase with my best efforts to combine the two.\n\n\"Go home and dream it,\" as he said at last when I ventured a question here and there toward the end of the recital. \"You'll see it best that way\u2014in sleep. Get clear away from me, and my surface physical consciousness. Perhaps it will come to you then.\"\n\nThere remains, however, to record the manner of his exit from that great Garden of the Earth's fair youth. And he tells it more simply. Or, perhaps, it is that I understand it better.\n\nFor suddenly, in the midst of all the joy and splendor that he tasted, there came unbidden a strengthening of the tie that held him to his \"outer,\" lesser state. A wave of pity and compassion surged in upon him from the depths. He saw the struggling millions in the prisons and cages civilization builds. He felt with them. No happiness, he understood, could be complete that did not also include them all; and\u2014he longed to tell them. The thought and the desire tore across him burningly.\n\n\"If only I can get this back to them!\" passed through him, like a flame. \"I'll save the world by bringing it again to simple things! I've only got to tell it and all will understand at once\u2014and follow!\"\n\nAnd with the birth of the desire there ran a deep convulsive sound like music through the greater Consciousness that held him close. Those Moods that were the gods, thronged gloriously about him, almost pressing forwards into actual sight\u2026. He might have lingered where he was for centuries, or forever; but this thought pulled him back\u2014the desire to share his knowledge with the world, the passion to heal and save and rescue.\n\nAnd instantly, in the twinkling of an eyelid, the Urwelt closed its gates of horn and ivory behind him. An immense dark shutter dropped noiselessly with a speed of lightning across his mind. He stood without\u2026.\n\nHe found himself near the tumbled-down stone huts of a hamlet that he recognized. He staggered, rubbed his eyes, and stared. A forest of beech trees shook below him in a violent wind. He saw the branches tossing. A Caucasian saddle-horse beside him nosed a sack that spilt its flour on the ground at his feet, he heard the animal's noisy breathing; he noted the sliding movement of the spilt flour before it finally settled; and some fifty yards beyond him, down the slopes, he saw a human figure\u2014running.\n\nIt was his Georgian guide. The man, half stooping, caught the woolen bashlik that had fallen from his head.\n\nO'Malley watched the man complete the gesture. Still running, he replaced the cap upon his head.\n\nAnd coming up to his ears upon the wind were the words of a broken French sentence that he also recognized. Disjointed by terror, it completed an interrupted phrase:\u2014\n\n\"\u2026 one of them is close upon us. Hide your eyes! Save yourself!. They come from the mountains. They are old as the stones\u2026 run\u2026!\"\n\nNo other living being was in sight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 152", + "text": "The extraordinary abruptness of the transition produced no bewilderment, it seems. Realizing that without Rostom he would be in a position of helplessness that might be serious, the Irishman put his hands to his lips and called out with authority to the running figure of his frightened guide. He shouted to him to stop.\n\n\"There is nothing to fear. Come back! Are you afraid of a gust of wind?\"\n\nAnd in his face and voice, perhaps too in his manner, was something he had brought back from the vision, for the man stopped at once in his headlong course, paused a moment to stare and question, and then, though still looking over his shoulder and making occasional signs of his religion, came slowly back to his employer's side again.\n\n\"It has passed,\" said O'Malley in a voice that seemed to crumble in his mouth. \"It is gone again into the mountains whence it came. We are safe. With me,\" he added, not without a secret sense of humor stirring in him, \"you will always be safe. I can protect us both.\" He felt as normal as a British officer giving orders to his soldiers. And the Georgian slowly recovered his composure, yet for a long time keeping close to the other's side.\n\nThe transition, thus, had been as sudden and complete as anything well could be. O'Malley described it as the instantaneous dropping of a shutter across his mind. The entire vision had lasted but a fraction of a second, and in a fraction of a second, too, he had returned to his state of everyday lesser consciousness. That blending with the Earth's great Consciousness was but a flashing glimpse after all. The extension of personality had been momentary.\n\nSo absolute, moreover, was the return that at first, remembering nothing, he took up life again exactly where he had left it. The guide completed the gesture and the sentence which the vision had interrupted, and O'Malley, similarly, resumed his own thread of thought and action.\n\nOnly a hint remained. That, and a curious sense of interval, alone were left to witness this flash of an immense vision,\u2014of cosmic consciousness\u2014that apparently had filled so many days and nights.\n\n\"It was like waking suddenly in the night out of deep sleep,\" he said; \"not of one's own accord, or gradually, but as when someone shakes you out of slumber and you are wide awake at once. You have been dreaming vigorously\u2014thick, lively, crowded dreams, and they all vanish on the instant. You catch the tail-end of the procession just as it's diving out of sight. In less than a second all is gone.\"\n\nFor this was the hint that remained. He caught the flying tail-end of the vision. He knew he had seen something. But, for the moment, that was all.\n\nThen, by degrees and afterwards, the details re-emerged. In the days that followed, while with Rostom he completed the journey already planned, the deeper consciousness gave back its memory piece by piece; and piece by piece he set it down in notebooks as best he could. The memory was on deposit deep within him, and at intervals he tapped it. Hence, of course, is due the confused and fragmentary character of those bewildering entries; hence, at the same time, too, their truth and value. For here was no imaginative dream concocted in a mood of high invention. The parts were disjointed, incomplete, just as they came. The lesser consciousness, it seems, could not contain the thing complete; nor to the last, I judge, did he ever know complete recapture." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 153", + "text": "They wandered for two weeks and more about the mountains, meeting various adventure by the way, reported duly in his letters of travel. But these concerned the outer man and have no proper place in this strange record\u2026 and by the middle of July he found himself once more in\u2014civilization. At Michaelevo he said good-bye to Rostom and took the train.\n\nAnd it was with the return to the conditions of modern life that the reaction set in and stirred the deeper layers of consciousness to reproduce their store of magic. For this return to what seemed the paltry activities of an age of machinery, physical luxury, and superficial contrivances brought him a sense of pain that was acute and trenchant, more\u2014a deep and poignant sense of loss. The yearnings, no longer satisfied, began again to reassert themselves. It was not the actual things the world seemed so busy about that pained him, but rather the point of view from which the world approached them\u2014those that it deemed with one consent \"important,\" and those, with rare exceptions, it obviously deemed worth no consideration at all, and ignored. For himself these values stood exactly reversed.\n\nThe Vision then came back to him, rose from the depths, blinded his eyes with maddening beauty, sang in his ears, possessed his heart and mind. He burned to tell it. The world of tired, restless men, he felt, must equally burn to hear it. Some vision of a simple life lived close to Nature came before his inner eye as the remedy for the vast disease of restless self-seeking of the age, the medicine that should cure the entire world. A return to Nature was the first step toward the great Deliverance men sought. And, most of all, he yearned to tell it first to Heinrich Stahl.\n\nTo hear him talk about it, as he talked perhaps to me alone, was genuinely pathetic, for here, in Terence O'Malley, I thought to see the essential futility of all dreamers nakedly revealed. His vision was so fine, sincere, and noble; his difficulty in imparting it so painful; and its marriage with practical action so ludicrously impracticable. At any rate that combination of vision and action, called sometimes genius, which can shake the world, assuredly was not his. For his was no constructive mind; he was not \"intellectual\"; he saw, but with the heart; he could not build. To plan a new Utopia was as impossible to him as to shape even in words the splendor he had known and lived. Bricks and straw could only smother him before he laid what most would deem foundations.\n\nAt first, too, in those days while waiting for the steamer in Batoum, he kept strangely silent. Even in his own thoughts was silence. He could not speak of what he knew. Even paper refused it. But all the time this glorious winged thing, that yet was simple as the sunlight or the rain, went by his side, while his soul knew the relief of some divine, proud utterance that, he felt, could never know complete confession in speech or writing. Later he stammered over it\u2014to his notebooks and to me, and partially also to Dr. Stahl. But at first it dwelt alone and hidden, contained in this deep silence.\n\nThe days of waiting he filled with walks about the streets, watching the world with new eyes. He took the Russian steamer to Poti, and tramped with a knapsack up the Tchourokh gorge beyond Bourtchka, regardless of the Turkish gypsies and encampments of wild peoples on the banks. The sense of personal danger was impossible; he felt the whole world kin. That sense protected him. Pistol and cartridges lay in his bag, forgotten at the hotel.\n\nDelight and pain lay oddly mingled in him. The pain he recognized of old, but this great radiant happiness was new. The nightmare of modern cheap-jack life was all explained; unjustified, of course, as he had always dimly felt, symptom of deep disorder; all due, this feverish, external business, to an odd misunderstanding with the Earth. Humanity had somehow quarreled with her, claiming an independence that could not really last. For her the centuries of this estrangement were but a little thing perhaps\u2014a moment or two in that huge life which counted a million years to lay a narrow bed of chalk. They would come back in time. Meanwhile she ever called. A few, perhaps, already dreamed of return. Movements, he had heard, were afoot\u2014a tentative endeavor here and there. They heard, these few, the splendid whisper that, sweetly calling, ever passed about the world.\n\nFor her voice in the last resort was more potent than all others\u2014an enchantment that never wholly faded; men had but temporarily left her mighty sides and gone astray, eating of trees of knowledge that brought them deceptive illusions of a mad self-intoxication; fallen away into the pains of separateness and death. Loss of direction and central control was the result; the Babel of many tongues so clumsily invented, by which all turned one against another. Insubordinate, artificial centers had assumed disastrous command. Each struggled for himself against his neighbors. Even religions fought to the blood. A single sect could damn the rest of humanity, yet in the same breath sing complaisantly of its own Heaven.\n\nMeanwhile She smiled in love and patience, letting them learn their lesson; meanwhile She watched and waited while, like foolish children, they toiled and sweated after futile transient things that brought no single letter of content. She let them coin their millions from her fairest thoughts, the gold and silver in her veins; and let them turn it into engines of destruction, knowing that each \"life lost,\" returned into her arms and heart, crying with the pain of its wayward foolishness, the lesson learned; She watched their tears and struggling just outside the open nursery door, knowing they must at length return for food; and while thus waiting, watching, She heard all prayers that reached her; She answered them with love and forgiveness ever ready; and to the few who realized their folly\u2014naughtiness, perhaps, at worst it was\u2014this side of \"death,\" She brought full measure of peace and joy and beauty.\n\nNot permanently could they hurt themselves, for evil was but distance from her side, the ignorance of those who had wandered furthest into the little dark labyrinth of a separated self. The \"intellect\" they were so proud of had misled them.\n\nAnd sometimes, here and there across the ages, with a glory that refused utterly to be denied, She thundered forth her old sweet message of deliverance. Through poet, priest, or child she called her children home. The summons rang like magic across the wastes of this dreary separated existence. Some heard and listened, some turned back, some wondered and were strangely thrilled; some, thinking it too simple to be true, were puzzled by the yearning and the tears and went back to seek for a more difficult way; while most, denying the secret glory in their hearts, sought to persuade themselves they loved the strife and hurrying fever best.\n\nAt other times, again, she chose quite different ways, and sent the amazing message in a flower, a breath of evening air, a shell upon the shore; though oftenest, perhaps, it hid in a strain of music, a patch of color on the sea or hills, a rustle of branches in a little twilight wind, a whisper in the dusk or in the dawn. He remembered his own first visions of it\u2026.\n\nOnly never could the summons come to her children through the intellect, for this it was that led them first away. Her message enters ever by the heart.\n\nThe simple life! He smiled as he thought of the bald Utopias here and there devised by men, for he had seen a truth whose brilliance smote his eyes too dazzlingly to permit of the smallest corner of darkness. Remote, no doubt, in time that day when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and men shall live together in peace and gentleness; when the inner life shall be admitted as the Reality, strife, gain, and loss unknown because possessions undesired, and petty selfhood merged in the larger life\u2014remote, of course, yet surely not impossible. He had seen the Face of Nature, heard her Call, tasted her joy and peace; and the rest of the tired world might do the same. It only waited to be shown the way. The truth he now saw so dazzling was that all who heard the call might know it for themselves at once, cuirassed with shining love that makes the whole world kin, the Earth a mother literally divine. Each soul might thus provide a channel along which the summons home should pass across the world. To live with Nature and share her greater consciousness, en route for states yet greater, nearer to the eternal home\u2014this was the beginning of the truth, the life, the way.\n\nHe saw \"religion\" all explained: and those hard sayings that make men turn away:\u2014the imagined dread of losing life to find it; the counsel of perfection that the neighbor shall be loved as self; the fancied injury and outrage that made it hard for rich men to enter the kingdom. Of these, as of a hundred other sayings, he saw the necessary truth. It all seemed easy now. The world would see it with him; it must; it could not help itself. Simplicity as of a little child, and selflessness as of the mystic\u2014these were the splendid clues.\n\nDeath and the grave, indeed, had lost their victory. For in the stages of wider consciousness beyond this transient physical phase he saw all loved ones joined and safe, as separate words upgathered each to each in the parent sentence that explains them, the sentence in the paragraph, the paragraph in the whole grand story all achieved\u2014and so at length into the eternal library of God that consummates the whole.\n\nHe saw the glorious series, timeless and serene, advancing to the climax, and somehow understood that individuality at each stage was never lost but rather extended and magnified. Love of the Earth, life close to Nature, and denial of so-called civilization was the first step upwards. In the Simple Life, in this return to Nature, lay the opening of the little path that climbed to the stars and heaven." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 154", + "text": "At the end of the week the little steamer dropped her anchor in the harbor and the Irishman booked his passage home. He was standing on the wharf to watch the unloading when a hand tapped him on the shoulder and he heard a well-known voice. His heart leaped with pleasure. There were no preliminaries between these two.\n\n\"I am glad to see you safe. You did not find your friend, then?\"\n\nO'Malley looked at the bronzed face beside him, noted the ragged tobacco-stained beard, and saw the look of genuine welcome in the twinkling brown eyes. He watched him lift his cap and mop that familiar dome of bald head.\n\n\"I'm safe,\" was all he answered, \"because I found him.\"\n\nFor a moment Dr. Stahl looked puzzled. He dropped the hand he held so tightly and led him down the wharf.\n\n\"We'll get out of this devilish sun,\" he said, leading the way among the tangle of merchandise and bales, \"it's enough to boil our brains.\" They passed through the crowd of swarthy, dripping Turks, Georgians, Persians, and Armenians who labored half naked in the heat, and moved toward the town. A Russian gunboat lay in the Bay, side by side with freight and passenger vessels. An oil-tank steamer took on cargo. The scene was drenched in sunshine. The Black Sea gleamed like molten metal. Beyond, the wooded spurs of the Caucasus climbed through haze into cloudless blue.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" remarked the German, pointing to the distant coastline, \"but hardly with the beauty of those Grecian Isles we passed together. Eh?\" He watched him closely. \"You're coming back on our steamer?\" he asked in the same breath.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" O'Malley answered ignoring the question, \"because it lives. But there is dust upon its outer loveliness, dust that has gathered through long ages of neglect, dust that I would sweep away\u2014I've learnt how to do it. He taught me.\"\n\nStahl did not even look at him, though the words were wild enough. He walked at his side in silence. Perhaps he partly understood. For this first link with the outer world of appearances was difficult for him to pick up. The person of Stahl, thick-coated with the civilization whence he came, had brought it, and out of the ocean of glorious vision in his soul, O'Malley took at random the first phrases he could find.\n\n\"Yes, I've booked a passage on your steamer,\" he added presently, remembering the question. It did not seem strange to him that his companion ignored both clues he offered. He knew the man too well for that. It was only that he waited for more before he spoke.\n\nThey went to the little table outside the hotel pavement where several weeks ago they had drunk Kakhetian wine together and talked of deeper things. The German called for a bottle, mineral water, ice, and cigarettes. And while they sipped the cooling golden liquid, hats off and coats on the backs of their chairs, Stahl gave him the news of the world of men and events that had transpired meanwhile. O'Malley listened vaguely as he smoked. It seemed remote, unreal, almost fantastic, this long string of ugly, frantic happenings, all symptoms of some disordered state that was like illness. The scream of politics, the roar and rattle of flying-machines, financial crashes, furious labor upheavals, rumors of war, the death of kings and magnates, awful accidents and strange turmoil in enormous cities. Details of some sad prison life, it almost seemed, pain and distress and strife the note that bound them all together. Men were mastered by these things instead of mastering them. These unimportant things they thought would make them free only imprisoned them.\n\nThey lunched there at the little table in the shade, and in turn the Irishman gave an outline of his travels. Stahl had asked for it and listened attentively. The pictures interested him.\n\n\"You've done your letters for the papers,\" he questioned him, \"and now, perhaps, you'll write a book as well?\"\n\n\"Something may force its way out\u2014come blundering, thundering out in fragments, yes.\"\n\n\"You mean you'd rather not\u2014?\"\n\n\"I mean it's all too big and overwhelming. He showed me such blinding splendors. I might tell it, but as to writing\u2014!\" He shrugged his shoulders.\n\nAnd this time Dr. Stahl ignored no longer. He took him up. But not with any expected words or questions. He merely said, \"My friend, there's something that I have to tell you\u2014or, rather, I should say, to show you.\" He looked most keenly at him, and in the old familiar way he placed a hand upon his shoulder. His voice grew soft. \"It may upset you; it may unsettle\u2014prove a shock perhaps. But if you are prepared, we'll go\u2014\"\n\n\"What kind of shock?\" O'Malley asked, startled a moment by the gravity of manner.\n\n\"The shock of death,\" was the answer, gently spoken.\n\nThe Irishman only knew a swift rush of joy and wonder as he heard it.\n\n\"But there is no such thing!\" he cried, almost with laughter. \"He taught me that above all else. There is no death!\"\n\n\"There is 'going away,' though,\" came the rejoinder, spoken low; \"there is earth to earth and dust to dust\u2014\"\n\n\"That's of the body\u2014!\"\n\n\"That's of the body, yes,\" the older man repeated darkly.\n\n\"There is only 'going home,' escape and freedom. I tell you there's only that. It's nothing but joy and splendor when you really understand.\"\n\nBut Dr. Stahl made no immediate answer, nor any comment. He paid the bill and led him down the street. They took the shady side. Passing beyond the skirts of the town they walked in silence. The barracks where the soldiers sang, the railway line to Tiflis and Baku, the dome and minarets of the church, were left behind in turn, and presently they reached the hot, straight dusty road that fringed the sea. They heard the crashing of the little waves and saw the foam creamily white against the dark grey pebbles of the beach.\n\nAnd when they reached a small enclosure where thin trees were planted among sparse grass all brown and withered by the sun, they paused, and Stahl pointed to a mound, marked at either end by rough stone boulder. A date was on it, but no name. O'Malley calculated the difference between the Russian Calendar and the one he was accustomed to. Stahl checked him.\n\n\"The fifteenth of June,\" the German said.\n\n\"The fifteenth of June, yes,\" said O'Malley very slowly, but with wonder and excitement in his heart. \"That was the day that Rostom tried to run away\u2014the day I saw him come to me from the trees\u2014the day we started off together\u2026 to the Garden\u2026.\"\n\nHe turned to his companion questioningly. For a moment the rush of memory was quite bewildering.\n\n\"He never left Batoum at all, you see,\" Stahl continued, without looking up. \"He went straight to the hospital the day we came into port. I was summoned to him in the night\u2014that last night while you slept so deeply. His old strange fever was upon him then, and I took him ashore before the other passengers were astir. I brought him to the hospital myself. And he never left his bed.\" He pointed down to the little nameless grave at their feet where a wandering wind from the sea just stirred the grasses. \"That was the date on which he died.\"\n\n\"He went away in the early morning,\" he added in a low voice that held both sadness and sympathy.\n\n\"He went home,\" said the Irishman, a tide of joy rising tumultuously through his heart as he remembered. The secret of that complete and absolute Leadership was out. He understood it all. It had been a spiritual adventure to the last.\n\nThen followed a pause.\n\nIn silence they stood there for some minutes. There grew no flowers on that grave, but O'Malley stooped down and picked a strand of the withered grass. He put it carefully between the pages of his notebook; and then, lying flat against the ground where the sunshine fell in a patch of white and burning glory, he pressed his lips to the crumbling soil. He kissed the Earth. Oblivious of Stahl's presence, or at least ignoring it, he worshipped.\n\nAnd while he did so he heard that little sound he loved so well\u2014which more than any words or music brought peace and joy, because it told his Passion all complete. With his ears close to the earth he heard it, yet at the same time heard it everywhere. For it came with the falling of the waves upon the shore, through the murmur of the rustling branches overhead, and even across the whispering of the withered grass about him. Deep down in the center of the mothering Earth he heard it too in faintly rising pulse. It was the exquisite little piping on a reed\u2014the ancient fluting of the everlasting Pan\u2026.\n\nAnd when he rose he found that Stahl had turned away and was gazing at the sea, as though he had not noticed.\n\n\"Doctor,\" he cried, yet so softly it was a whisper rather than a call, \"I heard it then again; it's everywhere! Oh, tell me that you hear it too!\"\n\nStahl turned and looked at him in silence. There was a moisture in his eyes, and on his face a look of softness that a woman might have worn.\n\n\"I've brought it back, you see, I've brought it back. For that's the message\u2014that's the sound and music I must give to all the world. No words, no book can tell it.\" His hat was off, his eyes were shining, his voice broke with the passion of joy he yearned to share yet knew so little how to impart. \"If I can pipe upon the flutes of Pan the millions all will listen, will understand, and\u2014follow. Tell me, oh, tell me, that you heard it too!\"\n\n\"My friend, my dear young friend,\" the German murmured in a voice of real tenderness, \"you heard it truly\u2014but you heard it in your heart. Few hear the Pipes of Pan as you do. Few care to listen. Today the world is full of other sounds that drown it. And even of those who hear,\" he shrugged his shoulders as he led him away toward the sea,\u2014\"how few will care to follow\u2014how fewer still will dare.\"\n\nAnd while they lay upon the beach and watched the line of foam against their feet and saw the seagulls curving idly in the blue and shining air, he added underneath his breath\u2014O'Malley hardly caught the murmur of his words so low he murmured them:\u2014\n\n\"The simple life is lost forever. It lies asleep in the Golden Age, and only those who sleep and dream can ever find it. If you would keep your joy, dream on, my friend! Dream on, but dream alone!\"\n\nSummer blazed everywhere and the sea lay like a blue pool of melted sky and sunshine. The summits of the Caucasus soon faded to the east and north, and to the south the wooded hills of the Black Sea coast accompanied the ship in a line of wavy blue that joined the water and the sky indistinguishably.\n\nThe first-class passengers were few; O'Malley hardly noticed their existence even. An American engineer, building a railway in Turkey, came on board at Trebizond; there were one or two light women on their way home from Baku, and the attach\u00e9 of a foreign embassy from Teheran. But the Irishman felt more in touch with the hundred peasant-folk who joined the ship at Ineboli from the interior of Asia Minor and were bound as third-class emigrants for Marseilles and far America. Dark-skinned, wild-eyed, ragged, very dirty, they had never seen the sea before, and the sight of a porpoise held them spellbound. They lived on the after-deck, mostly cooking their own food, the women and children sleeping beneath a large tarpaulin that the sailors stretched for them across the width of deck. At night they played their pipes and danced, singing, shouting, and waving their arms\u2014always the same tune over and over again.\n\nO'Malley watched them for hours together. He also watched the engineer, the over-dressed women, the attach\u00e9. He understood the difference between them as he had never understood it before. He understood the difficulty of his task as well. How in the world could he ever explain a single syllable of his message to these latter, or waken in them the faintest echo of desire to know and listen. The peasants, though all unconscious of the blinding glory at their elbows, stood far nearer to the truth.\n\n\"Been further east, I suppose?\" the engineer observed, one afternoon as the steamer lay off Broussa, taking on a little extra cargo of walnut logs. He looked admiringly at the Irishman's bronzed skin. \"Take a better sun than this to put that on!\"\n\nHe laughed in his breezy, vigorous way, and the other laughed with him. Previous conversations had already paved the way to a traveler's friendship, and the American had taken to him.\n\n\"Up in the mountains,\" he replied, \"camping out and sleeping in the sun did it.\"\n\n\"The Caucasus! Ah, I'd like to get up there myself a bit. I'm told they're a wonderful thing in the mountain line.\"\n\nScenery for him was evidently a commercial commodity, or it was nothing.\n\nIt was the most up-to-date nation in the world that spoke\u2014in the van of civilization\u2014representing the last word in progress due to triumph over Nature.\n\nO'Malley said he had never seen anything like them. He described the trees, the flowers, the tribes, the scenery in general; he dwelt upon the vast uncultivated spaces, the amazing fruitfulness of the soil, the gorgeous beauty above all. \"I'd like to get the overcrowded cities of England and Europe spread all over it,\" he said with enthusiasm. \"There is room for thousands there to lead a simple life close to Nature, in health and peace and happiness. Even your tired millionaires could escape their restless, feverish worries, lay down their weary burden of possessions, and enjoy the earth at last. The poor would cease to be with us; life become true and beautiful again\u2014\" He let it pour out of him, building the scaffolding of his dream before him in the air and filling it in with beauty.\n\nThe American listened in patience, watching the walnut logs being towed through the water to the side of the ship. From time to time he spat on them, or into the sea. He let the beauty go completely past him.\n\n\"Great idea, that!\" he interrupted at length. \"You're interested, I see, in socialism and communistic schemes. There's money in them somewhere right enough, if a man only could hit the right note at the first go off. Take a bit of doing, though!\"\n\nOne of the women from Baku came up and leaned upon the rails a little beyond them. The sickly odor of artificial scent wafted down. The attach\u00e9 strolled along the deck and ogled her.\n\n\"Get a few of that sort to draw the millionaires in, eh?\" he added vulgarly.\n\n\"Even those would come, yes,\" said the Irishman softly, realizing for the first time within his memory that his gorge did not rise, \"for they too would change, grow clean and sweet and beautiful.\"\n\nThe engineer looked sharply into his face, uncertain whether he had not missed a clever witticism of his own kind. But O'Malley did not meet his glance. His eyes were far away upon the snowy summit of Olympus where a flock of fleecy clouds hung hovering like the hair of the eternal gods.\n\n\"They say there's timber going to waste that you could get to the coast merely for the cost of drawing it\u2014Caucasian walnut, too, to burn,\" the other continued, getting on to safer ground, \"and labor's dirt cheap. There's every sort of mineral too God ever made. You could build light railways and run the show by electricity. And water-power for the asking. You'd have to get a Concession from Russia first though,\" he added, spitting down upon a huge floating log in the clear sea underneath, \"and Russia's got palms that want a lot of greasing. I guess the natives, too, would take a bit of managing.\"\n\nThe woman beyond had shifted several feet nearer, and after a pause the Irishman found no words to fill, his companion turned to address a remark to her. O'Malley took the opening and moved away.\n\n\"Here's my card, anyway,\" the American added, handing him an over-printed bit of large pasteboard from a fat pocket-book that bore his name and address in silver on the outside. \"If you develop the scheme and want a bit of money, count me in.\"\n\nHe went to the other side of the vessel and watched the peasants on the lower deck. Their dirt seemed nothing by comparison. It was only on their clothes and bodies. The odor of this unwashed humanity was almost sweet and wholesome. It cleansed the sickly taint of that other scent from his palate; it washed his mind of thoughts as well.\n\nHe stood there long in dreaming silence, while the sunlight on Olympus turned from gold to rose, and the sea took on the colors of the fading sky. He watched a dark Kurd baby sliding down the tarpaulin. A kitten was playing with a loose end of rope too heavy for it to move. Further off a huge fellow with bared chest and the hands of a colossus sat on a pile of canvas playing softly on his wooden pipes. The dark hair fell across his eyes, and a group of women listened idly while they busied themselves with the cooking of the evening meal. Immediately beneath him a splendid-eyed young woman crammed a baby to her naked breast. The kitten left the rope and played with the tassel of her scarlet shawl.\n\nAnd as he heard those pipes and watched the grave, untamed, strong faces of those wild peasant men and women, he understood that, low though they might be in scale of evolution, there was yet absent from them the touch of that deteriorating something which civilization painted into those other countenances. But whether the word he sought was degradation or whether it was shame, he could not tell. In all they did, the way they moved, their dignity and independence, there was this something, he felt, that bordered on being impressive. Their wants were few, their worldly possessions in a bundle, yet they had this thing that set them in a place apart, if not above, these others:\u2014beyond that simpering attach\u00e9 for all his worldly diplomacy, that engineer with brains and skill, those painted women with their clever playing upon the feelings and desires of their kind. There was this difference that set the ragged dirty crew in a proud and quiet atmosphere that made them seem almost distinguished by comparison, and certainly more desirable. Rough and untutored though they doubtless were, they still possessed unspoiled that deeper and more elemental nature that bound them closer to the Earth. It needed training, guidance, purifying; yes; but, in the last resort, was it not of greater spiritual significance and value than the mode of comparatively recently-developed reason by which Civilization had produced these other types?\n\nHe watched them long. The sun sank out of sight, the sea turned dark, ten thousand stars shone softly in the sky, and while the steamer swung about and made for peaked Andros and the coast of Greece, he still stood on in reverie and wonder. The wings of his great Dream stirred mightily\u2026 and he saw pale millions of men and women trooping through the gates of horn and ivory into that Garden where they should find peace and happiness in clean simplicity close to the Earth\u2026.\n\nThere followed four days then of sea, Greece left behind, Messina and the Lipari Islands past; and the blue outline of Sardinia and Corsica began to keep pace with them as they neared the narrow straits of Bonifacio between them. The passengers came up to watch the rocky desolate shores slip by so close, and Captain Burgenfelder was on the bridge.\n\nGrey-headed rocks rose everywhere close about the ship; overhead the seagulls cried and circled; no vegetation was visible on either shore, no houses, no abode of man\u2014nothing but the lighthouses, then miles of deserted rock dressed in those splendors of the sun's good-night. The dinner-gong had sounded but the sight was too magnificent to leave, for the setting sun floated on an emblazoned sea and stared straight against them in level glory down the narrow passage. Unimaginable colors painted sky and wave. The ruddy cliffs of bleak loneliness rose from a bed of flame. Soft airs fanned the cheeks with welcome coolness after the fierce heat of the day. There was a scent of wild honey in the air borne from the purple uplands far, far away.\n\n\"I wonder, oh, I wonder, if they realized that a god is passing close\u2026!\" the Irishman murmured with a rising of the heart, \"and that here is a great mood of the Earth-Consciousness inviting them to peace! Or do they merely see a yellow sun that dips beneath a violet sea\u2026?\"\n\nThe washing of the water past the steamer's sides caught away the rest of the half-whispered words. He remembered that host of many thousand heads that bowed in silence while a god swept by\u2026. It was almost a shock to hear a voice replying close beside him:\u2014\n\n\"Come to my cabin when you're ready. My windows open to the west. We can be alone together. We can have there what food we need. You would prefer it perhaps?\"\n\nHe felt the touch of that sympathetic hand upon his shoulder, and bent his head to signify agreement.\n\nFor a moment, face to face with that superb sunset, he had known a deep and utter peace in the vast bosom of this greater soul about him. Her consciousness again had bruised and fringed his own. Across that delicately divided threshold the beauty and the power of the gods had poured in a flood into his being. And only there was peace, only there was joy, only there was the death of those ancient yearnings that tortured his little personal and separate existence. The return to the world was aching pain again. The old loneliness that seemed more than he could bear swept icily through him, contracting life and freezing every spring of joy. For in that single instant of return he felt pass into him a loneliness of the whole travailing world, the loneliness of countless centuries, the loneliness of all the races of the Earth who were exiled and had lost the way.\n\nToo deep it lay for words or tears or sighs. The doctor's invitation came most opportunely. And presently in silence he turned his back upon that opal sky of dream from which the sun had gone, and walked slowly down the deck toward Stahl's cabin.\n\n\"If only I can share it with them,\" he thought as he went; \"if only men will listen, if only they will come. To keep it all to myself, to dream alone, will kill me.\"\n\nAnd as he stood before the door it seemed he heard wild rushing through the sky, the tramping of a thousand hoofs, a roaring of the wind, the joy of that free, torrential passage with the Earth. He turned the handle and entered the cozy room where weeks before they held the inquest on the little empty tenement of flesh, remembering how that other figure had once stood where he now stood\u2014part of the sunrise, part of the sea, part of the morning winds." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 155", + "text": "They had their meal almost in silence, while the glow of sunset filled the cabin through the western row of port-holes, and when it was over Stahl made the coffee as of old and lit the familiar black cigar. Slowly O'Malley's pain and restlessness gave way before the other's soothing quiet. He had never known him before so calm and gentle, so sympathetic, almost tender. The usual sarcasm seemed veiled in sadness; there was no irony in the voice, nor mockery in the eyes.\n\nThen to the Irishman it came suddenly that all these days while he had been lost in dreaming the doctor had kept him as of old under close observation. The completeness of his reverie had concealed from him this steady scrutiny. He had been oblivious to the fact that Stahl had all the time been watching, investigating, keenly examining. Abruptly he now realized it.\n\nAnd then Stahl spoke. His tone was winning, his manner frank and inviting. But it was the sadness about him that won O'Malley's confidence so wholly.\n\n\"I can guess,\" he said, \"something of the dream you've brought with you from those mountains. I can understand\u2014more, perhaps, than you imagine, and I can sympathize\u2014more than you think possible. Tell me about it fully\u2014if you can. I see your heart is very full, and in the telling you will find relief. I am not hostile, as you sometimes feel. Tell me, my dear, young clear-eyed friend. Tell me your vision and your hope. Perhaps I might even help\u2026 for there may be things that I could also tell to you in return.\"\n\nSomething in the choice of words, none of which offended; in the atmosphere and setting, no detail of which jarred; and in the degree of balance between utterance and silence his world of inner forces just then knew, combined to make the invitation irresistible. Moreover, he had wanted to tell it all these days. Stahl was already half convinced. Stahl would surely understand and help him. It was the psychological moment for confession. The two men rose in the same moment, Stahl to lock the cabin doors against interruption, O'Malley to set their chairs more closely side by side so that talking should be easiest.\n\nAnd then without demur or hesitation he opened his heart to this other and let the floodgates of his soul swing wide. He told the vision and he told the dream; he told his hope as well. And the story of his passion, filled in with pages from those notebooks he ever carried in his pocket, still lasted when the western glow had faded from the sky and the thick-sown stars shone down upon the gliding steamer. The hush of night lay soft upon the world before he finished.\n\nHe told the thing complete, much, I imagine, as he told it all to me upon the roof of that apartment building and in the dingy Soho restaurant. He told it without reservations\u2014his life-long yearnings: the explanation brought by the presence of the silent stranger upon the outward voyage: the journey to the Garden: the vision that all life\u2014from gods to flowers, from men to mountains\u2014lay contained in the conscious Being of the Earth, that Beauty was but glimpses of her essential nakedness; and that salvation of the world's disease of modern life was to be found in a general return to the simplicity of Nature close against her mothering heart. He told it all\u2014in words that his passionate joy chose faultlessly.\n\nAnd Heinrich Stahl in silence listened. He asked no single question. He made no movement in his chair. His black cigar went out before the half of it was smoked. The darkness hid his face impenetrably.\n\nAnd no one came to interrupt. The murmur of the speeding steamer, and occasional footsteps on the deck as passengers passed to and fro in the cool of the night, were the only sounds that broke the music of that incurable idealist's impassioned story.\n\nAnd then at length there came a change of voice across the cabin. The Irishman had finished. He sank back in the deep leather chair, exhausted physically, but with the exultation of his mighty hope still pouring at full strength through his heart. For he had ventured further than ever before and had spoken of a possible crusade\u2014a crusade that should preach peace and happiness to every living creature.\n\nAnd Dr. Stahl, in a voice that showed how deeply he was moved, asked quietly:\u2014\n\n\"By leading the nations back to Nature you think they shall advance to Truth at last?\"\n\n\"With time,\" was the reply. \"The first step lies there:\u2014in changing the direction of the world's activities, changing it from the transient Outer to the eternal Inner. In the simple life, external possessions unnecessary and recognized as vain, the soul would turn within and seek Reality. Only a tiny section of humanity has time to do it now. There is no leisure. Civilization means acquirement for the body: it ought to mean development for the soul. Once sweep aside the trash and rubbish men seek outside themselves today, and the wings of their smothered souls would stir again. Consciousness would expand. Nature would draw them first. They would come to feel the Earth as I did. Self would disappear, and with it this false sense of separateness. The greater consciousness would waken in them. The peace and joy and blessedness of inner growth would fill their lives. But, first, this childish battling to the death for external things must cease, and Civilization stand revealed for the bleak and empty desolate thing it really is. It leads away from God and from the things that are eternal.\"\n\nThe German made no answer; O'Malley ceased to speak; a long silence fell between them. Then, presently, Stahl relighted his cigar, and lapsing into his native tongue\u2014always a sign with him of deepest seriousness\u2014he began to talk.\n\n\"You've honored me,\" he said, \"with a great confidence; and I am deeply, deeply grateful. You have told your inmost dream\u2014the thing men find it hardest of all to speak about.\" He felt in the darkness for his companion's hand and held it tightly for a moment. He made no other comment upon what he had heard. \"And in return\u2014in some small way of return,\" he continued, \"I may ask you to listen to something of my own, something of possible interest. No one has ever known it from my lips. Only, in our earlier conversations on the outward voyage, I hinted at it once or twice. I sometimes warned you\u2014\"\n\n\"I remember. You said he'd 'get' me, 'win' me over\u2014'appropriation' was the word you used.\"\n\n\"I suggested caution, yes; urged you not to let yourself go too completely; told you he represented danger to yourself, and to humanity as it is organized today\u2014\"\n\n\"And all the rest,\" put in O'Malley a shade impatiently. \"I remember perfectly.\"\n\n\"Because I knew what I was talking about.\" The doctor's voice came across the darkness somewhat ominously. And then he added in a louder tone, evidently sitting forward as he said it: \"For the thing that has happened to yourself as I foresaw it would, had already almost happened to me too!\"\n\n\"To you, doctor, too?\" exclaimed the Irishman in the moment's pause that followed.\n\n\"I saved myself just in time\u2014by getting rid of the cause.\"\n\n\"You discharged him from the hospital, because you were afraid!\" He said it sharply as though are instant of the old resentment had flashed up.\n\nBy way of answer Stahl rose from his chair and abruptly turned up the electric lamp upon the desk that faced them across the cabin. Evidently he preferred the light. O'Malley saw that his face was white and very grave. He grasped for the first time that the man was speaking professionally. The truth came driving next behind it\u2014that Stahl regarded him as a patient." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 156", + "text": "\"Please go on, doctor,\" he said, keenly on the watch. \"I'm deeply interested.\" The wings of his great dream still bore him too far aloft for him to feel more than the merest passing annoyance at his discovery. Resentment had gone too. Sadness and disappointment for an instant touched him perhaps, but momentarily. In the end he felt sure that Stahl would stand at his side, completely won over and convinced.\n\n\"You had a similar experience to my own, you say,\" he urged him. \"I am all eagerness and sympathy to hear.\"\n\n\"We'll talk in the open air,\" the doctor answered, and ringing the bell for the steward to clear away, he drew his companion out to the deserted decks. They moved toward the bows, past the sleeping peasants. The stars were mirrored in a glassy sea and toward the north the hills of Corsica stood faintly outlined in the sky. It was already long after midnight.\n\n\"Yes, a similar thing nearly happened to me,\" he resumed as they settled themselves against a coil of rope where only the murmur of the washing sea could reach them, \"and might have happened to others too. Inmates of that big Krankenhaus were variously affected. My action, tardy I must admit, saved myself and them.\"\n\nAnd the German then told his story as a man might tell of his escape from some grave disaster. In the emphatic sentences of his native language he told it, congratulating himself all through. The Russian had almost won him over, gained possession of his heart and mind, persuaded him, but in the end had failed\u2014because the other ran away. It was like hearing a man describe an attempt to draw him into Heaven, then boast of his escape. His caution and his judgment, as he put it, saved him, but to the listening Celt it rather seemed that his compromise it was that damned him. The Kingdom of Heaven is hard to enter, for Stahl had possessions not of the wood and metal order, but possessions of the brain and reason he was too proud to forego completely. They kept him out.\n\nWith increasing sadness, too, he heard it; for here he realized was the mental attitude of an educated, highly civilized man today\u2014a representative type regarded by the world as highest. It was this he had to face. Moreover Stahl was more than merely educated, he was understandingly sympathetic, meeting the great dream halfway; seeing in it possibilities; admitting its high beauty, and even sometimes speaking of it with hope and a touch of enthusiasm. Its originator none the less he regarded as a reactionary dreamer, an unsettling and disordered influence, a patient, if not even something worse!\n\nStahl's voice and manner were singular while he told it all, revealing one moment the critical mind that analyzed and judged, and the next an enthusiasm almost of the mystic. Alternately, like the man and woman of those quaint old weather-glasses, each peered out and showed a face, the reins of compromise yet ever seeking to hold them well in leash and drive them together.\n\nHardly, it seems, had the strange Russian been under his care a week before he passed beneath the sway of his curious personality and experienced the attack of singular emotions upon his heart and mind.\n\nHe described at first the man's arrival, telling it with the calm and balanced phrases a doctor uses when speaking merely of a patient who had stirred his interest. He first detailed the method of suggestion he had used to revive the lapsed memory\u2014and its utter failure. Then he passed on to speak of him more generally: but briefly and condensed.\n\n\"The man,\" he said, \"was so engaging, so docile, his personality altogether so attractive and mysterious, that I took the case myself instead of delegating it to my assistants. All efforts to trace his past collapsed. It was as if he had drifted into that little hotel out of the night of time. Of madness there was no evidence whatever. The association of ideas in his mind, though limited, was logical and rigid. His health was perfect, barring strange, sudden fever; his vitality tremendous; yet he ate most sparingly and the only food he touched was fruit and milk and vegetables. Meat made him sick, the huge frame shuddered when he saw it. And from all the human beings in the place with whom he came in contact he shrank with a kind of puzzled dismay. With animals, most oddly it seemed, he sought companionship; he would run to the window if a dog barked, or to hear a horse's hoofs; a Persian cat belonging to one of the nurses never left his side, and I have seen the trees in the yard outside his window thick with birds, and even found them in the room and on the sill, flitting about his very person, unafraid and singing.\n\n\"With me, as with the attendants, his speech was almost nil\u2014laconic words in various languages, clipped phrases that sometimes combined Russian, French, or German, other tongues as well.\n\n\"But, strangest of all, with animal life he seemed to hold this kind of communication that was Intelligible both to himself and them. Animals certainly were 'aware' of him. It was not speech. It ran in a deep, continuous murmur like a droning, humming sound of wind. I took the hint thus faintly offered. I gave him his freedom in the yards and gardens. The open air and intercourse with natural life was what he craved. The sadness and the air of puzzled fretting then left his face, his eyes grew bright, his whole presentment happier; he ran and laughed and even sang. The fever that had troubled him all vanished. Often myself I took the place of nurse or orderly to watch him, for the man's presence more than interested me: it gave me a renewed sense of life that was exhilarating, invigorating, delightful. And in his appearance, meanwhile, something that was not size or physical measurement, turned\u2014tremendous.\n\n\"A part of me that was not mind\u2014a sort of forgotten instinct blindly groping\u2014came of its own accord to regard him as some loose fragment of a natural, cosmic life that had somehow blundered down into a human organism it sought to use\u2026.\n\n\"And then it was for the first time I recognized the spell he had cast upon me; for, when the Committee decided there was no reason to keep him longer, I urged that he should stay. Making a special plea, I took him as a private patient of my own. I kept him under closer personal observation than ever before. I needed him. Something deep within me, something undivined hitherto, called out into life by his presence, could not do without him. This new craving, breakingly wild and sweet, awoke in my blood and cried for him. His presence nourished it in me. Most insidiously it attacked me. It stirred deep down among the roots of my being. It 'threatened my personality' seems the best way I can put it; for, turning a critical analysis upon it, I discovered that it was an undermining and revolutionary change going steadily forward in my character. Its growth had hitherto been secret. When I first recognized its presence, the thing was already strong. For a long time, it had been building.\n\n\"And the change in a word\u2014you will grasp my meaning from the shortest description of essentials\u2014was this: that ambition left me, ordinary desire crumbled, the outer world men value so began to fade.\"\n\n\"And in their place?\" cried O'Malley breathlessly, interrupting for the first time.\n\n\"Came a rushing, passionate desire to escape from cities and live for beauty and simplicity 'in the wilderness'; to taste the life he seemed to know; to go out blindly with him into woods and desolate places, and be mixed and blended with the loveliness of Earth and Nature. This was the first thing I knew. It was like an expansion of my normal world\u2014almost an extension of consciousness. It somehow threatened my sense of personal identity. And\u2014it made me hesitate.\"\n\nO'Malley caught the tremor in his voice. Even in the telling of it the passion plucked at him, for here, as ever, he stood on the border-line of compromise, his heart tempting him toward salvation, his brain and reason tugging at the brakes.\n\n\"The sham and emptiness or modern life, its drab vulgarity, the unworthiness of its very ideals stood appallingly revealed before some inner eye just opening. I felt shaken to the core of what had seemed hitherto my very solid and estimable self. How the man thus so powerfully affected me lies beyond all intelligible explanation. To use the obvious catchword 'hypnotism' is to use a toy and stop a leak with paper. For his influence was unconsciously exerted. He cast no net of clever, persuasive words about my thought. Out of that deep, strange silence of the man it somehow came. His actions and his simple happiness of face and manner\u2014both in some sense the raw material of speech perhaps\u2014may have operated as potently suggestive agents; but no adequate causes to justify the result, apart from the fantastic theories I have mentioned, have ever yet come within the range of my understanding. I can only give you the undeniable effects.\"\n\n\"Your sense of extended consciousness,\" asked his listener, \"was this continuous, once it had begun?\"\n\n\"It came in patches,\" Stahl continued. \"My normal, everyday self was thus able to check it. While it derided, commiserated this everyday self, the latter stood in dread of it and even awe. My training, you see, regarded it as symptom of disorder, a beginning of unbalance that might end in insanity, the thin wedge of a dissociation of the personality Morton Prince and others have described.\"\n\nHis speech grew more and more jerky, even incoherent; evidently the material had not even now been fully reduced to order in his mind.\n\n\"Among other curious symptoms I soon established that this subtle spreading of my consciousness grew upon me especially during sleep. The business of the day distracted, scattered it. On waking in the morning, as with the physical fatigue that comes toward the closing of the day, it was strongest.\n\n\"And so, in order to examine it closely when in fullest manifestation, I came to spend the nights with him. I would creep in while he slept and stay till morning, alternately sleeping and waking myself. I watched the two of us together. I also watched the 'two' in me. And thus it was I made the further strange discovery that the influence he exerted on me was strongest while he slept. It is best described by saying that in his sleep I was conscious that he sought to draw me with him\u2014away somewhere into his own wonderful world\u2014the state or region, that is, where he manifested completely instead of partially as I knew him here. His personality was a channel somewhere out into a living, conscious Nature\u2026.\"\n\n\"Only,\" interrupted O'Malley, \"you felt that to yield and go involved some nameless inner catastrophe, and so resisted?\" He chose his phrase with purpose.\n\n\"Because I discovered,\" was the pregnant answer, given steadily while he watched his listener closely through the darkness, \"that this desire for escape the man had wakened in me was nothing more or less than the desire to leave the world, to leave the conditions that prevented\u2014in fact to leave the body. My discontent with modern life had gone as far as that. It was the birth of the suicidal mania.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 157", + "text": "The pause that followed the words, on the part of Dr. Stahl at any rate, was intentional. O'Malley held his peace. The men shifted their places oil the coil of rope, for both were cramped and stiff with the lengthy session. For a minute or two they leaned over the bulwarks and watched the phosphorescent foam in silence. The blue mountainous shores slipped past in shadowy line against the stars. But when they sat down again their relative positions were not what they had been before. Dr. Stahl had placed himself between his listener and the sea. And O'Malley did not let the manoeuvre escape him. Smiling to himself he noticed it. Just as surely he noticed, too, that the whole recital was being told him with a purpose.\n\n\"You really need not be afraid,\" he could not resist saying. \"The idea of escape that way has never even come to me at all. And, anyhow, I've far too much on hand first in telling the world my message.\" He laughed in the silence that took his words, for Stahl said nothing and made as though he had not heard. But the Irishman understood that it was in the spirit of feeble compromise that danger lay\u2014if danger there was at all, and he himself was far beyond such weakness. His eye was single and his body full of light, and the faith that plays with mountains had made him whole. Return to Nature for him involved no denial of human life, nor depreciation of human interests, but only a revolutionary shifting of values.\n\n\"And it was one night while he slept and I watched him in the little room,\" resumed the German as though there had been no interruption, \"I noticed first so decisively this growing of a singular size about him I have already mentioned, and grasped its meaning. For the bulk of the man while growing\u2014emerging, rather, I should say\u2014assumed another shape than his own. It was not my eyes that saw it. I saw him as he felt himself to be. The creature's personality, his essential inner being, was acting directly upon my own. His influence was at me from another point or angle. First the emotions, then the senses you see. It was a finely organized attack.\n\n\"I definitely understood at last that my mind was affected\u2014and proved it too, for the instant effort I made at recovery resulted in my seeing him normal again. The size and shape retreated the moment I denied them.\"\n\nO'Malley noticed how the speaker's voice lingered over the phrase. Again he knew the intention of the pause that followed. He held his peace, however, and waited.\n\n\"Nor was sight the only sense affected,\" Stahl continued, \"for smell and hearing also brought their testimony. Through all but touch, indeed, the hallucination attacked me. For sometimes at night while I sat up watching in the little room, there rose outside the open window in the yards and gardens a sound of tramping, a distant roaring as of voices in a rising wind, a rushing, hollow murmur, confused and deep like that of forests, or the swift passage of a host of big birds across the sky. I heard it, both in the air and on the ground\u2014this tramping on the lawns, this curious shaking of the atmosphere. And with it at the same time a sharp and mingled perfume that made me think of earth and leaves, of flowers after rain, of plains and open spaces, most singular of all\u2014of animals and horses.\n\n\"Before the firm denial of my mind, they vanished, just as the change of form had vanished. But both left me weaker than they found me, more tender to attack. Moreover, I understood most plainly, that they emanated all from him. These 'emanations' came, too, chiefly, as I mentioned, whilst he slept. In sleep, it seemed, he set them free. The slumber of the body disengaged them. And then the instinct came to warn me\u2014presenting itself with the authority of an unanswerable intuition\u2014the realization, namely, that if, for a single moment in his presence, I slept, the changes would leap forward in my own being, and I should join him.\"\n\n\"Escape! Know freedom in a larger consciousness!\" cried the other.\n\n\"And for a man of my point of view and training to have permitted such a conviction at all,\" he went on, the interruption utterly ignored again, \"proves how far along the road I had already traveled without knowing it. Only at the time I was not aware of this. It was the shock of full discovery later that brought me to my senses, when, seeking to withdraw,\u2014I found I could not.\"\n\n\"And so you ran away.\" It came out bluntly enough, with a touch of scorn but ill concealed.\n\n\"We discharged him. But before that came there was more I have to tell you\u2014if you still care to hear it.\"\n\n\"I'm not tired, if that's what you mean. I could listen all night, as far as that goes.\"\n\nHe rose to stretch his legs a moment, and Stahl rose too\u2014instantly. Together they leaned over the bulwarks. The German's hat was off and the air made by the steamer's passage drew his beard out. The warm soft wind brought odors of sea and shore. It caressed their faces, then passed on across those sleeping peasants on the lower deck. The masts and rigging swung steadily against the host of stars.\n\n\"Before I thus knew myself half caught,\" continued the doctor, standing now close enough beside him for actual contact, \"and found it difficult to get away, other things had happened, things that confirmed the change so singularly begun in me. They happened everywhere; confirmation came from many quarters; though slight enough, they filled in all the gaps and crevices, strengthened the joints, and built the huge illusion round me all complete until it held me like a prison.\n\n\"And they are difficult to tell. Only, indeed, to yourself who underwent a similar experience up there in the mountains, could they bring much meaning. You had the same temptation and you\u2014weathered the same storm.\" He caught O'Malley's arm a moment and held it. \"You escaped this madness just as I did, and you will realize what I mean when I say that the sensation of losing my sense of personal identity became so dangerously, so seductively strong. The feeling of extended consciousness became delicious\u2014too delicious to resist. A kind of pagan joy and exultation known to some in early youth, but put away with the things of youth, possessed me. In the presence of this other's soul, so strangely powerful in its silence and simplicity, I felt as though I touched new sources of life. I tapped them. They poured down and flooded me\u2014with dreams\u2014dreams that could really haunt\u2014with unsettling thoughts of glory and delight beyond the body. I got clean away into Nature. I felt as though some portion of me just awakening reached out across him into rain and sunshine, far up into the sweet and starry sky\u2014as a tree growing out of a thicket that chokes its lower part finds light and freedom at the top.\"\n\n\"It caught you badly, doctor,\" O'Malley murmured. \"The gods came close!\"\n\n\"So badly that I loathed the prisoned darkness that held me so thickly in the body. I longed to know my being all dispersed through Nature, scattered with dew and wind, shining with the star-light and the sun. And the manner of escape I hinted to you a little while ago came to seem right and necessary. Lawful it seemed, and obvious. The mania literally obsessed me, though still I tried to hide it even from myself\u2026 and struggled in resistance.\"\n\n\"You spoke just now of other things that came to confirm it,\" the Irishman said while the other paused to take breath. All this he knew. He grew weary of Stahl's clever laboring the point that it was madness. A little knowledge is ever dangerous, and he saw so clearly why the hesitation of the merely intellectual man had led him into error. \"Did you mean that others acknowledged this influence as well as yourself?\"\n\n\"You shall read that for yourself tomorrow,\" came the answer, \"in the detailed report I drew up afterwards; it is far too long to tell you now. But, I may mention something of it. That breaking out of patients was a curious thing, their trying to escape, their dreams and singing, their efforts sometimes to approach his room, their longing for the open and the gardens; the deep, prolonged entrancing of a few; the sounds of rushing, tramping that they, too, heard, the violence of some, the silent ecstasy of others. The thing may find its parallel, perhaps, in the collective mania that sometimes afflicts religious communities, in monasteries or convents. Only here there was no preacher and eloquent leader to induce hysteria\u2014nothing but that silent dynamo of power, gentle and winning as a little child, a being who could not put a phrase together, exerting his potent spell unconsciously, and chiefly while he slept.\n\n\"For the phenomena almost without exception came in the night, and often at their fullest strength, as afterwards reported to me, while I dozed in his room and watched beside his motionless and slumbering form. Oh, and there was more as well, much more, as you shall read. The stories my assistants brought me, the tales of frightened nurse and warder, the amazing yarns the porter stammered out, of strangers who had rung the bell at dawn, trying to push past him through the door, saying they were messengers and had been summoned, sent for, had to come,\u2014large, curious, windy figures, or, as he sometimes called them with unconscious humor, 'like creatures out of fairy books or circuses' that always vanished as suddenly as they came. Making every allowance for excitement and exaggeration, the tales were strange enough, I can assure you, and the way many of the patients knew their visions intensified, their illusions doubly strengthened, their efforts even to destroy themselves in many cases almost more than the staff could deal with\u2014all this brought the matter to a climax and made my duty very plain at last.\"\n\n\"And the effect upon yourself\u2014at its worst?\" asked his listener quietly.\n\nStahl sighed wearily a little as he answered with a new-found sadness in his tone.\n\n\"I've told you briefly that,\" he said; \"repetition cannot strengthen it. The worthlessness of the majority of human aims today expresses it Best\u2014what you have called yourself the 'horror of civilization.' The vanity of all life's modern, so-called up-to-date tendencies for outer, mechanical developments. A wild, mad beauty streaming from that man's personality overran the whole place and caught the lot of us, myself especially, with a lust for simple, natural things, and with a passion for spiritual beauty to accompany them. Fame, wealth, position seemed the shadows then, and something else it's hard to name announced itself as the substance\u2026. I wanted to clear out and live with Nature, to know simplicity, unselfish purposes, a golden state of childlike existence close to dawns and dew and running water, cared for by woods and blessed by all the winds\u2026.\" He paused again for breath, then added:\u2014\n\n\"And that's just where the mania caught at me so cunningly\u2014till I saw it and called a halt.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"For the thing I sought, the thing he knew, and perhaps remembered, was not possible in the body. It was a spiritual state\u2014\"\n\n\"Or to be known subjectively!\" O'Malley checked him.\n\n\"I am no lotus-eater by nature,\" he went on with energy, \"and so I fought and conquered it. But first, I tell you, it came upon me like a tempest\u2014a hurricane of wonder and delight. I've always held, like yourself perhaps, that civilization brings its own army of diseases, and that the few illnesses known to ruder savage races can be cured by simple means the earth herself supplies. And along this line of thought the thing swept into me\u2014the line of my own head-learning. This was natural enough; natural enough, too, that it thus at first deceived me.\n\n\"For the quack cures of history come to this\u2014herb simples and the rest; only we know them now as sun-cure, water-cure, open-air cure, old Kneipp, sea-water, and a hundred others. Doctors have never swarmed before as they do now, and these artificial diseases civilization brings in such quantity seemed all at once to mean the abeyance of some central life or power men ought to share with\u2014Nature\u2026. You shall read it all in my written report. I merely wish to show you now how the insidious thing got at me along the line of my special knowledge. I saw the truth that priests and doctors are the only possible and necessary 'professions' in the world, and\u2014that they should be really but a single profession\u2026.\"\n\nHe drew suddenly back with a kind of jerk. It was as though he realized abruptly that he had said too much\u2014had overdone it. He took his companion by the arm and led him down the decks.\n\nAs they passed the bridge the Captain called out a word of welcome to them; and his jolly, boisterous laugh ran down the wind. The American engineer came from behind a dark corner, almost running into them; his face was flushed. \"It's like a furnace below,\" he said in his nasal familiar manner; \"too hot to sleep. I've run up for a gulp of air.\" He made as though he would join them.\n\n\"The wind's behind us, yes,\" replied the doctor in a different tone, \"and there's no draught.\" With a gesture, half bow, half dismissal, he made even this thick-skinned member of \"the greatest civilization on earth\" understand he was not wanted. And they turned at the cabin door, O'Malley a moment wondering at the admirable dignity with which the \"little\" man had managed the polite dismissal.\n\nHimself, perhaps, he would not have minded the diversion. He was a little weary of the German's long recital. The confession had not been complete, he felt. Much had been held back. It was not altogether straightforward. The dishonesty which hides in compromise peeped through it everywhere.\n\nAnd the incoherence of the latter part had almost bored him. For it was, he easily divined, a studied incoherence. It was meant to touch a similar weakness in himself\u2014if there. But it was not there. He saw through the whole manoeuvre. Stahl wished to warn and save him by showing that the experience they had partly shared was nothing but a strange mental disorder. He wished to force in this subtle way his own interpretation of it upon his friend. Yet at the same time the intuitive Irishman discerned that other tendency in the man which would so gladly perhaps have welcomed a different explanation, and even in some fashion did actually accept it.\n\nO'Malley smiled inwardly as he watched him prepare the coffee as of old. And patiently he waited for the rest that was to come. In a certain sense it all was useful. It would be helpful later. This was an attitude he would often have to face when he returned to civilized life and tried to tell his Message to the thinking, educated men of today\u2014the men he must win over somehow to his dream\u2014the men, without whose backing, no Movement could hope to meet with even a measure of success.\n\n\"So, like myself,\" said Stahl, as he carefully tended the flame of the spirit-lamp between them, \"you have escaped by the skin of your teeth, as it were. And I congratulate you\u2014heartily.\"\n\n\"I thank you,\" said the other dryly.\n\n\"You write your version now, and I'll write mine\u2014indeed it is already almost finished\u2014then we'll compare notes. Perhaps we might even publish them together.\"\n\nHe poured out the fragrant coffee. They faced each other across the little table. But O'Malley did not take the bait. He wished to hear the balance his companion still might tell.\n\nAnd presently he asked for it.\n\n\"With the discharge of your patient the trouble ceased at once, then?\"\n\n\"Comparatively soon. It gradually subsided, yes.\"\n\n\"And as regards yourself?\"\n\n\"I came back to my senses. I recovered my control. The insubordinate impulses I had known retired.\" He smiled as he sipped his coffee. \"You see me now,\" he added, looking his companion steadily in the eyes, \"a sane and commonplace ship's doctor.\"\n\n\"I congratulate you\u2014\"\n\n\"Vielen Dank.\" He bowed.\n\n\"On what you missed, yet almost accomplished,\" the other finished. \"You might have known, like me, the cosmic consciousness! You might have met the gods!\"\n\n\"In a strait-waistcoat,\" the doctor added with a snap.\n\nThey laughed at one another across their coffee cups as once before they had laughed across their glasses of Kakhetian wine\u2014two eternally antagonistic types that will exist as long as life itself.\n\nBut, contrary to his expectations, the German had little more to tell. He mentioned how the experience had led his mind into strange and novel reading in his desire to know what other minds might have to offer by way of explanation, even the most fanciful and far-fetched. He told, though very briefly, how he had picked up Fechner among others, and carefully studied his \"poetic theories,\" and read besides the best accounts of \"spiritistic\" phenomena, as also of the rarer states of hysteria, double-consciousness, multiple personality, and even those looser theories which suggest that a portion of the human constitution called \"astral\" or \"etheric\" may escape from the parent center and, carrying with it the subtler forces of desire and yearning, construct a vivid subjective state of mind which is practically its Heaven of hope and longing all fulfilled.\n\nHe did not, however, betray the results upon himself of all this curious reading and study, nor mention what he found of truth or probability in it all. He merely quoted books and authors, in at least three languages, that stretched in a singular and catholic array from Plato and the Neo-Platonists across the ages to Myers, Du Prel, Flournoy, Lodge, and Morton Prince.\n\nOut of the lot, perhaps,\u2014O'Malley gathered it by inference rather than from actual statement, from fragments of their talks upon the outward voyage more than from anything let fall just then\u2014Fechner had proved the most persuasive to this man's contradictory and original mind. It certainly seemed, at least, as if he knew some secret sympathetic leaning toward the idea that consciousness and matter were inseparable, and that a Cosmic Consciousness \"of sorts\" might pertain to the Earth as, equally, to all the other stars and planets. The Urwelt idea he so often referred to had seized a part of his imagination\u2014that, at least, was clear.\n\nThe Irishman drank it all in, but he was too exhausted now to argue, and too full besides to ask questions. His natural volubility forsook him. He let the doctor have his say without interruptions. He took the warnings with the rest of it. Nothing the other said had changed him.\n\nIt was not the first sunrise they had watched together, and as they took the morning air on deck once more, Corsica rising like a dream the night had left behind her on the sea, he listened with fainter interest to the German's concluding sentences.\n\n\"At any rate you now understand why on that other voyage I was so eager to watch you with your friend, so keen to separate you, to prevent your sleeping with him, and at the same time so desirous to see his influence upon you at close quarters; and also\u2014why I always understood so well what was going on both outwardly and within.\"\n\nO'Malley quietly reiterated the belief he still held in the power of his own dream.\n\n\"I shall go home and give my message to the world,\" was what he said quietly. \"I think it's true.\"\n\n\"It's better to keep silent,\" was the answer, \"for, even if true, the world is not ready yet to listen. It will evaporate, you'll find, in the telling. You'll find there's nothing to tell. Besides, a dream like yours must dawn on all at once, and not on merely one. No one will understand you.\"\n\n\"I can but try.\"\n\n\"You will reach no men of action; and few of intellect. You will merely stuff the dreamers who are already stuffed enough. What is the use, I ask you? What is the use?\"\n\n\"It will set the world on fire for simplicity,\" the other murmured, knowing the great sweet passion flame within him as he watched the sun come slowly out of the rosy sea. \"All the use in the world.\"\n\n\"None,\" was the laconic answer.\n\n\"They might know the gods!\" cried O'Malley, using the phrase that symbolized for him the entire Vision.\n\nStahl looked at him for some time before he spoke. Again that expression of wistful, almost longing admiration shone in the brown eyes.\n\n\"My friend,\" he answered gravely, \"men do not want to know the gods. They prefer their delights less subtle. They crave the cruder physical sensations that bang them toward excitement\u2014\"\n\n\"Of disease, of pain, of separateness,\" put in the other.\n\nThe German shrugged his shoulders. \"It's the stage they're at,\" he said. \"You, if you have success, will merely make a few uncomfortable. The majority will hardly turn their heads. To one in a million you may bring peace and happiness.\"\n\n\"It's worth it,\" cried the Irishman, \"even for that one!\"\n\nStahl answered very gently, smiling with his new expression of tenderness and sympathy. \"Dream your great dream if you will, but dream it, my friend, alone\u2014in peace and silence. That 'one' I speak of is yourself.\"\n\nThe doctor pressed his hand and turned toward his cabin. O'Malley stood a little longer to share the sunrise. Neither spoke another word. He heard the door shut softly behind him. The unspoken answer in his mind was in two words\u2014two common little adjectives: \"Coward and selfish!\"\n\nBut Stahl, once in the privacy of his cabin, judging by the glance visible on his face ere he closed the door, may probably have known a very different thought. And possibly he uttered it below his breath. A sigh most certainly escaped his lips, a sigh half sadness, half relief. For O'Malley remembered it afterwards.\n\n\"Beautiful, foolish dreamer among men! But, thank God, harmless\u2014to others and\u2014himself.\"\n\nAnd soon afterwards O'Malley also went to his cabin. Before sleep took him he lay deep in a mood of sadness\u2014almost as though he had heard his friend's unspoken thought. He realized the insuperable difficulties that lay before him. The world would think him \"mad but harmless.\"\n\nThen, with full sleep, he slipped across that sunrise and found the old-world Garden. He held the eternal password.\n\n\"I can but try\u2026!\"\n\nAnd here the crowded, muddled notebooks come to an end. The rest was action\u2014and inevitable disaster.\n\nThe brief history of O'Malley's mad campaign may be imagined. To a writer who found interest in the study of forlorn hopes and their leaders, a detailed record of this particular one might seem worth while. For me personally it is too sad and too pathetic. I cannot bring myself to tell, much less to analyze the story of a broken heart, when that heart and story are those of a close and deeply admired intimate, a man who gave me genuine love and held my own.\n\nBesides, although a curious chapter in uncommon human nature, it is not by any means a new one. It is the true story of many a poet and dreamer since the world began, though perhaps not often told nor even guessed. And only the poets themselves, especially the little poets who cannot utter half the fire that consumes them, may know the searing pain and passion and the true inwardness of it all.\n\nMost of those months it chanced I was away, and only fragments of the foolish enterprise could reach me. But nothing, I think, could have stopped him, nor any worldly selfish wisdom made him even pause. The thing possessed him utterly; it had to flame its way out as best it could. To high and low, he preached by every means in his power the Simple Life; he preached the mystical life as well\u2014that the true knowledge and the true progress are within, that they both pertain to the inner being and have no chief concern with external things. He preached it wildly, lopsidedly, in or out of season, knowing no half measures. His enthusiasm obscured his sense of proportion and the extravagance hid the germ of truth that undeniably lay in his message.\n\nTo put the movement on its feet at first he realized every possession that he had. It left him penniless, if he was not almost so already, and in the end it left him smothered beneath the glory of his blinding and unutterable Dream. He never understood that suggestion is more effective than a sledge-hammer. His faith was no mere little seed of mustard, but a full-fledged forest singing its message in a wind of thunder. He shouted it aloud to the world.\n\nI think the acid disappointment that lies beneath that trite old phrase \"a broken heart\" was never really his; for indeed it seemed that his cruel, ludicrous failure merely served to strengthen hope and purpose by making him seek for a better method of imparting what he had to say. In the end he learned the bitter lesson to the full. But faith never trailed a single feather. Those jeering audiences in the Park; those empty benches in many a public hall, those brief, ignoring paragraphs in the few newspapers that filled a vacant corner by labeling him crank and long-haired prophet; even the silence that greeted his pamphlets, his letters to the Press, and all the rest, hurt him for others rather than for himself. His pain was altruistic, never personal. His dream and motive, his huge, unwieldy compassion, his genuine love for humanity, all were big enough for that.\n\nAnd so, I think, he missed the personal mortification that disappointment so deep might bring to dreamers with an aim less unadulteratedly pure. His eye was single to the end. He attributed only the highest motives to all who offered help. The very quacks and fools who flocked to his banner, eager to exploit their smaller fads by joining them to his own, he welcomed, only regretting that, as Stahl had warned him, he could not attract a better class of mind. He did not even see through the manoeuvres of the occasional women of wealth and title who sought to conceal their own mediocrity by advertising in their drawing-rooms the eccentricities of men like himself. And to the end he had the courage of his glorious convictions.\n\nThe change of method that he learned at last, moreover, was characteristic of this faith and courage.\n\n\"I've begun at the wrong end,\" he said; \"I shall never reach men through their intellects. Their brains today are occupied by the machine-made gods of civilization. I cannot change the direction of their thoughts and lusts from outside; the momentum is too great to stop that way. I must get at them from within. To reach their hearts, the new ideas must rise up from within. I see the truer way. I must do it from the other side. It must come to them\u2014in Beauty.\"\n\nFor he was to the last convinced that death would merge him in the being of the Earth's Collective Consciousness, and that, lost in her deep eternal beauty, he thus might reach the hearts of men in some stray glimpse of nature's loveliness, and register his flaming message. He loved to quote from Adonais:\n\n\u2003\"He is made one with Nature: there is heard\n\n\u2003His voice in all her music, from the moan\n\n\u2003Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird;\n\n\u2003He is a presence to be felt and known\n\n\u2003In darkness and in light, from herb and stone,\n\n\u2003Spreading itself where'er that Power may move\n\n\u2003Which has withdrawn his being to its own.\n\n\u2003He is a portion of the loveliness\n\n\u2003Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear\n\n\u2003His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress\n\n\u2003Sweeps through the dull dense world\u2026\"\n\nAnd this thought, phrased in a dozen different ways, was always on his lips. To dream was right and useful, even to dream alone, because the beauty of the dream must add to the beauty of the Whole of which it is a part and an interpretation. It was not really lost or vain. All must come back in time to feed the world. He had known gracious thoughts of Earth too big to utter, almost too big to hold. Such thoughts could not ever be really told; they were incommunicable. For the mystical revelation is incommunicable. It has authority only for him who feels it. A corporate revelation is impossible. Only those among men could know, in whose hearts it rose intuitively and made its presence felt as innate ideas. Inspiration brings it, and beauty is the vehicle. Their hearts must change before their minds could be reached.\n\n\"I can work it better from the other side\u2014from that old, old Garden which is the Mother's heart. In this way I can help at any rate\u2026!\"\n\nIt was at the close of a wet and foggy autumn that we met again, winter in the air, all London desolate; and his wasted, forlorn appearance told me the truth at once. Only the passionate eagerness of voice and manner were there to prove that the spirit had not weakened. There glowed within a fire that showed itself in the translucent shining of the eyes and face.\n\n\"I've made one great discovery, old man,\" he exclaimed with old, familiar, high enthusiasm, \"one great discovery at least.\"\n\n\"You've made so many,\" I answered cheerfully, while my real thoughts were busy with his bodily state of health. For his appearance shocked me. He stood among a litter of papers, books, neckties, nailed boots, knapsacks, maps and what-not, that rolled upon the floor from the mouth of the Willesden canvas sack. His old grey flannel suit hung literally upon a bag of bones; all the life there was seemed concentrated in his face and eyes\u2014those far-seeing, light blue eyes. They were darker than usual now, eyes like the sea, I thought. His hair, long and disordered, tumbled over his forehead. He was pale, and at the same time flushed. It was almost a disembodied spirit that I saw.\n\n\"You've made so many. I love to hear them. Is this one finer than the others?\"\n\nHe looked a moment at me through and through, almost uncannily. He looked in reality beyond me. It was something else he saw, and in the dusk I turned involuntarily.\n\n\"Simpler,\" he said quickly, \"much simpler.\"\n\nHe moved up close beside me, whispering. Was it all imagination that a breath of flowers came with him? There was certainly a curious fragrance in the air, wild and sweet like orchards in the spring.\n\n\"And it is\u2014?\"\n\n\"That the Garden's everywhere! You needn't go to the distant Caucasus to find it. It's all about this old London town, and in these foggy streets and dingy pavements. It's even in this cramped, undusted room. Now at this moment, while that lamp flickers and the thousands go to sleep. The gates of horn and ivory are here,\" he tapped his breast. \"And here the flowers, the long, clean open hills, the giant herd, the nymphs, the sunshine and the gods!\"\n\nSo attached was he now to that little room in Paddington where his books and papers lay, that when the curious illness that had caught him grew so much worse, and the attacks of the nameless fever that afflicted him turned serious, I hired a bedroom for him in the same house. And it was in that poky, cage-like den he breathed his last.\n\nHis illness I called curious, his fever nameless, because they really were so and puzzled every one. He simply faded out of life, it seemed; there was no pain, no sleeplessness, no suffering of any physical kind. He uttered no complaint, nor were there symptoms of any known disorder.\n\n\"Your friend is sound organically,\" the doctor told me when I pressed him for the truth there on the stairs, \"sound as a bell. He wants the open air and plenty of wholesome food, that's all. His body is ill-nourished. His trouble is mental\u2014some deep and heavy disappointment doubtless. If you can change the current of his thoughts, awaken interest in common things, and give him change of scene, perhaps\u2014\" He shrugged his shoulders and looked very grave.\n\n\"You think he's dying?\"\n\n\"I think, yes, he is dying.\"\n\n\"From\u2014?\"\n\n\"From lack of living pure and simple,\" was the answer. \"He has lost all hold on life.\"\n\n\"He has abundant vitality still.\"\n\n\"Full of it. But it all goes\u2014elsewhere. The physical organism gets none of it.\"\n\n\"Yet mentally,\" I asked, \"there's nothing actually wrong?\"\n\n\"Not in the ordinary sense. The mind is clear and active. So far as I can test it, the process of thought is healthy and undamaged. It seems to me\u2014\"\n\nHe hesitated a moment on the doorstep while the driver wound the motor handle. I waited with a sinking heart for the rest of the sentence.\n\n\"\u2026like certain cases of nostalgia I have known\u2014very rare and very difficult to deal with. Acute and vehement nostalgia, yes, sometimes called a broken heart,\" he added, pausing another instant at the carriage door, \"in which the entire stream of a man's inner life flows to some distant place, or person, or\u2014or to some imagined yearning that he craves to satisfy.\"\n\n\"To a dream?\"\n\n\"It might be even that,\" he answered slowly, stepping in. \"It might be spiritual. The religious and poetic temperament are most open to it, and the most difficult to deal with when afflicted.\" He emphasized the little word as though the doubt he felt was far less strong than the conviction he only half concealed. \"If you would save him, try to change the direction of his thoughts. There is nothing\u2014in all honesty I must say it\u2014nothing that I can do to help.\"\n\nAnd then, pulling at the grey tuft on his chin and looking keenly at me a moment over his glasses,\u2014\"Those flowers,\" he said hesitatingly, \"you might move those flowers from the room, perhaps. Their perfume is a trifle strong\u2026 It might be better.\" Again he looked sharply at me. There was an odd expression in his eyes. And in my heart there was an odd sensation too, so odd that I found myself bereft a moment of any speech at all, and when my tongue became untied, the carriage was already disappearing down the street. For in that dingy sick-room there were no flowers at all, yet the perfume of woods and fields and open spaces had reached the doctor too, and obviously perplexed him.\n\n\"Change the direction of his thoughts!\" I went indoors, wondering how any honest and even half-unselfish friend, knowing what I knew, could follow such advice. With what but the lowest motive, of keeping him alive for my own happiness, could I seek to change his thoughts of some imagined joy and peace to the pain and sordid facts of an earthly existence that he loathed?\n\nBut when I turned I saw the tousled yellow-headed landlady standing in the breach. Mrs. Heath stopped me in the hall to inquire whether I could say \"anythink abart the rent per'aps?\" Her manner was defiant. I found three months were owing.\n\n\"It's no good arsking 'im,\" she said, though not unkindly on the whole. \"I'm sick an' tired of always being put off. He talks about the gawds and a Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman who he says will look after it all. But I never sees 'im\u2014not this Mr. Pan. And his stuff up there,\" jerking her head toward the little room, \"ain't worth a Sankey-moody 'ymn-book, take the lot of it at cost!\"\n\nI reassured her. It was impossible to help smiling. For some minds, I reflected, a Sankey hymn-book might hold dreams that were every bit as potent as his own, and far less troublesome. But that \"Mr. Pan, or some such gentleman\" should serve as a \"reference\" between lodger and landlady was an unwitting comment on the modern point of view that made me want to cry rather than to laugh. O'Malley and Mrs. Heath between them had made a profounder criticism than they knew." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 158", + "text": "And so by slow degrees he went, leaving the outer fury for the inner peace. The center of consciousness gradually shifted from the transient form which is the true ghost, to the deeper, permanent state which is the eternal reality. For this was how he phrased it to me in one of our last, strange talks. He watched his own withdrawal.\n\nIn bed he would lie for hours with fixed and happy eyes, staring apparently at nothing, the expression on his face quite radiant. The pulse sank often dangerously low; he scarcely seemed to breathe; yet it was never complete unconsciousness or trance. My voice, when I found the heart to try and coax his own for speech, would win him back. The eyes would then grow dimmer, losing their happier light, as he turned to the outer world to look at me.\n\n\"The pull is so tremendous now,\" he whispered; \"I was far, so far away, in the deep life of Earth. Why do you bring me back to all these little pains? I can do nothing here; there I am of use\u2026\"\n\nHe spoke so low I had to bend my head to catch the words. It was very late at night and for hours I had been watching by his side. Outside an ugly yellow fog oppressed the town, but about him like an atmosphere I caught again that fragrance as of trees and flowers. It was too faint for any name\u2014that fugitive, mild perfume one meets upon bare hills and round the skirts of forests. It was somehow, I fancied, in the very breath.\n\n\"Each time the effort to return is greater. In there I am complete and full of power. I can work and send my message back so splendidly. Here,\" he glanced down at his wasted body with a curious smile, \"I am only on the fringe\u2014it's pain and failure. All so ineffective.\"\n\nThat other look came back into the eyes, more swiftly than before.\n\n\"I thought you might like to speak, to tell me\u2014something,\" I said, keeping the tears with difficulty from my voice. \"Is there no one you would like to see?\"\n\nHe shook his head slowly, and gave the peculiar answer:\n\n\"They're all in there.\"\n\n\"But Stahl, perhaps\u2014if I could get him here?\"\n\nAn expression of gentle disapproval crossed his face, then melted softly into a wistful tenderness as of a child.\n\n\"He's not there\u2014yet,\" he whispered, \"but he will come too in the end. In sleep, I think, he goes there even now.\"\n\n\"Where are you really then?\" I ventured, \"And where is it you go to?\"\n\nThe answer came unhesitatingly; there was no doubt or searching.\n\n\"Into myself, my real and deeper self, and so beyond it into her\u2014the Earth. Where all the others are\u2014all, all, all.\"\n\nAnd then he frightened me by sitting up in bed abruptly. His eyes stared past me\u2014out beyond the close confining walls. The movement was so startling with its suddenness and vigor that I shrank back a moment. The head was sideways. He was intently listening.\n\n\"Hark!\" he whispered. \"They are calling me! Do you hear\u2026?\"\n\nThe look of joy that broke over the face like sunshine made me hold my breath. Something in his low voice thrilled me beyond all I have ever known. I listened too. Only the rumble of the traffic down the distant main street broke the silence, the rattle of a nearer cart, and the footsteps of a few pedestrians. No other noises came across the night. There was no wind. Thick yellow fog muffled everything.\n\n\"I hear nothing,\" I answered softly. \"What is it that you hear?\"\n\nAnd, making no reply, he presently lay down again among the pillows, that look of joy and glory still upon his face. It lay there to the end like sunrise.\n\nThe fog came in so thickly through the window that I rose to close it. He never closed that window, and I hoped he would not notice. For a sound of wretched street-music was coming nearer\u2014some beggar playing dismally upon a penny whistle\u2014and I feared it would disturb him. But in a flash he was up again.\n\n\"No, no!\" he cried, raising his voice for the first time that night. \"Do not shut it. I shan't be able to hear then. Let all the air come in. Open it wider\u2026 wider! I love that sound!\"\n\n\"The fog\u2014\"\n\n\"There is no fog. It's only sun and flowers and music. Let them in. Don't you hear it now?\" he added. And, more to bring him peace than anything else, I bowed my head to signify agreement. For the last confusion of the mind, I saw, was upon him, and he made the outer world confirm some imagined detail of his inner dream. I drew the sash down lower, covering his body closely with the blankets. He flung them off impatiently at once. The damp and freezing night rushed in upon us like a presence. It made me shudder, but O'Malley only raised himself upon one elbow to taste it better, and\u2014to listen.\n\nThen, waiting patiently for the return of the quiet, trance-like state when I might cover him again, I moved toward the window and looked out. The street was empty, save for that beggar playing vilely on his penny whistle. The wretch came to a standstill immediately before the house. The lamplight fell from the room upon his tattered, broken figure. I could not see his face. He groped and felt his way.\n\nOutside that homeless wanderer played his penny pipe in the night of cold and darkness.\n\nInside the Dreamer listened, dreaming of his gods and garden, his great Earth Mother, his visioned life of peace and simple things with a living Nature\u2026\n\nAnd I felt somehow that player watched us. I made an angry sign to him to go. But it was the sudden touch upon my arm that made me turn round with such a sudden start that I almost cried aloud. O'Malley in his night-clothes stood close against me on the floor, slight as a spirit, eyes a-shine, lips moving faintly into speech through the most wonderful smile a human face has ever shown me.\n\n\"Do not send him away,\" he whispered, joy breaking from him like a light, \"but tell him that I love it. Go out and thank him. Tell him I hear and understand, and say that I am coming. Will you\u2026?\"\n\nSomething within me whirled. It seemed that I was lifted from my feet a moment. Some tide of power rushed from his person to my own. The room was filled with blinding light. But in my heart there rose a great emotion that combined tears and joy and laughter all at once.\n\n\"The moment you are back in bed,\" I heard my voice like one speaking from a distance, \"I'll go\u2014\"\n\nThe momentary, wild confusion passed as suddenly as it came. I remember he obeyed at once. As I bent down to tuck the clothes about him, that fragrance as of flowers and open spaces rose about my bending face like incense\u2014bewilderingly sweet.\n\nAnd the next second I was standing in the street. The man who played upon the pipe, I saw, was blind. His hand and fingers were curiously large.\n\nI was already close, ready to press all that my pockets held into his hand\u2014ay, and far more than merely pockets held because O'Malley said he loved the music\u2014when something made me turn my head away. I cannot say precisely what it was, for first it seemed a tapping at the window of his room behind me, and then a little noise within the room itself, and next\u2014more curious than either,\u2014a feeling that something came out rushing past me through the air. It whirled and shouted as it went\u2026\n\nI only remember clearly that in the very act of turning, and while my look still held that beggar's face within the field of vision, I saw the sightless eyes turn bright a moment as though he opened them and saw. He did most certainly smile; to that I swear.\n\nBut when I turned again the street immediately about me was empty.\n\nThe beggar-man was gone.\n\nAnd down the pavement, moving swiftly through the curtain of fog,\n\nI saw his vanishing figure. It was large and spreading. In the fringe of light the lamp-post gave, its upper edges seemed far above the ground.\n\nSomeone else was with him. There were two figures.\n\nI heard that sound of piping far away. It sounded faint and almost flute-like in the air. And in the mud at my feet the money lay\u2014spurned utterly. I heard the last coins ring upon the pavement as they settled. But in the room, when I got back, the body of Terence O'Malley had ceased to breathe." + }, + { + "title": "A Prisoner in Fairyland: Sequel to The Education of Uncle Paul", + "text": "'LITTLE MOUSE THAT, LOST IN WONDER, FLICKS ITS WHISKERS AT THE THUNDER!'\n\n\u2003\"Les Pensees!\n\n\u2003O leurs essors fougueux, leurs flammes dispersees,\n\n\u2003Leur rouge acharnement ou leur accord vermeil!\n\n\u2003Comme la-haut les etoiles criblaient la nue,\n\n\u2003Elles se constellaient sur la plaine inconnue;\n\n\u2003Elles roulaient dans l'espace, telles des feux,\n\n\u2003Gravissaient la montagne, illuminaient la fleuve\n\n\u2003Et jetaient leur parure universelle et neuve\n\n\u2003De mer en mer, sur les pays silencieux.\"\n\n\u2014Le Monde, EMILE VERHAEREN" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 160", + "text": "\u2003Man is his own star; and the soul that can\n\n\u2003Render an honest and a perfect man\n\n\u2003Commands all light, all influence, all fate,\n\n\u2003Nothing to him falls early, or too late.\n\n\u2003Our acts our angels are, or good or ill,\n\n\u2003Our fatal shadows that walk by us still.\n\n\u2014BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.\n\nMinks\u2014Herbert Montmorency\u2014was now something more than secretary, even than private secretary: he was confidential-private-secretary, adviser, friend; and this, more because he was a safe receptacle for his employer's enthusiasms than because his advice or judgment had any exceptional value. So many men need an audience. Herbert Minks was a fine audience, attentive, delicately responsive, sympathetic, understanding, and above all\u2014silent. He did not leak. Also, his applause was wise without being noisy. Another rare quality he possessed was that he was honest as the sun. To prevaricate, even by gesture, or by saying nothing, which is the commonest form of untruth, was impossible to his transparent nature. He might hedge, but he could never lie. And he was 'friend,' so far as this was possible between employer and employed, because a pleasant relationship of years' standing had established a bond of mutual respect under conditions of business intimacy which often tend to destroy it.\n\nJust now he was very important into the bargain, for he had a secret from his wife that he meant to divulge only at the proper moment. He had known it himself but a few hours. The leap from being secretary in one of Henry Rogers's companies to being that prominent gentleman's confidential private secretary was, of course, a very big one. He hugged it secretly at first alone. On the journey back from the City to the suburb where he lived, Minks made a sonnet on it. For his emotions invariably sought the safety valve of verse. It was a wiser safety valve for high spirits than horse-racing or betting on the football results, because he always stood to win, and never to lose. Occasionally he sold these bits of joy for half a guinea, his wife pasting the results neatly in a big press album from which he often read aloud on Sunday nights when the children were in bed. They were signed 'Montmorency Minks'; and bore evidence of occasional pencil corrections on the margin with a view to publication later in a volume. And sometimes there were little lyrical fragments too, in a wild, original metre, influenced by Shelley and yet entirely his own. These had special pages to themselves at the end of the big book. But usually he preferred the sonnet form; it was more sober, more dignified. And just now the bumping of the Tube train shaped his emotion into something that began with Success that poisons many a baser mind.\n\nWith thoughts of self, may lift\u2014but stopped there because, when he changed into another train, the jerkier movement altered the rhythm into something more lyrical, and he got somewhat confused between the two and ended by losing both.\n\nHe walked up the hill towards his tiny villa, hugging his secret and anticipating with endless detail how he would break it to his wife. He felt very proud and very happy. The half-mile trudge seemed like a few yards.\n\nHe was a slim, rather insignificant figure of a man, neatly dressed, the City clerk stamped plainly over all his person. He envied his employer's burly six-foot stature, but comforted himself always with the thought that he possessed in its place a certain delicacy that was more becoming to a man of letters whom an adverse fate prevented from being a regular minor poet. There was that touch of melancholy in his fastidious appearance that suggested the atmosphere of frustrated dreams. Only the firmness of his character and judgment decreed against the luxury of longish hair; and he prided himself upon remembering that although a poet at heart, he was outwardly a City clerk and, as a strong man, must permit no foolish compromise.\n\nHis face on the whole was pleasing, and rather soft, yet, owing to this warring of opposing inner forces, it was at the same time curiously deceptive. Out of that dreamy, vague expression shot, when least expected, the hard and practical judgment of the City\u2014or vice versa. But the whole was gentle\u2014admirable quality for an audience, since it invited confession and assured a gentle hearing. No harshness lay there. Herbert Minks might have been a fine, successful mother perhaps. The one drawback to the physiognomy was that the mild blue eyes were never quite united in their frank gaze. He squinted pleasantly, though his wife told him it was a fascinating cast rather than an actual squint. The chin, too, ran away a little from the mouth, and the lips were usually parted. There was, at any rate, this air of incompatibility of temperament between the features which, made all claim to good looks out of the question.\n\nThat runaway chin, however, was again deceptive. It did, indeed run off, but the want of decision it gave to the countenance seemed contradicted by the prominent forehead and straight eyebrows, heavily marked. Minks knew his mind. If sometimes evasive rather than outspoken, he could on occasion be surprisingly firm. He saw life very clearly. He could certainly claim the good judgment stupid people sometimes have, due perhaps to their inability to see alternatives\u2014 just as some men's claim to greatness is born of an audacity due to their total lack of humour.\n\nMinks was one of those rare beings who may be counted on\u2014a quality better than mere brains, being of the heart. And Henry Rogers understood him and read him like an open book. Preferring the steady devotion to the brilliance a high salary may buy, he had watched him for many years in every sort of circumstance. He had, by degrees, here and there, shown an interest in his life. He had chosen his private secretary well. With Herbert Minks at his side he might accomplish many things his heart was set upon. And while Minks bumped down in his third-class crowded carriage to Sydenham, hunting his evasive sonnet, Henry Rogers glided swiftly in a taxi-cab to his rooms in St. James's Street, hard on the trail of another dream that seemed, equally, to keep just beyond his actual reach.\n\nIt would certainly seem that thought can travel across space between minds sympathetically in tune, for just as the secretary put his latch-key into his shiny blue door the idea flashed through him, 'I wonder what Mr. Rogers will do, now that he's got his leisure, with a fortune and\u2014me!' And at the same moment Rogers, in his deep arm-chair before the fire, was saying to himself, 'I'm glad Minks has come to me; he's just the man I want for my big Scheme!' And then\u2014'Pity he's such a lugubrious looking fellow, and wears those dreadful fancy waistcoats. But he's very open to suggestion. We can change all that. I must look after Minks a bit. He's rather sacrificed his career for me, I fancy. He's got high aims. Poor little Minks!'\n\n'I'll stand by him whatever happens,' was the thought the slamming of the blue door interrupted. 'To be secretary to such a man is already success.' And again he hugged his secret and himself.\n\nAs already said, the new-fledged secretary was married and wrote poetry on the sly. He had four children. He would make an ideal helpmate, worshipping his employer with that rare quality of being interested in his ideas and aims beyond the mere earning of a salary; seeing, too, in that employer more than he, the latter, supposed. For, while he wrote verses on the sly, 'my chief,' as he now preferred to call him, lived poetry in his life.\n\n'He's got it, you know, my dear,' he announced to his wife, as he kissed her and arranged his tie in the gilt mirror over the plush mantelpiece in the 'parlour'; 'he's got the divine thing in him right enough; got it, too, as strong as hunger or any other natural instinct. It's almost functional with him, if I may say so'\u2014which meant 'if you can understand me'\u2014'only, he's deliberately smothered it all these years. He thinks it wouldn't go down with other business men. And he's been in business, you see, from the word go. He meant to make money, and he couldn't do both exactly. Just like myself\u2014-'\n\nMinks wandered on. His wife noticed the new enthusiasm in his manner, and was puzzled by it. Something was up, she divined.\n\n'Do you think he'll raise your salary again soon?' she asked practically, helping him draw off the paper cuffs that protected his shirt from ink stains, and throwing them in the fire. 'That seems to be the real point.'\n\nBut Herbert evaded the immediate issue. It was so delightful to watch her and keep his secret a little longer.\n\n'And you do deserve success, dear,' she added; 'you've been as faithful as a horse.' She came closer, and stroked his thick, light hair a moment.\n\nHe turned quickly. Had he betrayed himself already? Had she read it from his eyes or manner?\n\n'That's nothing,' he answered lightly. 'Duty is duty.'\n\n'Of course, dear,' and she brought him his slippers. He would not let her put them on for him. It was not gallant to permit menial services to a woman.\n\n'Success,' he murmured, 'that poisons many a baser mind\u2014-' and then stopped short. 'I've got a new sonnet,' he told her quickly, determined to prolong his pleasure, 'got it in the train coming home. Wait a moment, and I'll give you the rest. It's a beauty, with real passion in it, only I want to keep it cold and splendid if I can. Don't interrupt a moment.' He put the slippers on the wrong feet and stared hard into the fire.\n\nThen Mrs. Minks knew for a certainty that something had happened. He had not even asked after the children.\n\n'Herbert,' she said, with a growing excitement, 'why are you so full of poetry to-night? And what's this about success and poison all of a sudden?' She knew he never drank. 'I believe Mr. Rogers has raised your salary, or done one of those fine things you always say he's going to do. Tell me, dear, please tell me.' There were new, unpaid bills in her pocket, and she almost felt tempted to show them. She poked the fire fussily.\n\n'Albinia,' he answered importantly, with an expression that brought the chin up closer to the lips, and made the eyebrows almost stern, 'Mr. Rogers will do the right thing always\u2014when the right time comes. As a matter of fact'\u2014here he reverted to the former train of thought \u2014'both he and I are misfits in a practical, sordid age. We should have been born in Greece\u2014-'\n\n'I simply love your poems, Herbert,' she interrupted gently, wondering how she managed to conceal her growing impatience so well, 'but there's not the money in them that there ought to be, and they don't pay for coals or for Ronald's flannels\u2014-'\n\n'Albinia,' he put in softly, 'they relieve the heart, and so make me a happier and a better man. But\u2014I should say he would,' he added, answering her distant question about the salary.\n\nThe secret was almost out. It hung on the edge of his lips. A moment longer he hugged it deliciously. He loved these little conversations with his wife. Never a shade of asperity entered into them. And this one in particular afforded him a peculiar delight.\n\n'Both of us are made for higher things than mere money-making,' he went on, lighting his calabash pipe and puffing the smoke carefully above her head from one corner of his mouth, 'and that's what first attracted us to each other, as I have often mentioned to you. But now'\u2014his bursting heart breaking through all control\u2014'that he has sold his interests to a company and retired into private life\u2014er\u2014my own existence should be easier and less exacting. I shall have less routine, be more my own master, and also, I trust, find time perhaps for\u2014-'\n\n'Then something has happened!' cried Mrs. Minks, springing to her feet.\n\n'It has, my dear,' he answered with forced calmness, though his voice was near the trembling point.\n\nShe stood in front of him, waiting. But he himself did not rise, nor show more feeling than he could help. His poems were full of scenes like this in which the men\u2014strong, silent fellows\u2014were fine and quiet. Yet his instinct was to act quite otherwise. One eye certainly betrayed it.\n\n'It has,' he repeated, full of delicious emotion.\n\n'Oh, but Herbert\u2014-!'\n\n'And I am no longer that impersonal factor in City life, mere secretary to the Board of a company\u2014-'\n\n'Oh, Bertie, dear!'\n\n'But private secretary to Mr. Henry Rogers\u2014private and confidential secretary at\u2014-'\n\n'Bert, darling\u2014-!'\n\n'At 300 pounds a year, paid quarterly, with expenses extra, and long, regular holidays,' he concluded with admirable dignity and self-possession.\n\nThere was a moment's silence.\n\n'You splendour!' She gave a little gasp of admiration that went straight to his heart, and set big fires alight there. 'Your reward has come at last! My hero!'\n\nThis was as it should be. The beginning of an epic poem flashed with tumult through his blood. Yet outwardly he kept his admirable calm.\n\n'My dear, we must take success, like disaster, quietly.' He said it gently, as when he played with the children. It was mostly put on, of course, this false grandiloquence of the prig. His eyes already twinkled more than he could quite disguise.\n\n'Then we can manage the other school, perhaps, for Frank?' she cried, and was about to open various flood-gates when he stopped her with a look of proud happiness that broke down all barriers of further pretended secrecy.\n\n'Mr. Rogers,' was the low reply, 'has offered to do that for us\u2014as a start.' The words were leisurely spoken between great puffs of smoke. 'That's what I meant just now by saying that he lived poetry in his life, you see. Another time you will allow judgment to wait on knowledge\u2014-'\n\n'You dear old humbug,' she cried, cutting short the sentence that neither of them quite understood, 'I believe you've known this for weeks\u2014-'\n\n'Two hours ago exactly,' he corrected her, and would willingly have prolonged the scene indefinitely had not his practical better half prevented him. For she came over, dropped upon her knees beside his chair, and, putting both arms about his neck, she kissed his foolish sentences away with all the pride and tenderness that filled her to the brim. And it pleased Minks hugely. It made him feel, for the moment at any rate, that he was the hero, not Mr. Henry Rogers.\n\nBut he did not show his emotion much. He did not even take his pipe out. It slipped down sideways into another corner of his wandering lips. And, while he returned the kiss with equal tenderness and pleasure, one mild blue eye looked down upon her soft brown hair, and the other glanced sideways, without a trace of meaning in it, at the oleograph of Napoleon on Elba that hung upon the wall.\u2026\n\nSoon afterwards the little Sydenham villa was barred and shuttered, the four children were sound asleep, Herbert and Albinia Minks both lost in the world of happy dreams that sometimes visit honest, simple folk whose consciences are clean and whose aims in life are commonplace but worthy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 161", + "text": "When the creation was new and all the stars shone in their first splendour, the gods held their assembly in the sky and sang 'Oh, the picture of perfection! the joy unalloyed!'\n\nBut one cried of a sudden\u2014'It seems that somewhere there is a break in the chain of light and one of the stars has been lost.'\n\nThe golden string of their harp snapped, their song stopped, and they cried in dismay\u2014'Yes, that lost star was the best, she was the glory of all heavens!'\n\nFrom that day the search is unceasing for her, and the cry goes on from one to the other that in her the world has lost its one joy!\n\nOnly in the deepest silence of night the stars smile and whisper among themselves\u2014'Vain is this seeking! Unbroken perfection is over all!'\n\nRABINDRANATH TAGORE. (Prose translation by Author from his original Bengali.)\n\nIt was April 30th and Henry Rogers sat in his rooms after breakfast, listening to the rumble of the traffic down St. James's Street, and found the morning dull. A pile of letters lay unopened upon the table, waiting the arrival of the discriminating Mr. Minks with his shorthand note-book and his mild blue eyes. It was half-past nine, and the secretary was due at ten o'clock.\n\nHe smiled as he thought of this excellent fellow's first morning in the promoted capacity of private secretary. He would come in very softly, one eye looking more intelligent than the other; the air of the City clerk discarded, and in its place the bearing that belonged to new robes of office worn for the first time. He would bow, say 'Good morning, Mr. Rogers,' glance round with one eye on his employer and another on a possible chair, seat himself with a sigh that meant 'I have written a new poem in the night, and would love to read it to you if I dared,' then flatten out his oblong note-book and look up, expectant and receptive. Rogers would say 'Good morning, Mr. Minks. We've got a busy day before us. Now, let me see\u2014-' and would meet his glance with welcome. He would look quickly from one eye to the other- to this day he did not know which one was right to meet-and would wonder for the thousandth time how such an insignificant face could go with such an honest, capable mind. Then he smiled again as he remembered Frank, the little boy whose schooling he was paying for, and realised that Minks would bring a message of gratitude from Mrs. Minks, perhaps would hand him, with a gesture combining dignity and humbleness, a little note of thanks in a long narrow envelope of pale mauve, bearing a flourishing monogram on its back.\n\nAnd Rogers scowled a little as he thought of the air of gruffness he would assume while accepting it, saying as pleasantly as he could manage, 'Oh, Mr. Minks, that's nothing at all; I'm only too delighted to be of service to the lad.' For he abhorred the expression of emotion, and his delicate sense of tact would make pretence of helping the boy himself, rather than the struggling parents.\n\nAu fond he had a genuine admiration for Minks, and there was something lofty in the queer personality that he both envied and respected. It made him rely upon his judgment in certain ways he could not quite define. Minks seemed devoid of personal ambition in a sense that was not weakness. He was not insensible to the importance of money, nor neglectful of chances that enabled him to do well by his wife and family, but\u2014he was after other things as well, if not chiefly. With a childlike sense of honesty he had once refused a position in a company that was not all it should have been, and the high pay thus rejected pointed to a scrupulous nicety of view that the City, of course, deemed foolishness. And Rogers, aware of this, had taken to him, seeking as it were to make this loss good to him in legitimate ways. Also the fellow belonged to leagues and armies and 'things,' quixotic some of them, that tried to lift humanity. That is, he gave of his spare time, as also of his spare money, to help. His Saturday evenings, sometimes a whole bank holiday, he devoted to the welfare of others, even though the devotion Rogers thought misdirected.\n\nFor Minks hung upon the fringe of that very modern, new-fashioned, but almost freakish army that worships old, old ideals, yet insists upon new-fangled names for them. Christ, doubtless, was his model, but it must be a Christ properly and freshly labelled; his Christianity must somewhere include the prefix 'neo,' and the word 'scientific' must also be dragged in if possible before he was satisfied. Minks, indeed, took so long explaining to himself the wonderful title that he was sometimes in danger of forgetting the brilliant truths it so vulgarly concealed. Yet never quite concealed. He must be up-to-date, that was all. His attitude to the world scraped acquaintance with nobility somewhere. His gift was a rare one. Out of so little, he gave his mite, and gave it simply, unaware that he was doing anything unusual.\n\nThis attitude of mind had made him valuable, even endeared him, to the successful business man, and in his secret heart Rogers had once or twice felt ashamed of himself. Minks, as it were, knew actual achievement because he was, forcedly, content with little, whereas he, Rogers, dreamed of so much, yet took twenty years to come within reach of what he dreamed. He was always waiting for the right moment to begin.\n\nHis reflections were interrupted by the sunlight, which, pouring in a flood across the opposite roof, just then dropped a patch of soft April glory upon the black and yellow check of his carpet slippers. Rogers got up and, opening the window wider than before, put out his head. The sunshine caught him full in the face. He tasted the fresh morning air. Tinged with the sharp sweetness of the north it had a fragrance as of fields and gardens. Even St. James's Street could not smother its vitality and perfume. He drew it with delight into his lungs, making such a to-do about it that a passer-by looked up to see what was the matter, and noticing the hanging tassel of a flamboyant dressing-gown, at once modestly lowered his eyes again.\n\nBut Henry Rogers did not see the passer-by in whose delicate mind a point of taste had thus vanquished curiosity, for his thoughts had flown far across the pale-blue sky, behind the cannon-ball clouds, up into that scented space and distance where summer was already winging her radiant way towards the earth. Visions of June obscured his sight, and something in the morning splendour brought back his youth and boyhood. He saw a new world spread about him\u2014a world of sunlight, butterflies, and flowers, of smooth soft lawns and shaded gravel paths, and of children playing round a pond where rushes whispered in a wind of long ago. He saw hayfields, orchards, tea-things spread upon a bank of flowers underneath a hedge, and a collie dog leaping and tumbling shoulder high among the standing grass\u2026. It was all curiously vivid, and with a sense of something about it unfading and delightfully eternal. It could never pass, for instance, whereas\u2026.\n\n'Ain't yer forgotten the nightcap?' sang out a shrill voice from below, as a boy with a basket on his arm went down the street. He drew back from the window, realising that he was a sight for all admirers. Tossing the end of his cigarette in the direction of the cheeky urchin, he settled himself again in the arm-chair before the glowing grate-fire.\n\nBut the fresh world he had tasted came back with him. For Henry Rogers stood this fine spring morning upon the edge of a new life. A long chapter had just closed behind him. He was on the threshold of another. The time to begin had come. And the thrill of his freedom now at hand was very stimulating to his imagination. He was forty, and a rich man. Twenty years of incessant and intelligent labour had brought him worldly success. He admitted he had been lucky, where so many toil on and on till the gates of death stand up and block their way, fortunate if they have earned a competency through years where hope and disappointment wage their incessant weary battle. But he, for some reason known only to the silent Fates, had crested the difficult hill and now stood firm upon the top to see the sunrise, the dreadful gates not even yet in sight. At yesterday's Board meeting, Minks had handed him the papers for his signature; the patents had been transferred to the new company; the cheque had been paid over; and he was now a gentleman of leisure with a handsome fortune lying in his bank to await investment. He was a director in the parent, as well as the subsidiary companies, with fees that in themselves alone were more than sufficient for his simple needs.\n\nFor all his tastes were simple, and he had no expensive hobbies or desires; he preferred two rooms and a bath to any house that he had ever seen; pictures he liked best in galleries; horses he could hire without the trouble of owning; the few books worth reading would go into a couple of shelves; motors afflicted, even confused him\u2014he was old-fashioned enough to love country and walk through it slowly on two vigorous legs; marriage had been put aside with a searing disappointment years ago, not forgotten, but accepted; and of travel he had enjoyed enough to realise now that its pleasures could be found reasonably near home and for very moderate expenditure indeed. And the very idea of servants was to him an affliction; he loathed their prying closeness to his intimate life and habits, destroying the privacy he loved. Confirmed old bachelor his friends might call him if they chose; he knew what he wanted. Now at last he had it. The ambition of his life was within reach.\n\nFor, from boyhood up, a single big ambition had ever thundered through his being\u2014the desire to be of use to others. To help his fellow-kind was to be his profession and career. It had burned and glowed in him ever since he could remember, and what first revealed it in him was the sight\u2014common enough, alas\u2014of a boy with one leg hobbling along on crutches down the village street. Some deep power in his youthful heart, akin to the wondrous sympathy of women, had been touched. Like a shock of fire it came home to him. He, too, might lose his dearest possession thus, and be unable to climb trees, jump ditches, risk his neck along the edge of the haystack or the roof. 'That might happen to me too!' was the terrible thing he realised, and had burst into tears\u2026.\n\nCrutches at twelve! And the family hungry, as he later learned! Something in the world was wrong; he thought every one had enough to eat, at least, and only the old used crutches. 'The Poor was a sort of composite wretch, half criminal, who deserved to be dirty, suffering, punished; but this boy belonged to a family that worked and did its best. Something in the world-machinery had surely broken loose and caused violent disorder. For no one cared particularly. The 'thorities,' he heard, looked after the Poor\u2014'thorities in law,' as he used to call the mysterious Person he never actually saw, stern, but kindly in a grave impersonal way; and asked once if some relation- in-law or other, who was mentioned often but never seen, had, therefore, anything to do with the poor.\n\nDropping into his heart from who knows what far, happy star, this passion had grown instead of faded: to give himself for others, to help afflicted folk, to make the world go round a little more easily. And he had never forgotten the deep thrill with which he heard his father tell him of some wealthy man who during his lifetime had given away a million pounds\u2014anonymously.\u2026 His own pocket-money just then was five shillings a week, and his expectations just exactly\u2014nothing.\n\nBut before his dreams could know accomplishment, he must have means. To be of use to anybody at all he must make himself effective. The process must be reversed, for no man could fight without weapons, and weapons were only to be had as the result of steady, concentrated effort\u2014selfish effort. A man must fashion himself before he can be effective for others. Self-effacement, he learned, was rather a futile virtue after all.\n\nAs the years passed he saw his chances. He cut short a promising University career and entered business. His talents lay that way, as his friends declared, and unquestionably he had a certain genius for invention; for, while scores of futile processes he first discovered remained mere clever solutions of interesting problems, he at length devised improvements in the greater industries, and, patenting them wisely, made his way to practical results.\n\nBut the process had been a dangerous one, and during the long business experience the iron had entered his soul, and he had witnessed at close quarters the degrading influence of the lust of acquisition. The self-advertising humbug of most philanthropy had clouded something in him that he felt could never again grow clear and limpid as before, and a portion of his original zest had faded. For the City hardly encouraged it. One bit of gilt after another had been knocked off his brilliant dream, one jet of flame upon another quenched. The single eye that fills the body full of light was a thing so rare that its possession woke suspicion. Even of money generously given, so little reached its object; gaping pockets and grasping fingers everywhere lined the way of safe delivery. It sickened him. So few, moreover, were willing to give without acknowledgment in at least one morning paper. 'Bring back the receipt' was the first maxim even of the office-boys; and between the right hand and the left of every one were special 'private wires' that flashed the news as quickly as possible about the entire world.\n\nYet, while inevitable disillusion had dulled his youthful dreams, its glory was never quite destroyed. It still glowed within. At times, indeed, it ran into flame, and knew something of its original splendour. Women, in particular, had helped to keep it alive, fanning its embers bravely. For many women, he found, dreamed his own dream, and dreamed it far more sweetly. They were closer to essential realities than men were. While men bothered with fuss and fury about empires, tariffs, street-cars, and marvellous engines for destroying one another, women, keeping close to the sources of life, knew, like children, more of its sweet, mysterious secrets\u2014the things of value no one yet has ever put completely into words. He wondered, a little sadly, to see them battling now to scuffle with the men in managing the gross machinery, cleaning the pens and regulating ink-pots. Did they really think that by helping to decide whether rates should rise or fall, or how many buttons a factory-inspector should wear upon his uniform, they more nobly helped the world go round? Did they never pause to reflect who would fill the places they thus vacated? With something like melancholy he saw them stepping down from their thrones of high authority, for it seemed to him a prostitution of their sweet prerogatives that damaged the entire sex.\n\n'Old-fashioned bachelor, no doubt, I am,' he smiled quietly to himself, coming back to the first reflection whence his thoughts had travelled so far\u2014the reflection, namely, that now at last he possessed the freedom he had longed and toiled for.\n\nAnd then he paused and looked about him, confronted with a difficulty.\n\nTo him it seemed unusual, but really it was very common.\n\nFor, having it, he knew not at first what use to make of it. This dawned upon him suddenly when the sunlight splashed his tawdry slippers with its gold. The movement to the open window was really instinctive beginning of a search, as though in the free, wonderful spaces out of doors he would find the thing he sought to do. Now, settled back in the deep arm-chair, he realised that he had not found it. The memories of childhood had flashed into him instead. He renewed the search before the dying fire, waiting for the sound of Minks' ascending footsteps on the stairs.\u2026\n\nAnd this revival of the childhood mood was curious, he felt, almost significant, for it was symbolical of so much that he had deliberately, yet with difficulty, suppressed and put aside. During these years of concentrated toil for money, his strong will had neglected of set purpose the call of a robust imagination. He had stifled poetry just as he had stifled play. Yet really that imagination had merely gone into other channels\u2014scientific invention. It was a higher form, married at least with action that produced poetry in steel and stone instead of in verse. Invention has ever imagination and poetry at its heart.\n\nThe acquirement of wealth demanded his entire strength, and all lighter considerations he had consistently refused to recognise, until he thought them dead. This sudden flaming mood rushed up and showed him otherwise. He reflected on it, but clumsily, as with a mind too long trained in the rigid values of stocks and shares, buying and selling, hard figures that knew not elasticity. This softer subject led him to no conclusion, leaving him stranded among misty woods and fields of flowers that had no outlet. He realised, however, clearly that this side of him was not atrophied as he thought. Its unused powers had merely been accumulating\u2014underground.\n\nHe got no further than that just now. He poked the fire and lit another cigarette. Then, glancing idly at the paper, his eye fell upon the list of births, and by merest chance picked out the name of Crayfield. Some nonentity had been 'safely delivered of a son' at Crayfield, the village where he had passed his youth and childhood. He saw the Manor House where he was born, the bars across the night- nursery windows, the cedars on the lawn, the haystacks just beyond the stables, and the fields where the rabbits sometimes fell asleep as they sat after enormous meals too stuffed to move. He saw the old gravel-pit that led, the gardener told him, to the centre of the earth. A whiff of perfume from the laurustinus in the drive came back, the scent of hay, and with it the sound of the mowing-machine going over the lawn. He saw the pony in loose flat leather shoes. The bees were humming in the lime trees. The rooks were cawing. A blackbird whistled from the shrubberies where he once passed an entire day in hiding, after emptying an ink-bottle down the German governess's dress. He heard the old family butler in his wheezy voice calling in vain for 'Mr. 'Enery' to come in. The tone was respectful, seductive as the man could make it, yet reproachful. He remembered throwing a little stone that caught him just where the Newgate fringe met the black collar of his coat, so that his cry of delight betrayed his hiding-place. The whacking that followed he remembered too, and how his brother emerged suddenly from behind the curtain with, 'Father, may I have it instead of Henry, please?' That spontaneous offer of sacrifice, of willingness to suffer for another, had remained in his mind for a long time as a fiery, incomprehensible picture.\n\nMore dimly, then, somewhere in mist behind, he saw other figures moving\u2014the Dustman and the Lamplighter, the Demon Chimneysweep in black, the Woman of the Haystack\u2014outposts and sentries of a larger fascinating host that gathered waiting in the shadows just beyond. The creations of his boy's imagination swarmed up from their temporary graves, and made him smile and wonder. After twenty years of strenuous business life, how pale and thin they seemed. Yet at the same time how extraordinarily alive and active! He saw, too, the huge Net of Stars he once had made to catch them with from that night-nursery window, fastened by long golden nails made out of meteors to the tops of the cedars.\u2026 There had been, too, a train\u2014the Starlight Express. It almost seemed as if they knew, too, that a new chapter had begun, and that they called him to come back and play again.\u2026\n\nThen, with a violent jump, his thoughts flew to other things, and he considered one by one the various philanthropic schemes he had cherished against the day when he could realise them. That day had come. But the schemes seemed one and all wild now, impracticable, already accomplished by others better than he could hope to accomplish them, and none of them fulfilling the first essential his practical mind demanded\u2014knowing his money spent precisely as he wished. Dreams, long cherished, seemed to collapse one by one before him just when he at last came up with them. He thought of the woman who was to have helped him, now married to another who had money without working for it. He put the thought back firmly in its place. He knew now a greater love than that\u2014the love for many.\u2026\n\nHe was embarking upon other novel schemes when there was a ring at the bell, and the charwoman, who passed with him for servant, ushered in his private secretary, Mr. Minks. Quickly readjusting the machinery of his mind, Rogers came back to the present,\n\n'Good morning, Mr. Rogers. I trust I am punctual.'\n\n'Good morning, Minks; yes, on the stroke of ten. We've got a busy day. Let's see now. How are you, by the by?' he added, as an afterthought, catching first one eye, then the other, and looking finally between the two.\n\n'Very well, indeed, thank you, Mr. Rogers.' He was dressed in a black tail-coat, with a green tie neatly knotted into a spotless turn-down collar. He glanced round him for a chair, one hand already in his pocket for the note-book.\n\n'Good,' said Rogers, indicating where he might seat himself, and reaching for the heap of letters.\n\nThe other sighed a little and began to look expectant and receptive.\n\n'If I might give you this first, please, Mr. Rogers,' he said, suddenly pretending to remember something in his breast-pocket and handing across the table, with a slight flush upon his cheeks, a long, narrow, mauve envelope with a flourishing address. 'It was a red- letter day for Mrs. Minks when I told her of your kindness. She wished to thank you in person, but\u2014I thought a note\u2014I knew,' he stammered, 'you would prefer a letter. It is a tremendous help to both of us, if I may say so again.'\n\n'Yes, yes, quite so,' said Rogers, quickly; 'and I'm glad to be of service to the lad. You must let me know from time to time how he's getting on.'\n\nMinks subsided, flattening out his oblong notebook and examining the points of his pencil sharpened at both ends as though the fate of Empires depended on it. They attacked the pile of correspondence heartily, while the sun, watching them through the open window, danced gorgeously upon the walls and secretly put the fire out.\n\nIn this way several hours passed, for besides letters to be dictated, there were careful instructions to be given about many things. Minks was kept very busy. He was now not merely shorthand clerk, and he had to be initiated into the inner history of various enterprises in which his chief was interested. All Mr. Rogers's London interests, indeed, were to be in his charge, and, obviously aware of this, he bore himself proudly with an air of importance that had no connection with a common office. To watch him, you would never have dreamed that Herbert Minks had ever contemplated City life, much less known ten years of drudgery in its least poetic stages. For him, too, as for his employer, anew chapter of existence had begun\u2014'commenced' he would have phrased it\u2014and, as confidential adviser to a man of fortune whose character he admired almost to the point of worship, he was now a person whose importance it was right the world should recognise. And he meant the world to take this attitude without delay. He dressed accordingly, knowing that of every ten people nine judge value from clothes, and hat, and boots\u2014especially boots. His patent leather, buttoned boots were dazzling, with upper parts of soft grey leather. And his shiny 'topper' wore a band of black. Minks, so far as he knew, was not actually in mourning, but somebody for whom he ought to be in mourning might die any day, and meanwhile, he felt, the band conveyed distinction. It suited a man of letters. It also protected the hat.\n\n'Thank'ee,' said his chief as luncheon time drew near; 'and now, if you'll get those letters typed, you might leave 'em here for me on your way home to sign. That's all we have to-day, isn't it?'\n\n'You wanted, I think, to draft your Scheme for Disabled\u2014-' began the secretary, when the other cut him short.\n\n'Yes, yes, but that must wait. I haven't got it clear yet in my own mind. You might think it out a bit yourself, perhaps, meanwhile, and give me your ideas, eh? Look up what others have done in the same line, for instance, and tell me where they failed. What the weakness of their schemes was, you know\u2014and\u2014er\u2014so forth.'\n\nA faint smile, that held the merest ghost of merriment, passed across the face of Minks, leaping, unobserved by his chief, from one eye to the other. There was pity and admiration in it; a hint of pathos visited those wayward lips. For the suggestion revealed the weakness the secretary had long ago divined\u2014that the practical root of the matter did not really lie in him at all, and Henry Rogers forever dreamed of 'Schemes' he was utterly unable and unsuited to carry out. Improvements in a silk machine was one thing, but improvements in humanity was another. Like the poetry in his soul they could never know fulfilment. He had inspiration, but no constructive talent. For the thousandth time Minks wondered, glancing at his employer's face, how such calm and gentle features, such dreamy eyes and a Vandyke beard so neatly trimmed, could go with ambitions so lofty and so unusual. This sentence he had heard before, and was destined often to hear again, while achievement came no nearer.\n\n'I will do so at the first opportunity.' He put the oblong note-book carefully in his pocket, and stood by the table in an attitude of 'any further instructions, please?' while one eye wandered to the unopened letter that was signed 'Albinia Minks, with heartfelt gratitude.'\n\n'And, by the by, Minks,' said his master, turning as though a new idea had suddenly struck him and he had formed a hasty plan, 'you might kindly look up an afternoon train to Crayfield. Loop line from Charing Cross, you know. Somewhere about two o'clock or so. I have to\u2014er\u2014I think I'll run down that way after luncheon.'\n\nWhereupon, having done this last commission, and written it down upon a sheet of paper which he placed with care against the clock, beside the unopened letter, the session closed, and Minks, in his mourning hat and lavender gloves, walked up St. James's Street apparently en route for the Ritz, but suddenly, as with careless unconsciousness, turning into an A.B.C. Depot for luncheon, well pleased with himself and with the world, but especially with his considerate employer.\n\nTen minutes later Mr. Rogers followed him on his way to the club, and just when Minks was reflecting with pride of the well-turned phrases he had dictated to his wife for her letter of thanks, it passed across the mind of its recipient that he had forgotten to read it altogether. And, truth to tell, he never yet has read it; for, returning late that evening from his sentimental journey down to Crayfield, it stood no longer where he had left it beside the clock, and nothing occurred to remind him of its existence. Apart from its joint composers, no one can ever know its contents but the charwoman, who, noticing the feminine writing, took it back to Lambeth and pored over it with a candle for full half an hour, greatly disappointed. 'Things like that,' she grumbled to her husband, whose appearance suggested that he went for bigger game, 'ain't worth the trouble of taking at all, whichever way you looks at it.' And probably she was right." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 162", + "text": "\u2003And what if All of animated nature\n\n\u2003Be but as Instruments diversely framed\n\n\u2003That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps\n\n\u2003One infinite and intellectual Breeze,\n\n\u2003At once the Soul of each, and God of all?\n\n\u2014The AEolian Harp, S. T. COLERIDGE.\n\nIn the train, even before St. John's was passed, a touch of inevitable reaction had set in, and Rogers asked himself why he was going. For a sentimental journey was hardly in his line, it seemed. But no satisfactory answer was forthcoming\u2014none, at least, that a Board or a Shareholders' Meeting would have considered satisfactory.\n\nThere was an answer in him somewhere, but he couldn't quite get down to it. The spring glory had enticed him back to childhood. The journey was symbolical of escape. That was the truth. But the part of him that knew it had lain so long in abeyance that only a whisper flitted across his mind as he sat looking out of the carriage window at the fields round Lee and Eltham. The landscape seemed hauntingly familiar, but what surprised him was the number of known faces that rose and smiled at him. A kind of dream confusion blurred his outer sight;\n\nAt Bexley, as he hurried past, he caught dimly a glimpse of an old nurse whom he remembered trying to break into bits with a hop-pole he could barely lift; and, most singular thing, on the Sidcup platform, a group of noisy schoolboys, with smudged faces and ridiculously small caps stuck on the back of their heads, had scrambled viciously to get into his compartment. They carried brown canvas satchels full of crumpled books and papers, and though the names had mostly escaped him, he remembered every single face. There was Barlow\u2014big, bony chap who stammered, bringing his words out with a kind of whistling sneeze. Barlow had given him his first thrashing for copying his stammer. There was young Watson, who funked at football and sneaked to a master about a midnight supper. He stole pocket-money, too, and was expelled. Then he caught a glimpse of another fellow with sly face and laughing eyes; the name had vanished, but he was the boy who put jalap in the music-master's coffee, and received a penny from five or six others who thus escaped a lesson. All waved their hands to him as the train hurried away, and the last thing he saw was the station lamp where he had lit the cigar that made three of them, himself included, deadly sick. Familiar woods and a little blue-eyed stream then hid the vision\u2026 and a moment later he was standing on the platform of his childhood's station, giving up his first-class ticket (secretly ashamed that it was not third) to a station-master-ticket-collector person who simply was not real at all.\n\nFor he had no beard. He was small, too, and insignificant. The way he had dwindled, with the enormous station that used to be a mile or so in length, was severely disappointing. That STATION-MASTER with the beard ought to have lived for ever. His niche in the Temple of Fame was sure. One evening he had called in full uniform at the house and asked to see Master Henry Rogers, the boy who had got out 'WHILE-THE- TRAIN-WAS-STILL-IN-MOTION,' and had lectured him gravely with a face like death. Never again had he left a train 'whilestillinmotion,' though it was years before he discovered how his father had engineered that awful, salutary visit.\n\nHe asked casually, in a voice that hardly seemed his own, about the service back to town, and received the answer with a kind of wonder. It was so respectful. The porters had not found him out yet; but the moment they did so, he would have to run. He did not run, however. He walked slowly down the Station Road, swinging the silver-knobbed cane the office clerks had given him when he left the City. Leisurely, without a touch of fear, he passed the Water Works, where the huge iron crank of the shaft rose and fell with ominous thunder against the sky. It had once been part of that awful hidden Engine which moved the world. To go near it was instant death, and he always crossed the road to avoid it; but this afternoon he went down the cinder pathway so close that he could touch it with his stick. It was incredible that so terrible a thing could dwindle in a few years to the dimensions of a motor piston. The crank that moved up and down like a bending, gigantic knee looked almost flimsy now.\u2026\n\nThen the village street came into view and he suddenly smelt the fields and gardens that topped the hill beyond. The world turned gold and amber, shining beneath a turquoise sky. There was a rush of flaming sunsets, one upon another, followed by great green moons, and hosts of stars that came twinkling across barred windows to his very bedside\u2026 that grand old Net of Stars he made so cunningly. Cornhill and Lombard Street flashed back upon him for a second, then dived away and hid their faces for ever, as he passed the low grey wall beside the church where first he had seen the lame boy hobbling, and had realised that the whole world suffered.\n\nA moment he stood here, thinking. He heard the wind sighing in the yew trees beside the dark brown porch. Rooks were cawing among the elms across the churchyard, and pigeons wheeled and fluttered about the grey square tower. The wind, the tower, the weather-stained old porch \u2014these had not changed. This sunshine and this turquoise sky were still the same.\n\nThe village stopped at the churchyard\u2014significant boundary. No single building ventured farther; the houses ran the other way instead, pouring down the steep hill in a cataract of bricks and roofs towards the station. The hill, once topped, and the churchyard left behind, he entered the world of fields and little copses. It was just like going through a gateway. It was a Gateway. The road sloped gently down for half-a-mile towards the pair of big iron gates that barred the drive up to the square grey house upon whose lawns he once had chased butterflies, but from whose upper windows he once had netted\u2014stars.\n\nThe spell came over him very strongly then as he went slowly down that road. The altered scale of distance confused him; the road had telescoped absurdly; the hayfields were so small. At the turn lay the pond with yellow duckweed and a bent iron railing that divided it to keep the cows from crossing. Formerly, of course, that railing had been put to prevent children drowning in its bottomless depths; all ponds had been bottomless then, and the weeds had spread to entice the children to a watery death. But now he could have jumped across it, weed and railing too, without a run, and he looked in vain for the shores that once had been so seductively far away. They were mere dirty, muddy edges.\n\nThis general shrinkage in space was very curious. But a similar contraction, he realised, had taken place in time as well, for, looking back upon his forty years, they seemed such a little thing compared to the enormous stretch they offered when he had stood beside this very pond and looked ahead. He wondered vaguely which was the reality and which the dream. But his effort was not particularly successful, and he came to no conclusion. Those years of strenuous business life were like a few weeks, yet their golden results were in his pockets. Those years of childhood had condensed into a jumble of sunny hours, yet their golden harvest was equally in his heart. Time and space were mere bits of elastic that could stretch or shrink as thought directed, feeling chose. And now both thought and feeling chose emphatically. He stepped back swiftly. His mind seemed filled with stars and butterflies and childhood's figures of wonder. Childhood took him prisoner.\n\nIt was curious at first, though, how the acquired nature made a struggle to assert itself, and the practical side of him, developed in the busy markets of the world, protested. It was automatic rather, and at best not very persistent; it soon died away. But, seeing the gravel everywhere, he wondered if there might not be valuable clay about, what labour cost, and what the nearest stations were for haulage; and, seeing the hop-poles, he caught himself speculating what wood they were made of, and what varnish would best prevent their buried points from going rotten in this particular soil. There was a surge of practical considerations, but quickly fading. The last one was stirred by the dust of a leisurely butcher's cart. He had visions of a paste for motor-roads, or something to lay dust\u2026 but, before the dust had settled again through the sunshine about his feet, or the rumble of the cart died away into distance, the thought vanished like a nightmare in the dawn. It ran away over the switchback of the years, uphill to Midsummer, downhill to Christmas, jumping a ditch at Easter, and a hedge at that terrible thing known as 'Clipse of the Moon.' The leaves of the elm trees whispered overhead. He was moving through an avenue that led towards big iron gates beside a little porter's lodge. He saw the hollies, and smelt the laurustinus. There lay the triangle of uncut grass at the cross-roads, the long, grey, wooden palings built upon moss-grown bricks; and against the sky he just caught a glimpse of the feathery, velvet cedar crests, crests that once held nails of golden meteors for his Net of Stars.\n\nDetermined to enjoy his cake and eat it at the same time as long as possible, he walked down the road a little distance, eyeing the lawns and windows of the house through narrow gaps between the boarding of the fence. He prolonged the pleasures of anticipation thus, and, besides, he wished to see if the place was occupied or empty. It looked unkempt rather, the gardens somewhat neglected, and yet there hung an air of occupancy about it all. He had heard the house had changed hands several times. But it was difficult to see clearly; the sunshine dazzled; the lilac and laburnum scattered sheets of colour through which the shadows wove themselves an obscuring veil, He kept seeing butterflies and chasing them with his sight.\n\n'Can you tell me if this house is occupied?' he asked abruptly of an old gentleman who coughed suddenly behind him.\n\nIt was an explanation as well as a question, for the passer-by had surprised him in a remarkable attitude. He was standing on tiptoe upon the parapet of brick, pulling himself up above the fence by his hands, and his hat had fallen into the road.\n\n'The shrubberies are so dense I can't see through them,' he added, landing upon his feet with a jump, a little breathless. He felt rather foolish. He was glad the stranger was not Minks or one of his fellow directors. 'The fact is I lived here as a boy. I'm not a burglar.'\n\nBut the old gentleman\u2014a clergyman apparently\u2014stood there smiling without a word as he handed him the fallen hat. He was staring rather intently into his eyes.\n\n'Ahem!' coughed Mr. Rogers, to fill an awkward gap. 'You're very kind, sir,' and he took the hat and brushed the dust off. Something brushed off his sight and memory at the same time.\n\n'Ahem' coughed the other, still staring. 'Please do not mention it\u2014-' adding after a second's pause, to the complete amazement of his listener, 'Mr. Rogers.'\n\nAnd then it dawned upon him. Something in the charming, peace-lit face was strangely familiar.\n\n'I say,' he exclaimed eagerly, 'this is a pleasure,' and then repeated with even greater emphasis, 'but this is a pleasure, indeed. Who ever would have thought it?' he added with delicious ambiguity. He seized the outstretched hand and shook it warmly\u2014the hand of the old vicar who had once been his tutor too.\n\n'You've come back to your boyhood, then. Is that it? And to see the old place and\u2014your old friends?' asked the other with his beautiful, kindly smile that even false quantities had never been able to spoil. 'We've not forgotten you as you've forgotten us, you see,' he added; 'and the place, though empty now for years, has not forgotten you either, I'll be bound.'\n\nThey stood there in the sunshine on the dusty road talking of a hundred half-forgotten things, as the haze of memory lifted, and scenes and pictures, names and faces, details of fun and mischief rained upon him like flowers in a sudden wind of spring. The voice and face of his old tutor bridged the years like magic. Time had stood still here in this fair Kentish garden. The little man in black who came every Saturday morning with his dingy bag had forgotten to wind the clocks, perhaps.\u2026\n\n'But you will like to go inside and see it all for yourself\u2014alone,' the Vicar said at length. 'My housekeeper has the keys. I'll send a boy with them to the lodge. It won't take five minutes. And then you must come up to the Vicarage for tea\u2014or dinner if you're kept\u2014and stay the night. My married daughter-you remember Joan and May, of course?\u2014is with us just now; she'll be so very glad to see you. You know the way.'\n\nAnd he moved off down the country road, still vigorous at seventy, with his black straw hat and big square-toed boots, his shoulders hardly more bent than when his mischievous pupil had called every morning with Vergil and Todhunter underneath one arm, and in his heart a lust to hurry after sleepy rabbits in the field.\n\n'My married daughter\u2014you remember May?'\n\nThe blue-eyed girl of his boyhood passion flitted beside his disappearing figure. He remembered the last time he saw her\u2014refusing to help her from a place of danger in the cedar branches\u2014when he put his love into a single eloquent phrase: 'You silly ass!' then cast her adrift for ever because she said 'Thanks awfully,' and gave him a great wet kiss. But he thought a lot of her all the same, and the thoughts had continued until the uproar in the City drowned them.\n\nThoughts crowded thick and fast.\n\nHow vital thinking was after all! Nothing seemed able to kill its eternal pictures. The coincidence of meeting his old tutor again was like a story-book, though in reality likely enough; for his own face was not so greatly altered by the close brown beard perhaps; and the Vicar had grown smaller, that was all. Like everything else, he had shrunk, of course-like road and station-master and water-works. He had almost said, 'You, too, have shrunk'\u2014but otherwise was the same old fluffy personality that no doubt still got sadly muddled in his sermons, gave out wrong hymns, and spent his entire worldly substance on his scattered parish. His voice was softer too. It rang in his ears still, as though there had been no break of over two decades. The hum of bees and scythes was in it just as when it came through the open study window while he construed the Georgics.\u2026 But, most clearly of all, he heard two sentences\u2014\n\n'You have come back to your boyhood,' and 'The empty place has not forgotten you, I'll be bound.' Both seemed significant. They hummed and murmured through his mind. That old net of starlight somehow caught them in its golden meshes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 163", + "text": "\u2003A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,\n\n\u2003Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the\n\n\u2003Milky Way:\n\n\u2003Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and cease.\n\n\u2014Tomlinson, R. KIPLING.\n\nThe boy presently came up in a cloud of dust with the key, and ran off again with a shilling in his pocket, while Henry Rogers, budding philanthropist and re-awakening dreamer, went down the hill of memories at high speed that a doctor would have said was dangerous, a philosopher morbid, and the City decreed unanimously as waste of time.\n\nHe went over the house from cellar to ceiling\u2026\n\nAnd finally he passed through a back door in the scullery and came out upon the lawn. With a shock he realised that a long time had intervened. The dusk was falling. The rustle of its wings was already in the shrubberies. He had missed the tea hour altogether. And, as he walked there, so softly that he hardly disturbed the thrushes that busily tapped the dewy grass for supper, he knew suddenly that he was not alone, but that shadowy figures hid everywhere, watching, waiting, wondering like himself. They trooped after him, invisible and silent, as he went about the old familiar garden, finding nothing changed. They were so real that once he stopped beneath the lime trees, where afternoon tea was served in summer, and where the Long Walk began its haunted, shadowy existence\u2014stood still a moment and called to them\u2014\n\n'Is any one there? Come out and show yourselves\u2026.!'\n\nAnd though his voice fell dead among the foliage, winning echoes from spots whence no echoes possibly could come, and rushing back upon him like a boomerang, he got the curious impression that it had penetrated into certain corners of the shrubberies where it had been heard and understood. Answers did not come. They were no more audible than the tapping of the thrushes, or the little feet of darkness that ran towards him from the eastern sky. But they were there. The troop of Presences drew closer. They had been creeping on all fours. They now stood up. The entire garden was inhabited and alive.\n\n'He has come back!'\n\nIt ran in a muted whisper like a hush of wind. The thrill of it passed across the lawn in the dusk. The dark tunnel of the Long Walk filled suddenly to the brim. The thrushes raised their heads, peeping sideways to listen, on their guard. Then the leaves opened a little and the troop ventured nearer. The doors and windows of the silent, staring house had also opened. From the high nursery windows especially, queer shapes of shadow flitted down to join the others. For the sun was far away behind the cedars now, and that Net of Starlight dropped downwards through the air. So carefully had he woven it years ago that hardly a mesh was torn\u2026.\n\n'He has come back again\u2026!' the whisper ran a second time, and he looked about him for a place where he could hide.\n\nBut there was no place. Escape from the golden net was now impossible\u2026.\n\nThen suddenly, looming against the field that held the Gravel-Pit and the sleeping rabbits, he saw the outline of the Third Class Railway Carriage his father bought as a Christmas present, still standing on the stone supports that were borrowed from a haystack.\n\nThat Railway Carriage had filled whole years with joy and wonder. They had called it the Starlight Express. It had four doors, real lamps in the roof, windows that opened and shut, and big round buffers. It started without warning. It went at full speed in a moment. It was never really still. The footboards were endless and very dangerous.\n\nHe saw the carriage with its four compartments still standing there in the hay field. It looked mysterious, old, and enormous as ever. There it still stood as in his boyhood days, but stood neglected and unused.\n\nThe memory of the thrilling journeys he had made in this Starlight Express completed his recapture, for he knew now who the troop of Presences all about him really were. The passengers, still waiting after twenty years' delay, thinking perhaps the train would never start again, were now impatient. They had caught their engine-driver again at last. Steam was up. Already the blackbirds whistled. And something utterly wild and reckless in him passionately broke its bonds with a flood of longings that no amount of years or 'Cities' could ever subdue again. He stepped out from the dozing lime trees and held his hat up like a flag.\n\n'Take your seats,' he cried as of old, 'for the Starlight Express. Take your seats! No luggage allowed! Animals free! Passengers with special tickets may drive the engine in their turn! First stop the Milky Way for hot refreshments! Take your seats, or stay at home for ever!'\n\nIt was the old cry, still remembered accurately; and the response was immediate. The rush of travellers from the Long Walk nearly took him off his feet. From the house came streams of silent figures, families from the shrubberies, tourists from the laurels by the scullery windows, and throngs of breathless oddities from the kitchen-garden. The lawn was littered with discarded luggage; umbrellas dropped on flower-beds, where they instantly took root and grew; animals ran scuttling among them\u2014birds, ponies, dogs, kittens, donkeys, and white mice in trailing swarms. There was not a minute to spare. One big Newfoundland brought several Persian kittens on his back, their tails behind them in the air like signals; a dignified black retriever held a baby in his mouth; and fat children by the score, with unfastened clothes and smudged faces, many of them in their nightclothes, poured along in hurrying, silent crowds, softer than clouds that hide a crescent moon in summer.\n\n'But this is impossible,' he cried to himself. 'The multiplication tables have gone wrong. The City has driven me mad. No shareholder would stand such a thing for a minute!'\n\nWhile, at the same time, that other voice in him kept shouting, ever more loudly\u2014\n\n'Take your seats! Take your seats! The Starlight Express is off to Fairyland! Show your tickets! Show your tickets!'\n\nHe laughed with happiness.\n\nThe throng and rush were at first so great that he recognised hardly any of the passengers; but, the first press over, he saw several bringing up the rear who were as familiar as of yesterday. They nodded kindly to him as they passed, no sign of reproach for the long delay in their friendly eyes. He had left his place beside the lime trees, and now stood at the carriage door, taking careful note of each one as he showed his ticket to the Guard. And the Guard was the blue-eyed girl. She did not clip the tickets, but merely looked at them. She looked, first at the ticket, then into the face of the passenger. The glance of the blue eyes was the passport. Of course, he remembered now\u2014both guard and engine-driver were obliged to have blue eyes. Blue eyes furnished the motor-power and scenery and everything. It was the spell that managed the whole business\u2014the Spell of the Big Blue eyes \u2014blue, the colour of youth and distance, of sky and summer flowers, of childhood.\n\nHe watched these last passengers come up one by one, and as they filed past him he exchanged a word with each. How pleased they were to see him! But how ashamed he felt for having been so long away. Not one, however, reminded him of it, and\u2014what touched him most of all\u2014not one suspected he had nearly gone for good. All knew he would come back.\n\nWhat looked like a rag-and-bone man blundered up first, his face a perfect tangle of beard and hair, and the eyebrows like bits of tow stuck on with sealing-wax. It was The Tramp\u2014Traveller of the World, the Eternal Wanderer, homeless as the wind; his vivid personality had haunted all the lanes of childhood. And, as Rogers nodded kindly to him, the figure waited for something more.\n\n'Ain't forgot the rhyme, 'ave yer?' he asked in a husky voice that seemed to issue from the ground beneath his broken boots. 'The rhyme we used to sing together in the Noight-Nursery when I put my faice agin' the bars, after climbin' along 'arf a mile of slippery slaites to git there.'\n\nAnd Rogers, smiling, found himself saying it, while the pretty Guard fixed her blue eyes on his face and waited patiently:\u2014\n\n\u2003I travel far and wide,\n\n\u2003But in my own inside!\n\n\u2003Such places\n\n\u2003And queer races!\n\n\u2003I never go to them, you see,\n\n\u2003Because they always come to me!\n\n'Take your seat, please,' cried the Guard. 'No luggage, you know!' She pushed him in sideways, first making him drop his dirty bundle.\n\nWith a quick, light step a very thin man hurried up. He had no luggage, but carried on his shoulder a long stick with a point of gold at its tip.\n\n'Light the lamps,' said the Guard impatiently, 'and then sit on the back buffers and hold your pole out to warn the shooting stars.'\n\nHe hopped in, though not before Rogers had passed the time of night with him first:\u2014\n\n\u2003I stand behind the sky, and light the stars,\u2014\n\n\u2003Except on cloudy nights;\n\n\u2003And then my head\n\n\u2003Remains in bed,\n\n\u2003And takes along the ceiling\u2014easier flights!\n\nOthers followed quickly then, too quickly for complete recognition.\n\nBesides, the Guard was getting more and more impatient.\n\n'You've clean forgotten me,' said one who had an awful air of darkness about him; 'and no wonder, because you never saw me properly. On Sundays, when I was nicely washed up you couldn't 'ardly reckernise me. Nachural 'nuff, too!'\n\nHe shot by like a shadow, then pulled up a window with a rattle, popped his dirty head out, and called back thickly as if his mouth was full of smoke or pudding:\u2014\n\n\u2003The darkness suits me best,\n\n\u2003For my old face\n\n\u2003Is out of place,\n\n\u2003Except in chimney stacks!\n\n\u2003Upon my crown\n\n\u2003The soot comes down\n\n\u2003Filling my eyes with blacks.\n\n\u2003Don't light the fire,\n\n\u2003Or I'd\u2014.\n\n'Stop it!' cried the Guard, shutting the window with a snap, so that Rogers never knew whether the missing word used to be 'expire' or 'perspire'; 'and go on to your proper place on the tender.' Then she turned quickly to fix her big blue eyes upon the next comer. And how they did come, to be sure! There was the Gypsy, the Creature of the Gravel-Pit, the long-legged, long-armed thing from the Long Walk\u2014she could make her arm stretch the whole length like elastic\u2014the enormous Woman of the Haystack, who lived beneath the huge tarpaulin cover, the owner of the Big Cedar, and the owner of the Little Cedar, all treading fast upon one another's heels.\n\nFrom the Blue Summer-house came the Laugher. Rogers remembered pretending once that he was going to faint. He had thrown himself upon the summer-house floor and kicked, and the blue-eyed girl, instead of being thrilled as both anticipated, had laughed abominably.\n\n'Painters don't kick!' she had said with scorn, while he had answered, though without conviction, 'Men-fainters do\u2014kick dreadfully.' And she had simply laughed till her sides ached, while he lay there kicking till his muscles were sore, in the vain hope of winning her belief.\n\nHe exchanged a glance with her now, as the Laugher slipped in past them. The eyes of the Guard were very soft. He was found out and forgiven at the same time.\n\nThen came the very mysterious figure of authority\u2014the Head Gardener, a composite being who included all the lesser under-gardeners as well. His sunburned face presented a resume of them all. He was the man who burned the hills of dead leaves in autumn.\n\n'Give me of your fire, please,' whispered Rogers, something between joy and sadness in his heart, 'for there are hills of leaves that I would burn up quickly\u2014' but the man hurried on, tossing his trowel over the Guard's head, and nearly hitting another passenger who followed too close. This was the Woman of the Haystack, an enormous, spreading traveller who utterly refused to be hurried, and only squeezed through the door because Rogers, the Guard, and several others pushed behind with all their might, while the Sweep, the Tramp, and those already in tugged breathlessly at the same time\u2026.\n\nLast of all, just as the train was starting, came a hurrying shadowy thing with dreamy eyes, long hair like waving grass, and open hands that he spread like wings, as though he were sowing something through the air. And he was singing softly as he came fumbling along the byeways of the dusk.\n\n'Oh, but I know you well,' cried Rogers, watching him come with a thrill of secret wonder, 'and I love you better than all the rest together.'\n\nThe face was hidden as he wafted silently past them. A delicious odour followed him. And something, fine as star-dust, as he scattered it all about him, sifted down before the other's sight. The Dustman entered like a ghost.\n\n'Oh, give me of your dust!' cried Rogers again, 'for there are eyes that I would blind with it\u2014eyes in the world that I would blind with it\u2014your dust of dreams and beauty\u2026!'\n\nThe man waved a shadowy hand towards him, and his own eyes filled. He closed the lids a moment; and when he opened them again he saw two monster meteors in the sky. They crossed in two big lines of glory above the house, dropping towards the cedars. The Net of Stars was being fastened. He remembered then his old Star Cave\u2014cave where lost starlight was stored up by these sprites for future use.\n\nHe just had time to seize the little hand the Guard held out, and to drop into a seat beside her, when the train began to move. It rose soundlessly with lightning speed. It shot up to a tremendous height, then paused, hovering in the night.\n\nThe Guard turned her big blue eyes upon him.\n\n'Where to?' she whispered. And he suddenly remembered that it was always he who decided the destination, and that this time he was at a loss what to say.\n\n'The Star Cave, of course,' he cried, 'the cave where the lost starlight gathers.'\n\n'Which direction?' she asked, with the yellow whistle to her lips ready to signal the driver.\n\n'Oh, out there\u2014to the north-west,' he answered, 'to the mountains of \u2014across the Channel.'\n\nBut this was not precise enough. Formerly he had always given very precise directions.\n\n'Name, please,' she urged, 'but quickly. The Interfering Sun, you know\u2014there's no time to lose. We shall be meeting the Morning Spiders soon.'\n\nThe Morning Spiders! How it all came back! The Morning Spiders that fly over the fields in the dawn upon their private threads of gossamer and fairy cotton.\n\nHe remembered that, as children, they had never actually found this Star Cave, for the Interfering Sun had always come too soon and spoilt it all.\n\n'Name, please, and do hurry up. We can't hover here all night,' rang in his ears.\n\nAnd he made a plunge. He suddenly thought of Bourcelles, the little village in the Jura mountains, where he and his cousin had spent a year learning French. The idea flashed into him probably because it contained mountains, caves, and children. His cousin lived there now to educate his children and write his books. Only that morning he had got a letter from him.\n\n'Bourcelles, of course, Bourcelles!' he cried, 'and steer for the slopes of Boudry where the forests dip towards the precipices of the Areuse. I'll send word to the children to meet us.'\n\n'Splendid!' cried the Guard, and kissed him with delight. The whistle shrieked, the train turned swiftly in a tremendous sweeping curve, and vanished along the intricate star-rails into space, humming and booming as it went. It flew a mane of stars behind it through the sky." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 164", + "text": "\u2003Oh! thou art fairer than the evening air\n\n\u2003Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.\n\n\u2014Doctor Famtus, CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.\n\nThe plop of a water-rat in the pond that occupied the rock-garden in the middle of the lawn brought him back to earth, and the Vicar's invitation to tea flashed across his mind.\n\n'Stock Exchange and typewriters!' he exclaimed, 'how rude he'll think me!' And he rubbed something out of his eyes. He gave one long, yearning glance at the spangled sky where an inquisitive bat darted zigzag several times between himself and the Pleiades, that bunch of star-babies as yet unborn, as the blue-eyed guard used to call them.\n\n'And I shall miss my supper and bed into the bargain!'\n\nHe turned reluctantly from his place beside the lime trees, and crossed the lawn now wet with dew. The whole house seemed to turn its hooded head and watch him go, staring with amusement in its many lidless eyes. On the front lawn there was more light, for it faced the dying sunset. The Big and Little Cedar rose from their pools of shadow, beautifully poised. Like stately dowagers in voluminous skirts of velvet they seemed to curtsey to him as he passed. Stars like clusters of sprinkled blossoms hung upon their dignified old heads. The whole place seemed aware of him. Glancing a moment at the upper nursery windows, he could just distinguish the bars through which his little hands once netted stars, and as he did so a meteor shot across the sky its flashing light of wonder. Behind the Little Cedar it dived into the sunset afterglow. And, hardly had it dipped away, when another, coming crosswise from the south, drove its length of molten, shining wire straight against the shoulder of the Big Cedar.\n\nThe whole performance seemed arranged expressly for his benefit. The Net was loosed\u2014this Net of Stars and Thoughts\u2014perhaps to go elsewhere. For this was taking out the golden nails, surely. It would hardly have surprised him next to see the Starlight Express he had been dreaming about dart across the heavens overhead. That cool air stealing towards him from the kitchen-garden might well have been the wind of its going. He could almost hear the distant rush and murmur of its flying mass.\n\n'How extraordinarily vivid it all was!' he thought to himself, as he hurried down the drive. 'What detail! What a sense of reality! How carefully I must have thought these creatures as a boy! How thoroughly! And what a good idea to go out and see Jack's children at Bourcelles. They've never known these English sprites. I'll introduce 'em!'\n\nHe thought it out in detail, very vividly indeed. His imagination lingered over it and gave it singular reality.\n\nUp the road he fairly ran. For Henry Rogers was a punctual man; these last twenty years he had never once been late for anything. It had been part of the exact training he had schooled himself with, and the Vicar's invitation was not one he desired to trifle with. He made his peace, indeed, easily enough, although the excuses sounded a little thin. It was something of a shock, too, to find that the married daughter after all was not the blue-eyed girl of his boyhood's passion. For it was Joan, not May, who came down the gravel path between the roses to greet him.\n\nOn the way up he had felt puzzled. Yet 'bemused,' perhaps, is the word that Herbert Minks would have chosen for one of his poems, to describe a state of mind he, however, had never experienced himself. And he would have chosen it instinctively\u2014for onomatopoeic reasons\u2014because it hums and drones and murmurs dreamily. 'Puzzled' was too sharp a word.\n\nYet Henry Rogers, who felt it, said 'puzzled' without more ado, although mind, imagination, memory all hummed and buzzed pleasantly about his ears even while he did so.\n\n'A dream is a dream,' he reflected as he raced along the familiar dusty road in the twilight, 'and a reverie is a reverie; but that, I'd swear, went a bit further than either one or t'other. It puzzles me. Does vivid thinking, I wonder, make pictures everywhere?\u2026 And\u2014can they last?'\n\nFor the detailed reality of the experience had been remarkable, and the actuality of those childhood's creations scarcely belonged to dream or reverie. They were certainly quite as real as the sleek Directors who sat round the long Board Room table, fidgeting with fat quill pens and pewter ink-pots; more alive even than the Leading Shareholder who rose so pompously at Annual Meetings to second the resolution that the 'Report and Balance Sheet be adopted without criticism.'\n\nAnd he was conscious that in himself rose, too, a deep, passionate willingness to accept the whole experience, also 'without criticism.' Those picturesque passengers in the Starlight Express he knew so intimately, so affectionately, that he actually missed them. He felt that he had said good-bye to genuine people. He regretted their departure, and was keenly sorry he had not gone off with them\u2014such a merry, wild, adventurous crew! He must find them again, whatever happened. There was a yearning in him to travel with that blue-eyed guard among the star-fields. He would go out to Bourcelles and tell the story to the children. He thought very hard indeed about it all.\n\nAnd now, in the Vicarage drawing-room after dinner, his bemusement increased rather than grew less. His mind had already confused a face and name. The blue-eyed May was not, after all, the girl of his boyhood's dream. His memory had been accurate enough with the passengers in the train. There was no confusion there. But this gentle married woman, who sang to her own accompaniment at her father's request, was not the mischievous, wilful creature who had teased and tortured his heart in years gone by, and had helped him construct the sprites and train and star-trips. It was, surely, the other daughter who had played that delicious role. Yet, either his memory was at fault, or the Vicar had mixed the names up. The years had played this little unimportant trick upon him anyhow. And that was clear.\n\nBut if with so-called real people such an error was possible, how could he be sure of anything? Which after all, he asked himself, was real? It was the Vicar's mistake, he learned later, for May was now a teacher in London; but the trivial incident served to point this confusion in his mind between an outer and an inner world\u2014to the disadvantage, if anything, of the former.\n\nAnd over the glass of port together, while they talked pleasantly of vanished days, Rogers was conscious that a queer, secret amusement sheltered in his heart, due to some faint, superior knowledge that this Past they spoke of had not moved away at all, but listened with fun and laughter just behind his shoulder, watching them. The old gentleman seemed never tired of remembering his escapades. He told them one after another, like some affectionate nurse or mother, Rogers thought, whose children were\u2014to her\u2014unique and wonderful. For he had really loved this good-for-nothing pupil, loved him the more, as mothers and nurses do, because of the trouble he had given, and because of his busy and fertile imagination. It made Rogers feel ridiculously young again as he listened. He could almost have played a trick upon him then and there, merely to justify the tales. And once or twice he actually called him 'Sir.' So that even the conversation helped to deepen this bemusement that gathered somewhat tenderly about his mind. He cracked his walnuts and watched the genial, peace-lit eyes across the table. He chuckled. Both chuckled. They spoke of his worldly success too\u2014it seemed unimportant somehow now, although he was conscious that something in him expected, nay demanded tribute\u2014 but the former tutor kept reverting to the earlier days before achievement.\n\n'You were indeed a boy of mischief, wonder, and mystery,' he said, his eyes twinkling and his tone almost affectionate; 'you made the whole place alive with those creatures of your imagination. How Joan helped you too\u2014or was it May? I used to wonder sometimes\u2014' he glanced up rather searchingly at his companion a moment\u2014' whether the people who took the Manor House after your family left did not encounter them sometimes upon the lawn or among the shrubberies in the dusk\u2014those sprites of yours. Eh?' He passed a neatly pared walnut across the table to his guest. 'These ghosts that people nowadays explain scientifically\u2014what are they but thoughts visualised by vivid thinking such as yours was\u2014creative thinking? They may be just pictures created in moments of strong passionate feeling that persist for centuries and reach other minds direct They're not seen with the outer eye; that's certain, for no two people ever see them together. But I'm sure these pictures flame up through the mind sometimes just as clearly as some folk see Grey Ladies and the rest flit down the stairs at midnight.'\n\nThey munched their walnuts a moment in silence. Rogers listened very keenly. How curious, he reflected, that the talk should lie this way. But he said nothing, hoping that the other would go on.\n\n'And if you really believed in your things,' the older man continued presently, 'as I am sure you did believe, then your old Dustman and Sweep and Lamplighter, your Woman of the Haystack and your Net of Stars and Star Train\u2014all these, for instance, must still be living, where you left them, waiting perhaps for your return to lead their fresh adventures.'\n\nRogers stared at him, choking a little over a nut he had swallowed too hurriedly.\n\n'Yet,' mused on the other, 'it's hardly likely the family that succeeded you met them. There were no children!'\n\n'Ah,' exclaimed the pupil impulsively, 'that's significant, yes\u2014no children.' He looked up quickly, questioningly.\n\n'Very, I admit.'\n\n'Besides, the chief Magician had gone away into the City. They wouldn't answer to anybody's call, you know.'\n\n'True again. But the Magician never forgot them quite, I'll be bound,' he added. 'They're only in hiding till his return, perhaps!' And his bright eyes twinkled knowingly.\n\n'But, Vicar, really, you know, that is an extraordinary idea you have there-a wonderful idea. Do you really think\u2014?'\n\n'I only mean,' the other replied more gravely, 'that what a man thinks, and makes with thinking, is the real thing. It's in the heart that sin is first real. The act is the least important end of it\u2014 grave only because it is the inevitable result of the thinking. Action is merely delayed thinking, after all. Don't think ghosts and bogeys, I always say to children, or you'll surely see them.'\n\n'Ah, in that sense\u2014!'\n\n'In any sense your mind and intuition can grasp. The thought that leaves your brain, provided it be a real thought strongly fashioned, goes all over the world, and may reach any other brain tuned to its acceptance. You should understand that!' he laughed significantly.\n\n'I do,' said Rogers hastily, as though he felt ashamed of himself or were acknowledging a fault in his construing of Homer. 'I understand it perfectly. Only I put all those things\u2014imaginative things\u2014aside when I went into business. I had to concentrate my energies upon making money.'\n\n'You did, yes. Ah!' was the rejoinder, as though he would fain have added, 'And was that wise?'\n\n'And I made it, Vicar; you see, I've made it.' He was not exactly nettled, but he wanted a word of recognition for his success. 'But you know why, don't you?' he added, ashamed the same moment. There was a pause, during which both looked closely at their broken nuts. From one of the men came a sigh.\n\n'Yes,' resumed the older man presently, 'I remember your great dream perfectly well, and a noble one it was too. Its fulfilment now, I suppose, lies well within your reach? You have the means to carry it out, eh? You have indeed been truly blessed.' He eyed him again with uncommon keenness, though a smile ran from the eyes and mouth even up to the forehead and silvery hair. 'The world, I see, has not yet poisoned you. To carry it out as you once explained it to me would be indeed success. If I remember rightly,' he added, 'it was a\u2014er\u2014a Scheme for Disabled\u2014'\n\nRogers interrupted him quickly. 'And I am full of the same big dream still,' he repeated almost shyly. 'The money I have made I regard as lent to me for investment. I wish to use it, to give it away as one gives flowers. I feel sure\u2014'\n\nHe stopped abruptly, caught by the glow of enthusiasm that had leaped into the other's face with a strangely beautiful expression.\n\n'You never did anything by halves, I remember,' the Vicar said, looking at him proudly. 'You were always in earnest, even in your play, and I don't mind telling you that I've often prayed for something of that zeal of yours\u2014that zeal for others. It's a remarkable gift. You will never bury it, will you?' He spoke eagerly, passionately, leaning forward a little across the table. 'Few have it nowadays; it grows rarer with the luxury and self-seeking of the age. It struck me so in you as a boy, that even your sprites worked not for themselves but for others\u2014your Dustman, your Sweep, your absurd Lamplighter, all were busy doing wonderful things to help their neighbours, all, too, without reward.'\n\nRogers flushed like a boy. But he felt the thrill of his dream course through him like great fires. Wherein was any single thing in the world worth doing, any object of life worth following, unless as means to an end, and that end helping some one else. One's own little personal dreams became exhausted in a few years, endeavours for self smothered beneath the rain of disappointments; but others, and work for others, this was endless and inexhaustible.\n\n'I've sometimes thought,' he heard the older man going on, 'that in the dusk I saw'\u2014his voice lowered and he glanced towards the windows where the rose trees stood like little figures, cloaked and bonneted with beauty beneath the stars\u2014'that I saw your Dustman scattering his golden powder as he came softly up the path, and that some of it reached my own eyes, too; or that your swift Lamplighter lent me a moment his gold-tipped rod of office so that I might light fires of hope in suffering hearts here in this tiny world of my own parish. Your dreadful Head Gardener, too! And your Song of the Blue-Eyes Fairy,' he added slyly, almost mischievously, 'you remember that, I wonder?'\n\n'H'm\u2014a little, yes\u2014something,' replied Rogers confusedly. 'It was a dreadful doggerel. But I've got a secretary now,' he continued hurriedly and in rather a louder voice,' a fellow named Minks, a jewel really of a secretary he is\u2014and he, I believe, can write real\u2014'\n\n'It was charming enough for us all to have remembered it, anyhow,' the Vicar stopped him, smiling at his blushes,' and for May\u2014or was it Joan? dear me, how I do forget names!\u2014to have set it to music. She had a little gift that way, you may remember; and, before she took up teaching she wrote one or two little things like that.'\n\n'Ah, did she really?' murmured the other. He scarcely knew what he was saying, for a mist of blue had risen before his eyes, and in it he was seeing pictures. 'The Spell of Blue, wasn't it, or something like that?' he said a moment later, 'blue, the colour of beauty in flowers, sea, sky, distance\u2014the childhood colour par excellence?'\n\n'But chiefly in the eyes of children, yes,' the Vicar helped him, rising at the same time from the table. 'It was the spell, the passport, the open sesame to most of your adventures. Come now, if you won't have another glass of port, and we'll go into the drawing-room, and Joan, May I mean\u2014no, Joan, of course, shall sing it to you. For this is a very special occasion for us, you know,' he added as they passed across the threshold side by side. 'To see you is to go back with you to Fairyland.'\n\nThe piano was being idly strummed as they went in, and the player was easily persuaded to sing the little song. It floated through the open windows and across the lawn as the two men in their corners listened. She knew it by heart, as though she often played it. The candles were not lit. Dusk caught the sound and muted it enchantingly. And somehow the simple melody helped to conceal the meagreness of the childish words. Everywhere, from sky and lawn and solemn trees, the Past came softly in and listened too.\n\n\u2003There's a Fairy that hides in the beautiful eyes\n\n\u2003Of children who treat her well;\n\n\u2003In the little round hole where the eyeball lies\n\n\u2003She weaves her magical spell.\n\n\u2003Oh, tell it to me,\n\n\u2003Oh, how can it be,\n\n\u2003This Spell of the Blue-Eyes Fairy.\n\n\u2003Well,\u2014the eyes must be blue,\n\n\u2003And the heart must be true,\n\n\u2003And the child must be better than gold;\n\n\u2003And then, if you'll let her,\n\n\u2003The quicker the better,\n\n\u2003She'll make you forget that you're old,\n\n\u2003That you're heavy and stupid, and\u2014old!\n\n\u2003So, if such a child you should chance to see,\n\n\u2003Or with such a child to play,\n\n\u2003No matter how weary and dull you be,\n\n\u2003Nor how many tons you weigh;\n\n\u2003You will suddenly find that you're young again,\n\n\u2003And your movements are light and airy,\n\n\u2003And you'll try to be solemn and stiff in vain\u2014\n\n\u2003It's the Spell of the Blue-Eyes Fairy!\n\n\u2003Now I've told it to you,\n\n\u2003And you know it is true\u2014\n\n\u2003It's the Spell of the Blue-Eyes Fairy!\n\n'And it's the same spell,' said the old man in his corner as the last notes died away, and they sat on some minutes longer in the fragrant darkness, 'that you cast about us as a boy, Henry Rogers, when you made that wonderful Net of Stars and fastened it with your comets' nails to the big and little cedars. The one catches your heart, you see, while the other gets your feet and head and arms till you're a hopeless prisoner\u2014a prisoner in Fairyland.'\n\n'Only the world to-day no longer believes in Fairyland,' was the reply, 'and even the children have become scientific. Perhaps it's only buried though. The two ought to run in harness really\u2014opposite interpretations of the universe. One might revive it\u2014here and there perhaps. Without it, all the tenderness seems leaking out of life\u2014'\n\nJoan presently said good-night, but the other two waited on a little longer; and before going to bed they took a turn outside among the flower-beds and fruit-trees that formed the tangled Vicarage garden at the back. It was uncommonly warm for a night in early spring. The lilacs were in bud, and the air most exquisitely scented.\n\nRogers felt himself swept back wonderfully among his early years. It seemed almost naughty to be out at such an hour instead of asleep in bed. It was quite ridiculous\u2014but he loved the feeling and let himself go with happy willingness. The story of 'Vice Versa,' where a man really became a boy again, passed through his mind and made him laugh.\n\nAnd the old Vicar kept on feeding the semi-serious mood with what seemed almost intentional sly digs. Yet the digs were not intentional, really; it was merely that his listener, already prepared by his experience with the Starlight Express, read into them these searching meanings of his own. Something in him was deeply moved.\n\n'You might make a great teacher, you know,' suggested his companion, stooping to sniff a lilac branch as they paused a moment. 'I thought so years ago; I think so still. You've kept yourself so simple.'\n\n'How not to do most things,' laughed the other, glad of the darkness.\n\n'How to do the big and simple things,' was the rejoinder; 'and do them well, without applause. You have Belief.'\n\n'Too much, perhaps. I simply can't get rid of it.'\n\n'Don't try to. It's belief that moves the world; people want teachers \u2014that's my experience in the pulpit and the parish; a world in miniature, after all\u2014but they won't listen to a teacher who hasn't got it. There are no great poets to-day, only great discoverers. The poets, the interpreters of discovery, are gone\u2014starved out of life by ridicule, and by questions to which exact answers are impossible. With your imagination and belief you might help a world far larger than this parish of mine at any rate. I envy you.'\n\nGoodness! how the kind eyes searched his own in this darkness. Though little susceptible to flattery, he was aware of something huge the words stirred in the depths of him, something far bigger than he yet had dreamed of even in his boyhood, something that made his cherished Scheme seem a little pale and faded.\n\n'Take the whole world with you into fairyland,' he heard the low voice come murmuring in his ear across the lilacs. And there was starlight in it\u2014that gentle, steady brilliance that steals into people while they sleep and dream, tracing patterns of glory they may recognise when they wake, yet marvelling whence it came. 'The world wants its fairyland back again, and won't be happy till it gets it.'\n\nA bird listening to them in the stillness sang a little burst of song, then paused again to listen.\n\n'Once give them of your magic, and each may shape his fairyland as he chooses\u2026' the musical voice ran on.\n\nThe flowers seemed alive and walking. This was a voice of beauty. Some lilac bud was singing in its sleep. Sirius had dropped a ray across its lips of blue and coaxed it out to dance. There was a murmur and a stir among the fruit-trees too. The apple blossoms painted the darkness with their tiny fluttering dresses, while old Aldebaran trimmed them silently with gold, and partners from the Milky Way swept rustling down to lead the violets out. Oh, there was revelry to-night, and the fairy spell of the blue-eyed Spring was irresistible\u2026.\n\n'But the world will never dance,' he whispered sadly, half to himself perhaps; 'it's far too weary.'\n\n'It will follow a leader,' came the soft reply, 'who dances well and pipes the true old music so that it can hear. Belief inspires it always. And that Belief you have.' There was a curious vibration in his voice; he spoke from his heart, and his heart was evidently moved.\n\n'I wonder when it came to me, then, and how?'\n\nThe Vicar turned and faced him where they stood beneath the lime trees. Their scent was pouring out as from phials uncorked by the stars.\n\n'It came,' he caught the answer that thrilled with earnestness, 'when you saw the lame boy on the village hill and cried. As long ago as that it came.'\n\nHis mind, as he listened, became a plot of fresh-turned earth the Head Gardener filled with flowers. A mass of covering stuff the years had laid ever thicker and thicker was being shovelled away. The flowers he saw being planted there were very tiny ones. But they would grow. A leaf from some far-off rocky mount of olive trees dropped fluttering through the air and marvellously took root and grew. He felt for a moment the breath of night air that has been tamed by an eastern sun. He saw a group of men, bare-headed, standing on the slopes, and in front of them a figure of glory teaching little, simple things they found it hard to understand\u2026.\n\n'You have the big and simple things alive in you,' the voice carried on his pictured thought among the flowers. 'In your heart they lie all waiting to be used. Nothing can smother them. Only-you must give them out.'\n\n'If only I knew how\u2014!'\n\n'Keep close to the children,' sifted the strange answer through the fruit-trees; 'the world is a big child. And catch it when it lies asleep\u2014not thinking of itself,' he whispered.\n\n'The time is so short\u2014'\n\n'At forty you stand upon the threshold of life, with values learned and rubbish cleared away. So many by that time are already dead\u2014in heart. I envy your opportunities ahead. You have learned already one foundation truth\u2014the grandeur of toil and the insignificance of acquisition. The other foundation thing is even simpler\u2014you have a neighbour. Now, with your money to give as flowers, and your Belief to steer you straight, you have the world before you. And\u2014keep close to the children.'\n\n'Before there are none left,' added Rogers under his breath. But the other heard the words and instantly corrected him\u2014\n\n'Children of any age, and wherever you may find them.'\n\nAnd they turned slowly and made their way in silence across the soaking lawn, entering the house by the drawing-room window.\n\n'Good-night,' the old man said, as he lit his candle and led him to his room; 'and pleasant, happy, inspiring dreams.'\n\nHe seemed to say it with some curious, heartfelt meaning in the common words. He disappeared slowly down the passage, shading the candle with one hand to pick his way, and Rogers watched him out of sight, then turned and entered his own room, closing the door as softly as possible behind him.\n\nIt had been an astonishing conversation. All his old enthusiasm was stirred. Embers leaped to flame. No woman ever had done as much. This old fellow, once merely respected tutor, had given him back his first original fire and zeal, yet somehow cleansed and purified. And it humbled him at the same time. Dead leaves, dropped year by year in his City life, were cleared away as though a mighty wind had swept him. The Gardener was burning up dead leaves; the Sweep was cleaning out the flues; the Lamplighter waving his golden signal in the sky\u2014far ahead, it is true, but gleaming like a torch and beacon. The Starlight Express was travelling at top speed among the constellations. He stood at the beginning of the important part of life\u2026.\n\nAnd now, as he lay in bed and heard the owls hooting in the woods, and smelt the flowers through the open window, his thoughts followed strongly after that old Star Train that he used to drive about the sky. He was both engine-driver and passenger. He fell asleep to dream of it.\n\nAnd all the vital and enchanting thoughts of his boyhood flowed back upon him with a rush, as though they had never been laid aside. He remembered particularly one singular thing about them\u2014that they had never seemed quite his own, but that he had either read or heard them somewhere else. As a child the feeling was always strong that these 'jolly thoughts,' as he called them, were put into him by some one else\u2014some one who whispered to him\u2014some one who lived close behind his ears. He had to listen very hard to catch them. It was not dreams, yet all night long, especially when he slept tightly, as he phrased it, this fairy whispering continued, and in the daytime he remembered what he could and made up his stories accordingly. He stole these ideas about a Star Net and a Starlight Express. One day he would be caught and punished for it. It was trespassing upon the preserves of some one else.\n\nYet he could never discover who this some one else was, except that it was a 'she' and lived among the stars, only coming out at night. He imagined she hid behind that little dusty constellation called the Pleiades, and that was why the Pleiades wore a veil and were so dim\u2014 lest he should find her out. And once, behind the blue gaze of the guard-girl, who was out of his heart by this time, he had known a moment of thrilling wonder that was close to awe. He saw another pair of eyes gazing out at him They were ambery eyes, as he called them\u2014 just what was to be expected from a star. And, so great was the shock, that at first he stood dead still and gasped, then dashed up suddenly close to her and stared into her face, frightening her so much that she fell backwards, and the amber eyes vanished instantly. It was the 'some one else' who whispered fairy stories to him and lived behind his ear. For a second she had been marvellously close. And he had lost her!\n\nFrom that moment, however, his belief in her increased enormously, and he never saw a pair of brown-ambery eyes without feeling sure that she was somewhere close about him. The lame boy, for instance, had the same delicate tint in his sad, long, questioning gaze. His own collie had it too! For years it was an obsession with him, haunting and wonderful\u2014the knowledge that some one who watched close beside him, filling his mind with fairy thoughts, might any moment gaze into his face through a pair of ordinary familiar eyes. And he was certain that all his star-imagination about the Net, the Starlight Express, and the Cave of Lost Starlight came first into him from this hidden 'some one else' who brought the Milky Way down into his boy's world of fantasy.\n\n'If ever I meet her in real life,' he used to say, 'I'm done for. She is my Star Princess!'\n\nAnd now, as he fell asleep, the old atmosphere of that Kentish garden drew thickly over him, shaking out clusters of stars about his bed. Dreams usually are determined by something more remote than the talk that has just preceded going to bed, but to-night it was otherwise. And two things the old Vicar had let fall\u2014two things sufficiently singular, it seemed, when he came to think about them\u2014influenced his night adventures. 'Catch the world when it's asleep,' and 'Keep close to the children'\u2014these somehow indicated the route his dream should follow. For he headed the great engine straight for the village in the Jura pine woods where his cousin's children lived. He did not know these children, and had seen his cousin but rarely in recent years; yet, it seemed, they came to meet the train up among the mountain forests somewhere. For in this village, where he had gone to study French, the moods of his own childhood had somehow known continuation and development. The place had once been very dear to him, and he had known delightful adventures there, many of them with this cousin. Now he took all his own childhood's sprites out in this Starlight Express and introduced them to these transplanted children who had never made acquaintance with the English breed. They had surprising, wild adventures all together, yet in the morning he could remember very little of it all. The interfering sun melted them all down in dew. The adventures had some object, however; that was clear; though what the object was, except that it did good somewhere to. some one, was gone, lost in the deeps of sleep behind him. They scurried about the world. The sprites were very active indeed\u2014quite fussily energetic. And his Scheme for Disabled Something-or other was not anywhere discoverable in these escapades. That seemed forgotten rather, as though they found bigger, more important things to do, and nearer home too. Perhaps the Vicar's hint about the 'Neighbour' was responsible for that. Anyhow, the dream was very vivid, even though the morning sun melted it away so quickly and completely. It seemed continuous too. It filled the entire night.\n\nYet the thing that Rogers took off with him to town next morning was, more than any other detail, the memory of what the old tutor had said about the living reality and persistence of figures that passionate thinking has created\u2014that, and the value of Belief." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 165", + "text": "\u2003Be thou my star, and thou in me be seen\n\n\u2003To show what source divine is, and prevails.\n\n\u2003I mark thee planting joy in constant fire.\n\n\u2014To Sirius, G. MEREDITH.\n\nAnd he rather astonished the imperturbable Minks next day by the announcement that he was thinking of going abroad for a little holiday. 'When I return, it will be time enough to take up the Scheme in earnest,' he said. For Minks had brought a sheaf of notes embodying the results of many hours' labour, showing what others had already done in that particular line of philanthropy.\n\n'Very good indeed, Minks, very good. I'll take 'em with me and make a careful study of the lot. I shall be only gone a week or so,' he added, noticing the other's disappointment. For the secretary had hoped to expound these notes himself at length. 'Take a week's holiday yourself,' he added. 'Mrs. Minks might like to get to the sea, perhaps. There'll only be my letters to forward. I'll give you a little cheque.' And he explained briefly that he was going out to Bourcelles to enjoy a few days' rest before they attacked great problems together. After so many years of application to business he had earned it. Crayfield, it seemed, had given him a taste for sentimental journeys. But the fact was, too, the Tramp, the Dustman, the Lamplighter, and the Starlight Express were all in his thoughts still.\n\nAnd it was spring. He felt this sudden desire to see his cousin again, and make the acquaintance of his cousin's children. He remembered how the two of them had tramped the Jura forests as boys. They had met in London at intervals since. He dictated a letter to him then and there \u2014Minks taking it down like lightning\u2014and added a postscript in his own handwriting:\u2014\n\n'I feel a longing,' he wrote, 'to come out and see the little haven of rest you have chosen, and to know your children. Our ways have gone very far apart\u2014too far\u2014since the old days when we climbed out of the windows of la cure with a sheet, and tramped the mountains all night long. Do you remember? I've had my nose on the grindstone ever since, and you've worked hard too, judging by your name in publishers' lists. I hope your books are a great success. I'm ashamed I've never any time to read now. But I'm \"retired\" from business at last and hope to do great things. I'll tell you about a great Scheme I have in hand when we meet. I should like your advice too.\n\n'Any room will do\u2014sunny aspect if possible. And please give my love to your children in advance. Tell them I shall come out in the Starlight Express. Let me have a line to say if it's all right.'\n\nIn due course the line\u2014a warm-hearted one\u2014arrived. Minks came to Charing Cross to see him off, the gleam of the sea already in his pale-blue eyes.\n\n'The Weather Report says \"calm,\" Mr. Rogers,' he kept repeating. 'You'll have a good crossing, I hope and trust. I'm taking Mrs. Minks myself\u2014-'\n\n'Yes, yes, that's good,' was the quick reply. 'Capital. And\u2014let me see-I've got your notes with me, haven't I? I'll draft out a general plan and send it to you as soon as I get a moment. You think over it too, will you, while I'm away. And enjoy yourself at the same time. Put your children in the sea\u2014nothing like the sea for children\u2014sea and sun and sand and all that sort of thing.'\n\n'Thank you very much, Mr. Rogers, and I trust\u2014-'\n\nSomebody bumped against him, cutting short a carefully balanced sentence that was intended to be one-third good wishes, one-third weather remark, and the last third Mrs. Minks. Her letter of thanks had never been referred to. It rankled, though very slightly.\n\n'What an absurd-looking person!' exclaimed the secretary to himself, following the aggressor with one eye, and trying to recapture the lost sentence at the same time. 'They really should not allow such people in a railway terminus,' he added aloud. The man was ragged and unkempt to the last degree\u2014a sort of tramp; and as he bought a ticket at the third-class wicket, just beyond, he kept looking up slyly at Minks and his companion. 'The way he knocked against me almost seemed intentional,' Minks thought. The idea of pickpockets and cleverly disguised detectives ran confusedly in his mind. He felt a little flustered for some reason.\n\n'I beg your pardon,' Mr. Rogers was saying to a man who tried to push in front of him. 'But we must each take our turn, you know.' The throng of people was considerable. This man looked like a dustman. He, too, was eagerly buying a ticket, but had evidently mistaken the window. 'Third-class is lower down I think,' Mr. Rogers suggested with a touch of authority.\n\n'What a lot of foreigners there are about,' remarked Minks. 'These stations are full of suspicious characters.' The notice about loitering flashed across him.\n\nHe took the ticket Mr. Rogers handed to him, and went off to register the luggage, and when later he joined his chief at the carriage door he saw him talking to a couple of strangers who seemed anxious to get in.\n\n'I took this corner seat for you, Mr. Rogers,' he explained, both to prove his careful forethought and to let the strangers know that his master was a person of some importance. They were such an extraordinary couple too! Had there been hop-pickers about he could have understood it. They were almost figures of masquerade; for while one resembled more than anything else a chimney-sweep who had forgotten to wash his face below the level of the eyes, the other carried a dirty sack across his shoulders, which apparently he had just been trying to squeeze into the rack.\n\nThey moved off when they saw Minks, but the man with the sack made a gesture with one hand, as though he scattered something into the carriage through the open door.\n\nThe secretary threw a reproachful look at a passing guard, but there was nothing he could do. People with tickets had a right to travel. Still, he resented these crowding, pushing folk. 'I'm sorry, Mr. Rogers,' he said, as though he had chosen a poor train for his honoured chief; 'there must be an excursion somewhere. There's a big fete of Vegetarians, I know, at Surbiton to-day, but I can hardly think these people\u2014-'\n\n'Don't wait, Minks,' said the other, who had taken his seat. 'I'll let you hear from me, you know, about the Scheme and\u2014other things. Don't wait.' He seemed curiously unobservant of these strange folk, almost absent-minded.\n\nThe guard was whistling. Minks shut the door and gave the travelling- rug a last tuck-in about his feet. He felt as though he were packing off a child. The mother in him became active. Mr. Rogers needed looking after. Another minute and he would have patted him and told him what to eat and wear. But instead he raised his hat and smiled. The train moved slowly out, making a deep purring sound like flowing water. The platform had magically thinned. Officials stood lonely among the scattered wavers of hats and handkerchiefs. As he stepped backwards to keep the carriage window in sight until the last possible moment, Minks was nearly knocked over by a man who hurried along the platform as if he still had hopes of catching the train.\n\n'Really, sir!' gasped the secretary, stooping to pick up his newspaper and lavender glove\u2014he wore one glove and carried the other\u2014the collision had sent flying. But the man was already far beyond the reach of his voice. 'He must be an escaped lamplighter, or something,' he laughed good-naturedly, as he saw the long legs vanish down the platform. He leaped on to the line. Evidently he was a railway employe. He seemed to be vainly trying to catch the departing buffers. An absurd and reckless fellow, thought Minks.\n\nBut what caught the secretary's attention last, and made him wonder a little if anything unusual was happening to the world, was the curious fact that, as the last carriage glided smoothly past, he recognised four figures seated comfortably inside. Their feet were on the cushions\u2014disgracefully. They were talking together, heads forward, laughing, even\u2014singing. And he could have sworn that they were the two men who had watched himself and Mr. Rogers at the ticket window, and the strangers who had tried to force their way into Mr. Rogers's carriage when he came up just in time to interfere.\n\n'They got in somehow after all, then,' he said to himself. 'Of course, I had forgotten. The Company runs third-class carriages on the continental trains now. Odd!' He mentally rubbed his eyes.\n\nThe train swept round the corner out of sight, leaving a streaming cloud of smoke and sparks behind it. It went out with a kind of rush of delight, glad to be off, and conscious of its passengers' pleasure.\n\n'Odd.' This was the word that filled his mind as he walked home. 'Perhaps\u2014our minds are in such intimate sympathy together\u2014perhaps he was thinking of\u2014of that kind of thing\u2014er\u2014and some of his thoughts got into my own imagination. Odd, though, very, very odd.'\n\nHe had once read somewhere in one of his new-fangled books that 'thoughts are things.' It had made a great impression on him. He had read about Marconi too. Later he made a more thorough study of this 'thinking business.'\n\nAnd soon afterwards, having put his chief's papers in order at the flat, he went home to Mrs. Minks and the children with this other thought\u2014that he had possibly been overworking himself, and that it was a good thing he was going to have a holiday by the sea.\n\nHe liked to picture himself as an original thinker, not afraid of new ideas, but in reality he preferred his world sober, ordinary, logical. It was merely big-sounding names he liked. And this little incident was somewhere out of joint. It was\u2014odd.\n\n\u2003Success that poisons many a baser mind\n\n\u2003May lift\u2014-\n\nBut the sonnet had never known completion. In the space it had occupied in his mind another one abruptly sprouted. The first subject after all was banal. A better one had come to him\u2014\n\n\u2003Strong thoughts that rise in a creative mind\n\n\u2003May flash about the world, and carry joy\u2014-\n\nThen it stuck. He changed 'may' to 'shall,' but a moment later decided that 'do' was better, truer than either. After that inspiration failed him. He retired gracefully upon prose again.\n\n'Odd,' he thought, 'very odd!'\n\nAnd he relieved his mind by writing a letter to a newspaper. He did not send it in the end, for his better judgment prevented, but he had to do something by way of protest, and the only alternative was to tell his wife about it, when she would look half puzzled, half pained, and probably reply with some remark about the general cost of living. So he wrote the letter instead.\n\nFor Herbert Minks regarded himself as a man with the larger view of citizenship, a critic of public affairs, and, in a measure, therefore, an item of that public opinion which moulded governments. Hence he had a finger, though but a little finger, in the destiny of nations and in the polity\u2014a grand word that!\u2014of national councils. He wrote frequent letters, thus, to the lesser weekly journals; these letters were sometimes printed; occasionally\u2014oh, joy!\u2014they were answered by others like himself, who referred to him as 'your esteemed correspondent.' As yet, however, his following letter had never got into print, nor had he experienced the importance of that editorial decision, appended between square brackets: 'This correspondence must now cease'\u2014so vital, that is, that the editor and the entire office staff might change their opinions unless it did cease.\n\nHaving drafted his letter, therefore, and carried it about with him for several hours in his breast pocket, he finally decided not to send it after all, for the explanation of his 'odd' experience, he well knew, was hardly one that a newspaper office could supply, or that public correspondence could illuminate. His better judgment always won the day in the end. Thinking was creative, after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 166", + "text": "\u2003\u2026The sun,\n\n\u2003Closing his benediction,\n\n\u2003Sinks, and the darkening air\n\n\u2003Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night-\n\n\u2003Night with her train of stars\n\n\u2003And her great gift of sleep.\n\n\u2014W. E. HENLEY.\n\nIn a southern-facing room on the first floor of La Citadelle the English family sat after tea. The father, a spare, mild-eyed man, his thatch of brown hair well sprinkled with grey above the temples, was lighting his pipe for the tenth time-the tenth match, but the same pipeful of tobacco; and his wife, an ample, motherly woman, slightly younger than himself, was knitting on the other side of the open fireplace, in which still glowed a mass of peat ashes. From time to time she stirred them with a rickety pair of tongs, or with her foot kicked into the grate the matches he invariably threw short upon the floor. But these were adventures ill-suited to her. Knitting was her natural talent. She was always knitting.\n\nBy the open window stood two children, a boy and a girl of ten and twelve respectively, gazing out into the sunshine. It was the end of April, and though the sun was already hot, there was a sharpness in the air that told of snow still lying on the mountain heights behind the village. Across vineyard slopes and patches of agricultural land, the Lake of Neuchatel lay blue as a southern sea, while beyond it, in a line of white that the sunset soon would turn to pink and gold, stretched the whole range of Alps, from Mont Blanc to where the Eiger and the Weisshorn signalled in the east. They filled the entire horizon, already cloud-like in the haze of coming summer.\n\nThe door into the corridor opened, and a taller child came in. A mass of dark hair, caught by a big red bow, tumbled untidily down her back. She was sixteen and very earnest, but her eyes, brown like her father's, held a curious puzzled look, as though life still confused her so much that while she did her duties bravely she did not quite understand why it should be so.\n\n'Excuse me, Mother, shall I wash up?' she said at once. She always did wash up. And 'excuse me' usually prefaced her questions.\n\n'Please, Jane Anne,' said Mother. The entire family called her Jane Anne, although her baptismal names were rather fine. Sometimes she answered, too, to Jinny, but when it was a question of household duties it was Jane Anne, or even 'Ria.'\n\nShe set about her duties promptly, though not with any special deftness. And first she stooped and picked up the last match her father had dropped upon the strip of carpet that covered the linoleum.\n\n'Daddy,' she said reprovingly, 'you do make such a mess.' She brushed tobacco ashes from his coat. Mother, without looking up, went on talking to him about the bills-washing, school-books, boots, blouses, oil, and peat. And as she did so a puzzled expression was visible in his eyes akin to the expression in Jane Anne's. Both enjoyed a similar mental confusion sometimes as to words and meanings and the import of practical life generally.\n\n'We shan't want any more now, thank goodness,' he said vaguely, referring to the peat, though Mother was already far ahead, wading among boots and shirts and blouses.\n\n'But if we get a load in now, you see, it's cheaper,' she said with emphasis on every alternate word, slowing up the pace to suit him.\n\n'Mother, where did you put the washing-up rag?' came the voice of Jinny in plaintive accents from the tiny kitchen that lay beyond the adjoining bedroom. 'I can't find it anywhere,' she added, poking her head round the door suddenly.\n\n'Pet lamb,' was Mother's answer, still bending over her knitting-she was prodigal of terms like this and applied them indiscriminately, for Jane Anne resembled the animal in question even less than did her father\u2014'I saw it last on the geranium shelf\u2014you know, where the fuchsias and the-' She hesitated, she was not sure herself. 'I'll get it, my duckie, for you,' she added, and began to rise. She was a voluminous, very stately woman. The operation took time.\n\n'Let me,' said Daddy, drawing his mind with difficulty from the peat, and rising too. They rose together.\n\n'It's all right, I've got it,' cried the child, who had disappeared again. 'It was in the sink. That's Jimbo; he washed up yesterday.'\n\n'Pas vrai!' piped a little voice beside the open window, overhearing his name, 'because I only dried. It was Monkey who washed up.' They talked French and English all mixed up together.\n\nBut Monkey was too busy looking at the Alps through an old pair of opera-glasses, relic of her father's London days that served for telescope, to think reply worth while. Her baptismal names were also rather wonderful, though neither of her parents could have supplied them without a moment's reflection first. There was commotion by that window for a moment but it soon subsided again, for things that Jinny said never provoked dissension, and Jimbo and Monkey just then were busy with a Magic Horse who had wings of snow, and was making fearful leaps from the peaks of the Dent du Midi across the Blumlisalp to the Jungfrau.\n\n'Will you please carry the samovar for me?' exclaimed Jane Anne, addressing both her parents, as though uncertain which of them would help her. 'You filled it so awfully full to-day, I can't lift it. I advertise for help.'\n\nHer father slowly rose. 'I'll do it, child,' he said kindly, but with a patience, almost resignation, in his tone suggesting that it was absurd to expect such a thing of him. 'Then do exactly as you think best,' he let fall to his wife as he went, referring to the chaos of expenses she had been discussing with him. 'That'll be all right.' For his mind had not yet sorted the jumble of peat, oil, boots, school- books, and the rest. 'We can manage THAT at any rate; you see it's francs, not shillings,' he added, as Jane Anne pulled him by the sleeve towards the steaming samovar. He held the strings of an ever empty purse.\n\n'Daddy, but you've always got a crumb in your beard,' she was saying, 'and if it isn't a crumb, it's ashes on your coat or a match on the floor.' She brushed the crumb away. He gave her a kiss. And between them they nearly upset the old nickel-plated samovar that was a present from a Tiflis Armenian to whom the mother once taught English. They looked round anxiously as though afraid of a scolding; but Mother had not noticed. And she was accustomed to the noise and laughter. The scene then finished, as it usually did, by the mother washing up, Jane Anne drying, and Daddy hovering to and fro in the background making remarks in his beard about the geraniums, the China tea, the indigestible new bread, the outrageous cost of the necessaries of life, or the book he was at work on at the moment. He often enough gave his uncertain assistance in the little menial duties connected with the preparation or removal of the tea-things, and had even been known to dry. Only washing-up he never did. Somehow his vocation rendered him immune from that. He might bring the peat in, fill the lamps, arrange and dust the scanty furniture, but washing-up was not a possibility even. As an author it was considered beneath his dignity altogether, almost improper\u2014it would have shocked the children. Mother could do anything; it was right and natural that she should\u2014-poor soul I But Daddy's profession set him in an enclosure apart, and there were certain things in this servantless menage he could not have done without disgracing the entire family. Washing-up was one; carrying back the empty basket of tea-things to the Pension was another. Daddy wrote books. As Jane Anne put it forcibly and finally once, 'Shakespeare never washed up or carried a tea-basket in the street!'\u2014which the others accepted as a conclusive statement of authority.\n\nAnd, meantime, the two younger children, who knew how to amuse each other for hours together unaided, had left the Magic Horse in its stables for the night\u2014an enormous snow-drift\u2014and were sitting side by side upon the sofa conning a number of Punch some English aunt had sent them. The girl read out the jokes, and her brother pointed with a very dirty finger to the pictures. None of the jokes were seized by either, but Jimbo announced each one with, 'Oh! I say!' and their faces were grave and sometimes awed; and when Jimbo asked, 'But what does THAT mean?' his sister would answer, 'Don't you see, I suppose the cabman meant\u2014' finishing with some explanation very far from truth, whereupon Jimbo, accepting it doubtfully, said nothing, and they turned another page with keen anticipation. They never appealed for outside aid, but enjoyed it in their own dark, mysterious way. And, presently, when the washing-up was finished, and the dusk began to dim the landscape and conceal the ghostly-looking Alps, they retired to the inner bedroom\u2014for this was Saturday and there were no school tasks to be prepared\u2014and there, seated on the big bed in the corner, they opened a book of cantiques used in school, and sang one hymn and song after another, interrupting one another with jokes and laughter and French and English sentences oddly mixed together. Jimbo sang the tune, and Monkey the alto. It was by no means unpleasant to listen to. And, upon the whole, it was a very grave business altogether, graver even than their attitude to \"Punch.\" Jane Anne considered it a foolish waste of time, but she never actually said so. She smiled her grave smile and went her own puzzled way alone.\n\nUsually at this hour the Den presented a very different appearance, the children, with slates and cahiers, working laboriously round the table, Jane Anne and mother knitting or mending furiously, Mere Riquette, the old cat, asleep before the fire, and a general schoolroom air pervading the place. The father, too, tea once finished, would depart for the little room he slept in and used as work-place over at the carpenter's house among the vineyards. He kept his books there, his rows of pipes and towering little heap of half- filled match-boxes, and there he wrote his clever studies that yet were unproductive of much gold and brought him little more than pleasant notices and occasional letters from enthusiastic strangers. It seemed very unremunerative labour indeed, and the family had done well to migrate from Essex into Switzerland, where, besides the excellent schools which cost barely two pounds annually per head, the children learned the language and enjoyed the air of forest and mountain into the bargain. Life, for all that, was a severe problem to them, and the difficulty of making both ends come in sight of each other, let alone meeting, was an ever-present one. That they jogged along so well was due more than the others realised to the untiring and selfless zeal of the Irish mother, a plucky, practical woman, and a noble one if ever such existed on this earth. The way she contrived would fill a book; her economies, so clever they hardly betrayed themselves, would supply a comic annual with material for years, though their comedy involved a pathos of self-denial and sleepless nights that only those similarly placed could have divined. Herself a silent, even inarticulate, woman, she never spoke of them, least of all to her husband, whose mind it was her brave desire to keep free from unnecessary worries for his work. His studies she did not understand, but his stories she read aloud with patient resignation to the children. She marked the place when the reading was interrupted with a crimson paper-knife, and often Jimbo would move it several pages farther on without any of them discovering the gap. Jane Anne, however, who made no pretence of listening to 'Daddy's muddle- stories,' was beginning to realise what went on in Mother's mind underground. She hardly seized the pathos, but she saw and understood enough to help. And she was in many ways a little second edition\u2014a phrase the muddle-stories never knew, alas!\u2014of her mother, with the same unselfishness that held a touch of grandeur, the same clever domestic instinct for contrivance, and the same careful ways that yet sat ill upon a boundless generosity of heart beneath. She loved to be thought older than she was, and she used the longest, biggest, grandest words she could possibly invent or find.\n\nAnd the village life suited them all in all respects, for, while there was no degrading poverty anywhere, all the inhabitants, from the pasteur to the carpenter, knew the exact value of a centime; there was no question of keeping up impossible appearances, but a general frankness with regard to the fundamental values of clothing, food, and education that all shared alike and made no pretence about. Any faintest sign of snobbery, for instance, would have been drummed out of the little mountain hamlet at once by Gygi, the gendarme, who spent more time in his fields and vineyards than in his uniform. And, while every one knew that a title and large estates were a not impossible future for the famille anglaise, it made no slightest difference in the treatment of them, and indeed hardly lent them the flavour of a faintest cachet. They were the English family in La Citadelle, and that was all there was about it.\n\nThe peasants, however, rather pitied the hard-working author who 'had to write all those books,' than paid him honourable tribute for his work. It seemed so unnecessary. Vineyards produced wine a man could drink and pay for, but books\u2014-! Well, results spoke for themselves, and no one who lived in La Citadelle was millionaire.\n\nYet the reputation of John Frederic Campden stood high enough, for all his meagre earnings, and he was an ineffective author chiefly, perhaps, because he missed his audience. Somewhere, somehow, he fell between two stools. And his chagrin was undeniable; for though the poet's heart in him kept all its splendid fires alight, his failure chilled a little the intellect that should fashion them along effective moulds. Now, with advancing years, the increasing cost of the children's growing-up, and the failing of his wife's health a little, the burdens of life were heavier than he cared to think about.\n\nBut this evening, as the group sat round the wide peat fire, cheerful and jolly in the lamplight, there was certainly no sign of sadness. They were like a party of children in which the grave humour of the ever-knitting mother kept the balance true between fun and foolishness.\n\n'Please, Daddy, a story at once,' Jane Anne demanded, 'but a told one, not a read-aloud one. I like a romantic effort best.'\n\nHe fumbled in his pocket for a light, and Jimbo gravely produced a box he had secretly filled with matches already used, collected laboriously from the floor during the week. Then Monkey, full of mischief, came over from the window where she had been watching them with gasps of astonishment no one had heeded through the small end of the opera-glasses. There was a dancing brilliance in her movements, and her eyes, brown like her mother's, sparkled with fun and wickedness. Taking the knee Jimbo left unoccupied, and waiting till the diversion caused by the match-box had subsided, she solemnly placed a bread-crumb in his rather tangled beard.\n\n'Now you're full-dress,' she said, falling instantly so close against him that he could not tickle her, while Mother glanced up a second uncertain whether to criticise the impertinence or let it pass. She let it pass. None of the children had the faintest idea what it meant to be afraid of their father.\n\n'People who waste bread,' he began, 'end by getting so thin themselves that they double up like paper and disappear.'\n\n'But how thin, Daddy?' asked Jane Anne, ever literal to the death.\n\n'And is it romantic or just silly?'\n\nHe was puzzled for a moment what to reply.\n\n'He doesn't know. He's making up,' piped Jimbo.\n\n'I do know,' came the belated explanation, as he put the crumb into the bowl of his extinguished pipe with a solemnity that delighted them, but puzzled Jane Anne, who suggested it would taste 'like toast smelt.' 'People who take bread that doesn't belong to them end by having no dinner\u2014-'\n\n'But that isn't anything about thinness,' interrupted Jinny, still uncomforted. Some one wasted by love was in her mind perhaps.\n\n'It is, child, because they get so frightfully thin,' he went on, 'that they end by getting thinner than the thin end of a wedge.'\n\nThe eyes of Mother twinkled, but the children still stared, waiting. They had never heard of this phrase about the wedge. Indeed Jane Anne shared with Jimbo total ignorance of the word at all. Like the audience who read his books, or rather ought to have read them, they expected something different, yet still hoped.\n\n'It's a rhyme, and not a story though,' he added, anticipating perhaps their possible disappointment. For the recent talk about expenses had chilled his imagination too much for an instantaneous story, whereas rhymes came ever to him easily.\n\n\u2003'All right! Let's have it anyhow,' came the verdict in sentences of\n\n\u2003French and English. And in the breathless pause that followed, even\n\n\u2003Mother looking up expectantly from her busy fingers, was heard this\n\n\u2003strange fate of the Thin Child who stole another's bread-crumb:\u2014\n\n\u2003He then grew thinner than the thin,\n\n\u2003The thin end of the wedge;\n\n\u2003He grew so pitifully thin\n\n\u2003It set his teeth on edge;\n\n\u2003But the edge it set his teeth upon\n\n\u2003Was worse than getting thinner,\n\n\u2003For it was the edge of appetite,\n\n\u2003And his teeth were in no dinner!\n\nThere was a deep silence. Mother looked as though she expected more,\u2014 the good part yet to come. The rhyme fell flat as a pancake, for of course the children did not understand it. Its nonsense, clever enough, escaped them. True nonsense is for grown-ups only. Jane Anne stared steadily at him with a puzzled frown. Her face wore an expression like a moth.\n\n'Thank you, Daddy, very much,' she said, certain as ever that the fault if any was her own, since all that Daddy said and did was simply splendid. Whereupon the others fairly screamed with delight, turning attention thereby from the dismal failure.\n\n'She doesn't understand it, but she's always so polite!' cried Monkey.\n\nHer mother quickly intervened. 'Never mind, Jane Anne,' she soothed her, lest her feelings should be ruffled; 'you shall never want a dinner, lovey; and when all Monkey's teeth are gone you'll still be able to munch away at something.'\n\nBut Jinny's feelings were never ruffled exactly, only confused and puzzled. She was puzzled now. Her confidence in her father's splendour was unshakable.\n\n'And, anyhow, Mother, you'll never be a thin wedge,' she answered, meaning to show her gratitude by a compliment. She joined herself as loudly as anybody in the roar that followed this sally. Obviously, she had said a clever and amusing thing, though it was not clear to her why it was so. Her flushed face was very happy; it even wore a touch of proud superiority. Her talents were domestic rather than intellectual.\n\n'Excuse me, Daddy,' she said gravely, in a pause that followed presently. 'But what is a wedge, exactly? And I think I'd like to copy that poetry in my book, please.' For she kept a book in which his efforts were neatly inscribed in a round copy-book handwriting, and called by Monkey 'The Muddle Book.' There his unappreciated doggerels found fame, though misunderstood most of all by the affectionate child who copied them so proudly.\n\nThe book was brought at once. Her father wrote out the nonsense verse on his knee and made a funny little illustration in the margin. 'Oh, I say!' said Jimbo, watching him, while Monkey, lapsing into French, contributed with her usual impudence, 'Pas tant mal!' They all loved the illustrations.\n\nThe general interest, then, as the way is with children, puppies, and other young Inconsistencies, centred upon the contents of the book. They eagerly turned the pages, as though they did not know its contents by heart already. They praised for the hundredth time the drawing of the Muddle Animal who...\n\n\u2003Hung its hopes upon a nail\n\n\u2003Or laid them on the shelf;\n\n\u2003Then pricked its conscience with its tail,\n\n\u2003And sat upon itself.\n\nThey looked also with considerable approval upon the drawings and descriptions of the Muddle Man whose manners towards the rest of the world were cool; because\n\n\u2003He saw things with his naked eye,\n\n\u2003That's why his glance was chilly.\n\nBut the explanation of the disasters he caused everywhere by his disagreeable sharpness of speech and behaviour did not amuse them. They observed as usual that it was 'too impossible'; the drawings, moreover, did not quite convince:\u2014\n\n\u2003So cutting was his speaking tone\n\n\u2003Each phrase snipped off a button,\n\n\u2003So sharp his words, they have been known\n\n\u2003To carve a leg of mutton;\n\n\u2003He shaved himself with sentences,\n\n\u2003And when he went to dances,\n\n\u2003He made\u2014Oh shocking tendencies!-\n\n\u2003Deep holes with piercing glances.\n\nBut on the last page the Muddle Man behaved so badly, was so positively indecent in his conduct, that he was persuaded to disappear altogether; and his manner of extinguishing himself in the illustration delighted the children far more than the verse whose fun again escaped them:\u2014\n\n\u2003They observed he was indecent,\n\n\u2003But he said it wasn't true,\n\n\u2003For he pronounced it 'in descent'\u2014\n\n\u2003Then disappeared from view!\n\nMother's alleged 'second sight' was also attributed to the fact that she 'looked twice before she leaped'\u2014and the drawing of that leap never failed to produce high spirits. For her calm and steady way of walking\u2014sailing\u2014had earned her the name of the frigate\u2014and this was also illustrated, with various winds, all coloured, driving her along.\n\nThe time passed happily; some one turned the lamp out, and Daddy, regardless of expense\u2014he had been grumbling about it ten minutes before\u2014heaped on the bricks of peat. Riquette, a bit of movable furniture without which the room seemed incomplete, deftly slipped in between the circle of legs and feet, and curled up upon Jinny's lap. Her snoring, a wheezy noise that made Jimbo wonder 'why it didn't scrape her,' was as familiar as the ticking of the clock. Old Mere Riquette knew her rights. And she exacted them. Jinny's lap was one of these. She had a face like an old peasant woman, with a curious snub nose and irregular whiskers that betrayed recklessly the advance of age. Her snores and gentle purring filled the room now. A hush came over the whole party. At seven o'clock they must all troop over to the Pension des Glycines for supper, but there was still an hour left. And it was a magic hour. Sighs were audible here and there, as the exhausted children settled deeper into their chairs.\n\nA change came over the atmosphere. Would nothing exciting ever happen?\n\n'The stars are out,' said Jimbo in his soft, gentle little voice, turning his head towards the windows. The others looked too\u2014all except Mother, whose attitude suggested suspiciously that she slept, and Riquette, who most certainly did sleep. Above the rampart of the darkened Alps swung up the army of the stars. The brighter ones were reflected in the lake. The sky was crowded. Tiny, golden pathways slid down the purple walls of the night. 'Some one in heaven is letting down the star-ladders\u2026' he whispered.\n\nJimbo's sentence had marked the change of key. Enchantment was abroad \u2014the Saturday evening spell was in the room.\n\nAnd suddenly a new enormous thing stirred in their father's heart. Whence it came, or why, he knew not. Like a fire it rose in him deep down, from very far away, delightful. Was it an inspiration coming, he wondered? And why did Jimbo use that phrase of beauty about star- ladders? How did it come into the mind of a little boy? The phrase opened a new channel in the very depths of him, thence climbing up and outwards, towards the brain\u2026. And, with a thrill of curious high wonder, he let it come. It was large and very splendid. It came with a rush\u2014as of numerous whispering voices that flocked about him, urging some exquisite, distant sweetness in him to unaccustomed delivery. A softness of ten thousand stars trooped down into his blood. Some constellation like the Pleiades had flung their fiery tackle across the dusk upon his mind. His thought turned golden\u2026." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 167", + "text": "\u2003We are the stars which sing.\n\n\u2003We sing with our light.\n\n\u2003We are the birds of fire.\n\n\u2003We fly across the heaven.\n\n\u2003Our light is a star.\n\n\u2003We make a road for Spirits,\n\n\u2003A road for the Great Spirit.\n\n\u2003Among us are three hunters\n\n\u2003Who chase a bear:\n\n\u2003There never was a time\n\n\u2003When they were not hunting;\n\n\u2003We look down on the mountains.\n\n\u2003This is the Song of the Mountains.\n\n\u2003Red Indian (Algonquin) Lyric.\n\n\u2014Translator, J. D. PRINCE.\n\n'A star-story, please,' the boy repeated, cuddling up. They all drew, where possible, nearer. Their belief in their father's powers, rarely justified, was pathetic. Each time they felt sure he would make the adventures seem real, yet somehow he never quite did. They were aware that it was invention only. These things he told about he had not experienced himself. For they badly needed a leader, these children; and Daddy just missed filling the position. He was too 'clever,' his imagination neither wild nor silly enough, for children. And he felt it. He threw off rhymes and stories for them in a spirit of bravado rather\u2014an expression of disappointment. Yet there was passion in them too\u2014concealed. The public missed the heart he showed them in his books in the same way.\n\n'The stars are listening\u2026.' Jimbo's voice sounded far away, almost outside the window. Mother now snored audibly. Daddy took his courage in both hands and made the plunge.\n\n'You know about the Star Cavern, I suppose\u2014?' he began. It was the sudden idea that had shot into him, he knew not whence.\n\n'No.'\n\n'Never heard of it.'\n\n'Where is it, please?'\n\n'Don't interrupt. That wasn't a real question. Stories always begin like that.' It was Jane Anne who thus finally commanded order.\n\n'It's not a story exactly, but a sort of adventure,' he continued, hesitating yet undaunted. 'Star Caverns are places where the unused starlight gathers. There are numbers of them about the world, and one I know of is up here in our mountains,' he pointed through the north wall towards the pine-clad Jura, 'not far from the slopes of Boudry where the forests dip towards the precipices of the Areuse\u2014' The phrase ran oddly through him like an inspiration, or the beginning of a song he once had heard somewhere.\n\n'Ah, beyond le Vallon Vert? I know,' whispered Jimbo, his blue eyes big already with wonder.\n\n'Towards the precipices on the farther side,' came the explanation, 'where there are those little open spaces among the trees.'\n\n'Tell us more exactly, please.'\n\n'Star-rays, you see,' he evaded them, 'are visible in the sky on their way to us, but once they touch the earth they disappear and go out like a candle. Unless a chance puddle, or a pair of eyes happens to be about to catch them, you can't tell where they've gone to. They go really into these Star Caverns.'\n\n'But in a puddle or a pair of eyes they'd be lost just the same,' came the objection.\n\n'On the contrary,' he said; 'changed a little\u2014increased by reflection\u2014but not lost.'\n\nThere was a pause; the children stared, expectantly. Here was mystery.\n\n'See how they mirror themselves whenever possible,' he went on, 'doubling their light and beauty by giving themselves away! What is a puddle worth until a Star's wee golden face shines out of it? And then\u2014what gold can buy it? And what are your eyes worth until a star has flitted in and made a nest there?'\n\n'Oh, like that, you mean\u2014!' exclaimed Jane Anne, remembering that the wonderful women in the newspaper stories always had 'starry eyes.'\n\n'Like that, yes.' Daddy continued. 'Their light puts sympathy in you, and only sympathy makes you lovely and\u2014and\u2014'\n\nHe stopped abruptly. He hesitated a moment. He was again most suddenly aware that this strange idea that was born in him came from somewhere else, almost from some one else. It was not his own idea, nor had he captured it completely yet. Like a wandering little inspiration from another mind it seemed passing through him on uncertain, feathery feet. He had suddenly lost it again. Thought wandered. He stared at Jimbo, for Jimbo somehow seemed the channel.\n\nThe children waited, then talked among themselves. Daddy so often got muddled and inattentive in this way. They were accustomed to it, expected it even.\n\n'I always love being out at night,' said Monkey, her eyes very bright; 'it sort of excites and makes me soft and happy.'\n\n'Excuse me, Daddy, but have you been inside one? What's it like? The Cave, I mean?' Jinny stuck to the point. She had not yet travelled beyond it.\n\n'It all collects in there and rises to the top like cream,' he went on, 'and has a little tiny perfume like wild violets, and by walking through it you get clothed and covered with it, and come out again all soft-shiny\u2014'\n\n'What's soft-shiny, please?'\n\n'Something half-primrose and half-moon. You're like a star\u2014'\n\n'But how\u2014like a star?'\n\n'Why,' he explained gently, yet a little disappointed that his adventure was not instantly accepted, 'you shine, and your eyes twinkle, and everybody likes you and thinks you beautiful\u2014'\n\n'Even if you're not?' inquired Jinny.\n\n'But you are\u2014'\n\n'Couldn't we go there now? Mother's fast asleep!' suggested Jimbo in a mysterious whisper. He felt a curious excitement. This, he felt, was more real than usual. He glanced at Monkey's eyes a moment.\n\n'Another time,' said Daddy, already half believing in the truth of his adventure, yet not quite sure of himself. 'It collects, and collects, and collects. Sometimes, here and there, a little escapes and creeps out into yellow flowers like dandelions and buttercups. A little, too, slips below the ground and fills up empty cracks between the rocks. Then it hardens, gets dirty, and men dig it out again and call it gold. And some slips out by the roof\u2014though very, very little\u2014and you see it flashing back to find the star it belongs to, and people with telescopes call it a shooting star, and\u2014' It came pouring through him again.\n\n'But when you're in it\u2014in the Cavern,' asked Monkey impatiently; 'what happens then?'\n\n'Well,' he answered with conviction, 'it sticks to you. It sticks to the eyes most, but a little also to the hair and voice, and nobody loves you unless you've got a bit of it somewhere on you. A girl, before any one falls in love with her, has always been there, and people who write stories and music and things\u2014all have got some on their fingers or else nobody cares for what they write\u2014'\n\n'Oh, Daddy, then why don't you go there and get sticky all over with it?' Jinny burst out with sudden eagerness, ever thinking of others before herself. 'I'll go and get some for you\u2014lots and lots.'\n\n'I have been there,' he answered slowly, 'once long, long ago. But it didn't stick very well with me. It wipes off so quickly in the day- time. The sunlight kills it.'\n\n'But you got some!' the child insisted. 'And you've got it still, I mean?'\n\n'A little, perhaps, a very little.'\n\nAll felt the sadness in his voice without understanding it. There was a moment's pause. Then the three of them spoke in a single breath\u2014\n\n'Please show it to us\u2014now,' they cried.\n\n'I'll try,' he said, after a slight hesitation, 'but\u2014er\u2014it's only a rhyme, you see'; and then began to murmur very low for fear of waking Mother: he almost sang it to them. The flock of tiny voices whispered it to his blood. He merely uttered what he heard:\u2014\n\n\u2003Starlight\n\n\u2003Runs along my mind\n\n\u2003And rolls into a ball of golden silk\u2014\n\n\u2003A little skein\n\n\u2003Of tangled glory;\n\n\u2003And when I want to get it out again\n\n\u2003To weave the pattern of a verse or story,\n\n\u2003It must unwind.\n\n\u2003It then gets knotted, looped, and all up-jumbled,\n\n\u2003And long before I get it straight again, unwumbled,\n\n\u2003To make my verse or story,\n\n\u2003The interfering sun has risen\n\n\u2003And burst with passion through my silky prison\n\n\u2003To melt it down in dew,\n\n\u2003Like so much spider-gossamer or fairy-cotton.\n\n\u2003Don't you?\n\n\u2003I call it rotten!\n\nA hushed silence followed. Eyes sought the fire. No one spoke for several minutes. There was a faint laughter, quickly over, but containing sighs. Only Jinny stared straight into her father's face, expecting more, though prepared at any stage to explode with unfeigned admiration.\n\n'But that \"don't you\" comes in the wrong place,' she objected anxiously. 'It ought to come after \"I call it rotten\"\u2014-' She was determined to make it seem all right.\n\n'No, Jinny,' he answered gravely, 'you must always put others before yourself. It's the first rule in life and literature.'\n\nShe dropped her eyes to the fire like the others. 'Ah,' she said, 'I see; of course.' The long word blocked her mind like an avalanche, even while she loved it.\n\n'I call it rotten,' murmured Monkey under her breath. Jimbo made no audible remark. He crossed his little legs and folded his arms. He was not going to express an opinion until he understood better what it was all about. He began to whisper to his sister. Another longish pause intervened. It was Jinny again who broke it.\n\n'And \"wumbled,\"' she asked solemnly as though the future of everybody depended on it, 'what is wumbled, really? There's no such thing, is there?\u2014In life, I mean?' She meant to add 'and literature,' but the word stopped her like a hedge.\n\n'It's what happens to a verse or story I lose in that way,' he explained, while Jimbo and Monkey whispered more busily still among themselves about something else. 'The bit of starlight that gets lost and doesn't stick, you see\u2014ineffective.'\n\n'But there is no such word, really,' she urged, determined to clear up all she could. 'It rhymes\u2014that's all.'\n\n'And there is no verse or story,' he replied with a sigh. 'There was\u2014that's all.'\n\nThere was another pause. Jimbo and Monkey looked round suspiciously. They ceased their mysterious whispering. They clearly did not wish the others to know what their confabulation was about.\n\n'That's why your books are wumbled, is it?' she inquired, proud of an explanation that excused him, yet left his glory somehow unimpaired. Her face was a map of puzzled wrinkles.\n\n'Precisely, Jinny. You see, the starlight never gets through properly into my mind. It lies there in a knot. My plot is wumbled. I can't disentangle it quite, though the beauty lies there right enough\u2014-'\n\n'Oh, yes,' she interrupted, 'the beauty lies there still.' She got up suddenly and gave him a kiss.\n\n'Never mind, Daddy,' she whispered. 'I'll get it straight for you one day. I'll unwumble it. I'll do it like a company promoter, I will.' She used words culled from newspapers.\n\n'Thank you, child,' he smiled, returning her kiss; 'I'm sure you will. Only, you'd better let me know when you're coming. It might be dangerous to my health otherwise.'\n\nShe took it with perfect seriousness. 'Oh, but, excuse me, I'll come when you're asleep,' she told him, so low that the others could not hear. 'I'll come to you when I'm dreaming. I dream all night like a busy Highlander.'\n\n'That's right,' he whispered, giving her a hug. 'Come when I'm asleep and all the stars are out; and bring a comb and a pair of scissors\u2014-'\n\n'And a hay-rake,' added Monkey, overhearing.\n\nEverybody laughed. The children cuddled up closer to him. They pitied him. He had failed again, though his failure was as much a pleasure as his complete success. They sat on his knees and played with him to make up for it, repeating bits of the rhyme they could remember. Then Mother and Riquette woke up together, and the spell was broken. The party scattered. Only Jimbo and his younger sister, retiring into a corner by themselves, continued their mysterious confabulation. Their faces were flushed with excitement. There was a curious animation in their eyes\u2014though this may have been borrowed from the embers of the peat. Or, it may have been the stars, for they were close to the open window. Both seemed soft-shiny somehow. They, certainly, were not wumbled.\n\nAnd several hours later, when they had returned from supper at the Pension and lay in bed, exchanging their last mysterious whispers across the darkness, Monkey said in French\u2014\n\n'Jimbo, I'm going to find that Cavern where the star stuff lies,' and Jimbo answered audaciously, 'I've already been there.'\n\n'Will you show me the way, then?' she asked eagerly, and rather humbly.\n\n'Perhaps,' he answered from beneath the bedclothes, then added, 'Of course I will.' He merely wished to emphasise the fact that he was leader.\n\n'Sleep quickly, then, and join me\u2014over there.' It was their game to believe they joined in one another's dreams.\n\nThey slept. And the last thing that reached them from the outer world was their mother's voice calling to them her customary warning: that the ramoneur was already in the chimney and that unless they were asleep in five minutes he would come and catch them by the tail. For the Sweep they looked upon with genuine awe. His visits to the village\u2014once in the autumn and once in the spring\u2014were times of shivery excitement.\n\nPresently Mother rose and sailed on tiptoe round the door to peep. And a smile spread softly over her face as she noted the characteristic evidences of the children beside each bed. Monkey's clothes lay in a scattered heap of confusion, half upon the floor, but Jimbo's garments were folded in a precise, neat pile upon the chair. They looked ready to be packed into a parcel. His habits were so orderly. His school blouse hung on the back, the knickerbockers were carefully folded, and the black belt lay coiled in a circle on his coat and what he termed his 'westkit.' Beneath the chair the little pair of very dirty boots stood side by side. Mother stooped and kissed the round plush-covered head that just emerged from below the mountainous duvet. He looked like a tiny radish lying in a big ploughed field.\n\nThen, hunting for a full five minutes before she discovered the shoes of Monkey, one beneath the bed and the other inside her petticoat, she passed on into the little kitchen where she cleaned and polished both pairs, and then replaced them by their respective owners. This done, she laid the table in the outer room for their breakfast at half-past six, saw that their school-books and satchels were in order, gave them each a little more unnecessary tucking-up and a kiss so soft it could not have waked a butterfly, and then returned to her chair before the fire where she resumed the mending of a pile of socks and shirts, blouses and stockings, to say nothing of other indescribable garments, that lay in a formidable heap upon the big round table.\n\nThis was her nightly routine. Sometimes her husband joined her. Then they talked the children over until midnight, discussed expenses that threatened to swamp them, yet turned out each month 'just manageable somehow' and finally made a cup of cocoa before retiring, she to her self-made bed upon the sofa, and he to his room in the carpenter's house outside the village. But sometimes he did not come. He remained in the Pension to smoke and chat with the Russian and Armenian students, who attended daily lectures in the town, or else went over to his own quarters to work at the book he was engaged on at the moment. To-night he did not come. A light in an attic window, just visible above the vineyards, showed that he was working.\n\nThe room was very still; only the click of the knitting needles or the soft noise of the collapsing peat ashes broke the stillness. Riquette snored before the fire less noisily than usual.\n\n'He's working very late to-night,' thought Mother, noticing the lighted window. She sighed audibly; mentally she shrugged her shoulders. Daddy had long ago left that inner preserve of her heart where she completely understood him. Sympathy between them, in the true sense of the word, had worn rather thin.\n\n'I hope he won't overtire himself,' she added, but this was the habit of perfunctory sympathy. She might equally have said, 'I wish he would do something to bring in a little money instead of earning next to nothing and always complaining about the expenses.'\n\nOutside the stars shone brightly through the fresh spring night, where April turned in her sleep, dreaming that May was on the way to wake her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 168", + "text": "\u2003Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,\n\n\u2003Star-inwrought!\n\n\u2003Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day;\n\n\u2003Kiss her until she be wearied out,\n\n\u2003Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land,\n\n\u2003Touching all with thine opiate wand-\n\n\u2003Come, long sought!\n\n\u2014To Night, SHELLEY.\n\nNow, cats are curious creatures, and not without reason, perhaps, are they adored by some, yet regarded with suspicious aversion by others. They know so much they never dare to tell, while affecting that they know nothing and are innocent. For it is beyond question that several hours later, when the village and the Citadelle were lost in slumber, Mere Riquette stirred stealthily where she lay upon the hearth, opened her big green eyes, and\u2014began to wash.\n\nBut this toilette was pretence in case any one was watching. Really, she looked about her all the time. Her sleep also had been that sham sleep of cats behind which various plots and plans mature\u2014a questionable business altogether. The washing, as soon as she made certain no one saw her, gave place to another manoeuvre. She stretched as though her bones were of the very best elastic. Gathering herself together, she arched her round body till it resembled a toy balloon straining to rise against the pull of four thin ropes that held it tightly to the ground. Then, unable to float off through the air, as she had expected, she slowly again subsided. The balloon deflated. She licked her chops, twitched her whiskers, curled her tail neatly round her two front paws\u2014and grinned complacently. She waited before that extinguished fire of peat as though she had never harboured a single evil purpose in all her days. 'A saucer of milk,' she gave the world to understand, c is the only thing I care about.' Her smile of innocence and her attitude of meek simplicity proclaimed this to the universe at large. 'That's me,' she told the darkness, 'and I don't care a bit who knows it.' She looked so sleek and modest that a mouse need not have feared her. But she did not add, 'That's what I mean the world to think,' for this belonged to the secret life cats never talk about. Those among humans might divine it who could, and welcome. They would be admitted. But the rest of the world were regarded with mere tolerant disdain. They bored.\n\nThen, satisfied that she was unobserved, Mere Riquette abandoned all further pretence, and stalked silently about the room. The starlight just made visible her gliding shadow, as first she visited the made-up sofa-bed where the exhausted mother snored mildly beneath the book- shelves, and then, after a moment's keen inspection, turned back and went at a quicker pace into the bedroom where the children slept. There the night-light made her movements easily visible. The cat was excited. Something bigger than any mouse was coming into her life just now.\n\nRiquette then witnessed a wonderful and beautiful thing, yet witnessed it obviously not for the first time. Her manner suggested no surprise. 'It's like a mouse, only bigger,' her expression said. And by this she meant that it was natural. She accepted it as right and proper.\n\nFor Monkey got out of herself as out of a case. She slipped from her body as a sword slips from its sheath, yet the body went on breathing in the bed just as before; the turned-up nose with the little platform at its tip did not cease from snoring, and the lids remained fastened tightly over the brilliant brown eyes, buttoned down so securely for the night. Two plaits of hair lay on the pillow; another rose and fell with the regular breathing of her little bosom. But Monkey herself stood softly shining on the floor within a paw's length.\n\nRiquette blinked her eyes and smiled complacently. Jimbo was close behind her, even brighter than his sister, with eyes like stars.\n\nThe visions of cats are curious things, no doubt, and few may guess their furry, silent pathways as they go winding along their length of inconsequent development. For, softer than any mouse, the children glided swiftly into the next room where Mother slept beneath the book- shelves\u2014two shining little radiant figures, hand in hand. They tried for a moment to pull out Mother too, but found her difficult to move. Somewhere on the way she stuck. They gave it up.\n\nTurning towards the window that stood open beyond the head of the sofa-bed, they rose up lightly and floated through it out into the starry night. Riquette leaped like a silent shadow after them, but before she reached the roof of red-brown tiles that sloped down to the yard, Jimbo and Monkey were already far away. She strained her big green eyes in vain, seeing nothing but the tops of the plane trees, thick with tiny coming leaves, the sweep of vines and sky, and the tender, mothering night beyond. She pattered softly back again, gave a contemptuous glance at Mother in passing, and jumped up at once into the warm nest of sheets that gaped invitingly between the shoulder of Jimbo's body and the pillow. She shaped the opening to her taste, kneading it with both front paws, turned three times round, and then lay down. Curled in a ball, her nose buried between her back feet, she was asleep in a single moment. Her whiskers ceased to quiver.\n\nThe children were tugging at Daddy now over in the carpenter's house. His bed was short, and his body lay in a kind of knot. On the chair beside it were books and papers, and a candle that had burnt itself out. A pencil poked its nose out among the sheets, and it was clear he had fallen asleep while working.\n\n'Wumbled!' sighed Jimbo, pointing to the scribbled notes. But Monkey was busy pulling him out, and did not answer. Then Jimbo helped her. And Daddy came out magnificently\u2014as far as the head\u2014then stuck like Mother. They pulled in vain. Something in his head prevented complete release.\n\n'En voila un!' laughed Monkey. 'Quel homme!' It was her natural speech, the way she talked at school. 'It's a pity,' said Jimbo with a little sigh. They gave it up, watching him slide slowly back again. The moment he was all in they turned towards the open window. Hand in hand they sailed out over the sleeping village. And from almost every house they heard a sound of weeping. There were sighs and prayers and pleadings. All slept and dreamed\u2014dreamed of their difficulties and daily troubles. Released in sleep, their longings rose to heaven unconsciously, automatically as it were. Even the cheerful and the happy yearned a little, even the well-to-do whom the world judged so secure\u2014these, too, had their burdens that found release, and so perhaps relief in sleep.\n\n'Come, and we'll help them,' Jimbo said eagerly. 'We can change all that a little. Oh, I say, what a lot we've got to do to-night.'\n\n'Je crois bien,' laughed Monkey, turning somersaults for joy as she followed him. Her tendency to somersaults in this condition was irresistible, and a source of worry to Jimbo, who classed it among the foolish habits of what he called 'womans and things like that!'\n\nAnd the sound came loudest from the huddled little building by the Church, the Pension where they had their meals, and where Jinny had her bedroom. But Jinny, they found, was already out, off upon adventures of her own. A solitary child, she always went her independent way in everything. They dived down into the first floor, and there, in a narrow bedroom whose windows stood open upon the wistaria branches, they found Madame Jequier\u2014'Tante Jeanne,' as they knew the sympathetic, generous creature best, sister-in-law of the Postmaster\u2014not sleeping like the others, but wide awake and praying vehemently in a wicker-chair that creaked with every nervous movement that she made. All about her were bits of paper covered with figures, bills, calculations, and the rest.\n\n'We can't get at her,' said Monkey, her laughter hushed for a moment.\n\n'There's too much sadness. Come on! Let's go somewhere else.'\n\nBut Jimbo held her tight. 'Let's have a try. Listen, you silly, can't you!'\n\nThey stood for several minutes, listening together, while the brightness of their near approach seemed to change the woman's face a little. She looked up and listened as though aware of something near her.\n\n'She's praying for others as well as herself,' explained Jimbo.\n\n'Ca vaut la peine alors,' said Monkey. And they drew cautiously nearer\u2026. But, soon desisting, the children were far away, hovering about the mountains. They had no steadiness as yet.\n\n'Starlight,' Jimbo was singing to himself, 'runs along my mind.'\n\n'You're all up-jumbled,' Monkey interrupted him with a laugh, turning repeated somersaults till she looked like a catherine wheel of brightness.\n\n'\u2026 the pattern of my verse or story\u2026' continued Jimbo half aloud, '\u2026 a little ball of tangled glory\u2026.'\n\n'You must unwind!' cried Monkey. 'Look out, it's the sun! It'll melt us into dew!'\n\nBut it was not the sun. Out there beyond them, towards the purple woods still sleeping, appeared a draught of starbeams like a broad, deep river of gold. The rays, coming from all corners of the sky, wove a pattern like a network.\n\n'Jimbo!' gasped the girl, 'it's like a fishing-net. We've never noticed it before.'\n\n'It is a net,' he answered, standing still as a stone, though he had not thought of it himself until she said so. He instantly dressed himself, as he always translated il se dressait in his funny Franco- English. Deja and comme ca, too, appeared everywhere. 'It is a net like that. I saw it already before, once.'\n\n'Monkey,' he added, 'do you know what it really is? Oh, I say!'\n\n'Of course I do.' She waited nevertheless for him to tell her, and he was too gallant just then in his proud excitement for personal exultation.\n\n'It's the Star Cave\u2014it's Daddy's Star Cave. He said it was up here \"where the Boudry forests dip below the cliffs towards the Areuse.\"\u2026' He remembered the very words.\n\nHis sister forgot to turn her usual somersaults. Wonder caught them both. 'A pair of eyes, then, or a puddle! Quick!' she cried in a delighted whisper. She looked about her everywhere at once, making confused and rushing little movements of helplessness. 'Quick, quick!'\n\n'No,' said Jimbo, with a man's calm decision, 'it's when they can't find eyes or puddles that they go in there. Don't interfere.'\n\nShe admitted her mistake. This was no time to press a petty advantage.\n\n'I'll shut my eyes while you sponge up the puddles with a wedge of moss,' she began. But her brother cut her short. He was very sure of himself. He was leader beyond all question.\n\n'You follow me,' he commanded firmly, 'and you'll get in somehow.\n\nWe'll get all sticky with it. Then we'll come out again and help those crying people like Tante Jeanne and\u2026.' A list of names poured out.\n\n'They'll think us wonderful\u2014-'\n\n'We shall be wonderful,' whispered Monkey, obeying, yet peeping with one big brown eye.\n\nThe cataract of starbeams rushed past them in a flood of gold.\n\nThey moved towards an opening in the trees where the limestone cliffs ran into rugged shapes with pinnacles and towers. They found the entrance in the rocks. Water dripped over it, making little splashes. The lime had run into hanging pillars and a fringe of pointed fingers. Past this the river of starlight poured its brilliant golden stream. Its soft brightness shone yellow as a shower of primrose dust.\n\n'Look out! The Interfering Sun!' gasped Monkey again, awed and confused with wonder. 'We shall melt in dew or fairy cotton. Don't you?\u2026 I call it rotten\u2026!'\n\n'You'll unwind all right,' he told her, trying hard to keep his head and justify his leadership. He, too, remembered phrases here and there. 'I'm a bit knotted, looped, and all up-jumbled too, inside. But the sun is miles away still. We're both soft-shiny still.'\n\nThey stooped to enter, plunging their bodies to the neck in the silent flood of sparkling amber.\n\nThen happened a strange thing. For how could they know, these two adventurous, dreaming children, that Thought makes images which, regardless of space, may flash about the world, and reach minds anywhere that are sweetly tuned to their acceptance?\n\n'What's that? Look out! Gare! Hold tight!' In his sudden excitement Jimbo mixed questions with commands. He had caught her by the hand.\n\nThere was a new sound in the heavens above them\u2014a roaring, rushing sound. Like the thunder of a train, it swept headlong through the sky.\n\nVoices were audible too.\n\n'There's something enormous caught in the star-net,' he whispered.\n\n'It's Mother, then,' said Monkey.\n\nThey both looked up, trembling with anticipation. They saw a big, dark body like a thundercloud hovering above their heads. It had a line of brilliant eyes. From one end issued a column of white smoke. It settled slowly downwards, moving softly yet with a great air of bustle and importance. Was this the arrival of a dragon, or Mother coming after them? The blood thumped in their ears, their hands felt icy. The thing dipped slowly through the trees. It settled, stopped, began to purr.\n\n'It's a railway train,' announced Jimbo finally with authority that only just disguised amazement. 'And the passengers are getting out.'\n\nWith a sigh of immense relief he said it. 'You're not in any danger,\n\nMonkey,' he added.\n\nHe drew his sister back quickly a dozen steps, and they hid behind a giant spruce to watch. The scene that followed was like the holiday spectacle in a London Terminus, except that the passengers had no luggage. The other difference was that they seemed intent upon some purpose not wholly for their own advantage. It seemed, too, they had expected somebody to meet them, and were accordingly rather confused and disappointed. They looked about them anxiously.\n\n'Last stop; all get out here!' a Guard was crying in a kind of pleasant singing voice. 'Return journey begins five minutes before the Interfering Sun has risen.'\n\nJimbo pinched his sister's arm till she nearly screamed. 'Hear that?' he whispered. But Monkey was too absorbed in the doings of the busy passengers to listen or reply. For the first passenger that hurried past her was no less a person than\u2014Jane Anne! Her face was not puzzled now. It was like a little sun. She looked utterly happy and contented, as though she had found the place and duties that belonged to her.\n\n'Jinny!' whispered the two in chorus. But Jane Anne did not so much as turn her head. She slipped past them like a shaft of light. Her hair fell loose to her waist. She went towards the entrance. The flood rose to her neck.\n\n'Oh! there she is!' cried a voice. 'She travelled with us instead of coming to meet us.' Monkey smiled. She knew her sister's alien, unaccountable ways only too well.\n\nThe train had settled down comfortably enough between the trees, and lay there breathing out a peaceable column of white smoke, panting a little as it did so. The Guard went down the length of it, turning out the lamps; and from the line of open doors descended the stream of passengers, all hurrying to the entrance of the cave. Each one stopped a moment in front of the Guard, as though to get a ticket clipped, but instead of producing a piece of pasteboard, or the Guard a punching instrument, they seemed to exchange a look together. Each one stared into his face, nodded, and passed on.\n\n'What blue eyes they've got,' thought Monkey to herself, as she peered into each separate face as closely as she dared. 'I wish mine were like that!' The wind, sighing through the tree-tops, sent a shower of dew about their feet. The children started. 'What a lovely row!' Jimbo whispered. It was like footsteps of a multitude on the needles. The fact that it was so clearly audible showed how softly all these passengers moved about their business.\n\nThe Guard, they noticed then, called out the names of some of them; perhaps of all, only in the first excitement they did not catch them properly. And each one went on at once towards the entrance of the cave and disappeared in the pouring river of gold.\n\nThe light-footed way they moved, their swiftness as of shadows, the way they tossed their heads and flung their arms about\u2014all this made the children think it was a dance. Monkey felt her own legs twitch to join them, but her little brother's will restrained her.\n\n'If you turn a somersault here,' he said solemnly, 'we're simply lost.' He said it in French; the long word had not yet dawned upon his English consciousness. They watched with growing wonder then, and something like terror seized them as they saw a man go past them with a very familiar look about him. He went in a cloud of sparkling, black dust that turned instantly into shining gold when it reached the yellow river from the stars. His face was very dirty.\n\n'It's not the ramoneur,' whispered Jimbo, uncertain whether the shiver he felt was his sister's or his own. 'He's much too springy.' Sweeps always had a limp.\n\nFor the figure shot along with a running, dancing leap as though he moved on wires. He carried long things over his shoulders. He flashed into the stream like a shadow swallowed by a flame. And as he went, they caught such merry words, half sung, half chanted:\u2014,\n\n'I'll mix their smoke with hope and mystery till they see dreams and faces in their fires\u2014-' and he was gone.\n\nBehind him came a couple arm in arm, their movements equally light and springy, but the one behind dragging a little, as though lazily. They wore rags and torn old hats and had no collars to their shirts. The lazy one had broken boots through which his toes showed plainly. The other who dragged him had a swarthy face like the gypsies who once had camped near their house in Essex long, oh, ever so long ago.\n\n'I'll get some too,' the slow one sang huskily as he stumbled along with difficulty 'but there's never any hurry. I'll fill their journeys with desire and make adventure call to them with love\u2014-'\n\n'And I,' the first one answered, 'will sprinkle all their days with the sweetness of the moors and open fields, till houses choke their lungs and they come out to learn the stars by name. Ho, ho!'\n\nThey dipped, with a flying leap, into the rushing flood. Their rags and filthy slouched hats flashed radiant as they went, all bathed and cleaned in glory.\n\nOthers came after them in a continuous stream, some too outlandish to be named or recognised, others half familiar, very quick and earnest, but merry at the same time, and all intent upon bringing back something for the world. It was not for themselves alone, or for their own enjoyment that they hurried in so eagerly.\n\n'How splendid! What a crew!' gasped Monkey. 'Quel spectacle!' And she began a somersault.\n\n'Be quiet, will you?' was the rejoinder, as a figure who seemed to have a number of lesser faces within his own big one of sunburned brown, tumbled by them somewhat heavily and left a smell of earth and leaves and potting-sheds about the trees behind him. 'Won't my flowers just shine and dazzle 'em? And won't the dead leaves crackle as I burn 'em up!' he chuckled as he disappeared from view. There was a rush of light as an eddy of the star-stream caught him, and something certainly went up in flame. A faint odour reached the children that was like the odour of burning leaves.\n\nThen, with a rush, came a woman whose immensely long thin arms reached out in front of her and vanished through the entrance a whole minute before the rest of her. But they could not see the face. Some one with high ringing laughter followed, though they could not see the outline at all. It went so fast, they only heard the patter of light footsteps on the moss and needles. Jimbo and Monkey felt slightly uncomfortable as they watched and listened, and the feeling became positive uneasiness the next minute as a sound of cries and banging reached them from the woods behind. There was a great commotion going on somewhere in the train.\n\n'I can't get out, I can't get out!' called a voice unhappily. 'And if I do, how shall I ever get in again? The entrance is so ridiculously small. I shall only stick and fill it up. Why did I ever come? Oh, why did I come at all?'\n\n'Better stay where you are, lady,' the Guard was saying. 'You're good ballast. You can keep the train down. That's something. Steady thinking's always best, you know.'\n\nTurning, the children saw a group of figures pushing and tugging at a dark mass that appeared to have stuck halfway in the carriage door. The pressure of many willing hands gave it a different outline every minute. It was like a thing of india-rubber or elastic. The roof strained outwards with ominous cracking sounds; the windows threatened to smash; the foot-board, supporting the part of her that had emerged, groaned with the weight already.\n\n'Oh, what's the good of me?' cried the queer deep voice with petulance. 'You couldn't get a wisp of hay in there, much less all of me. I should block the whole cave up!'\n\n'Come out a bit!' a voice cried.\n\n'I can't.'\n\n'Go back then!' suggested the Guard.\n\n'But I can't. Besides I'm upside down!'\n\n'You haven't got any upside down,' was the answer; 'so that's impossible.'\n\n'Well, anyhow, I'm in a mess and muddle like this,' came the smothered voice, as the figures pulled and pushed with increasing energy.' And my tarpaulin skirt is all askew. The winds are at it as usual.'\n\n'Nothing short of a gale can help you now,' was somebody's verdict, while Monkey whispered beneath her breath to Jimbo. 'She's even bigger than Mother. Quelle masse!'\n\nThen came a thing of mystery and wonder from the sky. A flying figure, scattering points of light through the darkness like grains of shining sand, swooped down and stood beside the group.\n\n'Oh, Dustman,' cried the guard, 'give her of your dust and put her to sleep, please. She's making noise enough to bring the Interfering Sun above the horizon before his time.'\n\nWithout a word the new arrival passed one hand above the part of her that presumably was the face. Something sifted downwards. There was a sound of gentle sprinkling through the air; a noise followed that was half a groan and half a sigh. Her struggles grew gradually less, then ceased. They pushed the bulk of her backwards through the door. Spread over many seats the Woman of the Haystack slept.\n\n'Thank you,' said several voices with relief. 'She'll dream she's been in. That's just as good.'\n\n'Every bit,' the others answered, resuming their interrupted journey towards the cavern's mouth.\n\n'And when I come out she shall have some more,' answered the Dustman in a soft, thick voice; 'as much as ever she can use.'\n\nHe flitted in his turn towards the stream of gold. His feet were already in it when he paused a moment to shift from one shoulder to the other a great sack he carried. And in that moment was heard a low voice singing dreamily the Dustman's curious little song. It seemed to come from the direction of the train where the Guard stood talking to a man the children had not noticed before. Presumably he was the engine-driver, since all the passengers were out now. But it may have been the old Dustman himself who sang it. They could not tell exactly. The voice made them quite drowsy as they listened:\u2014\n\n\u2003The busy Dustman flutters down the lanes,\n\n\u2003He's off to gather star-dust for our dreams.\n\n\u2003He dusts the Constellations for his sack,\n\n\u2003Finding it thickest on the Zodiac,\n\n\u2003But sweetest in the careless meteor's track;\n\n\u2003That he keeps only\n\n\u2003For the old and lonely,\n\n\u2003(And is very strict about it!)\n\n\u2003Who sleep so little that they need the best;\n\n\u2003The rest,\u2014\n\n\u2003The common stuff,\u2014\n\n\u2003Is good enough\n\n\u2003For Fraulein, or for Baby, or for Mother,\n\n\u2003Or any other\n\n\u2003Who likes a bit of dust,\n\n\u2003But yet can do without it\n\n\u2003If they must!\n\n\u2003The busy Dustman hurries through the sky\n\n\u2003The kind old Dustman's coming to your eye!\n\nBy the time the song was over he had disappeared through the opening.\n\n'I'll show 'em the real stuff!' came back a voice\u2014this time certainly his own\u2014far inside now.\n\n'I simply love that man,' exclaimed Monkey. 'Songs are usually such twiddly things, but that was real.' She looked as though a somersault were imminent. 'If only Daddy knew him, he'd learn how to write unwumbled stories. Oh! we must get Daddy out.'\n\n'It's only the head that sticks,' was her brother's reply. 'We'll grease it.'\n\nThey remained silent a moment, not knowing what to do next, when they became aware that the big man who had been talking to the Guard was coming towards them.\n\n'They've seen us!' she whispered in alarm. 'He's seen us.' An inexplicable thrill ran over her.\n\n'They saw us long ago,' her brother added contemptuously. His voice quavered.\n\nJimbo turned to face them, getting in front of his sister for protection, although she towered above him by a head at least. The Guard, who led the way, they saw now, was a girl\u2014a girl not much older than Monkey, with big blue eyes. 'There they are,' the Guard said loudly, pointing; and the big man, looking about him as though he did not see very clearly, stretched out his hands towards him. 'But you must be very quick,' she added, 'the Interfering Sun\u2014-'\n\n'I'm glad you came to meet us. I hoped you might. Jane Anne's gone in ages ago. Now we'll all go in together,' he said in a deep voice, 'and gather star-dust for our dreams\u2026' He groped to find them. His hands grew shadowy. He felt the empty air.\n\nHis voice died away even as he said it, and the difficulty he had in seeing seemed to affect their own eyes as well. A mist rose. It turned to darkness. The river of starlight faded. The net had suddenly big holes in it. They were slipping through. Wind whispered in the trees. There was a sharp, odd sound like the plop of a water-rat in a pond\u2026.\n\n'We must be quick,' his voice came faintly from far away. They just had time to see his smile, and noticed the gleam of two gold teeth\u2026. Then the darkness rushed up and covered them. The stream of tangled, pouring beams became a narrow line, so far away it was almost like the streak of a meteor in the sky\u2026. Night hid the world and everything in it\u2026.\n\nTwo radiant little forms slipped past Riquette and slid feet first into the sleeping bodies on the beds.\n\nThere came soon after a curious sound from the outer room, as Mother turned upon her sofa-bed and woke. The sun was high above the Blumlisalp, spreading a sheet of gold and silver on the lake. Birds were singing in the plane trees. The roof below the open windows shone with dew, and draughts of morning air, sweet and fresh, poured into the room. With it came the scent of flowers and forests, of fields and peaty smoke from cottage chimneys\u2026.\n\nBut there was another perfume too. Far down the sky swept some fleet and sparkling thing that made the world look different. It was delicate and many-tinted, soft as a swallow's wing, and full of butterflies and tiny winds.\n\nFor, with the last stroke of midnight from the old church tower, May had waked April; and April had run off into the mountains with the dawn. Her final shower of tears still shone upon the ground. Already May was busy drying them.\n\nThat afternoon, when school was over, Monkey and Jimbo found themselves in the attics underneath the roof together. They had abstracted their father's opera-glasses from the case that hung upon the door, and were using them as a telescope.\n\n'What can you see?' asked Jimbo, waiting for his turn, as they looked towards the hazy mountains behind the village.\n\n'Nothing.'\n\n'That must be the opening, then,' he suggested, 'just air.'\n\nHis sister lowered the glasses and stared at him. 'But it can't be a real place?' she said, the doubt in her tone making her words a question. 'Daddy's never been there himself, I'm sure\u2014from the way he told it. You only dreamed it.' 'Well, anyhow,' was the reply with conviction, 'it's there, so there must be somebody who believes in it.' And he was evidently going to add that he had been there, when Mother's voice was heard calling from the yard below, 'Come down from that draughty place. It's dirty, and there are dead rats in it. Come out and play in the sunshine. Try and be sensible like Jinny.'\n\nThey smuggled the glasses into their case again, and went off to the woods to play. Though their union seemed based on disagreements chiefly they were always quite happy together like this, living in a world entirely their own. Jinny went her own way apart always\u2014ever busy with pots and pans and sewing. She was far too practical and domestic for their tastes to amalgamate; yet, though they looked down upon her a little, no one in their presence could say a word against her. For they recognised the child's unusual selflessness, and rather stood in awe of it.\n\nAnd this afternoon in the woods they kept coming across places that seemed oddly familiar, although they had never visited them before. They had one of their curious conversations about the matter\u2014queer talks they indulged in sometimes when quite alone. Mother would have squelched such talk, and Daddy muddled them with long words, while Jane Anne would have looked puzzled to the point of tears.\n\n'I'm sure I've been here before,' said Monkey, looking across the trees to a place where the limestone cliffs dropped in fantastic shapes of pointed rock. 'Have you got that feeling too?'\n\nJimbo, with his hands in the pockets of his blue reefer overcoat and his feet stuck wide apart, stared hard at her a moment. His little mind was searching too.\n\n'It's natural enough, I suppose,' he answered, too honest to pretend, too proud, though, to admit he had not got it.\n\nThey were rather breathless with their climb, and sat down on a boulder in the shade.\n\n'I know all this awfully well,' Monkey presently resumed, looking about her. 'But certainly we've never come as far as this. I think my underneath escapes and comes to places by itself. I feel like that. Does yours?'\n\nHe looked up from a bundle of moss he was fingering. This was rather beyond him.\n\n'Oh, I feel all right,' he said, 'just ordinary.' He would have given his ten francs in the savings bank, the collection of a year, to have answered otherwise. 'You're always getting tummy-aches and things,' he added kindly. 'Girls do.' It was pride that made the sharp addition. But Monkey was not hurt; she did not even notice what he said. The insult thus ignored might seem almost a compliment Jimbo thought with quick penitence.\n\n'Then, perhaps,' she continued, more than a little thrilled by her own audacity, 'it's somebody else's thinking. Thinking skips about the world like anything, you know. I read it once in one of Daddy's books.'\n\n'Oh, yes\u2014like that\u2014-'\n\n'Thinking hard does make things true, of course,' she insisted.\n\n'But you can't exactly see them,' he put in, to explain his own inexperience. He felt jealous of these privileges she claimed. 'They can't last, I mean.' 'But they can't be wiped out either,' she said decidedly. 'I'm sure of that.'\n\nPresently they scrambled higher and found among the rocks an opening to a new cave. The Jura mountains are riddled with caves which the stalactites turn into palaces and castles. The entrance was rather small, and they made no attempt to crawl in, for they knew that coming out again was often very difficult. But there was great excitement about it, and while Monkey kept repeating that she knew it already, or else had seen a picture of it somewhere, Jimbo went so far as to admit that they had certainly found it very easily, while suggesting that the rare good fortune was due rather to his own leadership and skill.\n\nBut when they came home to tea, full of the glory of their discovery, they found that a new excitement made the announcement fall a little flat. For in the Den, Daddy read a telegram he had just received from England to say that Cousin Henry was coming out to visit them for a bit. His room had already been engaged at the carpenter's house. He would arrive at the end of the week.\n\nIt was the first of May!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 169", + "text": "One of the great facts of the world I hold to be the registration in the Universe of every past scene and thought. F. W. M.\n\nNo place worth knowing yields itself at sight, and those the least inviting on first view may leave the most haunting pictures upon the walls of memory.\n\nThis little village, that Henry Rogers was thus to revisit after so long an interval, can boast no particular outstanding beauty to lure the common traveller. Its single street winds below the pine forest; its tiny church gathers close a few brown-roofed houses; orchards guard it round about; the music of many fountains tinkle summer and winter through its cobbled yards; and its feet are washed by a tumbling stream that paints the fields with the radiance of countless wild-flowers in the spring. But tourists never come to see them. There is no hotel, for one thing, and ticket agents, even at the railway stations, look puzzled a moment before they realise where this place with the twinkling name can hide\u2026. Some consult books. Yet, once you get there, it is not easy to get away again. Something catches the feet and ears and eyes. People have been known to go with all their luggage on Gygi's handcart to the station\u2014then turn aside at the last moment, caught back by the purple woods.\n\nA traveller, glancing up at the little three-storey house with 'Poste et Telegraphe' above the door, could never guess how busy the world that came and went beneath its red-tiled roof. In spring the wistaria tree (whence the Pension borrowed its brave name, Les Glycines) hangs its blossoms between 'Poste' and 'Telegraphe,' and the perfume of invisible lilacs drenches the street from the garden at the back. Beyond, the road dips past the bee-hives of la cure; and Boudry towers with his five thousand feet of blue pine woods over the horizon. The tinkling of several big stone fountains fills the street.\n\nBut the traveller would not linger, unless he chanced to pass at twelve o'clock and caught the stream of people going into their mid- day dinner at the Pension. And even then he probably would not see the presiding genius, Madame Jequier, for as often as not she would be in her garden, busy with eternal bulbs, and so strangely garbed that if she showed herself at all, it would be with a shrill, plaintive explanation\u2014'Mais il ne faut pas me regarder. Je suis invisible!' Whereupon, consistently, she would not speak again, but flit in silence to and fro, as though she were one of those spirits she so firmly believed in, and sometimes talked to by means of an old Planchette.\n\nAnd on this particular morning the Widow Jequier was 'invisible' in her garden clothes as Gygi, the gendarme, came down the street to ring the midi bell. Her mind was black with anxiety. She was not thinking of the troop that came to dejeuner, their principal meal of the day, paying a franc for it, but rather of the violent scenes with unpaid tradesmen that had filled the morning-tradesmen who were friends as well (which made it doubly awkward) and often dropped in socially for an evening's music and conversation. Her pain darkened the sunshine, and she found relief in the garden which was her passion. For in three weeks the interest on the mortgages was due, and she had nothing saved to meet it. The official notice had come that morning from the Bank. Her mind was black with confused pictures of bulbs, departed pensionnaires, hostile bankers, and\u2014the ghastly charite de la Commune which awaited her. Yet her husband, before he went into the wine-business so disastrously, had been pasteur here. He had preached from this very church whose bells now rang out the mid-day hour. The spirit of her daughter, she firmly believed, still haunted the garden, the narrow passages, and the dilapidated little salon where the ivy trailed along the ceiling.\n\nTwelve o'clock, striking from the church-tower clock, and the voice of her sister from the kitchen window, then brought the Widow Jequier down the garden in a flying rush. The table was laid and the soup was almost ready. The people were coming in. She was late as usual; there was no time to change. She flung her garden hat aside and scrambled into more presentable garments, while footsteps already sounded on the wooden stairs that led up from the village street.\n\nOne by one the retired governesses entered, hung their cloaks upon the pegs in the small, dark hallway, and took their places at the table. They began talking among themselves, exchanging the little gossip of the village, speaking of their books and clothes and sewing, of the rooms in which they lived, scattered down the street, of the heating, of barking dogs that disturbed their sleep, the behaviour of the postman, the fine spring weather, and the views from their respective windows across the lake and distant Alps. Each extolled her own position: one had a garden; another a balcony; a third was on the top floor and so had no noisy tenant overhead; a fourth was on the ground, and had no stairs to climb. Each had her secret romance, and her secret method of cheap feeding at home. There were five or six of them, and this was their principal meal in the day; they meant to make the most of it; they always did; they went home to light suppers of tea and coffee, made in their own appartements. Invitations were issued and accepted. There were some who would not speak to each other. Cliques, divisions, societes a part, existed in the little band. And they talked many languages, learned in many lands\u2014Russian, German, Italian, even Armenian\u2014for all had laboured far from their country, spending the best of their years teaching children of foreign families, many of them in important houses. They lived upon their savings. Two, at least, had less than thirty pounds a year between them and starvation, and all were of necessity careful of every centime. They wore the same dresses from one year's end to another. They had come home to die.\n\nThe Postmaster entered with the cash-box underneath one arm. He bowed gravely to the assembled ladies, and silently took his seat at the table. He never spoke; at meals his sole remarks were statements: 'Je n'ai pas de pain,' 'Il me manque une serviette,' and the like, while his black eyes glared resentfully at every one as though they had done him an injury. But his fierceness was only in the eyes. He was a meek and solemn fellow really. Nature had dressed him in black, and he respected her taste by repeating it in his clothes. Even his expression was funereal, though his black eyes twinkled.\n\nThe servant-girl at once brought in his plate of soup, and he tucked the napkin beneath his chin and began to eat. From twelve to two the post was closed; his recreation time was precious, and no minute must be lost. After dinner he took his coat off and did the heavy work of the garden, under the merciless oversight of the Widow Jequier, his sister-in-law, the cash-box ever by his side. He chatted with his tame corbeau, but he never smiled. In the winter he did fretwork. On the stroke of two he went downstairs again and disappeared into the cramped and stuffy bureau, whose window on the street was framed by the hanging wistaria blossoms; and at eight o'clock his day of labour ended. He carried the cash-box up to bed at 8.15. At 8.30 his wife followed him. From nine to five he slept.\n\nAlone of all the little household the Widow Jequier scorned routine. She came and went with the uncertainty of wind. Her entrances and exits, too, were like the wind. With a scattering rush she scurried through the years\u2014noisy, ineffective, yet somewhere fine. Her brother had finished his plate of soup, wiped his black moustaches elaborately, and turned his head towards the kitchen door with the solemn statement 'Je n'ai pas de viande,' when she descended upon the scene like a shrill-voiced little tempest.\n\n'Bonjour Mesdames, bonjour Mademoiselle, bonjour, bonjour,' she bowed and smiled, washing her hands in the air; 'et comment allez-vous ce matin?' as the little band of hungry governesses rose with one accord and moved to take their places. Some smiled in answer; others merely bowed. She made enemies as well as friends, the Widow Jequier. With only one of them she shook hands warmly-the one whose payments were long overdue. But Madame Jequier never asked for her money; she knew the old body's tiny income; she would pay her when she could. Only last week she had sent her food and clothing under the guise of a belated little Easter present. Her heart was bigger than her body.\n\n'La famille Anglaise n'est pas encore ici,' announced the Postmaster as though it were a funeral to come. He did not even look up. His protests passed ever unobserved.\n\n'But I hear them coming,' said a governess, swallowing her soup with a sound of many waters. And, true enough, they came. There was a thunder on the stairs, the door into the hall flew open, voices and laughter filled the place, and Jimbo and Monkey raced in to take their places, breathless, rosy, voluble, and very hungry. Jane Anne followed sedately, bowing to every one in turn. She had a little sentence for all who cared for one. Smiles appeared on every face. Mother, like a frigate coming to anchor with a favourable wind, sailed into her chair; and behind her stumbled Daddy, looking absent-minded and pre- occupied. Money was uncommonly scarce just then\u2014the usual Bourcelles complaint.\n\nConversation in many tongues, unmusically high-pitched, then at once broke loose, led ever by la patronne at the head of the table. The big dishes of meat and vegetables were handed round; plates were piled and smothered; knives and forks were laid between mouthfuls upon plate-edges, forming a kind of frieze all round the cloth; the gossip of the village was retailed with harmless gusto. Dejeuner at Les Glycines was in full swing. When the apples and oranges came round, most of the governesses took two apiece, slipping one or other into little black velvet bags they carried on their laps below the table.\n\nSome, it was whispered, put bread there too to keep them company. But this was probably a libel. Madame Jequier, at any rate, never saw it done. She looked the other way. 'We all must live,' was her invariable answer to such foolish stories. 'One cannot sleep if one's supper is too light.' Like her body, her soul was a bit untidy\u2014careless, that is, with loose ends. Who would have guessed, for instance, the anxiety that just now gnawed her very entrails? She was a mixture of shameless egotism, and of burning zeal for others. There was a touch of grandeur in her.\n\nAt the end of the table, just where the ivy leaves dropped rather low from their trailing journey across the ceiling, sat Miss Waghorn, her vigorous old face wrapped, apparently, in many apple skins. She was well past seventy, thin, erect, and active, with restless eyes, and hooked nose, the poor old hands knotted with rheumatism, yet the voice somehow retaining the energy of forty. Her manners were charming and old-fashioned, and she came of Quaker stock. Seven years before she arrived at the Pension for the summer, and had forgotten to leave. For she forgot most things within ten minutes of their happening. Her memory was gone; she remembered a face, as most other things as well, about twenty minutes; introductions had to be repeated every day, and sometimes at supper she would say with her gentle smile, 'We haven't met before, I think,' to some one she had held daily intercourse with for many months. 'I was born in '37,' she loved to add, 'the year of Queen Victoria's accession'; and five minutes later you might hear her ask, 'Now, guess how old I am; I don't mind a bit.' She was as proud of her load of years as an old gentleman of his thick hair. 'Say exactly what you think. And don't guess too low, mind.' Her numerous stories were self-repeaters.\n\nMiss Waghorn's memory was a source of worry and anxiety to all except the children, who mercilessly teased her. She loved the teasing, though but half aware of it. It was their evil game to extract as many of her familiar stories as possible, one after another. They knew all the clues. There was the Cornishman\u2014she came from Cornwall\u2014who had seen a fairy; his adventure never failed to thrill them, though she used the same words every time and they knew precisely what was coming. She was particularly strong on family reminiscences:\u2014her father was bald at thirty, her brother's beard was so long that he tied it round his neck when playing cricket; her sister 'had the shortest arms you ever saw.' Always of youth she spoke; it was pathetic, so determined was she to be young at seventy. Her family seemed distinguished in this matter of extremes.\n\nBut the superiority of Cornish over Devonshire cream was her piece de resistance. Monkey need merely whisper\u2014Miss Waghorn's acuteness of hearing was positively uncanny\u2014'Devonshire cream is what I like,' to produce a spurt of explanation and defence that lasted a good ten minutes and must be listened to until the bitter end.\n\nJimbo would gravely inquire in a pause\u2014of a stranger, if possible, if not, of the table in general\u2014\n\n'Have you ever seen a fairy?'\n\n'No, but I've eaten Cornish cream\u2014it's poison, you know,' Monkey would reply. And up would shoot the keen old face, preened for the fray.\n\n'We haven't been introduced, I think'\u2014forgetting the formal introduction of ten minutes ago\u2014'but I overheard, if you'll forgive my interrupting, and I can tell you all about Cornish cream. I was born in '37'\u2014with her eager smile\u2014'and for years it was on our table. I have made quantities of it. The art was brought first by the Phoenicians\u2014'\n\n'Venetians,' said Monkey.\n\n'No, Phoenicians, dear, when they came to Cornwall for tin\u2014'\n\n'To put the cream in,' from the same source.\n\n'No, you silly child, to get tin from the mines, of course, and\u2014'\n\nThen Mother or Daddy, noting the drift of things, would interfere, and the youngsters would be obliterated\u2014until next time. Miss Waghorn would finish her recital for the hundredth time, firmly believing it to be the first. She was a favourite with everybody, in spite of the anxiety she caused. She would go into town to pay her bill at the bootmaker's, and order another pair of boots instead, forgetting why she came. Her income was sixty pounds a year. She forgot in the afternoon the money she had received in the morning, till at last the Widow Jequier seized it for her the moment it arrived. And at night she would doze in her chair over the paper novel she had been \"at\" for a year and more, beginning it every night afresh, and rarely getting beyond the opening chapter. For it was ever new. All were anxious, though, what she would do next. She was so full of battle.\n\nEverybody talked at once, but forced conversation did not flourish. Bourcelles was not fashionable; no one ever had appendicitis there. Yet ailments of a milder order were the staple, inexhaustible subjects at meals. Instead of the weather, mon estomac was the inexhaustible tale. The girl brought in the little Cantonal newspaper, and the widow read out selections in a high, shrill voice, regardless who listened. Misfortunes and accidents were her preference. Grand ciel and quelle horreur punctuated the selections. 'There's Tante Jeanne grand-cieling as usual,' Mother would say to her husband, who, being a little deaf, would answer, 'What?' and Tante Jeanne, overhearing him, would re-read the accident for his especial benefit, while the governesses recounted personal experiences among themselves, and Miss Waghorn made eager efforts to take part in it all, or tell her little tales of fairies and Cornish cream\u2026.\n\nOne by one the governesses rose to leave; each made a comprehensive bow that included the entire company. Daddy lit a cigarette or let Jimbo light it for him, too wumbled with his thoughts of afternoon work to notice the puff stolen surreptitiously on the way. Jane Anne folded her napkin carefully, talking with Mother in a low voice about the packing of the basket with provisions for tea. Tea was included in the Pension terms; in a small clothes-basket she carried bread, milk, sugar, and butter daily across to La Citadelle, except on Sundays when she wore gloves and left the duty to the younger children who were less particular.\n\nThe governesses, charged with life for another twenty-four hours at least, flocked down the creaking stairs. They nodded as they passed the Bureau window where the Postmaster pored over his collection of stamps, or examined a fretwork pattern of a boy on a bicycle\u2014there was no heavy garden work that day\u2014and went out into the street. They stood in knots a moment, discussing unfavourably the food just eaten, and declaring they would stand it no longer. 'Only where else can we go?' said one, feeling automatically at her velvet bag to make sure the orange was safely in it. Upstairs, at the open window, Madame Jequier overheard them as she filled the walnut shells with butter for the birds. She only smiled.\n\n'I wish we could help her,' Mother was saying to her husband, as they watched her from the sofa in the room behind. 'A more generous creature never lived.' It was a daily statement that lacked force owing to repetition, yet the emotion prompting it was ever new and real.\n\n'Or a more feckless,' was his reply. 'But if we ever come into our estates, we will. It shall be the first thing.' His mind always hovered after those distant estates when it was perplexed by immediate financial difficulty, and just now he was thinking of various bills and payments falling due. It was his own sympathetic link with the widow\u2014ways and means, and the remorseless nature of sheets of paper with columns of figures underneath the horrible word doit.\n\n'So Monsieur 'Enry Rogairs is coming,' she said excitedly, turning to them a moment on her way to the garden. 'And after all these years! He will find the house the same, and the garden better\u2014oh, wonderfully improved. But us, helas! he will find old, oh, how old!' She did not really mean herself, however.\n\nShe began a long 'reminiscent' chapter, full of details of the days when he and Daddy had been boys together, but in the middle of it Daddy just got up and walked out, saying, 'I must get over to my work, you know.' There was no artificiality of manners at Bourcelles. Mother followed him, with a trifle more ceremony. 'Ah, c'est partir a l'anglaise!' sighed the widow, watching them go. She was accustomed to it. She went out into her garden, full of excitement at the prospect of the new arrival. Every arrival for her meant a possible chance of help. She was as young as her latest bulb really. Courage, hope, and generosity invariably go together." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 170", + "text": "\u2003Take him and cut him out in little stars,\n\n\u2003And he will make the face of heaven so fine\n\n\u2003That all the world will be in love with night\n\n\u2003And pay no worship to the garish sun!\n\n\u2014Romeo and Juliet.\n\nThe announcement of Henry Rogers's coming was received\u2014variously, for any new arrival into the Den circle was subjected to rigorous criticism. This criticism was not intentional; it was the instinctive judgment that children pass upon everything, object or person, likely to affect themselves. And there is no severer bar of judgment in the world.\n\n'Who is Cousinenry? What a name! Is he stiff, I wonder?' came from Monkey, almost before the announcement had left her father's lips. 'What will he think of Tante Jeanne?' Her little torrent of questions that prejudged him thus never called for accurate answers as a rule, but this time she meant to have an answer. 'What is he exaccurately?' she added, using her own invention made up of 'exact' and 'accurate.'\n\nMother looked up from the typewritten letter to reply, but before she could say, 'He's your father's cousin, dear; they were here as boys twenty years ago to learn French,' Jinny burst in with an explosive interrogation. She had been reading La Bonne Menagere in a corner. Her eyes, dark with conjecture, searched the faces of both parents alternately. 'Excuse me, Mother, but is he a clergyman?' she asked with a touch of alarm.\n\n'Whatever makes you think that, child?'\n\n'Clergymen are always called the reverundhenry. He'll wear black and have socks that want mending.'\n\n'He shouldn't punt his letters,' declared Monkey. 'He's not an author, is he?'\n\nJimbo, busy over school tasks, with a huge slate-pencil his crumpled fingers held like a walking-stick, watched and listened in silence. He was ever fearful, perhaps, lest his superior man's knowledge might be called upon and found wanting. Questions poured and crackled like grapeshot, while the truth slowly emerged from the explanations the parents were occasionally permitted to interject. The personality of Cousin Henry Rogers grew into life about them\u2014gradually. The result was a curious one that Minks would certainly have resented with indignation. For Cousinenry was, apparently, a business man with pockets full of sovereigns; stern, clever, and important; the sort of man that gets into Governments and things, yet somewhere with the flavour of the clergyman about him. This clerical touch was Jane Anne's contribution to the picture; and she was certain that he wore silk socks of the most expensive description\u2014a detail she had read probably in some chance fragments of a newspaper. For Jinny selected phrases in this way from anywhere, and repeated them on all occasions without the slightest relevancy. She practised them. She had a way of giving abrupt information and making startling statements a propos of nothing at all. Certain phrases stuck in her mind, it seemed, for no comprehensible reason. When excited she picked out the one that first presented itself and fired it off like a gun, the more inapt the better. And 'busy' was her favourite adjective always.\n\n'It's like a communication from a company,' Mother was saying, as she handed back the typewritten letter.\n\n'Is he a company promoter then?' asked Jinny like a flash, certainly ignorant what that article of modern life could mean.\n\n'Oh, I say!' came reproachfully from Jimbo, thus committing himself for the first time to speech. He glanced up into several faces round him, and then continued the picture of Cousin Henry he was drawing on his slate. He listened all the time. Occasionally he cocked an eye or ear up. He took in everything, saying little. His opinions matured slowly. The talk continued for a long time, questions and answers.\n\n'I think he's nice,' he announced at length in French. For intimate things, he always used that language; his English, being uncertain, was kept for matters of unimportance. 'A gentle man.'\n\nAnd it was Jimbo's verdict that the children then finally adopted. Cousin Henry was gentil. They laughed loudly at him, yet agreed. His influence on their little conclaves, though never volubly expressed\u2014 because of that very fact, perhaps\u2014was usually accepted. Jimbo was so decided. And he never committed himself to impulsive judgments that later had to be revised. He listened in silence to the end, then went plump for one side or the other. 'I think he'll be a nice man,' was the label, therefore, then and there attached to Mr. Henry Rogers in advance of delivery. Further than that, however, they would not go. It would have been childish to commit themselves more deeply till they saw him.\n\nThe conversation then slipped beyond their comprehension, or rather their parents used long words and circumventing phrases that made it difficult to follow. Owing to lack of space, matters of importance often had to be discussed in this way under the children's eyes, unless at night, when all were safe in bed; for French, of course, was of no avail for purposes of concealment. Long words were then made use of, dark, wumbled sentences spoken very quickly, with suggestive gestures and expressions of the eyes labelled by Monkey with, 'Look, Mother and Daddy are making faces\u2014something's up!'\n\nBut, none the less, all listened, and Monkey, whose intuitive intelligence soaked up hidden meanings like a sponge, certainly caught the trend of what was said. She detailed it later to the others, when Jinny checked her exposition with a puzzled 'but Mother could never have said that,' while Jimbo looked wise and grave, as though he had understood it all along, and was even in his parents' councils.\n\nOn this occasion, however, there was nothing very vital to retail. Cousin Henry was to arrive to-morrow by the express from Paris. He was a little younger than Daddy, and would have the room above him in the carpenter's house. His meals he would take at the Pension just as they did, and for tea he would always come over to the Den. And this latter fact implied that he was to be admitted into intimacy at once, for only intimates used the Den regularly for tea, of course.\n\nIt was serious. It involved a change in all their lives. Jinny wondered if it 'would cost Daddy any more money,' or whether 'Cousinenry would bring a lot of things with him,' though not explaining whether by 'things' she meant food or presents or clothes. He was not married, so he couldn't be very old; and Monkey, suggesting that he might 'get to love' one of the retired governesses who came to the Pension for their mid-day dinner, was squelched by Jimbo with 'old governesses never marry; they come back to settle, and then they just die off.'\n\nThus was Henry Rogers predigested. But at any rate he was accepted. And this was fortunate; for a new arrival whom the children did not 'pass' had been known to have a time that may best be described as not conducive to repose of body, mind, or spirit.\n\nThe arrival of Mr. Henry Rogers in the village\u2014in La Citadelle, that is\u2014was a red-letter day. This, however, seems a thin description of its glory. For a more adequate description a well-worn phrase must be borrowed from the poems of Montmorency Minks\u2014a 'Day of Festival,' for which 'coronal' invariably lay in waiting for rhyming purposes a little further down the sonnet.\n\nMonkey that afternoon managed to get home earlier than usual from Neuchatel, a somewhat suspicious explanation as her passport. Her eyes were popping. Jimbo was always out of the village school at three. He carried a time-table in his pocket; but it was mere pretence, since he was a little walking Bradshaw, and knew every train by heart\u2014the Geneva Express, the Paris Rapide, the 'omnibus' trains, and the mountain ones that climbed the forest heights towards La Chaux de Fonds and Le Locle. Of these latter only the white puffing smoke was visible from the village, but he knew with accuracy their times of departure, their arrival, and the names of every station where they stopped. In the omnibus trains he even knew some of the guards personally, the engine-drivers too. He might be seen any day after school standing in the field beside the station, waiting for them to pass; mecanicien and conducteur were the commonest words in his whole vocabulary. When possible he passed the time of day with both of these important personages, or from the field he waved his hand and took his cap off. All engines, moreover, were 'powerful locomotives.' The phrase was stolen from his father\u2014a magnificent sound it had, taking several seconds to pronounce. No day was wholly lived in vain which enabled him to turn to some one with, 'There's the Paris Rapide; it's five minutes late'; or 'That's the Geneva omnibus. You see, it has to have a very'\u2014here a deep breath\u2014'powerful locomotive.'\n\nSo upon this day of festival it was quite useless to talk of common things, and even the holidays acquired a very remote importance. Everybody in the village knew it. From Gygi, the solitary gendarme, to Henri Beguin, who mended boots, but had the greater distinction that he was the only man Gygi ever arrested, for periodical wild behaviour \u2014all knew that 'Cousin Henry, father's cousin, you know,' was expected to arrive in the evening, that he was an important person in the life of London, and that he was not exactly a pasteur, yet shared something of a clergyman's grave splendour. Clothed in a sacerdotal atmosphere he certainly was, though it was the gravity of Jane Anne's negative description that fastened this wild ecclesiastical idea upon him.\n\n'He's not exactly a clergyman,' she told the dressmaker, who for two francs every Monday afternoon sat in the kitchen and helped with the pile of indiscriminate mending,' because he has to do with rather big companies and things. But he is a serious man all the same\u2014and most fearfully busy always.'\n\n'We're going to meet him in the town,' said Jimbo carelessly. 'You see, the Paris Rapide doesn't stop here. We shall come back with him by the 6.20. It gets here at 6.50, so he'll be in time for supper, if it's punctual. It usually is.'\n\nAnd accordingly they went to Neuchatel and met the Paris train. They met their Cousin Henry, too. Powerful locomotives and everything else were instantly forgotten when they saw their father go up to a tall thin man who jumped\u2014yes, jumped\u2014down the high steps on to the level platform and at once began to laugh. He had a beard like their father. 'How will they know which is which?' thought Jinny. They stood in everybody's way and stared. He was so tall. Daddy looked no bigger than little Beguin beside him. He had a large, hooked nose, brown skin, and keen blue eyes that took in everything at a single glance. They twinkled absurdly for so big a man. He wore rough brown tweeds and a soft felt travelling hat. He wore also square-toed English boots. He carried in one hand a shiny brown leather bag with his initials on it like a member of the Government.\n\nThe clergyman idea was destroyed in a fraction of a second, never to revive. The company promoter followed suit. Jinny experienced an entirely new sensation in her life\u2014something none but herself had ever felt before\u2014something romantic. 'He's like a soldier\u2014a General,' she said to anybody who cared to listen, and she said it so loudly that many did listen. But she did not care. She stood apart from the others, staring as though it were a railway accident. This tall figure of a cousin she could fit nowhere as yet into her limited scheme of life. She admired him intensely. Yet Daddy laughed and chatted with him as if he were nothing at all! She kept outside the circle, wondering about his socks and underclothes. His beard was much neater and better trimmed than her father's. At least no crumb or bit of cotton was in it.\n\nBut Jimbo felt no awe. After a moment's hesitation, during which the passers-by butted him this way and that, he marched straight up and looked him in the face. He reached to his watch-chain only.\n\n'I'll be your sekrity, too,' he announced, interrupting Daddy's foolishness about 'this is my youngest lad, Rogers.' Youngest lad indeed!\n\nAnd Henry Rogers then stooped and kissed the lot of them. One after the other he put his big arms round them and gave them a hug that was like the hug of a bear standing on its hind legs. They took it, each in his own way, differently. Jimbo proudly; Monkey, with a smacking return kiss that somehow conveyed the note of her personality\u2014 impudence; but Jane Anne, with a grave and outraged dignity, as though in a public railway station this kind of behaviour was slightly inappropriate. She wondered for days afterwards whether she had been quite correct. He was a cousin, but still he was\u2014a man. And she wondered what she ought to call him. 'Mr. Rogers' was not quite right, yet 'Mr. Cousin Henry' was equally ill-chosen. She decided upon a combination of her own, a kind of code-word that was affectionate yet distant: 'Cousinenry.' And she used it with an explosive directness that was almost challenge\u2014he could accept which half he chose.\n\nBut all accepted him at once without fear. They felt, moreover, a secret and very tender thing; there was something in this big, important man that made them know he would love them for themselves; and more\u2014that something in him had need of them. Here lay the explanation of their instant confidence and acceptance.\n\n'What a jolly bunch you are, to be sure!' he exclaimed. 'And you're to be my secretary, are you?' he added, taking Jimbo by the shoulders. 'How splendid!'\n\n'I'm not,' said Monkey, with a rush of laughter already too long restrained. Her manner suggested a somersault, only prevented by engines and officials.\n\nBut Jimbo was a little shocked. This sort of thing disgraced them.\n\n'Oh, I say!' he exclaimed reproachfully.\n\n'Daddy, isn't she awful?' added Jane Anne under her breath, a sentence of disapproval in daily use. Her life seemed made up of apologising for her impudent sister.\n\n'The 6.20 starts at 6.20, you know,' Jimbo announced. 'The Lausanne Express has gone. Are your \"baggages\" registered?' And the party moved off in a scattered and uncertain manner to buy tickets and register the luggage. They went back second class\u2014for the first time in their lives. It was Cousin Henry who paid the difference. That sealed his position finally in their eyes. He was a millionaire. All London people went first or second class.\n\nBut Jimbo and his younger sister had noticed something else about the new arrival besides his nose and eyes and length. Even his luxurious habit of travelling second class did not impress them half as much as this other detail in his appearance. They referred to it in a whispered talk behind the shelter of the conducteur's back while tickets were being punched.\n\n'You know,' whispered Monkey, her eyes popping, 'I've seen Cousin Henry before somewhere. I'm certain.' She gave a little gasp.\n\nJimbo stared, only half believing, yet undeniably moved. Even his friend, the Guard, was temporarily neglected. 'Where?' he asked; 'do you mean in a picture?'\n\n'No,' she answered with decision, 'out here, I think. In the woods or somewhere.' She seemed vague. But her very vagueness helped him to believe. She was not inventing; he was sure of that.\n\nThe conducteur at that moment passed away along the train, and Cousin Henry looked straight at the pair of them. Through the open window dusk fluttered down the sky with spots of gold already on its wings.\n\n'What jolly stars you've got here,' he said, pointing. 'They're like diamonds. Look, it's a perfect network far above the Alps. By gum\u2014 what beauties!'\n\nAnd as he said it he smiled. Monkey gave her brother a nudge that nearly made him cry out. He wondered what she meant, but all the same he returned the nudge significantly. For Cousin Henry, when he smiled, had plainly shown\u2014two teeth of gold.\n\nThe children had never seen gold-capped teeth.\n\n'I'd like one for my collection,' thought Jimbo, meaning a drawer that included all his loose possessions of small size. But another thing stirred in him too, vague, indefinite, far away, something he had, as it were, forgotten." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 171", + "text": "\u2003O star benignant and serene,\n\n\u2003I take the good to-morrow,\n\n\u2003That fills from verge to verge my dream,\n\n\u2003With all its joy and sorrow!\n\n\u2003The old sweet spell is unforgot\n\n\u2003That turns to June December;\n\n\u2003And, though the world remember not,\n\n\u2003Love, we would remember.\n\n\u2014Life and Death, W. E. HENLEY.\n\nAnd Rogers went over to unpack. It was soon done. He sat at his window in the carpenter's house and enjoyed the peace. The spell of evening stole down from the woods. London and all his strenuous life seemed very far away. Bourcelles drew up beside him, opened her robe, let down her forest hair, and whispered to him with her voice of many fountains\u2026.\n\nShe lies just now within the fringe of an enormous shadow, for the sun has dipped behind the blue-domed mountains that keep back France. Small hands of scattered mist creep from the forest, fingering the vineyards that troop down towards the lake. A dog barks. Gygi, the gendarme, leaves the fields and goes home to take his uniform from its peg. Pere Langel walks among his beehives. There is a distant tinkling of cow-bells from the heights, where isolated pastures gleam like a patchwork quilt between the spread of forest; and farther down a train from Paris or Geneva, booming softly, leaves a trail of smoke against the background of the Alps where still the sunshine lingers.\n\nBut trains, somehow, do not touch the village; they merely pass it. Busy with vines, washed by its hill-fed stream, swept by the mountain winds, it lies unchallenged by the noisy world, remote, un-noticed, half forgotten. And on its outskirts stands the giant poplar that guards it\u2014la sentinelle the peasants call it, because its lofty crest, rising to every wind, sends down the street first warning of any coming change. They see it bend or hear the rattle of its leaves. The coup de Joran, most sudden and devastating of mountain winds, is on the way from the precipice of the Creux du Van. It comes howling like artillery down the deep Gorges de l'Areuse. They run to fasten windows, collect the washing from roof and garden, drive the cattle into shelter, and close the big doors of the barns. The children clap their hands and cry to Gygi, 'Plus vite! Plus vite!' The lake turns dark. Ten minutes later it is raging with an army of white horses like the sea.\n\nDarkness drapes the village. It comes from the whole long line of Jura, riding its troop of purple shadows\u2014slowly curtaining out the world. For the carpenter's house stands by itself, apart. Perched upon a knoll beside his little patch of vineyard, it commands perspective. From his upper window Rogers saw and remembered\u2026.\n\nHigh up against the fading sky ridges of limestone cliff shine out here and there, and upon the vast slopes of Boudry\u2014l'immense geant de Boudry\u2014lies a flung cloak of forest that knows no single seam. The smoke from bucheron fires, joining the scarves of mist, weaves across its shoulder a veil of lace-like pattern, and at its feet, like some great fastening button, hides the village of the same name, where Marat passed his brooding youth. Its evening lights are already twinkling. They signal across the vines to the towers of Colombier, rising with its columns of smoke and its poplars against the sheet of darkening water\u2014Colombier, in whose castle milord marechal Keith had his headquarters as Governor of the Principality of Neuchatel under the King of Prussia. And, higher up, upon the flank of wooded mountains, is just visible still the great red-roofed farm of Cotendard, built by his friend Lord Wemyss, another Jacobite refugee, who had strange parties there and entertained Jean Jacques Rousseau in his exile. La Citadelle in the village was the wing of another castle he began to build, but left unfinished.\n\nWhite in the gathering dusk, Rogers saw the strip of roadway where passed the gorgeous coach\u2014cette fameuse diligence du milord marshal Keith\u2014or more recent, but grimmer memory, where General Bourbaki's division of the French army, 80,000 strong, trailed in unspeakable anguish, hurrying from the Prussians. At Les Verrieres, upon the frontier, they laid down their arms, and for three consecutive days and nights the pitiful destitute procession passed down that strip of mountain road in the terrible winter of 1870-71.\n\nSome among the peasants still hear that awful tramping in their sleep: the kindly old vigneron who stood in front of his chalet from dawn to sunset, giving each man bread and wine; and the woman who nursed three soldiers through black small-pox, while neighbours left food upon the wall before the house\u2026. Memories of his boyhood crowded thick and fast. The spell of the place deepened about him with the darkness. He recalled the village postman\u2014fragment of another romance, though a tattered and discredited one. For this postman was the descendant of that audacious pale-frenier who married Lord Wemyss' daughter, to live the life of peasants with her in a yet tinier hamlet higher up the slopes. If you asked him, he would proudly tell you, with his bullet-shaped, close-cropped head cocked impertinently on one side, how his brother, now assistant in a Paris shop, still owned the title of baron by means of which his reconciliated lordship sought eventually to cover up the unfortunate escapade. He would hand you English letters\u2014and Scotch ones too!\u2014with an air of covert insolence that was the joy of half the village. And on Sundays he was to be seen, garbed in knickerbockers, gaudy stockings, and sometimes high, yellowish spats, walking with his peasant girl along the very road his more spirited forbear covered in his runaway match\u2026.\n\nThe night stepped down more quickly every minute from the heights. Deep-noted bells floated upwards to him from Colombier, bringing upon the evening wind some fragrance of these faded boyhood memories. The stars began to peep above the peaks and ridges, and the mountains of the Past moved nearer. A veil of gossamer rose above the tree-tops, hiding more and more of the landscape; he just could see the slim new moon dip down to drink from her own silver cup within the darkening lake. Workmen, in twos and threes, came past the little house from their toil among the vines, and fragments of the Dalcroze songs rose to his ear\u2014songs that the children loved, and that he had not heard for nearly a quarter of a century. Their haunting refrains completed then the spell, for all genuine spells are set to some peculiar music of their own. These Dalcroze melodies were exactly right\u2026. The figures melted away into the single shadow of the village street. The houses swallowed them, voices, footsteps, and all.\n\nAnd his eye, wandering down among the lights that twinkled against the wall of mountains, picked out the little ancient house, nestling so close beside the church that they shared a wall in common. Twenty-five years had passed since first he bowed his head beneath the wistaria that still crowned the Pension doorway. He remembered bounding up the creaking stairs. He felt he could still bound as swiftly and with as sure a step, only\u2014he would expect less at the top now. More truly put, perhaps, he would expect less for himself. That ambition of his life was over and done with. It was for others now that his desires flowed so strongly. Mere personal aims lay behind him in a faded heap, their seductiveness exhausted\u2026. He was a man with a Big Scheme now\u2014 a Scheme to help the world\u2026.\n\nThe village seemed a dull enough place in those days, for the big Alps beckoned beyond, and day and night he longed to climb them instead of reading dull French grammar. But now all was different. It dislocated his sense of time to find the place so curiously unchanged. The years had played some trick upon him. While he himself had altered, developed, and the rest, this village had remained identically the same, till it seemed as if no progress of the outer world need ever change it. The very people were so little altered\u2014hair grown a little whiter, shoulders more rounded, steps here and there a trifle slower, but one and all following the old routine he knew so well as a boy.\n\nTante Jeanne, in particular, but for wrinkles that looked as though a night of good sound sleep would smooth them all away, was the same brave woman, still 'running' that Wistaria Pension against the burden of inherited debts and mortgages. 'We're still alive,' she had said to him, after greetings delayed a quarter of a century, 'and if we haven't got ahead much, at least we haven't gone back!' There was no more hint of complaint than this. It stirred in him a very poignant sense of admiration for the high courage that drove the ageing fighter forward still with hope and faith. No doubt she still turned the kitchen saucer that did duty for planchette, unconsciously pushing its blunted pencil towards the letters that should spell out coming help. No doubt she still wore that marvellous tea-gown garment that did duty for so many different toilettes, even wearing it when she went with goloshes and umbrella to practise Sunday's hymns every Saturday night on the wheezy church harmonium. And most likely she still made underskirts from the silk of discarded umbrellas because she loved the sound of frou-frou thus obtained, while the shape of the silk exactly adapted itself to the garment mentioned. And doubtless, too, she still gave away a whole week's profits at the slightest call of sickness in the village, and then wondered how it was the Pension did not pay\u2026!\n\nA voice from below interrupted his long reverie.\n\n'Ready for supper, Henry?' cried his cousin up the stairs. 'It's past seven. The children have already left the Citadelle.'\n\nAnd as the two middle-aged dreamers made their way along the winding street of darkness through the vines, one of them noticed that the stars drew down their grand old network, fastening it to the heights of Boudry and La Tourne. He did not mention it to his companion, who was wumbling away in his beard about some difficult details of his book, but the thought slipped through his mind like the trail of a flying comet: 'I'd like to stay a long time in this village and get the people straight a bit,'\u2014which, had he known it, was another thought carefully paraphrased so that he should not notice it and feel alarm: 'It will be difficult to get away from here. My feet are in that net of stars. It's catching about my heart.'\n\nLow in the sky a pale, witched moon of yellow watched them go\u2026.\n\n'The Starlight Express is making this way, I do believe,' he thought.\n\nBut perhaps he spoke the words aloud instead of thinking them.\n\n'Eh! What's that you said, Henry?' asked the other, taking it for a comment of value upon the plot of a story he had referred to.\n\n'Oh, nothing particular,' was the reply. 'But just look at those stars above La Tourne. They shine like beacons burning on the trees.' Minks would have called them 'braziers.'\n\n'They are rather bright, yes,' said the other, disappointed. 'The air here is so very clear.' And they went up the creaking wooden stairs to supper in the Wistaria Pension as naturally as though the years had lifted them behind the mountains of the past in a single bound\u2014 twenty-five years ago." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 172", + "text": "\u2003Near where yonder evening star\n\n\u2003Makes a glory in the air,\n\n\u2003Lies a land dream\u2014found and far\n\n\u2003Where it is light always.\n\n\u2003There those lovely ghosts repair\n\n\u2003Who in sleep's enchantment are,\n\n\u2003In Cockayne dwell all things fair\u2014\n\n\u2003(But it is far away).\n\n\u2014Cockayne Country, Agnes Duclaux.\n\nThe first stage in Cousinenry's introduction took place, as has been seen, at a railway station; but further stages were accomplished later. For real introductions are not completed by merely repeating names and shaking hands, still less by a hurried kiss. The ceremony had many branches too\u2014departments, as it were. It spread itself, with various degrees, over many days as opportunity offered, and included Gygi, the gendarme, as well as the little troop of retired governesses who came to the Pension for their mid-day dinner. Before two days were passed he could not go down the village street without lifting his cap at least a dozen times. Bourcelles was so very friendly; no room for strangers there; a new-comer might remain a mystery, but he could not be unknown. Rogers found his halting French becoming rapidly fluent again. And every one knew so much about him\u2014more almost than he knew himself.\n\nAt the Den next day, on the occasion of their first tea together, he realised fully that introduction\u2014to the children at any rate\u2014 involved a kind of initiation.\n\nIt seemed to him that the room was full of children, crowds of them, an intricate and ever shifting maze. For years he had known no dealings with the breed, and their movements now were so light and rapid that it rather bewildered him. They were in and out between the kitchen, corridor, and bedroom like bits of a fluid puzzle. One moment a child was beside him, and the next, just as he had a suitable sentence ready to discharge at it, the place was vacant. A minute later 'it' appeared through another door, carrying the samovar, or was on the roof outside struggling with Riquette.\n\n'Oh, there you are!' he exclaimed. 'How you do dart about, to be sure!'\n\nAnd the answer, if any, was invariably of the cheeky order\u2014\n\n'One can't keep still here; there's not room enough.'\n\nOr, worse still\u2014\n\n'I must get past you somehow!' This, needless to say, from Monkey, who first made sure her parents were out of earshot.\n\nBut he liked it, for he recognised this proof that he was accepted and made one of the circle. These were tentative invitations to play. It made him feel quite larky, though at first he found his machinery of larking rather stiff. The wheels required oiling. And his first attempt to chase Miss Impudence resulted in a collision with Jane Anne carrying a great brown pot of home-made jam for the table. There was a dreadful sound. He had stepped on the cat at the same time.\n\nHis introduction to the cat was the immediate result, performed solemnly by Jimbo, and watched by Jinny, still balancing the jar of jam, with an expression of countenance that was half amazement and half shock. Collisions with creatures of his size and splendour were a new event to her.\n\n'I must advertise for help if it occurs again!' she exclaimed.\n\n'That's Mere Riquette, you know,' announced Jimbo formally to his cousin, standing between them in his village school blouse, hands tucked into his belt.\n\n'I heard her, yes.' From a distance the cat favoured him with a single comprehensive glance, then turned away and disappeared beneath the sofa. She, of course, reserved her opinion.\n\n'It didn't REALLY hurt her. She always squeals like that.'\n\n'Perhaps she likes it,' suggested Rogers.\n\n'She likes better tickling behind the ear,' Jimbo thought, anxious to make him feel all right, and then plunged into a description of her general habits\u2014how she jumped at the door handles when she wanted to come in, slept on his bed at night, and looked for a saucer in a particular corner of the kitchen floor. This last detail was a compliment. He meant to imply that Cousin Henry might like to see to it himself sometimes, although it had always been his own special prerogative hitherto.\n\n'I shall know in future, then,' said Rogers earnestly, showing, by taking the information seriously, that he possessed the correct instinct.\n\n'Oh yes, it's quite easy. You'll soon learn it,' spoken with feet wide apart and an expression of careless importance, as who should say, 'What a sensible man you are! Still, these are little things one has to be careful about, you know.'\n\nMother poured out tea, somewhat laboriously, as though the exact proportions of milk, hot water, and sugar each child took were difficult to remember. Each had a special cup, moreover. Her mind, ever crammed with a thousand domestic details which she seemed to carry all at once upon the surface, ready for any sudden question, found it difficult to concentrate upon the teapot. Her mind was ever worrying over these. Her husband was too vague to be of practical help. When any one spoke to her, she would pause in the middle of the operation, balancing a cup in one hand and a milk jug in the other, until the question was properly answered, every t crossed and every i dotted. There was no mistaking what Mother meant\u2014provided you had the time to listen. She had that careful thoroughness which was no friend of speed. The result was that hands were stretched out for second cups long before she had completed the first round. Her own tea began usually when everybody else had finished\u2014and lasted\u2014well, some time.\n\n'Here's a letter I got,' announced Jimbo, pulling a very dirty scrap of paper from a pocket hidden beneath many folds of blouse. 'You'd like to see it.' He handed it across the round table, and Rogers took it politely. 'Thank you very much; it came by this morning's post, did it?'\n\n'Oh, no,' was the reply, as though a big correspondence made the date of little importance. 'Not by that post.' But Monkey blurted out with the jolly laughter that was her characteristic sound, 'It came ages ago. He's had it in his pocket for weeks.'\n\nJimbo, ignoring the foolish interruption, watched his cousin's face, while Jinny gave her sister a secret nudge that every one could see.\n\n'Darling Jimbo,' was what Rogers read, 'I have been to school, and did strokes and prickings and marched round. I am like you now. A fat kiss and a hug, your loving\u2014-' The signature was illegible, lost amid several scratchy lines in a blot that looked as if a beetle had expired after violent efforts in a pool of ink.\n\n'Very nice indeed, very well put,' said Rogers, handing it gravely back again, while some one explained that the writer, aged five, had just gone to a kindergarten school in Geneva. 'And have you answered it?'\n\n'Oh, yes. I answered it the same day, you see.' It was, perhaps, a foolish letter for a man to have in his pocket. Still\u2014it was a letter.\n\n'Good! What a capital secretary you'll make me.' And the boy's flush of pleasure almost made the dish of butter rosy.\n\n'Oh, take another; take a lot, please,' Jimbo said, handing the cakes that Rogers divined were a special purchase in his honour; and while he did so, managed to slip one later on to the plates of Monkey and her sister, who sat on either side of him. The former gobbled it up at once, barely keeping back her laughter, but Jinny, with a little bow, put hers carefully aside on the edge of her plate, not knowing quite the 'nice' thing to do with it. Something in the transaction seemed a trifle too familiar perhaps. She stole a glance at mother, but mother was filling the cups and did not notice. Daddy could have helped her, only he would say 'What?' in a loud voice, and she would have to repeat her question for all to hear. Later, she ate the cake in very small morsels, a little uncomfortably.\n\nIt was a jolly, merry, cosy tea, as teas in the Den always were. Daddy wumbled a number of things in his beard to which no one need reply unless they felt like it. The usual sentences were not heard to-day: 'Monkey, what a mouthful! You must not shovel in your food like that!' or, 'Don't gurgle your tea down; swallow it quietly, like a little lady'; or, 'How often have you been told not to drink with your mouth full; this is not the servants' hall, remember!' There were no signs of contretemps of any kind, nothing was upset or broken, and the cakes went easily round, though not a crumb was left over.\n\nBut the entire time Mr. Rogers was subjected to the keenest scrutiny imaginable. Nothing he did escaped two pairs of eyes at least. Signals were flashed below as well as above the table. These signals were of the kind birds know perhaps\u2014others might be aware of their existence if they listened very attentively, yet might not interpret them. No Comanche ever sent more deft communications unobserved to his brother across a camp fire.\n\nYet nothing was done visibly; no crumb was flicked; and the table hid the pressure of the toe which, fortunately, no one intercepted. Monkey, at any rate, had eyes in both her feet, and Jimbo knew how to keep his counsel without betrayal. But inflections of the voice did most of the work\u2014this, with flashes of brown and blue lights, conveyed the swift despatches.\n\n'My underneath goes out to him,' Monkey telegraphed to her brother while she asked innocently for 'jam, please, Jimbo'; and he replied, 'Oh, he's all right, I think, but better not go too fast,' as he wiped the same article from his chin and caught her big brown eye upon him. 'He'll be our Leader,' she conveyed later by the way she stirred her cup of tea-hot-water-milk, 'when once we've got him \"out\" and taught him'; and Jimbo offered and accepted his own resignation of the coveted, long-held post by the way he let his eyelid twiddle in answer to her well-directed toe-nudge out of sight.\n\nThis, in a brief resume, was the purport of the give and take of numerous despatches between them during tea, while outwardly Mother\u2014 and Father, too, when he thought about it\u2014were delighted with their perfect company manners.\n\nJane Anne, outside all this flummery, went her own way upon an even keel. She watched him closely too, but not covertly. She stared him in the face, and imitated his delicate way of eating. Once or twice she called him 'Mr. Rogers,' for this had a grown-up flavour about it that appealed to her, and 'Cousin Henry' did not come easily to her at first. She could not forget that she had left the ecole secondaire and was on her way to a Geneva Pension where she would attend an ecole menagere. And the bursts of laughter that greeted her polite 'Mr. Rogers, did you have a nice journey, and do you like Bourcelles?'\u2014in a sudden pause that caught Mother balancing cup and teapot in mid-air\u2014puzzled her a good deal. She liked his quiet answer though\u2014'Thank you, Miss Campden, I think both quite charming.' He did not laugh. He understood, whatever the others might think. She had wished to correct the levity of the younger brother and sister, and he evidently appreciated her intentions. He seemed a nice man, a very nice man.\n\nTea once over, she carried off the loaded tray to the kitchen to do the washing-up. Jimbo and Monkey had disappeared. They always vanished about this time, but once the unenvied operation was safely under way, they emerged from their hiding-places again. No one ever saw them go. They were gone before the order, 'Now, children, help your sister take the things away,' was even issued. By the time they re-appeared Jinny was halfway through it and did not want to be disturbed.\n\n'Never mind, Mother,' she said, 'they're chronic. They're only little busy Highlanders!' For 'chronic' was another catch-word at the moment, and sometimes by chance she used it appropriately. The source of 'busy Highlanders' was a mystery known only to herself. And resentment, like jealousy, was a human passion she never felt and did not understand. Jane Anne was the spirit of unselfishness incarnate. It was to her honour, but made her ineffective as a personality.\n\nDaddy lit his big old meerschaum\u2014the 'squelcher' Jinny called it, because of its noise\u2014and mooned about the room, making remarks on literature or politics, while Mother picked a work-basket cleverly from a dangerously overloaded shelf, and prepared to mend and sew. The windows were wide open, and framed the picture of snowy Alps, now turning many-tinted in the slanting sunshine. (Riquette, gorged with milk, appeared from the scullery and inspected knees and chairs and cushions that seemed available, selecting finally the best arm-chair and curling up to sleep. Rogers smoked a cigarette, pleased and satisfied like the cat.) A hush fell on the room. It was the hour of peace between tea and the noisy Pension supper that later broke the spell. So quiet was it that the mouse began to nibble in the bedroom walls, and even peeped through the cracks it knew between the boards. It came out, flicked its whiskers, and then darted in again like lightning. Jane Anne, rinsing out the big teapot in the scullery, frightened it. Presently she came in softly, put the lamp ready for her mother's needle, in case of need later, gave a shy queer look at 'Mr. Rogers' and her father, both of whom nodded absent-mindedly to her, and then went on tip-toe out of the room. She was bound for the village shop to buy methylated spirits, sugar, blotting-paper, and\u2014a 'plaque' of Suchard chocolate for her Cousinenry. The forty centimes for this latter was a large item in her savings; but she gave no thought to that. What sorely perplexed her as she hurried down the street was whether he would like it 'milk' or 'plain.' In the end she bought both.\n\nDown the dark corridor of the Citadelle, before she left, she did not hear the muffled laughter among the shadows, nor see the movement of two figures that emerged together from the farther end.\n\n'He'll be on the sofa by now. Shall we go for him?' It was the voice of Monkey.\n\n'Leave it to me.' Jimbo still meant to be leader so far as these two were concerned at any rate. Let come later what might.\n\n'Better get Mother out of the way first, though.'\n\n'Mother's nothing. She's sewing and things,' was the reply. He understood the conditions thoroughly. He needed no foolish advice.\n\n'He's awfully easy. You saw the two gold teeth. It's him, I'm sure.'\n\n'Of course he's easy, only a person doesn't want to be pulled about after tea,' in the tone of a man who meant to feel his way a bit.\n\nClearly they had talked together more than once since the arrival at the station. Jimbo made up for ignorance by decision and sublime self- confidence. He answered no silly questions, but listened, made up his mind, and acted. He was primed to the brim\u2014a born leader.\n\n'Better tell him that we'll come for him to-night,' the girl insisted. 'He'll be less astonished then. You can tell he dreams a lot by his manner. Even now he's only half awake.'\n\nThe conversation was in French\u2014school and village French. Her brother ignored the question with 'va te cacher!' He had no doubts himself.\n\n'Just wait a moment while I tighten my belt,' he observed. 'You can tell it by his eyes,' he added, as Monkey urged him forward to the door. 'I know a good dreamer when I see one.'\n\nThen fate helped them. The door against their noses opened and Daddy came out, followed by his cousin. All four collided.\n\n'Oh, is the washing-up finished?' asked Monkey innocently, quick as a flash.\n\n'How you startled me!' exclaimed Daddy. 'You really must try to be less impetuous. You'd better ask Mother about the washing,' he repeated, 'she's in there sewing.' His thoughts, it seemed, were just a trifle confused. Plates and linen both meant washing, and sometimes hair and other stuff as well.\n\n'There's no light, you see, yet,' whispered Jimbo. A small lamp usually hung upon the wall. Jane Anne at that moment came out carrying it and asking for a match.\n\n'No starlight, either,' added Monkey quickly, giving her cousin a little nudge. 'It's all upwumbled, or whatever Daddy calls it.'\n\nThe look he gave her might well have suppressed a grown-up person\u2014 'grande personne,' as Jimbo termed it, translating literally\u2014but on Monkey it had only slight effect. Her irrepressible little spirit concealed springs few could regulate. Even avoir-dupois increased their resiliency the moment it was removed. But Jimbo checked her better than most. She did look a trifle ashamed\u2014for a second.\n\n'Can't you wait?' he whispered. 'Daddy'll spoil it if you begin it here. How you do fidget!'\n\nThey passed all together out into the yard, the men in front, the two children just behind, walking warily.\n\nThen came the separation, yet none could say exactly how it was accomplished. For separations are curious things at the best of times, the forces that effect them as mysterious as wind that blows a pair of butterflies across a field. Something equally delicate was at work. One minute all four stood together by the fountain, and the next Daddy was walking downhill towards the carpenter's house alone, while the other three were already twenty metres up the street that led to the belt of forest.\n\nJimbo, perhaps, was responsible for the deft manoeuvring. At any rate, he walked beside his big cousin with the air of a successful aide-de- camp. But Monkey, too, seemed flushed with victory, rolling along\u2014her rotundity ever suggested rolling rather than the taking of actual steps\u2014as if she led a prisoner.\n\n'Don't bother your cousin, children,' their father's voice was heard again faintly in the distance. Then the big shoulder of La Citadelle hid him from view and hearing.\n\nAnd so the sight was seen of these three, arm in arm, passing along the village street in the twilight. Gygi saw them go and raised his blue, peaked cap; and so did Henri Favre, standing in the doorway of his little shop, as he weighed the possible value of the new customer for matches, chocolate, and string\u2014the articles English chiefly bought; and likewise Alfred Sandoz, looking a moment through the window of his cabaret, the Guillaume Tell, saw them go past like shadows towards the woods, and observed to his carter friend across the table, 'They choose queer times for expeditions, these English, ouah!'\n\n'It's their climate makes them like that,' put in his wife, a touch of pity in her voice. Her daughter swept the Den and lit the fourneau for la famille anglaise in the mornings, and the mother, knowing a little English, spelt out the weather reports in the Daily Surprise she sometimes brought.\n\nMeanwhile the three travellers had crossed the railway line, where Jimbo detained them for a moment's general explanation, and passed the shadow of the sentinel poplar. The cluster of spring leaves rustled faintly on its crest. The village lay behind them now. They turned a moment to look back upon the stretch of vines and fields that spread towards the lake. From the pool of shadow where the houses nestled rose the spire of the church, a strong dark line against the fading sunset. Thin columns of smoke tried to draw it after them. Lights already twinkled on the farther shore, five miles across, and beyond these rose dim white forms of the tremendous ghostly Alps. Dusk slowly brought on darkness.\n\nJimbo began to hum the song of the village he had learned in school\u2014\n\n\u2003P'tit Bourcelles sur sa colline\n\n\u2003De partout a gentille mine;\n\n\u2003On y pratique avec success\n\n\u2003L'exploitation du francais,\n\n...and the moment it was over, his sister burst out with the question that had been buzzing inside her head the whole time\u2014\n\n'How long are you going to stay?' she said, as they climbed higher along the dusty road.\n\n'Oh, about a week,' he told her, giving the answer already used a dozen times. 'I've just come out for a holiday\u2014first holiday I've had for twenty years. Fancy that! Pretty long time, eh?'\n\nThey simply didn't believe that; they let it pass\u2014politely.\n\n'London's stuffy, you know, just now,' he added, aware that he was convicted of exaggeration. 'Besides, it's spring.'\n\n'There are millions of flowers here,' Jimbo covered his mistake kindly, 'millions and millions. Aren't there, Monkey?'\n\n'Oh, billions.'\n\n'Of course,' he agreed.\n\n'And more than anywhere else in the whole world.'\n\n'It looks like that,' said Cousin Henry, as proudly as they said it themselves. And they told him how they picked clothes-baskets full of the wild lily of the valley that grew upon the Boudry slopes, hepaticas, periwinkles, jonquils, blue and white violets, as well as countless anemones, and later, the big yellow marguerites.\n\n'Then how long are you going to stay\u2014really?' inquired Monkey once again, as though the polite interlude were over. It was a delicate way of suggesting that he had told an untruth. She looked up straight into his face. And, meeting her big brown eyes, he wondered a little\u2014for the first time\u2014how he should reply.\n\n'Daddy came here meaning to stay only six months\u2014first.'\n\n'When I was littler,' Jimbo put in.\n\n'\u2014and stayed here all this time\u2014four years.'\n\n'I hope to stay a week or so\u2014just a little holiday, you know,' he said at length, giving the answer purposely. But he said it without conviction, haltingly. He felt that they divined the doubt in him. They guessed his thought along the hands upon his arm, as a horse finds out its rider from the touch upon the reins. On either side big eyes watched and judged him; but the brown ones put a positive enchantment in his blood. They shone so wonderfully in the dusk.\n\n'Longer than that, I think,' she told him, her own mind quite made up.\n\n'It's not so easy to get away from.'\n\n'You mean it?' he asked seriously. 'It makes one quite nervous.'\n\n'There's such a lot to do here,' she said, still keeping her eyes fixed upon his face till he felt the wonder in him become a little unmanageable. 'You'll never get finished in a week.'\n\n'My secretary,' he stammered, 'will help me,' and Jimbo nodded, fastening both hands upon his arm, while Monkey indulged in a little gust of curious laughter, as who should say 'He who laughs last, laughs best.'\n\nThey entered the edge of the forest. Hepaticas watched them with their eyes of blue. Violets marked their tread. The frontiers of the daylight softly closed behind them. A thousand trees opened a way to let them pass, and moss twelve inches thick took their footsteps silently as birds. They came presently to a little clearing where the pines stood in a circle and let in a space of sky. Looking up, all three saw the first small stars in it. A wild faint scent of coming rain was in the air\u2014those warm spring rains that wash the way for summer. And a signal flashed unseen from the blue eyes to the brown.\n\n'This way,' said Jimbo firmly. 'There's an armchair rock where you can rest and get your wind a bit,' and, though Rogers had not lost his wind, he let himself be led, and took the great grey boulder for his chair. Instantly, before he had arranged his weight among the points and angles, both his knees were occupied.\n\n'By Jove,' flashed through his mind. 'They've brought me here on purpose. I'm caught!'\n\nA tiny pause followed.\n\n'Now, look here, you little Schemers, I want to know what\u2014'\n\nBut the sentence was never finished. The hand of Monkey was already pointing upwards to the space of sky. He saw the fringe of pine tops fencing it about with their feathery, crested ring, and in the centre shone faint, scattered stars. Over the fence of mystery that surrounds common objects wonder peeped with one eye like a star.\n\n'Cousinenry,' he heard close to his ear, so soft it almost might have been those tree-tops whispering to the night, 'do you know anything about a Star Cave\u2014a place where the starlight goes when there are no eyes or puddles about to catch it?'\n\nA Star Cave! How odd! His own boyhood's idea. He must have mentioned it to his cousin perhaps, and he had told the children. And all that was in him of nonsense, poetry, love rose at a bound as he heard it. He felt them settle themselves more comfortably upon his knees. He forgot to think about the points and angles. Here surely a gateway was opening before his very feet, a gateway into that world of fairyland the old clergyman had spoken about. A great wave of tenderness swept him\u2014a flood strong and deep, as he had felt it long ago upon the hill of that Kentish village. The golden boyhood's mood rushed over him once more with all its original splendour. It took a slightly different form, however. He knew better how to direct it for one thing. He pressed the children closer to his side.\n\n'A what?' he asked, speaking low as they did. 'Do I know a what?'\n\n'A cave where lost starlight collects,' Monkey repeated, 'a Star Cave.'\n\nAnd Jimbo said aloud the verses he had already learned by heart. While his small voice gave the words, more than a little mixed, a bird high up among the boughs woke from its beauty sleep and sang. The two sounds mingled. But the singing of the bird brought back the scenery of the Vicarage garden, and with it the strange, passionate things the old clergyman had said. The two scenes met in his mind, passed in and out of one another like rings of smoke, interchanged, and finally formed a new picture all their own, where flowers danced upon a carpet of star-dust that glittered in mid-air.\n\nHe knew some sudden, deep enchantment of the spirit. The Fairyland the world had lost spread all about him, and\u2014he had the children close. The imaginative faculty that for years had invented ingenious patents, woke in force, and ran headlong down far sweeter channels\u2014channels that fastened mind, heart, and soul together in a single intricate network of soft belief. He remembered the dusk upon the Crayfield lawns.\n\n'Of course I know a Star Cave,' he said at length, when Jimbo had finished his recitation, and Monkey had added the details their father had told them. 'I know the very one your Daddy spoke about. It's not far from where we're sitting. It's over there.' He pointed up to the mountain heights behind them, but Jimbo guided his hand in the right direction\u2014towards the Boudry slopes where the forests dip upon the precipices of the Areuse.\n\n'Yes, that's it\u2014exactly,' he said, accepting the correction instantly; 'only I go to the top of the mountains first so as to slide down with the river of starlight.'\n\n'We go straight,' they told him in one breath.\n\n'Because you've got more star-stuff in your eyes than I have, and find the way better,' he explained.\n\nThat touched their sense of pity. 'But you can have ours,' they cried, 'we'll share it.'\n\n'No,' he answered softly, 'better keep your own. I can get plenty now. Indeed, to tell the truth\u2014though it's a secret between ourselves, remember\u2014that's the real reason I've come out here. I want to get a fresh supply to take back to London with me. One needs a fearful lot in London\u2014'\n\n'But there's no sun in London to melt it,' objected Monkey instantly.\n\n'There's fog though, and it gets lost in fog like ink in blotting- paper. There's never enough to go round. I've got to collect an awful lot before I go back.'\n\n'That'll take more than a week,' she said triumphantly.\n\nThey fastened themselves closer against him, like limpets on a rock.\n\n'I told you there was lots to do here,' whispered Monkey again.\n\n'You'll never get it done in a week.'\n\n'And how will you take it back?' asked Jimbo in the same breath. The answer went straight to the boy's heart.\n\n'In a train, of course. I've got an express train here on purpose\u2014'\n\n'The \"Rapide\"?' he interrupted, his blue eyes starting like flowers from the earth.\n\n'Quicker far than that. I've got\u2014'\n\nThey stared so hard and so expectantly, it was almost like an interruption. The bird paused in its rushing song to listen too.\n\n'\u2014a Starlight Express,' he finished, caught now in the full tide of fairyland. 'It came here several nights ago. It's being loaded up as full as ever it can carry. I'm to drive it back again when once it's ready.'\n\n'Where is it now?'\n\n'Who's loading it?'\n\n'How fast does it go? Are there accidents and collisions?'\n\n'How do you find the way?'\n\n'May I drive it with you?'\n\n'Tell us exactly everything in the world about it\u2014at once!'\n\nQuestions poured in a flood about him, and his imagination leaped to their answering. Above them the curtain of the Night shook out her million stars while they lay there talking with bated breath together. On every single point he satisfied them, and himself as well. He told them all\u2014his visit to the Manor House, the sprites he found there still alive and waiting as he had made them in his boyhood, their songs and characters, the Dustman, Sweep, and Lamplighter, the Laugher, and the Woman of the Haystack, the blue-eyed Guard\u2014\n\n'But now her eyes are brown, aren't they?' Monkey asked, peering very close into his face. At the same moment she took his heart and hid it deep away among her tumbling hair.\n\n'I was coming to that. They're brown now, of course, because in this different atmosphere brown eyes see better than blue in the dark. The colours of signals vary in different countries.\n\n'And I'm the mecanicien,' cried Jimbo. 'I drive the engine.'\n\n'And I'm your stoker,' he agreed, 'because here we burn wood instead of coal, and I'm director in a wood-paving company and so know all about it.'\n\nThey did not pause to dissect his logic\u2014but just tore about full speed with busy plans and questionings. He began to wonder how in the world he would satisfy them\u2014and satisfy himself as well!\u2014when the time should come to introduce them to Express and Cave and Passengers. For if he failed in that, the reality of the entire business must fall to the ground. Yet the direct question did not come. He wondered more and more. Neither child luckily insisted on immediate tangible acquaintance. They did not even hint about it. So far the whole thing had gone splendidly and easily, like floating a new company with the rosiest prospectus in the world; but the moment must arrive when profits and dividends would have to justify mere talk. Concrete results would be demanded. If not forthcoming, where would his position be?\n\nYet, still the flood of questions, answers, explanations flowed on without the critical sentence making its appearance. He had led them well\u2014so far. How in the world, though, was he to keep it up, and provide definite result at the end?\n\nThen suddenly the truth dawned upon him. It was not he who led after all; it was they. He was being led. They knew. They understood. The reins of management lay in their small capable hands, and he had never really held them at all. Most cleverly, with utmost delicacy, they had concealed from him his real position. They were Directors, he the merest shareholder, useful only for 'calls.' The awkward question that he feared would never come, but instead he would receive instructions. 'Keep close to the children; they will guide you.' The words flashed back. He was a helpless prisoner; but had only just discovered the fact. He supplied the funds; they did the construction. Their plans and schemes netted his feet in fairyland just as surely as the weight of their little warm, soft bodies fastened him to the boulder where he sat. He could not move. He could not go further without their will and leadership.\n\nBut his captivity was utterly delightful to him\u2026.\n\nThe sound of a deep bell from the Colombier towers floated in to them between the trees. The children sprang from his knees. He rose slowly, a little cramped and stiff.\n\n'Half-past six,' said Jimbo. 'We must go back for supper.'\n\nHe stood there a moment, stretching, while the others waited, staring up at him as though he were a tree. And he felt like a big tree; they were two wild-flowers his great roots sheltered down below.\n\nAnd at that moment, in the little pause before they linked up arms and started home again, the Question of Importance came, though not in the way he had expected it would come.\n\n'Cousinenry, do you sleep very tightly at night, please?' Monkey asked it, but Jimbo stepped up nearer to watch the reply.\n\n'Like a top,' he said, wondering.\n\nSignals he tried vainly to intercept flashed between the pair of them.\n\n'Why do you ask?' as nothing further seemed forthcoming.\n\n'Oh, just to know,' she explained. 'It's all right.'\n\n'Yes, it's quite all right like that,' added Jimbo. And without more ado they took his arms and pulled him out of the forest.\n\nAnd Henry Rogers heard something deep, deep down within himself echo the verdict.\n\n'I think it is all right.'\n\nOn the way home there were no puddles, but there were three pairs of eyes\u2014and the stars were uncommonly thick overhead. The children asked him almost as many questions as there were clusters of them between the summits of Boudry and La Tourne. All three went floundering in that giant Net. It was so different, too, from anything they had been accustomed to. Their father's stories, answers, explanations, and the like, were ineffective because they always felt he did not quite believe them himself even while he gave them. He did not think he believed them, that is. But Cousin Henry talked of stars and star- stuff as though he had some in his pocket at the moment. And, of course, he had. For otherwise they would not have listened. He could not have held their attention.\n\nThey especially liked the huge, ridiculous words he used, because such words concealed great mysteries that pulsed with wonder and exquisitely wound them up. Daddy made things too clear. The bones of impossibility were visible. They saw thin nakedness behind the explanations, till the sense of wonder faded. They were not babies to be fed with a string of one-syllable words!\n\nJimbo kept silence mostly, his instinct ever being to conceal his ignorance; but Monkey talked fifteen to the dozen, filling the pauses with long 'ohs' and bursts of laughter and impudent observations. Yet her cheeky insolence never crossed the frontier where it could be resented. Her audacity stopped short of impertinence.\n\n'There's a point beyond which\u2014' her cousin would say gravely, when she grew more daring than usual; and, while answering 'It'll stick into you, then, not into me,' she yet withdrew from the borders of impertinence at once.\n\n'What is star-stuff really then?' she asked.\n\n'The primordial substance of the universe,' he answered solemnly, no whit ashamed of his inaccuracy.\n\n'Ah yes!' piped Jimbo, quietly. Ecole primaire he understood. This must be something similar.\n\n'But what does it do, I mean, and why is it good for people to have it in them\u2014on them\u2014whatever it is?' she inquired.\n\n'It gives sympathy and insight; it's so awfully subtle and delicate,' he answered. 'A little of it travels down on every ray and soaks down into you. It makes you feel inclined to stick to other people and understand them. That's sympathy.'\n\n'Sympathie,' said Jimbo for his sister's benefit apparently, but in reality because he himself was barely treading water.\n\n'But sympathy,' the other went on, 'is no good without insight\u2014which means seeing things as others see them\u2014from inside. That's insight\u2014-'\n\n'Inside sight,' she corrected him.\n\n'That's it. You see, the first stuff that existed in the universe was this star-stuff\u2014nebulae. Having nothing else to stick to, it stuck to itself, and so got thicker. It whirled in vortices. It grew together in sympathy, for sympathy brings together. It whirled and twirled round itself till it got at last into solid round bodies\u2014worlds\u2014 stars. It passed, that is, from mere dreaming into action. And when the rays soak into you, they change your dreaming into action. You feel the desire to do things\u2014for others.'\n\n'Ah! yes,' repeated Jimbo, 'like that.'\n\n'You must be full of vorty seas, then, because you're so long,' said Monkey, 'but you'll never grow into a solid round body\u2014'\n\nHe took a handful of her hair and smothered the remainder of the sentence.\n\n'The instant a sweet thought is born in your mind,' he continued, 'the heavenly stables send their starry messengers to harness it for use. A ray, perhaps, from mighty Sirius picks it out of your heart at birth.'\n\n'Serious!' exclaimed Jimbo, as though the sun were listening.\n\n'Sirius\u2014another sun, that is, far bigger than our own\u2014a perfect giant, yet so far away you hardly notice him.'\n\nThe boy clasped his dirty fingers and stared hard. The sun was listening.\n\n'Then what I think is known\u2014like that\u2014all over the place?' he asked. He held himself very straight indeed.\n\n'Everywhere,' replied Cousinenry gravely. 'The stars flash your thoughts over the whole universe. None are ever lost. Sooner or later they appear in visible shape. Some one, for instance, must have thought this flower long ago'\u2014he stooped and picked a blue hepatica at their feet\u2014'or it couldn't be growing here now.'\n\nJimbo accepted the statement with his usual gravity.\n\n'Then I shall always think enormous and tremendous things\u2014powerful locomotives, like that and\u2014and\u2014'\n\n'The best is to think kind little sweet things about other people,' suggested the other. 'You see the results quicker then.'\n\n'Mais oui,' was the reply, 'je pourrai faire ca au meme temps, n'est- ce pas?'\n\n'Parfaitemong,' agreed his big cousin.\n\n'There's no room in her for inside sight,' observed Monkey as a portly dame rolled by into the darkness. 'You can't tell her front from her back.' It was one of the governesses.\n\n'We'll get her into the cave and change all that,' her cousin said reprovingly. 'You must never judge by outside alone. Puddings should teach you that.'\n\nBut no one could reprove Monkey without running a certain risk.\n\n'We don't have puddings here,' she said, 'we have dessert\u2014sour oranges and apples.'\n\nShe flew from his side and vanished down the street and into the Citadelle courtyard before he could think of anything to say. A shooting star flashed at the same moment behind the church tower, vanishing into the gulf of Boudry's shadow. They seemed to go at the same pace together.\n\n'Oh, I say!' said Jimbo sedately, 'you must punish her for that, you know. Shall I come with you to the carpenter's?' he added, as they stood a moment by the fountain. 'There's just ten minutes to wash and brush your hair for supper.'\n\n'I think I can find my way alone,' he answered, 'thank you all the same.'\n\n'It's nothing,' he said, lifting his cap as the village fashion was, and watching his cousin's lengthy figure vanish down the street.\n\n'We'll meet at the Pension later,' the voice came back, 'and in the morning I shall have a lot of correspondence to attend to. Bring your shorthand book and lots of pencils, mind.'\n\n'How many?'\n\n'Oh, half a dozen will do.'\n\nThe boy turned in and hurried after his sister. But he was so busy collecting all the pencils and paper he could find that he forgot to brush his hair, and consequently appeared at the supper table with a head like a tangled blackberry bush. His eyes were bright as stars." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 173", + "text": "\u2003O pure one, take thy seat in the barque of the Sun,\n\n\u2003And sail thou over the sky.\n\n\u2003Sail thou with the imperishable stars,\n\n\u2003Sail thou with the unwearied stars.\n\n\u2014Pyramid Texts, Dynasty VI.\n\nBut Henry Rogers ran the whole two hundred yards to his lodgings in the carpenter's house. He ran as though the entire field of brilliant stars were at his heels. There was bewilderment, happiness, exhilaration in his blood. He had never felt so light-hearted in his life. He felt exactly fifteen years of age\u2014and a half. The half was added to ensure a good, safe margin over the other two.\n\nBut he was late for supper too\u2014later than the children, for first he jotted down some notes upon the back of an envelope. He wrote them at high speed, meaning to correct them later, but the corrections were never made. Later, when he came to bed, the envelope had been tidied away by the careful housewife into the dustbin. And he was ashamed to ask for them. The carpenter's wife read English.\n\n'Pity,' he said to himself. 'I don't believe Minks could have done it better!'\n\nThe energy that went to the making of those 'notes' would have run down different channels a few years ago. It would have gone into some ingenious patent. The patent, however, might equally have gone into the dustbin. There is an enormous quantity of misdirected energy pouring loose about the world!\n\n\u2003The notes had run something like this\u2014\n\n\u2003O children, open your arms to me,\n\n\u2003Let your hair fall over my eyes;\n\n\u2003Let me sleep a moment\u2014and then awake\n\n\u2003In your Gardens of sweet Surprise!\n\n\u2003For the grown-up folk\n\n\u2003Are a wearisome folk,\n\n\u2003And they laugh my fancies to scorn,\n\n\u2003My fun and my fancies to scorn.\n\n\u2003O children, open your hearts to me,\n\n\u2003And tell me your wonder-thoughts;\n\n\u2003Who lives in the palace inside your brain?\n\n\u2003Who plays in its outer courts?\n\n\u2003Who hides in the hours To-morrow holds?\n\n\u2003Who sleeps in your yesterdays?\n\n\u2003Who tiptoes along past the curtained folds\n\n\u2003Of the shadow that twilight lays?\n\n\u2003O children, open your eyes to me,\n\n\u2003And tell me your visions too;\n\n\u2003Who squeezes the sponge when the salt tears flow\n\n\u2003To dim their magical blue?\n\n\u2003Who draws up their blinds when the sun peeps in?\n\n\u2003Who fastens them down at night?\n\n\u2003Who brushes the fringe of their lace-veined lids?\n\n\u2003Who trims their innocent light?\n\n\u2003Then, children, I beg you, sing low to me,\n\n\u2003And cover my eyes with your hands;\n\n\u2003O kiss me again till I sleep and dream\n\n\u2003That I'm lost in your fairylands;\n\n\u2003For the grown-up folk\n\n\u2003Are a troublesome folk,\n\n\u2003And the book of their childhood is torn,\n\n\u2003Is blotted, and crumpled, and torn!\n\nSupper at the Pension dissipated effectively the odd sense of enchantment to which he had fallen a victim, but it revived again with a sudden rush when Jimbo and his sister came up at half-past eight to say good-night. It began when the little fellow climbed up to plant a resounding kiss upon his lips, and it caught him fullest when Monkey's arms were round his neck, and he heard her whisper in his ear\u2014\n\n'Sleep as tightly as you can, remember, and don't resist. We'll come later to find you.' Her brown eyes were straight in front of his own. Goodness, how they shone! Old Sirius and Aldebaran had certainly left a ray in each.\n\n'Hope you don't get any longer when you're asleep!' she added, giving him a sly dig in the ribs\u2014then was gone before he could return it, or ask her what she meant by 'we'll find you later.'\n\n'And don't say a word to Mother,' was the last thing he heard as she vanished down the stairs.\n\nSlightly confused, he glanced down at the aged pumps he happened to have on, and noticed that one bow was all awry and loose. He stooped to fidget with it, and Mother caught him in the act.\n\n'I'll stitch it on for you,' she said at once. 'It won't take a minute. One of the children can fetch it in the morning.'\n\nBut he was ashamed to add to her endless sewing. Like some female Sisyphus, she seemed always pushing an enormous needle through a mountain of clothes that grew higher each time she reached the top.\n\n'I always wear it like that,' he assured her gravely, his thoughts still busy with two other phrases\u2014' find you' and 'sleep tightly.' What in the world could they mean? Did the children really intend to visit him at night? They seemed so earnest about it. Of course it was all nonsense. And yet\u2014!\n\n'You mustn't let them bother you too much,' he heard their mother saying, her voice sounding a long way off. 'They're so wildly happy to have some one to play with.'\n\n'That's how I like them,' he answered vaguely, referring half to the pumps and half to the children. 'They're no trouble at all, believe me.'\n\n'I'm afraid we've spoilt them rather\u2014'\n\n'But\u2014not at all,' he murmured, still confused. 'They're only a little loose\u2014er\u2014lively, I mean. That's how they should be.'\n\nAnd outside all heard their laughing voices dying down the street as they raced along to the Citadelle for bed. It was Monkey's duty to see her brother safely in. Ten minutes later Mother would follow to tell them tuck-up stories and hear their prayers.\n\n'Excuse me! Have you got a hot-water bottle?' asked a sudden jerky voice, and he turned with a start to see Jane Anne towering beside him.\n\n'I'm sorry,' he answered, 'but I don't carry such things about with me.' He imagined she was joking, then saw that it was very serious.\n\nShe looked puzzled a moment. 'I meant\u2014would you like one? Everybody uses them here.' She thought all grown-ups used hot-water bottles.\n\nHe hesitated a second. The child looked as though she would produce one from her blouse like any conjurer. As yet, however, the article in question had not entered his scheme of life. He declined it with many thanks.\n\n'I can get you a big one,' she urged. But even that did not tempt him.\n\n'Will you have a cold-water bandage then\u2014for your head\u2014or anything?'\n\nShe seemed so afflicted with a desire to do something for him that he almost said 'Yes'; only the fear that she might offer next a beehive or a gramophone restrained him.\n\n'Thank you so much, but really I can manage without it\u2014to-night.'\n\nJane Anne made no attempt to conceal her disappointment. What a man he was, to be sure! And what a funny place the world was!\n\n'It's Jinny's panacea,' said Mother, helping herself with reckless uncertainty to a long word. 'She's never happy unless she's doing for somebody,' she added ambiguously. 'It's her metier in life.'\n\n'Mother, what are you saying?' said the child's expression. Then she made one last attempt. She remembered, perhaps, the admiring way he had watched her brother and sister's antics in the Den before. She was not clever on her feet, but at least she could try.\n\n'Shall I turn head over heels for you, then?'\n\nHe caught her mother's grave expression just in time to keep his laughter back. The offer of gymnastics clearly involved sacrifice somewhere.\n\n'To-morrow,' he answered quickly. 'Always put off till to-morrow what you're too old to do to-day.'\n\n'Of course; I see\u2014yes.' She was more perplexed than ever, as he meant that she should be. His words were meaningless, but they helped the poignant situation neatly. She could not understand why all her offers were refused like this. There must be something wrong with her selection, perhaps. She would think of better ones in future. But, oh, what a funny place the world was!\n\n'Good-night, then, Mr.\u2014Cousin Rogers,' she said jerkily with resignation. 'Perhaps to-morrow\u2014when I'm older\u2014'\n\n'If it comes.' He gravely shook the hand she held out primly, keeping a certain distance from him lest he should attempt to kiss her.\n\n'It always comes; it's a chronic monster,' she laughed, saying the first thing that came into her queer head. They all laughed. Jane Anne went out, feeling happier. At least, she had amused him. She marched off with the air of a grenadier going to some stern and difficult duty. From the door she flung back at him a look of speechless admiration, then broke into a run, afraid she might have been immodest or too forward. They heard her thumping overhead.\n\nAnd presently he followed her example. The Pension sitting-room emptied. Unless there was something special on hand\u2014a dance, a romp, a game, or some neighbours who dropped in for talk and music\u2014it was rarely occupied after nine o'clock. Daddy had already slipped home\u2014he had this mysterious way of disappearing when no one saw him go. At this moment, doubtless, a wumbled book absorbed him over at the carpenter's. Old Miss Waghorn sat in a corner nodding over her novel, and the Pension cat, Borelle, was curled up in her sloping, inadequate lap.\n\nThe big, worn velvet sofa in the opposite corner was also empty. On romping nights it was the train de Moscou, where Jimbo sold tickets to crowded passengers for any part of the world. To-night it was a mere dead sofa, uninviting, dull.\n\nHe went across the darkened room, his head scraping acquaintance with the ivy leaves that trailed across the ceiling. He slipped through the little hall. In the kitchen he heard the shrill voice of Mme. Jequier talking very loudly about a dozen things at once to the servant-girl, or to any one else who was near enough to listen. Luckily she did not see him. Otherwise he would never have escaped without another offer of a hot-water bottle, a pot of home-made marmalade, or a rug and pillow for his bed. He made his way downstairs into the street unnoticed; but just as he reached the bottom his thundering tread betrayed him. The door flew open at the top.\n\n'Bon soir, bonne nuit,' screamed the voice; 'wait a moment and I'll get the lamp. You'll break your neck. Is there anything you want\u2014a hot-water bottle, or a box of matches, or some of my marmalade for your breakfast? Wait, and I'll get it in a moment\u2014' She would have given the blouse off her back had he needed, or could have used it.\n\nShe flew back to the kitchen to search and shout. It sounded like a quarrel; but, pretending not to hear, he made good his escape and passed out into the street. The heavy door of the Post Office banged behind him, cutting short a stream of excited sentences. The peace and quiet of the night closed instantly about his steps.\n\nBy the fountain opposite the Citadelle he paused to drink from the pipe of gushing mountain water. The open courtyard looked inviting, but he did not go in, for, truth to tell, there was a curious excitement in him\u2014an urgent, keen desire to get to sleep as soon as possible. Not that he felt sleepy\u2014quite the reverse in fact, but that he looked forward to his bed and to 'sleeping tightly.'\n\nThe village was already lost in slumber. No lights showed in any houses. Yet it was barely half-past nine. Everywhere was peace and stillness. Far across the lake he saw the twinkling villages. Behind him dreamed the forests. A deep calm brooded over the mountains; but within the calm, and just below the surface in himself, hid the excitement as of some lively anticipation. He expected something. Something was going to happen. And it was connected with the children. Jimbo and Monkey were at the bottom of it. They had said they would come for him\u2014to 'find him later.' He wondered\u2014quite absurdly he wondered.\n\nHe passed his cousin's room on tiptoe, and noticed a light beneath the door. But, before getting into bed, he stood a moment at the open window and drew in deep draughts of the fresh night air. The world of forest swayed across his sight. The outline of the Citadelle merged into it. A point of light showed the window where the children already slept. But, far beyond, the moon was loading stars upon the trees, and a rising wind drove them in glittering flocks along the heights\u2026.\n\nBlowing out the candle, he turned over on his side to sleep, his mind charged to the brim with wonder and curious under-thrills of this anticipation. He half expected\u2014what? Reality lay somewhere in the whole strange business; it was not merely imaginative nonsense. Fairyland was close.\n\nAnd the moment he slept and began to dream, the thing took a lively and dramatic shape. A thousand tiny fingers, soft and invisible, drew him away into the heart of fairyland. There was a terror in him lest he should\u2014stick. But he came out beautifully and smoothly, like a thread of summer grass from its covering sheath.\n\n'I am slippery after all, then\u2014slippery enough,' he remembered saying with surprised delight, and then\u2014" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 174", + "text": "\u2003Look how the floor of heaven\n\n\u2003Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.\n\n\u2003There's not the smallest orb which thou beholdest\n\n\u2003But in his motion like an angel sings,\n\n\u2003Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims.\n\n\u2014Merchant of Venice.\n\n\u2014there came to him a vivid impression of sudden light in the room, and he knew that something very familiar was happening to him, yet something that had not happened consciously for thirty years and more \u2014since his early childhood in the night-nursery with the bars across the windows.\n\nHe was both asleep and awake at the same time. Some part of him, rather, that never slept was disengaging itself\u2014with difficulty. He was getting free. Stimulated by his intercourse with the children, this part of him that in boyhood used to be so easily detached, light as air, was getting loose. The years had fastened it in very tightly. Jimbo and Monkey had got at it. And Jimbo and Monkey were in the room at this moment. They were pulling him out.\n\nIt was very wonderful; a glory of youth and careless joy rushed through him like a river. Some sheath or vesture melted off. It seemed to tear him loose. How in the world could he ever have forgotten it\u2014 let it go out of his life? What on earth could have seemed good enough to take its place? He felt like an eagle some wizard spell had imprisoned in a stone, now released and shaking out its crumpled wings. A mightier spell had set him free. The children stood beside his bed!\n\n'I can manage it alone,' he said firmly. 'You needn't try to help me.'\n\nNo sound was audible, but they instantly desisted. This thought, that took a dozen words to express ordinarily, shot from him into them the instant it was born. A gentle pulsing, like the flicker of a flame, ran over their shining little forms of radiance as they received it. They shifted to one side silently to give him room. Thus had he seen a searchlight pass like lightning from point to point across the sea.\n\nYet, at first, there was difficulty; here and there, in places, he could not get quite loose and free.\n\n'He sticks like Daddy,' he heard them think. 'In the head it seems, too.'\n\nThere was no pain in the sensation, but a certain straining as of unaccustomed muscles being stretched. He felt uncomfortable, then embarrassed, then\u2014exhilarated. But there were other exquisite sensations too. Happiness, as of flooding summer sunshine, poured through him.\n\n'He'll come with a rush. Look out!' felt Jimbo\u2014'felt' expressing 'thought' and 'said' together, for no single word can convey the double operation thus combined in ordinary life.\n\nThe reality of it caught him by the throat.\n\n'This,' he exclaimed, 'is real and actual. It is happening to me now!'\n\nHe looked from the pile of clothes taken off two hours ago\u2014goodness, what a mass!\u2014to the children's figures in the middle of the room. And one was as real as the other. The moods of the day and evening, their play and nonsense, had all passed away. He had crossed a gulf that stood between this moment and those good-nights in the Pension. This was as real as anything in life; more real than death. Reality\u2014he caught the obvious thought pass thickly through the body on the bed\u2014 is what has been experienced. Death, for that reason, is not real, not realised; dinner is. And this was real because he had been through it, though long forgotten it. Jimbo stood aside and 'felt' directions.\n\n'Don't push,' he said.\n\n'Just think and wish,' added Monkey with a laugh.\n\nIt was her laugh, and perhaps the beauty of her big brown eyes as well, that got him finally loose. For the laughter urged some queer, deep yearning in him towards a rush of exquisite accomplishment. He began to slip more easily and freely. The brain upon the bed, oddly enough, remembered a tradition of old Egypt\u2014that Thoth created the world by bursting into seven peals of laughter. It touched forgotten springs of imagination and belief. In some tenuous, racy vehicle his thought flashed forth. With a gliding spring, like a swooping bird across a valley, he was suddenly\u2014out.\n\n'I'm out!' he cried.\n\n'All out!' echoed the answering voices.\n\nAnd then he understood that first vivid impression of light. It was everywhere, an evenly distributed light. He saw the darkness of the night as well, the deep old shadows that draped the village, woods, and mountains. But in themselves was light, a light that somehow enabled them to see everything quite clearly. Solid things were all transparent.\n\nLight even radiated from objects in the room. Two much-loved books upon the table shone beautifully\u2014his Bible and a volume of poems; and, fairer still, more delicate than either, there was a lustre on the table that had so brilliant a halo it almost corruscated. The sparkle in it was like the sparkle in the children's eyes. It came from the bunch of violets, gentians, and hepaticas, already faded, that Mother had placed there days ago on his arrival. And overhead, through plaster, tiles, and rafters he saw\u2014the stars.\n\n'We've already been for Jinny,' Jimbo informed him; 'but she's gone as usual. She goes the moment she falls asleep. We never can catch her up or find her.'\n\n'Come on,' cried Monkey. 'How slow you both are! We shan't get anywhere at this rate.' And she made a wheel of coloured fire in the air. 'I'm ready,' he answered, happier than either. 'Let's be off at once.'\n\nThrough his mind flashed this explanation of their elder sister's day- expression\u2014that expression of a moth she had, puzzled, distressed, only half there, as the saying is. For if she went out so easily at night in this way, some part of her probably stayed out altogether. She never wholly came back. She was always dreaming. The entire instinct of the child, he remembered, was for others, and she thought of herself as little as did the sun\u2014old tireless star that shines for all.\n\n'She's soaked in starlight,' he cried, as they went off headlong. 'We shall find her in the Cave. Come on, you pair of lazy meteors.'\n\nHe was already far beyond the village, and the murmur of the woods rose up to them. They entered the meshes of the Star Net that spun its golden threads everywhere about them, linking up the Universe with their very hearts.\n\n'There are no eyes or puddles to-night. Everybody sleeps. Hooray, hooray!' they cried together.\n\nThere were cross-currents, though. The main, broad, shining stream poured downwards in front of them towards the opening of the Cave, a mile or two beyond, where the forests dipped down among the precipices of the Areuse; but from behind\u2014from some house in the slumbering village\u2014came a golden tributary too, that had a peculiar and astonishing brightness of its own. It came, so far as they could make out, from the humped outline of La Citadelle, and from a particular room there, as though some one in that building had a special source of supply. Moreover, it scattered itself over the village in separate swift rivulets that dived and dipped towards particular houses here and there. There seemed a constant coming and going, one stream driving straight into the Cave, and another pouring out again, yet neither mingling. One stream brought supplies, while the other directed their distribution. Some one, asleep or awake\u2014they could not tell\u2014was thinking golden thoughts of love and sympathy for the world.\n\n'It's Mlle. Lemaire,' said Jimbo. 'She's been in bed for thirty years\u2014-' His voice was very soft.\n\n'The Spine, you know,' exclaimed Monkey, a little in the rear.\n\n'\u2014and even in the daytime she looks white and shiny,' added the boy. 'I often go and talk with her and tell her things.' He said it proudly. 'She understands everything\u2014better even than Mother.' Jimbo had told most. It was all right. His leadership was maintained and justified. They entered the main stream and plunged downwards with it towards the earth\u2014three flitting figures dipped in this store of golden brilliance.\n\nA delicious and wonderful thing then happened. All three remembered.\n\n'This was where we met you first,' they told him, settling down among the trees together side by side. 'We saw your teeth of gold. You came in that train\u2014'\n\n'I was thinking about it\u2014in England,' he exclaimed, 'and about coming out to find you here.'\n\n'The Starlight Express,' put in Jimbo.\n\n'\u2014and you were just coming up to speak to us when we woke, or you woke, or somebody woke\u2014and it all went,' said Monkey.\n\n'That was when I stopped thinking about it,' he explained.\n\n'It all vanished anyhow. And the next time was'\u2014she paused a moment\u2014 'you\u2014we saw your two gold teeth again somewhere, and half recognised you\u2014'\n\nIt was the daylight world that seemed vague and dreamlike now, hard to remember clearly.\n\n'In another train\u2014' Jimbo helped her, 'the Geneva omnibus that starts at\u2014at\u2014' But even Jimbo could not recall further details.\n\n'You're wumbled,' said Rogers, helping himself and the others at the same time. 'You want some starlight to put you in touch again. Come on; let's go in. We shall find all the others inside, I suspect, hard at it.'\n\n'At what?' asked two breathless voices.\n\n'Collecting, of course\u2014for others. Did you think they ate the stuff, just to amuse themselves?'\n\n'They glided towards the opening, cutting through the little tributary stream that was pouring out on its way down the sky to that room in La Citadelle. It was brighter than the main river, they saw, and shone with a peculiar brilliance of its own, whiter and swifter than the rest. Designs, moreover, like crystals floated on the crest of every wave.\n\n'That's the best quality,' he told them, as their faces shone a moment in its glory. 'The person who deserves it must live entirely for others. That he keeps only for the sad and lonely. The rest, the common stuff, is good enough for Fraulein or for baby, or for mother, or any other\u2014' The words rose in him like flowers that he knew.\n\n'Look out, mon vieux! 'It was Monkey's voice. They just had time to stand aside as a figure shot past them and disappeared into the darkness above the trees. A big bundle, dripping golden dust, hung down his back.\n\n'The Dustman!' they cried with excitement, easily recognising his energetic yet stooping figure; and Jimbo added, 'the dear old Dustman!' while Monkey somersaulted after him, returning breathless a minute later with, 'He's gone; I couldn't get near him. He went straight to La Citadelle\u2014'\n\nAnd then collided violently with the Lamplighter, whose pole of office caught her fairly in the middle and sent her spinning like a conjurer's plate till they feared she would never stop. She kept on laughing the whole time she spun\u2014like a catherine wheel that laughs instead of splutters. The place where the pole caught her, however\u2014it was its lighted end\u2014shines and glows to this day: the centre of her little heart.\n\n'Do let's be careful,' pleaded Jimbo, hardly approving of these wild gyrations. He really did prefer his world a trifle more dignified. He was ever the grave little gentleman.\n\nThey stooped to enter by the narrow opening, but were stopped again\u2014 this time by some one pushing rudely past them to get in. From the three points of the compass to which the impact scattered them, they saw a shape of darkness squeeze itself, sack and all, to enter. An ordinary man would have broken every bone in his body, judging by the portion that projected into the air behind. But he managed it somehow, though the discomfort must have been intolerable, they all thought. The darkness dropped off behind him in flakes like discarded clothing; he turned to gold as he went in; and the contents of his sack\u2014he poured it out like water\u2014shone as though he squeezed a sponge just dipped in the Milky Way.\n\n'What a lot he's collected,' cried Rogers from his point of vantage where he could see inside. 'It all gets purified and clean in there. Wait a moment. He's coming out again\u2014off to make another collection.'\n\nAnd then they knew the man for what he was. He shot past them into the night, carrying this time a flat and emptied sack, and singing like a blackbird as he went:\u2014\n\n\u2003Sweeping chimneys and cleaning flues,\n\n\u2003That is the work I love;\n\n\u2003Brushing away the blacks and the blues,\n\n\u2003And letting in light from above!\n\n\u2003I twirl my broom in your tired brain\n\n\u2003When you're tight in sleep up-curled,\n\n\u2003Then scatter the stuff in a soot-like rain\n\n\u2003Over the edge of the world.\n\n\u2003The voice grew fainter and fainter in the distance\u2014\n\n\u2003For I'm a tremendously busy Sweep,\n\n\u2003Catching the folk when they're all asleep,\n\n\u2003And tossing the blacks on the Rubbish Heap\n\n\u2003Over the edge of the world\u2026!\n\nThe voice died away into the wind among the high branches, and they heard it no more.\n\n'There's a Sweep worth knowing,' murmured Rogers, strong yearning in him.\n\n'There are no blacks or blues in my brain,' exclaimed Monkey, 'but Jimbo's always got some on his face.'\n\nThe impudence passed ignored. Jimbo took his cousin's hand and led him to the opening. The 'men' went in first together; the other sex might follow as best it could. Yet somehow or other Monkey slipped between their legs and got in before them. They stood up side by side in the most wonderful place they had ever dreamed of.\n\nAnd the first thing they saw was\u2014Jane Anne.\n\n'I'm collecting for Mother. Her needles want such a chronic lot, you see.' Her face seemed full of stars; there was no puzzled expression in the eyes now. She looked beautiful. And the younger children stared in sheer amazement and admiration.\n\n'I have no time to waste,' she said, moving past them with a load in her spread apron that was like molten gold; 'I have to be up and awake at six to make your porridge before you go to school. I'm a busy monster, I can tell you!' She went by them like a flash, and out into the night.\n\nMonkey felt tears in her somewhere, but they did not fall. Something in her turned ashamed\u2014for a moment. Jimbo stared in silence. 'What a girl!' he thought. 'I'd like to be like that!' Already the light was sticking to him.\n\n'So this is where she always comes,' said Monkey, soon recovering from the temporary attack of emotion. 'She's better out than in; she's safest when asleep! No wonder she's so funny in the daytime.'\n\nThen they turned to look about them, breathing low as wild-flowers that watch a rising moon.\n\nThe place was so big for one thing\u2014far bigger than they had expected. The storage of lost starlight must be a serious affair indeed if it required all this space to hold it. The entire mountain range was surely hollow. Another thing that struck them was the comparative dimness of this huge interior compared with the brilliance of the river outside. But, of course, lost things are ever dim, and those worth looking for dare not be too easily found.\n\nA million tiny lines of light, they saw, wove living, moving patterns, very intricate and very exquisite. These lines and patterns the three drew in with their very breath. They swallowed light\u2014the tenderest light the world can know. A scent of flowers\u2014something between a violet and a wild rose\u2014floated over all. And they understood these patterns while they breathed them in. They read them. Patterns in Nature, of course, are fairy script. Here lay all their secrets sweetly explained in golden writing, all mysteries made clear. The three understood beyond their years; and inside-sight, instead of glimmering, shone. For, somehow or other, the needs of other people blazed everywhere, obliterating their own. It was most singular.\n\nMonkey ceased from somersaulting and stared at Jimbo.\n\n'You've got two stars in your face instead of eyes. They'll never set!' she whispered. 'I love you because I understand every bit of you.'\n\n'And you,' he replied, as though he were a grande personne, 'have got hair like a mist of fire. It will never go out!'\n\n'Every one will love me now,' she cried, 'my underneath is gold.'\n\nBut her brother reproved her neatly:\u2014\n\n'Let's get a lot\u2014simply an awful lot'\u2014he made a grimace to signify quantity\u2014'and pour it over Daddy's head till it runs from his eyes and beard. He'll write real fairy stories then and make a fortune.'\n\nAnd Cousin Henry moved past them like a burning torch. They held their breath to see him. Jane Anne, their busy sister, alone excelled him in brightness. Her perfume, too, was sweeter.\n\n'He's an old hand at this game,' Monkey said in French.\n\n'But Jinny's never done anything else since she was born,' replied her brother proudly.\n\nAnd they all three fell to collecting, for it seemed the law of the place, a kind of gravity none could disobey. They stooped\u2014three semi- circles of tender brilliance. Each lost the least desire to gather for himself; the needs of others drove them, filled them, made them eager and energetic.\n\n'Riquette would like a bit,' cried Jimbo, almost balancing on his head in his efforts to get it all at once, while Monkey's shining fingers stuffed her blouse and skirts with sheaves of golden gossamer that later she meant to spread in a sheet upon the pillow of Mademoiselle Lemaire.\n\n'She sleeps so little that she needs the best,' she sang, realising for once that her own amusement was not the end of life. 'I'll make her nights all wonder.'\n\nCousinenry, meanwhile, worked steadily like a man who knows his time is short. He piled the stuff in heaps and pyramids, and then compressed it into what seemed solid blocks that made his pockets bulge like small balloons. Already a load was on his back that bent him double.\n\n'Such a tiny bit is useful,' he explained, 'if you know exactly how and where to put it. This compression is my own patent.'\n\n'Of course,' they echoed, trying in vain to pack it up as cleverly as he did.\n\nNor were these three the only gatherers. The place was full of movement. Jane Anne was always coming back for more, deigning no explanations. She never told where she had spent her former loads. She gathered an apron full, sped off to spend and scatter it in places she knew of, and then came bustling in again for more. And they always knew her whereabouts because of the whiter glory that she radiated into the dim yellow world about them.\n\nAnd other figures, hosts of them, were everywhere\u2014stooping, picking, loading one another's backs and shoulders. To and fro they shot and glided, like Leonids in autumn round the Earth. All were collecting, though the supply seemed never to grow less. An inexhaustible stream poured in through the narrow opening, and scattered itself at once in all directions as though driven by a wind. How could the world let so much escape it, when it was what the world most needed every day. It ran naturally into patterns, patterns that could be folded and rolled up like silken tablecloths. In silence, too. There was no sound of drops falling. Sparks fly on noiseless feet. Sympathy makes no bustle.\n\n'Even on the thickest nights it falls,' a voice issued from a robust patch of light beside them that stooped with huge brown hands all knotted into muscles; 'and it's a mistake to think different.' His voice rolled on into a ridiculous bit of singing:\u2014\n\nIt comes down with the rain drops,\n\nIt comes down with the dew,\n\nThere's always 'eaps for every one\u2014\n\nFor 'im and me and you.\n\nThey recognised his big face, bronzed by the sun, and his great neck where lines drove into the skin like the rivers they drew with blunt pencils on their tedious maps of Europe. It was several faces in one. The Head Gardener was no stranger to their imaginations, for they remembered him of old somewhere, though not quite sure exactly where. He worked incessantly for others, though these 'others' were only flowers and cabbages and fruit-trees. He did his share in the world, he and his army of queer assistants, the under-gardeners.\n\nPeals of laughter, too, sounded from time to time in a far away corner of the cavern, and the laughter sent all the stuff it reached into very delicate, embroidered patterns. For it was merry and infectious laughter, joy somewhere in it like a lamp. It bordered upon singing; another touch would send it rippling into song. And to that far corner, attracted by the sound, ran numberless rivulets of light, weaving a lustrous atmosphere about the Laugher that, even while it glowed, concealed the actual gatherer from sight. The children only saw that the patterns were even more sweet and dainty than their own. And they understood. Inside-sight explained the funny little mystery. Laughter is magical\u2014brings light and help and courage. They laughed themselves then, and instantly saw their own patterns wave and tremble into tiny outlines that they could squeeze later even into the darkest, thickest head.\n\nCousinenry, meanwhile, they saw, stopped for nothing. He was singing all the time as he bent over his long, outstretched arms. And it was the singing after all that made the best patterns\u2014better even than the laughing. He knew all the best tricks of this Star Cave. He remained their leader.\n\nAnd the stuff no hands picked up ran on and on, seeking a way of escape for itself. Some sank into the ground to sweeten the body of the old labouring earth, colouring the roots of myriad flowers; some soaked into the rocky walls, tinting the raw materials of hills and woods and mountain tops. Some escaped into the air in tiny drops that, meeting in moonlight or in sunshine, instantly formed wings. And people saw a brimstone butterfly\u2014all wings and hardly any body. All went somewhere for some useful purpose. It was not in the nature of star-stuff to keep still. Like water that must go down-hill, the law of its tender being forced it to find a place where it could fasten on and shine. It never could get wholly lost; though, if the place it settled on was poor, it might lose something of its radiance. But human beings were obviously what most attracted it. Sympathy must find an outlet; thoughts are bound to settle somewhere.\n\nAnd the gatherers all sang softly\u2014'Collect for others, never mind yourself!'\n\nSome of it, too, shot out by secret ways in the enormous roof. The children recognised the exit of the separate brilliant stream they had encountered in the sky\u2014the one especially that went to the room of pain and sickness in La Citadelle. Again they understood. That unselfish thinker of golden thoughts knew special sources of supply. No wonder that her atmosphere radiated sweetness and uplifting influence. Her patience, smiles, and courage were explained. Passing through the furnace of her pain, the light was cleansed and purified. Hence the delicate, invariable radiation from her presence, voice, and eyes. From the bed of suffering she had not left for thirty years she helped the world go round more sweetly and more easily, though few divined those sudden moments of beauty they caught flashing from her halting words, nor guessed their source of strength.\n\n'Of course,' thought Jimbo, laughing, 'I see now why I like to go and tell her everything. She understands all before I've said it. She's simply stuffed with starlight\u2014bursting with inside-sight.'\n\n'That's sympathy,' his cousin added, hearing the vivid thought. And he worked away like an entire ant-heap. But he was growing rather breathless now. 'There's too much for me,' he laughed as though his mouth were full. 'I can't manage it all!' He was wading to the waist, and his coat and trousers streamed with runnels of orange-coloured light.\n\n'Swallow it then!' cried Monkey, her hair so soaked that she kept squeezing it like a sponge, both eyes dripping too.\n\nIt was their first real experience of the joy of helping others, and they hardly knew where to begin or end. They romped and played in the stuff like children in sand or snow\u2014diving, smothering themselves, plunging, choking, turning somersaults, upsetting each other's carefully reared loads, and leaping over little pyramids of gold. Then, in a flash, their laughter turned the destroyed heaps into wonderful new patterns again; and once more they turned sober and began to work.\n\nBut their cousin was more practical. 'I've got all I can carry comfortably,' he sang out at length. 'Let's go out now and sow it among the sleepers. Come on!'\n\nA field of stars seemed to follow him from the roof as he moved with difficulty towards the opening of the cave.\n\nSome one shot out just in front of him. 'My last trip!' The words reached them from outside. His bulging figure squeezed somehow through the hole, layers of light scraping off against the sides. The children followed him. But no one stuck. All were beautifully elastic; the starlight oiled and greased their daring, subtle star-bodies. Laden to the eyes, they sped across the woods that still slept heavily. The tips of the pines, however, were already opening a million eyes. There was a faint red glimmer in the east. Hours had passed while they were collecting.\n\n'The Interfering Sun is on the way. Look out!' cried some one, shooting past them like an unleashed star. 'I must get just a little more\u2014my seventeenth journey to-night!' And Jane Anne, the puzzled look already come back a little into her face, darted down towards the opening. The waking of the body was approaching.\n\n'What a girl!' thought Jimbo again, as they hurried after their grown- up cousin towards the village.\n\nAnd here, but for the leadership of Cousin Henry, they must have gone astray and wasted half their stores in ineffective fashion. Besides, the east was growing brighter, and there was a touch of confusion in their little star-bodies as sleep grew lighter and the moment of the body's waking drew nearer.\n\nAh! the exquisite adjustment that exists between the night and day bodies of children! It is little wonder that with the process of growing-up there comes a coarsening that congeals the fluid passages of exit, and finally seals the memory centres too. Only in a few can this delicate adjustment be preserved, and the sources of inspiration known to children be kept available and sweet\u2014in the poets, dreamers, and artists of this practical, steel-girdled age.\n\n'This way,' called Cousinenry. 'Follow me.' They settled down in a group among Madame Jequier's lilacs. 'We'll begin with the Pension des Glycines. Jinny is already busy with La Citadelle.'\n\nThey perched among the opening blossoms. Overhead flashed by the Sweep, the Dustman, and the Laugher, bound for distant ports, perhaps as far as England. The Head Gardener lumbered heavily after them to find his flowers and trees. Starlight, they grasped, could be no separate thing. The rays started, indeed, from separate points, but all met later in the sky to weave this enormous fairy network in which the currents and cross-currents and criss-cross-currents were so utterly bewildering. Alone, the children certainly must have got lost in the first five minutes.\n\nTheir cousin gathered up the threads from Monkey's hair and Jimbo's eyes, and held them in one hand like reins. He sang to them a moment while they recovered their breath and forces:\u2014\n\n\u2003The stars in their courses\n\n\u2003Are runaway horses\n\n\u2003That gallop with Thoughts from the Earth;\n\n\u2003They collect them, and race\n\n\u2003Back through wireless space,\n\n\u2003Bringing word of the tiniest birth;\n\n\u2003Past old Saturn and Mars,\n\n\u2003And the hosts of big stars,\n\n\u2003Who strain at their leashes for joy.\n\n\u2003Kind thoughts, like fine weather,\n\n\u2003Bind sweetly together\n\n\u2003God's suns\u2014with the heart of a boy.\n\n\u2003So, beware what you think;\n\n\u2003It is written in ink\n\n\u2003That is golden, and read by His Stars!\n\n'Hadn't we better get on?' cried Monkey, pulling impatiently at the reins he held.\n\n'Yes,' echoed Jimbo. 'Look at the sky. The \"rapide\" from Paris comes past at six o'clock.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 175", + "text": "\u2003Aus den Himmelsaugen droben\n\n\u2003Fallen zitternd goldne Funken\n\n\u2003Durch die Nacht, und meine Seele\n\n\u2003Dehnt sich liebeweit und weiter.\n\n\u2003O ihr Himmelsaugen droben,\n\n\u2003Weint euch aus in meine Seele,\n\n\u2003Dass von lichten Sternentranen\n\n\u2003Uberfliesset meine Seele!\n\n\u2014Heine.\n\nThey rose, fluttered a moment above the lilac bushes, and then shot forward like the curve of a rainbow into the sleeping house. The next second they stood beside the bed of the Widow Jequier.\n\nShe lay there, so like a bundle of untidy sticks that, but for the sadness upon the weary face, they could have burst out laughing. The perfume of the wistaria outside the open window came in sweetly, yet could not lighten the air of heavy gloom that clothed her like a garment. Her atmosphere was dull, all streaked with greys and black, for her mind, steeped in anxiety even while she slept, gave forth cloudy vapours of depression and disquietude that made impossible the approach of\u2014light. Starlight, certainly, could not force an entrance, and even sunlight would spill half its radiance before it reached her heart. The help she needed she thus deliberately shut out. Before going to bed her mood had been one of anxious care and searching worry. It continued, of course, in sleep.\n\n'Now,' thought their leader briskly, 'we must deal with this at once'; and the children, understanding his unspoken message, approached closer to the bed. How brilliant their little figures were\u2014Jimbo, a soft, pure blue, and Monkey tinged faintly here and there with delicate clear orange. Thus do the little clouds of sunset gather round to see the sun get into bed. And in utter silence; all their intercourse was silent\u2014thought, felt, but never spoken.\n\nFor a moment there was hesitation. Cousinenry was uncertain exactly how to begin. Tante Jeanne's atmosphere was so very thick he hardly knew the best way to penetrate it. Her mood had been so utterly black and rayless. But his hesitation operated like a call for help that flew instantly about the world and was communicated to the golden threads that patterned the outside sky. They quivered, flashed the message automatically; the enormous network repeated it as far as England, and the answer came. For thought is instantaneous, and desire is prayer. Quick as lightning came the telegram. Beside them stood a burly figure of gleaming gold.\n\n'I'll do it,' said the earthy voice. 'I'll show you 'ow. For she loves 'er garden. Her sympathy with trees and flowers lets me in. Always send for me when she's in a mess, or needs a bit of trimmin' and cleanin' up.'\n\nThe Head Gardener pushed past them with his odour of soil and burning leaves, his great sunburned face and his browned, stained hands. These muscular, big hands he spread above her troubled face; he touched her heart; he blew his windy breath of flowers upon her untidy hair; he called the names of lilac, wistaria, roses, and laburnum\u2026.\n\nThe room filled with the little rushing music of wind in leaves; and, as he said 'laburnum,' there came at last a sudden opening channel through the fog that covered her so thickly. Starlight, that was like a rivulet of laburnum blossoms melted into running dew, flowed down it. The Widow Jequier stirred in her sleep and smiled. Other channels opened. Light trickled down these, too, drawn in and absorbed from the store the Gardener carried. Then, with a rush of scattering fire, he was gone again. Out into the enormous sky he flew, trailing golden flame behind him. They heard him singing as he dived into the Network \u2014singing of buttercups and cowslips, of primroses and marigolds and dandelions, all yellow flowers that have stored up starlight.\n\nAnd the atmosphere of Tante Jeanne first glowed, then shone; it changed slowly from gloom to glory. Golden channels opened everywhere, making a miniature network of their own. Light flashed and corruscated through it, passing from the children and their leader along the tiny pipes of sympathy the Gardener had cleared of rubbish and decay. Along the very lines of her face ran tiny shining rivers; flooding across her weary eyelids, gilding her untidy hair, and pouring down into her heavy heart. She ceased fidgeting; she smiled in her sleep; peace settled on her face; her fingers on the coverlet lost their touch of strain. Finally she turned over, stretched her old fighting body into a more comfortable position, sighed a moment, then settled down into a deep and restful slumber. Her atmosphere was everywhere 'soft-shiny' when they left her to shoot next into the attic chamber above, where Miss Waghorn lay among her fragments of broken memory, and the litter of disordered images that passed with her for 'thinking.'\n\nAnd here, again, although their task was easier, they needed help to show the right way to begin. Before they reached the room Jimbo had wondered how they would 'get at' her. That wonder summoned help. The tall, thin figure was already operating beside the bed as they entered. His length seemed everywhere at once, and his slender pole, a star hanging from the end, was busy touching articles on walls and floor and furniture. The disorder everywhere was the expression of her dishevelled mind, and though he could not build the ruins up again, at least he could trace the outlines of an ordered plan that she might use when she left her body finally and escaped from the rebellious instrument in death. And now that escape was not so very far away. Obviously she was already loose. She was breaking up, as the world expresses it.\n\nAnd the children, watching with happy delight, soon understood his method. Each object that he touched emitted a tiny light. In her mind he touched the jumble of wandering images as well. On waking she would find both one and the other better assorted. Some of the lost things her memory ever groped for she would find more readily. She would see the starlight on them.\n\n'See,' said their leader softly, as the long thin figure of the Lamplighter shot away into the night, 'she sleeps so lightly because she is so old\u2014fastened so delicately to the brain and heart. The fastenings are worn and loose now. Already she is partly out!'\n\n'That's why she's so muddled in the daytime,' explained Jimbo, for his sister's benefit.\n\n'Exaccurately, I knew it already!' was the reply, turning a somersault like a wheel of twirling meteors close to the old lady's nose.\n\n'Carefully, now!' said their leader. 'And hurry up! There's not much we can do here, and there's heaps to do elsewhere. We must remember Mother and Daddy\u2014before the Interfering Sun is up, you know.'\n\nThey flashed about the attic chamber, tipping everything with light, from the bundle of clothes that strewed the floor to the confused interior of the black basket-trunk where she kept her money and papers. There were no shelves in this attic chamber; no room for cupboards either; it was the cheapest room in the house. And the old woman in the bed sometimes opened her eyes and peered curiously, expectantly, about her. Even in her sleep she looked for things. Almost, they felt, she seemed aware of their presence near her, she knew that they were there; she smiled.\n\nA moment later they were in mid-air on their way to the Citadelle, singing as they went:\u2014\n\n\u2003He keeps that only\n\n\u2003For the old and lonely,\n\n\u2003Who sleep so little that they need the best.\n\n\u2003The rest\u2014\n\n\u2003The common stuff\u2014\n\n\u2003Is good enough\n\n\u2003For Fraulein, or for baby, or for mother,\n\n\u2003Or any other\n\n\u2003Who likes a bit of dust,\n\n\u2003And yet can do without it\u2014\n\n\u2003If they must\u2026\n\nAlready something of the Dawn's faint magic painting lay upon the world. Roofs shone with dew. The woods were singing, and the flowers were awake. Birds piped and whistled shrilly from the orchards. They heard the Mer Dasson murmuring along her rocky bed. The rampart of the Alps stood out more clearly against the sky.\n\n'We must be very quick,' Cousin Henry flashed across to them, 'quicker than an express train.'\n\n'That's impossible,' cried Jimbo, who already felt the call of waking into his daily world. 'Hark! There's whistling already\u2026.'\n\nThe next second, in a twinkling, he was gone. He had left them. His body had been waked up by the birds that sang and whistled so loudly in the plane tree outside his window. Monkey and her guide raced on alone into the very room where he now sat up and rubbed his eyes in the Citadelle. He was telling his mother that he had just been 'dreaming extraordinary.' But Mother, sleeping like a fossil monster in the Tertiary strata, heard him not.\n\n'He often goes like that,' whispered Monkey in a tone of proud superiority. 'He's only a little boy really, you see.'\n\nBut the sight they then witnessed was not what they expected.\n\nFor Mademoiselle Lemaire herself was working over Mother like an engine, and Mother was still sleeping like the dead. The radiance that emanated from the night-body of this suffering woman, compared to their own, was as sunlight is to candle-light. Its soft glory was indescribable, its purity quite unearthly, and the patterns that it wove lovely beyond all telling. Here they surprised her in the act, busy with her ceaseless activities for others, working for the world by thinking beauty. While her pain-racked body lay asleep in the bed it had not left for thirty years, nor would ever leave again this side of death, she found her real life in loving sympathy for the pain of others everywhere. For thought is prayer, and prayer is the only true effective action that leaves no detail incomplete. She thought light and glory into others. Was it any wonder that she drew a special, brilliant supply from the Starlight Cavern, when she had so much to give? For giving-out involved drawing-in to fill the emptied spaces. Her pure and endless sources of supply were all explained.\n\n'I've been working on her for years,' she said gently, looking round at their approach, 'for her life is so thickly overlaid with care, and the care she never quite knows how to interpret. We were friends, you see, in childhood\u2026. You'd better hurry on to the carpenter's house. You'll find Jinny there doing something for her father.' She did not cease her working while she said it, this practical mind so familiar with the methods of useful thinking, this loving heart so versed in prayer while her broken body, deemed useless by the world, lay in the bed that was its earthly prison-house. 'He can give me all the help I need,' she added.\n\nShe pointed, and they saw the figure of the Sweep standing in the corner of the room among a pile of brimming sacks. His dirty face was beaming. They heard him singing quietly to himself under his breath, while his feet and sooty hands marked time with a gesture of quaintest dancing:\u2014\n\n\u2003Such a tremendously busy Sweep,\n\n\u2003Catching the world when it's all asleep,\n\n\u2003And tossing the blacks on the Rubbish Heap\n\n\u2003Over the edge of the world!\n\n'Come,' whispered Cousin Henry, catching at Monkey's hair, 'we can do something, but we can't do that. She needs no help from us!'\n\nThey sped across to the carpenter's house among the vineyards.\n\n'What a splendour!' gasped the child as they went. 'My starlight seems quite dim beside hers.'\n\n'She's an old hand at the game,' he replied, noticing the tinge of disappointment in her thought. 'With practice, you know\u2014'\n\n'And Mummy must be pretty tough,' she interrupted with a laugh, her elastic nature recovering instantly.\n\n'\u2014with practice, I was going to say, your atmosphere will get whiter too until it simply shines. That's why the saints have halos.'\n\nBut Monkey did not hear this last remark, she was already in her father's bedroom, helping Jinny.\n\nHere there were no complications, no need for assistance from a Sweep, or Gardener, or Lamplighter. It was a case for pulling, pure and simple. Daddy was wumbled, nothing more. Body, mind, and heart were all up-jumbled. In making up the verse about the starlight he had merely told the truth\u2014about himself. The poem was instinctive and inspirational confession. His atmosphere, as he lay there, gently snoring in his beauty sleep, was clear and sweet and bright, no darkness in it of grey or ugliness; but its pattern was a muddle, or rather there were several patterns that scrambled among each other for supremacy. Lovely patterns hovered just outside him, but none of them got really in. And the result was chaos. Daddy was not clear-headed; there was no concentration. Something of the perplexed confusion that afflicted his elder daughter in the daytime mixed up the patterns inextricably. There was no main pathway through his inner world.\n\nAnd the picture proved it. It explained why Jinny pulled in vain. His night-body came out easily as far as the head, then stuck hopelessly. He looked like a knotted skein of coloured wools. Upon the paper where he had been making notes before going to sleep\u2014for personal atmosphere is communicated to all its owner touches\u2014lay the same confusion. Scraps of muddle, odds and ends of different patterns, hovered in thick blots of colour over the paragraphs and sentences. His own uncertainty was thus imparted to what he wrote, and his stories brought no conviction to his readers. He was too much the Dreamer, or too much the Thinker, which of the two was not quite clear. Harmony was lacking.\n\n'That's probably what I'M like, too,' thought his friend, but so softly that the children did not hear it. That Scheme of his passed vaguely through his mind.\n\nThen he cried louder\u2014a definite thought:\u2014\n\n'There's no good tugging like that, my dears. Let him slip in again.\n\nYou'll only make him restless, and give him distorted dreams.'\n\n'I've tugged like this every night for months,' said Jinny, 'but the moment I let go he flies back like elastic.'\n\n'Of course. We must first untie the knots and weave the patterns into one. Let go!'\n\nDaddy's night-body flashed back like a sword into its sheath. They stood and watched him. He turned a little in his sleep, while above him the lines twined and wriggled like phosphorus on moving water, yet never shaped themselves into anything complete. They saw suggestions of pure beauty in them here and there that yet never joined together into a single outline; it was like watching the foam against a steamer's sides in moonlight\u2014just failing of coherent form.\n\n'They want combing out,' declared Jane Anne with a brilliant touch of truth. 'A rake would be best.'\n\n'Assorting, sifting, separating,' added Cousinenry, 'but it's not easy.' He thought deeply for a moment. 'Suppose you two attend to the other things,' he said presently, 'while I take charge of the combing- out.'\n\nThey knew at once his meaning; it was begun as soon as thought, only they could never have thought of it alone; none but a leader with real sympathy in his heart could have discovered the way.\n\nLike Fairies, lit internally with shining lanterns, they flew about their business. Monkey picked up his pencils and dipped their points into her store of starlight, while Jinny drew the cork out of his ink- pot and blew in soft-shiny radiance of her own. They soaked his books in it, and smoothed his paper out with their fingers of clean gold. His note-books, chair, and slippers, his smoking-coat and pipes and tobacco-tins, his sponge, his tooth-brush and his soap\u2014everything from dressing-gown to dictionary, they spread thickly with their starlight, and continued until the various objects had drunk in enough to make them shine alone.\n\nThen they attacked the walls and floor and ceiling, sheets and bed- clothes. They filled the tin-bath full to the very brim, painted as well the windows, door-handles, and the wicker chair in which they knew he dozed after dejeuner. But with the pencils, pens, and ink-pots they took most trouble, doing them very thoroughly indeed. And his enormous mountain-boots received generous treatment too, for in these he went for his long lonely walks when he thought out his stories among the woods and valleys, coming home with joy upon his face\u2014'I got a splendid idea to-day\u2014a magnificent story\u2014if only I can get it on to paper before it's gone\u2026!' They understood his difficulty now: the 'idea' was wumbled before he could fashion it. He could not get the pattern through complete.\n\nAnd his older friend, working among the disjointed patterns, saw his trouble clearly too. It was not that he lacked this sympathy that starlight brings, but that he applied it without discernment. The receiving instrument was out of order, some parts moving faster than others. Reason and imagination were not exaccurately adjusted. He gathered plenty in, but no clear stream issued forth again; there was confusion in delivery. The rays were twisted, the golden lines caught into knots and tangles. Yet, ever just outside him, waiting to be taken in, hovered these patterns of loveliness that might bring joy to thousands. They floated in beauty round the edges of his atmosphere, but the moment they sank in to reach his mind, there began the distortion that tore their exquisite proportions and made designs mere disarrangement. Inspiration, without steady thought to fashion it, was of no value.\n\nHe worked with infinite pains to disentangle the mass of complicated lines, and one knot after another yielded and slipped off into rivulets of gold, all pouring inwards to reach heart and brain. It was exhilarating, yet disappointing labour. New knots formed themselves so easily, yet in the end much surely had been accomplished. Channels had been cleared; repetition would at length establish habit.\n\nBut the line of light along the eastern horizon had been swiftly growing broader meanwhile. It was brightening into delicate crimson. Already the room was clearer, and the radiance of their bodies fading into a paler glory. Jane Anne grew clumsier, tumbling over things, and butting against her more agile sister. Her thoughts became more muddled. She said things from time to time that showed it\u2014hints that waking was not far away.\n\n'Daddy's a wumbled Laplander, you know, after all. Hurry up!' The foolish daylight speech came closer.\n\n'Give his ink-pot one more blow,' cried Monkey. Her body always slept at least an hour longer than the others. She had more time for work.\n\nJane Anne bumped into the washhand-stand. She no longer saw quite clearly.\n\n'I'm a plenipotentiary, that's what I am. I'm afraid of nothing. But the porridge has to be made. I must get back\u2026.'\n\nShe vanished like a flash, just as her brother had vanished half an hour before.\n\n'We'll go on with it to-morrow night,' signalled Cousin Henry to his last remaining helper. 'Meet me here, remember, when\u2026the moon\u2026is high enough to\u2026cast\u2026a\u2026shadow\u2026.'\n\nThe opening and shutting of a door sounded through his sleep. He turned over heavily. Surely it was not time to get up yet. That could not be hot water coming! He had only just fallen asleep. He plunged back again into slumber.\n\nBut Monkey had disappeared.\n\n'What a spanking dream I've had\u2026!' Her eyes opened, and she saw her school-books on the chair beside the bed. Mother was gently shaking her out of sleep. 'Six o'clock, darling. The bath is ready, and Jinny's nearly got the porridge done. It's a lovely morning!'\n\n'Oh, Mummy, I\u2014'\n\nBut Mummy lifted her bodily out of bed, kissed her sleepy eyes awake, and half carried her over to the bath. 'You can tell me all about that later,' she said with practical decision; 'when the cold water's cleared your head. You're always fuzzy when you wake.'\n\nAnother day had begun. The sun was blazing high above the Blumlisalp. The birds sang in chorus. Dew shone still on the fields, but the men were already busy in the vineyards.\n\nAnd presently Cousin Henry woke too and stared lazily about his room.\n\nHe looked at his watch.\n\n'By Jove,' he murmured. 'How one does sleep in this place! And what a dream to be sure\u2014I who never dream!'\n\nHe remembered nothing more. From the moment he closed his eyes, eight hours before, until this second, all was a delicious blank. He felt refreshed and wondrously light-hearted, at peace with all the world. There was music in his head. He began to whistle as he lay among the blankets for half an hour longer. And later, while he breakfasted alone downstairs, he remembered that he ought to write to Minks. He owed Minks a letter. And before going out into the woods he wrote it. 'I'm staying on a bit,' he mentioned at the end. 'I find so much to do here, and it's such a rest. Meanwhile I can leave everything safely in your hands. But as soon as I get a leisure moment I'll send you the promised draft of my Scheme for Disabled, etc., etc.'\n\nBut the Scheme got no further somehow. New objections, for one thing, kept cropping up in his mind. It would take so long to build the place, and find the site, satisfy County Councils, and all the rest. The Disabled, moreover, were everywhere; it was invidious to select one group and leave the others out. Help the world, yes\u2014but what was 'the world'? There were so many worlds. He touched a new one every day and every hour. Which needed his help most? Bourcelles was quite as important, quite as big and hungry as any of the others. 'That old Vicar knew a thing or two,' he reflected later in the forest, while he gathered a bunch of hepaticas and anemones to take to Mlle. Lemaire. 'There are \"neighbours\" everywhere, the world's simply chock full of 'em. But what a pity that we die just when we're getting fit and ready to begin. Perhaps we go on afterwards, though. I wonder\u2026!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 176", + "text": "\u2003The stars ran loose about the sky,\n\n\u2003Wasting their beauty recklessly,\n\n\u2003Singing and dancing,\n\n\u2003Shooting and prancing,\n\n\u2003Until the Pole Star took command,\n\n\u2003Changing each wild, disordered band\n\n\u2003Into a lamp to guide the land\u2014\n\n\u2003A constellation.\n\n\u2003And so, about my mind and yours,\n\n\u2003Thought dances, shoots, and wastes its powers,\n\n\u2003Coming and going,\n\n\u2003Aimlessly flowing,\n\n\u2003Until the Pole Star of the Will\n\n\u2003Captains them wisely, strong, and still,\n\n\u2003Some dream for others to fulfil\n\n\u2003With consecration.\n\n\u2014Selected Poems, Montmorency Minke.\n\nThere was a certain air of unreality somewhere in the life at Bourcelles that ministered to fantasy. Rogers had felt it steal over him from the beginning. It was like watching a children's play in which the scenes were laid alternately in the Den, the Pension, and the Forest. Side by side with the grim stern facts of existence ran the coloured spell of fairy make-believe. It was the way they mingled, perhaps, that ministered to this spirit of fantasy.\n\nThere were several heroines for instance\u2014Tante Jeanne, Mademoiselle Lemaire, and Mother; each played her role quite admirably. There were the worthy sterling men who did their duty dumbly, regardless of consequences\u2014Daddy, the Postmaster, and the picturesque old clergyman with failing powers. There was the dark, uncertain male character, who might be villain, yet who might prove extra hero\u2014the strutting postman of baronial ancestry; there was the role of quaint pathetic humour Miss Waghorn so excellently filled, and there were the honest rough-and-tumble comedians\u2014half mischievous, half malicious\u2014the retired governesses. Behind them all, brought on chiefly in scenes of dusk and moonlight, were the Forest Elves who, led by Puck, were responsible for the temporary confusion that threatened disaster, yet was bound to have a happy ending\u2014the children. It was all a children's play set in the lovely scenery of mountain, forest, lake, and old-world garden.\n\nNumerous other characters also flitted in and out. There was the cat, the bird, the donkey as in pantomime; goblin caves and haunted valleys and talking flowers; and the queer shadowy folk who came to the Pension in the summer months, then vanished into space again. Links with the outside world were by no means lacking. As in the theatre, one caught now and again the rumble of street traffic and the roar of everyday concerns. But these fell in by chance during quiet intervals, and served to heighten contrast only.\n\nAnd so many of the principal roles were almost obviously assumed, interchangeable almost; any day the players might drop their wigs, rub off the paint, and appear otherwise, as they were in private life. The Widow Jequier's husband, for instance, had been a pasteur who had gone later into the business of a wine-merchant. She herself was not really the keeper of a Pension for Jeune Filles, but had drifted into it owing to her husband's disastrous descent from pulpit into cellar\u2014 understudy for some one who had forgotten to come on. The Postmaster, too, had originally been a photographer, whose funereal aspect had sealed his failure in that line. His customers could never smile and look pleasant. The postman, again, was a baron in disguise\u2014in private life he had a castle and retainers; and even Gygi, the gendarme, was a make-believe official who behind the scenes was a vigneron and farmer in a very humble way. Daddy, too, seemed sometimes but a tinsel author dressed up for the occasion, and absurdly busy over books that no one ever saw on railway bookstalls. While Mademoiselle Lemaire was not in fact and verity a suffering, patient, bed-ridden lady, but a princess who escaped from her disguise at night into glory and great beneficent splendour.\n\nMother alone was more real than the other players. There was no make- believe about Mother. She thundered across the stage and stood before the footlights, interrupting many a performance with her stubborn common-sense and her grip upon difficult grave issues. 'This performance will finish at such and such an hour,' was her cry. 'Get your wraps ready. It will be cold when you go out. And see that you have money handy for your 'bus fares home!' Yes, Mother was real. She knew some facts of life at least. She knitted the children's stockings and did the family mending.\n\nYet Rogers felt, even with her, that she was merely waiting. She knew the cast was not complete as yet. She waited. They all waited\u2014for some one. These were rehearsals; Rogers himself had dropped in also merely as an understudy. Another role was vacant, and it was the principal role. There was no one in the company who could play it, none who could understudy it even. Neither Rogers nor Daddy could learn the lines or do the 'business.' The part was a very important one, calling for a touch of genius to be filled adequately. And it was a feminine role. For here was a Fairy Play without a Fairy Queen. There was not even a Fairy Princess!\n\nThis idea of a representation, all prepared specially for himself, induced a very happy state of mind; he felt restful, calm, at peace with all the world. He had only to sit in his stall and enjoy. But it brought, too, this sense of delicate bewilderment that was continually propounding questions to which he found no immediate answer. With the rest of the village, he stood still while Time flowed past him. Later, with Minks, he would run after it and catch it up again. Minks would pick out the lost clues. Minks stood on the banks\u2014in London\u2014noting the questions floating by and landing them sometimes with a rod and net. His master would deal with them by and by; but just now he could well afford to wait and enjoy himself. It was a holiday; there was no hurry; Minks held the fort meanwhile and sent in reports at intervals.\n\nAnd the sweet spring weather continued; days were bright and warm; the nights were thick with stars. Rogers postponed departure on the flimsiest reasons. It was no easy thing to leave Bourcelles. 'Next week the muguet will be over in the vallon vert. We must pick it quickly together for Tante Anna.' Jinny brought every spring flower to Mademoiselle Lemaire in this way the moment they appeared. Her room was a record of their sequence from week to week. And Jimbo knew exactly where to find them first; his mind was a time-table of flowers as well as of trains, dates of arrival, and stations where they grew. He knew it all exaccurately. This kind of fact with him was never wumbled. 'Soon the sabot de Venus will be in flower at the Creux du Van, but it takes time to find it. It's most awfully rare, you see. You'll have to climb beyond the fontaine froide. That's past the Ferme Robert, between Champ du Moulin and Noiraigue. The snow ought to be gone by now. We'll go and hunt for it. I'll take you in\u2014oh, in about deux semaines\u2014comme ca.' Alone, those dangerous cliffs were out of bounds for him, but if he went with Cousinenry, permission could not be refused. Jimbo knew what he was about. And he took for granted that his employer would never leave Bourcelles again. 'Thursday and Saturday would be the best days,' he added. They were his half- holidays, but he did not say so. Secretaries, he knew, did not have half-holidays comme ca. 'Je suis son vrai secretaire,' he had told Mademoiselle Lemaire, who had confirmed it with a grave mais oui. No one but Mother heard the puzzled question one night when he was being tucked into bed; it was asked with just a hint of shame upon a very puckered little face\u2014'But, Mummy, what really is a sekrity?'\n\nAnd so Rogers, from day to day, stayed on, enjoying himself and resting. The City would have called it loafing, but in the City the schedule of values was a different one. Meanwhile the bewilderment he felt at first gradually disappeared. He no longer realised it, that is. While still outside, attacked by it, he had realised the soft entanglement. Now he was in it, caught utterly, a prisoner. He was no longer mere observer. He was part and parcel of it. 'What does a few weeks matter out of a whole strenuous life?' he argued. 'It's all to the good, this holiday. I'm storing up strength and energy for future use. My Scheme can wait a little. I'm thinking things out meanwhile.'\n\nHe often went into the forest alone to think his things out, and 'things' always meant his Scheme\u2026 but the more he thought about it the more distant and impracticable seemed that wondrous Scheme. He had the means, the love, the yearning, all in good condition, waiting to be put to practical account. In his mind, littered more and more now with details that Minks not infrequently sent in, this great Scheme by which he had meant to help the world ran into the confusion of new issues that were continually cropping up. Most of these were caused by the difficulty of knowing his money spent exactly as he wished, not wasted, no pound of it used for adornment, whether salaries, uniforms, fancy stationery, or unnecessary appearances, whatever they might be. Whichever way he faced it, and no matter how carefully thought out were the plans that Minks devised, these leakages cropped up and mocked him. Among a dozen propositions his original clear idea went lost, and floundered. It came perilously near to wumbling itself away altogether.\n\nFor one thing, there were rivals on the scene\u2014his cousin's family, the education of these growing children, the difficulties of the Widow Jequier, some kind of security he might ensure to old Miss Waghorn, the best expert medical attendance for Mademoiselle Lemaire\u2026 and his fortune was after all a small one as fortunes go. Only his simple scale of personal living could make these things possible at all. Yet here, at least, he would know that every penny went exaccurately where it was meant to go, and accomplished the precise purpose it was intended to accomplish.\n\nAnd the more he thought about it, the more insistent grew the claims of little Bourcelles, and the more that portentous Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs faded into dimness. The old Vicar's words kept singing in his head: 'The world is full of Neighbours. Bring them all back to Fairyland.' He thought things out in his own way and at his leisure. He loved to wander alone among the mountains\u2026 thinking in this way. His thoughts turned to his cousin's family, their expenses, their difficulties, the curious want of harmony somewhere. For the conditions in which the famille anglaise existed, he had soon discovered, were those of muddle pure and simple, yet of muddle on so large a scale that it was fascinating and even exhilarating. It must be lovely, he reflected, to live so carelessly. They drifted. Chance forces blew them hither and thither as gusts of wind blow autumn leaves. Five years in a place and then\u2014a gust that blew them elsewhere. Thus they had lived five years in a London suburb, thinking it permanent; five years in a lonely Essex farm, certain they would never abandon country life; and five years, finally, in the Jura forests.\n\nNeither parent, though each was estimable, worthy, and entirely of good repute, had the smallest faculty for seeing life whole; each studied closely a small fragment of it, the fragment limited by the Monday and the Saturday of next week, or, in moments of optimistic health, the fragment that lies between the first and thirty-first of a single month. Of what lay beyond, they talked; oh, yes, they talked voluminously and with detail that sounded impressive to a listener, but somehow in circles that carried them no further than the starting- point, or in spirals that rose higher with each sentence and finally lifted them bodily above the solid ground. It was merely talk\u2014 ineffective\u2014yet the kind that makes one feel it has accomplished something and so brings the false security of carelessness again. Neither one nor other was head of the house. They took it in turns, each slipping by chance into that onerous position, supported but uncoveted by the other. Mother fed the children, mended everything, sent them to the dentist when their teeth ached badly, but never before as a preventative, and\u2014trusted to luck.\n\n'Daddy,' she would say in her slow gentle way, 'I do wish we could be more practical sometimes. Life is such a business, isn't it?' And they would examine in detail the grain of the stable door now that the horse had escaped, then close it very carefully.\n\n'I really must keep books,' he would answer, 'so that we can see exactly how we stand,' having discovered at the end of laborious calculation concerning the cost of the proposed Geneva schooling for Jinny that they had reckoned in shillings instead of francs. And then, with heads together, they selected for their eldest boy a profession utterly unsuited to his capacities, with coaching expenses far beyond their purses, and with the comforting consideration that 'there's a pension attached to it, you see, for when he's old.'\n\nSimilarly, having planned minutely, and with personal sacrifice, to save five francs in one direction, they would spend that amount unnecessarily in another. They felt they had it to spend, as though it had been just earned and already jingled in their pockets. Daddy would announce he was walking into Neuchatel to buy tobacco. 'Better take the tram,' suggested Mother, 'it's going to rain. You save shoe leather, too,' she added laughingly. 'Will you be back to tea?' He thought not; he would get a cup of tea in town. 'May I come, too?' from Jimbo. 'Why not?' thought Mother. 'Take him with you, he'll enjoy the trip.' Monkey and Jane Ann, of course, went too. They all had tea in a shop, and bought chocolate into the bargain. The five francs melted into\u2014nothing, for tea at home was included in their Pension terms. Saving is in the mind. There was no system in their life.\n\n'It would be jolly, yes, if you could earn a little something regular besides your work,' agreed Mother, when he thought of learning a typewriter to copy his own books, and taking in work to copy for others too.\n\n'I'll do it,' he decided with enthusiasm that was forgotten before he left the room ten minutes later.\n\nIt was the same with the suggestion of teaching English. He had much spare time, and could easily have earned a pound a week by giving lessons, and a pound a week is fifty pounds a year\u2014enough to dress the younger children easily. The plan was elaborated laboriously. 'Of course,' agreed Daddy, with genuine interest. 'It's easily done. I wonder we never thought of it before.' Every few months they talked about it, but it never grew an inch nearer to accomplishment. They drifted along, ever in difficulty, each secretly blaming the other, yet never putting their thoughts into speech. They did not quite understand each other's point of view.\n\n'Mother really might have foreseen that!' when Jimbo, growing like a fairy beanstalk, rendered his recent clothes entirely useless. 'Boys must grow. Why didn't she buy the things a size or two larger?'\n\n'It's rather thoughtless, almost selfish, of Daddy to go on writing these books that bring in praise without money. He could write anything if he chose. At least, he might put his shoulder to the wheel and teach, or something!'\n\nAnd so, not outwardly in spoken words or quarrels, but inwardly, owing to that deadliest of cancers, want of sympathy, these two excellent grown-up children had moved with the years further and further apart. Love had not died, but want of understanding, not attended to in time, had frayed the edges so that they no longer fitted well together. They have blown in here, thought Rogers as he watched them, like seeds the wind has brought. They have taken root and grown a bit. They think they're here for ever, but presently a wind will rise and blow them off again elsewhere. And thinking it is their own act, they will look wisely at each other, as children do, and say, 'Yes, it is time now to make a move. The children are getting big. Our health, too, needs a change.' He wondered, smiling a little, in what vale or mountain top the wind would let them down. And a big decision blazed up in his heart. 'I'm not very strong in the domestic line,' he exclaimed, 'but I think I can help them a bit. They're neighbours at any rate. They're all children too. Daddy's no older than Jimbo, or Mother than Jane Anne!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 177", + "text": "In the spaces of the forest there was moss and sunshine. It was very still. The primroses and anemones had followed the hepaticas and periwinkles. Patches of lily of the valley filled the air with fragrance. Through openings of the trees he caught glimpses of the lake, deep as the Italian blue of the sky above his head. White Alps hung in the air beyond its farther shore line. Below him, already far away, the village followed slowly, bringing its fields and vineyards with it, until the tired old church called halt. And then it lay back, nestling down to sleep, very small, very cosy, mere handful of brown roofs among the orchards. Only the blue smoke of occasional peat fires moved here and there, betraying human occupation.\n\nThe peace and beauty sank into his heart, as he wandered higher across Mont Racine's velvet shoulder. And the contrast stirred memories of his recent London life. He thought of the scurrying busy-bodies in the 'City,' and he thought of the Widow Jequier attacking life so restlessly in her garden at that very minute. That other sentence of the old Vicar floated though his mind: 'the grandeur of toil and the insignificance of acquisition.'\u2026 Far overhead two giant buzzards circled quietly, ceaselessly watching from the blue. A brimstone butterfly danced in random flight before his face. Two cuckoos answered one another in the denser forest somewhere above him. Bells from distant village churches boomed softly through the air, voices from a world forgotten.\n\nAnd the contrast brought back London. He thought of the long busy chapter of his life just finished. The transition had been so abrupt. As a rule periods fade into one another gradually in life, easily, divisions blurred; it is difficult on looking back to say where the change began. One is well into the new before the old is realised as left behind. 'How did I come to this?' the mind asks itself. 'I don't remember any definite decision. Where was the boundary crossed?' It has been imperceptibly accomplished.\n\nBut here the change had been sudden and complete, no shading anywhere. He had leaped a wall. Turmoil and confusion lay on that side; on this lay peace, rest and beauty. Strain and ugliness were left behind, and with them so much that now seemed false, unnecessary, vain. The grandeur of toil, and the insignificance of acquisition\u2014the phrase ran through his mind with the sighing of the pine trees; it was like the first line of a song. The Vicar knew the song complete. Even Minks, perhaps, could pipe it too. Rogers was learning it. 'I must help them somehow,' he thought again. 'It's not a question of money merely. It's that they want welding together more\u2014more harmony\u2014more sympathy. They're separate bits of a puzzle now, whereas they might be a rather big and lovely pattern.\u2026'\n\nHe lay down upon the moss and flung his hat away. He felt that Life stood still within him, watching, waiting, asking beautiful, deep, searching questions. It made him slightly uncomfortable. Henry Rogers, late of Threadneedle Street, took stock of himself, not of set intention, yet somehow deliberately. He reviewed another Henry Rogers who had been unable to leap that wall. The two peered at one another gravely.\n\nThe review, however, took no definite form; precise language hardly came to help with definite orders. A vague procession of feelings, half sad, half pleasurable, floated past his closing eyes.\u2026 Perhaps he slept a moment in the sunshine upon that bed of moss and pine needles.\u2026\n\nSuch curious thoughts flowed up and out and round about, dancing like the brimstone butterflies out of reach before he could seize them, calling with voices like the cuckoos, themselves all the time just out of sight. Who ever saw a cuckoo when it's talking? Who ever foretold the instant when a butterfly would shoot upwards and away? Such darting, fragile thoughts they were, like hints, suggestions. Still, they were thoughts.\n\nMinks, dragging behind him an enormous Scheme, emerged from the dark vaults of a Bank where gold lay piled in heaps. Minks was looking for him, yet smiling a little, almost pityingly, as he strained beneath the load. It was like a comic opera. Minks was going down the noisy, crowded Strand. Then, suddenly, he paused, uncertain of the way. From an upper window a shining face popped out and issued clear directions \u2014as from a pulpit. 'That way\u2014towards the river,' sang the voice\u2014and far down the narrow side street flashed a gleam of flowing water with orchards on the farther bank. Minks instantly turned and went down it with his load so fast that the scenery changed before the heavy traffic could get out of the way. Everything got muddled up with fields and fruit-trees; the Scheme changed into a mass of wild- flowers; a lame boy knocked it over with his crutch; gold fell in a brilliant, singing shower, and where each sovereign fell there sprang up a buttercup or dandelion. Rogers rubbed his eyes\u2026 and realised that the sun was rather hot upon his face. A dragon fly was perched upon his hat three feet away.\u2026\n\nThe tea hour at the Den was close, and Jimbo, no doubt, was already looking for him at the carpenter's house. Rogers hurried home among the silent forest ways that were sweet with running shadows and slanting sunshine. Oh, how fragrant was the evening air! And how the lily of the valley laughed up in his face! Normally, at this time, he would be sitting in a taxi, hurrying noisily towards his Club, thoughts full of figures, politics, philanthropy cut to line and measure\u2014a big Scheme standing in squares across the avenue of the future. Now, moss and flowers and little children took up all the available space.\u2026 How curiously out of the world Bourcelles was, to be sure. Newspapers had no meaning any longer. Picture-papers and smart weekly Reviews, so necessary and important in St. James's Street, here seemed vulgar, almost impertinent\u2014ridiculous even. Big books, yes; but not pert, topical comments issued with an absurd omnipotence upon things merely ephemeral. How the mind accumulated rubbish in a city! It seemed incredible. He surely had climbed a wall and dropped down into a world far bigger, though a world the 'city' would deem insignificant and trivial. Yet only because it had less detail probably! A loved verse flashed to him across the years:\u2014\n\n\u2003'O to dream, O to awake and wander\n\n\u2003There, and with delight to take and render,\n\n\u2003Through the trance of silence,\n\n\u2003Quiet breath!\n\n\u2003Lo! for there among the flowers and grasses,\n\n\u2003Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;\n\n\u2003Only winds and rivers,\n\n\u2003Life and death.'\n\nBourcelles was important as London, yes, while simple as the nursery. The same big questions of life and death, of battle, duty, love, ruled the peaceful inhabitants. Only the noisy shouting, the clatter of superfluous chattering and feverish striving had dropped away. Hearts and minds wore fewer clothes among these woods and vineyards. There was no nakedness though\u2026 there were flowers and moss, blue sky and peace and beauty.\u2026 Thought ran into confused, vague pictures. He could not give them coherence, shape, form.\u2026\n\nHe crossed the meadows and entered the village through the Pension garden. The Widow Jequier gave him a spray of her Persian lilac on the way. 'It's been growing twenty-five years for you,' she said, 'only do not look at me. I'm in my garden things\u2014invisible.' He remembered with a smile Jane Anne's description\u2014that 'the front part of the house was all at the back.'\n\nTumbling down the wooden stairs, he crossed the street and made for the Citadelle, where the children opened the door for him even before he rang. Jimbo and Monkey, just home from school, pulled him by both arms towards the tea-table. They had watched for his coming.\n\n'The samovar's just boiling,' Mother welcomed him. Daddy was on the sofa by the open window, reading manuscript over to himself in a mumbling voice; and Jane Anne, apron on, sleeves tucked up, face flushed, poked her head in from the kitchen:\n\n'Excuse me, Mother, the cupboard's all in distress. I can't find the marmalade anywhere.'\n\n'But it's already on the table, child.'\n\nShe saw her Cousin and popped swiftly back again from view. One heard fragments of her sentences\u2014'wumbled\u2026 chronic\u2026 busy monster.\u2026 'And two minutes later la famille anglaise was seriously at tea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 178", + "text": "\u2003What art thou, then? I cannot guess;\n\n\u2003But tho' I seem in star and flower\n\n\u2003To feel thee some diffusive power,\n\n\u2003I do not therefore love thee less.\n\n\u2014Love and Death, TENNYSON.\n\nIn the act of waking up on the morning of the Star Cave experience, Henry Rogers caught the face of a vivid dream close against his own\u2014 but in rapid motion, already passing. He tried to seize it. There was a happy, delightful atmosphere about it. Examination, however, was impossible; the effort to recover the haunting dream dispersed it. He saw the tip, like an express train flying round a corner; it flashed and disappeared, fading into dimness. Only the delightful atmosphere remained and the sense that he had been somewhere far away in very happy conditions. People he knew quite well, had been there with him; Jimbo and Monkey; Daddy too, as he had known him in his boyhood. More than this was mere vague surmise; he could not recover details. Others had been also of the merry company, familiar yet unrecognisable. Who in the world were they? It all seemed oddly real.\n\n'How I do dream in this place, to be sure,' he thought; 'I, who normally dream so little! It was like a scene of my childhood\u2014 Crayfield or somewhere.' And he reflected how easily one might be persuaded that the spirit escaped in sleep and knew another order of experience. The sense of actuality was so vivid.\n\nHe lay half dozing for a little longer, hoping to recover the adventures. The flying train showed itself once or twice again, but smaller, and much, much farther away. It curved off into the distance. A deep cutting quickly swallowed it. It emerged for the last time, tiny as a snake upon a chess-board of far-off fields. Then it dipped into mist; the snake shot into its hole. It was gone. He sighed. It had been so lovely. Why must it vanish so entirely? Once or twice during the day it returned, touched him swiftly on the heart and was gone again. But the waking impression of a dream is never the dream itself. Sunshine destroys the sense of enormous wonder.\n\n'I believe I've been dreaming all night long, and going through all kinds of wild adventures.'\n\nHe dressed leisurely, still hunting subconsciously for fragments of that happy dreamland. Its aroma still clung about him. The sunshine poured into the room. He went out on to the balcony and looked at the Alps through his Zeiss field-glasses. The brilliant snow upon the Diablerets danced and sang into his blood; across the broken teeth of the Dent du Midi trailed thin strips of early cloud. Behind him rose great Boudry's massive shoulders, a pyramid of incredible deep blue. And the limestone precipices of La Tourne stood dazzlingly white, catching the morning sunlight full in their face.\n\nThe air had the freshness of the sea. Men were singing at their work among the vineyards. The tinkle of cow-bells floated to him from the upper pastures upon Mont Racine. Little sails like sea-gulls dipped across the lake. Goodness, how happy the world was at Bourcelles! Singing, radiant, careless of pain and death. And, goodness, how he longed to make it happier still!\n\nEvery day now this morning mood had been the same. Desire to do something for others ran races with little practical schemes for carrying it out. Selfish considerations seemed to have taken flight, all washed away while he slept. Moreover, the thought of his Scheme had begun to oppress him; a touch of shame came with it, almost as though an unworthy personal motive were somewhere in it. Perhaps after all\u2014he wondered more and more now\u2014there had been an admixture of personal ambition in the plan. The idea that it would bring him honour in the eyes of the world had possibly lain there hidden all along. If so, he had not realised it; the depravity had been unconscious. Before the Bourcelles standard of simplicity, artificial elements dropped off automatically, ashamed.\u2026 And a profound truth, fished somehow out of that vanished dreamland, spun its trail of glory through his heart. Kindness that is thanked-for surely brings degradation\u2014a degradation almost as mean as the subscription acknowledged in a newspaper, or the anonymous contribution kept secret temporarily in order that its later advertisement may excite the more applause. Out flashed this blazing truth: kind acts must be instinctive, natural, thoughtless. One hand must be in absolute ignorance of the other's high adventures.\u2026 And when the carpenter's wife brought up his breakfast tray, with the bunch of forest flowers standing in a tumbler of water, she caught him pondering over another boyhood's memory\u2014that friend of his father's who had given away a million anonymously.\n\n\u2026In his heart plans shaped themselves with soft, shy eyes and hidden faces\u2026. He longed to get la famille anglaise straight\u2026 for one thing.\u2026\n\nIt was an hour later, while he still sat dreaming in the sunshine by the open window, that a gentle tap came at the door, and Daddy entered. The visit was a surprise. Usually, until time for dejeuner, he kept his room, busily unwumbling stories. This was unusual. And something had happened to him; he looked different. What was it that had changed? Some veil had cleared away; his eyes were shining. They greeted one another, and Rogers fell shyly to commonplaces, while wondering what the change exactly was.\n\nBut the other was not to be put off. He was bursting with something.\n\nRogers had never seen him like this before.\n\n'You've stopped work earlier than usual,' he said, providing the opening. He understood his diffidence, his shyness in speaking of himself. Long disappointments lay so thinly screened behind his unfulfilled enthusiasm.\n\nBut this time the enthusiasm swept diffidence to the winds. It had been vitally stirred.\n\n'Early indeed,' he cried. 'I've been working four hours without a break, man. Why, what do you think?\u2014I woke at sunrise, a thing I never do, with\u2014with a brilliant idea in my head. Brilliant, I tell you. By Jove, if only I can carry it out as I see it\u2014!'\n\n'You've begun it already?'\n\n'Been at it since six o'clock, I tell you. It was in me when I woke\u2014 idea, treatment, everything complete, all in a perfect pattern of Beauty.'\n\nThere was a glow upon his face, his hair was untidy; a white muffler with blue spots was round his neck instead of collar. One end stuck up against his chin. The safety pin was open.\n\n'By Jove! I am delighted!' Rogers had seen him excited before over a 'brilliant idea,' but the telling of it always left him cold. It touched the intellect, yet not the heart. It was merely clever. This time, however, there was a new thing in his manner. 'How did you get it?' he repeated. Methods of literary production beyond his own doggerels were a mystery to him. 'Sort of inspiration, eh?'\n\n'Woke with it, I tell you,' continued his cousin, twisting the muffler so that it tickled his ear now instead of his chin. 'It must have come to me in sleep\u2014' 'In sleep,' exclaimed the other; 'you dreamt it, then?'\n\n'Kind of inspiration business. I've heard of that sort of thing, but never experienced it\u2014' The author paused for breath.\n\n'What is it? Tell me.' He remembered how ingenious details of his patents had sometimes found themselves cleared up in the morning after refreshing slumber. This might be something similar. 'Let's hear it,' he added; 'I'm interested.'\n\nHis cousin's recitals usually ended in sad confusion, so that all he could answer by way of praise was\u2014' You ought to make something good out of that. I shall like to read it when you've finished it.' But this time, he felt, there was distinctly a difference. There were new conditions.\n\nThe older man leaned closer, his face alight, his manner shyly, eagerly confidential. The morning sunshine blazed upon his untidy hair. A bread crumb from breakfast still balanced in his beard.\n\n'It's difficult to tell in a few words, you see,' he began, the enthusiasm of a boy in his manner, 'but\u2014I woke with the odd idea that this little village might be an epitome of the world. All the emotions of London, you see, are here in essence\u2014the courage and cowardice, the fear and hope, the greed and sacrifice, the love and hate and passion\u2014everything. It's the big world in miniature. Only\u2014with one difference.'\n\n'That's good,' said Rogers, trying to remember when it was he had told his cousin this very thing. Or had he only thought it? 'And what is the difference?'\n\n'The difference,' continued the other, eyes sparkling, face alight, 'that here the woods, the mountains and the stars are close. They pour themselves in upon the village life from every side\u2014above, below, all round. Flowers surround it; it dances to the mountain winds; at night it lies entangled in the starlight. Along a thousand imperceptible channels an ideal simplicity from Nature pours down into it, modifying the human passions, chastening, purifying, uplifting. Don't you see? And these sweet, viewless channels\u2014who keeps them clean and open? Why, God bless you\u2014. The children! My children!'\n\n'By Jingo, yes; your children.'\n\nRogers said it with emphasis. But there was a sudden catch at his heart; he was conscious of a queer sensation he could not name. This was exactly what he had felt himself\u2014with the difference that his own thought had been, perhaps, emotion rather than a reasoned-out idea. His cousin put it into words and gave it form. A picture\u2014had he seen it in a book perhaps?\u2014flashed across his mind. A child, suspiciously like Monkey, held a pen and dipped it into something bright and flowing. A little boy with big blue eyes gathered this shining stuff in both hands and poured it in a golden cataract upon the eyelids of a sleeping figure. And the figure had a beard. It was a man\u2026 familiar.\u2026 A touch of odd excitement trembled through his undermind\u2026 thrilled\u2026 vanished.\u2026\n\nAll dived out of sight again with the swiftness of a darting swallow. His cousin was talking at high speed. Rogers had lost a great deal of what he had been saying.\n\n'\u2026 it may, of course, have come from something you said the other night as we walked up the hill to supper\u2014you remember?\u2014something about the brilliance of our stars here and how they formed a shining network that hung from Boudry and La Tourne. It's impossible to say. The germ of a true inspiration is never discoverable. Only, I remember, it struck me as an odd thing for you to say. I was telling you about my idea of the scientist who married\u2014no, no, it wasn't that, it was my story of the materialist doctor whom circumstances compelled to accept a position in the Community of Shakers, and how the contrast produced an effect upon his mind of\u2014of\u2014you remember, perhaps? It was one or the other; I forget exactly,'\u2014then suddenly\u2014 'No, no, I've got it\u2014it was the analysis of the father's mind when he found\u2014'\n\n'Yes, yes,' interrupted Rogers. 'We were just passing the Citadelle fountain. I saw the big star upon the top of Boudry, and made a remark about it.' His cousin was getting sadly wumbled. He tried to put severity and concentration into his voice.\n\n'That's it,' the other cried, head on one side and holding up a finger, 'because I remember that my own thought wandered for a moment \u2014thought will, you know, in spite of one's best effort sometimes\u2014and you said a thing that sent a little shiver of pleasure through me for an instant\u2014something about a Starlight Train\u2014and made me wonder where you got the idea. That's it. I do believe you've hit the nail on the head. Isn't it curious sometimes how a practical mind may suggest valuable material to the artist? I remember, several years ago\u2014'\n\n'Starlight Express, wasn't it?' said his friend with decision in his voice. He thumped the table vigorously with one fist. 'Keep to the point, old man. Follow it out. Your idea is splendid.'\n\n'Yes, I do believe it is.' Something in his voice trembled.\n\nOne sentence in particular Rogers heard, for it seemed plucked out of the talk he had with the children in the forest that day two weeks ago.\n\n'You see, all light meets somewhere. It's all one, I mean. And so with minds. They all have a common meeting-place. Sympathy is the name for that place\u2014that state\u2014they feel with each other, see flash-like from the same point of view for a moment. And children are the conduits. They do not think things out. They feel them, eh?' He paused an instant.\n\n'For you see, along these little channels that the children\u2014my children, as I think I mentioned\u2014keep sweet and open, there might troop back into the village\u2014Fairyland. Not merely a foolish fairyland of make-believe and dragons and princesses imprisoned in animals, but a fairyland the whole world needs\u2014the sympathy of sweet endeavour, love, gentleness and sacrifice for others. The stars would bring it\u2014 starlight don't you see? One might weave starlight in and out everywhere\u2014use it as the symbol of sympathy\u2014and\u2014er\u2014so on\u2014-'\n\nRogers again lost the clue. Another strangely familiar picture, and then another, flashed gorgeously before his inner vision; his mind raced after them, yet never caught them up. They were most curiously familiar. Then, suddenly, he came back and heard his cousin still talking. It was like a subtle plagiarism. Too subtle altogether, indeed, it was for him. He could only stare and listen in amazement.\n\nBut the recital grew more and more involved. Perhaps, alone in his work-room, Daddy could unwumble it consistently. He certainly could not tell it. The thread went lost among a dozen other things. The interfering sun had melted it all down in dew and spider gossamer and fairy cotton.\u2026\n\n'I must go down and work,' he said at length, rising and fumbling with the door handle. He seemed disappointed a little. He had given out his ideas so freely, perhaps too freely. Rogers divined he had not sympathised enough. His manner had been shamefully absent-minded. The absent-mindedness was really the highest possible praise, but the author did not seem to realise it.\n\n'It's glorious, my dear fellow, glorious,' Rogers added emphatically. 'You've got a big idea, and you can write it too. You will.' He said it with conviction. 'You touch my heart as you tell it. I congratulate you. Really I do.'\n\nThere was no mistaking the sincerity of his words and tone. The other came back a step into the room again. He stroked his beard and felt the crisp, hard crumb. He picked it out, examining it without surprise. It was no unfamiliar thing, perhaps; at any rate, it was an excuse to lower his eyes. Shyness returned upon him.\n\n'Thank you,' he said gently; 'I'm glad you think so. You see, I sometimes feel\u2014perhaps\u2014my work has rather suffered from\u2014been a little deficient in\u2014the human touch. One must reach people's hearts if one wants big sales. So few have brains. Not that I care for money, or could ever write for money, for that brings its own punishment in loss of inspiration. But of course, with a family to support.\u2026 I have a family, you see.' He raised his eyes and looked out into the sunshine. 'Well, anyhow, I've begun this thing. I shall send it in short form to the X. Review. It may attract attention there. And later I can expand it into a volume.' He hesitated, examined the crumb closely again, tossed it away, and looked up at his cousin suddenly full in the face. The high enthusiasm flamed back into his eyes again. 'Bring the world back to Fairyland, you see!' he concluded with vehemence, 'eh?'\n\n'Glorious!' Surely thought ran about the world like coloured flame, if this was true.\n\nThe author turned towards the door. He opened it, then stopped on the threshold and looked round like a person who has lost his way.\n\n'I forgot,' he added, 'I forgot another thing, one of the chief almost. It's this: there must be a Leader\u2014who shall bring it back. Without the Guide, Interpreter, Pioneer, how shall the world listen or understand, even the little world of Bourcelles?'\n\n'Of course, yes\u2014some big figure\u2014like a priest or prophet, you mean?\n\nA sort of Chairman, President, eh?'\n\n'Yes,' was the reply, while the eyes flashed fires that almost recaptured forgotten dreams, 'but hardly in the way you mean, perhaps. A very simple figure, I mean, unconscious of its mighty role. Some one with endless stores of love and sympathy and compassion that have never found an outlet yet, but gone on accumulating and accumulating unexpressed.'\n\n'I see, yes.' Though he really did not 'see' a bit. 'But who is there like that here? You'll have to invent him.' He remembered his own thought that some principal role was vacant in his Children's Fairy Play. How queer it all was! He stared. 'Who is there?' he repeated.\n\n'No one\u2014now. I shall bring her, though.'\n\n'Her!' exclaimed Rogers with surprise. 'You mean a woman?'\n\n'A childless woman,' came the soft reply. 'A woman with a million children\u2014all unborn.' But Rogers did not see the expression of the face. His cousin was on the landing. The door closed softly on the words. The steps went fumbling down the stairs, and presently he heard the door below close too. The key was turned in it.\n\n'A childless woman!' The phrase rang on long after he had gone. What an extraordinary idea! 'Bring her here' indeed! Could his cousin mean that some such woman might read his story and come to claim the position, play the vacant role? No, nothing so literal surely. The idea was preposterous. He had heard it said that imaginative folk, writers, painters, musicians, all had a touch of lunacy in them somewhere. He shrugged his shoulders. And what a job it must be, too, the writing of a book! He had never realised it before. A real book, then, meant putting one's heart into sentences, telling one's inmost secrets, confessing one's own ideals with fire and lust and passion. That was the difference perhaps between literature and mere facile invention. His cousin had never dared do this before; shyness prevented; his intellect wove pretty patterns that had no heat of life in them. But now he had discovered a big idea, true as the sun, and able, like the sun, to warm thousands of readers, all ready for it without knowing it.\u2026\n\nRogers sat on thinking in the bright spring sunshine, smoking one cigarette after another. For the idea his cousin had wumbled over so fubsily had touched his heart, and for a long time he was puzzled to find the reason. But at length he found it. In that startling phrase 'a childless woman' lay the clue. A childless woman was like a vessel with a cargo of exquisite flowers that could never make a port. Sweetening every wind, she yet never comes to land. No harbour welcomes her. She sails endless seas, charged with her freight of undelivered beauty; the waves devour her glory, her pain, her lovely secret all unconfessed. To bring such a woman into port, even imaginatively in a story, or subconsciously in an inner life, was fulfilment of a big, fine, wholesome yearning, sacred in a way, too.\n\n'By George!' he said aloud. He felt strange, great life pour through him. He had made a discovery\u2026 in his heart\u2026 deep, deep down.\n\nSomething in himself, so long buried it was scarcely recognisable, stirred out of sight and tried to rise. Some flower of his youth that time had hardened, dried, yet never killed, moved gently towards blossoming. It shone. It was still hard a little, like a crystal, glistening down there among shadows that had gathered with the years. And then it suddenly melted, running in a tiny thread of gold among his thoughts into that quiet sea which so rarely in a man may dare the relief of tears. It was a tiny yellow flower, like a daisy that had forgotten to close at night, so that some stray starbeam changed its whiteness into gold.\n\nForgotten passion, and yearning long denied, stirred in him with that phrase. His cousin's children doubtless had prepared the way. A faded Dream peered softly into his eyes across the barriers of the years. For every woman in the world was a mother, and a childless woman was the grandest, biggest mother of them all. And he had longed for children of his own; he, too, had remained a childless father. A vanished face gazed up into his own. Two vessels, making the same fair harbour, had lost their way, yet still sailed, perhaps, the empty seas. Yet the face he did not quite recognise. The eyes, instead of blue, were amber.\u2026\n\nAnd did this explain a little the spell that caught him in this Jura village, perhaps? Were these children, weaving a network so cunningly about his feet, merely scouts and pilots? Was his love for the world of suffering folk, after all, but his love for a wife and children of his own transmuted into wider channels? Denied the little garden he once had planned for it, did it seek to turn the whole big world into a garden? Suppression was impossible; like murder, it must out. A bit of it had even flamed a passage into work and patents and 'City' life. For love is life, and life is ever and everywhere one. He thought and thought and thought. A man begins by loving himself; then, losing himself, he loves a woman; next, that love spreads itself over a still bigger field, and he loves his family, his wife and children, and their families again in turn. But, that expression denied, his love inevitably, irrepressibly seeking an outlet, finds it in a Cause, a Race, a Nation, perhaps in the entire world. The world becomes his 'neighbour.' It was a great Fairy Story.\u2026\n\nAgain his thoughts returned to that one singular sentence\u2026 and he realised what his cousin meant. Only a childless Mother, some woman charged to the brim with this power of loving to which ordinary expression had been denied, could fill the vacant role in his great Children's Play. No man could do it. He and his cousin were mere 'supers' on this stage. His cousin would invent her for his story. He would make her come. His passion would create her. That was what he meant.\n\nRogers smiled to himself, moving away from the window where the sunshine grew too fierce for comfort. What a funny business it all was, to be sure! And how curiously every one's thinking had intermingled! The children had somehow divined his own imaginings in that Crayfield garden; their father had stolen the lot for his story. It was most extraordinary. And then he remembered Minks, and all his lunatic theories about thought and thought-pictures. The garden scene at Crayfield came back vividly, the one at Charing Cross, in the orchard, too, with the old Vicar, when they had talked beneath the stars. Who among them all was the original sponsor? And which of them had set the ball a-rolling? It was stranger than the story of creation.\u2026 It was the story of creation.\n\nYet he did not puzzle very long. Actors in a play are never puzzled; it is the bewildered audience who ask questions. And Henry Rogers was on the stage. The gauzy curtain hung between him and the outside point of view. He was already deeply involved in Fairyland.\u2026 His feet were in the Net of Stars.\u2026 He was a prisoner.\n\nAnd that woman he had once dreamed might mother his own children\u2014 where was she? Until a few years ago he had still expected, hoped to meet her. One day they would come together. She waited somewhere. It was only recently he had let the dream slip finally from him, abandoned with many another personal ambition.\n\nIdly he picked up a pencil, and before he was aware of it the words ran into lines. It seemed as though his cousin's mood, thought, inspiration, worked through him.\n\n\u2003Upon what flowering shore,\n\n\u2003'Neath what blue skies\n\n\u2003She stands and waits,\n\n\u2003It is not mine to know;\n\n\u2003Only I know that shore is fair,\n\n\u2003Those skies are blue.\n\n\u2003Her voice I may not hear,\n\n\u2003Nor see her eyes,\n\n\u2003Yet there are times\n\n\u2003When in the wind she speaks.\n\n\u2003When stars and flowers\n\n\u2003Tell me of her eyes.\n\n\u2003When rivers chant her name.\n\n\u2003If ever signs were sure,\n\n\u2003I know she waits;\n\n\u2003If not, what means this sweetness in the wind,\n\n\u2003The singing in the rain, the love in flowers?\n\n\u2003What mean these whispers in the air,\n\n\u2003This calling from the hills and from the sea?\n\n\u2003These tendernesses of the Day and Night?\n\n\u2003Unless she waits!\n\nWhat in the world was this absurd sweetness running in his veins?\n\nHe laughed a little. A slight flush, too, came and went its way. The tip of the pencil snapped as he pressed too heavily on it. He had drawn it through the doggerel with impatience, for he suddenly realised that he had told a deep, deep secret to the paper. It had stammered its way out before he was aware of it. This was youth and boyhood strong upon him, the moods of Crayfield that he had set long ago on one side\u2014deliberately. The mood that wrote the Song of the Blue Eyes had returned, waking after a sleep of a quarter of a century.\n\n'What rubbish!' he exclaimed; 'I shall be an author next!' He tore it up and, rolling the pieces into a ball, played catch with it. 'What waste of energy! Six months ago that energy would have gone into something useful, a patent\u2014perhaps an improvement in the mechanism of\u2014of\u2014' he hesitated, then finished the sentence with a sigh of yearning and another passing flush\u2014'a perambulator!'\n\nHe tossed it out of the window and, laughing, leaned out to watch it fall. It bounced upon a head of tousled hair beneath, then flew off sideways in the wind and rattled away faintly among the vines. The head was his cousin's.\n\n'What are you up to?' cried the author, looking up. 'I'm not a waste- paper basket.' There was a cigarette ash in his beard.\n\n'Sending you ideas, he answered. 'I'm coming myself now. Look out!' He was in high spirits again. He believed in that Fairy Princess.\n\n'All right; I've put you in already. Everybody will wonder who Cousinenry is.\u2026' The untidy head of hair popped in again.\n\n'Hark!' cried Rogers, trying to look round the corner of the house. He edged himself out at a dangerous angle. His ears had caught another sound. There was music in the air." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 179", + "text": "The sweet spring winds came laughing down the street, bearing a voice that mingled with their music.\n\nDaddy! Daddy! vite; il y a un paquet!' sounded in a child's excited cry. 'It arrives this afternoon. It's got the Edinburgh postmark. Here is the notice. C'est enorme!'\n\nThe figure of Jimbo shot round the corner, dancing into view. He waved a bit of yellow paper in his hand. A curious pang tore its way into the big man's heart as he saw him\u2014a curious, deep, searching pain that yet left joy all along its trail. Positively moisture dimmed his eyes a second.\n\nBut Jimbo belonged to some one else.\n\nDaddy's wumbled head projected instantly again from the window beneath.\n\n'A box?' he asked, equally excited. 'A box from Scotland? Why, we had one only last month. Bless their hearts! How little they know what help and happiness.\u2026 'The rest of the sentence disappeared with the head; and a moment later Jimbo was heard scampering up the stairs. Both men went out to meet him.\n\nThe little boy was breathless with excitement, yet the spirit of the man of affairs worked strongly in him. He deliberately suppressed hysterics. He spoke calmly as might be, both hands in his trouser- pockets beneath the blouse of blue cotton that stuck out like a ballet skirt all round. The belt had slipped down. His eyes were never still. He pulled one hand out, holding the crumpled paper up for inspection.\n\n'It's a paquet,' he said, 'comme ca.' He used French and English mixed, putting the latter in for his cousin's benefit. He had little considerate ways like that. It's coming from Scotland, et puis ca pese soixante-quinze kilos. Oh, it's big. It's enormous. The last one weighed,' he hesitated, forgetful, 'much, much less,' he finished. He paused, looking like a man who has solved a problem by stating it.\n\n'One hundred and fifty pounds,' exclaimed his father, just as eager as the boy. 'Let me look,' and he held his hand out for the advice from the railway. 'What can be in it?'\n\n'Something for everybody,' said Jimbo decidedly. 'All the village knows it. It will come by the two o'clock train from Bale, you know.' He gave up the paper unwillingly. It was his badge of office. 'That's the paper about it,' he added again.\n\nDaddy read out slowly the advice of consignment, with dates and weights and address of sender and recipient, while Jimbo corrected the least mistake. He knew it absolutely by heart.\n\n'There'll be dresses and boots for the girls this time,' he announced, 'and something big enough for Mother to wear, too. You can tell\u2014-'\n\n'How can you tell?' asked Daddy, laughing slyly, immensely pleased about it all.\n\n'Oh, by the weight of the paquet, comme ca,' was the reply. 'It weighs 75 kilos. That means there must be something for Mummy in it.'\n\nThe author turned towards his cousin, hiding his smile. 'It's a box of clothes,' he explained, 'from my cousins in Scotland, Lady X you know, and her family. Things they give away\u2014usually to their maids and what-not. Awfully good of them, isn't it? They pay the carriage too,' he added. It was an immense relief to him.\n\n'Things they can't wear,' put in Jimbo, 'but very good things\u2014 suits, blouses, shirts, collars, boots, gloves, and\u2014oh, toute sorte de choses comme ca.'\n\n'Isn't it nice of 'em,' repeated Daddy. It made life easier for him\u2014 ever so much easier. 'A family like that has such heaps of things. And they always pay the freight. It saves me a pretty penny I can tell you. Why, I haven't bought the girls a dress for two years or more. And Edward's dressed like a lord, I tell you,' referring to his eldest boy now at an expensive tutor's. 'You can understand the excitement when a box arrives. We call it the Magic Box.'\n\nRogers understood. It had puzzled him before why the children's clothes, Daddy's and Mummy's as well for that matter, were such an incongruous assortment of village or peasant wear, and smart, well-cut garments that bore so obviously the London mark.\n\n'They're very rich indeed,' said Jimbo. 'They have a motor car. These are the only things that don't fit them. There's not much for me usually; I'm too little yet. But there's lots for the girls and the others.' And 'the others,' it appeared, included the Widow Jequier, the Postmaster and his wife, the carpenter's family, and more than one household in the village who knew the use and value of every centimetre of ribbon. Even the retired governesses got their share. No shred or patch was ever thrown away as useless. The assortment of cast-off clothing furnished Sunday Bests to half the village for weeks to come. A consignment of bullion could not have given half the pleasure and delight that the arrival of a box produced.\n\nBut midi was ringing, and dejeuner had to be eaten first. Like a meal upon the stage, no one ate sincerely; they made a brave pretence, but the excitement was too great for hunger. Every one was in the secret\u2014the Postmaster (he might get another hat out of it for himself) had let it out with a characteristic phrase: 'Il y a un paquet pour la famille anglaise!' Yet all feigned ignorance. The children exchanged mysterious glances, and afterwards the governesses hung about the Post Office, simulating the purchase of stamps at two o'clock. But every one watched Daddy's movements, for he it was who would say the significant words.\n\nAnd at length he said them. 'Now, we had better go down to the station,' he observed casually, 'and see if there is anything for us.' His tone conveyed the impression that things often arrived in this way; it was an everyday affair. If there was nothing, it didn't matter much. His position demanded calmness.\n\n'Very well,' said Jimbo. 'I'll come with you.' He strutted off, leading the way.\n\n'And I, and I,' cried Monkey and Jane Anne, for it was a half-holiday and all were free. Jimbo would not have appeared to hurry for a kingdom.\n\n'I think I'll join you, too,' remarked Mother, biting her lips, 'only please go slowly.' There were hills to negotiate.\n\nThey went off together in a party, and the governesses watched them go. The Widow Jequier put her head out of the window, pretending she was feeding the birds. Her sister popped out opportunely to post a letter. The Postmaster opened his guichet window and threw a bit of string into the gutter; and old Miss Waghorn, just then appearing for her daily fifteen minutes' constitutional, saw the procession and asked him, 'Who in the world all those people were?' She had completely forgotten them. 'Le barometre a monte,' he replied, knowing no word of English, and thinking it was her usual question about the weather. He reported daily the state of the barometer. 'Vous n'aurez pas besoin d'un parapluie.' 'Mercy,' she said, meaning merci.\n\nThe train arrived, and with it came the box. They brought it up themselves upon the little hand-cart\u2014le char. It might have weighed a ton and contained priceless jewels, the way they tugged and pushed, and the care they lavished on it. Mother puffed behind, hoping there would be something to fit Jimbo this time.\n\n'Shall we rest a moment?' came at intervals on the hill, till at last Monkey said, 'Sit on the top, Mummy, and we'll pull you too.' And during the rests they examined the exterior, smelt it, tapped it, tried to see between the cracks, and ventured endless and confused conjectures as to its probable contents.\n\nThey dragged the hand-cart over the cobbles of the courtyard, and heaved the box up the long stone staircase. It was planted at length on the floor beside the bed of Mlle. Lemaire, that she might witness the scene from her prison windows. Daddy had the greatest difficulty in keeping order, for tempers grow short when excitement is too long protracted. The furniture was moved about to make room. Orders flew about like grape-shot. Everybody got in everybody else's way. But finally the unwieldy packing-case was in position, and a silence fell upon the company.\n\n'My gum, we've put it upside down,' said Daddy, red in the face with his exertions. It was the merest chance that there was no wisp of straw yet in his beard.\n\n'Then the clothes will all be inside out,' cried Monkey, 'and we shall have to stand on our heads.'\n\n'You silly,' Jane Anne rebuked her, yet half believing it was true, while Jimbo, holding hammer and chisel ready, looked unutterable contempt. 'Can't you be serious for a moment?' said his staring blue eyes.\n\nThe giant chest was laboriously turned over, the two men straining every muscle in the attempt. Then, after a moment's close inspection again to make quite sure, Daddy spoke gravely. Goodness, how calm he was!\n\n'Jimbo, boy, pass me the hammer and the chisel, will you?'\n\nIn breathless silence the lid was slowly forced open and the splintered pieces gingerly removed. Sheets of dirty brown paper and bundles of odorous sacking came into view.\n\n'Perhaps that's all there is,' suggested Jinny.\n\n'Ugh! What a whiff!' said Monkey.\n\n'Fold them up carefully and put them in a corner,' ordered Mother.\n\nJane Anne religiously obeyed. Oh dear, how slow she was about it!\n\nThen everybody came up very close, heads bent over, hands began to stretch and poke. You heard breathing\u2014nothing more.\n\n'Now, wait your turn,' commanded Mother in a dreadful voice, 'and let your Father try on everything first.' And a roar of laughter made the room echo while Daddy extracted wonder after wonder that were packed in endless layers one upon another.\n\nPerhaps what would have struck an observer most of all would have been the strange seriousness against which the comedy was set. The laughter was incessant, but it was a weighty matter for all that. The bed- ridden woman, who was sole audience, understood that; the parents understood it too. Every article of clothing that could be worn meant a saving, and the economy of a franc was of real importance. The struggles of la famille anglaise to clothe and feed and educate themselves were no light affair. The eldest boy, now studying for the consular service, absorbed a third of their entire income. The sacrifices involved for his sake affected each one in countless ways. And for two years now these magic boxes had supplied all his suits and shirts and boots. The Scotch cousins luckily included a boy of his own size who had extravagant taste in clothes. A box sometimes held as many as four excellent suits. Daddy contented himself with one a year \u2014ordered ready-made from the place they called Chasbakerinhighholborn.' Mother's clothes were 'wropp in mystery' ever. No one ever discovered where they came from or how she made them. She did. It seemed always the same black dress and velvet blouse.\n\nGravity and laughter, therefore, mingled in Daddy's face as he drew out one paper parcel after another, opened it, tried the article on himself, and handed it next to be tried on similarly by every one in turn.\n\nAnd the first extraction from the magic box was a curious looking thing that no one recognised. Daddy unfolded it and placed it solemnly on his head. He longed for things for himself, but rarely found them. He tried on everything, hoping it might 'just do,' but in the end yielded it with pleasure to the others. He rarely got more than a pair of gloves or a couple of neckties for himself. The coveted suits just missed his size.\n\nGrave as a judge he balanced the erection on his head. It made a towering heap. Every one was puzzled. 'It's a motor cap,' ventured some one at length in a moment of intuition.\n\n'It's several!' cried Monkey. She snatched the bundle and handed it to Mother. There were four motor caps, neatly packed together. Mother put on each in turn. They were in shades of grey. They became her well.\n\n'You look like a duchess,' said Daddy proudly. 'You'd better keep them all.'\n\n'I think perhaps they'll do,' she said, moving to the glass, 'if no one else can wear them.' She flushed a little and looked self- conscious.\n\n'They want long pins,' suggested Jinny. 'They'll keep the rain off too, like an umbrella.' She laughed and clapped her hands. Mother pinned one on and left it there for the remainder of the afternoon. The unpacking of the case continued.\n\nThe next discovery was gloves. The lid of the box looked like a counter in a glove shop. There were gloves of leather and chamois, gauntlets, driving-gloves, and gloves of suede, yellow, brown, and grey. All had been used a little, but all were good. 'They'll wash,' said Jane Anne. They were set aside in a little heap apart. No one coveted them. It was not worth while. In the forests of Bourcelles gloves were at a discount, and driving a pleasure yet unknown. Jinny, however a little later put on a pair of ladies' suede that caught her fancy, and wore them faithfully to the end of the performance, just to keep her mother's motor cap in countenance.\n\nThe main contents of the box were as yet unbroached, however, and when next an overcoat appeared, with velvet collar and smart, turned-up cuffs, Daddy beamed like a boy and was into it before any one could prevent. He went behind a screen. The coat obviously did not fit him, but he tugged and pulled and wriggled his shoulders with an air of 'things that won't fit must be made to fit.'\n\n'You'll bust the seams! You'll split the buttons! See what's in the pockets!' cried several voices, while he shifted to and fro like a man about to fight.\n\n'It may stretch,' he said hopefully. 'I think I can use it. It's just what I want.' He glanced up at his wife whose face, however, was relentless.\n\n'Maybe,' replied the practical mother, 'but it's more Edward's build, perhaps.' He looked fearfully disappointed, but kept it on. Edward got the best of every box. He went on with the unpacking, giving the coat sly twitches from time to time, as he pulled out blouses, skirts, belts, queer female garments, boots, soft felt hats\u2014the green Homburg he put on at once, as who should dare to take it from him\u2014black and brown Trilbys, shooting-caps, gaiters, flannel shirts, pyjamas, and heaven knows what else besides.\n\nThe excitement was prodigious, and the floor looked like a bargain sale. Everybody talked at once; there was no more pretence of keeping order Mlle. Lemaire lay propped against her pillows, watching the scene with feelings between tears and laughter. Each member of the family tried on everything in turn, but yielded the treasures instantly at a word from Mother\u2014'That will do for so and so; this will fit Monkey; Jimbo, you take this,' and so on.\n\nThe door into the adjoining bedroom was for ever opening and shutting, as the children disappeared with armfuls and reappeared five minutes later, marvellously apparelled. There was no attempt at sorting yet. Blouses and flannel trousers lay upon the floor with boots and motor veils. Every one had something, and the pile set aside for Edward grew apace. Only Jimbo was disconsolate. He was too small for everything; even the ladies' boots were too narrow and too pointed for his little feet. From time to time he rummaged with the hammer and chisel (still held very tightly) among the mass of paper at the bottom. But, as usual, there was nothing but gaudy neckties that he could use. And these he did not care about. He said no word, but stood there watching the others and trying to laugh, only keeping the tears back with the greatest difficulty.\n\nFrom his position in the background Rogers took it all in. He moved up and slipped a ten-franc piece into the boy's hand. 'Secretaries don't wear clothes like this,' he whispered. 'We'll go into town to-morrow and get the sort of thing you want.'\n\nJimbo looked up and stared. He stood on tip-toe to kiss him. 'Oh, thank you so much,' he said, fearful lest the others should see; and tucked the coin away into a pocket underneath his cotton blouse. A moment later he came back from the corner where he had hid himself to examine it. 'But, Cousin Henry,' he whispered, utterly astonished, 'it's gold.' He had thought the coin was a ten-centime piece such as Daddy sometimes gave him. He could not believe it. He had never seen gold before. He ran up and told his parents. His sisters were too excited to be told just then. After that he vanished into the passage without being noticed, and when he returned five minutes later his eyes were suspiciously red. But no one heard him say a word about getting nothing out of the box. He stood aside, with a superior manner and looked quietly on. 'It's very nice for the girls,' his expression said. His interest in the box had grown decidedly less. He could buy an entire shop for himself now.\n\n'Mother, Daddy, everybody,' cried an excited voice, 'will you look at me a minute, please! It all fits me perfectly,' and Jinny emerged from the bedroom door. She had been trying on. A rough brown dress of Harris tweed became her well; she wore a motor veil about her head, and another was tied round her neck; a white silk blouse, at least one size too large for her, bulged voluminously from beneath the neat tweed jacket. She wore her suede gloves still. 'And there's an outside pocket in the skirt, you see.' She pulled it up and showed a very pointed pair of brown boots; they were much too long; they looked ridiculous after her square village boots. 'I can waggle my toes in them,' she explained, strutting to and fro to be admired. 'I'm a fashionable monster now!'\n\nBut she only held the centre of the stage a minute, for Monkey entered at her heels, bursting with delight in a long green macintosh thrown over another tweed skirt that hid her feet and even trailed behind. A pair of yellow spats were visible sometimes that spread fan-shaped over her boots and climbed half-way up the fat legs.\n\n'It all fits me exaccurately,' was her opinion. The sisters went arm in arm about the room, dancing and laughing.\n\n'We're busy blackmailers,' cried Jinny, using her latest acquisition which she practised on all possible occasions. 'We're in Piccadilly, going to see the Queen for tea.'\n\nThey tripped over Monkey's train and one of the spats came off in the struggle for recovery. Daddy, in his Homburg hat, looked round and told them sternly to make less noise. Behind a screen he was getting surreptitiously into a suit that Mother had put aside for Edward. He tried on several in this way, hopeful to the last.\n\n'I think this will fit me all right,' he said presently, emerging with a grave expression on his puckered face. He seemed uncertain about it. He was solemn as a judge. 'You could alter the buttons here and there, you know,' and he looked anxiously at his wife. The coat ran up behind, the waistcoat creased badly owing to the strain, and the trousers were as tight as those of a cavalry officer. Anywhere, and any moment, he might burst out into unexpected revelation. 'A little alteration,' he suggested hopefully, 'and it would be all right\u2014don't you think?' And then he added 'perhaps.'\n\nHe turned and showed himself. Even the roar of laughter that greeted his appearance did not quite convince him. He looked like a fat, impoverished bookmaker.\n\n'I think it will fit Edward better,' said Mother again without pity, for she did not like to see her husband look foolish before the children. He disappeared behind the screen, but repeated the performance with two other suits. 'This striped one seems a little looser,' he said; or, 'If you'd let out the trousers at the bottom, I think they would do.' But in the end all he got from the box was two pairs of pink silk pyjamas, the Homburg hat, several pairs of gloves, spats, and gaiters, and half a dozen neckties that no one else would wear. He made his heap carefully in the corner of the room, and later, when the mess was all cleared up and everybody went off with their respective treasures, he entirely forgot them in his pleasure and admiration of the others. He left them lying in the corner. Riquette slept on them that night, and next morning Jimbo brought them over for him to the carpenter's house. And Edward later magnanimously yielded up two flannel shirts because he had so many left over from the previous box. Also a pair of pumps.\n\n'I've not done so badly after all,' was his final matured opinion. 'Poor mother! She got nothing but motor caps.' Jimbo, however, had made a final discovery of value for himself\u2014of some value, at least. When the empty case was overturned as a last hope, he rummaged among the paper with his hammer and chisel, and found four pairs of golf stockings! The legs fitted him admirably, but the feet were much too big. There was some discussion as to whether they had belonged to a very thin-legged boy with big feet or to a girl who had no calves. Luckily, the former was decided upon, for otherwise they would have given no pleasure to Jimbo. Even as it was, he adopted them chiefly because it pleased his parents. Mother cut off the feet and knitted new ones a little smaller. But there was no mystery about those stockings. No special joy went with them. He had watched Mother knitting too often for that; she could make stockings half asleep.\n\nTwo hours later, while Jane Ann and Mother prepared the tea in the Den, Daddy, Jimbo, and Cousin Henry went in a procession to the carpenter's house carrying the piles of clothing in their arms to the astonishment of half the village. They were to be re-sorted there in privacy by the 'men,' where the 'children' could not interfere. The things they could not use were distributed later among the governesses; the Pension and the village also, got their share. And the Postmaster got his hat\u2014a black Trilby. He loved its hue.\n\nAnd for days afterwards the children hoarded their treasures with unholy joy. What delighted them as much as anything, perhaps, were the coronets upon the pyjamas and the shirts. They thought it was a London or Edinburgh laundry mark. But Jimbo told them otherwise: 'It means that Daddy's Cousin is a Lord-and-Waiting, and goes to see the King.' This explanation was generally accepted.\n\nThe relief to the parents, however, as they sat up in the Den that night and discussed how much this opportune Magic Box had saved them, may be better imagined than described. The sum ran into many, many francs. Edward had suits now for at least two years. 'He's stopped growing,' said his mother; 'thank goodness,' said his father.\n\nAnd to the long list he prayed for twice a day Jimbo added of his accord, 'Ceux qui ont envoye la grosse caisse.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 180", + "text": "\u2003Break up the heavens, O Lord! and far,\n\n\u2003Thro' all yon starlight keen,\n\n\u2003Draw me, thy bride, a glittering star,\n\n\u2003In raiment white and clean.\n\n\u2003He lifts me to the golden doors;\n\n\u2003The flashes come and go;\n\n\u2003All heaven bursts her starry floors,\n\n\u2003And strews her lights below.\n\n\u2014St. Agnes' Eve, Tennyson.\n\nMiss Waghorn, of late, had been unusually trying, and especially full of complaints. Her poor old memory seemed broken beyond repair. She offered Madame Jequier her weekly payment twice within ten minutes, and was quite snappy about it when the widow declined the second tender.\n\n'But you had the receipt in your hand wizin ten minutes ago, Mees Wag'orn. You took it upstairs. The ink can hardly be now already yet dry.' But nothing would satisfy her that she had paid until they went up to her room together and found it after much searching between her Bible and her eternal novel on the writing-table.\n\n'Forgive me, Madame, but you do forget sometimes, don't you?' she declared with amusing audacity. 'I like to make quite sure\u2014- especially where money is concerned.' On entering the room she had entirely forgotten why they came there. She began complaining, instead, about the bed, which had not yet been made. A standing source of grumbling, this; for the old lady would come down to breakfast many a morning, and then go up again before she had it, thinking it was already late in the day. She worried the pensionnaires to death, too. It was their duty to keep the salon tidy, and Miss Waghorn would flutter into the room as early as eight o'clock, find the furniture still unarranged, and at once dart out again to scold the girls. These interviews were amusing before they became monotonous, for the old lady's French was little more than 'nong pas' attached to an infinitive verb, and the girls' Swiss-German explanations of the alleged neglect of duty only confused her. 'Nong pas faire la chambre,' she would say, stamping her foot with vexation. 'You haven't done the room, though it's nearly dejooner time!' Or else\u2014'Ten minutes ago it was tidy. Look at it now!' while she dragged them in and forced them to put things straight, until some one in authority came and explained gently her mistake. 'Oh, excuse me, Madame,' she would say then, 'but they do forget so often.' Every one was very patient with her as a rule.\n\nAnd of late she had been peculiarly meddlesome, putting chairs straight, moving vases, altering the lie of table-cloths and the angle of sofas, opening windows because it was 'so stuffy,' and closing them a minute later with complaints about the draught, forcing occupants of arm-chairs to get up because the carpet was caught, fiddling with pictures because they were crooked either with floor or ceiling, and never realising that in the old house these latter were nowhere parallel. But her chief occupation was to prevent the children crossing their legs when they sat down, or pulling their dresses lower, with a whispered, 'You must not cross your legs like that; it isn't ladylike, dear.'\n\nShe had been very exasperating and interfering. Tempers had grown short. Twice running she had complained about the dreadful noise the pensionnaires made at seven o'clock in the morning. 'Nong pas creer comme ca!' she called, running down the passage in her dressing-gown and bursting angrily into their rooms without knocking\u2014to find them empty. The girls had left the day before.\n\nBut to-day (the morning after the Star Cave adventure) the old lady was calmer, almost soothed, and at supper she was composed and gentle. Sleep, for some reason, had marvellously refreshed her. Attacks that opened as usual about Cornish Cream or a Man with a long Beard, she repelled easily and quietly. 'I've told you that story before, my dear; I know I have.' It seemed her mind and memory were more orderly somehow. And the Widow Jequier explained how sweet and good-natured she had been all day\u2014better than for years. 'When I took her drops upstairs at eleven o'clock I found her tidying her room; she was sorting her bills and papers. She read me a letter she had written to her nephew to come out and take her home\u2014well written and quite coherent. I've not known her mind so clear for months. Her memory, too. She said she had slept so well. If only it would last, helas!'\n\n'There are days like that,' she added presently, 'days when everything goes right and easily. One wakes up happy in the morning and sees only the bright side of things. Hope is active, and one has new courage somehow.' She spoke with feeling, her face was brighter, clearer, her mind less anxious. She had planned a visit to the Bank Manager about the mortgages. It had come as an inspiration. It might be fruitless, but she was hopeful, and so knew a little peace. 'I wonder why it is,' she added, 'and what brings these changes into the heart so suddenly.'\n\n'Good sleep and sound digestion,' Mrs. Campden thought. She expressed her views deliberately like this in order to counteract any growth of fantasy in the children.\n\n'But it is strange,' her husband said, remembering his new story; 'it may be much deeper than that. While the body sleeps the spirit may get into touch with helpful forces\u2014' His French failed him. He wumbled painfully.\n\n'Thought-forces possibly from braver minds,' put in Rogers. 'Who knows? Sleep and dreaming have never really been explained.' He recalled a theory of Minks.\n\n'I dream a great deal,' Miss Waghorn observed, eager to take part. 'It's delightful, dreaming\u2014if only one could remember!' She looked round the table with challenge in her eager old eyes. But no one took her up. It involved such endless repetition of well-known stories. The Postmaster might have said a word\u2014he looked prepared\u2014but, not understanding English, he went on with his salad instead.\n\n'Life is a dream,' observed Monkey, while Jinny seemed uncertain whether she should laugh or take it seriously.\n\nThe Widow Jequier overheard her. There was little she did not overhear.\n\n'Coquine!' she said, then quoted with a sentimental sigh:\u2014\n\n\u2003La vie est breve,\n\n\u2003Un peu d'amour.\n\n\u2003Un peu de rive\n\n\u2003Et puis\u2014bonjour!\n\nShe hung her head sideways a moment for effect. There was a pause all down the long table.\n\n'I'm sure dreams have significance,' she went on. 'There's more in dreaming than one thinks. They come as warnings or encouragement. All the saints had dreams. I always pay attention to mine.'\n\n'Madame, I dream a great deal,' repeated Miss Waghorn, anxious not to be left out of a conversation in which she understood at least the key-word reve; 'a very great deal, I may say.'\n\nSeveral looked up, ready to tell nightmares of their own at the least sign of encouragement. The Postmaster faced the table, laying down his knife and fork. He took a deep breath. This time he meant to have his say. But his deliberation always lost him openings.\n\nI don't,' exclaimed Jinny, bluntly, five minutes behind the others. 'When I'm in bed, I sleep.' The statement brought laughter that confused her a little. She loved to define her position. She had defined it. And the Postmaster had lost his chance. Mlle. Sandoz, a governess who was invited to supper as payment for a music lesson given to his boy, seized the opening.\n\n'Last night I dreamed that a bull chased me. Now what did that mean,\n\nI wonder?'\n\n'That there was no danger since it was only a dream!' said the Postmaster sharply, vexed that he had not told his own.\n\nBut no one applauded, for it was the fashion to ignore his observations, unless they had to do with stamps and weights of letters, parcels, and the like. A clatter of voices rose, as others, taking courage, decided to tell experiences of their own; but it was the Postmaster's wife in the hall who won. She had her meals outside with the kitchen maid and her niece, who helped in the Post Office, and she always tried to take part in the conversation from a distance thus. She plunged into a wordy description of a lengthy dream that had to do with clouds, three ravens, and a mysterious face. All listened, most of them in mere politeness, for as cook she was a very important personage who could furnish special dishes on occasion\u2014but her sister listened as to an oracle. She nodded her head and made approving gestures, and said, 'Aha, you see,' or 'Ah, voila!' as though that helped to prove the importance of the dream, if not its actual truth. And the sister came to the doorway so that no one could escape. She stood there in her apron, her face hot and flushed still from the kitchen.\n\nAt length it came to an end, and she looked round her, hoping for a little sympathetic admiration, or at least for expressions of wonder and interest. All waited for some one else to speak. Into the pause came her husband's voice, 'Je n'ai pas de sel.'\n\nThere was no resentment. It was an everyday experience. The spell was broken instantly. The cook retired to her table and told the dream all over again with emphatic additions to her young companions. The Postmaster got his salt and continued eating busily as though dreams were only fit for women and children to talk about. And the English group began whispering excitedly of their Magic Box and all it had contained. They were tired of dreams and dreaming.\n\nTante Jeanne made a brave effort to bring the conversation back to the key of sentiment and mystery she loved, but it was not a success.\n\n'At any rate I'm certain one's mood on going to bed decides the kind of dream that comes,' she said into the air. 'The last thought before going to sleep is very important. It influences the adventures of the soul when it leaves the body every night.'\n\nFor this was a tenet of her faith, although she always forgot to act upon it. Only Miss Waghorn continued the train of ideas this started, with a coherence that surprised even herself. Somehow the jabber about dreams, though in a language that only enabled her to catch its general drift, had interested her uncommonly. She seemed on the verge of remembering something. She had listened with patience, a look of peace upon her anxious old face that was noticed even by Jane Anne. 'It smoothed her out,' was her verdict afterwards, given only to herself though. 'Everything is a sort of long unfinished dream to her, I suppose, at that age.'\n\nWhile the famille anglaise renewed noisily their excitement of the Magic Box, and while the talk in the hall went on and on, re-hashing the details of the cook's marvellous experience, and assuming entirely new proportions, Miss Waghorn glanced about her seeking whom she might devour\u2014and her eye caught Henry Rogers, listening as usual in silence.\n\n'Ah,' she said to him, 'but I look forward to sleep. I might say I long for it.' She sighed very audibly. It was both a sigh for release and a faint remembrance that last night her sleep had been somehow deep and happy, strangely comforting.\n\n'It is welcome sometimes, isn't it?' he answered, always polite and rather gentle with her.\n\n'Sleep unravels, yes,' she said, vaguely as to context, yet with a querulous intensity. It was as if she caught at the enthusiasm of a connected thought somewhere. 'I might even say it unties,' she added, encouraged by his nod, 'unties knots\u2014if you follow me.'\n\n'It does, Miss Waghorn. Indeed, it does.' Was this a precursor of the Brother with the Beard, he wondered? 'Untied knots' would inevitably start her off. He made up his mind to listen to the tale with interest for the twentieth time if it came. But it didn't come.\n\n'I am very old and lonely, and I need the best,' she went on happily, half saying it to herself.\n\nInstantly he took her up\u2014without surprise too. It was like a dream.\n\n'Quite so. The rest, the common stuff\u2014'\n\n'Is good enough\u2014' she chimed in quickly\u2014\n\n'For Fraulein, or for baby, or for mother,' he laughed.\n\n'Or any other,' chuckled Miss Waghorn.\n\n'Who needs a bit of sleep\u2014'\n\n'But yet can do without it\u2014' she carried it on.\n\nThen both together, after a second's pause\u2014\n\n'If they must\u2014' and burst out laughing.\n\nGoodness, how did she know the rhyme? Was it everywhere? Was thought running loose like wireless messages to be picked up by all who were in tune for acceptance?\n\n'Well, I never!' he heard her exclaim, 'if that's not a nursery rhyme of my childhood that I've not heard for sixty years and more! I declare,' she added with innocent effrontery, 'I've not heard it since I was ten years old. And I was born in '37\u2014the year\u2014'\n\n'Just fancy!' he tried to stop her.\n\n'Queen Victoria came to the throne.'\n\n'Strange,' he said more to himself than to any one else. She did not contradict him.\n\n'You or me?' asked Monkey, who overheard.\n\n'All of us,' he answered. 'We all think the same things. It's a dream,\n\nI believe; the whole thing is a dream.'\n\n'It's a fact though,' said Miss Waghorn with decision, 'and now I must go and write my letters, and then finish a bit of lace I'm doing. You will excuse me?' She rose, made a little bow, and left the table.\n\nMother watched her go. 'What has come over the old lady?' she thought. 'She seems to be getting back her mind and memory too. How very odd!'\n\nIn the afternoon Henry Rogers had been into Neuchatel. It seemed he had some business there of a rather private nature. He was very mysterious about it, evading several offers to accompany him, and after supper he retired early to his own room in the carpenter's house. And, since he now was the principal attraction, a sort of magnet that drew the train of younger folk into his neighbourhood, the Pension emptied, and the English family, deprived of their leader, went over to the Den.\n\n'Partir a l'anglaise,' laughed the Widow Jequier, as she saw them file away downstairs; and then she sighed. Some day, when the children were older and needed a different education, they would all go finally. Down these very stairs they would go into the street. She loved them for themselves, but, also, the English family was a permanent source of income to her, and the chief. They stayed on in the winter, when boarders were few and yet living expenses doubled. She sighed, and fluttered into her tiny room to take her finery off, finery that had once been worn in Scotland and had reached her by way of Cook and la petite vitesse in the Magic Box.\n\nAnd presently she fluttered out again and summoned her sister. The Postmaster had gone to bed; the kitchen girl was washing up the last dishes; Miss Waghorn would hardly come down again. The salon was deserted.\n\n'Come, Anita,' she cried, yet with a hush of excitement in her voice, 'we will have an evening of it. Bring the soucoupe with you, while I prepare the little table.' In her greasy kitchen apron Anita came. Zizi, her boy, came with her. Madame Jequier, with her flowing garment that was tea-gown, garden-dress, and dressing-gown all in one, looked really like a witch, her dark hair all askew and her eyes shining with mysterious anticipation. 'We'll ask the spirits for help and guidance,' she said to herself, lest the boy should overhear. For Zizi often helped them with their amateur planchette, only they told him it was electricity: le magnetisme, le fluide, was the term they generally made use of. Its vagueness covered all possible explanations with just the needed touch of confusion and suggestion in it.\n\nThey settled down in a corner of the room, where the ivy from the ceiling nearly touched their heads. The small round table was produced; the saucer, with an arrow pencilled on its edge, was carefully placed upon the big sheet of paper which bore the letters of the alphabet and the words oui and non in the corners. The light behind them was half veiled by ivy; the rest of the old room lay in comparative darkness; through the half-opened door a lamp shone upon the oil-cloth in the hall, showing the stains and the worn, streaked patches where the boards peeped through. The house was very still.\n\nThey began with a little prayer\u2014to ceux qui ecoutent,\u2014and then each of them placed a finger on the rim of the upturned saucer, waiting in silence. They were a study in darkness, those three pointing fingers.\n\n'Zizi, tu as beaucoup de fluide ce soir, oui?' whispered the widow after a considerable interval.\n\n'Oh, comme d'habitude,' he shrugged his shoulders. He loved these mysterious experiments, but he never claimed much fluide until the saucer moved, jealous of losing his reputation as a storehouse of this strange, human electricity.\n\nYet behind this solemn ritual, that opened with prayer and invariably concluded with hope renewed and courage strengthened, ran the tragic element that no degree of comedy could kill. In the hearts of the two old women, ever fighting their uphill battle with adversity, burned the essence of big faith, the faith that plays with mountains. Hidden behind the curtain, an indulgent onlooker might have smiled, but tears would have wet his eyes before the smile could have broadened into laughter. Tante Jeanne, indeed, had heard that the subconscious mind was held to account for the apparent intelligence that occasionally betrayed itself in the laboriously spelled replies; she even made use of the word from time to time to baffle Zizi's too importunate inquiries. But after le subconscient she always tacked on fluide, magnetisme, or electricite lest he should be frightened, or she should lose her way. And of course she held to her belief that spirits produced the phenomena. A subconscious mind was a cold and comfortless idea.\n\nAnd, as usual, the saucer told them exactly what they had desired to know, suggested ways and means that hid already in the mind of one or other, yet in stammered sentences that included just enough surprise or turn of phrase to confirm their faith and save their self-respect. It was their form of prayer, and with whole hearts they prayed. Moreover, they acted on what was told them. Had they discovered that it was merely the content of their subconscious mind revealing thus its little hopes and fears, they would have lost their chief support in life. God and religion would have suffered a damaging eclipse. Big scaffolding in their lives would have collapsed.\n\nDoubtless, Tante Jeanne did not knowingly push the saucer, neither did the weighty index finger of the concentrated cook deliberately exert muscular pressure. Nor, similarly, was Zizi aware that the weight of his entire hand helped to urge the dirty saucer across the slippery surface of the paper in whatever direction his elders thus indicated. But one and all knew 'subconsciously' the exact situation of consonants and vowels\u2014that oui lay in the right-hand corner and non in the left. And neither Zizi nor his mother dared hint to their leader not to push, because she herself monopolised that phrase, saying repeatedly to them both, 'mais il ne faut pas pousser! Legerement avec les doigts, toujours tres legerement! Sans ca il n'y a pas de valeur, tu comprends!' Zizi inserted an occasional electrical question. It was discreetly ignored always.\n\nThey asked about the Bank payments, the mortgages, the future of their much-loved old house, and of themselves; and the answers, so vague concerning any detailed things to come, were very positive indeed about the Bank. They were to go and interview the Manager three days from now. They had already meant to go, only the date was undecided; the corroboration of the spirits was required to confirm it. This settled it. Three days from to-night!\n\n'Tu vois!' whispered Tante Jeanne, glancing mysteriously across the table at her sister. 'Three days from now! That explains your dream about the three birds. Aha, tu vois!' She leaned back, supremely satisfied. And the sister gravely bowed her head, while Zizi looked up and listened intently, without comprehension. He felt a little alarm, perhaps, to-night.\n\nFor this night there was indeed something new in the worn old ritual. There was a strange, uncalculated element in it all, unexpected, and fearfully thrilling to all three. Zizi for the first time had his doubts about its being merely electricity.\n\n'C'est d'une puissance extraordinaire,' was the widow's whispered, eager verdict.\n\n'C'est que j'ai enormement de fluide ce soir,' declared Zizi, with pride and confidence, yet mystified. The other two exchanged frequent glances of surprise, of wonder, of keen expectancy and anticipation. There was certainly a new 'influence' at work to-night. They even felt a touch of faint dread. The widow, her ruling passion strong even before the altar, looked down anxiously once or twice at her disreputable attire. It was vivid as that\u2014this acute sense of another presence that pervaded the room, not merely hung about the little table. She could be 'invisible' to the Pension by the magic of old- established habit, but she could not be so to the true Invisibles. And they saw her in this unbecoming costume. She forgot, too, the need of keeping Zizi in the dark. He must know some day. What did it matter when?\n\nShe tidied back her wandering hair with her free hand, and drew the faded garment more closely round her neck.\n\n'Are you cold?' asked her sister with a hush in her voice; 'you feel the cold air\u2014all of a sudden?'\n\n'I do, maman,' Zizi answered. 'It's blowing like a wind across my hand. What is it?' He was shivering. He looked over his shoulder nervously.\n\nThere was a heavy step in the hall, and a figure darkened the doorway.\n\nAll three gave a start.\n\n'J'ai sommeil,' announced the deep voice of the Postmaster. This meant that the boy must come to bed. It was the sepulchral tone that made them jump perhaps. Zizi got up without a murmur; he was glad to go, really. He slept in the room with his parents. His father, an overcoat thrown over his night things, led him away without another word. And the two women resumed their seance. The saucer moved more easily and swiftly now that Zizi had gone. 'C'est done toi qui as le fluide,' each said to the other.\n\nBut in the excitement caused by this queer, new element in the proceedings, the familiar old routine was forgotten. Napoleon and Marie Antoinette were brushed aside to make room for this important personage who suddenly descended upon the saucer from an unknown star with the statement\u2014it took half an hour to spell\u2014'Je viens d'une etoile tres eloignee qui n'a pas encore de nom.'\n\n'There is a starry light in the room. It was above your head just now,' whispered the widow, enormously excited. 'I saw it plainly.' She was trembling.\n\n'That explains the clouds in my dream,' was the tense reply, as they both peered round them into the shadows with a touch of awe. 'Now, give all your attention. This has an importance, but, you know, an importance\u2014' She could not get the degree of importance into any words. She looked it instead, leaving the sentence eloquently incomplete.\n\nFor, certainly, into the quaint ritual of these two honest, troubled old women there crept then a hint of something that was uncommon and uplifting. That it came through themselves is as sure as that it spelt out detailed phrases of encouragement and guidance with regard to their coming visit to the Bank. That they both were carried away by it into joy and the happiness of sincere relief of mind is equally a fact. That their receptive mood attuned them to overhear subconsciously messages of thought that flashed across the night from another mind in sympathy with their troubles\u2014a mind hard at work that very moment in the carpenter's house\u2014was not known to them; nor would it have brought the least explanatory comfort even if they had been told of it. They picked up these starry telegrams of unselfish thinking that flamed towards them through the midnight sky from an eager mind elsewhere busily making plans for their benefit. And, reaching them subconsciously, their deep subconsciousness urged the dirty saucer to the spelling of them, word by word and letter by letter. The flavour of their own interpretation, of course, crept in to mar, and sometimes to obliterate. The instruments were gravely imperfect. But the messages came through. And with them came the great feeling that the Christian calls answered prayer. They had such absolute faith. They had belief.\n\n'Go to the Bank. Help awaits you there. And I shall go with you to direct and guide.' This was the gist of that message from 'une etoile tres eloignee.'\n\nThey copied it out in violet ink with a pen that scratched like the point of a pin. And when they stole upstairs to bed, long after midnight, there was great joy and certainty in their fighting old hearts. There was a perfume of flowers, of lilacs and wistaria in the air, as if the whole garden had slipped in by the back door and was unable to find its way out again. They dreamed of stars and starlight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 181", + "text": "La vie est un combat qu'ils ont change en fete. Lei Elus, E. VERHAIREN.\n\nThe excitement a few days later spread through the village like a flame. People came out of their way to steal a glance at the Pension that now, for the first time in their\u2014memory, was free of debt. Gygi, tolling the bell at midi, forgot to stop, as he peered through the narrow window in the church tower and watched the Widow Jequier planting and digging recklessly in her garden. Several came running down the street, thinking it was a warning of fire.\n\nBut the secret was well kept; no one discovered who had worked the miracle. Pride sealed the lips of the beneficiaries themselves, while the inhabitants of the Citadelle, who alone shared the knowledge, kept the facts secret, as in honour bound. Every one wondered, however, for every one knew the sum ran into several thousand francs; and a thousand francs was a fortune; the rich man in the corner house, who owned so many vineyards, and was reputed to enjoy an income of ten thousand francs a year, was always referred to as 'le million naire.' And so the story spread that Madame Jequier had inherited a fortune, none knew whence. The tradespeople treated her thereafter with a degree of respect that sweetened her days till the end of life.\n\nShe had come back from the Bank in a fainting condition, the sudden joy too much for her altogether. A remote and inaccessible air pervaded her, for all the red of her inflamed eyes and tears. She was aloof from the world, freed at last from the ceaseless, gnawing anxiety that for years had eaten her life out. The spirits had justified themselves, and faith and worship had their just reward. But this was only the first, immediate effect: it left her greater than it found her, this unexpected, huge relief\u2014brimming with new sympathy for others. She doubled her gifts. She planned a wonderful new garden. That very night she ordered such a quantity of bulbs and seedlings that to this day they never have been planted.\n\nHer interview with Henry Rogers, when she called at the carpenter's house in all her finery, cannot properly be told, for it lay beyond his powers of description. Her sister accompanied her; the Postmaster, too, snatched fifteen minutes from his duties to attend. The ancient tall hat, worn only at funerals as a rule, was replaced by the black Trilby that had been his portion from the Magic Box, as he followed the excited ladies at a reasonable distance. 'You had better show yourself,' his wife suggested; 'Monsieur Rogairs would like to see you with us\u2014to know that you are there.' Which meant that he was not to interfere with the actual thanksgiving, but to countenance the occasion with his solemn presence. And, indeed, he did not go upstairs. He paced the road beneath the windows during the interview, looking exactly like a professional mourner waiting for the arrival of the hearse.\n\n'My dear old friend\u2014friends, I mean,' said Rogers in his fluent and very dreadful French, 'if you only knew what a pleasure it is to me\u2014It is I who should thank you for giving me the opportunity, not you who should thank me.' The sentence broke loose utterly, wandering among intricacies of grammar and subjunctive moods that took his breath away as he poured it out. 'I was only afraid you would think it unwarrantable interference. I am delighted that you let me do it. It's such a little thing to do.'\n\nBoth ladies instantly wept. The Widow came closer with a little rush. Whether Rogers was actually embraced, or no, it is not stated officially.\n\n'It is a loan, of course, it is a loan,' cried the Widow.\n\n'It is a present,' he said firmly, loathing the scene.\n\n'It's a part repayment for all the kindness you showed me here as a boy years and years ago.' Then, remembering that the sister was not known to him in those far-away days, he added clumsily, 'and since\u2014I came back\u2026. And now let's say no more, but just keep the little secret to ourselves. It is nobody's business but our own.'\n\n'A present!' gasped both ladies to one another, utterly overcome; and finding nothing else to embrace, they flung their arms about each other's necks and praised the Lord and wept more copiously than ever\u2026. 'Grand ciel' was heard so frequently, and so loudly, that Madame Michaud, the carpenter's wife, listening on the stairs, made up her mind it was a quarrel, and wondered if she ought to knock at the door and interfere.\n\n'I see your husband in the road,' said Rogers, tapping at the window.\n\n'I think he seems waiting for you. Or perhaps he has a telegram for me, do you think?' He bowed and waved his hand, smiling as the Postmaster looked up in answer to the tapping and gravely raised his Trilby hat.\n\n'There now, he's calling for you. Do not keep him waiting\u2014I'm sure\u2014' he didn't know what to say or how else to get them out. He opened the door. The farewells took some time, though they would meet an hour later at dejeuner as usual.\n\n'At least you shall pay us no more pension,' was the final sentence as they flounced downstairs, so happy and excited that they nearly tumbled over each other, and sharing one handkerchief to dry their tears.\n\n'Then I shall buy my own food and cook it here,' he laughed, and somehow managed to close his door upon the retreating storm. Out of the window he saw the procession go back, the sombre figure of the Postmaster twenty yards behind the other two.\n\nAnd then, with joy in his heart, though a sigh of relief upon his lips\u2014there may have been traces of a lump somewhere in his throat as well, but if so, he did not acknowledge it\u2014he turned to his letters, and found among them a communication from Herbert Montmorency Minks, announcing that he had found an ideal site, and that it cost so and so much per acre\u2014also that the County Council had made no difficulties. There was a hint, moreover\u2014a general flavour of resentment and neglect at his master's prolonged absence\u2014that it would not be a bad thing for the great Scheme if Mr. Rogers could see his way to return to London 'before very long.'\n\n'Bother the fellow!' thought he; 'what a nuisance he is, to be sure!'\n\nAnd he answered him at once. 'Do not trouble about a site just yet,' he wrote; 'there is no hurry for the moment.' He made a rapid calculation in his head. He had paid those mortgages out of capital, and the sum represented just about the cost of the site Minks mentioned. But results were immediate. There was no loss, no waste in fees and permits and taxes. Each penny did its work.\n\n'There's the site gone, anyhow,' he laughed to himself. 'The foundation will go next, then the walls. But, at any rate, they needed it. The Commune Charity would have had 'em at the end of the month. They're my neighbours after all. And I must find out from them who else in the village needs a leg up. For these people are worth helping, and I can see exactly where every penny goes.'\n\nBit by bit, as it would seem, the great Scheme for Disabled Thingumagigs was being undermined." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 182", + "text": "\u2003And those who were good shall be happy.\n\n\u2003They shall sit in a golden chair;\n\n\u2003They shall splash at a ten-league canvas\n\n\u2003With brushes of comets' hair.\n\n\u2003They shall have real saints to paint from\u2014\n\n\u2003Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;\n\n\u2003They shall work for an age at a sitting\n\n\u2003And never get tired at all.\n\n\u2003And only the Master shall praise them,\n\n\u2003And only the Master shall blame;\n\n\u2003And no one shall work for money,\n\n\u2003And no one shall work for fame;\n\n\u2003But each for the joy of the working,\n\n\u2003And each in his separate star,\n\n\u2003Shall draw the thing as he sees it\n\n\u2003For the God of things as they are,\n\n\u2014R. KIPLING.\n\nAnd meanwhile, as May ran laughing to meet June, an air of coloured wonder spread itself about the entire village. Rogers had brought it with him from that old Kentish garden somehow. His journey there had opened doors into a region of imagination and belief whence fairyland poured back upon his inner world, transfiguring common things. And this transfiguration he unwittingly put into others too. Through this very ordinary man swept powers that usually are left behind with childhood. The childhood aspect of the world invaded all who came in contact with him, enormous, radiant, sparkling, charged with questions of wonder and enchantment. And every one felt it according to their ability of reconstruction. Yet he himself had not the least idea that he did it all. It was a reformation, very tender, soft, and true.\n\nFor wonder, of course, is the basis of all inquiry. Interpretation varies, facts remain the same; and to interpret is to recreate. Wonder leads to worship. It insists upon recreation, prerogative of all young life. The Starlight Express ran regularly every night, Jimbo having constructed a perfect time-table that answered all requirements, and was sufficiently elastic to fit instantly any scale that time and space demanded. Rogers and the children talked of little else, and their adventures in the daytime seemed curiously fed by details of information gleaned elsewhere.\n\nBut where? The details welled up in one and all, though whence they came remained a mystery. 'I believe we dream a lot of it,' said Jimbo. 'It's a lot of dreams we have at night, comme fa.' He had made a complete map of railway lines, with stations everywhere, in forests, sky, and mountains. He carried stations in his pocket, and just dropped one out of the carriage window whenever a passenger shouted, 'Let's stop here.' But Monkey, more intellectual, declared it was 'all Cousinenry's invention and make-up,' although she asked more questions than all the others put together. Jinny, her sister, stared and listened with her puzzled, moth-like expression, while Mother watched and marvelled cautiously from a distance. In one and all, however, the famished sense of wonder interpreted life anew. It named the world afresh\u2014the world of common things. It subdued the earth unto itself. What a mind creates it understands. Through the familiar these adventurers trace lines of discovery into the unfamiliar. They understood. They were up to their waists in wonder. There was still disorder, of course, in their great reconstruction, but that was where the exciting fun came in; for disorder involves surprise. Any moment out might pop the unexpected\u2014event or person.\n\nCousin Henry was easily leader now. While Daddy remained absorbed with his marvellous new story, enthusiastic and invisible, they ran about the world at the heels of this 'busy engineer,' as Jane Ann entitled him. He had long ago told them, with infinite and exaccurate detail, of his journey to the garden and his rediscovery of the sprites, forgotten during his twenty years of business life. And these sprites were as familiar to them now as those of their own childhood. They little knew that at night they met and talked with them. Daddy had put them all into the Wumble Book, achieving mediocre success with the rhymes, but amply atoning with the illustrations. The Woman of the Haystack was evidently a monster pure and simple, till Jinny announced that she merely had 'elephantitis,' and thus explained her satisfactorily. The Lamplighter, with shining feet, taking enormous strides from Neuchatel to a London slum, putting fire into eyes and hearts en route, thrilled them by his radiant speed and ubiquitous activity, while his doggerel left them coldly questioning. For the rhymes did not commend themselves to their sense of what was proper in the use of words. His natural history left them unconvinced, though the anatomy of the drawing fascinated them.\n\n\u2003He walked upon his toes\n\n\u2003As softly as a saying does,\n\n\u2003For so the saying goes.\n\nThat he 'walked upon his toes' was all right, but that he 'walked softly as a saying' meant nothing, even when explained that 'thus the saying goes.'\n\n'Poor old Daddy,' was Jinny's judgment; 'he's got to write something.\n\nYou see, he is an author. Some day he'll get his testimonial.'\n\nIt was Cousin Henry who led them with a surer, truer touch. He always had an adventure up his sleeve\u2014something their imaginations could accept and recreate. Each in their own way, they supplied interpretations as they were able.\n\nEvery walk they took together furnished the germ of an adventure.\n\n'But I'm not exciting to-day,' he would object thirsting for a convincing compliment that should persuade him to take them out. Only the compliment never came quite as he hoped.\n\n'Everybody's exciting somewhere,' said Monkey, leading the way and knowing he would follow. 'We'll go to the Wind Wood.'\n\nJimbo took his hand then, and they went. Corners of the forest had names now, born of stories and adventures he had placed there\u2014the Wind Wood, the Cuckoo Wood, where Daddy could not sleep because 'the beastly cuckoo made such a noise'; the Wood where Mother Fell, and so on. No walk was wholly unproductive.\n\nAnd so, one evening after supper, they escaped by the garden, crossed the field where the standing hay came to their waists, and climbed by forest paths towards the Wind Wood. It was a spot where giant pines stood thinly, allowing a view across the lake towards the Alps. The moss was thick and deep. Great boulders, covered with lichen, lay about, and there were fallen trees to rest the back against. Here he had told them once his vision of seeing the wind, and the name had stuck; for the story had been very vivid, and every time they felt the wind or heard it stirring in the tree-tops, they expected to see it too. There were blue winds, black winds, and winds\u2014violent these\u2014of purple and flaming scarlet.\n\nThey lay down, and Cousinenry made a fire. The smoke went up in thin straight lines of blue, melting into the sky. The sun had set half an hour before, and the flush of gold and pink was fading into twilight. The glamour of Bourcelles dropped down upon all three. They ought to have been in bed\u2014hence the particular enjoyment.\n\n'Are you getting excited now?' asked Monkey, nestling in against him.\n\n'Hush!' he said, 'can't you hear it coming?'\n\n'The excitement?' she inquired under her breath.\n\n'No, the Night. Keep soft and silent\u2014if you can.'\n\n'Tell us, please, at once,' both children begged him instantly, for the beauty of the place and hour demanded explanation, and explanation, of course, must be in story or adventure form. The fire crackled faintly; the smell crept out like incense; the lines of smoke coiled upwards, and seemed to draw the tree-stems with them. Indeed they formed a pattern together, big thick trunks marking the uprights at the corners, and wavy smoke lines weaving a delicate structure in between them. It was a kind of growing, moving scaffolding. Saying nothing, Cousin Henry pointed to it with his finger. He traced its general pattern for them in the air.\n\n'That's the Scaffolding of the Night beginning,' he whispered presently, feeling adventure press upon him.\n\n'Oh, I say,' said Jimbo, sitting up, and pretending as usual more comprehension than he actually possessed. But his sister instantly asked, 'What is it\u2014the Scaffolding of the Night? A sort of cathedral, you mean?'\n\nHow she divined his thought, and snatched it from his mind always, this nimble-witted child! His germ developed with a bound at once.\n\n'More a palace than a cathedral,' he whispered. 'Night is a palace, and has to be built afresh each time. Twilight rears the scaffolding first, then hangs the Night upon it. Otherwise the darkness would simply fall in lumps, and lie about in pools and blocks, unfinished\u2014a ruin instead of a building. Everything must have a scaffolding first. Look how beautifully it's coming now,' he added, pointing, 'each shadow in its place, and all the lines of grey and black fitting exaccurately together like a skeleton. Have you never noticed it before?'\n\nJimbo, of course, had noticed it, his manner gave them to understand, but had not thought it worth while mentioning until his leader drew attention to it.\n\n'Just as trains must have rails to run on,' he explained across Cousinenry's intervening body to Monkey, 'or else there'd be accidents and things all the time.'\n\n'And night would be a horrid darkness like a plague in Egypt,' she supposed, adroitly defending herself and helping her cousin at the same time. 'Wouldn't it?' she added, as the shadows drew magically nearer from the forest and made the fire gradually grow brighter. The children snuggled closer to their cousin's comforting bulk, shivering a little. The woods went whispering together. Night shook her velvet skirts out.\n\n'Yes, everything has its pattern,' he answered, 'from the skeleton of a child or a universe to the outline of a thought. Even a dream must have its scaffolding,' he added, feeling their shudder and leading it towards fun and beauty. 'Insects, birds, and animals all make little scaffoldings with their wee emotions, especially kittens and butterflies. Engine-drivers too,' for he felt Jimbo's hand steal into his own and go to sleep there, 'but particularly little beasties that live in holes under stones and in fields.\n\nWhen a little mouse in wonder flicks its whiskers at the thunder, it makes a tiny scaffolding behind which it hides in safety, shuddering. Same with Daddy's stories. Thinking and feeling does the trick. Then imagination comes and builds it up solidly with bricks and wall-papers\u2026.'\n\nHe told them a great deal more, but it cannot be certain that they heard it all, for there were other Excitements about besides their cousin\u2014the fire, the time, the place, and above all, this marvellous coming of the darkness. They caught words here and there, but Thought went its own independent way with each little eager mind. He had started the machinery going, that was all. Interpretation varied; facts remained the same. And meanwhile twilight brought the Scaffolding of Night before their eyes.\n\n'You can see the lines already,' he murmured sleepily, 'like veins against the sunset\u2026. Look!'\n\nAll saw the shadowy slim rafters slip across the paling sky, mapping its emptiness with intricate design. Like an enormous spider's web of fine dark silk it bulged before the wind. The trellis-work, slung from the sky, hung loose. It moved slowly, steadily, from east to west, trailing grey sheets of dusk that hung from every filament. The maze of lines bewildered sight. In all directions shot the threads of coming darkness, spun from the huge body of Night that still hid invisible below the horizon.\n\n'They're fastening on to everything\u2026 look!' whispered Cousin Henry, kicking up a shower of sparks with his foot. 'The Pattern's being made before your eyes! Don't you see the guy ropes?'\n\nAnd they saw it actually happen. From the summits of the distant Alps ran filmy lines of ebony that knotted themselves on to the crests of the pines beside them. There were so many no eye could follow them. They flew and darted everywhere, dropping like needles from the sky itself, sewing the tent of darkness on to the main supports, and threading the starlight as they came. Night slowly brought her beauty and her mystery upon the world. The filmy pattern opened. There was a tautness in the lines that made one feel they would twang with delicate music if the wind swept its hand more rapidly across them. And now and again all vibrated, each line making an ellipse between its fastened ends, then gradually settling back to its thin, almost invisible bed. Cables of thick, elastic darkness steadied them.\n\nHow much of it all the children realised themselves, or how much flashed into them from their cousin's mind, is of course a thing not even a bat can tell.\n\n'Is that why bats fly in such a muddle? Like a puzzle?'\n\n'Of course,' he said. The bats were at last explained.\n\nThey built their little pictures for themselves. No living being can lie on the edge of a big pine forest when twilight brings the darkness without the feeling that everything becomes too wonderful for words. The children as ever fed his fantasy, while he thought he did it all himself. Dusk wore a shroud to entangle the too eager stars, and make them stay.\n\n'I never noticed it before,' murmured Monkey against his coat sleeve.\n\n'Does it happen every night like this?'\n\n'You only see it if you look very closely,' was the low reply. 'You must think hard, very hard. The more you think, the more you'll see.'\n\n'But really,' asked Jimbo, 'it's only\u2014crepuscule, comme ca, isn't it?' And his fingers tightened on his leader's hand.\n\n'Dusk, yes,' answered Cousin Henry softly, 'only dusk. But people everywhere are watching it like ourselves, and thinking feather thoughts. You can see the froth of stars flung up over the crest of Night. People are watching it from windows and fields and country roads everywhere, wondering what makes it so beautiful. It brings yearnings and long, long desires. Only a few like ourselves can see the lines of scaffolding, but everybody who thinks about it, and loves it, makes it more real for others to see, too. Daddy's probably watching it too from his window.'\n\n'I wonder if Jinny ever sees it,' Monkey asked herself.\n\nBut Jimbo knew. 'She's in it,' he decided. 'She's always in places like that; that's where she lives.'\n\nThe children went on talking to each other under their breath, and while they did so Cousin Henry entered their little wondering minds. Or, perhaps, they entered his. It is difficult to say. Not even an owl, who is awfully wise about everything to do with night and darkness, could have told for certain. But, anyhow, they all three saw more or less the same thing. The way they talked about it afterwards proves that. Their minds apparently merged, or else there was one big mirror and two minor side-reflections of it. It was their cousin's interpretation, at any rate, that they remembered later. They brought the material for his fashioning.\n\n'Look!' cried Monkey, sitting up, 'there are millions and millions now\u2014lines everywhere\u2014pillars and squares and towers. It's like a city. I can see lamps in every street\u2014'\n\n'That's stars,' interrupted Jimbo. The stars indeed were peeping here and there already. 'I feel up there,' he added, 'my inside, I mean\u2014up among the stars and lines and sky-things.'\n\n'That's the mind wandering,' explained the eldest child of the three. 'Always follow a wandering mind. It's quite safe. Mine's going presently too. We'll all go off together.'\n\nSeveral little winds, released by darkness, passed them just then on their way out of the forest. They gathered half a dozen sparks from the fire to light them on their way, and brought cool odours with them from the deepest recesses of the trees\u2014perfumes no sunlight ever finds. And just behind them came a big white moth, booming and whirring softly. It darted to and fro to find the trail, then vanished, so swiftly that no one saw it go.\n\n'He's pushing it along,' said Jimbo.\n\n'Or fastening the lines,' his sister thought, 'you see he hovers in one place, then darts over to another.'\n\n'That's fastening the knots,' added Jimbo.\n\n'No; he's either an Inspector or a Pathfinder,' whispered Cousin Henry, 'I don't know exactly which. They show the way the scaffolding goes. Moths, bats, and owls divide the work between them somehow.' He sat up suddenly to listen, and the children sat up with him. 'Hark!' he added, 'do you hear that?'\n\nSighings and flutterings rose everywhere about them, and overhead the fluffy spires of the tree-tops all bent one way as the winds went foraging across the night. Majestically the scaffolding reared up and towered through the air, while sheets of darkness hung from every line, and trailed across the earth like gigantic sails from some invisible vessel. Loose and enormous they gradually unfolded, then suddenly swung free and dropped with a silent dip and rush. Night swooped down upon the leagues of Jura forest. She spread her tent across the entire range.\n\nThe threads were fastened everywhere now, and the uprights all in place. Moths were busy in all directions, showing the way, while bats by the dozen darted like black lightning from corner to corner, making sure that every spar and beam was fixed and steady. So exquisitely woven was the structure that it moved past them overhead without the faintest sound, yet so frail and so elastic that the whirring of the moths sent ripples of quivering movement through the entire framework.\n\n'Hush!' murmured Rogers, 'we're properly inside it now. Don't think of anything in particular. Just follow your wandering minds and wait.' The children lay very close against him. He felt their warmth and the breathing of their little bosoms. All three moved sympathetically within the rhythm of the dusk. The 'inside' of each went floating up into the darkening sky.\n\nThe general plan of the scaffolding they clearly made out as they passed among its myriad, mile-long rafters, but the completed temple, of course, they never saw. Black darkness hides that ever. Night's secret mystery lies veiled finally in its innermost chamber, whence it steals forth to enchant the mind of men with its strange bewilderment. But the Twilight Scaffolding they saw clearly enough to make a map of it. For Daddy afterwards drew it from their description, and gave it an entire page in the Wumble Book, Monkey ladling on the colour with her camel's-hair brush as well as she could remember.\n\nIt was a page to take the breath away, the big conception blundering clumsily behind the crude reconstruction. Great winds formed the base, winds of brown and blue and purple, piled mountainously upon each other in motionless coils, and so soft that the upright columns of the structure plunged easily and deeply into them. Thus the framework could bend and curve and sway, moving with steady glide across the landscape, yet never collapsing nor losing its exquisite proportions. The forests shored it up, its stays and bastions were the Jura precipices; it rested on the shoulders of the hills. From vineyard, field, and lake vast droves of thick grey shadows trooped in to curtain the lower halls of the colossal edifice, as chamber after chamber disappeared from view and Night clothed the structure from the ground-floors upwards. And far overhead a million tiny scarves, half sunset and half dusk, wove into little ropes that lashed the topmost spars together, dovetailing them neatly, and fastening them at last with whole clusters of bright thin stars.\n\n'Ohhhhh!' breathed Jimbo with a delicious shudder of giddiness. 'Let's climb to the very tip and see all the trains and railway stations in the world!'\n\n'Wait till the moon comes up and puts the silver rivets in,' the leader whispered. 'It'll be safer then. My weight, you know\u2014'\n\n'There she is!' interrupted Monkey with a start, 'and there's no such thing as weight\u2014'\n\nFor the moon that instant came up, it seemed with a rush, and the line of distant Alps moved forward, blocked vividly against the silvery curtain that she brought. Her sight ran instantly about the world. Between the trees shot balls of yellowish white, unfolding like ribbon as they rolled. They splashed the rocks and put shining pools in the hollows among the moss. Spangles shone on Monkey's hair and eyes; skins and faces all turned faintly radiant. The lake, like a huge reflector, flashed its light up into the heavens. The moon laid a coating of her ancient and transfiguring paint upon the enormous structure, festooning the entire sky. 'She's put the silver rivets in,' said Jimbo.\n\n'Now we can go,' whispered Rogers, 'only, remember, it's a giddy business, rather.'\n\nAll three went fluttering after it, floating, rising, falling, like fish that explore a sunken vessel in their own transparent medium. The elastic structure bore them easily as it swung along. Its enormous rhythm lulled their senses with a deep and drowsy peace, and as they climbed from storey to storey it is doubtful if the children caught their leader's words at all. There were no echoes\u2014the spaces were too vast for that\u2014and they swung away from spar to spar, and from rafter to rafter, as easily as acrobats on huge trapezes. Jimbo and Monkey shot upwards into space.\n\n'I shall explore the lower storeys first,' he called after them, his words fluttering in feathers of sound far up the vault. 'Keep the fire in sight to guide you home again\u2026' and he moved slowly towards the vast ground-floor chambers of the Night. Each went his independent way along the paths of reverie and dream. He found himself alone.\n\nFor he could not soar and float as they did; he kept closer to the earth, wandering through the under chambers of the travelling building that swung its way over vineyards, woods, and village roofs. He kept more in touch with earth than they did. The upper sections where the children climbed went faster than those lower halls and galleries, so that the entire framework bent over, breaking ever into a crest of foaming stars. But in these under halls where he stood and watched there was far less movement. From century to century these remained the same. Between the bases of the mighty columns he watched the wave of darkness drown the world, leading it with a rush of silence towards sleep. For the children Night meant play and mischief; for himself it meant graver reverie\u2026.\n\nThese were the chambers, clearly, of ancestral sleep and dream: they seemed so familiar and well known. Behind him blinked the little friendly fire in the forest, link with the outer world he must not lose. He would find the children there when he went back, lively from their scamper among the stars; and, meanwhile, he was quite content to wander down these corridors in the floor of Night and taste their deep repose. For years he had not visited or known them. The children had led him back, although he did not realise it. He believed, on the contrary, that it was he who led and they who followed. For true leadership is ever inspired, making each follower feel that he goes first and of his own free will\u2026.\n\n'Jimbo, you flickery sprite, where are you now?' he called, suddenly noticing how faint the little fire had grown with distance.\n\nA lonely wind flew down upon him with a tiny shout:\n\n'Up here, at the very top, with Daddy. He's making notes in a tower- room all by himself!'\n\nRogers could not believe his ears. Daddy indeed!\n\n'Is Monkey with you? And is she safe?'\n\n'She's helping Daddy balance. The walls aren't finished, and he's on a fearful ledge. He's after something or other for his story, he says.'\n\nIt seemed impossible. Daddy skylarking on the roof of Night, and making notes! Yet with a moment's reflection the impossibility vanished; surprise went after it; it became natural, right, and true. Daddy, of course, sitting by his window in the carpenter's house, had seen the Twilight Scaffolding sweep past and had climbed into it. Its beauty had rapt him out and away. In the darkness his mind wandered, too, gathering notes subconsciously for his wonderful new story.\n\n'Come down here to me,' he cried, as a man cries in his sleep, making no audible sound. 'There's less risk among the foundations.' And down came Daddy with an immediate rush. He arrived in a bundle, then straightened up. The two men stood side by side in these subterraneans of the night.\n\n'You!' whispered Rogers, trying to seize his hand, while the other evaded him, hiding behind a shadow.\n\n'Don't touch me,' he murmured breathlessly. 'You'll scatter my train of thought. Think of something else at once, please\u2026.' He moved into thicker shadows, half disappearing. 'I'm after something that suddenly occurred to me for my story.'\n\n'What is it? I'll think it with you,' his cousin called after him.\n\n'You'll see it better if I do. Tell me.'\n\n'A train that carries Thought, as this darkness carries stars\u2014a starlight express,' was the quick reply, 'and a cavern where lost starlight gathers till it's wanted-sort of terminus of the railway. They belong to the story somewhere if only I can find them and fit them in. Starlight binds all together as thought and sympathy bind minds\u2026.'\n\nRogers thought hard about them. Instantly his cousin vanished.\n\n'Thank you,' ran a faint whisper among the pillars; 'I'm on their trail again now. I must go up again. I can see better from the top,' and the voice grew fainter and higher and further off with each word till it died away completely into silence. Daddy went chasing his inspiration through the scaffolding of reverie and dream.\n\n'We did something for him the other night after all, then,' thought Rogers with delight.\n\n'Of course,' dropped down a wee, faint answer from above, as the author heard him thinking; 'you did a lot. I'm partly out at last. This is where all the Patterns hide. Awake, I only get their dim reflections, broken and distorted. This is reality, not that. Ha, ha! If only I can get it through, my lovely, beautiful pattern\u2014'\n\n'You will, you will,' cried the other, as the voice went fluttering through space. 'Ask the children. Jimbo and Monkey are up there somewhere. They're the safest guides.'\n\nRogers gave a gulp and found that he was coughing. His feet were cold. A shudder ran across the feathery structure, making it tremble from the foundations to the forest of spires overhead. Jimbo came sliding down a pole of gleaming ebony. In a hammock of beams and rafters, swinging like a network of trapezes, Monkey swooped down after him, head first as usual. For the moon that moment passed behind a cloud, and the silver rivets started from their shadowy sockets. Clusters of star nails followed suit. The palace bent and tottered like a falling wave. Its pillars turned into trunks of pine trees; its corridors were spaces through the clouds; its chambers were great dips between the mountain summits.\n\n'It's going too fast for sight,' thought Rogers; 'I can't keep up with it. Even the children have toppled off.' But he still heard Daddy's laughter echoing down the lanes of darkness as he chased his pattern with yearning and enthusiasm.\n\nThe huge structure with its towers and walls and platforms slid softly out of sight. The moonlight sponged its outlines from the sky. The scaffolding melted into darkness, moving further westwards as night advanced. Already it was over France and Italy, sweeping grandly across the sea, bewildering the vessels in its net of glamour, and filling with wonder the eyes of the look-out men at the mast heads.\n\n'The fire's going out,' a voice was saying. Rogers heard it through a moment's wild confusion as he fell swiftly among a forest of rafters, beams, and shifting uprights.\n\n'I'll get more wood.'\n\nThe words seemed underground. A mountain wind rose up and brought the solid world about him. He felt chilly, shivered, and opened his eyes. There stood the solemn pine trees, thick and close; moonlight flooded the spaces between them and lit their crests with silver.\n\n'This is the Wind Wood,' he remarked aloud to reassure himself.\n\nJimbo was bending over the fire, heaping on wood. Flame leaped up with a shower of sparks. He saw Monkey rubbing her eyes beside him.\n\n'I've had a dream of falling,' she was saying, as she snuggled down closer into his side.\n\n'I didn't,' Jimbo said. 'I dreamed of a railway accident, and everybody was killed except one passenger, who was Daddy. It fell off a high bridge. We found Daddy in the fourgon with the baggages, writing a story and laughing\u2014making an awful row.'\n\n'What did you dream, Cousinenry?' asked Monkey, peering into his eyes in the firelight.\n\n'That my feet were cold, because the fire had gone out,' he answered, trying in vain to remember whether he had dreamed anything at all. 'And\u2014that it's time to go home. I hear the curfew ringing.'\n\nSome one whistled softly. They ought to have been in bed an hour ago.\n\nIt was ten o'clock, and Gygi was sounding the couvre feu from the old church tower. They put the fire out and walked home arm in arm, separating with hushed good-nights in the courtyard of the Citadelle. But Rogers did not hear the scolding Mother gave them when they appeared at the Den door, for he went on at once to his own room in the carpenter's house, with the feeling that he had lived always in Bourcelles, and would never leave it again. His Scheme had moved bodily from London to the forest.\n\nAnd on the way upstairs he peeped a moment into his cousin's room, seeing a light beneath the door. The author was sitting beside the open window with the lamp behind him and a note-book on his knees. Moonlight fell upon his face. He was sound asleep.\n\n'I won't wake him,' thought his cousin, going out softly again. 'He's dreaming\u2014dreaming of his wonderful new story probably.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 183", + "text": "\u2003Even as a luminous haze links star to star,\n\n\u2003I would supply all chasms with music, breathing\n\n\u2003Mysterious motions of the soul, no way\n\n\u2003To be defined save in strange melodies.\n\n\u2014Paracelsus, R. BROWNING.\n\nDaddy's story, meanwhile, continued to develop itself with wonder and enthusiasm. It was unlike anything he had ever written. His other studies had the brilliance of dead precious stones, perhaps, but this thing moved along with a rushing life of its own. It grew, fed by sources he was not aware of. It developed of itself\u2014changed and lived and flashed. Some creative fairy hand had touched him while he slept perhaps. The starry sympathy poured through him, and he thought with his feelings as well as with his mind.\n\nAt first he was half ashamed of it; the process was so new and strange; he even attempted to conceal his method, because he could not explain or understand it. 'This is emotional, not intellectual,' he sighed to himself; 'it must be second childhood. I'm old. They'll call it decadent!' Presently, however, he resigned himself to the delicious flow of inspiration, and let it pour out till it flowed over into his daily life as well. Through his heart it welled up and bubbled forth, a thing of children, starlight, woods, and fairies.\n\nYet he was shy about it. He would talk about the story, but would not read it out. 'It's a new genre for me,' he explained shyly, 'an attempt merely. We'll see what comes of it. My original idea, you see, has grown out of hand rather. I wake every morning with something fresh, as though'\u2014he hesitated a moment, glancing towards his wife\u2014 'as if it came to me in sleep,' he concluded. He felt her common sense might rather despise him for it.\n\n'Perhaps it does,' said Rogers.\n\n'Why not?' said Mother, knitting on the sofa that was her bed at night.\n\nShe had put her needles down and was staring at her husband; he stared at Rogers; all three stared at each other. Something each wished to conceal moved towards utterance and revelation. Yet no one of them wished to be the first to mention it. A great change had come of late upon Bourcelles. It no longer seemed isolated from the big world outside as before; something had linked it up with the whole surrounding universe, and bigger, deeper currents of life flowed through it. And with the individual life of each it was the same. All dreamed the same enormous, splendid dream, yet dared not tell it\u2014yet.\n\nBoth parents realised vaguely that it was something their visitor had brought, but what could it be exactly? It was in his atmosphere, he himself least of all aware of it; it was in his thought, his attitude to life, yet he himself so utterly unconscious of it. It brought out all the best in everybody, made them feel hopeful, brighter, more courageous. Yes, certainly, he, brought it. He believed in them, in the best of them\u2014they lived up to it or tried to. Was that it? Was it belief and vision that he brought into their lives, though unconsciously, because these qualities lay so strongly in himself? Belief is constructive. It is what people are rather than what they preach that affects others. Two strangers meet and bow and separate without a word, yet each has changed; neither leaves the other quite as he was before. In the society of children, moreover, one believes everything in the world\u2014for the moment. Belief is constructive and creative; it is doubt and cynicism that destroy. In the presence of a child these latter are impossible. Was this the explanation of the effect he produced upon their little circle\u2014the belief and wonder and joy of Fairyland?\n\nFor a moment something of this flashed through Daddy's mind. Mother, in her way, was aware of something similar. But neither of them spoke it. The triangular staring was its only evidence. Mother resumed her knitting. She was not given to impulsive utterance. Her husband once described her as a solid piece of furniture. She was.\n\n'You see,' said Daddy bravely, as the moment's tension passed, 'my original idea was simply to treat Bourcelles as an epitome, a miniature, so to speak, of the big world, while showing how Nature sweetened and kept it pure as by a kind of alchemy. But that idea has grown. I have the feeling now that the Bourcelles we know is a mere shadowy projection cast by a more real Bourcelles behind. It is only the dream village we know in our waking life. The real one\u2014er\u2014we know only in sleep.' There!\u2014it was partly out!\n\nMother turned with a little start. 'You mean when we sleep?' she asked. She knitted vigorously again at once, as though ashamed of this sudden betrayal into fantasy. 'Why not?' she added, falling back upon her customary non-committal phrase. Yet this was not the superior attitude he had dreaded; she was interested. There was something she wanted to confess, if she only dared. Mother, too, had grown softer in some corner of her being. Something shone through her with a tiny golden radiance.\n\n'But this idea is not my own,' continued Daddy, dangerously near to wumbling. 'It comes through me only. It develops, apparently, when I'm asleep,' he repeated. He sat up and leaned forward. 'And, I believe,' he added, as on sudden reckless impulse, 'it comes from you, Henry. Your mind, I feel, has brought this cargo of new suggestion and discharged it into me\u2014into every one\u2014into the whole blessed village. Man, I think you've bewitched us all!'\n\nMother dropped a stitch, so keenly was she listening. A moment later she dropped a needle too, and the two men picked it up, and handed it back together as though it weighed several pounds.\n\n'Well,' said Rogers slowly, 'I suppose all minds pour into one another somewhere\u2014in and out of one another, rather\u2014and that there's a common stock or pool all draw upon according to their needs and power to assimilate. But I'm not conscious, old man, of driving anything deliberately into you\u2014'\n\n'Only you think and feel these things vividly enough for me to get them too,' said Daddy. Luckily 'thought transference' was not actually mentioned, or Mother might have left the room, or at least have betrayed an uneasiness that must have chilled them.\n\n'As a boy I imagined pretty strongly,' in a tone of apology, 'but never since. I was in the City, remember, twenty years\u2014'\n\n'It's the childhood things, then,' Daddy interrupted eagerly. 'You've brought the great childhood imagination with you\u2014the sort of gorgeous, huge, and endless power that goes on fashioning of its own accord just as dreams do\u2014'\n\n'I did, indulge in that sort of thing as a boy, yes,' was the half- guilty reply; 'but that was years and years ago, wasn't it?'\n\n'They have survived, then,' said Daddy with decision. 'The sweetness of this place has stimulated them afresh. The children'\u2014he glanced suspiciously at his wife for a moment\u2014'have appropriated them too. It's a powerful combination. After a pause he added, 'I might develop that idea in my story\u2014that you've brought back the sweet creations of childhood with you and captured us all\u2014a sort of starry army.'\n\n'Why not?' interpolated Mother, as who should say there was no harm in that. 'They certainly have been full of mischief lately.'\n\n'Creation is mischievous,' murmured her husband. 'But since you have come,' he continued aloud,\u2014'how can I express it exactly?\u2014the days have seemed larger, fuller, deeper, the forest richer and more mysterious, the sky much closer, and the stars more soft and intimate. I dream of them, and they all bring me messages that help my story. Do you know what I mean? There were days formerly, when life seemed empty, thin, peaked, impoverished, its scale of values horribly reduced, whereas now\u2014since you've been up to your nonsense with the children\u2014some tide stands at the full, and things are always happening.'\n\n'Well, really, Daddy!' said the expression on Mother's face and hands and knitting-needles, 'you are splendid to-day'; but aloud she only repeated her little hold-all phrase, 'Why not?'\n\nYet somehow he recognised that she understood him better than usual. Her language had not changed\u2014things in Mother worked slowly, from within outwards as became her solid personality\u2014but it held new meaning. He felt for the first time that he could make her understand, and more\u2014that she was ready to understand. That is, he felt new sympathy with her. It was very delightful, stimulating; he instantly loved her more, and felt himself increased at the same time.\n\n'I believe a story like that might even sell,' he observed, with a hint of reckless optimism. 'People might recognise a touch of their own childhood in it, eh?'\n\nHe longed for her to encourage him and pat him on the back.\n\n'True,' said Mother, smiling at him, 'for every one likes to keep in touch with their childhood\u2014if they can. It makes one feel young and hopeful\u2014jolly; doesn't it? Why not?'\n\nTheir eyes met. Something, long put aside and buried under a burden of exaggerated care, flashed deliciously between them. Rogers caught it flying and felt happy. Bridges were being repaired, if not newly built.\n\n'Nature, you see, is always young really,' he said; 'it's full of children. The very meaning of the word, eh, John?' turning to his cousin as who should say, 'We knew our grammar once.'\n\n'Natura, yes\u2014something about to produce.' They laughed in their superior knowledge of a Latin word, but Mother, stirred deeply though she hardly knew why, was not to be left out. Would the bridge bear her, was perhaps her thought.\n\n'And of the feminine gender,' she added slyly, with a touch of pride.\n\nThe bridge creaked, but did not give way. She said it very quickly.\n\nShe had suddenly an air of bouncing on her sofa.\n\n'Bravo, Mother,' said her husband, looking at her, and there was a fondness in his voice that warmed and blessed and melted down into her. She had missed it so long that it almost startled her. 'There's the eternal old magic, Mother; you're right. And if I had more of you in me\u2014more of the creative feminine\u2014I should do better work, I'm sure. You must give it to me.'\n\nShe kept her eyes upon her needles. The others, being unobservant 'mere men,' did not notice that the stitches she made must have produced queer kind of stockings if continued. 'We'll be collaborators,' Daddy added, in the tone of a boy building on the sands at Margate.\n\n'I will,' she said in a low voice, 'if only I know how.'\n\n'Well,' he answered enthusiastically, looking from one to the other, delighted to find an audience to whom he could talk of his new dream, 'you see, this is really a great jolly fairy-tale I'm trying to write. I'm blessed if I know where the ideas come from, or how they pour into me like this, but\u2014anyhow it's a new experience, and I want to make the most of it. I've never done imaginative work before, and\u2014though it is a bit fantastical, mean to keep in touch with reality and show great truths that emerge from the commonest facts of life. The critics, of course, will blame me for not giving 'em the banal thing they expect from me, but what of that?' He was dreadfully reckless.\n\n'I see,' said Mother, gazing open-mindedly into his face; 'but where does my help come in, please?'\n\nShe leaned back, half-sighing, half-smiling. 'Here's my life'\u2014she held up her needles\u2014'and that's the soul of prosaic dulness, isn't it?'\n\n'On the contrary,' he answered eagerly, 'it's reality. It's courage, patience, heroism. You're a spring-board for my fairy-tale, though I'd never realised it before. I shall put you in, just as you are. You'll be one of the earlier chapters.'\n\n'Every one'll skip me, then, I'm afraid.'\n\n'Not a bit,' he laughed gaily; 'they'll feel you all through the book. Their minds will rest on you. You'll be a foundation. \"Mother's there,\" they'll say, \"so it's all right. This isn't nonsense. We'll read on.\" And they will read on.'\n\n'I'm all through it, then?'\n\n'Like the binding that mothers the whole book, you see,' put in Rogers, delighted to see them getting on so well, yet amazed to hear his cousin talk so openly with her of his idea.\n\nDaddy continued, unabashed and radiant. Hitherto, he knew, his wife's attitude, though never spoken, had been very different. She almost resented his intense preoccupation with stories that brought in so little cash. It would have been better if he taught English or gave lessons in literature for a small but regular income. He gave too much attention to these unremunerative studies of types she never met in actual life. She was proud of the reviews, and pasted them neatly in a big book, but his help and advice on the practical details of the children's clothing and education were so scanty. Hers seemed ever the main burden.\n\nNow, for the first time, though she distrusted fantasy and deemed it destructive of action, she felt something real. She listened with a kind of believing sympathy. She noticed, moreover, with keen pleasure, that her attitude fed him. He talked so freely, happily about it all. Already her sympathy, crudely enough expressed, brought fuel to his fires. Some one had put starlight into her.\n\n'He's been hungry for this all along,' she reflected; 'I never realised it. I've thought only of myself without knowing it.'\n\n'Yes, I'll put you in, old Mother,' he went on, 'and Rogers and the children too. In fact, you're in it already,' he chuckled, 'if you want to know. Each of you plays his part all day long without knowing it.' He changed his seat, going over to the window-sill, and staring down upon them as he talked on eagerly. 'Don't you feel,' he said, enthusiasm growing and streaming from him, 'how all this village life is a kind of dream we act out against the background of the sunshine, while our truer, deeper life is hidden somewhere far below in half unconsciousness? Our daily doings are but the little bits that emerge, tips of acts and speech that poke up and out, masquerading as complete? In that vaster sea of life we lead below the surface lies my big story, my fairy-tale\u2014when we sleep.' He paused and looked down questioningly upon them. 'When we sleep,' he repeated impressively, struggling with his own thought. 'You, Mother, while you knit and sew, slip down into that enormous under-sea and get a glimpse of the coloured pictures that pass eternally behind the veil. I do the same when I watch the twilight from my window in reverie. Sunshine obliterates them, but they go just the same. You call it day- dreaming. Our waking hours are the clothes we dress the spirit in after its nightly journeys and activities. Imagination does not create so much as remember. Then, by transforming, it reveals.'\n\nMother sat staring blankly before her, utterly lost, while her husband flung these lumps of the raw material of his story at her\u2014of its atmosphere, rather. Even Rogers felt puzzled, and hardly followed what he heard. The intricacies of an artistic mind were indeed bewildering. How in the world would these wild fragments weave together into any intelligible pattern?\n\n'You mean that we travel when we sleep,' he ventured, remembering a phrase that Minks had somewhere used, 'and that our real life is out of the body?' His cousin was taking his thought\u2014-or was it originally Minks's?\u2014wholesale.\n\nMother looked up gratefully. 'I often dream I'm flying,' she put in solemnly. 'Lately, in particular, I've dreamed of stars and funny things like that a lot.'\n\nDaddy beamed his pleasure. 'In my fairy-tale we shall all see stars,' he laughed, 'and we shall all get \"out.\" For our thoughts will determine the kind of experience and adventure we have when the spirit is free and unhampered. And contrariwise, the kind of things we do at night\u2014in sleep, in dream\u2014will determine our behaviour during the day. There's the importance of thinking rightly, you see. Out of the body is eternal, and thinking is more than doing\u2014it's more complete. The waking days are brief intervals of test that betray the character of our hidden deeper life. We are judged in sleep. We last for ever and ever. In the day, awake, we stand before the easel on which our adventures of the night have painted those patterns which are the very structure of our outer life's behaviour. When we sleep again we re- enter the main stream of our spirit's activity. In the day we forget, of course\u2014as a rule, and most of us\u2014but we follow the pattern just the same, unwittingly, because we can't help it. It's the mould we've made.'\n\n'Then your story,' Rogers interrupted, 'will show the effect in the daytime of what we do at night? Is that it?' It amazed him to hear his cousin borrowing thus the entire content of his own mind, sucking it out whole like a ripe plum from its skin.\n\n'Of course,' he answered; 'and won't it be a lark? We'll all get out in sleep and go about the village together in a bunch, helping, soothing, cleaning up, and putting everybody straight, so that when they wake up they'll wonder why in the world they feel so hopeful, strong, and happy all of a sudden. We'll put thoughts of beauty into them\u2014beauty, you remember, which \"is a promise of happiness.\"'\n\n'Ah!' said Mother, seizing at his comprehensible scrap with energy.\n\n'That is a story.'\n\n'If I don't get it wumbled in the writing down,' her husband continued, fairly bubbling over. 'You must keep me straight, remember, with your needles\u2014your practical aspirations, that is. I'll read it out to you bit by bit, and you'll tell me where I've dropped a stitch or used the wrong wool, eh?'\n\n'Mood?' she asked.\n\n'No, wool,' he said, louder.\n\nThere was a pause.\n\n'But you see my main idea, don't you\u2014that the sources of our life lie hid with beauty very very far away, and that our real, big, continuous life is spiritual\u2014out of the body, as I shall call it. The waking-day life uses what it can bring over from this enormous under-running sea of universal consciousness where we're all together, splendid, free, untamed, and where thinking is creation and we feel and know each other face to face? See? Sympathy the great solvent? All linked together by thought as stars are by their rays. Ah! You get my idea\u2014 the great Network?'\n\nHe looked straight into his wife's eyes. They were opened very wide. Her mouth had opened a little, too. She understood vaguely that he was using a kind of shorthand really. These cryptic sentences expressed in emotional stenography mere odds and ends that later would drop into their proper places, translated into the sequence of acts that are the scaffolding of a definite story. This she firmly grasped\u2014but no more.\n\n'It's grand-a wonderful job,' she answered, sitting back upon the sofa with a sigh of relief, and again bouncing a little in the process, so that Rogers had a horrible temptation to giggle. The tension of listening had been considerable. 'People, you mean, will realise how important thinking is, and that sympathy\u2014-er\u2014-' and she hesitated, floundering.\n\n'Is the great way to grow,' Rogers quickly helped her, 'because by feeling with another person you add his mind to yours and so get bigger. And '\u2014turning to his cousin\u2014' you're taking starlight as the symbol of sympathy? You told me that the other day, I remember.' But the author did not hear or did not answer; his thought was far away in his dream again.\n\nThe situation was saved. All the bridges had borne well. Daddy, having relieved his overcharged mind, seemed to have come to a full stop. The Den was full of sunlight. A delightful feeling of intimacy wove the three humans together. Mother caught herself thinking of the far-off courtship days when their love ran strong and clear. She felt at one with her husband, and remembered him as lover. She felt in touch with him all over. And Rogers was such a comfortable sort of person. Tact was indeed well named\u2014sympathy so delicately adjusted that it involved feeling-with to the point of actual touch.\n\nDaddy came down from his perch upon the window-sill, stretched his arms, and drew a great happy sigh.\n\n'Mother,' he added, rising to go out, 'you shall help me, dearie. We'll write this great fairy-tale of mine together, eh?' He stooped and kissed her, feeling love and tenderness and sympathy in his heart.\n\n'You brave old Mother!' he laughed; 'we'll send Eddie to Oxford yet, see if we don't. A book like that might earn 100 pounds or even 200 pounds.'\n\nAnother time she would have answered, though not bitterly, 'Meanwhile I'll go on knitting stockings,' or 'Why not? we shall see what we shall see'\u2014something, at any rate, corrective and rather sober, quenching. But this time she said nothing. She returned the kiss instead, without looking up from her needles, and a great big thing like an unborn child moved near her heart. He had not called her 'dearie' for so long a time, it took her back to their earliest days together at a single, disconcerting bound. She merely stroked his shoulder as he straightened up and left the room. Her eyes then followed him out, and he turned at the door and waved his hand. Rogers, to her relief, saw him to the end of the passage, and her handkerchief was out of sight again before he returned. As he came in she realised even more clearly than before that he somehow was the cause of the changing relationship. He it was who brought this something that bridged the years\u2014made old bridges safe to use again. And her love went out to him. He was a man she could open her heart to even.\n\nPatterns of starry beauty had found their way in and were working out in all of them. But Mother, of course, knew nothing of this. There was a tenderness in him that won her confidence. That was all she felt. 'Oh, dear,' she thought in her odd way, 'what a grand thing a man is to be sure, when he's got that!' It was like one of Jane Anne's remarks.\n\nAs he came in she had laid the stocking aside and was threading a needle for darning and buttons, and the like.\n\n'\"Threading the eye of a yellow star,\" eh?' he laughed, 'and always at it. You've stirred old Daddy up this time. He's gone off to his story, simply crammed full. What a help and stimulus you must be to him!'\n\n'I,' she said, quite flabbergasted; 'I only wish it were true\u2014again.'\n\nThe last word slipped out by accident; she had not meant it.\n\nBut Rogers ignored it, even if he noticed it.\n\n'I never can help him in his work. I don't understand it enough. I don't understand it at all.' She was ashamed to hedge with this man. She looked him straight in the eye.\n\n'But he feels your sympathy,' was his reply. 'It's not always necessary to understand. That might only muddle him. You help by wishing, feeling, sympathising\u2014believing.'\n\n'You really think so?' she asked simply. 'What wonderful thoughts you have I One has read, of course, of wives who inspired their husbands' work; but it seemed to belong to books rather than to actual life.'\n\nRogers looked at her thoughtful, passionate face a moment before he answered. He realised that his words would count with her. They approached delicate ground. She had an absurd idea of his importance in their lives; she exaggerated his influence; if he said a wrong thing its effect upon her would be difficult to correct.\n\n'Well,' he said, feeling mischief in him, 'I don't mind telling you that I should never have understood that confused idea of his story but for one thing.'\n\n'What was that?' she asked, relieved to feel more solid ground at last.\n\n'That I saw the thing from his own point of view,' he replied; 'because I have had similar thoughts all my life. I mean that he's bagged it all unconsciously out of my own mind; though, of course,' he hastened to add, 'I could never, never have made use of it as he will. I could never give it shape and form.'\n\nMother began to laugh too. He caught the twinkle in her eyes. She bounced again a little on the springy sofa as she turned towards him, confession on her lips at last.\n\n'And I do believe you've felt it too, haven't you?' he asked quickly, before she could change her mind.\n\n'I've felt something\u2014yes,' she assented; 'odd, unsettled; new things rushing everywhere about us; the children mysterious and up to all sorts of games and wickedness; and bright light over everything, like- like a scene in a theatre, somehow. It's exhilarating, but I can't quite make it out. It can't be right to feel so frivolous and jumpy- about at my age, can it?'\n\n'You feel lighter, eh?\n\nShe burst out laughing. Mother was a prosaic person; that is, she had strong common-sense; yet through her sober personality there ran like a streak of light some hint of fairy lightness, derived probably from her Celtic origin. Now, as Rogers watched her, he caught a flash of that raciness and swift mobility, that fluid, protean elasticity of temperament which belonged to the fairy kingdom. The humour and pathos in her had been smothered by too much care. She accepted old age before her time. He saw her, under other conditions, dancing, singing, full of Ariel tricks and mischief\u2014instead of eternally mending stockings and saving centimes for peat and oil and washerwomen. He even saw her feeding fantasy\u2014poetry\u2014to Daddy like a baby with a spoon. The contrast made him laugh out loud.\n\n'You've lived here five years,' he went on, 'but lived too heavily. Care has swamped imagination. I did the same-in the City-for twenty years. It's all wrong. One has to learn to live carelessly as well as carefully. When I came here I felt all astray at first, but now I see more clearly. The peace and beauty have soaked into me.' He hesitated an instant, then continued. Even if she didn't grasp his meaning now with her brains, it would sink down into her and come through later.\n\n'The important things of life are very few really. They stand out vividly here. You've both vegetated, fossilised, atrophied a bit. I discovered it in my own case when I went back to Crayfield and\u2014'\n\nHe told her about his sentimental journey, and how he found all the creations of his childhood's imagination still so alive and kicking in a forgotten backwater of his mind that they all hopped out and took objective form\u2014the sprites, the starlight express, the boundless world of laughter, fun and beauty.\n\n'And, without exactly knowing it, I suppose I've brought them all out here,' he continued, seeing that she drank it in thirstily, 'and\u2014 somehow or other\u2014you all have felt it and responded. It's not my doing, of course,' he added; 'it's simply that I'm the channel as it were, and Daddy, with his somewhat starved artist's hunger of mind, was the first to fill up. It's pouring through him now in a story, don't you see; but we're all in it\u2014'\n\n'In a way, yes, that's what I've felt,' Mother interrupted. 'It's all a kind of dream here, and I've just waked up. The unchanging village, the forests, the Pension with its queer people, the Magic Box\u2014'\n\n'Like a play in a theatre,' he interrupted, 'isn't it?'\n\n'Exactly,' she laughed, yet half-seriously.\n\n'While your husband is the dramatist that writes it down in acts and scenes. You see, his idea is, perhaps, that life as we know it is never a genuine story, complete and leading to a climax. It's all in disconnected fragments apparently. It goes backwards and forwards, up and down, in and out in a wumbled muddle, just anyhow, as it were. The fragments seem out of their proper place, the first ones often last, and vice versa. It seems inconsequential, because we only see the scraps that break through from below, from the true inner, deeper life that flows on steadily and dramatically out of sight. That's what he means by \"out of the body\" and \"sleep\" and \"dreaming.\" The great pattern is too big and hidden for us to see it whole, just as when you knit I only see the stitches as you make them, although the entire pattern is in your mind complete. Our daily, external acts are the stitches we show to others and that everybody sees. A spiritual person sees the whole.'\n\n'Ah!' Mother interrupted, 'I understand now. To know the whole pattern in my mind you'd have to get in sympathy with my thought below. Is that it?'\n\n'Sometimes we look over the fence of mystery, yes, and see inside\u2014see the entire stage as it were.'\n\n'It is like a great play, isn't it?' she repeated, grasping again at the analogy with relief. 'We give one another cues, and so on\u2014-'\n\n'While each must know the whole play complete in order to act his part properly\u2014be in sympathy, that is, with all the others. The tiniest details so important, too,' he added, glancing significantly at the needles on her lap. 'To act your own part faithfully you must carry all the others in your mind, or else\u2014er\u2014get your own part out of proportion.'\n\n'It will be a wonderful story, won't it?' she said, after a pause in which her eyes travelled across the sunshine towards the carpenter's house where her husband, seen now in a high new light, laboured steadily.\n\nThere was a clatter in the corridor before he could reply, and Jimbo and Monkey flew in with a rush of wings and voices from school. They were upon him in an instant, smelling of childhood, copy-books, ink, and rampagious with hunger. Their skins and hair were warm with sunlight. 'After tea we'll go out,' they cried, 'and show you something in the forest\u2014-oh, an enormous and wonderful thing that nobody knows of but me and Jimbo, and comes over every night from France and hides inside a cave, and goes back just before sunrise with a sack full of thinkings\u2014-'\n\n'Thoughts,' corrected Jimbo.\n\n'\u2014-that haven't reached the people they were meant for, and then\u2014-'\n\n'Go into the next room, wash yourselves and tidy up,' said Mother sternly, 'and then lay the table for tea. Jinny isn't in yet. Put the charcoal in the samovar. I'll come and light it in a moment.'\n\nThey disappeared obediently, though once behind the door there were sounds that resembled a pillow-fight rather than tidying-up; and when Mother presently went after them to superintend, Rogers sat by the window and stared across the vineyards and blue expanse of lake at the distant Alps. It was curious. This vague, disconnected, rambling talk with Mother had helped to clear his own mind as well. In trying to explain to her something he hardly understood himself, his own thinking had clarified. All these trivial scenes were little bits of rehearsal. The Company was still waiting for the arrival of the Star Player who should announce the beginning of the real performance. It was a woman's role, yet Mother certainly could not play it. To get the family really straight was equally beyond his powers. 'I really must have more common-sense,' he reflected uneasily; 'I am getting out of touch with reality somewhere. I'll write to Minks again.'\n\nMinks, at the moment, was the only definite, positive object in the outer world he could recall. 'I'll write to him about\u2014-' His thought went wumbling. He quite forgot what it was he had to say to him\u2014'Oh, about lots of things,' he concluded, 'his wife and children and\u2014and his own future and so on.'\n\nThe Scheme had melted into air, it seemed. People lost in Fairyland, they say, always forget the outer world of unimportant happenings. They live too close to the source of things to recognise their clownish reflections in the distorted mirrors of the week-day level.\n\nYes, it was curious, very curious. Did Thought, then, issue primarily from some single source and pass thence along the channels of men's minds, each receiving and interpreting according to his needs and powers? Was the Message\u2014the Prophet's Vision\u2014-merely the more receipt of it than most? Had, perhaps, this whole wonderful story his cousin wrote originated, not in his, Rogers's mind, nor in that of Minks, but in another's altogether\u2014the mind of her who was destined for the principal role? Thrills of absurd, electric anticipation rushed through him\u2014very boyish, wildly impossible, yet utterly delicious.\n\nTwo doors opened suddenly\u2014one from the kitchen, admitting Monkey with a tray of cups and saucers, steam from the hissing samovar wrapping her in a cloud, the other from the corridor, letting in Jane Anne, her arms full of packages. She had been shopping for the family in Neuchatel, and was arrayed in garments from the latest Magic Box. She was eager and excited.\n\n'Cousinenry,' she cried, dropping half the parcels in her fluster, 'I've had a letter!' It was in her hand, whereas the parcels had been merely under her arms. 'The postman gave it me himself as I came up the steps. I'm a great correspondencer, you know.' And she darted through the steam to tell her mother. Jimbo passed her, carrying the tea-pot, the sugar-basin dangerously balanced upon spoons and knives and butter-dish. He said nothing, but glanced at his younger sister significantly. Rogers saw the entire picture through the cloud of steam, shot through with sunlight from the window. It was like a picture in the clouds. But he intercepted that glance and knew then the writer of the letter.\n\n'But did you get the mauve ribbon, child?' asked Mother.\n\nInstead of answer, the letter was torn noisily open. Jinny never had letters. It was far more important than ribbons.\n\n'And how much change have you left out of the five francs? Daddy will want to know.'\n\nJimbo and Monkey were listening carefully, while pretending to lay the table. Mother's silence betrayed that she was reading the letter with interest and curiosity equal to those of its recipient. 'Who wrote it? Who's it from? I must answer it at once,' Jinny was saying with great importance. 'What time does the post go, I wonder? I mustn't miss it.'\n\n'The post-mark,' announced Mother, 'is Bourcelles. It's very mysterious.' She tapped the letter with one hand, like the villain in the theatre. Rogers heard her and easily imagined the accompanying stage gesture. 'The handwriting on the envelope is like Tante Anna,' he heard, 'but the letter itself is different. It's all capitals, and wrongly spelt.' Mlle. Lemaire was certainly not the writer.\n\nJimbo and Monkey were busy hanging the towel out of the window, signal to Daddy that tea was ready. But as Daddy was already coming down the street at a great pace, apparently excited too, they waved it instead. Rogers suddenly remembered that Jimbo that morning had asked him for a two-centime stamp. He made no remark, however, merely wondering what was in the letter itself.\n\n'It's a joke, of course,' Mother was heard to say in an odd voice.\n\n'Oh no, Mother, for how could anybody know? It's what I've been dreaming about for nights and nights. It's so aromantic, isn't it?'\n\nThe louder hissing of the samovar buried the next words, and at that moment Daddy came into the room. He was smiling and his eyes were bright. He glanced at the table and sat down by his cousin on the sofa.\n\n'I've done a lot of work since you saw me,' he said happily, patting him on the knee, 'although in so short a time. And I want my cup of tea. It came so easily and fluently for a wonder; I don't believe I shall have to change a word\u2014though usually I distrust this sort of rapid composition.'\n\n'Where are you at now?' asked Rogers. 'We're all \"out,\"' was the reply, 'and the Starlight Express is just about to start and\u2014Mother, let me carry that for you,' he exclaimed, turning round as his wife appeared in the doorway with more tea-things. He got up quickly, but before he could reach her side Jinny flew into his arms and kissed him.\n\n'Did you get my tobacco, Jinny?' he asked. She thrust the letter under his nose. What was tobacco, indeed, compared to an important letter! 'You can keep the change for yourself.'\n\nHe read it slowly with a puzzled expression, while Mother and the children watched him. Riquette jumped down from her chair and rubbed herself against his leg while he scratched himself with his boot, thinking it was the rough stocking that tickled him.\n\n'Eh? This is very queer,' he muttered, slapping the open sheet just as his wife had done, and reading it again at arm's-length. 'Somebody'\u2014 he looked suspiciously round the room\u2014'has been reading my notes or picking out my thoughts while I'm asleep, eh?'\n\n'But it's a real letter,' objected Jinny; 'it's correspondence, isn't it, Daddy?'\n\n'It is certainly a correspondence,' he comforted her, and then, reading it aloud, he proceeded to pin it on the wall above the mantelpiece:\u2014\n\n'The Starlight Xpress starts to-night, Be reddy and punctuel. Sleep titely and get out.'\n\nThat was all. But everybody exchanged glances.\n\n'Odd,' thought Mother, again remembering her dreams.\n\nJimbo upset the milk-jug. Usually there would have been a rumpus over this. To-day it seemed like something happening far away\u2014something that had not really happened at all.\n\n'We must all be ready then,' said Rogers, noticing vaguely that Mother's sleeve had smeared the butter as she mopped up the mess.\n\n\u2003Daddy was making a note on his shirt sleeve:\u2014\n\n\u2003The Sweep, the Laugher and the Tramp,\n\n\u2003The running man who lights the lamp,\n\n\u2003The Woman of the Haystack, too,\n\n\u2003The Gardener and Man of Dust\n\n\u2003Are passengers because they must\n\n\u2003Follow the Guard with eyes of blue.\n\n\u2003Over the forests and into the Cave\n\n\u2003That is the way we must all behave\u2014-\n\n'Please, Daddy, will you move? It's dripping on to your boot.'\n\nThey all looked down; the milk had splashed from the cloth and fallen upon the toe of his big mountain boots. It made a pretty, white star. Riquette was daintily lapping it up with her long pink Tongue. Ray by ray the star set in her mysterious interior.\n\n'Riquette must come too,' said Rogers gravely. 'She's full of white starlight now.'\n\nAnd Jimbo left his chair and went seriously over to the book-shelf above Mother's sofa-bed to arrange the signals. For between the tightly-wedged books he had inserted all the available paper-knives and book-markers he could find to represent railway-signals. They stuck out at different angles. He altered several, putting some up, some down, and some at right angles.\n\n'The line's all clear for to-night,' he announced to Daddy with a covert significance he hardly grasped himself, then coming back to home-made jam and crusty village bread.\n\nJane Anne caught her father's answering glance-mysterious, full of unguessed meanings. 'Oh, excuse me, Mother,' she said, feeling the same thing in herself and a little frightened; 'but I do believe they're conspiring, aren't they?'\n\nAnd Mother gave a sudden start, whose cause she equally failed to analyse. 'Hush, dear,' she said. 'Don't criticise your elders, and when you do, don't use long words you cannot possibly understand.'\n\nAnd everybody understood something none of them understood-while tea went on as usual to the chatter of daily details of external life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 184", + "text": "\u2003All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;\n\n\u2003Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power\n\n\u2003Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist\n\n\u2003When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.\n\n\u2003The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,\n\n\u2003The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,\n\n\u2003Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;\n\n\u2003Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.\n\n\u2014Abt Vogler, R. BROWNING.\n\nSome hours later, as Rogers undressed for bed in his room beneath the roof, he realised abruptly that the time had come for him to leave. The weeks had flown; Minks and the Scheme required him; other matters needed attention too. What brought him to the sudden decision was the fact that he had done for the moment all he could find to do, beginning with the Pension mortgages and ending with little Edouard Tissot, the vigneron's boy who had curvature of the spine and could not afford proper treatment. It was a long list. He was far from satisfied with results, yet he had done his best, in spite of many clumsy mistakes. In the autumn he might return and have a further try. Finances were getting muddled, too, and he realised how small his capital actually was when the needs of others made claims upon it. Neighbours were as plentiful as insects.\n\nHe had made all manner of schemes for his cousin's family as well, yet seemed to have accomplished little. Their muddled life defied disentanglement, their difficulties were inextricable. With one son at a costly tutor, another girl in a Geneva school, the younger children just outgrowing the local education, the family's mode of living so scattered, meals in one place, rooms in several others,\u2014it was all too unmethodical and dispersed to be covered by their small uncertain income. Concentration was badly needed. The endless talks and confabulations, which have not been reported here because their confusion was interminable and unreportable, landed every one in a mass of complicated jumbles. The solution lay beyond his power, as equally beyond the powers of the obfuscated parents. He would return to England, settle his own affairs, concoct some practical scheme with the aid of Minks, and return later to discuss its working out. The time had come for him to leave.\n\nAnd, oddly enough, what made him see it were things the children had said that very evening when he kissed them all good-night. England had been mentioned.\n\n'You're here for always now,' whispered Monkey, 'because you love me and can't get away. I've tied you with my hair, you know.'\n\n'You'll have no sekrity in London,' said Jimbo. 'Who'll stick your stamps on?'\n\n'The place will seem quite empty if you go,' Jane Anne contributed, not wishing to make her contribution too personal, lest she should appear immodest. 'You've made a memorandum of agreement.' This meant he had promised rashly once to stay for ever. The phrase lent an official tone besides.\n\nHe fell asleep, devising wonderful plans, as usual, for the entire world, not merely a tiny section of it. The saviour spirit was ever in his heart. It failed to realise itself because the mind was unequal to the strain of wise construction; but it was there, as the old vicar had divined. He had that indestructible pity to which no living thing is outcast.\n\nBut to-night he fell asleep so slowly, gradually, that he almost watched the dissolving of consciousness in himself. He hovered a long time about the strange, soft frontiers. He saw the barriers lower themselves into the great dim plains. Inch by inch the outer world became remote, obscure, lit dubiously by some forgotten sun, and inch by inch the profound recesses of nightly adventure coaxed him down. He realised that he swung in space between the two. The room and house were a speck in the universe above him, his brain the mere outlet of a tunnel up which he climbed every morning to put his horns out like a snail, and sniff the outer world. Here, in the depths, was the workroom where his life was fashioned. Here glowed the mighty, hidden furnaces that shaped his tools. Drifting, glimmering figures streamed up round him from the vast under-world of sleep, called unconscious. 'I am a spirit,' he heard, not said or thought, 'and no spirit can be unconscious for eight hours out of every twenty-four\u2026!'\n\nSlowly the sea of dreamless sleep, so-called, flowed in upon him, down, round, and over; it submerged the senses one by one, beginning with hearing and ending with sight. But, as each physical sense was closed, its spiritual counterpart\u2014the power that exists apart from its limited organ-opened into clear, divine activity, free as life itself\u2026.\n\nHow ceaseless was this movement of Dreams, never still, always changing and on the dance, incessantly renewing itself in kaleidoscopic patterns. There was perpetual metamorphosis and rich transformation; many became one, one many; the universe was a single thing, charged with stimulating emotional shocks as each scrap of interpretation passed in and across the mind\u2026.\n\nHe was falling into deeper and deeper sleep, into that eternal region where he no longer thought, but knew\u2026 Immense processions of shifting imagery absorbed him into themselves, spontaneous, unfamiliar, self-multiplying, and as exquisitely baffling as God and all His angels\u2026.\n\nThe subsidence of the external world seemed suddenly complete.\n\nSo deeply was he sunk that he reached that common pool of fluid essence upon which all minds draw according to their needs and powers. Relations were established, wires everywhere connected. The central switchboard clicked all round him; brains linked with brains, asleep or not asleep. He was so deep within himself that, as the children and the Story phrased it, he was 'out.' The air grew light and radiant.\n\n'Hooray! I'm out!' and he instantly thought of his cousin.\n\n'So am I!' That wumbled author shot immediately into connection with him. 'And so is Mother\u2014for the first time. Come on: we'll all go together.'\n\nIt was unnecessary to specify where, for that same second they found themselves in the room of Mlle. Lemaire. At this hour of the night it was usually dark, except for the glimmer of the low-turned lamp the sufferer never quite extinguished.\n\nFrom dusk till dawn her windows in La Citadelle shone faintly for all to see who chanced to pass along the village street. 'There she lies, poor aching soul, as she has lain for twenty years, thinking good of some one, or maybe praying!' For the glimmer was visible from very far, and familiar as a lighthouse to wandering ships at sea. But, had they known her inner happiness, they would not have said 'poor soul!' They would have marvelled. In a Catholic canton, perhaps, they would have crossed themselves and prayed. Just now they certainly would have known a singular, exalted joy. Caught in fairyland, they would have wondered and felt happy.\n\nFor the room was crowded to the doors. Walls, windows, ceiling, had melted into transparency to let in the light of stars; and, caught like gold-fish in the great network of the rays, shone familiar outlines everywhere\u2014Jimbo, Monkey, Jinny, the Sweep, the Tramp, the Gypsy, the Laugher up against the cupboard, the Gardener by the window where the flower-pots stood, the Woman of the Haystack in the corridor, too extensive to slip across the threshold, and, in the middle of the room, motionless with pleasure-Mother!\n\n'Like gorgeous southern butterflies in a net, I do declare!' gasped Daddy, as he swept in silently with his companion, their colours mingling harmoniously at once with the rest.\n\nAnd Mother turned.\n\n'You're out, old girl, at last!' he cried.\n\n'God bless my soul, I am!' she answered. Their sentences came both together, and their blues and yellows swam into each other and made a lovely green. 'It's what I've been trying to do all these years without knowing it. What a glory! I understand now\u2014understand myself and you. I see life clearly as a whole. Hooray, hooray!' She glided nearer to him, her face was beaming.\n\n'Mother's going to explode,' said Monkey in a whisper. But, of course, everybody 'heard' it; for the faintest whisper of thought sent a ripple through that sea of delicate colour. The Laugher bent behind the cupboard to hide her face, and the Gardener by the window stooped to examine his flower-pots. The Woman of the Haystack drew back a little into the corridor again, preparatory to another effort to squeeze through. But Mother, regardless of them all, swam on towards her husband, wrapped in joy and light as in a garment. Hitherto, in her body, the nearest she had come to coruscating was once when she had taken a course of sulphur baths. This was a very different matter. She fairly glittered.\n\n'We'll never go apart again,' Daddy was telling her. 'This inner sympathy will last, you know. He did it. It's him we have to thank,' and he pointed at his cousin. 'It's starlight, of course, he has brought down into us.'\n\nBut Rogers missed the compliment, being busy in a corner with Monkey and Jimbo, playing at mixing colours with startling results. Mother swam across to her old friend, Mile. Lemaire. For a quarter of a century these two had understood one another, though never consciously been 'out' together. She moved like a frigate still, gliding and stately, but a frigate that has snapped its hawsers and meant to sail the skies.\n\n'Our poor, stupid, sleeping old bodies,' she smiled.\n\nBut the radiant form of the other turned to her motionless cage upon the bed behind her. 'Don't despise them,' she replied, looking down upon the worn-out prison-house, while a little dazzle of brilliance flashed through her atmosphere. 'They are our means of spreading this starlight about the world and giving it to others. Our brains transmit it cunningly; it flashes from our eyes, and the touch of our fingers passes it on. We gather it here, when we are \"out,\" but we can communicate it best to others when we are \"in.\"'\n\nThere was sound of confusion and uproar in the room behind as some one came tumbling in with a rush, scattering the figures in all directions as when a gust of wind descends upon a bed of flowers.\n\n'In at last!' cried a muffled voice that sounded as though a tarpaulin smothered it, and the Woman of the Haystack swept into the room with a kind of clumsy majesty. The Tramp and Gypsy, whose efforts had at length dislodged her awkward bulk, came rolling after. They had been pushing steadily from behind all this time, though no one had noticed them slip out.\n\n'We can do more than the smaller folk,' she said proudly, sailing up to Mother. 'We can't be overlooked, for one thing'; and arm-in-arm, like a pair of frigates then, they sailed about the room, magnificent as whales that swim in a phosphorescent sea. The Laugher straightened up to watch them, the Gardener turned his head, and Rogers and the children paused a moment in their artificial mixing, to stare with wonder.\n\n'I'm in!' said the Woman.\n\n'I'm out!' said Mother.\n\nAnd the children felt a trifle envious. Instantly their brilliance dimmed a little. The entire room was aware of it.\n\n'Think always of the world in gold and silver,' shot from Mile.\n\nLemaire. The dimness passed as she said it.\n\n'It was my doing,' laughed Monkey, turning round to acknowledge her wickedness lest some one else should do it for her and thus increase her shame.\n\n'Sweep! Sweep!' cried Rogers.\n\nBut this thought-created sprite was there before the message flashed. With his sack wide open, he stood by Monkey, full of importance. A moment he examined her. Then, his long black fingers darting like a shuttle, he discovered the false colouring that envy had caused, picked it neatly out\u2014a thread of dirty grey\u2014and, winding it into a tiny ball, tossed it with contempt into his sack.\n\n'Over the edge of the world you go,\n\nWith the mud and the leaves and the dirty snow!' he sang, skipping off towards the door. The child's star-body glowed and shone again, pulsing all over with a shimmering, dancing light that was like moonshine upon running water.\n\n'Isn't it time to start now?' inquired Jinny; and as she said it all turned instinctively towards the corner of the room where they were assembled. They gathered round Mlle. Lemaire. It was quite clear who was leader now. The crystal brilliance of her whiteness shone like a little oval sun. So sparkling was her atmosphere, that its purity scarcely knew a hint of colour even. Her stream of thought seemed undiluted, emitting rays in all directions till it resembled a wheel of sheer white fire. The others fluttered round her as lustrous moths about an electric light.\n\n'Start where?' asked Mother, new to this great adventure.\n\nHer old friend looked at her, so that she caught a darting ray full in the face, and instantly understood.\n\n'First to the Cave to load up,' flashed the answer; 'and then over the sleeping world to mix the light with everybody's dreams. Then back again before the morning spiders are abroad with the interfering sun.'\n\nShe floated out into the corridor, and all the others fell into line as she went. The draught of her going drew Mother into place immediately behind her. Daddy followed close, their respective colours making it inevitable, and Jinny swept in after him, bright and eager as a little angel. She tripped on the edge of something he held tightly in one hand, a woven maze of tiny glittering lines, exquisitely inter-threaded\u2014a skeleton of beauty, waiting to be filled in and clothed, yet already alive with spontaneous fire of its own. It was the Pattern of his story he had been busy with in the corner.\n\n'I won't step on it, Daddy,' she said gravely.\n\n'It doesn't matter if you do. You're in it,' he answered, yet lifted it higher so that it flew behind him like a banner in the night.\n\nThe procession was formed now. Rogers and the younger children came after their sister at a little distance, and then, flitting to and fro in darker shades, like a fringe of rich embroidery that framed the moving picture, came the figures of the sprites, born by Imagination out of Love in an old Kentish garden years and years ago. They rose from the tangle of the ancient building. Climbing the shoulder of a big, blue wind, they were off and away!\n\nIt was a jolly night, a windy night, a night without clouds, when all the lanes of the sky were smooth and swept, and the interstellar spaces seemed close down upon the earth.\n\n\u2003'Kind thoughts, like fine weather,\n\n\u2003Link sweetly together God's stars\n\n\u2003With the heart of a boy,' sang Rogers, following swiftly with Jimbo and his sister. For all moved along as easily as light across the surfaces of polished glass. And the sound of Rogers's voice seemed to bring singing from every side, as the gay procession swept onwards. Every one contributed lines of their own, it seemed, though there was a tiny little distant voice, soft and silvery, that intruded from time to time and made all wonder where it came from. No one could see the singer. At first very far away, it came nearer and nearer.\n\nDADDY: 'The Interfering Sun has set!\n\nGARDENER: Now Sirius flings down the Net!\n\nLAMPLIGHTER: See, the meshes flash and quiver,\n\n\u2003As the golden, silent river\n\nSWEEP: Clears the dark world's troubled dream.\n\nDUSTMAN: Takes it sleeping,\n\n\u2003Gilds its weeping\n\n\u2003With a star's mysterious beam.\n\nTiny, distant Voice: Oh, think Beauty!\n\n\u2003It's your duty!\n\n\u2003In the Cave you work for others,\n\n\u2003All the stars are little brothers;\n\nROGERS: Think their splendour,\n\n\u2003Strong and tender;\n\nDADDY: Think their glory\n\n\u2003In the Story\n\nMOTHER: Of each day your nights redeem?\n\nVoice (nearer): Every loving, gentle thought\n\n\u2003Of this fairy brilliance wrought,\n\nJANE ANNE: Every wish that you surrender,\n\nMONKEY: Every little impulse tender,\n\nJIMBO: Every service that you render\n\nTANTE ANNA: Brings its tributary stream!\n\nTRAMP AND GYPSY: In the fretwork\n\n\u2003Of the network\n\n\u2003Hearts lie patterned and a-gleam!\n\nWOMAN OF THE HAYSTACK: Think with passion\n\n\u2003That shall fashion\n\n\u2003Life's entire design well-planned;\n\nVoice (still nearer): While the busy Pleiades,\n\nROGERS: Sisters to the Hyades,\n\nVoice (quite close): Seven by seven,\n\n\u2003Across the heaven,\n\nROGERS: Light desire\n\n\u2003With their fire!\n\nVoice (in his ear): Working cunningly together in a soft and tireless band,\n\n\u2003Sweetly linking\n\n\u2003All our thinking,\n\n\u2003In the Net of Sympathy that brings back\n\n\u2003Fairyland!'\n\nMother kept close to her husband; she felt a little bewildered, and uncertain in her movements; it was her first conscious experience of being out. She wanted to go in every direction at once; for she knew everybody in the village, knew all their troubles and perplexities, and felt the call from every house.\n\n'Steady,' he told her; 'one thing at a time, you know.' Her thoughts, he saw, had turned across the sea to Ireland where her strongest ties were. Ireland seemed close, and quite as accessible as the village. Her friend of the Haystack, on the other hand, seemed a long way off by comparison.\n\n'That's because Henry never realised her personality very clearly,' said Daddy, seeing by her colour that she needed explanation. 'When creating all these Garden Sprites, he didn't think her sharply, vividly enough to make her effective. He just felt that a haystack suggested the elderly spread of a bulky and untidy old woman whose frame had settled beneath too many clothes, till she had collapsed into a field and stuck there. But he left her where he found her. He assigned no duties to her. She's only half alive. As a rule, she merely sits\u2014just \"stays put\"\u2014until some one moves her.'\n\nMother turned and saw her far in the rear, settling down comfortably upon a flat roof near the church. She rather envied her amiable disposition. It seemed so safe. Every one else was alive with such dangerous activity.\n\n'Are we going much further\u2014?' she began, when Monkey rushed by, caught up the sentence, and discharged herself with impudence into Daddy.\n\n'Which is right, \"further\" or \"farther\"?' she asked with a flash of light.\n\n'Further, of course,' said unsuspecting Mother.\n\n'But \"further\" sounds \"farther,\" she cried, with a burst of laughter that died away with her passage of meteoric brilliance\u2014into the body of the woods beyond.\n\n'But the other Sprites, you see, are real and active,' continued Daddy, ignoring the interruption as though accustomed to it, because he thought out clearly every detail. 'They're alive enough to haunt a house or garden till sensitive people become aware of them and declare they've seen a ghost.'\n\n'And we?' she asked. 'Who thought us out so wonderfully?'\n\n'That's more than I can tell,' he answered after a little pause. 'God knows that, for He thought out the entire universe to which we belong. I only know that we're real, and all part of the same huge, single thing.' He shone with increased brightness as he said it. 'There's no question about our personalities and duties and the rest. Don't you feel it too?'\n\nHe looked at her as he spoke. Her outline had grown more definite. As she began to understand, and her bewilderment lessened, he noted that her flashing lines burned more steadily, falling into a more regular, harmonious pattern. They combined, moreover, with his own, and with the starlight too, in some exquisite fashion he could not describe. She put a hand out, catching at the flying banner of his Story that he trailed behind him in the air. They formed a single design, all three. His happiness became enormous.\n\n'I feel joined on to everything,' she replied, half singing it in her joy. 'I feel tucked into the universe everywhere, and into you, dear. These rays of starlight have sewn us together.' She began to tremble, but it was the trembling of pure joy and not of alarm\u2026.\n\n'Yes,' he said, 'I'm learning it too. The moment thought gets away from self it lets in starlight and makes room for happiness. To think with sympathy of others is to grow: you take in their experience and add it to your own\u2014development; the heart gets soft and deep and wide till you feel the entire universe buttoning its jacket round you. To think of self means friction and hence reduction.'\n\n'And your Story,' she added, glancing up proudly at the banner that they trailed. 'I have helped a little, haven't I?'\n\n'It's nearly finished,' he flashed back; 'you've been its inspiration and its climax. All these years, when we thought ourselves apart, you've been helping really underground\u2014that's true collaboration.'\n\n'Our little separation was but a reculer pour mieux sauter. See how we've rushed together again!'\n\nA strange soft singing, like the wind in firs, or like shallow water flowing over pebbles, interrupted them. The sweetness of it turned the night alive.\n\n'Come on, old Mother. Our Leader is calling to us. We must work.'\n\nThey slid from the blue wind into a current of paler air that happened to slip swiftly past them, and went towards the forest where Mlle. Lemaire waited for them. Mother waved her hand to her friend, settled comfortably upon the flat roof in the village in their rear. 'We'll come back to lean upon you when we're tired,' she signalled. But she felt no envy now. In future she would certainly never 'stay put.' Work beckoned to her\u2014and such endless, glorious work: the whole Universe.\n\n'What life! What a rush of splendour!' she exclaimed as they reached the great woods and heard them shouting below in the winds. 'I see now why the forest always comforted me. There's strength here I can take back into my body with me when I go.'\n\n'The trees, yes, express visibly only a portion of their life,' he told her. 'There is an overflow we can appropriate.'\n\nYet their conversation was never audibly uttered. It flashed instantaneously from one to the other. All they had exchanged since leaving La Citadelle had taken place at once, it seemed. They were awake in the region of naked thought and feeling. The dictum of the materialists that thought and feeling cannot exist apart from matter did not trouble them. Matter, they saw, was everywhere, though too tenuous for any measuring instrument man's brain had yet invented.\n\n'Come on!' he repeated; 'the Starlight Express is waiting. It will take you anywhere you please\u2014Ireland if you like!'\n\nThey found the others waiting on the smooth layer of soft purple air that spread just below the level of the tree-tops. The crests themselves tossed wildly in the wind, but at a depth of a few feet there was peace and stillness, and upon this platform the band was grouped. 'The stars are caught in the branches to-night,' a sensitive walker on the ground might have exclaimed. The spires rose about them like little garden trees of a few years' growth, and between them ran lanes and intricate, winding thoroughfares Mother saw long, dark things like thick bodies of snakes converging down these passage-ways, filling them, all running towards the centre where the group had established itself. There were lines of dotted lights along them. They did not move with the waving of the tree-tops. They looked uncommonly familiar.\n\n'The trains,' Jimbo was crying. He darted to and fro, superintending the embarking of the passengers.\n\nAll the sidings of the sky were full of Starlight Expresses.\n\nThe loading-up was so quickly accomplished that Mother hardly realised what was happening. Everybody carried sacks overflowing with dripping gold and bursting at the seams. As each train filled, it shot away across the starry heavens; for everyone had been to the Cave and gathered their material even before she reached the scene of action. And with every train went a mecanicien and a conducteur created by Jimbo's vivid and believing thought; a Sweep, a Lamplighter, and a Head Gardener went, too, for the children's thinking multiplied these, too, according to their needs. They realised the meaning of these Sprites so clearly now\u2014their duties, appearance, laws of behaviour, and the rest-that their awakened imaginations thought them instantly into existence, as many as were necessary. Train after train, each with its full complement of passengers, flashed forth across that summer sky, till the people in the Observatories must have thought they had miscalculated strangely and the Earth was passing amid the showering Leonids before her appointed time.\n\n'Where would you like to go first?' Mother heard her friend ask softly. 'It's not possible to follow all the trains at once, you know.'\n\n'So I see,' she gasped. 'I'll just sit still a moment, and think.'\n\nThe size and freedom of existence, as she now saw it, suddenly overwhelmed her. Accustomed too long to narrow channels, she found space without railings and notice-boards bewildering. She had never dreamed before that thinking can open the gates to heaven and bring the Milky Way down into the heart. She had merely knitted stockings. She had been practical. At last the key to her husband's being was in her hand. That key at the same time opened a door through him, into her own. Hitherto she had merely criticised. Oh dear! Criticism, when she might have created!\n\nShe turned to seek him. But only her old friend was there, floating beside her in a brilliant mist of gold and white that turned the tree- tops into rows of Burning Bushes.\n\n'Where is he?' she asked quickly.\n\n'Hush!' was the instant reply; 'don't disturb him. Don't think, or you'll bring him back. He's filling his sack in the Star Cave. Men have to gather it,\u2014the little store they possess is soon crystallised into hardness by Reason,\u2014but women have enough in themselves usually to last a lifetime. They are born with it.'\n\n'Mine crystallised long ago, I fear.'\n\n'Care and anxiety did that. You neglected it a little. But your husband's cousin has cleaned the channels out. He does it unconsciously, but he does it. He has belief and vision like a child, and therefore turns instinctively to children because they keep it alive in him, though he hardly knows why he seeks them. The world, too, is a great big child that is crying for its Fairyland\u2026.'\n\n'But the practical\u2014' objected Mother, true to her type of mind-an echo rather than an effort.\n\n'\u2014is important, yes, only it has been exaggerated out of all sane proportion in most people's lives. So little is needed, though that little of fine quality, and ever fed by starlight. Obeyed exclusively, it destroys life. It bricks you up alive. But now tell me,' she added, 'where would you like to go first? Whom will you help? There is time enough to cover .the world if you want to, before the interfering sun gets up.'\n\n'You!' cried Mother, impulsively, then realised instantly that her friend was already developed far beyond any help that she could give. It was the light streaming from the older, suffering woman that was stimulating her own sympathies so vehemently. For years the process had gone on. It was at last effective.\n\n'There are others, perhaps, who need it more than I,' flashed forth a lovely ray.\n\n'But I would repay,' Mother cried eagerly, 'I would repay.' Gratitude for life rushed through her, and her friend must share it.\n\n'Pass it on to others,' was the shining answer. 'That's the best repayment after all.' The stars themselves turned brighter as the thought flashed from her.\n\nThen Ireland vanished utterly, for it had been mixed, Mother now perceived, with personal longings that were at bottom selfish. There were indeed many there, in the scenes of her home and childhood, whose lives she might ease and glorify by letting in the starlight while they slept; but her motive, she discerned, was not wholly pure. There was a trace in it, almost a little stain, of personal gratification\u2014 she could not analyse it quite\u2014that dimmed the picture in her thought. The brilliance of her companion made it stand out clearly. Nearer home was a less heroic object, a more difficult case, some one less likely to reward her efforts with results. And she turned instead to this.\n\n'You're right,' smiled the other, following her thought; 'and you couldn't begin with a better bit of work than that. Your old mother has cut herself off so long from giving sympathy to her kind that now she cannot accept it from others without feeling suspicion and distrust. Ease and soften her outlook if you can. Pour through her gloom the sympathy of stars. And remember,' she added, as Mother rose softly out of the trees and hovered a moment overhead, 'that if you need the Sweep or the Lamplighter, or the Gardener to burn away her dead leaves, you have only to summon them. Think hard, and they'll be instantly beside you.'\n\nUpon an eddy of glowing wind Mother drifted across the fields to the corner of the village where her mother occupied a large single room in solitude upon the top floor, a solitude self-imposed and rigorously enforced.\n\n'Use the finest quality,' she heard her friend thinking far behind her, 'for you have plenty of it. The Dustman gave it to you when you were not looking, gathered from the entire Zodiac\u2026 and from the careless meteor's track\u2026.'\n\n\u2003The words died off into the forest.\n\n\u2003That he keeps only\n\n\u2003For the old and lonely,\n\n\u2003(And is very strict about it)\n\n\u2003Who sleep so little that they need the best\u2014'\n\nThe words came floating behind her. She felt herself brimful\u2014charged with loving sympathy of the sweetest and most understanding quality. She looked down a moment upon her mother's roof. Then she descended." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 185", + "text": "\u2003And also there's a little star\u2014\n\n\u2003So white, a virgin's it must be;\u2014\n\n\u2003Perhaps the lamp my love in heaven\n\n\u2003Hangs out to light the way for me.\n\n\u2014Song, THEOPHILE MARZIALS.\n\nIn this corner of Bourcelles the houses lie huddled together with an air of something shamefaced; they dare not look straight at the mountains or at the lake; they turn their eyes away even from the orchards at the back. They wear a mysterious and secret look, and their shoulders have a sly turn, as though they hid their heads in the daytime and stirred about their business only after dark.\n\nThey lie grouped about a cobbled courtyard that has no fountain in it. The fair white road goes quickly by outside, afraid to look in frankly; and the entrance to the yard is narrow. Nor does a single tree grow in it. If Bourcelles could have a slum, this would be it.\n\nWhy the old lady had left her cosy quarters in Les Glycines and settled down in this unpleasant corner of the village was a puzzle to everybody. With a shrug of the shoulders the problem was generally left unsolved. Madame Jequier discussed it volubly a year ago when the move took place, then dismissed it as one of those mysteries of old people no one can understand. To the son-in-law and the daughter, who got nearer the truth, it was a source of pain and sadness beyond their means of relief. Mrs. 'Plume'\u2014it was a play in French upon her real name,\u2014had been four years in the Pension, induced to come from a lonely existence in Ireland by her daughter and throw in her lot with the family, and at first had settled down comfortably enough. She was over seventy, and possessed 80 pounds a year\u2014a dainty, witty, amusing Irish lady, with twinkling eyes and a pernicketty strong will, and a brogue she transferred deliciously into her broken French. She loved the children, yet did not win their love in return, because they stood in awe of her sarcastic criticisms. Life had gone hardly with her; she had lost her fortune and her children, all but this daughter, with whose marriage she was keenly disappointed. An aristocrat to the finger-tips, she could not accept the change of circumstances; distress had soured her; the transplanting hastened her decline; there was no sweetness left in her. She turned her heart steadily against the world.\n\nThe ostensible cause of this hiding herself away with her sorrow and disappointment was the presence of Miss Waghorn, with whom she disagreed, and even quarrelled, from morning till night. They formed a storm-centre that moved from salon to dining-room, and they squabbled acutely about everything\u2014the weather, the heating, the opening or shutting of windows, the details of the food, the arrangement of the furniture, even the character of the cat. Miss Waghorn loved. The bickerings were incessant. They only had to meet for hot disagreement to break out. Mrs. Plume, already bent with age, would strike the floor with the ebony stick she always carried, and glare at the erect, defiant spinster\u2014'That horrud, dirrty cat; its always in the room!' Then Miss Waghorn: 'It's a very nice cat, Madame'\u2014she always called her Madame\u2014'and when I was a young girl I was taught to be kind to animals.'\u2014'The drawing-room is not the place for animals,' came the pricking answer. And then the scuffle began in earnest.\n\nMiss Waghorn, owing to her want of memory, forgot the squabble five minutes afterwards, and even forgot that she knew her antagonist at all. She would ask to be introduced, or even come up sweetly and introduce herself within half an hour of the battle. But Madame Plume forgot nothing; her memory was keen and accurate. She did not believe in the other's failing. 'That common old woman!' she exclaimed with angry scorn to her daughter.\n\n'It's deliberate offensiveness, that's all it is at all!' And she left the Pension.\n\nBut her attitude to the harmless old Quaker lady was really in small her attitude to humanity at large. She drew away in disgust from a world that had treated her so badly. Into herself she drew, growing smaller every day, more sour, more suspicious, and more averse to her own kind. Within the restricted orbit of her own bitter thoughts she revolved towards the vanishing point of life which is the total loss of sympathy. She felt with no one but herself. She belonged to that, alas, numerous type which, with large expectations unrealised, cannot accept disillusionment with the gentle laughter it deserves. She resented the universe. Sympathy was dead.\n\nAnd she had chosen this unsavoury corner to dwell in because 'the poor' of the village lived there, and she wished to count herself among them. It emphasised the spite, the grudge, she felt against humanity. At first she came into dejeuner and souper, but afterwards her meals were sent over twice a day from the Pension. She discovered so many reasons for not making the little journey of a hundred yards. On Sunday the 'common people' were in the streets; on Saturday it was cleaning-day and the Pension smelt of turpentine; Monday was for letter-writing, and other days were too hot or too cold, too windy or too wet. In the end she accomplished her heart's desire. Madame Cornu, who kept the grocer's shop, and lived on the floor below with her husband, prepared the two principal meals and brought them up to her on a tray. She ate them alone. Her breakfast cup of tea she made herself, Mme. Cornu putting the jug of milk outside the door. She nursed her bitter grievance against life in utter solitude. Acidity ate its ugly pattern into her heart.\n\nThe children, as in duty bound, made dolorous pilgrimages to that upper floor from time to time, returning frightened, and Mother went regularly twice a week, coming home saddened and distressed. Her husband rarely went at all now, since the time when she told him to his face he came to taunt her. She spent her time, heaven only knows how, for she never left the building. According to Mother she was exceedingly busy doing nothing. She packed, unpacked, and then repacked all her few belongings. In summer she chased bees in her room with a wet towel; but with venom, not with humour. The Morning Post came daily from London. 'I read my paper, write a letter, and the morning's gone,' she told her daughter, by way of complaint that time was so scanty. Mme. Cornu often heard her walking up and down the floor, tapping her ebony stick and talking softly to herself. Yet she was as sane as any old body living in solitude with evil thinking well can be. She starved-because she neither gave nor asked.\n\nAs Mother thought of her, thus finding the way in instantly, the church clock sounded midnight. She entered a room that was black as coal and unsweetened as an airless cellar. The fair rays that had been pouring out of her returned with a little shock upon themselves\u2014 repulsed. She felt herself reduced, and the sensation was so unpleasant at first that she almost gasped. It was like suffocation. She felt enclosed with Death. That her own radiance dimmed a moment was undeniable, but it was for a moment only, for, thinking instantly of her friend, she drew upon that woman's inexhaustible abundance, and found her own stores replenished.\n\nSlowly, as a wintry sun pierces the mist in some damp hollow of the woods, her supply of starlight lit up little pathways all about her, and she saw the familiar figure standing by the window. The figure was also black; it stood like an ebony statue in an atmosphere that was thick with gloom, turgid, sinister, and wholly rayless. It was like a lantern in a London fog. A few dim lines of sombre grey issued heavily from it, but got no farther than its outer surface, then doubled back and plunged in again. They coiled and twisted into ugly knots. Her mother's atmosphere was opaque, and as dismal as a November fog. There was a speck of light in the room, however, and it came, the visitor then perceived, from a single candle that stood beside the bed. The old lady had been reading; she rarely slept before two o'clock in the morning.\n\nAnd at first, so disheartening, so hopeless seemed the task, that Mother wavered in her mission; a choking, suffocating sensation blocked all her channels of delivery. The very flowers on the window- sill, she noted, drooped in a languishing decline; they had a lifeless air as of flowers that struggle for existence in deep shadow and have never known the kiss of sunshine. Through the inch of opened window stole a soft breath of the night air, but it turned black and sluggish the moment it came in. And just then, as Mother hovered there in hesitating doubt, the figure turned and moved across to the bed, supporting herself with the ebony cane she always used. Stiffly she sank upon her knees. The habit was as strong as putting her shoes outside the door at night to be cleaned,-those shoes that never knew the stain of roadway dust-and equally devoid of spiritual significance. Yet, for a moment, as the embittered mind gabbled through the string of words that long habit had crystallised into an empty formula, Mother noticed that the lines of grey grew slightly clearer; the coil and tangle ceased; they even made an effort to emerge and leave the muddy cloud that obscured their knotted, intricate disorder.\n\nThe formula Mother recognised; it had hardly changed, indeed, since she herself had learned it at those very knees when days were brighter; it began with wholesale and audacious requests for self, then towards the end passed into vague generalities for the welfare of others. And just here it was that the lines of grey turned brighter and tried to struggle out of the murky atmosphere. The sight was pathetic, yet deeply significant. Mother understood its meaning. There was hope. Behind the prayer for others still shone at least an echo of past meaning.\n\n'I believe in you, old, broken, disappointed heart,' flashed through her own bright atmosphere, 'and, believing, I can help you!'\n\nHer skill, however, was slight, owing to lack of practice and experience. She moved over to the bed, trying first to force her own darting rays into the opaque, dull cloud surrounding the other; then seeking a better way-for this had no results\u2014-she slipped somehow inside the mist, getting behind it, down at the very source. From here she forced her own light through, mixing her beams of coloured radiance with the thick grey lines themselves. She tried to feel and think as her mother felt and thought, moving beside her mind's initial working, changing the gloom into something brighter as she moved along. This was the proper way, she felt-to clean the source itself, rather than merely untie knots at the outer surface. It was a stifling business, but she persisted. Tiny channels cleared and opened. A little light shone through. She felt-with her mother, instead of arguing, as it were\u2026\n\nThe old lady presently blew the candle out and composed herself to sleep. Mother laboured on\u2026.\n\n'Oh dear,' she sighed, 'oh dear!' as she emerged from the gloom a moment to survey her patient and note results. To her amazement she saw that there was a change indeed, though a very curious one. The entire outer surface of the cloud seemed in commotion, with here and there a glimmering lustre as if a tiny lamp was at last alight within. She felt herself swell with happiness. Instantly, then, the grey lines shot out, fastening with wee loops and curves among her own. Some links evidently had been established. She had imparted something.\n\n'She's dreaming! I do believe I've sown some dream of beauty in her!' she beamed to herself.\n\nSome golden, unaccustomed sleep had fallen over the old lady. Stray shreds of darkness loosened from the general mass and floated off, yet did not melt entirely from sight. She was shedding some of her evil thoughts.\n\n'The Sweep!' thought Mother, and turning, found him beside her in the room. Her husband, to her astonishment, was also there.\n\n'But I didn't think of you!' she exclaimed.\n\n'Not a definite thought,' he answered, 'but you needed me. I felt it. We're so close together now that we're practically one, you see.' He trailed his Pattern behind him, clothed now with all manner of rich new colouring, 'I've collected such heaps of new ideas,' he went on, 'and now I want her too. She's in the Story. I'll transfigure her as well.' He was bright as paint, and happy as a sand-boy. 'Well done, old Mother,' he added, 'you've done a lot already. See, she's dreaming small, soft, tender things of beauty that your efforts have let through.'\n\nHe glided across and poured from his own store of sympathy into that dry, atrophied soul upon the bed. 'It's a question how much she will be able to transmit, though,' he said doubtfully. 'The spiritual machinery is so stiff and out of gear from long disuse. In Miss Waghorn's case it's only physical\u2014I've just been there\u2014but this is spiritual blackness. We shall see to-morrow. Something will get through at any rate, and we must do this every night, you know.'\n\n'Rather!' echoed Mother.\n\n'Her actual self, you see, has dwindled so that one can hardly find it. It's smaller than a flea, and as hard and black.' They smiled a little sadly.\n\nThe Sweep, rushing out of the window with his heavy sack loaded to the brim, interrupted their low laughter. He was no talker, but a man of action. Busily all this time he had been gathering up the loose, stray fragments that floated off from the cloud, and stuffing them into the sack. He now flew, singing, into the night, and they barely caught the last words of his eternal song:\u2014\n\n\u2003'\u2026 a tremendously busy Sweep,\n\n\u2003Tossing the blacks in the Rubbish Heap\n\n\u2003Over the edge of the world.'\n\n'Come,' whispered Daddy. 'It's getting late. The interfering sun is on the way, and you've been hours here already. All the trains are back, and every one is waiting for us.' Yet it had seemed so short a time really.\n\nWrapped together in the beauty of his Pattern, they left the old lady peacefully asleep, and sped across the roofs towards the forest.\n\nBut neither of them noticed, it seemed, the lovely little shining figure that hovered far in the air above and watched them go. It followed them all the way, catching even at the skirts of the flying Pattern as they went. Was it the Spirit of some unknown Star they had attracted from beyond the Milky Way? Or was it, perhaps, a Thought from some fair, exquisite heart that had been wakened by the rushing of the Expresses, and had flashed in to take a place in the wonderful story Daddy wove?\n\nIt had little twinkling feet, and its eyes were of brown flame and amber.\n\n'No, they did not notice the starry, fluttering figure. It overtook them none the less, and with a flying leap was into the Pattern of his story\u2014in the very centre, too!\u2014as quickly as lightning passes through the foliage of the tree it strikes. Only the lightning stayed. The figure remained caught. The entire Pattern shivered to its outer fringes, then began to glow and shine all over. As the high harmonic crowns the end of a long cadenza on a violin, fulfilling bars of difficult effort, this point of exquisite beauty flashed life into the Pattern of the story, consummating the labour of construction with the true, inevitable climax. There was something of fairy insolence, both cheeky and delicious, in the proprietary way it chose the principal place, yet the only place still unoccupied, and sang 'I'm here. I've come!' It calmly fashioned itself a nest, as it were, curled up and made itself at home. It was at home. The audacity was justified. The Pattern seemed at last complete. Beauty and Truth shone at its centre. And the tiny voice continued singing, though no one seemed to know exactly whence the sound proceeded:\u2014\n\n\u2003'While the busy Pleiades,\n\n\u2003Sisters to the Hyades,\n\n\u2003Seven by seven,\n\n\u2003Across the heaven,\n\n\u2003Light desire\n\n\u2003With their fire,\n\n\u2003Flung from huge Orion's hand,\n\n\u2003Sweetly linking\n\n\u2003All our thinking\n\n\u2003In the Net of Sympathy that brings back Fairyland!'\n\nNo\u2014neither Mother nor Daddy were aware of what had happened thus in the twinkling of an eye. Certainly neither guessed that another heart, far distant as the crow flies, had felt the stream of his vital, creative thinking, and had thus delicately responded and sent out a sympathetic message of belief. But neither did Adams and Leverrier, measuring the heavens, and calculating through years of labour the delicate interstellar forces, know that each had simultaneously caught Neptune in their net of stars\u2014three thousand million miles away. Had they been 'out,' these two big, patient astronomers, they might have realised that they really worked in concert every night. But history does not relate that they slept well or ill; their biographies make no mention of what their 'Underneaths' were up to while their brains lay resting on the pillow; and private confession, if such exists, has never seen the light of print as yet. In that region, however, where Thinking runs and plays, thought dancing hand in hand with thought that is akin to it, the fact must surely have been known and recognised. They, too, travelled in the Starlight Express.\n\nMother and Daddy realised it just then as little as children are aware of the loving thoughts of the parent that hovers protectingly about them all day long. They merely acknowledged that a prodigious thrill of happiness pulsed through both of them at once, feeling proud as the group in the tree-tops praised their increased brightness and admired the marvellous shining of the completed Pattern they trailed above their heads. But more than that they did not grasp. Nor have they ever grasped it perhaps. That the result came through later is proved, however, by the published story, and by the strange, sweet beauty its readers felt all over the world. But this belongs to the private working of inspiration which can never be explained, not even by the artist it has set on fire. He, indeed, probably understands it least of all.\n\n'Where are the trains, the Starlight Expresses?' asked Mother.\n\n'Gone!' answered Jimbo. 'Gone to Australia where they're wanted. It's evening now down there.'\n\nHe pointed down, then up. 'Don't you see? We must hurry.' She looked across the lake where the monstrous wall of Alps was dimly visible. The sky was brightening behind them. Long strata of thin cloud glimmered with faintest pink. The stars were rapidly fading. 'What ages you've been!' he added.\n\n'And where's Tante Anna?' she inquired quickly, looking for her brilliant friend.\n\n'She's come and gone a dozen times while you've been skylarking somewhere else,' explained Monkey with her usual exaggeration. 'She's gone for good now. She sleeps so badly. She's always waking up, you know.' Mother understood. Only too well she knew that her friend snatched sleep in briefest intervals, incessantly disturbed by racking pain.\n\nA stream of light flashed past her, dashing like a meteor towards the village and disappearing before she could see the figure.\n\n'There goes Jinny,' cried some one, 'always working to the very last.\n\nThe interfering sun'll catch her if she doesn't look out!'\n\nThere was movement and hurry everywhere. Already the world ran loose and soft in colour. Birds, just awake, were singing in the trees below. Several passed swiftly overhead, raking the sky with a whirring rush of wings. Everybody was asking questions, urging return, yet lingering as long as possible, each according to his courage. To be caught 'out' by the sun meant waking with a sudden start that made getting out of bed very difficult and might even cause a headache.\n\nRogers alone seemed unperturbed, unhurried, for he was absorbed in a discovery that made him tremble. Noting the sudden perfection of his cousin's Pattern, he had gone closer to examine it, and had\u2014seen the starry figure. Instantly he forgot everything else in the world. It seemed to him that he had suddenly found all he had ever sought. He gazed into those gentle eyes of amber and felt that he gazed into the eyes of the Universe that had taken shape in front of him. Floating up as near as he could, he spoke\u2014\n\n'Where do you come from\u2014from what star?' he asked softly in an ecstasy of wonder.\n\nThe tiny face looked straight at him and smiled.\n\n'From the Pleiades, of course,\u2014that little group of star-babies as yet unborn.'\n\n'I've been looking for you for ever,' he answered.\n\n'You've found me,' sang the tiny voice. 'This is our introduction. Now, don't forget. There was a lost Pleiad, you know. Try to remember me when you wake.'\n\n'Then why are you here?' He meant in the Pattern.\n\nThe star-face rippled with laughter.\n\n'It's yours\u2014your Scheme. He's given it perfect shape for you, that's all. Don't you recognise it? But it's my Story as well.\u2026'\n\nA ray with crimson in it shot out just then across the shoulder of the Blumlisalp, and, falling full upon the tiny face, it faded out; the Pattern faded with it; Daddy vanished too. On the little azure winds of dawn they flashed away. Jimbo, Monkey, and certain of the Sprites alone held on, but the tree-tops to which they clung were growing more and more slippery every minute. Mother, loth to return, balanced bravely on the waving spires of a larch. Her sleep that night had been so deep and splendid, she struggled to prolong it. She hated waking up too early.\n\n'The Morning Spiders! Look out!' cried a Sprite, as a tiny spider on its thread of gossamer floated by. It was the Dustman's voice. Catching the Gypsy with one arm and the Tramp with the other, all three instantly disappeared.\n\n'But where's my Haystack friend?' called Mother faintly, almost losing her balance in the attempt to turn round quickly.\n\n'Oh, she's all right,' the Head Gardener answered from a little distance where he was burning something. 'She just \"stays put\" and flirts with every wind that comes near her. She loves the winds. They know her little ways.' He went on busily burning up dead leaves he had been collecting all night long\u2014dead, useless thoughts he had found clogging a hundred hearts and stopping outlets.\n\n'Look sharp!' cried a voice that fell from the sky above them.\n\n'Here come the Morning Spiders,\n\nOn their gossamer outriders!'\n\nThis time it was the Lamplighter flashing to and fro as he put the stars out one by one. He was in a frantic hurry; he extinguished whole groups of them at once. The Pleiades were the last to fade.\n\nRogers heard him and came back into himself. For his ecstasy had carried him even beyond the region of the freest 'thinking.' He could give no account or explanation of it at all. Monkey, Jimbo, Mother, and he raced in a line together for home and safety. Above the fields they met the spiders everywhere, the spiders that bring the dawn and ride off into the Star Cave on lost rays and stray thoughts that careless minds have left scattered about the world.\n\nAnd the children, as they raced and told their mother to 'please move a little more easily and slipperily,' sang together in chorus:\u2014\n\n\u2003'We shall meet the Morning Spiders,\n\n\u2003The fairy-cotton riders,\n\n\u2003Each mounted on a star's rejected ray;\n\n\u2003With their tiny nets of feather\n\n\u2003They collect our thoughts together,\n\n\u2003And on strips of windy weather\n\n\u2003Bring the Day.\u2026'\n\n'That's stolen from you or Daddy,' Mother began to say to Rogers\u2014but was unable to complete the flash. The thought lay loose behind her in the air.\n\nA spider instantly mounted it and rode it off.\n\nSomething brushed her cheek. Riquette stood rover her, fingering her face with a soft extended paw.\n\n'But it surely can't be time yet to get up!' she murmured. 'I've only just fallen asleep, it seems.' She glanced at her watch upon the chair beside the bed, saw that it was only four o'clock, and then turned over, making a space for the cat behind her shoulder. A tremendous host of dreams caught at her sliding mind. She tried to follow them. They vanished. 'Oh dear!' she sighed, and promptly fell asleep again. But this time she slept lightly. No more adventures came. She did not dream. And later, when Riquette woke her a second time because it was half-past six, she remembered as little of having been 'out' as though such a thing had never taken place at all.\n\nShe lit the fire and put the porridge saucepan on the stove. It was a glorious July morning. She felt glad to be alive, and full of happy, singing thoughts. 'I wish I could always sleep like that!' she said. 'But what a pity one has to wake up in the end!'\n\nAnd then, as she turned her mind toward the coming duties of the day, another thought came to her. It was a very ordinary, almost a daily thought, but there seemed more behind it than usual. Her whole heart was in it this time\u2014\n\n'As soon as the children are off to school I'll pop over to mother, and see if I can't cheer her up a bit and make her feel more happy. Oh dear!' she added, 'life is a bag of duties, whichever way one looks at it!' But she felt a great power in her that she could face them easily and turn each one into joy. She could take life more bigly, carelessly, more as a whole somehow. She was aware of some huge directing power in her 'underneath.' Moreover, the 'underneath' of a woman like Mother was not a trifle that could be easily ignored. That great Under Self, resting in the abysses of being, rose and led. The pettier Upper Self withdrew ashamed, passing over the reins of conduct into those mighty, shadowy hands." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 186", + "text": "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades,\n\nOr loose the bands of Orion?\n\nBook of Job.\n\nThe feeling that something was going to happen\u2014that odd sense of anticipation\u2014which all had experienced the evening before at tea-time had entirely vanished, of course, next morning. It was a mood, and it had passed away. Every one had slept it off. They little realised how it had justified itself. Jane Anne, tidying the Den soon after seven o'clock, noticed the slip of paper above the mantelpiece, read it over\u2014'The Starlight Express will start to-night. Be reddy!'\u2014and tore it down. 'How could that. have amused us!' she said aloud, as she tossed it into the waste-paper basket. Yet, even while she did so, some stray sensation of delight clutched at her funny little heart, a touch of emotion she could not understand that was wild and very sweet. She went singing about her work. She felt important and grown- up, extraordinarily light-hearted too. The things she sang made up their own words\u2014such odd snatches that came she knew not whence. An insect clung to her duster, and she shook it out of the window with the crumbs and bits of cotton gathered from the table-cloth.\n\n'Get out, you Morning Spider,\n\nYou fairy-cotton rider!' she sang, and at the same minute Mother opened the bedroom door and peeped in, astonished at the unaccustomed music. In her voluminous dressing-gown, her hair caught untidily in a loose net, her face flushed from stooping over the porridge saucepan, she looked, thought Jinny, 'like a haystack somehow.' Of course she did not say it. The draught, flapping at her ample skirts, added the idea of a covering tarpaulin to the child's mental picture. She went on dusting with a half-offended air, as though Mother had no right to interrupt her with a superintending glance like this.\n\n'You won't forget the sweeping too, Jinny?' said Mother, retiring again majestically with that gliding motion her abundant proportions achieved so gracefully.\n\n'Of course I won't, Mother,' and the instant the door was closed she fell into another snatch of song, the words of which flowed unconsciously into her mind, it seemed\u2014\n\n'For I'm a tremendously busy Sweep,\n\nDusting the room while you're all asleep,\n\nAnd shoving you all in the rubbish heap,\n\nOver the edge of the tiles'\n\n\u2014a little wumbled, it is true, but its source unmistakable.\n\nAnd all day long, with every one, it was similar, this curious intrusion of the night into the day, the sub-conscious into the conscious\u2014a kind of subtle trespassing. The flower of forgotten dreams rose so softly to the surface of consciousness that they had an air of sneaking in, anxious to be regarded as an integral part of normal waking life. Like bubbles in water they rose, discharged their puff of fragrant air, and disappeared again. Jane Anne, in particular, was simply radiant all day long, and more than usually clear-headed. Once or twice she wumbled, but there was big sense in her even then. It was only the expression that evaded her. Her little brain was a poor transmitter somehow.\n\n'I feel all endowed to-day,' she informed Rogers, when he congratulated her later in the day on some cunning act of attention she bestowed upon him. It was in the courtyard where they all sat sunning themselves after dejeuner, and before the younger children returned to afternoon school.\n\n'I feel emaciated, you know,' she added, uncertain whether emancipated was the word she really sought.\n\n'You'll be quite grown-up,' he told her, 'by the time I come back to little Bourcelles in the autumn.' Little Bourcelles! It sounded, the caressing way he said it, as if it lay in the palm of his big brown hand.\n\n'But you'll never come back, because you'll never go,' Monkey chimed in. 'My hair, remember\u2014-'\n\n'My trains won't take you,' said Jimbo gravely.\n\n'Oh, a train may take you,' continued Monkey, 'but you can't leave.\n\nGoing away by train isn't leaving.'\n\n'It's only like going to sleep,' explained her brother. You'll come back every night in a Starlight Express\u2014-'\n\n'Because a Starlight Express takes passengers\u2014whether they like it or not. You take an ordinary train, but a starlight train takes you!' added Monkey.\n\nMother heard the words and looked up sharply from her knitting. Something, it seemed, had caught her attention vividly, though until now her thoughts had been busy with practical things of quite another order. She glanced keenly round at the faces, where all sat grouped upon the stone steps of La Citadelle. Then she smiled curiously, half to herself. What she said was clearly not what she had first meant to say.\n\n'Children, you're not sitting on the cold stone, are you?' she inquired, but a little absent-mindedly.\n\n'We're quite warm; we've got our thick under-neathies on,' was the reply. They realised that only part of her mind was in the, question, and that any ordinary answer would satisfy her.\n\nMother resumed her knitting, apparently satisfied.\n\nBut Jinny, meanwhile, had been following her own train of thought, started by her cousin's description of her as 'grown-up.' The picture grew big and gracious in her mind.\n\n'I wonder what I shall do when my hair goes up?' she observed, apparently a propos de bottes. It was the day, of course, eagerly, almost feverishly, looked forward to.\n\n'Hide your head in a bag probably,' laughed her sister. Jinny flushed; her hair was not abundant. Yet she seemed puzzled rather than offended.\n\n'Never mind,' Rogers soothed her. 'The day a girl puts up her hair, a thousand young men are aware of it,\u2014and one among them trembles.' The idea of romance seemed somehow in the air.\n\n'Oh, Cousinenry!' She was delighted, comforted, impressed; but perplexity was uppermost. Something in his tone of voice prevented impudent comment from the others.\n\n'And all the stars grow a little brighter,' he added. 'The entire universe is glad.'\n\n'I shall be a regular company promoter!' she exclaimed, nearer to wit than she knew, yet with only the vaguest inkling of what he really meant.\n\n'And draw up a Memorandum of Agreement with the Milky Way,' he added, gravely smiling.\n\nHe had just been going to say 'with the Pleiades,' when something checked him. A wave of strange emotion swept him. It rose from the depths within, then died away as mysteriously as it came. Like exquisite music heard from very far away, it left its thrill of beauty and of wonder, then hid behind the breath of wind that brought it. 'The whole world, you see, will know,' he added under his breath to the delighted child. He looked into her queer, flushed face. The blue eyes for a moment had, he thought, an amber tinge. It was a mere effect of light, of course; the sun had passed behind a cloud. Something that he ought to have known, ought to have remembered, flashed mockingly before him and was gone. 'One among them trembles,' he repeated in his mind. He himself was trembling.\n\n'The Morning Spiders,' said some one quietly and softly, 'are standing at their stable doors, making faces at the hidden sun.'\n\nBut he never knew who said it, or if it was not his own voice speaking below his breath. He glanced at Jimbo. The small grave face wore an air of man-like preoccupation, as was always the case when he felt a little out of his depth in general conversation. He assumed it in self-protection. He never exposed himself by asking questions. The music of that under-voice ran on:\u2014\n\n\u2003'Sweet thoughts, like fine weather,\n\n\u2003Bind closely together\n\n\u2003God's stars with the heart of a boy.'\n\nBut he said it aloud apparently this time, for the others looked up with surprise. Monkey inquired what in the world he was talking about, only, not quite knowing himself, he could not answer her. Jimbo then, silent and preoccupied, found his thoughts still running on marriage. The talk about his sister's hair going up no doubt had caused it. He remembered the young schoolmistress who had her meals at the Pension, and the Armenian student who had fallen in love with, and eventually married, her. It was the only courtship he had ever witnessed. Marriage and courtship seemed everywhere this morning.\n\n'I saw it all with Mlle. Perette,' he informed the party. 'It began already by his pouring out water for her and passing the salt and things. It always begins like that. He got shawls even when she was hot.'\n\nHe looked so wise and grave that nobody laughed, and his sisters even seemed impressed rather. Jinny waited anxiously for more. If Mother did make an odd grimace, it was not noticed, and anyhow was cleverly converted into the swallowing of a yawn. There was a moment's silence. Jimbo, proudly conscious that more was expected of him, provided it in his solemn little voice.\n\n'But it must be horrid,' he announced, 'to be married\u2014always sticked to the same woman, like that.' No sentence was complete without the inevitable 'already' or 'like that,' translated from the language he was more at home in. He thought in French. 'I shall never marry myself (me marier) he decided, seeing his older sister's eyes upon him wonderingly. Then, uncertain whether he had said an awfully wise or an awfully foolish thing, he added no more. Anyhow, it was the way a man should talk\u2014with decision.\n\n'It's bad enough to be a wife,' put in Monkey, 'but it must be worse still to have one!'\n\nBut Jane Anne seemed shocked. A man, Jimbo reflected, can never be sure how his wisdom may affect the other sex; women are not meant to know everything. She rose with dignity and went upstairs towards the door, and Monkey, rippling with laughter, smacked her as she went. This only shocked her more.\n\n'That was a slight mistake behind,' she said reprovingly, looking back; 'you should have more reserve, I think,' then firmly shut the door.\n\nAll of which meant\u2014so far as Jane Anne was concerned\u2014that an important standard of conduct\u2014grown-up, dignified, stately in a spiritual sense\u2014was being transferred to her present behaviour, but transferred ineffectively. Elsewhere Jane Anne lived it, was it. She knew it, but could not get at the part of her that knew it. The transmitting machinery was imperfect. Connecting links and switches were somehow missing. Yearning was strong in her, that yearning which is common to all the world, though so variously translated. Once out of the others' sight, she made a curious face. She went into her room between the kitchen and the Den, flung herself on the bed, and burst into tears. And the fears brought relief. They oiled the machinery perhaps. At any rate, she soon felt better.\n\n'I felt so enormous and unsettled,' she informed Mother later, when the redness of her eyes was noticed and she received breathlessly a great comforting hug. I never get anything right.'\n\n'But you are right, darling,' Mother soothed her, little guessing that she told the perfect truth. 'You are all right, only you don't know it. Everybody's wumbled somewhere.' And she advised her\u2014ah, Mother was profoundly wise instinctively\u2014not to think so much, but just go ahead as usual and do her work.\n\nFor Mother herself felt a little queer that day, as though something very big and splendid lay hiding just beyond her reach. It surged up, vanished, then surged up again, and it came closest when she was not thinking of it. The least effort of the mind to capture it merely plunged her into an empty gulf where she could not touch bottom. The glorious thing ran instantly underground. She never ceased to be aware of it, but any attempt to focus resulted in confusion. Analysis was beyond her powers, yet the matter was very simple really, for only when thought is blank, and when the mind has forgotten to think, can inspiration come through into the heart. The intellect interprets afterwards, sets in order, regulates, examines the wonder and beauty the heart distils alchemically out of the eternal stream in which life everywhere dips its feet. If Reason interferes too soon, or during transmission, it only muddles and destroys. And Mother, hitherto, had always been so proud of being practical, prosaic, reasonable. She had deliberately suppressed the other. She could not change in a single day just because she had been 'out' and made discoveries last night. Oh, how simple it all was really, and yet how utterly most folk convert the wonder of it into wumbling!\n\nLike Jane Anne, her miniature, she felt splendid all day long, but puzzled too. It was almost like those religious attacks she had experienced in early youth. She had no definite creed by which she could explain it. Though nominally Christian, like her husband, she could not ascribe her joy to a 'Holy Spirit,' or to a 'God' working in her. But she was reminded of her early 'religious attacks' because she now experienced that large sensation of glorious peace and certainty which usually accompanies the phenomenon in the heart called 'conversion.' She saw life whole. She rested upon some unfailing central Joy. Come what might, she felt secure and 'saved.' Something everlasting lay within call, an ever-ready help in trouble; and all day she was vaguely conscious that her life lay hid with\u2014with what? She never found the word exactly, for 'Joy' was but one aspect of it. She fell back upon the teachings of the big religions which are the police regulations of the world. Yet all creeds shared these, and her feeling was far deeper than mere moral teachings. And then she gave up thinking about it. Besides, she had much knitting to do.\n\n'It's come to stay anyhow; I feel in sympathy with everybody,' she said, and so dismissed vain introspection, keeping the simple happiness and peace. That was her strength, as it was also Jinny's. A re-formation had begun.\n\nJimbo, too, felt something in his microcosmic way, only he said little and asked no single question. It betrayed itself, however, to his Mother's widened vision. He was all stirred up. He came back again from school at three o'clock\u2014for it was Thursday and he did not take the singing lesson from three to four\u2014put down his books with a very business-like air, forgot to kiss his Mother\u2014and went out.\n\n'Where are you off to, Jimbo?' She scented mischief. He was so affaire.\n\nHe turned obediently at once, the face grave and puckered.\n\n'Going over to the carpenter's house, Mummy.'\n\n'What for, dear? Why don't you stay and play here?' She had the feeling that her husband was absorbed in his work and would not like to be disturbed.\n\nThe boy's reply was evasive too. 'I want to have a long discuss with Daddy,' he said.\n\n'Can't you have your long discuss with me instead?' she asked.\n\nHe shook his head. 'You see,' he answered solemnly, 'it's about things.'\n\n'But Daddy's working just now; he'll be over to tea at four. Can't it wait till then?'\n\nShe understood too well to inquire what 'things' might be. The boy wished to speak with one of his own sex\u2014as one man to another man.\n\n'When a man's at work,' she added, 'he doesn't like to be disturbed.'\n\n'All right,' was the reply. 'We can wait a little,' and he settled down to other things in a corner by himself. His mind, clearly, was occupied with grave considerations he could not discuss with anybody, least of all with women and children. But, of course, busy men must not be interrupted. For a whole hour in his corner he made no sound, and hardly any movement.\n\nBut Daddy did not come at four o'clock. He was evidently deep in work. And Mother did not send for him. The carpenter's wife, she knew, would provide a cup of tea.\n\nHe came late to supper, too, at the Pension, nodded to Mother with an expression which plainly said, 'I've finished the story at last'; winked to his cousin, meaning, 'It came out all right, I'm satisfied,' and took his seat between Jinny and Mlle. Vuillemot, the governess who had earned her meal by giving a music lesson that afternoon to a pensionnaire. Jinny looked sideways at him in a spirit of examination, and picked the inevitable crumb deftly from his beard.\n\n'Reminiscences!' she observed slyly. 'You did have some tea, then.' Her long word was well chosen for once; her mind unusually logical, too.\n\nBut Daddy made no reply; he went on eating whatever was set before him with an air of complete detachment; he devoured cold ham and salad automatically; and the children, accustomed to this absorption, ignored his presence. He was still in the atmosphere of his work, abstracted, lost to the outer world. They knew they would only, get wumbled answers to their questions and remarks, and they did not dare to tease him. From time to time he lifted his eyes\u2014very bright they were\u2014and glanced round the table, dimly aware that he was in the midst of a stream of noisy chatter, but unable to enter it successfully at any point. Mother, watching him, thought, 'He's sitting on air, he's wrapped in light, he's very happy'; and ate an enormous supper, as though an insatiable hunger was in her.\n\nThe governess, Mlle. Vuillemot, who stood in awe of the 'author' in him, seized her opportunity. She loved to exchange a mot with a real writer, reading all kinds of unintended subtlety into his brief replies in dreadful French. To-night she asked him the meaning of a word, title of a Tauchnitz novel she had been reading\u2014Juggernaut; but, being on his deaf side, he caught 'Huguenot' instead, and gave her a laboured explanation, strangled by appalling grammar.\n\nThe historical allusions dazed her; the explanation ended on a date.\n\nShe was sorry she had ventured, for it made her feel so ignorant.\n\n'Shuggairnort,' she repeated bravely. She had a vague idea he had not properly heard before.\n\nBut this time he caught 'Argonaut,' and swamped her then with classical exposition, during which she never took her eyes off him, and decided that he was far more wonderful than she had ever dreamed. He was; but not for the reasons she supposed.\n\n'Thank you,' she said with meek gratitude at the end, 'I thank you.'\n\n'Il n'y a pas de quar,' replied Daddy, bowing; and the adventure came to an end. The others luckily had not heard it in full swing; they only caught the final phrase with which he said adieu. But it served its unwitting purpose admirably. It brought him back to the world about him. The spell was broken. All turned upon him instantly.\n\n'Snay pas un morsow de bong.' Monkey copied his accent, using a sentence from a schoolboy's letter in Punch. 'It's not a bit of good.' Mother squelched her with a look, but Daddy, even if he noticed it, was not offended. Nothing could offend him to-night. Impertinence turned silvery owing to the way he took it. There was a marvellous light and sweetness about him. 'He is on air,' decided Mother finally. 'He's written his great Story\u2014our story. It's finished!'\n\n'I don't know,' he said casually to the others, as they stood talking a few minutes in the salon before going over to the Den, 'if you'd like to hear it; but I've got a new creature for the Wumble Book. It came to me while I was thinking of something else\u2014-'\n\n'Thinking of one thing while you were thinking of another!' cried Monkey. It described exaccurately his state of mind sometimes.\n\n'\u2014-and I jotted down the lines on my cuff. So it's not very perfect yet.'\n\nMother had him by the arm quickly. Mlle. Vuillemot was hovering in his neighbourhood, for one thing. It seemed to her they floated over, almost flew.\n\n'It's a Haystack Woman,' he explained, once they were safely in the Den grouped about him. 'A Woman of the Haystack who is loved by the wind. That is to say, the big Wind loves her, but she prefers the younger, handsomer little Winds, and\u2014-'\n\nHe was not allowed to finish. The children laid his cuff back in a twinkling, drawing up the coat sleeve.\n\n'But surely I know that,' Mother was saying. 'I've heard of her before somewhere. I wonder where?' Others were saying the same thing. 'It's not new.'\n\n'Impossible,' said Daddy, 'for the idea only came to me this morning while I was\u2014-'\n\n'Thinking of something else,' Monkey again finished the sentence for him.\n\nMother felt that things were rushing about her from another world. She was vaguely conscious\u2014deliciously, bewilderingly\u2014of having heard this all before. Imaginative folk have built the certainty of a previous existence upon evidence as slight; for actual scenery came with it, and she saw dim forest trees, and figures hovering in the background, and bright atmosphere, and fields of brilliant stars. She felt happy and shining, light as a feather, too. It all was just beyond her reach, though; she could not recover it properly. 'It must have been a dream she told me,' was her conclusion, referring to Mlle. Lemaire. Her old friend was in it somewhere or other. She felt sure of that.\n\nShe hardly heard, indeed, the silly lines her husband read aloud to the children. She liked the sound of his voice, though; it suggested music she had known far away\u2014in her childhood.\n\n'It's high spirits really,' whispered Rogers, sitting beside her in the window. 'It's a sort of overflow from his story. He can't do that kind of rhyme a bit, but it's an indication\u2014-'\n\n'You think he's got a fine big story this time?' she asked under her breath; and Cousin Henry's eyes twinkled keenly as he gave a significant nod and answered: 'Rather! Can't you feel the splendour all about him, the strength, the harmony!'\n\nShe leaped at the word. Harmony exactly described this huge new thing that had come into the family, into the village, into the world. The feeling that they all were separate items, struggling for existence one against the other, had gone for ever. Life seemed now a single whole, an enormous pattern. Every one fitted in. There was effort\u2014 wholesome jolly effort, but no longer the struggle or fighting that were ugly. To 'live carelessly' was possible and right because the pattern was seen entire. It was to live in the whole.\n\n'Harmony,' she repeated to herself, with a great swelling happiness in her heart, 'that's the nunculus of the matter.'\n\n'The what?' he asked, overhearing her.\n\n'The nunculus,' she repeated bravely, seeing the word in her mind, yet unable to get it quite. Rogers did not correct her.\n\n'Rather,' was all he said. 'Of course it is.' What did the pronunciation of a word matter at such a time? Her version even sounded better than the original. Mother saw things bigger! Already she was becoming creative!\n\n'And you're the one who brought it,' she continued, but this time so low that he did not catch the words. 'It's you, your personality, your thinking, your atmosphere somehow that have brought this gigantic sense of peace and calm security which are au fond nothing but the consciousness of harmony and the power of seeing ugly details in their proper place\u2014in a single coup d'oeil\u2014and understanding them as parts of a perfect whole.'\n\nIt was her thought really running on; she never could have found the words like that. She thought in French, too, for one thing. And, in any case, Rogers could not have heard her, for he was listening now to the uproar of the children as they criticised Daddy's ridiculous effusion. A haystack, courted in vain by zephyrs, but finally taken captive by an equinoctial gale, strained nonsense too finely for their sense of what was right and funny. It was the pictures he now drew in the book that woke their laughter. He gave the stack a physiognomy that they recognised.\n\n'But, Mother, he's making it look like you!' cried Monkey\u2014only Mother was too far away in her magnificent reverie to reply intelligently.\n\nI know her; she's my friend,' she answered vaguely. 'So it's all right.'\n\n'Majestic Haystack'\u2014it was the voice of the wind addressing her:\u2014\n\n\u2003'Majestic Haystack, Empress of my life,\n\n\u2003Your ample waist\n\n\u2003Just fits the gown I fancy for my wife,\n\n\u2003And suits my taste;\n\n\u2003Yet there you stand, flat-footed, square and deep,\n\n\u2003An unresponsive, elephantine heap,\n\n\u2003Coquetting with the stars while I'm asleep,\n\n\u2003O cruel Stack!\n\n\u2003Coy, silent Monster, Matron of the fields,\n\n\u2003I sing to you;\n\n\u2003And all the fondest love that summer yields\n\n\u2003I bring to you;\n\n\u2003Yet there you squat, immense in your disdain,\n\n\u2003Heedless of all the tears of streaming rain\n\n\u2003My eyes drip over you\u2014your breathless swain;\n\n\u2003O stony Stack!\n\n\u2003Stupendous Maiden, sweetest when oblong,\n\n\u2003Does inner flame\n\n\u2003Now smoulder in thy soul to hear my song\n\n\u2003Repeat thy name?\n\n\u2003Or does thy huge and ponderous heart object\n\n\u2003The advances of my passion, and reject\n\n\u2003My love because it's airy and elect?\n\n\u2003O wily Stack!\n\n\u2003O crested goddess, thatched and top-knotted,\n\n\u2003O reckless Stack!\n\n\u2003Of wives that to the Wind have been allotted\n\n\u2003There is no lack;\n\n\u2003You've spurned my love as though I were a worm;\n\n\u2003But next September when I see thy form,\n\n\u2003I'll woo thee with an equinoctial storm!\n\n\u2003I have that knack!'\n\n'Far less wumbled than usual,' thought Rogers, as the children danced about the room, making up new ridiculous rhymes, of which 'I'll give you a whack' seemed the most popular. Only Jane Anne was quiet. A courtship even so remote and improbable as between the Wind and a Haystack sent her thoughts inevitably in the dominant direction.\n\n'It must be nice when one is two,' she whispered ambiguously to Mother with a very anxious face, 'but I'm sure that if a woman can't cook, love flies out of the window. It's a positive calamity, you know.'\n\nBut it was Cousin Henry's last night in Bourcelles, and the spirit of pandemonium was abroad. Neither parent could say no to anything, and mere conversation in corners was out of the question. The door was opened into the corridor, and while Mother played her only waltz, Jimbo and Monkey danced on the splintery boards as though it were a parquet floor, and Rogers pirouetted somewhat solemnly with Jane Anne. She enjoyed it immensely, yet rested her hand very gingerly upon his shoulder. 'Please don't hold me quite so tight,' she ventured. 'I've never danced with a strange man before, you see'; and he no more laughed at her than he had laughed at Mother's 'nunculus.' Even Jane Anne, he knew, would settle down comfortably before long into the great big pattern where a particular nook awaited\u2014aye, needed\u2014her bizarre, odd brilliance. The most angular fragments would nest softly, neatly in. A little filing, a little polishing, and all would fit together. To force would only be to break. Hurry was of the devil. And later, while Daddy played an ancient tune that was written originally as a mazurka yet did duty now for a two-step, he danced with Mother too, and the children paused to watch out of sheer admiration.\n\n'Fancy, Mother dancing!' they exclaimed with glee\u2014except Jinny, who was just a little offended and went to stand by the piano till it was over. For Mother danced as lightly as a child for all her pride of measurement, and no frigate ever skimmed the waves more gracefully than Mother glided over those uneven boards.\n\n'The Wind and the Haystack' of course, was Monkey's description.\n\n'You'll wind and haystack to bed now,' was the reply, as Mother sat and fanned herself in the corner. The 'bed-sentence' as the children called it, was always formed in this way. Whatever the child was saying when the moment came, Mother adopted as her verb. 'Shall I put some peat on, Mother?' became 'Peat yourself off to bed-it's nine o'clock'\u2014and the child was sorry it had spoken.\n\nGood-byes had really been said at intervals all day long, and so to- night were slight enough; the children, besides, were so 'excitey- tired,' as Monkey put it, that they possessed no more emotion of any kind. There were various disagreeable things in the immediate future of To-morrow\u2014getting up early, school, and so forth; and Cousin Henry's departure they lumped in generally with the mass, accepted but unrealised. Jimbo could hardly keep his eyes alight, and Monkey's hair was like a baby haystack the wind had treated to an equinoctial storm. Jinny, stiff, perplexed, and solemn with exhaustion, yet dared not betray it because she was older, in measurable distance of her hair going up.\n\n'Why don't you play with the others, child?' asked Mother, finding her upright on a sofa while the romp went on.\n\n'Oh, to-night,' Jinny explained, 'I sit indifferent and look on. I don't always feel like skedivvying about!'\n\nTo skedivvy was to chivvy and skedaddle\u2014its authority not difficult to guess.\n\n'Good-bye, Cousinenry,' each gasped, as his big arms went round them and squeezed out the exclamation. 'Oh, thank you most awfully,' came next, with another kiss, produced by his pressing something hard and round and yellow into each dirty little hand. 'It's only a bit of crystallised starlight,' he explained, 'that escaped long ago from the Cave. And starlight, remember, shines for everybody as well as for yourselves. You can buy a stamp with it occasionally, too,' he added, 'and write to me.'\n\n'We will. Of course!'\n\nJimbo straightened up a moment before the final collapse of sleep.\n\n'Your train leaves at 6.23,' he said, with the authority of exclusive information. 'You must be at the station at six to get the bagages enregistrees. It's a slow train to Pontarlier, but you'll find a wagon direct for Paris in front, next to the engine. I shall be at the station to see you off.'\n\n'I shan't,' said Monkey.\n\nRogers realised with delight the true meaning of these brief and unemotional good-byes. 'They know I'm coming back; they feel that the important part of me is not going away at all. My thinking stays here with them.'\n\nJinny lingered another ten minutes for appearance's sake. It was long past her bed-time, too, but dignity forbade her retiring with the others. Standing by the window she made conversation a moment, feeling it was the proper, grown-up thing to do. It was even expected of her.\n\n'Look! It's full moon,' she observed gravely, as though suggesting that she could, if she liked, go out and enjoy the air. 'Isn't it lovely?'\n\n'No, yesterday was full moon,' Rogers corrected her, joining her and looking out. 'Two nights ago, to be exact, I think.'\n\n'Oh,' she replied, as solemnly as though politics or finance were under discussion, 'then it's bigger than full moon now. It goes on, does it, getting fuller and fuller, till\u2014'\n\n'Now, Jinny dear, it's very late, and you'd better full-moon off to bed,' Mother interrupted gently.\n\n'Yes, Mother; I'm just saying good-night.' She held her hand out, as though she was afraid he might kiss her, yet feared he would not. 'Good-bye, Mr. Cousin Henry, and I hope you'll have an exceedingly happy time in the train and soon come back and visit us again.'\n\n'Thank you,' he said, 'I'm sure I shall.' He gave her a bit of solid starlight as he said it, then suddenly leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. Making a violent movement like an experienced boxer who dodges an upper cut, Jinny turned and fled precipitately from the room, forgetting her parents altogether. That kiss, she felt, consumed her childhood in a flash of fiery flame. In bed she decided that she must lengthen her skirts the very next day, and put her hair up too. She must do something that should give her protection and yet freedom. For a long time she did not sleep. She lay thinking it over. She felt supremely happy\u2014wild, excited, naughty. 'A man has kissed me; it was a man; it was Mr. Rogers, Daddy's cousin\u2026. He's not my cousin exactly, but just \"a man.\"' And she fell asleep, wondering how she ought to begin her letter to him when she wrote, but, more perplexing still, how she ought to\u2014end it! That little backward brain sought the solution of the problem all night long in dreams. She felt a criminal, a dare-devil caught in the act, awaiting execution. Light had been flashed cruelly upon her dark, careful secret\u2014the greatest and finest secret in the world. The child lay under sentence indeed, only it was a sentence of life, and not of death." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 187", + "text": "\u2003Asia.\u2026 I feel, I see\n\n\u2003Those eyes which burn through smiles that fade in tears,\n\n\u2003Like stars half quenched in mists of silver dew.\n\n\u2014Prometheus Unbound, SHELLEY.\n\nIt was only ten o'clock, really, and the curfew was ringing from every village on the mountain-side. The sound of the bells, half musical, half ominous, was borne by the bise across the vineyards, for the easterly wind that brings fine weather was blowing over lake and forest, and seemed to drive before it thin sheets of moonlight that turned the whole world soft. The village lay cosily dreaming beneath the sky. Once the curfew died away there was only the rustling of the plane trees in the old courtyard. The great Citadelle loomed above the smaller houses, half in shadow half in silver, nodding heavily to the spire of the Church, and well within sight of the sentinelle poplar that guarded the village from the forest and the mountains. Far away, these mountains now lowered their enormous shoulders to let night flow down upon the sleeping world. The Scaffolding that brought it had long since sailed over France towards the sea\u2026.\n\nMother, still panting from the ritual of fastening the younger children into bed, had gone a moment down the passage to say good- night to Mlle. Lemaire, and when she returned, the three of them\u2014 herself, her husband, and Cousin Henry\u2014dropped into chairs beside the window and watched the silvery world in silence for a time. None felt inclined to speak. There was drama somehow in that interval of silence\u2014that drama which lurks everywhere and always behind life's commonest, most ordinary moments. Actions reveal it\u2014sometimes\u2014but it mostly lies concealed, and especially in deep silences like this, when the ticking of a cuckoo clock upon the wall may be the sole hint of its presence.\n\nIt was not the good-byes that made all three realise it so near, though good-byes are always solemn and momentous things; it was something that stirred and rose upon them from a far deeper strata of emotion than that caused by apparent separation. For no pain lay in it, but a power much more difficult to express in the sounds and syllables of speech\u2014Joy. A great joy, creative and of big significance, had known accomplishment. Each felt it, knew it, realised it. The moonlit night was aware of it. The entire universe knew it, too. The drama lay in that. There had been creation\u2014of more light\u2026. The world was richer than it had been. Some one had caught Beauty in a net, and to catch Beauty is to transform and recreate all common things. It is revelation.\n\nThrough the mind of each of these three flowed the stream of casual thinking\u2014images, reflections, and the shadowy scaffoldings of many new emotions\u2014sweeping along between the banks of speech and silence. And this stream, though in flood, did not overflow into words for a long time. With eyes turned inwards, each watched the current pass. Clear and deep, it quietly reflected\u2014stars. Each watched the same stream, the same calm depths, the same delicate reflections. They were in harmony with themselves, and therefore with the universe\u2026.\n\nThen, suddenly, one of the reflections\u2014it was the Pleiades\u2014rose to the surface to clasp its lovely original. It was the woman who netted the golden thought and drew it forth for all to see.\n\n'Couldn't you read it to us, Daddy?' she whispered softly across the silence.\n\n'If it's not too long for you.' He was so eager, so willing to comply.\n\n'We will listen till the Morning Spiders take us home,' his cousin said.\n\n'It's only the shorter version,' Daddy agreed shiningly, 'a sketch for the book which, of course, will take a year to write. I might read that, perhaps.'\n\n'Do,' urged Mother. 'We are all in it, aren't we? It's our story as well as yours.'\n\nHe rose to get the portfolio from the shelf where he had laid it, and while Rogers lit the lamp, Riquette stole in at the window, picking her way daintily across the wet tiles. She stood a moment, silhouetted against the sky; then shaking her feet rapidly each in turn like bits of quivering wire, she stepped precisely into the room. 'I am in it too,' she plainly said, curling herself up on the chair Daddy had just vacated, but resigning herself placidly enough to his scanty lap when he came back again and began to read. Her deep purring, while he stroked her absent-mindedly, became an undercurrent in the sound of his voice, then presently ceased altogether\u2026.\n\nOn and on he read, while the moon sailed over La Citadelle, bidding the stars hush to listen too. She put her silvery soft hands across their eyes that they might hear the better. The blue wind of night gathered up the meaning and spread it everywhere. The forest caught the tale from the low laughter in the crest of the poplar, and passed it on to the leagues of forest that bore it in turn across the frontiers into France. Thence snowy Altels and the giant Blumlisalp flashed it south along the crowding peaks and down among the Italian chestnut woods, who next sent it coursing over the rustling waves of the Adriatic and mixed it everywhere with the Mediterranean foam. In the morning the shadows upon bare Grecian hills would whisper it among the ancient islands, and the East catch echoes of it in the winds of dawn. The forests of the North would open their great gloomy eyes with wonder, as though strange new wild-flowers had come among them in the night. All across the world, indeed, wherever there were gardened minds tender enough to grow fairy seed, these flakes of thought would settle down in sleep, and blossom in due season into a crop of magic beauty.\n\nHe read on and on\u2026. The village listened too, the little shadowy street, the familiar pine woods, the troubled Pension, each, as its image was evoked in the story, knew its soul discovered, and stirred in its sleep towards the little room to hear. And the desolate ridges of La Tourne and Boudry, the clefts where the wild lily of the valley grew unknown, high nooks and corners where the buzzards nested, these also knew and answered to the trumpet summons of the Thought that made them live. A fire of creation ran pulsing from this centre. All were in the Pattern of the Story.\n\nTo the two human listeners it seemed as familiar as a tale read, in childhood long ago, and only half forgotten. They always knew a little of what was coming next. Yet it spread so much further than mere childhood memories, for its golden atmosphere included all countries and all times. It rose and sang and sparkled, lighting up strange deep recesses of their unconscious and half-realised life, and almost revealing the tiny silver links that joined them on to the universe at large. The golden ladders from the Milky Way were all let down. They climbed up silvery ropes into the Moon\u2026.\n\n'It's not my own idea,' he said; 'I'm convinced of that. It's all flocked into me from some other mind that thought it long ago, but could not write it, perhaps. No thought is lost, you see\u2014never can be lost. Like this, somehow, I feel it:\u2014\n\n\u2003Now sinks to sleep the clamour of the day,\n\n\u2003And, million-footed, from the Milky Way,\n\n\u2003Falls shyly on my heart the world's lost Thought\u2014\n\n\u2003Shower of primrose dust the stars have taught\n\n\u2003To haunt each sleeping mind,\n\n\u2003Till it may find\n\n\u2003A garden in some eager, passionate brain\n\n\u2003That, rich in loving-kindness as in pain,\n\n\u2003Shall harvest it, then scatter forth again\n\n\u2003It's garnered loveliness from heaven caught.\n\n\u2003Oh, every yearning thought that holds a tear,\n\n\u2003Yet finds no mission,\n\n\u2003And lies untold,\n\n\u2003Waits, guarded in that labyrinth of gold,\u2014\n\n\u2003To reappear\n\n\u2003Upon some perfect night,\n\n\u2003Deathless\u2014not old\u2014\n\n\u2003But sweet with time and distance,\n\n\u2003And clothed as in a vision\n\n\u2003Of starry brilliance\n\n\u2003For the world's delight.'\n\nIn the pauses, from time to time, they heard the distant thunder of the Areuse as it churned and tumbled over the Val de Travers boulders. The Colombier bells, as the hours passed, strung the sentences together; moonlight wove in and out of every adventure as they listened; stars threaded little chapters each to each with their eternal golden fastenings. The words seemed written down in dew, but the dew crystallised into fairy patterns that instantly flew about the world upon their mission of deliverance. In this ancient Network of the Stars the universe lay fluttering; and they lay with it, all prisoners in Fairyland.\n\nFor the key of it all was sympathy, and the' delicate soul of it was tender human love. Bourcelles, in this magic tale, was the starting- point whence the Starlight Expresses flashed into all the world, even unto unvisited, forgotten corners that had known no service hitherto. It was so adaptable and searching, and knew such tiny, secret ways of entrance. The thought was so penetrating, true, and simple. Even old Mother Plume would wake to the recovery of some hitherto forgotten fragrance in her daily life\u2026 just as those Northern forests would wake to find new wild-flowers. For all fairytales issue first from the primeval forest, thence undergoing their protean transformation; and in similar fashion this story, so slight but so tremendous, issued from the forest of one man's underthinking\u2014one deep, pure mind, wumbled badly as far as external things were concerned, yet realising that Bourcelles contained the Universe, and that he, in turn contained Bourcelles. Another, it is true, had shown it to him, though all unwittingly, and had cleaned in his atmosphere the channels for the entrance of the glorious pattern. But the result was the same. In his brain\u2014perhaps by Chance, perhaps by God\u2014lay the machinery which enabled him to give it out to others\u2014the power and ability to transmit. It was a fairy-tale of the world, only the world had forgotten it. He brought back its fairyland again.\n\nAnd this fairyland, what and where was it? And how could this tale of its recovery bring into his listeners' hearts such a sense of peace and joy that they felt suddenly secure in the world and safe mid all the confusion of their muddled lives? That there were tears in Mother's eyes seems beyond question, because the moonlight, reflected faintly from a wet cobble in the yard below, glistened like a tiny silver lantern there. They betrayed the fact that something in her had melted and flowed free. Yet there was no sadness in the fairy-tale to cause it; they were tears of joy.\n\nSurely it was that this tale of Starlight, Starlight Expresses and Star Caves, told as simply as running water, revealed the entire Universe\u2014as One, and that in this mighty, splendid thing each of them nested safe and comfortable. The world was really thinking, and all lay fluttering in the grand, magnificent old Net of Stars. What people think, they are. All can think Beauty. And sympathy\u2014to feel with everything\u2014was the clue; for sympathy is love, and to love a star was to love a neighbour. To be without sympathy was to feel apart, and to think apart was to cut oneself off from life, from the Whole, from God and joy\u2014it was Death. To work at commonplace duties because they were duties to the Universe at large, this was the way to find courage, peace, and happiness, because this was genuine and successful work, no effort lost, and the most distant star aware of it. Thinking was living, whether material results were visible or not; yearning was action, even though no accomplishment was apparent; thought and sympathy, though felt but for a passing moment, sweetened the Pleiades and flashed along the Milky Way, and so-called tangible results that could prove it to the senses provided no adequate test of accomplishment or success. In the knowledge of belonging to this vast underlying unity was the liberation that brings courage, carelessness, and joy, and to admit failure in anything, by thinking it, was to weaken the entire structure which binds together the planets and the heart of a boy. Thoughts were the fairies that the world believed in when it was younger, simpler, less involved in separation; and the golden Fairyland recovered in this story was the Fairyland of lovely thinking\u2026.\n\nIn this little lamp-lit room of the Citadelle, the two listeners were conscious of this giant, delicate network that captured every flying thought and carried it streaming through the world. God became a simple thing: He fashioned Rogers's Scheme, even though it never materialised in bricks and mortar. God was behind Mother, even when she knitted or lit the fire in the Den. All were prisoners in His eternal Fairyland\u2026.\n\nAnd the symbolism of the story, the so-called fantasy, they also easily understood, because they felt it true. To be 'out' of the body was merely to think and feel away from self. As they listened they realised themselves in touch with every nation and with every time, with all possible beliefs and disbeliefs, with every conceivable kind of thinking, that is, which ever has existed or ever shall exist\u2026.\n\nThe heat and radiance given out by the clear delivery of this 'inspirational' fairy-tale must have been very strong; far-reaching it certainly was\u2026.\n\n'Ah!' sighed Rogers to himself, 'if only I could be like that!' not realising that he was so.\n\n'Oh dear!' felt the Woman, 'that's what I've felt sometimes. I only wish it were true of me!' unaware that it could be, and even by the fact of her yearning, was so.\n\n'If only I could get up and help the world!' passed like a flame across the heart of the sufferer who lay on her sleepless bed next door, listening to the sound of the droning voice that reached her through the wall, yet curiously ignorant that this very longing was already majestically effective in the world of definite action.\n\nAnd even Mother Plume, pacing her airless room at the further end of the village and tapping her ebony stick upon the floor, turned suspiciously, as at a passing flash of light that warmed her for a sudden instant as it went.\n\n'Perhaps, after all, they don't mean all these unkind things they do to me!' she thought; 'I live so much alone. Possibly I see things less clearly than I used to do!'\n\nThe spell was certainly very potent, though Daddy himself, reading out the little shining chapters, guessed as little as the rest of them how strong. So small a part of what he meant to say, it seemed, had been transferred to the paper. More than he realised, far, far more, lay between the lines, of course. There was conviction in it, because there was vision and belief. Not much was said when he put his roll of paper down and leaned back in his chair. Riquette opened her eyes and blinked narrowly, then closed them again and began to purr. The ticking of the cuckoo clock seemed suddenly very loud and noticeable.\n\n'Thank you,' said Mother quietly in an uncertain kind of voice. 'The world seems very wonderful now\u2014quite different.'\n\nShe moved in her chair\u2014the first movement she had made for over two hours. Daddy rubbed his eyes, stroked his beard, and lit a cigarette; it went out almost immediately, but he puffed on at it just the same, till his cousin struck a match and stood over him to see it properly alight.\n\n'You have caught Beauty naked in your net of stars,' he murmured; 'but you have left her as you found her\u2014shining, silvery, unclothed. Others will see her, too. You have taken us all back into Fairyland, and I, for one, shall never get out again.'\n\n'Nor I,' breathed some one in the shadows by the window\u2026.\n\nThe clock struck two. 'Odd,' said Mother, softly, 'but I never heard it strike once while you were reading!'\n\n'We've all been out,' Rogers laughed significantly, 'just as you make them get out in the story'; and then, while Riquette yawned and turned a moment from the window-sill to say thank you for her long, warm sleep, Mother lit the spirit-lamp and brewed the cups of chocolate. She tiptoed in next door, and as she entered the sick-room she saw through the steam rising from the cup she carried a curious thing\u2014an impression of brilliance about the bed, as though shafts of light issued from it. Rays pulsed and trembled in the air. There was a perfume of flowers. It seemed she stepped back into the atmosphere of the story for an instant.\n\n'Ah, you're not asleep,' she whispered. 'We've brewed some chocolate, and I thought you might like a cup.'\n\n'No, I'm not asleep,' answered the other woman from the bed she never would leave until she was carried from it, 'but I have been dreaming. It seemed the stars came down into my room and sang to me; this bed became a throne; and some power was in me by which I could send my thoughts out to help the world. I sent them out as a king sends messengers\u2014to people everywhere\u2014even to people I've never heard of. Isn't it wonderful?'\n\n'You've had no pain?' For Mother knew that these sleepless hours at night brought usually intense suffering. She stared at her, noting how the eyes shone and glistened with unshed moisture.\n\n'None,' was the answer, 'but only the greatest joy and peace I've ever known.' The little glass of calmant was untouched; it was not a drug that had soothed the exhausted nerves. In this room at any rate the spell was working still. 'I was carried through the air by stars, as though my ceaseless yearning to get up and work in the world for once was realised.'\n\n'You can do everything from your bed,' her friend murmured, sitting down beside her. 'You do. Your thoughts go out so strongly. I've often felt them myself. Perhaps that's why God put you here in bed like this,' she added, surprised at the power in herself that made her say such things\u2014'just to think and pray for the world.'\n\n'I do pray sometimes for others,' the tortured woman answered modestly, 'but this time I was not conscious of praying at all. It all swept out of me of its own accord. The force in me seemed so free and inexhaustible that it overflowed. It was irresistible. I felt able to save the world.'\n\n'You were out,' said Mother softly, 'out of yourself, I mean,' she corrected it. 'And your lovely thoughts go everywhere. You do save the world.'\n\nThere fell a long silence then between them.\n\n'You've been reading aloud,' Mlle. Lemaire said presently. 'I heard the drone of the voice through the wall\u2014-'\n\n'Daddy was reading his new story to us,' the other said. 'It didn't disturb you?'\n\n'On the contrary. I think it was the voice somehow that brought the vision. I listened vaguely at first, trying to sleep; then, opening my eyes suddenly, the room, as I told you, was full of stars. Their rays caught hold of me and drew these forces out of my very heart. I yielded, giving and giving and giving\u2026 such life flowed from me, and they carried it away in streams\u2026. Oh, it was really like a divine sensation.' 'It was divine,' said Mother, but whether she meant the story or her friend's experience, she hardly knew herself.\n\n'And the story\u2014was it not about our little Bourcelles?' asked the other.\n\nMother held her hands up as though words failed her. She opened her arms wide. She was not quite sure of her voice.\n\n'It was,' she said at length, 'but Bourcelles had grown into the universe. It's a fairy-tale, but it's like a great golden fire. It warmed my heart till my whole body seemed all heart, and I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It makes you see that the whole world is one, and that the sun and moon and stars lie in so small and unimportant a thing as, say, Jimbo's mischief, or Monkey's impudence, or Jinny's backwardness and absurdity. All are in sympathy together, as in a network, and to feel sympathy with anything, even the most insignificant, connects you instantly with the Whole. Thought and sympathy are the Universe\u2014they are life.'\n\nWhile Mother paused for breath, her old friend smiled a curious, meaning smile, as though she heard a thing that she had always known.\n\n'And all of us are in the story, and all the things we think are alive and active too, because we have created them. Our thoughts populate the world, flying everywhere to help or hinder others, you see.'\n\nThe sound of a door opening was heard. Mother got up to go. Shafts of light again seemed to follow her from the figure in the bed.\n\n'Good-night,' she whispered with a full heart, while her thought ran suddenly\u2014'You possess the secret of life and of creation, for suffering has taught it to you, and you have really known it always. But Daddy has put it into words for everybody.' She felt proud as a queen.\n\nThere were whispered good-nights then in the corridor, for Rogers and her husband were on their way home to bed.\n\n'Your chocolate is getting cold,' said Daddy kindly.\n\n'We thought you would probably stay in there. We're going over now.\n\nIt's very late,' Rogers added. They said good-night again.\n\nShe closed and locked the great door of the Citadelle behind them, hearing their steps upon the cobbles in the yard, and for some time afterwards upon the road. But their going away seemed the same as coming nearer. She felt so close to everything that lived. Everything did live. Her heart included all that existed, that ever had existed, that ever could exist. Mother was alive all over. 'I have just been created,' she laughed, and went back into the Den to drink her cup of tepid chocolate.\n\n\u2003See, the busy Pleiades,\n\n\u2003Sisters to the Hyades,\n\n\u2003Seven by seven\n\n\u2003Across the heaven,\n\n\u2003Light desire\n\n\u2003With their fire,\n\n\u2003Working cunningly together in a soft and tireless band,\n\n\u2003Sweetly linking\n\n\u2003All our thinking\n\n\u2003In the Net of Sympathy that brings back Fairyland.\n\nA Voice.\n\nThe prophecy of the children that Bourcelles was a difficult place to get away from found its justification next morning, for Rogers slept so heavily that he nearly missed his train. It was six o'clock when he tumbled downstairs, too late for a real breakfast, and only just in time to get his luggage upon the little char that did duty for all transport in this unsophisticated village. The carpenter pulled it for him to the station.\n\n'If I've forgotten anything, my cousin will send it after me,' he told Mme. Michaud, as he gulped down hot coffee on the steps.\n\n'Or we can keep it for you,' was the answer. 'You'll be coming back soon.' She knew, like the others, that one always came back to Bourcelles. She shook hands with him as if he were going away for a night or two. 'Your room will always be ready,' she added. 'Ayez la bonte seulement de m'envoyer une petite ligne d'avance.'\n\n'There's only fifteen minutes,' interrupted her husband, 'and it's uphill all the way.'\n\nThey trundled off along the dusty road, already hot in the early July sun. There was no breath of wind; swallows darted in the blue air; the perfume of the forests was everywhere; the mountains rose soft and clear into the cloudless sky. They passed the Citadelle, where the awning was already being lowered over the balcony for Mlle. Lemaire's bed to be wheeled out a little later. Rogers waved his handkerchief, and saw the answering flutter inside the window. Riquette, on her way in, watched him from the tiles. The orchards then hid the lower floors; he passed the tinkling fountain; to the left he saw the church and the old Pension, the wistaria blossoms falling down its walls in a cascade of beauty.\n\nThe Postmaster put his head out and waved his Trilby hat with a solemn smile. 'Le barometre est tres haut\u2026' floated down the village street, instead of the sentence of good-bye. Even the Postmaster took it for granted that he was not leaving. Gygi, standing in the door of his barn, raised his peaked hat and smiled. 'Fait beau, ce matin,' he said, 'plus tard il fera rudement chaud.' He spoke as if Rogers were off for a walk or climb. It was the same everywhere. The entire village saw him go, yet behaved as if he was not really leaving. How fresh and sweet the morning air was, keen mountain fragrance in it, and all the delicious, delicate sharpness of wet moss and dewy fields.\n\nAs he passed the courtyard near the Guillaume Tell, and glanced up at the closed windows of Mother Plume's apartment, a pattering step startled him behind, and Jimbo came scurrying up. Rogers kissed him and lifted him bodily upon the top of his portmanteau, then helped the carpenter to drag it up the hill. 'The barriers at the level crossing are down, the warning gongs are ringing. It's signalled from Auvernier.' They were only just in time. The luggage was registered and the train panting up the steep incline, when Monkey, sleep still thick in her eyes, appeared rolling along the white road. She was too breathless to speak; she stood and stared like a stuffed creature in a Museum. Jimbo was beside the engine, having a word with the mecanicien.\n\n'Send a telegram, you know\u2014like that,' he shouted, as the carriage slid past him, 'and we'll bring the char.' He knew his leader would come back. He took his cap off politely, as a man does to a lady\u2014the Bourcelles custom. He did not wave his handkerchief or make undignified signs. He stood there, watching his cousin to the last, and trying to see the working of the engine at the same time. He had already told him the times and stopping places, and where he had to change; there was nothing more for a man to say.\n\nMonkey, her breath recovered now, shouted something impudent from the road. 'The train will break down with you in it before it gets to Pontarlier, and you'll be back for tea\u2014worse luck!' He heard it faintly, above the grinding of the wheels. She blew him a kiss; her hair flew out in a cloud of brown the sunshine turned half golden. He almost saw the shining of her eyes. And then the belt of the forest hid her from view, hid Jimbo and the village too. The last thing he saw of Bourcelles was the top of the church spire and the red roof of the towering Citadelle. The crest of the sentinel poplar topped them both for a minute longer, waved a slight and stately farewell, then lowered itself into the forest and vanished in its turn.\n\nAnd Rogers came back with a start and a bump to what is called real life.\n\nHe closed his eyes and leaned back in his corner, feeling he had suddenly left his childhood behind him for the second time, not gradually as it ought to happen, but all in one dreadful moment. A great ache lay in his heart. The perfect book of fairy-tales he had been reading was closed and finished. Weeks had passed in the delicious reading, but now the last page was turned; he came back to duty\u2014duty in London\u2014great, noisy, overwhelming London, with its disturbing bustle, its feverish activities, its complex, artificial, unsatisfying amusements, and its hosts of frantic people. He grew older in a moment; he was forty again now; an instant ago, just on the further side of those blue woods, he had been fifteen. Life shrank and dwindled in him to a little, ugly, unattractive thing. He was returning to a flat in the dolorous edifice of civilisation. A great practical Scheme, rising in sombre bricks and mortar through a disfiguring fog, blocked all the avenues of the future.\n\nThe picture seemed sordid somewhere, the contrast was so striking. In a great city was no softness; hard, sharp angles everywhere, or at best an artificial smoothness that veiled ugliness and squalor very thinly. Human relationship worked like parts of a machine, cramped into definite orbits, each wheel, each pulley, the smallest deviation deemed erratic. In Bourcelles, the mountain village, there was more latitude, room for expansion, space. The heart leaped up spontaneously like a spring released. In the city this spring was held down rigidly in place, pressed under as by a weight; and the weight, surely, was that one for ever felt compelled to think of self\u2014self in a rather petty, shameful way\u2014personal safety. In the streets, in the houses, in public buildings, shops, and railway stations, even where people met to eat and drink in order to keep alive, were Notice Boards of caution and warning against their fellow kind. Instead of the kindly and unnecessary, even ridiculous little Gygi, there were big, grave policemen by the score, a whole army of them; and everywhere grinned the Notice Boards, like automatic, dummy policemen, mocking joy with their insulting warnings. The heart was oppressed with this constant reminder that safety could only be secured by great care and trouble\u2014 safety for the little personal self; protection from all kinds of robbery, depredation, and attack; beware of pickpockets, the proprietor is not responsible for overcoats and umbrellas even! And burglar alarms and doors of steel and iron everywhere\u2014an organised defence from morning till night\u2014against one's own kind.\n\nHe had lived among these terrible conditions all his life, proud of the personal security that civilisation provided, but he had never before viewed it from outside, as now he suddenly did. A spiritual being, a man, lives in a city as in a state of siege among his own kind. It was deplorable, it was incredible. In little Bourcelles, a mountain village most would describe pityingly as half civilised and out of the world, there was safety and joy and freedom as of the universe\u2026. His heart contracted as he thus abruptly realised the distressing contrast. Although a city is a unit, all classes neatly linked together by laws and by-laws, by County Councils, Parliaments, and the like, the spirit of brotherhood was a mockery and a sham. There is organised charity, but there is not\u2014Charity. In a London Square he could not ring the bell and ask for a glass of milk\u2026. In Bourcelles he would walk into any house, since there were no bells, and sit down to an entire meal!\n\nHe laughed as the absurd comparison darted across his mind, for he recognised the foolish exaggeration in it; but behind the laughter flamed the astonishing truth. In Bourcelles, in a few weeks, he had found a bigger, richer life than all London had supplied to him in twenty years; he had found wings, inspiration, love, and happiness; he had found the universe. The truth of his cousin's story blazed upon him like an inner sun. In this new perspective he saw that it was a grander fairy-tale than he had guessed even when close to it. What was a Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs compared to the endless, far- reaching schemes that life in Bourcelles suggested to him! There was the true centre of life; cities were accretions of disease upon the surface merely! He was leaving Fairyland behind him.\n\nIn sudden moments like this, with their synthetic bird's-eye view, the mind sometimes sees more clearly than in hours of careful reflection and analysis. And the first thing he saw now was Minks, his friendly, ridiculous little confidential secretary. From all the crowds of men and women he knew, respected, and enjoyed in London, as from the vast deluge of human mediocrity which for him was London, he picked out suddenly\u2014little Minks\u2014Herbert Montmorency Minks. His mind, that is, darting forward in swift, comprehensive survey, and searching automatically for some means whereby it might continue the happiness and sweetness recently enjoyed, selected Minks. Minks was a clue. Minks possessed\u2014no matter how absurd the proportions of their mixing \u2014three things just left behind: Vision, Belief, Simplicity, all products of a spiritual imagination.\n\nAnd at first this was the single thought sent forward into the future. Rogers saw the fact, flash-like and true-then let it go, yielding to the greater pull that drew reflection back into the past.\n\nAnd he found it rather dislocating, this abrupt stepping out of his delightful forest Fairyland\u2026. Equilibrium was not recovered for a long time, as the train went thundering over the Jura Mountains into France, Only on the other side of Pontarlier, when the country grew unfamiliar and different, did harmony return. Among the deep blue forests he was still in Fairyland, but at Mouchard the scenery was already changing, and by the time Dole was reached it had completely changed. The train ran on among the plains and vineyards of the Burgundy country towards Laroche and Dijon. The abrupt alteration, however, was pain. His thoughts streamed all backwards now to counteract it. He roamed again among the star fields above the Bourcelles woods. It was true\u2014he had not really left Bourcelles. His body was bumping into Dijon, but the important part of him\u2014thought, emotion, love\u2014lingered with the children, hovered above the Citadelle, floated through the dusky, scented forests.\n\nAnd the haunting picture was ever set in its framework of old burning stars. He could not get the Pleiades in particular out of his mind. The pictures swarmed past him as upon a boy returning to school after the holidays, and each one had a background of sky with stars behind it; the faces that he knew so well had starry eyes; Jimbo flung handfuls of stars loose across the air, and Monkey caught them, fastening them like golden pins into her hair. Glancing down, he saw a long brown hair upon his sleeve. He picked it off and held his finger and thumb outside the window till the wind took it away. Some Morning Spider would ride it home\u2014perhaps past his cousin's window while he copied out that wonderful, great tale. But, instead\u2014how in the world could it happen in clear daylight?\u2014a little hand shot down from above and gathered it in towards the Pleiades.\n\nThe Pleiades\u2014the Seven Sisters\u2014that most exquisite cluster of the eastern sky, soft, tender, lovely, clinging close together always like a group of timid children, who hide a little dimly for fear of being surprised by bolder stars upon their enormous journey\u2014they now shone down upon all he thought and remembered. They seemed always above the horizon of his mind. They never set. In them lay souls of unborn children, children waiting to be born. He could not imagine why this particular constellation clung with such a haunting touch of beauty about his mind, or why some passion of yearning unconfessed and throbbing hid behind the musical name. Stars and unborn children had got strangely mixed!\n\nHe tried to recall the origin of the name\u2014he had learned it once in the old Vicar's study. The Pleiades were attendants upon Artemis, the huntress moon, he recalled vaguely, and, being pursued by Orion, were set for safety among the stars. He even remembered the names of some of them; there was Maia, Tagete, Alcyone, but the other four lay in his mental lumber room, whence they could not be evoked, although Merope, he felt sure, was one of them. Of Maia, however, he felt positive\u2026. How beautiful the names were!\n\nThen, midway, in thinking about them, he found himself, as Monkey said, thinking of something else: of his weeks at Bourcelles again and what a long holiday it had been, and whether it was wasted time or well-used time-a kind of general stock-taking, as it were, but chiefly of how little he had accomplished after all, set down in black and white. He had enjoyed himself and let himself go, rather foolishly perhaps, but how much after all had he actually accomplished? He remembered pleasant conversations with Mother that possibly cheered and helped her\u2014or possibly were forgotten as soon as ended. He remembered his cousin's passing words of gratitude\u2014that he had helped him somehow with his great new story: and he remembered\u2014this least of all-that his money had done something to relieve a case or two of suffering. And this was all! The net result so insignificant! He felt dissatisfied, eager already to make new plans, something definite and thorough that should retrieve the wasted opportunities. With a little thought and trouble, how easily he might have straightened out the tangle of his cousin's family, helped with the education of the growing children, set them all upon a more substantial footing generally. It was possible still, of course, but such things are done best on the spot, the personal touch and presence of value; arranged by correspondence it becomes another thing at once and loses spontaneity. The accent lies on the wrong details. Sympathy is watered by the post\u2026. Importance lodges in angles not intended for it. Master of his time, with certain means at his disposal, a modicum of ability as well, he was free to work hard on the side of the angels wherever opportunity might offer; yet he had wasted all these weeks upon an unnecessary holiday, frittering the time away in enjoyment with the children. He felt ashamed and mortified as the meagre record stared him in the face.\n\nYet, curiously enough, when Reason had set down the figures accurately, as he fancied, and totted up the trifling totals, there flitted before him something more that refused to be set down upon the paper. The Ledger had no lines for it. What was it? Why was it pleasant, even flattering? Why did it mitigate his discontent and lessen the dissatisfied feeling? It passed hovering in and about his thoughts, though uncaught by actual words; and as his mind played with it, he felt more hopeful. He searched in vain for a definition, but, though fruitless, the search brought comfort somehow. Something had been accomplished and it was due to himself, because without his presence it would never have been done. This hint slipped into desire, yearning, hope\u2014that, after all, a result had perhaps been achieved, a result he himself was not properly aware of\u2014a result of that incalculable spiritual kind that escapes the chains of definite description. For he recalled\u2014yet mortified a little the memory should flatter\u2014that his cousin had netted Beauty in his story, and that Mother had spoken of living with greater carelessness and peace, and that each had thanked him as though he were the cause.\n\nAnd these memories, half thought, half feeling, were comforting and delicious, so that he revelled in them lingeringly, and wished that they were really true. For, if true, they were immensely significant. Any one with a purse could build a hospital or pay an education fee, but to be helpful because of being oneself was a vast, incalculable power, something direct from God\u2026 and his thoughts, wandering on thus between fact and fantasy, led him back with a deep inexplicable thrill again to\u2014the Pleiades, whose beauty, without their being aware of it, shines nightly for all who can accept it. Here was the old, old truth once more-that the left hand must not know what the right is doing, and that to be is of greater importance than to do. Here was Fairyland once more, the Fairyland he had just left. To think beauty and love is to become them, to shed them forth without realising it. A Fairy blesses because she is a Fairy, not because she turns a pumpkin into a coach and four\u2026. The Pleiades do not realise how their loveliness may\u2026.\n\nRogers started. For the thought had borrowed a tune from the rhythm of the wheels and sleepers, and he had uttered the words aloud in his corner. Luckily he had the carriage to himself. He flushed. Again a tender and very exquisite thing had touched him somewhere\u2026. It was in that involuntary connection his dreaming had found between a Fairy and the Pleiades. Wings of gauzy gold shone fluttering a moment before his inner sight, then vanished. He was aware of some one very dear and wild and tender, with amber eyes and little twinkling feet\u2014some one whom the Great Tale brought almost within his reach\u2026. He literally had seen stars for an instant\u2014a star! Its beauty brimmed him up. He laughed in his corner. This thing, whatever it was, had been coming nearer for some time. These hints of sudden joy that breathe upon a sensitive nature, how mysterious, how wildly beautiful, how stimulating they are! But whence, in the name of all the stars, do they come? A great happiness passed flaming through his heart, an extraordinary sense of anticipation in it\u2014as though he were going to meet some one who\u2014who\u2014well, what?\u2014who was a necessity and a delight to him, the complement needed to make his life effective\u2014some one he loved abundantly\u2014who would love him abundantly in return. He recalled those foolish lines he had written on sudden impulse once, then thrown away\u2026.\n\nThought fluttered and went out. He could not seize the elusive cause of this delicious joy. It was connected with the Pleiades, but how, where, why? Above the horizon of his life a new star was swimming into glory. It was rising. The inexplicable emotion thrilled tumultuously, then dived back again whence it came\u2026 It had to do with children and with a woman, it seemed, for the next thing he knew was that he was thinking of children, children of his own, and of the deep yearning Bourcelles had stirred again in him to find their Mother\u2026 and, next, of his cousin's story and that wonderful detail in it that the principal role was filled at last, the role in the great Children's Play he himself had felt was vacant. It was to be filled by that childless Mother the writer's imagination had discovered or created. And again the Pleiades lit up his inner world and beckoned to him with their little fingers of spun gold; their eyes of clouded amber smiled into his own. It was most extraordinary and delightful. There was something\u2014come much closer this time, almost within reach of discovery\u2014something he ought to remember about them, something he had promised to remember, then stupidly forgotten. The lost, hidden joy was a torture. Yet, try as he would, no revelation came to clear the matter up. Had he read it somewhere perhaps? Or was it part of the Story his cousin had wumbled into his ear when he only partly listened?\n\n'I believe I dreamed it,' he smiled to himself at last in despair. 'I do believe it was a dream\u2014a fragment of some jolly dream I had in my Fairyland of little Bourcelles!'\n\nChildren, stars, Fairyland, dreams\u2014these brought it somehow. His cousin's story also had to do with it, chiefly perhaps after all\u2014this great story.\n\n'I shall have to go back there to get hold of it completely,' he added with conviction. He almost felt as if some one were thinking hard about him\u2014one of the characters in the story, it seemed. The mind of some one far away, as yet unknown, was searching for him in thought, sending forth strong definite yearnings which came to rest of their own accord in his own being, a garden naturally suited to their growth. The creations of his boyhood's imagination had survived, the Sweep, the Dustman, and the Lamplighter, then why not the far more powerful creations in the story\u2026? Thought was never lost!\n\n'But no man in his senses can believe such a thing!' he exclaimed, as the train ran booming through the tunnel.\n\n'That's the point,' whispered a voice beside him. 'You are out of your senses. Otherwise you could not feel it!'\n\nHe turned sharply. The carriage was empty; there was no one there. It was, of course, another part of himself that supplied the answer; yet it startled him. The blurred reflection of the lamp, he noticed, cast a picture against the black tunnel wall that was like a constellation. The Pleiades again! It almost seemed as if the voice had issued from that false reflection in the shaking window-pane\u2026.\n\nThe train emerged from the tunnel. He rushed out into the blaze of the Interfering Sun. The lovely cluster vanished like a dream, and with it the hint of explanation melted down in dew. Fields sped past with a group of haystacks whose tarpaulin skirts spread and lifted in the gust of wind the train made. He thought abruptly of Mother\u2026. Perhaps, after all, he had taught her something, shown her Existence as a big, streaming, endless thing in which months and years, possibly even life itself, were merely little sections, each unintelligible unless viewed as portions of the Whole, and not as separate, difficult, puzzling items set apart. Possibly he had drawn her map to bigger scale, increased her faith, given her more sense of repose and peace, more courage therefore. She thought formerly of a day, but not of its relation to all days before and behind. She stuck her husband's 'reviews' in the big book, afflicted by the poor financial results they represented, but was unable to think of his work as a stage in a long series of development and progress, no effort lost, no single hope mislaid. And that was something\u2014if he had accomplished it. Only, he feared he had not. There was the trouble. There lay the secret of a certain ineffectiveness in his character. For he did not realise that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causative agent everywhere and always. 'Behind Will stands Desire,' and Desire is Action.\n\nAnd if he had accomplished this, how was it done? Not by preaching, certainly. Was it, then, simply by being, thinking, feeling it? A glorious thought, if true! For assuredly he had this faculty of seeing life whole, and even in boyhood he had looked ahead over its entire map. He had, indeed, this way of relating all its people, and all its parts together, instead of seeing them separate, unintelligible because the context was left out. He lived intensely in the present, yet looked backwards and forwards too at the same time. This large sympathy, this big comforting vision was his gift. Consequently he believed in Life. Had he also, then, the gift of making others feel and believe it too\u2026?\n\nThere he was again, thinking in a circle, as Laroche flew past with its empty platforms, and warned him that Paris was getting close. He bumped out of Fairyland, yet tumbled back once more for a final reverie before the long ugly arms of the city snatched him finally out. 'To see life whole,' he reflected, 'is to see it glorious. To think one's self part of humanity at large is to bring the universe down into the heart. But to see life whole, a whole heart is necessary\u2026. He's done it in that splendid story, and he bagged the raw idea somehow from me. That's something at any rate.\u2026 So few think Beaaty\u2026. But will others see it? That's the point!'\n\n'No, it isn't,' answered the voice beside him. 'The point is that he has thought it, and the universe is richer. Even if others do not read or understand, what he has thought is there now, for ever and ever.'\n\n'True,' he reflected, 'for that Beauty may float down and settle in other minds when they least are looking for it, and ignoring utterly whence comes the fairy touch. Divine! Delicious! Heavenly!'\n\n'The Beauty he has written came through you, yet was not yours,' the voice continued very faintly. 'A far more beautiful mind first projected it into that network which binds all minds together. 'Twas thence you caught it flying, and, knowing not how to give it shape, transferred it to another\u2014who could use it\u2014for others\u2026. Thought is Life, and Sympathy is living\u2026.'\n\nThe voice died away; he could not hear the remainder clearly; the passing scenery caught his attention again; during his reverie it had been unnoticed utterly. 'Thought is Life, but Sympathy is living\u2014-' it rolled and poured through him as he repeated it. Snatches of another sentence then came rising into him from an immense distance, falling upon him from immeasurable heights\u2014barely audible:\n\n'\u2026 from a mind that so loved the Pleiades she made their loveliness and joy her own\u2026 Alcyone, Merope, Maia\u2026' It dipped away into silence like a flower closing for the night, and the train, he realised, was slackening speed as it drew into the hideous Gare de Lyon.\n\n'I'll talk to Minks about it, perhaps,' he thought, as he stood telling the Customs official that he had no brandy, cigarettes, or lace. 'He knows about things like that. At any rate, he'll sympathise.'\n\nHe went across Paris to the Gare du Nord, and caught the afternoon boat train to London. The sunshine glared up from the baking streets, but he never forgot that overhead, though invisible, the stars were shining all the time\u2014Starlight, the most tender and least suspected light in all the world, shining bravely even when obscured by the Interfering Sun, and the Pleiades, softest, sweetest little group among them all.\n\nAnd when at eleven o'clock he entered his St. James's flat, he took a store of it shining in his heart, and therefore in his eyes. Only that was no difficult matter, for all the lamps far up the heights were lit and gleaming, and caught old mighty London in their gorgeous net." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 188", + "text": "\u2003Think with passion\n\n\u2003That shall fashion\n\n\u2003Life's entire design, well planned.\n\n\u2014Woman of the Haystack.\n\n'You are looking so wonderfully well, Mr. Rogers,' Minks observed at Charing Cross Station, 'the passage across the Channel, I trust, was calm.'\n\n'And yourself and Mrs. Minks?' asked Rogers, looking into the equally sunburned face of his secretary, remembering suddenly that he had been to the sea with his family; 'Frank, too, and the other children? All well, I hope?'\n\n'All in excellent health, Mr. Rogers, thanks to your generous thought.\n\nMy wife\u2014-'\n\n'These are the small bags,' the other interrupted, 'and here are the keys for my portmanteaux. There's nothing dutiable. You might bring them on to the flat while I run over to the Club for a bit of supper, Minks.'\n\n'Certainly, with pleasure, Mr. Rogers,' was the beaming reply. 'And Mrs. Minks begged me to tell you\u2014-'\n\nOnly Rogers was already in his taxi-cab and out of ear-shot.\n\n'How well he looks!' reflected Minks, dangling the keys, accustomed to these abrupt interruptions, and knowing that his message had been understood and therefore duly delivered. These cut-off sentences were like a secret code between them. 'And ten years younger! Almost like a boy again. I wonder if\u2014-' He did not permit himself to finish the thought. He tried to remember if he himself had looked like that perhaps in the days of long ago when he courted Albinia Lucy\u2014an air of joy and secrecy and an absent-minded manner that might any moment flame into vehement, concentrated action. For this was the impression his employer had made upon him. Only he could not quite remember those far-off, happy days. There was ecstasy in them; that he knew. And there was ecstasy in Henry Rogers now; that he divined.\n\n'He oughtn't to,' he reflected, as he hurried in another taxi with the luggage. 'All his yearnings would be satisfied if he did, his life flow into a single channel instead of into many.'\n\nHe did not think about his own position and his salary.\n\n'He won't,' he decided as the cab stopped at the door; 'he's not that kind of man.' Minks had insight; he knew men. 'No artist ever ought to. We are so few, and the world has need of us.' His own case was an exception that had justified itself, for he was but a man of talent, and talent did not need an exclusive asceticism; whereas his employer was a man of genius, and no one woman had the right to monopolise what was intended to sweeten the entire universe.\n\nBy the time the luggage had been taken up, he had missed the last tram home, and his sleep that night must in any case be short. Yet he took no note of that. One must live largely. A small sacrifice for such a master was nothing at all. He lingered, glancing now and again at the heap of correspondence that would occupy them next morning, and sorting once more the little pile that would need immediate personal attention. He was picking a bit of disfiguring fluff from his coat sleeve when the door opened and Henry Rogers came upon him.\n\n'Ah! I waited a moment, Mr. Rogers. I thought you might have something to say before I went, perhaps.'\n\n'I hoped you would, Minks. I have a great deal to say. It can wait till to-morrow, really\u2014only I wanted\u2014but, there now, I forgot; you have to get down to Sydenham, haven't you? And it's late already\u2014-'\n\n'That's nothing, Mr. Rogers. I can easily sleep in town. I came prepared, indeed, to do so\u2014-' as though he, too, had his Club and would take a bedroom in it.\n\n'Clever and thoughtful of you, Minks!'\n\n'Only you must be tired after your journey,' suggested the secretary.\n\n'Tired!' exclaimed the other vigorously, 'not a bit! I'm as fresh as a st\u2014a daisy, I mean. Come, draw your chair up; we'll have a smoke and a little chat. I'm delighted to see you again. How are you? And how's everything?'\n\nGoodness! How bright his eyes were, how alert his manner! He looked so young, almost springy, thought Minks, as he obeyed decorously, feeling flattered and pleased, yet at the same time uneasy a little. Such spirits could only proceed, he feared, from one cause. He was a close observer, as all poets had need to be. He would discover some clue before he went to bed, something that should betray the true state of affairs. In any case sleep would be impossible unless he did.\n\n'You stayed away somewhat longer than you originally intended,' he ventured at length, having briefly satisfied his employer's question. 'You found genuine recreation. You needed it, I'm sure.' He glanced with one eye at the letters.\n\n'Re-creation, yes; the very word. It was difficult to leave. The place was so delightful,' said Rogers simply, filling his pipe and lighting it. 'A wonderful mountain village, Minks,' he added, between puffs of smoke, while the secretary, who had been waiting for the sign, then lit his own Virginian and smoked it diffidently, and with just the degree of respect he felt was becoming. He never presumed upon his master's genial way of treating him. He made little puffs and was very careful with the ashes.\n\n'Ah, yes,' he said; 'I am sure it must have been\u2014both delightful and \u2014er\u2014difficult to leave.' He recalled the Margate sands, bathing with Albinia and digging trenches with the children. He had written many lyrics during those happy weeks of holiday.\n\n'Gave one, in fact, quite a new view of life\u2014and work. There was such space and beauty everywhere. And my cousin's children simply would not let me go.'\n\nThere was a hint of apology and excuse in the tone and words\u2014the merest hint, but Minks noticed it and liked the enthusiasm. 'He's been up to some mischief; he feels a little ashamed; his work\u2014his Scheme\u2014 has been so long neglected; conscience pricks him. Ha, ha!' The secretary felt his first suspicion confirmed. 'Cousin's children,' perhaps! But who else?\n\n'He made a tactful reference\u2014oh, very slight and tentative\u2014to the data he had collected for the Scheme, but the other either did not hear it, or did not wish to hear it. He brushed it aside, speaking through clouds of tobacco smoke. Minks enjoyed a bigger, braver puff at his own. Excitement grew in him.\n\n'Just the kind of place you would have loved, Minks,' Rogers went on with zeal. 'I think you really must go there some day; cart your family over, teach the children French, you know, and cultivate a bit of vineyard. Such fine big forests, too, full of wild flowers and things\u2014O such lovely hand-made things\u2014why, you could almost see the hand that made 'em.' The phrase had slipped suddenly into his mind.\n\n'Really, really, Mr. Rogers, but how very jo\u2014delightful it sounds.' He thought of the stubble fields and treeless sea-coast where he had been. The language, however, astonished him. Enthusiasm like this could only spring from a big emotion. His heart sank a little.\n\n'And the people all so friendly and hospitable and simple that you could go climbing with your bootmaker or ask your baker in to dine and sleep. No snobbery! Sympathy everywhere and a big free life flowing in your veins.' This settled it. Only a lover finds the whole world lovable.\n\n'One must know the language, though,' said Minks, 'in order to enjoy the people and understand them, I suppose?'\n\n'Not a bit, not a bit! One feels it all, you see; somehow one feels it and understands. A few words useful here and there, but one gets along without even these. I never knew such a place. Every one seemed to be in sympathy together. They think it, as it were. It was regular fairyland, I tell you.'\n\n'Which means that you felt and thought it,' said Minks to himself. Aloud he merely remarked, though with conviction, for he was getting interested, 'Thinking is important, I know.'\n\nRogers laid his pipe aside and suddenly turned upon him\u2014so abruptly that Minks started. Was this the confession coming? Would he hear now that his chief was going to be married? His wandering eyes almost drew level in the excitement that he felt. He knocked a tiny ash from his cigarette and waited. But the expected bomb did not explode. He heard instead this curious question:\u2014\n\n'And that's something\u2014it reminds me now\u2014something I particularly wanted to ask you about, my dear fellow. You are familiar, I know, with such things and theories\u2014er\u2014speculations, as it were. You read that sort of stuff. You are in touch with the latest ideas, I mean, and up-to-date. You can tell me, if any one can.'\n\nHe paused, hesitating a moment, as Minks, listening in some bewilderment, gazed into his eager face. He said nothing. He only committed himself to a deprecating gesture with his hands, letting his cigarette slip from his fingers on to the carpet.\n\n'About thought,' continued Rogers, keeping his eyes fixed upon him while he rose with flushed face from the search to find the stump. 'What do you know about thought? Tell me what you hear about that\u2014 what theories are held\u2014what people believe about it. I mean thought- transference, telepathy, or whatever it is called. Is it proved? Is it a fact?'\n\nHis voice had lowered. There was mystery in his manner. He sat back in his chair, picked up his pipe, replaced it in his mouth unlighted, and waited.\n\nMinks pulled himself together. His admirable qualities as a private secretary now came in. Putting excitement and private speculations of his own aside, he concentrated his orderly mind upon replies that should be models of succinct statement. He had practised thought- control, and prided himself upon the fact. He could switch attention instantly from one subject to another without confusion. The replies, however, were, of course, drawn from his own reading. He neither argued nor explained. He merely stated.\n\n'Those who have taken the trouble to study the evidence believe,' he began, 'that it is established, though its laws are as yet unknown. Personally, if I may quote myself, I do believe it.'\n\n'Quite so, quite so. Do quote yourself\u2014that's what I want\u2014facts. But you refer to deliberate experiments, don't you?'\n\n'In my own case, yes, Mr. Rogers, although the most successful thought-transference is probably unconscious and not deliberate\u2014-'\n\n'Such as, for instance\u2014-'\n\n'Public opinion,' replied Minks, after a moment's search, 'which is the result of waves of thought sent out by everybody\u2014by a community; or by the joint thinking of a nation, again, which modifies every mind born into that nation, the result of' centuries of common thinking along definite familiar channels. Thought-currents rush everywhere about the world, affecting every one more or less, and\u2014er\u2014 particularly lodging in minds receptive to them.'\n\n'Thought is dynamic, then, they hold?'\n\n'An actual force, yes; as actual as electricity, and as little understood,' returned the secretary, proud that he had read these theories and remembered them. 'With every real thought a definite force goes forth from you that modifies every single person, and probably every single object as well, in the entire world. Thought is creative according to its intensity. It links everybody in the world with everybody else\u2014-'\n\n'Objects too, you say?' Rogers questioned.\n\nMinks glanced up to make sure there was no levity in the question, but only desire for knowledge.\n\n'Objects too,' he replied, apparently satisfied, 'for science tells us that the movement of a body here affects the farthest star. A continuous medium\u2014ether\u2014transmits the vibrations without friction\u2014 and thought-force is doubtless similarly transmitted\u2014er\u2014-'\n\n'So that if I think of a flower or a star, my thought leaps into them and affects them?' the other interrupted again.\n\n'More, Mr. Rogers,' was the reply, 'for your thought, being creative, enriches the world with images of beauty which may float into another mind across the sea, distance no obstacle at all. You make a mental image when you think. There's imagination in all real thinking\u2014if I make myself clear. \"Our most elaborate thoughts,\" to quote for a moment, \"are often, as I think, not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell or down out of heaven.\" So what one thinks affects everybody in the world. The noble thinkers lift humanity, though they may never tell their thoughts in speech or writing.'\n\nHis employer stared at him in silence through the cloud of smoke. The clock on the mantelpiece struck half-past twelve.\n\n'That is where the inspiration of the artist comes in,' continued the secretary after a moment's hesitation whether he should say it or not, 'for his sensitive soul collects them and gives them form. They lodge in him and grow, and every passionate longing for spiritual growth sets the whole world growing too. Your Scheme for Disabled\u2014-'\n\n'Even if it never materialises\u2014-' Rogers brusquely interposed.\n\n'Sweetens the world\u2014yes\u2014according to this theory,' continued Minks, wondering what in the world had come over his chief, yet so pleased to state his own views that he forgot to analyse. 'A man in a dungeon earnestly praying would accomplish more than an active man outside who merely lived thoughtlessly, even though beneficently\u2014if I make myself clear.'\n\n'Yes, yes; you make yourself admirably clear, Minks, as I knew you would.' Rogers lit his pipe again and puffed hard through a minute's silence. The secretary held his peace, realising from the tone of the last sentence that he had said enough. Mr. Rogers was leading up to other questions. Hitherto he had been clearing the ground.\n\nIt came then, through the clouds of smoke, though Minks failed to realise exactly why it was\u2014so important:\n\n'So that if I thought vividly of anything, I should. actually create a mental picture which in turn might slip into another's mind, while that other would naturally suppose it was his own?'\n\n'Exactly, Mr. Rogers; exactly so.' Minks contrived to make the impatience in his voice sound like appreciation of his master's quickness. 'Distance no obstacle either,' he repeated, as though fond of the phrase.\n\n'And, similarly, the thought I deemed my own might have come in its turn from the mind of some one else?'\n\n'Precisely; for thought binds us all together like a network, and to think of others is to spread oneself about the universe. When we think thus we get out\u2014as it were\u2014into that medium common to all of us where spirit meets spirit\u2014-'\n\n'Out!' exclaimed Rogers, putting down his pipe and staring keenly, first into one eye, then into the other. 'Out?'\n\n'Out\u2014yes,' Minks echoed faintly, wondering why that particular word was chosen. He felt a little startled. This earnest talk, moreover, stirred the subconsciousness in him, so that he remembered that unfinished sonnet he had begun weeks ago at Charing Cross. If he were alone now he could complete it. Lines rose and offered themselves by the dozen. His master's emotion had communicated itself to him. A breath of that ecstasy he had already divined passed through the air between them.\n\n'It's what the Contemplative Orders attempt\u2014-' he continued, yet half to himself, as though a little bemused.\n\n'Out, by George! Out!' Rogers said again.\n\nSo emphatic was the tone that Minks half rose from his chair to go.\n\n'No, no,' laughed his chief; 'I don't mean that you're to get out. Forgive my abruptness. The fact is I was thinking aloud a moment. I meant\u2014I mean that you've explained a lot to me I didn't understand before\u2014had never thought about, rather. And it's rather wonderful, you see. In fact, it's very wonderful. Minks,' he added, with the grave enthusiasm of one who has made a big discovery, 'this world is a very wonderful place.'\n\n'It is simply astonishing, Mr. Rogers,' Minks answered with conviction, 'astonishingly beautiful.'\n\n'That's what I mean,' he went on. 'If I think beauty, that beauty may materialise\u2014-'\n\n'Must, will, does materialise, Mr. Rogers, just as your improvements in machinery did. You first thought them out!'\n\n'Then put them into words; yes, and afterwards into metal. Strong thought is bound to realise itself sooner or later, eh? Isn't it all grand and splendid?'\n\nThey stared at one another across the smoky atmosphere of the London flat at the hour of one in the morning in the twentieth century.\n\n'And when I think of a Scaffolding of Dusk that builds the Night,' Rogers went on in a lower tone to himself, yet not so low that Minks, listening in amazement, did not catch every syllable, 'or of a Dustman, Sweep, and Lamplighter, of a Starlight Express, or a vast Star Net that binds the world in sympathy together, and when I weave all these into a story, whose centre somehow is the Pleiades\u2014all this is real and actual, and\u2014and\u2014-'\n\n'May have been projected by another mind before it floated into your own,' Minks suddenly interposed almost in a whisper, charmed wholly into the poet's region by these suggestive phrases, yet wondering a little why he said it, and particularly how he dared to say it.\n\nHis chief turned sharply upon him.\n\n'My own thought exactly!' he exclaimed; 'but how the devil did you guess it?'\n\nMinks returned the stare with triumph.\n\n'Unconscious transference!' he said.\n\n'You really think that?' his master asked, yet not mockingly.\n\nMinks turned a shade pinker.\n\n'I do, indeed, sir,' he replied warmly. 'I think it probable that the thoughts of people you have never seen or heard of drop into your mind and colour it. They lodge there, or are rejected, according to your mood and the texture of your longings\u2014what you want to be, that is. What you want, if I may say so, is emptiness, and that emptiness invites. The flying thought flits in and makes itself at home. Some people overflow with thoughts of kindness and beauty that radiate from them, of love and tenderness and desire to help. These thoughts, it may be, find no immediate object; but they are not lost. They pour loose about the world of men and women, and sooner or later find the empty heart that needs them. I believe, sir, that to sit in a chair and think such things strongly brings comfort to thousands who have little idea whence comes the sudden peace and happiness. And any one who happens to be praying for these things at the moment attracts them instantly. The comfort, the joy, the relief come\u2014-'\n\n'What a good idea, Minks,' said Rogers gently, 'and how helpful if we all believed it. No one's life need be a failure then. Those who want love, for instance, need it, crave it, just think what an army they are!'\n\nHe stared thoughtfully a moment at his little secretary.\n\n'You might write a book about it, you know\u2014try and make people believe it\u2014convince them. Eh? Only, you'd have to give your proofs, you know. People want proofs.'\n\nMinks, pinker than before, hesitated a moment. He was not sure how far he ought to, indulge his private theories in words. The expression in his chief's blue eyes apparently encouraged him.\n\n'But, indeed, Mr. Rogers, the proofs are there. Those moments of sudden strength and joy that visit a man, catching him unawares and unexplained\u2014every solitary man and woman knows them, for every solitary man and woman in the world craves first of all\u2014to be loved. To love another, others, an impersonal Cause, is not enough. It is only half of life; to be loved is the other half. If every single person\u2014I trust, sir, I do not tire you?\u2014was loved by some one, the happiness of life would be enormously greater than it is, for each one loved would automatically then give out from his own store, and to receive love makes one overflow with love for every one else. It is so, is it not, sir?'\n\nRogers, an odd thrill catching him unawares, nodded. 'It is, Minks, it is,' he agreed. 'To love one person makes one half prepared to love all, and to be loved in turn may have a similar effect. It is nice to think so anyhow.'\n\n'It is true, sir\u2014' and Minks sat up, ready with another deluge.\n\n'But you were saying something just now,' interrupted the other, 'about these sudden glimpses of joy and beauty that\u2014er\u2014come to one\u2014 er\u2014inexplicably. What d'ye mean by that precisely?'\n\nMinks glowed. He was being listened to, and understood by his honoured chief, too!\n\n'Simply that some one, perhaps far away\u2014some sweet woman probably\u2014 has been thinking love,' he replied with enthusiasm, yet in a low and measured voice, 'and that the burning thoughts have rushed into the emptiness of a heart that needs them. Like water, thought finds its level. The sudden gush\u2014all feel it more or less at times, surely!\u2014 may rise first from her mind as she walks lonely upon the shore, pacing the decks at sea, or in her hillside rambles, thinking, dreaming, hoping, yearning\u2014to pour out and find the heart that needs these very things, perhaps far across the world. Who knows? Heart thrills in response to heart secretly in every corner of the globe, and when these tides flood unexplained into your soul\u2014-'\n\n'Into my soul\u2014-!' exclaimed his chief.\n\n'I beg your pardon, sir,' Minks hurried to explain; 'I mean to any lonely soul that happens to crave such comfort with real longing\u2014it implies, to my mind at least, that these two are destined to give and take from one another, and that, should they happen to meet in actual life, they will rush together instantly like a pair of flames\u2014-'\n\n'And if they never\u2014meet?' asked Rogers slowly, turning to the mantel- piece for the matches.\n\n'They will continue to feed each other in this delicious spiritual way from a distance, sir. Only\u2014the chances are\u2014that they will meet, for their thought already connects them vitally, though as yet unrealised.'\n\nThere was a considerable pause. Rogers lit his pipe. Minks, feeling he ought to stand while his master did so, also rose from his chair. The older man turned; they faced each other for a moment, Rogers putting smoke violently into the air between them.\n\n'Minks, my dear fellow,' he observed, 'you are, as I have always thought, a poet. You have ideas, and, whether true or not, they are rather lovely. Write them out for others to read. Use your spare time writing them out. I'll see to it that you have more leisure.'\n\nWith a laugh the big man moved abruptly past his chair and knocked his pipe on the edge of the ash-bowl. His eye, as he did so, fell upon the pile of letters and papers arranged so neatly on the table. He remembered the lateness of the hour\u2014and other things besides.\n\n'Well, well,' he said vaguely with a sigh; 'so here we are again back at work in London.'\n\nMinks had turned, too, realising that the surprising conversation was over. A great excitement was in him. He did not feel in the least tired. An unusual sense of anticipation was in the air. He could not make it out at all. Reviewing a dozen possibilities at once, he finally rejected the romantic one he had first suspected, and decided that the right moment had at last come to say something of the Scheme. He had worked so hard to collect data. All was in perfect order. His chief could not feel otherwise than pleased.\n\n'Then I'll be saying good-night, Mr. Rogers,' he began, 'for you must be very tired, and I trust you will enjoy a long night's rest. Perhaps you would like me to come a little later in the morning than usual.'\n\nHe stood looking affectionately at the formidable pile of correspondence, and, as his chief made no immediate reply, he went on, with more decision in his voice:\n\n'Here,' he said, touching the papers he had carefully set on one side, 'are all the facts you wanted referring to your great Scheme\u2014-'\n\nHe jumped. His master's fist had come down with a bang upon the table.\n\nHe stepped back a pace. They stared at one another.\n\n'Damn the Scheme!' cried Rogers. 'have done and finished with it. Tear up the papers. Cancel any arrangements already made. And never mention the thing again in my hearing. It's all unreal and wrong and unnecessary!'\n\nMinks gasped. The man was so in earnest. What could it mean?\n\n'Wrong\u2014unnecessary\u2014done with!' he faltered. Then, noticing the flashing eyes that yet betrayed a hint of merriment in their fire, he added quickly, 'Quite so, Mr. Rogers; I understand. You've got an improvement, you mean?'\n\nIt was not his place to ask questions, but he could not contain himself. Curiosity and disappointment rushed over him.\n\n'A bigger and a better one altogether, Minks,' was the vehement reply. He pushed the heap of papers towards the secretary. Minks took them gingerly, reluctantly.\n\n'Burn 'em up,' Rogers went on, 'and never speak to me again about the blessed thing. I've got a far bigger Scheme than that.'\n\nMinks slowly gathered the papers together and put them in his biggest pocket. He knew not what to think. The suddenness of the affair dazed him. Thought-transference failed this time; he was too perturbed, indeed, to be in a receptive state at all. It seemed a catastrophe, a most undesirable and unexpected climax. The romantic solution revived in him\u2014but only for a passing moment. He rejected it. Some big discovery was in the air. He felt that extraordinary sense of anticipation once again.\n\n'Look here, my dear fellow, Minks,' said Rogers, who had been watching his discomfiture with amusement, 'you may be surprised, but you need not be alarmed. The fact is, this has been coming for a long time; it's not an impulsive decision. You must have felt it\u2014from my letters. That Scheme was all right enough, only I am not the right man for it. See? And our work,' he added laughingly, 'won't go for nothing either, because our thought will drop into another mind somewhere that will accomplish the thing far better than I could have accomplished it.'\n\nMinks made an odd gesture, as who should say this might not be true. He did not venture upon speech, however. This new plan must be very wonderful, was all he thought just then. His faith in his employer's genius was complete.\n\n'And in due time you shall hear all about it. Have a little patience. Perhaps you'll get it out of my thoughts before I tell it to you,' he smiled, 'but perhaps you won't. I can only tell you just now that it has beauty in it\u2014-a beauty of the stars.'\n\nYet what his bigger Scheme was he really had no clear idea. He felt it coming-that was all!\n\nAnd with that Minks had to be content. This was dismissal. Good-nights were said, and the secretary went out into the street.\n\n'Go to a comfortable hotel,' was the last thing he heard, 'and put it down to me, of course. Sleep well, sleep well. To-morrow at two o'clock will do.'\n\nMinks strolled home, walking upon air. The sky was brilliant with its gorgeous constellations\u2014the beauty of the stars. Poems blazed upon him. But he was too excited to compose. Even first lines evaded capture. 'Stars,' besides, was a dreadful word to rhyme with, for all its charm and loveliness. He knew of old that the only word was 'wars,' most difficult to bring in naturally and spontaneously, and with the wrong sound in any case.\n\n'He must have been writing poetry out there,' he reflected finally, 'or else living it. Living it, probably. He's a grand fellow anyhow, grand as a king.' Stars, wars, kings, thrones-the words flew in and out among a maze of unaccomplished lines.\n\nBut the last thing in his mind as he curled up to sleep in the strange bed was that he had delivered his wife's message, but that he could not tell her about this sudden collapse of the great, long-talked-of Scheme. Albinia would hardly understand. She might think less of his chief. He would wait until the new one dawned upon the horizon with its beauty of the stars. Then he would simply overwhelm her with it, as his temperament loved to do." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 189", + "text": "\u2003Lo, every yearning thought that holds a tear,\n\n\u2003Yet finds no mission\n\n\u2003And lies untold,\n\n\u2003Waits, guarded in that labyrinth of gold,\u2014\n\n\u2003To reappear\n\n\u2003Upon some perfect night,\n\n\u2003Deathless\u2014not old\u2014\n\n\u2003But sweet with time and distance,\n\n\u2003And clothed as in a vision\n\n\u2003Of starry brilliance\n\n\u2003For the world's delight.\n\n\u2014JOHN HENRY CAMPDEN.\n\nThen, as the days passed, practical life again caught Henry Rogers in its wholesome grip. Fairyland did not fade exactly, but it dipped a little below the horizon. Like hell and heaven, it was a state of mind, open potentially to all, but not to be enjoyed merely for the asking. Like other desirable things, it was to be 'attained.' Its remoteness and difficulty of access lent to it a haunting charm; for though its glory dimmed a little, there was a soft afterglow that shed its radiance even down Piccadilly and St. James's Street. He was always conscious of this land beyond the sunset; the stars shone brightly, though clouds or sunlight interfered to blur their message.\n\nLondon life, however, by the sheer weight of its grinding daily machinery, worked its slow effect upon him. He became less sensitive to impressions. These duller periods were interrupted sometimes by states of brilliant receptiveness, as at Bourcelles; but there was a fence between the two\u2014a rather prickly frontier, and the secret of combining them lay just beyond his reach. For his London mind, guided by reason, acted in a logical plane of two dimensions, while imagination, captained by childhood's fairy longings, cantered loose in all directions at once\u2014impossibly. The first was the world; the second was the universe. As yet, he was unable to co-ordinate them. Minks, he was certain, could\u2014and did, sailing therefore upon an even keel. There was this big harmony in little Minks that he envied. Minks had an outlet. Sydenham, and even the City, for him were fairyland; a motor-bus fed his inspiration as surely as a starlit sky; moon always rhymed with June, and forget with regret. But the inner world of Henry Rogers was not yet properly connected with the outer. Passage from one to the other was due to chance, it seemed, not to be effected at will. Moods determined the sudden journey. He rocked. But for his talks with little Minks, he might have wrecked.\n\nAnd the talks with Minks were about\u2014well, he hardly knew what, but they all played round this map of fairyland he sought to reduce to the scale of everyday life. They discussed thought, dreams, the possibility of leaving the body in sleep, the artist temperament, the source of inspiration as well as the process of the imaginative faculty that created. They talked even of astronomy. Minks held that the life of practical, daily work was the bed-rock of all sane production, yet while preaching this he bubbled over with all the wild, entrancing theories that were in the air to-day. They were comical, but never dangerous\u2014did not upset him. They were almost a form of play.\n\nAnd his master, listening, found these conversations an outlet somehow for emotions in himself he could not manage\u2014a scaffolding that provided outlines for his awakening dreams to build upon. He found relief. For Minks, with his delightful tact, asked no awkward questions. He referred neither to the defunct Scheme, nor mentioned the new one that held 'a beauty of the stars.' He waited. Rogers also waited.\n\nAnd, while he waited, he grew conscious more and more of an enormous thing that passed, driving behind, below, his daily external life. He could never quite get at it. In there, down out of sight somewhere, he knew everything. His waking existence was fed invisibly from below. In the daytime he now frequently caught himself attempting to recover the memory of things that went on elsewhere, things he was personally involved in, vital things. This daylight effort to recover them was as irksome as the attempt to draw a loose hair that has wound about the tongue. He spoke at length to Minks about it.\n\n'Some part of you,' replied the imperturbable secretary, after listening carefully to his master's vague description of the symptoms, 'is being engaged elsewhere\u2014very actively engaged\u2014-'\n\n'Eh?' asked Rogers, puzzled.\n\n'Probably at night, sir, while your brain and body sleep,' Minks elaborated, 'your energetic spirit is out\u2014on the plane of causes\u2014-'\n\nThe other gasped slightly, 'While my body lies unconscious?'\n\n'Your spirit may be busy at all kinds of things. That can never be unconscious,' was the respectful answer. 'They say\u2014-'\n\n'Yes, what do they say?' He recognised a fairy theory, and jumped at it.\n\n'That in sleep,' continued the other, encouraged, 'the spirit knows a far more concentrated life\u2014dips down into the deep sea of being\u2014our waking life merely the froth upon the shore.'\n\nRogers stared at him. 'Yes, yes,' he answered slowly, 'that's very pretty, very charming; it's quite delightful. What ideas you have, my dear Minks! What jolly, helpful ideas!'\n\nMinks beamed with pleasure.\n\n'Not my own, Mr. Rogers, not my own,' he said, with as much pride as if they were his own, 'but some of the oldest in the world, just coming into fashion again with the turn of the tide, it seems. Our daily life\u2014even the most ordinary\u2014is immensely haunted, girdled about with a wonder of incredible things. There are hints everywhere to-day, though few can read the enormous script complete. Here and there one reads a letter or a word, that's all. Yet the best minds refuse to know the language, not even the ABC of it; they read another language altogether\u2014-'\n\n'The best minds!' repeated Rogers. 'What d'you mean by that!' It sounded, as Minks said it, so absurdly like best families.\n\n'The scientific and philosophical minds, sir. They think it's not worth learning, this language. That's the pity of it\u2014ah, the great pity of it!' And he looked both eager and resentful\u2014his expression almost pathetic. He turned half beseechingly to his employer, as though he might alter the sad state of things. 'As with an iceberg, Mr. Rogers,' he added, 'the greater part of everything\u2014of ourselves especially\u2014is invisible; we merely know the detail banked against an important grand Unseen.'\n\nThe long sentence had been suffered to its close because the audience was busy with thoughts of his own instead of listening carefully. Behind the wild language stirred some hint of meaning that, he felt, held truth. For a moment, it seemed, his daylight searching was explained\u2014almost.\n\n'Well and good, my dear fellow, and very picturesque,' he said presently, gazing with admiration at his secretary's neat blue tie and immaculate linen; 'but thinking, you know, is not possible without matter.' This in a tone of 'Do talk a little sense.' 'Even if the spirit does go out, it couldn't think apart from the brain, could it now, eh?'\n\nMinks took a deep breath and relieved himself of the following:\n\n'Ah, Mr. Rogers'\u2014as much as to say 'Fancy you believing that!'\u2014 'but it can experience and know direct, since it passes into the region whence the material that feeds thought issues in the first instance\u2014causes, Mr. Rogers, causes.'\n\n'Oho!' said his master, 'oho!'\n\n'There is no true memory afterwards,' continued the little dreamer, 'because memory depends upon how much the spirit can bring back into the brain, you see. We have vague feelings, rather than actual recollection\u2014feelings such as you were kind enough to confess to me you had been haunted by yourself\u2014-'\n\n'All-overish feelings,' Rogers helped him, seeing that he was losing confidence a little, 'vague sensations of joy and wonder and\u2014well\u2014in a word, strength.'\n\n'Faith,' said Minks, with a decision of renewed conviction, 'which is really nothing but unconscious knowledge\u2014knowledge unremembered. And it's the half-memory of what you do at night that causes this sense of anticipation you now experience; for what is anticipation, after all, but memory thrown forward?'\n\nThere was a pause then, during which Rogers lit a cigarette, while Minks straightened his tie several times in succession.\n\n'You are a greater reader than I, of course,' resumed his employer presently; 'still, I have come across one or two stories which deal with this kind of thing. Only, in the books, the people always remember what they've done at night, out of the body, in the spirit, or whatever you like to call it. Now, I remember nothing whatever. How d'you account for that, pray?'\n\nMinks smiled a little sadly. 'The books,' he answered very softly, 'are wrong there\u2014mere inventions\u2014not written from personal experience. There can be no detailed memory unless the brain has been 'out' too\u2014which it hasn't. That's where inaccuracy and looseness of thought come in. If only the best minds would take the matter up, you see, we might\u2014-'\n\nRogers interrupted him. 'We shall miss the post, Minks, if we go on dreaming and talking like this,' he exclaimed, looking at his watch and then at the pile of letters waiting to be finished. 'It is very delightful indeed, very\u2014but we mustn't forget to be practical, too.'\n\nAnd the secretary, not sorry perhaps to be rescued in time from the depths he had floundered in, switched his mind in concentration upon the work in hand again. The conversation had arisen from a chance coincidence in this very correspondence\u2014two letters that had crossed after weeks of silence.\n\nWork was instantly resumed. It went on as though it had never been interrupted. Pride and admiration stirred the heart of Minks as he noticed how keenly and accurately his master's brain took up the lost threads again. 'A grand fellow!' he thought to himself, 'a splendid man! He lives in both worlds at once, yet never gets confused, nor lets one usurp his powers to the detriment of the other. If only I were equally balanced and effective. Oh dear!' And he sighed.\n\nAnd there were many similar conversations of this kind. London seemed different, almost transfigured sometimes. Was this the beginning of that glory which should prove it a suburb of Bourcelles?\n\nRogers found his thoughts were much in that cosy mountain village: the children capered by his side all day; he smelt the woods and flowers; he heard the leaves rustle on the poplar's crest; and had merely to think of a certain room in the tumble-down old Citadelle for a wave of courage and high anticipation to sweep over him like a sea. A new feeling of harmony was taking him in hand. It was very delightful; and though he felt explanation beyond his reach still, his talks with Minks provided peep-holes through which he peered at the enormous thing that brushed him day and night.\n\nA great settling was taking place inside him. Thoughts certainly began to settle. He realised, for one thing, that he had left the theatre where the marvellous Play had been enacted. He stood outside now, able to review and form a judgment. His mind loved order. Undue introspection he disliked, as a form of undesirable familiarity; a balanced man must not be too familiar with himself; it endangered self-respect.\n\nHe had been floundering rather. After years of methodical labour the freedom of too long a holiday was disorganising. He tried to steady himself. And the Plan of Life, answering to control, grew smaller instantly, reduced to proportions he could examine reasonably. This was the beginning of success. The bewildering light of fairyland still glimmered, but no longer so diffused. It focused into little definite kernels he could hold steady while he scrutinised them.\n\nAnd these kernels he examined carefully as might be: in the quiet, starry evenings usually, while walking alone in St. James's Park after his day of board meetings, practical work with Minks, and the like.\n\nGradually then, out of the close survey, emerged certain things that seemed linked together in an intelligible sequence of cause and effect. There was still mystery, for subconscious investigation ever involves this background of shadow. Question and Wonder watched him. But the facts emerged.\n\nHe jotted them down on paper as best he could. The result looked like a Report drawn up by Minks, only less concise and\u2014he was bound to admit it\u2014less intelligible. He smiled as he read them over\u2026.\n\n'My thoughts and longings, awakened that night in the little Crayfield garden,' he summed it up to himself, having read the Report so far, 'went forth upon their journey of realisation. I projected them\u2014 according to Minks\u2014vividly enough for that! I thought Beauty\u2014and this glorious result materialised! More\u2014my deepest, oldest craving of all has come to life again\u2014the cry of loneliness that yearns to\u2014that seeks\u2014er\u2014-'\n\nAt this point, however, his analysis grew wumbled; the transference of thought and emotion seemed comprehensible enough; though magical, it was not more so than wireless telegraphy, or that a jet of steam should drive an express for a hundred miles. It was conceivable that Daddy had drawn thence the inspiration for his wonderful story. What baffled him was the curious feeling that another was mixed up in the whole, delightful business, and that neither he nor his cousin were the true sponsors of the fairy fabric. He never forgot the description his cousin read aloud that night in the Den\u2014how the Pattern of his Story reached its climax and completeness when a little starry figure with twinkling feet and amber eyes had leaped into the centre and made itself at home there. From the Pleiades it came. The lost Pleiad was found. The network of thought and sympathy that contained the universe had trembled to its uttermost fastenings. The principal role was filled at last.\n\nIt was here came in the perplexing thing that baffled him. His mind sat down and stared at an enormous, shadowy possibility that he was unable to grasp. It brushed past him overhead, beneath, on all sides. He peered up at it and marvelled, unconvinced, yet knowing himself a prisoner. Something he could not understand was coming, was already close, was watching him, waiting the moment to pounce out, like an invisible cat upon a bewildered mouse. The question he flung out brought no response, and he recalled with a smile the verse that described his absurd position:\u2014\n\nLike a mouse who, lost in wonder,\n\nFlicks its whiskers at the thunder!\n\nFor, while sprites and yearning were decidedly his own, the interpretation of them, if not their actual origin, seemed another's. This other, like some dear ideal on the way to realisation, had taken him prisoner. The queer sense of anticipation Bourcelles had fostered was now actual expectation, as though some Morning Spider had borne his master-longing, exquisitely fashioned by the Story, across the Universe, and the summons had been answered-from the Pleiades. The indestructible threads of thought and feeling tightened. The more he thought about his cousin's interpretation the more he found in it a loveliness and purity, a crystal spiritual quality, that he could credit neither to the author's mind nor to his own. This soft and starry brilliance was another's. Up to a point the interpretation came through Daddy's brain, just as the raw material came through his own; but there-after this other had appropriated both, as their original creator and proprietor. Some shining, delicate hand reached down from its starry home and gathered in this exquisite form built up from the medley of fairy thought and beauty that were first its own. The owner of that little hand would presently appear to claim it.\n\n'We were but channels after all then\u2014both of us,' was the idea that lay so insistently in him. 'The sea of thought sends waves in all directions. They roll into different harbours. I caught the feeling, he supplied the form, but this other lit the original fire!'\n\nAnd further than this wumbled conclusion he could not get. He went about his daily work. however, with a secret happiness tugging at his mind all day, and a sense of expectant wonder glancing brightly over everything he thought or did. He was a prisoner in fairyland, and what he called his outer and his inner world were, after all, but different ways of looking at one and the same thing. Life everywhere was one." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 190", + "text": "\u2003Es stehen unbeweglich\n\n\u2003Die Sterne in der Hoh'\n\n\u2003Viel tausend Jahr', und schauen\n\n\u2003Sich an mit Liebesweh.\n\n\u2003Sie sprechen eine Sprache,\n\n\u2003Die ist so reich, so schon;\n\n\u2003Doch keiner der Philologen\n\n\u2003Kann diese Sprache verstehen.\n\n\u2003Ich aber hab' sie gelernet,\n\n\u2003Und ich vergesse sie nicht;\n\n\u2003Mir diente als Grammatik\n\n\u2003Der Herzallerliebsten Gesicht.\n\n\u2014HEINE.\n\nOne evening in particular the sense of expectation in him felt very close upon delivery. All day he had been aware of it, and a letter received that morning from his cousin seemed the cause. The story, in its shorter version, had been accepted. Its reality, therefore, had already spread; one other mind, at least, had judged it with understanding. Two months from now, when it appeared in print, hundreds more would read it. Its beauty would run loose in many hearts. And Rogers went about his work that day as though the pleasure was his own. The world felt very sweet. He saw the good in every one with whom he came in contact. And the inner excitement due to something going to happen was continuous and cumulative.\n\nYet London just then\u2014it was August\u2014was dull and empty, dusty, and badly frayed at the edges. It needed a great cleaning; he would have liked to pour sea water over all its streets and houses, bathed its panting parks in the crystal fountains of Bourcelles. All day long his thoughts, indeed, left London for holidays in little Bourcelles. He was profoundly conscious that the Anticipation he first recognised in that forest village was close upon accomplishment now. On the journey back to England he recalled how urgent it had been. In London, ever since, it had never really left him. But to-day it now suddenly became more than expectation\u2014he felt it in him as a certainty that approached fulfilment. It was strange, it was bewildering; it seemed to him as though something from that under-self he could never properly reach within him, pushed upwards with a kind of aggressive violence towards the surface. It was both sweet and vital. Behind the 'something' was the 'some one' who led it into action.\n\nAt half-past six he strolled down a deserted St. James's Street, passed the door of his club with no temptation to go in, and climbed the stairs slowly to his rooms. His body was languid though his mind alert. He sank into an arm-chair beside the open window. 'I must do something to-night,' he thought eagerly; 'mere reading at the club is out of the question. I'll go to a theatre or\u2014or\u2014.' He considered various alternatives, deciding finally upon Richmond Park. He loved long walks at night when his mind was restless thus; the air in Richmond Park was peculiarly fresh and scented after dark. He knew the little gate that was never closed. He would dine lightly, and go for a ten-mile stretch among the oaks, surprise the deer asleep, listen to the hum of distant London, and watch the fairy battle between the lurid reflection of its million lights and the little stars\u2026. There were places in the bracken where\u2026.\n\nThe rumbling clatter of a railway van disturbed the picture. His mind followed the noise instead. Thought flashed along the street to a station. He saw trains\u2026\n\n'Come at once! You're wanted here\u2014some one calls you!' sounded a breathless merry voice beside him. 'Come quickly; aussi schnell que moglich!'\n\nThere was a great gulp of happiness in him; his spirit plunged in joy. He turned and looked about him swiftly. That singing voice, with its impudent mingling of languages was unmistakable.\n\n'From the Pleiades. Look sharp! You've been further off than ever lately, and further is further than farther\u2014much! Over the forests and into the cave, that is the way we must all behave\u2014-!'\n\nHe opened an eye.\n\nBetween him and a great gold sunset ran the wind. It was a slender violet wind. The sunset, however, was in the act of disappearing for the Scaffolding of Dusk was passing through the air\u2014he saw the slung trellis-work about him, the tracery of a million lines, the guy-ropes, uprights, and the feathery threads of ebony that trailed the Night behind them like a mighty cloth. There was a fluttering as of innumerable wings.\n\n'You needn't tug like that,' he gasped. 'I'm coming all right. I'm out!'\n\n'But you're so slow and sticky,' she insisted. 'You've been sticky like this for weeks now!'\n\nHe saw the bright brown eyes and felt the hair all over his face like a bath of perfume. They rushed together. His heart beat faster\u2026.\n\n'Who wants me in such a hurry?' he cried, the moment he was disentangled. Laughter ran past him on every side from the world of trees.\n\n'As if you didn't know! What is the good of pretending any longer! You're both together in the Network, and you know it just as well as she does!'\n\nPretending! Just as well as she does!\n\nAs though he had eyes all over his body he saw the Net of Stars above him. Below were forests, vineyards, meadows, and the tiny lights of houses. In the distance shimmered the waters of a familiar lake. Great purple mountains rolled against the sky line. But immediately over his head, close yet also distant, filling the entire heavens, there hung a glittering Pattern that he knew, grown now so vast that at first he scarcely recognised its dazzling loveliness. From the painted western horizon it stretched to other fastenings that dipped below the world, where the East laid its gulfs of darkness to surprise the sun. It swung proudly down, as though hung from the Pole Star towards the north, and while the Great Bear 'pointers' tossed its embroidery across Cassiopeia, the Pleiades, just rising, flung its further fringes down to Orion, waiting in wonder to receive them far below the horizon. Old Sirius wore one breadth of it across his stupendous shoulder, and Aldebaran, with fingers of bronze and fire, drew it delicately as with golden leashes over the sleeping world.\n\nWhen first he saw it, there was this gentle fluttering as of wings through all its intricate parts, but the same moment four shooting stars pierced its outlying edges with flying nails of gold. It steadied and grew taut.\n\n'There she is!' cried Monkey, flashing away like a comet towards the Cave. 'You'll catch it now\u2014and you deserve to!' She turned a brilliant somersault and vanished.\n\nThen, somehow, the vast Pattern settled into a smaller scale, so that he saw it closer, clearer, and without confusion. Beauty and wonder focused for his sight. The perfected design of Daddy's fairy story floated down into his heart without a hint of wumbling. Never had he seen it so luminous and simple. For others, of course, meanwhile had known and understood it. Others believed. Its reality was more intense, thus, than before.\n\nHe rose from the maze of tree-tops where he floated, and stretched his arms out, no fear or hesitation in him anywhere. Perched in the very centre of the Pattern, seated like a new-born star upon its throne, he saw that tiny figure who had thrilled him months ago when he caught it in a passing instant, fluttering in the web of Daddy's story,\u2014both its climax and its inspiration. The twinkling feet were folded now. He saw the soft little eyes that shone like starlight through clear amber. The hands, palms upwards, were stretched to meet his own.\n\n'You, of course, must come up\u2014to me,' he heard.\n\nAnd climbing the lace-like tracery of the golden web, he knelt before her. But, almost before both knees were bent, her hands had caught him\u2014the touch ran like a sheath of fire through every nerve\u2014and he was seated beside her in that shining centre.\n\n'But why did it suddenly grow small?' he asked at once. He felt absolutely at home. It was like speaking to a child who loved him utterly, and whom he, in his turn, knew intimately inside out.\n\n'Because you suddenly understood,' was the silvery, tiny answer. 'When you understand, you bring everything into yourself, small as a toy. It is size that bewilders. Men make size. Fairy things, like stars and tenderness, are always small.'\n\n'Of course,' he said; 'as if I didn't know it already!'\n\n'Besides,' she laughed, half closing her brilliant eyes and peering at him mischievously, 'I like everything so tiny that you can find it inside a shell. That makes it possible to do big things.'\n\n'Am I too big\u2014-?' he exclaimed, aware of clumsiness before this exquisite daintiness.\n\n'A little confused, that's all,' her laughter rippled. 'You want smoothing down. I'll see to that.'\n\nHe had the feeling, as she said it, that his being included the entire Pattern, even to its most distant edges where it fastened on to the rim of the universe. From this huge sensation, he came back swiftly to its tiny correspondence again. His eyes turned to study her. But she seemed transparent somehow, so that he saw the sky behind her, and in it, strangely enough\u2014just behind her face\u2014the distant Pleiades, shining faintly with their tender lustre. They reached down into her little being, it seemed, as though she emanated from them. Big Aldebaran guided strongly from behind. For an instant he lost sight of the actual figure, seeing in its place a radiant efflorescence, purified as by some spiritual fire\u2014the Spirit of a Star.\n\n'I'm here, quite close beside you,' whispered the tiny voice. 'Don't let your sight get troublesome like your size. Inside-sight, remember, is the thing!'\n\nHe turned, or rather he focused sight again to find her. He was startled a little. For a moment it seemed like his own voice speaking deep down within himself.\n\n'Make yourself at home,' it continued, 'you belong here\u2014almost as much as I do.' And at the sound of her voice all the perplexities of his life lay down. It brushed him smooth, like a wind that sets rough feathers all one way,\n\nHe remembered again where he was, and what was going on.\n\n'I do,' he answered, happy as a boy. 'I am at home. It is perfect.'\n\n'Do you, indeed! You speak as though this story were your own!'\n\nAnd her laugh was like the tinkle of hare-bells in the wind.\n\n'It is,' he said; 'at least I had\u2014I have, rather, a considerable hand in the making of it.'\n\n'Possibly,' she answered, 'but the story belongs to the person who first started it. And that person is myself. The story is mine really!'\n\n'Yours!' he gasped.\n\n'Because\u2014I am the story!'\n\nHe stared hard to find the face that said this thing. Thought stopped dead a moment, blocked by a marvel that was impossible, yet true.\n\n'You mean\u2014-?' he stammered.\n\n'You heard perfectly what I said; you understood it, too. There's no good pretending,' impatience as well as laughter in the little voice. 'I am the story,\u2014the story that you love.'\n\nA sudden joy burst over him in a flood. Struggle and search folded their wings and slept. An immense happiness wrapped him into the very woof of the pattern wherein they sat. A thousand loose and ineffective moods of his life found coherence, as a thousand rambling strands were gathered home and fastened into place.\n\nAnd the Pattern quivered and grew brighter.\n\n'I am the story because I thought of it first. You, as a version of its beauty\u2014a channel for its delivery\u2014belong utterly to me. You can no more resist me than a puddle can resist the stars' reflection. You increase me. We increase each other.'\n\n'You say you thought it first,' he cried, feeling the light he radiated flow in and mingle with her own. 'But who are you? Where do you come from?'\n\n'Over there somewhere, I think,' she laughed, while a ray like fire flashed out in the direction of the Pleiades that climbed the sky towards the East. 'You ought to know. You've been hunting for me long enough!'\n\n'But who are you?' he insisted again, 'for I feel it's you that have been looking for me\u2014I've so often heard you calling!'\n\nShe laughed again till the whole web quivered. Through her eyes the softness of all the seven Pleiades poured deliciously into him.\n\n'It's absurd that such a big thing as you could hide so easily,' she said. 'But you'll never hide again. I've got you fast now. And you've got me! It's like being reflected together in the same puddle, you see!'\n\nThe dazzling radiance passed as she said it into a clearer glow, and across the fire of it he caught her eyes steadily a moment, though he could not see the face complete. Two brilliant points of amber shone up at him, as stars that peep from the mirror of a forest pool. That mental daylight-searching seemed all explained, only he could not remember now that there was any such thing at all as either searching or daylight. When 'out' like this, waking was the dream\u2014-the sunlight world forgotten.\n\n'This Pattern has always been my own,' she continued with infinite softness, yet so clearly that his whole body seemed a single ear against her lips, 'for I've thought it ever since I can remember. I've lived it. This Network of Stars I made ages ago in a garden among far bigger mountains than these hills, a garden I knew vividly, yet could not always find\u2014almost as though I dreamed it. The Net included the\u2014 oh, included everything there is, and I fastened it to four big pines that grew on the further side of the torrent in that mountain garden of my dream\u2014fastened it with nails of falling stars. And I made the Pleiades its centre because I loved them best of all. Oh! Orion, Orion, how big and comforting your arms are! Please hold me tight for ever and ever!'\n\n'But I know it, too, that lovely dream,' he cried. 'It all comes back to me. I, too, have dreamed it with you then somewhere\u2014somewhere\u2014-!' His voice choked. He had never known that life could hold such sweetness, wonder, joy. The universe lay within his arms.\n\n'All the people I wanted to help I used to catch in my Net of Stars,' she went on. 'There was a train that brought them up to its edges, and once I got the passengers into the web, and hung them loose in it till they were soaked with starlight, I could send them back happier and braver than they came. It's been my story ever since I can remember anything\u2014my adventure, my dream, my life. And when the great Net faded a little and wanted brightening, we knew an enormous cavern in the mountains where lost starlight collected, and we used to gather this in thousands of sacks, and wash and paint the entire web afresh. That made it sticky, so that the passengers hung in it longer. Don't you remember?\n\nThey came back with starlight in their hair and eyes and voices\u2014and in their hearts.'\n\n'And the way you\u2014we got them into the Net,' he interrupted excitedly, 'was by understanding them\u2014by feeling with them\u2014-'\n\n'Sympathy,' she laughed, 'of course! Only there were so many I could not reach and could not understand, and so could never get in. In particular there was some one who ought to have been there to help me. If I could find that some one I could do twice as much. I searched and searched. I hunted through every corner of the garden, through forest, cavern, sky, but never with success. Orion never overtook me! My longing cried every where, but in vain. Oh, Orion, my lost Orion, I have found you now at last!\u2026 The Net flashed messages in all directions, but without response. This some one who could make my work complete existed\u2014that I knew\u2014only he was hidden somewhere out of sight\u2014concealed in some corner or other, veiled by a darkness that he wove about himself\u2014as though by some funny kind of wrong thinking that obscured the light I searched for and made it too dim to reach me properly. His life or mind\u2014his thought and feeling, that is\u2014were wumbled\u2014-'\n\n'Wumbled!' he cried, as the certainty burst upon him with the password. He stood close to her, opening his arms.\n\nInstantly she placed her golden palm upon his mouth, with fingers that were like soft star-rays. Her words, as she continued, were sweeter than the footfalls of the Pleiades when they rise above the sea.\n\n'Yet there were times when we were so close that we could feel each other, and each wondered why the other did not actually appear. I have been trying,' she whispered, oh so dearly, 'to find you always. And you knew it, too, for I've felt you searching too\u2026.'\n\nThe outlying skirts of the Pattern closed in a little, till the edges gathered over them like a tent of stars. Alone in the heart of the universe they told their secret very softly\u2026.\n\n'There are twin-stars, you know,' she whispered, when he released her, 'that circle so close about each other that they look like one. I wonder, oh, I wonder, do they ever touch!'\n\n'They are apart in order to see one another better,' he murmured. 'They watch one another more sweetly so. They play at separation for the joy of coming together again.'\n\nAnd once more the golden Pattern hid them for a moment from the other stars\u2026. The shafts of night-fire played round and above their secret tent in space\u2026. Most marvellously their beings found each other in the great whispering galleries of the world where Thought and Yearning know that first fulfilment which is the source of action later\u2026.\n\n'So, now that I have found you,' her voice presently went on, 'our Network shall catch everybody everywhere. For the Pattern of my story, woven so long ago, has passed through you as through a channel\u2014to another who can give it forth. It will spread across every sky. All, all will see it and climb up.'\n\n'My scheme\u2014-' he cried, with eager delight, yet not quite certain what he meant, nor whence the phrase proceeded.\n\n'Was my thought first,' she laughed, 'when you were a little boy and I was a little girl\u2014somewhere in a garden very long ago. A ray from its pattern touched you into beauty. Though I could do nothing with it myself, one little ray shot into the mirror of your mind and instantly increased itself. But then, you hid yourself; the channel closed\u2014-'\n\n'It never died, though,' he interrupted; 'the ray, I mean.'\n\n'It waited,' she went on, 'until you found children somewhere, and the channel cleared instantly. Through you, opened up and cleaned by them, my pattern rushed headlong into another who can use it. It could never die, of course. And the long repression\u2014I never ceased to live it\u2014 made its power irresistible.'\n\n'Your story!' he cried. 'It is indeed your story.'\n\nThe eyes were so close against his own that he made a movement that was like diving into a deep and shining sea to reach them\u2026. The Pleiades rushed instantly past his face\u2026. Soft filaments of golden texture stroked his very cheeks. That slender violet wind rose into his hair. He saw other larger winds behind it, deeply coloured\u2026. Something made him tremble all over like a leaf in a storm. He saw, then, the crest of the sentinel poplar tossing between him and the earth far, far below. A mist of confusion caught him, so that he knew not where he was\u2026. He made an effort to remember\u2026 a violent effort\u2026. Some strange sense of heaviness oppressed him\u2026. He was leaving her.\n\n'Quick!' he tried to cry; 'be quick! I am changing. I am drowsy with your voice and beauty. Your eyes have touched me, and I am\u2014falling asleep!' His voice grew weaker as he said it.\n\nHer answer sounded faint, and far above him:\n\n'Give me\u2026 your\u2026 hand. Touch me. Come away with me\u2026 to\u2026 my\u2026 garden\u2026 in the mountains\u2026. We may wake together\u2026 You are waking now\u2026!'\n\nHe made an effort to find her little palm. But the wind swept coldly between his opened fingers.\n\n'Waking!\u2014what is it?' he cried thinly. He thought swiftly of something vague and muddy\u2014something dull, disordered, incomplete. Here it was all glass-clear. 'Where are you? I can't find you. I can't see!'\n\nA dreadful, searching pain shot through him. He was losing her, just when he had found her. He struggled, clung, fought frantically to hold her. But his fingers seized the air.\n\n'Oh, I shall find you\u2014even when you wake,' he heard far away among the stars. 'Try and remember me\u2014when I come. Try and remember\u2026.'\n\nIt dipped into the distance. He had lost her. He caught a glimpse of the Pleiades as he fell at a fearful speed. Some one behind them picked up stars and tossed them after him. They dimmed as they shot by\u2014from gold to white, from white to something very pale. Behind them rose a wave of light that hurt his eyes.\n\n'Look out! The Interfering Sun!' came a disappearing voice that was followed by a peal of laughter. 'I hope you found her, and I hope you caught it well. You deserved to\u2026.'\n\nThere was a scent of hair that he loved, a vision of mischievous brown eyes, an idea that somebody was turning a somersault beside him\u2014and then he landed upon the solid earth with a noise like thunder.\n\nThe room was dark. At first he did not recognise it. Through the open window came the clatter of lumbering traffic that passed heavily down St. James's Street. He rose stiffly from his chair, vexed with himself for having dozed. It was more than a doze, though; he had slept some thirty minutes by his watch. No memory of any dreams was in him\u2014 nothing but a feeling of great refreshing lightness and peace\u2026.\n\nIt was wonderful, he reflected, as he changed into country clothes for his walk in Richmond Park, how even the shortest nap revives the brain and body. There was a sense that an immense interval had elapsed, and that something very big had happened or was going to happen to him very soon\u2026.\n\nAnd an hour later he passed through the Richmond Gate and found the open spaces of the Park deserted, as they always were. The oaks and bracken rustled in a gentle breeze. The swishing of his boots through the wet grass was the only sound he heard, for the boom and purr of distant London reached him more as touch than as something audible. Seated on a fallen tree, he watched the stars and listened to the wind. That hum and boom of the city seemed underground, the flare it tossed into the sky rose from vast furnaces below the world. The stars danced lightly far beyond its reach, secure and unafraid. He thought of children dancing with twinkling feet upon the mountains\u2026.\n\nAnd in himself there was hum and light as well. Too deep, too far below the horizon for full discovery, he caught the echo, the faint, dim flashings of reflection that are called by men a Mood. These, rising to the surface, swept over him with the queer joy of intoxicating wonder that only children know. Some great Secret he had to tell himself, only he had kept it so long and so well that he could not find it quite. He felt the thrill, yet had forgotten what it was.\n\nSomething was going to happen. A new footfall was coming across the world towards him. He could almost hear its delicate, swift tread. Life was about to offer him this delicious, thrilling secret\u2014very soon. Looking up he saw the Pleiades, and the single footfall became many. He remembered that former curious obsession of the Pleiades\u2026 and as Thought and Yearning went roaming into space, they met Anticipation, who took them by the hand. It seemed, then, that children came flocking down upon him from the sky, led by a little figure with starry eyes of clearest amber, a pair of tiny twinkling feet, and a voice quite absurdly soft and tender.\n\n'Your time is coming,' he heard behind the rustling of the oak leaves overhead, 'for the children are calling to you\u2014children of your own. And this is the bravest Scheme in all the world. There is no bigger. How can there be? For all the world is a child that goes past your windows crying for its lost Fairyland\u2026!'\n\nIt was after midnight when at length he slipped through the Robin Hood Gate, passed up Priory Lane, and walked rapidly by the shuttered houses of Roehampton. And, looking a moment over Putney Bridge; he saw the reflections of the stars in the muddy, dawdling Thames. Nothing anywhere was thick enough to hide them. The Net of Stars, being in his heart, was everywhere. No prisoner could be more securely caught than he was." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 191", + "text": "\u2003Asia. The point of one white star is quivering still\n\n\u2003Deep in the orange light of widening morn\n\n\u2003Beyond the purple mountains: through a chasm\n\n\u2003Of wind-divided mist the darker lake\n\n\u2003Reflects it: now it wanes: it gleams again\n\n\u2003As the waves fade, and as the burning threads\n\n\u2003Of woven cloud unravel in the pale air:\n\n\u2003'Tis lost! and through yon peaks of cloud-like snow\n\n\u2003The roseate sunlight quivers: hear I not\n\n\u2003The AEolian music of her sea-green plumes\n\n\u2003Winnowing the crimson dawn?\n\n\u2014Prometheus Unbound, SHELLEY.\n\nAugust had blazed its path into September, and September had already trimmed her successor's gown with gold and russet before Henry Rogers found himself free again to think of holidays. London had kept its grip upon him all these weeks while the rest of the world was gay and irresponsible. He was so absurdly conscientious. One of his Companies had got into difficulties, and he was the only man who could save the shareholders' money. The Patent Coal Dust Fuel Company, Ltd., had bought his invention for blowing fine coal dust into a furnace whereby an intense heat was obtainable in a few minutes. The saving in material, time, and labour was revolutionary. Rogers had received a large sum in cash, though merely a nominal number of the common shares. It meant little to him if the Company collapsed, and an ordinary Director would have been content with sending counsel through the post in the intervals of fishing and shooting. But Henry Rogers was of a different calibre. The invention was his child, born by hard labour out of loving thought. The several thousand shareholders believed in him: they were his neighbours. Incompetence and extravagance threatened failure. He took a room in the village near the Essex factories, and gave his personal energy and attention to restoring economical working of every detail. He wore overalls. He put intelligence into hired men and foremen; he spent his summer holiday turning a system of waste into the basis of a lucrative industry. The shareholders would never know whose faithfulness had saved them loss, and at the most his thanks would be a formal paragraph in the Report at the end of the year. Yet he was satisfied, and worked as though his own income depended on success. For he knew\u2014of late this certainty had established itself in him, influencing all he did\u2014that faithful labour, backed by steady thinking, must reach ten thousand wavering characters, merge with awakening tendencies in them, and slip thence into definite daily action. Action was thought materialised. He helped the world. A copybook maxim thus became a weapon of tempered steel. His Scheme was bigger than any hospital for disabled bodies. It would still be cumulative when bodies and bricks were dust upon the wind. It must increase by geometrical progression through all time.\n\nIt was largely to little Minks that he owed this positive conviction and belief, to that ridiculous, high-souled Montmorency Minks, who, while his master worked in overalls, took the air himself on Clapham Common, or pored with a wet towel round his brow beneath the oleograph of Napoleon in the attempt to squeeze his exuberant emotion into tripping verse. For Minks admired intensely from a distance. He attended to the correspondence in the flat, and made occasional visits down to Essex, but otherwise enjoyed a kind of extra holiday of his own. For Minks was not learned in coal dust. The combustion was in his eager brain. He produced an amazing series of lyrics and sonnets, though too high-flown, alas, to win a place in print. Love and unselfishness, as usual, were his theme, with a steady sprinkling of 'the ministry of Thought,' 'true success, unrecognised by men, yet noted by the Angels,' and so forth. His master's labour seemed to him a 'brilliant form of purity,' and 'the soul's security' came in admirably to close the crowded, tortuous line. 'Beauty' and 'Duty' were also thickly present, both with capitals, but the verse that pleased him most, and even thrilled Albinia to a word of praise, was one that ended\u2014'Those active powers which are the Doves of Thought.' It followed 'neither can be sold or bought,' and Mrs. Minks approved, because, as she put it, 'there, now, is something you can sell; it's striking and original; no editor could fail to think so.' The necessities of Frank and Ronald were ever her standard of praise or blame.\n\nThus, it was the first week in October before Rogers found himself free to leave London behind him and think of a change of scene. No planning was necessary\u2026. Bourcelles was too constantly in his mind all these weary weeks to admit of alternatives. Only a few days ago a letter had come from Jinny, saying she was going to a Pension in Geneva after Christmas, and that unless he appeared soon he would not see her again as she 'was,' a qualification explained by the postscript, 'My hair will be up by that time. Mother says I can put it up on Xmas Day. So please hurry up, Mr. Henry Rogers, if you want to see me as I am.'\n\nBut another thing that decided him was that the great story was at last in print. It was published in the October number of the Review, and the press had already paid considerable attention to it. Indeed, there was a notice at the railway bookstall on the day he left, to the effect that the first edition was exhausted, and that a large second edition would be available almost immediately. 'Place your orders at once' was added in bold red letters. Rogers bought one of these placards for his cousin.\n\n'It just shows,' observed Minks, whom he was taking out with him.\n\n'Shows what?' inquired his master.\n\n'How many more thoughtful people there are about, sir, than one had any idea of,' was the reply. 'The public mind is looking for something of that kind, expecting it even, though it hardly knows what it really wants. That's a story, Mr. Rogers, that must change the point of view of all who read it\u2014with understanding. It makes the commonest man feel he is a hero.'\n\n'You've put our things into a non-smoker, Minks,' the other interrupted him. 'What in the world are you thinking about?'\n\n'I beg your pardon, I'm sure, sir; so I have,' said Minks, blushing, and bundling the bags along the platform to another empty carriage, 'but that story has got into my head. I sat up reading it aloud to Mrs. Minks all night. For it says the very things I have always longed to say. Sympathy and the transference of thought\u2014to say nothing of the soul's activity when the body is asleep\u2014have always seemed to me\u2014-'\n\nHe wandered on while his companion made himself comfortable in a corner with his pipe and newspaper. But the first thing Rogers read, as the train went scurrying through Kent, was a summary of the contents of this very Review. Two-thirds of the article was devoted to the 'Star Story' of John Henry Campden, whose name 'entitled his work to a high standard of criticism.' The notice was well written by some one evidently of intelligence and knowledge; sound judgment was expressed on style and form and general execution, but when it came to the matter itself the criticism was deplorably misunderstanding. The writer had entirely missed the meaning. While praising the 'cleverness' he asked plainly between the lines of his notice 'What does it mean?' This unconscious exposure of his own ignorance amused his reader while it also piqued him. The critic, expert in dealing with a political article, was lamentably at sea over an imaginative story.\n\n'Inadequate receiving instrument,' thought Rogers, smiling audibly.\n\nMinks, deep in a mysterious looking tome in the opposite corner, looked up over his cigarette and wondered why his employer laughed. He read the article the other handed to him, thinking how much better he could have done it himself. Encouraged by the expression in Mr. Rogers's eyes, he then imparted what the papers call 'a genuine contribution to the thought upon the subject.'\n\n'The writer quarrels with him,' he observed, 'for not giving what is expected of him. What he has thought he must go on thinking, or be condemned. He must repeat himself or be uncomprehended.\n\nHitherto'\u2014Minks prided himself upon the knowledge\u2014'he has written studies of uncommon temperaments. Therefore to indulge in fantasy now is wrong.'\n\n'Ah, you take it that way, do you?'\n\n'Experience justifies me, Mr. Rogers,' the secretary continued. 'A friend of mine, or rather of Mrs. Minks's, once wrote a volume of ghost stories that, of course, were meant to thrill. His subsequent book, with no such intention, was judged by the object of the first\u2014 as a failure. It must make the flesh creep. Everything he wrote must make the flesh creep. One of the papers, the best\u2014a real thunderer, in fact\u2014said \"Once or twice the desired thrill comes close, but never, alas, quite comes off.\"'\n\n'How wumbled,' exclaimed his listener.\n\n'It is indeed,' said Minks, 'in fact, one of the thorns in the path of literature. The ordinary clever mind is indeed a desolate phenomenon. And how often behind the \"Oxford manner\" lurks the cultured prig, if I may put it so.'\n\n'Indeed you may,' was the other's rejoinder, 'for you put it admirably.'\n\nThey laughed a little and went on with their reading in their respective corners. The journey to Paris was enlivened by many similar discussions, Minks dividing his attentions between his master, his volume of philosophy, and the needs of various old ladies, to whom such men attach themselves as by a kind of generous, manly instinct. Minks was always popular and inoffensive. He had such tact.\n\n'Ah! and that reminds me, Minks,' said Rogers, as they paced the banks of the Seine that evening, looking at the starry sky over Paris. 'What do you know about the Pleiades? Anything\u2014eh?'\n\nMinks drew with pride upon his classical reading.\n\n'The seven daughters of Atlas, Mr. Rogers, if I remember correctly, called therefore the Atlantides. They were the virgin companions of Artemis. Orion, the great hunter, pursued them in Boeotia, and they called upon the gods for help.'\n\n'And the gods turned 'em into stars, wasn't it?'\n\n'First into doves, sir\u2014Peleiades means doves\u2014and then set them among the Constellations, where big Orion still pursues, yet never overtakes them.'\n\n'Beautiful, isn't it? What a memory you've got, Minks. And isn't one of 'em lost or something?'\n\n'Merope, yes,' the delighted Minks went on. He knew it because he had looked it up recently for his lyric about 'the Doves of Thought.' 'She married a mortal, Sisyphus, the son of Aeolus, and so shines more dimly than the rest. For her sisters married gods. But there is one who is more luminous than the others\u2014-'\n\n'Ah! and which was that?' interrupted Rogers.\n\n'Maia,' Minks told him pat. 'She is the most beautiful of the seven. She was the Mother, too, of Mercury, the Messenger of the gods. She gave birth to him in a cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia. Zeus was the father\u2014-'\n\n'Take care; you'll get run over,' and Rogers pulled him from the path of an advancing taxi-cab, whose driver swore furiously at the pair of them. 'Charming, all that, isn't it?'\n\n'It is lovely, sir. It haunts the mind. I suppose,' he added, 'that's why your cousin, Mr. Campden, made the Pleiades the centre of his Star Net in the story\u2014a cluster of beautiful thoughts as it were.'\n\n'No doubt, no doubt,' his tone so brusque suddenly that Minks decided after all not to mention his poem where the Pleiades made their appearance as the 'doves of thought.'\n\n'What a strange coincidence,' Rogers said as they turned towards the hotel again.\n\n'Subconscious knowledge, probably, sir,' suggested the secretary, scarcely following his meaning, if meaning indeed there was.\n\n'Possibly! One never knows, does one?'\n\n'Never, Mr. Rogers. It's all very wonderful.'\n\nAnd so, towards six o'clock in the evening of the following day, having passed the time pleasantly in Paris, the train bore them swiftly beyond Pontarlier and down the steep gradient of the Gorges de l'Areuse towards Neuchatel. The Val de Travers, through which the railway slips across the wooded Jura into Switzerland, is like a winding corridor cleft deep between savage and precipitous walls. There are dizzy glimpses into the gulf below. With steam shut off and brakes partly on, the train curves sharply, hiding its eyes in many tunnels lest the passengers turn giddy. Strips of bright green meadow- land, where the Areuse flows calmly, alternate with places where the ravine plunges into bottomless depths that have been chiselled out as by a giant ploughshare. Rogers pointed out the chosen views, while his secretary ran from window to window, excited as a happy child. Such scenery he had never known. It changed the entire content of his mind. Poetry he renounced finally before the first ten minutes were past. The descriptions that flooded his brain could be rendered only by the most dignified and stately prose, and he floundered among a welter of sonorous openings that later Albinia would read in Sydenham and retail judiciously to the elder children from 'Father's foreign letters.'\n\n'We shall pass Bourcelles in a moment now! Look out! Be ready with your handkerchief!' Rogers warned him, as the train emerged from the final tunnel and scampered between thick pine woods, emblazoned here and there with golden beeches. The air was crystal, sparkling. They could smell the forests.\n\nThey took their places side by side at the windows. The heights of Boudry and La Tourne, that stand like guardian sentries on either side of the mountain gateway, were already cantering by. The precipices flew past. Beyond lay the smiling slopes of vineyard, field, and orchard, sprinkled with farms and villages, of which Bourcelles came first. The Areuse flowed peacefully towards the lake. The panorama of the snowy Alps rolled into view along the farther horizon, and the slanting autumn sunshine bathed the entire scene with a soft and ruddy light. They entered the Fairyland of Daddy's story.\n\n'Voila la sentinelle deja!' exclaimed Rogers, putting his head out to see the village poplar. 'We run through the field that borders the garden of the Pension. They'll come out to wave to us. Be ready.'\n\n'Ah, oui,' said Minks, who had been studying phrase books, 'je vwa.' But in reality he saw with difficulty, for a spark had got into his eye, and its companion optic, wandering as usual, was suffused with water too.\n\nThe news of their arrival had, of course, preceded them, and the row of waving figures in the field gave them a welcome that went straight to Minks's heart. He felt proud for his grand employer. Here was a human touch that would modify the majesty of the impersonal mountain scenery in his description. He waved his handkerchief frantically as the train shot past, and he hardly knew which attracted him most\u2014the expression of happiness on Mr. Rogers's face, or the line of nondescript humanity that gesticulated in the field as though they wished to stop the Paris 'Rapide.'\n\nFor it was a very human touch; and either Barnum's Circus or the byeways and hedges of Fairyland had sent their picked representatives with a dance seen usually only in shy moonlit glades. His master named them as the carriage rattled by. The Paris Express, of course, did not stop at little Bourcelles. Minks recognised each one easily from the descriptions in the story.\n\nThe Widow Jequier, with garden skirts tucked high, and wearing big gauntlet gloves, waved above her head a Union Jack that knocked her bonnet sideways at every stroke, and even enveloped the black triangle of a Trilby hat that her brother-in-law held motionless aloft as though to test the wind for his daily report upon the condition of le barometre. The Postmaster never waved. He looked steadily before him at the passing train, his small, black figure more than usually dwarfed by a stately outline that rose above the landscape by his side, and was undoubtedly the Woman of the Haystack. Telling lines from the story's rhymes flashed through Minks's memory as, chuckling with pleasure, he watched the magnificent, ample gestures of Mother's waving arms. She seemed to brush aside the winds who came a-courting, although wide strokes of swimming really described her movements best. A little farther back, in the middle distance, he recognised by his peaked cap the gendarme, Gygi, as he paused in his digging and looked up to watch the fun; and beyond him again, solid in figure as she was unchanging in her affections, he saw Mrs. Postmaster, struggling with a bed sheet the pensionnaires des Glycines helped her shake in the evening breeze. It was too close upon the hour of souper for her to travel farther from the kitchen. And beside her stood Miss Waghorn, waving an umbrella. She was hatless. Her tall, thin figure, dressed in black, against the washing hung out to dry, looked like a note of exclamation, or, when she held the umbrella up at right angles, like a capital L the fairies had set in the ground upon its head.\n\nAnd the fairies themselves, the sprites, the children! They were everywhere and anywhere. Jimbo flickered, went out, reappeared, then flickered again; he held a towel in one hand and a table napkin in the other. Monkey seemed more in the air than on the solid earth, for one minute she was obviously a ball, and the next, with a motion like a somersault, her hair shot loose across the sunlight as though she flew. Both had their mouths wide open, shouting, though the wind carried their words all away unheard. And Jane Anne stood apart. Her welcome, if the gesture is capable of being described at all, was a bow. She moved at the same time sedately across the field, as though she intended to be seen separately from the rest. She wore hat and gloves. She was evidently in earnest with her welcome. But Mr. John Henry Campden, the author and discoverer of them all, Minks did not see.\n\n'But I don't see the writer himself!' he cried. 'I don't see Mr.\n\nCampden.'\n\n'You can't,' explained Rogers, 'he's standing behind his wife.'\n\nAnd the little detail pleased the secretary hugely. The true artist, he reflected, is never seen in his work.\n\nIt all was past and over\u2014in thirty seconds. The spire of the church, rising against a crimson sky, with fruit trees in the foreground and a line of distant summits across the shining lake, replaced the row of wonderful dancing figures. Rogers sank back in his corner, laughing, and Minks, saying nothing, went across to his own at the other end of the compartment. It all had been so swift and momentary that it seemed like the flash of a remembered dream, a strip of memory's pictures, a vivid picture of some dazzling cinematograph. Minks felt as if he had just read the entire story again from one end to the other\u2014in thirty seconds. He felt different, though wherein exactly the difference lay was beyond him to discover. 'It must be the spell of Bourcelles,' he murmured to himself. 'Mr. Rogers warned me about it. It is a Fairyland that thought has created out of common things. It is quite wonderful!' He felt a glow all over him. His mind ran on for a moment to another picture his master had painted for him, and he imagined Albinia and the family out here, living in a little house on the borders of the forest, a strip of vineyards, sunlight, mountains, happy scented winds, and himself with a writing-table before a window overlooking the lake\u2026 writing down Beauty.\n\n\u2003We never meet; yet we meet day by day\n\n\u2003Upon those hills of life, dim and immense:\n\n\u2003The good we love, and sleep-our innocence.\n\n\u2003O hills of life, high hills! And higher than they,\n\n\u2003Our guardian spirits meet at prayer and play.\n\n\u2003Beyond pain, joy, and hope, and long suspense,\n\n\u2003Above the summits of our souls, far hence,\n\n\u2003An angel meets an angel on the way.\n\n\u2003Beyond all good I ever believed of thee\n\n\u2003Or thou of me, these always love and live.\n\n\u2003And though I fail of thy ideal of me,\n\n\u2003My angel falls not short. They greet each other.\n\n\u2003Who knows, they may exchange the kiss we give,\n\n\u2003Thou to thy crucifix, I to my mother.\n\n\u2014ALICE MCYNELL.\n\nThe arrival at the station interrupted the reverie in which the secretary and his chief both were plunged.\n\n'How odd,' exclaimed Minks, ever observant, as he leaped from the carriage, 'there are no platforms. Everything in Switzerland seems on one level, even the people\u2014everything, that is, except the mountains.'\n\n'Switzerland is the mountains,' laughed his chief.\n\nMinks laughed too. 'What delicious air!' he added, filling his lungs audibly. He felt half intoxicated with it.\n\nAfter some delay they discovered a taxi-cab, piled the luggage on to it, and were whirled away towards a little cluster of lights that twinkled beneath the shadows of La Tourne and Boudry. Bourcelles lay five miles out.\n\n'Remember, you're not my secretary here,' said Rogers presently, as the forests sped by them. 'You're just a travelling companion.'\n\n'I understand,' he replied after a moment's perplexity. 'You have a secretary here already.'\n\n'His name is Jimbo.'\n\nThe motor grunted its way up the steep hill above Colombier. Below them spread the vines towards the lake, sprinkled with lights of farms and villages. As the keen evening air stole down from forest and mountain to greet them, the vehicle turned into the quiet village street. Minks saw the big humped shoulders of La Citadelle, the tapering church spire, the trees in the orchard of the Pension. Cudrefin, smoking a cigar at the door of his grocery shop, recognised them and waved his hand. A moment later Gygi lifted his peaked hat and called 'bon soir, bonne nuit,' just as though Rogers had never gone away at all. Michaud, the carpenter, shouted his welcome as he strolled towards the Post Office farther down to post a letter, and then the motor stopped with a jerk outside the courtyard where the fountain sang and gurgled in its big stone basin. Minks saw the plane tree. He glanced up at the ridged backbone of the building. What a portentous looking erection it was. It seemed to have no windows. He wondered where the famous Den was. The roof overlapped like a giant hood, casting a deep shadow upon the cobbled yard. Overhead the stars shone faintly.\n\nInstantly a troop of figures shot from the shadow and surrounded them. There was a babel of laughter, exclamations, questions. Minks thought the stars had fallen. Children and constellations were mingled all together, it seemed. Both were too numerous to count. All were rushing with the sun towards Hercules at a dizzy speed.\n\n'And this is my friend, Mr. Minks,' he heard repeated from time to time, feeling his hand seized and shaken before he knew what he was about. Mother loomed up and gave him a stately welcome too.\n\n'He wears gloves in Bourcelles!' some one observed audibly to some one else.\n\n'Excuse me! This is Riquette!' announced a big girl, hatless like the rest, with shining eyes. 'It's a she.'\n\n'And this is my secretary, Mr. Jimbo,' said Rogers, breathlessly, emerging from a struggling mass. Minks and Jimbo shook hands with dignity.\n\n'Your room is over at the Michauds, as before.'\n\n'And Mr. Mix is at the Pension\u2014there was no other room to be had\u2014-'\n\n'Supper's at seven\u2014-'\n\n'Tante Jeanne's been grand-cieling all day with excitement. She'll burst when she sees you!'\n\n'She's read the story, too. Elle dit que c'est le bouquet!'\n\n'There's new furniture in the salon, and they've cleaned the sink while you've been away!\u2026'\n\nThe author moved forward out of the crowd. At the same moment another figure, slight and shadowy, revealed itself, outlined against the white of the gleaming street. It had been hidden in the tangle of the stars. It kept so quiet.\n\n'Countess, may I introduce him to you,' he said, seizing the momentary pause. There was little ceremony in Bourcelles. 'This is my cousin I told you about\u2014Mr. Henry Rogers. You must know one another at once. He's Orion in the story.'\n\nHe dragged up his big friend, who seemed suddenly awkward, difficult to move. The children ran in and out between them like playing puppies, tumbling against each in turn.\n\n'They don't know which is which,' observed Jinny, watching the introduction. Her voice ran past him like the whir of a shooting star through space\u2014far, far away. 'Excuse me!' she cried, as she cannoned off Monkey against Cousinenry. 'I'm not a terminus! This is a regular shipwreck!'\n\nThe three elder ones drew aside a little from the confusion.\n\n'The Countess,' resumed Daddy, as soon as they were safe from immediate destruction, 'has come all the way from Austria to see us. She is staying with us for a few days. Isn't it delightful? We call her the little Grafin.' His voice wumbled a trifle thickly in his beard. 'She was good enough to like the story\u2014our story, you know\u2014 and wrote to me\u2014-'\n\n'My story,' said a silvery, laughing voice.\n\nAnd Rogers bowed politely, and with a moment's dizziness, at two bright smiling eyes that watched him out of the little shadow standing between him and the children. He was aware of grandeur.\n\nHe stood there, first startled, then dazed. She was so small. But something about her was so enormous. His inner universe turned over and showed its under side. The hidden thing that so long had brushed his daily life came up utterly close and took him in its gigantic arms. He stared like an unmannered child.\n\nSomething had lit the world\u2026.\n\n'This is delicious air,' he heard Minks saying to his cousin in the distance\u2014to his deaf side judging by the answer:\n\n'Delicious here\u2014yes, isn't it?'\n\nSomething had lit the stars.\u2026\n\nMinks and his cousin continued idly talking. Their voices twittered like birds in empty space. The children had scattered like marbles from a spinning-top. Their voices and footsteps sounded in the cobbled yard of La Citadelle, as they scampered up to prepare for supper. Mother sailed solemnly after them, more like a frigate than ever. The world, on fire, turned like a monstrous Catherine wheel within his brain.\n\nSomething had lit the universe.\u2026\n\nHe stood there in the dusk beneath the peeping stars, facing the slender little shadow. It was all he saw at first\u2014this tiny figure. Demure and soft, it remained motionless before him, a hint of childhood's wonder in its graceful attitude. He was aware of something mischievous as well\u2014that laughed at him\u2026. He realised then that she waited for him to speak. Yet, for the life of him, he could find no words, because the eyes, beneath the big-brimmed hat with its fluttering veil, looked out at him as though some formidable wild creature watched him from the opening of its cave. There was a glint of amber in them. The heart in him went thumping. He caught his breath. Out, jerked, then, certain words that he tried hard to make ordinary\u2014\n\n'But surely\u2014we have met before\u2014I think I know you\u2014-'\n\nHe just said it, swallowing his breath with a gulp upon the unfinished sentence. But he said it\u2014somewhere else, and not here in the twilight street of little Bourcelles. For his sight swam somehow far away, and he was giddy with the height. The roofs of the houses lay in a sea of shadow below him, and the street wound through them like a ribbon of thin lace. The tree-tops waved very softly in a wind that purred and sighed beneath his feet, and this wind was a violet little wind, that bent them all one way and set the lines and threads of gold a-quiver to their fastenings. For the fastenings were not secure; any minute he might fall. And the threads, he saw, all issued like rays from two central shining points of delicate, transparent amber, radiating forth into an exquisite design that caught the stars. Yet the stars were not reflected in them. It was they who lit the stars\u2026.\n\nHe was dizzy. He tried speech again.\n\n'I told you I should\u2014' But it was not said aloud apparently.\n\nTwo little twinkling feet were folded. Two hands, he saw, stretched down to draw him close. These very stars ran loose about him in a cloud of fiery sand. Their pattern danced in flame. He picked out Sirius, Aldebaran\u2014the Pleiades! There was tumult in his blood, a wild and exquisite confusion. What in the world had happened to him that he should behave in this ridiculous fashion? Yet he was doing nothing. It was only that, for a passing instant, the enormous thing his life had been dimly conscious of so long, rose at last from its subterranean hiding-place and overwhelmed him. This picture that came with it was like some far-off dream he suddenly recovered. A glorious excitement caught him. He felt utterly bewildered.\n\n'Have we?' he heard close in front of him. 'I do not think I have had the pleasure'\u2014it was with a slightly foreign accent\u2014'but it is so dim here, and one cannot see very well, perhaps.'\n\nAnd a ripple of laughter passed round some gigantic whispering gallery in the sky. It set the trellis-work of golden threads all trembling. He felt himself perched dizzily in this shaking web that swung through space. And with him was some one whom he knew\u2026. He heard the words of a song:\n\n'Light desire With their fire.'\n\nSomething had lit his heart.\u2026\n\nHe lost himself again, disgracefully. A mist obscured his sight, though with the eyes of his mind he still saw crystal-clear. Across this mist fled droves and droves of stars. They carried him out of himself\u2014out, out, out!\u2026 His upper mind then made a vehement effort to recover equilibrium. An idea was in him that some one would presently turn a somersault and disappear. The effort had a result, it seemed, for the enormous thing passed slowly away again into the caverns of his under-self,\u2026 and he realised that he was conducting himself in a foolish and irresponsible manner, which Minks, in particular, would disapprove. He was staring rudely\u2014at a shadow, or rather, at two eyes in a shadow. With another effort\u2014oh, how it hurt!\u2014he focused sight again upon surface things. It seemed his turn to say something.\n\n'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, 'but I thought\u2014it seemed to me for a moment\u2014that I\u2014remembered.'\n\nThe face came close as he said it. He saw it clear a moment. The figure grew defined against the big stone fountain\u2014the little hands in summer cotton gloves, the eyes beneath the big brimmed hat, the streaming veil. Then he went lost again\u2014more gloriously than before. Instead of the human outline in the dusky street of Bourcelles, he stared at the host of stars, at the shimmering design of gold, at the Pleiades, whose fingers of spun lustre swung the Net loose across the world\u2026.\n\n'Flung from huge Orion's hand\u2026' he caught in a golden whisper,\n\n\u2003'Sweetly linking\n\n\u2003All our thinking\u2026.'\n\nHis cousin and Minks, he was aware vaguely, had left him. He was alone with her. A little way down the hill they turned and called to him. He made a frantic effort\u2014there seemed just time\u2014to plunge away into space and seize the cluster of lovely stars with both his hands. Headlong, he dived off recklessly\u2026 driving at a fearful speed,\u2026 when\u2014the whole thing vanished into a gulf of empty blue, and he found himself running, not through the sky to clutch the Pleiades, but heavily downhill towards his cousin and Minks.\n\nIt was a most abrupt departure. There was a curious choking in his throat. His heart ran all over his body. Something white and sparkling danced madly through his brain. What must she think of him?\n\n'We've just time to wash ourselves and hurry over to supper,' his cousin said, as he overtook them, flustered and very breathless. Minks looked at him\u2014regarded him, rather\u2014astonishment, almost disapproval, in one eye, and in the other, apparently observing the vineyards, a mild rebuke.\n\nHe walked beside them in a dream. The sound of Colombier's bells across Planeyse, men's voices singing fragments of a Dalcroze song floated to him, and with them all the dear familiar smells:\u2014\n\n\u2003Le coeur de ma mie\n\n\u2003Est petit, tout petit petit,\n\n\u2003J'en ai l'ame ravie\u2026.\n\nIt was Minks, drawing the keen air noisily into his lungs in great draughts, who recalled him to himself.\n\n'I could find my way here without a guide, Mr. Campden,' he was saying diffidently, burning to tell how the Story had moved him. 'It's all so vivid, I can almost see the Net. I feel in it,' and he waved one hand towards the sky.\n\nThe other thanked him modestly. 'That's your power of visualising then,' he added. 'My idea was, of course, that every mind in the world is related with every other mind, and that there's no escape\u2014we are all prisoners. The responsibility is vast.'\n\n'Perfectly. I've always believed it. Ah! if only one could live it!'\n\nRogers heard this clearly. But it seemed that another heard it with him. Some one very close beside him shared the hearing. He had recovered from his temporary shock. Only the wonder remained. Life was sheer dazzling glory. The talk continued as they hurried along the road together. Rogers became aware then that his cousin was giving information\u2014meant for himself.\n\n'\u2026 A most charming little lady, indeed. She comes from over there,' and he pointed to where the Pleiades were climbing the sky towards the East, 'in Austria somewhere. She owns a big estate among the mountains. She wrote to me\u2014I've had such encouraging letters, you know, from all sorts of folk\u2014and when I replied, she telegraphed to ask if she might come and see me. She seems fond of telegraphing, rather.' And he laughed as though he were speaking of an ordinary acquaintance.\n\n'Charming little lady!' The phrase was like the flick of a lash.\n\nRogers had known it applied to such commonplace women.\n\n'A most intelligent face,' he heard Minks saying, 'quite beautiful, I thought\u2014the beauty of mind and soul.'\n\n'\u2026 Mother and the children took to her at once,' his cousin's voice went on. 'She and her maid have got rooms over at the Beguins. And, do you know, a most singular coincidence,' he added with some excitement, 'she tells me that ever since childhood she's had an idea like this\u2014 like the story, I mean\u2014an idea of her own she always wanted to write but couldn't\u2014-'\n\n'Of course, of course,' interrupted Rogers impatiently; and then he added quickly, 'but how very extraordinary!'\n\n'The idea that Thought makes a network everywhere about the world in which we all are caught, and that it's a positive duty, therefore, to think beauty\u2014as much a duty as washing one's face and hands, because what you think touches others all day long, and all night long too\u2014 in sleep.'\n\n'Only she couldn't write it?' asked Rogers. His tongue was like a thick wedge of unmanageable wood in his mouth. He felt like a man who hears another spoil an old, old beautiful story that he knows himself with intimate accuracy.\n\n'She can telegraph, she says, but she can't write!'\n\n'An expensive talent,' thought the practical Minks.\n\n'Oh, she's very rich, apparently. But isn't it odd? You see, she thought it vividly, played it, lived it. Why, she tells me she even had a Cave in her mountains where lost thoughts and lost starlight collected, and that she made a kind of Pattern with them to represent the Net. She showed me a drawing of it, for though she can't write, she paints quite well. But the odd thing is that she claims to have thought out the main idea of my own story years and years ago with the feeling that some day her idea was bound to reach some one who would write it\u2014-'\n\n'Almost a case of transference,' put in Minks.\n\n'A fairy tale, yes, isn't it!'\n\n'Married?' asked Rogers, with a gulp, as they reached the door. But apparently he had not said it out loud, for there was no reply.\n\nHe tried again less abruptly. It required almost a physical effort to drive his tongue and frame the tremendous question.\n\n'What a fairy story for her children! How they must love it!' This time he spoke so loud that Minks started and looked up at him.\n\n'Ah, but she has no children,' his cousin said.\n\nThey went upstairs, and the introductions to Monsieur and Madame Michaud began, with talk about rooms and luggage. The mist was over him once more. He heard Minks saying:\u2014\n\n'Oui, je comprongs un poo,' and the clatter of heavy boots up and down the stairs,\u2026 and then found himself washing his hands in stinging hot water in his cousin's room.\n\n'The children simply adore her already,' he heard, 'and she won Mother's confidence at the very start. They can't manage her long name. They just call her the Little Countess\u2014die kleine Grafin. She's doing a most astonishing work in Austria, it seems, with children\u2026 the Montessori method, and all that\u2026.'\n\n'By George, now; is it possible? Bourcelles accepted her at once then?'\n\n'She accepted Bourcelles rather\u2014took it bodily into herself\u2014our poverty, our magic boxes, our democratic intimacy, and all the rest; it was just as though she had lived here with us always. And she kept asking who Orion was\u2014that's you, of course\u2014and why you weren't here\u2014-'\n\n'And the Den too?' asked Rogers, with a sudden trembling in his heart, yet knowing well the answer.\n\n'Simply appropriated it\u2014came in naturally without being asked; Jimbo opened the door and Monkey pushed her in. She said it was her Star Cave. Oh, she's a remarkable being, you know, rather,' he went on more gravely, 'with unusual powers of sympathy. She seems to feel at once what you are feeling. Takes everything for granted as though she knew. I think she does know, if you ask me\u2014-'\n\n'Lives the story in fact,' the other interrupted, hiding his face rather in the towel, 'lives her belief instead of dreaming it, eh?'\n\n'And, fancy this!' His voice had a glow and softness in it as he said it, coming closer, and almost whispering, 'she wants to take Jinny and Monkey for a bit and educate them.' He stood away to watch the effect of the announcement. 'She even talks of sending Edward to Oxford, too!' He cut a kind of wumbled caper in his pleasure and excitement.\n\n'She loves children then, evidently?' asked the other, with a coolness that was calculated to hide other feelings. He rubbed his face in the rough towel as though the skin must come off. Then, suddenly dropping the towel, he looked into his cousin's eyes a moment to ensure a proper answer.\n\n'Longs for children of her own, I think,' replied the author; 'one sees it, feels it in all she says and does. Rather sad, you know, that! An unmarried mother\u2014-'\n\n'In fact,' put in Rogers lightly, 'the very character you needed to play the principal role in your story. When you write the longer version in book form you'll have to put her in.'\n\n'And find her a husband too\u2014which is a bore. I never write love stories, you see. She's finer as she is at present\u2014mothering the world.'\n\nRogers's face, as he brushed his hair carefully before the twisted mirror, was not visible.\n\nThere came a timid knock at the door.\n\n'I'm ready, gentlemen, when you are,' answered the voice of Minks outside.\n\nThey went downstairs together, and walked quickly over to the Pension for supper. Rogers moved sedately enough so far as the others saw, yet inwardly he pranced like a fiery colt in harness. There were golden reins about his neck. Two tiny hands directed him from the Pleiades. In this leash of sidereal fire he felt as though he flew. Swift thought, flashing like a fairy whip, cut through the air from an immense distance, and urged him forwards. Some one expected him and he was late\u2014years and years late. Goodness, how his companions crawled and dawdled!\n\n'\u2026 she doesn't come over for her meals,' he heard, 'but she'll join us afterwards at the Den. You'll come too, won't you, Mr. Minks?'\n\n'Thank you, I shall be most happy\u2014if I'm not intruding,' was the reply as they passed the fountain near the courtyard of the Citadelle. The musical gurgle of its splashing water sounded to Rogers like a voice that sang over and over again, 'Come up, come up, come up! You must come up to me!'\n\n'How brilliant your stars are out here, Mr. Campden,' Minks was saying when they reached the door of La Poste. He stood aside to let the others pass before him. He held the door open politely. 'No wonder you chose them as the symbol for thought and sympathy in your story.' And they climbed the narrow, creaking stairs and entered the little hall where the entire population of the Pension des Glycines awaited them with impatience.\n\nThe meal dragged out interminably. Everybody had so much to say. Minks, placed between Mother and Miss Waghorn, talked volubly to the latter and listened sweetly to all her stories. The excitement of the Big Story, however, was in the air, and when she mentioned that she looked forward to reading it, he had no idea, of course, that she had already done so at least three times. The Review had replaced her customary Novel. She went about with it beneath her arm. Minks, feeling friendly and confidential, informed her that he, too, sometimes wrote, and when she noted the fact with a deferential phrase about 'you men of letters,' he rose abruptly to the seventh heaven of contentment. Mother meanwhile, on the other side, took him bodily into her great wumbled heart. 'Poor little chap,' her attitude said plainly, 'I don't believe his wife half looks after him.' Before the end of supper she knew all about Frank and Ronald, the laburnum tree in the front garden, what tea they bought, and Albinia's plan for making coal last longer by mixing it with coke.\n\nTante Jeanne talked furiously and incessantly, her sister-in-law told her latest dream, and the Postmaster occasionally cracked a solemn joke, laughing uproariously long before the point appeared. It was a merry, noisy meal, and Henry Rogers sat through it upon a throne that was slung with golden ropes from the stars. He was in Fairyland again. Outside, the Pleiades were rising in the sky, and somewhere in Bourcelles\u2014in the rooms above Beguin's shop, to be exact\u2014some one was waiting, ready to come over to the Den. His thoughts flew wildly. Passionate longing drove behind them. 'You must come up to me,' he heard. They all were Kings and Queens.\n\nHe played his part, however; no one seemed to notice his preoccupation. The voices sounded now far, now near, as though some wind made sport with them; the faces round him vanished and reappeared; but he contrived cleverly, so that none remarked upon his absent-mindedness. Constellations do not stare at one another much.\n\n'Does your Mother know you're \"out\"?' asked Monkey once beside him\u2014it was the great joke now, since the Story had been read\u2014and as soon as she was temporarily disposed of, Jimbo had serious information to impart from the other side. 'She's a real Countess,' he said, speaking as man to man. 'I suppose if she went to London she'd know the King\u2014 visit him, like that?'\n\nBless his little heart! Jimbo always knew the important things to talk about.\n\nThere were bursts of laughter sometimes, due usually to statements made abruptly by Jane Anne\u2014as when Mother, discussing the garden with Minks, reviled the mischievous birds:\u2014\n\n'They want thinning badly,' she said.\n\n'Why don't they take more exercise, then?' inquired Jinny gravely.\n\nAnd in these gusts of laughter Rogers joined heartily, as though he knew exactly what the fun was all about. In this way he deceived everybody and protected himself from discovery. And yet it seemed to him that he shouted his secret aloud, not with his lips indeed, but with his entire person. Surely everybody knew it\u2026! He was self- conscious as a schoolgirl.\n\n'You must come up\u2014to me,' rang continuously through his head like bells. 'You must come up to me.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 192", + "text": "\u2003How many times do I love thee, dear?\n\n\u2003Tell me how many thoughts there be\n\n\u2003In the atmosphere\n\n\u2003Of a new fall'n year,\n\n\u2003Whose white and sable hours appear\n\n\u2003The latest flake of Eternity:\u2014\n\n\u2003So many times do I love thee, dear.\n\n\u2003How many times do I love again?\n\n\u2003Tell me how many beads there are\n\n\u2003In a silver chain\n\n\u2003Of evening rain,\n\n\u2003Unravelled from the tumbling main,\n\n\u2003And threading the eye of a yellow star:\u2014\n\n\u2003So many times do I love again.\n\n\u2014THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES.\n\nA curious deep shyness settled upon Henry Rogers as they all trooped over to the Den. The others gabbled noisily, but to him words came with difficulty. He felt like a boy going up for some great test, examination, almost for judgment. There was an idea in him that he must run and hide somewhere. He saw the huge outline of Orion tilting up above the Alps, slanting with the speed of his eternal hunt to seize the Pleiades who sailed ever calmly just beyond his giant arms. Yet what that old Hunter sought was at last within his reach. He knew it, and felt the awe of capture rise upon him.\n\n'You've eaten so much supper you can't speak,' said Monkey, whose hand was in his coat-pocket for loose chicken-feed, as she called centimes. 'The Little Countess will regler ton affaire all right. Just wait till she gets at you.'\n\n'You love her?' he asked gently, feeling little disposed to play.\n\nThe child's reply was cryptic, yet uncommonly revealing:\u2014\n\n'She's just like a relation. It's so funny she didn't know us long, long ago\u2014find us out, I mean.'\n\n'Mother likes her awfully,' added Jimbo, as though that established the matter of her charm for ever. 'It's a pity she's not a man'\u2014just to show that Cousinenry's position was not endangered.\n\nThey chattered on. Rogers hardly remembers how he climbed the long stone steps. He found himself in the Den. It came about with a sudden jump as in dreams. She was among them before the courtyard was crossed; she had gone up the steps immediately in front of him\u2026. Jinny was bringing in the lamp, while Daddy struggled with a load of peat for the fire, getting in everybody's way. Riquette stood silhouetted against the sky upon the window sill. Jimbo used the bellows. A glow spread softly through the room. He caught sight of Minks standing rather helplessly beside the sofa talking to Jane Anne, and picking at his ear as he always did when nervous or slightly ill at ease. He wondered vaguely what she was saying to him. He looked everywhere but at the one person for whose comfort the others were so energetic.\n\nHis eyes did not once turn in her direction, yet he knew exactly how she was dressed, what movements she made, where she stood, the very words, indeed, she used, and in particular the expression of her face to each in turn. For he was guilty of a searching inner scrutiny he could not control. And, above all, he was aware, with a divine, tumultuous thrill, that she, for her part, also neither looked at him nor uttered one sentence that he could take as intended for himself.\n\nBecause, of course, all she said and did and looked were meant for him, and her scrutiny was even closer and more searching than his own.\n\nIn the Den that evening there was one world within another, though only these two, and probably the intuitive and diabolically observant Minks, perceived it. The deep furnaces of this man's inner being, banked now so long that mere little flames had forgotten their way out, lay open at last to that mighty draught before whose fusing power the molten, fluid state becomes inevitable.\n\n'You must come up to me' rang on in his head like a chime of bells. 'O think Beauty: it's your duty\u2026.'\n\nThe chairs were already round the open fireplace, when Monkey pushed him into the big one with the broken springs he always used, and established herself upon his knee. Jimbo was on the other in a twinkling. Jane Anne plumped down upon the floor against him. Her hair was up, and grown-ups might sit as they pleased. Minks in a hard, straight-backed chair, firmly assured everybody that he was exceedingly comfortable and really preferred stiff chairs. He found safety next to Mother who, pleased and contented, filled one corner of the sofa and looked as though she occupied a pedestal. Beyond her perched Daddy, on the music stool, leaning his back against the unlighted fourneau. The Wumble Book was balanced on his knees, and beside him sat the little figure of the visitor who, though at the end, was yet somehow the true centre of the circle. Rogers saw her slip into her unimportant place. She took her seat, he thought, as softly as a mouse. For no one seemed to notice her. She was so perfectly at home among them. In her little folded hands the Den and all its occupants seemed cared for beyond the need of words or definite action. And, although her place was the furthest possible remove from his own, he felt her closer to him than the very children who nestled upon his knees.\n\nRiquette then finally, when all were settled, stole in to complete the circle. She planted herself in the middle of the hearth before them all, looked up into their faces, decided that all was well, and began placidly to wash her face and back. A leg shot up, from the middle of her back apparently, as a signal that they might talk. A moment later she composed herself into that attitude of dignified security possible only to the feline species. She made the fourth that inhabited this world within a world. Rogers, glancing up suddenly from observing her, caught\u2014-for the merest fraction of an instant\u2014a flash of starfire in the air. It darted across to him from the opposite end of the horse- shoe. Behind it flickered the tiniest smile a human countenance could possibly produce.\n\n'Little mouse who, lost in wonder,\n\nFlicks its whiskers at the thunder.'\n\nIt was Jane Anne repeating the rhyme for Minks's benefit. How appropriately it came in, he thought. And voices were set instantly in motion; it seemed that every one began to speak at once.\n\nWho finally led the conversation, or what was actually said at first, he has no more recollection than the man in the moon, for he only heard the silvery music of a single voice. And that came rarely. He felt washed in glory from head to foot. In a dream of happy starlight he swam and floated. He hid his face behind the chair of Monkey, and his eyes were screened below the welcome shelter of Jimbo's shoulder.\n\nThe talk meanwhile flowed round the horse-shoe like a river that curves downhill. Life ran past him, while he stood on the banks and watched. He reconstructed all that happened, all that was said and done, each little movement, every little glance of the eye. These common things he recreated. For, while his body sat in the Den before a fire of peat, with children, a cat, a private secretary, three very ordinary people and a little foreign visitor, his spirit floated high above the world among the immensities of suns and starfields. He was in the Den, but the Den was in the universe, and to the scale of the universe he set the little homely, commonplace picture. Life, he realised, is thought and feeling; and just then he thought and felt like a god. He was Orion, and Orion had at last overtaken the Pleiades. The fairest of the cluster lay caught within his giant arms. The Enormous Thing that so long had haunted him with hints of its approach, rose up from his under-self, and possessed him utterly. And, oh, the glory of it, the splendour, the intoxication!\n\nIn the dim corner where she sat, the firelight scarcely showed her face, yet every shade of expression that flitted across her features he saw unobscured. The sparkling, silvery sentences she spoke from time to time were volumes that interpreted life anew. For years he had pored over these thick tomes, but heavily and without understanding. The little things she said now supplied the key. Mind and brain played no part in this. It was simply that he heard\u2014and knew. He re- discovered her from their fragments, piece by piece\u2026.\n\nThe general talk flowed past him in a stream of sound, cut up into lengths by interrupting consonants, and half ruined by this arbitrary division; but what she said always seemed the living idea that lay behind the sound. He could not explain it otherwise. With herself, and with Riquette, and possibly with little, dreaming Minks, he sat firmly at the centre of this inner world. The others, even the children, hovered about its edges, trying to get in. That tiny smile had flashed its secret, ineffable explanation into him. Starlight was in his blood\u2026.\n\nMother, for instance, he vaguely knew, was speaking of the years they all had lived in Bourcelles, of the exquisite springs, of the fairy, gorgeous summers. It was the most ordinary talk imaginable, though it came sincerely from her heart.\n\n'If only you had come here earlier,' she said, 'when the forest was so thick with flowers.' She enumerated them one by one. 'Now, in the autumn, there are so few!'\n\nThe little sparkling answer lit the forest glades afresh with colour, perfume, wonder:\u2014\n\n'But the autumn flowers, I think, are the sweetest; for they have the beauty of all the summer in them.'\n\nA slight pause followed, and then all fell to explaining the shining little sentence until its lustre dimmed and disappeared beneath the smother of their words. In himself, however, who heard them not, a new constellation swam above the horizon of his inner world. Riquette looked slyly up and blinked. She purred more deeply, but she made no stupid sign\u2026.\n\nAnd Daddy mentioned then the forest spell that captured the entire village with its peace and softness\u2014'all so rough and big and tumbled, and yet every detail so exquisitely finished and thought out, you know.'\n\nOut slipped the softest little fairy phrase imaginable from her dim corner then:\u2014\n\n'Yes, like hand-made things\u2014you can almost see the hand that made them.'\n\nAnd Rogers started so perceptibly that Jimbo shifted his weight a little, thinking he must be uncomfortable. He had surely used that very phrase himself! It was familiar. Even when using it he remembered wondering whence its sweetness had dropped into his clumsier mind. Minks uncrossed his legs, glanced up at him a moment, then crossed them again. He made this sign, but, like Riquette, he said nothing\u2026.\n\nThe stream flowed on and on. Some one told a story. There was hushed attentive listening, followed suddenly by bursts of laughter and delight. Who told it, or what it was about, Rogers had no notion. Monkey dug him in the ribs once because apparently he grunted at the wrong moment, and Jimbo chided her beneath his breath\u2014'Let him have a nap if he wants to; a man's always tired after a long journey like that\u2026!' Some one followed with another story\u2014Minks, was it, this time?\u2014for Rogers caught his face, as through a mist, turning constantly to Mother for approval. It had to do with a vision of great things that had come to a little insignificant woman on a bed of sickness. He recognised the teller because he knew the tale of old. The woman, he remembered, was Albinia's grandmother, and Minks was very proud of it.\n\n'That's a very nice story,' rippled from the dim corner when it was over. 'For I like everything so tiny that you can find it inside a shell. That's the way to understand big things and to do them.'\n\nAnd again the phrase was as familiar to him as though he had said it himself\u2014heard it, read it, dreamed it, even. Whatever its fairy source, he knew it. His bewilderment increased absurdly. The things she said were so ordinary, yet so illuminating, though never quite betraying their secret source. Where had he heard them? Where had he met this little foreign visitor? Whence came the singular certainty that she shared this knowledge with him, and might presently explain it, all clear as daylight and as simple? He had the odd impression that she played with him, delayed purposely the moment of revelation, even expected that he would be the first to make it known. The disclosure was to come from himself! She provided him with opportunities\u2014these little sparkling sentences! But he hid in his corner, silent and magically excited, afraid to take the lead. These sentences were addressed to him. There was conversation thus between the two of them; but his replies remained inaudible. Thought makes no sound; its complete delivery is ever wordless\u2026. He felt very big, and absurdly shy.\n\nIt was gesture, however, that infallible shorthand of the mind, which seemed the surest medium of this mute delightful intercourse. For each little gesture that she made\u2014unconsciously, of course\u2014expressed more than the swiftest language could have compassed in an hour. And he noted every one: the occasional flourish of the little hands, the bending of the graceful neck, the shadowy head turned sideways, the lift of one shoulder, almost imperceptible, and sometimes the attitude of the entire body. To him they were, one and all, eloquently revealing. Behind each little gesture loomed a yet larger one, the scale increasing strangely, till his thoughts climbed up them as up a ladder into the region where her ideas lay naked before casual interpretation clothed them. Those, he reflected, who are rich in ideas, but find words difficult, may reveal themselves prodigally in gesture. Expression of one kind or another there must be; yet lavish action, the language of big souls, seems a man's expression rather than a woman's\u2026. He built up swiftly, surely, solidly his interpretation of this little foreign visitor who came to him thus suddenly from the stars, whispering to his inmost thought, 'You must come up to me.' The whole experience dazed him. He sat in utter dumbness, shyer than a boy, but happier than a singing star!\u2026 The Joy in his heart was marvellous.\n\nYet how could he know all this?\n\nIn the intervals that came to him like breathing spaces he asked himself this childish question. How could he tell that this little soft being with the quiet unobtrusive manners had noble and great beauty of action in her anywhere? A few pretty phrases, a few significant gestures, these were surely a slight foundation to build so much upon! Was there, then, some absolute communion of thought between the two of them such as his cousin's story tried to show? And had their intercourse been running on for years, neither of them aware of it in the daytime? Was this intimate knowledge due to long acquaintance? Had her thought been feeding him perhaps since childhood even?\n\nIn the pause of his temporary lunacy he asked himself a dozen similar questions, but before the sign of any answer came he was off again, sweeping on outstretched wings among the stars. He drank her in. He knew. What was the good of questions? A thirsty man does not stop midway in his draught to ask when his thirst began, its cause, or why the rush of liquid down his throat is satisfying. He knows, and drinks. It seemed to Henry Rogers, ordinary man of business and practical affairs, that some deep river which so long had flowed deep out of sight, hidden below his daily existence, rose now grandly at the flood. He had heard its subterranean murmurs often. Here, in the Den, it had reached his lips at last. And he quenched his thirst\u2026. His thought played round her without ceasing, like flowing water\u2026.\n\nThis idea of flux grew everywhere about him. There was fluid movement in this world within a world. All life was a flowing past of ceaseless beauty, wonder, splendour; it was doubt and question that dammed the rush, causing that stoppage which is ugly, petty, rigid. His being flowed out to mingle with her own. It was all inevitable, and he never really doubted once. Only before long he would be compelled to act\u2014to speak\u2014to tell her what he felt, and hear her dear, dear answer\u2026. The excitement in him became more and more difficult to control. Already there was strain and tension below his apparent outer calmness. Life in him burst forward to a yet greater life than he had ever known\u2026.\n\nThe others\u2014it was his cousin's voice this time\u2014were speaking of the Story, and of his proposed treatment of it in its larger version as a book. Daddy was saying, apparently, that it must fail because he saw no climax for it. The public demanded a cumulative interest that worked up to some kind of thrilling denouement that they called a climax, whereas his tale was but a stretch of life, and of very ordinary life. And Life, for the majority, knew no such climax. How could he manage one without inventing something artificial?\n\n'But the climax of life comes every day and every minute,' he heard her answer\u2014and how her little voice rang out above the others like a bell!\u2014'when you deny yourself for another, and that other does not even know it. A day is lost that does not pin at least one sweet thought against each passing hour.'\n\nAnd his inner construction took a further prodigious leap, as the sentence showed him the grand and simple motive of her being. It had been his own as well, though he had stupidly bungled it in his search to find something big enough to seem worth doing. She, he divined, found neighbours everywhere, losing no time. He had known a few rare, exquisite souls who lived for others, but here, close beside him at last, was one of those still rarer souls who seem born to\u2014die for others\u2026. They give so unsparingly of their best\u2026. To his imaginative interpretation of her he gave full rein\u2026. And it was instantaneous as creation\u2026.\n\nThe voices of Minks and Mother renewed the stream of sound that swept by him then, though he caught no words that were comparable in value to these little singing phrases that she used from time to time. Jimbo, bored by the grown-up talk that took the place of expected stories, had fallen asleep upon his shoulder; Monkey's hair, as usual, was in his eyes; he sat there listening and waiting with a heart that beat so loudly he thought the children must feel it and ask him what was the matter. Jinny stirred the peat from time to time. The room was full of shadows. But, for him, the air grew brighter every minute, and in this steady brilliance he saw the little figure rise and grow in grandeur till she filled all space.\n\n'You called it \"getting out\" while the body is asleep,' came floating through the air through the sound of Jimbo's breathing, 'whereas I called it getting away from self while personal desire is asleep. But the idea is the same\u2026.'\n\nHis cousin's words that called forth this criticism he had not heard.\n\nIt was only her sentence that seemed to reach him.\n\nFrom the river of words and actions men call life she detained, it seemed to him, certain that were vital and important in some symbolical sense; she italicised them, made them her own\u2014then let them go to join the main stream again. This selection was a kind of genius. The river did not overwhelm her as it overwhelms most, because the part of it she did not need for present action she ignored, while yet she swam in the whole of it, shirking nothing.\n\nThis was the way he saw her\u2014immediately. And, whether it was his own invention, or whether it was the divination of a man in the ecstasy of sudden love, it was vital because he felt it, and it was real because he believed it. Then why seek to explain the amazing sense of intimacy, the certainty that he had known her always? The thing was there; explanation could bring it no nearer. He let the explanations go their way; they floated everywhere within reach; he had only to pocket them and take them home for study at his leisure afterwards\u2014 with her.\n\n'But, we shall come to it in time,' he caught another flying sentence that reached him through the brown tangle of Monkey's hair. It was spoken with eager emphasis. 'Does not every letter you write begin with dear?\u2026.'\n\nAll that she said added something to life, it seemed, like poetry which, he remembered, 'enriches the blood of the world.' The selections were not idle, due to chance, but belonged to some great Scheme, some fairy edifice she built out of the very stuff of her own life. Oh, how utterly he understood and knew her. The poison of intellectuality, thank heaven, was not in her, yet she created somehow; for all she touched, with word or thought or gesture, turned suddenly alive in a way he had never known before. The world turned beautiful and simple at her touch\u2026.\n\nEven the commonest things! It was miraculous, at least in its effect upon himself. Her simplicity escaped all signs of wumbling. She had no favourite and particular Scheme for doing good, but did merely what was next her at the moment to be done. She was good. In her little person glowed a great enthusiasm for life. She created neighbours. And, as the grandeur of her insignificance rose before him, his own great Scheme for Disabled Thingumabobs that once had filled the heavens, shrank down into the size of a mere mouse-trap that would go into his pocket. In its place loomed up another that held the beauty of the Stars. How little, when announcing it to Minks weeks and weeks ago, had he dreamed the form it was to take!\n\nAnd so, wrapped in this glory of the stars, he dreamed on in his corner, fashioning this marvellous interpretation of a woman he had never seen before, and never spoken with. It was all so different to ordinary falling in love at sight, that the phrase never once occurred to him. It was consummated in a moment\u2014out there, beside the fountain when he saw her first, shadowy, with brilliant, peering eyes. It seemed perfect instantly, a recovery of something he had always known. And who shall challenge the accuracy of his vision, or call its sudden maturity impossible? For where one sees the surface only, another sees the potentialities below. To believe in these is to summon them into activity, just as to think the best of a person ever brings out that best. Are we not all potential splendours?\n\nSwiftly, in a second, he reviewed the shining sentences that revealed her to him: The 'autumn flowers'\u2014she lived, then, in the Present, without that waste of energy which is regret! In 'a little shell' lay the pattern of all life,\u2014she saw the universe in herself and lived, thus, in the Whole! To be 'out' meant forgetting self; and life's climax is at every minute of the day\u2014she understood, that is, the growth of the soul, due to acceptance of what every minute brings, however practical, dull, uninteresting. By recreating the commonest things, she found a star in each. And her world was made up of neighbours\u2014for 'every letter that one writes begins with dear!'\n\nThe Pattern matured marvellously before his eyes; and its delicate embroideries, far out of sight, seemed the arabesques that yearnings, hitherto unfulfilled, had traced long long ago with the brush of tender thinking. Together, though at opposite ends of the world, these two had woven the great Net of sympathy, thought, and longing in which at last they both were prisoners\u2026 and with them all the earth.\n\nThe figure of Jane Anne loomed before him like an ogress suddenly.\n\n'Cousinenry, will you answer or will you not? Daddy's already asked you twenty times at least!' Then, below her breath, as she bent over him, 'The Little Countess will think you awf'ly rude if you go to sleep and snore like this.'\n\nHe looked up. He felt a trifle dazed. For a moment he had forgotten where he was. How dark the room had grown! Only\u2014he was sure he had not snored.\n\n'I beg your pardon,' he stammered, 'but I was only thinking\u2014how wonderful you\u2014how wonderful it all is, isn't it? I was listening. I heard perfectly.'\n\n'You were dozing,' whispered Monkey. 'Daddy wants the Countess to tell you how she knew the story long ago, or something. Ecoute un peu, man vieux!'\n\n'I should love to hear it,' he said, louder, sitting up so abruptly in his chair that Jimbo tilted at a dangerous angle, though still without waking. 'Please, please go on.'\n\nAnd he listened then to the quiet, silvery language in which the little visitor described the scenery of her childhood, when, without brothers or sisters, she was forced to play alone, and had amused herself by imagining a Net of Constellations which she nailed by shooting stars to four enormous pine trees that grew across the torrent. She described the great mountains that enclosed her father's estate, her loneliness in this giant garden, due to his morose severity of character, her yearnings to escape and see the big world beyond the ridges. All her thought and longing went to the fashioning of this Net, and every night she flung it far across the peaks and valleys to catch companions with whom she might play. The characters in her fairy books came out of the pages to help her, and sometimes when they drew it in, it was so heavy with the people entangled in its meshes that they could scarcely move it. But the moment all were out, the giant Net, relieved of their weight, flew back into the sky. The Pleiades were its centre, because she loved the Pleiades best of all, and Orion pursued its bright shape with passion, yet could never quite come up with it.\n\n'And these people whom you caught,' whispered Rogers from his corner, listening to a tale he knew as well as she did, 'you kept them prisoners?'\n\n'I first put into them all the things I longed to do myself in the big world, and then flung them back again into their homes and towns and villages\u2014-'\n\n'Excepting one,' he murmured.\n\n'Who was so big and clumsy that he broke the meshes and so never got away.' She laughed, while the children stared at their cousin, wondering how he knew as much as she did. 'He stayed with me, and showed me how to make our prisoners useful afterwards by painting them all over with starlight which we collected in a cave. Then they went back and dazzled others everywhere by their strange, alluring brilliance. We made the whole world over in this way\u2014-'\n\n'Until you lost him.'\n\n'One cloudy night he disappeared, yes, and I never found him again. There was a big gap between the Pleiades and Orion where he had tumbled through. I named him Orion after that; and I would stand at night beneath the four great pine trees and call and call, but in vain. \"You must come up to me! You must come up to me!\" I called, but got no answer\u2014-'\n\n'Though you knew quite well where he had fallen to, and that he was only hiding\u2014-'\n\n'Excuse me, but how did she know?' inquired Jinny abruptly.\n\nThe Little Countess laughed. 'I suppose\u2014because the threads of the Net were so sensitive that they went on quivering long after he tumbled out, and so betrayed the direction\u2014-'\n\n'And afterwards, when you got older, Grafin,' interrupted Daddy, who wished his cousin to hear the details of the extraordinary coincidence, 'you elaborated your idea\u2014-'\n\n'Yes, that thought and yearning always fulfil themselves somewhere, somehow, sooner or later,' she continued. 'But I kept the imagery of my Star Net in which all the world lies caught, and I used starlight as the symbol of that sympathy which binds every heart to every other heart. At my father's death, you see, I inherited his property. I escaped from the garden which had been so long my prison, and I tried to carry out in practical life what I had dreamed there as a child. I got people together, where I could, and formed Thinkers' Guilds\u2014 people, that is, who agreed to think beauty, love, and tolerance at given hours in the day, until the habit, once formed, would run through all their lives, and they should go about as centres of light, sweetening the world. Few have riches, fewer still have talent, but all can think. At least, one would think so, wouldn't one?'\u2014with a smile and a fling of her little hands.\n\nShe paused a moment, and then went on to describe her failure. She told it to them with laughter between her sentences, but among her listeners was one at least who caught the undertone of sadness in the voice.\n\n'For, you see, that was where I made my mistake. People would do anything in the world rather than think. They would work, give money, build schools and hospitals, make all manner of sacrifices\u2014only\u2014they would not think; because, they said, there was no visible result.' She burst out laughing, and the children all laughed too.\n\n'I should think not indeed,' ventured Monkey, but so low that no one heard her.\n\n'And so you went on thinking it all alone,' said Rogers in a low voice.\n\n'I tried to write it first as a story,' she answered softly, 'but found that was beyond me; so I went on thinking it all alone, as you say\u2014-'\n\n'Until the Pattern of your thought floated across the world to me,' said Daddy proudly. 'I imagined I was inspired; instead I was a common, unoriginal plagiarist!'\n\n'Like all the rest of us,' she laughed.\n\n'Mummie, what is a plagiarist?' asked Jinny instantly; and as Rogers, her husband, and even Minks came hurriedly to her aid, the spell of the strange recital was broken, and out of the turmoil of voices the only thing distinctly heard was Mother exclaiming with shocked surprise:\u2014\n\n'Why, it's ten o'clock! Jimbo, Monkey, please plagiarise off to bed at once!'\u2014in a tone that admitted of no rejoinder or excuses.\n\n'A most singular thing, isn't it, Henry?' remarked the author, coming across to his side when the lamp was lit and the children had said their good-nights.\n\n'I really think we ought to report it to the Psychical Society as a genuine case of thought-transference. You see, what people never properly realise is\u2014-'\n\nBut Henry Rogers lost the remainder of the sentence even if he heard the beginning, for his world was in a state of indescribable turmoil, one emotion tumbling wildly upon the heels of another. He was elated to intoxication. The room spun round him. The next second his heart sank down into his boots. He only caught the end of the words she was saying to Mother across the room:\u2014\n\n'\u2026 but I must positively go to-morrow, I've already stayed too long. So many things are waiting at home for me to do. I must send a telegram and\u2026.'\n\nHis cousin's wumbling drowned the rest. He was quite aware that Rogers was not listening to him.\n\n'\u2026 your great kindness in writing to him, and then coming yourself,' Mother was saying. 'It's such an encouragement. I can't tell you how much he\u2014we\u2014-'\n\n'And you'll let me write to you about the children,' she interrupted, 'the plans we discussed, you know\u2026.'\n\nRogers broke away from his cousin with a leap. It felt at least like a leap. But he knew not where to go or what to say. He saw Minks standing with Jane Anne again by the fourneau, picking at his ear. By the open window with Mother stood the little visitor. She was leaving to-morrow. A torturing pain like twisting knives went through him. The universe was going out!\u2026 He saw the starry sky behind her. Daddy went up and joined them, and he was aware that the three of them talked all at once for what seemed an interminable time, though all he heard was his cousin's voice repeating at intervals, 'But you can't send a telegram before eight o'clock to-morrow morning in any case; the post is closed\u2026.'\n\nAnd then, suddenly, the puzzle reeled and danced before his eyes. It dissolved into a new and startling shape that brought him to his senses with a shock. There had been a swift shuffling of the figures.\n\nMinks and his cousin were helping her into her cloak. She was going.\n\nOne of them\u2014he knew not which\u2014was offering politely to escort her through the village.\n\nIt sounded like his own sentence of exile, almost of death. Was he forty years of age, or only fifteen? He felt awkward, tongue-tied, terrified.\n\nThey were already in the passage. Mother had opened the door into the yard.\n\n'But your way home lies down the hill,' he heard the silver voice, 'and to go with me you must come up. I can easily\u2014-'\n\nAbove the leaves of the plane tree he saw the stars. He saw Orion and the Pleiades. The Fairy Net flung in and caught him. He found his voice.\n\nIn a single stride he was beside her. Minks started at his sudden vehemence and stepped aside.\n\n'I will take you home, Countess, if I may,' and his tone was so unnecessarily loud and commanding that Mother turned and stared. 'Our direction lies together. I will come up\u2014with you.'\n\nShe did not even look at him. He saw that tiny smile that was like the flicker of a star\u2014no more. But he heard her answer. It seemed to fill the sky.\n\n'Thank you. I might lose my way alone.'\n\nAnd, before he realised how she managed it, they had crossed the cobbled yard, Daddy was swinging away downhill towards the carpenter's, and Minks behind them, at the top of the stone steps, was saying his last good-night to Mother. With the little visitor beside him, he passed the singing fountain and led her down the deserted village street beneath the autumn stars.\n\nThree minutes later they were out of sight\u2026 when Minks came down the steps and picked his way among the shadows after Daddy, who had the latch-key of the carpenter's house. He ran to overtake him.\n\n\u2003And he ran upon his toes\n\n\u2003As softly as a saying does,\n\n\u2003For so the saying goes!\n\nHis thoughts were very active, but as clear as day. He was thinking whether German was a difficult language to acquire, and wondering whether a best man at a wedding ought to wear white gloves or not. He decided to ask Albinia. He wrote the letter that very night before he went to sleep.\n\nAnd, while he slept, Orion pursued the Pleiades across the sky, and numerous shooting stars fastened the great Net of thought and sympathy close over little Bourcelles.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Extra Day by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nJudy, Tim, and Maria were just little children. It was impossible to say exactly what their ages were, except that they were just the usual age, that Judy was the eldest, Maria the youngest, and that Tim, accordingly, came in between the two.\n\nTheir father did his best for them; so did their mother; so did Aunt Emily, the latter's sister. It is impossible to say very much about these three either, except that they were just Father, Mother, and Aunt Emily. They were the Authorities-in-Chief, and they knew respectively everything there was to be known about such remote and difficult subjects as London and Money; Food, Health and Clothing; Conduct, Behaviour and Regulations, both general and particular. Into these three departments of activity the children, without realising that they did so, classed them neatly. Aunt Emily, besides the special duties assigned to her, was a living embodiment of No. While Father allowed and permitted, while Mother wobbled and hesitated, Aunt Emily shook her head with decision, and said distinctly No. She was too full of warnings, advice, and admonitions to get about much. She wore gold glasses, and had an elastic, pointed nose. From the children's point of view she must be classed as invalid. Somewhere, deep down inside them, they felt pity.\n\nThe trio loved them according to their just deserts; they grasped that the Authorities did their best for them. This \"best,\" moreover, was done in different ways. Father did it with love and tenderness, that is, he spoilt them; Mother with tenderness and love, that is, she felt them part of herself and did not like to hurt herself; Aunt Emily with affectionate and worthy desire to see them improve, that is, she trained them. Therefore they adored their father, loved their mother, and thought highly\u2014from a distance preferably\u2014of their aunt.\n\nThis was the outward and visible household that an ordinary person, say, a visitor who came to lunch on Sunday after church, would have noticed. It was the upper layer; but there was an under layer too. There was Thompson, the old pompous family butler; they trusted him because he was silent and rarely smiled, winked at their mischief, pretended not to see them when he caught them in his pantry, and never once betrayed them. There was Mrs. Horton, the fat and hot-tempered family cook; they regarded her with excitement including dread, because she left juicy cakes (still wet) upon the dresser, yet denied them the entry into her kitchen. Her first name being Bridget, there was evidently an Irish strain in her, but there was probably a dash of French as well, for she was an excellent cook and recipe was her master-word\u2014she pronounced it \"recipee.\" There was Jackman, the nurse, a mixture of Mother and Aunt Emily; and there was Weeden, the Head Gardener, an evasive and mysterious personality, who knew so much about flowers and vegetables and weather that he was half animal, half bird, and scarcely a human being at all\u2014vaguely magnificent in a sombre way. His power in his own department was unquestioned. He said little, but it \"meant an awful lot\"\u2014most of which, perhaps, was not intended.\n\nThese four constituted the under layer of the household, concealed from visitors, and living their own lives apart behind the scenes. They were the Lesser Authorities.\n\nThere were others too, of course, neighbours, friends, and visitors, who dwelt outside the big iron gates in the Open World, and who entered their lives from various angles, some to linger, some merely to show themselves and vanish into mist again. Occasionally they reappeared at intervals, occasionally they didn't. Among the former were Colonel William Stumper, C.B., a retired Indian soldier who lived in the Manor House beyond the church and had written a book on Scouting; a nameless Station-Master, whom they saw rarely when they accompanied Daddy to the London train; a Policeman, who walked endlessly up and down the muddy or dusty lanes, and came to the front door with a dirty little book in his big hands at Christmas-time; and a Tramp, who slept in barns and haystacks, and haunted the great London Road ever since they had once handed him a piece of Mrs. Horton's sticky cake in paper over the old grey fence. Him they regarded with a special awe and admiration, not unmixed with tenderness. He had smiled so nicely when he said \"Thank you\" that Judy, wondering if there was any one to mend his clothes, had always longed to know him better. It seemed so wonderful. How could he live without furniture, house, regular meals\u2014without possessions, in a word? It made him so real. It was \"real life,\" in fact, to live that way; and upon Judy especially the impression was a deep one.\n\nIn addition to these occasional intruders, there was another person, an Authority, but the most wonderful Authority of all, who came into their lives a little later with a gradual and overwhelming effect, but who cannot be mentioned more definitely just now because he has not yet arrived. The world, in any case, speaking generally, was enormous; it was endless; it was always dropping things and people upon them without warning, as from a clear and cloudless sky. But this particular individual was still climbing the great curve below their horizon, and had not yet poked his amazing head above the edge.\n\nYet, strange to say, they had always believed that some such person would arrive. A wonderful stranger was already on the way. They rarely spoke of it\u2014it was just a great, passionate expectancy tucked away in the deepest corner of their hearts. Children possess this sense of anticipation all the world over; grown-ups have it too in the form of an unquenchable, though fading hope: the feeling that some day or other a Wonderful Stranger will come up the pathway, knock at the door, and enter their lives, making life worth living, full of wonder, beauty, and delight, because he will make all things new.\n\nThis wonderful stranger, Judy had a vague idea, would be\u2014be like at least\u2014the Tramp; Tim, following another instinct, was of the opinion he would be a \"soldier-explorer-hunter kind of man\"; Maria, if she thought anything at all about him, kept her decision securely hidden in her tight, round body. But Judy qualified her choice by the hopeful assertion that he would \"come from the air\"; and Tim had a secret notion that he would emerge from a big, deep hole\u2014pop out like a badger or a rabbit, as it were\u2014and suddenly declare himself; while Maria, by her non-committal, universal attitude, perhaps believed that, if he came at all, he would \"just come from everywhere at once.\" She believed everything, always, everywhere. But to assert that belief was to betray the existence of a doubt concerning it. She just lived it.\n\nFor the three children belonged to three distinct classes, without knowing that they did so. Tim loved anything to do with the ground, with earth and soil, that is, things that made holes and lived in them, or that did not actually make holes but just grubbed about; mysterious, secret things, such as rabbits, badgers, hedgehogs, mice, rats, hares, and weasels. In all his games the \"earth\" was home.\n\nJudy, on the other hand, was indubitably an air person\u2014birds amazed her, filling her hungry heart with high aspirations, longings, and desires. She looked, with her bright, eager face and spidery legs, distinctly bird-like. She flitted, darted, perched. She had what Tim called a \"tweaky\" nose, though whether he meant that it was beak-like or merely twitched, he never stated; it was just \"tweaky,\" and Judy took it as a compliment. One could easily imagine her shining little face peeping over the edge of a nest, the rest of her sitting warmly upon half a dozen smooth, pink eggs. Her legs certainly seemed stuck into her like pencils, as with a robin or a seagull. She adored everything that had wings and flew; she was of the air; it was her element.\n\nMaria's passions were unknown. Though suspected of being universal, since she manifested no deliberate likes or dislikes, approving all things with a kind of majestic and indifferent omnipotence, they remained quiescent and undeclared. She probably just loved the universe. She felt at home in it. To Maria the entire universe belonged, because she sat still and with absolute conviction\u2014claimed it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 193", + "text": "The country house, so ancient that it seemed part of the landscape, settled down secretively into the wintry darkness and watched the night with eyes of yellow flame. The thick December gloom hid it securely from attack. Nothing could find it out. Though crumbling in places, the mass of it was solid as a fortress, for the old oak beams had resisted Time so long that the tired years had resigned themselves to siege instead of assault, and the protective hills and woods rendered it impregnable against the centuries. The beleaguered inhabitants felt safe. It was a delightful, cosy feeling, yet excitement and surprise were in it too. Anything might happen, and at any moment.\n\nThis, at any rate, was how Judy and Tim felt the personality of the old Mill House, calling it Daddy's Castle. Maria expressed no opinion. She felt and knew too much to say a word. She was habitually non-committal. She shared the being of the ancient building, as the building shared the landscape out of which it grew so naturally. Having been born last, her inheritance of coming Time exceeded that of Tim and Judy, and she lived as though thoroughly aware of her prerogative. In quiet silence she claimed everything as her very own.\n\nThe Mill House, like Maria, never moved; it existed comfortably; it seemed independent of busy, hurrying Time. So thickly covered was it with ivy and various creepers that the trees on the lawn wondered why it did not grow bigger like themselves. They remembered the time when they looked up to it, whereas now they looked over it easily, and even their lower branches stroked the stone tiles on the roof, patched with moss and lichen like their own great trunks. They had come to regard it as an elderly animal asleep, for its chimneys looked like horns, it possessed a capacious mouth that both swallowed and disgorged, and its eyes were as numerous as those of the forest to which they themselves properly belonged. And so they accepted the old Mill House as a thing of drowsy but persistent life; they protected and caressed it; they liked it exactly where it was; and if it moved they would have known an undeniable shock.\n\nThey watched it now, this dark December evening, as one by one its gleaming eyes shone bright and yellow through the mist, then one by one let down their dark green lids. \"It's going to sleep,\" they thought. \"It's going to dream. Its life, like ours, is all inside. It sleeps the winter through as we do. All is well. Good-night, old house of grey! We'll also go to sleep.\"\n\nUnable to see into the brain of the sleepy monster, the trees resigned themselves to dream again, tucking the earth closely against their roots and withdrawing into the cloak of misty darkness. Like most other things in winter they also stayed indoors, leading an interior life of dim magnificence behind their warm, thick bark. Presently, when they were ready, something would happen, something they were preparing at their leisure, something so exquisite that all who saw it would dance and sing for gladness. They also believed in a Wonderful Stranger who was coming into their slow, steady lives. They fell to dreaming of the surprising pageant they would blazon forth upon the world a little later. And while they dreamed, the wind of night passed moaning through their leafless branches, and Time flew noiselessly above the turning Earth.\n\nMeanwhile, inside the old Mill House, the servants lit the lamps and drew the blinds and curtains. Behind the closing eyelids, however, like dream-chambers within a busy skull, there were rooms of various shapes and kinds, and in one of these on the ground-floor, called Daddy's Study, the three children stood, expectant and a little shy, waiting for something desirable to happen. In common with all other living things, they shared this enticing feeling\u2014that Something Wonderful was going to happen. To be without this feeling, of course, is to be not alive; but, once alive, it cannot be escaped. At death it asserts itself most strongly of all\u2014Something Too Wonderful is going to happen. For to die is quite different from being not alive. This feeling is the proof of eternal life\u2014once alive, alive for ever. To live is to feel this yearning, huge expectancy.\n\nDaddy had taught them this, though, of course, they knew it instinctively already. And any moment now the door would open and his figure, familiar, yet each time more wonderful, would cross the threshold, close the door behind him, and\u2026 something desirable would happen.\n\n\"I wish he'd hurry,\" said Tim impatiently. \"There won't be any time left.\" And he glanced at the cruel clock that stopped all their pleasure but never stopped itself. \"The motor got here hours ago. He can't STILL be having tea.\" Judy, her brown hair in disorder, her belt sagging where it was of little actual use, sighed deeply. But there was patience and understanding in her big, dark eyes. \"He's in with Mother doing finances,\" she said with resignation. \"It's Saturday. Let's sit down and wait.\" Then, seeing that Maria already occupied the big armchair, and sat staring comfortably into the fire, she did not move. Maria was making a purring, grunting sound of great contentment; she felt no anxiety of any kind apparently.\n\nBut Tim was less particular.\n\n\"Alright,\" he said, squashing himself down beside Maria, whose podgy form accommodated itself to the intrusion like a cat, \"as long as Aunt Emily doesn't catch him on the way and begin explaining.\"\n\n\"She's in bed with a headache,\" mentioned Judy. \"She's safe enough.\" For it was an established grievance against their mother's sister that she was always explaining things. She was a terrible explainer. She couldn't move without explaining. She explained everything in the world. She was a good soul, they knew, but she had to explain that she was a good soul. They rather dreaded her. Explanations took time for one thing, and for another they took away all wonder. In bed with a headache, she was safely accounted for, explained.\n\n\"She thinks we miss her,\" reflected Tim. He did not say it; it just flashed through his mind, with a satisfaction that added vaguely to his pleasurable anticipation of what was coming. And this satisfaction increased his energy. \"Shove over a bit,\" he added aloud to Maria, and though Maria did not move of her own volition, she was nevertheless shoved over. The pair of them settled down into the depths of the chair, but while Maria remained quite satisfied with her new position, her brother fussed and fidgeted with impatience born of repressed excitement. \"Run out and knock at the door,\" he proposed to Judy. \"He'll never get away from Mother unless we let him KNOW we're waiting.\"\n\nJudy, kneeling on a chair and trying to make it sea-saw, pulled up her belt, sprang down, then hesitated. \"They'll only think it's Thompson and say come in,\" she decided. \"That's no good.\"\n\nTim jumped up, using Maria as a support to raise himself. \"I know what!\" he cried. \"Go and bang the gong. He'll think it's dressing-time.\" The idea was magnificent. \"I'll go if you funk it,\" he added, and had already slithered half way over the back of the chair when Judy forestalled him and had her hand upon the door-knob. He encouraged her with various instructions about the proper way to beat the gong, and was just beginning a scuffle with the inanimate Maria, who now managed to occupy the entire chair, when he was aware of a new phenomenon that made him stop abruptly. He saw Judy's face hanging in mid-air, six feet above the level of the floor. Her face was flushed and smiling; her hair hung over her eyes; and from somewhere behind or underneath her a gruff voice said sternly:\n\n\"What are you doing in my Study at this time of night? Who asked you in?\"\n\nThe expected figure had entered, catching Judy in the act of opening the door. He was carrying her in his arms. She landed with a flop upon the carpet. The desired and desirable thing was about to happen. \"Get out, you lump, it's Daddy.\" But Maria, accustomed to her brother's exaggerated language, and knowing it was only right and manly, merely raised her eyes and waited for him to help her out. Tim did help her out; half dragging and half lifting, he deposited her in a solid heap upon the floor, then ran to the figure that now dominated the dim, fire-lit room, and hugged it with all his force, making sounds in his throat like an excited animal: \"Ugh! ugh! ugh!\u2026!\"\n\nThe hug was returned with equal vigour, but without the curious sounds; Maria was hugged as well and set upon her feet; while Judy, having already been sufficiently hugged, pushed the arm-chair closer up to the fire and waited patiently for the proper business of the evening to begin.\n\nThe figure, meanwhile, disentangled itself. It was tall and thin, with a mild, resigned expression upon a kindly face that years and care had lined before its time: old-fashioned rather, with soft, grey whiskers belonging to an earlier day. A black tail-coat adorned it, and the neck-tie was crooked in the turned-down collar. The watch-chain went from the waist-coat button to one pocket only, instead of right across, and one finger wore a heavy signet-ring that bore the family crest. It was obviously the figure of an overworked official in the Civil Service who had returned from its daily routine in London to the evening routine of its family in the country, the atmosphere of Government and the Underground still hanging round it. For sundry whiffs of the mysterious city reached the children's nostrils, bringing thrills of some strange, remote reality they had never known at first-hand. They busied themselves at once. While Tim unbuttoned the severe black coat and pulled it off, Judy brought a jacket of dingy tweed from behind a curtain in the corner, and stood on a chair to help the figure put it on. All knew their duties; the performance went like clockwork. And Maria sat and watched in helpful silence. There was a certain air about her as though she did it all.\n\n\"How they do spoil me, to be sure,\" the figure murmured to itself; \"yet Mother's always saying that I spoil them. I wonder\u2026!\"\n\n\"Now you look decent at last,\" said Judy. \"You smell like a nice rabbit.\"\n\n\"It's my shooting-coat.\" The figure cleared its throat, apparently on the defensive a little.\n\nTim and Judy sniffed it. \"Rabbits and squirrels and earth and things,\" thought Tim.\n\n\"And flowers and burning leaves,\" said Judy. \"It's his old garden-coat as well.\" She sniffed very audibly. \"Oh, I love that smoky smell.\"\n\n\"It's the good old English smell,\" said the figure contentedly, while they put his neck-tie straight and arranged the pocket flaps for him. \"It's English country\u2014England.\"\n\n\"Don't other countries smell, then?\" inquired Tim. \"I mean, could any one tell you were English by your smell?\" He sniffed again, with satisfaction. \"Weeden's the same,\" he went on, without waiting for an answer, \"only much stronger, and so's the potting shed.\"\n\n\"But yours is sweeter much,\" said Judy quickly. To share odours with an Authority like the Head Gardener was distinctly a compliment, but Daddy must come first, whatever happened. \"How funny,\" she added, half to herself, \"that England should have such a jolly smell. I wonder what it comes from?\"\n\n\"Where does England come from?\" asked Tim, pausing a moment to stare into the figure's face. \"It's an island, of course\u2014England\u2014but\u2014\"\n\n\"A piece of land surrounded by water,\" began the figure, but was not allowed to finish. A chorus of voices interrupted:\n\n\"Make a story of it, please. There's just time. There's half an hour.\n\nIt's nice and dark. Ugh! Something very awful or very silly, please\u2026.\"\n\nThere followed a general scuffle for seats, with bitter complaints that he only had two pointed knees. Maria was treated with scant respect. There was also criticism of life\u2014that he had no lap, \"no proper lap,\" that it was too dark to see his face, that everybody in turn had got \"the best place,\" but, chiefly, that there was \"very little time.\" Time was a nuisance always: it either was time to go, or time to stop, or else there was not time enough. But at length quiet was established; the big arm-chair resembled a clot of bees upon a honeycomb; the fire burned dully, and the ceiling was thick with monstrous fluttering shadows, vaguely shaped.\n\n\"Now, please. We've been ready for ages.\"\n\nA deep hush fell upon the room, and only a sound of confused breathing was audible. The figure heaved a long, deep sigh as though it suffered pain, paused, cleared its throat, then sighed again more heavily than before. For the moment of creation was at hand, and creation is not accomplished without much travail.\n\nBut the children loved the pause, the sigh, the effort. Not realising with what difficulty the stories were ground out, nor that it was an effort against time\u2014to make a story last till help came from outside\u2014they believed that something immense and wonderful was on the way, and held their breath with beating hearts. Daddy's stories were always marvellous; this one would be no exception.\n\nMarvellous up to a point, that is: something in them failed. \"He's trying,\" was their opinion of them; and it was the trying that they watched and listened to so eagerly. The results were unsatisfying, the effect incomplete; the climax of sensation they expected never came. Daddy, though they could not put this into words, possessed fancy only; imagination was not his. Fancy, however, is the seed of imagination, as imagination is the blossom of wonder. His stories prepared the soil in them at any rate. They felt him digging all round them.\n\nHe began forthwith:\n\n\"Once, very long ago\u2014\"\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"So long ago that the chalk cliffs of England still lay beneath the sea\u2014\"\n\n\"Was Aunt Emily alive then?\"\n\n\"Or Weeden?\"\n\n\"Oh, much longer ago than that,\" he comforted them; \"so long, in fact, that neither your Aunt Emily nor Weeden were even thought of\u2014there lived a man who\u2014\"\n\n\"Where? What country, please?\"\n\n\"There lived a man in England\u2014\"\n\n\"But you said England was beneath the sea with the chalk cliffs.\"\n\n\"There lived a man in a very small, queer little island called Ingland, spelt 'Ing,' not 'Eng,' who\u2014\"\n\n\"It wasn't our England, then?\"\n\n\"On a tiny little island called Ingland, who was very lonely because he was the only human being on it\u2014\"\n\n\"Weren't there animals and things too?\"\n\n\"And the only animals who lived on it with him were a squirrel who lived in the only tree, a rabbit who lived in the only hole, and a small grey mouse who made its nest in the pocket of his other coat.\"\n\n\"Were they friendly? Did he love them awfully?\"\n\n\"At first he was very polite to them only, because he was a civil servant of his Government; but after a bit they became so friendly that he loved them even better than himself, and went to tea with the rabbit in its hole, and climbed the tree to share a nut-breakfast with the squirrel, and\u2014and\u2014\"\n\n\"He doesn't know what to do with the mouse,\" a loud whisper, meant to be inaudible, broke in upon the fatal hesitation.\n\n\"And went out for walks with the mouse when the ground was damp and the mouse complained of chilly feet. In the pocket of his coat, all snug and warm, it stood on its hind legs and peered out upon the world with its pointed nose just above the pocket flap\u2014\"\n\n\"Then he liked the mouse best?\"\n\n\"What sort of coat was it? An overcoat or just an ordinary one that smelt? Was that the only pocket in it?\"\n\n\"It was made of the best leaves from the squirrel's tree, and from the rabbit's last year's fur, and the mouse had fastened the edges together neatly with the sharpest of its own discarded whiskers. And so they walked about the tiny island and enjoyed the view together\u2014\"\n\n\"The mouse couldn't have seen much!\"\n\n\"Until, one day, the mouse declared the ground was ALWAYS wet and was getting wetter and wetter. And the man got frightened.\"\n\n\"Ugh! It's going to get awful in a minute!\" And the children nestled closer. The voice sank lower. It became mysterious.\n\n\"And the wetter it got the more the man got frightened; for the island was dreadfully tiny and\u2014\"\n\n\"Why, please, did it get wetter and wetter?\"\n\n\"THAT,\" continued the man who earned his living in His Majesty's Stationery Office by day, and by night justified his existence offering the raw material of epics unto little children, \"that was the extraordinary part of it. For no one could discover. The man stroked his beard and looked about him, the squirrel shook its bushy tail, the rabbit lifted its upper lip and thrust its teeth out, and the mouse jerked its head from side to side until its whiskers grew longer and sharper than ever\u2014but none of them could discover why the island got wetter and wetter and wetter\u2014\"\n\n\"Perhaps it just rained like here.\"\n\n\"For the sky was always blue, it never rained, and there was so little dew at night that no one even mentioned it. Yet the tiny island got wetter every day, till it finally got so wet that the very floor of the man's hut turned spongy and splashed every time the man went to look out of the window at the view. And at last he got so frightened that he stayed indoors altogether, put on both his coats at once, and told stories to the mouse and squirrel about a country that was always dry\u2014\"\n\n\"Didn't the rabbit know anything?\"\n\n\"For all this time the rabbit was too terrified to come out of its hole at all. The increasing size of its front teeth added to its uneasiness, for they thrust out so far that they hid the view and made the island seem even smaller than it was\u2014\"\n\n\"I like rabbits, though.\"\n\n\"Till one fine day\u2014\"\n\n\"They were all fine, you said.\"\n\n\"One finer day than usual the rabbit made a horrible discovery. The way it made the discovery was curious\u2014may seem curious to us, at least\u2014but the fact is, it suddenly noticed that the size of its front teeth had grown out of all proportion to the size of the island. Looking over its shoulder this fine day, it realised how absurdly small the island was in comparison with its teeth\u2014and grasped the horrid truth. In a flash it understood what was happening. The island was getting wetter because it was also getting\u2014smaller!\"\n\n\"Ugh! How beastly!\"\n\n\"Did it tell the others?\"\n\n\"It retired half-way down its hole and shouted out the news to the others in the hut.\"\n\n\"Did they hear it?\"\n\n\"It warned them solemnly. But its teeth obstructed the sound, and the windings of its hole made it difficult to hear. The man, besides, was busy telling a story to the mouse, and the mouse, anyhow, was sound asleep at the bottom of his pocket, with the result that the only one who caught the words of warning was\u2014the squirrel. For a squirrel's ears are so sharp that it can even hear the grub whistling to itself inside a rotten nut; and it instantly took action.\"\n\n\"Ah! IT saved them, then?\"\n\n\"The squirrel flew from the man's shoulder where it was perched, balanced for a second on the top of his head, then clung to the ceiling and darted out of the window without a moment's delay. It crossed the island in a single leap, scuttled to the top of the tree, peered about over the diminishing landscape, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Didn't it see the rabbit?\"\n\n\"And returned as quickly as it went. It bustled back into the hut, hopping nervously, and jerking its head with excitement. In a moment it was perched again on the man's shoulder. It carefully kept its bushy tail out of the way of his nose and eyes. And then it whispered what it had seen into his left ear.\"\n\n\"Why into his left ear?\"\n\n\"Because it was the right one, and the other had cotton wool in it.\"\n\n\"Like Aunt Emily!\"\n\n\"What did it whisper?\"\n\n\"The squirrel had made a discovery, too,\" continued the teller, solemnly.\n\n\"Goodness! That's two discoveries!\"\n\n\"But what did it whisper?\"\n\nIn the hush that followed, a coal was heard falling softly into the grate; the night-wind moaned against the outside walls; Judy scraped her stockinged foot slowly along the iron fender, making a faint twanging sound. Breathing was distinctly audible. For several moments the room was still as death. The figure, smothered beneath the clotted mass of children, heaved a sigh. But no one broke the pause. It was too precious and wonderful to break at once. All waited breathlessly, like birds poised in mid-air before they strike\u2026 until a new sound stole faintly upon the listening silence, a faint and very distant sound, barely audible as yet, but of unmistakable character. It was far away in the upper reaches of the building, overhead, remote, a little stealthy. Like the ominous murmur of a muffled drum, it had approach in it. It was coming nearer and nearer. It was significant and threatening.\n\nFor the first time that evening the ticking of the clock was also audible. But the new sound, though somewhat in league with the ticking, and equally remorseless, did not come from the clock. It was a human sound, the most awful known to childhood. It was footsteps on the stairs!\n\nBoth the children and the story-teller heard it, but with different results. The latter stirred and looked about him, as though new hope and strength had come to him. The former, led by Tim and Judy, broke simultaneously into anxious speech. Maria, having slept profoundly since the first mention of the mouse in its cosy pocket, gave no sign at all.\n\n\"Oh, quick! quick! What did the squirrel whisper in his good right ear?\n\nWhat was it? DO hurry, please!\"\n\n\"It whispered two simple words, each of one syllable,\" continued the reanimated figure, his voice lowered and impressive. \"It said\u2014the sea!\"\n\nThe announcement made by the squirrel was so entirely unexpected that the surprise of it buried all memory of the disagreeable sound. The children sat up and stared into the figure's face questioningly. Surely he had made a slight mistake. How could the sea have anything to do with it? But no word was spoken, no actual question asked. This overwhelming introduction of the sea left him poised far beyond their reach. His stories were invariably marvellous. He would somehow justify himself.\n\n\"The Sea!\" whispered Tim to Judy, and there was intense admiration in his voice and eyes.\n\n\"From the top of its tree,\" resumed the figure triumphantly, \"the squirrel had seen what was happening, and made its great discovery. It realised why the ground was wetter and wetter every day, and also why the island was small and growing smaller. For it understood the awful fact that\u2014the sea was rising! A little longer and the entire island would be under water, and everybody on it would be drowned!\" \"Couldn't none of them swim or anything?\" asked Judy with keen anxiety.\n\n\"Hush!\" put in Tim. \"It's what did they do? And who thought of it first?\"\n\nThe question last but one was chosen for solution.\n\n\"The rabbit,\" announced the figure recklessly. \"The rabbit saved them; and in saving them it saved the Island too. It founded Ingland, this very Ingland on which we live to-day. In fact, it started the British Empire by its action. The rabbit did it.\"\n\n\"How? How?\"\n\n\"It heard the squirrel's whisper half-way down its hole. It forgot about its front teeth, and the moment it forgot them they, of course, stopped growing. It recovered all its courage. A grand idea had come to it. It came bustling out of its hiding-place, stood on its hind legs, poked its bright eyes over the window-ledge, and told them how to escape. It said, 'I'll dig my hole deeper and we'll empty the sea into it as it rises. We'll pour the water down my hole!'\"\n\nThe figure paused and fixed his eyes upon each listener in turn, challenging disapproval, yet eager for sympathy at the same time. In place of criticism, however, he met only silence and breathless admiration. Also\u2014he heard that distant sound they had forgotten, and realised it had come much nearer. It had reached the second floor. He made swift and desperate calculations. He decided that it was just possible\u2026 with ordinary good luck\u2026\n\n\"So they all went out and began to deepen the rabbit's hole. They dug and dug and dug. The man took off both his coats; the rabbit scraped with its four paws, using its tail as well\u2014it had a nice long tail in those days; the mouse crept out of his pocket and made channels with its little pointed toes; and the squirrel brushed and swept the water in with its bushy, mop-like tail. The rising sea poured down the ever-deepening hole. They worked with a will together; there was no complaining, though the rabbit wore its tail down till it was nothing but a stump, and the mouse stood ankle-deep in water, and the squirrel's fluffy tail looked like a stable broom. They worked like heroes without stopping even to talk, and as the water went pouring down the hole, the level of the sea, of course, sank lower and lower and lower, the shores of the tiny island stretched farther and farther and farther, till there were reaches of golden sand like Margate at low tide, and as the level sank still lower there rose into view great white cliffs of chalk where before there had been only water\u2014until, at last, the squirrel, scampering down from the tree where it had gone to see what had been accomplished, reported in a voice that chattered with stammering delight, 'We're saved! The sea's gone down! The land's come up!'\"\n\nThe steps were audible in the passage. A gentle knock was heard. But no one answered, for it seemed that no one was aware of it. The figure paused a moment to recover breath.\n\n\"And then, and then? What happened next? Did they thank the rabbit?\"\n\n\"They all thanked each other then. The man thanked the rabbit, and the rabbit thanked the squirrel, and the mouse woke up, and\u2014\"\n\nNo one noticed the slip, which proved that their attention was already painfully divided. For another knock, much louder than before, had interrupted the continuation of the story. The figure turned its head to listen. \"It's nothing,\" said Tim quickly. \"It's only a sound,\" said Judy. \"What did the mouse do? Please tell us quickly.\"\n\n\"I thought I heard a knock,\" the figure murmured. \"Perhaps I was mistaken. The mouse\u2014er\u2014the mouse woke up\u2014\"\n\n\"You told us that.\"\n\nThe figure continued, speaking with greater rapidity even than before:\n\n\"And looked about it, and found the view so lovely that it said it would never live in a pocket again, but would divide its time in future between the fields and houses. So it pricked its whiskers up, and the squirrel curled its tail over its back to avoid any places that still were damp, and the rabbit polished its big front teeth on the grass and said it was quite pleased to have a stump instead of a tail as a memento of a memorable occasion when they had all been nearly drowned together, and\u2014they all skipped up to the top of the high chalk cliffs as dry as a bone and as happy as\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off in the middle of the enormous sentence to say a most ridiculous and unnecessary thing. \"Come in,\" he said, just as though there was some one knocking at the door. But no single head was turned. If there was an entry it was utterly ignored.\n\n\"Happy as what?\"\n\n\"As you,\" the figure went on faster than ever. \"And that's why England to-day is an island of quite a respectable size, and why everybody pretends it's dry and comfortable and cosy, and why people never leave it except to go away for holidays that cannot possibly be avoided.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" began an awful voice behind the chair.\n\n\"And why to this day,\" he continued as though he had not heard, \"a squirrel always curls its tail above its back, why a rabbit wears a stump like a pen wiper, and why a mouse lives sometimes in a house and sometimes in a field, and\u2014\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, sir,\" clanged the slow, awful voice in a tone that was meant to be heard distinctly, \"but it's long gone 'arf-past six, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Time for bed,\" added the figure with a sound that was like the falling of an executioner's axe. And, as if to emphasise the arrival of the remorseless moment, the clock just then struck loudly on the mantelpiece\u2014seven times.\n\nBut for several minutes no one stirred. Hope, even at such moments, was stronger than machinery of clocks and nurses. There was a general belief that somehow or other the moment that they dreaded, the moment that was always coming to block their happiness, could be evaded and shoved aside. Nothing mechanical like that was wholly true. Daddy had often used queer phrases that hinted at it: \"Some day\u2014A day is coming\u2014A day will come\"; and so forth. Their belief in a special Day when no one would say \"Time\" haunted them already. Yet, evidently this evening was not the momentous occasion; for when Tim mentioned that the clock was fast, the figure behind the chair replied that she was half an hour overdue already, and her tone was like Thompson's when he said, \"Dinner's served.\" There was no escape this time.\n\nAccordingly the children slowly disentangled themselves; they rose and stretched like animals; though all still ignored the figure behind the chair. A ball of stuff unrolled and became Maria. \"Thank you, Daddy,\" she said. \"It was just lovely,\" said Judy. \"But it's only the beginning, isn't it?\" Tim asked. \"It'll go on to-morrow night?\" And the figure, having escaped failure by the skin of its teeth, kissed each in turn and said, \"Another time\u2014yes, I'll go on with it.\" Whereupon the children deigned to notice the person behind the chair. \"We're coming up to bed now, Jackman,\" they mentioned casually, and disappeared slowly from the room in a disappointed body, robbed, unsatisfied, but very sleepy. The clock had cheated them of something that properly was endless. Maria alone made no remark, for she was already asleep in Jackman's comfortable arms. Maria was always carried.\n\n\"Time's up,\" Tim reflected when he lay in bed; \"time's always up. I do wish we could stop it somehow,\" and fell asleep somewhat gratified because he had deliberately not wound up his alarum-clock. He had the delicious feeling\u2014a touch of spite in it\u2014that this would bother Time and muddle it.\n\nYet Time, as a monster, chased him through a hundred dreams and thus revenged itself. It pursued him to the very edge of the daylight, then mocked him with a cold bath, lessons, and a windy sleet against the windows. It was \"time to get up\" again.\n\nYet, meanwhile, Time helped and pleased the children by showing them its pleasanter side as well. It pushed them, gently but swiftly, up the long hill of months and landed them with growing excitement into the open country of another year. Since the rabbit, mouse, and squirrel first woke in their hearts the wonder of common things, they had all grown slightly bigger. Time tucked away another twelve months behind their backs: each of them was a year older; and that in itself was full of a curious and growing wonder.\n\nFor the birth of wonder is a marvellous, sweet thing, but the recognition of it is sweeter and more marvellous still. Its growth, perhaps, shall measure the growth and increase of the soul to whom it is as eyes and hands and feet, searching the world for signs of hiding Reality. But its persistence\u2014through the heavier years that would obliterate it\u2014this persistence shall offer hints of something coming that is more than marvellous. The beginning of wisdom is surely\u2014Wonder." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 194", + "text": "There was a man named Jinks. In him was neither fancy, imagination, nor a sign of wonder, and so he\u2014died.\n\nBut, though he appears in this chapter, he disappears again so quickly that his being mentioned in a sentence all by himself should not lead any one astray. Jinks made a false entry, as it were. The children crossed him out at once. He became illegible. For the trio had their likes and dislikes; they resented liberties being taken with them. Also, when there was no one to tell them stories, they were quite able to amuse themselves. It was the inactive yet omnipotent Maria who brought about indirectly the obliteration of Mr. Jinks.\n\nAnd it came about as follows:\n\nMaria was a podgy child of marked individuality. It was said that she was seven years old, but she declared that eight was the figure, because some uncle or other had explained, \"you're in your eighth year.\" Wandering uncles are troublesome in this kind of way. Every time her age was mentioned she corrected the informant. She had a trick of moving her eyes without moving her head, as though the round face was difficult to turn; but her big blue eyes slipped round without the least trouble, as though oiled. The performance gave her the sly and knowing aspect of a goblin, but she had no objection to that, for it saved her trouble, and to save herself trouble\u2014according to nurses, Authorities, and the like\u2014was her sole object in existence.\n\nYet this seemed a mistaken view of the child. It was not so much that she did not move unnecessarily as that it was not necessary for her to move at all, since she invariably found herself in the middle of whatever was going on. While life bustled anxiously about her, hurrying to accomplish various ends, she remained calm and contented at the centre, completely satisfied, mistress of it all. And her face was symbolic of her entire being; whereas so many faces seem unfinished, hers was complete\u2014globular like the heavenly bodies, circular like the sun, arms and legs unnecessary. The best of everything came to her because she did not run after it. There was no hurry. Time did not worry her. Circular and self-sustaining, she already seemed to dwell in Eternity.\n\n\"And this little person,\" one of these inquisitive, interfering visitors would ask, smiling fatuously; \"how old is she, I wonder?\"\n\n\"Seven,\" was the answer of the Authority in charge.\n\nMaria's eyes rolled sideways, and a little upwards. She looked at the foolish questioner; the Authority who had answered was not worth a glance.\n\n\"No,\" she said flatly, with sublime defiance, \"I'm more. I'm in my eighth year, you see.\"\n\nAnd the visitor, smiling that pleasant smile that makes children distrust, even dislike them, and probably venturing to pinch her cheek or pat her on the shoulder into the bargain, accepted the situation with another type of smile\u2014the Smile-that-children-expect. As a matter of fact, children hate it. They see through its artificial humbug easily. They prefer a solemn and unsmiling face invariably. It's the latter that produces chocolates and sudden presents; it's the stern-faced sort that play hide-and-seek or stand on their heads. The Smilers are bored at heart. They mean to escape at the first opportunity. And the children never catch their sleeves or coattails to prevent them going.\n\n\"So you're in your eighth year, are you?\" this Smiler chuckled with a foolish grin. He patted her cheek kindly. \"Why, you're almost a grown-up person. You'll be going to dinner-parties soon.\" And he smiled again. Maria stood motionless and patient. Her eyes gazed straight before her. Her podgy face remained expressionless as dough.\n\n\"Answer the kind gentleman,\" said the Authority reprovingly.\n\nMaria did not budge. A finger and thumb, both dirty, rolled a portion of her pinafore into a pointed thing like a string, distinctly black. She waited for the visitor to withdraw. But this particular visitor did not withdraw.\n\n\"I knew a little girl\u2014\" he began, with a condescending grin that meant that her rejection of his advances had offended him, \"a little girl of about your age, who\u2014\"\n\nBut the remainder of the rebuke-concealed-in-a-story was heard only by the Authority. For Maria, relentless and unhumbugged, merely walked away. In the hall she discovered Tim, discreetly hiding. \"What's he come for?\" the brother inquired promptly, jerking his thumb towards the hall.\n\nMaria's eyes just looked at him.\n\n\"To see Mother, I suppose,\" he answered himself, accustomed to his sister's goblin manners, \"and talk about missions and subshkiptions, and all that. Did he give you anything?\"\n\n\"No, nothing.\"\n\n\"Did he call us bonny little ones?\" His face mentioned that he could kill if necessary, or if his sister's honour required it.\n\n\"He didn't say it.\"\n\n\"Lucky for him,\" exclaimed Tim gallantly, rubbing his nose with the palm of his hand and snorting loudly. \"What did he say, then\u2014the old Smiler?\"\n\n\"He said,\" replied Maria, moving her head as well as her eyes, \"that I wasn't really old, and that he knew another little girl who was nicer than me, and always told the truth, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, come on,\" cried Tim, impatiently interrupting. \"My trains are going in the schoolroom, and I want a driver for an accident. We'll put the Smiler in the luggage van, and he'll get smashed in the collision, and all the wheels will go over his head. Then he'll find out how old you really are. We'll fairly smash him.\"\n\nThey disappeared. Judy, who was reading a book on the Apocalypse, in a corner of the room, looked up a moment as they entered.\n\n\"What's up?\" she asked, her mind a little dazed by the change of focus from stars, scarlet women, white horses, and mysterious \"Voices,\" to dull practical details of everyday existence. \"What's on?\" she repeated.\n\n\"Trains,\" replied Tim. \"We're going to have an accident and kill a man dead.\"\n\n\"What's he done?\" she inquired.\n\n\"Humbugged Maria with a lot of stuff\u2014and gave her nothing\u2014and didn't believe a single word she told him.\"\n\nJudy glanced without much interest at the railway laid out upon the floor, murmured \"Oh, I see,\" and resumed her reading of the wonderful book she had purloined from the top shelf of a neglected bookcase outside the gun-room. It absorbed her. She loved the tremendous words, the atmosphere of marvel and disaster, and especially the constant suggestion that the end of the world was near. Antichrist she simply adored. No other hero in any book she knew came near him.\n\n\"Come and help,\" urged Tim, picking up an engine that lay upon its side. \"Come on.\"\n\n\"No, thanks. I've got an Apocalypse. It's simply frightfully exciting.\"\n\n\"Shall we break both legs?\" asked Maria blandly, \"or just his neck?\"\n\n\"Neck,\" said Tim briefly. \"Only they must find the heart beneath the rubbish of the luggage van.\"\n\nJudy looked up in spite of herself. \"Who is it?\" she inquired, with an air of weighing conflicting interests.\n\n\"Mr. Jinks.\" It was Maria who supplied the information.\n\n\"But he's Daddy's offiss-partner man,\" Judy objected, though without much vim or heat.\n\nMaria did not answer. Her eyes were glued upon the other engine.\n\n\"All black and burnt and\u2014full of the very horridest diseases,\" put in Tim, referring to the heart of the destroyed Mr. Jinks beneath the engine.\n\nHe glanced up enticingly at his elder sister, whom he longed to draw into the vindictive holocaust.\n\n\"He said things to Maria,\" he explained persuasively, \"and it's not the first time either. Last Sunday he called me 'his little man,' and he's never given me a single thing since ever I can remember, years and years ago.\"\n\nThen Judy remembered that he invariably kissed her on both cheeks as though she was a silly little child.\n\n\"Oh, that man!\" she exclaimed, realising fully now the enormities he had committed. She appeared to hesitate a moment. Then she flung down her Apocalypse suddenly. \"Put him on a scarlet horse,\" she cried, \"pretend he's the Beast, and I'll come.\"\n\nMaria's blue eyes wheeled half a circle towards Tim. She did not move her head. It signified agreement. Tim knew. Only her consent, as the insulted party, was necessary before he could approve.\n\n\"All right,\" he cried to Judy. \"We'll put him in a special carriage with his horse, and I'll make out a label for the window, so that every one will know.\" He went over to the table and wrote \"BEAST\" in capital letters on a half-sheet of paper. The cumbersome quill pen made two spongy blots.\n\n\"It's the end of the world really at the same time,\" decided Judy, to a chorus of general approval, \"not only the end of Mr. Jinks.\" She liked her horrors on a proper scale.\n\nAnd the railway line was quickly laid across the room from the window to the wall. The lamps of oil on both engines were lit. The trains faced one another. Mr. Jinks and his scarlet horse thought themselves quite safe in their special carriage, unaware that it was labelled \"Beast\" with a label that overlapped the roof and hid all view of the landscape through the windows on one side. Apparently they slept in opposite corners, with full consciousness of complete security. Mr. Jinks was tucked up with woolly rugs, and a newspaper lay across his knee. The scarlet horse had its head in a bag of oats, and its bridle was fastened to the luggage rack above. Both were supplied with iron foot-warmers. There was a fearful fog; and the train was going at a TREMENDOUS pace.\n\nSo was the other train. They approached, they banged, they smashed to atoms. It was the most appalling collision that had ever been heard of, and the Guard and Engine-Driver, as well as the Ticket-Collectors and Directors of the Company, were all executed by the Government the very next day from gallows that an angry London built in half an hour on the top of St. Paul's Cathedral dome.\n\nIt took place between the footstool and the fireplace in the thickest fog that England had ever known. And the horrid black heart of Mr. Jinks was discovered beneath the wreckage of a special carriage next to the luggage van. It was simply black as coal and very nasty indeed. The little boy who found it was a porter's son, whose mother was so poor that she took in washing for members of Parliament, who paid their bills irregularly because they were very busy governing Ireland. He knew it was a cinder, but did not discover it was a heart until he showed it to his mother, and his mother said it was far too black to wash.\n\nThe accident to Mr. Jinks, therefore, was a complete success. The butler helped with the mending of the engine, and Maria informed at least one Authority, \"We do not know Mr. Jinks. We have other friends.\"\n\n\"But, remember,\" said Judy, \"we mustn't mention it to Daddy, because Mr. Jinks is his partner-in-the-offiss.\"\n\n\"Was,\" said Tim. The remains they decided to send to what they called the \"Hospital for Parilysed Ineebrits with Incurable Afflictions of the Heart.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 195", + "text": "But the children were not always so vindictive and blood-thirsty. All three could be very tender sometimes. Even Maria was not wholly implacable and merciless, she had a pretty side as well. Their neighbour at the Manor House, Colonel William Stumper, C.B., experienced this gentler quality in the trio. He was Mother's cousin, too.\n\nThey were inclined to like this Colonel Stumper, C.B. For one thing he limped, and that meant, they decided, that he had a wooden leg. They never called it such, of course, but indicated obliquely that the injured limb was made of oak or walnut, by referring to the other as \"his living leg,\" \"his good leg,\" and so forth. For another thing, he did not smile at them; and for a third, he did not ask foolish questions in an up-and-down voice (assumed for the moment), as though they were invalids, idiots, or tailless puppies who could not answer. He frowned at them. He said furiously, \"How are you, creatures?\" And\u2014he gave usually at least a shilling to each.\n\n\"That makes three shillings altogether,\" as Tim cleverly explained.\n\n\"But not three shillings for each of us,\" Maria qualified the praise. \"I only got one.\" She took it out of her mouth and showed it by way of proof.\n\n\"You'll swallow it,\" warned Judy, \"and then you won't have none at all.\"\n\nIf received early in the week, they reported their good fortune to the Authorities; but if Sunday was too near, they waited. Daddy had a queer idea of teasing sometimes. \"Just in time for to-morrow's collection,\" he would be apt to say; and though he did not really mean it perhaps, there was a hint of threat in the suggestion that quenched high spirits at the moment.\n\n\"You see, he takes the plate round,\" Judy told them, \"and so feels ashamed.\" She did not explain the feeling ashamed. It was just that her father, who always did things thoroughly, had to say something, and so picked on that. \"Monday or Tuesday's safest,\" was her judgment.\n\nMaria rolled her eyes round like a gigantic German doll.\n\n\"Never's best,\" she gave as her opinion.\n\nBut that was sly. The others reproved her quickly.\n\n\"Daddy likes to know,\" they told her. \"Monday or Tuesday's all right.\" They agreed just to mention the matter only. There was no need to \"say a lot.\"\n\nSo they liked this Colonel Stumper, C.B. They liked his \"title,\" declaring that the letters stood for \"Come Back,\" and referring to their owner as \"Come Back Stumper.\" Some day, when he was gone for good, he was to be promoted to K.C.B., meaning \"Kan't-Come-Back.\" But they preferred him as he was, plain C.B., because they did not want to lose him. They declared that \"Companion to the Bath\" was just nonsense invented by a Radical Government. For in politics, of course, they followed their father's lead, and their father had distinctly stated more than once that \"the policy of a Radical Government was some-funny-word-or-other nonsense,\" which statement helped them enormously in forming their own opinions on several other topics as well. In personal disagreements, for instance\u2014they never \"squabbled\"\u2014the final insult was to say, \"My dear, you're as silly as a something-or-other Radical Govunment,\" for there was no answer to this anywhere in the world.\n\nCome-Back Stumper, therefore, though casual outsiders might never have guessed it, was a valuable ally. He was what Mother called \"a character\" as well, and if the children used this statement in praise of him, while adopting in their carelessness a revised version, \"he has no character,\" this was not Come-Back Stumper's fault. He was also an \"extinguished soldger,\" and had seen much service in foreign parts. India with its tigers, elephants, and jungles, was in his heated atmosphere deliciously, and his yellow tint, as of an unripe orange, was due to something they had learned from hearsay to describe as \"curried liver trouble.\" All this, and especially his dead or wooden leg, was distinctly in his favour. Come-Back Stumper was real. Also, he was hard and angular in appearance, short, brisk in manner, square-shouldered, and talked like a General who was bothered about something in a battle. His opinions were most decided. His conversation consisted of negatives, refusals and blank denials. If Come-Back Stumper agreed with what was said, it meant that he was feeling unwell with an attack of curried-liver-trouble. The children understood him. He understood the children, too.\n\n\"It's a jolly morning, William,\" from Daddy would be met with \"Might be worse\" and a snort like the sneeze of the nursery cat, but a direct invitation of any sort was simply declined point blank. \"Care to see The Times, William?\" ensured the answer, \"Oh, no, thanks; there's never anything worth reading in it.\" This was as regular as breakfast when Cousin William was staying in the house. It was, in fact, Daddy's formula when he settled into his armchair for a quiet half-hour's read. Daddy's question was the mere politeness of a host. It was sham, but Cousin William's answer was as real as breakfast. The formula was a mechanical certainty, as certain as that pressing a button in the wall produced Thompson in the room.\n\nAccordingly, when Mother said, \"Now, don't bother your Cousin William, children; he doesn't want you,\" this individual would instantly shoulder arms and state the exact contrary with fiery emphasis.\n\n\"If you've no objection,\" came the testy answer, \"and if it's all the same to you, Cecilia\"\u2014a shade sarcastically, this\u2014\"it's precisely what I do want.\"\n\nAnd he would look at the children in a way that suggested the most intimate of secret understanding between himself and them. More, he would rise and leave the room with the impetus of a soldier going out to fight, and would play with Judy, Tim, and Maria in a fashion that upset the household routine and made the trio unmanageable for the Authorities for hours afterwards.\n\n\"He's an honourable gentleman like the gentlemen in Parliament,\" declared Judy, \"and that's my opinion of why I think him nice.\"\n\n\"And when I'm grown-up,\" was Tim's verdict, \"I'll be a soldger just exactly the same, only not yellow, and taller, and not so thick in the middle, and much, much richer, and with C.B. in front of my name as well as at the end.\"\n\nMaria, not being present at the time, said nothing audible. But she liked him, too, unquestionably. Otherwise she would have announced the fact without delay. \"He is a lump rather,\" she had been heard to remark, referring to his actual bulk and slowness of movement when in play. But it was nicely, very nicely meant.\n\n\"I am sure your Cousin William would rather be left alone to read quietly,\" said Mother, seeing the trio approach that individual stealthily after tea in the library one evening. He was deep in a big armchair, and deep in a book as well. The children were allowed downstairs after their schoolroom tea for an hour when nothing particular was on. \"Wouldn't you, William?\" she added. She went on knitting a sort of muffler thing she held up close to the lamp. She expected no reply, apparently.\n\nCousin William made none. But he raised the level of his book so that it hid his face. A moment before, the eyes had been looking over the top at the advancing trio, watching their movements narrowly.\n\nThe children did not answer either. They separated. They scouted. They executed a flank attack in open order. Three minutes later Colonel Stumper was surrounded. And no word was spoken; the scouts just perched and watched him. He was not actually reading, for he had not turned a page for about ten minutes, and it was not a picture book. The difficulty was, however, to get him started. If only Mother would help them! Then Mother, unwittingly, did so. For she dropped her ball of wool, and finding no one at hand to recover it, she looked vaguely round the room\u2014and saw them. And she shook her head at them.\n\n\"Don't bother him just now,\" she whispered again, \"he's got a cold. Here, Maria, pick up my wool, darling, will you?\" But while Tim (for Maria only moved her eyes) picked up the wool obediently, Cousin William picked up himself with difficulty, tossed his book into the deep arm-chair, and stalked without a single word towards the door. Mother watched him with one eye, but the children did not stir a muscle.\n\n\"William, you're not going to bed, are you?\" she asked kindly, \"or would you like to, perhaps? And have your dinner in your room, and a warm drink just before going to sleep? That's the best thing for a cold, I always think.\"\n\nHe turned at the door and faced her. \"Thank you very much,\" he said with savage emphasis, \"but I am not ill, and I am not going to bed.\" The negatives sounded like pistol shots. \"My cold is nothing to speak of.\" And he was gone, leaving a trail of fire in the air.\n\nThe children, cunning in their generation, did not move. There were moments in life, and this was one of them, when \"stir a finger and you're a dead man\" was really true. No finger stirred, no muscle twitched; one pair of eyelids fluttered, nothing more. And Mother, happy with her recovered ball of wool, was presently lost in the muffler thing she knitted, forgetful of their presence, if not of their very existence. Signals meanwhile were made and answered by means of some secret code that birds and animals understand. The plan was matured in silence.\n\n\"Good-night, Mother,\" said Judy innocently, a few moments later, stepping up and kissing her.\n\n\"Good-night,\" said Tim gravely, doing likewise.\n\nMaria kissed, but said no word at all. They did not linger, as their custom was, to cuddle in or hear a fairy story. To-night they were good and businesslike.\n\n\"Good-night, duckies,\" said Mother, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. \"It's not quite bed-time yet, but it's been a long day, and you're tired out. I shall be up presently to hear your prayers and tuck you up. And, Judy, you might tell Jackman\u2014\"\n\nBut the room was empty, the children vanished. The door banged softly, cutting off the sentence in its middle, and Mother resumed her knitting, smiling quietly to herself. And in the hall outside Come-Back Stumper was discovered, warming his Army back before the open fire of blazing logs. He looked like a cart-horse, the shadows made him spread so. Maria pushed him to one side. She pushed, at least, but he did not move exactly. Yet somehow, by a kind of sidling process, he took up a new position in regard to the fire and themselves, the result of which was that they occupied the best places, while he stood at one corner in an attitude which resisted attack and yet invited it.\n\n\"Good-evening,\" remarked Maria; \"are you warm?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" exclaimed Tim, \"that's not it at all. The thing is, shall we play hide-and-seek, or would you really rather go to bed, as Mother said, and have dinner and hot drinks?\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" cried Judy with authority. \"He's got an awful cold, and he's got to go to bed at once. He's shivering all over. It's Nindian fever.\"\n\n\"No, really, really\u2014\" began Stumper, but was not allowed to finish.\n\n\"Thin captain biscuits soaked in hot milk with ginger, nutmeg, lemon, and whisky,\" announced Judy, \"would be best.\" And she shot towards the door, her hair untied and flying.\n\n\"But, my dear, I assure you\u2014\"\n\n\"Or Bath Olivers,\" she interrupted, \"because they soak better. You know nothing,\" she added motheringly; \"no man ever does.\" There was contempt in her voice as well as pity.\n\n\"Why do you know nothing?\" inquired Maria, with a blaze of staring eyes, as the door slammed upon her vanishing sister.\n\n\"I think you know everything,\" said Tim with pride, decidedly, \"only you've forgotten it in India. I think it's silly.\"\n\n\"The milk and stuff?\" agreed the soldier. \"Yes, so do I. And I hate biscuits, and ginger makes me hot and ill\u2014\"\n\n\"Iller than you are already?\" asked Maria, \"because that means bed.\"\n\n\"Maria,\" he snapped angrily, \"I'm not ill at all. If you go on saying I'm ill, of course I shall get ill. I never felt better in my life.\"\n\nTim turned round like a top. \"Then let's play hide-and-seek,\" he cried.\n\n\"Let's hide before Judy gets back, and she can come and never find us!\"\n\nCousin William suggested they were not enough to play that game, and was of opinion that Aunt Emily might be invited too.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Tim gave his decided verdict, \"not women. They can't hide properly. They bulge.\"\n\nAnd at that moment Judy appeared in the doorway across the hall.\n\n\"It's coming,\" she cried. \"I've ordered everything\u2014hot milk and Bath Olivers and preserved ginger and\u2014\"\n\nCousin William took the matter into his own hands then, for the situation was growing desperate. \"Look here,\" he suggested gravely, yet without enthusiasm, \"I'll take the milk and stuff upstairs when I've got into bed, and meanwhile we'll do something else. I'm\u2014that is, my cold is too bad to play a game, but I'll tell you a story about\u2014er\u2014about a tiger\u2014if you like?\" The last three words were added as a question. An answer, however, was not immediately forthcoming. For the moment was a grave one. It was admitted that Come-Back Stumper could play a game with credit and success, even an active game like hide-and-seek; but it was not known yet that he could tell a story. The fate of the evening, therefore, hung upon the decision.\n\n\"A tiger!\" said Tim, doubtfully, weighing probabilities. \"A tiger you shot, was it, or just\u2014a tiger?\" A sign, half shadow and half pout, was in his face. Maria and Judy waited upon their brother's decision with absolute confidence, meanwhile.\n\nColonel Stumper moved artfully backwards towards a big horsehair sofa, beneath the deer heads and assegais from Zululand. He did it on tiptoe, aware that this mysterious and suggestive way of walking has a marked effect on children in the dark. \"I did not shoot it,\" he said, \"because I lived with it. It was the most extraordinary tiger that was ever known\u2014\"\n\n\"In India?\"\n\n\"In the world. And I ought to know, because, as I say, I lived with it for days\u2014\"\n\n\"Inside it?\"\n\n\"Nearly, but not quite. I lived in its cave with the cubs and other things, half-eaten deer and cows and the bones of Hindus\u2014\"\n\n\"Were the bones black? However did you escape? Why didn't the tiger eat you?\"\n\nHe drew the children closely round him on the sofa. \"I'll tell you,\" he said, \"for this is an inaugural occasion, and I've never told the story before to any one in the world. The experience was incredible, and no one would believe it. But the proof that it really happened is that the tiger has left its mark upon me till I die\u2014\"\n\n\"But you haven't died\u2014yet, I mean,\" Maria observed.\n\n\"He means teeth, silly,\" Tim squelched her.\n\n\"Died in another sense than the one you mean,\" the great soldier and former administrator of a province continued, \"dyed yellow\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh-h-h! Is that why\u2014?\"\n\n\"That is why,\" he replied pathetically. \"For living with that tiger family so long, I almost turned into one myself. The tiger nature got into me. I snarl and growl, I use my teeth ferociously when hungry, I walk stealthily on tiptoe, I let my whiskers grow, and my colour has the tint of Indian tigers' skins.\"\n\n\"Have you got a tail, too?\"\n\nHe glared into the blue eyes of Maria, sternly. \"It's growing,\" he whispered horribly, \"it's growing.\"\n\nThere was a pause in which credulity shook hands with faith. Belief was in the air. If doubt did whisper, \"Let me see, please,\" it was too low to be quite audible. Come-Back Stumper was surrounded by an atmosphere of black-edged glory suddenly; he wore a halo; his feet were dipped in mystery.\n\n\"Then what's an orgully occasion?\" somebody asked.\n\n\"This!\" replied Stumper. But he uttered it so savagely that no one cared to press for further details. Clearly it was a secret and confidential moment, and \"inaugural occasion\" had something to do with the glory of wearing an incipient tail. Glory and mystery clothed Stumper from that moment with Indian splendour. At least, he thought so\u2026.\n\n\"And the tiger?\" came the whispering question.\n\n\"Ugh-h-h-h!\" he shuddered; \"I'll tell you. But I must think a moment quietly first.\"\n\n\"His tail hurts,\" Maria told Tim beneath her breath, while they waited for the story to begin.\n\n\"So would yours,\" was the answer, \"if you had a cold at the same time, too. A girl would simply cry.\" And he looked contempt at her, but unutterable respect at his soldier friend.\n\n\"This tiger,\" began the traveller, in a heavy voice, \"was a\u2014a very unusual tiger. I met it, that is to say, most unexpectedly. It was in a tropical jungle, where the foliage was so thick that the sunlight hardly penetrated at all. It was dark as night even in the daytime. There were monkeys overhead and snakes beneath, and bananas were so plentiful that every time my elephant knocked against a tree a shower of fruit fell down like hail and tickled its skin.\"\n\n\"You were on an elephant, then?\"\n\n\"We were all on elephants. On my particular elephant there was a man to load for me and a man to guide the beast. We moved slowly and cautiously. It was dark, as I said, but the showers of falling bananas made yellow streaks against the black that the elephant constantly mistook for tigers flying through the air as they leaped in silent fury against the howdah in which we crouched upon his back. The howdah, you know, is the saddle.\"\n\n\"Was the elephant friendly?\"\n\n\"Very friendly indeed; but he found it difficult to see, and all of a sudden he would give a hop and a jump that nearly flung me off his shoulders. For a long time\u2014\"\n\n\"That was the bananas tickling him, I suppose?\"\n\n\"This continued without anything dangerous happening, but all at once he gave a tremendous leap into the air, lifted his trunk, trumpeted like an Army bugle, and then set off at full speed through the tangled jungle. He had stupidly stepped upon a cobra! And the cobra, before it was squashed to pulp, had stung him between the big and little toe.\"\n\n\"On purpose?\" Judy asked.\n\n\"In an Indian jungle everything's done on purpose. My elephant raced away, trumpeting in agony, at twenty miles an hour. The driver lost his balance and fell off; the other man, scrambling along to take his place and steer the monster, fell off after him, taking both my guns with him as he went; and I myself, crouching in the swaying howdah, and holding on for grim death, continued to tear through the jungle on top of my terrified and angry elephant. Then, suddenly, the branch of a tree caught the howdah in the middle and swept it clear. The elephant rushed on. The howdah, with myself inside it, swung in mid-air like a caught balloon. But I saw it could not hold on long. There was just time to scramble out of it into safety upon the branch when there came a sound of ripping, and the thing fell smash upon the ground some twenty feet below, leaving me alone in an Indian jungle\u2014up a tree.\"\n\nAnd he paused a moment to produce the right effect and reap the inevitable glory of applause.\n\nOut of the breathless silence sprang a voice at once: \"Was the elephant badly hurt?\" And then another: \"I thought elephants were too big to feel a bite like that.\" Followed by a third\u2014Maria's: \"It wasn't fair to step on it and expect it to do nothing.\"\n\nBut no single word about his own predicament\u2014its horror, danger, loneliness, and risk. No single syllable. Even the Hindus, the driver, and the man who carried the guns, were left unmentioned. Bananas were equally ignored. The tiger itself had passed into oblivion.\n\n\"Thanks most awfully,\" said Tim, politely, after an interval. \"It must have been awful for you.\" It was said as spokesman for the other listeners. All were kind and grateful, but actual interest there was none. They took the pause to mean that the story was at an end; but they had not cared about it because they\u2014did not believe it.\n\n\"Simply awful,\" the boy added, as though, perhaps, he had not made it quite clear that he wished to thank yet could not honestly praise. \"Wasn't it, Judy?\" And he jerked his head round towards his elder sister.\n\n\"Oh, awful\u2014yes,\" agreed that lady.\n\nBut neither of them risked inviting the opinion of Maria. Her uncompromising nature was too well known for that. Nevertheless, unasked, she offered her criticism too: \"Awful,\" she said, her podgy face unmoved, her blue eyes fixed upon the ceiling. And the whole room seemed to give a long, deep sigh.\n\nNow, for the hero, this was decidedly an awkward moment; he had done his best and miserably failed. He was no story-teller, and they had found him out. None the less, however, he was a real hero. He faced the situation as a brave man should:\n\n\u2003For his tale was mediocre,\n\n\u2003And his face of yellow ochre\n\n\u2003Took a tinge of saffron sorrow in his fright;\n\n\u2003Yet he rose to the occasion,\n\n\u2003Without anger or evasion,\n\n\u2003And did his best to put the matter right.\n\n\"Tell me how you knew,\" he asked at length, facing the situation. \"What made you guess?\"\n\n\"Because, in the first place, you're not an atom like a tiger, anyhow,\" explained Judy.\n\n\"And you made the jungle so very dark,\" said Tim, \"that you simply couldn't have seen the bananas falling.\"\n\n\"And we know you haven't got a tail at all,\" Maria added, clinchingly.\n\n\"Of course,\" he agreed; \"your discernment does you credit, very great credit indeed. Few of the officials under me in India had as much.\"\n\nJudy looked soothingly at him and stroked his sleeve. Somehow or other she divined, it seemed, he felt mortified and ashamed. He was a dear old thing, whatever happened.\n\n\"Never mind,\" she whispered, \"it really doesn't matter. It was very nice to hear about your tiger. Besides\u2014it must hurt awfully, having a cold like this.\"\n\n\"I knew,\" put in Tim sympathetically, \"the moment you began about the bananas falling. But I didn't say anything, because I knew it couldn't last\u2014anything that began like that.\"\n\n\"But it got wonderful towards the end,\" insisted Judy.\n\n\"Till he was in the tree,\" objected her brother. \"He never could really have got along a branch like that.\"\n\n\"No,\" agreed Judy, thoughtfully, \"that was rather silly.\"\n\nThey continued discussing the story for some time as though its creator was elsewhere. He kept very still. Maria already slept in a soft and podgy ball on his lap\u2026.\n\n\"I am a lonely old thing,\" he said suddenly, with a long sigh, for in reality he was deeply disappointed at his failure, and had aspired to be their story-teller as well as playmate. Ordinary life bored him dreadfully. He had melancholy yearnings after youth and laughter. \"Let's do something else now. What do you say to a turn of hide-and-seek? Eh?\"\n\nThe miraculous Maria woke at this, yawned like a cat, and nearly rolled off on to the floor. \"I dreamed of a real tiger,\" she informed every one. But no one was listening. Judy and Tim were prancing wildly.\n\n\"If your cold isn't too bad,\" cried Judy, \"it would be lovely.\" No grown-up could have been more thoughtful of his welfare than she was.\n\n\"I'll hide,\" he said, \"and in five minutes you come and find me.\" He went towards the door into the passage.\n\n\"Choose a warm place, and keep out of draughts,\" she cried after him. And he was gone. He nearly collided with a servant carrying a tray, but the servant, hearing his secret instructions, vanished again instantly in the direction of the kitchen. Five minutes later\u2014an alleged five minutes\u2014the children began their search. But they never found him. They hunted high and low, from attic to cellar, in gun-room, scullery, and pantry, even climbing up the ladder from the box-room to the roof, but without result. Colonel Stumper had disappeared. He was K.C.B.\n\n\"D'you think he's offended?\" suggested Judy, as they met at length in the hall to consider the situation.\n\n\"Of course not,\" said Tim emphatically, \"a man like that! He's written a book on Scouting!\"\n\n\"I've finished,\" Maria mentioned briefly, and sat down.\n\nOn Judy's puzzled face there appeared an anxious expression then. His cold, she remembered, was very heavy. \"I looked under every sofa and into every cupboard,\" she said, as though she feared he might have choked or suffocated. They stood in front of the fireplace and began to talk about other things. Their interest in the game was gone, they were tired of looking; but at the back of their minds was a secret annoyance, though at the same time a sense of great respect for the man who could conceal himself so utterly from sight. A touch of the marvellous was in it somehow.\n\n\"There's no good hiding like that,\" they felt indignantly. Still it was rather wonderful, after all. A man \"like that\" could do anything. He might even be up a chimney somewhere. He might be anywhere! They felt a little creepy\u2026.\n\n\"P'raps he is a sort of tiger thing,\" whispered some one\u2026 and they were rather relieved when the drawing-room door opened and Mother appeared, knitting her scarlet muffler as she walked. The scene of scolding, explanation, and excuses that followed\u2014for it was half an hour after bed-time\u2014was cut short by Maria informing the company that she was \"awfully tired,\" with a sigh that meant she would like to be carried up to bed. She was carried. The procession moved slowly, Tim and Judy bringing up the rear. But while Tim talked about a water-rat he meant to kill next day with an air-gun, Judy used her eyes assiduously, still hoping to discover Cousin William crumpled up in some incredible hiding-place. They told their mother nothing. The matter was private. It was between themselves and him. It would have to be cleared up on the morrow\u2014if they remembered. On the upper landing, however, there was a curious sound. Maria, half asleep in the maternal arms, did not hear it, apparently, but the other two children exchanged sudden, recriminating glances. A door stood ajar, and light came through it from the room within. This curious sound came with it. It was a sneeze\u2014a regular Nindian sneeze.\n\n\"We never thought of looking there,\" they said reproachfully.\n\nCome-Back Stumper had simply gone to bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 196", + "text": "Meanwhile their father alone grew neither older nor larger. His appearance did not change. They could not imagine that he would ever change. He still went up to London in the morning, he still came down again, he still continued to grind out stories which they thought wonderful, and he still, on occasions, said mysteriously, \"A day will come,\" or its variants, \"Some day,\" and \"A day is coming.\" Yet, though he had Fancy, he had not Imagination. He did not satisfy them. For while Fancy may attend the birth of Wonder, Imagination alone accompanies her growth. Daddy was too full of stationery and sealing-wax in his daily work to have got very far.\n\nAunt Emily also still was there, explaining everything and saying No, shaking her head at them, or holding up a warning finger. Their outward life, indeed, showed little change, but it included one important novelty that affected all their present and all their subsequent existence, too. They made a new friend\u2014their father's brother.\n\nWhen first his visit was announced, they had their doubts about him\u2014\"your Uncle Felix\" had a very questionable sound indeed, but the fact that he lived in Paris and was a writer of sea-stories and historical novels counterbalanced the handicap of the unpleasant \"Felix.\" For to their ears Felix was not a proper sort of name at all; it was all right for a horse or a dog or even for a town, but for a man who was also a relation it was a positive disaster. It would not shorten for one thing, and for another it reminded them of \"a king, or some one in a history book,\" and thus did not predispose them in his favour. It was simply what Tim called a \"beastly name.\" Aunt Emily, however, was responsible for their biggest prejudice against him: \"You must remember not to bother him, children; you must never disturb him when he's working.\" And as Uncle Felix was coming to stay for several weeks in the Mill House, they regarded him in advance as some kind of horrible excitement they must put up with.\n\nHowever, as most things in life go by contraries, this Uncle Felix person turned out just the opposite. Within an hour of his arrival he was firmly established as friend and ally, yet so quickly and easily was this adjustment brought about that no one could say exactly how it happened. They themselves said nothing\u2014just stood and stared at him; Daddy and Mother said the expected things, and Aunt Emily, critical and explanatory as usual, found it necessary to add: \"You'll find it such a quiet house to work in, Felix, and the children will never interfere or get in your way.\" She was evidently proud of her relative and his famous books. \"They'll be as good as gold\u2014won't you, Judy?\" by which name she referred to the trio as a whole.\n\nWhereupon Judy smiled and nodded shyly, Tim bent down and scratched his stocking, and Maria, her face expressionless, merely stared at her aunt as though she\u2014Emily, that is\u2014were a piece of inanimate furniture.\n\n\"I see,\" said Uncle Felix carelessly, and glanced down at the trio.\n\nThat was all he said. But it was the way he said it that instantly explained his position. He looked at them and said, \"I see\"; no more than that\u2014and it was done. They knew, he knew, Aunt Emily also knew. Two little careless words\u2014and then continued to talk of Paris, the Channel crossing, and the weather.\n\n\"Didn't he squash her just!\" remarked Tim, when they were alone together. \"She expected him to thank her awfully and give her a kiss.\" And, accordingly, none of them were in the least surprised when he suddenly poked his head inside the door as they lay in bed and explained that he had just looked in to say good-night, and when he left them a moment later added gravely from the door: \"Mind, you never disturb me, children; because, if you do\u2014!\" He shook a warning finger and was gone. He looked enormous in the doorway.\n\nFrom that moment Uncle Felix became an important factor in their lives. The mysterious compact between them all was signed and sealed, yet none could say who drew it up and worded it. His duties became considerable. He almost took Daddy's place. The Study, indeed, at certain hours of the evening, became their recognised nesting place, and Daddy was as pleased as they themselves were. He seemed relieved. He rarely ground out epics now when his brain was tired and full of Government stationery and sealing-wax. Uncle Felix held the wizard's wand, and what he did with it was this: he raised the sense of wonder in them to a higher level. Daddy had awakened it, and fed it with specimens they could understand. But Uncle Felix poked it into yet greater activity by giving them something that no one could ever possibly understand! He stimulated it so that it worked in them spontaneously and of its own accord. He made it grow. And no amount of Aunt Emilies in the world could stop him.\n\nTheir father felt no jealousy. When the story-hour came round, he produced a set of sentences he kept slyly up his sleeve for the occasion. \"Ask your Uncle Felix; he's better at stories and things than I am. It's his business.\" This was the model. A variation ran: \"Oh, don't bother me just now, children. I've got a lot of figures to digest.\" But the shortest version was simply, \"Run and plague your uncle. I'm too busy.\"\n\n\"Try Mother\" was used when Uncle Felix was in hiding. Only it had no result. Mother's mind was too diffuse to carry conviction. It was soaked in servants and things. In another sense it was too exact. The ingredients of her stories were like a cooking recipe. Besides, hers was the unpardonable fault of never forgetting the time. On the very stroke of the clock she broke off abruptly with \"Now it's bed-time; you shall hear the rest another night.\" Daddy forgot, or pleaded for \"ten minutes more.\" Uncle Felix, however, said flatly, \"They can't go till it's finished\"\u2014and he meant it. His voice was deep and gruff\u2014\"like a dog's,\" according to Maria\u2014and his laugh was like a horse's neigh; it made the china rattle. He was \"frightfully strong,\" too, stronger than Weeden, for he could take a child under each arm and another on his back\u2014and run! He never smiled when he told his stories, and, though this made them seem extra real, it also alarmed deliciously\u2014in the terrible places. Perched on his gigantic knees, they felt \"like up the cedar,\" and when he stretched an arm or leg it was the great cedar branch swaying in the wind.\n\nHis manner, too, was stern to severity, and his voice was so deep sometimes that they could \"feel it rumbling inside,\" as though he had \"swallowed the dinner gong.\" He was a very important man somewhere; Daddy was just in the Stationery Office, but Uncle Felix was an author, and the very title necessarily included awe. He wrote \"storical-novuls.\" His name was often in the newspapers. They connected him with the \"Govunment.\" It had to do somewhere with the Police. No one trifled with Uncle Felix. Yet, strange to say, the children never could be properly afraid of him, although they tried very hard. Their audacity, their familiarity, their daring astonished everybody. The gardeners and coachmen, to say nothing of the indoor servants, treated him as though he was some awful emperor. But the children simply pushed him about. He might have been a friendly Newfoundland dog that wore tail-coats and walked on his hind legs, for all they feared reprisals.\n\nHe gave them a taste of his quality soon after his arrival.\n\n\"No, children, it's impossible now. I'm busy over a scene of my storicalnovul. Ask your father.\" He growled it at them, frowning darkly.\n\nThe parental heels had just that instant vanished round the door.\n\n\"Father's got the figures and says he can't.\"\n\n\"Or your mother\u2014\" he said, gruffly.\n\n\"Mother's doing servants in the housekeeper's room.\"\n\n\"Take your foot out of my waistcoat pocket this instant,\" he roared.\n\n\"Why?\" enquired Maria. \"How else can I climb up?\"\n\nHe shook and swayed like the cedar branch, but he did not shake her off. \"Because,\" he thundered, \"there's money in it, and you've got holes in your stockings, and toes with you are worse than fingers.\"\n\nAnd he strode across the floor, Tim clinging to one leg with both feet off the ground, and Judy pushing him behind as though he were a heavy door that wouldn't open. He was very angry indeed. He told them plainly what he thought about them. He explained the philosophy of authors to them in brutal sentences. \"Leave me alone, you little botherations!\" he cried. \"I'm in the middle of a scene in a storicalnovul.\" It was disgraceful that a man could lose his temper so. \"Leave me alone, or I'll\u2026\"\n\nIn the corner of the big nursery sofa there was sudden silence. It was a chilly evening in early spring. Between the bars across the windows the wisteria leaves sifted the setting sunlight. The railway train lay motionless upon the speckled carpet. A cat, so fat it couldn't unroll, lay in a ball of mystery against the high guard of wire netting before the fire. Outside the wind went moaning.\n\nAnd Time ran backwards, or else the clock stopped dead. Dusk slipped in between the window bars. The cedars on the lawn became gigantic. They heard the haystacks shuffling out of their tarpaulins. The whole house rose into the air and floated off. Mother, Daddy, Nurses, beds dropped from the windows as it sailed away. All were left behind, forgotten details of some stupid and uncomfortable life elsewhere.\n\n\"Quite ready,\" sighed the top of one cedar to the other.\n\n\"And waiting, too,\" an answer came from nowhere.\n\nAnd then the Universe paused and settled with a little fluttering sound of wonder. The onceuponatime Moment entered the room\u2026.\n\n\"There was a thing that nobody could understand,\" began the deep, gruff voice. \"And this thing that nobody could understand was something no one understood at all.\"\n\n\"That's twice they couldn't understand it,\" observed Judy, in the slight pause he made for effect.\n\n\"It was alive,\" he went on, \"and very beautiful, so beautiful, in fact, that people were astonished and felt rather ashamed because they couldn't understand it. Some declared it wasn't worth understanding at all; others said it might be worth understanding if they had the time to think about it; and the rest decided that it was nothing much, and promptly forgot that it existed. Their lives grew rather dull in consequence. A few, however, set to work to discover what it was. For the beauty of it set something in them strangely burning.\"\n\n\"It was a firework, I think,\" remarked Maria, then felt she had said quite an awful thing. For Tim just looked at her. \"It's alive, Uncle Felix told you,\" he stated. She was obliterated\u2014for the moment.\n\n\"Yes,\" resumed the story-teller, \"it was alive, and its beauty set the hearts of a few people on fire to know what it meant. It was difficult to find, however, and difficult to see properly when found.\n\n\"These people tried to copy it, and couldn't. Though it looked so simple it was impossible to imitate. It went about so quickly, too, that they couldn't catch hold of it and\u2014\"\n\n\"But have you seen it?\" asked Judy, her head bobbing up into his face with eager curiosity.\n\nIt was a vital question. All waited anxiously for his reply.\n\n\"I have,\" he answered convincingly. \"I saw it first when I was about your age, and I've never forgotten it.\"\n\n\"But you've seen it since, haven't you? It's still in the world, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I've seen it since, and it's still in the world. Only no one knows to this day why it's there. No one can explain it. No one can understand it. It's so beautiful that it makes you wonder, and it's so mysterious that it makes you\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" asked Tim for the others, while he paused a moment and stared into their gazing faces.\n\n\"Wonder still more,\" he added.\n\nAnother pause followed.\n\n\"Then is your heart still burning, Uncle Felix?\" Judy enquired, prodding him softly. \"And does it matter much?\"\n\n\"It matters a great deal, yes, because I want to find out, and cannot. And the burning goes on and on whenever I see the thing-that-nobody-can-understand, and even when I don't see it but just think about it\u2014which is pretty often. Because, if I found out why it's there, I should know so much that I should give up writing storicalnovuls and become a sort of prophet instead.\"\n\nThey stared in great bewilderment. Their curiosity was immense. They were dying to know what the thing was, but it was against the Rules to ask outright.\n\n\"Were their lives very dull?\"\u2014Maria set this problem, suddenly recalling something at the beginning of the story.\n\n\"Oh, very dull indeed. They had no sense of wonder\u2014those who forgot.\"\n\n\"How awful for them!\"\n\n\"Awful,\" he agreed, in a long-drawn whisper, shuddering.\n\nAnd that shudder ran through every one. The children turned towards the darkening room. The gloomy cupboard was a blotch of shadow. The table frowned. The bookshelves listened. The white face of the cuckoo clock peered down upon them dimly from the opposite wall, and the chairs, it seemed, moved up a little closer. But through the windows the stars were beginning to peep, and they saw the crests of the friendly cedars waving against the fading sky.\n\nHe pointed. High above the cedars, where the first stars twinkled, the blue was deep and exquisitely shaded from the golden streak below it into a colour almost purple.\n\n\"The thing that nobody could understand was even more wonderful than that,\" he whispered. \"But no one could tell why it was there; no one could guess; no one could find out. And to this day\u2014no one can find out.\"\n\nHis voice grew lower and lower and lower still.\n\n\"To-morrow I'll show it to you. You shall see it for yourselves.\"\n\nThey hardly heard him now. The voice seemed far away. What could it be\u2014this very, very wonderful thing?\n\n\"We'll go out and find one\u2026by the stream\u2026where the willows bend\u2026and shake their pointed leaves\u2026. We'll go to-morrow\u2026.\"\n\nHis voice died away inside his waistcoat. Not a sound was audible. The children were very close against him. In his big hands he took each face in turn and put his lips inside the rim of three small ears.\n\nHe told the secret then, while wonder filled the room and hovered exquisitely above the crowded chair\u2026.\n\nAwakened by the silence, presently, the ball of black unrolled itself beside the wire fender, it stretched its four black legs. And the children, hushed, happy, and with a mysterious burning in their hearts, went off willingly to bed, to dream of wonder all night long, and to ask themselves in sleep, \"Why God has put blue dust upon the body of a dragon-fly?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 197", + "text": "The story of the dragon-fly marked a turning-point in their lives; they realised that life was crammed with things that nobody could understand. Daddy's reign was over, and Uncle Felix had ascended the throne. Wonder\u2014but a growing wonder\u2014ruled the world. The great Stranger they had always been vaguely expecting had drawn nearer; it was not Uncle Felix, yet he seemed the forerunner somehow. That \"Some Day\" of Daddy's\u2014they had almost forgotten its existence\u2014became more and more a possibility. Life had two divisions now: Before Uncle Felix came\u2014and Now. To Maria alone there seemed no interval. To her it was always Now. She had so much wonder in her that she knew.\n\nOutwardly the household ran along as usual, but inwardly this enormous change was registered in three human hearts. The adventures they had before Uncle Felix came were the ordinary kind all children know; they invented them themselves. Their new adventures were of a different order\u2014impossible but true. Their uncle had brought a key that opened heaven and earth.\n\nHe did not know that he had brought this key. It was just natural\u2014he let himself in because it was his nature so to do; the others merely went in with him. He worked away in his room, covering reams of paper with nonsense out of his big head; and the trio never disturbed him or knocked at his door, or even looked for him: they knew that his real life ran with theirs, and the moment he had covered so many dozen sheets he would appear and join them. All people had their duties; his duty was to fill so many sheets a day for printers; but his important life belonged to them and they just lived it naturally together. He would never leave the Old Mill House. The funny thing was\u2014whatever had he done with himself before he came there!\n\nEverything he said and did lit up the common things of daily life with this strange, big wonder that was his great possession. Yet his method was simple and instinctive; he never thought things out; he just\u2014knew.\n\nAnd the effect of his presence upon the other Authorities was significant. Not that the Authorities admitted or even were aware of it, but that the children saw them differently. Aunt Emily, for instance, whom they used to dread, they now felt sorry for. She was so careful and particular that she was afraid of life, afraid of living. Prudence was slowly killing her. Everything must be done in a certain way that made it safe; only, by the time it was safe it was no longer interesting. They saw clearly how she missed everything owing to the excessive caution and preparation in her: by the time she was ready, the thing had simply left. Instead of coming into the hayfield at once and enjoying it, she uttered so many warnings and gave so much advice against disaster\u2014\"better take this,\" and \"better not take that\"\u2014that by the time they got there the hayfield had lost all its wonder. It was just a damp, untidy hayfield.\n\nDaddy, however, gained in glory. He approved of his big brother. On his return from London every evening the first thing he asked was, \"What have you all been up to to-day? Has Uncle Felix given you the moon or rolled the sun and stars into a coloured ball?\" Weeden, too, had grown in mystery\u2014he made the garden live, and understood the secret life of every growing thing; while Thompson and Mrs. Horton, each in their separate ways, led lives of strange activity in the lower regions of the house till the kitchen seemed the palace of an ogress and the pantry was its haunted vestibule. \"Mrs. Horton's kitchen\" was a phrase as powerful as \"Open Sesame\"; and \"the butler's pantry\" edged the world of mighty dream.\n\nAbove all, Mother occupied a new relationship towards them that made her twice as splendid as before. Until Uncle Felix came, she was simply \"Mother,\" who loved them whatever they did and made allowances for everything. That was her duty, and unless they provided her with something to make allowances for they had failed in what was expected of them. Her absorption in servants and ordering of meals, in choosing their clothes and warning Jackman about their boots\u2014all this was a chief reason for her existence, and if they didn't eat too much sometimes and wear their boots out and tear their clothes, Mother would have been without her normal occupation. Whereas now they saw her in another light, touched with the wonder of the sun and stars. It was proper, of course, for her to have children, but they realised now that she contrived to make the whole world work somehow for their benefit. Mother not only managed the entire Household, from the dinner-ordering slate at breakfast-time to the secret whisperings with Jackman behind the screen at bedtime, or the long private interviews with Daddy in his study after tea: she led a magnificent and stupendous life that regulated every smallest detail of their happiness. She was for ever thinking of them and slaving for their welfare. The wonder of her enormous love stole into their discerning hearts. They loved her frightfully, and told her all sorts of little things that before they had kept concealed. There were heaps and heaps of mothers in the world, of course; they were knocking about all over the place; but there was only one single Mother, and that was theirs.\n\nYet, in his own peculiar way, it was Uncle Felix who came first. Daddy believed in a lot of things; Mother believed in many things; Aunt Emily believed in certain things done at certain times and in a certain way. But Uncle Felix believed in everything, everywhere and always. To him nothing was ever impossible. He held, that is, their own eternal creed. He was akin to Maria, moreover, and Maria, though silent, was his spokesman often.\n\n\"Why does a butterfly fly so dodgy?\" inquired Tim, having vainly tried to catch a Painted Lady on the lawn.\n\nDaddy made a grimace and shrugged his shoulders, yet left the insect quite as wonderful as it was before. Mother looked up from her knitting with a gentle smile and said, \"Does it, darling? I hadn't noticed.\" Aunt Emily, balancing her parasol to keep the sun away, observed in an educational tone of voice, \"My dear Tim, what foolish questions you ask! It's because its wings are so large compared to the rest of its body. It can't help itself, you see.\" She belittled the insect and took away its wonder. She explained.\n\nTim, unsatisfied, moved over to the wicker chair where Uncle Felix sat drowsily smoking his big meerschaum pipe. He pointed to the vanishing Painted Lady and repeated his question in a lower voice, so that the others could not hear:\n\n\"Why does it fly like that\u2014all dodgy?\" Whatever happened, the boy knew his Uncle would leave the butterfly twice as wonderful as he found it.\n\nBut no immediate answer came. They watched it for a moment together in silence. It behaved in the amazing way peculiar to its kind. Nothing in the world flies like a butterfly. Birds and other things fly straight, or sweep in curves, or rise and drop in understandable straight lines. But the Painted Lady obeyed no such rules. It dodged and darted, it jerked and shot, it was everywhere and anywhere, least of all where it ought to have been. The swallows always missed it. It simply doubled\u2014and disappeared round the corner of the building.\n\nThen, puffing at his pipe, Uncle Felix looked at Tim and said, \"I couldn't tell you. It's one of the things nobody can understand, I think.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" agreed Tim, \"it must be.\"\n\nThere was a considerable pause.\n\n\"But there must be some way of finding out,\" the boy said presently. He had been thinking over it.\n\n\"There is.\" The man rose slowly from his chair.\n\n\"What is it?\" came the eager question.\n\n\"Try it ourselves, and see if we can do the same!\"\n\nAnd they went off instantly, hand in hand, and vanished round the corner of the building.\n\nThe adventures they had since Uncle Felix came were of this impossible and marvellous order. That strange and lovely cry, \"There's some one coming,\" ran through the listening world. \"I believe there is,\" said Uncle Felix. \"Some day he'll come and a tremendous thing will happen,\" was another form of it, to which the answer was, \"I know it will.\"\n\nIt was much nearer to them than before. It was just below the edge of the world, the edge of life. It was in the air. Any morning they might wake and find the great thing was there\u2014arrived in the night while they were sound asleep. So many things gave hints. A book might tell of it between the lines; each time a new book was opened a thrill slipped out from the pages in advance. Yet no book they knew had ever told it really. Out of doors, indeed, was the more likely place to expect it. The tinkling stream either ran towards it, or else came from it; that was its secret, the secret it was always singing about day and night. But it was impossible to find the end or beginning of any stream. Wind, moreover, announced it too, for wind didn't tear about and roar like that for nothing. Spring, however, with its immense hope and expectation, gave the clearest promise of all. In winter it hid inside something, or at least went further away; yet even in winter the marvellous something or some one lay waiting underneath the snow, behind the fog, above the clouds. One day, some day, next day, or the day after to-morrow\u2014and it would suddenly be there beside them.\n\nWhence came this great Expectancy they never questioned, nor what it was exactly, nor who had planted it. This was a mystery, one of the things that no one can understand. They felt it: that was all they knew. It was more than Wonder, for Wonder was merely the sign and proof that they were seeking. It was faint and exquisite in them, like some far, sweet memory they could never quite account for, nor wholly, even once, recapture. They remembered almost\u2014almost before they were born.\n\n\"We'll have a look now,\" Uncle Felix would say every walk they took; but before they got very far it was always time to come in again. \"That's the bother of everything,\" he agreed with them. \"Time always prevents, doesn't it? If only we could make it stop\u2014get behind time, as it were\u2014we might have a chance. Some day, perhaps, we shall.\"\n\nHe left the matter there, but they never forgot that pregnant remark about stopping time and getting in behind it. No, they never forgot about it. At Christmas, Easter, and the like, it came so near that they could almost smell it, but when these wonderful times were past they looked back and knew it had not really come. The holidays cheated them in a similar way. Yet, when it came, they knew it would be as natural and simple as eating honey, though at the same time with immense surprise in it. And all agreed that it was somehow connected with the Dawn, for the Dawn, the opening of a new day, was something they had heard about but never witnessed. Dawn must be exceedingly wonderful, because, while it happened daily, none of them had ever seen it happen. A hundred times they had agreed to wake and have a look, but the Dawn had always been too quick and quiet. It slipped in ahead of them each time. They had never seen the sun come up.\n\nIn some such sudden, yet quite natural way, this stupendous thing they expected would come up. It would suddenly be there. Everybody, moreover, expected it. Grown-ups pretended they didn't, but they did. Catch a grown-up when he wasn't looking, and he was looking. He didn't like to be caught, that's all, for as often as not he was smiling to himself, or just going to\u2014cry.\n\nThey shared, in other words, the great, common yearning of the world; only they knew they yearned, whereas the rest of the world forgets.\n\n\"I think,\" announced Judy one day\u2014then stopped, as though unsure of herself.\n\n\"Yes?\" said her Uncle encouragingly.\n\n\"I think,\" she went on, \"that the Night-Wind knows an awful lot, if only\u2014\" she stopped again.\n\n\"If only,\" he helped her.\n\n\"We,\" she continued.\n\n\"Could,\" he added.\n\n\"Catch it!\" she finished with a gasp, then stared at him expectantly.\n\nAnd his answer formed the subject of conversation for fully half an hour in the bedroom later, and for a considerable time after Jackman had tucked them up and taken the candle away. They watched the shadows run across the ceiling as she went along the passage outside; they heard her steps go carefully downstairs; they waited till she had safely disappeared, for the door was ajar, and they could hear her rumbling down into the lower regions of Mrs. Horton's kitchen\u2014and then they sat up in bed, hugged their knees, shuddered with excitement, and resumed the conversation exactly where it had been stopped.\n\nFor Uncle Felix had given a marvellous double-barrelled answer. He had said, \"We can.\" And then he had distinctly added, \"We will!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 198", + "text": "For the Night-Wind already had a definite position in the mythology of the Old Mill House, and since Uncle Felix had taken to reading aloud certain fancy bits from the storicalnovul he was writing at the moment, it had acquired a new importance in their minds.\n\nThese fancy bits were generally scenes of action in which the Night-Wind either dropped or rose unexpectedly. He used the children as a standard. \"Thank you very much, Uncle,\" meant failure, the imagination was not touched; but questions were an indication of success, the audience wanted further details. For he knew it was the child in his audience that enjoyed such scenes, and if Tim and Judy felt no interest, neither would Mr. and Mrs. William Smith of Peckham. To squeeze a question out of Maria raised hopes of a second edition!\n\nA Duke, disguised as a woman or priest, landing at night; a dark man stealing documents from a tapestried chamber of some castle, where bats and cobwebs shared the draughty corridors\u2014such scenes were incomplete unless a Night-Wind came in audibly at critical moments. It wailed, moaned, whistled, cried, sang, sighed, soughed or\u2014sobbed. Keyholes and chimneys were its favourite places, but trees and rafters knew it too. The sea, of course, also played a large part in these adventures, for water above all was the element Uncle Felix loved and understood, but this Night-Wind, being born at sea, was also of distinct importance. The sea was terrible, the wind was sad.\n\nTo the children it grew more and more distinct with each appearance. It had a personality, and led a curious and wild existence. It had privileges and prerogatives. Owing to its various means of vocal expression\u2014singing, moaning, and the rest\u2014a face belonged to it with lips and mouth; teeth too, since it whistled. It ran about the world, and so had feet; it flew, so wings pertained to it; it blew, and that meant cheeks of sorts. It was a large, swift, shadowy being whose ways were not the ordinary ways of daylight. It struck blows. It had gigantic hands. Moreover, it came out only after dark\u2014an ominous and suspicious characteristic rather.\n\n\"Why isn't there a day-wind too?\" inquired Judy thoughtfully.\n\n\"There is, but it's quite a different thing,\" Uncle Felix answered. \"You might as well ask why midday and midnight aren't the same because they both come at twelve o'clock. They're simply different things.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Tim helped him unexpectedly; \"and a man can't be a woman, can it?\"\n\nThe Night-Wind's nature, accordingly, remained a mystery rather, and its sex was also undetermined. Whether it saw with eyes, or just felt its way about like a blind thing, wandering, was another secret matter undetermined. Each child visualised it differently. Its hiding-place in the daytime was equally unknown. Owls, bats, and burglars guessed its habits best, and that it came out of a hole in the sky was, perhaps, the only detail all unanimously agreed upon. It was a pathetic being rather.\n\nThis Night-Wind used to come crying round the bedroom windows sometimes, and the children liked it, although they did not understand all its melancholy beauty. They heard the different voices in it, although they did not catch the meaning of the words it sang. They heard its footsteps too. Its way of moving awed them. Moreover, it was for ever trying to get in.\n\n\"It's wings,\" said Judy, \"big, dark wings, very soft and feathery.\"\n\n\"It's a woman with sad, black eyes,\" thought Tim, \"that's how I like it.\"\n\n\"It's some one,\" declared Maria, who was asleep before it came, so rarely heard it at all. And they turned to Uncle Felix who knew all that sort of thing, or at any rate could describe it. He found the words. They lay hidden in his thick back hair apparently\u2014there was little on the top!\u2014for he always scratched his head a good deal when they asked him questions about such difficult matters. \"What is it really\u2014the Night-Wind?\" they asked gravely; \"and why does it sound so very different from the wind in the morning or the afternoon?\"\n\n\"There is a difference,\" he replied carefully. \"It's a quick, dark, rushing thing, and it moves like\u2014like anything.\"\n\n\"We know that,\" they told him.\n\n\"And it has long hair,\" he added hurriedly, looking into Tim's staring eyes. \"That's what makes it swish. The swishing, rushing, hushing sound it makes\u2014that's its hair against the walls and tiles, you see.\"\n\n\"It is a woman, then?\" said Tim proudly. All looked up, wondering. An extraordinary thing was in the air. A mystery that had puzzled them for ages was about to be explained. They drew closer round the sofa, and Maria blundered against the table, knocking some books off with a resounding noise. It was their way of reminding him that he had promised. \"Hush, hush!\" said Uncle Felix, holding up a finger and glancing over his shoulder into the darkened room. \"It may be coming now\u2026 Listen!\"\n\n\"Yes, but it is a woman, isn't it?\" insisted Tim, in a hurried whisper. He had to justify himself before his sisters. Uncle Felix must see to that first.\n\nThe big man opened his eyes very wide. He shuddered. \"It's a\u2014Thing,\" was the answer, given in a whisper that increased the excitement of anticipation. \"It certainly is a\u2014Thing! Now hush! It's coming!\"\n\nThey listened then intently. And a sound was heard. Out of the starry summer night it came, quite softly, and from very far away\u2014upon discovery bent, upon adventure. Reconnoitering, as from some deep ambush in the shrubberies where the blackbirds hid and whistled, it flew down against the house, stared in at the nursery windows, fluttered up and down the glass with a marvellous, sweet humming\u2014and was gone again.\n\n\"Listen!\" the man's voice whispered; \"it will come back presently. It saw us. It's awfully shy\u2014\"\n\n\"Why is it awfully shy?\" asked Judy in an undertone.\n\n\"Because people make it mean so much more than it means to mean,\" he replied darkly. \"It never gets a chance to be just itself and play its own lonely game\u2014\"\n\n\"We've called it things,\" she stated.\n\n\"But we haven't written books about it and put it into poetry,\" Uncle Felix corrected her with an audacity that silenced them. \"We play our game; it plays its.\"\n\n\"It plays its,\" repeated Tim, amused by the sound of the words.\n\n\"And that's why it's shy,\" the man held them to the main point, \"and dislikes showing itself\u2014\"\n\n\"But why is its game lonely?\" some one asked, and there was a general feeling that Uncle Felix had been caught this time without an answer. For what explanation could there possibly be of that? Their faces were half triumphant, half disappointed already.\n\nHe smiled quietly. He knew everything\u2014everything in the world. \"It's unhappy as well as shy,\" he sighed, \"because nothing will play with it. Everything is asleep at night. It comes out just when other things are going in. Trees answer it, but they answer in their sleep. Birds, tucked away in nests and hiding-places, don't even answer at all. The butterflies are gone, the insects lost. Leaves and twigs don't care about being blown when there's no one there to see them. They hide too. If there are clouds, they're dark and sulky, keeping their jolly sides towards the stars and moon. Nothing will play with the Night-Wind. So it either plays with the tiles on the roof and the telegraph wires\u2014dead things that make a lot of noise, but never leave their places for a proper game\u2014or else just\u2014plays with itself. Since the beginning of the world the Night-Wind has been shy and lonely and unhappy.\"\n\nIt was unanswerable. They understood. Their sense of pity was greatly touched, their love as well.\n\n\"Do pigs really see the wind, as Daddy says?\" inquired Maria abruptly, feeling the conversation beyond her. She merely obeyed the laws of her nature. But no one answered her; no one even heard the question. Another sound absorbed their interest and attention. There was a low, faint tapping on the window-pane. A hush, like church, fell upon everybody.\n\nAnd Uncle Felix stood up to his full height suddenly, and opened his arms wide. He drew a long, deep breath.\n\n\"Come in,\" he said splendidly.\n\nThe tapping, however, grew fainter and fainter, till it finally ceased. Everybody waited expectantly, but it was not repeated. Nothing happened. Nobody came in. The tapper had retreated.\n\n\"It was a twig,\" whispered Judy, after a pause. \"The Virgin Creeper\u2014\"\n\n\"But it was the wind that shook it,\" exclaimed Uncle Felix, still standing and waiting as though he expected something. \"The Night-Wind\u2014Look out!\"\n\nA roaring sound over the roof drowned his words; it rose and fell like laughter, then like crying. It dropped closer, rushed headlong past the window, rattled and shook the sash, then dived away into the darkness. Its violence startled them. A deep lull followed instantly, and the little tapping of the twig was heard again. Odd! Just when the Night-Wind seemed furthest off it was all the time quite near. It had not really gone at all; it was hiding against the outside walls. It was watching them, trying to get in. The tapping continued for half a minute or more\u2014a series of hurried, gentle little knocks as from a child's smallest finger-tip.\n\n\"It wants to come in. It's trying,\" whispered some one.\n\n\"It's awfully shy.\"\n\n\"It's lonely and frightfully unhappy.\"\n\n\"It likes us and wants to play.\"\n\nThere was another pause and silence. No one knew quite what to do. \"There's too much light. Let's put the lamp out,\" said a genius, using the voice of Judy.\n\nAs though by way of answer there followed instantly a sudden burst of wind. The torrent of it drove against the house; it boomed down the chimney, puffing an odour of soot into the room; it shook the door into the passage; it lifted an edge of carpet, flapping it. It shouted, whistled, sang, using a dozen different voices all at once. The roar fell into syllables. It was amazing. A great throat uttered words. They could scarcely believe their ears.\n\nThe wind was shouting with a joyful, boisterous shout: \"Open the window! I'll put out the light!\"\n\nAll heard the wonderful thing. Yet it seemed quite natural in a way. Uncle Felix, still standing and waiting as though he knew not exactly what was going to happen, moved forward at once and boldly opened the window's lower sash. In swept the mighty visitor, the stranger from the air. The lamp gave one quick flicker and went out. Deep stillness followed. There was a silence like the moon.\n\nThe shy Night-Wind had come into the room.\n\nAh, there was awe and wonder then! The silence was so unexpected. The whole wind, not merely part of it, was in. It had come so gently, softly, delicately too! In the darkness the outline of the window-frame was visible; Uncle Felix's big figure blocked against the stars. Judy's head could be seen in silhouette against the other window, but Tim and Maria, being smaller, were merged in the pool of shadow below the level of the sill. A large, spread thing passed flutteringly up and down the room a moment, then came the rest. It settled over everything at once. A rustle was audible as of trailing, floating hair.\n\n\"It's hiding in the corners and behind the furniture,\" whispered Uncle Felix; \"keep quiet. If you frighten it\u2014whew!\"\u2014he whistled softly\u2014\"it'll be off above the tree-tops in a second!\"\n\nA low soft whistle answered to his own; somewhere in the room it sounded; there was no mistaking it, though the exact direction was difficult to tell, for while Tim said it was through the keyhole, Judy declared positively that it came from the door of the big, broken cupboard opposite. Maria stated flatly, \"Chimney.\"\n\n\"Hush! It's talking.\" It was Uncle Felix's voice breathing very low.\n\n\"It likes us. It feels we're friendly.\"\n\nA murmur as of leaves was audible, or as of a pine bough sighing in a breeze. Yet there were words as well\u2014actual spoken words:\n\n\"Don't look for me, please,\" they heard. \"I do not want to be seen. But you may touch me. I like that.\"\n\nThe children spread their hands out in the darkness, groping, searching, feeling.\n\n\"Ah, your touch!\" the sighing voice continued.\n\n\"It's like my softest lawn. Your hair feels as my grass feels on the hill-tops, and the skin of your cheeks is smooth and cool as the water-surface of my lily ponds at midnight. I know you\"\u2014it raised its tones to singing. \"You are children. I kiss you all!\"\n\n\"I feel you,\" Judy said in her clear, quiet voice. \"But you're cold.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" was the answer that seemed all over the room at once. \"That's only the touch of space. I've come from very high up to-night. There's been a change. The lower wind was called away suddenly to the sea, and I dropped down with hardly a moment's warning to take its place. The sun has been very tiresome all day\u2014overheating the currents.\"\n\n\"Uncle, you ask it everything,\" whispered Tim, \"simply everything!\"\n\n\"Say how we love it, please,\" sighed Judy. \"I feel it closing both my eyes.\"\n\n\"It's over all my face,\" put in Maria, drawing her breath in loudly.\n\n\"But my hair's lifting!\" Judy exclaimed. \"Oh, it's lovely, lovely!\"\n\nUncle Felix straightened himself up in the darkness. They could hear him breathing with the effort. \"Please tell us what you do,\" he said. \"We all can feel you touching us. Play with us as you play with trees and clouds and sleeping flowers along the hedgerows.\"\n\nA singing, whistling sound passed softly round the room; there was a whirr and a flutter as when a flight of bees or birds goes down the sky, and a voice, a plaintive yet happy voice, like the plover who cry to each other on the moors, was audible:\n\n\u2003\"I run about the world at night,\n\n\u2003Yet cannot see;\n\n\u2003My hair has grown so thick these millions years,\n\n\u2003It covers me.\n\n\u2003So, like a big, blind thing\n\n\u2003I run about,\n\n\u2003And know all things by touching them.\n\n\u2003I touch them with my wings;\n\n\u2003I know each one of you\n\n\u2003By touching you;\n\n\u2003I touch your hearts!\"\n\n\"I feel you!\" cried Judy. \"I feel you touching me!\"\n\n\"And I, and I!\" the others cried. \"It's simply wonderful!\"\n\nAn enormous sigh of happiness went through that darkened room.\n\n\"Then play with me!\" they heard. \"Oh, children, play with me!\"\n\nThe wild, high sweetness in the windy voice was irresistible. The children rose with one accord. It was too dark to see, but they flew about the room without a fault or slip. There was no stumbling; they seemed guided, lifted, swept. The sound of happy, laughing voices filled the air. They caught the Wind, and let it go again; they chased it round the table and the sofa; they held it in their arms until it panted with delight, half smothered into silence, then marvellously escaping from them on the elastic, flying feet that tread on forests, clouds, and mountain tops. It rushed and darted, drove them, struck them lightly, pushed them suddenly from behind, then met their faces with a puff and shout of glee. It caught their feet; it blew their eyelids down. Just when they cried, \"It's caught! I've got it in my hands!\" it shot laughing up against the ceiling, boomed down the chimney, or whistled shrilly as it escaped beneath the crack of the door into the passage. The keyhole was its easiest escape. It grew boisterous, singing with delight, yet was never for a moment rough. It cushioned all its blows with feathers.\n\n\"Where are you now? I felt your hair all over me. You've gone again!\"\n\nIt was Judy's voice as she tore across the floor.\n\n\"You're whacking me on the head!\" cried Tim. \"Quick, quick! I've got you in my hands!\" He flew headlong over the sofa where Maria sat clutching the bolster to prevent being blown on to the carpet.\n\nThey felt its soft, gigantic hands all over them; its silky coils of hair entangled every movement; they heard its wings, its rushing, sighing voice, its velvet feet. The room was in a whirr and uproar.\n\n\"Uncle! Can't you help? You're the biggest!\"\n\n\"But it's blown me inside out,\" he answered, in a curiously muffled voice. \"My fingers are blown off. It's taken all my breath away.\"\n\nThe pictures rattled on the wall; loose bits of paper fluttered everywhere; the curtains flapped out horizontally into the air.\n\n\"Catch it! Hold it! Stop it!\" cried the breathless voices.\n\n\"Join hands,\" he gasped. \"We'll try.\" And, holding hands, they raced across the floor. They managed to encircle something with their spread arms and legs. Into the corner by the door they forced a great, loose, flowing thing against the wall. Wedged tight together like a fence, they stooped. They pounced upon it.\n\n\"Caught!\" shouted Tim. \"We've got you!\"\n\nThere was a laughing whistle in the keyhole just behind them. It was gone.\n\nThe window shook. They heard the wild, high laughter. It was out of the room. The next minute it passed shouting above the cedar tops and up into the open sky. And their own laughter went out to follow it across the night.\n\nThe room became suddenly very still again. Some one had closed the window. The twig no longer tapped. The game was over. Uncle Felix collected them, an exhausted crew, upon the sofa by his side.\n\n\"It was very wonderful,\" he whispered. \"We've done what no one has ever done before. We've played with the Night-Wind, and the Night-Wind's played with us. It feels happier now. It will always be our friend.\"\n\n\"It was awfully strong,\" said Tim in a tone of awe. \"It fairly banged me.\"\n\n\"But awfully gentle,\" Judy sighed. \"It kissed me hundreds of times.\"\n\n\"I felt it,\" announced Maria.\n\n\"It's only a child, really,\" Uncle Felix added, half to himself, \"a great wild child that plays with itself in space\u2014\"\n\nHe went on murmuring for several minutes, but the children hardly heard the words he used. They had their own sensations. For the wind had touched their hearts and made them think. They heard it singing now above the cedars as they had never heard it sing before. It was alive and lovely, it meant a new thing to them. For they had their little aching sorrows too; it had taken them all away: they had their little passionate yearnings and desires; it had prophesied fulfilment. The dreamy melancholy of childhood, the long, long days, the haunted nights, the everlasting afternoons\u2014all these were in its wild, great, windy voice, the sighing, the mystery, the laughter too. The joy of strange fulfilment woke in their wind-kissed hearts. The Night-Wind was their friend; they had played with it. Now everything could come true.\n\nAnd next day Maria, lost to the Authorities for over an hour, was at length discovered by the forbidden pigsties in a fearful state of mess, but very pleased and happy about something. She was watching the pigs with eyes brimful of questioning wonder and excitement. She was listening intently too. She wanted to find out for certain whether pigs really\u2014really and truly\u2014saw\u2014anything unusual!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 199", + "text": "The children had never been to London, but they knew the direction in which it lay\u2014beyond the crumbling kitchen-garden wall, where the wall-flowers grew in a proud colony. The sky looked different there, a threatening quality in it. Both snow and thunderstorm came that way, and the dirty sign-post \"London Road\" outside the lodge-gates was tilted into the air significantly.\n\nThey regarded London as a terrible place, though a necessity: Daddy's office was there; Christmas and Birthday presents came from London, but also it was where the Radical govunment lived\u2014an enormous, evil, octopus kind of thing that made Daddy poor. Weeden, too, had been known to say dark things with regard to selling vegetables, hay, and stuff. \"What can yer igspect when a Radical govunment's in?\" And the fact that neither he nor Daddy did anything to move it away proved what a powerful thing it was, and made them feel something hostile to their happiness dwelt London-way beyond that crumbling wall.\n\nThe composite picture grew steadily in their little minds. When ominous clouds piled up on that northern horizon, floating imperceptibly towards them, it was a fragment of London that had broken off and come rolling along to hover above the old Mill House. A very black cloud was the Seat of Govunment.\n\nLondon itself, however, remained as obstinately remote as Heaven, yet the two visibly connected; for while the massed vapours were part of London, the lanes and holes of blue were certainly the vestibule of Heaven. \"His seat is in the Heavens\" must mean something, they argued. They were quite sweetly reverent about it. They merely obeyed the symbolism of primitive age.\n\n\"I shall go to Heaven,\" Tim said once, when they discussed dying as if it were a game. He wished to define his position, as it were.\n\n\"But you haven't been to London yet,\" came the higher criticism from Judy. \"London's a metropolis.\"\n\nMetropolis! It was an awful thing to say, though no one quite knew why. Part of their dread was traceable to this word. Ever since some one had called it \"the metropolis\" in their hearing, they had associated vague awe with the place. The ending \"opolis\" sounded to them like something that might come \"ontopofus\"\u2014and that, again, brought \"octopus\" into the mind. It seemed reckless to mention London and Heaven together\u2014yet was right and proper at the same time. Both must one day be seen and known, one inevitably as the other. Thus heavenly rights were included in their minds with a ticket to London, far, far away, when they were much, much older. And both trips were dreaded yet looked forward to.\n\nMaria, however, held no great opinion of either locality. She disliked the idea of long journeys to begin with. Having no objection to moving her eyes, she was opposed to moving her body\u2014unless towards an approved certainty. Puddings, bonfires, and laps at story-time were approved certainties; Heaven and London apparently were not. She was contented where she was. \"London's a bother,\" was her opinion: it meant a rush in the hall when the dog-cart was waiting for the train and Daddy was too late to hear about bringing back a new blue eye for a broken doll. And as for the other place\u2014her ultimatum was hardly couched in diplomatic language, to say the least. An eternal Sunday was not her ideal of happiness. Aunt Emily, it was stated, would live in Heaven when she died, and the place had lost its attractiveness in consequence. For Aunt Emily used long words and heard their \"Sunday Colics,\" and the clothes she wore on that seventh workless day reminded them of village funerals or unhappy women who came to see over the house when it was to be let, and asked mysterious questions about something called \"the drains.\" Daddy's top-hat with a black band was another item in the Sunday and Metropolis picture. London and Heaven, as stated, were not looked forward to unreservedly.\n\nThere were compensations, though. They knew the joy of deciding who would go there. Stumper, of course, for one: it was the only place he would not come back from: he would be K.C.B. Uncle Felix, too, because it was his original source of origin. Mother repeatedly called him \"angel,\" and even if she hadn't, it was clear he knew all about both places by the way he talked. Stumper's India was not quite believed in owing to the way he described it, but Uncle Felix's London was real and living, while the other marvellous things he told them could only have happened in some kind of heavenly place. His position, therefore, was unshakable, and Mother and Daddy also had immemorial rights. Others of their circle, however, found themselves somewhat equivocally situated. Thompson and Mrs. Horton were uncertain, for since there was \"no marriage\" there, there could be no families to wait upon and cook for. Weeden, also, was doubtful. Having never been to London, the alternative happiness was not properly within his grasp, whereas the Postman might be transferred from the metropolis to the stars at any minute of the day or night. Those London letters he brought settled his case beyond all argument whatever.\n\nAll of which needs mention because there was a place called the End of the World, and the title has of course to do with it. For the End of the World is the hiding-place of Wonder.\n\nBeyond that crumbling kitchen-garden wall was a very delightful bit of the universe. A battered grey fence kept out the road, but there were slits between the boards through which the Passers-by could be secretly observed. All Passers-by were criminals or heroes on their way to mysterious engagements; the majority were disguised; many of them could be heard talking darkly to themselves. They were a queer lot, those Passers-by. Those who came from London were escaping, but those going north were intent upon awful business in the sinister metropolis\u2014explosions, murders, enormous jewel robberies, and conspiracies against the Radicalgovunment. The solitary policeman who passed occasionally was in constant terror of his life. They longed to warn him. Yet he had his other side as well\u2014his questionable side.\n\nThis neglected patch of kitchen-garden, however, possessed other claims to charm as well as the tattered fence. It was uncultivated. Some rows of tangled currant bushes offered excellent cover; there was a fallen elm tree whose trunk was \"home\"; a pile of rubbish that included scrap-iron, old wheel-barrows, broken ladders, spades, and wire-netting, and, chief of all, there was the spot behind the currant bushes where Weeden, the Gardener, burnt dead leaves. It was sad, but mysterious and beautiful too, this burning of the leaves; though, according to Uncle Felix, who gave the Gardener's explanation, it was right and necessary. They loved the smoke, too, hanging in the air above the lawn, with its fragrant smell and shadowy distances:\n\n\"Oh, Gardener! How can you let them burn?\"\n\n\"Because,\" he explained, \"they've 'ad their turn, And nobody wants their shade.\n\n\u2003These withered-up messes\n\n\u2003Is worn-out old dresses\n\n\u2003I tuck round the boots\n\n\u2003Of the shiverin' roots\n\n\u2003Till the Spring makes 'em over\n\n\u2003Like roses and clover\u2014\n\n\u2003But nobody wants dead leaves, dead leaves,\n\n\u2003Nor nobody wants their shade!\"\n\nA deserted corner, yet crowded gloriously with life. Adventure lurked in every inch. There was danger, too, terror, wonder, and excitement. And since for them it was the beginning of all things, they called it, naturally, The End of the World. To escape to the End of the World, unaccompanied by grown-ups, and, if possible, their whereabouts unknown to anybody, was a daily duty second to no other. It was a duty, wet or fine, they seldom left, neglected.\n\nBesides themselves, two others alone held passes to this sanctuary: Uncle Felix, because he loved to go there (he wrote his adventure stories there, saying anything might happen in such a lonely place), and the Gardener, because he was obliged to. Come-Back Stumper was excluded. They had taken him once, and he had said such an abominable thing that he was never allowed to visit it again. \"A messy hole,\" he called it. Mr. Jinks had never even seen it, but, after his death in the railway accident, his remains, recovered without charge from the Hospital, had been buried somewhere in the scrap-heap. From this point of view alone he knew the End of the World; he was worthy of no other. His epitaph was appalling\u2014too horrible to mention really. Tim composed it, but Uncle Felix distinctly said that it never, never must be referred to audibly again:\n\n\u2003Here Matthew Jinks\n\n\u2003Just lies and st\u2014\n\n\"It's not nice,\" he said emphatically, \"and you mustn't say it. Always speak well of the dead.\" And, as they couldn't honestly do that, they obeyed him and left Mr. Jinks in his unhonoured grave, with a broken wheel-barrow for a headstone and a mass of wire-netting to make resurrection difficult. In order to get the disagreeable epitaph out of their minds Uncle Felix substituted a kinder and gentler one, and made them learn it by heart:\n\n\u2003Old Jinks lies here\n\n\u2003Without a tear;\n\n\u2003He meant no wrong,\n\n\u2003But we didn't get along;\n\n\u2003So Jinks lies here,\n\n\u2003And we've nothing more to fear.\n\n\u2003He's all right:\n\n\u2003Jinks\n\n\u2003Sinks\n\n\u2003Out of sight!\n\nIt was the proud colony of wallflowers that first made Uncle Felix like the place. Their loveliness fluttered in the winds, and their perfume stole down deliciously above the rubbish and neglect. They seemed to him the soul of ruins triumphing over outward destruction. Hence the delicate melancholy in their scent and hence their lofty chosen perch. Out of decay they grew, yet invariably above it. Both sun and stars were in their flaming colouring, and their boldness was true courage. They caught the wind, they held the sunset and the dawn; they turned the air into a shining garden. They stood somehow for a yearning beauty in his own heart that expressed itself in his stories.\n\n\"If you pick them,\" he warned Tim, who climbed like a monkey, and was as destructive as his age, \"the place will lose its charm. They grow for the End of the World, and the End of the World belongs to them. This wonderful spot will have no beauty when they're gone.\" To wear a blossom in the hair or buttonhole was to be protected against decay and ugliness.\n\nMost wonderful of all, however, was the door in the old grey fence; for it was a Gateway, and a Gateway, according to Uncle Felix, was a solemn thing. None knew where it led to, it was a threshold into an unknown world. Ordinary doors, doors in a house, for instance, were not Gateways; they merely opened into rooms and other familiar places. Dentists, governesses, and bedrooms existed behind ordinary, indoor doors; but out-of-doors opened straight into the sky, and in virtue of it were extraordinary. They were Gateways. At the End of the World stood a stupendous, towering door that was a Gateway. Another, even more majestic, rose at the end of life. This door in the grey fence was a solemn, mysterious, and enticing Gateway\u2014into everything worth seeing.\n\nIt was invariably kept locked; it led into the high-road that slithered along secretly and sedulously\u2014to London. For the children it was out of bounds. Here the Policeman lived in constant terror of his life, and here went to and fro the strange world of Passers-by. The white road flowed past like a river. It moved. From the lower branches of the horse-chestnut tree they could just see it slide; also when the swing went extra high, and from the end of the prostrate elm. It went in both directions at once. It encircled the globe, going under the sea too. The door leading into it was a quay or port. But the brass knob never turned; the Gardener said there was no key; and from the outer side the handle had long since been removed, lest Passers-by might see it and come in. Even the keyhole had been carefully stuffed up with that stringy stuff the Gardener carried in his pockets.\n\nTill, finally, something happened that made the End of the World seem suddenly a new place. Tim noticed that the stringy stuff had been removed.\n\nThe day had been oppressively hot, and tempers had been sorely tried. Mother had gone to lie down with a headache; Aunt Emily was visiting the poor with a basket; Daddy was inaccessible in his study; all Authorities were doing the dull things Authorities have to do. It was September, and the world stood lost in this golden haze of unexpected heat. Very still it stood, the yellow leaves quite motionless and the smoke from the kitchen chimney hanging stiff and upright in the air. There was no breath of wind.\n\n\"There's simply nothing to do,\" the children said\u2014when suddenly Uncle Felix arrived, and their listlessness was turned to life and interest. He had gone up in the morning to London, and the suddenness of his return was part of his prerogative. Stumper, Jinks, and other folk were announced days and days beforehand, but Uncle Felix just\u2014came.\n\n\"We'll go to the End of the World,\" he decided gravely, the moment he had changed. \"There's something going on there. Quick!\" This meant, as all knew, that he had an idea. They stole out, and no one saw them go. Across the lawn and past the lime trees humming busily with tired bees, they crept beneath the shadow of the big horse-chestnut, where the staring windows of the house could no longer see them. They disappeared. The Authorities might look and call for ever without finding them.\n\n\"Slower, please, a little,\" said Maria breathlessly, and was at once picked up and carried. Moving cautiously through the laurel shrubbery, they left the garden proper with its lawns and flower-beds, and entered the forbidden region at the End of the World. They stood upright. Uncle Felix dropped Maria like a bundle.\n\n\"Look!\" he said below his breath. \"I told you so!\"\n\nHe pointed. The colony of wallflowers were fluttering in the windless air. Nothing stirred but these. The stillness was unbroken. Sunshine blazed on the rubbish-heap. The currant bushes watched. Deep silence reigned everywhere. But the flowers on the crumbling wall waved mysteriously their coloured banners of alarm.\n\n\"It looks different,\" said Judy in a hushed aside.\n\n\"Something's happened,\" whispered Tim, staring round him.\n\nMaria watched them from the ground, prepared to follow in any direction, but in no hurry until a plan was decided.\n\n\"The keyhole!\" cried Tim loudly, and at the same moment a huge blackbird flew out of the shrubberies behind them, and flashed across the open space toward the orchard on the other side. It whistled a long, shrill scream of warning. It was bigger by far than any ordinary blackbird.\n\n\"Home! Quick! Run for your lives!\" cried some one, as they dashed for the safety of the elm tree. Even Maria ran. They scrambled on to the slippery, fallen trunk and gasped for breath as they stood balancing in an uneasy row, all holding hands.\n\n\"It was bigger than a hen,\" exclaimed Judy inconsequently. \"It couldn't have come through any keyhole.\" She stared with inquiring, startled eyes at her brother. The bird and the keyhole were somehow lumped together in her mind.\n\n\"They've stopped,\" observed Maria, and sat down in the comfortable niche between the lopped branch and the trunk. It was true. The wallflowers were as motionless now as painted outlines on a nursery saucer.\n\n\"Because we're safe,\" said Uncle Felix. \"It was a warning.\"\n\nAnd then all turned their attention to Tim's discovery of the keyhole. For the stuffing had been removed. The white, dusty road gleamed through the hole in a spot of shining white.\n\n\"Hush!\" whispered their guide. \"There's something moving.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it's Jinks in his cemetery,\" thought Judy after a pause to listen.\n\n\"No,\" said Uncle Felix with decision. \"It's outside. It's on the\u2014road!\"\n\nHis earnestness on these occasions always thrilled them; his gravity and the calm way he kept his head invariably won their confidence.\n\n\"The London Road!\" they repeated. That meant the world.\n\n\"Something going past,\" he added, listening intently. They listened intently with him. All four were still holding hands.\n\n\"The great High Road outside,\" he repeated softly, while they moved instinctively to the highest part of the tree whence they could see over the fence. They craned their necks. The dusty road was flowing very swiftly, and like a river it had risen. Never before had it been so easily visible. They saw the ruts the carts had made, the hedge upon the opposite bank, the grassy ditch where the hemlock grew in feathery quantities. They even saw loose flints upon the edge. But the actual road was higher than before. It certainly was rising.\n\n\"Metropolis!\" cried Tim. \"I see an eye!\"\n\nSome one was looking through the keyhole at them.\n\n\"An eye!\" exclaimed several voices in a hushed, expectant tone.\n\nThere was a pause, during which every one looked at every one else.\n\n\"It's probably a tramp,\" said Uncle Felix gravely. \"We'll let him in.\"\n\nThe proposal, however, alarmed them, for they had expected something very different. To stuff the keyhole, run away and hide, or at least to barricade the fence was what he ought to have advised. Instead of this they heard the very opposite. The excitement became intense. For them a tramp meant danger, robbery with violence, intoxication, awful dirt, and an under-the-bed-at-midnight kind of terror. It was so long since they had seen the tramp\u2014their own tramp\u2014that they had forgotten his existence.\n\n\"They'll kill us at once,\" said Maria, using the plural with the comprehensive and anticipatory vision of the child.\n\n\"They're harmless as white mice,\" said her Uncle quickly, \"once you know how to treat them, and full of adventures too. I do,\" he added with decision, referring to the treatment. And he stepped down to unbar the gate.\n\nThe children, breathless with interest, watched him go. On the trunk, of course, they felt comparatively safe, for it was \"home\"; but none the less the \"girls\" drew up their skirts a little, and Tim felt premonitory thrills run up his spidery legs into his spine. The wallflowers shook their tawny heads as a sudden breath of wind swept past them across the End of the World. It seemed an age before the audacious thing was accomplished and the door swung wide into the road outside. Uncle Felix might so easily have been stabbed or poisoned or suffocated\u2014but instead they saw a shabby, tangled figure come shuffling through that open gate upon a cloud of dust.\n\n\"Quick! he's a perjured man!\" cried Judy, remembering a newspaper article. \"Shut the gate!\" She sprang down to help. \"He'll be arrested for a highway violence and be incarc-\"\n\nThere was confusion in her mind. She felt pity for this woebegone shadow of a human being, and terror lest the Policeman, who lived on the white, summery high road, would catch him and send him to the gallows before he was safe inside. Her love was ever with the under dog.\n\nThere was a rush and a scramble, the gate was shut, and the Tramp stood gasping before them in the enchanted sanctuary of the End of the World.\n\n\"He's ours!\" exclaimed Judy. \"It's our old tramp!\"\n\n\"Be very polite to him,\" Uncle Felix had time to whisper hurriedly, seeing that all three stood behind him. \"He's a great Adventurer and a Wanderer too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 200", + "text": "He was a grey and nameless creature of shadowy outline and vague appearance. The eye focused him with difficulty. He had an air of a broken tombstone about him, with moss and lichen in wayward patches, for his face was split and cracked, and his beard seemed a continuation of his hair; but he had soft blue eyes that had got lost in the general tangle and seemed to stray about the place and peep out unexpectedly like flowers hiding in a thick-set hedge. The face might be anywhere; he might move suddenly in any direction; he was prepared, as it were, to move forward, sideways, or backwards according as the wind decided or the road appeared\u2014a sort of universal scarecrow of a being altogether.\n\nYet, for all his forlorn and scattered attitude, there hung about his rags an air of something noble and protective, something strangely inviting that welcomed without criticism all the day might bring. Homeless himself, and with no place to lay his extraordinary body, the birds might have built their nests in him without alarm, or the furry creatures of fields and woods have burrowed among his voluminous misfit-clothing to shelter themselves from rain and cold. He would gladly have carried them all with him, safely hidden from guns or traps or policemen, glad to be useful, and careless of himself. That, at any rate, was the mixed impression that he gave.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said in a comfortable sort of voice that sounded like wind among telegraph wires on a high road: then added \"kindly all.\"\n\nAnd instantly the children felt delighted with him; their sympathy was gained; fear vanished; the Policeman, like a scape-goat, took all their sins away. They did not actually move closer to the Tramp but their eyes went nestling in and out among his tattered figure. Judy, however, it was noticeable, looked at him as though spell-bound. To her he was, perhaps, as her Uncle said, the Great Adventurer, the type of romantic Wanderer for ever on the quest of perilous things\u2014a Knight.\n\nIt was Uncle Felix who first broke the pause.\n\n\"You've come a long way,\" he suggested.\n\n\"Oh, about the same as usual,\" replied the Tramp, as though all distances and localities were one to him.\n\n\"Which means\u2014?\"\n\n\"From nowhere, and from everywhere.\"\n\n\"And you are going on to\u2014?\"\n\n\"Always the same place.\"\n\n\"Which is\u2014?\"\n\n\"The end.\" He said it in a rumbling voice that seemed to issue from a pocket of the torn old coat rather than from his bearded mouth.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" sighed Judy, \"that is a very long way indeed. But, of course, you never get tired out?\" Her eyes were brimmed with admiration.\n\nHe shrugged his great loose shoulders. It was odd how there seemed to be another thing within all that baggy clothing and behind the hair. The shaggy exterior covered a slimmer thing that was happy, laughing, dancing to break out. \"Not tired out,\" he said, \"a bit sleepy sometimes, p'r'aps.\" He glanced round him carelessly, his strange eyes resting finally on Judy's face. \"But there's lots of beds about,\" he explained to her, \"once you know how to make 'em.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the child murmured, with a kind of soft applause, \"of course there must be.\"\n\n\"And those wot sleeps in ditches dreams the sweetest\u2014that I know.\"\n\n\"They must,\" agreed Judy, as though grass and dock leaves were familiar to her. \"And you get up when you're ready, don't you?\"\n\n\"That's it,\" replied the wanderer. \"Only you always are ready.\"\n\n\"But how do you know the time?\" asked Tim.\n\nThe Tramp turned round slowly and looked at his questioner.\n\n\"Time!\" he snorted. And he exchanged a mysterious glance of sympathy with Maria, who lifted her eyes in return, but otherwise made no sign whatever. \"Sit quiet like,\" he added, \"and everything worth 'aving comes of itself. That's living that is. The 'ole world belongs to you.\"\n\n\"I've got a watch,\" said Tim, as though challenged. \"I've got an alarum clock too. Only you have to wind them up, of course.\"\n\n\"There you are!\" the Tramp exclaimed, \"you've got to wind 'em up. They don't go of theirselves, do they?\"\n\n\"Oh, no.\"\n\n\"I never knew 'appiness until I chucked my watch away,\" continued the other.\n\n\"Your watch!\" exclaimed Tim.\n\n\"Well, not igsackly,\" laughed the Tramp.\n\n\"Oh, he didn't mean that,\" Judy put in quickly.\n\n\"I was usin' it at the time, any'ow,\" chuckled their guest, \"and wot you're usin' at the time belongs to you. I never knew 'appiness while I kep' it. Watches and clocks only mean 'urry. It's an endless job, tryin' to keep up with 'em. You've got to go so fast for one thing\u2014I never was a sprinter\u2014bah!\" he snorted\u2014\"there's nothing in it. Life isn't a 'undred yards race. You miss all the flowers on the way at that pace. And what's the prize?\" He glanced down contemptuously at his feet. \"Worn-out boots. Yer boots wear out\u2014that's all.\"\n\nHe looked round at the children, smiling wonderfully. Maria seemed to understand him best, perhaps. She looked up innocently into his tangled face. \"That's it,\" he said, with another chuckle. \"YOU know wot I mean, don't yer, missie?\" But Maria made no reply. She merely beamed back at him till her face seemed nothing but a pair of wide blue eyes.\n\n\"Stop yer clocks, go slow,\" the man murmured, half to himself, \"and you'll see what I mean. There's twice as much time as before. You can do anything, everything,\"\u2014he spread his arms out\u2014\"because there's never any 'urry. You'd be surprised.\"\n\n\"You're very hungry, aren't you?\" inquired Tim, resenting the man's undue notice of Maria.\n\nThe Tramp stared hard into the boy's unwavering eyes. \"Always,\" he said briefly, \"but, then, there's always folks to give.\"\n\n\"Rather,\" exclaimed Judy with enthusiasm, and Tim added eagerly, \"I should think so.\"\n\nThey seemed to know all about him, then. Something had entered with him that made common stock of the five of them. It was wonderful of Uncle Felix to have known all this beforehand.\n\n\"We're all alive together,\" murmured the Tramp below his breath, and then Uncle Felix showed another stroke of genius. \"We'll make tea out here to-day,\" he said, \"instead of having it indoors. Tim, you run and fetch a tea-pot, a bottle of milk, and some cups and a kettle full of water; put some sugar in your pockets and bring a loaf and butter and a pot of jam. A basket will hold the lot. And while you're gone we'll get the fire going.\"\n\n\"A big knife and some spoons too,\" Judy cried after his disappearing figure, \"and don't let Aunt Emily see you, mind.\"\n\nThe Tramp looked up sharply. \"I had an Aunt Emily once,\" he said behind his hedged-in face. Expecting more to follow, the others waited; but nothing came. There was a little pause.\n\n\"Once?\" asked Maria, wondering perhaps if there were two such beings in the world at the same time.\n\nThe man of journeys nodded.\n\n\"Did she mend your clothes and things\u2014and love to care for you?\" Judy wished to know.\n\nHe shook his tangled head. \"She visited the poor,\" he told them, \"and had no time for the likes of me. And one day I fell out of a big hole in my second suit and took to tramping.\" He rubbed his hands vigorously together in the air. \"And here I am.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Maria kindly. \"I'm glad.\"\n\nMeanwhile, Judy having decided to go and help her brother with the tea-things, the others set to work and made a fire. Maria helped with her eyes, picking up an occasional stick as well, but it was the Tramp who really did the difficult part. Only the way he did it made it appear quite easy somehow. He began with the tiniest fire in the world, and the next minute it seemed ready for the kettle, with a cross-bar arranged adroitly over it and a supply of fresh wood in a pile beside it.\n\n\"What do you think about it?\" asked Tim of his sister, as they struggled back with the laden basket. Apparently a deep question of some kind asked for explanation in his mind.\n\n\"It's awful that he has no one to care about him,\" was the girl's reply. \"I think he's a very nice man. He looks magnificent and awfully brown.\"\n\n\"That's dirt,\" said her brother.\n\n\"It's travel,\" she replied indignantly.\n\nThe Tramp, when they got back, looked tidier somehow, as though the effect of refined society had already done him good. His appearance was less uncouth, his hair and beard a shade less hay-fieldy. It was possible to imagine what he looked like when he was young\u2014sure sign of being tidy; just as to be very untidy gives an odd hint of what old age will do eventually to face and figure. The Tramp looked younger.\n\nThey all made friends in the simple, unaffected way of birds and animals, for at the End of the World there was no such thing as empty formality. The children, supported by the presence of their important uncle, asked questions, this being their natural prerogative; it came to them as instinctively as tapping the lawn for worms comes to birds, or scratching the earth for holes is a sign of health with rabbits. At first shyly\u2014then in a ceaseless, yet not too inquisitive torrent. Questions are the sincerest form of flattery, and the Tramp, accustomed probably to severer questions from people in uniform, was quite delighted. He smiled quietly behind the scenery of his curious great face, but he answered all: where he lived, how he travelled, what friends he had, where he spent Christmas, what barns and ditches and haystacks felt like, anything and everything, even where he meant to be buried when he died. \"'ere, where I've lived so 'appily,\" and he made a wide gesture with one tattered arm to include the earth and sky. He had no secrets apparently; he was glad they should know all. The children had never known such a delightful creature in their lives before.\n\n\"And you eat anything?\" inquired Tim, \"anything you can, I mean?\"\n\n\"Anything you can get, he means,\" corrected Judy softly.\n\nHe gave an unexpected answer. \"I swallow sunsets, and I bite the moon;\n\nI nibble stars. I never need a spoon.\"\n\nHe said it as naturally as a duchess describing her latest diet at a smart dinner-party, with an air, too, as of some great personage disguised on purpose so that he might enjoy the simple life.\n\n\"That rhymes,\" stated Maria.\n\n\"So does this,\" he replied; \"I live on open hair and bits of bread; the sunlight clothes me, and I lay me 'ead\u2014\"\n\nThe hissing of the kettle interrupted him. \"Water's boiling,\" cried Uncle Felix; \"hand round the cups and cut the loaf.\" A cup was given to each. The tea was made.\n\n\"Do you take sugar, please?\" asked Judy of the guest. The quietness of her voice made it almost tender. Such a man, moreover, might despise sweet things. But he said he did.\n\n\"Two lumps?\" she asked, \"or one?\"\n\n\"Five, please,\" he said.\n\nShe was far too polite to show surprise at this, nor at the fact that he stirred his tea with a little bit of stick instead of with a spoon. She remembered his remark that he had no use for spoons. Tim, saying nothing, imitated all he did as naturally as though he had never done otherwise in his life before. They enjoyed their picnic tea immensely in this way, seated in a row upon the comfortable elm tree, gobbling, munching, drinking, chattering. The Tramp, for all his outward roughness, had the manners of a king. He said what he thought, but without offence; he knew what he wanted, yet without greed or selfishness. He had that politeness which is due to alert perception of every one near him, their rights and claims, their likes and dislikes; for true politeness is practically an expansion of consciousness which involves seeing the point of view of every one else\u2014at once. A tramp, accustomed to long journeys, big spaces, obliged ever to consider the demands of impetuous little winds, the tastes of flowers, the habits and natural preferences of animals, birds, and insects, develops this bigger sense of politeness that crowds in streets and drawing-rooms cannot learn. Unless a tramp takes note of all, he remains out of touch with all, and therefore is uncomfortable.\n\n\"Is everything all right?\" asked Uncle Felix presently, anxious to see that he was well provided for.\n\n\"Everything, thank you,\" the wanderer replied, \"and, if you don't mind, I'll 'ave my supper here later too. I've brought it with me.\" And out of one capacious pocket he produced\u2014a bird. \"It's a chickin,\" he informed them, as they stared with wide-opened eyes. Maria was the first to go on eating her slice of bread and jam. Unordinary things seemed to disturb her less than ordinary ones. Somehow it seemed quite natural that he should go about with a bird for supper in his pocket.\n\n\"However did you get it\u2014in there?\" asked Tim, modifying his sentence just in time to avoid inquisitive rudeness.\n\n\"It gave itself to me,\" he replied. \"That kind of things 'appens sometimes when you're tramping. They know,\" he added significantly. \"You see, it's my birthday to-day, and something like this always 'appens on my birthday. Last time it was a fish. I fell into the stream and went right under. When I got out on to the bank again I found a trout in my pocket. The time before I slept beside a haystack, and when I awoke at sunrise I felt something warm and soft against my face like feathers. It was feathers. There was a 'en's nest two inches from my nose, and six nice eggs in it all ready for my birthday breakfast. I only ate four of them. You should never take all the heggs out of a nest.\" He looked round at the group and smiled. \"But I think the chickin's best of all,\" he told them, \"and next year I expect a turkey, or a bit of bacon maybe.\"\n\n\"You never, never grow old, do you?\" Judy asked. Her admiration was no longer concealed. It seemed she saw him differently a little from the others.\n\n\"Oh, jest a nice age,\" he said.\n\n\"You seem to know so much,\" she explained her question, \"everything.\"\n\nHe laughed behind his tea-cup as he fingered the chicken on his lap.\n\n\"As to that,\" he murmured, \"there's only a few things worth knowing. If you can just forget the rest, you're all right.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she replied beneath her breath. \"But\u2014but it's got to be plucked and cleaned and cooked first, hasn't it?\"\n\n\"The chickin?\" he laughed. \"Oh, dear me, no! Cooked, yes, but not plucked or cleaned in the sense you mean. That's what they do in 'ouses. Out here we have a better way. We just wrap it up in clay and dig a 'ole and light a fire on top, and in a 'arf hour it's ready to eat, tender, juicy, and sweet as a bit of 'oneycomb. Break open the ball of clay, and the feathers all come away wiv it.\" And then he produced from another pocket a fat, thick roll of yellow butter, freshly made apparently, for it was wrapped in a clean white cloth.\n\nThey stared at that for a long time without a word.\n\n\"They go together,\" he explained, and the explanation seemed sufficient as well as final. \"And they come together too,\" he added with a smile.\n\n\"Did the butter give itself to you as well as the chicken?\" inquired Judy. The Tramp nodded in the affirmative as he placed it beside him on the trunk ready for use later. And everybody felt in the middle of a delightful mystery. All were the same age together. Bird and butter, sun and wind, flowers and children, tramp and animals\u2014all seemed merged in a jolly company that shared one another's wants and could supply them. The wallflowers wagged their orange-bonneted heads, the wind slipped sighing with delicious perfumes from the trees, the bees were going home in single file, and the sun was sinking level with the paling top\u2014when suddenly there came a disturbing element into the scene that made their hearts beat faster with one accord. It was a sound.\n\nA muffled, ominous beat was audible far away, but slowly coming nearer. As it approached it changed its character. It became sharper and more distinct. Something about the measured intervals between its tapping repetitions brought a threatening message of alarm. Every one felt the little warning and looked up. There was anxiety. The sound jarred unpleasantly upon the peace of the happy company. They listened. It was footsteps on the road outside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 201", + "text": "Uncle Felix paused over his last bit of bread and jam, Tim and Judy cocked their ears up. Maria's eyes stood still a moment in the heavens, and the Tramp stopped eating. He picked up the butter and replaced it carefully in his pocket.\n\n\"I know those steps,\" he murmured half to himself and half to the others. \"They're all over the world. They follow me wherever I go. I hear 'em even in me sleep.\" He sighed, and the tone of his voice was weary and ill at ease.\n\n\"How horrid for you,\" said Judy very softly.\n\n\"It keeps me moving,\" he muttered, trying to conceal all signs of face behind hair and beard, which he pulled over him like a veil. \"It's the Perliceman.\"\n\n\"The Policeman!\" they echoed, staring.\n\n\"But he can't find you here!\"\n\n\"He'll never see you!\"\n\n\"You're quite safe inside the fence with us, for this is the End of the World, you know.\"\n\n\"He's not afraid\u2014never!\" exclaimed Judy proudly.\n\n\"He goes everywhere and sees everything,\" whispered the Tramp. \"He's been following me since time began. So far he has not caught me up, but his boots are so much bigger than my own\u2014the biggest, strongest boots in the world\u2014that in the hend he is bound to get me.\"\n\n\"But you've done nothing,\" said Judy.\n\nThe wanderer smiled. \"That's why,\" he said, holding up a warning finger. \"It's because I do nothing. 'ush!\" he whispered. The steps came nearer, and he lowered his voice so that the end of the sentence was not audible.\n\n\"'ide me,\" he said in a whisper. And he waved his arms imploringly, like the branches of some wind-hunted tree.\n\nThere was a tarpaulin near the rubbish-heap, and some sacking used for keeping the vegetables warm at night. \"That'll do,\" he said, pointing. \"Quick!\u2014Good-bye!\" In a moment he was beneath the spread black covering, the children were sitting on its edges, quietly eating more bread and jam, and looking as innocent as stars. Uncle Felix poked the fire busily, a grave and anxious look upon his face.\n\nThe steps came nearer, paused, came on again then finally stopped outside the gate. The flowing road that bore them ceased running past in its accustomed way. The evening stopped still too. The silence could be heard. The setting sun looked on. Upon the crumbling wall the orange flowers shook their little warning banners.\n\nAnd there came a tapping on the wooden gate.\n\nNo one moved.\n\nThe tapping was repeated. There was a sound of drums about it. The round brass handle turned. The door pushed open, and in the empty space appeared\u2014the Policeman.\n\n\"Good evening,\" he said in a heavy, uncompromising way. He looked enormous, framed there by the open gate, the white road behind him like a sheet. He looked very blue\u2014a great towering shadow against the sunlight. It was very clear that he knew he was a policeman and could think of nothing else. He was dressed up for the part, and received many shillings a week from a radculgovunment to look like that. It would have been a dereliction of duty to forget it. He was stuffed with duty. His brass buttons shone.\n\n\"Good evening,\" he repeated, as no one spoke.\n\n\"Good evening,\" replied Uncle Felix calmly. The Policeman accentuated the word \"evening,\" but Uncle Felix emphasised the adjective \"good.\" From the very beginning the two men disagreed. \"This is private property, very private indeed. We are having tea, in fact, privately, upon our own land.\"\n\n\"No property is private,\" returned the Policeman, \"and to the Law no thing nor person either.\"\n\nFor a moment the children felt afraid. It seemed incredible that Uncle Felix could be arrested, and yet things had an appearance of it.\n\n\"Kindly close the gate so that we cannot be overheard,\" he said firmly, \"and then be good enough to state your business here.\" He did not offer him a seat; he did not suggest a cup of tea; he spoke like a brave man who expected danger but was prepared to meet it.\n\nThe Policeman stepped back and closed the gate. He then stepped forward again a little nearer than before. From a pocket, hitherto invisible inside his belt, he drew forth a crumpled notebook and a stub of pencil. He was very dignified and very grave. He took a deep breath, held the paper and pencil ready to use, expanded his chest till it resembled a toy balloon in the Park, and said:\n\n\"I am looking for a man.\" He paused, then added: \"Have you seen a man about?\"\n\n\"About what?\" asked Uncle Felix innocently.\n\n\"About fifty or thereabouts,\" replied the other. \"Disguised in rags and a wig of hair and a false beard.\"\n\n\"What has he done?\" It was like a game of chess, both opponents well matched. Uncle Felix was too big to be caught napping by clever questions that hid traps. The children felt the danger in the air, and watched their uncle with quivering admiration. Only their uncle stood alone, whereas behind the Policeman stretched a line of other policemen that reached to London and was in touch with the Government itself.\n\n\"What has he done?\" repeated their champion.\n\n\"He's disappeared,\" came the deep-voiced answer.\n\n\"There's no crime in that,\" was the comment, given flatly.\n\n\"But he's disappeared with\"\u2014the Policeman consulted his notebook a moment\u2014\"a chicken and a roll of butter what don't belong to him\u2014\"\n\n\"Roll and butter, did you say?\"\n\n\"No, sir, roll of butter was what I said.\" He spoke respectfully, but was grave and terrible. \"He is a thief.\"\n\n\"A thief!\"\n\n\"He lives nowhere and has no home. You see, sir, duty is duty, and we're expected to run in people who live nowhere and have no homes.\"\n\n\"Which road did he take?\" Uncle Felix clearly was pretending in order to gain time.\n\nThe man of law looked puzzled. \"It was a roll of butter and a bird, sir,\" he said, consulting his book again, \"and my duty is to run him in\u2014\"\n\n\"The moment you run into him.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" replied the blue giant. \"And, having seen him come in here some time ago, I now ask you formally whether you have seen him too, and I call upon you to show me where he's hiding.\" He thrust one huge foot forward and held his notebook open with the pencil ready. \"Anything you say will be used against you later, remember. You must all be witnesses.\"\n\n\"If you find him,\" put in Uncle Felix dryly.\n\n\"When I find him,\" said the other. And his eye wandered over to the tarpaulin that was spread out beside the rubbish-heap. For it had suddenly moved.\n\nEverybody had seen that movement. There was no disguising it. Feeling uncomfortable the Tramp had shifted his position. He probably wanted air.\n\n\"I saw it move,\" the Policeman growled, moving a step towards the rubbish-heap. \"He's under there all right enough, and the sooner he comes out the better for him. That's all I've got to say.\"\n\nIt was a most disagreeable and awkward moment. No one knew quite what was best to do. Maria turned her eyes as innocently upon the tarpaulin as she could manage, but it was obvious what she was really looking at. Her brother held his breath and stared, expecting a pistol might appear and some one be shot dead with a marvellous aim, struck absolutely in the mathematical centre of the heart. Uncle Felix, upon whom fell the burden of rescue or defence, sat there with a curious look upon his face. For a moment it seemed he knew not what to do.\n\nThe Policeman, approaching still nearer to the tarpaulin, glared at him.\n\n\"You're an accessory,\" he said sternly, \"both before and after the fact.\"\n\n\"I didn't say he wasn't there.\"\n\n\"You didn't say he was,\" was the severe retort. It was unanswerable.\n\n\"He'll hang by the neck till he's dead,\" thought Tim, \"and afterwards they'll bury the body in a lime-kiln so that even his family can't visit the grave.\" He looked wildly about him, thinking of possible ways of escape he had read or heard about, and his eye fell upon his sister Judy.\n\nNow Judy was a queer, original maid. She believed everything in the world. She believed not only what was told her but also what she thought. And among other things she believed herself to be very beautiful, though in reality she was the ugly duckling of the brood. \"All God has made is beautiful,\" Aunt Emily had once reproved her, and, since God had made everything, everything must be beautiful. It was. God had made her too, therefore she was simply lovely. She enjoyed numerous romances; one romance after another flamed into her puzzled life, each leaving her more lovely than it found her. She was also invariably good. To be asked if she was good was a blundering question to which the astonished answer was only an indignant \"Of course.\" And, similarly, all she loved herself was beautiful. Her romances had included gardeners and postmen, stable-boys and curates, age of no particular consequence provided they stimulated her creative imagination. And the latest was\u2014the Tramp.\n\nSomething about the woebegone figure of adventure had set on fire her mother instinct and her sense of passionate romance. She saw him young, without the tangled beard, without the rags, without the dilapidated boots. She saw him in her mind as a warrior hero, storming difficulty, despising danger, wandering beneath the stars, a being resplendent as a prince and fearless as a deity. He was a sun of the morning, and the dawn was in his glorious blue eyes.\n\nAnd Tim now saw that this sister of his, alone of all the party, was about to do something unexpected. She had left her place upon the fallen trunk and stepped up in front of the Policeman.\n\n\"Stand aside, missy,\" this individual said, and his voice was rough, his gesture very decided. It was, in fact, his \"arresting\" manner. He was about to do his duty.\n\n\"Just wait a moment,\" said Judy calmly; and she placed herself directly in his path, her legs apart, her arms akimbo on her hips. \"You say the man you want to find is old and ragged and looks like a tramp?\"\n\n\"That's it,\" replied the Policeman, greatly astonished, and pausing a moment in spite of himself. \"You'll see him in a moment. Jest help me to lift a corner o' this 'ere tarpaulin, and I'll show him to you.\" He pushed her deliberately aside.\n\n\"All right,\" said Judy, her eyes shining brilliantly, her gestures touched with a confidence that surprised everybody into silence, \"but first I want to tell you that the person underneath this old sheet thing is not a tramp at all\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't say so,\" interrupted the other, half impudently, half sarcastically. \"What is he then, I'd like to know?\"\n\nThe girl drew herself up and looked the great blue figure straight in the eyes.\n\n\"He's my brother,\" she said, in a clear strong voice, \"and he's not a thief.\"\n\n\"Your brother!\" repeated the man, a trifle taken aback. He guffawed.\n\n\"He's young and noble,\" she went on, half singing the words in her excitement and belief, \"and he's dressed all in gold. He walks like wind about the world, has curly hair, and wears a sword of silver. He's simply beautiful, and he's got no beard at all!\"\n\n\"And he's your brother, is he?\" cried the Policeman, laughing rudely, \"and he jest wears all that get-up for fun, don't he?\" And he stooped down and pulled the tarpaulin violently to one side.\n\n\"He is my brother, and I love him, and he is beautiful,\" she answered, dancing lightly round him and flinging her arms in the air to the complete amazement of policeman, Uncle Felix, and her brother and sister into the bargain. \"There! You can see for yourself!\"\n\nThe Policeman stood aghast and stared. He drew a long, deep breath; he whistled softly; he pushed his big, spiked helmet back. He staggered. \"Seems there's a mistake,\" he stammered stupidly, \"a kind of mistake somewhere, as it were. I\u2014\" He stuck fast. He wiped his lips with his thick brown hand.\n\n\"A mistake everywhere, I think,\" said Uncle Felix sternly. \"Your mistake.\"\n\nThe two men faced each other, for Uncle Felix had risen to his feet. The children held back and stared in silence. They were not quite sure what it was they saw. On Judy's face alone was a radiant confidence.\n\nFor, in place of the bedraggled and unkempt figure that had crawled beneath the sheet ten minutes before, there rose before them all apparently a tall young stripling, clean and white and shining as a fair Greek god. His hair was curly, he was dressed in gold, a silver sword hung down beside him, and his beardless face and beauty in it that made it radiant as a glad spring day. The sunlight was very dazzling just at that moment.\n\n\"You said,\" continued Uncle Felix, in a voice of deadly quiet, \"that the man you wanted had a wig of hair and a beard\u2014a false beard?\"\n\nThe Policeman stared as though his eyes would drop out upon the tarpaulin. But he said no word. He consulted his note-book in a dazed, flustered kind of way. Then he looked up nervously at the astonishing figure of the \"Tramp.\" Then he looked back at his book again.\n\n\"And old?\" said Uncle Felix.\n\n\"And old,\" repeated the officer thickly, poring over the page.\n\n\"About fifty, I think, you mentioned?\"\n\n\"'Bout fifty\u2014did I?\" He said it faintly, like a man not sure of a lesson he ought to know by heart.\n\n\"Disguised into the bargain!\" Uncle Felix raised his voice till it seemed to thunder out the words.\n\n\"Them was my instructions, sir,\" the man was heard to mumble sulkily.\n\nUncle Felix, to the children's immense delight and admiration, took a step nearer to the man of law. The latter moved slowly backwards, glancing half fiercely, half suspiciously at the glorious figure of the person he had expected to arrest as a dangerous thief and tramp.\n\n\"And, following what you stupidly call your instructions,\" cried Uncle Felix, looking sternly at him, \"you have broken in our gate, trespassed on our private property, disturbed our guests, and removed forcibly our tarpaulin from its rightful place.\"\n\nThe crestfallen and amazed Policeman gasped and raised his hands with a gesture of despair. He looked like a ruined man. Had there been a handkerchief in his bulging coat, he must have cried.\n\n\"And you call yourself an Officer of the Law?\" boomed the Defender of Personal Liberty. He went still nearer to him. His voice, to the children, sounded simply magnificent. \"A uniformed and salaried representative of the Government of England!\"\n\n\"Oo calls me orl that?\" asked the wretched man in a trembling tone. \"I gets twenty-five shillings a week, and that's orl I know.\"\n\nThere came a pause then, while the men faced each other.\n\n\"Uncle, let him go, please,\" said Judy. \"He couldn't help it, you know.\n\nAnd he's a married man with a family, I expect. Some day\u2014\"\n\nA forgiving smile softened the features of both men at these gentle words.\n\n\"This time, then,\" said Uncle Felix slowly, \"I won't report you; but don't let it occur again as long as you live. A day will come, perhaps, when you will understand. And here,\" he added, holding out his hand with something in it, \"is another shilling to make it twenty-six. I advise you\u2014if you're still open to friendly advice\u2014to buy a pair of glasses with it.\"\n\nThe discredited official took the shilling meekly and pocketed it with his note-book. He cast one last hurried glance of amazement and suspicion at the man who had been beneath the tarpaulin, and began to slink back ignominiously towards the gate. At the last minute he turned.\n\n\"Good evenin',\" he said, as he vanished into the road.\n\n\"Good evening,\" Uncle Felix answered him, as he closed the gate behind him.\n\nThen, how it happened no one knew exactly. Judy, walking up to the shining figure, took him by the hand and led him slowly through the gate on to the long white road. There was a blaze of sunset pouring through the trees and the shafts of slanting light made it difficult to see what every one was doing. In the general commotion he somehow vanished. The gate was closed. Judy stood smiling and triumphant just inside upon the mossy path.\n\n\"You saved his life,\" said some one.\n\n\"It's all right,\" she said\u2014and burst into tears.\n\nBut children are not much impressed by the tears of others, knowing too well how easily they are produced and stopped. Tim went burrowing to find the bird, and Maria just mentioned that the Tramp had taken the butter away in his pocket. By the time this fact was thoroughly established the group was ready to leave, the tea-things all collected, the fire put out, and the sun just dipping down below the top of the old grey fence.\n\nThen, and not till then, did the affair of the Tramp come under discussion. What seemed most puzzling was why the Policeman had not arrested him after all. They could not make it out at all; it seemed a mystery. There was something quite unusual about it altogether. Uncle Felix and Judy had been wonderful, but\u2014\n\n\"Did you see him blink,\" said Tim, \"when Judy went up and gave it him hot?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" observed Maria, who had done nothing herself but stare. \"I did.\"\n\nThe brother, however, was not so sure. \"I think he really believed her,\" he declared with assurance, proud of her achievement. \"He really saw him young and with a sword and curly hair and all that.\"\n\nJudy looked at him with surprise. Her tears had ceased flowing by this time.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said. \"Didn't you?\" There was pain in her voice in addition to blank astonishment.\n\n\"Of course we did,\" said Uncle Felix quickly with decision. \"Of course we did.\"\n\nAs they went into the house, however, Uncle Felix lingered behind a moment as though he had forgotten something. His face wore a puzzled expression. He seemed a little bewildered. He walked into the hat-rack first, then into the umbrella-stand, then stopped abruptly and put his hand to his head.\n\n\"Headache?\" asked Tim, who had been watching him.\n\nHis uncle did not hear the question, at least he did not answer. Instead he pulled something hurriedly out of his waistcoat pocket, held it to his ear, listened attentively a moment, and then gave a sudden start.\n\n\"What is it, Uncle?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothing,\" was the reply; \"my watch has stopped, that's all.\" He stood still a moment or two, reflecting deeply. His eyebrows went up and down. He pursed his lips. \"Odd,\" he continued, half to himself; \"I'm sure I wound it up last night\u2026!\" he added, \"it's going again now. It stopped\u2014only for a moment!\"\n\n\"Aha,\" said Tim significantly, and looked about him. He waited breathlessly for something more to happen. But nothing did happen\u2014just then.\n\nOnly, when at last Uncle Felix looked down, their eyes met and a flash of knowledge too enormous ever to be forgotten passed noiselessly between the two of them.\n\n\"Perhaps\u2026!\" murmured his uncle.\n\n\"I wonder\u2026!\"\n\nThat was all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 202", + "text": "Adventure means saying Yes, and being careless; children say Yes to everything and are very careless indeed: even their No is usually a Yes, inverted or deferred. \"I won't play,\" parsed by a psychologist, means \"I'll play when I'm ready.\" The adventurous spirit accepts what offers regardless of consequences; he who hesitates and thinks is but a Policeman who prevents adventure. Now everything offers itself to children, because they rightly think that everything belongs to them. Life is conditionless, if only people would let them accept it as it is. \"Don't think; accept!\" expresses the law of their swift and fluid being. They act on it. They take everything they can\u2014get. But it is the Policeman who adds the \"get,\" changing the whole significance of life with one ugly syllable.\n\nEach of the children treasured an adventure of its very own; an adventure-in-chief, that could not possibly have happened to anybody else in the world. These three survivals in an age when education considers childhood a disease to be cured as hurriedly as possible\u2014took their adventure the instant that it came, and each with a complete assurance that it was unique. To no one else in the world could such a thing have happened, least of all to the other two. Each took it characteristically, according to his or her individual nature\u2014Judy, with a sense of Romance called deathless; Tim, with a taste for Poetic Drama, a dash of the supernatural in it; and Maria, with a magnificent inactivity that ruled the world by waiting for things to happen, then claiming them as her own. Her masterly instinct for repose ran no risk of failure from misdirected energy. And to all three secrecy, of course, was essential: \"Don't never tell the others, Uncle! Promise faithfully!\"\n\nFor to every adventure Uncle Felix acted as audience, atmosphere, and chorus. He watched whatever happened\u2014audience; believed in its reality\u2014atmosphere; and explained without explaining away\u2014chorus. He had the unusual faculty of being ten years young as well as forty years old, and a real adventure was not possible without him.\n\nThe secrecy, of course, was not preserved for long; sooner or later the glory must be shared so that \"the others\" knew and envied. For only then was the joy complete, the splendour properly fulfilled. And so the old tired world went round, and life grew more and more wonderful every day. For children are an epitome of life\u2014a self-creating universe.\n\nThat week was a memorable one for several reasons. Daddy, overworked among his sealing-wax, went for a change to Switzerland, taking Mother with him; Aunt Emily, in her black silk dress that crackled with disapproval, went to Tunbridge Wells\u2014an awful place in another century somewhere; and Uncle Felix was left behind to \"take charge of ''em'\"\u2014\"'em\" being the children and himself. It was evidence of monumental trust and power, placing him in their imaginations even above the recognised Authorities. His sway was never for a moment questioned.\n\n\"No lessons, then!\" he had insisted as a condition of acceptance, and after much confabulation the point was yielded with reluctance. It was to be a fortnight's holiday all round. They had the house and grounds entirely to themselves, and with the departure of the elders a sheet was pulled by some one off the world, a curtain rolled away, another drop-scene fell, the word No disappeared. They saw invisible things.\n\nAnother reason, however, made the week memorable\u2014the daisies. It was extraordinary. The very day after the grown-ups left the daisies came. Like thousands of small white birds, with bright and steady eyes, they arrived and settled, thick and plentiful. They appeared in sheets and crowds upon the grass, all of their own accord and unexplained. In a night the lawns turned white. It seemed a prearranged invasion. Judy, first awake that morning, looked out of her window to watch a squirrel playing, and noticed them. Then she told the others, and Maria, one eye above the blankets, ejaculated \"Ah!\" She claimed the daisies too.\n\nNow, whereas a single daisy has no smell and seems a common, unimportant thing, a bunch of several hundred holds all the perfume of the spring. No flowers lie closer to the soil or bring the smell of earth more sweetly to the mind; upon the lips and cheeks they are as soft as a kitten's fur, and lie against the skin closer than tired eyelids. They are the common people of the flower world, yet have, in virtue of that fact, the beauty and simplicity of the common people. They own a subdued and unostentatious strength, are humble and ignored, are walked upon, unnoticed, rarely thought about and never praised; they are cut off in early youth by mowing machines; yet their pain in fading is unreported, their little sufferings unsung. They cling to earth, and never aspire to climb, but they hold the sweetest dew and nurse the tiniest little winds imaginable. Their patience is divine. They are proud to be the carpet for all walking, running things, and in their universal service is their strength. The rain stays longer with them than with grander flowers, and the best sunlight goes to sleep among them in great pools of fragrant and delicious heat. The daisies are a stalwart little people altogether.\n\nBut they have another quality as well\u2014something elfin, wayward, mischievous. They peep and whisper. It is said they can cast spells. To sleep upon a daisied lawn is to run a certain risk. There is this hint of impudence in their attitude, half audacity, half knavery, that shows itself a little in the way they stare unwinkingly all day at everything above them\u2014at the stately things that tower proudly in the air\u2014then just shut up at sunset without a word of explanation or apology. They see everything, but keep their opinions to themselves. Because people notice them so little, and even tread upon their tiny and inquiring faces, they are up to things all the time\u2014undiscovered things. They know, it is said, the thoughts of Painted Ladies and Clouded Brimstones, as well as the intentions of the disappearing golden flies; why wind often runs close to the ground when the tree-tops are without a single breath; but, also, they know what is going on below the surface. They live, moreover, in every country of the globe, and their system of intercommunication is so perfect that even birds and flying things can learn from it. They prove their breeding by their perfect taste in dress, the well-bred ever being inconspicuous; and their simplicity conceals enormous, undecipherable wonder. One daisy out of doors is worth a hundred shelves of text-books in the house. Their mischief, moreover, is not revenge, though some might think it so\u2014but a natural desire to be recognised and thought and talked about a little. Daisies, in a word, are\u2014daisies.\n\nAnd it was by way of the daisies that Judy's great adventure came to her, the particular adventure that was her very own. For she had deep sympathy with flowers, a sympathy lacking in her brother and sister, and it was natural that her adventure in chief should come that way. She could play with flowers for long periods at a time; she knew their names and habits; she picked them gently, without cruelty, and never merely for the \"fun\" of picking them; while the way she arranged them about the house proved that she understood their silent, inner natures, their likes and dislikes\u2014in a word, their souls. For Judy connected them in her mind with birds. Born in the air, they seemed to her.\n\nAs has been seen, she was the first to notice the arrival of the daisies. From the bedroom window she waved her arm to them, and showed plainly the pleasure that she felt. They arrived in troops and armies. Risen to the surface of the lawn like cream, she saw them staring with suspicious innocence at the sky. They stared at her.\n\n\"Just when the others have gone away!\" was her instant thought, though unexpressed in words. There was meaning somewhere in this calculated arrival.\n\n\"They are alive,\" she asked that afternoon, \"aren't they? But why do they all shut up at night? Who\u2014\" she changed the word\u2014\"what closes them?\"\n\nShe was alone with Uncle Felix, and they had chosen with great difficulty a spot where they could lie down without crushing a single flower with their enormous bodies. After considerable difficulty they had found it. Having done a great many things since lunch\u2014a feast involving several second helpings\u2014they were feeling heavy and exhausted. So Judy chose this moment for her simple question. The world required explanation.\n\n\"There's life in everything,\" he mumbled, with his face against the grass, \"everything that grows, especially.\" And having said it, he settled down comfortably again to doze. His pipe was out. He felt rather like a log.\n\n\"But stopping growing isn't dying,\" she informed him sharply.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" he agreed lazily, \"you're alive for a long time after that.\"\n\n\"You stopped growing before I was born.\"\n\n\"And I'm not quite dead yet.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" she said, \"so daisies are alive.\"\n\nIt was absurd to think of dozing at such a time. He rolled round heavily and gazed at her through half-closed eyelids. \"A daisy breathes,\" he murmured, \"and drinks and eats; sap circulates in its little body. Probably it feels as well. Delicate threads like nerves run through it everywhere. It knows when it is being picked or walked on. Oh, yes, a daisy is alive all right enough.\" He sighed like a big dog that has just shaken a fly off its nose and lies waiting for the next attack. It came at once.\n\n\"But who knows it?\" she asked. \"I mean\u2014there's no good in being alive unless some one else knows it too!\"\n\nThen he sat up and stared at her. Judy, he remembered, knew a lot of things she could tell to no one, not even to herself\u2014and this seemed one of them. The question was a startling one.\n\n\"An intellectual mystic at twelve!\" he gasped. \"How on earth did you manage it?\"\n\n\"I may be a mystillectual insect,\" she replied, proud of the compliment. \"But what's the good of being alive, even like a daisy, unless others know it\u2014us, for instance?\"\n\nHe still stared at her, sitting up stiffly, and propped by his hands upon the grass behind him. After prolonged reflection, during which he closed his eyes and opened them several times in succession, sighing laboriously while he did so, low mumbled words became audible.\n\n\"Forgive my apparent slowness,\" he said, \"but I feel like a mowing-machine this afternoon. I want oiling and pushing. The answer to your inquiry, however, is as follows: We could\u2014if we took the trouble.\"\n\n\"Could know that daisies are alive?\" she cried.\n\nHis great head nodded.\n\n\"If we thought about them very hard indeed,\" he went on, \"and for a very, very long time we could feel as they feel, and so understand them, and know exactly how they are alive.\"\n\nAnd the way he said it, the grave, thoughtful, solemn way, convinced her, who already was convinced beforehand.\n\n\"I do believe we could,\" she answered simply.\n\n\"I'm sure of it,\" he said.\n\n\"Let's try,\" she whispered breathlessly.\n\nFor a minute and a half they stared into each other's eyes, knowing themselves balanced upon the verge of an immense discovery. She did not doubt or question; she did not tell him he was only humbugging. Her heart thrilled with the right conditions\u2014expectation and delight. Her dark-brown eyes were burning.\n\nHe murmured something that she did not properly understand:\n\n\u2003Expect and delight\n\n\u2003Is the way to invite;\n\n\u2003Delight and expect,\n\n\u2003And you'll know things direct!\n\n\"Let's try!\" she repeated, and her face proved that she fulfilled his conditions without knowing it; she was delighted, and she expected\u2014everything.\n\nHe scratched his head, wrinkling up his nose and pursing his lips for a moment. \"There's a dodge about it,\" he explained. \"To know a flower yourself you must feel exactly like it. Its life, you see, is different to ours. It doesn't move and hurry, it just lives. It feels sun and wind and dew; it feels the insects' tread; it lifts its skin to meet the rain-drops and the whispering butterflies. It doesn't run away. It has no fear of anything, because it has the whole green earth behind it, and it feels safe because millions of other daisies feel the same\"\u2014\n\n\"And smells because it's happy,\" put in Judy. \"Then what is a daisy?\n\nWhat is it really?\"\n\nShe was \"expecting\" vividly. Her mind was hungry for essentials. This mere description told her nothing real. She wanted to feel \"direct.\"\n\nWhat is a daisy? The little word already had a wonderful and living sound\u2014soft, sweet, and beautiful. But to tell the truth about this ordinary masterpiece was no easy matter. An ostentatious lily, a blazing rose, a wayward hyacinth, a mass of showy wisteria\u2014advertised, notorious flowers\u2014presented fewer difficulties. A daisy seemed too simple to be told, its mystery and honour too humble for proud human minds to understand. So he answered gently, while a Marble White sailed past between their very faces: \"Let's think about it hard; perhaps we'll get it that way.\"\n\nThe butterfly sailed off across the lawn; another joined it, and then a third. They danced and flitted like winged marionettes on wires that the swallows tweaked; and, as they vanished, a breath of scented air stole round the trunk of the big lime tree and stirred the daisies' heads. A thousand small white faces turned towards them; a thousand steady eyes observed them; a thousand slender necks were bent. A wave of movement passed across the lawn as though the flowers pressed nearer, aware at last that they were being noticed. And both humans, the big one and the little one, felt a sudden thrill of happiness and beauty in their hearts. The rapture of the Spring slipped into them. They concentrated all their thoughts on daisies\u2026.\n\n\"I'm beginning to feel it already,\" whispered the Little Human, turning to gaze at him as though that breath of air impelled her too.\n\nThe wind blew her voice across his face like perfume; he looked, but could not see her clearly; she swayed a little; her eyes melted together into a single lovely circle, bright and steady within their fringe of feathery lashes. He tried to speak\u2014\"Delight and expect, and we'll know it direct\"\u2014but his voice spread across whole yards of lawn. It became a single word that rolled and floated everywhere about him, rising and falling like a wave upon a sea of green: \"Daisy, daisy, daisy.\" On all sides, beneath, above his head as well, it passed with the music of the wandering wind, and he kept repeating it\u2014\"Daisy, daisy!\" She kept repeating it, too, till the sound multiplied, yet never grew louder than a murmur of air and grass and tiny leaves\u2014\"Daisy, daisy, daisy.\" It broke like a sea upon the coast-line of another world. It seemed to contain an entire language in itself, nothing more to be said but those two soft syllables. It was everywhere.\n\nBut another vaster sound lay underneath. As the crest of a breaking wave utters its separate note of foam above the general booming of the sea that bears it, so the flying wave of daisy-tones rose out of this deeper sound beneath. Both humans became aware that it was but a surface-voice they imitated. They heard this other foundation-sound that bore it\u2014deep, booming, thunderous, half lost and very far away. It was prodigious; yet there was safety and delight in it that brought no hint of fear. They swam upon the pulse of some enormous, gentle life that rose about and through them in a swelling tide. They felt the heave of something that was strong enough to draw the moon, yet soft enough to close a daisy's eyes. They heard the deep, lost roar of it, rising and coming nearer.\n\n\"The Earth!\" he whispered. \"And the Spring is rising through it.\n\nListen!\"\n\n\"We're growing together,\" replied the Little Human. \"We're rising with the Spring!\"\n\nAh, it was exquisite. They were in the Daisy World\u2026. He tried to move and reach her, but found that he could not take a step in any direction, and that his feet were imbedded in the soft, damp soil. The movement which he tried to make spread wide among a hundred others like himself. They rose on every side. All shared his movements as they had shared his voice. He heard his whole body murmuring \"Daisy, daisy, daisy\u2026.\" And she leaned over, bending towards him a slim form in a graceful line of green that formed the segment of a circle. A little shining face came close for a moment against his own, rimmed with delicate spears of pink and white. It sang as it shone. The Spring was in it. There were hundreds like it everywhere, yet he recognised it as one he knew. There were thousands, tens of thousands, yet this one he distinguished because he loved it.\n\nTheir faces touched like the fringes of two clouds, and then withdrew. They remained very close together, side by side among thousands like themselves, slowly rising on the same great tide. The Earth's round body was beneath them. They felt quite safe\u2014but different. Already they were otherwise than they had been. They felt the big world flying.\n\n\"We're changing,\" he murmured, seizing some fragments of half-remembered speech. \"We're marvellously changed!\"\n\n\"Daisies,\" he heard her vanishing reply, \"we're two daisies on the lawn!\"\n\nAnd then their voices went. That was the end of speech, the end of thinking too. They only felt\u2026.\n\nLong periods passed above their heads and then the air about them turned gorgeous as a sunset sky. It was a Clouded Yellow that sailed lazily past their faces with spreading wings as large as clouds. They shared that saffron glory. The draught of cool air fanned them. The splendid butterfly left its beauty in them before it sailed away. But that sunset sky had lasted for hours; that cool wind fanning them was a breeze that blew steadily from the hills, making \"weather\" for half an afternoon. Time and duration as humans measure them had passed away; there was existence without hurry; end and beginning had not been invented yet. They did not know things in the stupid sense of having names for them; all that there was they shared; that was enough. They knew by feeling.\n\nFor everything was plentiful and inexhaustible\u2014the heavens emptied light and warmth upon them without stint or measure; space poured about them freely, for they had no wish to move; they felt themselves everywhere, for all they needed came to them without the painful effort of busy things that hunt and search outside themselves; both food and drink slipped into them unawares from an abundant source below that equally supplied whole forests without a trace of lessening or loss. All life was theirs, full, free, and generous beyond conception. They owned the world, without even the trouble of knowing that they owned it. They lived, simply staring at the universe with eyes of exquisitely fashioned beauty. They knew joy and peace, and were content with that.\n\nThey did communicate. Oh, yes, they shared each other's special happiness. There was, it is true, no sound of broken syllables, no speech which humans use to veil the very thing they would express; but there was that simpler language which all Nature knows, which cannot lie because it is unconscious, and by which constellations converse with buttercups, and cedars with the flying drops of rain\u2014there was gesture. For gesture and attitude can convey all the important and necessary things, while speech in the human sense is but an invention of some sprite who wanted people to wonder what they really meant. In sublimest moments it is never used even in the best circles of intelligence; it drops away quite naturally; souls know one another face to face in dumb but eloquent\u2014gesture.\n\n\"The sun is out; I feel warm and happy; there is nothing in the world I need!\"\n\n\"You are beside me,\" he replied. \"I love you, and we cannot go far apart. I smell you even when no wind stirs. You are sweetest when the dew has gone and left you moist and shiny.\"\n\nA little shiver of enjoyment quivered through her curving stem. His petals brushed her own. She answered:\n\n\"Wet or fine, we stand together, and never stop staring at each other till we close our faces\u2014\"\n\n\"In the long darkness. But even then we whisper as we grow\u2014\"\n\n\"And open our eyes together at the same moment when the light comes back\u2014\"\n\n\"And feel warm and soft, and smell more delicious than ever in the dawn.\"\n\nThese two brave daisies, growing on the lawn, had lives of concentrated happiness, asking no pity for their humble station in the universe. All treated them with unadulterated respect, and everything made love to them because they were so tender and so easily pleased. They knew, for instance, that their splendid Earth was turning with them, for they felt the swerve of her, sharing from their roots upwards her gigantic curve through space; they knew the sun was part of them, because they felt it drawing their sweet-flavoured food up all their dainty length till it glowed in health upon their small, flushed faces; also they knew that streams of water made a tumbling fuss and sent them messages of laughter, because they caught the little rumble of it through miles of trembling ground. And some among them\u2014though these were prophets and poets but half believed, and looked upon as partly mad and partly wonderful\u2014affirmed that they felt the sea itself far leagues away, bending their heads this way and that for hours at a stretch, according to the thundering vibrations that the tide sent through the soil from distant shores.\n\nBut all, from the tallest spread-head to the smallest button-face\u2014all knew the pleasure of the uncertain winds; all knew the game of holding flying things just a moment longer, by fascinating them, by drowsing them into sleepiness, by nipping their probosces, or by puffing perfume into their nostrils while they caught their feet with the pressure of a hundred yellow rods\u2026.\n\nEnormous periods passed away. A cloud that for a man's \"ten minutes\" hid the sun, wearied them so that they simply closed their eyes and went to sleep. Showers of rain they loved, because it washed and cooled them, and they felt the huge satisfaction of the earth beneath them as it drank: the sweet sensation of wet soil that sponged their roots, the pleasant gush that sluiced their bodies and carried off the irritating dust. They also felt the heavier tumbling of the swollen streams in all directions. The drops from overhanging trees came down and played with them, bringing another set of perfumes altogether. A summer shower was, of course, \"a month\" to them, a day of rain like weeks of holiday by the sea\u2026. But, most of all, they enjoyed the rough-and-tumble nonsense of the violent weather, when they were tied together by the ropes of running wind; for these were visiting days\u2014all manner of strangers dropped in upon them from distant walks in life, and they never knew whether the next would be a fir-cone or one of those careless, irresponsible travellers, a bit of thistle-down\u2026.\n\nYet, for all their steadiness, they knew incessant change\u2014the variety of a daisy's existence was proverbial. Nor was the surprise of being walked upon too alarming\u2014it did not come to all\u2014for they knew a way of bending beneath enormous pressure so that nothing broke, while sometimes it brought a queer, delicious pleasure, as when the bare feet of some flying child passed lightly over them, leaving wild laughter upon a group of them. They knew, indeed, a thousand joys, proudest of all, however, that the big Earth loved them so that she carried millions of them everywhere she went.\n\nAnd all, without exception, communicated their knowledge by the movements, attitudes, and gestures they assumed; and since each stood close to each, the enjoyment spread quickly till the entire lawn felt one undivided sensation by itself. Anything passing across it at such a moment, whether insect, bird, loose leaf or even human being, would be aware of this, and thus, for a fleeting second, share another world. Poets, it is said, have received their sweetest inspirations upon a daisied lawn in the flush of spring. Nor is it always a sight of prey that makes the swallows dart so suddenly sideways and away, but some chance message of joy or warning intercepted from the hosts of flowers in the soil.\n\nAnd from this region of the flower-life comes, of course, the legend that fairies have emotions that last for ever, with eternal youth, and with loves that do not pass away to die. This, too, they understood. Because the measurement of existence is a mightier business than with over-developed humans-in-a-hurry. For knowledge comes chiefly through the eye, and the eye can perceive only six times in a second\u2014things that happen more quickly or more slowly than six times a second are invisible. No man can see the movement of a growing daisy, just as no man can distinguish the separate beats of a sparrow's wing: one is too slow, and the other is too quick. But the daisy is practically all eye. It is aware of most delightful things. In its short life of months it lives through an eternity of unhurrying perceptions and of big sensations. Its youth, its loves, its pleasures are\u2014to it\u2014quite endless\u2026.\n\n\"I can see the old sun moving,\" she murmured, \"but you will love me for ever, won't you?\"\n\n\"Even till it sinks behind the hills,\" he answered, \"I shall not change.\"\n\n\"So long we have been friends already,\" she went on. \"Do you remember when we first met each other, and you looked into my opening eyes?\"\n\nHe sighed with joy as he thought of the long, long stretch of time.\n\n\"That was in our first reckless youth,\" he answered, catching the gold of passionate remembrance from an amber fly that hovered for an instant and was gone. \"I remember well. You were half hidden by a drop of hanging dew, but I discovered you! That lilac bud across the world was just beginning to open.\" And, helped by the wind, he bent his shining head, taller than hers by the sixtieth part of an inch, towards the lilac trees beside the gravel path.\n\n\"So long ago as that!\" she murmured, happy with the exquisite belief in him. \"But you will never change or leave me\u2014promise, oh, promise that!\"\n\nHis stalk grew nearer to her own. He leaned protectively towards her eager face.\n\n\"Until that bud shall open fully to the light and smell its sweetest,\" he replied\u2014the gesture of his petals told it plainly\u2014\"so long shall you and I enjoy our happy love.\"\n\nIt was an eternity to them.\n\n\"And longer still,\" she pleaded.\n\n\"And longer still,\" he whispered in the wind. \"Even until the blossom falls.\"\n\nAh, it was good to be alive with such an age of happiness before them!\n\nHe felt the tears in her voice, however; he knew there was something that she longed to tell.\n\n\"What is your sadness?\" he asked softly, \"and why do you put such questions to me now? What is your little trouble?\"\n\nA moment's hesitation, a moment's hanging of the graceful head the width of a petal's top nearer to his shoulder\u2014and then she told him.\n\n\"I was in darkness for a time,\" she faltered, \"but it was a long, long time. It seemed that something came between us. I lost your face. I felt afraid.\"\n\nAnd his laughter\u2014for just then a puff of wind passed by and shook his sides for him\u2014ran across many feet of lawn.\n\n\"It was a Bumble Bee,\" he comforted her. \"It came between us for a bit, its shadow fell upon you, nothing more! Such things will happen; we must be prepared for them. It was nothing in myself that dimmed your world.\"\n\n\"Another time I will be braver, then,\" she told him, \"and even in the darkness I shall know you close, ah, very close to me\u2026.\"\n\nFor a long, long stretch of time, then, they stood joyfully together and watched the lilac growing. They also saw the movement of the sun across the sky. An eternity passed over them\u2026. The vast disc of the sun went slowly gliding\u2026.\n\nBut all the enormous things that happened in their lives cannot be told. Lives crammed with a succession of such grand and palpitating adventures lie beyond the reach of clumsy words. The sweetness sometimes was intolerable, and then they shared it with the entire lawn and so obtained relief\u2014yet merely in order to begin again. The humming of the rising Spring continued with the thunderous droning of the turning Earth. Never uncared for, part of everything, full of the big, rich life that brims the world in May\u2014ah, almost fuller than they could hold sometimes\u2014they passed with existence along to their appointed end.\n\n\"We began so long ago, I simply can't remember it,\" she sighed.\n\nYet the sun they watched had not left half a degree behind him since they met.\n\n\"There was no beginning,\" he reproved her, smiling, \"and there will never be any end.\"\n\nAnd the wind spread their happiness like perfume everywhere until the whole white lawn of daisies lay singing their rapture to the sunshine\u2026.\n\nThe minute underworld of grass and stalks seemed of a sudden to grow large; yet, till now, they had not realised it as \"large\"\u2014but simply natural. A beetle, big and broad as a Newfoundland dog, went lumbering past them, brushing its polished back against their trembling necks; yet, till now, they had not thought of it as \"big\"\u2014but simply normal. Its footsteps made a grating sound like the gardener's nailed boots upon the gravel paths. It was strange and startling. Something was different, something was changing. They realised dimly that there was another world somewhere, a world they had left behind long, long ago, forgotten. Something was slipping from them, as sleep slips from the skin and the eyes in the early morning when the bath comes \"pinging\" upon the floor. What did it mean?\n\nBig and little, far and near, above, below, inside and outside\u2014all were mixed together in a falling rush.\n\nThey themselves were changing.\n\nThey looked up. They saw an enormous thing rising behind them with vast caverns of square outline opening in its sides\u2014a house. They saw huge, towering shapes whose tops were in the clouds\u2014the familiar lime trees. Big and tiny were inextricably mixed together.\n\nAnd that was wrong. For either the forest of grass was as big as themselves\u2014in which case they still were daisies; or else it was tiny and far below them\u2014in which case they were hurrying humans again. There was an odd confusion\u2026while consciousness swung home to its appointed centre and Adventure brought them back towards the old, familiar starting-place again.\n\nThere came an ominous and portentous sound that rushed towards them through the air, and through the solid ground as well. They heard it, and grew pale with terror. Across the entire lawn it rumbled nearer, growing in volume awfully. The very earth seemed breaking into bits about them. And then they knew.\n\nIt was the End of the World that their prophets had long foretold.\n\nIt crashed upon them before they had time to think. The roar was appalling. The whole lawn trembled. The daisies bowed their little faces in a crowd. They had no time even to close their innocent eyes. Before a quarter of their sweet and happy life was known, the End swept them from the world, unsung and unlamented. Two of them who had planned Eternity together fell side by side before one terrible stroke\u2026.\n\n\"I do believe\u2014\" said Judy, brushing her tumbled hair out of her eyes.\n\n\"Not possible!\" exclaimed Uncle Felix, sitting up and stretching himself like a dog. \"It's a thing I never do, never, NEVER! I think my stupid watch has stopped again\u2026.\"\n\nThey stared at each other with suspiciously sleepy eyes.\n\n\"Promise,\" she whispered presently, \"promise never to tell the others!\"\n\n\"I promise faithfully,\" he answered. \"But we'd better get up, or we shall have our heads cut off like\u2014all the other daisies.\"\n\nHe pulled her to her feet\u2014out of the way of the heavy mowing machine which Weeden was pushing with a whirring, droning noise across the lawn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 203", + "text": "Tim's \"particular adventure\" was of another kind. It was a self-repeater\u2014of some violence, moreover, when the smallness of the hero is considered. Whether in after-life he become an astronomer-poet or a \"silver-and-mechanical engineer\"\u2014both dreams of his\u2014he will ever be sharp upon rescuing something. A lost star or a burning mine will be his objective, but with the essential condition that it be\u2014unattainable. Achievement would mean lost interest. For Tim's desire was, is, and ever will be insatiable. Profoundest mystery, insoluble difficulty, and endless searching were what his soul demanded of life. For him all ponds were bottomless, all gipsies older than the moon. He felt the universe within him, and was born to seek its inexplicable \"explanation\"\u2014outside. The realisation of such passion, however, is not necessarily confined to writers of epics and lyrics. Tim was a man of action before he was a poet. \"Forever questing\" was his unacknowledged motto. Besides asking questions about stars and other inaccessible incidents of his Cosmos, he liked to \"go busting about,\" as he called it\u2014again with one essential condition that the thing should never come to an end by merely happening. Its mystery must remain its beauty.\n\n\"I want to save something from an awful, horrible death,\" he announced one evening, looking up from Half-hours with English Battles for a sign of beauty in distress.\n\n\"Not so easy,\" his uncle warned him, equally weary of another overrated book\u2014his own.\n\n\"But I feel like it,\" he replied. \"Come on.\"\n\nUncle Felix still held back. \"That you feel like it doesn't prove that there's anything that wants rescuing,\" he objected.\n\nThe boy stared at him with patient tolerance and surprise.\n\n\"I promised,\" he said simply.\n\nIt was the other's turn to stare. \"And when, pray?\" They had been alone for the last half hour. It seemed strange.\n\n\"Oh\u2014just now,\" replied the boy carelessly. \"A few minutes ago\u2014about.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" It seemed stranger still. No one had come in. Yet Tim never prevaricated.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"I gave my wordy honour.\" It was so gravely spoken that, while pledges involving life and death were obviously not new to him, this one was of exceptional kind.\n\n\"Who, then, did you promise\u2014whom, I mean?\" the man demanded, fixing him with his stern blue eyes.\n\nAnd the answer came out pat: \"Myself!\"\n\n\"Aha!\" said the other, with a sigh and a raising of the eyebrows, by way of apology. \"That settles it\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Because what you think and say, you must also act,\" the man continued. \"If you promise yourself a thing, and then don't do it, you've simply told a lie.\" And he drew another sigh. He scented action coming.\n\n\"Let's go at once and find it,\" said Tim, putting a text-book into seven words. He hitched his belt up, and looked round to make sure his sisters were not within reach of interference. There was a moment's pause, during which Uncle Felix hitched his will up. They rose, then, standing side by side. They left the room arm in arm on their way into the garden. The dusk was already laying its first net of shadows to catch the Night.\n\n\"Hadn't you better change first?\" asked Tim, thoughtfully, on his way down. He glanced at his companion's white flannel suit. \"You're so awfully visible.\"\n\n\"Visible!\" It was not his bulk. Tim was never deliberately rude. Was it the risk of staining that he meant?\n\n\"Any one can see you miles away like that.\"\n\nThe other understood instantly. In an adventure everything sees, everything has eyes, everything watches. The world is alive and full of eyes. He hesitated a moment.\n\n\"Oh, that's all right,\" he replied. \"To be easily seen is the best way. It disarms curiosity at once. Tell all about yourself and nobody ever thinks anything. It's trying to hide that makes the world suspect you. Keep nothing back and show yourself is the best way to go about unnoticed. I've tried it.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" exclaimed Tim, in an eager whisper, \"same as walking into the strawberry-bed without asking\u2014\"\n\n\"So my white clothes are just the thing,\" said the other, avoiding the pit laid for him.\n\n\"Of course, yes.\" Tim still chased the big idea in his mind. \"Besides,\" he added, full of another splendid thought, \"like that they won't expect you to do very much. They'll watch you instead of me.\"\n\nThere was confusion in the utterance, but things were rather crowding in upon him, to tell the truth, and imagination leaped ahead upon two trails at once. He looked at his big companion with more approval. \"You'll do,\" he signified, pulling his cap over his eyes, thrusting both hands in his pockets, and slithering rapidly down the bannisters in advance.\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Uncle Felix, following him, three steps at a time, with effort.\n\nIn the hall they paused a moment\u2014a question of doors.\n\n\"Back,\" said Uncle Felix.\n\n\"Front's better,\" decided the boy. \"Then nobody'll think anything, you see.\" He was quick to put the new principle into practice.\n\nOn the lawn there was another pause, this time a question of direction.\n\n\"The wood, of course!\" And they set off together at a steady trot. Few words were wasted when Tim went \"busting about\" in this way. Uncle Felix resigned himself and looked to him for guidance; there was some one to be rescued; there was danger to be run; the risk was bigger than either of them realised; but more than that he knew not.\n\n\"Got a handkerchief with you?\" the boy asked presently.\n\n\"Yes, thanks; got everything,\" panted the other.\n\n\"For signalling,\" was offered three minutes later by way of explanation, \"in case we get lost\u2014or anything like that.\"\n\n\"Quite so.\"\n\n\"Is it a clean one?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good!\"\n\nThey climbed the swinging gate of iron, rushed the orchard, crossed the smaller hayfield in the open, heedless of the rabbits that rolled like fat balls into pockets made to fit them, slipped out of sight behind a stack of straw whose threatening lopsidedness seemed to support a ladder, and so eventually came to a breathless and perspiring halt upon the edges of a\u2014wood.\n\nIt was a very ordinary wood, small, inconspicuous, and unimposing. No big trees towered; there was no fence of thick, black trunks. It was not mysterious, like the dense evergreens on the other side of the grounds where the west wind shook half a mile of dripping branches in stormy weather:\n\nWhere the yew trees are gigantic,\n\nAnd the yellow coast of \"Spain,\"\n\nBreasting on the dim \"Atlantic,\"\n\nStores the undesired rain.\n\nIt grew there in a kind of untidy muddle, on the very outskirts of the estate, meekly\u2014rather disappointingly, Uncle Felix thought. There was no hint of anything haunted or terrible about it. Round rabbits fussed busily about its edges, darting as though pulled by wires, and the older wood-pigeons, no doubt, slept comfortably in its middle. But game despised it heartily, and traps were never laid. There was not even a trespassers' board, without which no wood is properly attractive. Indeed, for most people it was simply not worth the trouble of entering at all. Apparently no one ever bothered about it.\n\nYet, precisely for these very reasons, it was real. Tim described it afterwards as a \"naked\" wood. It had no fence to hold it together, it was not dressed up by human beings, it just grew naturally. To this very openness and want of concealment it owed its deep security, its safety was due entirely to the air of innocence it wore. But in reality it was disguised. It was a forest\u2014without a middle, without a heart.\n\n\"This is our wood,\" announced Tim in a low voice, as they stood and mopped their faces. His tone suggested that they would enter at their peril.\n\n\"And is it a big wood?\" the other asked with caution, as though he had not noticed it before.\n\n\"Much bigger than it looks,\" the boy replied. \"You can easily get lost.\" Then added, with the first touch of awe about him, \"It has no centre.\"\n\n\"That's the worst kind,\" said his companion shivering slightly. \"Like a pond that has no bottom.\"\n\nTim nodded. His face had grown a trifle paler. He showed no immediate anxiety to make the first advance, reserving that privilege for his comrade. A breath of wind stole out and set the dry leaves rustling.\n\n\"We must look out,\" he said at length. \"There'll be a sign.\"\n\nUncle Felix listened attentively to every word. The boy had moved up closer to him. \"And if anything happens one of us must climb a tree and signal. You've got the clean handkerchief. You see, it's at the centre that it gets rather nasty\u2014because anybody who gets there simply disappears and is never heard of again. That's why there's no centre at all really. It's a terrible rescue we've got to do.\"\n\nThe adventure fulfilled the desire of his heart, for, since there was no centre, the search would last for ever.\n\n\"Keep a sharp look-out for the sign,\" replied the man, feeling a small hand steal into his own. \"We'd better go in before it gets any darker.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's nothing,\" was the whispered comment. \"The great thing is not to lose our way. Just follow me!\"\n\nThey then went into this wood without a centre, without a middle, without a heart. Into this heartless wood they moved stealthily, Uncle Felix singing under his breath to keep his courage up:\n\n\u2003\"A wood is a mysterious place,\n\n\u2003It never looks you in the face,\n\n\u2003But stares behind you all the time.\n\n\u2003Your safest plan is just to\u2014climb!\n\n\u2003For, otherwise you lose your way,\n\n\u2003The week, the month, the time of day;\n\n\u2003It turns you round, it makes you blind,\n\n\u2003And in the end you lose your mind!\n\n\u2003Avoid the centre,\n\n\u2003If you enter!\n\n\u2003\"It grows upon you\u2014grows immense,\n\n\u2003Its peace is not indifference,\n\n\u2003It sees you\u2014and it takes offence,\n\n\u2003It knows you're interfering.\n\n\u2003Its sleepliness is all pretence,\n\n\u2003With trunks and twigs and foliage dense\n\n\u2003It's watching you, alert, intense,\n\n\u2003It's furious; it's peering.\n\n\u2003\"Upon the darkening paths below,\n\n\u2003Whichever way you try to go\n\n\u2003You'll meet with strange resistance.\n\n\u2003So climb a tree and wave your hand,\n\n\u2003The birds will see and understand,\n\n\u2003And may bring you assistance.\n\n\u2003Avoid the centre,\n\n\u2003If you enter,\n\n\u2003For once you're there\n\n\u2003You\u2014disappear!\n\n\u2003Smothered by depth and distance!\"\n\nTim listened without a sign of interest. Every one has his peculiarity, he supposed, and, provided his companion did not dance as well as sing, it was all right. The noise was unnecessary, perhaps, still\u2014the sound of a human voice was not without its charm. The house was a very long way off; the gardeners never came this way. A wood was a mysterious place! \"Is that all?\" he asked\u2014but whether glad or sorry, no man could possibly have told.\n\n\"For the present,\" came the reply, and the sound of both their voices fell a little dead, muffled by the density of the undergrowth. \"Are we going right?\"\n\n\"There'll be a sign,\" Tim explained again. And the way he said it, the air of positive belief in tone and manner, stung the man's consciousness with a thrill of genuine adventure. It began to creep over him. He kept near to the comforting presence of the boy, aware in quite a novel way of the Presence of the Wood. This very ordinary wood, without claim to particular notice, much less to a notice-board, changed his normal feelings by arresting their customary flow. An unusual sensation replaced what he meant to feel, expected to feel. He was aware of strangeness. He felt included in the purpose of a crowd of growing trees. \"But it's just a common little wood,\" he assured himself, realising as he said it that both adjectives were wrong. For nothing left to itself is ever common, and as for \"little\"\u2014well, it had suddenly become enormous.\n\nOutside, in what was called the big world, things were going on with frantic hurry and change, but in here the leisured calm was huge, gigantic, so much so that the other dwindled into a kind of lost remoteness. \"Smothered by depth and distance,\" he could almost forget it altogether. Out there nations were at war, republics fighting, empires tottering to ruin; great-hearted ladies were burning furniture and stabbing lovely pictures (not their own) to prove themselves intelligent enough to vote; and gallant gentlemen were flying across the Alps and hunting for the top and bottom of the earth instead of hurrying to help them. All manner of tremendous things were happening at a frightful pace\u2014while this unnoticed wood just stood and grew, watching the sun and stars and listening to the brushing winds. Its unadvertised foliage concealed a busy universe of multitudinous, secret life.\n\nHow still the trees were\u2014far more imposing than in a storm! Still, quiet things are much more impressive than things that draw attention to themselves by making a noise. They are more articulate. The strength of all these trees emerged in their silence. Their steadiness might easily wear one down.\n\nAnd now, into its quiet presence, a man and a boy from that distressful outer world had entered. They moved with effort and difficulty into its untrodden depths. Uninvited and unasked, they sought its hidden and invisible centre, the mysterious heart of it which the younger of the adventurers could only describe by saying that \"It isn't there, because when you get there, you disappear!\" Two ways of expressing the same thing, of course! Moreover, entering involved getting out again. Escape and Rescue\u2014the Wood always in opposition\u2014took possession of the man's slow mind\u2026.\n\nIt was already thick about them, and the trees stood very still. The branches drooped, motionless in the warm evening air. The twigs pointed. Each leaf had an eye, but a hidden, lidless eye. The saplings saw them, but the heavier trunks observed them. It was known in what direction they were going, the direction, however, being chosen and insisted on by the Wood. Their very steps were counted. The whole business of the trees was suspended while they passed. They were being watched. And the stillness was so deep that it forced them, too, to make as little noise as possible. They moved with the utmost caution, pretending that a snapping twig might betray their presence, yet knowing quite well that each detail of their blundering advance was marked down with the accuracy of an instantaneous photograph. Tim, usually in advance, looked round from time to time, with a finger on his lips; and though he himself made far more noise than his companion, he stared with reproach when the latter snapped a stick or let a leafy branch swish through the air too loudly.\n\n\"Oh, hush!\" he whispered. \"Please do hush!\" and the same moment caught his own foot in a root, placed cunningly across the path, and sprawled forward with the noise of an explosion. But he made no reference to the matter. His own noises did no harm apparently. He was perfectly honest about it, not merely putting the blame elsewhere to draw attention from himself. His uncle's size and visibility were co-related in his mind. Being convinced that he moved as stealthily and soundlessly as a Redskin, it followed obviously that his companion didn't.\n\nThe dusk had noticeably deepened when at length they reached a little clearing and stood upright, perspiring freely, and both a little flustered. The silence was really extraordinary. It seemed they had entered a private place, a secret chamber where they had no right, and were intruders. The clearing formed a circle, and from the open sky overhead a grey, mysterious light fell softly on the leafy walls. They paused and peered about them.\n\n\"Hark! What's that?\" asked Tim in a whisper.\n\n\"Nothing,\" replied the other.\n\n\"But I heard it,\" the boy insisted; \"something rushing.\"\n\n\"I'm rather out of breath, perhaps.\"\n\nThe boy looked at him reproachfully. His expression suggested \"Why are you so noisy and enormous? It's hopeless, really!\" But aloud he merely said, \"It's got awfully dark all of a sudden.\"\n\n\"It's the wood does that,\" replied Uncle Felix. \"Outside it's only twilight. I think we'd better be getting on.\"\n\n\"We're getting there,\" observed the boy.\n\n\"But we shan't be able to see the sign if this darkness gets worse,\" said the other apprehensively.\n\nThe answer gave him quite a turn. \"It's been\u2014ages and ages ago!\"\n\nThe idea of rescue meanwhile had merged insensibly into escape, but neither remarked upon the change. It was only that the original emotion had spread a bit. Tim and Uncle Felix stood close together in this solemn clearing, waiting, peering about them, listening intently. But Tim had seen the sign; he knew what he was doing all the time; he was in more intimate relations with the Being of the Wood than his great floundering Uncle possibly could be.\n\n\"Which way, do you think?\" asked the latter anxiously.\n\nThere seemed no possible exit from the clearing, no break anywhere in the leafy walls; even the entrance was covered up and hidden. The Wood blocked further advance deliberately.\n\n\"We're lost,\" said Tim bluntly, turning round and round. His eyes opened to their widest. \"You've simply taken a wrong turning somewhere.\"\n\nAnd before Uncle Felix could expostulate or say a word in self-defence, the inevitable reward of his mistake was upon him.\n\n\"You've got the handkerchief!\"\n\nAlready the boy was looking about him for a suitable tree.\n\n\"But you saw the sign, Tim,\" he began excuses; \"and it's your wood;\n\nI've never been here before\u2014\"\n\n\"That one looks the easiest,\" suggested Tim, pointing to a beech. It had one low branch, but the trunk was smooth and slippery as ice. He pushed aside the foliage with his hands to make an opening towards it. \"I'll help you up.\" Tim spoke as though there was no time to lose.\n\nBut help came just then unexpectedly from another quarter\u2014there was a sudden battering sound. Something went past them through the branches with a crashing noise. It was terrific, the way it smashed and clattered overhead, making a clapping rattle that died away into the distance with strange swiftness. They jumped; their hearts stood still a moment. It was so horribly close. But the stillness that followed the uproar was far worse than the noise. It felt as though the Wood had stretched a hand and aimed a crafty blow at them from behind the shield of foliage. A quiver of visible silence ran across the leafy walls. They stood stock still, staring blankly into each other's eyes.\n\n\"A wood-pigeon!\" whispered Uncle Felix, recovering himself first.\n\n\"We've been seen!\"\n\nA faint smile passed over Tim's startled face. There was no other expression in it. The tension was distressingly acute. One sentence, however, came to the lips of both adventurers. They uttered it under their breath together:\n\n\"It's\u2014disappeared!\"\n\nInstinctively they held hands then. Tim stood, rooted to the ground.\n\n\"The centre!\" They whispered it almost inaudibly. The horror of the spot where people vanished was upon them both. The power of the Wood had worn them down.\n\n\"Yes, but don't say it,\" cried Uncle Felix; \"above all, don't say it aloud.\" And he clapped one hand upon his own mouth, and the other upon the boy's, as Tim came cuddling closer to his comforting expanse of side. \"That only wakes it up, and\u2014\"\n\nHe did not finish the sentence. Instead, his mind began to think tremendously. They were both badly frightened. What was the best thing to be done? At first he thought: \"Keep perfectly still, and make no slightest movement; a quiet person is not noticed.\" But, the next instant, came the truer wisdom: \"If anything unusual occurs, go on doing exactly what you were doing before. Hold the atmosphere, as it were.\" And on this latter inspiration he decided to act at once\u2014\n\nOnly to discover that Tim had realised it before him. The boy was pulling at him. \"Do come on, Uncle!\" he was saying. \"We shall go mad with fright if we keep on standing here\u2014we shall be raving lunatics!\"\n\nThey set off wildly then, plunging helter-skelter into the silent, heartless wood. The trees miraculously opened up a way for them as they dived and stooped and wriggled forward. In which direction they were going neither of them had the least idea, but as neither one nor the other disappeared, it was clear they had not reached the actual centre. They gasped and spluttered, their breath grew shorter, the darkness increased. They came to all sorts of curious places that deceived them; ways opened invitingly, then closed down again and blocked advance; there were clearings that were obviously false, open places that were plainly sham; and a dozen times they came to spots that seemed familiar, but which really they had never seen before. Sense of direction left them, for they continually changed the angle, compelled by the undergrowth to do so. Twigs leaped at them and stung their faces, Tim's cheeks were splashed with mud, Uncle Felix's clean white flannels showed irregular lines of dirty water to his knees. It was altogether a tremendous affair in which rescue and escape were madly mingled with furious attack and terrified retreat. Everything was moving, and in all directions at once. They rushed headlong through the angry Wood. But the Wood itself rushed ever past them. It was roused.\n\nThe confusion and bewilderment had got a little more than they could manage, indeed, when\u2014quite marvellously and unexpectedly\u2014the darkness lifted. They saw trees separately instead of in a whirling mass. The trunks stood more apart from one another. There were patches of faint light. More\u2014there was a line of light. It shone, grey and welcome, some dozen yards in front of them.\n\n\"Come on!\" cried Tim. \"Follow me!\"\n\nAnd two minutes later they found themselves outside, torn, worn, and breathless, upon the edge\u2014standing exactly at the place where they had entered three-quarters of an hour before. They had made an enormous circle. Panting and half collapsed, they stood side by side in an exhausted heap.\n\n\"We're out,\" said Tim, with immense relief. Profoundly satisfied with himself, he looked round at his bedraggled Uncle. It was plain that he had rescued some one from \"an awful-anorrible death.\"\n\n\"At last!\" replied the other gratefully, aware that he was the rescued one. \"But only just in time!\"\n\nAnd they moved away in the deepening dusk towards the house, whose welcome lights shone across the intervening hayfield." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 204", + "text": "Meanwhile the coveted fortnight drew towards a close. It had begun on a Friday, and that left two full, clear weeks ahead. It had seemed an inexhaustible period\u2014when it started. There was the feeling that it would draw out slowly, like an ordinary lesson-week; instead of which it shot downhill to Saturday with hardly a single stop. On looking back, the children almost felt unfairness; somebody had pushed it; they had been cheated.\n\nAnd, of course, they had been cheated. Time had played his usual trick upon them. The beginning was so prodigal of reckless promises that they had really believed a week would last for ever. Childhood expects, quite rightly, to have its cake and eat it, for there is no true reason why anything should ever end at all. The devices are various: a titbit is set aside to enjoy later, thus deceiving Time and checking its ridiculous hurry. But in the long run Time invariably wins. After Thursday the week had shot into Saturday without a single pause. It whistled past. And the titbit, Saturday, had come.\n\nYet without the usual titbit flavour; for Saturday, as a rule, wore splashes of gold and yellow upon its latter end, being a half-holiday associated with open air and sunshine, but now, Monday already in sight, with lessons and early bed and other prohibitions by the dozen, hearts sank a little, a shadow crept upon the sun. They had a grievance; some one had cheated them of a final joy. The collapse was unexpected, therefore wrong. And the arch-deceiver who had humbugged them, they knew quite well, was Time. He was in their thoughts. He mocked them all day long. Clocks grinned; Saturday, June 3, flaunted itself insolently in their faces.\n\n\"The day after to-morrow,\" remarked some one, noticing a calendar staring on the wall; and from the moment that phrase could be used it meant the day was within measurable distance.\n\n\"Aunt Emily leaves Tunbridge Wells\" was mentioned too, sounding less unpleasant than \"Aunt Emily comes back.\" But the climax was reached when somebody stated bluntly without fear of contradiction:\n\n\"To-morrow's Sunday.\"\n\nFor Sunday had no particular colour. Monday was black, and Saturday was gold, but Sunday never had been painted anything. Though a buffer-day between a vanished week and a week of labour coming, it was of uncertain character. Queer, grave people came back to lunch. There were collects and a vague uneasiness about the heathen being unfed and naked. There was a collection, too\u2014pennies emerged from stained leather purses and dropped clicking into a polished box with a slit in the top. Greenland's icy mountains also helped to put a chill into the sunshine. A pause came. Time went slower than usual\u2014God rested, they remembered, on the seventh day\u2014yet nothing happened much, and with their Sunday clothes they put on a sort of dreadful carefulness that made play seem stiff, unnatural, and out of place.\n\nDaddy, too, before the day was over, invariably looked worried, the servants bored, Mother drowsy, and Aunt Emily \"like a clergyman's wife.\" Time sighed audibly on Sunday.\n\n\"It's our last day, anyhow,\" they agreed, determined to live in the present and enjoy Saturday to the full.\n\nIt was then Uncle Felix, having overheard their comments upon Time, looked round abruptly and made one of his startling remarks. \"To-morrow,\" he said, \"is one of the most wonderful days that was ever invented. You'll see.\"\n\nAnd the way he said it provided the very thrill that was needed to chase the shadow from the sun. For there was a hint of promise in his voice that almost meant he had some way of delaying the arrival of Black Monday.\n\n\"You'll see,\" he repeated significantly, shading his eyes with both hands and peering up at the sun.\n\nTim and Judy watched him with keen faces. They noticed that he said \"to-morrow\" instead of \"Sunday.\" But before they could squeeze out a single question, there came a remarkable interruption from below. From somewhere near the ground it came. Maria, seated on a flower-pot whose flower didn't want to grow, opened her mouth and spoke. As is already known, this did not often happen. It was her characteristic to keep it closed. Even at the dentist's she never could be got to open her mouth, because he had once hurt her; she flatly refused to do so, and no amount of \"Now open, please,\" ever had the least effect on her firm decision. She was taken in vain to see the dentist.\n\nThis last Saturday of the week, however, she opened.\n\n\"I've not had my partickler adventure,\" was what she said.\n\nAt the centre of that circle where she lived in a state of unalterable bliss, the fact had struck her, and she mentioned it accordingly.\n\nTim and Judy turned upon her hungrily, but before they could relieve their feelings by a single word their Uncle had turned upon her too. Lowering his eyes from the great circular sun that moved in a circle through the sky, he let them fall upon the circular Maria who reposed calmly upon the circle of the earth, which itself swung in another circle round the sun.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said, \"but it's coming. Your father told you a day would come. It is!\"\n\nHe said no more than that, but it was enough to fill the remainder of the day with the recurrent thrill of a tremendous promise. Each hour seemed pregnant with a hint of exceptional delivery. There were signs and whispers everywhere, and everybody was aware of it. Uncle Felix looked \"bursting with it,\" as though he could hardly keep it in, and even the Lesser Authorities had as much as they could do to prevent it flying out of them in sudden sentences. Jackman wore a curious smile, which Judy declared was \"just the face she made the day Maria was born\"; Mrs. Horton left her kitchen and was seen upon the lawn actually picking daisies; and even Thompson\u2014well, when Tim and his sister came upon him basking with a pipe against the laundry window, wearing a discarded tweed coat of their father's, and looking \"exactly like the Pope asleep,\" he explained his position to Tim with the extraordinary remark that \"even the Servants' Hall 'as dreams,\" and went on puffing his pipe precisely as before. But Weeden betrayed it most. They knew by the smell\u2014\"per fumigated,\" as they called it\u2014that he was in the passages, watering the flowers or arranging new ones on the window-sills, and when Tim said, \"Seen any more water-rats to pot at, Weeden?\" the man just smiled and replied, \"Good mornin', Master Tim; it's Saturday.\"\n\nThe inflection of his tone was instantly noticed. \"Oh, I say, Weeden, how do you know? Do tell me. I won't say a word, I promise.\" But the Head Gardener kept his one eye\u2014the other was of glass\u2014upon the spout of his watering-can, and answered in a voice that issued from his boots\u2014\"Because to-morrow's Sunday, Master Tim, unless something 'appens to prevent it.\" He then went quickly from the room, as though he feared more questions; he took the secret with him; he was nervous about betraying what he knew. But Judy agreed with Tim that \"his answer proved it, because why should he have said it unless he knew!\"\n\nMeanwhile, that fine morning in early June slipped along its sunny way; a heavy treacle-pudding luncheon was treated properly; Uncle Felix lit his great meerschaum pipe, and they all went out on the lawn beneath the lime trees. The undercurrent of excitement filled the air. Something was going to happen, something so wonderful that they could not speak about it. They did not dare to ask questions lest they should somehow stop it. It was a most delicately poised affair. The least mistake might send it racing in the opposite direction. But their imaginations were so actively at work inside that they could not help whispering among themselves about it. The silence of their Uncle piled up the coming wonder in an enormous heap.\n\n\"Something is coming,\" affirmed Judy in an undertone for the twentieth time, \"but I think it will be after tea, don't you?\"\n\n\"Prob'ly,\" assented her brother, very full of treacle pudding. He sighed.\n\n\"Or p'r'aps it's somebody, d'you think?\"\n\nTim shrugged his shoulders carefully, conscious of insecurity within.\n\n\"I shouldn't be surprised, would you?\" Judy insisted. Of course she knew as much as he did, but she wanted to make him say something definite.\n\n\"It's both,\" he said grandly. \"Things like this always come together.\"\n\n\"Yes, but it's quite new. It's never happened before.\"\n\nHe looked sideways at her with the pity of superior knowledge.\n\n\"How could it?\" So great was his private information that he almost added \"stupid.\" But he kept back the word for later. He repeated instead: \"However could it?\"\n\n\"Well, but\u2014\" she began.\n\n\"Don't you see, it's what Daddy always told us,\" he reminded her with an air. And instantly, with overwhelming certainty, those Wonder Sentences of their father's, first spoken years ago, crashed in upon their minds: Some day; a day is coming; a day will come.\n\nTim's assurance hurt her vanity a little, for it was only fair that she should know something too, however little. But the force of the discovery at once obliterated all lesser personal emotions.\n\n\"Tim!\" she gasped, overcome with admiration. \"Is it really that?\"\n\nTim never forgot that moment of proud ascendancy. He felt like a king or something.\n\n\"Look out,\" he whispered quickly. \"You'll spoil it all if he knows we've guessed.\" And he nodded his head towards Uncle Felix in his wicker-chair. \"It's Maria's adventure, too, remember.\"\n\nJudy smiled and flushed a little.\n\n\"He's not listening,\" she whispered back, ignoring Maria's claim. She was not quite so stupid as her brother thought her. \"But how on earth did you know? It's too wonderful!\" She flung the hair out of her eyes and wriggled away some of her suppressed excitement on the grass. Tim held his breath in agony while he watched her. But the smoke from his Uncle's pipe rose steadily into the sunny air, and his face was hidden by a paper that he held. The moment of danger passed. The boy leaned over towards his sister's ear.\n\n\"Where it comes from,\" he whispered, \"is what I want to know,\" and straightened up again with the air of having delivered an ultimatum that no girl could ever possibly reply to.\n\n\"From?\" she repeated. She seemed a little disappointed. \"D'you mean that may stop it coming?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" he said contemptuously. \"But everything must come from somewhere, mustn't it?\"\n\nJudy stared at him speechless, while he surveyed her with an air of calm omnipotence. To ask a thing no one could answer was the same as knowing the answer oneself.\n\n\"Mustn't it?\" he repeated with triumph.\n\nAnd, in the inevitable pause that followed, they both instinctively glanced up at Uncle Felix. The same idea had occurred to both of them. Although direct questions about what was coming were obviously impermissible, an indirect question seemed fairly within the rules. The fact was, neither of them could keep quiet about it any longer. The strain was more than human nature could stand. They simply must find out. They would get at it that way.\n\n\"Try him,\" whispered Judy. And Tim turned recklessly towards his Uncle and drew a long, deep breath." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 205", + "text": "\"Uncle,\" he began with a rush lest his courage should forsake him, \"where does everything come from? Everything in the world, I mean?\"\u2014then waited for an answer that did not come.\n\nUncle Felix neither moved nor spoke, and the question, like a bomb that fails to explode, produced no result after considerable effort and expense. The boy looked down again at the alarum clock he had been trying to mend, and turned the handle. It was too tightly wound to go. A stopped clock has the sulkiest face in the world. He stared at it; the handle clicked beneath the pressure of his hand. \"It must come from somewhere,\" he added with decision, half to himself.\n\n\"From the East, of course,\" advanced Judy, and tried to draw her Uncle by putting some buttercups against his cheek and mentioning loudly that he liked butter.\n\nThen, since neither sound nor movement issued from the man in the wicker-chair, the children continued the discussion among themselves, but at the man, knowing that sooner or later he must become involved in it. Judy's answer, moreover, so far as it went, was excellent. The sun rose in the East, and the wind most frequently mentioned came also from that quarter. Easter, when everything rose again, was connected with the same point of the compass. The East was enormously far away with a kind of fairyland remoteness. The dragon-rugs in Daddy's study and the twisted weapons in the hall were \"Easty\" too. According to Tim, it was a \"golden, yellow, crimson-sort-of, mysterious, blazing hole of a place\" of which no adequate picture had ever been shown to them. China and Japan were too much photographed, but the East was vague and marvellous, the beginning of all things, \"Camel-distant,\" as they phrased it, with Great Asia upon its magical frontiers. For Asia, being equally unphotographed, still shimmered with uncommon qualities.\n\nBut, chiefly, it was a vast hole where travellers disappeared and left no trace; and to leave no trace was simply horrible.\n\n\"The easier you go the less chance there is,\" maintained Judy. She said this straight into the paper that screened her uncle's face\u2014without the smallest result of any kind whatsoever. Then Tim recalled something that Colonel Stumper had said once, and let fly with it, aiming his voice beneath the paper's edge.\n\n\"East is east,\" he announced with considerable violence, but might as well have declared that it was south for all the response obtained. It was very odd, he thought; his Uncle's mind must be awfully full of something. For he remembered Come-Back Stumper saying the same thing once to Daddy at the end of a frightful argument about missionaries and idols, and Daddy had been unable to find any reply at all. Yet Uncle Felix did not stir a finger even. Accordingly, he made one more effort. He recited in a loud voice the song that Stumper had made up about it. If that had no effect, they must try other means altogether:\n\n\u2003The East is just an endless place\n\n\u2003That lies beyond discovery,\n\n\u2003Where travellers who leave no trace\n\n\u2003Are lost without recovery.\n\n\u2003Both North and South have got a pole\u2014\n\n\u2003Men stand on the equator;\n\n\u2003But the East is just an awful hole\u2014\n\n\u2003You're never heard of later!\n\nIt had no effect. Goodness! he thought, the man must be ill. Or, perhaps, like the alarum clock, he was too tightly wound to go, and the burden of the secret he contained so wonderfully up his sleeve half choked him. The boy grew impatient; he nudged Judy and made an odd grimace, and Judy, belonging to the sex that took risks and thought little of personal safety when a big end was to be obtained, stood up and put the buttercups against her own cheek.\n\n\"But I like it ever so much more than you do,\" she said in a loud voice.\n\nThe move was not a bad one; the paper wobbled, sank a quarter of an inch, revealed the bridge of the reader's nose, then held severely steady again. Whereupon Tim, noticing this sign of weakening, followed his sister's lead, rose, kicked the tired clock like a ball across the lawn, and exclaimed in a tone of challenge to the universe: \"But where did everything come from before that\u2014before the East, I mean?\" And he glared at his immobile Uncle through the paper with an air of fearful accusation, as though he distinctly held he was to blame. If that didn't let the cat out of the bag, nothing would!\n\nThe big man, however, rested heavily with his legs crossed, as though still he had not heard. Doubtless he felt as heavy as he looked, for the afternoon was warm, and luncheon\u2014well, at any rate, he remained neutral and inactive. Something might happen to divert philosophical inquiry into other channels; a rat might poke its nose above the pond; a big fish might jump; an awfully rare butterfly come dancing; or Maria, as on rare occasions she had been known to do, might stop discussion with a word of power. The chances were in his favour on the whole. He waited.\n\nBut nothing happened. No rat, nor fish, nor butterfly did the things expected of them; they were on the children's side. Maria sat blocked and motionless against the landscape; and the round world dozed. Yes\u2014but the music of the world was humming. The bees droned by, there was a whisper among the unruffled leaves.\n\nTim tapped him sharply on the knee. The man shuffled, then looked over the top of his illustrated paper with an air of shocked surprise.\n\n\"Eh, Tim,\" he asked. \"Where we all come from, did you say?\"\n\n\"Everything, not only us,\" was the clean reply.\n\n\"That's it,\" Judy supported him.\n\n\"Now, then,\" Maria added quietly, as if she had done all the work.\n\nUncle Felix laid down his entertaining pictures of public men in misfit-clothing furiously hitting tiny balls over as much uncultivated land as possible\u2014and sighed. Their violent attitudes had given him a delightful sensation of repose. They were the men who governed England, and this savage hitting was proof of their surplus energy. He resigned himself, but with an air.\n\n\"Well,\" he said vaguely, \"I suppose\u2014it all just\u2014began somehow\u2014of itself.\" And he stole a sideways glance at a picture of a stage Beauty attired like a female Guy Fawkes.\n\n\"It was created in six days, of course, us last,\" said Tim, regarding him with patient dignity. \"We remember all that. But where it came from is what we thought you'd know.\" He closed the illustrated paper and moved it out of reach, while the man brushed from his beard the grass and stuff that Judy had arranged there cleverly in a decorative pattern.\n\n\"From?\" repeated Uncle Felix, as though the word were unfamiliar.\n\n\"Your body and mind,\" the boy resumed, ignoring the pretence that laziness offered in place of information, \"and all that kind of thing; trees and mountains, and birds and caterpillars and people like Aunt Emily, and clergymen and volcanoes and elephants\u2014oh, everything in the world everywhere?\"\n\nThere was another sigh. And another pause dropped down upon creation, while they watched a looper caterpillar that clung to the edge of the illustrated paper and made futile circles in the air with the knob it called its head. Some one had forgotten to let down the ladder it expected, or perhaps it, too, was asking unanswerable questions of the sun.\n\n\"I believe,\" announced Judy, still smarting under a sense of recent neglect, \"it just came from nowhere. It's all in a great huge circle. And we go round and round and rounder,\" she went on, as no one met her challenge, \"till we're finished!\"\n\nShe avoided her brother's eye, but glanced winningly at Uncle Felix, remembering that she had gained support from him before by a similar device. At Maria she looked down. \"You know nothing anyhow,\" her expression said, \"so you must agree.\"\n\n\"I don't finish,\" said Maria quietly, whereupon Tim, feeling that the original question was being shelved, made preparation to obliterate her\u2014when Uncle Felix intervened with a longer observation of his own.\n\n\"It's not such a bad idea,\" he said, glancing sideways at Maria with approval, \"that circle business. Everything certainly goes round. The earth is round, and the sun is round, and, as Maria says, a circle never finishes.\" He paused, reflecting deeply.\n\n\"But who made the circle,\" demanded Tim.\n\n\"That is the point,\" agreed Uncle Felix, nodding his head. \"Some one must have made it\u2014some day\u2014mustn't they?\"\n\nThey stared at him, as probably the animals stared at Adam, wondering what their splendid names were going to be. The yearning in their eyes was enough to make a rock produce sweet-scented thyme. Even the looper steadied its pin-point head to listen. But nothing happened. Uncle Felix looked dumber than the clock. He looked hot, confused, and muddled too. He kept his eyes upon the grass. He fumbled in his pockets for a match. He spoke no word.\n\n\"What?\" asked Tim abruptly, by way of a hint that something further was expected of him.\n\nUncle Felix looked up with a start. Like Proteus who changed his shape to save himself the trouble of prophesying, he swiftly changed the key to save himself providing accurate information that he didn't possess.\n\n\"It wasn't a circle, exactly,\" he said slowly; \"it was a thought, a great, white, wonderful, shining thought. That's what started the whole business first,\" and he looked round hopefully at the eager faces. \"Somebody thought it all,\" he went on, recklessly, \"and it all came true that way. See?\"\n\nThey waited in silence for particulars.\n\n\"Somebody thought it all out first,\" he elaborated, \"and so it simply had to happen.\"\n\nThere was an interval of some thirty seconds, and then Tim asked:\n\n\"But who thought him?\" He said it with much emphasis.\n\nUncle Felix sat up with energy and lit his pipe. His listeners drew closer, with the exception of Maria, whose life seemed concentrated in her fixed and steady eyes.\n\n\"It's like this, you see,\" the man explained between the puffs; \"if you go into the schoolroom, you find a lot of things lying about everywhere\u2014blocks, toys, engines, and all sorts of things\u2014don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" they agreed, without enthusiasm.\n\n\"Well,\" he continued, \"what's the good of them until you think something about them\u2014think them into something\u2014some game or meaning or other? They're nothing but a lot of useless stuff just lying untidily upon the floor. See what I mean?\"\n\nThey nodded, but again without enthusiasm.\n\n\"With our End of the World place,\" he went on, seeing that they listened attentively, \"it's the same again. It was nothing but a rubbish-heap until we thought it into something wonderful\u2014which, of course, it is,\" he hastened to add. \"But by thinking about it, we discovered\u2014we created it!\"\n\nThey nodded again. Somebody grunted. Maria watched the caterpillar crawling up his sleeve.\n\n\"The things\u2014the place and the toys,\" he resumed hopefully, \"were there all the time, but they meant nothing\u2014they weren't alive\u2014until we thought about them.\" He blew a cloud of smoke. \"So, you see,\" he continued with an effort, \"if we could only think out what everything meant, we could\u2014er\u2014find out what\u2014what everything meant\u2014and where it came from. Everything would be all right, don't you see?\"\n\nJudy's expression was distraught and puzzled. Maria's eyes were closed so tightly that her entire face seemed closed. The pause drew out.\n\n\"Yes, but where does everything come from?\" inquired Tim calmly.\n\nHe valued the lengthy explanation at just exactly\u2014nothing!\n\n\"Because there simply must be a beginning somewhere,\" added Judy.\n\nThey were at the starting-point again. They had merely made a circle.\n\nAnd Uncle Felix found himself in difficulties of his own creating. Where everything came from puzzled him as much as it puzzled the children, or the looper caterpillar that was now crawling from his flannel collar to his neck and contemplating the thicket of his dense back hair. Why ask these terrible questions? he thought, as he looked around at the sunshine and the trees. Life would be no happier if he knew. Since everything was already here, going along quite pleasantly and usefully, it really couldn't help matters much to know precisely where it all came from. Possibly not. But it would have helped him enormously in his relations with the children\u2014his particular world at the moment\u2014if he could have provided them with a satisfactory explanation. And he knew quite well what they expected from him. That dreadful \"Some Day\" hung in the balance between success and failure.\n\nAnd it was then that assistance came from a most unlikely quarter\u2014from Maria. There was no movement in the stolid head. The eyes merely rolled round like small blue moons upon the expanse of the expressionless face. But the lips parted and she spoke. She asked a question. And her question shifted the universe back upon its ultimate foundations. It set a problem deeper far than the mere origin of everything. It touched the cause.\n\n\"Why?\" she inquired blandly.\n\nIt seemed a bomb-shell had fallen among them. Maria had closed her eyes again. Her face was calm as a cabbage, still as a mushroom in a storm. She claimed the entire discussion somehow as her own. Yet she had merely exercised her prerogative of being herself. Having gone into the root of the matter with a monosyllable, she retired again into her eternal centre. She had nothing more to offer\u2014at the moment.\n\nWhy?\n\nThey had never thought of Why there should be anything. It was far more interesting than Where. Why was a deeper question than whence. It made them feel more important, for one thing. Somebody\u2014but Somebody who was not there\u2014owed them a proper explanation about it. The burden of apology or excuse was lifted instantly from Uncle Felix's shoulders, for, obviously, he had nothing to do with the reason for their being in the world.\n\nWithout a moment's hesitation he flung his arms out, let the pipe fall from his lips, and\u2014burst into song:\n\nWhy should there be anything?\n\nWhy should we be here?\n\nIt isn't where we come from,\n\nBut why should we appear?\n\nIt's really inexplicable,\n\nExtr'ordinary, queer:\n\nWhy should we come and talk a bit,\n\nAnd then\u2014just disappear?\n\n\"Why, why, why?\" shouted the two elder children. The air was filled with flying \"whys.\" They tried to sing the verse.\n\n\"Let's dance it,\" cried Judy, leaping to her feet. \"Give us the words again, please.\" She picked up the clock and plumped it down into Maria's uncertain lap. \"You beat time,\" she ordered. \"It's the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers.'\"\n\nMaria, disinclined to budge unless obliged to, did nothing.\n\n\"It's a beastly tune,\" Tim supported her. \"I hate those Sunday hymn tunes. They're not real a bit.\"\n\nHe watched Judy and his Uncle capering hand in hand among the flower-beds. He didn't feel like dancing himself. He looked at the clock that, like Maria and himself, refused to go. He looked at Maria, fastened immovably upon the lawn. The clock lay glittering in the sunshine. Maria sat like a shining ball beside it. He felt the afternoon was a failure somewhere. Things weren't going quite as he wanted, the clock wasn't going either. And when they did go they went of their own accord, independent of himself, of his direction, guidance, wishes. He was out of it. This was not the time to dance. What was the meaning of it all? It had to do somehow with the clock that wouldn't go. It had to do with Maria, who wouldn't budge. The clock had stopped of its own accord. That lay at the bottom of it all, he felt. Some day things would be different, more satisfactory\u2014more real\u2026. Some day!\n\nAnd strange, new ideas, very vague and dim, very far away, very queer, and very wonderful, poured through his searching, questioning little mind.\n\n\"Beat time!\" shouted Judy to her motionless sister. \"I told you to beat time. You're doing nothing. You never do!\"\n\nTim stood watching them, while the words rang on in his head: \"You are doing nothing! You never do!\" How wonderful it was! Maria never did anything, yet was always there in everything. And the others\u2014how funny they were, too! They looked like an elephant and a bird, he thought, for Judy hopped and fluttered, while his Uncle moved heavily, making holes in the soft lawn with his great feet. \"Beat time, beat time!\" cried Judy at intervals.\n\nWhat a queer phrase it was\u2014to beat time. Why beat it? It wasn't there unless it was beaten. Poor Time; and Maria refused to beat it. His eye wandered from Maria to the dancers, and a kind of reverie stole over him. What was the use of dancing unless there was something to dance round? Maria was round; why didn't they dance round her? His thoughts returned to Maria. How funny Maria was! She just sat there doing nothing at all. Maria was dull and unenterprising, yet somehow everything came round to her in the end. It was just because she waited, she never hurried. She was a sort of centre. Only it must be rather stupid just to be a centre. Then, suddenly, two ideas struck him at the same instant, scattering his dreamy state of reverie. The first was\u2014Everything comes from a centre like Maria; that's where everything comes from! The second, bearing no apparent relation to it, found expression in words:\n\nHe cried out: \"I know what! Let's go to the End of the World and make a fire and burn things!\"\n\nAnd he looked at Maria as though he had discovered America.\n\n\"Beat time, oh, do beat time,\" cried Judy breathlessly.\n\n\"We're going to make a fire,\" he shouted; \"there's lots of things to burn.\" He looked about him as though to choose a place. But he couldn't find one. He pointed vaguely, first at Maria, as though she was the thing to burn, and then at the landscape generally. \"Then you can dance round it,\" he added convincingly to clinch the matter.\n\nBut the bird and the elephant continued their gymnastic exercises on the lawn, while Maria turned her eyes without moving her head and watched them too.\n\nThen, while the tune of \"Onward Christian Soldiers\" filled the air, Tim and Maria began an irrelevant argument about things in general. Tim, at least, told her things, while she laid the clock down upon the grass and listened. But the flood of language rolled off her as minutes roll from the face of the sun, producing no effect. There was wonder in her big blue eyes, wonder that never seemed to end. But minutes don't decrease merely because the rising and setting of the sun sends them flying, and there are not fewer words in a boy's vocabulary merely because he uses up a lot in saying things. Both words and minutes seemed a circle without beginning or end. It was most odd and strange\u2014this feeling of endlessness that was everywhere in the air. And, long before Tim had got even to the middle of his enormous speech, he had forgotten all about the fire, forgotten about dancing, about burning things, forgotten about everything everywhere, because his roving eye had fallen again upon the\u2014clock. The clock absorbed his interest. It lay there glittering in the sunshine beside Maria. It wasn't going; Maria wasn't going either. It had stopped. He realised abruptly, realised it without rhyme or reason, that a stopped clock, a clock that isn't going, was a\u2014mystery.\n\nAnd the tide of words dried up in him; he choked; something was wrong with the universe; for if the clock stopped\u2014his clock\u2014time\u2014time must\u2014he was unable to think it out\u2014but time must surely get muddled and go wrong too.\n\nAnd he moved over to Maria just as she was about to burst into tears. He sat down beside her. At the same moment Judy and Uncle Felix, thinking a quarrel was threatening, stopped their dancing, and joined the circle too. They stood with arms akimbo, panting, silent, waiting for something to happen so that they could interfere and set it right again.\n\nBut nothing did happen. There was deep silence only. The slanting sunshine lay across the lawn, the wind passed sighing through the lime trees, and the clock stared up into their faces, motionless, a blank expression on it\u2014stopped. They formed a circle round it. No one moved or spoke. There was a queer, deep pause. The sun watched them; the sky was listening; the entire afternoon stood still. Something else beside the clock, it seemed, was slowing up.\n\n\"To-morrow's Sunday. Time's getting awfully short,\" was in the air inaudibly.\n\n\"Let's sit down,\" whispered Tim, already seated himself, but anxious to feel the others close. Judy and Uncle Felix obeyed. They all sat round in a circle, staring at the shining disc of the motionless, stopped clock. It might have been a Lucky Bag by the way they watched it with expectant faces.\n\nBut Maria also was in that circle, sitting calmly in its centre.\n\nThen Uncle Felix cautiously lifted the glittering round thing and held it in his hand. He put his ear down to listen. He shook his head.\n\n\"It hasn't gone since this time yesterday,\" said Tim in a low tone. \"That's twenty-four hours,\" he added, calculating it on the fingers of both hands.\n\n\"A whole day,\" murmured Judy, as if taken by surprise somehow; \"a day and a night, I mean.\"\n\nShe exchanged a glance of significant expectation with her brother, but it was at their uncle they looked the moment after, because of the strange and sudden sound that issued from his lips. For it was like a cry, and his face wore a flushed and curious expression they could not fathom. The face and the cry were signs of something utterly unusual. He was startled\u2014out of himself. A marvellous idea had evidently struck him. \"It's either something,\" thought Judy, \"or else he's got a pain.\" But Tim's mind was quicker. \"He's got it,\" the boy decided, meaning, \"We've got it out of him at last!\" Their manoeuvres had taken so long of accomplishment that their original purpose had almost been forgotten.\n\n\"A day, a whole day,\" Uncle Felix was mumbling to himself in a dazed kind of happy way, \"an entire day, I do declare!\" He looked round solemnly, yet with growing excitement, into the children's faces. \"Twenty-four hours! An entire day,\" he went on, half beneath his breath.\n\n\"Some day; of course\u2026\" Tim said in a low voice, catching the mood of wonder, while Judy added, equally stirred up, \"A day will come\u2026\" and then Uncle Felix, breaking out of his queer reverie with an effort, raised his voice and looked as if the end of the world had come.\n\n\"But do you realise what it means?\" he asked them sharply. \"D'you understand what's happened?\"\n\nHe drew a long, deep breath that quivered with suppressed amazement, and waited several seconds for their answers\u2014in vain. The children gazed at him without uttering a word; they made no movement either. The arresting tone of his voice and a certain huge expression in his eyes made everything in the world seem different. It was a moment of real life; he had discovered something stupendous. But, explanation being beyond them, they attempted no immediate answer to his question. The pressure of interest blocked every means of ordinary expression known to them.\n\nThen Uncle Felix spoke again; his big eyes fixed Tim piercingly like a pin. \"When did it stop?\" he inquired gravely. He meant to make quite sure of his discovery before revealing it. There must be no escape, no slip, no carelessness. \"When did it stop, I ask you, Tim?\" he repeated.\n\nTim was a trifle vague. \"I was asleep,\" he whispered. \"When I woke up\u2014it wasn't going.\"\n\n\"You wound it?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I wound it right enough.\"\n\n\"What time was it?\"\n\n\"The clock\u2014or the day, Uncle?\" He was confused a little; he wished to be awfully accurate.\n\nUncle Felix explained that he desired to know what time the clock had stopped. The importance of the answer could be judged by the intentness of his expression while he waited.\n\n\"The finger-hands were at four,\" said the boy at length.\n\nUncle Felix gave a jump. \"Ha, ha!\" he exclaimed triumphantly, \"then it stopped of its own accord!\" They could have screamed with excitement, though without the least idea what they were excited about. You could have heard a butterfly breathing.\n\n\"It stopped at dawn!\" he continued, louder.\n\n\"Dawn!\" piped Tim, unable to think of anything else, but obliged to utter something.\n\n\"Dawn, yes,\" cried Uncle Felix louder still. \"It stopped of its own accord at dawn! Just at the beginning of a new day it stopped! It's marvellous! Don't you see? It's marvellous!\"\n\n\"Goodness!\" cried Judy, her mind obfuscated, yet thrilled with a transport of inexplicable delight. \"It's marvellous!\"\n\n\"I say!\" Tim shouted, dropping his voice suddenly because he too was at a loss for any more intelligible relief in words.\n\nThey sat and stared at their amazing uncle. There was a hush upon the entire universe; there was marvel, mystery, but at first there was also muddle. They waited, holding their breath with difficulty. Some one, it seemed, must either explode or\u2014or something else, they knew not exactly what. It would hardly have surprised them if Judy had suddenly flown through the air, Tim vanished down a hole, or Maria gleamed at them from the inside of a quivering bubble of soap. There was this kind of intoxicating feeling, delicious and intense. Even To-morrow might not be Sunday after all: it felt strange and wonderful enough for that!\n\nThe possibility that Some Day was coming\u2014was close at hand\u2014had in some mysterious way become a probability. It was clear at last why Uncle Felix had been so heavy and preoccupied.\n\n\"You see what's happened?\" he continued after the long pause. \"You see what it all means\u2014this strange stopping of the clock\u2014at Dawn?\"\n\nThey admitted nothing; the least mistake on their part might prevent, might spoil or cripple it. The depth and softness of his tone warned them. They stared and waited. He gathered them closer to him with both arms. Even Maria wriggled slightly nearer\u2014an inch or so.\n\n\"It means,\" he said in still lower tones, \"the calendar,\"\u2014then stopped abruptly to examine the effect upon them.\n\nNow, ordinarily, they knew quite well what a calendar was; but this new, strange emphasis he put upon it robbed the word suddenly of all its original meaning. Their minds went questioning at once:\n\n\"What is a calendar?\" asked Judy carefully\u2014\"exactly?\" she added, to make her meaning absolutely clear. It sounded almost like a nonsense word.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he repeated cautiously, yet with some great emotion working in him, \"what is a calendar? That's the whole question. I'll try and tell you what a calendar is.\" He drew a deeper breath, a great effort being evidently needed. \"A calendar,\" he went on, while the word sounded less real each time it was uttered, \"is an invention of clever, scientific men to note the days as they pass; it records the passing days. It's a plan to measure Time. It's made of paper and has the date and the name of the day stamped in ink on separate sheets. When a day has passed you tear off a sheet. That day is done with\u2014gone. There are three hundred and sixty-five of these separate sheets in a year. It's just an invention of scientific men to measure the passing of\u2014Time, you see?\"\n\nThey said they saw.\n\n\"Another invention,\" he resumed, his face betraying more and more emotion, \"is a clock. A clock is just a mechanical invention that ticks off the movements of the sun into seconds and minutes and hours. Both clocks and calendars, therefore, are mere measuring tricks. Time goes on, or does not go on, just the same, whether you possess these inventions or whether you do not possess them. Both clocks and calendars go at the same rate whether Time goes fast or slow. See?\"\n\nA tremendous discovery began to poke its nose above the edge of their familiar world. But they could not pull it up far enough to \"see\" as yet. Uncle Felix continued to pull it up for them. That he, too, was muddled never once occurred to them.\n\n\"Scientific men, like all other people, are not always to be relied upon,\" he went on. \"They make mistakes like\u2014you, or Thompson, or Mrs. Horton, or\u2014or even me. Clocks, we all know, are full of mistakes, and for ever going wrong. But the same thing has happened to calendars as well. Calendars are notoriously inaccurate; they simply cannot be depended upon. No calendar has ever been entirely veracious, nor ever will be. Like elastic, they are sometimes too long and sometimes too short\u2014imperfectly constructed.\"\n\nHe paused and looked at them. \"Yes,\" they said breathlessly, aware dimly that accustomed foundations were already sliding from beneath their feet.\n\n\"Half the calendars of the world are simply wrong,\" he continued, more boldly still, \"and the people who live by them are in a muddle consequently\u2014a muddle about Time. England is no exception to the rest. Is it any wonder that Time bothers us in the way it does\u2014always time to do this, or time to do that, or not time enough to finish, and so on?\"\n\n\"No,\" they said promptly, \"it isn't.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he resumed. \"Well, sometimes a nation finds out its mistake and alters its calendar. Russia has done this; the Russian New Year and Easter are not the same as ours. Pope Gregory, the thirteenth, ordered that the day after October 4, 1582, should be called October 15. He called it the Gregorian Calendar; but there are lots of other calendars besides\u2014there's the Jewish and Mohammedan, and a variety of calendars in the East. All of them can't be right. The result is that none of them are right, and the world is in confusion. Some calendars mark off too many days, others mark off too few. Half the world is ahead of Time, and the other half behind it. The Governments know this quite well, but they dare not say anything, because their officials are muddled enough as it is. There is everywhere this fearful rush and hurry to keep up with Time. All are terrified of being late\u2014too late or too early.\"\n\n\"Naturally.\"\n\n\"And the extraordinary result of all these mistakes,\" he went on marvellously, \"is simply this: that a considerable amount of Time has never been recorded at all by any of them. There are a lot of extra days, unused, unrecorded days, still at large\u2014if only we could find them.\"\n\n\"Extra Days!\" they gasped. Tim and Judy's mouths were open now, and slowly opening wider every minute. Only Maria's mouth kept closed. Her great blue eyes were closed as well. She looked as if she could have told them all this in a couple of words!\n\n\"Knocking about on the loose,\" he explained further, then paused and stared into the upturned faces; \"sort of escaped days that have never been torn off calendars or ticked away by clocks\u2014unused, unfilled, unlived\u2014slipped out of Time, that is\u2014\"\n\n\"Then when Daddy said, 'A day is coming,' and all that\u2014?\" Tim managed to squeeze out as though the pain of the excitement hurt his lips.\n\n\"Of course,\" replied Uncle Felix, nodding his great head, \"of course. Sooner or later one of these lost Extra Days is bound to crop up. And what's more\u2014\" he glanced down significantly at the stopped alarum-clock\u2014\"I think\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off in the middle of the sentence. They all stood up. Tim picked up the clock and handed it to his uncle, who held it tightly against his chest a moment, then put it into his capacious pocket.\n\n\"I think,\" he went on enormously, \"it's come!\"\n\nAn entire minute passed without a sound.\n\n\"We can fill it with anything we like?\" asked Judy, overawed a little.\n\n\"Anything we like,\" came the sublime reply.\n\n\"And do things over and over again\u2014sort of double\u2014and no hurry?\" Tim whispered.\n\n\"Anything, anywhere, anyhow, and no end to it all,\" he answered gloriously. \"No hurry either!\" It was too much to think about all at once, too big to realise. They all sat down again beside Maria, who had not moved an inch in any direction at all. She was a picture of sublime repose.\n\n\"We have only got to find it, then climb into it, then sail away,\" murmured Uncle Felix, with a strange catch in his breath they readily understood.\n\n\"When will it begin?\" both children asked in the same breath.\n\n\"At dawn,\" he said.\n\n\"To-morrow morning?\"\n\n\"At dawn to-morrow morning.\"\n\n\"But to-morrow's Sunday,\" they objected.\n\n\"To-morrow's\u2014an Extra Day,\" he said amazingly.\n\nThey hesitated a moment, stared, frowned, smiled, then opened their eyes and mouths still wider than before.\n\n\"Oh, like that!\" they exclaimed.\n\n\"Like that, yes,\" he said finally. \"It means getting in behind Time, you see. There's no Time in an Extra Day because it's never been recorded by calendar or clock. And that means getting behind the great hurrying humbug of a thing that blinds and confuses everybody all the world over\u2014it means getting closer to the big Reality that\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off sharply, aware that his own emotion was carrying him out of his depth, and out of their depth likewise. He changed the sentence: \"We shall be in Eternity,\" he whispered very softly, so softly that it was scarcely audible perhaps.\n\nAnd it was then that Maria, still seated solidly upon the lawn, looked up and asked another baffling and unexpected question. For this was her private and particular adventure: and, living ever at the centre of the circle, Maria claimed even Eternity as especially her own. Her question was gigantic. It was infinitely bigger than her original question, \"Why?\" It was the greatest question in the universe, because it answered itself adequately at once. It was the question the undying gods have flung about the listening cosmos since Time first began its tricky cheating of delight\u2014and still fling into the echoing hearts of men and children everywhere. The stars and insects, the animals and birds, even the stones and flowers, all keep the glorious echo flying.\n\n\"Why not?\" she asked.\n\nIt was unanswerable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 206", + "text": "\"A DAY WILL COME\"\n\nThey went into the house as though wafted\u2014thus does a shining heart deduct bodily weight from life's obstructions; they had their tea; after tea they played games as usual, quite ordinary games; and in due course they went to bed. That is, they followed a customary routine, feeling it was safer. To do anything unusual just then might attract attention to their infinite Discovery and so disturb its delicate equilibrium. Its balance was precarious. Once an Authority got wind of anything, the Extra Day might change its course and sail into another port. Aunt Emily, even from a distance\u2026! In any case, they behaved with this intuitive sagacity which obviated every risk\u2014by taking none.\n\nYet everything was different. Behind the routine lay the potent emphasis of some strange new factor, as though a lofty hope, a brave ideal, had the power of transmuting common duties into gold and crystal. This new factor pushed softly behind each little customary act, urging what was commonplace over the edge into the marvellous. The habitual became wonderful. It felt like Christmas Eve, like the last night of the Old Year, like the day before the family moved for the holidays to the sea\u2014only more so. Even To-morrow-will-be-Sunday had entirely disappeared. A thrill of mysterious anticipation gilded everything with wonder and beauty that were impossible, yet true. Some Day, the Thing that Nobody could Understand\u2014Somebody\u2014was coming at last.\n\nUncle Felix was in an extraordinary state; his acts were normal enough, but his speech betrayed him shamefully; they had to warn him more than once about it. He seemed unable to talk ordinary prose, saying that \"Everything ought to rhyme, At such a time,\" and, instead of walking like other people, his feet tried to keep in time with his language. \"But you don't understand,\" he replied to Tim's grave warnings; \"you don't understand what a gigantic discovery it is. Why, the whole world will thank us! The whole world will get its breath back! The one thing it's always dreaded more than anything else\u2014being too late\u2014will come to an end! We ought to dance and sing\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, please hush!\" warned Judy. \"Aunt Emily, you know\u2014\" Even at Tunbridge Wells Aunt Emily might hear and send a telegram with No in it.\n\n\"Has it lost its breath?\" Tim asked, however. But, though it was in the middle of tea, Uncle Felix could not restrain himself, and burst into one of his ridiculous singing fits, instead of answering in a whisper as he should have done. \"Burst\" described it accurately. And his feet kept time beneath the table. It was the proper place for Time, he explained.\n\nThe clocks are stopped, the calendars are wrong, Time holds gigantic finger-hands Before his guilty face. Listen a moment! I can hear the song That no one understands\u2014\n\n\"It's the blue dragon-fly,\" interrupted Tim, remembering the story of long ago.\n\n\"It's the Night-Wind\u2014out by day,\" cried Judy.\n\n\"It's both and neither,\" sang the man,\n\n\u2003\"This song I hear. It first began\n\n\u2003Before the hurrying race\n\n\u2003Of ticking, and of tearing pages\n\n\u2003Deafened the breathless ages:\n\n\u2003It is the happy singing\n\n\u2003Of wind among the rigging\n\n\u2003Of our Extra Day!\"\n\n\"It's something anyhow,\" decided Judy, rather impressed by her uncle's fit of bursting.\n\nAnd, somehow, Dawn was the password and Tomorrow the key. No one knew more than that. It had to do with Time, for Uncle Felix had taken the stopped clock to his room and hidden it there lest somebody like Jackman or Thompson should wind it up. Later, however, he gave it for safer keeping to Maria, because she moved so rarely and did so little that was unnecessary that she seemed the best repository of all. Also, this was her particular adventure, and what risk there was belonged properly to her. But beyond this they knew nothing, and they didn't want to know. In the immediate future, just before the gateway of To-morrow's dawn, a great gap lay waiting, a gap they had discovered alone of all the world. The scientists had made a mistake, the Government had been afraid to deal with it, the rest of the world lay in ignorance of its very existence even. It satisfied all the conditions of real adventure, since it was unique, impossible, and had never happened to any one before. They, with Uncle Felix, had discovered it. It belonged to them entirely\u2014the most marvellous secret that anybody could possibly imagine. Maria, they took for granted, would share it with them. A hole in Time lay waiting to receive them. A Day Will Come at last was actually coming.\n\n\"We'd better pack up,\" said Judy after tea. She said it calmly, but the voice had a whisper of intense expectancy in it.\n\n\"Pack up nothing,\" Uncle Felix reproved her quickly. \"The important thing is\u2014don't wind up. Just go on as usual. It will be best,\" he added significantly, \"if you all hand over your timepieces to me at once.\" And, without a word, they recognised his wisdom and put their treasures into his waistcoat pockets\u2014watches of silver, tin, and gunmetal. His use of the strange word \"timepieces\" was convincing. The unusual was in the air.\n\n\"There's Thompson's and Jackman's and Mrs. Horton's,\" Judy reminded him, her eyes shining like polished door-knobs.\n\n\"Too wrong to matter,\" decided Uncle Felix. \"They're always slow or fast.\"\n\n\"Then there's the kitchen clock,\" Tim mentioned; \"the grandfather thing.\"\n\nUncle Felix reflected a moment. His reply was satisfactory and conclusive:\n\n\"I'll go down to-night,\" he explained in a low voice, \"when the servants are in bed. I'll take the weights off.\"\n\nJudy and Tim appreciated the seriousness of the occasion more than ever.\n\n\"Into Mrs. Horton's kitchen?\" they whispered.\n\n\"Into Mrs. Horton's kitchen,\" he agreed, beneath his breath.\n\nMaria, meanwhile, said nothing. Her eyes kept open very wide, but no audible remark got past her lips. She paid no attention to the singing nor to the whispered conversation; she ate an enormous tea, finishing up all the cakes that the others neglected in their excitement and preoccupation; but she appeared as calm and unconcerned as the tea-cosy that concealed the heated, stimulating teapot beneath it. She looked more circular and globular than ever. Even the knowledge that this was the eve of her own particular adventure did not rouse her. Her expression seemed to say, \"I never have believed in Time; at the centre where I live, clocks and calendars are not recognised\"; and later, when Judy blew the candle out and asked as usual, \"Are you all right, Maria?\" her reply came floating across the darkened room without the smallest alteration in tone or accent: \"I'm alright.\" The stopped alarum-clock was underneath her pillow; Uncle Felix had tucked them up, each in turn; everything was all right. She fell asleep, the others fell asleep, Time also fell asleep.\n\nAnd above the Old Mill House that warm June night the darkness kept the secret faithfully, yet offered little signs and hints to those who did not sleep too heavily. The feeling that something or somebody was coming hung in the very air; there was a gentle haze beneath the stars; and a breeze that passed softly through the lime trees dropped semi-articulate warnings. There were curious, faint echoes flying between the walls and the Wood without a Centre; the daisies heard them and opened half an eyelid; the Night-Wind whispered and sighed as it bore them to and fro. Maria's question entered the dream of the entire garden: \"Why not? Why not? Why not?\"\n\nAn owl in the barn beyond the stables heard the call and took it up, and told it to some swallows fast asleep below the eaves, who woke with sudden chattering and mentioned it to a robin in the laurel shrubberies below. The robin pretended not to be at all surprised, but felt it a duty to inform a coot who lived a quarter of a mile away among the reeds of the lower pond. When it returned from its five-minute flight, the swallows had gone to sleep again, and only the owl went on hooting softly through the summer darkness. \"It really needn't go on so long about it,\" thought the robin, then fell asleep again with its head between exactly the same feathers as before. But the news had been distributed; the garden was aware; the birds, as natural guardians of the dawn, had delivered the message as their duty was. \"Why not? Why not?\" hummed all night long through the dreams of the Mill House garden. Weeden turned in his sleep and sighed with happiness.\n\nNothing could now prevent it; a day was coming at last, an extra, unused, unrecorded day. The immemorial expectancy of childhood, the universal anticipation, the promise that something or somebody was coming\u2014all this would be fulfilled. This promise is really but the prelude to creation. God felt it before the world appeared. And children have stolen it from heaven. Conceived of wonder, born of hope, and realised by belief, it is the prerogative of all properly-beating hearts. Everything living feels it, and\u2014everything lives. The Postman; the Figure coming down the road; the Visitor on the pathway; the Knock upon the door; even the Stranger in the teacup\u2014all are embodiments of this exquisite scrap of heaven, divine expectancy. It may be Christmas, it may be only To-morrow, but equally it may be the End of the World. Something is coming\u2014into the heart\u2014something satisfying. It is the eternal beginning. It is the\u2014dawn.\n\nLong after the children had retired to bed Uncle Felix sat up alone in the big house thinking. He made himself cosy in the library, meaning to finish a chapter of the historical novel he had sadly neglected these past days, and he set himself to the work with a will. But, try as he would, the story would not run; he fixed his mind upon the scene in vain; he concentrated hard, visualised the place and characters as his habit was, reconstructed the incidents and conversation exactly as though he had seen them happen and remembered them\u2014but the imagination that should have given them life failed to operate. It became a mere effort of invention. The characters would not talk of their own accord; the incidents did not flow in a stream as when he worked successfully; life was not in them. He began again, wrote and rewrote, but failed to seize the atmosphere of reality that alone could make them interesting. Interest\u2014he suddenly realised it\u2014had vanished. He felt no interest in the stupid chapter. He tore it up\u2014and knew it was the right thing to do, because he heard the characters laughing.\n\n\"I'm not in the mood,\" he reflected. \"It's artificial. William Smith of Peckham would skip this chapter. There's something bigger in me. I wonder\u2026!\"\n\nHe lit his pipe and sat by the open window, watching the stars and sniffing the scented summer night. He let his thoughts go wandering as they would, and the moment he relaxed attention a sense of pleasant relief stole over him. He discovered how great the effort had been. He also discovered the reason. It offered itself in a flash to his mind that was no longer blocked by the effort and therefore unreceptive.\n\n\"A man can't live adventure and write it too,\" he, realised sharply. \"He writes what he would like to live. I'm living adventure. The desire to live it vicariously by writing it has left me. Of course!\"\n\nIt was a sweet and rich discovery\u2014that the adventures of the last ten days had been so real and meant so much to him. No man of action, leading a deep, full life of actual experience, felt the need of scribbling, painting, fiddling. \"Glorious, by Jove!\" he exclaimed between great puffs of smoke. \"I've struck a fact!\" He had been so busily creating these last days that he had lost the yearning to describe merely what others did. The children had caught him body and soul in their eternal world of wonder and belief. Judy and Tim had taught him this.\n\nYet, somehow, it was the inactive, calm Maria who loomed up in his thoughts as the principal enchantress. Maria's apparent inactivity was a blind; she did not do very much in the sense of rushing helter-skelter after desirable things, but she obtained them nevertheless. She got in their way so that they ran into her\u2014then she claimed them. She knew beforehand, as it were, the way they would take. She was always there when anything worth happening was about. And though she spoke so little\u2014during a general conversation, for instance\u2014she said so much. At the end of all the talk, it was always Maria who had said the important thing. Her \"why\" and \"why not\" that very afternoon were all that he remembered of the intricate and long discussion. It left the odd impression on his mind that talk, all the world over, said one thing only; that the millions of talkers on the teeming earth, eagerly chattering in many languages, said one and the same thing only. There was only one thing to be said.\n\nThat is\u2014they were all trying to say it. Maria had said it\u2026.\n\nA whirring moth flew busily past the open window and vanished into the night. He thought of his own books; for writers, painters, preachers, musicians, these were trying to say it too. \"If I could describe that moth exactly,\" he murmured to himself, \"give the sensation of its flight, its unconscious attraction to the light, its plunge back into the darkness, its precise purpose in the universe, its marvellous aim and balance\u2014its life, I could\u2014er\u2014\"\n\nThe thought broke off with a jagged end. With a leap then it went on again:\n\n\"Touch reality,\" and he heard his own voice saying it. He had uttered it aloud. The sound had an odd effect upon him. He realised the uselessness of words. No words touched reality. To be known, reality had to be lived, experienced. Maria managed this in some extraordinary way. She had reality\u2026. Time did not humbug her. Nor did space\u2026. Goodness!\n\nThe moth whirred into the room, softly banging itself against the ceiling, and through the smoke from his pipe he saw that a dozen more were doing the same thing with tireless energy. They felt or saw the light; all obeyed the one driving desire to get closer into it. He saw millions and millions of people, the whole world over, rushing about on two legs and behaving similarly. How they did run about and fuss, to be sure! What was it all about? What were they after? People had to earn their living, of course, but it seemed more than that, for all were after something, and the faster they went the better pleased they were. Apparently they thought speed was of chief importance\u2014as though speed killed Time. They banged themselves into obstacles everywhere; they screamed and disagreed, and accused each other of lying and being blind, but the thing they were after either hid itself remarkably well, or went at incredible speed, for no one ever came up with it or found it. Time invariably blocked them. Only one or two\u2014Maria sort of people\u2014sat still and waited\u2026.\n\nHe watched them all and wondered. One rushed up to an office in a train, while another built the train he rushed in; one wore black and preached a sermon, another wore blue and guarded a street, a third wore red and killed, a fourth wore very little and danced; all in the end were nothing and\u2014disappeared. Some lived in a room and read hundreds of books; another wrote them; one spent his days examining the stars through a telescope, another hurried off to find the Poles; hundreds were digging into the ground, ferreting in the air or under the water. A large number fed animals, then killed and cooked them when they had been fed enough. Hens laid eggs and eggs produced hens that laid more eggs. There were always thousands hurrying along the roads, then coming back again. The millions of living beings were everywhere extremely busy after something, yet hardly any two of them agreed exactly what it was they sought. There were sects, societies, religions by the score, each one cocksure it knew and had found Reality, yet proving by the continuous busy searching that it had not found it. Yet all, oddly enough, fitted in together fairly well, as in a gigantic Dance, though obviously none knew exactly what the tune was, nor who played it. Would they never know? Would all die before they found it? Were they all after the same thing, or after a lot of different things? And why, in the name of goodness, couldn't they all agree about it? Wasn't it, perhaps, that they looked in different ways\u2014all for the same thing? Surely the world had existed long enough for that to be settled finally\u2014Reality! Time prevented always\u2026.\n\nA moth fell with a soft and disconcerting plop upon the top of his head, cannonaded thence against the window-sill, and shot out into the night again. He came back with a start to his reality: that he had promised the children an Extra Day, that for twenty-four hours, in spite of the paradox, Time should cease its driving hurry\u2014and that, for the moment at any rate, he was very sleepy and must go upstairs to bed.\n\nHe rose, shook himself free of the curious reverie with a mighty yawn, and looked at the gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. Out came a number of other timepieces with it! And it was then that the personality of Maria entered the room, and stood beside him, and said distinctly, \"This is my particular adventure, please remember.\"\n\nAnd he understood that whatever happened, it would happen according to the gospel of Maria. Getting behind Time meant getting a little nearer to Reality, one stage nearer at any rate. It meant entering the region where she dwelt so serenely. It was her doing, and not his. He realised in a flash that in her quiet way she was responsible and had drawn them in, seduced them. All gravitated to her and into her mysterious circle. Maria claimed them. It was certainly her particular adventure. Only she would share it with them all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 207", + "text": "He looked at his watch a second time, and found that it was later than he had supposed\u2014eleven o'clock. In the act of winding it, however, he paused; something he had forgotten came back to him, and a curious smile broke over his face. He stroked his beard, glanced at the ceiling where the moths still banged and buzzed, then strolled over to the open window, and said \"Hm!\" He put his head and shoulders out into the air. And then he again said \"Hm\u2014m\u2014m\"\u2014only longer than the first time. It seemed as if some one answered him. That \"Hm\" floated off to some one who was listening for it. Perhaps it was an echo that came floating back. Perhaps it wasn't.\n\nBut any grown-up person who hesitates in an empty room of a country house at eleven o'clock at night and murmurs \"Hm\" into the open air is not in an ordinary state of mind. The normal thing is to put the lights out and go up more or less briskly to bed. Uncle Felix was no exception to this rule. His emotions, evidently, were not quite normal.\n\nHe listened. The night was very still. The stars, like a shower of golden rain arrested in full flight, paused in a flock and looked at him, but in so deliberate a way that he was conscious of being looked at. It was rather a delightful sensation, he thought; never before had they seemed so intimate, so interested in his life. He was aware that a friendly relationship existed between him and those far, bright, twinkling eyes. \"Hm\" he murmured softly once again, then heard a sound of wings rush whirring past his face, and next a chattering of birds somewhere overhead among the heavy eaves. \"So I'm not the only one awake,\" he thought, and, for some odd reason, felt rather pleased about it. \"Sounds like swallows. I wonder!\"\n\nBut he saw no movement anywhere; no wind stirred the ivy on the wall, the limes were motionless, the earth asleep. Even the stream beyond the laurel shrubberies ran silently. Dimly he made out the garden lying at attention, the flower-beds like folded hands upon its breast; and further off, the big untidy elms in pools of deeper shadow, their outlines blurred as dreams blur the mind. Yet, though he could detect no slightest movement, he was keenly aware that other things beside the stars were looking at him. The night was full of carefully-screened eyes, all fixed upon him. Framed in the lighted window, he was so easily visible. Night herself, calm and majestic, gazed down upon him through wide-open lids that filled the entire sky. He felt the intentness of her steadfast gaze, and paused. He stopped. It seemed that everything stopped too. So striking, indeed, was the sensation, that he gave expression to it half aloud:\n\n\"It's slowing up,\" he murmured, \"stopping!\u2026 I do believe! Hm!\u2026\"\n\nThere was no answer this time, no sign of echo anywhere, but he heard an owl calling its muffled note from the Wood without a Centre.\n\n\"It's probably seen me too,\" he thought, and then it also stopped.\n\nHe waited a moment, hoping it would begin again, for he loved the atmosphere of childhood that the sound invoked in him. But the flutey call was not repeated. He drew his head in, closed and bolted the window, fastened the shutters carefully and pulled the curtains over; then he extinguished the lamps, lit his candle, and moved out softly into the hall on his way upstairs. And for the first time in his life he felt that in shutting the window he had not shut the beauty out. The beauty of that watching, listening night had not gone away from him by closing down the shutters. It was not lost. It stopped there. This novel realisation was very queer and very exquisite. Regret did not operate.\n\nAnd he went along the passage, murmuring \"Hm\" over and over to himself, for there seemed nothing more adequate that he could think of. The servants had long since gone to bed; he alone was awake in the whole big house. He moved cautiously down the long corridor towards the green baize doors, fully aware that it was not the proper way upstairs. He pushed them, and they swung behind him with a grunt that repeated itself several times, lessening and shortening until it ended in an abrupt puffing sound\u2014and he found himself in a chilly corridor of stone. It was very dark; the candle threw the shadow of his hand down the gaping length in front of him. He went stealthily a few steps further, then stopped opposite a closed door of white. For a moment he held his breath, examining the panels by the light of the raised candle; then turned the knob of brass, threw it wide open, and found himself\u2014in Mrs. Horton's kitchen.\n\nThe room was very warm. There was the curious, familiar smell of brooms and aprons, of soap and soda, flavoured with brown sugar, treacle, and a dash of toast and roasted coffee. The ashes still glowed between the bars of the range like a grinning mouth. He put the candle down and looked about him nervously. There was an awful moment when he thought a great six-foot cook, with red visage and bare arms, would rise and strike him with a ladle or a rolling-pin. In the faint light he made out the white deal table in the centre, the rows of pots and pans gleaming in mid-air, dish-cloths hanging on a string to dry, layers of plates of various sizes on the shelves, and jugs suspended by their handles at an angle ready for pouring out. He saw the dresser with its huge, capacious drawers\u2014the only drawers in the world that opened easily, and were deep enough to be of value.\n\nAlso\u2014there was a sound, the sound all kitchens have, steadily tapping, clicking, ticking. He turned; he saw the familiar object whence the sound proceeded. At the end of the great silent room, upright like a sentry placed against the wall, stiff and rigid, he saw a figure with a round and pallid face, staring solemnly at him through the gloom. He stiffened and stood rigid too, listening to the tapping noise that issued from its hollow interior of wood and iron. Watching him with remorseless mien, the kitchen clock asked him for the password. \"Why not? Why not?\" its ticking said distinctly.\n\nThe warmth was comforting. He sat down on the white deal table, knowing himself an intruder, but boldly facing the tall monster that guarded the deserted room and challenged him. \"You haven't stopped,\" he answered in his beard. \"Why not?\" And as he said it, a new expression stole upon its hardened countenance, the challenge melted, the obdurate stare relaxed. The quaint, grandfatherly aspect of benevolence shone over it like a smile; it looked not only kind, but contrite. He saw it as it used to be, ages and ages ago, when he was a boy, sliding down the banisters towards it, or towards its counterpart in the hall. It winked.\n\nThe ticking, too, became less aggressive and relentless, less sure of itself, almost as though it were slowing up. There was a plaintive note behind the metallic sharpness. The great kitchen clock also was aware of a conspiracy hatching against Time\u2026.\n\nAnd as he sat and listened to the machinery tapping away the seconds, he heard a similar tapping in his brain that swung gradually into rhythm with the clock. A pendulum in his mind was swinging, each swing a little shorter than the one before; and he remembered that a dozen pendulums in a room, starting at different lengths, ended by swinging all together. \"We're slowing up together\u2014stopping!\" murmured the two pendulums. \"Why not? Why not? Why not?\u2026\"\n\nPresently both would cease, yet ceasing would be the beginning, not the end. A state without end or beginning would supervene. Ticking meant time, and time meant becoming; but beyond becoming lay the bottomless sea of being, which was eternity. Maria floated there\u2014calm, quiet, serene, little globular Maria, circular, the perfect form.\n\nThe Kitchen Spell rolled in upon him, smothering mind and senses.\n\nIt came at first so gradually he hardly noticed it, but it rose and rose and rose, till at length he sat dipped to the eyes in it, and then finally his eyes went under too. He was immersed, submerged. The parochial vanished; he swam in the universal. He felt drowsy, soothed, and very happy; his heart beat differently. Consciousness ran fluttering along the edge of something hard that hitherto had seemed an unsurpassable barrier. The barrier melted and let him through.\n\nHe rubbed his eyes and started. \"That's the clock in Mrs. Horton's kitchen,\" he tried to say, but the words had an empty and ridiculous sound, as if there was no meaning in them. They flew about him in the air like little butterflies trying to settle. They settled on one meaning, only to flit elsewhere the next minute and settle on another meaning. They could mean anything and everything. They did mean everything. They meant one thing. Finally they settled back into his heart. And their meaning caught him by the throat in a most delicious way. The air was full of tiny fluttering wings; he heard pattering feet and little voices; hair tied with coloured ribbons brushed his cheeks; and laughing, mischievous eyes like stars floated loose about the ceiling. The Kitchen Spell grew mighty\u2014irresistible\u2026 rising over him out of a timeless Long Ago.\n\nFrom the direction of the ghostly towel-horse it seemed to come. But beyond the towel-horse was the window, and beyond the window lay the open fields, and beyond the fields lay miles and miles of country asleep beneath the stars; and this country stretched without a break right up to the lonely wolds of distant Yorkshire where an old grey house contained another kitchen, silent and deserted in the night. All the empty kitchens of England were at this moment in league together, but this old Yorkshire kitchen was the parent of them all\u2014and thence the Spell first issued. It was his own childhood kitchen.\n\nAnd Uncle Felix travelled backwards against the machinery of Time that cheats the majority so easily with its convention of moving hands and ticking voice and bullying, staring visage. He slid swiftly down the long banister-descent of years and reached in a flash that old sombre Yorkshire kitchen, and stood, four-foot nothing, face smudged and fingers sticky, beside the big deal table with the dying embers in the grate upon his right. His heart was beating. He could just reach the juicy cake without standing on a chair. He ate the very slice that he had eaten forty years ago. It was possible to have your cake and eat it too!\u2026\n\nHe gulped it down and sucked the five fingers of each hand in turn\u2014then turned to attack the staring monster that had tried to make him believe it was impossible. He crossed the stone floor on tiptoe, but with challenge in his heart, looked straight into its humbugging big face, opened its carefully buttoned jacket\u2014and took off the weights.\n\n\"Hm!\" he murmured, with complacent satisfaction that included victory,\n\n\"I've stopped you!\"\n\nThere was a curious, long-drawn sound as the machinery ran down; the chains quivered, then hung motionless. There was disaster in the sound, but laughter too\u2014the laughter of the culprit caught in the act, unmasked, exposed at last. \"But I've had a good time these last hundred years,\" he seemed to hear, with the obvious answer this insolence suggested: \"Caught! You're It!\"\u2014in a tone that was not wholly unlike Maria's.\n\nHe turned and left the kitchen as stealthily as he had entered it. He went along the cold stone corridor, through the green baize doors, and so up the softly carpeted stairs to his bedroom. He undressed and rolled solemnly between the sheets. He sighed deeply, but he did not move again. He fell instantly into the right position for sleep.\n\nBut while he slept, the timeless night brought up its mystery. Moored outside against the walls an Extra Day lay swinging from the stars. The waves of Time washed past its sides, yet could not move it. The wind was in the rigging; it lay at anchor, filling the sky with a beauty of eternity. And above the old Mill House the darkness, led by the birds, flowed on to meet the quivering Dawn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 208", + "text": "The day was hardly born, and still unsure of itself, when a robin with its tail cocked up stood up alertly on the window-sill of Uncle Felix's bedroom, peeped in through the open sash, and noticed the objects in front of it with a certain deliberation.\n\nThese objects were half in shadow, but, unlike those it was most familiar with, they did not move in the breeze that stirred the world outside. The robin had just swung up from a lilac branch below. Its toes were spread to their full extent for balancing purposes. It peeped busily in all directions. Then, suddenly, a big object at the far end of the darkened room moved slowly underneath a mass of white, as Uncle Felix, aware that some one was watching him, rolled over in his bed, opened his sleepy eyes, and stared. At the same moment the robin twitched, and fixed its brilliant glance upon him. It had found the particular object that it sought.\n\nUncle Felix, somewhat dazed by sleep and dreams, saw the tight, fat body of the bird outlined against the open sky, but thought at first it was an eagle or a turkey, until perspective righted itself, and enabled him to decide that it was a robin only. He saw its scut tail pointing. And, from the attitude of the bird, of its cocked-up tail, the angle of its neck and head, to say nothing of the inquisitive way it peeped sideways at him over the furniture, he realised that it had come in with a definite purpose\u2014a purpose that concerned himself. In a word, it had something to communicate.\n\n\"Odd!\" he thought drowsily, as he met its piercing eye. \"A robin in my room at dawn! I wonder what it's up to?\"\n\nThen, remembering vaguely that he expected somebody or something out of the ordinary, he made a peculiar noise that seemed to meet the case: he tried to whistle at it. But his lips, being rather dry, made instead a hissing sound that would have frightened most robins out of the room at once. On this particular bird, however, the effect was just the opposite. It hopped self-consciously on to the dressing-table, fluttered next to the arm-chair, and the same second dropped out of sight behind the end of the four-poster bed. It acted, that is, with decision; it was making distinct advances.\n\nHe sat up then in order to see it better, and discovered it perched saucily upon the toe of his evening shoe, looking deliberately into his face as it rose above the bed-clothes.\n\n\"Come along,\" he said, making his voice as soft as possible, \"and tell me what you want.\"\n\nHis expression tried to convey that he was harmless, and he smiled to counteract the effect of his bristling hair which stuck out at right angles as it only can stick out on waking. He felt complimented by the visit of the bird, and did not wish to frighten it. But the Robin, accustomed to seeing scarecrows in the dawn, showed not the slightest fear; on the contrary, it showed interest and a simple, innocent affection too. It fluttered up on to the rail between the bed-posts, almost within reach of his stretched-out hand; its flexible toes clutched the bar as though it were a twig; it moved first two inches to the right, then two inches to the left again, then held steady. It next flicked its tail, and cocked its small head sideways, as if about to deliver a speech or message it had learned by heart; stared intently into the bearded human visage close in front of it; abruptly opened its wings; whirred them with a rapidity that made a sound like a shower of peas striking a taut sheet; and then, with a single, exquisitely-chosen curve\u2014vanished through the open window and was gone.\n\n\"Well,\" murmured the confused and astonished man, \"if anything means anything, that does. Only, I wonder what it does mean!\"\n\nHe was a little startled, and he remained in a sitting position for some minutes, staring at the open window, and hoping the robin would return. Somehow he did not think it would, but he hoped it might. The robin, however, made no sign. And, meanwhile, the dawn slipped higher up the sky, showing the groups of trees with greater sharpness. A draught of morning air came in.\n\n\"The dawn!\" he thought; \"how marvellous! Perhaps the robin came to show me that.\" He sniffed the fresh perfume of dew and leaves and earth that rise for a moment with the early light, then fade away. \"Or that!\" he added, pausing to enjoy the delicate fragrance. \"But for the bird I should have slept, and missed them both. I wonder!\"\n\nHe wished he were dressed and out upon the lawn; but the bed was enticing, and it was no easy thing to get up and wash and put on eleven separate articles of clothing. What a pity he was not dressed like a bird in one garment only! What a pity he could not wash himself by flying through a rushing shower of sweet rain! By the time his clothes were on, and he had made his way downstairs, and unlocked the big chained doors, all this strange, wild emotion would have evaporated. If only he could have landed with a single curve among the flower-beds, as the robin did! Besides, he would feel hungry, and a worm\u2026!\n\nThe warmth of the bed crept upwards towards his eyes; the eyelids dropped of their own accord; his weight sank slowly downwards; the pillow was smooth as cream. He remembered Judy saying once that, if a war came, she would go out and \"soothe pillows.\" A pillow was, indeed, a very soothing thing. His head sank backwards into a mass of feathery sensations like a flock of dreams. He drew a long, deep breath. He began to forget a number of things, and to remember a number of other things. They mingled together, they became indistinguishable. What were they? He could make a selection\u2014choose those he liked best, and leave the others\u2014couldn't he? Why not, indeed? Why not?\n\nOne was that the clocks had stopped for twenty-four hours and that an extra, unused day was dawning; another, that To-day was Sunday. He could make his choice. Yet all days, surely, were unused till they came! True; but clocks decreed and regulated their length. This Extra Day, having been overlooked long ago, was beyond the reach of measuring clocks. No clocks had ever ticked it into passing. It could never pass. Only the present passed. The Past, to which this day belonged, remained where it was, endless, beginningless, self-repeating. He chose it without more ado. And the robin had come to mention something about it. Its small round body was full, its head tight packed with what it had to tell. It was bursting with information. But what\u2014?\n\nAnd then he realised abruptly another thing: It had delivered its message.\n\nThe presence of the bird had announced a change of conditions in the room, a change in his heart and brain as well. But how? He was too drowsy to decide quite; yet in some way the robin had brought in with it the dawn of an unusual day, a kind of bird-day, light as a feather, swift as a flashing wing, spontaneous\u2014air, freedom, escape, sweet brilliance, a thing of flowers, winds, and beauty, a thing of innocence and captivating loveliness, a happy, dancing day. He felt a new sort of knowledge pass darting through him, a new point of view, almost a bird's-eye aspect of old familiar things\u2014joy. That neat, sharp beak had pricked his imagination into swifter life. The meaning of the bird's announcement flowed with delicate power all through his drowsy body. It summed itself up in this:\u2014Somebody, Something, long expected, at last was coming\u2026.\n\nAnd then he incontinently fell asleep. He lost consciousness. But, while he lay heavily upon his soothing pillow, the marvellous Dawn slid higher up the sky, and the robin popped up once upon the window-sill again, glanced sideways at him with approval, then flashed away so close above the soaking lawn that the dew-drops quivered as it passed. Apparently, it was satisfied.\n\nAt the same moment, in another part of the old house, Tim found his sleep disturbed in a similar fashion; a shrill twittering beneath the eaves mingled with his dreams. He shook a toe and wrinkled up his nose. He woke. His bedroom, being on the top floor, was lighter than those below; there were no trees to cast shadows or obstruct the dawn.\n\nTim rubbed his eyes, yawned, scratched, then pattered over to the window to see what all the noise was about. In his night-shirt he looked like a skinny bird with folded wings of white, as he leaned forward and stuck his head out into the morning air. Upon the strip of back-lawn below, the swallows, who had been chattering so loudly overhead, stood in an active group. Clutching the cold iron bars, and resting his chin upon the topmost one, he watched them. He had never before seen swallows on the ground like that; he associated them with the upper sky. It was odd to see them standing instead of flying; their behaviour seemed not quite normal; there was commotion of an unusual kind among them. A grey cat, stalking them warily down the stable path, came near yet did not trouble them; they felt no alarm. They strutted about like a lot of black-frocked parsons at a congress; they looked as if they had hands tucked behind their pointed coat-tails. They were talking among themselves\u2014discussing something. And from time to time they shot upward glances at the window just above them\u2014at himself.\n\n\"I believe they want me to look at something or other,\" the boy thought vaguely. It seemed as if he had picked them out of a dream and put them there upon the lawn. He felt dazed and happy; he had been dreaming of curious wild things. Where was he? What had happened? \"It feels just like something coming,\" he decided, \"or somebody. Some one's about in the grounds, perhaps\u2026!\"\n\nIt was very exciting to be awake at such an unearthly hour; the sun was still below the edge of the gigantic earth! A great, slow thrill stole up into his heart. He noticed the streaks of colour in the sky, and felt the chilly wind. \"It's sunrise!\" he exclaimed, rubbing one naked foot against the other; \"that's what it is. And I'm up to see it!\"\n\nThe thrill merged into a deep, huge sense of wonder that enthralled him. At the same moment the swallows, disturbed by his voice, looked up with one accord, then rose in a single sweep and whirled off into the upper air, wings faintly tinged with gold. They scattered. Tim watched them for a little while, dimly aware that he watched something \"perfectly magnificent.\" His eyes followed one bird after another, caught in a sudden little rapture he could not understand\u2026 then turned and saw his bed, flushed with early pink, across the room. With a running jump he landed among the sheets, rolled himself up into a ball, and promptly fell asleep again. It was not yet four o'clock.\n\nAcross the landing, meanwhile, Judy, wakened by a brush of feathery wind, was at her window too. She felt very sure of something, although she didn't in the least know what. It was the same thing that Tim and Uncle Felix knew, only they knew they didn't know it, whereas she didn't know she knew it. Her knowledge, therefore, was greater than theirs.\n\nThe room was touched with soft grey light; it was to the west, and the night still clung about the furniture. Like a ball in a saucer, Maria lay asleep in bed against the opposite wall, her neutrality to all that was going on absolute as usual. But Judy did not wake her, she preferred to live alone; she knew that she was alive in her night-gown between night and morning, and that was an unusual pleasure she wished to enjoy without interference. For months she had not waked before half-past seven. The excitement of the unfamiliar was in her heart. She had caught the earth asleep\u2014surprised it. For the first time in her life she saw \"the Earth.\" She discovered it.\n\nShe knelt on a chair beside the open window, peering out, and as she did so, a strange, wild cry came sounding through the stillness. It was like a bugle-call, but she knew no human lips had made it. She glanced quickly in the direction whence it came\u2014the pond\u2014and the next instant the reeds about the edge parted and the thing that had emitted the curious wild cry emerged plainly into view. It was a pompous-looking creature. It came out waddling.\n\n\"It's the up-and-under bird,\" exclaimed Judy in a whisper. \"Something's happening!\"\n\nIt was a water-fowl, a creature whose mysterious habit of living upon the surface of the pond as well as underneath made the children's nick-name a necessity. And now it was attempting a raid on land as well. But land was not its natural place. Something certainly had happened, or was going to happen.\n\n\"It's a snopportunity,\" decided Judy instantly. Far more than an opportunity, a snopportunity was something to be snapped up quickly, the sort of thing that ordinarily happened behind one's back, usually discovered too late to be made use of. \"I've caught it!\" She remembered that the clocks had stopped, yet not knowing why she remembered it. It was the thing she didn't know she knew. She knew it before it happened. That was a snopportunity.\n\nShe watched the heavy bird for a considerable time as it slowly appropriated the land it had no right to. It moved, she thought, like a twisted drum on very short drumsticks. It had a water-logged appearance. It was bird and fish ordinarily, but now it was pretending to be animal as well\u2014a thing that flew, swam, walked. Its webbed feet patted the ground complacently. It came laboriously towards the wall of the house, then halted. It paused a moment, then turned its eyes up, while Judy turned hers down. The pair of creatures looked at one another steadily for several seconds.\n\n\"You're not out for nothing,\" exclaimed Judy audibly. \"So now I know!\"\n\nThe reply was neither in the affirmative nor in the negative. The up-and-under bird said nothing. It made no sign. It just turned away, stalked heavily back across the lawn without once looking either to right or left, launched itself upon the water, uttered its queer bugle-call for the last and second time, and promptly disappeared below. The tilt of its vanishing tail expressed sublime indifference to everything on land. And Judy, reflecting vaguely that she, too, was something of an up-and-under creature, followed its example, though without the same dispatch or neatness of execution. She tumbled sideways into bed and disappeared beneath the sheets, aware that the bird had left her richer than it found her. It had communicated something that lay beyond all possible explanation. She had no tail, nor did she express indifference. On the contrary, she hugged herself, making sounds of pleasurable anticipation in her throat that lay plunged among depths of soothing pillows.\n\nIt seems, then, that the entire household, the important portion of it, at any rate, had been duly notified that something unusual was afoot, and that the dawn of the day just breaking through a ghostly sky was distinctly out of the ordinary. The birds, always the first to wake, and provided with the most sensitive apparatus for recording changes, had caught the mysterious whisper from the fading night; they had instantly communicated it to the best of their ability to their established friends. The robin, the swallows, and the up-and-under bird, having accomplished their purpose, disappeared from view in order to attend to breakfast and the arrangement of their own subsequent adventures. Earth, air, and water had delivered messages. The news had been flashed. Those who deserved it had been warned. The day could now begin.\n\nMaria, alone, meanwhile, slept on soundly, secure in that stodgy immobility that takes no risks. Oblivious, apparently, of all secret warnings of excitement or alarm, she lay in a tight round ball, inactive, undisturbed. Even her breathing revealed her peculiar idiosyncrasy: no actual movement on her surface was discernible. Her breathing involved the least possible disturbance of the pink and white contours that bulged the sheets and counterpane. Her face was calm, expressionless, and even dull, yet wore a certain look as though she knew so much that she had no need to maintain her position by the least assertion. Exertion would have been a denial of her right to exist. And exist she certainly did. The weight of her personality lent balance to the quivering uncertainty of this mysterious dawn. Maria remained an unassailable reality, an immovable centre round which anything might happen, yet never end, and certainly no disaster come. And Judy, glancing at her as she disappeared below her own sheets, noted this fact without understanding that she did so. This was another aspect of the thing she didn't know she knew.\n\n\"Maria's asleep,\" she felt, \"so there's no need to get up yet. It's all right!\" In spite of the marvellous thing she knew was coming, that is, she felt herself anchored safely to the firm reality of calm Maria, soundly, peacefully asleep. And five minutes later she was in the same desirable condition herself.\n\nBut, hardly were they all asleep, than a figure none of them had noticed, yet all perhaps had vaguely felt, rose out of the little ditch this side of the laurel shrubberies, and advanced slowly towards the old Mill House. The shape was shadowy and indeterminate at first; it might have been a bush, a sheaf of straw, a clump of high-grown weeds, for birds fluttered just above it, and the swallows darted down without alarm. A shaggy thing, it seemed part of the natural landscape.\n\nHalf-way across the lawn, however, it paused and stretched itself; it rubbed its eyes; it yawned; and, as it shook the sleep from face and body, the outline grew distinctly clearer. The thing that had looked like a bundle of hay or branches resolved itself into a human being; the loose untidiness gave place to definite shape, as leaves, grass, twigs, and wisps of straw fell fluttering from it to the ground. It was a pathetic and yet wonderful sight, beauty, happiness, and peace about it somewhere, together with a soft and tender sweetness that tempered the wildness of its aspect. Indescribably these qualities proclaimed themselves. It was a man.\n\n\"They've seen me twice,\" he mentioned to the dipping swallows. \"This is my third appearance. They'll recognise me without a word. The Day has come.\"\n\nHe stood a moment, shaking the extras of the night from hair and clothing, then laughed with a sound like running water as the birds swooped down and carried the straws and twigs away with a great business of wings. Next, glancing up at the open windows of the house, he started forward with a light but steady step. \"They will not be surprised,\" he said, \"for they have always believed in me. They knew that some day I should come, and in the twinkling of an eye!\" He paused and chuckled in his beard. \"I'm not the one thing they're expecting, but I'm next door to it, and I can show them how to look at any rate.\"\n\nAnd he began softly humming the words of a little song he had evidently made up himself, and therefore liked immensely. He neared the walls; the sunrise tipped a happy, glorious face; he disappeared from view as though he had melted through the old grey stone. And a flight of swallows, driven by the fresh dawn wind, passed high overhead across the heavens, leading the night away. They swung to the rhythm of his little song:\n\n\u2003My secret's in the wind and open sky,\n\n\u2003There is no longer any Time\u2014to lose;\n\n\u2003The world is young with laughter; we can fly\n\n\u2003Among the imprisoned hours as we choose.\n\n\u2003The rushing minutes pause; an unused day\n\n\u2003Breaks into dawn and cheats the tired sun;\n\n\u2003The birds are singing. Hark! Come out and play!\n\n\u2003There is no hurry! Life has just begun!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 209", + "text": "The day broke. It broke literally. The sky gave way and burst asunder, scattering floods of radiant sunshine. This was the feeling in Uncle Felix's heart as he came downstairs to breakfast in the schoolroom. A sensation of feathery lightness was in him, of speed as well: he could rise above every obstacle in the world, only\u2014there were no obstacles in the world to rise above. Boredom, despair, and pessimism, he suddenly realised, meant deficiency of energy merely. \"Birds can rise above everything\u2014and so can I!\"\u2014as though he possessed a robin's normal temperature of 110 degrees!\n\nAlthough it was Sunday morning, and a dark suit was his usual custom, he had slipped into flannels and a comfortable low collar, without thinking about it one way or the other. \"It's a jolly day,\" he hummed to himself, \"and I'm alive. We must do all kinds of things\u2014everything! It's all one thing really!\" It seemed there was a new, uplifting sense of joy in merely being alive. He repeated the word again and again\u2014\"alive, alive, alive!\" Of course a robin sang: it was the natural thing to do.\n\nHe looked out of the window while dressing, and caught the startling impression that this life emanated from the world of familiar trees and grass and flowers spread out before his eyes. Everything was singing. Beauty had dropped down upon the earth; the earth, moreover, knew that she was beautiful\u2014she was obviously enjoying herself, both as a whole and in every tiniest nook and corner of her gigantic being. Yet without undue surprise he noted this; the marvel was there as always, but he did not pause to say, \"How marvellous!\" It was as natural as breathing, and as easily accepted. He was always breathing, but he never stopped and thought, \"Good Lord, I'm breathing! How dreadful if it stopped!\" He simply went on breathing. And so, with the beauty of this radiant morning, it never occurred to him \"This will not last, the sun will set, the shadows fall, the marvel pass and die.\" That this particular day could end did not even suggest itself.\n\nOn his way down the passage, Judy and Tim came dancing from their rooms to meet him. They, too, were dressed in their everyday-adventure things, no special sign of Sunday anywhere about them\u2014slipped into their summery clothing as naturally as birds and flowers grow into the bright and feathery stuff that covers them. This notion struck him, but faintly; it was not a definite thought. He might as well have noticed, \"Ah, the sky is dressed in light, or mist! The wind blows it into folds and creases!\" Yet the notion did strike him with its little dream-like hammer, because with it came a second tiny blow, producing, it seemed, a soft blaze of light behind his eyes somewhere: \"I've recovered the childhood sense of reality, the vivid certainty, the knowledge!\u2026 Somebody's coming\u2026. Somebody's here\u2014hiding still, perhaps, yet nearer\u2026\" It flashed like a gold-fish in some crystal summer fountain\u2026 and was gone again.\n\nIn the passage Judy touched his hand, and said confidingly, \"You will take me to the end of the world to-day, Uncle.\"\n\nIt was true and possible. No special preparation was required for any journey whatsoever. They were already prepared for anything\u2014like birds. And some one, it seemed, had taken his name away!\n\n\"We'll do everything at once,\" said Tim, with the utmost assurance in tone and manner.\n\n\"Of course,\" was his obvious and natural reply to each, no explanations or conditions necessary. Things would happen of themselves, spontaneously. There was only one thing to do! \"We're alive,\" he added. They just looked at him as he said it, then pulled him down the passage a little faster than before. Yet the way they ran dancing along that oil-cloth passage held something of the joy and confidence with which birds launch themselves into flight across the earth. There was this sense of spontaneous excitement and delight about.\n\n\"He's here already,\" Judy whispered, as they neared the breakfast room.\n\n\"I can feel it.\"\n\n\"Came in while we were asleep,\" her brother added. \"I know it,\" and he clapped his hands.\n\n\"At dawn, yes,\" agreed Uncle Felix, saying it on the spur of the moment. He was perplexed a little, perhaps, but did not hesitate. He had not quite the assurance of the others. He meant to let himself go, however.\n\nThere was not the slightest doubt or question anywhere; they believed because they knew; what they had expected for so long had happened. The Stranger in the Tea-cup had arrived at last. They went down the long corridor of the Old Mill House, every window open to the sunshine that came pouring in. The very walls seemed made of transparent, shining paper. The world came flowing in. A happiness of the glowing earth sang in their veins. At the door they paused a second.\n\n\"I know exactly who he is,\" breathed Judy softly.\n\n\"I know what he looks like,\" whispered Tim.\n\n\"There was never time to see him properly before,\" said Uncle Felix.\n\n\"Things went by so fast. He whizzed and vanished. But now\u2014of course-\"\n\nThey pushed the door open and went in.\n\nBreakfast was already laid upon the shining cloth; hot dishes steamed; there were flowers upon the table, and climbing roses peeped in round the grey walls of sun-baked stone. A bird or two hopped carelessly upon the window-sill, and a smell of earth and leaves was in the air. Sunshine, colour, and perfume filled the room to overflowing, yet not so full that there was not ample space for the \"somebody\" who had brought them. For somebody certainly was there\u2014some one whom the children, moreover, took absolutely for granted.\n\nThere had been surprise outside the door, but there was none when they were in. Something like a dream, it seemed, this absence of astonishment, though, of course, no one took it in that way. For, at first, no one spoke at all. The children went to their places, lifting the covers to see what there was to eat. They did the normal, natural thing; eyed and sniffed the porridge, cream, brown sugar, and especially approved the dish of comfortable, fat poached eggs on toast. They were satisfied with what they saw; everything was as it ought to be\u2014plentiful, available, on hand. There was enough for everybody.\n\nBut Uncle Felix paused a moment just inside the open door, and stared; he looked about him as though the incredible thing had really happened at last. A rapt expression passed over his face, and his eyes seemed fixed upon something radiant that hung upon the air. He sighed, and caught his breath. His heart grew amazingly light within him. Every thought and feeling that made up his personality\u2014so it felt, at least\u2014had wings of silver tipped with golden fire.\n\n\"At last!\" he murmured softly to himself, \"at last!\"\n\nHe moved forward slowly into the room, his eyes still fixed on vacancy. The face showed exquisite delight, but the lips were otherwise dumb. He looked as if he had caught a glimpse of something he could not utter.\n\n\"Porridge, please, Uncle,\" he heard a voice saying, as some one put a large silver spoon into his hand. \"I like the hard lumps.\" And another voice added, \"I like the soupy, slippery stuff, please.\" He pulled himself together with an effort.\n\n\"Ah,\" he mumbled, peeping from the dishes at the children's faces, \"the tea has stopped turning in the cup at last. He's come up to the surface.\"\n\nAnd they turned and looked at him, but without the least surprise again; it was perfectly natural, it seemed, that there should be this Presence in the room; their Uncle's remark was neither here nor there. He had a right to express his own ideas in his own way if he wanted to. Their own remarks outside the door they had apparently forgotten. That, indeed, was already a very long time ago now. In the full bliss of realisation, anticipation was naturally not remembered. The excitement in the passage belonged to some dim Yesterday\u2014almost when they were little.\n\nThey began immediately to talk at the Stranger in the room.\n\n\"I didn't hear anybody come,\" remarked Tim, as he mixed cream and demerara sugar inside an artificial pool of porridge, \"but it's all the same\u2014now. Our Somebody's here all right.\" And then, between gulps, he added, \"The swallows laid an awful lot of eggs in the night, I think.\"\n\n\"On tiptoe just at dawn,\" remarked Judy casually, following her own train of thought, and intent upon chasing a slippery poached egg round and round her plate at the same time. \"The birds were awake, of course.\"\n\nThe birds! As she said it, a memory of some faint, exquisite dream, of years and years ago it seemed, fled also on tiptoe through the bright, still air, and through three listening hearts as well. The robin, the swallows, and the up-and-under bird made secret signs and vanished.\n\n\"They know everything first, of course,\" said Uncle Felix aloud;\n\n\"they're up so early, aren't they?\" To himself he said, \"I'm dreaming!\n\nThis is a dream!\" his reason still fluttering a little before it died.\n\nBut he kept his secret about the robin tightly in its hiding-place.\n\n\"Before they've happened\u2014really,\" Tim mentioned. \"They do a thing to-morrow long before to-morrow's come.\" He knew something the others could not possibly know.\n\n\"Everything comes from the air, you see,\" advanced Judy, secure in the memory of her private morning interview. \"But it can disappear under\u2014underneath when it wants to.\"\n\n\"Or into a hole,\" agreed Tim.\n\nAnd somebody in that breakfast-room, somebody besides themselves, heard every word they spoke, listened attentively, and understood the meanings they thought they hid so cleverly. They knew, moreover, that he did so.\n\n\"Let's pretend,\" Tim suddenly exclaimed, catching his sister's eye just as it was wandering into the pot of home-made marmalade.\n\n\"All right,\" she said at once, \"same as usual, I suppose?\"\n\nTim nodded, glancing across the table. \"Sitting next to you, Uncle\"\u2014he pointed to the unoccupied chair and unused plate\u2014\"in that empty place.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" murmured the man, still hovering between reality and dream. He said it shyly. It was all too marvellous to ask questions about, he felt.\n\n\"It's a lovely morning,\" continued Judy politely, smiling at the empty place. \"Will you have tea and coffee, or milkhotwaterandsugar?\" She listened attentively for the answer, the smile of a duchess on her rosy face, then bowed and handed a lump of sugar to Tim, who set it carefully in the middle of the plate.\n\n\"Butter or honey?\" inquired the boy, \"or butter and honey?\" He, too, waited for the inaudible reply, then asked his Uncle to pass the pot of honey and the butter-dish. The Stranger, apparently, liked sweet things best\u2014at any rate, natural things.\n\nThey went on with their breakfast then, eating as much as ever they could hold, talking about everything in the world as usual, and occasionally bowing to the empty chair, addressing remarks to it, and listening to\u2014answers! Sometimes they passed things, too\u2014another lump of sugar, more drops of honey, a thick blob of clotted cream as well. It was obvious to them that somebody occupied that chair, so real, indeed, that Uncle Felix found himself passing things and making observations about the weather and even arranging a few crumbs of bread in a row beside the other delicacies. It was the right thing to do evidently; acting spontaneously, he had performed an inspired action. And the odd thing was that the food, lying in the blaze of sunlight on the plate, slowly underwent a change: the sugar got smaller in size, the honey-drops diminished, the blob of cream lost its first circumference, and even the bread-crumbs seemed to dwindle visibly.\n\n\"It's very hot this morning,\" said Judy after a bit. \"The sun's hungrier than usual,\" and she pushed the plate into the shade. But it was clear that she referred to some one other than the sun, although the sun belonged to what was going on. \"Thirsty, too,\" she added, \"although there are bucketsful of dew about.\"\n\n\"And extra bright into the bargain,\" declared Tim. \"I love shiny stuff like that to wear and dress in. It fits so easily\u2014no bothering buttons.\"\n\n\"And doesn't wear out or stain, does it?\" put in Uncle Felix, saying the first thing that came into his head\u2014and again behaving in the appropriate, spontaneous manner. It was clear that the Stranger\u2014to them, at least\u2014was clothed in the gold and silver of the brilliant morning. There was a delicate perfume, too, as of wild flowers and sweet little roadside blossoms. The very air of the room was charged with some living light and beauty brought by the invisible guest. It was passing wonderful. The invading Presence seemed all about them like a spreading fire of loveliness and joy\u2014yet natural as sunshine.\n\nThen, suddenly, Tim sprang up from his chair, and ran to the empty seat. His face shone with keen and eager expectancy, but wore a touch of shyness too.\n\n\"I want to be like you,\" he said in a hushed voice that had all the yearning of childhood breaking through it. \"Please put your hand on me.\" He lowered his head and closed his eyes. He made an odd grimace, half pleasure and half awe, like a boy about to plunge into a pool of water,\u2014then stood upright, proud and delighted as any victorious king. He drew a long breath of relief. He seemed astonished that it had been so easily accomplished.\n\n\"I'm full of it!\" he cried. \"I'm burning! He touched me on the head!\"\n\n\"Touched!\" cried Judy, full herself of joy and happy envy.\n\nThe boy nodded his head, as though he would nod it off on to the tablecloth. He looked as if any minute he might burst into flame with the sheer enjoyment of it. \"Warm all over,\" he gasped. \"I could strike a match on my trousers now like Weeden.\"\n\nThen, while Uncle Felix rubbed his eyes and did his best to see the invisible, Judy sprang lightly from her chair, ran up to the vacant place, put out her arms and bent her face down so that her falling torrent of hair concealed it for a moment. She certainly put her arms round\u2014something. The next minute she straightened up again with triumph and tumult in her shining eyes.\n\n\"I kissed him,\" she announced, flushed like any rose, \"and he kissed me back. He blew the wind into my hair as well. I'm flying! I'm lighter than a feather!\" And she went, dancing and flitting, round the table like a happy bird.\n\nThen Uncle Felix rose sedately from his seat. He did not mean to be left out of all this marvellous business merely because his body was a little older and more worn. He stretched his arm across the table, missing the cream-jug by a narrow margin, but knocking the toast-rack over in his eagerness. He held his hand out to the empty chair.\n\n\"Please take my hand,\" he said, \"and let me have something too.\"\n\nHe went through the pantomime of shaking hands, but to his intense amazement it seemed that there was an answering clasp. A smooth, soft running touch closed gently on his own; it was cool and yielding, delicate as the down upon a robin's breast, yet firm as steel. And in that moment he knew that his glimpse on entering the room was not a trick, but had been a passing glimpse of what the children always believed in, hoped for\u2014saw.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he murmured, withdrawing his hand and examining it, \"very much indeed. This is a beautiful day.\"\n\nAn extraordinary power came into him, a feeling of confidence and security and joy he had never known before. Yet all he could find to say was that it was a very beautiful day. The commonest speech expressed exactly what he felt. Ordinary words at last had meaning, small words could tell it.\n\n\"It's all right?\" remarked Tim, in an excited but quite natural tone.\n\n\"It is,\" he answered.\n\n\"Then let's go out now and do all sorts of things. There's simply heaps to do.\"\n\n\"Out into the sun,\" cried Judy. \"Come on. We'll get into our old garden boots.\" And she dragged her brother headlong out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 210", + "text": "And Uncle Felix moved forward into the pool of sunlight that blazed upon the faded carpet pattern. It was composed of round, fat trees, this pattern, with birds like goblin peacocks flying in mid-air between them. The sunshine somehow lifted them, so that they floated upon the quivering atmosphere; the pattern seemed to hover between him and the carpet. And he too felt himself lifted\u2014in mid-air\u2014part of the day and sunshine.\n\nHe closed his eyes; he tried to realise who and where he was; all he could remember, however, went into a single sentence and kept repeating itself on the waves of his singing, dancing blood: \"Clock's stopped, clock's stopped,\u2014stopped clocks, stopped clocks\u2026!\" till it sounded like a puzzle sentence\u2014then lost all meaning.\n\nHe sat down in a chair, but the chair was next to the \"empty\" one, and from it something poured into him, over him, round him, as wind pours about a bird or tree. He became enveloped by it; his mind began to rush, yet rushed in a circle, so that he never entirely lost sight of it. Another set of words replaced the first ones: \"Behind Time, behind Time,\" jostling on each other's heels, tearing round and round like a Catherine Wheel, shining and dancing as they spun.\n\nHe opened his eyes and looked about him. The room was full of wonder. It glistened, sparkled, shone. A million things, screened hitherto from sight by thick clouds of rushing minutes, paused and offered themselves; things that were commonplace before stood still, revealed in startling glory. They no longer raced past at headlong speed. Visible at last, unmasked, they showed themselves as they really were, in naked beauty. This beauty settled on everything in golden rain, it settled on himself as well. All that his eyes rested on looked\u2014distinguished\u2026.\n\nAnd, like snow-flakes, words and thoughts came thickly crowding, like flakes of fire too. He snatched at them, caught them in bunches, tried to sort them into sentences. They were everywhere about him, showering down as from a box of cardboard letters overturned in the sky. The reality he sought hid among them as a whole\u2014he knew that\u2014but no mere sequence of words and letters could quite capture this reality.\n\nHe plunged his hands among the flying symbols\u2026.\n\nIn a flash a number of things\u2014an enormous number of things\u2014became extraordinarily clear and simple; they became one single thing. Then, while reason and vision still fluttered to and fro, like a pair of butterflies, first one and then the other leading, he dashed in between them. He seized handfuls of the flying letters and made the queerest sentences out of them, longer and faster-moving than the first ones.\n\n\"Time is the arch-deceiver. It drives things past us in a hurrying flock. We snatch at them. And those we miss seem lost for ever because some one calls out, in a foolish voice of terror and regret, 'Too late!' Yet, in reality, we stand still; the rush of the hours is a sham. We see things out of proportion, like trees from the window of a train, their beauty hidden in a long, thick smudge. We do not move; it is the train that hurries us along: the trees are always steadily there\u2014and beautiful. There is enough of everything for everybody\u2014no need to try and get there first. To hurry is to chase your tail, which some one has suggested does not belong to you. It can never be captured by pursuit. But pause\u2014stand still\u2014it instantly presents itself, twitches its tip, and laughs: 'I've been here all the time. I'm part of you!'\"\n\nHe turned towards the empty chair and smiled. The smile, he felt, came marvellously back to him from the sunshine and the open world of sky and trees beyond. There was some one there who smiled\u2014invisibly.\n\n\"You're real, quite real,\" the letters danced instantly into new sentences. \"But you are so awfully close to me\u2014so close I cannot see you.\"\n\nHe felt the invisible Stranger suddenly as real as that. There was only one thing to see\u2014only one thing everywhere. The beauty of the discovery put reason utterly and finally to flight. But that one thing was hiding. The Stranger concealed himself\u2014he hid on purpose. He wanted to be looked for\u2014found. And the heart grew \"warm\" or \"cold\" accordingly: when it was warm that mysterious anticipation stirred\u2014\"Some one is coming!\"\n\nAnd Uncle Felix, sitting in the sunlight of that breakfast-room, understood that the entire universe formed a conspiracy to hide \"him.\" Some one, indeed, had come, slipped into the gorgeous and detailed clothing of the entire world as easily as birds and trees slip into their own particular clothing, planning with Time to hide him, wanting to play a little\u2014to play at Hide-and-Seek. \"Let them all look for me! I'm hiding!\u2026\"\n\nYet so few would play! Instead of coming out to find him where he hid so simply in the open, they built severe and gloomy edifices; invented Rules of the game by which each could prove himself right and all the others wrong\u2026. Oh, dear!\u2026 And all the time, he hid there in the open before their very eyes\u2014in the wind, the stream, the grass, in the sunlight and the song of birds, and especially behind little careless things that took no thought\u2026 waiting to play and let himself be found\u2026 while songs and poems and fairy-tales, even religious too, cried endlessly across the world, \"Look and you'll find him.\" There was only one thing to say: \"Search in the open; he hides there!\"\n\nEverything became clear and simple\u2014one thing, Life was a game of Hide-and-Seek. There were obstacles placed in the way on purpose to make it more interesting. One of them was Time. But everything was one thing, and one thing only; a peacock and a policeman were the same, so were an elephant and a violet, an uncle and a bee, a Purple Emperor and a child like Tim or Judy: all did, said, lived one and the same thing only. They looked different\u2014because one looked at them differently.\n\nSmiling happily to himself again as the letters grouped themselves swiftly into these curious sentences, he heard the birds singing in the clean, great sky\u2026 and it seemed to him that the Stranger blew softly upon his eyes and hair. The sentences instantly telescoped: \"Come, look for me! There is no hurry; life has just begun\u2026.\" And he barely had time to realise that the entire complicated mass of them had, after all, only this one thing to say\u2026 when the returning children bursting into the room scattered his long reverie, and the last cardboard letter disappeared like magic into empty space.\n\n\"Where is he?\" cried Tim at once, staring impatiently about him. There was rebuke and disappointment in his eyes. \"Uncle, you've been arguing. He's gone!\"\n\nJudy was equally quick to seize the position of affairs. \"You've frightened him away!\" she declared with energy. \"Quick! We must go out and look!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" muttered their uncle a little guiltily, and was about to add something by way of explanation when he felt Judy pull his sleeve. \"Look!\" she whispered. \"He can't have gone so very far!\"\n\nShe pointed to the plate with the sugar, honey, cream, and crumbs upon it; a bird was picking up the crumbs, a wasp was on the lump of sugar, a bee beside it, standing on its head, was drinking at the drop of honey; all were unafraid, and very leisurely about it; there seemed no hurry; there was enough for every one. Then, as the trio of humans stared with delight, they saw another guest arrive and dance up gaily to the feast. A gorgeous butterfly sailed in, hovered above the crowded plate a moment, then settled comfortably beside its companions and examined the blob of cream. The others moved a little to make room for it. It was a Purple Emperor, the rarest butterfly in all England, whose home was normally high above the trees.\n\n\"Of course,\" Judy whispered to her brother, as she watched the bee make room for its larger neighbour; \"they belong to him\u2014\"\n\n\"He sent them,\" replied Tim below his breath, \"just to let us know\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" mumbled Uncle Felix for the second time, a soft amazement stealing over him. \"He brought them. And they're all the same thing really.\"\n\nThere was the perfume of a thousand flowers in the room. A faint breeze floated through the open window and touched his eyes. He heard the world outside singing in the sunshine. \"Come along,\" he said in a low, hushed whisper; \"let's go and look.\" And he moved eagerly\u2014over the tree-and-peacock pattern.\n\nThey tiptoed out together, while the bird cocked up its head to watch them go; the bee, still drinking, raised its eyes; and all four fluttered their wings as though they laughed. They seemed to say \"There is no hurry! We're all alive together! There's enough for all; no need to get there first!\" They knew. The golden day lay waiting outside with overflowing beauty, and he who had brought them in stood just behind this beauty that hid and covered them. When they had eaten and drunk, they, too, would come and join the search. Exceedingly beautiful they were\u2014the shy grace of the dainty bird, the brilliant wasp in black and gold, the soft brown bee, the magnificent Purple Emperor, fresh from the open spaces above the windy forest: all said the same big, joyful thing, \"We are alive!\u2026 No hurry!\u2026\"\n\nThe trio flew down the passage, took the stairs in leaps and bounds, raced across the hall where the back-door, standing open, framed the lawn and garden in a blaze of sunshine.\n\nAnd as Uncle Felix followed, half dancing like the other two, he saw a little thing that vaguely reminded him of\u2014another little thing. The memory was vague and far away; there was a curious distance in it, like the distance of a dream recalled in the day-light, no longer what is called quite real. For his eye caught something gleaming on the side-table below the presentation clock, and the odd, ridiculous word that sprang into his mind was \"salver.\" It was the silver salver on which Thompson brought in visitors' cards. But it was a plate as well; and, being a plate, he remembered vaguely something about a collection. The association of ideas worked itself out in a remote and dreamlike way; he felt in his pocket for a shilling, a sixpence, or a threepenny bit, and wondered for a second where the big, dark building was to which all this belonged. Something was changed, it seemed. His clothes, this dancing sunshine, joy and laughter. The world was new. What did it mean?\u2026\n\n\"No bells are ringing,\" flashed back the flying letters in a spray.\n\nHe was on the point of catching something by the tail\u2026 when he saw the children waiting for him on the sunny lawn outside. He ran out instantly to join them. They had noticed nothing odd, apparently. It had never even occurred to them. And in himself the memory dived away, its very trail obliterated as though it had not been.\n\nFor this was Sunday morning, yet Sunday had not\u2014happened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 211", + "text": "The garden clung close and soft about the Old Mill House as a mood clings about the emotion that has summoned it. Uncle Felix, Tim, and Judy were as much a part of it as the lilac, hyacinths, and tulips. Any minute, it seemed, the butterflies and bees and birds might settle on them too.\n\nFor a bloom of exquisite, fresh wonder lay upon the earth, lay softly and secure as though it need never pass away. No fading of daylight could dim the glory of all the promises of joy the day contained, no hint of waning anywhere. \"There is no hurry,\" seemed written on the very leaves and blades of grass. \"We're all alive together! Come and\u2014look!\" The garden, lying there so gently in its beauty, hid a secret.\n\nYet, though all was so calm and peaceful, there was nowhere the dulness of stagnation. Life brimmed the old-world garden with incessant movement that flashed dancing and rhythm even into things called stationary. The joy of existence ran riot everywhere without check or hindrance; there was no time\u2014to pause and die. For the sunlight did not merely lie upon the air\u2014it poured; wind did not blow\u2014it breathed, ambushed one minute among the rose-trees just above the ground, and cantering next through the crests of the busy limes. The elms and horse-chestnuts that ordinarily grew now leaped\u2014leaped upwards to the sun; while all flying things\u2014birds, insects, bees, and butterflies\u2014passed in and out like darting threads of colour, pinning the beauty into a patterned tapestry for all to see. The entire day was charged with the natural delight of endless, sheer existence. It was visible.\n\nEach detail, moreover, claimed attention, as though never seen properly before; no longer dulled by familiarity, but shaking off its \"ordinary\" appearance, proud to be looked at, naked and alive. The rivulet ran on, but did not run away; the gravel paths, soft as rolled brown sugar, led somewhere, but led in both directions, each of them inviting; the blue of the sky did not stay \"up there and far away,\" but dropped down close in myriad flakes, lifting the green carpet of the lawn to meet it. The day seemed like a turning circle that changed every moment to show another aspect of its gorgeous pattern, yet, while changing, only turned, unable to grow older or to pass away. There was something real at last, something that could be known, enjoyed\u2014something of eternity about it. It was real.\n\n\"Wherever has he got to?\" exclaimed Judy, trying to pierce the distances of earth and sky with distended eyes. \"He can't be very far away, because\u2014I kissed him.\"\n\nTim, sitting beside her on the grass, felt the exquisite mystery of it too. It was marvellous that any one could vanish in such a way. But he hesitated too. He felt uncertain about something. His thoughts flew off to that strange wood he loved to play in. He remembered the warning: \"Beware the centre, if you enter; For once you're there, you disappear!\" But this explanation did not appeal to him as likely now. He stared at Judy and his uncle. Some one had touched him, making him warm and happy. He remembered that distinctly. He had caught a glimpse\u2014though a glimpse too marvellous to be seen for long, even to be remembered properly. \"But there's no good looking unless we know where to look,\" he remarked. \"Is there?\"\n\n\"He's just gone out like a candle,\" whispered Judy.\n\n\"Extror'nary,\" declared her brother, hugging the excitement that thrilled his heart. \"But he can't be really lost. I'm sure of that!\"\n\nAnd a great hush fell upon them all. Some one, it seemed, was listening; some one was watching; some one was waiting for them to move.\n\n\"Uncle?\" they said in the same breath together, then hung upon his answer.\n\nThis authority hesitated a moment, looking about him expectantly as though for help.\n\n\"I think,\" he stated shyly, \"I think\u2014he's\u2014hiding.\"\n\nNothing more wonderful ever fell from grown-up lips. They had heard it said before\u2014but only said. Now they realised it.\n\n\"Hiding!\" They stood up; they could see further that way. But they waited for more detail before showing their last approval.\n\n\"Out here,\" he added.\n\nThey were not quite sure. They expected a disclosure more out of the ordinary. It might be true, but\u2014\n\n\"Hide-and-seek?\" they repeated doubtfully. \"But that's just a game.\"\n\nThey were unsettled in their minds.\n\n\"Not that kind,\" he replied significantly. \"I mean the kind the rain plays with the wind and leaves, the stream with the stones and roots along its bank, the rivers with the sea. That's the kind of hide-and-seek I mean!\"\n\nHe chose instinctively watery symbols. And his tone conveyed something so splendid and mysterious that it was impossible to doubt or hesitate a moment longer.\n\n\"Oh,\" they exclaimed. \"It never ends, you mean?\"\n\n\"Goes on for ever and ever,\" he murmured. \"The moment the river finds the sea it disappears and the sea begins to look. The wind never really finds the clouds, and the sun and the stars\u2014\"\n\n\"We know!\" they shouted, cutting his explanations short.\n\n\"Come on then!\" he cried. \"We've got the hunt of our lives before us.\" And he began to run about in a circle like an animal trying to catch its tail.\n\n\"But are we to look for him, or he for us?\" inquired the boy, after a preliminary canter over the flower-beds.\n\n\"We for him.\" They sprang to attention and clapped their hands.\n\n\"It's an enormous hide,\" said Tim. \"We may get lost ourselves. Better look out!\"\n\nAnd then they waited for instructions. But the odd thing was that their uncle waited too. There was this moment's hesitation. They looked to him. The old fixed habit asserted itself: a grown-up must surely know more than they did. How could it be otherwise? In this case, however, the grown-up seemed in doubt. He looked at them. It was otherwise.\n\n\"It's so long since I played this kind of hide-and-seek,\" he murmured.\n\n\"I've rather forgotten\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped short. There certainly was a difficulty. Nobody knew in what direction to begin.\n\n\"It's a snopportunity,\" exclaimed Judy. \"I'm sure of that!\"\n\n\"We just look\u2014everywhere!\" cried Tim.\n\nA light broke over their uncle's face as if a ray of sunshine touched it. His mind cleared. Some old, forgotten joy, wonderful as the dawn, burst into his heart, rose to fire in his eyes, flooded his whole being. A glory long eclipsed, a dream interrupted years ago, an uncompleted game of earliest youth\u2014all these rose from their hiding-place and recaptured him, soul and body. He glanced at the children. These things he had recaptured, they, of course, had never lost; this state and attitude of wonder was their natural prerogative; he had recovered the ownership of the world, but they had possessed it always. They knew the whole business from beginning to end\u2014only they liked to hear it stated. That was obviously his duty as a grown-up: to stick the label on.\n\n\"Of course,\" he whispered, deliciously enchanted. \"You've got it. It's the snopportunity! The great thing is to\u2014look.\"\n\nAnd, as if to prove him right, a flock of birds passed sweeping through the air above their heads, paused in mid-flight, wheeled, fluttered noisily a second, then scattered in all directions like leaves whirled by an eddy of loose, autumn wind.\n\n\"Come on,\" cried Tim, remembering perhaps the \"dodgy\" butterfly and trying to imitate it with his arms and legs. \"I know where to go first. Just follow me!\"\n\n\"And there'll be signs, remember,\" Uncle Felix shouted as he followed.\n\n\"Whoever finds a sign must let the others know at once.\"\n\nThey began with the feeling that they would discover the Stranger in a moment, sure of the places where he had tried cleverly to conceal himself, but soon began to realise that this was no ordinary game, and that he certainly knew of mysterious spots and corners they had never dreamed about. It was as Tim declared, \"an enormous hide.\" Come-Back Stumper's cunning dive into bed was nothing compared to the skill with which this hider eluded their keen searching. There was another difference too. In Stumper's case their interest had waned, they felt they had been cheated somehow, they knew themselves defeated and had given up the search. But here the interest was unfailing; it increased rather than diminished; they were ever on the very edge of finding him, and more than once they shrieked with joy, \"I've got him!\"\u2014only to find they had been \"very hot\" but not quite hot enough. It was, like everything else upon this happy morning, endless.\n\nIt continued and continued, as naturally as the rivulet that ran for ever downhill to find the sea, that nothing, it seemed, could put a stop to, much less an end. The feeling that time was passing utterly disappeared; weeks, months, and years lay waiting somewhere near, but could be left or taken, used or not used, as they pleased. To take a week and use it was like picking a flower that looked much prettier growing sweetly in the sunny earth. Why pick it? It came to an end that way! The minutes, the hours and days, morning, noon and night as well, the very seasons too, offered themselves, and\u2014vanished. They did not come and go, they were just \"there\"; and to steal into one or other of them at will was like stealing into one mood after another as the heart decreed. They were mere counters in the gorgeous and unending game. They helped to hide the mysterious Stranger who was evidently in the centre round which all life lay grouped so marvellously. They hid and covered him as moods hide and cover the heart that wears them\u2014temporarily. Uncle Felix and the children used them somewhat in this way, it seems, for while they looked and hunted in and out among them, any minute, day or season was recoverable at will. They did not pass away. It was the seekers who passed through them. To Uncle Felix, at any rate, it seemed a fact\u2014this joyous sensation of immense duration, yet of nothing passing away: the bliss of utter freedom. He gasped to realise it. But the children did not gasp. They had always known that nothing ever really came to an end. \"The weather's still here,\" he heard Judy calling across the lawn to Tim\u2014as though she had just been looking among December snowdrifts and had popped back again into the fragrance of midsummer hayfields. \"The Equator's made of golden butterflies, all shining,\" the boy called back, having evidently just been round the world and seen its gleaming waist\u2026.\n\nBut none of them had found what they were looking for\u2026.\n\nThey had looked in all the difficult places where a clever player would be most likely to conceal himself, yet in vain; there was no definite sign of him, no footprints on the flower-beds or along the edge of the shrubberies. The garden proper had been searched from end to end without result. The children had been to the particular hiding-places each knew best, Tim to the dirty nook between the ilex and the larder window, and Judy to the scooped-out trunk of the rotten elm, and both together to the somewhat smelly channel between the yew trees and a disused outhouse\u2014all equally untenanted.\n\nIn the latter gloomy place, in fact, they met. No sunlight pierced the dense canopy of branches; it was barely light enough to see. Judy and Tim advanced towards each other on tiptoe, confident of discovery at last. They only realised their mistake at five yards' distance.\n\n\"You!\" exclaimed Tim, in a disappointed whisper. \"I thought it was going to be a sign.\" \"I felt positive he'd be in here somewhere,\" said Judy.\n\n\"Perhaps we're both signs,\" they declared together, then paused, and held a secret discussion about it all.\n\n\"He's got a splendid hide,\" was the boy's opinion. \"D'you think Uncle Felix knows anything? You heard what he said about signs\u2026!\"\n\nThey decided without argument that he didn't. He just went \"thumping about\" in the usual places. He'd never find him. They agreed it was very wonderful. Tim advanced his pet idea\u2014it had been growing on him: \"I think he knows some special place we'd never look in\u2014a hole or something.\" But Judy met the suggestion with superior knowledge: \"He moves about,\" she announced. \"He doesn't stop in a hole. He flies at an awful rate\u2014from place to place. That's\u2014signs, I expect.\"\n\n\"Wings?\" suggested Tim.\n\nJudy hesitated. \"You remember\u2014at breakfast, wasn't it?\u2014ages and ages ago\u2014all had wings\u2014those things\u2014\"\n\nShe broke off and pointed significantly at the figure of Uncle Felix who was standing with his head cocked up at an awkward angle, staring into the sky. Shading his eyes with one hand, he was apparently examining the topmost branches of the tall horse-chestnuts.\n\n\"He couldn't have got up a tree, could he, or into a bird's nest?\" said the girl. She offered the suggestion timidly, yet her brother did not laugh at her. There was this strange feeling that the hider might be anywhere\u2014simply anywhere. This was no ordinary game.\n\n\"There's such a lot,\" Tim answered vaguely.\n\nShe looked at him with intense admiration. The wonder of this marvellous game was in their hearts. The moment when they would find him was simply too extraordinary to think about.\n\nJudy moved a step closer in the darkness. \"Can he get small, then\u2014like that?\" she whispered.\n\nBut the question was too much for Tim.\n\n\"Anyhow he gets about, doesn't he?\" was the reply, the vagueness of uncertain knowledge covering the disappointment. \"There are simply millions of trees and nests and\u2014and rabbit-holes all over the place.\"\n\nThey were silent for a moment. Then Judy asked, still more timidly:\n\n\"I say, Tim?\"\n\n\"Well.\"\n\n\"What does he really look like? I can't remember quite. I mean\u2014shall we recognise him?\"\n\nTim stared at her. \"My dear!\" he gasped, as though the question almost shocked him. \"Why, he touched me\u2014on the head! I felt it!\"\n\nJudy laughed softly; it was only that she wanted to remind herself of something too precious to be forgotten.\n\n\"I kissed him!\" she whispered, a hint of triumph in her voice and eyes.\n\nThey stood staring at one another for a little while, weighing the proofs thus given; then Tim broke the silence with a question of his own. It was the result of this interval of reflection. It was an unexpected sort of question:\n\n\"Do you know what it is we want?\" he asked. \"I do,\" he added hurriedly, lest she should answer first.\n\n\"What?\" she said, seeing from his tone and manner that it was important.\n\n\"We shall never, never find him this way,\" he said decisively.\n\n\"What?\" she repeated with impatience.\n\nTim lowered his voice. \"What we want,\" he said with the emphasis of true conviction, \"is\u2014a Leader.\"\n\nJudy repeated the word after him immediately; it was obvious; why hadn't she thought of it herself? \"Of course,\" she agreed. \"That's it exactly.\"\n\n\"We're looking wrong somewhere,\" her brother added, and they both turned their heads in the direction of Uncle Felix who was still standing on the lawn in a state of bewilderment, examining the treetops. He expected something from the air, it seemed. Perhaps he was looking for rain\u2014he loved water so. But evidently he was not a proper leader; he was even more bewildered than themselves; he, too, was looking wrong somewhere, somehow. They needed some one to show them how and where to look. Instinctively they felt their uncle was no better at this mighty game than they were. If only somebody who knew and understood\u2014a leader\u2014would turn up!\n\nAnd it was just then that Judy clutched her brother by the arm and said in a startled whisper, \"Hark!\"\n\nThey harked. Through the hum of leaves and insects that filled the air this sweet June morning they heard another sound\u2014a voice that reached them even here beneath the dense roof of shrubbery. They heard words distinctly, though from far away, rising, falling, floating across the lawn as though some one as yet invisible were singing to himself.\n\nFor it was the voice of a man, and it certainly was a song. Moreover, without being able to explain it exactly, they felt that it was just the kind of singing that belonged to the kind of day: it was right and natural, a fresh and windy sound in the careless notes, almost as though it was a bird that sang. So exquisite was it, indeed, that they listened spellbound without moving, standing hand in hand beneath the dark bushes. And Uncle Felix evidently heard it too, for he turned his head; instead of examining the tree-tops he peered into the rose trees just behind him, both hands held to his ears to catch the happy song. There was both joy and laughter in the very sound of it:\n\n\u2003My secret's in the wind and open sky;\n\n\u2003There is no longer any Time\u2014to lose;\n\n\u2003The world is young with laughter; we can fly\n\n\u2003Among the imprisoned hours as we choose.\n\n\u2003The rushing minutes pause; an unused day\n\n\u2003Breaks into dawn and cheats the tired sun.\n\n\u2003The birds are singing. Hark! Come out and play!\n\n\u2003There is no hurry; life has just begun.\n\nThe voice died away among the rose trees, and the birds burst into a chorus of singing everywhere, as if they carried on the song among themselves. Then, in its turn, their chorus also died away. Tim looked at his sister. He seemed about to burst\u2014if not into song, then into a thousand pieces.\n\n\"A leader!\" he exclaimed, scarcely able to get the word out in his excitement. \"Did you hear it?\"\n\n\"Tim!\" she gasped\u2014and they flew out, hand in hand still, to join their uncle in the sunshine.\n\n\"Found anything?\" he greeted them before they could say a word. \"I heard some one singing\u2014a man, or something\u2014over there among the rose trees\u2014\"\n\n\"And the birds,\" interrupted Judy. \"Did you hear them?\"\n\n\"Uncle,\" cried Tim with intense conviction, \"it's a sign. I do believe it's a sign\u2014\"\n\n\"That's exactly what it is,\" a deep voice broke in behind them \"\u2014a sign; and no mistake about it either.\"\n\nAll three turned with a start. The utterance was curiously slow; there was a little dragging pause between each word. The rose trees parted, and they found themselves face to face with some one whom they had seen twice before in their lives, and who now made his appearance for the third time therefore\u2014the man from the End of the World: the Tramp." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 212", + "text": "He was a ragged-looking being, yet his loose, untidy clothing became him so well that his appearance seemed almost neat\u2014it was certainly natural: he was dressed in the day, the garden, the open air. Judy and Tim ran up fearlessly and began fingering the bits of stuff that clung to him from the fields and ditches. In his beard were some stray rose leaves and the feather of a little bird. The children had an air of sheltering against a tree trunk\u2014woodland creatures\u2014mice or squirrels chattering among the roots, or birds flown in to settle on a hedge. They were not one whit afraid. For nothing surprised them on this marvellous morning; everything that happened they\u2014accepted.\n\n\"He's shining underneath,\" Judy whispered in Tim's ear, cocking her head sideways so that she could catch her brother's eye and at the same time feel the great comfort of the new arrival against her cheek.\n\n\"And awfully strong,\" was the admiring reply.\n\n\"So soft, too,\" she declared\u2014though whether of mind or body was not itemized\u2014\"like feathers.\"\n\n\"And smells delicious,\" affirmed Tim, \"like hay and rabbits.\"\n\nEach child picked out the quality the heart desired and approved; almost, it seemed, each felt him differently. Yet, although not one whit afraid, they whispered. Perhaps the wonder of it choked their utterance a little.\n\nThe Tramp smiled at them. All four smiled. The way he had emerged from among the rose trees made them smile. It was as natural as though he had been there all the time, growing out of the earth, waving in the morning air and sunlight. There was something simple and very beautiful about him, perhaps, that made them smile like this. Then Uncle Felix, whom the first shock of surprise had apparently deprived of speech, found his voice and observed, \"Good-morning to you, good-morning.\" The little familiar phrase said everything in a quite astonishing way. It was like a song.\n\n\"Good-morning,\" replied the Tramp. \"It is. I was wondering how long it would be before you saw me.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said Judy and Tim in the same breath, \"of course.\"\n\n\"The fact is,\" stammered Uncle Felix, \"you're so like the rest of the garden\u2014so like a bit of the garden, I mean\u2014that we didn't notice you at first. But we heard\u2014\" he broke off in the middle of the sentence\u2014\"That was you singing, wasn't it?\" he asked with a note of hushed admiration in his voice.\n\nThe smile upon the great woodland face broadened perceptibly. It was as though the sun burst through a cloud. \"That's hard to say,\" he replied, \"when the whole place is singing. I'm just like everything else\u2014alive. It's natural to sing, and natural to dance\u2014when you're alive and looking\u2014and know it.\"\n\nHe spoke with a sound as though he had swallowed the entire morning, a forest rustling in his chest, singing water just behind the lips.\n\n\"Looking!\" exclaimed Uncle Felix, picking out the word. He moved closer; the children caught his hands; the three of them sheltered against the spreading figure till the four together seemed like a single item of the landscape. \"Looking!\" he repeated, \"that's odd. We've lost something too. You said too,\u2014just now\u2014something about\u2014a sign, I think?\" Uncle Felix added shyly.\n\nAll waited, but the Tramp gave no direct reply. He smiled again and folded two mighty arms about them. Two big feathery wings seemed round them. Judy thought of a nest, Tim of a cozy rabbit hole, Uncle Felix had the amazing impression that there were wild flowers growing in his heart, or that a flock of robins had hopped in and began to sing.\n\n\"Lost something, have you?\" the Tramp enquired genially at length; and the slow, leisurely way he said it, the curious half-singing utterance he used, the words falling from his great beard with this sound as of wind through leaves or water over sand and pebbles\u2014somehow included them in the rhythm of existence to which he himself naturally belonged. They all seemed part of the garden, part of the day, part of the sun and earth and flowers together, marvellously linked and caught within some common purpose. Question and answer in the ordinary sense were wrong and useless. They must feel\u2014feel as he did\u2014to find what they sought.\n\nIt was Uncle Felix who presently replied: \"Something\u2014we've\u2014mis-laid,\" he said hesitatingly, as though a little ashamed that he expressed the truth so lamely.\n\n\"Mis-laid?\" asked the Tramp. \"Mis-laid, eh?\"\n\n\"Forgotten,\" put in Tim.\n\n\"Mis-laid or forgotten,\" repeated the other. \"That all?\"\n\n\"Somebody, I should have said,\" explained Uncle Felix yet still falteringly, \"somebody we've lost, that is.\"\n\n\"Hiding,\" Tim said quickly.\n\n\"About,\" added Judy. There was a hush in all their voices.\n\nThe Tramp picked the small feather from his beard\u2014apparently a water-wagtail's\u2014and appeared to reflect a moment. He held the soft feather tenderly between a thumb and finger that were thick as a walking-stick and stained with roadside mud and yellow with flower-pollen too.\n\n\"Hiding, is he?\" He held up the feather as if to see which way it fluttered in the wind. \"Hiding?\" he repeated, with a distinct broadening of the smile that was already big enough to cover half the lawn. It shone out of him almost like rays of light, of sunshine, of fire. \"Aha! That's his way, maybe, just a little way he has\u2014of playing with you.\"\n\n\"You know him, then! You know who it is?\" two eager voices asked instantly. \"Tell us at once. You're leader now!\" The children, in their excitement, almost burrowed into him; Uncle Felix drew a deep breath and stared. His whole body listened.\n\nAnd slowly the Tramp turned round his shaggy head and gazed into their faces, each in turn. He answered in his leisurely, laborious way as though each word were a bank-note that he dealt out carefully, fixing attention upon its enormous value. There was certainly a tremor in his rumbling voice. But there was no hurry.\n\n\"I've\u2014seen him,\" he said with feeling, \"seen him\u2014once or twice. My life's thick with memories\u2014\"\n\n\"Seen him!\" sprang from three mouths simultaneously.\n\n\"Once or twice, I said.\" He paused and sighed. Wind stirred the rose trees just behind him. He went on murmuring in a lower tone; and as he spoke a sense of exquisite new beauty stole across the old-world garden. \"It was\u2014in the morning\u2014very early,\" he said below his breath.\n\n\"At dawn!\" Uncle Felix whispered.\n\n\"When the birds begin,\" from Judy very softly.\n\n\"To sing,\" Tim added, a single shiver of joy running through all three of them at once. The enchantment of their own dim memories of the dawn\u2014of a robin, of swallows, and of an up-and-under bird flashed magically back.\n\nThe Tramp nodded his great head slowly; he bowed it to the sunlight, as it were. There was a great light flaming in his eyes. He seemed to give out heat.\n\n\"Just seen him\u2014and no more,\" he went on marvellously, as though speaking of a wonderful secret of his own. \"Seen him a-stealing past me\u2014in the dawn. Just looked at me\u2014and went\u2014went back again behind the rushing minutes!\"\n\n\"Was it long ago? How long?\" asked Judy with eager impatience impossible to suppress. They did not notice the reference to Time, apparently.\n\nThe wanderer scratched his tangled crop of hair and seemed to calculate a moment. He gazed down at the small white feather in his hand. But the feather held quite still. No breath of wind was stirring. \"When I was young,\" he said, with an expression half quizzical, half yearning. \"When I first took to the road\u2014as a boy\u2014and began to look.\"\n\n\"As long ago as that!\" Tim murmured breathlessly. It was like a stretch of history.\n\nThe Tramp put his hand on the boy's shoulder. \"I was about your age,\" he said, \"when I got tired of the ordinary life, and started wandering. And I've been wandering and looking ever since. Wandering\u2014and wondering\u2014and looking\u2014ever since,\" he repeated in the same slow way, while the feather between his great fingers began to wave a little in time with the dragging speech.\n\nThe wonder of it enveloped them all three like a perfume rising from the entire earth.\n\n\"We've been looking for ages too,\" cried Judy.\n\n\"And we've seen him,\" exclaimed her brother quickly.\n\n\"Somebody,\" added Uncle Felix, more to himself than to the others.\n\nThe Tramp combed his splendid beard, as if he hoped to find more feathers in it.\n\n\"This morning, wasn't it?\" he asked gently, \"very early?\"\n\nThey reflected a moment, but the reflection did not help them much. \"Ages and ages ago,\" they answered. \"So long that we've forgotten rather\u2014\"\n\n\"Forgotten what he looks like. That's it. Same trouble here,\" and he tapped his breast. \"We're all together, doing the same old thing. The whole world's doing it. It's the only thing to do.\" And he looked so wise and knowing that their wonder increased to a kind of climax; they were tapping their own breasts before they knew it.\n\n\"Doing it everywhere,\" he went on, weighing his speech as usual; \"only some don't know they're doing it.\" He looked significantly into their shining eyes, then finished with a note of triumph in his voice. \"We do!\"\n\n\"Hooray!\" cried Tim. \"We can all start looking together now.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" agreed the wanderer, very sweetly for a tramp, they thought.\n\nThey glanced at their Uncle first for his approval; the Tramp glanced at him too; his face was flushed and happy, the eyes very bright. But there was an air of bewilderment about him too. He nodded his head, and repeated in a shy, contented voice\u2014as though he surrendered himself to some enchantment too great to understand\u2014\"I think so; I hope so; I\u2014wonder!\"\n\n\"We've looked everywhere already,\" Tim shouted by way of explanation\u2014when the Tramp cut him short with a burst of rolling laughter:\n\n\"But in the wrong kind of places, maybe,\" he suggested, moving forward like a hedge or bit of hayfield the wind pretends to shift.\n\n\"Oh, well\u2014perhaps,\" the boy admitted.\n\n\"Probly,\" said Judy, keeping close beside him.\n\n\"Of course,\" decided Uncle Felix; \"but we've been pretty warm once or twice all the same.\" He lumbered after the other three, yet something frisky about him, as about a pony released into a field and still uncertain of its bounding strength.\n\n\"Have you really?\" remarked their leader, good-humouredly, but with a touch of sarcasm. \"Good and right, so far as it goes; only 'warm' is not enough; we want to be hot, burning hot and steaming all the time. That's the way to find him.\" He paused and turned towards them; he gathered them nearer to him with his smiling eyes somehow. \"It's like this,\" he went on more slowly than ever: \"A good hider doesn't choose the difficult places; he chooses the common ordinary places where nobody would ever think of looking.\" He kept his eyes upon them to make sure they understood him. \"The little, common places,\" he continued with emphasis, \"that no one thinks worth while. He hides in the open\u2014bang out in the open!\"\n\n\"In the open!\" cried the children. \"The open air!\"\n\n\"In the open!\" gasped Uncle Felix. \"The open sea!\"\n\nThe Tramp almost winked at them. He looked like a lot of ordinary people. He looked like everybody. He looked like the whole world somehow. He smiled just like a multitude. He spoke, as it were, for all the world\u2014said the one simple thing that everybody everywhere was trying to say in millions of muddled words and sentences. The wind and trees and sunshine said it with him, for him, after him, before him. He said the thing\u2014so Uncle Felix felt, at any rate,\u2014that was always saying itself, that was everywhere heard, though rarely listened to; but, according to the children, the thing they knew and believed already. Only it was nice to hear it stated definitely\u2014they felt.\n\nAnd the tide of enchantment rose higher and higher; in a tide of flowing gold it poured about all three.\n\n\"That's it,\" the Tramp continued, as though he had not noticed the rapture his very ordinary words had caused. \"Sea and land and air together. But more than that\u2014he hides deep and beautiful.\"\n\n\"Deeply and beautifully,\" murmured the writer of historical novels, all of them entirely forgotten now.\n\n\"Deep and beautiful,\" repeated the other, as though he preferred the rhythm of his own expression. He drew himself up and swallowed a long and satisfying draught of air and sunshine. He waved the little wagtail's feather before their eyes. He touched their faces with its tip. \"Deep, tender, kind, and beautiful,\" he elaborated. \"Those are the signs\u2014signs that he's been along\u2014just passed that way. The whole world's looking, and the whole world's full of signs!\"\n\nFor a moment all stood still together like a group of leafy things a passing wind has shaken, then left motionless; a wild rose-bush, a climbing vine, a clinging ivy branch\u2014all three kept close to the stalwart figure of their big, incomparable leader.\n\nAnd Judy knew at last the thing she didn't know; Tim felt himself finally in the eternal centre of his haunted wood; in the eyes of Uncle Felix there was a glistening moisture that caught the sunlight like dew upon the early lawn. He staggered a little as though he were on a deck and the sea was rolling underneath him.\n\n\"How ever did you find it out?\" he asked, after an interval that no one had cared to interrupt. \"What in the world made you first think of it?\" And though his voice was very soft and clear, it was just a little shaky.\n\n\"Well,\" drawled the Tramp, \"maybe it was just because I thought of nothing else. On the road we live sort of simply. There's never any hurry; the wind's a-blowing free; everything's sweet and careless\u2014and so am I.\" And he chuckled happily to himself.\n\n\"Let's begin at once!\" cried Tim impatiently. \"I feel warm already\u2014hot all over\u2014simply burning.\"\n\nThe Tramp signified his agreement. \"But you must each get a feather first,\" he told them, \"a feather that a bird has dropped. It's a sign that we belong together. Birds know everything first. They go everywhere and see everything all at once. They're in the air, and on the ground, and on the water, and under it as well. They live in the open\u2014sea or land. And if you have a feather in your hand\u2014well, it means keeping in touch with everything that's going. They go light and easy; we must go light and easy too.\"\n\nThey stared at him with wonder at the breaking point. It all seemed so obviously and marvellously true. How had they missed it up till now?\n\n\"So get a feather,\" he went on quietly, \"and then we can begin to look at once.\"\n\nNo one objected, no one criticised, no one hesitated. Tim knew where all the feathers were because he knew every nest in the garden. He led the way. In less than two minutes all had small, soft feathers in their hands.\n\n\"Now, we'll begin to look,\" the Tramp announced. \"It's the loveliest game on earth, and the only one. It's Hide-and-Seek behind the rushing minutes. And, remember,\" he added, holding up a finger and chuckling happily, \"there's no hurry, the wind's a-blowing free, the sun is warm, everything's sweet and careless\u2014and so are we.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 213", + "text": "\"But has he called yet?\" asked Tim, remembering suddenly that it wasn't fair to begin till the hider announced that he was ready. \"He's got to hoot first, you know. Hasn't he?\" he added doubtfully.\n\n\"Listen!\" replied the man of the long white roads. And he held his feather close against his ear, while the others copied him. Fixing their eyes upon a distant point, they listened, and as they listened, their lips relaxed, their mouths opened slowly, their eyebrows lifted\u2014they heard, apparently, something too wonderful to be believed.\n\nTo Uncle Felix, still fumbling in his mind among unnecessary questions, it seemed that the power of hearing had awakened for the first time, or else had grown of a sudden extraordinarily acute. The children merely listened and said \"Oh, oh, oh!\"; the sound they heard was familiar, though never fully understood till now. For him, it was, perhaps, the recovery of a power he had long forgotten. At any rate he\u2014heard. For the air passed through the tiny fronds of the feather\u2014through the veined web of its delicate resistance\u2014round the hollow stem and across the fluffy breadth of it\u2014with a humming music as of wind among the telegraph wires, only infinitely sweet and far away. There were several notes in it, a chord\u2014the music that accompanies all flying things, even a butterfly or settling leaf, and ever fills the air with unguessed melody.\n\nIt opened their power of hearing to a degree as yet undreamed of even by the all-believing children. Their feathers became wee, accurate, tuning-forks for all existence. They understood that everything in the whole world sang; that no rose leaf fluttered to the earth, no rabbit twitched its ears, no mouse its tail, no single bluebell waved a head towards its bluer neighbour, without this exquisite accompaniment of fairy music.\n\n\"Listen, listen!\" the Tramp repeated softly from time to time, watching their faces keenly. \"Listen, and you'll hear him calling\u2026!\"\n\nAnd this fairy humming, having so marvellously attuned their hearing, then led them on to the larger, louder sounds; they pricked their ears up, as the saying goes; they noticed the deeper music everywhere. For the morning breeze was rustling and whispering among the leaves and blades of grass with a thousand happy voices. It was the ordinary summer sound of moving air that no one pays attention to.\n\n\"Oh, that!\" exclaimed Uncle Felix. \"I hadn't noticed it.\" He felt ashamed. He who had taught them the beauty of the self-advertising Night-Wind, had somehow missed and overlooked the wonder\u2014the searching, yearning beauty\u2014of this meek, incomparable music: because it was so usual. For the first time in his life he heard the wind as it slipped between the leaves, shaking them into rapture.\n\n\"And that,\" laughed the Tramp, cocking his great head to catch the murmur of the stream beyond the lawn, \"if the dust of furniture and houses ain't blocked your ears too thickly.\" They stooped to listen. \"Like laughter, isn't it?\" he observed, \"singing and laughing mixed together?\"\n\nThey straightened up again, too full of wonder to squeeze out any words.\n\n\"It's everywhere,\" said Uncle Felix, \"this calling\u2014these calling voices. Is that where you got your song from?\"\n\n\"It's everywhere and always,\" replied the other evasively. \"The birds get their singing from it. They get everything first, of course, then pass it on. The whole world's music comes from that, though there's nothing\u2014nothing,\" he added with emphasis, \"to touch the singing of a bird. He's calling everywhere and always,\" he went on as no one contradicted him or ventured upon any question; \"only you've got to listen close. He calls soft and beautiful. He doesn't shout and yell at you.\"\n\n\"Soft and beautiful, yes,\" repeated Uncle Felix below his breath, \"the small, still voices of the air and sea and earth.\" And, as he said it, they caught the murmur of the little stream; they heard singing in the air as well. The blackbirds whistled in one direction, the thrushes trilled and gurgled in another, and overhead, both among the covering leaves and from the open sky, a chorus of twittering and piping filled the chambers of the day. Judy recalled, as of long ago, the warning bugle-call of an up-and-under bird; Tim faintly remembered having overheard some swallows \"discussing\" together; Uncle Felix saw a robin perched against a sky of pearly grey at the end of an interminable corridor that stretched across whole centuries\u2026. Then, close beside the three of them, a bumble-bee, a golden fly, and a company of summer gnats went by\u2014booming, trumpeting, singing like a tiny carillon of bells respectively.\n\n\"Hark and listen,\" exclaimed the Tramp with triumph in his voice, and looking down at Tim particularly. \"He's calling all the time. It's the little ordinary sounds that give the hints.\"\n\n\"It's an enormous hide; I mean to look for ever and ever,\" cried the delighted boy.\n\n\"I can hear everything in the world now,\" cried Judy.\n\n\"Signs,\" said Uncle Felix, after a pause. This time he did not make a question of his thought, but merely dropped the word out like a note of music into the air. His feather answered it and took it further.\n\nThe Tramp caught the word flying before it reached the ground:\n\n\"Deep, tender, kind and beautiful,\" he said, \"but above all\u2014beautiful.\" He turned his shaggy head and looked about him carelessly. \"There's one of them, for instance,\" he added, pointing across the lawn. \"There's a sign. It means he's passed that way! He ain't too far away\u2014may-be.\"\n\nThey followed the direction of his eyes. A dragon-fly paused hovering above the stream, its reflection mirrored in the clear running water underneath. Against the green palisade of reeds its veined and crystal wings scattered the sunlight into shining flakes. The blue upon its body burned\u2014a patch of flaming beauty in mid-air. They watched it for a moment. Then, suddenly\u2014it was gone, the spot was empty. But the speed, the poise, the perfect movement, the flashing wings, above all the flaming blue upon its tail still held them spellbound. Somehow, it seemed, they had borrowed that speed, that flashing beauty, making the loveliness part and parcel of themselves. Swiftly they turned and stared up at the Tramp. There was a rapt look upon his tangled face.\n\n\"A sign,\" he was saying softly. \"He's passed this way. He can't be hiding very far from here.\" And, drawing a long, deep breath, he gazed about him into endless space as though about to sing again.\n\nThe dragon-fly had vanished, none knew whither, gone doubtless into some new hiding-place; it just gave the hint, then slipped away upon its business. But the wonder and the beauty it had brought remained behind, crept into every heart. The mystery of life, the reality that lay hiding at the core of things, the marvel and the dream\u2014all these were growing clearer. All lovely things were \"signs.\" And there fell a sudden hush upon the group, for the Thing that Nobody could Understand crept up and touched them.\n\nAbruptly, then, lest the wonder of it should prove more than they could bear perhaps, a blackbird whistled with a burst of flying laughter at them from the shrubberies. Laughter and dancing both were part of wonder. The Tramp at once moved forward, chuckling in his beard; he waved his arms; his step was lighter, quicker; he was singing softly to himself: they only caught stray sentences, but they loved the windy ringing of his voice. They knew not where he borrowed words and tune: \"The world is young with laughter; we can fly\u2026. Among the imprisoned hours as we choose\u2026. The birds are singing\u2026. Hark! Come out and play\u2026. There is no hurry\u2026. Life has just begun\u2026.\"\n\n\"Come on!\" cried Tim. \"Let's follow him; we're getting frightfully warm!\"\n\nHe seized Judy and his uncle by the hands and cleared the rivulet with a running leap. The Tramp, however, preferred to wade across. \"Get into everything you can,\" he explained in mid-stream with a laugh. \"It keeps you in touch; it's all part of the looking.\"\n\nHe led them into the field where the blackbird still went on whistling its heart out into the endless summer morning. But to them it seemed that he led them out across the open world for ever and ever\u2026.\n\nIt grew very marvellous, this game of hide and seek. Sometimes they forgot it was a game at all, forgot what they were looking for, forgot that they were looking for anything or any one at all. Yet the mighty search continued subconsciously, even when passing incidents drew their attention from their chief desire. Always, at the back of thought, lay this exquisite, sweet memory in their hearts, something they half remembered, half forgot, but very dear, very marvellous. Some one was hiding somewhere, waiting, longing to play with them, expecting to be found.\n\nIt may be that intervals went by, those intervals called years and months; yet no one noticed them, and certainly no one named them. They knew one feeling only\u2014the joy of endless search. Some one was hiding, some one was near, and signs lay scattered everywhere. This some one lay in his wonderful hiding-place and watched their search with laughter in his eyes. He remained invisible; perhaps they would never see him actually; but they felt his presence everywhere, in every object, every tree and flower and stone, in sun and wind, in water and in earth. The power and loveliness of common things became insistent. They were aware of them. It seemed they brushed against this shining presence, pushing for ever against a secret door of exit that led into the final hiding-place. Eager to play with them, yet more eager still to be discovered, the wonderful hider kept just beyond their sight and touch, while covering the playground with endless signs that he was near enough for them to know for certain he was\u2014there. For among the four of them there was no heart that doubted. None explained. None said No\u2026. Nor was there any hurry.\n\n\"I believe,\" announced Tim at length, with the air of a sage about him, \"the best way is to sit still and wait; then he'll just come out like a rabbit and show himself.\" And, as no one contradicted, he added confidently, \"that's my idea.\" His love was evidently among the things of the soil, rabbits, rats and hedgehogs, both hunter and adventurer strong in him.\n\n\"A hole!\" cried Judy with indignation. \"Never! He's in the air. I heard a bird just now that\u2014\"\n\n\"Whew!\" whistled Uncle Felix, interrupting her excitedly. \"He's been along here. Look! I'm sure of it.\" And he said it with such conviction that they ran up, expecting actual footprints.\n\n\"How do you know?\" Tim asked dubiously, seeing no immediate proof himself. All paused for the reply; but Uncle Felix also paused. He had said a thing it seemed he could not justify.\n\n\"Don't hesitate,\" said the Tramp, watching him with amusement. \"Don't think before you speak. There's nothing to think about until you've spoken.\"\n\nUncle Felix wore an expression of bewilderment. \"I meant the flowers,\" he stammered, still unsure of his new powers.\n\n\"Of course,\" the other chuckled. \"Didn't I tell you 'tender and beautiful,' and 'bang out in the open'?\"\n\n\"Then you're right, Uncle; they are signs,\" cried Judy, \"and you do like butter,\" and she danced away to pick the dandelions that smothered the field with gold. But the Tramp held out his feather like a wand.\n\n\"They're our best signs, remember,\" he cried. \"You might as well pick a feather out of a living bird.\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\u2014and she pulled herself up sharply, a little flush running across her face and the wind catching at her flying hair. She swayed a moment, nearly overbalancing owing to the interrupted movement, and looking for all the world like a wild young rose tree, her eyes two shining blossoms in the air. Then she dropped down and buried her nose among the crowd of yellow flowers. She smelt them audibly, drawing her breath in and letting it out again as though she could almost taste and eat the perfume.\n\n\"That's better,\" said the Tramp approvingly. \"Smell, then follow,\" and he moved forward again with his dancing, happy step. \"All the wild, natural things do it,\" he cried, looking back over his shoulder at the three who were on their knees with faces pressed down against the yellow carpet. \"It's the way to keep on the trail. Smell\u2014then follow.\"\n\nSomething flashed through the clearing mind of the older man, though where it came from he had less idea than the dandelions: a mood of forgotten beauty rushed upon him\u2014\n\n\u2003\"O, follow, follow!\n\n\u2003Through the caverns hollow,\n\n\u2003As the song floats thou pursue,\n\n\u2003Where the wild bee never flew\u2014\"\n\n...and he ran dancing forward after the great Tramp, singing the words as though they were his own.\n\nYet the flowers spread so thickly that the trail soon lost itself; it seemed like a paper-chase where the hare had scattered coloured petals instead of torn white copy-books. Each searcher followed the sign of his or her own favourite flower; like a Jack-in-the-Box each one bobbed up and down, smelling, panting, darting hither and thither as in the mazes of some gnat\u2014or animal-dance, till knees and hands were stained with sweet brown earth, and lips and noses gleamed with the dust of orange-tinted pollen.\n\n\"Anyhow, I'd rather look than find,\" cried Tim, turning a somersault over a sandy rabbit-mound.\n\nThe swallows flashed towards Judy, a twittering song sprinkling itself like liquid silver behind them as they swooped away again.\n\n\"I expect,\" the girl confessed breathlessly, \"that when we do find him\u2014we shall just die\u2014!\"\n\n\"Of happiness, and wonder,\" ventured Uncle Felix, watching a common Meadow Brown that perched, opening and closing its wings, upon his sleeve. And the Tramp, almost invisible among high standing grass and thistles, laughed and called in his curious, singing voice, \"There is no hurry! Life has just begun!\"\n\n\"Then we might as well sit down,\" suggested Uncle Felix, and suiting the action to the word, chose a nice soft spot upon the mossy bank and made himself comfortable as though he meant to stay; the Tramp did likewise, gathering the children close about his tangled figure. For one thing a big ditch faced them, its opposite bank overgrown with bramble bushes, and for another the sloping moss offered itself invitingly, like a cushioned sofa. So they lay side by side, watching the empty ditch, listening to the faint trickle of water tinkling down it. Slender reeds and tall straight grasses fringed the nearer edge, and, as the wind passed through them with a hush and whisper, they bent over in a wave of flowing green.\n\n\"He's certainly gone that way,\" Judy whispered, following with her eyes the direction of the bending reeds. She was getting expert now.\n\n\"Along the ditch, I do believe,\" agreed Tim. There were no flowers in it, and few, perhaps, would have found beauty there, yet the pointing of the reeds was unmistakable. \"It's chock full of stuff,\" he added, \"but a rat could get along, so I suppose\u2014\"\n\n\"The signs are very slight sometimes,\" murmured the Tramp, his head half buried in the moss, \"and sometimes difficult as well. You'd be surprised.\" He flung out his arms and legs and continued laughingly. \"When things are contrary you may be sure you're getting somewhere\u2014getting warm, that is.\"\n\nThe children heard this outburst, but they did not listen. They were absorbed in something else already, for the movements of the reeds were fascinating. They began to imitate them, swaying their heads and bodies to and fro in time, and crooning to themselves in an attempt to copy the sound made by the wind among the crowded stalks.\n\n\"Don't,\" objected Uncle Felix, half in fun, \"it makes me dizzy.\" He was tempted to copy them, however, and made an effort, but the movement caught him in the ribs a little. His body, like his mind, was not as supple as theirs. An oak tree or an elm, perhaps, was more his model.\n\n\"Do,\" the Tramp corrected him, swaying as he said it. \"Swing with a thing if you want to understand it. Copy it, and you catch its meaning. That's rhythm!\" He made an astonishing mouthful of the word. The children overheard it.\n\n\"How do you spell it?\" Judy asked.\n\n\"I don't,\" he replied; \"I do it. Once you get into the\"\u2014he took a great breath\u2014\"rhythm of a thing, you begin to like it. See?\"\n\nAnd he went on swaying his big shoulders in imitation of the rustling reeds. All four swayed together then, holding their feathers before them like little flying banners. More than ever, they seemed things growing out of the earth, out of the very ditch. The movement brought a delicious, soothing sense of peace and safety over them; earth, air, and sunshine all belonged to them, plenty for everybody, no need to get there first and snatch at the best places. There was no hurry, life had just begun. They seemed to have dug a hole in space and curled up cosily inside it. They whispered curious natural things to one another. \"A wren is settling on my hair,\" said Judy: \"a butterfly on my neck,\" said Uncle Felix: \"a mouse,\" Tim mentioned, \"is making its nest in my trousers pocket.\" And the Tramp kept murmuring in his voice of wind and water, \"I'm full of air and sunlight, floating in them, floating away\u2026 my secret's in the wind and open sky\u2026 there is no longer any Time\u2014to lose\u2026.\"\n\nA bright green lizard darted up the sun-baked bank, vanishing down a crack without a sound; it left a streak of fire in the air. A golden fly hovered about the tallest reed, then darted into another world, invisibly. A second followed it, a third, a fourth\u2014points of gold that pinned the day fast against the moving wall of green. A wren shot at full speed along the bed of the ditch, threading its winding length together as upon a woven pattern. All were busy and intent upon some purpose common to the whole of them, and to everything else as well; even the things that did not move were doing something.\n\n\"I say,\" cried Tim suddenly, \"they're covering him up. They're hiding him better so that we shan't find him. We've got too warm.\"\n\nHow long they had been in that ditch when the boy exclaimed no one could tell; perhaps a lifetime, or perhaps an age only. It was long enough, at any rate, for the Tramp to have changed visibly in appearance\u2014he looked younger, thinner, sprightlier, more shining. He seemed to have shed a number of outward things that made him bulky\u2014bits of beard and clothing, several extra waistcoats, and every scrap of straw and stuff from the hedges that he wore at first. More and more he looked as Judy had seen him, ages and ages ago, emerging from the tarpaulin on the rubbish-heap at the End of the World.\n\nHe sprang alertly to his feet at the sound of Tim's exclamation. The sunlit morning seemed to spring up with him.\n\n\"We have been very warm indeed,\" he sang, \"but we shall get warmer still before we find him. Besides, those things aren't hiding him\u2014they're looking. Everything and everybody in the whole wide world is looking, but the signs are different for everybody, don't you see? Each knows and follows their own particular sign. Come on!\" he cried, \"come on and look! We shall find him in the end.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 214", + "text": "The steep bank was easily managed. They were up it in a twinkling, a line of dancing figures, all holding hands.\n\nFirst went the Tramp, shining and glowing like a mirror in the sunshine\u2014fire surely in him; next Judy, almost flying with the joy and lightness in her\u2014as of air; Tim barely able to keep tight hold of her hand, so busily did his feet love the roots and rabbit-holes of\u2014earth; and finally, Uncle Felix, rolling to and fro, now sideways, now toppling headlong, roaring as he followed like a heavy wave. Fire, air, earth, and water\u2014they summarised existence; owned and possessed the endless day; lived it, were one with it. Their leader, who apparently had swallowed the sun, fused and unified them in this amazing way with\u2014fire.\n\nAnd hardly had they passed the line of shy forget-me-nots on the top of the bank, than they ran against a curious looking object that at first appeared to be an animated bundle of some kind, but on closer inspection proved to be a human figure stooping. It was somebody very busy about the edges of a great clump of bramble bushes. At the sound of their impetuous approach it straightened up. It had the face of a man\u2014yellowish, patched with red, breathless and very hot. It was Come-back Stumper.\n\nHe glared at them, furious at being disturbed, yet with an uneasy air, half comical, half ashamed, as of being\u2014caught. He took on a truculent, aggressive attitude, as though he knew he would have to explain himself and did not want to do so. He turned and faced them.\n\n\"Mornin',\" he grunted fiercely. \"It's a lovely day.\"\n\nBut they all agreed so promptly with him that he dropped the offensive at once. His face was very hot. It dripped.\n\n\"Energetic as usual,\" observed Uncle Felix, while Tim poked among the bushes to see what he had been after, and Judy offered him a very dirty handkerchief to mop his forehead with. His bald head shone and glistened. Wisps of dark hair lay here and there upon it like the feathers of a crow's torn wing.\n\n\"Thanks, dear,\" he said stiffly, using the few inches of ragged cambric and then tucking the article absent-mindedly into a pocket of his shooting coat. \"I've been up very early\u2014since dawn. Since dawn,\" he repeated in a much louder voice, \"got up, in fact, with the sun.\" He meant to justify his extreme and violent activity. He glanced at the Tramp with a curious air of respect. Tim thought he saluted him, but Judy declared afterwards he was only wiping \"the hot stuff off the side of his dear old head.\"\n\n\"Wonderful moment,\u2014dawn, ain't it, General?\" said the Tramp. \"Best in the whole day when you come to think of it.\"\n\n\"It is, sir,\" replied Stumper, as proud as though a Field-Marshal had addressed him, \"and the first.\" He looked more closely at the Tramp; he rubbed his eyes, and then produced the scrap of cambric and rubbed them again more carefully than before. Perhaps he, too, had been hoping for a leader! Something very proud and happy stole upon his perspiring face of ochre. He moved a step nearer. \"Did you notice it this morning?\" he asked in a whisper, \"the dawn, I mean? Never saw anything like it in me life before. Thought I was in the Himalayas or the Caucasus again. Astonishin', upon me word\u2014the beauty of it! And the birds! Did you hear 'em? Expect you usually do, though,\" he added with a touch of unmistakable envy and admiration in his tone.\n\n\"Uncommon,\" agreed the Tramp, \"and no mistake about it. They knew, you see.\" They no longer called each other \"Sir\" and \"General\"; they had come to an understanding apparently.\n\n\"Umph!\" said Stumper, and looked round shyly at the others.\n\nStumper was evidently under the stress of some divine emotion he was half ashamed of. An unwonted passion stirred him. He seemed a prey to an unusual and irrepressible curiosity. Only the obvious fact that his listeners shared the same feelings with him loosened his sticky tongue and stole self-consciousness away. He had expected to be laughed at. Instead the group admired him. The Tramp\u2014his manner proved it\u2014thought of him very highly indeed.\n\n\"Never knew such a day in all me life before,\" Stumper admitted frankly. \"Couldn't\u2014simply couldn't stay indoors.\"\n\nHe still retained a trace of challenge in his tone. But no one challenged. Judy took his arm. \"So you came out?\" she said softly.\n\n\"Like us,\" said Uncle Felix.\n\n\"Of course,\" Tim added. But it was the Tramp who supplied the significant words they had all been waiting for, Stumper himself more eagerly than any one else. \"To look,\" he remarked quite naturally.\n\nStumper might have just won a great world-victory, judging by the expression that danced upon his face. He dropped all pretence at further concealment. He put his other arm round Tim's shoulder, partly to balance himself better against Judy's pushing, and partly because he realised the companionship of both children as very dear just then. He had a great deal to say, and wanted to say it all at once, but words never came to him too easily; he had missed many an opportunity in life for the want of fluent and spontaneous address. He stammered and halted somewhat in his delivery. A new language with but a single word in it would have suited him admirably.\n\n\"Yes,\" he growled, \"I came out\u2014to look. But when I got out\u2014I clean forgot what it was\u2014who, I mean\u2014no, what,\" he corrected himself again, \"I'd come out to look for. Can't make it out at all.\" He broke off in a troubled way.\n\n\"No?\" agreed Judy sympathetically, as though she knew.\n\n\"But you want to find it awfully,\" Tim stated as a fact.\n\n\"Awfully,\" admitted Stumper with a kind of fierceness.\n\n\"Only you can't remember what it looks like quite?\" put in Uncle Felix.\n\nStumper hesitated a moment. \"Too wonderful to remember properly,\" he said more quietly; something like that. \"But the odd thing is,\" he went on in a lower tone, \"I've seen it. I know I've seen it. Saw it this mornin'\u2014very early\u2014when the pigeon woke me up\u2014at dawn.\"\n\n\"Pigeon!\" exclaimed Tim and Judy simultaneously. \"Dawn!\"\n\n\"Carrier-pigeon\u2014flew in at my open window\u2014woke me,\" continued the soldier in his gruff old voice. \"I've used 'em\u2014carrier-pigeons, you know. Sent messages\u2014years ago. I understand the birds a bit. Extraordinary thing, I thought. Got up and looked at it.\" He blocked again.\n\n\"Ah!\" said some one, by way of encouragement.\n\n\"And it looked back at me.\" By the way he said it, it was clear he hardly expected to be believed.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Uncle Felix.\n\n\"Naturally,\" added Tim.\n\n\"And what d'you think?\" Stumper went on, a note of yearning and even passion in his voice. \"What d'you think?\" he whispered: \"I felt it had a message for me\u2014brought me a message\u2014something to tell me\u2014\"\n\n\"Round its neck or foot?\" asked Tim.\n\nStumper drew the boy closer and looked down into his face. \"Eyes,\" he mumbled, \"in its small bright eyes. There was a flash, I saw it plainly\u2014something strange and marvellous, something I've been looking for all my life.\"\n\nNo one said a single word, but the old soldier felt the understanding sympathy rising like steam from all of them.\n\n\"Then, suddenly, it was gone\u2014out into the open sky\u2014bang into the sunrise. And I saw the dawn all over everything. I dressed\u2014rushed out\u2014and\u2014\"\n\n\"Had it laid an egg?\" Tim asked, remembering another kind of hunting somewhere, long ago.\n\n\"How could it?\" Judy corrected him quickly. \"There was\u2014no time\u2014\" then stopped abruptly. She turned towards Come-Back Stumper; she gave him a hurried and affectionate hug. \"And then,\" she asked, \"what happened next?\"\n\nStumper returned the hug, including Tim in it too. \"I found this\u2014fluttering in my hand,\" he said, and held up a small grey feather for them to admire. \"It's the only clue I've got. The pigeon left it.\"\n\nWhile they admired the feather and exhibited their own, Tim crying, \"We've got five now, nearly a whole wing!\" Stumper was heard to murmur above their heads, \"And since I\u2014came out to look\u2014I've felt\u2014quite different.\"\n\n\"Your secret's in the wind and open sky!\" cried Judy, dancing round him with excitement. Her voice came flying from the air.\n\n\"You're awfully warm\u2014you're hot\u2014you're burning!\" shouted Tim, clapping his hands. His voice seemed to rise out of the earth.\n\n\"We've all seen it, all had a glimpse,\" roared Uncle Felix with a sound of falling water, rolling up nearer as he spoke. \"It's too wonderful to see for long, too wonderful to remember quite. But we shall find it in the end. We're all looking!\" He began a sort of dancing step. \"And when we find it\u2014\" he went on.\n\n\"We'll change the world,\" shouted Stumper, as though he uttered a final word of command.\n\n\"It's a he, remember,\" interrupted Tim. \"Come along!\"\n\nAnd then the Tramp, who had been standing quietly by, smiling to himself but saying nothing, came nearer, opened his great arms and drew the four of them together. His voice, his shining presence, the warm brilliance that glowed about him, seemed to envelop them like a flame of fire and a fire of\u2014love.\n\n\"We're thinking and arguing too much,\" he drawled in his leisurely, big voice, \"we lose the trail that way, we lose the rhythm. Just love and look and wonder\u2014then we'll find him. There is no hurry, life has just begun. But keep on looking all the time.\" He turned to Stumper with a chuckle. \"You said you had a flash,\" he reminded him. \"What's become of it? You can't have lost it\u2014with that pigeon's feather in your hand!\"\n\n\"It's waggling,\" announced Tim, holding up his own, while the others followed suit. The little feathers all bent one way\u2014towards the bramble clump. Their tiny, singing music was just audible in the pause.\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Come-Back Stumper at length. \"I've had a flash\u2014flashes, in fact! What's more,\" he added proudly, \"I was after a couple of them\u2014just when you arrived.\"\n\nEverybody talked at once then. Uncle Felix and the children fell to explaining the signs and traces they had already discovered, each affirming vehemently that their own particular sign was the loveliest\u2014the dragon-fly, the flowers, the wind, the bending reeds, even the lizard and the bumble-bee. The chorus of sound was like the chattering of rooks among the tree-tops; in fact, though the quality of tone of course was different, the resemblance to a concert of birds, all singing together in a summer garden, was quite striking. Out of the hubbub single words emerged occasionally\u2014a \"robin,\" \"swallows,\" an \"up-and-under bird\"\u2014yet, strange to say, so far as Stumper was concerned, only one thing was said; all said the same one thing; he heard this one thing only\u2014as though the words and sentences they used were but different ways of pronouncing it, of spelling it, of uttering it. Moreover, the wind in the feather said it too, for the sound and intonation were similar. It was the thing that wind and running water said, that flame roared in the fireplace, that rain-drops pattered on the leaves, even house-flies, buzzing across the window-panes\u2014everything everywhere, the whole earth, said it.\n\nHe stood still, listening in amazement. His face had dried by now; he passed his hand across it; he tugged at his fierce military moustache.\n\n\"Hiding\u2014near us\u2014in the open\u2014everywhere,\" he muttered, though no one heard him; \"I've had my flashes too.\"\n\n\"Different people get different signs, of course,\" the Tramp made himself heard at length, \"but they're all the same. All lie along the trail. The earth's a globe and circle, so everything leads to the same place\u2014in the end.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Stumper; \"thank you\"\u2014as though he knew it already, but felt that it was neatly put.\n\n\"Follow up your flash,\" added the Tramp. \"Smell\u2014then follow. That is\u2014keep on looking.\"\n\nStumper turned, pirouetting on what the children called his \"living leg.\" \"I will,\" he cried, with an air of self-abandonment, and promptly diving by a clever manoeuvre out of their hands, he fell heavily upon all fours, and disappeared beneath the dense bramble bushes just behind them. Panting, and certainly perspiring afresh, he forced his way in among the network of thick leaves and prickly branches. They heard him puffing; it seemed they heard him singing too, as he reached forward with both arms into the dark interior. Caught by his whole-hearted energy, they tried to help; they pushed behind; they did their best to open a way for his head between the entwining brambles.\n\n\"Don't!\" he roared inside. \"You'll scratch my eyes out. I shan't see\u2014anything!\" His mouth apparently was full of earth. They watched the retreating soles of his heavy shooting-boots. Slowly the feet were dragged in after him. They disappeared from sight. Stumper was gone.\n\n\"He'll come back, though,\" mentioned Judy. The performance had been so interesting that she almost forgot its object, however. Tim reminded her. \"But he won't find anything in a smelly place like that,\" he declared. \"I mean,\" he added, \"it can't be a beetle or a grub that we're\u2014looking for.\" Yet there was doubt and wonder in his voice. Stumper, a \"man like that,\" and a soldier, a hunter too, who had done scouting in an Indian jungle, and met tigers face to face\u2014a chap like that could hardly disappear on all fours into a clump of bramble bushes without an excellent reason!\n\nAn interval of comparative silence followed, broken only by the faint murmur of the wind that stirred their humming feathers. They stood in a row and listened intently. Hardly a sound came from the interior of the bramble bushes. The soldier had justified his title. He had retired pletely. To Judy it occurred that he might be suffocated, to Tim that he might have been eaten by some animal, to Uncle Felix that he might have slipped out at the other side and made his escape. But no one expressed these idle thoughts in words. They believed in Stumper really. He invariably came back. This time would be no exception to the rule.\n\nAnd, presently, as usual, Stumper did come back. They heard him grunting and panting long before a sign of him was visible. They heard his voice, \"Got him! Knew I was right! Bah! Ugh!\" as he spluttered earth and leaves from his mouth apparently. He emerged by degrees and backwards; backed out, indeed, like an enormous rabbit. His boots, his legs, his hands planted on the ground, his neck and then his face, looking out over his shoulder, appeared successively. \"Just the kind of place he would choose!\" he exclaimed triumphantly, collapsing back upon his haunches and taking a long, deep breath. Beside the triumph in his voice there was a touch of indescribable, gruff sweetness the children knew was always in his heart\u2014no amount of curried-liver trouble could smother that. Just now it was more marked than usual.\n\n\"Show us!\" they cried, gathering round him. Judy helped him to his feet; he seemed a little unsteady. Purple with the exertion of the search, both cheeks smeared with earth, neck-tie crooked, and old grey shooting-coat half-way up his back, Come-Back Stumper stood upright, and looked at them with shining eyes. He was the picture of a happy and successful man.\n\n\"There!\" he growled, and held out a hand, palm upwards, still trembling with his recent exertions. \"Didn't I tell you?\"\n\nThey crowded round to examine a small object that lay between two smears of earth in the centre of the upturned palm. It was round and had a neat little opening on its under side. It was pretty, certainly. Their heads pressed forward in a bunch, like cabbages heaped for market. But no one spoke.\n\n\"See it?\" said Stumper impatiently; \"see what it is?\" He bent forward till his head mixed with theirs, his big aquiline nose in everybody's way.\n\n\"We see it\u2014yes,\" said Uncle Felix without enthusiasm. \"It's a snail shell\u2014er\u2014I believe?\" The shade of disappointment in his voice was reflected in the children's faces too, as they all straightened up and gazed expectantly at the panting soldier. \"Is that all?\" was the sentence no one liked to utter.\n\nBut Stumper roared at them. \"A snail shell!\" he boomed; \"of course it's a snail shell! But did you ever see such a snail shell in your lives before? Look at the colour! Look at the shape! Put it against your ears and hear it singing!\" He was furious with their lack of appreciation.\n\n\"It's the common sort,\" said Uncle Felix, braver than the others, \"something or other vulgaris\u2014\"\n\n\"Hundreds of them everywhere,\" mentioned Tim beneath his breath to Judy.\n\nBut Stumper overheard them.\n\n\"Common sort! Hundreds everywhere!\" he shouted, his voice almost choking in his throat; \"look at the colour! Look at the shape, I tell you! Listen to it!\" He said the last words with a sudden softness.\n\nThey lowered their heads again for a new examination.\n\n\"What more d'you want, I'd like to know? There's colour for you! There's wonder! There's a sheer bit of living beauty!\" and he lowered his head again so eagerly that it knocked audibly against Tim's skull.\n\n\"Please move your nose away,\" said Tim, \"I can't see.\"\n\n\"Common indeed!\" growled the soldier, making room willingly enough, while they obeyed his booming orders. They felt a little ashamed of themselves for being so obtuse, for now that they looked closer they saw that the shell was certainly very beautiful. \"Common indeed!\" he muttered again. \"Why, you don't know a sign when it's straight before your noses!\"\n\nJudy pulled the fingers apart to make it roll towards her; she felt it all over, stroking the smooth beauty of its delicate curves. It was exquisitely tinted. It shone and glistened in the morning sunlight. She put it against her ear and listened. \"Oh!\" she exclaimed. \"It is singing,\" as the murmur of the wind explored its hollow windings.\n\n\"That's the Ganges,\" explained Stumper in a softer voice. \"The waves of the Ganges breaking on the yellow sands of India. Wind in the jungle too.\" His face looked happy as he watched her; his explosions never lasted long.\n\nShe passed it over to her brother, who crammed it against his ear and listened with incredible grimaces as though it hurt him. \"I can hear the tigers' footsteps,\" he declared, screwing up his eyes, \"and birds of paradise and all sorts of things.\" He handed it on reluctantly to his uncle, who listened so deeply in his turn that he had to shut both eyes. \"I hear calling voices,\" he murmured to himself, \"voices calling, calling everywhere\u2026.it's wonderful\u2026 like a sea of voices from the other side of the world\u2026 the whole world's singing\u2026!\"\n\n\"And look at the colour, will you?\" urged Stumper, snatching it away from the listener, who, seemed in danger of becoming entranced. \"Why, he's not only passed this way\u2014he's actually touched it. That's his touch, I tell you!\"\n\n\"That's right,\" mumbled the Tramp, watching the whole performance with approval. \"Folks without something are always sharper than the others.\" But this reference to a wooden leg was also too low for any one to hear it.\n\nBesides Stumper was saying something wonderful just then; he lowered his voice to say it; there was suppressed excitement in him; he frowned and looked half savagely at them all:\n\n\"I found other signs as well,\" he whispered darkly. \"Two other signs. In the darkness of those bushes I saw\u2014another flash\u2014two of 'em!\" And he slowly extended his other hand which till now he had kept behind his back. It was tightly clenched. He unloosed the fingers gradually. \"Look!\" he whispered mysteriously. And the hand lay open before their eyes. \"He's been hiding in those very bushes, I tell you. A moment sooner and we might have caught him.\"\n\nHis enthusiasm ran all over them as they pressed forward to examine the second grimy hand. There were two things visible in it, and both were moving. One, indeed, moved so fast that they hardly saw it. There was a shining glimpse\u2014a flash of lovely golden bronze shot through with blue\u2014and it was gone. Like a wee veiled torch it scuttled across the palm, climbed the thumb, popped down the other side and dropped upon the ground. Vanished as soon as seen!\n\n\"A beetle!\" exclaimed Uncle Felix. \"A tiny beetle!\"\n\n\"But dipped in colour,\" said Stumper with enthusiasm, \"the colour of the dawn!\"\n\n\"Another sign! I never!\" He was envious of the soldier's triumph.\n\n\"He looks in the unlikely places,\" muttered the Tramp again, approvingly. \"You've been pretty warm this time.\" But, again, he said it too low to be audible. Besides, Stumper's other \"find\" engrossed everybody's attention. All were absorbed in the long, dainty object that clung cautiously to his hand and showed no desire to hurry out of sight after the brilliant beetle. It was familiar enough to all of them, yet marvellous. It presented itself in a new, original light.\n\nThey watched it spellbound; its tiny legs moved carefully over the wrinkles of the soldier's skin, feeling its way most delicately, and turning its head this way and that to sniff the unaccustomed odour. Sometimes it looked back to admire its own painted back, and to let its distant tail know that all was going well. The coloured hairs upon the graceful body were all a-quiver. It fairly shone. There was obviously no fear in it; it had perfect control of all its length and legs. Yet, fully aware that it was exploring a new country, it sometimes raised its head in a hesitating way and looked questioningly about it and even into the great faces so close against its eyes.\n\n\"A caterpillar! A common Woolly Bear!\" observed Tim, yet with a touch of awe.\n\n\"It tickles,\" observed Stumper.\n\n\"I'll get a leaf,\" Judy whispered. \"It doesn't understand your smell, probly.\" She turned and picked the biggest she could find, and the caterpillar, after careful observation, moved forward on to it, turning to inform its following tail that all was safe. Gently and cleverly they restored it to the bush whence Stumper had removed it. It went to join the snail-shell and the beetle. They stood a moment in silence and watched the quiet way it hid itself among the waves of green the wind stirred to and fro. It seemed to melt away. It hid itself. It left them. It was gone.\n\nAnd Stumper turned and looked at them with the air of a man who has justified himself. He had certainly discovered definite signs.\n\nBut there was bewilderment among the group as well as pleasure. For signs, they began to realise now, were everywhere indeed. The world was smothered with them. There was no one clear track that they could follow. All Nature seemed organised to hide the thing they looked for. It was a conspiracy. It was, indeed, an \"enormous hide,\" an endless game of hide-and-seek. The interest and the wonder increased sensibly in their hearts. The thing they sought to find, the Stranger, \"It,\" by whatever name each chose to call the mysterious and evasive \"hider,\" was so marvellously hidden. The glimpse they once had known seemed long, long ago, and very far away. It lay like a sweet memory in each heart, half forgotten, half remembered, but always entirely believed in, very dear and very exquisite. The precious memory urged them forward. They would search and search until they re-discovered it, even though their whole lives were spent in the looking. They were quite positive they would find him in the end.\n\nAll this lay somehow in the expression on Stumper's face as he glared at them and ejaculated a triumphant \"There! I told you so!\" And at that moment, as though to emphasize the thrill of excited bewilderment they felt, a gorgeous brimstone butterfly sailed carelessly past before their eyes and vanished among the pools of sunlight by the forest edge. Its presence added somehow to the elusive and difficult nature of their search. Its flamboyant beauty was a kind of challenge.\n\n\"That's what the caterpillar gets into,\" observed Tim dreamily.\n\n\"Let's follow it,\" said Judy. \"I believe the flying signs are best.\"\n\n\"Puzzlin' though,\" put in the Tramp behind them. They had quite forgotten his existence. \"Let's ask the gardener what he thinks.\"\n\nHe pointed to a spot a little further along the edge of the wood where the figure of a man was visible. It seemed a good idea. Led by the Tramp, Uncle Felix and Stumper following slowly in the rear, they moved forward in a group. Weeden might have seen something. They would ask him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 215", + "text": "John WEEDEN\u2014the children always saw his surname in capitals\u2014was probably the most competent Head Gardener of his age, or of any other age: he supplied the household with fruit and vegetables without grumbling or making excuses. When asked to furnish flowers at short notice for a dinner-party he made no difficulty, but just produced them. Neither did he complain about the weather; wet or dry, it was always exactly what his garden needed. All weather to him was Fine Weather. He believed in his garden, loved it, lived in it, was almost part of it. To make excuses for it was to make excuses for himself. WEEDEN was a genius.\n\nBut he was mysterious too. He was one-eyed, and the loss endeared him to the children, relating him also, once or twice removed, to Come-Back Stumper; it touched their imaginations. Being an artist, too, he never told them how he lost it, a pitchfork and a sigh were all he vouchsafed upon the exciting subject. He understood the value of restraint, and left their minds to supply what details they liked best. But this wink of pregnant suggestion, while leaving them divinely unsatisfied, sent them busily on the search. They imagined the lost optic roaming the universe without even an attendant eyelid, able to see things on its own account\u2014invisible things. \"Weeden's lost eye's about,\" was a delightful and mysterious threat; while \"I can see with the Gardener's lost eye,\" was a claim to glory no one could dispute, for no one could deny it. Its chief duty, however, was to watch the \"froot and vegebles\" at night and to keep all robbers\u2014two-foot, four-foot, winged, or wriggling robbers\u2014from what Aunt Emily called \"destroying everything.\"\n\nA source of wonder to the children, this competent official was at the same time something of an enigma to the elders. His appearance, to begin with, was questionable, and visitors, being shown round the garden, had been known to remark upon it derogatively sometimes. It was both in his favour and against him. For, either he looked like an untidy parcel of brown paper, loose ends of string straggling out of him, or else\u2014in his Sunday best\u2014was indistinguishable from a rose-bush wrapped up carefully in matting against the frost. Yet, in either aspect, no one could pretend that he looked like anything but a genuine Head Gardener, the spirit of the kitchen-garden and the potting-shed incarnate.\n\nIt was the way he answered questions that earned for him the title of enigma\u2014he avoided a direct reply. (He was so cautious that he would hesitate even when he came to die.) He would think twice about it. The decision to draw the final breath would incapacitate him. He would feel worse\u2014and probably continue alive instead, from sheer inability to make his mind up. In all circumstances, owing to his calling doubtless, he preferred to hedge. If Mrs. Horton asked for celery, he would intimate \"I'll have a look.\" When Daddy enquired how the asparagus was doing, he obtained for reply, \"Won't you come and see it for yourself, sir?\" Upon Mother's anxious enquiry if there would be enough strawberries for the School Treat, WEEDEN stated \"It's been a grand year for the berries, mum.\" Then, just when she felt relieved, he added, \"on the 'ole.\"\n\nFor the children, therefore, the Gardener was a man of mystery and power, and when they saw his figure in the distance, their imagination leaped forward with their bodies, and WEEDEN stood wrapped in a glory he little guessed. He was bent double, digging (as usual in his spare time) for truffles beneath the beech trees. These mysterious delicacies with the awkward name he never found, but he liked looking for them.\n\nAt first he was so intent upon his endless quest that he did not hear the approach of footsteps.\n\n\"No hurry,\" said the Tramp, as they collected round the stooping figure and held their feathers up to warn his back. For the wandering eye had a way of seeing what went on behind him. An empty sack, waiting for the truffles, lay beside him. He looked like an untidy parcel, so he was not in his Sunday clothes.\n\nAt the sound of voices he straightened slowly and looked round. He seemed pleased with everything, judging by the expression of his eye, yet doubtful of immediate success.\n\n\"Good mornin',\" he said, touching his speckled cap to the authorities.\n\n\"Found any?\" enquired Uncle Felix, sympathetically.\n\n\"It seems a likely spot, maybe,\" was the reply. \"I'm looking.\" And he closed the mouth of the sack with his foot lest they should see its emptiness.\n\nBut the use of the verb set the children off at once.\n\n\"I say,\" Tim exploded eagerly, \"we're looking too\u2014for somebody who's hiding. Have you seen any one?\"\n\n\"Some one very wonderful?\" said Judy. \"Has he passed this way? It's Hide-and-Seek, you know.\"\n\nWEEDEN looked more mysterious at once. It was strange how a one-eyed face could express so big a meaning. He scratched his head and smiled.\n\n\"All my flowers and vegitubles is a-growin' nicely,\" he said at length. \"It is a lovely mornin' for a game.\" His eye closed and opened. The answer was more direct than usual. It meant volumes. WEEDEN was in the know. They felt him somehow related to their leader\u2014a kind of organised and regulated tramp.\n\n\"You have seen him, then?\" cried Judy.\n\n\"With your gone eye!\" exclaimed Tim. \"Which way? And what signs have you got?\"\n\n\"Flowers, beetles, snail-shells, caterpillars\u2014anything beautiful is a sign, you know,\" went on Judy, breathlessly.\n\n\"Deep, tender, kind and beautiful,\" interposed the Tramp, laying the accent significantly on the first adjective, as if for Weeden's special benefit.\n\nWEEDEN looked up. \"Sounds like my garden things,\" he said darkly, more to himself than to the others. He gazed down into the hole he had been digging. The moist earth glistened in the sunlight. He sniffed the sweet, rich odour of it, and scratched his head in the same spot as before\u2014just beneath the peak of his speckled cap. His nose wrinkled up. Then he looked again into the faces, turning his single eye slowly upon each in turn. The Tramp's remark had reached his cautious brain.\n\n\"There's no sayin' where anybody sich as you describe him to be might hide hisself a day like this,\" he observed deliberately, his optic ranging the sunny landscape with approval. \"I never saw sich a beautiful day before\u2014not like to-day. It's endless sort of. Seems to me as if I'd been at this 'ole for weeks.\"\n\nHe paused. The others waited. WEEDEN was going to say something real any moment now, they felt.\n\n\"No hurry,\" the Tramp reminded him. \"Everything's light and careless, and so are we. There is no longer any Time\u2014to lose.\"\n\nHis voice half sang, half chanted in the slow, windy way he had, and the Gardener looked up as if a falling apple had struck him on the head. He shifted from one leg to the other; he seemed excited, moved. His single eye was opened\u2014to the sun. He looked as if his body was full of light.\n\n\"You was the singer, was you?\" he asked wonderingly, the tone low and quiet. \"It was you I heard a-singin'\u2014jest as dawn broke!\" He scratched his head again. \"And me thinkin' all the time it was a bird!\" he added to himself.\n\nThe Tramp said nothing.\n\nWEEDEN then resumed his ordinary manner; he went on speaking as before. But obviously\u2014somewhere deep down inside himself\u2014he had come to a big decision.\n\n\"Gettin' nearer and nearer,\" he resumed his former conversation exactly where he had left it off, \"but never near enough to get disappointed\u2014ain't it? When you gets to the end of anything, you see, it's over. And that's a pity.\"\n\nUncle Felix glanced at Stumper; Stumper glanced down at the end of his \"wooden\" leg; the Tramp still said nothing, smiling in his beard, now combed out much smoother than before.\n\n\"It comes to this,\" said Weeden, \"my way of thinkin' at least.\" He scratched wisdom from another corner of his head. \"There's a lot of 'iding goin' on, no question about that; and the great thing is\u2014my way of thinkin' at any rate\u2014is\u2014jest to keep on lookin'.\"\n\nThe children met him eagerly at this point, using two favourite words that Aunt Emily strongly disapproved of: \"deslidedly,\" said one; \"distinkly,\" exclaimed the other.\n\n\"That's it,\" continued WEEDEN, pulling down his cap to hide, perhaps, the spot where wisdom would leak out. \"And, talking of signs, I say\u2014find out yer own pertickler sign, then follow it blindly\u2014till the end.\"\n\nHe straightened up and looked with an air of respectful candour at the others. The decision of his statement delighted them. The children felt something of awe in it. Something of their Leader's knowledge evidently was in him.\n\n\"Miss Judy, she gets 'er signs from the air,\" he said, as no one spoke. \"Master Tim goes poking along the ground, looking for something with his feet. He feels best that way, feels the earth\u2014things a-growin' up or things wot go down into 'oles. Colonel Stumper\u2014and no offence to you, sir\u2014chooses dark places where the sun forgets to shine\u2014\"\n\n\"Dangerous, jungly places,\" whispered Tim, admiringly.\n\n\"And Mr. Felix\u2014\" he hesitated. Uncle Felix's easiest way of searching seemed to puzzle him. \"Mr. Felix,\" he went on at length, \"jest messes about all over the place at once, because 'e sees signs everywhere and don't know what to foller in partickler for fear of losin' hisself.\"\n\nCome-Back Stumper chuckled audibly, but Uncle Felix asked at once\u2014\"And you, WEEDEN? What about yourself, I wonder?\"\n\nThe Gardener replied without his usual hesitation. It was probably the most direct reply he had ever made. No one could guess how much it cost him. \"Underground,\" he said. \"My signs lies underground, sir. Where the rain-drops 'ides theirselves on getting down and the grubs keeps secret till they feel their wings. Where the potatoes and the reddishes is,\" he added, touching his cap with a respectful finger. He went on with a hint of yearning in his tone that made it tremble slightly: \"If I could find igsackly where and 'ow the potatoes gets big down there\"\u2014he pointed to the earth\u2014\"or how my roses get colour out of the dirt\u2014I'd know it, wouldn't I, sir? I'd\u2014'ave him, fair!\"\n\nThe effort exhausted him, it seemed. So deeply was he moved that he had almost gone contrary to his own nature in making such an explicit statement. But he had said something very real at last. It was clear that he was distinctly in the know. Living among natural growing things, he was in touch with life in a deeper sense than they were.\n\n\"And me?\" the Tramp mentioned lightly, smiling at his companion of the outdoor life. \"Don't leave me out, please. I'm looking like the rest of you.\"\n\nWEEDEN turned round and gazed at him. He wore a strange expression that had respect in it, but something more than mere respect. There was a touch of wonder in his eye, a hint of worship almost. But he did not answer; no word escaped his lips. Instead of speaking he moved up nearer; he took three cautious steps, then halted close beside the great burly figure that formed the centre of the little group.\n\nAnd then he did a curious and significant little act; he held out both his hands against him as a man might hold out his hands to warm them before a warm and comforting grate of blazing coals.\n\n\"Fire,\" he said; then added, \"and I'm much obliged to you.\"\n\nHe wore a proud and satisfied air, grateful and happy too. He put his cap straight, picked up his spade, and prepared without another word to go on digging for truffles where apparently none existed. He seemed quite content with\u2014looking.\n\nA pause followed, broken presently by Tim: a whisper addressed to all.\n\n\"He never finds any. That shows how real it is.\"\n\n\"They're somewhere, though,\" observed Judy.\n\nThey stood and watched the spade; it went in with a crunching sound; it came out slowly with a sort of \"pouf,\" and a load of rich, black earth slid off it into the world of sunshine. It went in again, it came out again; the rhythm of the movement caught them. How long they watched it no one knew, and no one cared to know: it might have been a moment, it may have been a year or two; so utterly had hurry vanished out of life it seemed to them they stood and watched for ever\u2026when they became aware of a curious sensation, as though they felt the whole earth turning with them. They were moving, surely. Something to which they belonged, of which they formed a part\u2014was moving. A windy voice was singing just in front of them. They looked up. The words were inaudible, but they knew it was a bit of the same old song that every one seemed singing everywhere as though the Day itself were singing.\n\nThe Tramp was going on.\n\n\"Hark!\" said Tim. \"The birds are singing. Let's go on and look.\"\n\n\"The world is wild with laughter,\" Judy cried, snatching the words from the air about her. \"We can fly\u2014\" She darted after him.\n\n\"Among the imprisoned hours as we choose,\" boomed the voice of Uncle Felix, as he followed, rolling in behind her.\n\n\"We can play,\" growled Stumper, hobbling next in the line. \"My life has just begun.\"\n\nTheir Leader waited till they all came up with him. They caught him up, gathering about him like things that settled on a sunny bush. It almost seemed they were one single person growing from the earth and air and water. The Tramp glowed there between them like a heart of burning fire.\n\n\"He ought to be with us, too,\" said Judy, looking back.\n\n\"No hurry,\" replied the Tramp. \"Let him be; he's following his sign.\n\nWhen he's ready, he'll come along. It's a lovely day.\"\n\nThey moved with the rhythm of a flock of happy birds across the field of yellow flowers, singing in chorus something or other about an \"extra day.\" A hundred years flowed over them, or else a single instant. It mattered not. They took no heed, at any rate. It was so enormous that they lost themselves, and yet so tiny that they held it between a finger and a thumb. The important thing was\u2014that they were getting warmer.\n\nThen Judy suddenly nudged Tim, and Tim nudged Uncle Felix, and Uncle Felix dug his elbow into Come-Back Stumper, and Stumper somehow or other caught the attention of the Tramp\u2014a sort of panting sound, half-whistle and half-gasp. They paused and looked behind them.\n\n\"He's ready,\" remarked their Leader, with a laughing chuckle in his beard. \"He's coming on!\"\n\nWEEDEN, sure enough, had quietly shouldered his shovel and empty sack, and was making after them, singing as he came. Judy was on the point of saying to her brother, \"Good thing Aunt Emily isn't here!\" when she caught a look in his eyes that stopped her dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 216", + "text": "\"My dear!\" he exclaimed in his tone of big discovery.\n\nJudy made a movement like a swan that inspects the world behind its back. She tried to look everywhere at once. It seemed she did so.\n\n\"Gracious me!\" she cried. She instinctively chose prohibited words. \"My gracious me!\"\n\nFor the places of the world had marvellously shifted and run into one another somehow. A place called \"Somewhere Else\" was close about her; and standing in the middle of it was\u2014a figure. Both place and figure ought to have been somewhere else by rights. Judy's surprise, however, was quite momentary; swift, bird-like understanding followed it. Place was a sham and humbug really; already, without leaving the schoolroom carpet, she and Tim had been to the Metropolis and even to the East. This was merely another of these things she didn't know she knew; she understood another thing she didn't understand. She believed.\n\nThe rest of the party had disappeared inside the wood; only Tim remained\u2014pointing at this figure outlined against the trees. But these trees belonged to a place her physical eyes had never seen. Perhaps they were part of her mental picture of it. The figure, anyhow, barred the way.\n\nIt was a woman, the last person in the world they wished to see just then. The face, wearing an expression as though it tried to be happy when it felt it ought not to be, was pointed; chin, ears, and eye-brows pointed; nose pointed too\u2014round doors and into corners\u2014an elastic nose; there was a look of struggling sweetness about the thin, tight lips; the entire expression, from the colourless eyes down to the tip of the decided chin, was one of marked reproach and disapproval that at the same time fought with an effort to be understanding, gentle, wise. The face wanted to be very nice, but was prevented by itself. It was pathetic. Its owner was dressed in black, a small, neat bonnet fastened carefully on the head, an umbrella in one hand, and big goloshes on both feet. There were gold glasses balanced on the nose. She smiled at them, but with a smile that prophesied rebuke. Before she spoke a word, her entire person said distinctly NO.\n\n\"Bother!\" Tim muttered beneath his breath, then added, \"It's her!\" Already he felt guilty\u2014of something he had not done, but might do presently. The figure's mere presence invited him to break all rules.\n\n\"We thought,\" exclaimed Judy, trying to remember what rules she had just disobeyed, and almost saying \"hoped,\"\u2014\"we thought you were at Tunbridge Wells.\" Then with an effort she put in \"Aunty.\"\n\nYet about the new arrival was a certain flustered and uneasy air, as though she were caught in something that she wished to hide\u2014at any rate something she would not willingly confess to. One hand, it was noticed, she kept stiffly behind her back.\n\n\"Children,\" she uttered in an emphatic voice, half-surprised remonstrance, half-automatic rebuke; \"I am astonished!\" She looked it. She pursed her lips more tightly, and gazed at the pair of culprits as though she had hoped better things of them and again had been disappointed. \"You know quite well that this is out of bounds.\" It came out like an arrow, darting.\n\n\"We were looking for some one,\" began Tim, but in a tone that added plainly enough \"it wasn't you.\"\n\n\"Who's hiding, you see,\" quoth Judy, \"but expecting us\u2014at once.\" The delay annoyed her.\n\n\"You are both well aware,\" Aunt Emily went on, ignoring their excuses as in duty bound, \"that your parents would not approve. At this hour of the morning too! You ought to be fast asleep in bed. If your father knew\u2014!\"\n\nYet, strange to say, the children felt that they loved her suddenly; for the first time in their lives they thought her lovable. A kind of understanding sympathy woke in them; there was something pitiable about her. For, obviously, she was looking just as they were, but looking in such a silly way and in such hopelessly stupid places. All her life she had been looking like this, dressed in crackling black, wearing a prickly bonnet and heavy goloshes, and carrying a useless umbrella that of course must bother her. It was disappointment that made her talk as she did. But it was natural she should feel disappointment, for it never rained when she had her umbrella, and her goloshes were always coming off.\n\n\"She's stuck in a hole,\" thought Tim, \"and so she just says things at us. She hurts herself somewhere. She's tired.\"\n\n\"She has to be like that,\" thought Judy. \"It's really all pretending.\n\nPoor old thing!\"\n\nBut Aunt Emily was not aware of what they felt. They were out of bed, and it was her duty to find fault; they were out of bounds, and she must take note of it. So she prepared to scold a little. Her bonnet waggled ominously. She gripped her umbrella. She spoke as though it was very early in the morning, almost dawn\u2014as though the sun were rising. There was confusion in her as to the time of day, it seemed. But the children did not notice this. They were so accustomed to being rebuked by her that the actual words made small impression. She was just \"saying things\"; they were often very muddled things; the attitude, not the meaning, counted. And her attitude, they divined, was subtly different.\n\n\"You know this is forbidden,\" she said. \"It is damp and chilly. It's sure to rain presently. You'll get your feet wet. You should keep to the gravel paths. They're plain enough, are they not?\" She looked about her, sniffing\u2014a sniff that usually summoned disasters in a flock.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Tim; \"and they look like brown sugar, we thought.\"\n\n\"It does not matter what you thought, Timothy. The paths are made on purpose to be walked upon and used\u2014\"\n\n\"They're beautifully made,\" interrupted Judy, unable to keep silent longer. \"WEEDEN made them for us.\"\n\n\"And we've used them all,\" exclaimed Tim, \"only we came to an end of them. We've done with them\u2014paths!\" The way he uttered the substantives made it instantly sound ridiculous.\n\nAunt Emily opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again without saying it. She stared at them instead. They watched her. All fear of her had left their hearts. A new expression rose struggling upon her pointed features. She fidgeted from one foot to the other. They felt her as \"Aunty,\" a poor old muddled thing, always looking in ridiculous places without the smallest notion she was wrong. Tim saw her suddenly \"all dressed up on purpose\" as for a game. Judy thought \"She's bubbling inside\u2014really.\"\n\n\"There's WEEDEN in there,\" Tim mentioned, pointing to the wood behind her.\n\nSomething uncommonly like a smile passed into Aunt Emily's eyes, then vanished as suddenly as it came. Judy thought it was like a bubble that burst the instant it reached the sunlight on the surface of a pond.\n\n\"And how often,\" came the rebuke, automatically rather, \"has your Mother told you not to be familiar with the Gardener? Play if you want to, but do not play with your inferiors. Play with your Uncle Felix, with Colonel Stumper, or with me\u2014\"\n\nAnother bubble had risen, caught the sunshine, reflected all the colours of the prism, then burst and vanished into airy spray.\n\n\"But they're looking with us,\" Tim insisted eagerly. \"We're all looking together for something\u2014Uncle Felix, Come-Back Stumper, everybody. It's wonderful. It never ends.\"\n\nAunt Emily's hand, still clutching the umbrella, stole up and put her bonnet straight. It was done to gain a little time apparently. There was a certain hesitation in her. She seemed puzzled. She betrayed excitement too.\n\n\"Looking, are you?\" she exclaimed, and her voice held a touch of mellowness that was new. \"Looking!\"\n\nShe stopped. She tried to hide the mellowness by swallowing it.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Tim. \"There's some one hiding. It's Hide-and-Seek, you see.\n\nWe're the seekers. It's enormous.\"\n\n\"Will you come with us and look too?\" suggested Judy simply. Then while Aunt Emily's lips framed themselves as from long habit into a negative or a reprimand, the child continued before either reached delivery: \"There are heaps of signs about; anything lovely or beautiful is a sign\u2014a sign that we're getting warm. We've each got ours. Mine's air. What's yours, Aunty?\"\n\nAunt Emily stared at them; her bewilderment increased apparently; she swallowed hard again. The children returned her stare, gazing innocently into her questioning eyes as if she were some strange bird at the Zoo. The new feeling of kinship with her grew stronger in their hearts. They knew quite well she was looking just as they were; really she longed to play their game of Hide-and-Seek. She was very ignorant, of course, they saw, but they were ready and willing to teach her how to play, and would make it easy for her into the bargain.\n\n\"Signs!\" she repeated, in a voice that was gentler than they had ever known it. There was almost a sound of youth in it. Judy suddenly realised that Aunt Emily had once been a girl. A softer look shone in the colourless eyes. The lips relaxed. In a hat she might have been even pretty. No one in a bonnet could be jolly. \"Signs!\" she repeated; \"deep and beautiful! Whatever in the world\u2014?\"\n\nShe stopped abruptly, started by the exquisite trilling of a bird that was perched upon a branch quite close behind her. The liquid notes poured out in a stream of music, so rich, so lovely that it seemed as if no bird had ever sung before and that they were the first persons in the world who had ever heard it.\n\n\"My sign!\" cried Judy, dancing round her disconcerted and bewildered relative. \"One of my signs\u2014that!\"\n\n\"Mine is rabbits and rats and badgers,\" Tim called out with ungrammatical emphasis. \"Anything that likes the earth are mine.\" He looked about him as if to point one out to her. \"They're everywhere, all over the place,\" he added, seeing none at the moment. \"Aunty, what's yours? Do tell us, because then we can go and look together.\"\n\n\"It's much more fun than looking alone,\" declared Judy.\n\nNo answer came. But, caught by the astounding magic of the singing bird, Aunt Emily had turned, and in doing so the hand behind her back became visible for the first time since their meeting. The children saw it simultaneously. They nudged each other, but they said no word. The same moment, having failed to discover the bird, Aunt Emily turned back again. She looked caught, they thought. But, also she looked as if she had found something herself. The secret joy she tried to hide from them by swallowing it, rose to her wrinkled cheeks and shone in both her eyes, then overflowed and rippled down towards her trembling mouth. The lips were trembling. She smiled, but so softly, sweetly, that ten years dropped from her like a dissolving shadow. And the hand she had so long kept hidden behind her back stole forth slowly into view.\n\n\"How did you guess that I was looking for anything?\" she inquired plaintively in an excited yet tremulous tone. \"I thought no one knew it.\" She seemed genuinely surprised, yet unbelievably happy too. A great sigh of relief escaped her.\n\n\"We're all the same,\" one of them informed her; \"so you are too! Everybody's looking.\" And they crowded round to examine the objects in her hand\u2014a dirty earth-stained trowel and a fern. They knew she collected ferns on the sly, but never before had they seen her bring home such a prize. Usually she found only crumpled things like old bits of wrinkled brown paper which she called \"specimens.\" This one was marvellously beautiful. It had a dainty, slender stalk of ebony black, and its hundred tiny leaves quivered like a shower of green water-drops in the air. There was actual joy in every trembling bit of it.\n\n\"That's my sign,\" announced Aunt Emily with pride: \"Maidenhair! It'll grow again. I've got the roots.\" And she said it as triumphantly as Stumper had said \"snail-shell.\"\n\n\"Of course, Aunty,\" Judy cried, yet doubtfully. \"You ought to know.\" She twiddled it round in her fingers till the quivering fronds emitted a tiny sound. \"And you can use it as a feather too.\" She lowered her head to listen.\n\n\"We've each got a feather,\" mentioned Tim. \"It's a compass. Shows the way, you know. You hear him calling\u2014that way.\"\n\n\"The Tramp explained that,\" Judy added. \"He's Leader. Come on, Aunty. We ought to be off; the others went ages ago. We're going to the End of the World, and they've already started.\"\n\nFor a moment Aunt Emily looked as rigid as the post beside a five-barred gate. The old unbending attitude took possession of her once again. Her eyes took on the tint of soapy water. Her elastic nose looked round the corner. She frowned. Her black dress crackled. The mention of a tramp and the End of the World woke all her savage educational instincts visibly.\n\n\"He's a singing tramp and shines like a Christmas Tree,\" explained Judy, \"and he looks like everybody in the world. He's extror'iny.\" She turned to her brother. \"Doesn't he, Tim?\"\n\nTim ran up and caught his Aunt by the umbrella hand. He saw her stiffening. He meant to prevent it if he could.\n\n\"Everybody rolled into one,\" he agreed eagerly; \"Daddy and Mother and the Clergyman and you.\"\n\n\"And me?\" she asked tremulously.\n\n\"Rather!\" the boy said vehemently; \"as you are now, all rabbity and nice.\"\n\nAunt Emily slowly removed one big golosh, then waited.\n\n\"Cleaned up and young,\" cried Judy, \"and smells delicious\u2014like flowers and hay\u2014\"\n\n\"And soft and warm\u2014\"\n\n\"And sings and dances\u2014\"\n\n\"And is positive that if we go on looking we shall find\u2014exactly what we're looking for.\"\n\nAunt Emily removed the other golosh\u2014a shade more quickly than the first one. She kicked it off. The stiffness melted out of her; she smiled again.\n\n\"Well,\" she began\u2014when Judy stood on tip-toe and whispered in her ear some magic sentence.\n\n\"Dawn!\" Aunt Emily whispered back. \"At dawn\u2014when the birds begin to sing!\"\n\nSomething had caught her heart and squeezed it.\n\nTim and Judy nodded vehemently in agreement. Aunt Emily dropped her umbrella then. And at the same moment a singing voice became audible in the trees behind them. The song came floating to them through the sunlight with a sound of wind and birds. It had a marvellous quality, very sweet and very moving. There was a lilt in it, a laughing, happy lilt, as though the Earth herself were singing of the Spring.\n\nAnd Aunt Emily made one last vain attempt: she struggled to put her fingers in her ears. But the children held her hands. She crackled and made various oppressive and objecting sounds, but the song poured into her in spite of all her efforts. Her feet began to move upon the grass. It was awful, it was shocking, it was forbidden and against all rules and regulations: yet\u2014Aunt Emily danced!\n\nAnd a thin, plaintive voice, like the voice of her long-forgotten youth, slipped out between her faded lips\u2014and positively sang:\n\n\"The world is young with laughter; we can fly Among the imprisoned hours as we choose\u2026.\"\n\nBut to Tim and Judy it all seemed merely right and natural.\n\n\"Come on,\" cried the boy, pulling his Aunt towards the wood.\n\n\"We can look together now. You've got your sign,\" exclaimed Judy, tugging at her other hand. \"Everything's free and careless, and so are we.\"\n\n\"Aim for a path,\" Tim shouted by way of a concession. \"Aunty'll go quicker on a path.\"\n\nBut Aunty was nothing if not decided. \"I know a short-cut,\" she sang.\n\n\"Paths are for people who don't know the way. There's no time\u2014to lose.\n\nDear me! I'm warm already!\" She dropped her umbrella.\n\nAnd, actually dancing and singing, she led the way into the wood, holding the fern before her like a wand, and happy as a girl let out of school.\n\nBut as they went, Judy, knowing suddenly another thing she didn't know, made a discovery of her own, an immense discovery. It was bigger than anything Tim had ever found. She felt so light and swift and winged by it that she seemed almost to melt into the air herself.\n\n\"I say, Tim,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe took her eyes from the sky to see what her feet were doing; Tim lifted his from the earth to see what was going on above him in the air.\n\nJudy went on: \"I know what,\" she announced.\n\n\"What?\" He was not particularly interested, it seemed.\n\nJudy paused. She dropped a little behind her dancing Aunt. Tim joined her. It all happened as quickly as a man might snap his fingers; Aunt Emily, her heart full of growing ferns, noticed nothing.\n\n\"We've found her out!\" whispered Judy, communicating her immense discovery. \"What she really is, I mean!\"\n\nHe agreed and nodded. It did not strike him as anything wonderful or special. \"Oh, yes,\" he answered; \"rather!\" He did not grasp her meaning, perhaps.\n\nBut his sister was bursting with excitement, radiant, shivering almost with the wonder of it.\n\n\"But don't you see? It's\u2014a sign!\" she exclaimed so loud that Aunt Emily almost heard it. \"She's found herself! She was hiding\u2014from herself. That's part of it all\u2014the game. It's the biggest sign of all!\"\n\nShe was so \"warm\" that she burned all over.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" repeated Tim. \"I see!\" But he was not particularly impressed. He merely wanted his Aunt to find an enormous fern whose roots were growing in the sweet, sticky earth he loved. Her sign was a fern; his was the ground. It made him understand Aunt Emily at last, and therefore love her; he saw no further than that.\n\nJudy, however, knew. She suddenly understood what the Tramp meant by \"deep.\" She also knew now why Stumper, WEEDEN, Uncle Felix too, looked at him so strangely, with wonder, with respect, with love. Something about the Tramp explained each one to himself. Each one found\u2014himself. And she\u2014without realising it before, had acquired this power too, though only in a small degree as yet. The Tramp believed in everybody; she, without knowing it, believed in her Aunt. It was another thing she didn't know she knew.\n\nAnd the real, long-buried, deeply-hidden Aunt Emily had emerged accordingly. All her life she had been hiding\u2014from herself. She had found herself at last. It was the biggest sign of all.\n\nTim caught her hand and dragged her after him. \"Come on,\" he cried, \"we're getting frightfully warm. Look at Aunty! Listen, will you?\"\n\nAunt Emily, a little way in front of them, was digging busily with her dirty trowel. Her bonnet was crooked, her skirts tucked up, her white worsted stockings splashed with mud, her elastic-sided boots scratched and plastered. And she was singing to herself in a thin but happy voice that was not unlike an old and throaty corncrake: \"The birds are singing\u2026.Hark! Come out and play\u2026.Life is an endless search\u2026.I've just begun\u2026!\"\n\nThey listened for a little while, and then ran headlong up to join her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 217", + "text": "And it was somewhere about here and now\u2014the exact spot impossible to determine, since it was obviously a circular experience without beginning, middle or end\u2014that the gigantic character of the Day declared itself in all its marvellous simplicity. For as they dived deeper and deeper towards its centre, they discovered that its centre, being everywhere at once, existed\u2014nowhere. The sun was always rising\u2014somewhere.\n\nIn other words, each seeker grasped, in his or her own separate way, that the Splendour hiding from them lay actually both too near and far away for any individual eye to see it with completeness. Someone, indeed, had come; but this Someone, as Judy told herself, was \"simply all over the place.\" To see him \"distinkly is an awful job,\" according to Uncle Felix; or as Come-Back Stumper realised in the middle of another clump of bramble bushes, \"Perspective is necessary to proper vision.\" \"He\" lay too close before their eyes to be discovered fully. Tim had long ago described it instinctively as \"an enormous hide,\" but it was more than that; it was a universal hide.\n\nAlone, perhaps, Weeden's lost optic, wandering ubiquitously and enjoying the bird's-eye view, possessed the coveted power. But, like the stars, though somewhat about, it was invisible. WEEDEN made no reference to it. He attended to one thing at a time, he lived in the present; one eye was gone; he just looked for truffles\u2014with the other.\n\nYet this did not damp their ardour in the least; increased it rather: the gathering of the clues became more and more absorbing. Though not seen, the hider was both known and felt; his presence was a certainty. There was no real contradiction.\n\nFor signs grew and multiplied till the entire world seemed overflowing with them, and hardly could the earth contain them. They brimmed the sunny air, flooded the ponds and streams, lay thick upon the fields, and almost choked the woods to stillness. They trickled out, leaked through, dripped over everywhere in colour, shape, and sound. The hider had passed everywhere, and upon everything had left his exquisite and deathless traces. The inanimate, as well as the animate world had known the various touch of his great passing. His trail had blazed the entire earth about them. For the very clouds were dipped in snow and gold, and the meanest pebble in the lane wore a self-conscious gleam of shining silver. So-called domestic creatures also seemed aware that a stupendous hiding-place was somewhere near\u2014the browsing cow, contented and at ease, the horse that nuzzled their hands across the gate, the very pigs, grubbing eternally for food, yet eternally unsatisfied; all these, this endless morning, wore an unaccustomed look as though they knew, and so were glad to be alive. Some knew more than others, of course. The cat, for instance, defending its kittens single-pawed against the stable-dog who pretended to be ferocious; the busy father-blackbird, passing worms to his mate for the featherless mites, all beak and clamour in the nest; the Clouded Yellow, sharing a spray of honeysuckle with a Bumble-bee, and the honeysuckle offering no resistance\u2014one and all, they also were aware in their differing degrees. And the seekers, noting the signs, grew warmer and ever warmer. An ordinary day these signs, owing to their generous profusion, might have called for no remark. They would, probably, have drawn no attention to themselves, merely lying about unnoticed, undiscovered because familiar. But this was not an ordinary day. It was unused, unspoilt and unrecorded. It was the Some Day of humanity's long dream\u2014an Extra Day. Time could not carry it away; it could not end; all it contained was of eternity. The great hider at the heart of it was real. These signs\u2014deep, tender, kind and beautiful\u2014were part of him, and in knowing, recognising them, they knew and recognised him too. They drew near, that is, brushed up closer, to his hiding-place from which he saw them. They approached within knowing distance of a Reality that each in his or her particular way had always yearned for. They held\u2014oh, distinkly held\u2014that they were winning. They won the marvellous game as soon as it began. They never had a doubt about the end.\n\nBut their supreme, superb discovery was this: They had always secretly longed to find the elusive hider; they now realised that he\u2014wanted them to find him, and that from his hiding-place he saw them easily. That was the most wonderful thing of all\u2026.\n\nTo describe the separate adventures of each seeker would involve a series of bulky trilogies no bookshelves in the world could carry; they can, besides, be adequately told in three simple words that Tim used\u2014shouted with intense enthusiasm when he tripped over a rabbit-hole and tumbled headlong against that everlasting Tramp: \"I'm still looking!\" He dived away into another hole. \"I'm looking still.\" \"So am I,\" the Tramp answered, also in three words. \"I'm very warm,\" growled Stumper; \"I'm getting on,\" Aunt Emily piped; and while Judy was for ever shouting out \"I've found him!\" Uncle Felix, puffing and panting, could only repeat with rapture each time he met another seeker: \"A lovely day! A lovely day!\" They said so little\u2014experienced and felt so much!\n\nFrom time to time, too, others joined them in the tremendous game. It seemed the personality of the Tramp attracted them. Something about him\u2014his sincerity, perhaps, or his simplicity\u2014made them realise suddenly what they were about: as though they had not noticed it before, not understood it quite, at any rate. They found themselves. He did and said so little. But he possessed the unique quality of a Leader\u2014natural persuasion.\n\nThompson, for instance, cleaning the silver at the pantry window, looked up and saw them pass. They caught him unawares. His pompous manner hung like a discarded mask on a nail beside his livery. He wore his black and white striped waistcoat, and an apron. Of course he looked proper, as an old family servant ought to look, but he looked cheerful too. He was humming to himself as he polished up the covers and the candelabra.\n\n\"Well, I never!\" he exclaimed, as the line of them filed by. \"I never did. And Mr. Weeden with 'em too!\"\n\nThe Tramp passed singing and looked through the open window at the butler. No more than that. Their eyes met between the bars. They exchanged glances. But something incalculable happened in that instant, just as it had happened to Stumper, Aunt Emily, and the rest of them. Thompson put several questions into his look of sheer astonishment.\n\n\"Why not?\" the Tramp replied, chuckling as he caught the butler's eye.\n\n\"It's a lovely morning. We're just looking!\"\n\nThompson was flabbergasted\u2014as if all the old-fashioned families of the world had suddenly praised him. All his life he had never done anything but his ordinary duty.\n\n\"It's 'oliday time,\" said Weeden, coming next, \"and all my flowers and vegitubles is a-growin' nicely.\" He too seemed singing, dancing. Something had happened. The whole world seemed out and playing.\n\nThompson forgot himself in a most unusual way, forgot that he was an old family servant, that the apron-string met round his middle with difficulty, that the Authorities were away and his responsibilities increased thereby; forgot too, that for twenty years he had been answering bells, over-hearing conversations without pretending to do so, and that visitors wanted hot water and early tea at \"7:30 sharp.\" He remembered suddenly that he was a man\u2014and that he was very fond of some one. The birds were singing, the sun was shining, the flowers were out upon the lawn, and it was Spring.\n\nAn amazing longing in him woke and stirred to life. There was a singular itching in his feet. Something in his butler-heart began to purr. \"Looking, eh!\" he thought. \"There's something I've been looking for too. I'd forgot about it.\"\n\n\"No one can make the silver shine as I can,\" he mumbled, watching the retreating figures, \"but it is about finished now,\"\u2014he glanced down at it with pride\u2014\"and fit to set on the table. Why shouldn't I take a turn in the garden too?\"\n\nHe looked out a moment. The magic of the spring came upon him suddenly like a revelation. He knew he was alive, that there was something he wanted somewhere, something real and satisfying\u2014if only he could find it\u2014find out what it was. For twenty years he had been living automatically. Alfred Thompson suddenly felt free and careless. The butler\u2014yearned!\n\nHe hesitated, gave the dish-cover an extra polish, then called through the door to Mrs. Horton:\n\n\"There's a tramp in the garden, Bridget, and Mr. Weeden's with him. Mr.\n\nFelix is halso taking the air, and Master Tim\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped, hearing a step in the pantry. Mrs. Horton stood behind him with a shawl about her shoulders. Her red face was smiling.\n\n\"Alfred, let's go out and take a look,\" she said. \"Mary can see to the shepherd's-pie. I've been as quick as I could,\" she added, as if excusing herself. Moreover, she said distinctly, \"shepherd's-poie.\"\n\n\"I haven't been 'calling,'\" replied the butler, \"except only just now\u2014just this minute.\" He spoke as though he was being scolded for not answering a bell. But he cast an admiring glance, half wild, half reckless, at the cook.\n\n\"An' you shouting to me to come this last 'arf hour and more!\" cried Mrs. Horton. She, too, apparently, was in a \"state.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken, Bridget, I have been singing, as I often do when attending to the silver, but as for\u2014\"\n\n\"You can do without a hat,\" she interrupted. \"Come on! I want to go and look for\u2014for\u2014\" She broke off, taking his arm as though they were going down the Strand or Oxford Street. Her red face beamed. She looked very proud and happy. She wanted to look for something too, but she could not believe the moment had really come. She had put it away so long\u2014like a special dish in a cupboard.\n\n\"I don't know what's come over me,\" she went on very confidentially, as she moved beside him through the scullery door, \"but\u2014but I don't feel satisfied\u2014not satisfied with meself as I used to be.\"\n\n\"No, Bridget?\" It was in his best \"7:30\" manner. There was a struggle in him.\n\n\"No,\" said Mrs. Horton, with decision. \"I give satisfaction\u2014that I know\u2014\"\n\n\"We both do that,\" said Thompson proudly. \"And no one can do a suet pudding to a turn as you can. Only the other day I heard Sir William a-speaking of it\u2014\"\n\nShe held his arm more tightly. They were on the lawn by now. The flood of sunlight caught them, showed up the worn and shabby places in his suit of broadcloth, gleamed on her bursting shoes she \"fancied\" for her kitchen work. They heard the birds, they smelt the flowers, the air bathed them all over like a sea.\n\n\"And the silver, Alfred,\" she said in a lower tone. \"Who in the world can make it look as you do? But what I've been feeling lately\u2014since this morning, that is to say\u2014and feeling for the first time in me life, so to speak\u2014\"\n\n\"Bridget, dear, you've got it!\" he interrupted with excitement, \"I've felt it too. Felt it this morning first, when I woke up and remembered that nobody wanted hot-water nor early tea, and I said to myself, 'There's more than that in it. I'm not doing all this just only for a salary. I'm doing it for something else. What is it?'\"\n\nHe spoke very rapidly for a butler. He looked down at her red and smiling face.\n\n\"What is it?\" he repeated, curiously moved.\n\nShe looked up at him without a word.\n\n\"It's something 'idden,\" he said, after a pause. \"That's what it is.\"\n\n\"That's it,\" agreed Mrs. Horton. \"Like a recipe.\"\n\nThere was another pause. The butler broke it. They stood together in the middle of the field, flowers and birds and sunshine all about them.\n\n\"A mystery\u2014inside of us,\" he said, \"I think\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, Alfred,\" the cook murmured softly.\n\n\"I think,\" he continued, \"it's a song and dance we want. A little life.\" He broke off abruptly, noticing the sudden movement of her bursting shoes. She took a long step forwards, then sideways. She opened her arms to the air and sun. She almost pirouetted.\n\n\"Life!\" she cried, \"'ot and fiery. Life! That's it. Hark, Alfred, d'ye hear that singing far away?\" She felt the Irish break out of her. \"Listen!\" she cried, trying to drag him faster. \"Listen, will ye? It makes me wild entirely! Give me yer hand! Come on and dance wid me! It's in me hearrt I feel it, in me blood. To the devil with me suet puddings and shepherd-poies\u2014that singing's real, that's loife, that's lovely as a dhream! It's what I've been looking for iver since I can remember. I've got it!\"\n\nAnd Thompson felt himself spinning through the air. Old families were forgotten. The world was young with laughter. They could fly. They did.\n\nThe silver was beautifully cleaned. He had earned his holiday.\n\n\"That singing!\" he gasped, feeling his heart grow big. He followed her across the flowered world. \"I believe it is a bird! It would not surprise me to be told\u2014\"\n\n\"A birrd!\" cried Mrs. Horton, turning him round and round. \"It's a birrd from Heaven then! I've heard it all the morning. It's been singing in me heart for ages. Now it's out! Come follow it wid me! We'll go to the end of the wurrld to foinde it.\"\n\nHer kitchen energy\u2014some called it temper\u2014had discovered a greater scope than puddings.\n\n\"There is no hurry,\" the butler panted, moving along with her, and trying hard to keep his balance. \"We'll look together. We'll find it!\" And as they raced across the field among the flowers after the line of disappearing figures, the Tramp looked back at them and waved his hand.\n\n\"It's a lovely morning,\" he said, as they came up with the rest of the party. \"So you're looking too?\"\n\nToo much out of breath to answer, they just nodded, and the group accepted them without more to-do. Their object evidently was the same. Aunt Emily glanced up from her ferns, nodded and said, \"Good morning, it's a lovely day\"\u2014and resumed her digging again. It was like shaking hands! They all went forward happily, eagerly, across the wide, wide world together.\n\nThe absence of surprise the children knew had now become a characteristic everybody shared. All were in the same state together. The whole day flowed, there were no limitations or conditions, least of all surprise. Even WEEDEN had forgotten hedges and artificial boundaries. No one, therefore, ejaculated nor exclaimed when they ran across the Policeman. He, too, was looking for some one, but, having mislaid his notebook and pencil stub, was unable to mention any names, and was easily persuaded to join the body of eager seekers. Being a policeman, he was naturally a seeker by profession; he was always looking for somebody somewhere\u2014somebody who was going in the wrong direction.\n\n\"That's just it,\" he said, the moment he saw the Tramp, taking his helmet off as though an odd respect was in him. \"That's just what I've always felt,\" he went on vaguely. \"I'm looking for some one wot's a'looking for something else\u2014only looking wrong.\"\n\n\"In the wrong places,\" suggested Stumper, remembering his Indian scouting days.\n\n\"In the wrong way,\" put in Uncle Felix, full of experience by now.\n\nThe Policeman listened attentively, as though by rights he ought to enter these sentences laboriously in his notebook.\n\n\"That's it, per'aps,\" he stated. \"It takes 'em longer, but they finds out in the end. If I was to show 'em the right way of looking instead of arresting 'em\u2014I'd be reel!\" And then he added, as if he were giving evidence in a Court of Justice and before a County Magistrate, \"There's no good looking for anything where it ain't, now is there?\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" agreed Colonel Stumper, remembering happily that his pockets were full of snail-shells. He knew his sign.\n\nThompson, Mrs. Horton, Weeden, and the Policeman glanced at him gratefully. But it was the last mentioned who replied:\n\n\"Because every one,\" he said with conviction at last, \"has his own way of looking, and even the burgular is only looking wrong.\" He, too, it seemed, had found himself.\n\nTheir search, their endless hunt, their conversation and adventures thus might be reported endlessly, if only the book-shelves of the world were built more stoutly, and everybody could find an Extra Day lying about in which to read it all. Each seeker held true to his or her first love, obeying an infallible instinct. The adventure and romance that hid in Tim and Judy, respectively, sent them headlong after anything that offered signs of these two common but seductive qualities. Judy lived literally in the air, her feet, her heart, her eyes all off the ground; Tim, filled with an equally insatiable curiosity, found adorable danger in every rabbit-run, and rescued things innumerable. Off the ground he felt unsafe, unsure, and lost himself. Stumper, faithful to his scouting passion, disappeared into all kinds of undesirable places no one else would have dreamed of looking in, yet invariably\u2014came back; and while Uncle Felix tried a little of everything and found \"copy\" in a puddle or a dandelion, Weeden carried his empty sack without a murmur, knowing it would be filled with truffles at the end. Aunt Emily, exceedingly particular, but no longer interfering with the others, was equally sure of herself. A touch of fluid youth ran in her veins again, and in her heart grew a fern that presently she would find everywhere outside as well\u2014a maiden-hair.\n\nEach, however, in some marvellous way, shared the adventures of the others, as though the Tramp merged all seven of them into one single being, unified them, at any rate, into this one harmonious, common purpose with himself. For, while everybody had a different way of looking, everybody's way\u2014for that particular individual\u2014was exactly right.\n\n\"Smell, then follow,\" was the secret. \"Find your own sign and stick to it,\" the clue. Each sign, though by different routes, led straight towards the marvellous hiding-place. To urge one's own sign upon another was merely to delay that other; but to point out better signs of his own particular kind was to send him on faster than before. Thus there was harmony among them all, for every seeker, knowing this, had\u2014found himself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 218", + "text": "But, while there was no hurry, no passing, and, most certainly of all, no passing away, there was a sense of enormous interval. There were epochs, there were interludes, there was\u2014duration.\n\nThough everything had only just begun, it was yet complete, if not completed.\n\nAt any point of an adventure that adventure could be taken over from the very start, the experience holding all the thrill and wonder of the first time.\n\nCake could be had and eaten too. Tim, half-way down a rabbit-hole, could instantly find himself at the opening again, bursting with all the original excitement of trembling calculations. With the others it was similar.\n\nThere was no end to anything. Yet\u2014there was this general consciousness of gigantic interval. It turned in a circle round them\u2014everywhere\u2026.\n\nThey came together, then, all eight of them, into that place of singular enchantment known as the End of the World, sitting in a group about the prostrate elm that on ordinary days was Home. What they had been doing each one knew assuredly, even if no one mentioned it. Tim, who had been to India with Come-Back Stumper, had a feeling in his heart that expressed itself in one word, \"everywhere,\" accompanied by a sigh of happy satisfaction; Judy felt what she knew as \"Neverness\"; she had seen the Metropolis inside out, with Uncle Felix apparently. And these two couples now sat side by side upon the tree, gazing contentedly at the colony of wallflowers that flamed in the sunshine just above their heads. WEEDEN, cleaning his spade with a great nailed boot, turned his good eye affectionately upon the sack that lay beside him, full now to bursting. Aunt Emily breathed on her gold-rimmed glasses, rubbed them, and put them on her elastic nose, then looked about her peacefully yet expectantly, ready, it seemed, to start again at any moment\u2014anywhere. She guarded carefully a mossy bundle in her black silk lap. A little distance from her Thompson was fastening a flower into Mrs. Horton's dress, and close to the gate stood the Policeman, smoking a pipe and watching everybody with obvious contentment. His belt was loose; both hands stuck into it; he leaned against the wooden fence.\n\nOn the ground, between the tree and the fence, the Tramp had made a fire. He lay crouched about it. He and the fire belonged to one another. It seemed that he was dozing.\n\nAnd this sense of lying in the heart of an enormous circular interval touched everybody with delicious peace; each had apparently found something real, and was content merely to lie and\u2014be with it. All came gradually to sitting or reclining postures. Yet there was no sense of fatigue; any instant they would be up again and looking.\n\nOccasionally one or other of them spoke, but it was not the kind of speech that struggled to express difficult ideas with tedious sentences of many words. There was very little to say: mere statements of indubitable reality could be so easily and briefly made.\n\n\"Now,\" said Tim, unafraid of contradiction.\n\n\"Then,\" said Judy, equally certain of herself.\n\n\"Now then,\" declared Uncle Felix, positive at last of something.\n\n\"Naturally,\" affirmed Aunt Emily.\n\n\"Of course,\" growled Come-Back Stumper. And while WEEDEN, looking contentedly at his bursting sack, put in \"Always,\" the Policeman, without referring to his notebook, added from the fence, \"That's right.\" The remarks of Thompson and Mrs. Horton were not audible, for they were talking to one another some little distance away beside the Rubbish Heap, but their conversation seemed equally condensed and eloquent, judging by the satisfied expression on their faces. Thompson probably said, \"Well,\" the cook adding, \"I never!\"\n\nThe Tramp, stretched out beside his little fire of burning sticks, however, said more than any of them. He also said it shortly\u2014as shortly as the children. There was never any question who was Leader.\n\n\"Yes,\" he mentioned in a whisper that flowed about them with a sound like singing wind.\n\nIt summed up everything in a single word. It made them warm, as though a little flame had touched them. All the languages of the world, using all their sentences at once, could have said no more than that consummate syllable\u2014in the way he said it: \"Yes!\" It was the word the whole Day uttered.\n\nFor this was perfectly plain: Each of the group, having followed his or her particular sign to the end of the world, now knew exactly where the hider lay. The supreme discovery was within reach at last. They were merely waiting, waiting in order to enjoy the revelation all the more, and\u2014waiting in an ecstasy of joy and wonder. Seven or eight of them were gathered together; the hiding-place was found. It was now, and then, and natural, and always, and right: it was Yes, and life had just begun\u2026.\n\nThere happened, then, a vivid and amazing thing\u2014all rose as one being and stood up. The Tramp alone remained lying beside his little fire. But the others stood\u2014and listened.\n\nThe precise nature of what had happened none of them, perhaps, could explain. It was too marvellous; it was possibly the thing that nobody understands, and possibly the thing they didn't know they knew; yet they both knew and understood it. To each, apparently, the hiding-place was simultaneously revealed. Their Signs summoned them. The hider called!\n\nYet all they heard was the singing of a little bird. Invisible somewhere above them in the sea of blazing sunshine, it poured its heart out rapturously with a joy and a passion of life that seemed utterly careless as to whether it was heard or not. It merely sang because it was\u2014alive.\n\nTo Judy, at any rate, this seemed what they heard. To the others it came, apparently\u2014otherwise. Their interpretations, at any rate, were various.\n\nThompson and Mrs. Horton were the first to act. The latter looked about her, sniffing the air. \"It's burning,\" she said. \"Mary don't know enough. That's my job, anyhow!\" and moved off in the direction of the house with an energy that had nothing of displeasure nor of temper in it. It was apparently crackling that she heard. Thompson went after her, a willing alacrity in his movements that yet showed no sign of undignified hurry. \"I'll be at the door in no time,\" he was heard to say, \"before it's stopped ringing, I should not wonder!\" There was a solemn joy in him, he spoke as though he heard a bell. WEEDEN turned very quietly and watched their disappearing figures. He shouldered his heavy sack of truffles and his spade. No one asked him anything aloud, but, in answer to several questioning faces, he mumbled cautiously, though in a satisfied and pleasant voice, \"My garden wants me\u2014maybe; I'll have a look\"\u2014obviously going off to water the apricots and rose trees. He heard the dry leaves rustling possibly.\n\n\"Keep to the gravel paths,\" began Aunt Emily, adjusting her gold glasses; \"they're dry\"\u2014then changed her sentence, smiling to herself: \"They're so beautifully made, I mean.\" And gathering up her bundle of living ferns, she walked briskly over the broken ground, then straight across the lawn, waving her trowel at them as she vanished in the shade below the lime trees. The shade, however, seemed deeper than before. It concealed her quickly.\n\n\"I'll be moving on now,\" came the deep voice of the Policeman. He opened the gate in the fence and consulted a notebook as he did so. He passed slowly out of sight, closing the gate behind him carefully. His heavy tramp became audible on the road outside, the road leading to the Metropolis. \"There's some one asking the way\u2014\" his voice was audible a moment, before it died into the distance. The road, the gateway, the fence were not so clear as hitherto\u2014a trifle dim.\n\nThese various movements took place so quickly, it seemed they all took place at once; Judy still heard the bird, however. She heard nothing else. It was singing everywhere, the sky full of its tender and delicious song. But the notes were a little\u2014just a little\u2014further away she thought, nor could she see it anywhere.\n\nAnd it was then that Come-Back Stumper, limping a trifle as usual, approached them. He looked troubled rather, and though his manner was full of confidence still, his mind had mild confusion in it somewhere. He joined Uncle Felix and the children, standing in front of them.\n\n\"Listen!\" he said in low, gruff voice. He held out an open palm, three snail-shells in it, signifying that they should take one each. \"Listen!\" he repeated, and put the smallest shell against his own ear. \"D'you hear that curious sound?\" His head was cocked sideways, one ear pressed tight against the shell, the other open to the sky. \"The Ganges\u2026\" he mumbled to himself after an interval, \"but the stones are moving\u2014moving in the river bed\u2026. That long, withdrawing roar!\" He was just about to add \"down the naked shingles of the world,\" when Uncle Felix interrupted him.\n\n\"Grating,\" he said, listening intently to his shell; \"a metallic, grating sound. What is it?\" There was apprehension in his tone, a touch of sadness. \"It's getting louder too!\"\n\n\"Footsteps,\" exclaimed Tim. \"Two feet, not four. It's not a badger or a rabbit.\" He went on with sudden conviction\u2014\"and it's coming nearer.\" There was disappointment and alarm in him. \"Though it might be a badger, p'r'aps,\" he added hopefully.\n\n\"But I hear singing,\" cried Judy breathlessly, \"nothing but singing. It's a bird.\" Her face was radiant. \"It is a long way off, though,\" she mentioned.\n\nThey put their shells down then, and listened without them. They glanced from one another to the sky, all four heads cocked sideways. And they heard the sound distinctly, somewhere in the air about them.\n\nIt had changed a little. It was louder. It was coming nearer.\n\n\"Metallic,\" repeated Uncle Felix, with an ominous inflection.\n\n\"Machinery,\" growled Stumper, a fury rising in his throat.\n\n\"Clicking,\" agreed Tim. He looked uneasy.\n\n\"I only hear a bird,\" Judy whispered. \"But it comes and goes\u2014rather.\" And then the Tramp, still lying beside his little fire of burning sticks, put in a word.\n\n\"It's we who are going,\" he said in his singing voice. \"We're moving on again.\"\n\nThey heard him well enough, but they did not understand quite what he meant, and his voice died into the distance oddly, far away already, almost on the other side of the fence. And as he spoke they noticed another change in the world about them. Three of the party noticed it\u2014the males, Uncle Felix, Tim, and Come-Back Stumper.\n\nFor the light was fading; it was getting darker; there was a slight sense of chill, a growing dimness in the air. They realised vaguely that the Tramp was leaving them, and that with him went the light, the heat, the brilliance out of their happy day.\n\nThey turned with one accord towards him. He still lay there beside his little fire, but he seemed further off; both his figure and the burning sticks looked like a picture seen at the end of a corridor, an interminable corridor, edged and framed by gathering shadows that were about to cover it. They stretched their hands out; they called to him; they moved their feet; for the first time this wonderful day, there was hurry in them. But the receding figure of the Tramp withdrew still further and further, until an inaccessible distance intervened. They heard him singing faintly \"There is no hurry, Life has just begun\u2026The world is young with laughter\u2026We can fly\u2026\" but the words came sighing towards them from the inaccessible region where he lay, thousands of years ago, millions of miles away, millions of miles\u2026.\n\n\"You won't forget,\" were the last words they caught. \"You know now.\n\nYou'll never forget\u2026!\"\n\nWhen a sudden cry of joy and laughter sounded close behind them, and they turned to see Judy standing on tiptoe, stretching her thin, slim body as if trying to reach the moon. The light was dim; it seemed the sun had set and moonlight lay upon the world; but her figure, bright and shining, stood in a patch of radiant brilliance by herself. She looked like a white flame of fire ascending.\n\n\"I've got it!\" she was crying rapturously, \"I've got it!\" Her voice was wild with happiness, almost like the singing of a bird.\n\nThe others stared\u2014then came up close. But, while Tim ran, Stumper and Uncle Felix moved more slowly. For something in them hesitated; their attitudes betrayed them; there was a certain confusion in the minds of the older two, a touch of doubt. The contrast between the surrounding twilight and the brilliant patch of glory in which Judy stood bewildered them. The long, slim body of the child, every line of her figure, from her toes to the crown of her flying hair, pointing upwards in a stream of shining aspiration, was irresistible, however. She looked like a lily growing, nay rushing, upwards to the sun.\n\nThey followed the direction of her outstretched arms and hands. But it was Tim who spoke first. He did not doubt as they did:\n\n\"Oh, Judy, where?\" he cried out passionately. \"Show me! Show me!\"\n\nThe child raised herself even higher, stretching her toes and arms and hands; her fingers lengthened; she panted; she made a tremendous effort.\n\n\"There!\" she said, without looking down. Her face was towards the sky, her throat stretched till the muscles showed and her hair fell backwards in a stream.\n\nThen, following the direction of her eyes and pointing fingers, the others saw for the first time what Judy saw\u2014a small wild rose hung shining in the air, dangling at the end of a little bending branch. The bush grew out of the rubbish-heap, clambering up the wall. No one had noticed it before. At the end of the branch hung this single shining blossom, swinging a little in the wind. But it was out of reach\u2014just a shade too high for her eager fingers to take hold of it. Beyond it grew the colony of wall-flowers, also in the curious light that seemed the last glory of the fading day. But it was the rose that Judy wanted. And from somewhere near it came the sweet singing of the unseen bird.\n\n\"Too high,\" whispered Uncle Felix, watching in amazement. \"You can't manage it. You'll crick your back! oh\u2014oh!\" The sight of that blossom drew his heart out.\n\n\"Impossible,\" growled Stumper, yet wondering why he said it. \"It's out of reach.\"\n\n\"Go it!\" cried Tim. \"You'll have it in a second. Half an inch more!\n\nThere\u2014you touched it that time!\"\n\nFor an interval no one could measure they watched her spellbound; in each of them stirred the similar instinct\u2014that they could reach it, but that she could not. A deep, secret desire hid in all of them to pick that gleaming wild rose that swung above them in the air. And, meanwhile, the darkness deepened perceptibly, only Judy and the blossom framed still in shining light.\n\nThen, suddenly, the child's voice broke forth again like a burst of music.\n\n\"I've got it! I've got it!\"\n\nThere was a breathless pause. Her finger did not stretch a fraction of an inch\u2014but the rose was nearer. For the bird that still sang invisibly had fluttered into view and perched itself deliberately upon the prickly branch. It lowered the rose towards the human hands. It hopped upon the twig. Its weight dropped the prize\u2014almost into Judy's fingers. She touched it.\n\n\"I've found him!\" gasped the child.\n\nShe touched it\u2014and sank with the final effort in a heap upon the ground. The bird fluttered an instant, and was gone into the darkness. The twig, released, flew back. But at the end of it, swinging out of reach, still hung the lovely blossom in mid-air\u2014unpicked.\n\nThere was confusion then about the four of them, for the light faded very quickly and darkness blotted out the world; the rose was no longer visible, the bush, the wall, the rubbish-heap, all were shrouded. The singing-bird had gone, the Tramp beside his little fire was hidden, they could hardly see one another's faces even. Voices rose on every side. \"She missed it!\" \"It was too lovely to be picked!\" \"It's still there, growing\u2026.I can smell it!\"\n\nYet above them all was heard Judy's voice that sang, rose out of the darkness like a bird that sings at midnight: \"I touched it! My airy signs came true! I know the hiding-place! I've\u2014found him!\"\n\nThe voice had something in it of the Tramp's careless, windy singing as well.\n\n\"Look! He's touched me\u2026! Look\u2026!\"\n\nFor in that instant when the rose swung out of reach again, in that instant when she touched it, and before the fading light hid everything\u2014all saw the petal floating down to earth. It settled slowly, with a zigzag, butterfly course, fluttering close in front of their enchanted eyes. And it was this petal, perhaps, that brought the darkness, for, as it sank, it grew vast and spread until it covered the entire sky. Like a fairy silken sheet of softest coloured velvet it lay on everything, as though the heavens lowered and folded over them. They felt it press softly on their faces. A curtain, it seemed\u2014some one had let the curtain down.\n\nBeneath it, then, the confusion became extraordinary. There was tumult of various kinds. Every one cried at once \"I've found him! Now I know!\" At the touch of the petal, grown so vast, upon their eyelids, each knew his \"sign\" had led him to the supreme discovery. This flower was born of the travail of a universe. Child of the elements, or at least blessed by them, this petal of a small wild-rose made all things clear, for upon its velvet skin still lay the morning dew, air kissed it, its root and origin was earth, and the fire of the sun blazed in its perfect colouring\u2026. Yet in the tumult and confusion such curious behaviour followed. For Come-Back Stumper, crying that he saw a purple beetle pass across the world, proceeded to curl up as though he crawled into a spiral snail-shell and meant to go to sleep in it; Tim shouted in the darkness that he was riding a huge badger down a hole that led to the centre of the earth; and Uncle Felix begged every one to look and see what he saw, darkness or no darkness\u2014\"the splash of misty blue upon the body of a dragon-fly!\"\n\nThey might almost have been telling their dreams at breakfast-time\u2026.\n\nBut while the clamour of their excited voices stirred the world beneath the marvellous covering, there rose that other sound\u2014increasing until it overpowered every word they uttered. In the world outside there was a clicking, grating, hard, metallic sound\u2014as though machinery was starting somewhere\u2026.\n\nAnd Judy, managing somehow or other to lift a corner and peer out, saw that the dawn was breaking in the eastern sky, and that a new day was just beginning. The sun was rising\u2026. She went back again to tell the others, but she could not find them. She did not try very hard; she did not look for them. She just closed her eyes\u2026. The swallows were chattering in the eaves, a robin sang a few marvellous bars, then ceased, and an up-and-under bird sent forth its wild, high bugle-call, then dived out of sight below the surface of the pond.\n\nJudy did likewise\u2014dived down and under, drawing the soft covering against her cheek, and although her eyes were already closed she closed them somehow a second time. \"Everything's all right,\" she had a butterfly sort of thought; \"there's no hurry. It's not time\u2026 yet\u2026!\"\u2014and the petal covered her again from head to foot. She had noticed, a little further off, a globular, round object lying motionless beneath another corner of the covering. It gave her a feeling of comfort and security. She slid away to find the others. It seemed she floated, rather. \"Everything's free and careless\u2026and so are\u2014so am I\u2026for we shall never\u2026never forget\u2026!\" she remembered sweetly\u2014and was gone, fluttering after the up-and-under bird\u2026into some hidden world she had discovered\u2026.\n\nThe old Mill House lay dreaming in the dawn. Transparent shades of pink and gold stole slowly up the eastern sky. A stream of amber diffused itself below the paling stars. Rising from a furnace below the horizon it reached across and touched the zenith, painting mid-heaven with a mystery none could understand; then sank downwards and dipped the crests of the trees, the lawn, the moss-grown tiles upon the roof in that sea of everlasting wonder which is light.\n\nDawn caught the old sleeping world once more in its breathless beauty. The earth turned over in her sleep, gasped with delight\u2014and woke. There was a murmur and a movement everywhere. The spacious, stately life that breathes o'er ancient trees came forth from the wood without a centre; from the lines emanated that gracious, almost tender force they harvest in the spring. There was a little shiver of joy among the rose trees. The daisies blinked and stared. And the earth broke into singing.\n\nThen, in this chorus, came a pause; the thousand voices hushed a moment; the robin ceased its passionate solo in the shrubbery. All listened\u2014listened to another and far sweeter song that stirred with the morning wind among the rose trees. It was very soft and tender, it died away and returned with a faint, mysterious murmur, it rose and fell so gently that it may have been only the rustling of their thousand leaves that guard the opening blossoms.\n\n\u2003Yet it ran with power across the entire waking earth:\n\n\u2003My secret's in the wind and open sky,\n\n\u2003There is no longer any Time\u2014to lose;\n\n\u2003The world is young with laughter; we can fly\n\n\u2003Among the imprisoned hours as we choose.\n\n\u2003The rushing minutes pause; an unused day\n\n\u2003Breaks into dawn and cheats the tired sun.\n\n\u2003The birds are singing: Hark! Come out and play!\n\n\u2003There is no hurry; life has just begun.\n\nAnd as it died away the sun itself came up and shouted it aloud as with a million golden trumpets." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 219", + "text": "Hardly had Judy closed her eyes for the second time, however, than the globular object she had noticed in the corner stirred. It turned, but turned all over, as though it were a ball. It made a sideways movement too, a movement best described as budging. And, accompanying the movements, was a comfortable, contented, satisfied sound that some people call deep breathing, and others call a sigh.\n\nThe globular outline then grew slightly longer; one portion of it left the central mass, but left it slowly. The lower part prolonged itself. Slight cracks were audible like sharp reports, muffled but quite distinct. Next, the other end of the ball extended itself, twisted in a leisurely fashion sideways, rose above the general surface and plainly showed itself. It, too, was round. It emerged. Upon its surface shone two small pools of blue. It was a face. Even in the grey, uncertain light this was beyond dispute. It was Maria's face.\n\nMaria awoke. She looked about her calmly. Her mind, ever unclouded because it thought of one thing only, took in the situation at a glance. It was dawn, she was in bed and sleepy, it was not time to get up. Dawn, sleep, bed and time belonged to her. There certainly was no hurry.\n\nThe pools of blue then disappeared together, the smaller ball sank down into the pillow to join the larger one, the lower portion that had stretched itself drew in again, and a peaceful sigh informed the universe that Maria intended to resume her interrupted slumbers. She became once more a mere globular outline, self-contained, at rest.\n\nBut, in accepting life as it really was by lying down again, the lesser ball had imperceptibly occupied a new position. Maria's head had shifted. Her ear now pressed against another portion of the pillow. And this pressure, communicating itself to an object that lay beneath the pillow, touched a small brass handle, jerked it forward, released a bit of quivering wire connected with a set of wheels, and set in motion the entire insides of this hidden object. There was a sound of grating. This hard, metallic sound rose through the feathers, a clicking, thudding noise that reached her brain. It was\u2014she knew instantly\u2014the stopped alarum clock. It had been overwound. The weight of her head had started it again.\n\nMaria, as usual, by doing nothing in particular, had accomplished much. By yielding herself to her surroundings, she united her insignificant personal forces with the gigantic purposes of Life. She swung contentedly in rhythm with the universe. Maria had set the clock going again!\n\nThere was excitement in her then, but certainly no hurry. Disturbing herself as little as possible, she pushed one hand beneath the pillow, drew out the ticking clock, looked at it quietly, remembered sleepily that it had stopped at dawn\u2014Uncle Felix had said so\u2014put it on the chair beside her bed, and promptly retired again into her eternal centre.\n\n\"Tim's clock,\" she realised, \"but I've got it.\" There was no expression on her face whatever. Another child might have taken the trouble\u2014felt interested, at any rate\u2014to try and see what time it was. But Maria, aware that the dim light would make this a difficult and tedious operation, did nothing of the sort. It could make no difference anyhow to any one, anywhere! She was content to know that it was some time or other, and that the clock was going again. Her plan of life was: interfere with nothing. She did not know, therefore, that the hands pointed with accuracy to 4 A. M., because she merely did not care to know. But, not caring to know placed her on a loftier platform of intelligence than the rest of the world\u2014certainly above that of her sister, Judy, who was snoring softly among the shadows just across the room. Maria didn't know that she didn't know. No one could rebuke her with \"You might have known,\" much less \"You didn't know,\"\u2014because she didn't know she didn't know! It was the biggest kind of knowledge in the world. Maria had it.\n\nBut before she actually regained her absolute centre, and long before she lost sight of herself within its depths, dim thoughts came floating through her mind like pictures that moonlight paints upon high summer clouds. She saw these pictures; that is, she looked at them and recognised their existence; but she asked no questions. They reached her through the ticking of the busy clock beside the bed; the ticking brought them; but it brought them back. Maria remembered things. And chief among them were the following: That Uncle Felix had promised everybody an Extra Day, that he had stopped all the clocks to let it come, that this Extra Day was to be her own particular adventure, that last night was Saturday, and that this was, therefore, Sunday morning, very early.\n\nAnd the instant she remembered these things, they were real\u2014for her. She accepted them, one and all, even the contradictions in them. If this was actually an Extra Day it could not be Sunday morning too, and vice versa. But yet she knew it was. Both were. The confusion was a confusion of words only. There were too many words about.\n\n\"Why not?\" expressed her attitude. The clock might tick itself to death for all she cared. The Extra Day was her adventure and she claimed it. But she did not bother about it.\n\nAbove all, she asked no questions. Nothing really meant anything in particular, because everything meant everything. To ask questions, even of herself, involved hearing a lot of answers and listening to them. But answers were explanations, and explanations muddled and obscured. Explanations were a new set of questions merely. People who didn't know asked questions, and people who didn't understand gave explanations. Aunt Emily explained\u2014because she didn't understand. Also, because she didn't understand, she didn't know. To ask a question was the same thing as to explain it. Everything was one thing. She, Maria, both knew and understood.\n\nShe did not say all this, she did not think it even; she just felt it all: it was her feeling. Believing in her particular adventure of an Extra Day, she had already experienced it. She had shared it with the others too. It was her Extra Day, so she could do with it what she pleased. \"They can have it,\" she gave the clock to understand. \"I'm going to sleep again.\" All life was an extra day to her.\n\nShe went to sleep; sleep, rather, came to her. Happy dreams amused and comforted her. And, while she dreamed, the dawn slid higher up the sky, ushering in\u2014Sunday Morning." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 220", + "text": "\u2014AS USUAL\n\nConsciousness was first\u2014unconsciousness; the biggest changes are unconscious before they are conscious. They have been long preparing. They fall with a clap; and people call them sudden and exclaim, \"How strange!\" But it is only the discovery and recognition that are sudden. It all has happened already long ago\u2014happened before. The faint sense of familiarity betrays it. It is there the strangeness lies.\n\nAnd it was this delicate fragrance of an uncommunicable strangeness that floated in the air when Uncle Felix and the children came down to breakfast that Sunday morning and heard the sound of bells in the wind across the fields. They came down punctually for a wonder, too; Maria, last but not actually late, brought the alarum clock with her. \"It's going,\" she stated quietly, and handed it to her brother.\n\nTim took it without a word, looked at it, shook it, listened to its ticking against his ear, then set it on the mantelpiece where it belonged. He seemed pleased to have it in his possession again, yet something puzzled him. An expression of wonder flitted across his face; the eyes turned upwards; he frowned; there was an effort in him\u2014to remember something. He turned to Maria who was already deep in porridge.\n\n\"Did you wind it up?\" he asked. \"I thought it'd stopped\u2014last night.\"\n\n\"It's going,\" she said, thinking of her porridge chiefly.\n\n\"It wasn't, though,\" insisted Tim. He reflected a moment, evidently perplexed. \"I wound it and forgot,\" he added to himself, \"or else it wound itself.\" He went to his place and began his breakfast.\n\n\"Wound itself,\" mentioned Maria, and then the subject dropped.\n\nIt was Sunday morning, and everybody was dressed in Sunday things. The excitement of the evening before, the promise of an Extra Day, the detailed preparation\u2014all this had disappeared. Being of yesterday, it was no longer vital: certainly there was no necessity to consult it. They looked forward rather than backward; the mystery of life lay ever just in front of them, what lay behind was already done with. They had lived it, lived it out. It was in their possession therefore, part of themselves.\n\nNo one of the four devouring porridge round that breakfast table had forgotten about the promise, any more than they had forgotten giving up their time-pieces, the conversation, and all the rest of it. It was not forgetfulness. It was not loss of interest either that led no one to refer to it, least of all, to clamour for fulfilment. It was quite another motive that kept them silent, and that, even when Uncle Felix handed back the watches, prevented them saying anything more than \"Thank you, Uncle,\" then hanging them on to belt and waistcoat.\n\nExpectation\u2014an eternal Expectation\u2014was established in them.\n\nBut there was also this sense of elusive strangeness in their hearts, the certainty that an enormous interval had passed, almost the conviction that an Extra Day\u2014had been. Somewhere, somehow, they had experienced its fulfilment: It was now inside them. A strange familiarity hung about this Sunday morning.\n\nYet there were still a million things to do and endless time in which to do them. Expectation was stronger than ever before, but the sense of Interval brought a happy feeling of completion too. There was no hurry. They felt something of what Maria felt, living at the centre of a circle that turned unceasingly but never finished. It was Maria's particular adventure, and Maria had shared it with them. Wonder and expectation made them feel more than usually\u2014alive.\n\nThey talked normally while eating and drinking. If things were said that skirted a mystery, no one tried to find its name or label it. It was just hiding. Let it hide! To find it was to lose the mystery, and life without mystery was unthinkable.\n\n\"That's bells,\" said Tim, \"it's church this morning\"; but he did not sigh, there was no sinking of the heart, it seemed. He spoke as if it was an adventure he looked forward to. \"I've decided what I'm going to be,\" he went on\u2014\"an engineer, but a mining engineer. Finding things in the earth, valuable things like coal and gold.\" Why he said it was not clear exactly; it had no apparent connection with church bells. He just thought of life as a whole, perhaps, and what he meant to do with it. He looked forward across the years to come. He distinctly knew himself alive.\n\n\"I shall put sixpence in, I think,\" observed Judy presently. \"It's a lot. And I shall wear my blue hat with the pheasant's feather\u2014\"\n\n\"Pheasants feather,\" repeated Tim in a single word, amused as usual by a curious sound.\n\n\"And a wild rose here,\" she added, pointing to the place on her dress, though nobody felt interested enough to look. Her remark about the Collection was more vital than the other. Collections in church were made, they believed, to \"feed the clergyman.\" And Sunday was the clergyman's day.\n\n\"I've got sixpence,\" Tim hastened to remind everybody. \"I've got a threepenny bit as well.\"\n\n\"It's sixpence to-day, I think,\" Judy decided almost tenderly. Behind her thought was a caring, generous impulse; the motherly instinct sent her mind to the collection for the clergyman's comfort. But romance stirred too; she wanted to look her best. Her two main tendencies seemed very much alive this Sunday morning. The hat and the sixpence\u2014both were real.\n\nMaria, as usual, had little or nothing to say. She spoke once, however.\n\n\"I dreamed,\" she informed the company. She did not look up, keeping her head bent over the bread and marmalade upon her plate; her blue eyes rolled round the table once, then dropped again. No one asked for details of her dream, she had no desire to supply them. She announced her position comfortably, as it were, set herself right with life, and quietly went on with the business of the moment, which was bread and marmalade.\n\nUncle Felix looked up, however, as she said it.\n\n\"That reminds me,\" he observed, \"I dreamed too. I dreamed that you dreamed.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maria replied briefly, moving her eyes in his direction, but not her head. No other remarks were made; the statement was too muddled to stimulate interest particularly.\n\nWhen breakfast was over they went to the open window and threw crumbs to a robin that was obviously expecting to be fed. They all leaned out with their heads in the sunlight, watching it. It hopped from a twig on to the ground, its body already tight to bursting. It looked like a toy balloon\u2014as though it wore a dress of red elastic stretched to such a point that the merest pinprick must explode it with a sharp report; and it hopped as though springs were in its feet. The earth, like a taut sheet, made it bounce. Tim aimed missiles of bread rolled into pellets at its head, but never hit it.\n\n\"It's a lovely morning,\" remarked Uncle Felix, looking across the garden to the yellow fields beyond. \"A perfect day. We'll walk to church.\" He brushed the breakfast crumbs from the waistcoat of his neat blue suit, lit his pipe, sniffed the air contentedly, and had an air generally of a sailor on shore-leave.\n\nJudy sprang up. \"There's button-holes to get,\" she mentioned, and flew out of the room like a flash of sunlight or a bird.\n\nTim raced after her. \"Wallflower for me!\" he cried, while Judy's answer floated back from halfway down the passage: \"I'll have a wild rosebud\u2014it'll match my hat!\"\n\nUncle Felix and Maria were left alone, gazing out of the window side by side upon the \"lovely morning.\" She was just high enough to see above the edge, and her two hands lay sprawled, fingers extended, upon the shining sill.\n\n\"Yes,\" she mentioned quietly, as to herself, \"and I'll have a forget-me-not.\" Her eyes rolled up sideways, meeting those of her uncle as he turned and noticed her.\n\nFor quite suddenly he \"noticed\" her, became aware that she was there, discovered her. He stared a moment, as though reflecting. That \"yes\" had a queer, familiar sound about it, surely.\n\n\"Maria,\" he said, \"I believe you will. Everything comes to you of its own accord somehow.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"And there's another thing. You've got a secret\u2014haven't you?\" It occurred to him that Maria was rather wonderful.\n\n\"I expect so,\" she answered, after a moment's pause. She looked wiser than an owl, he thought.\n\n\"What is it? What is your secret? Can't you tell me?\"\n\nFor it came over him that Maria, for all her inactivity, was really more truly alive than both the other children put together. Their tireless, incessant energy was nothing compared to some deep well of life Maria's outer calm concealed.\n\nHe continued to stare at her, reflecting while he did so. Through her globular exterior, standing here beside him, rose this quiet tide whose profound and inexhaustible source was nothing less than the entire universe. Finding himself thus alone with her, he knew his imagination singularly stirred. The full stream of this imagination\u2014usually turned into sea\u2014and history-stories\u2014poured now into Maria. It was the way she had delivered herself of the monosyllable, \"Yes,\" that first enflamed him.\n\nThe child, obviously, was quite innocent that her uncle's imagination clothed her in such wonder; she was entirely unselfconscious, and remained so; but, as she kept silent as well, there was nothing to interrupt the natural process of his thought. \"You're a circle, a mystery, a globe of wonder,\" his mind addressed her, gazing downwards half in play and half in earnest. \"You're always going it. Though you seem so still\u2014you're turning furiously like a little planet!\"\n\nFor this abruptly struck him, flashing the symbol into his imagination\u2014that Maria lived so close to the universe that her life and movements were akin to those of the heavenly bodies. He saw her as an epitome of the earth. Fat, peaceful, little, calm, rotund Maria\u2014a miniature earth! She had no call to hurry nor rush after things. Like the earth she contained all things within herself. It made him smile; he smiled as he looked down into her face; she smiled as she rolled her blue eyes upwards into his.\n\nYet her calm was not the calm of sloth. In that mysterious centre where she lived he felt her as tremendously alive.\n\nFor the earth, apparently so calm and steady, knows no pause. She moves round her axis without stopping. She rushes with immense rapidity round the sun. Simultaneously with these two movements she combines a third; the sun, carrying her and all his other planets with him, hurries at a prodigious rate through interstellar space, adventuring new regions never seen before. Calm outwardly, and without apparent motion, the earth\u2014at this very moment, as he leaned across the window-sill\u2014was making these three gigantic, endless movements. This peaceful summer morning, like any other peaceful summer morning, she was actually spinning, rushing, rising. And in Maria\u2014it came to him\u2014in Maria, outwardly so calm, something also\u2014spun\u2014rushed\u2014rose! This amazing life that brimmed her full to bursting, even as it brimmed the robin and the earth, overflowed and dripped out of her very eyes in shining blue. There was no need for her to dash about. She, like the earth, was\u2014carried.\n\nAll this flashed upon him while the alarum clock ticked off a second merely, for imagination telescopes time, of course, and knows things all at once.\n\n\"What is your secret, Maria?\" he asked again. \"I believe it's about that Extra Day we meant to steal. Is that it?\"\n\nHer eyes gazed straight before her across the lawn where Tim and Judy were now visible, searching busily for button-holes.\n\n\"It was to be your particular adventure, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she told him at length, without changing her expression of serene contentment.\n\nHis imagination warned him he was getting \"at her\" gradually. He possibly read into her a thousand things that were not there. Certainly, Maria was not aware of them. But, though Uncle Felix knew this perfectly well, he persisted, hoping for a sudden disclosure that would justify his search\u2014even expecting it, perhaps.\n\n\"And what sort of a day would it be, then, this Extra Day of yours?\" he went on. \"It would never end, of course, for one thing, would it? There'd be no time?\"\n\nShe nodded quietly by way of effortless agreement and consent.\n\n\"So that, in a sense, you'd have it always,\" he said, aware of distinct encouragement. He felt obliged to help her. This was her peculiar power\u2014that everything was done for her while she seemed to do it all herself. \"You would live it over and over again, for ever and ever. That's your secret, I expect, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I expect so,\" the child answered quietly. \"I've always got it.\" She moved in a little closer to his side as she said it. The disclosure he expected seemed so near now that excitement grew in him. Across the lawn he saw the hurrying figures of Tim and Judy, racing back with their button-holes. There was no time to lose.\n\nHe put his arm about her, tilting her face upwards with one hand to see it plainly. The blue dyes came up with it.\n\n\"Then, what kind of a day would you choose, Maria? Tell me\u2014in a whisper.\"\n\nAnd then the disclosure came. But it was not whispered. Uncle Felix heard the secret in a very clear, decided voice and in a single word:\n\n\"Birthday.\"\n\nAt the same moment the others poured into the room; they came like a cataract; it seemed that a dozen children rushed upon them in a torrent. The air was full of voices and flowers suddenly. A smell of the open world came in with them. Button-holes were fastened into everybody, accompanied by a breathless chorus of where and how they had been found, who got the best, who got it first, and all the rest. From the End of the World they came, apparently, but while Tim had climbed the wall for his, Judy picked hers because a bird had lowered the branch into her very hand. For Uncle Felix she brought a spray of lilac; Tim brought a bit of mignonette. Eventually he had to wear them both.\n\n\"And here's a forget-me-not, Maria,\" cried Judy, stooping down to poke it into her sister's blue and white striped dress. \"That suits you best, I thought.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Maria, moving her eyes the smallest possible fraction of an inch.\n\nAnd they scampered out of the room again, Maria ambling slowly in the rear, to prepare for church. There were prayer-books and things to find, threepenny bits and sixpences for the collection. There was simply heaps to do, as they expressed it, and not a moment to lose either. Uncle Felix listened to the sound of voices and footsteps as they flew down the passage, dying rapidly away into the distance, and finally ceasing altogether. He puffed his pipe a little longer before going to his room upon a similar errand. He watched the smoke curl up and melt into the outer air; he felt the pleasant sunshine warm upon his face; he smelt the perfume rising from his enormous button-hole. But of these things he did not think. He thought of what Maria said. The way she uttered that single word remained with him: \"Birthday.\"\n\nHe had half divined her secret. For a birthday was the opening of life; it was the beginning. Maria had \"got it always.\" All days for her were birthdays, Extra Days.\n\nAnd while they walked along the lane to church he still was thinking about it.\n\nThe conversation proved that he was absent-minded rather; yet not that his mind was absent so much as intent upon other things. The children found him heavy; he seemed ponderous to them. And pondering he certainly was\u2014pondering the meaning of existence. The children, he realised, were such brilliant comments upon existence; their unconscious way of living, all they said and thought and did, but especially all they believed, offered such bright interpretations, such simple solutions of a million things. They lived so really, were so really\u2014alive. They never explained, they just accepted; and the explanations given they placed at their true value, still asking, \"Yes, but what is the meaning of all that?\" So close to Reality they lived\u2014before reason, cloaked and confused it with a million complex explanations. That \"Yes\" and \"Birthday\" of Maria's were illuminating examples.\n\nOf this he was vaguely pondering as they walked along the sunny lanes to church, and his conversation proved it. For conversation with children meant answering endless questions merely, and the questions were prompted by anything and everything they saw. Reality poked them; they gave expression to it by a question. And nothing real was trivial; the most careless detail was important, all being but a single question\u2014an affirmation: \"We're alive, so everything else is too!\"\n\nHis conversation proved that he had almost reached that state of time-less reality in which they lived. He felt it this morning very vividly. It seemed familiar somehow\u2014like his own childhood recovered almost.\n\nHe answered them accordingly. It didn't matter what was said, because all the words in the world said one thing only. Whether the words, therefore, made sense or not, was of no importance.\n\n\"Have you ever seen a rabbit come out of its hole?\" asked Tim. \"They do that for safety,\" he added; and if there was confusion in his language, there was none in his thought. \"Then no one can tell which its hole is, you see. Because each rabbit\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off and glanced expectantly at his uncle. At junctures like this his uncle usually cleared things up with an easy word or two. He would not fail him now.\n\n\"Come out, no,\" was the reply; \"no one ever sees a rabbit come out. But I've seen them go in; and that's the same thing in the end. They go down the wrong hole on purpose. They know right enough. Rabbits are rabbits.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" exclaimed Judy, \"everything's itself and knows its own sign\u2014er\u2014business, I mean.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Maria repeated.\n\nAnd before anything further could be mentioned\u2014if there was anything to mention\u2014they arrived at the porch of the church, passed under it without speaking, walked up the aisle and took their places in the family pew, Maria occupying the comfortable corner against the inner wall." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 221", + "text": "\u2014BUT DIFFERENTLY!\n\nChurch was very\u2014that is, they enjoyed the service very much, without knowing precisely why they liked it. They joined in the hymns with more energy than usual, because they felt \"singy\" and knew the tunes as well. Colonel Stumper handed round one of the bags at the end of a long pole\u2014and, though the clergyman didn't look at all as if he required feeding, the threepenny bits dropped in without the least regret on the part of the contributors. Tim's coin, however, having been squeezed for several minutes before the bag came round, stuck to his moist finger, and Stumper, thinking he had nothing to put in, drove the long handle past him towards Maria. That same instant the coin came un-stuck, and dropped with a rattle into the aisle. Come-Back Stumper stooped to recover it. Whereupon, to Judy, Tim and Uncle Felix, watching him, came a sudden feeling of familiarity, as though all this had happened before. The bent figure, groping after the hidden coin, seemed irresistibly familiar. It was very odd, they thought, very odd indeed. Where\u2014when\u2014had they seen him groping before like that, almost on all fours? But no one, of course, could remark upon it, and it was only Tim and Judy who exchanged a brief, significant glance. Maria, being asleep, did not witness it, nor did she contribute to the feeding of the clergyman either.\n\nThere followed a short sermon, of which they heard only the beginning, the end, and certain patches in the middle when the preacher raised his voice abruptly, but the text, they all agreed, was \"Seek and ye shall find.\" During the delivery of the portions that escaped them, Tim scratched his head and thought about rabbits, while Judy's mind hesitated between various costumes in the pews in front of her, unable to decide which she would wear when she reached the age of its respective owner.\n\nAnd so, in due course, feeling somehow that something very real had been accomplished, they streamed out with the rest of the congregation into the blazing summer sunshine. Expectant, inquisitive and hungry, they stood between the yew trees and the porch, yawning and fidgeting until Uncle Felix gave the signal to start. The sunlight made them blink. There was something of pleasurable excitement in knowing themselves part of a \"Congregation,\" for a Congregation was distantly connected with \"metropolis\" and \"govunment,\" and an important kind of thing at any time.\n\nThey stood and watched it. It scattered slowly, loth to separate and go. There was no hurry certainly. People talked in lowered voices, as if conversation after service was against the rules, and the church and graves might overhear; they smiled, but not too gaily; they seemed subdued; yet really they wanted to sing and dance\u2014once safely out of hearing and sight, they would run and jump and stand on their heads. The children, that is, attributed their own feelings to them.\n\nSeveral\u2014all \"Members\" of the Congregation\u2014approached and asked unreal questions, to which Judy, as the eldest, gave unreal answers:\n\n\"Your parents will soon be back again?\"\n\n\"Yes; Father comes to-morrow, Mother too.\"\n\n\"I hope they have enjoyed their little change.\"\n\n\"I think so\u2014thank you.\"\n\nGradually the Congregation melted away, broughams and victorias drove off sedately down the road, the horses making as little sound as possible with their hoofs. The Choir-boys emerged from a side-door and vanished into a field; a series of Old Ladies and Invalids felt their way down the gravel path with sticks; the \"Neighbours,\" looking clean and dressed-up, went off in various directions\u2014gravely, voices hushed, manners circumspect. Tim, feeling as usual \"awfully empty after church,\" was sure they ran as fast as ever they could the moment they were out of sight. A Congregation was a wonderful thing altogether. It was a puzzle how the little church could hold so many people. They watched the whole familiar business with suppressed excitement, forgetting they were hungry and impatient. It was both real and unreal, something better beckoned beyond all the time; but there was no hurry. It was a deep childhood mystery\u2014wonder filled them to the brim.\n\n\"Come on, children; we'll be off now,\" sounded their uncle's voice, and at the same moment Come-Back Stumper joined them. He had been counting over the money with the clergyman, of course, all this time. He was very slow. They hoped their contributions had been noticed.\n\n\"You'll come back with us?\" suggested Uncle Felix. And Stumper, growling his acceptance, walked home to lunch with them in the old Mill House. In his short black coat, trousers of shepherd's plaid, and knotted white tie bearing a neat horseshoe pin, he looked smart yet soldierly. Tim apologised for his moist finger and the threepenny bit. \"I thought it had got down a hole,\" he said, \"but you found it wonderfully.\" \"It simply flew!\" cried Judy. \"Clever old thing!\" she added with admiration.\n\n\"I've found harder things than that,\" said Stumper. \"It hid itself well, though\u2014bang in the open like a lost collar-stud. Thought I'd never look there!\"\n\nThey glanced at one another with a curious, half-expectant air, and Tim suddenly took the soldier's hand. But no one said anything more about it; the sin was forgiven and forgotten. Uncle Felix put in a vague remark concerning Indian life, and Stumper mentioned proudly that a new edition of his scouting book was coming out and he had just finished revising the last sheets. \"All yesterday I spent working on it,\" he informed them with a satisfied air, whereupon Tim said \"Fancy that!\" and Judy exclaimed \"Did you really?\" They seemed to have an idea that he was doing something else \"all yesterday\"; but no one knew exactly what it was. Then Judy planted herself in the road before him, made him stop, and picked something off his shoulder. \"A tiny caterpillar!\" she explained. \"Another minute and you'd have had it down your neck.\" \"It would have come back though,\" he said with a gruff laugh. \"It might'nt have,\" returned Judy. \"But look; it's awfully beautiful!\" They examined it for a moment, all five of them, and then Judy set it down carefully in the ditch and watched it march away towards the safer hedge.\n\nIt was a pleasant walk home, all together; they took the short cut across the fields; the world was covered with flowers, birds were singing, the air was fresh and sweet and the delicious sunlight not uncomfortably hot. Tim ran everywhere, exploring eagerly like a dog, and, also like a dog, doubling the journey's length. He whistled to himself; from time to time he came back to report results of his discoveries. He was full of energy. Judy behaved in a similar manner, dancing in circles to make her hair and dress fly out; she sang bits of the hymn-tunes that she liked, taking the tune but fitting words of her own upon it. Maria was carried over two fields and a half; the down-hill parts she walked, however. She kept everybody waiting. They could not leave her. She contrived to make herself the centre of the party. Stumper and Uncle Felix brought up the rear, talking together \"about things,\" and whirling their sticks in the air as though it helped them forward somehow.\n\nOn the slippery plank-bridge across the mill stream all paused a moment to watch the dragon-flies that set the air on fire with their coloured tails.\n\n\"The things that nobody can understand!\" cried Judy.\n\n\"Nobody else,\" Tim corrected her. \"We do!\"\n\nThey leaned over the rail and saw their own reflections in the running water.\n\n\"Why, Come-Back hasn't got a button-hole!\" exclaimed Judy\u2014and flew off to find one for him, Tim fast upon her heels like a collie after a dipping swallow. They raced down the banks where the golden king-cups grew in spendthrift patches and disappeared among the colonies of reeds. Between some hanging willow branches further down they were visible a moment, like dryad figures peering and flitting through the cataract of waving green. They searched as though their lives depended on success. It was absurd that Stumper had no button-hole!\n\nMaria, seated comfortably on the lower rail, watched their efforts and listened to the bursts of laughing voices that came up-stream\u2014then, with a leisurely movement, took the flower from her own button-hole and handed it to Stumper. The eyes rolled upwards with the flower\u2014solemnly. And Come-Back saw the action reflected in the stream below.\n\n\"Aw\u2014thank you, my dear,\" he said, fastening the forget-me-not into his Sunday coat, \"but I ought not to take it all. It's yours.\" The voice had a quiet, almost distant sound in it.\n\n\"Ours,\" Maria murmured to herself, addressing the faces in the water. She took the fragment Stumper handed back to her. All three, forgetting it was time for lunch, forgetting they were hungry, forgetting that there was still half a mile of lane between them and the house, gazed down at their reflections in the stream as though fascinated. Uncle Felix certainly felt the watery-enchantment in his soul. The reflections trembled and quivered, yet did not pass away. The stream flowed hurrying by them, yet still was always there. It gave him a strange, familiar feeling\u2014something he knew, but had forgotten. Everything in life was passing, yet nothing went\u2014there was no hurry. The rippling music, as the water washed the banks and made the grasses swish, was audible, and there was a deeper sound of swirling round the wooden posts that held the bridge secure. Bubbles rose and burst in spray. A lark, hanging like a cross in the blue sky, overhead, dropped suddenly as though it was a stone, but in the reflection it rushed up into their faces. It seemed to rise at them from the pebbly bed of the stream. Both movements seemed one and the same\u2014both were true\u2014the direction depended upon the point of view.\n\nIt startled them and broke the water-spell. For the singing stopped abruptly too. At the same moment Judy and Tim arrived, their arms full of flowers, hemlock, ferns, and bulrushes. They were breathless and exhausted; both talked at once; they had quite forgotten, apparently, what they had gone to find. Judy had seen a king-fisher, Tim had discovered tracks of an otter; in the excitement they forgot about the button-hole. But, somehow, the bird, the animal, and the flowers were the same thing really\u2014one big simple thing. Only the point of view was different.\n\n\"We've looked simply everywhere!\" cried Judy.\n\n\"Just look what we found!\" Tim echoed.\n\nTo Uncle Felix it seemed they said one and the same thing merely\u2014using one word in many syllables.\n\n\"Beautiful!\" agreed Stumper, as they emptied their arms at his feet in wild profusion; \"and enough for everybody too!\"\n\nStumper also said the thing they had just said. Uncle Felix watched him move forward, where Maria was already using the heaped-up greenery as a cushion for her back, and pick something off the stem of a giant bulrush.\n\n\"But that's what I like best,\" he exclaimed. \"Look at the colour, will you\u2014blue and cream and yellow! You can hear the Ganges in it, if you listen close enough.\" He held a small, coloured snail-shell between his sinewy fingers, then placed it against his ear, while the others, caught by a strange enveloping sense of wonder, stared and listened, swept for a moment into another world.\n\n\"How marvellous!\" whispered some one.\n\n\"Extrornary!\" another murmured.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Maria. Her voice made a sound like a thin stone falling from a height into water. But Maria had said the same thing as the others, only said it shorter. An entire language lay in that mono-syllable. Again, it was the point of view of doing, saying one enormous thing. And Maria's point of view was everywhere at once\u2014the centre.\n\n\"Listen!\" she added the next minute.\n\nPerhaps the sunlight quivering on the surface of the stream confused them, or perhaps it was the murmur and movement of the leaves upon the banks that brought the sense of sweet, queer bewilderment upon all five. A new sound there certainly was\u2014footsteps, as though some one came dancing\u2014voices, as though some one sang. Figures were seen in the distance among the waving world of green; they moved behind the cataract of falling willow branches; and their distance was as the distance of a half-remembered dream.\n\n\"They're coming,\" gasped Judy below her breath.\n\n\"They're coming back,\" Tim whispered, the tone muffled, underground.\n\n\"Eh?\" ejaculated Stumper. \"Coming back?\" His voice, too, had distance in it.\n\nWhether they saw it in the reflections on the running water, or whether the maze of shadow and sunshine in the wooded banks produced it, no one knew exactly. The figures, at any rate, were plainly visible, moving along with singing and dancing through the summery noontide of the brilliant day. No one spoke while they went by, no one except Maria who at intervals murmured \"Yes.\" There was no other audible comment or remark. They afterwards agreed that Weeden was seen clearest, but Thompson and Mrs. Horton were fairly distinct as well, and bringing up the rear was a figure in blue that could only have been the Policeman who lived usually upon the high road to London. They carried flowers in their arms, they moved lightly and quickly\u2014it was uncommonly like dancing\u2014and their voices floated through the woodland spaces with a sound that, if it was not singing, was at least an excellent imitation\u2014an attempt to sing!\n\n\"They're not lost,\" said Tim, as they disappeared from view. \"They're just looking\u2014for the way.\"\n\n\"The way home,\" said Judy. \"And they're following some one\u2014who knows it.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" added Maria. For another figure, more like a tree moving in the wind than anything else, and certainly looking differently to each of them\u2014another figure was seen in advance of the group, seen in flashes, as it were, and only glimpses of it discernible among the world of moving green. This other figure was singing too; snatches of wild sweet music floated through the quiet wood\u2014one said the singing of a bird, another, the wind, a third, the rippling murmur of the stream\u2014but, to one and all, an enchanting and enticing sound. And, to one and all, familiar too, with the familiarity of a half-remembered dream.\n\nAnd a flood of memory rose about them as they watched and listened, a tide that carried them away with it into the heart of something they knew, yet had forgotten. In the few moments' interval an eternity might have passed. Their hearts opened curiously, they saw wonder growing like a flower inside\u2014the exquisite wonder of common things. There was something they were looking for, but they had found it. The flower of wonder blossomed there before their very eyes, explaining the world, but not explaining it away, explaining simply that it was wonderful beyond all telling. They all knew suddenly what they didn't know they knew; they understood what nobody understands. None knew why it came just at this particular moment, and none knew where it came from either. It was there, so what else mattered. It broke upon them out of the heart of the summer's day, out of this very ordinary Sunday morning, out of the brimming life all about them that was passing but could never pass away. The familiar figures of the gardener, the butler, the policeman and the cook brought back to them the memory of something they had forgotten, yet brought it back in the form of endless and inexhaustible enticement rather than of complete recovery. There had been long preparation somewhere, growth, development; but that was past and they gave no thought to it; Expectancy and Wonder rushed them off their feet. The world hid something. Every one was looking for it. They must go on looking, looking, looking too!\n\nWhat it was they had forgotten\u2014they entirely forgot. Only the marvellous hint remained, and the certainty that it could be found. For, to each of them it seemed, came this fairy reminder, stealing deliciously upon the senses: somewhere, somehow, they had known an experience that had enriched their lives. It had become part of them. It had always been in them, but they had found it now. They felt quite positive about it. They believed. To Tim came messages from the solid earth about him, secrets from creatures that lived in it and knew; Judy, catching a thousand kisses from the air upon her cheeks, divined the mystery of all flying life\u2014that brought the stars within her reach; Maria, possessing all within herself, remained steady and calm at the eternal centre of the circle\u2014a clearing-house for messages from everywhere at once. Asking nothing for herself, she merely wanted to give away, give out. She said \"Yes\" to all that came her way; and all did come her way. To every one of them, to Stumper and Uncle Felix too, came a great conviction that they had passed nearer, somehow, to an everlasting joy. There was no hurry, life had just begun\u2014seemed singing everywhere about them. There was Unity.\n\n\"It's a lovely day,\" remarked Uncle Felix presently. \"I want my luncheon.\"\n\nHe picked up Maria and moved on across the bridge.\n\n\"It's the Extra Day,\" Maria whispered in his ear. \"It's my adventure, but you all can have it.\"\n\nThe others followed with Come-Back Stumper, and in the lane they saw the figures of Weeden, Thompson and Mrs. Horton in front of them, coming home from church. They were walking quietly enough.\n\n\"We're not late, then,\" Tim remarked. \"There's lots of time!\"\n\nCrossing the field in the direction of the London road a policeman was moving steadily. They saw him stoop and pick a yellow flower as he went. He was off to take charge of the world upon his Sunday beat. He disappeared behind a hedge. The butler and the cook vanished through a side-door into the old Mill House about the same time.\n\nIn due course, they also arrived at the porch, and Uncle Felix set his burden down. As they scraped their muddy boots and rubbed them on the mat, their backs were turned to the outside world; but Maria, whose boots required no scraping, happened to face it still. As usual she faced in all directions like a circle.\n\n\"Look,\" she said. \"There's some one coming!\"\n\nAnd they saw the figure of a tramp go past the opening of the drive where the London road was just visible. He paused a moment and looked towards the house. He did not come in. He just looked\u2014and waved his hand at them. The next minute he was gone. But not before Maria had returned his wave.\n\n\"He'll come back,\" suggested Stumper, as they went inside.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Maria. \"He's mine\u2014but you can have him too.\"\n\nTen minutes later, when they all sat down to lunch, the big blue figure of the policeman passed the opening of the drive. Being occupied with hot roast beef, they did not see him. He paused a moment, looked towards the house, and then went slowly out of sight again along the London road, following the tramp\u2026.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Julius LeVallon by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\n[ Schooldays ]\n\n\u2003\"Dream faces bloom around your face\n\n\u2003Like flowers upon one stem;\n\n\u2003The heart of many a vanished race\n\n\u2003Sighs as I look on them.\"\n\n\u2014A. K" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 222", + "text": "\"Surely death acquires a new and deeper significance when we regard it no longer as a single and unexplained break in an unending life, but as part of the continually recurring rhythm of progress \u2014 as inevitable, as natural, and as benevolent as sleep.\" \u2014 \"Some Dogmas of Religion\" (Prof. J. M'Taggart).\n\nIt was one autumn in the late 'nineties that I found myself at Bale, awaiting letters. I was returning leisurely from the Dolomites, where a climbing holiday had combined pleasantly with an examination of the geologically interesting Monzoni Valley. When the claims of the latter were exhausted, however, and I turned my eyes towards the peaks, it happened that bad weather held permanent possession of the great grey cliffs and towering pinnacles, and climbing was out of the question altogether. A world of savage desolation gloomed down upon me through impenetrable mists; the scouts of winter's advance had established themselves upon all possible points of attack; and the whole tossed wilderness of precipice and scree lay safe, from my assaults at least, behind a frontier of furious autumn storms.\n\nHaving ample time before my winter's work in London, I turned my back upon the unconquered Marmolata and Cimon della Pala, and made my way slowly, via Bozen and Innsbruck, to Bale; and it was in the latter place, where my English correspondence was kind enough to overtake me, that I found one letter in particular that interested me more than all the others put together. It bore a Swiss stamp; and the handwriting caused me a thrill of anticipatory excitement even before I had consciously recalled the name of the writer. It was addressed before and behind till there was scarcely room left for a postmark, and it had journeyed from my chambers to my club, from my club to the university, and thence, by way of various poste-restantes, from one hotel to another till, with good luck little short of marvellous, it discovered me in my room of the Trois Rois Hotel overlooking the Rhine.\n\nThe signature, to which I turned at once before reading the body of the message, was Julius LeVallon; and as my eye noted the firm and very individual writing, once of familiar and potent significance in my life, I was conscious that emotions of twenty years ago woke vigorously into being, releasing sensations and memories I had thought buried beyond all effective resurrection. I knew myself swept back to those hopes and fears that, all these years before, had been \u2014 me. The letter was brief; it ran as follows:\n\nFriend of a million years, \u2014 Should you remember your promise, given to me at Edinburgh twenty years ago, I write to tell you that I am ready. Yours, especially in separation,\n\nJulius LeVallon.\n\nAnd then followed two lines of instructions how to reach him in the isolated little valley of the Jura Mountains, on the frontier between France and Switzerland, whence he wrote.\n\nThe wording startled me; but this surprise, not unmingled with amusement, gave place immediately to emotions of a deeper and much more complex order, as I drew an armchair to the window and resigned myself, half pleasurably, half uneasily, to the flood of memories that rose from the depths and besieged me with their atmosphere of half-forgotten boyhood and of early youth. Pleasurably, because my curiosity was aroused abruptly to a point my dull tutorial existence now rarely, if ever, knew; uneasily, because these early associations grouped themselves about the somewhat unearthly figure of a man with whom once I had been closely intimate, but who had since disappeared behind a veil of mystery to follow pursuits where danger to body, mind and soul \u2014 it seemed to me \u2014 must be his constant attendant.\n\nFor Julius LeVallon, or Julius, as he was known to me in our school and university days, had been once a name to conjure with; a personality who evoked for me a world more vast and splendid, horizons wider, vistas of possibilities more dazzling, than any I have since known \u2014 which have contracted, in fact, with my study of an exact science to a dwindled universe of pettier scale and measurement; \u2014 and wherein, formerly, with all the terror and delight of vividly imagined adventure, we moved side by side among strange experiences and fascinating speculations.\n\nThe name brings back the face and figure of as singular an individual as I have ever known who, but for my saving streak of common sense and inability to imagine beyond a certain point, might well have swept me permanently into his own region of research and curious experiment. As it was, up to the time when I felt obliged to steer my course away from him, he found my nature of great assistance in helping him to reconstruct his detailed mental pictures of the past; we were both \"in the same boat together,\" as he constantly assured me \u2014 this boat that travelled down the river of innumerable consecutive lives; and there can be no doubt that my cautious questionings \u2014 lack of perspective, he termed it \u2014 besides checking certain aspects of his conception, saved us at the same time from results that must have proved damaging to our reputations, if not injurious actually to our persons, physically and mentally. Yet that he captured me so completely at the time was due to an innate sympathy I felt towards his theories, a sympathy that at times amounted to complete acceptance. I freely admit this sympathy. He used another word for it, however: he called it Memory.\n\nAs a boy, Julius LeVallon was beyond question one of the strangest beings that ever wore a mortar-board, or lent his soul and body to the conventionalities of an English private school.\n\nI recall, as of yesterday, my first sight of him, and the vivid impression, startling as of shock, he then produced: the sensitive, fine face, pallid as marble, the thatch of tumbling dark hair, and the eyes of changing greeny blue that shone unlike any English eyes I have ever looked upon before or since. \"Giglamps\" the other boys called them, of course; but when you caught them through the black hair that straggled over the high white forehead, they somehow conveyed the impression of twin lanterns, now veiled, now clear, seen through the tangled shadows of a twilight wood. Unlike the eyes of most dreamers, they looked keenly within, rather than vaguely beyond; and I recall to this day the sharp, half disquieting effect produced upon my mind as a new boy the first instant I saw them \u2014 that here was an individual who somehow stood aloof from the mob of noisy, mischief-loving youngsters all about him, and had little in common with the world in which this school was a bustling, practical centre of educational energy.\n\nNor is it that I recall that first sight with the added judgment of later years. I insist that this moment of his entrance into my life was accompanied by an authentic thrill of wonder that announced his presence to my nerves, or even deeper, to my very soul. My sympathetic nervous system was instinctively aware of him. He came upon me with a kind of rush for which the proper word is startling; there was nothing gradual about it; its nature was electrifying; and in some sense he certainly captivated me, for, immediately upon knowing him; this opening wonder merged in a deep affection of a kind so intimate, so fearless, so familiar, that it seemed to me that I must, somewhere, somehow, have known him always. For years to come it bound me to his side. To the end, moreover, I never quite lost something of that curious first impression, that he moved, namely, in an outer world that did not claim him; that those luminous, inward-peering eyes saw but dimly the objects we call real; that he saw them as counters in some trivial game he deemed it not worth while to play; that while, perforce, he used them like the rest of us, their face-value was as naught compared to what they symbolised; that, in a word, he stood apart from the vulgar bustle of ordinary ambitious life, and above it, in a region by himself where he was forever questing issues of infinitely greater value.\n\nFor a boy of fifteen, as I then was, this seems much to have discerned. At the time I certainly phrased it all less pompously in my own small mind. But that first sense of shock remains: I yearned to know him, to stand where he stood, to be exactly like him. And our speedy acquaintance did not overwhelm me as it ought to have done \u2014 for a singular reason; I felt oddly that somehow or other I had the right to know him instantly.\n\nImagination, no doubt, was stronger in me at that time than it is today; my mind more speculative, my soul, perhaps, more sensitively receptive. At any rate the insignificant and very ordinary personality I own at present has since largely recovered itself. If Julius LeVallon was one in a million, I know that I can never expect to be more than one of a million. And it is something in middle age to discover that one can appreciate the exceptional in others without repining at its absence in oneself.\n\nJulius was two forms above me, and for a day or two after my arrival at mid-term, it appears he was in the sick-room with one of those strange nervous illnesses that came upon him through life at intervals, puzzling the doctors and alarming those responsible for his well-being; accompanied, too, by symptoms that today would be recognised, I imagine, as evidence of a secondary personality. But on the third or fourth day, just as afternoon \"Preparation\" was beginning and we were all shuffling down upon our wooden desks with a clatter of books and pens, the door beside the great blackboard opened, and a figure stole into the room, tall, slender, and unsubstantial as a shadow, yet intensely real.\n\n\"Hullo! Giglamps back again!\" whispered the boy on my left, and another behind me sniggered audibly \"Jujubes\" \u2014 thus Julius was sometimes paraphrased \u2014 \"tired of shamming at last!\" Then Hurrish, the master in charge, whose head had been hidden a moment behind his desk, closed the lid and turned. He greeted the boy with a few kind words of welcome which, of course, I have forgotten; yet, so strange are the freaks of memory, and so instantaneous and prophetic the first intuitions of sympathy or aversion, that I distinctly recall that I liked Hurrish for his words, and was grateful to him for his kindly attitude towards a boy whose very existence had hitherto been unknown to me. Already, before I knew his name, Julius LeVallon meant, at any rate, this to me.\n\nBut from that instant the shadow became most potently real substance. The boy moved forward to his desk, looked about him as though to miss no face, and almost immediately across that big room full of heads and shoulders saw \u2014 myself.\n\nThat something of psychical import passed swiftly between us is indubitable, for while Julius visibly started, pausing a moment in his walk and staring as though he would swallow me with his eyes, there flashed upon my own mind a thought so vivid, so precise, that it took actual sentence form, and before I could possibly have imagined or invented an idea so uncorrelated with a previous experience of any kind at all, I heard myself murmuring: \"He's found me... I\"\n\nIt seemed audible, at least. I hid my face a second, thinking I had spoken it aloud. No one looked at me, however; Hurrish made no comment. My name did not sound terribly across the classroom. The sentence, after all, had remained a thought. But that it leaped into my mind at all seems to me now, as it did at the time, significant.\n\nHis eyes rested for the fraction of a second on my face as he crossed the floor, and I felt \u2014 but how describe It intelligibly? \u2014 as though a wind had risen and caught me up into another place where there was great light and an impression of vast distances. Hypnotic we should call it today; hypnotic let it be. I can only affirm how, with that single glance from a boy but slightly older than myself, seen then for the first time, and with no word yet spoken, there came back to me a larger sense of life, and of the meaning of life. I became aware of an extended world, of wonder, movement, adventure on a scale immensely grander than anything I found about me among known external things. But I became aware \u2014 \"again.\" In earlier childhood I had known this bigger world. It suddenly flashed over me that time stretched behind me as well as before \u2014 and that I stretched back with it. Something scared me, I remember, with a faint stirring as of old pains and pleasures suffered long ago. The face and eyes that called into being these fancies, so oddly touched with alarm, were like those seen sometimes in dreams that never venture into daily life \u2014 things of composite memory, no doubt, that bring with them an atmosphere, and a range of query, nothing in normal waking life can even suggest.\n\nHe passed to his place in front of Hurrish's desk among the upper forms, and a sea of tousled heads intervened to hide him from my sight; but as he went the afternoon sunshine fell through the unfrosted half of the window, and in later years \u2014 now, in fact, as 1 hold his letter in my hand and recollect these vanished memories \u2014 I still see him coming into my life with the golden sunlight about his head and his face wrapped in its halo. I see it reflected in the lamping eyes, glistening on the mop of dark hair, shining on the pallid face with its high expression of other-worldliness and yearning remote from the chaos of modern life... It was a long time before I managed to bring myself down again to parse the verbs in that passage of Hecuba, for, if anything, I have understated rather than exaggerated the effect that this first sight of Julius LeVallon produced upon my feelings and imagination. Some one, lost through ages but ever seeking me, rose suddenly and spoke: \"So here you are, at last! I've found you. We've found each other again!\"\n\nTo say more could only be to elaborate the memory with knowledge that came later, and thus to distort the first simple and profound impression. I merely wish to present, as it occurred, the picture of this wizard face appearing suddenly above the horizon of my small school-boy world, staring with that deep suggestion of having travelled down upon me from immense distances behind, bringing fugitive and ghostly sensations of things known long ago, and hinting very faintly, as I have tried to describe, of vanished pains and alarms \u2014 yet of sufferings so ancient that to touch them even with the tenderest of words is to make them crumble into dust and disappear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 223", + "text": "\"'Body! observes Plotinus, 'is the true river of Lethe.' The memory of definite events in former lives can hardly come easily to a consciousness allied with brain... Bearing in mind also that even our ordinary definite memories slowly become indefinite, and that most drop altogether out of notice, we shall attach no importance to the naive question, 'Why does not Smith remember who he was before?' It would be an exceedingly strange fact if he did, a new Smith being now in evidence along with a new brain and nerves. Still, it is conceivable that such remembrances occasionally arise. Cerebral process, conscious or subconscious, is psychical.\" \u2014 \"Individual and Reality\" (K D. Fawcett).\n\nLooking back upon this entrance, not from the present long interval of twenty years, but from a point much nearer to it, and consequently more sympathetically in touch with my own youth, I must confess that his presence \u2014 his arrival, as it seemed \u2014 threw a momentary clear light of electric sharpness upon certain \"inner scenery\" that even at this period of my boyhood was already beginning to fade away into dimness and \"mere imagining.\" Which brings me to a reluctant confession I feel bound to make. I say \"reluctant,\" because at the present time I feel intellectually indisposed to regard that scenery as real. Its origin I know not; its reality at the time I alone can vouch for. Many children have similar experiences, I believe; with myself it was exceptionally vivid.\n\nEver since I could remember, my childhood days were charged with it \u2014 haunting and stimulating recollections that were certainly derived from nothing in this life, nor owed their bright reality to anything seen or read or heard. They influenced all my early games, my secret make-believe, my magical free hours after lessons. I dreamed them, played them, lived them, and nothing delighted me so much as to be alone on half-holidays in summer out of doors, or on winter evenings in the empty schoolroom, so that I might reconstruct for myself the gorgeous detail of their remote, elusive splendour. For the presence of others, even of my favourite playmates, ruined their reality with criticising questions, and a doubt as to their genuineness was an intrusion upon their sacredness my youthful heart desired to prevent by \u2014 killing it at once. Their nature it would be wearisome to detail, but I may mention that their grandeur was of somewhat mixed authority, and that if sometimes I was a general like Gideon, against whom Amalekites and such like were the merest insects, at others I was a High Priest in some huge, dim-sculptured Temple whose magnificence threw Moses and the Bible tabernacles into insignificance.\n\nYet it was upon these glories, and upon this sacred inner scenery, that the arrival of Julius LeVallon threw a new daylight of stark intensity. He made them live again. His coming made them awfully real. They had been fading. Going to school was, it seemed, a finishing touch of desolating destruction. I felt obliged to give them up and be a man. Thus ignored, disowned, forgotten of set deliberation, they sank out of sight and were prepared to disappear, when suddenly his arrival drew the entire panorama delightfully into the great light of day again. His presence retouched, recoloured the entire series. He made them true.\n\nIt would take too long, besides inviting the risk of unconscious invention, were I to attempt in detail the description of our growing intimacy. Moreover, I believe it is true that the intimacy did not grow at all, but, suddenly, incomprehensibly was. At any rate, I remember with distinctness our first conversation. The hour's \"prep.\" was over, and I was in the yard, lonely and disconsolate as a new boy, watching the others playing tip-and-run against the high enclosing wall, when Julius LeVallon came up suddenly behind me, and I turned expectantly at the sound of his almost stealthy step. He came softly. He was smiling. In the falling dusk he looked more shadow-like than ever. He wore the school cap at the back of his head, where it clung to his tumbling hair like some absurd disguise circumstances forced him to adopt for the moment.\n\nAnd my heart gave a bound of excitement at the sound of his voice. In some strange way the whole thing seemed familiar. I had expected this. It had happened before. And, very swiftly, a fragment of that inner scenery, laid like a theatre-inset against the playground of today, flashed through the depths of me, then vanished.\n\n\"What is your name?\" he asked me, very gently.\n\n\"Mason,\" I told him, conscious that I flushed and almost stammered. \"John Mason. I'm a new boy.\" Then, although my brother, formerly Head of the school, had already gone on to Winchester, I added \"Mason secundus.\" My outer self felt shy, but another, deeper self realised a sense of satisfaction that was pleasure. I was aware of a desire to seize his hand and utter something of this bigger, happier sensation. The strength of school convention, however, prevented anything of the sort. I was at first embarrassed by the attention of a bigger boy, and showed it.\n\nHe looked closely into my face a moment, as though searching for something, but so penetratingly that I felt his eyes actually inside me. The information I had given did not seem to interest him particularly. At the same time I was conscious that his near presence affected me in a curious way, for I lost the feeling that this attention to a new boy was flattering and unusual, and became aware that there was something of great importance he wished to say to me. It was all right and natural. There was something he desired to find out and know: it was not my name. A vague yet profound emotion troubled me.\n\nHe spoke then, slowly, earnestly; the voice gentle and restrained, but the expression in the eyes and face so grave, almost so solemn, that it seemed an old and experienced man who addressed me, instead of a boy barely sixteen years of age.\n\n\"Have you then... quite... forgotten... everything?\" he asked, making dramatic pauses thus between the words.\n\nAnd, singular in its abruptness though the question was, there flashed upon me even while he uttered it, a sensation, a mood, a memory \u2014 I hardly know what to call it \u2014 that made the words intelligible. It dawned upon me that I had \"forgotten... everything... quite\": crowded, glorious, ancient things, that somehow or other I ought to have remembered. A faint sense of guiltiness accompanied the experience. I felt disconcerted, half ashamed.\n\n\"I'm afraid... I have,\" came my faltering reply. Though bewildered, I raised my eyes to his. I looked straight at him. \"I'm \u2014 Mason secundus... now...\"\n\nHis eyes, I saw, came up, as it were, from their deep searching. They rested quietly upon my own, with a reassuring smile that made them kindly and understanding as those of my own father. He put his hand on my shoulder in a protective fashion that gave me an intense desire to remember all the things he wished me to remember, and thus to prove myself worthy of his interest and attention. The desire in me was ardent, serious. Its fervency, moreover, seemed to produce an effect, for immediately there again rose before my inner vision that flashing scenery I had \"imagined\" as a child.\n\nPossibly something in my face betrayed the change. His expression, at any rate, altered instantly as though he recognised what was happening.\n\n\"You're Mason secundus now,\" he said more quickly. \"I know that. But \u2014 can you remember nothing of the Other Places? Have you quite forgotten when \u2014 we were together?\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly, repeating the last three words almost beneath his breath. His eyes rested on mine with such pleasure and expectancy in them that for the moment the world I stood in melted out, the playground faded, the shouts of cricket ceased, and I seemed to forget entirely who or where I was. It was as though other times, other feelings, other scenery battled against the actual present, claiming me, sweeping me away, extending the sense of personal identity towards a previous series. Seductive the sensation was beyond belief, yet at the same time disturbing. I wholly ignored the flattery of this kindness from an older boy. A series of vivid pictures, more familiar than the nursery, more distant than a dream of years ago, swam up from some inner region of my being like memories of places, people, adventures I had actually lived and seen. The near presence of Julius LeVallon drew them upwards in a stream above the horizon of some temporarily veiled oblivion.\n\n\"...in the Other Places,\" his voice continued with a droning sound that was like the sea a long way off, or like wind among the branches of a tree.\n\nAnd something in me leaped automatically to acknowledge the truth I suddenly realised.\n\n\"Yes, yes!\" I cried, no shyness in me any more, and plunged into myself to seize the flying pictures and arrest their sliding, disappearing motion. \"I remember, oh, I remember... a whole lot of,.. dreams... or things like made-up adventures I once had ages and ages ago.,. with... \" I hesitated a second. A rising and inexplicable excitement stopped my words. I was shaking all over. \"...with you!\" I added boldly, or rather the words seemed to add themselves inevitably. \"It was with you, sir?\"\n\nHe nodded his head slightly and smiled. I think the \"sir,\" sounding so incongruous, caused the smile.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said in his soft, low voice, \"it was with me. Only they were not dreams. They were real. There's no good denying what's real; it only prevents your remembering properly.\"\n\nThe way he said it held conviction as of sunrise, but anyhow denial in myself seemed equally to have disappeared. Deep within me a sense of reality answered willingly to his own.\n\n\"And myself?\" he went on gently yet eagerly at the same time, his eyes searching my own. \"Don't you remember \u2014 me? Have I, too, gone quite beyond recall?\"\n\nBut with truth my answer came at once:\n\n\"Something... perhaps... comes back to me... a little,\" I stammered. For while aware of a keen sensation that I talked with someone I knew as well as I knew my own father, nothing at the moment seemed wholly real to me except his sensitive, pale face with the large and beautiful eyes so keenly peering, and the tangled hair escaping under that ridiculous school cap. The pine trees in the cricket-field rose into the fading sky behind him, and I remember being puzzled to determine where his hair stopped and the feathery branches began.\n\n\"...carrying the spears up the long stone steps in the sunshine,\" his voice murmured on with a sound like running water, \"and the old man in the robe of yellow standing at the top... and orchards below, all white and pink with blossoms dropping in the wind... and miles of plain in blue distances far away, the river winding... and birds fishing in the shallow places...\"\n\nThe picture flashed into my mind. I saw it. I remembered it in detail as easily as any childhood scene of a few years ago, but yet through a blur of summery haze and at the end of a stupendous distance that reduced the scale to lilliputian proportions. I looked down the wrong end of a telescope at it all. The appalling distance \u2014 and something else as well I was at a loss to define \u2014 frightened me a little.\n\n\"I... my people, I mean... live in Sussex,\" I remember saying irrelevantly in my bewilderment, \"and my father's a clergyman.\" It was the upper part of me that said it, no doubt anticipating the usual question \"What's your father?\" My voice had a lifeless, automatic sound.\n\n\"That's now,\" LeVallon interrupted almost impatiently. \"It's thinking of these things that hides the others.\"\n\nThen he smiled, leaning against the wall beside me while the sunset flamed upon the clouds above us and the tide of noisy boys broke, tumbling about our feet. I see those hurrying clouds, crimson and gold, that scrimmage of boys in the school playground, and Julius LeVallon gazing into my eyes, his expression rapt and eager \u2014 I see it now across the years as plainly as I saw that flash of inner scenery far, far away. I even hear his low voice speaking. The whole, strange mood that rendered the conversation not too incredibly fantastic at the time comes over me again as I think of it.\n\nHe went on in that murmuring tone, putting true words to the pictures that rolled clearly through me:\n\n\"...and the burning sunlight on the white walls of the building... the cool deep shadows where we talked and slept... the shouting of the armies in the distance... with the glistening of the spears and shining shields...\"\n\nMixed curiously together, kaleidoscopic, running one into the other without sharp outlines of beginning or end, the scenes fled past me like the pages of a coloured picture-book. I saw figures plainly, more plainly than the scenery beyond. The man in the yellow robe looked close into my eyes, so close, indeed, I could almost hear him speak. He vanished, and a woman took his place. Her back was to me. She stood motionless, her hands upraised, and a gesture of passionate entreaty about her plunged me suddenly into a sea of whirling, poignant drama that had terror in it. The blood rushed to my head. My heart beat violently. I knew a moment of icy horror \u2014 that she would turn \u2014 and I should recognise her face \u2014 worse, that she would recognise my own. I experienced actual fear, a shrinking dread of something that was nameless. Escape was impossible, I could neither move nor speak, nor alter any single detail in this picture which \u2014 most terrifying of all \u2014 I knew contained somewhere too \u2014 myself. But she did not turn; I did not see her face. She vanished like the rest... and I next saw quick, running figures with skins of reddish brown, circlets of iron about their foreheads and red tassels hanging from their loin cloths. The scene had shifted.\n\n\"...when we lit the signal fires upon the hills,\" the voice of LeVallon broke in softly, looking over his shoulder lest we be disturbed, \"and lay as sentinels all night beside the ashes... till the plain showed clearly in the sunrise with the encampments marked over it like stones...\"\n\nI saw the blue plain fading into distance, and across it a swiftly-moving cloud of dust that was ominous in character, presaging attack. Again the scene shifted noiselessly as a picture on a screen, and a deserted village slid before me, with small houses built of undressed stone, and roomy paddocks, abandoned to the wild deer from the hills. I smelt the keen, fresh air and the scent of wild flowers. A figure, carrying a small blue stick, passed with tearing rapidity up the empty street.\n\n\"...when you were a Runner to the tribe,\" the voice stepped curiously in from a world outside it all, \"carrying warnings to the House of Messengers... and I held the long night-watches upon the passes, signalling with the flaming torches to those below...\"\n\n\"But so far away, so dim, so awfully small, that I can hardly\"\n\nThe world of today broke in upon my voice, and I stopped, not quite aware of what I had been about to say. Martin, the Fourth Form and Mathematical Master, had come up unobserved by either of us, and was eyeing LeVallon and myself somewhat curiously. It was afterwards, of course, that I discovered who the interrupter was. I only knew at the moment that I disliked the look of him, and also that I felt somehow guilty.\n\n\"New boy in tow, LeVallon?\" he remarked casually, the tone and manner betraying ill-concealed disapproval. The change of key, both in its character and its abruptness, seemed ugly, almost dreadful. It was so trivial.\n\n\"Yes, sir. It's young Mason.\" LeVallon answered at once, touching his cap respectfully, but by no means cordially.\n\n\"Ah,\" said the master dryly. \"He's fortunate to find a friend so soon. Tell him we look to him to follow his brother's example and become Head of the school one day perhaps.\" I got the impression, how I cannot say, that Martin stood in awe of LeVallon, was even a little afraid of him as well. He would gladly have \"scored off\" him if it were possible. There was a touch of spite in his voice, perhaps.\n\n\"We knew one another before, sir,\" I heard Julius say quietly, as though his attention to a new boy required explanation \u2014 to Martin.\n\nI could hardly believe my ears. This extraordinary boy was indeed in earnest. He had not the smallest intention of saying what was untrue. He said what he actually believed. I saw him touch his cap again in the customary manner, and Martin, the under-master, shrugging his shoulders, passed on without another word. It is difficult to describe the dignity LeVallon put into that trivial gesture of conventional respect, or in what way Martin gained a touch of honour from it that really was no part of his commonplace personality. Yet I can remember perfectly well that this was so, and that I deemed LeVallon more wonderful than ever from that moment for being able to exact deference even from an older man who was a Form Master and a Mathematical Master into the bargain. For LeVallon, it seemed to me, had somehow positively dismissed him.\n\nYet, to such extent did the pictures in my mind dominate the playground where our bodies stood, that I almost expected to see the master go down the \"long stone steps towards the sunny orchard below\" \u2014 instead of walk up and cuff young Green who was destroying the wall by picking out the mortar from between the bricks. That wall, and the white wall in the dazzling sunshine seemed, as it were, to interpenetrate each other. The break of key caused by the interruption, however, was barely noticeable. The ugliness vanished instantly. Julius was speaking again as though nothing had happened. He had been speaking for some little time before I took in what the words were:\n\n\"...with the moonlight gleaming on the bosses of the shields... the sleet of flying arrows... and the hissing of the javelins...\"\n\nThe battle-scene accompanying the sentence caught me so vividly, so fiercely even, that I turned eagerly to him, all shyness gone, and let my words pour out impetuously as they would, and as they willynilly had to. For this scene, more than all the others, touched some intimate desire, some sharp and keen ambition that burned in me today. My whole heart was wrapped up in soldiering. I had chosen a soldier's career instinctively, even before I knew quite the meaning of it.\n\n\"Yes, rather!\" I cried with enthusiasm, staring so close into his face that I could have counted the tiny hairs on the smooth pale skin, \"and that narrow ledge high up inside the dome where the prisoners stood until they dropped on to the spear-heads in the ground beneath, and how some jumped at once, and others stood all day, and \u2014 and how there was only just room to balance by pressing the feet sideways against the curving wall...?\"\n\nIt all rushed at me as though I had witnessed the awful scene a week ago. Something inside me shook again with horror at the sight of the writhing figures impaled upon the spears below. I almost felt a sharp and actual pain pierce through my flesh. I over-balanced. It was my turn to fall...\n\nA sudden smile broke swiftly over LeVallon's face, as he held my arm a moment with a strength that almost hurt.\n\n\"Ah, you remember that! And little wonder \u2014\" he began, then stopped abruptly and released his grip. The cricket ball came bouncing to our feet across the yard, with insistent cries of \"Thank you, ball 1 Thank you, LeVallon!\" impossible to ignore. He did not finish the sentence, and I know not what shrinking impulse of suffering and pain in me it was that felt relieved he had not done so. Instead, he stooped good-naturedly, picked up the ball, and flung it back to the importunate cricketers; and as he did so I noticed that his action was unlike that of any English boy I had ever seen. He did not throw it as men usually throw a ball, but used a violent yet graceful motion that I vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere before. It perplexed me for a moment \u2014 then, suddenly, out of that deeper part of me so strangely now astir, the hint of explanation came. It was the action of a man who flings a spear or javelin.\n\nA bell rang over our heads with discordant clangour, and we were swept across the yard with the rush of boys. The transition was abrupt and even painful \u2014 as when one comes into the noisy street from a theatre of music, lights and colour. A strong effort was necessary to recover balance and pull myself together. Until we reached the red-brick porch, however, LeVallon kept beside me, and his hurried last phrases, as we parted, were the most significant of all. It seemed as if he kept them for the end, although no such intention was probably in his thought. They left me quivering through and through as I heard them fall from his lips so quietly.\n\nHis face was shining. The words came from his inmost heart:\n\n\"Well, anyhow,\" he said beneath his breath lest he might be overheard, \"I've found you, and we've found each other \u2014 at last. That's the great thing, isn't it? No one here understands all that. Now, we can go on together where we left of? before; and, having found you, I expect I shall soon find her as well. For we're all three together, and \u2014 sooner or later \u2014 there's no escaping anything.\"\n\nI remember that I staggered. The hand I put out to steady myself scraped along the uneven bricks and broke the skin. A boy with red hair struck me viciously in the back because I had stumbled into him; he shouted at me angrily too, though I heard no word he said. And LeVallon, for his part, just had time to bend his head down with \"work hard and get up into my form \u2014 we shall have more chances then,\" and was gone into the passage and out of sight \u2014 leaving me trembling inwardly as though stricken by some sudden strange attack of nerves.\n\nFor his words about the woman turned me inexplicably \u2014 into ice. My legs gave way beneath me. A cold perspiration broke out upon my skin. No words of any kind came to me; there was no definite thought; clear recollection, absolutely none. The strange emotion itself I could not put a name to, nor could I say what part was played in it by any particular ingredient such as horror, terror, or mere ordinary alarm. All these were in it somewhere, linked darkly to a sense of guilt at length discovered and brought home. I can only say truthfully that I saw again the picture of that woman with her back towards me; but that, when he spoke, she turned and looked at me. She showed her face. I knew a sense of dreadful chill like some murderer who, after years of careful hiding, meets unexpectedly The Law and sees the gallows darkly rise. A hand of justice \u2014 of retribution \u2014 seemed stretched upon my shoulder from the empty sky.\n\nI now set down my faithful recollection of what happened; and, incredible as it doubtless sounds today, yet it was most distressingly real. Out of what dim, forgotten past his words, this woman's face, arose to haunt \"me\" of Today, I had no slightest inkling. What crime of mine, what buried sin, came as with a blare of trumpets, seeking requital, no slightest hint came whispering. Yet this was the impression I instantly received. I was a boy. It terrified and amazed me, but it held no element of make-believe. Julius LeVallon, myself, and an unknown woman stood waiting on the threshold of the breathless centuries to set some stone in its appointed place \u2014 a stone, moreover, he, I, and she, together breaking mighty laws, had left upon the ground. It seemed no common wrong to her, to him, to me, and yet we three, working together, alone could find it and replace it.\n\nThis, somehow, was the memory his words, that face, struggled to reconstruct.\n\nI saw LeVallon smiling as he left my side. He disappeared in the way already described. The stream of turbulent boys separated us physically, just as, in his belief, the centuries had carried us apart spiritually \u2014 he \u2014 myself \u2014 and this other. I saw a veil drop down upon his face. The lamps in his splendid eyes were shrouded. At supper we sat far apart, and the bedroom I shared with two other youngsters of my own age and form, of course, did not include LeVallon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 224", + "text": "\"Souls without a past behind them, springing suddenly into existence, out of nothing, with marked mental and moral peculiarities, are a conception as monstrous as would be the corresponding conception of babies suddenly appearing from nowhere, unrelated to anybody, but showing marked racial and family types.\"\u2014 \"The Ancient Wisdom\" (A. Besant).\n\nAs the terms passed and I ceased to be a new boy, it cannot be said that I got to know Julius LeVallon any better, because our intimacy had been established, or \"resumed\" as he called it, from the beginning; but the chances of being together increased, we became members of the same form, our desks were side by side, and we shared at length the same bedroom with another Fifth Form boy named Goldingham. And since Goldingham, studious, fat, good-natured, slept soundly from the moment his head touched the pillow till the seven o'clock bell rang \u2014 and sometimes after it in order to escape his cold bath \u2014 we practically had the room to ourselves.\n\nMoreover, from the beginning, it all seemed curiously true. It was not Julius who invented, but I who in my stupidity had forgotten. Long, detailed dreams, too, came to me about this time, which I recognised as a continuation of these of \"Other Places\" his presence near me in the daytime would revive. They existed, apparently, in some layer deeper than my daily consciousness, recoverable in sleep. In the daytime something sceptical in me that denied, rendered them inaccessible, but once reason slept and the will was in abeyance, they poured through me in a continuous, uninterrupted flow. A word from Julius, a touch, a glance from his eyes perhaps, would evoke them instantly, and I would see. Yet he made no potent suggestions that could have caused them; there was no effort; I did not imagine at his bidding; and often, indeed, his descriptions differed materially from my own, which makes me hesitate to ascribe the results to telepathy alone. It was his presence, his atmosphere that revived them. Today, of course, immediately after our schooldays in fact, they ceased to exist for me \u2014 to my regret, I think, on the whole, for they were very entertaining, and sometimes very exquisite. I still retain, however, the vivid recollection of blazing summer landscapes; of people, sometimes barbaric and always picturesque, moving in brilliant colours; of plains, and slopes of wooded mountains that dipped, all blue and thirsty, into quiet seas \u2014 scenes and people, too, utterly unlike any I had known during my fifteen years of existence under heavy English skies.\n\nLeVallon knew this inner world far better and more intimately than I did. He lived in it. Motfield Close, the private school among the Kentish hills, was merely for him a place where his present brain and body \u2014 instruments of his soul \u2014 were acquiring the current knowledge of Today. It was but temporary. He himself, the eternal self that persisted through all the series of lives, was in quest of other things, \"real knowledge,\" as he called it. For this reason the recollection of his past, these \"Other Places,\" was of paramount importance, since it enabled him to see where he had missed the central trail and turned aside to lesser pursuits that had caused delay. He was forever seeking to recover vanished clues, to pick them up again, and to continue the main journey with myself and, eventually, with \u2014 one other.\n\n\"I've always been after those things,\" he used to say, \"and I'm searching, searching always \u2014 inside myself, for the old forgotten way. We were together, you and I, so your coming back like this will help\"\n\nI interrupted, caught by an inexplicable dread that he would mention another person too. I said the first thing that came into my head. Instinctively the words came, yet right words:\n\n\"But my outside is different now. How could you know? My face and body, I mean?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he smiled; \"but I knew you instantly. I shall never forget that day. I felt it at once \u2014 all over me. I had often dreamed about you,\" he added after a moment's pause, \"but that was no good, because you didn't dream with me.\" He looked hard into my eyes. \"We've a lot to do together, you know,\" he said gravely, \"a lot of things to put right \u2014 one thing, one big thing in particular \u2014 when the time comes. Whatever happens, we mustn't drift apart again. We shan't.\"\n\nAnother minute and I knew he would speak of \"her.\" It was strange, this sense of shrinking that particular picture brought. Never, except in sleep occasionally, had it returned to me, and I think it was my dread that kept it out of sight. Yet Julius just then did not touch the topic that caused my heart to sink.\n\n\"I must be off,\" he exclaimed a moment later. \"There's 'stinks' to mug up, and I haven't looked at it. I shan't know a blessed word!\" For the chemistry, known to the boys by this shorter yet appropriate name, was a constant worry to him. He was learning it for the first time, he found it difficult. But he was a boy, a schoolboy, and he talked like one.\n\nHe never doubted for one instant that I was not wholly with him. He assumed that I knew and remembered, though less successfully, and that we merely resumed an interrupted journey. Pre-existence was as natural to him as that a certain man and woman had provided his returning soul with the means of physical expression, termed body. His soul remembered; he, therefore, could not doubt. It was innate conviction, not acquired theory.\n\n\"I can't get down properly to the things I want,\" he said another time, \"but they're coming. It's a rotten nuisance \u2014 learning dates and all these modern languages keeps them out. The two don't mix. But, now you're here, we can dig up a jolly sight more than I could alone. And you're getting it up by degrees all right enough.\"\n\nFor the principle of any particular knowledge, once acquired, was never lost. It was learning a thing for the first time that was the grind. Instinctive aptitude was subconscious memory of something learned before.\n\n\"The pity is we're made to learn a lot of stuff that belongs to one particular section, and doesn't run through them all. It clogs the memory. The great dodge is to recognise the real knowledge and go for it bang. Then you get a bit further every section.\"\n\nUntil my arrival, it seems, he kept these ideas strictly to himself, knowing he would otherwise be punished for lying, or penalised in some other educational manner for being too imaginative. Yet, while he stood aloof somewhat from the common school life, he was popular and of good repute. The boys admired, but stood in awe of him. He pleased the masters almost as much as he puzzled them; for, unlike most dreamy, fanciful youths, he possessed concentration and an imperious will; he worked hard and always knew his lessons. Modern knowledge he found difficult, and only mastered with great labour the details of recent history, elementary science, chemistry, and so forth, whereas in algebra, euclid, mathematics, and the dead languages, especially Greek, he invariably stood at the head of the form. He was merely recollecting them.\n\nDuring the whole two years of our schooldays at the Close, I never heard him use such phrases as \"former life\" or \"reincarnation.\" Life, for him, was eternal simply, and at Motfield he was in eternal life, just as he always had been and always would be. Only he never said this. He was a boy and talked like a boy. He just lived it. Death to him was an insignificant detail. His whole mind ran to the idea that life was continuous, each section casting aside the wornout instrument which had been exactly suited to the experience its wearer needed for its development at that time and under those conditions. And, certainly, he never understood that astounding tenet of most religions, that life can be \"eternal\" by prolonging itself endlessly in the future, without having equally extended endlessly also in the past!\n\n\"But I'm going to be a general,\" I said, \"when I grow up,\" afraid that the \"real knowledge\" might interfere with my main ambition. \"I could never think of giving up that.\"\n\nJulius looked up from tracing figures in the sand with the point of his gymnasium shoe. There was a smile on his lips, a light in his eye that I understood. I had said something that belonged to Today, and not to all Todays.\n\n\"You were before,\" he answered patiently, \"a magnificent general, too.\"\n\n\"But I don't remember it,\" I objected, being in one of my denying moods.\n\n\"You want to be it again,\" he smiled. \"It's born in you. That is memory. But, anyhow,\" he added, \"you can do both \u2014 be a general with your mind and the other thing with your soul. To shirk your job only means to come back to it again later, don't you see?\"\n\nQuite naturally, and with profound conviction, he spoke of life's obligations. Physical infirmities resulted from gross errors in the past; mental infirmities, from lost intellectual opportunities; spiritual disabilities, from past moral shirkings and delinquencies: all were methods, moreover, by which the soul divines her mistakes and grows, through discipline, stronger, wiser. He would point to a weakness in someone, and suggest what kind of error caused it in a previous section, with the same certainty that a man might show a scar and say \"that came from fooling with a mowing machine when I was ten years old.\"\n\nThe antipathies and sympathies of Today, the sudden affinities like falling in love at sight, and the sudden hostilities that apparently had no cause \u2014 all were due to relationships in some buried Yesterday, while those of Tomorrow could be anticipated, and so regulated, by the actions of Today. Even to the smallest things. If, for instance, Martin vented his spite and jealousy, working injustice upon another, he but prepared the way for an exactly adequate reprisal later that must balance the account to date. For into the most trivial affairs of daily life dipped the spirit of this remarkable boy's belief, revealing as with a torch's flare the workings of an implacable justice that never could be mocked. No question of punishment meted out by another entered into it, but only an impersonal law, which men call \u2014 elsewhere \u2014 Cause and Effect.\n\nAt the time, of course, I was somewhat carried away by the thoroughness with which he believed and practised these ideas, though without grasping the logic and consistency of his intellectual position. I was aware, most certainly, in his presence of large and vitalising sensations not easily accounted for, of being caught up into some unfamiliar region over vast horizons, where big winds blew from dim and ancient lands, where a sunlight burned that warmed the inmost heart in me, and where I seemed to lose myself amid the immensities of an endless, vistaed vision.\n\nThis, of course, is the language of maturity. At the time I could not express a tithe of what my feelings were, except that they were vast and wonderful. To think myself back imaginatively, even now, into that period of my youth with Julius LeVallon by my side, is to feel myself eternally young, alive forever beyond all possibility of annihilation or decay; it is, further, to realise an ample measure of lives at my disposal in which to work towards perfection, the mere ageing and casting off of any particular body after using it for sixty years or so \u2014 nothing, and less than nothing.\n\n\"Don't funk!\" I remember his saying once to a boy named Creswick who had \"avoided\" the charging Hurrish at football. \"You can't lose your life. You can only lose your body. And you'll lose that anyhow.\"\n\n\"Crazy lout!\" Creswick exclaimed, nursing his ankle, as he confided to another boy of like opinions. \"I'm not going to have my bones all smashed to pulp for anybody. Body I'm using at the moment indeed! It'll be life I'm using at the moment next!\"\n\nWhich, I take it, was precisely what LeVallon meant." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 225", + "text": "\"In the case of personal relations, I do not see that heredity would help us at all. Heredity, however, can produce a more satisfactory explanation of innate aptitudes. On the other hand, the doctrine of preexistence does not compel us to deny all influence on a man's character of the character of his ancestors. The character which a man has at any time is modified by any circumstances which happen to him at that time, and may well be modified by the fact that his rebirth is in a body descended from ancestors of a particular character.\" \u2014 Prof. J. M'Taggart.\n\nThere were numerous peculiarities about this individual with a foreign name that I realise better on looking back than I did at the time.\n\nOf his parentage and childhood I knew nothing, for he mentioned neither, and his holidays were spent at school; but he was always well dressed and provided with plenty of pocket-money, which he generously shared. Later I discovered that he was an orphan, but a certain cruel knowledge of the world whispered that he was something else as well. This mystery of his origin, however, rather added to the wonder of him than otherwise. Compared to the stretch of time behind, it seemed a trifling detail of recent history that had no damaging significance. \"Julius LeVallon is. my label for this section,\" he observed, \"and John Mason is yours.\" And family ties for him seemed to have no necessary existence, since neither parents nor relations were of a man's own choosing. It was the ties deliberately formed, and especially the ties renewed, that held real significance.\n\nI thought of him as \"foreign,\" though, in a deeper sense than that he was not quite English. He carried me away from England, but also away from modern times; and something about him belonged to lands where life was sunnier, more passionate, more romantic even, and where the shadows of great Gods haunted blue, wooded mountains, vast plains and deep, sequestered valleys. He claimed kinship somehow with an earlier world, magical, unstained. Even his athletic gifts, admired of all, had this subtle distinction too: the way he ran and jumped and \"fielded\" was not English. At fives, squash-racquets, or with the cricket-bat he fumbled badly, whereas in any game that demanded speed, adroitness, swift intuitive decision, and physical dexterity of a certain un-English kind \u2014 as against mere strength and pluck \u2014 he was supreme. He was deer rather than bull-dog. The school-games of modern days he was learning, apparently, for the first time.\n\nIn a corner of the field, where a copse of larches fringed the horizon against the sloping woods and hop-poles in the distance, we used to He and talk for hours during playtime. The high-road skirted this field, and a hedge was provided with a gate which, under penalties, was the orthodox means of entrance. Few boys attempted any other, though Peabody was once caught by the Head as he floundered through a thorny opening with the jumping pole. But Julius never used the gate \u2014 nor was ever caught. He would dart from my side with a few quick steps, leap into the air, and fly soaring over the hedge, his feet tucked neatly under him like a bird's.\n\n\"Now,\" he would say, as we flung ourselves down beneath the shade of the larches, \"we've got an hour or more. Let's talk, and remember, and get well down into it all.\"\n\nHow it was accomplished I cannot hope to describe. The world about me faded, another took its place. It rose in sheets and layers, shimmering, alive, and amazingly familiar. Space and time seemed to overlap, objects and scenery interpenetrated. There was fragrance, light and colour; adventure and alarm; delight and ceaseless expectation. It was a kind of fairyland where flowers never died, where motion was swift as thought, and life seemed meted out on a more lavish scale than by the meagre measurements of ticking clocks. And, while the memories were often hard to disentangle, the marked idiosyncrasies of our separate natures were never in the least confusion: my passion for adventure, his to find the reality that lay behind all manifested life. For this was the lode-star that guided him over the hills and deserts of all his many \"sections\" \u2014 the unquenchable fever to learn essential truth, to pierce behind the veil of appearances and discover the secret nature of the soul, its origin, its destiny, the methods of its full realisation. It was a pastoral people that interested me most, primitive folk with migratory habits not yet abandoned. Their herds roamed an enormous territory. There was a Red Tribe and a Blue Tribe. The fighting men used bows, spears and javelins, and carried shields with round, smooth metal bosses to deflect the rain of arrows. And there was cavalry \u2014 two thousand men on horseback called a \"coorlie.\" Julius and I both knew it all as if we had lived with them, not merely read an invented tale; and it was pictures of this land and people that had first flared up in me that afternoon in the playground when he asked if I \"remembered.\" Memories of my childhood a few years before had not half the vividness and actuality of these. Nothing could have been more stupid than such undistinguished legends, but for this convincing reality that was their outstanding characteristic... It all came back to me: the days and nights of hunting, nomad existence, the wild freedom of open plains and trackless forests, of migrations in the spring, wood fires, lawless raids, and also of some kind of mighty worship that stirred me deeply with an old, grand sense of Nature Deities adequately approached.\n\nThis latter fact, indeed, rose most possessingly upon me. There came a vague uneasiness and discomfort with it. I was aware of brooding Presences...\n\n\"And they are still about us if we care to look for them,\" interrupted a low voice in my ear, \"ready to give us of their strength and happiness, waiting to answer if we call...\"\n\nI looked up, disagreeably startled. A breath of wind stirred in the branches overhead. The tufts of ragwort bent their yellow heads. In the sky there was a curious glow and warmth. A sense of hush pervaded all the air, as though someone had crept close to where we lay and overheard our thoughts with sympathy.\n\nAnd in that very moment, just as I looked up at Julius, the picture of the woman, her face averted and her hands upraised, stole like a ghost before my inner vision. She vanished into mist again; the layer that had so suddenly disclosed itself, sank down; the other shifted up into its former place; and my companion, I saw, with sharp amazement was stretched upon his back, his head turned from me, resting on his folded hands \u2014 as though he had not spoken any word at all. For his eyes, as I then leaned over to discover, were gazing into space, and his mind seemed intent upon pictures that he visualised for himself.\n\n\"Julius,\" I said quickly, \"you spoke to me just now?\"\n\nHe turned slowly, as with an effort to tear himself away from what he saw within him; he answered quietly:\n\n\"I may have spoken. I can't be sure. Why do you ask? I've been so far away.\" His face was rapt as with some inner light. It had a radiant look. There was no desire in me to insist.\n\n\"Oh, nothing,\" I answered quickly, and lay down again to follow what memories might come. The slight shiver that undeniably had touched me went its way. There was relief, intense relief \u2014 that he had not taken the clue I recklessly had offered. And, almost at once, the world about me faded out once more, the larches dipped away, the field sank out of sight.. I plunged down into the sea of older memories...\n\nI saw the sunlight flashing on shield and spear; I saw the hordes all gathered in the plains below, a mass of waving plumes, with red on the head-dress of the chieftains; I saw the river blackened by the thousands crossing it, covering the opposite bank like swarms of climbing ants... I saw the chieftains lay aside their arms as they entered the sacred precincts of the grove; I smelt the odour of the sacrificial fires, heard the long-drawn droning of petitions, the cries of the victims... And then the sentry-fires behind the sleeping camps... the stirring of the soldiers at dawn... the perfume of leagues of open plain... muffled tramping far away... wind... fading stars... wild-flowers dripping with the dew...\n\nThere was fighting, too, galore; tremendous marches; signalling by night from the mountain-tops with torches alternately hidden and revealed; and of sacred rites, primitive and fraught with danger to human life, no end...\n\nIn the middle of which up stole again that other layer, breathing terror and shrinking dread, and with a vividness of actuality that put all the rest into the shade. It could not, would not be dismissed. Its irruption was of but an instant's duration, but in that instant there flashed upon me a clear intuition of certainty. I knew that Julius refrained purposely from speaking of this figure, because he understood my dread might drive me from his side before what we three must accomplish together was ripe for action, and because he waited \u2014 till she should appear in person. And, before it vanished again, I knew another thing: that what we three must accomplish together had to do directly with the worship of these mighty, old-world Nature Deities.\n\nThe stirring of these deep, curious emotions in me banished effectually all further scenery. I sat up and began to talk. I laughed a little and raised my voice. The sky, meanwhile, had clouded over, there was no heat in the occasional gleams of sunshine.\n\n\"I've been hunting and fighting and the Lord knows what else besides,\" I exclaimed, touching Julius on the shoulder where he lay. \"But somehow I didn't feel that you were with me \u2014 always.\"\n\n\"It's too awfully far back, for one thing,\" he replied dreamily, as if still half withdrawn, \"and, for another, we both left that section young. The three of us were not together then. That was a bit later. All the same,\" he added, \"it was there you sowed the first seeds of the soldiering instinct which is so strong in you today. I was killed in battle. We were on opposite sides. You fell \u2014\"\n\n\"On the steps \u2014\" I cried, seizing a flashing memory.\n\n\"Of the House of Messengers,\" he caught me up. \"You carried the Blue Stick of warning. You got down the street in safety when the flying javelin caught you as you reached the very steps \u2014\"\n\nThere was a sound behind us in the field quite close.\n\n\"What in the world do you two boys find to talk about so much?\" asked the voice of Hurrish suddenly. \"I'm afraid it's not all elegiacs.\" And he laughed good-humouredly.\n\nWe turned with a start. Julius looked up, then rose and touched his cap. I followed his example the same moment.\n\n\"No, sir,\" he said, before I could think of anything to answer. \"It's the Memory Game.\"\n\nHurrish looked at him with a quiet smile upon his face. His expression betrayed interest. But he said nothing, merely questioning with his eyes.\n\n\"The most wonderful game you ever played, sir,\" continued Julius.\n\n\"Indeed! The most wonderful game you ever played?\" Hurrish repeated, yet by no means unkindly.\n\n\"Getting down among the memories of \u2014 of before, sir. Recovering what we did, and what we were \u2014 and so understanding what we are today.\"\n\nThe master stared without a sign of emotion upon his face. Apparently, in some delightful way, he understood. He was very sympathetic, I remember, to both of us. We thought the world of him, respecting him almost to the point of personal affection; and this in spite of punishments his firm sense of justice often obliged him to impose. I think, at that moment, he divined what Julius meant and even felt more sympathy than he cared to show.\n\n\"The Memory Game,\" he repeated, looking quizzically down at us over the top of his glasses. \"Well, well.\" He hummed and hesitated a moment, choosing his words, it seemed, with care. \"There's a good deal of that in the air just now, I know \u2014 as you'll discover for yourselves when you leave here and get into the world outside. But, remember,\" he went on with a note of earnestness and warning in his voice, \"most of it is little better than a feeble, yet rather dangerous, form of hysteria, with vanity as a basis.\"\n\nI hardly understood what he meant myself, but I saw the quick flush that coloured the pale cheeks of my companion.\n\n\"There are numbers of people about today,\" continued Hurrish, as we walked home slowly across the field, \"who pretend to remember all kinds of wonderful things about themselves and about their past, not one of which can be justified. But it only means, as a rule, that they wish to appear peculiar by taking up the fad of the moment. They like to glorify themselves, though few of them understand even the A B C of the serious belief that may lie behind it all.\"\n\nJulius squeezed my arm; the flush had left his skin; he was listening eagerly.\n\n\"You may later come across a good many thinking people, too,\" said the master, \"who play your Memory Game, or think they do, and some among them who claim to have carried it to an extraordinary degree of perfection. There are ways and means, it is said. I do not deny that their systems may be worthy of investigation; I merely say it is a good plan to approach the whole thing with caution and common sense.\"\n\nHe glanced down first at one, then the other of us, with a grave and kindly expression in the eyes his glasses magnified so oddly.\n\n\"And most who play it,\" he added dryly, \"remember so much of their wonderful past that they forget to do their ordinary duties in their very commonplace present.\" He chuckled a little, while Julius again gripped my flesh so hard that I only just prevented crying out.\n\n\"I'll remember him in a minute \u2014 if only I can get down far enough,\" he managed to whisper in my ear. \"We were together\"\n\nWe had reached the gate, and were walking down the road towards the house. It was very evident that Hurrish understood more than he cared to admit about our wonderful game, and was trying to guide us rather than to deride instinctive beliefs.\n\nThat night in our bedroom, when Goldingham was asleep and snoring, I felt a touch upon my pillow, and looking up from the edge of unconsciousness. Saw the white outline of Julius beside the bed.\n\n\"Come over here,\" he whispered, pointing to a shaded candle on the chest of drawers, \"I've got something to show you. Something Hurrish gave me \u2014 something out of a book.\"\n\nWe peered together over a page of writing spread before us. Julius was excited and very eager. I do not think he understood it much better than I myself did, but it was the first time he had come across anything approaching his beliefs in writing. The discovery thrilled him. The authority of print was startling.\n\n\"He said it was somebody or other of importance, an Authority,\" Julius whispered as I leaned over to read the fine handwriting. \"It's Hurrish's,\" I announced. \"Rather,\" Julius answered. \"But he copied it from a book. He knows right enough.\"\n\nOddly enough, the paper came eventually into my hands, though how I know not; I found it many years later in an old desk I used in those days. I have it now somewhere. The name of the author, however, I quite forget.\n\n\"The moral and educational importance of the belief in metempsychosis,\" it ran, as our fingers traced the words together in the uncertain candle-light, \"lies in the fact that it is a manifestation of the instinct that we are not 'complete,' and that one life is not enough to enable us to reach that perfection whither we are urged by the inmost depths of our being, and also an evidence of the belief that all human action will be inevitably rewarded or punished\"\n\n\"Rewards or punishes itself,\" interrupted Julius; \"it's not punishment at all really.\"\n\n\"And this is an importance that must not be underestimated,\" the interrupted sentence concluded. \"In so far,\" we read on together, somewhat awed, I think, to tell the truth, \"as the theory is based upon the supposition that a personal divine power exists and dispenses this retributive justice\"\n\n\"Wrong again,\" broke in Julius, \"because it's just the law of natural results \u2014 there's nothing personal about it.\"\n\n\"\u2014 and that the soul must climb a long steep path to approach this power, does metempsychosis preserve its religious character.\"\n\n\"He means going back into animals as well \u2014 which never happens,\" commented the excited boy beside me once again. We read to the end then without further interruption.\n\n\"This, however, is not all. The Theory is also the expression of another idea which gives it a philosophical character. It is the earliest intellectual attempt of man, when considering the world and his position in it, to conceive that world, not as alien to him, but as akin to him, and to incorporate himself and his life as an indispensable and eternal element in the past and future of the world with which it forms one comprehensive totality. I say an eternal element, because, regarded philosophically, the belief in metempsychosis seems a kind of unconscious anticipation of the principle now known as 'Conservation of Energy.' Nothing that has ever existed can be lost, either in life or by death. All is but change; and hence souls do not perish, but return again and again in ever-changing forms. Moreover, later developments of metempsychosis, especially as conceived by Lessing, can without difficulty be harmonised with the modern idea of evolution from lower to higher forms.\"\n\n\"That's all,\" Julius whispered, looking round at me.\n\n\"By George!\" I replied, returning his significant stare.\n\n\"I promised Hurrish, you know,\" he added, blowing out the candle. \"Promised I'd read it to you.\"\n\n\"All right,\" I answered in the dark.\n\nAnd, without further comment or remark, we went back to our respective beds, and quickly so to sleep.\n\nBefore taking the final plunge, however, into oblivion, I heard the whisper of Julius, sharply audible in the silence, coming at me across the darkened room:\n\n\"It's all rot,\" he said. \"The chap who wrote that was simply thinking with his brain. But it's not the brain that remembers; it's the other part of you.\" There was a pause. And then he added, as though after further reflection: \"Don't bother about it. There's lots of stuff like that about \u2014 all tommy-rot and talk, that's all. Good night! We'll dream together now and p'raps remember.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 226", + "text": "\"We have no right whatever to speak of really unconscious Nature, but only of uncommunicative Nature, or of Nature whose mental processes go on at such different time-rates to ours that we cannot easily adjust ourselves to an appreciation of their inward fluency, although our consciousness does make us aware of their presence... Nature is a vast realm of finite consciousness of which your own is at once a part and an example.\" \u2014 Royce.\n\nThese was a great deal more in LeVallon, however, than the Memory Game: he brought a strange cargo with him from these distant shores, where, apparently, I\u2014 to say nothing of another \u2014 had helped to load it. Bit by bit, as my own machinery of recovery ran more easily, I tapped other layers also in myself. Our freight was slowly discharged. We examined and discussed each bale, as it were, but I soon became aware that there was a great deal he kept back from me. This secrecy first piqued and then distressed me. It brought mystery between us; there stood a shadowy question-mark in our relationship.\n\nI divined the cause, and dreaded it \u2014 that is, I dreaded the revelation he would sooner or later make. For I guessed \u2014 I knew \u2014 what it involved and whom. I asked no questions. But I noticed that at a certain point our conversations suddenly stopped, he changed the subject, or withdrew abruptly into silence. And something sinister gripped my heart. Behind it, closely connected in some undiscovered manner, lay two things I have already mentioned: the woman, and the worship.\n\nThis reconstruction of our past together, meanwhile, was \u2014 for a pair of schoolboys \u2014 a thrilling pursuit that never failed to absorb. Stone by stone we built it up. After often missing one another, sometimes by a century, sometimes by a mere decade or so, our return at last had chimed, and we found ourselves on earth again. We had inevitably come together. There was no such thing as missing eventually, it seemed. Debts must be discharged between those who had incurred them. And, chief among these mutual obligations, I gathered, were certain dealings we had together in connection with some form of Nature worship, during a section he referred to as our \"Temple Days.\"\n\nThe character of these dealings was one of those secret things that he would not disclose; he knew, but would not speak of it; and alone I could not \"dig it up.\" Moreover, the effect upon me here was decidedly a mixed one, for while there was great beauty in these Temple Days, there lurked behind this portion of them \u2014 terror. We had not been alone in this. Involved somehow or other with us was \"the woman.\"\n\nJulius would talk freely of certain aspects of this period, of various practices, physical, mental, spiritual, and of gorgeous ceremonies that were stimulating as well as true, pertaining undoubtedly to some effective worship of the sun, that resulted in the obtaining of enormous energy by the worshippers; but after a certain point he would say no more, and would deliberately try to shift back to some other \"layer\" altogether. And it was sheer cowardice in me that prevented my forcing a declaration. I burned to know, yet was afraid.\n\n\"I do wish I could remember better,\" I said once.\n\n\"It comes gradually of itself,\" he answered, \"and best of all when you're not thinking at all. The top part gets thin, and suddenly you see down into clear deep water. The top part, of course, is recent; it smothers the older things.\"\n\n\"Like thick sand, mine is,\" I said, \"heaps and heaps of it.\"\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders and laughed.\n\n\"The pictures of Today hide those of Yesterday,\" he explained. \"You can't remember two things at once. If your head is stuffed with what's happening at the moment, you can't expect to remember what happened a month ago. Dig back. It's trying that starts it moving.\"\n\nAncient as the stars themselves appeared the origins of our friendship and affection of today.\n\n\"Then I didn't get as far as you \u2014 in those Temple Days?\" I asked.\n\nHe glanced sharply at me beneath his long dark eyelids. He hesitated a moment.\n\n\"You began,\" he answered presently in a low voice, \"but got caught later by \u2014 something in the world \u2014 fighting, or money, or a woman \u2014 something sticky like that. And you left me for a time.\"\n\nAny temptation that enticed the soul from \"real knowledge\" he described as \"sticky.\"\n\n\"For several sections you fooled with things that counted for the moment, but were not carried over through the lot. You came back to the real ones \u2014 but too late.\" His voice sank down into a whisper; his face was grave and troubled. Shrinking stole over me. There was the excitement that he was going to tell me something, yet the dread, too, that I should hear it. \"But now,\" he went on, half to himself and half to me, \"we can put that right. Our chance \u2014 at last \u2014 is coming.\" These last words he uttered beneath his breath.\n\nAnd then he abruptly shifted the subject, leaving me with a strangely disquieting emotion that I should be drawn against my will into something that I dreaded yet could not possibly avoid. The expression of his face chilled my heart. He pulled me down upon the grass beside him. \"You've got to burrow down inside yourself,\" he went on earnestly, raising his voice again to its normal pitch, \"that's where it all lies buried. Once you get it up by yourself, you'll understand. Then you can help me.\"\n\nHis own excitement ran across the air to me. I felt grandeur in his wonderful conception \u2014 this immense river of our lives, the justice of inevitable cause and effect, the ultimate importance of every action, word and thought, and, what appealed to me most of all, the idea that results depended upon one's own character and will without the hiring of exalted substitutes to make it easy. Even as a boy this all appealed strongly to me, probably to the soldier fighting-instinct that was my chief characteristic...\n\nOf these Temple Days with their faint, flying pictures I retain fascinating recollections. In them was nothing to suggest any country I could name, certainly neither Egypt, Greece nor India. Julius spoke of some great civilisation in which primitive worship of some true kind combined with accomplishments we might regard today as the result of trained and accurate science. It involved union somehow with great \"natural\" forces. There was awe in it, but an atmosphere, too, of wonder, power and aspiration of a genuinely lofty type.\n\nIt left upon me the dim impression that it was not on the earth at all. But, for me it was too thickly veiled for detailed recovery, though an invincible instinct whispered that it was here \"the woman\" first intruded upon our joint relationship. I saw, with considerable sharpness, however, delightful pictures of what was evidently sun-worship, though of an intelligent rather than a superstitious kind. We seemed nearer to the sun than we are today, differently constituted, aware of greater powers; there was vast heat, there were gigantic, mighty winds. In this heat, through these colossal winds, came deity. The elemental powers were its manifestation. The sun, the planets, the entire universe, in fact, seemed then alive; we knew it was alive; we were kin with every point in it; and worship of a sun, a planet, or a tree, as the case might be, somehow drew their beings into definite relationship with our own, even to the point of leaving the characteristics of their particular Powers in our systems. A human being was but one living detail of a universe in which all other details were equally living and equally \u2014 possibly more \u2014 important. Nature was a power to be experienced, shared, and natural objects had a meaning in their own right. We read the phenomena of Nature as signs and symbols, clear as the black signs of writing on a printed page.\n\nOut of many talks together, Julius and I recovered all this. Alone I could not understand it. Julius, moreover, believed it still today. Though nominally, and in his life as well, a Christian, he always struck me as being intensely religious, yet without a definite religion. It was afterwards, of course, I realised this, when my experience of modern life was larger. He was unfettered by any little dogmas of man-made creeds, but obeyed literally the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount, which he knew by heart. It was essential spiritual truth he sought. His tolerance and respect for all the religions of today were based upon the belief that each contained a portion of truth at least. His was the attitude of a perfect charity \u2014 of an \"old soul,\" as he phrased it later, who \"had passed through all the traditions.\" His belief included certainly God and the gods, Nature and Christ, temples of stone and hills and woods and that temple of the heart which is the Universe itself. True worship, however, was with Nature.\n\nA vivid picture belongs to this particular \"layer.\" I saw the light of a distant planet being used, apparently in some curative sense, by human beings. It took place in a large building. Long slits in the roof were so arranged that the planet shone through them exactly upon the meridian. Dropping through the dusky atmosphere, the rays were caught by an immense concave mirror of polished metal that hung suspended above an altar where the smoke of incense rose; and, since a concave mirror forms at its focus in the air before it an image of whatever is reflected in its depths, a radiant image of the planet stood shining there in the heart of the building. It was a picture of arresting beauty and significance. Gleaming overhead, hung a mirror of still mightier proportions that caught the reflected rays and poured them down in a stream of intensified light upon the backs of men and women who lay naked on the ground, waiting to receive them.\n\n\"The quality of that particular planet is what they need,\" whispered Julius, as we watched together; \"the light-cures of that age have hardly changed,\" he laughed; \"the principle, at least, remains the same.\"\n\nThere was another scene as well in which I saw motionless, stretched figures. I could never see it clearly, though. Darkness invariably rolled down and hid it; and I had the idea that LeVallon tried to prevent its complete recovery \u2014 just then. Nor was I sorry at this, for beyond it lay something that seemed the source of the shrinking dread that haunted me. If I saw all, I should see also \u2014 her. I should know the secret thing Julius kept back from me, the thing we three had somehow to \"set right again.\" And once, when this particular scene was in my mind and Julius, I felt sure, was seeing it too, as he lay beside me on the grass, there passed into me a sudden sensation of a kind I find it difficult to describe. There was yearning in it, but there was anguish too, and a pain as of deep, unfathomable regret, wholly beyond me to account for. It swept into me, I think, from him.\n\nI turned suddenly. He lay, I saw, with his face hidden in his hands; his shoulders shook as though he sobbed; and it seemed that some memory of great poignancy convulsed him. For several minutes he lay speechless in this way, yet an air of privacy about him, that forbade intrusion. Once or twice I surprised him under these curious attacks; they were invariably connected with this particular \"inner scenery\"; and sometimes were followed by bouts of that nameless and mysterious illness that kept him in the sick-room for several days. But I asked no questions, and he vouchsafed no explanation.\n\nOn this particular point, at least, I asked no questions; but on the general subject of my uneasiness I sometimes probed him.\n\n\"This sense of funk when I remember these old forgotten things,\" I asked, \"what is it? Why does it frighten me?\"\n\nGazing at me out of those strange eyes that saw into so huge a universe, he answered softly:\n\n\"It's a faint memory, too \u2014 of the first pains and trials you suffered when you began to learn. You feel the old wrench and strain.\"\n\n\"It hurt so?\"\n\nHe nodded, with that smile of yearning that sometimes shone so beautifully on his face.\n\n\"At first,\" he replied. \"It seemed like losing your life \u2014 until you got far enough to know the great happiness of the bigger way of living. Coming back to me like this revives it. We began to learn together, you see.\"\n\nI mentioned the extraordinary feelings of the playground when first I spoke with him, and of the classroom when first we saw each other.\n\n\"Ah,\" he sighed, \"there's no mistaking it \u2014 the coming together of old friends or enemies. The instant the eyes meet, the flash of memory follows. Only, the tie must have been real, of course, to make it binding.\"\n\n\"How can it ever end?\" I asked. \"Each time starts it all going again.\"\n\n\"By starting the opposite. Love dissolves the link. Understand why you hate \u2014 and at once it lessens. Sympathy follows, feeling-with \u2014 that's love; and love sets you both free. It's not thinking, but feeling that makes the strongest chains.\"\n\nAnd it was speaking of \"feeling\" that led to his saying things I have never forgotten. For thinking, in those older days, seemed of small account. It was an age of feeling, chiefly. Feeling was the way to knowledge: here was the main difference between Today and those far-off Yesterdays. The way to know an object was to feel it \u2014 feel-with it. The simplicity of the method was as significant as its \u2014 impossibility! Yet a fundamental truth was in it.\n\nTo know a thing was not to enumerate merely its qualities. To state the weight, colour, texture of a stone, for instance, was merely to mention its external characteristics; whereas to think of it till it became part of the mind, seen from its own point of view, was to know it as it actually is. The mind felt-with it. It became a part of yourself. Knowledge, as Julius understood the word, was identifying himself with the object: it became part of the substance of the mind: it was known from within.\n\nCommunion with inanimate objects, with Nature itself, was in this way actually possible.\n\n\"Dwell upon anything you like,\" he said, \"to the point where you feel it, and you get it all exactly as it is, not merely as you see it. Its quality, its power, becomes a part of yourself. Take trees, rivers, mountains, take wind and fire in this way \u2014 and you feel their power in you. You can use them. That was the way of worship \u2014 then.\"\n\n\"The sun itself, the planets, anything?\" I asked eagerly, recognising something that seemed once familiar to me.\n\n\"Anything,\" he replied quietly. \"Copy their own movements, too, and you'll get nearer still. Imitate the attitude and gestures of a stranger and you begin to understand what he's up to, his point of view \u2014 what he's feeling. You begin to know him. All ceremonies began that way. On that big plain where the worship of the sun was held, the smaller temples represented the planets, the distances all calculated in proper ratio from the heavens. We copied their movements exactly, as we moved, thousands and thousands of us, in circular form about the centre. We felt-with them, got all joined up to the whole system; by imitating. their gestures, we understood them and absorbed a portion of their qualities and powers. Our energy became as theirs. Acting the ceremony brought the knowledge, don't you see? Oh, it's scientific, right enough,\" he added. \"It's not going backwards \u2014 instinctive knowledge. It's a pity it's forgotten now.\"\n\n\"How do you know all this?\" I asked.\n\n\"I've done it so often. You've done it with me. Alone, of course, it's difficult to get results; but when a lot together do it \u2014 a crowd \u2014 a nation \u2014 the whole world \u2014 you could shift Olympus into the AEgean, or bring Mars near enough to throw a bridge across!\"\n\nWe burst out laughing together, though his face instantly again grew grave and earnest.\n\n\"It will come,\" he said, \"it will come again in time. When the idea of brotherhood has spread, and the separate creeds have merged, and the whole world feels the same thing together \u2014 it will come. It's another order of consciousness, that's all.\"\n\nHis passionate conviction certainly stirred joy and wonder in me somewhere. It was stupendous, yet so simple. The universe was knowable; its powers assimilable by human beings. Here was true Nature Magic, the elements cooperating, the stars alive, the sun a deity to be known and felt.\n\n\"And that's why concentration gives such power,\" he added. \"By feeling anything till you feel-with it and become it, you know every blessed thing about it from inside. You have instinctive knowledge of it. Mistakes become impossible. You live and act with the whole universe.\"\n\nAnd, as I listened, it seemed a kind of childish presumption that had shut us off from the sun, the stars, the numerous other systems of space, and that reduced knowledge to the meagre statement of a people dwelling upon one unimportant globe of comparatively recent matter in one of the smaller solar systems.\n\nOur earth, indeed, was not the centre of the universe; it was but a temporary point in the long, long journey of the River of Lives. The soul would eventually traverse a million other points. It was so integral a part of everything, so intimately akin to every corner and aspect of the cosmos, that a \"human\" being's relative position to the very stars, the angle at which he met their light and responded to the tension of their forces, must necessarily affect his inmost personality. If the moon could raise the tides, she could assuredly cause an ebb and flow in the fluids of the human body, and how could men and women expect to resist the stress and suction of those tremendous streams of power that played upon the earth from the network of great distant suns? Times and seasons, now known as feast-days and the like, were likewise of significance. There were moments, for instance, in the \"ceremony\" of the heavens when it was possible to see more easily in one direction than in another, when certain powers, therefore, were open and accessible. The bridges then were clear, the channels open. A revelation of intenser life \u2014 from the universe, from a star, from mountains, rivers, winds or forests \u2014 could then steal down and leave their traces in the heart and passion of a human being. For, just as there is a physical attitude of prayer by which the human body invites communion, so times and seasons were attitudes and gestures of that greater body of Nature when results could be most favourably expected.\n\nIt was all very bewildering, very big, very curious; but if I protested that it merely meant a return to the unreasoning superstitious days of Nature Magic, there was something in me at the same time that realised vital, forgotten truth behind it all. Cleansed and scientific, Julius urged, it must return into the world again. What men formerly knew by feeling, an age now coming would justify and demonstrate by brain and reason. Touch with the universe would be restored. We should go back to Nature for peace and power and progress. Scientific worship would be known.\n\nYet by worship he meant not merely kneeling before an Ideal and praying eagerly to resemble it; but approaching a Power and acquiring it. What heat in itself may be we do not know; only that without it we collapse into inert particles. What lies behind, beyond the physicist's account of air as a gas, remains unknown; deprived of it, however, we cease to breathe and be conscious in matter. Each moment we feel the sun, take in the air, we live; and the more we accomplish this union, the more we are alive. In addition to these physical achievements, however, their essential activities could be known and acquired spiritually. And the means was that worship which is union \u2014 feeling-with.\n\nTo Julius this achievement was a literal one.' The elements were an expression of spiritual powers. To be in touch with them was to be in touch with a Whole in which the Earth or Sirius are, after all, but atoms. Moreover, it was a conscious Whole. In atoms themselves he found life too. Chemical affinity involved intelligence. Certain atoms refuse to combine with certain other atoms, they are hostile to each other; while others rush headlong into each other's arms. How do the atoms know?\n\nHere lay hints of powers he sought to reclaim for human use and human help and human development.\n\n\"For they were known once,\" he would cry. \"We knew them, you and I. Their nature is not realised today; consciousness has lost touch with them. We recall a broken fragment, but label it superstition, ignorance, and the like. And, being incomplete, these remnants of necessity seem child.ish. Their meaning cannot come through the brain, and that other mode of consciousness which understood has left us now. The world, pursuing a lesser ideal, denies its forgotten greatness with a sneer!\"\n\nA great deal of this he said to me one day while we were walking home from church, whose \"service\" had stirred him into vehement and eager utterance. His language was very boyish, and yet it seemed to me that I listened to someone quite as old as Dr. Randall, the Headmaster who had preached. I can see the hedges, wet and shining after rain; the dull November sky; ploughed fields and muddy lanes. I can hear again the plover calling above the hill. Nothing could possibly have been more uninspiring than the dreary hop-poles, the moist, depressing air, the leafless elms, and the \"Sunday feeling\" amid which the entire scene was laid.\n\nThe boys straggled along; the road in twos and threes, hands in pockets, points of Eton jackets sticking out behind. Hurrish, the nice master, was just in front of us, walking with Goldingham. I saw the latter turn his face up sideways as he asked some question, and I suddenly wondered whether he knew how odd he looked, or, indeed, what he looked like at all. I wondered what sort of \"sections\" and adventures Goldingham, Hurrish, and all these Eton-jacketed boys had been through before they arrived at this; and next it flashed across me what a grotesque result it was for LeVallon to have reached after so many picturesque and stimulating lives \u2014 an Eton jacket, a mortar-board, and tight Wesleyan striped trousers.\n\nAnd now, as I recall these curious recollections of years ago, it occurs to me as remarkable that, although a sense of humour was not lacking in either of us, yet neither then nor now could the spirit of the comic, and certainly never of the ludicrous, rob by one little jot the reality, the deep, convincing actuality of these strange convictions that LeVallon and I shared together when at Motfield Close we studied Greek and Latin, while remembering a world before Greeks or Latins ever existed at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 227", + "text": "\"There seems nothing in preexistence incompatible with any of the dogmas which are generally accepted as fundamental to Christianity.\" \u2014 Prof. M'Taggart.\n\nBy my last half-year at Motfield Close, when I was Head of the school, LeVallon had already left, but the summer term preceding his departure is the one most full of delightful recollections for me. He was Head then \u2014 which proves that he was sufficiently normal and practical to hold that typically English position, and to win respect in it \u2014 and I was \"Follow-on Head,\" as we called it.\n\nI suppose he was verging on eighteen at the time, for neither of us was destined for a Public School later, and we stayed on longer than the general run of boys. We still shared the room with Goldingham \u2014 \"Goldie,\" who went on to Wellington and Sandhurst, and afterwards lost his life in the Zulu War \u2014 and we enjoyed an unusual amount of liberty. The \"triumvirate\" the masters called us, and I remember that we were proud of topping Hurrish by half an inch, each being over six feet in his socks.\n\nWith peculiar pleasure, too, I recall the little class we formed by ourselves in Greek, and the hours spent under Hurrish's sympathetic and enthusiastic guidance, reading Plato for the first time. Hurrish was an admirable scholar, and myself and Goldie, though unable to match LeVallon's singular and intuitive mastery of the language, made up for our deficiency by working like slaves. The group was a group of enthusiasts, not of mere plodding schoolboys. But Julius it undoubtedly was who fed the little class with a special subtle fire of his own, and with a spirit of searching interpretative insight that made the delighted Hurrish forget that he was master and Julius pupil. And in the \"Sympathetic Studies\" the former published later upon Plotinus and some of the earlier Gnostic writings, I certainly traced more than one illuminating passage to its original inspiration in some remark let fall by LeVallon in those intimate talks round Hurrish's desk at Motfield Close.\n\nBut what comes back to me now with a kind of veritable haunting wonder that almost makes me sorry such speculations are no longer possible, were the talks and memories we enjoyed together in our bedroom. For there was a stimulating excitement about these whispered conversations we held by the open window on summer nights \u2014 an atmosphere of stars and scented airs and hushed silent spaces beyond the garden \u2014 that comes back to me now with an added touch of mystery and beauty both compelling and suggestive. When I think of those bedroom hours I step suddenly out of the London murk and dinginess, out of the tedium of my lecturing and teaching, into a vast picture gallery of vivid loveliness. The scenery of mighty dreams usurps the commonplace realities of the present.\n\nTen o'clock was the hour for lights out, and by ten-fifteen Goldie, with commendable regularity, was asleep and snoring. We thanked him much for that, as somebody says in \"Alice,\" and Julius, as soon as the signal of Goldie's departure became audible, would creep over to my bed, touch me on the shoulder, and give the signal to drag the bolsters from a couple of unused beds and plant ourselves tailor-wise in our dressing-gowns before the window.\n\n\"It's like the old, old days,\" he would say, pointing to the sky. \"The stars don't change much, do they?\" He indicated the dim terraces of lawn with the tassel of his dressing-gown. \"Can't you imagine it all? I can. There were the long stone steps \u2014 don't you see? \u2014 below, running off into the plain. Behind us, all the halls and vestibules, cool and silent, veil after veil hiding the cells for meditation, and over there in the corner the little secret passages down to the crypts below ground where the tests took place. Better put a blanket round you if you're cold,\" he added, noticing that I shivered, though it was excitement and not cold that sent the slight trembling over my body. \"And there\" \u2014 as the church clock sounded the hour across the Kentish woods and fields \u2014 \"are the very gongs themselves, I swear, the great gongs that swung in the centre of the dome.\"\n\nGoldie's peaceful snoring, and an occasional closing of a door as one master after another retired to his room in the house below, were the only sounds that reminded me of the present. Julius, sitting beside me in the star-light, his eyes a-shine, his pale skin gleaming under the mop of tangled dark hair, whispered words that conjured up not only scenes and memories, but the actual feelings, atmosphere and emotions of days more ancient than any dreams. I smelt the odour of dim, pillared aisles, tasted the freshness of desert air, heard the high rustle of other winds in palm and tamarisk. The Past that never dies swept down upon us from sky and Kentish countryside with the murmur of the night-breeze in the shrubberies below. It enveloped us completely.\n\n\"Not the stars we knew together first \u2014 not the old outlines we once travelled by,\" he whispered, describing in the air with his finger the constellations presumably of other skies. \"That was earlier still. Yet the general look is the same. You can feel the old tinglings coming down from some of them.\" And he would name the planet that was in ascension at the moment, with invariable correctness I found out afterwards, and describe the particular effect it produced upon his thoughts and imagination, the moods and forces it evoked, the mental qualities it served \u2014 in a word, its psychic influence upon the inner personality.\n\n\"Look,\" he whispered, but so suddenly that it made me start. He pointed to the darkened room behind us. \"Can't you almost see the narrow slit in the roof where the rays came through and fell upon the metal discs swinging in mid-air? Can't you see the rows of dark-skinned bodies on the ground? Can't you feel the minute and crowding vibrations of the light on your flesh, as the disc swung round and the stream fell down in a jolly blaze all over you?\"\n\nAnd, though I saw nothing in the room but faintly luminous patches where the beds stood, and the two tin baths upon the floor, a vivid scene rose before my mind's eye that stirred poignant emotions I was wholly at a loss to explain. The consciousness of some potent magical life stirred in my veins, a vaster horizon, and a larger purpose than anything I had known hitherto in my strict and conventional English life and my quaint worship in a pale-blue tin tabernacle where all was ugly, cramped, and literally idolatrous.\n\n\"And the gongs so faintly ringing,\" I cried.\n\nJulius turned quickly and thrust his face closer into mine. Then he stood up beside the open window and drew in a deep breath of the June night air.\n\n\"Ah, you remember that?\" he said, with eyes aglow. \"The gongs \u2014 the big singing gongs! There you had a bit of clean, deep memory right out of the centre. No wonder you feel excited...!\"\n\nAnd he explained to me, though I scarcely recognised the voice or language, so strongly did the savour of shadowy past days inform them, how it was in those old temples when the world was not cut off from the rest of the universe, but claimed some psychical kinship with all the planetary and stellar forces, that each planet was represented by a metal gong so attuned in quality and pitch as to vibrate in sympathy with the message of its particular rays, sound and colour helping and answering one another till the very air trembled and pulsed with the forces the light brought down. No doubt, Julius's words, vibrating with earnestness, completed my confusion while they intensified my enjoyment, for I remember how carried away I was by this picture of the temples acting as sounding-boards to the sky, and by his description of the healing powers of the light and sound thus captured and concentrated.\n\nThe spirit of comedy peeped in here and there between the entr'actes, as it were, for even the peaceful and studious Goldie was also included in these adventures of forgotten days, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously.\n\n\"By the gods!\" Julius exclaimed, springing up, \"I've an idea! We'll try it on Goldie, and see what happens!\"\n\n\"Try what?\" I whispered, catching his own excitement.\n\n\"Gongs, discs and planet,\" was the reply.\n\nX stared at him through the gloom. Then I glanced towards the unconscious victim.\n\n\"There's no harm. We'll imagine this is one of the old temples, and we'll do an experiment!\" He touched me on the back. Excitement ran through me. Something caught me from the past. I watched him with an emotion that was half amazement, half alarm.\n\nIn a moment he had the looking-glass balanced upon the window-ledge at a perilous angle, reflecting the faint starlight upon the head of the sleeping Goldingham. Any minute I feared it would fall with a crash upon the lawn below, or break into smithereens upon the floor. Julius fixed it somehow with a hairbrush and a towel against the sash.\n\n\"Get the disc,\" he whispered, and after a moment's reflection I understood what he meant; I emptied one bath as quietly as possible into the other, then dragged it across the carpet to the bedside of the snoring Goldie who was to be \"healed.\" The ridiculous experiment swept me with such a sense of reality, owing to the intense belief LeVallon injected into it, that I never once felt inclined to laugh. I was only vaguely afraid that Goldingham might somehow suffer.\n\n\"It's Venus,\" exclaimed Julius under his breath. \"She's in the ascendant too. That's the luck of the gods, isn't it?\"\n\nI whispered something in reply, wondering dimly what Goldie might think.\n\n\"You bang the bath softly for the sound,\" said he, \"while I hold it up for you. We may hit the right note \u2014 the vibrations that fit in with the rate of the light, I mean \u2014 though it's a bit of a chance, I suppose!\"\n\nI obeyed, thinking of masters sleeping down below in the silent building.\n\n\"Louder!\" exclaimed Julius peremptorily.\n\nI obeyed again, with a dismal result resembling tin cans in orgy. And the same minute the good-natured and studious Goldingham awoke with a start and stretched out a hand for his glasses.\n\n\"Feel anything unusual, Goldie?\" asked LeVallon at once, tremendously in earnest, as he lowered the tin bath.\n\n\"Oh, it's only you!\" exclaimed the victim, awakened out of his first sleep and blinking in the gloom, \"and you!\" he added, catching sight of me, my fist still upraised to beat; \"rotten brutes, both of you! You might let a fellow sleep a bit. You know I'm swotting up for an exam.!\"\n\n\"But do you feel anything, Goldie?\" insisted LeVallon, as though it were a matter of life and death. \"It was Venus, you know...\"\n\n\"Was it?\" spluttered the other, catching sight of the big bath between him and the open window. \"Well, Venus is beastly cold. Who opened the window?\" The sight of the bath apparently unnerved him. He hardly expected it before seven in the morning.\n\nFurther explanations were cut short by the sudden collapse of the mirror with a crash of splintering glass upon the floor. The noise of the bath, that pinged and boomed as I balanced it against the bed, completed the uproar. Then the door opened, and there stood \u2014 Martin.\n\nIt was an awkward moment. Yet it was not half as real, half as vivid, half as alive with the emotion of actual life, as that other memory so recently vanished. Martin, at first, seemed the dream; that other, the reality.\n\nHe entered with a lighted candle. The noise of the opening window and the footsteps had, no doubt, disturbed him for some time. Yet, quickly as he came, Goldie and I were \"asleep\" even before he had time to cross the threshold. Julius stood alone to face him in the middle of the floor. It was characteristic of the boy. He never shirked.\n\n\"What's the meaning of all this noise?\" asked Martin, obviously pleased to find himself in a position of unexpected advantage. \"LeVallon, why are you not in bed? And why is the window open?\"\n\nSecretly ashamed of myself, I lay under the sheets, wondering what Julius would answer.\n\n\"We always sleep with the window open, sir,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"What was that crash I heard?\" asked the master, coming farther into the room, and holding the candle aloft so that it showed every particle of the broken glass. \"Who did this?\" He glanced suspiciously about him, knowing of course that Julius was not the only culprit.\n\nLeVallon stood there, looking straight at him. Martin \u2014 as I think of the incident today \u2014 had the appearance of a weasel placed by chance in a position of advantage, yet afraid of its adversary. He winced, yet exulted.\n\n\"Do you realise that it's long after eleven,\" he observed frigidly, \"and that I shall be obliged to report you to Dr. Randall in the morning...\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Julius.\n\n\"It's very serious,\" continued Martin, more excitedly, and apparently uncertain how to drive home his advantage, \"it's very distressing \u2014 er \u2014 to find you, LeVallon, Head of the School, guilty of mischief like a Fourth\u2013Form boy \u2014 at this hour of the night too!\"\n\nThe reference to the lower form was, of course, intended to be crushing. But Julius in his inimitable way turned the tables astonishingly.\n\n\"Very good, sir,\" he said calmly, \"but I was only trying to get the light of Venus, and her sound, into Goldingham's head \u2014 into his system, that is \u2014 by reflecting it in the looking-glass; and it fell off the ledge. It's an experiment of antiquity, as you know, sir. I'm exceedingly sorry...\"\n\nMartin stared. He was a little afraid of LeVallon; the boy's knowledge of mathematics had compelled his admiration as often as his questions, sometimes before the whole class, had floored him.\n\n\"It's an old experiment,\" the boy added, his pale face very grave, \"healing, you know, sir, by the rays of the planets \u2014 forgotten star-worship \u2014 like the light-cures of today\"\n\nMartin's somewhat bewildered eye wandered to the flat tin bath still propped against Goldingham's bedside.\n\n\"...and using gongs to increase the vibrations,\" explained Julius further, noticing the glance. \"We were trying to make it do for a gong \u2014 the scientists will discover it again before long, sir.\"\n\nThe master hardly knew whether to laugh or scold. He stood there in his shirt-sleeves looking hard at Le\u2013Vallon who faced him with tumbled hair and shining eyes in his woolly red dressing-gown. Erect, dignified, for all the absurdity of the situation, the flush of his strange enthusiasm emphasising the delicate beauty of his features, I remember feeling that even the stupid Martin must surely understand that there was something rather wonderful about him, and pass himself beneath the spell.\n\n\"I was the priest,\" he said.\n\n\"But I did the gong \u2014 I mean, the bath-part, please, sir,\" I put in, unable any longer to let Julius bear all the blame.\n\nThere was a considerable pause, during which grease dripped audibly upon the floor from the master's candle, while Goldingham lay blinking in bed in such a way that I dared not look at him for fear of laughter. I have often wondered since what passed through the mind of Tuke Martin, the senior Master of Mathematics, during that pregnant interval.\n\n\"Get up, all of you,\" he said at length, \"and pick up this mess. Otherwise you'll cut your feet to pieces in the morning. Here, Goldingham, you help too. You're no more asleep than the others.\" He tried to make his tone severe.\n\n\"Goldingham only woke when the glass fell off the ledge, sir,\" explained LeVallon. \"It was all my doing, really\"\n\n\"And mine,\" I put in belatedly.\n\nMartin watched us gather up the fragments, Goldie, still dazed and troubled, barking his shins against chairs and bedposts, unable to find his blue glasses in the excitement.\n\n\"Put the pieces in the bath,\" continued Martin shortly, \"and ring for William in the morning to clear it away. And pay the matron for a new looking-glass,\" he addled, with something of a sneer; \"Mason half, and you, Le\u2013Vallon, the other half.\"\n\n\"Of course, sir,\" said Julius.\n\n\"And don't let me hear any further sounds tonight,\" said the master finally, closing the window, and going out after another general look of suspicion round the room.\n\nWhich was all that we ever heard of the matter! For the Master of Mathematics did not particularly care about reporting the Head of the School to Dr. Randall, and incurring the dislike of the three top boys into the bargain. I got the impression, too, that Tuke Martin was as glad to get out of that room without loss of dignity as we were to see him go. LeVallon, by his very presence even, had a way of making one feel at a disadvantage.\n\n\"Anything particular come to you?\" he asked Goldie, as soon as we were alone again, and the victim's temper was restored by finding himself the centre of so much general interest. \"I suppose there was hardly time, though\"\n\n\"Queer dream's all I can remember,\" he replied gruffly.\n\n\"What sort?\"\n\n\"Nothing much. I seemed to be hunting through a huge lexicon for verbs, but every time I opened the beastly thing it was like opening the lid of a box instead of the cover of a book; and, in place of pages, I saw rows of people lying face downwards, and streaks of light dodging about all over their skins. Rotten nightmare, that's all!\"\n\nJulius and I exchanged glances.\n\n\"And then,\" continued Goldie, \"that bally tin bath banged like thunder and I woke up to see you two rotters by my bed.\"\n\n\"If there had been more time \u2014 \" Julius observed to me in an aside.\n\n\"I'm jolly glad it's your last term,\" Goldingham growled, looking at LeVallon, or LeValion, as he usually called him; \"you're as mad as a March hare, anyhow!\" \u2014 which was the sentence I took into dreamland with me." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 228", + "text": "\u2003\"The blue dusk ran between the streets: my love was winged within my mind.\n\n\u2003It left today and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.\n\n\u2003Today was past and dead for me, for from, today my feet had run\n\n\u2003Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.\"\n\n\u2014 A. E.\n\nIt was another time, very early in the morning, that LeVallon called me from the depths of dreamless sleep with a whisper that seemed to follow me out of some vast place where I had been lying under open skies with the winds of heaven about my face and the stars as close as flowers. It was no dream; I brought back no single detail of incident or person \u2014 only this keen, sweet awareness of having been somewhere far away upon an open plain or desert of enormous stretch, waiting for something, watching, preparing \u2014 and that I had been awakened. Great hands drew back into the stars; eyes that were mighty closed; heads of majestic aspect turned away; and Presences of some infinite demeanour grandly concealed themselves as when mountains become veiled by the hood of hurrying clouds. I had the feeling that the universe had touched me, then withdrawn.\n\nThe room was dark, but shades of tender grey, stealing across the walls and ceiling, told that the dawn was near. Our windows faced the east; a flush of delicate light was in the sky; and, between me and this sky, something moved very softly and came close. It touched me.\n\nJulius, I saw, was bending down above my pillow.\n\n\"Are you ready?\" he whispered, as I felt his hand upon my hair. \"The sun is on the way!\"\n\nThe words, however, at first, seemed not in English, but in some other half-familiar language that I instantly translated into my own tongue. They drifted away from me like feathers into space. I grew wide awake and rubbed my eyes. It startled me a little to find myself in this modern room and to see his pale visage peering so closely into mine. I surely had dropped from a height, or risen from some hollow of prodigious depth; for it flashed across me that, had I waked a moment sooner, I must have caught a glimpse of other faces, heard other voices in that old familiar language, remembered other well-known things, all of which had fled too suddenly away, plunging with swiftness into the limbo of forgotten times and places... It was very sweet. There was yearning desire in me to know more.\n\nI sat up in bed.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked, my tongue taking the words with a certain curious effort. \"What were you saying...? A moment ago... just now?\" I tried to arrest the rout of flying sensations. Dim, shadowy remoteness gathered them away like dreams.\n\n\"I'm calling you to see the sunrise,\" he whispered softly, taking my hand to raise me; \"the sunrise on the Longest Day upon the plain. Wake up and come!\"\n\nConfusion vanished at his touch and voice. Yet a fragment of words just vanished dropped back into my mind. Something sublime and lovely ran between us.\n\n\"But you were saying \u2014 about the Blue Circle and the robes \u2014 that it was time to \u2014\" I went on, then, with the effort to remember, lost the clue completely. He had said these other things, but already they had dipped beyond recovery. I scrambled out of bed, almost expecting to find some robe or other in place of my old grey dressing-'gown beside the chair. Strong feelings were in me, awe, wonder, high expectancy, as of some grand and reverent worship. No mere bedroom of a modem private school contained me. I was elsewhere, among imperial and august conditions. I was aware of the Universe, and the Universe aware of me.\n\nI spoke his name as I followed him softly over the carpet. But to my amazement, my tongue refused the familiar \"Julius\" of today, and framed instead another sound. Four syllables lay in the name. It was \"Concerighe\" that slipped from my lips. Then instantly, in the very second of utterance, it was gone beyond recovery. I tried to repeat the name, and could not find it.\n\nJulius laughed softly just below his breath, making no reply. I saw his white teeth shine in the semi-darkness. He moved away on tiptoe towards the window, while I followed...\n\nThe lower sash was open wide as usual. I heard Goldingham breathing quietly in his sleep. Still with the mistiness of slumber round me, I felt bewildered, half caught away, as it seemed, into some web of ancient, far-off things that swung earthwards from the stars. In this net of other times and other places, I hung suspended above the world I ordinarily knew. I was not Mason, a Sixth\u2013Form boy at a private school in Kent, yet I was indubitably myself. A flood of memories rose; my soul moved among more spacious conditions; all hauntingly alive and real, yet never recoverable completely...\n\nWe stood together by the open window and looked out. The country lay still beneath the fading stars. A faint breath of air stirred in the laurel shrubberies below. The notes of awakening birds, marvellously sweet, came penetratingly from the distant woods. I smelt the night, I smelt the coolness of very early morning, but there was another subtler, wilder perfume, that came to my nostrils with a deep thrill of happiness I could not name. It was the perfume of another day, another time, another land. all three as familiar to me as this Kentish hill where now I lived, yet gone otherwise beyond recall. Deep emotion stirred in me the sense of recognition, as though smell alone had the power to reconstruct the very atmosphere of those dim days by raising the ghosts of feelings that once accompanied them...\n\nTo the right I saw the dim cricket-field with hedge of privet and hawthorn that ran away in a dark and undulating line towards the hop-poles standing stiffly in the dusk; and, farther off, to the left, loomed the oast-houses, peaked and hooded, their faces turned the other way like a flock of creatures that belonged to darkness. The past seemed already indistinguishable from the present. I stood upon shifting sands that rustled beneath my feet... The centuries drove backwards...\n\nAnd the eastern sky, serene and cloudless, ran suddenly into gold and crimson near to the horizon's rim. It became a river of fire that flashed along the edge of the world with high, familiar speed. It broke the same instant into coloured foam far overhead, with shafts of reddish light that swept the stars and put them out. And then this strange thing happened:\n\nFor, as my sight passed from the shadowy woods beyond, the scene before me rose like a lifted map into the air; changed; trembled as though it were a sheet shaken from the four corners, and \u2014 disclosed another scene below it, most exquisitely prepared. The world I knew melted and disappeared. I looked a second time. It was gone.\n\nAnd with it vanished the entire little bundle of thoughts and feelings I was accustomed to regard as John Mason... I smelt the long and windy odours of the open world. The stars bent down and whispered Rivers rolled through me. Forests and grass grew thickly in my thoughts. And there was dew upon my face... It was all so natural and simple. It was divine. The Universe was conscious. I was not separate from it at any point... More, I was conscious with it.\n\nFar off, as an auditorium seen with a bird's-eye view from some gigantic height, yet with the distinctness of a map both scaled and raised, I saw a treeless plain of vast dimensions, grey in the shadows just before the dawn. In the middle distance stood a domed white building upon the summit of a mound, with broad steps of stone in circles all about it, leading to a pillared door that faced the east. On all sides round it, covering the plain like grass, there was a concourse, many thousands strong, of people, upright and motionless, arranged in wide concentric rings, each one a hundred to two hundred deep. Each ring was dressed in coloured robes, from blue to red, from green to a soft pale yellow, purple, brown and orange, and the outermost of all a delicate and tender green that merged into the tint of the plain itself at a distance of a mile beyond the central building.\n\nThese concentric rings of colour, this vast living wheel of exquisitely merging tints, standing motionless and silent about the hub of that majestic temple, formed a picture whose splendour has never left my mind; and a sense of intoxicating joy and awe swept through me as something whispered that long ago, I, too, had once taken my appointed place in those great circles, and had felt the power of the Deity of Living Fire pass into me in the act of worship just about to begin. The courage and sweetness of the sun stole on me; light, heat and glory burned in my heart; I knew myself akin to earth, sea and sky, as also to every human unit in the breathing wheel; and, knowing this, I knew the power of the universe was in me because the universe was my Self.\n\nImperceptibly at first, but a moment later with measurable speed, a movement ran quivering round the circles. They began to turn. The immense, coloured wheel revolved silently upon the plain. The rings moved alternately, the first to the right, the second to the left, those at the outer rim more swiftly, and those within more slowly, each according to its distance from the centre, so that the entire mass presented the appearance of a single body rotating with a uniform and perfect smoothness. There rose a deep, muffled sound of myriad feet that trampled down the sand. The mighty shuffling of it paced the air. No other sound was audible. The sky grew swiftly brighter. The shafts of light shot out like arms towards the paling zenith. There came a whir of cool, delicious wind that instantly died down again and left the atmosphere more still and empty than before.\n\nAnd then the sun came up. With the sudden rush of an eastern clime, it rose above the world. One second it was not there, the next it had appeared. The wheel blazed into flame. The circles turned to coloured fire. And a roaring chant burst forth instantaneously \u2014 a prodigious sound of countless voices whose volume was as the volume of an ocean. This wind of singing swept like a tempest overhead, each circle emitting the note related to its colour, the total resulting in a chord whose magnificence shook the heart with an ecstasy of joyful worship... I was aware of the elemental power of fire in myself...\n\nHow long this lasted, or how long I listened is impossible to tell... the dazzling glory slowly faded; there came a moment when the brilliance dimmed; a blur of coloured light rose like a sheet from the surface of the wheeling thousands, floating off into the sky as though it were a separate shining emanation the multitude gave off. I seemed to lose my feet. I no longer stood on solid earth. There came upon me a curious sense of lightness, as of wings, that yet left my body far below... I was charged with a deific power, energy... Long shafts of darkness flashed across the sea of light; the pattern of interwoven colour was disturbed and broken; and, suddenly, with a shock as though I fell again from some great height, I remembered dimly that I was no longer \u2014 that my name was \u2014\n\nI cannot say. I only know confusion and darkness sponged the entire picture from the world; and my sight, I suddenly realised, went groping with difficulty about a little field, a rough, uneven hedge, a strip of ribboned whiteness that was a road, and some ugly, odd-shaped things that I recognised as \u2014 yes, as oast-houses just beyond. And a pale, sad-looking sun then crawled above the horizon where the hop-poles stood erect.\n\n\"You saw...?\" whispered someone beside me.\n\nIt was Julius. His voice startled me. I had forgotten his very presence.\n\nI nodded in reply; no words came to me; there was still a trembling in me, a sense of intolerable yearning, of beauty lost, of power gone beyond recall, of pain and littleness in the place of it.\n\nJulius kept his eyes upon my face, as though waiting for an answer.\n\n\"The sun... \" I said in a low and shaking voice.\n\nHe bent his head a moment, leaning down upon the window-sill with his face in his hands.\n\n\"As we knew it then,\" he said with a deep-drawn sigh, raising himself again. \"Today 1\"\n\nHe pointed. Across the fields I saw the tin roof of the conventicle where we went to church on Sunday, lifting its modern ugliness beyond the playground walls. The contrast was somehow dreadful. A revulsion of feeling rose within me like a storm. I stared at the meagre building beneath whose roof of corrugated iron, once a week, we knelt and groaned that we were \"miserable sinners\" \u2014 begging another to save us from \"punishment\" because we were too weak to save ourselves. I saw once more in memory the upright-standing throng, claiming with joy the powers of that other Deity of whom they knew they formed a living portion. And again this intolerable yearning swept me. My soul rose up in a passionate protest that vainly sought to express itself in words. Language deserted me; tears dimmed my eyes and blurred my sight; I stretched my hands out straight towards that misty sunrise of Today...\n\nAnd, when at length I turned again to speak to Julius, I saw that he had already left my side and gone back to bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 229", + "text": "\u2002\"Not unremembering we pass our exile from the starry ways:\n\n\u2002One timeless hour in time we caught from the long night of endless days.\"\n\n\u2014 A. E.\n\nAnd so, in due course, the period of our schooldays came to its appointed end without one single further reference to the particular thing I dreaded. Julius had offered no further word of explanation, and my instinctive avoidance of the subject had effectively prevented my asking pointed questions. It remained, however; it merely waited the proper moment to reveal itself. It was real. No effort on my part, no evasion, no mere pretence that it was fantasy or imagination altered that. The time would come when I should know and understand; evasion would be impossible. It was inevitable as death.\n\nDuring our last term together it lay in almost complete abeyance, only making an appearance from time to time in those vivid dreams which still presented themselves in sleep. It hid; and I pretended bravely to ignore it altogether.\n\nMeanwhile our days were gloriously happy, packed with interest, and enlivened often with experiences as true and beautiful as the memory of our ancient sun-worship I have attempted to describe. No doubt assailed me; we had existed in the past together; those pictures of \"inner scenery\" were memories. The emotions that particular experience, and many others, stirred in me were as genuine as the emotions I experienced the last term but one, when my mother died; and, whatever my opinion of the entire series may be today, on looking back, honesty compels me to admit this positive character of their actuality. There was no make-believe, no mere imagination.\n\nOur intimacy became certainly very dear to me, and I felt myself linked to Julius LeVallon more closely than to a brother. The knowledge that much existed he could not, or would not, share with me was pain, the pain of jealousy and envy, or possibly the deeper pain that a barrier was raised. Sometimes, indeed, he went into his Other Places almost for days together where I could not follow him, and on these occasions the masters found him absent-minded and the boys avoided him; he went about alone; if games or study compelled his attention, he would give it automatically \u2014 almost as though his body obeyed orders mechanically while the main portion of his consciousness seemed otherwise engaged. And, while it lasted, he would watch me curiously, as from a distance, expecting apparently that I would suddenly \"remember\" and come up to join him. His soul beckoned me, I felt, but half in vain. I longed to be with him, to go where he was, to see what he saw, but there was something that effectually prevented.\n\nAnd these periods of absence I rather dreaded for some reason. It was uncanny, almost creepy. For I would suddenly meet his glowing eyes fixed queerly, searchingly on my own, gazing from behind a veil at me, asking pregnant questions that I could not catch. I would see him lying there beneath the larches of the cricket-field alone, rapt, far away, deep in his ancient recollections, and apart from me; or I would come upon him suddenly in the road, in a sunny corner of the playground, even in the deserted gymnasium on certain afternoons, when he would start to see me, and turn away without a word, but with an expression of unhappy yearning in his eyes as though he shared my pain that he dwelt among these Other Places which, for the moment, I might not know.\n\nMany, many, indeed, are the details of these days that I might mention, but their narration would prove too long. One, however, may be told. He had, for instance, a kind of sign-language that was quite remarkable. On the sandy floor of a disused gravel-pit, where we lay on windy days for shelter while we talked, he would trace with a twig a whole series of these curious signs. They were for him the alphabet of a long-forgotten language \u2014 some system of ideograph or pictorial representation that expressed the knowledge of the times when it was used. He never made mistakes; the same sign invariably had the same meaning; and it all existed so perfectly in his inner vision that he used it even in his work, and kept a book in which the Greek play of the moment was written out entirely in this old hieroglyphic side by side with the original. He read from it in class, even under the eagle eye of the Head, with the same certainty as he read from the Greek itself.\n\nThere were characteristic personal habits, too, that struck me later as extraordinary for a boy of eighteen \u2014 in England; for he led an inner life of exceeding strictness, not to say severity, and was for ever practising mental concentration with a view to obtaining complete control of his feelings, thoughts and, therefore, actions. Upright as a rod of steel himself, he was tolerant to the failings of others, lenient to their weaknesses, and forgiving to those who wronged him. He bore no malice, cherished no ill-feeling. \"It's as far as they've got,\" he used to say, \"and no one can be farther than he is.\" Indeed, his treatment of others implied a degree of indifference to self that had something really big about it. And, even on the lowest grounds, to bear a grudge meant only casting a net that must later catch the feet.\n\nHis wants in the question of food were firmly regulated too; for at an age when most boys consider it almost an aim in life to devour all they can possibly get and to spend half of their pocket-money on tempting eatables, Julius exercised a really Spartan control over these particular appetites. Not only was his fare most frugal in quantity, but he avoided the eating of meat almost entirely, alcohol completely, and sometimes would fast for a period that made me wonder for his health. He never spoke of this. I noticed it. Nor ever once did he use his influence to persuade me to like habits. No boy was ever less a prig than LeVallon. Another practice of his was equally singular. In order to increase control of the body and develop tenacity of will, I have known him, among other similar performances, stand for hours at a time on winter nights, clad only in a nightshirt, fighting sleep, cold, hunger, movement \u2014 stand like a statue in the centre of the room, as though the safety of the world depended upon success.\n\nMost curious of all, however, seemed to me his habit of \u2014 what I can only call \u2014 communing with inanimate things. \"You only remember the sections where we were together,\" he explained, when once I asked the meaning of what he did; \"and as you were little with me when this was the way of getting knowledge, it is difficult for you to understand.\" This fact likewise threw light upon the enormous intervals between remembered sections. We recalled no recent ones at all. We had not come back together in them.\n\nThis communing with inanimate things had chiefly to do, of course, with Nature, and I may confess at once that it considerably alarmed me. To read about it comfortably in an armchair over the fire is one thing; to see it done is another. It alarmed me, moreover, for the reason that somewhere, somehow, it linked on to the thing I dreaded above all others \u2014 the days when he and I and she had made some wrong, some selfish use of it. This, of course, remained an intuition of my own. I never asked; I never spoke of it. Only in my very bones I felt sure that the thing we three must come together to put right again somehow involved, and involved unpleasantly, this singular method of acquiring knowledge and acquiring power. We had abused it together; we had yet to put it right.\n\nTo see Julius practising this mysterious process with a stone, a flower, a tree, and to hear him then talk about these three different objects, was like listening to a fairy tale told with the skill of a great imaginative artist. He personified them, gave their life history, rendered their individual experiences, moods, sensations, qualities, adventures \u2014 anything and everything that could ever happen to a stone, a flower, a tree. I realised their existence from their own point of view; felt-with them; shared their joys and sufferings, and understood that they were living things, though with a degree of life so far below our own. Communion with Nature was, for him, communion with the very ground of things. All this, though exquisitely wonderful, was within the grasp of sympathetic comprehension. It was natural.\n\nBut when he dealt with things less concrete \u2014 and his favourites were elemental forces such as air and heat, or as he preferred to call them, wind and fire \u2014 the experience, though no whit less convincing owing to the manner of his description, was curiously disturbing, because of the results produced upon himself. I can describe it in two words, though I can give no real idea of it in two thousand. He rushed, he flamed. It was almost as if, in one case, his actual radiation became enormous, and in the other, some power swept, as in the form of torrential enthusiasm, from his very person. I remember my first impression in the classroom \u2014 that a great wind blew, and that flaming colours moved upon the air.\n\nWhen he was \"feeling-with\" this pair of elemental forces he seemed to draw their powers into his own being so that I, being in close sympathy with him, caught some hint of what was going forward in his heart. Sometimes on drowsy summer afternoons when no air stirred through the open windows of the room, there would come a sudden change in my surroundings, an alteration. I would hear a faint and distant sound of roaring; something invisible drove past me. Julius, at the desk beside me, had finished work, and closed his books. His head in his hands, he sat motionless, an intent expression on both face and body, wrapped deep in concentrated effort of some kind. He was practising... And once, too, I remember being waked out of sleep in the early morning with an impression of a stimulating heat about me which amounted to an intensification of life almost. There he stood beside the window, arms folded, head bent down upon his breast, and an effect about him that can only be described as glowing. The air immediately round him seemed to shine with a faint, delicate radiance as of tropical starlight, or as though he stood over a dying fire of red-hot coals. It was a half fascinating, half terrifying sight; the light pulsed and trembled with distinct vibrations, the air quivered so as to increase his bodily appearance. He looked taller, vaster. And not once I saw this thing, but many times. No single dream could possibly explain it. In both cases, with the wind as with the fire, his life seemed magnified as though he borrowed from these elemental forces of Nature their own special qualities and powers.\n\n\"All the elements,\" I remember his saying to me once, \"are in our bodies. Do you expect Nature to be less intelligent than the life that she produces?\" For him, certainly, there was the manifestation of something deeper than physics in the operations of so-called natural laws.\n\nFor here, let me say now in conclusion of this broken record of our days at school together, was the rock on which our intercourse eventually suffered interruption, and here was that first sign of the parting of our ways. It frightened me... Later, in our university days, the cleavage became definite, causing a break in our friendship that seemed at the moment final. For a long time the feeling in me had been growing that his way and mine could not lie much farther together. Julius attributed it to my bringing up, which I was not independent enough to shake off. I can only say that I became conscious uneasily that this curious intercourse with Nature \u2014 \"communing,\" as he termed it \u2014 led somehow away from the Christianity of my childhood to the gods and deification of the personal self. I did not see at the time, as he insisted, that both were true, being different aspects of the central fact that God is the Universe, and that man, being literally part of it, must eventually know Him face to face by actually becoming Him. All this lay far beyond me at the time.\n\nIt seemed to me then, and more as I grew older, an illegitimate, dangerous traffic; for paganism, my father taught me sternly, was the Devil, and that the Universe could actually be alive was a doctrine of heathenish days that led straight to hell and everlasting burning. I could not see, as Julius saw, that here was teaching which might unify the creeds, put life into the formal churches, inspire the world with joy and hope, and bring on the spirit of brotherhood by helping the soul to rediscover its kinship with a living cosmos.\n\nOne certainty, however, my schooldays with this singular boy bequeathed to me, a certainty I have never lost, and a very gorgeous and inspiring one \u2014 that life is continuous.\n\nLeVallon lived in eternal life. He knew that it stretched infinitely behind his present \"section,\" and infinitely ahead into countless other \"sections.\" The results of what lay behind he must inevitably exhaust. Be that harvest painful or pleasant, he must reap what he had sown. But the future lay entirely in his own hands, and in his power of decision; chance or caprice had no word to say at all. And this consciousness of being in eternal life now, at the present moment, master of fate, potentially at least deific \u2014 this has remained a part of me, whether I will or no. To Julius LeVallon I owe certainly this unalterable conviction.\n\nAnother memory of that early intercourse that has remained with me, though too vaguely for very definite description, is the idea that personal life, even in its smallest details, is part of a cosmic ceremony, that to perform ft faithfully deepens the relationship man bears to the Universe as a living whole, and is therefore of ultimate spiritual significance. An inspiring thought, I hold, even in the vagueness of my comprehension of it.\n\nYet above and beyond such notions, remained the chief memory of all: that in some such ancient cosmic ceremony, Julius, myself and one other had somehow abused our privileges in regard to Nature Powers, and that the act of restoration still awaiting fulfilment at our hands, an act involving justice to the sun and stars as well as to our lesser selves, could not be accomplished until that \"other\" was found on earth together with himself and me. And that other was a woman." + }, + { + "title": "Edinburgh", + "text": "\u2002\"We do not know where sentient powers, in the widest sense of the term, begin or end. And there may be disturbances and moods of Nature wherein the very elemental forces approach sentient being, so that, perhaps, mythopaeic man has not been altogether a dreamer of dreams. I need not dwell on the striking reflections to which this possibility gives rise; enough that an idealistic dynamism forces the possibility on our view. If the life of Nature is from time to time, and under special conditions, raised to the intense requisite level, we are in the presence of elemental forces whose character primitive man has not entirely misunderstood.\" \u2014 \"Individual and Reality\" (E. D. Fawcett).\n\nThere was an interval of a year and a half before we met again. No letters passed between us, and I had no knowledge of where LeVallon was or what he did. Yet while in one sense we had gone apart, in another sense I knew that our relationship suffered no actual break. It seemed inevitable that we should come together again. Our tie was of such a kind that neither could shake the other off. In the meantime my soldier's career had been abandoned; loss of money in the family decreed a more remunerative destiny; and the interval had been spent learning French and German abroad with a view to a less adventurous profession. At the age of nineteen, or thereabouts, I found myself at Edinburgh University to study for a Bachelor of Science degree, and the first face I saw in Professor Geikie's lecture room for geology was that of my old school-friend of the \"Other Places,\" Julius LeVallon.\n\nI stood still and stared, aware of two opposing sensations. For this unexpected meeting came with a kind of warning upon me. I felt pleasure, I felt dread: I cannot determine which came first, only that, mingled with the genuine gratification, there was also the touch of uneasiness, the sinking of the heart I knew so well.\n\nAnd I remember saying to myself \u2014 so odd are the tricks of memory \u2014 \"Why, he's as pale as ever! Always that marble skin!\" As though during the interval he ought somehow to have acquired more colour. He was tall, over six feet, thin, graceful as an Oriental; an expression of determination in his face had replaced the former dreaminess. The eyes were clear and very strong. There was an expression of great intensity about him. His greeting was characteristic: he showed eager pleasure, but expressed no surprise.\n\n\"Old souls like ours are bound to meet again,\" he said with a smile, as he shook my hand. \"We have so much to do together.\"\n\nI recalled the last time I had seen him, waiting on the school platform as the train went out, and I realised that there were changes in him that left me standing still, as it were. Perhaps he caught my thought, for his face took on a touch of sadness; he gazed into my eyes, making room for me beside him on the bench. \"But you've been dawdling on the way a bit,\" he added. \"You've been after other things, I see.\"\n\nIt was true enough. I had fallen in love, for one thing, besides devoting myself with the ardour of youth to literature, music, sport, and other normal interests of my age. From his point of view, of course, I had not advanced, whereas he obviously had held steadily to the path he had chosen for himself, following always one main thing \u2014 this star in the east of his higher knowledge. His attitude to me, I felt moreover, had undergone a change. The old sympathy and affection had not altered, but a strain of pity had crept in, a regret that I suffered the attractions of the world to interfere with my development.\n\nA delay, as he called it, in our relationship there had certainly been, though the instant we met I realised that something bound us together fundamentally with a power that superficial changes or external separation could never wholly dissolve.\n\nYet, on the whole, I saw little enough of him during these Edinburgh days, far less certainly than at Motfield Close. I was older, for one thing, more of the world for another. As a boy, of course, the idea that we renewed an eternal friendship, faithful to one another through so many centuries, made a romantic appeal that was considerable. But the glamour had evaporated; I was a man now, I considered, busy with the things of men. At the same time I was aware that these other tendencies were by no means dead in me, and that very little would be required to revive them. Buried by other interests, they were yet ready to assert themselves again.\n\nAnd LeVallon, for his part, though he saw less of me, and I think cared to see less of me than before, kept deliberately in touch, and of set purpose would not suffer us to go too far apart. We did not live in the same building, but he came often to my rooms, we took great walks together over the Pentland Hills, and once or twice wandered down the coast from Musselburgh to the cliffs of St. Abbs Head above the sea. Why he came to Edinburgh at all, indeed, puzzled me a little; but I am probably not far wrong in saying that two things decided the choice: He wished to keep me in sight, having heard somehow of my destination; and, secondly, certain aspects of Nature that he needed were here easily accessible \u2014 the sea, hills, woods, and lonely places that his way of life demanded. Among the lectures he took a curious selection: geology, botany, chemistry, certain from the Medical Course, such as anatomy and materia medica, and, above all, the advanced mental classes. He attended operations, post-mortems, and anything in the nature of an experiment, while the grim Dissecting Room knew him as well as if his living depended upon passing the examination in anatomy.\n\nOf his inner life at this period it was not so easy to form an estimate. He worked incessantly, but at something I never could quite determine. At school he was for ever thinking of this \"something\"; now he was working at it. It seemed remote from the life of the rest of us, students and others, because its aim was different. Pleasure, as such, and the usual forms of indulgence, he left on one side; and women, though his mysterious personality, his physical beauty, and his cold indifference attracted them, he hardly admitted into his personal life at all; to his intimacy, never. His habits were touched with a singular quality of selflessness, very rare, very exquisite, sincere as it was modest, that set him apart in a kind of divine loneliness, giving to all, yet asking of none. My former feeling that his aims were tinged by something dark and antispiritual no longer held good; it was due to a partial and limited judgment, to ignorance, even to misunderstanding. His aims were undeniably lofty, his life both good and pure. Respect grew with my closer study of him, for his presence brought an uplifting atmosphere of intenser life whose centre of activity lay so high above the aims of common men as to constitute an \"other-worldliness\" of a very unusual kind indeed.\n\nI observed him now as a spectator, more critically. No dreams or imaginative visions \u2014 with one or two remarkable exceptions \u2014 came to bewilder judgment. I saw him from outside. If not sufficiently unaffected by his ideas to be quite a normal critic, I was certainly more prosaic, and often sceptical. None the less the other deeper tendency in me was still strong; it easily wakened into life. This deep contradiction existed.\n\nThe only outward change I noticed, apart from the greater maturity and decision in the features, was a look of sadness he habitually wore, that altered when he spoke of the things he cared about, into an expression of radiant joy. The thought of his great purpose then lit flames in his eyes, and brought into the whole countenance a certain touch of grandeur. It was not often, evidently, that he found anyone to talk with; and arguing, as such, he never cared about. He knew. He was one of those fortunate beings who never had felt doubt. Perfect assurance he had.\n\nJulius, at that time, occupied a suite of rooms at the end of Princes Street, where Queensferry Road turns towards the Forth. They were, I think, his only extravagance, for the majority of students were content with a couple of rooms, or a modest flat on the Morningside.\n\nThis suite he furnished himself, and there was one room in it that no one but himself might enter. It had, I believe, no stick of furniture in it, and required, therefore, no dusting apparently; in any case, neither landlady, friend nor servant ever passed its door.\n\nMy curiosity concerning it was naturally considerable, though never satisfied. He needed a place, it seems, where absolute solitude was possible, an atmosphere uncoloured by others. He made frequent use of it, but whether for that process of \"feeling \u2014 with\" already mentioned, or for some kind of secret worship, ceremonial, or what not, is more than I can say. Often enough I have sat waiting for him in the outer room when he was busy within this mysterious sanctum; no sound audible; no movement; a bright light visible beneath the crack of the door; a sense of hush, both deep and solemn, about the entire place. Though it may sound ridiculous to say so, there was a certain air of sanctity that hung like a veil about that inner chamber, the silence and stillness evoked a hint of reverence. I waited with something between awe and apprehension for the handle to turn, aware that behind the apparent stillness something intensely active was going forward, of which faint messages reached my mind outside. Certainly, while sitting with book or newspaper, waiting for his footstep, my thoughts would glow and burn within me, rushing with energy along unaccustomed channels, and I remember the curious feeling that behind those panels of painted deal there lay a space far larger than the mere proportions of a room.\n\nAs in the fairy-tale, that door opened into outer space; and I suspect that Julius used the solitude for \"communing\" with those Nature Powers he seemed always busy with. Once, indeed, when he at length appeared, after keeping me waiting for a longer periods than usual, I was aware of two odd things about him: he brought with him a breath of open air, cool, fresh and scented as by the fragrance of the forest; about him, too, a faintly luminous atmosphere that lent to his face a kind of delicate radiance almost shining. My sight for a moment wavered; the air between us vibrated as he came across the room towards me. There was a strangeness round about him. There was power. And when he spoke, his voice, though low as always, had a peculiar resonance that woke echoes, it seemed, beyond the actual walls.\n\nThe impressions vanished as curiously as they came; but their reality was beyond question. And at times like these, I confess, the old haunting splendour of his dream would come afresh upon me as at Motfield Close. My little world of ambition and desire seemed transitory and vain. The magic of his personality stole sweetly, powerfully upon me; I was swept by gusts of passionate yearning to follow where he led. For his purpose was not selfish. The knowledge and powers he sought were for the ultimate service of the world. It was the permanent Self he trained rather than the particular brain and body of one brief and transient \"section,\" called Today.\n\nThese moods with me passed off quickly, and the practical world in which I now lived brought inevitable reaction; I mention them to show that in me two persons existed still: an upper, that took life normally like other people, and a lower, that hid with Julius LeVallon in strange \"Other Places.\" For in this duality lies the explanation of certain experiences I later shared with him, to be related presently.\n\nOur relations, meanwhile, held intimate and close as of old \u2014 up to a certain point. There was this barrier of my indifference and the pity that it bred in him. Though never urging it, he was always hoping that I would abandon all and follow him; but, failing this, he held to me because something in the future made me necessary. Otherwise the gulf between us had certainly not widened.\n\nI see him as he stood before me in those Edinburgh lodgings: young, in the full tide of modern life, with good faculties, health, means, looks, high character, and sane as a policeman! All that men hold dear and the world respects was his. Yet, without a hint of insincerity or charlatanism, he seemed conscious only of what he deemed the long, sweet prizes of the soul, difficult of attainment, and to the majority mere dreams. His was that rare detachment which sees clear to the end, not through avoiding the stress of perilous adventure by the way, but through refusing 'the conclusion that the adventures were ends in themselves, or could have any other significance than as items in development, justifying all suffering.\n\nEternal life for him was now. He sought the things that once acquired can never be forgotten, since their fruits are garnered by the Self that persists through all the series of consecutive lives. Through all the bewildering rush and clamour of the amazing world he looked ever to the star burning in the depths of his soul. And for a tithe of his certainty, as of the faith and beauty of living that accompanied it, I sometimes felt tempted to give all that I possessed and follow him. The scale at any rate was grand. The fall of empires, the crash of revolutions, the destiny of nations, all to him were as nothing compared with the advance or retreat of a single individual soul in the pursuit of what he deemed \"real knowledge.\"\n\nYet, while acknowledging the seduction of his dream, and even half yielding to it sometimes, ran ever this hidden thread of lurking dread and darkness that, for the life of me, I could never entirely get rid of. It was lodged too deeply in me for memory to discover, or for argument to eject. Ridicule could not reach it, denial made no difference. To ignore it was equally ineffective. Even during the long interval of our separation it was never quite forgotten. Like something on the conscience it smouldered out of sight, but when the time was ripe it would burst into a blaze.\n\nAt school I merely \"funked\" it; I would not hear about it. Now, however, my attitude had changed a little. The sense of responsibility that comes with growing older was involved \u2014 rather to my annoyance and dismay. Here was something I must put right, or miss an important object of my being. It was inevitable; the sooner it was faced and done with, the better.\n\nYet the time, apparently, was not quite yet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 231", + "text": "\"Instead of conceiving the elements as controlled merely by blindly operative forces, they may be imagined as animated spiritual beings, who strive after certain states, and offer resistance to certain other states.\" \u2014 Lotze.\n\nIn connection with LeVallon's settled conviction that the Universe was everywhere alive and one, and that only the thinnest barriers divided animate from so-called inanimate Nature, I recall one experience in particular. The world men ordinarily know is limited to a few vibrations the organs of sense respond to. Though science, with her delicate new instruments, was beginning to justify the instinctive knowledge of an older time, and wireless marvels and radioactivity were still unknown (at the time of which I write), Julius spoke of them as the groundwork of still greater marvels by which thought would be transmissible. The thought-current was merely a little higher than the accepted wave lengths; moreover, powers and qualities were equally transmissible. Unscientifically, he was aware of all these things, and into this beyond-world he penetrated, apparently, though with the effort of a long-forgotten practice. He linked the human with the non-human. He knew Saturn or the Sun in the same way that he knew a pebble or a wild flower \u2014 by feeling-with them.\n\n\"It's coming back into the world,\" he said. \"Before we leave this section it will all be known again. The 'best minds,'\" he laughed, \"will publish it in little primers, and will label it 'extension of consciousness,' or some such laboured thing. And they will think themselves very wonderful to have discovered what they really only recollect.\"\n\nHe looked up at me and smiled significantly, as we sat side by side in the Dissecting Room, busily tracing the nerves and muscles in a physical \"instrument\" some soul had recently cast aside. I use his own curious phraseology, of course. He laid his pointed weapon down a moment upon the tangle of the solar plexus that resembled the central switchboard of a great London telegraph office.\n\n\"There's the main office,\" he pointed, \"not that,\" indicating the sawn-off skull where the brain was visible. \"Feeling is the clue, not thinking.\"\n\nAnd, then and there, he described how this greatest nerve-centre of the human system could receive and transmit messages and powers between its owner and the entire universe. His quiet yet impassioned language I cannot pretend at this interval to give; I only remember the conviction that his words conveyed. It was more wonderful than any fairy-tale, for it made the fairy-tale come true. For this \"beyond-world\" of Julius LeVallon contained whole hierarchies of living beings, whose actuality is veiled today in legend, folk-lore, and superstition generally \u2014 some small and gentle as the fairies, some swift and radiant as the biblical angels, others, again, dark, powerful and immense as the deities of savage and \"primitive\" races. But all knowable, all obedient to the laws of their own being, and, furthermore, all accessible to the trained will of the human who understood them. Their great powers could be borrowed, used, adapted. Herein lay for him a means to deeper wisdom, richer life, the recovery of true worship, powers that must eventually help Man to that knowledge of the universe which is, more simply put, the knowledge of one God. At present Man was separate, cut off from all this bigger life, matter \"inanimate\" and Nature \"dead.\"\n\nAnd I remember that in this remarkable outburst he touched very nearly upon the origin of my inner dread. Again I felt sure that it was in connection with practices of this nature that he and I and she had involved ourselves in something that, as it were, disturbed the equilibrium of those forces whose balance constitutes the normal world, but something that could only be put right again by the three of us acting in concert and facing an ordeal that was somehow terrible.\n\nOne afternoon in October I always associate particularly with this talk about elemental Nature Powers being accessible to human beings, for it was the first occasion that I actually witnessed anything in the nature of definite results. And I recall it in detail; the memory of such an experience could never fade.\n\nWe had been walking for a couple of hours, much of the time in silence. My own mind was busy with no train of thought in particular; rather I was in a negative, receptive state, idly reviewing mental pictures, and my companion's presence obtruded so little that I sometimes almost forgot he was beside me. On the Pentlands we followed the sheep tracks carelessly where they led, and presently lay down among the heather of the higher slopes to rest. Julius flung himself down first, and, pleasantly tired, I imitated him at once. In the distance lay the mosaic of Edinburgh town, her spires rising out of haze and mist. Across the uninspiring strip of modern houses called the Morningside, the Castle Rock stood on its blunt pedestal, carved out by the drive of ancient glaciers. At the end of the small green valley where immense ice-chisels once had ploughed their way, we saw the Calton Hill; beyond it, again, the line of Princes Street with its stream of busy humanity; and further still, the lovely dip over the crest of the hill where the Northern ocean lay towards the Bass Rock and the sea-birds.\n\nThe autumn air drew cool and scented along the heathery ridges, and while Julius lay gazing at the cirrus clouds, I propped myself upon one elbow and enjoyed the scene below. It was my pleasure always to know a thing by name and recognise it \u2014 the different churches, the prison, the University buildings, the particular house where my own lodgings were; and I was searching for Frederick Street, trying to pick out the actual corner where George Street cut through it, when I became aware that, across the great dip of intervening valley, something equally saw me. This was my first impression \u2014 that something watched me.\n\nI placed it, naturally enough, where my thought was fixed, across the dip; but the same instant I realised my mistake. It was much nearer \u2014 close beside me. Something was watching us intently. We were no longer quite alone. And, with the discovery, there grew gradually about me a sense of indescribable loveliness, a soft and tender beauty impossible to define precisely. It came like one of those enveloping moods of childhood, when everything is alive and anything may happen. My heart, it seemed, expanded. It turned wild.\n\nI looked round at Julius. He still lay on his back as before, with the difference that his hands now were folded across his eyes and that his body was motionless and rigid as a log. He hardly breathed. He seemed part and parcel of the earth, merged in the hillside as naturally as the heather.\n\nYet something had happened, or was in the act of happening, to him. The forgotten schoolday atmosphere of Other Places stole over me as I gazed.\n\nI made no sound; I did not speak; my eyes passed quickly from the panorama of town and sea to a flock of mountain sheep that nibbled the patches of coarse grass not far away. The feeling that something invisible yet conscious approached us from the empty spaces of the afternoon became a certainty. My spirit lifted. There wae a new and vital relationship between my inner nature, so to speak, and my material environment. My nerves were quivering, the sense of beauty remained, but my questioning wonder changed to awe. Somewhere about me on that bare hillside Nature had become aggressively alive.\n\nYet no one of my senses in particular conveyed the great impression; it seemed wrought of them all in combination \u2014 a large, synthetic, universal report sent forth by the natural things about me. Some flooding energy, like a tide of unknown power, rose through my body. But my brain was clear. One by one I ticked off the different senses; it was neither sight, smell, touch, nor hearing that was individually affected. There was vague uneasiness, it seems, as well, for I sought instinctively what was of commonplace import in the landscape. I stared at the group of nibbling sheep. My sight wandered to the larches on my right, some thirty yards away. Next, seeking things more humanly comforting still, I fixed my gaze upon my nailed and muddy boots.\n\nAt the same moment Julius became suddenly alert. He sat erect.\n\nThe change in his attitude startled me; he seemed intent upon something in the nearer landscape that escaped me. He, like myself, was aware that other life approached; he shared my strange emotion of delight and power; but in him was no uneasiness, for whereas I questioned nervously, he knew with joy. Yet he was doing nothing definite, so far as I could see. The change of attitude resulted in no act. His face, however, was so intense, so animated, that I understood it was the touch of his mind that had reached my own so stimulatingly, and that what was coming \u2014 came through him. His eyes were fixed, I saw, upon the little grove of larches.\n\nI made no movement, but watched the larches and his face alternately. And what I can only call the childhood mood of make-believe enormously increased. It extended, however, far beyond the child's domain; it seemed all-potent, irresistibly imperative. By the mere effort of my will I could \u2014 create. Some power in me hidden, lost, unused, seemed trying to assert itself. I merely had to say \"Let there be a ball before me in the air,\" and by the simple fiat of this power it must appear. I had only to will the heather at my feet to move, and it must move \u2014 as though, in the act of willing, some intense, inter-molecular energy were set free. There was almost the sense that I had this power in me now \u2014 that I had certainly once known how to use it.\n\nI can hardly describe intelligently what followed. It is so easy to persuade myself that I was dreaming or deceived, yet so difficult to prove that I was neither one nor other, but keenly observant and wholly master of my mind. For by this time it was clear to me that the sensation of being watched, of knowing another living presence close, as also of sharing this tender beauty, issued primarily from the grove of larches. My being and their own enjoyed some inter-relationship, exquisite yet natural. There was exchange between us. And the wind, blowing stiffly up the heather slopes, then lifted the lower branches of the trees, so that I saw deep within the little grove, yet at the same time behind and beyond them. Something that their veil of greenness draped went softly stirring. The same minute it came out towards me with a motion best described as rushing. The heart of the grove became instinct with life, life that I could appreciate and understand, each individual tree contributing its thread to form the composite whole, Julius and myself contributing as well. This Presence swam out through the afternoon atmosphere towards us, whirring, almost dancing, as it came. There was an impression of volume \u2014 of gigantic energy. The air in our immediate neighbourhood became visible.\n\nYet to say that I saw something seems as untrue as to say that I saw nothing. Form was indistinguishable from movement. The air, the larches and ourselves were marvellously entangled with the sunshine and the landscape. I was aware of an intelligence different from my own, immensely powerful, but somehow not a human intelligence. Superb, unearthly beauty touched the very air.\n\n\"Hush!\" I heard LeVallon whisper. \"Feel-with it, but do not think.\"\n\nThe advice was unnecessary. I felt; but I had no time to think, no inclination either. A long-forgotten \"I\" was active. My familiar, daily self shrank out of sight. Vibrant, sensitive, amazingly extended, my being responded in an immediate fashion to things about me. Any \"thoughts\" I had came afterwards.\n\nFor the greenness whirled and flashed like sunlight upon water or on fluttering silk. With an intricate and complex movement it appeared to spin and revolve within itself; and I cannot dare to say from what detail came the absolute persuasion that it was alive in the same sense that I myself and Julius were alive, while of another order of intelligence.\n\nJulius rose suddenly to his feet, and a fear came over me that he was going to touch it; for he moved forwards with an inviting gesture that caused me an exhilarating distress as when a friend steps too near the edge of a precipice. But the next moment I saw that he was directing it rather, with the immediate result that it swerved sharply to one side, passed with swiftness up the steep hillside, and \u2014 disappeared. It raced by me with a soft and roaring noise, leaving a marked disturbance of the air that was like a wind within a wind. I seemed pushed aside by the fringe of a small but violent whirlwind. The booming already sounded some distance up the slope.\n\n\"I've lost it!\" I remember shouting with a pang of disappointment. For it seemed that the power and delight in me both ebbed and that energy went with them.\n\n\"Because you thought a moment instead of felt!\" cried Julius. He turned, holding up one hand by way of warning. His voice was more than ordinarily resonant, his whole body charged with force. \"Now \u2014 watch the sheep,\" he added in a lower tone. And, although the words surprised me in one way, in another I anticipated them. There passed across his face a momentary expression of intense effort, but even before the sentence was finished I heard the rushing of the frightened animals, and understood something of what was happening. There was panic in them. The entire flock ran headlong down the steep slope of heather. The thunder of their feet is in my ears today. I see their heaving backs of dirty wool climbing in tumbling fashion one upon another as they pressed tightly in a wedge-shaped outline. They plunged frantically together down the steep place to some level turf below. But, even then, I think they would not have stopped, had not a sound, half cry, half word of command, from my companion brought them to a sudden halt again. They paused in their wild descent. Like a single animal the entire company of them \u2014 twenty or thirty, perhaps, all told \u2014 were arrested. They looked stupidly about them, turned their heads in the opposite direction, and with one accord began once more peacefully \u2014 eating grass.\n\nThe incident had occupied, perhaps, three minutes.\n\n\"The larches!\" I heard, and the same instant that softly-roaring thing, not wind, yet carried inside the wind, again raced past me, going this time in the direction of the grove. There was just time to turn, when I heard a clap \u2014 not unlike the sound of an open hand that strikes a pillow, though on a far vaster scale \u2014 and it seemed to me that the bodies of the trees trembled for a moment where they melted into one another amid the general greenness of stems and branches.\n\nFor the fraction of a second they shone and pulsed and quivered. Something opened; something closed again. The enthralling sense of beauty left my heart. the power sank away, the huge energy retired. And, in a flash, all was normal once again; it was a cool October afternoon upon the Pentland Hills, and a wind was blowing freshly from the distant sea.\n\nI was lying on the grass again exactly as before; Julius, watching me keenly beneath the lids of his narrowed eyes, had just flung himself down to keep me company...\n\n\"The barriers, you see, are thin,\" he said quietly. \"There really are no barriers at all.\"\n\nThis was the first sentence I heard, though his voice, it seemed, had been speaking for some considerable time. I had closed my eyes \u2014 to shut out a rising tide of wonderful and familiar pictures whose beauty somehow I sought vigorously to deny. Yet there was this flare of vivid memory: a penetrating odour of acrid herbs that burned in the clearing of a sombre forest; a low stone altar, the droning of men's voices chanting monotonously as they drew near in robes of white and yellow... and I seemed aware of some forgotten but exquisite ceremonial by means of which natural forces were drawn upon to benefit the beings of the worshippers...\n\n\"All is transmissible,\" rose LeVallon's voice out of the picture, \"all can be shared. That was the aim and meaning of our worship...\"\n\nI opened my eyes and looked at him. The expansion of my consciousness had been a genuine thing; the power and joy both real; the worship authentic. Now they had left me and the shrinkage caused me pain; there was a poignant sense of loss. I felt afraid again.\n\n\"But it's all gone,\" I answered in a hushed tone, \"and everything has left me.\" Reason began to argue and deny. I could scarcely retain the memory of those big sensations which had offered a channel into an extended world.\n\nJulius searched my face with his patient, inward-gazing eyes.\n\n\"Your attitude prevented,\" he replied after a moment's hesitation; \"it became unsafe.\"\n\n\"You brought it?\" I faltered.\n\nHe nodded. \"A human will,\" he replied, \"and a physical body \u2014 as channel. Your resistance broke the rhythm and brought danger in.\" And after a pause he added significantly: \"For the return \u2014 the animals served well.\" He smiled. \"Ran down a steep place into the sea \u2014 almost.\"\n\nAnd, abruptly then, the modern world came back, as though what I had just experienced had been but some pictured memory, thrust up, withdrawn. I was aware that my fellow student at Edinburgh University, LeVallon by name, lay beside me in the heather, his face charged with peace and happiness... that the dusk was falling, and that the air was turning chilly.\n\nWithout further speech we rose and made our way down from the windy ridge, and the chief change I noticed in myself seemed to be a marked increase of vitality that was singularly exhilarating, yet included the touch of awe already mentioned. The feeling was in me that life of some non-human kind had approached us both. I looked about me, first at Julius, then at the landscape, growing dim. The wind blew strongly from the sea. Far in the distance rose the outline of the Forth Bridge, then a-building, its skeleton, red in the sunset, rearing across the water like a huge sea-serpent with ribs of gleaming steel. I could almost hear the hammering of the iron... And, at our feet, the first lights of the (Did Town presently twinkled through the veil of dusk and smoke that wove itself comfortingly about the habitations of men and women.\n\nMy thoughts were busy, but for a long time no speech passed. Occasionally I stole glances at my companion as we plodded downwards through the growing dusk, and there seemed a curious glow about his face that made him more clearly visible than the other objects about us. The way he looked back from time to time across his shoulder increased my impression \u2014 by no means a pleasant one just then \u2014 that something followed us from those heathery hilltops, kept close behind us through the muddy lanes, and watched our movements across the fields and hedges.\n\nI have never forgotten that walk home in the autumn twilight, nor the sense of haunting possibilities that hung about it like an atmosphere \u2014 the feeling that Other life loomed close upon our steps. Before Roslin Chapel was passed, and the welcome lights of the town were near, this consciousness of a ghostly following suite became a certainty, and I felt that every copse and field sent out some messenger to swell the throng. We had established touch with another region of life, of power, and the link was not yet fully broken.\n\nAnd the sentences Julius let fall from time to time, half to himself and half to me, increased my nervousness instead of soothing it.\n\n\"The gods, you see, are not dead,\" he said, waving his hand towards the hills, \"but only distant. They are still accessible to all who can feel-with their powers. In your self-consciousness a door stands open; they can be approached \u2014 through Nature. Ages ago, when the sun was younger, and you and I were nearer to the primitive beauty...\"\n\nA cat, darting silently across the road like a shadow from a cottage door, gave me such a start that I lost the remainder of the sentence. His arm was linked in mine as he added softly:\n\n\"...Only, what is borrowed in this way must always be returned, for otherwise the equilibrium is destroyed, and the borrower suffers until he puts it right again. So utterly exact is the balance of the universe...\"\n\nI deliberately turned my head away, aware that something in me would not listen. The conviction grew that he had a motive in the entire business. That inner secret dread revived. Yet, in spite of it, there was a curiosity that refused to let me escape altogether. It was bound to satisfy itself. The question seemed to force itself out of my lips:\n\n\"They are unconscious, though, these Powers?\" And, having asked it, I would willingly have blotted out the words. I heard his low voice answer so far away it seemed an echo from the hills behind us.\n\n\"Of a different order,\" he replied, \"until they are part of you; and then they share your consciousness...\"\n\n\"Hostile or friendly?\" I believed I thought this question only, but apparently I spoke it out aloud. Julius paused a moment. Then he said briefly:\n\n\"Neither one nor other, of themselves. Merely that they resent an order being placed upon them. It involves mastery or destruction.\"\n\nThe words sank into me with something like a shudder. It seemed that everything I asked and everything he answered were as familiar as though we spoke of some lecture of the day before. What I had witnessed shared this familiarity, too, though more faintly. All belonged to this incalculable past he for ever searched to bring to light. Yet of what dim act of mine, of his, or of another working with us, this mysterious shudder was born, I still remained in ignorance, though an ignorance that seemed now slowly about to lift.\n\nThen, suddenly, the final question was out before I could prevent it. It came irresistibly:\n\n\"And if, instead of animals, it had been men...?\"\n\nThe effect was instantaneous, and very curious. I could have sworn he had been waiting for that question. For he turned upon me with passion that shone a moment in his pale and eager face, then died away as swiftly as it came. His hand tightened upon my arm; he drew me closer. He bent down. I saw his eyes gleam in the darkness as he whispered:\n\n\"Such men would know themselves cut off from their own kind, a gulf between humanity \u2014 and themselves. For the elemental powers may be borrowed, but not kept. There would burn in them fires no human hands could quench, because no human hands had lit them. Yet their vast energies might lift our little self-seeking.race into that grander universal life where\"\n\nHe stopped dead in the darkened road and fixed me with his eyes. He said the next words with a vehement conviction that struck cold into my very entrails:\n\n\"He who retains within himself the elemental powers which are the deities in Nature, is both above and below his kind.\"\n\nA moment he hid his face in his hands; then, opening his arms wide and throwing his head back to the sky, he raised his voice; he almost cried aloud: \"A man who has worshipped the Powers of Wind and the Powers of Fire, and has retained them in himself, keeping them out of their appointed places, is born of them. He is become their child. He is a son of Wind and Fire. And though he break and flame with energies that could regenerate the world, he must remain alien and outcast from humanity, untouched by love or sorrow, stranger to joy, aloof, impersonal, until by full and complete restitution, he restore the balance in the surrender of his stolen powers.\"\n\nIt seemed to me he towered; that his stature grew; that the darkness round his very head turned bright; and that a wind from nowhere went driving down the sky behind him with a wailing violence. The amazing outburst took me off my feet by its suddenness. An emotion from the depths rose up and shook me. What happened next I hardly realised, only that he caught my arm and hurried along the road at a reckless, half stumbling speed, and that the lonely hills behind us followed in the darkness...\n\nA few moments afterwards we found ourselves among the busy lights and traffic of the streets. His calm had returned as suddenly as it had deserted him. Such moments with him were so rare, he seemed almost unnatural, superhuman. And presently we separated at the corner of the North Bridge, going home to our respective rooms. He made no single reference to the storm that had come upon him in this extraordinary manner; I likewise spoke no word. We said good night. He turned one way, I another. But, as I went, his burning sentences still haunted me; I saw his face like moonlight through the tangle of a wood; and I knew that all we had seen and heard and spoken that afternoon had reference to a past that we had shared, yet also to a future, which he and I awaited together for the coming of a \u2014 third." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 232", + "text": "\"Strange as it may appear to the modern mind, whose one ambition is to harden and formalise itself... the ancient mind conceived of knowledge in a totally different fashion. It did not crystallise itself into a hardened point, but, remaining fluid, knew that the mode of knowledge suitable to its nature was by intercourse and blending. Its experience was... that it could blend with intelligence greater than itself, that it could have intercourse with the gods.\" \u2014 \"Some Mystical Adventures\" (G. R. S. Mead).\n\nAn inevitable result of this experience was that, for me, a reaction followed. I had no stomach for such adventures. Though carried away at the moment by the enthralling character of the feelings roused that afternoon, my normal self, my upper self as I had come to call it, protested \u2014 with the result that I avoided Julius. I changed my seat in the classrooms, giving as excuse that I could not hear the lecturer; I gave up attending post-mortems and operations where I knew that he would be; and if I saw him in the street I would turn aside or dive into some shop until the danger of our meeting passed. Ashamed of my feebleness, I yet could not bring myself to face him and thrash the matter out.\n\nOther influences also were at work, for my father, it so happened, and the girl I was engaged to marry, her family, too, were all of them in Edinburgh just about that time, and some instinct warned me that they and LeVallon must not meet. In the latter case particularly I obeyed this warning instinct, for in the influence of Julius there hid some strain of opposition towards these natural affections. I was aware of it unconsciously, perhaps. It seemed he made me question the reality of my love; made me doubt and hesitate; sometimes almost made me challenge the value of these ties that meant so much to me. From his point of view, I knew, these emotions belonged to transient relationships of one brief section, and to become centred in them involved the obliteration of the larger view. His attitude was more impersonal: Love everyone, but do not lose perspective by focusing your entire self in one or two. It was au fond a selfish pleasure merely; it delayed the development of the permanent personality; it destroyed \u2014 more important still \u2014 the sense of kinship with the universe which was the basic principle with him. It need not: but it generally did.\n\nFor some weeks, therefore, our talks and walks were interrupted; I devoted myself to work, to intercourse with those I loved, and led generally the normal existence of a university student who was reading for examinations that were of importance to his future career in life.\n\nYet, though we rarely met, and certainly held no converse for some time, interruption actually there was none at all. To pretend it were a farce. The inner relationship continued as before. Physical separation meant absolutely nothing in those ties that so strangely and so intimately knit our deeper lives together. There was no more question of break between us than there is question of a break in time when light is extinguished and the clock becomes invisible. His presence always stood beside me; the beauty of his pale, un-English face kept ever in my thoughts; I heard his whisper in my dreams at night, and the ideas his curious language watered continued growing with a strength I could not question.\n\nThere were two selves in me then as in our school-days: one that resisted, and one that yearned. When together, it was the former that asserted its rights, but when apart, oddly enough, it was the latter. There is little question, however, that the latter was the stronger of the two. Thus, the moment I found myself alone again, my father and my fiancee both gone, we rushed together like two ends of an elastic that had been stretched too long apart.\n\nAnd almost immediately, as though the opportunity must not be lost, he spoke to me of an experiment he had in view.\n\nBy what network of persuasiveness he induced me to witness, if not actually to cooperate in, this experiment, I cannot pretend at this distance to remember. I think it is true that he used no persuasion at all, but that at the first mention of it my deeper being met the proposal with curious sympathy. At the horror and audacity my upper self shrank back aghast; the thing seemed wholly unpermissible and dreadful; something unholy, as of blasphemy, lay in it too. But, as usual, when this mysterious question of \"Other Places\" was involved, in the end I followed blindly where he led. My older being held the casting vote. And the reason \u2014 I admit it frankly \u2014 was that somewhere behind the amazing glamour of it all lay \u2014 truth. While reason scoffed, my heart remembered and believed.\n\nMoreover, in this particular instance, a biting curiosity had its influence too. I was wholly sceptical of results. The thing was mad, incredible, even wicked. It could never happen. Yet, while I said these words, and more besides, there ran a haunting terror in me underground that, after all... that possibly... I cannot even set down in words the nature of my doubt. I can merely affirm that something in me was not absolutely sure.\n\n\"The essential thing,\" he told me, \"is to find an empty 'instrument' that is in perfect order \u2014 young, vigorous, the tissues unwasted by decay or illness. There must have been no serious deterioration of the organs, muscles, and so forth.\"\n\nI knew then that this new experiment was akin to that other I had already witnessed. The experience on the Pentlands had also been deliberately brought about The only difference was that this second one he announced beforehand. Further, it was of a higher grade. The channel of evocation, instead of being in the vegetable kingdom, was in the human.\n\nI understood his meaning, and suggested that someone in deep trance might meet the conditions, for in trance he held that the occupant, or soul, was gone elsewhere, the tenement of flesh deserted.\n\nBut he shook his head. That was not, he said, legitimate. The owner would return. He watched me with a curious smile as he said this. I knew then that he referred to the final emptiness of a vacated body.\n\n\"Sudden death,\" I said, while his eyes flashed back the answer. \"And the Elemental Powers?\" I asked quickly.\n\n\"Wind and fire,\" he replied. And in order to carry his plan into execution he proposed to avail himself of his free access to the students' Dissecting Room.\n\nDuring the longish interval between the conception and carrying out of this preposterous experiment I shifted like a weathercock between acceptance and refusal. My doubts were torturing. There were times when I treated it as the proposal of a lunatic that at worst could work no injury to anyone concerned. But there were also times when a certain familiar reality clothed it with a portentous actuality. I was reminded faintly of something similar I had been connected with before. Dim figures of this lost familiarity stalked occasionally across the field of inner sight. Julius and I had done this thing together long, long ago, \"when the sun was younger,\" and when we were \"nearer to the primitive beauty,\" as he phrased it. In reverie, in dreams, in moments when thinking was in abeyance, this odd conviction asserted itself. It had to do with a Memory of some worship that once was mighty and effective; when august Presences walked the earth in stupendous images of power; and traffic with them had been useful, possible. The barrier between the human and the non-human, between Man and Nature, was not built. Wind and fire! It was always wind and fire that he spoke of. And I remember one vivid and terrific dream in particular in which I heard again a voice pronounce that curious name of \"Concerighe,\" and, though the details were blurred on waking, I clearly grasped that certain elemental powers had been evoked by us for purposes of our own and had not been suffered to return to their appointed places; further, that concerned with us in the awful and solemn traffic was \u2014 another. We had been three.\n\nThis dream, of course, I easily explained as due directly to my talks with Julius, but my dread was not so easily dismissed, and that I overcame it finally and consented to attend was due partly to the extraordinary curiosity I felt, and partly to this inexplicable attraction in my deeper self which urged me to see the matter through. Something inevitable about it forced me. Yet, but for the settled conviction that behind the abhorrent proposal lay some earnest purpose of LeVallon's, not ignoble in itself, I should certainly have refused. For, though saying little, and not taking me fully into his confidence, he did manage to convey the assurance that this thing was not to be carried out as an end, but as a means to an end, in itself both legitimate and necessary. It was, I gathered, a kind of preliminary trial \u2014 an attempt that might possibly succeed, even without the presence of the third.\n\n\"Sooner or later,\" he said, aware that I hesitated, \"it must be faced. Here is an opportunity for us, at least. If we succeed, there is no need to wait for \u2014 another. It is a question. We can but try.\"\n\nAnd try accordingly we did.\n\nThe occasion I shall never forget \u2014 a still, cold winter's night towards the middle of December, most of the students already gone down for Christmas, and small chance of the room being occupied. For even in the busiest time before examinations there were few men who cared to avail themselves of the gruesome privilege of night-work, for which special permission, too, was necessary. Julius, in any case, made his preparations well, and the janitor of the grey-stone building on the hill, whose top floor was consecrated to this grisly study of life in death, had surrendered the keys even before we separated earlier in the evening for supper at the door of the post-mortem theatre.\n\n\"Upstairs at eleven o'clock,\" he whispered, \"and if I'm late \u2014 the preparations may detain me \u2014 go inside and wait. Your presence is necessary to success.\" He laid his hand on my shoulder; he looked at me searchingly a moment, almost beseechingly, as though he detected the strain of opposition in me. \"And be as sympathetic as you can,\" he begged. \"At least, do not actively oppose.\" Then, as he turned away, \"I'll try to be punctual,\" he added, smiling, \"but \u2014 well, you know as well as I do!\" He shrugged his shoulders and was gone.\n\nYou know! Somehow or other it was true: I did know. The interval of several hours he would spend in his inner chamber concentrated upon the process of feeling-with \u2014 evoking. He would have no food, no rest, no moment's pause. At the appointed hour he would arrive, charged with the essential qualities of these two elemental powers which in dim past ages, summoned by another audacious \"experiment\" from their rightful homes, he now sought to \"restore.\" He would seek to return what had been \"borrowed.\" He would attempt to banish them again. For they could only be thus banished, as they had been summoned \u2014 through the channel of a human organism. They were of a loftier order, then, than the Powers for whose return the animal organisms of the sheep had served.\n\nI went my way down Frederick Street with a heart, I swear, already palpitating.\n\nOf the many thrilling experiences that grew out of my acquaintance with this extraordinary being, I think that night remains supreme \u2014 certainly, until our paths met again in the Jura Mountains. But, strangest of all, is the fact that throughout the ghastly horror of what occurred was \u2014 beauty! To convey this beauty is beyond any power that I possess, yet it was there, a superb and awful beauty that informed the meanest detail of what I witnessed. The experiment failed of course; in the accomplishment of LeVallon's ultimate purpose, that is, it failed; but the failure was due. apparently, to one cause alone: that the woman was not present.\n\nIt is most difficult to describe, and my pen, indeed, shrinks from setting down so revolting a performance..Yet this curious high beauty redeems it in my memory as I now recall the adventure through the haze of years, and I believe the beauty was due to a deeper fact impossible to convey in words. Behind the little \"modern\" experiment, and parallel to it, ran another, older Memory that was fraught with some significance of eternity. This parent memory penetrated and overshadowed the smaller copy of it; it exalted what was ugly, uplifted what seemed abominable, sublimated the distressing failure into an image of what might have been magnificent. I mean, in a word, that this experiment was a poor attempt to reconstruct an older ritual of spiritual significance whereby those natural forces, once worshipped as the gods, might combine with qualities similar to their own in human beings. The memory of a more august and effective ceremony moved all the time behind the little reconstruction. The beauty was derived from my dim recollection of some transcendent but now forgotten worship.\n\nAt the appointed hour I made my way across the Bridge and towards the Old Town where the University buildings stood. It was, as I said, a bitter night. The Castle Rock and Cathedral swam in a flood of silvery moonlight; frost sparkled on the roofs; the spires of Edinburgh shone in the crystal wintry atmosphere. The air, so keen, was windless. Few people were about at this late hour, and I had the feeling that the occasional pedestrians, hurrying homewards in tightly-buttoned overcoats, eyed me askance. No one of them was going in the same direction as myself. They questioned my purpose, looked sharply over their shoulders, then quickened their pace away from me towards the houses where the fires burned in cosy human sitting-rooms.\n\nAt the door of the great square building itself I hesitated a moment, hiding in the shadow of the overhanging roof. It was easy to pretend that moral disapproval warned me to turn back, but the simpler truth is that I was afraid. At the best of times the Dissecting Room, with its silent cargo of dreadful forms and faces, was a chamber of horrors I could never become hardened to as the majority of students did; but on this occasion, when a theory concerning the alien to humanity was to be put to so strange a test, I confess that the prospect set my nerves a-quivering and made the muscles of my legs turn weak. A cold sensation ran down my spine, and it was not the wintry night alone that caused it.\n\nOpening the heavy door with an effort, I went in and waited a moment till the clanging echo had subsided through the deserted building. My imagination figured the footsteps of a crowd hurrying away behind the sound down the long stone corridors. In the silence that followed I slowly began climbing the steps of granite, hoping devoutly that Julius would be waiting for me at the top. I was a little late; he might possibly have arrived before me. Up the four flights of stairs I went stealthily, trying to muffle my footsteps, putting my weight heavily upon the balustrade, and doing all I could to make no sound at all. For it seemed to me that my movements were both watched and heard, and that those motionless, silent forms above were listening for my approach, and knew that I was coming.\n\nOn the.landings at each turn lay a broad sweet patch of moonlight that fell through the lofty windows, and but for these the darkness would have been complete. No light, it seemed to me, had ever looked more clean and pure and welcome. I thought of the lone Pentland ridges, and of the sea, lying calm and still outside beneath the same sheet of silver, the air of night all keen and fragrant. The heather slopes came back to me, the larches and the flock of nibbling sheep. I thought of these in detail, of my fire-lit rooms in Frederick Street, of the vicarage garden at home in Kent where my boyhood had been spent; I thought of a good many things, truth to tell, all of them as remote as possible from my present surroundings; but when I eventually reached the topmost landing and found LeVallon was not there, I thought of one thing only \u2014 that I was alone. Just beyond, me, through that door of frosted glass, lay in its most loathsome form the remnant of humanity left behind by death.\n\nIn the daytime, when noisy students, callous and unimaginative, thronged the room, the horror of it retreated, modified by the vigorous vitality of these doctors of the future; but now at night, amid the ominous silence, with darkness over the town and the cold of outer space dropping down upon the world, as though linking forces with that other final cold within the solemn chamber, it seemed quite otherwise. I stood shivering and afraid upon the landing \u2014 angry that I could have lent myself to so preposterous and abominable a scheme, yet determined, so long as my will held firm, to go through with it to the end.\n\nHe had asked me to wait for him \u2014 inside.\n\nKnowing that every minute of hesitation must weaken my powers of resolve, I moved at once towards the door, then paused again. The comforting roar of the traffic floated to my ears; I heard the distant tinkle of a tramcar bell, the boom of Edinburgh, a confused noise of feet and wheels and voices, far away, it is true, but distinctly reassuring.\n\nOutside, the Hfe of humanity rolled upon its accustomed way, recking little of the trembling figure that stood on the top floor of this silent building, one hand on the door upon whose further side so many must one day come to final rest. For one hand already touched the freezing knob, and I was in the act of turning it when another sound, that was certainly not the murmur of the town, struck sharply through the stillness and brought all movement in me to a sudden halt.\n\nIt came from within, I thought at first; and it was like a wave of sighs that rose and fell, sweeping against the glass door a moment, then passing away as abruptly as it came. Yet it was more like wind than sighs through human lips, and immediately, then, I understood that it was wind. I caught my breath again with keen relief. Wind was rising from the hills, and this was its first messenger running down among the roofs and chimney-pots. I heard its wailing echoes long after it had died away.\n\nBut a moment later it returned, louder and stronger than before, and this time, hearing it so close, I know not what secret embassies of wonder touched me from the night outside, deposited their undecipherable messages, and were gone again. I can only say that the key of my emotions changed, changed, moreover, with a swelling rush as when the heavier stops are pulled out upon an organ-board. For, on entering the building, the sky had been serenely calm, and keen frost locked the currents of the air; whereas now that wind went wailing round the walls as though it sought an entrance, almost as though its crying voice veiled purpose. There seemed a note of menace, eager and peremptory, in its sudden rush and drop. It knocked upon the stones and upon the roof above my head with curious and repeated buffets of sound that resembled the \"clap\" I had heard that October afternoon among the larches, only a hundred times repeated and a hundred-fold increased. The change in myself, moreover, was similar to the change then experienced \u2014 the flow and drive of bigger consciousness that helped to banish fear. I seemed to know about that wind, to feel its life and being, indeed, to share it. No longer was I merely John Mason, a student in Edinburgh, separate and distinct from all about me, but was \u2014 I realised it amazingly \u2014 a bit of life in the universe, not isolated even from the wind.\n\nThe beauty of the sensation did not last; it passed through me, linked to that insistent roar; but the fact that I had felt it gave me courage. The stops were instantly pushed in again... and the same minute the swing-door closed behind me with a sullen thud.\n\nI stood within the chamber; Julius, I saw in a moment, was not there. I moved through the long, narrow room, keeping close beside the wall, taking up my position finally about halfway down, where I could command the six tall windows and the door. The moon was already too high to send her rays directly through the panes, but from the extensive sky-lights she shed a diffused, pale glow upon the scene, and my eyes, soon accustomed to the semi-darkness, saw everything quite as clearly as I cared about.\n\nIn front of me stretched the silent, crowded room, patchy in the moonshine, but with shadows deeply gathered in the corners; and, row after row upon the white marble slabs, lay the tenantless forms in the grotesque, unnatural positions as the students had left them a few hours before. The picture does not invite detailed description, but I at once experienced the peculiar illusion that attacks new students even in the daytime. It seemed that the sightless eyes turned slowly round to stare at me, that the shrunken lips half opened as in soundless speech, and that the heads with one accord shifted to an angle whence they could observe and watch me better. There went a rustling through that valley of dry bones as though life returned for a moment to drive the broken machinery afresh.\n\nThis sensible illusion was, of course, one I could easily dismiss. More difficult, however, was the subtler attack that came upon me from behind the sensory impressions. For, while I stood with my back against the wall, listening intently for LeVallon's step upon the stairs, I could not keep from my mind the terror of those huddled sheep upon the Pentland ridges; the whole weird force of his theories about \"Hfe\" in Nature came beating against my mind, aided, moreover, by some sympathy in myself that could never wholly ridicule their possible truth.\n\nI gazed round me at the motionless, discarded forms, used for one brief \"section,\" then cast aside, and as I did so my mind naturally focused itself upon a point of dreadful and absorbing interest \u2014 which one was to be the subject of the experiment? So short a time ago had each been a nest of keenest activity and emotion, enabling its occupant to reap its harvest of past actions while sowing that which it must reap later again in its new body, already perhaps now a-forming. And of these discarded vehicles, one was to be the channel through which two elemental Powers, evoked in vanished ages, might return to their appointed place. I heard that clamouring wind against the outer walls; I felt within me the warmth of a strange enthusiasm rise and glow; and it seemed to me just then that the whole proposal was as true and simple and in the natural order of things as birth or death, or any normal phenomenon to the terror and glory of which mankind has grown accustomed through prolonged familiarity. To this point, apparently, had the change in my feelings brought me. The dreadful novelty had largely gone. Something would happen, nor would it be entirely unfamiliar.\n\nThen, on a marble slab beside the door, the body of a boy, fresh, white and sweet, and obviously brought in that very day, since it was as yet untouched by knife or scalpel, \"drew\" my attention of its own accord \u2014 and I knew at once that I had found it.\n\nOddly enough, the discovery brought no increase of fearful thrill; it was as natural as though I had helped to place it there myself. And, again, for some reason, that delightful sense of power swept me; my diminutive modern self slipped off to hide; I remembered that a million suns surrounded me; that the earth was but an insignificant member of one of the lesser systems; that man's vaunted Reason was as naught compared to the oceans of what might be known and possible; and that this body I wore and used, like that white, empty one upon the slab, was but a transient vehicle through which I, as a living part of the stupendous cosmos, acted out my little piece of development in the course of an eternal journey. This wind, this fire, that Julius spoke of, were equally the vehicles of other energies, alive as myself, only less tamed and cabined, yet similarly obedient, again, to the laws of their own beings. The extraordinary mood poured through me like a flood \u2014 and once more passed away. And the wind fled singing round the building with a shout.\n\nI looked steadily at the beautiful but vacated framework that the soul had used \u2014 used well or ill I knew not \u2014 lying there so quietly, so calmly, the smooth skin as yet untouched by knife, unmarred by needle, surrounded on all sides by the ugly and misshapen crew of older death; and as I looked, I thought of some fair shell the tide had left among the seaweed wrack, a flower of beauty shining 'mid decay. In the moonlight I could plainly see the thin and wasted ribs, the fixed blue eyes still staring as in life, the lank and tangled hair, the listless fingers that a few hours before must have been active in the flush of health, and passionately loved by more than one assuredly. For, though I knew not the manner of the soul's out-passing, this boy must have suddenly met death that very day. And I found it odd that he should now be lying here, since usually the students' work is concerned to study the processes of illness and decay. It confirmed my certainty that here was the channel LeVallon meant to use.\n\nTime for longer reflection, however, there was none, for just then another gust of this newly-risen wind fell against the building with a breaking roar, and at the same moment the swing door opened and Julius LeVallon stood within the room.\n\nWhether windows had burst, or the great skylights overhead been left unfastened, I had no time, nor inclination either, to discover, but I remember that the wind tore past him down the entire length of the high-ceilinged chamber, tossing the hair uncannily upon a dozen heads in front of me and even stirring the dust about my feet. It was almost as though we stood upon an open plain and met the unobstructed tempest in our teeth.\n\nYet the rush and vehemence with which he entered startled me, for I found myself glad of the support which a high student's stool afforded. I leaned against it heavily, while Julius, after standing by the door a moment, turned immediately then to the left. He knew exactly where to look. Simultaneously, he saw me too.\n\nOur eyes, in that atmosphere of shadow and soft moonlight, met also across centuries. He spoke my name; but it was no name I answered to Today.\n\n\"Come, Silvatela,\" he said, \"lend me your will and sympathy. Feel now with Wind and Fire. For both are here, and the time is favourable. At last, I shall perhaps return what has been borrowed.\" He beckoned me with a gesture of strange dignity. \"It is not that time of balanced forces we most desire \u2014 the Equinox \u2014 but it is the winter solstice,\" he went on, \"when the sun is nearest. That, too, is favourable. We may transcend the appointed boundaries. Across the desert comes the leaping wind. Both heat and air are with us. Come!\" And, having vaguely looked for some kind of elaborate preparation or parade, this sudden summons took me by surprise a little, though the language somehow did not startle me. I sprang up; the stool fell sideways, then clattered noisily upon the concrete floor. I made my way quickly between the peering faces. It seemed no longer strange, this abrupt disturbance of two familiar elements, nor did I remark with unusual curiosity that the wind went rushing and crying about the room, while the heat grew steadily within me so that my actual skin was drenched with perspiration. All came about, indeed, quickly, naturally, and without any pomp of dreadful ceremonial as I had expected. Julius had come with power in his hands; and preparation, if any, had already taken place elsewhere. He spoke no further word as I approached, but bent low over the thin, white form, his face pale, stern and beautiful as I had never seen it before. I thought of a star that entered the roof of those Temple Memories, falling beneficently upon the great concave mirrors where the incense rose in a column of blue smoke. His entire personality, when at length I stood beside him, radiated an atmosphere of force as though charged with some kind of elemental activity that was intense and inexhaustible. The wonder and beauty of it swept me from head to foot. The air grew marvellously heated. It rose in beating waves that accompanied the rushing wind, like a furnace driven by some powerful, artificial draught; in his immediate neighbourhood it whirled and roared. It drew me closer. I, too, found myself bending down above the motionless, stretched form, oblivious of the other crowded slabs about us.\n\nSo familiar it all seemed suddenly. Some such scene I had witnessed surely many a time elsewhere. I knew it all before. Upon success hung issues of paramount importance to his soul, to mine, to the soul of another who, for some reason unexplained, was not present with us, and, somehow, also, to the entire universe of which we formed, with these two elements, a living, integral portion. A weight of solemn drama lay behind our little show. It seemed to me the universe looked on and waited. The issue was of cosmic meaning.\n\nThen, as I entered the sphere of LeVallon's personality, a touch of dizziness caught me for an instant, as though this running wind, this accumulating heat, emanated directly from his very being; and, before I quite recovered myself, the moonlight was extinguished like a lamp blown out. Across the sky, apparently, rushed clouds that changed the spreading skylights into thick curtains, while into the room of death came a blast of storm that I thought must tear the windows from their very sockets in the stone. And with the wind came also a yet further increase of heat that was like a touch of naked fire on some inner membrane.\n\nI dare not assert that I was wholly master of myself throughout the swift, dramatic scene that followed in darkness and in tumult, nor can I claim that what I witnessed in the gloom, shot with occasional gleams of moonlight here and there, was more than the intense visualisation of an overwrought imagination. It well may be that what I expected to happen dramatised itself as though it actually did occur. I can merely state that, at the moment, \u2014 it seemed real and natural, and that what I saw was the opening scene in a ceremony as familiar to me as the Litany in my father's church.\n\nFor, with the pouring through the room of these twin energies of wind and fire, I saw, sketched in the dim obscurity, one definite movement \u2014 as the body of the boy rose up into a sitting posture close before our faces. It instantly then sank back again, recumbent as before upon the marble slab. The upright movement was repeated the same second, and once more there came the sinking back. There were several successive efforts before the upright position was maintained; and each time it rose slowly, gradually, all of one piece and rigidly, until finally these tentative movements achieved their object \u2014 and the boy sat up as though about to stand. Erect before us, the head slightly hanging on one side, the shoulders squared, the chest expanded as with lung-drawn air, he rose steadily above his motionless companions all around.\n\nAnd Julius drew back a pace. He made certain gestures with his arms and hands that in some incalculable manner laid control upon the movements. I saw his face an instant as the moon fell on it, pale, glorious and stately, wearing a glow that was not moonlight, the lips compressed with effort, the eyes ablaze. He looked to me unearthly and magnificent. His stature seemed increased. There was an air of power, of majesty about him that made his presence beautiful beyond words; and yet, most strange of all, it was familiar to me, even this. I had seen it all before. I knew well what was about to happen.\n\nHis gesture changed. No word was spoken. It was a Ceremony in which gesture was more significant than speech. There was evidence of intense internal struggle that yet did not include the ugliness of strain. He put forth all his power merely \u2014 and the body rose by jerks. Spasmodically, this time, as though pulled by wires, yet with a kind of terrible violence, it floated from that marble slab into the air. With a series of quick, curious movements, half plunge, half jerk, it touched the floor. It stood stiffly upright on its feet. It rose again, it turned, it twisted, moving arms and legs and head, passing me unsupported through the atmosphere some four feet from the ground. The wind rushed round it with a roar; the fire, though invisible, scorched my eyes. This way and that, now up, now down, the body of this boy danced to and fro before me, silent always, the blue eyes fixed, the lips half parted, more with the semblance of some awful marionette than with human movement, yet charged with a colossal potency that drove it hither and thither. Like some fair Ariel, laughing at death, it flitted above the yellow Calibans of horror that lay strewn below.\n\nYet, from the very nature of these incompleted movements, I was aware that the experiment was unsuccessful, and that the power was insufficient. Instead of spasmodic, the movements should have been rhythmical and easy; there should have been purpose and intention in the performance of that driven body; there should have been commanding gestures, significant direction; there should have been spontaneous breathing and \u2014 a voice \u2014 the voice of Life.\n\nAnd instead \u2014 I witnessed an unmeaning pantomime, and heard the wailing of the dying wind...\n\nA voice, indeed, there was, but it was the voice of Julius LeVallon that eventually came to me across the length of the room. I saw him slowly approaching through the patches of unequal moonlight, carrying over his shoulder the frail, white burden that had collapsed against the further wall. And his words were very few, spoken more to himself apparently than to me. I heard them; they struck chill and ominous upon my heart:\n\n\"The conditions were imperfect, the power insufficient. Alone we cannot do it. We must wait for her... And the channel must be another's \u2014 as before.\"\n\nThe strain of high excitement passed. I knew once again that small and pitiful sensation of returning to my normal consciousness. The exhilaration all was gone. There came a dwindling of the heart. I was \"myself\" again, John Mason, student at Edinburgh University. It produced a kind of shock, the abruptness of the alteration took my strength away. I experienced a climax of sensation, disappointment, distress, fear and revolt as well, that proved too much for me. I ran. I reeled. I heard the sound of my own falling.\n\nNo recollection of what immediately followed remains with me... for when I opened my eyes much later, I found myself prone upon the landing several floors below, with Julius bending solicitously over me, helping me to rise. The moonlight fell in a flood through a window on the stairs. My recovery was speedy, though not complete. I accompanied' him down the remaining flight, leaning upon his arm; and in the street my senses, though still dazed, took in that the night was calm and cloudless, that the moonlight veiled the stars by its serene brightness, and that the clock above the University buildings pointed to the hour of two in the morning.\n\nThe cold was bitter. There was no wind!\n\nJulius came with me to my door in Frederick Street, but the entire distance of a mile neither of us spoke a word.\n\nAt the door of my lodging-house, however, he turned. I drew back instinctively, hesitating, for my desire was to get upstairs into my own room with the door locked safely behind me. But he caught my hand.\n\n\"We failed tonight,\" he whispered, \"but when the real time comes we shall succeed. You will not \u2014 fail me then?\"\n\nIn the stillness of very early morning, the moon sinking towards the long dip of the Queensferry Road, and the shadows lying deep upon the deserted streets, I heard his voice once more come travelling down the centuries to where I stood. The atmosphere of those other days and other places came back with incredible appeal upon me.\n\nHe drew me within the chilly hall-way, the sound of our feet echoing up the spiral staircase of stone. Night lay silently over everything, sunrise still many hours away.\n\nI turned and looked into his eager, passionate face, into his eyes that still shone with the radiance of the two great powers, at the mouth and lips which now betrayed the exhaustion that had followed the huge effort. And something appealing and personal in his entire expression made it impossible to refuse. I shook my head, I shrank away, but a voice I scarcely recognised as my own gave the required answer. My upper and my under selves conflicted; yet the latter gave the inevitable pledge: \"Julius... I promise you.\"\n\nHe gazed into my eyes. An inexpressible tenderness stole into his manner. He took my hand and held it. The die was cast.\n\n\"She is now upon the earth with us,\" he said. \"I soon shall find her. We three shall inevitably be drawn together, for we are linked by indestructible ties. There is this debt we must repay \u2014 we three who first together incurred it.\"\n\nThere was a pause. Far away I heard a cart rumbling over the cobbles of George Street. In another world it seemed, for the gods were still about us where we stood. Julius moved from me. Once more I saw his eyes fixed pleadingly, almost yearningly upon my own. Then the street door closed upon him and he was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 233", + "text": "\"Love and pity are pleading with me this hour.\n\nWhat is this voice that stays me forbidding to yield,\n\nOffering beauty, love, and immortal power.\n\nAeons away in some far-off heavenly field?\" \u2014 A. E.\n\nThe actual beginnings of a separation are often so slight that they are scarcely noticed. Between two friends, whose acquaintance is of several years' standing, sure that their tie will stand the ordinary tests of life, some unexpected and trivial incident first points to the parting of the ways; each discovers suddenly that, after all, the other is not necessary to him. An emotion unshared is sufficient to reveal some fundamental lack of sympathy hitherto concealed, and they go their different ways, neither claim debited with the least regret. Like the scarce perceptible mist of evening that divides dusk from night, the invisible chill has risen between them; each sees the other through a cloud that first veils, then distorts, and finally obliterates.\n\nFor some weeks after the \"experiment\" I saw LeVallon through some such risen mist, now thin, now thick, but always there and invariably repelling. I remember distinctly, however, that our going apart was to me not without a sense of regret both keen and poignant. I owed him something impossible to describe; a yearning sense of beauty touched common things about me at the sight of him, even at the mention of his name in the University classrooms; he had given me an awareness of other possibilities, an exhilarating view of life that held immense perspectives; a feeling that justice determined even the harshest details; above all, a sense of kinship with Nature that combined to form a tie of a most uncommon order.\n\nYet I went willingly from his side; for his prospectus of existence led me towards heights where I could not comfortably breathe. His entire scheme I never properly grasped, perhaps; the little parts we shared I saw, possibly, in wrong proportion, uncorrelated to the huge map his mind contained so easily. My own personality was insignificant, my powers mediocre; above all I had not always his strange conviction of positive memory to support me. I lagged behind. I left him. The seductive world that touched him not made decided claims upon my heart \u2014 love, passion, ambition and adventure called me strongly. I would not give up all and follow where he led. Yet I left him with the haunting consciousness that I surrendered a system of belief that was logical, complete and adequate, its scale of possible achievement wonderful, and its unselfish ideal, if immensely difficult, at least noble and inspiring. For all his mysticism, Julius, it seems to me, was practical and scientific.\n\nYet, the plausibility of his audacious theories would sometimes return questioningly upon me. Man was an integral part of Nature, not alien to it. What was there, after all, so impossible in what he claimed? And what amongst it might not the science of tomorrow, with its X rays, N rays, its wireless messages, its radium, its inter-molecular energy, and its slowly-formulating laws of telepathy and the dynamic character of Thought, not come eventually to confirm under new-fangled names?\n\nSo far as I reflected concerning these things at all, I kept an open mind; my point was simply that I preferred the ordinary pursuits of ordinary men. He was evidently aware of the change in me, while yet he made no effort to prevent my going. Nor did he make, so far as I can recall, any direct reference to the matter. Once only, in a lecture room, with a hand upon my shoulder while we jostled out together in the stream of other students, he bent his face towards me and said with the tender, comprehending smile that never failed to touch me deeply: \"Our lives are far too deeply knit for any final separation. Out of the Past we come, and that Past is not exhausted yet.\" The crowd had carried us apart before I could reply, but through me like a flash of lightning rose the certainty that this was literally true, and that while my upper, modern Self went off, my older, hidden Self was with him to the end. We merely took two curves that presently must join again.\n\nBut, though we saw little of one another all these weeks, I can never forget the scene of our actual leave-taking, nor the extraordinary incidents that led up to it. Now that I set it down on paper such phrases as \"imaginative glamour\" and the like may tempt me, but at the time it was as real and actual as the weekly battles with my landlady, or the sheaves of laborious notes I made at lecture \u2014 time. In some region of my consciousness, abnormal or otherwise, this scene most certainly took place.\n\nIt was one late evening towards the close of the session \u2014 March or April, therefore \u2014 that I had occasion to visit LeVallon's house for some reason in itself of no importance; one of those keen and blustery nights that turn Edinburgh into a scene of unspeakable desolation. Princes Street, a vista of sheeted rain where shop-windows glistened upon black pavements; the Castle smothered in mist; Scott's Monument semi-invisible with a monstrous air about it in the gloom; and the entire deserted town swept by a wind that howled across the Forth with gusts of quite thunderous energy. Even the cable-cars blundered along like weary creatures blindly seeking shelter.\n\nI hurried through the confusion of the tempest, fighting my way at every step, and on turning the corner past the North British Railway Station, the storm carried me with a rush into the porch of the house, whipping the soaked macintosh with a blow across my face. The rain struck the dripping walls down their entire height, then poured splashing along the pavement in a stream. Night seemed to toss me into the building like some piece of wreckage from the crest of a great wave.\n\nPanting and momentarily flustered, I paused in the little hall to recover breath, while the hurricane, having flung me into shelter, went roaring and howling down the sloping street. I wiped the rain from my face and put straight my disordered clothes. My mind just then was occupied with nothing but these very practical considerations. The impression that followed the next instant came entirely unbidden:\n\nFor I became aware of a sudden and enveloping sense of peace, beyond all telling calm and beautiful \u2014 an interior peace \u2014 a calm upon the spirit itself. It was a spiritual emotion. There drifted over me and round me, like the stillness of some perfect dawn, the hush of something serene and quiet as the stars. All stress and turmoil of the outer world passed into an exquisite tranquillity that in some nameless way was solemn as the spaces of the sky. I felt almost as if some temple atmosphere, some inner Sanctuary of olden time, where the tumult of external life dared not intrude, had descended on me. And the change arrested every active impulse in my being; my hurrying thoughts lay down and slept; all that was scattered in me gathered itself softly into an inner fold; unsatisfied desires closed their eyes. It seemed as if all the questing energies of my busy personality found suddenly repose. Life's restlessness was gone. I even forgot momentarily the purpose for which I came.\n\nSo abrupt a change of key was difficult to realise; I can only say that the note of spiritual peace seemed far more true and actual than the physical relief due to the escape from wind and rain. Moreover, as I climbed the spiral staircase to the second floor where Julius lived, it deepened perceptibly \u2014 as though it emanated from his dwelling quarters, pervading the entire building. It brought back the atmosphere of what a:t school we called our \"Temple Days.\"\n\nI went on tiptoe, fearful of disturbing what seemed solemn even to the point of being sacred, for the mood was so strong that I felt no desire to resist or criticise. Whatever its cause, this subjective state of mind was soothing to the point of actual happiness. A hint of bliss was in it. And it did not lessen either, when I discovered the landlady, Mrs. Garnier, white of face in the little hall-way, showing signs of nervousness that she made no attempt whatever to conceal.\n\nShe was all eagerness to speak. Before I could ask if Julius was at home, she relieved her burdened mind:\n\n\"Oh, it'll be you, Mr. Mason! And I'm that glad ye've come!\"\n\nHer round, puffy visage plainly expressed relief, as she came towards me with a shambling gait, looking over her shoulder across the dim-lit hall. \"Mr. LeVallon,\" she whispered, \"has been in there without a sound since mornin', and I'm thinkin', maybe, something would ha' happened to him.\" And she stared into my face as though I could instantly explain what troubled her. Where I felt spiritual peace, she felt, obviously, spiritual alarm.\n\n\"He is engaged?\" I inquired. Then \u2014 though hardly aware why I put the question \u2014 I added: \"There is someone with him?\"\n\nShe peered about her.\n\n\"He'll be no engaged to you, sir,\" she replied. Plainly, it was not her lodger's instructions that prompted the words; by the way she hung back I discerned that she dreaded to announce me; she hoped I would go in and explore alone.\n\n\"I'll wait in the sitting-room till he comes out,\" I said, after a moment's hesitation. And I moved towards the door.\n\nMrs. Gamier, however, at once made an involuntary gesture to prevent me. I can still hear her slippered tread shuffling across the oil-cloth. The gesture became a sort of leap when she saw that I persisted. It reminded me of a frightened animal.\n\n\"There'll be twa gentlemen already waiting,\" she mumbled thickly, her face turning a shade paler.\n\nAnd, hearing this, I paused. The old woman, I saw, was trembling. I was annoyed at the interruption, for it destroyed the sense of delightful peace I had enjoyed.\n\n\"Anyone I know?\"\n\nI was close to the door as I asked it, the terrified old woman close beside me. She thrust her grey face up to mine; her eyes shone in the gleam of the low-turned gas jet above our heads; and her excitement communicated itself suddenly to my own blood. A distinct shiver ran down my back.\n\n\"I dinna ken them,\" she whispered behind a hand she held to her mouth, \"for, ye see, I dinna let them in.\"\n\nI stared at her, wondering what was coming next The slight trepidation I had felt for a moment vanished, but I kept my voice at a whisper for fear of disturbing Julius in his inner chamber on the other side of the wall.\n\n\"What do you mean? Tell me plainly what's the matter.\" I said it with some sharpness.\n\nShe replied at once, only too glad to share her anxiety with another.\n\n\"They came in by themselves,\" she whispered with a touch of superstitious awe; \"wonderfu' big men, the twa of them, and dark-skinned as the de'il,\" and she drew back a pace to watch the effect of her words upon me.\n\n\"How long ago?\" I asked impatiently. I remembered suddenly that Julius had friends among the Hindu students. It was more than possible that he had given them his key.\n\nMrs. Gamier shook her head suggestively. \"I went in an hour ago,\" she told me in a low tone, \"thinkin' maybe he would be eatin' something, and, O Lord mercy, I ran straight against the pair of them, settin' there in the darkness wi'oot a word.\"\n\n\"Well?\" I said, seeing that she was likely to invent, \"and what of it?\"\n\n\"Neither of them moved a finger at me,\" she continued breathlessly, \"but they looked all over me, and they had eyes like a flame o' fire, and I all but let the lamp fall and came out in a faintin' condeetion, and have been prayin' ever since that someone would come in.\"\n\nShe shuffled into the middle of the hall \u2014 way, drawing me after her by my sleeve. She pointed towards a comer of the ceiling. A small square window was let into the wall of the little interior room where Julius sought his solitude, and where at this moment he was busy with his mysterious occupations.\n\n\"And what'll be that awfu' licht, then?\" she inquired, plucking me by the arm.\n\nA gleam of bright white light, indeed, was visible through the small dusty pane above us, and again a curious memory ran like sheet-lightning across my mind that I had seen this kind of light before and that it was familiar to me. It vanished instantly before I could seize the fleeting picture. The light certainly was of peculiar brightness, coming from neither gas nor candle, nor from any ordinary light that I could have named off-hand.\n\n\"It'll be precisely that kind of licht that's in their eyes,\" I heard her whisper, as she jerked her whole body rather than her head alone towards the sitting-room I was about to enter. She wiped her clammy hands upon the striped apron that hung crooked from her angular hips.\n\n\"Mrs. Gamier,\" I said with authority, \"there's nothing to be afraid of. Mr. LeVallon makes experiments sometimes, that's all. He wouldn't hurt a hair of your head\"\n\n\"Nae doot,\" she interrupted me, backing away from the door, \"for his bonny face is a face to get well on, but the twa others in there, the darkies \u2014 aye, and that'll be another matter, and not one for me to be meddlin' with\"\n\nI cut her short. \"If you feel frightened,\" I said, smiling, \"go to your room and pray. You needn't announce me. I'll go in and wait until he's ready to come out and see me.\"\n\nHer face went white as linen, showing up an old scar on the cheek in an ugly reddish pattern, while I pushed past her and turned the handle of the door. I heard the breath catch in her throat. The next minute, lamp in hand, I was in the room, slamming the door literally in her face lest she might follow and do some foolish thing. I set the lamp down upon the table in the centre. I looked quickly about me. No living person but myself was there \u2014 certainly no Hindu gentlemen with eyes of flame. Mrs. Garnier's Celtic imagination had run away with her altogether. I sat down and waited. A line of that same bright, silvery light shone also beneath the crack of the door from the inner chamber. The wind and rain trumpeted angrily at the windows. But the room was undeniably empty.\n\nYet it is utterly beyond me to describe the sense of exaltation that at once rose over me like some influence of perfect music; \"exaltation\" is the right word, I think, and \"music\" conveys best the uplifting and soothing effect that was produced. For here, at closer quarters, the sensation of exquisite peace was doubly renewed. The nervous alarm inspired by the woman fled. This peace flooded me; it stirred the bliss of some happy spiritual life long since enjoyed and long since forgotten. I passed instantly, as it were, under the sway of some august authority that banished the fret and restlessness of the extraneous world; and compared to which the strife and ambition of my modern life seemed, indeed, well lost.\n\nBehind it, however, and behind the solemnity that awed, was at the same time the faint presage of something vaguely disquieting. The memory of some afflicting incompleteness gripped me; the anguish of ideals too lofty for attainment; the sweet pain and passion of some exquisite long suffering; the secret yearning of a soul that had dared sublime accomplishment, then plunged itself and others in the despair of failure \u2014 all this lay in the apprehension that stood close behind the bliss.\n\nBut, above all else, was the certainty that I remembered definite details of those Temple Days, and that I was upon the verge of still further and more detailed recollection... That faintness stealing over me was the faintness of immeasurable distance, the ache of dizzy time, the weariness that has no end and no beginning. I felt what Julius LeVallon felt \u2014 the deep sickness of eternity that knows no final rest, either of blessed annihilation or of non-existence, until the journey of the soul comes to its climax in the Deity. And, feeling this \u2014 realising it \u2014 for the first time, I understood, also for the first time, LeVallon's words at Motfield Close two years ago \u2014 \"If the soul remembered all, it would lose the courage to attempt. Only the vital things are worth recalling, because they guide.\"\n\nThis flashed across me now, as I sat in that Edinburgh lodging-house, waiting for him to come. I knew myself, beyond all doubt or question, caught away in that web of wonderful, far-off things; there revived in me the yearnings of memories exceedingly remote: poignant still with life, because they were unexhausted still, and terrible with that incompleteness which sooner or later must find satisfaction. And it was this sense of things left undone that brought the feeling of presentiment. Julius, in that inner chamber, was communing as of old. But also \u2014 he was searching. He was hard upon the trail of ancient clues. He was seeking her. I knew it in my bones.\n\nFor I felt some subtle communication with that other mind beyond the obstructing door \u2014 not, however, as it was today, but as it was in the recoverable centuries when the three of us had committed the audacious act which still awaited its final readjustment at our hands. Julius, searching by some method of his own among the layers of our ancient lives, reconstructed the particular scenes he needed. Involuntarily, unwittingly, I shared them too. I had stepped into his ancient mood...\n\nMy mind grew crowded. The pictures rose and passed, and rose again...\n\nBut it was always one in particular that returned, staying longer than the others. He concentrated upon one, then. In his efforts to find her soul in its body of today, he went back to the source of our original relationship, the immensely remote experience when he and I and she had sown the harvest we had now come back to reap together. Thence, holding the clue, he could trace the thread of her existences down to this very moment. He could find her where she stood upon the earth \u2014 today.\n\nThis seemed very clear to me, though how I realised it is difficult to say. I remember a curious thought \u2014 which proves how real the conviction was in me. I asked myself: \"Does she feel anything now, as she goes about her business on this earth, perhaps in England, perhaps not far removed from us, as distance goes? And is she, too, wherever she stands and waits, aware perhaps of some queer presentiment that haunts her waking or her sleeping mind \u2014 the presentiment of something coming, something about to happen \u2014 that someone waits for her?\"\n\nThe one persistent picture rose and captured me a:gain...\n\nIn blazing sunlight stood the building of whitened stone against the turquoise sky; and, a little to the left, the yellow cliffs, precipitous and crumbling. At their base were mounds of sand the wind and sun had chiselled and piled up against their feet. The soft air trembled with the heat; fierce light bathed everything \u2014 from the small white figures moving up and down the rock-hewn steps, to the Temple hollowed out between the stone paws of an immense outline half animal, half human. To the right, and towards the east, stretched the abundant desert, shimmering grey and blue and green beneath the torrid sun. I smelt the empty leagues of sand, the delicate perfume that gathers among the smooth, baked hollows of a million dunes; I felt the breeze, sharp and exhilarating, that knew no interruption of broken surfaces to break its journey of days and nights; and behind me I heard the faint, sharp rustle of trees whose shadows flickered on the burning ground. This heat and air grew stealthily upon me; fire and wind were here the dominating influences, the natural methods which furnished vehicles for the manifestation of particular Powers. Here was the home of our early worship of the Sun and space, of Fire and Wind. Yet, somehow, it seemed not of this present planet we call Earth, but of some point nearer to the centre.\n\nBeside those enormous paws, where the air danced and shimmered in the brilliant glare, I saw the narrow flight of steps leading to the crypts below \u2014 the retreats for solitude. And then, suddenly, with a shock of poignant recognition \u2014 1 saw a figure that I knew instantly to be myself, the Sower of my harvest of Today. It slowly moved down the steps behind another figure that I recognised with equal conviction \u2014 some inner flash of lightning certainty \u2014 as Julius LeVallon, the soul I knew today in Edinburgh, the soul that, in another body, now stood near me in a nineteenth century lodging-house. The bodies, too, were lighter, less dense and material than those we used today, the spirit occupier less hampered and restricted. That too was clear to me.\n\nI was aware of both times, both places simultaneously. That is, I was not dreaming. The peace, moreover, that stole round me in this modern building was but a faint reflection of the peace once familiar to me in those far-off Temple Days. And somehow it was the older memory that dominated consciousness.\n\nAbout me the room held still as death, the battle of that earthly storm against the walls and windows half unreal, or so remote as to be not realised. Time paused a moment. I looked back. I lived as I had been then \u2014 in another type of consciousness, it seemed. It was marvellous, yet natural as in a dream. Only, as in a dream, subsequent language fails to retain the searching, vivid reality. The living fact is not recaptured. I felt. I understood. Certain tendencies and characteristics that were \"me\" today I saw explained \u2014 those that derived from this particular period. What must be conquered, and why, flashed sharply; also individuals whom to avoid would be vain shirking, since having sown together we must reap together \u2014 or miss the object of our being.\n\nI heard strange names \u2014 Concerighe, Silvatela, Ziaz... and a surge of passionate memories caught at my heart. Yet it was not Egypt, it was not India or the East, it was not Assyria or old Chaldea even; this belonged to a civilisation older than them all, some dim ancient kingdom that antedated all records open to possible research today...\n\nI was in contact with the searching mind within that inner chamber. His effort included me, making the deeps in me give up their dead. I saw. He sought through many \"sections.\" ...I followed... There was confusion \u2014 the pictures of recent days breaking in upon others infinitely remote. I could not disentangle...\n\nVery sharply, then, and with a sensation of uneasiness that was almost pain, another figure rose. I saw a woman. With the same clear certainty of recognition the face presented itself. Hair, lips, and eyes I saw distinctly, yet somehow through a haze that veiled the expression. About the graceful neck hung a soft cloth of gold; dark lashes screened a gaze still starry and undimmed; there was a smile of shining teeth... the eyes met mine...\n\nWith a diving rush the entire picture shifted, passing on to another scene, and I saw two figures, her own and his, bending down over something that lay stretched and motionless upon an altar of raised stones. We were in shadow now; the air was cool; the perfume of the open desert had altered to the fragrance that was incense... The picture faded, flashed quickly back, faded again, and once again was there. I could not hold it for long. Larger, darker figures swam between to confuse and blur its detail, figures of some swarthier race, as though layers of other memories, perhaps more recent, mingled bewilderingly with it. The two passed in and out of one another, sometimes interpenetrating, as when two slides appear upon the magic-lantern sheet together; yet, peering at me through the phantasmal kaleidoscope, shone ever this woman-face, seductively lovely, haunting as a vision of stars, mask of a soul even then already \"old,\" although the picture was of ages before the wisdom of Buddha or the love of Christ had stolen on the world...\n\nThen came a moment of clearer sight suddenly, and I saw that the objects lying stretched and motionless in the obscurity, and over one of which they bent in concentrated effort, were the bodies of men not dead, but temporarily vacated. And I knew that we stood in the Hall of the Vacated Bodies, an atmosphere of awe and solemnity about us. For these were the advanced disciples who in the final initiation lay three days and nights entranced, while their souls acquired \"elsewhere and otherwise\" the knowledge no brain could attain to in the flesh. During the interval there were those who watched the empty tenements \u2014 Guardians of the Vacated Bodies \u2014 and two of these I now saw bending low \u2014 the woman and a man. The body itself I saw but dimly, but an overmastering curiosity woke in me to see it clearly \u2014 to recognise!\n\nThe intensity of my effort caused a blur, it seemed. Across my inner sight the haze thickened for a moment, and I lost the scene. But this time I understood. The dread of something they were about to consummate blackened the memory with the pain of treachery. Guardians of the Vacated Bodies, they had been faithless to their trust: they had used their position for some personal end. Awe and terror clutched my soul. Who was the leader, who the led, I failed utterly to recover, nor what the motive of the broken trust had been. A sublime audacity lay in it, that I knew. There was the desire for knowledge not yet properly within their reach; there was the ambition to evoke the elemental powers; and there was an \"experiment,\" using the instrument at hand as the channel for an achievement that might have made them \u2014 one of them, at any rate \u2014 as the gods. But there was about it all an entanglement of personalities and motives I was helpless to unravel. The whole deep significance I could not recover. My own part, the part he played, and the part the woman played, seemed woven in an involved and inextricable knot. It belonged, I felt, to an order of consciousness which is not the order of today. I, therefore, failed to understand completely. Only that we three were together, closely linked, emerged absolutely clear.\n\nFor one moment the scene returned again. I remember that something drove forcibly against me in that ancient place, that it flung itself roaring like a tempest in my face, that a great burning sensation passed through me, while sheets of what I can only describe as black fire tore through the air about us. There was fire and there was wind... that much I realised.\n\nI rocked \u2014 that is my present body rocked. I reeled upon my chair. The entire memory plunged down into darkness with a speed of lightning. I seemed to rise \u2014 to emerge from the depths of some sea within me where I had lain sunk for ages. In one sense \u2014 I awoke. But, before the glamour passed entirely, and while the reality of the scene hung about me still, I remember that a cry for help escaped my lips, and that it was the name of our leader that I called upon:\n\n\"Concerighe...!\"\n\nWith that cry still sounding in the air, I turned, and saw him whom I had called upon beside me. With a kind of splendid, dazzling light he came. He rested one hand upon my shoulder; he gazed down into my eyes; and I looked into a face that was magnificent with power, radiant, glorious. The atmosphere momentarily seemed turned to flame. I felt a wind of strength strike through me. The old temptation and the sin \u2014 the failure \u2014 all were clear at last.\n\nI remembered..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 234", + "text": "The brilliance of the figure dimmed and melted, as though the shadows ate it from the edges inwards; there came a rattling at the handle of that inner chamber door; it opened suddenly; and Julius LeVallon, this time in his body of Today, stood framed against the square of light that swirled behind him like clouds of dazzlingly white steam. The door swung to and closed. He moved forward quickly into the room.\n\nBy this time I was more in possession of my normal senses again. Here was no question of memory, vision, or imagination's glamour. Beyond any doubt or ambiguity, there stood beside me in this sitting-room of the Edinburgh lodging-house two figures of Julius LeVallon. I saw them simultaneously. There was the normal Julius walking across the carpet towards me, and there was his double that stood near me in a body of light \u2014 now fading, yet unquestionably wearing the likeness of that Concerighe whom I had seen bending with the woman above the vacated body.\n\nThey moved together swiftly. Almost the same moment they met; they intermingled, much as two outlines of an object slip one into the other when the finger's pressure on the eyeball is removed. They became one person. Julius was there before me in the lamp-lit room, just come from his inner chamber that blazed with brilliance. This light now disappeared. No line showed beneath the crack of the door. I heard the wind and rain shout drearily past the windows with the dying storm.\n\nI caught my breath. I stood up to face him, taking a quick step backwards. And I heard Julius laugh a little. He told me afterwards I had assumed an attitude of defence.\n\nHe was speaking \u2014 in his ordinary voice, no sign of excitement in him, nor about his presence anything unusual.\n\n\"You called me,\" he said quietly; \"you called for help. But I could not come at once; I could not get back; it was such a long way off.\" He looked at me and smiled. \"I was searching,\" he added, as though he had been merely turning the pages of a book.\n\n\"Our old Memory Game. I know. I felt it \u2014 even out here.\"\n\nHe nodded gravely.\n\n\"You could hardly help it,\" he replied, \"being so close,\" and indicated that inner room with a gesture of his head. \"Besides, you were in it all the time. And she was in it too. Oh,\" he said with a touch of swift enthusiasm, \"I have recovered nearly all. I know exactly now what happened. I was the leader, I the instigator; you both merely helped me; you with your faithful friendship, even while you warned; she with her passionate love that asked no questions, but obeyed.\"\n\n\"She loved you so?\" I asked faintly, but with an uncontrollable trembling of the voice. An amazing prescience seized me.\n\n\"You,\" he said calmly. \"It was you she loved.\"\n\nWhat thrill of romance, deathless and enthralling, stirred in me as I heard these words! What starry glory stepped down upon the world! A memory of bliss poured into me; the knowledge of an undying love constant as the sun itself. Then, hard upon its heels, flashed back the Present with a small and insignificant picture \u2014 of my approaching union \u2014 with another. An extraordinary revulsion caught me. I remember steadying myself against the chair in front of me.\n\n\"For it was your love,\" Julius went on quietly, \"that made you so necessary. You two were a single force together. I had the knowledge, but you together had the greatest power in the world. We were three \u2014 a trinity \u2014 the strongest union possible. And the temptation was too much for me\"\n\nHe turned away a moment so that I could not see his face. He broke off suddenly. There was a new and curious quality in his voice, as though it dwindled in volume and grew smaller, yet was not audibly lowered.\n\nWhat caused the old sense of dread to quicken in me? What brought this sudden sinking of the heart as he turned again from the cabinet where he stood, and our eyes met steadily through the lamp-lit room?\n\n\"I borrowed love, but knew not how to use it,\" he went on slowly, solemnly. \"I had evoked the Powers successfully; through the channel of that vacated body I had drawn them into my own being. Then came the failure\"\n\n\"I\u2014 we failed you!\" I faltered.\n\n\"The failure,\" he replied, still fixing me with his glowing eyes, \"was mine, and mine alone. The power lent me I did not understand. It was not my own, and without great love these things cannot be accomplished. I must first know love. What I had summoned I was too weak to banish. The owner of the vacated body returned.\" Then, after a pause, he added half below his breath: \"The Powers, exiled from their appointed place, are about me to this very day. But it is the owner of that body whose forgiveness I need most. And only with your help \u2014 with the presence, the sympathetic presence of yourself and her \u2014 can this be effected.\"\n\nPast, present, and future seemed strangely inter-mingled as I heard, for my thoughts went groping forward, and at the same time diving backwards among desert sands and temples. The passion of an immense love-story caught me; I was aware of intense yearning to resume my place in it all with him, with her, with all the reconstructed conditions of relationships so ancient and so true. It swept over me like a storm unchained. That scene in the cool and sunless crypt flamed forth again, reality in each smallest detail. The meaning of his words I did not wholly grasp, however; there was something lacking in my mind of Today that withheld the final clue. My present consciousness was not as then. From brain and reason all this seemed so utterly divorced, and I had forgotten how to understand by feeling in the way that Julius did. Those last words, however, brought a sudden question to my lips. Almost unconsciously I gave it utterance:\n\n\"Through the channel of a body?\" I asked, and my voice was lower than his own.\n\n\"Through the channel of a human system,\" was his answer, \"an organism that uses consciously both heat and air, and that, therefore, knows the nature of them both. For the Powers can be summoned only by those who understand them; and understanding, being worship, depends ultimately upon sharing their natures, though it be in little.\"\n\nThere came a welcome break, then, in the strain of this extraordinary conversation, as Julius, using no bridge to transpose our emotions from one key to the other, walked quietly over to the cupboard. It was characteristically significant of his attitude to life in general, that the solemn things we had been speaking of were yet no more sacred than the prosaic detail of today that now concerned him \u2014 a student's supper. All was \"one\" to him in this rare but absolutely genuine way. He was unconscious of any break in the emotional level of what had been \u2014 for him there was, indeed, no break \u2014 and, watching him, it almost seemed that I still saw that other figure of long ago striding across the granite, sun-drenched slabs.\n\nThe voice rose unbidden within me, choked by the stress of some inexplicable emotion:\n\n\"Concerighe...!\" I cried aloud involuntarily; \"Concerighe... Ziaz... We are all together still... my help is yours... my unfailing help...\"\n\nJulius, loaf and marmalade jar in hand, turned from the cupboard as though he had been struck. For a moment he stood and stared. The customary expression melted from his face, and in its place a look of tenderest compassion shone through the strength.\n\n\"You do remember, then!\" he said very softly; \"even the names!\"\n\n\"And Silvatela,\" I murmured, moisture rising unaccountably to my eyes. I saw the room in mist.\n\nJulius stood before me like a figure carved in stone. For a long time he spoke no word. Gradually the curious disturbance in my own breast sank and passed. The mist lifted and disappeared. I felt myself slipping back into Today on the ebb of some shattering experience, already half forgotten.\n\n\"You remember,\" he repeated presently, his voice impassioned but firmly quiet, \"the temptation \u2014 and \u2014 the failure...?\"\n\nI nodded, almost involuntarily again.\n\n\"And still hold to you \u2014 both,\" I murmured.\n\nHe held me with his eyes for quite a minute. Though he used no word or gesture, I felt his deep delight.\n\n\"Because we must,\" he answered presently; \"because we must.\"\n\nHe had moved so close to me that I felt his breath upon my face. I could have sworn for a second that I gazed into the shining eyes of that other and audacious figure, for it was the voice of Concerighe, yet the face of Julius. Past and present seemed to join hands, mingling confusedly in my mind. Cause and effect whispered across the centuries, linking us together. And the voice continued deeply, as if echoing down hollow aisles of stone.\n\nI heard the words in the shadowy spaces of that old-world crypt, rather than among the plush furniture of these Edinburgh lodgings.\n\n\"We three are at last together again, and must bring the Balance to a final close. As the stars are but dust upon the pathway of the gods, so our mistakes are but dust upon the pathway of our lives. What we let fall together, we must together remove.\"\n\nThen, with an abruptness that pertained sometimes to these curious irruptions from the past, the values shifted. He became more and more the Julius LeVallon whom I knew today. Speech changed to a modern and more usual key. And the effect upon myself was of vague relief, for while the impression of great drama did not wholly pass, the uneasiness lightened in me, and I found my tongue again. I told my own experience \u2014 all that I had seen and felt and thought. Brewing the cocoa, and setting out the bread and marmalade upon the table, Julius listened to every word without interruption. Our intimacy was complete again as though no separation, either of lives or days, had been between us.\n\n\"Inside me, of course,\" I concluded the recital; \"in some kind of interior sight I saw it all\"\n\n\"The only true sight,\" he declared, \"though what you saw was but the reflection at second-hand of memories I evoked in there.\" He pointed to the inner room. \"In there,\" he went on significantly, \"where nothing connected with the Present enters, no thought, no presence, nothing that can disturb or interrupt, \u2014 in there you would see and remember as vividly as I myself. The room is prepared... The channels all are open. As it was, my pictures flashed into you and set the great chain moving. For no life is isolated; all is shared; and every detail, animate or so-called inanimate, belongs inevitably to every other.\"\n\n\"Yet what I saw was so much clearer than our school-day memories,\" I said. \"Those pictures, for instance, of the pastoral people where we came together first.\"\n\nAn expression of yearning passed into his eyes as he answered.\n\n\"Because in our Temple Days you led the life of the soul instead of the body merely. The soul alone remembers. There lies the permanent record. Only what has touched the soul, therefore, is recoverable \u2014 the great joys, great sorrows, great adventures that have reached it. You feel them. The rest are but fugitive pictures of scenery that accompanied the spiritual disturbances. Each body you occupy has a different brain that stores its own particular series. But true memory is in, and of, the Soul. Few have any true soul-life at all; few, therefore, have anything to remember!\"\n\nHis low voice ran on and on, charged with deep earnestness; his very atmosphere seemed to vibrate with the conviction of his words; about his face occasionally were flashes of that radiance in which his body of light \u2014 his inmost being \u2014 dwelt for ever. I remember moving the marmalade pot from its precarious position on the table edge, lest his gestures should send it flying! But I remember also that the haunting reality of \"other days and other places\" lay about us while we talked, so that the howling of the storm outside seemed far away and quite unable to affect us. We knew perfect communion in that dingy room. We felt together.\n\n\"But it is difficult, often painful, to draw the memories up again,\" he went on, still speaking of recovery, \"for they lie so deeply coiled about the very roots of joy and grief. Things of the moment smother the older pictures. The way of recovery is arduous, and not many would deem the sacrifice involved worth while. It means plunging into yourself as you must plunge below the earth if you would see the starlight while the sun is in the sky. Today's sunlight hides the stars of yesterday. Yet all is accessible \u2014 the entire series of the soul's experiences, and real forgetting is not possible.\"\n\nA movement as of wind seemed to pass between us over the faded carpet, bearing me upwards while he spoke, sweeping me with his own conviction of our eternal ancestry and of our unending future.\n\n\"We have made ourselves exactly what we are. We are making our future at this very minute \u2014 now!\" I exclaimed. The justice of the dream inspired me. Great courage, a greater hope awoke.\n\nHe smiled, opening his arms with a gesture that took in the world.\n\n\"Your aspirations, hopes and fears, all that has ever burned vitally at your centre, every spiritual passion that uplifted or enticed, each deep endeavour that seeded your present tendencies and talents \u2014 everything, in fact, strong enough to have touched your Soul \u2014 sends up its whirling picture of beauty or dismay at the appointed time. The disentangling may be difficult, but all are there, for you yourself are their actual, living Record. Feeling, not thinking, best unravels them \u2014 the primitive vision as of children \u2014 the awareness of kinship with everything about you. The sense of separateness and isolation vanishes, and the soul recovers the consciousness of sharing all the universe. There is no loneliness; there is no more fear.\"\n\nAh, how we talked that night of tempest through! What thoughts and dreams and possibilities Julius sent thundering against my mind as with the power of the loosed wind and rain outside. The scale of life became immense, each tiniest detail of act and thought important with the sacredness of some cosmic ceremonial that it symbolised. Yet to his words alone this power was not due, but rather to some force of driving certitude in himself that brought into me too a similar conviction. The memory of it hardened in the sands of my imagination, as it were, so that the result has remained, although the language by which he made it seem so reasonable has gone.\n\nI smoked my pipe; and, as the smoke curled upwards, I watched his face of pallid marble and the mop of ebony hair that set off so well the brilliance of the eyes. He looked, I thought to myself, like no human being I had ever seen before.\n\n\"And sometimes,\" I remember hearing, \"the memories from a later section may suddenly swarm across an earlier one \u2014 confusing the sight, perhaps, just when it is getting clear. A few hours ago, for 'instance, my search was interrupted by an inrush of two more recent layers \u2014 Eastern ones \u2014 which came to obliterate with their vividness the older, dimmer ones I sought.\"\n\nI mentioned what the frightened woman imagined she had seen.\n\n\"She caught a reflected fragment too,\" he said. \"So strong a picture was bound to spread.\"\n\n\"Then was Mrs. Garnier with us too before?\" I asked, as we burst out laughing.\n\n\"Not in that sense, no. It was the glamour that touched her only \u2014 second-sight, as she might call it. She is sensitive to impressions, nothing more.\"\n\nHe came over and sat closer to me. The web of his language folded closer too. The momentum of his sincerity threw itself against all my prejudices, so that I, too, saw the serpentine vista of these previous lives stretching like a river across the ages. To this day I see his tall, slim figure, his face with the clear pale skin, the burning eyes; now he leaned across the table, now stood up to emphasise some phrase, now paced the floor of that lamp-lit students' lodging-house, while he spoke of the long battling of our souls together, sowing thoughts and actions whose consequences must one day be reaped without evasion. The scale of his Dream was vast indeed, its prospect austere and merciless, yet the fundamental idea of justice made it beautiful, as its inclusion of all Nature made it grand.\n\nTo Julius LeVallon the soul was indeed unconquerable, and man master of his fate. Death lost its ugliness and terror; the sense of broken, separated life was replaced by the security of a continuous existence, whole, unhurried, eternal, affording ample time for all development, accepting joy and suffering as the justice of results, but never as of reward or punishment. There was no caprice; there was no such thing as chance.\n\nThen, as the night wore slowly on, and the wind died down, and the wonderful old town lay sleeping peacefully, we talked at last of that one thing towards which all our conversation tended subconsciously: our future together and the experiment that it held in store for us \u2014 with her.\n\nI cannot hope to set down here the words by which this singular being led me, half accepting, to the edge of understanding that his conception might be right. To that edge, however, I somehow felt my mind was coaxed. I looked over that edge. I saw for a moment something of his magnificent panorama. I realised a hint of possibility in his shining scheme. But it is beyond me to report the persuasive reasonableness of all I heard, for the truth is that Julius spoke another language \u2014 a language incomprehensible to my mind today. His words, indeed, were those of modern schools and books, but the spirit that ensouled them belong to a forgotten time. Only by means of some strange inner sympathy did I comprehend him. Another, an older type of consciousness, perhaps, woke in me. As with the pictures, this also seemed curiously familiar as I listened. Something in me old as the stars and wiser than the brain both heard and understood.\n\nFor the elemental forces he held to be Intelligences that share the life of the cosmos in a degree enormously more significant than anything human life can claim. Mother Earth, for him, was no mere poetic phrase. There was spiritual life in Nature as there was spiritual life in men and women. The insignificance of the latter was due to their being cut off from the great sources of supply \u2014 to their separation from Nature. Under certain conditions, and with certain consequences, it was possible to obtain these powers which, properly directed, might help the entire world. This experiment we had once made \u2014 and failed.\n\nThe method I already understood in a certain measure; but the rest escaped my comprehension. Memory failed to reconstruct it for me; vision darkened; his words conveyed no meaning. It was beyond me. Somewhere, somehow, personal love had entered to destroy the effective balance that ensured complete success. Yet, equally, the power of love which is quintessential sympathy, was necessary.\n\nWhat, however, I did easily understand was that the object of that adventure was noble, nothing meanly personal in it anywhere; and, further, that to restore the damaged equilibrium by returning these particular powers to their rightful places, there must be an exact reproduction of the conditions of evocation \u2014 that is, the three original participants must be together again \u2014 a human system must serve again as channel.\n\nAnd the essential fact of all that passed between us on this occasion was that I gave again my promise. When the necessary conditions were present \u2014 I would not fail him. This is the memory I have carried with me through the twenty years of our subsequent separation. I gave my pledge.\n\nThe storm blew itself to rest behind the hills; the rain no longer set the windows rattling; the hush of early morning stole down upon the sleeping city. We had talked the night away. He seemed aware \u2014 I know not how \u2014 that we stood upon the brink of going apart for years. There was great tenderness in his manner, his voice, his gestures. Turning to me a moment as the grey light crept past the curtains, he peered into my face as though he would revive lost centuries with the passion of his eyes. He took my hand and held it, while a look of peace and trust passed over his features as though the matter of the future were already then accomplished.\n\nHe led me silently across the room towards the door. I turned instinctively; words rose up in me, but words that found no utterance. A deep emotion held me dumb. Then, as I opened the door, I found the old, familiar name again:\n\n\"Concerighe... Friend of a million years...!\"\n\nBut no sentence followed it. He touched my arm. A cold wind seemed to pass between us. I firmly believe that somehow he foresaw the long interval of separation that was coming. Something about him seemed to fade; I saw him less distinctly; my sight, perhaps, was blurred with the strain of these long hours \u2014 hours the like of which I was not to know again for many years. That magical name has many a time echoed since in my heart away from him, as it echoed then across the darkened little hall-way of those Edinburgh lodgings: \"Concerighe! Friend of a million years!\"\n\nSide by side we went down the granite steps of the spiral staircase to the street. Julius opened the big front door. I heard the rattling of the iron chain. A breeze from the sea blew salt against our faces, then ran gustily along the streets. Behind the Calton Hill showed a crimson streak of dawn. A line of clouds, half rosy and half gold, ran down the sky. No living being was astir. I heard only the noisy whirling of the iron chimney-pots against the morning wind.\n\nAnd then his voice:\n\n\"Goodbye Until we meet again...\"\n\nHe pressed my hands. I looked into his eyes. He stepped back into the shadow of the porch. The door closed softly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 235", + "text": "\u2003\"Forgive? O yes! How lightly, lightly said!\n\n\u2003Forget? No, never, while the ages roll.\n\n\u2003Till God slay o'er again the undying dead,\n\n\u2003And quite unmake my soul!\" \u2014 Mary Coleridge.\n\nI stepped down, it seemed, into a lilliputian world where the grander issues no longer drew the souls of men. The deep and simple things were fled, the old Nature gods withdrawn. The scale of life had oddly shrunk.\n\nI saw the names above the shuttered shops with artificial articles for sale \u2014 \"11\u00bed. a yard\" \u2014 on printed paper labels. The cheapness of a lesser day flashed everywhere.\n\nI passed the closed doors of a building where people flocked to mumble that no good was in them, while a man proclaimed in a loud voice things he hardly could believe. A few streets behind me Julius LeVallon stood in the shadows of another porch, solitary and apart, yet communing with stars and hills and seas, survival from a vital, vanished age when life was realised everywhere and the elemental Nature Powers walked hand in hand with men.\n\nThrough the deserted streets I made my way across the town to my own little student's flat on the Morningside where I then lived. Gradually the crimson dawn slipped into a stormy sunrise. I watched the Pentlands take the gold, and the Castle rock turn ruddy; a gentle mist lay over Leith below; a pool of deep blue shadow marked the slumbering Old Town.\n\nBut about my heart at this magic hour stirred the dawn \u2014 winds of a thousand ancient sunrises, and I felt the haunting atmosphere of other days and other places steal up through the mists of immemorial existences. I thought of the whole great series, each life rising and setting like a little day, each with its dawn and noon and sunset, each with its harvest of failure and success, of joy and sorrow, of friendships formed and enemies forgiven, of ideals realised or abandoned \u2014 pouring out of the womb of time and slowly bringing the soul through the discipline of all possible experience towards that perfection which proclaims it one with the entire universe \u2014 the Deity.\n\nAnd a profound weariness fell about my spirit as I went. I became aware of my own meagre enthusiasm. I welcomed the conception of some saviour who should do it all for me. I knew myself unequal to the gigantic task. In that moment the heroic figure of Julius seemed remote from reality, a towering outline in the sky, an austere embodiment of legendary myth. The former passionate certainty that he was right dwindled amid wavering doubts. The perplexities of life came back upon me with tormenting power. I lost the coherent vision of consistent and logical beauty that he inspired. It was all too vast for me.\n\nThis reaction was natural enough, though for a long time mood chased mood across my troubled mind, each battling for supremacy. The materialism of the day, proudly strutting with its boundless assurance and its cock-sure knowledge, regained possession of my thoughts. The emptiness of scholastic theology no longer seemed so hideously apparent. It was pain to let the other go, but go it did \u2014 though never, perhaps, so completely as I then believed.\n\nBy insignificant details the change revealed itself. I recalled that I was due that very afternoon at a luncheon where \"intellectual\" folk would explain away the soul with a single scientific formula, and where learned heads would wag condescendingly as they murmured \"But there's no evidence to prove that, you know... \".., and Julius rose before me in another light at once \u2014 Pagan, dreamer, monster of exploded superstitions, those very hills where he evoked the sylvan deities, a momentary hallucination...\n\nThen again, quite suddenly, it was the chatterers at the luncheon party who seemed unreal, and all their clever patter about the \"movements\" of the day mere shallow verbiage. The hoardings of the town were blue and yellow with gaudy election posters, but the sky was aflame with the grand old message of the Sun God, written in eternal hieroglyphs of gold and red upon the clouds that brushed the hills. The elemental deities stormed thundering by. And, instead of scholars laying down the letter of their little law, I heard the tones of Concerighe calling across the centuries the names of great belief, of greater beauty.\n\nAnd the older pageantry stole back across the world.\n\nAlmost it was in me to turn and seek... with him,.. that soul-knowledge which ran through all the \"sections.\" ...Yet the younger fear oppressed me. The endless journey, the renunciation and suffering involved, the incessant, tireless striving, with none to help but one's own unconquerable will \u2014 this, and a host of other feelings that lay beyond expression, bore down upon me with their cold, glacier power. I thought of Julius with something of reverence akin to terror... I despised myself. I also understood why the majority need priests and creeds and formulae to help them... The will, divorced from Nature, was so small a thing!\n\nWhen I entered my rooms the sunlight lay upon the carpet, and never before had it seemed so welcome or so comforting. I could then and there have worshipped the great body that sent it forth. But, instead, in a state of exhaustion and weariness, I flung myself upon the bed. Yet, while I slept, it seemed I left that little modern room and entered the region of great, golden days \"when the sun was younger.\" In very different attire, I took my place in the blue-robed circle, a portion of some ancient, gorgeous ceremonial that was nearer to the primitive beauty, when the \"circles swallowed the sun,\" and the elemental Powers were accessible to every heart.\n\nIt was not surprising that I slept till dusk, missing my lectures and the luncheon party as well; but it was distinctly surprising to find myself wakened by a knocking at the door for a telegram that summoned me south forthwith. And only in the train, anxiously counting the minutes in the hope that I might find my father still alive, did the possible significance of LeVallon's final words come back upon my troubled mind: \"Until we meet again.\"\n\nFor little did I guess that my father's death was to prevent my returning to the University, that my career would be changed and hastened owing to an unexpected lack of means, that my occasional letters to Julius were to be returned \"unknown,\" or that my next word of him would be received twenty years later in a room overlooking the Rhine at Bale, where I have attempted to set down these difficult notes of reminiscence..." + }, + { + "title": "The Chalet in the Jura Mountains", + "text": "\u2002\"He (man) first clothes the gods in the image of his own innermost nature; he personifies them as modes of his own greater consciousness. All this was native to him when he still felt himself kin with Nature; when he felt rather than thought, when he followed instinct rather than ratiocination. But for long centuries this feeling of kinship with Nature has been gradually weakened by the powerful play of that form of mind peculiar to man; until he has at last reached a stage when he finds himself largely divorced from Nature, to such an extent indeed that he treats her as something foreign and apart from himself...\n\n\u2002\"He seems at present, at any rate in the persons of most of the accredited thinkers of the West, to be absolutely convinced that no other mode of mind can exist except his own mode... To say that Nature thinks, he regards as an entire misuse of language... That Nature has feelings even, he will not allow; to speak of love and hate among the elements is for him a puerile fancy the cultured mind has long outgrown.\n\n\u2002\"The sole joy of such a mind would almost seem to be the delight of expelling the life from all forms and dissecting their dead bodies.\"\n\n\u2014 \"Some Mystical Adventures\" (G. R. S. Mead).\n\nFor a long time that letter lay on my table like a challenge \u2014 neither accepted nor refused. Something that had slumbered in me for twenty years awoke. The enchantment of my youthful days, long since evaporated as I believed, rose stealthily upon me at the sight of this once familiar handwriting. LeVallon, of course, had found the woman. And my word was pledged.\n\nTo say that I hesitated, however, would be no more true than to say that I debated or considered. The first effect upon me was a full-blown amazement that I could ever have come under the spell of so singular a kind or have promised cooperation in anything so wildly preposterous as Julius had proposed. The second effect, however \u2014 and, as it turned out, the deeper one \u2014 was different. I experienced a longing, a thrill of anticipation, a sense even of joy \u2014 I know not what to call it; while in its train came a hint, though the merest hint, of that vague uneasiness I had known in my school and university days.\n\nYet by some obscure mental process difficult to explain, I found myself half caught already in consent. I answered the letter, asking instructions how to reach him in his distant valley of the Jura Mountains. Some love of adventure \u2014 so I flattered myself \u2014 long denied by my circumscribed conditions of life, prompted the decision in part. For in the heart of me I obviously wished to go; and, briefly, it was the heart of me that finally went.\n\nI passed some days waiting for a reply, LeVallon's abode being apparently inaccessible to the ordinary service of the post \u2014 \"poste restante\" in a village marked only upon the larger maps where, I judged, he had to fetch his letters. And those days worked their due effect upon me; they were filled with questions to which imagination sought the answers. How would the intervening years have dealt with him? What changes would have come upon him with maturity? And this woman \u2014 what melancholy splendours brought from \"old, forgotten, far-off things\" would she bring with her down into the prosaic conditions of this materialistic century? What signs and evidences would there be that she, like himself, was an adept at life, seeking eternal things, discerning what was important, an \"old soul\" taught of the gods and charged with the ideals of another day? I saw her already in imagination \u2014 a woman of striking appearance and unusual qualities. And, how had he found her? A hundred similar questions asked themselves, but, chief among them, two: Would she \u2014 should I, remember?\n\nThe time passed slowly; my excitement grew; sometimes I hesitated, half repented, almost laughed, but never once was tempted really to change my mind. For in the deeper part of me, now so long ignored, something of these ancient passions blew to flame again; symptoms of that original dread increased; there rose once more the whisper \"we are eternally together; the thing is true!\" And on the seventh day, when the porter handed me the letter, it almost seemed that Julius stood beside me, beckoning. I felt his presence; the old magic of his personality tightened up a thousand loosened threads; belief was unwillingly renewed.\n\nThe instructions were very brief, no expression of personal feeling accompanying them. Julius counted on my fidelity. It had never occurred to him that I could fail. I left my heavy luggage in the care of the hotel and packed the few things necessary for the journey. The notes of our school and university days I have just jotted down I sent by post to my London chambers. A spirit of recklessness seemed in me. I was off into fairy-land, mystery and wonder about me, possibly romance. Nothing mattered; work could wait; I possessed a small competency of my own; the routine of my life was dull and uninspiring. Also I was alone in the world, for my early attachment had not resulted in marriage, and I knew no other home than that of chambers, restaurants, and the mountain inns where my holidays were usually spent. I welcomed the change with its promise of adventure \u2014 and I went. This feeling of welcome owned perhaps a deeper origin than I realised.\n\nTravelling via Bienne and Neuchatel to a point beyond the latter town I took thence, according to instructions, a little mountain railway that left the lake behind and plunged straight into the purple valleys of the Jura range. Deep pine woods spread away on all sides as we climbed a winding ravine among the folds of these soft blue mountains that are far older than the Alps. Scarred cliffs and ridges of limestone gleamed white against the velvet forests, now turning red and yellow in the sunset, but no peaks were visible and no bare summits pricked the sky. Thick and soft, the trees clothed all. Their feathery presence filled the air. The clatter of the train seemed muffled, and the gathering shadows below the eastern escarpments took on that rich black hue that ancient forests lend to the very atmosphere above them. We passed into a world where branches, moss and flowers muted every sound with a sense of undisturbable peace. The softness of great age reigned with delicious silence. The very engine puffed uphill on wheels of plush.\n\nOccasional hamlets contributed a few woodcutters by way of passengers; strips of half-cleared valley revealed here and there a farmhouse with dark brown walls and spreading roof; little sentiers slipped through the pine trees to yet further recesses of unfrequented woods; but nowhere did I see a modern building, a country house, nor any dwelling that might be occupied by other than simple peasant folk. Suggestion of tourists there was absolutely none; no trees striped blue and yellow by Improvement Committees; no inns with central-heating and tin banners stating that touring clubs endorsed them; no advertisements at all; only this air of remote and kindly peace, the smoke of peat fires, and the odour of living woods stealing upon the dusk.\n\nThe feeling grew that I crossed a threshold into a region that lay outside the common happenings of the world; life here must be very gentle, wonderful, distinguished, and things might come to pass that would be true yet hard to explain by the standards of the busy cities. Those cities, indeed, seemed very far away, unreal, and certainly unimportant. For the leisurely train itself was almost make-believe, and the station officials mere uniformed automata. The normal world, in a word, began to fade a little. I was aware once more of that bigger region in which Julius LeVallon lived \u2014 the cosmic point of view. The spell of our early days revived, worked on my nerves and thought, altering my outlook sensibly even at this early stage of my return.\n\nThe autumn afternoon was already on the wane when at length I reached C, an untidy little watch-making town, and according to instructions left the train. I searched the empty platform in vain for any sign of Julius. Instead of the tall, familiar figure, a little dark-faced man stood abruptly before me, stared into my face with the questioning eyes of a child or animal, and exclaimed bluntly enough \"Monsieur le professeur?\" We were alone on the deserted platform, the train already swallowed by the forest, no porter, of course, visible, and signs of civilisation generally somewhat scanty.\n\nThis man, sent by Julius, made a curious impression on me as I gave him my bag and prepared to follow him to the cart I saw standing outside the station. His mode of addressing me seemed incongruous. Of peasant type. with black moustaches far too big for his features, and bushy eyebrows reminding me of tree-lichen, there was something in his simplicity of gesture and address that suggested a faithful animal. His voice was not unlike a growl; he was delighted to have found me, but did not accept me yet; he showed his pleasure in his honest smile and in certain quick, jerky movements of the body that made me think how a clever caricaturist could see the dog in him. Yet in his keen and steady eyes there was another look that did not encourage levity; one would not lightly trifle with him. There was something about the alert little fellow that insisted on respect, and a touch of the barbaric counteracted the comedy of the aggressive eyebrows and moustache. In the eyes, unflinching yet respectful, I fancied to detect another thing as well: a nameless expression seen sometimes in the eyes of men who have known uncommon things \u2014 habitual amazement grown slowly to unwilling belief. He was a man, certainly, who would serve his master to the death and ask no questions.\n\nBut also he would not answer questions; I could get nothing out of him, as the springless cart drove slowly up the steep mountain road behind the pair of sturdy horses. Oui and non and peut-etre summed up his conversational powers, till I gave up trying and lapsed into silence. Perhaps he had not \"passed\" me yet, not quite approved me. He was just the sort of faithful, self-contained servant Julius required, no doubt, and, as a conductor into mysterious adventure, a by no means inadequate figure. Name, apparently, he had also none, for Julius, as I learned later, referred to him as simply \"he.\" But my imagination instantly christened him \"The Dog\u2013Man,\" and as such the inscrutable fellow lives in my memory to this day. He seemed just one degree above the animal stage.\n\nBut while thought was busy with a dozen speculations, the dusk had fallen steadily, and the character of the country, I saw, had changed. It was more rugged and inhospitable, the valleys narrower, the forests very deep, with taller and more solemn trees, and no signs anywhere of the axe. An hour ago we had left the main road and turned up a rough, deep-rutted track that only the feet of oxen seemed to have used. We moved in comparative gloom, though far overhead the heights shone still with the gold of sunset. For a long time we had seen no peasant huts, no sign of habitation, nor passed a single human being. Woodcutters and charcoal-burners apparently had not penetrated here, and the track, I gathered, was used in summer only and led to some lonely farm among the upper pastures. It was very silent; no wind stirred the sea of branches; no animal life showed itself; and the only moving things beside ourselves were the jays that now and again flew across the path or announced their invisible presence in the woods by raucous screaming.\n\nAlthough the ceaseless jolting of the cart was severe, the long journey most fatiguing, I was sensible of the deep calm that brooded everywhere. After the bluster of the aggressive Alps, this peaceful Jura stole on the spirit with a subtle charm. Something whispered that I was not alone, but that a friendly touch of welcome pervaded the cool recesses of these wooded hills. The sense of hostile isolation inspired by the snowy peaks, that faint dismay one knows som.etimes at the foot of towering summits, was wholly absent here. I felt myself, not alien to these rolling mountains, but akin. I was known and hospitably admitted, not merely ignored, nor let in at my own grave risk. The spirit of the mountains here was kind.\n\nYet that I was aware of this at all made m.e realise the presence of another thing as well: It was in myself, not in these velvet valleys. For, while the charm of the scenery acted as a sedative, I realised that something alert in me noted the calming influence and welcomed it.\n\nThat did not go to sleep \u2014 it resolutely kept awake. A faint instinct of alarm had been stimulated, if ever so slightly, from the moment I left the train and touched the atmosphere of my silent guide, the \"Dog\u2013Man.\" It was, of course, that he brought his master nearer. Julius and I should presently meet again, shake hands, look into each other's eyes \u2014 I should hear his voice and share again the glamour of his personality. Also there would be \u2014 a third.\n\nIt was an element, obviously, in a process of readjustment of my being which had begun the moment I received his letter; it had increased while I sat in the Bale hotel and jotted down those early recollections \u2014 an ingredient in the new grouping of emotions and sensations constituting myself which received the attack, so to speak, of what came later. My consciousness was slowly changing.\n\nYet this, I think, was all I felt at the moment: a perfectly natural anticipatory excitement, a stirring wonder, and behind them both a hint of shrinking that was \u00a5aint uneasiness. It was the thought of the woman that caused the last, the old premonition that something grave involving the three of us would happen. The potent influences of my youth were already at work again.\n\nMy entrance into the secluded spot Julius had chosen came unexpectedly; we were suddenly upon it; the effect was almost dramatic. The last farmhouse had been left behind an hour or more, and we had been winding painfully up a steep ascent that led through a tunnel of dark, solemn trees, when the forest abruptly stopped, and a little, cup-like valley lay before me, bounded on three sides by jagged limestone ridges. Open to the sky. like some lonely flower, it lay hidden and remote upon this topmost plateau, difficult of access to the world. I saw cleared meadows of emerald green beneath the peeping stars; a stream ran gurgling past my feet; the surface of a little lake held the shadows of the encircling cliffs; and at the further end, beneath the broken outline of the ridges, lights twinkled in a peasant's chalet.\n\nThe effect was certainly of Fairyland. The stillness and cool air, after the closeness of the heavy forest, seemed to bring the stars much nearer. There was a clean, fresh perfume; the atmosphere crystal clear, the calm profound. I felt a little private world about me, self-contained, and impressive with a quiet dignity of its own. Unknown, unspoilt, serene and exquisite, it lay hidden here for some purpose that vulgar intrusion might not discover. If ever an enchanted valley existed, it was here before my eyes.\n\n\"So this is the chosen place \u2014 this isolated spot of beauty!\" My heart leaped to think that Julius stood already within reach of my voice, possibly of my sight as well. No meeting-place, surely, could have been more suitable.\n\nThe cart moved slowly, and the horses, steam rising from their heated bodies against the purple trees, stepped softly upon the meadowland. The sound of hoofs and wheels was left behind, we silently moved up the gentle slope towards the lights. Night stepped with us from the hills; the forest paused and waited at a distance; only the faint creaking of the wheels upon damp grass and the singing of the little stream were audible. The air grew sharp with upland perfumes. We passed the diminutive lake that mirrored the first stars. And a curious feeling reached me from the sky and from the lonely ridges; a nameless emotion caught my heart a moment; some thrill of high, unearthly loveliness, familiar as a dream yet gone again before it could be seized, mirrored itself in the depths of me like those buried stars within the water \u2014 when, suddenly, a figure detached itself from the background of trees and cliffs, and towards me over the dew-drenched grass moved \u2014 Julius LeVallon.\n\nHe came like a figure from the sky, the forest, the distant ridges. The spirit of this marvellous spot came with him. He seemed its incarnation. Whether he first drew me from the cart, or whether I sprang down to meet him, is impossible to say, for in that big moment the thousand threads that bound us together with their separate tensions slipped into a single cable of overwhelming strength. We stood upon the wet meadow, close to one another, hands firmly clasped, eyes gazing into eyes.\n\n\"Julius \u2014 it's really you \u2014 at last!\" I found to say \u2014 then his reply in the old, unchanging voice that made me tremble a little as I heard it: \"I knew you would come \u2014 friend of a million years!\" He laughed a little; I laughed too.\n\n\"I promised.\" It seemed incredible to me that I had ever hesitated.\n\n\"Ages ago,\" I heard his answer. It was like the singing of the stream that murmured past our feet. \"Ages ago.\n\nI was aware that he let go my hand. We were moving through the dripping grass, crossing and recrossing the little stream. The mountains rose dark and strong about us. I heard the cart lumbering away with creaking wheels towards the barn. Across the heavens the stars trailed their golden pattern more and more thickly. I saw them gleaming in the unruffled lake. I smelt the odour of wood-smoke that came from the chalet chimney.\n\nWe walked in silence. Those stars, those changeless hills, deep woods and singing rivulet \u2014 primitive and eternal things \u2014 accompanied us. They were the right witnesses of our meeting. And a night-wind, driving the dusk towards the west, woke in the forest and came out to touch our faces. Splendour and loneliness closed about us, heralding Powers of Nature that were here not yet explained away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 237", + "text": "\"We cannot limit the types, superhuman or subhuman, that may obtain. We can 'set no bounds to the existence or powers of sentient beings' \u2014 a consideration of the highest importance, as well, perhaps, practical as theoretical... The discovery of Superhumans of an exalted kind may be only a question of time, and the attainment of knowledge on this head one of the most important achievements in the history of races that are to come.\" \u2014 \"The Individual and Reality\" (Fawcett).\n\nSomething certainly tightened in my throat as we went across that soaking grass towards the building that was half chalet, half farmhouse, with steep, heavy roof and wide veranda. The lights beckoned to us through the little windows. I saw a shadow slip across the casement window on the upper floor. And my question was cut of its own accord before I could prevent it. My mind held in that moment no other thought at all; my pulses quickened.\n\n\"So, Julius, you have \u2014 found her?\"\n\nAnd he answered as though no interval of years had been; as though still we stood in the dawn upon the steps of the Edinburgh lodging-house. The tone was matter of fact and without emotion:\n\n\"She is with me here \u2014 my wife \u2014 eager to see you at last.\"\n\nThe words dropped down between us like lightning into the earth, and a sense of chill, so faint I hardly recognised it, passed over me. Emotion followed instantly, yet emotion, again, so vague, so odd, so distant in some curious way, that I found no name for it. A shadow as, perhaps, of disappointment fell on my thoughts. Yet, assuredly, I had expected no different statement. He had said the right and natural thing. He had found the woman of his dream and married her. What lurked, I wondered nervously, behind my lame congratulations? Why was I baffled and ashamed? What made my speech come forth with a slight confusion between the thought and its utterance? For \u2014 almost \u2014 I had been about to say another thing, and had stopped myself just in time.\n\n\"And she \u2014 remembers?\" I asked quickly \u2014 pointblank, and bluntly enough \u2014 and felt mortified the same instant by my premature curiosity. Before I could modify my words, or alter them into something less aggressively inquisitive, he turned and faced me, holding my arm to make me look at him. His skin wore the familiar marble pallor as of old; I saw it shine against the dark building where the light from the window caught it.\n\n\"Me?\" he asked quietly, \"or \u2014 you?\"\n\n\"Anything,\" I stammered, \"anything at all of \u2014 of the past, I meant. Forgive me for asking so abruptly; I\u2014\"\n\nThe words froze on my lips at the expression that came into his face. He merely looked at me and smiled. No more than that, so far as accurate description goes, and yet enough to make my heart stop dead as a stone, then start thumping against my ribs as though a paddle-wheel were loose in me. For it was not Julius in that instant who looked at me. His white skin masked another; behind and through his eyes this other stared straight into my own; and this other was familiar to me, yet unknown. The look disappeared again as instantaneously as it came.\n\n\"You shall judge for yourself,\" I heard, as he drew me on towards the house.\n\nHis tone made further pointed questioning impossible, rousing my curiosity higher than ever before. Again I saw the woman in my imagination; I pictured her as a figure half remembered. As the shadow had slid past the casement of the upper floor, so her outline slipped now across a rising screen of memory not entirely obliterated.\n\nThe presentment was even vivid: she would be superb. I saw her of the Greek goddess type, with calm, inscrutable eyes, majestic mien, the suggestion of strange knowledge in her quiet language and uncommon gestures. She would be genuinely distinguished, remarkable in mind as well as in appearance. Already, as we crossed the veranda, the thrill of anticipation caught me. She would be standing in the hall to greet us, or, seated before an open fire of logs, would rise out of the shadows to meet the friend of whom she had doubtless \"heard so much,\" and with whom such strange things were now to be accomplished. The words Julius next actually uttered, accordingly, reached me with a sense of disappointment that was sharp, and the entire picture collapsed like a house of cards. The reaction touched my sense of comedy almost.\n\n\"I think she is still preparing your room,\" he said. \"I had just taken the water up when I heard your cart. We have little help, or need for help. A girl from the farm in the lower valley brings butter sometimes. We do practically everything ourselves.\" I murmured something, courtesy keeping a smile in check; and then he added, \"We chose this solitude on purpose, of course \u2014 she chose it, rather \u2014 and you are the first visitor since we came here months ago. We were only just ready for you; it was good that you were close \u2014 that it was so easy for you to get here.\"\n\n\"I am looking forward immensely to seeing Mrs. LeVallon,\" I replied, but such a queer confusion of times and places had fallen on my mind that my tongue almost said \"to seeing her again.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"She will be with us in the morning,\" hp added quietly, \"if not tonight.\"\n\nThis simple exchange of commonplaces let down the tension of my emotions pleasantly. He turned towards me as he spoke, and for the first time, beneath the hanging oil lamp, I noted the signature of the intervening years. There was a look of power in eyes and mouth that had not been there previously. I was aware of a new distance between us, and a new respect came with it. Julius had \"travelled.\" He seemed to look down upon me from a height. But, at the same time, the picture his brief words conveyed had the effect of restoring me to my normal world again. For nothing more banal could have been imagined, and side by side with the chagrin to my sense of the theatrical ran also a distinct relief. It came as a corrective to the loneliness and grandeur of the setting, and checked the suggestion lying behind the hint that they were \"only just ready\" for my coming.\n\nMy emotions sank comfortably to a less inflated level. I murmured something politely as we passed into the so-called \"sitting-room\" together, and for a moment the atmosphere of my own practical world came in strongly with me. The sense of the incongruous inevitably was touched. The immense fabric of my friend's beliefs seemed in that instant to tremble a little. That the woman he \u2014 we \u2014 had been waiting for through centuries, this \"old soul\" taught of the ancient wisdom and aware of august, forgotten worship, should be \"making a bed upstairs\" woke in me a sense of healthy amusement. Julius took up the water! She was engaged in menial acts! A girl brought butter from a distant farm! And I could have laughed \u2014 but for one other thing that lay behind and within the comedy. For that other thing was \u2014 pathos. There was a kind of yearning pain at the heart of it: a pain whose origins were too remote to be discoverable by the normal part of me.\n\nIt touched the poetry in me, too. For after the first disturbing eif ect \u2014 that it was not adequate \u2014 I felt slowly another thing: that this commonplace meeting was far more likely to be true than the dramatic sort I had anticipated. It was natural, it was simple; all big adventures of the soul begin in a quiet way. Obviously, as yet, the two selves in me were not yet comfortably readjusted.\n\nI became aware, too, that Julius was what I can only call somewhere less human than before \u2014 more impersonal. He talked, he acted, he even looked as a figure might outside our world. I had no longer insight into his being as before. His life lay elsewhere, expresses it best perhaps. I can hardly present him as a man of flesh and blood. Emotion broke through so rarely.\n\nAnd our talk that evening together \u2014 for Mrs. Le\u2013Vallon put in no appearance \u2014 was ordinary, too. Julius, of course, as ever, used phrases that belonged to the world peculiarly his own, but he said nothing startling in the sense I had expected. No dramatic announcement came. He took things for granted in the way he always did, assuming my beliefs and theories were his own, and that my scepticism was merely due to the \"mind\" in me today. We had some supper together, a bowl of bread and milk the man brought in, and we talked of the intervening years as naturally as might be \u2014 but for this phraseology he favoured. When the man said \"good night,\" Julius smiled kindly at him, and the' fellow made a gesture of delight as though the attention meant far more to him than money. He reminded me again irresistibly, yet in no sense comically, of a faithful and devoted animal. Julius had patted him! It was delightful. An inarticulateness, as of the animal world, belonged to him. His rare words came out with effort, almost with difficulty. He looked his master straight in the eye, listened to orders with a personal interest mere servants never have, and, without a trace of servility in face or manner, hurried off gladly to fulfil them. The distress in the eyes alone still puzzled me.\n\n\"You have a treasure there,\" I said. \"He seems devoted to you.\"\n\n\"A young soul,\" he said, \"in a human body for the first time, still with the innocence and simplicity of the recent animal stage about his awakening self \u2014 consciousness. It is unmistakable...\"\n\n\"What sleeps in the vegetable, dreams in the animal, wakes in the man,\" I said, remembering Leibnitz. \"I'm glad we've left the earlier stages behind us.\" His explanation interested me. \"But that expression in his eyes,\" I asked, \"that look of searching, almost of anxiety?\"\n\nJulius replied thoughtfully. \"My atmosphere acts upon him as a kind of forcing-house, perhaps. He is dimly aware of knowledge that lies, at present, too far beyond him \u2014 and yet he reaches out for it. Instinctive, but not yet intuitional. The privilege brings terror. Opportunities of growth so swift and concentrated involve bewilderment, even pain.\"\n\n\"Pain?\" I queried, interested as of old.\n\n\"Development is nothing but a series of little deaths. The soul passes so quickly to new stages.\" He looked up searchingly into my face. \"We knew that privilege once,\" he added significantly; \"we, too, knew special teaching.\"\n\nAnd, though at the moment I purposely ignored this reference to our \"Temple Days,\" I understood that this man's neighbourhood might, indeed, have an unusual and stimulating effect upon a simple, ignorant type of mind. Even in my own case his presence gave me furiously to think. The \"Dog\u2013Man,\" the more I observed him, was little more than a faithful creature standing on his hind legs with considerable surprise and enjoyment that he was able to do so \u2014 that \"little more\" being quite possibly self-consciousness. He showed his teeth when I met him at the station, whereas, now that I was accepted by his master, his approval was unlimited. He gave willing service in the form of love.\n\nWhile Julius continued speaking, as though nothing else existed at the moment, I observed him carefully. My eyes assessed the changes in the outward \"expression\" of himself. He was thinner, slighter than before; there was an increased balance and assurance in his manner; a poise not present in our earlier days; but to say that he looked older seemed almost a misuse of language. Though the eyes were stronger, steadier, the lines in the skin more deeply cut, the outline of the features chiselled with more decision, these, even in combination, added no signature of age to the general expression of high beauty that was his. The years had not coarsened, but etherealised the face. Two other things, moreover, impressed me: the texture of skin and flesh had refined away, so that the inner light of his enthusiasm shone through; and \u2014 there was a marked increase in what I must term the \"feel\" of his immediate atmosphere or presence. Always electric and alive, it now seemed doubly charged. Against that dark inner screen where the mind visualises pictorially, he rose in terms of radiant strength. Immense potency lay suppressed in him; Powers \u2014 spiritual or Nature Powers \u2014 were in attendance. He had acquired a momentum that was in some sense both natural and super-human. It was not unlike the sense of power that great natural scenes evoke in those who are receptive \u2014 mountains, landscapes, forests. It was elemental. I felt him immense, at the head of an invisible procession, as it were, a procession from the sky, the heights, the woods, the stars.\n\nAnd a touch of eeriness stole over me. I was aware of strange vitality in this lonely valley; and I was aware of it \u2014 through him. I stood, as yet, upon the outer fringe. Its remoteness from the modern world was not a remoteness of space alone, but of \u2014 condition.\n\nThere was, however, another thing impossible to ignore \u2014 that somewhere in this building there moved a figure already for me mysterious and half legendary. Upstairs, not many feet away from us, her step occasionally audible by the creaking of the boards, she moved, breathing, thinking, listening, hearing our voices, almost within touching distance of our hands. There was a hint of the fabulous in it somewhere.\n\nAnd, realising her near presence, I felt a curious emotion rising through me as from a secret spring. Its character, veiled by interest and natural anticipation, remained without a name. I could not describe it to myself even. Each time the thought of meeting her, that she was close, each time the sound of her soft footfall overhead was audible, this emotion rose in me pleasurably, yet with dread behind it somewhere lurking. I caught it stirring; the stream of it went out to this woman I had never seen with the certain aim of intuitive direction; I surprised it in the act. But always something blocked it, hiding its name away. It escaped analysis. And, never more than instantaneous, passing the very moment it was born, it seemed to me that the opposing force that blocked it thus had to do with the man who was my host and my companion. It emanated from him \u2014 this objecting force. Julius checked it; though not with deliberate consciousness \u2014 he prevented my discovery of its nature. There was uncommon and mysterious sweetness in it, a sweetness as of long mislaid romance that lifted the heart. Yet it returned each time upon me, blank and unrewarded.\n\nIt was noticeable, moreover, that our talk avoided the main object of my presence here. LeVallon talked freely of other things, of the \"Dog\u2013Man,\" of myself \u2014 I gave him a quick sketch of my life in the long interval \u2014 of anything and everything but the purpose of my coming. There was, doubtless, awkwardness on my side, since my instinct was not to take my visit heavily, but to regard the fulfilment of my old-time pledge as an adventure, even a fantasy, rather than the serious acceptance of a grave \"experiment.\" His reluctance, yet, was noticeable. He told me little or nothing of himself by way of exchange.\n\n\"Tomorrow, when you are thoroughly rested from your journey,\" he met my least approach to the matter that occupied our deepest thoughts; or \u2014 \"later, when you've had a little time to get acclimatised. You must let this place soak into you. Rest and sleep and take things easy; there is no hurry \u2014 here.\" Until I realised that he wished to establish a natural sympathy between my being and the enchanted valley, to avoid anything in the nature of surprise or shock which might disturb a desired harmony, and that, in fact, the absence of his wife and his silence about himself were both probably intentional. Conditions were to flow in upon me of their own accord and naturally, thus reducing possible hostility to a minimum. Before we rose to go to bed an hour later this had become a conviction in me. It was all thought out beforehand.\n\nWe stood a moment on the veranda to taste the keen, sweet air and see the dark mountains blocked against the stars. The sound of running water was all we heard. No lights, of course, showed anywhere. The meadows, beneath thin, frosty mist, lay very still. But the valley somehow rushed at me; it seemed so charged to the brim with stimulating activity and life. Something felt on the move in it. I stood in the presence of a crowd, waiting to combine with energies latent in it. I was aware of the idea of cooperation almost.\n\n\"One of the rare places,\" he said significantly when I remarked upon it cautiously, \"where all is clean and open still. Humanity has been here, but humanity of the helpful kind. We went to infinite trouble to find it.\"\n\nIt was the first time he had come so near to the actual subject. I was aware he watched me, although his eyes were turned towards the darkness of the encircling forest.\n\n\"And \u2014 your wife likes it too?\" For though I remembered that she had \"chosen it,\" its loneliness must surely have dismayed an ordinary woman.\n\nStill with his eyes turned out across the valley, he replied, \"She chose it. Yes\" \u2014 he hesitated slightly \u2014\n\n\"she likes it, though not always \" He broke off abruptly, still without looking at me, then added, as he came a little nearer, \"But we both agree \u2014 we know it is the right place for us.\" That \"us,\" I felt certain, included myself as well.\n\nI did not press for explanation at the moment. I touched upon another thing.\n\n\"Humanity, you say, has been here! I should have thought some virgin corner of the earth would have suited your \u2014 purpose \u2014 better?\" Then, as he did not answer for a moment, I added: \"This is surely an ordinary peasant's house that you've made comfortable?\"\n\nHe looked at me. A breath of wind went past us. I had the ghostly feeling someone had been listening; and a faint shiver ran across my nerves.\n\n\"A peasant's, yes, but not\" \u2014 and he smiled \u2014 \"an ordinary peasant. We found here an old man with his sons; they, or their forbears, had lived in isolation for generations in this valley; they were 'superstitious' in the sense of knowing Nature and understanding her. They believed, though in an imperfect and degraded form, what was once a living truth. They sold out to me quite willingly and are now established in the plains below. In this loneliness, away from modem 'knowledge,' they loved what surrounded them, and in that sense their love was worship. They felt-with the forests, with streams and mountains, with clouds and sky, with dawn and sunset, with the darkness too.\" He looked about him as he said it, and my eyes followed the direction of his own across the night. Again the valley stirred and moved throughout its whole expanse. \"They also,\" Julius continued in a lower tone, his face closer than before, \"felt-with the lightning and the wind.\"\n\nI could have sworn some subtle change went through the surrounding darkness as he said the words. Fire and wind sprang at me, so vivid was their entrance into my thought. Again that slight shudder ran tingling up my spine.\n\n\"The place,\" he continued, \"is therefore already prepared to some extent, for the channels that we need are partly open. The veil is here unthickened. We can work with less resistance.\"\n\n\"There is certainly peace,\" I agreed, \"and an uplifting sense of beauty.\"\n\n\"You feel it?\" he asked quickly.\n\n\"I feel extraordinarily and delightfully alive,\" I admitted truthfully.\n\nWhereupon he turned to me with a still more significant rejoinder:\n\n\"Because that which worship and consecration-ceremonies ought to accomplish for churches \u2014 are meant to accomplish, rather \u2014 has never been here undone. All places were holy ground until men closed the channels with their unbelief and thus defiled them by cutting them off from the life about them.\"\n\nI heard a window softly closing above us; we turned and went indoors. Julius put the lamps out one by one, taking a candle to show me up the stairs. We went along the wooden passage. We passed several doors, beneath one of which I saw a line of light. My own room was at the further end, simply, almost barely, furnished, with just the actual necessaries. He paused at the threshold, shook my hand, said a short \"good night,\" and left me, closing the door behind him carefully. I heard his step go softly down the passage. A door in the distance also opened and closed. Then complete silence hushed the entire house about me, yet a silence that was listening and alive. No ancient, turreted castle, with ivied walls and dungeons, with forsaken banqueting-hall or ghostly corridors, could possibly have felt more haunted than this peasant's chalet in the Jura fastnesses.\n\nFor a considerable time I sat at my open window, thinking; and yet not thinking so much, perhaps, as \u2014 relaxing. I was aware that my mind had been at high tension the entire day, almost on guard \u2014 as though seeking unconsciously to protect itself. Ever since the morning I had been on the alert against quasi-attack, and only now did I throw down my arms and abandon myself without reserve. Something I had been afraid of had shown itself friendly after all. A feeling of security stole over me; I was safe; gigantic powers were round me, oddly close, yet friendly, provided I, too, was friendly. It was a singular feeling of being helpless, yet cared for. The valley took hold of me and all my little human forces. To set myself against it would be somehow dangerous, but to go with it, adopting its over-mastering stride, was safety. This became suddenly clear to me \u2014 that I must be sympathetic and that hostility on my part might involve disaster.\n\nHere, apparently, was the first symptom of that power which Julius declared was derived from \"feeling-with.\" I began to understand another thing as well; I recalled his choice of words \u2014 that the veil hereabouts was \"unthickened\" and the channels \"open.\" He did not say the veil was thin, the channels cleared. It was in its native, primitive condition.\n\nI sat by the window, letting the valley pour through and over me. It flooded my being with its calm and beauty. The stars were very bright above the ridges; small clouds passed westwards; the water sang and tinkled; the cup-like hollow had its secrets, but it told them. I had never known night so wonderfully articulate. Power brooded here. I felt my blood quicken with the sense of kinship.\n\nAnd the little room with its unvarnished pine-boards that held a certain forest perfume, was comforting too; the odour of peat fires still clung to the darkened rafters overhead; the candle, in its saucer-like receptacle of wood, gave just the simple, old-fashioned light that was appropriate. Bodily fatigue made bed exceedingly welcome, though it was long before I fell asleep. Figures, at first, stole softly in across the night and peered at me \u2014 Julius, pale and rapt, remote from the modern world; the silent \"Dog\u2013Man,\" with those eyes of questioning wonder and half-disguised distress. And another ghostly figure stole in too, though without a face I could decipher; a woman whom the long, faultless balance of the ages delivered, with the rest of us, into the keeping of this lonely spot for some deep purpose of our climbing souls. Their outlines hovered, mingled with the shadows, and withdrew.\n\nAnd a certain change in myself, though perhaps not definitely noted at the time, was apparent too \u2014 I found in my heart a singular readiness to believe. While sleep crept nearer, and reason dropped a lid, there assuredly was in me, as part of something accepted naturally, the likelihood that LeVallon's attitude was an aspect of forgotten truth. Veiled in Nature's operations, perchance directing them, and particularly in spots of loneliness such as this, dwelt those mighty elemental Potencies he held were accessible to humanity. A phrase from some earlier reading floated back to me, as though deliberately supplied \u2014 not that Nature \"works towards what are called 'ends,' but that it was possible or rather probable, that 'ends' which implied conscious superhuman activities, are being realised.\" The sentence, for some reason, had remained in my memory. When life was simpler, closer to Nature, some such doctrine may have been objectively verifiable, and worship, in the sense that Julius used the word, might well promise to restore the grandeur of forgotten beliefs which should make men as the gods...\n\nWith the delightful feeling that in this untainted valley, the woods, the mountains, the very winds and stormy lightnings, were yet but the physical vehicle of powers that expressed intelligence and true being, I passed from dozing into sleep, the cool outside air touching my eyelids with the beauty of the starry Jura night. An older, earlier type of consciousness \u2014 though I did not phrase it to myself thus \u2014 was asserting itself and taking charge of me. The spell was on my heart.\n\nYet the human touch came last of all, following me into the complicated paths of slumber, and haunting me as with half-recovered memories of far-off, enchanted days. Uncommon visions met my descending or ascending consciousness, so that while brain and body slept, some deeper part of me went travelling swiftly backwards. I knew the old familiar feeling that the whole of me did not sleep... and, though remembering nothing definite, my first thought on awakening was the same as my final thought on falling into slumber: What manner of marvellous woman would she prove to be?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 238", + "text": "\u2003\"Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth.\n\n\u2003Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea;\n\n\u2003Thy face remembered is from other worlds.\n\n\u2003It has been died for, though I know not when.\n\n\u2003It has been sung of, though I know not where.\n\n\u2003It has the strangeness of the luring West,\n\n\u2003And of sad sea-horizons; beside thee\n\n\u2003I am aware of other times and lands,\n\n\u2003Of birth far back, of lives in many stars.\"\n\n\u2014 \"Marpessa\" (Stephen Phillips).\n\nDuring sleep, however, the heavier emotions had sunk to the bottom, the lighter had risen to the top. I woke with a feeling of vigour, and with the sense called \"common\" distinctly in the ascendant. Through the open window came sunshine in a flood, the crisp air sparkled. I could taste it from my bed. Youth ran in my veins and ten years seemed to drop from my back as I sprang up and thrust my face into the radiant morning. Drawing a deep draught into my lungs, I must at the same time have unconsciously exclaimed, for the peasant girl gathering vegetables below \u2014 the garden, such as it was, merged into the pastures \u2014 looked up startled. She had been singing to herself. I withdrew my pyjamaed figure hurriedly, while she, as hurriedly, let drop the skirts the dew had made her lift so high; and when I peeped a moment later, she had gone. I, too, felt inclined to sing with happiness, so invigorating was the clear brilliance of the opening day. A joyful irresponsibility, as of boyhood, coursed in my tingling blood. Everything in this enchanted valley seemed young and vigorous; the stream ran gaily past the shining trees; the meadows glistened; the very mountains wore a lustre as of life that ran within their solid frames.\n\nIt was impossible to harbour the slightest thought of dread before such peace and beauty; all ominous forebodings fled away; this joy and strength of Nature brought in life. Even the \"Dog\u2013Man\" smiled with eyes unclouded when, a little later, he brought a small pail of boiling water, and informed me that there was a pool in the forest close at hand where I could bathe. He nosed about the room \u2014 only thus can I describe his friendly curiosity for my welfare \u2014 fussed awkwardly with my boots and clothes, looked frankly into my eyes with an expression that said plainly \"How are you this morning? I'm splendid!\" grunted, sniffed, almost wagged his tail for pleasure \u2014 and trotted out. And he went, I declare, as though he had heard a rabbit and must be after it. The laughter in me was only just suppressed, for I could have sworn that he expected me to pat him, with the remark \"Good fellow! Sick 'em, then!\" or words to that effect.\n\nThe secluded valley, walled-in from the blustering world like some wild, primitive garden, was drenched in sunshine by the time I went downstairs; the limestone cliffs a mile away of quite dazzling brilliance; and the pine woods across the meadowland scented the whole interior of the little chalet. But for stray wisps of autumn mist that still clung along the borders of the stream, it might have been a day in June the mountains still held prisoner. My heart leaped with the beauty. This lonely region of woods and mountain tops suggested the presence of some Nature Deity that presided over it, and as I stood a moment on the veranda, I turned at a sound of footsteps to see the figure of my imagination face to face. \"If she is of equal splendour!\" flashed instantly through my mind. For Julius wore the glory of the morning in his eyes, the neck was bare and the shirt a little open; standing there erect in his mountain clothes, he was as like the proverbial Greek god as any painter could have possibly desired.\n\n\"Whether I slept well?\" I answered his inquiry. \"Why, Julius, I feel positively like a boy again. This place has worked magic on me while I slept. There's the idea in me that one must live for ever.\"\n\nAnd, even while I said it, my eyes glanced over his shoulder into the hall for a sight of someone who any moment might appear. Excitement was high in me.\n\nJulius quietly held my hand in his own firm grasp a second.\n\n\"Life came to you in sleep,\" he said. \"I told you \u2014 I warned you, the channels here were open and easily accessible. All power \u2014 all powers \u2014 everywhere are natural. Our object is to hold them, isn't it?\"\n\n\"You mean control them?\" I said, still watching the door behind him.\n\n\"They visit the least among us; they touch us, and are gone. The essential is to harness them \u2014 in this case before they harness us \u2014 again.\"\n\nI made no reply. The other excitement was too urgent in me.\n\nLinking his arm in mine, he led me towards a corner of the main room, half hall, half kitchen, where a white tablecloth promised breakfast. The \"man\" was already busying himself to and fro with plates and a gleaming metal pot that steamed. I smelt coffee and the fragrance of baked bread. But I listened half-heartedly to my host's curious words because every minute I expected the door to open. There was a nervousness in me what I should find to say to such a woman when she came.\n\nWas there, as well, among my bolder feelings, a faint suspicion of something else \u2014 something so slight and vague it hardly left a trace, while yet I was aware that it had been there? I could not honestly say. I only knew that, again, there stirred about my heart unconsciously a delicate spiderweb of resentment, envy, disapproval \u2014 call it what one may, since it was too slight to own a definite name \u2014 that seemed to wake some ghost of injustice, of a grievance almost, in the hidden depths of me. It passed, unexplained, untraceable. Perhaps I smothered it, perhaps I left it unacknowledged. I know not. So elusive an emotion I could not retain a second, far less label. \"Julius has found her; she is his,\" was the clear thought that followed it. No more than that. And yet \u2014 like the shadow of a leaf, it floated down upon me, darkening, though almost imperceptibly, some unknown corner of my heart.\n\nAnd, remembering my manners, I asked after her indisposition, while he laughed and insisted upon our beginning breakfast; she would presently join us; I should see her for myself. He looked so happy that I yielded to the momentary temptation.\n\n\"Julius,\" I said, by way of compliment and somewhat late congratulation, \"she must be wonderful. I'm so \u2014 so very pleased \u2014 for you.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, as he poured coffee and boiling milk into my wooden bowl, \"and we have waited long. But the opportunity has come at last, and this time we shall not let it slip.\"\n\nThe simple words were not at all the answer I expected. There was a mingling of relief and anxiety in his voice; I remembered that she \"did not always like it here,\" and I wondered again what my \"understanding\" was to be that he had promised would \"come later.\" What determined her change of mood? Why did she sometimes like it, and sometimes not like it? Was it loneliness, or was it due to things that \u2014 happened? Any moment now she would be in the room, holding my hand, looking into my eyes, expecting from me words of greeting, speaking to me. I should hear her voice. Twice I turned quickly at the sound of an opening door, only to find myself face to face with the \"man\"; but at length came a sound that was indisputably the rustle of skirts, and, with a quickening of the heart, I pushed my plate away, and rose from my chair, turning half way to greet her.\n\nDisappointment met me again, however, for this time it was merely the peasant girl I had seen from my window; and once more I sat down abruptly, covering my confusion with a laugh and feeling like a schoolboy surprised in a foolish mistake. And then a movement from Julius opposite startled me. He had risen from his seat. There was a new expression on his face, an extraordinary expression \u2014 observation the most alert imaginable, anxiety, question, the tension of various deep emotions oddly mingled. He watched me keenly. He watched us both.\n\n\"My wife,\" he said quietly, as the figure advanced towards us. Then, turning to her: \"And this is my friend, Professor Mason.\" He indicated myself.\n\nI rose abruptly, startled and dismayed, nearly upsetting the chair behind me in my clumsiness. The \"Professor Mason\" sounded ludicrous, almost as ludicrous as the \"Mrs. LeVallon\" he had not uttered. I stared. She stared. There was a moment of blank silence. Disappointment petrified me. There was no distinction, there was no beauty. She was tall and slim, and the face, of a commonplace order, was slightly pockmarked. I forgot all manners.\n\nShe was the first to recover. We both laughed. But if there was nervousness of confused emotion in my laugh, there was in hers a happy pleasure, frankly and naturally expressed.\n\n\"How do you do, sir \u2014 Professor?\" she instantly corrected herself, shaking me vigorously, yet almost timidly, by the hand. It was a provincial and untutored voice.\n\n\"I'm \u2014 delighted to see you,\" my lips stammered, stopping dead before the modern title. The control of my breath was not quite easy for a moment.\n\nWe sat down. In her words \u2014 or was it in her manner, rather? \u2014 there was a hint of undue familiarity that tinged my disappointment with a flash of disapproval too, yet caught up immediately by a kind of natural dignity that denied offence, or at any rate, corrected it. Another impression then stole over me. I was aware of charm. The voice, however, unquestionably betrayed accent. Of the \"lady,\" in the restricted, ordinary meaning of the word, there was no pretence. A singular revulsion made me tremble. For a moment she had held my hand with deliberate pressure, while her eyes remained fixed upon my face with a direct, a searching intentness. She too, like her husband, watched me. If she formed a swift, intuitive judgment regarding myself, nothing at first betrayed it. I was aware, however, at once, that, behind the decision of her natural frankness, something elusive hovered. The effect was highly contradictory, even captivating, certainly provocative of curiosity. Accompanying her laughter was a delicate, swift flush, and the laugh, though loud in some other sense than of sound alone, was not unmusical. A breath of glamour, seductive as it was fleeting, caught me as I heard.\n\nFor a moment or two my senses certainly reeled. It seemed that swift shutters rose and fell before my eyes. One screen rolled up, another dropped, vistas opened, vanishing before their depths showed anything. The chalet, with our immediate surroundings, faded; I was aware of ourselves only, chiefly, however, of her. This first sight of her had the effect that years before Julius had produced: the peculiar sense of \"other places.\" And this in spite of myself, without any decided belief of my own as yet to help it...\n\nThe confusion of my senses passed then, and consciousness focused clearly once more on my surroundings. The disturbed emotions, however, refused wholly to quiet down. Her face, I noted, beneath the disfiguring marks, was rosy, and the grey-green eyes were very bright. They were luminous, changing eyes, their hue altering of its own accord apart from mere play or angle of the light. Sometimes their grey merged wholly Into green, but a very wonderful deep green that made them like the sea; later, again, they were distinctly blue. They lit the entire face, its expression changing when they changed. The frank and open innocence of the child in them was countered, though not injuriously, by an un fathomed depth that had its effect upon the whole physiognomy. An arresting power shone in them as if imperiously. There were two faces there.\n\nAnd the singular and fascinating effect of these dominating eyes left further judgment at first disabled. I noticed, however, that her mouth had that generous width that makes for strength rather than for beauty; that the teeth were fine and regular; and that the brown hair, tinged with bronze, was untidy about the neck and ears. A narrow band of black velvet encircled the throat; she wore a blouse, short skirt, and high brown boots with nails that clattered on the stone flooring when she moved. Since gathering vegetables in the dawn she had changed her costume, evidently. A certain lightness, I saw now, had nothing of irresponsibility in it, but was merely youth, vitality, and physical vigor. She was fifteen years younger than Julius, if a day, and I judged her age no more than twenty-five perhaps.\n\n\"It's a pore house to have your friends to,\" she said in her breezy, uncultivated voice, \"but I hope you managed all right with your room \u2014 Professor?\" It was the foundation of the voice that had the uncultivated sound; on the top of it, like a layer of something imitated or acquired, there was refinement. I got the impression that, unconsciously, she aped the better manner of speech, yet was not aware she did so.\n\nBurning questions rose within me as I listened to this opening conversation: How much she knew, and believed, of her husband's vast conceptions; what explanation of my visit he had offered her, what explanation of myself; chief of all, how much \u2014 if anything \u2014 she remembered? For our coming together in this hidden Jura valley under conditions that seemed one minute ludicrous, and the next sublime, was the alleged meeting of three Souls who had not recognised each other through bodily, human eyes for countless centuries. And our purpose, if not madness, held a solemnity that might well belong to a forgotten method of approaching deity.\n\n\"He's told me such a lot about you, Julius has,\" she continued half shyly, jerking her thumb in the direction of her husband, \"that I wanted to see what you were like.\" It was said naturally, as by a child; yet the freedom might equally have been assumed to conceal an admitted ignorance of manners. \"You're such \u2014 very old friends, aren't you?\" She seemed to look me up and down. I thought I detected disappointment in her too.\n\n\"We were together at school and university, you see,\" I made reply, shirking the title again, \"but it's a good many years now since we met. We've been out of touch for a long time. I hadn't even heard of his marriage. My congratulations are late, but most sincere.\"\n\nI bowed. Strange! Both in word and gesture some faintest hint of sarcasm or resentment forced itself against my conscious will. The blood rose \u2014 I hoped unnoticed \u2014 to my cheeks. My eyes dropped quickly from her face.\n\n\"That's reely nice of you,\" she said simply, and without a touch of embarrassment anywhere. She cut a lump of bread from the enormous loaf in front of us and broke it in little pieces into her bowl of milk. Her spoon remained standing in her coffee cup. It seemed impossible for me to be unaware of any detail that concerned her, either of gesture or pronunciation. I noticed every tiniest detail whether I would or no. Her charm, I decided, increased. It was wholly independent of her looks. It took me now and again by surprise, as it were.\n\n\"Maybe \u2014 I suppose he didn't know where you were,\" she added, as Julius volunteered no word. \"But he was shore you'd come if you got the letter.\"\n\n\"It was a promise,\" her husband put in quietly. Evidently he wished us to make acquaintance in our own way. He left us alone with purpose, content to watch and show his satisfaction. The relationship between them seemed natural and happy, utterly devoid of the least sign of friction. She certainly \u2014 had I perhaps, anticipated otherwise? \u2014 showed no fear of him.\n\nThe \"man\" came in with a plate of butter, clattering out noisily again in his heavy boots. He gave us each a look in turn, of anxiety first, and then of pleasure. All was well with us, he felt. His eyes, however, lingered longest on his mistress,.as though she needed his protective care more than we did. It was the attitude and expression of a faithful dog who knows he has the responsibility of a child upon his shoulders, and is both proud and puzzled by the weight of honour.\n\nA pause followed, during which I made more successful efforts to subdue the agitation that was in me. I broke the silence by a commonplace, expressing a hope that my late arrival the night before had not disturbed her.\n\n\"Lord, no!\" she exclaimed, laughing gaily, while she glanced from me to Julius. \"Only I thought you and he'd like to be alone for a bit after such a long time apart... Besides, I didn't fancy my food somehow \u2014 I get that way up here sometimes,\" she added, \"don't I, Julius?\"\n\n\"You've been here some time already?\" I asked sympathetically, before he could reply.\n\n\"Ever since the wedding,\" she answered frankly. \"Seven \u2014 getting on for eight \u2014 months ago, it is now \u2014 we came up straight from the Registry Office. At times it's a bit funny, an' no mistake \u2014 lonely, I mean,\" she quickly corrected herself. And she looked at her husband again with a kind of childish mischief in her expression that I thought most becoming.\n\n\"It's not for ever, is it?\" he laughed with her.\n\n\"And I understand you chose it, didn't you?\" I fell in with her mood. \"It must be lonely, of course, sometimes,\" I added.\n\n\"Yes, we chose it,\" she replied. \"We choose everything together.\" And they looked proudly at each other like two children. For a moment it flashed across me to challenge him playfully, yet not altogether playfully, for burying a young wife in such a deserted place. I did not yield to the temptation, however, and Mrs. LeVallon continued breezily in her off-hand manner:\n\n\"Julius wanted you badly, I know. You must stay here now we've got you. There's reelly lots to do, once you get used to it; only it seems strange at first after city life \u2014 like what I've had, and sometimes\" \u2014 she hesitated a second \u2014 \"well, of an evening, or when it gets stormy \u2014 the thunder-storms are something awful \u2014 you feel wild and want to do things, to rush about and take your clothes off.\" She stopped; and the deep green of the sea came up into her eyes. Again, for an instant, I caught two faces in her. \"It turns you wild here when the wind gets to blowing,\" she added, laughing, \"and the lightning's like loose, flying fire.\" The way she said it made me forget the physical disabilities. There was even a hint of fascination somewhere in the voice.\n\n\"It takes you back to the natural, primitive state,\" I said. \"I can well believe it.\" And no amount of restraint could keep the admiration out of my eyes. \"Civilisation is easily forgotten in a place like this.\"\n\n\"Oh, is that it?\" she said shortly, while we laughed, all three together. \"Civilisation \u2014 eh?\"\n\nI got the impression that she felt left out of something, something she knew was going on, but that didn't include her quite. Her intuition, I judged, was very keen. Beneath this ordinary conversation she was aware of many things. She was fully conscious of a certain subdued excitement in the three of us, and that between her husband and her guest there was a constant inter-play of half-discovered meaning, half-revealed emotion. She was reading me too. Yet all without deliberation; it was intuitive, the mind took no conscious part in it. And, when she spoke of the effect of the valley upon her, I saw her suddenly a little different, too \u2014 wild and free, untamed in a sense, and close to the elemental side of life. Her enthusiasm for big weather betrayed it. During the whole of breakfast, indeed, we all were \"finding\" one another, Julius in particular making notes. For him, of course, there was absorbing interest in this meeting of three souls whom Fate had kept so long apart \u2014 the signs of recognition he detected or imagined, the sympathy, the intimacy betrayed by the way things were taken for granted between us. He said no word, however. He was very quiet.\n\nMy own feelings, meanwhile, seemed tossed together in too great and violent confusion for immediate disentanglement. My sense of the dramatic fitness of things was worse than unsatisfied \u2014 it was shattered. Julius unquestionably had married a superior domestic servant.\n\n\"Is the bread to your liking. Professor?\"\n\n\"I think it's quite delicious, Mrs. LeVallon. It tempts me even to excess,\" I added, facetious in my nervousness. I had used her name at last, but with an effort.\n\n\"I made it,\" she said proudly. \"Mother taught me that before I was fifteen.\"\n\n\"And the butter, too?\" I asked.\n\n\"No,\" she laughed, with a touch of playful disappointment. \"We get that from a farm five miles down the valley. It's in special honour of your arrival, this.\"\n\n\"Our nearest contact with the outside world,\" added Julius, \"and over a thousand feet below us. We're on a little plateau here all by ourselves\"\n\n\"Put away like,\" she interrupted gaily, \"as though we'd been naughty,\" and then she added, \"or for something special and very mysterious.\" She looked into his face half archly, half inquisitively, as if aware of something she divined yet could not understand. Her honesty and sincerity made every little thing she said seem dignified. I was again aware of pathos.\n\n\"The peace and quiet,\" I put in quickly, conscious of something within me that watched and listened intently, \"must be delightful \u2014 after the cities \u2014 and with the great storms you mention to break the possible monotony.\"\n\nShe looked at me a full moment steadily, and in her eyes, no longer green but sky-blue, I read the approach of that strange expression I called another \"face,\" that in the end, however, did not fully come. But the characteristic struck me, for Julius had it too.\n\n\"O, you find out all about yourself in a place like this,\" she said slowly, \"a whole lot of things you didn't know before. You'll like it; but it's not for everybody. It's very elite.\" She turned to Julius. \"The Professor'll love it, won't he? And we must keep him,\" she repeated, \"now we've got him.\"\n\nSomething moved between the three of us as she said it. There was no inclination in me to smile, even at the absurd choice of a word. An upheaving sense of challenge came across the air at me, including not only ourselves at the breakfast table, but the entire valley as well. Against some subterranean door in me rose sudden pressure, and the woman's commonplace words had in them something incalculable that caused the door to yield. Out rushed a pouring, bursting flood. A wild delight of beauty ran suddenly in my civilised veins; I felt uplifted, stimulated, carried off my feet.\n\nIt was but the flash and touch of a passing mood, of course, yet it marked a change in me, another change.\n\nShe was aware of elemental powers even as her husband was. First through him, but now through her, I, too, was becoming similarly \u2014 aware.\n\nI glanced at Julius, calmly devouring bread and milk beyond all reach of comedy \u2014 Julius who recognised an \"old soul\" in a servant girl with the same conviction that he invoked the deific Powers of a conscious Nature; to whom nothing was trivial, nothing final, the future magnificent as the past, and behind whose chair stood the Immensities whispering messages of his tireless evolutionary scheme. And I saw him \"unclassable\" \u2014 merely an eternal, travelling soul, working out with myself and with this other \"soul\" some detail long neglected by the three of us. Marriage, class, social status, education, culture \u2014 what were they but temporary external details, whose sole value lay in their providing conditions for acquiring certain definite experiences? Life's outer incidents were but episodic, after all.\n\nAnd this flash of insight into his point of view came upon me thus suddenly through her. The mutual sympathy and understanding between the three of us that he so keenly watched for had advanced rapidly. Another stage was reached. The foundations seemed already established here among us.\n\nThus, while surprise, resentment and distress fought their battle within me against something that lay midway between disbelief and acceptance, my mind was aware of a disharmony that made judgment extremely difficult. Almost I knew the curious feeling that one of us had been fooled. It was all so incongruous and disproportioned, on the edge of the inconceivable. And yet, at the same time, some sense of keen delight awoke in me that satisfied. Joy glowed in some depth I could not reach or modify.\n\nHad the \"woman\" proved wonderful in some ordinary earthly way, I could have continued to share in a kind of dramatic make-believe LeVallon's imagination of an \"old soul\" returned. The sense of fitness would have felt requited. Yet what so disconcerted me was that this commonplace disclosure of the actual facts did not destroy belief, but even increased it! This unexpected and banal denouement, denying, apparently, all the requirements of his creed, fell upon me with a crash of reality that was arresting in an entirely unexpected way. It made the conception so much more likely \u2014 possible \u2014 true!\n\nOut of some depth in me I could not summon to the bar of judgment or analysis rose the whisper that in reality the union of these two was not so incongruous and outrageous as it seemed. To a penetrating vision such as his, what difference could that varnish of the mind called \"education\" pretend to make? Or how could he be deceived by the surface tricks of \"refinement,\" in accent, speech, and manner, that so often cloak essential crudeness and vulgarity? These were to him but the external equipment of a passing Today, whereas he looked for the innate acquirements due to real experience \u2014 age in the soul itself. Her social status, education and so forth had nothing to do with \u2014 her actual Self. In some ultimate region that superficial human judgment barely acknowledges the union of these two seemed right, appropriate and inevitably true.\n\nThis breakfast scene remains graven in my mind. LeVallon talked little, even as he ate little, while his wife and I satisfied our voracious appetites with the simple food provided. She chattered sans gene, eating not ungracefully so much as in a manner untaught. Her smallest habits drew my notice and attention of their own accord. I watched the velvet band rising and falling as she swallowed \u2014 noisily, talking and drinking with her mouth full, and holding her knife after the manner of the servants' hall. Her pronunciation at times was more than marked. For instance, though she did not say \"gime,\" she most assuredly did not say \"game,\" and her voice, what men call \"common,\" was undeniably of the upper servant class. While guilty now and again of absurd solecisms, she chose words sometimes that had an air of refinement above the ordinary colloquial usage \u2014 the kind affected by a lady's-maid who has known service in the \"upper suckles\" of the world \u2014 \"close\" the door in place of simply \"shut\" it, \"commence\" in preference to the ordinary \"begin,\" \"costume\" rather than merely \"clothes,\" and a hundred others of similar kind. Sofa, again, was \"couch.\" She missed a sentence, and asked for it with \"What say?\" while her \"if you please\" and \"pardon\" held a suspicion of that unction which, it seemed, only just remembered in time not to add \"sir,\" or even \"my lady.\" She halted instinctively before a door, as though to let her husband or myself pass out in front, and even showed surprise at being helped at the table before ourselves. These and a thousand other revealing touches I noticed acutely, because I had expected something so absolutely different. I was profoundly puzzled.\n\nYet, while I noted closely these social and mental disabilities, I was aware also of their flat and striking contradiction; and her beautifully-shaped hands, her small, exquisite feet and ankles, her natural dignity of carriage, gesture, bearing, were the least of these. Setting her beside maid or servitor, my imagination recoiled as from something utterly ill-placed. I could have sworn she owned some secret pedigree that no merely menial position could affect, most certainly not degrade. In spite of less favourable indications, so thick about her, I caught unmistakable tokens of a superiority she herself ignored, which yet proclaimed that her soul stood erect and four-square to the winds of life, independent wholly of the \"social position\" her body with its untutored brain now chanced to occupy.\n\nExactly the nature of these elusive signs of innate nobility I find it more than difficult to describe. They rose subtly out of her, yet evaded separate subtraction from either the gestures or conversation that revealed them. They explained the subtle and increasing charm. They were of the soul.\n\nFor, even thus early in our acquaintance, there began to emerge these other qualities in this simple girl that at first the shock of disappointment and surprise had hidden from me. The apparent emptiness of her face was but a mask that cloaked an essential, native dignity. From time to time, out of those strange, arresting eyes that at first had seemed all youth and surface, peered forth that other look, standing a moment to query and to judge, then, like moods of sky which reveal and hide a depth of sea, plunged out of sight again. It betrayed an inner, piercing sight of a far deeper kind. Out of this deeper part of her I felt she watched me steadily \u2014 to wonder, ask, and weigh. It was hence, no doubt, I had the curious impression of two faces, two beings, in her, and the moments when I surprised her peering thus were, in a manner, electrifying beyond words. For then, into tone and gesture, conquering even accent and expression, crept flash-like this \"something\" that would not be denied, hinting at the distinction of true spiritual independence superior to all local, temporary, or worldly divisions implied in mere \"class\" or \"station.\"\n\nThis girl, behind her ignorance of life's snobbish values, possessed that indefinable spiritual judgment best called \"taste.\" And taste, I remember Julius held, was the infallible evidence of a soul's maturity \u2014 of age. The phrase \"old soul\" acquired more meaning for me as I watched her. I recalled that strange hint of his long years before, that greatness and position, as the world accepts them, are actually but the kindergarten stages for the youngest, crudest souls of all. The older souls are not \"distinguished\" in the \"world.\" They are beyond it.\n\nMoreover, during the course of this singular first meal together, while she used the phraseology of the servant class and betrayed the manners of what men call \"common folk,\" it was borne in upon me that she, too, unknowingly, touched the same vast sources of extended life that her husband claimed to realise, and that her being unknowingly swept that region of elemental Powers with which he now sought conscious union. In her infectious vitality beat the pulse of vaster tides than she yet knew.\n\nAlready, in our conversation, this had come to me; it increased from minute to minute as our atmospheres combined and mingled. The suggestion of what I must call great exterior Activities that always accompanied the presence of Julius made themselves felt also through the being of this simple and uneducated girl. Winds, cool and refreshing, from some elemental region blew soundlessly about her. I was aware of their invigorating currents. And this came to me with my first emotions, and was not due to subsequent reflection. For, in my own case, too, while resenting the admission, I felt something more generously scaled than my normal self, scientifically moulded, trying to urge up as with great arms and hands that thrust into my mind. What hitherto had seemed my complete Self opened, as though it were but a surface tract, revealing depths of consciousness unguessed before.\n\nAnd this, I think, was the disquieting sensation that perplexed me chiefly with a sense of unstable equilibrium. The idea of preexistence, with its huge weight of memory lost and actions undischarged, pressed upon a portion of my soul that was trying to awake. The foundations of my known personality appeared suddenly insecure, and what the brain denied, this other part accepted, even half remembered. The change of consciousness in me was growing. While observing Mrs. LeVallon, listening to the spontaneous laughter that ran between her sentences, meeting her quick eyes that took in everything about them, these varied and contradictory judgments of my own worked their inevitable effect upon me. The quasi-memory, with its elusive fragrance of far-off, forgotten things; the promised reconstruction of passionate emotions that had burned the tissues of our earlier bodies before even the foundations of these \"eternal\" hills were laid; the sense of being again among ancient friends, netted by deathless forces of spiritual adventure and desire \u2014 Julius, his wife, myself, mutually involved in the intricate pattern of our souls' development:\u2014 all this, while I strove to regard it as mere telepathic reflection from his own beliefs, yet made something in me, deeper than any ratiocination, stand up and laugh in my face with the authoritative command that it was absolutely \u2014 true.\n\nOur very intimacy, so readily established as of its own accord \u2014 established, moreover, among such unlikely and half antagonistic elements \u2014 seemed to hint at a relationship resumed, instead of now first beginning. The fact that the three of us took so much for granted almost suggested memory. For the near presence of this woman \u2014 I call her woman, though she was but girl \u2014 disturbed me more than uncommonly; and this curious, soft delight I felt raging in the depths of me \u2014 whence did it come? Whence, too, the depth and power of other feelings that she roused in me, their reckless quality, their certainty, the haunting pang and charm that her face, not even pretty apart from its disfigurement, stirred in my inmost being? There was mischief and disaster in her sea-green eyes, though neither mischief nor disaster quite of this material world.\n\nI confessed \u2014 the first time for many years \u2014 to something moving beyond ordinary. More and more I longed to learn of her first meeting with the man she had married, and by what method he claimed to have recognised in this servant girl the particular ancient soul he waited for, and by what unerring instinct he had picked her out and set her upon so curious a throne.\n\n\u2003I watched the velvet band about the well-shaped neck...\n\n\u2003\"I have been here before,\n\n\u2003But when or how I cannot tell:\n\n\u2003I know the grass beyond the door,\n\n\u2003The sweet keen smell,\n\n\u2003The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.\n\n\u2003\"You have been mine before.\n\n\u2003How long ago I may not know:\n\n\u2003But just when at that swallow's soar\n\n\u2003Your neck turned so...\n\n\u2003Some veil did fall \u2014 I knew it all of yore.\"\n\n\"And now,\" she exclaimed, springing up and turning to her husband, \"I'm going to leave you and the Professor together to talk out all your old things without me intervening! Besides I've got the bread to make,\" she added with a swift, gay smile in my direction, \"that bread you called delicious. I generally do it of a morning.\"\n\nWith a swinging motion of her lithe young body she was gone; the room seemed strangely empty; the disfiguring marks upon her girlish face were already forgotten; and a sense of companionship within me turned somehow lonely and bereft." + }, + { + "title": "To Memory", + "text": "\u2003\"Yet, when I would command thee hence,\n\n\u2003Thou mockest at the vain pretence,\n\n\u2003Murmuring in mine ear a song\n\n\u2003Once loved, alas! forgotten long;\n\n\u2003And on my brow I feel a kiss\n\n\u2003That I would rather die than miss.\"\n\n\u2014 Mary Coleridge.\n\n\"Well?\" Julius asked me, as we strolled across the pastures that skirted the main forest, \"and does it seem anywhere familiar to you \u2014 the three of us together again? You recall \u2014 how much?\" A rather wistful smile passed over his face, but the eyes were grave. He was in earnest if ever man was. \"She doesn't seem wholly a stranger to you?\"\n\nMy mind searched carefully for words. To refer to any of my recent impressions was difficult, even painful, and frank discussion of my friend's wife impossible \u2014 though, probably, there was nothing Julius would not have understood and even welcomed.\n\n\"I\u2014 cannot deny,\" I began, \"that somewhere \u2014 in my imagination, perhaps, there seems\"\n\nHe interrupted me at once. \"Don't suppress the imaginative pictures \u2014 they're memory. To deny them is only to forget again. Let them come freely in you.\"\n\n\"Julius!\" I exclaimed, conscious that I flushed a little, \"but she is wonderful; superior, too, in some magnificent way to \u2014 any\"\n\n\"Lady,\" he came abruptly to my assistance, no vestige of annoyance visible.\n\n\"To anyone of our own class,\" I completed the sentence more to my liking. \"I admit I feel drawn to her \u2014 in a kind of understanding sympathy \u2014 though how can I pretend that I\u2014 that this sense of familiarity is really memory?\" It was impossible to treat him lightly; his belief was his Hfe, commanding a respect due to all great convictions of the soul. \"You have found someone you can love,\" I went on, aware that it gave me no pleasure to say it, \"and someone who loves you. I\u2014 am delighted.\"\n\nHe turned to me, standing hatless, the sunlight in his face, his eyes fixed steadily upon my own.\n\n\"We had to meet \u2014 all three,\" he said slowly; \"sooner or later. It's an old, old debt we've got to settle up together, and the opportunity has come at last. I only ask your sympathy \u2014 and hers.\" He shrugged his shoulders slightly. \"To you it may seem a small thing, and, if you have no memory, a wild, impossible thing as well, even with delusion in it. But nothing is really small.\" He paused. \"I only ask that you shall not resist.\" And then he added gravely: \"The risk is mine.\"\n\nI felt uneasiness; the old schooldays' basis of complete sincerity was not in me quite. I had lived too long in the world of ordinary men and women. His marriage seemed prompted by an impersonal sense of justice to the universe rather than by any desire for the companionship and sweetness that a woman's love could give him. For a moment I knew not what to say. Could such a view be hers as well? Had she yielded herself to him upon a similar understanding? And if not \u2014 the thought afflicted me \u2014 might not this debt he spoke of have been discharged without claiming the whole life of another in a union that involved also physical ties?\n\nYet, while I could not find it in me to utter all I thought, there was a burning desire to hear details of the singular courtship. Almost I felt the right to know, yet shrank from asking it.\n\n\"Then nothing more definite stirs in you?\" he asked quietly, his eyes still holding mine, \"no memory you can recognise? No wave of feeling; no picture, even of that time when we \u2014 we three\"\n\n\"Julius, old friend,\" I exclaimed with sudden impulsiveness, and hardly knowing why I said it, \"it only seems to me that these pine woods behind you are out of the picture rather. They should be palms, with spaces of sand shimmering in a hot sun. And the chalet\" \u2014 pointing over his shoulder \u2014 \"seems still less to belong to you when I recall the temples we talked about before the plain where the worship of the rising sun took place\"\n\nI broke off abruptly with a little shamefaced laughter: my invention, or imagination, seemed so thin. But Julius turned eagerly, his face alight.\n\n\"Laugh as you please,\" he said, \"but what makes you feel me out of the picture, as you call it, is memory \u2014 memory of where we three were last together. That sense of incongruity is memory. Don't resist. Let the pictures rise and grow as they will. And don't deny any instinctive feelings that come to you \u2014 they're memory too.\"\n\nA moment of revolt swept over me, yet with it an emotion both sweet and painful. Dread and delight both troubled me. Unless I resisted, his great conviction would carry me away again as of old. And what if she should come to aid him? What if she should bring the persuasion of her personality to the attack, and with those eyes of mischief and disaster ask me questions out of a similar conviction and belief? If she should hold me face to face: \"Do you remember me \u2014 as I remember you?\"\n\n\"Julius,\" I cried, \"let me speak plainly at once and so prevent your disappointment later.\" I forced the words out against my will, it seemed. \"For the truth, my dear fellow, is simply \u2014 that I remember \u2014 nothing! Definitely \u2014 I remember nothing.\"\n\nYet there was pain and sadness in me suddenly. I had prevaricated. Almost I had told a lie. Some vague fear of involving myself in undesirable consequences had forced me against my innate knowledge. Almost I had denied \u2014 her.\n\nFrom the forest stole forth a breath too soft and perfumed for an autumn wind. It stirred the hair upon his forehead, left its touch of dream upon my cheeks, then passed on to lift a wreath of mist in the fields below. And, as though a spirit older than the wind moved among my thoughts, this modern world seemed less real when it had gone. I heard the voice of Julius answering me. His words came very slowly, fastening upon my own. The resentment, the disappointment I had looked for were not there, nor the comparison of myself \u2014 in her favour \u2014 I had half anticipated.\n\nThe answer utterly nonplussed me:\n\n\"Neither does she remember \u2014 anything.\"\n\nI started. A curious pang shot through me \u2014 something of regret, even of melancholy in it. That she had forgotten \"everything\" was pain. She had forgotten me.\n\n\"But we \u2014 you, I mean \u2014 can make her?\"\n\nThe words were out impulsively before I could prevent them. He did not look at me. I did not look at him.\n\n\"I should have put it differently, perhaps,\" he answered. \"She is not aware that she remembers.\"\n\nHe drew me further along the dewy meadow towards the upper valley, and drew me deeper, as it seemed, into his own strange region whence came these perplexing statements.\n\n\"But, Julius,\" I stammered, seeing that he kept silence, \"if she remembers nothing \u2014 how could you know \u2014 how could you feel sure, when you met her?\"\n\nMy sentences stopped dead. Even in these unusual circumstances it was not possible to question a friend about the woman he had married. Had she proved some marvel of physical beauty or of intellectual attainment, curiosity might have been taken as a compliment. But as it was!\n\nYet all the time I knew that her insignificant worldly value was a clean stroke of proof that he had not suffered himself to be deceived in this recovery and recognition of the spiritual maturity he meant by the term \"old soul.\" His voice reached me, calm and normal as though he talked about the weather. \"I'll tell you,\" he said, \"for it's interesting, and, besides, you have the right to know.\"\n\nAnd the words fell among my tangled thoughts like deft fingers that put confusion straight. The incredible story he told me as a child might relate a fairy-tale it knows is true, yet thinks may not be quite believed. Without the slightest emphasis, and certainly without the least embarrassment or sense that it was unusual. Even of comedy I was not properly once aware. All through the strange recital rang in my mind, \"She is not aware that she remembers.\"\n\n\"'The Dardanelles,' \" he began, smiling a little as though at the recollection, \"was where I met her, thus recovered. Not on the way from Smyrna to Constantinople; oh, no! It was not romantic in that little sense. 'The Dardanelles' was a small and ugly red-brick villa in Upper Norwood, with a drive ten yards long, ragged laurel bushes, and a green five-barred gate, gold-lettered. Maennlich lives there \u2014 the Semitic language man and Egyptologist; you know. She was his parlour-maid at the time, and before that had been lady's-maid to the daughter of some undistinguished duchess. In this way,\" he laughed softly, \"may old souls wait upon the young ones sometimes! Her father,\" he continued, \"was a market-gardener and fruiterer in a largish way at East Croydon, and she herself had been brought up upon the farm whence his supplies came. 'Chance,' as they call it, led her into these positions I have mentioned, and so, inevitably \u2014 to me.\"\n\nHe looked up at me a moment. \"And so to you as well.\"\n\nHis manner was composed and serious. He spoke with the simple conviction of some Christian who traces the Hand of God in the smallest details of his daily life, and seeks His guidance in his very train journeys. There was something rather superb about it all.\n\n\"A fruiterer in East Croydon! A maid in service! And \u2014 you knew \u2014 you recognised her?\"\n\n\"At once. The very first day she let me in at the front door and asked if I wished to see her master, what name she might announce, and so forth.\"\n\n\"It was all \u2014 er \u2014 unexpected and sudden like that?\" came the question from a hundred others that crowded together in me. \"To find a lost friend of years only \u2014 in such a way \u2014 the shock, I mean, to you!\" I simply could not find my words. He told it all so calmly, naturally. \"You were wholly unprepared, weren't you? Nothing had led you to expect?\" I ended with a dash.\n\n\"Not wholly unprepared,\" was his rejoinder; \"nor was the meeting altogether unexpected \u2014 on my side, that is. Intimations, as I told you at Motfield Close twenty years ago \u2014 when she was born \u2014 had come to me. No soul draws breath for the first time, without a quiver of response running through all that lives. Souls intimately connected with each other may feel the summons. There are ways! I knew that she was once more in the world, that, like ourselves, her soul had reincarnated; and ever since I have been searching\"\n\n\"Searching 1\"\n\n\"There are clues that offer themselves \u2014 that come, perhaps in sleep, perhaps by direct experiment, and, regardless of space, give hints\"\n\n\"Psychometry?\" I asked, remembering a word just coined.\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders. \"All objects radiate,\" he said, \"no matter how old they are. Their radiation never ceases till they are disintegrated; and if you are sensitive you can receive their messages. If you have certain powers, due to relation and affinity, you may interpret them. There is an instantaneous linking-up \u2014 in picture-form \u2014 impossible to mistake.\"\n\n\"You knew, then, she was somewhere on the earth \u2014 waiting for you?\" I repeated, wondering what was coming next. That night in the Edinburgh lodgings, when he had been \"searching,\" came back to me.\n\n\"For us,\" he corrected me. \"It was something from a Private Collection that gave me the clue by which I finally traced her \u2014 something from the older sands.\"\n\n\"The sands! Egyptian?\"\n\nJulius nodded. \"Egypt, for all of us, was a comparatively recent section \u2014 nearer to Today, I mean. Many a time has each of us been back there \u2014 Thebes, Memphis, even as lately ago as Alexandria at its zenith, learning, developing, reaping what ages before we sowed \u2014 for in Egypt the knowledge that was our knowledge survived longer than anywhere else. Yet never, unfortunately, returning together, and thus never finding the opportunity to achieve the great purpose of our meeting.\"\n\n\"But the clue?\" I asked breathlessly.\n\nHe smiled again at the eagerness that again betrayed me.\n\n\"This old world,\" he resumed quietly, \"is strewn, of course, with the remnants of what once has been our bodies \u2014 'suits of clothes' we have inhabited, used, and cast aside. Here and there, from one chance or another, some of these may have been actually preserved. The Egyptians, for instance, went to considerable trouble to ensure that they should survive as long as possible, thus assisting memory later.\"\n\n\"Embalming, you mean?\"\n\n\"As you wander through the corridors of a modem museum,\" he continued imperturbably, \"you may even look through a glass covering at the very tenement your soul has occupied at an earlier stage! Probably, of course, without the faintest whisper of recognition, yet, possibly, with just that acute and fascinated interest which is the result of stirring memory. For the 'old clothes' still radiate vibrations that belong to you; the dried blood and nerves once thrilled with emotions, spiritual or otherwise, that were you \u2014 the link may be recoverable. You think it is wild nonsense! I tell you it is in the best sense scientific. And, similarly,\" he added, \"you may chance upon some such remnant of another \u2014 the body of ancient friend or enemy.\" He paused abruptly in his extraordinary recital. \"I had that good fortune,\" he added, \"if you like to call it so.\"\n\n\"You found hers?\" I asked in a low voice. \"Her, I mean?\"\n\n\"Maennlich,\" he replied with a smile, \"has the best preserved mummies in the world. He never allowed them even to be unwrapped. The object I speak of \u2014 a body she had occupied in a recent Egyptian section \u2014 though not when we were there, unfortunately \u2014 lay in one of his glass cases, while the soul who once had used it answered his bell and walked across his carpets \u2014 two of her bodies in the house at once. Curious, wasn't it? A discarded instrument and the one in present use! The rest was comparatively easy. I traced her whereabouts at once, for the clue furnished the plainest possible directions. I went straight to her.\"\n\n\"And you knew instantly \u2014 when you saw her? You had no doubt?\"\n\n\"Instantly \u2014 when the door swung open and our eyes met on the threshold.\"\n\n\"Love at first sight, Julius, you mean? It was love you felt?\" I asked it beneath my breath, for my heart was beating strangely.\n\nHe raised his eyebrows. \"Love?\" he repeated, questioningly. \"Deep joy, intuitive sympathy, content and satisfaction, rather. I knew her. I knew who she was. In a few minutes we were more intimate in mind and feeling than souls who meet for the first time can become after years of living together. You understand?\"\n\nI lowered my eyes, not knowing what to say. The standards of modern conduct, so strong about me, prevented the comments or questions that I longed to utter.\n\nThere flashed upon me in that instant's pause a singular conviction \u2014 that these two had mated for a reason of their own. They had not known the clutch of elemental power by which Nature ensures the continuance of the race. They had not shuddered, wept, and known the awful ecstasy, but had slipped between her fingers and escaped. They had not loved. While he knew this consciously, she was aware of it unconsciously. They mated for another reason, yet one as holy, as noble, as pure \u2014 if not more so, indeed \u2014 as those that consecrate marriage in the accepted sense. And the thought, strange as it was, brought a sweet pleasure to me, though shot with a pain that was equally undeniable and equally perplexing. While my thoughts floundered between curiosity, dismay and something elusive that yet was more clamorous than either, Julius continued without a vestige of embarrassment, though obviously omitting much detail that I burned to hear.\n\n\"And that very week \u2014 the next day, I think, it was, I asked Maennlich to allow me an hour's talk with her alone\"\n\n\"She \u2014 er \u2014?\"\n\n\"She liked me \u2014 from the very first, yes. She felt me.\"\n\n\"And showed it?\" I asked bluntly.\n\n\"And showed it,\" he repeated, \"although she said it puzzled her and she couldn't understand.\"\n\n\"On her side, then, it was love \u2014 love at first sight?\"\n\n\"Strong attraction,\" he put it, \"but an attraction she thought it her duty to resist at first. Her present conditions made any relationship between us seem incongruous, and when I offered marriage \u2014 as I did at once \u2014 it overwhelmed her. She made sensible objections, but it was her brain of Today that made them. You can imagine how it went. She urged that to marry a man in another class of life, a 'gentleman,' a 'wealthy' gentleman and an educated, 'scholar gentleman,' as she called me, could only end in unhappiness \u2014 because I should tire of her. Yet, all the time \u2014 she told me this afterwards \u2014 she had the feeling that we were meant for one another, and that it must surely be. She was shy about it as a child.\"\n\n\"And you convinced her in the end!\" I said to myself rather than aloud to him. There were feelings in me I could not disentangle.\n\n\"Convinced her that we needed one another and could never go apart,\" he said. \"We had something to fulfil together. The forces that drove us together, though unintelligible to her, were yet acknowledged by her too, you see.\"\n\n\"I see,\" my voice murmured faintly, as he seemed to expect some word in reply. \"I see.\" Then, after a longer pause than usual, I asked: \"And you told her of your \u2014 your theories and beliefs \u2014 the purpose you had to do together?\"\n\n\"No single word. She could not possibly have understood. It would have frightened her.\" I heard it with relief, yet with resentment too.\n\n\"Was that quite fair, do you think?\"\n\nHis answer I could not gainsay. \"Cause and effect,\" he said, \"work out, whether memory is there or not. To attempt to block fulfilment by fear or shrinking is but to delay the very thing you need. I told her we were necessary to each other, but that she must come willingly, or not at all. I used no undue persuasion, and I used no force. I reahsed plainly that her upper, modern, uncultured and uneducated self was merely what she had acquired in the few years of her present life. It was this upper self that hesitated and felt shy. The older self below was not awake, yet urged her to acceptance blindly \u2014 as by irresistible instinctive choice. She knew subconsciously; but, once I could succeed in arousing her knowledge consciously, I knew her doubts would vanish. I suggested living away from city life, away from any conditions that might cause her annoyance or discomfort due to what she called our respective 'stations' in life; I suggested the mountains, some beautiful valley perhaps, where in solitude for a time we could get to know each other better, untroubled by the outer world \u2014 until she became accustomed\"\n\n\"And she approved?\" I interrupted with impatience.\n\n\"Her words were 'That's the very thing; I've always had a dream like that.' She agreed with enthusiasm, and the opposition melted away. She knew the kind of place we needed,\" he added significantly.\n\nWe had reached the head of the valley by this time, and I sat down upon a boulder with the sweep of Jura forests below us like a purple carpet. The sun and shadow splashed it everywhere with softest colouring. The morning wind was fresh; birds were singing; this green vale among the mountains seemed some undiscovered paradise.\n\n\"And you have never since felt a moment's doubt \u2014 uncertainty \u2014 that she really is this 'soul' you knew before?\"\n\nHe lay back, his head upon his folded hands, and his eyes fixed upon the blue dome of sky.\n\n\"A hundred proofs come to me all the time,\" he said, stretching himself at full length upon the grass. \"And in her atmosphere, in her presence, the memories still revive in detail from day to day \u2014 just as at school they revived in you \u2014 those pictures you sought to stifle and deny. From the first she never doubted me. She was aware of a great tie and bond between us. 'You're the only man,' she said to me afterwards, 'that could have done it like that. I belonged to you \u2014 oh! I can't make it out \u2014 but just as if there wasn't any getting out of it possible. I felt stunned when I saw you. I had always felt something like this coming, but thought it was a dream.' Only she often said there was something else to come as well, and that we were not quite complete. She knew, you see; she knew.\" He broke off suddenly and turned to look at me. He added in a lower tone, as he watched my face: \"And you see how pleased and happy she is to have you here!\"\n\nI made no reply. I reached out for a stone and flung it headlong down the steep slope towards the stream five hundred feet below.\n\n\"And so it was settled then and there?\" I asked, after a pause that Julius seemed inclined to prolong.\n\n\"Then and there,\" he said, watching the rolling stone with dreamy eyes. \"In the hall-way of that Norwood villa, under the very eyes of Maennlich who paid her wages and probably often scolded her, she came up into my arms at the end of our final talk, and kissed me like a happy child. She cried a good deal at the time, but I have never once seen her cry since!\"\n\n\"And it's all gone well \u2014 these months?\" I murmured.\n\n\"There was a temporary reaction at first \u2014 at the very first, that is,\" he said, \"and I had to call in Maennlich to convince her that I was in earnest. At her bidding I did that. Some instinct told her that Maennlich ought to see it \u2014 perhaps, because it would save her awkward and difficult explanations afterwards. There's the woman in her, you see, the normal, wholesome woman, sweet and timid.\"\n\n\"A fascinating personality,\" I murmured quickly, lest I might say other things \u2014 before their time.\n\n\"No looks, no worldly beauty,\" he nodded, \"but the unconscious charm of the old soul. It's unmistakable.\"\n\nWorlds and worlds I would have given to have been present at that interview; Julius LeVallon, so unusual and distinguished; the shy and puzzled serving-maid, happy and incredulous; the grey-bearded archaeologist and scholar; the strange embarrassment of this amazing proposal of marriage!\n\n\"And Maennlich?\" I asked, anxious for more detail.\n\nJulius burst out laughing. \"Maennlich lives in his own world with his specimens and theories and memories of travel \u2014 more recent memories of travel than our own! It hardly interested him for more than a passing moment. He regarded it, I think, as an unnecessary interruption \u2014 and a bothering one \u2014 some joke he couldn't quite appreciate or understand. He pulled his dirty beard, patted me on the back as though I were a boy running after some theatre girl, and remarked with a bored facetiousness that he could give her a year's character with a clear conscience and great pleasure. Something like that it was; I forget exactly. Then he went back to his library, shouting through the door some appointment about a Geographical Society meeting for the following week. For how could he know\" \u2014 his voice grew softer as he said it and his laughter ceased \u2014 \"how could he divine, that old literal-minded savant, that he stood before a sign-post along the route to the eternal things we seek, or that my marrying his servant was a step towards something we three owe together to the universe itself?\"\n\nIt was some time before either of us spoke, and when at length I broke the silence it was to express surprise that a woman, so long ripened by the pursuit of spiritual, or at least exalted aims, should have returned to earth among the lowly. By rights, it seemed, she should have reincarnated among the great ones of the world. I knew I could say this now without offence.\n\n\"The humble,\" Julius answered simply, \"are the great ones.\"\n\nHis fingers played with the fronds of a piece of stag-horn moss as he said it, and to this day I cannot see this kind of moss without remembering his strange words.\n\n\"It's among what men call the lower ranks that the old souls return,\" he went on; \"among peasants and simple folk, unambitious and heedless of material power, you always find the highest ones. They are there to learn the final lessons of service or denial, neglected in their busier and earlier \u2014 kindergarten sections. The last stages are invariably in humble service \u2014 they are by far the most difficult; no young, 'ambitious' soul could manage it. But the old souls, having already mastered all the more obvious lessons, are content.\"\n\n\"Then the oldest souls are not the great minds and great characters of history?\" I exclaimed.\n\n\"Not necessarily,\" he answered; \"probably never. The most advanced are unadvertised, in the least assuming positions. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to them, hard of attainment by those the world applauds. The successful, so called, are the younger, cruder souls, passionately acquiring still the external prizes men hold so dear. Maturer souls have long since discarded these as worthless. The qualities the world crowns are great, perhaps, at that particular stage, but they never are the highest. Intellect, remember, is not of the soul, and all that reason teaches must be unlearned again. Theories change, knowledge shifts, facts are forgotten or proved false; only what the soul itself acquires remains eternally the same. The old are the intuitional; and the oldest of all \u2014 ah! how wonderful! \u2014 He who came back from loftier heights than most of us can yet even conceive of, was the \u2014 son of a carpenter.\"\n\nI left my seat upon the boulder and lay beside him, listening for a long time while he talked, and if there was much that seemed visionary, there was also much that thrilled me with emotions beyond ordinary. Nothing, certainly, was foolish \u2014 because of the man who said it. And, while he took it for granted that all Nature was alive and a manifestation of spiritual powers, the elements themselves but forces to be mastered and acquired, it grew upon me that I had indeed entered an enchanted valley where, with my strange companions, I might witness new, incredible things. Finding little to reply, I was content to listen, wondering what was coming next. And in due course the talk came round again to ourselves, and so to the woman who was now his wife.\n\n\"Then she has no idea,\" I said at length, \"that we three \u2014 you and I and she \u2014 have been together before, or that there is any particular purpose in my being here at this moment?\"\n\n\"In her normal condition \u2014 none,\" he answered. \"For she has no memory.\"\n\n\"There is a state, however, when she does remember?\" I asked. \"You have helped her to remember? Is that it, Julius?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied; \"I have reached down and touched her soul, so that she remembers for herself.\"\n\n\"The deep trance state?\"\n\n\"Where all the memories of the past lie accumulated,\" he answered, \"the subconscious state. Her Self of Today \u2014 with new body and recent brain \u2014 she has forgotten; in trance \u2014 the subconscious Self where the soul dwells with all its past \u2014 she remembers.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 240", + "text": "\"Proof of the reality of a personal sovereign of the universe will not be obtained. But proof of the reality of a power or powers, not unworthy of the title of gods, in respect of our corner of the cosmos, may be feasible.\" \u2014 \"The Individual and Reality\" (E. D. Fawcett).\n\nI shrank. certain memories of our Edinburgh days revived unpleasantly. They seemed to have happened yesterday instead of years ago. A shadowy hand from those \u2014 distant skies he spoke of, from those dim avenues of thickly written Time, reached down and touched my heart, leaving the chill of an indescribable uneasiness. The change in me since my arrival only a few hours before was too rapid not to bring reaction. Yet on the whole the older, deeper consciousness gained power.\n\nPossibilities my imagination had unwisely played with now seemed stealing slowly toward probabilities. I felt as?, man might feel who, having never known fire, and disbelieved in its existence, becomes aware of the warmth of its approach \u2014 a strange and revolutionary discomfort. For Julius was winning me back into his world again, and not with mere imaginative, half-playful acceptance, but with practical action and belief. Yet the change in me was somehow welcome. No feeling of resentment kept it in check, and certainly neither scorn nor ridicule. Incredulity glanced invitingly at faith. They would presently shake hands.\n\nI made, perhaps, an effort to hold back, to define the position, my position, at any rate.\n\n\"Julius,\" I said gravely, yet with a sympathy I could not quite conceal, \"as boys together, and even later at the University, we talked of various curious things, remarkable, even amazing things. You even showed me certain extraordinary things which, at the time, convinced me possibly. I ought to tell you now \u2014 and before we go any further, since you take it for granted that my feelings and \u2014 er \u2014 beliefs are still the same as yours \u2014 that I can no longer subscribe to all the articles of your wild conviction. I have been living in the world, you see, these many years, and \u2014 well, my imagination has collapsed or dried up or whatever you like to call it. I don't really see, or remember \u2014 anything \u2014 quite in the way you mean\"\n\n\"The 'world' has smothered it \u2014 temporarily,\" he put in gently.\n\n\"And what is more,\" I continued, ignoring his interruption, \"I must confess that I have no stomach now for any 'great experiment' such as you think our coming together in this valley must involve. Your idea of reincarnation may be true \u2014 why not? It's a most logical conception. And we three may have been together before \u2014 granted! I admit I rather like the notion. It may even be conceivable that the elemental powers of Nature are intelligent, that men and women could use them to their advantage, and that worship and feeling-with is the means to acquire them \u2014 it's just as likely as that some day we shall send telegrams without wires, thoughts and pictures too!\"\n\nI drew breath a moment, while he waited patiently, linking his arm in mine and listening silently.\n\n\"It may even be possible, too,\" I went on, finding some boyish relief in all these words, \"that we three together in earlier days did \u2014 in some kind of primitive Nature Worship \u2014 make wrong use of an unconscious human body to evoke those particular Powers you say exist behind Wind and Fire, and that, having thus upset the balance of material forces, we must readjust that balance or suffer accordingly \u2014 you in particular, since you were the prime mover\"\n\n\"How well you state it,\" he murmured. \"How excellent your memory is after all.\"\n\n\"But even so,\" I continued, nettled by his calm interpretation of my long and plodding objection, \"and even if all you claim is true \u2014 I\u2014 I mean bluntly \u2014 that the transitory acceptance you woke in me years ago no longer holds. I am with you now merely to keep a promise, a boy's promise, but my heart is no longer in the matter \u2014 except out of curiosity \u2014 curiosity pure and simple.\"\n\nI stopped, or rather it was his face and the expression in his eyes that stopped me. I felt convicted of somewhat pompous foolishness, my sense of humour and proportion gone awry. Fear, with its ludicrous inhibitions, made me strut in this portentous fashion. His face, wearing the child's expression of belief and confidence, arrested me by its sheer simplicity. But the directness of his rejoinder, however \u2014 of his words, at least, for it was not a reply \u2014 struck me dumb.\n\n\"You are afraid for her,\" he said without a trace of embarrassment or emotion, \"because you love her still, even as she loves you \u2014 beneath.\"\n\nIf unconsciously or consciously I avoided his eye, he made no attempt to avoid my own. He looked calmly at me like some uncannily clairvoyant lawyer who has pierced the elaborate evasions of his cross-examined witness \u2014 yet a witness who believed in his own excuses, quite honestly self-deceived.\n\nAt first the shock of his words deprived me of any power to think. I was not offended, I was simply speechless. He forgot who I was and what my life had been, forgot my relation with himself, forgot also the brevity of my acquaintance with his wife. He forgot, too, that I had accepted her, an inferior woman, accepted her without a hint of regret \u2014 nay, let me use the word I mean \u2014 of contempt that he, my friend, had linked his life with such a being \u2014 married her. And, further, he forgot all that was due to himself, to me, to her! It was too distressing. What could he possibly think of me, of himself, of her, that so outrageous a statement, and without a shred of evidence, could pass his lips? I, a middle-aged professor of geology, with an established position in the world! And she, a parlour-maid he had been wild enough to marry for the sake of some imagined dream, a woman, moreover, I had seen for the first time a short hour before, and with whom I had exchanged a few sentences in bare politeness, remembering that this uneducated creature was the wife of my old friend, and \u2014!\n\nThought galloped on in indignant disorder and agitation. The pretence was so apparent even to myself. But I remained speechless. For while he spoke, looking me calmly in the eye, without a sign of arriere pensee, I realised in a flash \u2014 that it all was true. Like the witness who still believes in his indignant answers until the lawyer puts questions that confound him by unexpected self-revelation \u2014 I suddenly saw \u2014 myself. My own heart opened in a blaze of fire. It was the truth.\n\nAnd all this came upon me, not in a flash, but in a series of flashes. I had not known it. I now discovered myself, but for the first time. Layer after layer dropped away. The naked fact shone clearly.\n\n\"It is exactly what I hoped,\" he went on quietly. \"It proves memory beyond all further doubt. A love like yours and hers can never die. Even another thirty thousand years could make no difference \u2014 the instant you met you would be bound to take it up again \u2014 exactly where you left it off \u2014 no matter how long the interval of separation. The first sign would be this divine and natural intimacy.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nHow I said it passes my understanding. I swear my lips moved without my mind's consent. The words slipped out. I couldn't help myself. The same instant some words he had used in our Edinburgh days came back to me: that human love was somehow necessary to him, since love was the greatest power in the world, the supreme example of \"feeling-with.\" Without its aid \u2014 that majestic confidence it brings \u2014 his great experiment must be impossible and fail. That union which is love was necessary.\n\nI felt an extraordinary exultation, an extraordinary tumult of delight, and \u2014 a degrading flush of shame. I felt myself blushing under his quiet gaze while the blood rushed over neck and cheeks and forehead. Both guilty and innocent I felt. The very sun and trees, it seemed, witnessed my nakedness. I stumbled as I moved beside my friend, and it was my friend who caught my arm and steadied me.\n\n\"Good God, Julius,\" I remember stammering, \"but what in the name of heaven are you saying?\"\n\n\"The truth,\" he answered, smiling. \"And do not for a moment think of me as unnatural or a monster. For this is all inevitable and right and good. It means our opportunity has come at last. It also means that you have not failed me.\"\n\nI was glad he went on talking. I am a fool, I know it. I am weak, susceptible and easily influenced. I have no claim to any strength of character, nor ever had. But, without priggishness or self-righteousness, I can affirm that hitherto I have never done another man deliberate, conscious injury, or wronged a personal friend \u2014 never in all my days. I can say that, and for the satisfaction of my conscience I did say it, and kept on saying it in my thought while listening to the next words that Julius uttered there beside me.\n\n\"And so, quite naturally, from your point of view,\" he pursued, \"you are afraid for her. I am delighted; for it proves again the strength of the ineradicable, ancient tie. My union, remember, is not, properly speaking, love; it is the call of sympathy, of friendship, of something that we have to do together, of a claim that has the drive of all the universe behind it. And if I have felt it wise and right and necessary to\" \u2014 he must have felt the shudder down the arm he held, for he said it softly, even tenderly \u2014 \"give to her a child, it is because her entire nature needs it, and maternity is the woman's first and ultimate demand of her present stage in life. Without it she is never quite complete...\"\n\n\"A child!\"\n\n\"A child,\" he repeated firmly but with a kind of reverent gravity, \"for otherwise her deepest functions are not exercised and\"\n\n\"And?\" I asked, noticing the slight pause he made.\n\n\"The soul \u2014 her complete and highest self \u2014 never takes full possession of her body. It hovers outside. She misses the full, entire object of her reincarnation. The child, you see, was necessary \u2014 for her sake as well as for my own \u2014 for ours.\"\n\nThought, speech and action \u2014 all three stood still in me. I stopped in my walk, half paralysed. I remember we sat down.\n\n\"And she,\" I said at length, \"knows nothing \u2014 of all this?\"\n\n\"She,\" he replied, \"knows everything, and is content. Her mind and brain of Today may remain unaware; but she \u2014 the soul now fully in her \u2014 knows all, and is content, as you shall see. She has her debt to pay as well as myself \u2014 and you.\"\n\nFor a long time we sat there silent in that sweet September sunshine. The birds sang round us, the rivulet went murmuring, the branches sighed and rustled just behind us, as though no problems vexed their safe, unconscious lives. Yet to me just then they all seemed somehow to participate in this complex plot of human emotion. Nature herself in some deep fashion was involved.\n\nNo man, I realised, knows himself, nor understands the acts of which he is potentially capable, until certain conditions bring them out. We imagine we know exactly how we should act in given circumstances \u2014 until those circumstances actually arrive and dislocate all our preconceived decisions. For the \"given circumstances\" produce emotions before whose stress \u2014 not realised when the decisions were so lightly made \u2014 we act quite otherwise. I could have sworn, for instance; that in a case like this \u2014 incredible though its ever happening must have seemed \u2014 I should then and there have taken my departure. I should have left. I would have gone without a moment's hesitation, and let him follow his own devices without my further assistance at any rate. I would have been furious with anyone who dared to state the contrary.\n\nYet it was exactly the opposite I did. The first instinct to clear out of this outrageous situation \u2014 proved impossible. It was not for her I remained; it was equally not for him; and it was assuredly not for myself in any meaning of the words. But yet I stayed. I could no more have gone away than I could have \u2014 made love to her before his eyes, or even not before his eyes. I argued, reasoned, moralised \u2014 but I stayed. It was over very soon \u2014 what there was of doubt and hesitation. While we sat there side by side upon that sunny mountain slope, I came to the clear decision that I could not go. But why, or how, I stayed is something beyond my powers to explain. Perhaps, au fond, it was because I believed in Julius LeVallon \u2014 believed, that is, in his innate uprightness and rectitude and nobility of soul. It was all beyond me. I could not understand. But \u2014 I had this strange belief in him. My relationship with her was, and would remain on both sides, a subconscious one \u2014 a memory. There would be no betrayal anywhere. I resolved to see it through.\n\n\"I ask nothing but your presence,\" I heard him saying presently; \"if not actively sympathetic, at least not actively hostile. It is the sum of forces you bring with you that I need. They are in your atmosphere, whether expressed or merely latent. You are you.\" He watched me as he said this. \"I failed once before, you remember,\" he added, \"because she was absent. Your desertion now would render success again impossible.\"\n\nHe took my hand in his. A tender, even beseeching note crept into his deep voice. \"Help me,\" he concluded, \"if you will. You bring your entire past with you, though you know it not. It is that Past that our reconstruction needs.\"\n\nA wind from the south, I remember, blew the firs behind us into low, faint sighing, and with the exquisite sound there stole a mingled joy and yearning on my soul. Perhaps some flower of memory in that moment yielded up its once familiar perfume, dim, ancient, yet not entirely forgotten. The sighing of the forest wafted it from other times and other places. Wonder and beauty touched me; I knew longing, but a longing so acutely poignant that it seemed not of this little earth at all. A fragrance and power of other stars, I could have sworn, lay in it. The pang of some long, long sweetness made me tremble. An immense ideal rose and beckoned with that whispering wind among the Jura pine woods, and a grandeur, remote but of ineffable sweetness, stirred through the undergrowths of a half-claimed, half-recognised consciousness within me.\n\nI was aware of this incalculable ' emotion. Ancient yearnings seemed on the verge of coaxing loved memories into the light of day. I burned, I trembled, I suffered atrociously, yet with a rush of blind delight never before realised by me on earth. Then, suddenly, and wholly without warning, the desire for tears came over me in a flood... Control was possible, but left no margin over. Somehow I managed it, so that no visible sign of this acute and extraordinary collapse should appear. It seemed, for a moment, that the frame of my modern personality was breaking down under the stress of new powers unleashed by my meeting with these two in this enchanted valley. Almost, another order of consciousness supervened... then passed without being quite accomplished... I heard the singing of the trees in the low south wind again. I saw the clouds sailing across the blue foreign sky. I saw his eyes upon me like twin flames. With the greatest difficulty I found speech possible in that moment.\n\n\"I can promise, at least, that I will not be hostile. I can promise that,\" I said in a low and faltering tone.\n\nHe made no direct reply; least of all did it occur to him to thank me. The storm that had shaken me had apparently not touched him. His tone was quiet and normal as he continued speaking, though its depth and power, with that steady drive of absolute conviction behind, could never leave it quite an ordinary voice.\n\n\"She, as I told you, knows nothing in her surface mind,\" I heard. \"Beyond occasional uprushes of memory that have come to her lately in dreams \u2014 she tells them naively, confusedly in the morning sometimes \u2014 she is aware of no more than a feeling of deep content, and that our union is right in the sense of being inevitable. Her pleasure that you have come is obvious. And more,\" he added, \"I do not wish the older memories to break through yet, for that might wake pain or terror in her and, therefore, unconscious opposition.\"\n\nHe touched my arm a moment, looking at me with a significant expression. It was a suggestive thing he said: \"For human consciousness is different at different periods, remember, and ages remotely separated cannot understand each other. Their points of view, their modes of consciousness, are too different. In her deeper state \u2014 separated by so huge an interval from the nineteenth century \u2014 with its origin long before we came to live upon this little earth \u2014 she would not, could not understand. There would be no sympathy; there might be terror; there must certainly be failure.\"\n\nI murmured something or other, heaven alone knows what it was.\n\n\"What we think fine and wonderful may then have seemed the crudest folly, superstition, wickedness \u2014 and vice versa. Look at the few thousand years of history we have \u2014 and you'll see the truth of this. We cannot grasp how certain periods could possibly have done the things they did.\" He paused, then added in a lower tone, more to himself than to me: \"So with what we have to do now \u2014 though exceptional, utterly exceptional \u2014 it is a remnant that we owe to Nature \u2014 to the universe \u2014 and we must see it through... \" His voice died away.\n\n\"I understand,\" my voice dropped into the open pause he left.\n\n\"Though you neither believe nor welcome,\" he replied.\n\n\"My promise,\" I said quietly, \"holds good. Also\" \u2014 I blushed and half-stammered over the conventional words \u2014 \"I will do nothing that can cause possible offence \u2014 to anyone.\"\n\nThe hand that rested on my arm tightened its grasp a little. He made no other sign. It was remarkable how the topic that must have separated two other men \u2014 any two other men in the world, I suppose \u2014 had been subtracted from our relationship, laid aside as dealt with and admitted, calling for no further mention even. It all seemed, in some strange way, impersonal almost \u2014 another attitude to life \u2014 a faint sign, it may well have been, of that older mode of consciousness he spoke about.\n\nI hardly recognised myself, so complete was the change in me, and so swiftly going forward. This drag-net from the Past drew ever closer. If the mind in me resisted still, it seemed rather from some natural momentum acquired by habit, than from any spontaneous activity due to the present. The modern, upper self surrendered.\n\n\"How soon?\" was the question that seemed to come of its own accord; it was certainly not my confused and shaken mind that asked it. \"When do you propose to \u2014\"\n\nHe answered without a sign of hesitation. \"The Autumnal Equinox. You've forgotten that,\" he added as though he justified my lack of memory here, \"for all the world has forgotten it too \u2014 the science of Times and Seasons \u2014 the oldest known to man. It was true cosmic knowledge, but so long ago that it has left our modern consciousness as though it never had existed even.\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly. I think he desired me to discover for myself, unguided, unhampered by explanation. And, at the words, something remote and beautiful did stir, indeed, within me. A curtain drew aside..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 241", + "text": "Some remnant of ghostly knowledge quickened. Behind the mind and brain, in that region, perhaps, where thought ceases and intuition offers her amazing pageant, there stirred \u2014 reality. Times and seasons, I seemed to realise, have spiritual importance; there is a meaning in months and hours; if noon is different from six o'clock, what happens at noon varies in import from what happens at six o'clock, although the happening itself at both moments be identical. An event holds its minimum or its maximum of meaning according to the moment when it happens. Its effectiveness varies with the context.\n\nPower is poured out, or power is kept back. To ask a man for energetic action when he is falling asleep is to court refusal; to expect life of him when he is overflowing with vitality and joy is probably to obtain it. The hand is stretched out to give, or the hand is withheld.\n\nWith the natural forces of the earth \u2014 it now dawned upon me \u2014 the method was precisely similar. Nature and human-nature reacted differently at different moments. At the moment of equilibrium called \"equinox,\" there was a state of balance so perfect that this balance could be most easily, most naturally \u2014 transcended.\n\nAnd objects in the outer world around me changed. Their meaning, ordinarily superficial, appeared of incalculable significance. The innate activities of Nature, the elements, I realised indeed as modes of life; the communication Julius foreshadowed, a possible and natural thing.\n\nSomeone, I believe, was speaking of these and similar things \u2014 words came floating on the wind, it seemed \u2014 yet with meanings so remote from all that my mind of Today deemed possible, that I scarcely knew whether it was the voice of my companion speaking, or a voice of another kind, whispering in my very blood.\n\nIn Bale a week ago, or in London six weeks ago, such theories would have left me cold. Now, at this particular juncture, they came with a solemn beauty I can only account for by the fact that I had changed into almost another being. My mind seemed ready for anything and everything. No modern creeds and dogmas could confine my imagination...\n\nI had entered a different cycle of operation. I felt these ideas all-over-me. The brain might repeat insistently \"this is false, this is superstition\"; but something bigger than reason steadily overrode the criticism. My point of view had changed. In some new way, strangely exciting, I saw everything at once. My entire Self became the percipient, rather than my five separate senses. In Nature all around me another language uttered. It was the cosmic sense that stirred and woke. It was another mode of consciousness.\n\nWe three, it came upon me, were acting out some omitted detail of a great world-purpose. The fact that she forgot, that I was ignorant, that Julius LeVallon seemed guilty of unmoral things \u2014 these were but ripples upon the deep tide that bore us forward. We were uttering a great sentence we had left unfinished. I knew not exactly what was coming, only that we had begun its utterance ages before the present, and probably upon a planet nearer to the sun than our younger earth. The verb had not yet made its appearance in this sentence, but it would presently appear and explain the series of acts, and, meanwhile, I must go on acting and wondering what it all could mean. I thought of a language that first utters the nouns and adjectives, then adds the verb at the end, explaining the whole series of unmeaning sounds. Our \"experiment\" was the verb.\n\nThen came the voice of Julius suddenly:\n\n\"Fate is the true complement of yourself; it completes your nature. By doing it, you become one with your surroundings. Note attitude and gesture \u2014 of yourself and of everything. They are signs. Our attitudes must coincide with that of the earth to the heavens \u2014 possible only at the Equinox. We must feel-with her. We then act with her. Do not resist. Let this valley say to you what it will. Regard it, and regard our life here at the moment, as a symbol, clothed in a whole story of information, the story varying with every hour of the day and with the slightest change of the earth in relation to the universe.\"\n\nIt seemed I watched the track of some unknown animal upon the ground, and tried to reconstruct the entire creature. Such imprint is but a trace of the invisible being that has made it. All about this valley there were tracks offering a hint of Beings that had left them \u2014 that any moment might reveal themselves. Julius talked on in his calm and unimpassioned way. I both understood and could not understand. I realised that there is a language for the mind, but no language for the spirit. There are no words in which to express big cosmic meanings. Action \u2014 a three-dimensional language \u2014 alone could be their vehicle. The knowledge must be performed \u2014 acted out in ceremony. Comprehension filtered into me, though how I cannot say.\n\n\"Symbols are merely the clues,\" he went on. \"It is a question of stimulating your own imagination. Into the images created by your own activities the meaning flows. You must play with them and let them play with you. They depend for their meaning on history and happenings, and vary according to their setting \u2014 the time of day or night, the season of the year, the year itself, the exact relation of your Self to every other Self, human or otherwise, in the universe. Let your life and activities now arrange themselves in such a way that they shall demonstrate the workings of the elemental powers you feel about you. Every automatic activity of your body, every physiological process in you, links you on to this great elemental side of things. Be open now to the language of action. Think of the motion of all objects here as connected with the language of symbols, a living, ever-moving language, and do not allow your mind to mutilate the moods that come upon you. Let your nerves, if they will, come into contact with the Nature Powers, and so realise that the three kingdoms are alive. Watch your own automatic activities \u2014 I mean what you do unconsciously without deliberate thinking. For what you do consciously you are learning, but what you do unconsciously you have learned before. We have to become the performance by acting it \u2014 instantaneous understanding. All such attitudes are language, and the power to read it comes from a synthetical, intuitive feeling of the entire being. The heart may get one letter only, but that letter is a clue, an omen. A moth flies into the room and everything immediately looks different; it remains the same, yet means something different. It's like the vowel in the ancient languages \u2014 put in later, according to the meaning. You have, I know, forgotten\" \u2014 he paused a moment and put his hand on my shoulder \u2014 \"but every wind that blows across our valley here, and every change in temperature that lowers or raises the heat and fire of your own particular system\" \u2014 he looked at me with a power in bearing and gesture impossible to describe \u2014 \"is a sign and hint of whether\"\n\nHe stopped, glancing suddenly down the steep grass slopes. A breeze stirred the hair upon his forehead. It brushed my eyes and cheeks as well. I felt as though a hand had touched me as it passed invisibly. A momentary sensation of energy, of greater life swept over me, then disappeared as though the wind had borne it off.\n\n\"Of whether your experiment will be successful?\" I broke in.\n\nTurning his eyes from the sunny valley to my face again, he said slowly:\n\n\"These Powers can only respond to the language they understand. My deliverance must be experienced, acted out.\"\n\n\"A ceremony?\" I asked, wondering uneasily what \"acts of language\" he might demand of me and of another.\n\n\"To restore them finally \u2014 where they rightfully belong,\" he answered, \"I must become them. There is no other way.\"\n\nHow little intelligible result issued from this conversation must be apparent from the confused report here given, yet that something deep and true was in his mind lay beyond all question. At the back of my own, whence no satisfactory sentences could draw it out into clean description, floated this idea that the three of us were already acting out some vast, strange ceremonial in which Nature, indeed the very earth and heavens themselves, were acting with us. There was this cooperation, this deep alliance. The \"experiment\" we approached would reveal itself in natural happenings and circumstances. Action was to take the place of words, conveying meaning as speech or handwriting conveys a message. The attitude of ourselves, the very grouping of inanimate objects, of trees and hills, the effects of light and shade, the moods of day and night, above all, the time and season of the year which is nothing but the attitude of the earth towards the rest of the universe \u2014 all these, as modes of intelligent expression, would belong to the strange performance. They were the conscious gestures of the universe. If I could feel-with them, interpretation would be mine.\n\nAnd, that I understood even this proved memory.\n\n\"You will gradually become conscious,\" he said, \"of various signs about you. Analyse these signs. But analyse them with a view to creating language. For language does not create ideas; Ideas become language. Put the vowels in. When communication begins to be established, the inanimate world here will talk to you as in the fairy tales \u2014 seem alive. Play with it, as you play with symbols in algebra before you rise to the higher mathematics. So, notice and think about anything that\" \u2014 he emphasised the verb significantly \u2014 \"draws your attention. Do not point out at the moment; that's compulsion and rouses opposition; just be aware and accept by noticing. And do not concentrate too much; what flows in must also be able to flow out; otherwise there comes congestion, and so \u2014 fear. In this valley the channels all are open, and wonder everywhere. The more you wonder, the more your memory will come back and consciousness extend. Great language has no words. The only way to grow in consciousness is to be for ever changing your ideas and point of view. Accept Nature here. Feel like a tree and then like a star. Be violent with wind, and burn with fire. These things are forgotten Today because Wonder has left the world \u2014 and with it worship. So do not be ashamed to wonder at anything you notice. It all lies in you \u2014 I know that \u2014 and here it will rise to the surface.\" He laughed. \"If a woman,\" he went on, \"wears embroidered lilies on her dress, all London seems full of flower-sellers. They were there before, but she had nothing in herself to make her conscious of them. Notice all the little things, for you are a portion of the universe as much as Sirius or Vega, and in living relation with every other atom. You can share Nature, and here in our secret valley you may welcome her without alarm. The cosmic organism, denied by civilisation, survives in you as it survives also in myself and in \u2014 my wife. Through that, and through that alone, is the experiment possible to us.\"\n\nAnd it flashed into me that my visit to this enchanted valley would witness no concentrated, miniature \"ceremonial,\" reduced in form for worship as in a church or temple, but that all we did and experienced in the course of normal, every-day life would mark the outlines of this vast performance. Understanding would come that way.\n\nAnd then the mention of his \"wife\" brought me sharply back to emotions of \u2014 another kind. My thought leaped back again \u2014 by what steps I cannot say, it seemed so disconnected with what had just occupied my mind \u2014 to his statement of ten minutes before.\n\n\"By becoming them,\" I asked, \"you mean that you must feel-with wind and fire to the point of being them?\"\n\n\"You think this might be done alone, without your help or hers?\" he asked, picking the thought straight out of my mind. \"But only a group could have done what we did \u2014 a group, moreover, in perfect sympathy. For as love between the three of us was essential to success then, so is love between us essential now. A group, combined by love into a unit, exerts a power impossible to an individual. The secret of our power lies in that \u2014 ideal love and perfect sympathy.\"\n\nI listened, sure of one thing only \u2014 that I would keep an open mind. To deny, object, criticise, above all to ridicule would rob me of an experience. I believe honestly this was my attitude: to miss no value that might be in it by assuming it was nonsense merely because it was so strange. Apart from the curious fact that something in me was sympathetic to a whole world of deep ideas behind his language, I felt the determined desire to see the matter through. There was no creed or religious dogma in me to offend. I made myself receptive. For, out of this singular exposition the conviction grew that I was entering almost a new order of existence, and that an earlier mode of consciousness revived.\n\nIn this lonely valley, untouched by the currents of modern thought and feeling, companioned by Julius LeVallon and that old, recovered soul, his wife, the conditions of our previous existence together perhaps reformed themselves. Behind his talk came ideas that bore an aspect of familiarity, although my present brain, try as it might, failed to mould them into any acceptable form. The increasing change in myself was certainly significant. The crumbling of old shibboleths continued. A relationship between my inner nature and the valley seemed established in some way that was new, yet not entirely forgotten. The very sunlight and the wind assisted. Closer to the natural things I felt, the earth not alien to me...\n\nWe had neared the chalet again. I saw the peat smoke rising against the background of the ridges. The \"man\" was whistling at his work in the yard behind the building. The column of smoke, I remember, was agitated by the wind towards the top; it turned, blew downwards. No other sign of movement was anywhere visible, for in the bottom of the hollow where we now stood, the wind did not even stir the isolated larches or tall yellow gentians. Sunshine flooded everything. Out of this peace and stillness then came a sudden cry and the sight of something moving rapidly \u2014 both from the chalet.\n\n\"Julius!\" called a shrill voice, as the figure of Mrs. LeVallon, with flying hair and skirts, came running over the meadow towards us. \"Julius! \u2014 Professor! Quick!\"\n\nThe voice and figure startled me; both came, it seemed, out of some other place; a picture from my youth rose up \u2014 a larch grove in October upon the Pentland Hills. I experienced a sense of deep and thrilling beauty similar to what I had felt then. But as I watched the slim, hurrying figure I was aware of another thing that left me breathless: For with her, as she passed through chequered sun and shadow along the fringe of forest, there moved something else enormously larger than herself. It was in the air about her Like that strange Pentland memory, it whirled. It was formless, and owing to its huge proportions gave the impression of moving slowly, yet its very formlessness was singularly impressive and alive, so that the word \"body\" sprang instantly into my mind. Actually it moved at a tremendous speed.\n\nIn my first confusion and bewilderment I remember saying aloud in sheer amazement: \"a fragment of the day has broken off; it's clothed in wind and sunlight!\"\n\nA phrase quite meaningless, of course, yet somehow accurately descriptive, for it appealed to me as a fragment of conditionless, universal activity that had seized upon available common elements to furnish itself a visible appearance. I got the astounding suggestion that it was heat and air moving under intelligent and conscious direction. Combined with its airy lightness there was power, for in its brief, indeed its instantaneous, appearance I felt persuaded of an irresistible strength that no barrier of solid matter could possibly withstand. At the same time it was transparent, for I saw the trees upon its further side. It passed' ahead of the human figure, so close it seemed to touch her dress, rose with a kind of swift, driving plunge into the air, slipped meltingly into the clean blue colour of the atmosphere \u2014 and disappeared.\n\nAnd so swift was the entire presentment of the thing, that even while I tried to focus my sight upon it to make sure I was not deceived, it had both come and gone. The same second Julius caught my arm. I heard him utter a quick, low cry, stifled instantly. He gasped. He quivered. I heard him whispering:\n\n\"Already! Your presence here \u2014 the additional forces that you bring \u2014 are known and recognised! See, how complete we are \u2014 a unit \u2014 you, she and I\u2014 a trinity!\"\n\nA coldness not of this world touched me as I heard. But that first sense of joy and beauty followed. I felt it true \u2014 the three of us were somehow one.\n\n\"You saw it too?\" I asked, exhilaration still about me.\n\n\"They are everywhere and close,\" he whispered quickly, as the running figure came on toward us, \"breaking out into visible manifestation even. Hold yourself strong and steady. Remember, your attitude of mind and feeling are important. Each detail of behaviour is significant.\"\n\nHis anxiety, I realised, was for us, not for himself. Already, it seemed, our souls were playing vital roles in some great dramatic ceremonial just beginning. What we did and felt and thought was but a partial expression of something going forward with pregnant completeness behind the visible appearances all round. Mrs. LeVallon stood breathless in front of us. She was hatless, her hair becomingly dishevelled; her arms bare to the elbow and white with flour. She stopped, placed her hands upon her hips, and panted for a full minute before she could get breath enough to speak. Her eyes, a deep, luminous sea-green, looked into ours. Her face was pale, yet the emotion was excitement rather than alarm. I was aware of a superb, nymph-like grace and charm about her. I caught my breath. Julius made no movement, spoke no word. I wondered. I made a step forward to catch her. But she did not fall; she merely sank down upon the ground at our feet.\n\n\"Julius,\" she panted, \"that thing I've dreamed about so often\"\n\nShe stopped short, glancing up at me, the eyes, charged with a sweet agitation, full upon my own. I turned to Julius with a gesture of uncontrollable impatience.\n\nHe spoke calmly, sitting down on the slope beside her. \"You felt it again \u2014 the effect of your vivid dreaming? Or did you this time \u2014 see anything?\"\n\nThe swiftness and surprise of the little scene had been bewildering, but the moment he spoke confusion and suspense both vanished. The sound of his quiet voice restored the threatened balance. Peace came back into the sunlight and the air. There was composure again.\n\n\"You certainly were not frightened!\" he added, as she made no reply. \"You look too happy and exhilarated for that.\" He put his hand on hers.\n\nI sat down then beside her, and she turned and looked at me with a pathetic mingling of laughter and agitation still in her wide-opened eyes. The three of us were close together. He kept his hand on hers. Her shoulder touched me. I was aware of something very wonderful there between us. We comforted her, but it was more, far more, than that. There was sheer, overflowing Happiness in it.\n\n\"It came into the house,\" she said, her breath recovered now, and her voice gentle. \"It follered me \u2014 out here. I ran.\" She looked swiftly round at me. The radiance in her face was quite astonishing, turning her almost beautiful. Her eyelids quivered a moment and the corners of her lips seemed trying to smile \u2014 or not to smile. She was happy there, sitting between us two. Yet there was nothing light or foolish in her. Something of worship rose in me as I watched her.\n\n\"Well,\" urged Julius, \"and then \u2014 what?\" I saw him watching me as well as her. \"You remembered your dream, you felt something, and \u2014 you ran out here to us. What else?\"\n\nShe hesitated deliciously. But it was not that she wanted coaxing. She evidently knew not how to tell the thing she had to say. She looked hard into my face, her eyes keenly searching.\n\n\"It has something to do with him, you mean?\" asked Julius, noting the direction of her questioning gaze.\n\n\"Oh, I'm glad he's here,\" she answered quickly. \"It's the best thing that could happen.\" And she looked round again at Julius, moving her hand upon his own.\n\n\"We need him,\" said Julius simply with a smile. Then, suddenly, she took my hand too, and held it tightly. \"He's a protection, I think, as well,\" she added quite gravely; \"that's how I feel him.\" Her hand lay warm and fast on mine.\n\nThere was a pause. I felt her fingers strongly clasp my own. The three of us were curiously linked together somehow by those two hands of hers. A great harmony united us. The day was glorious, the power of the sun divine, there was power in the wind that touched our faces.\n\n\"Yes,\" she continued slowly, \"I think it had to do with him \u2014 with you, Professor,\" she repeated emphatically, fixing her bright gaze upon me. \"I think you brought it \u2014 brought my dream back \u2014 brought that thing I dreamed about into \u2014 the house itself.\" And in her excitement she said distinctly \" 'ouse.\"\n\nI found no word to say at the moment. She kept her hand firmly upon mine.\n\n\"I was making bread there, by the back winder as usual,\" she went on, \"when suddenly I started thinking of that splendid dream I've had so offen \u2014 of you,\" looking at her husband, \"and me and another man \u2014 that's you I'm sure,\" she gazed at me \u2014 \"all three of us doing some awful thing together in a place underground somewhere, but dressed quite different to what we are now, and standing round a lot of people sleeping in a row \u2014 when something we expected, yet were frightened at, used to come in \u2014 and give me such a start that I always woke up before knowing what was really going to happen.\"\n\nShe paused a second. She was confused. Her sentences ran into each other.\n\n\"Well, I was making the bread there when the wind came in with a bang and sent the flour in a cloud all over everything \u2014 look! You can see it over my dress still \u2014 and with it, sort of behind it, so to speak, something followed with a rush \u2014 oh, an enormous rush and scurry it was \u2014 and I thought I was rising in the air, or going to burn to pieces by the heat that came in with it. I felt big like \u2014 as the sea when you get out of your depth and feel yourself being carried away. I screamed \u2014 and the three of us were all together in a moment, just as in the dream, you know \u2014 and we were glad, tremendously glad, because we'd got something we wanted that made us feel as if we could do anything, oh, anything in the world \u2014 a sort of 'eavenly power I think it was \u2014 and then, just as we were going to use our power and do all kinds of things with it, someone \u2014 I don't know who it was, for I never can see the face \u2014 a man, though \u2014 one of those sleeping figures \u2014 rose up and came at us all in a fury, and \u2014 well, I don't know exactly, but it all turned out a failure somehow \u2014 It got terrible then\"\n\nShe looked like a flash of lightning into my face, then dropped her eyes again.\n\n\"You acted out your dream, as it were?\" interrupted Julius a moment.\n\nShe looked at him with a touch of wonder. \"I suppose so,\" she said, and let go both our hands. \"Only this time someone really did come in and caught me just as I seemed going out of myself \u2014 it may have been fainting, but I don't think so, for I'm never one to faint \u2014 more like being carried off in a storm, a storm with wind and fire in it\"\n\n\"It was the 'man' caught you?\" I asked quickly.\n\n\"The man, yes,\" she continued. \"I didn't fall. He caught me just in time; but my wind was gone \u2014 gone clean out of me as though someone had knocked me down.\"\n\n\"He said nothing?\" Julius asked.\n\nShe looked sharply at him. \"Nothing,\" she answered, \"not a single word. I.ran away. He frightened me.\n\nFor a moment \u2014 I was that confused with remembering my dream, I suppose; so I just pushed him off and ran out here to find you both. I'd been watching you for a long time while I was mixing the dough.\"\n\n\"I'm glad he was close enough to help you,\" put in Julius.\n\n\"Well,\" she explained, \"I've a sort of idea he was watching me and saw the thing coming, for he'd been in and out of the kitchen for half an hour before, asking me silly questions about whether I wanted this or that, and fussing about\" \u2014 she laughed at her own description \u2014 \"just like an old faithful dog or something.\"\n\nWe all laughed together then.\n\n\"I'm glad I found you so quickly,\" she concluded, \"because while I was running up here I felt that something was running with me \u2014 something that was burning and rushing \u2014 like a bit of what was in the house.\"\n\nShe stopped, and a shadow passed across her eyes, changing their colour to that nondescript grey tint they sometimes wore. The wonderful deep green went out of them. And for a moment there was silence that seemed to fill the entire valley. Julius watched her steadily, strong and comforting in his calmness. The valley, I felt, watched us too, something protective in its perfect stillness. All signs of agitation were gone; the wind sank down; the trees stood by in solemn rows; the very clouds moved more slowly down the calm blue sky. I watched the bosom of Mrs. LeVallon rise and fall as she recovered breath again. She put her hands up to gather in the hair at the back of her head, deftly tidying its disordered masses, and as she did so I felt her gaze draw my own with a force I could not resist. We looked into each other's eyes for a full two minutes, no one speaking, no signs anywhere exchanged, Julius watchfully observant close beside us; and though I know not how to tell it quite, it is a fact that something passed from those clear, discerning eyes into my heart, convincing me more than any words of Julius ever could, that all he claimed about her and myself was true. She was imperial somewhere... She had once been mine...\n\nThe cloud passed slowly from her face. To my intense relief \u2014 for I had the dread that the silent gaze would any moment express itself in fateful words as well \u2014 the muscles of her firm, wide mouth relaxed. She broke into happy laughter suddenly.\n\n\"It's very silly of me to think and feel such things, or be troubled by a dream,\" she exclaimed, still holding my eyes, and her laughter running over me like some message of forgiveness. \"We shall frighten him away,\" she went on, turning now to Julius, \"before he's had time to taste the new bread I'm making \u2014 for him.\" Her manner was quiet and composed again, natural, prettily gracious. I searched in vain for something to say; the turmoil of emotion within offered too many possible rejoinders; I could not choose. Julius, however, relieved me of the necessity by taking her soothingly in both his arms and kissing her. The next second, before I could move or speak, she leaned over against my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek as well.\n\nYet nothing happened; there was no sign anywhere that an unusual thing had occurred; I felt that the sun and wind had touched me. It was as natural as shaking hands. Ah! but the sun and wind were magical with life!\n\n\"There!\" she laughed happily, \"we're all three together and understanding, and nothing can go wrong. Isn't it so, Julius?\" And, if there was archness in her voice and manner, there was certainly no trace of that mischief which can give offence. \"And you understand. Professor, don't you?\"\n\nI saw him take her hand and stroke it. He showed no more resentment than if she had handed me a flower. And I tried to understand. I struggled. I at least succeeded in keeping my attitude of thought and feeling above destructive levels. We three were one; love made us so. A devouring joy was in me, but with it the strange power of a new point of view.\n\n\"We couldn't be together like this,\" she laughed naively, \"in a city. It's only here. It's this valley and the sun and wind what does it.\" She looked round her. \"All this sun and air, and the flowers, and the forest and the clear cold little stream. Why, I believe, if we stay here we shall never die at all. We'd turn into gods or something.\"\n\nShe murmured on half to herself, the voice sinking towards a whisper \u2014 leaning over upon her husband's breast, she stretched out her hand and quietly took my own again. \"It's got much stronger,\" I heard, \"since he's come; it makes me feel closer to you too, Julius. Only \u2014 he's with us as well, just like \u2014 just as if we were all meant for each other somehow.\"\n\nThere was pressure, yet no suggestive pressure, in the hand that held my own. It just took me firmly, with a slight gesture of drawing me closer to herself and to Julius too. It united us all three. And, strange as it all was, I, for my part, was aware of no uneasiness, no discomfort, no awkwardness certainly. I only felt that what she said was true: we were linked together by some deep sympathy of feeling-with; we were at one; we were marvellously fused by some tie of universal life that this enchanted valley made apparent. Nature fused with human nature, raising us all to a diviner level.\n\nThere was a period of silence in which no one moved or spoke; and then, to my relief, words came from Julius \u2014 natural and unforced, yet with a meaning that I saw was meant for me:\n\n\"The presence of so distinguished a man,\" he said lightly, looking down into her face with almost a boyish smile, \"is bound to make itself felt anywhere.\" He glanced across at me significantly. \"Even the forces of nature in this peaceful valley, you see, are aware of his arrival, and have sent out messengers to greet him. Only,\" he added, \"they need not be in such a hurry about it, need they \u2014 or so violent?\"\n\nWe all laughed together. It was the only reference he made in her presence to what had happened. Nor did she ask a single question. We lay a little longer, basking in the sunlight and breathing the fragrant mountain air, and then Mrs. LeVallon sprang to her feet alertly, saying that she must go and finish her bread. Julius went with her. I was left alone \u2014 with the eerie feeling that more than these two had just been with me...\n\nLess than an hour later the horizon darkened suddenly. Out of a harmless sky appeared masses of ominous cloud. Wild gusts of hot, terrific wind rushed sideways over the swaying forest. The trees shook to their roots, groaning; they shouted; loosened stones fell rattling down the nearer gullies; and, following a minute of deep silence, there blazed forth then a wild glory of lightning such as I have never witnessed. It was a dancing sea of white and violet. It came from every quarter of the sky at once with a dazzling fury as though the entire atmosphere were set on fire. The wind and thunder shook the mountains. From a cupful of still, sweet sunshine, our little valley changed into a scene of violent pandemonium. The precipices tossed the echoing thunder back and forth, the clear stream beside the chalet became a torrent of foaming, muddy water, and the wind was of such convulsive turbulence that it seemed to break with explosive detonations that menaced the upheaval of all solid things. There was a magnificence in it all as though the universe, and riot a small section of the sky, produced it.\n\nIt passed away again as swiftly as it came. At lunch time the sun blazed down upon a drenched and laughing scene, washed as by magic, brilliant and calm as though made over all afresh. The air was limpid; the forest poured out perfume; the meadows shone and twinkled. During the assault I saw neither Julius nor the Man, but in the occasional deep pauses I heard the voice of Mrs. LeVallon singing gaily while she kneaded bread at the kitchen \"winder\" just beneath my own. She, at any rate, was not afraid. But, while it was in progress, I went alone to my room and watched it, caught by a strange sensation of power and delight its grandeur woke in me, and also by a sense of wonder that was on the increase." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 242", + "text": "\u2003\"Why is she set so far, so far above me.\n\n\u2003And yet not altogether raised above?\n\n\u2003I would give all the world that she should love me.\n\n\u2003My soul that she should never learn to love.\"\n\n\u2014 Mary Coleridge.\n\n\"The channels here are open.\"\n\nAs the days went by the words remained with me. I recognised their truth. Nature was pouring through me in a way I had never known before. I had gone for a walk that afternoon after the sudden storm, and tried to think things out. It was all useless. I could only feel. The stream of this strange new point of view had swept me from known moorings; I was in deep water now; there was exhilaration in the rush of an unaccustomed tide. One part of me, hourly fading, weighed, criticised and judged; another part accepted and was glad. It was like the behaviour of a divided personality.\n\n\"Your brain of Today asks questions, while your soul of long ago remembers and is sure.\"\n\nI was constantly in the presence of Mrs. LeVallon. My \"brain\" was active with a thousand questions. The answers pointed all one way. This woman, so humbly placed in life today, rose clearer and clearer before me as the soul that Julius claimed to be of ancient lineage. Respect increased in me with every word, with every act, with every gesture. Her mental training, obviously, was small, and of facts that men call knowledge she had but few; but in place of these recent and artificial acquirements she possessed a natural and spontaneous intelligence that was swiftly understanding. She seized ideas though ignorant of the words that phrased them; she grasped conceptions that have to be hammered into minds the world regards as well equipped \u2014 seized them naively, yet with exquisite comprehension. Something in her discriminated easily between what was transitory and what was real, and the glory of this world made evidently small appeal to her. No ordinary ambition of vulgar aims was hers. Fame and position were no bait at all; she cared nothing about being \"somebody.\" There was a touch of unrest and impatience about her when she spoke of material things that most folk value more than honour, some even more than character. Something higher, yet apparently forgotten, drew her after it. The pursuit of pleasure and sensation scarcely whispered to her at all, and though her self-esteem was strong, personal vanity in the little sense was quite a negligible quantity.\n\nThis young wife had greatness in her. Domestic servant though she certainly had been, she was distinguished in her very bones. A clear ray of mental guidance and intuition ran like a gleam behind all her little blunders of speech and action. To her, it was right and natural, for instance, that her husband's money should mostly be sent away to help those who were without it. \"We're much better this way,\" she remarked lightly, remembering, perhaps, the life of detailed and elaborate selfishness she once had served, \"and anyhow I can't wear two dresses at the same time, can I? Or live in two houses \u2014 what's the good of all that? But for those who like it,\" she added, \"I expect it's right enough. They need it \u2014 to learn, or something. I've been in families of the best that didn't want for anything \u2014 but really they had nothing at all.\" It was in the little things I caught the attitude. Although conditions here made it impossible to test it, I had more and more the impression, too, that she possessed insight into the causes of human frailty, and understood temptations she could not possibly have experienced personally in this present life.\n\nAn infallible sign of younger souls was their pursuit hotfoot of pleasure and sensation, of power, fame, ambition. The old souls leave all that aside; they have known its emptiness too often. Their hallmark lies in spiritual discernment, the power to choose between the permanent and the transitory. Brains and intellect were no criterion of development at all. And I reflected with a smile how the \"educated\" and \"social\" world would close its doors to such a woman \u2014 the common world of younger, cruder souls, insipid and undistinguished, many of them but just beyond the animal stage \u2014 the \"upper classes\"! The Kingdom of Heaven lies within, I remembered, and the meek and lowly shall inherit the \"earth.\"\n\nAnd the \"Dog\u2013Man\" also rose before me in another light \u2014 this slow-minded, instinctive being whom elsewhere I should doubtless have dismissed as \"stupid.\" His approximation to the instinctive animal life became so clear. In his character and essential personality lay the curious suggestion. Out of his frank gaze peered the mute and searching appeal of the soul awakening into self-consciousness \u2014 a look of direct and simple sincerity, often questioning, often poignant. The interval between Mrs. LeVallon and himself was an interval of countless lives. How welcome to him would be the support of a thought-out religious creed, to her how useless! The different stages individuals occupy, how far apart, how near, how various! I felt it all as true, and the effect of this calm valley upon me was not sympathy with Nature only, but a certain new sympathy with all the world. It was very wonderful.\n\nI watched the \"man\" with a new interest and insight \u2014 the proud and self-conscious expression on his face as he moved constantly about us, his menial services earnest and important. The safety of the entire establishment lay upon his shoulders. He made the beds as he served the coffee, cleaned the boots or lit the lamps at dusk, with a fine dignity that betrayed his sense of our dependence on him \u2014 he would never fail. He was ever on the watch. I could believe that he slept at night with one eye open, muscles ready for a spring in case of danger. In myself, at any rate, his signal devotion to our interest woke a kind of affectionate wonder that touched respect. He was so eager and ready to learn, moreover. The pathos in his face when found fault with was quite appealing \u2014 the curious dumb attitude, the air of mortification that he wore: \"I'm rather puzzled, but I shall know another time. I shall do better. Only \u2014 I haven't got as far as you have!\"\n\nIn myself, meanwhile, the change worked forward steadily. I was much alone, for Julius, preoccupied and intense, was now more and more engaged upon purposes that kept him out of sight. Much of the time he kept to his room upstairs, but he spent hours, too, in the open, among the woods and on the further ridges, especially at night. Not always did he appear at meals even, and what intercourse I had was with Mrs. LeVallon, so that our intimacy grew quickly, ripening with this sense of sudden and delightful familiarity as though we had been long acquainted. There was at once a happy absence of formality between us, although a dignity and sweet reserve tempered our strange relationship in a manner the ordinary world \u2014 I feel certain \u2014 could hardly credit. Out of all common zones of danger our intercourse was marvellously lifted, yet in a way it is difficult to describe without leaving the impression that we were hardly human in the accepted vulgar meaning of the words.\n\nBut the truth was simple enough, the explanation big with glory. It was that Nature included us, mothering all we said or did or thought, above all, felt. Our intercourse was not a separate thing, apart, shut off, two little humans merely aware of the sympathetic draw of temperament and flesh. It was part of Nature, natural in the biggest sense, a small, true incident in the processes of the entire cosmos whose life we shared. The physical thing called passion, of course, was present, yet a passion that the sun and wind took care of, spreading it everywhere about us through the hourly happenings of \"common\" things \u2014 in the wind that embraced the trees and then passed on, in the rushing stream that caught the flowers on its bank, then let them go again, in the fiery sunshine that kissed the earth while leaving the cooling shadows beside every object that it glorified.\n\nAll this seemed in some new fashion clear to me \u2014 that passion degrades because it is set exclusive and apart, magnified, idolatrised into a false importance due to Nature's being neglected and left outside. For not alone the wind and sun and water shared our intercourse, knowing it was well, but in some further sacramental way the whole big Earth, the movements of the Sun, the Seasons, aye, and the armies of the other stars in all their millions, took part in it, justifying its necessity and truth. Without a trace of false exaltation in me I saw far, far beyond even the poet's horizon of love's philosophy:\n\n\"Nothing in the world is single;\n\nAll things by a law divine In one another's being mingle \u2014\n\nWhy not I with thine?\" and so came again with a crash of fuller comprehension upon the words of Julius that here we lived and acted out a Ceremony that conveyed great teaching from a cosmic point of view. My relations with Mrs. LeVallon, as our relations all three together, seen from this grander angle, were not only possible and true: they were necessary. We were a unit formed of three, a group-soul affirming truths beyond the brain's acceptance, proving universal, cosmic teaching in the only feasible way \u2014 by acting it out." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 243", + "text": "The scale of experience grew vast about me. This error of the past we would set right was but an episode along the stupendous journey of our climbing souls. The entire Present, the stage at which humanity found itself today, was but a moment, and values worshipped now, and by the majority rightly worshipped, would pass away, and be replaced by something that would seem entirely new, yet would be in reality not discovery but recovery.\n\n\u2003\"This mighty sea of Love, with wondrous tides.\n\n\u2003Is sternly just to sun and grain;\n\n\u2003'Tis laving at this moment Saturn's sides,\n\n\u2003'Tis in my blood and brain.\"\n\n\u2014 Alexander Smith.\n\nOne evening, as the shadows began to lengthen across the valley, I came in from my walk, and saw Mrs. LeVallon on the veranda, looking out towards the ridges now tipped with the sunset gold. Her back was to me. One hand shaded her eyes; her tall figure was like a girl's; her attitude conveyed expectancy. I got the impression she had been watching for me.\n\nShe turned at the sound of my footstep on the boards. \"Ah, I hoped you'd get back before the dark,\" she said, with a smile of welcome that betrayed a touch of relief. \"It's so easy to get lost in those big woods.\" She led the way indoors, where a shaded lamp stood on the table laid for tea. She talked on easily and simply. She had been washing \"hankercheefs,\" and as the dusk came on had felt she \"oughter\" be seeing where I'd got to. I thanked her laughingly, saying that she must never regard me as a guest who had to be looked after, and she replied, her big eyes penetratingly on my own \u2014 \"Oh, I didn't mean that. Professor. I knew by instinc' you were not one to need entertaining. I saw it reely the moment you arrived. I was just wondering where you'd got to and \u2014 whether you'd find your way back all right.\" And then, as I made no reply, she went on to talk about the housework, what fun it was, how it amused her, and how different it was from working for other people. \"I could work all day and night, you see, when the results are there, in sight. It's working for others when you never see the result, or what it leads to, and jest get paid so much a week or month, that makes you tired. Seeing the result seems to take away fatigue. The other's simply toil. Now, come to tea. I do relish my cup of tea.\"\n\nIt was very still and peaceful in the house; the logs burned brightly on the open hearth; Julius was upstairs in his room. The winds had gone to sleep, and the hush of dusk crept slowly on the outside world.\n\nI followed my hostess into the corner by the fire where two deep armchairs beside the table beckoned us. Rather severe she looked now in a dark stuff dress, dignified, something half stately, half remote about her attitude. The poise in her physical expression came directly from the mind. She moved with grace, sure of herself, seductive too, yet with a seduction that led the thoughts far beyond mere physical attraction. It was the charm of a natural simplicity I felt.\n\n\"I've taken up Julius his,\" I heard her saying in her uncultivated voice, as she began to pour out tea. \"And I've made these \u2014 these sort of flat unleavened cakes for us.\" The adjective startled me. She pointed to thin, round scone-like things that lay steaming in a plate. But her eyes were fixed on mine as though, they questioned.\n\n\"You used to like 'em...\"\n\nOr, whether she said \"I hope you'll like 'em,\" I am not certain \u2014 for a sudden sense of intimacy flashed between us and disconcerted me. Perhaps it was the tone and gesture rather than the actual words. A sweetness as of some deep, remembered joy rose in me.\n\nI started. There had been disclosure, a kind of revelation. A door had opened. They were familiar to me \u2014 those small \"unleavened cakes.\" Something of happiness that had seemed lost slipped back of its own accord into my heart. My head swam a second. Some part of me was drawn backwards. For, as I took the offered cake, there stole to my nostrils a faint perfume that made me tremble. Elusive, ghostly sensations dropped their hair-like tracery on the brain, then vanished utterly. It was all dim, yet haunting as a dream. The perfume faded instantly.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I murmured. \"You make them deliciously... \" aware at the same moment I had been about to say another thing in place of the empty words, but had deliberately kept it back.\n\nThe bewilderment came and went. Mrs. LeVallon dropped her eyes from mine, although the question in their penetrating gaze still lingered. I realised this new sense of intimacy that seemed uncannily perfect, it was so natural. No suggestion lay in it of anything that should not be, but rather the close-knit comfortable atmosphere of two minds that were familiar and at home in silence. It deepened with every minute. It seemed the deep companionship that many, many years had forged.\n\nYet the moment of wonder had mysteriously come and gone. Even the aroma of the little steaming cake was lost as well \u2014 I could not recapture the faint odour. And it was my surface consciousness, surely, that asked then about the recipe, and joined in the soft, familiar laughter with which she answered that she \"reely couldn't say quite,\" because \"it seemed to have come of its own accord while I was doing nothing in particular with odds and ends about the cooking-stove.\"\n\n\"A very simple way,\" I suggested, trying to keep my thoughts upon the present, \"a very easy way of finding new recipes,\" whereupon, her manner graver somewhat, she replied: \"But, of course, I could make them better if I stopped to think a bit first... and had the proper things. It's jest my laziness. I know how \u2014 only\" \u2014 she looked peeringly at me again as with an air of searching for something I might supply \u2014 \"I've sort of mislaid something \u2014 forgot it, rather... and I can't, for the life of me, remember where I learned it first.\"\n\nThere stirred between us into that corner of the lamp-lit room an emotion that made me feel we used light words together as men use masks upon their faces for disguise, fully aware that while the skin is hidden the eyes are clear. My happiness seemed long-established. There was a little pause in which the key sank deeper. Before I could find anything to say, Mrs. LeVallon went on again:\n\n\"There's several things come to me like that these last few days\"\n\n\"Since I came?\" I could not prevent the question, nor could I hide the pleasure in my voice.\n\n\"That's it,\" she agreed instantly; \"it's as though you brought them \u2014 back \u2014 simply by being here. It's got to do with you.\" Her elbows were on the table, the chin resting on her folded hands as she stared at me, both concentration and absent-mindedness in her expression at the same time. Her thoughts were travelling, searching, beating backwards into time. She leaned a little nearer to me suddenly, so that I could almost feel her breath upon my face.\n\n\"Like memories of childhood revived,\" I said. My heart beat quickly. There was great sweetness in me.\n\n\"That's it,\" she repeated, but in a lowered tone. \"That's it, I think; as if we'd been children together, only so far back I can't hardly remember.\"\n\nShe gazed again into my eyes, searching for words her untutored brain could not supply. There was a moment of extraordinary tenseness. I felt unsure of myself; uneasiness was in it, but a strange, lifting joy as well. I knew an instant's terror that either she or I might say an undesirable thing.\n\nAnd to my relief just then the Man came clattering in with a cup containing \u2014 cream! Her eyes left mine as with an effort. Drawing herself free, yet not easily. from some inner entanglement that had captured both of us, she turned and took the little cup. \"There is no proper cream jug,\" she observed with a smile, dropping back into the undisguised accent of the East Croydon fruiterer's daughter, \"but the cream's thick and good jest the same, and we'll take it like this, won't we?\" She stirred it with a spoon into my teacup.\n\nThe \"Man\" stood watching us a moment with a questioning, puzzled look, and then went out again. At the door he turned once more to assure himself that all was as it should be, decided that it was so, and vanished with a little run. Slowly, then, upon her face stole back that graver aspect of the eyes and mouth; and into my own mind stole equally a sense of deep confusion as I watched her \u2014 very delightful, strangely sweet, but my first uneasiness oddly underlying it. Instinctively I caught myself shrinking as from vague pain or danger. I made a struggle to get free, but it was a feeble and half-hearted effort. Mrs. LeVallon was saying exactly what I had known she was going to say.\n\n\"I'm all upset today,\" she said with blunt simplicity, \"and you must excuse my manners. I feel sort of lost and queer. I can't make it out, but I keep forgettin' who I am, and sometimes even where I am. You\" \u2014 raising her eyes from the plate to mine \u2014 \"oughter be able to help me. D'you know what I mean? Professor, sometimes, especially nights,\" her voice sinking as she said it,\n\n\"I feel afraid of something \" She paused, correcting herself suddenly. \"Oh, no, it isn't fear exactly, you see, but a great happiness that seems too big to get hold of quite. It's jest out of reach always, and something'll go wrong before it reely comes.\" She looked very hard at me. The strange sea-green eyes became luminous. I felt power in her, a power she was not aware of herself. \"As if,\" she continued earnestly, \"there was some price to pay for it \u2014 first. And somehow it's for you \u2014 it's what you've come for \" She broke off suddenly.\n\nA touch of rapture caught me. It was only with strong effort that I made a commonplace reply:\n\n\"This valley, Mrs. LeVallon\" \u2014 I purposely used the name and title \u2014 \"is exceedingly lonely; you are shut off from the world you are accustomed to.\" I tried to put firmness and authority into my words and manner. \"You have no companionship \u2014 of your own sex\"\n\nShe brushed my explanation aside impatiently. \"Oh, but it ain't nothing of that sort,\" she exclaimed, seeing through my conventional words, and knowing I realised that she did so; \"it's not loneliness, nor anything ordin'ry like that. Julius is everything to me in that way. It's something bigger and quite different \u2014 that's got worse, got stronger I mean, since you came. But I like your being here,\" she added quickly, \"because I feel it's jest the thing for Julius and for \u2014 for all of us. Only, since you've been here it seems \u2014 well, it's sort of coming to a head.\"\n\nI remained speechless. A kind of helplessness \u2014 came over me. I could not prevent it.\n\n\"And mixed up with it,\" she continued, not waveringly, but wholly mistress of herself, \"is the feeling that you've been here before too \u2014 been with me. We've been together, and you know we have.\" Her cheek turned a shade paler; she was very earnest; there was deep emotion in her. \"That's what I keep feelin' for one thing. Everything is that familiar \u2014 as if all three of us had been together before and had come back again.\" Her breath came faster.\n\n\"You understand me, don't you? When Julius told me you were coming, it seemed quite natural, and I didn't feel nothing of any kind except that it was so natural; but the day you arrived I felt \u2014 afraid, though always with this tremendous happiness behind it. And that's why I didn't come down to meet you!\" The words came pouring out, yet without a sign of talking wildly. Her eyes shone; the velvet band on her throat rose and fell; I was aware of happiness and amazement, but never once of true surprise. I had expected this, and more besides. \"The moment I saw you \u2014 up there at the winder in the early mornin' \u2014 it came bursting over me. Professor, as sure as anything in this world, that we've come together again like old, old friends.\"\n\nAnd it was still my conventional sense of decent conduct that held me to make a commonplace rejoinder. Yet how the phrases came, and why the thin barrier between us did not fall with a crash is more than I can tell.\n\n\"Julius had spoken about me, and no doubt your imagination \u2014 here in this deserted place \u2014\"\n\nShe shook her head almost contemptuously. \"Julius said nothing,\" she put in quickly, \"nothing in particular, I mean; only that you were old friends and he was positive sure you'd come because you'd promised. It's since you've come here that I've felt all this so strong. You come as familiar and natural to me as my own mother,\" she continued, a faint flush rising on the former pallor; \"and what's more, your coming has brought a whole lot of other things nearer, too,\" adding in a whisper suddenly, \"things that make me afraid and happy at the same time.\"\n\nShe paused a moment, peering round the room and out of the blindless windows into the darkening valley. \"Now, he\" \u2014 pointing with her thumb in the direction of the kitchen \u2014 \"is all new to me, and I have no feeling about him at all. But you! Why, I always know where you are, and what you'll be doing next, and saying, and even what you're thinking and feeling half the time \u2014 jest as I do with Julius \u2014 almost.\"\n\nThe next minute came the direct question that I dreaded. It was like a pistol shot:\n\n\"And you feel the same. Professor? You feel it, too? You know all about me \u2014 and this great wonderful thing that's creepin' up nearer all the time. Don't you, now?\"\n\nI looked straight at her over the big lampshade, feeling that some part of me went lost in the depths of those strange, peering eyes. There was a touch of authority in her face \u2014 about lips and mouth \u2014 that I had seen once before. For an instant it hovered there while she waited for my reply. It lifted the surface plainness of her expression into a kind of solemn beauty. Her charm poured over me envelopingly.\n\n\"There is,\" I stammered, \"a curious sense of intimacy between us \u2014 all, and it is very delightful. It comes to me rather like childhood memories revived. The loneliness of this valley,\" I added, sinking my voice lest its trembling should be noticeable, \"may account for a good many strange feelings, but it's the peace and loveliness that should make the chief appeal.\"\n\nThe searching swiftness of the look she flashed upon me, faintly touched with scorn, I have seen sometimes in the eyes of a child who knows an elder says vain things for its protection in the dark. Such weak attempts but bring the reality nearer.\n\n\"Oh, I feel that too \u2014 the loveliness \u2014 right enough,\" she said at once, her eyes still fixed on mine, \"but I mean these other things as well.\" Her tone, her phrase, assumed that I also was aware of them. \"Where do they come from? What are they exactly? I often fancy there's lots of other people up here besides ourselves, only they're hidden away always \u2014 watchin', waitin' for something to happen \u2014 something that's being got ready like. Oh, but it's a splendid feeling, too, and makes me feel alive all over.\" She sat up and clapped her hands softly like a child, but there was awe as well as joy in her. \"And it comes from the woods and sky somehow \u2014 like wind and lightning. God showed Himself once, didn't He, in a burnin' bush and in a mighty rushin' wind?\"\n\n\"Nature seems very real in a place like this,\" I said hurriedly. \"We see no other human beings. Imagination grows active and constructs\"\n\nThe instant way she swept aside the evasive reply I was so proud of made me feel foolish.\n\n\"Imagination,\" she said firmly, yet with a bewitching smile, \"is not making up. It's finding out. You know that!\"\n\nWe stared at one another for a moment without speech. It seemed as if the forest, the meadows, the little rivulet of cool, clear water, the entire valley itself became articulate \u2014 through her. Her personality rushed over me like a gush of wind. In her enthusiasm and belief rose the glow of fire.\n\n\"You feel the same,\" she went on, with conviction in her voice, \"or you wouldn't try to pretend you don't. You wouldn't try to hide it.\" And the authority grew visibly upon her face. There was a touch of something imperious as well. \"You see, I can't speak to him about it, I can't ask him\" \u2014 jerking her head towards the room upstairs \u2014 \"because\" \u2014 she faltered oddly for a second \u2014 \"because it's about himself. I mean he knows it all. And if I asked him \u2014 my God, he'd tell me!\"\n\n\"You prefer not to know?\"\n\nShe smiled and shrugged her shoulders with a curious gesture impossible to interpret. \"I long to know,\" she replied, \"but I'm half afraid\" \u2014 she shivered slightly \u2014 \"to hear everything. I feel as if it would change me \u2014 into \u2014 someone else.\" The last words were spoken almost below her breath.\n\nBut the joy broke loose in me as I heard. It was another state of consciousness she dreaded yet desired. This new consciousness was creeping over her as well. She shared it with me; our innate sympathy was so deep and perfect. More, it was a type of consciousness we had shared together before. An older day rose hauntingly about us both. We felt-with one another.\n\n\"For yourself?\" I asked, dropping pretence as useless any longer. \"You feel afraid for yourself?\"\n\nShe moved the lamp aside with a gesture so abrupt it seemed almost violent; no object intervened between our gaze; and she leaned forward, folding her hands upon the white tablecloth. I sat rigidly still and watched her. Her face was very near to mine. I could see myself reflected in her glowing eyes.\n\n\"Not for myself, Professor, nor for you,\" she said in a low voice. Then, dropping the tone to a whisper, \"but for him. I've felt it on and off ever since we came up here last spring. But since you've come, I've known it positive \u2014 that something'll happen to Julius \u2014 before we leave \u2014 and before you leave...\"\n\n\"But, Mrs. LeVallon\"\n\n\"And it's something we can't prevent,\" she went on whispering, \"neither of us \u2014 nor oughter prevent either \u2014 because it's something we've got to do all three together.\"\n\nThe intense conviction in her manner blocked utterance in me.\n\n\"Something I want to do, what's more,\" she continued, \"because it's sort of magnificent \u2014 if it comes off proper and as it should \u2014 magnificent for all of us, and like a great vision or something. You know what I mean. We are together in it, but this old valley and the whole world is somehow in it, too. I can't quite understand. It's very wonderful. Julius will suffer, too, only he'll call it jest development.\" Her voice sank lower still, \"D'you know. Professor, I sometimes feel there's something in Julius that seems to me like \u2014 God.\"\n\nShe stood up as she said it, tall, erect, her figure towering above me; and as she rose her face passed out of the zone of yellow lamplight into comparative shadow, the eyes fixed always penetratingly upon my own. And I could have sworn that not alone their expression altered, growing as with fiery power, but that the very outline of her head and shoulders shifted into something else, something dark, remote and solemn as a tree at midnight, drawn almost visibly into larger scale.\n\nShe bent lower again a little over the table, leaning her hands upon the back of the chair she had just occupied. I knew exactly what she was going to say. The sentences dropped one by one from her lips just as I expected.\n\n\"I've always had a dread in me, ever since I can remember,\" I heard this familiar thing close in my ear, \"a. sinking like \u2014 of some man that I was bound to meet \u2014 that there was an injury I'd got to put right, and that I'd have to suffer a lot in doing it. When I met Julius first I thought it might be him. Then I knew it wasn't him, but that I'd meet the other \u2014 the right man \u2014 through him sooner or later.\" She stopped and watched me for a second. Her eyes looked through and through me. \"It's you, Professor,\" she concluded; \"it's you.\"\n\nShe straightened up again and passed behind my chair. I heard her retreating steps. A thousand words rose up in me, but I kept silence. What should I say? How should I confess that I, too, had known a similar dread of meeting \u2014 her? A net encompassed me, a web was flung that tightened as it fell \u2014 a web of justice, marvellously woven, old as the stars and certain as the pull of distant planets, closing us all together into a pattern of actions necessary and inexorable.\n\nI turned. I saw her against the window where she stood looking out into the valley, now thick with darkness about the little house. And for one passing instant it seemed to me that the entire trough of that dark valley brimmed with the forces of wind and fire that were waiting to come in upon us.\n\nAnd Mrs. LeVallon turned and looked at me across the room. There was a smile upon her lips.\n\n\"But we'll play it out,\" her whisper reached me, \"and face it all without fear or shirking... when it... comes... \" And as she whispered it I hid my face in my hands so as not to meet her gaze. For my own dread of years ago returned in force upon me, and I knew beyond all doubt or question, though without a shred of evidence, that what she said was true.\n\nAnd when I lifted my eyes a moment later Mrs. LeVallon had gone from the room, and the Man, I saw, was clearing away the tea things, glancing at me from time to time for a word or smile, as though to show that whatever happened he was always faithful, ready to fight for all of us to the death if necessary, and to be depended upon absolutely." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 244", + "text": "\u2003\"A thousand ages onward led\n\n\u2003Their joys and sorrows to that hour;\n\n\u2003No wisdom weighed, no word was said.\n\n\u2003For only what we were had power.\" \u2014 A. E.\n\nMeanwhile my intercourse with Nature now began to betray itself in curious little ways, and none more revealing of this mingled joy and nervousness than my growing excitement on being abroad after dark alone.\n\nIn the far more desolate Monzoni Valley a few weeks before I had passed whole nights in the open without the least suspicion of uneasiness, yet here, amid these friendly woods, covered by this homely, peaceful valley, it was suddenly made clear to me that I had nerves. And the reason, briefly put, was that there I knew myself alone, whereas here I knew myself never alone.\n\nThis sense of a populated Nature grew. After dusk it fairly mastered me, but even in broad daylight, when the September sunshine flooded the whole trough of valley with warmth and brightness, there clung to me the certainty that my moods and feelings, as my very footsteps, too, were noted \u2014 and understood. This sense of moving Presences, as in childhood, was stirred by every wind that blew. The feeling of cooperation increased. It was conscious, intelligent cooperation.\n\n\"Over that limestone ridge against the sky,\" I caught myself feeling, rather than definitely thinking; \"from just beyond the crests of those tall pines, will presently come \u2014\" What? I knew not, even as the child knows not. Only, it would come \u2014 appearing suddenly from the woods, or clouds, or from behind the big boulders that strewed the open spaces.\n\nIn the fields about the chalet this was manifest too, but especially on the naked ridges above the forests and in the troughs that held the sunlight. Where the wind had unobstructed motion, and where the heat of the sun accumulated in the hollows, this sense of preparation, of cooperation, chiefly touched me. There was behind it pressure \u2014 as of purpose and direction, the idea that intelligence stirred within these natural phenomena. Some type of elemental life, enormous yet generally diffused through formlessness, moved and had its being behind natural appearances.\n\nMore and more, too, I realised that \"inanimate\" Nature was a script that it was possible to read; that certain objects, certain appearances drew my attention because they had a definite meaning to convey, whereas others remained unnoticed, as though not necessary to the sentence of some message or communication. The Language of Happenings that Julius talked about \u2014 the occurrences of daily life as words in some deep cosmical teaching \u2014 connected itself somewhere with this meaning that hid in common objects.\n\nThat my awareness of these things was known to others of the household besides myself was equally clear, for I never left the immediate neighbourhood of the chalet after dark without the Man following my movements with a kind of anxiety, sometimes coming on my very tracks for a considerable distance, or hanging about until I returned to light and safety. In sleep, too, as I passed slowly into unconsciousness, it seemed that the certainty of these Presences grew startlingly distinct, and more than once I woke in the night without apparent cause, yet with the conviction that they brooded close upon the chalet and its inmates, pressing like a rising flood against the very walls and windows. And on these occasions I usually heard Julius moving in his room just across the narrow passage, or the Man astir in the lower regions of the house. Outside, the moonlight, cold and gleaming, silvered the quiet woods and limestone heights. Yet not all the peace and beauty of the scene, nor the assurance of the steady stars themselves, could quite dispel this conviction that something was in active progress all about me, and that the elements themselves urged forward towards the deliverance of some purpose that had relation to ourselves.\n\nJulius, I knew, was at the root of it.\n\nOne night \u2014 a week or so after my arrival \u2014 I woke from a dreamless sleep with the impression that a voice had called me. I paused and listened, but the sound was not repeated. I lay quietly for some minutes, trying to discover whose voice it was, for I seemed bereft of some tender companionship quite recently enjoyed. Someone who had been near me had gone again. I was aware of loneliness.\n\nIt was between one and two in the morning and I had slept for several hours, yet this mood was not the one in which I had gone to bed. Sleep, even ten minutes' sleep, brings changes on the heart; I woke to this sense of something desirable just abandoned. Someone, it seemed, had called my name. There was a tingling of the nerves, a poignant anticipation that included high delight. I craved to hear that voice again. Then, suddenly, I knew.\n\nI rose and crossed the room. The warmth of the house oppressed me, although the wood-fire in the hearth downstairs was long since out, and by the open window I drank in the refreshing air. The valley lay in a lake of silver. There was mist upon the meadows, transparent, motionless, the tinkling of the rivulet just audible beneath its gauzy covering. The cliffs rose in the distance, gaunt and watchful; the forest was a pool of black. I saw the lake, a round blot upon the fields. Over the shingled roof occasional puffs of wind made a faint rushing sound under the heavy eaves. The moonlight was too bright for stars, and the ridges seemed to top the building with the illusion of nearness that such atmosphere engenders. The hush of a perfect autumn night lay over all.\n\nI stood by that open window spellbound. For the clear loveliness seemed to take my hand and lead me forth into a vale of beauty that, behind the stillness, was brimming with activity. Vast energy paused beneath the immobility. The moonlight, so soft and innocent, yet gleamed with a steely brightness as of hidden fire; the puffs of wind were but the trickling draughts escaping from reservoirs that stored incalculable reserves. A terrific quality belied the appearance of this false repose. I was aware of elemental powers, pressed down and eager to run over. It came to me they also had been \u2014 called. Their activity, moreover, was in some very definite relation to myself. The voice that summoned me had warned as well.\n\nI stood listening, trembling with an anticipation of things called unearthly. Nature, dressed in the Night, stepped in and took my hand. There seemed an enormous gesture; and it was a gesture, I felt, of adoration. Somewhere behind the calm picture there lay worship.\n\nAnd I realised, then, that I stood before a page of writing. Out of this inanimate map that was composed of earth, air, fire and water, a deep sentence of elemental significance thrust up into my consciousness. Objects, forced into syllables of this new language, spoke to me. The cosmic language which is the language of the gods stood written on the moonlit world. \"We lie here ready for your use,\" I read. \"Worship is the link. We may be known on human terms. You can use us. We can work with you.\"\n\nThe message was so big, it seemed to thunder. Close to this window-sill on which I leaned the rising energy swayed like a sea. It was obedient to human will, and human will could harness it for practical purposes. I was feeling \u2014 with it. Immense, far-spreading, pouring down in viewless flood from the encircling heights, the surge of it came round the lonely chalet. The valley brimmed. The blindly-heaving lift of it \u2014 thus it presented itself to my imagination \u2014 could alter the solid rocks until they flowed like water, could float the trees as though they were but straws. For this also came to me with a conviction no less significant than the rest \u2014 that the particular elemental powers at hand were the familiar ones of heat and air. With those twin powers, which in their ultimate physical manifestation men know as wind and fire, my mind had established contact. But it was with the spiritual prototypes of these two elements my own small personal breath and heat linked on. There was cooperation. I had been called by name; yet my summoning was but a detail in some vaster evocation. There was no barrier between the not-me, as I must call it, and the me. Others had been called as well.\n\nSo strong was the sense that some unusual manifestation of these two \"elements\" approached, that I instinctively drew back; and in that same instant there flashed into me a vision, as it were, of sheeted flame and of gigantic wind. In my heart the picture rushed, for outwardly still reigned the calm and silence of the autumn night. Yet any moment, it seemed, the barrier into visible, sensible appearance would be leaped. And it was then, while I stood hesitating half-way between the window and the bed, that the sound rose again with sharp distinctness, and my name was called a second time.\n\nI heard the voice; I recognised it; but the name was not the one I answer to today. It was another \u2014 first uttered at Edinburgh many years ago \u2014 Silvatela. And strong emotion laid a spell upon my senses, masking the present with a veil of other times and other places.\n\nI stood entranced... I heard Julius moving softly on the bare boards of the passage as he came towards my room; the door opened quietly; he held a lighted candle; I saw him framed against the darkness on the threshold.\n\nFor a fraction of a second then, before either of us spoke, it was as though he stood before me in another setting. For the meagre wood on either side of him gave place somehow to pylons of grey stone, hewn massively; the ceiling lifted into vaulted space where stars hung brightly; cool air breathed against my skin; and through an immense crepuscular distance I was aware of moving figures, clothed like his own in flowing white with napkined heads, their visages swarthier than those I knew today. He took a step forward into the room, and the shifting shadows from the moving candle dispelled the entire scene as though the light and darkness had constructed it. He spoke at once:\n\n\"She calls you,\" he said quietly.\n\nHe set the candle down upon the table by my bed and gently closed the door. The draught, as he did so, shook the flame, sending a flutter of shadows dancing through the air. Yet it was no play of light and shadow that this time laid the strange construction on his face and gestures. So stately were his movements, so radiant his pale, passionless features, so touched with high, unearthly glory his whole appearance, that I watched him for a minute in silence, conscious of respect that bordered upon awe. He had been, I knew, in direct communication with the very sources of his strange faith, and a remnant of the power still clung to the outer body of his flesh. Into that small, cramped chamber Julius brought the touch of other life, of other consciousness that yet was not wholly unfamiliar to me. I remained close beside him. I drank in power from him. And, again, across my thoughts swept that sheet of fire and that lift of violent wind.\n\n\"She calls you,\" he repeated calmly; and by the emphasis on the pronoun I knew he meant her Self of older times.\n\n\"She \" I whispered. \"Your wife!\"\n\nHe bowed his head. \"She knows, now for the first time, that you are here.\"\n\n\"She remembers?\" I asked falteringly, knowing the \"you\" he meant was also of an older day.\n\n\"She lies in trance,\" he answered, \"and the buried Self is in command. She felt your presence, and she called for you \u2014 by name.\"\n\n\"In trance?\" I had the feeling of distress that he had forced her. But he caught my thought and set it instantly at rest.\n\n\"From deep sleep she passed of her own accord,\" he said, \"into the lucid state. Her older Self, which retains the memories of all the sections, is now consciously awake.\"\n\n\"And she knows you too? Knows you as you were \u2014 remembers?\" I asked breathlessly, thinking of my first sight of him in the doorway.\n\n\"She is aware at this very moment of both you and me,\" he answered, \"but as she knew us in that particular past. For the old conditions are gathering tonight about the house, and the Equinox is nearer.\"\n\n\"Gathered, then, by you,\" I challenged, conscious that an emotion of protection rose strong in me \u2014 protection of the woman.\n\n\"Gathered, rather,\" he at once rejoined, \"by our collective presence, by our collective feeling, thought and worship, but also by necessity and justice which bring the opportunity.\"\n\nHe spoke with solemnity. I stared for several minutes in silence, facing him and holding his brilliant eyes with an answering passion in my own. Through the open window came a sighing draught of wind; a sense of increasing warmth came with it; it seemed to me that the pictured fire and wind were close upon me, as though the essential life of these two common elements were rising upon me from within; and I turned, trembling slightly, aware of the valley behind me in the moonlight. The chalet, it seemed, already was surrounded. The Presences stood close.\n\n\"They also know,\" he whispered; \"they wait for the moment when we shall require them \u2014 the three of us together. She, too, desires them. The necessity is upon us all.\"\n\nWith the words there rose a certainty in me that knew no vain denial. The sense of reality and truth came over me again. He was in conscious league with powers of Nature that held their share of universal intelligence; we three had returned at last together. The approach of semi-spiritual intelligences that operate through phenomenal effects \u2014 in this case wind and fire \u2014 was no imaginative illusion. The channels here were open.\n\n\"No sparrow falls, no feather is misplaced,\" he whispered, \"but it is known and the furthest star responds. From our life in another star we brought our knowledge first. But we used it here \u2014 on the earth. It was you \u2014 your body \u2014 that we used as channel. It was your return that prevented our completion. Your dread of today is memory\"\n\nThere broke in upon his unfinished sentence an interrupting voice that turned me into stone. Ringing with marvellous authority, half sweet, half terrible, it came along the wooden walls of that narrow corridor, entered the very room about our ears, then died away in the open valley at our backs. The awakened Self of \"Mrs. LeVallon\" called us:\n\n\"Concerighe... Silvatela...!\" sounded through the quiet night.\n\nThe voice, with its clear accents, plunged into me with an incredible appeal of some forgotten woe and joy combined. It was a voice I recognised, yet one unheard by me for ages. Power and deep delight rose in me, but with them a flash of stupid, earthly terror. It sounded again, breaking the silence of the early morning, but this time nearer than before. It was close outside the door. I felt Julius catch me quickly by the arm. My terror vanished at his touch.\n\nThe tread of bare feet upon the boards was audible; the same second the door pushed open and she stood upon the threshold, a tall, white figure with fixed and luminous eyes, and hair that fell in a dark cloud to the waist. Into the zone of pallid candle-light that the moon made paler still, she passed against the darkness of the outer passage, white and splendid, like some fair. cloud that swims into the open sky. And as wind stirs the fringes of a cloud, the breeze from the window stirred the edges of her drapery where the falling hair seemed to gather it in below the waist.\n\nIt was the wife of Julius, but the wife of Julius changed. Like some vision of ethereal beauty she stood before us, yet a vision that was alive. For she moved, she breathed, she spoke. It was both the woman as I knew her actually Today, and the woman as I had known her \u2014 Yesterday. The partial aspect that used this modern body was somehow supplemented \u2014 fulfilled by the presentment of her entire Self. The whole series of past sections came up to reinforce the little present, and I gazed upon the complete soul of her, rather than upon the fragment that made bread now in the kitchen and had known domestic service. The bearing was otherwise, the attitude another, the very fashion of her features changed. Her walk, her gestures, her mien had undergone enthralling alteration.\n\nThe stream of time went backwards as I gazed, or, rather, it stopped flowing altogether and held steady in a sea that had no motion. I sought the familiar points in her, plunging below the surface with each separate one to find what I\u2014 remembered. The eyes, wide open in the somnambulistic lucidity, were no longer of a nondescript mild grey, but shone with the splendour I had already half surprised in them before; the poise of the neck, the set of the shoulders beneath the white linen of her simple nightdress, had subtly, marvellously changed. She stood in challenge to a different world. It seemed to me that I saw the Soul of her, attended by the retinue of memories, experience, knowledge of all its past, summed up sublimely in a single moment. She was superb.\n\nThe outward physical change was, possibly, of the slightest, yet wore just that touch of significant alteration which conveyed authority. The tall, lithe figure moved with an imperial air; she raised her arm towards the open window; she spoke. The voice was very quiet, but it held new depth, sonority and accent. She had not seen me yet where I stood in the shadows by the wall, for Julius screened me somewhat, but I experienced that familiar clutch of dread upon the heart that once before \u2014 ages and ages ago \u2014 had overwhelmed me. Memory poured back upon my own soul too.\n\n\"Concerighe,\" she uttered, looking full at Julius while her hand pointed towards the moonlit valley. \"They stand ready. The air is breaking and the fire burns. Then where is he? I called him.\"\n\nAnd Julius, looking from her face to mine, answered softly: \"He is beside you \u2014 close. He is ready with us too. But the appointed time \u2014 the Equinox \u2014 is not quite yet.\"\n\nThe pointing hand sank slowly to her side. She turned her face towards me and she \u2014 saw. The gaze fell full upon my own, the stately head inclined a little. We both advanced; she took my outstretched hand, and at the touch a shock as of wind and fire seemed to drive against me with almost physical violence. I heard her voice.\n\n\"Silvatela \u2014 we meet \u2014 again!\" Her eyes ran over in a smile of recognition as the old familiar name came floating to me through the little room. But for the firm clasp of her hand I should have dropped, for there was a sudden weakness in my knees, and my senses reeled a moment. \"We meet again,\" she repeated, while her splendid gaze held mine, \"yet to you it is a dream. Memory in you lies unawakened still. And the fault is ours.\"\n\nShe turned to Julius; she took his hand too; we stood linked together thus; and she smiled into her husband's eyes. \"His memory,\" she said, \"is dim. He has forgotten that we wronged him. Yet forgiveness is in his soul that only half remembers.\" And the man who was her husband of Today said low in answer: \"He forgives and he will help us now. His love forgives. The delay we caused his soul he may forget, but to the Law there is no forgetting possible. We must \u2014 we shall \u2014 repay.\"\n\nThe clasp of our hands strengthened; we stood there linked together by the chain of love both past and present that knows neither injustice nor forgetting.\n\nThen, with the words, as also with the clasping hands that joined us into one, some pent up barrier broke down within my soul, and a flood of light burst over me within that made all things for a moment clear. There came a singular commotion of the moonlit air outside the window, as if the tide that brimmed the valley overflowed and poured about us in the room. I stood transfixed and speechless before the certainty that Nature, in the guise of two great elements, flooded in and shared our passionate moment of recognition. A blinding confusion of times and places struggled for possession of me. For a tempest of memories surged past, driven tumultuously by sheeted flame and rushing wind. The inner hurricane lasted but a second. It rose, it fell, it passed away. I was aware that I saw down into deep, prodigious depths as into a pool of water, crystal clear; veil lifted after veil; memory revived.\n\nI shuddered; for it seemed my present self slipped out of sight while this more ancient consciousness usurped its place. My little modern confidence collapsed; the mind that doubts and criticises, but never knows, fell back into its smaller role. The sum-total that was Me remembered and took command. And realising myself part of a living universe, I answered her:\n\n\"With love and sympathy,\" I uttered in no uncertain tones, \"and with complete forgiveness too.\"\n\nIn that little bedroom of a mountain chalet, lit by the moon and candle-light, we stood together, our bodies joined by the clasp of hands, and our ancient souls united in a single purpose.\n\nI looked into the eyes of this great woman, imperially altered in her outward aspect, magnificent in the towering soul of her; I looked at Julius, stately as some hierophantic figure who mastered Nature by comprehending her; I felt their hands, his own firm and steady, hers clasping softly, tenderly, yet with an equal strength; and I realised that I stood thus between them, not merely in this isolated mountain valley, but in the full tide of life whose source rose in the fountains of an immemorial past, Nature and human-nature linked together in a relationship that was a practical reality. Our three comrade-souls were reunited in an act of restitution; sharing, or about to share, a ceremony that had cosmic meaning.\n\nAnd the beauty of the woman stole upon my heart, bringing the loveliness of the universe, while Julius brought its strength.\n\n\"This time,\" I said aloud, \"you shall not fail. I am with you both in sympathy, forgiveness, \u2014 love.\"\n\nTheir hands increased the pressure on my own.\n\nHer eyes held mine as she replied: \"This duty that we owe to Nature and to you \u2014 so long \u2014 so long ago.\"\n\n\"To me?\" I faltered.\n\nWith shining eyes, and a smile divinely tender, she answered: \"Love shall repay. We have delayed you by our deep mistake.\"\n\n\"We shall undo the wrong we worked upon you,\" I heard Julius say. \"We stole the channel of your body. And we failed.\"\n\n\"My love and sympathy are yours,\" I repeated, as we drew closer still together. \"I bear you no ill-will...\"\n\nAnd then she continued gravely, but ever with that solemn beauty lighting up her face:\n\n\"Oh, Silvatela, it seems so small a thing in the long, long journey of our souls. We were too ambitious only. The elemental Powers we tried to summon through your vacated body are still unhoused. The fault was not yours; it was our ambition and our faithlessness. I loved you to your undoing \u2014 you sacrificed yourself so willingly, loving me, alas, too well. The failure came. Instead of becoming as the gods, we bear this burden of a mighty debt. We owe it both to you and to the universe. Fear took us at the final moment \u2014 and you returned too soon \u2014 robbed of the high teaching that was yours by right, your progress delayed thereby, your memory clouded now...\"\n\n\"My development took another turning,\" I said, hardly knowing whence the knowledge came to me, \"no more than that. It was for love of you that I returned too soon \u2014 the fault, was mine. It was for the best \u2014 there has been no real delay.\" But there mingled in me a memory both clouded and unclouded. There was a confusion beyond me to unravel. I only knew our love was marvellous, although the fuller motives remained entangled. \"It is all forgiven,\" I murmured.\n\n\"Your forgiveness,\" she answered softly, \"is of perfect love. We loved each other then \u2014 nor have we quite forgotten now. This time, at least, we shall ensure success. The Powers stand ready, waiting; we are united; we shall act as one. At the Equinox we shall restore the balance; and memory and knowledge shall be yours a hundredfold at last.\"\n\nThe voice of Julius interrupted, though so low it was scarcely audible:\n\n\"I offer myself. It is just and right, not otherwise. The risk must be all mine. Once accomplished\" \u2014 he turned to me with power in his face \u2014 \"we shall provide you with the privilege you lost through us. Our error will then be fully expiated and the equilibrium restored. It is an expiation and a sacrifice. Nature in this valley works with us now, and behind it is the universe \u2014 all, all aware...\"\n\nIt seemed to me she leaped at him across the space between us. Our hands released. Perhaps, with the breaking of our physical contact, some measure of receptiveness went out of me, or it may have been the suddenness of the unexpected action that confused me. I no longer fully understood. Some bright clear flame of comprehension wavered, dimmed, went out in me. Even the words that passed between them then I did not properly catch. I saw that she clasped him round the neck while she uttered vehement words that he resisted, turning aside as with passionate refusal. It was \u2014 this, at least, I grasped before the return of reason in me broke our amazing union and left confusion in the place of harmony \u2014 that each one sought to take the risk upon himself, herself. The channel of evocation \u2014 a human system \u2014 I dimly saw, was the offering each one burned to make. The risk, in some uncomprehended way, was grave. And I stepped forward, though but half understanding what it was I did. I offered, to the best of my memory and belief \u2014 offered myself as a channel, even as I had offered or permitted long ago in love for her.\n\nFor I had discerned the truth, and knew deep suffering, nor cared what happened to me. It was the older Self in her that gave me love, while her self of Today \u2014 the upper self \u2014 loved Julius. Mine was the old subconscious love unrecognised by her normal self; the love of the daily, normal self was his.\n\nThe look upon their faces stopped me. They moved up closer, taking my hands again. The moonlight fell in a silver pool upon the wooden flooring just between us; it clothed her white-clad figure with its radiance; it shone reflected in the eyes of Julius. I heard the tinkling of the little stream outside, beginning its long journey to an earthly sea. The nearer pine trees rustled. And her voice came with this moonlight, wind and water, as though the quiet night became articulate.\n\n\"So great is your forgiveness, so deep our ancient love,\" she murmured. And while she said it, both he and she together made the mightiest gesture I have ever seen upon small human outlines \u2014 a gesture of resignation and refusal that yet conveyed power as though a forest swayed or some great sea rolled back its flood. There was this sublime suggestion in the wordless utterance by which they made me know my offering was impossible. For Nature behind both of them said also No...\n\nThen, with a quiet motion that seemed gliding rather than the taking of actual steps, her figure withdrew slowly towards the door. Her face turned from me as when the moon slips down behind a cloud. Erect and stately, as though a marble statue passed from my sight by some interior motion of its own, her figure entered the zone of shadow just beyond the door. The sound of her feet upon the boards was scarcely audible. The narrow passage took her. She was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 245", + "text": "I stood alone with julius, Nature alive and stirring strangely, as with aggressive power, just beyond the narrow window-sill on which he leaned.\n\n\"You understand,\" he murmured, \"and you remember too \u2014 at last.\"\n\nI made no reply. There are moments when extraordinary emotions, beyond expression either of tears or laughter, move the heart as with the glory of another world. And one of these was certainly upon me now. I knew things that I did not understand. A pageant of incomparable knowledge went past me, yet, as it were, just out of reach. The memories that offered themselves were too enormous \u2014 and too different \u2014 to be grasped intelligently by the mind.\n\nAnd yet one thing I realised clearly: that the elemental powers of Nature already existing in every man and woman in small degree, could know an increase, an intensification, which, directed rightly, might exalt humanity. The consciousness of those olden days knew direct access to Nature. And the method, for which no terms exist Today in any spoken language, was that feeling-with which is adoration, and that desiring sympathy which is worship. The script of Nature wrote it clear. To read it was to act it out. The audacity of their fire-stealing ambition in the past I understood, and so forgave. My memory, further than this, refused to clear...\n\nI remember that we talked together for a space; and it was longer than I realised at the time, for before we separated the moon was down behind the ridges and the valley lay in a single blue-black shadow. There was confusion on my heart and mind. The self in me that asked and answered seemed half of Today and half of Yesterday.\n\n\"She remembered,\" Julius said below his breath yet with deep delight; \"she recognised us both. In the morning she will have again forgotten, for she knows not how to bring the experiences of deep sleep over into her upper consciousness.\"\n\n\"She said 'they waited.' There are \u2014 others \u2014 in this valley?\" It was more a statement to myself than a question, but he answered it:\n\n\"Everywhere and always there are others. But just now in this valley they are near to us and active. I have sent out the call.\"\n\n\"You have sent out the call,\" I repeated without surprise and yet with darkened meaning. \"Yes, I knew \u2014 I was aware of it.\" My older consciousness was sinking down again.\n\n\"By worship,\" he interrupted, \"the worship of many weeks. We have worshipped and felt-with, intensifying the link already established by those who lived before us here. Your attitude is also worship. Together we shall command an effective summons that cannot fail. Already they are aware of us, and at the Equinox their powers will come close \u2014 closer than love or hunger.\"\n\n\"In ourselves,\" I muttered. \"Aware of their activities in ourselves!\"\n\nAnd my mouth went suddenly dry as I heard his quiet answer:\n\n\"We shall feel their immense activities in ourselves as they return to their appointed places whence we first evoked them. Through one of our three bodies they must pass \u2014 the bodiless ones.\" A silence fell between us. The blood beat audibly in my ears like drums.\n\n\"They need a body \u2014 again?\" I whispered.\n\nHe bowed his head. \"The channel, as before,\" he whispered with deep intensity, \"of a human organism \u2014 a brain, a mind, a body.\" And, seeing perhaps that I stared with a bewilderment half fear and half refusal, he added quietly, \"In the raw, they are too vast for human use, their naked, glassy essence impossible to hold. They must mingle first with our own smaller powers that are akin to them, and thus take on that restraint which enables the human will to harness their colossal strength. Alone I could not accomplish this, but with the three of us, merged by our love into a single unit\"\n\n\"But the risk \u2014 you both spoke of?\" I asked it impatiently, yet it was only a thick whisper that I heard.\n\nThere was a little pause before he answered me.\n\n\"There are two risks,\" he said with utmost gravity in his voice and face. \"The descent of such powers may cause a shattering of the one on whom they first arrive \u2014 he is the sacrifice. My death \u2014 any consequent delay \u2014 might thus be the expiation I offer in the act of their release. That is the first, the lesser risk.\"\n\nHe paused, then added: \"But I shall not fail.\"\n\n\"And \u2014 should you!\" My voice had dwindled horribly.\n\n\"The Powers, once summoned, would \u2014 automatically \u2014 seek another channel: the channel for their return \u2014 in case I failed. That is the second and the greater risk.\"\n\n\"Your wife?\" The words came out with such difficulty that they were scarcely audible. But Julius heard them.\n\nHe shook his head. \"For herself there is no danger,\" he answered. \"My love of today, and yours of yesterday protect her. Nor has it anything to do with you,\" he added, seeing the touch of fear that flashed from my eyes beyond my power to conceal it. \"The Powers, deprived of my control in the case of my collapse beneath the strain, would follow the law of their own beings automatically. They would seek the easiest channel they could find. They would follow the line of least resistance.\"\n\nAnd, realising that it was the other human occupant of the house he meant, I experienced a curious sensation of pity and relief; and with a hint of grandeur in my thought, I knew with what fine pathetic willingness, with what wholehearted simplicity of devotion, this faithful \"younger soul\" would offer himself to help in so big a purpose \u2014 if he understood.\n\nIt was with an appalling shock that I reahsed my mistake. Julius, watching me closely, divined my instant thought. He made a gesture of dissent. To my complete amazement, I saw him shake his head.\n\n\"An empty and deserted organism, as yours was at the time we used it for our evocation,\" he said slowly; \"an organism unable to offer resistance owing to its being unoccupied \u2014 that is the channel, if it were available, which they would take. When the soul is out \u2014 or not yet \u2014 in.\"\n\nWe gazed fixedly at one another for a time I could not measure. I knew his awful meaning. For to me, in that first moment of comprehension, it seemed too terrible, too incredible for belief. I staggered over to the open window. Julius came after me and laid his hand upon my shoulder.\n\n\"The body is but the instrument,\" I heard him murmur; \"the vehicle of the soul that uses it. Only at the moment of birth does a soul move in to take possession. The parents provide it, helpless and ignorant as to who eventually shall take command. And if this thing happened \u2014 though the risk is small\"\n\nI turned and faced him as he stopped.\n\n\"A monster!\"\n\n\"An elemental being, a child of the elements\"\n\n\"Non-human?\" I gasped.\n\n\"Nature and human-nature linked,\" he replied with curious reverence. \"A cosmic being born in a human body. Only I shall not fail.\"\n\nAnd before I could find another word to utter, or even acknowledge the quick pressure of his hand upon my own, I heard his step upon the passage boards, and found myself alone again. I stood by the open window, gazing into the deep, star-lit sky above this mountain valley on our little, friendly Earth, prey to emotions that derived from another, but forgotten planet \u2014 emotions, therefore, that no \"earthly\" words can attempt to fathom or describe..." + }, + { + "title": "The Attempted Restitution", + "text": "\u2002\"Let us consider wisdom first.\n\n\u2002\"Can we be wiser by reason of something which we have forgotten? Unquestionably we can... A man who dies after acquiring knowledge \u2014 and all men acquire some \u2014 might enter his new life, deprived indeed of his knowledge, but not deprived of the increased strength and delicacy of mind which he had gained in acquiring the knowledge. And if so, he will he wiser in the second life because of what has happened in the first.\n\n\u2002\"Of course he loses something in losing the actual knowledge... But... is not even this loss really a gain? For the mere accumulation of knowledge, if memory never ceased, would soon become overwhelming, and worse than useless. What better fate would we wish for than to leave such accumulations behind us, preserving their greatest value in the mental faculties which have been strengthened by their acquisition.\" \u2014 J. M'Taggart\n\nAs I sit here in the little library of my Streatham house, trying to record faithfully events of so many years ago, I find myself at a point now where the difficulty well-nigh overwhelms me. For what happened in that valley rises before me now as though it had been some strange and prolonged enchantment; it comes back to me almost in the terms of dream or vision.\n\nIf it be possible for a man to enjoy two states of consciousness simultaneously, then that possibility was mine. I know not. I can merely state that at the time my normal consciousness seemed replaced by another mode, another order, that usurped it, and that this usurping consciousness was incalculably older than anything known to men today; further, also, that the three of us had revived it from some immemorial preexistence. It was memory.\n\nThus it seemed to me at the time; thus, therefore, I must record it. And so completely was the change effected in me that belief came with it. In no one of us, indeed, lay the slightest hint of doubt. What happened must otherwise have been the tawdriest superstition, whereas actually there was solemnity in it, even grandeur. The performance our sacramental attitude of mind made holy, was true with the reality of an older time when Nature \u2014 Worship was effective in some spiritual sense far beyond what we term animism in our retrospective summary of the past. We did, each one of us, and in more or less degree, share the life of Nature by the inner process of feeling-with that life. Her natural forces augmented us indubitably \u2014 there was intelligent cooperation.\n\nToday, of course, the forces in humanity drive in quite another direction; Nature is inanimate and Pan is dead; another attitude obtains \u2014 thinking, not feeling, is our ideal; men's souls are scattered beyond the hope of unity and the sword of formal creeds sharply separates them' everywhere. We regard ourselves proudly as separate from Nature. Yet, even now, as I struggle to complete this record in the suburban refuge my old age has provided for me, I seem aware of changes stealing over the face of the world once more. Like another vast dream beginning, I feel, perhaps, that man's consciousness is slowly spreading outwards once again; it is reentering Nature, too, in various movements; the wireless note is marvellously sounding; on all sides singular phenomena that seem new suggest that there is no limit \u2014 to extension of consciousness \u2014 to interior human activity. Some voice from the long ago is divinely trumpeting across our little globe.\n\nThis, possibly, is an old man's dream. Yet it helps me vaguely to understand how, in that enchanted valley, the three of us may actually have realised another, older point of view which amounted even to a different type of consciousness. The slight analogy presents itself; I venture to record it. Only on some such supposition could I, a normal, commonplace product of the day, have consented to remain in the valley without repugnance and distress, much less to have participated willingly as I did in all that happened. For I was almost wholeheartedly in and of it. My moments of criticism emerged, but passed. I saw existence from some cosmic point of view that presented a human life as an insignificant moment in an eternal journey that was related both to the armies of the stars and to the blades of grass along the small, cool rivulet. At the same time this vast perspective lifted each tiny detail into a whole that inspired these details with sacramental value whose meaning affected everything. To live with the universe made life the performance of a majestic ceremony; to live against it was to creep aside into a cul de sac. And so this small item of balance we three, as a group, desired to restore was both an insignificant and a mighty act of worship.\n\nYet, whereas to myself the happenings were so intense as to seem terrific even, to one who had not felt them \u2014 as I did \u2014 they must seem hardly events or happenings at all. I say \"felt,\" because my perception of what occurred was \"feeling\" more than anything else. I enjoyed this other mode of existence known to the human spirit in an earlier day, and brought, apparently, to earth from our experience upon another planet.\n\nThe happenings, to me, seemed momentous \u2014 yet they consisted largely of interior changes. They were inner facts. And such inner facts \"Today\" regards as less real than outer events, dismissing them as subjective. The collapse of a roof is real, the perception of an eternal verity is a mood! And if my attempt to describe halts between what is alternately bald and overstrained, it is because modern words can only stammer in dealing with experiences that have so entirely left the racial memory.\n\nFor myself the test of their actuality lies in the death that resulted \u2014 an indubitable fact at any rate! \u2014 and in the birth that followed it a little later \u2014 another unquestionable \"fact.\"\n\nI may advantageously summarise the essential gist of the entire matter. I would do so for this reason: that physical memory grows dim on looking back so many years and that the events in the chalet grow more and more elusive, so that I find a sharp general outline helpful to guide me in this subsequent record. Further, the portion I am now about to describe depends wholly upon a yet older memory, the memory \u2014 as it seemed to me \u2014 of thousands of years ago. This more ancient memory came partially to me only. I saw much I could not understand or realise, and so can merely report baldly. There was fluctuation. Perhaps, after all, my earlier consciousness was never restored with sufficient completeness to reconstitute the entire comprehension that had belonged to it when it was my natural means of perceiving, knowing, being. Words, therefore, obviously fail.\n\nLet me say then, as Julius himself might have said, that in some far-off earlier existence the three of us had offended a cosmic law, and that for the inevitable readjustment of this error, its expiation, the three of us must first of all find ourselves reincarnated once again together. This, after numerous intervening centuries, had come to pass.\n\nThe nature of the offence seemed crudely this: that, in the days when elemental Nature\u2013Powers were accessible to men, we used two of these \u2014 those operating behind wind and fire \u2014 for selfish instead of for racial purposes. Apparently they had been evoked by means of a human body which furnished their channel of approach. It was available because untenanted, as already described. I state merely the belief and practice of an earlier day. Special guardians protected the vacated bodies from undesirable invasion, and while Julius and the woman performed this duty, they had been tempted to unlawful use for purposes of their own. The particular body was my own: I was the channel of evocation. That I had, however, been persuaded to permit such usage was as certain as that it was the love between the woman and myself that was the reason of such permission. How and why I cannot state, because, simply, I could not \u2014 remember. But that the failure of their experiment resulted in my sudden recall into the body, and the loss, therefore, of teaching and knowledge I should have otherwise enjoyed \u2014 this had delayed my soul's advance and explained also why, Today, memory failed in me and my soul had lagged behind in its advance. Somewhat in this way LeVallon stated it.\n\nWhere this ancient experiment took place, in what country and age, I cannot pretend to affirm. The knowledge-made use of, however, seems to have been, in its turn, a yet earlier memory still, and of an existence upon a planet nearer to the sun, since Fire and Wind were there recognised as a means by which deific Powers became accessible \u2014 through worship. That the human spirit was then clothed in bodies of lighter mould, and that Wind and Fire were viewed as manifestations of deity, turns my imagination, if not my definite memory, to a planet like Mercury, where gigantic Heat and therefore mighty Winds would be imposing vehicles of conveying energy from their source \u2014 the Sun.\n\nFor the expiation of the error, a reenactment of the actual scene of its committal was necessary. It must be acted out to be effective \u2014 a ceremony. The channel, again, of a human system was essential as before. The struggles that eventually ensued, complicated by the stress of personal emotion \u2014 the individual attempts each participator made to become the channel and so the possible sacrifice \u2014 this caused, apparently, the awful failure. Emotion destroyed the unity of the group. For Julius was unable to direct the Powers evoked. They were compelled to seek a channel elsewhere, and they automatically availed themselves of that which offered the least resistance. The birth that subsequently followed, accordingly, was a human body informed literally by these two elemental Powers; and it is in the hope that of those who chance to read these notes, someone may perhaps be aware of the existence in the world of this unique being \u2014 it is in this hope primarily, I say, that the record I have attempted is made, that it may survive my death which cannot now be very long delayed.\n\nOne word more, however, I am compelled to add:\n\nI am aware that my so easy surrender to the spell of LeVallon's personality and ideas must seem difficult to justify. Even those of my intimates, who may read this record after I am gone, may feel that my capitulation was due to what men now term hypnotic influence; whereas, that some part of me accepted with joy and welcome is the actual truth \u2014 it was some lesser part that objected and disapproved.\n\nTo myself, as to those few who may find these notes, I owe this somewhat tardy confession of personal bias. That I have concealed it in this Record hitherto seems because my \"educated\" self must ever struggle to deny it.\n\nFor there have always been two men in me \u2014 more than in the usual sense of good and evil. One, up to date and commonplace, enjoys the game of nineteenth century life, interests itself in motors, telephones, and mechanical progress generally, finds Socialism intriguing and even politics absorbing; while the other, holding all that activity of which such things are symbols, in curious contempt, belongs to the gods alone know what. It remains essentially inscrutable, incalculable, its face masked by an indecipherable smile. It worships the sun, believes in Magic, accepts the influences of the stars, and acknowledges with sweet reverence extended hierarchies of Beings, both lower and higher than the stage at which humanity now finds itself.\n\nIn youth, of course, this other self was stronger than in later years; yet, though submerged, it has never been destroyed. It seemed an older aspect of my divided being that declined to die. For periods of varying duration, the modern part would deny it as the superstition of primitive animistic ignorance; but, biding its time, it would rise to the surface and take the reins again. The modern supremacy passed, the older attitude held authoritative sway. The Universe then belonged to it, alive in every detail; there was communion with trees and winds and streams; the thrill of night became articulate; it was concerned with distant stars; the sun changed the earth once more into a vast temple-floor. I was not apart from any item, large or small, on earth or in the heavens, while myth and legend, poetry and folk-lore were but the broken remnants of a once extended faith, a mighty worship that was both of God and knew the gods.\n\nAt such times the drift of modern life seemed in another \u2014 a minor \u2014 direction altogether. The two selves in me could not mingle, could not even compromise. The recent one seemed trivial, but the older one pure gold. It dwelt, this latter, in loneliness, sweetly-prized, perhaps, but isolated from all minds of today worth knowing, because its mode of being was not theirs. A loneliness, however, not intolerable, since it was aware of lifting joy, of power no mere contrivance could conceive, and of a majestic beauty nothing of today could even simulate... Societies, moreover, called secret, fraternities labelled magical and hierophantic, were all too trumpery to feed its ancient longings, too charlatan to offer it companionship, too compromising to obtain results. Among modern conditions I found no mode of life that answered to its imperious call in me. It seemed an echo and a memory.\n\nAs I grew older, both science and religion told me it must be denied. Respectful of the former, I sought some reasonable basis for these strange burning beliefs that flamed up with this older self \u2014 in vain. Unjustifiable, according to all knowledge at my disposal, they remained. History went back step by step to that darkness whence ignorance emerged; evolution traced a gradual rise from animal conditions; to no dim, former state of exalted civilisation, either remembered or imagined, could this deeper part of me track its home and origin. Yet that home, that origin, I felt, existed, and were accessible. I could no more resign their actuality than I could cease to love, to hate, to live. The mere thought of them woke emotions independent of my will, contemptuous of my intellect \u2014 emotions that were of indubitable reality. They remained convictions.\n\nHad I, then, known some state antedating history altogether, some unfabled land of which storied Atlantis, itself a fragment, lingered as a remnant of some immenser life? Had I experienced a mode of being less cabined than the one I now experienced in a body of blood and flesh \u2014 another order of consciousness, yet identity retained \u2014 upon another star?... The centuries geology counts backwards were but moments, the life of a planet only a little instant in the universal calendar. Was there, a million years ago, a civilisation of another kind, too ethereal to leave its signatures in sand and rocks, yet in its natural simplicity nearer, perhaps, to deity? Was here the origin of my unrewarded yearnings? Could reincarnation, casting back across the aeons to lovelier or braver planets, give the clue? And did this older self trail literally clouds of glory from a golden age of light and heat and splendour that lay nearer to the shining centre of our corner of the heavens...?\n\nAt intervals I flung my queries like leaves upon the wind; and the leaves came back to me upon the wind. I found no answer. Speculation became gradually less insistent, though the yearnings never died. Deeper than doubt or question, they seemed ingrained \u2014 that my preexistence has been endless, that I continue always... And it was this strange, buried self in me, already beginning to fade a little when I went to Motfield Close to train my modern mind in modem knowledge \u2014 it was this curious older self that Julius LeVallon vitalised anew. Back came the flood of mighty questions:\u2014 Whence have we come? From what dim corner of the unmeasured cosmos are we derived, descended, making our little way on to the earth? Where have these hints of an immenser life their sweet, terrific origin, and \u2014 why this unbridged hiatus in our memory...?\n\nThe subsequent events lie somewhat confused in me until the night that heralded the Equinox. Whether two days or three intervened between the night-scene of Mrs. LeVallon's Older Self already described, and the actual climax, I cannot remember clearly. The sequence of hours went so queerly sliding; incidents of external kind were so few that the interval remained unmarked; little happened in the sense of outward happenings on which the mind can fasten by way of measurement. We lived, it seems, so close to Nature that those time-divisions we call hours and days flowed with us in a smooth undifferentiated stream. I think we were too much in Nature to observe the size or length of any particular parcels. We just flowed forward with the tide itself. Yet to explain this, now that for years I am grown normal and ordinary again, is hardly possible. I only remember that larger scale; I can no longer realise it.\n\nI recall, however, the night of that conversation when Julius left me to my hurricane of thoughts and feelings, and think I am right in saying it immediately preceded the September day that ushered in the particular \"attitude\" of our earth towards the rest of the Universe we call the Autumnal Equinox.\n\nSleep and resistance were equally impossible; I swam with an enormous current upon a rising tide. And this tide bore stars and worlds within its irresistible momentum. It bore also little flowers; moisture felt, before it is seen, as dew or rain; heat that is latent before the actual flame is visible; and air that lies everywhere until the rush of wind insists on recognition. I was aware of a prophecy that included almost menace. An uneasy sense that preparations of immense, portentous character were incessantly in progress, not in the house and in ourselves alone, but in the entire sweep of forest, vale and mountain, pressed upon me from all sides. Nature conspired, I felt, through her most usual channels to drive into a corner where she would drip over, so to speak, into amazing manifestation. And that corner, waiting and inviting, was ourselves...\n\nTowards morning I fell asleep, and when I woke a cloudless day lay clear and fresh upon the world, the meadows shone with dew, cobwebs shimmered past my open window, and a keen breeze from the heights stung my nostrils with the scent from miles of forest. A sparkling vitality poured almost visibly with the air and sunshine into my human blood. I bathed and dressed. Frost had laid silvery fingers upon the valley during the night, and the shadows beneath the woods still shone in white irregular patches of a pristine loveliness. The feeling that Nature brimmed over was even stronger than before, and I went downstairs half conscious that the \"corner\" we prepared would show itself somehow fuller, different. The little arena waiting for it \u2014 that arena occupied by our human selves \u2014 would proclaim the risen tide. I almost expected to find Julius and his wife expressing in their physical persons the advent of this power, their very bodies, gestures, voices increased and grown upon a larger scale. And when I met them at the breakfast table, two normal, ordinary persons, merely full of the exhilarating autumn morning, I knew a moment of surprise that at the same time included relief, though possibly, too, a touch of disappointment. They were both so simple and so natural.\n\nIt brought me up short, as though before a promised hope not justified, a balked anticipation. But the next moment my mistake was clear. The sense of something dwindled gave place to its very opposite \u2014 a fuller realisation. The three of us were so intimate \u2014 I might say so divinely intimate \u2014 that my failure to see them \"grander\" arose from my attempt to see them \"separate\" \u2014 from myself. For actually we floated, all three, upon the risen tide together. It was the \"mind\" in me that sounded the old false note. Having increased like themselves, I was of equal stature with them; to see them \"different\" was impossible.\n\nAnd this amazing quality was characteristic of all that followed. Ever since my arrival I had been slowly rising with the tide that brimmed the valley now to the very lips of the surrounding mountains. It brimmed our hearts as well. My companions were quiet because they, like myself, were part of it. There was no sense of disproportion or exaggeration, much less of dislocation; we shared Nature's powers without effort, without struggle, as naturally as sunshine, wind or rain. We stood within; the day contained all three. The Ceremony, which was living-with Nature, tuned to the universal life, had been in progress from the instant Julius had welcomed me a week ago. Our attitude and the earth's were one. The Equinox was in us too.\n\nIn that moment when we met at breakfast, the flash of clearer sight left all this beyond dispute. Memory shot back in a lightning glance over recent sensations and events. I realised my gradual growth into the larger scale, I grasped the significance of the various moods and tenses my changing consciousness had known as in a kind of initiation. Premonitions of another mode of mind had stolen upon me out of ordinary things. The habitual had revealed its marvellous hidden beauty. There had been transmutation. The ensouling life behind broke loose everywhere, even through the elements themselves: but particularly through the two of them that are so closely levelled to the little division we call human life: air-things and fire-things had become alert and eager. There was commotion in the palaces of Wind and Fire.\n\nAnd so the bigger truth explained itself to me. What happened later seems only incredible on looking back at it from my present dwindled consciousness. At the time it was natural and quiet. A tourist, passing through our lonely valley, need not have been aware either of tumult or of wonder. He would have been too remote from us, too centred in the consciousness of Today that accepts only what is expected, or explicable \u2014 too different, in a word, to have noticed anything beyond the presence of three strangely quiet people in a lonely chalet of the mountains.\n\nBut for us, the gamut of experience had stretched; there was in our altered state both a microscope and telescope; but a casual intruder, unprovided with either, must have gone his way, I think, unaware, unstimulated, and uninformed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 247", + "text": "\"With virtue the point is perhaps clearer... I have for \u2014 gotten the greater number of the good and evil acts which I have done in my present life. And yet each must have left a trace on my character. And so a man may carry over into his next life the dispositions and tendencies which he has gained by the moral contests of this life, and the value of those experiences will not have been destroyed by the death which has destroyed the memory of them.\" \u2014 Ibid.\n\nThe day that followed lives with me still as an experience of paradise beyond intelligible belief. Yet I unquestionably experienced it. The touch of dread was but the warning of the little mind, which shrank from a joy too vast for it to comprehend. Of Mrs. LeVallon this was similarly true. Julius alone, sure and steadfast in the state from which since early boyhood he had never lapsed, combined Reason and Intuition in that perfect achievement towards which humanity perhaps slowly seems moving now. He remained an image of strength and power; he lived in full consciousness what she and I lived half unconsciously. Yet to record the acts and words which proved it I find now stammeringly difficult; they were so ordinary. The point of view which revealed their \"otherness\" I have so wholly lost.\n\n\"The Equinox comes tonight \u2014 the pause in Nature,\" he said at breakfast, joy in his voice and eyes. \"We shall have greater life. The moment is ours, because we know how to use it.\" Yet what pregnant truth came with the quiet words, what realisation of simple, overflowing beauty, what incalculable power, no language known to me can possibly express.\n\nAnd his wife, equally, was aglow with happiness and splendour as of a forgotten age. In myself, too, remained no vestige of denial or alarm. The day seemed a long, sweet period without divisions, a big, simple sacrament of unconditioned bliss. Memory came back upon me in a flood, yet a memory of states, and never once of scenes or places. I relived a time, a state, when men knew greater purposes than they realised, dimly and instinctively perhaps, not blindly altogether, yet taught of Nature and the Nature Powers close upon their daily lives. They knew these Powers direct, experiencing them, existing side by side with them in definite mutual relationship. They neither reasoned nor, possibly, even thought. They knew.\n\nFor my nature was no longer in opposition to the rest of things, nor set over against the universe, as apart from it. I felt my acts related in a vital manner to the planet, as to the entire cosmos, and the elemental side of Nature moved alongside of my most trivial motions. The drift of happenings, in things \"external\" to me, were related to that drift of inner sensation that I called myself. Thoughts, desires, emotions found themselves completed in trees and grass, in rocks and flowers, in the flowing rivulet, in the whir of wind, the drip of water, the fire of the sunshine. They told me things about myself; they revealed a pregnant story of information by their attitudes and aspects; they were related to my very fate and character. The sublime simplicity of it lies beyond description. For this sacramental tone changed ordinary daily life into something splendid as eternity. I shared the elemental power of \"inanimate\" things. They affected me and I affected them. The Universe itself, but especially the known and friendly Earth, was hand in hand and arm in arm with me. It was feeling-with; it was the cosmic point of view.\n\nAnd thus, I suppose, it was that I realised humanity as but a little portion of the whole \u2014 important, of course, as the animalculas in a drop of water are important, yet living towards extinction only if they live apart from the surrounding ocean which divinely mothers them. To this divinity seemed due the presumption with which man Today imagines himself the centre of this colossal ocean, and lays down the law so insolently for the entire Universe. The birth of a soul \u2014 its few years of gaining experience in a material form called body \u2014 was vital certainly for itself, yet whether that body should be informed by a \"human\" soul, or by another type of life of elemental kind \u2014 this, seen in proportion to the gigantic scale of universal life, left me unshocked and undismayed. To provide a body for any life was a joy, a proud delight, a duty to the whole, but whether Mrs. Le\u2013Vallon bore a girl or a boy, or furnished a vehicle for some swift marvellous progeny of another kind, seemed in no sense to offer an afflicting alternative. My present point of view may be imagined \u2014 the ghastliness and terror, even the horror of it \u2014 but at the time I faced it otherwise, regarding the possibility with a kind of reverent wonder only. It was not terrible, but grand.\n\nThe certainty of all this I realised at the time. I see it now less vividly. The intensity has left me. So overwhelming was its perfection, however, that, as I have said, the contingency to which Mrs. LeVallon, as mother, was exposed, held no dire or unmoral suggestion for me, as it now must hold. Nor did the correlative conditions appear otherwise than true and possible. And that these two, Julius and his wife, staked an entire lifetime to correct an error of the past, meant no more \u2014 viewed in this vaster proportion \u2014 than if I ran upstairs to close a door I had foolishly left open. An open door is a little thing, yet may cause currents of air that can disarrange the harmony of the objects in its path, upsetting the purpose and balance of the entire household. It must be closed before the occupants of the house can do their work effectively. They owe it to the house as well as to themselves. There was this door left open. It must be closed.\n\nBut it could not be closed by one. We three, a group, alone could compass this small act. We who had opened it alone could close it. The potential strength of three in one was the oldest formula of effective power known to life. Such a group was capable of a claim on Nature impossible to an individual \u2014 the method of evocation we had used together in the long ago." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 248", + "text": "\"There remains love. The gain which the memory of the past gives us here is that the memory of past love for any person can strengthen our present love of him. And this is what must he preserved if the value of past love is not to be lost. But love has no end but itself. If it has gone, it helps us little that we keep anything it has brought us...\n\n\"What more do we want? The past is not preserved separately in memory, but it exists, concentrated and united in the present... If we still think that the past is lost, let us ask ourselves whether we regard, as lost all those incidents in a friendship which, even before death, are forgotten.\" \u2014 Ibid.\n\nHere, then, as well as the mind in me can set it down, was the background against which the various incidents of this final day occurred. This was my \"attitude\" towards them; these thoughts and feelings, though unexpressed in words, were the \"mood\" which accepted and understood each slightest incident of those extraordinary hours.\n\nThe length of the day amazed me; it seemed endless. Time went another gait. The sequence of little happenings that marked its passage remains blurred in the memory, and I look back to these with the curious feeling that they happened all at once. Yet the strongest impression, perhaps, is that time, the sense of duration, was arrested or at least moved otherwise. There was a pause in Nature, the pause before the approaching Equinox. A river halted a moment at the bend. And hence came, of course, the sensation of pressure accumulating everywhere in the valley. Acceleration would come afterwards, but first this wondrous pause.\n\nAnd this pressure that brimmed the valley forced common details into an uncommon view. The rising tide drove objects on the banks above high-water mark. There was exhilaration without alarm, as when an exceptional tide throws a full ocean into unaccustomed inlets. The thrill was marvellous. The forest made response, offering its secret things without a touch of fear... as when the deer came out and grazed upon the meadow before the chalet windows, not singly but in groups, and invariably, I noticed, groups of three and three. We passed close in and out among them; I stroked the thick rough hair upon their flanks; I remember Mrs. LeVallon's arm about their necks, and once in particular, when she was lying down, that a fawn, no hint of fear in its beautiful, gracious eyes, pushed her hair aside with its shining muzzle to nibble the grass against her neck. The mood of an ancient and divining prophecy lay in the sight, linking Nature with human-nature in natural harmony when the lion and the lamb might play together, and a little child might lead them. For \u2014 significant, arresting item \u2014 the very air came sweetly down among us too, and the friendly intimacy of the birds brought this exquisite touch of love into the entire day. There was communion everywhere between our Selves and Nature. The birds were in my room when I went upstairs, one hopping across the pillow on my bed, its bright eyes shining as it perched an instant on my shoulder, two others twittering and dancing along the narrow window-sill. There was no fear in them; they fluttered here and there at will, and my quickest movements caused them no alarm. From the table they peeped up into my face; they were downstairs flitting in and out among the chairs and sofas; they did not fly away when we came in. And in threes I saw them, always in threes together. It was like reading natural omens; I understood the significance that lay in omens; and in this delightful sense, but in no other, these natural signs were \u2014 ominous.\n\nOver the face of Nature, and in our hearts as well, lay everywhere this attitude of divine carelessness. Everything felt-with everything else, and all were neighbours. The ascension of the soul through all the natural kingdoms seemed written clear upon the trees and rocks and flowers, upon birds and animals, upon the huge, quiet elements themselves.\n\nFor the pause and stillness, these were ominous, too. This hush of Nature upon the banks of Time, this beautiful though solemn pause upon the heart of things, was but the presage of an accelerated rushing forward that would follow it. The world halted and took breath. It was the moment just before the leap.\n\nWith midnight the climax would be reached \u2014 the timeless instant of definite arrest, too brief, too swift for mechanism to record, the instant when Julius would enforce his ancient claim. Then the impetuous advance would be resumed, but resumed with the increased momentum, moreover, of natural forces whose outward manifestation men call the equinoctial gales. Those elemental disturbances, that din and riot in the palaces of heat and air, of wind and fire \u2014 how little the sailors, the men upon the heights, the dwellers in the streets of crowded cities might guess the free divinity loose upon the earth behind the hurricanes! The forgotten majesty of it broke in upon me as I realised it. For realise it I most assuredly did. The channels here, indeed, were open.\n\nThere seemed a halo laid upon the day; sanctity and peace in all its corners; the valley was a temple, the splendour of true old-world worship ushering in the Equinox: Earth's act of adoration to the sun, the breathless moment when she sank upon her knees before her source of life, her progeny aware, participating.\n\nFor the joy and power that vibrated with every message of light and sound about us came to me in the terms of love, as though a love which broke all barriers down flowed in from Nature. It woke in me an unmanageable, an infinite yearning; I burned to sweep all modern life into this lonely mountain valley, to share its happiness with the entire world; the tired ones, the sick and weary, the poor, those who deem themselves outcast and useless in the scheme of things, the lonely, the destitute in spirit, the failures, the wicked, and, above all, the damned. For here all broken and shattered lives, it seemed to me, must find that sense of wholeness which is confidence and that peace due to the certainty of being cared for by the universe \u2014 divinely mothered. The natural sacrament of elemental powers, in its simplicity, could heal the nations. I yearned to bring humanity into the power of Nature and the joy of Nature\u2013Worship.\n\nSo complete, moreover, was my inclusion in this sacramental attitude towards Nature, that I saw the particular purpose for which we three were here \u2014 as Julius saw it. I experienced a growing joy, an ever lessening alarm. Three human souls met here upon this island of a moment's restitution, important certainly, yet after all an episode merely, set between a series of lives long past and of countless lives to follow after. The elements, and the Earth to which they were consciously related, the Universe of which, with ourselves, she formed an integral constituent \u2014 all were relatively and in their just proportions involved in this act of restitution. Hence, in a dim way, it was out of time and space. Our very acts and feelings were those of Nature and of that vaster Whole, wherein Nature, herself but a little item, lies secure. The Universe felt and acted with us. The gentian in the field would be aware, but Sirius, too.\n\nThree human specks would act out certain things, but the wind in the forest would cooperate and feel glad, and the fire in Orion's nebula would be aware.\n\nAn older form of consciousness was operative. We were not separate. Instead of thinking as separate items apart from the rest of the cosmos, we felt as integral bits of it \u2014 and here, perhaps, lay the essence of what I call another kind of consciousness than the one known today." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 249", + "text": "My mind retains with photographic accuracy the detail of that sinister yet gorgeous night. One thing alone vitiates the value of my report \u2014 while I remember what happened, I cannot remember why it happened.\n\nAt the actual time, I understood the meaning of every word and action because the power to do so was in me. I was in another state of consciousness. That state has passed, and with it the ability to interpret. I am in the position of a man who remembers clearly the detail of some dream to which, on waking, he has lost the key. While dreaming it, the meaning was daylight clear. The return to normal consciousness has left him with a photograph he no longer can explain.\n\nThe first tentative approach, however, of those Intelligences men call Fire and Wind \u2014 their first contact with this other awakened Self in me, I remember perfectly. Wind came first, then Fire; yet at first it was merely that they made their presence known. I became aware of them. And the natural, simple way in which this came about I may describe to some extent perhaps.\n\nThe ruins of a flaming sunset lay above the distant ridges when Julius left my room, and, after locking away the private papers entrusted to my charge, I stood for some time watching the coloured storm-clouds hurrying across the sky. For, though the trees about the chalet were motionless, a violent wind ran high overhead, and on the summits it would have been impossible to stand. Round the building, however, sunken in its protected valley, and within the walls especially, reigned a still, delightful peace. The wind kept to the summits. But i\u00b05. of some Spirit of Wind I was aware long before the faintest movement touched a single branch.\n\nUpon me then, gathering with steady power, stole the advance-guard of these two invasions \u2014 air and warmth, yet an inner air, an inner warmth. For, while I watched, the silence of those encircling forests conveyed the sound and movement of approaching life. There grew upon me, first as by dim and curious suggestion, a sense of ordered preparation slowly accumulating behind the mass of shadowy trees. The picture then sharpened into more definite outline. The forest was busy with the stirrings of a million thread-like airs that built up together the body of a rising wind, yet not of wind as commonly experienced, but rather of some subtler, more acute activity of which wind is but the outer vehicle. The inner activity, of which it is the sensible manifestation \u2014 the body \u2014 was beginning to move. The soul of air itself was stirring. These million ghost-like airs were lifting wings from their invisible, secret lairs, all running as by a word of command towards a determined centre whence, obeying a spiritual summons, they would presently fall upon the valley in that sensible manifestation called the equinoctial gales. Behind the material effect, the spiritual Cause was active.\n\nThis imaginative picture grew upon me, as though in some way I was let into the inner being of that life which prompts all natural movements and hides, securely veiled, in every stock and stone. A new interpretative centre was awake in me. In the movement of wind I was aware of \u2014 life. Then, while this subtle perception that an intelligent, directing power lay behind the very air I breathed, a similar report reached me from another, equally elemental, quarter, though it is less easy to describe.\n\nFrom the sun? Originally, yes \u2014 since primarily from the sun emerges all the heat the earth contains. It first stirred definite sensation in me when my eye caught the final gleam upon the turreted walls of vapour where still the sunset stood emblazoned. From that coloured sea of light, and therefore of heat, something flashed in power through me; a vision of running fire broke floodingly above the threshold of my mind, ran into every corner of my being, left its inspiring trail, became part of my very nerves and blood. Consciousness was deepened and intensified.\n\nYet it was neither common heat I felt nor common flame I pictured, but rather a touch of that primordial and ethereal fire which dwells at the heart of all manifested life \u2014 latent heat. For it was neither yellow, red, nor white with any aspect of common flame, but what I can only dare to describe as a fierce, dark splendour, black and shining, yet of intense, incandescent brilliance. The contradictory adjectives catch a ghost of it. Moreover, I was aware of no discomfort, for while it threatened to overwhelm me, the chief effect was to leave a glow, a radiance, an enthusiasm of strengthened will and confidence, combined with a sense of lightning's power. It was spiritual heat, of which fire is but a physical vehicle. The central fire of the universe burned in my heart.\n\nI realised, in a word, that both elements were vehicles of intelligent and living Agencies. Of their own accord they became active, and natural laws were but their method of activity. They were alert; the valley was alive, combining, cooperating with myself \u2014 and taking action.\n\nThis was their first exquisite approach. But presently, when I moved away from the window, the sunset clouds grown dark and colourless again, I realised lesser manifestations of this new emotion which may seem more intelligible when I set them down in words. The candle flame, for instance, and the flaring match with which I lit my cigarette seemed not so much to produce fire by a chemical device, as to puncture holes through a curtain into that sea of latent fire that lies in all material things. The breath of air, moreover, that extinguished the flame did not annihilate it, but merged it into the essential being of its own self. The two acted in sympathy together. Both Wind and Fire drew attention to themselves of set intention, insisting upon notice, as if inviting cooperation.\n\nAnd something leviathan leaped up in me to welcome them. The standing miracle of fire lit up the darkened valley. Pure flame revealed itself suddenly as the soul in me, the eternal part that remembered and grew wise, the deathless part that survived all successive bodies.\n\nAnd I realised with a shock of comprehension the danger that Julius ran in the evocation that his \"experiment\" involved: Fire, once kindled, and aided naturally by air, must seek to destroy the prison that confines it...\n\nI remained for some time in my room. My will, my power of choice, seemed taken from me. My life moved with these vaster influences. I argued vehemently with some part of me that still offered a vague resistance. It was the merest child's play. I figured myself in my London lecture room, explaining to my students the course and growth of the delusion that had captured me. The result was futile; I convinced neither my students nor myself. It was the thinking mind in me that opposed, but it was another thing in me that knew, and this other thing was enormously stronger than the reasoning mind, and overwhelmed it. No amount of arguing could stand against the power of knowledge that had become established in me by feeling-with. I felt-with Nature, especially with her twin elemental powers of wind and fire. And this wisdom of feeling-with dominated my entire being. Denial and argument were merely false.\n\nAll that evening this sense of the companionship of Wind and Fire remained vividly assertive. Everywhere they moved about me. They acted in concert, each assisting the other. I was for ever aware of them; their physical manifestations were as great dumb gestures of two living and intelligent Immensities in Nature. Yet it was only in part, perhaps, I knew them. Their full, amazing power never came to me completely. The absolute realisation that came to Julius in full consciousness was not mine. I shared at most, it seems, a reflected knowledge, seeing what happened as through some lens of half \u2014 recovered memory.\n\nMoreover, supper, when I came downstairs to find Julius and his wife already waiting for me, was the most ordinary and commonplace meal imaginable. We talked of the weather! Mrs. LeVallon was light-hearted, almost gay, though I felt it was repressed excitement that drove outwards this trivial aspect of her. But for the fact that all she did now seemed individual and distinguished, her talk and gestures might have scraped acquaintance with mere foolishness. Indeed, our light talk and her irresponsibility added to the sense of reality I have mentioned. It was a mask, and the mask dropped occasionally with incongruous abruptness that was startling.\n\nSuch insignificant details revealed the immediate range of the Powers that watched and waited close beside our chairs. That sudden, fixed expression in her eyes, for instance, when the Man brought in certain private papers, handed them to Julius who, after reading them, endorsed them with a modern fountain pen, then passed them on to me! That fountain pen and her accompanying remark \u2014 how incongruous and insignificant they were! Both seemed symbolical items in some dwindled, trivial scale of being!\n\n\"It isn't everybody that's got a professor for a secretary, Julius, is it?\"\n\nShe said it with her mouth full, her elbows on the table, and only that other look in the watchful eyes seemed to contradict the awkward, untaught body. There was a flash of tenderness and passion in them, a pathetic questioning and wonder, as though she saw in her husband's act an acknowledgment of dim forebodings in her own deep heart. She appealed, it seemed, to me. Was it that she divined he was already slipping from her, farewells all unsaid, yet that she was \u2014 inarticulate?... The entire little scene, the words, the laughter and the look, were but evidence of an attempt to lift the mask. Her choice of words, their accent and pronunciation, that fountain pen, the endorsement, the stupid remark about myself \u2014 were all these lifted by those yearning eyes into the tragedy of a fateful goodbye message?...\n\nMore significant still, though even less direct, was another moment \u2014 when the Man stretched his arm across the table to turn the lamp up. For in this unnecessary act she saw \u2014 the intuition came sharply to me \u2014 an effect of the approaching Powers upon his untutored soul. The wick was already high enough when, with an abrupt, impulsive movement, he stooped to turn it higher; and instantly Mrs. LeVallon was on her feet, her face first pale, then hotly flushed. She rose as though to strike him, then changed the gesture as if to ward a blow \u2014 almost to protect. It was an impetuous, revealing act.\n\nOut of some similar impulse, too, only half understood, I sprang to her assistance.\n\n\"There's light enough,\" I exclaimed.\n\n\"And heat,\" she added quickly. \"Good Lord! the room's that hot, it's like a furnace!\"\n\nShe flashed a look of gratitude at me. What exactly was in her mind I cannot know, but in my own was the strange feeling that the less visible fire in the air the better. An expression of perplexed alarm showed itself in the face of the faithful but inarticulate serving man. Unwittingly he had blundered. His distress was acute.\n\nI almost thought he would drop to his knees and ask his mistress's hand for forgiveness.\n\nWhether Julius perceived all this is hard to say. He looked up calmly, watching us; but the glance he gave, and the fact that he spoke no word, made me think he realised what the energy of her tone and gesture veiled. The desire to assist the increase of heat, of fire \u2014 cooperation \u2014 had acted upon the physical medium least able to resist \u2014 the most primitive system present. The approach of the two Activities affected us, one and all.\n\nThere were other incidents of a similar kind before the meal was over, quite ordinary in themselves, yet equally revealing; my interpretation of them due to this enhanced condition of acute perception that pertained to awakening memory. Air and fire accumulated, flake by flake. A kind of radiant heat informed all common objects. It was in our hearts as well. And wind was waiting to blow it into flame." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 250", + "text": "\u2003\"Not yet are fixed the prison bars;\n\n\u2003The hidden light the spirit owns\n\n\u2003If blown to Aame would dim the stars\n\n\u2003And they who rule them from their thrones:\n\n\u2003And the proud sceptred spirits thence\n\n\u2003Would bow to pay us reverence.\"\n\n\u2014 A. E.\n\nIt was out of this accumulation of unusual emotion that a slight but significant act of Julius recalled me to the outer world. I was lighting my pipe \u2014 from the chimney of the lamp rather than by striking a match \u2014 when I overheard him telling the Man that, instead of sitting up as usual, he might go to bed at once. He went off obediently, but with some latent objection, half resentment, half opposition, in his manner. There was a sulkiness as of disappointment in his face. He knew that something unusual was on foot, and he felt that he should by rights be in it \u2014 he might be of use, he might be needed. There was this dumb emotion in him, as in a faithful dog who, scenting danger, is not called upon to fight, and so retires growling to his kennel.\n\nHe went slowly, casting backward glances, and at the door he turned and caught my eye. I had only to beckon, to raise my hand a moment, to say a word \u2014 he would have come running back with a bound into the room. But the gaze of his master was upon him, and he went; and though he may have lain down in his room beyond the kitchen, I felt perfectly sure he did not sleep. His body lay down, but not his excited instincts.\n\nFor this dismissal of the Man was, of course, a signal. The three of us were then in that dim-lit peasant's room \u2014 alone; and for a long time in a silence broken only by the sparks escaping from the burning logs upon the hearth, and by the low wind that now went occasionally sighing past the open window. We sat there waiting, not looking at each other, yet each aware of the slightest physical or mental movement. It was an intense and active silence in which deep things were being accomplished; for, if Mrs. LeVallon and myself were negative, I was alert to immense and very positive actions that were going forward in the being of our companion. Julius, sitting quietly with folded hands, his face just beyond the lamp's first circle of light, was preparing, and with a stress of extreme internal effort that made the silence seem a field of crashing battle. The entire strength of this strange being's soul, cooperating with Nature, and by methods of very ancient acquirement known fully to himself alone, sought an achievement that should make us act as one. Through two natural elemental powers, fire and wind \u2014 both vitally part of us since the body's birth \u2014 we could claim the incalculable support of the entire universe. It was a cosmic act. Ourselves were but the channel. ' Later this channel would define itself still more.\n\nBeneath those smoke-stained rafters, as surely as beneath the vaulted roof of some great temple, stepped worship and solemnity. The change came gradually. From the sky above the star-lit valley this grave, tremendous attitude swung down into our hearts. Not alone the isolated chalet, but the world itself contained us, a temple wherein we, insignificant worshippers, knelt before the Universe. For the powers we invoked were not merely earthly powers, but those cosmic energies that drove and regulated even the flocks of stars.\n\nMrs. LeVallon and I both knew it dimly, as we waited with beating hearts in that great silence. She scarcely moved. Somehow divining the part she had to play, she sat there motionless as a figure in stone, offering no resistance. Her reawakened memory must presently guide us; she knew the importance of her role, and the composure with which she accepted it touched grandeur. Yet each one of us was necessary. If Julius took the leader's part, her contribution, as my own, were equally essential to success. If the greater risk was his, our own risk was yet not negligible. The elemental Powers would take what channel seemed best available. It was not a personal consideration for us. We were most strangely one.\n\nMy own measure of interpretation I have already attempted to describe. Hers I guess intuitively. For we shared each other's feelings as only love and sympathy know how to share. These feelings now grew steadily in power; and, obeying them, our bodies moved to new positions. We changed our attitudes.\n\nFor I remember that while Julius rose and stood beside the table, his wife went quietly from my side and seated herself before the open window, her face turned towards the valley and the night. Instinctively we formed a living triangle, Mrs. LeVallon at the apex. And, though at the time I understood the precise significance of these changes, reading clearly the language they acted out in motion, that discernment is now no longer in me, so that I cannot give the perfect expression of meaning they revealed. Upon Julius, however, some appearance, definite as a robe upon the head and shoulders, proclaimed him a figure of command and somehow, too, of tragedy. It set him in the centre. Close beside me, within the circle of the lamplight, I watched him \u2014 so still, so grave, the face of marble pallor, the dark hair tumbling as of old about the temples whereon the effort of intensest concentration made the pulsing veins stand out as thick as cords. Calm as an image he stood there for a period of time I cannot state. Beyond him, in the shadows by the window, his wife's figure was just visible as she leaned, half reclining, across the wooden sill into the night. There was no sound from the 'outer valley, there was no sound in the room. Then, suddenly of itself, a change approached. The silence broke.\n\n\"Julius...!\" came faintly from the window, as Mrs. LeVallon with a sudden gesture drew the curtain to shut out the darkness. She turned towards us. \"Julius!\" And her voice, using the tone I had heard before when she fled past me up that meadow slope, sounded as from some space beyond the walls. I looked up, my nerves on the alert, for it came to me that she was at the limit of endurance and that something now must break in her.\n\nJulius moved over to her side, while she put her hands out first to welcome him, then half to keep him off. He spoke no word. He took her outstretched hands in both of his, leading her back a little nearer towards the centre of the room.\n\n\"Julius,\" she whispered, \"what frightens me tonight? I'm all a-shiver. There's something coming? \u2014 but what is it? And why do I seem to know, yet not to know?\"\n\nHe answered her quietly, the voice deep with tenderness:\n\n\"We three are here together\" \u2014 I saw the shining smile I knew of old \u2014 \"and there is no cause to feel afraid. You are tired with your long, long waiting.\" And he meant, I knew, the long fatigue of ages that she apprehended, but did not grasp fully yet. She was Mrs. LeVallon still.\n\n\"I'm both hot and cold together, and all oppressed,\" she went on; \"like a fever it is \u2014 icy and yet on fire. I can't get at myself, to keep it still. Julius... what is it?\" The whisper held somehow for me the potentiality of scream. Then, taking his two hands closer, she raised her voice with startling suddenness. \"Julius,\" she cried, \"I know what frightens me \u2014 it's you! What are you tonight?\" She looked searchingly a moment into his face. \"And what is this thing that's going to happen to you? I hear it coming nearer \u2014 outside\" \u2014 she moved further from the curtained window with small, rushing steps, looking back across her shoulder \u2014 \"all down the valley from the mountains, those awful mountains. Oh, Julius, it's coming \u2014 for you \u2014 my husband! And for him,\" she added, laying her eyes upon me like a flame.\n\nI thought the tears must come, but she held them back, looking appealingly at me, and clutching Julius as though he would slip from her. Then, with a quick movement and a little gust of curious laughter, she clapped her hand upon her mouth to stop the words. Something she meant to say to me was left unspoken, she was ashamed of the momentary weakness. \"Mrs. LeVallon\" was still uppermost.\n\n\"Julius,\" she added more softly, \"there's something about tonight I haven't known since childhood. There's such heat and \u2014 oh, hark!\" \u2014 she stopped a moment, holding up her finger \u2014 \"there's a sound \u2014 like riggin' in the wind. But it ain't wind. What is it, Julius? And why is that wonderful?\"\n\nYet no sound issued from the quiet valley;, it was as still as death. Even the sighing of the breeze had ceased about the walls.\n\n\"If only I understood,\" she went on, looking from his face to mine, \"if only I knew exactly. It was something,\" she added almost to herself, \"that used to come to me when I was little \u2014 on the farm \u2014 and I put it away because it made me\" \u2014 she whispered the last two words below her breath \u2014 \"feel crazy\"\n\n\"Crazy?\" repeated Julius, smiling down at her.\n\n\"Like a queen,\" she finished proudly, yet still timid. \"I couldn't feel that way and do my work.\" And her long lashes lifted, so that the eyes flashed at me across the table. \"It made everything seem too easy.\"\n\nI cannot say what quality was in his voice, when, leading her gently towards a wicker chair beside the fire, he spoke those strange words of comfort. There seemed a resonant power in it that brought strength and comfort in. She smiled as she listened, though it was not her brain his language soothed. That other look began to steal upon her face as he proceeded.\n\n\"You!\" he said gently, \"so wonderful a woman, and so poised with the discipline these little nerves forget \u2014 you cannot yield to the fear that loneliness and darkness bring to children.\" She settled down into the chair, gazing into his face as he settled the cushions for her back. Her hands lay in her lap. She listened to every syllable, while the expression of perplexity grew less marked. And the change upon her features deepened as he continued: \"There are moments when the soul sees her own shadow, and is afraid. The Past comes up so close. But the shadow and the fear will pass. We three are here. Beyond all chance disaster, we stand together... and to our real inner selves nothing that is sad or terrible can ever happen.\"\n\nAgain her eyes flashed their curious lightning at me as I watched; but the sudden vague alarm was passing as mysteriously as it came. She said no more about the wind and fire. The magic of his personality, rather than the words which to her could only have seemed singular and obscure, had touched the sources of her strength. Her face was pale, her eyes still bright with an unwonted brilliance, but she was herself again \u2014 I think she was no longer the \"upper\" self I knew as \"Mrs. LeVallon.\" The marvellous change was slowly stealing over her.\n\n\"You're cold and tired,\" he said, bending above her \"Come closer to the fire \u2014 with us all.\"\n\nI saw her shrink, for all the brave control she exercised. The word \"fire\" came on her like a blow. \"It's not my body,\" she answered; \"that's neither cold nor tired. It's another thing \u2014 behind it.\" She turned toward the window, where the curtain at that moment rose and fell before a draught of air. \"I keep getting the feeling that something's coming tonight for \u2014 one of us.\" She said it half to herself, and Julius made no answer. I saw her look back then at the glowing fire of wood and peat. At the same moment she threw out both hands first as if to keep the heat away, then as though to hold her husband closer.\n\n\"Julius! If you went from me! If I lost you!\"\n\nI heard his low reply:\n\n\"Never, through all eternity, can we go \u2014 away from one another \u2014 except for moments.\"\n\nShe partly understood, I think, for a great sigh, but half suppressed, escaped her.\n\n\"Moments,\" she murmured, \"that are very long... and lonely.\"\n\nIt was then, as she said the words, that I noticed the change which so long had been rising, establish itself definitely in the luminous eyes. That other colour fastened on them \u2014 the deep sea-green. \"Mrs. LeVallon\" before my sight sank slowly down, and a completer, far more ancient self usurped her. Small wonder that my description halts in confusion before so beautiful a change, for it was the beginning of an actual transfiguration of her present person. It was bewildering to watch the gradual, enveloping approach of that underlying Self, shrine of a million memories, deathless, and ripe with long \u2014 forgotten knowledge. The air of majesty that she wore in the sleep-walking incident gathered by imperceptible degrees about the uninspired modern presentment that I knew. Slowly her face turned calm with beauty. The features composed themselves in some new mould of grandeur. The perplexity, at first so painfully apparent, but marked the singular passage of the less into the greater. I saw it slowly disappear. As she lay back in that rough chair of a peasant's chalet, there was some calm about her as of the steadfast hills, some radiance as of stars, a suggestion of power that told me \u2014 as though some voice whispered it in my soul \u2014 she knew the link with Nature reestablished finally within her being. Her head turned slightly towards me. I stood up.\n\nInstinctively I moved across the room and drew the curtain back. I saw the stars; I saw the dark line of mountains; the odours of forest and meadow came in with sweetness; I heard the tinkling of the little stream \u2014 yet all contained somehow in the message of her turning head and shoulders.\n\nThere was no sound, there was no spoken word, but the language was one and unmistakable. And as I came slowly again towards the fire Julius stood over her, uttering in silence the same stupendous thing. The sense of my own inclusion in it was amazing. He smiled down into her lifted face. These two, myself a vital link between them, smiled across the centuries at one another. We formed \u2014 I noticed then \u2014 with the fire and the open window into space \u2014 a circle.\n\nTo say that I grasped some spiritual import in these movements of our bodies, realising that they acted out an inevitable meaning, is as true as my convinced belief can make it. It is also true that in this, my later report of the event, that meaning is no longer clear to me. I cannot recover the point of view that discerned in our very positions a message of some older day. The significance of attitude and gesture then were clear to me; the translation of this three-dimensional language I have lost again. A man upon his knees, two arms outstretched to clasp, a head bowed down, a pointing finger \u2014 these are interpretable gestures and attitudes that need no spoken words. Similarly, following some forgotten wisdom, our related movements held a ceremonial import that, by way of acceptance or refusal, helped or hindered the advance of the elemental powers then invoked. In some marvellous fashion one consciousness was shared amongst us all. We worked with a living Nature, and a living Nature worked actively with us, and it was attitude, movement, gestures, rather than words, that assisted the alliance.\n\nThen Julius took the hand that lay nearest to him, while the other she lifted to place within my own. And a light breeze came through the open window at that moment, touched the embers of the glowing logs, and blew them into flame. I felt our hands tighten as that slight increase of heat and air passed into us. For in that passing breeze was the eternal wind which is the breath of God, and in that flame upon the hearth was the fire which burns in suns and lights the heart in men and women...\n\nThere came with unexpected suddenness, then, a moment of very poignant human significance \u2014 because of the great perspective against which it rose. She sat erect; she gazed into his face and mine; in her eyes burned an expression of beseeching love and sacrifice, but a love and sacrifice far older than this present world on which her body lay. Her arms stretched out and opened, she raised her lips, and, while I looked aside, she kissed him softly. I turned away from that embrace, aware in my heart that it was a half-divined farewell... and when I looked back again the little scene was over.\n\nHe bent slightly down, releasing the hand he held, and signifying by a gesture that I should do the same. Her body relaxed a little; she sank deeper into the chair; she sighed. I realised that he was assisting her into that artificial slumber which would lead to the full release of the subconscious self whose slow approach she already half divined. Stooping above her, he gently touched the hypnogenic points above the eyes and behind the ears. It was the oldest memories he sought. She offered them quite willingly.\n\n\"Sleep!\" he said soothingly, command and tenderness mingled in the voice. \"Sleep... and remember!\" With the right hand he made slow, longitudinal passes before her face. \"Sleep, and recover what you... knew! We need your guidance.\"\n\nHer body swayed a little before it settled; her feet stretched nearer to the fire; her respiration rapidly diminished, becoming deep and regular; with the movement of her bosom the band of black velvet rose and fell about the neck, her hands lay folded in her lap. And, as I watched, my own personal sensations of quite nameless joy and anguish passed into a curious abandonment of self that merged me too completely in the solemnity of worship to leave room for pain. ' Hand in hand with the earthly darkness came in to us that Night of Time which neither sleeps nor dies, and like a remembered dream up stole our inextinguishable Past.\n\n\"Sleep!\" he repeated, lower than before.\n\nCold, indeed, touched my heart, but with it came a promise of some deep spiritual sweetness, rich with the comfort of that life which is both abundant and universal. The valley and the sky, stars, mountains, forests, running water, all that lay outside of ourselves in Nature everywhere, came with incredible appeal into my soul. Confining barriers crumbled, melted into air; the imprisoned human forces leaped forth to meet the powers that \"inanimate\" Nature holds. I knew the drive of tireless wind, the rush of irresistible fire. It seemed a state in which we all joined hands, a state of glory that justified the bravest hopes, annihilating doubt and disbelief.\n\nShe slept. And in myself something supremely sure, supremely calm, looked on and watched.\n\n\"It helps,\" Julius murmured in my ear, referring to the sleep; \"it makes it easier for her. She will remember now... and guide.\"\n\nHe moved to her right side, I to her left. Between the fire and the open window we formed then \u2014 a line.\n\nAlong a line there is neither tension nor resistance. It was the primitive, ultimate figure." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 251", + "text": "A rush of air ran softly round the walls and roof, then dropped away into silence. There was this increased activity outside. A roar next sounded in the chimney, high up rather; a block of peat fell with a sudden crash into the grate, sending a shower of sparks to find the outer air. Behind us the pine boards cracked with miniature, sharp reports.\n\nJulius continued the longitudinal passes, and \"Mrs. LeVallon\" passed with every minute into deeper and more complete somnambulism. It was a natural, willing process. He merely made it easier for her. She sank slowly into the deep subconscious region where all the memories of the soul He stored for use.\n\nIt seemed that everything was in abeyance in myself, except the central fact that this experience was true. The rest of existence fell away, clipped off as by a pair of mighty shears. Both fire and wind seemed actively about me; yet not unnaturally. There was this heat and lift, but there was nothing frantic. The native forces in me were raised to their ultimate capacity, though never for a moment beyond the limit that high emotion might achieve. Nature accomplished the abnormal, possibly, but still according to law and what was \u2014 or had been once \u2014 comprehensible.\n\nThe passes grew slower, with longer intervals between; Mrs. LeVallon lay motionless, the lips slightly parted, the skin preternaturally pale, the eyelids tightly closed,\n\n\"Hush!\" whispered Julius, as I made an involuntary movement, \"it is still the normal sleep, and she may easily awake. Let no sound disturb her. It must go gradually.\" He spoke without once removing his gaze from her face. \"Be ready to write what you hear,\" he added, \"and help by 'thinking' fire and wind \u2014 in my direction.\"\n\nA long-drawn sigh was audible, accompanied by the slightest possible convulsive movement of the reclining body.\n\n\"She sinks deeper,\" he whispered, ceasing the passes for a moment. \"The consciousness is already below the deep-dream stage. Soon she will wake into the interior lucidity when her Self of Today will touch the parent source behind. They are already with her: they light \u2014 and lift \u2014 her soul. She will remember all her past, and will direct us.\"\n\nI made no answer; I asked no questions; I stood and watched, willingly sympathetic, yet incapable of action. The curious scene held something of tragedy and grandeur. There was triumph in it. The sense of Nature working with us increased, yet we ourselves comparatively unimportant. The earth, the sky, the universe took part and were involved in our act of restitution. It was beyond all experience. It was also \u2014 at times \u2014 intolerable.\n\nThe body settled deeper into the chair; the crackling of the wicker making sharp reports in the stillness. The pallor of the face increased; the cheeks sank in, the framework of the eyes stood out; imperceptibly the features began to rearrange themselves upon another, greater scale, most visible, perhaps, in the strong, delicate contours of the mouth and jaw. Upon Julius, too, as he stood beside her, came down some indefinable change that set him elsewhere and otherwise. His dignity, his deep solicitous tenderness, and at the same time a hint of power that emanated more and more from his whole person, rendered him in some intangible fashion remote and inaccessible. I watched him with growing wonder.\n\nFor over the room as well a change came stealing. In the shadows beyond the fringe of lamplight, perspective altered. The room ran off in distances that yet just escaped the eye: I felt the change, though it was so real that the breath caught in me each time I sought to focus it. Space spread and opened on all sides, above, below, while so naturally that it was never actually unaccountable. Wood seemed replaced by stone, as though the solidity of our material surroundings deepened. I was aware of granite columns, corridors of massive build, gigantic pylons towering to the sky. The atmosphere of an ancient temple grew about my heart, and long-forgotten things came with a crowding of half-familiar detail that insisted upon recognition. It was an early memory, I knew, yet not the earliest...\n\n\"Be ready.\" I heard the low voice of Julius. \"She is about to wake \u2014 within,\" and he moved a little closer to her, while I took up my position by the table by the lamp. The paper lay before me. With fingers that trembled I lifted the pencil, waiting. The hands of the sleeping woman raised themselves feebly, then fell back upon the arms of the chair. It seemed she tried to make signs but could not quite complete them. The expression on the face betrayed great internal effort.\n\n\"Where are you?\" Julius asked in a steady but very gentle tone.\n\nThe answer came at once, with slight intervals between the words:\n\n\"In a building... among mountains...\"\n\n\"Are you alone?\"\n\n\"No... not alone,\" spoken with a faint smile, the eyes still tightly closed.\n\n\"Who, then, is with you?\"\n\n\"You... and he,\" after a momentary hesitation.\n\n\"And who am I?\"\n\nThe face showed slight confusion; there was a gesture as though she felt about her in the air to find him.\n\n\"I do not know... quite,\" came the halting answer. \"But you \u2014 both \u2014 are mine... and very near to me. Or else you own me. All three are so close I cannot see ourselves apart... quite.\"\n\n\"She is confused between two memories,\" Julius whispered to me. \"The true regression of memory has not yet begun. The present still obscures her consciousness.\"\n\n\"It is coming,\" she said instantly, aware of his lightest whisper.\n\n\"All in due time,\" he soothed her in a tender tone; \"there is no hurry. Nor is there anything to fear\"\n\n\"I am not afraid. I am... happy. I feel safe.\" She paused a moment, then added: \"But I must go deeper... further down. I am too near the surface still.\"\n\nHe made a few slow passes at some distance from her face, and I saw the eyelids flutter as though about to lift. She sighed deeply. She composed herself as into yet deeper sleep.\n\n\"Ah! I see better now,\" she murmured. \"I am sinking... sinking...\"\n\nHe waited for several minutes and then resumed the questioning.\n\n\"Now tell me who you are,\" he enjoined.\n\nShe faintly shook her head. Her lips trembled, as though she tried to utter several names and then abandoned all. The effort seemed beyond her. The perplexed expression on the face with the shut eyes was movingly pathetic, so that I longed to help her, though I knew not how.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she murmured instantly, with a gentle smile in my direction. Our thoughts, then, already found each other!\n\n\"Tell me who you are,\" Julius repeated firmly. \"It is not the name I ask.\"\n\nShe answered distinctly, with a smile:\n\n\"A mother. I am soon to be a mother and give birth.\"\n\nHe glanced at me significantly. There was both joy and sadness in his eyes. But it was not this disclosure that he sought. She was still entangled in the personality of Today. It was far older layers of memory and experience that he wished to read. \"Once she gets free from this,\" he whispered, \"it will go with leaps and bounds, whole centuries at a time.\" And again I knew by the smile hovering round the lips that she had heard and understood.\n\n\"Pass deeper; pass beyond,\" he continued, with more authority in the tone. \"Drive through \u2014 sink down into what lies so far behind.\"\n\nA considerable interval passed before she spoke again, ten minutes at the lowest reckoning, and possibly much longer. I watched her intently, but with an afflicting anxiety at my heart. The body lay so still and calm, it was like the immobility of death, except that once or twice the forehead puckered in a little frown and the compression of the lips told of the prolonged internal effort. The grander aspect of her features came for moments flittingly, but did not as yet establish itself to stay. She was still confused with the mind and knowledge of Today. At length a little movement showed itself; she changed the angle of her head in an effort to look up and speak; a scarcely perceptible shudder ran down the length of her stretched limbs. \"I cannot,\" she murmured, as though glancing at her husband with closed eyelids. \"Something blocks the way. I cannot see. It's too thickly crowded... crowded.\"\n\n\"Describe it, and pass on,\" urged Julius patiently. There was unalterable decision in his quiet voice. And in her tone a change was also noticeable. I was profoundly moved; only with a great eiffort I controlled myself.\n\n\"They crowd so eagerly about me,\" \u2014 the choice of words seemed no longer quite \"Mrs. LeVallon's\" \u2014 \"with little arms outstretched and pleading eyes. They seek to enter, they implore...\"\n\n\"Who are they?\"\n\n\"The Returning Souls.\" The love and passion in her voice brought near, as in a picture, the host of reincarnating souls eager to find a body for their development in the world. They besieged her, clamouring for birth \u2014 for a body.\n\n\"Your thoughts invite them,\" replied Julius, \"but you have the power to decide.\" And then he asked more sternly: \"Has any entered yet?\"\n\nIt was unspeakably moving \u2014 this mother willing to serve with anguish the purpose of advancing souls. Yet this was all of Today. It was not the thing he sought. The general purpose must stand aside for the particular. There was an error to be set right first. She had to seek its origin among the ages infinitely far away. The guidance Julius sought lay in the long ago. But the safety of the little unborn body troubled him, it seemed.\n\n\"As yet,\" she murmured, \"none. The little body of the boy is empty... though besieged.\"\n\n\"By whom besieged?\" he asked more loudly. \"Who hinders?\"\n\nThe little body of the boy! And it was then a further change came suddenly, both in her face and voice, and in the voice of Julius too.\n\nThat larger expression of some forgotten grandeur passed into her features, and she half sat up in the chair; there was a stiffening of the frame; resistance, power, an attitude of authority, replaced the former limpness. The moment was, for me, electrifying. Ice and fire moved upon my skin.\n\nShe opened her lips to speak, but no words were audible.\n\n\"Look close \u2014 and tell me,\" came from Julius gravely.\n\nShe made an effort, then shrank back a little, this time raising one arm as though to protect herself from something coming, then sharply dropping it again over the heart and body.\n\n\"I cannot see,\" she murmured, slightly frowning; \"they stand so close and... are... so splendid. They are too great... to see.\"\n\n\"Who \u2014 what \u2014 are they?\" he insisted. He took her hand in his. I saw her smile.\n\nThe simple words were marvellously impressive. Depths of untold memory stirred within me as I heard.\n\n\"Powers... we knew... so long ago.\"\n\nSome ancient thing in me opened an eye and saw. The Powers we evoked came seeking an entrance, brought nearer by our invitation. They came from the silent valley; they were close about the building. But only through a human channel could they emerge from the spheres where they belonged.\n\n\"Describe them, and pass on,\" I heard Julius say, and there came a pause then that I thought would never end. The look of power rolled back upon her face. She spoke with joy, with a kind of happiness as though she welcomed them.\n\n\"They rush and shine... They flood the distance like a sea, and yet stand close against my heart and blood. They are clothed in wind and fire. I see the diadems of flame ascending and descending. Their breath is all the winds. There is such roaring. I see mountains of wind and fire... advancing... nearer... nearer... We used them \u2014 we invited... long, long ago... And so they... come again about us...\"\n\nHis following command appalled me:\n\n\"Keep them back. You must protect the vacant body from invasion.\"\n\nAnd then he added in tones that seemed to make the very air vibrate, although the voice but whispered, \"You must direct them \u2014 towards me.\"\n\nHe moved to a new position, so that we formed a triangle again. Dimly at the time I understood. The circle signified the union which, having received, enclosed the mighty forces. Only it enclosed too much; the danger of misdirection had appeared. The triangle, her body forming the apex towards the open night, aimed at controlling the immense arrival by lessening the entry. Another thing stood out, too, with crystal clearness \u2014 at the time: the elemental Powers sought the easiest channel, the channel of least resistance, the body still unoccupied: whereas Julius offered \u2014 himself. The risk must be his and his alone. There was \u2014 in those few steps he took across the dim-lit room \u2014 a sense of tremendous, if sinister, drama that swept my heart with both tenderness and terror. The significance of his changed position was staggering.\n\nI watched the sleeper closely. The lips grew more compressed, and the fingers of both hands clenched themselves upon the dark dress on her lap. I saw the muscles of the altering face contract with effort; the whole framework of the body became more rigid. Then, after several minutes, followed a gradual relaxation, as she sank back again into her original position.\n\n\"They retire... \" she murmured with a sigh. \"They retire... into darkness a little. But they still... wait and hover. I hear the rush of their great passing... I see the distant shine of fire... still.\"\n\n\"And the souls?\" he asked gently, \"do they now return?\"\n\nShe lowered her head as with a gesture of relief.\n\n\"They are crowding, crowding. I see them as an endless flight of birds... \" She held out her arms, then shrank back sharply. An expression I could not interpret flashed across the face. Behind a veil, it seemed. And the stern voice of Julius broke in upon the arrested action:\n\n\"Invite them by your will. Draw to you by desire and love one eager soul. The little vacant body must be occupied, so that the Mighty Ones, returning, shall find it thus impossible of entry.\"\n\nIt was a command; it was also a precaution; for if the body of the child were left open it would inevitably attract the invading Powers from \u2014 himself. I watched her very closely then. I saw her again stretch out her arms and hands, then once again \u2014 draw sharply back. But this time I understood the expression on the quivering face. The veil had lifted.\n\nBy what means this was clear to me, yet hidden from Julius, I cannot say. Perhaps the ineradicable love that she and I bore for one another in that long-forgotten time supplied the clue. But of this I am certain \u2014 that she disobeyed him. She left the little waiting body as it was, empty, untenanted. Life \u2014 a soul returning to rebirth \u2014 was not conceived and did not enter in. The reason, moreover, was also clear to me in that amazing moment of her choice: she divined his risk of failure, she wished to save him, she left open the channel of least resistance of set purpose \u2014 the unborn body. For a love known here and now, she sacrificed a love as yet unborn. If Julius failed, at least he would not now be destroyed; there would be another channel ready.\n\nThat thus she thought, intended, I felt convinced. If her mistake was fraught with more danger than she knew, my lips were yet somehow sealed. Our deeper, ancient bond gave me the clue that to Julius was not offered, but no words came from me to enlighten him. It seemed beyond my power; I should have broken faith with her, a faith unbelievably precious to me.\n\nFor a long time, then, there was silence in the little room, while LeVallon continued to make slow passes as before. The anguish left her face, drowned wholly in the grander expression that she wore. She breathed deeply, regularly, without effort, the head sunk forward a little on the breast. The rustle of his coat as his arm went to and fro, and the creaking of the wicker chair were all I heard. Then, presently, Julius turned to me with a low whisper I can hear to this very day. \"I, and I alone,\" he said, \"am the rightful channel. I have waited long.\" He added more that I have forgotten; I caught something about \"all the aspects being favourable,\" and that he felt confidence, sure that he would not fail.\n\n\"You will not,\" I interrupted passionately, \"you dare not fail... \" And then speech suddenly broke down in me, and some dark shadow seemed to fall upon my senses so that I neither heard nor saw nor felt anything for a period I cannot state.\n\nAn interval there certainly was, and of some considerable length probably, for when I came to myself again there was change accomplished, though a change I could not properly estimate. His voice filled the room, addressing the sleeper as before, yet in a way that told me there had been progress accomplished while I had been unconscious.\n\n\"Deeper yet,\" I heard, \"pass down deeper yet, pass back across a hundred intervening lives to that far-off time and place when first \u2014 first \u2014 we called Them forth. Sink down into your inmost being and remember!\"\n\nAnd in her immediate answer there was a curious faintness as of distance: \"It is... so... far away... so far beyond...\"\n\n\"Beyond what?\" he asked, the expression of \"Other Places\" deepening upon his face.\n\nHer forehead wrinkled in a passing frown. \"Beyond this earth,\" she murmured, as though her closed eyes saw within. \"Oh, oh, it hurts. The heat is awful... the light... the tremendous winds... they blind, they tear me... I\" And she stopped abruptly.\n\n\"Forget the pain,\" he said; \"it is already gone.\" And instantly the tension of her face relaxed. She drew a sigh of deep relief. Before I could prevent it, my own voice sounded: \"When we were nearer to the sun!\"\n\nShe made no reply. He took my hand across the table and laid it on her own. \"She cannot hear your voice,\" he said, \"unless you touch us. She is too far away. She does not even know that you are here beside me. You ' of Today she has forgotten, and the you of that long ago she has not yet found.\"\n\n\"You speak with someone \u2014 but with whom?\" she asked at once, turning her head a little in my direction. Not waiting for his reply she at once went on: \"Upon another planet, yes... but oh, so long ago... \" And again she paused.\n\n\"The one immediately before this present one?\" asked Julius.\n\nShe shook her head gently. \"Still further back than that... the one before the last, when first we knew delight of life... without these heavy, closing bodies. When the sun was nearer... and we knew deity in the fiery heat and mighty winds... and Nature was... ourselves... \" The voice wavered oddly, broke, and ceased upon a sigh. A thousand questions burned in me to ask. An amazing certainty of recognition and remembrance burst through my heart. But Julius spoke before my tongue found words.\n\n\"Search more closely,\" he said with intense gravity. \"The time and place we summoned Them is what we need \u2014 not where we first learned it, but where we practised it and failed. Confine your will to that. Forget the earlier planet. To help you, I set a barrier you cannot pass...\"\n\n\"The scene of our actual evocation is what we must discover,\" he whispered to me. \"When that is found we shall be in touch with the actual Powers our worship used.\"\n\n\"It was not there, in that other planet,\" she murmured. \"It was only there we first gained the Nature-wisdom. Thence \u2014 we brought it with us... to another time and place... later... much nearer to Today \u2014 to Earth.\"\n\n\"Remember, then, and see \u2014\" he began, when suddenly her unutterably wonderful expression proclaimed that she at last had found it.\n\nIt was curiously abrupt. He moved aside. We waited. I took up my pencil between fingers that were icy cold. My gaze remained fixed upon the motionless body. Those fast-closed eyes seemed cut in stone, as if they never in this world could open. The forehead gleamed pale as ivory in the lamplight. The soft gulping of the lamp oil beside me, the crumbling of the fire-wood in the grate deepened the silence that I feared to break. The pallid oval of the sleeper's countenance shone at me out of a room turned wholly dark. I forgot the place wherein we sat, our names, our meanings in the present. For there grew vividly upon that disc-like countenance the face of another person \u2014 and of one I knew.\n\nAnd with this shock of recognition \u2014 there came over me both horror and undying sweetness \u2014 a horror that the face would smile into my own with a similar recognition, that from those lips a voice must come I should remember; that those arms would lift, those hands stretch out; an ecstasy that I should be remembered.\n\n\"Open!\" I heard, as from far away, the voice of Julius.\n\nAnd then I realised that the eyes were open. The lids were raised, the eyeballs faced the lamp. Some tension drew the skin sideways. They were other eyes. The eternal Self looked out of them bringing the message of a vast antiquity. They gazed steadily and clearly into mine." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 252", + "text": "Today retired. I remembered Yesterday, but a Yesterday more remote, perhaps, than the fire-mist out of which our little earth was born...\n\nI half rose in my chair. The first instinct \u2014 strong in me still as I write this here in modern Streatham \u2014 was to fall upon my knees as in the stress of some immense, remembered love. That glory caught me, that power of an everlasting passion that was holy. Bathed in a sea of perfect recollection, my eyes met hers, lost themselves, lived back into a Past that had been joy. A flood of shame broke fiercely over me that such a union could ever have seemed \"forgotten.\" That Today could smother Yesterday so easily seemed sacrilege. For this memory, uprising from the mists of hoary preexistence, brought in its train other great emotions of recovered grandeur, all stirred into life by this ancient ceremony we three acted out. Our purpose then had been, I knew, no ordinary, selfish love, no lust of possession or ownership behind it. Its aim and end were not mere personal contentment, mere selfish happiness that excluded others, but, rather, a part of some vast, coordinated process that involved all Nature with her powers and workings, and fulfilled with beauty a purpose of the entire Universe. It was holy in the biggest sense; it was divine. The significance of our attitudes Today was all explained \u2014 Julius, herself and I, exquisitely linked to Nature, a group-soul formed by the loves of Yesterday and Now.\n\nWe gazed at one another in silence, smiling at our recovered wonder. We spoke no word, we made no gesture; there was perfect comprehension; we were, all three, as we had been \u2014 long ago. An earlier state of consciousness took this supreme command... And presently \u2014 how long the interval I cannot say \u2014 her eyelids dropped, she drew a deep sigh of happiness, and lay quiescent as before.\n\nIt was then, I think, that the sense of worship in me became so imperative that denial seemed impossible. Some inner act of adoration certainly accomplished itself although no physical act resulted, for I remember dropping back again into my chair, not knowing what exactly I meant to do. The old desire for the long, sweet things of the soul burst suddenly into flame, the inner yearning to know the deathless Nature Powers which were the gods, and to taste divinity by feeling-with their mighty beings. That early state of simpler consciousness, it seems, lay too remote from modern things to be translatable in clear language. Yet at the time I knew it, felt it, realised it, because I lived it once again. The flood of aspiration that bore me on its crest left thinking and reason utterly out of account. No link survives Today with the state we then recovered...\n\nAnd both she and Julius changed before my eyes. The chalet changed as well, slipping into the shadowy spaces of some vast, pillared temple. The soul in me realised its power and knew its origin divine. Bathed in a sea of long-forgotten glory, it rose into a condition of sublimest bliss and confidence. It recognised its destiny and claimed all Heaven. And this raging fire of early spiritual ambition passed over me as upon a mighty wind; desire and will became augmented as though wind blew them into flame.\n\n\"Watch... and listen,\" I heard, \"and feel no fear!\"\n\nThe change visibly increased; it seemed that curtains lifted in succession... The sunken head was raised; the lips quivered with approaching speech; the pale cheeks deepened with a sudden flush that set the cheek-bones in a quick, high light; the neck bent slightly forward, foreshortening, as it were, the presentment of the head and shoulders; while some indescribable touch of power painted the marble brows cold and almost stern. The entire countenance breathed the august passion of a remoter age dropped close... And to see the little face I knew as Mrs. LeVallon, domestic servant in the world Today, unscreen itself thus before me, while its actual structure yet remained unchanged, broke down the last resistance in me, and rendered my subjugation absolute. Transfiguration was visibly accomplished...\n\nOnce more she turned her head and looked at me. I met the eyes that saw me and remembered. And, though I would have screened myself from their tremendous gaze, there was no remnant of power in me that could do so... She smiled, then slowly withdrew her eyes... I passed, with these two beside me, back into the womb of preexistence. We were upon the Earth \u2014 at the very time and place where we had used the knowledge brought from a still earlier globe.\n\n\"What do you see?\" came in those quiet tones that rolled up time and distance like a scroll. \"Tell me now!\" It was the scene of the lost experiment he sought. We were close upon it.\n\nShe spread her arms; her hands waved slowly through the air to indicate these immense enclosing walls of stone about us. The voice reverberated as in great hollow space.\n\n\"Darkness... and the Vacated Bodies,\" was the reply. I knew that we stood in the Hall of Silence where the bodies lay entranced while their spirits went forth upon the three days' quest. And one of these, I knew, was mine.\n\n\"What besides?\"\n\n\"The Guardians \u2014 who protect.\"\n\n\"Who are they? Who are these Guardians?\"\n\nAn expression of shrinking passed across her face, and disappeared again. The eyes stared fixedly before her into space.\n\n\"Myself,\" she answered slowly, \"you \u2014 Concerighe... and...\"\n\n\"There Was another?\" he asked. \"Another who was with us?\"\n\nShe hesitated. At first no answer came. She seemed to search the darkness to discover it.\n\n\"He is not near enough to see,\" she murmured presently. \"Somewhere beyond... he stands... he lies... I cannot see him clearly.\"\n\nJulius touched my hand, and with the contact the expression on her face grew clear. She smiled.\n\n\"You see him now,\" he said with decision.\n\nShe turned her face towards me with a tender, stately movement. The sterner aspect deepened into softness on the features. Great joy for an instant passed into the strange sea-green eyes.\n\n\"Silvatela,\" she whispered, slightly lowering the head. \"He offered himself \u2014 for me. He lies now \u2014 empty at our feet.\" And the utterance of the name passed through me with a thrill of nameless sweetness. An infinite desire woke, yet desire not for myself alone.\n\n\"The time...?\" asked Julius in that cabn, reverent tone.\n\nShe rose with a suddenness that made me start, though, somehow, I had expected it. At her full height she stood between us. Then, spreading her hands from both the temples outwards, she bowed her head to the level of the breast. Julius, I saw, did likewise, and before I realised it, the same deep, instinctive awe had brought me to my feet in a similar obeisance. A breath of air from the night outside passed sensibly between us, enough to stir the hair upon my head and increase the fire on the hearth behind. It ceased, and a wave of comforting heat moved in, paused a moment, settled like a great invisible presence, and held the atmosphere.\n\n\"It is the Pause in Nature,\" I heard the answer, and saw that she was seated in the chair once more. \"The Third Day nears its end... The Questing Souls... draw near again to enter. We have kept their vacated bodies safe for them. Our task is almost over...\"\n\nShe drew a deep, convulsive sigh. Then Julius, taking her right hand, guided my left to hold the other one. I touched her fingers and felt them instantly clasp about my own; she sighed again, the frown went from her forehead, and turning her gaze upon us both she murmured:\n\n\"I see clearly, I see everything.\"\n\nThe past surged over me in a drowning flood.\n\n\"This is the moment, this the very place,\" came the voice of Julius. \"It was at this moment we were faithless to our trust. We used your body as the channel... \" He turned slightly in my direction.\n\n\"The moment and the place,\" she interrupted. \"There is just time. Before the Souls return... You have called upon the Powers... Yet both cannot enter!... he... and they...\"\n\nThere was a mighty, echoing cry.\n\nShe stopped abruptly. Her face darkened as with some great internal effort. I darkened too. My vision broke... There was a sense of interval...\n\n\"And the channel?\" he asked below his breath.\n\nShe shook her head slowly to and fro. \"It lies waiting still in the Iron Slumber... You used it... it is shattered... The soul returning finds it not..,. His soul... whom I loved...\"\n\n.The voices ceased. A sudden darkness dropped. I had the sensation that I was rushing, flying, whirling. The hand I clasped seemed melted into air. I lost the final remnant of present things about me. The circle of my own sensations, my identity, the identity of my two companions vanished. A remarkable feeling of triumph came upon me, of joyful power that lifted me high above all injury and death, while something utterly gigantic asserted itself in the place of what had just been \"me\" \u2014 something that could never be maimed, subdued, held prisoner. The darkness then lifted, giving way before a hurricane of light that swept me, as it were, upon a pinnacle. Secure and strong I felt beyond all possible disaster, yet breathless amid things too long unfamiliar... And then, abruptly, I knew searing pain, the pain of something broken in me, of spiritual incompleteness, disappointment... I was called back to lesser life \u2014 before my time \u2014 before some high fulfilment due to me...\n\nJulius and Mrs. LeVallon were no longer there beside me, but in their place I saw two solemn figures standing motionless and grave above a prostrate body. It lay upon a marble slab, and sunlight fell over the face and folded hands. The two moved forward. They knelt... there was a sound of voices as in prayer, a powerful, drawn-out sound that produced intense vibrations, vibrations so immense that the motion in the air was felt as wind. I saw gestures... the body half rose up upon its marble slab... and then the blaze of some incredible effulgence descended before my eyes, so fiercely brilliant, and accompanied by such an intolerable, radiant heat... that the entire scene went lost behind great shafts of light that splintered and destroyed it... and an awful darkness followed, a darkness that again had pain and incompleteness at the heart of it...\n\nOne thing alone I understood \u2014 that body on the shining slab was mine. My absent soul, deprived of high glory elsewhere that was mine by right, returned into it unexpectedly, aware of danger. It had been used for the purposes of evocation. I had met the two Powers evoked by means of it midway: Fire and Wind...\n\nThe vision vanished. I was standing in the chalet room again, he and the woman by my side. There was a sense of enormous interval." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 253", + "text": "We were back among the present things again. I had merely relived in a moment's space a vision of that Past where these two had sinned against me. The memory was gone again. We now resumed our present reconstruction, by means of which the balance should be finally restored. The same two elemental Powers were with us still. Summoned once again \u2014 but this time that they might be dismissed.\n\n\"The Messengers of Wind and Fire approach,\" Julius was saying softly. \"Be ready for the Powers that follow after.\"\n\n\"But \u2014 there poured through me but a moment ago \u2014\" I began, when his face stopped my speech sharply.\n\n\"That 'moment' was sixty centuries ago! Keep hold now upon your will,\" he interrupted, yet without a trace of the vast excitement that I felt, \"lest they invade your heart instead of mine. The glory that you knew was but the shadow of their coming \u2014 as long ago you returned arid met them \u2014 when we failed. Keep close watch upon your will. It is the Equinox... The pause now comes with midnight.\"\n\nEven before he had done speaking the majesties of Wind and Fire were upon us. And Nature came in with them. A dislocating change, swift as the shaking of some immense thick shutter that hides life behind material things, passed in a flash about us. We stood in a circle, hands firmly clasped. There was a first effect as if those very hands were fused and ran into a single molten chain. There was no outer sound. The silence in the air was deathlike. But the sensation in my soul was \u2014 life. The momentary confusion was stupendous, then passed away. I stood in that room, but I stood in the valley too. I was in Nature everywhere. I heard the deer go past me, I heard them on the soft, sweet grass, I heard their breathing and the beating of their hearts. Birds fluttered round my face and shoulders, I heard their singing in my blood and ears, I knew their wild desires and freedom, their darting to and fro, their swaying on the boughs. My feet were running water, while yet the solid mass of earth and cliff stood up in me. I also knew the growing of the flowers by the forests, tasted their fragrance in my breath, their tender, delicate essence all unwasted. It passed understanding, yet was natural as sight, for my hands went far away, while still quite close, dipping among the stars that grew and piled like heaps of gathered sand. It all was simple, easy, mine by right. Nature gave me her myriad sensations without stint. I had forgotten. I remembered. The universe stood open. \"I\" had entered with these other two beside me.\n\nShe raised her arms aloft, taking our hands up with her own, and cried with a voice like wind against great branches :\n\n\"They come! The Doors of Fire are wide, and the Gates of Wind stand open I They enter the channel that is offered.\"\n\nAnd his voice, like a roar of flame, came answering hers:\n\n\"The salutations of the Fire and Wind are made! The channel is prepared! There is no resistance I\"\n\nThey stood erect and rigid, their outlines merged with some strange extension into space. They were superb, tremendous. There was no shrinking there. The deities of wind and fire came up, seeking their channel of return.\n\nAnd so \"They\" came. Yet not outwardly; nor was the terrific impact of their advent known completely to any but himself alone who sought to harbour them now within his little human organism. Into my heart and soul poured but a fragment of their radiant, rushing presences. About us all some intelligent power as of a living wind brought in its mighty arms that ethereal fire which is not merely living, but is life itself. Material objects wavered, then disappeared, thin as transparent glass that increases light and heat. Walls, ceiling, floor were burned away, yet not consumed; the atoms composing all physical things glowed with a radiant energy they no longer could conceal. The latent heat of inanimate Nature emerged, not rebellious but triumphant. It was a deific manifestation of those natural powers which are the first essentials of human existence \u2014 heat and air. We were not alien to Nature, nor was Nature set apart from us; we shared her inexhaustible life, and the glory of the Universe in which she is a fragment.\n\n\"The Doors of the Creative Fire stand wide,\" rang out her triumphant voice again. \"The golden splendour of the invisible Fire loosens and flows free. The Breath of Life is everywhere... our own... But what, oh what of \u2014 him!\" The scene of their past audacious error swept again before me. And, partially, I caught it.\n\nInto a gulf of silence her words fell, recaptured from a mode of invocation effective in forgotten ages. Quivering lightnings, like a host of running stars, flashed marvellously about us, with bars of fire that seemed to map all space, while there was a sense of prodigious lifting in the heart as though some power like rushing wind drove will and yearning to the summit of all possible achievement. I realised simply this \u2014 that Nature's powers and purposes became mine too.\n\nHow long this lasted is impossible to state; duration disappeared. The Universe, it seemed, had caught me up, joyful and unafraid, into her bosom. It was too immense for little terrors... And it was only after what seemed an interminable interval that I became aware of something that marred; of effort somewhere to confine and limit; of conflict, in a word, as though some smaller force strove to impose an order upon Powers that resented it. And I understood the meaning of this too. Julius battled in his soul. He wrestled with the Energies he had invoked, exerting to the utmost a trained, spiritual will to influence their direction into himself, as expiatory channel. Julius, after the lapse of centuries, fought to restore the balance he had long ago disturbed.\n\nHer voice, too, occasionally reached me with a sound as of wind that rushed, but very far away. The words went past me with a heat like flame. I caught fragments only... \"The King of Breath... The Master of the Diadems of Fire... they seek to enter... the channel of safe return... Oh, beware... beware...\"\n\nAnd it was then I saw this wonderful thing happen, poignant with common human drama, intensifying the reality of the whole amazing experience. For she turned suddenly to him, her face alight and radiant. She would not let him accept the awful risk. Her arms went out to hold him to her. He drove her back.\n\n\"I open wide the channel of my life and soul!\" he cried, with a gesture of the entire body that made it relaxed and unresisting. He stepped backwards a little from her touch. \"It must be through me!\"\n\nAnd there was anguish in her tone that seemed to press all possible human passion into the single sentence:\n\n\"I, too, throw myself open! I cannot let you go from me I\"\n\nHe moved still further from her. It seemed to me he went at prodigious speed, yet grew no smaller to the eye. The withdrawal belonged to some part of his being that I was aware of inwardly. Streams of fire and wind went with him. They followed. And I heard her voice in agonised pursuit. She raised her hands as in supplication, but to whom or what I knew not. She fought to prevent. She fought to offer herself instead.\n\nBut also she offered the body as yet unclaimed \u2014 untenanted.\n\n\"He who is in the Fire and in the Sun... I call upon His power. I offer myself!\" I heard her cry.\n\nHis answering voice seemed terrible:\n\n\"The Law forbids. You hold Them back from me.\" And then as from a greater distance, the voice continued more faintly: \"You prevent. It has to be! Help me before it is too late; help me... or... I... fail!\"\n\nFail! I heard the awful word like thunder in the heavens.\n\nThe conflict of their wills, the distress of it was terrible. At this last moment she realised that the strain was more than he could withstand \u2014 he would go from her in that separation which is the body's death. She saw it all; there was division in her will and energies. Opposing herself to the justice he had invoked, she influenced the invasion of the elemental Powers, offering herself as channel in the hope of saving him. Her human desire weighed the balance \u2014 turning it just against him. Her insight clouded with emotion. She increased the risk for him, and at the same time left open to the great invading Powers another channel \u2014 the line of least resistance, the empty vehicle all prepared within herself.\n\nTo me it was mercilessly clear. I tried to speak, but found no words to utter; my tongue refused to frame a single sound; nor could I move my limbs. I heard Julius only, his voice calling like a distant storm.\n\n\"I call upon the Fire and Wind to enter me, and pass to their eternal home... whence you and I... and he...\"\n\nHis voice fell curiously away into a gulf; there was weakness in it. I saw her frail body shake from head to foot. She swayed as though about to fall. And then her voice, strong as a bugle-call, rang out:\n\n\"I claim it by \u2014 my love...!\"\n\nThere was a burst of wind, a rush of sheeted fire Then darkness fell. But in that instant before the fire passed, I saw his form stand close before my eyes. The face, alight with compassion and resignation, was turned towards her own. I saw the eyes; I saw the hands outstretched to take her; the lips were parted in a final attempt at utterance which never knew completion. And I knew \u2014 the certainty stopped the beating of my heart \u2014 that he had failed. There was no actual sound. Like a gleaming sword drawn swiftly from its scabbard, he rose past me through the air, borne from his body, as it were, on wings of ascending flame. There was a second of intolerable radiance, a rush of driving wind \u2014 and he was gone.\n\nAnd far away, at the end of some stone corridor in the sunshine, yet at the same time close beside me upon the floor of the little mountain chalet, I heard the falling body as it dropped with a thud before my feet \u2014 untenanted..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 254", + "text": "I remember what followed very much as one remembers the confusion after an anaesthetic \u2014 fragments of extraordinary dream and of sensational experience jostling one another on the threshold of awakening. Then, very swiftly, like a train of gorgeous colour disappearing into a tunnel of darkness, the memory slipped down within me and was gone. The Past with a rush of lightning swept back into its sheath.\n\nThe glory and sense of exaltation, that is, were gone, but not the memory that they had been. I knew what had happened, what I had felt, seen, yearned for; but it was the cold facts alone remained, the feelings that had accompanied them vanished. Into a dull, chilled world I dropped back, wondering and terrified. A long interval had passed.\n\nAnd the first thing I realised was that Mrs. LeVallon still lay sleeping in that chair of wicker \u2014 profoundly sleeping \u2014 that the lamp had burned low, and that the chalet felt like ice. Her face, even in the twilight, I saw was normal, the older expression gone. I turned the wick up higher, noting as I did so that the paper strewn about me was thick with writing, and it was then my half-dazed senses took in first that Julius was not standing near us, and that a shadow, oddly shaped and huddled, lay on the floor where the lamplight met the darkness.\n\nThe moving portion seemed at once to disentangle itself from the rest, and a face turned up to stare at me. It was the serving-man upon his knees. The expression in his eyes did more to bring me to my normal senses than anything else. That scared and anguished look made me understand the truth \u2014 that, and the moaning that from time to time escaped his lips.\n\nOf speech from him I hardly got a word; he was inarticulate to the last as ever, and all that I could learn was that he had felt his master's danger and had come...\n\nWe carried the body upstairs and laid it on the bed. I strove to regard it merely as the \"instrument\" he had used awhile, strove to find still his real undying Presence close to me \u2014 but that comfort failed me too. The face was very white. Upon the pale marble features lay still that signature of \"Other Places\" which haunted his life and soul. We closed the staring eyes and covered him with a sheet. And there the servant crouched upon the floor for the remaining five hours until the dawn, when I came up from watching that other figure of sleep in the room below, and found him in the same position. AH that day as well he watched indeed, until at last I made him realise that the sooner he got the farmer's horse below and summoned a doctor, the better for all concerned.\n\nBut that was many hours later in the day, and meanwhile he just crouched there, difficult of approach, eyeing me savagely almost when I came, his eyes aflame with a kind of ugly, sullen resentment, but faithful to the last. What the silent, devoted being had heard or seen during our long hours of sinister struggle and experiment, I never knew, nor ever shall know.\n\nMy memory hardly lingers upon that; nor upon the unprofitable detail of the doctor's tardy arrival in the evening, his ill-concealed suspicion and eventual granting of a death certificate according to Swiss law; nor, again, upon his obvious verdict of a violent heart-stroke, or the course of procedure that he bade us follow.\n\nEven the distressing details of the burial have somewhat faded, and I recall chiefly the fact that the Man established himself in the village where the churchyard was and began his watch that kept him near the grave, I believe, till death relieved him. My memory lingers rather upon the hours that I watched beside the sleeping woman, and upon the dreadful scene of her awakening and discovery of the truth.\n\nFor hours we had the darkness and the silence to ourselves, a silence broken only by the steady breathing of her slumber. I dared not wake her; knowing that the trance condition in time exhausts itself and the subject returns to normal waking consciousness without effort or distress, I let her slumber on, dreading the moment when the eyes would open and she must question me. The cold increased with the early hours of the morning, and I spread a rug about her stretched-out form. Slowly with the failing of the oil, the little lamp flame flickered and died, then finally went out, leaving us in the chill gloom together. All heat had long since left the fire of peat.\n\nIt was a vigil never to be forgotten. My thoughts revolved the whole time in one and the same circle, seeking in vain support from common things. Slowly and by degrees my mind found steadiness, though with returning balance my pain grew keener and more searching. The poignant minutes stretched to days and years. For ever I fell to reconstructing those vanished scenes of memory, while striving to believe that the whole thing had been but a detailed vivid dream, and that presently I, too, should awake to find our life in the chalet as before, Julius still alive and close...\n\nThe moaning from the room overhead, where the Man watched over that other, final sleep, then brought bitterly again the sad reality, and set my thoughts whirling afresh with anguish. I was distraught and trembling... London and my lectures, the recent climbing in the Dolomites, cities and trains and the business of daily modern life, these were the dreams... The reality, truth, lay in that world of vision just departed... Concerighe, Silvatela, the woman of that ancient, splendid past, the recapture of the Temple Days when we three trod together that strange path of questing; the broken fragment of it all; the Chamber of the Vacated Bodies, and the sin of long ago; then, chief of all, the attempt to banish the Powers, evoked in those distant ages, back to their eternal home \u2014 his effort to offer himself as channel \u2014 her fear to lose him and her offering of herself \u2014 the failure... and that appalling result upstairs.\n\nFor, ever and again, my thoughts returned to that: the spirit of the chief transgressor hovering now without a body, waiting for the River of the Lives to bring in some dim future another opportunity for atonement.\n\nThe failure...! In the glimmer of that pale, cold dawn I watched the outline of her slumbering form. I remembered her cry of sacrificing love that drew the great rushing Powers down into herself, and thus into the unresisting little body gathered now in growth against her heart. That human love the world deems great, seeking to save him to her own distress, had only blocked the progress of his soul she yearned to protect, so little understanding... I heard her deep-drawn breathing in the darkness and wondered... for the child that she would bear... come to our modern strife and worldly things with this freight of elemental forces linked about his human heart and mind \u2014 fierce child of Wind and Fire... I A \"natural,\" perhaps a \"supernatural\" being...\n\nThis sense of woe and passion, haunting my long, silent vigil from night to dawn, and after it when the sunshine of the September morning lit the room and turned her face to silver \u2014 this it is that, after so many years, clings to the memory as though of yesterday.\n\nAnd then, without a sign, or movement to prepare me, I saw that the eyes had opened and were fixed upon my face.\n\nThe whispered words came instantly:\n\n\"Where is he? Has he gone away?\"\n\nStupid with distress and pain, my heart was choked. I stared blankly in return, the channels of speech too blocked to find a single syllable.\n\nI raised my hands, though hardly knowing what I meant to do. She sat up in the chair and looked a moment swiftly about the room. Her lips parted for another question, but it did not come. I think in my face, or in my gesture perhaps, she read the message of despair. She hid her face behind her hands, leaned back with a dreadful drooping of the entire frame, and let a sigh escape her that held the substance of all unutterable words of grief.\n\nI yearned to help, but it was my silence, of course, that brought the truth so swiftly home to her returning consciousness. The awakening was complete and rapid, not as out of common sleep. I longed to touch and comfort her, yet my muscles refused to yield in any action I could manage, and my tongue clung dry against the roof of my mouth.\n\nThen, presently, between her fingers came the words below a whisper:\n\n\"1 knew that this would happen... I knew that once I slept, he'd go from me... and I should lose him. I tried... that hard... to keep awake... But sleep would take me. An' now... it's took him... too. He's gone for \u2014 for very long... again!\" She did not say \"for ever.\"\n\nIt was the voice, the accent and the words again of Mrs. LeVallon.\n\n\"Not for ever,\" I whispered, \"but for a little time.\"\n\nShe rose up like a figure of white death, taking my hand. She did not tremble, and her step was firm. And more than this I never heard her say, for the entire contents of the interval since she first fell asleep beneath her husband's passes had gone beyond recall.\n\n\"Take me to him,\" she said gently. \"I want to say goodbye.\"\n\nI led her up those creaking wooden stairs and left her with her dead.\n\nHer strength was wonderful. I can never forget the quiet self-control she showed through all the wretched details that the situation then entailed. She asked no questions, shed no tears, moving brave and calm through all the ghastly duties. Something in her that lay deeper than death understood, and with the resignation of a truly great heart, accepted. Far stronger than myself she was; and, indeed, it seemed that my pain for her \u2014 at the time anyhow \u2014 absorbed the suffering that made my own heart ache with a sense of loss that has ever since left me empty and bereaved. Only in her eyes was there betrayal of sorrow that was itself, perhaps, another half revival of yet dimmer memories... \"eyes in which desire of some strange thing unutterably burned, unquenchable... \" For the first time I understood the truth of another's words \u2014 so like a statue was her appearance, so set in stone, her words so sparing and her voice so dead:\n\n\u2003\"I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;\n\n\u2003That only men incredulous of despair,\n\n\u2003Half taught in anguish, through the midnight air\n\n\u2003Beat upward to God's throne in loud access\n\n\u2003Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness\n\n\u2003In souls as countries lieth silent-bore...\"\n\nHer soul lay silent, bare; her grief was hopeless... To my shame it must be confessed that I longed to escape from all the strain and nightmare of what had passed. The few days had been charged with material for a lifetime. I knew the sharp desire to find myself in touch once more with common, wholesome things \u2014 with London noise and bustle, trains, telephones and daily newspapers, with stupid students who could not even remember what they had learned the previous week, and with all the great majority who never even dreamed of a consciousness less restricted than their own. I saw the matter through, however, to the bitter end, and did not lose sight of Mrs. LeVallon until I left her safely in Lausanne, and helped her find a woman who should be both maid and companion, at least for the immediate future. It cannot be of interest or value to relate here. She did not cross my path again; while, on the other hand, it has never been possible for me to forget her. To this day I hear her voice and accent, I feel the touch of that hand that drew me softly into such depths of inexplicable vision; above all, I see her luminous, strange eyes and her movements of strange grace across the chalet floor... And sometimes, even now, I half... remember.\n\nYet never, till after this long interval of years, could I bring myself to set down any record of what had happened. Perhaps \u2014 most probably, I think \u2014 I feared that dwelling upon the haunting details that writing would involve might revive too obsessingly the memory of an experience so curiously overwhelming.\n\nNow time has brought the necessity, as it were, of this confession; and I have done my best with material that really resists the mould of language, at least as I can use it. Later reading \u2014 for I devoured the best authorities and ransacked even the most extravagant records in my quest \u2014 has come to throw a little curious light upon some parts of it; and the results of this subsequent study no doubt appear in this report. At the time, however, I was ignorant of all such things, and the effect upon me of what I witnessed thus for the first time may be judged accordingly. It was dislocating.\n\nTwo facts alone remain to mention. And the first seems to me perhaps the most singular of the entire experience. For the pages I had covered with writing showed suddenly an abrupt and extraordinary change of script. Although the earlier sheets were in my own handwriting, roughly jotting down question and reply as they fell from the lips of Julius or his wife, there came midway in them this inexplicable change that altered them into the illegible scribble of a language that I could not read, yet recognised. It changed into that curious kind of ideograph that Julius used at school, that he showed me many a time in the sand at the end of the football field where we used to lie and talk, and that he claimed then was the ancient sacerdotal cipher we had used together in our remotest \"Temple Days.\" I cannot read a word of it, nor can any to whom I have shown it decipher a single outline. The change began, it seems, at the point where \"Mrs. LeVallon\" went \"deeper\" at his word of command, and entered the layer of memories that dealt with that most ancient \"section.\" This accounts, too, for the confusion and incompleteness of my record as written. A page of this script is framed upon my walls today; my eye rests on it as I write these words upon a modern typewriter \u2014 in Streatham.\n\nThe other fact I have to mention might well be the starting point for study and observation of an interesting kind. Yet, though it sorely tempted me, I resisted the temptation, and now, after twenty years, it is too late, and I, too old. This record, if published, may fall beneath the eye of someone to whom the chance and the desire may possibly combine to bring the opportunity.\n\nFor some weeks after the events that have been here described, Mrs. LeVallon gave birth to a boy, surviving him, alas! by but a single day.\n\nThis I heard long afterwards by the merest chance. But my strenuous efforts to trace the child proved unavailing, and I only learned that he was adopted by a French family whose name even was not given to me. If alive he would be now about twenty years of age.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Wave ]\n\nSince childhood days he had been haunted by a Wave.\n\nIt appeared with the very dawn of thought, and was his earliest recollection of any vividness. It was also his first experience of nightmare: a wave of an odd, dun colour, almost tawny, that rose behind him, advanced, curled over in the act of toppling, and then stood still. It threatened, but it did not fall. It paused, hovering in a position contrary to nature; it waited.\n\nSomething prevented; it was not meant to fall; the right moment had not yet arrived.\n\nIf only it would fall! It swept across the skyline in a huge, long curve far overhead, hanging dreadfully suspended. Beneath his feet he felt the roots of it withdrawing; he shuffled furiously and made violent efforts; but the suction undermined him where he stood. The ground yielded and dropped away. He only sank in deeper. His entire weight became that of a feather against the gigantic tension of the mass that any moment, it seemed, must lift him in its rising curve, bend, break, and twist him, then fling him crashing forward to his smothering fate.\n\nYet the moment never came. The Wave hung balanced between him and the sky, poised in mid-air. It did not fall. And the torture of that infinite pause contained the essence of the nightmare.\n\nThe Wave invariably came up behind him, stealthily, from what seemed interminable distance. He never met it. It overtook him from the rear. The horizon hid it till it rose.\n\nThere were stages in its history, moreover, and in the effect it produced upon his early mind. Usually he woke up the moment he realised it was there. For it invariably announced its presence. He heard no sound, but knew that it was coming\u2014there was a feeling in the atmosphere not unlike the heavy brooding that precedes a thunderstorm, only so different from anything he had yet known in life that his heart sank into his boots. He looked up. There, above his head was the huge, curved monster, hanging in mid-air. The mood had justified itself. He called it the 'wavy feeling.' He was never wrong about it.\n\nThe second stage was reached when, instead of trying to escape shorewards, where there were tufts of coarse grass upon a sandy bank, he turned and faced the thing. He looked straight into the main under-body of the poised billow. He saw the opaque mass out of which this line rose up and curved. He stared against the dull, dun-coloured parent body whence it came\u2014the sea. Terrified yet fascinated, he examined it in detail, as a man about to be executed might examine the grain of the wooden block close against his eyes. A little higher, some dozen feet above the level of his head, it became transparent; sunlight shot through the glassy curve. He saw what appeared to be streaks and bubbles and transverse lines of foam that yet did not shine quite as water shines. It moved suddenly; it curled a little towards the crest; it was about to topple over, to break\u2014yet did not break.\n\nAbout this time he noticed another thing: there was a curious faint sweetness in the air beneath the bend of it, a delicate and indescribable odour that was almost perfume. It was sweet; it choked him. He called it, in his boyish way, a whiff. The 'whiff' and the 'wavy feeling' impressed themselves so vividly upon his mind that if ever he met them in his ordinary life\u2014out of dream, that is\u2014he was sure that he would know them. In another sense he felt he knew them already. They were familiar.\n\nBut another stage went further than all the others put together. It amounted to a discovery. He was perhaps ten years old at this time, for he was still addressed as 'Tommy,' and it was not till the age of fifteen that his solid type of character made 'Tom' seem more appropriate. He had just told the dream to his mother for the hundredth time, and she, after listening with sympathy, had made her ever-green suggestion\u2014'If you dream of water, Tommy, it means you're thirsty in your sleep,'\u2014when he turned and stared straight into her eyes with such intentness that she gave an involuntary start.\n\n'But, mother, it isn't water!'\n\n'Well, darling, if it isn't water, what is it, then?' She asked the question quietly enough, but she felt, apparently, something of the queer dismay that her boy felt too. It seemed the mother-sense was touched. The instinct to protect her offspring stirred uneasily in her heart. She repeated the question, interested in the old, familiar dream for the first time since she heard it several years before: 'If it isn't water, Tommy, what is it? What can it be?' His eyes, his voice, his manner\u2014 something she could not properly name\u2014had startled her.\n\nBut Tommy noticed her slight perturbation, and knowing that a boy of his age did not frighten his mother without reason, or even with it, turned his eyes aside and answered:\n\n'I couldn't tell. There wasn't time. You see, I woke up then.'\n\n'How curious, Tommy,' she rejoined. 'A wave is a wave, isn't it?'\n\nAnd he answered thoughtfully: 'Yes, mother; but there are lots of things besides water, aren't there?'\n\nShe assented with a nod, and a searching look at him which he purposely avoided. The subject dropped; no more was said; yet somehow from that moment his mother knew that this idea of a wave, whether it was nightmare or only dream, had to do with her boy's life in a way that touched the protective thing in her, almost to the point of positive defence. She could not explain it; she did not like it; instinct warned her\u2014that was all she knew. And Tommy said no more. The truth was, indeed, that he did not know himself of what the Wave was composed. He could not have told his mother even had he considered it permissible. He would have loved to speculate and talk about it with her, but, having divined her nervousness, he knew he must not feed it. No boy should do such a thing.\n\nMoreover, the interest he felt in the Wave was of such a deep, enormous character\u2014the adjectives were his own\u2014that he could not talk about it lightly. Unless to some one who showed genuine interest, he could not even mention it. To his brothers and sister, both older and younger than himself, he never spoke of it at all. It had to do with something so fundamental in him that it was sacred. The realisation of it, moreover, came and went, and often remained buried for weeks together; months passed without a hint of it; the nightmare disappeared. Then, suddenly, the feeling would surge over him, perhaps just as he was getting into bed, or saying his prayers, or thinking of quite other things. In the middle of a discussion with his brother about their air-guns and the water-rat they hadn't hit\u2014up would steal the 'wavy' feeling with its dim, familiar menace. It stole in across his brother's excited words about the size and speed of the rat; interest in sport entirely vanished; he stared at Tim, not hearing a word he said; he dived into bed; he had to be alone with the great mood of wonder and terror that was rising. The approach was unmistakable; he cuddled beneath the sheets, fighting-angry if Tim tried to win him back to the original interest. The dream was coming; and, sure enough, a little later in his sleep, it came.\n\nFor even at this stage of his development he recognised instinctively this special quality about it\u2014that it could not, was not meant to be avoided. It was inevitable and right. It hurt, yet he must face it. It was as necessary to his well-being as having a tooth out. Nor did he ever seek to dodge it. His character was not the kind that flinched. The one thing he did ask was\u2014to understand. Some day, he felt, this full understanding would come.\n\nThere arrived then a new and startling development in this curious obsession, the very night, Tommy claims, that there had been the fuss about the gun and water-rat, on the day before the conversation with his mother. His brother had plagued him to come out from beneath the sheets and go on with the discussion, and Tommy, furious at being disturbed in the 'wavy' mood he both loved and dreaded, had felt himself roused uncommonly. He silenced Tim easily enough with a smashing blow from a pillow, then, with a more determined effort than usual, buried himself to face the advent of the Wave. He fell asleep in the attempt, but the attempt bore fruit. He felt the great thing coming up behind him; he turned; he saw it with greater distinctness than ever before; almost he discovered of what it was composed.\n\nThat it was not water established itself finally in his mind; but more\u2014 he got very close to deciding its exact composition. He stared hard into the threatening mass of it; there was a certain transparency about the substance, yet this transparency was not clear enough for water: there were particles, and these particles went drifting by the thousand, by the million, through the mass of it. They rose and fell, they swept along, they were very minute indeed, they whirled. They glistened, shimmered, flashed. He made a guess; he was just on the point of guessing right, in fact, when he saw another thing that for the moment obliterated all his faculties. There was both cold and heat in the sensation, fear and delight. It transfixed him. He saw eyes.\n\nSteady, behind the millions of minute particles that whirled and drifted, he distinctly saw a pair of eyes of light-blue colour, and hardly had he registered this new discovery, when another pair, but of quite different kind, became visible beyond the first pair\u2014dark, with a fringe of long, thick lashes. They were\u2014he decided afterwards\u2014what is called Eastern eyes, and they smiled into his own through half-closed lids. He thinks he made out a face that was dimly sketched behind them, but the whirling particles glinted and shimmered in such a confusing way that he could not swear to this. Of one thing only, or rather of two, did he feel quite positive: that the dark eyes were those of a woman, and that they were kind and beautiful and true: but that the pale-blue eyes were false, unkind, and treacherous, and that the face to which they belonged, although he could not see it, was a man's. Dimly his boyish heart was aware of happiness and suffering. The heat and cold he felt, the joy and terror, were half explained. He stared. The whirling particles drifted past and hid them. He woke.\n\nThat day, however, the 'wavy' feeling hovered over him more or less continuously. The impression of the night held sway over all he did and thought. There was a kind of guidance in it somewhere. He obeyed this guidance as by an instinct he could not, dared not disregard, and towards dusk it led him into the quiet room overlooking the small Gardens at the back of the house, his father's study. The room was empty; he approached the big mahogany cupboard; he opened one of the deep drawers where he knew his father kept gold and private things, and birthday or Christmas presents. But there was no dishonourable intention in him anywhere; indeed, he hardly knew exactly why he did this thing. The drawer, though moving easily, was heavy; he pulled hard; it slid out with a rush; and at that moment a stern voice sounded in the room behind him: 'What are you doing at my Eastern drawer?'\n\nTommy, one hand still on the knob, turned as if he had been struck. He gazed at his father, but without a trace of guilt upon his face.\n\n'I wanted to see, Daddy.'\n\n'I'll show you,' said the stern-faced man, yet with kindness and humour in the tone. 'It's full of wonderful things. I've nothing secret from you; but another time you'd better ask first\u2014Tommy.'\n\n'I wanted to see,' faltered the boy. 'I don't know why I did it. I just had a feeling. It's the first time\u2014really.'\n\nThe man watched him searchingly a moment, but without appearing to do so. A look of interest and understanding, wholly missed by the culprit, stole into his fine grey eyes. He smiled, then drew Tommy towards him, and gave him a kiss on the top of his curly head. He also smacked him playfully. 'Curiosity,' he said with pretended disapproval, 'is divine, and at your age it is right that you should feel curiosity about everything in the world. But another time just ask me\u2014and I'll show you all I possess.' He lifted his son in his arms, so that for the first time the boy could overlook the contents of the opened drawer. 'So you just had a feeling, eh\u2014?' he continued, when Tommy wriggled in his arms, uttered a curious exclamation, and half collapsed. He seemed upon the verge of tears. An ordinary father must have held him guilty there and then. The boy cried out excitedly:\n\n'The whiff! Oh, Daddy, it's my whiff!'\n\nThe tears, no longer to be denied, came freely then; after them came confession too, and confused though it was, the man made something approaching sense out of the jumbled utterance. It was not mere patient kindness on his part, for an older person would have seen that genuine interest lay behind the half-playful, half-serious cross-examination. He watched the boy's eager, excited face out of the corner of his eyes; he put discerning questions to him, he assisted his faltering replies, and he obtained in the end the entire story of the dream\u2014the eyes, the wavy feeling, and the whiff. How much coherent meaning he discovered in it all is hard to say, or whether the story he managed to disentangle held together. There was this strange deep feeling in the boy, this strong emotion, this odd conviction amounting to an obsession; and so far as could be discovered, it was not traceable to any definite cause that Tommy could name\u2014a fright, a shock, a vivid impression of one kind or another upon a sensitive young imagination. It lay so deeply in his being that its roots were utterly concealed; but it was real.\n\nDr. Kelverdon established the existence in his second boy of an unalterable premonition, and, being a famous nerve specialist, and a disciple of Freud into the bargain, he believed that a premonition has a cause, however primitive, however carefully concealed that cause may be. He put the boy to bed himself and tucked him up, told Tim that if he teased his brother too much he would smack him with his best Burmese slipper which had tiny nails in it, and then whispered into Tommy's ear as he cuddled down, happy and comforted, among the blankets: 'Don't make a special effort to dream, my boy; but if you do dream, try to remember it next morning, and tell me exactly what you see and feel.' He used the Freudian method.\n\nThen, going down to his study again, he looked at the open drawer and sniffed the faint perfume of things\u2014chiefly from Egypt\u2014that lay inside it. But there was nothing of special interest in the drawer; indeed, it was one he had not touched for years.\n\nHe went over one by one a few of the articles, collected from various points of travel long ago. There were bead necklaces from Memphis, some trash from a mummy of doubtful authenticity, including several amulets and a crumbling fragment of old papyrus, and, among all this, a tiny packet of incense mixed from a recipe said to have been found in a Theban tomb. All these, jumbled together in pieces of tissue-paper, had lain undisturbed since the day he wrapped them up some dozen years before\u2014 indeed he heard the dry rattle of the falling sand as he undid the tissue-paper. But a strong perfume rose from the parcel to his nostrils. 'That's what Tommy means by his whiff,' he said to himself. 'That's Tommy's whiff beyond all question. I wonder how he got it first?'\n\nHe remembered, then, that he had made a note of the story connected with the incense, and after some rummaging he found the envelope and read the account jotted down at the time. He had meant to hand it over to a literary friend\u2014the tale was so poignantly human\u2014then had forgotten all about it. The papyrus, dating over 3000 B.C., had many gaps. The Egyptologist had admittedly filled in considerable blanks in the afflicting story:\u2014\n\nA victorious Theban General, Prince of the blood, brought back a Syrian youth from one of his foreign conquests and presented him to his young wife who, first mothering him for his beauty, then made him her personal slave, and ended by caring deeply for him. The slave, in return, loved her with passionate adoration he was unable to conceal. As a Lady of the Court, her quasi-adoption of the youth caused comment. Her husband ordered his dismissal. But she still made his welfare her especial object, finding frequent reasons for their meeting. One day, however, her husband caught them together, though their meeting was in innocence. He half strangled the youth, till the blood poured down upon his own hands, then had him flogged and sent away to On, the City of the Sun.\n\nThe Syrian found his way back again, vengeance in his fiery blood. The clandestine yet innocent meetings were renewed. Rank was forgotten. They met among the sand-dunes in the desert behind the city where a pleasure tent among a grove of palms provided shelter, and the slave losing his head, urged the Princess to fly with him. Yet the wife, true to her profligate and brutal husband, refused his plea, saying she could only give a mother's love, a mother's care. This he rejected bitterly, accusing her of trifling with him. He grew bolder and more insistent. To divert her husband's violent suspicions she became purposely cruel, even ordering him punishments. But the slave misinterpreted. Finally, warning him that if caught he would be killed, she devised a plan to convince him of her sincerity. Hiding him behind the curtains of her tent, she pleaded with her husband for the youth's recall, swearing that she meant no wrong. But the soldier, in his fury, abused and struck her, and the slave, unable to contain himself, rushed out of his hiding-place and stabbed him, though not mortally. He was condemned to death by torture. She was to be chief witness against him.\n\nMeanwhile, having extracted a promise from her husband that the torture should not be carried to the point of death, she conveyed word to the victim that he should endure bravely, knowing that he would not die. She now realised that she loved. She promised to fly with him.\n\nThe sentence was duly carried out, the slave only half believing in her truth. It was a public holiday in Thebes. She was compelled to see the punishment inflicted before the crowd. There were a thousand drums. A sand-storm hid the sun.\n\nSeated beside her husband on a terrace above the Nile, she watched the torture\u2014then knew she had been tricked. But the Syrian did not know; he believed her false. As he expired, casting his last glance of anguish and reproach at her, she rose, leaped the parapet, flung herself into the river, and was drowned. The husband had their bodies thrown into the sea, unburied. The same wave took them both. Later, however, they were recovered by influential friends; they were embalmed, and secretly laid to rest in his ancestral Tomb in the Valley of the Kings among the Theban Hills. In due course the husband, unwittingly, was buried with them.\n\nNearly five thousand years later all three mummies were discovered lying side by side, their story inscribed upon a papyrus inside the great sarcophagus.\n\nDr. Kelverdon glanced through the story he had forgotten, then tore it into little pieces and threw them into the fireplace. For a moment longer, however, he stood beside the open drawer reflectingly. Had he ever told the tale to Tommy? No; it was hardly likely; indeed it was impossible. The boy was not born even when first he heard it. To his wife, then? Less likely still. He could not remember, anyhow. The faint suggestion in his mind\u2014a story communicated pre-natally\u2014was not worth following up. He dismissed the matter from his thoughts. He closed the drawer and turned away. The little packet of incense, however, taken from the Tomb, he did not destroy. 'I'll give it to Tommy,' he decided. 'Its whiff may possibly stimulate him into explanation!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 255", + "text": "As a result of having told everything to his father, Tommy's nightmare, however, largely ceased to trouble him. He had found the relief of expression, which is confession, and had laid upon the older mind the burden of his terror. Once a month, once a week, or even daily if he wanted to, he could repeat the expression as the need for it accumulated, and the load which decency forbade being laid upon his mother, the stern-faced man could carry easily for him.\n\nThe comfortable sensation that forgiveness is the completion of confession invaded his awakening mind, and had he been older this thin end of a religious wedge might have persuaded him to join what his mother called that 'vast conspiracy.' But even at this early stage there was something stalwart and self-reliant in his cast of character that resisted the cunning sophistry; vicarious relief woke resentment in him; he meant to face his troubles alone. So far as he knew, he had not sinned, yet the Wave, the Whiff, the Eyes were symptoms of some fate that threatened him, a premonition of something coming that he must meet with his own strength, something that he could only deal with effectively alone, since it was deserved and just. One day the Wave would fall; his father could not help him then. This instinct in him remained unassailable. He even began to look forward to the time when it should come\u2014to have done with it and get it over, conquering or conquered.\n\nThe premonition, that is, while remaining an obsession as before, transferred itself from his inner to his outer life. The nightmare, therefore, ceased. The menacing interest, however, held unchanged. Though the name had not hitherto occurred to him, he became a fatalist. 'It's got to come; I've got to meet it. I will.'\n\n'Well, Tommy,' his father would ask from time to time, 'been dreaming anything lately?'\n\n'Nothing, Daddy. It's all stopped.'\n\n'Wave, eyes, and whiff all forgotten, eh?'\n\nTommy shook his head. 'They're still there,' he answered slowly, 'but\u2014' He seemed unable to complete the sentence. His father helped him at a venture.\n\n'But they can't catch you\u2014is that it?'\n\nThe boy looked up with a dogged expression in his big grey eyes. 'I'm ready for them,' he replied. And his father laughed and said, 'Of course. That's half the battle.'\n\nHe gave him a present then\u2014one of the packets of tissue-paper\u2014and Tommy took it in triumph to his room. He opened it in private, but the contents seemed to him without especial interest. Only the Whiff was, somehow, sweet and precious; and he kept the packet in a drawer apart where the fossils and catapult and air-gun ammunition could not interfere with it, hiding the key so that Tim and the servants could not find it. And on rare occasions, when the rest of the household was asleep, he performed a little ritual of his own that, for a boy of his years, was distinctly singular.\n\nWhen the room was dark, lit in winter by the dying fire, or in summer by the stars, he would creep out of bed, make quite sure that Tim was asleep, stand on a chair to reach the key from the top of the big cupboard, and carefully unlock the drawer. He had oiled the wood with butter, so that it was silent. The tissue-paper gleamed dimly pink; the Whiff came out to meet him. He lifted the packet, soft and crackling, and set it on the window-sill; he did not open it; its contents had no interest for him, it was the perfume he was after. And the moment the perfume reached his nostrils there came a trembling over him that he could not understand. He both loved and dreaded it. This manly, wholesome-minded, plucky little boy, the basis of whose steady character was common sense, became the prey of a strange, unreasonable fantasy. A faintness stole upon him; he lost the sense of kneeling on a solid chair; something immense and irresistible came piling up behind him; there was nothing firm he could push against to save himself; he began shuffling with his bare feet, struggling to escape from something that was coming, something that would probably overwhelm him yet must positively be faced and battled with. The Wave was rising. It was the wavy feeling.\n\nHe did not turn to look, because he knew quite well there was nothing in the room but beds, a fender, furniture, vague shadows and his brother Tim. That kind of childish fear had no place in what he felt. But the Wave was piled and curving over none the less; it hung between him and the shadowed ceiling, above the roof of the house; it came from beyond the world, far overhead against the crowding stars. It would not break, for the time had not yet come. But it was there. It waited. He knelt beneath its mighty shadow of advance; it was still arrested, poised above his eager life, competent to engulf him when the time arrived. The sweep of its curved mass was mountainous. He knelt inside this curve, small, helpless, but not too afraid to fight. The perfume stole about him. The Whiff was in his nostrils. There was a strange, rich pain\u2014oddly remote, yet oddly poignant.\u2026\n\nAnd it was with this perfume that the ritual chiefly had to do. He loved the extraordinary sensations that came with it, and tried to probe their meaning in his boyish way. Meaning there was, but it escaped him. The sweetness clouded something in his brain, and made his muscles weak; it robbed him of that resistance which is fighting strength. It was this battle that he loved, this sense of shoving against something that might so easily crush and finish him. There was a way to beat it, a way to win\u2014could he but discover it. As yet he could not. Victory, he felt, lay more in yielding and going-with than in violent resistance.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, in an ecstasy of this half yielding, half resisting, he lent himself fully to the overmastering tide. He was conscious of attraction and repulsion, something that enticed, yet thrust him backwards. Some final test of manhood, character, value, lay in the way he faced it. The strange, rich pain stole marvellously into his blood and nerves. His heart beat faster. There was this exquisite seduction that contained delicious danger. It rose upon him out of some inner depth he could not possibly get at. He trembled with mingled terror and delight. And it invariably ended with a kind of inexpressible yearning that choked him, crumpled him inwardly, as he described it, brought the moisture, hot and smarting, into his burning eyes, and\u2014each time to his bitter shame\u2014 left his cheeks wet with scalding tears.\n\nHe cried silently; there was no heaving, gulping, audible sobbing, just a relieving gush of heartfelt tears that took away the strange, rich pain and brought the singular ritual to a finish. He replaced the tissue-paper, blotted with his tears; locked the drawer carefully; hid the key on the top of the cupboard again, and tumbled back into bed.\n\nDownstairs, meanwhile, a conversation was in progress concerning the welfare of the growing hero.\n\n'I'm glad that dream has left him anyhow. It used to frighten me rather. I did not like it,' observed his mother.\n\n'He doesn't speak to you about it any more?' the father asked.\n\nFor months, she told him, Tommy had not mentioned it. They went on to discuss his future together. The other children presented fewer problems, but Tommy, apparently, felt no particular call to any profession.\n\n'It will come with a jump,' the doctor inclined to think. 'He's been on the level for some time now. Suddenly he'll grow up and declare his mighty mind.'\n\nFather liked humour in the gravest talk; indeed the weightier the subject, the more he valued a humorous light upon it. The best judgment, he held, was shaped by humour, sense of proportion lost without it. His wife, however, thought 'it a pity.' Grave things she liked grave.\n\n'There's something very deep in Tommy,' she observed, as though he were developing a hidden malady.\n\n'Hum,' agreed her husband. 'His subconscious content is unusual, both in kind and quantity.' His eyes twinkled. 'It's possible he may turn out an artist, or a preacher. If the former, I'll bet his output will be original; and, as for the latter,'\u2014he paused a second\u2014'he's too logical and too fearless to be orthodox. Already he thinks things out for himself.'\n\n'I should like to see him in the Church, though,' said Mother. 'He would do a lot of good. But he is uncompromising, rather.'\n\n'His honesty certainly is against him,' sighed his father. 'What do you think he asked me the other day?'\n\n'I'm sure I don't know, John.' The answer completed itself with the unspoken 'He never asks me anything now.'\n\n'He came straight up to me and said, 'Father, is it good to feel pain? To let it come, I mean, or try to dodge it?\"\n\n'Had he hurt himself?' the woman asked quickly. It seemed she winced.\n\n'Not physically. He had been feeling something inside. He wanted to know how 'a man' should meet the case.'\n\n'And what did you tell him, dear?'\n\n'That pain was usually a sign of growth, to be understood, accepted, faced. That most pain was cured in that way\u2014'\n\n'He didn't tell you what had hurt him?' she interrupted.\n\n'Oh, I didn't ask him. He'd have shut up like a clam. Tommy likes to deal with things alone in his own way. He just wanted to know if his way was\u2014well, my way.'\n\nThere fell a pause between them; then Mother, without looking up, enquired: 'Have you noticed Lettice lately? She's here a good deal now.'\n\nBut her husband only smiled, making no direct reply. 'Tommy will have a hard time of it when he falls in love,' he remarked presently. 'He'll know the real thing and won't stand any nonsense\u2014just as I did.' Whereupon his wife informed him that if he was not careful he would simply ruin the boy\u2014and the brief conversation died away of its own accord. As she was leaving the room a little later, unsatisfied but unaggressive, he asked her: 'Have you left the picture books, my dear?' and she pointed to an ominous heap upon the table in the window, with the remark that Jane had 'unearthed every book that Tommy had set eyes upon since he was three. You'll find everything that's ever interested him,' she added as she went out, 'every picture, that is\u2014and I suppose it is the pictures that you want.'\n\nFor an hour and a half the great specialist turned pages without ceasing\u2014 well-thumbed pages; torn, crumpled, blotted, painted pages. It was easy to discover the boy's favourite pictures; and all were commonplace enough, the sort that any normal, adventure-loving boy would find delightful. But nothing of special significance resulted from the search; nothing that might account for the recurrent nightmare, nothing in the way of eyes or wave. He had already questioned Jane as to what stories she told him, and which among them he liked best. 'Hunting or travel or collecting,' Jane had answered, and it was about 'collecting that he asks most questions. What kind of collecting, sir? Oh, treasure or rare beetles mostly, and sometimes\u2014just bones.'\n\n'Bones! What kind of bones?'\n\n'The villin's, sir,' explained the frightened Jane. 'He always likes the villin to get lost, and for the jackals to pick his bones in the desert\u2014'\n\n'Any particular desert?'\n\n'No, sir; just desert.'\n\n'Ah\u2014just desert! Any old desert, eh?'\n\n'I think so, sir\u2014as long as it is desert.'\n\nDr. Kelverdon put the woman at her ease with the humorous smile that made all the household love\u2014and respect\u2014him; then asked another question, as if casually: Had she ever told him a story in which a wave or a pair of eyes were in any way conspicuous?\n\n'No, never, sir,' replied the honest Jane, after careful reflection. 'Nor I wouldn't,' she added, 'because my father he was drowned in a tidal wave; and as for eyes, I know that's wrong for children, and I wouldn't tell Master Tommy such a thing for all the world\u2014'\n\n'Because?' enquired the doctor kindly, seeing her hesitation.\n\n'I'd be frightening myself, sir, and he'd make such fun of me,' she finally confessed.\n\nNo, it was clear that the nurse was not responsible for the vivid impression in Tommy's mind which bore fruit in so strange a complex of emotions. Nor were other lines of enquiry more successful. There was a cause, of course, but it would remain unascertainable unless some clue offered itself by chance. Both the doctor and the father in him were pledged to a persistent search that was prolonged over several months, but without result. The most perplexing element in the problem seemed to him the whiff. The association of terror with a wave needed little explanation; the introduction of the eyes, however, was puzzling, unless some story of a drowning man was possibly the clue; but the addition of a definite odour, an Eastern odour, moreover, with which the boy could hardly have become yet acquainted,\u2014this combination of the three accounted for the peculiar interest in the doctor's mind.\n\nOf one thing alone did he feel reasonably certain: the impression had been printed upon the deepest part of Tommy's being, the very deepest; it arose from those unplumbed profundities\u2014though a scientist, he considered them unfathomable\u2014of character and temperament whence emerge the most primitive of instincts,\u2014the generative and creative instinct, choice of a mate, natural likes and dislikes,\u2014the bed-rock of the nature. A girl was in it somewhere, somehow.\u2026\n\nMidnight had sounded from the stable clock in the mews when he stole up into the boys' room and cautiously approached the yellow iron bed where Tommy lay. The reflection of a street electric light just edged his face. He was sound asleep\u2014with tear-stains marked clearly on the cheek not pressed into the pillow. Dr. Kelverdon paused a moment, looked round the room, shading the candle with one hand. He saw no photograph, no pictures anywhere. Then he sniffed. There was a faint and delicate perfume in the air. He recognised it. He stood there, thinking deeply.\n\n'Lettice Aylmer,' he said to himself presently as he went softly out again to seek his own bed; 'I'll try Lettice. It's just possible.\u2026 Next time I see her I'll have a little talk.' For he suddenly remembered that Lettice Aylmer, his daughter's friend and playmate, had very large and beautiful dark eyes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 256", + "text": "Lettice Aylmer, daughter of the Irish Member of Parliament, did not provide the little talk that he anticipated, however, because she went back to her Finishing School abroad. Dr. Kelverdon was sorry when he heard it. So was Tommy. She was to be away a year at least. 'I must remember to have a word with her when she comes back,' thought the father, and made a note of it in his diary twelve months ahead. 'Three hundred and sixty-five days,' thought Tommy, and made a private calendar of his own.\n\nIt seemed an endless, zodiacal kind of period; he counted the days, a sheet of foolscap paper for each month, and at the bottom of each sheet two columns showing the balance of days gone and days to come. Tuesday, when he had first seen her, was underlined, and each Tuesday had a number attached to it, giving the total number of weeks since that wonderful occasion. But Saturdays were printed. On Saturday Lettice had spoken to him; she had smiled, and the words were, 'Don't forget me, Tommy!' And Tommy, looking straight into her great dark eyes, that seemed to him more tender even than his mother's, had stammered a reply that he meant with literal honesty: 'I won't\u2014never\u2026'; and she was gone\u2026 to France\u2026 across the sea.\n\nShe took his soul away with her, leaving him behind to pore over his father's big atlas and learn French sentences by heart. It seemed the only way. Life had begun, and he must be prepared. Also, his career was chosen. For Lettice had said another thing\u2014one other thing. When Mary, his sister, introduced him, 'This is Tommy,' Lettice looked down and asked: 'Are you going to be an engineer?' adding proudly, 'My brother is.' Before he could answer she was scampering away with Mary, the dark hair flying in a cloud, the bright bow upon it twinkling like a star in heaven\u2014and Tommy, hating his ridiculous boyish name with an intense hatred, stood there trembling, but aware that the die was cast\u2014he was going to be an engineer.\n\nTrembling, yes; for he felt dazed and helpless, caught in a mist of fire and gold, the furniture whirling round him, and something singing wildly in his heart. Two things, each containing in them the essence of genuine shock, had fallen upon him: shock, because there was impetus in them as of a blow. They had been coming; they had reached him. There was no doubt or question possible. He staggered from the impact. Joy and terror touched him; at one and the same moment he felt the enticement and the shrinking of his dream.\u2026 He longed to seize her and prevent her ever going away, yet also he wanted to push her from him as though she somehow caused him pain.\n\nFor, on the two occasions when speech had taken place between himself and Lettice, the dream had transferred itself boldly into his objective life\u2014 yet not entirely. Two characteristics only had been thus transferred. When his sister first came into the hall with 'This is Tommy,' the wavy feeling had already preceded her by a definite interval that was perhaps a second by the watch. He was aware of it behind him, curved and risen\u2014not curving, rising\u2014from the open fireplace, but also from the woods behind the house, from the whole of the country right back to the coast, from across the world, it seemed, towering overhead against the wintry sky. And when Lettice smiled and asked that question of childish admiration about being an engineer, he was already shuffling furiously with his feet upon the Indian rug. She was gone again, luckily, he hoped, before the ridiculous pantomime was noticeable.\n\nHe saw her once or twice. He was invariably speechless when she came into his presence, and his silence and awkwardness made him appear at great disadvantage. He seemed intentionally rude. Nervous self-consciousness caused him to bridle over nothing. Even to answer her was a torture. He dreaded a snub appallingly, and bridled in anticipation. Furious with himself for his inability to use each precious opportunity, he pretended he didn't care. The consequence was that when she once spoke to him sweetly, he was too overpowered to respond as he might have done. That she had not even noticed his anguished attitude never occurred to him.\n\n'We're always friends, aren't we, Tommy?'\n\n'Rather,' he blurted, before he could regain his composure for a longer sentence.\n\n'And always will be, won't we?'\n\n'Rather,' he repeated, cursing himself later for thinking of nothing better to say. Then, just as she flew off in that dancing way of hers, he found his tongue. Out of the jumbled mass of phrases in his head three words got loose and offered themselves: 'We'll always be!' he flung at her retreating figure of intolerable beauty. And she turned her head over her shoulder, waved her hand without stopping her career, and shouted 'Rather!'\n\nThat was the Tuesday in his calendar. But on Saturday, the printed Saturday following it, the second characteristic of his dream announced itself: he recognised the Eyes. Why he had not recognised them on the Tuesday lay beyond explanation; he only knew it was so. And afterwards, when he tried to think it over, it struck him that she had scampered out of the hall with peculiar speed and hurry; had made her escape without the extra word or two the occasion naturally demanded\u2014almost as though she, too, felt something that uneasily surprised her.\n\nTommy wondered about it till his head spun round. She, too, had received an impact that was shock. He was as thorough about it as an instinctive scientist. He also registered this further fact\u2014that the dream-details had not entirely reproduced themselves in the affair. There was no trace of the Whiff or of the other pair of Eyes. Some day the three would come together; but then.\u2026\n\nThe main thing, however, undoubtedly was this: Lettice felt something too: she was aware of feelings similar to his own. He was too honest to assume that she felt exactly what he felt; he only knew that her eyes betrayed familiar intimacy when she said 'Don't forget me, Tommy,' and that when she rushed out of the hall with that unnecessary abruptness it was because\u2014well, he could only transfer to her some degree of the 'wavy' feeling in himself.\n\nAnd he fell in love with abandonment and a delicious, infinite yearning. From that moment he thought of himself as Tom instead of Tommy.\n\nIt was an entire, sweeping love that left no atom or corner of his being untouched. Lettice was real; she hid below the horizon of distant France, yet could not, did not, hide from him. She also waited.\n\nHe knew the difference between real and unreal people. The latter wavered about his life and were uncertain; sometimes he liked them, sometimes he did not; but the former\u2014remained fixed quantities: he could not alter towards them. Even at this stage he knew when a person came into his life to stay, or merely to pass out again. Lettice, though seen but twice, belonged to this first category. His feeling for her had the Wave in it; it gathered weight and mass, it was irresistible. From the dim, invisible foundations of his life it came, out of the foundations of the world, out of that inexhaustible sea-foundation that lay below everything. It was real; it was not to be avoided. He knew. He persuaded himself that she knew too.\n\nAnd it was then, realising for the first time the searching pain of being separated from something that seemed part of his being by natural right, he spoke to his father and asked if pain should be avoided. This conversation has been already sufficiently recorded; but he asked other things as well. From being so long on the level he had made a sudden jump that his father had foretold; he grew up; his mind began to think; he had peered into certain books; he analysed. Out of the nonsense of his speculative reflections the doctor pounced on certain points that puzzled him completely. Probing for the repressed elements in the boy's psychic life that caused the triple complex of Wave and Eyes and Whiff, he only saw the cause receding further and further from his grasp until it finally lost itself in ultimate obscurity. The disciple of Freud was baffled hopelessly.\u2026\n\nTom, meanwhile, bathed in a sea of new sensations. Distance held meaning for him, separation was a kind of keen starvation. He made discoveries\u2014watched the moon rise, heard the wind, and knew the stars shone over the meadows below the house, things that before had been merely commonplace. He pictured these details as they might occur in France, and once when he saw a Swallow Tail butterfly, knowing that the few English specimens were said to have crossed the Channel, he had a touch of ecstasy, as though the proud insect brought him a message from the fields below the Finishing School. Also he read French books and found the language difficult but exquisite. All sweet and lovely things came from France, and at school he attempted violent friendships with three French boys and the Foreign Language masters, friendships that were not appreciated because they were not understood. But he made progress with the language, and it stood him in good stead in his examinations. He was aiming now at an Engineering College. He passed in\u2014eventually\u2014brilliantly enough.\n\nBefore that satisfactory moment, however, he knew difficult times. His inner life was in a splendid tumult. From the books he purloined he read a good many facts concerning waves and wave-formation. He learned, among other things, that all sensory impressions reached the nerves by impact of force in various wave-lengths; heat, light and sound broke upon the skin and eyes and ears in vibrations of \u00e6ther or air that advanced in steady series of wavy formations which, though not quite similar to his dream-wave, were akin to it. Sensation, which is life, was thus linked on to his deepest, earliest memory.\n\nA wave, however, instantly rejoined the parent stock and formed again. And perhaps it was the repetition of the wave\u2014its forming again and breaking again\u2014that impressed him most. For he imagined his impulses, emotions, tendencies all taking this wave-form, sweeping his moods up to a certain point, then dropping back into his centre\u2014the Sea, he called it\u2014 which held steady below all temporary fluctuations\u2014only to form once more and happen all over again.\n\nWith his moral and spiritual life it was similar: a wind came, wind of desire, wind of yearning, wind of hope, and he felt his strength accumulating, rising, bending with power upon the object that he had in view. To take that object exactly at the top of the wave was to achieve success; to miss that moment was to act with a receding and diminishing power, to dissipate himself in foam and spray before he could retire for a second rise. He saw existence as a wave. Life itself was a wave that rose, swept, curved, and finally\u2014must break.\n\nHe merely visualised these feelings into pictures; he did not think them out, nor get them into words. The wave became symbolic to him of all life's energies. It was the way in which all sensation expressed itself. Lettice was the high-water mark on shore he longed to reach and sweep back into his own tumultuous being. In that great underneath, the Sea, they belonged eternally together.\u2026\n\nOne thing, however, troubled him exceedingly: he read that a wave was a segment of a circle, the perfect form, yet that it never completed itself. The ground on which it broke prevented the achievement of the circle. That, he felt, was a pity, and might be serious; there was always that sinister retirement for another effort that yet never did, and never could, result in complete achievement. He watched the waves a good deal on the shore, when occasion offered in the holidays\u2014they came from France!\u2014and made a discovery on his own account that was not mentioned in any of the books. And it was this: that the top of the wave, owing to its curve, was reflected in the under part. Its end, that is, was foretold in its beginning.\n\nThere was a want of scientific accuracy here, a confusion of time and space, perhaps, yet he noticed the idea and registered the thrill. At the moment when the wave was poised to fall its crest shone reflected in the base from which it rose.\n\nBut the more he watched the waves on the shore, the more puzzled he became. They seemed merely a movement of the sea itself. They endlessly repeated themselves. They had no true, separate existence until they\u2014 broke. Nor could he determine whether the crest or the base was the beginning, for the two ran along together, and what was above one minute was below the minute after. Which part started first he never could decide. The head kept chasing the tail in an effort to join up. Only when a wave broke and fell was it really\u2014a wave. It had to 'happen' to earn its name.\n\nThere were ripples too. These indicated the direction of the parent wave upon whose side they happened, but not its purpose. Moods were ripples: they varied the surface of life but did not influence its general direction.\n\nHis own life followed a similar behaviour; he was full of ripples that were for ever trying to complete themselves by happening in acts. But the main Wave was the thing\u2014end and beginning sweeping along together, both at the same time somehow. That is, he knew the end and could foretell it. It rose from the great 'beneath' which was the sea in him. It must topple over in the end and complete itself. He knew it would; he knew it would hurt; he knew also that he would not shirk it when it came. For it was a repetition somehow.\n\n'I jolly well mean to enjoy the smash,' he felt. 'I know one pair of Eyes already; there's only the Whiff and the other Eyes to come. The moment I find them, I'll go bang into it.' He experienced a delicious shiver at the prospect.\n\nOne thing, however, remained uncertain: the stuff the Wave was made of. Once he discovered that, he would discover also\u2014where the smash would come." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 257", + "text": "'Can a chap feel things coming?' he asked his father. He was perhaps fifteen or sixteen then. 'I mean, when you feel them coming, does that mean they must come?'\n\nHis father listened warily. There had been many similar questions lately.\n\n'You can feel ordinary things coming,' he replied; 'things due to association of ideas.'\n\nTom looked up. 'Association?' he queried uncertainly.\n\n'If you feel hungry,' explained the doctor, 'you know that dinner's coming; you associate the hunger with the idea of eating. You recognise them because you've felt them both together before.'\n\n'They ought to come, then?'\n\n'Dinner does come\u2014ordinarily speaking. You've learned to expect it from the hunger. You could, of course, prevent it coming,' he added dryly, 'only that would be bad for you. You need it.'\n\nTom reflected a moment with a puckered face. His father waited for him to ask more, hoping he would. The boy felt the sympathy and invitation.\n\n'Before,' he repeated, picking out the word with sudden emphasis, his mind evidently breaking against a problem. 'But if I felt hungry for something I hadn't had before\u2014?'\n\n'In that case you wouldn't call it hunger. You wouldn't know what to call it. You'd feel a longing of some kind and would wonder what it meant.'\n\nTom's next words surprised him considerably. They came promptly, but with slow and thoughtful emphasis.\n\n'So that if I know what I want, and call it dinner, or pain, or\u2014love, or something,' he exclaimed, 'it means that I've had it before? And that's why I know it.' The last five words were not a question but a statement of fact apparently.\n\nThe doctor pretended not to notice the variants of dinner. At least he did not draw attention to them.\n\n'Not necessarily,' he answered. 'The things you feel you want may be the things that everybody wants\u2014things common to the race. Such wants are naturally in your blood; you feel them because your parents, your grandparents, and all humanity in turn behind your own particular family have always wanted them.'\n\n'They come out of the sea, you mean?'\n\n'That's very well expressed, Tom. They come out of the sea of human nature, which is everywhere the same, yes.'\n\nThe compliment seemed to annoy the boy.\n\n'Of course,' he said bluntly. 'But\u2014if it hurts?' The words were sharply emphasised.\n\n'Association of ideas again. Toothache suggests the pincers. You want to get rid of the pain, but the pain has to get worse before it can get better. You know that, so you face it gladly\u2014to get it over.'\n\n'You face it, yes,' said Tom. 'It makes you better in the end.'\n\nIt suddenly dawned upon him that his learned father knew nothing, nothing at least that could help him. He knew only what other people knew. He turned then, and asked the ridiculous question that lay at the back of his mind all the time. It cost him an effort, for his father would certainly deem it foolish.\n\n'Can a thing happen before it really happens?'\n\nDr. Kelverdon may or may not have thought the question foolish; his face was hidden a moment as he bent down to put the Indian rug straight with his hand. There was no impatience in the movement, nor was there mockery in his expression, when he resumed his normal position. He had gained an appreciable interval of time\u2014some fifteen seconds. 'Tom, you've got good ideas in that head of yours,' he said calmly; 'but what is it that you mean exactly?'\n\nTom was quite ready to amplify. He knew what he meant:\n\n'If I know something is going to happen, doesn't that mean that it has already happened\u2014and that I remember it?'\n\n'You're a psychologist as well as engineer, Tom,' was the approving reply. 'It's like this, you see: In emotion, with desire in it, can predict the fulfilment of that desire. In great hunger you imagine you're eating all sorts of good things.'\n\n'But that's looking forward,'; the boy pounced on the mistake. 'It's not remembering.'\n\n'That is the difficulty,' explained his father; 'to decide whether you're anticipating only\u2014or actually remembering.'\n\n'I see,' Tom said politely.\n\nAll this analysis concealed merely: it did not reveal. The thing itself dived deeper out of sight with every phrase. He knew quite well the difference between anticipating and remembering. With the latter there was the sensation of having been through it. Each time he remembered seeing Lettice the sensation was the same, but when he looked forward to seeing her again the sensation varied with his mood.\n\n'For instance, Tom\u2014between ourselves this\u2014we're going to send Mary to that Finishing School in France where Lettice is.' The doctor, it seemed, spoke carelessly while he gathered his papers together with a view to going out. He did not look at the boy; he said it walking about the room. 'Mary will look forward to it and think about it so much that when she gets there it will seem a little familiar to her, as if\u2014almost as if she remembered it.'\n\n'Thank you, father; I see, yes,' murmured Tom. But in his mind a voice said so distinctly 'Rot!' that he was half afraid the word was audible.\n\n'You see the difficulty, eh? And the difference?'\n\n'Rather,' exclaimed the boy with decision.\n\nAnd thereupon, without the slightest warning, he looked out of the window and asked certain other questions. Evidently they cost him effort; his will forced them out. Since his back was turned he did not see his father's understanding smile, but neither did the latter see the lad's crimson cheeks, though possibly he divined them.\n\n'Father\u2014is Miss Aylmer older than me?'\n\n'Ask Mary, Tom. She'll know. Or, stay\u2014I'll ask her for you\u2014if you like.'\n\n'Oh, that's all right. I just wanted to know,' with an assumed indifference that barely concealed the tremor in the voice.\n\n'I suppose,' came a moment later, 'a Member of Parliament is a grander thing than a doctor, is it?'\n\n'That depends,' replied his father, 'upon the man himself. Some M.P.'s vote as they're told, and never open their mouths in the House. Some doctors, again\u2014'\n\nBut the boy interrupted him. He quite understood the point.\n\n'It's fine to be an engineer, though, isn't it?' he asked. 'It's a real profession?'\n\n'The world couldn't get along without them, or the Government either. It's a most important profession indeed.'\n\nTom, playing idly with the swinging tassel of the window-blind, asked one more question. His voice and manner were admirably under control, but there was a gulp, and his father heard and noted it.\n\n'Shall I have\u2014shall I be rich enough\u2014to marry\u2014some day?'\n\nDr. Kelverdon crossed the room and put his hand on his son's shoulder, but did not try to make him show his face. 'Yes,' he said quietly, 'you will, my boy\u2014when the time comes.' He paused a moment, then added: 'But money will not make you a distinguished man, whereas if you become a famous engineer, you'll have money of your own and\u2014any nice girl would be proud to have you.'\n\n'I see,' said Tom, tying the strings of the tassel into knots, then untying them again with a visible excess of energy\u2014and the conversation came somewhat abruptly to an end. He was aware of the invitation to talk further about Lettice Aylmer, but he resisted and declined it. What was the use? He knew his own mind already about that.\n\nYet, strictly speaking, Tom was not imaginative. It was as if an instinct taught him. More and more, the Wave, with its accompanying details of Eyes and Whiff, seemed to him the ghost of some dim memory that brought a forgotten warning in its train\u2014something missed, something to be repeated, something to be faced and learned and\u2014mastered.\u2026\n\nHis father, meanwhile, went forth upon his rounds that day, much preoccupied about the character of his eldest boy. He felt a particular interest in the peculiar obsession that he knew overshadowed the young, growing life. It puzzled him; he found no clue to it; in his thought he was aware of a faint uneasiness, although he did not give it a definite name\u2014something akin to what the mother felt. Admitting he was baffled, he fell back, however, upon such generalities as prenatal influence, ancestral, racial, and so eventually dismissed it from his active mind.\n\nTom, meanwhile, for his part, also went along his steep, predestined path. The nightmare had entirely deserted him, he now rarely dreamed; and his outer life shaped bravely, as with a boy of will, honesty, and healthy ambition might be expected. Neither Wavy feeling, Eyes, nor Whiff obtruded themselves: they left him alone and waited: he never forgot them, but he did not seek them out. Things once firmly realised remained in his consciousness; he knew that his life was rising like a wave, that all his energies worked in the form of waves, his moods and wishes, his passions, emotions, yearnings\u2014all expressed themselves by means of this unalterable formula, yet all contributed finally to the one big important Wave whose climax would be reached only when it fell. He distinguished between Wave and Ripples. He, therefore, did not trouble himself with imaginary details; he did not search; he waited. This steady strength was his. His firm, square jaw and the fearless eyes of grey beneath the shock of straight dark hair told plainly enough the kind of stuff behind them. No one at school took unnecessary liberties with Tom Kelverdon.\n\nBut, having discovered one pair of Eyes, he did not let them go. In his earnest, dull, inflexible way he loved their owner with a belief in her truth and loyalty that admitted of no slightest question. Had his mother divined the strength and value of his passion, she would surely have asked herself with painful misgiving: 'Is she\u2014can she be\u2014 worthy of my boy?' But his mother guessed it as little as any one else; even the doctor had forgotten those early signs of its existence; and Tom was not the kind to make unnecessary confidences, nor to need sympathy in any matter he was sure about.\n\nThere was down now upon his upper lip, for he was close upon seventeen and the Entrance Examination was rising to the crest of its particular minor wave, yet during the two years' interval nothing\u2014no single fact\u2014had occurred to justify his faith or to confirm its amazing certainty within his heart. Mary, his sister, had not gone after all to the Finishing School in France; other girl friends came to spend the holidays with her; the Irish member of Parliament had either died or sunk into another kind of oblivion; the paths of the Kelverdons and the Aylmer family had gone apart; and the name of Lettice no longer thrilled the air across the tea-table, nor chance reports of her doings filled the London house with sudden light.\n\nYet for Tom she existed more potently than ever. His yearning never lessened; he was sure she remembered him as he remembered her; he persuaded himself that she thought about him; she doubtless knew that he was going to be an engineer. He had cut a thread from the carpet in the hall\u2014from the exact spot her flying foot had touched that Tuesday when she scampered off from him\u2014and kept it in the drawer beside the Eastern packet that enshrined the Whiff. Occasionally he took it out and touched it, fingered it, even caressed it; the thread and the perfume belonged together; the ritual of the childish years altered a little\u2014worship raised it to a higher level.\n\nHe saw her with her hair done up now, long skirts, and a softer expression in the tender, faithful eyes; the tomboy in her had disappeared; she gazed at him with admiration. The face was oddly real, it came very close to his own; once or twice, indeed, their cheeks almost touched: 'almost,' because he withdrew instantly, uneasily aware that he had gone too far\u2014 not that the intimacy was unwelcome, but that it was somehow premature. And the instant he drew back, a kind of lightning distance came between them; he saw her eyes across an immense and curious interval, though whether of time or space he could not tell. There was strange heat and radiance in it\u2014as of some blazing atmosphere that was not England.\n\nThe eyes, moreover, held a new expression when this happened\u2014pity. And with this pity came also pain: the strange, rich pain broke over all the other happier feelings in him and swamped them utterly.\u2026\n\nBut at that point instinct failed him; he could not understand why she should pity him, why pain should come to him through her, nor why it was necessary for him to feel and face it. He only felt sure of one thing\u2014 that it was essential to the formation of the Wave which was his life. The Wave must 'happen,' or he would miss an important object of his being\u2014and she would somehow miss it too. The Wave would one day fall, but when it fell she would be with him, by his side, under the mighty curve, involved in the crash and tumult\u2014with himself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 258", + "text": "Then, without any warning, he received a second shock\u2014it fell upon him from the blue and came direct from Lettice.\n\nThe occasion was a tennis party in the garden by the sea where the family had come to spend the summer holidays. Tom was already at College, doing brilliantly, and rapidly growing up. The August afternoon was very hot; no wind ruffled the quiet blue-green water; there were no waves; the leaves of the privet hedge upon the side of the cliffs were motionless. A couple of Chalk-Blues danced round and round each other as though a wire connected them, and Tom, walking in to tea with his partner after a victorious game, found himself watching the butterflies and making a remark about them\u2014a chance observation merely to fill an empty pause. He felt as little interest in the insects as he did in his partner, an uncommonly pretty, sunburned girl, whose bare arms and hatless light hair became her admirably. She, however, approved of the remark and by no means despised the opportunity to linger a moment by the side of her companion. They stood together, perhaps a dozen seconds, watching the capricious scraps of colour rise, float over the privet hedge on balanced wings, dip abruptly down and vanish on the farther side below the cliff. The girl said something\u2014an intentional something that was meant to be heard and answered: but no answer was forthcoming. She repeated the remark with emphasis; then, as still no answer came, she laughed brightly to make his silence appear natural.\n\nBut Tom had no word to say. He had not noticed the man\u0153uvre of the girl, nor the man\u0153uvre of the two Chalk-Blues; neither had he heard the words, although conscious that she spoke. For in that brief instant when the insects floated over the hedge, his eyes had wandered beyond them to the sea, and on the sea, far off against the cloudless horizon, he had seen\u2014 the Wave.\n\nThinking it over afterwards, however, he realised that it was not actually a wave he saw, for the surface of the blue-green sea was smooth as the tennis lawn itself: it was the sudden appearance of the 'wavy feeling' that made him think he saw the old, familiar outline of his early dream. He had objectified his emotion. His father perhaps would have called it association of ideas.\n\nAbruptly, out of nothing obvious, the feeling rose and mastered him: and, after its quiescence\u2014its absence\u2014for so long an interval, this revival without hint or warning of any kind was disconcerting. The feeling was vivid and unmistakable. The joy and terror swept him as of old. He braced himself. Almost\u2014he began shuffling with his feet.\u2026\n\n'Tea's waiting for you,'; his mother's voice floated to his ears across the lawn, as he turned with an effort from the sea and made towards the group about the tables. The Wave, he knew, was coming up behind him, growing, rising, curving high against the evening sky. Beside him walked the sunburned girl, wondering doubtless at his silence, but happy enough, it seemed, in her own interpretation of its cause. Scarcely aware of her presence, however, Tom was searching almost fiercely in his thoughts, searching for the clue. He knew there was a clue, he felt sure of it; the 'wavy feeling' had not come with this overwhelming suddenness without a reason. Something had brought it back. But what? Was there any recent factor in his life that might explain it? He stole a swift glance at the girl beside him: had she, perhaps, to do with it? They had played tennis together for the first time that afternoon: he had never seen her before, was not even quite sure of her name; to him, so far, she was only 'a very pretty girl who played a ripping game.' Had this girl to do with it?\n\nFeeling his questioning look, she glanced up at him and smiled. 'You're very absent-minded,' she observed with mischief in her manner. 'You took so many of my balls, it's tired you out!' She had beautiful blue eyes, and her voice, he noticed for the first time, was very pleasant. Her figure was slim, her ankles neat, she had nice, even teeth. But, even as he registered the charming details, he knew quite well that he registered them, one and all, as belonging merely to a member of the sex, and not to this girl in particular. For all he cared, she might follow the two Chalk-Blues and disappear below the edge of the cliff into the sea. This 'pretty girl' left him as untroubled as she found him. The wavy feeling was not brought by her.\n\nHe drank his tea, keeping his back to the sea, and as the talk was lively, his silence was not noticed. The Wave, meanwhile, he knew, had come up closer. It towered above him. Its presence would shortly be explained. Then, suddenly, in the middle of a discussion as to partners for the games to follow, a further detail presented itself\u2014also apparently out of nothing. He smelt the Whiff. He knew then that the Wave was poised immediately above his head, and that he stood underneath its threatening great curve. The clue, therefore, was at hand.\n\nAnd at this moment his father came into view, moving across the lawn towards them from the French window. No one guessed how Tom welcomed the slight diversion, for the movement was already in his legs and in another moment must have set his feet upon that dreadful shuffling. As from a distance, he heard the formal talk and introductions, his father's statement that he had won his round of golf with 'the Dean,' praise of the weather, and something or other about the strange stillness of the sea\u2014 but then, with a sudden, hollow crash against his very ear, the appalling words: '... broke his mashie into splinters, yes. And, by the by, the Dean knows the Aylmers. They were staying here earlier in the summer, he told me. Lettice, the girl,\u2014Mary's friend, you remember\u2014is going to be married this week.\u2026'\n\nTom clutched the back of the wicker-chair in front of him. The sun went out. An icy air passed Up his spine. The blood drained from his face. The tennis courts, and the group of white figures moving towards them, swung up into the sky. He gripped the chair till the rods of wicker pressed through the flesh into the bone. For a moment he felt that the sensation of actual sickness was more than he could master; his legs bent like paper beneath his weight.\n\n'You remember Lettice, Tom, don't you?' his father was saying somewhere in mid-air above him.\n\n'Yes, rather.' Apparently he said these words; the air at any rate went through his teeth and lips, and the same minute, with a superhuman effort that only just escaped a stagger, he moved away towards the tennis courts. His feet carried him, that is, across the lawn, where some figures dressed in white were calling his name loudly; his legs went automatically. 'Hold steady!' he remembers saying somewhere deep inside him. 'Don't make an ass of yourself,'; whereupon another voice\u2014or was it still his own?\u2014 joined in quickly, 'She's gone from me, Lettice has gone. She's dead.' And the words, for the first time in his life, had meaning: for the first time in his life, rather, he realised what their meaning was. The Wave had fallen. Moreover\u2014this also for the first time in the history of the Wave\u2014there was something audible. He heard a Sound.\n\nShivering in the hot summer sunshine, as though icy water drenched him, he knew the same instant that he was wrong about the falling: the Wave, indeed, had curled lower over him than ever before, had even toppled\u2014but it had not broken. As a whole, it had not broken. It was a smaller wave, upon the parent side, that had formed and fallen. The sound he heard was the soft crash of this lesser wave that grew out of the greater mass of the original monster, broke upon the rising volume of it, and returned into the greater body. It was a ripple only. The shock and terror he felt were a foretaste of what the final smothering crash would be. Yet the Sound he had heard was not the sound of water. There was a sharp, odd rattling in it that he had never consciously heard before. And it was\u2014dry.\n\nHe reached the group of figures on the tennis-courts: he played: a violent energy had replaced the sudden physical weakness. His skill, it seemed, astonished everybody; he drove and smashed and volleyed with a recklessness that was always accurate: but when, at the end of the amazing game, he heard voices praising him, as from a distance, he knew only that there was a taste of gall and ashes in his mouth, and that he had but one desire\u2014to get to his room alone and open the drawer. Even to himself he would not admit that he wished for the relief of tears. He put it, rather, that he must see and feel the one real thing that still connected him with Lettice\u2014the thread of carpet she had trodden on. That\u2014and the 'whiff'\u2014alone could comfort him.\n\nThe comedy, that is, of all big events lay in it; no one must see, no one must know: no one must guess the existence of this sweet, rich pain that ravaged the heart in him until from very numbness it ceased aching. He double-locked the bedroom door. He had waited till darkness folded away the staring day, till the long dinner was over, and the drawn-out evening afterwards. None, fortunately, had noticed the change in his demeanour, his silence, his absentmindedness when spoken to, his want of appetite. 'She is going to be married\u2026 this week,' were the only words he heard; they kept ringing in his brain. To his immense relief the family had not referred to it again.\n\nAnd at last he had said good-night and was in his room\u2014alone. The drawer was open. The morsel of green thread lay in his hand. The faint eastern perfume floated on the air. 'I am not a sentimental ass,' he said to himself aloud, but in a low, steady tone. 'She touched it, therefore it has part of her life about it still.' Three years and a half ago! He examined the diary too; lived over in thought every detail of their so-slight acquaintance together; they were few enough; he remembered every one.\u2026 Prolonging the backward effort, he reviewed the history of the Wave. His mind stretched back to his earliest recollections of the nightmare. He faced the situation, tried to force its inner meaning from it, but without success.\n\nHe did not linger uselessly upon any detail, nor did he return upon his traces as a sentimental youth might do, prolonging the vanished sweetness of recollection in order to taste the pain more vividly. He merely 'read up,' so to speak, the history of the Wave to get a bird's-eye view of it. And in the end he obtained a certain satisfaction from the process\u2014a certain strength. That is to say, he did not understand, but he accepted. 'Lettice has gone from me\u2014but she hasn't gone for good.' The deep reflection of hours condensed itself into this.\n\nWhatever might happen 'temporarily,' the girl was loyal and true: and she was\u2014his. It never once occurred to him to blame or chide her. All that she did sincerely, she had a right to do. They were in the 'underneath' together for ever and ever. They were in the sea.\n\nThe pain, nevertheless, was acute and agonising; the temporary separation of 'France' was nothing compared to this temporary separation of her marrying. There were alternate intervals of numbness and of acute sensation; for each time thought and feeling collapsed from the long strain of their own tension, the relief that followed proved false and vain. Up sprang the aching pain again, the hungry longing, the dull, sweet yearning\u2014and the whole sensation started afresh as at the first, yet with a vividness that increased with each new realisation of it. 'Wish I could cry it out,' he thought. 'I wouldn't be a bit ashamed to cry.' But he had no tears to spill.\u2026\n\nMidnight passed towards the small hours of the morning, and the small hours slipped on towards the dawn before he put away the parcel of tissue-paper, closed the drawer and locked it. And when at length he dropped exhausted into bed, the eastern sky was already tinged with the crimson of another summer's day. He dreaded it, and closed his eyes. It had tennis parties and engagements in its wearisome, long hours of heat and utter emptiness.\u2026\n\nJust before actual sleep took him, however, he was aware of one other singular reflection. It rose of its own accord out of that moment's calm when thought and feeling sank away and deliberate effort ceased: the fact namely that, with the arrival of the Sound, all his five senses had been now affected. His entire being, through the only channels of perception it possessed, had responded to the existence of the Wave and all it might portend. Here was no case of a single sense being tricked by some illusion: all five supported each other, taste being, of course, a modification of smell.\n\nAnd the strange reflection brought to his aching mind and weary body a measure of relief. The Wave was real: being real, it was also well worth facing when it\u2014fell." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 259", + "text": "Between twenty and thirty a man rises through years reckless of power and spendthrift of easy promises. The wave of life is rising, and every force tends upwards in a steady rush. At thirty comes a pause upon the level, but with thirty-five there are signs of the droop downhill. Age is first realised when, instead of looking forward only, he surprises thought in the act of looking\u2014behind.\n\nOf the physical, at any rate, this is true; for the mental and emotional wave is still ripening towards its higher curve, while the spiritual crest hangs hiding in the sky far overhead, beckoning beyond towards unvistaed reaches.\n\nTom Kelverdon climbed through these crowded years with the usual scars and bruises, but steadily, and without the shame of any considerable disaster. His father's influence having procured him an opening in an engineering firm of the first importance, his own talent and application maintained the original momentum bravely. He justified his choice of a profession. Also, staring eagerly into life's marvellous shop-window, he entered, hand in pocket, and made the customary purchases of the enchantress behind the counter. If worthless, well,\u2014everybody bought them; the things had been consummately advertised; he paid his money, found out their value, threw them away or kept them accordingly. A certain good taste made his choice not too foolish: and there was this wholesome soundness in him, that he rarely repeated a purchase that had furnished him cheap goods. Slowly he began to find himself.\n\nFrom learning what it meant to be well thrashed by a boy he loathed, and to apply a similar treatment himself\u2014he passed on to the pleasure of being told he had nice eyes, that his voice was pleasant, his presence interesting. He fell in love\u2014and out again. But he went straight. Moreover, beyond a given point in any affair of the heart he seemed unable to advance: some secret, inner tension held him back. While believing he loved various adorable girls the years offered him, he found it impossible to open his lips and tell them so. And the mysterious instinct invariably justified itself: they faded, one and all, soon after separation. There was no wave in them; they were ripples only.\u2026\n\nAnd, meanwhile, as the years rushed up towards the crest of thirty, he did well in his profession, worked for the firm in many lands, obtained the confidence of his principals, and proved his steady judgment if not his brilliance. He became, too, a good, if generous, judge of other men, seeing all sorts, both good and bad, and in every kind of situation that proves character. His nature found excuses too easily, perhaps, for the unworthy ones. It is not a bad plan, wiser companions hinted, to realise that a man has dark behaviour in him, while yet believing that he need not necessarily prove it. The other view has something childlike in it; Tom Kelverdon kept, possibly, this simpler attitude alive in him, trusting overmuch, because suspicion was abhorrent to his soul. The man of ideals had never become the man of the world. Some high, gentle instinct had preserved him from the infliction that so often results in this regrettable conversion. Slow to dislike, he saw the best in everybody. 'Not a bad fellow,' he would say of some one quite obviously detestable. 'I admit his face and voice and manner are against him; but that's not his fault exactly. He didn't make himself, you know.'\n\nThe idea of a tide in the affairs of men is obvious, familiar enough. Nations rise and fall, equally with the fortunes of a family. History repeats itself, so does the tree, the rose: and if a man live long enough he recovers the state of early childhood. There is repetition everywhere. But while some think evolution moves in a straight line forward, others speculate fancifully that it has a spiral twist upwards. At any given moment, that is, the soul looks down upon a passage made before\u2014but from a point a little higher. Without living through events already experienced, it literally lives them over; it sees them mapped out below, and with the bird's-eye view it understands them.\n\nAnd in regard to his memory of Lettice Aylmer\u2014the fact that he was still waiting for her and she for him\u2014this was somewhat the fanciful conception that lodged itself, subconsciously perhaps, in the mind of Tom Kelverdon, grown now to man's estate. He was dimly aware of a curious familiarity with his present situation, a sense of repetition\u2014yet with a difference. Something he had experienced before was coming to him again. It was waiting for him. Its wave was rising. When it happened before it had not happened properly somehow\u2014had left a sense of defeat, of dissatisfaction behind. He had taken it, perhaps, at the period of receding momentum, and so had failed towards it. This time he meant to face it. His own phrase, as has been seen, was simple: 'I'll let it all come.' It was something his character needed. Deep down within him hid this attitude, and with the passage of the years it remained\u2014though remained an attitude merely.\n\nBut the attitude, being subconscious in him, developed into a definite point of view that came, more and more, to influence the way he felt towards life in general. Life was too active to allow of much introspection, yet whenever pauses came\u2014pauses in thought and feeling, still backwaters in which he lay without positive direction\u2014there, banked up, unchanging in the background, stood the enduring thing: his love for Lettice Aylmer. And this background was 'the sea' of his boyhood days, the 'underneath' in which they remained unalterably together. There, too, hid the four signs that haunted his impressionable youth: the Wave, the other Eyes, the Whiff, the Sound. In due course, and at their appointed time, they would combine and 'happen' in his outward life. The Wave would\u2014fall.\n\nMeanwhile his sense of humour had long ago persuaded him that, so far as any claim upon the girl existed, or that she reciprocated his own deep passion, his love-dream was of questionable security. The man in him that built bridges and cut tunnels laughed at it; the man that devised these first in imagination, however, believed in it, and waited. Behind thought and reason, suspected of none with whom he daily came in contact, and surprised only by himself when he floated in these silent, tideless backwaters\u2014it persisted with an amazing conviction that seemed deathless. In these calm deeps of his being, securely anchored, hid what he called the 'spiral' attitude. The thing that was coming, a tragedy whereof that childish nightmare was both a memory and a premonition, clung and haunted still with its sense of dim familiarity. Something he had known before would eventually repeat itself. But\u2014with a difference; that he would see it from above\u2014from a higher curve of the ascending spiral.\n\nThere lay the enticing wonder of the situation. With his present English temperament, stolid rather, he would meet it differently, treat it otherwise, learn and understand. He would see it from another\u2014higher\u2014 point of view. He would know great pain, yet some part of him would look on, compare, accept the pain\u2014and smile. The words that offered themselves were that he had 'suffered blindly,' but suffered with fierce and bitter resentment, savagely, even with murder in his heart; suffered, moreover, somehow or other, at the hands of Lettice Aylmer.\n\nLettice, of course,\u2014he clung to it absurdly still\u2014was true and loyal to him, though married to another. Her name was changed. But Lettice Aylmer was not changed. And this mad assurance, though he kept it deliberately from his conscious thoughts, persisted with the rest of the curious business, for nothing, apparently, could destroy it in him. It was part of the situation, as he called it, part of the 'sea,' out of which would rise eventually\u2014the Wave.\n\nOutwardly, meanwhile, much had happened to him, each experience contributing its modifying touch to the character as he realised it, instead of merely knowing that it came to others. His sister married; Tim, following his father's trade, became a doctor with a provincial practice, buried in the country. His father died suddenly while he was away in Canada, busy with a prairie railway across the wheat fields of Assiniboia. He met the usual disillusions in a series, savoured and mastered them more or less in turn.\n\nHe was in England when his mother died; and, while his other experiences were ripples only, her going had the wave in it. The enormous mother-tie came also out of the 'sea'; its dislocation was a shock of fundamental kind, and he felt it in the foundations of his life. It was one of the things he could not quite realise. He still felt her always close and near. He had just been made a junior partner in the firm; the love and pride in her eyes, before they faded from the world of partnerships, were unmistakable: 'Of course,' she murmured, her thin hand clinging to his own, 'they had to do it\u2026 if only your father knew\u2026' and she was gone. The wave of her life sank back into the sea whence it arose. And her going somehow strengthened him, added to his own foundations, as though her wave had merged in his.\n\nWith her departure, he felt vaguely the desire to settle down, to marry. Unconsciously he caught himself thinking of women in a new light, appraising them as possible wives. It was a dangerous attitude rather; for a man then seeks to persuade himself that such and such a woman may do, instead of awaiting the inevitable draw of love which alone can justify a life-long union.\n\nIn Tom's case, however, as with the smaller fires of his younger days, he never came to a decision, much less to a positive confession. His immense idealism concerning women preserved him from being caught by mere outward beauty. While aware that Lettice was an impossible dream of boyhood, he yet clung to an ideal she somehow foreshadowed and typified. He never relinquished this standard of his dream; a mysterious woman waited for him somewhere, a woman with all the fairy qualities he had built about her personality; a woman he could not possibly mistake when at last he met her. Only he did not meet her. He waited.\n\nAnd so it was, as time passed onwards, that he found himself standing upon the little level platform of his life at a stage nearer to thirty-five than thirty, conscious that a pause surrounded him. There was a lull. The rush of the years slowed down. He looked about him. He looked\u2014back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 260", + "text": "The particular moment when this happened, suitable, too, in a chance, odd way, was upon a mountain ridge in winter, a level platform of icy snow to which he had climbed with some hotel acquaintances on a ski-ing expedition. It was on the Polish side of the Hohe Tatra.\n\nWhy, at this special moment, pausing for breath and admiring the immense wintry scene about him, he should have realised that he reached a similar position in his life, is hard to say. There is always a particular moment when big changes claim attention. They have been coming slowly; but at a given moment they announce themselves. Tom associated that icy ridge above Zakopan\u00e9 with a pause in the rushing of the years: 'I'm getting on towards middle age; the first swift climb\u2014impetuous youth\u2014lies now behind me.' The physical parallel doubtless suggested it; he had felt his legs and wind a trifle less willing, perhaps; there was still a steep, laborious slope of snow beyond; he discovered that he was no longer twenty-five.\n\nHe drew breath and watched the rest of the party as they slowly came nearer in the track he had made through the deep snow below. Each man made this track in his turn, it was hard work, his share was done. 'Nagorsky will tackle the next bit,' he thought with relief, watching a young Pole of twenty-three in the ascending line, and glancing at the summit beyond where the run home was to begin. And then the wonder of the white silent scene invaded him, the exhilarating thrill of the vast wintry heights swept over him, he forgot the toil, he regained his wind and felt his muscles taut and vigorous once more. It was pleasant, standing upon this level ridge, to inspect the long ascent below, and to know the heavy yet enjoyable exertion was nearly over.\n\nBut he had felt\u2014older. That ridge remained in his memory as the occasion of its first realisation; a door opened behind him; he looked back. He envied the other's twenty-three years. It is curious that, about thirty, a man feels he is getting old, whereas at forty he feels himself young again. At thirty he judges by the standard of eighteen, at the later age by that of sixty. But this particular occasion remained vivid for another reason\u2014it was accompanied by a strange sensation he had almost forgotten; and so long an interval had elapsed since its last manifestation that for a moment a kind of confusion dropped upon him, as from the cloudless sky. Something was gathering behind him, something was about to fall. He recognised the familiar feeling that he knew of old, the subterranean thrill, the rich, sweet pain, the power, the reality. It was the wavy feeling.\n\nBalanced on his ski, the sealskin strips gripping the icy ridge securely, he turned instinctively to seek the reason, if any were visible, of the abrupt revival. His mind, helped by the stimulating air and sunshine, worked swiftly. The odd confusion clouded his faculties still, as in a dream state, but he pierced it in several directions simultaneously.\n\nWas it that, envying another's youth, he had re-entered imaginatively his own youthful feelings? He looked down at the rest of the party climbing towards him. And doing so, he picked out the slim figure of Nagorsky's sister, a girl whose winter costume became her marvellously, and whom the happy intimacy of the hotel life had made so desirable that an expedition without her seemed a lost, blank day. Unless she was of the party there was no sunshine. He watched her now, looking adorable in her big gauntlet gloves, her short skirt, her tasselled cap of black and gold, a fairy figure on the big snowfield, filling the world with sunshine\u2014and knew abruptly that she meant to him just exactly\u2014nothing. The intensity of the wavy feeling reduced her to an unreality.\n\nIt was not she who brought the great emotion.\n\nThe confusion in him deepened. Another scale of measurement appeared. The crowded intervening years now seemed but a pause, a brief delay; he had run down a side track and returned. He had not grown older. Seen by the grand scale to which the Wave and 'sea' belonged, he had scarcely moved from the old starting-point, where, far away in some unassailable recess of life, still waiting for him, stood\u2014Lettice Aylmer.\n\nTurning his eyes, then, from the approaching climbers, he glanced at the steep slope above him, and saw\u2014as once before on the English coast\u2014 something that took his breath away and made his muscles weak. He stared up at it. It looked down at him.\n\nFive hundred feet above, outlined against the sky of crystal clearness, ran a colossal wave of solid snow. At the highest point it was, of course, a cornice, but towards the east, whence came the prevailing weather, the wind had so manipulated the mass that it formed a curling billow, twenty or thirty feet in depth, leaping over in the very act of breaking, yet arrested just before it fell. It hung waiting in mid-air, perfectly moulded, a wave\u2014but a wave of snow.\n\nIt swung along the ridge for half a mile and more: it seemed to fill the sky; it rose out of the sea of eternal snow below it, poised between the earth and heavens. In the hollow beneath its curve lay purple shadows the eye could not pierce. And the similarity to the earlier episode struck him vividly; in each case Nature assisted with a visible wave as by way of counterpart; each time, too, there was a girl\u2014as though some significance of sex hid in the 'wavy feeling.' He was profoundly puzzled.\n\nThe same second, in this wintry world where movement, sound, and perfume have no place, there stole to his nostrils across the desolate ranges another detail. It was more intimate in its appeal even than the wavy feeling, yet was part of it. He recognised the Whiff. And the joint attack, both by its suddenness and by its intensity, overwhelmed him. Only the Sound was lacking, but that, too, he felt, was on the way. Already a sharp instinctive movement was running down his legs. He began to shuffle on his ski.\u2026\n\nA chorus of voices, as from far away, broke round him, disturbing the intense stillness; and he knew that the others had reached the ridge. With a violent effort he mastered the ridiculous movement of his disobedient legs, but what really saved him from embarrassing notice was the breathless state of his companions, and the fact that his action looked after all quite natural\u2014he seemed merely rubbing his ski along the snow to clean their under-surface.\n\nExclamations in French, English, Polish rose on all sides, as the view into the deep opposing valley caught the eye, and a shower of questions all delivered at once, drew attention from himself. What scenery, what a sky, what masses of untrodden snow! Should they lunch on the ridge or continue to the summit? What were the names of all these peaks, and was the Danube visible? How lucky there was no wind, and how they pitied the people who stayed behind in the hotels! Sweaters and woollen waistcoats emerged from half a dozen knapsacks, cooking apparatus was produced, one chose a spot to make a fire, while another broke the dead branches from a stunted pine, and in five minutes had made a blaze behind a little wall of piled-up snow. The Polish girl came up and asked Tom for his Zeiss glasses, examined the soaring slope beyond, then obediently put on the extra sweater he held out for her. He hardly saw her face, and certainly did not notice the expression in her eyes. All took off their ski and plunged them upright in the nearest drift. The sun blazed everywhere, the snow crystals sparkled. They settled down for lunch, a small dark clot of busy life upon the vast expanse of desolate snow\u2026 and anything unusual about Tom Kelverdon, muffled to the throat against the freezing cold, his eyes, moreover, concealed by green snow-spectacles, was certainly not noticed.\n\nAnother party, besides, was discovered climbing upwards along their own laborious track: in the absorbing business of satisfying big appetites, tending the fire, and speculating who these other skiers might be, Tom's silence caused no comment. His self-control, for the rest, was soon recovered. But his interest in the expedition had oddly waned; he was still searching furiously in his thoughts for an explanation of the unexpected 'attack,' waiting for the Sound, but chiefly wondering why his boyhood's nightmare had never revealed that the Wave was of snow instead of water\u2014and, at the same time, oddly convinced that he had moved but one stage nearer to its final elucidation. That it was solid he had already discovered, but that it was actually of snow left a curious doubt in him.\n\nOf all this he was thinking as he devoured his eggs and sandwiches, something still trembling in him, nerves keenly sensitive, but not quite persuaded that this wave of snow was the sufficient cause of what he had just experienced\u2014when at length the other climbers, moving swiftly, came close enough to be inspected. The customary remarks and criticisms passed from mouth to mouth, with warnings to lower voices since sound carried too easily in the rarefied air. One of the party was soon recognised as the hotel doctor, and the other, first set down as a Norwegian owing to his light hair, shining hatless in the sunlight, proved on closer approach to be an Englishman\u2014both men evidently experienced and accomplished 'runners.'\n\nIn any other place the two parties would hardly have spoken, settling down into opposing camps of hostile silence; but in the lonely winter mountains human relationship becomes more natural; the time of day was quickly passed, and details of the route exchanged; the doctor and his friend mingled easily with the first arrivals; all agreed spontaneously to take the run home together; and finally, when names were produced with laughing introductions, the Englishman\u2014by one of those coincidences people pretend to think strange, but that actually ought to occur more often than they do\u2014turned out to be known to Tom, and after considerable explanations was proved to be more than that\u2014a cousin.\n\nWelcoming the diversion, making the most of it in fact, Kelverdon presented Anthony Winslowe to his Polish companions with a certain zeal to which the new arrival responded with equal pleasure. The light-haired blue-eyed Englishman, young and skilful on his ski, formed a distinct addition to the party. He was tall, with a slight stoop about the shoulders that suggested study; he was gay and very easy-going too. It was 'Tom' and 'Tony' before lunch was over; they recalled their private school, a fight, an eternal friendship vowed after it, and the twenty intervening years melted as though they had not been.\n\n'Of course,' Tom said, proud of his new-found cousin, 'and I've read your bird books, what's more. By Jove, you're quite an authority on natural history, aren't you?'\n\nThe other modestly denied any notoriety, but the girls, especially Nagorsky's sister, piqued by Tom's want of notice, pressed for details in their pretty broken English. It became a merry and familiar party, as the way is with easy foreigners, particularly when they meet in such wild and unconventional surroundings. Winslowe had lantern slides in his trunk: that night he promised to show them: they chattered and paid compliments and laughed, Tony explaining that he was on his way to Egypt to study the bird-life along the Nile. Natural history was his passion; he talked delightfully; he made the bird and animal life seem real and interesting; there was imagination, humour, lightness in him. There was a fascination, too, not due to looks alone. It was in his atmosphere, what is currently, perhaps, called magnetism.\n\n'No animals here for you,' said a girl, pointing to the world of white death about them.\n\n'There's something better,' he said quickly in quite decent Polish. 'We're all in the animal kingdom, you know.' And he glanced with a bow of admiration at the speaker, whom the others instantly began to tease. It was Irena, Nagorsky's sister; she flushed and laughed. 'We thought,' she said, 'you were Norwegian, because of your light hair, and the way you moved on your ski.'\n\n'A great compliment,' he rejoined, 'but I saw you long ago on the ridge, and I knew at once that you were\u2014Polish.'\n\nThe girl returned his bow. 'The largest compliment,' she answered gaily, 'I had ever in my life.'\n\nTom had only arrived two days before, bringing a letter of introduction to the doctor, and that night he changed his hotel, joining his new friends and his cousin at the Grand. An obvious flirtation, possibly something more, sprung up spontaneously between him and the Polish girl, but Kelverdon welcomed it and felt no jealousy. 'Not trespassing, old chap, am I?' Tony asked jokingly, having divined on the mountains that the girl was piqued. 'On the contrary,' was the honest assurance given frankly, 'I'm relieved. A delightful girl, though, isn't she? And fascinatingly pretty!'\n\nFor the existence of Nagorsky's sister had become suddenly to him of no importance whatsoever. It was strange enough, but the vivid recurrence of long-forgotten symbols that afternoon upon the heights had restored to him something he had curiously forgotten, something he had shamefully neglected, almost, it seemed, had been in danger of losing altogether. It came back upon him now. He clung desperately to it as to a real, a vital, a necessary thing. It was a genuine relief that the relationship between him and the girl might be ended thus. In any case, he reflected, it would have 'ended thus' a little later\u2014like all the others. No trace or sign of envy stayed in him. Irena and Tony, anyhow, seemed admirably suited to one another; he noticed on the long run home how naturally they came together. And even his own indifference would not bring her back to him. He felt quite pleased and satisfied. He had a long talk with Tony before going to bed. He felt drawn to him. There was a spontaneous innate sympathy between them.\n\nThey had many other talks together, and Tom liked his interesting, brilliant cousin. A week passed; dances, ski-ing trips, skating, and the usual programme of wintry enjoyments filled the time too quickly; companionship became intimacy; all sat at the same table: Tony became a general favourite. He had just that combination of reserve and abandon which\u2014provided something genuine lies behind\u2014attracts the majority of people who, being dull, have neither. Most are reserved, through emptiness, or else abandoned\u2014also through emptiness. Tony Winslowe, full of experience and ideas, vivid experience and original ideas, combined the two in rarest equipoise. It was spontaneous, and not calculated in him. There was a stimulating quality in his personality. Like those tiny, exciting Japanese tales that lead to the edge of a precipice, then end with unexpected abruptness that is their purpose, he led all who liked him to the brink of a delightful revelation\u2014then paused, stopped, vanished. And all did like him. He was light and gay, for all the depth in him. Something of the child peeped out. He won Tom Kelverdon's confidence without an effort. He also won the affectionate confidence of the Polish girl.\n\n'You're not married, Tony, are you?' Tom asked him.\n\n'Married!' Tony answered with a flush\u2014he flushed so easily when teased\u2014 'I love my wild life and animals far too much.' He stammered slightly. Then he looked up quickly into his cousin's eyes with frankness. Tom, without knowing why, almost felt ashamed of having asked it. 'I\u2014I never can go beyond a certain point,' he said, 'with girls. Something always holds me back. Odd\u2014isn't it?' He hesitated. Then this flashed from him: 'Bees never sip the last, the sweetest drop of honey from the rose, you know. The sunset always leaves one golden cloud adrift\u2014eh?' So there was poetry in him too!\n\nAnd Tom, simpler, as well as more rigidly moulded, felt a curious touch of passionate sympathy as he heard it. His heart went out to the other suddenly with a burst of confidence. Some barrier melted in him and disappeared. For the first time in his life he knew the inclination, even the desire, to speak of things hidden deep within his heart. His cousin would understand.\n\nAnd Tony's sudden, wistful silence invited the confession. They had already been talking of their forgotten youthful days together. The ground was well prepared. They had even talked of his sister, Mary, and her marriage. Tony remembered her distinctly. He spoke of it, leaning forward and putting a hand on his cousin's knee. Tom noticed vaguely the size of the palm, the wrist, the fingers\u2014they seemed disproportionate. They were ugly hands. But it was subconscious notice. His mind was on another thing.\n\n'I say,' Tom began with a sudden plunge, 'you know a lot about birds and natural history\u2014biology too, I suppose. Have you ever heard of the spiral movement?'\n\n'Spinal, did you say?' queried the other, turning the stem of his glass and looking up.\n\n'No\u2014spiral,' Tom repeated, laughing dryly in spite of himself. 'I mean the idea\u2014that evolution, whether individually in men and animals, or with nations\u2014historically, that is\u2014is not in a straight line ahead, but moves upwards\u2014in a spiral?'\n\n'It's in the air,' replied Tony vaguely, yet somehow as if he knew a great deal more about it. 'The movement of the race, you mean?'\n\n'And of the individual too. We're here, I mean, for the purpose of development\u2014whatever one's particular belief may be\u2014and that this development, instead of going forwards in a straight line, has a kind of\u2014 spiral movement\u2014upwards?'\n\nTony looked wonderfully wise. 'I've heard of it,' he said. 'The spiral movement, as you say, is full of suggestion. It's common among plants. But I don't think science\u2014biology, at any rate\u2014takes much account of it.'\n\nTom interrupted eagerly, and with a certain grave enthusiasm that evidently intrigued his companion. 'I mean\u2014a movement that is always upwards, always getting higher, and always looking down upon what has gone before. That, if it's true, a soul can look back\u2014look down upon what it has been through before, but from a higher point\u2014do you see?'\n\nTony emptied his glass and then lit a cigarette. 'I see right enough,' he said at length, quick and facile to appropriate any and every idea he came across, yet obviously astonished by his companion's sudden seriousness. 'Only the other day I read that humanity, for instance, is just now above the superstitious period\u2014of the Middle Ages, say\u2014going over it again\u2014 but that the recrudescence everywhere of psychic interests\u2014 fortune-telling, palmistry, magic, and the rest\u2014has become quasi-scientific. It's going through the same period, but seeks to explain and understand. It's above it\u2014one stage or so. Is that what you mean, perhaps?'\n\nTom drew in his horns, though for the life of him he could not say why. Tony appropriated his own idea too easily somehow\u2014had almost read his thoughts. Vaguely he resented it. Tony had stolen from him\u2014offended against some schoolboy meum and tuum standard.\n\n'That's it\u2014the idea, at any rate,' he said, wondering why confidence had frozen in him. 'Interesting, rather, isn't it?'\n\nAnd then abruptly he found that he was staring at his cousin's hands, spread on the table palm downwards. He had been staring at them for some time, but unconsciously. Now he saw them. And there was something about them that he did not like. Absurd as it seemed, his change of mood had to do with those big, ungainly hands, tanned a deep brown-black by the sun. A faint shiver ran through him. He looked away.\n\n'Extraordinary,' Tony went chattering on. 'It explains these new wild dances perhaps. Anything more spiral and twisty than these modern gyrations I never saw!' He turned it off in his light amusing way, yet as though quite familiar with the deeper aspects of the question\u2014if he cared. 'And what the body does,' he added, 'the mind has already done a little time before!'\n\nHe laughed, but whether he was in earnest, or merely playing with the idea, was uncertain. What had stopped Tom was, perhaps, that they were not in the same key together; Tom had used a word he rarely cared to use\u2014 soul\u2014it had cost him a certain effort\u2014but his cousin had not responded. That, and the hands, explained his change of mood. For the first time it occurred to his honest, simple mind that Tony was of other stuff, perhaps, than he had thought. That remark about the bees and sunset jarred a little. The lightness suggested insincerity almost.\n\nHe shook the notion off, for it was disagreeable, ungenerous as well. This was holiday-time, and serious discussion was out of place. The airy lightness in his cousin was just suited to the conditions of a winter-sport hotel; it was what made him so attractive to all and sundry, so easy to get on with. Yet Tom would have liked to confide in him, to have told him more, asked further questions and heard the answers; stranger still, he would have liked to lead from the spiral to the wave, to his own wavy feeling, and, further even\u2014almost to speak of Lettice and his boyhood nightmare. He had never met a man in regard to whom he felt so forthcoming in this way. Tony surely had seriousness and depth in him; this irresponsibility was on the surface only.\u2026 There was a queer confusion in his mind\u2014several incongruous things trying to combine.\u2026\n\n'I knew a princess once\u2014the widow of a Russian,' Tony was saying. He had been talking on, gaily, lightly, for some time, but Tom, busy with these reflections, had not listened properly. He now looked up sharply, something suddenly alert in him. 'They're all princes in Russia,' Tony laughed; 'it means less than Count in France or von in Germany.' He stopped and drained his glass. 'But you know,' he went on, his thoughts half elsewhere, it seemed, 'it's bad for a country when titles are too common, it lowers the aristocratic ideal. In the Caucasus\u2014 Batoum, for instance\u2014every Georgian is a noble, your hotel porter a prince.' He broke off abruptly as though reminded of something. 'Of course!' he exclaimed, 'I was going to tell you about the Russian woman I knew who had something of that idea of yours.' He stopped as his eye caught his cousin's empty glass. 'Let's have another,' he said, beckoning to the waitress, 'it's very light stuff, this beer. These long ski-trips give one an endless thirst, don't they?' Tom didn't know whether he said yes or no. 'What idea?' he asked quickly. 'What do you mean exactly?' A curious feeling of familiarity stirred in him. This conversation had happened before.\n\n'Eh?' Tony glanced up as though he had again forgotten what he was going to say. 'Oh yes,' he went on, 'the Russian woman, the Princess I met in Egypt. She talked a bit like that once\u2026 I remember now.'\n\n'Like what?' Tom felt a sudden, breathless curiosity in him: he was afraid the other would change his mind, or pass to something else, or forget what he was going to say. It would prove another Japanese tale\u2014 disappear before it satisfied.\n\nBut Tony went on at last, noticing, perhaps, his cousin's interest.\n\n'I was up at Edfu after birds,' he said, 'and she had a dahabieh on the river. Some friends took me there to tea, or something. It was nothing particular. Only it occurred to me just now when you talked of spirals and things.'\n\n'You talked about the spiral?' Tom asked. 'Talked with her about it, I mean?' He was slow, almost stupid compared to the other, who seemed to flash lightly and quickly over a dozen ideas at once. But there was this real, natural sympathy between them both again. It seemed he knew exactly what his cousin was going to say.\n\nTony, blowing the foam off his beer glass, proceeded to quench his wholesome thirst. 'Not exactly,' he said at length, 'but we talked, I remember, along that line. I was explaining about the flight of birds\u2014 that all wild animal life moves in a spontaneous sort of natural rhythm\u2014 with an unconscious grace, I mean, we've lost because we think too much. Birds in particular rise and fall with a swoop, the simplest, freest movement in the world\u2014like a wave\u2014'\n\n'Yes?' interrupted Tom, leaning over the table a little and nearly upsetting his untouched glass. 'I like that idea. It's true.'\n\n'And\u2014oh, that all the forces known to science move in a similar way\u2014by wave-form, don't you see? Something like that it was.' He took another draught of the nectar his day's exertions had certainly earned.\n\n'She said that?' asked Tom, watching his cousin's face buried in the enormous mug.\n\nTony set it down with a sigh of intense satisfaction, 'I said it,' he exclaimed with a frank egoism. 'You're too tired after all your falls this afternoon to listen properly. I was the teacher on that occasion, she the adoring listener! But if you want to know what she said too, I'll tell you.'\n\nTom waited; he raised his glass, pretending to drink; if he showed too much interest, the other might swerve off again to something else. He knew what was coming, yet could not have actually foretold it. He recognised it only the instant afterwards.\n\n'She talked about water,' Tony went on, as though he had difficulty in recalling what she really had said, 'and I think she had water on the brain,' he added lightly. 'The Nile had bewitched her probably; it affects most of 'em out there\u2014the women, that is. She said life moved in a stream\u2014that she moved down a stream, or something, and that only things going down the stream with her were real. Anything on the banks\u2014 stationary, that is\u2014was not real. Oh, she said a lot. I've really forgotten now\u2014it was a year or two ago\u2014but I remember her mentioning shells and the spiral twist of shells. In fact,' he added, as if there was no more to tell, 'I suppose that's what made me think of her just now\u2014your mentioning the spiral movement.'\n\nThe door of the room, half caf\u00e9 and half bar, where the peasants sat at wooden tables about them, opened, and the pretty head of Irena Nagorsky appeared. A burst of music came in with her. 'We dance,' she said, a note of reproach as well as invitation in her voice\u2014then vanished. Tony, leaving his beer unfinished, laughed at his cousin and went after her. 'My last night,' he said cheerily. 'Must be gay and jolly. I'm off to Trieste tomorrow for Alexandria. See you later, Tom\u2014unless you're coming to dance too.'\n\nBut, though they saw each other many a time again that evening, there was no further conversation. Next day the party broke up, Tom returning to the Water Works his firm was constructing outside Warsaw, and Tony taking the train for Budapesth en route for Trieste and Egypt. He urged Tom to follow him as soon as his work was finished, gave the Turf Club, Cairo, as his permanent address where letters would always reach him sooner or later, waved his hat to the assembled group upon the platform, and was gone. The last detail of him visible was the hand that held the waving hat. It looked bigger, darker, thought Tom, than ever. It was almost disfiguring. It stirred a hint of dislike in him. He turned his eyes away.\n\nBut Tom Kelverdon remembered that last night in the hotel for another reason too. In the small hours of the morning he woke up, hearing a sound close beside him in the room. He listened a moment, then turned on the light above the bed. The sound, of an unusual and peculiar character, continued faintly. But it was not actually in the room as he first supposed. It was outside.\n\nMore than ten years had passed since he had heard that sound. He had expected it that day on the mountains when the wavy feeling and the Whiff had come to him. Sooner or later he felt positive he would hear it. He heard it now. It had merely been delayed, postponed. Something gathering slowly and steadily behind his life was drawing nearer\u2014had come already very close. He heard the dry, rattling Sound that was associated with the Wave and with the Whiff. In it, too, was a vague familiarity.\n\nAnd then he realised that the wind was rising. A frozen pine-branch, stiff with little icicles, was rattling and scraping faintly outside the wooden framework of the double windows. It was the icy branch that made the dry, rattling sound. He listened intently; the sound was repeated at certain intervals, then ceased as the wind died down. And he turned over and fell asleep again, aware that what he had heard was an imitation only, but an imitation strangely accurate\u2014of a reality. Similarly, the wave of snow was but an imitation of a reality to come. This reality lay waiting still beyond him. One day\u2014one day soon\u2014he would know it face to face. The Wave, he felt, was rising behind his life, and his life was rising with it towards a climax. On the little level platform where the years had landed him for a temporary pause, he began to shuffle with his feet in dream. And something deeper than his mind\u2014looked back.\u2026\n\nThe instinct, or by whatever name he called that positive, interior affirmation, proved curiously right. Life rose with the sweep and power of a wave, bearing him with it towards various climaxes. His powers, such as they were, seemed all in the ascendant. He passed from that level platform as with an upward rush, all his enterprises, all his energies, all that he wanted and tried to do, surging forward towards the crest of successful accomplishment.\n\nAnd a dozen times at least he caught himself asking mentally for his cousin Tony; wishing he had confided in him more, revealed more of this curious business to him, exchanged sympathies with him about it all. A kind of yearning rose in him for his vanished friend. Almost he had missed an opportunity. Tony would have understood and helped to clear things up; to no other man of his acquaintance could he have felt similarly. But Tony was now out of reach in Egypt, chasing his birds among the temples of the haunted Nile, already, doubtless, the centre of a circle of new friends and acquaintances who found him as attractive and fascinating as the little Zakopan\u00e9 group had found him. Tony must keep.\n\nTom Kelverdon meanwhile, his brief holiday over, returned to his work at Warsaw, and brought it to a successful conclusion with a rapidity no one had foreseen, and he himself had least of all expected. The power of the rising wave was in all he did. He could not fail. Out of the success grew other contracts highly profitable to his firm. Some energy that overcame all obstacles, some clarity of judgment that selected unerringly the best ways and means, some skill and wisdom in him that made all his powers work in unison till they became irresistible, declared themselves, yet naturally and without adventitious aid. He seemed to have found himself anew. He felt pleased and satisfied with himself: always self-confident, as a man of ability ought to be, he now felt proud; and, though conceit had never been his failing, this new-born assurance moved distinctly towards pride. In a moment of impulsive pleasure he wrote to Tony, at the Turf Club, Cairo, and told him of his success.\u2026 The senior partner, his father's old friend, wrote and asked his advice upon certain new proposals the firm had in view; it was a question of big docks to be constructed at Salonica, and something to do with a barrage on the Nile as well\u2014there were several juicy contracts to choose between, it seemed,\u2014and Sir William proposed a meeting in Switzerland, on his way out to the Near East; he would break the journey before crossing the Simplon for Milan and Trieste. The final telegram said Montreux, and Kelverdon hurried to Vienna and caught the night express to Lausanne by way of B\u00e2le.\n\nAnd at Montreux further evidence that the wave of life was rising then declared itself, when Sir William, having discussed the various propositions with him, listening with attention, even with deference, to Kelverdon's opinion, told him quietly that his brother's retirement left a vacancy in the firm which\u2014he and his co-directors hoped confidently\u2014Kelverdon might fill with benefit to all concerned. A senior partnership was offered to him before he was thirty-five! Sir William left the same night for his steamer, and Tom was to wait at Montreux, perhaps a month, perhaps six weeks, until a personal inspection of the several sites enabled the final decision to be made; he was then to follow and take charge of the work itself.\n\nTom was immensely pleased. He wrote to his married sister in her Surrey vicarage, told her the news with a modesty he did not really feel, and sent her a handsome cheque by way of atonement for his bursting pride.\n\nFor simple natures, devoid of a saving introspection and self-criticism, upon becoming unexpectedly successful easily develop an honest yet none the less corroding pride. Tom felt himself rather a desirable person suddenly; by no means negligible at any rate; pleased and satisfied with himself, if not yet overweeningly so. His native confidence took this exaggerated turn and twist. His star was in the ascendant, a man to be counted with.\u2026\n\nThe hidden weakness rose\u2014as all else in him was rising\u2014with the Wave. But he did not call it pride, because he did not recognise it. It was akin, perhaps, to that fatuous complacency of the bigoted religionist who, thinking he has discovered absolute truth, looks down from his narrow cell upon the rest of the world with a contemptuous pity that in itself is but the ignorance of crass self-delusion. Tom felt very sure of himself. For a rising wave drags up with it the mud and rubbish that have hitherto lain hidden out of sight in the ground below. Only with the fall do these undesirable elements return to their proper place again\u2014where they belong and are of value. Sense of proportion is recovered only with perspective, and Tom Kelverdon, rising too rapidly, began to see himself in disproportionate relation to the rest of life. In his solid, perhaps stolid, way he considered himself a Personality\u2014indispensable to no small portion of the world about him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 261", + "text": "It was towards the end of March, and spring was flowing down almost visibly from the heights behind the town. April stood on tiptoe in the woods, finger on lip, ready to dance out between the sunshine and the rain.\n\nAbove four thousand feet the snows of winter still clung thickly, but the lower slopes were clear, men and women already working busily among the dull brown vineyards. The early mist cleared off by ten o'clock, letting through floods of sunshine that drenched the world, sparkled above the streets crowded with foreigners from many lands, and lay basking with an appearance of July upon the still, blue lake. The clear brilliance of the light had a quality of crystal. Sea-gulls fluttered along the shores, tame as ducks and eager to be fed. They lent to this inland lake an atmosphere of the sea, and Kelverdon found himself thinking of some southern port, Marseilles, Trieste, Toulon.\n\nIn the morning he watched the graceful fishing-boats set forth, and at night, when only the glitter of the lamps painted the gleaming water for a little distance, he saw the swans, their heads tucked back impossibly into the centre of their backs, scarcely moving on the unruffled surface as they slept into the night. The first sounds he heard soon after dawn through his wide-opened windows were the whanging strokes of their powerful wings flying low across the misty water; they flew in twos and threes, coming from their nests now building in the marshes beyond Villeneuve. This, and the screaming of the gulls, usually woke him. The summits of Savoy, on the southern shore, wore pink and gold upon their heavy snows; the sharp air nipped; far in the west a few stars peeped before they faded; and in the distance he heard the faint, drum-like mutter of a paddle-steamer, reminding him that he was in a tourist centre after all, and that this was busy, little, organised Switzerland.\n\nBut sometimes it was the beating strokes of the invisible paddle-steamer that woke him, for it seemed somehow a continuation of dreams he could never properly remember. That he had been dreaming busily every night of late he knew as surely as that he instantly forgot these dreams. That muffled, drum-like thud, coming nearer and nearer towards him out of the quiet distance, had some connection\u2014undecipherable as yet\u2014with the curious, dry, rattling sound belonging to the Wave. The two were so dissimilar, however, that he was unable to discover any theory that could harmonise them. Nor, for that matter, did he seek it. He merely registered a mental note, as it were, in passing. The beating and the rattling were associated.\n\nHe chose a small and quiet hotel, as his liking was, and made himself comfortable, for he might have six weeks to wait for Sir William's telegram, or even longer, if, as seemed likely, the summons came by post. And Montreux was a pleasant place in early spring, before the heat and glare of summer scorched the people out of it towards the heights. He took long walks towards the snow-line beyond Les Avants and Les Pl\u00e9iades, where presently the carpets of narcissus would smother the fields with white as though winter had returned to fling, instead of crystal flakes, a hundred showers of white feathers upon the ground. He discovered paths that led into the whispering woods of pine and chestnut. The young larches wore feathery green upon their crests, primroses shone on slopes where the grass was still pale and dead, snowdrops peeped out beside the wooden fences, and here and there, shining out of the brown decay of last year's leaves and thick ground-ivy, he found hepaticas. He had never felt the spring so marvellous before; it rose in a wave of colour out of the sweet brown earth.\n\nThough outwardly nothing of moment seemed to fill his days, inwardly he was aware of big events\u2014maturing. There was this sense of approach, of preparation, of gathering. How insipid external events were after all, compared to the mass, the importance of interior changes! A change of heart, an altered point of view, a decision taken\u2014these were the big events of life.\n\nYet it was a pleasant thing to be a senior partner. Here by the quiet lake, stroking himself complacently, he felt that life was very active, very significant, as he wondered what the choice would be. He rather hoped for Egypt, on the whole. He could look up Tony and the birds. They could go after duck and snipe together along the Nile. He would, moreover, be quite an important man out there. Pride and vanity rose in him, but unobserved. For the Wave was in this too.\n\nOne afternoon, late, he returned from a long scramble among icy rocks about the Dent de Jaman, changed his clothes, and sat with a cigarette beside the open window, watching the throng of people underneath. In a steady stream they moved along the front of the lake, their voices rising through the air, their feet producing a dull murmur as of water. The lake was still as glass; gulls asleep on it in patches, and here and there a swan, looking like a bundle of dry white paper, floated idly. Off-shore lay several fishing-boats, becalmed; and far beyond them, a rowing-skiff broke the surface into two lines of widening ripples. They seemed floating in mid-air against the evening glow. The Savoy Alps formed a deep blue rampart, and the serrated battlements of the Dent du Midi, full in the blaze of sunset, blocked the Rhone Valley far away with its formidable barricade.\n\nHe watched the glow of approaching sunset with keen enjoyment; he sat back, listening to the people's voices, the gentle lap of the little waves; and the pleasant lassitude that follows upon hard physical exertion combined with the even pleasanter stimulus of the tea to produce a state of absolute contentment with the world.\u2026\n\nThrough the murmur of feet and voices, then, and from far across the water, stole out another sound that introduced into his peaceful mood an element of vague disquiet. He moved nearer to the window and looked out. The steamer, however, was invisible; the sea of shining haze towards Geneva hid it still; he could not see its outline. But he heard the echoless mutter of the paddle-wheels, and he knew that it was coming nearer. Yet at first it did not disturb him so much as that, for a moment, he heard no other sound: the voices, the tread of feet, the screaming of the gulls all died away, leaving this single, distant beating audible alone\u2014as though the entire scenery combined to utter it. And, though no ordinary echo answered it, there seemed\u2014or did he fancy it?\u2014a faint, interior response within himself. The blood in his veins went pulsing in rhythmic unison with this remote hammering upon the water.\n\nHe leaned forward in his chair, watching the people, listening intently, almost as though he expected something to happen, when immediately below him chance left a temporary gap in the stream of pedestrians, and in this gap\u2014for a second merely\u2014a figure stood sharply defined, cut off from the throng, set by itself, alone. His eyes fixed instantly upon its appearance, movements, attitude. Before he could think or reason he heard himself exclaim aloud:\n\n'Why\u2014it's\u2014'\n\nHe stopped. The rest of the sentence remained unspoken. The words rushed down again. He swallowed, and with a gulp he ended\u2014as though the other pedestrians all were men\u2014'\u2014a woman!'\n\nThe next thing he knew was that the cigarette was burning his fingers\u2014had been burning them for several seconds. The figure melted back into the crowd. The throng closed round her. His eyes searched uselessly; no space, no gap was visible; the stream of people was continuous once more. Almost, it seemed, he had not really seen her\u2014had merely thought her\u2014up against the background of his mind.\n\nFor ten minutes, longer perhaps, he sat by that open window with eyes fastened on the moving crowd. His heart was beating oddly; his breath came rapidly. 'She'll pass by presently again,' he thought; 'she'll come back!' He looked alternately to the right and to the left, until, finally, the sinking sun blazed too directly in his eyes for him to see at all. The glare blurred everybody into a smudged line of golden colour, and the faces became a series of artificial suns that mocked him.\n\nHe did, then, an unusual thing\u2014out of rhythm with his normal self,\u2014he acted on impulse. Kicking his slippers off, he quickly put on a pair of boots, took his hat and stick, and went downstairs. There was no reflection in him; he did not pause and ask himself a single question; he ran to join the throng of people, moved up and down with them, in and out, passing and re-passing the same groups over and over again, but seeing no sign of the particular figure he sought so eagerly. She was dressed in black, he knew, with a black fur boa round her neck; she was slim and rather tall; more than that he could not say. But the poise and attitude, the way the head sat on the shoulders, the tilt upwards of the chin\u2014he was as positive of recognising these as if he had seen her close instead of a hundred yards away.\n\nThe sun was down behind the Jura Mountains before he gave up the search. Sunset slipped insensibly into dusk. The throng thinned out quickly at the first sign of chill. A dozen times he experienced the thrill\u2014his heart suddenly arrested\u2014of seeing her, but on each occasion it proved to be some one else. Every second woman seemed to be dressed in black that afternoon, a loose black boa round the neck. His eyes ached with the strain, the change of focus, the question that burned behind and in them, the joy\u2014the strange rich pain.\n\nBut half, at least, of these dull people, he renumbered, were birds of passage only; to-morrow or the next day they would take the train. He said to himself a dozen times, 'Once more to the end and back again!' For she, too, might be a bird of passage, leaving to-morrow or the next day, leaving that very night, perhaps. The thought afflicted, goaded him. And on getting back to the hotel he searched the Liste des \u00c9trangers as eagerly as he had searched the crowded front\u2014and as uselessly, since he did not even know what name he hoped to find.\n\nBut later that evening a change came over him. He surprised some sense of humour: catching it in the act, he also surprised himself a little\u2014 smiling at himself. The laughter, however, was significant. For it was just that restless interval after dinner when he knew not what to do with the hours until bedtime: whether to sit in his room and think and read, or to visit the principal hotels in the hope of chance discovery. He was even considering this wild-goose chase to himself, when suddenly he realised that his course of procedure was entirely the wrong one.\n\nThis thing was going to happen anyhow, it was inevitable; but\u2014it would happen in its own time and way, and nothing he might do could hurry it. To hunt in this violent manner was to delay its coming. To behave as usual was the proper way. It was then he smiled.\n\nHe crossed the hall instead, and put his head in at the door of the little Lounge. Some Polish people, with whom he had a bowing acquaintance, were in there smoking. He had seen them enter, and the Lounge was so small that he could hardly sit in their presence without some effort at conversation. And, feeling in no mood for this, he put his head past the edge of the glass door, glanced round carelessly as though looking for some one\u2014then drew sharply back. For his heart stopped dead an instant, then beat furiously, like a piston suddenly released. On the sofa, talking calmly to the Polish people, was\u2014the figure. He recognised her instantly.\n\nHer back was turned; he did not see her face. There was a vast excitement in him that seemed beyond control. He seemed unable to make up his mind. He walked round and round the little hall examining intently the notices upon the walls. The excitement grew into tumult, as though the meeting involved something of immense importance to his inmost self\u2014his soul. It was difficult to account for. Then a voice behind him said, 'There is a concert to-night. Radwan is playing Chopin. There are tickets in the Bureau still\u2014if Monsieur cares to go.' He thanked the speaker without turning to show his face: while another voice said passionately within him, 'I was wrong; she is slim, but she is not so tall as I thought.' And a minute later, without remembering how he got there, he was in his room upstairs, the door shut safely after him, standing before the mirror and staring into his own eyes. Apparently the instinct to see what he looked like operated automatically. For he now remembered\u2014realised\u2014 another thing. Facing the door of the Lounge was a mirror, and their eyes had met. He had gazed for an instant straight into the kind and beautiful Eyes he had first seen twenty years ago\u2014in the Wave.\n\nHis behaviour then became more normal. He did the little, obvious things that any man would do. He took a clothes-brush and brushed his coat; he pulled his waistcoat down, straightened his black tie, and smoothed his hair, poked his hanging watch-chain back into its pocket. Then, drawing a deep breath and compressing his lips, he opened the door and went downstairs. He even remembered to turn off the electric light according to hotel instructions. 'It's perfectly all right,' he thought, as he reached the top of the stairs. 'Why shouldn't I? There's nothing unusual about it.' He did not take the lift, he preferred action. Reaching the salon floor, he heard voices in the hall below. She was already leaving therefore, the brief visit over. He quickened his pace. There was not the slightest notion in him what he meant to say. It merely struck him that\u2014idiotically\u2014he had stayed longer in his bedroom than he realised; too long; he might have missed his chance. The thought urged him forward more rapidly again.\n\nIn the hall\u2014he seemed to be there without any interval of time\u2014he saw her going out; the swinging doors were closing just behind her. The Polish friends, having said good-bye, were already rising past him in the lift. A minute later he was in the street. He realised that, because he felt the cool night air upon his cheeks. He was beside her\u2014looking down into her face.\n\n'May I see you back\u2014home\u2014to your hotel?' he heard himself saying. And then the queer voice\u2014it must have been his own\u2014added abruptly, as though it was all he really had to say: 'You haven't forgotten me really. I'm Tommy\u2014Tom Kelverdon.'\n\nHer reply, her gesture, what she did and showed of herself in a word, was as queer as in a dream, yet so natural that it simply could not have been otherwise: 'Tom Kelverdon! So it is! Fancy\u2014you being here!' Then: 'Thank you very much. And suppose we walk; it's only a few minutes\u2014and quite dry.'\n\nHow trivial and commonplace, yet how wonderful!\n\nHe remembers that she said something to a coachman who immediately drove off, that she moved beside him on this Montreux pavement, that they went up-hill a little, and that, very soon, a brilliant door of glass blazed in front of them, that she had said, 'How strange that we should meet again like this. Do come and see me\u2014any day\u2014just telephone. I'm staying some weeks probably,'\u2014and he found himself standing in the middle of the road, then walking wildly at a rapid pace downhill, he knew not whither, that he was hot and breathless, that stars were shining, and swans, like bundles of white newspaper, were asleep on the lake, and\u2014that he had found her.\n\nHe had walked and talked with Lettice. He bumped into more than one irate pedestrian before he realised it; they knew it better than he did, apparently. 'It was Lettice Aylmer, Lettice\u2026' he kept saying to himself. 'I've found her. She shook hands with me. That was her voice, her touch, her perfume. She's here\u2014here in little Montreux\u2014for several weeks. After all these years! Can it be true\u2014really true at last? She said I might telephone\u2014might go and see her. She's glad to see me\u2014 again.'\n\nHow often he paced the entire length of the deserted front beside the lake he did not count: it must have been many times, for the hotel door, which closed at midnight, was locked and the night-porter let him in. He went to bed\u2014if there was rose in the eastern sky and upon the summits of the Dent du Midi, he did not notice it. He dropped into a half-sleep in which thought continued but not wearingly. The excitement of his nerves relaxed, soothed and mothered by something far greater than his senses, stronger than his rushing blood. This greater Rhythm took charge of him most comfortably. He fell back into the mighty arms of something that was rising irresistibly\u2014something inevitable and\u2014half-familiar. It had long been gathering; there was no need to ask a thousand questions, no need to fight it anywhere. From the moment when he glanced idly into the Lounge he had been aware of it. It had driven him downstairs without reflection, as it had driven him also uphill till the blazing door was reached. He smelt it, heard it, saw it, touched it. It was the Wave.\n\nTime certainly proved its unreality that night; the hours seemed both endless and absurdly brief. His mind flew round and round in a circle, lingering over every detail of the short interview with a tumultuous pleasure that hid pain very thinly. He felt afraid, felt himself on the brink of plunging headlong into a gigantic whirlpool. Yet he wanted to plunge.\u2026 He would.\u2026 He had to.\u2026 It was irresistible.\n\nHe reviewed the scene, holding each detail forcibly still, until the last delight had been sucked out of it. At first he remembered next to nothing\u2014a blur, a haze, the houses flying past him, no feeling of pavement under his feet, but only her voice saying nothing in particular, her touch, as he sometimes drew involuntarily against her arm, her eyes shining up at him. For her eyes remained the chief impression perhaps\u2014so kind, so true, so very sweet and frank\u2014soft Irish eyes with something mysterious and semi-eastern in them. The conversation seemed to have entirely escaped recovery.\n\nThen, one by one, he remembered things that she had said. Sentences offered themselves of their own accord. He flung himself upon them, trying to keep tight hold of their first meaning\u2014before he filled them with significance of his own. It was a desperate business altogether; emotion distorted her simple words so quickly. 'I was thinking of you only to-day. I had the feeling you were here. Curious, wasn't it?' He distinctly remembered her saying this. And then another sentence: 'I should have known you anywhere; though, of course, you've changed a lot. But I knew your eyes. Eyes don't change much, do they?' The meanings he read into these simple phrases filled an hour at least; he lost entirely their simple first significance. But this last remark brought up another in its train. As the tram went past them she had raised her voice a little and looked up into his face\u2014it was just then they had cannonaded. People who like one another always cannonade, he reflected. And her remark\u2014'Ah, it comes back to me. You're so very like your sister Mary. I've seen her several times since the days in Cavendish Square. There's a strong family likeness.'\n\nHe disliked the last part of the sentence. Mary, besides, had mentioned nothing; her rare letters made no reference to it. The schooldays' friendship had evaporated perhaps. This sent his thoughts back upon the early trail of those distant months when Lettice was at a Finishing School in France and he had kept that tragic Calendar.\u2026\n\nAnother sentence interrupted them: 'I had, oddly enough, been thinking of you this very afternoon. I knew you the moment you put your head in at the door, but, for the life of me, I couldn't get the name. All I got was 'Tommy'!' And only his sense of humour prevented the obvious rejoinder, 'I wish you would always call me that.' It struck him sharply. Such talk could have no part in a meeting of this kind; the idea of flirtation was impossible, not even thought of. Yet twice she had said, 'I was thinking of you only to-day!'\n\nBut other things came back as well. It was strange how much they had really said to each other in those few brief minutes. Next day he retraced the way and discovered that, even walking quickly, it took him a good half hour; yet they had walked slowly, even leisurely. But, try as he would, he was unable to force deeper meanings into these other remarks that he recalled. She was evidently pleased to see him, that at least was certain, for she had asked him to come and see her, and she meant it. He remembered his reply, 'I'll come to-morrow\u2014may I?' and then abruptly realised for the first time that the plunge was taken. He felt himself committed, sink or swim. The Wave already had lifted him off his feet.\n\nAnd it was on this his whirling thoughts came down to rest at last, and sleep crept over him\u2014just as dawn was breaking. He felt himself in the 'sea' with Lettice, there was nothing he could do, no course to choose, no decision to be made. Though married, she was somehow free\u2014he felt it in her attitude. That sense of fatalism known in boyhood took charge of him. The Wave was rising towards the moment when it must invariably break and fall, and every impulse in him rising in it without a shade of denial or resistance. It would hurt\u2014the fall and break would cause atrocious pain. But it was somewhere necessary to him. No atom of him held back or hesitated. For there was joy beyond it somehow\u2014an intense and lasting joy, like the joy that belongs to growth and development after accepted suffering.\n\nVaguely\u2014not put into definite words\u2014it was this he felt, when at length sleep took him. Yet just before he slept he remembered two other little details, and smiled to himself as they rose before his sleepy mind, yet not understanding exactly why he smiled: for he did not yet know her name\u2014and there was, of course, a husband." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 262", + "text": "This resumption of a childhood's acquaintance that, by one at least, had been imaginatively coaxed into a relationship of ideal character, at once took on a standing of its own. It started as from a new beginning.\n\nTom Kelverdon did not forget the childhood part, but he neglected it at first. It was as if he met now for the first time\u2014a woman who charmed him beyond anything known before; he longed for her; that he had longed for her subconsciously these twenty years slipped somehow or other out of memory. With it slipped also those strange corroborative details that imagination had clung to so tenaciously during the interval. The Whiff, the Sound, the other pair of Eyes, the shuffling feet, the joy that cloaked the singular prophecy of pain\u2014all these, if not entirely forgotten, ceased to intrude themselves. Even when looking into her clear, dark eyes, he no longer quite realised them as the 'eastern eyes' of his dim, dim dream; they belonged to a woman, and a married woman, whom he desired with body, heart and soul. Calm introspection was impossible, he could only feel, and feel intensely. He could not fuse this girl and woman into one continuous picture: each was a fragment of some much older, larger picture. But this larger canvas he could never visualise successfully. It was coloured, radiant, gorgeous; it blazed as with gold, a gold of sun and stars. But the strain of effort caused rupture instantly. The vaster memory escaped him. He was conscious of reserve.\n\nThe comedy of telephoning to a name he did not know was obviated next morning by the arrival of a note: 'Dear Tom Kelverdon,' it began, and was signed 'Yours, Lettice Jaretzka.' It invited him to come up for d\u00e9jeuner in her hotel. He went. The luncheon led naturally to a walk together afterwards, and then to other luncheons and other walks, to evening rows upon the lake, and to excursions into the surrounding country.\u2026 They had tea together in the lower mountain inns, picked flowers, photographed one another, laughed, talked and sat side by side at concerts or in the little Montreux cinema theatre. It was all as easy and natural as any innocent companionship well could be\u2014because it was so deep. The foundations were of such solid strength that nothing on the surface trembled.\u2026 Madame de Jaretzka was well known in the hotel\u2014 she came annually, it seemed, about this time and made a lengthy stay,\u2014 but no breath of anything untoward could ever be connected with her. He, too, was accepted by one and all, no glances came their way. He was her friend: that was apparently enough. And though he desired her, body, heart and soul, he was quick to realise that the first named in the trio had no r\u00f4le to play. Something in her, something of attitude and atmosphere, rendered it inconceivable. The reserve he was conscious of lay very deep in him; it lay in her too. There was a fence, a barrier he must not, could not pass\u2014both recognised it. Being a man, romance for him drew some tendril doubtless from the creative physical, but the shade of passing disappointment, if it existed, was renounced as instantly as recognised. Yet he was not aware at first of any incompleteness in her. He felt only a bigger thing. There seemed something in this simple woman that bore him to the stars.\n\nFor simple she undoubtedly was, not in the way of shallowness, but because her nature seemed at harmony with itself: uncomplex, natural, frank and open, and with an unconventional carelessness that did no evil for the reason that she thought and meant none. She could do things that must have made an ordinary worldly woman the centre of incessant talk and scandal. There was, indeed, an extraordinary innocence about her that perturbed the judgment, somewhat baffling it. Whereas with many women it might have roused the suspicion of being a pose, an affectation, with her, Tom felt, it was a genuine innocence, beyond words delightful and refreshing. And it arose, he soon discovered, from the fact that, being good and true herself, she thought everybody else was also good and true. This he realised before two days' intercourse had made it seem as if they had been together always and were made for one another. Something bigger and higher than he had ever felt before stirred in him for this woman, whom he thought of now invariably as Madame de Jaretzka, rather than as Lettice of his younger dream. If she woke something nobler in him that had slept, he did not label it as such: nor, if a portion of his younger dream was fulfilling itself before his eyes, in a finer set of terms, did he think it out and set it down in definite words. There was this intense and intimate familiarity between them both, but somehow he did not call it by these names. He just thought her wonderful\u2014and longed for her. The reserve began to trouble him.\u2026\n\n'It's sweet,' she said, 'when real people come together\u2014find each other.'\n\n'Again,' he added. 'You left that out. For I've never forgotten\u2014all these years.'\n\nShe laughed. 'Well, I'll tell you the truth,' she confessed frankly. 'I hadn't forgotten either; I often thought of you and wondered\u2014'\n\n'What I was like now?'\n\n'What you were doing, where you were,' she said. 'I always knew what you were like. But I often wondered how far on you had got.'\n\n'You had no news of me?'\n\n'None. But I always believed you'd do something big in the world.'\n\nSomething in her voice or manner made it wholly natural for him to tell her of his boyhood love. He mentioned the Wave and wavy feeling, the nightmare too, but when he tried to go beyond that, something checked him; he felt a sudden shyness. It 'sounds so silly,' was his thought. 'But I always know a real person,' he said aloud, 'anybody who's going to be real in my life; they always arrive on a wave, as it were. My wavy feeling announces them.' And the interest with which she responded prevented his regretting having made his confession.\n\n'It's an instinct, I think,' she agreed, 'and instincts are meant to be listened to. I've had something similar, though with me it's not a wave.' Her voice grew slower, she made a pause; when he looked up\u2014her eyes were gazing across the lake as though in a moment of sudden absent-mindedness... 'And what's yours?' he asked, wondering why his heart was beating as though something painful was to be disclosed.\n\n'I see a stream,' she went on slowly, still gazing away from him across the expanse of shining water, 'a flowing stream\u2014with faces on it. They float down with the current. And when I see one I know it's somebody real\u2014real to me. The unreal faces are always on the bank. I pass them by.'\n\n'You've seen mine?' he asked, unable to hide the eagerness. 'My face?'\n\n'Often, yes,' she told him simply. 'I dream it usually, I think: but it's quite vivid.'\n\n'And is that all? You just see the faces floating down with the current?'\n\n'There's one other thing,' she answered, 'if you'll promise not to laugh.'\n\n'Oh, I won't laugh,' he assured her. 'I'm awfully interested. It's no funnier than my Wave, anyhow.'\n\n'They're faces I have to save,' she said. 'Somehow I'm meant to rescue them.' In what way she did not know. 'Just keep them above water, I suppose!' And the smile in her face gave place to a graver look. The stream of faces was real to her in the way his Wave was real. There was meaning in it. 'Only three weeks ago,' she added, 'I saw you like that.' He asked where it was, and she told him Warsaw. They compared notes; they had been in the town together, it turned out. Their outer paths had been converging for some time, then.\n\n'Why\u2014did you leave?' he asked suddenly. He wanted to ask why she was there at all, but something stopped him.\n\n'I usually come here,' she said quietly, 'about this time. It's restful. There's peace in these quiet hills above the town, and the lake is soothing. I get strength and courage here.'\n\nHe glanced at her with astonishment a moment. Behind the simple language another meaning flashed. There was a look in the eyes, a hint in the voice that betrayed her.\u2026 He waited, but she said no more. Not that she wished to conceal, but that she did not wish to speak of something. Warsaw meant pain for her, she came here to rest, to recuperate after a time of stress and struggle, he felt. And looking at the face he recognised for the first time that behind its quiet strength there lay deep pain and sadness, yet accepted pain and sadness conquered, a suffering she had turned to sweetness. Without a particle of proof, he yet felt sure of this. And an immense respect woke in him. He saw her saving, rescuing others, regardless of herself: he felt the floating faces real; the stream was life\u2014her life.\u2026 And, side by side with the deep respect, the bigger, higher impulse stirred in him again. Name it he could not: it just came: it stole into him like some rare and exquisite new fragrance, and it came from her.\u2026 He saw her far above him, stooping down from a higher level to reach him with her little hand.\u2026 He knew a yearning to climb up to her\u2014a sudden and searching yearning in his soul. 'She's come back to fetch me,' ran across his mind before he realised it; and suddenly his heart became so light that he thought he had never felt such happiness before. Then, before he realised it, he heard himself saying aloud\u2014from his heart:\n\n'You do me an awful lot of good\u2014really you do. I feel better and happier when I'm with you. I feel\u2014' He broke off, aware that he was talking rather foolishly. Yet the boyish utterance was honest; she did not think it foolish apparently. For she replied at once, and without a sign of lightness:\n\n'Do I? Then I mustn't leave you, Tom!'\n\n'Never!' he exclaimed impetuously.\n\n'Until I've saved you.' And this time she did not laugh.\n\nShe was still looking away from him across the water, and the tone was quiet and unaccented. But the words rang like a clarion in his mind. He turned; she turned too: their eyes met in a brief but penetrating gaze. And for an instant he caught an expression that frightened him, though he could not understand its meaning. Her beauty struck him like a sheet of fire\u2014all over. He saw gold about her like the soft fire of the southern stars. With any other woman, at any other time, he would\u2014but the thought utterly denied itself before it was half completed even. It sank back as though ashamed. There was something in her that made it ugly, out of rhythm, undesirable, and undesired. She would not respond\u2014she would not understand.\n\nIn its place another blazed up with that strange, big yearning at the back of it, and though he gazed at her as a man gazes at a woman he needs and asks for, her quiet eyes did not lower or turn aside. The cheaper feeling 'I'm not worthy of you,' took in his case a stronger form: 'I'll be better, bigger, for you.' And then, so gently it might have been a mother's action, she put her hand on his with firm pressure, and left it lying there a moment before she withdrew it again. Her long white glove, still fastened about the wrist, was flung back so that it left the palm and fingers bare, and the touch of the soft skin upon his own was marvellous; yet he did not attempt to seize it, he made no movement in return. He kept control of himself in a way he did not understand. He just sat and looked into her face. There was an entire absence of response from her\u2014in one sense. Something poured from her eyes into his very soul, but something beautiful, uplifting. This new yearning emotion rose through him like a wave, bearing him upwards.\u2026 At the same time he was vaguely aware of a lack as well\u2026 of something incomplete and unawakened.\u2026\n\n'Thank you\u2014for saying that,' he was murmuring; 'I shall never forget it,'; and though the suppressed passion changed the tone and made it tremble even, he held himself as rigid as a statue. It was she who moved. She leaned nearer to him. Like a flower the wind bends on its graceful stalk, her face floated very softly against his own. She kissed him. It was all very swift and sudden. But, though exquisite, it was not a woman's kiss.\u2026 The same instant she was sitting straight again, gazing across the blue lake below her.\n\n'You're still a boy,' she said, with a little innocent laugh, 'still a wonderful, big boy.'\n\n'Your boy,' he returned. 'I always have been.'\n\nThere was deep, deep joy in his heart, it lifted him above the world\u2014with her. Yet with the joy there was this faint touch of disappointment too.\n\n'But, I say\u2014isn't it awfully strange?' he went on, words failing him absurdly. 'It's very wonderful, this friendship. It's so natural.' Then he began to flush and stammer.\n\nIn an even tone of voice she answered: 'It's wonderful, Tom, but it's not strange.' And again he was vaguely aware that something which might have made her words yet more convincing was not there.\n\n'But I've got that curious feeling\u2014I could swear it's all happened before.' He moved closer as he spoke; her dress was actually against his coat, but he could not touch her. Something made it impossible, wrong, a false, even a petty thing. It would have taken away the kiss. 'Have you?' he asked abruptly, with an intensity that seemed to startle her, 'have you got that feeling of familiarity too?'\n\nAnd for a moment in the middle of their talk they both, for some reason, grew very thoughtful.\u2026\n\n'It had to be\u2014perhaps,' she answered simply a little later. 'We are both real, so I suppose\u2014yes, it has to be.'\n\nThere was the definite feeling that both spoke of a bigger thing that neither quite understood. Their eyes searched, but their hearts searched too. There was a gap in her that somehow must be filled, Tom felt.\u2026 They stared long at one another. He was close upon the missing thing\u2014 when suddenly she withdrew her eyes. And with that, as though a wave had swept them together and passed on, the conversation abruptly changed its key. They fell to talking of other things. The man in him was again aware of disappointment.\n\nThe change was quite natural, nothing forced or awkward about it. The significance had gone its way, but the results remained. They were in the 'sea' together. It 'had to be.' As from the beginning of the world they belonged to one another, each for the other\u2014real. There was nothing about it of a text-book 'love affair,' absolutely nothing. Deeper far than a passional relationship, guiltless of any fruit of mere propinquity, the foundations of the sudden intimacy were as ancient as immovable. The inevitable touch lay in it. And Tom knew this partly confirmed, at any rate, by the emotion in him when she said 'my boy,' for the term woke no annoyance, conveyed no lightness. Yet there was a flavour of disappointment in it somewhere\u2014something of necessary value that he missed in her.\u2026 To a man in love it must have sounded superior, contemptuous: whereas to him it sounded merely true. He was her boy. This mother-touch was in her. To care, to cherish, somehow even to rescue, she had come to find him out\u2014again. She had come back.\u2026 It was thus, at first, he felt it. From somewhere above, beyond the place where he now stood in life, she had 'come back, come down, to fetch him.' She was further on than he was. He longed to stand beside her. Until he did so\u2026 this gap in her must prevent absolute union. On both sides it was not entirely natural as yet.\u2026 Thought grew confused in him.\n\nAnd, though he could not understand, he accepted it as inevitable. The joy, moreover, was so urgent and uprising, that it smothered a delicate whisper that yet came with it\u2014that the process involved also\u2014 pain. Though aware, from time to time, of this vague uneasiness, he easily brushed it aside. It was the merest gossamer-thread of warning that with each recurrent appearance became more tenuous, until finally it ceased to make its presence felt at all.\u2026\n\nIn the entire affair of this sudden intercourse he felt the Wave, yet the Wave, though steadily rising, ceased to make its presence too consciously known; the Whiff, the Sound, the Eyes seemed equally forgotten: that is, he did not realise them. He was living now, and introspection was a waste of time, living too intensely to reflect or analyse. He felt swept onwards upon a tide that was greater than he could manage, for instead of swimming consciously, he was borne and carried with it. There was certainly no attempt to stem. Life was rising. It rushed him forwards too deliciously to think.\u2026\n\nHe began asking himself the old eternal question: 'Do I love? Am I in love\u2014at last, then?'\u2026 Some time passed, however, before he realised that he loved, and it was in a sudden, curious way that this realisation came. Two little words conveyed the truth\u2014some days later, as they were at tea on the verandah of her hotel, watching the sunset behind the blue line of the Jura Mountains. He had been talking about himself, his engineering prospects\u2014rather proudly\u2014his partnership and the letter he expected daily from Sir William. 'I hope it will be Assouan,' he said, 'I've never been in Egypt. I'm awfully keen to see it.' She said she hoped so too. She knew Egypt well: it enchanted, even enthralled her: 'familiar as though I'd lived there all my life. A change comes over me, I become a different person\u2014and a much older one; not physically,' she explained with a curious shy gaze at him, 'but in the sense that I feel a longer pedigree behind me.' She gave the little laugh that so often accompanied her significant remarks. 'I always think of the Nile as the 'stream' where I see the floating faces.'\n\nThey went on chatting for some minutes about it. Tom asked if she had met his cousin out there; yes, she remembered vaguely a Mr. Winslowe coming to tea on her dahabieh once, but it was only when he described Tony more closely that she recalled him positively. 'He interested me,' she said then: 'he talked wildly, but rather picturesquely, about what he called the 'spiral movement of life,' or something.' 'He goes after birds,' Tom mentioned. 'Of course,' she replied, 'I remember distinctly now. It was something about the flight of birds that introduced the spiral part of it. He had a good deal in him, that man,' she added, 'but he hid it behind a lot of nonsense\u2014almost purposely, I felt.'\n\n'That's Tony all over,' Tom assented, 'but he's a rare good sort and I'm awfully fond of him. He's 'real' in our sense too, I think.'\n\nShe said then very slowly, as though her thoughts were far away in Egypt at the moment: 'Yes, I think he is. I've seen his face too.'\n\n'Floating down, you mean\u2014or on the bank?'\n\n'Floating,' she answered. 'I'm sure I have.'\n\nTom laughed happily. 'Then you've got him to rescue too,' he said. 'But, remember, if we're both drowning, I come first.'\n\nShe looked into his face and smiled her answer, touching his fingers with her hand. And again it was not a woman's touch.\n\n'He was in Warsaw, too, a few weeks ago,' Tom went on, 'so we were all three there together. Rather odd, you know. He was ski-ing with me in the Carpathians,'; and he described their meeting at Zakopan\u00e9 after the long interval since boyhood. 'He told me about you in Egypt, too, now I come to think of it. He mentioned the dahabieh, but called you a Russian\u2014yes, I remember now,\u2014and a Russian Princess into the bargain. Evidently you made less impression on Tony than\u2014'\n\nIt was then he stopped as though he had been struck. The idle conversation changed. He heard her interrupting words from a curious distance. They fell like particles of ice upon his heart.\n\n'Polish, of course, not Russian,' she mentioned casually, 'but the rest is right, though I never use the title. My husband, in his own country, is a Prince, you see.'\n\nSomething reeled in him, then instantly righted itself. For a moment he felt as though the freedom of their intercourse had received a shock that blighted it. The words, 'my husband,' struck chill and ominous into his heart. The recovery, however,\u2014almost simultaneous\u2014showed him that both the freedom and the intercourse were right and unashamed. She gave him nothing that belonged to any other: she was loyal and true to that other as she was loyal and true to himself. Their relationship was high above mere passional intrigue; it could exist\u2014in the way she knew it, felt it\u2014 side by side with that other one, before that other one's very eyes, if need be.\u2026 He saw it true: he saw it innocent as daylight.\u2026 For what he felt was somehow this: the woman in her was not his, but more than that\u2014it was not any one's. It still lay dormant.\u2026\n\nIf there was a momentary confusion in his own mind, there was none, he felt positive, in hers. The two words that struck him such a blow, she uttered as lightly, innocently, as the rest of the talk between them. Indeed, had that other\u2014even in thought Tom preferred the paraphrase\u2014been present, she would have introduced them to each other then and there. He heard her saying the little phrases even: 'My husband,' and, 'This is Tom Kelverdon whom I've loved since childhood.'\n\nNothing brought more home to him the high innocence, the purity and sweetness of this woman than the reflections that flung after one another in his mind as he realised that his hope of her being a widow was not justified, and at the same moment that he desired exclusive possession of her\u2014that he was definitely in love.\n\nThat she was unaware of any discovery, even if she divined the storm in him at all, was clear from the way she went on speaking. For, while all this flashed through his mind, she added quietly: 'He is in Warsaw now. He\u2014lives there. I go to him for part of every year.' To which Tom heard his voice reply something as natural and commonplace as 'Yes\u2014I see.'\n\nOf the hundred pregnant questions that presented themselves, he did not ask a single one: not that he lacked the courage so much as that he felt the right was\u2014not yet\u2014his. Moreover, behind her quiet words he divined a tragedy. The suffering that had become sweetness in her face was half explained, but the full revelation of it belonged to 'that other' and to herself alone. It had been their secret, he remembered, for at least fifteen years." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 263", + "text": "Yet, knowing himself in love, he was able to set his house in order. Confusion disappeared. With the method and thoroughness of his character he looked things in the face and put them where they belonged. Even to wake up to an untidy room was an affliction. He might arrive in a hotel at midnight, but he could not sleep until his trunks were empty and everything in its place. In such outer details the intensity of his nature showed itself: it was the intensity, indeed, that compelled the orderliness.\n\nAnd the morning after this conversation, he woke up to an ordered mind\u2014 thoughts and emotions in their proper places where he could see and lay his hand upon them. The strength and weakness of his temperament betrayed themselves plainly here, for the security that pedantic order brought precluded the perspective of a larger vision. This careful labelling enclosed him within somewhat rigid fences. To insist upon this precise ticketing had its perilous corollary; the entire view\u2014perspective, proportion, vision\u2014was lost sight of.\n\n'I'm in love: she's beautiful, body, mind and soul. She's high above me, but I'll climb up to where she is.' This was his morning thought, and the thought that accompanied him all day long and every day until the moment came to separate again.\u2026 'She's a married woman, but her husband has no claim on her.' Somehow he was positive of that; the husband had forfeited all claim to her; details he did not know; but she was free; she did no wrong.\n\nIn imagination he furnished plausible details from sensational experiences life had shown him. These may have been right or wrong; possibly the husband had ill-treated, then deserted her; they were separated possibly, though\u2014she had told him this\u2014there were no children to complicate the situation. He made his guesses.\u2026 There was a duty, however, that she would not, did not neglect: in fulfilment of its claim she went to Warsaw every year. What it was, of course, he did not know; but this thought and the emotions caused by it, he put away into their proper places; he asked no questions of her; the matter did not concern him really. The shock experienced the day before was the shock of realising that\u2014he loved. Those two significant words had suddenly shown it to him. The order of his life was changed. 'She is essential to me; I am essential to her.' But 'She's all the world to me,' involved equally 'I'm all the world to her.' The sense of his own importance was enormously increased. The Wave surged upwards with a sudden leap.\u2026\n\nThere was one thing lacking in this love, perhaps, though he hardly noticed it\u2014the element of surprise. Ever since childhood he had suspected this would happen. The love was predestined, and in so far seemed a deliberate affair, pedestrian, almost calm. This sense of the inevitable robbed it of that amazing unearthly glamour which steals upon those who love for the first time, taking them deliciously by surprise. He saw her beautiful, and probably she was, but her beauty was familiar to him. He had come up with the childhood dream, and in coming up with it he recognised it. It seemed thus somewhat.\u2026 But her mind and soul were beautiful too, only these were more beautiful than he had dreamed. In that lay surprise and wonder too. There was genuine magic here, discovery and exhilarating novelty. He had not caught up with that. The love as a whole, however, was expected, natural. It was inevitable. The familiarity alone remained strange, a flavour of the uncanny about it almost\u2014yet certainly real.\n\nAnd these things also he tried to face and label, though with less success. To bring order into them was beyond his powers. She had outstripped him somehow in her soul, but had come back to fetch him\u2014also to get something for herself she lacked. The rest was oddly familiar: it had happened before. It was about to happen now again, but on a higher level; only before it could happen completely he must overtake her. The spiral idea lay in it somewhere. But the Wave contained and drove it.\u2026 His mind was not supple; analogy, that spiritual solvent, did not help him. Yet the fact remained that he somehow visualised the thing in picture form; a rising wave bore them charging up the spiral curve to a point whence they both looked down upon a passage they had made before. She was always a little in front of him, beyond him. But when the Wave finally broke they would rush together\u2014become one\u2026 there would be pain, but joy would follow.\n\nAnd during all their subsequent happy days of companionship this one thing alone marred his supreme contentment\u2014this sense of elusiveness, that while he held her she yet slipped between his fingers and escaped. He loved; but whereas to most men love brings a feeling of finality and rest, as of a search divinely ended, to Tom came the feeling that his search was merely resumed, or, indeed, had only just begun. He had not come into full possession of this woman: he had only found her.\u2026 She was deep; her deceptive simplicity hid surprises from him; much\u2014and it was the greater part\u2014he could not understand. Only when he came up with that would possession be complete. Not that she said or did a single thing that suggested this; she was not elusive of set purpose; she was entirely guiltless of any desire to hold back a fraction of herself, and to conceal was as foreign to her nature as to play with him; but that some part of her hung high above his reach, and that he, knowing this, admitted a subtle pain behind the joy. 'I can't get at her\u2014quite,' he put it to himself. 'Some part of her is not mine yet\u2014doesn't belong to me.'\n\nHe thought chiefly, that is, of his own possible disabilities rather than of hers.\n\n'I often wonder why we've come together like this,' he said once, as they lay in the shade of a larch wood above Corvaux and looked towards the snowy summits of Savoy. 'What brought us together, I mean? There's something mysterious about it to me\u2014'\n\n'God,' she said quietly. 'You needed me. You've been lonely. But you'll never be lonely again.'\n\nHer introduction of the Deity into a conversation did not displease. Fate, or any similar word, could have taken its place; she merely conveyed her sense that their coming together was right and inevitable. Moreover, now that she said it, he recognised the fact of loneliness\u2014that he always had been lonely, but that it was no longer possible. He felt like a boy and spoke like a boy. She had come to look after, care for him. She asked nothing for herself. The thought gave him a sharp and sudden pang.\n\n'But my love means a lot to you, doesn't it?' he asked tenderly. 'I mean, you need me too?'\n\n'Everything, Tom,' she told him softly. He was conscious of the mother in her, as though the mother overshadowed the woman. But while he loved it, the tinge of resentment still remained.\n\n'You couldn't do without me, could you?' He took the hand she placed upon his knee and looked up into her quiet eyes. 'You'd be lonely too if\u2014I went?'\n\nFor a moment she gazed down at him and did not answer; he was aware of both the pain and sweetness in her face; an interval of thoughtfulness again descended on them both: then a great tenderness came welling up into her eyes as she answered slowly: 'You couldn't go, Tom. You couldn't leave me ever.'\n\nHer hand was on his shoulder, almost about his neck as she said it, and he came in closer, and before he knew what he was doing his face was buried in her lap. Her hand stroked his hair. Twenty-five years dropped from him\u2014he was a child again, a little boy, and she, in some divine, half-impersonal sense he could not understand, was mothering him. No foolish feeling of shame came with it; the mood was too sudden for analysis, it passed away swiftly too; but he knew, for a brief second, all the sensations of a restless and dissatisfied boy who needed above all else\u2014comfort: the comfort that only an inexhaustible mother-love could give.\u2026 And this love poured from her in a flood. Till now he had never known it, nor known the need of it. And because it had been curiously lacking he suddenly wondered how he had done without it. A strange sense of tears rose in his heart. He felt pain and tragedy somewhere. For there was another thing he wanted from her too.\u2026 Through the sparkle of his joy peeped out that familiar, strange, rich pain, but so swiftly he hardly recognised it. It withdrew again. It vanished.\n\n'But you couldn't leave me either, could you?' he asked, sitting erect again. He made a movement as though to draw her head down upon his shoulder in the protective way of a man who loves, but\u2014he could not do it. It was curious. She did nothing to prevent, only somehow the position would be a false one. She did not need him in that way. He was not yet big enough to protect. It was she who protected him. And when she answered the same second, the familiar sentence flashed across his mind again: 'She has come back to fetch me.'\n\n'I shall never, never leave you, Tom. We're together for always. I know it absolutely.' The girl of seventeen, the unawakened woman who was desired, the mother who thought not of herself,\u2014all three spoke in those quiet words; but with them, too, he was aware of this elusive other thing he could not name. Perhaps her eyes conveyed it, perhaps the pain and sweetness in the little face so close above his own. She was bending over him. He looked up. And over his heart rushed again that intolerable yearning\u2014the yearning to stand where she stood, far, far beyond him, yet with it the certainty that pain must attend the effort. Until that pain, that effort were accomplished, she could not entirely belong to him. He had to win her yet. Yet also he had to teach her something.\u2026 Meanwhile, in the act of protecting, mothering him she must use pain, as to a learning child. Their love would gain completeness only thus.\n\nYet in words he could not approach it; he knew not how to.\n\n'It's a strange relationship,' he stammered, concealing, as he thought, the deep emotions that perplexed him. 'The world would misunderstand it utterly.' She smiled, nodding her head. 'I wish\u2014' he added, 'I mean it comes to me sometimes\u2014that you don't need me quite as I need you. You're my whole life, you know\u2014now.'\n\n'You're growing imaginative, Tom,' she teased him smilingly. Then, catching the earnest expression in his face, she added: 'My life has been very full, you see, and I've always had to stand alone. There's been so much for me to do that I've had no time to feel loneliness perhaps.'\n\n'Rescuing the other floating faces!'\n\nA slight tinge of a new emotion slipped through his mind, something he had never felt before, yet so faint he could not even recapture it, much less wonder whether it were jealousy or envy. It rose from the depths; it vanished into him again.\u2026 Besides, he saw that she was smiling; the teasing mood that so often baffled him was upon her; he heard her give that passing laugh that almost 'kept him guessing,' as the Americans say, whether she was in play or earnest.\n\n'It's worth doing, anyhow\u2014rescuing the floating faces,' she said: 'worth living for.' And she half closed her eyes so that he saw her as a girl again. He saw her as she had been even before he knew her, as he used to see her in his dream. It was the dream-eyes that peered at him through long, thick lashes. They looked down at him. He felt caught away to some remote, strange place and time. He was aware of gold, of colour, of a hotter blood, a fiercer sunlight.\u2026\n\nAnd the sense of familiarity became suddenly very real; he knew what she was going to say, how he would answer, why they had come together. It all flashed near, yet still just beyond his reach. He almost understood. They had been side by side like this before, not in this actual place, but somewhere\u2014somewhere that he knew intimately. Her eyes had looked down into his own precisely so, long, long ago, yet at the same time strangely near. There was a perfume, a little ghostly perfume\u2014it was the Whiff. It was gone instantly, but he had tasted it.\u2026 A veil drew up.\u2026 He saw, he knew, he remembered\u2014almost.\u2026 Another second and he would capture the meaning of it all. Another moment and it would reveal itself\u2014then, suddenly, the whole sensation vanished. He had missed it by the minutest fraction in the world, yet missed it utterly. It left him confused and baffled.\n\nThe veil was down again, and he was talking with Madame Jaretzka, the Lettice Aylmer of his boyhood days. Such moments of the d\u00e9j\u00e0-vu leave bewilderment behind them, like the effect of sudden change of focus in the eye; and with the bewilderment a sense of insecurity as well.\n\n'Yes,' he said half dreamily, 'and you've rescued a lot already, haven't you?' as though he still followed in speech the direction of the vanished emotion.\n\n'You know that, Tom?' she enquired, raising her eyelids, thus finally restoring the normal.\n\nHe stammered rather: 'I have the feeling\u2014that you're always doing good to some one somewhere. There's something,'\u2014he searched for a word\u2014 'impersonal about you\u2014almost.' And he knew the word was nearly right, though found by chance. It included 'un-physical,' the word he did not like to use. He did not want an angel's love; the spiritual, to him, rose from the physical, and was not apart from it. He was not in heaven yet, and had no wish to be. He was on earth; and everything of value\u2014love, above all\u2014must spring from earth, or else remain incomplete, insecure, ineffective even.\n\nAnd again a tiny dart of pain shot through him. Yet he was glad he said it, for it was true. He liked to face what hurt him. To face it was to get it over.\u2026\n\nBut she was laughing again gently to herself, though certainly not at him. 'What were you thinking about so long?' she asked. 'You've been silent for several minutes and your thoughts were far away.' And as he did not reply immediately, she went on: 'If you go to Assouan you mustn't fall into reveries like that or you'll leave holes in the dam, or whatever your engineering work is\u2014Tom!'\n\nShe spoke the name with a sudden emphasis that startled him. It was a call.\n\n'Yes,' he said, looking up at her. He was emerging from a dream.\n\n'Come back to me. I don't like your going away in that strange way\u2014 forgetting me.'\n\n'Ah, I like that. Say it again,' he returned, a deeper note in his voice.\n\n'You were away\u2014weren't you?'\n\n'Perhaps,' he said slowly. 'I can't say quite. I was thinking of you, wherever I was.' He went on, holding her eyes with a steady gaze: 'A curious feeling came over me like\u2014like heat and light. You seemed so familiar to me all of a sudden that I felt I had known you ages and ages. I was trying to make out where\u2014it was\u2014'\n\nShe dropped her eyelids again and peered at him, but no longer smiling. There was a sterner expression in her face. The lips curved a moment in a new strange way. The air seemed to waver an instant between them. She peered down at him as through a mist.\u2026\n\n'There\u2014like that!' he exclaimed passionately. 'Only I wish you wouldn't. There's something I don't like about it. It hurts,'\u2014and the same minute felt ashamed, as though he had said a foolish thing. It had come out in spite of himself.\n\n'Then I won't, Tom\u2014if you'll promise not to go away again. I was thinking of Egypt for a second\u2014I don't know why.'\n\nBut he did not laugh with her; his face kept the graver expression still.\n\n'It changes you\u2014rather oddly,' he said quietly, 'that lowering of the eyelids. I can't say why exactly, but it makes you look\u2014Eastern.' Again he had said a foolish thing. A kind of spell seemed over him.\n\n'Irish eyes!' he heard her saying. 'They sometimes look like that, I'm told. But you promise, don't you?'\n\n'Of course I promise,' he answered bluntly enough, because he meant it. 'I can never go away from you because,'\u2014he turned and looked very hard at her a moment\u2014'because there's something in you I need in my very soul,' he went on earnestly, 'yet that always escapes me. I can't get hold of\u2014 all of you.'\n\nAnd though she refused his very earnest mood, she answered with obvious sincerity at once. 'That's as it should be, Tom. A man tires of a woman the moment he gets to the end of her.' She gave her little laugh and touched his hand. 'Perhaps that's what I'm meant to teach you. When you know all of me\u2014'\n\n'I shall never know all of you,' said Tom.\n\n'You never will,' she replied with meaning, 'for I don't even know it all myself.' And as she said it, he thought he had never seen anything so beautiful in all the world before, for the breeze caught her long gauzy veil of blue and tossed it across her face so that the eyes seemed gazing at him from a distance, but a distance that had height in it. He felt her above him, beyond him, on this height, a height he must climb before he could know complete possession.\n\n'By Jove!' he thought, 'isn't it rising just!' For the Wave was under them tremendously.\n\nApril meanwhile had slipped into May, and their daily companionship had become the most natural thing in the world, when the telegram arrived that threatened to interrupt the delightful intercourse. But it was not the telegram Tom expected. Neither Greece nor Egypt claimed his talents yet, for the contracts both at Assouan and Salonica were postponed until the autumn, and the routine of a senior partner's life in London was to be his immediate fate. He brought her the news at once: they discussed it together in all its details and as intimately as though it affected their joint lives similarly. His first thought was to run and talk it over with her; hers, how the change might influence their intercourse, their present and their future. Their relationship was now established in this solid, natural way. He told her everything as a son might tell his mother: she asked questions, counselled, made suggestions as a woman whose loving care considered his welfare and his happiness before all else.\n\nHowever, it brought no threatened interruption after all\u2014involved, indeed, less of separation than if he had been called away as they expected: for though he must go to London that same week, she would shortly follow him. 'And if you go to Egypt in the autumn, Tom,'\u2014she smiled at the way they influenced the future nearer to the heart's desire\u2014'I may go with you. I could make my arrangements accordingly\u2014 take my holiday out there earlier instead of here as usual in the spring.'\n\nThe days passed quickly. Her first duty was to return to Warsaw; she would then follow him to London and help him with his flat. No man could choose furniture and carpets and curtains properly. They discussed the details with the enthusiasm of children: she would come up several times a week from her bungalow in Kent and make sure that his wall-papers did not clash with the general scheme. Brown was his colour, he told her, and always had been. It was the dominant shade of her eyes as well. He made her promise to stand in the rooms with her eyes opened very wide so that there could be no mistake, and they laughed over the picture happily.\n\nShe came to the train, and although he declared vehemently that he disliked 'being seen off,' he was secretly delighted. 'One says such silly things merely because one feels one must say something. And those silly things remain in the memory out of all proportion to their value.' But she insisted. 'Good-byes are always serious to me, Tom. One never knows. I want to see you to the very last minute.' She had this way of making him feel little things significant with Fate. But another little thing also was in store for him. As the train moved slowly out he noticed some letters in her hand; and one of them was addressed to Warsaw. The name leaped up and stung him\u2014Jaretzka. A spasm of pain shot through him. She was leaving in the morning, he knew.\u2026\n\n'Write to me from Warsaw,' he said. 'Take care! We're moving!'\n\n'I'll write every day, my dearest Tom, my boy. You won't forget me. I shall see you in a fortnight.'\n\nHe let go the little hand he held till the last possible minute. The bells drowned her final words. She stood there waving her hand with the unposted letters in them, till the station pillars intervened and hid her from him.\n\nAnd this time no 'silly last things' had been said that could 'stay in the memory out of all proportion to their value.' It was something he had noticed on the envelope that stayed\u2014not the husband's name, but a word in the address, a peculiar Polish word he happened to know:\u2014'Tworki'\u2014the name of the principal maison de sant\u00e9 that stood just outside the city of Warsaw.\u2026\n\nHalf an hour, perhaps an hour, he sat smoking in his narrow sleeping compartment, thinking with a kind of intense confusion out of which no order came.\u2026 At Pontarlier he had to get out for the Customs formalities. It was midnight. The stars were bright. The keen spring air from the wooded Jura Mountains had a curious effect, for he returned to his carriage feeling sleepy, the throng of pictures drowned into calmness by one master-thought that reduced their confusion into order. He looked back over the past weeks and realised their intensity. He had lived. There was a change in him, the change of growth, development. He loved. There was now a woman who was his entire world, essential to him. He was essential to her too. And the importance of this ousted all lesser things, even the senior partnership. This was the master-thought\u2014that he now lived for her. He was 'real' even as she was 'real,' each to the other real. The Wave had lifted him to a level never reached before. And it was rising still.\u2026\n\nHe fell asleep on this, to dream of a mighty stream that swept them together irresistibly towards some climax that he never could quite see. She floated near to save him. She floated down. Her little hands were stretched. It was a gorgeous and stupendous dream\u2014a dream of rising life itself\u2014rising till it would curve and break and fall, and the inevitable thing would happen that would bring her finally into his hungry arms, complete, mother and woman, a spiritual love securely founded on the sweet and wholesome earth.\u2026" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 264", + "text": "During the brief separation of a fortnight Tom was too busy in London to allow himself much reflection. Absence, once the first keen sense of loss is over, is apt to bring reaction. The self makes an automatic effort to regain the normal life it led before the new emotion dislocated the long-accustomed routine. It tries to run back again along the line of least resistance that habit has made smooth and easy. If the reaction continues to assert its claim, the new emotion is proved thereby a delusion. The test lies there.\n\nIn Tom's case, however, the reaction was a feeble reminder merely that he had once lived\u2014without her. It took the form of regret for all the best years of his life he had endured\u2014how, he could not think\u2014without this tender, loving woman at his side. That is, he recognised that his love was real and had changed his outlook fundamentally. He could never do without her from this moment onwards. She equally needed him. He would never leave her.\u2026 Further than that, for the present, he did not allow himself to think. Having divined something of her tragedy, he accepted the definite limitations. Speculations concerning another he looked on as beside the point. As far as possible he denied himself the indulgence in them. But another thing he felt as well\u2014the right to claim her, whether he exercised that right or not.\n\nConcerning his relationship with her, however, he did not deny speculation, though somehow this time the perspective was too vast for him to manage quite. There was a strange distance in it: he lost himself in remoteness. In either direction it ran into mists that were interminable, as though veils and curtains lifted endlessly, melting into shadowy reaches beyond that baffled all enquiry. The horizons of his life had grown so huge. This woman had introduced him to a scale of living that he could only gaze at with wondering amazement and delight, too large as yet to conform to the order that his nature sought. He could not properly find himself.\n\n'It feels almost as if I've loved her before like this\u2014yet somehow not enough. That's what I've got to learn,' was the kind of thought that came to him, at odd moments only. The situation seemed so curiously familiar, yet only half familiar. They were certainly made for one another, and the tie between them had this deep touch of the inevitable about it that refused to go. That notion of the soul's advance in a spiral cropped up in his mind again. He saw her both coming nearer and retreating\u2014as a moving figure against high light leaves the spectator uncertain whether it is advancing or retiring. He would have liked to talk to Tony all about it, for Tony would be sympathetic. He wanted a confidant and turned instinctively to his cousin.\u2026 She already understood more than he did, though perhaps not consciously, and therein lay the secret of her odd elusiveness. Yet, in another sense, his possession was incomplete because a part of her still lay unawakened. 'I must love her more and more and more,' he told himself. But, at the same time, he took it for granted that he was indispensable to her, as she was to him.\n\nThese flashes of perception, deeper than anything he had experienced in life hitherto, came occasionally while he waited in London for her return; and though puzzled\u2014his straightforward nature disliked all mystery\u2014he noted them with uncommon interest. Nothing, however, could prevent the rise upwards of the Wave that bore the situation on its breast. The affair swept him onwards; it was not to be checked or hindered. He resigned direction to its elemental tide.\n\nThe faint uneasiness, also, recurred from time to time, especially now that he was alone again. He attributed it to the unsatisfied desire in his heart, the knowledge that as yet he had no exclusive possession, and did not really own her; the sense of insecurity unsettled him, the feeling that she was open to capture by any one\u2014'who understands and appreciates her better than I do,' was the way he phrased it sometimes. He was troubled and uneasy because so much of her lay unresponsive to his touch\u2014 not needing him. While he was climbing up to reach her, another, with a stronger claim, might step in\u2014step back\u2014and seize her.\n\nIt made him smile a little even while he thought of it, for her truth and constancy were beyond all question. And then, suddenly, he traced the uneasiness to its source. There was 'another' who had first claim upon her\u2014who had it once, at any rate. Though at present some cloud obscured and negatived that claim, the cloud might lift, the situation change, the claim become paramount again, as once it surely had been paramount. And, disquieting though the possibility was, Tom was pleased with himself\u2014he was so na\u00efve and simple towards life\u2014for having discerned it clearly. He recognised the risk and thus felt half prepared in advance.\u2026 In another way it satisfied him too. With this dream-like suggestion that it all had happened before, he had always felt that a further detail was lacking to complete the scene he half remembered. Something, as yet, was wanting. And this item needed to make the strange repetition of the scene fulfil itself seemed, precisely, the presence of 'another.'\n\nTheir intercourse, meanwhile, proved beyond words delightful during the following weeks, when, after her return from Warsaw, she kept her word and helped him in the prosaic business of furnishing his flat and settling down, as in a hundred other details of his daily life as well. All that they did and said together confirmed their dear relationship and established it beyond reproach. There was no question of anything false, illicit, requiring concealment: nothing to hide and no one to evade. In their own minds their innocence was so sure, indeed, that it was not once alluded to between them. It was impossible to look at her and doubt: nor could the most cynical suspect Tom Kelverdon of an undesirable intrigue with the wife of another man. His acquaintance, moreover, were not of the kind that harboured the usual 'worldly' thoughts; he went little into society, whereas the comparatively few Londoners she knew were almost entirely\u2014he discovered it by degrees\u2014people whose welfare in one way or another she had earnestly at heart. It was a marvel to him, indeed, how she never wearied of helping ungrateful folk, for the wish to be of service seemed ingrained in her. Her first thought on making new acquaintances was always what she could do for them, not with money necessarily, but by 'seeing' them in their proper milieu and planning to bring about the conditions they needed in order to realise themselves fully. Failure, discontent, unhappiness were due to wrong conditions more than to radical fault in the people themselves; once they 'found themselves,' the rest would follow. It amounted to a genius in her.\n\nIt seemed the artist instinct that sought this unselfish end rather than any religious tendency. She felt it ugly to see people at issue with their surroundings. Her religion was humanity, and had no dogmas. Even Tony Winslowe, now in England again, came in for his share of this sweet fashioning energy in her; much to his own bewilderment and to Tom's amusement.\u2026\n\nThe summer passed towards early autumn and London emptied, but it made no difference to them. Tom had urgent work to do and was absorbed in it, never forgetting for a moment that he was now a Partner in the Firm. He spent frequent week-ends at Madame Jaretzka's Kentish bungalow, where she had for companion at the moment an Irish cousin who, as Tom easily guessed, was also a dependant. This cousin had been invited with her child, Molly, for the summer holidays, and these summer holidays had run on into three months at least.\n\nA tall, thin, angular woman, of uncertain manners and capricious temperament, Mrs. Haughstone had perhaps lived so long upon another's bounty that she had come to take her good fortune for granted, and permitted herself freely two cardinal indulgences\u2014grumbling and jealousy. Having married unwisely, in order to better herself rather than because she loved, her shiftless husband had disgraced himself with an adventuress governess, leaving her with three children and something below \u00a3150 a year. Madame Jaretzka had stepped in to bring them together again: she provided schooling abroad, holidays, doctors, clothes, and all she could devise by way of helping them 'find themselves' again, and so turning their broken lives to good account. With the husband, sly, lazy, devoid of both pride and honesty, she could do little, and she was quite aware that he and his wife put their heads together to increase the flow of 'necessaries' she generously supplied.\n\nIt was a sordid, commonplace story, sordidly treated by the soured and vindictive wife, whose eventual aims upon her saviour's purse were too obvious to be mistaken. Even Tom perceived the fact without delay. He also perceived, behind the flattering tongue, an acid and suspicious jealousy that regarded new friends with ill-disguised alarm. Mrs. Haughstone thought of herself and her children before all else. She mistook the impersonal attitude of her benefactress for credulous weakness. A new friend was hostile to her shameless ambitions and disliked accordingly.\u2026 Tom scented an enemy the first time he met her. To him she expressed her disapproval of Tony, and vice versa, while to her hostess she professed she liked them both\u2014'but': the 'but' implying that men were selfish and ambitious creatures who thought only of their own advantage.\n\nHis country visits, therefore, were not made happier by the presence in the cottage of this woman and her child, but the manner in which the benefactress met the situation justified the respect he had felt first months before. It increased his love and admiration. Madame Jaretzka behaved unusually. That she grasped the position there could be no doubt, but her manner of dealing with it was unique. For when Mrs. Haughstone grumbled, Madame Jaretzka gave her more, and when Mrs. Haughstone yielded to jealousy, Madame Jaretzka smiled and said no word. She won her victories with further generosity.\n\n'Another face that has to be rescued?' Tom permitted himself to say once, after an unfortunate scene in which his hostess had been subtly accused of favouritism to another child in the house. He could hardly suppress the annoyance and impatience that he felt.\n\n'Oh, I never thought about it in that way,' she answered with her little laugh, quite unruffled by what had happened. 'The best way is to help them to\u2014see themselves. Then they try to cure themselves.' She laughed again, as though she had said a childish thing instead of something distinctly wise. 'I can't cure them,' she added. 'I can only help.'\n\nTom looked at her. 'Help others to see themselves\u2014as they are,' he repeated slowly. 'So that's how you do it, is it?' He reflected a moment. 'That's being impersonal. You rouse no opposition that way. It's good.'\n\n'Is it?' she replied, as though guiltless of any conscious plan. 'It seems the natural thing to do.' Then, as he was evidently preparing for discussion in his honest and laborious way, she stopped him with a look, smiling, sighing, and holding up her little finger warningly. He understood. Analysis and argument she avoided always; they obscured the essential thing; here was the intuitive method of grasping the solution the instant the problem was stated. Detailed examination exhausted her merely. And Tom obeyed that look, that threatening finger. In little things he invariably yielded, while in big things he remained firm, even obstinate, though without realising it.\n\nHer head inclined gracefully, acknowledging her victory. 'That's one reason I love you, Tom,' she told him as reward; 'you're a boy on the surface and a man inside.'\n\nTom saw beauty flash about her as she said it; emotion rose through him in a sudden tumult; he would have seized her, kissed her, crumpled her little self against his heart and held her there, but for the tantalising truth that the thing he wanted would have escaped him in the very act. The loveliness he yearned for, craved, was not open to physical attack; it was a loveliness of the spirit, a bird, a star, a wild flower on some high pinnacle near the snow: to obtain it he must climb to where it soared above the earth\u2014rise up to her.\n\nHe laughed and took her little finger in both hands. He felt awkward, big and clumsy, a giant trying to catch an elusive butterfly. 'You turn us all round that!' he declared. 'You turn her,' nodding towards the door, 'and me,' kissing the tip quickly, 'and Tony too. Only she and Tony don't know you twiddle them\u2014and I do.'\n\nShe let him kiss her hand, but when he drew nearer, trying to set his lips upon the arm her summer dress left bare, she put up her face instead and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Her free hand made a caressing gesture across his neck and shoulder, as she stood on tiptoe to reach him. The mother in her, not the woman, caressed him dearly. It was wonderful; but the surge of mingled emotions clouded something in his brain, and a string of words came tumbling out in a fire of joy and pain. 'You're a queen and a conqueror,' he said, longing to seize her, yet holding himself back strongly. 'Somewhere I'm your helpless slave, but somewhere I'm your master.' The protective sense came up in him. 'It's too delicious! I'm in a dream! Lettice,' he whispered, 'it's my Wave! The Wave is behind it! It's behind us both!'\n\nFor an instant she half closed her eyelids in the way she knew both pleased and frightened him. Invariably this gave her the advantage. He felt her above him when she looked like this, he kneeling with hands outstretched, yearning to be raised to where she stood. 'You're a baby, a poet, and a man rolled into a dear big boy,' she said quickly, moving towards the door away from him. 'And now I must go and get my garden hat, for it's time to meet Tony and Moyra at the train, and as you have so much surplus energy to-day we'll walk through the woods instead of going in the motor.' She waved her hand and vanished behind the door. He heard the patter of her feet as she ran upstairs.\n\nHe went to the open window, lit his pipe, leaned out with his head among the climbing roses, and thought of many things. Great joy was in him, but behind it, far down where he could not reach it quite, hid a gnawing pain that was obscure uneasiness. Pictures came floating across his mind, rising and falling, sometimes rushing hurriedly; he saw things and faces mixed, his own and hers chief among them. Her little finger pointed to a star. He sighed, he wondered, he half prayed. Would he ever understand, rise to her level, possess her for his very own? She seemed so far beyond him. It was only part of her he touched.\n\nThe faces fluttered and looked into his own, one among them an imagined face\u2014the husband's. It was a face with light blue eyes, moreover. He saw Tony's too, frank, laughing, irresponsible, and the face of the Irish girl who was Tony's latest passion. Tony could settle down to no one for long. Tom remembered suddenly his remark at Zakopan\u00e9 months ago, that the bee never sipped the last drop of honey from the flower.\u2026 His thoughts tumbled and flew in many directions, yet all at once. Life seemed very full and marvellous; it had never seemed so intense before; it bore him onwards, upwards, forwards, with a rush beyond all possible control and guidance. He acknowledged a rather delicious sense of helplessness. The Wave was everywhere behind and under him. It was sweeping him along.\n\nThen thought returned to Tony and the Irish girl who were coming down for the Sunday, and he smiled to himself as he recalled his cousin's ardent admiration at a theatre party a few nights ago in town. Tony had something that naturally attracted women, dominating them too easily. Was he heartless a little in the business? Would he never, like Tom, settle down with one? His thought passed to the latest capture: there were signs, indeed, that here Tony was caught at last.\n\nFor Tom, Tony, and Madame Jaretzka formed an understanding trio, and there were few expeditions, town or country, of which the lively bird-enthusiast did not form an active member. Tony took it all very lightly, unaware of any serious intention behind the pleasant invitations. Tom was amused by it. He looked forward to his cousin's visit now. He was feeling the need of a confidant, and Tony might so admirably fill the r\u00f4le. It was curious, a little: Tom often felt that he wanted to confide in Tony, yet somehow or other the confidences were never actually made. There was something in Tony that invited that free, purging confidence which is a need of every human being. It was so easy to tell things, difficult things, to this careless, sympathetic being; yet Tom never passed the frontier into definite revelation. At the last moment he invariably held back.\n\nThought passed to his hostess, already man\u0153uvring to help Tony 'find himself.' It amused Tom, even while he gave his willing assistance; for Tony was of evasive, slippery material, like a fluid that, pressed in one given direction, resists and runs away into several others. 'He scatters himself too much,' she remarked, 'and it's a pity; there's waste.' Tom laughed, thinking of his episodic love affairs. 'I didn't mean that,' she added, smiling with him; 'I meant generally. He's full of talent and knowledge. His power over women is natural, but it comes of mere brilliance. If all that were concentrated instead, he would do something real; he might be extraordinarily effective in life. Yes, Tom, I mean it.' But Tom, though he smiled, agreed with her, feeling rather flattered that she liked his cousin.\n\n'But he breaks too many hearts,' he said lightly, thinking of his last conquest, and then added, hardly knowing why he said it, 'By the by, did you ever notice his hands?'\n\nThe way she quickly looked up at him proved that she divined his meaning. But the glance had a flash of something that escaped him.\n\n'You're very observant, Tommy,' she said evasively. It seemed impossible for her to say a disparaging thing of anybody. She invariably picked out and emphasised the best. 'You don't admire them?'\n\n'Do you, Lettice?'\n\nShe paused for an imperceptible second, then smiled. 'I rather like big rough hands in a man\u2014perhaps,' she said without any particular interest, 'though\u2014in a way\u2014they frighten me sometimes. Tony's are ugly, but there's power in them.' And she placed her own small gloved hand upon his arm. 'He's rather irresponsible, I know,' she added gently, 'but he'll grow out of that in time. He's beginning to improve already.'\n\n'You see, he's got no mother,' Tom observed.\n\n'No wife either\u2014yet,' she added with a laugh.\n\n'Or work,' put in Tom, with a touch of self-praise, and thinking of his own position in the world. Her interest in Tony had the effect of making himself seem worthier, more important. This fine woman, who judged people from so high a standpoint, had picked out\u2014himself! He had an absurd yet delightful feeling as though Tony was their child, and the perfectly natural way she took him under her mothering wing stirred an admiring pity in him.\n\nThen as they walked together through the fragrant pine-woods to the station, an incident at a recent theatre party rose before his memory. Tony and his Amanda had been with them. The incident in question had left a singular impression on his mind, though why it emerged now, as they wandered through the quiet wood, he could not tell. It had occurred a week or two ago. He now saw it again\u2014in a tenth of the time it takes to tell.\n\nThe scene was laid in ancient Egypt, and while the play was commonplace, the elaborate production\u2014scenery, dresses, atmosphere\u2014was good. But Tom, unable to feel interest in the trivial and badly acted story, had felt interest in another thing he could not name. There was a subtle charm, a delicate glamour about it as of immensely old romance, but some lost romance of very far away. Yet, whether this charm was due to the stage effects or to themselves, sitting there in the stalls together, escaped him. For in some singular way the party, his hostess certainly, seemed to interpenetrate the play itself. She, above all, and Tony vaguely, seemed inseparable from what he gazed at, heard, and felt.\n\nContinually he caught himself thinking how delightful it was to know himself next to Madame Jaretzka, so close that he shared her atmosphere, her perfume, touched her even; that their minds were engaged intimately together watching the same scene; and also, that on her other side, sat Tony, affectionate, whimsical, fascinating Tony, whom they were trying to help 'find himself'; and that he, again, was next to a girl he liked. The harmonious feeling of the four was pleasurable to Tom. He felt himself, moreover, an important and indispensable item in its composition. It was vague; he did not attempt to analyse it as self-flattery, as vanity, as pride\u2014he was aware, merely, that he felt very pleased with himself and so with everybody else. It was gratifying to sit at the head of the group; everybody could see how beautiful she was; the dream of exclusive ownership stole over him more definitely than ever before. 'She's chosen me! She needs me\u2014a woman like that!'\n\nThe audience, the lights, the colour, the music influenced him. It seemed he caught something from the crude human passion that was being ranted on the stage and transferred it unconsciously into his relations with the party he belonged to, but, above all, into his relationship with her\u2014and with another. But he refused to let his mind dwell upon that other. He found himself thinking instead of the divine tenderness that was in her, yet at the same time of her elusiveness and the curious pain it caused him. Whence came, he wondered, the sweet and cruel flavour? It seemed like a memory of something suffered long ago, the sweetness in it true and exquisite, the cruelty an error on his own part somehow. The old hint of uneasiness, the strange, rich pain he had known in boyhood, stole faintly over him; its first and immediate effect heightening the sense of dim, old-world romance already present.\u2026\n\nAnd he had turned cautiously to look at her. She was leaning forward a little as though the play absorbed her, and the attitude startled him. It caused him almost a definite shock. The face had pain in it.\n\nShe was not aware that he stared; her attention was fastened upon the stage; but the eyes were fixed, the little mouth was fixed as well, the lips compressed; and all her features wore this expression of curious pain. There was sternness in them, something almost hard. He watched her for some minutes, surprised and fascinated. It came over him that he almost knew what that was in her mind. Another moment and he would discover it\u2014when, past her profile, he caught his cousin's eyes peering across at him. Tony had felt the direction of his glance and had looked round: and Tony\u2014mischievously\u2014winked!\n\nThe spell was broken. In that instant, however, through the heated air of the crowded stalls already weighted with sickly artificial perfumes, there reached him faintly, as from very far away, another and a subtler perfume, something of elusive fragrance in it. It was very poignant, instinct as with forgotten associations. It was the Whiff. It came, it went; but it was unmistakable. And he connected it, as by some instantaneous certitude, with the play\u2014with Egypt.\n\n'What do you think of it, Lettice?' he had whispered, nodding towards the stage.\n\nShe turned with a start. She came back. The expression of pain flashed instantly away. She had evidently not been thinking of the performance. 'It's not much, Tom, is it? But I like the scenery. It makes me feel strange somewhere\u2014the change that comes over me in Egypt. We'll be there together\u2014some day.' She leaned over with her lips against his ear.\n\nAnd there was significance in the commonplace words, he thought\u2014a significance her whisper did not realise, and certainly did not intend.\n\n'All three of us,' he rejoined before he knew what he meant exactly.\n\nAnd she nodded hurriedly. Either she agreed, or else she had not heard him. He did not insist, he did not repeat, he sat there wondering why on earth he said the thing. A touch of pain pricked him like an insect's sting, but a pain he could not account for. His blood, at the same time, leaped as she bent her face so near to his own. He felt his heart swell as he looked into her eyes. Her beauty astonished him; in this twilight of the theatre it glowed and burned like a veiled star. He fancied\u2014it was the trick of the half-light, of course\u2014she had grown darker and that a dusky flush lay on her cheeks.\n\n'What were you thinking about?' he whispered lower again, changing the sentence slightly. And, as he asked it, he saw Tony still watching him, two seats away. It annoyed him; he drew his head back a little so that her face concealed him.\n\n'I don't know,' she whispered back; 'nothing in particular.' She put her gloved hand stealthily towards him and touched his knee. The gesture, he felt, was intended to supplement the words. For the first time in his life he did not quite believe her. The thought was odious, but not to be denied. It merely flashed across him, however. He forgot it instantly.\n\n'Seems oddly familiar somehow,' he said, 'doesn't it?'\n\nAgain she nodded, smiling, as she gazed for a moment first into one eye, then into the other, then turned away to watch the stage. And abruptly, as she did so, the entire feeling vanished, the mood evaporated, her expression was normal once more, and he fixed his attention on the stupid play.\n\nHe turned his interest into other channels; he would take his party on to supper. He did so. Yet an impression remained\u2014the impression that the Wave had come nearer, higher, that it was rising and gaining impetus, accumulating mass, momentum, power. The gay supper could not dissipate that, nor could the happy ten minutes in a taxi, when he drove her to her door, decrease or weaken it. She was very tired. They spoke little, he remembered; she gave him a gentle touch as the cab drew up, and the few things she said had entirely to do with his comfort in his flat. He felt in that touch and in those tender questions the mother only. The woman, it suddenly occurred to him, had gone elsewhere. He had never had it, never even claimed it. A deep sense of loneliness touched him for a moment. His heart beat rapidly. He dreamed.\u2026\n\nWhy the scene came back to him now as they walked slowly through the summery pine-wood he knew not. He caught himself thinking vividly of Egypt suddenly, of being in Egypt with her\u2014and with another. But on that other he refused to let thought linger. Of set purpose he chose Tony in that other's place. He saw it in a picture: he and she together helping Tony, she and Tony equally helping him. It passed before him merely, a glowing coloured picture set in high light against the heavy background of these English fir-woods and the Kentish sky. Whether it came towards him or retreated, he could not say. It was very brief, instantaneous almost. The memory of the play, with its numerous attendant correlations, rose up, then vanished.\n\n'Give me your arm, Tom, you mighty giant: these pine-needles are so slippery.' He felt her hand creep in and rest upon his muscles, and a glow of boyish pride came with it. In her summer dress of white, her big garden hat and flowing violet veil, she looked adorable. He liked the long white gauntlet gloves. The shadows of the trees became her well: against the thick dark trunks she seemed slim and dainty as a flower that the breeze bent over towards him. 'You're so horribly big and strong,' she said, and her eyes, full of expression, glanced up at him. He watched her little feet in the neat white shoes peep out in turn as they walked along; her fingers pressed his arm. He tried to take her parasol, but she prevented him, saying it was her only weapon of defence against a giant, 'and there is a giant in this forest, though only a baby one perhaps!' He felt the mother in her pour over him in a flood of tenderness that blessed and soothed and comforted. It was as if a divine and healing power streamed from her into him.\n\n'And what were you thinking about, Tom?' she enquired teasingly. 'You haven't said a word for a whole five minutes!'\n\n'I was thinking of Egypt,' he answered with truth.\n\nShe looked up quickly.\n\n'I'm to go out in December,' he went on. 'I told you. It was decided at our last Board Meeting.'\n\nShe said she remembered. 'But it's funny,' she added, 'because I was thinking of Egypt too just then\u2014thinking of the Nile, my river with the floating faces.'\n\nThe week-end visit was typical of many others; Mrs. Haughstone, seeing safety in numbers possibly, was pleasant on the surface, Molly deflecting most of her poisoned darts towards herself; while Tom and Tony shared the society of their unconventional hostess with boyish enjoyment. Tom modified the air of ownership he indulged when alone with her, and no one need have noticed that there was anything more between them than a hearty, understanding friendship. Tony, for instance, may have guessed the true situation, or, again, he may not; for he said no word, nor showed the smallest hint by word, by gesture, or by silence\u2014most significant betrayal of all\u2014that he was aware of any special tie. Though a keen observer, he gave no sign. 'She's an interesting woman, Tom,' he remarked lightly yet with enthusiasm once, 'and a rare good hostess\u2014a woman in a thousand, I declare. We make a famous trio. As you've got that Assouan job we'll have some fun next winter in Egypt, eh?'\n\nAnd Tom, pleased and secretly flattered by the admiration, tried to make his confidences. Unless Tony had liked her this would have been impossible. But they formed such a natural, happy trio together, giving the lie to the hoary proverb, that Tom felt it was permissible to speak of her to his sympathetic cousin. Already they had laughingly discussed the half-forgotten acquaintanceship begun in the dahabieh on the Nile, Tony making a neat apology by declaring to her, 'Beautiful women blind me so, Madame Jaretzka, that I invariably forget all lesser details. And that's why I told Tom you were a Russian.'\n\nOn this particular occasion, too, it was made easier because Tony had asked his cousin's opinion about the Irish girl, invited for his special benefit. 'I was never so disappointed in my life,' he said in his convincing yet airy way. 'She looked so wonderful the other night. It was the evening dress, I suppose. You should always see a girl first in the daytime; the daylight self is the real self.' And Tom, amused by the irresponsible attitude towards the sex, replied that the right woman looked herself in any dress because it was as much a part of her as her own skin. 'Yes,' said Tony, 'it's the thing inside the skin that counts, of course; you're right; the rest is only a passing glamour. But friendship with a woman is the best of all, for friendship grows insensibly into the best kind of love. It's a delightful feeling,' he added sympathetically, 'that kind of friendship. Independent of what they wear!'\n\nHe enjoyed his pun and laughed. 'I say, Tom,' he went on suddenly with a certain inconsequence, 'have you ever met the Prince\u2014Madame Jaretzka's husband\u2014by the way? I wonder what he's like.' He looked up carelessly and raised his eyebrows.\n\n'No,' replied Tom in a quiet tone, 'but I\u2014exp\u2014hope to some day.'\n\n'I think he ran away and left her, or something,' continued the other. 'He's dead, anyhow, to all intents and purposes. But I've been wondering lately. I'll be bound there was ill-treatment. She looks so sad sometimes. The other night at the theatre I was watching her\u2014'\n\n'That Egyptian play?' broke in Tom.\n\n'Yes; it was bad enough to make any one look sad, wasn't it? But it was curious all the same\u2014'\n\n'I didn't mean the badness.'\n\n'Nor did I. It was odd. There was atmosphere in spite of everything.'\n\n'I thought you were too occupied to notice the performance,' Tom hinted.\n\nTony laughed good-naturedly. 'I was a bit taken up, I admit,' he said. 'But there was something curious all the same. I kept seeing you and our hostess on the stage\u2014'\n\n'In Egypt!'\n\n'In a way, yes.' He hesitated.\n\n'Odd,' said his cousin briefly.\n\n'Very. It seemed\u2014there was some one else who ought to have been there as well as you two. Only he never came on.'\n\nTom made no comment. Was this thought-transference, he wondered?\n\nThe natural sympathy between them furnished the requisite conditions certainly.\n\n'He never came on,' continued Tony, 'and I had the queer feeling that he was being kept off on purpose, that he was busy with something else, but that the moment he came on the play would get good and interesting\u2014real. Something would happen. And it was then I noticed Madame Jaretzka\u2014'\n\n'And me, too, I suppose,' Tom put in, half amused, half serious. There was an excited yet uneasy feeling in him.\n\n'Chiefly her, I think. And she looked so sad,\u2014it struck me suddenly. D'you know, Tom,' he went on more earnestly, 'it was really quite curious. I got the feeling that we three were watching that play together from above it somewhere, looking down on it\u2014sort of from a height above\u2014'\n\n'Above,' exclaimed his cousin. There was surprise in him\u2014surprise at himself. That faint uneasiness increased. He realised that to confide in Tony was impossible. But why?\n\n'H'm,' Tony went on in a reflective way as if half to himself. 'I may have seen it before and forgotten it.' Then he looked up at his cousin. 'And what's more\u2014that we three, as we watched it, knew the same thing together\u2014knew that we were waiting for another chap to come on, and that when he came the silly piece would turn suddenly interesting, dramatic in a true sense, only tragedy instead of comedy. Did you, Tom?' he asked abruptly, screwing up his eyes and looking quite serious a moment.\n\nTom had no answer ready, but his cousin left no time for answering.\n\n'And the fact is,' he continued, lowering his voice, 'I had the feeling the other chap we were waiting for was him.'\n\nTom was too interested to smile at the grammar. 'You mean\u2014her husband?' he said quietly. He did not like the turn the talk had taken; it pleased him to talk of her, but he disliked to bring the absent husband in. There was trouble in him as he listened.\n\n'Possibly it was,' he added a trifle stiffly. Then, ashamed of his feeling towards his imaginative cousin, he changed his manner quickly. He went up and stood behind him by the open window. 'Tony, old boy, we're together somehow in this thing,' he began impulsively; 'I'm sure of it.' Then the words stuck. 'If ever I want your help\u2014'\n\n'Rather, Tom,' said the other with enthusiasm, yet puzzled, turning with an earnest expression in his frank blue eyes. In another moment, like two boys swearing eternal friendship, they would have shaken hands. Tom again felt the impulse to make the confidences that desire for sympathy prompted, and again realised that it was difficult, yet that he would accomplish it. Indeed, he was on the point of doing so, relieving his mind of the childhood story, the accumulated details of Wave and Whiff and Sound and Eyes, the singular Montreux meeting, the strange medley of joy and uneasiness as well, all in fact without reserve\u2014when a voice from the lawn came floating into the room and broke the spell. It lifted him sharply to another plane. He felt glad suddenly that he had not spoken\u2014 afterwards, he felt very glad. It was not right in regard to her, he realised.\n\n'You're never ready, you boys,' their hostess was saying, 'and Miss Monnigan declares that men always wait to be fetched. The lunch-baskets are all in, and the motor's waiting.'\n\n'We didn't want to be in the way,' cried Tony gaily, ever ready with an answer first. 'We're both so big and clumsy. But we'll make the fire in the woods and do the work that requires mere strength without skill all right.' He leaped out of the window to join them, while Tom went by the door to fetch his cap and overcoat. Turning an instant he saw the three figures on the lawn standing in the sunlight, Madame Jaretzka with a loose, rough motor-coat over her white dress, a rose at her throat and the long blue veil he loved wound round her hair and face. He saw her eyes look up at Tony and heard her chiding him. 'You've been talking mischief in there together,' she was saying laughingly, giving him a searching glance in play, though the tone had meaning in it. 'We were talking of you,' swore Tony, 'and you,' he added, turning by way of polite after-thought to the girl. And one of his big hands he laid for a moment upon Madame Jaretzka's arm.\n\nTom turned sharply and hurried on into the hall. The first thought in his mind was how tender and gentle Madame Jaretzka looked standing in the sunshine, her eyes turned up at Tony. His second thought was vaguer: he felt glad that Tony admired and liked her so. The third was vaguer still: Tony didn't really care for the girl a bit and was only amusing himself with her, but Madame Jaretzka would protect her and see that no harm came of it. She could protect the whole world. That was her genius.\n\nIn a moment these three thoughts flashed through him, but while the last two vanished as quickly as they came, the first lingered like sunlight in him. It remained and grew and filled his heart, and all that day it kept close by him\u2014her love, her comfort, her mothering compassion.\n\nAnd Tom felt glad for some reason that his confidences to Tony after all had been interrupted and prevented. They remained thus interrupted and prevented until the end, even when the 'other' came upon the scene, and above all while that 'other' stayed. It all seemed curiously inevitable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 265", + "text": "The last few weeks of September they were much alone together, for Mrs. Haughstone had gone back to her husband's tiny house at Kew, Molly to the Dresden school, and Tony somewhere into space\u2014northern Russia, he said, to watch the birds beginning to leave.\n\nMeanwhile, with deepening of friendship, and experiences whose ordinariness was raised into significance because this woman shared them with him, Tom saw the summer fade in England and usher in the longer evenings. Light and heat waned from the sighing year; winds, charged with the memory of roses, took the paling skies; the swallows whispered together of the southern tour. New stars swam into their autumnal places, and the Milky Way came majestically to its own. He watched the curve of it on moonless nights, pouring its grand river across the heavens. And in the heart of its soft brilliance he saw Cygnus, cruciform and shining, immersed in the white foam of the arching wave.\n\nHe noticed these things now, as once long ago in early boyhood, because a time of separation was at hand. His yearning now was akin to his yearning then\u2014it left a chasm in his soul that beauty alone could help to fill. At fifteen he was thirty-five, as now at thirty-five he was fifteen again.\n\nLettice was not, indeed, at a Finishing School across the Channel, but she was shortly going to Warsaw to spend October with her husband, and in November she was to sail for Egypt from Trieste. Tom was to follow in December, so a separation of three months was close at hand. 'But a necessary separation,' she said one evening as they motored home beneath the stars, 'is always bearable and strengthening; we shall both be occupied with things that must\u2014I mean, things we ought to do. It's the needless separations that are hard to bear.' He replied that it would be wonderful meeting again and pretending they were strangers. He tried to share her mood, her point of view with honesty. 'Yes,' she answered, 'only that wouldn't be quite true, because you and I can never be separated\u2014really. The curve of the earth may hide us from each other's sight like that,'\u2014and she pointed to the sinking moon\u2014'but we feel the pull just the same.'\n\nThey leaned back among the cushions, sharing the mysterious beauty of the night-sky in their hearts. They lowered their voices as though the hush upon the world demanded it. The little things they said seemed suddenly to possess a significance they could not account for quite and yet admitted.\n\nHe told her that the Milky Way was at its best these coming months, and that Cygnus would be always visible on clear nights. 'We'll look at that and remember,' he said half playfully. 'The astronomers say the Milky Way is the very ground-plan of the Universe. So we all come out of it. And you're Cygnus.' She called him sentimental, and he admitted that perhaps he was. 'I don't like this separation,' he said bluntly. In his mind he was thinking that the Milky Way had his wave in it, and that its wondrous arch, like his life and hers, rose out of the 'sea' below the world. In that sea no separation was possible.\n\n'But it's not that that makes you suddenly poetic, Tom. It's something else.'\n\n'Is it?' he answered. A whisper of pain went past him across the night. He felt something coming; he was convinced she felt it too. But he could not name it.\n\n'The Milky Way is a stream as well as a wave. You say it rises in the autumn\u2014?' She leaned nearer to him a little.\n\n'But it's seen at its best a little later\u2014in the winter, I believe.'\n\n'We shall be in Egypt then,' she mentioned. He could have sworn she would say those very words.\n\n'Egypt,' he repeated slowly. 'Yes\u2014in Egypt.'\n\nAnd a little shiver came over him, so slight, so quickly gone again, that he hoped it was imperceptible. Yet she had noticed it.\n\n'Why, Tom, don't you like the idea?'\n\n'I wonder\u2014' he began, then changed the sentence\u2014'I wonder what it will be like. I have a curious desire to see it\u2014I know that.'\n\nHe heard her laugh under her breath a little. What came over them both in that moment he couldn't say. There was a sense of tumult in him somewhere, a hint of pain, of menace too. Her laughter, slight as it was, jarred upon him. She was not feeling quite what he felt\u2014this flashed, then vanished.\n\n'You don't sound enthusiastic,' she said calmly.\n\n'I am, though. Only\u2014I had a feeling\u2014' He broke off. The truth was he couldn't describe that feeling even to himself.\n\n'Tom, dear, my dear one\u2014' she began, then stopped. She also stopped an impulsive movement towards him. She drew back her sentence and her arms. And Tom, aware of a rising passion in him he might be unable to control, turned his face away a moment. Something clutched at his heart as with cruel pincers. A chill followed close upon the shiver. He felt a moment of keen shame, yet knew not exactly why he felt it.\n\n'I am a sentimental ass!' he exclaimed abruptly with a natural laugh. His voice was tender. He turned again to her. 'I believe I've never properly grown up.' And before he could restrain himself he drew her towards him, seized her hand and kissed it like a boy. It was that kiss, combined with her blocked sentence and uncompleted gesture, rather than any more passionate expression of their love for one another, that he remembered throughout the empty months to follow.\n\nBut there was another reason, too, why he remembered it. For she wore a silk dress, and the arm against his ear produced a momentary rustling that brought back the noise in the Zakopan\u00e9 bedroom when the frozen branch had scraped the outside wall. And with the Sound, absent now so long, the old strange uneasiness revived acutely. For that caressing gesture, that kiss, that phrase of love that blocked its own final utterance brought back the strange rich pain.\n\nIn the act of giving them, even while he felt her touch and held her within his arms\u2014she evaded him and went far away into another place where he could not follow her. And he knew for the first time a singular emotion that seemed like a faint, distant jealousy that stirred in him, yet a spiritual jealousy\u2026 as of some one he had never even seen.\n\nThey lingered a moment in the garden to enjoy the quiet stars and see the moon go down below the pine-wood. The tense mood of half an hour ago in the motor-car had evaporated of its own accord apparently.\n\nA conversation that followed emphasised this elusive emotion in him, because it somehow increased the remoteness of the part of her he could not claim. She mentioned that she was taking Mrs. Haughstone with her to Egypt in November; it again exasperated him; such unselfishness he could not understand. The invitation came, moreover, upon what Tom felt was a climax of shameless behaviour. For Madame Jaretzka had helped the family with money that, to save their pride, was to be considered lent. The husband had written gushing letters of thanks and promises that\u2014Tom had seen these letters\u2014could hardly have deceived a schoolgirl. Yet a recent legacy, which rendered a part repayment possible, had been purposely concealed, with the result that yet more money had been 'lent' to tide them over non-existent or invented difficulties.\n\nAnd now, on the top of this, Madame Jaretzka not only refused to divulge that the legacy was known to her, but even proposed an expensive two months' holiday to the woman who was tricking her.\n\nTom objected strongly for two reasons; he thought it foolish kindness, and he did not want her.\n\n'You're too good to the woman, far too good,' he said. But his annoyance was only increased by the firmness of the attitude that met him. 'No, Tom; you're wrong. They'll find out in time that I know, and see themselves as they are.'\n\n'You forgive everything to everybody,' he observed critically. 'It's too much.'\n\nShe turned round upon him. Her attitude was a rebuke, and feeling rebuked he did not like it. For though she did not quote 'until seventy times seven,' she lived it.\n\n'When she sees herself sly and treacherous like that, she'll understand,' came the answer, 'she'll get her own forgiveness.'\n\n'Her own forgiveness!'\n\n'The only real kind. If I forgive, it doesn't alter her. But if she understands and feels shame and makes up her mind not to repeat\u2014that's forgiving herself. She really changes then.'\n\nTom gasped inwardly. This was a level of behaviour where he found the air somewhat rarified. He saw the truth of it, but had no answer ready.\n\n'Remorse and regret,' she went on, 'only make one ineffective in the present. It's looking backwards, instead of looking forwards.'\n\nHe felt something very big in her as she said it, holding his eyes firmly with her own. To have the love of such a woman was, indeed, a joy and wonder. It was a keen happiness to feel that he, Tom Kelverdon, had obtained it. His admiration for himself, and his deep, admiring love for her rose side by side. He did not recognise the flattery of self in this attitude. The simplicity in her baffled him.\n\n'I could forgive you anything, Lettice!' he cried.\n\n'Could you?' she said gently. 'If so, you really love me.'\n\nIt was not the doubt in her voice that overwhelmed him then; she never indulged in hints. It was a doubt in himself, not that he loved her, but that his love was not yet big enough, unselfish enough, sufficiently large and deep to be worthy of this exquisite soul beside him. Perhaps it was realising he could not yet possess her spirit that made him seize the precious little body that contained it. Nothing could stop him. He took her in his arms and held her till she became breathless. The passionate moment expressed real spiritual yearning. And she knew it. She did not struggle, yet neither did she respond. They stood upon different levels somehow.\n\n'There'll be nothing left to love,' she gasped, 'if you do that often!' She released herself quietly, tidying her hair and putting her hat straight while she smiled at him. Her dark veil had caught in his tie-pin. She disentangled it, her hands touching his mouth as she did so. He kissed them gently, bending his head down with an air of repentance.\n\n'My God, Lettice\u2014you're precious to me!' he stammered.\n\nBut even as he said it, even while he still felt her soft cheeks against his lips, her frail unresisting figure within his arms, there came this pang of sudden pain that was so acute it frightened him. There was something impersonal in her attitude that alarmed him. What was it? He was helpless to understand it. The excitement in his blood obscured inner perception.\u2026 Such tempestuous moments were rare enough between them, and when they came he felt that she endured them rather than responded. He was aware of a touch of shame in himself. But this pain\u2014? Even while he held her it seemed again that she escaped him because of the heights she lived on, yet partly, too, because of the innocence which had not yet eaten of the tree of knowledge.\u2026 Was that, then, the lack in her? Had she yet to learn that the spiritual dare not be divorced wholly from the physical and that the divine blending of the two in purity of heart alone brings safety?\n\nShe slipped from his encircling arms and\u2014rose. He struggled after her. But that air he could not breathe. She was too far above him. She had to stoop to meet the passionate man in him that sought to seize and hold her. She had\u2014the earlier phrase returned\u2014come back to fetch him. He did not really love yet as he ought to love. He loved himself\u2014in her; selfishly somehow, somewhere. But this thought he did not capture wholly. It cast a shadow merely and was gone.\n\nSomewhere, too, there was jealous resentment in him. He could not feel himself indispensable to a woman who occupied a pinnacle.\n\nHis cocksureness wavered a little before the sharp attack. Pang after pang stung him shrewdly, stung his pride, his confidence, his vanity, shaking the platform on which he stood till each separate plank trembled and the sense of security grew less.\n\nBut the confusion in his heart and mind bewildered him. It was all so strange and incomprehensible; he could not understand it. He knew she was true and loyal, her purity beyond reproach, her elusiveness not calculated or intended, yet that somewhere, somehow she could do without him, and that if he left her she\u2014almost\u2014would have neither remorse nor regret. She would just accept it and\u2014forgive.\u2026\n\nAnd he thought suddenly with an intense bitterness that amazed him\u2014of the husband. The thought of that 'other' who had yet to come afflicted him desperately. When he met those light-blue eyes of the Wave he would surely know them\u2026! He felt again the desire to seek counsel and advice from another, some one of his own sex, a sympathetic and understanding soul like Tony.\n\nThe turmoil in him was beyond elucidation: thoughts and emotions of nameless kind combined to produce a fluid state of insecurity he could not explain. As usual, however, there emerged finally the solid fact which seemed now the keynote of his character; at least, he invariably fell back upon it for support against these occasional storms: 'She has singled me out; she can't really do without me; we're necessary to each other; I'm safe.' The rest he dismissed as half realised only and therefore not quite real. His position with her was unique, of course, something the world could not possibly understand, and, while resenting what he called the 'impersonal' attitude in her, he yet knew that it was precisely this impersonal attitude that justified their love. Their love, in fine, was proved spiritual thereby. They were in the 'sea' together. Invariably in the end he blamed himself.\n\nThe rising Wave, it seemed, was bringing up from day to day new, unexpected qualities from the depths within him, just as it brings up mud and gravel from the ground-bed of the shore. He felt it driving him forward with increasing speed and power. With an irresistible momentum that left him helpless, it was hurrying him along towards the moment when it would lower its crest again towards the earth\u2014and break.\n\nHe knew now where the smothering crash would come, where he would finally meet the singular details of his boyhood's premonition face to face,\u2014the Sound, the Whiff, the other pair of Eyes. They awaited him\u2014in Egypt. In Egypt, at last, he would find the entire series, recognise each item. He would also discover the nature of the wave that was neither of water nor of snow.\u2026\n\nYet, strange to say, when he actually met the pair of light-blue eyes, he did not recognise them. He encountered the face to which they belonged, but was not warned. While fulfilling its prophecy, the premonition failed, of course, to operate.\n\nFor premonitions are a delicate matter, losing their power in the act of justifying themselves. To prevent their fulfilment were to stultify their existence. Between a spiritual warning and its material consummation there is but a friable and gossamer alliance. Had he recognised, he might possibly have prevented; whereas the deeper part of him unconsciously invited and said, Come.\n\nAnd so, not recognising the arrival of the other pair of eyes, Tom, when he met them, knew himself attracted instead of repelled. Far from being warned, he knew himself drawn towards their owner by natural sympathy, as towards some one whose deep intrusion into his inner life was necessary to its fuller realisation\u2014the tumultuous breaking of the rapidly accumulating Wave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 266", + "text": "The weeks that followed seemed both brief and long to Tom. The separation he felt keenly, though as a breathing spell the interval was even welcome in a measure. Since the days at Montreux he had been living intensely, swept along by a movement he could not control: now he could pause and think a moment. He tried to get the bird's-eye view in which alone details are seen in their accurate relations and proportions. There was much that perplexed his plain, straightforward nature. But the more he thought, the more puzzled he became, and in the end he resigned himself happily to the great flow of life that was sweeping him along. He was distinctly conscious of being 'swept along.' What was going to happen would happen. He wondered, watched and waited. The idea of Egypt, meanwhile, thrilled him with a curious anticipation each time he thought of it. And he thought of it a good deal.\n\nHe received letters from Warsaw, but they told nothing of her life there: she referred vaguely to duties whose afflicting nature he half guessed now; and the rest was filled with loving solicitude for his welfare. Even through the post she mothered him absurdly. He felt his life now based upon her. Her love was indispensable to him.\n\nThe last letters\u2014from Vienna and Trieste\u2014were full of a tenderness most comforting, and he felt relief that she had 'finished with Warsaw,' as he put it. His own last letter was timed to catch her steamer. 'You have all my love,' he wrote, 'but you can give what you can spare to Tony, as he's in Egypt by now, and tell him I shall be out a month from to-day. Everything goes well here. I'm to have full charge of the work at Assouan. The Firm has put everything in my hands, but there won't be much to do at first, and I shall be with you at Luxor a great deal. I'm looking forward to Egypt too\u2014immensely. I believe all sorts of wonderful things are going to happen to us there.'\n\nHe was very pleased with himself, and very pleased with her, and very pleased with everything. The wave of his life was rising still triumphantly.\n\nHe kept her Warsaw letters and reread them frequently. She wrote admirably. Mrs. Haughstone, it seemed, complained about everything, from the cabin and hotel room 'which, she declares, are never so good as my own,' to her position as an invited guest, 'which she accepts as though she favoured me by coming, thinking herself both chaperone and indispensable companion. How little some people realise that no one is ever really indispensable!' And the first letter from Egypt told him to come out quickly and 'help me keep her in her place, as only a man can do. Tony wonders why you're so long about it.' It pleased him very much, and as the time approached for leaving, his spirits rose; indeed, he reached Marseilles much in the mood of a happy, confident boy who has passed all exams, and is off upon a holiday most thoroughly deserved.\n\nThere had been time for three or four letters from Luxor, and he read them in the train as he hurried along from Geneva towards the south, leaving the snowy Jura hills behind him. 'Those are the blue mountains we watched from Montreux together in the spring,' he said to himself, looking out of the window. 'Soon, in Egypt, we shall watch the Desert and the Nile instead.' And, remembering that dream-like, happy time of their earliest acquaintance, his heart beat in delighted anticipation. He could think of nothing else but her. Those Montreux days seemed years ago instead of a brief six months. What a lot he had to tell her, how much they would have to talk about. Life, indeed, was rich and full. He was a lucky man; yet\u2014he deserved it all. Belief and confidence in himself increased. He gazed out of the window, thinking happily as the scenery rushed by.\u2026 Then he came back to the letters and read them over yet once again; he almost knew them now by heart; he opened his bag and read the Warsaw letters too. Then, putting them all away, he lay back in his corner and tried to sleep. The express train seemed so slow, but the steamer would seem slower still.\u2026 Thoughts and memories passed idly through his brain, grew mingled and confused; his eyes were closed; he fell into a doze: he almost slept\u2014when something rose into his drowsy mind and made him suddenly wakeful.\n\nWhat was it? He didn't know. It had vanished as soon as it appeared. But the drowsy mood had passed, the desire to sleep was gone. There was impatience in him, the keen wish to be in Egypt\u2014immediately. He cursed the slow means of travel, longed to be out there, on the spot, with her and Tony. Her last letters had been full of descriptions of the place and people, of Tony and his numerous friends, his kindness in introducing her to the most interesting among them, their picnics together on the Nile and in the Desert, visits to the famous sites of tomb and temple, in particular of an all-night bivouac somewhere and the sunrise over the Theban hills.\u2026 Tom, as he read it all, felt this keen impatience to be sharing it with them; he was out of it; oh, how he would enjoy it all when he got there! The words 'Theban hills' called up a vivid and stimulating picture in particular.\n\nBut it was not this that chased the drowsy mood and made him wakeful. It was the letters themselves, something he had not noticed hitherto, something that had escaped him as he first read them one by one. Indefinable, it hid between the lines. Only on reading the series as a whole was it noticeable at all. He wondered. He asked himself vague questions.\n\nOpening his bag again, he went through the letters in the order of their arrival; then put them back inside the elastic ring with a sensation of relief and a happy sigh. He had discovered the faint, elusive impression that had made him wakeful, but in discovering it had satisfied himself that it was imagination\u2014caused by the increasing impatience of his impetuous heart. For it had seemed to him that he was aware of a change, though so slight as to be scarcely perceptible, and certainly not traceable to actual words or sentences. It struck him that the Warsaw letters felt the separation more keenly, more poignantly, than the Egyptian letters. This seemed due rather to omissions in the latter than to anything else that he could name, for while the Warsaw letters spoke frequently of the separation, of her longing to see him close, those from Luxor omitted all such phrases. There were pleas in plenty for his health, his comfort, his welfare and success\u2014the Mother found full scope\u2014but no direct expression of her need for him. This, briefly, was the notion he had caught faintly from 'between the lines.'\n\nBut, having run it to earth, he easily explained it too. At Warsaw she was unhappy; whereas now, in Egypt, their reunion was almost within sight: she felt happier, too, her unpleasant duties over. It was all natural enough. 'What a sentimental donkey a man is when he's in love!' he exclaimed with a self-indulgent smile of pleased forgiveness; 'but the fact is\u2014when she's not by me to explain\u2014I could imagine anything!' And he fell at length into the doze his excited fancy had postponed.\n\nAfter leaving Marseilles his impatience grew with the slowness of the steamer. The voyage of four days seemed interminable. The sea and sky took on a deeper blue, the air turned softer, the sweetness of the south became more marked. His exhilaration increased with every hour, the desire to reach his destination increasing with it. There was an intensity about his feelings he could not entirely account for. The longing to see Egypt merged with the longing to see Lettice. But the two were separate. The latter was impatient happiness, while the former struck a slower note\u2014respect and wonder that contained a hint of awe.\n\nSomewhere in this anticipatory excitement, too, hid drama. And his first glimpse of the marvellous old land did prove dramatic in a sense. For when a passenger drew his attention to the white Alexandrian harbour floating on the shining blue, he caught his breath a moment and his heart gave a sudden unexpected leap. He saw the low-lying coast, a palm, a mosque, a minaret; he saw the sandy lip of\u2014Africa.\n\nThat shimmering line of blue and gold was Egypt.\u2026 He had known it would look exactly thus, as he now saw it. The same instant his heart contracted a little.\u2026 He leaned motionless upon the rail and watched the coast-line coming nearer, ever nearer. It rose out of the burning haze of blue and gold that hung motionless between the water and the air. Bathed in the drenching sunlight, the fringe of the great thirsty Desert seemed to drink the sea.\u2026\n\nHis entry was accompanied by mingled emotions and sensations. That Lettice stood waiting for him somewhere behind the blaze of light contributed much; yet the thrill owned a more complex origin, it seemed. To any one not entirely callous to the stab of strange romance and stranger beauty, the first sight of Egypt must always be an event, and Tom, by no means thus insensitive, felt it vividly. He was aware of something not wholly unfamiliar. The invitation was so strong, it seemed to entice as with an attraction that was almost summons. As the ship drew nearer, and thoughts of landing filled his mind, he felt no opposition, no resistance, no difficulty, as with other countries. There was no hint of friction anywhere. He seemed instantly at home. Egypt not merely enticed\u2014she pulled him in.\n\n'Here I am at last!' whispered a voice, as he watched the noisy throng of Arabs, Nubians, Soudanese upon the crowded wharf. He delighted in the colour, the gleaming eyes, bronze skins, the white caftans with their red and yellow sashes. The phantasmal amber light that filled the huge, still heavens lit something similar in his mind and thoughts. Only the train, with its luxurious restaurant car, its shutters to keep out the dust and heat, appeared incongruous. He lost the power to think this or that. He could only feel, and feel intensely. His feet touched Egypt, and a deep glow of inner happiness possessed him. He was not disappointed anywhere, though as yet he had seen nothing but a steamer quay. Then he sent a telegram to Lettice: 'Arrived safely. Reach Luxor eight o'clock to-morrow morning.'; and, having slid through the Delta country with the flaming sunset, he had his first glimpse of the lordly Pyramids as the train drew into Cairo. Dim and immense he saw them across the swift-falling dusk, shadowy as forgotten centuries that cannot die. Though too distant to feel their menace, he yet knew them towering over him, mysterious, colossal, unintelligible, the sentinels of a gateway he had passed.\n\nSuch was the first touch of Egypt on his soul. It was as big and magical as he had known it would be. The magnificence and the glamour both were there. Europe already lay forgotten far behind him, non-existent. Some one tapped him on the shoulder, whispered a password, he was\u2014 in.\u2026\n\nHe dined in Cairo and took the night train on to Luxor, the white, luxurious wagon lit again striking an incongruous note. For he had stepped from a platform into space, a space that floated suns and constellations. About him was that sense of the illimitable which broods everywhere in Egypt, in sand and sky, in sun and stars; it absorbed him easily, small human speck in a toy train with electric lights and modern comforts! An emotion difficult to seize gripped his heart, as he slid deeper and deeper into the land towards Lettice.\u2026 For Lettice also was involved in this. With happiness, yet somehow, too, with tears, he thought of her waiting for him now, expecting him, perhaps reading his telegram for the twentieth time. Through a mist of blue and gold she seemed to beckon to him across the shimmer of the endless yellow sands. He saw the little finger he had kissed. The dear face smiled. But there was a change upon it somewhere, though a change too subtle to be precisely named. The eyelids were half closed, and in the smile was power; the beckoning finger conveyed a gesture that was new\u2014command. It seemed to point; it had a motion downwards; about her aspect was some flavour of authority almost royal, borrowed, doubtless, from the regal gold and purple of the sky's magnificence.\n\nOddly, again, his heart contracted as this changed aspect of her, due to heightened imagination, rose before the inner eye. A sensation of uncertainty and question slipped in with it, though whence he knew not. A hint of insecurity assailed his soul\u2014almost a sense of inferiority in himself. It even flashed across him that he was under orders. It was inexplicable.\u2026 A restlessness in his blood prevented sleep.\u2026 He drew the blind up and looked out.\n\nThere was no moon. The night was drowned in stars. The train rushed south towards Thebes along the green thread of the Nile; the Lybian desert keeping pace with it, immense and desolate, death gnawing eternally at the narrow strip of life.\u2026 And again he knew the feeling that he had stepped from a platform into space. Egypt lay spread below him. He fell towards it, plunging, and as he fell, looked down\u2014upon something vaguely familiar and half known.\u2026 An underlying sadness, inexplicable but significant, crept in upon his thoughts.\n\nThey rushed past Bedrashein, a straggling Arab village where once great Memphis owned eighteen miles of frontage on the stately river; he saw the low mud huts, the groves of date-palms that now marked the vanished splendour. They slid by in their hundreds, the spectral desert gleaming like snow between the openings. The huge pyramids of Sakkh\u00e2ra loomed against the faint western afterglow. He saw the shaft of strange green light they call zodiacal.\n\nAnd the sadness in him deepened inexplicably\u2014that strange Egyptian sadness which ever underlies the brilliance.\u2026 The watchful stars looked down with sixty listening centuries between them and a forgotten glory that dreamed now among a thousand sandy tombs. For the silent landscape flying past him like a dream woke emotions both sweet and painful that he could not understand\u2014sweet to poignancy, exquisitely painful.\n\nPerhaps it was natural enough, natural, too, that he should transfer these in some dim measure to the woman now waiting for him among the ruins of many-gated Thebes. The ancient city, dreaming still beside the storied river, assumed an appearance half fabulous in his thoughts. Egypt had wakened imagination in his soul. The change he fancied in Lettice was due, doubtless, to the transforming magic that mingled an actual present with a haunted past. Possibly this was some portion of the truth.\u2026 And yet, while the mood possessed him, some joy, some inner sheath, as it were, of anticipated happiness slipped off him into the encroaching yellow sand\u2014as though he surrendered, not so much the actual happiness, as his right to it. A second's helplessness crept over him; another Self that was inferior peeped up and sighed and whispered.\u2026 He was aware of hidden touches that stabbed him into uneasiness, disquiet, almost pain.\u2026 Some outer tissue was stripped from his normal being, leaving him naked to the tang of extremely delicate shafts, buried so long that interpretation failed him.\n\nThe curious sensation, luckily, did not last; but this hint of a familiarity that seemed both sweet and dangerous, made it astonishingly convincing at the time. Some aspect of vanity, of confidence in himself distinctly weakened.\u2026\n\nIt passed with the spectral palm trees as the train sped farther south. He finally dismissed it as the result of fatigue, excitement and anticipation too prolonged.\u2026 Yes, he dismissed it. At any rate it passed. It sank out of sight and was forgotten. It had become, perhaps, an integral portion of his being. Possibly, it had always been so, and had been merely waiting to emerge.\u2026\n\nBut such intangible and elusive emotions were so new to him that he could not pretend to deal with them. There is a stimulus as of ether about the Egyptian climate that gets into the mind, it is said, and stirs unwonted dreams and fantasies. The climate becomes mental. His stolid temperament was, perhaps, pricked thus half unintelligibly. He could not understand it. He drew the blind down. But before turning out the light, he read over once again the note of welcome Lettice had sent to meet him at the steamer. It was brief, but infinitely precious. The thought of her love sponged all lesser feelings completely from his mind, and he fell asleep thinking only of their approaching meeting, and of his marvellous deep joy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 267", + "text": "On reaching Luxor at eight o'clock in the morning, to his keen delight an Arab servant met him with an unexpected invitation. He had meant to go first to his hotel, but Lettice willed otherwise, everything thought out beforehand in her loving way. He drove accordingly to her house on the outskirts of the town towards Karnak, changed and bathed in a room where he recognised with supreme joy a hundred familiar touches that seemed transplanted from the Brown Flat at home\u2014and found her at nine o'clock waiting for him on the verandah. Breakfast was laid in the shady garden just beyond.\n\nIt was ideal as a dream. She stood there dressed in white, wearing a big sun-hat with little roses, sparkling, radiant, a graceful fairy figure from the heart of spring. 'Here's the inevitable fly-whisk, Tom,' was the first thing she said, and as naturally as though they had parted a few hours before, 'it's to keep the flies away, and to keep you at your distance too!' And his first remark, escaping him impulsively in place of a hundred other things he had meant to say, was, 'You look different; you've changed. Lettice, you're far more lovely than I knew. I've never seen you look like that before!' He felt his entire being go out to her in a consuming flame. 'You look perfectly divine.' Sheer admiration took his breath away. 'I believe you're Isis herself,' he laughed in his delight, 'come back into her own!'\n\n'Then you must be Osiris, Tom!' her happy voice responded, 'new risen from his sandy tomb!'\n\nThere was no time for private conversation, for Mrs. Haughstone appeared just then and enquired politely after his health and journey. 'The flies are awful,' she mentioned, 'but Lettice always insists on having breakfast out of doors. I hope you'll be able to stand it.' And she continued to flutter her horse-hair whisk as though she would have liked to sweep Egypt itself from the face of the map. 'No wonder the Israelites were glad to leave. There's sand in everything you eat and flies on everything you see.' Yet she said it with what passed in her case for good nature; she, too, was evidently enjoying herself in Egypt.\n\nTom said that flies and sand would not trouble him with such gorgeous sunlight to compensate, and that anyhow they were better than soot and fogs in London.\n\n'You'll be tired of the sun before a week is over,' she replied, 'and long to see a cloud or feel a drop of rain.' She followed his eyes which seemed unable to leave the face and figure of his hostess. 'But it all agrees wonderfully with my cousin. Don't you find her looking well? She's quite changed into another person, I think,' the tone suggesting that it was not altogether a change that she herself approved of. 'We're all different here, a little. Even Mr. Winslowe's improved enormously. He's steadier and wiser than he used to be.' And Tom, laughing, said he hoped he would improve, too, himself.\n\nThe comforting hot coffee, the delicious rolls, the cool iced fruit, and, above all, Lettice beside him at last in the pleasant shade, gave Tom such high spirits that the woman's disagreeable personality produced no effect. Through the gate in the stone wall at the end of the garden, beneath masses of drooping bougainvill\u00e6a, the Nile dreamed past in a sheet of golden haze; the Theban hills, dipped in the crystal azure of the sky, rose stern and desolate upon the horizon; the air, at this early hour, was fresh and keen. He felt himself in some enchanted garden of the ancient world with a radiant goddess for companion.\u2026 There was a sound of singing from the river below\u2014the song of the Nile boatman that has not changed these thousand years; a quaint piping melody floated in from the street outside; from the farther shore came the dull beating of a native tom-tom; and the still, burning atmosphere held the mystery of wonder in suspension. Her beauty, at last, had found its perfect setting.\n\n'I never saw your eyes so wonderful\u2014so soft and brilliant,' he whispered as soon as they were alone. 'You're very happy.' He paused, looking at her. 'That's me, isn't it? Lettice, say it is at once.' He was very playful in his joy; but he longed eagerly to hear her admit that his coming meant as much to her as it meant to him.\n\n'I suppose it must be,' she replied, 'but it's the climate too. This keen dry air and the sunshine bring all one's power out. There's something magical in it. You forget the years and feel young\u2014against the background of this old land a lifetime seems like an afternoon, merely. And the nights\u2014oh, Tom, the stars are too, too marvellous.' She spoke with a kind of exuberance that seemed new in her.\n\n'They must be,' he rejoined, as he gazed exultantly, 'for they're all in you, sun, air, and stars. You're a perfect revelation to me of what a woman\u2014'\n\n'Am I?' she interrupted, fluttering her whisk between her chair and his. 'But now, dear Tom, my headstrong boy, tell me how you are and all about yourself, your plans, and everything else in the world besides.' He told her what he could, answered all her questions, declared he and she were going to have the time of their lives, and behaved generally, as she told him, like a boy out of school. He admitted it. 'But I'm hungry, Lettice, awfully hungry.' He kept reminding her that he had been starving for two long months; surely she was starving too. He longed to hear her confess it with a sigh of happy relief. 'My arms and lips are hungry,' he went on incorrigibly, 'but I'm tired, too, from travelling. I feel like putting my head on your breast and going sound asleep.' 'My boy,' she said tenderly, 'you shall.' She responded instantly to that. 'You always were a baby and I'm here to take care of you.' He seized her hand and kissed it before she could draw it away. 'You must be careful, Tom. Everything has eyes in Egypt; the Arabs move like ghosts.' She glanced towards the windows. 'And the gossip is unbelievable.' She was quiet again now, and very gentle; it struck him how calm and sweet she was towards him, yet that there was a delightful happy excitement underneath that she only just controlled. He was aware of something wild in her just out of sight\u2014a kind of mental effervescence, almost intoxication she deliberately suppressed.\n\n'And so are you\u2014unbelievable,' he exclaimed impetuously; 'unbelievably beautiful. This is your country with a vengeance, Lettice. You're like an Egyptian queen\u2014a princess of the sun!'\n\nHe gazed critically at her till she lowered her eyes. He realised that, actually, they were not visible from the house and that the garden trees were thick about them; but he also received a faint impression that she did not want, did not intend, to allow quite the same intimacy as before. It just flashed across him with a hint of disappointment, then was gone. His boyish admiration, perhaps, annoyed her. He had felt for a second that her excuse of the windows and the gossip was not the entire truth. The merest shadow of a thought it was. He noticed her eyes fixed intently upon him. The same minute, then, she rose quietly and rustled over to his chair, kissed him on the cheek quickly, and sat down again. 'There!' she said playfully as though she had guessed his thoughts, 'I've done the awful thing; now you'll be reasonable, perhaps!' And whether or not she had divined his mood, she instantly dispelled it\u2014for the moment.\u2026\n\nThey talked about a hundred things, moving their chairs as the blazing sunshine found them out, till finally they sat with cushions on the steps of stone that led down to the river beneath the flaming bougainvill\u00e6a. He felt the strange touch of Egypt all about them, that touch of eternity that floats in the very air, a hint of something deathless and sublime that whispers in the sunshine. Already he was aware of the long fading stretch of years behind. He thought of Egypt as two vast hands that held him, one of tawny gold and one of turquoise blue\u2014the desert and the sky. In the hollow of those great hands, he lay with Lettice\u2014two tiny atoms of sand.\u2026\n\nHe watched her every movement, every gesture, noted the slightest inflection of her voice, was aware that five years at least had dropped from her, that her complexion had grown softer, a shade darker, too, from the sun; but, above all, that there was a new expression, a new light certainly, soft and brilliant, in her eyes. It seemed, briefly put, that she had blossomed somehow into a fuller expression of herself. An overflowing vitality, masked behind her calmness, betrayed itself in every word and glance and gesture. There was an exuberance he called joy, but it was, somehow, a new, an unexpected joy.\n\nShe was, of course, aware of his untiring scrutiny; and presently, in a lull, keeping her eyes on the river below them, she spoke of it. 'You find me a little changed, Tom, don't you? I warned you that Egypt had a certain effect on me. It enflames the heart and\u2014'\n\n'But a very wonderful effect,' he broke in with admiration. 'You're different in a way\u2014yes\u2014but you haven't changed\u2014not towards me, I mean.' He wanted to say a great deal more, but could not find the words; he divined that something had happened to her, in Warsaw probably, and he longed to question her about the 'other' who was her husband, but he could not, of course, allow himself to do so. An intuitive feeling came to him that the claim upon her of this other was more remote than formerly. His dread had certainly lessened. The claims upon her of this 'other' seemed no longer\u2014dangerous.\u2026 He wondered.\u2026 There was a certain confusion in his mind.\n\n'You got my letter at Alexandria?' she interrupted his reflections. He thanked her with enthusiasm, trying to remember what it said\u2014but without success. It struck him suddenly that there was very little in it after all, and he mentioned this with a reproachful smile. 'That's my restraint,' she replied. 'You always liked restraint. Besides, I wasn't sure it would reach you.' She laughed and blew a kiss towards him. She made a curious gesture he had never seen her make before. It seemed unlike her. More and more he registered a difference in her, as if side by side with the increase of spontaneous vitality there ran another mood, another aspect, almost another point of view. It was not towards him, yet it affected him. There seemed a certain new lightness, even irresponsibility in her; she was more worldly, more human, not more ordinary by any means, but less 'impersonal.' He remembered her singular words: 'It enflames the heart.' He wondered\u2014a little uneasily. There seemed a new touch of wonder about her that made him aware of something commonplace, almost inferior, in himself.\u2026\n\nAt the same time he felt another thing\u2014a breath of coldness touched him somewhere, though he could not trace its origin to anything she did or said. Was it perhaps in what she left unsaid, undone? He longed to hear her confess how she had missed him, how thrilled she was that he had come: but she did not say these passionately desired things, and when he teased her about it, she showed a slight impatience almost: 'Tom, you know I never talk like that. Anything sentimental I abhor. But I live it. Can't you see?' His ungenerous fancies vanished then at once; at a word, a smile, a glance of the expressive eyes, he instantly forgot all else.\n\n'But I am different in Egypt,' she warned him playfully again, half closing her eyelids as she said it. 'I wonder if you'll like me\u2014quite as well.'\n\n'More,' he replied ardently, 'a thousand times more. I feel it already. There's mischief in you,' he went on watching the half-closed eyes, 'a touch of magic too, but very human magic. I love it.' And then he whispered, 'I think you're more within my reach.'\n\n'Am I?' She looked bewitching, a being of light and air.\n\n'Everybody will fall in love with you at sight.' He laughed happily, aware of an enchantment that fascinated him more and more, but when he suddenly went over to her chair, she stopped him with decision. 'Don't, Tom, please don't. Tony'll be here any minute now. It would be unpleasant if he saw you behaving wildly like this! He wouldn't understand.'\n\nHe drew back. 'Oh, Tony's coming\u2014then I must be careful!' He laughed, but he was disappointed and he showed it: it was their first day together, and eager though he was to see his cousin, he felt it might well have been postponed a little. He said so.\n\n'One must be natural, Tom,' she told him in reply; 'it's always the best way. This isn't London or Montreux, you see, and\u2014'\n\n'Lettice, I understand,' he interrupted, a trifle ashamed of himself. 'You're quite right.' He tried to look pleased and satisfied, but the truth was he felt suddenly\u2014stupid. 'And we've got lots of time\u2014three months or more ahead of us, haven't we?' She gave him an expressive, tender look with which he had to be contented for the moment.\n\n'And by the by, how is old Tony, and who is his latest?' he enquired carelessly.\n\n'Very excited at your coming, Tom. You'll think him improved, I hope. I believe I'm his latest,' she added, tilting her chin with a delicious pretence at mischief. And the gesture again surprised him. It was new. He thought it foreign to her. There seemed a flavour of impatience, of audacity, almost of challenge in it.\n\n'Finding himself at last. That's good. Then you've been fishing to some purpose.'\n\n'Fishing?'\n\n'Rescuing floating faces.'\n\nShe pouted at him. 'I'm not a saint, Tom. You know I never was. Saints are very inspiring to read about, but you couldn't live with one\u2014 or love one. Could you, now?'\n\nHe gave an inward start she did not notice. The same instant he was aware that it was her happy excitement that made her talk in this exaggerated way. That was why it sounded so unnatural. He forgot it instantly.\n\nThey laughed and chatted as happily as two children\u2014Tom felt a boy again\u2014until Mrs. Haughstone appeared, marching down the river bank with an enormous white umbrella over her head, and the talk became general. Tom said he would go to his hotel and return for lunch; he wanted to telephone to Assouan. He asked where Tony was staying. 'But he knew I was at the Winter Palace,' he exclaimed when she mentioned the Savoy. 'He found some people there he wanted to avoid,' she explained, 'so moved down to the Savoy.'\n\nTom said he would do the same; it was much nearer to her house, for one thing: 'You'll keep him for lunch, won't you?' he said as he went off. 'I'll try,' she promised, 'but he's so busy with his numerous friends as usual that I can't be sure of him. He has more engagements here than in London,'\u2014whereupon Mrs. Haughstone added, 'Oh, he'll stay, Mr. Kelverdon. I'm sure he'll stay. We lunch at one o'clock, remember.'\n\nAnd in his room at the hotel Tom found a dozen signs of tenderness and care that increased his happiness; there were touches everywhere of her loving thought for his comfort and well-being\u2014flowers, his favourite soap, some cigarettes, one of her own deck-chairs, books, and even a big box of crystallised dates as though he was a baby or a little boy. It all touched him deeply; no other woman in the world could possibly have thought out such dear reminders, much less have carried them into effect. There was even a writing-pad and a penholder with the special nib he liked. He laughed. But her care for him in such trivial things was exquisite because it showed she claimed the right to do them.\n\nHis heart brimmed over as he saw them. It was impossible to give up any room, even a hotel room, into which she had put her sweet and mothering personality. He could do without Tony's presence and companionship, rather than resign a room she had thus prepared for him. He engaged it permanently therefore. Then, telephoning to Assouan, he decided to take the night train and see what had to be done there. It all sounded most satisfactory; he foresaw much free time ahead of him; occasional trips to the work would meet the case at present.\u2026\n\nHappier than ever, he returned to a lunch in the open air with her and Tony, and it was the gayest, merriest meal he had ever known. Mrs. Haughstone retired to sleep through the hotter hours of the afternoon, leaving the trio to amuse themselves in freedom. And though they never left the shady garden by the Nile, they amused themselves so well that tea was over and it was time for Tom to get ready for his train before he realised it. Tony and Madame Jaretzka drove him to his hotel, and afterwards to the station, sitting in the compartment with him until the train was actually moving. He watched them standing on the platform together, waving their hands. He waved his own. 'I'll be back to-morrow or the next day,' he cried. Emotions and sensations were somewhat tangled in him, but happiness certainly was uppermost.\n\n'Don't forget,' he heard Tony shout.\u2026 And her eyes were on his own until the trees on the platform hid her from his sight behind their long deep shadows." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 268", + "text": "The first excitement of arrival over, he drew breath, as it were, and looked about him. Egypt delighted and amazed him, surpassing his expectations. Its effect upon him was instantaneous and profound. The decisive note sounded at Alexandria continued in his ears. Egypt drew him in with golden, powerful arms. In every detail it was strange, yet with the strangeness of a predetermined welcome. It was not strange to him. The thrill of welcome made him feel at home. He had come back.\u2026\n\nHere, at Assouan, he was aware of Africa, mystic, half-monstrous continent, lying with its heat and wonder just beyond the horizon. He saw the Southern Cross, pitched low above the sandy rim.\u2026 Yet Africa had no call for him. It left him without a thrill, an uninviting, undesirable land. It was Egypt that made the intimate and personal appeal, as of a deeply loved and half-familiar place. It seemed to gather him in against its mighty heart. He lay in some niche of comforting warm sand against the ancient mass that claimed him, tucked in by the wonder and the mystery, protected, even mothered. It was an oddly stimulated imagination that supplied the picture\u2014and made him smile. He snuggled down deeper and deeper into this figurative warm bed of sand the ages had pre-ordained. He felt secure and sheltered\u2014as though the wonder and the mystery veiled something that menaced joy in him, something that concealed a notion of attack. Almost there seemed a whisper in the wind, a watchful and unclosing eye behind the dazzling sunshine: 'Surrender yourself to me, and I will care for you. I will protect you against\u2026 yourself.\u2026 Beware!'\n\nThis peculiar excitement in his blood was somehow precisely what he had expected; the wonder and the thrill were natural and right. He had known that Egypt would mesmerise his soul exactly in this way. He had, it seemed, anticipated both the exhilaration and the terror. He thought much about it all, and each time Egypt looked him in the face, he saw Lettice too. They were inseparably connected, as it were. He saw her brilliant eyes peering through the great tawny visage. Together they bade him pause and listen.\u2026 The wind brought up its faint, elusive whisper: 'Wait.\u2026 We have not done with you.\u2026 Wait and listen! Watch\u2026!'\n\nBefore his mind's eye the mighty land lay like a map, a blazing garden of intenser life that the desolation ill concealed. Europe seemed infinitely remote, the life he had been accustomed to unreal, of tepid interest, while the intimate appeal that Egypt made grew more insistent every hour of the day. It was Luxor, however, that called him peremptorily\u2014Luxor where all that was dearest to him in life now awaited his return. He yearned for Luxor; Thebes drew him like a living magnet. Lettice was in Thebes, and Thebes also seemed the heart of ancient Egypt, its centre and its climax. 'Come back to us,' whispered the sweet desert wind; 'we are waiting.\u2026' In Thebes seemed the focus of the strange Egyptian spell.\n\nAt all hours of the day and night, here in Assouan, it caught him, asking forever the great unanswerable questions. In the pauses of his strenuous work, in the watches of the night, when he heard the little owls and the weird barking of the prowling jackals; in the noontide heat, and in the cold glimmer of the quiet stars, he was never unconscious of its haunting presence, he was never beyond its influence. He was never quite alone.\u2026\n\nWhat did it mean? And why did this hint of danger, of pain, of loneliness lurk behind the exhilaration and the peace? Wherein lay the essence of the enchantment this singular Egyptian glamour laid upon his very soul?\n\nIn his laborious way, Tom worked at the disentanglement, but without much success. One curious thought, however, persisted with a strange enough significance. It rose, in a sense, unbidden. It was not his brain that discovered it. It just 'came.'\n\nFor he was thinking of other wonderful countries he had known. He remembered Japan and India, both surpassing Egypt in colour, sunshine, gorgeous pageantry, and certainly equalling it in historical association and the rest. Yet, for him, these old lands had no spell, no glamour comparable to what he now experienced. The mind contains them, understands them easily. They are continuous with their past. The traveller drops in and sees them as they always have been. They are still, so to speak, going on comfortably as before. There is no shock of dislocation. They have not died.\n\nWhereas Egypt has left the world; Egypt is dead; there is no link with present things. Both heart and mind are aware of this deep vacuum they vainly strive to fill. That ancient civilisation, both marvellous and somewhere monstrous, breaking with beauty, burning with aspiration, mysterious and vital\u2014all has vanished as completely as though it had not been. The prodigious ruins hint, but cannot utter. No reconstruction from tomb or temple can recall a great dream the world has lost. It is forgotten, swept away, there is no clue. Egypt has left the world.\u2026\n\nYet, as he thought about it in his uninspired way, it seemed that some part of him still beat in sympathy with the pulse of the forgotten dream. Egypt indeed was dead, yet sometimes\u2014she came back.\u2026 She came to revisit her soft stars and moon, her great temples and her mighty tombs. She stole back into the sunshine and the sand; her broken, ruined heart at Thebes received her. He saw her as a spirit, a persistent, living presence, a stupendous Ghost.\u2026 And the idea, having offered itself, remained. Both he and Lettice somehow were associated with it, and with this elusive notion of return. They, too, were entangled in the glamour and the spell. They, too, had stolen back as from some immemorial lost dream to revisit the scenes of an intenser yet forgotten life. And Thebes was its centre; the secretive and forbidding Theban Hills, with their desolate myriad sepulchres, its focus and its climax.\u2026\n\nAssouan detained him only a couple of days. He had capable lieutenants; there was delay, moreover, in the arrival of certain material; he could always be summoned quickly by telephone. He sent home his report and took the express train back to Luxor and to\u2014her.\n\nHe had been too occupied, too tired at night, to do more than write a fond, short letter, then go to sleep; the heat was considerable; he realised that he was in Africa; the scenery fascinated him, the enormous tawny desert, the cataracts of golden yellow sand, the magical old river. The wonder of Philae, with its Osirian shrine and island sanctuary, caught him as it has caught most other humans. After the sheer bulk of the pyramids and temples, Philae bursts into the heart with almost lyrical sweetness. But his heart was fast in Thebes, and not all the enchantment of this desert paradise could seduce him. Moreover, one detail he disliked: the ubiquitous earthenware tom-tom that sounded day and night\u2026 he heard its sullen beating in his dreams.\n\nYet of one thing he was ever chiefly conscious\u2014that he was impatient to be with Lettice, that his heart hungered without ceasing, that she meant more to him than ever. Her new beauty astonished him, there was a subtle charm in her presence he had not felt in London, her fresh spontaneous gaiety filled him with keen delight. And all this was his. His arrival gave her such joy that she could not even speak of it; yet he was the cause of it. It made him feel almost shy.\n\nHe received one characteristic letter from her. 'Come back as quickly as you can,' she wrote. 'Tony has gone down the river after his birds, and I feel lonely. Telegraph, and come to dinner or breakfast according to your train. I'll meet you if possible. You must come here for all your meals, as I'm sure the hotel food is poor and the drinking water unsafe. This is open house, remember, for you both.' And there was a delicious P.S. 'Mind you only drink filtered water, and avoid the hotel salads because the water hasn't been boiled.' He kissed the letter. He laughed. Her tender thought for him almost brought the tears into his eyes. It was the tenderness of his own mother who was dead.\n\nHe reached Luxor in the evening, and to his delight she was on the platform; long before the train stopped he recognised her figure, the wide sun-hat with the little roses, the white serge skirt and jacket of knitted yellow silk to keep the evening chill away. They drove straight to her house; the sun was down behind the rocky hills and the Nile lay in a dream of burnished gold; the little owls were calling; there was singing among the native boatmen on the water; they saw the fields of brilliant green with the sands beyond, and the keen air from the desert wafted down the street of what once was great hundred-gated Thebes. A strangely delicate perfume hung about the ancient city. Tom turned to look at the woman beside him in the narrow-seated carriage, and felt as if he were driving through a dream.\n\n'I can stay a week or ten days at least,' he said at last. 'Is old Tony back?'\n\nYes, he had just arrived and telephoned to ask if he might come to dinner. 'And look, Tom, you can just see the heads of the Colossi rising out of the haze,'\u2014she pointed quickly\u2014'I thought we would go and show them you to-morrow. We might all take our tea and eat it in the clover. You've seen nothing of Egypt yet.' She spoke rapidly, eagerly, full of her little plan.\n\n'All?' he repeated doubtfully.\n\n'Yes, wouldn't you like it?'\n\n'Oh, rather,' he said, wondering why he did not say another thing that rose for a moment in his mind.\n\n'You must see everything,' she went on spontaneously, 'and a dragoman's a bore. Tony's a far better guide. He knows old Egypt as well as he knows his old birds.' She laughed. 'It's too ridiculous\u2014his enthusiasm; he's been dying to explain it all to you as he did to me, and he does it exactly like a museum guide who is a scholar and a poet too. And he is a poet, you know. I'd never noticed it before.'\n\n'Splendid,' said Tom. He was thinking several things at once, among them that the perfumed air reminded him of something he could not quite recall. It seemed far away and yet familiar. 'I'm a rare listener too,' he added.\n\n'The King's Valley you really must do alone together,' she went on; 'I can't face it a second time\u2014the heat, the gloom of it\u2014it oppressed and frightened me a little. Those terrible grim hills\u2014they're full of death, those Theban hills.'\n\n'Tony took you?' he asked.\n\nShe nodded. 'We did the whole thing,' she added, 'every single Tomb. I was exhausted. I think we all were\u2014except Tony.' The eager look in her face had gone. Her voice betrayed a certain effort. A darkness floated over it, like the shadow of a passing cloud.\n\n'All of you!' he exclaimed, as though it were important. 'No bird-man ever feels tired.' He seemed to think a moment. There was a tiny pause. The carriage was close to the house now, driving up with a flourish, and Tony and Mrs. Haughstone, an incongruous couple, were visible standing against the luminous orange sky beside the river. Tom pointed to them with a chuckle. 'All right,' he exclaimed, with a gesture as though he came to a decision suddenly, 'it shall be the Colossi to-morrow. There are two of them, aren't there\u2014only two?'\n\n'Two, yes, the Twin Colossi they call them,' she replied, joining in his chuckle at the silhouetted figures in the sunset.\n\n'Two,' he repeated with emphasis, 'not three.' But either she did not notice or else she did not hear. She was leaning forward waving her hand to her other guests upon the bank.\n\nThere followed then the happiest week that Tom had ever known, for there was no incident to mar it, nor a single word or act that cast the slightest shadow. His dread of the 'other' who was to come apparently had left him, the faint uneasiness he had felt so often seemed gone. He even forgot to think about it. Lettice he had never seen so gay, so full of enterprise, so radiant. She sparkled as though she had recovered her girlhood suddenly. With Tony in particular she had incessant battles, and Tom listened to their conversations with amusement, for on no single subject were they able to agree, yet neither seemed to get the best of it. Tom felt unable to keep pace with their more nimble minds.\u2026\n\nTony was certainly improved in many ways, more serious than he had showed himself before, and extraordinarily full of entertaining knowledge into the bargain. Birds and the lore of ancient Egypt, it appeared, were merely two of his pet hobbies; and he talked in such amusing fashion that he kept Tom in roars of laughter, while stimulating Madame Jaretzka to vehement contradictions. They were much alone, and profited by it. The numerous engagements Lettice had mentioned gave no sign. Tony certainly was a brilliant companion as well as an instructive cicerone. There was more in him than Tom had divined before. His clever humour was a great asset in the longer expeditions. 'Tony, I'm tired and hot; please come and talk to me: I want refreshing,' was never addressed to Tom, for instance, whose good nature could not take the place of wit. Each of the three, as it were, supplied what the other lacked; it was not surprising they got on well together. Tom, however, though always happy provided Lettice was of the party, envied his cousin's fluid temperament and facile gifts\u2014even in the smallest things. Tony, for instance, would mimic Mrs. Haughstone's attitude of having done her hostess a kindness in coming out to Egypt: 'I couldn't do it again, dear Lettice, even for you'\u2014the way Tony said and acted it had a touch of inspiration.\n\nMrs. Haughstone herself, meanwhile, within the limits of her angular personality, Tom found also considerably improved. Egypt had changed her too. He forgave her much because she was afraid of the sun, so left them often alone. She showed unselfishness, too, even kindness, on more than one occasion. Tom was aware of a nicer side in her; in spite of her jealousy and criticism, she was genuinely careful of her hostess's reputation amid the scandal-loving atmosphere of Egyptian hotel life. It amused him to see how she arrogated to herself the place of chaperone, yet Tom saw true solicitude in it, the attitude of a woman who knew the world towards one who was too trustful. He figured her always holding up a warning finger, and Lettice always laughingly disregarding her advice.\n\nHer warnings to Lettice to be more circumspect were, at any rate, by no means always wrong. Though not particularly observant as a rule, he caught more than once the tail-end of conversations between them in which advice, evidently, had been proffered and laughed aside. But, since it did not concern him, he paid little attention, merely aware that there existed this difference of view. One such occasion, however, Tom had good cause to remember, because it gave him a piece of knowledge he had long desired to possess, yet had never felt within his rights to ask for. It merely gave details, however, of something he already knew.\n\nHe entered the room, coming straight from a morning's work at his own hotel, and found them engaged hammer and tongs upon some dispute regarding 'conduct.' Tony, who had been rowing Madame Jaretzka down the river, had made his escape. Madame Jaretzka effected hers as Tom came in, throwing him a look of comical relief across her shoulder. He was alone with the Irish cousin. 'After all, she is a married woman,' remarked Mrs. Haughstone, still somewhat indignant from the little battle.\n\nShe addressed the words to him as he was the only person within earshot. It seemed natural enough, he thought.\n\n'Yes,' said Tom politely. 'I suppose she is.'\n\nAnd it was then, quite unexpectedly, that the woman spoke to him as though he knew as much as she did. He ought, perhaps, to have stopped her, but the temptation was too great. He learned the facts concerning Warsaw and the\u2014husband. That the Prince had ill-treated her consistently during the first five years of their married life could certainly not justify her freedom, but that he had lost his reason incurably, no longer even recognised her, that her presence was discouraged by the doctors since it increased the violence of his attacks, and that his malady was hopeless and could end only in his death\u2014all this, while adding to the wonder of her faithful pilgrimages, did assuredly at the same time set her free.\u2026 The effect upon his mind may be imagined; it deepened his love, increased his admiration, for it explained the suffering in the face she had turned to sweetness, while also justifying her conduct towards himself. With a single blow, moreover, it killed the dread Tom had been haunted by so long\u2014that this was that 'other' who must one day take her from him, obedient to a bigger claim.\n\nThis knowledge, as though surreptitiously obtained, Tom locked within his breast until the day when she herself should choose to share it with him.\n\nHe remembered another little conversation too when, similarly, he disturbed them in discussion: this time it was Mrs. Haughstone who was called away.\n\n'Behaving badly, Lettice, is she? Scolding you again?'\n\n'Not at all. Only she sees the bad in every one and I see the good. She disapproves of Tony rather.'\n\n'Then she will be less often deceived than you,' he replied laughingly. The reference to Tony had escaped him; his slow mind was on the general proposition.\n\n'Perhaps. But you can only make people better by believing that they are better,' she went on with conviction\u2014when Mrs. Haughstone joined them and took up her parable again:\n\n'My cousin behaves like a child,' she said with amusing severity. 'She doesn't understand the world. But the world is hard upon grown-ups who behave like children. Lettice thinks everybody good. Her innocence gets her misjudged. And it's a pity.'\n\n'I'll keep an eye on her,' Tom said solemnly, 'and we'll begin this very afternoon.'\n\n'Do, Mr. Kelverdon, I'm glad to hear it.' And as she said it, he noticed another expression on her face as she glanced down the drive where Tony, dressed in grey flannels and singing to himself, was seen sauntering towards them. She wore an enigmatic smile by no means pleasant. It gave him a moment's twinge. He turned from her to Lettice by way of relief. She was waving her white-gloved hand, her eyes were shining, her little face was radiant\u2014and Tom's happiness came back upon him in a rising flood again as he watched her beauty.\u2026 He thought that Egypt was the most marvellous place he had ever known. Even Tony looked enchanted\u2014almost handsome. But Lettice looked divine. He felt more and more that the woman in her blossomed into life before his very eyes. His content was absolute." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 269", + "text": "With Tony as guide they took their fill of wonder. The principal expeditions were made alone, introducing Tom to the marvels of ancient Egypt which they already knew. On the sturdiest donkey Thebes could furnish, he raced his cousin across the burning sands, Madame Jaretzka following in a sand-cart, her blue veil streaming in the cool north wind. They played like children, defying the tide of mystery that this haunted land pours against the modern human soul, while yet the wonder and the mystery added to their enjoyment, deepening their happiness by contrast.\n\nThey ate their al fresco luncheons gaily, seated by hoary tombs that opened into the desolate hills; kings, priests, princesses, dead six thousand years, listening in caverns underground to their careless talk. Yet their gaiety had a hush in it, a significance behind the sentences; for even their lightest moments touched ever upon the borders of an awfulness that was sublime, and all that they said or did gained this hint of deeper value\u2014that it was set against a background of the infinite, the deathless.\n\nIt was impossible to forget that this was Egypt, the deposit of immemorial secrets, the store-house of stupendous vanished dreams.\n\n'There was a majesty, after all, about their strange old gods,' said Tony one afternoon as they emerged from the stifling darkness of a forgotten kingly tomb into the sunlight. 'They seem to thunder still\u2014below the ground\u2014subconsciously.' He was ever ready with the latest modern catchword. He flung himself down upon the sand, shaded from the glare by a recumbent column of granite exquisitely carved, then abandoned of the ages. 'They touch something in one even to-day\u2014something superb. Human worship hasn't changed so fundamentally after all.'\n\n'A sort of ghostly deathlessness,' agreed Lettice, making a bed of sand beside him. 'I think that's what one feels.'\n\nTony looked up. He glanced alertly at her. A question flashed a moment in his eyes, then passed unspoken.\n\n'Perhaps,' Tony went on in a more flippant tone, 'even the dullest has to acknowledge the sublime in their conceptions. Isis! Why, the very name is a poem in a single word. Anubis, Nepthys, Horus\u2014 there's poetry in them all. They seem to sing themselves into the heart, as Petrie might have said\u2014but didn't.'\n\n'The names are rather splendid,' Tom put in, as he unpacked the kettle and spirit-lamp for tea. 'One can't forget them either.'\n\nThere was a moment's silence, then Tony spoke again. He had lost his flippant tone. He addressed his remark to Lettice. Tom was aware that she was somehow waiting for it.\n\n'Their deathlessness! Yes, you're right.' He turned an instant to look at the colossal structure behind them, whence the imposing figures of a broken Pharaoh and his Queen stared to the east cross the shoulder of some granite Deity that had refused to crumble for three thousand years. 'Their deathlessness,' he repeated, lowering his voice, 'it's really startling.'\n\nHe looked about him. It was amazing how his little words, his gesture, his very atmosphere created a spontaneous expectancy\u2014as though Thoth might stride sublimely up across the sand, or even Ra himself come blazing with extended wings and awful disk of fire.\n\nTom felt the touch of the unearthly as he watched and listened. Lettice\u2014he was certain of it\u2014shivered. He moved nearer and spread a rug across her feet.\n\n'Don't, Tom, please! I'm hot enough already.' Her tone had a childish exasperation in it\u2014as though he interrupted some mood that gave her pleasure. She turned her eyes to Tony, but Tony was busily opening sandwich packets with hands that\u2014Tom thought\u2014shared one quality at least of the stone effigies they had been discussing\u2014 size. And he laughed. The spell was broken. They fell hungrily upon their desert meal.\u2026\n\nYet, it was odd how Tony had expressed precisely what Tom had himself been vaguely feeling, though unable to find the language for his fancy\u2014odd, too, that apparently all three of them had felt the same dim thing. No one among them was 'religious,' nor, strictly speaking, imaginative; poetical least of all in the regenerative, creative sense. Not one of the trio, that is, could have seized imaginatively the conception of an alien deity and made it live. Yet Tony's idle mood or idler words had done this very thing\u2014and all three acknowledged it in their various ways. The flavour of a remote familiarity was manifest in each one of them\u2014collectively as well.\n\nAnother time they sat by night in ruined Karnak, watching the silver moonlight bring out another world among the mighty pylons. It painted the empty and enormous aisles with crowding processions of lost ages. Speaking in whispers, they saw the stars peep down between the soaring forest of old stone; the cold desert wind brought with it a sadness, a mournful retrospect too vast to realise, the tragedy that such splendour left but a lifeless skeleton behind, a gigantic, soulless ruin. That such great prophecies remained unfulfilled was somewhere both terrible and melancholy. The immortal strength of these Egyptian stones conveyed a grandeur almost sinister. The huge dumb beauty seemed menacing, even ominous; they sat closer; they felt dwarfed uncomfortably, their selves reduced to insignificance, almost threatened. Even Tony sobered as they talked in lowered voices, seated in the shadow of the towering columns, their feet resting on the sand.\n\n'I'm sure we've sat here before just like this, the three of us,' he said in a lowered voice; 'it all seems like a dream to me.'\n\nMadame Jaretzka, who was between them, made no answer, and Tom, leaning forward, caught his cousin's eye beyond her.\u2026 The scene in the London theatre flashed across his mind. He felt very happy, very close to them both, extraordinarily at one with them, the woman he loved best in all the world, the man who was his greatest friend. He felt truth, not foolishness, in Tony's otherwise commonplace remarks that followed: 'I could swear I'd known you both before\u2014here in Egypt.'\n\nMadame Jaretzka moved a little, shuffling farther back so that she could lean against the great curved pillar. It brought them closer together still. She said no word, however.\n\n'There's certainly a curious sympathy between the three of us,' murmured Tom, who usually felt out of his depth in similar talks, leaving his companions to carry it further while he listened merely. 'It's hard to believe that we meet for the first time now.'\n\nHe sat close to her, fingering her gauzy veil that brushed his face. There was a pause, and then Madame Jaretzka said, turning to Tony: 'We met here first anyhow, didn't we? Two winters ago, before I met Tom\u2014'\n\nBut Tony said he meant something far older than that, much longer ago. 'You and Tom knew each other as children, you told me once. Tom and I were boys together too\u2026 but\u2026'\n\nHis voice died away in Tom's ears; her answers also were inaudible as she kept her head turned towards Tony: his thoughts, besides, were caught away a moment to the days in Montreux and in London.\u2026 He fell into a reverie that lasted possibly a minute, possibly several minutes. The conversation between them left him somehow out of it; he had little to contribute; they had an understanding, as it were, on certain subjects that neglected him. His mind accordingly left them. He followed his own thoughts dreamily\u2026 far away\u2026 past the deep black shadows and out into the soft blaze of moonlight that showered upon the distant Theban hills.\u2026 He remembered the curious emotions that had marked his entry into Egypt. He thought of a change in Lettice, at present still undefined. He wondered what it was about her now that lent to her gentle spirit a touch of authority, of worldly authority almost, that he dared not fail to recognise\u2014as though she had the right to it. The flavour of uneasiness stole back. It occurred to him suddenly that he felt no longer quite at home with her alone as of old. Some one watched him: some one watched them both.\u2026\n\nIt was as though for the first time he realised distance\u2014a new distance creeping in upon their relationship somewhere.\u2026\n\nA slight shiver brought him back. The wind came moaning down the monstrous, yawning aisles against them. The overpowering effect of so much grandeur had become intolerable. 'Ugh! I'm cold,' he exclaimed abruptly. 'I vote we move a bit. I think\u2014I'll move anyhow.'\n\nMadame Jaretzka turned to him with a definite start; she straightened herself against the huge sandstone column. The moonlight touched her; it clothed her in gold and silver, the gold of the sand, the silver of the moon. She looked ethereal, ghostly, a figure of air and distance. She seemed to belong to her surroundings\u2014another person somehow\u2014faintly Egyptian almost.\n\n'I thought you were asleep, Tom,' she said softly. She had been in the middle of an animated, though whispered, talk with Tony. She peered at him with a little smile that lifted her lip oddly.\n\n'I was far away somewhere,' he returned, peering at her closely. 'I forgot all about you both. I thought, for a moment, I was quite\u2014 alone.'\n\nHe saw her start again. A significance he hardly intended had crept into his tone. Her face moved back into the shadow quickly beside Tony.\n\nShe teased Tom for his want of manners, then fell to caring for his comfort. 'It's icy,' she said, 'and you're in flannels. The sudden chill of these Egyptian nights is really treacherous,' and she took the rug from her lap and put it round his shoulders. As she did so, the strange appearance he had noted increased about her.\n\nAnd Tom got up abruptly. 'No, Lettice dear, thank you; I think I'll move a bit.' He had said 'Lettice dear' without realising it, and before his cousin too. 'I'll take a turn and then come back for you. You stay here with Tony,' and he moved off somewhat briskly.\n\nThen, instantly, the other two rose up like one person, following him to where the carriage waited.\u2026\n\n'They're frightening rather, don't you think\u2014these ancient places?' she said presently, as they drove along past palms and the flat-topped houses of the felaheen. 'There's something watching and listening all the time.'\n\nTom made no answer. He felt suddenly unsure of something\u2014almost unsure of himself, it seemed.\n\n'One feels a bit lost,' he said slowly after a bit, 'and lonely. It's the size, I think.'\n\n'Perhaps,' she rejoined, peering at him with half-lowered eyelids, 'and the silence.' She broke off, then added, 'You can hear your thoughts too clearly.'\n\nTom was sitting back amid a bundle of rugs she had wrapped him in; Tony, beside her, on the front seat, seemed in a gentle doze. They drove the rest of the way in silence, dropping Tony first at the Savoy, then going on to Tom's hotel. She insisted, although her own house was in the opposite direction. 'And you're to take a hot whisky when you get into bed, remember, and don't get up to-morrow if you feel a chill.' She gave him orders for his health and comfort as though he were her son. Tom noticed it, told her she was divinely precious to him, and promised faithfully to obey.\n\n'What do you think about Tony?' he asked suddenly, when they had driven alone for several minutes. 'I mean, what impression does he make on you? How do you feel him?'\n\n'He's enjoying himself immensely with his numerous friends,' she replied at once. 'He grows on one rather. He's a dear, I think.' She looked at him, then turned away again. 'Don't you, Tom?'\n\n'Oh, rather. I've always thought so. I told you first long ago, didn't I?' He made no reference to the exaggeration about the friends. 'And I think it's wonderful how well we\u2014what a perfect trio we are.'\n\n'Yes, isn't it?'\n\nThey both became thoughtful then. There fell a pause between them, when Tom broke in abruptly once again:\n\n'But\u2014what do you feel? Because I think he's half in love with you, if you want to know.' He leaned over and whispered in her ear. The words tumbled out as though they were in a hurry. 'It pleases me immensely, Lettice; it makes me feel so proud of you and happy. It'll do him a world of good, too, if he loves a woman like you. You'll teach him something.' She smiled shyly and said, 'I wonder, Tom. Do you really think so? He certainly seems fond of me, but I hadn't thought quite that. You think everybody must fall in love with me.' She pushed him away with a gentle yet impatient pressure of her arm, indicating the Arab coachman with a nod of her head. 'Take care of him, Lettice: he's a dear fellow; don't let him break his heart.'\n\nTom began to flirt outrageously; his arm crept round her, he leaned over and stole a kiss\u2014and to his amazement she did not try to stop him. She did not seem to notice it. She sat very still\u2014a stone statue in the moonlight.\n\nThen, suddenly, he realised that she had not replied to his question. He promptly repeated it therefore. 'You put me off with what he feels, but I want to know what you feel,' he said with emphasis.\n\n'But, Tom, I'm not putting you off, as you call it\u2014with anything,' and there was a touch of annoyance in her tone and manner.\n\n'Tell me, Lettice; it interests me. You're such a puzzle, d'you know, out here.' His tone unconsciously grew more earnest as he spoke.\n\nMadame Jaretzka broke into a little laugh. 'You boy!' she exclaimed teasingly, 'you're trying to heighten his value so as to increase your own by contrast. The more people you can find in love with me, the more you'll be able to flatter yourself.'\n\nTom laughed with her, though he did not quite understand. He had never heard her say such a thing before. He accepted the cleverness she gave him credit for, however. 'Of course, and why shouldn't I?' And he was just going to put his original question in another form\u2014 had already begun it, in fact\u2014when she interrupted him, putting her hand playfully over his mouth for a second: 'I do think Tony's a happy entertaining sort of man,' she told him, 'even fascinating in a certain kind of way. He's very stimulating to me. And I feel\u2014don't you, Tom?'\u2014a slight change\u2014was it softness?\u2014crept into her tone\u2014 'a sort of beauty in him somewhere?'\n\n'Yes, p'raps I do,' he assented briefly; 'but, I say, Lettice darling, you mischievous Egyptian princess.'\n\n'Be quiet, Tom, and take your arm away. Here's the hotel in sight.' And yet, somehow, he fancied that she preferred his action to the talk.\n\n'Tell me this first,' he went on, obeying her peremptory tone: 'do you think it's true that we three have been together before like that\u2014as Tony said, I mean? It's a funny thing, but I swear it sounded true when he said it.' His tone was earnest again. 'It gave me the creeps a bit, and, d'you know, you looked so queer, so wonderful in the moonlight\u2014you looked un-English, foreign\u2014like one of those Egyptian figures come to life. That's what made me cold, I think.' His laughter died away. He was grave suddenly. He sighed a little and moved closer to her. 'That's\u2014what made me get up and leave you,' he added abruptly.\n\n'Oh, he's always saying that kind of thing,' she answered quickly, moving the rugs for him to get out as the carriage slowed up before the brilliantly lit hotel. She made no reference to his other words. 'There's a lot of poetry in Tony too\u2014out here.'\n\n'Said it before, has he?' exclaimed Tom with genuine astonishment. 'All three of us or\u2014or just you and him? Am I in the business too?' He was now bubbling over with laughter again for some reason; it all seemed comical, almost. Yet it was a sudden, an emotional laughter. His emotion\u2014his excitement surprised him even at the time.\n\n'All three of us\u2014I think,' she said, as he held her hand a moment, saying good-bye. 'Yes, all three of us, of course. Now good-night, you inquisitive and impertinent boy, and if you have to stay in bed to-morrow we'll come over and nurse you all day long.' He answered that he would certainly stay in bed in that case\u2014and watched her waving her hand over the back of the carriage as she drove away into the moonlight like a fading dream of stars and mystery and beauty. Then he took his telegrams and letters from the Arab porter with the face of expressionless bronze, and went up to bed.\n\n'What a strange and wonderful woman!' he thought as the lift rushed him up: 'out here she seems another being, and a thousand times more fascinating.' He felt almost that he would like to win her all over again from the beginning. 'She's different to what she was in England. Tony's different too. And so am I, I do believe!' he exclaimed in his bedroom, looking at his sunburned face in the glass a moment. 'We're all different!' He felt singularly happy, hilarious, stimulated\u2014a deep and curious excitement was in him. Above all there was high pride that she belonged to him so absolutely. But the analysis he had indulged in England vanished here. He forgot it all.\u2026 He was in Egypt with her\u2026 now.\n\nHe read his letters and telegrams, only half realising at first that they called him back to Assouan. 'What a bore,' he thought; 'I simply shan't go. A week's delay won't matter. I can telephone.'\n\nHe laid them down upon the table beside him and walked out on to his balcony. Responsibility seemed less in him. He felt a little reckless. His position was quite secure. He was his own master. He meant to enjoy himself.\u2026 But another, deeper voice was sounding in him too. He heard it, but at first refused to recognise it. It whispered. One word it whispered: 'Stay\u2026!'\n\nThere was no sleep in him; with an overcoat thrown across his shoulders he watched the calm Egyptian night, the soft army of the stars, the river gleaming in a broad band of silver. Hitherto Lettice had monopolised his energies; he had neglected Egypt, whose indecipherable meaning now came floating in upon him with a strange insistence. Lettice came with it too. The two beauties were indistinguishable.\u2026\n\nA flock of boats lay motionless, their black masts hanging in mid-air; all was still and silent, no voices, no footsteps, no movements anywhere. In the distance the desolate rocky hills rolled like a solid wave along the horizon. Gaunt and mysterious, they loomed upon the night. They were pierced by myriad tombs, those solemn hills; the stately dead lay there in hundreds\u2014he imagined them looking forth a moment like himself across the peace and silence of the moonlit desert. They focussed upon Thebes, upon the white hotel, upon a modern world they could not recognise\u2014upon his very windows. It seemed to him for a moment that their ancient eyes met his own across the sand, across the silvery river, and, as they met, a shadowy gleam of recognition passed between them and himself. At the same time he also saw the eyes he loved. They gazed through half-closed eyelids\u2026 the Eastern eyes of his early boyhood's dream. He remembered again the strange emotion of the day he first arrived in Egypt, weeks ago.\u2026\n\nAnd then he suddenly thought of Tony, and of Tony's careless remark as they sat in ruined Karnak together: 'I feel as if we three had all been here before.'\n\nWhy it returned to him just now he did not know: for some reason unexplained the phrase revived in him. Perhaps he felt an instinctive sympathy towards the poet's idea that he and she were lovers of such long standing, of such ancient lineage. It flattered his pride, while at the same time it disturbed him. A sense of vague disquiet grew stronger in him. In any case, he did not dismiss it and forget\u2014his natural way of treating fancies. 'Perhaps,' he murmured, 'the bodies she and I once occupied lie there now\u2014lie under the very stars their eyes\u2014our own\u2014once looked upon.'\n\nIt was strange the fancy took such root in him.\u2026 He stood a long time gazing at the vast, lonely necropolis among the mountains. There was an extraordinary stillness over that western bank, where the dead lay in their ancient tombs. The silence was eloquent, but the whole sky whispered to his soul. And again he felt that Egypt welcomed him; he was curiously at home here. It moved the deeps in him, brought him out; it changed him; it brought out Lettice too\u2014 brought out a certain power in her. She was more of a woman here, a woman of the world. She was more wilful, and more human. Values had subtly altered. Tony himself was altered.\u2026 Egypt affected them all three.\u2026\n\nThe vague uneasiness persisted. His mood changed a little, the excitement gradually subsided; thought shifted to a minor key, subdued by the beauty of the southern night. The world lay in a mysterious glow, the hush was exquisite. Yet there was expectancy: that glow, that hush were ready to burst into flame and language. They covered secrets. Something was watching him. He was dimly aware of a thousand old forgotten things.\u2026\n\nHe no longer thought, but felt. The calm, the peace, the silence laid soothing fingers against the running of his blood; the turbulent condition settled down. Then, through the quieting surface of his reverie, stole up a yet deeper mood that seemed evoked partly by the mysterious glamour of the scene, yet partly by his will to let it come. It had been a long time in him; he now let it up to breathe. It came, moreover, with ease, and quickly.\n\nFor a gentle sadness rose upon him, a sadness deeply hidden that he suddenly laid bare as of set deliberation. The recent play and laughter, above all his own excitement, had purposely concealed it\u2014 from others possibly, but certainly from himself. The excitement had been a mask assumed by something deeper in him he had wished\u2014and tried\u2014to hide. Gently it came at first, this sadness, then with increasing authority and speed. It rose about him like a cloud that hid the stars and dimmed the sinking moon. It spread a veil between him and the rocky cemetery on those mournful hills beyond the Nile. In a sense it seemed, indeed, to issue thence. It emanated from their silence and their ancient tombs. It sank into him. It was penetrating\u2014it was familiar\u2014it was deathless.\n\nBut it was no mood of common sadness; there lay no physical tinge in it, but rather a deep, unfathomable sadness of the spirit: an inner loneliness. From his inmost soul it issued outwards, meeting half-way some sense of similar loneliness that breathed towards him from these tragic Theban hills.\u2026\n\nAnd Tom, not understanding it, tried to shake himself free again; he called up cheerful things to balance it; he thought of his firm position in the world, of his proud partnership, of his security with her he loved, of his zest in life, of the happy prospect immediately in front of him. But, in spite of all, the mood crept upwards like a rising wave, swamping his best resistance, drowning all appeal to joy and confidence. He recognised an unwelcome revival of that earlier nightmare dread connected with his boyhood, things he had decided to forget, and had forgotten as he thought. The mood took him gravely, with the deepest melancholy he had ever known. It had begun so delicately; it became in a little while so determined, it threatened to overmaster him. He turned then and faced it, so to speak. He looked hard at it and asked of himself its meaning. Thought and emotion in him shuffled with their shadowy feet.\n\nAnd then he realised that, in germ at any rate, the mood had lain actually a long time in him, deeply concealed\u2014the surface excitement merely froth. He had hidden it from himself. It had been accumulating, gaining strength and impetus, pausing upon direction only. All the hours just spent at Karnak it had been there, drawing nearer to the surface; this very night, but a little while ago, during the drive home as well; before that even\u2014during all the talks and out-door meals and expeditions; he traced its existence suddenly, and with tiny darts of piercing, unintelligible pain, as far back as Alexandria and the day of his arrival. It seemed to justify the vivid emotions that had marked his entry into Egypt. It became sharply clear now\u2014this had been in him subconsciously since the moment when he read the little letter of welcome Lettice sent to meet him at the steamer, a letter he discovered afterwards was curiously empty. This disappointment, this underlying sadness he had kept hidden from himself: he now laid it bare and recognised it. He faced it. With a further flash he traced it finally to the journey in the Geneva train when he had read over the Warsaw and the Egyptian letters.\n\nAnd he felt startled: something at the roots of his life was trembling. He tried to think. But Tom was slow; he could feel, but he could not dissect and analyse. Introspection with him invariably darkened vision, led to distortion and bewilderment. The effort to examine closely confused him. Instead of dissipating the emotion he intensified it. The sense of loneliness grew inexplicably\u2014a great, deep loneliness, a loneliness of the spirit, a loneliness, moreover, that it seemed to him he had experienced before, though when, under what conditions, he could not anywhere remember.\n\nHis former happiness was gone, the false excitement with it. This freezing loneliness stole in and took their places. Its explanation lay hopelessly beyond him, though he felt sure it had to do with this haunted and mysterious land where he now found himself, and in a measure with her, even with Tony too.\u2026\n\nThe hint Egypt dropped into him upon his arrival was a true one\u2014he had slipped over an edge, slipped into something underneath, below him\u2014something past. But slipped with her. She had come back to fetch him. They had come back to fetch\u2014each other\u2026 through pain.\u2026\n\nAnd a shadow from those sombre Theban mountains crept, as it were, upon his life. He knew a sinking of the heart, a solemn, dark presentiment that murmured in his blood the syllables of 'tragedy.' To his complete amazement\u2014at first he refused to believe it indeed\u2014 there came a lump into his throat, as though tears must follow to relieve the strain; and a moment later there was moisture, a perceptible moisture, in his eyes. The sadness had so swiftly passed into foreboding, with a sense of menacing tragedy that oppressed him without cause or explanation. Joy and confidence collapsed before it like a paper platform beneath the pressure of a wind. His feet and hands were cold. He shivered.\u2026\n\nThen gradually, as he stood there watching the calm procession of the stars, he felt the ominous emotion draw down again, retreat. Deep down inside him whence it came, it retired into a kind of interior remoteness that lay beyond his reach. It was incredible and strange. The intensity had made it seem so real.\u2026 For, while it lasted, he had felt himself bereft, lonely beyond all telling, outcast, lost, forgotten, wrapped in a cold and desolate misery that frightened him past all belief. The hand that lit his pipe still trembled. But the mood had passed as mysteriously as it came. It left him curiously shaken in his heart. 'Perhaps this too,'\u2014 thought murmured from some depth in him he could neither control nor understand\u2014'perhaps this too is\u2014Egypt.'\n\nHe went to bed, emotion all smoothed out again, yet wondering a good deal at himself. For the odd upheaval was a new experience. Such an attack had never come to him before; he laughed at it, called it hysteria, and decided that its cause was physical; he persuaded himself that it had a very banal cause\u2014a chill, even a violent chill, incipient fever and over-fatigue at the back of it. He smiled at himself, while obeying the loving orders he had received, and brewing the comforting hot mixture with his spirit-lamp.\n\nThen drinking it, he looked round the room with satisfaction at the various evidences of precious motherly care. This mother-love restored his happiness by degrees. His more normal, stolid, unimaginative self climbed back into its place again\u2014yet with a touch of awkwardness and difficulty. Something in him was changed, or changing; he had surprised it in the act.\n\nThe nature of the change escaped him, however. It seemed, perhaps\u2014 this was the nearest he could get to it\u2014that something in him had weakened, some sense of security, of confidence, of self-complacency given way a little. Only it was not his certainty of the mother-love in her: that remained safe from all possible attack. A tinge of uneasiness still lay like a shadow on his mind\u2014until the fiery spirit chased it away, and a heavy sleep came over him that lasted without a break until he woke two hours after sunrise." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 270", + "text": "He sprang from his bed, went to the open window and thrust his head out into the crystal atmosphere. It was impossible to credit the afflicting nightmare of a few hours ago. Gold lay upon the world, and the face of Egypt wore her great Osirian look.\n\nIn the air was that tang of mountain-tops that stimulated like wine. Everything sparkled, the river blazed, the desert was a sheet of burnished bronze. Light, heat, and radiance pervaded the whole glad morning, bathing even his bare feet on the warm, soft carpet. It was good to be alive. How could he not feel happy and unafraid?\n\nThe change, perhaps, was sudden; it certainly was complete.\u2026 These vivid alternations seemed characteristic of his whole Egyptian winter. Another self thrust up, sank out of sight, then rose again. The confusion seemed almost due to a pair of competing selves, each gaining the upper hand in turn\u2014sometimes he lived both at once.\u2026 The uneasy mood, at any rate, had vanished with the darkness, for nothing sad or heavy-footed could endure amid this dancing exhilaration of the morning. Born of the brooding night and mournful hills, his recent pain was forgotten.\n\nHe dressed in flannels, and went his way to the house upon the Nile soon after nine o'clock; he certainly had no chill, there was only singing in his heart. The curious change in Lettice, it seemed, no longer troubled him. And, finding Tony already in the garden, they sat in the shade and smoked together while waiting for their hostess. Light-hearted as himself, Tony outlined various projects, to which the other readily assented. He persuaded himself easily, if recklessly; the work could wait. 'We simply must see it all together,' Tony urged. 'You can go back to Assouan next week. You'll find everything all right. Why hurry off?'\u2026 How his cousin had improved, Tom was thinking; his tact was perfect; he asked no awkward questions, showed no inquisitiveness. He just assumed that his companions had a right to be fond of each other, while taking his own inclusion in the collective friendship for granted as natural too.\n\nAnd when Lettice came out to join them, radiant in white, with her broad sun-hat and long blue veil and pretty gauntlet gloves, Tony explained with enthusiasm at the beauty of the picture: 'She's come into her own out here with a vengeance,' he declared. 'She ought to live in Egypt always. It suits her down to the ground.' Whereupon Tom, pleased by the spontaneous admiration, whispered proudly to himself, 'And she is mine\u2014 all mine!' Tony's praise seemed to double her value in his eyes at once. So Tony, too, was aware that she had changed; had noted the subtle alteration, the enhancement of her beauty, the soft Egyptian transformation!\n\n'You'd hardly take her for European, I swear\u2014at a distance\u2014now, would you?'\n\n'N-no,' Tom agreed, 'perhaps you wouldn't\u2014' at which moment precisely the subject of their remarks came up and threw her long blue veil across them both with the command that it was time to start.\n\nThe following days were one long dream of happiness and wonder spent between the sunlight and the stars. They were never weary of the beauty, the marvel, and the mystery of all they saw. The appeal of temple, tomb, and desert was so intimate\u2014it seemed instinctive. The burning sun, the scented winds, great sunsets and great dawns, these with the palms, the river, and the sand seemed a perfect frame about a perfect picture. They knew a kind of secret pleasure that was satisfying. Egypt harmonised all three of them. And if Tom did not notice the change increasing upon one of them, it was doubtless because he was too much involved in the general happiness to see it separate.\n\nThere came a temporary interruption, however, in due course\u2014his conscience pricked him. 'I really must take a run up to Assouan,' he decided. 'I've been rather neglecting things perhaps. A week at most will do it\u2014and then for another ten days' holiday again!'\n\nThe rhythm broke, as it were, with a certain suddenness. A rift came in the collective dream. He saw details again\u2014saw them separate. And the day before he left a trifling thing occurred that forced him to notice the growth of the change in Lettice. He focussed it. It startled him a little.\n\nThe others had not sought to change his judgment. But they planned an all-night bivouac in the desert for his return; they would sleep with blankets on the sand, cook their supper upon an open fire, and see the dawn. 'It's an exquisite experience,' said Tony. 'The stars fade quickly, there's a puff of warmer wind, and the sun comes up with a rush. It's marvellous. I'll get de Lorne and his sister to join us; he can tell stories round the fire, and perhaps she will get inspiration at last for her awful pictures.' Madame Jaretzka laughed. 'Then we must have Lady Sybil too,' she added; 'de Lorne may find courage to propose to her fortune at last.' Tom looked up at her with a momentary surprise. 'I declare, Lettice, you've grown quite worldly; that's a very cynical remark and point of view.'\n\nHe said it teasingly, but it was this innocent remark that served to focus the change in her he had been aware of vaguely for a long time. She was more worldly here, the ordinary 'woman' in her was more in evidence: and while he rather liked it\u2014it brought her more within his reach, as it were, yet without lowering her\u2014he felt also puzzled. Several times of late he had surprised this wholesome sign of sex in things she said and did, as though the woman-side, as he called it, was touched into activity at last. It added to her charm; at the same time it increased his burning desire to possess her absolutely for himself. What he felt as the impersonal\u2014almost spiritually elusive\u2014aspect of her he had first known, was certainly less in evidence. Another part of her was rising into view, if not already in the ascendant. The burning sun, the sensuous colour and beauty of the Egyptian climate, he had heard, could have this physiological effect. He wondered.\n\n'Sybil has been waiting for him to ask her ever since I came out,' he heard her saying with a gesture almost of impatience. 'Only he thinks he oughtn't to speak because he's poor. The result is she's getting bolder in proportion as he gets more shy.'\n\nThey all laughingly agreed to help matters to a climax when Tom, looking up suddenly, saw Madame Jaretzka smiling at his cousin with her eyelids half closed in the way he once disliked but now adored. He wondered suddenly how much Tony liked her; the improvement in him was assuredly due to her, he felt; Tony had less and less time now for his other friends. It occurred to him for a second that the change in her was greater than he quite knew, perhaps. He watched them together for some moments. It gave him a proud sense of pleasure to feel that her influence was making a man out of the medley of talent and irresponsibility that was Tony. Tony was learning at last to 'find himself.' It must be quite a new experience for him to know and like a woman of her sort, almost a discovery. But with a flash\u2014too swift and fleeting to be a definite thought\u2014Tom was conscious of another thing as well\u2014and for the first time: 'How she would put him in his place if he attempted any liberties with her!'\n\nThe same second he was ashamed that such a notion could ever have occurred to him: it was mean towards Tony, ungenerous towards her; and yet\u2014he was aware of a distinct emotion, a touch of personal triumph in it somewhere.\u2026\n\nHis thoughts were interrupted by a sudden tumult. There was a scurry; Tony flung a stone; Madame Jaretzka leaped upon a boulder, gathering her skirts together hurriedly, with a little scream. 'Kill it, Tony! Quick!' he heard her cry. And he saw then a very large and hairy spider crawling swiftly across the white paper that had wrapped their fruit and sandwiches, an ugly and distressing sight. 'It's a tarantula,' she screamed, half laughing, half alarmed, showing neat ankles as she balanced precariously upon her boulder, 'and it's coming at me. Quick, Tony, another stone,' as he missed it for the second time, 'it's making for me! Oh, kill it, kill it!' Tony, still aiming badly, assured her it was not a tarantula, nor poisonous even; he knew the species well. 'It's quite harmless,' he cried, 'there's no need to kill it. It's not in a house\u2014' And he flung another useless stone at it.\n\nWhat followed happened very quickly, in a second or two at most. Tom saw it with sharp surprise, a curious distaste, almost with a shudder. It certainly astonished him, and in another sense it shocked him. He had done nothing himself because Lettice, he thought, was half in fun, making a diversion out of nothing. Only much later did it occur to him that she had turned instinctively to Tony for protection, rather than to himself. What caused him the unpleasant sensation, however, was that she deliberately stepped down from her perch of safety and kicked at the advancing horror. Probably her intention was merely to drive it away\u2014she was certainly excited\u2014but the result was that she set her foot upon the creature and crushed its life out with an instant's pressure of her dainty boot. 'There!' she cried. 'Oh, but I didn't mean to kill it! How frightful of me!'\n\nHe heard Tony say, 'Bravo, you are a brave woman! Such creatures have no right to live!' as he hid the disfigured piece of paper beneath some stones\u2026 and, after a few minutes' chatter, the donkey-boys had packed up the luncheon things and they were all on their way towards the next object of their expedition, as though nothing had happened. The entire incident had occupied a moment and a half at most. Madame Jaretzka was laughing and talking as before, gay as a child and pretty as a dream.\n\nIn Tom's mind, however, it went on happening\u2014over and over again. He could not at once clean his mind of a disagreeable impression that remained. Another woman, any woman for that matter, might have done what she did without leaving a trace in him of anything but a certain admiration. It was a perfectly natural thing. The creature probably was poisonous as well as hideous; Tony merely said the contrary to calm her; moreover, he gave no help, and the insect was certainly making hurriedly towards her\u2014she had to save and protect herself. There was nothing in the incident beyond an ugliness, a passing second of distress; and yet\u2014 this was what remained with him\u2014it was not a natural thing for 'Lettice' to have done. Her intention, no doubt, was otherwise; there was miscalculation as well. She had only meant to frighten the scurrying creature. Yet at the same time the instinctive act issued, he felt, from another aspect, another part of her, a part that in London, in Montreux, lay unexpressed and unawakened. And it issued deliberately too. The exquisite tenderness that could not have put a fly to death was less in her. Egypt had changed her oddly. He was aware of something that made him shrink, though he did not use the phrase even to himself in thought; of something hard and almost cruel, though both adjectives lay far from clothing the faint sensation in his mind with definite words.\n\nTom watched her instinctively from that moment, unconsciously, that is; less with his eyes than with a little pair of glasses in his heart. There was certainly a change in her that he could not quite account for; the notion came to him once or twice that some influence was upon her, some power that was outside herself, modifying the sharp outlines of her first peculiar tenderness. These dear outlines blurred a trifle in the fierce sunlight of this desert air. He knew not how to express it even to himself, for it was too tenuous to seize in actual words.\n\nHe arrived at this partial conclusion anyhow: that he was aware of what he called the 'woman' in her, but a very human woman\u2014a certain wilfulness that was half wildness in it. There was a hint of the earthly, too, as opposed to spiritual, though in a sense that was wholesome, good, entirely right. Yet it was rather, perhaps, primitive than earthly in any vulgar meaning.\u2026 It had been absent or dormant hitherto. She needed it; something\u2014was it Egypt? was it sex?\u2014had stirred it into life. And its first expression\u2014surprising herself as much as it surprised him\u2014had an aspect of exaggeration almost.\n\nThe way she raced their donkeys in her sand-cart on the way home, by no means sparing the whip, was extremely human, but unless he had witnessed it he could never have pictured it as possible\u2014so utterly unlike the gentle, gracious, almost fastidious being he had known first. There was a hint of a darker, stronger colour in the pattern of her being now, partly of careless and abundant spirits, partly of this new primitive savagery. He noticed it more and more, it was both repellant and curiously attractive; yet, while he adored it in her, he also shrank. He detected a touch even of barbaric vanity, and this singular touch of the barbaric veiled the tenderness. He almost felt in her the power to inflict pain without flinching\u2014upon another.\u2026\n\nThe following day their time of gaiety was to end, awaiting only his return later from Assouan. Tony was going down to Cairo with some other friends. Tom would be away at least a week, and tried hard to persuade his cousin to come with him instead; but Tony had given his word, and could not change. Moreover, he was dining with his friends that very night, and must hurry off at once. He said his good-byes and went.\n\n'We're very rarely alone now, are we, Lettice?' Tom began abruptly the instant they were together. At the back of his mind rose something he did not understand that forced more significance into his tone than he intended. He felt very full\u2014an accumulation that must have expression. He blurted it out without reflection. 'Hardly once since I arrived two weeks ago, now I come to think of it.' He looked at her half playfully, half reproachfully. 'We're always three,' he added with the frank pathos of a boy. And while one part of him felt ashamed, another part urged him onward and was glad.\n\nBut the way she answered startled him.\n\n'Tom dear, don't scold me now. I am so tired.' It was the tone that took his breath away. For the first time in their acquaintance he noticed something like exasperation. 'I've been doing too much,' she went on more gently, smiling up into his face: 'I feel it. And that dreadful thing\u2014 that insect,'\u2014she shuddered a little\u2014'I never meant to hurt it. It's upset me. All this daily excitement, and the sun, and the jolting of that rickety sand-cart\u2014There, Tom, come and sit beside me a moment and let's talk before you go. I'm really too done up to drive you to the station to-night. You'll understand and forgive me, won't you?' Her voice was very soft. She was excited, too, talking at random rather. Her being seemed confused.\n\nHe took his place on a sturdy cushion at her feet, full of an exaggerated remorse. She looked pale, though her eyes were very sparkling. His heart condemned him. He said nothing about the 'dreadful incident.'\n\n'Lettice, dearest girl, I didn't mean anything. You have been doing far too much, and it's my fault; you've done it all for me\u2014to give me pleasure. It's been too wonderful.' He took her hand, while her other stroked his head. 'You must rest while I'm away.'\n\n'Yes,' she murmured, 'so as to be quite fresh when you come back. You won't be very long, will you?' He said he would risk his whole career to get back within the week. 'But, you know, I have neglected things rather\u2014up there.' He smiled fondly as he said 'up there.' She looked down tenderly into his eyes. 'And I have neglected you\u2014down here,' she said. 'That's what you mean, boy, isn't it?' And for the first time he did not like the old mode of address he once thought perfect. There seemed a flavour of pity in it. 'It would be nice to be alone sometimes, wouldn't it, Lettice? Quite alone, I mean,' he said with meaning.\n\n'We shall be, we will be\u2014later, Tom,' she whispered; 'quite alone together.' She paused, then added louder: 'The truth is, Egypt\u2014the air and climate\u2014stimulates me too much; it makes me restless. It excites me in a way I can't quite understand. I can't sit still and talk and be idle as one does in sleepy, solemn England.'\n\nHe was explaining with laborious logic that it was the dryness of the air that exhausted the nerves a bit, when she straightened herself up and took her hand away. 'Oh yes, Tom, I know, I know. That's perfectly true, and everybody says that\u2014I mean, everybody feels it, don't they?' She said it quickly, almost impatiently.\n\nThe old uneasiness flashed through him at that moment: it occurred to him, 'I'm dull, I'm boring her.' She was over-tired, he remembered then, her nerves on edge a trifle; it was natural enough; he would just kiss her and leave her to rest quietly. Yet a tiny sense of resentment, even of chill, crept over him. This impatience in her was new to him. He wondered an instant, then crushed back the words that tried to rise. He said goodbye, taking her in his arms for a moment with an overmastering impulse he could not check. Deep love and tenderness were in his heart and eyes. He yearned to protect and guide her\u2014keep her safe from harm. He felt his older years, his steadier strength; he was a man, she but a little gentle woman. And the elemental powers of life were very strong. With a sudden impulsive gesture, then, that surprised him, she returned the embrace with a kind of vehemence, pressing him closely to her heart and kissing him repeatedly on the cheeks and eyes.\n\nTom had expected her to resist and chide him. He was bewildered and delighted; he was also puzzled\u2014for the first second only. 'You darling woman,' he cried, forgetting utterly the suspicion, the uneasiness, the passing cold of a moment before. He marvelled that his heart could have let such fancies come to birth. Surely he had changed for such a thing to be possible at all!\u2026 Various impulses and emotions that clamoured in him he kept back with an effort. He was aware of clashing contradictions. Confidence was less in him. He felt curiously unsure of himself\u2014also, in a cruel, subtle way\u2014of her. There was a new thing in her\u2014rising. Was it against himself somewhere? The tangle in his heart and mind seemed inextricable: he wanted to seize her and carry her away, struggling but captured, and at the same time\u2014singular contradiction\u2014to entreat her humbly, though passionately, to love him more, and to show more that she loved him. Surely there were two selves in him.\n\nHe moved over to the door. 'Cataract Hotel, remember, finds me.' He stood still, looking back at her.\n\nShe smiled, repeating the words after him. 'And Lettice, you will write?' She blew a kiss to him by way of answer. Then, charged to the brim with a thousand things he ached to say, yet would not, almost dared not say, he added playfully\u2014a child must have noticed that his voice was too deep for banter and his breath came oddly:\n\n'And mind you don't let Tony lose his head too much. He's pretty far gone, you know, already.'\n\nThe same instant he could have bitten his tongue off to recall the words. Somewhere he had been untrue to himself, almost betrayed himself.\n\nShe rose suddenly from her sofa and came quickly towards him across the floor; he felt his heart sink a moment, then start hammering irregularly against his ribs. Something frightened him. For he caught in her face an expression he could not understand\u2014the struggle of many strong emotions\u2014anxiety and passion, fear and love; the eyes were shining, though the lids remained half closed; she made a curious gesture: she moved swiftly. He braced himself as against attack. He shrank. Her power over him was greater than he knew.\n\nFor he saw her in that instant as another person, another woman, foreign\u2014 almost Eastern; the barbaric primitive thing flamed out of her, but with something regal, queenly, added to it; she looked Egyptian; the Princess, as he called her sometimes, had come to life. And the same moment in himself this curious sense of helplessness appeared\u2014he raged against it inwardly\u2014as though he were in her power somehow, as though her little foot could crush him\u2014too\u2014into the yellow sand.\u2026\n\nA spasm of acute and aching pain shot through him; he winced; he wanted to turn and fly, yet was held rooted to the floor. He could not escape. It had to be. For oddly, mysteriously, he felt pain in her quick approach: she was coming to do him injury and hurt. The incident of the afternoon flashed again upon his mind\u2014with the idea of cruelty in it somewhere, but a deep surge of strange emotion that flung wild sentences into his mind at the same instant. He tightly shut his lips, lest a hundred thoughts that had lain in him of late might burst into words he would later regret intensely. He must not avoid, delay, an inevitable thing. To resist was somehow to be untrue to the deepest in him\u2014to something painful he deserved, and, paradoxically, desired too. What could it all mean?\u2026 He shivered as he waited\u2014watching her come nearer.\n\nShe reached his side and her arms were stretched towards him. To his amazement she folded him in closely against her breast and held him as though she never could let him go again. He stood there helpless; the revulsion of feeling took his strength away. He heard her breathless, yearning whisper as she kissed him: 'My Tom, my precious boy, I couldn't see a hair of your dear head injured\u2014I couldn't see you hurt! Take care of yourself and come back quickly\u2014do, do take care of yourself. I shall count the days\u2014' she broke off, held his face between her hands, gazed into his astonished eyes, and kissed him with the utmost tenderness again, the tenderness of a mother who is forced to be separated from the boy she loves better than herself.\n\nTom stood there trembling before her, and no speech came to help him. The thing passed like a dream; the dread, the emotion left him; the nightmare touch was gone. Her self-betrayal his simple nature did not at once discern. He felt only her divine tenderness pour over him. A spring of joy rose bubbling in him that no words could tell. Also he felt afraid. But the fear was no longer for himself. In some perplexing, singular way, he felt afraid for her.\n\nThen, as a sentence came struggling to his lips, a step was heard upon the landing. There was time to resume conventional attitudes of good-bye when Mrs. Haughstone appeared on the staircase leading to the hall. Tom said his farewells hurriedly to both of them, making his escape as naturally as possible. 'I've just time to pack and catch the train,' he shouted, and was gone.\n\nAnd what remained with him afterwards of the curious little scene was the absolute joy and confidence those last tender embraces had restored to him, side by side with another thing that he was equally sure about, yet refused to dwell upon because he dared not\u2014yet. For, as she came across the floor of the sunny room towards him, he realised two things in her, two persons almost. Another influence, he was convinced, worked in her strangely\u2014some older, long-buried presentment of her interpenetrating, even piercing through, the modern self. She was divided against herself in some extraordinary fashion, one half struggling fiercely, yet struggling bravely, honestly, against the other. And the relationship between himself and her, though the evidence was so negligibly slight as yet, he knew had definitely changed.\u2026\n\nIt came to him as the Mother and the Woman in her. The Mother belonged unchangeably to him: the Woman, he felt, was troubled, tempted, and afraid." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 271", + "text": "Afterwards, months, years afterwards, looking back upon these strange weeks of his brief Egyptian winter, Tom marvelled at himself; he looked back, as it were, upon the thoughts and emotions of another man he could not recognise. This illusion involved his two companions also, Madame Jaretzka supremely, Tony slightly less, all three, however, together affected, all three changed.\n\nAs regards himself, however, there was always a part, it seemed, that remained unaffected. It looked on, it compared, it judged. He called it the Onlooker.\u2026\n\nExplanation lay beyond his reach; he termed it enchantment: and there he left it. Insight seemed only to operate with regard to himself: of their feelings, thoughts, or point of view he was uninformed. They offered no explanations, and he sought none.\u2026 The man honest with himself is more rare than a January swallow. He alone is honest who can state a case without that bias of exaggeration favourable to himself which is almost lying. Try as he may, his statement leans one way or the other. The spirit-level of absolute honesty is hard to find, and, of course, Tom was no exception.\u2026 Occasionally he recalled the 'spiral theory,' which once, at least, had been in the minds of all three\u2014the notion that their three souls lived over a former episode together, but from a higher point, and with the bird's-eye view which brought in understanding. But if this offered a hint of that winter's inner spiritual structure, Tom certainly did not claim it as a true solution. The whole thing began so stealthily, and progressed so slowly yet so surely.\u2026\n\nHe could only marvel at himself: he was so singularly changed\u2014imagination so active, judgment alternately so positive and so faltering, every emotion so amazingly intensified. All the weakest and least admirable in him, the very dregs, seemed dragged up side by side with what was noblest, highest, and flung together in the rush and smother of the breaking Wave.\n\nEvents, in the dramatic meaning of the word, and outwardly, there were few perhaps, and those few meagre and unsensational. No one was shot or drowned, no one was hanged and quartered; the police were not called in; to outsiders there seemed no air or attitude of drama anywhere; but in three human hearts, thrown together as by chance currents of normal life, there came to pass changes of a spiritual kind, conflict between essential, primitive forces of the soul, battlings, temptings, aspirations, sacrifice, that are the truest drama always, because the inmost being, whether glorified or degraded, is thereby\u2014changed.\n\nIn this fierce intensification of his own being, and in the events experienced, Tom recognised the rising of his childhood Wave towards the breaking point. The early premonition that had seemed causeless to his learned father, that stirred in his mother the deep instinct to protect, and that ever, more or less, hung poised above the horizon of his passing years, had its origin in the bed-rock of his nature. It was associated with memory and instinct; the native tendencies and forces of his being had dramatised their inevitable fulfilment in a dream. He recognised intuitively what was coming\u2014and he welcomed it. The body shrank from pain; the soul held out her hands to it.\u2026\n\nThus, looking back, he saw it mapped below him from a higher curve in life's ascending spiral. In the glare of a drenching sunshine that seemed hauntingly familiar, in the stupendous blaze of Egypt that knew and favoured it, the action lay spread out: but in darkness, too, an oppressive, suffocating darkness as of the grave, as of the bottom of the sea. The map was streaked with this alternate light and gloom of elemental kind. It passed swiftly, he went swiftly with it. A few short crowded weeks of the intensest pain and happiness he had ever known,\u2014and the Wave, its crest reflected in its origin, fell with a drowning crash. He merged into his background, yet he did not drown: in due course he again\u2014emerged.\n\nThe sense of rushing that accompanied it all was in himself apparently: heightened by the contrast of the divine stillness which is Egypt\u2014the golden, hanging days, the nights of cool, soft moonlight, the sighing winds with perfume in their breath, the mournful palms that fringed the peaceful river, the calm of multitudinous stars. The grim Theban hills looked on; the ruined Temples watched and knew; there were listening ears within a thousand tombs.\u2026 And there was the Desert\u2014the endless emptiness where everything had already happened, the place where, therefore, everything could happen again without affronting time and space\u2014the Desert seemed the infinite background whence the Wave tossed up three little specks of passionate human action and reaction. It was the 'sea,' a sea of dust. Yet out of the dust wild roses blossomed eventually with a sweetness of beauty unknown to any cultivated gardens.\u2026\n\nAnd while he and his two companions made their moves upon this ancient chessboard of half-forgotten, half-remembered life, all natural things as well seemed raised to their most significant expression, sharing the joy and sadness, the beauty and the terror of his own experience. For the very scenery borrowed of his intensity, the familiar details urged a fraction beyond the normal, as though any moment they must break down into their elemental and essential nakedness. The pungent odour of the universal sand, the dust, the minute golden particles suspended in the flaming air, the marvellous dawns and sunsets, the mighty, awful pylons, and the heat\u2014all these contributed their quota of wonder and mystery to what happened. Egypt inspired it, and was satisfied.\n\nThe sediment of his nature was drawn up, the rubbish floated before his eyes, he saw himself through the curtains of suspended dust\u2014until the flood, retiring, left him high upon the shore, no longer shuffling with his earthly, physical feet.\n\nIn the train to Assouan, Tom still felt the clinging arms about his neck, still heard the loving voice, eager with tenderness for his welfare and his quick return. She needed him: he was everything to her. He knew it, oh he was sure of it. He thought of his work, and knew some slight anxiety that he had neglected it. He would devote all his energies to the interests of his firm: there should be no shirking anywhere; his ten days' holiday was over. His mind fixed itself deliberately, though not too easily, on this alone.\n\nHe knew his own capacity, however, and that by concentration he could accomplish in a short time what other men might ask weeks to complete. Provided all was going well, he saw no reason why he could not be free again in a week at most. He knew quite well his value to the firm, but he knew also that he must continue to justify it. He was complacent, but, he hoped, not carelessly complacent. Tom felt very sure of himself again.\n\nTo his great relief he found things running smoothly. He examined every detail, interviewed all and sundry, supervised, decided, gave instructions. There was a letter from the London office conveying the formal satisfaction of the Board with results so far, praising especially certain reductions in cost he had judiciously effected; another private letter from the older partner referred confidently to greater profits than they had dared to anticipate; also there was a brief note from Sir William, the Chairman, now at Salonica, saying he might run over a little later and see for himself how the work was getting along.\n\nTom was supremely happy with it all. There was really very little for him to do; his engineers were highly competent; they could summon him at a day's notice from Luxor if anything went wrong. 'But there's no sign of difficulty, sir,' was their verdict; 'everything's going like clockwork; the men working splendidly; it's only a matter of time.'\n\nIt was the evening of the second day that Tom decided to go back to Luxor. He was eager for the promised bivouac they had arranged together. He had written once to say that all was well, but no word had yet come from her; she was resting, he was glad to think: Tony was away at Cairo with his friends; there might be a letter for him in the morning, but that could be sent after him. Joy and impatience urged him. He chuckled happily over his boyish plan; he would not announce himself; he would surprise her. He caught a train that would get him in for dinner.\n\nAnd during his journey of six hours he rehearsed this pleasure of surprising her. She was lonely without him. He visualised her delight and happiness. He would creep up to the window, to the edge of the verandah where she sat reading, Mrs. Haughstone knitting in a chair opposite. He would call her name 'Lettice.\u2026' Her eyes would lighten, her manner change. That new spontaneous joy would show itself.\u2026\n\nThe sun was setting when the train got in, but by the time he had changed into flannels at his hotel the short dusk was falling. The entire western sky was gold and crimson, the air was sharp, the light dry desert wind blew shrewdly down the street. Behind the eastern hills rose a huge full moon, still pale with daylight, peering wisely over the enormous spread of luminous desert.\u2026 He drove to her house, leaving the arabyieh at the gates. He walked quickly up the drive. The heavy foliage covered him with shadows, and he easily reached the verandah unobserved; no one seemed about; there was no sound of voices; the thick creepers up the wooden pillars screened him admirably. There was a movement of a chair, his heart began to thump, he climbed up softly, and at the other end of the verandah saw\u2014Mrs. Haughstone knitting. But there was no sign of Lettice\u2014and the blood rushed from his heart.\n\nHe had not been noticed, but his game was spoilt. He came round to the front steps and wished her politely a good-evening. Her surprise once over and explanations made, she asked him, cordially enough, to stay to dinner. 'Lettice, I know, would like it. You must be tired out. She did not expect you back so soon; but she would never forgive me if I let you go after them.'\n\nTom heard the words as in a dream, and answered also in a dream\u2014a dream of astonishment, vexation, disappointment, none of them concealed. His uneasiness returned in an acute, intensified form. For he learned that they were bivouacking on the Nile to see the sunrise. Tony had, after all, not gone to Cairo; de Lorne and Lady Sybil accompanied them. It was the picnic they had planned together against his return. 'Lettice wrote,' Mrs. Haughstone mentioned, 'but the letter must have missed you. I warned her you'd be disappointed\u2014if you knew.'\n\n'So Tony didn't go to Cairo after all?' Tom asked again. His voice sounded thin, less volume in it than usual. That 'if you knew' dropped something of sudden anguish in his heart.\n\n'His friends put him off at the last moment\u2014illness, he said, or something.' Mrs. Haughstone repeated the invitation to dine and make himself at home. 'I'm positive my cousin would like you to,' she added with a certain emphasis.\n\nTom thanked her. He had the impression there was something on her mind. 'I think I'll go after them,' he repeated, 'if you'll tell me exactly where they've gone.' He stammered a little. 'It would be rather a lark, I thought, to surprise them.' What foolish, what inadequate words!\n\n'Just as you like, of course. But I'm sure she's quite safe,' was the bland reply. 'Mr. Winslowe will look after her.'\n\n'Oh, rather,' replied Tom; 'but it would be good fun\u2014rather a joke, you know\u2014to creep upon them unawares,'\u2014and then was surprised and sorry that he said it. 'Have they gone very far?' he asked, fumbling for his cigarettes.\n\nHe learned that they had left after luncheon, taking with them all necessary paraphernalia for the night. There were feelings in him that he could not understand quite as he heard it. But only one thing was clear to him\u2014he wished to be quickly, instantly, where Lettice was. It was comprehensible. Mrs. Haughstone understood and helped him. 'I'll send Mohammed to get you a boatman, as you seem quite determined,' she said, ringing the bell: 'you can get there in an hour's ride. I couldn't go,' she added, 'I really felt too tired. Mr. Winslowe was here for lunch, and he exhausted us all with laughing so that I felt I'd had enough. Besides, the sun\u2014'\n\n'They all lunched here too?' asked Tom.\n\n'Mr. Winslowe only,' she mentioned, 'but he was a host in himself. It quite exhausted me\u2014'\n\n'Tony can be frightfully amusing, can't he, when he likes?' said Tom. Her repetition of 'exhausted' annoyed him furiously for some reason.\n\nHe saw her hesitate then: she began to speak, but stopped herself; there was a curious expression in her face, almost of anxiety, he fancied. He felt the kindness in her. She was distressed. And an impulse, whence he knew not, rose in him to make her talk, but before he could find a suitable way of beginning, she said with a kind of relief in her tone and manner: 'I'm glad you're back again, Mr. Kelverdon.' She looked significantly at him. 'Your influence is so steadying, if you don't mind my saying so.' She gave an awkward little laugh, half of apology, half of shyness, or of what passed with her for shyness. 'This climate\u2014upsets some of us. It does something to the blood, I'm sure\u2014'\n\n'You feel anxious about\u2014anything in particular?' Tom asked, with a sinking heart. At any other time he would have laughed.\n\nMrs. Haughstone shrugged her shoulders and sighed. She spoke with an effort apparently, as though doubtful how much she ought to say. 'My cousin, after all, is\u2014in a sense, at least\u2014a married woman,' was the reply, while Tom remembered that she had said the same thing once before. 'And all men are not as careful for her reputation, perhaps, as you are.' She mentioned the names of various people in Luxor, and left the impression that there was considerable gossip in the air. Tom disliked exceedingly the things she said and the way she said them, but felt unable to prevent her. He was angry with himself for listening, yet felt it beyond him to change the conversation. He both longed to hear every word, and at the same time dreaded it unspeakably. If only the boat would give him quickly an excuse.\u2026 He therefore heard her to the end concerning the unwisdom of Madame Jaretzka in her careless refusal to be more circumspect, even\u2014Mrs. Haughstone feared\u2014to the point of compromising herself. With whom? Why, with Mr. Winslowe, of course. Hadn't he noticed it? No! Well, of course there was no harm in it, but it was a mistake, she felt, to be seen about always with the same man. He called, too, at such unusual hours.\u2026\n\nAnd each word she uttered seemed to Tom exactly what he had expected her to utter, entering his mind as a keenly poisoned shaft. Something already prepared in him leaped swiftly to understanding; only too well he grasped her meaning. The excitement in him passed into a feverishness that was painful.\n\nFor a long time he merely stood and listened, gazing across the river but seeing nothing. He said no word. His impatience was difficult to conceal, yet he concealed it.\n\n'Couldn't you give her a hint perhaps?' continued the other, as they waited on the steps together, watching the preparations for the boat below. She spoke with an assumed carelessness that was really a disguised emphasis. 'She would take it from you, I'm sure. She means no harm; there is no harm. We all know that. She told me herself it was only a boy and girl affair. Still\u2014'\n\n'She said that?' asked Tom. His tone was calm, even to indifference, but his eyes, had she looked round, must certainly have betrayed him. Luckily she kept her gaze upon the moon-lit river. She drew her knitted shawl more closely round her. The cold air from the desert touched them both. Tom shivered.\n\n'Oh, before you came out, that was,' she mentioned; and each word was a separate stab in the centre of his heart. After a pause she went on: 'So you might say a little word to be more careful, if you saw your way. Mr. Winslowe, you see, is a poor guide just now: he has so completely lost his head. He's very impressionable\u2014and very selfish\u2014I think.'\n\nTom was aware that he braced himself. Various emotions clashed within him. He knew a dozen different pains, all equally piercing. It angered him, besides, to hear Lettice spoken of in this slighting manner, for the inference was unavoidable. But there hid below his anger a deep, dull bitterness that tried angrily to raise its head. Something very ugly, very fierce moved with it. He crushed it back.\u2026 A feeling of hot shame flamed to his cheeks.\n\n'I should feel it an impertinence, Mrs. Haughstone,' he stammered at length, yet confident that he concealed his inner turmoil. 'Your cousin\u2014 I mean, all that she does is quite beyond reproach.'\n\nHer answer staggered him like a blow between the eyes.\n\n'Mr. Kelverdon\u2014on the contrary. My cousin doesn't realise quite, I'm sure\u2014that she may cause him suffering. She won't listen to me, but you could do it. You touch the mother in her.'\n\nIt was a merciless, keen shaft\u2014these last six words. The sudden truth of them turned him into ice. He touched only the mother in her: the woman\u2014 but the thought plunged out of sight, smothered instantly as by a granite slab he set upon it. The actual thought was smothered, yes, but the feeling struggled horribly for breath; and another inference, more deadly than the first, stole with a freezing touch upon his soul.\n\nHe turned round quietly and looked at his companion. 'By Jove,' he said, with a laugh he believed was admirably natural, 'I believe you're right. I'll give her a little hint\u2014for Tony's sake.' He moved down the steps. 'Tony is so\u2014I mean he so easily loses his head. It's quite absurd.'\n\nBut Mrs. Haughstone did not laugh. 'Think it over,' she rejoined. 'You have excellent judgment. You may prevent a little disaster.' She smiled and shook a warning finger. And Tom, feigning amusement as best he might, murmured something in agreement and raised his helmet with a playful flourish.\n\nMohammed, soft of voice and moving like a shadow, called that the boat was ready, and Tom prepared to go. Mrs. Haughstone accompanied him half-way down the steps.\n\n'You won't startle them, will you, Mr. Kelverdon?' she said. 'Lettice, you know, is rather easily frightened.' And she laughed a little. 'It's Egypt\u2014the dry air\u2014one's nerves\u2014'\n\nTom was already in the boat, where the Arab stood waiting in the moonlight like a ghost.\n\n'Of course not,' he called up to her through the still air. But, none the less, he meant to surprise her if he could. Only in his thought the pronoun insisted, somehow, on the plural form." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 272", + "text": "The boat swung out into mid-stream. Behind him the figure of Mrs. Haughstone faded away against the bougainvill\u00e6a on the wall; in front, Mohammed's head and shoulders merged with the opposite bank; beyond, the spectral palms and the shadowy fields of clover slipped into the great body of the moon-fed desert. The desert itself sank down into a hollow that seemed to fling those dark Theban hills upwards\u2014towards the stars.\n\nEverything, as it were, went into its background. Everything, animate and inanimate, rose out of a common ultimate\u2014the Sea. Yet for a moment only. There was this sense of preliminary withdrawal backwards, as for a leap that was to come.\u2026\n\nHe, too, felt merged with his own background. In his soul he knew the trouble and tumult of the Wave\u2014gathering for a surging rise to follow.\u2026\n\nFor some minutes the sense of his own identity passed from him, and he wondered who he was. 'Who am I?' would have been a quite natural question. 'Let me see; I'm Kelverdon, Tom Kelverdon.' Of course! Yet he felt that he was another person too. He lost his grip upon his normal modern self a moment, lost hold of the steady, confident personality that was familiar.\u2026 The voice of Mohammed broke the singular spell. 'Shicago, vair' good donkey. Yis, bes' donkey in Luxor\u2014' and Tom remembered that he had a ride of an hour or so before he could reach the Temple of Deir El-Bahri where his friends were bivouacking. He tipped Mohammed as he landed, mounted 'Chicago,' and started off impatiently, then ran against little Mohammed coming back for a forgotten\u2014kettle! He laughed. Every third Arab seemed called Mohammed. But he learned exactly where the party was. He sent his own donkey-boy home, and rode on alone across the moon-lit plain.\n\nThe wonder of the exquisite night took hold of him, searching his heart beyond all power of language\u2014the strange Egyptian beauty. The ancient wilderness, so calm beneath the stars; the mournful hills that leaped to touch the smoking moon; the perfumed air, the deep old river\u2014each, and all together, exhaled their innermost, essential magic. Over every separate boulder spilt the flood of silver. There were troops of shadows. Among these shadows, beyond the boulders, Isis herself, it seemed, went by with audible footfall on the sand, secretly guiding his advance; Horus, dignified and solemn, with hawk-wings hovering, and fierce, deathless eyes\u2014Horus, too, watched him lest he stumble.\u2026\n\nOn all sides he seemed aware of the powerful Egyptian gods, their protective help, their familiar guidance. The deeps within him opened. He had done this thing before.\u2026 Even the little details brought the same lost message back to him, as the hoofs of his donkey shuffled through the sand or struck a loose stone aside with metallic clatter. He heard the lizards whistling.\u2026\n\nThere were other vaster emblems too, quite close. To the south, a little, the shoulders of the Colossi domed awfully above the flat expanse, and soon he passed the Ramesseum, the moon just entering the stupendous aisles. He saw the silvery shafts beneath the huge square pylons. On all sides lay the welter of prodigious ruins, steeped in a power and beauty that seemed borrowed from the scale of the immeasurable heavens. Egypt laid a great hand upon him, her cold wind brushed his cheeks. He was aware of awfulness, of splendour, of all the immensities. He was in Eternity; life was continuous throughout the ages; there was no death.\u2026\n\nHe felt huge wings, and a hawk, disturbed by his passing, flapped silently away to another broken pillar just beyond. He seemed swept forward, the plaything of greater forces than he knew. There was no question of direction, of resistance: the Wave rushed on and he rushed with it. His normal simplicity disappeared in a complexity that bewildered him. Very clear, however, was one thing\u2014courage; that courage due to abandonment of self. He would face whatever came. He needed it. It was inevitable. Yes\u2014this time he would face it without shuffling or disaster.\u2026 For he recognised disaster\u2014and was aware of blood.\u2026\n\nQuestions asked themselves in long, long whispers, but found no answers. They emerged from that mothering background and returned into it again.\u2026 Sometimes he rode alone, but sometimes Lettice rode beside him: Tony joined them.\u2026 He felt them driven forward, all three together, obedient to the lift of the same rising wave, urged onwards towards a climax that was lost to sight, and yet familiar. He knew both joy and shrinking, a delicious welcome that it was going to happen, yet a dread of searing pain involved. A great fact lay everywhere about him in the night, but a fact he could not seize completely. All his faculties settled on it, but in vain\u2014they settled on a fragment, while the rest lay free, beyond his reach. Pain, which was a pain at nothing, filled his heart; joy, which was joy without a reason, sang in him. The Wave rose higher, higher\u2026 the breath came with difficulty\u2026 the wind was icy\u2026 there was choking in his throat.\u2026\n\nHe noticed the same high excitement in him he had experienced a few nights ago beneath the Karnak pylons\u2014it ended later, he remembered, in the menace of an unutterable loneliness. This excitement was wild with an irresponsible hilarity that had no justification. He felt exalt\u00e9. The wave, he swinging in the crest of it, was going to break, and he knew the awful thrill upon him before the dizzy, smothering plunge.\n\nThe complex of emotions made clear thought impossible. To put two and two together was beyond him. He felt the power that bore him along immensely greater than himself. And one of the smaller, self-asking questions issued from it: 'Was this what she felt? Was Tony also feeling this? Were all three of them being swept along towards an inevitable climax?'\u2026 This singular notion that none of them could help themselves passed into him.\u2026\n\nAnd then he realised from the slower pace of the animal beneath him that the path was going uphill. He collected his thoughts and looked about him. The forbidding cliffs that guard the grim Valley of the Kings, the haunted Theban hills, stood up pale yellow against the stars. The big moon, no longer smoking in the earthbound haze, had risen into the clear dominion of the upper sky. And he saw the terraces and columns of the Deir El-Bahri Temple facing him at the level of his eyes.\n\nNothing bore clearer testimony to the half-unconscious method by which the drama developed itself, to the deliberate yet uncalculated attitude of the actors towards some inevitable fulfilment, than the little scene which Tom's surprise arrival then discovered. According to the mood of the beholder it could mean much or little, everything or nothing. It was so nicely contrived between concealment and disclosure, and, like much else that happened, seemed balanced exquisitely, if painfully, between guilt and innocence. The point of view of the onlooker could alone decide. At the same time it provided a perfect frame for another picture that later took the stage. The stage seemed set for it exactly. The later picture broke in and used it too. That is to say, two separate pictures, distinct yet interfused, occupied the stage at once.\n\nFor Tom, dismounting, and leaving his animal with the donkey-boys some hundred yards away, approached stealthily over the sand and came upon the picnic group before he knew it. He watched them a moment before he announced himself. The scene was some feet below him. He looked down.\n\nTwo minutes sooner, he might conceivably have found the party quite differently grouped. Instead, however, his moment of arrival was exactly timed as though to witness a scene set cleverly by the invisible Stage Manager to frame two similar and yet different incidents.\n\nTom leaned against a broken column, staring.\n\nYoung de Lorne and Lady Sybil, he saw, were carefully admiring the moonlight on the yellow cliffs. Miss de Lorne stooped busily over rugs and basket packages. Her back was turned to Tony and Madame Jaretzka, who were intimately engaged, their faces very close together, in the half-prosaic, half-poetic act of blowing up a gipsy fire of scanty sticks and crumpled paper. The entire picture seemed arranged as though intended to convey a 'situation.' And to Tom a situation most certainly was conveyed successfully, though a situation of which the two chief actors\u2014 who shall say otherwise?\u2014were possibly unconscious. For in that first moment as he leaned against the column, gazing fixedly, the smoking sticks between them burst into a flare of sudden flame, setting the two faces in a frame of bright red light, and Tom, gazing upon them from a distance of perhaps some twenty yards saw them clearly, yet somehow did not\u2014recognise them. Another picture thrust itself between: he watched a scene that lay deep below him. Through the soft blaze of that Egyptian moonlight, across the silence of that pale Egyptian desert, beneath those old Egyptian stars, there stole upon him some magic which is deathless, though its outer covenants have vanished from the world.\u2026 Down, down he sank into the forgotten scenes whence it arose. Smothered in sand, it seemed, he heard the centuries roar past him.\u2026\n\nHe saw two other persons kneeling above that fire on the desert floor, two persons familiar to him, yet whom he could not wholly recognise. In that amazing second, while his heart stopped beating, it seemed as if thought in anguish cried aloud: 'So, there you are! I have the proof!' while yet all verification of the tragic 'you' remained just out of reach and undisclosed.\n\nHe did not recognise two persons whom he knew, while yet some portion of him keenly, fiercely searching, dived back into the limbo of unremembered time.\u2026 A thin blue smoke rose before his face, and to his nostrils stole a delicate perfume as of ambra. It was a picnic fire no longer. It was an Eastern woman he saw lean forward across the gleam of a golden brazier and yield a kiss to the lips of a man who claimed it passionately. He saw her small hands folded and clinging about his neck. The face of the man he could not see, the head and shoulders being turned away, but hers he saw clearly\u2014the dark, lustrous eyes that shone between half-closed eyelids. They were highly placed in life, these two, for their aspect as their garments told it; the man, indeed, had gold about him somewhere and the woman, in her mien, wore royalty. Yet, though he but saw their hands and heads alone, he knew instinctively that, if not regal, they were semi-regal, and set beyond his reach in power natural to them both. They were high-born, the favoured of the world. Inferiority was his who watched them, the helpless inferiority of subordinate position. That, too, he knew\u2026 for a gasp of terror, though quickly smothered terror, rose vividly behind an anger that could gladly\u2014kill.\n\nThere was a flash of fiery and intolerable pain within him.\u2026\n\nThe next second he saw merely\u2014Lettice!\u2014blowing the smoke from her face and eyes, with an impatient little gesture of both hands, while in front of her knelt Tony\u2014fanning a reluctant fire of sticks and paper with his old felt hat.\n\nHe had been gazing at a coloured bubble, the bubble had burst into air and vanished, the entire mood and picture vanished with it\u2014so swiftly, so instantaneously, moreover, that Tom was ready to deny the entire experience.\n\nIndeed, he did deny it. He refused to credit it. It had been, surely, a feeling rather than a sight. But the feeling having utterly vanished, he discredited the sight as well. The fiery pain had vanished too. He found himself watching the semi-comical picture of de Lorne and Lady Sybil flirting in dumb action, and Tony and Lettice trying to make a fire without the instinct or ability to succeed. And, incontinently, he burst out laughing audibly.\n\nYet, apparently, his laughter was not heard; he had made no actual sound. There was, instead, a little scream, a sudden movement, a scurrying of feet among the sand and stones, and Lettice and Tony rose upon one single impulse, as once before he had seen them rise in Karnak weeks ago. They stood up like one person. They looked about them into the surrounding shadows, disturbed, afflicted, yet as though they were not certain they had heard\u2026 and then, abruptly, the figure of Tony went out\u2026 it disappeared. How, precisely, was not clear, but it was gone into the darkness.\u2026\n\nAnd another picture\u2014or another aspect of the first\u2014dropped into place. There was an outline of a shadowy tent. The flap was stirring lightly, as though behind it some one hid\u2014and watched. He could not tell. A deep confusion, as of two pictures interfused, was in him. For somehow he transferred his own self\u2014was it physical desire? was it spiritual yearning? was it love?\u2014projected his own self into the figure that had kissed her, taking her own passionate kiss in return. He actually experienced it. He did this thing. He had done it\u2014once before! Knowing himself beside her, he both did it and saw himself doing it. He was both actor and onlooker.\u2026\n\nThere poured back upon him then, sweet and poignant, his love of an Egyptian woman, the fragrance of remembered tresses, the perfume of fair limbs that clung and of arms that lingered round his neck\u2014yet that in the last moment slipped from his full possession. He was on his knees before her; he gazed up into her ardent eyes, set in a glowing face above his own; the face bent lower; he raised two slender hands, the fingers henna-stained, and pressed them to his lips. He felt their silken texture, the fragile pressure, her breath upon his face\u2014yet all sharply withdrawn again before he captured them completely. There was the odour of long-forgotten unguents, sweet with a tang that sharpened them towards desire in days that knew a fiercer sunlight.\u2026 His brain went reeling. The effort to keep one picture separate from the other broke them both. He could not disentangle, could not distinguish. They intermingled. He was both the figure hidden behind the tent and the figure who held the woman in his arms. What his heart desired became, it seemed, that which happened.\u2026\n\nAnd then the flap of the tent flung open, and out rushed a violent, leaping outline\u2014the figure of a man. Another\u2014it seemed himself\u2014rushed to meet him. There was a gleam, a long deep cry.\u2026 A woman, with arms outstretched, knelt close beside the struggling figures on the sand. He saw two huge, dark, muscular hands about a bent and yielding neck, blood oozing thickly between the gripping fingers, staining them\u2026 then sudden darkness that blacked out the entire scene, and a choking effort to find breath.\u2026 But it was his own breath that failed, choked as by blood and fire that broke into his own throat.\u2026 Smothered in sand, the centuries roared past him, died away into the distance, sank back into the interminable desert.\u2026 He found his voice this time. He shouted.\n\nHe saw again\u2014Lettice, blowing the smoke from her face and eyes with an impatient little gesture of both hands, while Tony knelt in front of her and fanned a reluctant fire with his old felt hat. The picture\u2014the second picture\u2014had been instantaneous. It had not lasted a fraction of a second even.\n\nHe shouted. And this time his voice was audible. Lettice and Tony stood up, as though a single person rose. Both turned in the direction of the sound. Then Tony moved off quickly. Tom's vision had interpenetrated this very action even while it was actually taking place\u2014the first time.\n\n'Why\u2014I do declare\u2014if it isn't\u2014Tom!' he heard in a startled woman's voice.\n\nHe came down towards her slowly. Something of the 'pictures' still swam in between what was next said and done. It seemed in the atmosphere, pervading the three of them. But it was weakening, passing away quickly. For one moment, however, before it passed, it became overpowering again.\n\n'But, Tom\u2014is this a joke, or what? You frightened me,'\u2014she gave a horrid gasp\u2014'nearly to death! You've come back\u2014!'\n\n'It's a surprise,' he cried, trying to laugh, though his lips were dry and refused the effort. 'I have surprised you. I've come back!'\n\nHe heard the gasp prolonged. Breathing seemed difficult. Some deep distress was in her. Yet, in place of pity, exultation caught him oddly. The next instant he felt suddenly afraid. There was confusion in his soul. For it was he and she, it seemed, who had been 'surprised and caught.' And her voice called shrilly:\n\n'Tony! Tony\u2026!'\n\nThere was amazement in the sound of it\u2014terror, relief, and passion too. The thin note of fear and anguish broke through the natural call. Then, as Tony came running up, a few sticks in his big hands\u2014she screamed, yet with failing breath:\n\n'Oh, oh\u2026! Who are you\u2026?'\n\nFor the man she summoned came, but came too swiftly. Moving with uncertain gait, he yet came rapidly\u2014terribly, somehow, and with violence. Instantaneously, it seemed, he covered the intervening space. In the calm, sweet moonlight, beneath the blaze of the steady stars, he suddenly was\u2014there, upon that patch of ancient desert sand. He looked half unearthly. The big hands he held outspread before him glistened a little in the shimmer of the moon. Yet they were dark, and they seemed menacing. They threatened\u2014as with some power he meant to use, because it was his right. But the gleam upon them was not of swarthy skin alone. The gleam, the darkness, were of blood.\u2026 There was a cry again\u2014a sound of anguish almost intolerable.\u2026\n\nAnd the same instant Tom felt the clasp of his cousin's hand upon his own, and heard his jolly voice with easy, natural laughter in it: 'But, Tom, old chap, how ripping! You're really back! This is a grand surprise! It's splendid!'\n\nThere was nothing that called upon either his courage or control. They were overjoyed to see him, the surprise he provided proved indeed the success of the evening.\n\n'I thought at first you were Mohammed with the kettle,' exclaimed Madame Jaretzka, coming close to make quite sure, and murmuring quickly\u2014 nervously as well, he thought\u2014'Oh, Tom, I am so glad,' beneath her breath. 'You're just in time\u2014we all wanted you so.'\n\nExplanations followed; Tony's friends had postponed the Cairo trip at the last moment; the picnic had been planned as a rehearsal for the real one that was to follow later. Tom's adroitness in finding them was praised; he became the unwilling hero of the piece, and as such had to make the fire a success and prove himself generally the clou of the party that hitherto was missing. He became at once the life and centre of the little group, gay and in the highest spirits, the emotion accumulated in him discharging itself in the entirely unexpected direction of hilarious fun and gaiety.\n\nThe sense of tragedy he had gathered on his journey, if it muttered at all, muttered out of sight. He looked back upon his feelings of an hour before with amazement, dismay, distress\u2014then utterly forgot them. The picture itself\u2014the vision\u2014was as though it had not been at all. What, in the name of common sense, had possessed him that he could ever have admitted such preposterous uneasiness? He thought of Mrs. Haughstone's absurd warnings with a sharp contempt, and felt his spirits only rise higher than before. She was meanly suspicious about nothing. Of course he would give Lettice a hint: why not, indeed? He would give it then and there before them all and hear them laugh about it till they cried. And he would have done so, doubtless, but that he realised the woman's jealousy was a sordid topic to introduce into so gay a party.\n\n'You arrived in the nick of time, Tom,' Lettice told him. 'We were beginning to feel the solemnity of these surroundings, the awful Tombs of the Kings and Priests and people. Those cliffs are too oppressive for a picnic.'\n\n'A fact,' cried Tony. 'It feels like sacrilege. They resent us being here.' He glanced at Madame Jaretzka as he said it. 'If you hadn't come, Tom, I'm sure there'd have been a disaster somewhere. Anyhow, one must feel superstitious to enjoy a place like this. It's the proper atmosphere!'\n\nLettice looked up at Tom, and added, 'You've really saved us. The least we can do is to worship the sun the moment he gets up. We'll adore old Amon-Ra. It's obvious. We must!'\n\nThey made themselves merry over a rather sandy meal. She arranged a place for him close beside her, and her genuine pleasure at his unexpected return filled him with a joy that crowded out even the memory of other emotions. The mixture called Tom Kelverdon asserted itself: he felt ashamed; he heartily despised his moods, wondering whence they came so strangely. Tony himself was quiet and affectionate. If anything was lacking, Tom's high spirits carried him too boisterously to notice it. Otherwise he might possibly have thought that she spoke a little sharply once or twice to Tony, neglecting him in a way that was not quite her normal way, and that to himself, even before the others, she was unusually\u2014almost too emphatically\u2014dear and tender. Indeed, she seemed so pleased he had come that a cynical observer, cursed with an acute, experienced mind, might almost have thought she showed something not far from positive relief. But Tom, too happy to be sensitive to shades of feminine conduct, was aware chiefly, if not solely, of his own joy and welcome.\n\n'You didn't get my letter, then, before you left?' she asked him once; and he replied, 'The answer, as in Parliament, is in the negative. But it will be forwarded all right.' He would get it the following night. 'Ah, but you mustn't read it now,' she said. 'You must tear it up unread,' and made him promise faithfully he would obey. 'I wrote to you too,' mentioned Tony, as though determined to be left out of nothing. 'You'll get it at the same time. But you mustn't tear mine up, remember. It's full of advice and wisdom you badly need.' And Tom promised that faithfully as well. The reply was in the affirmative.\n\nThe bivouac was a complete success; all looked back upon it as an unforgettable experience. They declared, of course, they had not slept a wink, yet all had snored quite audibly beneath the wheeling stars. They were fresh and lively enough, certainly, when the sun poured his delicious warmth across the cloudless sky, while Tom and Tony made the fire and set the coffee on for breakfast.\n\nOf the marvellous beauty that preceded the actual sunrise no one spoke; it left them breathless rather; they watched the sky beyond the hills change colour; great shafts of gold transfixed the violet heavens; the Nile shone faintly; then, with a sudden drive, the stars rushed backwards in a shower, and the amazing sun came up as with a shout. Perfumes that have no name rose from the desert and the fields along the distant river banks. The silence deepened, for no birds sang. Light took the world\u2014 and it was morning.\n\nAnd when the donkey-boys arrived at eight o'clock, the party were slow in starting: it was so pleasant to lie and bask in the sumptuous bath of heat and light that drenched them. The night had been chilly enough. They were a tired party. Once home again, all retired with one accord to sleep, remaining invisible until the sun was slanting over Persia and the Indian Ocean, gilding the horizon probably above the starry skies of far Cathay.\n\nBut as Tom dozed off behind the shuttered windows in the hotel towards eleven o'clock, having bathed and breakfasted a second time, he thought vaguely of what Mrs. Haughstone had said to him a few hours before. It seemed days ago already. He was too drowsy to hold the thought more than a moment in his mind, much less to reflect upon it. 'It may be just as well to give a hint,' occurred to him. 'Tony is a bit too fond of her\u2014too fond for his happiness, perhaps.' Nothing had happened at the picnic to revive the notion; it just struck him as he fell asleep, then vanished; it was a moment's instinct. The vision\u2014it had been an instantaneous flash after all and nothing more\u2014had left his mind completely for the time.\n\nBut Tom looked back afterwards upon the all-night bivouac as an occasion marked specially in memory's calendar, yet for a reason that was unlike the reasons his companions knew. He remembered it with mingled joy and pain, also with a wonder that he could have been so blind\u2014the last night of happiness in his brief Egyptian winter." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 273", + "text": "He slept through the hot hours of the afternoon. In the cool of the evening, as he strolled along the river bank, he read the few lines Lettice had written to him at Assouan. For the porter had handed him half-a-dozen letters as he left the hotel. Tony's he put for the moment aside; the one from Lettice was all he cared about, quite forgetting he had promised to tear it up unread. It was short but tender\u2014anxious about his comfort and well-being in a strange hotel 'when I am not there to take care of you.' It ended on a complaint that she was 'tired rather and spending my time at full length on a deck-chair in the garden.' She promised to write 'at greater length to-morrow.'\n\n'Instead of which,' thought Tom with a boy's delight, 'I surprised her and we talked face to face.' But for the Arab touts who ran beside him, offering glass beads made in Birmingham, he could have kissed the letter there and then.\n\nThe resplendent gold on the river blinded him, he was glad to enter the darker street and shake off the children who pestered him for bakshish. Passing the Savoy Hotel, he hesitated a moment, then went on. 'No, I won't call in for Tony; I'll find her alone, and we'll have a cosy little talk together before the others come.' He quickened his pace, entered the shady garden, discovered her instantly, and threw himself down upon the cushions beside her deck-chair. 'Just what I hoped,' he said, with pleasure and admiration in his eyes, 'alone at last. That is good luck\u2014 isn't it, Lettice?'\n\n'Of course,' she agreed, and smiled lazily, though some might have thought indifferently, as she watched him arranging the cushions. He flung himself back and gazed at her. She wore a dress of palest yellow, and the broad-brimmed hat with the little roses. She seemed part of the flaming sunset and the tawny desert.\n\n'Well,' he grumbled playfully, 'it is true, isn't it? Our not being alone often, I mean?' He watched her without knowing that he did so.\n\n'In a way\u2014yes,' she said. 'But we can't have everything at once, can we, Tom?' Her voice was colourless perhaps. A tiny frown settled for an instant between her eyes, then vanished. Tom did not notice it. She sighed. 'You baby, Tom. I spoil you dreadfully, and you know I do.'\n\nHe liked her in this quiet, teasing mood; it was often the prelude to more delightful spoiling. He was in high spirits. 'You look as fresh as a girl of sixteen, Lettice,' he declared. 'I believe you're only this instant out of your bath and bed. D'you know, I slept like a baby too\u2014 the whole afternoon\u2014'\n\nHe interrupted himself, for at that moment a cigarette-case on the sand beside him caught his eye. He picked it up\u2014he recognised it. 'Yes\u2014I wish you'd smoke,' she said the same instant, brushing a fly quickly from her cheek.\n\n'Tony's,' he exclaimed, examining the case.\n\nHe noticed at the same time several burnt matches between his cushions and her chair.\n\n'But he'd love you to smoke them: I'll take the responsibility.' She laughed quietly. 'I'm sure they're good\u2014better than yours; he's wickedly extravagant.' She watched him as he took one out, examining the label critically, then lighting it slowly and inhaling the smoke to taste it. There was a faint perfume that clung to the case and its contents. 'Ambra,' said Lettice, a kind of watchful amusement in her eyes. 'You don't like it!'\n\nTom looked up sharply.\n\n'Is that it? I didn't know.'\n\nShe nodded. 'It's Tony's smell; haven't you noticed it? He always has it about him. No, no,' she laughed, noticing his expression of disapproval, 'he doesn't use it. It's just in his atmosphere, I mean.'\n\n'Oh, is it?' said Tom.\n\n'I rather like it,' she went on idly, 'but I never can make out where it comes from. We call it ambra\u2014the fragrance that hangs about the bazaars: I believe they used it for the mummies; but the desert perfume is in it too. It's rather wonderful\u2014it suits him\u2014don't you think? Penetrating, and so delicate.'\n\nWhat a lot she had to say about it! He made no reply. He was looking down to see what caused him that sudden, inexplicable pain\u2014and discovered that the lighted match had burned his fingers. The next minute he looked up again\u2014straight into her eyes.\n\nBut, somehow, he did not say exactly what he meant to say. He said, in fact, something that occurred to him on the spur of the moment. His mind was simple, possibly, yet imps occasionally made use of it. An imp just then reminded him: 'Her letter made no mention of the picnic, of Tony's sudden change of plan, yet it was written yesterday morning when both were being arranged.'\n\nSo Tom did not refer to the ambra perfume, nor to the fact that Tony had spent the afternoon with her. He said quite another thing\u2014said it rather bluntly too: 'I've just got your letter from Assouan, Lettice, and I clean forgot my promise that I wouldn't read it.' He paused a second. 'You said nothing about the picnic in it.'\n\n'I thought you'd be disappointed if you knew,' she replied at once. 'That's why I didn't want you to read it.' And she fell to scolding him in the way he usually loved,\u2014but at the moment found less stimulating for some reason. He smoked his stolen cigarette with energy for a measurable period.\n\n'You're the spoilt child, not I,' he said at length, still looking at her. 'You said you were tired and meant to rest, and then you go for an exhausting expedition instead.'\n\nThe tiny frown reappeared between her eyes, lingered a trifle longer than before, and vanished. She made a quick gesture. 'You're in a very nagging mood, Tom; bivouacs don't agree with you.' She spoke lightly, easily, in excellent good temper really. 'It was Tony persuaded me, if you want to know the truth. He found himself free unexpectedly; he was so persistent; it's impossible to resist him when he's like that\u2014the only thing is to give in and go.'\n\n'Of course.' Tom's face was like a mask. He thought so, at least, as he laughed and agreed with her, saying Tony was an unscrupulous rascal at the best of times. Apparently there was a struggle in him; he seemed in two minds. 'Was he here this afternoon?' he asked. He learned that Tony had come at four o'clock and had tea with her alone. 'We didn't telephone because he said it would only spoil your sleep, and that a man who works as well as plays must sleep\u2014longer than a younger man.' Then, as Tom said nothing, she added, 'Tony is such a boy, isn't he?'\n\nThere were several emotions in Tom just then. He hardly knew which was the true, or at least, the dominant one. He was thinking of several things at once too: of her letter, of that faint peculiar odour, of Tony's coming to tea, but chiefly, perhaps, of the fact that Lettice had not mentioned it,\u2014but that he had found it out.\u2026 His heart sank. It struck him suddenly that the mother in her sought to protect him from the pain the woman gave.\n\n'Is he\u2014yes,' he said absent-mindedly. And she repeated quietly, 'Oh, I think so.'\n\nThe brief eastern twilight had meanwhile fallen, and the rapidly cooling air sighed through the foliage. It grew darker in their shady corner. The western sky was still a blaze of riotous colour, however, that filtered through the trees and shed a luminous glow upon their faces. It was a bewitching light\u2014there was something bewitching about Lettice as she lay there. Tom himself felt a touch of that deep Egyptian enchantment. It stole in among his thoughts and feelings, colouring motives, lifting into view, as from far away, moods that he hardly understood and yet obeyed because they were familiar.\n\nThis evasive sense of familiarity, both welcome and unwelcome, swept in, dropped a fleeting whisper, and was gone again. He felt himself for an instant\u2014some one else: one Tom felt and spoke, while another Tom looked on and watched, a calm, outside spectator. And upon his heart came a touch of that strange, rich pain that was never very far away in Egypt.\n\n'I say, Lettice,' he began suddenly, as though he came to an abrupt decision. 'This is an awful place for talk\u2014these Luxor hotels\u2014' He stuck. 'Isn't it? You know what I mean.' His laborious manner betrayed intensity, yet he meant to speak lightly, easily, and thought his voice was merely natural. He stared hard at the glowing tip of his cigarette.\n\nLettice looked across at him without speaking for a moment. Her eyelids were half closed. He felt her gaze and raised his own. He saw the smile steal down towards her lips.\n\n'Tom, why are you glaring at me?'\n\nHe started. He tried to smile, but there was no smile in him.\n\n'Was I, Lettice? Forgive me.' The talk that was coming would hurt him, yet somehow he desired it. He would give his little warning and take the consequences. 'I was devouring your beauty, as the Family Herald says.' He heard himself utter a dry and unconvincing laugh. Something was rising through him; it was beyond control; it had to come. He felt stupid, awkward, and was angry with himself for being so. For, somehow, at the same time he felt powerless too.\n\nShe came to the point with a directness that disconcerted him. 'Who has been talking about me?' she enquired, her voice hardening a little; 'and what does it matter if they have?'\n\nTom swallowed. There was something about her beauty in that moment that set him on fire from head to foot. He knew a fierce desire to seize her in his arms, hold her for ever and ever\u2014lest she should escape him.\n\nBut he was unable to give expression in any way to what was in him. All he did was to shift his cushions slightly farther from her side.\n\n'It's always wiser\u2014safer\u2014not to be seen about too much with the same man\u2014alone,' he fumbled, recalling Mrs. Haughstone's words, 'in a place like this, I mean,' he qualified it. It sounded foolish, but he could evolve no cleverer way of phrasing it. He went on quicker, a touch of nervousness in his voice he tried to smother: 'No one can mistake our relationship, or think there's anything wrong in it.' He stopped a second, as she gazed at him in silence, waiting for him to finish. 'But Tony,' he concluded, with a gulp he prayed she did not notice, 'Tony is a little\u2014'\n\n'Well?' she helped him, 'a little what?'\n\n'A little different, isn't he?'\n\nTom realised that he was producing the reverse of what he intended. Somehow the choice of words seemed forced upon him. He was aware of his own helplessness; he felt almost like a boy scolding his own wise, affectionate mother. The thought stung him into pain, and with the pain rose, too, a first distant hint of anger. The turmoil of feeling confused him. He was aware\u2014by her silence chiefly\u2014of the new distance between them, a distance the mention of Tony had emphasised. Instinctively he tried to hide both pain and anger\u2014it could only increase this distance that was already there. At the same time he saw red.\u2026 Her answer, then, so gently given, baffled him absurdly. He felt out of his depth.\n\n'I'll be more careful, Tom, dear\u2014you wise, experienced chaperone.'\n\nThe words, the manner, stung him. Another emotion, wounded vanity, came into play. To laugh at himself was natural and right, but to be laughed at by a woman, a woman whom he loved, whom he regarded as exclusively his own, against whom, moreover, he had an accumulating grievance\u2014it hurt him acutely, although he seemed powerless to prevent it. He felt his own stupidity increase.\n\n'It's just as well, I think, Lettice.' It was the wrong, the hopeless thing to say, but the words seemed, in a sense, pushed quickly out of his mouth lest he should find better ones. He anticipated, too, her exasperation before her answer proved it: 'But, really, Tom, you know, I can look after myself rather well as a rule\u2014don't you think?'\n\nHe interrupted her then, a mixture of several feelings in him\u2014shame, the pain of frustrate yearning, perversity too. For, in spite of himself, he wanted to hear how she would speak of Tony. He meant to punish himself by hearing her praise him. He, too, meant to speak well of his cousin.\n\n'He's a bit careless, though,' he blurted, 'irresponsible, in a way\u2014where women are concerned. I'm sure he means no harm, of course, but\u2014' He paused in confusion, he was no longer afraid that harm might come to Tony; he was afraid for her, but now also for himself as well.\n\n'Tom, I do believe you're jealous!'\n\nHe laughed boisterously when he heard it. It was really comical, absurdly comical, of course. It sounded, too, the way she said it\u2014ugly, mean, contemptible. The touch of shame came back.\n\n'Lettice! But what an idea!' He gasped, turning round upon his other elbow, closer to her. But the sinking of his heart increased; he felt an inner cold. And a moment of deep silence followed the empty laughter. The rustle of the foliage alone was audible.\n\nLettice looked down sideways at him through half-closed eyelids; propped on his cushions beside her, this was natural: yet he felt it mental as well as physical. There was pity in her attitude, a concealed exasperation, almost contempt. At the same time he realised that she had never seemed so adorably lovely, so exquisite, so out of his reach. He had never felt her so seductively desirable. He made an impetuous gesture towards her before he knew it.\n\n'Don't, Tom; you'll upset my papers and everything,' she said calmly, yet with the merest suspicion of annoyance in her tone. She was very gentle, she was also very cold\u2014cold as ice, he felt her, while he was burning as with fire. He was aware of this unbridgeable distance between his passion and her indifference; and a dreadful thought leaped up in him with stabbing pain: 'Her answer to Tony would have been quite otherwise.'\n\n'I'm sorry, Lettice\u2014so sorry,' he said brusquely, to hide his mortification. 'I'm awfully clumsy.' She was putting her papers tidy again with calm fingers, while his own were almost cramped with the energy of suppressed desire. 'But, seriously,' he went on, refusing the rebuff by pretending it was play on his part, 'it isn't very wise to be seen about so much alone with Tony. Believe me, it isn't.' For the first time, he noticed, it was difficult to use the familiar and affectionate name. But for a sense of humour he could have said 'Anthony.'\n\n'I do believe you, Tom. I'll be more careful.' Her eyes were very soft, her manner quiet, her gentle tone untinged with any emotion. Yet Tom detected, he felt sure, a certain eagerness behind the show of apparent indifference. She liked to talk\u2014to go on talking\u2014about Tony. 'Do you really think so, really mean it?' he heard her asking, and thus knew his thought confirmed. She invited more. And, with open eyes, with a curious welcome even to the pain involved, Tom deliberately stepped into the cruel little trap. But he almost felt that something pushed him in. He talked exactly like a boy: 'He\u2014he's got a peculiar power with women,' he said. 'I can't make it out quite. He's not good-looking\u2014exactly\u2014is he?' It was impossible to conceal his eagerness to know exactly what she did feel.\n\n'There's a touch of genius in him,' she answered. 'I don't think looks matter so much\u2014I mean, with women.' She spoke with a certain restraint, not deliberately saying less than she thought, but yet keeping back the entire truth. He suddenly realised a relationship between her and Tony into which he was not admitted. The distance between them increased visibly before his very eyes.\n\nAnd again, out of a hundred things he wanted to say, he said\u2014as though compelled to\u2014another thing.\n\n'Rather!' he burst out honestly. 'I should hate it if\u2014you hadn't liked him.' But a week ago he would have phrased this differently\u2014'If he had not liked you.'\n\nThere were perceptible pauses between their sentences now, pauses that for him seemed breaking with a suspense that was painful, almost cruel. He knew worse was coming. He both longed for it yet dreaded it. He felt at her mercy, in her power somehow.\n\n'It's odd,' she went on slowly, 'but in England I thought him stupid rather, whereas out here he's changed into another person.'\n\n'I think we've all changed\u2014somehow,' Tom filled the pause, and was going to say more when she interrupted.\n\nShe kept the conversation upon Tony. 'I shall never forget the day he walked in here first. It was the week I arrived. You'll laugh, Tom, when I tell you\u2014' She hesitated\u2014almost it seemed on purpose.\n\n'How was it? How did he look?' The forced indifference of the tone betrayed his anxiety.\n\n'Well, he's not impressive exactly\u2014is he?\u2014as a rule. That little stoop\u2014and so on. But I saw his figure coming up the path before I recognised who it was, and I thought suddenly of an Egyptian, almost an old Pharaoh, walking.'\n\nShe broke off with that little significant laugh Tom knew so well. But, comical though the picture might have been\u2014Tony walking like a king,\u2014Tom did not laugh. It was not ludicrous, for it was somewhere true. He remembered the singular inner mental picture he had seen above the desert fire, and the pain within him seemed the forerunner of some tragedy that watched too close upon his life. But, for another and more obvious reason, he could not laugh; for he heard the admiration in her voice, and it was upon that his mind fastened instantly. His observation was so mercilessly sharp. He hated it. Where was his usual slowness gone? Why was his blood so quickly apprehensive?\n\nShe kept her eyes fixed steadily on his, saying what followed gently, calmly, yet as though another woman spoke the words. She stabbed him, noting the effect upon him with a detached interest that seemed indifferent to his pain. Something remote and ancient stirred in her, something that was not of herself To-day, something half primitive, half barbaric.\n\n'It may have been the blazing light,' she went on, 'the half-savage effect of these amazing sunsets\u2014I cannot say,\u2014but I saw him in a sheet of gold. There was gold about him, I mean, as though he wore it\u2014and when he came close there was that odd, faint perfume, half of the open desert and half of ambra, as we call it\u2014' Again she broke off and hesitated, leaving the impression there was more to tell, but that she could not say it. She kept back much. Into the distance now established between them Tom felt a creeping sense of cold, as of the chill desert wind that follows hard upon the sunset. Her eyes still held him steadily. He seemed more and more aware of something merciless in her.\n\nHe sat and gazed at her\u2014at a woman he loved, a woman who loved him, but a woman who now caused him pain deliberately because something beyond herself compelled. Her tenderness lay inactive, though surely not forgotten. She, too, felt the pain. Yet with her it was in some odd way\u2014impersonal.\u2026 Tom, hopelessly out of his depth, swept onward by this mighty wave behind all three of them, sat still and watched her\u2014 fascinated, even terrified. Her eyelids were half closed again. Another look stole up into her face, driving away the modern beauty, replacing its softness, tenderness with another expression he could not fathom. Yet this new expression was somehow, too, half recognisable. It was difficult to describe\u2014a little sterner, a little wilder, a faint emphasis of the barbaric peering through it. It was darker. She looked eastern. Almost, he saw her visibly change\u2014here in the twilight of the little Luxor garden by his side. Distance increased remorselessly between them. She was far away, yet ever close at the same time. He could not tell whether she was going away from him or coming nearer. The shadow of tragedy fell on him from the empty sky.\u2026\n\nIn his bewilderment he tried to hold steady and watch, but the soul in him rushed backwards. He felt, but could not think. The wave surged under him. Various impulses urged him into a pouring flood of words; yet he gave expression to none of them. He laughed a little dry, short laugh. He heard himself saying lightly, though with apparent lack of interest: 'How curious, Lettice, how very odd! What made him look like that?'\n\nBut he knew her answer would mean pain. It came just as he expected:\n\n'He is wonderful\u2014out here\u2014quite different\u2014' Another minute and she would have added 'I'm different, too.' But Tom interrupted hurriedly:\n\n'Do you always see him\u2014like that\u2014now? In a sheet of gold\u2014with beauty?' His tongue was so hot and dry against his lips that he almost stammered.\n\nShe nodded, her eyelids still half closed. She lay very quiet, peering down at him. 'It lasts?' he insisted, turning the knife himself.\n\n'You'll laugh when I tell you something more,' she went on, making a slight gesture of assent, 'but I felt such joy in myself\u2014so wild and reckless\u2014that when I got to my room that night I danced\u2014danced alone with all my clothes off.'\n\n'Lettice!'\n\n'The spontaneous happiness was like a child's\u2014a sort of freedom feeling. I had to shake my clothes off simply. I wanted to shake off the walls and ceiling too, and get out into the open desert. Tom\u2014I felt out of myself in a way\u2014as though I'd escaped\u2014into\u2014into quite different conditions\u2014'\n\nShe gave details of the singular mood that had come upon her with the arrival of Tony, but Tom hardly heard her. Only too well he knew the explanation. The touch of ecstasy was no new thing, although its manifestation may have been peculiar. He had known it himself in his own lesser love affairs. But that she could calmly tell him about it, that she could deliberately describe this effect upon her of another man\u2014! It baffled him beyond all thoughts or words.\u2026 Was the self-revelation an unconscious one? Did she realise the meaning of what she told him? The Lettice he had known could surely not say this thing. In her he felt again, more distinctly than before, another person\u2014division, conflict. Her hesitations, her face, her gestures, her very language proved it. He shrank, as from some one who inflicted pain as a child, unwittingly, to see what the effect would be.\u2026 He remembered the incident of the insect in the sand.\u2026\n\n'And I feel\u2014even now\u2014I could do it again,' her voice pierced in across his moment of hidden anguish. The knife she had thrust again into his breast was twisted then.\n\nIt was time that he said something, and a sentence offered itself in time to save him. The desire to hide his pain from her was too strong to be disobeyed. He wanted to know, yet not, somehow, to prevent. He seized upon the sentence, keeping his voice steady with an effort that cut his very flesh: 'There's nothing impersonal exactly in that, Lettice!' he exclaimed with an exaggerated lightness.\n\n'Oh no,' she agreed. 'But it's only in England, perhaps, that I'm impersonal, as you call it. I suppose, out here, I've changed. The beauty, the mystery,\u2014this fierce sunshine or something\u2014stir\u2014' She hesitated for a fraction of a second.\n\n'The woman in you,' he put in, turning the knife this time with his own fingers deliberately. The words seemed driven out by their own impetus; he did not choose them. A faint ghastly hope was in him\u2014that she would shake her head and contradict him.\n\nShe waited a moment, then turned her eyes aside. 'Perhaps, Tom. I wonder.\u2026!'\n\nAnd as she said it, Tom knew suddenly another thing as well. It stood out clearly, as with big printed letters that violent advertisements use upon the hoardings. Her new joy and excitement, her gaiety and zest for life\u2014 all had been caused, not by himself, but by another. Heavens! how blind he had been! He understood at last, and a flood of freezing water drenched him. His heart stopped beating for a moment. He gasped. He could not get his breath. His accumulating doubts hitherto unexpressed, almost unacknowledged even, were now confirmed.\n\nHe got up stiffly, awkwardly, from his cushions, and moved a few steps towards the house, for there stole upon her altered face just then the very expression of excitement, of radiant and spontaneous joy, he had believed until this moment were caused by himself. Tony was coming up the darkened drive. He was exactly in her line of sight. And a severe, embittered struggle then took place in a heart that seemed strangely divided against itself. He felt as though a second Tom, yet still himself, battled against the first, exchanging thrusts of indescribable torture. The complexity of emotions in his heart was devastating beyond anything he had ever known in his thirty-five years of satisfied, self-centred life. Two voices spoke in clear, sharp sentences, one against the other:\n\n'Your suspicions are unworthy, shameful. Trust her. She's as loyal and true and faithful as yourself!' cried the first.\n\nAnd the second:\n\n'Blind! Can't you see what's going on between them? It has happened to other men, why not to you? She is playing with you; she has outgrown your love.' It was the older voice that used the words.\n\n'Impossible, ridiculous!' the first voice cried. 'There's something wrong with me that I can have such wretched thoughts. It's merely innocence and joy of life. No one can take my place.'\n\nTo which, again, the second Tom made bitter answer. 'You are too old for her, too dull, too ordinary! You hold the loving mother still, but a younger man has waked the woman in her. And you must let it come. You dare not blame. Nor have you the right to interfere.'\n\nSo acute, so violent was the perplexity in him that he knew not what to say or do at first. Unable to come to a decision, he stood there, waving his hand to Tony with a cry of welcome. His first vehement desire to be alone, to make an excuse, to get to his room and think, had passed: a second, a maturer attitude, conquered it: to take whatever came, to face it, in a word to know the worst.\u2026 And the extraordinary pain he hid by an exuberance of high spirits that surprised himself. It was, of course, the suppressed emotional energy finding another outlet. A similar state had occurred that 'Karnak night' of a long ten days ago, though he had not understood it then. Behind it lay the misery of loneliness that he knew in his very bones was coming.\n\n'Tony! So it is. I was afraid he'd change his mind and leave us in the lurch.'\n\nTom heard the laugh of happiness as she said it; he heard the voice distinctly\u2014the change of tone in it, the softness, the half-caressing tenderness that crept unconsciously in, the faint thrill of womanly passion. Unconsciously, yes! he was sure, at least, of that. She did not know quite yet, she did not realise what had happened. Honest to the core, he felt her. His love surged up tumultuously. He could face pain, loss, death\u2014or, as he put it, 'almost anything,' if it meant happiness to her. The thought, at any rate, came to him thus.\u2026 And Tom believed it.\n\nAt the same moment he heard her voice, close behind him this time. She had left her chair, meaning to go indoors and prepare for supper before Tony actually arrived. 'Tom, dear boy,' her hand upon his shoulder a moment as she passed, 'you're tired or something. I can see it. I believe you're worrying. There's something you haven't told me\u2014isn't there now?' She gave him a loving glance that was of purest gold. 'You shall tell me all about it when we're alone. You must tell me everything.'\n\nThe pain and joy in him were equal then. He was a boy of eighteen, aching over his first love affair; and she was divinely mothering him. It was extraordinary; it was past belief; another minute, had they been alone, he could almost have laid his head upon her breast, complaining in anguish to the mother in her that the woman he loved was gone: 'I feel you're slipping from me! I'm losing you\u2026!'\n\nInstead he stammered some commonplace unreality about his work at Assouan and heard her agree with him that he certainly must not neglect it\u2014and she was gone into the house. The swinging curtains of dried grasses hid her a few feet beyond, but between them, he felt, stretched five thousand years and half a dozen continents as well.\n\n'Tom, old chap, did you get my letter? You promised to read it. Is it all right, I mean? I wouldn't for all the world let anything\u2014'\n\nTom stopped him abruptly. He wished to read the letter for himself without foreknowledge of its contents.\n\n'Eh? No\u2014that is, I got it,' he said confusedly, 'but I haven't read it yet. I slept all the afternoon.'\n\nAn expression of anxiety in Tony's face came and vanished. 'You can tell me to-morrow\u2014frank as you like, mind,' he replied, to which Tom said quite eagerly, 'Rather, Tony: of course. I'll read your old letter the moment I get back to-night.' And Tony, merry as a sandboy, changed the subject, declaring that he had only one desire in life just then, and that was\u2014food." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 274", + "text": "The conflict in Tom's puzzled heart sharpened that evening into dreadful edges that cut him mercilessly whichever way he turned. One minute he felt sure of Lettice, the next the opposite was clear. Between these two certainties he balanced in secret torture, one factor alone constant\u2014that his sense of security was shaken to the foundations.\n\nBelief in his own value had never been thus assailed before; that he was indispensable had been an ultimate assurance. His vanity and self-esteem now toppled ominously. A sense of inferiority crept over him, as on the first day of his arrival at Alexandria. There seemed the flavour of some strange authority in her that baffled all approach to the former intimacy. He hardly recognised himself, for, the foundations being shaken, all that was built upon them trembled too.\n\nThe insecurity showed in the smallest trifles\u2014he expressed himself hesitatingly; he felt awkward, clumsy, ineffective; his conversation became stupid for all the false high spirits that inflated it, his very manners gauche; he said and did the wrong things; he was boring. Being ill at ease and out of harmony with himself, he found it impossible to play his part in the trio as of old; the trio, indeed, had now divided itself\u2014one against two.\n\nThat is, keenly, and in spite of himself, he watched the other two; he watched them as a detective does, for evidence. He became uncannily observant. And since Tony was especially amusing that evening, Lettice, moreover, apparently absorbed in his stimulating talk, Tom's alternate gaucheries and silence passed unnoticed, certainly uncommented. In schoolboy phraseology, Tom felt out of it. His presence was tolerated\u2014as by favour. The two enjoyed a mutual understanding from which he was excluded, a private intimacy that was spiritual, mental,\u2014 physical.\n\nHe even found it in him for the first time to marvel that Lettice had ever cared for him at all. Beside Tony's brilliance he felt himself cheaper, almost insignificant. He felt old.\u2026 His pain, moreover, was twofold: his own selfish sense of personal loss produced one kind of anguish, but the possibility that she was playing false produced another. The first was manageable: the second beyond words appalling.\n\nAgainst this background of emotional disturbance he watched the evening pass. It developed as the hours moved. Tony, he noticed, though so full of life, betrayed a certain malaise towards himself and avoided that direct meeting of the eye that was his characteristic. More and more, especially when Mrs. Haughstone had betaken herself to bed, and the trio sat in the cooler garden alone, Tom became aware of a subtle intimacy between his companions that resented all his efforts to include him too. It was, moreover\u2014his heart warned him now,\u2014an affectionate, a natural intimacy, built upon many an hour of intercourse while he was yet in England, and, worst of all, that it was secret. But more\u2014he realised that the missing part of her was now astir, touched into life by another, and a younger, man. It was ardent and untamed. It had awakened from its slumber. He even fancied that something of challenge flashed from her, though without definite words or gesture.\n\nWith a degree of acute perception wholly new to him, he watched the evidence of inner proximity, yet watched it automatically and certainly not meanly nor with slyness. The evidence that was sheer anguish thrust itself upon him. His eyes had opened; he could not help himself.\n\nBut he watched himself as well. Only at moments was he aware of this\u2014a kind of higher Self, detached from shifting moods, looked on calmly and took note. This Self, placed high above the stage, looked down. It was a Self that never acted, never wept or suffered, never changed. It was secure, superb, it was divine. Its very existence in him hitherto had been unknown. He was now vividly aware of it. It was the Onlooker.\n\nThe explanation of his mysterious earlier moods offered itself with a clarity that was ghastly. Watching the happiness of these two, he recalled a hundred subconscious hints he had disregarded: the empty letter at Alexandria, her dislike of being alone with him, the increasing admiration for his cousin, a thousand things she had left unsaid, above all, the exuberance and radiant joy that Tony's presence woke in her. The gradual but significant change, the singular vision in the desert, his own foretaste of misery as he watched the Theban Hills from the balcony of his bedroom\u2014all, all returned upon him, arranged in a phalanx of neglected proofs that the new Tom offered cruelly to the old. But it was her slight exasperation, her evasion when he questioned her, that capped the damning list. And her silence was the culminating proof.\n\nThen, inexplicably, he shifted to the other side that the old, the normal Tom presented generously to the new. While this reaction lasted he laughed away the evidence, and honestly believed he was exaggerating trifles. The new zest that Egypt woke in her\u2014God bless her sweetness and simplicity!\u2014was only natural; if Tony stimulated the intellectual side of her, he could feel only pleasure that her happiness was thus increased. She was innocent. He could not possibly doubt or question, and shame flooded him till he felt himself the meanest man alive. Suspicion was no normal part of him. He crushed it out of sight, scotched as he thought to death. To lose belief in her would mean to lose belief in everybody. It was inconceivable. Every instinct in him repelled the vile suggestion. And while this reaction lasted his security returned.\n\nOnly it did not last; it merged invariably into its opposite again; and the alternating confidence and doubt produced a state of confused emotion that contained the nightmare touch in its most essential form. The Wave hung, poised above him\u2014but would not fall\u2014quite yet.\n\nIt was later in the evening that the singular intensity introduced itself into all they said and did, hanging above them like a cloud. It came curiously, was suddenly there\u2014without hint or warning. Tom had the feeling that they moved amid invisible dangers, almost as though explosives lay hidden near them, ready any moment to bring destruction with a sudden crash\u2014final destruction of the happy pre-existing conditions. The menace of a thunder-cloud approached as in his childhood's dream; disaster lurked behind the quiet outer show. The Wave was rising almost audibly.\n\nFor upon their earlier mood of lighter kind that had preceded Mrs. Haughstone's exit, and then upon the more serious talk that followed in the garden, there descended abruptly this uncanny quiet that one and all obeyed. The contrast was most marked. Tom remembered how their voices hushed upon a given moment, how they looked about them during the brief silence following, peering into the luminous darkness as though some one watched them\u2014and how Madame Jaretzka, remarking on the chilly air, then rose suddenly and led the way into the house. Both she and Tony, he remembered, had been restless for some little time. 'It's chilly. We shall be cosier indoors,' she said lightly, and moved away, followed by his cousin.\n\nTom lingered a few minutes, watching them pass along the verandah to the room beyond. He did not like the change. In the open air, the intimacy he dreaded was less suggested than in the friendly familiarity of a room, her room; out of doors it was more diffused; he preferred the remoteness that the garden lent. At the same time he was glad of a moment by himself\u2014though a moment only. He wanted to collect his thoughts and face things as they were. There should be no 'shuffling' if he possibly could prevent it.\n\nHe lingered with his cigarette behind the others. A red moon hung above the mournful hills, and the stars shone in their myriads. Both lay reflected in the quiet river. The night was very peaceful. No wind stirred.\u2026 And he strove to force the exquisite Egyptian silence upon the turmoil that was in his soul\u2014to gain that inner silence through which the voice of truth might whisper clearly to him. The poise he craved lay all about him in the solemn stillness, in stars and moon and desert; the temple columns had it, the steadfast, huge Colossi waiting for the sun, the bleak stone hills, the very Nile herself. Something of their immemorial resolution and resistance he might even borrow for his little tortured self\u2026 before he followed his companions. For it came to him that within the four walls of her room all that he dreaded must reveal itself in such concentrated, visible form that he no longer would be able to deny it: the established intimacy, the sweetness, the desire, and\u2014the love.\n\nHe made this effort, be it recorded in his favour, and made it bravely; while every minute that he left his companions undisturbed was a long-drawn torment in his heart. For he plainly recognised now a danger he knew not how he might adequately meet. Here was the strangeness of it: that he did not distrust Lettice, nor felt resentment against Tony. Why this was so, or what the meaning was, he could not fathom. He felt vaguely that Lettice, like himself, was the plaything of greater forces than she knew, and that her perplexing conduct was based upon disharmony in herself beyond her possible control. Some part of her, long hidden, had emerged in Egypt, brought out by the deep mystery and passion of the climate, by its burning, sensuous splendour: its magic drove her along unconsciously. There were two persons in her.\n\nIt may have been absurd to divide the woman and the mother as he did; probably it was false psychology as well; where love is, mother and woman blend divinely into one. He did not know: it seemed, as yet, they had not blended. He was positive only that while part of her was going from him, if not already gone, the rest, and the major part, was true and loyal, loving and marvellously tender. The conflict of these certainties left hopeless disorder in every corner of his being.\u2026\n\nTossing away his cigarette, he moved slowly up the verandah steps. The Wave was never more sensibly behind, beneath him, than in that moment. He rose upon it, it was under him, he felt its lift and irresistible momentum; almost it bore him up the steps. For he meant to face whatever came; deliberately he welcomed the hurt; it had to come; beyond the suffering beckoned some marvellous joy, pure as the dawn beyond the cruel desert. There was in him that rich, sweet pain he knew of old. It beckoned and allured him even while he shrank. Alone the supreme Self in him looked calmly on, seeming to lessen the part that trembled and knew fear.\n\nThen, as he neared the room, a sound of music floated out to meet him\u2014 Tony was singing to his own accompaniment. Lettice, upon a sofa in the corner, looked up and placed a finger on her lips, then closed her eyes again, listening to the song. And Tom was glad she closed her eyes, glad also that Tony's back was towards him, for as he crossed the threshold a singular impulse took possession of his legs and he was only just able to stop a ridiculous movement of shuffling with his feet upon the matting. Quickly he gained a sofa by the window and dropped down upon it, watching, listening. Tony was singing softly, yet with deep expression half suppressed:\n\n\u2003We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,\n\n\u2003And the door stood open at our feast,\n\n\u2003When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,\n\n\u2003And a man with his back to the East.\n\n\u2003O, still grew the hearts that were beating so fast,\n\n\u2003The loudest voice was still.\n\n\u2003The jest died away on our lips as they passed,\n\n\u2003And the rays of July struck chill.\n\nHe sang the words with an odd, emphatic slowness, turning to look at Lettice between the phrases. He was not yet aware that Tom had entered. The tune held all the pathos and tragedy of the world in it. 'Both going the same way together,' he said in a suggestive undertone, his hands playing a soft running chord; 'the man and the woman.' He again leaned in her direction. 'It's a pregnant opening, don't you think? The music I found in the very depths of me somewhere. Lettice, I believe you're asleep!' he whispered tenderly after a second's pause.\n\nShe opened her eyes then and looked meaningly at him. Tom made no sound, no movement. He saw only her eyes fixed steadily on Tony, whose last sentence, using the Christian name so softly, rang on inside him like the clanging of a prison bell.\n\n'Sing another verse first,' said Madame Jaretzka quietly, 'and we'll pass judgment afterwards. But I wasn't asleep, was I, Tom?' And, following the direction of her eyes, Tony started, and turned round. 'I shut my eyes to listen better,' she added, almost impatiently. 'Now, please go on; we want to hear the rest.'\n\n'Of course,' said Tom, in as natural a tone as possible. 'Of course we do. What is it?' he asked.\n\n'Mary Coleridge\u2014the words,' replied Tony, turning to the piano again. 'In a moment of aberration I thought I could write the music for it\u2014' The softness and passion had left his voice completely.\n\n'Oh, the tune is yours?'\n\nHis cousin nodded. There was a little frown between the watching eyes upon the sofa. 'Tom, you mustn't interrupt; it spoils the mood\u2014the rhythm,' and she again asked Tony to go on. The difference in the two tones she used was too obvious to be missed by any man who heard them\u2014the veiled exasperation and\u2014the tenderness.\n\nTony obeyed at once. Striking a preliminary chord as the stool swung round, he said for Tom's benefit, 'To me there's tragedy in the words, real tragedy, so I tried to make the music fit it. Madame Jaretzka doesn't agree.' He glanced towards her; her eyes were closed again; her face, Tom thought, was like a mask. Tony did not this time use the little name.\n\nThe next verse began, then suddenly broke off. The voice seemed to fail the singer. 'I don't like this one,' he exclaimed, a suspicion of trembling in his tone. 'It's rather too awful. Death comes in, the bread at the feast turns black, the hound falls down\u2014and so on. There's general disaster. It's too tragic, rather. I'll sing the last verse instead.'\n\n'I want to hear it, Tony. I insist,' came the command from the sofa. 'I want the tragic part.'\n\nTo Tom it seemed precisely as though the voice had said, 'I want to see Tom suffer. He knows the meaning of it. It's right, it's good, it's necessary for him.'\n\nTony obeyed. He sang both verses:\n\n\u2003The cups of red wine turned pale on the board,\n\n\u2003The white bread black as soot.\n\n\u2003The hound forgot the hand of his lord,\n\n\u2003She fell down at his foot.\n\n\u2003Low let me lie, where the dead dog lies,\n\n\u2003Ere I sit me down again at a feast,\n\n\u2003When there passes a woman with the West in her eyes,\n\n\u2003And a man with his back to the East.\n\nThe song stopped abruptly, the music died away, there was an interval of silence no one broke. Tom had listened spellbound, haunted. He was no judge of poetry or music; he did not understand the meaning of the words exactly; he knew only that both words and music expressed the shadow of tragedy in the air as though they focussed it into a tangible presence. A woman and a man were going in the same direction; there was an onlooker.\u2026 A spontaneous quality in the words, moreover, proved that they came burning from the writer's heart, and in Tony's music, whether good or bad, there was this same proof of genuine feeling. Judge or no judge, Tom was positive of that. He felt himself the looker-on, an intruder, almost a trespasser.\n\nThis sense of exclusion grew upon him as he listened; it passed without warning into the consciousness of a mournful, freezing isolation. These two, sitting in the room, and separated from him by a few feet of coloured Persian rug, were actually separated from him by unbridgeable distance, wrapped in an intimacy that kept him inexorably outside\u2014because he did not understand. He almost knew an objective hallucination\u2014that the sofa and the piano drew slightly nearer to one another, whereas his own chair remained fixed to the floor, immovable\u2014outside.\n\nThe intensity of his sensations seemed inexplicable, unless some reality, some truth, lay behind them. The bread at the feast turned black before his very eyes. But another line rang on with a sound of ominous and poignant defeat in his heart, now lonely and bereft: 'Low let me lie, where the dead dog lies\u2026' To the onlooker the passing of the pair meant death.\u2026\n\nThen, through his confusion, flashed clearly this bitter certitude: Tom suddenly realised that after all he knew nothing of her real, her inner life; he knew her only through himself and in himself\u2014knew himself in her. Tony, less self-centred, less rigidly contained, had penetrated her by an understanding sympathy greater than his own. She was unintelligible to him, but not to Tony. Tony had the key.\u2026 He had touched in her what hitherto had slept.\n\nAs the music wailed its dying cadences into this fateful silence, Tom met her eyes across the room. They were strong, and dark with beauty. He met them with no outer quailing, though with a sense of drenching tears within. They seemed to him the eyes of the angel gazing through the gate. He was outside.\u2026\n\nHe was the first to break a silence that had grown unnatural, oppressive.\n\n'What was it?' he asked again abruptly. 'Has it got a name, I mean?' His voice had the cry of a wounded creature in it.\n\nTony struck an idle chord from the piano as he turned on his stool, 'Oh, yes, it's got a name. It's called \"Unwelcome.\" And Tom, aware that he winced, was also aware that something in his life congealed and stopped its normal flow.\n\n'Tony, you are a genius,' broke in quickly the voice from the other side of the room; 'I always said so. Do you know, that's the most perfect accompaniment I ever heard.' She spoke with feeling, her tone full of admiration.\n\nTony made no reply. He strummed softly, swaying to the rhythm of what he played.\n\n'I meant the setting,' explained Lettice, 'the music. It expresses the emotion of the words too, too exactly. It's wonderful!'\n\n'I didn't know you composed,' put in Tom stupidly. He had to say something. He saw them exchange a glance. She smiled. 'When did you do it?'\n\n'Oh, the other day in a sudden fit,' said Tony, without turning. 'While you were at Assouan, I think.'\n\n'And the words, Tom; don't you think they're wonderful, too, and strange?' asked Lettice. 'I find them really haunting.'\n\n'Y-es,' he agreed, without looking at her. He realised that the lyric, though new to him, was not new to them; they had discussed it together already; they felt the same emotion about it; it had moved and stirred them before, moved Tony so deeply that he had found the music for it in the depths of himself. It was an enigmatical poem, it now became symbolic. It embodied the present situation somehow for him. Tom did not understand its meaning as they did; to him it was a foreign language. But they knew the language easily. It betrayed their deep emotional intimacy.\n\n'You didn't hear the first part?' said Tony.\n\n'Not quite. You had just started\u2014when I came in.' Tom easily read the meaning in the question. And in his heart the name of the poem repeated itself with significant insistence: Unwelcome! It had come like a blow in the face when Tony mentioned it, bruising him internally. He was bleeding.\u2026 He watched the big, dark hands upon the keys as they moved up and down. It suddenly seemed they moved towards himself. There was power, menace in them\u2014there was death. He felt as if they seized\u2014choked him.\u2026 They grew stained.\u2026\n\nThe voices of his companions came to him across great distance; there was a gulf between them, they on that side, he on this: he was aware of antagonism between himself and Tony, and between himself and Lettice. It was very dreadful; his feet and hands were cold; he shivered. But he gave no outer sign that he was suffering, and a desperate pride\u2014though he knew it was but a sham, a temporary pride\u2014came to his assistance. Yet at the same time\u2014he saw red. He felt like a boy at school again.\n\nIn imagination, then, he visualised swiftly a definite scene:\n\n'Tony,' he heard himself say, 'you're coming between us. It means all the world to me, to you it means only a passing game. If it means more, it's time for you to say so plainly\u2014and let her decide.'\n\nThe situation seemed all cleared up; the clouds of tragedy dissipated, the dreadful accumulation of emotion, suspense, and hidden pain, too long suppressed, too intense to be borne another minute, discharged itself in an immense relief. Lettice at last spoke freely and explained: Tony expressed regret, laughing it all away with his accustomed brilliance and irresponsibility.\n\nThen, horribly, he heard Tony give a different answer that was far more possible and likely:\n\n'I knew you were great friends, but I did not guess there was anything more between you. You never told me. I'm afraid I\u2014I am desperately fond of her, and she of me. We must leave it\u2014yes, to her. There is no other way.'\n\nHe was lounging on his sofa by the window, his eyes closed, while these thoughts flashed through him. He had never known such insecurity before; he felt sure of nothing; the foundations of his being seemed sliding into space.\u2026 For it came to him suddenly that he was a slave and that she was set upon a throne far, far beyond his reach.\u2026\n\nAcross the room, lit only by a single lamp upon the piano, the voices of his companions floated to him, low pitched, a ceaseless murmuring stream. He had been listening even while busy with his own reflections, intently listening. They were still talking of the poem and the music, exchanging intimate thoughts in the language he could not understand. They had passed on to music and poetry at large\u2014dangerous subjects by whose means innocent words, donning an easy mask, may reveal passionate states of mental and physical kind\u2014and so to personal revelations and confessions the apparently innocent words interpreted. He heard and understood, yet could not wholly follow because the key was missing. He could not take part, much less object. It was all too subtle for his mind. He listened.\u2026\n\nThe moonlight fell upon his stretched-out figure, but left his face in shadow; opening his eyes, he could see the others clearly; the intent expression upon her face fascinated him as he watched. Yet before his eyes had opened, the feeling again came to him that they had changed their positions somehow, and the verification of this feeling was the first detail he then noticed. Tony's stool was nearer to the bass keys of the piano, while the sofa Lettice lay upon had certainly been drawn up towards him. And Tony leaned over as he talked, bringing their lips within whispering distance. It was all done with that open innocence which increased the cruelty of it. Tom saw and heard and felt all over his body. He lay very still. He half closed his eyes again.\n\n'I do believe Tom's dropped asleep,' said Lettice presently. 'No, don't wake him,' as Tony half turned round, 'he's tired, poor boy!'\n\nBut Tom could not willingly listen to a private conversation.\n\n'I'm not asleep,' he exclaimed, 'not a bit of it,' and noticed that they both were startled by the suddenness and volume of his voice. 'But I am tired rather,' and he got up, lit a cigarette, wandered about the room a minute, and then leaned out of the open window. 'I think I shall slip off to bed soon\u2014if you'll forgive me, Lettice.'\n\nHe said it on impulse; he did not really mean to go; to leave them alone together was beyond his strength. She merely nodded. The woman he had felt so proudly would put Tony in his place\u2014nodded consent!\n\n'I must be going too in a moment,' Tony murmured. He meant it even less than Tom did. He shifted his stool towards the middle of the piano and began to strum again.\n\n'Sing something more first, Tony; I love your ridiculous voice.'\n\nTom heard it behind his back; it was said half in banter, half in earnest; yet the tone pierced him. She used the private language she and Tony understood. The little sentence was a paraphrase that, being interpreted, said plainly: 'He'll go off presently; then we can talk again of the things we love together\u2014the things he doesn't understand.'\n\nWith his face thrust into the cold night air Tom felt the blood go throbbing in his temples. He watched the moonlight on the sandy garden paths. The leaves were motionless, the river crept past without a murmur, the dark hills rose out of the distant desert like a wave. There was faint fragrance as of wild flowers, very tiny, very soft. But he kept his eyes upon the gliding river rather than on those dark hills crowded with their ancient dead. For he felt as if some one watched him from their dim recesses. It almost seemed that from those bleak, lonely uplands, silent amid the stream of hurrying life to-day, came his pain, his agony. He could not understand it; the strange, sinister mood he had known already once before stole out from the desolate Theban hills and mastered him again. Any moment, if he looked up, he would meet eyes\u2014eyes that gazed with dim yet definite recognition into his own across the night. They would gaze up at him, for somehow he was placed above them.\u2026 He had known all this before, this very situation, these very actors\u2014he now looked down upon it all, a scene mapped out below him. There were two pictures that yet were one.\n\n'What shall it be?' the voice of Tony floated past him through the open window.\n\n'The gold and ambra one\u2014I like best of all,' her voice followed like a sigh across the air. 'But only once\u2014it makes me cry.'\n\nTo Tom, as he heard it, came the shattering conviction that the words were not in English, and that it was neither Lettice nor his cousin who had used them. Reality melted; he felt himself\u2014brain, heart, and body\u2014 dropping down through empty space as though towards the speakers. This was another language that they spoke together. He had forgotten it.\u2026 They were themselves, yet different. Amazement seized him. A familiarity, intense with breaking pain, came with it. Where, O where\u2026?\n\nHe heard the music steal past him towards these Theban hills.\n\nHis heart was no longer beating; it was still. Life paused, as it were, to let the voice insert itself into another setting, out of due place, yet at the same time true and natural. An intolerable sweetness in the music swept him. But there was anguish too. The pain and pleasure were but one sensation.\u2026 All the melancholy blue and gold of Egypt's beauty passed in that singing before his soul, and something of transcendant value he had lost, something ancient it seemed as those mournful Theban hills, rose with it. It was offered to him again. He saw it rise within his reach\u2014once more. Upon this tide of blue and of gold it floated to his hand, could he but seize it.\u2026 Emotion then blocked itself through sheer excess; the tide receded, the vision dimmed, the gold turned dull and faded, the music and the singing ceased. Yet an instant, above the pain, Tom had caught a flush of inexplicable happiness. Beyond the anguish he felt joy breaking upon him like the dawn.\u2026\n\n'Joy cometh in the morning,' he remembered, with a feeling as of some modern self and sanity returning. He had been some one else; he now was Tom again. The pain belonged to that 'some one else.' It must be faced, for the final outcome would be joy.\u2026 He turned round into the room now filled with tense silence only.\n\n'Tony,' he asked, 'what on earth was it?' His voice was low but did not tremble. The atmosphere seemed drawn taut before him as though it must any instant split open upon a sound of crying. He saw Lettice on her sofa, the lamplight in her wide-open eyes that shone with moisture. She looked at Tony, not at him. There was no decipherable expression on her face. That elusive Eastern touch hung mysteriously about her. It was all half fabulous.\n\nWithout turning Tony answered shortly: 'Oh, just a little native Egyptian song\u2014very old\u2014dug up somewhere, I believe,' and he strummed softly to himself as though he did not wish to talk more about it.\n\nLettice watched him for several minutes, then fixed her eyes on Tom; they stared at each other across the room; her expression was enigmatical, yet he read resolution into it, a desire and a purpose. He returned her gaze with a baffled yearning, thinking how mysteriously beautiful she looked, frail, elusive, infinitely desirable, yet hopelessly beyond his reach.\u2026 And then he saw the eyelids lower slightly, and a shadowy darkness like a veil fall over her. A smile stole down towards the lips. Terror and fascination caught him; he turned away lest she should reach his secret and communicate her own. She looked right through him. Words, too, were spoken, ordinary modern words, though he did not hear them properly: 'You're tired out\u2026 you know. There's no need to be formal where I'm concerned\u2026' or something similar. He listened, but he did not hear; they were remote, unreal, not audible quite; they were far away in space. He was only aware that the voice was tender and the tone was very soft.\u2026\n\nHe made no answer. The pain in her leaped forth to clasp his own, it seemed. For in that instant he knew that the joy divined a little while before was her, but also that he must wade through intolerable pain to reach it.\n\nThe spell was broken. The balance of the evening, a short half-hour at the most, was uninspired, even awkward. There was strain in the atmosphere, cross-purposes, these purposes unfulfilled, each word and action charged with emotion that was unable to express itself. A desultory talk between Tony and his hostess seemed to struggle through clipped sentences that hung in the air as though afraid to complete themselves. The unfinished phrases floated, but dared not come to earth; they gathered but remained undelivered. Tom had divined the deep, essential intimacy at last, and his companions knew it.\n\nHe lay silent on his sofa by the window, or nearly silent. The moonlight had left him, he lay in shadow. Occasionally he threw in words, asked a question, ventured upon a criticism; but Lettice either did not hear or did not feel sufficient interest to respond. She ignored his very presence, though readily, eagerly forthcoming to the smallest sign from Tony. She hid herself with Tony behind the shadowy screen of words and phrases.\n\nTony himself was different too, however. There was acute disharmony in the room, where a little time before there had been at least an outward show of harmony. A heaviness as of unguessed tragedy lay upon all three, not only upon Tom. Spontaneous gaiety was gone out of his cousin, whose attempts to be his normal self became forced and unsuccessful. He sought relief by hiding himself behind his music, and his choice, though natural enough, seemed half audacious and half challenging\u2014the choice of a devious soul that shirked fair open fight and felt at home in subterfuge. From Grieg's Ich liebe Dich he passed to other tender, passionate fragments Tom did not recognise by name yet understood too well, realising that sense of ghastly comedy, and almost of the ludicrous, which ever mocks the tragic.\n\nFor Tony certainly acknowledged by his attitude the same threatening sense of doom that lay so heavy upon his cousin's heart. There was presentiment and menace in every minute of that brief half-hour. Never had Tom seen his gay and careless cousin in such guise: he was restless, silent, intense and inarticulate. 'He gives her what I cannot give,' Tom faced the situation. 'They understand one another.\u2026 It's not her fault.\u2026 I'm old, I'm dull. She's found a stronger interest.\u2026 The bigger claim at last has come!'\n\nThey brewed their cocoa on the spirit-lamp, they munched their biscuits, they said good-night at length, and Tom walked on a few paces ahead, impatient to be gone. He did not want to go home with Tony, while yet he could not leave him there. He longed to be alone and think. Tony's hotel was but a hundred yards away. He turned and called to him. He saw them saying goodnight at the foot of the verandah steps. Lettice was looking up into his cousin's face.\u2026\n\nThey went off together. 'Night, night,' cried Tony, as he presently turned up the path to his own hotel. 'See you in the morning.'\n\nAnd Tom walked down the silent street alone. On his skin he still felt her fingers he had clasped two minutes before. But his eyes saw only\u2014her face and figure as she stood beside his cousin on the steps. For he saw her looking up into his eyes as once before on the lawn of her English bungalow four months ago. And Tony's two great hands were laid upon her arm.\n\n'Lettice, poor child\u2026!' he murmured strangely to himself. For he knew that her suffering and her deep perplexity were somewhere, somehow almost equal to his own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 275", + "text": "He walked down the silent street alone.\u2026 How like a theatre scene it was! Supers dressed as Arabs passed him without a word or sign; the Nile was a painted back-cloth; the columns of the Luxor Temple hung on canvas. The memory of a London theatre flitted through his mind.\u2026 He was playing a part upon the stage, but for the second time, and this second performance was better than the first, different too, a finer interpretation as it were. He could not manage it quite, but he must play it out in order to know joy and triumph at the other end.\n\nThis sense of the theatre was over everything. How still and calm the night was, the very stars were painted on the sky, the lights were low, there lay a hush upon the audience. In his heart, like a weight of metal, there was sadness, deep misgiving, sense of loss. His life was fading visibly; it threatened to go out in darkness. Yet, like Ra, great deity of this ancient land, it would suffer only a temporary eclipse, then rise again triumphant and rejuvenated as Osiris.\u2026\n\nHe walked up the sweep of sandy drive to the hotel and went through the big glass doors. The huge brilliant building swallowed him. Crowds of people moved to and fro, chattering and laughing, the women gaily, fashionably dressed; the band played with that extravagant abandon hotels demanded. The contrast between the dark, quiet street and this busy modern scene made him feel it was early in the evening, instead of close on midnight.\n\nHe was whirled up to his lofty room above the world. He flung himself upon his bed; no definite thought was in him; he was utterly exhausted. There was a vicious aching in his nerves, his muscles were flaccid and unstrung; a numbness was in his brain as well. But in the heart there was vital energy. For his heart seemed alternately full and empty; all the life he had was centred there.\n\nAnd, lying on his bed in the darkened room, he sighed, as though he struggled for breath. The recent strain had been even more tense than he had guessed\u2014the suppressed emotion, the prolonged and difficult effort at self-control, the passionate yearning that was denied relief in words and action. His entire being now relaxed itself; and his physical system found relief in long, deep sighs.\n\nFor a long time he lay motionless, trying vainly not to feel. He would have welcomed instantaneous sleep\u2014ten hours of refreshing, dreamless sleep. If only he could prevent himself thinking, he might drop into blissful unconsciousness. It was chiefly forgetfulness he craved. A few minutes, and he would perhaps have slipped across the border\u2014when something startled him into sudden life again. He became acutely wakeful. His nerves tingled, the blood rushed back into the brain. He remembered Tony's letter\u2014returned from Assouan. A moment later he had turned the light on and was reading it. It was, of course, several days old already:\u2014\n\nSavoy Hotel, Luxor.\n\nDear old Tom\u2014What I am going to say may annoy you, but I think it best that it should be said, and if I am all wrong you must tell me. I have seldom liked any one as much as I like you, and I want to preserve our affection to the end.\n\nThe trouble is this:\u2014I can't help feeling\u2014I felt it at the Bungalow, in London too, and even heard it said by some one\u2014whom, possibly, you may guess\u2014that you were very fond of her, and that she was of you. Various little things said, and various small signs, have strengthened this feeling. Now, instinctively, I have a feeling also that she and I have certain things in common, and I think it quite possible that I might have a bad effect on her.\n\nI do not suppose for one moment that she would ever care for me, but, from one or two signs in her, I do see possibilities of a sort of playing with fire between us. One feels these things without apparent cause; and all I can say is that, absurd as it may sound, I scent danger. To put it quite frankly, I can imagine myself becoming sufficiently excited by her to lose my head a little, and to introduce an element of sex into our friendship which might have some slight effect on us both. I don't mean anything serious, but, given the circumstances, I can imagine myself playing the fool; and the only serious thing is that I can picture myself growing so fond of her that I would not think it playing the fool at the time.\n\nNow, if I am right in thinking that you love her, it is obvious that I must put the matter before you, Tom, as I am here doing. I would rather have your friendship than her possible excitement\u2014and I repeat that, absurd as it may seem, I do scent the danger of my getting worked up, and, to some extent, infecting her. You see, I know myself and know the wildness of my nature. I don't fool about with women at all, but I have had affairs in my life and can judge of the utter madness of which I am capable, madness which, to my mind, must affect and stimulate the person towards whom it is directed.\n\nOn my word of honour, Tom, I am not in love with her now at all, and it will not be a bit hard for me to clear out if you want me to. So tell me quite straight: shall I make an excuse, as, for example, that I want to avoid her for fear of growing too fond of her, and go? Or can we meet as friends? What I want you to do is to be with us if we are together, so that we may try to make a real trinity of our friendship. I enjoy talking to her; and I prefer you to be with me when I am with her\u2014really, believe me, I do.\n\nWords make things sound so absurd, but I am writing like this because I feel the presence of clouds, almost of tragedy, and I can't for the life of me think why. I want her friendship and 'motherly' care badly. I want your affection and friendship exceedingly. But I feel as though I were unconsciously about to trouble your life and hers; and I can only suppose it is that hard-working subconsciousness of mine which sees the possibility of my suddenly becoming attracted to her, suddenly losing control, and suddenly being a false friend to you both.\n\nNow, Tom, old chap, you must prevent that\u2014either by asking me to keep away, or else by making yourself a definite part of my friendship with her.\n\nI want you to say no word to her about this letter, and to keep it absolutely between ourselves; and I am very hopeful\u2014I feel sure, in fact\u2014that we shall make the jolliest trio in the world.\u2014Yours ever, Tony.\n\nTom, having read it through without a single stop, laid it down upon his table and walked round the room. In doing so, he passed the door. He locked it, then paused for a moment, listening. 'Why did I lock it? What am I listening for?' he asked himself. He hesitated. 'Oh, I know,' he went on, 'I don't want to be disturbed. Tony knows I shall read this letter to-night. He might possibly come up\u2014' He walked back to the table again slowly. 'I couldn't see him,' he realised; 'it would be impossible!' If any one knocked, he would pretend to be asleep. His face, had he seen it in the glass, was white and set, but there was a curious shining in his eyes, and a smile was on the lips, though a smile his stolid features had never known before. 'I knew it,' said the Smile, 'I knew it long ago.'\n\nHis hand stretched out and picked the letter up again. But at first he did not look at it; he looked round the room instead, as though he felt that he was being watched, as though somebody were hiding. And then he said aloud, but very quietly:\n\n'Light-blue eyes, by God! The light-blue eyes!'\n\nThe sound startled him a little. He repeated the sentence in a whisper, varying the words. The voice sounded like a phonograph.\n\n'Tony's got light-blue eyes!'\n\nHe sat down, then got up again.\n\n'I never, never thought of it! I never noticed. God! I'm as blind as a bat!'\n\nFor some minutes he stood motionless, then turned and read the letter through a second time, lingering on certain phrases, and making curious unregulated gestures as he did so. He clenched his fists, he bit his lower lip. The feeling that he was acting on a stage had left him now. This was reality.\n\nHe walked over to the balcony and drew the cold night air into his lungs. He remembered standing once before on this very spot, that foreboding of coming loneliness so strangely in his heart. 'It's come,' he said dully to himself. 'It's justified. I understand at last.' And then he repeated with a deep, deep sigh: 'God\u2014how blind I've been! He's taken her from me! It's all confirmed. He's wakened the woman in her!'\n\nIt seemed, then, he sought a mitigation, an excuse\u2014for the man who wrote it, his pal, his cousin, Tony. He wanted to exonerate, if it were possible. But the generous impulse remained frustrate. The plea escaped him\u2014because it was not there. The falseness and insincerity were too obvious to admit of any explanation in the world but one. He dropped into a chair, shocked into temporary numbness.\n\nGradually, then, isolated phrases blazed into prominence in his mind, clearest of all\u2014that what Tony pretended might happen in the future had already happened long ago. 'I can picture myself growing too fond of her,' meant 'I am already too fond of her.' That he might lose his head and 'introduce an element of sex' was conscience confessing that it had been already introduced. He 'scented danger\u2026 tragedy' because both were in the present\u2014now.\n\nTony hedged like any other coward. He had already gone too far, he felt shamed and awkward, he had to put himself right, as far as might be, with his trusting, stupid cousin, so he warned him that what had already taken place in the past might take place\u2014he was careful to mention that he had no self-control\u2014in the future. He begged the man he had injured to assist him; and the method he proposed was that old, well-proved one of assuring the love of a hesitating woman\u2014'I'll tell her I'm too fond of her, and go!'\n\nThe letter was a sham and a pretence. Its assurance, too, was unmistakable: Tony felt certain of his own position. 'I'm sorry, old chap, but we love each other. Though I've sometimes wondered, you never definitely told me that you did.'\n\nHe read once again the cruellest phrase of all: 'From one or two signs in her, I do see possibilities of a sort of playing with fire between us.' It was cleverly put, yet also vilely; he laid half the burden of his treachery on her. The 'introduction of sex' was gently mentioned three lines lower down. Tony already had an understanding with her\u2014which meant that she had encouraged him. The thought rubbed like a jagged file against his heart. Yet Tom neither thought this, nor definitely said it to himself. He felt it; but it was only later that he knew he felt it.\n\nAnd his mind, so heavily bruised, limped badly. The same thoughts rose again and again. He had no notion what he meant to do. There was an odd, half-boyish astonishment in him that the accumulated warnings of these recent days had not shown him the truth before. How could he have known the Eyes of his Dream for months, have lived with them daily for three weeks\u2014the light-blue eyes\u2014yet have failed to recognise them? It passed understanding. Even the wavy feeling that had accompanied Tony's arrival in the Carpathians\u2014the Sound heard in his bedroom the same night\u2014had left him unseeing and unaware. It seemed as if the recognition had been hidden purposely; for, had he recognised it, he would have been prepared, he might even have prevented. It now dawned upon him slowly that the inevitable may not be prevented. And the cunning of it baffled him afresh: it was all planned consummately.\n\nTom sat for a long time before the open window in a state of half stupor, staring at the pictures his mind offered automatically. A deep, vicious aching gnawed without ceasing at his heart: each time a new picture rose a fiery pang rose with it, as though a nerve were bared.\u2026\n\nHe drew his chair closer into the comforting darkness of the night. All was silent as the grave. The stars wheeled overhead with their accustomed majesty; he could just distinguish the dim river in its ancient bed; the desert lay watchful for the sun, the air was sharp with perfume. Countless human emotions had these witnessed in the vanished ages, countless pains and innumerable aching terrors; the emotions had passed away, yet the witnesses remained, steadfast, unchanged, indifferent. Moreover, his particular emotion now seemed known to them\u2014known to these very stars, this desert, this immemorial river; they witnessed now its singular repetition. He was to experience it unto the bitter end again\u2014yet somehow otherwise. He must face it all. Only in this way could the joy at the end of it be reached.\u2026 He must somehow accept and understand.\u2026 This confused, unjustifiable assurance strengthened in him.\n\nYet this last feeling was so delicate that he scarcely recognised its intense vitality. The cruder sensations blinded him as with thick, bitter smoke. He was certain of one thing only\u2014that the fire of jealousy burned him with its atrocious anguish\u2026 an anguish he had somewhere known before.\n\nThen presently there was a change. This change had begun soon after he drew his chair to the balcony, but he had not noticed it. The effect upon him, nevertheless, had been gradually increasing.\n\nThe psychological effects of sound, it would seem, are singular. Even when heard unconsciously, the result continues; and Tom, hearing this sound unconsciously, did not realise at first that another mood was stealing over him. Then hearing became conscious hearing\u2014listening. The sound rose to his ears from just below his balcony. He listened. He rose, leaned over the rail, and stared. The crests of three tall palms immediately below him waved slightly in the rising wind. But the fronds of a palm-tree in the wind produce a noise that is unlike the rustle of any other foliage in the world. It was a curious, sharp rattling that he heard. It was the Sound.\n\nHis entire being was at last involved\u2014the Self that used the separate senses. His thoughts swooped in another direction\u2014he suddenly fixed his attention upon Lettice. But it was an inner attention of a wholesale kind, not of the separate mind alone. And this entire Self included regions he did not understand. Mind was the least part of it. The 'whole' of him that now dealt with Lettice was far above all minor and partial means of knowing. For it did not judge, it only saw. It was, perhaps, the soul.\n\nFor it seemed the pain bore him upwards to an unaccustomed height. He stood for a moment upon that level where she dwelt, even as now he stood on this balcony looking down upon the dim Egyptian scene. She was beside him; he gazed into her eyes, even as now he gazed across to the dark necropolis among the Theban hills. But also, in some odd way, he stood outside himself. He swam with her upon the summit of the breaking Wave, lifted upon its crest, swept onward irresistibly.\u2026 No halt was possible\u2026 the inevitable crash must come. Yet she was with him. They were involved together.\u2026 The sea!\u2026\n\nThe first bitterness passed a little, the sullen aching with it. He was aware of high excitement, of a new reckless courage; a touch of the impersonal came with it all, one Tom playing the part of a spectator to another Tom\u2014an onlooker at his own discomfiture, at his own suffering, at his own defeat.\n\nThis new exalted state was very marvellous; for while it lasted he welcomed all that was to come. 'It's right and necessary for me,' he recognised; 'I need it, and I'll face it. If I refuse it I prove myself a failure\u2014again. Besides\u2026 she needs it too!'\n\nFor the entire matter then turned over in his mind, so that he saw it from a new angle suddenly. He looked at it through a keyhole, as it were\u2014the extent was large yet detailed, the picture distant yet very clearly focussed. It lay framed within his thoughts, isolated from the rest of life, isolated somehow even from the immediate present. There was perspective in it. This keyhole was, perhaps, his deep, unalterable love, but cleansed and purified.\u2026\n\nIt came to him that she, and even Tony, too, in lesser fashion, were, like himself, the playthings of great spiritual forces that made alone for good. The Wave swept all three along. The attitude of his youth returned; the pain was necessary, yet would bring inevitable joy as its result. There had been cruel misunderstanding on his part somewhere; that misunderstanding must be burned away. He saw Lettice and his cousin helping towards this exquisite deliverance somehow. It was like a moment of clear vision from a pinnacle. He looked down upon it.\u2026\n\nLettice smiled into his eyes through half-closed eyelids. Her smile was strangely distant, strangely precious: she was love and tenderness incarnate; her little hands held both of his.\u2026 Through these very eyes, this smile, these little hands, his pain would come; she would herself inflict it\u2014because she could not help herself; she played her inevitable r\u00f4le as he did. Yet he kissed the eyes, the hands, with an absolute self-surrender he did not understand, willing and glad that they should do their worst. He had somewhere dreadfully misjudged her; he must, he would atone. This passion burned within him, a passion of sacrifice, of resignation, of free, big acceptance. He felt joy at the end of it all\u2014the joy of perfect understanding\u2026 and forgiveness... on both sides.\u2026\n\nAnd the moment of clear vision left its visible traces in him even after it had passed. If he felt contempt for his cousin, he felt for Lettice a deep and searching pity\u2014she was divided against herself, she was playing a part she had to play. The usual human emotions were used, of course, to convey the situation, yet in some way he was unable to explain she was\u2014 being driven. In spite of herself she must inflict this pain.\u2026 It was a mystery he could not solve.\u2026\n\nHis exaltation, naturally, was of brief duration. The inevitable reaction followed it. He saw the situation again as an ordinary man of the world must see it.\u2026 The fires of jealousy were alight and spreading. Already they were eating away the foundations of every generous feeling he had ever known.\u2026 It was not, he argued, that he did not trust her. He did. But he feared the insidious power of infatuation, he feared the burning glamour of this land of passionate mirages, he feared the deluding forces of sex which his cousin had deliberately awakened in her blood\u2014and other nameless things he feared as well, though he knew not exactly what they were. For it seemed to him that they were old as dreams, old as the river and the menace of these solemn hills.\u2026 From childhood up, his own trust in her truth and loyalty had remained unalterably fixed, ingrained in the very essence of his being. It was more than his relations with a woman he loved that were in danger: it was his belief and trust in Woman, focussed in her self symbolically, that were threatened.\u2026 It was his belief in Life.\n\nWith Lettice, however, he felt himself in some way powerless to deal; he could watch her, but he could not judge\u2026 least of all, did he dare prevent.\u2026 Her attitude he could not know nor understand.\u2026\n\nThere was a pink glow upon the desert before he realised that a reply to Tony's letter was necessary; and that pink was a burning gold when he knew his answer must be of such a kind that Tony felt free to pursue his course unchecked. Tom held to his strange belief to 'Let it all come,' he would not try to prevent; he would neither shirk nor dodge. He doubted whether it lay in his power now to hinder anything, but in any case he would not seek to do so. Rather than block coming events, he must encourage their swift development. It was the best, the only way; it was the right way too. He belonged to his destination. He went into his own background.\u2026\n\nThe sky was alight from zenith to horizon, the Nile aflame with sunrise, by the time the letter was written. He read it over, then hurriedly undressed and plunged into bed. A long, dreamless sleep took instant charge of him, for he was exhausted to a state of utter depletion.\n\nDear Tony\u2014I have read your letter with the greatest sympathy\u2014it was forwarded from Assouan. It cost you a good deal, I know, to say what you did, and I'm sure you mean it for the best. I feel it like that too\u2014for the best.\n\nBut it is easier for you to write than for me to answer. Her position, of course, is an awfully delicate one; and I feel\u2014 no doubt you feel too\u2014that her standard of conduct is higher than that of ordinary women, and that any issue between us\u2014if there is an issue at all!\u2014should be left to her to decide.\n\nNothing can touch my friendship with her; you needn't worry about that. But if you can bring any added happiness into her life, it can only be welcomed by all three of us. So go ahead, Tony, and make her as happy as you can. The important things are not in our hands to decide in any case; and, whatever happens, we both agree on one thing\u2014that her happiness is the important thing.\u2014Yours ever, Tom." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 276", + "text": "He was wakened by the white-robed Arab housemaid with his breakfast. He felt hungry, but still tired; sleep had not rested him. On the tray an envelope caught his eye\u2014sent by hand evidently, since it bore no stamp. The familiar writing made the blood race in his veins, and the instant the man was gone he tore it open. There was burning in his eyes as he read the pencilled words. He devoured it whole with a kind of visual gulp\u2014a flash; the entire meaning first, then lines, then separate words.\n\nCome for lunch, or earlier. My cousin is invited out, and Tony has suddenly left for Cairo with his friends. I shall be lonely. How beautiful and precious you were last night. I long for you to comfort me. But don't efface yourself again\u2014it gave me a horrid, strange presentiment\u2014as if I were losing you\u2014almost as if you no longer trusted me. And don't forget that I love you with all my heart and soul. I had such queer, long dreams last night\u2014terrible rather. I must tell you. Do come.\u2014Yours, L.\n\nP.S. Telephone if you can't.\n\nSweetness and pain rose in him, then numbness. For his mind flung itself with violence upon two sentences: he was 'beautiful and precious'; she longed for him to 'comfort' her. Why, he asked himself, was his conduct beautiful and precious? And why did she need his comfort? The words were like vitriol in the eyes.\n\nLong before reason found the answer, instinct\u2014swift, merciless interpreter\u2014told him plainly. While the brain fumbled, the heart already understood. He was stabbed before he knew what stabbed him.\n\nAnd hope sank extinguished. The last faint doubt was taken from him. It was not possible to deceive himself an instant longer, for the naked truth lay staring into his eyes.\n\nHe swallowed his breakfast without appetite\u2026 and went downstairs. He sighed, but something wept inaudibly. A wall blocked every step he took. The devastating commonplace was upon him\u2014it was so ordinary. Other men\u2026 oh, how often he had heard the familiar tale! He tried to grip himself. 'Others\u2026 of course\u2026 but me!' It seemed impossible.\n\nIn a dream he crossed the crowded hall, avoiding various acquaintances with unconscious cunning. He found the letter-box and\u2014posted his letter to Tony. 'That's gone, at any rate!' he realised. He told the porter to telephone that he would come to lunch. 'That's settled too!' Then, hardly knowing what blind instinct prompted, he ordered a carriage\u2026 and presently found himself driving down the hot, familiar road to\u2014Karnak. For some faultless impulse guided him. He turned to the gigantic temple, with its towering, immense proportions\u2014as though its grandeur might somehow protect and mother him.\n\nIn those dim aisles and mighty halls brooded a Presence that he knew could soothe and comfort. The immensities hung still about the fabulous ruin. He would lose his tortured self in something bigger\u2014that beauty and majesty which are Karnak. Before he faced Lettice, he must forget a moment\u2014forget his fears, his hopes, his ceaseless torment of belief and doubt. It was, in the last resort, religious\u2014a cry for help, a prayer. But also it was an inarticulate yearning to find that state of safety where he and she dwelt secure from separation\u2014in the 'sea.' For Karnak is a spiritual experience, or it is nothing. There, amid the deep silence of the listening centuries, he would find peace; forgetting himself a moment, he might find\u2014strength.\n\nThen reason parsed the sentences that instinct already understood complete. For Lettice\u2014the tender woman of his first acquaintance\u2014had obviously experienced a moment of reaction. She realised he was wounded at her hands. She felt shame and pity. She craved comfort and forgiveness\u2014his comfort, his forgiveness. Conscience whispered. As against the pain she inflicted, he had been generous, long-suffering\u2014 therefore his conduct was 'beautiful and precious.' Tony, moreover, had hidden himself until his letter should be answered\u2014and she was 'lonely.'\n\nWith difficulty Tom suppressed the rising bitterness of contempt and anger in him. His cousin's obliquity was a sordid touch. He forgot a moment the loftier point of view; but for a short time only. The contempt merged again in something infinitely greater. The anger disappeared. Her attitude occupied him exclusively. The two phrases rang on with insistent meaning in his heart, as with the clang of a fateful sentence of exile, execution\u2014death:\n\n'How beautiful you were last night, and precious\u2026 I long for you to comfort me.\u2026'\n\nWhile the carriage crawled along the sun-baked sand, he watched the Arab children with their blue-black hair, who ran beside it, screaming for bakshish. The little faces shone like polished bronze; they held their hands out, their bare feet pattered in the sand. He tossed small coins among them. And their cries and movements fell into the rhythm of the song, whose haunting refrain pulsed ever in his blood: 'We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise.\u2026'\n\nThey were soon out-distanced, the palm-trees fell away, the soaring temple loomed against the blazing sky. He left the arabyieh at the western entrance and went on foot down the avenue of headless rams. The huge Khonsu gateway dropped its shadow over him. Passing through the Court with its graceful colonnades, and the Chapel, flanked by cool, dark chambers, where the Sacred Boat floated on its tideless sea beyond the world, he moved on across the sandy waste of broken stone again, and reached in a few minutes the towering grey and reddish sandstone that was Amon's Temple.\n\nThis was the goal of his little pilgrimage. Sublimity closed round him. The gigantic pylon, its shoulders breaking the sky four-square far overhead, seemed the prodigious portal of another world. Slowly he passed within, crossed the Great Court where the figures of ancient Theban deities peered at him between the forest of broken monoliths and lovely Osiris pillars, then, moving softly beneath the second enormous pylon, found himself on the threshold of the Great Hypostyle Hall itself.\n\nHe caught his breath, he paused, then stepped within on tiptoe, and the hush of four thousand years closed after him. Awe stole upon him; he felt himself included in the great ideal of this older day. The stupendous aisles lent him their vast shelter; the fierce sunlight could not burn his flesh; the air was cool and sweet in these dim recesses of unremembered time. He passed his hand with reverence over the drum-shaped blocks that built up the majestic columns, as they reared towards the massive, threatening roof. The countless inscriptions and reliefs showered upon his sight bewilderingly.\n\nAnd he forgot his lesser self in this crowded atmosphere of ancient divinities and old-world splendour. He was aware of kings and queens, of princes and princesses, of stately priests, of hosts and conquests; forgotten gods and goddesses trooped past his listening soul; his heart remembered olden wars, and the royalty of golden days came back to him. He steeped himself in the long, long silence in which an earlier day lay listening with ears of stone. There was colour; there was spendthrift grandeur, half savage, half divine. His imagination, wakened by Egypt, plunged backwards with a sense of strange familiarity. Tom easily found the mightier scale his aching heart so hungrily desired. It soothed his personal anguish with a sense of individual insignificance which was comfort.\u2026\n\nThe peace was marvellous, an unearthly peace; the strength unwearied, inexhaustible. The power that was Amon lingered still behind the tossed and fabulous ruin. Those soaring columns held up the very sky, and their foundations made the earth itself swing true. The silence, profound, unalterable, was the silence in the soul that lies behind all passion and distress. And these steadfast qualities Tom absorbed unconsciously through his very skin.\u2026 The Wave might fall indeed, but it would fall into the mothering sea where levels must be restored again, secure upon unshakable foundations.\u2026 And as he paced these solemn aisles, his soul drank in their peace and stillness, their strength of calm resistance. Though built upon the sand, they still endured, and would continue to endure. They pointed to the stars.\n\nAnd the effect produced upon him, though the adjective was not his, seemed spiritual. There was a power in the mighty ruin that lifted him to an unaccustomed level from which he looked down upon the inner drama being played. He reached a height; the bird's-eye view was his; he saw and realised, yet he did not judge. The vast structure, by its harmony, its power, its overmastering beauty, made him feel ashamed and mortified. A sense of humiliation crept into him, melting certain stubborn elements of self that, grown out of proportion, blocked his soul's clear vision. That he must stand aside had never occurred to him before with such stern authority; it occurred to him now. The idea of sacrifice stole over him with a sweetness that was deep and marvellous. It seemed that Isis touched him. He looked into the eyes of great Osiris,\u2026 and that part of him that ever watched\u2014the great Onlooker\u2014smiled.\n\nHis being, as a whole, remained inarticulate as usual; no words came to his assistance. It was rather that he attained\u2014as once before, in another moment of deeper insight\u2014that attitude towards himself which is best described as impersonal. Who was he, indeed, that he should claim the right to thwart another's happiness, hinder another's best self-realisation? By what right, in virtue of what exceptional personal value, could he, Tom Kelverdon, lay down the law to this other, and say, 'Me only shall you love\u2026 because I happen to love you\u2026?'\n\nAnd, as though to test what of strength and honesty might lie in this sudden exaltation of resolve, he recognised just then the very pylon against whose vast bulk they had rested together that moonlit night a few short weeks before\u2026 when he saw two rise up like one person\u2026 as he left them and stole away into the shadows.\n\n'So I knew it even then\u2014subconsciously,' he realised. 'The truth was in me even then, a few days after my arrival.\u2026 And they knew it too. She was already going from me, if not already gone\u2026!'\n\nHe leaned against that same stone column, thinking, searching in his mind, feeling acutely. Reactions caught at him in quick succession. Doubt, suspicion, anger clouded vision; pain routed the impersonal conception. Loneliness came over him with the cool wind that stirred the sand between the columns; the patches of glaring sunshine took on a ghastly whiteness; he shivered.\u2026 But it was not that he lost belief in his moment of clear vision, nor that the impersonal attitude became untrue. It was another thing he realised: that the power of attainment was not yet in him\u2026 quite. He could renounce, but not with complete acceptance.\u2026\n\nAs he drove back along the sandy lanes of blazing heat a little later, it seemed to him that he had been through some strenuous battle that had taxed his final source of strength. If his position was somewhat vague, this was due to his inability to analyse such deep interior turmoil. He was sure, at least, of one thing\u2014that, before he could know this final joy awaiting him, he must first find in himself the strength for what seemed just then an impossible, an ultimate sacrifice. He must forget himself\u2014if such forgetfulness involved the happiness of another. He must slip out. The strength to do it would come presently. And his heart was full of this indeterminate, half-formed resolve as he entered the shady garden and saw Lettice lying in her deck-chair beneath the trees, awaiting him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 277", + "text": "Events, however slight, which involve the soul are drama; for once the soul takes a hand in them their effects are permanent and reproductive. Not alone the relationship between individuals are determined this way or that, but the relationships of these individuals towards the universe are changed upon a scale of geometrical progression. The results are of the eternal order. Since that which persists\u2014the soul\u2014is radically affected, they are of ultimate importance.\n\nHad the strange tie between Tom and Lettice been due to physical causes only, to mental affinity, or to mere sympathetic admiration of each other's outward strength and beauty, a rupture between them could have been of a passing character merely. A pang, a bitterness that lasted for a day or for a year\u2014and the gap would be filled again by some one else. They had idealised; they would get over it; they were not indispensable to one another; there were other fish in the sea, and so forth.\n\nBut with Tom, at any rate, there was something transcendental in their intimate union. Loss, where she was concerned, involved a permanent and irremediable bereavement\u2014no substitute was conceivable. With him, this relationship seemed foreordained, almost prenatal\u2014it had come to him at the very dawn of life; it had lasted through years of lonely waiting; no other woman had ever threatened its fixed security, and the sudden meeting in Switzerland had seemed to him reunion rather than discovery. Moreover, he had transferred his own sense of security to her; had always credited her with similar feelings; and the suspicion now that he had deceived himself in this made life tremble to the foundations. It was a terrible thought that robbed him of every atom of self-confidence. It affected his attitude to the entire universe.\n\nThe intensity of this drama, however, being interior, caused little outward disturbance that casual onlookers need have noticed. He waved his hat as he walked towards the corner where she lay, greeting her with a smile and careless word, as though no shadow stood between them. A barrier, nevertheless, was there he knew. He felt it almost sensibly. Also\u2014it had grown higher. And at once he was aware that the Lettice who returned his smile with a colourless 'Good morning, Tom, I'm so glad you could come,' was not the Lettice who had known a moment's reaction a little while before. He told by her very attitude that now there was lassitude, even weariness in her. Her eyes betrayed none of the excitement and delight that another could wake in her. His own presence certainly no longer brought the thrill, the interest that once it did. She was both bored and lonely.\n\nAnd, while an exquisite pain ran through him, he made a prodigious effort to draw upon the strength he had felt in Karnak a short half-hour ago. He struggled bravely to forget himself. 'So Tony's gone!' he said lightly, 'run off and left us without so much as a word of warning or good-bye. A rascally proceeding, I call it! Rather sudden, too, wasn't it?'\n\nHe sat down beside her and began to smoke. She need not answer unless she wanted to. She did answer, however, and at once. She did not look at him; her eyes were on the golden distance. It had to be said; she said it. 'He's only gone for two or three days. His friends suddenly changed their minds, and he couldn't get out of it. He said he didn't want to go\u2014a bit.'\n\nHow did she know it, Tom wondered, glancing up over his cigarette? And how had she read his mind so easily?\n\n'He just popped in to tell me,' she added, 'and to say good-bye. He asked me to tell you.' She spoke without a tremor, as if Tom had no right to disapprove.\n\n'Pretty early, wasn't it?' It was not the first time either. 'He comes at such unusual hours'\u2014he remembered Mrs. Haughstone's words.\n\n'I was only just up. But there was time to give him coffee before the train.'\n\nShe offered no further comment; Tom made none; he sat smoking there beside her, outwardly calm and peaceful as though no feeling of any kind was in him. He felt numb perhaps. In his mind he saw the picture of the breakfast-table beneath the trees. The plan had been arranged, of course, beforehand.\n\n'Miss de Lorne's coming to lunch,' she mentioned presently. 'She's to bring her pictures\u2014the Deir-el-Bahri ones. You must help me criticise them.'\n\nSo they were not to be alone even, was Tom's instant thought. Aloud he said merely, 'I hope they're good.' She flicked the flies away with her horse-hair whisk, and sighed. He caught the sigh. The day felt empty, uninspired, the boredom of cruel disillusion in it somewhere. But it was the sigh that made him realise it. Avoiding the subject of Tony's abrupt departure, he asked what she would like to do that afternoon. He made various proposals; she listened without interest. 'D'you know, Tom, I don't feel inclined to do anything much, but just lie and rest.'\n\nThere was no energy in her, no zest for life; expeditions had lost their interest; she was listless, tired. He felt impatience in him, sharp disappointment too; but there was an alert receptiveness in his mind that noted trifles done or left undone. She made no reference, for instance, to the fact that they might be frequently alone together now. A faint hope that had been in him vanished quickly.\u2026 He wondered when she was going to speak of her letter, of his conduct the night before that was 'beautiful and precious,' of the 'comfort' she had needed, or even of the dreams that she had mentioned. But, though he waited, giving various openings, nothing was forthcoming. That side of her, once intimately precious and familiar, seemed buried, hidden away, perhaps forgotten. This was not Lettice\u2014it was some one else.\n\n'You had dreams that frightened you?' he enquired at length. 'You said you'd tell them to me.' He moved nearer so that he could watch her face.\n\nShe looked puzzled for a second. 'Did I?' she replied. She thought a moment. 'Oh yes, of course I did. But they weren't much really. I'd forgotten. It was about water or something. Ah, I remember now\u2014we were drowning, and you saved us.' She gave a little unmeaning laugh as she said it.\n\n'Who were drowning?'\n\n'All of us\u2014me and you, I think it was\u2014and Tony\u2014'\n\n'Oh, of course.'\n\nShe looked up. 'Tom, why do you say \"of course\" like that?'\n\n'It was your old idea of the river and the floating faces, I meant,' he answered. 'I had the feeling.'\n\n'You said it so sharply.'\n\n'Did I!' He shrugged his shoulders slightly. 'I didn't mean to.' He noticed the beauty of her ear, the delicate line of the nostrils, the long eyelashes. The graceful neck, with the firm, slim line of the breast below, were exquisite. The fairy curve of her ankle was just visible. He could have knelt and covered it with kisses. Her coolness, the touch of contempt in her voice made him wild.\u2026 But he understood his r\u00f4le; and\u2014he remembered Karnak.\n\nA little pause followed. Lettice made one of her curious gestures, half impatience, half weariness. She stretched; the other ankle appeared. Tom, as he saw it, felt something in him burst into flame. He came perilously near to saying impetuously a hundred things he had determined that he must not say. He felt the indifference in her, the coolness, almost the cruelty. Her negative attitude towards him goaded, tantalised. He was full of burning love, from head to foot, while she lay there within two feet of him, calm, listless, unresponsive, passionless. The bitter pain of promises unfulfilled assailed him acutely, poignantly. Yet in ordinary life the situation was so commonplace. The 'strong man' would face her with it, have it out plainly; he would be masterful, forcing a climax of one kind or another, behaving as men do in novels or on the stage.\n\nYet Tom remained tongue-tied and restrained; he seemed unable to take the lead; an inner voice cried sternly No to all such natural promptings. It would be a gross mistake. He must let things take their course. He must not force a premature disclosure. With a tremendous effort, he controlled himself and smothered the rising fires that struggled towards speech and action. He would not even ask a single question. Somehow, in any case, it was impossible.\n\nThe subject dropped; Lettice made no further reference to the letter.\n\n'When you feel like going anywhere, or doing anything, you'll let me know,' he suggested presently. 'We've been too energetic lately. It's best for you to rest. You're tired.' The words hurt and stung him as though he were telling lies. He felt untrue to himself. The blood boiled in his veins.\n\nShe answered him with a touch of impatience again, almost of exasperation. He noticed the emphasis she used so needlessly.\n\n'Tom, I'm not tired\u2014not in the way you mean. It's just that I feel like being quiet for a bit. Really it's not so remarkable! Can't you understand?'\n\n'Perfectly,' he rejoined calmly, lighting another cigarette. 'We'll have a programme ready for later\u2014when Tony gets back.' The blood rushed from his heart as he said it.\n\nHer face brightened instantly, as he had expected\u2014dreaded; there was no attempt at concealment anywhere; she showed interest as frankly as a child. 'It was stupid of him to go, just when we were enjoying everything so,' she said again. 'I wonder how long he'll stay\u2014'\n\n'I'll write and tell him to hurry up,' suggested Tom. He twirled his fly-whisk energetically.\n\n'Tell him we can't get on without our dragoman,' she added eagerly with her first attempt at gaiety; and then went on to mention other things he was to say, till her pleasure in talking about Tony was so obvious that Tom yielded to temptation suddenly. It was more than he could bear. 'I strongly suspect a pretty girl in the party somewhere,' he observed carelessly.\n\n'There is,' came the puzzling reply, 'but he doesn't care for her a bit. He told me all about her. It's curious, isn't it, how he fascinates them all? There's something very remarkable about Tony\u2014I can't quite make it out.'\n\nTom leaned forward, bringing his face in front of her own, and closer to it. He looked hard into her eyes a moment. In the depths of her steady gaze he saw shadows, far away, behind the open expression. There was trouble in her, but it was deep, deep down and out of sight. The eyes of some one else, it seemed, looked through her into his. An older world came whispering across the sunlight and the sand.\n\n'Lettice,' he said quietly, 'there's something new come into your life these last few weeks\u2014isn't there?' His voice grated\u2014like machinery started with violent effort against resistance. 'Some new, big force, I mean? You seem so changed, so different.' He had not meant to speak like this. It was forced out. He expressed himself badly too. He raged inwardly.\n\nShe smiled, but only with her lips. The shadows from behind her eyes drew nearer to the surface. But the eyes themselves held steady. That other look peered out of them. He was aware of power, of something strangely bewitching, yet at the same time fierce, inflexible in her\u2026 and a kind of helplessness came over him, as though he was suddenly out of his depth, without sure footing. The Wave roared in his ears and blood.\n\n'Egypt probably\u2014old Egypt,' she said gently, making a slow gesture with one hand towards the river and the sky. 'It must be that.' The gesture, it seemed to him, had royalty in it somewhere. There was stateliness and dignity\u2014an air of authority about her. It was magnificent. He felt worship in him. The slave that lies in worship stirred. He could yield his life, suffer torture for days to give her a moment's happiness.\n\n'I meant something personal, rather,' he prevaricated.\n\n'You meant Tony. I know it. Didn't you, Tom?'\n\nHis breath caught inwardly. In spite of himself, and in spite of his decision, she drew his secret out. Enchantment touched him deliciously, an actual torture in it.\n\n'Yes,' he said honestly, 'perhaps I did.' He said it shamefacedly rather, to his keen vexation. 'For it has to do with Tony somehow.'\n\nHe got up abruptly, tossed his cigarette over the wall into the river, then sat down again. 'There's something about it\u2014strange and big. I can't make it out a bit.' He faltered, stammered over the words. 'It's a long way off\u2014then all at once it's close.' He had the feeling that he had put a match to something. 'I've done it now,' he said to himself like a boy, as though he expected that something dramatic must happen instantly.\n\nBut nothing happened. The river flowed on silently, the heat blazed down, the leaves hung motionless as before, and far away the lime-stone hills lay sweltering in the glare. But those hills had glided nearer. He was aware of them,\u2014the Valley of the Kings,\u2014the desolate Theban Hills with their myriad secrets and their deathless tombs.\n\nLettice gave her low, significant little laugh. 'It's odd you should say that, Tom\u2014very odd. Because I've felt it too. It's awfully remote and quite near at the same time\u2014'\n\n'And Tony's brought it,' he interrupted eagerly, half passionately. 'It's got to do with him, I mean.'\n\nIt seemed to him that the barrier between them had lowered a little. The Lettice he knew first peered over it at him.\n\n'No,' she corrected, 'I don't feel that he's brought it. He's in it somehow, I admit, but he has not brought it exactly.' She hesitated a moment. 'I think the truth is he can't help himself\u2014any more than we\u2014 you or I\u2014can.'\n\nThere was a caressing tenderness in her voice as she said it, but whether for himself or for another he could not tell. In his heart rose a frantic impulse just then to ask\u2014to blurt it out: 'Do you love Tony? Has he taken you from me? Tell me the truth and I can bear it. Only, for heaven's sake, don't hide it!' But, instead of saying this absurd, theatrical thing, he looked at her through the drifting cigarette smoke a moment without speaking, trying to read the expression in her face. 'Last night, for instance,' he exclaimed abruptly; 'in the music room, I mean. Did you feel that?\u2014the intensity\u2014a kind of ominous feeling?'\n\nHer expression was enigmatical; there were signs of struggle in it, he thought. It was as if two persons fought within her which should answer. Apparently the dear Lettice of his first acquaintance won\u2014for the moment.\n\n'You noticed it too!' she exclaimed with astonishment. 'I thought I was the only one.'\n\n'We all\u2014all three of us\u2014felt it,' he said in a lower tone. 'Tony certainly did\u2014'\n\nLettice raised herself suddenly on her elbow and looked down at him with earnestness. Something of the old eagerness was in her. The barrier between them lowered perceptibly again, and Tom felt a momentary return of the confidence he had lost. His heart beat quickly. He made a half-impetuous gesture towards her\u2014'What is it? What does it all mean, Lettice?' he exclaimed. 'D'you feel what I feel in it\u2014danger somewhere\u2014danger for us?' There was a yearning, almost a cry for mercy in his voice.\n\nShe drew back again. 'You amaze me, Tom,' she said, as she lay among her cushions. 'I had no idea you were so observant.' She paused, putting her hand across her eyes a moment. 'N-no\u2014I don't feel danger exactly,' she went on in a lower tone, speaking half to herself and half to him; 'I feel\u2014' She broke off with a little sigh; her hand still covered her eyes. 'I feel,' she went on slowly, with pauses between the words, 'a deep, deep something\u2014from very far away\u2014that comes over me at times\u2014 only at times, yes. It's remote, enormously remote\u2014but it has to be. I've never given you all that I ought to give. We have to go through with it\u2014'\n\n'You and I?' he whispered. He was listening intently. The beats of his heart were most audible.\n\nShe sighed. 'All three of us\u2014somehow,' she replied equally low, and speaking again more to herself than to him. 'Ah! Now my dream comes back a little. It was the river\u2014my river with the floating faces. And the thing I feel comes\u2014from its source, far, far away\u2014its tiny source among the hills\u2014' She sighed again, more deeply than before. Her breast heaved slightly. 'We must go through it\u2014yes. It's necessary for us\u2014 necessary for you\u2014and me\u2014'\n\n'Lettice, my precious, my wonderful!' Tom whispered as though the breath choked and strangled him. 'But we stay together through it? We stay together afterwards? You love me still?' He leaned across and took her other hand. It lay unresistingly in his. It was very cold\u2014without a sign of response.\n\nHer faint reply half staggered him: 'We are always, always together, you and I. Even if you married, I should still be yours. He will go out\u2014'\n\nFear clashed with hope in his heart as he heard these words he could not understand. He groped and plunged after their meaning. He was bewildered by the reference to marriage\u2014his marriage! Was she, then, already aware that she might lose him?\u2026 But there was confession in them too, the confession that she had been away from him. That he felt clearly. Now that the dividing influence was removed, she was coming back perhaps! If Tony stayed away she would come back entirely; only then the thing that had to happen would be prevented\u2014which was not to be thought of for a moment.\u2026 'Poor Lettice.\u2026' He felt pity, love, protection that he burned to give; he felt a savage pain and anger as well. In the depths of him love and murder sat side by side.\n\n'Oh, Lettice, tell me everything. Do share with me\u2014share it and we'll meet it together.' He drew her cold hand towards him, putting it inside his coat. 'Don't hide it from me. You're my whole world. My love can never change.\u2026 Only don't hide anything!' The words poured out of him with passionate entreaty. The barrier had melted, vanished. He had found her again, the Lettice of his childhood, of his dream, the true and faithful woman he had known first. His inexpressible love rose like a wave upon him. Regardless of where they were he bent over to take her in his arms\u2014when she suddenly withdrew her hand from his. She removed the other from her eyes. He saw her face. And he realised in an instant that his words had been all wrong. He had said precisely again what he ought not to have said. The moment in her had passed.\n\nThe sudden change had a freezing effect upon him.\n\n'Tom, I don't understand quite,' she said coldly, her eyes fixed on his almost with resentment in them. 'I'm not hiding anything from you. Why do you say such things? I'm true\u2014true to myself.'\n\nThe barrier was up again in an instant, of granite this time, with jagged edges of cut glass upon it, so that he could not approach it even. It was not Lettice that spoke then:\n\n'I don't know what's come over you out here,' she went on, each word she uttered increasing the distance between them; 'you misunderstand everything I say and criticise all I do. You suspect my tenderest instincts. Even a friendship that brings me happiness you object to and\u2014 and exaggerate.'\n\nHe listened till she ceased; it was as if he had received a blow in the face; he felt disconcerted, keenly aware of his own stupidity, helpless. Something froze in him. He had seen her for a second, then lost her utterly.\n\n'No, no, Lettice,' he stammered, 'you read all that into me\u2014really, you do. I only want your happiness.'\n\nHer eyes softened a little. She sighed wearily and turned her face away.\n\n'We were only talking of this curious, big feeling that's come\u2014' he went on.\n\n'You were speaking of Tony\u2014that's what you really meant, Tom,' she interrupted. 'You know it perfectly well. It only makes it harder\u2014for me?'\n\nHe felt suddenly she was masquerading, playing with him again, playing with his very heart and soul. The devil tempted him. All the things he had decided he would not say rose to the tip of his tongue. The worst of them\u2014those that hurt him most\u2014he managed to force down. But even the one he did suffer to escape gave him atrocious pain:\n\n'Well, Lettice, to tell the truth, I do think Tony has a bad\u2014a curious influence on you. I do feel he has come between us rather. And I do think that if you would only share with me\u2014'\n\nThe sudden way she turned upon him, rising from her chair and standing over him, was so startling that he got up too. They faced each other, he in the blazing sunshine, she in the shade. She looked so different that he was utterly taken aback. She wore that singular Eastern appearance he now knew so well. Expression, attitude, gesture, all betrayed it. That inflexible, cruel thing shone in her eyes.\n\n'Tom, dear,' she said, but with a touch of frigid exasperation that for a moment paralysed thought and utterance in him, 'whatever happens, you must realise this\u2014that I am myself and that I can never allow my freedom to be taken from me. If you're determined to misjudge, the fault is yours, and if our love, our friendship, cannot understand that, there's something wrong with it.'\n\nThe word 'friendship' was like a sword thrust. It went right through him. 'I trust you,' he faltered, 'I trust you wholly. I know you're true.' But the words, it seemed, gave expression to an intense desire, a fading hope. He did not say it with conviction. She gazed at him for a moment through half-closed eyelids.\n\n'Do you, Tom?' she whispered.\n\n'Lettice\u2026!'\n\n'Then believe at least\u2014' her voice wavered suddenly, there came a little break in it\u2014'that I am true to you, Tom, as I am to myself. Believe in that\u2026 and\u2014Oh! for the love of heaven\u2014help me!'\n\nBefore he could respond, before he could act upon the hope and passion her last unexpected words set loose in him\u2014she turned away to go into the house. Voices were audible behind them, and Miss de Lorne was coming up the sandy drive with Mrs. Haughstone. Tom watched her go. She moved with a certain gliding, swaying walk as she passed along the verandah and disappeared behind the curtains of dried grass. It almost seemed\u2014though this must certainly have been a trick of light and shadow\u2014that she was swathed from head to foot in a clinging garment not of modern kind, and that he caught the gleam of gold upon the flesh of dusky arms that were bare above the elbow. Two persons were visible in her very physical appearance, as two persons had just been audible in her words. Thence came the conflict and the contradictions." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 278", + "text": "A few minutes later Lettice was presiding over her luncheon table as though life were simple as the sunlight in the street outside, and no clouds could ever fleck the procession of the years. She was quiet and yet betrayed excitement. Tom, at the opposite end of the table, watched her girlish figure, her graceful gestures. Her eyes were very bright, no shadows in their depths; she returned his gaze with untroubled frankness. Yet the set of her little mouth had self-mastery in it somewhere; there was no wavering or uncertainty; her self-possession was complete. But above his head the sword of Damocles hung. He saw the thread, taut and gleaming in the glare of the Egyptian sunlight.\u2026 He waited upon his cousin's return as men once waited for the sign thumbs up, thumbs down.\u2026\n\n'Molly has sent me her album,' mentioned Mrs. Haughstone when the four of them were lounging in the garden chairs; 'she wonders if you would write your name in it. It's her passion\u2014to fill it with distinguished names.' And when the page was found, she pointed to the quotation against his birthday date with the remark, in a lowered voice: 'It's quite appropriate, isn't it? For a man, I mean,' she added, 'because when a man's unhappy he's more easily tempted to suspicion than a woman is.'\n\n'What is the quotation?' asked Lettice, glancing up from her deck chair.\n\nTom was carefully inscribing his 'distinguished' name in the child's album, as Mrs. Haughstone read the words aloud over his shoulder:\n\n'\"Whatever the circumstances, there is no man so miserable that he need not be true.\" It's anonymous,' she added, 'but it's by some one very wise.'\n\n'A woman, probably,' Miss de Lorne put in with a laugh.\n\nThey discussed it, while Tom laboriously wrote his name against it with a fountain pen. His writing was a little shaky, for his sight was blurred and ice was in his veins.\n\n'There's no need for you to hurry, is there?' said Lettice presently. 'Won't you stay and read to me a bit? Or would you rather look in\u2014after dinner\u2014and smoke?' The two selves spoke in that. It was as if the earlier, loving Lettice tried to assert itself, but was instantly driven back again. How differently she would have said it a few months ago.\u2026 He made excuses, saying he would drop in after dinner if he might. She did not press him further.\n\n'I am tired a little,' she said gently. 'I'll sleep and rest and write letters too, then.'\n\nShe was invariably tired now, Tom soon discovered\u2014until Tony returned from Cairo.\u2026\n\nAnd that evening he escaped the invitations to play bridge, and made his way back, as in a dream, to the little house upon the Nile. He found her bending over the table so that the lamp shone on her abundant coils of hair, and as he entered softly he saw the address on the envelope beside her writing pad, several pages of which were already covered with her small, fine writing. He read the name before he could turn his eyes away.\n\n'I was writing to Tony,' she said, looking up with an untroubled smile, 'but I can finish later. And you've come just in time to take my part. Ettie's been scolding me severely again.'\n\nShe blotted the lines and put the paper on one side, then turned with a challenging expression at her cousin who was knitting by the open window. The little name sounded so incongruous; it did not suit the big gaunt woman who had almost a touch of the monstrous in her. Tom stared a moment without speaking. The playful challenge had reality in it. Lettice intended to define her position openly. She meant that Tom should support her too.\n\nHe smiled as he watched them. But no words came to him. Then, remembering all at once that he had not kept his promise, he said quietly: 'I must send a line as well. I quite forgot.'\n\n'You can write it now,' suggested Lettice, 'and I'll enclose it in mine.' And she pointed to the envelopes and paper before him on the table.\n\nThere was a moment of acute and painful struggle in him; pride and love fought the old pitched battle, but on a field of her own bold choosing! Tom knew murder in his heart, but he knew also that strange rich pain of sacrifice. It was theatrical: he stood upon the stage, an audience watching him with intent expectancy, wondering upon his decision. Mrs. Haughstone, Lettice and another part of himself that was Onlooker were the audience; Mrs. Haughstone had ceased knitting, Lettice leaned back in her chair, a smile in the eyes, but the lips set very firmly together. The man in him, with scorn and anger, seemed to clench his fists, while that other self\u2014as with a spirit's voice from very far away\u2014whispered behind his pain: 'Obey. You must. It has to be, so why not help it forward!'\n\nTo play the game, but to play it better than before, flashed through him.\u2026 Half amazed at himself, yet half contented, he sat down mechanically and scribbled a few lines of urgent entreaty to his cousin to come back soon.\u2026 'We want you here, it's dull, we can't get on without you\u2026' knowing that he traced the sentences of his own death-warrant. He folded it and passed it across to Lettice, who slipped it unread into her envelope. 'That ought to bring him, you think?' she observed, a happy light in her eyes, yet with a faint sigh half suppressed, as though she did a thing which hurt her too.\n\n'I hope so,' replied Tom. 'I think so.'\n\nHe knew not what she had written to Tony; but whatever it was, his own note would appear to endorse it. He had perhaps placed in her hand the weapon that should hasten his own defeat, stretch him bleeding on the sand. And yet he trusted her; she was loyal and true throughout. The quicker the climax came, the sooner would he know the marvellous joy that lay beyond the pain. In some way, moreover, she knew this too. Actually they were working together, hand in hand, to hasten its inevitable arrival. They merely used such instruments as fate offered, however trivial, however clumsy. They were being driven. They could neither choose nor resist. He found a germ of subtle comfort in the thought. The Wave was under them. Upon its tumultuous volume they swept forward, side by side\u2026 striking out wildly.\n\n'And will you also post it for me when you go?' he heard. 'I'll just add a line to finish up with.' Tom watched her open the writing-block again and trace a hurried sentence or two; she did it openly; he saw the neat, small words flow from the nib; he saw the signature: 'Lettice.'\n\n'Fasten it down for me, Tom, will you? It's such an ugly thing for a woman to do. It's absurd that science can't invent a better way of closing an envelope, isn't it?' He was oddly helpless; she forced him to obey out of some greater knowledge. And while he did the ungraceful act, their eyes met across the table. It was the other person in her\u2014the remote, barbaric, eastern woman, set somehow in power over him\u2014who watched him seal his own discomfiture, and smiled to know his obedience had to be. It was, indeed, as though she tortured him deliberately, yet for some reason undivined.\n\nFor a passing second Tom felt this\u2014then the strange exaggeration vanished. They played a game together. All this had been before. They looked back upon it, looked down from a point above it.\u2026 Tom could not read her heart, but he could read his own.\n\nIn a few minutes at most all this happened. He put the letter in his pocket, and Lettice turned to her cousin, challenge in her manner, an air of victory as well. And Tom felt he shared that victory somehow too. It was a curious moment, charged with a subtle perplexity of emotions none of them quite understood. It held such singular contradictions.\n\n'There, Ettie!' she exclaimed, as much as to say 'Now you can't scold me any more. You see how little Mr. Kelverdon minds!'\n\nWhile she flitted into the next room to fetch a stamp, Mrs. Haughstone, her needles arrested in mid-air, looked steadily at Tom. Her face was white. She had watched the little scene intently.\n\n'The only thing I cannot understand, Mr. Kelverdon,' she said in a low tone, her voice both indignant and sympathetic, 'is how my cousin can give pain to a man like you. It's the most heartless thing I've ever seen.'\n\n'Me!' gasped Tom. 'But I don't understand you!'\n\n'And for a creature like that!' she went on quickly, as Lettice was heard in the passage; 'a libertine,'\u2014she almost hissed the word out\u2014'who thinks every pretty woman is made for his amusement\u2014and false into the bargain\u2014'\n\nTom put the stamp on. A few minutes later he was again walking along the narrow little Luxor street, the sentences just heard still filling the silent air about him, emotions charging wildly, each detail of the familiar little journey associated already with present pain and with prophecies of pain to come. The bewilderment and confusion in him were beyond all quieting. One moment he saw the picture of a slender foot that deliberately crushed life into the dust, the next he gazed into gentle, loving eyes that would brim with tears if a single hair of his head were injured.\n\nA cold and mournful wind blew down the street, ruffling the darkened river. The black line of hills he could not see. Mystery, enchantment hung in the very air. The long dry fingers of the palm trees rattled overhead, and looking up, he saw the divine light of the starry heavens.\u2026 Surely among those comforting stars he saw her radiant eyes as well.\u2026\n\nA voice, asking in ridiculous English the direction to a certain house, broke his reverie, and, turning round, he saw the sheeted figure of an Arab boy, the bright eyes gleaming in the mischievous little face of bronze. He pointed out the gateway, and the boy slipped off into the darkness, his bare feet soundless and mysterious on the sand. He disappeared up the driveway to the house\u2014her house. Tom knew quite well from whom the telegram came. Tony had telegraphed to let her know of his safe arrival. So even that was necessary! 'And to-morrow morning,' he thought, 'he'll get my letter too. He'll come posting back again the very next day.' He clenched his teeth a moment; he shuddered. Then he added: 'So much the better!' and walked on quickly up the street. He posted her letter at the corner.\n\nHe went up to his bedroom. His sleepless nights had begun now.\u2026\n\nWhat was the use of thinking, he asked himself as the hours passed? What good did it do to put the same questions over and over again, to pass from doubt to certainty, only to be flung back again from certainty to doubt? Was there no discoverable centre where the pendulum ceased from swinging? How could she be at the same time both cruel and tender, both true and false, frank and secretive, spiritual and sensual? Each of these pairs, he realised, was really a single state of which the adjectives represented the extremes at either end. They were ripples. The central personality travelled in one or other direction according to circumstances, according to the pull or push of forces\u2014the main momentum of the parent wave. But there was a point where the heart felt neither one nor other, neither cruel nor tender, false nor true. Where, on the thermometer, did heat begin and cold come to an end? Love and hate, similarly, were extremes of one and the same emotion. Love, he well knew, could turn to virulent hatred\u2014if something checked and forced it back upon the line of natural advance. Could, then, her tenderness be thus reversed, turning into cruelty.\u2026 Or was this cruelty but the awakening in her of another thing?\u2026\n\nPossibly. Yet at the centre, that undiscovered centre at present beyond his reach, Lettice, he knew, remained unalterably steadfast. There he felt the absolute assurance she was his exclusively. His centre, moreover, coincided with her own. They were in the 'sea' together. But to get back into the sea, the Wave now rolling under them must first break and fall.\u2026\n\nThe sooner, then, the better! They would swing back with it together eventually.\n\nHe chose, that is\u2014without knowing it\u2014a higher way of moulding destiny. It was the spiritual way, whose method and secret lie in that subtle paradox: Yield to conquer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 279", + "text": "Yes, she was always 'tired' now, though the 'always' meant but three days at most. It was the starving sense of loneliness, the aching sense of loss, the yearning and the vain desire that made it seem so long. Lettice evaded him with laughter in her eyes, or with a tired smile. But the laughter was for another. It was merciless and terrible\u2014so slightly, faintly indicated, yet so overwhelmingly convincing.\n\nThe talk between them rarely touched reality, as though a barrier deadened their very voices. Even her mothering became exasperating; it was so unforced and natural; it seemed still so right that she should show solicitude for his physical welfare. And therein lay the anguish and the poignancy. Yet, while he resented fiercely, knowing this was all she had to offer now, he struggled at the same time to accept. One moment he resisted, the next accepted. One hour he believed in her, the next he disbelieved. Hope and fear alternately made tragic sport of him.\n\nTwo personalities fought for possession of his soul, and he could not always keep back the lower of the two. They interpenetrated\u2014as, at Dehr-el-Bahri, two scenes had interpenetrated, something very, very old projected upon a modern screen.\n\nLettice too\u2014he was convinced of it\u2014was undergoing a similar experience in herself. Only in her case just now it was the lower, the primitive, the physical aspect that was uppermost. She clung to Tony, yet struggled to keep Tom. She could not help herself. And he himself, knowing he must shortly go, still clung and hesitated, hoping against hope. More and more now, until the end, he was aware that he stood outside his present-day self, and above it. He looked back\u2014looked down\u2014upon former emotions and activities; and hence the confusing alternating of jealousy and forgiveness.\n\nThere were revealing little incidents from time to time. On the following afternoon he found her, for instance, radiant with that exuberant happiness he had learned now to distrust. And for a moment he half believed again that the menace had lifted and the happiness was for him. She held out both hands towards him, while she described a plan for going to Edfu and Abou Simbel. His heart beat wildly for a second.\n\n'But Tony?' he asked, almost before he knew it. 'We can't leave him out!'\n\n'Oh, but I've had a letter.' And as she said it his eye caught sight of a bulky envelope lying in the sand beside her chair.\n\n'Good,' he said quietly, 'and when is he coming back? I haven't heard from him.' The solid ground moved beneath his feet. He shivered, even in the blazing heat.\n\n'To-morrow. He sends you all sorts of messages and says that something you wrote made him very happy. I wonder what it was, Tom?'\n\nBehind her voice he heard the north wind rattling in the palms; he heard the soft rustle of the acacia leaves as well; there was the crashing of little waves upon the river; but a deep, deep shadow fell upon the sky and blotted out the sunshine. The glory vanished from the day, leaving in its place a painful glare that hurt the eyes. The soul in him was darkened.\n\n'Ah!' he exclaimed with assumed playfulness, 'but that's my secret!' Men do smile, he remembered, as they are led to execution.\n\nShe laughed excitedly. 'I shall find it out\u2014'\n\n'You will,' he burst out significantly, 'in the end.'\n\nThen, as she passed him to go into the house, he lost control a moment. He whispered suddenly:\n\n'Love has no secrets, Lettice, anywhere. We're in the Sea together. I shall never let you go.' The intensity in his manner betrayed him; he adored her; he could not hide it.\n\nShe turned an instant, standing two steps above him; the sidelong downward glance lent to her face a touch of royalty, half pitying, half imperious. Her exquisite, frail beauty held a strength that mocked the worship in his eyes and voice. Almost\u2014she challenged him:\n\n'Soothsayer!' she whispered back contemptuously. 'Do your worst!'\u2014and was gone into the house.\n\nDesire surged wildly in him at that moment; impatience, scorn, fury even, raised their heads; he felt a savage impulse to seize her with violence, force her to confess, to have it out and end it one way or the other. He loathed himself for submitting to her cruelty, for it was intentional cruelty\u2014she made him writhe and suffer of set purpose. And something barbaric in his blood leaped up in answer to the savagery in her own\u2026 when at that instant he heard her calling very softly:\n\n'Tom! Come indoors to me a moment; I want to show you something!'\n\nBut with it another sentence sprang across him and was gone. Like a meteor it streaked the screen of memory. Seize it he could not. It had to do with death\u2014his death. There was a thought of blood. Outwardly what he heard, however, was the playful little sentence of to-day. 'Come, I want to show you something.'\n\nAt the sound of her voice so softly calling all violence was forgotten; love poured back in a flood upon him; he would go through fire and water to possess her in the end. In this strange drama she played her inevitable part, even as he did; there must be no loss of self-control that might frustrate the coming climax. There must be no thwarting. If he felt jealousy, he must hide it; anger, scorn, desire must veil their faces.\n\nHe crossed the passage and stood before her in the darkened room, afraid and humble, full of a burning love that the centuries had not lessened, and that no conceivable cruelty of pain could ever change. Almost he knelt before her. Even if terrible, she was utterly adorable.\n\nFor he believed she was about to make a disclosure that would lay him bleeding in the dust; singularly at her mercy he felt, his heart laid bare to receive the final thrust that should make him outcast. Her little foot would crush him.\u2026\n\nThe long green blinds kept out the glare of the sunshine; and at first he saw the room but dimly. Then, slowly, the white form emerged, the broad-brimmed hat, the hanging violet veil, the yellow jacket of soft, clinging silk, the long white gauntlet gloves. He saw her dear face peering through the dimness at him, the eyes burning like two dark precious stones. A table stood between them. There was a square white object on it. A moment's bewilderment stole over him. Why had she called him in? What was she going to say? Why did she choose this moment? Was it the threat of Tony's near arrival that made her confession\u2014and his dismissal\u2014at last inevitable?\n\nThen, suddenly, that night in the London theatre flashed back across his mind\u2014her strange absorption in the play, the look of pain in her face, the little conversation, the sense of familiarity that hung about it all. He remembered Tony's words later: that another actor was expected with whose entry the piece would turn more real\u2014turn tragic.\n\nHe waited. The dimness of the room was like the dimness of that theatre. The lights were lowered. They played their little parts. The audience watched and listened.\n\n'Tom, dear,' her voice came floating tenderly across the air. 'I didn't like to give it you before the others. They wouldn't understand\u2014they'd laugh at us.'\n\nHe did not understand. Surely he had heard indistinctly. He waited, saying nothing. The tenderness in her voice amazed him. He had expected very different words. Yet this was surely Lettice speaking, the Lettice of his spring-time in the mountains beside the calm blue lake. He stared hard. For the voice was Lettice, but the eyes and figure were another's. He was again aware of two persons there\u2014of perplexing and bewildering struggle. But Lettice, for the moment, dominated as it seemed.\n\n'So I put it here,' she went on in a low gentle tone, 'here, Tommy, on the table for you. And all my love is in it\u2014my first, deep, fond love\u2014our childhood love.' She leaned down and forward, her face in her hands, her elbows on the dark cloth; she pushed the square, white packet across to him. 'God bless you,' floated to him with her breath.\n\nThe struggle in her seemed very patent then. Yet in spite of that other, older self within her, it was still the voice of Lettice.\u2026\n\nThere was a moment's silence while her whisper hung, as it were, upon the air. His entire body seemed a single heart. Exactly what he felt he hardly knew. There was a simultaneous collapse of several huge emotions in him.\u2026 But he trusted her.\u2026 He clung to that beloved voice. For she called him 'Tommy'; she was his mother; love, tenderness, and pity emanated from her like a cloud of perfume. He heard the faint rustle of her dress as she bent forward, but outside he heard the dry, harsh rattle of the palm trees in the northern wind. And in that\u2014was terror.\n\n'What\u2014what is it, Lettice?' The voice sounded like a boy's. It was outrageous. He swallowed\u2014with an effort.\n\n'Tommy, you\u2014don't mind? You will take it, won't you?' And it was as if he heard her saying 'Help me\u2026' once again, 'Trust me as I trust you.\u2026'\n\nMechanically he put his hand out and drew the object towards him. He knew then what it was and what was in it. He was glad of the darkness, for there was a ridiculous moisture in his eyes now. A lump was in his throat!\n\n'I've been neglecting you. You haven't had a thing for ages. You'll take it, Tommy, won't you\u2014dear?'\n\nThe little foolish words, so sweetly commonplace, fell like balm upon an open wound. He already held the small white packet in his hand. He looked up at her. God alone knows the strain upon his will in that moment. Somehow he mastered himself. It seemed as if he swallowed blood. For behind the mothering words lurked, he knew, the other self that any minute would return.\n\n'Thank you, Lettice, very much,' he said with a strange calmness, and his voice was firm. Whatever happened he must not prevent the delivery of what had to be. Above all, that was clear. The pain must come in full before the promised joy.\n\nWas it, perhaps, this strength in him that drew her? Was it his moment of iron self-mastery that brought her with outstretched, clinging arms towards him? Was it the unshakable love in him that threatened the temporary ascendancy of that other in her who gladly tortured him that joy might come in a morning yet to break?\n\nFor she stood beside him, though he had not seen her move. She was close against his shoulder, nestling as of old. It was surely a stage effect. A trap-door had opened in the floor of his consciousness; his first, early love sheltered in his aching heart again. The entire structure of the drama they played together threatened to collapse.\n\n'Tom\u2026 you love me less?'\n\nHe held her to him, but he did not kiss the face she turned up to his. Nor did he speak.\n\n'You've changed somewhere?' she whispered. 'You, too, have changed?'\n\nThere was a pause before he found words that he could utter. He dared not yield. To do so would be vain in any case.\n\n'N\u2014no, Lettice. But I can't say what it is. There is pain.\u2026 It has turned some part of me numb\u2026 killed something, brought something else to life. You will come back to me\u2026 but not quite yet.'\n\nIn spite of the darkness, he saw her face clearly then. For a moment\u2014it seemed so easy\u2014he could have caught her in his arms, kissed her, known the end of his present agony of heart and mind. She would have come back to him, Tony's claim obliterated from her life. The driving power that forced an older self upon her had weakened before the steadfast love he bore her. She was ready to capitulate. The little, childish present in his hands was offered as of old.\u2026 Tears rose behind his eyes.\n\nHow he resisted he never understood. Some thoroughness in him triumphed. If he shirked the pain to-day, it would have to be faced to-morrow\u2014that alone was clear in his breaking heart. To be worthy of the greater love, the completer joy to follow, they must accept the present pain and see it through\u2014experience it\u2014exhaust it once for all. To refuse it now was only to postpone it. She must go her way, while he went his.\u2026\n\nGently he pushed her from him, released his hold; the little face slipped from his shoulder as though it sank into the sea. He felt that she understood. He heard himself speaking, though how he chose the words he never knew. Out of new depths in himself the phrases rose\u2014a regenerated Tom uprising, though not yet sure of himself:\n\n'You are not wholly mine. I must first\u2014oh, Lettice!\u2014learn to do without you. It is you who say it.'\n\nHer voice, as she answered, seemed already changed, a shade of something harder and less yielding in it:\n\n'That which you can do without is added to you.'\n\n'A new thing\u2026 beginning,' he whispered, feeling it both belief and prophecy. His whisper broke in spite of himself. He saw her across the room, the table between them again. Already she looked different, 'Lettice' fading from her eyes and mouth.\n\nShe said a marvellous, sweet thing before that other self usurped her then:\n\n'One day, Tom, we shall find each other in a crowd.\u2026'\n\nThere was a yearning cry in him he did not utter. It seemed she faded from the atmosphere as the dimness closed about her. He saw a darker figure with burning eyes upon a darker face; there was a gleam of gold; a faint perfume as of ambra hung about the air, and outside the palm leaves rattled in the northern wind. He had heard awful words, it seemed, that sealed his fate. He was forsaken, lonely, outcast. It was a sentence of death, for she was set in power over him.\u2026\n\nA flood of dazzling sunshine poured into the room from a lifted blind, as the others looked in from the verandah to say that they were going and wanted to say good-bye. A moment later all were discussing plans in the garden, Tom as loudly and eagerly as any of them. He held his square white packet. But he did not open it till he reached his room a little later, and then arranged the different articles in a row upon his table: the favourite cigarettes, the soap, the pair of white tennis socks with his initial neatly sewn on, the tie in the shade of blue that suited him best\u2026 the writing-pad and the dates!\n\nA letter from Tony next caught his eye and he opened it, slowly, calmly, almost without interest, knowing exactly what it would say:\n\n'\u2026 I was delighted, old chap, to get your note,' he read. 'I felt sure it would be all right, for I felt somehow that I had exaggerated your feeling towards her. As you say, what one has to think of with a woman in so delicate a position is her happiness more than one's own. But I wouldn't do anything to offend you or cause you pain for worlds, and I'm awfully glad to know the way is clear. To tell you the truth, I went away on purpose, for I felt uneasy. I wanted to be quite sure first that I was not trespassing. She made me feel I was doing you no wrong, but I wanted your assurance too.\u2026'\n\nThere was a good deal more in similar vein\u2014he laid the burden upon her\u2014ending with a word to say he was coming back to Luxor immediately. He would arrive the following day.\n\nAs a matter of fact Tony was already then in the train that left Cairo that evening and reached Luxor at eight o'clock next morning. Tom, who had counted upon another twenty-four hours' respite, did not know this; nor did he know till later that another telegram had been carried by a ghostly little Arab boy, with the result that Tony and Lettice enjoyed their hot rolls and coffee alone together in the shady garden where the cool northern wind rattled among the palm trees. Mrs. Haughstone mentioned it in due course, however, having watched the t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate from her bedroom window, unobserved." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 280", + "text": "And next day there was one more revealing incident that helped, yet also hindered him, as he moved along his via dolorosa. For every step he took away from her seemed also to bring him nearer. They followed opposing curves of a circle. They separated ever more widely, back to back, yet were approaching each other at the same time. They would meet face to face.\u2026\n\nHe found her at the piano, practising the song that now ran ever in his blood; the score, he noticed, was in Tony's writing.\n\n'Unwelcome!' he exclaimed, reading out the title over her shoulder.\n\n'Tom! How you startled me! I was trying to learn it.' She turned to him; her eyes were shining. He was aware of a singular impression\u2014 struggle, effort barely manageable. Her beauty seemed fresh made; he thought of a wild rose washed by the dew and sparkling in the sunlight.\n\n'I thought you knew it already,' he observed.\n\nShe laughed significantly, looking up into his face so close he could have kissed her lips by merely bending his head a few inches. 'Not quite\u2014 yet,' she answered. 'Will you give me a lesson, Tom?'\n\n'Unpaid?' he asked.\n\nShe looked reproachfully at him. 'The best services are unpaid always.'\n\n'I'm afraid I have neither the patience nor the knowledge,' he replied.\n\nHer next words stirred happiness in him for a moment; the divine trust he fought to keep stole from his heart into his eyes: 'But you would never, never give up, Tom, no matter how difficult and obstinate the pupil. You would always understand. That I know.'\n\nHe moved away. Such double-edged talk, even in play, was dangerous. A deep weariness was in him, weakening self-control. Sensitive to the slightest touch just then, he dared not let her torture him too much. He felt in her a strength far, far beyond his own; he was powerless before her. Had Tony been present he could not have played his part at all. Somehow he had a curious feeling, moreover, that his cousin was not very far away.\n\n'Tony will be here later, I think,' she said, as she followed him outside. 'But, if not, he's sure to come to dinner.'\n\n'Good,' he replied, thinking that the train arrived in time to dress, and in no way surprised that she divined his thoughts. 'We can decide our plans then.' He added that he might be obliged to go back to Assouan, but she made no comment. Speech died away between them, as they sat down in the old familiar corner above the Nile. Tom, for the life of him, could think of nothing to say. Lettice, on the other hand, wanted to say nothing. He felt that she had nothing to say. Behind, below the numbness in him, meanwhile, her silence stabbed him without ceasing. The intense yearning in his heart threatened any minute to burst forth in vehement speech, almost in action. It lay accumulating in him dangerously, ready to leap out at the least sign\u2014the pin-prick of a look, a word, a gesture on her part, and he would smash the barrier down between them and\u2014ruin all. The sight of Tony, for instance, just then must have been as a red rag to a bull.\n\nHe traced figures in the sand with his heel, he listened to the wind above them, he never ceased to watch her motionless, indifferent figure stretched above him on the long deck-chair. A book peeped out from behind the cushion where her head rested. Tom put his hand across and took it suddenly, partly for something to do, partly from curiosity as well. She made a quick, restraining gesture, then changed her mind. And again he was conscious of battle in her, as if two beings fought.\n\n'The Mary Coleridge Poems,' she said carelessly. 'Tony gave it me. You'll find the song he put to music.'\n\nTom vigorously turned the leaves. He had already glanced at the title-page with the small inscription in one corner: 'To L. J., from A. W.' There was a pencil mark against a poem half-way through.\n\n'He's going to write music for some of the others too,' she added, watching him; 'the ones he has marked.' Her voice, he fancied, wavered slightly.\n\nTom nodded his head. 'I see,' he murmured, noticing a cross in pencil. A sullen defiance rose in his blood, but he forced it out of sight. He read the words in a low voice to himself. It was astonishing how the powers behind the scenes forced a contribution from the commonest incidents:\n\nThe sum of loss I have not reckoned yet, I cannot tell.\n\nFor ever it was morning when we met,\n\nNight when we bade farewell.\n\nPerhaps the words let loose the emotion, though of different kinds, pent up behind their silence. The strain, at any rate, between them tightened first, then seemed to split. He kept his eyes upon the page before him; Lettice, too, remained still as before; only her lips moved as she spoke:\n\n'Tom.\u2026' The voice plunged into his heart like iron.\n\n'Yes,' he said quietly, without looking up.\n\n'Tom,' she repeated, 'what are you thinking about so hard?'\n\nHe found no answer.\n\n'And all to yourself?'\n\nThe blood rushed to his face; her voice was so soft.\n\nHe met her eyes and smiled. 'The same as usual, I suppose,' he said.\n\nFor a moment she made no reply, then, glancing at the book lying in his hand, she said in a lower voice: 'That woman had suffered deeply. There's truth and passion in every word she writes; there's a marvellous restraint as well. Tom,' she added, gazing hard at him, 'you feel it, don't you? You understand her?' For an instant she knit her brows as if in perplexity or misgiving.\n\n'The truth, yes,' he replied after a moment's hesitation; 'the restraint as well.'\n\n'And the passion?'\n\nHe nodded curtly by way of agreement. He turned the pages over very rapidly. His fingers were as thick and clumsy as rigid bits of wood. He fumbled.\n\n'Will you read it once again?' she asked. He did so\u2026 in a low voice. With difficulty he reached the end. There was a mist before his eyes and his voice seemed confused. He dared not look up.\n\n'There's a deep spiritual beauty,' he went on slowly, making an enormous effort, 'that's what I feel strongest, I think. There's renunciation, sacrifice\u2014'\n\nHe was going to say more, for he felt the words surge up in his throat. This talk, he knew, was a mere safety valve to both of them; they used words as people attacked by laughter out of due season seize upon anything, however far-fetched, that may furnish excuse for it. The flood of language and emotion, too long suppressed, again rose to his very lips\u2014when a slight sound stopped his utterance. He turned. Amazement caught him. Her frozen immobility, her dead indifference, her boredom possibly\u2014all these, passing suddenly, had melted in a flood of tears. Her face was covered by her hands. She lay there sobbing within a foot of his hungry arms, sobbing as though her heart must break. He saw the drops between her little fingers, trickling.\n\nIt was so sudden, so unexpected, that Tom felt unable to speak or act at first. Numbness seized him. His faculties were arrested. He watched her, saw the little body heave down its entire length, noted the small convulsive movements of it. He saw all this, yet he could not do the natural thing. It was very ghastly.\u2026 He could not move a muscle, he could not say a single word, he could not comfort her\u2014because he knew those tears were the tears of pity only. It was for himself she sobbed. The tenderness in her\u2014in 'Lettice'\u2014broke down before his weight of pain, the weight of pain she herself laid upon him. Nothing that he might do or say could comfort her. Divining what the immediate future held in store for him, she wept these burning tears of pity. In that poignant moment of self-revelation Tom's cumbersome machinery of intuition did not fail him. He understood. It was a confession\u2014the last perhaps. He saw ahead with vivid and merciless clarity of vision. Only another could comfort her.\u2026 Yet he could help. Yes\u2014he could help\u2014by going. There was no other way. He must slip out.\n\nAnd, as if prophetically just then, she murmured between her tight-pressed fingers: 'Leave me, Tom, for a moment\u2026 please go away\u2026 I'm so mortified\u2026 this idiotic scene.\u2026 Leave me a little, then come back. I shall be myself again presently.\u2026 It's Egypt\u2014this awful Egypt.\u2026'\n\nTom obeyed. He got up and left her, moving without feeling in his legs, as though he walked in his sleep, as though he dreamed, as though he were\u2014dead. He did not notice the direction. He walked mechanically. It felt to him that he simply walked straight out of her life into a world of emptiness and ice and shadows.\u2026\n\nThe river lay below him in a flood of light. He saw the Theban Hills rolling their dark, menacing wave along the far horizon. In the blistering heat the desert lay sun-drenched, basking, silent. Its faint sweet perfume reached him in the northern wind, that pungent odour of the sand, which is the odour of this sun-baked land etherealised.\n\nA fiery intensity of light lay over it, as though any moment it must burst into sheets of flame. So intense was the light that it seemed to let sight through to\u2014to what? To a more distant vision, infinitely remote. It was not a mirror, but a transparency. The eyes slipped through it marvellously.\n\nHe stood on the steps of worn-out sandstone, listening, staring, feeling nothing\u2026 and then a little song came floating across the air towards him, sung by a boatman in mid-stream. It was a native melody, but it had the strange, monotonous lilt of Tony's old-Egyptian melody.\u2026 And feeling stole back upon him, alternately burning and freezing the currents of his blood. The childhood nightmare touch crept into him: he saw the wave-like outline of the gloomy hills, he heard the wind rattling in the leaves behind him, to his nostrils came the strange, penetrating perfume of the tawny desert that encircles ancient Thebes, and in the air before him hung two pairs of eyes, dark, faithful eyes, cruel and at the same time tender, true yet merciless, and the others\u2014treacherous, false, light blue in colour.\u2026 He began to shuffle furiously with his feet.\u2026 The soul in him went under.\u2026 He turned to face the menace coming up behind\u2026 the falling Wave.\u2026\n\n'Tom!' he heard\u2014and turned back towards her. And when he reached her side, she had so entirely regained composure that he could hardly believe it was the same person. Fresh and radiant she looked once more, no sign of tears, no traces of her recent emotion anywhere. Perhaps the interval had been longer than he guessed, but, in any case, the change was swift and half unaccountable. In himself, equally, was a calmness that seemed unnatural. He heard himself speaking in an even tone about the view, the river, the gold of the coming sunset. He wished to spare her, he talked as though nothing had happened, he mentioned the deep purple colour of the hills\u2014when she broke out with sudden vehemence.\n\n'Oh, don't speak of those hills, those awful hills,' she cried. 'I dread the sight of them. Last night I dreamed again\u2014they crushed me down into the sand. I felt buried beneath them, deep, deep down\u2014buried.' She whispered the last word as though to herself. She hid her face.\n\nThe words amazed him. He caught the passing shiver in her voice.\n\n'\"Again\"?' he asked. 'You've dreamed of them before?' He stood close, looking down at her. The sense of his own identity returned slowly, yet he still felt two persons in him.\n\n'Often and often,' she said in a lowered tone, 'since Tony came. I dream that we all three lie buried somewhere in that forbidding valley. It terrifies me more and more each time.'\n\n'Strange,' he said. 'For they draw me too. I feel them somehow known\u2014 familiar.' He paused. 'I believe Tony was right, you know, when he said that we three\u2014'\n\nHow she stopped him he never quite understood. At first he thought the curious movement on her face portended tears again, but the next second he saw that instead of tears a slow strange smile was stealing upon her\u2014 upwards from the mouth. It lay upon her features for a second only, but long enough to alter them. A thin, diaphanous mask, transparent, swiftly fleeting, passed over her, and through it another woman, yet herself, peered up at him with a penetrating yet somehow distant gaze. A shudder ran down his spine; there was a sensation of inner cold against his heart; he trembled, but he could not look away.\u2026 He saw in that brief instant the face of the woman who tortured him. The same second, so swiftly was it gone again, he saw Lettice watching him through half-closed eyelids. He heard her saying something. She was completing the sentence that had interrupted him:\n\n'We're too imaginative, Tom. Believe me, Egypt is no place to let imagination loose, and I don't like it.' She sighed: there was exhaustion in her. 'It's stimulating enough without our help. Besides\u2014' she used a curious adjective\u2014'it's dangerous too.'\n\nTom willingly let the subject drop; his own desire was to appear natural, to protect her, to save her pain. He thought no longer of himself. Drawing upon all his strength, forcing himself almost to breaking-point, he talked quietly of obvious things, while longing secretly to get away to his own room where he could be alone. He craved to hide himself; like a stricken animal his instinct was to withdraw from observation.\n\nThe arrival of the tea-tray helped him, and, while they drank, the sky let down the emblazoned curtain of a hundred colours lest Night should bring her diamonds unnoticed, unannounced. There is no dusk in Egypt; the sun draws on his opal hood; there is a rush of soft white stars: the desert cools, and the wind turns icy. Night, high on her spangled throne, watches the sun dip down behind the Libyan sands.\n\nTom felt this coming of Night as he sat there, so close to Lettice that he could touch her fingers, feel her breath, catch the lightest rustle of her thin white dress. He felt night creeping in upon his heart. Swiftly the shadows piled. His soul seemed draped in blackness, drained of its shining gold, hidden below the horizon of the years. It sank out of sight, cold, lost, forgotten. His day was past and over.\u2026\n\nThey had been sitting silent for some minutes when a voice became audible, singing in the distance. It came nearer. Tom recognised the tune\u2014'We were young, we were merry, we were very, very wise,'; and Lettice sat up suddenly to listen. But Tom then thought of one thing only\u2014that it was beyond his power just now to meet his cousin. He knew his control was not equal to the task; he would betray himself; the r\u00f4le was too exacting. He rose abruptly.\n\n'That must be Tony coming,' Lettice said. 'His tea will be all cold!' Each word was a caress, each syllable alive with interest, sympathy, excited anticipation. She had become suddenly alive. Tom saw her eyes shining as she gazed past him down the darkening drive. He made his absurd excuse. 'I'm going home to rest a bit, Lettice. I played tennis too hard. The sun's given me a headache. We'll meet later. You'll keep Tony for dinner?' His mind had begun to work, too; the evening train from Cairo, he remembered, was not due for an hour or more yet. A hideous suspicion rushed like fire through him.\n\nBut he asked no question. He knew they wished to be alone together. Yet also he had a wild, secret hope that she would be disappointed. He was speedily undeceived.\n\n'All right, Tom,' she answered, hardly looking at him. 'And mind you're not late. Eight o'clock sharp. I'll make Tony stay.'\n\nHe was gone. He chose the path along the river bank instead of going by the drive. He did not look back once. It was when he entered the road a little later that he met Mrs. Haughstone coming home from a visit to some friends in his hotel. It was then she told him.\u2026\n\n'What a surprise you must have had,' Tom believes he said in reply. He said something, at any rate, that he hoped sounded natural and right.\n\n'Oh, no,' Mrs. Haughstone explained. 'We were quite prepared. Lettice had a telegram, you see, to let her know.'\n\nShe told him other things as well.\u2026" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 281", + "text": "Tony had come back. The Play turned very real.\n\nThe situation \u00e0 trois thenceforward became, for Tom, an acutely afflicting one. He found no permanent resting-place for heart or mind. He analysed, asked himself questions without end, but a final decisive judgment evaded him. He wrote letters and tore them up again. He hid himself in Assouan with belief for a companion, he came back and found that companion had been but a masquerader\u2014disbelief. Suspicion grew confirmed into conviction. Vanity persuaded him against the weight of evidence, then left him naked with his facts. He wanted to kill, first others, then himself. He laughed, but the same minute he could have cried. Such complicated tangles of emotion were beyond his solving\u2014it amazed him; such prolonged and incessant torture, so delicately applied\u2014he marvelled that a human heart could bear it without breaking. For the affection and sympathy he felt for his cousin refused to die, while his worship and passion towards an unresponsive woman increasingly consumed him.\n\nHe no longer recognised himself, his cousin, Lettice; all three, indeed, were singularly changed. Each duplicated into a double r\u00f4le. Towards their former selves he kept his former attitude\u2014of affection, love, belief; towards the usurping selves he felt\u2014he knew not what. Therefore he drifted.\u2026 Strange, mysterious, tender, unfathomable Woman! Vain, primitive, self-sufficing, confident Man! In him the masculine tried to reason and analyse to the very end; in her the feminine interpreted intuitively: the male and female attitudes, that is, held true throughout. The Wave swept him forward irresistibly, his very soul, it seemed, went shuffling to find solid ground.\u2026\n\nMeanwhile, however, no one broke the rules\u2014rules that apparently had made themselves: subtle and delicate, it took place mostly out of sight, as it were, inside the heart. Below the mask of ordinary surface-conduct all agreed to wear, the deeper, inevitable intercourse proceeded, a Play within a Play, a tragedy concealed thinly by general consent under the most commonplace comedy imaginable. All acted out their parts, rehearsed, it seemed, of long ago. For, more and more, it came to Tom that the one thing he must never lose, whatever happened, was his trust in her. He must cling to that though it cost him all\u2014trust in her love and truth and constancy. This singular burden seemed laid upon his soul. If he lost that trust and that belief, the Wave could never break, she could never justify that trust and that belief.\n\nThis 'enchantment' that tortured him, straining his whole being, was somehow a test indeed of his final worthiness to win her. Somehow, somewhence, he owed her this.\u2026 He dared not fail. For if he failed the Wave that should sweep her back into the 'sea' with him would not break\u2014he would merely go on shuffling with his feet to the end of life. Tony and Lettice conquered him till he lay bleeding in the sand; Tom played the r\u00f4le of loss\u2014obediently almost; the feeling that they were set in power over him persisted strangely. It dominated, at any rate, the resistance he would otherwise have offered. He must learn to do without her in order that she might in the end be added to him. Thus, and thus alone, could he find himself, and reach the level where she lived. He took his fate from her gentle, merciless hands, well knowing that it had to be. In some marvellous, sweet way the sacrifice would bring her back again at last, but bring her back completed\u2014and to a Tom worthy of her love. The self-centred, confident man in him that deemed itself indispensable must crumble. To find regeneration he must risk destruction.\n\nEvents\u2014yet always inner events\u2014moved with such rapidity then that he lost count of time. The barrier never lowered again. He played his ghastly part in silence\u2014always inner silence. Out of sight, below the surface, the deep wordless Play continued. With Tony's return the drama hurried. The actor all had been waiting for came on, and took the centre of the stage, and stayed until the curtain fell\u2014a few weeks, all told, of their short Egyptian winter.\n\nIn the crowded rush of action Tom felt the Wave\u2014bend, break, and smash him. At its highest moment he saw the stars, at its lowest the crunch of shifting gravel filled his ears, the mud blinded sight, the rubbish choked his breath. Yet he had seen those distant stars.\u2026 Into the mothering sea, as he sank back, the memory of the light went with him. It was a kind of incredible performance, half on earth and half in the air: it rushed with such impetuous momentum.\n\nAmid the intensity of his human emotions, meanwhile, he lost sight of any subtler hints, if indeed they offered: he saw no veiled eastern visions any more, divined no psychic warnings. His agony of blinding pain, alternating with briefest intervals of shining hope when he recovered belief in her and called himself the worst names he could think of\u2014this seething warfare of cruder feelings left no part of him sensitive to the delicate promptings of finer forces, least of all to the tracery of fancied memories. He only gasped for breath\u2014sufficient to keep himself afloat and cry, as he had promised he would cry, even to the bitter end: 'I'll face it\u2026 I'll stick it out\u2026 I'll trust.\u2026!'\n\nThe setting of the Play was perfect; in Egypt alone was its production possible. The brilliant lighting, the fathomless, soft shadows, deep covering of blue by day, clear stars by night, the solemn hills, and the slow, eternal river\u2014all these, against the huge background of the Desert, silent, golden, lonely, formed the adequate and true environment. In no other country, in England least of all, could the presentation have been real. Tony, himself, and Lettice belonged, one and all, it seemed, to Egypt\u2014yet, somehow, not wholly to the Egypt of the tourist hordes and dragoman, and big hotels. The Onlooker in him, who stood aloof and held a watching brief, looked down upon an ancient land unvexed by railways, graciously clothed and coloured gorgeously, mapped burningly mid fiercer passions, eager for life, contemptuous of death. He did not understand, but that it was thus, not otherwise, he knew.\u2026\n\nHer beauty, too, both physical and spiritual, became for him strangely heightened. He shifted between moods of worship that were alternately physical and spiritual. In the former he pictured her with darker colouring, half barbaric, eastern, her slender figure flitting through a grove of palms beyond a river too wide for him to cross; gold bands gleamed upon her arms, bare to the shoulder; he could not reach her; she was with another\u2014it was torturing; she and that other disappeared into the covering shadows.\u2026 In the latter, however, there was no unworthy thought, no faintest desire of the blood; he saw her high among the little stars, gazing with tender, pitying eyes upon him, calling softly, praying for him, loving him, yet remote in some spiritual isolation where she must wait until he soared to join her.\n\nBoth physically and spiritually, that is, he idealised her\u2014saw her divinely naked. She did not move. She hung there like a star, waiting for him, while he was carried past her, swept along helplessly by a tide, a flood, a wave, though a wave that was somehow rising up to where she dwelt above him.\u2026\n\nIt was a marvellous experience. In the physical moods he felt the fires of jealousy burn his flesh away to the bare nerves\u2014resentment, rage, a bitterness that could kill; in the alternate state he felt the uplifting joy and comfort of ultimate sacrifice, sweet as heaven, the bliss of complete renunciation\u2014for her happiness. If she loved another who could give her greater joy, he had no right to interfere.\n\nIt was this last that gradually increased in strength, the first that slowly, surely died. Unsatisfied yearnings hunted his soul across the empty desert that now seemed life. The self he had been so pleased with, had admired so proudly with calm complacence, thinking it indispensable\u2014 this was tortured, stabbed and mercilessly starved to death by slow degrees, while something else appeared shyly, gently, as yet unaware of itself, but already clearer and stronger. In the depths of his being, below an immense horizon, shone joy, luring him onward and brightening as it did so.\n\nLove, he realised, was independent of the will\u2014no one can will to love: she was not anywhere to blame, a stronger claim had come into life and changed her. She could not live untruth, pretending otherwise. He, rather, was to blame if he sought to hold her to a smaller love she had outgrown. She had the inalienable right to obey the bigger claim, if such it proved to be. Personal freedom was the basis of their contract. It would have been easier for him if she could have told him frankly, shared it with him; but, since that seemed beyond her, then it was for him to slip away. He must subtract himself from an inharmonious three, leaving a perfect two. He must make it easier for her.\n\nThe days of golden sunshine passed along their appointed way as before, leaving him still without a final decision. Outwardly the little party a trois seemed harmonious, a coherent unit, while inwardly the accumulation of suppressed emotion crept nearer and nearer to the final breaking point. They lived upon a crater, playing their comedy within sight and hearing of destruction: even Mrs. Haughstone, ever waiting in the wings for her cue, came on effectively and filled her r\u00f4le, insignificant yet necessary. Its meanness was its truth.\n\n'Mr. Winslowe excites my cousin too much; I'm sure it isn't good for her\u2014 in England, yes, but not out here in this strong, dangerous climate.'\n\nTom understood, but invariably opposed her:\n\n'If it makes her happy for a little while, I see no harm in it; life has not been too kind to her, remember.'\n\nSometimes, however, the hint was barbed as well: 'Your cousin is a delightful being, but he can talk nonsense when he wants to. He's actually been trying to persuade me that you're jealous of him. He said you were only waiting a suitable moment to catch him alone in the Desert and shoot him!'\n\nTom countered her with an assumption of portentous gravity: 'Sound travels too easily in this still air,' he reminded her; 'the Nile would be the simplest way.' After which, confused by ridicule, she renounced the hint direct, indulging instead in facial expression, glances, and innuendo conveyed by gesture.\n\nThat there was some truth, however, behind this betrayal of her hostess and her fellow-guest, Tom felt certain; it lied more by exaggeration than by sheer invention: he listened while he hated it; ashamed of himself, he yet invited the ever-ready warnings, though he invariably defended the object of them\u2014and himself.\n\nAlternating thus, he knew no minute of happiness; a single day, a single hour contained both moods, trust ousted suspicion, and suspicion turned out trust. Lettice led him on, then abruptly turned to ice. In the morning he was first and Tony nowhere, the same afternoon this was reversed precisely\u2014yet the balance growing steadily in his cousin's favour, the evidence accumulating against himself. It was not purposely contrived, it was in automatic obedience to deeper impulses than she knew. Tom never lost sight of this amazing duality in her, the struggle of one self against another older self to which cruelty was no stranger\u2014or, as he put it, the newly awakened Woman against the Mother in her.\n\nHe could not fail to note the different effects he and his cousin produced in her\u2014the ghastly difference. With himself she was captious, easily exasperated; her relations with Tony, above all, a sensitive spot on which she could bear no slightest pressure without annoyance; while behind this attitude, hid always the faithful motherly care that could not see him in distress. That touch of comedy lay in it dreadfully:\u2014wet feet, cold, hungry, tired, and she flew to his consoling! Towards Tony this side of her remained unresponsive; he might drink unfiltered water for all she cared, tire himself to death, or sit in a draught for hours. It could have been comic almost but for its significance: that from Tony she received, instead of gave. The woman in her asked, claimed even\u2014of the man in him. The pain for Tom lay there.\n\nHis cousin amused, stimulated her beyond anything Tom could offer; she sought protection from him, leant upon him. In his presence she blossomed out, her eyes shone the moment he arrived, her voice altered, her spirits became exuberant. The wholesome physical was awakened by him. He could not hope to equal Tony's address, his fascination. He never forgot that she once danced for happiness.\u2026 Helplessness grew upon him\u2014he had no right to feel angry even, he could not justly blame herself or his cousin. The woman in her was open to capture by another; so far it had never belonged to him. In vain he argued that the mother was the larger part; it was the woman that he wanted with it. Having separated the two aspects of her in this way, the division, once made, remained.\n\nAnd every day that passed this difference in her towards himself and Tony grew more mercilessly marked. The woman in her responded to another touch than his. Though neither lust nor passion, he knew, dwelt in her pure being anywhere, there were yet a thousand delicate unconscious ways by which a woman betrayed her attraction to a being of the opposite sex; they could not be challenged, but equally they could not be misinterpreted. Like the colour and perfume of a rose, they emanated from her inmost being.\u2026 In this sense, she was sexually indifferent to Tom, and while passion consumed his soul, he felt her, dearly mothering, yet cold as ice. The soft winds of Egypt bent the full-blossomed rose into another's hand, towards another's lips.\u2026 Tony had entered the garden of her secret life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 282", + "text": "And so the fires of jealousy burned him. He struggled hard, smothering all outward expression of his pain, with the sole result that the suppression increased the fury of the heat within. For every day the tiniest details fed its fierceness. It was inextinguishable. He lost his appetite, his sleep, he lost all sense of what is called proportion. There was no rest in him, day and night he lived in the consuming flame.\n\nHis cousin's irresponsibility now assumed a sinister form that shocked him. He recognised the libertine in his careless play with members of the other sex who had pleased him for moments, then been tossed aside. He became aware of grossness in his eyes and lips and bearing. He understood, above all, his\u2014hands.\n\nAgainst the fiery screen of his emotions jealousy threw violent pictures which he mistook for thought\u2026, and there burst through this screen, then, scattering all lesser feelings, the flame of a vindictive anger that he believed was the protective righteous anger of an outraged man. 'If Tony did her wrong,' he told himself, 'I would kill him.'\n\nAlways, at this extravagant moment, however, he reached a climax, then calmed down again. A sense of humour rose incongruously to check loss of self-restraint. The memory of her daily tenderness swept over him; and shame sent a blush into his cheeks. He felt mortified, ungenerous, a foolish figure even. While the reaction lasted he forgave, felt her above reproach, cursed his wretched thoughts that had tried to soil her, and lost the violent vindictiveness that had betrayed him. His affection for his cousin, always real, and the sympathy between them, always genuine, returned to complete his own discomfiture. His mood swayed back to the first, happy days when the three of them had laughed and played together.\n\nAnd to punish himself while this reaction lasted, he would seek her out and see that she inflicted the punishment itself. He would hear from her own lips how fond she was of Tony, fighting to convince himself, while he listened, that she was above suspicion, and that his pain was due solely to unworthy jealousy. He would be specially nice to Tony, making things easier for him, even urging him, as it were, into her very arms.\n\nThese moments of generous reaction, however, seemed to puzzle her. The exalted state of emotion was confined, perhaps, to himself. At any rate, he produced results the very reverse of what he intended; Tony became more cautious, Lettice looked at himself with half-questioning eyes.\u2026 There was falseness in his attitude, something unnatural. It was not the part he was cast for in the Play. He could not keep it up. He fell back once more to watching, listening, playing his proper r\u00f4le of a slave who was forced to observe the happiness of others set somehow over him, while suffering in silence. The inner fires were fed anew thereby. He knew himself flung back, bruised and bleeding, upon his original fear and jealousy, convinced more than ever before that this cruelty and torture had to be, and that his pain was justified. To resist was only to delay the perfect dawn.\n\n\u2003The sum of loss I have not reckoned yet,\n\n\u2003I cannot tell\n\n\u2003For ever it was morning when we met,\n\n\u2003Night when we bade farewell.\n\nHe changed the pronouns in the last two lines, for always it was morning when they met, night when they bade farewell.\n\nMrs. Haughstone, meanwhile, neglected no opportunity of dotting the vowel for his benefit; she crossed each t that the writing of the stars dropped fluttering across her path. 'Mr. Winslowe has emotions,' she mentioned once, 'but he has no heart. If he ever marries and settles down, his wife will find it out.'\n\n'My cousin is not the kind to marry,' Tom replied. 'He's too changeable, and he knows it.'\n\n'He's young,' she said, 'he hasn't found the right woman yet. He will improve\u2014a woman older than himself with the mother strong in her might hold him. He needs the mother too. Most men do, I think; they're all children really.'\n\nTom laughed. 'Tony as father of a family\u2014I can't imagine it.'\n\n'Once he had children of his own,' she suggested, 'he would steady wonderfully. Those men often make the best husbands\u2014don't you think?'\n\n'Perhaps,' Tom replied briefly. 'Provided there's real heart beneath.'\n\n'In the woman, yes,' returned the other quietly. 'Too much heart in the man can so easily cloy. A real man is always half a savage; that's why the woman likes him. It's the woman who guards the family.'\n\nTom, knowing that her words veiled other meanings, pretended not to notice. He no longer rose to the bait she offered. He detected the nonsense, the insincerity as well, but he could not argue successfully, and generalisations were equally beyond him. Too polite to strike back, he always waited till she had talked herself out; besides he often acquired information thus, information he both longed for yet disliked intensely. Such information rarely failed: it was, indeed, the desire to impart it with an air of naturalness that caused the conversation almost invariably. It appeared now. It was pregnant information, too. She conveyed it in a lowered tone: there was news from Warsaw. The end, it seemed, was expected by the doctors; a few months at most. Lettice had been warned, however, that her appearance could do no good; the sufferer mistook her for a relative who came to persecute him. Her presence would only hasten the end. She had cabled, none the less, to say that she would come. This was a week ago; the answer was expected in a day or two.\n\nAnd Tom had not been informed of this.\n\n'Mr. Winslowe thinks she ought to go at once. I'm sure his advice is wise. Even if her presence can do no good, it might be an unceasing regret if she was not there.\u2026'\n\n'Your cousin alone can judge,' he interrupted coldly. 'I'd rather not discuss it, if you don't mind,' he added, noticing her eagerness to continue the conversation.\n\n'Oh, certainly, Mr. Kelverdon\u2014just as you feel. But in case she asks your advice as well\u2014I only thought you'd like to know\u2014to be prepared, I mean.'\n\nOnly long afterwards did it occur to him that Tony's informant was possibly this jealous parasite herself, who now deliberately put the matter in another light, hoping to sow discord to her own eventual benefit. All he realised at the moment was the intolerable pain that Lettice should tell him nothing. She looked to Tony for help, advice, possibly for consolation too.\n\nThere were moments of another kind, however, when it seemed quite easy to talk plainly. His position was absurd, undignified, unmanly. It was for him to state his case and abide by the result. Hearts rarely break in two, for all that poets and women might protest.\n\nThese moments, however, he did not use. It was not that he shrank from hearing his sentence plainly spoken, nor that he decided he must not prevent something that had to be. The reason lay deeper still:\u2014it was impossible. In her presence he became tongue-tied, helpless. His own stupidity overwhelmed him. Silence took him. He felt at a hopeless disadvantage, ashamed even. No words of his could reach her through the distance, across the barrier, that lay between them now. He made no single attempt. His aching heart, filled with an immeasurable love, remained without the relief of utterance. He had lost her. But he loved now something in her place beyond the possibility of loss\u2014an indestructible ideal.\n\nWords, therefore, were not only impossible, they were vain. And when the final moment came they were still more useless. He could go, but he could not tell her he was going. Before that moment came, however, another searching experience was his: he saw Tony jealous\u2014jealous of himself! He actually came to feel sympathy with his cousin who was his rival! It was his faithful love that made that possible too.\n\nHe realised this suddenly one day at Assouan.\n\nHe had been thinking about the long conversations Tony and Lettice enjoyed together, wondering what they found to discuss at such interminable length. From that his mind slipped easily into another question\u2014how she could be so insensible to the pain she caused him?\u2014when, all in a flash, he realised the distance she had travelled from him on the road of love towards Tony. The moment of perspective made it abruptly clear. She now talked with Tony as once, at Montreux and elsewhere, she had talked with himself. He saw his former place completely occupied. As an accomplished fact he saw it.\n\nThe belief that Tony's influence would weaken deserted him from that instant. It had been but a false hope created by desire and yearning.\n\nThere was a crash. He reached the bottom of despair. That same evening, on returning to his hotel from the Works, he found a telegram. It had been arranged that Lettice, Tony, Miss de Lorne and her brother should join him in Assouan. The telegram stated briefly that it was not possible after all:\u2014she sent an excuse.\n\nThe sleepless night was no new thing to him, but the acuteness of new suffering was a revelation. Jealousy unmasked her amazing powers of poisonous and devastating energy.\u2026 He visualised in detail. He saw Lettice and his cousin together in the very situations he had hitherto reserved imaginatively for himself, both sweets hoped for and delights experienced, but raised now a hundredfold in actuality. Like pictures of flame they rose before his inner eye; they seared and scorched him; his blood turned acid; the dregs of agony were his to drink. The happiness he had planned for himself, down to the smallest minuti\u00e6 of each precious incident, he now saw transferred in this appalling way\u2014to another. Not deliberately summoned, not morbidly evoked\u2014the pictures rose of their own accord against the background of his mind, yet so instinct with actuality, that it seemed he had surely lived them, too, himself with her, somewhere, somehow\u2026 before. There was that same haunting touch of familiarity about them.\n\nIn the long hours of this particular night he reached, perhaps, the acme of his pain; imagination, whipped by jealousy, stoked the furnace to a heat he had not known as yet. He had been clinging to a visionary hope. 'I've lost her\u2026 lost her\u2026 lost her,' he repeated to himself, as though with each repetition the meaning of the phrase grew clearer. Numbness followed upon misery; there were long intervals when he felt nothing at all, periods when he thought he hated her, when pride and anger whispered he could do without her.\u2026 A state of negative insensibility followed.\u2026 On the heels of it came a red and violent vindictiveness; next\u2014resignation, complete acceptance, almost peace. Then acute sensitiveness returned again\u2014he felt the whole series of emotions over and over without one omission. This numbness and sensitiveness alternated with a kind of rhythmic succession.\u2026 He reviewed the entire episode from beginning to end, recalled every word she had uttered, traced the gradual influence of Tony on her, from its first faint origin to its present climax. He saw her struggles and her tears\u2026 the mysterious duality working to possess her soul. It was all plain as daylight. No justification for any further hope was left to him. He must go.\u2026 It was the thunder, surely, of the falling Wave.\n\nFor Tony, he realised at last, had not merely usurped his own place, but had discovered a new Lettice to herself, and setting her thus in a new, a larger world, had taught her a new relationship. He had achieved\u2014perhaps innocently enough so far as his conscience was concerned?\u2014a new result, and a bigger one than Tom, with his lesser powers, could possibly have effected.\n\nThere was no falseness, no duplicity in her. 'She still loves me as before, the mother still gives me what she always gave,' Tom put it to himself, 'but Tony has ploughed deeper\u2014reached the woman in her. He loves a Lettice I have never realised. It is this new Lettice that loves him in return.\u2026 What right have I, with my smaller claim, to stand in her way a single moment?\u2026 I must slip out.'\n\nHe had lost the dream that Tony but tended a blossom, the fruit of which would come sweetly to his plucking afterwards. The intense suffering concealed all prophecy, as the jealousy killed all hope. He spent that final night of awful pain on his balcony, remembering how weeks before in Luxor the first menacing presentiment had come to him. He stared out into the Egyptian wonder of outer darkness. The stillness held a final menace as of death. He recalled a Polish proverb: 'In the still marshes there are devils.' The world spread dark and empty like his life; the Theban Hills seemed to have crept after him, here to Assouan; the stars, incredibly distant, had no warmth or comfort in them; the river roared with a dull and lonely sound; he heard the palm trees rattling in the wind. The pain in him was almost physical.\u2026\n\nDawn found him in the same position\u2014yet with a change. Perhaps the prolonged agony had killed the ache of ceaseless personal craving, or perhaps the fierceness of the fire had burned it out. Tom could not say; nor did he ask the questions. A change was there, and that was all he knew. He had come at last to a decision, made a final choice. He had somehow fought his battle out with a courage he did not know was courage. Here at Assouan, he turned upon the Wave and faced it. He saw her happiness only, fixed all his hope and energy on that. A new and loftier strength woke in him. There was no shuffling now.\n\nHe would give her up. In his heart she would always remain his dream and his ideal\u2014but outwardly he would no longer need her. He would do without her. He forgave\u2014if there was anything to forgive\u2014forgave them both.\u2026\n\nSomething in him had broken.\n\nHe could not explain it, though he felt it. Yet it was not her that he had given up\u2014it was himself.\n\nThe first effect of this, however, was to think that life lay in ruins round him, that, literally, the life in him was smothered by the breaking wave.\u2026\n\nAnd yet he did not break\u2014he did not drown.\n\nFor, as though to show that his decision was the right, inevitable one, small outward details came to his assistance. Fate evidently approved. For Fate just then furnished relief by providing another outlet for his energies: the Works went seriously wrong: Tom could think of nothing else but how he could put things right again. Reflection, introspection, brooding over mental and spiritual pain became impossible.\n\nThe lieutenants he trusted had played him false; sub-contracts of an outrageous kind, flavoured by bribery, had been entered into; the cost of certain necessaries had been raised absurdly, with the result that the profits of the entire undertaking to the Firm must be lowered correspondingly. And the blame, the responsibility was his own; he had unwisely delegated his powers to underlings whose ambitions for money exceeded their sense of honour. But Tom's honour was involved as well. He had delegated his powers in writing. He now had to pay the price of his prolonged neglect of duty.\n\nThe position was irremediable; Tom's neglect and inefficiency were established beyond question. He had failed in a position of high trust. And to make the situation still less pleasant, Sir William, the Chairman of the Company\u2014Tom's chief, the man to whom he owed his partnership and post of trust\u2014telegraphed that he was on the way at last from Salonika. One way alone offered\u2014to break the disastrous contracts by payments made down without delay. Tom made these payments out of his own pocket; they were large; his private resources disappeared in a single day.\u2026 But, even so, the delay and bungling at the Works were not to be concealed. Sir William, shrewd, experienced man of business, stern of heart as well as hard of head, could not be deceived. Within half an hour of his arrival, Tom Kelverdon's glaring incompetency\u2014worse, his unreliability, to use no harsher word\u2014were all laid bare. His position in the Firm, even his partnership, perhaps, became untenable. Resignation stared him in the face.\n\nHe saw his life go down in ruins before his very eyes; the roof had fallen long ago. The pillars now collapsed. The Wave, indeed, had turned him upside down; its smothering crash left no corner of his being above water; heart, mind, and character were flung in a broken tangle against the cruel bottom as it fell to earth.\n\nBut, at any rate, the new outlet for his immediate energies was offered. He seized it vigorously. He gave up his room at Luxor, and sent a man down to bring his luggage up. He did not write to Lettice. He faced the practical situation with a courage and thoroughness which, though too late, were admirable. Moreover, he found a curious relief in the new disaster, a certain comfort even. There was compensation in it somewhere. Everything was going to smash\u2014the sooner, then, the better! This recklessness was in him. He had lost Lettice, so what else mattered? His attitude was somewhat devil-may-care, his grip on life itself seemed slipping.\n\nThis mood could not last, however, with a character like his. It seized him, but retained no hold. It was the last cry of despair when he touched bottom, the moment when weaker temperaments think of the emergency exit, realise their final worthlessness\u2014proving themselves worthless, indeed, thereby.\n\nTom met the blow in other fashion. He saw himself unworthy, but by no means worthless. Suicide, whether of death or of final collapse, did not enter his mind even. He faced the Wave, he did not shuffle now. He sent a telegram to Lettice to say he was detained; he wrote to Tony that he had given up his room in the Luxor hotel, an affectionate, generous note, telling him to take good care of Lettice. It was only right and fair that Tony should think the path for himself was clear. Since he had decided to 'slip out' this attitude towards his cousin was necessarily involved. It must not appear that he had retired, beaten and unhappy. He must do no single thing that might offer resistance to the inevitable fate, least of all leave Tony with the sense of having injured him. True sacrifice forbade; renunciation, if real, was also silent\u2014the smiling face, the cheerful, natural manner!\n\nTom, therefore, fixed his heart more firmly than ever upon one single point: her happiness. He fought to think of that alone. If he knew her happy, he could live. He found life in her joy. He lived in that. By 'slipping out,' no word of reproach, complaint, or censure uttered, he would actually contribute to her happiness. Thus, vicariously, he almost helped to cause it. In this faint, self-excluding bliss, he could live\u2014 even live on\u2014until the end. That seemed true forgiveness.\n\nMeanwhile, not easily nor immediately, did he defy the anguish that, day and night, kept gnawing at his heart. His one desire was to hide it, and\u2014if the huge achievement might lie within his powers\u2014 to change it sweetly into a source of strength that should redeem him. The 'sum of loss,' indeed, he had not 'reckoned yet,' but he was beginning to add the figures up. Full measurement lay in the long, long awful years ahead. He had this strange comfort, however\u2014that he now loved something he could never lose because it could not change. He loved an ideal. In that sense, he and Lettice were in the 'sea' together. His belief and trust in her were not lost, but heightened. And a hint of mothering contentment stole sweetly over him behind this shadowy yet genuine consolation.\n\nThe childhood nightmare was both presentiment and memory. The crest of the falling Wave was reflected in its base." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 283", + "text": "Tom took his passage home; he also told Sir William that his resignation, whether the Board accepted it or not, was final. His reputation, so far as the Firm was concerned, he knew was lost. His own self-respect had dwindled dangerously too. He had the feeling that he wanted to begin all over again from the very bottom. It seemed the only way. The prospect, at his age, was daunting. He faced it.\n\nAt the very moment in life when he had fancied himself most secure, most satisfied mentally, spiritually, materially\u2014the entire structure on which self-confidence rested had given way. Even the means of material support had vanished too. The crash was absolute. This brief Egyptian winter had, indeed, proved the winter of his loss. The Wave had fallen at last.\n\nDuring the interval at Assouan\u2014ten days that seemed a month!\u2014he heard occasionally from Lettice. 'To-day I miss you,' one letter opened. Another said: 'We wonder when you will return. We all miss you very much: it's not the same here without you, Tom.' And all were signed 'Your ever loving Lettice.' But if hope for some strange reason refused to die completely, he did not allow himself to be deceived. His task\u2014no easy one\u2014was to transmute emotion into the higher, self-less, ideal love that was now\u2014oh, he knew it well enough\u2014his only hope and safety. In the desolate emptiness of desert that yawned ahead, he saw this single tree that blossomed, and offered shade. Beauty and comfort both were there. He believed in her truth and somehow in her faithfulness as well.\n\nTom sent his heavy luggage to Port Said, and took the train to Luxor. He had decided to keep his sailing secret. He could mention honestly that he was going to Cairo. He would write a line from there or, better still, from the steamer itself.\n\nAnd the instinct that led to this decision was sound and wise. The act was not as boyish as it seemed. For he feared a reaction on her part that yet could be momentary only. His leaving so suddenly would be a shock, it might summon the earlier Lettice to the surface, there might be a painful scene for both of them. She would realise, to some extent at any rate, the immediate sense of loss; for she would surely divine that he was going, not to England merely, but out of her life. And she would suffer; she might even try to keep him\u2014the only result being a revival of pain already almost conquered, and of distress for her.\n\nFor such reaction, he divined, could not be permanent. The Play was over; it must not, could not be prolonged. He must go out. There must be no lingering when the curtain fell. A curtain that halts in its descent upon the actors endangers the effect of the entire Play.\n\nHe wired to Cairo for a room. He wired to her too: 'Arrive to-morrow, en route Cairo. Leave same night.' He braced himself. The strain would be cruelly exacting, but the worst had been lived out already; the jealousy was dead; the new love was established beyond all reach of change. These last few hours should be natural, careless, gay, no hint betraying him, flying no signals of distress. He could just hold out. The strength was in him. And there was time before he caught the evening train for a reply to come: 'All delighted; expect you breakfast. Arranging picnic expedition.\u2014Lettice.'\n\nAnd that one word 'all' helped him unexpectedly to greater steadiness. It eliminated the personal touch even in a telegram.\n\nIn the train he slept but little; the heat was suffocating; there was a Khams\u00een blowing and the fine sand crept in everywhere. At Luxor, however, the wind remained so high up that the lower regions of the sky were calm and still. The sand hung in fog-like clouds shrouding the sun, dimming the usual brilliance. But the heat was intense, and the occasional stray puffs of air that touched the creeping Nile or passed along the sweltering street, seemed to issue from the mouth of some vast furnace in the heavens. They dropped, then ceased abruptly; there was no relief in them. The natives sat listlessly in their doorways, the tourists kept their rooms or idled complainingly in the hotel halls and corridors. The ominous touch was everywhere. He felt it in his heart as well\u2014the heart he thought broken beyond repair.\n\nTom bathed and changed his clothes, then drove down to the shady garden beside the river as of old. He felt the gritty sand between his teeth, it was in his mouth and eyes, it was on his tongue.\u2026 He met Lettice without a tremor, astonished at his own coolness and self-control; he watched her beauty as the beauty of a picture, something that was no longer his, yet watched it without envy and, in an odd sense, almost without pain. He loved the fairness of it for itself, for her, and for another who was not himself. Almost he loved their happiness to come\u2014for her sake. Her eyes, too, followed him, he fancied, like a picture's eyes. She looked young and fresh, yet something mysterious in the following eyes. The usual excited happiness was less obvious, he thought, than usual, the mercurial gaiety wholly absent. He fancied a cloud upon her spirit somewhere. He imagined tiny, uncertain signs of questioning distress. He wondered.\u2026 This torture of a last uncertainty was also his.\n\nYet, obviously, she was glad to see him; her welcome was genuine; she came down the drive to meet him, both hands extended. Apparently, too, she was alone, Mrs. Haughstone still asleep, and Tony not yet arrived. It was still early morning.\n\n'Well, and how did you get on without me\u2014all of you?' he asked, adding the last three words with emphasis.\n\n'I thought you were never coming back, Tom; I had the feeling you were bored here at Luxor and meant to leave us.' She looked him up and down with a curious look\u2014of admiration almost, an admiration he believed he had now learned to do without. 'How lean and brown and well you look!' she went on, 'but thin, Tom. You've grown thinner.' She shook her finger at him. Her voice was perilously soft and kind, a sweet tenderness in her manner, too. 'You've been over-working and not eating enough. You've not had me to look after you.'\n\nHe flushed. 'I'm awfully fit,' he said, smiling a little shyly. 'I may be thinner. That's the heat, I suppose. Assouan's a blazing place\u2014you feel you're in Africa.' He said the banal thing as usual.\n\n'But was there no one there to look after you?' She gave him a quick glance. 'No one at all?'\n\nTom noticed the repeated question, wondering a little. But there was no play in him; in place of it was something stern, unyielding as iron, though not tested yet.\n\n'The Chairman of my Company, nine hundred noisy tourists, and about a thousand Arabs at the Works,' he told her. 'There was hardly a soul I knew besides.'\n\nShe said no more; she gave a scarcely audible sigh; she seemed unsatisfied somewhere. To his surprise, then, he noticed that the familiar little table was only laid for two.\n\n'Where's Tony?' he asked. 'And, by the by, how is he?'\n\nHe thought she hesitated a moment. 'Tony's not coming till later,' she told him. 'He guessed we should have a lot to talk about together, so he stayed away. Nice of him, wasn't it?'\n\nBehind the commonplace sentences, the hidden wordless Play also drew on towards its Curtain.\n\n'Well, it is my turn rather for a chat, perhaps,' he returned presently with a laugh, taking his cup of steaming coffee from her hand. 'I can see him later in the day. You've arranged something, I'm sure. Your wire spoke of a picnic, but perhaps this heat\u2014this beastly Khams\u00een\u2014'\n\n'It's passing,' she mentioned. 'They say it blows for three days, for six days, or for nine, but as a matter of fact, it does nothing of the sort. It's going to clear. I thought we might take our tea into the Desert.'\n\nShe went on talking rapidly, almost nervously, it seemed to Tom. Her mind was upon something else. Thoughts of another kind lay unexpressed behind her speech. His own mind was busy too\u2014Tony, Warsaw, the long long interval he had been away, what had happened during his absence, and so forth? Had no cable come? What would she feel this time to-morrow when she knew?\u2014these and a hundred others seethed below his quiet manner and careless talk. He noticed then that she was exquisitely dressed; she wore, in fact, the very things he most admired\u2014and wore them purposely: the orange-coloured jacket, the violet veil, the hat with the little roses on the brim. It was his turn to look her up and down.\n\nShe caught his eye. Uncannily, she caught his thought as well. Tom steeled himself.\n\n'I put these on especially for you, you truant boy,' she said deliciously across the table at him. 'I hope you're sensible of the honour done you.'\n\n'Rather, Lettice! I should think I am, indeed!'\n\n'I got up half an hour earlier on purpose too. Think what that means to a woman like me.' She handed him a grape-fruit she had opened and prepared herself.\n\n'My favourite hat, and my favourite fruit! I wish I were worthy of them!' He stammered slightly as he said the stupid thing: the blood rushed up to his very forehead, but she gave no sign of noticing either words or blush. The strong sunburn hid the latter doubtless. There was a desperate shyness in him that he could not manage quite. He wished to heaven the talk would shift into another key. He could not keep this up for long; it was too dangerous. Her attitude, it seemed, had gone back to that of weeks ago; there was more than the mother in it, he felt: it was almost the earlier Lettice\u2014and yet not quite. Something was added, but something too was missing. He wondered more and more\u2026 he asked himself odd questions.\u2026 It seemed to him suddenly that her mood was assumed, not wholly natural. The flash came to him that disappointment lay behind it, yet that the disappointment was not with\u2014himself.\n\n'You're wearing a new tie, Tom,' her voice broke in upon his moment's reverie. 'That's not the one I gave you.'\n\nIt was so unexpected, so absurd. It startled him. He laughed with genuine amusement, explaining that he had bought it in Assouan in a moment of extravagance\u2014'the nearest shade I could find to the blue you gave me. How observant you are!' Lettice laughed with him. 'I always notice little things like that,' she said. 'It's what you call the mother in me, I suppose.' She examined the tie across the table, while they smoked their cigarettes. He looked aside. 'I hope it was admired. It suits you.' She fingered it. Her hand touched his chin.\n\n'Does it? It's your taste, you know.'\n\n'But was it admired?' she insisted almost sharply.\n\n'That's really more than I can say, Lettice. You see, I didn't ask Sir William what he thought, and the natives are poor judges because they don't wear ties.' He was about to say more, talking the first nonsense that came into his head, when she did a thing that took his breath away, and made him tremble where he sat. Regardless of lurking Arab servants, careless of Mrs. Haughstone's windows not far behind them, she rose suddenly, tripped round the little table, kissed him on his cheek\u2014and was back again in her chair, smoking innocently as before. It was a repetition of an earlier act, yet with a difference somewhere.\n\nThe world seemed unreal just then; things like this did not happen in real life, at least not quite like this; nor did two persons in their respective positions talk exactly thus, using such banal language, such insignificant phrases half of banter, half of surface foolishness. The kiss amazed him\u2014for a moment. Tom felt in a dream. And yet this very sense of dream, this idle exchange of trivial conversation cloaked something that was a cruel, an indubitable reality. It was not a dream shot through with reality, it was a reality shot through with dream. But the dream itself, though old as the desert, dim as those grim Theban Hills now draped with flying sand, was also true and actual.\n\nThe hidden Play had broken through, merging for an instant with the upper surface-life. He was almost persuaded that this last, strange action had not happened, that Lettice had never really left her chair. So still and silent she sat there now. She had not stirred from her place. It was the burning wind that touched his cheek, a waft of heated atmosphere, lightly moving, that left the disquieting trail of perfume in the air. The glowing heavens, luminous athwart the clouds of fine, suspended sand, laid this ominous hint of dream upon the entire day.\u2026 The recent act became a mere picture in the mind.\n\nYet some little cell of innermost memory, stirring out of sleep, had surely given up its dead.\u2026 For a second it seemed to him this heavy, darkened air was in the recesses of the earth, beneath the burden of massive cliffs the centuries had piled. It was underground. In some cavern of those mournful Theban Hills, some one\u2014had kissed him! For over his head shone painted stars against a painted blue, and in his nostrils hung a faint sweetness as of ambra.\u2026\n\nHe recovered his balance quickly. They resumed their curious masquerade, the screen of idle talk between significance and emptiness, like sounds of reality between dream and waking.\n\nAnd the rest of that long day of stifling heat was similarly a dream shot through with incongruous touches of reality, yet also a reality shot through with the glamour of some incredibly ancient dream. Not till he stood later upon the steamer deck, the sea-wind in his face and the salt spray on his lips, did he awake fully and distinguish the dream from the reality\u2014or the reality from the dream. Nor even then was the deep, strange confusion wholly dissipated. To the end of life, indeed, it remained an unsolved mystery, labelled a Premonition Fulfilled, without adequate explanation.\u2026\n\nThe time passed listlessly enough, to the accompaniment of similar idle talk, careless, it seemed to Tom, with the ghastly sense of the final minutes slipping remorselessly away, so swiftly, so poignantly unused. For each moment was gigantic, brimmed full with the distilled essence, as it were, of intensest value, value that yet was not his to seize. He never lost the point of view that he watched a picture that belonged to some one else. His own position was clear; he had already leaped from a height; he counted, as he fell, the blades of grass, the pebbles far below; slipping over Niagara's awful edge, he noted the bubbles in the whirlpools underneath. They talked of the weather.\u2026!\n\n'It's clearing,' said Lettice. 'There'll be sand in our tea and thin bread and butter. But anything's better than sitting and stifling here.'\n\nTom readily agreed. 'You and I and Tony, then?'\n\n'I thought so. We don't want too many, do we?'\n\n'Not for our la\u2014not for a day like this.' He corrected himself just in time. 'Tony will be here for lunch?' he asked.\n\nShe nodded. 'He said so, at any rate, only one never quite knows with Tony.' And though Tom plainly heard, he made no comment. He was puzzled.\n\nMost of the morning they remained alone together. Tom had never felt so close to her before; it seemed to him their spirits touched; there was no barrier now. But there was distance. He could not explain the paradox. A vague sweet feeling was in him that the distance was not of height, as formerly. He had risen somehow; he felt higher than before; he saw over the barrier that had been there. Pain and sacrifice, perhaps, had lifted him, raised him to the level where she dwelt; and in that way he was closer. A new strength was in him. At the same time, behind her outer quietness and her calm, he divined struggle still. In her atmosphere was a hint of strain, disharmony. He was positive of this. From time to time he caught trouble in her eyes. Could she, perhaps, discern\u2014foreknow\u2014the shadow of the dropping Curtain? He wondered.\u2026 He detected something in her that was new.\n\nIf any weakening of resolve were in himself, it disappeared long before Tony's arrival on the scene. A few private words from Mrs. Haughstone later banished it effectually. 'Your telegram, Mr. Kelverdon, came as a great surprise. We had planned a three-day trip to the Sphinx and Pyramids. Mr. Winslowe had written to you; he hoped to persuade you to join us. Again you left Assouan before the letter arrived. It's a habit with you!'\n\n'Apparently.'\n\nThe poison no longer fevered him; he was immune.\n\n'Mr. Winslowe\u2014I had better warn you before he comes\u2014was disappointed.'\n\n'I'm sorry I spoilt the trip. It was most inconsiderate of me. But you can make it later when I'm gone\u2014to Cairo, can't you?'\n\nMrs. Haughstone watched him somewhat keenly. Did she discover anything, he wondered? Was she aware that he was no longer within reach of her little shafts?\n\n'It's all for the best, I think,' she went on in a casual tone. 'Lettice was too easily persuaded\u2014she didn't really want to go without you. She said so. And Mr. Winslowe soon gets over his sulks\u2014'\n\nTom interrupted her, turning sharply round. 'Oh,' he laughed, 'was that why he wouldn't come to breakfast, then?' And whether it was pain or pleasure that he felt, he did not know. The moment's anguish\u2014he verily believed it\u2014was for Lettice. And for Tony? Something akin to sympathy perhaps! If Tony should ever suffer pain like his\u2014even temporarily.\u2026!\n\nThe other shrugged her angular shoulders a little. 'It's all passed now,' she observed; 'he's forgotten it, I'm sure. You needn't notice anything, by the way,' she added, 'if\u2014if he seems ungracious.'\n\n'Not for worlds,' replied Tom, throwing stones into the sullen river below. 'I'm far too tactful.'\n\nMrs. Haughstone looked away. There was a moment's expression of admiration on her face. 'You're big, Mr. Kelverdon, very big. I wish all men were as generous.' She spoke hurriedly below her breath. 'I saw this coming before you arrived. I wish I could have saved you. You've got the hero in you.'\n\nTom changed the subject, and presently moved away: it was time for lunch for one thing, and for another he wanted to hide his face from her too peering eyes. He was not quite sure of himself just then; his lips trembled a little; he could not altogether control his facial muscles. Tony jealous! Lettice piqued! Was this the explanation of her new sweetness towards himself! The position tried him sorely, testing his new strength from such amazing and unexpected angles. It was all beyond him somehow, the reversal of r\u00f4les so afflicting, tears and laughter so oddly mingled. Yet the sheet-anchor\u2014his self-less love\u2014held fast and true. There was no dragging, no shuffling where he stood.\n\nNor was there any weakening of resolution in him, any dimming of the new dawn within his heart. He felt sure of something that he did not understand, aware of a radiant promise some one whispered marvellously in his ear. He was alone, yet not alone, outcast yet companioned sweetly, bereft of all the world holds valuable, yet possessor of riches that the world passed by. He felt a conqueror. The pain was somehow turning into joy. He seemed above the earth. Only one thing mattered\u2014that his ideal love should have no stain upon it.\n\nThe lunch he dreaded passed smoothly and without alarm. Tony was gay, light-hearted as usual, belying Mrs. Haughstone's ominous prediction. They smoked together afterwards, walking up and down the garden arm-in-arm, Tony eagerly discussing expeditions, picnics, birds, anything and everything that offered, with keen interest as of old; he even once suggested coming back to Assouan with his cousin\u2014alone\u2026 Tom made no comment on the adverb. Nor was his sympathy mere acting; he genuinely felt it; the affection for Tony somehow was not dead.\u2026 The joy in him grew, meanwhile, brighter, clearer, higher. It was alive. Some courage of the sun was in him. There seemed a great understanding with it, and a greater forgiveness.\n\nOf one thing only did he feel uncertain. He caught himself sharply wondering more than once. For he had the impression\u2014the conviction almost\u2014that something had happened during his absence at Assouan\u2014that there was a change in her attitude to Tony. It was a subtle change; it was beginning merely; but it was there. Her behaviour at breakfast was not due to pique, not solely due to pique, at any rate. It had a deeper origin. Almost he detected signs of friction between herself and Tony. Very slight they were indeed, if not imagined altogether. His perception was still exceptionally alert, its acuteness left over, apparently, from the earlier days of pain and jealousy. Yet the result upon him was confusing chiefly.\n\nIn very trivial ways the change betrayed itself. The talk between the three of them remained incongruously upon the surface always. The play and chatter went on independently of the Play beneath, almost ignoring it. In that Wordless Play, however, the change was registered.\n\n'Tom, you've got the straightest back of any man I ever saw,' Lettice exclaimed once, eyeing them critically with an amused smile as they came back towards her chair. 'I've just been watching you both.'\n\nThey laughed, while Tony turned it wittily into fun. 'It's always safer to look a person in the face,' he observed. If he felt the comparison was made to his disadvantage he did not show it. Tom, wondering what she meant and why she said it, felt that the remark annoyed him. For there was disparagement of Tony in it.\n\n'I can read your soul from your back alone,' she added.\n\n'And mine!' cried Tony, laughing: 'what about my back too? Or have I got no soul misplaced between my shoulder-blades?'\n\nTom laid his hand between those slightly-rounded shoulders then\u2014and rather suddenly.\n\n'It's bent from too much creeping after birds,' he exclaimed. 'In your next life you'll be on all fours if you're not careful.'\n\nThe Arab appeared to say the donkeys and sand-cart were waiting in the road, and Tony went indoors to get cameras and other paraphernalia essential to a Desert picnic. Lettice continued talking idly to Tom, who stood beside her, smoking.\u2026 The feeling of dream and reality were very strong in him at the moment. He hardly realised what the nonsense was he had said to his cousin. There was a slight sense of discomfort in him. The little, playful conversation just over had meaning in it. He missed that meaning. Somehow the comparison in his favour was disagreeable\u2014he preferred to hear his cousin praised, but certainly not belittled. Perhaps vanity was wounded there\u2014that his successful rival woke contempt in her was unendurable.\u2026 And he thought of his train for the first time with a vague relief.\n\n'Birds,' she was saying, half to herself, the eyes beneath the big sun-hat looking beyond him, 'that reminds me, Tom\u2014a dream I had. A little bird left its nest and hopped about to try all the other branches, because it thought it ought to explore them\u2014had to, in a way. And it got into all sorts of danger, and ran fearful risks, and couldn't fly or use its wings properly,\u2014till finally\u2014'\n\nShe stopped, and her eyes turned full upon his own. The love in his face was plain to read, though he was not conscious of it. He waited in silence:\n\n'Till finally it crept back up into its own nest again,' she went on, 'and found its wings lying there all the time. It had forgotten them! And it got in, felt warm and safe and cosy\u2014and fell asleep.'\n\n'Whereupon you woke and found it was all a dream,' said Tom. His tone, though matter-of-fact, was lower than usual, but it was firm. No sign of emotion now was visible in his face. The eyes were steady, the lips betrayed no hint. Her little dream, the way of telling it rather, perplexed him.\n\n'Yes,' she said, 'but I found somehow that the bird was me.' She sighed a little.\n\nIt flashed upon him suddenly that she was exhausted, wearied out; that her heart was beating with some interior stress and struggle. She seemed on the point of giving up, some long long battle in her ended. There was something she wished to say to him\u2014he got this impression too\u2014something she could not bring herself to say, unless he helped her, unless he asked for it. The duality was ending, perhaps fused into unity again?\u2026 The intense and burning desire to help her rose upon him, the desire to protect. And the word 'Warsaw' fled across his mind\u2026 as though it fell through the heated air into his mind\u2026 from hers.\n\n'Tony declares,' she was saying, 'that our memories are packed away under pressure like steam in a boiler, and the dream is their safety-valve\u2026 I wonder.\u2026 He read it somewhere. It's not his own, of course. But Tony never explains\u2014because he doesn't really know. He's flashy\u2014not the depth we thought\u2014the truth\u2026 Tom!'\n\nShe called his name with emphasis, as if annoyed that he showed so little interest. There was an instant's cloud upon her face; the eyes wavered, then looked away; he felt again there was disappointment somewhere in her \u2014with himself or with Tony, he did not know.\u2026 He kept silent. He could think of nothing by way of answer\u2014nothing appropriate, nothing safe.\n\nShe waited, keeping silent too. The Curtain was lowering, its shadow growing on the air.\n\n'I dream so little,' he stammered at length, 'I can't say.' It enraged him that he faltered. He turned away.\u2026 Tony at that moment arrived. The cart and animals were ready, everything was collected. He announced it loudly, urging them with a certain impatience, as though they caused the delay. He stared keenly at them a moment.\u2026 They started." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 284", + "text": "How trivial, yet how significant of the tension of interior forces\u2014the careless words, the foolish little dream, the playful allusion to one man's stoop and to another's upright carriage, how easy to read, how obvious! Yet Tom, too intensely preoccupied, perhaps, with keeping his own balance, was unaware of revelation. His mind perceived the delicate change, yet attached a wrong direction to it. Perplexity and discomfort in him deepened. He was relieved when Tony interrupted; he felt glad. The shifting of values was disturbing to him. It was as though the falling Curtain halted.\u2026\n\nThe hours left to him were few; they both rushed and lingered. The afternoon seemed gone so quickly, while yet the moments dragged, each separate instant too intense with feeling to yield up its being willingly. The minutes lingered; it was the hours that rushed.\n\nSubconsciously, it seemed, Tom counted them in his heart.\u2026 Subconsciously, too, he stated the position, as though to do so steadied him: Three persons, three friends, were off upon a picnic. At a certain moment they would turn back; at a certain moment two of them would say good-bye; at a certain moment a final train would start\u2014his eyes would no longer see her.\u2026 It seemed impossible, unreal; it could not happen.\u2026 He could so easily prevent it. No question had been asked about his going to Cairo; it was taken for granted that he went on business and would return. He could cancel his steamer-berth, no explanation necessary, nor any asked.\n\nBut having weighed the sacrifice against the joy, he was not wanting.\n\nThey mounted their lusty donkeys; Lettice climbed into her sand-cart; the boys came clattering after them down the street of Thebes with the tea-things and the bundles of clover for the animals. Across the belt of brilliant emerald green, past clover-fields and groves of palms, they followed the ancient track towards the desert. They were on the eastern bank, the Theban Hills far behind them on the horizon. Towards the Red Sea they headed, though Tom had no notion of their direction, aware only that while they went further and further from those hills, the hills themselves somehow came ever nearer. The gaunt outline followed them; each time he looked back the shadow cast was closer than before, almost upon their heels. But for the assurance of his senses he could have believed they headed towards these yellow cliffs instead of the reverse. He could not shake off the singular impression that their weight was on his back; he felt the oppression of those ancient tombs, those crowded corridors, that hidden subterranean world. No mummy, he remembered, but believed it would one day unwind again when the soul, cleansed and justified, came back to claim it. Regeneration was inevitable. A glorious faith secure in ultimate joy!\n\nThey hurried vainly; the distance between them, instead of increasing, lessened. The hills would not let them go.\n\nThe burning atmosphere, the motionless air caused doubtless the optical illusion. The glare was blinding. Tom did not draw attention to it. He tugged his obstinate donkey into line with the slower sand-cart, riding for several minutes in silence, close beside Lettice, aware of her perfume, her flying veil almost across his eyes from time to time. Tony was some way ahead.\n\n'Tom,' he heard suddenly, 'must you really go to Cairo to-night?'\n\n'I'm afraid so. It's important.' But after a pause he added 'Why?' He said it because his sentence sounded otherwise suspiciously incomplete. Above all, he must seem natural. 'Why do you ask?'\n\nThe answer made him regret that extra word:\n\n'There's something I want to tell you.'\n\n'Very important?' He asked it laughingly, busy with the reins apparently.\n\n'Far more important than your going to Cairo. I want your advice and help.'\n\n'I must,' he said slowly. 'Won't it keep?' He tugged violently at the reins, though the donkey was behaving admirably.\n\n'How long will you stay?' she asked.\n\n'One night only, Lettice. Not longer.'\n\nThey were on soft and yellow sand by now; the desert shone with a luminous glow; Tom could not hear the sound of his donkey's hoofs, nor the crunching of the sand-cart. He heard nothing but a voice singing beside him in the burning air. But the air had grown radiant. He realised that he was beating the donkey without the slightest reason.\n\n'When you come back, then\u2014I'll tell you when you come back,' he heard.\n\nAnd a sudden inspiration came to his assistance. 'Couldn't you write it?' he asked calmly. 'The Semiramis Hotel will find me\u2014in case anything happened. I should have time to think it over\u2014I like that best\u2014if it's really so important. My mind, you know, works slowly.'\n\nHer reply had a curious effect upon him. She needed help\u2014his help. 'Perhaps, Tom. But one can depend so upon your judgment.'\n\nHe knew that she was watching his face. With an effort he turned to meet her gaze. He saw her against the background of the hills, whose following mass towered menacingly above her little outline. And as he looked he was suddenly transfixed, he dropped his reins, he stared without a word. Two pairs of eyes, two smiles, two human physiognomies once again met his arrested gaze. He knew them, of course, well enough by now, but never before had he caught the two expressions so vividly revealed, so distinctly marked; clear as a composite picture, one face painted in upon another that lay beneath it. There was the darker face\u2014and there was Lettice; and each struggled for complete possession of her features. There was conflict, sharp and dreadful; one second, the gleam of cruelty flashed out, a yellow of amber in it, as though gold shone reflected faintly\u2014the next, an anguish of tenderness, as though love brimmed her eyes with the moisture of divine compassion. The conflict was desperate, amazing, painful beyond words. Then the darker aspect slowly waned, withdrawing backwards, melting away into the shadows of the hills behind\u2014 as though it first had issued thence\u2014as though almost it belonged there. Alive and true, yet vanquished, it faded out.\u2026 He saw at last the dear, innocent eyes of\u2014Lettice only. It was this Lettice who had spoken.\n\nHis donkey stumbled\u2014it was natural enough, seeing that the reins hung loose and his feet had somehow left the stirrups. Tom pitched forward heavily, saving himself and his animal from an ignominious accident just in the nick of time. There were cries and laughter. The sand-cart swerved aside at the same moment, and Tony, from a distance, came galloping back towards them.\n\nTom recovered his balance and told his donkey in honest English what he thought of it. 'But it was your fault, you careless boy,' cried Lettice; 'you let go the reins and whacked it at the same time. Your eyes were popping out of your head. I thought you'd seen a ghost.'\n\nTom glanced at her. 'I was nearly off,' he said. 'Another second and it would have been a case of \"Low let me lie where the dead dog\u2014\"'\n\nShe interrupted him with surprising vehemence:\n\n'Don't, don't, Tom. I hate it! I hate the words and the tune and everything. I won't hear it\u2026!'\n\nTony came clattering up and the incident was over, ended as abruptly as begun. But, as Tom well realised, another hitch had occurred in the lowering of the Curtain. The actors, for a moment, had stood there in their normal fashion, betrayed, caught in the act, a little foolish even. It was the hand of a woman this time that delayed it.\n\n'Did you hurt yourself anywhere, Tom?' Her question rang in his head like music for the next mile or two. He kept beside the sand-cart until they reached their destination. It was absurd\u2014yet he could not ride in front with Tony lest some one driving behind them should notice\u2014yes, that was the half-comical truth\u2014notice that Tony was round-shouldered\u2014oh, very, very slightly so\u2014whereas his own back was straight! It was ridiculously foolish, yet pathetic. At the same time, it was poignantly dramatic.\u2026\n\nAnd their destination was a deep bay of yellow sand, soft and tawny, ribbed with a series of lesser troughs the wind had scooped out to look like a shore some withdrawing ocean had left exposed below the westering sun. A solitary palm tree stood behind upon a dune.\n\nThe afternoon, the beating hotness of the air, the clouds of high, suspended sand, the stupendous sunset\u2014as if the world caught fire and burned along the whole horizon\u2014it was all unforgettable. The yellow sand about them blazed and shone, scorching their bare hands; the Desert was empty, silent, lonely. Only the western heavens, where the sun sank in a red mass of ominous splendour, was alive with energy. Coloured shafts mapped the vault from horizon to zenith like the spokes of a prodigious wheel of fire. Any minute the air and the sand it pressed upon might burst into a sea of flame. The furnace where the Khams\u00een brewed in distant Nubia sent its warnings in advance; it was slowly travelling northward. And hence, possibly, arose the disquieting sensation that something was gathering, something that might take them unawares. The sand lay listening, waiting, watching. There was whispering among the very grains.\u2026\n\nIt was half way through tea when the first stray puffs of wind came dropping abruptly, sighing away in tiny eddies of dust beyond the circle. Three human atoms upon the huge yellow carpet, that ere long would shake itself across five hundred miles and rise, whirling, driving, suffocating all life within its folds\u2014three human beings noted the puffs of heated air and reacted variously to the little change. Each felt, it seemed, a slight uneasiness, as though of trouble coming that was yet not entirely atmospherical. Nerves tingled. They looked into each other's faces. They looked back.\n\n'We mustn't stay too late,' said Tony, filling a basket for the donkey-boys in their dune two hundred yards away. 'We've a long way to go.' He examined the portentous sky. 'It won't come till night,' he added, 'still\u2014they're a bit awkward, these sandstorms, and one never knows.'\n\n'And I've got a train to catch,' Tom mentioned, 'absurd as it sounds in a place like this.' He was scraping his lips with a handkerchief. 'I've eaten enough bread-and-sand to last me till dinner, anyhow.' He helped his cousin with the Arabs' food. 'They probably don't mind it, they're used to it.' He straightened up from his stooping posture. Lettice, he saw, was lying with a cigarette against the bank of sloping sand that curved above them. She was intently watching them. She had not spoken for some time; she looked almost drowsy; the eyelids were half closed; the cigarette smoke rose in a steady little thread that did not waver.\u2026 There was perhaps ten yards between them, but he caught the direction of her gaze, and throwing his own eyes into the same line of sight, he saw what she saw. Instinctively, he took a quick step forward\u2014 hiding Tony from her immediate view.\n\nIt was certainly curious, this desire to screen his cousin, to prevent his appearing at a disadvantage. He was impelled, at all costs and in the smallest details, to help the man she admired, to increase his value, to minimise his disabilities, however trivial. It pained him to see Tony even at a physical disadvantage; Tony must show always at his very best; and at this moment, bending over the baskets, the attitude of the shoulders was disagreeably emphasised.\n\nTom did not laugh, he did not even smile. Gravely, as though it were of importance, he moved forward so that Lettice should not see the detail of the rounded shoulders which, he knew, compared unfavourably with his own straighter carriage. Yet almost the next minute, when he looked back again, he saw that the cigarette had fallen from her fingers, the eyes were closed, her body had slipped into a more recumbent angle, she seemed actually asleep.\n\n'Give a shout, Tom, and the boys will come to fetch it,' said Tony, when at length the basket was ready. He put his hands to his own mouth to coo-ee across the dunes. Tom stopped him at once. 'Hush! Lettice has dropped off,' he explained, 'you'll wake her. It's the heat. I'll carry the things over to them.' He noticed Tony's hands as he held them to his lips. And again he felt a touch of sympathy, almost pity. Had she, so observant, so discerning in her fastidious taste\u2014had she failed to notice the small detail too?\n\n'No, let me take it,' Tony was saying, seizing the hamper from his cousin. Tom suggested carrying it between them. They tried it, laughing and struggling together with the awkward burden, but keeping their voices low. They lost the direction too; for all the sand-dunes were alike, and the boys were hidden in a hollow. It ended in Tony going off in triumph with the basket under one arm, guided at length by the faint neighing of a donkey in the distance.\n\nSome little time had passed, perhaps five minutes, perhaps longer, when Tom went back to the tea-place across the soft sand, stepping cautiously so as not to disturb the sleeper. And another five minutes, perhaps another ten, had slipped by before Tony's head reappeared above a neighbouring dune. A boy had come to meet him, shortening his journey.\n\nBut Fate calculated to a nicety, wasting no seconds one way or the other. There had been time\u2014just time before Tony's return\u2014for Tom to have stretched himself at her feet, to have lit a cigarette, and to have smoked sufficient of it for the first ash to fall. He was very careful to make no sound, even lighting the match softly inside his hat. But his hand was trembling. For Lettice slept, and in her sleep made little sounds of pain.\n\nHe watched her. There was a tiny frown between the eyebrows, the lips twitched from time to time, she moved uneasily upon the bank of sliding sand; and, as she made these little broken sounds of pain, from beneath the closed eyelids two small tears crept out upon her cheeks.\n\nTom stared, making no sound or movement. The tears rolled down and fell into the sand. The suffering in the face made his heart beat irregularly. Something transfixed him. She wore the expression he had seen in the London theatre. For a moment he felt terror\u2014a terror of something coming, something going to happen. He stared, trembling, holding his breath. She was dreaming, as a person even in a three-minute sleep can dream\u2014deeply, vividly. He waited. He had the amazing sensation that he knew what she was dreaming\u2014that he took part in it with her almost.\u2026 Unable, finally, to restrain himself another instant, he moved\u2014and the noise wakened her. She sighed. The eyes opened of their own accord. She stared at him in a dazed way for a moment. Then she looked over his shoulder across the desert.\n\n'You've been asleep, Lettice,' he whispered, 'and actually dreaming\u2014all in five minutes.'\n\nShe rubbed her eyes slowly, as though sand was in them. She stared into his face a moment before she spoke.\n\n'Yes, I dreamed,' she answered with a little frightened sigh. 'I dreamed of you\u2014There was a tent\u2014the flap lifted suddenly\u2014oh, it was so vivid! Then there was a crowd and awful drums were beating\u2014and my river with the floating faces was there and I plunged in to save one\u2014it was yours, Tom, yours\u2014'\n\nShe paused for a fraction of a second, while his heart went thumping against his ribs. He did not speak. He waited.\n\n'Then somehow you were taken from me,' she went on; 'you left me, Tom.' Her voice sank. 'And it broke my heart in two.'\n\n'Lettice\u2026!'\n\nHe made a sudden movement in the sand\u2014at which moment, precisely, Tony's head appeared above the neighbouring dune, the rest of his body following it immediately.\n\nAnd it seemed to Tom that his cousin came upon them out of the heart of a dream, out of the earth, out of a sandy tomb. His very existence, for those minutes, had been utterly forgotten, obliterated. He rose from the dead and came towards them over the hot, yellow desert. The distant hills\u2014the Theban Hills above the Valley of the Kings\u2014disgorged him. And, as once before, he looked dreadful, threatening, his great hands held out in front of him. He came gliding down the yielding slope. He caught them!\n\nIn that second\u2014it was but the fraction of a second actually\u2014the impression upon Tom's mind was acute and terrible. Speech and movement were not in him anywhere; he could only sit and stare, both terrified and fascinated. Between himself and Lettice stretched an interval of six feet certainly, and into this very gap, the figure of his cousin, followed and preceded by heaps of moving sand, descended now. It was towards Lettice that Tony came so swiftly gliding.\n\nIt was his cousin surely\u2026?\n\nHe saw the big hands outspread, he saw the slightly stooping shoulders, he saw the face and eyes, the light blue eyes. But also he saw strange, unaccustomed raiment, he saw a sheet of gold, he smelt the soft breath of ambra.\u2026 And the face was dark and menacing. There were words, too, careless, playful words, uttered undoubtedly by Tony's familiar voice: 'Caught you both asleep! Well, I declare! You are a couple\u2026!' followed by something else about its being 'time to pack up and go because the sand was coming.\u2026' Tom heard the words distinctly, but far away, tiny with curious distance; they were half smothered, half submerged, it seemed, behind an acute inner hearing that caught another set of words he could not understand\u2014in a language he both remembered and forgot. And the deep sense of dread passed swiftly then into a blinding jealous rage; he saw red; a fury of wrath that could kill and stab and strangle rushed over him in a flood of passionate emotion. He lost control. He rushed headlong.\n\nSeconds dragged out incredibly into minutes, as though time halted.\u2026 An intense, murderous hatred blazed in his heart.\n\nFrom where he sat, both figures were above him, sheltered halfway up the long sliding slope. At the base of the yellow dune he crouched; he looked up at them. His eyes perhaps were blinded by the red tempest in his heart; or perhaps the tiny particles of flying sand drove against his eyeballs. He saw, at any rate, the figures close together, as if the man came gliding straight into her arms. He rose\u2014\n\nAt the same moment a draught of sudden, violent wind broke with a pouring rush across the desert, and the entire crest of the undulating dune behind them rose to meet it in a single whirling eddy. As a gust of sea-wind tosses the spray into the air, this burst of scorching desert-wind drew the ridge up after it, then flung it in a blinding swirl against his face and skin.\n\nThe dune rose in a Wave of glittering yellow sand, drowning them from head to foot. He saw the glint and shimmer of the myriad particles in the sunset; he saw them drifting by the thousand, by the million through the whirling mass of it; he saw the two figures side by side above him, caught beneath the toppling crest of this bending billow that curved and broke against the fiery sky; he smelt the faint perfume of the desert underneath the hollow arch; he heard the thin, metallic grating of the countless grains in friction; he heard the palm leaves rattling; he saw two pairs of eyes\u2026 his feet went shuffling. It was The Wave\u2014of sand.\u2026\n\nAnd the nightmare clutch laid hold upon his heart with giant pincers. The fiery red of insensate anger burst into flames, filled his throat to choking, set his paralysed muscles free with uncontrollable energy. This savage lust of murder caught him. The shuffling went faster, faster.\u2026 He turned and faced the eyes. He would kill\u2014rather than see her touched by those great hands. It seemed he made the leap of a wild animal upon its prey.\u2026\n\nFire flashed\u2026 then passed, before he knew it, from red to shining amber, from sullen crimson into purest gold, from gold to the sheen of dazzling whiteness. The change was instantaneous. His leap was arrested in mid-air. The red wrath passed amazingly, forgotten or transmuted. With a miraculous swiftness he was aware of understanding, of sympathy, of forgiveness.\u2026 The red light melted into white\u2014the white of glory. The murder faded from his heart, replaced by a deep, deep glow of peace, of love, of infinite trust, of complete comprehension.\u2026 He accepted something marvellously... He forgot\u2014himself.\u2026\n\nThe eyes faded, the gold, the raiment, the perfume vanished, the sound died away. He no longer shuffled upon yielding sand. There was solid ground beneath his feet.\u2026 He was standing alert and upright, his arms outstretched to save\u2014Tony from collapse upon the sliding dune. And the sandy wind drove blindingly against his face and skin.\n\nThe three of them stood side by side, holding to each other, laughing, choking, spluttering, heads bent and eyes closed tightly. Tom found his cousin's hand in his own, clutching it firmly to keep his balance, while behind himself\u2014against his 'straight back,' he realised, even while he choked and laughed\u2014Lettice clung for shelter. Tom, therefore, actually had leaped forward\u2014but to protect and not to kill. He protected both of them. This time, however, it was to himself that Lettice clung, instead of to another.\n\nThe violent gust passed on its way, the flying cloud of sand subsided, settling down on everything. For a moment they stood there rubbing their eyes, shaking their clothing free; then raising their heads cautiously, they looked about them. The air was still and calm again, but in the distance, already a mile away and swiftly travelling across the luminous waste, they saw the miniature whirlwind driving furiously, leaping from ridge to ridge. It swept over the innumerable dunes, lifting the series, one crest after another, into upright waves upon a yellow shimmering sea, then scattering them in a cloud that shone and glinted against the fiery sunset. Its track was easily marked. They watched it.\u2026\n\nTony was the first to recover breath.\n\n'Whew!' he cried, still spluttering, 'but that was sudden! It took me clean off my feet for a moment. I got your hand, Tom, only just in time to save myself!' He shook himself, the sand was down his back and in his hair, his shoes were full of it. 'There'll be another any minute now\u2014 another whirlwind\u2014we'd better be starting.' He began packing up busily, shouting as he did so to the donkey-boys. 'By Jove!' he cried the next second, 'look what's happened to our dune!'\n\nTom, who was on his knees, helping Lettice shake her skirts free, rose to look. The high, curving bank of sand where they had sheltered had indeed changed its shape; the entire ridge had been flattened by the wind; the crest had been lifted and carried away, scattered in all directions. The wave-outline of two minutes before no longer existed, it had broken, fallen over, melted back into the surrounding sea of desert whence it rose.\u2026\n\n'It's disappeared!' exclaimed Tom and Lettice in the same breath.\n\nThe boys arrived with the animals and sand-cart; the baskets were quickly arranged, Tony mounted, Tom helped Lettice in. She leaned heavily on his arm and shoulder. It was in this moment's pause before the actual start that Lettice turned her head suddenly as though listening. The air, motionless again, extraordinarily heated, hung in a dull and yet transparent curtain between them and the sinking sun. The entire heavens seemed to form a sounding-board, the least vibration resonant beneath its stretch.\n\n'Listen!' she exclaimed. She had uttered no word till now. She looked down at Tom, then looked away again.\n\nThey turned their heads in the direction where she pointed, and Tom caught a faint, distant sound as of little strokes that fell thudding on the heavy air. Tony declared he heard nothing. The sound repeated itself rapidly, but at rhythmic intervals; it was unpleasant somewhere, a hint of alarm and menace in the throbbing note\u2014ominous as though it warned. In the pulse of the blood it seemed, like the beating of the heart, Tom thought. It came to him almost through the pressure of her hand upon his shoulder, although his ear told him it came from the horizon where the Theban Hills loomed through the coming dusk, just visible, but shadowy. The muttering died away, then ceased, but not before he suddenly recalled an early morning hour beside a mountain lake, when months ago the thud of invisible paddle-wheels had stolen upon him through the quiet air.\u2026\n\n'A drum,' he heard Lettice murmur. 'It's a native drum in Thebes. My little dream! How the sound travels too! And how it multiplies!' She peered at Tom through half-closed eyelids. 'It must be at least a dozen miles away\u2026!' She smiled faintly, then dropped her eyes quickly.\n\n'Or a dozen centuries,' he replied, not knowing quite why he said it. 'And more like a thousand drums than only one!' He smiled too. For another part of him, beyond capture somehow, knew what he meant, knew also why he smiled\u2014knew also that she knew.\n\n'It frightens me! It's horrible. It sounds like death!' And though she whispered the words, more to herself than to the others, Tom heard each syllable.\n\nThe sound died away into the distance, and then ceased.\n\nThen Tony, watching them both, but, unable to hear anything himself, called out again impatiently that it was time to start, that Tom had a train to catch, that any minute the real, big wind might be upon them. The hand slowly, half lingeringly, left Tom's shoulder. They started rapidly with a kind of flourish. In a thin, black line the small procession crept across the immense darkening desert, like a strip of life that drifted upon a shoreless ocean.\u2026\n\nThe sun sank down below the Libyan sands. But no awful wind descended. They reached home safely, exhausted and rather silent. The two hours seemed to Tom to have passed with a dream-like swiftness. The stars were shining as they clattered down the little Luxor street. In a dream, too, he went to the hotel to change, and fetch his bag; in a dream he stood upon the platform, held Tony's hand, held the soft hand of Lettice, said good-bye\u2026 and watched the station lights glide past as he left them standing there together, side by side." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 285", + "text": "One incident, however,\u2014trivial, yet pregnant with significant revelation,\u2014remained vividly outside the dream. The Play behind broke through, as it were; an actor forgot his r\u00f4le, and involved another actor; for an instant the masquerade tripped up, and merged with the commonplace reality of daily life. Explicit disclosure lay in the trifling matter.\n\nThey supplied a touch of comedy, but of rather ghastly comedy, ludicrous and at the same time painful\u2014those smart, new yellow gloves that Tony put on when he climbed into the sand-cart and took the reins. His donkey had gone lame, he abandoned it to the boys behind, he climbed in to drive with Lettice. Tom, riding beside the cart, witnessed the entire incident; he laughed as heartily as either of the others; he felt it, however, as she felt it\u2014a new sudden spiritual proximity to her proved this to him. Both shrank\u2014from something disagreeable and afflicting. The hands looked somehow dreadful.\n\nFor the first time Tom realised the physiognomy of hands\u2014that hands, rather than faces, should be photographed; not merely that they seemed now so large, so spread, so ugly, but that somehow the glaring canary yellow subtly emphasised another aspect that was distasteful and unpleasant\u2014an undesirable aspect in their owner. The cotton was atrocious. So obvious was it to Tom that he felt pity before he felt disgust. The obnoxious revelation was so palpable. He was aware that he felt ashamed\u2014for Lettice. He stared for a moment, unable to move his eyes away. The next second, lifting his glance, he saw that she, too, had noticed it. With a flash of keen relief, he was aware that she, like himself, shrank visibly from the distressing half-sinister revelation that was betrayal.\n\nThe hands, cased in their ridiculous yellow cotton, had physiognomy. Upon the pair of them, just then, was an expression not to be denied: of furtiveness, of something sly and unreliable, a quality not to be depended on through thick and thin, able to grasp for themselves but not to hold\u2014for others; eager to take, yet incompetent to give. The hands were selfish, mean and unprotective. It was a remarkable disclosure of innate duality hitherto concealed. Their physiognomy dropped a mask the face still wore. The hands looked straight at Lettice; they assumed a sensual leer; they grinned.\n\n'One second,' Tony cried, 'the reins hurt my fingers,'\u2014and had drawn from his pocket the gloves and quickly slipped them on\u2014canary yellow\u2014cotton!\n\n'Oh, oh!' exclaimed Lettice, 'but how can you! It's ghastly\u2026 for a man\u2026!' She stared a moment, as though fascinated, then turned her eyes away, flicking the whip in the air and laughing\u2014a trifle nervously.\n\nWhy the innocent, if vulgar, scraps of clothing should have been so revealing was hard to say. That they were incongruous and out of place in the Desert was surely an inconsiderable thing, that they were possibly in bad taste was of even less account. It was something more than that. It came in a second of vivid intuition\u2014so, at least, it seemed to Tom, and therefore perhaps to Lettice too\u2014that he saw his cousin's soul behind the foolish detail. Tony had put his soul upon his hands\u2014and the hands were somewhere cheap and worthless.\n\nSo difficult was it to catch the elusive thought in language, that Tom certainly used none of the adjectives that flashed unbidden across his mind; he assuredly thought neither of 'coarse,' 'untrustworthy,' nor of 'false' or 'nasty'\u2014yet the last named came probably nearest to expressing the disquieting sensation that laid its instant pressure upon his nerves, then went its way again. It was disturbing in a very searching way; he felt uneasy for her sake. How could he leave her with the owner of those hands, the wearer of those appalling yellow cotton gloves! The laughter in him was subtle mockery. For, of course, he laughed at himself for such an absurd conclusion.\u2026 Yet, somehow, those gloves revealed the man, betrayed him mercilessly! The hands were naked\u2014they were stained.\n\nIt was just then that her exclamation of disapproval interrupted Tom's curious sensations. It came with welcome. 'Thank Heavens!' a voice cried inside him.\u2026 'She feels it too!'\n\n'But my sister sent them to me,' Tony defended himself, 'sent them from London. They're the latest thing at home!' He was laughing at himself. At the same time he was shifting the responsibility as usual.\n\nLettice laughed with him then, though her laughter held another note that was not merriment. He felt disgust, resentment in her. There was no pity there. Tony had missed a cue\u2014the entire Play was blocked. The 'hero' stirred contempt in place of admiration. But more\u2014the incident confirmed, it seemed, much else that had preceded it. Her eyes were opened.\n\nThe conflict of pain and joy in Tom was most acute. His entire sacrifice\u2014for an instant\u2014trembled in a hair-like balance. For the capital r\u00f4le stood gravely endangered in her eyes.\n\n'Take them off, Tony! Put them away! Hide them! I couldn't trust you to drive me with such things on your hands. A man in yellow canary cotton!'\n\nAll three laughed together, and Tom, watching the trivial incident, as he rode beside them, saw her seize one hand and pull the glove off by the fingers. It seemed she tore a mask from one side of his face\u2014the face beneath was disfigured. The glove fell into the bottom of the cart, then caught the loose rein and was jerked out upon the sand. The next second, something of covert fury in the gesture, Tony had taken off the other and tossed it to keep company with the first. Both hands showed naked: the entire face was bare. Tom looked away. 'They are hideous rather, I admit,' exclaimed Tony. 'The donkey boys can pick them up and wear them.' And there was mortification in his tone and manner; almost\u2014he was found out.\n\nIt was the memory of this pregnant little incident that held persistently before Tom's mind now, as the train bore him the long night through between the desert and the river that were Egypt. The bigger crowding pictures, scenes and sentences, thronged panorama of the recent weeks, lay in hiding underneath; but it was the incident of those yellow gloves that memory tossed up for ever before his eyes. He clung to it in spite of himself. Imagination played its impish pranks. What did it portend? Removing gloves was the first act in undressing, it struck him. Tony had dressed up for the Play, the Play was over, he must put off, piece by piece, the glamour he had worn so successfully for his passionate r\u00f4le. Once off the stage, the enchantment of the limelight, the scenery, the raiment of gold that left a perfume of ambra in the air\u2014all the assumed allurements he had borrowed must be discarded. The Tony of the Play withdrew, the real Tony stood discovered, undressed\u2014by no means admirable. No longer on the boards, walking like a king, with the regal fascination of an older day, he would pass along the busy street unnoticed, unadorned, bereft of the high distinction that imagination, so strangely stirred, had laid upon him for a little space.\u2026 The yellow gloves lay now upon the desert sand; perhaps the whirling tempest tossed them to and fro, perhaps it buried them; perhaps the Arab boys, proud of the tinsel they mistook for gold, now wore them in their sleep, lying on beds of rushes beneath the flat-roofed houses of sun-baked clay.\u2026\n\nThis vivid detail kept the heavier memories back at first; somehow the long review of his brief Egyptian winter blocked each time against a pair of stooping shoulders and a pair of yellow cotton gloves.\n\nDuring the voyage of four days, however, followed then the inevitable cruel aftermath of doubt, suspicion, jealousy he had fancied long since overthrown. A hundred incidents and details forced themselves upon him from the past\u2014glances, gestures, phrases, such little things and yet so pregnant with delayed or undelivered meaning. The meanings rose remorselessly to the surface now.\n\nAll belonged to the first days in Egypt before he noticed anything; the mind worked backwards to their gleaning. They had escaped his attention at the time, yet the mind had registered them none the less. He did not seek their recovery, but the series offered itself, compelling him to examine one and all, demanding that he should pass judgment. He forced them back, they leaped up again on springs; the resilience was due to their life, their truth; they were not to be denied. There was no escape.\u2026\n\nAll pointed to the same conclusion: the month spent alone with Tony had worked the mischief before his own arrival\u2014by the time he came upon the scene the new relationship was in full swing beyond her power to stop it. Heavens, he had been blind! Ceaselessly, endlessly, he made the circle of alternate pain and joy, of hope and despair, of doubt and confidences\u2014yet the ideal in him safe beyond assault. He believed in her, he trusted, and he\u2014hoped.\n\nThe most poignant test, however, came when port was reached and the scented land-wind met his nostrils with the\u2014Spring. He saw the harbour with its white houses shining in the early April sunshine; the blue sea recalled a wide-shored lake among the mountains: he saw the sea-gulls, heard the lapping of the waves against the shipping.\u2026\n\nHe took the train to a little town along the coast, meaning to stay there a day or two before facing London, where the dismantling of the Brown Flat and the search for work awaited him. And there the full-blooded spring of this southern climate took him by the throat. The haze, the sweet moist air, the luscious fields, the woods and flowery roads, above all the singing birds\u2014this biting contrast with the dry, blazing desert skies of tawny Egypt was dislocating. The fierce glare of perpetual summer seemed a nightmare he had left behind; he came back to the sweet companionship of friendly life in field and tree and flower.\n\nThe first soft shower of rain, the first long twilight, the singing of the thrushes after dark, the light in the little homestead windows\u2014he felt such intimate kindness in it all that the tears rose to his eyes. He longed to share it with her\u2026 there was no joy in life without her.\u2026 Egypt lay behind him with its awful loneliness, its stern, forbidding emptiness, its nightmare sunsets, its cruel desert, its appalling vastness in which everything had already happened. Thebes was a single, enormous tomb; his past lay buried there; from the solemn, mournful, desolate hills he had escaped.\u2026 He emerged into a smiling land of running streams and flowers. His new life was beginning like the Spring. It gushed everywhere, reminding him of another Spring he had known among the mountains.\u2026 The 'sum of loss' he counted minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. He began the long, long reckoning.\u2026\n\nHe felt intolerably alone. The hunger and yearning in his heart seemed more than he could bear. This beauty\u2026 without her beside him, without her to share the sweet companionship of the earth\u2026 was too much to bear. For one minute with her beside him in the meadows, picking flowers, listening to the birds, her blue veil flying in the wet mountain wind\u2014he would have given all his life, his past, his future, everything that mind and heart held precious.\u2026 In the middle of which and at its darkest moment came the certain knowledge with a joy that broke in light and rapture on his soul\u2014that she was beside him because she was within him.\u2026 He approached the impersonal, selfless attitude to which the attainment of an ideal alone is possible. She had been added to him.\u2026\n\nThe silence, meanwhile, was like the silence that death brings. He clung tenaciously to his ideal, yet he thought of her daily, nightly, hourly. She was really never absent from his thoughts. He starved, yet perhaps he did not know he starved.\u2026 The days grew into weeks with a grinding, dreadful slowness. He had written from the steamer, explaining briefly that he was called to England. He had written a similar line to Tony too. No answers came.\n\nYet the silence was full of questions. The mystery of her Egyptian infatuation remained the biggest one of all perhaps. But there were others, equally insistent. Did he really possess her in a way that made earthly companionship unnecessary? Had he lasting joy in this ideal possession? Was it true that an ideal once attained, its prototype becomes unsatisfying? Did he deceive himself? And had not her strange experience after all but ripened and completed her nature, provided something she had lacked before, and blended the Mother and the Woman into the perfect mate his dream foretold and his heart's deep instinct prophesied?\n\nHe heard many answers to these questions; his heart made one, his reason made another. It was the soft and urgent Spring, however, with its perfumed winds, its singing birds, its happy message breaking with tumultuous life\u2014it was the Spring on those wooded Mediterranean shores that whispered the compelling truth. He needed her, he yearned. An ideal, on this earth, to retain its upward lure, must remain\u2014an ideal. Attainment in the literal sense destroys it. His arms were hungry and his heart was desolate. Then one day he knew the happy yet unhappy feeling that she suffered too. He felt her thoughts about him like soft birds.\u2026\n\nAnd he wrote to her: 'I should just like to know that you are well\u2014and happy.' He addressed it to the Bungalow. The same day, chance had it, he received word from her, forwarded from the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. She wrote two lines only: 'Tom, the thing I had to tell you about was\u2014 Warsaw. It is over. As you said, it is better written, perhaps, than told. Yours, L.'\n\nEgypt came flooding through the open window as he laid the letter down; the silence, the desert spaces, the perfume and the spell. He saw one thing clearly in that second, for he saw it in a flash. The secret of her trouble that last day in Luxor was laid bare\u2014the knowledge that within a few hours she would be free. To Tom she could not easily tell it; delicacy, modesty, pride forbade. Her long, painful duty, faithfully fulfilled these many years, was over. Her world had altered, opened out. Values, of course, had instantly altered too; she saw what was real and what ephemeral; she looked at Tony and she looked at\u2014himself. She could speak to Tony\u2014it was easier, it did not matter\u2014but she could not so easily speak to Tom. The yellow gloves of cotton!\u2026 His heart leaped within him.\u2026\n\nHe stared out of the window across the blue Mediterranean with its dancing, white-capped waves; he saw the white houses by the harbour; he watched the whirling sea-gulls and tasted the fresh, salt air. How familiar it all was! Of her whereabouts at that moment he had no knowledge; she might be on the steamer, gazing at the same dancing waves; she might be in Warsaw or in London even; she might pass by the windows of the Brown Flat.\u2026\n\nHe turned aside, closing the window. Egypt withdrew, the glamour waned, the ancient spell seemed lifted. He thought of those Theban Hills without emotion. Yet something in him trembled; he yearned, he ached, he longed with all the longing of the Spring. He wavered\u2014oh, deliciously\u2026! He was glad, radiantly glad, that she had written. Only\u2014he dared not, he could not answer.\u2026\n\nYet big issues are decided sometimes by paltry and ignoble influences when sturdier considerations produce no effect. It is the contrast that furnishes the magic. It was contrast, doubtless, that swayed Tom's judgment in the very direction he had decided was prohibited. His surroundings at the moment supplied the contrast, for these surroundings were petty and ignoble\u2014they drove him by the distress of sheer disgust into the world of larger values he had known with her. Probably, he did not discover this consciously for himself: the result, in any case, was logical and obvious. Values changed suddenly for him, too, both in his outlook and his judgment.\n\nFor he was spending a few days with his widowed sister, she who had been playmate to Lettice years ago; and the conditions of her life and mind distressed him. He had seen her name in a hotel list of Mentone; he surprised her with a visit; he was received with inexplicable coldness. His tie with her was slight, her husband, a clergyman, little to his liking; he had not been near them for several years. The frigid reception, however, had a deeper cause, he felt; his curiosity was piqued.\n\nHis sister's chart of existence, indeed, was too remote from his own for true sympathy to be possible, and her married life had not improved her. They had drifted apart without openly acknowledging it. There was no quarrel, but there was a certain bitterness between them. She had a marked faiblesse, strange in one securely born, for those nominally in high places that, while disingenuous enough, jarred painfully always on her brother. God was unknown to her, although her husband preached most familiarly concerning Him. She had never seen the deity, but an Earl was a living reality, and often very useful. This banal weakness, he now found, had increased in widowhood. Tom hid his extreme distaste\u2014and learned the astonishing reason for her coldness. It was Mrs. Haughstone. It took his breath away. He was too amazed to speak.\n\nHow clearly he understood her conduct now in Egypt! For Mrs. Haughstone had spread stories of the Bungalow, pernicious stories of an incredible kind, yet with just sufficient basis of apparent truth to render them plausible\u2014plausible, that is, to any who were glad of an excuse to believe them against himself. These stories by a round-about way, gathering in circumstantial detail as they travelled, had reached his sister. She wished to believe them, and she did. Certain relatives, moreover, of meagre intelligence but highly placed in the social world, and consequently of great importance in her life, were remotely affected by the lurid tales. A report in full is unnecessary, but Mary held that the family honour was stained. It was an incredible imbroglio. Tom was so overwhelmed by this revelation of the jealous woman's guile, and the light it threw upon her r\u00f4le in Egypt, that he did not even trouble to defend himself. He merely felt sorry that his sister could believe such tales\u2014and forgave her without a single word. He saw in it all another scrap of evidence that the Wave had indeed fallen, that his life everywhere, and from the most unlikely directions, was threatened, that all the most solid in the structure he had hitherto built up and leaned upon, was crumbling\u2014and must crumble utterly\u2014in order that it might rise secure upon fresh foundations.\n\nHe faced it, but faced it silently. He washed his hands of all concerned; he had learned their values too; he now looked forward instead of behind; that is, he forgot, and at the same time utterly\u2014forgave.\n\nBut the effect upon him was curious. The stagnant ditch his sister lived in had the result of flinging him headlong back into the larger stream he had just left behind him; in that larger world things happened indeed, things unpleasant, cruel, mysterious, amazing\u2014but yet not little things. The scale was vaster, horizons wider, beauty and wonder walked hand in hand with love and death. The contrast shook him; the trivial blow had this immense effect, that he yearned with redoubled passion for the region in which bigger ideals with their prototypes, however broken, existed side by side.\n\nThis yearning, and the change involved, remained subtly concealed, however. He was not properly conscious of it. Other very practical considerations, it seemed, influenced him; his money was getting low; he had luckily sublet the flat, but the question of work was becoming insistent. There was much to be faced.\u2026 A month had slipped by, it was five weeks since he had left Egypt. He decided to go to London. He telegraphed to the Club for his letters\u2014he expected important ones\u2014to be sent to Paris, and it was in a small high room on the top floor of a second-rate hotel across the Seine that he found them waiting for him. It was here, in this dingy room, that he read the wondrous words. The letter had lain at his Club three days, it was dated Switzerland and the postmark was Montreux. It was in pencil, without beginning and without end; his name, the signature did not appear:\n\nYour little letter has come\u2014yes, I am well, but happy I am not. I went to the Semiramis and found that you had sailed, sailed without even a good-bye. I have come here, here to familiar little Montreux by the blue lake, where we first knew the Spring together. I can't say anything, I can't explain anything. You must never ask me to explain; Egypt changed me\u2014brought out something in me I was helpless to resist. It was something perhaps I needed. I struggled\u2014perhaps you can guess how I struggled, perhaps you can't. I have suffered these past weeks, I believe that I have expiated something. The power that drove me is exhausted, and that is all I know. I have worked it out. I have come back. There is no blame for others\u2014for any one; I can't explain. Your little letter has come, and so I write. Help me, oh, help me in years to find my respect again, and try to love the woman you once knew\u2014knew here in Montreux beside the lake, long ago in our childhood days, further back still, perhaps, though where I do not know. And, Tom\u2014 tell me how you are. I must know that. Please write and tell me that. I can bear it no longer. If anything happened to you I should just turn over and die. You have been true and very big, oh, so true and big. I see it now.\u2026\n\nTom did not answer. He took the night train. He was just in time to catch the Simplon Express from the Gare de Lyon. He reached Montreux at seven o'clock, when the June sun was already high above the Dent du Midi and the lake a sheet of sparkling blue. He went to his old hotel. He saw the swans floating like bundles of dry paper, he saw the whirling sea-gulls, he obtained his former room. And spring was just melting into full-blown summer upon the encircling mountains.\n\nIt was still early when he had bathed and breakfasted, too early for visitors to be abroad, too early to search.\u2026 He could settle to nothing; he filled the time as best he could; he smoked and read an English newspaper that was several days old at least. His eyes took in the lines, but his mind did not take in the sense\u2014until a familiar name caught his attention and made him keenly alert. The name was Anthony Winslowe. He remembered suddenly that Tony had never replied to his letter.\u2026 The paragraph concerning his cousin, however, dealt with another matter that sent the blood flaming to his cheeks. He was defendant in the breach of promise suit brought by a notorious London actress, then playing in a popular revue. The case had opened; the letters were already produced in court\u2014and read. The print danced before his eyes. The letters were dated last October and November, just before Tony had come out to Egypt, and with crimson face Tom read them. It was more than distressing, it was afflicting\u2014the letters tore an established reputation into a thousand pieces. He could not finish the report; he only prayed that another had not seen it.\u2026\n\nIt was eleven o'clock when he went out and joined the throng of people sunning themselves on the walk beside the lake. The air was sweet and fresh, there were sailing-boats upon the water, the blue mountains lifted their dazzling snow far, far into the summer sky. He leaned over the rail and watched the myriads of tiny fishes, he watched the swans, he saw the dim line of the Jura hills in the hazy distance, he heard the muffled beat of a steamer's paddle-wheels a long way off. And then, abruptly, he was aware that some one touched him; a hand in a long white glove was on his arm; there was a subtle perfume; two dark eyes looked into his; and he heard a low familiar voice:\n\n'One day we shall find each other in a crowd.'\n\nTom was amazingly inarticulate. He just turned and looked down at her, moving a few inches closer as he did so. She wore a black boa; the fur touched his cheek.\n\n'You have come back,' he said.\n\nThere was a new wonder in her face, a soft new beauty. The woman in her glowed.\u2026 He saw the suffering plainly too.\n\n'We have both found out,' she said very low, 'found out what we are to one another.'\n\nTom's supply of words failed completely then. He looked at her\u2014looked all the language in the world. And she understood. She lowered her eyes. 'I feel shy,' he thought he heard. It was murmured only. The next minute she raised her eyes again to his. He saw them dark and beautiful, tender as his mother's, true and faithful, as in his boyhood's dream of years ago. But they were now a woman's eyes.\n\n'I never really left you, Tom\u2026' she said with absolute conviction. 'I never could. I went aside\u2026 to fetch something\u2014to give to you. That was all!'\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Promise of Air by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nJoseph Wimble was the only son of an analytical chemist, who, having made considerable profits out of an Invisible Sticking Plaster, sent the boy to Charterhouse and Cambridge in the hope that he would turn out a gentleman. When Joseph left Cambridge his father left business, referred to himself as Expert, used a couple of letters after his name, and suggested making the Grand Tour of Europe together as a finishing touch. 'To talk familiarly of Rome and Vienna and Constantinople as though you knew them,' he explained, 'is a useful thing. It helps one with the women, and to be helped by women in life is half the battle.' His ambitions for his son were considerable, including above all a suitable marriage. The abrupt destruction of these ambitions, accordingly, was so bitter a disappointment that he felt justified in giving the lad a nominal sum and mentioning that he had better shift for himself. For Joseph married secretly the daughter of a Norfolk corn-chandler, announcing the news to his father upon the very eve of starting for the Grand Tour. Joseph found himself with \u00a3500 and a wife.\n\nJoseph himself was of that placid temperament to which things in life just came and went apparently without making very deep impressions. He was a careless, indifferent sort of fellow even as a boy, careless of consequences, indifferent to results: not irresponsible, yet very easy-going. There was no intensity in him; he did not realise things. 'Oh, it's much the same to me,' would be his reply to most proposals. 'I'd as soon as not.' There was something fluid in his nature that accepted life nonchalantly, as if all things were one to him; yet, again, not that he was devoid of feeling or desires, but that he did not realise life in the solid way of the majority. At school he did not realise that he was what the world calls 'not quite a gentleman,' although the boys made a point of proving it to him. At Cambridge he did not realise that to pass his Little-go, or acquire the letters B.Sc., was of any importance, although various learned and older men received good pay in order to convince him of the fact. He just went along in a loose, careless, big-hearted way of living, and took whatever came\u2014exactly as it came. He had a delightful smile and put on fat; shared his money with one and all; existed in a methodical way as most other fellows of his age existed, and grew older much as they did. So ordinary was he in fact, so little distinguished from the rest of his kind, that men who knew him well would stop and think when questioned if they numbered Joseph Wimble among their acquaintances. 'Wimble, lemme see\u2014oh yes, of course! Why, I've known him for a couple of years!' That was Joseph Wimble. Only it made no difference to him whether they remembered him or not. He behaved rather as if everything was one to him in a very literal sense; as if the whole bewildering kaleidoscope of life conveyed a single vast impression; there was no reason to get excited over particular details; in the end it was literally all one. His smattering of physics taught him that all things could be expressed, more or less, in terms of one another. That was his attitude, at any rate. 'Take it as a whole,' he would say vaguely, 'and it's all right. It's all the same.'\n\nYet his indifference to things was not so colourless as it appeared; but was due, perhaps, to the transference of his interests elsewhere. His centre of gravity hardly seemed on earth is one way of expressing it. Behind the apparent stolidity hid something that danced and sang; something almost flighty. It was laborious explanation that he dreaded and despised, as though things capable of being 'explained' were of small importance to him. He was eager to know things he wanted to know, yet in a way he was too intensely curious, too impatient certainly, to put himself to much trouble to find out. He refused to work, to 'grind' he knew not how; yet he absorbed a good deal of knowledge; information came to him, as it were. He figured to himself vaguely that there was another surer way of learning than by memorising detail,\u2014a flashing, darting, sudden way, like the way of a bird. To follow a line of information to its bitter end was a wearisome, stultifying business, the reality he sought was lost sight of in the process. The main idea had interest for him, but not the details, for the details blurred and obscured it. Proof was a stupid word that blocked his faculties. He did not despise or reject it exactly, but he refused to recognise it. In a sense he overlooked it. Of answers to the important questions millions have been asking for thousands of years there was no proof obtainable. Of survival, for instance, or the existence of the soul, there was no 'proof,' yet for that very reason he believed in both. He could 'prove' a stone, a tree, a dog. He could name and weigh and describe it. The senses of hearing, sight, and touch reported upon it, yet these reports he knew to be but vibrations of the respective nerves that brought them to his brain. They were at best indirect reports, and at worst referred to a mere collection of unverified appearances. Logic, too, the backbone of philosophy, affected him with weariness, just as his respect for reason was shockingly undeveloped. And argument could prove anything, hence argument for him was also futile. He jumped to the conclusion always. Thus at school, and even more at Cambridge, he liked to know what other fellows thought and believed, but as a whole and in outline only. A general idea of 'what and why' was enough for him\u2014just to catch the drift.\n\nThis faculty of catching the drift of any knowledge that he cared about came to him naturally, as it seemed. They called him talented but lazy; for he took the cream off; he swooped like a bird, caught it flying, and was off upon another quest. Since there was no real proof of any of the important things, why toil to master the tedious arguments and facts of either side? There was somewhere a swifter, lighter way of knowing things, a direct and instantaneous way. He was sure of it. Thus the ordinary things of life he did not realise\u2014quite as other people realised them. They passed him by.\n\nOne thing and one only, it seemed, he desired to realise, and that was birds. It was a passion in him, a mania. He had a yearning desire to understand the mystery of bird-life\u2014not ornithology but birds. Anything to do with birds changed the expression of his face at once; the fat and placid indifference gave way to an emotion that, judging by his expression, caused him a degree of wonder that was almost worship, of happiness nearly painful. Their intense vitality inspired him, their equality stirred respect. Anything to do with their flight, their songs, their eggs, their habits fascinated him. And this fascination he realised. He indulged it furiously, if of necessity secretly, since to study bird-life fields and hedges must be visited without company. But here again he took no particular pains, it seemed. As is usual with an overmastering tendency, his knowledge of his subject was instinctive. Before he went to Charterhouse he knew the size and colouring of every egg that ever lay in a British nest, and by the time he left that school he could imitate with marvellous accuracy the singing notes and whistles of any bird he had heard once. He devoured books about them, studied their differing ways of flight, knew every nest within a radius of miles about his house in a given neighbourhood, and above all was moved to a kind of ecstasy of wonder over the magic of their annual migration. That in particular touched him into poetry. He thought dumbly about it, but his imagination stirred. Inarticulateness increased his accumulating store of wonder. The Grand Tour! Rome, Vienna, Constantinople, indeed! What were the capitals of Europe compared to the Southern Tour they made! That deep instinct to hurry after the fading sun, to keep in touch with their source of life, to follow colour, heat, light, and beauty. That vast autumnal flight! The marvel of the great return, entranced by the southern sun, intoxicated with the music of the southern winds! That such tiny bodies could dare four thousand miles of trackless space, travelling for the most part in the darkness, carelessly carrying nothing with them, and rush back in the spring to the very copse or hedgerow left six months before\u2014that was a source of endless wonder to his mind. There was pathos and loneliness in their absence. England seemed empty once the birds had flown. The sky was dead without the swallows. Of course the land was dark and silent when they left, and of course it burst into colour, rhythm, movement, and singing when they showered back upon it in the spring!\n\nThe sweet passion of woodland music caught his heart. He realised that birds had a secret and mysterious life of their very own, and that the world they lived in was a happy and desirable world. That strange knowledge at a distance men called instinct, puzzled him. A new method of communication belonged to it too. It had its laws and customs, its joys and terrors, its habits, rules, and purposes; but these all were strangely different from anything that solid earth-life knew. Freedom, light, and swiftness were the characteristics of that existence, and joy its outstanding quality. Its universal telepathy exhilarated. No other beings in the universe expressed themselves naturally by singing.\n\nThe Kingdom of the Air became for him a symbol of an existence higher than anything on the earth; air stood for a condition that at present was beyond the reach of humanity, but that humanity one day would achieve. His imagination figured this glorious accomplishment as the next stage in evolution. A clever poet might have made Joseph Wimble the hero of an original fairy tale, in which he lived and suffered heavily on solid ground, eternal type of the exile, vainly yearning for his natural element, the air. For exile was in it; he claimed the knowledge of the air as a familiar experience. He felt that he knew and understood the air instinctively; he belonged 'up there'; he had nested in the trees, perched on some topmost twig, had balanced in the breeze, and sung his heart out from sheer joy of living; he had even flown.\n\nThis was doubtless a mental exercise, an imaginative flight. It all seemed familiar to him, long, long ago, before this enormous physical frame had walled him down to the ground and weight had handicapped aspiration so distressingly. He looked at his body in the glass and sighed. 'There's something wrong,' he realised. 'Why should I need such a mass of stuff to function through? I'm supposed to be more intelligent than animals or things.' He thought of a swift\u2014and sighed. Size and weight were so out of proportion to the r\u00f4le he played on earth. The smaller forms of life were far less handicapped; a flea, a beetle were a thousand times stronger relatively than a human being, whereas a little bird\u2014It all left him inarticulate. He was always inarticulate. Dumbly he yearned for air; desired, that is, the mental attitude of one to whom free swift movement in the air was natural; and the intensity of the yearning\u2014the one thing he fully realised\u2014must some day produce a result. The beauty of an air-life hid in his blood. It expressed the ultimate yearning of his very soul.\n\n'The next stage of the world is air,' he imagined with some part of his intelligence that never could articulately clothe the dream in language. 'We shall never be happy and right until we know the air as birds do. We've learned all the earth has got to teach us. There's a new age coming\u2014a new element its key: Air!'\n\nEarth, ever sweet and beautiful, was in the main, however, chiefly useful only. Somehow he no longer felt the need of it.\n\nThe unreality of objective knowledge, the limitations of the human intellect afflicted him. He thought of the barren sterility of learned minds, sacked tight with this objective information about the clothes of the universe, yet uninformed concerning the living personality that wears them. The scholars and collectors had no joy; they never sang.\n\nHe thought hard about it. He tried to state to himself what he meant in clear words. It was difficult. Already he thought in terms of air\u2014 transparent, everywhere at once, radiant and flashing. He experienced a completeness and a buoyancy that denied the accepted rule that two and two make four. Two and two, of course, did make four on earth and in the nursery or the nest. But somehow in the air\u2014they just didn't. There was no two and two at all. They didn't exist. It was some kind of synthetical air-knowledge that he sought.\n\n'Earth is divisible\u2014divided,' he said to himself. 'It has details, separate objects, definite divisions into stones and things. But in the air there is no division. Air is homogeneous\u2014not as the physicist's gas, but as an expression of space.' In the air, or rather of the air, two and two make four became not false exactly, but impossible. It could not be said. Earth is not continuous, but broken up; it belongs to time and time's divisions of the nursery. Earth is an expression of separateness. Even water has drops, fluid and cohering though it is. Air has no drops. There are no drops of air. There are currents, streams and surfaces, all undetailed. Earth, he felt, belonged to time and time's divisions where two and two made four. But air was of another category altogether, and not of time at all. Air was one.\n\nIt explained his indifference to earth. Though fastened physically like every one else to the ground, his inmost being lived in the air already, and some day he would meet a person who would explain and justify this extraordinary yearning. He was aware of this expectancy in him, for the craving to become articulate produced it. He needed a mate, of course. Together, somehow, their deep desire would find expression. He would become articulate through her. And suddenly, with a kind of abrupt surprise that belongs to birds, he found her.\n\nThe surprising way he found her, too, was characteristic. They floated, if not flew, into each other's arms." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 286", + "text": "It was a glad May morning, the air soft-flowing and cool, the sunshine warm and brilliant, when the youth cut his lectures and went out into the fields, drawn irresistibly by the electric rush and sparkle of the spring. The swallows were home from the Southern Tour, and the sky was singing. He could not sit and listen to chemical formulae in a lecture-room; it was not possible. He wandered out carelessly into the world of buttercups, following the stream where the feathered willows bent in a wave of falling green. It was a true bird-day, and his heart, uprising like the larks, was shrilling. He felt exactly like a bird himself, and it made him laugh as naturally as a bird might sing. He fell to copying their various cries. They came up close and saw him. They were aware of him. 'Birds of the sweet spring skies!' he thought, and yearned to share their strange collective life, individual still, yet part of their magical community.\n\nHe soon found himself out of the scholastic town and among the flat expanse of yellow fields beyond. The stream was blue, the grass an emerald green, the willows laughed, showing their under leaves, the dew still sparkled. Buttercups by the million nodded in the breeze; wings were everywhere, the surface of the earth was dancing, and the whole air fluttered. The earth was dressed in blue and gold.\n\nThe singing was so general that he had to pause in order to pick out the separate melodies; the song of the birds was, indeed, so much a part of their surroundings that an act of definite listening was necessary to hear it. It linked him on to Nature; it made Nature articulate. He heard the hearty whistle of the blackcap among the swaying tree-tops, shrill with joy; a whitethroat tossed itself exultantly into the air beside him; he heard the warblers trilling, the little calling cry of the chiff-chaff, the tiny poem of the willow-warbler, the merry laughter of the dainty wren. The tits shot everywhere, pecking in seed, pricking the sunshine with their tiny beaks, darting, flashing. He passed a farm and saw the vigorous outline of a blackbird, perched upon an oak bough still bare, fluting as Pan fluted upon many-fountained Ida long ago; a chaffinch dipped at him over the wall from wet shrubberies beyond, hopped to a twig in the sunlight above the blackbird, and let loose a shower of notes like silvery drops of water. Singing shook itself out of the atmosphere everywhere, as though the whole of Nature moved and trembled into her strange scale-less music. There was the joy of air upon the stirring world.\n\nThe life of air was dominant, ruling the heavy earth\u2014bird-life. What delicious names they had, Whitethroat, Gold-oriel, Wheat-ear, Dipper, Bunting, Redpoll, Osprey, Snowy-owl, Snow-bunting, Martin; what lyrical names with fun and laughter in them, a childlike beauty of air and sunny woodland-space. The magic of Spring captured him by its suggestion: nothing was fully out, it was suggested only\u2014eternal promise, ethereal glamour: prophecy, hope, expectancy\u2014fulfilment.\n\nOn all sides he felt the tremendous lift of the year that comes in May with song and colour and movement. The world was rhythmical. It caught him into joy, as though it would sweep him like a harp into passionate response. Yet he remained dumb and inarticulate. He drank it in: but he could not sing, he could not soar, he could not fly. This piping, fluting, thrilling, this showering stream of sweet elemental song and dance was not of the earth, but of the air. The strange yearning in him grew and gathered into a dangerous accumulation. It must find expression somehow or he would\u2014burst.\n\nHe threw himself down in the long grass beside the blue-throated stream, and became at once all eyes and ears. There was no other way. The cool touch of the luxuriant herbage brought a slight relief, as did the itemising of the songs he heard and imitated, the colours he gazed upon and named: the shimmering sheen of the rooks in the elm trees yonder; the deep, unpolished ebony of the blackbird with its beak of gleaming yellow; the bright and roving eye of the little whitethroat picking food along the bank; the shearing speed of the swifts cutting the air with tapering, scythe-like wings; the piping sweetness of a thrush, invisible in a thicket behind the farm buildings\u2014all these combined to put the true bird-ecstasy upon him as he lay and watched and listened. The amazing outburst of spring music lifted him almost into the air to join the ropes of starlings twisting and untwisting as if they reproduced the wild soft tangle of his unsatisfied yearnings. And their tiny flickering shadows fell upon the ground in ever-shifting patterns that he could never catch or seize. Upon his mind fell similarly rushing thoughts he was unable to express... the rhythm of some mighty promise that uplifted. He was aware of love and beauty. The soul in him rose and twittered like a lark...\n\nThen, presently, he raised his head above the screen of grass. There was a sound of footsteps. His hearing was abnormally acute when this bird-mood took him, for the tapping tread of a wagtail on the bank had made itself distinctly heard. He saw the frisky creature, dainty as a sprite, tripping nimbly among the rushes just below him. It balanced very cleverly, neatly dressed in its tailor-made of feathers. He saw its fairy ankles. It seemed to hold its skirts up. He caught its bright eye peeping. It was gone.\n\n'Soft, slip of a bird!' he thought to himself with a sharp sensation of regret; 'why did it leave me in such a hurry?' He felt something tender and earnest in him, something true and thorough, yet careless and light with joy, a true bird-quality. He felt, too, the pathos of the sudden disappearance: a moment ago it had been there in all its gracious beauty, and now the spot was empty.\n\n'Where, in what new haunted corner of these fields\u2014' he began, half-singing, when a new and startling flash of loveliness caught his eye and took his breath away. Another wagtail, but this time yellow, marvellous as a dream, came pricking into view.\n\nSomehow, beyond all understanding, the sweet apparition focussed his tangle of inarticulate yearning into a blaze of delight that was a climax. The advent of the exquisite little creature, with its delicate carriage, its bosom of pure yellow, seemed symbolical almost. The idea of something sylph-like from the heart of the air flashed into him. The whole singing, dancing, coloured element produced this living emblem from its central heart of the flooding Spring. There was true air-magic in it. The passion of Spring and the mystery of birds focussed together in the tiny symbol. Imagination touched the pitch of ecstasy. He turned abruptly. There was a whirr, a streak of burning yellow that lost itself against the sea of buttercups, and lo! He was\u2014alone again.\n\nBut this time the loneliness was more than he could bear.\n\nHe sprang to his feet, and at full speed took the direction in which it disappeared. Some wisdom of the birds was in him possibly, though alas, not their light rapidity, for while guided wisely along the windings of the willow-guarded stream, across the fields, past hedges, copses, farms, over ditches innumerable, he could not overtake his prize\u2014and so at last came into a lonely spot that lay far away upon the surface of the countryside. The occasional flash of yellow had led him onwards in this way, as though the bird enticed him of set purpose; it would land, then shoot away again just as he came up with it. It left a trail of gold across the sunlit fields. It was a will-o'-the-wisp\u2014in sunlight. It behaved like some spiritual decoy.\n\nAfterwards, when he thought about it, his chase took on this aspect of curious allurement, for he knew he could never catch the bird for actual handling, even had he so desired. Nor did he wish to; he had no desire to 'prove' this symbol that summed up his imaginative passion. He only wanted to come up with it; to meet its peeping eye, to watch it at close quarters: its sylph-like beauty had seduced him. Twice he dashed through the water, where the stream made a tiresome bend, and his track across the fields of early hay would have warranted a farmer in putting dust-shot into him. Yet he kept just within sight of it\u2014of the flashing yellow which made him oblivious of all else; and the brimstone butterflies, the yellow-hammers, the orange-tinted kingfishers that obviously tried to confuse the trail by shooting across his path, failed wholly to divert him from the chase. He knew which gold to follow. It was in his heart.\n\nThe wagtail at last shot headlong past a clump of bramble-bushes, and Wimble, arriving also headlong, saw to his amazement that the yellow of its breast remained on the branches as though caught and fixed. To his astonishment the gold lay in a shining stream across the prickles without moving. It held fast. He saw the gleaming line of it. He thought he was dreaming for an instant\u2014then discovered that the stream of gold was a yellow scarf that had been netted by the hedge. It belonged to a human being. The same second he saw a sun-bonnet and a book lying on the other side by a pond below some willows. And the being was a blue-eyed girl. His sylph of the air had come to earth. Two black stockings hung on a branch to dry. She was bare-footed. He certainly met her eye, and it was a surprised, reproachful eye. He looked down at her, and she looked up at him. His heart came up into his throat and then into his eyes.\n\n'I suppose you know you're trespassing,' said a voice that was both cross and sweet at once. 'These fields are father's.'\n\n'Yes,' replied young Wimble of Trinity, staring at her in amazement. 'I'm awfully sorry.' He was lost in admiration and unable to conceal it. She was more than a farmer's daughter, he was thinking, as instinctively he transferred to her all the yearning, airy passion he had put into his search for the yellow wagtail.\n\n'Father complained last week again, and there are new boards up everywhere.' He remembered vaguely there had been complaints about trespassing; he had blundered into the very spot where the offences had been committed. 'So you've no excuse!' she added, watching him.\n\n'I'm awfully sorry,' he repeated, as he disentangled the yellow scarf and passed the end into her outstretched hand. The sunburned skin just matched the landscape, he noted the tiny bleached hairs upon her arm. 'I saw a yellow wagtail and went after it. They're rather uncommon.' And then he added, 'I suppose it\u2014you\u2014got caught, scrambling through the hedge. I'm frightfully sorry. Really, I'm ashamed. I saw the bird\u2014and forgot everything. I believe it flew back\u2014flew into you!'\n\nThey stood looking at each other. If he cut a comical figure, she certainly did not; for whereas his face was hot, his tie flown over one shoulder, his grey trousers splashed with mud; she seemed in her natural setting between the willows and the hedge, the untidy hair falling loose about the neck, her arms akimbo and her sunburned face suiting her to perfection. She looked cool and extraordinarily radiant. He thought she was absurdly beautiful; his heart began to beat deliciously; and when she lost the cross expression and smiled at him the next moment he blurted out a confused, impetuous something before he could possibly prevent it.\n\n'You're awfully becoming,' he stammered. 'I say\u2014I'm jolly glad I saw that yellow wagtail and followed it. I believe it flew back into your heart.'\n\nHer smile broadened into a laugh at once. It was impossible to be angry with such a youth. 'You undergraduates,' she said, 'are the most ridiculous people I've ever known. But I shan't let you go now I've got you. You're fairly caught.'\n\n'Rather,' said Wimble with unfeigned delight.\n\n'Then you'd better come with me and see father at once,' she went on. 'You can explain yourself to him\u2014about the wagtail.'\n\n'Rather,' he repeated, though with less enthusiasm. It was the only word that he could think of; and he added, 'presently.'\n\nShe looked him up and down. 'It's best, I think.' And her laughter was now friendly.\n\n'I will,' he repeated, 'I'll go anywhere with you. I admit I'm caught. Do you think he'll be very nasty to me?'\n\nBut he scarcely knew what he was saying all the time, for his one desire was not to lose sight of her now that he had found her. Her face, her laughter, her singing voice, her attitude, everything about her made him gasp. He already thought of her in bird-terms. He remembered the redwing, delicate thrush, that comes to England from the North and is off again too soon\u2014of countless birds that haunt our fields with transient beauty, then vanish suddenly, afraid to stay and rest. An anxious pang transfixed his heart. Any moment she might spread big yellow wings and leave him fluttering on the ground. 'If I've done any damage,' he added, 'I'll put it right. It was worth it, anyhow.' But he saw that she laughed with him now, not at him, and he began to smile himself. She was adorable. 'I'll swear she's a birdy girl,' the thought flashed through him.\n\n'If you'll turn your back a moment, please,' he heard her saying, 'I'll put my shoes and stockings on again. There's no good paddling any more with you here.'\n\n'Rather not,' he said, and ran down to fetch them for her.\n\nAnd so it began and ended in the brief ten minutes of this intoxicating May morning beside the willow pond where the birds of the countryside came down to bathe at dawn and drink at sunset. It was an ideal opening. She put her stockings on, but not before he had complained that she was slow about it because a thorn had run into her toe, blaming him so that he had to extract it with trembling fingers and a penknife. They were laughing together like two children by the time he finished; and by the time they reached the house he had dipped into her being and found, as in a book of poetry, that all his favourite passages were marked. Moreover, she had led him by so round a way that they had been obliged to rest under the hedges more than once, and had discovered also that they were very hungry. The sudden intimacy was the sudden falling in love of two young persons who were obviously made for one another. It was the mating of two birds. They had met by the pond, exchanged glances, and then flown off together across the lawn. For it was spring and nesting time... The dust of blue and bronze was on the dragon-flies, the bloom and promise of deep-bosomed summer in the air...\n\n'Father, this is my friend, Mr. Wimble,' she introduced him. 'You remember, I told you. He's at Trinity.'\n\n'You'll stay and have a bite with us, won't you then? It's just time,' was the genial invitation, given to hide his excusable lack of recognition. There was no mention of the damaged fields nor of the trespassing. 'Come, Joan, let's get at it, for I'm starving.'\n\nThe name sounded wonderful, but Joseph knew it already and had already used it, his face close against her red lips and shining eyes. He also knew his fate was sealed, and he wished to heaven his own father was as nice as hers.\n\n'I'm a chandler,' he was told in the course of the talk across the luncheon table by the window while the birds hushed their song outside, well knowing it was noon, 'a corn-chandler down in Norfolk. But I've got two farms up here in Cambridgeshire, and I'm just up to look over 'em for a chap as wants to buy 'em off me.' He was a rough-and-ready type, free in his drink and language, using meaningless oaths more frequently as intimacy grew, and betraying a somewhat irascible temperament as well. Yet he was kindly enough. And before Joseph left to go back to his forgotten lectures there had been an invitation too: 'You must come down and see us there some time if you don't mind a bit of roughing it. We live very simple.'\n\nFrom all of which it was clear that the corn-chandler was favourably impressed by the visit of an Undergraduate of Cambridge University, and would not be at all averse to marrying his daughter to the first available young man with reasonable credentials. It was all so easy, instinctive, natural. It ran so smoothly. It flowed, it flew. No obstacles appeared. There was flight and rapture in it from the very start. The couple managed to see one another once a day at least for the next three weeks, but before the first week ended they were engaged. Young Wimble said nothing at home because he knew his father would object to the daughter of a corn-chandler who lived in Norfolk. By September they were married. But by the end of September Joseph realised that they were married\u2014quite another thing. For his father meant what he said, and beyond a modest allowance from the chandler to his daughter, they started life with nothing but the small lump sum by means of which Mr. Wimble senior eased his conscience and set himself right with the outside world. The capitals of Europe were not visited.\n\nJoseph and Joan, however, took the situation like a pair of birds, lightly and carelessly. They were as thoughtless as two finches on the lawn, and as faithful as red linnets. The game of the yellow wagtail chase was kept up between them. He pretended that it was her flying scarf he had seen shining two miles across the buttercup fields, and she declared that she had gone to the willow pond on purpose, knowing in her bones\u2014she called them feathers\u2014that one day some one would find her there and capture her. The actual wagtail was a real decoy. It was his yearning and her own materialised.\n\nThey laughed and played with the idea till it grew very real. And the future did not frighten them a bit. They took their money and spent it on their honeymoon, leaving for the south in October with the birds. They started on the great Southern Tour, building their first nest far away in a sun-drenched Algerian garden where the air, soft with the bloom of an eternal summer, mastered the earth and made it seem of small account. Nothing could weigh them down, nor cage them in. They led a true air-life together, the winds were softly scented, stars shone nightly above their cosy tent, they sang in the golden sunsets and washed their young bodies in the morning dew.\n\nIt was the paradise of a realised dream, a sparkling ecstasy they thought could never end. Her beauty seemed to him the one thing necessary. The autumn migration of the birds, mysterious with grandeur, had always suggested to him a passing-away from earth, a procession to another life, and a returning to sing of it with rapture in the spring. Their honeymoon was this dream come true. They mated and married as birds do, on the wing, and singing. And their first-born, a girl, was the offspring of a passion as intense and radiant as any passion can be in this world. Their imaginative ecstasy, prolonged wondrously through golden months, lifted them from the earth towards the very stars. In it was singing, flight, and rapture, the freedom of wild free spaces and the glory of flashing, coloured wings.\n\nIt was of the air. They fluted to one another beneath the moon; they soared above the noonday heat, they warbled in the scented dusk. Their child, conceived of sun and wind, in a transport of bliss akin to that careless passionate happiness that makes bird-life a ceaseless running song, was born where the missel-thrush sings in the moonlight, and the nightingales in February. She was a veritable child of air. A bird on the wing dropped her to earth in passing, and was gone...\n\nBut something else was gone about that time as well. There came the collapse of inevitable reaction\u2014tragedy. It was as pitiful as anything well could be. Having accomplished her chief end in life, the wife's strange beauty faded: her lightness, brilliance waned, her rapture sank and died; she became a heavy, rather stupid mother; she returned to type whence youth and imagination had temporarily rescued her. Her underlying traits of ordinary texture dulled the colour of her yellow wings. She bequeathed her all to this radiant, sparkling firstborn, and herself went out. The thing he loved in her vanished or became obliterated. He had caught her main drift; he tired. She tired too. In him patient affection replaced ecstatic adoration; in her there was tolerance, misunderstanding, then disappointment. To live longer on the heights they had first climbed became impossible. All that had fascinated him, caught him into the air, departed from her. The bird flew from her\u2014into the little girl with yellow hair and big blue eyes.\n\nShe wearied of the life in tents and spoke of 'artistic furniture' at home, of comfort, and began to wonder how their 'living' could be 'earned.' The practical outlook developed, the carelessness of air decreased. Tom, the second-born, was the culminating proof of the saddening descent. He was just a jolly little dirty animal. 'He's like a rabbit,' thought his father, looking with disappointment on him, thus introducing the big, bitter quarrel that ended in their coming back to the heavy skies of England, settling in a flat in Maida Vale, and led eventually to his taking up work in connection with a modern publishing house to provide the necessary food and rent and clothing. They landed with a distinctly heavy thud\u2014on earth.\n\nIt was, on the mother's part, a great tragedy of sacrifice. Having given all her best qualities to the first-born, she kept none over for herself\u2014 not even enough to appreciate her loss. Her radiance, sparkle, lightness, all her airy wonder, joy and singing, passed from her into yellow-haired little Joan. She stared at it with dull misunderstanding in her heart. She had not retained enough even to understand herself. She did not even discover that she had changed, for only when a fragment remains is the loss of the rest recognised, much less regretted.\n\nBy expressing herself in reproduction, she had not grown richer, but had somehow merely emptied herself. Her husband, moreover, was not heartless. He was not even to blame. He remained tender, kind, and true, but he did not love. For the thing he loved had gone\u2014into another form.\n\nLike the shifting shadows of the wings upon the Cambridge flats that gay spring morning, there fell upon his mind a shower of vague and indescribable thoughts, only one of which he pounced upon before it fled away.\n\n'What has been so long unconscious in me, little Joan may perhaps make conscious. I wonder...!' He wondered till he died. He kept his wings, that is." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 287", + "text": "The return to London was a return to the demands of earth; from the bright and fiery aether of the southern climate they landed with something of a jar among sooty bricks and black-edged mortar. The sunshine dimmed, the very air seemed solid. Regular hours of work made it difficult for him to lift his wings, much less to fly; he knew the London air was good, but he never noticed that it was air at all; he almost forgot they had ever lived in the air and flown at all. Grocers, butchers, and bakers taught Mrs. Wimble to become very practical, and the halfpenny newspapers stirred her social ambitions for her children. Wimble worked hard and capably, and they made both ends meet. He proved a patient husband and a devoted father, if perhaps a rather vague one. His moment of realisation was over. He accepted the routine of the majority, living methodically, almost automatically, yet always a little absent-mindedly as though much of his intelligence was unconsciously at work elsewhere.\n\nBoth parents altered; but, whereas his change was on the surface only, his wife's seemed fundamental and permanent. He was aware that he had altered, she was not aware. They differed radically, for instance, about the prolonged and golden honeymoon in the south.\n\n'The money lasted uncommonly well,' said Mrs. Wimble when they spoke of it; 'it was a pity we didn't keep over a little, wasn't it?' There was a hint of asperity in the droop of her lips.\n\n'We should have it now if we had,' he answered vaguely but with patience. 'But for me it's a memory that will always live.' He spoke with longing tenderness.\n\n'What?' said Mrs. Wimble, who, like all slow thinkers, liked sentences repeated, thus giving time to find an intelligent reply.\n\n'We had a lovely time out there,' she admitted with a sigh, and went on to mention by way of complaint that she feared she was getting rather stout in London. There was no idea in her that she had changed in any other way; she looked back upon Algeria as a kind of youthful madness, half regretting it. That the bird had flown from her heart did not occur to her. Not alone her body, but her mind was getting stout. She had grown so artificial that she was no longer real. The manners, moods, the words and gestures she adopted in order to please or in order to appear as others are, had ended by effectually screening her own natural self, that which is every one's possession of unique value. It was not so much that she was false as that she was not herself. She was unreal.\n\nIn Wimble, however, those two years remained as something bewilderingly beautiful. Just out of sight in his heart he wore still the steady glow of it. He never could recall quite what he had felt in those deliriously happy days, yet the knowledge that they had been deliriously happy remained and warmed his blood. It was a big, brave, heartening memory beneath his coloured waistcoat. He dreamed his dream, only he did not tell it to any one\u2014yet. He remained a kind, untidy husband and father. But that was the outer portion of him. The inner portion flew and soared and even sang. He no longer quite understood the meaning of this inner portion, but some day, he felt, it would be drawn out of him again and recognised. He would be taught to realise it, and what this bird-thing in him meant would be made clear. Already he looked to little Joan with something more than an infatuated father's adoration for her yellow hair, her bright blue eyes, her light and dancing ways. Tom he just loved in the way his mother loved. He remained a rabbit with distinctive tendencies of the animal. But with Joan it was different. In Joan there was something he looked forward to. Even at the age of five there was a glint about her that increased the glow in him; at ten it was still more marked. She puzzled her mother considerably, just as later she alarmed her. 'I'm nervous about the child; she doesn't seem like other girls of her age. I don't see her getting on much,' was her opinion, expressed again and again in the same or similar language. 'Joan seems to me backward.'\n\n'Well,' admitted her husband, 'she's certainly not in a hurry about it. She's maturing slowly. Lots of them do\u2014when there's a good deal to mature.'\n\n'I hope you're right, Joe.' And then she added with pride by way of compensation\u2014'Tom's coming along nicely, anyhow,'\u2014as though she spoke of a growing vegetable or, as he thought, of a rabbit in a cage with lettuces in front of it, and the idea of mating the chief end in life.\n\nOnce past the age of sixteen, however, Joan too came along nicely, and with a sudden rush that reminded her father of a young bird consciously leaving the nest. She seemed to mature so abruptly. There came a wondrous bloom upon her, as though the South poured up and blossomed in her body, mind, and soul. It took her father deliciously by surprise. The glowing thing in him spread too, rose to the surface, caught fire. He watched her with amazement, joy, and pride. He felt wings inside him. Thought danced\u2014flashed against a background of blue and gold again.\n\n'She'll do something in the world before she's done,' he said confusedly to himself, feeling a prophecy he had always made without realising it. 'There's wings in the girl. She'll teach them how to fly!'\n\nHe was beginning to realise himself\u2014through her. His early ideal had taken flesh again, but this time with a difference. He had not merely found it. He had created it.\n\nFor, more and more lately, the influence of Joan upon him had been growing. It was not merely that she made him feel young again, nor that her queer ways made him aware that he wanted to sing and dance. It was, in a word, that he recognised in her the remarkable thing he had known first in her mother years ago\u2014but released in all its golden fullness. He recovered in her sparkling presence the imaginative dream that had caught him up into the air in youth, and it was both in her general attitude to life as well as in the odd things she now began to say and do. Her general attitude expressed it better than her words and acts. She was it\u2014lived it naturally. She had the Air in her. In her presence the old magic rose over him again. He remembered the strange boyhood's point of view about it\u2014that a new thing was stealing down into the world of men, a new point of view, a new way of looking at old, dull, heavy things, that Air was catching at the heart of humanity here and there, trying to lift it somehow into freedom. He thought of the collective wisdom and brotherhood of birds. He forgot that he was growing old.\n\nThe old longing for carelessness, lightness, speed in life\u2014these snatched at him with passionate yearning once again. Joan was the air-idea personified. And she had begun to find herself.\n\nBut so long now had he lived the mole-existence in London that at first this delicious revival baffled and bewildered him. He could not suddenly acquire speed without the risk of losing balance.\n\nHe became aware of a maddening desire to escape. He wanted air. Joan, he felt positive, knew the way. But the majority of people about him\u2014his wife, Tom, their visitors, their neighbours\u2014had not the least idea what it was he meant. And this lack of comprehension gave him a feeling of insecurity. He was out of touch with his environment. He was above, beyond, in advance of it. He was in the air a little.\n\nHe looked down on them\u2014in one sense.\n\nThere were times when he did not know whether he was standing on his head or his feet. 'Everything looks different suddenly,' as he expressed it. He saw things upside down, or inside out, or backwards forwards. And the condition first betrayed itself one afternoon when he returned unexpectedly from work\u2014he was still traveller to a publishing house\u2014and found his wife talking over the tea-cups with a caller. He burst into the room before he knew that any one was there, and did not know how to escape without appearing rude. He sat down and fingered a cup of tea. They were talking of many things, the sins of their neighbours in Maida Vale, chiefly, and after the pause and interruption caused by his unwelcome entrance, the caller, searching for a suitable subject, asked:\n\n'You've heard about Captain Fox, I suppose?'\n\n'What?' asked Mrs. Wimble, opening her eyes as though anxious to read the other's thoughts. Evidently she had not heard about Captain Fox.\n\n'I don't think I have,' she said cautiously. 'What\u2014in particular?'\n\n'He's going to marry her,' was the reply. 'I know it for a fact. But don't say anything about it yet, because I heard it from Lady Spears, who...'\n\nShe dragged a good deal of Burke into the complicated explanation, making it as impressive as she could. Captain Fox, who was no better than he should be, according to the speakers, paid rather frequent visits upon the young widow of the ground-floor flat, who should have been better than she was. To find that honest courtship explained the friendship was something of a disappointment. Mrs. Marks wished to be the first to announce the innocent interpretation, to claim authorship, indeed\u2014having persistently advocated the darker view.\n\n'Who'd ever have guessed that?' exclaimed Mrs. Wimble, off her guard a moment. 'You always told me\u2014'\n\nThe face of her caller betrayed a passing flush.\n\n'Oh, one always hoped,' she began primly, when Mrs. Wimble interrupted her with a firm, clear question:\n\n'By the bye, who was she?' she asked.\n\nAnd hearing it, Wimble felt his world turn upside down a moment. He realised, that is, that his wife saw it upside down. For his wife to ask such a question was as if he had asked it himself. He felt ashamed. His world turned inside out. He looked down on them. He rose abruptly, finding the energy to invent a true-escaping sentence:\n\n'You ask who she was,' he said, not with intentional rudeness, yet firmly, 'when you ought to ask\u2014'\n\nBoth ladies stared at him with surprise, waiting for him to finish. He was picking up the cup his sudden gesture had overturned.\n\n'Who she is,' concluded Wimble, with the astonishment of positive rebuke in his tone. 'What can it matter who she was? It's what she is that's of importance. The Captain's got to live with that.' And then the escaping-sentence: 'If you'll excuse me, Mrs. Marks, I have to go upstairs to see a book'\u2014he hesitated, stammered, and ended in confusion\u2014'about a book.' And off he went, making a formal little bow at the door. He went into the dining-room down the passage, vaguely aware that he had not behaved very nicely. 'But, of course, I'm not a gentleman exactly,' he said to himself; 'what's called a gentleman, that is. Father was only an analytical chemist.'\n\nHe stood still a moment, then dropped into a chair beside the table with the red and black check cloth. His mind worked on by itself, as it were.\n\n'What I said was true, anyhow. People always ask, \"Who was she?\" about everything. What the devil does that matter? It's what you are that counts. Father was a chemist, but I\u2014I\u2014'\n\nHe got up and walked over to the clock, because the clock stood on the mantelpiece, and there was a mirror behind it. He wanted to see his own face. He stared at himself a moment without speaking, thinking, or feeling anything. He put his tie straight and picked a bit of cotton from his shoulder.\n\n'I am Joseph Wimble, not a gentleman quite, not of much account anywhere perhaps, but a true workman, earning \u00a3250 a year, knowing all about the outside, and something about the inside of books; thirty-seven years old, with a boy at the Grammar School, a girl of sixteen in the house, and married to\u2014to\u2014' He paused, turned from the mirror, and sat down. It cost him an effort to remember\u2014'to Joan Lumley, daughter of a corn-chandler in Norfolk, who might die any moment and leave us enough to live on,' he went on, 'in a more comfortable position,' passing his hand over his forehead; 'and my life is insured, and I've put a bit by, and Tom's to be a solicitor's clerk, and everything's going smoothly except that taxes\u2014'\n\nThe sound of an opening door disturbed him. He felt confused in his mind. He heard Mrs. Marks saying loudly, 'And please say good-bye for me to your husband,' the aspirate so emphasised that it was obviously an insecurity. She intended he should hear and understand she bore him no ill-will for his bad manners, yet despised him. The steps went downstairs, and the two questions came back upon him like pistol-shots:\n\n'Who was she? Who am I?\n\nHe realised he had been wandering from the point.\n\n'I'm a centre of life, independent and unafraid,' thought flashed an answer. 'I'm what I make myself, what I think myself. I'm not seeing things upside down; I'm beginning to think for myself, and that's what it is. No one, nor nothing, nor anything anywhere in the world,' he went on, mixed in speech, but clear in mind, 'can prevent me from being anything I feel myself, will myself, say I am. I've never read nor thought nor bothered my head about things before. By heavens! I'll begin! I have begun\u2014'\n\n'What's the matter, Joe? Have you got a headache, or is it the books bothering you, dear?' His wife had come in upon him.\n\nShe put her hand upon his forehead, and he got up from his chair and faced her.\n\n'I've made a discovery,' he said, with exhilaration in his manner, 'a great discovery.' He looked triumphantly at her. 'I am.'\n\n'What are you?' she asked, thinking he was joking, and his sentence left unfinished on purpose.\n\n'I am,' he repeated with emphasis. 'I have discovered that I am, that I exist. Your question to that woman made me suddenly see it.'\n\nHis wife looked flustered, and said vaguely, 'What?' Wimble continued:\n\n'As yet, I don't know exactly what I am, but I mean to find out. Up till now I've been automatic, just doing things because other people do 'em. But I've discovered that's not necessary. I'm going to do things in future because I want to. But first I must find out why I am what I am. Then the explanation'll come\u2014of everything. Do you see what I mean? It's a case of \"Enquire within upon everything.\"' And he smiled. His heart fluttered. He felt wings in it\u2014again.\n\n'Do you mean you're going to start in the writing or publishing line, Joe?' It had always been her secret ambition.\n\n'That may come later,' he told her, 'when I've something to say. For it's really big, this discovery of mine. Most people never find it out at all. She'\u2014indicating with his thumb the direction Mrs. Marks had taken\u2014 'hasn't, for instance. She simply isn't aware that she exists. She isn't.'\n\n'Isn't what, dear?'\n\n'She is not, I mean, because she doesn't know she is,' he said loudly.\n\n'Oh, that way. I see.' Mrs. Wimble looked a wee bit frightened. He had seen an animal, a rabbit for instance, look like that before it decided to plunge back into its hole for safety.\n\n'There are strange, big things about these days, I know,' she said after a pause, thinking of the books with queer titles his employers published. 'You have been reading too much, dear, thinking and\u2014'\n\n'Mother,' he interrupted, instinctively omitting her name, and in a tone that convinced her his head was momentarily turned, 'that's the whole trouble. I've never thought in my life.'\n\n'But why should you, dear?' she soothed him, wondering if people who lost their memory and wandered off exhibited such symptoms first. 'You always do your work splendidly. Don't think too much, is what I say. It always leads to worrying\u2014'\n\n'Hardly ever\u2014till this moment,' he was saying in the grave, emphatic way that so alarmed her. 'Not even when I asked you to marry me, when Tom was born, or Joan, or when we took this flat, or anything.'\n\n'You've made quite a success of your life without it anyhow, Joe dear. And no woman could ask more than that. D'you feel poorly? Joan can fetch Dr. Monson in a moment.' It was a variant of 'What?'\n\n'I feel better and bigger and stronger,' he replied, 'more real than ever in my life before. I have never been really alive till this moment. I am\u2014and for the first time I know it. I'm experiencing.' He stopped short, as Joan went down the passage singing, pausing a moment to look in, then tactfully going on her way again. The fluttering in his heart became more marked. Something was trying to escape. There was a whirr of wings again. 'Mother,' he said to his wife, as their heads turned back from the door together, 'do you know what \"experiencing\" is? D'you realise what the word means?'\n\nShe sat down, resting her arms upon the table. She looked quietly into his eyes, as at one who is about to speak out of greater knowledge.\n\n'Joe dear, I have had experiences\u2014experiences of my very own, you know.'\n\n'Yes, yes, I know, I know. But what I mean is\u2014do you get the meaning, the real meaning of the word?'\n\nShe sighed audibly. 'Not your meaning, perhaps,' she meant. But she did not say it.\n\n'It means,' he said, delighted with her exquisite silence, 'it means\u2014 er\u2014' He thought hard a moment. 'Experience,' he went on, 'is that \"something\" which changes potatoes into nourishment, and so into emotion. That's it. Until you eat potatoes, you don't exist. Until you have experiences, you don't exist. When you have experiences and know that you have them, you\u2014persist.'\n\nShe gasped aloud. She took his hand\u2014very quietly.\n\n'Joe dear,' she said, softly as in their courtship days, 'such ideas don't come into your head from nowhere. Has some one been talking to you? Have you been reading these books?'\n\nHis pulse was very quiet.\n\n'Have you been reading the firm's books, dear?' she repeated.\n\nShe asked it gently, forgivingly, as a mother might ask her boy, 'Have you been tasting father's whisky?' The books were meant to sell to booksellers, to the public, to people who needed that particular kind of excitement. Her husband was to be trusted. He was not supposed to know what they contained. His 'line' of trade was chiefly medical, psychological, religious, philosophical. Fiction was another 'line'\u2014for the apprentice. Joe was an 'expert' traveller. He was expected to talk about his wares, but not as one who read them. Merely their selling value was his strong point.\n\nBy the expression of his face she knew the answer.\n\nHe leaned back in his chair, just as he did sometimes when he asked what there was for dinner\u2014the same real interest in his eyes\u2014and he answered very calmly:\n\n'My dear, I have\u2014a bit. Cogito ergo sum. For the first time I understood, in theory, that I existed. My reading taught me that. But I never knew it in practice until just now, when I heard you ask that question about the future Mrs. Fox: \"Who was she?\" And then I knew also that you\u2014'\n\n'You what?' enquired Mrs. Wimble, bridling.\n\n'Were unaware that you existed,' he replied point blank.\n\n'Aren't you a little beside yourself, Joe\u2014sort of excited, or something? 'she gasped, proud of her tact and self-control. 'What else could I have said? How could I have put it different?'\n\n'Joan,' he answered gently, 'you should have said, \"What is she?\" For that would have meant you thought for yourself. It would have meant that you knew you were, and that you knew she was.'\n\n'Original?' said Mrs. Wimble slowly, catching her husband's meaning vaguely, but more than a little disturbed in her mind.\n\n'No,' he answered, 'true. Just as when, years ago\u2014the sunshine lovely and the fields full of buttercups\u2014you wore a yellow scarf, and a wagtail beside a willow pond came so near that\u2014'\n\n'Joe,' she said with a slight flush that was half displeasure yet half flattered vanity,' you needn't bring up that again. We were a bit above ourselves, dear, when that happened. We lost our heads\u2014'\n\n'Above ourselves! Free and real and happy,' he interrupted her, 'that's what we were then. We had wings. We've lost 'em. We were in the air, I tell you.' His voice grew louder. 'And what's more, we knew it.'\n\nHe heard his daughter pass down the narrow passage again, singing. He got up and seemed to shake himself. There was again a fluttering in him.\n\n'We certainly were in the air,' murmured his astonished wife.\n\n'You were a glorious yellow wagtail,' he went on, so that she didn't know whether his laughter was in earnest or in play, 'and we were rising\u2014into flight. We've come down to earth since. We live in a hole, as it were. I'm going to get out!'\n\nJoan's little song went past the door and died away towards the kitchen:\n\nFlow, fly, flow,\n\nWherever I am, I go.\n\n'We've lost our wings. We crawl about. We never dance now, or sing, or\u2014' He broke off abruptly. He felt the other portion of himself, so long hidden, coming to the surface; and he was aware that it went after his daughter. He was a little afraid of it\u2014felt giddy. Her voice in the distance sounded like a lark's, the lilt of her curious little song had an echo of the open air in it, her tread brought back the tripping of the wagtail along the river's bank. 'We never get out now,' he finished the sentence, 'we never get out. Earth smothers us. We want air!'\n\nMrs. Wimble watched him a moment with frightened eyes. He was standing on tiptoe, holding the tails of his coat in his hands as though he was about to do something very unusual\u2014something foolish and ridiculous, she thought. He seemed about to dance, to rise, almost to fly up to the ceiling. She felt uneasy, hot\u2014a little ashamed.\n\n'We can go out more, dear, if you think it wise,' she said cautiously, moving a little further away. 'It's the expense\u2014I always thought\u2014'\n\nHer husband stared at her a moment dumbly. He seemed to be listening. In his heart a little, forgotten song crept back, answering the singing of the girl. Then, dropping upon his heels again, he said patiently in a soothing tone:\n\n'There, there, Mother! Forgive me if I frightened you. I was only pretending we were young again. That old bird thing\u2014bird-magic\u2014came over me for a moment. The girl's singing did it, I suppose. Something ageless in me got the upper hand...'\n\nHe took her hand and comforted her. 'Steady, Joe,' she said, horribly puzzled, 'she is a bit flighty, I know.'\n\n'But we will go out more,' he went on more normally again, adopting her meaning perfectly. 'Bother the expense! We'll go out this very night and take the child with us. We'll dine out, my dear. I'll take you to a West End restaurant!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 288", + "text": "For Joan certainly was no ordinary girl; some called her backward, some considered her deficient, but all agreed that she was singular. Yet all liked her. Tall, slim and fair, with plenty of golden hair and eyes of merry brightness, she was out of the common in an attractive sort of way. Tom, her brother, with the mind of a solicitor's clerk, looked down upon her; her mother, fond, conventional, socially ambitious, despaired of her; her father alone held the opinion, 'There's something in that girl. She's always herself. But town-life over-weights and hides her; and in the end will suffocate. It'll snuff her out. She's meant for country.' He was aware of something unusually real in her. They were great friends. 'I want more air,' she had said once. 'In a field or garden I'd grow enormous like a bean plant. In these streets I'm just a stone squashed down by crowds. I'm in a hole and can't breathe. I prefer a fewity.' Even her words were her own like this. 'I'd like room to dance in. Life is a dance. I'd learn it in a field. I'd be a bird girl.' Space was her need, for mind as well as body.\n\nIt was her father's secret ambition too: a cottage, a garden with things that grew silently into beauty, flowers, vegetables, plants; sweet laughing winds; the rush of living rain at midnight; water to drink from a deep, cool spring instead of from metal pipes; a large, inviting horizon in which a man might lose himself; and above all\u2014birds.\n\n'After a month in real private country\u2014loose country, talking, dancing, running country\u2014' She paused.\n\n'Liquid, fluid, as it were,' he put in, delighted.\n\n'Yes, deep and clear as a river,' she went on, 'in country like that, do you know what'd happen to me, father, after a few months of waiting?'\n\n'I know, but I can't quite say,' he answered. 'Tell me, child, for I'd love to hear your own description.'\n\n'I'd fly,' was her answer. 'Everything in me would fly about like a bird, picking up things, and all over the place at once without a plan\u2014a fixed, heavy plan like a street or square in London here\u2014and yet getting on all the time\u2014getting further.'\n\n'And how would you learn, dear?'\n\n'Birds,' she laughed. 'There's bird-teaching, I'm sure.' She flitted across to another chair as she said it. She came closer to her father, who was listening with both ears, watching, drinking in something he had known long ago and then forgotten. 'You know all about it, Daddy. You needn't pretend.'\n\n'You're rather like one, d'you know,' he smiled. 'Like a bird, I mean.' He thought of a dabchick that hides so cleverly no one can put it up\u2014 then, suddenly, is there, close at hand.\n\nShe was perched on his knee before he knew it. Her small voice twittered on into his ear. Something about her sparkled, flashed and vanished, and it reminded him of sunshine on swift-fluttering wings through the speckled shade of an orchard. She darted, whirred, and came to rest. He stroked her.\n\n'Father, you know everything before I say it,' she went on, her face shining with happiness that made her almost beautiful. 'If I could only live like a bird, I could live. Here it's all a big, stuffy cage.' She flitted to the window, pointing to roofs and walls and chimney-pots, black with grime. The same instant she was back again upon his knees. 'To live like a bird is to be alive all over, I'm sure, I'm sure. I know it. It's all routing here.'\n\nWhether she meant rotten, routine, or living in a rut, he did not ask. He felt her meaning.\n\n'There's a nest in a garden waiting for us somewhere,' he said, living the dream with her in his heart. 'And it's got an orchard, high deep grass, wild flowers, hills in the distance, with a tremendous sky where the winds go tearing about like the flight of birds. And a stream that ripples and sings and shines. All alive, I mean, and always moving. They say the country's stagnation. It isn't. It's a perfect rush\u2014'\n\n'Of course,' she put in. 'Oh, father, think hard about that place, and we'll attract it nearer and nearer, till in the end we drop into it and grow like\u2014'\n\n'Beans,' he laughed.\n\n'Birds,' she rippled, and hopped from his knee across the room, and was down the passage and out of sight before he could draw another breath.\n\nThere was something alert as lightning in the girl. She woke a similar thing in him, too. It had nothing to do with brain as intellect, or with reason, or with knowledge in the ordinary sense the world gives to these words. But it had to do, he dimly felt, with another bigger thing that was everywhere and in everything. Joan shared it, brought it nearer; it was universal. What that bigger thing might be perplexed him. He was aware that it drove past, alertness in so huge a thing conveying the impression of vast power. There was grandeur in it somewhere, poise, dignity, beauty; yet this subtle alertness too, and this swift protean sparkle. It was towering as a night of stars, alluring as a peeping wildflower, but prodigious also as though all the oceans flowed suddenly between narrow banks in a flood of clearest water, very rapid, terrifyingly deep. For a robe it wore the lustrous colouring of untold age. His imagery, when he tried to visualise it, grew mixed. He called it Experience. But sometimes he told himself he knew its Christian name\u2014 its familiar, little, intimate nickname\u2014and that was Wisdom.\n\nAnd so he was rather glad that Joan, like himself, was but half educated; that she was backward, and that he knew, relatively, only the outsides of books. For facts, he vaguely felt, might come between them and this august yet precious thing they knew together. Birds could teach it, but Ornithology hid it.\n\nLately, however, as his wife divined, he had been dipping in between the covers of the goods he travelled in. Caught by the bait of several drugging titles, he had nibbled\u2014in the train, in waiting-rooms, in the 'parlours' of commercial hotels where he put up for the night. He had found names and descriptions of various things, but they were the names and descriptions given by others to their own sensations. The ordered classification merely developed snapshots. He recognised photographs of dead things that he knew must be somewhere\u2014alive. The names made stationary what ought to dance along with incessant movement. Only he did not realise this until he saw the photographs. The alleged accuracy of a photograph was an insolent falsehood, pretending that what was alive was dead, that what rushed was stationary. Dogs and savages cannot recognise the photographs of their masters. The resemblance has to be taught. Everything flows, his shilling Heraclitus told him. He had always known it. Birds taught it. Joan lived it. To classify was to photograph\u2014a prevarication. To publish a snapshot of a jumping horse was to teach what is not true. Definitions were trivial and absurd, for what was true to-day was false to-morrow. The sole value of names, of classification, of photographing lay in stopping life for an instant so that its flow might be realised\u2014as a momentary stage in an incessant process. And he looked at a group of acquaintances his wife had 'Kodaked' ten days ago, and realised with delight how they all had rushed away, torn on ahead, lived, since she had told that insignificant lie in black and white about them.\n\nJoan, catching him in the act of destroying it, had said, 'I know why you're doing that, father.'\n\n'Why?' he asked, half ashamed and half surprised.\n\n'Because you don't want to stop them,' was her answer, 'and because it wasn't fair of mother to catch them in the act like that. It wasn't all.'\n\nAnd as he stared at her curious peeping face, she came quickly up to him, saying passionately, imploringly:\n\n'Oh, do let's get into the country soon, and live along with it, and grow and know things. I feel so stuck still here, and always caught-in-the-act like that photo. It's so dead. It's a toad of a place! The streets are all nailed down on to the ground. In the country they run about\u2014'\n\nHe interrupted her on purpose:\n\n'But in a city life is supposed to be much richer than in the country,' he said. 'You know that?'\n\n'It goes round and round like a circle, though; it doesn't go on. I'm living other people's lives here. I want to live my own. Everybody here lives the same thing over and over again till they get so hot they get ill. I want to be cool and naked like a fern. Here I'm being photographed all day long. Every man who looks at me takes a photograph. Oh, father, I'm so tired of it. Do let's go soon and live hoppily like the birds.'\n\n'You mean happily?' he asked, laughing with her.\n\n'It's the same thing,' she laughed back, 'it's like wings or running water\u2014always going wherever they are\u2014\n\nAnd was dancing to and fro over the carpet, when the door opened and in came her brother Tom, followed by another youth.\n\nHe looked surprised, ashamed, then vexed. It was Saturday afternoon. He had been six months now in the office.\n\n'I've brought Mr. Halliday with me,' he said pompously, 'to have tea. We've just been to a matin\u00e9e at the Coliseum. Joan, this is Mr. Halliday, our junior clerk. My sister, Harold.'\n\nJoan instantly looked gauche and ugly. She shook hands with a speckled youth, whose shy want of manners did not prevent his eyeing her all over. He sat down beside his friend, talking of the singing, dancing, juggling and so on that they had witnessed. All the time he talked at something else in her. But she hid it away as cleverly as a bird hides its nest. The callow youth, without realising it, was hunting for a nest. In the country he might have found it. He would have been sunburned, for one thing, instead of speckled. The wind, the rain, the starlight would have guided him. His natural instinct would have flowed out in a dance of spontaneous running movement, easy, graceful, clean. Here, however, it seemed rigid, ugly, diseased. He was living the life of others.\n\n'You were dancing just as we came in,' observed Mr. Halliday. 'Does that line of things attract you? You are going on the stage, perhaps?'\n\nJoan looked past him out of the window, and saw the swallows flashing about the sky.\n\n'I can dance,' she replied, 'but not on a stage.'\n\n'But you'd be a great success, I think, from what I saw,' opined the junior clerk. And somehow he said it unpleasantly. His tone half undressed her.\n\nShe didn't flush, she didn't stammer, at first she didn't answer even. She watched the swallows a moment, as though she had not heard him.\n\n'You only stare, you don't watch and enjoy,' she said suddenly, turning upon him. 'And an audience like that...!' She stopped, got up from her chair, put her head out of the open window and gazed into the air above. When she turned back, she saw that her mother had come in and was leading the others into the dining-room for tea. Her father's face wore a singular expression\u2014it seemed, of exultation. Tom, black as a thunder-cloud, waited for her.\n\n'You're nothing but a little barbarian,' he said angrily under his breath. The life of others he led had been sorely wounded. 'I can never bring Mr. Halliday here again. You're simply not a lady.'\n\n'I'm a bird,' she laughed in his face. 'And you men can never understand that, because no man has a bird in him, but only a creepy, crawly animal. We go on two legs, you on four.'\n\n'I'm ashamed of you, Joan. You're nothing but a savage.' He snapped at her. He could have smacked her. His face was flushed, but his neck thin, scraggy, white. He looked starved and twisted. 'In the City we\u2014' he began with a clown's dignity.\n\n'Live like rats in a drain,' she interrupted quickly, perched a moment on her toes in front of his face. 'You don't breathe or dance. Tom,' she added with a gesture of her arms like flapping wings, 'if you were alive, you'd be\u2014a mole. But you're not. You're a lot of other people. You're a herd\u2014always enclosed and always feeding.'\n\nShe danced down the corridor and into her room, locked the door, slipped out of some tight clothing, and began to sing her bird-song of incessant movement:\n\n\u2003Flow! Fly! Flow!\n\n\u2003Wherever I am I go;\n\n\u2003I live on the run\n\n\u2003Like the birds\u2014it's fun!\n\n\u2003Flow, fly, flow...\n\nShe sang it to a tiny, uneven, twittering melody that was made up of half notes. It went on and on, repeating itself without end. It seemed to have no real end at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 289", + "text": "To others she was doubtless an exasperating being. To her father alone\u2014 since he saw in her something he had lost but was now recovering, something he therefore idealised, seeing in perfected form what was actually but a germ still\u2014to her father she expressed a little of that higher carelessness, or wisdom, that he had touched in boyhood and now yearningly desired again.\n\n'Oh, she's all in the air,' people said. And it was truer than they knew. She had an affinity with all that flew. This bird-idea was in her heart and blood. Whatever flew, whatever rose above the ground, whatever passed swiftly, suddenly, from place to place, without deliberation, without calculation, without weighing risk and profit\u2014this appealed to her. Yet there must be steadiness in it somewhere too, and it must get somewhere. A swallow or a butterfly she approved, but not a bat. The latter, for all its darting swiftness, was a sham; it was an earth-crawler really, frightened into ridiculous movement by finding itself aloft like a blown leaf; like a flying fish, it was wrong and out of place. It merely flew round and round in stupid, broken circles without rhythm. But the former were perfect. They were ideal. They were almost spirits.\n\nAnd when her father said he was glad she was half educated, he only meant glad that she had left school and teachers before her butterfly mind had become a rigid, accurate, mechanical thing. She might play with books as he himself did, fluttering over the covers, smelling their perfume, glancing at sentences and chapter headings, at indices even. But she must not build nests in them. A book, like a photograph, was an evillish attempt to nail a flowing idea into a fixed pattern. In the author's mind an idea was true, but when he had put it down in black and white he had put down only a snapshot of it: the idea was already far away.\n\n'Not poetry-books,' Joan qualified this, 'because poetry runs clean off the page. It's alive and wingy. It sings my bird-song\u2014\n\nFlow, fly, flow,\n\nWherever I am\u2014I go!\n\nShe had this unerring instinct of the bird in everything, the quality that flashes, darts, is gone before it can be killed by capture. A bird is everywhere and nowhere. It's all over the place at once. Look at it, and it's no longer there; listen to it, and it's gone; touch it, and you catch a sunbeam that warms the hand but loses half its beauty; catch it\u2014and it's dead. But no one ever caught a swallow or a skylark naturally on the wing. Even the eye, the mind, the following thought grows dizzy in the effort.\n\nFor the cow in the field she had no song. 'Wherever I am, I stay,' was without a tune of its own. A cow couldn't leave the ground. She wanted something with incessant movement that could touch the earth, yet leave it at will. Wings and water could. Birds and rain both flew. Half the time a river (the only real water for her) flowed over the earth without stopping on it, and half the time it was a cloud in the sky, yet never lived there. 'Flow, fly, flow; wherever I am, I go,'\u2014this was the little song of life and change and movement that came out of her curious heart and mind. 'Live on the run, like a bird, that's fun!' And by fun she meant life, and the soaring joy of life.\n\nShe applied her principle unconsciously to people, too. Few men had the bird in them except her father. Mother was a badger, half the time out of sight below the earth. She felt respect, but no genuine love, for mother.\n\n'A whale or a badger, I really don't know which,' she said. 'That's Mother.'\n\n'Joan, I cannot allow you to speak in that way of your parent and my wife.' The sentence was unreal. He chose it deliberately, as it seemed, from some book or other. What she had said was sparklingly true, only it could not be said. 'You were born out of mother, and so must think her holy.'\n\n'I only meant that she is not birdy,' was the answer, 'and that she likes thick salt water, or sticky earth. I mean that I never see her on the surface much, and never for an instant above it. A fish is all right, but not a half-and-half thing.'\n\n'She built your nest for you. She taught you how to fly. Remember that.' He lit his pipe to hide the laughter that would bubble up.\n\n'But she never flew with me, father\u2014as you do. Besides, you know, I like whales and badgers. I only say they're not birds.'\n\nShe paused, stared triumphantly at him a moment, and then with anxiety in her tone, she added: 'And you said that as if some one had taught it you, Daddy. Some one's put bird-lime near you\u2014some book, I suspect.'\n\n'Grammar's all right enough in its way,' he told her finally, meaning perhaps that there were correct and incorrect ways of saying a thing, and so the little matter was nicely settled up, and they flew on to other things as their way invariably was. But, after that, whenever mother was in the room, they thought of something under ground or under water that emerged for a brief moment to stare at them and wonder, heavens!\u2014how they lived. They wondered how, on earth, she lived. They were in different worlds.\n\nFor a long time now Joseph Wimble, 'travelling' in tabloid knowledge, had been absorbing what is called the Spirit of the Age. On the paper wrappers of his books\u2014chiefly Knowledge Primers\u2014were printed neat and striking epitomes of the contents. Written by expert minds, these epitomes were admirable brief statements. There was no room for argument. They merely gave the entire book in a few short sentences that hit the mind\u2014and stayed in it. They left the impression that the problem was proved, though actually it was merely stated. Hundreds of those statements he had now read, until they flowed like a single sentence through his consciousness, each r\u00e9sum\u00e9 a word, as it were, in the phrase describing the knowledge\u2014or at least the tendencies\u2014of the day. Wimble was thus a concise phrase-book, who taught the grammar of the twentieth century.\n\nFor his Firm, alert and enterprising, had the gift of scenting a given tendency before it was understood by the mass\u2014still 'in the air,' that is\u2014yet while the mass still wanted to know about it; then of choosing the writer who could crystallise it in simple language that made the man in the street feel well informed and up to date. The What's-in-the-Air-To-day Publishing Co. was well named; it had the bird quality. These Picturesque Knowledge Primers sold like wildfire. They purveyed knowledge in tabloid form and advertised the hungry public into nourishment. The latest thing in politics, painting, flying, in feminism or call-of-the-wild, in music, scouting, cubism, futurism, feeding, dancing, clothing, ancient philosophy redressed, or modern pulpit pretending to be neo\u2014everything that thrills the public to-day, from pageantry and Eurhythmics to higher thought and psychism, they touched with clever condensing accuracy of aim, and grew fat upon the proceeds. The stream of little books flowed forth, written by birds, distributed in flocks, scattered broadcast like seed in a wind, each picked up eagerly and discarded for the next\u2014winged knowledge in sparrow doses. The Managing Director, Fox Martin (n\u00e9 Max Levi), was a genius in his way, sure as a hawk, clairvoyant as a raven. His Bergson sold as successfully as his Exercises for the Bedroom\u2014because he chose the writer. He hovered, swooped, struck\u2014and the primer was caught and issued in its thousands. His advertising was consummate, for it convinced the ordinary man he ought to know that particular Thing-in-the-Air-To-day, just as he ought to wear a high collar with his evening clothes or a slit in his coat behind with flannels. He aimed at the men as the machine-made novel aims at the women.\n\nWimble, the traveller facile princeps, for this kind of goods, knew, therefore, everything that was 'in-the-air-to-day,' without knowing in the least why it was to be believed, or what the arguments were. And yet he knew that he was right. He knew things as a bird does, gathering them on every wind, and shaping his inner life swiftly, unburdened by reasoning calculation built on facts. Thus, useless in debate, his mind was packed with knowledge. He was a walking Index.\n\nAnd the feeling in him that everything flowed and nothing was stationary was strong. He dealt in shooting ideas, not in dead, photographic detail. He flashed from one subject to another; flowed through all categories, ancient and modern; skimmed the cream off current tendencies, and swept above the knowledge of the day with a bird's-eye view, unburdened by fact or argument.\n\nOf late, moreover, he had enjoyed these curious upside-down and inside-out experiences, because he had filled himself to the saturation point, and become, as it were, stationary. He could hold no more without a change. He stopped. He took a snapshot photograph of himself, realised that he existed as a separate, vital entity, and thenceforward watched himself expectantly to see what the change was going to be, for he knew he would not stay still. Hitherto he had been mechanical, whereas now he was an engine capable of self-direction\u2014an engine stoked to the brim. When the air is at the saturation point, the tiniest additional percentage of moisture causes rain to fall. It's the final straw that makes the camel pause. So with Joseph Wimble. He was ready to discharge.\n\nAnd it was this chance remark of his under-ground wife asking who the widow was that took the photograph, and made him say, 'I am.' All he had read was included in the affirmation. The epitomes had become part of his consciousness. Like the weary camel, like the moisture tired of balancing in the air, he wanted to sit down now and consider. His daughter's longing for the country was his too. And it was she who now brought out all this.\n\nAt dinner that night in a West End restaurant near Piccadilly Circus he broached the subject and listened patiently to his wife's objections.\n\n'What's the good, even if we had the means, Joe? Burying ourselves like that.'\n\nJoan hopped, as it were. She recognised her mother's instinctive dread that she would go under ground or under water and never come up again.\n\n'None of the nice people, the county families, would call. There'd only be the vicar and the local doctor, or p'r'aps a gentleman-farmer or two. We know much better class in town, and there's always chances of getting to know better still. Besides, who'd there be for Joan? The girl wouldn't have a look-in, simply. And the winters are so sloppy in a country cottage. Think of the Sundays. And the chickens and pigs I really couldn't abide, and howling winds at night, and owls in the eaves, and rats in the attics. You see, we'd have no standing at all.'\n\n'But just a week-end cottage, Mother,' Joan put in, 'just a place of flowers and orchards and a little stream to flit down to overnight, so to say\u2014that now you'd like, wouldn't you?'\n\n'Oh, that's different,' she said more brightly, 'only that's not what father means. He means a place to live in altogether. The week-end idea is right enough. That's what everybody does who can afford to\u2014a bungalow on the Thames. But that means more money than we shall ever see, and even for that you want to keep a motor or a horse and dog-cart, or a little steam launch to get about in. Then the handy places are very expensive, and we couldn't go very far because of Tom. Tom could come down and bring his friends if it was near enough.'\n\n'Grandfather might give us a little nest cheap,' suggested Joan. She didn't 'see' Tom in the cottage.\n\nBut mother turned up her nose as she sipped her glass of Asti Spumante that accompanied the west-end dinner by way of champagne. She didn't approve of Norfolk.\n\n'There's no society,' she said. 'It's flat and chilly. Your grandfather only stays there because there's the business to keep going. If we ever did such a thing as to move to the country, it'd have to be the Surrey pinewoods or the Thames.'\n\nShe looked across the table questioningly at her husband. The music played ragtime. The waiters bustled. There was movement and excitement in the air about them. Joe looked quite distinguished in his evening dress, and she felt proud and distinguished herself. She only wished he were a publisher. Still, no one need feel ashamed of being interested in the book line. Literature was not a trade.\n\n'Some place, yes, where the country's really alive,' he agreed. 'I don't want to vegetate any more than you do, dear, I can assure you.'\n\n'Nor I, mother,' laughed Joan. 'I simply want to fly about all the time.'\n\n'Joan,' was the reply, half reproachfully, 'you always talk as if we kept you in a cage at home. The more you fly the better we like it; I only say choose places worth flying to\u2014'\n\nHer husband interrupted abruptly.\n\n'It was nothing but a little dream of my own, really,' he said lightly. 'A castle in the air, a flash of country in the brain.' He laughed and called the waiter.\n\n'Black, white, or Turkish?' he asked his wife. 'And what liqueur, dear?'\n\n'Turkish and Grand Marnier,' was the prompt reply, and she would have said 'fine champagne' only felt uncertain how fine should be pronounced. They sipped their coffee and talked of other things. It was no good, this speculative talk, it was too much in the air.\n\nThe key of mother's mind was always: Who was she? What'll they say? She lived underground, using the worn old narrow routes. Joan and her father made their own pathways in the trackless air. During the remainder of the evening they kept to the earth beside mother.\n\nThat night in the poky flat, after the girl had gone to bed, Mrs. Wimble observed to her husband:\n\n'Do you know, Joe, I think a little change would do her a lot of good. She's getting restless here, and seems to take to nobody. Why not take her with you sometimes on your literary trips?'\n\nThis was her name for his journeys to provincial booksellers, or when sent to interview one of the Primer writers upon some practical detail.\n\n'If we could afford it,' he replied.\n\n'Father might help,' she said, showing that she had considered the matter already. 'It would be good for her\u2014educational, I mean.'\n\nHer husband agreed, and they fell asleep on that agreement.\n\nA few days later a reply was received from Mrs. Wimble's father, the corn-chandler in Norfolk, enclosing a cheque for \u00a320 'as a starter.' The parents were delighted. Joan preened her wings and began at once her short flying journeys about the country with her father. He avoided the Commercial Traveller Hotels and took her to little Inns, where they were very cosy together. They went from Norfolk to the edge of Wales. She acquired a bird's-eye knowledge of the map of Southern England. These short trips gave her somehow the general 'feel' of the various counties, each with its different 'note,' in much the same way as the Primers gave her father his surface impression of England's mental condition. She noticed and remembered the living arteries which are rivers, he the streams of thought and theory which are tendencies. The two maps were shown and explained, and each was wonderfully alert in understanding the other's meaning. The girl drank in her father's knowledge, while he in his turn 'felt' the country as a dancing sheet beneath them, flowing, liquid, alive. A new language grew into existence between them, a kind of shorthand, almost a symbol language. They realised it first when talking of their journeys at the dinner-table, and Mrs. Wimble looked puzzled. Her face betrayed anxiety; she asked perplexed questions, looking up at them as a badger might look up at wheeling pigeons from the opening of its hole. Mentally she turned tail and dived out of sight below ground, where, with her feet on solid earth, her back and sides touching material that did not yield, she felt more at home, the darkness comforting and safe. Her husband and Joan flew too near the sun. It dazzled her. They could have talked for hours without her catching the drift, only they were far too fond of her to do so. They resented going underground with her, but they came down and settled on earth, folded their wings, used words instead of unintelligible chirrupings, and chatted with her through the opening of the hole.\n\nOne afternoon, then, in Chester, they received a telegram from her that, for a moment, stopped the flow of things, though immediately afterwards the rush went on with greater impetus than ever.\n\n\u2002\"Father passed away peacefully\n\n\u2002return at once funeral tomorrow\n\n\u2002Swaffham.\"\n\nAnd the family found itself with a solid little income of its own, free to fly and settle where it would." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 290", + "text": "Nothing showed more vividly the peculiarity of Joan's unearthly airiness than the way in which the death affected her. It was the first time the great thing all talk about but none realise until they touch it, had come near her. It gave her a feeling of insecurity. She felt the solid earth\u2014so called\u2014unreal. Not that she had a feather of affection for her mother's father. She regarded him as a second-rate animal of prey, like a jackal, and always shrank when he was near. There was something 'sticky' in him; she classed him with her father's father, earthy, but not 'clean-earthy'; muddy rather. But that an earthy person could disappear in such a way made her feel shaky. If he couldn't stay on the earth, who could?\n\nOutwardly, and according to the newspapers, he had died rather well, leaving money to hospitals and waif Societies; but, inwardly, he had died in deep disgrace, a bankrupt soul with a heavy overdraft at the bank. He had been a self-seeker of that notorious kind that achieves worldly success without much thought for others. Now that he was gone, mother declared he was a hero, father denounced him privately as ignoble,\u2014and their daughter divined secretly that he was a jackal.\n\nHis record, however, has nothing to do with this story, and is mentioned only because his departure affected the members of his family. Mother wept and pasted the obituary notices from the Norfolk papers in a book; father soothed her with 'earth to earth, my dear, you know,' and Joan remarked beneath her breath 'he belongs there, he never really left it.' And felt an entirely new sensation.\n\nFor death puzzled her. She realised it as a fact in her own life\u2014she, too, would come to an end, stop, go out. Yet that life could come to an end astonished her; she simply didn't believe it. In her own queer way she looked into the odd occurrence. The corn-chandler's death had raised a dust; but it was an unjustifiable disappearance somehow; once the dust settled she would surely see how and why it was unjustifiable. He would still be on the earth. But the dust did not settle, the chandler did not come back. He was beneath the earth. The feeling of insecurity remained in her. Earth, evidently, was not her element.\n\nShe envisaged then suddenly a delightful thing, and possibly being a mere child still, in spite of her years, she actually believed it. It was wondrous enough anyhow to be worth believing. For it occurred to her that the body of earth went back merely to its own, earth to earth, sweetly, naturally, while Something that had used that bit of earth, borrowing it, was set free. It\u2014that marvellous Something\u2014likewise returned to its own element\u2014air. 'The airy part\u2014that's me\u2014flies off, if it's there at all.' Only grandfather had made the mistake of identifying himself with his borrowed earth, so he was finished and done with. Mother had the same downward tendency. If she wasn't careful, she would be finished and done with too. It was a matter of choice. But how could they? How could any one? She and her father 'knew different'\u2014it was mother's phrase\u2014and identified themselves with the airy part that was the reality.\n\nShe looked the thing in the face as well as she could, trying to hold it steady for a photograph. Death, to her mind, seemed to photograph the life it put an end to. The long series of acts and movements ceased. There came an abrupt full stop. Like a photograph this was somewhere, somehow, false. Wings folded for the last time; air failed for ever; there was a sudden drop to earth. Her grandfather, whom death had photographed, had gone, yet surely only gone\u2014elsewhere; his record in the world of men and women was his attitude in the photograph; he was posing elsewhere now, but even he had not really stopped. Her little Song of Being did not mention anything of the sort. 'Flow, fly\u2014stop! Wherever I am\u2014I drop!' was merely wrong. A living thing could never end. It could neither drop nor stop. Some one had made a big mistake about death. She felt insecure.\n\nAnd then she saw the matter differently, as though her mind made a sudden swerving turn into bright sunlight. And the sense of insecurity began to pass. This act of death revealed another meaning, connecting her with a vaster centre somehow, joining her up with a main central power. Death was returning to the main. She recovered the immense sense of unity she had momentarily lost. It made her realise that this tremendous centre, this main, was elsewhere than on the earth. Her conception of this unity deepened. To join the majority was more than a neat phrase. The photograph analogy came back of its own accord. Life here on the earth was indeed but a photograph, taken almost instantaneously though it seemed quite long, of a\u2014moment's pose. The shutter snapped, the sitter flashed elsewhere, flashed away to resume big interrupted activities, behind space, behind time, where no hurry was\u2014into a universal, mothering state she felt as air. Man's life was a suburb of this state, a furnished house in that suburb, a Maida Vale tenancy, as it were; but there was this vast metropolis of air, the main, the centre, where the 'majority' lived, and whither all lines of flight converged. A thought of Everlasting Wings came to her with amazing comfort. And she realised that the insecurity she felt belonged to the suburb earth, rather than to herself. Others looked upon it as the one secure and solid permanency; for air was unsafe but earth did not change; air meant giddiness, absence of support, bewilderment, and terror of being lost, while earth stood for the reverse of all these dangers\u2014permanent security. Her mother, for instance, simply dared not leave it for an instant. Whereas, it came to Joan suddenly now, that it was earth that crumbled, melted, got easily broken and dispersed, while air, though it moved, could never be destroyed. 'You can photograph earth,' she said, 'but no one has ever photographed the air.'\n\n'A person just goes out\u2014like that?' she asked her father, snapping her fingers. 'How can it be, exactly? Time ends for him: is that it?' Her face was distressed and puckered. She had no language to express the ugly thing that blocked her running, flowing mind. 'Once you're in among minutes, hours, years,' she went on, 'how can you ever get out of them? They don't stop.'\n\nIt seemed to her, apparently, that once a living thing exists it should not cease to exist unless Time, which bore it, ceased as well. And then another notion flashed upon her.\n\n'Or perhaps they're just a trick,' she exclaimed, referring to days and minutes, 'and you've been alive somewhere else all the time too\u2014and when you die you go back to that!'\n\nHer father glanced up from the ordnance map he was studying and smiled with a sort of bewildered happy amusement on his face. Mother, however, turned with an uncomfortable sigh. 'That reminds me,' she stated inconsequently, 'I must go and sit in the Park.' She turned as a cow that prefers the rain upon its tail instead of in its eyes. 'I'll take a taxi, dear,' she added from the door. 'Do,' said her husband, suppressing with difficulty an intense desire to laugh out loud. 'Ask the porter in the hall. Or shall I call one for you?' 'The porter'll do,' she said. 'I'll go and get ready.' He said good-bye kindly, and she went.\n\n'Time doesn't stop, of course,' he went on to Joan. 'You don't stop either, I suppose, if the whole truth were known.' He eyed her quizzically, for he delighted in her wild, nonsensical questioning. Behind it he divined that she knew something he didn't know, but only guessed. Or perhaps he had known it in his youth and since forgotten it. He remembered the ecstasy which had produced her.\n\n'But why do we know a bit of the truth and not the whole? It's all one piece. It must be, father. What hides the rest, then?'\n\nBut he ignored the new questions. 'At death,' he said, 'you just go into another category perhaps. I suspect that's it. You continue, sure enough, but in another direction, as it were.'\n\nJoan brushed the map aside and lit with a hop upon the table as though she fluttered down from above his head. Her hands rested on his shoulders, and her eyes stared hard into his own. They were very bright and twinkling. 'That's just throwing words at me,' she told him earnestly. 'That catty-thing, as you call it, isn't in our language and you know it. You nipped it out of a book.' She shook her finger at him solemnly. 'What I mean is'\u2014thrusting her keen face with its London pallor and shining eyes closer to him\u2014'how in the world can any one get out of Time, once they're in it?' She drew back as though to focus him better and command a true reply. 'Tell me that, please, father, will you?'\n\n'That's a question, isn't it?' he said laughingly, yet not really trying to evade her. He wanted to hear her own answer, her own explanation. He knew quite well\u2014had not the Primer on Expression said so?\u2014that the things they discussed in this way lay just beyond known words. Only by apparent nonsense-talk could they be brought within sight at all.\n\n'It's a thing we ought to know,' Joan went on gravely. 'I do know it somewhere\u2014only I haven't found it out quite.' Then, with another flash of her blue eyes, she stated: 'If a person goes from here\u2014from now, I mean\u2014they must go to somewhere else. I suppose they go back to the bigger thing. They go all over the place at once, perhaps.' And again she drew back a moment, staring at him as if judging height and distance before taking a breathless swoop down into a lower branch.\n\n'Something like that, I imagine,' her father began. 'Time, you see, is only a point, a single point\u2014the present. And if\u2014'\n\nBut Joan was already following her own wild swoop, and hardly listening.\n\n'That I can understand,' she said rapidly. 'You escape at death from a point where you've been stuck\u2014like in a photograph. You go all over then.' Her mind tried to say a hundred things. 'I understand. That's easy. I'm an all-over person myself; I do several things at once\u2014 like a flock of birds or a great high wind. And when I do things like that they're always right, but if I wait and think about one of them, they go wrong and I'm in an awful muddle\u2014'\n\n'Your intuition being stronger than your reason,' he put in with a gasp.\n\nShe did not notice the interruption; she had reached her tree; she saw a thousand things below her simultaneously, grouped, as it were, into one.\n\n'But what I don't see plainly,' she returned to her original puzzle, 'is how a person\u2014by dying\u2014can get out of all this.' She flung her arms out wide to include the room. 'Out of all this air and stuff.'\n\n'Space?'\n\n'Yes, Space!' She darted upon the word with a twitter of satisfaction. 'I feel much more free among yards and miles, up and down, across and round and through\u2014than I do just in minutes and days and years. Oh, I've got it,' she cried so suddenly that it startled him; 'Space is several things, and Time is only one. Space has throughth\u2014you go through it in several directions at once. Time hasn't!'\n\nHe caught his breath and stared obliquely at her, for the fact was she was taking these ideas out of his own head. He had found them in his Primers, of course; now, she was taking them from his mind, sharing his knowledge by some strange, instinctive method of her own. In some such way, perhaps, birds shared and communicated ideas with one another. He felt dizzy; there was confusion in him as though he flew at fifty miles an hour through the air and was without support, seeing many things at once below. One of those moments was near when he stood upon his head. He was up a tree with the girl; he felt the wind; he, too, saw a thousand things at-once; he swayed.\n\n'Space,' he mentioned, as soon as he had recovered breath, and drawing upon his inexhaustible reserve of Primers, 'has three dimensions, height, breadth, and length. But Time has only one\u2014length. In Time you go forwards only, never back, or to the left or right. Time is a line. Don't pinch\u2014it hurts!' he cried, for in her excitement she leaned forward and seized his coat-sleeve, taking up the flesh. 'So, possibly, at death,' he continued as soon as she released him, 'a person\u2014'\n\n'Goes off sideways,' she laughed, clapping her hands; 'disappears off sideways\u2014'\n\n'In a new direction,' he suggested. 'That's what I said long ago\u2014another category, where a body isn't necessary.'\n\n'It's not a full stop, anyhow,' she cried; 'it's a flight.'\n\n'Provided you've been already moving,' he said; 'some people don't move. They haven't started. And for them, I suppose, it's a biggish change\u2014 difficult, uncomfortable, painful too, possibly,' he added reflectively.\n\n'They start for the first time\u2014at death.' She ran to the window, but the same second was back again beside him.\n\n'They get off the ground\u2014off the map altogether. But they go into the air. They get alive,' and she picked the ordnance maps from the floor where her impetuous movements had tossed them. 'Death is just a change of direction then, really; that's all.' And the door slammed after her flying figure, though it seemed to her father that she might equally have gone by the window or the chimney, so swift and sudden was her way of vanishing. 'Bless me, Joan, how you do fly about, to be sure!' he heard his wife complaining in the passage. 'You bang about like a squirrel in a cage. Whatever will the neighbours say?'\n\nShe had taken all this time to clothe herself suitably for the Park. Mr. Wimble saw her to the lift.\n\n'That's it,' he reflected a moment, before returning to search the map for a suitable country place to settle down in; 'that's it exactly. Mother says \"Who was she?\" and \"What'll people say?\" Joan says \"Where, why, who am I?\" Mother is past and Joan is future. That's it exactly. And I\u2014well, what do I say?' He rose and looked at himself in the mirror with the artistic frame his wife had 'selected' at Liberty's Bazaar.\n\n'I just say \"I am,\"' he concluded. 'So I'm present. That's it exactly.' He chuckled inwardly. 'Past, present, future, that's what we are! Yet somehow Joan's all three at once, a sort of universal point of view. Ah!' He paused. 'Ah! she's not future. She's now!' He caught dimly at the idea she tried to convey. To think of many subjects simultaneously was to escape time, avoiding sequence of events and minutes, obliterating\u2014or, rather, seeing through\u2014perspective which pretends that a tree ten yards away is nearer to one than the forest just beyond it. The centre, for her, was everywhere. To see things lengthwise only, in time or space, was a slow addition sum achieved laboriously by the mind, whereas, subconsciously, the bird's-eye view (as with the prodigy) perceived everything at once, making separate addition, or two and two make four, absurd. He was aware of a power in her, an attitude, a point of view, higher than this precious intellect which knows things lengthwise only, concentrating upon separate points, one at a time, consecutively. Joan knew everything at once. Her conception of perceiving things was all-embracing\u2014as air. She flew; wherever she was, she went. 'Throughth' was the word she coined to express it.\n\nHe felt very happy, there was a peculiar sense of joy and lightness in him, and yet he sighed. It was his mind that sighed. He was completely muddled. Yet another part of him, something he shared rather, was bright and clear and lucid. And, putting on his hat, he went after his wife and sat with her in the Park for half an hour, feeling the need of a little wholesome earth to counteract the dose of air Joan had administered to him.\n\nThey watched the people pass, the distinguished people as his wife called them, but actually the people who were dressed in the fashion merely, ordinary as sheep, shocked by the slightest evidence of originality,\u2014 un-distinguished in their very essence. Mr. Wimble knew this, but Mrs. Wimble remained uninformed. The review of rich, commonplace types passed to and fro before their penny chairs, while they eyed them, Mrs. Wimble thinking, 'This is the great London world, the people whose names and dresses the newspapers refer to in Society columns. Oh dear!' Park Lane was the background; none of them dined till half-past eight; they kept numerous servants and were carelessly immoral, carelessly in debt, intimate with 'foreign diplomats,' reserved and unemotional\u2014the aileet, as Mrs. Wimble called them. But, according to Mr. Wimble, they were animals, a herd of animals. They couldn't escape from the line of Time. They knew 'through' in Space, but not in Time. The bird-thing was not in them.\n\n'Joan's coming on a bit,' ventured the father presently, trying to keep himself down upon the earth.\n\n'If you call it coming on,' replied his wife, with a touch of acid superiority she caught momentarily from her overdressed surroundings. 'It's a pity, it seems to me. She's not English, Joan isn't, whatever else she is.'\n\n'Oh, come now,' said Mr. Wimble cautiously, adding, a moment afterwards, 'perhaps.'\n\n'It'll be the ruin of her, if we don't stop it in time,' came presently in what he recognised as her 'Park' voice. 'She don't get it from me, Joe.' Her words became inaudible a moment as she turned her head to follow a vision she imagined was at least a duchess, though her husband could have told her it had emerged, like themselves, from a suburban flat. 'I sometimes think the girl's got a soupsong of the East in her,' continued Mrs. Wimble, glancing with what she meant to be an aristocratic hint of wickedness and suspicion at her untidy husband.\n\n'She may have,' he replied innocently, 'for all I know. Something very old and very new. It's not silly now, but it might become silly. She's too careless somehow for this world\u2014and too wise at the same time. I can't make it out quite.' He looked up at the trees as the wind passed rustling among the dull green leaves. How blue the sky was! How sweet and fresh the taste of the air! There was room up there to move in. He saw a swallow wheeling. And the old yearning burned in him. He thought of the phrase 'bird-happy'\u2014happy as a singing-bird.\n\n'It's a pity she's so peculiar. She'll make a mess of her life unless you're careful, dear.' Mrs. Wimble said it out of a full heart really, but she used the careless accent her surroundings prompted. She said it with an air. And, to her keen annoyance, the County Council man came up just then and asked for tickets, Mr. Wimble producing two plebeian coppers out of a dirty leather purse to settle the account. The pennies spoilt her dream. Money\u2014but a lot of money\u2014was what counted in life.\n\n'Tom's doing exceptionally, I'm glad to say,' she resumed, by way of relieving an emotion that exasperated her. 'He'll make money. He'll be somebody\u2014some day.'\n\n'Tom's a good boy. He's safe and normal,' agreed her husband.\n\nWhen the taxi had rushed them back to Maida Vale, and Mrs. Wimble had gone up in the lift, Mr. Wimble decided that he would like to go for a little walk before coming in. It was towards sunset as he ambled off. Joan, from the roof, watching the birds as they dashed racing through the air at play, caught sight of him below and waved her hand. But he did not see her; he did not look up; his eyes were on the ground. Yet he had a springy walk as if he might rise any moment. Joan watched him for some time, signalling as it were, making a series of slight movements and gestures that seemed a method of communication almost. Had he glanced up and seen her he must have noticed and understood what she was trying to say, as a bird on the lawn would understand what its companion, perched in the cedars overhead, was saying, distance no bar at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 291", + "text": "And then, suddenly, he did look up. Feeling his attention drawn, he turned and raised his eyes to her. The rays of the setting sun fell on her dress of white and yellow. She looked like a bird showing its under-plumage. He waved his hand in return, instinctively making gestures similar to her own, and as he did so, a Flock of Ideas flew down upon him like a shower of leaves\u2014nothing very distinct and sharp, but just loose, flying ideas that were in-the-air-to-day.\n\nThey seemed to result from the signalling; they interpreted something he could not frame in words. They fluttered about his mind, trying to get in and lodge. It was wireless communication\u2014the kind used by animals, fish, moths, insects, above all, birds. He remembered the female Emperor-moth that, hidden in a closed box during the short breeding season, summoned the males across twenty miles of country until her antennae were cut off, when no male came near her. He felt as if Joan transmitted ideas to him, shaking them through the air from invisible antennae. He received the currents, but could not properly de-code them. He waved back to her again, then was lost to view round the corner.\n\n'It's a queer thing,' ran through his mind, as though catching the drift of something she had flashed towards him, 'but Joan's got something no one else has got\u2014yet. It's coming into the world. Telepathy and wireless are signs, only she's got it naturally, she's born with it. She's in touch with everything and everybody everywhere, as though Time and Space don't trick her as they trick the rest. It's life, but a new kind of life. It's air life. That's what she means by saying she's an all-at-once and an all-over person. I understand it, but I haven't got it myself\u2014and, as if to prove it, he ran into another pedestrian who cursed him, and, before he could recover himself, collided the next minute with a lamp-post.\n\nThe current that had been pouring through him was interrupted; it switched elsewhere.\n\n'When more of us get like that,' it went on brokenly, 'when the whole world feels it'\u2014he snatched at an immense and brilliant certainty that was gone before he could switch it completely into his mind\u2014'it will be brotherhood! The world will feel together,\u2014one! It's beginning already. Only people can't quite manage it yet.'\n\nAnd the strange lost mood of his youth poured through him, the point of view that made everybody seem one to him, when air and birds offered the dream of some inexpressible ideal... He lost himself among the buttercup fields of spring... wandered through Algerian gardens where the missel-thrush sang in the moonlight and the radiant air was perfumed with a thousand scents... then pulled himself up just in time to avoid collision with a policeman who came heavily along the solid earth against him.\n\n'Look where you're a-going,' growled the policeman.\n\n'Go where you're looking,' he answered silently in his mind. 'That's the important thing\u2014to look and to go!'\n\nHe steadied himself then. His mind scurried through the Primers, but found nothing that helped him much. Joan had asked him about Time and Space, and he had replied almost as though she had put the words into him first. Never before had he actually thought in such a way. Time and Space, as a Primer reminded him, were merely 'Modes under which physical phenomena are presented to our consciousness, under which our senses act and by which our thoughts are limited.' Both were illusory, figments of our finite minds; both could be subdivided or extended infinitely; both, therefore, were unrealities. They were false, as a picture is false that makes a pebble in the foreground as large as a cathedral in the background in order to convey so-called perspective.\n\nAnd Joan, somehow or other, was aware of this, for she saw things all-at-once and all-over. He thought of her word 'throughth'; it wasn't bad. For she applied it to time as well as space. Time was more than a line to her, it had several directions, like space. He smiled and felt light and airy. Joan knew a landscape all at once, as though she had another sense almost. Every man believes he sees a landscape all at once, but in reality each spot is past by the time he sees it; it happened several seconds ago; he sees it as it was when the light left it to travel to his eye. Each spot has its separate now; there is no absolute Now. He had been wrong to tell her there was only the present; he saw it; she had flashed this into him somehow. To think the future is not there until it is reached was as false as to think his flat was not there until he stepped into it. He laughed happily, aware of a strange, light-hearted carelessness known in childhood first, then known again when he fell in love and so shared everything in the world. An immensely exalted point of view seemed almost within his reach from which he could know, see and be everything at once. Joan would know and understand what it meant; yet he had created Joan... and had forgotten... He thought of light.\n\nBy overtaking the rays of light thrown off from the battle of Waterloo he could see it happening now; if he moved forward at the same pace as the rays he could see Waterloo stationary; if he moved faster he could see the battle going backwards, of course. But Waterloo remained always\u2014there. Time and space were mere tricks. The unit of perception decided the childish dream of measurement. 'Ha, ha!' he chuckled. 'Real perception is for the inner self, then, omnipresent, omniscient\u2014at-once and all-over.' To realise 'I am' was to identify oneself with all, and everywhere. 'Wherever I am, I\u2014go!'\n\n'That's it,' he concluded abruptly, dropping upon a bench in a little Park he had reached, 'Joan doesn't think or reason. She just knows. She's an all-over and all-at-once person!' And he put the Primers, with their neat, clever explanations, out of his head forthwith.\n\n'Cleverness,' he reflected, leaning back in the soft smothering dusk, 'is the hall-mark of To-day. It is worthless. It is the devil. It separates, shuts off, confines and crystallises what should flow and fly. Birds ain't clever. They just know. There's no cleverness in that Southern Tour, there's knowledge\u2014all shared together.' The Primer writers, men who had made their names, were clever merely. By concentrating on a single thing they could describe it, but they didn't know it, because the whole was out of sight. They explained the bit of truth. Joan, ignorant of the photographic details they described and explained, yet knew the whole\u2014somehow. But how? Wherever she was, she went!\n\nHe drew a long breath as if he had flown ten miles.\n\n'She's something new perhaps,' he felt run through him, 'something new and brilliant flashing down into the old, tired world.' He lit his pipe with difficulty in the wind, fascinated by the marvel of the little flaming match. 'She's off the earth\u2014a new type of consciousness altogether\u2014sees old things in another way\u2014from above and all at once. She's got the bird in her\u2014'Half-angel and half-bird,' he remembered with a sigh. Only that morning an essay on Rhythm in his newspaper, The Times, had mentioned: 'Angels have been called the Birds of God, and an angel, as we imagine him, is a being that can do all good things as easily as a bird flies. When we represent him with bodily wings we are thinking of the wings of his spirit, and of a soaring power of action and thought for which we have no analogy in this world except in the physical beauty of flight.' 'By Jove!' he cried aloud.\n\nA flock of sparrows, startled by a cat, rose like a fountain of grey feathers past him, whirring through the air. There were fifty of them, but they moved like one.\n\n'Got a whole flock in her!' he added.\n\nHe watched the fluttering mass of busy wings as they shot into a leafy plane tree overhead and vanished. A touch of awe stole over him. 'There's a whole flight of birds in her. She's a lot, yet one,' he went on under his breath, thinking that the fifty sparrows went out of sight like one person who turns a corner and is gone. How did they manage it? By what magical sympathy, as though one single consciousness actuated them all, did they swerve instantly together?\n\nThere was something uncanny about it. He felt a little creepy even... The shadows were stealing over the deserted Park. A low wind shivered through the iron fence. A vast nameless power came close... He got up slowly, heavily, and went out into the crowded street, glad a moment to feel himself surrounded by men and women, all following routine, thick, solid, reasoning folk, unable to fly. A swallow, flashing like visible wind across the paling sky of pink and gold, went past him. He looked up. He sighed. He wondered. Something marvellously sweet and lofty stirred in him. With intense yearning he thought of his little, strange, birdy daughter, Joan, again. His absorbing love for her spread softly to include the world. 'If she should teach them...!' came the bewildering idea, as though the swallow dropped it into him. 'Drag them out of their holes, show them air and wings, make them bird-happy... teach them that!'\n\nA tremendous freedom, lofty and careless, beckoned to him,\u2014release, escape at full speed into the infinite air; all cages opened, all bars destroyed, doors wide and ceilings gone; that was what he felt.\n\nBut lack of words blocked the completion of the wild, big thought in him, for he had never felt quite like this since early youth, and had no means of describing the swift yet deep emotion that was in him. He could not express it\u2014unless he sang. And he was afraid to sing. The County Council would misinterpret Joy. There was an attendant in the Park, a policeman in the road; he would be locked up merely." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 292", + "text": "He plunged into the stream of pedestrians and it struck him how thickly, heavily clothed they were; the street resembled a sluggish river of dark liquid; he struggled through it, immersed to his shoulders.\n\nAnd the flock of curious, elusive thoughts, half-formed, fluttered above his mind just near enough to drop their shadows before they scattered and passed on. Much as a kitten pounces on the shadow of shifting foliage on a lawn his brain pursued and pounced upon them, bringing up the best words available, yet that did not suit because the necessary words do not exist. It was only the shadow of the ideas he captured.\n\n'A new language is wanted,' he decided, 'a flying language, with a rapid air vocabulary, condensed, intense. Everything else is speeding up nowadays, but language lags behind. It's old-fashioned, slow. All these ideas I've got, for instance, ought to go into a word or two by rights. Joan put 'em into me just now from the roof by a couple of gestures\u2014enough to fill a dozen Primers with words. Ah, that's it! What comes to me in a single thought\u2014and in a second\u2014takes thousands of words to get itself told in language. Words are too detailed and clever: they miss the whole. Aha! There's a new language floating into the world from the air\u2014a new way, a bird-way, of communicating. We shall share as the birds do. We shall all understand each other by gesture\u2014thought\u2014 feeling! Instant understanding means a new sympathy; that, again, means a divine carelessness, based on a common trust and faith.' And the immensely lofty point of view\u2014as from a dizzy height in space\u2014once more floated past him.\n\nHe steadied himself by pausing to look in at the shop windows. On a chemist's shelves he saw various things to stimulate, coax and feed people into keener life. The Invisible Sticking Plaster was there, too, to patch them up. Next door was a book-shop, where he remained glued to the window like a fly to treacle-paper. 'Success and how to attain It,' he read, 'in twelve lessons, 1s.'; 'Train your Will and earn more Money, 4\u00bdd.'; 'The Mysteries of Life, Here and Hereafter, all explained, 6d. net.' And second-hand copies of various books, marked 'All in this row tuppence only,' including several of the 'What's-in-the-Air-To-day' Primers.\n\nBeyond was a window full of clothing, woollen garments guaranteed not to shrink; electric or magnetic belts, to store energy, 'special line\u2014a bargain,' and various goods for keeping warmth in various parts of the body. All these shops, he reflected, sold things intended to increase or preserve life, artificial things, cheaply made, and sold to the public as dearly as possible, things intended to increase life and prevent its going. In other shops he saw mechanical means for stimulating, intensifying, driving life along. Life had come to this: All these artificial tricks were necessary to keep it going. Food, knowledge, clothes, speed that a bird possessed naturally in abundance. A robin's temperature in the snow was 110\u00b0. Yet human beings required thousands of shops that sold the conditions for keeping alive,\u2014at a profit. He passed an undertaker's shop\u2014to die was a costly artificial business too. There was too much earth in the whole affair. He remembered that no one ever saw a bird dead, when its death was a natural death. It slipped away and hid itself\u2014ashamed of being caught dead!\n\nA crowd collected round him, thinking he had discovered something exciting, and it jostled him until he elbowed his way out. He swerved dizzily amid the booming, thundering traffic, as he crossed the road and brought up against a toy-shop, where the sight of balls and butterfly nets, ships and trains and coloured masks restored his equilibrium. 'Real things are still to be had,' the fluttering shadows danced across his mind, 'And there are folk who like them!' he added in his own words, as two tousled-headed children came up and stood beside him, staring hungrily. He gave sixpence to each, told them to go in and buy something, and then continued his evening walk along the crowded pavement. 'Life is a great grand thing,' he realised, 'if we could all get together somehow. It's coming, I think. A change is coming, something light and airy penetrating all this\u2014this sluggish mass\u2014' he broke off, again unable to express the idea that fluttered round him\u2014' ah! it's good to be alive!' he went on, 'but to know it is better still. But you have no right to live unless you can be grateful to life, and create your own reason for existing. It means dancing, singing, flying!' He felt new life everywhere near him; a new supply of a lighter, more vivid kind was descending from the air. 'It's a new thing coming down into the world; it's beginning to burst through everywhere: a change, a change of direction\u2014'\n\nHe repeated this to himself as he moved slowly through the surging crowd. Joan, he remembered, had called death a change of direction only. But as he reached the word 'change,' it seemed to jump up at him and hang blazing with fire before his eyes. He had caught it flying; he held it fast and looked at it. The other shadows careered away, but this one stayed. He had caught the thing that cast it. The flock of shadows, he realised, were not cast by actual thoughts; they were the faint passage through his mind of mysterious premonitions that Joan's gestures had tossed carelessly towards him through the air. Coming ideas cast their shadow before. This one, at least, he had captured in a word, a figure of speech. He had pounced and caught it by the tail. It fluttered, but could not wholly get away.\n\nChange was the keyword. A gigantic change was coming, but coming gently, stealing along almost like a thief in the night, emerging into view wherever a channel offered itself. Life was being geared up everywhere. Human activities, physical, mental, spiritual, too, were increasing speed. Humanity was being quickened. They were passing from earth to air.\n\nSigns were plentiful, though mysterious. His mind roamed through the Epitomes of his Primers, skimming off the cream. Thinkers, artists, preachers, although they hardly realised it, were beginning to look up instead of down; from pulpit, press, and platform the little signs peeped out and flashed about the mass of expectant men and women. The entire world seemed standing on tip-toe, ready for a tentative flight at last. There was a universal expectation abroad that was almost anticipation.\n\nBut change involved dislocation here and there, and this dislocation was apparent in the general confusion that reigned in the affairs of the world. Stupendous hope was felt, though not yet realised and fulfilled. No one as yet could justify it. Pessimism and confidence, both strangely fundamental, were violently active. So long accustomed to terra firma, the world asked questions of its little coming wings, and the new element of air frightened even while it attracted\u2014nervous, timid, wild, uneasy questions were asked on every side. Deprived of the old, comfortable ideas of Heaven and Hell, and suspicious of the newly hinted promise of survival, hearts trembled while they listened to so sweet whispers of escape into the air. The old shibboleths, distrusted, were slinking one by one into their holes. Science could, perhaps, go usefully no further; Reason, still proud upon her pinnacle, yet hesitated, unable to advance; Theology looked round her with dim, tired eyes. The whole starving earth paused upon a mighty change that should usher in a new and single thing\u2014a new direction. Alone the few who knew, felt glad and confident\u2014joy. But they felt it only, for as yet they could not tell it in language usefully.\n\nThey might live it, though!\n\n'Live it\u2014ah!' he exclaimed, and his thoughts came back again to his queer, birdy daughter. For Joan, he told himself, brimmed over with it. She had in her the lightness, speed, and shining of the new element; she was glad and confident, full of joy, bird-happy, aware of principles rather than of details. She sang. Of all creatures this spontaneous expression of joy in life was known to birds alone. No other creatures sang. The essential ecstasy that dwells in air, making its inhabitants soar, fly, sing, was liberated in her human heart.\n\nTrue... The weary world stood everywhere on tiptoe, craning its neck into the air for some new expected prophet who should take it by the\u2014 wing.\n\nIt was a marvellous, delightful thought, and it sent his imagination whirring into space. The wings of his mind went shivering. He gave expression to it by a sudden gesture of his arms and head, making, it seemed, a spontaneous effort to rise and fly\u2014and, luckily, no one observed him making it. It was similar, however, to the movement Joan had made upon the roof as she stood outlined against the red and yellow sky; similar, also, to the flashing curve the swallow had shown him not long afterwards. It conveyed a thousand laborious sentences in a small spontaneous gesture that was rhythmical. Ah! there was a change of rhythm coming! And in rhythm lay a new means of instantaneous communication. Two persons in the same rhythm knew and understood each other completely\u2014 felt together. Then why not all?\n\nThe flock of shifting shadows fell more thickly down upon the floor of his receptive mind. He pounced upon them eagerly.\n\n'Yes, it's an air-thing somehow,' he felt, watching the amazing pattern, 'a bird-thing coming. And she knows it. She's born with it.' He again remembered the buttercup meadows of Cambridge and the singing gardens of Algeria, the ecstasy, the light and heat of that exalted passion. 'Her mother had the germ of it, but in Joan it's blossomed out. People would call her primitive, backward, even a little crazy, 'hysterical' is the word they'd use to-day, I suppose\u2014but in reality she's\u2014er\u2014awfully advanced. To be behind the race is the same as to be ahead of it, for life is circular and to run fast ahead is to overtake your tail. Signs of going back are equally signs of going forward. The same place is passed again and again until all it can teach has been caught from it; so the brain may be justifying scientifically To-day what was known instinctively to ancient times. The subconscious becomes the conscious.'\n\n'No, no,' the shadows painted somewhere behind his thought, 'it's not circular, it's spiral. We come round to the same place again, only higher up, above\u2014in the air. And with the bird's-eye view from above comes understanding.'\n\nJoan, he remembered, had said a few days before, speaking of his button-hole: 'A flower is a stone put up several octaves.' That was flight in itself\u2014all she said had flight in it. Her statement was true, literally, scientifically, spiritually, yet evolution was a word certainly unknown to her, and the spiral movement equally beyond her mental vocabulary.\n\nThe shadows danced and grouped themselves anew.\n\nHe reviewed strange signs that were-in-the-air-to-day, seeing them all as aspects of one single thing. They were not really disconnected; their apparent separation was caused by the various angles of survey, just as a floor seen from below became a ceiling. All that he was thinking now was, similarly, one big thing caught from various points of view. Some power swifter, surer than thought in him surveyed it all at once; the tiresome descriptions his mind laboured over took in the details separately\u2014the shifting shadows; yet the pattern as a whole was in him, captured by some kind of instantaneous knowledge such as birds possess. Like Joan, he caught the bird's-eye view, in principle. Yet she refused to be blinded and smothered by the details, whereas they certainly muddled him. It was necessary to select the details one thought about evidently. He tried to stand outside himself and see the single something that included all the details, and in proportion as he did so he seemed to rise into the air.\n\nHe reviewed these details flashily, and, so doing, got a glimpse, an inkling, of the entirety whence they arose. All seemed to him significant evidence of one and the same vast thing; this new, queer, rushing supply of air-life flowing through everything everywhere, forcing a swift and rhythmical way in the most unlikely places, modifying human activities in all directions unaccountably. He saw a hundred of his Primer-Writers sitting in a studious group about it, each describing certain specific details, while the general outline of the whole escaped them individually. Each called his scrap by different names, little aware that all sat regarding the same one thing. It came up bubbling, dancing, pouring forth with rhythm, bringing lightness into solid details, unsettling the old-fashioned, and carrying many off their feet into the air. It was so brimming that it overflowed; to resist it brought confusion, insecurity, distress; to go with it was the only way to understand it\u2014accepting the huge new rhythm. Yet it had so many guises, so many protean forms. Proteus was, indeed, a deathless truth, things changing into one another because they all are one.\n\nHe felt this new thing as synthesis, unity. The signs he reviewed combined in a single gesture that conveyed it. Earth, with its reason, logic, facts, could teach no more; Science was blocked from sheer accumulation of undigested detail; the new knowledge was not there; a new element was needed. And it was coming: Air.\n\nAlready there was a change even in sight itself, and artists saw things in a new direction. Mere foolishness to the majority, the cubists, futurists and the like presented objects to others\u2014others quite as intelligent as the majority, quite as competent to judge\u2014with an authentic fiat of truth and beauty. They conveyed an essentially new view of objects, warning the man in the street that the objective world is illusory and that concepts built upon the reports of the senses are radically deceptive. A city seen from an aeroplane resembled a cubist picture. This new sight seemed a bird's-eye view, again, though using\u2014going back to\u2014the primitive, naked, savage sight, yet a stage above it, higher, a tumultuous rhythm in it. The spiral again!\n\nSide by side with it ran a strange new hearing too. The musicians\u2014he recalled the names that showered through the Primer pages\u2014called attention to this new hearing-from-another-angle. And, here again, it was a going back apparently. Debussy used the old, primitive tone scale, while Strauss and Scriabin, to say nothing of a hundred lesser ears, extended the rhythm of music to include the world of sounds as none have dared before. In literature, more swiftly assimilative and interpretative of the airy inrush, the signs were thickly bewildering. Only, for the majority, Pan being still misunderstood, the God of Air came more slowly to his own. But the signs were everywhere, like birds and buttercups in spring. The bird's-eye view, flashing marvellously, imperishably lovely, was on the way into the hearts of men, the fairy touch, the protean aspect, the light, electric rhythm running from the air upon the creaking ground, urging the mass upwards with singing, dancing, into a synthesis, a unity like a flock of birds.\n\nThe nonsense of unintelligible words and decapitated sentences tried to catch hold of what he felt, only failed to express it because it was too big for used-up, pedestrian language. He felt this coming change and swept along with it. He was aware of it all over.\n\nIt came, he realised, flushing the most sensitive, receptive channels first\u2014the artists chiefly\u2014and the apparent ugliness here and there was due to distortion and exaggeration, to that violence necessary to overcome the inertia of habit in a narrow groove, the tyranny of Mode. The accumulated momentum of habit flowing so long in one direction called for a prodigious rhythm to stop it first, then turn it back\u2014into the new direction. Mode was the devil\u2014der Geist der stets verneint\u2014forbidding change, destroying innovators, worshipping that formal, dull routine which is ever anti-spiritual because it photographs a moment and fixes it to earth for always... It was, of course, attacked, as all new movements are attacked, with contempt, with ridicule, with anger; but the attacks were negligible, and could not stay its gathering flow. The bright little minds of the day charged against it, stuck their clever shafts, and scuttled back again into the obscurity of their safe, accustomed groove. Mistaking stagnation for balance, they clung to the solid earth of years ago, but knew it not.\n\nOf all this his mind did not frame, much less utter, a single word. But the pattern of its coming fell glowingly across his feelings. Life too long had been a single photograph; it seemed now a rushing cinematograph, revolving, advancing, mounting spirally into the air. He felt it thus. Something new was pushing up the map from underneath to meet the air; it was sprouting everywhere, going back to deep Pagan joy and wonder, yet with Reason added to it. Reason looked back breathless to Instinct long despised and cried, 'Come! Help me out!' And into his mind leaped the symbolic image of a Centaur combining both these faculties. He added wings to it.\n\n'Reason\u2014oh, of course! Without reason who could know that at a certain station there must be a change of carriage?' The train and station once there, that method of roving once accepted, Reason was as necessary as a railway ticket. Only\u2014well, he thought of the great Southern Tour and the perfect motion and perfect knowledge that led those tiny travellers to their distant destination and brought them home again to the identical hedge and bush and twig six months later. There was another way of communication. Birds knew it. The female Emperor-moth used it. Our wireless poles and instruments followed laboriously to achieve it. Yet the power itself lay in ourselves too, somewhere, waiting to be recognised without costly mechanism.\n\nYes, there surely was another way of travelling, of motion, coming, a bird-way, yet even swifter, surer still, because independent of the earthy body. The real, airy part of men and women were acquiring it already, their real selves, thought and consciousness, learning the new mighty rhythm by degrees. The transference of thought and consciousness was close upon them\u2014from the air; wireless communication with all parts of space; the mysterious, unconscious wisdom of the bird, organised and directed consciously by men and women.\n\nAn immense thrill passed over him. He began to sing softly to himself, but so softly, luckily, that no one overheard him: 'Flow, fly, flow; Wherever I am, I go!' Joan knew it all unconsciously. She just sang it.\n\nAnd bits of a bird-primer flew across his mind, casting the same delicate, protean shadows against the wall where thought stopped helplessly. The precocious intelligence of feathered life was still a mystery no primer-writer could explain. The curlew, he recalled, after wintering in New Zealand, paused to mate and nest in the South of England on his way to Northern Siberia, while awaiting the summons to complete its journey when the ice is gone. 'It is a fact, proved and attested beyond dispute, that the evening the curlew leaves the South of England is invariably the day on which the ice breaks in the north, at least two thousand miles distant.' How does the curlew know it?\n\nHe thought of the plover with five drums in his ear, able to hear the 'slow, sinuous movement of the worm in the soil, eight inches below the hard-crusted surface'; of the lapwing who imitates the sound of rain by drumming with his feet to bring the worms up; of the cuckoo matching her egg with those of the foster-mother selected for her baby\u2014hundreds of variations; of the swallow, mating like the nightingale for life, and of a certain pair of swallows, in particular, who 'for fifteen consecutive years returned to the same spot, after wintering in Cape Colony, to build their nest, arriving invariably on the same day of the year\u2014the 11th of April'; of the nightingales who winter separately, but return faithfully together to England in the spring, the female, perhaps, from India, the male from Persia.\n\nA hundred marvels of air-life came back to him; all 'instinct'\u2014only 'mere instinct'! Birds, birds, birds! The wisdom of the birds! Their communications, their flocking together, their swift rhythmical movements, their singing language, their unity, their\u2014brotherhood!\n\nFrom the air the new thing was rushing down upon the world, yes. Yet not alone the sensitive artist-temperament perceived it; it came overflowing into far less delicate channels as well, breaking up the old with difficulty, but producing first a tumult of disturbance that would later fall into harmonious rhythm too. There were everywhere new men, new women; behind the Woman Movement, for all its first excess, was a colossal, necessary, inevitable thing. Once rhythmical, the disorder and extravagance would become order, balance. The neuter woman was a passing moment in it, not to endure. The new woman was but another sign of the airy invasion which the painters and musicians, the writers and the preachers, felt. And the air-man, with new nerves, new courage, new outlook upon energy, even new bird-like face and strange lightning eyes, was another obvious, physical, yet only half-physical, expression. His audacious courage seemed somehow to focus the new consciousness preparing. The birds were coming everywhere. A new element, a new direction!\n\nIn advance of the invasion, making way for it, old solid obstacles were everywhere breaking down. He seemed to recognise a crumbling of religions, of religious forms. The rigid creeds and dogmas, made by man, and imprisoning him so long, were turning fluid before the stress of the new arrival, melting down like sand-castles when the tide comes in. They must hurry to adapt themselves, or else cease to exist. Formal, elaborate, dead-letter theology must go, to let in\u2014Religion. The churches seemed to have become unreal already, continuing, parrot-like, to teach traditional doctrines the people have long ago abandoned. He heard another Primer whisper in his ear. 'Every one is aware of the failure of the churches to touch modern life; to escape from their grooves; to cease to deal in conventional and monotonous iterations of old-fashioned formulae, instead of finding vital, human, developing expressions of the spiritual craving in man. They do not teach that the Kingdom of Heaven is on earth. They have isolated religion from practical life. Religion must evolve with the evolution of human culture'\u2014or disappear. Its teaching must take wings and rise to lead into the air, or remain stagnant on the ground in ruins, stony, motionless, dead, a photograph.\n\nThe 'wireless imagination' of the futurist was not so meaningless as it sounded. The exaggeration that preceded the new arrival would soon pass. Only, the first flight took the breath away a little, as when a man, from walking, breaks into a run to leap into an unknown element. Through the scientific world the quiver was running too. What's coming next? What in the world is going to happen? seemed the universal cry. The composite face of the world already assumed the eager lineaments of the great bird-visage. The air was coming.\n\nThe rhythm of life was everywhere being accelerated, and side by side with the mechanical expression in telephones and wireless communications, a quickening transformation of human sensibility was taking place as well. It was the running start for a leap into the air. Facilities for increasing the spontaneity of living existed at every street corner, but it was air that first produced them. Air made them possible. There was even approach towards the unification of the senses, one man hearing through his teeth and skull, another seeing through his temples. The localisation of sensibility was merging into a unified perception whereby people would presently know all-over and at-once. They would realise the eternal principle and ignore the obscuring details. Once they all felt together as the bird did, brotherhood, which is sharing all in natural sympathy, would be close...\n\nThe shadow-patterns flashed and rustled on across his mind. In a couple of minutes all these wild ideas occurred to him. They were extraordinarily elusive, yet extraordinarily real. In an interval as brief as that between saying 'Quite well, thank you,' to some one who asks 'How are you?' this flock of suggestions swept over him and went their way. They never grew clear enough to be actual thoughts; they were just passing hints of what was in-the-air-to-day. All telescoped together in a rapid rush, marked him, vanished, yet left behind them something that was real. They came through his skin, he fancied, rather than through his brain. They came all over.\n\nThe pedestrians, meanwhile, shuffled past him heavily; he made his way with difficulty, the thick stream opening to let him through, then closing in again behind him. He felt closely in touch with them all, in more ways than one; but the majority were still groping on the ground, hunting for luxurious holes to shelter in. Only a few were looking up. He saw, here and there, an eager face turned skywards, tipped with the beauty of a flushing dawn. These, perhaps, felt it coming. But few as yet\u2014one in a million, say\u2014would dare to fly.\n\nHe watched them as he passed along, feeling them gathering him in. He saw the endless, seething crowd as a unit. He felt their strength, their beauty. He was aware of democracy, virile, proud, inevitable. He felt the hovering bird above it somewhere, immense, inspiring. The advancing tide was rising, undermining caste and class distinctions steadily, breaking down conventions, the feeblest sand-castles children ever built. He heard an awful thunder too. It revealed a storming majesty, shattering, cataclysmic, making most hearts afraid\u2014the opening and stirring of multitudinous huge wings. Yet it was merely the new element coming, the great invasion with its irresistible rhythm. Democracy wore striped wings beneath its Sunday black, powerful, magnificent eagle-wings. Birds flying in their thousands, he recalled, convey sublimity. But yet he shuddered. The rising of such tremendous wings involved somewhere\u2014blood.\n\nHe saw, with his bird's-eye view, the general levelling up, or levelling down, in progress. No big outstanding figure led the world to-day. There were no giants anywhere. Much of a muchness ruled in art and business, as in statesmanship. No towering figures showed the way into the air. On the other hand there was degeneracy that could not be denied. He saw it, however, like the dirty flotsam seaweed pushed in front of a great high-tide. Degeneracy precedes new growth when that growth is of a different kind. Out of decaying wood springs a tree of fairer type, and from the ashes of a burnt hemlock forest emerge maple, birch and oak, while the flaming Fireweed lights the way with beauty. When a Canadian forest is destroyed by fire, the growth next spring is of a totally new kind, and no one has yet told whence came the seed of this new, different growth. After a prairie fire, similarly, new flowers spring up that were not there before. The subsoil possibly has concealed them; they are discovered by the fiery heat. The decay of old, true grandeur he saw everywhere, the democratic vulgarisation of beauty, the universal levelling up and levelling down, but he saw these as evidence of that crumbling of too in-bred forms which announced the new coming harvest from the air. It was but the decay of old foundations which have served their time.\n\n'We shall build lighter,' he half sang, half whispered to himself, squeezing between a lamp-post and a workman who came rolling unsteadily out of a tavern door; 'birds'-nests, up among the swinging trees! We shall live more carelessly, and nearer to the stars! No cellars any more, no basements, but gardens on the roof! Winds, colours, sunshine, air! Oh!\u2014' as the man bumped into him and sent him off the pavement with 'Beg parding, sir!' 'No, I beg yours,' he replied, and came down to earth with a crash, remembering that supper was at seven-thirty and he must be turning homewards.\n\nSo he turned and retraced his steps, feeling somehow that he had come down from the mountain tops or from a skimming rush along high windy cliffs. The net result of all these strange half-thoughts was fairly simple. His imagination had been stirred by the sight of his daughter in the sunset making those suggestive gestures against the coloured sky. With her hands she had flung a shower of silver threads about him; along these, somehow, her own queer ideas flashed into him. A new point of view, a new attitude to life, something with the light, swift rhythm of a bird's flight was coming into the minds of men. Most of those who felt it were hardly conscious, perhaps, that they did so, because carried along with it. The old were frightened, change being difficult for them; but the young, the more sensitive ones among them at any rate, stretched out their arms and legs to meet the flowing, flying invasion. 'Flow, fly, flow; wherever I am\u2014I go,' was in the air to-day. Joan knew. New hope, new light, new language, all aspects of joy and confidence, seemed dawning. Air and birds were symbols of it. It was rhythmical, swift, spontaneous. It sang. It was bird-happy and bird-wise. It was a new kind of consciousness, yet more than a mere expansion of present consciousness. It was a new direction altogether, while its object, purpose, aim was the oldest dream known to this old-tired world\u2014 brotherhood and unity. A bird brotherhood! The wisdom of the Flock!\n\n'I declare,' he murmured, laughing quietly to himself, 'if any one could hear me\u2014see inside my mind just now\u2014they'd say I was\u2014!'\n\nAnd that reminded him of his wife. He remembered that he was thinking of moving into the country with his family before very long. He came back to a definite thought again. He pondered facts and ways and means. He was very practical really at heart, no mere dreamer by any means. He weighed the difficulties. Mother was one of them. Sad, sad, the bird had left her; she was a badger now. He felt uneasy, troubled in his mind. But he smiled. He was fond of her.\n\n'How ever shall we manage?' he asked himself. 'There are so many incongruous things to reconcile. Gently, kindly, softly, airily is the way.'\n\nThen, suddenly, a bird-thought came to help him. Ah, it was practically useful, this inspiration from the air. It was not merely nonsense, then!\n\n'If I just hope and believe, and do my best, and don't think\u2014too much\u2014it will all come right. I must be spontaneous and instinctive, not overweighted by worrying and detailed reason. I must believe and trust. That's the way to get what's called good judgment. See it whole from the air!'\n\nFor the details that perplexed him were, after all, merely different aspects of one and the same thing\u2014the several points of view of Mother, Joan, Tom, himself. Hold in the mind the details in solution, and the problem must solve itself. If he understood each one\u2014that was necessary\u2014while viewing the problem as a whole, the solution must come spontaneously of itself. The bird's-eye view would show the way, while he remained nominally leader, like the bird that heads the triangular wedge of wild geese across a hundred miles of sky. This flashed upon him like a song.\n\nAnd as he realised this, his trouble vanished; joy took its place; with it came a sense of confidence, power, even wisdom. Though the matter was trivial enough, it was the triumph of instinct: Reason laid out the details, instinct pieced them together, then Intuition led. It was seeing all-over, knowing all-at-once. Already he had begun to live like a bird, and Joan, though he knew not how exactly, had taught him.\n\n'Wherever I am, I go,' went darting through his head. He smiled, felt light and happy\u2014and strangely wise. Perhaps he could help. Perhaps he was going to be a teacher even. A Teacher, he realised, must first of all find out the point of view of the person to be taught, and then discover a new point of view which will make the wrong or foolish attitude harmonise with reality. Everybody is right where he is, however wrong he may be. Only he must not stay there. The Teacher is a priest who supplies the new point of view. New teaching, however, was not necessary; the world was choked to the brim with teaching already. A new airy understanding of old teaching was the thing...\n\nHe was now close to the iron gates of Sun Court Mansions, where he lived. In the diminutive, yet pretentious, plot of garden stood a tall, leafy tree. A gust of wind blew past him at that moment with a roaring sound that was like laughter, and he saw the tree shake and tremble. The countless branches tossed in a dozen directions, hopelessly in disorder, each branch, each twig obeying its own particular little rhythm. That they all belonged to a single, central object seemed incredible, so brave the show they made of being independent and apart.\n\nThen, as he stood and watched, seventy thousand leaves turned all one way, showing their delicate under-skins. The great tree suddenly blew open. He saw the trunk to which leaves and branches all belonged. And at the wind's order the tree behaved as a single thing, even the most outlying portions answering to the one harmonious rhythm. At which moment, once again, a flock of birds rose from somewhere near with an effortless rush and swooped in among the leaves with one great gesture common to each one. They settled with the utmost ease. The myriad little busy details merged in one; they disappeared. But in settling thus, they made the solid green seem light as air, shiny, almost fluid.\n\nAnd Wimble, taking the odd hint, felt too that his own difficulties had similarly turned fluid, melted, disappeared. The details merged into a whole; they were referred, at any rate, to some central authority that hid deep within him. A wind of inspiration, as it were, had blown him wide open too. Details that tossed in different directions, apparently hostile to one another, betrayed their common trunk. They showed their under-sides. He was aware of an essential unity to which all belonged.\n\nSomething in him shone. He had taught himself, at any rate. He went upstairs, confident and light-hearted, breathless a little too, as though he had enjoyed an exhilarating flight of leagues, instead of a two-mile trudge along the solid, crowded pavements of Maida Vale.\n\nAnd later, when he went to bed, he fell asleep upon a gorgeous, airy conviction: 'The Golden Age lies in front of us, and not behind!' It was a birdy thought. He flew into dreamland with it in his wings." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 293", + "text": "Mrs. Wimble felt the death in another manner. It disconnected her from life. It cut her off from a network of safe, accustomed grooves. Something solid she had clung to subsided under ground. A final link with childhood, youth, and beauty broke. Death has a way of making survivors older suddenly. Mrs. Wimble now admitted age to herself; wore unsightly and depressing black; felt sentimental about a big 'p' Past; and ruminated uneasily about other worlds. Black with her was an admission that an after-life was at best an open question. It was a lugubrious conventional act symbolical of selfish grief, a denial of true religious teaching which should have faith, and therefore joy, as its illuminating principle. She did not understand the question. She had no answer ready. She said, 'What?'\n\nShe referred to the 'lost' at intervals. It did not occur to her that what is lost is open to recovery. When she said 'lost' she really meant annihilated. For, though a Christian nominally, and a faithful church-goer, when she had clothes she considered fit for the Deity to see her in, her notions of a future state were mental conceptions merely that contained no real belief. She was not aware that she did not believe, but this was, of course, the fact. Her father, moreover, had long ago destroyed the reality of the two after-death places generally accepted, soon after he had taught her that they both existed. Not wittingly for his part, nor for her part, consciously. But since 'heavenly' was a term he used to describe large sales of corn, and 'Go to hell, you idiot' was a phrase he applied frequently to underlings in yard and office, his daughter had grown up with less respect for the actuality of these localities than she might otherwise have had.\n\nAnd with regard to her love for him\u2014it was not love at all, but a selfish dependence tempered with mild affection. He was now gone; she missed him. A prop had sunk, a tie with the distant nursery snapped, the sense of continuity with the fragrance of early days, of toys, of romance and Christmas presents was no longer there. Instead of looking backwards\u2014 still possible while a parent lives\u2014she now looked forward into a muddled, shadowy future that brought depression and low spirits. It was a subterranean look. She went down under ground into her hole, yet backwards, still peering with pathetic eagerness into the sunshine of life that she must leave behind.\n\nTherefore, for her father at any rate, she knew not love. For the one thing certain and positive about love is that those who feel it know, and to mention loss in the sense of annihilation is but childish ignorance. There is physical disappearance, separation, going elsewhere, but these are temporary, another direction, as Joan expressed it. Love shouts the fact, contemptuous of exact photographic proof. No mother worth her salt, at any rate, believes that death is final loss. She has known union; and Love brings, above all, the absolute consciousness of eternal union. 'Loss,' used of death, is a devil-word where love is, and as ignorant as 'loss of appetite' when food has become a portion of the eater. One's self is not separable from its-self. Love, having absorbed the essentials of what it loves, remains because it is; for ever indivisible; there. The beloved dead step nearer when their bodies drop aside. 'The dead know where they are, and what they're doing,' as Joan mentioned. 'It's not for us to worry\u2014in that way. And they're out of hours and minutes. They probably have no time to come back and tell us.'\n\nTo which Mother's whole attitude replied with an exasperated 'What? I don't think you know what you mean, child.'\n\nJoan answered in a flash, her face clouding slightly, then breaking into a happy smile again: 'But, mother, what people think about a thing has nothing to do with the real meaning.'\n\n'Eh?' said Mother.\n\n'Their opinion doesn't matter.'\n\nMrs. Wimble bridled a little. She was not yet ready to be taught to fly. In this airy element she felt unsafe, bewildered, and therefore irritable.\n\n'Then you'll find out later, Joan, that it does matter,' she replied emphatically with ruffled dignity. 'One can't play fast and loose with things like that, not in this world, my dear. One must be fixed to something\u2014somewhere. Life isn't nonsense. And you'll remember later that I said so.'\n\nJoan peeped at her sideways, as a robin might peep at a barking dog. A tender and earnest expression lit upon her sparkling little face.\n\n'But life is a vision,' she said with a glow in her voice; 'it begins and goes on just like that,' and she clicked her fingers in the air. 'If you see it from above, from outside\u2014like a swallow\u2014you know it all at once like in a dream and vision, and it means everything there is to be meant. You put in the details afterwards.' She was perched upon the window-sill again, her long legs dangling. She began to sing her bird-song.\n\n'There, there,' expostulated Mr. Wimble, who was listening, 'we're not birds yet, Joan, whatever we're going to be,' but the last seven words dropped unconsciously into the rhythm of her singing tune. He felt a wind blow from her into his heart. Mrs. Wimble, however, remained concealed behind her World. She was not actually reading anything, because her eyes moved too quickly from paragraph to paragraph. But she said nothing for some moments, and presently she folded the paper with great deliberation, laying it beside her on the table, and patting it emphatically.\n\n'Visions are for those that like them,' she announced, moving towards the door and casting a sideways look of surprise and contempt at her husband whose silence seemed to favour Joan. 'To my way of thinking, they're unsettling. What time does Tom come in to-night?'\n\nThey discussed Tom for a few moments, and it was remembered that he had a latch-key and could let himself in, and that therefore they might go to bed without anxiety. But what Mrs. Wimble said upon this unnecessary topic meant really: 'You're both too much for me; my hopes are set on Tom.' She continued her perusal of the World in her room, retiring shortly afterwards to sleep heavily for nine full hours without a break." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 294", + "text": "Her father stood upside-down\u2014mentally, of course, not physically. Certain of the Primer 'Epitomes' came in helter-skelter to support his daughter's nonsense. At the same time he was aware that he ought to chide her. And probably he would have done so but for the fact that before he knew it, the girl was asking to be forgiven. He had not seen her move; his mental sight was still following Mother. There was a flutter of something white across the air\u2014and there Joan was\u2014upon his knee.\n\nAnd so he did not chide her. Nor did he rebuke her for singing under her breath what she called 'Mother's Song,' beginning:\n\n\u2003O Disaster!\n\n\u2003You're my Master!\n\n'Your mother's tired to-night,' he observed. 'But all the same, you are a nasty little tease, you know.' Her arms felt like warm, smooth feathers as he stroked them. He seemed floating lightly in mid-air above the roof. And he remembered vaguely the fairy tales of his youth when Princesses turned suddenly into swans. Oh, how beautiful it was, this bird idea, this seeing and feeling things in the terms of birds. Those girls in Greece the gods changed into a nightingale and a swallow\u2014what a delightful, exhilarating experience! Easy\u2014and how true! 'The feathery change came o'er you,' he murmured from the Treasury of Song, then, interrupting his own mood of curious enjoyment, turned to Joan abruptly.\n\n'Why did you talk like that?' he inquired.\n\n'To make Mother move\u2014'\n\n'To bed, you mean?' he asked, almost severely.\n\n'Yes, no,' said Joan.\n\n'Answer me properly, girl,' he observed.\n\n'Of course not. Move nearer to you\u2014and me\u2014even to grandpa. We ought to be a flock somehow, I felt. But we looked so separate and apart, you two on chairs, reading, him out of sight, and me on the window-sill.'\n\n'Eh?'\n\n'We ought to be one thing more. The whole world ought to be. Not crowded\u2014oh, there'd be heaps of room to move in\u2014but all together somehow like birds. It's only bad birds that are apart\u2014ravens, hawks, and birds of prey. All the others flock.' She darted from his knee and stood upon her toes a second before him, staring down into his eyes. 'It's coming, you know, Daddy. It's coming, anyhow!' She said it brightly, eagerly, yet with a singular conviction in her tone. 'The whole world's flocking somehow\u2014somewhere\u2014for I feel it. We shall all be happy together once we get into the country.'\n\nA shiver of beauty passed through him as he heard her. He remembered his walk up Maida Vale, and the rushing, shadowy presentiment in his mind that something new was on the way.\n\n'Like a single big family, you mean? All after one high big thing together?' He asked it, greatly wondering at her. But her reply made him gasp. Where had she learned such things, unless from the air?\n\n'Your language is so draughty, Daddy. I mean a bird-world. Birds aren't unselfish, they're just\u2014together.'\n\nHe rubbed his forehead, saying nothing, while she fluttered down upon his knees again.\n\n'Like my body,' she said. 'Don't you see?'\n\n'Yes, no,' he laughed, using her method unconsciously.\n\n'I can't lace my boot with one hand, but the other isn't unselfish when it comes to help. My head is no farther from me than my boot, is it?' And she sang softly her bird-song of movement and delight, until he felt the quality of her volatile, aerial mind flash down into his own and lighten it amazingly.\n\n'My precious little daughter,' he cried, 'you are a bird, and you shall teach me all your flying secrets. But, tell me,' he whispered, 'how in the world did you find out all this?'\n\n'Oh, I can't tell that,' she replied almost impatiently, 'for once I begin to think it all goes, and I feel like an animal in a hole. But I'll tell you soon\u2014when the right moment comes\u2014in the fields. I just go about and it all shoots into me.'\n\nIt was the true bird-quality, always singing, always on the alert, swift to notice and be glad.\n\n'Yet I said it without thinking,' she went on, 'and the meaning came in afterwards at the end\u2014all of its own accord. And that's really the way to live together. At least, it's coming\u2014'\n\n'The next stage, the next move!'\n\n'Flight!' she cried, half singing it.\n\n'You live and talk,' he laughed, 'like a German sentence that carries all in the head and suddenly puts the verb down at the end.'\n\n'Yes, yes,' he realised after she had gone to bed, while he sat there, pondering her fluid statements, 'there is this new thing coming into life, and it is in some sense indeed a bird-thing. It's a new outlook!'\n\nHe caught at her feathery meanings none the less. A great aerial movement had begun, an etherialisation, a spiritualisation of life. And in true spirituality there was nothing vague; its expression was terrifically definite, stupendously alive, swift, sure, and steady as a mighty bird. Spirit was a bird of fire. Joan left him in that dreary sitting-room with a feeling that life was glorious and that the entire population of the globe must presently take flight and wing its way to some less ponderous star\u2014migration. Joan's language was absurd, yet she left winged ideas rushing like imperial eagles through his mind. Humanity was really one, but on earth alone it would never, never find it out. In the air it would. Its upward struggles were not mere figures of speech. Routine oppressed and deadened life, prisoning it within a network of rigid, fixed ideas, and behind barriers of concentrated effort which turned the fluid stagnant\u2014hard. Routine was dulling, anti-spiritual. To live like a quicksand before you get fixed and sank, this was the way. To be ready for a fire that should burn up all you had. Life flows, flies, flows; it has rhythm and abandon; self, by means of boundaries and casting limits, resists this universal flow towards expansion characteristic of all Nature. A bird was poised. True! But it was ready to go in any direction instantly, for it was more various and less intense, by no means purposeless, and never bound. It was spontaneous, instantaneous, for ever on the run. That was living, that was 'fun.' People, like animals, were congested. But life was growing quicker, lighter, with rhythm, movement everywhere.\n\nThe shadow dance began again deliciously.\n\nYet to act intuitively seemed a dangerous plan for the majority at present, to live on impulse seemed mere recklessness. But it would come. Already people were tired of knowing exact and detailed reasons for all they did. Confusion would come first, of course, but out of that confusion, as out of the apparent trouble of a rising flock of birds, or the scattered muddle of leaves and branches in a wind-tossed tree, would follow magnificent concerted life. Democracy was growing wings. Soon it would sing for joy.\n\nYes, there was truth in it. Majestic powers were moving already past the visible curtain of fixed and rigid formulae. To obey an intuition the instant it came, was to find the opportunity at hand for carrying it out effectively. To wait and hesitate, consider, reflect and reason out, was to lose the chance. It was disobedience, and disobedience detached from power. Fate was controlled by an obedient and instantaneous mind, for it meant acting in harmony with these majestic powers. Understanding followed later, as with Joan's outlook; the verb came down at the end, explaining, justifying all that had preceded it. Good and evil were, after all, misnomers of the nursery. In rhythm or out of rhythm was common, aye, the commonest sense. Rhythm was simply ease, as separateness, due to want of rhythm, was dis-ease.\n\n'Oh dear!' sighed Joseph Wimble, as he turned the light out and pattered down the corridor to bed. 'I feel carried off my feet. What a buoyant thing life is, to be sure! It gets big and light and happy when you least expect it! Evidently, there's a big universal thing underlying it all\u2014 that's what she means by air\u2014and to lean upon that\u2014subconsciously, I suppose\u2014to act in rhythm with it\u2014' He broke off, colliding with a chest of drawers Mother would keep in the narrow passage.\n\nThen, suddenly, as he switched the light on in his bedroom, he realised something very big and striking:\n\n'Of course, I'm a cosmic, not merely a planetary, being...!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 295", + "text": "But what followed that night, while it may have caught him into the air, as he phrased it, and given him an airy point of view, took his breath away at the same time. He was not ready yet for so strange a revelation.\n\nHe did not sleep very soundly. Too many ideas were rustling in his brain. 'Rise out of rigid ideas,' a voice kept whispering. 'Hold ideas loosely in the mind. Cultivate agility of thought. Re-fresh, remake your thought. Destroy the hard walls that hide God from you. He is so close to you always. Shatter your idols and get free! Rise out of the network of fixed ideas! Watch life without sinking into your own personality. That is, share every point of view and think in every corner of your body. Grow alive all over. Don't think things out in your head; just see them! Embrace all possibilities! Get into the air! Melt down that absurdity, the scientific materialist, and show him LIFE!'\n\nHe heard these whispered sentences traversing the darkness like singing arrows whose whistling speed made a noise of words. Even in sleep he stood upon his head. But the arrows, of course, were feathered. They were feathers. Wings flashed and fluttered everywhere about him. He was in a cage. He must escape. He tried. Somehow, it seemed, he used his whole body instead of his brain alone. He was escaping... Life, blown open by a wind, seemed to show its under-side where everything was one...\n\nBy this time he was half awake. 'I must do something; I must act,' he dimly realised. He turned over in his bed, and the sound of arrowy, rushing air went farther into the distance as he did so.\n\n'It's imagination,' sneered a tiny, wakeful point in his mediocre brain. Another part of him not brain was alight and shining.\n\n'But you're no farther from Reality by letting your imagination loose,' sang a returning arrow\u2014in his head. It came from something bigger than his mind. His mind, strutting and arrogant, seemed such an insignificant part of him, whereas the rest, where the arrows flashed and flew, seemed so enormous that he was conscious of the 'nightmare touch' of Size. Mind strove to justify itself, however, and Reason snatched at names and labels.\n\n'But that's right,' a flying sentence laughed. 'You do not see a thing until you've named it. You only feel it. Once, however, it's described, it's seen!'\n\n'Aha! That's Joan's fairy-tale method grotesquely cropping up in my dreams,' he realised\u2014and so, of course, awoke properly.\n\nAnd it was here that his breath got shorter and his heart beat irregularly.\n\nThe room was dark and silent, but he heard a murmuring as though Night were talking in her sleep. The dizziness of great heights was still about him, and remained a little even when he turned the lights on. It was four o'clock. The room wore a waiting, listening air, as though a moment before it had all been whirling, and his waking at this unlawful hour had disturbed it. Waking had rolled the darkness back, let in light, and taken\u2014a photograph. He felt mad and happy\u2014madly happy. There was nonsense in him that belonged to careless joy. The curious notion came that he ought to introduce himself to the various objects\u2014chairs, cupboards, book-shelf, writing-table\u2014and apologise to them for having believed himself separate from them. He ought to explain. But the same second he realised this as wrong, for he himself had been moving, whirling, too. Everything had stopped, himself included, when he awoke. He had stepped aside to look at it. He had photographed it. Of course it stopped.\n\n'I am,' he remembered, 'but wherever I am, I go!'\n\nAnd then, before further Explanation could explain away the truth, he seized at another diving arrow and saw it whole, though it vanished the same instant:\n\n'I am the whole room. I am my surroundings!'\n\nSome new point of view had leaped into him, something almost daemonic that suggested limitless confidence in his power to overcome all obstacles, because they were part of his own being.\n\nObjects, things, details\u2014during that amazing second at least\u2014no longer seemed separate, alone, apart from one another. They were not anywhere cut off. Seen thus, a chair was a cupboard, a table was a basin, he was the ceiling, bed, and carpet. Equally, a cat was a peacock, a mouse was an elephant.\n\nHe said these words to himself in an astonished whisper, and in doing so he understood something he didn't understand. The sentence waited for the verb, the meaning, and it suddenly came down pop\u2014at the end. Reason helped a little there, for he had named and described, and therefore seen what before he had only felt. Perhaps further understanding would follow. The verb would come. He would get up and try. He would do something\u2014act\u2014act out his mood. Action seemed suddenly a new kind of language, a three-dimensional language, an ever-moving language in which objects took on character and played parts for the sake of expression. A language of action! You are whatever you do...!\n\nAnd as this arrow shot its message past him it seemed that certain objects in the room were about to jump at him. They did not actually move, but they were just about to move\u2014ready and alert. The instant he slept they would rise and fly together again. It was his point of view, his mind in him, that made them appear separate. Each object was clothed in its own story of information, as it were. Objects were telling him something. They were demonstrating an idea.\n\n'I am not alone, although I'm only one,' he said aloud. 'In arithmetic one is not more lonely than seven.' But, again, he didn't understand quite why he said it, while yet he understood perfectly at the same time. 'I'm not quite myself at any rate,' he added, and it was true. Perhaps he was a trifle frightened, still hovering on the nightmare edge of sleep. For all this happened in a single instant when he turned the light up. With sight his breath came more easily at once, his heart beat steadily again.\n\nYet there was certainly a sense of rhythm in the room, though lessening rapidly. He must hurry. The cage was closing round him again. He heard the flying voices farther and farther in the distance, but still sweet with a rhythmical new music.\n\n'Use the mood of the moment, but first understand why it is the mood of the moment!'\n\n'Use the material you have at once! Don't wait for something different!'\n\n'There is no need to wait; to wait shows incompetence!'\n\n'Act instantly! Don't reason, calculate, think! Operate in a flash!'\n\nHe felt, that is, rather as a bird might feel. There was haste, yet no hurry, purpose yet leisure, delight without delay, spontaneity. So he got out of bed, put on dressing-gown and slippers, and went on tiptoe into the passage. Then, standing in the shaft of light from his room, the dark corridor in front of him, he realised that the entire flat\u2014the furnished flat that Dizzy & Dizzy had let to him\u2014was alive. The feathered arrows were not imagined, the voice was not a dream. Inanimate things stirred everywhere about him. He perceived their undersides and his own. Their apartness that so dislocated the upper, outer, surface-life was only apparent after all. Bars melted. He felt instantaneous. 'Wherever I am I go!' But objects shared the same illusion: wherever they were, they went! The sensations of a flock were in him. A new order of consciousness was close.\n\nHe paused and listened. No sound was audible. Mother's door was closed, but Joan's, he saw, just opposite, stood ajar. A draught blew coldly on him. He tapped gently and, receiving no reply, pushed the door wider and peeped through. The light from the corridor behind poured in. The room was empty, but the sheets, he saw, had not been lain in.\n\nRecalling then her state of excitement when she went to bed, he searched the flat, peering cautiously even into Mother's room, but without result. The front door was bolted on the inner side. She had not left the building. He felt alarmed. Then a cold air stirred the hair of his head, and, looking up, he saw that the trap-door in the ceiling was open and that the ladder looked inviting. It 'jumped' at him, as he called it, that is it drew his attention as with meaning. So he snatched a rug from the shelf beneath the hat-rack, and, throwing it round his shoulders, clambered up on to the roof.\n\nIt was September and the sky was soft with haze, yet still empty and hungry for the swallows. Round balls of vapour pretending to be solid were being driven by an upper wind across the stars; but the stars were brilliant and shone through the edges of the vapour. And the night seemed in a glow. The wind did not come down, the roof was still; the mass of London lay like a smouldering furnace far below, bright patches alternating with deep continents of shadow. He heard the town booming in its sleep, a thick and heavy sound, yet resonant. And at first he saw only a confused forest of chimneys about him that rose somewhat ominously into the air, their crests invisible. Then, suddenly, one of them bent over in a curve, fell silently with marvellous grace upon the leaden covering; and, fluttering towards him softly as an owl, came some one who had been standing against it\u2014Joan.\n\nThis happened in the first few seconds; but even before she came he was aware that the strange stirring of inanimate nature in the room below had transferred its magic up here. It was not discontinuous, that is, but everywhere. It had come down into the flat, as from the outside world, but the singular rhythm emanated first from here\u2014above. Joan had to do with it.\n\nIt was exquisite, this soft feathery way she came to him across the London roof, swooping low as with the flight of an owl, an owl that flies so easily and buoyantly, it seems it never could drop. It was lovely. In some such way a spirit, a disembodied life, might be expected to move. He listened with eager intensity for the first word she would utter.\n\n'Father,' she whispered, 'it's the Bird!'\n\nHe felt his entire life leap out on wings into open space. He had asked no questions. She stood in front of him. Her voice, with its curious lilt, seemed on the verge of singing. It came from her lips, but it sounded everywhere about him, as though delivered by the air itself, as though it dropped from the unravelling clouds, as though it fell singing from the paling stars. Night breathed it. And it frightened him\u2014for a moment\u2014out of himself. His ordinary mind seemed loose, uprooted, floating away as though compelling music swayed it into great happiness. His stream of easy breath increased. He touched that indefinable ecstasy which is extension of consciousness, caused by what men call crudely Beauty. Joy flooded him.\n\n'The Bird!' He repeated the words below his breath. 'What do you mean?' Yet, even as he did so, something in him knew. 'A bird in her bosom' flashed across him from some printed page. The girl, he realised, had been communing with that type of life to which she was so mysteriously akin. Its approach had stirred inanimate nature into language. Meaning had invaded objects, striking rhythm, almost speech, from inert details. Joan had brought this new living thing\u2014new point of view\u2014into the very slates and furniture.\n\n'The Bird!' he whispered again.\n\n'Our Bird! Daddy.' And she opened her arms like soft white wings, the shawl fluttering from them in the starlight.\n\nHe ought to have said\u2014'Nonsense; go back to bed; you'll catch your death of cold!' Or to have asked 'What bird? I don't see any bird!'\u2014and laughed. Instead he merely echoed her strange remark. He agreed with her. Instinctively, again, he knew something that he didn't know.\n\n'So it is!' he exclaimed in a whisper of excitement, taking a deeper breath and peering expectantly about him, as though some exhilarating power drew closer with the dawn. 'I do declare! The Bird\u2014our Bird!'\n\nHe caught her hand in his. She was very warm. And, touching her, he was instantly aware of fuller knowledge, yet of less explanation. A sensation of keen delight rose in him, free, light, and airy, new vast possibilities in sight, almost within reach. He caught, for instance, at the meaning of this great rhythm everywhere, this impression that dead objects moved and conveyed a revelation that was so full of meaning it was almost language. Birds saw them thus, flashing above them, noting one swift, crowded series of objects one upon another. It was a runic script in the landscape that birds read and understood in long sentences of colour, shade, and surface, pages full of significant pictured outlines, turning rapidly over as they skimmed the earth. It was a new language, a movement-language. Birds read it out to one another as they flew. They acted it. Their language was one of movement and of action, three-dimensional; and, whether they flitted from one chimney to another, or travelled from Primrose Hill to the suns of Abyssinia, their lives acted out this significant, silent language.\n\nHigh, sweet rapture caught him. Of course birds sang, where men only grunted and animals, still nearer to the ground, were inarticulate with unrhythmical noises.\n\nAll this flashed and vanished even while his eye lost its way in the canopy of smoky air immediately above him.\n\n'Listen!' he heard in his ear, like the faint first opening whistle of some tiny songster. 'They're waking now all over England. You felt it in your sleep! That's what brought you up. It's the moment just before the dawn!'\n\nA million, ten, twenty million birds were waking out of sleep. In field and wood, in copse and hedge and barn, in tall rushes by the lakes, in willows upon river banks, in glens and parks and gardens, on gaunt cliffs above the sea, and on lonely dim salt marshes\u2014everywhere over England the birds were coming back to consciousness.\n\nIt was this vast collective consciousness that had awakened him. He had somehow or other taken on, through Joan, certain conditions of the great Bird-mind. It was marvellous, yet at the time seemed natural. He recalled the strange sentences: all descriptive of a bird's mentality, put into words, of course, by his own brain. The movement of objects was merely their new appearance, seen from above in rapid passage, all speaking, telling something, reporting to the rushing bird the conditions of the surface where they lay. And those at the point of lowest approach in the curve of flight appeared to 'jump.' The sense of rhythm, moreover, was the outstanding characteristic of feathered life\u2014in song, in movement, in beat of wing, in swinging habits of the larger kind when migration regularly sets in and there is known that 'mighty breath which, in a powerful language, felt not heard, instructs the fowls of heaven.' He had responded somehow to the world of greater rhythms in which all airy life existed, and compared with which human existence seemed disjointed, disconnected, incomplete in rhythm.\n\n'Air,' he remembered from one of the ridiculous Primers, 'is the highest perception we have, yet we need not be in the air to get this view. We have placed the Heaven within us up there, because it was, physically, our highest place to set it in.'\n\n'Listen! and you'll feel it all over you,' Joan's voice reached him. 'I often come here in the dawn. I know things here.'\n\nBy 'listen' she meant apparently 'receive,' for no sound was audible except the hum of London town still sleeping heavily.\n\n'So this is how you learn things! From the air?'\n\n'I don't learn anything\u2014in that sense,' she murmured quickly. 'It's in me. It just flies out\u2014I see it.'\n\n'Ah!' He caught a feather and understood.\n\n'Especially when I go like this! Look, Daddy!' And she darted from his side and began on tiptoe a movement, half dance, half flight, between the crowding chimney-stacks. She vanished and reappeared. He heard no sound. The shadows clothed her, now close, now spread out, like wings whose motion just escaped the measuring eye. And the dance was revealing in someway he could not analyse. She seemed to bring the dawn up. The ugly roof turned garden, the chimneys shaded off into trees, as though her little dance flashed aspiration into rigid bricks. She interpreted the flight of darkness, the awakening of wings, the silent rush of dawn. No modern dancer, interpreting Chopin, Schumann, could have given a deeper, truer revelation. She uttered in her movements a language that she read, but a language for the majority at present undecipherable. Action and gesture interpreted the inarticulate.\n\nShe expressed, he was aware, the return to consciousness of the birds; but at the same time she expressed a new air-born consciousness that was stealing out of the skies upon a yet sleeping world.\n\n'By doing it, I understand it,' she laughed softly, but no whit breathless, as she floated back to his side. 'But I can't tell it in words till long afterwards.'\n\nThe east grew lighter. The tips of the flying clouds turned red. A beauty, as of dawn in the mountains, crept slowly over the towered London world. It seemed the spires and soaring chimneys steadied down, as though precipitating a pattern from some intricate movement of the universe. Speech failed him for the moment. For the language of words is but an invention of civilisation, and he had just heard the runic speech that is universal and has no grammar but in natural signs of sky and earth. And then the words he vainly sought dropped into him suddenly from the air. Above him on a chimney crest a group of starlings fell to chattering gaily; hidden in the leaves of trees far below he heard the common sparrow chirrup; the earliest swallows, just awake, flashed overhead, telling the joy of morning in their curves of joy. In the distance trilled a rising lark.\n\nThe wonder and glory of that breaking dawn lay for him, indeed, beyond all telling; not that he had been insensible to loveliness in Nature hitherto, but that he saw new meaning in it now. In himself he saw it. The point of view was new. To Joan, however, it was merely familiar and natural. But more\u2014he was aware that in him lay the germ, at least, of a new airy consciousness that included it all, and that he longed to share it with the still sleeping world below. A mighty spiritual emotion swept him.\n\n'Mother would feel cold, and notice the blacks,' she laughed, but there was love and pity in her laughter.\n\nFor her it was all in the ordinary run and flow of habitual life. She was aware of no exalted state of emotion. She said it as normally as a swallow dares to take an insect from the heart of an amazing sunset. That sunset and that insect both belong to it. There was no need to be hysterical about either one or other." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 296", + "text": "He woke in the morning and decided that his experience of the night had been a vivid dream-experience, although that was not to deny a deep reality to it. A sense of uplifting joy was in his heart that was the rhythm of some larger life. A new lightness pervaded his very flesh and bones; it sent him along the narrow passage to the bathroom\u2014dancing, much to the astonishment of the cook who caught a glimpse of the phenomenon as she stirred the porridge; it made him sing while he sponged himself, waking Mrs. Wimble earlier than usual and stirring in her an unwelcome reminder that she was older, stouter than she had been. For the singing brought back to her a fugitive memory of a sunny Algerian garden, where life sang to a measure of blue and gold Romance, now vanished beyond recall. 'Joe's odd this morning,' she thought, turning over to sleep upon her other side.\n\nBut Joe, meanwhile, splashed in his bath and went on singing just because he couldn't help himself; his voice was meagre, yet it would come out. He dried himself, standing in a hot sunbeam on the oil-cloth that made him feel he caught the entire sun. Such a deluge of happiness, confidence, natural bliss seemed in him, seemed everywhere about him too. He could not understand it, but he felt it, and therefore it was real. In the rise and fall of some larger rhythm than he had ever known he swung above a world that could no longer cage him in. He saw the bars below him. Alarm, anxiety, worry, even death were but little obstacles that tried to trip him up and make him stumble, stop, and give up existence as too difficult to face. They lay below him now. He saw them from above. He was in the air. It made him laugh and sing to think that such tricks could ever have frightened or discouraged him. Actually they were but of use to stand on for a leap into the air\u2014taking-off-things, spots to jump from into space.\n\n'I can't explain it,' occurred to him, 'so it must be true.' It was a thing his daughter might have said. He shared her point of view, it seemed, completely now. They were in the air together.\n\nAnd, though later and by degrees, the airy exhilaration left him, so that he came down to earth and settled, the descent was gradual and without a thud. Something of lightness and of wonder stayed. The memory of some loftier point of view guided him all day long amid the tangle of little difficulties that usually seemed mountainous. He rose lightly above all obstacles that opposed and hindered. He saw them from above, that is, he saw them in proportion. Stepping on each in turn, he flew easily over every one; they served their purpose as jumping-off spots for taking flight. It was the Bird's-eye point of view.\n\nBut each time he flew thus, he left his mind behind, using it as a cushion for landing later, easily, without a jarring bump. And thus, before the day was over, he realised somewhat this: that the instantaneous, spontaneous attitude Joan stole from the air and taught him meant simply that the subconscious became convincingly, superbly, conscious. The personality operated as a whole without friction or delay from separate portions that held back and hesitated. All these lesser, separate rhythms merged in one. It mobilised, as with a lightning instinct, the entire available forces of the being. He reacted to every stimulus as a whole, instead of in separate parts. Action and decision came in a single flash; to reason, judgment, the weighing of pros and cons, and so forth, he appealed afterwards. That is, intuitive knowledge became instantaneous action.\n\nAnd, realising this, he also grasped what Joan meant by describing a room as 'happening all at once,' and found meaning also in her nonsense-dream of feeling for the one-ness of all life everywhere. The details of the room could be inserted later according to judgment and desire, and four-footed animals on the ground might also discover later the point of view of birds who, from a high altitude in the air, saw everything at once. Instantaneous action, immediate conduct, spontaneous behaviour enlisted the supporting drive of the entire universe behind them. Properly accepted, absolutely obeyed, such a way of living ensured inevitable success. It was irresistible; for since everything was one, each detail was the whole, and no whole could be disobedient or hostile to itself. And this was why he had danced along the passage-way and sung into his sponge.\n\nYet this attitude of mind, this point of view, was easily lost again; it was difficult to hold permanently; to practise, still more difficult. How to translate it into daily action was the problem. At breakfast this new language of action seemed mere phantasy. He certainly had enjoyed a dream of a three-dimensional language in which objects and things helped to interpret his own wishes; he remembered that distinctly; and surely it was not all imagination? Imagination, he felt sure, included prophecy as well as memory.\n\n'It's time we found our country cottage,' he remarked, tasting his crisp Cambridge sausage and bacon. 'I must get to work at once.'\n\nMother glanced up over the morning newspaper she had crumpled till it looked like a bundle for lighting the fire. She had ignored the news and been deep in the advertisements. 'It's best to go to the agents,' she observed, folding the paper with the creases uneven and the pages mixed, then patting it into flatness. 'And if they're no good, we might insert an advertisement stating our exact requirements.' She mopped up a remnant of fried egg with a thick wedge of brown bread at the end of her fork. 'A nice neighbourhood's the chief thing, isn't it?'\n\nHer husband straightened the paper so that the creases fitted evenly and the pages lay in sequence. It hurt him acutely to see it twisted; he felt something out of place inside himself, as though the feathers of a wing were tangled. 'It'll turn up,' he said airily, 'we shall come across it suddenly. I'll go and see some agents all the same, though,' he added. He had the feeling that the right place would hardly come through agents, but would just 'turn up.' Somehow he would be attracted to it: it would be there before his eyes; it would jump at him. He had already seen so many agents. Newspaper advertisements never mentioned it. This strange belief and faith was in him. 'I'll have a look,' he added, as his wife put the plates together, swept some crumbs carefully from the cloth, then tapped the marmalade spoon on the rim of the jar before she sucked it clean.\n\n'There's no good just hoping and trusting to chance,' she said in a practical voice. 'Nothing comes that way.' She clicked her tongue, tasting the marmalade reflectively.\n\n'On the contrary\u2014everything comes that way.' To believe, he grasped, was to act with the Whole in which all that was required lay contained. 'Enquire within upon everything.' He laughed happily. But his wife had not followed his thought\u2014nor heard him.\n\n'That's turnip rind, not oranges,' she added. 'They sell you anything nowadays, and everything's adulterated\u2014' and laid the spoon aside.\n\n'In the country we'll make our own,' her husband interrupted. 'Delicious stuff!'\n\n'If we ever get there,' she replied, 'and if sugar ever goes down again, and we can get servants who'll condescend to stay. There's no good being too remote, remember, or we won't keep a single one. Servants won't stand being dull.' She sighed. Life to her spelt apprehension.\n\n'Well, we've agreed on Sussex, haven't we?' he answered cheerfully, hunting for his lost new attitude again. 'A nice bit of wayward Sussex, where there are trees and fields and perhaps a snap of running water so that the birds'll come\u2014' he saw the cloud on Mother's face\u2014' Oh, but in a nice neighbourhood with decent neighbours,' he added, 'and a town not too far away, with a cinema and shops, and so on. Oh, it will come all right, Mother, don't you worry. We'll find it sure enough\u2014probably this very day. I feel it coming; it's close already; I can almost see it at this moment.'\n\n'It's there, waiting for us all the time. The very place,' said Joan suddenly, clapping her hands softly, and meeting her father's eye. 'Only we've got to want it enough and\u2014'\n\n'Tidy up your place, child,' said Mother sharply, 'and fold your serviette. It's time you were at your scales.' She sighed as Joan obeyed and left the room, and two minutes later, while Mother made notes on a squeaky slate for dinner, the sound of C major came to them through the wall, going rapidly up and down again with both hands. Only it was accompanied by a clear and happy voice that sang the notes, or rather sang a running melody to them that turned even the technical routine into music. The drudgery, though faithfully done, brought its fulfilment almost within reach. Like a bird, she leaped upon the promise and enjoyed it. Scales and music, toil and its results, prophecy and its accomplishment\u2014even in this tiny detail\u2014seemed present in her simultaneously. Carelessness and faithful plodding method went side by side. This came to her father as he lit his pipe and listened to the pure childish voice that unconsciously sang meaning, even beauty, into formal rigid outline.\n\n'An all-at-once and all-over little creature,' he heard something whisper to him. 'Care-less and happy as a bird. The true air quality! That's the way, of course. I see it\u2014a sort of bird's-eye view of beginning and end in one. The joy of fulfilment shining through the actual work. I'll find the cottage that way too!'\n\nHe puffed thick clouds of smoke between himself and his wife, who stood watching him, a touch of apprehension about her somewhere, impatience as well. She too was listening. He recalled the smile of the badger at the mouth of its hole. But, at any rate, it was a faithful, practical, and affectionate badger. Moreover, once\u2014strange memory\u2014it had known wings, it had been a bird! Wrong methods had brought it down to earth. It puzzled him dreadfully, yet rather sweetly. The bird, he fancied, must still lie hidden in her somewhere.\n\n'Joan never can do one thing properly at a time\u2014not even her scales,' she was saying. 'There she is, trying to sing before she's learnt her notes. I wish you'd speak to her about it. But, if you ask me, I think it's good money wasted\u2014those music lessons.'\n\nHow right she was, he thought, from her point of view. At the same time, how entirely that point of view lacked vision. A badger criticised a bird for flying uselessly when there were eggs to be laid and worms to be pulled up and twigs for a nest to look at instead of rushing landscapes.\n\n'I will, dear. I'll speak to her at once, before I go to see the agents. I'll bring back good news at dinner-time. Now good-bye, bless you.' He kissed her. She looked so helpless and pathetic that he kissed her again, adding 'Good-bye, old thing, don't worry. Take everything lightly like a bird and remember\u2014Wherever we are, we go!'\n\n'Good-bye, Joe dear. Do your best. You know our limit as to rent.' He noticed that for once she had not asked him to repeat.\n\nHe left the room and walked down the passage to admonish Joan, yet knowing that there was nothing he could honestly chide her for. She sang at her scales for the same reason he sang in his bath. In both of them, father and daughter, was the carelessness and joy of air, the certainty that, whatever they did on earth with effort, toil, and purpose, had in it\u2014 behind it and sustaining it\u2014the glad sweet element of air. Air had no divisions, it was whole\u2014a universal radiant element containing end and beginning, everything. To act with it instantaneously was to be confident that fulfilment lay already in the smallest germ of every action. 'The cottage lies there waiting for us now. Just look for it with faith and careless happiness... The perfect music lies within these boring scales. Just sing to them. It brings accomplishment more swiftly near!'\n\nBut on opening the door and poking his head inside, he found that she had ceased singing and was diligently practising.\n\n'That's right,' he said, smiling; 'it's rather dull, but stick to it. It'll please your mother, and before long you'll be able to play all my favourite pieces.'\n\nShe stopped, swung round on the stool and looked at him. Her little face in its wreath of shining hair was very earnest, the eyes big with wonder as though she had made a great discovery. He had seen a robin thus, perched on a window-sill, its head cocked sideways at a crumb of bread\u2014 poise, alertness, happiness in the attitude and gesture.\n\n'Well,' he asked, 'what is it now? 'And pointing to the maze of black printed notes, she said: 'I only wanted to tell you something I've got hold of\u2014There are only seven notes after all\u2014only seven altogether.'\n\n'That's all, yes.'\n\n'All the music in the world comes out of that\u2014just seven notes\u2014'\n\n'Combinations of them\u2014with a lot of half-notes too,' he explained.\n\n'But half-notes only suggest. The real notes are the thing\u2014just seven of them. Isn't it jolly? They'll never frighten me again. Now, listen a moment, Daddy, I'll play you what the wings sing when they rush along. You know\u2014the sound in the air when birds fly past:\n\n\u2003Flow, fly, flow,\n\n\u2003Wherever I am, I go;\n\n\u2003I live in the air\n\n\u2003Without thought or care,\n\n\u2003Flow, fly, flow...\n\nShe played and sang till he felt every atom in his being moving rhythmically to the little doggerel. He took her in his arms and hugged her.\n\n'Ah,' he cried, 'I put all this into you unconsciously, and now you're explaining it to me. That's fun indeed, isn't it?'\n\n'And I've only used three notes for it\u2014for the tune, I mean,' she exclaimed breathlessly as he released her. 'I've still got four more.'\n\nHe blew her a kiss from the door and went on the top of a 'bus to Dizzy & Dizzy, who gave him a list of orders to view some half-dozen desirable cottages and bungalows in Sussex that seemed reasonably within the price he could afford, but none of which, it so happened, was the thing he wanted.\n\nAnd during the day, odd thoughts and feelings, born of that mystic dawn he had witnessed with the birds, came flitting round him. Being wordless, he could only translate them as best occurred to him. It was impossible to keep pace with many-sided life to-day unless a new method were discovered. To skim adequately among the numerous sources of information and instruction, wings were needed. With their speed and economy of energy the feathered mind could dive into all, absorb fresh knowledge instantly, and pass on swiftly to yet further sources. At present complete exhaustion followed the mere bodily and mental effort to keep abreast even with one line of thought and action. The bird's-eye view, involving bird's-eye action, alone could manage it. It was a case of flow, fly, flow, indeed. He was dimly aware of a new method coming softly, silently, from the air. Air meant the spiritual method. While the body, guided by surefooted, slow, laborious reason, attended to its necessary duties on the ground, the mind, the soul, the spirit would flow, fly, flow, with the new powers of the air...\n\nHe played lovingly with the idea. He thought of birds as the aborigines of the air, the pioneers perhaps. They represent no climax of evolution. On the earth men appeared last, preceded by many stages of earlier development. Birds were, possibly, but the first, the earliest inhabitants of their delicious realm, still imperfect, but alive with a promise for mankind. They were not an ideal, they merely offered their best qualities to those below.\n\nThe Promise of the Air ran through him like a strain of glad spring music. Air, he knew, as Joan used the term, meant aether, the mother of all air. She dreamed of passages to dim old gleaming Hercules adrift in open space, to Cassiopeia, happily, mightily wandering, to the golden blossoms of the Nebulae's garden of shining gold. Across his mind the great flocks of stars were flying...\n\n'I'm not a \"miserable sinner.\" It's a lie that \"there is no health in me.\" Nor do I believe that another man can \"forgive my sins,\" because I confess them to him, or that those who refuse to believe as I do\u2014whatever it is I do believe!\u2014shall forfeit my special favours, least of all suffer the smallest prick of a pin on that account...!'\n\nIf ever he had been affected by the dogmatic teaching of any person or group of persons, alive or dead, he broke finally with them in that moment." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 297", + "text": "Remembering his promise, though made only to himself, he proposed going to the cinema. Tom, who was present during the discussion that followed, wanted a Revue, but was overruled.\n\n'You can't smoke,' he objected, but what he really meant was that he wanted to have his physical sensations stimulated by suggestive reminders that he was a breeding rabbit that had never left earth\u2014earth which a single shower could turn into mud.\n\n'That won't hurt you for one night, Tom,' observed Mother, aware vaguely of his difficulty.\n\nThey chose the best the advertisements supplied and went off after an early dinner. In a sort of bundle they started, Mother in her finery forgetting the performance was in the dark, Joan, smiling, neat and bright, her little ankles tripping, and Mr. Wimble important, holder of the purse-strings and full of anticipatory wonder. Tom, smoking cheap gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes, was superior and sulky. Like an untidy bundle the family made the journey towards Piccadilly Circus, a bundle with loose ends, patched corners, one end hardly belonging to the other, yet obviously coherent for all that, and with a spot of brilliant colour\u2014 Joan's bright, glancing eyes and eagerly pretty face.\n\nTom, having bought a halfpenny evening paper, read the sporting and financial news; his racing tips had proved false; his mood was ill-humoured; he eyed the girls on the pavement below, flicking his cigarette ash over the edge of the motor-bus from time to time.\n\n'What's on?' enquired a chance acquaintance across the gangway, with an eye on pretty Joan. 'Music hall or high-brow legitimate?'\n\n'Cinema,' returned Tom in a scratchy voice, 'with the family. I'm beat to the wide.'\n\n'Who's put the wind up you this time?' enquired his friend.\n\n'Family. They put it across me sometimes. Can't be helped.'\n\n'Good egg!' was the reply, as the youth looked past him admiringly at Joan.\n\n'Oh!\u2014my sister,' mentioned Tom, proudly, and with a flash of self-satisfaction; 'Joan, a friend of mine\u2014Mr. Spindle,' adding under his breath something about Rolls Royce and Limousines, as though Mr. Spindle, who was actually merely an employ\u00e9 in some motor works, owned several expensive cars.\n\nJoan, ignorant of the strange modern slang they used, nodded sweetly, then turned to watch the surging throng of energetic humanity on the pavement below. She was in the corner seat. Father and Mother sat below\u2014inside. The sea of human beings rolled past like waves of water.\n\n'Everybody going somewhere,' she said half to herself with a thrill of wonder. It struck her that, though hardly any one looked up, some must surely want to fly, and one or two, at least, must know they could. She wondered there were no collisions. All dodged and slid past and side-stepped so cleverly. The energy, skill, and subconscious calculation they used were considerable. In each brain was a distinct and separate purpose, a mental picture of the spot each busily made for, while yet all seemed governed by one common denial: that nothing off the earth was conceivable even. Like crowding ants, they stuck to the ground, shuffling laboriously along the world-worn routes. Their minds, she was persuaded, knew heavy ways, unaware that horizons are made to lift. She watched the herd in search for amusement after the drudgery of the day, engaged upon a common search. What they really sought, she felt, was air. Only they knew it not. In ignorance they toiled to find artificial excitement\u2014 pleasure.\n\nShe longed to lift them up and swing them loose into undivided space, let them know freedom, lightness, spontaneous carelessness. If they would only dance\u2014it would be something.\n\n'And all going to the same place,' she added aloud. She sighed.\n\n'I hope to God they're not,' said Tom in his scratchy voice, thinking of the cinema.\n\n'Eh?' remarked Mr. Spindle, with a thrust forward of his head.\n\nThe motor-bus lumbered into the Circus and drew up, leaning over to one side.\n\n'So long,' said Tom to his friend, 'we push off here.'\n\nMr. Spindle offered his hand to Joan, who shook it, but looked past him, refusing the gleaming eye he offered her at the same time. They clambered down to their parents on the pavement, and joined the throng that swept heavily into the pretentious doorways of the cinema building. As they went in Joan glanced at her mother and realised that she loved her. She looked so worried and so helpless. It was pathetic how heavily she moved. Age! The age of the body, of course. But why should she be old? She was barely forty. She was out, seeking with a good expenditure of energy, for pleasure. It struck the girl suddenly that her mother's ignorance was singular. She knew so little. Somewhere about her\u2014at the corners of her mouth, flickering in her opaque eyes, in the tilt of her ears\u2014was still a vestige of youth and fun and joy. But Mother ignored it, crawling willingly with the herd. Yet the bird lurked in her surely. In spite of this heavy crawling, there were wings tucked away in her somewhere.\n\n'Mother, we're out on a spree,' whispered Joan. 'Wherever we are, we go! Let me carry your bag?'\n\n'Eh, Joan? What d'you say? Don't shove, my love. We shall get nowhere that way.' It was the Is-my-hat-on-straight tone of voice\u2014self the centre. She yielded the tiresome bag gratefully.\n\n'Everywhere, mother,' Joan whispered gaily. 'We'll get everywhere because we belong everywhere. Besides I'm not shoving.'\n\nShe glanced round at the other people, all pressing thickly towards the booking-office. All of them had troubles, joys, hopes, fears, and vague desires. All were out to enjoy themselves. Only their faces were so anxious, lined, and care-worn. They wore an enormous quantity of manufactured clothing, and each article of clothing represented similar joys, hopes, fears, and vague desires, complicated toil of those who had made and sold them.\n\nShe felt a curious longing\u2014to collect them all together on the roof one morning so that they might dance and hear the birds sing at dawn. If only they could realise the bird-life and what it meant\u2014care-less, happy, singing, dancing; deep purpose underneath it all, but that purpose not clogged with the stupefying detail of unimportant items. The trouble all had taken to clothe themselves suitably for this particular enjoyment was alone enough to kill any spontaneity. She smelt the fields, the keen, fresh air, the dew. She heard a lark rise whistling through the silver air...\n\nAnd she glanced back at her mother. Her mother was obviously adorned\u2014 with effort and difficulty. She looked as if she had walked through a Liberty curtain and parts of the curtain had stuck to her in patches. This complexity of cloth and silk and beads was wrong\u2014funny at any rate. She sighed.\n\n'It's all right,' said her father, catching the sigh behind him. 'We must take our turn, you know. But I'm out for the best seats\u2014no matter what it costs.' It was like a breath of air to hear him say it.\n\n'Extravagance,' put in Mother under her breath, overhearing. 'But it is an exception, isn't it?' Her mind fixed upon the difficult side of existence, the cost in labour and in pain.\n\n'Eh?' said Wimble. He put his gaudy tie straight with a free half-finger.\n\n'It isn't every night, I mean,' whispered Mother. 'It's an exception.' She looked challengingly at the listening crowd. It was very warm. The air smelt of people, clothes, and cheap scent. She was aware of scullery-maids, boot-polish, stable-boys, and wages. The ham in the larder\u2014had they put the fly-cover over it? Oh dear, how sordid even enjoyment was!\n\n'Move on, please,' boomed the deep voice of a policeman, and everybody moved on a step or half a step, casting looks of admiration, respect, and exasperation at the Great Bobby who represented rigidity, law, order, and that vague, distant power\u2014the Government. To be spontaneous meant to be arrested, evidently.\n\n'Wot've you got left?' asked Wimble mildly, facing at last the booking-clerk, then added quickly, 'Good. I'll take the three,' and put the money down. 'No\u2014four, I mean; four, of course. How stupid of me! Thanks, thanks very much.' He had forgotten himself. Also, he had felt for a second that he couldn't afford the price, but yet somehow it didn't matter. It was stupid, it was extravagant, it was un-practical; no one in their senses could have approved his conduct. The clerk had explained briefly that no cheap seats were left; there was nothing under four shillings\u2014and Wimble, without an instant's hesitation, had snapped up the expensive seats.\n\nJoan witnessed it with a rush of joy. She saw her father slip several silver discs across the counter and take pink slips of paper in exchange. But it was not his extravagance, nor the prospect of greater comfort, that caused her joy; it was the unhesitating spontaneity. Daddy had not haggled; without hesitation he had taken the risk. He had flown... In reality he could not afford it, yet only a stingy convention might have urged him to be careful. And he had not been care-full.\n\n'Take no thought...' whispered a voice\u2014was it Joan's?\u2014in his ear, as they pressed forward. And, as a consequence, he immediately bought several programmes where one would have been sufficient. Ah! They were in full flight. Their wings were spread. The earth lay mapped beneath them. In the silver, dewy dawn they flew. How keen the sweet, fresh air...!\n\nHe looked at her. 'You don't earn the family income, my dear,' he observed drily, half-ashamed, half-proud. He fingered the pink tickets nervously, clumsily.\n\n'But I will,' she replied. 'Besides, there's heaps for everybody really.'\n\n'You're an unpractical absurdity,' he murmured\u2014then gasped.\n\nIt was the child's reply that made him gasp:\n\n'We're alive! So we deserve it.'\n\nThey swept the meadows and the pine copse in their flight. There was a crimson dawn. They smelt the sea, the wide salt marshes. Freedom of space was theirs.\n\nPerhaps he didn't quite understand what she meant, yet it made him feel happy and careless. In a sense it made him feel\u2014spiritual. She had said something that was beyond the reach of language, of accurate language. But it was true, true as a turnip. It satisfied him as a mouthful of mashed potatoes, and was as easy to eat and swallow. What a simile! He laughed to himself.\n\n'Be more accurate in your language,' he said slyly.\n\n'And stick in grammar all your life!' she replied. They moved on. Tom looked superior and aloof. He did not belong to this ridiculous party.\n\n'Hurry up, Daddy,' and Joan poked him in the ribs. 'Mother's waiting. You're thinking of your old Primers.' It was true. He had paused a moment. A sentence had flashed into his mind and made him stop, while Mother and Tom were waiting in the corridor beyond, something about the 'courage of a fly.'\n\nA fly, the most fearless of attack of all creatures, an insect incapable of fear. He remembered that Athena gave Menelaus, in order that he might resist Hector\u2014what? Not weapons or money or skill or strength. No. Athena gave him\u2014'the courage of a fly.'\n\nIt struck him suddenly that the reckless courage of a fly\u2014a fly that settles on the nose, the lips, the hand of a being enormously more powerful and terrible than itself\u2014was unequalled among all living creatures. No lion or tiger dared the half, no man the quarter. But a fly, depending solely on its swift, unconquerable wings and power of darting flight, risked these amazing odds. He\u2014in paying this high price for the tickets recklessly\u2014had shown the courage of the fly: the sneers of Tom, the abuse of Mother, the scorn of cautious and careful convention. He had the money in his pocket, then why not spend it? His labour had deserved it; he had earned it; he was indeed 'alive.' Like an audacious fly he had settled on the nose of Fate. And all this Joan had snapped into a sentence:\n\n'We deserve it. We're alive!'\n\n'Is it all right, dear?' asked Mother anxiously. She was stuck with her elaborate flounces in a corner of the corridor. The programme-seller was at her elbow, pressingly.\n\n'All right,' he replied, waving the programmes like a flag of victory, and led the way towards the seats. 'Everything's paid.' He bowed, dismissingly, to the girl. He walked on his toes.\n\nThey went in. Mother flounced down proudly, as though the cost, the risk, were hers. Anyhow, they had paid for their seats and had a right to them. Now they could see the show in comfort and with easy consciences. There was a vague feeling that too much had been expended, but it was discreetly ignored. Vanity forbade. Economy might follow. Let it follow. They could enjoy themselves for a few hours. They would enjoy themselves. Some one had paid good money and money well earned. Uneasiness was vulgar. Daddy's flying attitude influenced them all secretly, and the great human power of make-believe, so gingerly expended as a rule, asserted itself. They took the moment as birds take the air. They flew with him.\n\nSettling themselves into their front-row seats, they fingered their programmes, and felt like Royalty.\n\nMother looked round her at the inferior human mass. 'We can see quite well,' she observed. 'You were lucky, Joe. You got good seats.' She was wholly unaware that she tried her wings.\n\n'Not bad,' scratched Tom, equally unaware that he flew behind her, though parting from the sticky loamy soil with difficulty. Had his companion of the motor-bus been with him, he would doubtless have said 'Good egg!' instead.\n\n'It's all right,' said Wimble. 'Like to see a programme? 'He passed over several\u2014all he had. He felt uplifted, without knowing why. He felt reckless, extravagant, careless, happy. He had touched the element of air without knowing it. He had forgotten 'money,' toil, conventional rigid formality, the terror of the herd, everything that compressed life into a four-footed rut, like the rut trodden by cows and pigs and rabbits. He had, for a moment, left the earth. He had, however, no idea that he was hovering in mid-air. Having taken a risk with courage\u2014the courage of the fly\u2014he was not quite positive of his dizzy elevation. The strange, intuitive, natural certainty of Joan was not yet quite his. He caught his breath a little in this rarefied air, from this spiritual point of view\u2014 this bird's-eye aspect\u2014he was by no means sure of himself.\n\nThe rush of the wonderful cinema then began, and he forgot himself.\n\nThey experienced the sense such a performance leaves behind of having been\u2014as Mother put it\u2014all over the place. Sitting in the dark the individual at first is conscious only of himself, neighbours ignored if not forgotten. The screen then flashes into light, and with the picture, consciousness flashes across the world. The lie of the stationary photograph is corrected, time is denied, partially at least, and space is unable to boast and swagger as it loves to do. The cinema frees and extends the consciousness, restores the past, and sets distance close beneath the eyes. Only the watching self remains\u2014pregnant symbol!\u2014in the darkness.\n\nIt was one of the best performances in London; within an hour or two the audience danced from the dingy streets of the metropolis into the sunlight of India, Africa, and of islands among far southern seas. The kaleidoscope of other lands and other ways of thinking, acting, living carried them away with understanding sympathy. From savage wild life drinking at water-holes in the sun-drenched Tropics, they darted across half-charted oceans and watched the penguin and the polar bear amid arctic ice. Over mountains, down craters, flying above cities and peering deep under water, the various experiences of strange distant life came into their ken. They flew about the planet. The leaders of the world gazed at them, so close and real that their emotions were legible on their magnified features. They smiled or frowned, then flashed away, and yet still were there, living, thinking, willing this and that. Widely separated portions of the vast human family presented themselves vigorously, registered a tie of kinship, and were gone again about their business, now become in some sense the business of the audience too. Fighting, toiling, loving, hating, meeting death and adventure by sea and land, creating and destroying, differing much in colour, custom, clothing, and the rest, yet human as Wimble and his family were human, possessed with the same griefs, hopes, and joys, the same passion to live, the same fear of death\u2014one great family.\n\nJoan slipped her arm into that of her father; they nestled closely, very much in sympathy as the world rushed past their eyes upon the screen.\n\n'We're flying,' she whispered, with a squeeze, as the penguins on the polar ice gave place to a scene of negroes sweating in the sun and munching sugarcane while they lazily picked the fluffy cotton. 'We're everywhere all-at-once, don't you see?' A moment later, as though to point her words, they looked down upon a mapped-out county from an aeroplane. The unimportance of earth was visible in the distance.\n\n'You can't fly under water anyhow,' mumbled Wimble, as they left the air and flashed with a submarine upon sponges, coral, and inquisitive, perfectly poised fish. A black man was trying to knife a shark.\n\n'I can see what they feel though,' was the whispered answer. 'Inside their watery minds, I mean.'\n\n'Wherever I am I go,' he thought, but didn't say it, because by the time he had reflected how foolish it was to remain stuck only upon the minute point of his own tiny personal experience, they were climbing with a scientific Italian of eminence down a crater full of smoke and steam, and could almost hear the thunder of the explosions. But while they went down, everything else went up. Smoke, steam, masses of rock all trying to rise. 'Gravity is the devil,' he remembered; 'it keeps us from flying into the sun.'\n\nThe idea made him chuckle, and Joan pinched his arm, giggling too audibly in her excitement.\n\n'Hush!' said Mother. They watched in silence then; a bird's-eye view of the planet was what they watched. With each picture they took part. Every corner of the globe, with its different activities, touched their hearts and minds with interest\u2014busy, rushing life in various forms, and all going on simultaneously, at this very moment\u2014now. Life obviously was one. The strange unity was convincing. Nothing they saw was alien to themselves, for they took part in it. In each picture they 'wondered what it felt like.' They took for an instant, longer or shorter, the point of view of a new aspect of life, of something as yet they had not actually experienced. They longed\u2014or dreaded\u2014to stand within that huge cavern of blue lonely ice and hear the waves of the Polar Sea lick up the snow; to taste that sugary cane with animal-white teeth, and feel the fluffy cotton between thick, lumpy fingers; to swim under water and look up instead of down; to crawl fearfully a little nearer to the molten centre of the planet through smoke and fire and awful thundering explosions. They longed or dreaded. Mentally, that is, they experienced a new relationship in each separate case, a relationship that stretched a suburban consciousness beyond its normal ken.\n\n'It's very tiring,' mentioned Mother, during a brief interval of glaring light, 'and hurts my eyes. And I can't see why they want to show us those half-naked natives. I'm glad I'm English. Disgusting people, I call them.'\n\n'They'll improve it, you know,' observed Tom; 'the flickering, I mean. It's a great invention. Somebody made a bit of cash there all right.'\n\nOne couple, at any rate, in the four-shilling seats felt the tie and knew their consciousness extended to include them all. They were engaged with all these various folk and multifarious activities. Humanity was one. The cinema shouted it aloud. The sense of collective consciousness was stirred.\n\n'Well,' gasped Mother, blinking her eyes in the sudden light at the end, 'that was a show, wasn't it?' She seemed tired rather than exhilarated.\n\n'Not half,' declared Tom, feeling for his cigarettes. He kept the programmes, putting both into his pocket.\n\n'I'm glad I'm English anyhow,' repeated Mother, stationary at the mouth of her hole in the ground; but whether she despised the Hottentots, the Eskimo, or the penguins, she did not specify. It was her final verdict merely. The statement said simply that she was satisfied to be her little self, balanced safely on a clod of earth, in a spot of the universe called England. Extension of consciousness gave her no joy at all. She felt unsafe.\n\nThey left the theatre slowly, their minds shrinking back with a touch of disappointment, almost of pain, within the prescribed limits of normal, practical life again. Wimble felt he had been flying, and had just come back; he settled with difficulty. In the brief space between the vestibule and the door his thoughts continued flying. There was excitement and anticipation in him. 'The next stage,' he said to himself, 'will be hearing. We shall hear the people talk. After that\u2014not so very far away either\u2014we shall see 'em now, and no interval of time at all. Machinery won't be used. Our minds will do the trick. We'll see everywhere with our thoughts!' He remembered his Telepathy Primer, giving individual instances, as authentic and well proven as any reasonable person could desire. He felt sure this vast, general development must follow\u2014some faculty of air, swift and flashing as light\u2014the bird's-eye view.\n\nThe murky street, with its damp and chilly air, struck him in the face as he stood with his family a moment, then walked down the steps. There was still a luminous glow in the western sky above the roofs. Mother took his arm to steady herself; Tom was behind, his eyes roving hungrily; Joan flitted just in front.\n\n'Our 'bus is over there,' said Mother, pointing with a black-gloved hand.\n\n'We'll take a taxi, my dear,' was his reply. He hailed one, bundled his astonished family inside, wished the driver 'Good-evening' with a smile, and slammed the door upon his own coat-tails.\n\n'But you haven't told him the address,' said Mother.\n\n'He ought to know,' exclaimed Wimble, 'but he's not a bird yet, so I'd better tell him.'\n\n'It might be safer,' added his wife sarcastically, holding on to his coat-tails as he leaned out of the window to do so.\n\nHe watched the crowd as they whirled away; he felt happy, happy, happy. With the damp London air he felt as though a part of him still sweltered in the golden sunshine, diving under blue clear water where the sponges and the corals grew. Soft breezes touched his cheek one minute, the next he laid his hand on glittering ice. He heard the surf crashing upon a palm-clad reef... These thronging people, policemen, costers, shop-folk, pale-faced workers, and over-dressed men and women of the big houses, all had some link with himself, that had been drawn closer; but so had the swarthy half-naked folk at the Antipodes who had just claimed his consciousness. They were all one really. Each nation seemed a mood. The sense of oneness leaped upon his heart and seized him.\n\n'It all happened without our even moving,' as Joan had said on the way home. 'I suppose everything's in us then, really. We're everywhere.' And while Tom's superior 'Oh, cut it out' seemed more than usually ignorant and silly, Wimble's heart flamed within him. For it came to him, like a promise of wind-borne freedom, that there existed in his own being an immense and mighty under-side that was only waiting to be organised into fuller, even into all-embracing, consciousness. Man, he felt sure again, was a cosmic, not only a planetary, being. He could know the stars. The real self was of air..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 298", + "text": "'Look here, Father,' said Joan next day, 'why is it\u2014' then paused, unable apparently to express herself.\n\n'Eh, child?' He gasped, thinking her question consisted of those three words alone, and wondering how in the world he was going to satisfy her.\n\n'Why is it,' she went on the next moment, 'that wherever we are we want to be somewhere else, and whatever we know we want to know something else\u2014 more at any rate? And we never want it alone. We want to tell everything to some one else, I mean.'\n\nFather almost preferred the first question\u2014it left openings for vaguer answers. This definiteness increased his difficulty rather. He scratched his head and passed his fingers through his hair, which looked just then as if it would neither stay on nor down. He smoothed it deliberately, thinking as hard and quickly as he could. He knew what the girl meant, of course, more or less.\n\n'The instinct to share what we like is, I suppose, a proof that we\u2014' he was going to say.\n\nBefore he could utter the words, however, she answered for him: 'Because we ought to be everywhere at once and know everything at once\u2014like in that cinema. Isn't that it?'\n\nMother, it so chanced, just then went past the open door along the corridor; she went steadily, not to say heavily; she was obviously in one place at a time, doing one thing at a time, a worthy, practical, useful human being, and what the world considers a valuable unit of humanity\u2014 yet surely, oh, surely, wrong and a wing-less entity clogged with earth and the limits that earth-ignorance involved. She was on her way to scold the servant, to order dinner, or to fetch socks to mend. Good. But it was the way she went about her job\u2014the un-birdy way\u2014that proved the badger in her. Air and the careless joy of air was nowhere in her, not even in her most helpful actions. 'One should take life as a bird takes the air,' he was thinking again. It had become a motto.\n\nAnd a flood of shadowy thoughts swept down upon his mind. Joan, when he turned to find her, had already gone from the room. He was alone. The half-read newspaper lay upon his knee; Tom had long since gone to the office; the sun shone in across the sea of roofs and chimney-pots; he saw a white, soft, fluffy cloud bedded in the blue. A swift shot gloriously across the narrow strip of sky. And this flood of shadow thoughts poured in and out of his mind like a hundred thousand swifts.\n\nThey would have filled an entire Primer if written out and printed; but in his mind, together with their host of suggestive correlations, they flashed and vanished with the speed and ease of the swift, a bird that seemed only wings, without body, legs, or head\u2014powerful, graceful flight personified. The laborious absurdity of words made him feel helpless and rather stupid. He felt lonely, too, exiled from a finer, easier state of being to which something in him properly and rightfully belonged. The wings of the spirit stirred and fluttered in him. He sighed. Joan's sentence vibrated in him like a song, for nothing so much as music sets free the bird in human beings, enabling the soul to soar beyond all possible categories of time and space, beyond all confinements and limitations, even beyond death.\n\nIt was his daughter's remark that led in this rushing shower of thoughts that followed: 'Why is it that, wherever we are, we want to be elsewhere?'\n\nPeople as a whole were always afflicted with this desire to be somewhere else. It was true. In London he longed for windy lanes, but in the windy lanes he thought how nice it would be to see the shops and people in the streets; at a party he would think with longing of the cosy room at home, the book and chair beside the fire-corner with his pipe, yet in that corner with pipe and book he would suddenly lay them down and remember with envy the gaiety of company, the talk, the laughter, and the bright companionship he was missing. It was often, if not always, so: the desire to be elsewhere and otherwise seemed inherent in human beings; they were never content or satisfied with the place they were in at a given moment.\n\n'It's the restlessness of the race,' he decided, 'for whom movement is so laborious, slow, and costly. If they moved as a bird moves, swiftly, instantly, and without trouble or cost, this restlessness would not be felt.'\n\nThen he paused. 'But it's not merely that,' flashed through him, 'far, far more. It's the expression of a strange and deep belief: the belief that we ought to be, and should be, can be everywhere at once. This power lies in us somewhere, only as yet we haven't discovered how to use it... But it's coming, and air and flight, wings and speed are already its beckoning symbols. We're being mysteriously quickened. We ought to be able to know everything, and to be everywhere, at once, in touch with all the universe, able to draw on all its powers. We have the right. This longing so to know and be, this uneasy yearning in us, what is it but an affirmation, a conviction that we can so be? Our wings go fluttering in our tiny cages. Wherever I am I go\u2014and I am wherever my thought and desire are.'\n\nHe sat back and thought about it. It seemed to him a great discovery. He felt sure that somewhere in himself lay the power to be everywhere at once, one with everybody and everything. To be aware of everybody everywhere was the first step at any rate, and the cinema had dropped a hint that it was coming.\n\n'Well\u2014but the practical meaning of it\u2014what? The use that people like Mother should make of it\u2014what? Bodies will never actually fly. Certainly not, but thought flies already, and it only remains for consciousness to accompany it. Bodies, of course, are earth; yet they will, they must, grow lighter, more responsive, both as receiving and transmitting instruments, consciousness no longer focussed only where the body is. We shall be human cinemas,' he thought, 'going where we will, instantaneously and easily as a bird, seeing all and knowing all. Universal consciousness, of course, is a spiritual condition; it is an Air quality, space and time denied. The Kingdom of Air is within us. We shall experience air with its collective instantaneity...'\n\nHe folded his newspaper and went down the narrow corridor to his little private den. 'Oh, that I had the wings of a dove,' occurred to him and made him smile. 'A cry of the soul, of course,' he realised, as he took his twenty limited steps between the rigid walls. He stubbed his toe against the desk, and sat down in his revolving chair.\n\nThe ideas set in motion by Joan's remark continued flowing, flying through him. He seized what he could catch.\n\n'Our bodies, responding to a swifter, happier, more careless attitude of mind, will gradually grow lighter, more sensitive; become less dense and earthy; until at last we shall feel with everybody everywhere. No longer separate and cut off from others, divided as earth is divided, we shall win this immense increase of sympathy and be everywhere we want to be, every-at-once, as Joan put it. We shall move with our thought\u2014air! We shall have instantaneity\u2014air again! Our bodies may not fly, but our consciousness will fly to one another, as light flies across the universe unerringly from sun to sun\u2014bodies of light. Like the birds in England, we shall know when the Siberian ice has broken. We shall be off!'\n\nThe thrill of some mighty wisdom came very near.\n\nHe became strangely aware\u2014it was like the lifting of great wings within his soul\u2014that this collective, airy consciousness was already gathering the world into a flock; and it was the cinema, explained by Joan's brief sentence, that flashed the amazing and uplifting thought upon him.\n\nWhirling round and round in his revolving chair, reason tried to grapple with the rush of ideas. The contents of a hundred Primers rose higgledy-piggledy, to congest his mind and memory. But his soul, rising like a lark, outdistanced everything he had ever read. The one clear dazzling certainty was this: 'We shall no longer be cut off and separate from others.' A variant, surely, of loving, and therefore knowing, all neighbours as ourselves. A thousand years as one day! To be everywhere at once and to know everybody was, after all, but to slip the cables of the tiny, separate self, and experience the Whole. Hence the desire to be always elsewhere and otherwise. Hence, too, the innate yearning to share experiences of all kinds with others. 'Nirvana' dropped from a forgotten Primer into him, and for the first time pages of laborious explanation utterly ignored, he grasped its gracious meaning fully. 'To meet the Lord in the air and be for ever with him,' came another clich\u00e9. They poured and rained upon him in their naked meanings, undisguised by words.\n\n'Ah! To live in the Whole was not, then, to lose individuality, but to extend and share it!' He spun round and round happily in his chair. 'Grand bird idea, and air ideal!' He saw in his heart the nations taking wing at last, leaving earth below them, free of space and free of time, sharing this new and undivided consciousness. It was spiritual, of course; yet not an inaccessible nor a different state; it was a state growing naturally and truly out of the physical. Spontaneous living and the bird's-eye point of view were the first faint signs of its approach...\n\nThe chair stopped turning, while he filled and lit his pipe, watching the clouds of blue smoke float here and there in wreaths and eddies. Joan's eyes peered across it at him like a phantom's... 'It's immense, but very simple,' he was thinking, 'her funny little song puts it all in a nutshell... and the way she tries to live...' when a heavy tread disturbed him and something came into the room.\n\n'Joe dear!' said his wife as she entered,\u2014'but you've got no air here!' She opened a window, while he at once sprang up and opened another. Her manner gave him the impression that she had come in with a definite purpose; she had something important she wished to say. He decided to let it come out naturally. He would wait.\n\n'Not both,' she said, 'it makes a draught,' and closed her own.\n\n'Bless you, my dear,' he exclaimed, 'you do look after me splendidly.' He gave her a sudden hug and kiss that startled her. Looking at him in a puzzled, wistful way, she smiled, and something of long-forgotten days slipped in magically between them for an instant. He saw a yellow scarf across the smoke; she saw perhaps, a breathless boy with a field of golden buttercups behind him...\n\n'You catch cold so easily,' she mumbled, then added quickly, 'the country will suit us all better, won't it?'\n\n'Yes,' he answered, 'yet, once we're there, we shall want to be somewhere else, I suppose\u2014'\n\n'Oh, I hope not, Joe,' with a Martha sigh. 'Whatever makes you think that?'\n\n'We can be, anyhow; we must remember that.'\n\n'Oh dear, Joe, you're very restless these days,' she exclaimed, and the way she said it made him realise her customary load of apprehension, her care-full, heavy way of taking life, seeing the difficulties first. Pessimism was a sure sign of waning life-forces. He felt pity and sympathy. And instantly an eddy of his recent whirlwind ideas swept down upon him and joy followed. He longed to communicate this joy to his wife, the joy she had known in her days of courtship long ago when the airy consciousness had touched her. And, as though to emphasise the contrast between their points of view, a wasp buzzed in through the open window just then, and Mother\u2014shrank.\n\nIn a flash he understood her very clearly. Her attitude to life was fear. Unable to leave the ground, she was always afraid of being caught. If she met a cow, it would toss her; a goat, it meant to butt her; a dog, a cat only waited an opportunity to bite or scratch, a wasp came in on purpose to sting her and not merely because it had lost its way. She invariably locked the door of her room and looked under the bed; she was nervous about lamps\u2014they would blow up if she tried to put them out. Probably all these disasters would happen to her; her shrinking attitude of fear attracted the very thing she dreaded. People similarly would deceive her, since she expected, even demanded, it of them. In a word, the trouble she dreaded she attracted.\n\n'Fly at anything you're afraid of,' he said suddenly. 'That paralyses it. It can't happen then. Or, better still, fly over it.' But she looked so bewildered, puzzled, even unhappy, that he got up and took her hand. 'Don't mind me, Mother dear,' he said soothingly; 'I've got an idea, that's all.' His heart brimmed full with comfort; her face said so plainly 'I don't understand, I feel out of it, I'm a little frightened! Only I can't express it quite.' 'It's immense but very simple,' he went on; 'Joan put it into me, I believe, first, and Joan was born out of us both, out of you and me, in those brilliant happy days when we were afraid of nothing. So it belongs to you, too, you see.' He paused, giving her an opportunity to state her mission.\n\n'It's all a bit beyond me, I'm afraid,' said Mother patiently, an anxious expression in her eyes. But there was admiration as well. It occurred to her perhaps that she might have married a genius after all. She did not yet make her special and particular announcement, however. She would do so in her own way presently, no doubt.\n\n'Mother,' he said abruptly, 'there's nothing in the universe beyond you.' He dropped her hand and stood erect, opening his short arms to the sky outside the window. The wasp buzzed out at that moment, and left him her undivided attention. His eyes were fixed upon the clouds where the swallows darted. 'Mother,' he went on, 'I'm illogical, unscientific, ignorant rather, and very confused in mind\u2014in mind,' he emphasised 'but this immense idea beyond all books and learning has come to me, and I'm sure it's wisdom, though I call it Air.'\n\n'Air,' she repeated slowly. 'Yes, dear.'\n\n'Air, dear, yes, and that means living like the birds, more carelessly, more lightly, taking no thought for the morrow\u2014not shirking work and duties and so on, but\u2014'\n\n'But we know all that,' she interrupted. 'I mean, we've read it. It's this sort of having-faith business. It's all right for people with money.'\n\n'The very people,' he corrected her, 'for whom it's most difficult.'\n\n'Oh dear,' and she heaved another Martha sigh. There was a pause. 'Couldn't you put it in a book, Joe\u2014write it?' she asked, pride in one eye and ambition in the other. He looked very much of a man, standing there so erect with his eyes fixed on space above her head. 'We could do with a bit extra, too.'\n\n'And might help other people,' he added, 'eh?'\n\nShe said nothing to that. 'It might sell; you never know.'\n\nHe shook his head. He realised, once again, the pathos in her, and at the same time that she vampired him. It's the pathetic people that ever vampire and exhaust those who are more vital.\n\n'I'm not literary,' he replied, 'not literary in that way. Only the few with air in them would catch my idea, and the others, the commonplace Press in particular which decides the sale of a book, would find a joke they could understand and call it air. And air is gas, you know.' He chuckled. 'Whereas what I mean is Air\u2014instantaneous unifier of thought and action, the L.C.D. of a new order of existence, a new point of view born of collective sympathy, as with a flock of birds, community involving something akin to the strange bird-wisdom and bird-knowledge\u2014' he took a deep breath\u2014'the solvent of all philosophic and religious problems\u2014'\n\nShe caught a word and clutched it. 'Religious people,' she put it hurriedly, 'might buy it\u2014a book like that.'\n\nHe came back from his flight with a thud, landing beside her. 'Their imagination is too sluggish, dear. As a rule, too, they have not intellect enough to detect the comic element in life. They can't laugh at themselves. They exclude joy and fun and play. They never really sing.'\n\n'They do, yes,' said Mother\u2014'I mean they don't. That's quite true.'\n\nShe settled herself more comfortably in her chair. Evidently she appreciated his talking to her of his intimate thought; she felt herself taken into his confidence and liked it. It made it easier for her to say what she had come to say. Noticing her gesture his own sympathy and pity deepened. 'Ah, Mother dear,' he exclaimed, touched by a sudden pathos,' it's wonderful to be alive, isn't it? And to be able to think and feel ideas tearing about inside you? It's worth everything\u2014just to be able to say \"I am,\" and still more wonderful if you can add \"I go.\" That's the secret. Live in the interest of the actual moment, but never imagine that it ties you there, eh? Life lies at your feet in a map; you can take what direction you please. Choice is your own, you can take or leave\u2014as literally as when you stand above a jeweller's counter. One person chooses the bright stones, another the dark. It's all a matter of selection. On a picnic you may select the midge that stings you, the few drops of rain that fell, or the midges that did not sting you... You can choose gloom or joy, I mean, just as you\u2014'\n\n'Joe dear,' she interrupted, sitting forward in her chair, 'there's something I wanted to say to you\u2014seriously.'\n\nHe took her hand again. He had noticed the growing pucker between her eyes and knew the difficulty she experienced in unburdening herself of something. He had chattered in this way to give her confidence and show his sympathy. But she had not followed, had not understood. She had remained safe in the mouth of her hole.\n\n'Talking of religion, as you were just now,' she went on with an effort rather, 'I\u2014I wanted to talk to you about it.' There was a hint, but a very tiny hint, of challenge in her voice.\n\n'Of course, of course,' he said encouragingly, patting the hand he held.\n\nThere was a moment's silence, while their eyes met and he smiled into her troubled face. What she was about to say meant much to her, and she feared opposition. She took a deeper breath.\n\n'I'm thinking of becoming High Church,' she announced.\n\n'Admirable!' he exclaimed. 'I'm delighted!'\n\n'What! You don't mind, dear?'\n\n'It's just exactly what'll suit you,' he replied happily. 'Just what you need.'\n\n'But very High Church\u2014it means confession, you know,' she went on quickly, relieving herself of ideas evidently long pent up, 'and it must be very helpful, I think, knowing one's sins forgiven.'\n\n'Helpful, and very pleasant,' he agreed, lowering his eyes from hers. The sudden sense of his own failure towards her pained him. She needed some one to lean on, to confide in, to unburden herself upon, and she turned to a paid official instead of to himself. She didn't know yet that she could confess to herself and so forgive herself, which meant understanding her sins and deciding not to repeat them. She needed some one who could do this for her. It was the stage she was at. 'Splendid,' he reflected, 'there were creeds for every stage. What a mercy!' And while she explained herself now without shyness, but with a confusion as great as his own, at his stage, he listened to her as vaguely as, doubtless, she had listened to him. He glanced down at his newspaper, not to read it exactly, but in the way a man who wants to think\u2014to think subconsciously perhaps\u2014takes up the object nearest to his hand and regards it attentively. His eye ran along the print, while his thought was: 'She wants something, some one to lean upon, of course, poor soul. I'm not sufficient, I don't give her sympathy enough. I'll do better in future. Her wings are on the flutter.'\n\n'... Something to guide and help one a bit,' he heard her saying.\n\n'The very thing, Mother, the very thing,' he put in. 'I'm so glad. It'll speed you up. Quickening\u2014that's it, isn't it? Quickening of the spirit, and of the body too,' he added. 'You'll be flying with us next!'\n\nAnd while she poured into his ears the confused but genuine story of her need, his own mind continued its own wordless thoughts. He saw the millions of history wading through the creeds, and, thank heaven, there were creeds enough to satisfy every type. For himself, a creed seemed to play the r\u00f4le of a porter in a mountain climb\u2014carrying the weight from the climber's shoulders, but never guiding. Nevertheless, he blessed them all, and the Creed Primers in a long series with red covers and black lettering flashed across his memory. 'All true,' he realised, 'every blessed one of them. And no wonder each man swears by his own that it alone is true. For it is true; it's exactly what he needs.'\n\n'... I was sure you wouldn't mind, Joe dear. I knew you'd understand,' came from Mother at last.\n\n'And so you shall, dear. It'll help you along magnificently. We'll start the moment we get into the country\u2014start it up, eh?'\n\n'I have begun already,' she said, more sure of herself.\n\n'Better still,' was his reply.\n\nShe got up, patted his shoulder awkwardly, kissed him, and stood a moment by his chair; a second later the door closed behind her. But hardly had her step died away along the corridor than the words his eye had rested upon absent-mindedly in the newspaper, rose and offered themselves. It was a coincidence, of course, but coincidences do occur. The sentence lay in the middle of a paragraph concerned with some new book or other, a book on Russia, he discovered, by glancing higher: '... She has a far-reaching vision, and her Church at least has for long been preoccupied with the idea of the union of humanity... The idea of brotherhood and even universal brotherhood, permeates all classes of society...'; while opposite, and level with it in the adjoining column, oddly enough, was a notice of an article in some important Review or other with the title 'The New Religion.' The sentence quoted that caught his eye referred to the Church of England: 'A pitifully forlorn body, bankrupt in valour and policy, resource and prestige.' No one To-day with spiritual needs could, apparently, rely upon it; the new spirit regarded it as prehistoric. The people were far ahead of it already...\n\nHe laid the paper down and wondered; the two statements capped his flying ideas so appositely.\n\n'Yes, there's a new thing coming into life,' he exclaimed aloud. 'It's in the air, even in this vulgar halfpenny paper.' He relit his pipe and smoked a moment hard. 'Of course it's not generally realised yet,' he went on to himself between the puffs; 'but that's not odd after all: it's taken the world two thousand years to realise Christ, and only a few realised Him when He was there. When\u2014how\u2014will this new spirit touch us all...? What's got to happen first, I wonder?'\n\nHe sighed and a curious shiver ran down his spine. Nothing, he remembered, was born, nothing big and deep ever came to birth, without travail and upheaval. He was conscious of this strange shiver in his being. He almost shuddered. His pipe went out. Through the open window he looked down upon the crowded pavements, but the next instant looked up to where the swallows danced and twittered happily in the summer light and air.\n\nThe vision in Maida Vale came back to him when the masses, clothed in black, had seemed to rise and open a million mighty wings. He remembered the singular idea of blood that had accompanied it. And again a shudder touched him.\n\n'Something's got to happen first,' he sighed, 'before all can take the air. Something's got to happen.' And then, as a burst of sunshine and cool wind entered the room together by the window, a sudden conviction swept him off his feet. The world blew open; the nations rose in a stupendous flock before his eyes; humanity as a unit spread its wings. 'something's going to happen,' he exclaimed, 'but out of it will grow the new birth of happy air!' There was both joy and shuddering in his heart, but the joy was uppermost.\n\nHe met his wife in the passage on his way out a little later. She button-holed him for a moment, a new confidence and lightness in her, it almost seemed. She was High Church now. It concerned their daughter. Joan, she mentioned, was not quite like other girls of her own age. She was growing very fast in mind as well as in body. She suggested a doctor for her. 'A London doctor, and before we go to the country. We might have her overhauled, you know. She seems to me light-headed sometimes.' Mother felt sure it would be wise. This time she was not anxious, did not worry as usual; she merely thought of the girl's welfare in the best way that occurred to her. From her new High Church pedestal she looked out upon the world with a temporary new confidence, at any rate.\n\n'Admirable,' agreed her husband. 'I'll take her myself to-morrow.'\n\n'Why not to-day, dear?' she asked, relieved that she need not go herself.\n\n'We're off to look at cottages,' he told her. 'I'll take her to-morrow.' And the matter was settled thus." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 299", + "text": "The visit to the doctor was a great success, and Wimble left two guineas on the marble mantelpiece without regret. Joan was growing rapidly in mind and body, and mind and body should develop evenly if possible, otherwise there must be unbalance somewhere. 'It's a nervous, restless age we live in,' observed the physician; 'the mind is apt to take in too much nourishment and shoot ahead much quicker than it did when we were young, Mr. Wimble, and unless the body is well cared for, the nervous system cannot possibly keep even pace with the mass of instruction it receives at every turn. The young it is wisest to consider as healthy animals that need play, food, and rest in right proportions. Personally, I prefer to see the mind develop a trifle late, rather than too early.' He advised, therefore, play, rest, and ample nourishment. 'Half an hour's rest in the afternoon, or better still, an hour,' he added, 'is an excellent thing.' He looked at Joan searchingly, with both severity and kindness, for he had that mixture of father and policeman which belongs to most successful doctors. Joan felt a little guilty. She had not read Erewhon, of course, yet was vaguely aware she had done something wrong. To be obliged to see a doctor touched the sense of shame in her. 'The country's just the thing for you,' the specialist mentioned, ignoring the two guineas that lay within the reach of his hand, 'the very place.' And Wimble felt relieved as he went out. It was like a visit to the police that had ended happily. Neither he nor Joan had been arrested, but they had been told they must not do it again. He had paid a fine.\n\n'Mother'll be very pleased with that,' he remarked, while Joan, glancing up quickly, seemed glad it was over. 'It's the first time I've ever felt ill,' she said. 'The moment I saw him I felt I ought to be ill.'\n\n'Suggestion,' he mumbled. 'Never mind. Mother'll feel better now that you've been. That's something.'\n\nThey walked happily down Seymour Street together. 'Don't skip, child. It looks funny in a town. Besides, you're too big to skip.' She took a slower pace to suit his slower little legs. But even so there were springs in her feet, and her movements seemed to push the solid earth away as though she wanted to rise. 'Flow, fly, flow,' she hummed, 'wherever I am, I go.'\n\n'I shouldn't hum in the street, dear, if I were you,' he chided. People were staring, he noticed. 'It looks so odd. I mean it sounds unusual.'\n\nShe turned her bright, happy eyes upon him. 'Daddy, that's the doctor,' she warned him, 'you're saying \"No\" to everything.' She came close and took his arm, whispering at the same time, 'I believe you're sorry about the two guineas. You're trying to get your money's worth, as Tom calls it,' and the shaft was so true it made him laugh.\n\nThey turned down into the great thoroughfare of Oxford Street. It was brimmed with people, a river filled and running over. They crossed it somehow, he rather like a bewildered rabbit, a step forwards, a pause, a hesitating step backwards, a glance in both directions that saw nothing accurately, and then a flurried run; Joan catching his outstretched hand and pulling him against his will and better judgment, while his little coat-tails flapped in the wind. They landed on the curb, merged in the stream of pedestrians, bumped into some, collided with others, and were swept round the swirling corner of the Circus into the downhill torrent of Regent Street.\n\n'Yet a bird,' he remembered, 'plunges headlong, at fifty miles an hour, into a forest of branches, swaying possibly in a wind, avoided the slightest collision, and with unerring and instant calculation selects a twig and lands on it, balancing with perfect security on feet so tiny they're not worth mentioning!' He felt clumsy and inferior. What co-ordination of sight and muscle! What confidence! What poise... The throng of awkward, crawling, heavy-footed humans sprawled in all directions; he was one of them, one of the least steady too. And yet he was aware of something in himself that did not shake and wobble, something secure and balanced, something that went gliding with swift and certain safety. He noted the easy grace of Joan passing the shop windows like a nut-hatch along a twig, half dancing and half flitting on her toes. It was not a physical thing he felt. It was not that. It was a quality\u2014a careless, exquisite balance in herself. It entered him too as he watched her. His soul rested securely amid the turmoil by means of it. It was poise.\n\nHis thoughts ran on...\n\n'Look, Daddy,' Joan interrupted him. 'Here's a funny sign. What does it mean? Let's go in.'\n\nHe drew up beside her, a trifle breathless. They were in a side street, the main stream of people pouring away at right angles now, bathed in the autumn sunshine.\n\n'Look,' she repeated. 'Wings.' She pointed to a brass plate advertisement in a little hall-way. 'Isn't it funny?' He read the sign in neat black letters against the shining metal: 'Aquarian Society, Membership Free,' and wondered what it meant. Ruins and battered objects of the past occurred to him, for at first he connected the word with 'antiquarian.' Above them, black tipped with gold, were a pair of outspread wings, the badge of the Society apparently. In brackets was 'First Floor,' and a piece of paper pasted below bore a notice: 'Meeting Daily from 11.30 to 1. All welcome.'\n\n'Let's go up, Daddy,' Joan said again. 'There's a meeting going on now, and it's free. What does it mean? Something about birds\u2014'\n\n'Water birds, probably,' he said, still puzzling about the strange word; 'old water birds apparently,' he added, combining both possible derivations; 'perhaps a society to preserve old water birds and provide artificial paddles when their webbed feet wear out.'\n\nThey laughed at the idea, but their laughter hushed as a couple of ladies, beautifully dressed and with what is called refined, distinguished bearing, brushed past them and went upstairs, evidently going to the meeting. Though they were unknown to him, and it was obvious, in his black tail-coat and brown boots, that he was a commercial traveller of sorts, they bowed with a pleasant little smile of polite apology for pushing past. 'A duchess and her daughter at least! Old families certainly!' he thought; 'yet they treated us as equals!' It startled him, it was so un-English. He raised his hat and smiled. In their manner and the expression of face he caught something new, a kindness, a sympathy, a touch of light perhaps, something at any rate quick and alert and gentle that brought the word 'sympathy' intuitively across his mind. He held his hat in his hand a moment. 'They've got air in them,' flashed into him. 'I wonder if they're members.'\n\n'Your head's in a draught, Daddy,' said Joan. He put his hat on. A scrap of conversation reached them from the stairs: 'I'd rather sit well at the back, I think,' said the younger of the two.\n\n'We shall have to, probably,' was the reply; 'it's always full. And remember\u2014just keep an open mind and listen. The quackery doesn't matter, nor the grammar. He was only a railway guard'\u2014then something inaudible as they turned the corner\u2014'his idea of a New Age is true somewhere, I'm positive. It was the speed of the train, you know\u2014always rushing through space\u2014that made him...' And the voices died away.\n\n'Come, Joan, we'll go in too. What are you dawdling about for?' exclaimed Wimble on the spur of the moment. Something in that interrupted sentence caught him.\n\n'You, Daddy,' she said, as she tripped after him up the stairs.\n\nPeople were standing in the corridor and in the little hall; the room beyond, where a heavily-moustached man, with an eager, soap-polished face, cheerful expression, and bright earnest eyes, stood lecturing, was full. The two ladies who had preceded them were sitting on a window-sill. 'I'm afraid there are no seats left,' whispered a pleasant, earnest woman beside the door, 'but I've sent for some chairs. They'll be here presently. I hope you'll hear something out here.' Wimble thanked her with a nod and smile; he leaned against the wall with Joan and looked about him.\n\nSome thirty people were crowded into the small inner room, three-quarters of their number women, what are called 'nice' women. They were well dressed; there was a rustle of silk, a faint atmosphere of perfume, and fur, and soft expensive garments; young and old, he saw, a good many of them in mourning. The men looked, generally speaking, like well-to-do business men; he noticed one clergyman; a few were shabbily dressed; one or two were workmen, mechanics possibly. There was an alert attention on most of the faces, and in the air a kind of eager expectancy, serious, watchful, yearning, and waiting to be satisfied; sympathetic, it seemed, on the whole, rather than critical. One or two listeners looked vexed and scowling, and a tall, thin-visaged man in the corner was almost angry. But as a whole he got the impression of people just listening patiently, people for the most part empty, hungry, wondering if what they heard might fill them. He was aware of minds on tiptoe. Here, evidently, he judged, was a group of enquiring folk following a new Movement. 'One of the Signs of what's in the air To-day,' he thought. 'Five years ago these people would have been in Church, convinced they were miserable sinners with no good in them. That mechanic-looking fellow would have been in Chapel. That portly man with the stolid face, wearing a black tail-coat, a low collar, a heavy gold watch-chain and a black and white striped tie surely took round the plate in Kensington.' The thin-faced angry man was merely a professional iconoclast.\n\nHe wondered. He thought a moment of the unimaginative English standing about the island in hordes, marvellously reliable, marvellously brave, with big, deep hearts, but childishly unobservant, conservative, conventional, not to be moved till the fire burns the soles of their feet, sturdy and unemotional, and constitutionally suspicious of all new things. He saw these hordes, strong in their great earth-qualities, ballast of the world, but at the same time world-rulers... And then his thought flashed back with a snap to the scene before him. What was this group after? Why was it dissatisfied? Why had it turned from the ancient shibboleths? Something, of course, was up. He wondered. These people looked so earnest. This Aquarian Society, he knew, was one of a hundred, a thousand others. It might be rubbish, it might contain a true idea, it was sure to prove exaggerated. The people, however, were enquiring. He glanced at Joan, but her eyes were fixed intently upon the speaker's face\u2014the face of a former railway guard whose familiarity with speed (certainly not on his own crawling line, thought Wimble!), with rushing transit from scene to scene through the air, had opened his mind to some new idea or other.\n\n'I wonder if he sang \"Wherever I am, I go!\"' he whispered to Joan. 'He ought to, anyhow!' But Joan was too intent to hear him. He swallowed his smile and listened. The speaker's rough, uncultivated voice rang with sincerity. There was a glow about his face that only deep conviction brings. To Wimble, however, it all sounded at the moment as if he had fallen out of his Express Train and picked up his ideas as he picked up himself.\n\nFor at first he could not understand a single word, as though, coming out of the busy human street, he had plunged neck-deep into a stream of ideas that took his breath away. Having missed what had gone before, he could not catch the drift of what he heard. Then gradually, and by degrees, his listening mind fell into the rhythm of the minds about him; he slipped into the mood of the meeting; his intelligence merged with the collective intelligence of the others; he merged with the group-consciousness of the little crowd. The hostile interjections had no meaning for him, since those who made them, not being included in the group-consciousness, spoke an unintelligible language.\n\nThe speaker was very much in earnest evidently; he believed what he was saying, at the moment anyhow. Possibly this belief was permanent; possibly it was merely self-persuasion. Though obviously he expected hostile comment from time to time, when it came\u2014usually from the iconoclast in the corner\u2014he rarely replied to it. This method of ignoring criticism was not only easier than answering it, it induced an appearance of contemptuous superiority that increased his authority.\n\nWimble and his daughter had come in at a happy moment, for the long stretch of argument and explanation was just over, it seemed, and a summing up was about to begin.\n\n'So where are we, then, with it all?' asked the lecturer. 'Where 'ave we got to? Where do we stand?'\n\nHe paused, and into the pause fell the angry voice of the thin-faced man: 'Exactly where we started. You haven't stated one single fact as yet.'\n\nThe speaker looked straight in front of him without a word, and the audience, almost to an individual, ignored the criticism. They supported the lecturer loyally, to the point at least of not even turning their heads away. They stared patiently and waited.\n\n'Where 'ave we got to,' repeated the man on the platform, 'that's wot we want to know, isn't it? After all we've listened to this morning, 'ow do we stand about it?'\n\n'That's it exactly,' from the interrupter in a contemptuous but intense tone of voice. He seemed annoyed that no one was intelligent enough to support him. At a Society of Rationalist Control across the road he would have been at home. He, too, was a seeker, and a very earnest one, only he had tumbled into the wrong group. Across the road he might have been constructive; here he was destructive merely.\n\n'Well, on the physical plane,' resumed the speaker, 'on wot I might call the scientific and materialistic plane, as I've tried to show you, the 'ole trend of modern civilisation is towards speed and universality. That's clear\u2014at least I 'ope I've made it so. Air, and wot air represents, shows itself in the physical plane like that. Distant countries are getting all linked up everywhere\u2014by wireless, by motor, by aviation, by cinematograph, and the like. A kind of telepathy all over the world is\u2014' he hesitated an instant\u2014'engendered.'\n\n'Go on,' from the critic, 'any word will do as well.'\n\n'That's the scientific side of the business, as it were,' he went on, 'the practical, everyday aspect we can all understand. It's the universality of the new element, air, as it affects the practical mind, so to speak; the technical understanding and mastery or space\u2014wot I called aether a little while ago, as you'll remember\u2014or, as the Aquarian Society prefers to call it, as being simpler and shorter\u2014air.'\n\n'Well,' he added, 'we now want to see 'ow we stand with regard to the 'igher side of life, the mental, spiritual aspect. Wot does this new Age, in which air is the key\u2014the symbol like\u2014wot does it mean to the race on that side?'\n\n'Gas,' interjected the other, but in a lower voice.\n\nFrom several books lying beside the water-bottle the lecturer selected one. He adjusted a pair of heavy reading-glasses to his eyes.\n\n'The link between the two is better expressed than wot I can express it,' he resumed quickly, 'in this little volume, The New Science of Colour\u2014 and colour means light, remember, and light means aether, and aether means space, universality\u2014so it's all the same.'\n\n'Every bit of it,' came the contemptuous comment from the corner.\n\n'Just this short paragraph\u2014I came across it by chance\u2014except that there reely is no chance at all\u2014and it puts it well. It supplies the link. So I'll read it.' He heavily emphasised certain words:\n\n'We are approaching an age of mental telepathy, in which the organism of the race is about to become attuned to the second sense of the earth and to the third element that sustains her\u2014i.e. air\u2014and in which our action and our outlook will alike assume the characteristics of that element, which are elasticity and brilliance.'\n\nHe laid down the book, slowly removing the heavy glasses from his nose, and while 'that's no proof was heard to snap from the corner, the other repeated with emphasis of manner, yet lowering his voice at the same time: 'the organism of the race\u2014becoming attuned to air\u2014elasticity and brilliance.'\n\nFingering his glasses and looking very thoughtful, the speaker kept silence for a minute or so. He drank a few sips of water slowly, while everybody, even the interjector, waited, and those who had been staring at him turned their eyes away from his face, as though embarrassed to watch him drink. He produced a big handkerchief from his coat-tail pocket, wiped his lips, and replaced the handkerchief with some difficulty whence it came. The pause lengthened, but no one stirred. Then the earnest-faced woman near the door touched Wimble on the arm and indicated an empty chair, but Wimble, too absorbed in the proceedings, shook his head impatiently. Joan slipped into it. Joan, he noticed, did not seem interested; the keen attention she had shown at first had left her face, she looked half bewildered and half bored. 'She's too much in it to need explanation,' flashed across him.\n\nThe slight shuffling warned the lecturer that the mind of his audience needed holding lest it begin to wander. Picking up a sheet of paper covered with notes, he advanced to the edge of the little platform and cleared his throat.\n\n'As I've been trying to explain,' he began, 'umanity has now reached a crushial moment in its development. The planet we live on belongs to the sun, and the sun has just entered\u2014in 1881, to be igsact,\u2014the sign of Aquarius. Aquarius, according to the old Chaldean system, is wot's called an Air Sign, and the new powers waking in us all\u2014coming down into our world now\u2014will be ruled by the element of air. The Age of Pisces, a Water Sign, is just finished and done with. We are entering another period. A new Age is beginning\u2014the Age of Air.' And he glanced about him as though to catch any evidence of challenge.\n\n'What is an Age?' asked a thin voice from the rear. It was not hostile, and heads were turned to find the questioner, but without success.\n\n'An accomplice,' muttered the habitual interrupter to himself. No one noticed the comment, and Wimble, now completely captured by the collective sympathy, even wondered what he meant.\n\n'I'll tell you,' continued the lecturer, and referred to the sheet of notes in his hand. 'I'll tell you again with pleasure.' He emphasised the word 'again.' The glasses were readjusted. With a certain air of mystery, as though he knew far more than he cared to impart, he read aloud, emphasising frequent passages as his habit was, and making here and there effective and semi-theatrical pauses. Behind this cheapness, however, burned obviously a deep sincerity and belief. He deemed himself a prophet, and he knew a prophet's proverbial fate.\n\n'Astronomers tell us that our sun and his fam'ly of planets revolve around a central sun, which is millions of miles distant,' he read slowly, 'and that it requires about 26,000 years to make one revolution.'\n\nRemembering one of his most successful Primers, Wimble sat forward on his chair, all eagerness. Here was what the critic called a 'fact' at any rate.\n\n'This orbit is called the Zodiac,' continued the other, 'and it is divided into twelve signs.' He mentioned them, beginning with Aries and Taurus, and ending with Aquarius and Pisces. 'Now, you asked what is an Age, didn't you?' He paused a second. 'Well, our solar system takes a bit over 2000 years to pass through each of these Signs, and this time is the measurement of an Age. And with each Age certain new things 'appen.'\n\nHe made this announcement with a certain mysterious significance.\n\n'Certain things 'appen to the planet and to us as lives on it. Certain changes come. They're sure as summer and winter is sure\u2014that is, you can count on them. Those who know can count on them\u2014prophets and people with inner vision. There you get prophecy and the meaning of prophecy. Vision!' And without a vision the people perish\u2014miss their chances, that is. The seers, the mystics, always know and see ahead, and this end of the Age\u2014and of the world as it's sometimes called stupidly\u2014has been prophesied by many.'\n\nThe audience was on tiptoe with anticipation. Each individual possibly hoped that certain personal peculiarities of his own were going to be explained, made wonderful. Wimble was particularly aware of this excitement; it dawned upon him that he was about to receive an explanation, and a semi-scientific explanation too, of his own strange ideas and feelings. He glanced across at Joan. She seemed, to his amazement, asleep; her eyes were closed, at any rate; her attention was not held. He wanted to poke her. He wanted to say 'I told you so,' or rather 'You told me so.' But the speaker had ended his pause, and, to Wimble's delight, was explaining that this movement of the sun passes through the Zodiacal Signs in reverse order\u2014'precession of the equinoxes,' as it is called\u2014Pisces therefore preceding Aquarius instead of following it. Here was another 'fact' that his Knowledge Primer justified.\n\nThe personal anticipation in the audience was not immediately satisfied, however. The speaker intensified it first by a slight delay. Aware that he held the minds before him, he took his time.\n\n'Now, these Signs'\u2014lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper and fixing them upon a woman in the front row, who at once showed nervousness, as though she would believe black was white, if only he would stare at some one else\u2014' these Signs ain't just dead things. They reveal and express and convey intelligent life. They're immense intelligences, they're Zodiacal Intelligences. That's wot they are. The 'ole universe, remember, is alive, and you and I ain't the only living beings in it, nor the 'ighest either. We're not the only bodies. No one can say wot constitoots a body, a living body, nor define it. Our planet is a tuppeny-'alfpenny affair compared to the others, and we're nothing but a lot of hinsects like ants and so forth on it. But if the 'ole universe is alive\u2014and we know it is\u2014'\n\n'Hanwell,' interrupted the angry man.\n\n'\u2014each and every part of it must be alive too. And you can't leave out the planets, stars, and suns, the most magnificent bodies, called the 'eavenly bodies, as you know. They're all living bodies. They're the bodies of beings, living beings, but beings far higher than wot we are. And the Zodiacal Signs are 'igher still. They represent functions of the universe, as the ancients knew quite well. They're a kind of intelligence we may call per'aps a Group Intelligence.'\n\nAgain he paused a moment. Then, as no interruption came, he went on with greater emphasis than before:\n\n'Now, each of these Zodiacal Intelligences\u2014as the sun, with our little earth alongside, passes through it\u2014rules over its partickler period. With every period we enter a new current of forces. Each period, therefore, of about 2000 years has new Gods, new characteristics, new types of 'uman beings with new tendencies and powers and possibilities in them\u2014a new point of view, if you like to call it so, or, as we Aquarians call it, a new consciousness. Well, the Aquarius Sign just beginning, is an Air Sign. We're getting our new powers, our new point of view and hattitude, our new consciousness\u2014from the air.'\n\nIn his excitement and deep belief the word 'air' was dangerously near 'hair,' but no one smiled. Perhaps even the critic experienced similar difficulties in his home circle that prevented his noticing it, or caring to take advantage of it if he did.\n\n'I've already referred,' the speaker continued, 'to its effect on the physical plane, new inventions and the like, and 'ow men now navigate the air as fish do the sea, and send their thoughts spinning round the world with the speed of lightning. That's easy enough. I mean, you can all see it for yourselves. The areoplane's a fac' nobody can't get away from, whichever way you take it. But the effect on the spiritual plane is not so simple. It's not so easy to describe\u2014far from it, I admit. When a new mode of consciousness begins to hoperate in men and women, they find difficulty in expressing it. They're puzzled a bit. They don't know where they are with it quite. Those 'oo get it first are called quacks and charlituns, and maybe swindlers too. The slower ones regard them with suspicion, and they may think themselves lucky if they 'ain't stoned or burned alive or crucified as they once was.'\n\nHe smiled, and the audience smiled deprecating with him.\n\n'And the chief reason for their difficulty,' he went on, 'is simply this: They 'aven't got the language. Nor the words. That's it. The words describe the experiences of a new type of consciousness don't exist at first. They come later, slowly, gradually. They evolve as the new powers in the race evolve.'\n\nHe took his glasses off and wiped them carefully.\n\n'So wot's the result?' he asked. 'Why, this. There's only feeling left. The people that first get the new consciousness feel it in them. But they can't prove it to others because their power is small. And they can't explain it in words, because the words don't exist. So there you are. Only the truth is there too jest the same.'\n\nThe challenge in his tone was unmistakable, but no one took it up. The critic was making notes on his cuff and probably had not heard it. Some one coughed, however, and feet shuffled here and there.\n\n'I know it's true, and some of you 'ere in front of me know it's true,' the speaker resumed quickly, his eyes alight and intense conviction in his tone and manner, 'but we can't do more at first than feel it and be glad. All we can do is to show it in our lives. We can live it. We can feel the joy and speed and lightness of the air, and we can live it, show it. We can express it that way, leaving the words to follow in good time. And that's a lot, for example guides the world.'\n\nA murmur of applause greeted the emphatic statement, and Wimble, for one, was tempted to rise on his toes with waving hands and give his confession of faith in no uncertain voice. This railway guard, half quack, half prophet, this man of the people whose knowledge was as faulty as his grammar, had offered the first explanation he had yet heard of his own strange attitude to life and of his experiences since boyhood. This man, similarly, had caught his secret from the air. His exposition might be as exaggerated and wild as the critic suggested, yet it was somewhere true, he felt. The man, owing to his very ignorance perchance, had caught at the skirts of a new and mighty truth that in a century would have become a commonplace, but that at the present moment caused others with better education than himself to talk of Hanwell. Wimble felt this excitement in him\u2014to get up before them all and say that he, too, had felt and tried to live this light, new, swift and spontaneous airy consciousness. The impulse, the generous desire to help, caught at him. Another minute and he might have been on his toes, bearing stammering witness to the truth that was in him. The lecturer himself, however, prevented.\n\n'We stand to-day,' he said, using his notes again, 'upon the cusp of the Aquarian Age. The Piscean Age lies behind us. The Zodiacal Intelligences of that Piscean Age were watery powers and water was its keynote and its symbol. It was the Age of Jesus. Now, listen, please, listen closely, for 'istory bears me out.'\n\nHe moved nearer to the edge of the platform, and heads were craned forward to lose no word.\n\n'The sun,' he said, in a lowered tone, 'entered the sign of Taurus in the days of our pre'istoric Adam. That was the Taurian Age. Next came the Arian Age\u2014about the time that Abra'am lived, and with Aries the ram replaced the bull. With the rise of the Roman Empire the sun entered the sign of Pisces, and the Piscean Age began. It took the fish for its symbol. That was the Christian Dispensation with its new outlook and attitude, its new powers, its new type of consciousness. Jesus introduced water baptism, and water became the symbol of purification. It was a watery sign, as I told you. While it lasted, as you'll notice\u2014the last 2000 years\u2014this Piscean Age, with a fish for its symbol, 'as certainly been one of water, and the many uses of that element 'ave been emphasised, and sea and lake and river navigation have been brought to a 'igh degree of efficiency.'\n\nHe waited for the impression this was bound to produce. It was evidenced by deep silence, broken only by the rustle of paper and soft garments.\n\n'Jesus Himself referred to the beginning of this Aquarian Age in these words,' he continued solemnly and reverently, 'as you'll find in one of Wisdom Books they don't include in our own Bible:\n\n'And then the man who bears the pitcher will walk forth across an arc of 'eaven; the sign and signet of the Son of Man will stand forth in the Eastern sky. The wise will then lift up their heads and know that the redemption of the earth is near.'\n\nHe paused significantly. Then he added, his hands raised aloft and his eyes turned toward the ceiling:\n\n'We're already in it, the new Dispensation, the New Age\u2014air.'\n\n'Compressed air,' added the critic, after his long silence.\n\n'Bravo! bravo!' exclaimed Wimble, unable to suppress himself.\n\n'But surely a new Age can only begin in each person individually, and not in any other sense,' put in the thin voice that had spoken once before.\n\nUnperturbed, the speaker repeated with deep emphasis, his eyes and hands still raised aloft:\n\n'And air means spiritual. The Aquarian Age is pre-eminently a spiritual age; and its meaning may now be apprehended by multitudes of people, 'ungry for truth, who will now come\u2014are already coming\u2014into an advanced spiritual consciousness. Our air-bodies is being quickened.'\n\nThe last few words seemed to produce a strange effect upon the chief critic. Apparently they enraged him. He fidgeted, half rising from his chair as though about to make a violent speech in reply. In the end, however, he did nothing beyond shrugging his shoulders, with a muttered 'Consciousness indeed! Why, you don't even know the meaning of the word!' He leaned back in his seat, unwilling to stay, yet too annoyed to leave; he resigned himself, keeping his great onslaught perhaps for the close of the meeting. Then, suddenly changing his mind, he leaped to his feet. But the lecturer was before him. In a ringing voice that held his audience and drowned the interruption, he dominated the room. He was about to satisfy the anticipation raised some ten minutes earlier. He took his listeners into his confidence.\n\n'Now, ladies and gentlemen,' he cried, 'or brothers and sisters, as I'd prefer to call you if you've no objection, wot is it we Aquarians means when we talk of air, when we speak of air as the sign of the New Age? We call it spiritual. Wot do we reely mean by that? 'Ow can we show it in our lives? Let us come down to plain words, the language of the street.'\n\nThere was again a rustle, as pencils and paper were prepared anew for taking notes.\n\n'It means this\u2014to put it quite plainly, simply: It means living lightly, carelessly, spontaneously, as a bird does, so to speak, 'oose 'ome is air and 'oo works 'ard without taking too much thought. It means living by faith and that means\u2014' he uttered the next words with great emphasis\u2014 'living by the subconsciousness\u2014by intuition.'\n\n'A bird's heart,' he cried, 'lies in the centre of its body. We must live from the centre too.\n\n'That's the secret, and that's the first sign that you're getting it. There you get the first 'int of this new Aquarian Age, and from the moment we entered it\u2014not so long ago, forty years or so\u2014this idea of the Subconsciousness 'as showed itself as the key-word of the day. It's everywhere already. Even the scientific men 'as got it. Bergson began with 'is intuition, and professors like Frood of Vienna and Young of Zurich caught on like lightning. William James too, and a 'undred others. Why, it's got down into our poietry and novels, and even the pore old dying pulpits 'ave a smack at it just to try and keep their heads above water.\n\n'To live by your subconscious knowledge, instead of by your slow old calculating reason, means a new, airy way of living. And it's spiritual, I say, because it stands for the beginning of a new knowledge and understanding, and therefore a new sympathy with each other. With everybody! All sorts of powers lie in our subconsciousness, powers of the 'ole race, powers forgotten and powers to come, and it's in touch with greater powers still that so far 'ave been beyond us as a race. All knowledge 'ides there\u2014God.\n\n'And if you rely upon it, it will guide you\u2014and guide you quickly, surely, in a flash. Nor you won't go wrong either, for in your subconsciousness you touch everybody else; we all join on down there\u2014within\u2014and that's where the Kingdom of 'eaven lies\u2014and if you rely upon the Kingdom of 'eaven it will guide you right. We all touch 'ands if you go deep enough, and that means brotherhood, don't it? For it means sympathy, understanding, love. The 'ottentot's your neighbour.'\n\nHe stepped back, squaring his shoulders and drawing a deep breath as he surveyed his audience.\n\n'Well, it's only just beginning. Some of us, many of us likely, don't know about it yet, don't feel it. We're only ankle-deep as yet. And those 'oo ain't aware of this great subconscious life, no amount of argument or explanation won't put it into them. A new Age touches individuals first, one 'ere, one there. The end of the world, as some call it, 'appens to each heart alone, as somebody said just now. But it'll come to all in the end. It's coming now. We're in Aquarius, and sooner or later we'll all get into the air and know it. And the new inventions, the new tricks everywhere, as I told you, are paving the way already on the physical plane so that even the hintellectuals and materialists are bound to feel its bigger side before long.\n\n'Air! Why, think of it, and wot a lovely symbol it is! It's everywhere. It flows. Nothing belonging to the sky is stationary. It all moves. Light grows and wanes, wind falls and rises, clouds, birds pass rapidly across it. It 'as nothing rigid about it anywhere. Breath is the first sign of life in your body when you're born, and the breath of the spirit is the first sign of life in your soul when you are born again. And the bird, remember, the natural in'abitant of air, 'as its heart in the centre of its body!\n\n'The subconscious powers, the subconscious life\u2014yes, that's the secret. To rely upon it, live and act by it, means to act with the 'ole world at once and know the 'appiness of brother'ood and love. It means to lose yourself\u2014your little conscious, surface, limited self\u2014in the bigger ocean of the air. 'Itherto it's been called living by faith and prayer. That's all right enough, but it ain't enough. That means touching the subconscious at moments only. We want to touch it always and every minute. In this new Aquarian Age it will be at our fingers' ends, so to speak. The \"sub\" will disappear. The subconscious will become the conscious. We shall know everything, and everything at once; we shall be everywhere, and everywhere at once.' He raised his voice. 'We shall be ONE, and know that we are ONE. We shall 'ave spiritual consciousness.'\n\nThe noise of an overturned chair was heard. Outside the shrill blast of distant factory whistles suggested lunch and food. The critic, pushing hastily past the hushed sitters near him, made his way to the door. As he reached the passage he turned. 'That's the best recipe for hysteria I ever heard,' he cried back, 'and the sooner you're safe in Hanwell, the better for the world!'\u2014and vanished.\n\nIt was an abrupt and violent interruption, but yet it startled no one; the thread of interest was not broken; a few heads turned to look, and then faced towards the lecturer again. A general sigh was heard, expressive of relief. The audience settled itself more comfortably, and a deeper concentration of interest was felt at once. The removal of the hostile element produced an immediate increase of attentive earnestness. It showed first in the lecturer's face; his eyes grew fixed and steady, his manner more confident, more impressive, and his tone of voice had a more authoritative ring than before.\n\nHe leaned forward with an air of mysterious intimacy, as though about to share a secret knowledge he had not dared to divulge before a scoffer. There was a booming note about his voice that thrilled. The charlatan that hides in every human soul slipped out, unconsciously perhaps but unmistakably. It was this, possibly, that affected Wimble as he watched and waited, so eagerly attentive; or, possibly, it was some uncanny anticipation of what he was about to hear. An emotion, at any rate, and one shared by others in the small packed room, rose suddenly in his soul. A little shiver ran down his spine, he shuddered, as once before he had shuddered in Maida Vale.\n\n'Before we close this little meeting,' the deep voice rang, 'and before you go your way and I go mine, per'aps not to come across each other's path again for a tidy while\u2014I want to just say this. It's as well we all should know it, so as we are prepared.'\n\nHe fixed his glowing eyes on one of his audience\u2014on Wimble, it so happened\u2014and went on slowly, choosing his words with care and uttering them with a conviction that was not without its impressiveness:\n\n'I want to warn you all, to give you this little word of warning. For I'm led to believe\u2014in fact, I may say it's been given me\u2014that a dying Age\u2014 don't die without an effort. An expiring Age, so to say, seeks to prolong its life. With the result that, just before it passes, its characteristics is first intensified. The Powers that have ruled over us for 2000 years make themselves felt with extra strength; and these Powers, seeing that their time is past, are no longer right. They're no longer what we need. Good and right in their time, they now seem wrong, and out of place. They're evil. We see them as evil, any'ow, though they make for good in another way. I don't know if you foller me. Wot I mean is that, when an old Age is passing and a new Age coming to birth\u2014there's conflict.'\n\nThere was a renewed rustling, as this sentence was written down on many half-sheets that had so far been blank. But Wimble had no need to make a note of it. He remembered that walk down Maida Vale of several months before, and again the singular shudder passed like a little wind of ice along his nerves.\n\n'Conflict means trouble,' continued the speaker amid a solemn hush, 'and nothing big ever comes to birth without labour and travail and pain. We must expect this pain and travail, and be ready for it. A new 'eaven and a new earth will come, but they won't come easily. They will be preceded by a mighty effort of the old ones to keep going a bit longer first. A 'uge up'eaval, physically and spiritually, will take place first\u2014on the earth, that is, as well as in our 'earts\u2014before we all get caught up to meet the Lord in the air.'\n\nHis sentences grew slower and more emphatic, more charged with conviction and with warning. He made privileged communications. There were pauses between his utterances:\n\n'I warn you, I prepare you, so that when it comes you will be ready and prepared\u2014not for yourselves, mind, but so as you may 'elp others wot won't quite realise quite wot it all means.\n\n'For there'll be sacrifice as well.\n\n'There's always a sacrifice when a New Age catches 'old of our old earth, and our old earth will shake and tremble in the re-making, and some of us will shake and tremble too. You'll feel, maybe, that shudder in advance and know what it means. Signs and wonders, men's 'earts failing them for fear, and the instability of all solid things. 'There will be death.\n\n'Death takes its 'undreds, aye, its thousands at a time like that, and many\u2014the best and finest usually\u2014go out before their time, as it seems. But\u2014mark this\u2014they go out\u2014to help!\n\n'There comes in the sacrifice.\n\n'They'll be taken off to 'elp, taken into the air, but taken away from those they leave be'ind.'\n\nHis tone grew lower, and a deeper hush passed over the little crowd before him. There was dull fire in his eyes. An atmosphere of the prophet clothed him.\n\n'It's just there,' he emphasised, 'that we\u2014we who know\u2014can 'elp.\n\n'For we know that death is nothing more nor less than slipping back into your own subconsciousness, and so becoming greater and finer and more active\u2014more useful, too, and with grander powers\u2014than we ever 'ad in our limited, imperfect bodies. And we know that this separate life, ended at death, is nothing but an episode in our universal life which death can never put an end to because it is imperishable. We are part of the universe, not of this little planet alone.\n\n'There'll be mourning, but we can 'elp dry their tears; there'll be terror, but we can take their fear away; there'll be loneliness, but we can show them\u2014show 'em by the way we live\u2014that there'll be reunion better than before. We all meet in the sub-consciousness, and know each other face to face. For it means reunion in the air, which is everywhere at once and universal, and stands for that denial of space and time\u2014that spiritual haffirmation\u2014we Aquarians call NOW.'\n\nHe held out his hands as in blessing over the intently listening and expectant throng. Gazing above their heads into space, he appeared to concentrate his thoughts a moment. Then his face lightened, as though his mental effort had succeeded.\n\n'After every meeting,' he then went on, but this time in a conversational tone, as friend to friend, the prophet and his flock put aside, 'it is our custom, as you know, to find a carrying-away Sentence. Something you can take away and remember easily. Something that sums up all we've talked about together. Something to keep in your minds and think about every minute of the day until we meet again. Something you can try to live in your daily lives.'\n\nHe waited a moment to ensure that all listened closely.\n\n'The sentence I've chosen this time will 'elp you to remember all we've said to-day. It's a symbol that includes the 'ole promise of the air that's so soon to be fulfilled in us.\n\n'I'll now give it out\u2014if yer all ready.' The expectant, eager, attentive faces were a convincing proof that all were ready and listening attentively.\n\nWith a happy and confiding smile, the speaker then pronounced the carrying-away sentence:\n\n'The 'eart of a bird lies in the centre of its body.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 300", + "text": "The carrying-away sentence stuck in Wimble's mind as he journeyed back to the flat on the top of a motor omnibus with Joan, for it expressed a concrete fact, a fact that he could understand. 'The heart of a bird lies in the centre of its body,' he murmured to himself happily. It gave him a secret thrill of joy and wonder. His own heart, thrust to the left though it was, felt ageless. The happy, invincible optimism of the bird was in him. To live from the centre was a neat way of expressing what he had been trying to do for so long, and he had not been far wrong in taking the life and attitude of a bird for his symbol. It meant neglecting the strained, laborious effort of the calculating mind, and leaning for help and guidance upon something bigger, deeper, less fallible than the strutting conscious self. The railway guard labelled it the subconscious, that mysterious region in which every soul is linked to every other soul, involving thus that comprehensive sympathy which is the beginning possibly of brotherhood. He phrased it wildly, but that was what he meant. The bigger self that lay like an ocean behind his separate, personal thought shared everything with every one. The joy, the wisdom of the birds! The elasticity and brilliance of the universal air! The divine carelessness that flows from living at the centre!\n\n\u2003'Flow, fly, flow!\n\n\u2003Wherever I am, I go;\n\n\u2003I live in the air\n\n\u2003Without thought or care...!'\n\n'Daddy, you mustn't hum in public. It sounds so unusual, and people are staring,' Joan reminded him. 'And you'll forget your hat and leave it behind, if you don't put it on.'\n\nHe smoothed his ruffled hair and placed his black billycock upon it.\n\n'So you've woken up at last, have you?' he replied, laughing at her. 'You slept through most of the lecture. What did you make of it,\u2014eh?'\n\nShe looked at him with a puzzled expression in her soft, bright eyes.\n\n'D'you think it was all nonsense? Was it true, I mean?' he repeated.\n\n'He didn't lie, but he didn't tell the truth,' she said at once. 'Besides, I wasn't asleep. I heard it all.'\n\n'You mean he didn't explain it properly?' he asked.\n\n'It was the wrong way,' she said.\n\n'Ah! words\u2014'\n\n'He ought to have danced it,' she said suddenly with decision. 'It's too quick, too flashing for words. I could have shown it to them easily, by dancing it.'\n\nHe remembered the amazing ideas her dancing gestures on the roof had once put into him. Then, thinking of the teachers of the world conveying their meaning by dancing and gestures from the pulpits, he chuckled.\n\n'Shall we join the Aquarians?' he asked slyly. 'What do you say to becoming members of their Society?'\n\nShe took her answer out of his own mind, it seemed.\n\n'If you belong, you belong. You needn't join. Societies are only cages, Daddy. You're caught and you can't fly on.'\n\n'We could spend the money better, yes,' he mumbled. 'Garden-gloves for mother, a lawn-mower, a hurricane lantern for stormy nights or something\u2014'\n\n'Much, much better,' she agreed.\n\n'When once we've found the cottage,' he went on vaguely.\n\n'It's there,' she interrupted instantly. 'Let's get the hurricane lantern. I'd love to choose it with you. May I?'\n\nWimble looked about him as the heavy vehicle lumbered clumsily along its swaying journey. The soft autumn sunshine of hazy gold lay on the streets, but there was a nip, a sharpness in the air that put an electric sparkle into everything. The solid world was really lighter than it looked. There was a covert brilliance ready to dart forth into swift-rushing flame. He felt the throbbing sheen and rustle in the golden light, and his heart sang with joy above the heavy streets and pavements. He was aware of a point of view that almost denied weight to inert matter, making the dead mass of the universe alive and dancing. This nip and sparkle in the air interpenetrated all these fixed and heavy things, these laborious structures, these rigid forms, dissolving them into flowing, ever-changing patterns of fluid loveliness. He saw them again as powder, the parks and road blown everywhere, the pavements lifted, the walls wide open to the sky. The solid earth became transparent, flooded with light and air. It seemed etherealised. It spread great golden wings towards the blazing sun and limitless sky. Air knew no fixed and rigid forms. Societies, of course, were only cages. He saw the huge cage of the earth blow open. Humanity flew out at last...\n\n'We'll get three, and at once,' he remarked, referring to the lanterns. 'And a pair of hedge-clippers as well, a ladder for the fruit trees, two pair of best garden-gloves for mother, and a revolving summer-house where she can follow the sun\u2014and sit in peace.'\n\nThat ridiculous lecture acted like some mental cuckoo that had chucked him finally out of the nest into the air. If he did not actually fly, he certainly walked on air, with the same faith that had once been claimed for walking on the sea. He became a daring and a happy soul. Air represented a confident and free imagination in which everything was possible. Earth he still loved, but only as a place to land on and take off from. Imagination and intuition must still, at his present stage, be backed and checked by reason; earth was still there to sleep on. But that spontaneous way of living which is air, using the ground merely as the swallow does\u2014a swallow that exists in space and almost entirely neglects its legs\u2014this careless and new attitude leaped forward in him towards realisation. A bird, he remembered, though apparently so free and careless, works actually with an ordered precision towards great purposes.\n\nHe seemed conscious suddenly of a complete and absolute independence, beyond the need of any one's comprehension. Few, if any, would understand him, but that did not matter. The need to be understood was left behind, below. He had soared beyond the loneliness even of a god. He felt very humble, but very happy. And the loneliness would be but temporary, for the rest of the world would follow before long...\n\nThe motor omnibus lurched and stopped with grunting noises. Wimble, led by his more nimble daughter, climbed down the narrow spiral stair. He glanced upwards longingly as he descended. He saw the flashing birds. 'The brotherhood of the air,' he thought. 'Oh, how the earth must yearn for it!'\n\n'There's an ironmonger,' cried Joan, pointing across the road. And they went in to buy the hurricane lanterns. They assumed, that is, that the cottage was already found.\n\nThen, after luncheon, while Mother criticised the garden-gloves, observing with regard to the hurricane lanterns that it was 'living backwards, rather, to buy things before we have the place to use them in,' he took from the book-shelf his copy of the Queen of the Air and read once again a favourite passage. It was thumb-marked, the margin scored by his pencil long years ago.\n\n'... the bird, in which the breath, or spirit, is more full than in any other creature and the earth-power least... It is little more than a drift of the air brought into form by plumes; the air is in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh, and glows with air in its flying, like a blown flame: it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it;\u2014is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.\n\n'Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air. All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit together in its song... unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all intense passion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among the boughs and hedges through heat of day, like little winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of the wild rose...'\n\nHis reading was interrupted by the entrance from the passage of his wife, her face heavily veiled; she was dressed for the street, in solemn black; she wore a mysterious yet very confident expression. 'Joe dear, I'm going out. I have an appointment at three o'clock sharp. I mustn't be late.'\n\nHe watched her with an absent-minded air for a moment, as though he saw her for the first time almost; all he could remember about her just then was that during the cinema performance she had said with proud superiority: 'I'm glad I'm English.' Then, recognising his wife, he realised that she was going to confession, of course, for he guessed it by the way she folded her hands, waiting patiently for a word of commendation.\n\n'All right, my dear,' he said, 'and good luck. You'll be back for tea, I suppose.' He rose and kissed her on her heavy veil, and she went out with a smile. 'I'm so glad,' he added.\n\n'That's her stage,' he thought to himself, 'and the critic and the Aquarian quack have their stage, and I have mine. It's all right.'\n\nThere were immense tracts of experience in everybody, unknown, unused, but waiting to be known and used. Some people lived in one tract only, caged and fixed, unaware of the vast freedom a little farther outside themselves. Different people knew different tracts, each positive that his own particular tract alone was right\u2014as for him, assuredly, it was\u2014 thinking also that it was the only one, the whole, which, assuredly, it was not. There was, however, assuredly, a point of view, the bird's, that saw all these tracts at once, the boundaries and divisions between them mere walls erected by the mind in ignorance. The bird's-eye view looked down and saw the landscape whole, the divisions unreal, the separation false. This attitude was the attitude of air; air unified; the unity of humanity was realised. Consciousness, focussed hitherto upon little separate tracts with feeble light, blazed upon all at once with shining splendour.\n\nIt was true. A great world-telepathy was being 'engendered,' barriers of creed and class were crumbling, democracy was combing out its mighty wings; the 'tracts' inhabited by Mother, Tom, the quack, the critic, by himself and by Joan, by that narrow snob and gossip at the tea-party who asked, 'Who was she?'\u2014all these would be seen as adjoining little strips belonging to the universal air which knows neither strips, divisions nor boundaries.\n\nA great light blazed into his heart. He wondered. Apparently it was the little, simple, insignificant people, and not the great minds of the day, who were the first to become aware of air. The great ones were too rigid. Air rushed first into the hearts of the uneducated, the ignorant, the unformed and informal\u2014the little children of the race. It has been ever so. The learned, knowing too much, solid with facts and explanations, are no longer fluid. They neither flow nor fly. The brotherhood of air, he grasped, would come first through the untaught babes and little children of earth's vast, scattered family.\n\nAnd, while these vague reflections danced across his mind, dropping their curious shadows upon his own little tract of experience, his wife was whispering her sins to another mind who should forgive them for her, the critic was writing a vehement pamphlet to prove that he alone was right, Tom, in the office, was scheming new plans for making money that should satisfy his natural desires for pleasure and self-indulgence, the quack was elaborating Zodiacal Explanations in his studio next to his Private Consulting Room, and Joan\u2014\n\nHe listened. A light, tripping step went down the corridor, passed his door and began to climb the ladder to the open skylight in the hall. He listened closely, eagerly, a new rhythm catching at his heart. The little song came to him faintly through the obstructing barriers of brick and mortar. He caught the tap and tremble of her feet upon the roof.\n\nJoan sang and danced above the world." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 301", + "text": "'Careless as a bird! Bird-happy and bird-wise,' he murmured to himself as they moved in a month later. For he had found a cottage as by instinct. It was not on the agents' list of modern, ugly and comfortless cages, but was an old-world little place that had caught his eye by the corner of the lane as he returned to the country station, weary and almost faith-less, after a vain inspection. A white board suddenly peered at him through the branches of a yew, there were roses up the walls, a tiny fountain played on the lawn, and beyond he caught a glimpse of a neglected orchard, sloping fields of yellow ragwort, and a stream. The stream, moreover, ran under the road just there, so that he could look down into it from the old stone bridge. The water ran swiftly, but deep enough to grow long weeds of green and gold that swung with the current like thick fairy hair. Two or three silver birches shone and rustled by the wicket-gate. He went in. A robin hopped up, inspected him, and hopped away into the shadow of the yew.\n\nThe interior seemed to him like a bit of forest\u2014the beams, the panelling, the dark, stained settles. Yet there was a bathroom, too, the kitchen was large and light, the bedrooms airy, the living-rooms just right in size and number. The front windows looked out across the rose-plot to the little green where the geese were gabbling, while the back ones opened straight into the orchard, where fruit and walnut trees stood ankle deep in uncut grass. The windows, too, were wide and high, letting in big stretches of the sky. Also, there were a mulberry-bush and several heavy quince trees. And the stream ran singing and bubbling between the orchard and the farther fields, where, amid the sprinkled gold of the ragwort, scuttled countless rabbits.\n\nMoreover, it was cheap, the drains were safe, the church was as picturesque as an old-fashioned Christmas card, and the vicar was brother to a peer. Thus there was something for everybody. The nest was found. Mother inspected it in due course and gave her modified approval; Tom said it 'sounded ripping,' he would 'run down for week-ends' whenever he could; and Joan, catching her breath when she saw it first on the afternoon of a golden-brown October day, felt a lump in her throat and moisture in her eyes, such happiness rose in her breast. She stood with her father in the sandy lane,\u2014Mother had gone inside at once,\u2014the larches rustling and the excited geese examining their stiff town clothing from behind. On the topmost branch of an apple tree a big brown thrush was singing its heart out over the garden, its small packed outline silhouetted against the pale blue sky. Joan caught her father's hand.\n\n'Look!' she whispered, pointing. 'Listen!'\n\nHe did so. He felt the strange excitement in the child. Her lips were parted and her shining eyes turned heavenwards a moment. The thrush poured forth its liquid song deliciously; and the sound sank into his heart as though it expressed the full happiness of the air that welcomed them to the cottage and the garden. He experienced surely something of the soft air-magic as he stood there watching, listening. The natural joy and sweetness of it touched him deeply. And his daughter sang a strange thing then, murmuring it to herself. He only just caught the curious words:\n\n\u2003'There's a bird for me\n\n\u2003On the apple tree!\n\n\u2003It's explaining all the garden!'\n\nUp the scaffolding of the quaint phrases he passed, as it were, with her into the clear air beside the singing bird: that scrap of nonsense 'explaining all the garden' did the trick. A sack of meanings seemed emptied before him out of the sweet October sky. The interesting, valuable ideas in life began, he realised, just where language stops\u2014 intelligible, sensible language, that is. Then came either poetry, legend, nonsense, or else mere silence. Joan used a combination of the former.\n\n'Words are parvenu people,' he recalled a Primer sentence, 'as compared with thought and action. Communications between God and man must always be either above or below them; for with words come in translations.'\n\n'Explaining all the garden!' The touch of nonsense brought a thousand 'translations' into his mind. The air was full of fluttering meanings that showered about him. He balanced aloft on the twig beside the singing thrush, his sight darting, as with the bird's-eye view, upon recent happenings. He read various translations instantaneously.\n\nIn front of him stood the cottage and garden, the fields and trees and stream he had dreamed about with his daughter\u2014an accomplished, solid fact. It had come as by magic, materialised by thought and desire, and yet, as Mother said, 'by chance.' But the chance included method, because Fate obeyed a confident Belief. And circumstances were moulded or modified by faith. He and Joan somehow held the sure sweetness of fulfilment in their minds from the beginning; they had always believed, indeed had known, the cottage would be found. And it had been found. He had not fussed nor worried; there had been no friction due to the grit of doubt. Like his queer, spontaneous daughter, he had believed in his dream\u2014and at the same time kept his eyes wide open like a hawk.\n\nAs he stood there, listening to the song of the thrush and aware of its poise on the swaying twig balanced so steadily, yet alert for spontaneous flight in any direction, these fluttering translations of the child's nonsense words shot through him. The joy of the happy thrush shone in his heart, explaining the garden that was life.\n\nThe bird, at that moment, flew off with a whirr of wings, still singing as it vanished with an undulating swoop over the roof towards the orchard. Across the patch of watery blue sky he had been watching shot half a dozen swallows, then intent only upon darting insects, although on the eve of their huge journey of ten thousand miles. Beyond them two plover tumbled like blown leaves towards the ground, yet rising again instantly before they touched it... and into his hand he felt Joan's fingers creep softly. He looked down into her eyes, moist with excitement, joy, and wonder. The magic of the air seemed all about them, in their minds and hearts and very bodies even.\n\n'You've found a real nest, Daddy, but we can travel everywhere from here.' It was said simply, as though a bird had learned to speak. 'Think of the journeys we shall make\u2014just by staying here!'\n\n'The cottage seems swung in the branches, doesn't it?' he replied. 'Come on, now; let's go inside.' And he walked across the lawn, lifting his feet quickly, lightly, as though he feared his weight might hurt the earth, yet still more as though he might any instant spring into the air and follow the thrush, the plover, or the swallows.\n\nUpon the threshold of the open door, at that minute, Mother faced them. Having made her inspection of the arrangements and the furniture, all that the workmen had done in the last few days, she came out to report. She stood there very solidly, her feet in goloshes, planted tenaciously upon the damp October earth. She was smiling contentedly; behind her gleamed the white apron of the parlourmaid. Tea obviously was ready and she was waiting for them to come in. A fire burned pleasantly in the dining-room, glinting on a clean white table-cloth. There were buttered toast and a jug of cream\u2014solid realities both. This atmosphere of wholesome, earthly comfort glowed about her. Her very smile conveyed it.\n\n'Mother's settled down already,' Joan whispered. 'She likes it! That means Tom'll like it too. But she'll live indoors.'\n\nIn his own mind, however, rose another thought, although he agreed with what she said. He was thinking how odd it was that Mother always appeared to be settled in the mouth of a hole. She stood, framed by the dark doorway, as though a deep burrow stretched behind her and below. The simile of the nervous badger, peering forth upon a dangerous upper world, passed through him. A great tenderness rose in his heart. Mother, he knew, though she had done no actual work, had felt the move a heavy strain. To dig a new hole, of course, was a dusty and laborious job, whereas to flutter across a few fields to another tree was but a careless joy.\n\n'I've been through all the rooms,' she said cautiously, as they went down the passage, 'and everything seems very nice indeed, Joe. The wood makes it seem a bit dark, perhaps, but it's all very respectable. And the parlour looks really quite distinguished. Tea's laid for us in the dining-room.'\n\nThey went in; the fire shone brightly; the lamp was lit. Mother moved towards the great silver tea-pot, letting herself down with a sigh into the black horsehair arm-chair. It was as though she went down into the earth. He sat with his cup of tea in the wide settle of the ingle-nook, and Joan, having first seen to her parents' wants, then took the corner facing him.\n\nThey settled in. Yet this settling was characteristic of the family, for whereas Mother settled down, Mr. Wimble and his daughter became unsettled. That is, they felt restless. Mother, with the security of a comfortable home and comfortable income at her back, cropped her food safely, yet wondered why she felt dull and bored and lonely. There is no call to describe the actions and reactions of her familiar type to the conditions of the quiet country life, and her chief tragedy that winter was perhaps that when 'his lordship, the vicar,' called, he surprised her in old garden clothes, the fire in the 'distinguished parlour' (kept unused against just this particular event) unlighted, so that she was obliged to receive him in the dark dining-room with the ungentlemanly settles.\n\nJoan and her father were unsettled for the very reason that made her settled. Mother felt her feet. They felt their wings.\n\nA week after the settling in, their restless feeling, wholly unanticipated, came to a head. The windy skies were already calling the swallows together swiftly, collecting their mobile squadrons in a few hours for the grand southern tour. And these amazing birds seemed nothing less than an incarnation of the air itself. There is nothing of earth about them anywhere; their feet are too weak to stand on the ground; every darting turn they make is a movement of the entire creature, rather than of the head first and then the body; they have no necks, their bullet heads turn simultaneously with the tail, and all at once. Joan and her father watched them daily going about their careless, windy life, gathering on the telegraph wires, giving the young ones hints, on the wing to the very last minute. They had no packing-up to do.\n\n'They'll be off soon now,' said Joan. 'Wherever they are, they go\u2014don't they?' There was a tinge of restless desire in her eyes as she followed their movements.\n\n'A few days, yes,' said her father. 'About the middle of the month they leave. They know right enough.'\n\nAnd two days later\u2014it was October 15th\u2014Joan woke at dawn and looked out of her open window. The twittering of many thousand voices had called her out of sleep, but something in her heart had called her too. It was very early, the daylight of dawn, yet not the daylight quite, and everywhere, from fields and trees, the chorus of bird-life was audible. Birds sing their best and loudest always in that half-hour which precedes the actual dawn. The volume is astonishing. 'As the real daylight comes, it sinks and almost ceases, and never in the whole twenty-four hours is there such an hour again.' The entire air seemed calling 'good-bye and safe return' to those about to leave.\n\nJoan ran and woke her father. 'They're off,' she whispered, as he crawled out of his warm bed, careful not to waken his wife. 'Come and say good-bye.'\n\nThe peculiar joy and mystery of early morning was in the quiet house and in the sharp tang of the fresh, cool autumn air. In nightgown and pyjamas, a single rug about their shoulders, they leaned out of the upper window. The ivy rustled just beneath them on the wall, there was a whisper among the yellow walnut leaves to their right, the orchard trees hung still and motionless, breathing out the perfume of earth and fruit and heavy dew.\n\nThe sky, however, was alive; it seemed all motion; even the streaky clouds tinged with pale colour looked like stretched wings mightily extended. And the vague murmur of a flock of birds rose everywhere. There was a hurricane of wings above the world, as the armies of the swallows came carelessly together. They left in scattered groups, but with every party that left, another instantly assembled, born out of empty space. Multitudes took the wing towards the sea, while other darting multitudes collected instantly behind them. The air, indeed, was alive and whirring into a symbol of lovely, rushing flight\u2014swarming, settling, turning, wheeling in a turmoil of ascending and descending feathers that yet expressed a design of ordered beauty. Myriad clusters formed, then instantly dispersed again, threaded together upon one invisible pattern; now herded into a wedge, shaped like a wild black comet, now circling, streaming, dividing, melting away into a living cloud. The evolutions were bewildering.\n\nAs the eastern horizon began to burn with red and gold, the wings took colour faintly, brightening as an upward slant revealed their pallid under-sides, then darkening again as they tilted backwards. The swallows alternately focussed and dispersed. Separate hordes, turning at high velocity with one accord, shot forth and away to the south. They rose, they sank, they vanished. They went first to the coast; for their migration, led by the infallible sense of orientation which is subconscious knowledge, takes place chiefly in the night\u2014in darkness. Within a brief half-hour the whole of the immense army disappeared. The sky was still and silent, motionless and empty. The swallows were gone.\n\n'They've taken part of me with them,' whispered Joan, 'part of my warmth,' and she drew the rug closer about her shoulders as the October sun came up above the misty fields.\n\n'They'll be in Algeria to-morrow,' sighed her father, 'and I'd like to be there too.' His thought went back to the sun-drenched garden where nightingales sang in the February moonlight... The old romance stirred in him painfully. 'Mother, poor old Mother,' he murmured to himself, 'she seemed so wonderful then. How strange!' He felt himself old suddenly. He felt himself caught, caged\u2014stuck.\n\n'That's where I was born, wasn't it?' Joan asked, catching the sentence. She straightened herself suddenly, throwing the rug aside; the sun shone into her face and on her golden hair that fell rippling over her nightgown. The light gleamed, too, in her moistened eyes. He saw joy steal back upon her. 'But, Daddy,' she exclaimed with an odd touch of confident wonder in her voice and look, 'we can be there just the same, if we want to.' She raised herself on her toes a moment as though she were going to dance or fly. In the pale gold light of the sunrise she looked like some ethereal bird of fire rising into the air.\n\n'We can be everywhere\u2014everywhere at once\u2014really! Don't you see? We always want to be somewhere else anyhow. That proves it.'\n\nAnd as she said it, he remembered the cinema, and felt his wings again; he was free, uncaged; of course he could go anywhere, everywhere at once almost. He knew himself eternally young. He realised Air, that which is everywhere at once and cannot age. Earth obeys time, grows old, changes, and eventually dies; but air is ever changeless, free of time altogether, unageing. It cannot wear away, it is invisible, omnipresent. The wings of the spirit opened in him, rose into space and light, then flashed, darting after the amazing swallows. 'Wherever I am, I go,' he hummed, as he went softly back along the cold passage and crept cautiously into bed beside his wife, who, heavily breathing still, had not moved since he left her, and lay in ignorance of the sunrise, as also of the army of happy wings that by now were already out of England and far across the sea.\n\nAnd, later in the day, as he stood with her near a gravel-pit beside the road, watching a colony of busy starlings, she objected: 'What a noise and fuss about nothing! What a nuisance they are, Joe. Do come on, dear. There's really nothing to watch, and I want to get in and change my things in case any callers come.'\n\nHe remembered a passage about starlings written by a strenuous big-game hunter, who yet had the air-magic in his blood. He quoted it to her, as best he could, and she said it was pretty:\n\n'Happy birdies! What a bore all morality seems, as one watches them. How tiresome it is to be high in the scale (and human)! Those who would shake off the cobwebs\u2014who are tired of teachings and preachings and heavy-high novellings, who would see things anew, and not mattering, rubbing their eyes and forgetting their dignities, missions, destinies, virtues, and the rest of it\u2014let them come and watch a colony of starlings at work in a gravel-pit.'\n\n'Yes,' he agreed, 'quite pretty. Selous got a glimpse there\u2014didn't he? \u2014but only a glimpse. The great thing is to see it all. He forgot the swallows.'\n\nHis thought ran on, fragments becoming audible sometimes. 'It's all one, you see. Stars and starlings are the same one thing, only differently expressed... That's what genius does, of course. Genius has the bird's-eye point of view... It sees analogies everywhere, the underlying unity of everything\u2014sees the similar in the dissimilar. It reduces the Many to the One,' he added in a louder tone, as a Primer came opportunely to his support.\n\n'I ask you, Mother,' he cried with enthusiasm, 'what else is genius but that? I ask you?'\n\n'What?' said Mother, as they went indoors." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 302", + "text": "Wimble watched the year draw to its close and run into the past. Born slowly out of sullen skies, it had shaken off the glistening pearls of April and slipped, radiant and laughing, into May; at the end of June, full-bosomed still and stately, it had begun to hasten, lest the roses hold it prisoner for ever; pausing a moment in August, it looked out with perfect eyes upon the world as from a pinnacle; then, poised and confident, began the grand descent down the red slopes of Autumn into the peace of winter and the snow.\n\nThus, at least, its history described itself in Wimble's thoughts, because his little mind, standing on tiptoe, saw it whole and from above. 'You ought to publish it, dear,' said Mother, to whom he mentioned it one December evening round the fire. 'You really ought to write it.' He objected that everybody knew it just as well as he did. 'It's always happening to everybody, so why should I remind them?' 'Because they don't see it,' was her answer. 'Besides, they'd think you wonderful.' But Wimble was no writer. He shook his untidy head, yet secretly pleased with his wife's remark that people don't see the obvious. It was almost an air-remark. Mother was changing a little... And he dozed in his chair, thinking how easily the world calls a man wonderful\u2014he has but to startle it\u2014and how easily, too, that man is destroyed if he believes its verdict.\n\nWith the rare exception of occasional signs like this, however, his wife had not mobilised her being radically for a big change. She retired into her prosaic background, against which, as with certain self-protecting, ultra-cautious animals and insects, she remained safely invisible. Back to the land proved rather literal for her; she wore her heavy garden-gloves with pride. At the same time her practical nature, streaked with affection, patience, and unselfishness, took on, somehow, a tiny glint of gold. Her eyes grew lighter, her movements less laborious. Fear lessened in her; joy often caught her by surprise. Sparks, though not yet flame, lit up her attitude to things, as if, close to her beloved element of earth, the country life both soothed and blessed her. She felt at home. She said 'what' far less frequently. This quiet, peaceful winter was perhaps for her a period of gestation. The family gathered about her more than in town.\n\nWith a buoyancy hard to define and possibly not justified, Wimble watched her. He looked out upon life about him. His health was good, but this buoyancy was based on something deeper than that; his health was good because of it. Nothing mattered, a foolish phrase of those who shirked responsibilities, was far from him; everything mattered equally expressed it better. The New Thing coming, which he and Joan called Air, lay certainly in him, though very far yet from finding full expression. The germ of it at any rate lay in him, as in her. The fact that they recognised it was proof of that. A divine carelessness took charge of his whole life and being; Mother was aware of it; even Tom responded mildly: 'quite sets a fellow up,' as he expressed it after his rare week-end visits, the Sunday spent in killing rabbits; 'town's overrated after all.'\n\nThey merged pleasantly enough with their surroundings, melting without shock into the life of neighbours, sharing the community existence, narrow, conventional, uninspired though it was. And all through the dark and clouded months, the skies emptied of birds, weighted at the low horizons, afraid to shine, yet waiting for the marvellous coming dawn\u2014 all through these heavy weeks and days Joan's presence, flitting everywhere with careless singing and dancing, shot the wintry gloom with happy radiance. It was her spontaneous dancing that especially made Wimble stare and wonder. It conveyed meanings no words could compass, expressing better than anything else the new attitude he felt coming into life. He remembered the flood of shadowy ideas her graceful gestures had poured into him once before when he walked up Maida Vale; and that strange night in the flat when, seeing her dancing on the London roof, he was dimly aware of a new language which included even inanimate objects. The strange shudder that accompanied the vision he had forgotten. This magical rhythm was her secret. It stirred the heart, making it vulnerable to impulses from some brighter, happier state she knew instinctively and in advance. Mother, he noticed, watched her too, peering above her knitting-needles, moving her head in sympathy, sometimes a faint, wondering smile lighting upon her bewildered, careworn face. A real smile, however, for it was in the eyes alone, and did not touch the lips. Even Tom admired. 'You ought to be taught,' he said guardedly. 'You'd touch 'em up a bit. If you did that in church the whole world would go.' He too, without knowing it, realised that something sacred, inspired, regenerating was being whispered.\n\nYet Joan herself, though growing older, hardly developed in the ordinary way. She did not grow up. She remained backward somehow. She lived subconsciously, perhaps. Some new knowledge, gathering below the surface, found expression in this spontaneous dancing. With the dawn, now slowly coming, it would burst full-fledged upon the world, and the world itself would dance with joy. Meanwhile, a new bloom, a new beauty settled on the girl, and Mother proudly insisted that she 'must go to a good photographer and have her picture taken.' But the result was commonplace, for in the rigid black and white outline all the subtlety escaped, and, regretting the money wasted, Mother wondered why it had failed. Like the audience at the Vicarage charities when Joan danced, she watched the performance, felt a hint of strange beauty, clapped her hands and wondered 'what it meant.'\n\n'It's her life, you see,' Wimble comforted her. 'And you can't photograph life. To get her real meaning, we ought to do it with her\u2014 dance it.'\n\n'She's light, rather, for her age,' replied Mother ambiguously. 'But everybody seems to love her somehow,' she added proudly. 'She seems to make people happy. P'r'aps later she'll develop and get sensible.' She sighed, and resumed her knitting. Presently she got up to light the lamps. 'The days are drawing out, Joe,' she mentioned, smiling. 'Spring will be here before we know it.' He lifted the chimney to help her, turned up the wick, struck a match, and kissed her fondly.\n\nThe country life, it seemed, had brought them all together more, made them aware of their underlying unity, as it were. They flocked. Wimble, dressed now in wide brown knickerbockers, wearing bright stockings and brogue shoes with feathered tongues that flapped when he walked, noticed the change with pleasure. The new attitude was only in his brain as yet, but it was already stealing down into his heart. This increased sense of a harmonious manifold unity in the family impressed him, and it was Joan, he felt, who made him see it, if she was not also the cause of its coming to pass. Only some spiritual actuary could make it quite clear, but he discerned the oneness behind the different members of his family, uniting them. In this subconscious, completer self lay full understanding. There was no need to pay annual subscriptions to an Aquarian Society to realise that! Moreover, if a small family with such divergent interests and ambitions could flock and realise unity, the larger family of a village, country, nation could do the same\u2014once the underlying unity were realised. That was the difficulty. The whole world was, after all, but a single family, humanity... In his quiet country nook Wimble dreamed his great dream. He saw the nations with but a single flag, a single drum, a single anthem, true to a larger single patriotism that could never again be split up into lesser divisional patriotisms. The universal fraternity of indivisible Air was coming; the subconscious where individuals pooled their surface differences would become conscious; that was the truth, he felt, the one great thing the Aquarian lecturer had said... He remembered the cinema, with its mechanical suggestion of a unification of world-experience faintly offered; he remembered the free, happy, collective life of the inhabitants of air, the natural singers of the world. The deep underlying sense of unity buried in the subconscious once realised, full understanding must follow, and with complete understanding the way was cleared for love. And it was Joan's dancing, somehow, that set the dream within his heart. The new attitude to life he imagined dawning on the world was the first hint of a coming spiritual consciousness, and for spiritual consciousness the totality of things is present. 'All at once and everywhere at once,' as she had put it. His heart swelled big within him as he dreamed...\n\n'Coal's getting very expensive,' mentioned Mother, as she leaned forward beside him to poke the fire. 'We'd better mix it with coke. You might find out, Joe. We can't go on at this rate.'\n\n'I will, dear,' he replied. 'I'll write to Snodden and Tupps at once.' He patted her knee and got up to go to his little den where he kept his papers, books, and pipes, reflecting as he did so that it was easy enough to love the world; it was loving the individual that breaks the heart. Pricked by an instant of remorse, then, it occurred to him that a pat on the knee, as a sign of love, might be improved. He trotted back and kissed her. 'We must flock more and more and more,' he mumbled, and before she could say 'What, Joe?' he gave her another kiss and was gone to write to his coal merchant as she had suggested. He would bring back the bird into Mother's heart or die in the attempt. If the new thing he dreamed about didn't begin at home, it was not worth much. He felt happy, so happy that he longed to share it with others; he would have liked to mention it in his letter to the coal merchant. Instead, he merely began, 'Dear Messrs. Snodden and Tupps,' yet signed himself, 'Yours full of faith,' since 'faithfully' alone sounded insincere.\n\n'Odd,' he reflected, 'that unless happiness is shared, it's incomplete, unsatisfying. The chief item lacks. Selfish happiness is a contradiction in terms. We are meant to share everything and be together more. There's the instinctive proof of it.' If the coal merchant felt equally happy, he might even have shared his coal. 'But he'd only think me mad if I suggested that,' thought Wimble, chuckling. 'We can exchange coal and money and still love one another.' He posted the letter before he could change his mind, and came back to his wife. 'Some day,' he said, as he sat down and poked the fire, 'some day, Mother, and not very far off either, we shall all be sharing everything all over the world, just as birds share the air and worms and water.' This time she did not ask him to repeat his words. She smiled a comfortable smile half-way between belief and incredulity. 'You really think so, Joe?' 'It's coming,' he rejoined; 'it's in the air, you know, for I feel it. Don't you?' he added. He leaned nearer and softly whispered in her ear, 'You're happy here, aren't you, Mother? Much happier than you used to be? 'She smiled again contentedly. 'The country air, Joe dear,' she replied. 'The bird's flown back into you,' he said, taking her hand and ignoring the bunch of knitting-needles that came pricking with it. 'Perhaps,' she mumbled, 'perhaps. Life's sweeter, easier than it used to be\u2014in some ways.' She flushed a little, while Wimble murmured to himself, yet just low for her to hear, 'and in your heart some late lark singing, dear. A new thing is stealing down upon us all.' 'There's something coming, certainly,' she agreed. 'Come,' he corrected her, 'not coming. It's here now.' Holding hands, they looked into each other's eyes, as Joan's little song and dancing steps went down the passage just outside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 303", + "text": "January sparkled, dropped like a broken icicle, and was gone; February, so eager for the sun that she shortens her days while lengthening her searching evening hours, summoned one night the tyrant winds of March; these shouted and blew the world awake, then yielded with a sigh to the kiss of April's laughter. A disturbing sweetness ran upon the world, agitating the hearts and minds of men. Yearning stirred even among deep city slums; in the country hope and desire burst into glad singing. Spring returned with her eternal magic. The hawthorn was in bloom.\n\nThe birds came back, filling the air with song, with the glance of wings and the whirr of feathers, with the gold and confidence of coming summer. The air was alive again with careless joy. Wimble responded instantly. The thrill pierced to his very marrow. Memories revived like wild-flowers, and his thoughts, shot with the gold and blue of lost romance, turned to the open air. He got some sandwiches, mounted his bicycle, and, followed by Joan, started in a southerly direction as once, long years ago, he had escaped from streets and lectures to spend a day with his beloved birds. This time, however, it was not the willow-haunted Cambridge flats that were his aim. He took Joan with him to the bare open downs above the sea.\n\nIt was a radiant morning, and a south-west wind blew gently in their faces. Wimble's felt hat fluttered behind him at the end of a string, as they skimmed down the sandy lanes towards Lewes, the smooth, scooped hollows of the downs coming nearer every minute. Their majestic outline seemed hung down from the sky itself, yet in spite of their mass they had a light, almost transparent look in the morning brilliance. They melted into the air. The noble line of them flung upwards the space as though time met eternity and disappeared.\n\nDown the long hill into the ancient town Joan shot past him. He noticed her balance, and thought of the perfect equilibrium of a bird that shoots full speed upon its resting-place, then stops, securely poised, making no single effort to recover steadiness. For all its tiny legs, no bird wobbles or overbalances, much less trips or stumbles. Joan flew ahead of him, both hands off the bars. The careless gesture reminded him of the matchless grace of the wagtail. He laughed aloud, coasting after her unconscious ease with his own more deliberate, reasoned caution. 'She could fly to Africa without a guide!' he thought, aware for an instant of the great subconscious rhythm in Nature birds obeyed instinctively. No wonder their purposes were carelessly achieved. 'She's sure,' he added. 'Something very big takes care of her, and she knows it.'\n\nThey walked up the steep hill out of the town, ran to the left along a chalky lane, dipped in between the folds of grassy hills and great covering fields, Joan leading always without hesitation. Once they paused to watch the aerial evolutions of a body of plover, rising, falling, tumbling, turning at full speed without confusion or collision, as though one single telepathic sympathy operated throughout the entire mass of individuals. Instinct the Primers called it, but Wimble, recalling the Aquarian lecture, caught at another phrase\u2014subconscious unity. It was a power, at any rate, beyond man's conscious reasoning mind. The careless safety of the birds amazed him. 'Air wisdom!' he exclaimed aloud to Joan; 'we shall all have it some day!' It was odd how that crazy lecture had lodged ideas in his thoughts, claiming confirmation, returning again and again to his memory. They coasted down a grassy track into a village, left their bicycles behind a farmer's gate, and sat down a moment to recover breath. It was ten o'clock in the morning.\n\nFrom the tiny hamlet, where a few flint cottages and barns clustered about an ivied church, they took the path southwards up the slope. In the cup or the hills below them sheltered the toy buildings and the trees. The rooks, advertising their clumsy flight and semi-human ways, cawed noisily, playing in the gusty wind. They showed off consciously, devoid of grace. One minute the scene was visible below, a perfect miniature; the next it was hidden by a heavy shoulder of ground; the earth had swallowed it, church, houses, trees, and all. No sound was audible. Even the rooks had vanished. In front stretched an open and a naked world. The human couple paused a moment and stared. The wind went past their ears. There was a sense of immensity and freedom. There was great light. They were on the Downs.\n\n'Oh, Daddy,' cried Joan, 'we're out of England! This is the world!'\n\n'And the world has blown wide open!' he replied. 'I feel everywhere at once!' The gust whirled his words and laughter into space. 'The misunderstanding of streets and houses leaves\u2014' he snatched at the same time at his vanishing hat and seized the cord.\n\nJoan flung herself backwards against the wind with arms spread out, her hat in one hand and a blue-ribbon that had tied her hair fluttering in the other. The loosened hair streamed past her neck, great strands of it flattened against the curve of her back as well, her short skirts flapping with a noise like sails. Then, turning about, she faced the gust, and everything streamed the other way. The wind clapped the clothes so tight against her slender figure that it seemed to undress her, or rather made them fit as tight and neat as feathers. Like some bird of paradise, indeed, she looked, the slim black legs straining to take the air. She began to dance.\n\nAnd as he watched the golden hair against the blue, there flashed into him the memory of a distant day, when a saffron scarf had set his heart on fire with strange airy yearnings, and the blue and golden earth had danced to the tune of another spring. The tiny human outline amid this vast expanse seemed wonderful, so safe, so exquisite, caught in some rhythm born of the immensities of sky and earth and ocean. A mile to the southward lay the sea. There was a taste of clover-honey, a tang of salt, and the gorse laid its sweetness in between the two. Memories crowded upon him as he watched Joan playing and dancing. The fervour and earnestness of her pleasure exhilarated him. 'Blithe creature,' he said to himself, 'you were surely born to fly!'\u2014and remembered Mother as she once had been and as she was now. Why had it all left her, this joyous rapture of their early days together? Had the bird flown really from her heart and into Joan? Was it not merely caged awhile? Had he himself not helped to cage it? He recalled her radiant face beside the pond among the emerald Cambridge fields, and the old first love poured back upon him in a flood.\n\nIn a lull of the wind he caught the ecstatic singing of a lark, and at the same moment Joan danced back to his side suddenly and seized his arm. Her voice, it almost seemed, carried on the trill and music of the lark. 'It's all new as gold,' she cried. 'Everybody'd live for ever up here. We must bring Mother. She'd flow fly flow all over!'\n\n'Dance, my child,' he exclaimed, 'don't talk! Go on with your dancing. It gives me ideas.'\n\n'But you're always thinking,' she said, still breathless from her exertions. 'It spoils everything, that thinking and thinking\u2014'\n\n'It's not thinking,' he interrupted, 'it's seeing. When you dance I see things. I see everything at once. It's like a huge vision, yet so small and simple that it's all in my head at once. It explains the universe somehow to me. Thinking indeed! Why, I never thought in my life\u2014'\n\n'There's a bird for me, On the apple tree, It's explaining all the garden,' sang the girl, dancing away towards the yellow gorse. Her father's words conveyed no meaning to her; she had not listened. He watched her. Her movements, he felt, obeyed the great unconscious rhythm that breathes through nature, through the entire universe, from the spinning midge to the most distant sun. Surely it must include humanity as well, these millions of separate individuals who had lost it temporarily, much as Mother had lost the 'bird.' He, too, was caught along with it, as though he shared it, did it, danced it. He could see what he could not say. He understood. Immense, yet at lightning speed, the meaning of Air slid with that simple dancing deep into his heart. It was unity of life everywhere that he saw interpreted, and the ease, the grace, the carelessness were due to their being mothered and inspired by Nature's great safe rhythm. Relying on this, as birds did, there was safety, unerring intelligence, infallible guidance, flight from Siberia to Abyssinia possible without a leader. Birds migrated at night, he remembered, stopping at dawn to rest and sing, then going on again in the twilight: surer of their inner guidance in the darkness than in the blaze of daylight. Amazing symbol! Instinct, unconscious, subconscious\u2014whatever it might be called in rigid language, this deep attitude, poised and steady, obeyed the mighty rhythm that realised the underlying unity of all that lives, of everything. Thought breaks this rhythm, which it should merely guide; reason reduces, opposes, and finally interrupts it. His backward child\u2014and she was still a child for all her eighteen years\u2014had somehow tapped it.\n\n'Dance, my child, dance on!' he cried as he followed her. 'You dance joy and brotherhood into my heart.' And, looking more like a mechanical gollywog than a human being who has discovered truth, he floundered after her as a gnome might chase a butterfly. Thus, swinging along between the yellow gorse, over the tumuli, leaping the rabbit holes, he realised that the love and joy he sought and dreamed about was here and now; not in some future Golden Age, but at his very feet upon the earth. All that he meant by Air and the Airy Consciousness was now. This little prophet without a lyre saw it clear. Torn by the brambles, tripped by the holes, he chased his marvellous dream as once, years before, he had chased an elusive streak of gold across the Cambridge flats. He was caught by the elemental rhythm of the Downs, borrowed in its turn from the suns of uttermost space that equally obeyed and shared it.\n\nHe looked about him. Immense domed surfaces, smooth as a pausing ocean, stretched undulating to dim horizons; air lifted the earth into immaterial space; they intermingled; and sight roved everywhere without a break. Upon this vast expanse there were no details to enchain attention, blocking the rhythm of the eye; no points of interest stood up, as in mere 'scenery,' to fasten feeling to a limited area. Enjoyment soared, unconfined, on wings. He saw no barriers, no trees, no hedges or divisions; no summits startled him with 'See, how big I am!' all self-asserting items lacked. Wind, sky, and sea offered their unconditioned, limitless invitation. Even the flowers were unobtrusive, the ragwort, thyme, and yellow gorse claimed no deliberate notice, and the thistle-down flew past like air made visible. It was, in a word, this liberation from detail, snapping attention with definite objects, that set him free in mind, as Joan already proved herself free in action. Earth here was sublimated into air.\n\n'Good heavens!' his heart cried out. 'It's here, it's now\u2014this new thing coming from the Air!'\n\nThis deep rhythm of the landscape caught his very feet, making even his physical movements elastic, springy, sharing the rise and fall of flight expressed in the waving surface of the world about him. He no longer stumbled. Joan's dancing, though apparently she merely leapt to catch the thistle-down, or played with her flying hair and fluttering ribbon, interpreted in the gestures of her young lithe figure all he felt, but reproduced it unconsciously.\n\nThis was, indeed, not England, but the world.\n\n'We're over the edge of everything,' sang Joan, catching at his hand. 'Hold up, Daddy! Hold up!' She tugged him along to join her wild, happy dance. 'You ought to sing. We're over the edge of the world!'\n\n'Above it,' he cried breathlessly. 'We're in the air. Look out, my dear\u2014!'\n\nShe had suddenly released his hand and sent him spinning with the unaccustomed momentum. Her yellow hair vanished beyond a sea of golden gorse. Her figure melted against it, she was out of sight. 'I'm not a bird yet, at any rate,' he gasped, settling to rest upon a convenient mound and mopping his forehead. 'Not in body, at least. I've got no balance to speak of. I think too much\u2014probably.' He heard her singing somewhere far behind him, and again a lark overhead took up the note and bore it into space.\n\nBut with the repose of his creaking muscles and elderly body, the rhythm he had tried to dance now slipped under his ageless and untiring soul. Like a rising wind the Downs were under him and he was up. Seeking a point to settle on, his eye found only strong, subtle lines against the blue, and running along these lines, his spirit was flung forwards with them, upward into limitless space. No peak, no precipice blocked their endless utterance; they flowed, they flew, and Wimble's heart flew with them. The sense of unity, characteristic of airy freedom, invaded his soul triumphantly with its bird's-eye view. He saw life whole beneath him. Perhaps he dozed, perhaps he even slept; at any rate he knew this strange perspective that showed him life, with its huge freight of plodding humanity, rising suddenly into the air.\n\nTo rely upon inner, subconscious guidance was to rely upon that portion of his being\u2014that greater portion\u2014which obeyed spontaneously an immense rhythm of the mothering World-Spirit. Thought broke this rhythm; Reason was clever but not wise. The subconscious powers, knowing nothing, yet approached omniscience; enjoyed omnipresence, while still being here. In that state his individuality pooled in sympathy with all others everywhere, tapping a universal wisdom which is available to intuition but not to argument, and is so simple that a child, a bird, may know it easily, singing and dancing its expression naturally. Unerring, infallible, it is the rhythm of divinity, it is reliance upon deity.\n\nThis germ of understanding sprouted in his heart, and practice would develop it. He realised himself linked up, not alone with Nature, but with the entire human family\u2014and hence, with Mother. The practice, it was obvious, began with Mother. He must see to it at once. Yet, though clear as crystal in his heart, in his mind it all remained confused, too shy for language, so that he recalled what the railway guard had said\u2014it cannot yet be told, but it can be lived.\n\nHis heart flew like a bird through empty space, above all obstacles, above all barriers. There was no detail to enchain attention, nothing to obscure free vision; the soul in him, grand super-bird, took flight. The airy attitude to life became divinely clear and simple, because, with this bird's perspective, he saw life whole. Details that blocked creative energy on earth with fear and difficulty, seemed negligible after all; they were places to take off from. As wings trust carelessly for support upon the universal, ethereal element enveloping them, so could, so must, his will know faith and safety in the immense and powerful rhythms that guide that delicate thrush, the redwing, from Siberia to England every autumn, and steer Sirius unleashed, untroubled, towards his eternal goal. He watched the little wheatears, back from Africa, flitting from perch to perch of tufted grass, soon to leave for their summer in distant Norway. Obedient to this serene and mighty guidance, secure upon these everlasting wings, he saw the bird in humanity open its wings at last. A new reliance upon subconscious inspiration, linking all together, from the butterfly to the angel, flashed through him, air its symbol, wings and flight its emblem. He realised, with an instant's strange intensity, the unity of indivisible air manifested in all forms of life the planet bore.\n\nThis undetailed space about him inspired him oddly, it symbolised his dream, the dream that had haunted him since earliest youth. He looked down upon the world beneath him, upon the stretch of years he had flown over, upon the congested streets and houses where men lived, upon the iron conventions and traditions imprisoning their minds from escape into freedom that yet lay so close. The element of earth weighed still heavily upon them; earth builds forms; air, being form-less, offered liberty. He saw these million forms already crumbling; he saw the masses at the upper windows, on the roofs, all looking\u2014up. With the coming of air, the day of forms was passing. The ferment, the unrest, the universal questing shone in these upturned eyes. They would not look down again. The vital force had drained out of a thousand forms which have served their day; no past tradition was absolute; they had found it out. Everywhere he saw the emergence of this new spirit, leaving behind it the empty, unsatisfying forms, yearning for fuller self-expression that the unifying ethereal element of air now promised. The roofs were strangely crowded. He saw the myriad figures. He saw that some of them already sang and danced!\n\nAlready the new mighty rhythm caught them whirling into space, each soul more and more en rapport with the universal world-soul. Into their hearts, with the lift of wings and a happy bird-like song, it stole subconsciously; the formulae of doctrine which change and shift were giving place to inner experience, and inner experience cannot be destroyed, since it is formless, acknowledging no boundaries, obedient to no creed. Form was dying, life was being born...\n\nHe watched the tumbling plover, the sea-gulls grandly sailing, the soaring lark; the floating thistledown went past along the careless wind; he saw his un-thinking daughter's natural, happy dancing, one and all interpreting this message of the air, this promise of liberty that brimmed his deep heart and his uneducated mind. The huge simplicity of the naked Downs made him see existence singularly as a whole; across the open sweep before him the air came sweetly, blowing the tangle of artificial living into easy rhythm and dancing everywhere.\n\nHe saw the accidental barriers between creed and sect and nation blown away. A new spiritual unity took their place, a synthetic life, the parts highly specialised, as with birds, yet the whole in perfect harmony. The day of special, exclusive dispensations had disappeared, and this organic spiritual unity, with its new religion of service, lifted the people as with mighty wings.\n\n'Dance on, my child! dance on!' he cried, 'it makes me see things whole!' He watched her light, flying movements against the sea of yellow gorse, the hair like a saffron scarf upon the wind, her radiant face shining and laughing with the blue of endless space behind it. She did not heed his words; she danced away again; she seemed one with the tumbling plover, the sailing sea-birds, and the drifting thistle-down. She danced with the Spring, and the air was in her heart.\n\nThe spirit quickened in him as he saw her. His consciousness, he knew, was but a fragment of an immense and deeper consciousness, of limitless scope and powers; this greater self made affirmations to which no mere intellect would dare to set the boundaries. With the air there was a return of joy, belief and wonder into a world that has too long denied all three. Intellect might stand aside a little longer, watching cautiously, like Mother, the flights of intuition, that flashing bird of fire that strikes and vanishes; but science, hitherto destructive chiefly, must enter a new field or be discredited. It must become constructive, it must examine spiritual states. The barrier between the organic and the inorganic was already breached.\n\n'Dance on! My heart flies dancing with you!'\n\nWith you! Rather with everything and every one! For he had this curious inspiration, as though all his past condensed now into a single moment\u2014 that a new attitude, due to the subliminal consciousness becoming consciously organised with its myriad and mighty powers, was stealing down into the hearts of men from the air. Since its outstanding characteristic was a fuller understanding, a natural sharing, a deep, instinctive sympathy, it involved an actual realisation of spiritual unity that intellect alone has never yet achieved, and never can. It was no flabby, Utopian, idealistic brotherhood he saw, but a practical, co-operative life based upon those greater powers, and upon that completer understanding lying, hid with God, in the subliminal regions of humanity. Experienced hitherto sporadically, only, he saw in what his heart called the promise of the air, their universal acceptance and development... In a second of time, this all flashed into him as he watched the dancing little human figure on the gigantic landscape. And after it, if not actually with it, rose that unaccountable, uneasy, half-terrible emotion of deep-seated pain he had known before\u2014the shudder... He trembled, tried to sing. Then the gorse pricked him where he lay. He turned to make himself more comfortable. He wriggled. The attempt to sing tickled his throat and he coughed.\n\nHe sat up, feeling in his pockets for a pencil and paper. For the first time in his life he felt he must write. 'I must give it out,' he mumbled to himself. 'It's so wonderful, so simple. I must share it. I must tell it to others\u2014to everybody.' He actually made some notes. 'Ah,' he thought, as he read them over a few days later, 'they're no good. I don't quite understand them now, to tell the truth.' He sighed. 'I'm only muddled,' he decided, 'just a Man in the Street bewildered by a touch of inspiration that blew into me!'\n\nHe lay watching Joan for a little longer, dancing in the middle distance still. The zest of a bird was in her, the toss, the scamper. Lithe, spinning, sure, her movements interpreted the air far more clearly than his thoughts could compass it in words. Her song came to him with the breeze. He watched her, then waved the packet of sandwiches above his head. He was hungry. They ate their lunch, and spent the rest of the day exploring the great spaces round them.\n\nIt was evening when they got home; they heard the random sweetness of the thrush's song among the laurels on the lawn; a nightjar was churning in the dusk beyond; there was a subdued and tiny chattering of the swallows in the eaves. They found Mother among the flower-beds, wearing her big garden-gloves. Wimble took her in his arms and kissed her.\n\n'It's come, Mother, it's come,' he whispered against her cheek. 'And, d'you know?\u2014you've been with us all day long.'\n\nShe looked up, peaceful and happy, a smell of garden earth about her, and the glow of the sunset in her eyes. 'Have I really, Joe dear?' she said. 'How lovely!' And then she added: 'I believe it is; yes, I believe it is.'\n\nNext morning Wimble woke very, very early\u2014close upon three o'clock. He peered out of the window a moment. The dawn, he saw with a happy sigh of wonder, was just beginning to break. The gleam of light fell upon Mother's face; and the singing of a lark high up in the clearing air came to him. At the same moment Mother moved in her bed close by; her heavy breathing was interrupted. He listened. She was talking in her sleep, though the words were indistinguishable. He waited, thinking she might get up and walk. Her eyes, however, did not open; she lay still again. He slipped over to tuck the blankets more securely round her. 'Bless her!' he thought. 'She's asleep! Her surface consciousness is merged with her deep, safe, wise subconsciousness\u2014' And his thought broke off abruptly. It had suddenly occurred to him that the sleep-walker and the migrating bird both found their way unerringly in the darkness, both obedient to inner guidance. He stood still an instant, looking down upon her face in the pale morning light.\n\n'Who, what guides the redwing over hills, and vales, and seas?' he whispered. 'Who, what guides the sleep-walker amid the intricacies of Maple furniture?' He chuckled to himself. It was odd how the comic Aquarian lecture cropped up in his memory like this once more.\n\nHe bent down and kissed her lightly on the cheek, then went back to bed. Mother still mumbled in her sleep\u2014' Flow, fly, flow,' he seemed to catch, 'it's coming, coming...'\n\n'It's the bird returning to her heart,' he whispered to himself. Deep down inside her being something sang; outside, the carolling of the lark continued, blithe and joyous in the breaking dawn. As he fell asleep, the two sounds were so curiously mingled that they seemed almost indistinguishable...\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Garden of Survival ]\n\nIt will surprise and at the same time possibly amuse you to know that I had the instinct to tell what follows to a Priest, and might have done so had not the Man of the World in me whispered that from professional Believers I should get little sympathy, and probably less credence still. For to have my experience disbelieved, or attributed to hallucination, would be intolerable to me. Psychical investigators, I am told, prefer a Medium who takes no cash recompense for his performance, a Healer who gives of his strange powers without reward. There are, however, natural-born priests who yet wear no uniform other than upon their face and heart, but since I know of none I fall back upon yourself, my other half, for in writing this adventure to you I almost feel that I am writing it to myself.\n\nThe desire for confession is upon me: this thing must out. It is a story, though an unfinished one. I mention this at once lest, frightened by the thickness of the many pages, you lay them aside against another time, and so perhaps neglect them altogether. A story, however, will invite your interest, and when I add that it is true, I feel that you will bring sympathy to that interest: these together, I hope, may win your attention, and hold it, until you shall have read the final word.\n\nThat I should use this form in telling it will offend your literary taste\u2014you who have made your name both as critic and creative writer\u2014for you said once, I remember, that to tell a story in epistolary form is a subterfuge, an attempt to evade the difficult matters of construction and delineation of character. My story, however, is so slight, so subtle, so delicately intimate too, that a letter to some one in closest sympathy with myself seems the only form that offers.\n\nIt is, as I said, a confession, but a very dear confession: I burn to tell it honestly, yet know not how. To withhold it from you would be to admit a secretiveness that our relationship has never known\u2014out it must, and to you. I may, perhaps, borrow\u2014who can limit the sharing powers of twin brothers like ourselves?\u2014some of the skill your own work spills so prodigally, crumbs from your writing-table, so to speak; and you will forgive the robbery, if successful, as you will accept lie love behind the confession as your due.\n\nNow, listen, please! For this is the point: that, although my wife is dead these dozen years and more\u2014I have found reunion and I love. Explanation of this must follow as best it may. So, please mark tie point which for the sake of emphasis I venture to repeat: that I know reunion and I love.\n\nWith the jealous prerogative of the twin, you objected to that marriage, though I knew that it deprived you of no jot of my affection, owing to the fact that it was prompted by pity only, leaving the soul in me wholly disengaged. Marion, by her steady refusal to accept my honest friendship, by her persistent admiration of me, as also by her loveliness, her youth, her singing, persuaded me somehow finally that I needed her. The cry of the flesh, which her beauty stimulated and her singing increased most strangely, seemed raised into a burning desire that I mistook at the moment for the true desire of the soul. Yet, actually, the soul in me remained aloof, a spectator, and one, moreover, of a distinctly lukewarm kind. It was very curious. On looking back, I can hardly understand it even now; there seemed some special power, some special undiscovered tie between us that led me on and yet deceived me. It was especially evident in her singing, this deep power. She sang, you remember, to her own accompaniment on the harp, and her method, though so simple it seemed almost childish, was at the same time charged with a great melancholy that always moved me most profoundly. The sound of her small, plaintive voice, the sight of her slender fingers that plucked the strings in some delicate fashion native to herself, the tiny foot that pressed the pedal\u2014all these, with her dark searching eyes fixed penetratingly upon my own while she sang of love and love's endearments, combined in a single stroke of very puissant and seductive kind. Passions in me awoke, so deep, so ardent, so imperious, that I conceived them as born of the need of one soul for another. I attributed their power to genuine love. The following reactions, when my soul held up a finger and bade me listen to her still, small warnings, grew less positive and of ever less duration. The frontier between physical and spiritual passion is perilously narrow, perhaps. My judgment, at any rate, became insecure, then floundered hopelessly. The sound of the harp-strings and of Marion's voice could overwhelm its balance instantly.\n\nMistaking, perhaps, my lukewarm-ness for restraint, she led me at last to the altar you described as one of sacrifice. And your instinct, more piercing than my own, proved only too correct: that which I held for love declared itself as pity only, the soft, affectionate pity of a weakish man in whom the flesh cried loudly, the pity of a man who would be untrue to himself rather than pain so sweet a girl by rejecting the one great offering life placed within her gift. She persuaded me so cunningly that I persuaded myself, yet was not aware I did so until afterwards. I married her because in some manner I felt, but never could explain, that she had need of me.\n\nAnd, at the wedding, I remember two things vividly: the expression of wondering resignation on your face, and upon hers\u2014chiefly in the eyes and in the odd lines about the mouth\u2014the air of subtle triumph that she wore: that she had captured me for her very own at last, and yet\u2014for there was this singular hint in her attitude and behaviour\u2014that she had taken me, because she had this curious deep need of me.\n\nThis sharply moving touch was graven into me, increasing the tenderness of my pity, subsequently, a thousandfold. The necessity lay in her very soul. She gave to me all she had to give, and in so doing she tried to satisfy some hunger of her being that lay beyond my comprehension or interpretation. For, note this\u2014she gave herself into my keeping, I remember, with a sigh.\n\nIt seems as of yesterday the actual moment when, urged by my vehement desires, I made her consent to be my wife; I remember, too, the doubt, the shame, the hesitation that made themselves felt in me before the climax when her beauty overpowered me, sweeping reflection utterly away. I can hear to-day the sigh, half of satisfaction, yet half, it seemed, of pain, with which she sank into my arms at last, as though her victory brought intense relief, yet was not wholly gamed in the way that she had wanted. Her physical beauty, perhaps, was the last weapon she had wished to use for my enslavement; she knew quite surely that the appeal to what was highest in me had not succeeded...\n\nThe party in our mother's house that week in July included yourself; there is no need for me to remind you of its various members, nor of the strong attraction Marion, then a girl of twenty-five, exercised upon the men belonging to it. Nor have you forgotten, I feel sure, the adroit way in which she contrived so often to find herself alone with me, both in the house and out of it, even to the point of sometimes placing me in a quasi-false position. That she tempted me is, perhaps, an overstatement, though that she availed herself of every legitimate use of feminine magic to entrap me is certainly the truth. Opportunities of marriage, it was notorious, had been frequently given to her, and she had as frequently declined them; she was older than her years; to inexperience she certainly had no claim: and from the very first it was clear to me\u2014if conceited, I cannot pretend that I was also blind\u2014that flirtation was not her object and that marriage was. Yet it was marriage with a purpose that she desired, and that purpose had to do, I felt, with sacrifice. She burned to give her very best, her all, and for my highest welfare. It was in this sense, I got the impression strangely, that she had need of me.\n\nThe battle seemed, at first, uneven, since, as a woman, she did not positively attract me. I was first amused at her endeavours and her skill; but respect for her as a redoubtable antagonist soon followed. This respect, doubtless, was the first blood she drew from me, since it gained my attention and fixed my mind upon her presence. From that moment she entered my consciousness as a woman; when she was near me I became more and more aware of her, and the room, the picnic, the game of tennis that included her were entirely different from such occasions when she was absent, I became self-conscious. It was impossible to ignore her as formerly had been my happy case.\n\nIt was then I first knew how beautiful she was, and that her beauty made a certain difference to my mood. The next step may seem a big one, but, I believe, is very natural: her physical beauty gave me definite pleasure. And the instant this change occurred she was aware of it. The curious fact, however, is that, although aware of this gain of power, she made no direct use of it at first. She did not draw this potent weapon for my undoing; it was ever with her, but was ever sheathed. Did she discern my weakness, perhaps, and know that the subtle power would work upon me most effectively if left to itself? Did she, rich in experience, deem that its too direct use might waken a reaction in my better self? I cannot say, I do not know... Every feminine art was at her disposal, as every use of magic pertaining to young and comely womanhood was easily within her reach. As you and I might express it bluntly, she knew men thoroughly, she knew every trick; she drew me on, then left me abruptly in the wrong, puzzled, foolish, angry, only to forgive me later with the most enchanting smile or word imaginable. But never once did she deliberately make use of the merciless weapon of her physical beauty although\u2014perhaps because\u2014she knew that it was the most powerful in all her armoury.\n\nFor listen to this: when at last I took her in my arms with passion that would not be denied, she actually resented it. She even sought to repel me from her touch that had undone me. I repeat what I said before: She did not wish to win me in that way. The sigh of happiness she drew in that moment\u2014I can swear to it\u2014included somewhere, too, the pain of bitter disappointment.\n\nThe weapon, however, that she did use without hesitation was her singing. There was nothing special either in its quality or skill; it was a voice untrained, I believe, and certainly without ambition; her repertoire was limited; she sang folk-songs mostly, the simple love-songs of primitive people, of peasants and the like, yet sang them with such truth and charm, with such power and conviction, somehow, that I knew enchantment as I listened. This, too, she instantly divined, and that behind my compliments lay hid a weakness of deep origin she could play upon to her sure advantage. She did so without mercy, until gradually I passed beneath her sway.\n\nI will not now relate in detail the steps of my descent, or if you like it better, of my capture. This is a summary merely. So let me say in brief that her singing to the harp combined with the revelation of her physical beauty to lead me swiftly to the point where I ardently desired her, and that in this turmoil of desire I sought eagerly to find real love. There were times when I deceived myself most admirably; there were times when I plainly saw the truth. During the former I believed that my happiness lay in marrying her, but in the latter I recognised that a girl who meant nothing to my better self had grown of a sudden painfully yet exquisitely desirable. But even during the ascendancy of the latter physical mood, she had only to seat herself beside the harp and sing, for the former state to usurp its place, I watched, I listened, and I yielded. Her voice, aided by the soft plucking of the strings, completed my defeat. Now, strangest of all, I must add one other thing, and I will add it without comment. For though sure of its truth, I would not dwell upon it. And it is this: that in her singing, as also in her playing, in the \"colour\" of her voice as also in the very attitude and gestures of her figure as she sat beside the instrument, there lay, though marvellously hidden, something gross. It woke a response of something in myself, hitherto unrecognized, that was similarly gross...\n\nIt was in the empty billiard-room when the climax came, a calm evening of late July, the dusk upon the lawn, and most of the house-party already gone upstairs to dress for dinner. I had been standing beside the open window for some considerable time, motionless, and listening idly to the singing of a thrush or blackbird in the shrubberies\u2014when I heard the faint twanging of the harp-strings in the room behind me, and turning, saw that Marion had entered and was there beside the instrument. At the same moment she saw me, rose from the harp and came forward. During the day she had kept me at a distance. I was hungry for her voice and touch; her presence excited me\u2014and yet I was half afraid.\n\n\"What! Already dressed!\" I exclaimed, anxious to avoid a talk a deux. \"I must hurry then, or I shall be later than usual.\"\n\nI crossed the room towards the door, when she stopped me with her eyes.\n\n\"Do you really mean to say you don't know the difference between an evening frock and\u2014and this,\" she answered lightly, holding out the skirt in her fingers for me to touch. And in the voice was that hint of a sensual caress that, I admit, bewildered both my will and judgment. She was very close and her fragrance came on me with her breath, like the perfume of the summer garden. I touched the material carelessly; it was of softest smooth white serge. It seemed I touched herself that lay beneath it. And at that touch some fire of lightning ran through every vein.\n\n\"How stupid of me,\" I said quickly, making to go past her, \"but it's white, you see, and in this dim light I\u2014\"\n\n\"A man's idea of an evening frock is always white, I suppose, or black.\" She laughed a little. \"I'm not coming to dinner to-night,\" she added, sitting down to the harp. \"I've got a headache and thought I might soothe it with a little music. I didn't know any one was here. I thought I was alone.\"\n\nThus, deftly, having touched a chord of pity in me, she began to play; her voice followed; dinner and dressing, the house-party and my mother's guests, were all forgotten. I remember that you looked in, your eyes touched with a suggestive and melancholy smile, and as quickly closed the door again. But even that little warning failed to help me. I sat down on the sofa facing her, the world forgotten. And, as I listened to her singing and to the sweet music of the harp, the spell, it seemed, of some ancient beauty stole upon my spirit. The sound of her soft voice reduced my resistance to utter impotence. An aggressive passion took its place. The desire for contact, physical contact, became a vehement aching that I scarcely could restrain, and my arms were hungry for her. Shame and repugnance touched me faintly for a moment, but at once died away again. I listened and I watched. The sensuous beauty of her figure and her movements, swathed in that soft and clinging serge, troubled my judgment; it seemed, as I saw her little foot upon the pedal, that I felt with joy its pressure on my heart and life. Something gross and abandoned stirred in me; I welcomed her easy power and delighted in it. I feasted my eyes and ears, the blood rose feverishly to my head. She did not look at me, yet knew that I looked at her, and how. No longer ashamed, but with a fiery pleasure in my heart, I spoke at last. Her song had ended. She softly brushed the strings, her eyes turned downwards.\n\n\"Marion,\" I said, agitation making my voice sound unfamiliar, \"Marion, dear, I am enthralled; your voice, your beauty\u2014\"\n\nI found no other words; my voice stopped dead; I stood up, trembling in every limb. I saw her in that instant as a maid of olden time, singing the love-songs of some far-off day beside her native instrument, and of a voluptuous beauty there was no withstanding. The half-light of the dusk set her in a frame of terrible enchantment.\n\nAnd as I spoke her name and rose, she also spoke my own, my Christian name, and rose as well. I saw her move towards me. Upon her face, in her eyes and on her lips, was a smile of joy I had never seen before, though a smile of conquest, and of something more besides that I must call truly by its rightful name, a smile of lust. God! those movements beneath the clinging dress that fell in lines of beauty to her feet! Those little feet that stepped upon my heart, upon my very soul... For a moment I loathed myself. The next, as she touched me and my arms took her with rough strength against my breast, my repugnance vanished, and I was utterly undone. I believed I loved. That which was gross in me, leaping like fire to claim her glorious beauty, met and merged with that similar, devouring flame in her; but in the merging seemed cunningly transformed into the call of soul to soul: I forgot the pity... I kissed her, holding her to me so fiercely that she scarcely moved. I said a thousand things. I know not what I said. I loved.\n\nThen, suddenly, she seemed to free herself; she drew away; she looked at me, standing a moment just beyond my reach, a strange smile on her lips and in her darkened eyes a nameless expression that held both joy and pain. For one second I felt that she repelled me, that she resented my action and my words. Yes, for one brief second she stood there, like an angel set in judgment over me, and the next we had come together again, softly, gently, happily; I heard that strange, deep sigh, already mentioned, half of satisfaction, half, it seemed, of pain, as she sank down into my arms and found relief in quiet sobbing on my breast.\n\nAnd pity then returned. I felt unsure of myself again. This was the love of the body only; my soul was silent. Yet\u2014somehow, in some strange hidden way, lay this ambushed meaning\u2014that she had need of me, and that she offered her devotion and herself in sacrifice." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 304", + "text": "The brief marriage ran its course, depleting rather than enriching me, and I know you realized before the hurried, dreadful end that my tie with yourself was strengthened rather than endangered, and that I took from you nothing that I might give it to her. That death should intervene so swiftly, leaving her but an interval of a month between the altar and the grave, you could foreknow as little as I or she; yet in that brief space of time you learned that I had robbed you of nothing that was your precious due, while she as surely realized that the amazing love she poured so lavishly upon me woke no response\u2014beyond a deep and tender pity, strangely deep and singularly tender I admit, but assuredly very different from love.\n\nNow this, I think, you already know and in some measure understand; but what you cannot know\u2014since it is a portion of her secret, of that ambushed meaning, as I termed it, given to me when she lay dying\u2014is the pathetic truth that her discovery wrought no touch of disenchantment in her. I think she knew with shame that she had caught me with her lowest weapon, yet still hoped that the highest in her might complete and elevate her victory. She knew, at any rate, neither dismay nor disappointment; of reproach there was no faintest hint. She did not even once speak of it directly, though her fine, passionate face made me aware of the position. Of the usual human reaction, that is, there was no slightest trace; she neither chided nor implored; she did not weep. The exact opposite of what I might have expected took place before my very eyes.\n\nFor she turned and faced me, empty as I was. The soul in her, realizing the truth, stood erect to meet the misery of lonely pain that inevitably lay ahead\u2014in some sense as though she welcomed it already; and, strangest of all, she blossomed, physically as well as mentally, into a fuller revelation of gracious loveliness than before, sweeter and more exquisite, indeed, than anything life had yet shown to me. Moreover, having captured me, she changed; the grossness I had discerned, that which had led me to my own undoing, vanished completely as though it were transmuted into desires and emotions of a loftier kind. Some purpose, some intention, a hope immensely resolute shone out of her, and of such spiritual loveliness, it seemed to me, that I watched it in a kind of dumb amazement.\n\nI watched it\u2014unaware at first of my own shame, emptied of any emotion whatsoever, I think, but that of a startled worship before the grandeur of her generosity. It seemed she listened breathlessly for the beating of my heart, and hearing none, resolved that she would pour her own life into it, regardless of pain, of loss, of sacrifice, that she might make it live. She undertook her mission, that is to say, and this mission, in some mysterious way, and according to some code of conduct undivined by me, yet passionately honoured, was to give\u2014regardless of herself or of response. I caught myself sometimes thinking of a child who would instinctively undo some earlier grievous wrong. She loved me marvellously.\n\nI know not how to describe to you the lavish wealth of selfless devotion she bathed me in during the brief torturing and unfulfilled period before the end. It made me aware of new depths and heights in human nature. It taught me a new beauty that even my finest dreams had left unmentioned. Into the region that great souls inhabit a glimpse was given me. My own dreadful weakness was laid bare. And an eternal hunger woke in me\u2014that I might love.\n\nThat hunger remained unsatisfied. I prayed, I yearned, I suffered; I could have decreed myself a deservedly cruel death; it seemed I stretched my little nature to unendurable limits in the fierce hope that the Gift of the Gods might be bestowed upon me, and that her divine emotion might waken a response within my leaden soul. But all in vain. My attitude, in spite of every prayer, of every effort, remained no more than a searching and unavailing pity, but a pity that held no seed of a mere positive emotion, least of all, of love. The heart in me lay unredeemed; it knew ashamed and very tender gratitude; but it did not beat for her. I could not love.\n\nI have told you bluntly, frankly, of my physical feelings towards Marion and her beauty. It is a confession that I give into my own safe keeping. I think, perhaps, that you, though cast in a finer mould, may not despise them utterly, nor too contemptuously misinterpret them. The legend that twins may share a single soul has always seemed to me grotesque and unpoetic nonsense, a cruel and unnecessary notion too: a man is sufficiently imperfect without suffering this further subtraction from his potentialities. And yet it is true, in our own case, that you have exclusive monopoly of the ethereal qualities, while to me are given chiefly the physical attributes of the vigorous and healthy male\u2014the animal: my six feet three, my muscular system, my inartistic and pedestrian temperament. Fairly clean-minded, I hope I may be, but beyond all question I am the male animal incarnate. It was, indeed, the thousand slaveries of the senses, individually so negligible, collectively so overwhelming, that forced me upon my knees before her physical loveliness. I must tell you now that this potent spell, alternating between fiery desire and the sincerest of repugnance, continued to operate. I complete the confession by adding briefly, that after marriage she resented and repelled all my advances. A deep sadness came upon her; she wept; and I desisted. It was my soul that she desired with the fire of her mighty love, and not my body... And again, since it is to myself and to you alone I tell it, I would add this vital fact: it was this \"new beauty which my finest dreams have left unmentioned\" that made it somehow possible for me to desist, both against my animal will, yet willingly.\n\nI have told you that, when dying, she revealed to me a portion of her \"secret.\" This portion of a sacred confidence lies so safe within my everlasting pity that I may share it with you without the remorse of a betrayal. Full understanding we need never ask; the solution, I am convinced, is scarcely obtainable in this world. The message, however, was incomplete because the breath that framed it into broken words failed suddenly; the heart, so strangely given into my unworthy keeping, stopped beating as you shall hear upon the very edge of full disclosure. The ambushed meaning I have hinted at remained\u2014a hint." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 305", + "text": "There was, then, you will remember, but an interval of minutes between the accident and the temporary recovery of consciousness, between that recovery again and the moment when the head fell forward on my knee and she was gone. That \"recovery\" of consciousness I feel bound to question, as you shall shortly hear. Among such curious things I am at sea admittedly, yet I must doubt for ever that the eyes which peered so strangely into mine were those of Marion herself\u2014as I had always known her. You will, at any rate, allow the confession, and believe it true, that I\u2014did not recognize her quite. Consciousness there was, indubitably, but whether it was \"recovery\" of consciousness is another matter, and a problem that I must for ever question though I cannot ever set it confidently at rest. It almost seemed as though a larger, grander, yet somehow a less personal, soul looked forth through the fading eyes and used the troubled breath.\n\nIn those brief minutes, at any rate, the mind was clear as day, the faculties not only unobscured, but marvellously enhanced. In the eyes at first shone unveiled fire; she smiled, gazing into my own with love and eager yearning too. There was a radiance in her face I must call glory. Her head was in my lap upon the bed of rugs we had improvised inside the field: the broken motor posed in a monstrous heap ten yards away; and the doctor, summoned by a passing stranger, was in the act of administrating the anaesthetic, so that we might bear her without pain to the nearest hospital\u2014when, suddenly, she held up a warning finger, beckoning to me that I should listen closely.\n\nI bent my head to catch the words. There was such authority in the gesture, and in the eyes an expression so extraordinarily appealing, and yet so touched with the awe of a final privacy beyond language, that the doctor stepped backwards on the instant, the needle shaking in his hand\u2014while I bent down to catch the whispered words that at once began to pass her lips.\n\nThe wind in the poplar overhead mingled with the little sentences, as though the breath of the clear blue sky, calmly shining, was mingled with her own.\n\nBut the words I heard both troubled and amazed me:\n\n\"Help me! For I am in the dark still!\" went through me like a sword. \"And I do not know how long.\"\n\nI took her face in both my hands; I kissed her. \"You are with friends,\" I said. \"You are safe with us, with me\u2014Marion!\" And I apparently tried to put into my smile the tenderness that clumsy words forswore. Her next words shocked me inexpressibly: \"You laugh,\" she said, \"but I\u2014\" she sighed\u2014\"I weep.\"\n\nI stroked her face and hair. No words came to me.\n\n\"You call me Marion,\" she went on in an eager tone that surely belied her pain and weakness, \"but I do not remember that. I have forgotten names.\" Then, as I kissed her, I heard her add in the clearest whisper possible, as though no cloud lay upon her mind: \"Yet Marion will do\u2014if by that you know me now.\"\n\nThere came a pause then, but after it such singular words that I could hardly believe I heard aright, although each syllable sank into my brain as with pointed steel:\n\n\"You come to me again when I lie dying. Even in the dark I hear\u2014how long I do not know\u2014I hear your words.\"\n\nShe gave me suddenly then a most piercing look, raising her face a little towards my own. I saw earnest entreaty in them. \"Tell me,\" I murmured; \"you are nearer, closer to me than ever before. Tell me what it is?\"\n\n\"Music,\" she whispered, \"I want music\u2014\"\n\nI knew not what to answer, what to say. Can you blame me that, in my troubled, aching heart, I found but commonplaces? For I thought of the harp, or of some stringed instrument that seemed part of her.\n\n\"You shall have it,\" I said gently, \"and very soon. We shall carry you now into comfort, safety. You shall have no pain. Another moment and\u2014\"\n\n\"Music,\" she repeated, interrupting, \"music as of long ago.\"\n\nIt was terrible. I said such stupid things. My mind seemed frozen.\n\n\"I would hear music,\" she whispered, \"before I go again.\"\n\n\"Marion, you shall,\" I stammered. \"Beethoven, Schumann,\u2014what would please you most? You shall have all.\"\n\n\"Yes, play to me. But those names\"\u2014she shook her head\u2014\"I do not know.\"\n\nI remember that my face was streaming, my hands so hot that her head seemed more than I could hold. I shifted my knees so that she might lie more easily a little.\n\n\"God's music!\" she cried aloud with startling abruptness; then, lowering her voice again and smiling sadly as though something came back to her that she would fain forget, she added slowly, with something of mournful emphasis:\n\n\"I was a singer...\"\n\nAs though a flash of light had passed, some inner darkness was cleft asunder in me. Some heaviness shifted from my brain. It seemed the years, the centuries, turned over like a wind-blown page. And out of some hidden inmost part of me involuntary words rose instantly:\n\n\"You sang God's music then...\"\n\nThe strange, unbidden sentence stirred her. Her head moved slightly; she smiled. Gazing into my eyes intently, as though to dispel a mist that shrouded both our minds, she went on in a whisper that yet was startlingly distinct, though with little pauses drawn out between the phrases: \"I was a singer... in the Temple. I sang\u2014men\u2014into evil. You... I sang into... evil.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause, as a spasm of inexplicable pain passed through my heart like fire, and a sense of haunting things whereof no conscious memory remained came over me. The scene about me wavered before my eyes as if it would disappear.\n\n\"Yet you came to me when I lay dying at the last,\" I caught her thin clear whisper. \"You said, 'Turn to God!'\"\n\nThe whisper died away. The darkness flowed back upon my mind and thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead. The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the driver made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a sign\u2014when Marion's low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind than a living voice, rose into the still evening air:\n\n\"I have failed. And I shall try again.\"\n\nShe gazed up at me with that patient, generous love that seemed inexhaustible, and hardly knowing what to answer, nor how to comfort her in that afflicting moment, I bent lower\u2014or, rather, she drew my ear closer to her lips. I think her great desire just then was to utter her own thought more fully before she passed. Certainly it was no avowal or consolation from myself she sought.\n\n\"Your forgiveness,\" I heard distinctly, \"I need your full forgiveness.\"\n\nIt was for me a terrible and poignant moment. The emptiness of my pity betrayed itself too mercilessly for me to bear; yet, before my bewilderment enabled me to frame an answer, she went on hurriedly, though with a faultless certainty: the meaning to her was clear as day:\n\n\"Born of love... the only true forgiveness...\"\n\nA film formed slowly. Her eyes began to close, her breath died off into a sigh; she smiled, but her head sank lower with her fading strength. And her final words went by me in that sigh:\n\n\"Yet love in you lies unawakened still... and I must try again...\"\n\nThere was one more effort, painful with unexpressed fulfilment. A flicker of awful yearning took her paling eyes. Life seemed to stammer, pause, then flush as with this last deep impulse to yield a secret she discerned for the first time fully, in the very act of passing out. The face, with its soft loveliness, turned grey in death. Upon the edge of a great disclosure\u2014she was gone.\n\nI remember that for a space of time there was silence all about us. The doctor still kept his back to us, the driver had ceased his wretched hammering, I heard the wind in the poplar and the hum of insects. A bird sang loudly on a branch above; it seemed miles away, across an empty world... Then, of a sudden, I became aware that the weight of the head and shoulders had dreadfully increased. I dared not turn my face lest I should look upon her whom I had deeply wronged\u2014the forsaken tenement of this woman whose matchless love now begged with her dying breath for my forgiveness!\n\nA cowardly desire to lose consciousness ran through me, to forget myself, to hide my shame with her in death; yet, even while this was so, I sought most desperately through the depths of my anguished pity to find some hint, if only the tiniest seed, of love\u2014and found it not... The rest belonged to things unrealized...\n\nI remember a hand being laid upon me. I lifted my head which had fallen close against her cheek. The doctor stood beside me, his grave and kindly face bent low. He spoke some gentle words. I saw him replacing the needle in its little leathern case, unused.\n\nMarion was dead, her deep secret undisclosed. That which she yearned to tell me was something which, in her brief period of devotion, she had lived, had faithfully acted out, yet herself only dimly aware of why it had to be. The solution of this problem of unrequited love lay at last within her grasp; of a love that only asked to give of its unquenched and unquenchable store, undismayed by the total absence of response.\n\nShe passed from the world of speech and action with this intense desire unsatisfied, and at the very moment\u2014as with a drowning man who sees his past\u2014when the solution lay ready to her hand. She saw clearly, she understood, she burned to tell me. Upon the edge of full disclosure, she was gone, leaving me alone with my aching pity and with my shame of unawakened love.\n\n\"I have failed, but I shall try again...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 306", + "text": "That, as you know, took place a dozen years ago and more, when I was thirty-two, and time, in the interval, has wrought unexpected ends out of the material of my life. My trade as a soldier has led me to an administrative post in a distant land where, apparently, I have deserved well of my King and Country, as they say in the obituaries. At any rate, the cryptic letters following my name, bear witness to some kind of notoriety attained.\n\nYou were the first to welcome my success, and your congratulations were the first I looked for, as surely as they were more satisfying than those our mother sent. You knew me better, it seems, than she did. For you expressed the surprise that I, too, felt, whereas mother assured me she had \"always known you would do well, my boy, and you have only got your deserts in this tardy recognition.\" To her, of course, even at forty-five, I was still her \"little boy.\" You, however, guessed shrewdly that Luck had played strong cards in bringing me this distinction, and I will admit at once that it was, indeed, due to little born in me, but, rather, to some adventitious aid that, curiously, seemed never lacking at the opportune moment. And this adventitious aid was new.\n\nThis is the unvarnished truth. A mysterious power dealt the cards for me with unfailing instinct; a fortunate combination of events placing in my hands, precisely at the moment of their greatest value, clear opportunities that none but a hopeless blunderer could have disregarded. What men call Chance operated in my favour as though with superb calculation, lifting me to this miniature pinnacle I could never have reached by my own skill and judgment.\n\nSo, at least, you and I, knowing my limited abilities, consent to attribute my success to luck, to chance, to fate, or to any other name for the destiny that has placed me on a height my talent never could have reached alone. You, and I, too, for that matter, are as happy over the result as our mother is; only you and I are surprised, because we judge it, with some humour, out of greater knowledge. More\u2014you, like myself, are a little puzzled, I think. We ask together, if truth were told: Whose was the unerring, guiding hand?\n\nAmid this uncertainty I give you now another curious item, about which you have, of course, been uninformed. For none could have detected it but myself: namely, that apart from these opportunities chance set upon my path, an impulse outside myself\u2014and an impulse that was new\u2014drove me to make use of them. Sometimes even against my personal inclination, a power urged me into decided, and it so happened, always into faultless action. Amazed at myself, I yet invariably obeyed.\n\nHow to describe so elusive a situation I hardly know, unless by telling you the simple truth: I felt that somebody would be pleased.\n\nAnd, with the years, I learned to recognize this instinct that never failed when a choice, and therefore an element of doubt, presented itself. Invariably I was pushed towards the right direction. More singular still, there rose in me unbidden at these various junctures, a kind of inner attention which bade me wait and listen for the guiding touch. I am not fanciful, I heard no voice, I was aware of nothing personal by way of guidance or assistance; and yet the guidance, the assistance, never failed, though often I was not conscious that they had been present until long afterwards. I felt, as I said above, that somebody would be pleased.\n\nFor it was a consistent, an intelligent guidance; operating, as it were, out of some completer survey of the facts at a given moment than my own abilities could possibly have compassed; my mediocre faculties seemed gathered together and perfected\u2014with the result, in time, that my \"intuition,\" as others called it, came to be regarded with a respect that in some cases amounted to half reverence. The adjective \"uncanny\" was applied to me. The natives, certainly, were aware of awe.\n\nI made no private use of this unearned distinction; there is nothing in me of the charlatan that claimed mysterious power; but my subordinates, ever in growing numbers as my promotions followed, held me in greater respect, apparently, on that very account. The natives, especially, as I mentioned, attributed semi-deific properties to my poor personality. Certainly my prestige increased out of all proportion to anything my talents deserved with any show of justice.\n\nI have said that, so far as I was concerned, there lay nothing personal in this growth of divining intuition. I must now qualify that a little. Nothing persuaded me that this guidance, so infallible, so constant, owed its origin to what men call a being; I certainly found no name for it; exactness, I think, might place its truest description in some such term as energy, inner force or inspiration; yet I must admit that, with its steady repetition, there awoke in me an attitude towards it that eluded somewhere also an emotion. And in this emotion, in its quality and character, hid remotely a personal suggestion: each time it offered itself, that is, I was aware of a sharp quiver of sensitive life within me, and of that sensation, extraordinarily sweet and wonderful, which constitutes a genuine thrill.\n\nI came to look for this \"thrill,\" to lie in wait with anticipatory wonder for its advent; and in a sense this pause in me, that was both of expectancy and hope, grew slowly into what I may almost call a habit. There was an emptiness in my heart before it came, a sense of peace and comfort when it was accomplished. The emptiness and then the satisfaction, as first and last conditions, never failed, and that they took place in my heart rather than in my mind I can affirm with equal certainty.\n\nThe habit, thus, confirmed itself. I admitted the power. Let me be frank\u2014I sought it, even longing for it when there was no decision to be made, no guidance therefore needed: I longed for it because of the great sweetness that it left within my heart. It was when I needed it, however, that its effect was most enduring. The method became quite easy to me. When a moment of choice between two courses of action presented itself, I first emptied my heart of all personal inclination, then, pausing upon direction, I knew\u2014or rather felt\u2014which course to take. My heart was filled and satisfied with an intention that never wavered. Some energy that made the choice for me had been poured in. I decided upon this or that line of action. The Thrill, always of an instantaneous nature, came and went\u2014and somebody was pleased.\n\nMoreover\u2014and this will interest you more particularly\u2014the emotion produced in me was, so far as positive recognition went, a new emotion; it was, at any rate, one that had lain so feebly in me hitherto that its announcement brought the savour of an emotion before unrealized. I had known it but once, and that long years before, but the man's mind in me increased and added to it. For it seemed a development of that new perception which first dawned upon me during my brief period of married life, and had since lain hidden in me, potential possibly, but inactive beyond all question, if not wholly dead. I will now name it for you, and for myself, as best I may. It was the Thrill of Beauty.\n\nI became, in these moments, aware of Beauty, and to a degree, while it lasted, approaching revelation. Chords, first faintly struck long years before when my sense of Marion's forgiveness and generosity stirred worship in me, but chords that since then had lain, apparently, unresponsive, were swept into resonance again. Possibly they had been vibrating all these intervening years, unknown to me, unrecognized. I cannot say. I only know that here was the origin of the strange energy that now moved me to the depths. Some new worship of Beauty that had love in it, of which, indeed, love was the determining quality, awoke in the profoundest part of me, and even when the \"thrill\" had gone its way, left me hungry and yearning for its repetition. Here, then, is the \"personal\" qualification that I mentioned. The yearning and the hunger were related to my deepest needs. I had been empty, but I would be filled. For a passionate love, holding hands with a faith and confidence as passionate as itself, poured flooding into me and made this new sense of beauty seem a paramount necessity of my life.\n\nWill you be patient now, if I give you a crude instance of what I mean? It is one among many others, but I choose it because its very crudeness makes my meaning clear.\n\nIn this fevered and stricken African coast, you may know, there is luxuriance in every natural detail, an exuberance that is lavish to excess. Yet beauty lies somewhat coyly hid\u2014as though suffocated by over-abundance of crowding wonder. I detect, indeed, almost a touch of the monstrous in it all, a super-expression, as it were, that bewilders, and occasionally even may alarm. Delicacy, subtlety, suggestion in any form, have no part in it. During the five years of my exile amid this tropical extravagance I can recall no single instance of beauty \"hinting\" anywhere. Nature seems, rather, audaciously abandoned; she is without restraint. She shows her all, tells everything\u2014she shouts, she never whispers. You will understand me when I tell you that this wholesale lack of reticence and modesty involves all absence in the beholder of\u2014surprise. A sudden ravishment of the senses is impossible. One never can experience that sweet and troubling agitation to which a breathless amazement properly belongs. You may be stunned; you are hardly ever \"thrilled.\"\n\nNow, this new sensitiveness to Beauty I have mentioned has opened me to that receptiveness which is aware of subtlety and owns to sharp surprise. The thrill is of its very essence. It is unexpected. Out of the welter of prolific detail Nature here glories in, a delicate hint of wonder and surprise comes stealing. The change, of course, is in myself, not otherwise. And on the particular \"crude\" occasion I will briefly mention, it reached me from the most obvious and banal of conditions\u2014the night sky and the moon.\n\nHere, then, is how it happened: There had arisen a situation of grave difficulty among the natives of my Province, and the need for taking a strong, authoritative line was paramount. The reports of my subordinates from various parts of the country pointed to very vigorous action of a repressing, even of a punitive, description. It was not, in itself, a complicated situation, and no Governor, who was soldier too, need have hesitated for an instant. The various Stations, indeed, anticipating the usual course of action indicated by precedent, had automatically gone to their posts, prepared for the \"official instructions\" it was known that I should send, wondering impatiently (as I learned afterwards) at the slight delay. For delay there was, though of a few hours only; and this delay was caused by my uncomfortable new habit\u2014pausing for the guidance and the \"thrill.\" Intuition, waiting upon the thrill of Beauty that guided it, at first lay inactive.\n\nMy behaviour seemed scarcely of the orthodox, official kind, soldierly least of all. There was uneasiness, there was cursing, probably; there were certainly remarks not complimentary. Prompt, decisive action was the obvious and only course... while I sat quietly in the Headquarters Bungalow, a sensitive youth again, a dreamer, a poet, hungry for the inspiration of Beauty that the gorgeous tropical night concealed with her excess of smothering abundance.\n\nThis incongruity between my procedure and the time-honoured methods of \"strong\" Governors must have seemed exasperating to those who waited, respectful, but with nerves on edge, in the canvassed and tented regions behind the Headquarters clearing. Indeed, the Foreign Office, could it have witnessed my unpardonable hesitation, might well have dismissed me on the spot, I think. For I sat there, dreaming in my deck-chair on the verandah, smoking a cigarette, safe within my net from the countless poisonous mosquitoes, and listening to the wind in the palms that fringed the heavy jungle round the building.\n\nSmoking quietly, dreaming, listening, waiting, I sat there in this mood of inner attention and expectancy, knowing that the guidance I anticipated must surely come.\n\nA few clouds sprawled in their beds of silver across the sky; the heat, the perfume, were, as always, painfully, excessive; the moonlight bathed the huge trees and giant leaves with that habitual extravagance which made it seem ordinary, almost cheap and wonderless. Very silent the wooden house lay all about me, there were no footsteps, there was no human voice. I heard only the wash of the heavy-scented wind through the colossal foliage that hardly stirred, and watched, as a hundred times before, the immense heated sky, drenched in its brilliant and intolerable moonlight. All seemed a riot of excess, an orgy.\n\nThen, suddenly, the shameless night drew on some exquisite veil, as the moon, between three-quarters and the full, slid out of sight behind a streaky cloud. A breath, it seemed, of lighter wind woke all the perfume of the burdened forest leaves. The shouting splendour hushed; there came a whisper and, at last\u2014a hint.\n\nI watched with relief and gratitude the momentary eclipse, for in the half-light I was aware of that sharp and tender mood which was preparatory to the thrill. Slowly sailing into view again from behind that gracious veil of cloud\u2014\n\n\"The moon put forth a little diamond peak, No bigger than an unobserved star, Or tiny point of fairy scimitar; Bright signal that she only stooped to tie Her silver sandals, ere deliciously She bowed into the heavens her timid head.\"\n\nAnd then it came. The Thrill stole forth and touched me, passing like a meteor through my heart, but in that lightning passage, cleaving it open to some wisdom that seemed most near to love. For power flowed in along the path that Beauty cleft for it, and with the beauty came that intuitive guidance I had waited for.\n\nThe inspiration operated like a flash. There was no reasoning; I was aware immediately that another and a better way of dealing with the situation was given me.\n\nI need not weary you with details. It seemed contrary to precedent, advice, against experience too, yet it was the right, the only way. It threatened, I admit, to destroy the prestige so long and laboriously established, since it seemed a dangerous yielding to the natives that must menace the white life everywhere and render trade in the Colony unsafe. Yet I did not hesitate... There was bustle at once within that Bungalow; the orders went forth; I saw the way and chose it\u2014to the dismay, outspoken, of every white man whose welfare lay in my official hands.\n\nAnd the results, I may tell you now without pride, since, as we both admit, no credit attaches to myself\u2014the results astonished the entire Colony... The Chiefs came to me, in due course, bringing fruit and flowers and presents enough to bury all Headquarters, and with a reverential obedience that proved the rising scotched to death\u2014because its subtle psychological causes had been marvellously understood.\n\nFull comprehension, as I mentioned earlier in this narrative, we cannot expect to have. Its origin, I may believe, lies hid in the nature of that Beauty which is truth and love\u2014in the source of our very life, perhaps, which lies hid again with beauty very far away... But I may say this much at least: that it seemed, my inspired action had co-operated with the instinctive beliefs of these mysterious tribes\u2014cooperated with their primitive and ancient sense of Beauty. It had, inexplicably to myself, fulfilled their sense of right, which my subordinates would have outraged. I had acted with, instead of against, them.\n\nMore I cannot tell you. You have the \"crude instance,\" and you have the method. The instances multiplied, the method became habit. There grew in me this personal attitude towards an impersonal power I hardly understood, and this attitude included an emotion\u2014love. With faith and love I consequently obeyed it. I loved the source of my guidance and assistance, though I dared attach no name to it. Simple enough the matter might have been, could I have referred its origin to some name\u2014to our mother or to you, to my Chief in London, to an impersonal Foreign Office that has since honoured me with money and a complicated address upon my envelopes, or even, by a stretch of imagination, to that semi-abstract portion of my being some men call a Higher Self.\n\nTo none of these, however, could I honestly or dishonestly ascribe it. Yet, as in the case of those congratulatory telegrams from our mother and yourself, I was aware\u2014and this feeling never failed with each separate occurrence\u2014aware that somebody, other than ourselves individually or collectively\u2014was pleased." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 307", + "text": "What I have told you so far concerns a growth chiefly of my inner life that was almost a new birth. My outer life, of event and action, was sufficiently described in those monthly letters you had from me during the ten years, broken by three periods of long-leave at home, I spent in that sinister and afflicted land. This record, however, deals principally with the essential facts of my life, the inner; the outer events and actions are of importance only in so far as they interpret these, since that which a man feels and thinks alone is real, and thought and feeling, of course, precede all action.\n\nI have told you of the Thrill, of its genesis and development; and I chose an obvious and rather banal instance, first of all to make myself quite clear, and, secondly, because the majority were of so delicate a nature as to render their description extremely difficult. The point is that the emotion was, for me, a new one. I may honestly describe it as a birth.\n\nI must now tell you that it first stirred in me some five years after I left England, and that during those years I had felt nothing but what most other men feel out here. Whether its sudden birth was due to the violent country, or to some process of gradual preparation that had been going forward in me secretly all that time, I cannot tell. No proof, at any rate, offered itself of either. It came suddenly. I do know, however, that from its first occurrence it has strengthened and developed until it has now become a dominating influence of a distinctly personal kind.\n\nMy character has been affected, perhaps improved. You have mentioned on several occasions that you noted in my letters a new tenderness, a new kindness towards my fellow-creatures, less of criticism and more of sympathy, a new love; the \"birth of my poetic sense\" you also spoke of once; and I myself have long been aware of a thousand fresh impulses towards charity and tolerance that had, hitherto, at any rate, lain inactive in my being.\n\nI need not flatter myself complacently, yet a change there is, and it may be an improvement. Whether big or small, however, I am sure of one thing: I ascribe it entirely to this sharper and more extended sensitiveness to Beauty, this new and exquisite receptiveness that has established itself as a motive-power in my life. I have changed the poet's line, using prose of course: There is beauty everywhere and therefore joy.\n\nAnd I will explain briefly, too, how it is that this copybook maxim is now for me a practical reality. For at first, with my growing perception, I was distressed at what seemed to me the lavish waste, the reckless, spendthrift beauty, not in nature merely but in human nature, that passed unrecognized and unacknowledged. The loss seemed so extravagant. Not only that a million flowers waste their sweetness on the desert air, but that such prodigal stores of human love and tenderness remain unemployed, their rich harvest all ungathered\u2014because, misdirected and misunderstood, they find no receptacle into which they may discharge.\n\nIt has now come to me, though only by & slow and almost imperceptible advance, that these stores of apparently unremunerative beauty, this harvest so thickly sown about the world, unused, ungathered\u2014prepare yourself, please, for an imaginative leap\u2014ore used, are gathered, are employed. By Whom?\n\nI can only answer: By some one who is pleased; and probably by many such. How, why, and wherefore\u2014I catch your crowd of questions in advance\u2014we need not seek exactly to discover, although the answer of no uncertain kind, I hear within the stillness of a heart that has learned to beat to a deeper, sweeter rhythm than before.\n\nThose who loved beauty and lived it in their lives, follow that same ideal with increasing power and passion afterwards\u2014and for ever.\n\nThe shutter of black iron we call Death hides the truth with terror and resentment; but what if that shutter were, after all, transparent?\n\nA glorious dream, I hear you cry. Now listen to my answer. It is, for me, a definite assurance and belief, because\u2014I know.\n\nLong before you have reached this point you will, I know, have reached also the conclusion (with a sigh) that I am embarked upon some commonplace experience of ghostly return, or, at least, of posthumous communication. Perhaps I wrong you here, but in any case I would at once correct the inference, if it has been drawn. You remember our adventures with the seance-mongers years ago?... I have not changed my view so far as their evidential value is concerned. Be sure of that.\n\nThe dead, I am of opinion, do not return; for, while individuals may claim startling experiences that seem to them of an authentic and convincing kind, there has been no instance that can persuade us all\u2014in the sense that thunderstorm convinces us all. Such individual experiences I have always likened to the auto-suggestion of those few who believe the advertisements of the hair-restorers\u2014you will forgive the unpoetic simile for the sake of its exactitude\u2014as against the verdict of the world that a genuine discovery of such a remedy would leave no single doubter in Europe or America, nor even in the London Clubs! Yet each time I read the cunning article (I have less hair than when I ran away from Sandhurst that exciting July night and met you in the Strand!), and look upon the picture of the man, John Henry Smith, \"before and after using,\" I admit the birth of an unreasonable belief that there may be something in it after all.\n\nOf such indubitable proof, however, there is, alas, as yet no sign.\n\nAnd so with the other matter\u2014the dead do not \"return.\" My story, therefore, be comforted, has no individual instance to record. It may, on the other hand, be held to involve a thread of what might be called\u2014at a stretch\u2014posthumous communication, yet a thread so tenuous that the question of personal direction behind it need hardly be considered at all. For let me confess at once that, the habit of the \"thrill\" once established, I was not long in asking myself point blank this definite question: Dared I trace its origin to my own unfruitful experience of some years before?\u2014and, discovering no shred of evidence, I found this positive answer: Honestly I could not.\n\nThat \"somebody was pleased\" each time Beauty offered a wisdom I accepted, became an unanswerable conviction I could not argue about; but that the guidance\u2014waking a responsive emotion in myself of love\u2014was referable to any particular name I could not, by any stretch of desire or imagination, bring myself to believe.\n\nMarion, I must emphasise, had been gone from me five years at least before the new emotion gave the smallest hint of its new birth; and my feeling, once the first keen shame and remorse subsided\u2014I confess to the dishonouring truth\u2014was one of looking back upon a painful problem that had found an unexpected solution. It was chiefly relief, although a sad relief, I felt... And with the absorbing work of the next following years (I took up my appointment within six months of her death) her memory, already swiftly fading, entered an oblivion whence rarely, and at long intervals only, it emerged at all. In the ordinary meaning of the phrase, I had forgotten her. You will see, therefore, that there was no desire in me to revive an unhappy memory, least of all to establish any fancied communication with one before whose generous love I had felt myself dishonoured, if not actually disgraced. Even the remorse and regret had long since failed to disturb my peace of mind, causing me no anxiety, much less pain. Sic transit was the epitaph, if any. Acute sensation I had none at all. This, then, plainly argues against the slightest predisposition on my part to imagine that the loving guidance so strangely given owned a personal origin I could recognize. That it involved a \"personal emotion\" is quite another matter.\n\nThe more remarkable, therefore, is the statement truth now compels me to confess to you\u2014namely, that this origin is recognizable, and that I have traced in part the name it owns to. My next sentence you divine already; you at once suspect the name I mean. I hear you say to yourself with a smile\u2014\"So, after all...!\"\n\nPlease, wait a moment, and listen closely now; for, in reply to your suspicion, I can give neither full affirmation or full denial. Yet an answer of a certain kind is ready: I have stated my firm conviction that the dead do not return; I do not modify it one iota; but I mentioned a moment ago another conviction that is mine because I know. So now let me supplement these two statements with a third: the dead, though they do not return, are active; and those who lived beauty in their lives are\u2014benevolently active.\n\nThis may prepare you for a further assurance, yet one less easy to express intelligibly. Be patient while I make the difficult attempt.\n\nThe origin of the wisdom that now seeks to shape and guide my life through Beauty is, indeed, not Marion, but a power that stands behind her, and through which, with which, the energy of her being acts. It stood behind her while she lived. It stands behind not only her, but equally behind all those peerless, exquisite manifestations of self-less love that give bountifully of their best without hope or expectation of reward in kind. No human love of this description, though it find no object to receive it, nor one single flower that \"wastes\" its sweetness on the desert air, but acknowledges this inexhaustible and spendthrift source. Its evidence lies strewn so thick, so prodigally, about our world, that not one among us, whatever his surroundings and conditions, but sooner or later must encounter at least one marvellous instance of its uplifting presence. Some at once acknowledge the exquisite flash and are aware; others remain blind and deaf, till some experience, probably of pain, shall have prepared and sensitized their receptive quality. To all, however, one day, comes the magical appeal. As in my own case, there was apparently some kind of preparation before I grew conscious of that hunger for beauty which, awakening intuition, opened the heart to truth and so to wisdom. It then came softly, delicately, whispering like the dawn, yet rich with a promise I could, at first, not easily fathom, though as sure of fulfilment as that promise of day that steals upon the world when night is passing.\n\nI have tried to tell you something of this mystery. I cannot add to that. I was lifted, as it were, towards some region or some state of being, wherein I was momentarily aware of a vaster outlook upon life, of a deeper insight into the troubles of my fellow-creatures, where, indeed, there burst upon me a comprehension of life's pains and difficulties so complete that I may best describe it as that full understanding which involves also full forgiveness, and that sympathy which is love, God's love.\n\nThis exaltation passed, of course, with the passing of the thrill that made it possible; it was truly instantaneous; a point of ecstasy, perhaps, in some category not of time at all, but of some state of consciousness that lifted me above, outside of, self. But it was real, as a thunderstorm is real. For, with this glimpse of beauty that I call the \"thrill,\" I touched, for an instant so brief that it seemed timeless in the sense of having no duration, a pinnacle of joy, of vision, beyond anything attainable by desire or by. intellect alone. I stood aware of power, wisdom, love; and more, this power, wisdom, love were mine to draw upon and use, not in some future heaven, but here and now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 308", + "text": "I returned to England with an expectant hunger born of this love of beauty that was now ingrained in me. I came home with the belief that my yearning would be satisfied in a deeper measure; and more\u2014that, somehow, it would be justified and explained. I may put it plainly, if only to show how difficult this confession would have been to any one but yourself; it sounds so visionary from a mere soldier and man of action such as I am. For my belief included a singular dream that, in the familiar scenes I now revisited, some link, already half established, would be strengthened, and might probably be realized, even proved.\n\nIn Africa, as you know, I had been set upon the clue at home in England. Among the places and conditions where this link had been first established in the flesh, must surely come a fuller revelation. Beauty, the channel of my inspiration, but this time the old sweet English beauty, so intimate, so woven through with the fresh wonder of earliest childhood days, would reveal the cause of my first failure to respond, and so, perhaps, the intention of those final pathetic sentences that still haunted me with their freight of undelivered meaning. In England, T believed, my \"thrill\" must bring authentic revelation.\n\nI came back, that precarious entity, a successful man. I was to be that thing we used to laugh about together in your Cambridge days, a distinguished personality; I should belong to the breed of little lions. Yet, during the long, tedious voyage, I realized that this held no meaning for me; I did not feel myself a little lion, the idea only proved that the boy in me was not yet dead. My one desire, though inarticulate until this moment of confessing it, was to renew the thrills, and so to gather from an intenser, sweeter beauty some measure of greater understanding they seemed to promise. It was a personal hope, a personal desire; and, deep at the heart of it, Memory, passionate though elusive, flashed her strange signal of a personal love. In this dream that mocked at time, this yearning that forgot the intervening years, I nursed the impossible illusion that, somehow or other, I should become aware of Marion.\n\nNow, I have treated you in this letter as though you were a woman who reads a novel, for in my first pages I have let you turn to the end and see that the climax is a happy one, lest you should faint by the way and close my story with a yawn. You need not do that, however, since you already know this in advance. You will bear with me, too, when I tell you that my return to England was in the nature of a failure that, at first, involved sharpest disappointment. I was unaware, as a whole, of the thrills I had anticipated with such longing. The sweet picture of English loveliness I had cherished with sentimental passion during my long exile hardly materialized.\n\nThat I was not a lion, but an insignificant quasi-colonial adventurer among many others, may have sprinkled acid upon my daily diet of sensation, but you will do me the justice to believe that this wounded vanity was the smallest item in my disenchantment. Ten years, especially in primitive, godforsaken Africa, is a considerable interval; I found the relationship between myself and my beloved home-land changed, and in an unexpected way.\n\nI was not missed for one thing, I had been forgotten. Except from our mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the first sight of the \"old country,\" I found England and the English dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave heavy dinner-parties, they wrote letters to the Times, and ignored an outside world beyond their island. Their estimate of themselves and of foreigners remained unaltered, their estimate of rich or influential neighbours was what it always had been, there were many more motor-cars and a few more peers, it was more difficult than formerly to get into a good club; but otherwise, God bless them, they were worthier than ever. The \"dear old country,\" that which \"out there\" we had loved and venerated, worked and fought for, was stolid and unshaken; the stream of advancing life that elsewhere rushed, had left England complaisantly unmoved and unresponsive.\n\nYou have no idea how vividly\u2014and in what curious minor details\u2014the general note of England strikes a traveller returning after an interval of years. Later, of course, the single impression is modified and obscured by other feelings. I give it, therefore, before it was forgotten. England had not budged. Had it been winter instead of early spring, I might sum up for you what I mean in one short sentence: I travelled to London in a third-class railway carriage that had no heating apparatus.\n\nBut to all this, and with a touch of something akin to pride in me, I speedily adjusted myself. I had been exiled, I had come home. As our old nurse, aged and withered, but otherwise unaltered, said to me quietly by way of greeting: \"Well, they didn't kill you, Master Richard!\" I was, therefore, alive. It was for me, the unimportant atom, to recover my place in the parent mass. I did so. I was English. I recovered proportion. I wore the accustomed mask; I hid both my person and my new emotions, as was obviously expected of me. Having reported my insignificance to the Foreign Office... I came down to the Manor House.\n\nYet, having changed, and knowing that I had changed, I was aware of a cleft between me and my native stock. Something un-English was alive in me and eager to assert itself. Another essence in my blood had quickened, a secret yearning that I dared not mention to my kind, a new hunger in my heart that clamoured to be satisfied, yet remained, speaking generally, un-nourished. Looking for beauty among my surroundings and among my kith and kin, I found it not; there was no great Thrill from England or from home. The slowness, the absence of colour, imagination, rhythm, baffled me, while the ugliness of common things and common usages afflicted my new sensitiveness. Not that I am peculiarly alert to beauty, nor claim superior perception\u2014I am no artist, either by virtue of vision or power of expression\u2014but that a certain stagnant obtuseness, a kind of sordid and conservative veneration of the ugly that the English favour, distressed and even tortured me in a way I had never realized formerly. They were so proud to live without perception. An artist was a curiosity, not a leader, far less a prophet. There was no imagination.\n\nIn little things, as I said, a change was manifest, however. Much that tradition had made lovely with the perfume of many centuries I found modernized until the ancient spirit had entirely fled, leaving a shell that was artificial to the point of being false. The sanction of olden time that used to haunt with beauty was deceived by a mockery I found almost hideous. The ancient inns, for instance, adapted to week-end motor traffic, were pretentious and uncomfortable, their \"menus\" of inferior food written elaborately in French. The courtliness had vanished, and the cost had come. Telephones everywhere not only destroyed privacy, but brought dismay into countless gentle intimacies, their nuisance hardly justified by their usefulness. Life, it seemed, in a frantic hurry, had been cheapened, not improved; there was no real progress, but only more unrest. England\u2014too solid to go fast, had made ungainly efforts; but she had moved towards ungraciousness where she had moved at all; I found her a cross between a museum and an American mushroom town that advertises all the modern comforts with a violent insistence that is meant to cloak their very absence.\n\nThis, my first impression, toned down, of course, a little later; but it was my first impression. The people, however, even in the countryside, seemed proud both of mushroom and museum, and commercial ugliness, greedy and unashamed, now distorted every old-world village. The natives were pleased to the point of vanity.\n\nFor myself, I could not manage this atrocious compromise, and looking for the dear old England of our boyhood days, I found it not. The change, of course, was not in the country only, but in myself. The soul in me, awakened to a new standard, had turned round to face another way.\n\nThe Manor House was very still when I arrived from London\u2014& late May evening between the sunset and the dark. Mother, as you know, met me at the station, for they had stopped the down-train by special orders, so that I stepped out upon the deserted platform of the countryside quite alone, a distinguished man, with my rug and umbrella. A strange footman touched his hat, an old, stooping porter stared hard at me, then smiled vaguely, while the guard, eyeing respectfully the individual for whom his train had halted, waved his red flag, and swung himself into the disappearing van with the approved manner we once thought marvellous. I left the empty platform, gave up my ticket to an untidy boy, and crossed the gloomy booking-hall. The mournfulness of the whole place was depressing. I heard a blackbird whistle in a bush against the signal-box. It seemed to scream.\n\nMother I first saw, seated in the big barouche. She was leaning back, but sat forwards as I came. She looked into my face across the wide interval of years now ended, and my heart gave a great boyish leap, then sank into stillness again abruptly. She seemed to me exactly the same as usual\u2014only so much smaller. We embraced with a kind of dignity:\n\n\"So here you are, my boy, at last,\" I heard her say in a quiet voice, and as though she had seen me a month or two ago, \"and very, very tired, I'll be bound.\"\n\nI took my seat beside her. I felt awkward, stiff, self-conscious; there was disappointment somewhere.\n\n\"Oh, I'm all right, mother, thanks,\" I answered. \"But how are you?\" And the next moment, it seemed to me, I heard her asking if I was hungry;\u2014whereupon, absurd as it must sound, I was aware of an immense emotion that interfered with my breathing. It broke up through some repressive layer that had apparently concealed it, and made me feel\u2014well, had I been thirty-five years younger, I could have cried\u2014for pleasure. Mother, I think, forgot those years perhaps. To her I was still in overalls and wanted food. We drove, then, in comparative silence the four miles behind the big pair of greys, the only remark that memory credits me with being an enquiry about the identity of the coachman whose dim outline I saw looming in the darkness just above me. The lamplight showed one shoulder, one arm, one ear, the rest concealed; but the way he drove was, of course, unmistakeable; slowly, more cautiously, perhaps, but with the same flourish of the whip, the same air of untold responsibility as ever. And, will you believe it, my chief memory of all that scene of anticipated tenderness and home-emotion is the few words he gave in reply to my enquiry and recognition when at length the carriage stopped and I got out:\n\n\"Well, Brown, I'm glad to see you again. All well at home, I hope?\" followed by something of sympathy about his beloved horses.\n\nHe looked down sideways at me from the box, touching his cockade with the long yellow whip in his thick, gloved hand. I can hear his warm, respectful answer now; I can see the gleam of proud pleasure in his eye:\n\n\"Yes, sir, thank you, Sir Richard, and glad to see you back again, sir, and with such success upon you.\"\n\nI moved back to help our mother out. I remember thinking how calm, how solid, how characteristically inarticulate it all was. Did I wish it otherwise? I think not. Only there was something in me beating its wings impatiently like a wild bird that felt the bars close round it... Mother, I realized, could not have said even what the old coachman had said to save her life, and I remember wondering what would move her into the expression of natural joy. All that half-hour, as the hoofs echoed along the silence of the country road, and the old familiar woods and fields slid past, no sign of deep emotion had escaped her. She had asked if I was hungry...\n\nAnd then the smells! The sweet, faint garden smell in the English twilight:\u2014of laurels and laurestinus, of lilac, pinks, and the heavy scent of May, wall-flowers and sweet william too\u2014these, with the poignant aroma of the old childhood house, were the background of familiar loveliness against which my subsequent disillusion of the homeland set itself in such afflicting contrast. I remember, as we entered the dim hall, the carriage lamps fell on, the flowering horse-chestnut by the door; the bats were flitting; a big white moth whirred softly against the brilliant glass as though you and I were after it again with nets and killing-bottles... and, helping mother out, I noticed, besides her smallness, how slow and aged her movements were.\n\n\"Mother, let me help you. That's what I've come home for,\" I said, feeling for her little hand. And she replied so quietly, so calmly it was almost frigid, \"Thank you, dear boy; your arm, perhaps\u2014a moment. They are so stupid about the lamps in the hall, I've had to speak so often. There, now! It is an awkward step.\" I felt myself a giant beside her. She seemed so tiny now. There was something very strong in her silence and her calm; and though a portion of me liked it, another portion resented it and felt afraid. Her attitude was like a refusal, a denial, a refusal to live, a denial of life almost. A tinge of depression, not far removed from melancholy, stole over my spirit. The change in me, I realized then, indeed, was radical.\n\nNow, lest this narrative should seem confused, you must understand that my disillusions with regard to England were realized subsequently, when I had moved about the counties, paid many solid visits, and tasted the land and people in some detail. And the disappointment was the keener owing to the fact that very soon after my arrival in the old Home Place, the \"thrill\" came to me with a direct appeal that was disconcerting. For coming unexpectedly, as it did, in this familiar scene where yet previously I had never known it, it had the effect of marking the change in me with a certainty from which there was no withdrawal possible. It standardized this change. The new judgment was made uncompromisingly clear; people and places must inevitably stand or fall by it. And the first to fall\u2014since the test lies beyond all control of affection or respect\u2014was our own dear, faithful mother.\n\nYou share my reverence and devotion, so you will feel no pain that I would dishonour a tie that is sacred to us both in the old Bible sense. But, also, you know what a sturdy and typical soul of England she has proved herself, and that a sense of beauty is not, alas, by any stretch of kindliest allowance, a national characteristic. Culture and knowledge we may fairly claim, no doubt, but the imaginative sense of beauty is o rare among us that its possession is a peculiarity good form would suppress. It is a pose, an affectation, it is unmanly\u2014it is not English. We are too strong to thrill. And that one so near and dear to me, so honoured and so deeply loved, should prove herself to my new standard thus typically English, while it came as sharpest pain, ought not, I suppose, to have caused me the surprise it did. It made me aware, however, of the importance of my new criterion, while at the same time aware of a lack of sympathy between us that amounted to disenchantment. It was a shock, to put it plainly. A breath of solitude, of isolation, stole on me and, close behind it, melancholy.\n\nFrom the smallest clue imaginable the truth came into me, from a clue so small, indeed, that you may smile to think I dared draw such big deductions from premises so insignificant. You will probably deny me a sense of humour even when you hear. So let me say at once, before you judge me hastily, that the words, and the incident which drew them forth, were admittedly inadequate to the deduction. Only, mark this, please\u2014I drew no deduction. Reason played no part. Cause and effect were unrelated. It was simply that the truth flashed into me. I knew.\n\nWhat did I know? Perhaps that the gulf between us lay as wide as that between the earth and Sirius; perhaps that we were, individually, of a kind so separate, so different, that mutual understanding was impossible; perhaps that while she was of To-day and proud of it, I was of another time, another century, and proud of that. I cannot say precisely. Her words, while they increased my sense of isolation, of solitude, of melancholy, at the same time also made me laugh, as assuredly they will now make you laugh.\n\nFor, while she was behind me in the morning-room, fingering some letters on the table, I stood six feet away beside the open window, listening to the nightingales\u2014the English nightingales\u2014that sang across the quiet garden in the dusk. The high-pitched clamour of the jungle choruses with their monstrous turmoil, their prolific detail, came back to me in startling contrast. This exquisite and delicious sound I now heard belonged still to England. And it had not changed. \"No hungry generations tread thee down...\" rose in some forgotten corner of my mind, and my yearning that would be satisfied moved forth to catch the notes.\n\n\"Listen, mother,\" I said, turning towards her.\n\nShe raised her head and smiled a little before reading the rest of the letter that she held.\n\n\"I only pray they won't keep you awake, dear boy,\" she answered gently. \"They give us very little peace, I'm afraid, just now.\"\n\nPerhaps she caught some expression in my face, for she added a trifle more quickly: \"That's the worst of the spring\u2014our English spring\u2014it is so noisy!\" Still smiling, she picked up her letter again, while I, though still listening by the window, heard only the harsh scream and rattle of the jungle voices, thousands and thousands of miles away across the world." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 309", + "text": "It was some little time after my arrival, as I shall presently relate, that the experience I call the thrill came to me in England\u2014and, like all its predecessors, came through Nature. It came, that is, through the only apparatus I possessed as yet that could respond.\n\nThe point, I think, is of special interest; I note it now, on looking back upon the series as a whole, though at the time I did not note it.\n\nFor, compared with yourself at any rate, the aesthetic side of me is somewhat raw; of pictures, sculpture, music I am untaught and ignorant; with other Philistines, I \"know what I like,\" but nothing more. It is the honest but uncultured point of view. I am that primitive thing, the mere male animal. It was my love of Nature, therefore, that showed me beauty, since this was the only apparatus in my temperament able to respond. Natural, simple things, as before, were the channel through which beauty appealed to that latent store of love and wisdom in me which, it almost seemed, were being slowly educated.\n\nThe talks and intimacies with our mother, then, were largely over; the re-knitting of an interrupted relationship was fairly accomplished; she had asked her questions, and listened to my answers. All the dropped threads had been picked up again, so that a pattern, similar to the one laid aside, now lay spread more or less comfortably before us. Outwardly, things seemed much as they were when I left home so many years ago. One might have thought the interval had been one of months, since her attitude refused to recognize all change, and change, and growth, was abhorrent to her type. For whereas I had altered, she had remained unmoved.\n\nSo unsatisfying was this state of things to me, however, that I felt unable to confide my deepest, as now I can do easily to you\u2014so that during these few days of intercourse renewed, we had said, it seemed, all that was to be said with regard to the past. My health was most lovingly discussed, and then my immediate and remoter future. I was aware of this point of view\u2014that I was, of course, her own dear son, but that I was also England's son. She was intensely patriotic in the insular sense; my soul, I mean, belonged to the British Empire rather than to humanity and the world at large. Doubtless, a very right and natural way to look at things... She expressed a real desire to \"see your photographs, my boy, of those outlandish places where they sent you\"; then, having asked certain questions about the few women (officers' wives and so forth) who appeared in some of them, she leaned back in her chair, and gave me her very definite hopes about \"my value to the country,\" my \"duty to the family traditions,\" even to the point, finally, of suggesting Parliament, in what she termed with a certain touch of pride and dignity, \"the true Conservative interest.\"\n\n\"Men like yourself, Richard, are sorely needed now,\" she added, looking at me with a restrained admiration; \"I am sure the Party would nominate you for this Constituency that your father and your grandfather both represented before you. At any rate, they shall not put you on the shelf!\"\n\nAnd before I went to bed\u2014it was my second or third night, I think\u2014she had let me see plainly another hope that was equally dear to her: that I should marry again. There was an ominous reference to my \"ample means,\" a hint of regret that, since you were unavailable, and Eva dead, our branch of the family could not continue to improve the eastern counties and the world. At the back of her mind, indeed, I think there hovered definite names, for a garden party in my honour was suggested for the following week, to which the Chairman of the Local Conservatives would come, and where various desirable neighbours would be only too proud to make my acquaintance and press my colonial and distinguished fingers.\n\nIn the interval between my arrival and the \"experience\" I shall presently describe, I had meanwhile renewed my acquaintance with the countryside. The emotions, however, I anticipated, had even cherished and eagerly looked forward to, had not materialized. There was a chill of disappointment over me. For the beauty I had longed for seemed here so thickly veiled; and more than once I surprised in my heart a certain regret that I had come home at all. I caught myself thinking of that immense and trackless country I had left; I even craved it sometimes, both physically and mentally, as though, for all its luscious grossness, it held something that nourished and stimulated, something large, free and untamed that was lacking in this orderly land, so neatly fenced and parcelled out at home.\n\nThe imagined richness of my return, at any rate, was unfulfilled; the tie with our mother, though deep, was uninspiring; while that other more subtle and intangible link I had fondly dreamed might be strengthened, if not wholly proved, was met with a flat denial that seemed to classify it as nonexistent. Hope, in this particular connection, returned upon me, blank and unrewarded... The familiar scenes woke no hint of pain, much less of questing sweetness. The glamour of association did not operate. No personal link was strengthened.\n\nAnd, when I visited the garden we had known together, the shady path beneath the larches; saw, indeed, the very chairs that she and I had used, the framed portrait in the morning-room, the harp itself, now set with its limp and broken strings in my own chamber\u2014I was unaware of any ghostly thrill; least of all could I feel that \"somebody was pleased.\"\n\nExcursion farther afield deepened the disenchantment. The gorse was out upon the Common, that Common where we played as boys, thinking it vast and wonderful with the promise of high adventure behind every prickly clump. The vastness, of course, was gone, but the power of suggestion had gone likewise. It was merely a Common that deserved its name. For though this was but the close of May, I found it worn into threadbare patches, with edges unravelled like those of some old carpet in a seaside lodging-house. The lanes that fed it were already thick with dust as in thirsty August, and instead of eglantine, wild-roses, and the rest, a smell of petrol hung upon hedges that were quite lustreless. On the crest of the hill, whence we once thought the view included heaven, I stood by those beaten pines we named The Fort, counting jagged bits of glass and scraps of faded newspaper that marred the bright green of the sprouting bracken.\n\nThis glorious spot, once sacred to our dreams, was like a great backyard\u2014the Backyard of the County\u2014while the view we loved as the birthplace of all possible adventure, seemed to me now without spaciousness or distinction. The trees and hedges cramped the little fields and broke their rhythm. No great winds ever swept them clean. The landscape was confused: there was no adventure in it, suggestion least of all. Everything had already happened there.\n\nAnd on my way home, resentful perhaps yet eager still, I did a dreadful thing. Possibly I hoped still for that divine sensation which refused to come. I visited the very field, the very poplar... I found the scene quite unchanged, but found it also\u2014lifeless. The glamour of association did not operate. I knew no poignancy, desire lay inert. The thrill held stubbornly aloof. No link was strengthened... I came home slowly, thinking instead of my mother's plans and wishes for me, and of the clear intention to incorporate me in the stolid and conventional formulas of what appeared to me as uninspired English dullness. My disappointment crystallized into something like revolt. A faint hostility even rose in me as we sat together, talking of politics, of the London news just come to hand, of the neighbours, of the weather too. I was conscious of opposition to her stereotyped plans, and of resentment towards the lack of understanding in her. I would shake free and follow beauty. The yearning, for want of sympathy, and the hunger, for lack of sustenance, grew very strong and urgent in me.\n\nI longed passionately just then for beauty\u2014and for that revelation of it which included somewhere the personal emotion of a strangely eager love." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 310", + "text": "This, then, was somewhat my state of mind, when, after our late tea on the verandah, I strolled out on to the lawn to enjoy my pipe in the quiet of the garden paths. I felt dissatisfied and disappointed, yet knew not entirely perhaps, the reason. I wished to be alone, but was hungry for companionship as well. Mother saw me go and watched attentively, but said no word, merely following me a moment with her eyes above the edge of the Times she read, as of old, during the hours between tea and dinner. The Spectator, her worldly Bible, lay ready to her hand when the Times should have been finished. They were, respectively, as always, her dictionary of opinion, and her medicine-chest. Before I had gone a dozen yards, her head disappeared behind the printed sheet again. The roses flowed between us.\n\nI felt her following glance, as I felt also its withdrawal. Then I forgot her... A touch of melancholy stole on me, as the garden took me in its charge. For a garden is a ghostly place, and an old-world garden, above all, leads thought backwards among vanished memories rather than forward among constructive hopes and joys.\n\nI yielded, in any case, a little to this subtle pressure from the past, and I must have strolled among the lilac and laburnums for a longer time than I knew, since the gardener who had been trimming the flower-beds with a hand lawn-mower was gone, and dusk already veiled the cedars, when I found myself leaning against the wooden gate that opened into the less formal part beyond the larches.\n\nThe house was not visible from where I stood. I smelt the May, the lilac, the heavy perfume everywhere of the opening year; it rose about me in waves, as though full-bosomed summer lay breathing her great promises close at hand, while spring, still lingering, with bright eyes of dew,' watched over her. Then, suddenly, behind these richer scents, I caught a sweeter, wilder tang than anything they contained, and turning, saw that the pines were closer than I knew. A waft of something purer, fresher, reached my nostrils on a little noiseless wind, as, leaning across the gate, I turned my back upon the cultivated grounds and gazed into a region of more natural, tangled growth.\n\nThe change was sudden. It was exquisite, sharp and unexpected, too, as with a little touch of wonder. There was surprise in it. For the garden, you will remember, melts here insensibly into a stretch of scattered pines, where heather and bracken cover wide reaches of unreclaimed and useless land. Irregular trails of whitish sand gleamed faintly before the shadows swallowed them, and in the open patches I saw young silver-birches that made me think of running children arrested in mid-play. They stood outlined very tenderly against the sky; their slender forms still quivered; their feathery hair fell earthwards as they drew themselves together, bending their wayward little heads before the approaching night. Behind them, framed by the darker pines into a glowing frieze, the west still burned with the last fires of the sunset; I could see the heather, rising and falling like a tumbled sea against the horizon, where the dim heave of distant moorland broke the afterglow.\n\nAnd the dusk now held this region in its magic. So strange, indeed, was the contrast between the ebony shadows and the pools and streaks of amberish light, that I looked about me for a moment, almost sharply. There was a touch of the unearthly in this loveliness that bewildered sight a little. Extraordinarily still the world was, yet there seemed activity close upon my footsteps, an activity more than of inanimate Nature, yet less than of human beings. With solidarity it had nothing to do, though it sought material expression. It was very near. And I was startled, I recognized the narrow frontier between fear and wonder. And then I crossed it.\n\nFor something stopped me dead. I paused and stared. My heart began to beat more rapidly. Then, ashamed of my moment's hesitation, I was about to move forward through the gate, when again I halted. I listened, and caught my breath. I fancied the stillness became articulate, the shadows stirred, the silence was about to break.\n\nI remember trying to think; I wanted to relieve the singular tension by finding words, if only inner words,\u2014when, out of the stillness, out of the silence, out of the shadows\u2014something happened. Some faculty of judgment, some attitude in which I normally clothed myself, were abruptly stripped away. I was left bare and sensitive. I could almost have believed that my body had dropped aside, that I stood there naked, unprotected, a form-less spirit, stirred and lifted by the passing breeze.\n\nAnd then it came. As with a sword-thrust of blinding sweetness, I was laid open. Yet so instant, and of such swiftness, was the stroke, that I can only describe it by saying that, while pierced and wounded, I was also healed again.\n\nWithout hint or warning, Beauty swept me with a pain and happiness well nigh intolerable. It drenched me and was gone. No lightning flash could have equalled the swiftness of its amazing passage; something tore in me; the emotion was enveloping but very tender; it was both terrible yet dear. Would to God I might crystallize it for you in those few mighty words which should waken in yourself\u2014in every one!\u2014the wonder and the joy. It contained, I felt, both the worship that belongs to awe and the tenderness of infinite love which welcomes tears. Some power that was not of this world, yet that used the details of this world to manifest, had visited me.\n\nNo element of surprise lay in it even. It was too swift for anything but joy, which of all emotions is the most instantaneous: I had been empty, I was filled. Beauty that bathes the stars and drowns the very universe had stolen out of this wild morsel of wasted and uncared-for English garden, and dropped its transforming magic into\u2014me. At the very moment, moreover, when I had been ready to deny it altogether. I saw my insignificance, yet, such was the splendour it had wakened in me, knew my right as well. It could be ever thus; some attitude in myself alone prevented...\n\nAnd\u2014somebody was pleased.\n\nThis personal ingredient lay secure in the joy that assuredly remained when the first brief intolerable ecstasy had passed. The link I desired to recognize was proved, not merely strengthened. Beauty had cleft me open, and a message, if you will, had been delivered. This personal hint persisted; I was almost aware of conscious and intelligent direction. For to you I will make the incredible confession, that I dare phrase the experience in another fashion, equally true: In that flashing instant I stood naked and shelterless to the gaze of some one who had looked upon me. I was aware of sight; of eyes in which \"burning memory lights love home.\" These eyes, this sight had gazed at me, then turned away. For in that blinding sweetness there was light, as with the immediate withdrawal again there was instant darkness. I was first visible, then concealed. I was clothed again and covered.\n\nAnd the thick darkness that followed made it appear as though night, in one brief second, had taken the place of dusk.\n\nTrembling, I leaned across the wooden gate and waited while the darkness settled closer. I can swear, moreover, that it was neither dream, nor hope, nor any hungry fantasy in me that then recognized a further marvel\u2014I was no longer now alone.\n\nA presence faced me, standing breast-high in the bracken. The garden had been empty; somebody now walked there with me.\n\nIt was, as I mentioned, the still hour between the twilight and the long, cool dark of early summer. The little breeze passed whispering through the pines. I smelt the pungent perfume of dry heather, sand, and bracken. The horizon, low down between the trunks, shone gold and crimson still, but fading rapidly. I stood there for a long time trembling; I was a part of it; I felt that I was shining, as though my inner joy irradiated the world about me. Nothing in all my life has been so real, so positive. I was assuredly not alone...\n\nThe first sharp magic, the flash that pierced and burned, had gone its way, but Beauty still stood so perilously near, so personal, that any moment, I felt, it must take tangible form, betray itself in visible movement of some sort, break possibly into audible sound of actual speech. It would not have surprised me\u2014more, it would have been natural almost\u2014had I felt a touch upon my hands and lips, or caught the murmur of spoken words against my ear.\n\nYet from such direct revelation I shrank involuntarily and by instinct. I could not have borne it then. I had the feeling that it must mar and defile a wonder already great enough; there would have lain in it, too, a betrayal of the commonplace, as of something which I could not possibly hold for true. I must have distrusted my own senses even, for the beauty that cleft me open dealt directly with the soul alone, leaving the senses wholly disengaged. The Presence was not answerable to any lesser recognition.\n\nThus I shrank and turned away, facing the familiar garden and the \"wet bird-haunted English lawn,\" a spiritual tenderness in me still dreading that I might see or hear or feel, destroying thus the reality of my experience. Yet there was, thank God, no speech, no touch, no movement, other than the shiver of the birches, the breath of air against my cheek, the droop and bending of the nearer pine boughs. There was no audible or visible expression; I saw no figure breast-high in the bracken. Yet sound there was, a moment later. For, as I turned away, a bird upon a larch twig overhead burst into sudden and exultant song." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 311", + "text": "Now, do not be alarmed lest I shall attempt to describe a list of fanciful unrealities that borrowed life from a passing emotion merely; the emotion was permanent, the results enduring. Please believe the honest statement that, with the singing of that bird, the pent-up stress in me became measurably articulate. Some bird in my heart, long caged, rang out in answering inner song.\n\nIt is also true, I think, that there were no words in me at the moment, and certainly no desire for speech. Had a companion been with me, I should probably have merely lit my pipe and smoked in silence; if I spoke at all, I should have made some commonplace remark: \"It's late; we must be going in to dress for dinner...\" As it was, however, the emotion in me, answering the singing of the bird, became, as I said, measurably articulate. I give you simple facts, as though this were my monthly Report to the Foreign Office in days gone by. I spoke no word aloud, of course. It was rather that my feelings found utterance in the rapturous song I listened to, and that my thoughts knew this relief of vicarious expression, though of inner and inaudible expression. The beauty of scene and moment were adequately recorded, and for ever in that song. They were now part of me.\n\nUnaware of its perfect mission the bird sang, of course because it could not help itself; perhaps some mating thrush, perhaps a common blackbird only; I cannot say; I only realized that no human voice, no human music, even of the most elaborate and inspired kind, could have made this beauty, similarly articulate. And, for a moment I knew my former pain that I could not share this joy, this beauty, with others of my kind, that, except for myself, the loveliness seemed lost and wasted. There was no spectator, no other listener; the sweet spring night was lavish for no audience; the revelation had been repeated, would be repeated, a thousand thousand times without recognition and without reward.\n\nThen, as I listened, memory, it seemed, took yearning by the hand, and led me towards that inner utterance I have mentioned. There was no voice, least of all that inner voice you surely have anticipated. But there was utterance, as though my whole being combined with nature in its birth.\n\nInto the mould of familiar sentences of long ago it ran, yet nearer at last to full disclosure, because the pregnant sentences had altered:\n\n\"I need your forgiveness born of love...\" passed through me with the singing of the bird.\n\nI listened with the closest inner attention I have ever known. I paused. My heart brimmed with an expectant wonder that was happiness. And the happiness was justified. For the familiar sentence halted before its first sorrowful completion; the poignant close remained unuttered\u2014because it was no longer true.\n\nOut of deep love in me, new-born, that held the promise of fulfilment, the utterance concluded:\n\n\"...I have found a better way...\"\n\nBefore I could think or question, and almost as though a whisper of the wind went past, there rose in me at once this answering recognition. It seemed authentically convincing; it was glorious; it was full of joy:\n\n\"That beauty which was Marion lives on, and lives for me.\"\n\nIt was as though a blaze of light shone through me; somewhere in my body there were tears of welcome; for this recognition was to me reunion.\n\nIt must seem astonishing for me, a mere soldier and Colonial Governor, to confess you that I stood there listening to the song for a long interval of what I can only term, with utmost sincerity, communion. Beauty and love both visited me; I believe that truth and wisdom entered softly with them. As I wrote above, I saw my own insignificance, yet, such was the splendour in me, I knew my right as well. It could be ever thus. My attitude alone prevented. I was not excluded, not cut off. This Beauty lay ready to my hand, always available, for ever, now. It was not unharvested. But more\u2014it could be shared with others; it was become a portion of myself, and that which is part of my being must, inevitably and automatically, be given out.\n\nIt was, thus, nowhere wasted or unharvested; it offered with prodigal opportunity a vehicle for that inspiration which is love, and being love of purest kind, is surely wisdom too. The dead, indeed, do not return, yet they are active, and those who lived beauty in their lives are still, through that beauty, benevolently active.\n\nI will give you now the change instantaneously produced in me:\n\nThere rose in me another, deeper point of view that dispelled as by magic the disenchantment that had chilled these first days of my return. I stood here in this old-world garden, but I stood also in the heart of that beauty, so carefully hidden, so craftily screened behind the obvious, that strong and virile beauty which is England. Within call of my voice, still studying by lamplight now the symbols of her well-established strength, burning, moreover, with the steady faith which does not easily break across restraint, and loving the man as she had loved the little boy, sat one, not wondering perhaps at my unspoken misunderstanding, yet hoping, patiently and in silence, for its removal in due time. In the house of our boyhood, of our earliest play and quarrels, unchanged and unchangeable, knowing simply that I had \"come home again to her,\" our mother waited...\n\nI need not elaborate this for you, you for whom England and our mother win almost a single, undivided love. I had misjudged, but the cause of my misjudgment was thus suddenly removed. A subtler understanding insight, a sympathy born of deeper love, something of greater wisdom, in a word, awoke in me. The thrill had worked its magic as of old, but this time in its slower English fashion, deep, and characteristically sure. To my country (that is, to my first experience of impersonal love) and to my mother (that is, to my earliest acquaintance with personal love) I had been ready, in my impatience, to credit an injustice. Unknown to me, thus, there had been need of guidance, of assistance. Beauty, having cleared the way, had worked upon me its amazing alchemy.\n\nThere, in fewest possible words, is what had happened.\n\nI remember that for a long time, then, I waited in the hush of my childhood's garden, listening, as it were, with every pore, and conscious that some one who was pleased interpreted the beauty to my soul. It seemed, as I said, a message of a personal kind. It was regenerative, moveover, in so far that life was enlarged and lifted upon a nobler scale; new sources of power were open to me; I saw a better way. Irresistibly it came to me again that beauty, far from being wasted, was purposive, that this purpose was of a redeeming kind, and that some one who was pleased co-operated with it for my personal benefit. No figure, thank God, was visible, no voice was audible, but a presence there indubitably was, and, whether I responded or otherwise, would be always there.\n\nAnd the power was such that I felt as though the desire of the planet itself yearned through it for expression." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 312", + "text": "I watched the little bird against the paling sky, and my thoughts, following the happy singing, went slowly backwards into the half-forgotten past... They led me again through the maze of gorgeous and mysterious hopes, un-remembered now so many years, that had marked my childhood. Few of these, if any, it seemed, had known fulfilment... I stole back with them, past the long exile in great Africa, into the region of my youth and early boyhood...\n\nAnd, as though a hand uncovered it deliberately, I recalled an earliest dream\u2014strangest, perhaps, of all the mysterious dreams of that far time. It had, I thought, remained unrealized, as, certainly, till this moment, it had lain forgotten\u2014a boyish dream that behind the veils of the Future some one waited for me with the patience of a perfect love that was my due.\n\nThe dream reached forward towards some one who must one day appear, and whose coming would make life sweet and wonderful, fulfilling, even explaining, the purpose of my being. This dream which I had thought peculiarly my own, belongs, I learned later, to many, if not to the race in general, and, with a smile at my own incurable vanity (and probably a grimace at being neatly duped), I had laid it on one side. At any rate, I forgot it, for nothing happened to keep it active, much less revive it.\n\nNow, however, looking backwards, and listening to the singing in the sky, I recalled what almost seemed to have been its attempt at realization. Having recovered its earliest appearance, my thought next leaped forward to the moment that might possibly have been its reappearance. For memory bore me off without an effort on my part, and set me abruptly within a room of the house I had come home to, where Marion sat beside me, singing to the harp she loved. The scene rose up before me as of yesterday... the emotions themselves reconstituted. I recalled the deep, half-sad desire to be worthy of her, to persuade myself I loved as she did, even the curious impulse to acknowledge an emotion that came and went before it could be wholly realized\u2014the feeling, namely, that I ought to love her because\u2014no more, no less is the truth\u2014because she needed it: and then the blank dismay that followed my failure, as with a kind of shameful horror before a great purpose that my emptiness left unfulfilled.\n\nThe very song came back that moved me more than any else she sang\u2014her favourite it was as well. I heard the twanging of the strings her fingers plucked. I heard the words:\n\n\u2003\"About the little chambers of my heart\n\n\u2003Friends have been coming\u2014going\u2014many a year.\n\n\u2003The doors stand open there.\n\n\u2003Some, lightly stepping, enter; some depart.\n\n\u2003Freely they come and go, at will.\n\n\u2003The walls give back their laughter; all day long\n\n\u2003They fill the house with song.\n\n\u2003One door alone is shut, one chamber still.\"\n\nWith each repetition of the song, I remembered, how at that time my boyhood's dream came back to me, as though its fulfilment were at last at hand; as though, somehow, that \"door\" must open, that \"still chamber\" welcome the sweetness and the loveliness of her who sang. For I could not listen to the music, nor watch her fingers moving down the strings, her slender wrist and rounded arm, her foot upon the pedal as she held the instrument so close\u2014without this poignant yearning that proved ever vain, or this shame of unshed tears my heart mysteriously acknowledged. To the end, as you know, that door remained unopened, that chamber still.\n\nIt was the singing of this sweet English bird, making articulate for me the beauty I could not utter, that brought back to memory the scene, the music, and the words...\n\nI looked round me; I looked up. As I did so, the little creature, with one last burst of passionate happiness, flew away into the darkness. And silence followed, so deep that I could hear the murmur of my blood... an exquisite joy ran through me, making me quiver with expectancy from head to foot...\n\nAnd it was then suddenly I became aware that the long-closed door at last was open, the still chamber occupied. Some one who was pleased, stretching a hand across the silence and the beauty, drew me within that chamber of the heart, so that I passed behind the door that was now a veil, and now a mist, and now a shining blaze of light... passed into a remote and inner stillness where that direct communion which is wordless can alone take place.\n\nIt was, I verily believe, a stillness of the spirit. At the centre of the tempest, of the whirlpool, of the heart's commotion, there is peace. I stood close against that source of our life which lies hid with beauty very far away, and yet so near that it is enclosed in every hope, in every yearning, and in every tear. For the whisper came to me, beyond all telling sure.\n\nBeauty had touched me, Wisdom come to birth; and Love, whispering through the silence those marvellous words that sum up all spiritual experience, proved it to me:\n\n\"Be still\u2014and know...\"\n\nI found myself moving slowly across the lawn again towards the house. I presently heard the wind mousing softly in the limes. The air was fresh and cool. The first stars were out. I saw the laburnum drooping, as though thick clusters of these very stars had drifted earthwards among the branches; I saw the gleam of the lilac; across the dim tangle of the early roses shone the familiar windows, cosy now with the glow of lighted lamps... and I became suddenly, in a very intimate sense, \"aware\" of the garden. The Presence that walked beside me moved abruptly closer. This Presence and the garden seemed, as in some divine mysterious way, inseparable.\n\nThere was a stirring of the dimmest and most primitive associations possible. Memory plunged back among ancestral, even racial, shadows. I recalled the sweet and tender legend of the beginnings of the world, when something divine, it was whispered, was intimate with man, and companioning his earliest innocence, walked with him in that happier state those childlike poets called\u2014a garden. That childhood of the world seemed very near.\n\nI found again the conditions of innocence and pristine wonder\u2014of simplicity. There was a garden in my heart, and some one walked with me therein. For Life in its simplest form\u2014of breathing leaves and growing flowers, of trees and plants and shrubs\u2014glowed all about me in the darkness. The blades of grass, the blossoms hanging in the air, strong stems and hidden roots, fulfilled themselves with patience upon every side, brimming with beauty and stillness did not seek to advertise. And of this simplest form of life\u2014the vegetable kingdom\u2014I became vividly aware, prodigal, mysterious, yet purposive. The outer garden merged with the inner, and the Presence walked in both of them...\n\nI was led backwards, far down into my own being. I reached the earliest, simplest functions by which I myself had come to be, the state where the frontier lies between that which is dead and that which is alive. Somewhere between the mineral and vegetable worlds, I knew, that frontier lay. For the vegetable kingdom alone possesses the power of converting the mineral or the chemical into the living organism by absorption; and here, among the leaves and roots and flowers, that power was sweetly, irresistibly, at work.\n\nIt seemed I reached that frontier, and I passed it. Beauty came through the most primitive aspect of my being.\n\nAnd so I would tell you, you alone of all the world, that the Presence walking beside me in the scented darkness came suddenly so close that I was aware of it in what seemed my earliest and most innocent state of soul.\n\nBeside me, in that old-world garden, walked the Cause of all things. The Beauty that in you was truth, in Marion tenderness, was harvested: and somebody was pleased." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 313", + "text": "ALL this I have told to you because we have known together the closest intimacy possible to human beings\u2014we have shared beauty.\n\nThey said, these many days ago, that you had gone away, that you were dead. The wind on the Downs, your favourite Downs, your favourite southwest wind, received your dust, scattering it like pollen into space. No sign has come to me, no other sign than this I tell you now in my long letter. It is enough. I know.\n\nThere were thus two loves, one unrecognized till afterwards, the other realized at the time... In the body there was promise. There is now accomplishment.\n\nIt is very strange, and yet so simple. Beauty, I suppose, opens the heart, extends the consciousness. It is a platitude, of course. You will laugh when I tell you that afterwards I tried to reason it all out. I am not apparently intellectual. The books I read would fill your empty room\u2014on aesthetics, art, and what not. I got no result from any of them, but rather a state of muddle that was, no doubt, congestion. None of the theories and explanations touched the root of the matter. I am evidently not \"an artist\"\u2014that at any rate I gathered, and yet these learned people seemed to write about something they had never \"lived.\" I could almost believe that the writers of these subtle analyses have never themselves felt beauty\u2014the burn, the rapture, the regenerating fire. They have known, perhaps, a reaction of the physical nerves, but never this light within the soul that lifts the horizons of the consciousness and makes one know that God exists, that death is not even separation, and that eternity is now.\n\nMetaphysics I studied too. I fooled myself, thirty years after the proper time for doing so, over the old problem whether beauty lies in the object seen or in the mind that sees the object. And in the end I came back hungrily to my simple starting-point\u2014that beauty moved me. It opened my heart to one of its many aspects\u2014truth, wisdom, joy, and love\u2014and what else, in the name of heaven, mattered!\n\nI sold the books at miserable prices that made Mother question my judgment: coloured plates, costly bindings, rare editions, and all. Aesthetics, Art, rules and principles might go hang for all I cared or any good they did me. It was intellect that had devised all these. The truth was simpler far. I cared nothing for these scholarly explanations of beauty's genesis and laws of working, because I felt it. Hunger needs no analysis, does it? Nor does Love. Could anything be more stultifying? Give to the first craving a lump of bread, and to the second a tangible man or woman\u2014and let those who have the time analyse both cravings at their leisure.\n\nFor the thrill I mean is never physical, and has nothing in common with that acute sensation experienced when the acrobat is seen to miss the rope in mid-air as he swings from bar to bar. There is no shock in it, for shock is of the nerves, arresting life; the thrill I speak of intensifies and sets it rising in a wave that flows. It is of the spirit. It wounds, yet marvellously. It is unearthly. Therein, I think, lies its essential quality; by chance, as it were, in writing this intimate confession, I have hit upon the very word: it is unearthly, it contains surprise. Yes, Beauty wounds marvellously, then follows the new birth, regeneration. There is a ravishment of the entire being into light and knowledge.\n\nThe element of surprise is certainly characteristic. The thrill comes unheralded\u2014a sudden uprush of convincing joy loosed from some store that is inexhaustible. Unlike the effect of a nervous shock which can be lived over and reconstituted, it knows no repetition; its climax is instantaneous, there is neither increase nor declension; it is unrecoverable; it strikes and is gone. Breaking across the phantasmagoria of appearances, it comes as a flash of reality, a lightning recognition of something that cannot be travestied. It is not in time. It is eternity.\n\nI suspect you know it now with me; in fact I am certain that you do...\n\nI remember how, many years ago\u2014in that delightful period between boyhood and manhood when we felt our wings and argued about the universe\u2014we discovered this unearthly quality in three different things: the song of a bird, the eyes of a child, and a wild-flower come upon unexpectedly in a scene of desolation. For in all three, we agreed, shines that wonder which holds adoration, that joy which is spontaneous and uncalculated, and that surprise which pertains to Eternity looking out triumphantly upon ephemeral things.\n\nSo, at least, in our youthful eagerness, we agreed; and to this day one in particular of the three\u2014a bird's song\u2014always makes me think of God. That divine, ecstatic, simple sound is to me ever both surprising and unearthly. Each time it takes me by surprise\u2014that people do not hush their talk to kneel and listen... And of the eyes of little children\u2014if there is any clearer revelation granted to us of what is unearthly in the sense of divinity brought close, I do not know it. Each time my spirit is arrested by surprise, then filled with wondering joy as I meet that strange open look, so stainless, accepting the universe as its rightful toy, and, as with the bird and flower, saying Yes to life as though there could not possibly exist a No.\n\nThe wildflower too: you recall once\u2014it was above Igls when the Tyrolean snows were melting\u2014how we found a sudden gentian on the dead, pale grass? The sliding snows had left the coarse tufts stroked all one way, white and ugly, thickly streaked with mud, no single blade with any sign of life or greenness yet, when we came upon that star of concentrated beauty, more blue than the blue sky overhead, the whole passion of the earth in each pointed petal. A distant avalanche, as though the hills were settling, the bustle of the torrent, the wind in the pines and larches, only marked by contrast the incredible stillness of the heights\u2014then, suddenly, this star of blue blazing among the desolation. I recall your cry and my own\u2014wonder, joy, as of something unearthly\u2014that took us by surprise.\n\nIn these three, certainly, lay the authentic thrill I speak of; while it lasts, the actual moment seems but a pedestal from which the eyes of the heart look into Heaven, a pedestal from which the soul leaps out into the surrounding garden of limitless possibilities which are its birthright, and immediately accessible. And that, indeed, is the essential meaning of the thrill\u2014that Heaven is here and now. The gates of ivory are very tiny; Beauty sounds the elfin horns that opens them; smaller than the eye of a needle is that opening\u2014upon the diamond point of the thrill you flash within, and the Garden of Eternity is yours for ever\u2014now.\n\nI am writing this to you, because I know you listen with your heart, not with your nerves; and the garden that I write about you know now better than I do myself. I have but tasted it, you dwell therein, unaged, unageing. And so we share the flowers; we know the light, the fragrance and the birds we know together... They tell me\u2014even our mother says it sometimes with a sigh\u2014that you are far away, not understanding that we have but recovered the garden of our early childhood, you permanently, I whenever the thrill opens the happy gates. You are as near to me as that. Our love was forged inside those ivory gates that guard that childhood state, facing four ways, and if I wandered outside a-while, puzzled and lonely, the thrill of beauty has led me back again, and I, have found your love unchanged, unaged, still growing in the garden of our earliest memories. I did but lose my way for a time...\n\nThat childhood state must be amazingly close to God, I suppose, for though no child is consciously aware of beauty, its whole being cries Yes to the universe and life as naturally and instinctively as a flower turns to the sun. The universe lies in its overall pocket of alpaca, and beauty only becomes a thing apart when the growing consciousness, hearing the world cry No, steps through the gates to enquire and cannot find the entrance any more. Beauty then becomes a signpost showing the way home again. Baudelaire, of course, meant God and Heaven, instead of \"genius\" when he said, \"Le genie n'est que l'enfance retrouvee a volonte...\"\n\nAnd so when I write to you, I find myself again within the garden of our childhood, that English garden where our love shared all the light and fragrance and flowers of the world together. \"Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass,\" and since my thought is with you, you are with me now... and now means always or it means nothing.\n\nSo these relationships are real still among a thousand shadows. Your beauty was truth, hers was unselfish love. The important thing is to know you still live, not with regret and selfish grief, but with that joy and sure conviction which makes the so-called separation a temporary test, perhaps, but never a final blow. What are the few years of separation compared to this certainty of co-operation in eternity? We live but a few years together in the flesh, yet if those few are lived with beauty and beautifully, the tie is unalterably forged which fastens us lovingly together for ever. Where, how, under what precise conditions it were idle to enquire and unnecessary\u2014the wrong way too. Our only knowledge (in the scientific sense) comes to us through our earthly senses. To forecast our future life, constructing it of necessity upon this earthly sensory experience, is an occupation for those who have neither faith nor imagination. All such \"heavens\" are but clumsy idealizations of the present\u2014\"Happy Hunting Grounds\" in various forms: whereas we know that if we lived beauty together, we shall live it always\u2014\"afterwards,\" as our poor time-ridden language phrases it. For Beauty, once known, cannot exclude us. We cooperated with the Power that makes the universe alive.\n\nAnd, knowing this, I do not ask for your \"return,\" or for any so-called evidence that you survive. In beauty you both live now with less hampered hands, less troubled breath, and I am glad.\n\nWhy should you come, indeed, through the gutter of my worn, familiar, personal desires, when the open channel of beauty lies ever at the flood for you to use? Coming in this way, you come, besides, for many, not for me alone, since behind every thrill of beauty stand the countless brave souls who lived it in their lives. They have entered the mighty rhythm that floats the spiral nebulae in space, as it turns the little aspiring Nautilus in the depths of the sea. Having once felt this impersonal worship which is love of beauty, they are linked to the power that drives the universe towards perfection, the power that knocks in a million un-advertised forms at every human heart: and that is God.\n\nWith that beneficent power you cooperate. I ask no other test. I crave no evidence that you selfishly remember me. In the body we did not know so closely. To see into your physical eyes, and touch your hand, and hear your voice\u2014these were but intermediary methods, symbols, at the best. For you I never saw nor touched nor heard. I felt you\u2014in my heart. The closest intimacy we knew was when together we shared one moment of the same beauty; no other intimacy approaches the reality of that; it is now strengthened to a degree unrealized before. For me that is enough. I have that faith, that certainty, that knowledge. Should you come to me otherwise I must disown you. Should you stammer through another's earthly lips that you now enjoy a mere idealized repetition of your physical limitations, I should know my love, my memory, my hope degraded, nay, my very faith destroyed.\n\nTo summon you in that way makes me shudder. It would be to limit your larger uses, your wider mission, merely to numb a selfish grief born of a faithless misunderstanding.\n\nCome to me instead\u2014or, rather, stay, since you have never left\u2014be with me still in the wonder of dawn and twilight, in the yearning desire of inarticulate black night, in the wind, the sunshine, and the rain. It is then that I am nearest to you and to your beneficent activity, for the same elemental rhythm of Beauty includes us both. The best and highest of you are there; I want no lesser assurance, no broken personal revelation. Eternal beauty brings you with an intimacy unknown, impossible, indeed, to partial disclosure. I should abhor a halting masquerade, a stammering message less intelligible even than our intercourse of the body.\n\nCome, then! Be with me, your truth and Marion's tenderness linked together with what is noblest in myself. Be with me in the simple loveliness of an English garden where you and I, as boys together, first heard that voice of wonder, and knew the Presence walking with us among the growing leaves.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Bright Messenger; Sequel to Julius LeVallon by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nEdward Fillery, So Far as may be possible to a man of normal passions and emotions, took a detached view of life and human nature. At the age of thirty-eight he still remained a spectator, a searching, critical, analytical, yet chiefly, perhaps, a sympathetic spectator, before the great performance whose stage is the planet and whose performers and auditorium are humanity.\n\nKnowing himself outcast, an unwelcome deadhead at the play, he had yet felt no bitterness against the parents whose fierce illicit passion had deprived him of an honourable seat. The first shock of resentment over, he had faced the situation with a tolerance which showed an unusual charity, an exceptional understanding, in one so young.\n\nHe was twenty when he learned the truth about himself. And it was his wondering analysis as to why two loving humans could be so careless of their offspring's welfare, when the rest of Nature took such pains in the matter, that first betrayed, perhaps, his natural aptitude. He had the innate gift of seeing things as they were, undisturbed by personal emotion, while yet asking himself with scientific accuracy why and how they came to be so. These were invaluable qualities in the line of knowledge and research he chose for himself as psychologist and doctor. The terms are somewhat loose. His longing was to probe the motives of conduct in the first place, and, in the second, to correct the results of wrong conduct by removing faulty motives. Psychiatrist and healer, therefore, were his more accurate titles; psychiatrist and healer, in due course, he became.\n\nHis father, an engineer of ability and enterprise, prospecting in the remoter parts of the Caucasus for copper, and making a comfortable fortune in so doing, was carried off his feet suddenly by the beauty of a Khaketian peasant girl, daughter of a shepherd in these lonely and majestic mountains, whose intolerable grandeur may well intoxicate a man to madness. A dangerous and disgraceful episode it seems to have been between John Fillery, hitherto of steady moral fibre, and this strange, lovely pagan girl, whose savage father hunted the pair of them high and low for weeks before they finally eluded him in the azalea valleys beyond Artvine.\n\nGreat passion, possibly great love, born of this enchanted land whose peaks touch heaven, while their lower turfy slopes are carpeted with lilies, azaleas, rhododendrons, contributed to the birth of Edward, who first saw the light in a secret chamber of a dirty Tiflis house, above the Koura torrent. That same night, when the sun dipped beneath the Black Sea waters two hundred miles to the westward, his mother had looked for the last time upon her northern lover and her wild Caucasian mountains.\n\nEdward, however, persisted, visible emblem of a few weeks' primal passion in a primal land. Intense desire, born in this remote wilderness of amazing loveliness, lent him, perhaps, a strain of illicit, almost unearthly yearning, a secret nostalgia for some lost vale of beauty that held fiercer sunshine, mightier winds and fairer flowers than those he knew in this world.\n\nAt the age of four he was brought to England; his Russian memories faded, though not the birthright of his primitive blood. Settling in London, his father increased his fortune as consulting engineer, but did not marry. To the short vehement episode he had given of his very best; he remained true to his gorgeous memory and his sin; the cream of his life, its essence and its perfume, had been spent in those wild wind-swept azalea valleys beyond Artvine. The azalea honey was in his blood, the scent of the lilies in his brain; he still heard the Koura and Rion foaming down towards ancient Colchis. Edward embodied for him the spirit of these sweet, passionate memories. He loved the boy, he cherished and he spoilt him.\n\nBut Edward had stuff in him that rendered spoiling harmless. A vigorous, independent youngster, he showed firmness and character as a lad. To the delight of his father he knew his own mind early, reading and studying on his own account, possessed at the same time by a vehement love of nature and outdoor life that was far more than the average English boy's inclination to open air and sport. There lay some primal quality in his blood that was of ancient origin and leaned towards wildness. There seemed almost, at the same time, a faunish strain that turned away from life.\n\nAs a tiny little fellow he had that strange touch of creative imagination other children have also known\u2014an invisible playmate. It had no name, as it, apparently, had no sex. The boy's father could trace it directly to no fairy tale read or heard; its origin in the child's mind remained a mystery. But its characteristics were unusual, even for such fanciful imaginings: too full-fledged to have been created gradually by the boy's loneliness, it seemed half goblin and half Nature-spirit; it replaced, at any rate, the little brothers and sisters who were not there, and the father, led by his conscience, possibly, to divine or half divine its origin, met the pretence with sympathetic encouragement.\n\nIt came usually with the wind, moreover, and went with the wind, and wind accordingly excited the child. \"Listen! Father!\" he would exclaim when no air was moving anywhere and the day was still as death. Then: \"Plop! So there you are!\" as though it had dropped through empty space and landed at his feet. \"It came from a tremenjus height,\" the child explained. \"The wind's up there, you see, to-day.\" Which struck the parent's mind as odd, because it proved later true. An upper wind, far in the higher strata of air, came down an hour or so afterwards and blew into a storm.\n\nFire and flowers, too, were connected with this invisible playmate. \"He'll make it burn, father,\" the child said convincingly, when the chimney smoked and the coals refused to catch, and then became very busy with his friend in the grate and about the hearth, just as though he helped and superintended what was being invisibly accomplished. \"It's burning better, anyhow,\" agreed the father, astonished in spite of himself as the coals began to glow and spurt their gassy flames. \"Well done; I am very much obliged to you and your little friend.\"\n\n\"But it's the only thing he can do. He likes it. It's his work really, don't you see\u2014keeping up the heat in things.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's his natural job, is it? I see, yes. But my thanks to him, all the same.\"\n\n\"Thank you very much,\" said grave Edward, aged five, addressing his tiny friend among the fire-irons. \"I'm much mobliged to you.\"\n\nEdward was a bit older when the flower incident took place\u2014with the geranium that no amount of care and coaxing seemed able to keep alive. It had been dying slowly for some days, when Edward announced that he saw its \"inside\" flitting about the plant, but unable to get back into it. \"It's got out, you see, and can't get back into its body again, so it's dying.\"\n\n\"Well, what in the world are we to do about it?\" asked his father.\n\n\"I'll ask,\" was the solemn reply. \"Now I know!\" he cried, delighted, after asking his question of the empty air and listening for the answer. \"Of course. Now I see. Look, father, there it is\u2014its spirit!\" He stood beside the flower and pointed to the earth in the pot.\n\n\"Dear me, yes! Where d'you see it? I\u2014don't see it quite.\"\n\n\"He says I can pick it up and put it back and then the flower will live.\" The child put out a hand as though picking up something that moved quickly about the stem.\n\n\"What's it look like?\" asked his father quickly.\n\n\"Oh, sort of trinangles and things with lines and corners,\" was the reply, making a gesture as though he caught it and popped it back into the red drooping blossoms. \"There you are! Now you're alive again. Thank you very much, please\"\u2014this last remark to the invisible playmate who was superintending.\n\n\"A sort of geometrical figure, was it?\" inquired the father next day, when, to his surprise, he found the geranium blooming in full health and beauty once again. \"That's what you saw, eh?\"\n\n\"It was its spirit, and it was shiny red, like fire,\" the child replied. \"It's heat. Without these things there'd be no flowers at all.\"\n\n\"Who makes everything grow?\" he asked suddenly, a moment later.\n\n\"You mean what makes them grow.\"\n\n\"Who,\" he repeated with emphasis. \"Who builds the bodies up and looks after them?\"\n\n\"Ah! the structure, you mean, the form?\"\n\nEdward nodded. His father had the feeling he was not being asked for information, but was being cross-examined. A faint pressure, as of uneasiness, touched him.\n\n\"They develop automatically\u2014that means naturally, under the laws of nature,\" he replied.\n\n\"And the laws\u2014who keeps them working properly?\"\n\nThe father, with a mental gulp, replied that God did.\n\n\"A beetle's body, for instance, or a daisy's or an elephant's?\" persisted the child undeceived by the theological evasion. \"Or mine, or a mountain's\u2014?\"\n\nJohn Fillery racked his brain for an answer, while Edward continued his list to include sea-anemones, frost-patterns, fire, wind, moon, sun and stars. All these forms to him were bodies apparently.\n\n\"I know!\" he exclaimed suddenly with intense conviction, clapping his hands together and standing on his toes.\n\n\"Do you, indeed! Then you know more than the rest of us.\"\n\n\"They do, of course,\" came the positive announcement. \"The other kind! It's their work. Yours, for instance\"\u2014he turned to his playmate, but so naturally and convincingly that a chill ran down his father's spine as he watched\u2014\"is fire, isn't it? You showed me once. And water stops you, but wind helps you...\" and he continued long after his father had left the room.\n\nWith advancing years, however, Edward either forgot his playmate or kept its activities to himself. He no longer referred to it, at any rate. His energies demanded a bigger field; he roamed the fields and woods, climbed the hills, stayed out all night to see the sunrise, made fires even when fires were not exactly needed, and hunted with Red Indians and with what he called \"Windy-Fire people\" everywhere. He was never in the house. He ran wild. Great open spaces, trees and flowers were what he liked. The sea, on the other hand, alarmed him. Only wind and fire comforted him and made him happy and full of life. He was a playmate of wind and fire. Water, in large quantities at any rate, was inimical.\n\nWith concealed approval, masking a deep love fulfilled yet incomplete, his father watched the growth of this fiercer strain that mere covert shooting could not satisfy, nor ordinary sporting holidays appease.\n\n\"England's too small for you, Edward, isn't it?\" he asked once tentatively, when the boy was about fifteen.\n\n\"The English people, you mean, father?\"\n\n\"You find them dull, don't you? And the island a bit cramped\u2014eh?\"\n\nEdward waited without replying. He did not quite understand what his indulgent father intended, or was leading up to.\n\n\"You'd like to travel and see things and people for yourself, I mean?\"\n\nHe watched the boy without, as he thought, the latter noticing. The answer pleased but puzzled him.\n\n\"We're all much the same, aren't we?\" said Edward.\n\n\"Well\u2014with differences\u2014yes, we are. But still\u2014\"\n\n\"It's only the same over and over again, isn't it?\" Then, while his father was thinking of this reply, and of what he should say to it, the boy asked suddenly with arresting intensity:\n\n\"Are we the only people\u2014the only sort of beings, I mean? Just men and women like us all over the world? No others of any sort\u2014bigger, for instance, or\u2014more wild and wonderful?\" Then he added, a thrust of strange yearning in his face and eyes: \"More beautiful?\" He almost whispered the last words.\n\nHis father winced. He divined the origin of that strange inquiry. Upon those immense and lonely mountains, distant in space and time for him, imagination, rich and pagan, ran, he well knew, to vast and mighty beings, superior to human, benignant and maleficent, akin to the stimulating and exhilarating conception of the gods, and certainly non-human.\n\n\"Nothing, Edward, that we know of. Why should there be?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know, dad. I just wondered\u2014sometimes. But, as you say, we've not a scrap of evidence, of course.\"\n\n\"Not a scrap,\" agreed his father. \"Poetic legends ain't evidence.\"\n\nThe mind ruled the heart in Edward; he had his father's brains, at any rate; and all his powers and longings focused in a single line that indicated plainly what his career should be. The Public Schools could help him little; he went to Edinburgh to study medicine; he passed eventually with all possible honours; and the day he brought home the news his father, dying, told him the secret of his illegitimate birth." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 314", + "text": "The subsequent twenty years or so may be summarized.\n\nAlone in the world, of a loving, passionate nature, he deliberately set all thought of marriage on one side as an impossibility, and directed his entire energy into the acquirement of knowledge; reading, studying, experimenting far outside the circle of the ordinary medical man. The attitude of detachment he had adopted became a habit. He believed it was now his nature.\n\nThe more he learned of human frailty and human faculties, the greater became the charity he felt towards his fellow-kind. In his own being, it seemed, lay something big, sweet, simple, a generosity that longed to share with others, a tolerance more ready to acquit than to condemn, above all, a great gift of understanding sympathy that, doubtless, was the explanation of his singular insight. Rarely he found it in him to blame; forgiveness, based upon the increasing extent of his experience, seemed his natural view of human mistakes and human infirmities. His one desire, his one hope, was to serve the Race.\n\nYet he himself remained aloof. He watched the Play but took no part in it. This forgiveness, too, began at home. His grievance had not soured or dejected him, his father's error presenting itself as a problem to be pondered over, rather than a sin to blame. Some day, he promised himself, he would go and see with his own eyes the Khaketian tribe whence his blood was partially derived, whence his un-English yearnings for a wilder scale of personal freedom amid an unstained, majestic Nature were first stolen. The inherited picture of a Caucasian vale of loveliness and liberty lay, indeed, very deep in his nature, emerging always like a symbol when he was profoundly moved. At any crisis in his life it rose beckoning, seductive, haunting beyond words... Curious, ill-defined emotions with it, that drove him towards another standard, another state, to something, at any rate, he could neither name nor visualize, yet that seemed to dwarf the only life he knew. About it was a touch of strange unearthly radiance that dimmed existence as he knew it. The shine went out of it. There was involved in this symbolic \"Valley\" something wholly new both in colour, sound and outline, yet that remained obstinately outside definition.\n\nFirst, however, he must work, develop himself, and broaden, deepen, extend in every possible way the knowledge of his kind that seemed his only love.\n\nHe began in a very practical way, setting up his plate in a mean quarter of the great metropolis, healing, helping, learning with his heart as well as with his brain, observing life at closest quarters from its beginning to its close, his sympathies becoming enriched the more he saw, and his mind groping its way towards clearer insight the more he read, thought, studied. His wealth made him independent; his tastes were simple; his wants few. He observed the great Play from the Pit and Gallery, from the Wings, from Behind the Scenes as well.\n\nMoving then, into the Stalls, into a wealthier neighbourhood, that is, he repeated the experience among another class, finding, however, little difference except in the greater artificiality of his types, the larger proportion of mental and nervous ailments, of hysteria, delusion, imaginary troubles, and the like. The infirmities due to idleness, enflamed vanity and luxury offered a new field, though to him a less attractive one. The farther from simplicity, from the raw facts of living, the more complicated, yet the more trivial, the resulting disabilities. These, however, were quite as real as those, and harder, indeed, to cure. Idle imagination, fostered by opportunity and means, yet forced by conventionality to wear infinite disguises, brought a strange, if far from a noble, crop of disorders into his ken. Yet he accepted them for serious treatment, whatever his private opinion may have been, while his patience, tact and sympathy, backed by his insight and great knowledge, brought him quick success. He was soon in a fair way to become a fashionable doctor.\n\nBut the field, he found, was restricted somewhat. His quest was knowledge, not fame or money. He chose his cases where he could, though actually refusing nothing. He specialized more and more with afflictions of a mental kind. He was immensely successful in restoring proportion out of disorder. He revealed people to themselves. He taught them to recover lost hope and confidence. He used little medicine, but stimulated the will towards a revival of fading vitality. Auto-suggestion, rather than suggestion or hypnotism, was his method. He healed. He began to be talked about.\n\nThen, suddenly, his house was sold, his plate was taken down, he vanished.\n\nHuman beings object to sudden changes whose secret they have not been told and cannot easily guess; his abrupt disappearance caused talk and rumours, led, of course, by those, chiefly disappointed women, who had most reason to be grateful for past services. But, if the words charlatan and quack were whispered, he did not hear them; he had taken the post of assistant in a lunatic asylum in a northern town, because the work promised him increase of knowledge and experience in his own particular field. The talk he left behind him mattered as little as the small pay attached to the humble duties he had accepted.\n\nLondon forgot him, but he did not forget what London had taught him.\n\nA new field opened, and in less than two years, opportunity, combined with his undoubted qualifications, saw him Head of an establishment where he could observe at first hand the facts and phenomena that interested him most. Humane treatment, backed by profound insight into the derangements of the poor human creatures under his charge, brought the place into a fame it had never known before. He spent five years there in profound study and experiment; he achieved new results and published them. His Experimental Psychology caused a sensation. His name was known. He was an Authority.\n\nAt this time he was well past thirty, a tall, dark, distinguished-looking man, of appearance grave and even sombre; imposing, too, with his quiet, piercing eyes, but sombre only until the smile lit up his somewhat rugged face. It was a face that nobody could lie to, but to that smile the suffering heart might tell its inmost secrets with confidence, hope, trust, and without reserve.\n\nThere followed several years abroad, in Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, Moscow; Vienna and Zurich he also visited to test there certain lines of research and to meet personally their originators.\n\nThis period was partly a holiday, partly an opportunity to know at first hand the leaders in mental therapeutics, psychology and the rest, and also that he might find time to digest and arrange his own accumulation of knowledge with a view, later, to undertaking the life-work to which his previous experience was but preliminary. Fame had come to him unsought; his published works alone ensured his going down to posterity as a careful but daring and original judge of the human species and its possibilities. It was the supernormal rather than the merely abnormal powers that attracted him. In the subconscious, as, equally, in the superconscious, his deep experience taught him, lay amazing powers of both moral and physical healing, powers as yet but little understood, powers as limitless as they seemed incredible, as mysterious in their operation as they were simple in their accessibility. And auto-suggestion was the means of using them. The great men whom he visited welcomed him with open arms, added to his data, widened yet further his mental outlook. Sought by high and low in many countries and in strangest cases, his experience grew and multiplied, his assortment of unusual knowledge was far-reaching; till he stood finally in wonder and amazement before the human being and its unrealized powers, and his optimism concerning the future progress of the race became more justified with every added fact.\n\nYet, perhaps, his greatest achievement was the study of himself; it was probably to this deep, intimate and honest research into his own being that his success in helping others was primarily due. For in himself, though mastered and co-ordinated by his steady will, rendered harmless by his saving sense of humour and (as he believed) by the absence of any harboured grievance against others\u2014in his very own being lay all those potential elements of disorder, those loose unravelled threads of alien impulse and suppressed desire, which can make for dangerous disintegration, and thus produce the disturbing results classed generally under alienation and neurosis.\n\nThe incongruous elements in him were the gift of nature; \u03b3\u03bd\u1ff6\u03b8\u03b9 \u03c3\u03b5\u03b1\u03c5\u03c4\u1f79\u03bd was the saving attitude he brought to that gift, redeeming it. This phrase, borrowed, he remembered with a smile, for the portal of the ancient Mysteries, remained his watchword. He was able to thank the fierce illicit love that furnished his body and his mental make-up for a richer field of first-hand study than years of practice among others could have supplied. He belonged by temperament to the unstable. But\u2014he was aware of it. He realized the two beings in him: the reasoning, scientific man, and the speculative dreamer, visionary, poet. The latter wondered, dreamed among a totally different set of values far below and out of sight. This deeper portion of himself was forever beating up for recognition, clamouring to be used, yet with the strange shyness that reminded him of a loving woman who cannot be certain her passion is returned. It hinted, threatened, wept and even sulked. It rose like a flame, bringing its own light and wind, blessed his whole being with some divine assurance, and then, because not instantly accepted, it retired, leaving him empty, his mind coloured with unearthly yearnings, with poignant regrets, yet perfumed as though the fairness of Spring herself had lit upon his heart and kissed it into blossom on her passage north. It presented its amazing pictures, and withdrew. Elusive, as the half memory of some radiant dream, whose wonder and sweetness have been intense to the point of almost pain, it hovered, floating just out of reach. It lay waiting for that sincere belief which would convince that its passion was returned. And a fleeting picture of a wild Caucasian valley, steeped in sunshine and flowers, was always the first sign of its awakening.\n\nThough not afraid of reason, it seemed somehow independent of the latter's processes. It was his reason, however, he well knew that dimmed the light in its grand, terrible eyes, causing it to withdraw the instant he began to question. Precise, formal thinking shut the engines off and damped the furnaces. His love, his passion, none the less, were there, hiding with belief, until some bright messenger, bringing glad tidings, should reveal the method of harmonious union between reason and vision, between man's trivial normal faculties and his astounding supernormal possibilities.\n\n\"This element of feeling in our outlook on Nature is a satisfaction in itself, but our plea for allowing it to operate in our interpretation of Nature is that we get closer to some things through feeling than we do through science. The tendency of feeling is always to see things whole. We cannot, for our life's sake, and for the sake of our philosophical reconstruction, afford to lose in scientific analysis what the poets and artists and the lovers of Nature all see. It is intuitively felt, rather than intellectually perceived, the vision of things as totalities, root and all, all in all; neither fancifully, nor mystically, but sympathetically in their wholeness.\"\n\nTo these words of Professor T. Arthur Thomson's, he heartily subscribed, applying their principle to his own particular field." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 315", + "text": "The net result of his inquiries and research, when, at the age of nearly forty, he established his own Private Home for unusual, so-called hopeless cases in North-West London\u2014it was free to all, and as Spiritual Clinique he thought of it sometimes with a smile\u2014may be summed up in the single sentence that man is greater than he knows, and that completer realization of his full possibilities lies accessible to his subconscious and superconscious powers. Herein he saw, indeed, the chief hope of progress for humanity.\n\nAnd it was to the failures, the diseased, the evil and the broken that he owed chiefly his inspiring optimism, since it was largely in collapse that occurred the sporadic upheaval of those super-normal forces which, controlled, co-ordinated, led, must eventually bring about the realization he foresaw.\n\nThe purpose, however, of these notes is not to furnish a sensational story of various patients whom he studied, healed, or failed to heal. Its object is to give some details of one case in particular whose outstanding peculiarities affected his theories and convictions, leaving him open-minded still, but with a breath of awe in his heart perhaps, before a possibility his previous knowledge had ruled entirely out of court, even if\u2014which is doubtful\u2014he had ever considered it as a possibility at all.\n\nHe had realized early that the individual manifests but an insignificant portion of his being in his ordinary existence, the normal self being the tip of his consciousness only, yet whose fuller expression rises readily to adequate evocation; and it was the study of genius, of prodigies, so-called, and of certain faculties shown sometimes in hysteria, that led him to believe these were small jets from a sea of power that might, indeed ought, to be realizable at will. The phenomena all pointed, he believed, to powers that seemed as superior to cerebral functions as they were independent of these.\n\nMan's possible field of being, in other words, seemed capable of indefinite extension. His heart glowed within him as he established, step by step, these greater powers. He dared to foresee a time when the limitations of separate personality would have been destroyed, and the vast brotherhood of the race become literally realized, its practical unity accomplished.\n\nThe difficulties were endless and discouraging. The inventive powers of the bigger self, its astonishing faculty for dramatizing its content in every conceivable form, blocked everywhere the search for truth.\n\nIt could, he found, also detach a portion of its content into a series of separate personalities, each with its individual morals, talents, tendencies, each with its distinct and separate memory. These fragments it could project, so to speak, masquerading convincingly as separate entities, using strange languages, offering detailed knowledge of other conditions, distant in time and space, suggesting, indeed, to the unwary that they were due to obsessing spirits, and leaving the observer in wonder before the potential capacity of the central self disgorging them.\n\nThe human depths included, beyond mere telepathy and extended telepathy, an expansion of consciousness so vast as to be, apparently, limitless. The past, on rare occasions even the future, lay open; the entire planetary memory, stored with rich and pregnant accumulated experience, was accessible and shareable. New aspects of space and time were equally involved. A vision of incredible grandeur opened gradually before his eyes.\n\nThe surface consciousness of to-day was really rather a trumpery affair; the gross lethargy of the vast majority vis \u00e0 vis the greater possibilities afflicted him. To this surface consciousness alone was so-called evil possible\u2014as ignorance. As \"ugly is only half-way to a thing,\" so evil is half-way to good. With the greater powers must come greater knowledge, shared as by instantaneous wireless over the entire planet, and misunderstanding, chief obstacle to progress always, would be impossible. A huge unity, sense of oneness must follow. Moral growth would accompany the increase of faculty. And here and there, it seemed to him, the surface ice had thawed already a little; the pressure of the great deeps below caused cracks and fissures. Auto-suggestion, prototype of all suggestion, offered mysterious hints of the way to reach the stupendous underworld, as the Christian Scientists, the miraculous healers, the New Thought movement, saints, prophets, poets, artists, were finding out.\n\nThe subliminal, to state it shortly, might be the divine. This was the hope, though not yet the actual belief, that haunted and inspired him. Behind his personality lurked this strange gigantic dream, ever beating to get through...\n\nIn his Private Home, helping, healing, using his great gifts of sympathy and insight, he at the same time found the material for intimate study and legitimate experiment he sought. The building had been altered to suit his exact requirements; there were private suites, each with its door and staircase to the street; one part of it provided his own living quarters, shut off entirely from the patients' side; in another, equally cut off and self-contained, yet within easy communication of his own rooms, lived Paul Devonham, his valued young assistant. There was a third private suite as well. The entire expenses he defrayed himself.\n\nHere, then, for a year or two he worked indefatigably, with the measure of success and failure he anticipated; here he dreamed his great dream of the future of the race, in whose progress and infinite capacities he hopefully believed. Work was his love, the advancement of humanity his god. The war availed itself of his great powers, as also of his ready-made establishment, both of which he gave without a thought of self. New material came as well from the battlefields into his ken.\n\nThe effect of the terrible five years upon him was in direct proportion to his sincerity. His mind was not the type that shirks conclusions, nor fears to look facts in the face. For really new knowledge he was ever ready to yield all previous theories, to scrap all he had held hitherto for probable. His mind was open, he sought only Truth.\n\nThe war, above all the Peace, shook his optimism. If it did not wholly shatter his belief in human progress, it proved such progress to be so slow that his Utopia faded into remotest distance, and his dream of perfectibility became the faintest possible star in his hitherto bright sky of hope.\n\nHe felt shocked and stupefied. The reaction was greater than at first he realized. He had often pitied the mind that, aware only of its surface consciousness, uninformed by thrill or shift of the great powers below and above, lived unwarned of its own immenser possibilities. To such, the evidence for extended human faculties must seem explicable by fraud, illusion, derangement, to be classed as abnormal rubbish worthy only of the alienist's attention as diseases. To him such minds, though able, with big intellects among them, had ever seemed a prejudiced, fossilized, prehistoric type. Restricted by their very nature, violently resisting new ideas, they might be intense within their actual scope, but, with vision denied them, they never could be really great.\n\nOne effect of the shock he had undergone will be evident by merely stating that he now understood this type of mind a good deal better than before." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 316", + "text": "The war was over, though the benefits of the long anticipated peace still kept provocatively, exasperatingly, out of reach, when, about the middle of September, Dr. Fillery received a letter that interested him deeply.\n\nThe shattered world was still distraught, uneasy. Nervously eager to resume its former activities, it was yet waiting for the word that should give it the necessary confidence to begin. Doubt, insecurity, uncertainty everywhere dominated human minds. Those who hoped for a renewal of the easy, careless mood of pre-war days were dismayed to find this was impossible; others who had allowed an optimistic idealism to prophesy a New Age, looked about them bewilderingly and in vain for signs of its fair birth. The latter, to whom, perhaps, Dr. Fillery belonged, were more bitterly disappointed, more cruelly shocked, than the former. The race, it seemed to many unshirking eyes, had leaped back centuries at a single spring; the gulf of primal savagery which had gaped wide open for five years, proving the Stone Age close beneath the surface of so-called civilization, had not yet fully closed. Its jaws still dripped blood, hatred, selfishness; the Race was still dislocated by the convincing disproof of progress, horrified at the fierce reality which had displaced the two-pence coloured dream it had been complacently worshipping hitherto. Men in the mass undoubtedly were savages still.\n\nTo Dr. Fillery, an honest, though not a necessarily fundamental pessimism, seemed justified. He believed in progress still, but as his habit was, he faced the facts. His attitude lost something of its original enthusiasm. Looking about him, he saw no big constructive movement; the figure who more than any other was altering the face of the world with his ideas as well as his armies, was avowedly destructive only. He found himself a sobered and a saddened man.\n\nHis Private Home, having accomplished splendid work, had just discharged its last shell-shocked patient; it was now empty again, the staff, carefully chosen and proved by long service, dismissed on holidays, the building itself renovated and repaired against the arrival later of new patients that were expected.\n\nDevonham, his assistant, away for a period of rest in Switzerland, would be back in a week or two, and Dr. Fillery, before resuming his normal work, found himself with little to do but watch the progress of the cleaners, painters and carpenters at work.\n\nInto this brief time of leisure dropped the strange, perplexing letter with an effect distinctly stimulating. It promised an unusual case, a patient, if patient the case referred to could properly be called, a young man \"who if you decide after careful reflection to reject, can be looked after only by the State, which means, of course, an Asylum for the Insane. I know you are no longer head of the Establishment in Liverpool, but that you confine yourself to private work along similar lines, though upon a smaller scale, and that you welcome only cases that have been given up as hopeless. I honour your courage and your sympathy, I know your skill. So far as a cure is conceivable, this one is hopeless certainly, but its unusual, indeed, its unique character, entitles it, I believe, to be placed among your chosen few. Love, sympathy, patience, combined with the closest observation, it urgently demands, and these qualities, associated with unrivalled skill, you must allow me, again, to think you alone possess among healers and helpers of strange minds.\n\n\"For over twenty years, in the solitudes of these Jura forests and mountains, I have cared for him as best I could, and with a devotion a child of my own might have expected. But now, my end not far away, I cannot leave him behind me here uncared for, yet the alternative, the impersonal and formal care of an Institute, must break my heart and his. I turn to you.\n\n\"My advanced age and growing infirmities, in these days of unkind travel, prohibit my bringing him over. Can your great heart suggest a means, since I feel sure you will not refuse the care of this strange being whose nature and peculiarities indicate your especial care, and yours alone? Is it too much to wonder if you yourself could come and see him\u2014here in the remote mountain ch\u00e2let where I have tended and cared for him ever since his mother died in bearing him over twenty years ago?\n\n\"I have taught him what seemed wise and best; I have guarded and observed him; he knows little or nothing of an outside world of men and women, and is ignorant of life in the ordinary meaning of the word. What precisely he may be, to what stratum of consciousness he belongs, what kind of being he is, I mean...\" The last two lines were then scored through, though left legible. \"I feel with Arago, that he is a rash man who pronounces the word 'impossible' anywhere outside the sphere of pure mathematics.\" More sentences were here scored through.\n\n\"Dare I say\u2014to you, as master, teacher, great open-minded soul\u2014that to human life, as we know it, he does not, perhaps, belong?\n\n\"In writing\u2014in this letter\u2014I find it impossible to give you full details. I had intended to set them down; my pen refuses; in the plain English at my disposal\u2014well, simply, it is not credible. But I have kept full notes all these years, and the notes belong to you. I enclose an imperfect painting I made of him some four years ago. I am no artist; for background you must imagine what lay beyond my little skill\u2014the blazing glory of the immense wood-fires that he loves to make upon the open mountain side, usually at dawn after a night of prayer and singing, while waiting for the strange power he derives (as we all do, indeed, at second or third hand), from the worship of what is to him his mighty father, the life-giving sun. Wind, as the 'messengers' of the sun, he worships too... Both sun and wind, that is, produce an unusual state approaching ecstasy.\n\n\"Counting upon you, I have hypnotized him, suggesting that he forget all the immediate past (in fact to date), and telling him he will like you in place of me\u2014though with him it is an uncertain method.\n\n\"I am now old in years. I have lived and loved, suffered and dreamed like most of us; my hands have been warmed at the fires of life, of which, let me add, I am not ignorant. You have known, I believe, my serious, as also my lighter imaginative books; my occasional correspondence with your colleague Paul Devonham has been of help and guidance to me. We are not, therefore, wholly strangers.\n\n\"The twenty years spent in these solitudes among simple peasant folk, with a single object of devotion to fill my days, have been, I would tell you, among the best of my long existence. My renouncement of the world was no renouncement. I am enriched with wonder and experience that amaze me, for the world holds possibilities few have ever dreamed of, and that I myself, filled as I am with the memory of their contemplation, can hardly credit even now. Perhaps in an earlier stage of evolution, as Delboeuf believes, man was fully aware of all that went on within himself\u2014a region since closed to us, owing to attention being increasingly directed outwards. Into some such region I have had a glimpse, it seems. I feel sometimes there was as much fact as fancy, perhaps, in the wise old Hebrew who stated poetically\u2014recently, too, compared with the stretch of time my science deals with\u2014'The Sons of God took to themselves daughters of the children of men...\"\n\nThe letter here broke off, as though interrupted by something unexpected and unusual; it was signed, indeed, \"John Mason,\" but signed in pencil and at the bottom of an unwritten blank sheet. It had not all been written, either, at one time, or on the same day; there were intervals, evidently, perhaps of hours, perhaps of days, between the paragraphs. Dr. Fillery read, re-read, then read again the strange epistle, coming each time to the same conclusion\u2014the writer was dying in the very act of forming the last sentences. Their incoherence, the alteration in the style, were thus explained. He had felt the end of life so close that he had written his signature, probably addressed the envelope as well, knowing the page might never be filled up. It had not been filled up.\n\nSomething behind the phrases, behind the intensity of the actual words, beyond the queer touches that revealed a mind betrayed by solitude, the hints possibly of a deluded intelligence\u2014there was something that rang true and stimulated him more than ordinarily. The reference to Devonham, too, was definite enough. Dr. Fillery remembered vaguely a correspondence during recent crowded years with a man named Mason, living away in Switzerland somewhere, and that Devonham had asked him questions from time to time about what he called, with his rough-and-ready and half-humorous classification, \"pagan obsession,\" \"worshipper of fire and wind,\" referring it to the writer of the letters, named John Mason. \"Non-human delusion,\" he had also called it sometimes. They had come to refer to it, he remembered, as \"N. H.\" in fact.\n\nHe now looked up those Notes, for the mention of the books caused him an uncomfortable feeling of neglected opportunity, and John Mason was an honoured name.\n\n\"You know, I believe... my books,\" the writer said. Could this be, he asked himself anxiously, John Mason, the eminent geologist? Had Devonham not realized who he was? Must he blame his assistant, whose jealous care and judgment saved him so many foolish, futile, un-real cases, reserving what was significant and important only?\n\nThe Notes established his mistakes and his assistant's\u2014perhaps intentional?\u2014ignorance. The writer of this curious letter was unquestionably the author of those fairy books for children, old and young, whose daring speculations had suggested that other types and races, ages even before the Neanderthal man, had dwelt side by side with what is known as modern man upon this time-worn planet. Behind the literary form of legend and fairy tale, however, lay a curious conviction. Atlantis was of yesterday compared with earlier civilizations, now extinct by fire and flood and general upheaval, which once may have inhabited the globe. The present evolutionary system, buttressed by Darwin and the rest, was but a little recent insignificant series, trivial both in time and space, when set beside the mightier systems that had come and gone. Their evidence he found, not in clumsy fossils and footprints on cooled rocks, but in the minds of those who had followed and eventually survived them: memories of Titan Wars and mighty beings, and gods and goddesses of non-human kind, to whose different existence the physical conditions of an over-heated planet presented no impossibility. The human species, this trumpery, limited, self-satisfied super-animal man, was not the only type of being.\n\nYet John Mason, in his day, had held the chair at Edinburgh University, his lectures embodied common-sense and knowledge, with acutest imaginative insight. His earliest writings were the text-books of the time. His name, when Edward Fillery was medical student there, still hovered like well-loved incense above the old-town towers.\n\nThe Notes now intrigued him. No blame attached to Devonham for having missed the cue, Devonham could not know everything; geology was not in his line of work and knowledge; and Mason was a common name. Rather he blamed himself for not having been struck by the oddness of the case\u2014the Mason letters, the pagan obsession, worshipper of wind and fire, the strange \"N. H.\"\n\n\"A competent indexer, at any rate,\" he said to himself with a smile, as he turned up the details easily.\n\nThese were very scanty. Devonham evidently had deemed the case of questionable value. The letters from Mason, with the answers to them, he could not find.\n\nThe slight record was headed \"Mason, John,\" followed by an address \"Chez Henri Petavel, peasant, Jura Mountains, Vaud, French Switzerland,\" and details how to reach this apparently remote valley by mule and carriage and foot-path. Name of Mason's prot\u00e9g\u00e9 not given.\n\n\"Sex, male; age\u2014born 1895; parentage, couple of mystical temperament, sincere, but suffering from marked delusions, believers in Magic (various, but chiefly concerned with Nature and natural forces, once known, forgotten to-day, of immense potency, accessible to certain practices of logical but undetailed kind, able apparently to intensify human consciousness).\n\n\"Subject, of extremely quick intelligence, yet betrays ignorance of human conditions; intelligence superior to human, though sometimes inferior; long periods of quiescence, followed by immense, almost super-human, activity and energy; worships fire and air, chiefly the former, calling the sun his father and deity.\n\n\"Abhors confined space; this shown by intense desire for heat, which, together with free space (air), seem conditions of well-being.\n\n\"Fears (as in claustrophobia) both water and solidity (anything massive).\n\n\"Has great physical power, yet indifferent to its use; women irresistibly attracted to him, but his attitude towards other sex seems one of gentleness and pity; love means nothing. Has, on the other hand, extraordinarily high ideal of service. Is puzzled by quarrels and differences of personal kind. Half-memories of vast system of myriad workers, ruled by this ideal of harmonious service. Faithful, true, honest; falseness or lies impossible... lovable, pathetic, helpless type\u2014\"\n\nThe Notes broke off abruptly.\n\nDr. Fillery, wondering a little that his subordinate's brief but suggestive summary had never been brought to his notice before, turned a moment to glance at the rough water-colour drawing he held in his hand. He looked at it for some moments with absorption. The expression of his face was enigmatical. He was more than surprised that Devonham had not drawn his attention to the case in detail. Placing his hand so as to hide the lower portion of the face, he examined the eyes, then turned the portrait upside down, gazing at the eyes afresh. He seemed lost in thought for a considerable time. A faint flush stole into his cheek, and a careful observer might have noticed an increase of light about the skin. He sighed once or twice, and presently, laying the portrait down again, he turned back to the dossier upon the table in front of him.\n\n\"Very accurate and careful,\" he said to himself with satisfaction as he noticed the date Devonham had set against the entries\u2014\"June 20th, 1914.\"\n\nThe war, therefore, had interrupted the correspondence.\n\nDevonham had made further notes of his own in the margin here and there:\n\n\"Does this originate primarily from Mason's mind, communicated thence to his prot\u00e9g\u00e9?\" He agreed with his assistant's query.\n\n\"If so, was it transferred to Mason's mind before that? By the father or mother? The mother was, obviously, his\u2014Mason's\u2014great love. Yet the father was his life friend. Mason's great passion was suppressed. He never told it. It found no outlet.\"\n\n\"Admirable,\" was the comment spoken below his breath.\n\n\"Boy born as result of some 'magical' experiment intensely believed (not stated in detail), during course of which father died suddenly.\n\n\"Mason tended mother, then lived alone in remote place where all had occurred.\n\n\"Did Mason inherit entire content of parents' beliefs, dramatizing this by force of unexpressed but passionate love?\n\n\"Did not Mason's mind, thus charged, communicate whole business to the young mind he has since formed, a plastic mind uninfluenced by normal human surroundings and conditions of ordinary life?\n\n\"Transfer of a sex-inspired mania?\"\n\nThen followed another note, summarizing evidently Devonham's judgment:\n\n\"Not worth F.'s investigation until examined further. N.B.\u2014Look up Mason first opportunity and judge at first hand.\"\n\nDr. Fillery, glancing from the papers to the portrait, smiled a little again as he signified approval.\n\nBut the last entry interested him still more. It was dated July 13, 1914.\n\n\"Mason reports boy's prophecy of great upheaval coming. Entire race slips back into chaos of primitive life again. Entire Western Civilization crumbles. Modern inventions and knowledge vanish. Nature spirits reappear... Desires return of all previous letters. These sent by registered post.\"\n\nA few scattered notes on separate sheets of paper lay at the end of the carefully typed dossier, but these were very incomplete, and Devonham's handwriting, especially when in pencil, was not of the clearest.\n\n\"Non-human claim, though absurd, not traceable to any antecedent causes given by letters. What is Mason's past mental and temperamental history? Is he not, through the parents, the cause? Mania seems harmless, both to subject and others. No suffering or unhappiness. Therefore not a case for F., until further examined by self. Better see Mason and his subject first. Wrote July 24th proposing visit.\"\n\nDr. Fillery's eyes twinkled. His forehead relaxed. He looked back. He remembered details. Devonham's holiday that year, he recalled, was due on August 1st; he had intended going out mountain climbing in Switzerland.\n\nThe final note of all, also in half-legible writing, seemed to refer to the treatment Mason had asked advice about, and the line Devonham had suggested:\n\n\"Natural life close to Nature cannot hurt him. But I advise watch him with fire and with heights\u2014heat, air! That is, he may decide his physical body is irksome and seek to escape it. Teach him natural history\u2014botany, geology, insects, animals, even astronomy, but always giving him reasons and explanations. Above all\u2014let him meet girls of his own age and fall in love. Fullest natural expression, but guarded without his knowing it...\"\n\nFor a long time Dr. Fillery sat with the notes and papers before him, thinking over what he had read. Devonham's advice was clever enough, but without insight, sound and astute, yet lacking divination.\n\nThe twinkle in his eyes, caused by the final entry, died away. His face was grave, his manner preoccupied, intense. He gazed long at the portrait in his hand... It was dusk when he finally rose, replaced the dossier, locked the cabinet, and went out into another room, and thence into the hall. Taking his hat and stick, he left the house, already composing in his mind the telegram instructing Devonham, while apologizing for the interrupted holiday, to bring the subject of the Notes to England with him. A telegraph girl met him on the very steps of the house. He took the envelope from her, and opened it. He read the message. It was dated B\u00e2le, the day before:\n\n\"Arriving end week with interesting patient. Details index under Mason. Prepare private suite.\n\n\"Devonham.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 317", + "text": "It was, however, some two weeks later before Dr. Fillery was on his way to the station to meet Devonham and his companion. A slight delay, caused apparently by the necessity of buying an outfit, had intervened and given time for an exchange of letters, but Devonham had contented himself chiefly with telegrams. He did not wish his chief to know too much about the case in advance. \"Probably he regrets the Notes already,\" thought the doctor, as the car made its way slowly across crowded London. \"He wants my first unbiased judgment; he's right, of course, but it's too late for that now.\"\n\nThe delay, however, had been of value. The Home was in working order again, the staff returned, the private suite all ready for its interesting occupant, whom in thought he had already named \"N. H.\"; for in the first place he did not know his name as yet, and in the second he felt towards him a certain attitude of tolerant, half-humorous scepticism.\n\nCut off from his own kind for so many years, educated, perhaps half-educated only, by too speculative and imaginative a mind, equally warped by this long solitude, a mind unduly stretched by the contemplation of immense geological perspectives, filled, too, with heaven knows what strange stories of pantheistic Nature-feeling\u2014\"N. H.\" might be distinctly interesting, but hardly all that Mason had thought him. \"Unique\" was a word rarely justified; the peculiarities would prove to be mere extravagances that had, of necessity, remained uncorrected by the friction of intercourse with his own kind. The rest was inheritance, equally unpruned; a mind living in a side-eddy, a backwater with Nature...\n\nAt the same time Dr. Fillery admitted a certain anticipatory excitement he could not wholly account for, an undercurrent of wonder he ascribed to his Khaketian blood.\n\nHe had written once only to his assistant, sending briefest instructions to say the rooms would be ready, and that the young man must believe he was an invited guest coming on a visit. \"Let him expect complete freedom of movement and occupation without the smallest idea of restraint in any way. He is merely coming to stay for as long as he pleases with a friend of Mason. Impress him with a sense of hearty welcome.\" And Devonham, replying, had evidently understood the wisdom of this method. \"He is also greatly pleased with your name\u2014the sound of it,\" was stated in the one letter that he wrote, \"and as names mean a lot to him, so much the better. The sound of it gives him pleasure; he keeps repeating it over to himself; he already likes you. My name he does not care about, saying it quickly, sharply. But he trusts me. His trust in anyone who shows him kindness is instantaneous and complete. He invariably expects kindness, however, from everyone\u2014gives it himself equally\u2014and is baffled and puzzled by any other treatment.\"\n\nSo Devonham, with \"N. H.\", who attached importance to names and expected kindness from people as a natural thing, would be in London town within the hour. Straight from his forests and mountains for the first time in his life, he would find himself in the heart of the greatest accumulation of human beings on the planet, the first city of the world, the final expression of civilization as known to the human race.\n\n\"'N. H.' in London town,\" thought Dr. Fillery, his mouth twitching with the smile that began in his quiet eyes. \"Bless the lad! We must make him feel at home and happy. He shall indeed have kindness. He'll need a woman's touch as well.\" He reflected a moment. \"Women are a great help in doubtful cases\u2014the way a man reacts to them,\" he mused. \"Only they must be distinct in type to be of value.\" And his mind ran quickly, comprehensively over the women of his acquaintance, pausing, as it did so, upon two in particular\u2014a certain Lady Gleeson, and Iraida\u2014sometimes called Nayan\u2014Khilkoff, the daughter of his Russian friend, the sculptor.\n\nHis mind pondered for some moments the two he had selected. It was not the first time he had made use of them. Their effect respectively upon a man was invariably instinctive and illuminating.\n\nThe two were radically different feminine types, as far removed from one another as pole from pole, yet each essentially of her sex. Their effect, respectively, upon such a youth must be of value, and might be even illuminating to the point of revelation. Both, he felt sure, would not be indifferent to the new personality.\n\nIt was, however, of Nayan Khilkoff that he thought chiefly. Of that rare, selfless, maternal type which men in all ages have called saint or angel, she possessed that power which evoked in them all they could feel of respect, of purity, of chivalry, that love, in a word, which holds as a chief ingredient, worship. Her beauty, beyond their reach, was of the stars; it was the unattainable in her they loved; her beauty was of the soul. Nayan was spiritual, not as a result of painful effort and laborious development, but born so. Her life, moreover, was one of natural service. Personal love, exclusive devotion to an individual, concentration of her being upon another single being\u2014this seemed impossible to her. She was at the same time an enigma: there was an elusive flavour about her that made people a little in awe of her, a flavour not of this earth, quite. She carried an impersonal attitude almost to the point of seeming irresponsive to common human things and interests.\n\nThe other woman, Lady Gleeson, Angela her Christian name, was equally a simple type, though her simplicity was that of the primitive female who is still close to the Stone Age\u2014a savage. She adorned herself to capture men. She was the female spider that devours its mates. She wanted slaves. To describe her as selfish were inadequate, for she was unaware that any other ideal existed in life but that of obtaining her own pleasure. There was instinct and emotion, but, of course, no heart. Without morals, conscience or consideration, she was the animal of prey that obeys the call of hunger in the most direct way possible, regardless of consequences to herself or others. Her brain was quick, her personality shallow. When talking she \"rattled on.\" Devonham had well said once: \"You can hear her two thoughts clicking, both of them in trousers!\" Sir George, recently knighted, successful with large concessions in China, was indulgent. The male splendour of the youth was bound to stimulate her hunger, as his simplicity, his loneliness, and in a sense his pathetic helplessness, would certainly evoke the tenderness in Nayan. \"He'll probably like her dear, ridiculous name, too,\" Dr. Fillery felt, \"the nickname they gave her because she's the same to everybody, whichever way you take her\u2014Nayan Khilkoff.\" Yet her real name was more beautiful\u2014Iraida. And, as he repeated it half aloud, a soft light stole upon his face, shone in the deep clear eyes, and touched even the corners of the rather grim mouth with another, a tenderer expression, before the sternness quickly returned to it.\n\n\"N. H.\" would meet, thus, two main types of female life. He, apparently an exceedingly male being, would face the onslaught of passion and heart, of lust and love, respectively; and it was his reactions to these onslaughts that Fillery wished to observe. They would help his diagnosis, they might guide his treatment.\n\nIt was a warm and muggy afternoon, the twilight passing rapidly into darkness now; one of those late autumn days when summer heat flits back, but light is weak. The covered sky increased the clammy warmth, which was damp, unhealthy, devitalizing. No wind stirred. The great city was sticky and depressing. Yet people approved the heat, although it tired them. \"It shortens the winter, anyhow,\" was the general verdict, when expressed at all. They referred unconsciously to the general dread of strikes.\n\nLondon was hurried and confused. An air of feverish overcrowding reigned in the great station, when he left the car and went in on foot. No sign of order, system, direction, was visible. The scene might have been a first rehearsal of some entirely new experiment. Grumbling and complaint rose from all sides in an exasperated chorus. He tried to ascertain how late the train was and on which platform it might be expected, but no one knew for certain, and the grudging replies to questions seemed to say, \"You've no right to ask anything, and if you keep on asking there will be a strike. So that's that!\"\n\nHe listened to the talk and watched the facial expressions and the movements of the half-resigned and half-excited concourse of London citizens. The clock was accurate, and everyone was kind to ladies; stewed tea, stale cake with little stones in it, vile whisky and very weak beer were obtainable at high prices. There were no matches. The machine for supplying platform-tickets was broken. He saw men paying more thought and attention to the comfort of their dogs than to their own. The great, marvellous, stupid, splendid race was puzzled and exasperated. Then, suddenly, the train pulled in, full of returned exiles longing to be back again in \"dear old England.\"\n\n\"Thank God, it's come,\" sighed the crowd. \"Good! We're English. Forgive and forget!\" and prepared to tip the porters handsomely and carry their own baggage.\n\nThe confusion that followed was equally characteristic, and equally remarkable, displaying greatness side by side with its defects. There was no system; all was muddled, yet all was safe. Anyone could claim what luggage they liked, though no one did so, nor dreamed, it seemed, of doing so. There was an air of decent honesty and trust. There were ladies who discovered that all men are savages; there were men\u2014and women\u2014who were savages. People shook hands warmly, smiled with honest affection, said light, careless good-byes that hid genuine emotion; helped one another with parcels, offered one another lifts. There were few taxicabs, one perhaps to every thirty people. And in this general scrimmage, Dr. Fillery, at first, could see no sign of his expected arrivals; he walked from end to end of the platform littered with luggage and thronged with bustling people, but nowhere could he discover the familiar outline of Devonham, nor anyone who answered to the strange picture that already stood forth sharply in his mind.\n\n\"There's been a mistake somewhere,\" he said to himself; \"I shall find a telegram when I get back to the house explaining it\"\u2014when, suddenly and without apparent cause, there stole upon him a curious lift of freedom\u2014a sharp sense of open spaces he was at a loss to understand. It was accompanied by an increase of light. For a second it occurred to him that the great enclosing roof had rolled back and blown away, letting in air and some lost ray of sunshine. A lovely valley flitted across his thought. Almost he was aware of flowers, of music, of rhythmic movement.\n\n\"Edward! there you are. I thought you hadn't come,\" he heard close behind him, and, turning, saw the figure of Devonham, calm and alert as usual. At his side stood a lean, virile outline of a young man, topping Devonham by several inches, with broad but thin shoulders, figure erect yet flexible, whose shining and inquiring eyes of blue were the most striking feature in a boyish face, where strength, intensity and radiant health combined in an unusual degree.\n\n\"Here is our friend, LeVallon,\" added Devonham, but not before the figure had stepped lightly and quickly forward, already staring at him and shaking his outstretched hand.\n\nSo this was \"N. H.,\" and LeVallon was his name. The calm, searching eyes held a touch of bewilderment in them, the eyes of an honest, intelligent animal, thought Fillery quickly, adding in spite of himself and almost simultaneously, \"but of a divine animal.\" It was a look he had never in his life before encountered in any human eyes. Mason's water-colour sketch had caught something, at least, of their innocence and question, of their odd directness and intensity, something, too, of the golden fire in the hair. He wore a broad-brimmed felt hat of Swiss pattern, a Bernese overcoat, a low, soft-collared shirt, with blue tie to match.\n\nBuffeted and pushed by the frenzied travellers, they stood and faced each other, shaking hands, eyes looking into eyes, two strangers, doctor and patient possibly, but friends most certainly, both felt instantly. They liked one another. Once again the scent of flowers danced with light above the piled-up heaps of trunks, rugs, packages. A cool wind from mountains seemed to blow across the dreadful station.\n\n\"You've arrived safely,\" began Dr. Fillery, a little taken aback perhaps. \"Welcome! And not too tired, I hope\u2014\" when the other interrupted him in a man's deep voice, full of pleasant timbre:\n\n\"Fill-er-y,\" he said, making the \"F\" sound rather long, \"I need you. To see you makes me happy.\"\n\n\"Tired,\" put in Devonham breathlessly, \"good heavens, not he! But I am. Now for a porter and the big luggage. Have you got a taxi?\"\n\n\"The car is here,\" said Fillery, letting go with a certain reluctance the hand he held, and paying little attention to anything but the figure before him who used such unexpected language. What was it? What did it mean? Whence came this sudden sense of intensity, light, of order, system, intelligence into the racial scene of muddled turmoil all about him? There seemed an air of speeding up in thought and action near him, compared to which the slow stupidity, unco-ordinated and confused on all sides, became painful, gross, and even ludicrous.\n\nSomeone bumped against him with violence, but quite needlessly, since the simplest judgment of weight and distance could have avoided the collision. In such ordinary small details he was aware of another, a higher, standard close. A man on his left, trying to manage several bundles, appeared vividly as of amazing incompetence, with his miscalculation, his clumsy movement, his hopeless inability to judge cause and effect. Yet he had two arms, ten fingers, two legs, broad shoulders and deep chest. Misdirection of his great strength made it impossible for him to manage the assortment of light parcels. Next to him, however, stood a woman carrying a baby\u2014there was no error there. The panting engine just beyond them, again, set a standard of contemptuous, impersonal intelligence that, obeying Nature's laws, dwarfed the humans generally. But it was another, a quasi-spiritual standard that had flashed to him above all. In some curious way the competent \"dead\" machinery that obeyed the Law with faultless efficiency, and the woman obeying instinct with equally unconscious skill\u2014these two energies were akin to the new standard he was now startlingly aware of.\n\nHe looked up, as though to trace this sudden new consciousness of bright, quick, rapid competence\u2014almost as of some immense power building with consistent scheme and system\u2014that had occurred to him; and he met again the direct, yet slightly bewildered eyes that watched him, watched him with confidence, sweetness, and with a questioning intensity he found intriguing, captivating, and oddly stimulating. He felt happiness.\n\n\"By yer leave!\" roared a porter, as they stepped aside just in time to save being pushed by the laden truck\u2014just in time to save himself, that is, for the other, Fillery noticed, moved like a chamois on its native rocks, so surely, lightly, swiftly was he poised.\n\n\"This! Ah, you must excuse it,\" the doctor exclaimed with a smile of apology almost, \"we've not yet had time to settle down after the war, you see.\" He pointed with a sweep of his hand to the roaring, dim-lit cavern where confusion reigned supreme, the G.H.Q. of travel in the biggest city of the Empire.\n\n\"I've got a porter,\" cried Devonham, beckoning vigorously a little further down the platform. \"You wait there. I'll be along in a minute with the stuff.\" He was hot, flustered, exhausted.\n\n\"You struggle. It was like this all the way. Is there no knowledge?\" LeVallon asked in his deep, quiet tones.\n\n\"We do,\" said Fillery. \"With us life is always struggle. But there is more system than appears. The confusion is chiefly on the surface.\"\n\n\"It is dark and there is so little air,\" observed the other. \"And they all work against each other.\"\n\nFillery laughed into the other's eyes; they laughed together; and it seemed suddenly to the doctor that their beings somehow merged, so that, for a second, he knew the entire content of his companion's mind\u2014as if there was nothing in LeVallon he did not understand.\n\n\"You\u2014are a builder,\" LeVallon said abruptly. But as he said it his companion caught, on the wing as it were, another meaning. He became curiously aware of the smallness, of the remote insignificance of the little planet whereon this dialogue took place, yet at the same time of its superb seductive loveliness. In him rose a feeling, as on wings, that he was not chained in his familiar, daily personality, but that an immense, delicious freedom lay within reach. He could be everywhere at once. He could do everything.\n\n\"Wait here while I help Devonham. Then we'll get into the car and be off.\" He moved away, threading a path with difficulty.\n\n\"I wait in peace. I am happy,\" was the reply.\n\nAnd with those few phrases, uttered in the quiet, deep voice, sounding in his ears and in his very blood, the older man went towards the spot where Devonham struggled with a porter, a pile of nondescript luggage and a truck: \"I wait in peace... You struggle, you work against each other... It is dark, there is little air... You are a builder...\"\n\nBut not these singular words alone remained alive in his mind; there remained in his heart the sense of that vitality of open spaces, keen air and brighter light he had experienced\u2014and, with it, the security of some higher, faultless standard. His brain, indeed, had recognized a consciousness of swifter reactions, of surer movements, of more intelligent co-ordination, compared to which the people about him behaved like stupid, almost like half-witted beings, the one exception being the instinctive action of the mother in carrying her baby, and the other, the impersonal, accurate, competence of the dead machinery.\n\nBut, more than this reasoned change, there burned suddenly in his heart an inexplicable exhilaration and brightness, a wonder that he could attribute only to another mode of life. His Khaketian blood, he knew, might be responsible for part of it, but not for all. The invigorating mountain wind, the sunlight, the rhythmic sound, the scent of wild flowers, these were his own personal interpretations of a quickened sense he could not analyse as yet. As he held the young man's hand, as he gazed into his direct blue eyes, this sense had increased in intensity. LeVallon had some marvellous quality or power that was new to him, while yet not entirely unfamiliar. What was it? And how did the youth perceive this sense in him so surely that he took its presence for granted, accepted, even played upon it? He experienced, as it were, a brilliant intensification of spirit. Some portion of him already knew exactly what LeVallon was.\n\nAcross the ugly turmoil and confusion of the huge dingy railway terminus had moved wondrously some simple power that brought in\u2014Beauty. Some very deep and ancient conception had touched him and gone its way again. The stupendous beauty of a simple, common day appeared to him. His subconscious being, of course, was deeply stirred. That was the truth, phrase it as he might. His heart was lifted as by a primal wind at dawn upon some mountain top. The heaviness of the day was gone. Fatigue, too, vanished. The \"civilized\" folk appeared contemptible and stupid. Something direct from Nature herself poured through him. And it was from the atmosphere of LeVallon this new vitality issued radiating.\n\nHe found a moment or two, while alone with Devonham, to exchange a few hurried sentences. As they bent over bags and bundles he asked quick questions. These questions and answers between the two experienced men were brief but significant:\n\n\"Yes, quiet as a lamb. Just be kind and sympathetic. You looked up the Notes? Well, that can't be helped now, though I had rather you knew nothing. My mistake, of course.\"\n\n\"The content of his mind is accessible to me\u2014telepathically\u2014in any case.\"\n\n\"But at one remove more distant, because unexpressed.\"\n\nFillery laughed. \"Quite right. I admit it's a pity. But tell me more about him\u2014anything I ought to know\u2014at once.\"\n\n\"Quiet as a lamb, I told you,\" repeated the other, \"and most of the way over too. But puzzled\u2014my God, Edward, his criticisms would make a book.\"\n\n\"Normal? Intelligent criticisms?\"\n\n\"Intelligent above ordinary. Normal\u2014no.\"\n\n\"Hysteria?\"\n\n\"Not a sign.\"\n\n\"Health?\"\n\n\"Perfect, magnificent, as you see. He's less tired now than when we started three days ago, whereas I'm fagged out, though in climbing condition.\"\n\n\"Origin of delusions\u2014any indication?\"\n\nDevonham looked up quickly. His eyes flashed a peculiarly searching glance\u2014something watchful in it perhaps. \"No delusion at all of any sort. As for origin of his ideas\u2014the parents probably, but stimulated and allowed unchecked growth by Mason. Affected by Nature beyond anything we know.\"\n\n\"By Nature. Ah!\" He checked himself. \"And what peculiarities?\" he asked.\n\n\"His terror of water, for instance. Crossing the Channel he was like a frightened child. He hid from it, kept his hands over his eyes even, so as not to see it.\"\n\n\"Give any reason?\"\n\n\"All he said was 'It is unknown, an enemy, and can destroy me, I cannot understand its secret ways. Fire and wind are not in it. I cannot work with it.' No, it was not fear of drowning that he meant. He found comfort, too, in the repetition of your name.\"\n\n\"Appetite, pulse, temperature?\" asked Fillery, after a brief pause.\n\n\"First two very strong; temperature always slightly above normal.\"\n\n\"Other peculiarities?\"\n\n\"He became rather excited before a lighted match once\u2014tried to kneel, almost, but I stopped it.\"\n\n\"Fire?\"\n\n\"That's it. Instinct of worship presumably.\"\n\nThe barrow was laden, the porter was asking where the car was. They prepared to move back to the companion, whom Fillery had never failed to observe carefully over his shoulder during this rapid conversation. \"N. H.\" had not moved the whole time: he stood quietly, looking about him, a curious figure, aloof somehow from his surroundings, so tall and straight and unconcerned he seemed, yet so poised, alert, virile, vigorous. It was not his clothes that made him appear unusual, nor was it his eyes and hair alone, though all three contributed their share. Yet he seemed dressed up, his clothes irksome to him. He was uncommon, an attractive figure, and many a pair of eyes, female eyes especially, Fillery noticed, turned to examine him with undeniable curiosity.\n\n\"And women?\" the doctor asked quickly in a lowered voice, as they followed the porter's barrow towards LeVallon, who already smiled at their approach\u2014the most engaging, trustful, welcoming smile that Fillery had ever seen upon a human countenance.\n\nHe lowered his head to catch the reply. But Devonham only laughed and shrugged his shoulders. \"All attracted,\" he mumbled in a half whisper, \"and eager to help him.\"\n\n\"And he\u2014?\"\n\n\"Gentle, astonished, but indifferent, oh, supremely indifferent.\"\n\nLeVallon came forward to meet them, and Fillery took his hand and led him to the car. The luggage was bundled in, some behind and some on the roof. Fillery and LeVallon sat side by side. The car started.\n\n\"We shall get home in half an hour,\" the doctor mentioned, turning to his companion. \"We'll have a good dinner and then get to bed. You are hungry, I know.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" was the reply, \"thank you, dear Fillery. I want sleep most. Will there be trees and air near me? And stars to see?\"\n\n\"Your windows open on to a garden with big trees, there will be plenty of fresh air, and you will hear the sparrows chattering at dawn. But London, of course, is not the country. Oh, we'll make you comfortable, never fear.\"\n\n\"Dear Fillery, I thank you,\" said LeVallon quietly, and without more ado lay back among the soft cushions and closed his eyes. Hardly a word was said the whole way out to the north-west suburb, and when they arrived the \"patient\" was too overcome with sleep to wish to eat. He went straight to his room, found a hot bath into which he tumbled first, and then leaped into his bed and was sound asleep almost before the door was closed. Upon a table beside the bed Dr. Fillery, with his own hands, arranged bread, butter, eggs and a jug of milk in case of need. Nurse Robbins, an experienced, tactful young woman, he put in special charge. He thought of everything, divining his friend's possible needs instinctively, noticing with his keen practised eye several details for himself at the same time. The splendid physical condition, frame-work, muscular development he noted\u2014no freakish bulky masses produced by gymnastic exercises, but the muscles laid on flowingly, smooth and firm and ample, without a trace of fat, and the whole in the most admirable proportion possible. The leanness was deceptive; the body was of immense power. The quick, certain, unerring movements he noticed too; perfect, swift co-ordination between brain and physical response, no misdirection, no miscalculation, the reactions extremely rapid. He thought with a smile of something between deer and tiger. The poise and balance and accuracy conveyed intense joy of living. Yet above and beyond these was something else he could not name, something that stirred in him wonder, love, a touch of awe, and a haunting suggestion of familiarity.\n\nHe saw him into bed, he saw him actually asleep. The strong blue eyes looked up into his own with their intense and innocent gaze for a moment; he held the firm, dry muscular hand; ten seconds later the eyes were closed in sleep, the grip of the powerful but slender fingers relaxed.\n\n\"Good night, my friend, and sleep deeply. To-morrow we'll see to everything you need. Be happy here and comfortable with us, for you are welcome and we love you.\" His voice trembled slightly.\n\n\"Good night, dear Fill-er-y,\" the musical tones replied, and he was off.\n\nThe windows were wide open. \"N. H.\" had thrown aside the pyjamas and blankets. On this cool, damp night of late autumn he covered his big, warm, lithe body with a single sheet only.\n\nFillery went out quietly, an expression of keen approval and enjoyment on his face\u2014not a smile exactly, but that look of deep content, betraying a fine inner excitement of happiness, which is the mother of all smiles. As he softly opened the door the draught blew through from the open windows, stirring the white curtains by the bed. It came from the big damp garden where the trees stood, already nearly leafless, and where no flowers were. And yet a scent of flowers came faintly with it. He caught an echo of faint sound like music. There was the invigorating hint of forests too. It seemed a living wind that blew into the house.\n\nDr. Fillery paused a moment, sniffed with surprise and sharp enjoyment, listened intently, then switched the light off and went out, closing the door behind him. There was a flash of wonder in his eyes, and a thrill of some remote inexplicable happiness ran through his nerves. An instant of complete comprehension had been his, as if another consciousness had, for that swift instant, identified itself with his own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 318", + "text": "Edward Fillery was glad that Paul Devonham, good friend and skillful colleague, was his assistant; for Devonham, competent as himself in knowledge and experience, found explanations for all things, and had in his natural temperament a quality of sane judgment which corrected extravagances.\n\nDevonham was agnostic, because reason ruled his life. Devoid of imagination, he had no temptations. Speculative, within limits, he might be, but he belonged not to the unstable. Not that he thought he knew everything, but that he refused to base action on what he regarded as unknown. A clue into the unknown he would follow up as keenly, carefully, as Fillery himself, but he went step by step, with caution, declining to move further until the last step was of hardened concrete. To the powers of the subconscious self he set drastic limits, admitting their existence of course, but attaching small value to their use or development. His own deeper being had never stirred or wakened. Of this under-sea, this vast background in himself, he remained placidly uninformed. A comprehensive view of a problem\u2014the flash of vision he never knew\u2014thus was perhaps denied him, but so far as he went he was very safe and sure. And his chief was the first to appreciate his value. He appreciated it particularly now, as the two men sat smoking after their late dinner, discussing details of the new inmate of the Home.\n\nFillery, aware of the strong pull upon his own mixed blood, aware of a half-wild instinctive sympathy towards \"N. H.,\" almost of a natural desire now, having seen him, to believe him \"unique\" in several ways, and, therefore, conscious of a readiness to accept more than any evidence yet justified\u2014feeling these symptoms clearly, and remembering vividly his experiences in the railway station, he was glad, for truth's sake, that Devonham was there to clip extravagance before it injured judgment. A weak man, aware of his own frailties, excels a stronger one who thinks he has none at all. The two colleagues were a powerful combination.\n\n\"In your view, it's merely a case of a secondary\u2014anyhow of a divided\u2014personality?\" he asked, as soon as the other had recovered a little from his journey, and was digesting his meal comfortably over a pipe. \"You have seen more of him than I have. Of insanity, at any rate, there is no sign at all, I take it? His relations with his environment are sound?\"\n\n\"None whatever.\" Devonham answered both questions at once. \"Exactly.\"\n\nHe took off his pince-nez, cleaned them with his handkerchief, and then replaced them carefully. This gave him time to reflect, as though he was not quite sure where to begin his story.\n\n\"There are certainly indications,\" he went on slowly, \"of a divided personality, though of an unusual kind. The margin between the two\u2014between the normal and the secondary self\u2014is so very slight. It is not clearly defined, I mean. They sometimes merge and interpenetrate. The frontier is almost indistinguishable.\"\n\nFillery raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"You feel uncertain which is the main self, and which the split-off secondary personality?\" he inquired, with surprise.\n\nDevonham nodded. \"I'm extremely puzzled,\" he admitted. \"LeVallon's most marked self, the best defined, the richest, the most fully developed, seems to me what we should call his Secondary Self\u2014this 'Nature-being' that worships wind and fire, is terrified by a large body of water, is ignorant of human ways, probably also quite un-moral, yet alive with a kind of instinctive wisdom we credit usually to the animal kingdom\u2014though far beyond anything animals can claim\u2014\"\n\n\"Briefly, what we mean by the term 'N. H.,'\" suggested Fillery, not anxious for too many details at the moment.\n\n\"Exactly. And I propose we always refer to that aspect of him as 'N. H.,' the other, the normal ordinary man, being LeVallon, his right name.\" He smiled faintly.\n\n\"Agreed,\" replied his chief. \"We shall always know then exactly which one we're talking of at a given moment. Now,\" he went on, \"to come to the chief point, and before you give me details of what happened abroad, let me hear your own main conclusion. What is LeVallon? What is 'N. H.'?\"\n\nDevonham hesitated for some time. It was evident his respect for his chief made him cautious. There was an eternal battle between these two, keen though always good-natured, even humorous, the victory not invariably perhaps with the assistant. Later evidence had often proved Fillery's swifter imagination correct after all, or, alternately, shown him to be wrong. They kept an accurate score of the points won and lost by either.\n\n\"You can always revise your conclusions later,\" Fillery reminded him slyly. \"Call it a preliminary conclusion for the moment. You've not had time yet for a careful study, I know.\"\n\nBut Devonham this time did not smile at the rally, and his chief noticed it with secret approval. Here was something new, big, serious, it seemed. Devonham, apparently, was already too interested to care who scored or did not score. His Notes of 1914 indeed betrayed his genuine zeal sufficiently.\n\n\"LeVallon,\" he said at length\u2014\"to begin with him! I think LeVallon\u2014without any flavour of 'N. H.'\u2014is a fine specimen of a normal human being. His physique is magnificent, as you have seen, his health and strength exceptional. The brain, so far as I have been able to judge, functions quite normally. The intelligence, also normal, is much above the average in quickness, receptivity of ideas, and judgment based on these. The emotional development, however, puzzles me; the emotions are not entirely normal. But\"\u2014he paused again, a grave expression on his face\u2014\"to answer your question as well as my limited observation of him, of LeVallon, allows\u2014I repeat that I consider him a normal young man, though with peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of his own, as with most other normal young fellows who are individuals, that is,\" he added quickly, \"and not turned out in bundles cut to measure.\"\n\n\"So much for LeVallon. Now what about 'N. H.'?\"\n\nHe repeated the question, fixing the assistant with his steady gaze. He had noticed the confusion in the reply.\n\n\"My dear Edward\u2014\" began Devonham, after a considerable pause. Then he stuck fast, sighed, settled his glasses carefully upon his aquiline, sharp nose, and relapsed into silence. His forehead became wrinkled, his mouth much pursed.\n\n\"Out with it, Paul! This isn't a Court of Law. I shan't behead you if you're wrong.\" Yet Fillery, too, spoke gravely.\n\nThe other kept his eyes down; his face still wore a puzzled look. Fillery detected a new expression on the keen, thoughtful features, and he was pleased to see it.\n\n\"To give you the truth,\" resumed his assistant, \"and all question of who is right or who is wrong aside, I tell you frankly\u2014I am not sure. I confess myself up against it. It\u2014er\u2014gives me the creeps a little\u2014\" He laughed awkwardly. That swift watchful look, as of a man who plays a part, flashed and vanished.\n\n\"Your feeling, anyhow?\" insisted his friend. \"Your general feeling?\"\n\n\"A general judgment based on general feeling,\" said the other in a quiet tone, \"has little value. It is based, necessarily, as you know, upon intuition, which I temperamentally dislike. It has no facts to go upon. I distrust generalizations.\" He took a deep breath, inhaled a lot of smoke, exhaled it with relief, and made an effort. It went against the grain in him to be caught without an explanation.\n\n\"'N. H.' in my opinion, and so far as my limited observation of him\u2014\"\n\nFillery allowed himself a laugh of amused impatience. \"Leave out the personal extras for once, and burn your bridges. Tell me finally what you think about 'N. H.' We're not scoring points now.\"\n\nThus faced with an alternative, Devonham found his sense of humour again and forgot himself. It cost him an effort, but he obeyed the bigger and less personal mind.\n\n\"I really don't know exactly what he is,\" he confessed again. \"He puzzles me completely. It may be\"\u2014he shrugged his shoulders, compelled by his temperament to hedge\u2014\"that he represents, as I first thought, the content of his parents' minds, the subsequent addition of Mason's mind included.\"\n\n\"That's possible, usual and comprehensible enough,\" put in the doctor, watching him with amused concentration, but with an inner excitement scarcely concealed.\n\n\"Or\" resumed Devonham, \"it may be that through these\u2014\"\n\n\"Through his mental inheritance from his parents and from Mason, yes\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014he taps the most primitive stores and layers of racial memory we know. The world-memory, if I dare put it so, full proof being lacking, is open to him\u2014\"\n\n\"Through his subconscious powers, of course?\"\n\n\"That is your usual theory, isn't it? We have there, at any rate, a working hypothesis, with a great mass of evidence\u2014generally speaking\u2014behind it.\"\n\n\"Don't be cynical, Paul. Is this 'N. H.' merely a Secondary Personality, or is it the real central self? That's the whole point.\"\n\n\"You jump ahead, as usual,\" replied Devonham, really smiling for the first time, though his face instantly grew serious again. \"Edward,\" he went on, \"I do not know, I cannot say, I dare not\u2014dare not guess. 'N. H.' is something entirely new to me, and I admit it.\" He seemed to find his stride, to forget himself. \"I feel far from cynical. 'N. H.,' in my opinion, is exceptional. My notes suggested it long ago. He has, for instance\u2014at least, so it seems to me\u2014peculiar powers.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"Of suggestion, let us put it.\"\n\n\"Of suggestion, yes. Get on with it, there's a good fellow. I felt myself an extraordinary vitality about him. I noticed it at once at Charing Cross.\"\n\n\"I saw you did.\" Devonham looked hard at him. \"You were humming to yourself, you know.\"\n\n\"I didn't know,\" was the surprised reply, \"but I can well believe it. I felt a curious pleasure and exhilaration.\"\n\nDevonham, shrugging his shoulders slightly, resumed: \"During the 'LeVallon' periods he is ordinary, though unusually observant, critical and intelligent; during the 'N. H.' periods he becomes\u2014er\u2014super-normal. If you felt this\u2014felt anything in the station, it was because something in you\u2014called up the 'N. H.' aspect.\"\n\n\"It's quick of you to guess that,\" said Fillery, with quick appreciation. \"You noticed a change in me, well\u2014but the other\u2014? He divined my 'foreign' blood, you think?\"\n\n\"It is enough that you responded and felt kinship. Put it that way. 'N. H.' seems to me\"\u2014he took a deeper breath and gave a sort of gasp\u2014\"in some ways\u2014a unique\u2014being\u2014as I said before.\"\n\n\"Tell me, if you can,\" said Fillery, lighting his own pipe and settling back into his chair, \"tell me a little about your first meeting with him in the Jura Mountains, what happened and so forth. I remember, of course, your Notes. After your telegram, I read 'em carefully.\" He glanced round at his companion. \"They were very honest, Paul, I thought. Eh?\" He was unable to refuse himself the pleasure of the little dig. \"Honest you always are,\" he added. \"We couldn't work together otherwise, could we?\"\n\nDevonham, deep in his own thoughts, did not accept the challenge. He turned in his chair, puffing at his pipe.\n\n\"I can give you briefly what happened and how things went,\" he said. \"The place, then, first: an ordinary peasant ch\u00e2let in a remote Jura valley, difficult of access, situated among what they call the upper pastures. I reached it by diligence and mule late in the afternoon. A peasant in a lower valley directed me, adding that 'le monsieur anglais' was dead and buried two days before\u2014\"\n\n\"Mason, that is?\"\n\nThe other nodded. \"And adding that 'le fou'\u2014\"\n\n\"LeVallon, of course?\"\n\n\"\u2014would eat me alive at sight. He spoke with respect, however, even awe. He hoped I had come to take him away. The countryside was afraid of him.\n\n\"The valley struck me as intolerably lonely, but of unusual beauty. Big forests, great rocks, and tumbling streams among cliffs and pastures made it exceptional. The ch\u00e2let was simple, clean and comfortable. It was really an ideal spot for a thinker or a student. The first thing I noticed was a fire burning on a pile of rock in front of the building. The sun was setting, and its last rays lit the entire little glen\u2014a mere gully between precipices and forest slopes\u2014but especially lit up the pile of rocks where the fire burned, so that I saw the smoke, blue, red and yellow, and the figure kneeling before it. This figure was a man, half naked, and of magnificent proportions. When I shouted\u2014\"\n\n\"You would shout, of course.\" Yet he did not say it critically.\n\n\"\u2014the figure rose and turned and came to meet me. It was LeVallon.\"\n\nDevonham paused a moment. Fillery's eyes were fixed upon him.\n\n\"I admit,\" Devonham went on, conscious of the other's inquiring and intent expression, \"I was surprised a bit.\" He smiled his faint, unwilling smile. \"The figure made me start. I was aware of an emotion I am not subject to\u2014what I called just now the creeps. I thought, at last, I had really seen a\u2014a vision. He looked so huge, so wonderful, so radiant. It was, of course, the effect of coloured smoke and magnifying sunset, added to his semi-nakedness. To the waist he was stripped. But, at first, his size, his splendour, a kind of radiance borrowed from the sunlight and the fire, seemed to enlarge him beyond human. He seemed to dominate, even to fill the little valley.\n\n\"I stood still, uncertain of my feelings. There was, I think, a trace of fear in me. I waited for him to come up to me. He did so. He stretched out a hand. I took it. And what do you think he said?\"\n\nFillery, the inner excitement and delight increasing in him as he listened, stared in silence. There was no lightness in him now.\n\n\"'Are you Fillery?' That's what he said, and the first words he uttered. 'Are you Fillery?' But spoken in a way I find difficult to reproduce. He made the name sound like a rush of wind. 'F,' of course, involves a draught of breath between the teeth, I know. But he made the name sound exactly like a gush of wind through branches\u2014that's the nearest I can get to it.\"\n\n\"Well\u2014and then?\"\n\n\"Don't be impatient, Edward. I try to be accurate. But really\u2014what happened next is a bit beyond any experience that we\u2014I\u2014have yet come across. And, as to what I felt\u2014well, I was tired, hungry, thirsty. I wanted, normally, rest and food and drink. Yet all these were utterly forgotten. For a moment or two\u2014I admit it\u2014I felt as if I had come face to face with something not of this earth quite.\" He grinned. \"A touch of gooseflesh came to me for the first time in my life. The fellow's size and radiance in the sunlight, the fact that he stood there worshipping fire\u2014always, to me, the most wonderful of natural phenomena\u2014his grandeur and nakedness\u2014the way he pronounced your name even\u2014all this\u2014er\u2014upset my judgment for the moment.\" He paused again. He hesitated. \"A visual hallucination, due to fatigue, can be, of course, very detailed sometimes,\" he added, a note of challenge in his tone.\n\nFillery watched his friend narrowly, as he stumbled among the details of what he evidently found a difficult, almost an impossible description.\n\n\"Natural enough,\" he put in. \"You'd hardly be human yourself if you felt nothing at such a sight.\"\n\n\"The loneliness, too, increased the effect,\" went on the other, \"for there was no one nearer than the peasants who had directed me a thousand feet below, nor was there another building of any sort in sight. Anyhow, it seemed, I managed my strange emotions all right, for the young man took to me at once. He left the fire, if reluctantly, singing to himself a sort of low chanting melody, with perhaps five or six notes at most in it, and far from unmusical\u2014\"\n\n\"He explained the fire? Was he actually worshipping, I mean?\"\n\n\"It was certainly worship, judging by the expression of his face and his gestures of reverence and happiness. But I asked no questions. I thought it best just to accept, or appear to accept, the whole thing as natural. He said something about the Equinox, but I did not catch it properly and did not ask. This had evidently been taught him. It was, however, the 22nd of September, oddly enough, though the gales had not yet come.\"\n\n\"So you got into the ch\u00e2let next?\" asked the other, noticing the gaps, the incoherence.\n\n\"He put his coat on, sat down with me to a meal of bread and milk and cheese\u2014meat there seemed none in the building anywhere. This meal was, if you understand me, obeying a mere habit automatically. He did just what it had been his habit to do with Mason all these years. He got the stuff himself\u2014quickly, effectively, no fumbling anywhere\u2014and, from that moment, hardly spoke again until we left two days later. I mean that literally. All he said, when I tried to make him talk, was, 'You are not Fillery,' or 'Take me to Fillery. I need him.'\n\n\"I almost felt that I was living with some marvellously trained animal, of extraordinary intelligence, gentle, docile, friendly, but unhappy because it had lost its accustomed master. But on the other hand\u2014I admit it\u2014I was conscious of a certain power in his personality beyond me to explain. That, really, is the best description I can give you.\"\n\n\"You mentioned the name of Mason?\" asked Fillery, avoiding a dozen more obvious and natural questions.\n\n\"Several times. But his only reply was a smile, while he repeated the name himself, adding your own after it: 'Mason Fillery, Mason Fillery,' he would say, smiling with quiet happiness. \"I like Fillery!'\"\n\n\"The nights?\"\n\n\"Briefly\u2014I was glad to see the dawn. We had separate rooms, my own being the one probably where Mason had died a few days before. But it was not that I minded in the least. It was the feeling\u2014the knowledge in fact\u2014that my companion was up and about all night in the building or out of doors. I heard him moving, singing quietly to himself, the wooden veranda creaked beneath his tread. He was active all through the darkness and cannot have slept at all. When I came down soon after dawn he was running over the slopes a mile away, running towards the ch\u00e2let, too, with the speed and lightness of a deer. He had been to some height, I think, to see the sun rise and probably to worship it\u2014\"\n\n\"And your journey? You got him away easily?\"\n\n\"He was only too ready to leave, for it meant coming to you. I arranged with the peasants below to have the ch\u00e2let closed up, took my charge to Neuch\u00e2tel, and thence to Berne, where I bought him an outfit, and arrived in due course, as you know, at Charing Cross.\"\n\n\"His first sight of cities, people, trains, steamers and the rest, I take it. Any reactions?\"\n\n\"The troubles I anticipated did not materialize. He came like a lamb, the most helpless and pathetic lamb I ever saw. He stared but asked no questions. I think he was half dazed, even stupefied with it all.\"\n\n\"Stupefied?\"\n\n\"An odd word to use, I know. I should have said perhaps 'automatic' rather. He was so open to my suggestions, doing what my mind expected him to do, but nothing more\u2014ah! with one exception.\"\n\nFillery meant to hear an account of that exception, though the other would willingly have foregone its telling evidently. It was related, Fillery felt sure, to the unusual powers Devonham had mentioned.\n\n\"Oh, you shall hear it,\" said the latter quickly, \"for what it's worth. There's no need to exaggerate, of course.\" He told it rapidly, accurately, no doubt, because his mind was honest, yet without comment or expression in his voice and face. He supplied no atmosphere.\n\n\"I had got him like a lamb, as I told you, to Paris, and it was during the Customs examination the\u2014er\u2014little thing occurred. The man, searching through his trunk, pulled out a packet of flat papers and opened it. He looked them over with puzzled interest, turning them upside down to examine them from every possible angle. Then he asked a trifle unpleasantly what they were. I hadn't the smallest idea myself, I had never seen them before; they were very carefully wrapped up. LeVallon, whose sudden excitement increased the official's interest, told him that they were star-and-weather maps. It doubtless was the truth; he had made them with Mason; but they were queer-looking papers to have at such a time, hidden away, too, at the bottom of the trunk; and LeVallon's manner and expression did not help to disarm the man's evident suspicion. He asked a number of pointed questions in a very disagreeable way\u2014who made them, for what purpose, how they were used, and whether they were connected with aviation. I translated, of course. I explained their innocence\u2014\"\n\n\"LeVallon's excitement?\" asked Fillery. \"What form did it take? Rudeness, anger, violence of any sort?\" He was aware his friend would have liked to shirk these details.\n\n\"Nothing of the kind.\" He hesitated briefly, then went on. \"He behaved, rather, as though\u2014well, as a devout Catholic might have behaved if his crucifix or some holy relic were being mauled. The maps were sacred. Symbols possibly. Heaven knows what! He tried to take them back. The official, as a natural result, became still more suspicious and, of course, offensive too. My explanations and expostulations were quite useless, for he didn't even listen to them.\"\n\nDevonham was now approaching the part of the story he least wished to describe. He played for time. He gave details of the ensuing altercation.\n\n\"What happened in the end?\" Fillery at length interrupted. \"What did LeVallon do? There were no arrests, I take it?\" he added with a smile.\n\nPaul coughed and fidgeted. He told the literal truth, however.\n\n\"LeVallon, after listening for a long time to the conversation he could not understand, suddenly took his fingers off the papers. The man's dirty hand still held them tightly on the grimy counter. LeVallon began\u2014or\u2014he suddenly began to breathe\u2014well\u2014heavily rather.\"\n\n\"Rhythmically?\"\n\n\"Heavily,\" insisted the other. \"In a curious way, anyhow,\" he added, determined to keep strictly to the truth, \"not unlike Heathcote when he put himself automatically into trance and then told us what was going on at the other end of England. You remember the case.\" He paused a moment again, as if to recall exactly what had occurred. \"It's not easy to describe, Edward,\" he continued, looking up. \"You remember that huge draughty hall where they examine luggage at the Lyons Station. I can't explain it. But that breathing somehow caught the draughts, used them possibly, in any case increased them. A wind came through the great hall. I can't explain it,\" he repeated, \"I can only tell you what happened. That wind most certainly came pouring steadily through, for I felt it myself, and saw it blow upon the fluttering papers. The heat in the salle at the same moment seemed to grow intense. Not an oppressive heat, though. Radiant heat, rather. It felt, I mean, like a fierce sunlight. I looked up, almost expecting to see a great light from which it came. It was then\u2014at this very moment\u2014the Frenchman turned as if someone touched him.\"\n\n\"You felt anything, Paul?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" admitted the other slowly.\n\nFillery waited.\n\n\"A\u2014what I must call\u2014a thrill.\" His voice was lower now.\n\n\"Of\u2014?\" his Chief persisted.\n\nDevonham waited a full ten seconds before reply. He again shrugged his shoulders a little. Apparently he sought his words with honest care that included also intense reluctance and disapproval:\n\n\"Loveliness, romance, enchantment; but, above all, I think\u2014power.\" He ground out the confession slowly. \"By power I mean a sort of confidence and happiness.\"\n\n\"Increase of vitality, call it. Intensification of your consciousness.\"\n\n\"Possibly. A bigger perspective suddenly, a bigger scale of life; something\u2014er\u2014a bit wild, but certainly\u2014er\u2014uncommonly stimulating. The best word, I think, is liberty, perhaps. An immense and careless sense of liberty.\" And Fillery, knowing the value of superlatives in Devonham's cautious mind, felt satisfied. He asked quietly what the official did next.\n\n\"Stood stock still at first. Then his face changed; he smiled; he looked up understandingly, sympathetically, at LeVallon. He spoke: 'My father, too,' he said with admiration, 'had a big telescope. Monsieur is an astronomer.'\n\n\"'One of the greatest,' I added quickly; 'these charts are of infinite value to France.' No sense of comedy touched me anywhere, the ludicrous was absent. The man bowed, as carefully, respect in every gesture, he replaced the maps, marked the trunk with his piece of chalk, and let us go, helping in every way he could.\"\n\nDevonham drew a long breath, glad that he had relieved himself of his unwelcome duty. He had told the literal truth.\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" Fillery said, half to himself perhaps. \"A breath of bigger consciousness, his imagination touched, the subconscious wakened, and intelligence the natural result.\" He turned to his colleague. \"Interesting, Paul, very,\" he added in a louder tone, \"and not easy to explain, I grant. The official we do not know, but you, at any rate, are not a good subject for hypnotic suggestion!\"\n\nFor some time Devonham said nothing. Presently he spoke:\n\n\"Fillery, I tell you\u2014really I love the fellow. He's the most lovable thing in human shape I ever saw. He gets into your heart so strangely. We must heal him.\"\n\nThe other sighed, quickly smothering it, yet not before Devonham had noticed it. They did not look at one another for some seconds, and there was a certain tenseness, a sense of deep emotion in the air that each, possibly, sought to hide from the other.\n\nDevonham was the first to break the silence that had fallen between them.\n\n\"To be quite frank\u2014it's LeVallon that appeals most to me,\" he said, as if to himself, \"whereas you, Edward, I believe, are more\u2014more interested in the other aspect of him. It's 'N. H.' that interests you.\"\n\nNo challenge was intended, yet the glove was flung. Fillery said nothing for a minute or two. Then he looked up, and their eyes met across the smoke-laden atmosphere. It was close on midnight. The world lay very still and hushed about the house.\n\n\"It is,\" he said quietly, \"a pathetic and inspiring case. He is deserving of\"\u2014he chose his words slowly and with care\u2014\"our very best,\" he concluded shortly.\n\n\"And now,\" he added quickly, \"you're tired out, and I ought to have let you have a night's sleep before taxing you like this.\" He poured out two glasses of whisky. \"Let us drink anyhow to success and healing of body, mind\u2014and soul.\"\n\n\"Body, mind and\u2014nerves,\" said Devonham slowly, as he drank the toast.\n\n\"The reason I had none of the trouble I anticipated,\" remarked Devonham, as he sipped the reviving liquor, \"is simple enough.\"\n\n\"There are two periods, of course. I guessed that.\"\n\n\"Exactly. There is the LeVallon period, when he is quiescent, normal, very charming into the bargain, more like a good child or trained animal or happy peasant, if you like it better, than a grown man. And there is the 'N. H.' period, when he is\u2014otherwise.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"I arrived just at the transition moment, so to speak. It was during the change I reached the ch\u00e2let.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\" Fillery looked up, smiled and nodded.\n\n\"That's about the truth,\" repeated Devonham, putting his glass down. He thought for a moment, then added slowly, \"I think that fire of his, the worship, singing\u2014at the autumnal equinox\u2014marked the change. 'N. H,' at once after that, slipped back into the unconscious state. LeVallon emerged. It was with LeVallon only or chiefly, I had to deal. He became so very quiet, dazed a little, half there, as we call it, and almost entirely silent. He retained little, if any, memory of the 'N. H.' period, although it lies, I think, just beneath the surface only. The LeVallon personality, you see, is not very positive, is it? It seems a quiet, negative state, a condition almost of rest, in fact.\"\n\nFillery listening attentively, made no rejoinder.\n\n\"We may expect,\" continued Devonham, \"these alternating states, I think. The frontier between them is, as I said, a narrow one. Indeed, often they merge or interpenetrate. In my judgment, the main, important part of his consciousness, that parent Self, is LeVallon\u2014not 'N. H.'\" The voice was slightly strident.\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\nIt so happened that, in the act of exchanging these last words, they both looked up toward the ceiling, where a moth buzzed round and round, banging itself occasionally against the electric light. Whether it was this that drew their sight upwards simultaneously, or whether it was that some other sound in the stillness of the night had caught their strained attention, is uncertain. The same thought, at any rate, was in both minds at that instant, the same freight of meaning trailing behind it invisibly across the air. Their hearts burned within them; the two faces upward turned, the lips a little parted as when listening is intense, the heads thrown back. For in the room above that ceiling, asleep at this moment, lay the subject of their long discussion; only a few inches of lath and plaster separated them from the strange being who, dropping out of space, as it were, had come to make his home with them. A being, lonely utterly in the world, unique in kind perhaps, his nature as yet undecipherable, lay trustingly unconscious in that upper chamber. The two men felt the gravity, the responsibility of their charge. The same thought had vividly touched them both at the same instant.\n\nA few minutes later they were still standing, facing one another. They were of a height, but compared to Fillery's big frame and rugged head, his friend's appearance was almost slight. Devonham, for all his qualifications, looked painfully like a shopwalker. They exchanged this steady gaze for a few seconds without speaking. Then the older man said quietly:\n\n\"Paul, I understand, and I respect your reticence. I think I can agree with it.\"\n\nHe placed a hand upon the other's shoulder, smiling gently, even tenderly.\n\n\"You have told me much, but you have not told me all! The chief part\u2014you have intentionally omitted.\"\n\n\"For the present, at any rate,\" was the reply, given without flinching.\n\n\"Your reasons are sound, your judgment perhaps right. I ask no questions. What happened, what you saw, at the ch\u00e2let; the 'peculiar powers' you mentioned; all, in fact, that you think it wise to keep to yourself for the moment, I leave there willingly.\"\n\nHe spoke gravely, sincere emotion in the eyes and tone. It was in a lower voice he added:\n\n\"The responsibility, of course, is yours.\"\n\nDevonham returned the steady gaze, pondering his reply a moment.\n\n\"I can\u2014and do accept it,\" he answered. \"You have read my thoughts correctly as usual, Edward. I think you know quite enough already\u2014what with my Notes and Mason's letter\u2014even too much. Besides, why complicate it with an account of what were doubtless mere mental pictures\u2014hallucinations\u2014on my part? This is a matter,\" he went on slowly, \"a case, we dare not trifle with; there may be strange and terrible afflictions in it later; we must remain unbiased.\" The anxiety deepened on his face.\n\n\"True, true,\" murmured the other. \"God bless the boy! May his own gods bless him!\"\n\n\"In other words, it will need your clearest, soundest judgment, your finest skill, your very best, as you said yourself just now.\" He used a firmer, yet also a softer tone suddenly: \"Edward, you know your own mind, its contents, its suppressions, its origin; your refusal of the love of women, your deep powerful dreams that you have suppressed and put away. Promise me\"\u2014the voice and manner were very earnest\u2014\"that you will not communicate these to him in any way, and that you will keep your judgment absolutely unbiased and untainted.\" He looked at his old friend and paused. \"Only your purest judgment of what is to come can help. You promise.\"\n\nFillery sighed a scarcely noticeable sigh. \"I promise you, Paul. You are wise\u2014and you are right,\" he said. \"On the other hand, let me say one thing to you in my turn. This theory of heredity and of mental telepathic transference\u2014the idea that all his mind's content is derived from his parents and from Mason\u2014we cannot, remember, force this transference and interchange too far. I ask only this: be fair and open yourself with all that follows.\"\n\nDevonham raised his voice: \"Nor can we, apparently, set limits to it, Edward. But\u2014to be fair and open-minded\u2014I give my promise too.\"\n\nThus, in the little downstairs room of a Private Home for Incurable Mental Cases, not a Lunatic Asylum, though sometimes perhaps next door to it, these two men, deeply intrigued by a new \"Case\" that passed their understanding, as it exceeded their knowledge, practice and experience, swore to each other to observe carefully, to report faithfully, and to experiment, if experiment proved necessary, with honest and affectionate uprightness.\n\nTheir views were, obviously, not the same. Devonham, temperamentally opposed to radical innovations, believed it was a case of divided personality\u2014hundreds of such cases had passed through their hands. Forced to accept extended telepathy\u2014that all minds can on occasion share one another's content, and that even a racial and a world-memory can be tapped\u2014he feared that his Chief might influence LeVallon, and twist, thus, the phenomena to a special end. He knew Edward Fillery's story. He feared, for the sake of truth, the mental transference. He had, perhaps, other fears as well.\n\nFillery, on the other hand, believing as much, and knowing more than his colleague, saw in \"N. H.\" a unique possibility. He was thrilled and startled with a half-impossible hope. He felt as if someone ran beside his life, bearing impossible glad tidings, an unexpected, half-incredible figure, the tidings marvellously bright. He hoped, he already wished to think, that \"N. H.\" might shadow forth a promise of some magical advance for the ultimate benefit of the Race...\n\nThe thinkers were crying on the housetops that progress was a myth, that each wave of civilization at its height reached the same average level without ever passing further. The menace to the present civilization, already crumbling, was in full swing everywhere; knowledge, culture, learning threatened in due course with the chaos of destruction that has so far been the invariable rule. The one hope of saving the world, cried religion, lay in substituting spiritual for material values\u2014a Utopian dream at best. The one chance, said science, on the other hand, was that civilization to-day is continuous and not isolated.\n\nThe best hope, believed Fillery, the only hope, lay in raising the individual by the drawing up into full consciousness of the limitless powers now hidden and inactive in his deeper self\u2014the so-called subliminal faculties. With these greater powers must come also greater moral development.\n\nAlready, with his uncanny insight, derived from knowledge of himself, he had piercingly divined in \"N. H.\" a being, whatever he might be, whose nature acted automatically and directly upon the subconscious self in everybody.\n\nThat bright messenger, running past his life, had looked, as with fire and tempest, straight into his eyes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 319", + "text": "It was long after one o'clock when the two men said good-night, and went to their rooms. Devonham was soon in bed, though not soon asleep. Exhausted physically though he was, his mind burned actively. His recent memories were vivid. All he had purposely held back from Fillery returned with power...\n\nThe uncertainty whether he had experienced hallucination, or had actually, as by telepathic transfer from LeVallon, touched another state of consciousness, kept sleep far away...\n\nHis brain was far too charged for easy slumber. He feared for his dear, faithful friend, his colleague, the skilful, experienced, yet sorely tempted mind\u2014tempted by Nature and by natural weaknesses of birth and origin\u2014who now shared with him the care and healing of a Case that troubled his being too deeply for slumber to come quickly.\n\nYet he had done well to keep these memories from Edward Fillery. If Fillery once knew what he knew, his judgment and his scientific diagnosis must be drawn hopelessly away from what he considered the best treatment: the suppression of \"N. H.\" and the making permanent of \"LeVallon.\"\n\nHe fell asleep eventually, towards dawn, dreaming impossible, radiant dreams of a world he might have hoped for, yet could not, within the limits of his little cautious, accurate mind, believe in. Dreams that inspire, yet sadden, haunted his release from normal consciousness. Someone had walked upon his life, leaving a growth of everlasting flowers in their magical tread, though his mind\u2014his stolid, cautious mind\u2014had no courage for the plucking...\n\nAnd while he slept, as the hours slipped from west to east, his chief and colleague, lying also sleepless, rose suddenly before the late autumn dawn, and walked quietly along the corridor towards the Private Suite where the new patient rested. His mind was quiet, yet his inner mind alert. His thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, these lay, perhaps, beyond human computation. He was calmer far than his assistant, though more strangely tempted.\n\nIt was just growing light, the corridor was cold. A cool, damp air came through the open windows and the linoleum felt like ice against the feet. The house lay dead and silent. Pausing a moment by a window, he listened to the chattering of early sparrows. He felt chill and hungry, unrested too, though far from sleepy. He was aware of London\u2014bleak, heavy, stolid London town. The troubles of modern life, of Labour, Politics, Taxes, cost of living, all the common, daily things came in with the cheerless morning air.\n\nHe reached the door he sought, and very softly opened it.\n\nThe radiance met him in the face, so that he almost gasped. The scent of flowers, the sting of sharp, keen forest winds, the exhilaration of some distant mountain-top. There was, actually, a tang of dawn, known only to those who have tasted the heights at sunrise with the heart. And into his heart, singing with happy confidence, rose a sense of supreme joy and confidence that mastered all little earthly woes and pains, and walked among the stars.\n\nThe occupant of the bed lay very still. His shining hair was spread upon the pillow. The splendid limbs were motionless. The chest and arms were bare, the single covering sheet tossed off. The strange, wild face wore happiness and peace upon its skin, the features very calm, the mouth relaxed. It almost seemed a god lay sleeping there upon a little human bed.\n\nHow long he stood and stared he did not know, but suddenly, the light increased. The curtains stirred about the bed.\n\nWith a marvellous touch the separate details merged and quickened into life. The room was changed. The occupant of the bed moved very swiftly, as through the open window came the first touch of exhilarating light. Gold stole across the lintel, breaking over the roofs of slates beyond. The leafless elm trees shimmered faintly. The telegraph wires shone. There was a running sparkle. It was dawn.\n\nThe figure leaped, danced\u2014no other word describes it\u2014to the open window where the light and air gushed in, spread wide its arms, lowered its radiant head, began to sing in low, melodious rhythmic chant\u2014and Fillery, as silently as he had come, withdrew and closed the door unseen. His heart moved strangely, but\u2014his promise held him..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 320", + "text": "The following days it seemed to both Fillery and Devonham that their discussion of the first night had been pitched in too intense, too serious a key. Their patient was so commonplace again, so ordinary. He made himself quite at home, seemed contented and uncurious, taking it for granted he had come to stay for ever, apparently.\n\nApart from his strange beauty, his size, virility and a general impression he conveyed of immense energies he was too easy-going to make use of, he might have passed for a peasant, a countryman to whom city life was new; but an educated, or at least half-educated, countryman. He was so big, yet never gauche. He was neither stupid nor ill-informed; the garden interested him, he knew much about the trees and flowers, birds and insects too. He discussed the weather, prevailing wind, moisture, prospects of change and so forth with a judgment based on what seemed a natural, instinctive knowledge. The gardener looked on him with obvious respect.\n\n\"Such nice manners and such a steady eye,\" Mrs. Soames, the matron, mentioned, too, approvingly to Devonham. \"But a lot in him he doesn't understand himself, unless I'm wrong. Not much the matter with his nerves, anyhow. Once he's married\u2014unless I'm much mistaken\u2014eh, sir?\"\n\nHe was quiet, talking little, and spent the morning over the books Fillery had placed purposely in his sitting-room, books on simple physics, natural history and astronomy. It was the latter that absorbed him most; he pored over them by the hour.\n\nFillery explained the situation so far as he thought wise. The young man was honesty and simple innocence, but only vaguely interested in the life of the great city he now experienced for the first time. He had in his luggage a copy of the Will by which Mason had left him everything, and he was pleased to know himself well provided for. Of Mason, however, he had only a dim, uncertain, almost an impersonal memory, as of someone encountered in a dream.\n\n\"I suppose something's happened to me,\" he said to Fillery, his language normal and quite ordinary again. He spoke with a slight foreign accent. \"There was somebody, of course, who looked after me and lived with me, but I can't remember who or where it was. I was very happy,\" he added, \"and yet... I miss something.\"\n\nDr. Fillery, remembering his promise, did not press him.\n\n\"It will all come back by degrees,\" he remarked in a sympathetic tone. \"In the meantime, you must make yourself at home here with us, for as long as you like. You are quite free in every way. I want you to be happy here.\"\n\n\"I live with you always,\" was the reply. \"There are things I want to tell you, ask you too.\" He paused, looking thoughtful. \"There was someone I told all to once.\"\n\n\"Come to me with everything. I'll help you always, so far as I can.\" He placed a hand upon his knee.\n\n\"There are feelings, big feelings I cannot reach quite, but that make me feel different\"\u2014he smiled beautifully\u2014\"from\u2014others.\" Quick as lightning he had changed the sentence at the last word, substituting \"others\" for \"you.\" Had he been aware of a slight uneasy emotion in his listener's heart? It had hardly betrayed itself by any visible sign, yet he had instantly divined its presence. Such evidences of a subtle, intimate, understanding were not lacking. Yet Fillery admirably restrained himself.\n\n\"There are bright places I have lost,\" he went on frankly, no sign of shy reserve in him. \"I feel confused, lost somewhere, as if I didn't belong here. I feel\"\u2014he used an odd word\u2014\"doubled.\" His face shaded a little.\n\n\"Big overpowering London is bound to affect you,\" put in Fillery, who had noticed the rapid discernment, \"after living among woods and mountains, as you have lived, for years. All will come right in a little time; we must settle down a bit first\u2014\"\n\n\"Woods and mountains,\" repeated the other, in a half-dreamy voice, his eyes betraying an effort to follow thought elsewhere. \"Of course, yes\u2014woods and mountains and hot living sunlight\u2014and the winds\u2014\"\n\nHis companion shifted the conversation a little. He suggested a line of reading and study... They talked also of such ordinary but necessary things as providing a wardrobe, of food, exercise, companionship of his own age, and so forth\u2014all the commonplace details of ordinary daily life, in fact. The exchange betrayed nothing of interest, nothing unusual. They mentioned theatres, music, painting, and, beyond the natural curiosity of youth that was ignorant of these, no detail was revealed that need have attracted the attention of anybody, neither of doctor, psychologist, nor student of human nature. With the single exception that the past years had been obliterated from memory, though much that had been acquired in them remained, there was not noticeable peculiarity of any sort. Both language and point of view were normal.\n\nThis was obviously LeVallon. The \"N. H.\" personality scarcely cast a shadow even. Yet \"N. H.,\" the doctor was quick to see, lay ready and waiting just below the surface. There was no doubt in his mind which was the central self and which its transient projection, the secondary personality. Again, as he sat and talked, he had the odd impression that someone with bright tidings ran swiftly past his life, perhaps towards it.\n\nThe swift messenger was certainly not LeVallon. LeVallon, indeed, was but a shadow cast before this glad, bright visitant. Thus he felt, at any rate. LeVallon was an empty simulacrum left behind while \"N. H.\" rested, or was active upon other things, things natural to him, elsewhere. LeVallon was an arm, a limb, a feeler that \"N. H.\" thrust out. At Charing Cross, for instance, for a brief moment only, \"N. H.\" had peered across his shoulder, then withdrawn again. In the car had sat by his side LeVallon. The being he now chatted with was also LeVallon only.\n\nBut in his own heart, deep down, hidden yet eager to break loose, lay his own deeper self that burned within him. This, the important part of him, yearned towards \"N. H.\" And up rose the strange symbol that always appeared when his deepest, perhaps his subliminal self was stirred. That lost radiant valley in the haunted Caucasus shone close and brimming over... with light, with flowers, with splendid winds and fire, symbols of a vaster, grander, happier life, though perhaps a life not yet within the range of normal human consciousness... The fiery symbol flashed and passed.\n\nCurious thoughts and pictures rose flaming in his mind, persistent ideas that bore no possible relation to his intellectual, reasoning life. Passing across the background of his brain, as with waves of heat and colour, they were correlated somewhere with harmonious sound. Music, that is, came with them, as though inspiration brought its own sound with it that made singing natural. They haunted him, these vague, pleasurable phantasmagoria that were connected, he felt sure, with music, as with childhood's lost imaginings. For a long time he searched in vain for their source and origin. Then, suddenly, he remembered. He heard his father's gruff, humorous voice: \"There's not a scrap of evidence, of course...\" And, sharply, vividly, the buried memory gave up its dead. His childish question went crashing through the air: \"Are we the only beings in the world?\"\n\n\"Nothing is ever lost,\" he reminded himself with a smile that Devonham assuredly never saw. \"Every seed must bear its fruit in time.\"\n\nAnd emotion surged through him from the remorseless records of his underself. The childhood's love, with its correlative of deep, absolute belief, returned upon him, linked on somehow to that old familiar symbol he knew to mean his awakening subconscious being\u2014a flowering Caucasian vale of sun and wind. A belief, he realized, especially a belief of childhood, remains for ever inexpugnable, eternal, prolific seed of future harvests.\n\nThe unstable in him betrayed its ineradicable, dangerous streak. There rose upon him in a cloud strange notions that inflamed imagination sweetly. Later reading, indeed, had laid flesh upon the skeleton of the boyish notion, though derived in the first instance he certainly knew not whence. The literature and tradition of the East, he recalled, peopled the elements with conscious life, to which the world's fairy-tales\u2014remnant of lost knowledge possibly\u2014added nerves and heart and blood. In all human bodies, at any rate, dwelt not necessarily always human spirits, human souls...\n\nHe checked himself with a smile he would have liked to call a chuckle, but that yet held some inexplicable happiness at its heart. His rugged, eager face, its expression bitten deeply by experience, turned curiously young. There rushed through him the Eastern conception of another system of life, another evolution, deathless, divine, important, the Order of the Devas, a series of Nature Beings entirely apart from human categories. They included many degrees, from fairies to planetary spirits, the gods, so called; and their duties, work and purposes were concerned, he remembered, with carrying out the Laws of Nature, the busy tending of all forms and structures, from the elaborately marvellous infusoria in a drop of stagnant water, the growth of crystals, the upbuilding of flowers and trees, of insects, animals, humans, to the guidance and guardianship of those vaster forms of heavenly bodies, the stars, the planets and the mighty suns, whose gigantic \"bodies,\" inhabited by immenser consciousness, people empty space... A noble, useful, selfless work, God's messengers...\n\nHe checked himself again, as the rich, ancient notion flitted across his stirring memory.\n\n\"Delightful, picturesque conceptions of the planet's young, fair ignorance!\" he reminded himself, smiling as before.\n\nWhereupon rose, bursting through his momentary dream, with full-fledged power, the great hope of his own reasoned, scientific Dream\u2014that man is greater than he knows, and that the progress of the Race was demonstrable.\n\nFor, to the subliminal powers of an awakened Race these Nature Beings with their special faculties, must lie open and accessible. The human and the non-human could unite! Nature must come back into the hearts of men and win them again to simple, natural life with love, with joy, with naked beauty. Death and disease must vanish, hope and purity return. The Race must develop, grow, become in the true sense universal. It could know God!\n\nThe vision flashed upon him with extraordinary conviction, so that he forgot for the moment how securely he belonged to the unstable. The smile of happiness spread, as it were, over his entire being. He glowed and pulsed with its delicious inward fire. Light filled his being for an instant\u2014an instant of intoxicating belief and certainty and vision. The instant inspiration of a dream went lost and vanished. He had drawn upon childhood and legendary reading for the substance of a moment's happiness. He shook himself, so to speak. He remembered his patients and his duties, his colleague too...\n\nNothing, meanwhile, occurred to arouse interest or attention. LeVallon was quite docile, ordinary; he needed no watching; he slept well, ate well, spent his leisure with his books and in the garden. He complained often of the lack of sunlight, and sometimes he might be seen taking some deep breaths of air into his lungs by the open window or on the balcony. The phases of the moon, too, interested him, and he asked once when the full moon would come and then, when Devonham told him, he corrected the date the latter gave, proving him two hours wrong. But, on the whole, there seemed little to differentiate him from the usual young man whose physique had developed in advance of his mental faculties; his knowledge in some respects certainly was backward, as in the case of arrested development. He seemed an intelligent countryman, but an unusually intelligent countryman, though all the time another under-intelligence shone brightly, betraying itself in remarks and judgments oddly phrased.\n\nDr. Fillery took him, during the following day or two, to concerts, theatres, cinemas. He enjoyed them all. Yet in the theatres he was inclined to let his attention wander. The degree of alertness varied oddly. His critical standard, moreover, was curiously exacting; he demanded the real creative interpretation of a part, and was quick to detect a lack of inspiration, of fine technique, of true conception in a player. Reasons he failed to give, and argument seemed impossible to him, but if voice or gesture or imaginative touch failed anywhere, he lost interest in the performer from that moment.\n\n\"He has poor breath,\" he remarked. \"He only imitates. He is outside.\" Or, \"She pretends. She does not feel and know. Feeling\u2014the feeling that comes of fire\u2014she has not felt.\"\n\n\"She does not understand her part, you mean?\" suggested Fillery.\n\n\"She does not burn with it,\" was the reply.\n\nAt concerts he behaved individually too. They bored as well as puzzled him; the music hardly stirred him. He showed signs of distress at anything classical, though Wagner, Debussy, the Russians, moved him and produced excitement.\n\n\"He,\" was his remark, with emphasis, \"has heard. He gives me freedom. I could fly and go away. He sets me free...\" and then he would say no more, not even in reply to questions. He could not define the freedom he referred to, nor could he say where he could go away to. But his face lit up, he smiled his delightful smile, he looked happy. \"Stars,\" he added once in a tone of interest, in reply to repeated questions, \"stars, wind, fire, away from this!\"\u2014he tapped his head and breast\u2014\"I feel more alive and real.\"\n\n\"It's real and true, that music? That's what you feel?\"\n\n\"It's beyond this,\" he replied, again tapping his body. \"They have heard.\"\n\nThe cinema interested him more. Yet its limits seemed to perplex him more than its wonder thrilled him. He accepted it as a simple, natural, universal thing.\n\n\"They stay always on the sheet,\" he observed with evident surprise. \"And I hear nothing. They do not even sing. Sound and movement go together!\"\n\n\"The speaking will come,\" explained Fillery. \"Those are pictures merely.\"\n\n\"I understand. Yet sound is natural, isn't it? They ought to be heard.\"\n\n\"Speech,\" agreed his companion, \"is natural, but singing isn't.\"\n\n\"Are they not alive enough to sing?\" was the reply, spoken to himself rather than to his neighbour, who was so attentive to his least response. \"Do they only sing when\"\u2014Fillery heard it and felt something leap within him\u2014\"when they are paid or have an audience?\" he finished the sentence quickly.\n\n\"No one sings naturally of their own accord\u2014not in cities, at any rate,\" was the reply.\n\nLeVallon laughed, as though he understood at once.\n\n\"There is no sun and wind,\" he murmured. \"Of course. They cannot.\"\n\nIt was the cinemas that provided most material for observation, Fillery found. There was in a cinema performance something that excited his companion, but excited him more than the doctor felt he was justified in encouraging. Obviously the other side of him, the \"N. H.\" aspect, came up to breathe under the stimulus of the rapid, world-embracing, space-and-time destroying pictures on the screen. Concerts did not stimulate him, it seemed, but rather puzzled him. He remained wholly the commonplace LeVallon\u2014with one exception: he drew involved patterns on the edge of his programmes, patterns of a very complicated yet accurate kind, as though he almost saw the sounds that poured into his ears. And these ornamented programmes Dr. Fillery preserved. Sound\u2014music\u2014seemed to belong to his interpretation of movement. About the cinema, however, there seemed something almost familiar, something he already knew and understood, the sound belonging to movement only lacking.\n\nApart from these small incidents, LeVallon showed nothing unusual, nothing that a yokel untaught yet of natural intelligence might not have shown. His language, perhaps, was singular, but, having been educated by one mind only, and in a region of lonely forests and mountains, remote from civilized life, there was nothing inexplicable in the odd words he chose, nor in the peculiar\u2014if subtle and penetrating\u2014phrases that he used. Invariably he recognized the spontaneous, creative power as distinguished from the derivative that merely imitated.\n\nHe found ways of expressing himself almost immediately, both in speech and writing, however, and with a perfection far beyond the reach of a half-educated country lad; and this swift aptitude was puzzling until its explanation suddenly was laid bare. He absorbed, his companion realized at last, as by telepathy, the content of his own, of Fillery's mind, acquiring the latter's mood, language, ideas, as though the two formed one being.\n\nThe discovery startled the doctor. Yet what startled him still more was the further discovery, made a little later, that he himself could, on occasions, become so identified with his patient that the slightest shade of thought or feeling rose spontaneously in his own mind too.\n\nHe remained, otherwise, almost entirely \"LeVallon\"; and, after a full report made to Devonham, and the detailed discussion thereon that followed, Dr. Fillery had no evidence to contradict the latter's opinion: \"LeVallon is the real true self. The other personality\u2014'N. H.' as we call it\u2014is a mere digest and accumulation of material supplied by his parents and by Mason.\"\n\n\"Let us wait and see what happens when 'N. H.' appears and does something,\" Fillery was content to reply.\n\n\"If,\" answered Devonham, with sceptical emphasis, \"it ever does appear.\"\n\n\"You think it won't?\" asked Fillery.\n\n\"With proper treatment,\" said Devonham decisively, \"I see no reason why 'N. H.' should not become happily merged in the parent self\u2014in LeVallon, and a permanent cure result.\"\n\nHe put his glasses straight and stared at his chief, as much as to say \"You promised.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said Fillery. \"But, in my judgment, 'LeVallon' is too slight to count at all. I believe the whole, real, parent Self is 'N. H.,' and the only life LeVallon has at all is that which peeps up through him\u2014from 'N. H.'\"\n\nFillery returned his serious look.\n\n\"If 'N. H.' is the real self, and I am right,\" he added slowly, \"you, Paul, will have to revise your whole position.\"\n\n\"I shall,\" returned Devonham. \"But\u2014you will allow this\u2014it is a lot to expect. I see no reason to believe in anything more than a subconscious mind of unusual content, and possibly of unusual powers and extent,\" he added with reluctance.\n\n\"It is,\" said Fillery significantly, \"a lot to expect\u2014as you said just now. I grant you that. Yet I feel it possible that\u2014\" he hesitated.\n\nDevonham looked uncomfortable. He fidgeted. He did not like the pause. A sense of exasperation rose in him, as though he knew something of what was coming.\n\n\"Paul,\" went on his chief abruptly in a tone that dropped instinctively to a lower key\u2014almost a touch of awe lay behind it\u2014\"you admit no deity, I know, but you admit purpose, design, intelligence.\"\n\n\"Well,\" replied the other patiently, long experience having taught him iron restraint, \"it's a blundering, imperfect system, inadequately organized\u2014if you care to call that intelligence. It's of an extremely intricate complexity. I admit that. Deity I consider an unnecessary assumption.\"\n\n\"The love and hate of atoms alone bowls you over,\" was the unexpected comment. \"The word 'Laws' explains nothing. A machine obeys the laws, but intelligence conceived that machine\u2014and a man repairs and keeps it going. Who\u2014what\u2014keeps the daisy going, the crystal, the creative thought in the imagination? An egg becomes a leaf-eating caterpillar, which in turn becomes a honey-eating butterfly with wings. A yolk turns into feathers. Is that accomplished without intelligence?\"\n\n\"Ask our new patient,\" interrupted Devonham, wiping his glasses with unnecessary thoroughness.\n\n\"Which?\"\n\nDevonham startled, looked up without his glasses. It seemed the question made him uneasy. Putting the glasses on suddenly, he stared at his chief.\n\n\"I see what you mean, Edward,\" he said earnestly, his interest deeply captured. \"Be careful. We know nothing, remember, nothing of life. Don't jump ahead like this or take your dreams for reality. We have our duty\u2014in a case like this.\"\n\nFillery smiled, as though to convey that he remembered his promise.\n\n\"Humanity,\" he replied, \"is a very small section of the universe. Compared to the minuter forms of life, which may be quite as important, if not more so, the human section is even negligible; while, compared to the possibility of greater forms\u2014\" He broke off abruptly. \"As you say, Paul, we know nothing of life after all, do we? Nothing, less than nothing! We observe and classify a few results, that's all. We must beware of narrow prejudice, at any rate\u2014you and I.\"\n\nHis eyes lost their light, his speech dried up, his ideas, dreams, speculations returned to him unrewarded, unexpressed. With natures in whom the subconscious never stirred, natures through whom its magical fires cast no faintest upward gleam, intercourse was ever sterile, unproductive. Such natures had no background. Even a fact, with them, was detached from its true big life, its full significance, its divine potentialities!...\n\n\"We must beware of prejudice,\" he repeated quietly. \"We seek truth only.\"\n\n\"We must beware,\" replied Devonham, as he shrugged his shoulders, \"of suggestion\u2014of auto-suggestion above all. We must remember how repressed desires dramatize themselves\u2014especially,\" he added significantly, \"when aided by imagination. We seek only facts.\" On his face appeared swiftly, before it vanished again, an expression of keen anxiety, almost of affliction, yet tempered, as it were, by surprise and wonder, by pity possibly, and certainly by affection." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 321", + "text": "To Devonham, meanwhile, LeVallon's behaviour was polite and kind and distant; he did not show distrust of any sort, but he betrayed a certain diffidence, reserve and caution. Trust he felt; sympathy he did not feel. To the amusement of Fillery, he suggested almost a kind of mild contempt when dealing with him, and this amusement was increased by the fact that it obviously annoyed Devonham, while it gratified his chief. For towards Fillery, LeVallon behaved with an intimate and understanding sympathy that proved his instantaneous affection based upon mutual comprehension. It seemed that LeVallon and Fillery had known one another always.\n\nIt was doubtless, due to this innate sympathy between them that Edward Fillery's rare gift of absorbing the content of another's mind, even to the point of taking on that other's conditions, physical and emotional at the same time, was so successful. By means of a highly developed power of auto-suggestion, he had learned so to identify his own mind, thought, feeling with those of a patient, that there resulted a kind of merging by which he literally became that patient. He felt with him. As a subject sees the pictures in the hypnotiser's mind, perceives his thoughts, divines his slightest will, so Fillery, reversing the process, could realize for the moment exactly what his patient was thinking, feeling, desiring. It was of great use to him in his strange practice.\n\nThis gift, naturally, varied in degree, and was not invariably successful. In some cases he only felt, the emotion alone being thus transferred; in others he only saw what the patient saw, or thought he saw, the accompanying emotion being omitted; in others again, as in cases of vision at a distance, either of time or space, he had been able to follow the \"travelling sight\" of his patient, whose consciousness in trance was operating far away, and thus to check for subsequent verification exactly what that patient saw. He had shared strange experiences with others\u2014with a man, for instance, in whom sight was transferred to the tip of his index finger, so that he could read a book by passing that finger along the printed line; with a woman, again, in whom \"exteriorized consciousness\" manifested itself, so that, if the air several inches from her face was pinched or struck, the impact was received and an actual bruise produced upon her skin.\n\nThis extension of consciousness, its seeds already in his nature, he had trained and developed to a point where he could almost rely upon auto-suggestion bringing about quickly the desired conditions. Its success, however, as mentioned, was variable. With \"N. H.,\" especially now, this variableness was marked; sometimes it was so easily accomplished as to seem natural and without a conscious effort, while at other times it failed completely. Since it was in no sense an attempt to transfer anything from his own mind to that of the patient, Fillery felt that his promise to his colleague was not involved.\n\nThe following scene describes the first time in which the process took place with his new patient. Fillery himself wrote down the words, supplied the detailed description, filled in the emotion and psychology, but exactly as these occurred and as he felt them, both when these took place, respectively, in his own consciousness and in that of his patient. Part of the time he was present, part of it he was not visibly so, being screened from observation, yet so placed that he could note everything that happened. It is clear, however, that his mind was so intimately en rapport with the thoughts and feelings of \"N. H.,\" that he experienced in his own being all that \"N. H.\" experienced. The description was written immediately after the occurrence, though some of it, the spoken language in particular, was jotted down in his hiding place at the actual moment.\n\nThe interlacing of the two minds, their interpenetration, as it were, one occasionally dominating the other, is curious to trace and far from difficult to disentangle. Similarly the interweaving of LeVallon and \"N. H.\" is noticeable. The description given by Devonham of the portion of the occurrence he witnessed personally, or heard about from Nurse Robbins and the attendants\u2014this description reduces the whole thing to the commonplace level of \"a slight seizure accompanied by signs of violence and moments of delirium due to excitement and fatigue, and soon cured by sleep.\"\n\nThe occurrence took place precisely at the period when the moon was at the full." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 322", + "text": "The body I'm in and using is 22, as they call it, and from a man named Mason, a geologist, I receive sums of money, regularly paid, with which I live. They call it \"live.\" A roof and walls protect me, who do not need protection; my body, which it irks, is covered with wool and cloth and stuff, fitting me as bark fits a tree and yet not part of me; my feet, which love the touch of earth and yearn for it, are cased in dead dried skin called leather; even my head and hair, which crave the sun and wind, are covered with another piece of dead dried skin, shaped like a shell, but an ugly shell, in which, were it shaped otherwise, the wind and rustling leaves might sing with flowers.\n\nBefore 22 I remember nothing\u2014nothing definite, that is. I opened my eyes in a soft, but not refreshing case standing on four iron legs, and well off the ground, and covered with coarse white coverings piled thickly on my body. It was a bed. Slabs of transparent stuff kept out the living sunshine for which I hungered; thick solid walls shut off the wind; no stars or moon showed overhead, because an enormous lid hid every bit of sky. No dew, therefore, lay upon the sheets. I smelt no earth, no leaves, no flowers. No single natural sound entered except the chattering of dirty sparrows which had lost its freshness. I was in a hospital.\n\nOne comely figure alone gave me a little joy. It was soft and slim and graceful, with a smell of fern and morning in its hair, though that hair was lustreless and balled up in ugly lumps, with strips of thin metal in it. They called it nurse and sister. It was the first moving thing I saw when my eyes opened on my limited and enclosed surroundings. My heart beat quicker, a flash of thin joy came up in me. I had seen something similar before somewhere; it reminded me, I mean, of something I had known elsewhere; though but a shabby, lifeless, clumsy copy of this other glorious thing. Though not real, it stirred this faint memory of reality, so that I caught at the skirts of moonlight, stars and flowers reflected in a forest pool where my companion played for long periods of happiness between our work. The perfume and the eyes did that. I watched it for a bit, as it moved away, came close and looked at me. When the eyes met mine, a wave of life, but of little life, surged faintly through me.\n\nThey were dim and pitiful, these eyes; mournful, unlit, unseeing. The stars had set in them; dull shadows crowded. They were so small. They were hungry too. They were unsatisfied. For some minutes it puzzled me, then I understood. That was the word\u2014unsatisfied. Ah, but I could alter that! I could comfort, help, at any rate. My strength, though horribly clipped and blocked, could manage a little thing like that! My smaller rhythms I could put into it.\n\nThe eyes, the smile, the whole soft comely bundle, so pitifully hungry and unsatisfied, I rose and seized, pressing it close inside my own great arms, and burying it all against my breast. I crushed it, but very gently, as I might crush a sapling. My lips were amid the ferny hair. I breathed upon it willingly, glad to help.\n\nIt was a poor unfinished thing, I felt at once, soft and yielding where it should have been resilient and elastic as fresh turf; the perfume had no body, it faded instantly; there was so little life in it.\n\nBut, as I held it in my big embrace, smothering its hunger as best I could within my wave of being, this bundle, this poor pitiful bundle, screamed and struggled to get free. It bit and scratched and uttered sounds like those squeaks the less swift creatures make when the swifter overtake them.\n\nI was too surprised to keep it to me; I relaxed my hold. The instant I did so the figure, thus released, stood upright like a young birch the wind sets free. The figure looked alive. The hair fell loose, untidily, the puny face wore colour, the eyes had fire in them. I saw that fire. It was a message. Memory stirred faintly in me.\n\n\"Ah!\" I cried. \"I've helped you anyhow a little!\"\n\nThe scene that followed filled me with such trouble and bewilderment that I cannot recall exactly what occurred. The figure seemed to spit at me, yet not with grace and invitation. There was no sign of gratitude. I was entirely misunderstood, it seemed. Bells rang, as the figure rushed to the door and flung it open. It called aloud; similar, though quite lifeless figures came in answer and filled the room. A doctor\u2014Devonham, they called him\u2014followed them. I was most carefully examined in a dozen curious ways that tickled my skin a little so that I smiled. But I lay quite still and silent, watching the whole performance with a confusion in my being that baffled my comprehending what was going on. Most of the figures were frightened.\n\nThen the doctor gave place to Fillery, whose name has rhythm.\n\nTo him I spoke at once:\n\n\"I wished to comfort and revive her,\" I told him. \"She is so starved. I was most gentle. She brings a message only.\"\n\nHe made no reply, but gazed at me with the corners of his mouth both twitching, and in his eyes\u2014ah, his eyes had more of the sun in them\u2014a flash of something that had known fire, at least, if it had not kept it.\n\n\"My God! I worship thee,\" I murmured at the glimpse of the Power I must own as Master and creator of my being. \"Even when thou art playful, I adore thee and obey.\"\n\nThen four other figures, shaped like the doctor but wholly mechanical, a mere blind weight operating through them, held my arms and legs. Not the least desire to move was in me luckily. I say \"luckily,\" because, had I wished it, I could have flung them through the roof, blown down the little walls, caught up a dozen figures in my arms, and rushed forth with them towards the Powers of Fire and Wind to which I belonged.\n\nCould I? I felt that I could. The sight of the true fire, small though it was, in the comely figure's and the doctor's eyes, had set me in touch again with my home and origin. This touch I had somehow lost; I had been \"ill,\" with what they called nervous disorder and injured reason. The lost touch was now restored. But, luckily, as I said, there was no desire in me to set free these other figures, to help them in any way, after the reception my first kindly effort had experienced. I lay quite still, held by these four grotesque and puny mechanisms. The comely one, with the others similar to her, had withdrawn. I felt very kindly towards them all, but especially towards the doctor, Fillery, who had shown that he knew my deity and origin. None of them were worth much trouble, anyhow. I felt that too. A mild, sweet-toned contempt was in me.\n\n\"Dangerous,\" was a word I caught them whispering as they went. I laughed a little. The four faces over me made odd grimaces, tightening their lips, and gripping my legs and arms with greater effort. The doctor\u2014Fillery\u2014noticed it.\n\n\"Easy, remember,\" he addressed the four. \"There's really no need to hold. It won't recur.\" I nodded. We understood one another. And, with a smile at me, he left the room, saying he would come back after a short interval. A link with my source, a brother as it were, went with him. I was lonely...\n\nI began to hum songs to myself, little fragments of a great natural music I had once known but lost, and I noticed that the four figures, as I sang, relaxed their grip of my limbs considerably. To tell the truth, I forgot that they were holding me; their grip, anyhow, was but a thread I could snap without the smallest effort. The songs were happiness in me. Upon free leaping rhythms I careered with an exhilarating rush of liberty; all about space I soared and sank; I was picked up, flung far, riding the crest of immense waves of orderly vibration that delighted me. I let myself go a bit, let my voice out, I mean. No effort accompanied my singing. It was automatic, like breathing almost. It was natural to me. These rhythmical sounds and the patterns that they wove in space were the outlines of forms it was my work to build. This expressed my nature. Only my power was blocked and stifled in this confining body. The fire and air which were my tools I could not control. I have forgotten\u2014forgotten\u2014!\n\n\"Got a voice, ain't he?\" observed one of the figures admiringly.\n\n\"Lunies can do 'most anything they have a mind to.\"\n\n\"Grand Opera isn't it.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" mentioned the fourth, \"but he'll lift the roof off presently. We'd better stop him before there's any trouble.\"\n\nI stopped of myself, however: their remarks interested me. Also while I had been singing, although I called it humming only, they had gradually let go of me, and were now sitting down on my bed and staring with quite pleasant faces. All their dim eight eyes were fixed on me. Their forms were not built well.\n\n\"Where did you get that from, Guv'nor?\" asked the one who had spoken first. \"Can you give me the name of it?\"\n\nThe sound of his own voice was like the scratching of a pin after the enormous rhythm that now ceased.\n\n\"Ain't printed, is it?\" he went on, as I stared, not understanding what he meant. \"I've got a sister at the Halls,\" he explained. \"She'd make a hit with that kind of thing. Gave me quite a twist inside to hear it,\" he added, turning to the others.\n\nThe others agreed solemnly with dull stupid faces. I lay and listened to their talk. I longed to help them. I had forgotten how.\n\n\"A bit churchy, I thought it,\" said one. \"But, I confess, it stirred me up.\"\n\n\"Churchy or not, it's the stuff,\" insisted the first.\n\n\"Oh, it's the stuff to give 'em, right enough.\" And they looked at me admiringly again. \"Where did you get it, if I may ask?\" replied Number One in a more respectful tone. His face looked quite polite. The lips stretched, showing yellow teeth. It was his smile. But his eyes were a little more real. Oh, where was my fire? I could have built the outline better so that he was real and might express far more. I have forgotten\u2014!\n\n\"I hear it,\" I told him, \"because I'm in it. It's all about me. It never stops. It's what we build with\u2014\"\n\nNumber One seemed greatly interested.\n\n\"Hear it, do you? Why, that's odd now. You see\"\u2014he looked at his companions apologetically, as though he knew they would not believe him\u2014\"my father was like that. He heard his music, he always used to say, but we laughed at him. He was a composer by trade. Oh, his stuff was printed too. Of course,\" he added, \"there's musical talent in the family,\" as though that explained everything. He turned to me again. \"Give us a little more, Mister\u2014if you don't object, that is,\" he added. And his face was soft as he said it. \"Only gentle like\u2014if you don't mind.\"\n\n\"Yes, keep it down a bit,\" another put in, looking anxiously in the direction of the closed door. He patted the air with his open palm, slowly, carefully, as though he patted an animal that might rise and fly at him.\n\nI hummed again for them, but this time with my lips closed. The waves of rhythm caught me up and away. I soared and flew and dropped and rose again upon their huge coloured crests. Curtains and sheets of quiet flame in palest gold flared shimmering through the sound, while winds that were full of hurricanes and cyclones swept down to lift the fire and dance with it in spirals. The perfume of great flowers rose. There were flowers everywhere, and stars shone through it all like showers of gold. Ah! I began to remember something. It was flowers and stars as well as human forms we worked to build...\n\nBut I kept the fire from leaping into actual flame; the mighty winds I held back. Even thus pent and checked, their powerful volume made the atmosphere shake and pulse about us. Only I could not control them now... With an effort I came back, came down, as it were, and saw the funny little faces staring at me with opened eyes and mouths, and yellow teeth, pale gums, their skins gone whitish, their figures rigid with their tense emotion. They were so poorly made, the patterns so imperfect. The new respect in their manner was marked plainly. Suddenly all four turned together towards the door. I stopped. The doctor had returned. But it was Fillery again. I liked the feel of him.\n\n\"He wanted to sing, sir, so we let him. It seemed to relieve him a bit,\" they explained quickly and with an air of helpless apology.\n\n\"Good, good,\" said the doctor. \"Quite good. Any normal expression that brings relief is good.\" He dismissed them. They went out, casting back at me expressions of puzzled thanks and interest. The door closed behind them. The doctor seated himself beside me and took my hand. I liked his touch. His hand was alive, at any rate, although within my own it felt rather like a dying branch or bunch of leaves I grasped. The life, if thin, was real.\n\n\"Where's the rest of it?\" I asked him, meaning the music. \"I used to have it all. It's left me, gone away. What's cut it off?\"\n\n\"You're not cut off really,\" he said gently. \"You can always get into it again when you really need it.\" He gazed at me steadily for a minute, then said in his quiet voice\u2014a full, nice tone with wind through a forest running in it: \"Mason... Dr. Mason...\"\n\nHe said no more, but watched me. The name stirred something in me I could not get at quite. I could not reach down to it. I was troubled by a memory I could not seize.\n\n\"Mason,\" I repeated, returning his strong gaze. \"What\u2014who\u2014was Mason? And where?\" I connected the name with a sense of liberty, also with great winds and pools of fire, with great figures of golden skin and radiant faces, with music, too, the music that had left me.\n\n\"You've forgotten for the moment,\" came the deep running voice I liked. \"He looked after you for twenty years. He gave his life for you. He loved you. He loved your mother. Your father was his friend.\"\n\n\"Has he gone\u2014gone back?\"\n\n\"He's dead.\"\n\n\"I can get after him though,\" I said, for the name touched me with a sense of lost companionship I wanted, though the reference to my father and mother left me cold. \"I can easily catch him up. When I move with my wind and fire, the fastest things stand still.\" My own speed, once I was free again, I knew outpaced easily the swiftest bird, outpaced light itself.\n\n\"Yes,\" agreed the doctor; \"only he doesn't want that now. You can always catch him up when the time comes. Besides, he's waiting for you anyhow.\"\n\nI knew that was true. I sank back comforted upon the stuffy pillows and lay silent. This tinkling chatter wearied me. It was like trickling wind. I wanted the flood of hurricanes, the pulse of storms. My building, shaping powers, my great companions\u2014oh! where were they?\n\n\"He taught you himself, taught you all you know,\" I heard the tinkling go on again, \"but he kept you away from life, thinking it was best. He was afraid for you, afraid for others too. He kept you in the woods and mountains where, as he believed, you could alone express yourself and so be happy. A hundred times, in babyhood and early childhood, you nearly died. He nursed you back to life. His own life he renounced. Now he is dead. He has left you all his money.\"\n\nHe paused. I said no word. Faint memories passed through my mind, but nothing I could hold and seize. The money I did not understand at all, except that it was necessary.\n\n\"He thought at first that you could not possibly live to manhood. To his surprise you survived everything\u2014illness, accident, disaster of every sort and kind. Then, as you grew up, he realized his mistake. Instead of keeping you away from life, he ought to have introduced you to it and explained it\u2014as I and Devonham are now trying to do. You could not live for ever alone in woods and mountains; when he was gone there would be no one to look after you and guide you.\"\n\nThe trickling of wind went on and on. I hardly listened to it. He did it for his own pleasure, I suppose. It pleased and soothed him possibly. Yet I remembered every syllable. It was a small detail to keep fresh when my real memory covered the whole planet.\n\n\"Before he died, he recognized his mistake and faced the position boldly. It was some years before the end; he was hale and hearty still, yet the end, he knew, was in sight. While the power was still strong in him, therefore, he did the only thing left to him to do. He used his great powers. He used suggestion. He hypnotized you, telling you to forget\u2014from the moment of his death, but not before\u2014forget everything\u2014 It was only partially successful.\"\n\nThe door opened, the comely figure glanced in, then vanished.\n\n\"She wants more help from me,\" I interrupted the monotonous tinkling instantly, for pity stirred in me again as I saw her eager, hungry and unsatisfied little eyes. \"Call her back. I feel quite willing. It is one of the lower forms we made. I can improve it.\"\n\nDr. Fillery, as he was called, looked at me steadily, his mouth twitching at the corners as before, a flash of fire flitting through his eyes. The fire made me like and trust him; the twitching, too, I liked, for it meant he knew how absurd he was. Yet he was bigger than the other figures.\n\n\"You can't do that,\" he said, \"you mustn't,\" and then laughed outright. \"It isn't done, you know\u2014here.\"\n\n\"Why not, sir?\" I asked, using the terms the figures used. \"I feel like that.\"\n\n\"Of course, you do. But all you feel can't be expressed except at the proper times and places. The consent of the other party always is involved,\" he went on slowly, \"when it's a question of expressing\u2014anything you feel.\"\n\nThis puzzled me, because in this particular instance the other party had asked me with her eyes to comfort her. I told him this. He laughed still more. Caught by the sound\u2014it was just like wind passing among tall grasses on a mountain ridge\u2014I forgot what he was talking about for the moment. The sound carried me away towards my own rhythms.\n\n\"You've got such amazing insight,\" he went on tinkling to himself, for I heard, although I did not listen. \"You read the heart too easily, too quickly. You must learn to hide your knowledge.\" The laughter which ran with the words then ended, and I came back to the last thing I had definitely listened to\u2014\"express, expressing,\" was the phrase he used.\n\n\"You told me that self-expression is the purpose for which I'm here\u2014?\"\n\n\"I believe it is,\" he agreed, more solemnly.\n\n\"Only sometimes, then?\"\n\n\"Exactly. If that expression involves another in pain or trouble or discomfort\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah! I have to choose, you mean. I have to know first what the other feels about it.\"\n\nI began to understand better. It was a game. And all games delighted me.\n\n\"You may put it roughly so, yes,\" he explained, \"you're very quick. I'll give you a rule to guide you,\" he went on. I listened with an effort; this tinkling soon wearied me; I could not think long or much; my way, it seemed, was feeling. \"Ask yourself always how what you do will affect another,\" Dr. Fillery concluded. \"That's a safe rule for you.\"\n\n\"That is of children,\" I observed. We stared at each other a moment. \"Both sides keep it?\" I asked.\n\n\"Childish,\" he agreed, \"it certainly is. Both sides, yes, keep it.\"\n\nI sighed, and the sigh seemed to rise from my very feet, passing through my whole being. He looked at me most kindly then, asking why I sighed.\n\n\"I used to be free,\" I told him. \"This is not liberty. And why are we not all free together?\"\n\n\"It is liberty for two instead of only for one,\" he said, \"and so, in the long run, liberty for all.\"\n\n\"So that's where they are,\" I remarked, but to myself and not to him. \"Not further than that.\" For what I had once known, but now, it seemed, forgotten, was far beyond such a foolish little game. We had lived without such tiny tricks. We lived openly and unafraid. We worked in harmony. We lived. Yes\u2014but who was \"we\"? That was the part I had forgotten.\n\n\"It's the growth and development of civilization,\" I heard the little drift of wind go whistling thinly, \"and it won't take you long to become quite civilized at this rate, more civilized, indeed, than most\u2014with your swift intelligence and lightning insight.\"\n\n\"Civilization,\" I repeated to myself. Then I looked at his eyes which hid carefully in their depths somewhere that tiny cherished flame I loved. \"Your ways are really very simple,\" I said. \"It's all easy enough to learn. It is so small.\"\n\n\"A man studying ants,\" he tinkled, \"finds them small, but far from simple. You may find complications later. If so, come to me.\"\n\nI promised him, and the fire gleamed faintly in his eyes a moment. \"He entrusted you to me. Your mother,\" he added softly, \"was the woman he loved.\"\n\n\"Civilization,\" I repeated, for the word set going an odd new rhythm in me that I rather liked, and that tired me less than the other things he said. \"What is it then? You are a Race, you told me.\"\n\n\"A Race of human beings, of men and women developing\u2014\"\n\n\"The comely ones?\"\n\n\"Are the women. Together we make up the Race.\"\n\n\"And civilization?\"\n\n\"Is realizing that we are a community, learning, growing, all its members living for the others as well as for themselves.\"\n\nDr. Fillery told me then about men and women and sex, how children are made, and what enormous and endless work was necessary merely to keep them all alive and clothed and sheltered before they could accomplish anything else of any sort at all. Half the labour of the majority was simply to keep alive at all. It was an ugly little system he described. Much I did not hear, because my thinking powers gave out. Some of it gave me an awful feeling he called pain. The confusion and imperfection seemed beyond repair, even beyond the worth of being part of it, of belonging to it at all. Moreover, the making of children, without which the whole thing must end, gave me spasms of irritation he called laughter. Only the Comely Ones, and what he told me of them, made me want to sing.\n\n\"The men,\" I said, \"but do they see that it is ugly and ludicrous and\u2014\"\n\n\"Comic,\" he helped me.\n\n\"Do they know,\" I asked, taking his unknown words, \"that it's comic?\"\n\n\"The glamour,\" he said, \"conceals it from them. To the best among them it is sacred even.\"\n\n\"And the Comely Ones?\"\n\n\"It is their chief mission,\" he replied. \"Always remember that. It's sacred.\" He fixed his kind eyes gravely on my face.\n\n\"Ah, worship, you mean,\" I said. \"I understand.\" Again we stared for some minutes. \"Yet all are not comely, are they?\" I asked presently.\n\nThe fire again shone faintly in his eyes as he watched me a moment without answering. It caught me away. I am not sure I heard his words, but I think they ran like this:\n\n\"That's just the point where civilization\u2014so far\u2014has always stopped.\"\n\nI remember he ceased tinkling then; our talk ceased too. I was exhausted. He told me to remember what he had said, and to lie down and rest. He rang the bell, and a man, one of the four who had held me, came in.\n\n\"Ask Nurse Robbins to come here a moment, please,\" he said. And a moment later the Comely One entered softly and stood beside my bed. She did not look at me. Dr. Fillery began again his little tinkling. \"...wishes to apologize to you most sincerely, nurse, for his mistake. He meant no harm, believe me. There is no danger in him, nor will he ever repeat it. His ignorance of our ways, I must ask you to believe\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, it's nothing, sir,\" she interrupted. \"I've quite forgotten it already. And usually he's as good as gold and perfectly quiet.\" She blushed, glancing shyly at me with clear invitation.\n\n\"It will not recur,\" repeated the Doctor positively. \"He has promised me. He is very, very sorry and ashamed.\"\n\nThe nurse looked more boldly a moment. I saw her silver teeth. I saw the hint of soft fire in her poor pitiful eyes, but far, far away and, as she thought, safely hidden.\n\n\"Pitiful one, I will not touch you,\" I said instantly. \"I know that you are sacred.\"\n\nI noticed at once that her sweet natural perfume increased about her as I said the words, but her eyes were lowered, though she smiled a little, and her little cheeks grew coloured. I saw her small teeth of silvery marble again. Our work was visible. I liked it.\n\n\"You have promised me,\" said Dr. Fillery, rising to go out.\n\n\"I promise,\" I said, while the Comely One was arranging my pillows and sheets with quick, clever hands, sometimes touching my cheek on purpose as she did so. \"I will not worship, unless it is commanded of me first. The increased sweetness of her smell will tell me.\"\n\nBut indeed already I had forgotten her, and I no longer realized who it was that tripped about my bed, doing numerous little things to make me comfortable. My friend, the understanding one, companion of my big friend, Mason, who was dead, also had left the room. His twitching mouth, his laughter, and his shining eyes were gone. I was aware that the Comely One remained, doing all manner of little things about me and my bed, unnecessary things, but my pity and my worship were not asked, so I forgot her. My thinking had wearied me, and my feeling was not touched. I began to hum softly to myself; my giant rhythms rose; I went forth towards my Powers of Wind and Fire, full of my own natural joy. I forgot the Race with its men, its women, its rules and games, its tiny tricks, its civilization. I was free for a little with my own.\n\nOne detail interfered a little with the rhythms, but only for a second and very faintly even then. The Comely One's face grew dark.\n\n\"He's gone off asleep\u2014actually,\" I heard her mutter, as she left the room with a fling of her little skirts, shutting the door behind her with a bang.\n\nThat bang was far away. I was already rising and falling in that natural happy state which to me meant freedom. It is hard to tell about, but that dear Fillery knows, I am sure, exactly what I know, though he has forgotten it. He has known us somewhere, I feel. He understands our service. But, like me, he has forgotten too.\n\nWhat really happened to me? Where did I go, what did I see and feel when my rhythms took me off?\n\nThinking is nowhere in it\u2014I can tell him that. I am conscious of the Sun.\n\nOne difficulty is that my being here confuses me. Here I am already caught, confined and straitened. I am within certain limits. I can only move in three ways, three measurements, three dimensions. The space I am in here allows only little rhythms; they are coarse and slow and heavy, and beat against confining walls as it were, are thrown back, cross and recross each other, so that while they themselves grow less, their confusion grows greater. The forms and outlines I can build with them are poor and clumsy and insignificant. Spirals I cannot make. Then I forget.\n\nInto these small rhythms I cannot compress myself; the squeezing hurts. Yet neither can I make them bigger to suit myself. I would break forth towards the Sun.\n\nThus I feel cramped, confused and crippled. It is almost impossible to tell of my big rhythms, for it is an attempt to tell of one thing in terms of another. How can I fix fire and wind upon the point of a pin, for instance, and examine them through a magnifying-glass? The Sun remains. What I experience, really, when I go off into my own freedom is release. My rhythms are of the Sun. They are his messengers, they are my law, they are my life and happiness. By means of them I fulfill the purpose of my being. I work, so Fillery calls it. I build.\n\nThat, at any rate, is literally true. My thinking stops at that point, perhaps; but \"I think\" I mean by \"release\"\u2014that I escape back from being trapped by all these separate little individualities, human beings each working on his own, for his own, and against all the others\u2014escape from this stifling tangle into the sweep of my big rhythms which work together and in unison. I search for lost companions, but do not find them\u2014the golden skins and radiant faces, the mighty figures and the splendid shapes.\n\nThey work without effort, however. That is another difference.\n\nI, too, work, only I work with them, and never against them. I can draw upon them as they can draw upon me. We do draw on one another. We know harmony. Service is our method and system.\n\nMy dear Fillery also wants to know who \"we\" are. How can I tell him? The moment I try to \"think,\" I seem to forget. This forgetting, indeed, is one of the limits against which I bang myself, so that I am flung back upon the tangle of criss-cross, tiny rhythms which confuse and obliterate the very thing he wants to know. Yet the Sun I never forget\u2014father of fire and wind. My companions are lost temporarily. I am shut off from them. It seems I cannot have them and the Race at the same time. I yearn and suffer to rejoin them. The service we all know together is great joy. Of love, this love between two isolated individuals the Race counts the best thing they have\u2014we know nothing.\n\nNow, here is one thing I can understand quite clearly:\n\nI have watched and helped the Race, as he calls it, for countless ages. Yet from outside it. Never till now have I been inside its limits with it. And a dim sense of having watched it through a veil or curtain comes to me. I can faintly recall that I tried to urge my big rhythms in among its members, as great waves of heat or sound might be launched upon an ant-heap. I used to try to force and project my vast rhythms into their tiny ones, hoping to make these latter swell and rise and grow\u2014but never with success. Though a few members, here and there, felt them and struggled to obey and use their splendid swing, the rest did not seem to notice them at all... Indeed, they objected to the struggling efforts of the few who did feel them, for their own small accustomed rhythms were interfered with. The few were generally broken into little pieces and pushed violently out of the way.\n\nAnd this made me feel pitiful, I remember dimly; because these smaller rhythms, though insignificant, were exquisite. They were of extraordinary beauty. Could they only have been increased, the Race that knew and used them must have changed my own which, though huge and splendid of their kind, lacked the intense, perfect loveliness of the smaller kind.\n\nThe Race, had it accepted mine and mastered them, must have carried themselves and me towards still mightier rhythms which I alone could never reach.\n\nThis, then, is clear to me, though very faint now. Fillery, who can think for a long time, instead of like me for seconds only, will understand what I mean. For if I tell him what \"we\" did, he may be able to think out what \"we\" were.\n\n\"Your work?\" he asked me too.\n\nI'm not sure I know what he means by \"work.\" We were incessantly active, but not for ourselves. There was no effort. There was easy and sure accomplishment\u2014in the sense that nothing could stop or hinder our fulfilling our own natures. Obstacles, indeed, helped our power and made it greater, for everything feeds fire and opposition adds to the pressure of wind. Our main activity was to make perfect forms. We were form-builders. Apart from this, our \"work\" was to maintain and keep active all rhythms less than our own, yet of our kind. I speak of my own kind alone. We had no desire to be known outside our kind. We worked and moved and built up swiftly, but out of sight\u2014an endless service.\n\n\"You are the Powers behind what we call Nature, then?\" the dear Fillery asked me. \"You operate behind growing things, even behind inanimate things like trees and stones and flowers. Your big rhythms, as you call them, are our Laws of Nature. Your own particular department, your own elements evidently, were heat and air.\"\n\nI could not answer that. But, as he said it, I saw in his grey eyes the flash of fire which so few of his Race possessed; and I felt vaguely that he was one of the struggling members who was aware of the big rhythms and who would be put away in little pieces later by the rest. It made me pitiful. \"Forget your own tiny rhythms,\" I said, \"and come over to us. But bring your tiny rhythms with you because they are so exquisitely lovely. We shall increase them.\"\n\nHe did not answer me. His mouth twitched at the corners, and he had an attack of that irritation which, he says, is relieved and expressed by laughter. Yet the face shone.\n\nThe laughter, however, was a very quick, full, natural answer, all the same. It was happy and enthusiastic. I saw that laughter made his rhythms bigger at once. Then laughter was probably the means to use. It was a sort of bridge.\n\n\"Your instantaneous comprehension of our things puzzles me,\" he said. \"You grasp our affairs in all their relations so swiftly. Yet it is all new to you.\" His voice and face made me wish to stroke and help him, he was so dear and eager. \"How do you manage it?\" he asked point blank. \"Our things are surely foreign to your nature.\"\n\n\"But they are of children,\" I told him. \"They are small and so very simple. There are no difficulties. Your language is block letters because your self-expression, as you call it, is so limited. It all comes to me at a glance. I and my kind can remember a million tiniest details without effort.\"\n\nHe did not laugh, but his face looked full of questions. I could not help him further. \"A scrap, probably, of what you've taught us,\" I heard him mumble, though no further questions came. \"Well,\" he went on presently, while I lay and watched the pale fire slip in tiny waves about his eyes, \"remember this: since our alphabet is so easy to you, follow it, stick to it, do not go outside it. There's a good rule that will save trouble for others as well as for yourself.\"\n\n\"I remember and I try. But it is not always easy. I get so cramped and stiff and lifeless with it.\"\n\n\"This sunless, chilly England, of course, cannot feed you,\" he said. \"The sense of beauty in our Race, too, is very poor.\"\n\nOnce he suddenly looked up and fixed his eyes on my face. His manner became very earnest.\n\n\"Now, listen to me,\" he said. \"I'm going to read you something; I want you to tell me what you make of it. It's private; that is, I have no right to show it to others, but as no one would understand it\u2014with the exception possibly of yourself\u2014secrecy is not of importance.\" And his mouth twitched a little.\n\nHe drew a sheaf of papers from an inner pocket, and I saw they were covered with fine writing. I laughed; this writing always made me laugh\u2014it was so laborious and slow. The writing I knew best, of course, lay all over and inside the earth and skies. The privacy also made me laugh, so strange seemed the idea to me, and so impossible\u2014this idea of secrecy. It was such an admission of ignorance.\n\n\"I will understand it quickest by reading it,\" I said. \"I take in a page at once\u2014in your block letters.\"\n\nBut he preferred to read it out himself, so that he could note the effect upon me, he explained, of definite passages. He saw that I guessed his purpose, and we laughed together a moment. \"When you tire of listening,\" he said, \"just tell me and I'll pause.\" I gave him my hand to hold. \"It helps me to stay here,\" I explained, and he nodded as he grasped me in his warm firm clasp.\n\n\"It's written by one who may have known you and your big rhythms, though I can't be sure,\" he added. \"One of\u2014er\u2014my patients wrote it, someone who believed she was in communication with a kind of immense Nature-spirit.\"\n\nThen he began to read in his clear, windy voice:\n\n\"'I sit and weave. I feel strange; as if I had so much consciousness that words cannot explain it. The failure of others makes my work more hard, but my own purposes never fail, I am associated with those who need me. The universal doors are open to me. I compass Creation.'\"\n\nBut already I began to hum my songs, though to please him I kept the music low, and he, dear Fillery, did not bid me stop, but only tightened his grasp upon my hand. I listened with pleasure and satisfaction. Therefore I hummed.\n\n\"'I am silent, seeking no expression, needing no communication, satisfied with the life that is in me. I do not even wish to be known about\u2014'\"\n\n\"That's where your Race,\" I put in, \"is to me as children. All they do must be shouted about so loud or they think it has not happened.\"\n\n\"'I do not wish to be forced to obtrude myself,'\" he went on. \"'There are hosts like me. We do not want that which does not belong to us. We do not want that hindrance, that opposition which rouses an undesirable consciousness; for without that opposition we could never have known of disobedience. We are formless. The formless is the real. That cannot die. It is eternal.'\"\n\nAgain he tightened his grasp, and this time also laid his eyes a moment on my own, over the top of his paper, so that I kept my music back with a great effort. For it was hard not to express myself when my own came calling in this fashion.\n\nHe continued reading aloud. He selected passages now, instead of going straight through the pages. The words helped memory in me; flashes of what I had forgotten came back in sheets of colour and waves of music; the phrases built little spirals, as it were, between two states. Of these two states, I now divined, he understood one perfectly\u2014his own, and the other\u2014mine\u2014partially. Yet he had a little of both, I knew, in himself. With me it was similar, only the understood state was not the same with us. To the Race, of course, what he read would have no meaning.\n\n\"The Comely One and the four figures,\" I said, \"how they would turn white and run if they could hear you, showing their yellow teeth and dim eyes!\"\n\nHis face remained grave and eager, though I could see the laughter running about beneath the tight brown skin as he went on reading his little bits.\n\n\"'We heard nothing of man, and were rarely even conscious of him, although he benefited by our work in all that sustained and conditioned him. The wise are silent, the foolish speak, and the children are thus led astray, for wisdom is not knowledge, it is a realization of the scheme and of one's own part in it.'\"\n\nHe took a firmer, broader grip of my hand as he read the next bit. I felt the tremble of his excitement run into my wrist and arm. His voice deepened and shook. It was like a little storm:\n\n\"'Then, suddenly, we heard man's triumphant voice. We became conscious of him as an evolving entity. Our Work had told. We had built his form and processes so faithfully. We knew that when he reached his height we must be submissive to his will.'\"\n\nA gust of memory flashed by me as I heard. Those small but perfect, exquisite, lovely rhythms!\n\n\"Who called me here? Whose voice reached after me, bringing me into this undesirable consciousness?\" I cried aloud, as the memory went tearing by, then vanished before I could recover it. At the same time Fillery let go my hand, and the little bridge was snapped. I felt what he called pain. It passed at once. I found his hand again, but the bridge was not rebuilt. How white his skin had grown, I noticed, as I looked up at his face. But the eyes shone grandly. \"I shall find the way,\" I said. \"We shall go back together to our eternal home.\"\n\nHe went on reading as though I had not interrupted, but I found it less easy to listen now.\n\nI realized then that he was gone. He had left the room, though I had not seen him go. I had been away.\n\nIt was some days ago that this occurred. It was to-day, a few hours ago, that I seized the Comely One and tried to comfort her, poor hungry member of this little Race.\n\nBut both occurrences help us\u2014help dear Fillery and myself\u2014to understand how difficult it is to answer his questions and tell him exactly what he wants to know.\n\n\"How long, O Lord, how long!\" I hear his yearning cry. \"Yet other beings cannot help us; they can only tell us what their own part is.\"\n\nAfter the door had clicked I knew release for a bit\u2014release from a state I partially understood and so found irksome, into another where I felt at home and so found pleasurable. In the big rhythms my nature expressed itself apparently. I rose, seeking my lost companions. They\u2014the Devonham and his busy little figures\u2014called it sleep. It may be \"sleep.\" But I find there what I seek yet have forgotten, and that with me were dear Fillery and another\u2014a Comely One whom he brings\u2014as though we belong together and have a common origin. But this other Comely One\u2014who is it?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 323", + "text": "About a week after the arrival of LeVallon in London, Dr. Fillery came out of the Home one morning early, upon some uninteresting private business. He had left \"LeVallon\" happy with his books and garden, Devonham was with him to answer questions or direct his energies; the other \"cases\" in the establishment were moving nicely towards a cure.\n\nThe November air was clear and almost bright; no personal worries troubled him. His mind felt free and light.\n\nIt was one of those mornings when Nature slips, very close and sweet, into the heart, so close and sweet that the mind wonders why people quarrel and disagree, when it is so easy to forgive, and the planet seems but a big, lovely, happy garden, evil an impossible nightmare, and personal needs few and simple.\n\nHe walked by cross roads towards Primrose Hill, entering Regent's Park near the Zoo. An early white frost was rapidly melting in the sun. The sky showed a faint tinge of blue. He saw floating sea-gulls. These, and a faint breeze that stirred the yellowing last leaves of autumn, gave his heart a sudden lift.\n\nAnd this lift was in the direction of a forbidden corner. He was aware of some exquisite dawn-wind far away stirring a million flowers, dew sparkled, streams splashed and murmured. A valley gleamed and vanished, yet left across his mind its shining trail... For this lift of his heart made him soar into a region where it was only too easy to override temptation. Fillery, however, though his invisible being soared, kept both visible feet firmly on the ground. The surface was slippery, being melted by the sun, but frost kept the earth hard and frozen underneath. His balance never was in danger. He remained detached and a spectator.\n\nShe walked beside him nevertheless, a figure of purity and radiance, perfumed, soft, delicious. She was so ignorant of life. That was her wonder partly; for beauty was her accident and, while admirable, was not a determining factor. Life, in its cruder sense, she did not know, though moving through the thick of it. It neither touched nor soiled her; she brushed its dirt and dust aside as though a non-conducting atmosphere surrounded her. Her emotions, deep and searching, had remained untorn. A quality of pristine innocence belonged to her, as though, in the noisy clamour of ambitious civilized life, she remained still aware of Eden. Her grace, her loveliness, her simplicity moved by his side as naturally, it seemed to him, as air or perfume.\n\n\"Iraida,\" he murmured to himself, with a smile of joy. \"Nayan Khilkoff. All the men worship and adore you, yet respect you too. They cannot touch you. You remain aloof, unstained.\" And, remembering LeVallon's remarks in cinema and theatre, he could have sung at this mere thought of her.\n\n\"Untouched by coarseness, something unearthly about your loveliness of soul, a baby, a saint, and to all the men in Khilkoff's Studio, a mother. Where do you really come from? Whence do you derive? Your lovely soul can have no dealings with our common flesh. How many young fellows have you saved already, how many floundering characters redeemed! They crave your earthly, physical love. Instead you surprise and disappoint and shock them into safety again\u2014by giving to them Love...!\"\n\nAnd, as he half repeated his vivid thoughts aloud, he suddenly saw her coming towards him from the ornamental water, and instantly, wondering what he should say to her, his mind contracted. The thing in him that sang went backward into silence. He put a brake upon himself. But he watched her coming nearer, wondering what brought her so luckily into Regent's Park, and all the way from Chelsea, at such an hour. She moved so lightly, sweetly; she was so intangible and lovely. He feared her eyes, her voice.\n\nThey drew nearer. From looking to right and left, he raised his head. She was close, quite close, a hundred yards away. That walk, that swing, that poise of head and neck he could not mistake anywhere. His whole being glowed, thrilled, and yet contracted as in pain.\n\nA sentence about the weather, about her own, her father's, health, about his calling to see them shortly, rose to his lips. He turned his eyes away, then again looked up. They were now not twenty yards apart; in another moment he would have raised his hat, when, with a sensation of cold disappointment in him, she went past in totally irresponsive silence. It was a stranger\u2014a shop girl, a charwoman, a bus-conductor's wife\u2014anybody but she whom he had thought.\n\nHow could he have been so utterly mistaken? It amazed him. It was, indeed, months since they had met, yet his knowledge of her appearance was so accurate and detailed that such an error seemed incredible. He had experienced, besides, the actual thrill.\n\nThe phenomenon, however, was not new to him. Often had he experienced it, much as others have. He knew, from this, that she was somewhere near, coming deliciously, deliberately towards him, moving every minute firmly nearer, from a point in great London town which she had left just at the precise moment which would time her crossing his own path later. They would meet presently, if not now. Fate had arranged all details, and something in him was aware of it before it happened.\n\nThe phenomenon, as a matter of fact, was repeated twice again in the next half-hour: he saw her\u2014on both occasions beyond the possibility of question\u2014coming towards him, yet each time it was a complete stranger masquerading in her guise.\n\nIt meant, he knew, that their two minds\u2014hearts, too, he wondered, with a sense of secret happiness, enjoyed intensely then instantly suppressed\u2014were wirelessing to one another across the vast city, and that both transmitter and receiver, their physical bodies, would meet shortly round the corner, or along the crowded street. Strong currents of desiring thought, he knew, he hoped, he wondered, were trying to shape the crude world nearer to the heart's desire, causing the various intervening passers-by to assume the desirable form and outline in advance.\n\nHe reflected, following the habit of his eager mind; this wireless discovery, after all, was the discovery of a universal principle in Nature. It was common to all forms of life, a faint beginning of that advance towards marvellous intercommunicating, semi-telepathic brotherhood he had always hoped for, believed in... Even plants, he remembered, according to Bose...\n\nThen, suddenly, half-way down Baker Street he found her close beside him.\n\nShe was dressed so becomingly, so naturally, that no particular detail caught his eye, although she wore more colour than was usual in the dull climate known to English people. There was a touch of fur and there were flowers, but these were part of her appearance as a whole, and the hat was so exactly right, though it was here that Englishwomen generally went wrong, that he could not remember afterwards what it was like. It was as suitable as natural hair. It looked as if she had grown it. The shining eyes were what he chiefly noticed. They seemed to increase the pale sunlight in the dingy street.\n\nShe was so close that he caught her perfume almost before he recognized her, and a sense of happiness invaded his whole being instantly, as he took the slender hand emerging from a muff and held it for a moment. The casual sentences he had half prepared fled like a flock of birds surprised. Their eyes met... And instantly the sun rose over a far Khaketian valley; he was aware of joy, of peace, of deep contentment, London obliterated, the entire world elsewhere. He knew the thrill, the ecstasy of some long-forgotten dawn...\n\nBut in that brief second while he held her hand and gazed into her eyes, there flashed before him a sudden apparition. With lightning rapidity this picture darted past between them, paused for the tiniest fraction of a second, and was gone again. So swiftly the figure shot across that the very glance he gave her was intercepted, its angle changed, its meaning altered. He started involuntarily, for he knew that vision, the bright rushing messenger, someone who brought glad tidings. And this time he recognized it\u2014it was the figure of \"N. H.\"\n\nThe outward start, the slight wavering of the eyelids, both were noticed, though not understood, much less interpreted by the young woman facing him.\n\n\"You are as much surprised as I am,\" he heard the pleasant, low-pitched voice before his face. \"I thought you were abroad. Father and I came back from Sark only yesterday.\"\n\n\"I haven't left town,\" he replied. \"It was Devonham went to Switzerland.\"\n\nHe was thinking of her pleasant voice, and wondering how a mere voice could soothe and bless and comfort in this way. The picture of the flashing figure, too, preoccupied him. His various mind was ever busy with several trains of thought at once, though all correlated. Why, he was wondering, should that picture of \"N. H.\" leave a sense of chill upon his heart? Why had the first radiance of this meeting thus already dimmed a little? Her nearness, too, confused him as of old, making his manner a trifle brusque and not quite natural, until he found his centre of control again. He looked quickly up and down the street, moved aside to let some people pass, then turned to the girl again. \"Your holiday has done you good, Iraida,\" he said quietly; \"I hope your father enjoyed it too.\"\n\n\"We both enjoyed ourselves,\" she answered, watching him, something of a protective air about her. \"I wish you had been with us, for that would have made it perfect. I was thinking that only this morning\u2014as I walked across Hyde Park.\"\n\n\"How nice of you! I believe I, too, was thinking of you both, as I walked through Regent's Park.\" He smiled for the first time.\n\n\"It's very odd,\" she went on, \"though you can explain it probably,\" she added, with a smile that met his own, increasing it, \"or, at any rate, Dr. Devonham could\u2014but I've seen you several times this morning already\u2014in the last half-hour. I've seen you in other people in the street, I mean. Yet I wasn't thinking of you at the actual moment, it's two months since we've met, and I imagined you were abroad.\"\n\n\"Odd, yes,\" he said, half shyly, half curtly. \"It's an experience many have, I believe.\"\n\nShe gazed up at him. \"It's very natural, I think, when people like each other, Edward, and are in sympathy.\"\n\n\"Yet it happens with people who don't like each other too,\" he objected, and at the same moment was vexed that he had used the words.\n\nIraida Khilkoff laughed. He had the feeling that she read his thoughts as easily as if they were printed in red letters on his grey felt hat.\n\n\"There must be some bond between them, though,\" she remarked, \"an emotion, I mean, whatever it may be\u2014even hatred.\"\n\n\"Probably, Nayan,\" he agreed. \"It's you now, not Devonham, that wants to explain things. I think I must take you into the Firm, you could take charge of the female patients with great success.\"\n\nWhereupon she looked up at him with such a grave mothering expression that he was aware of her secret power, her central source of strength in dealing with men. Her innocence and truth were an atmosphere about her, protecting her as naturally and neatly as the clothes upon her body. She believed in men. He felt like a child beside her.\n\n\"I'm in the Firm already,\" she said, \"for you made me a partner years ago when I was so high,\" and her small gloved hand indicated the stature of a little girl. \"You taught me first.\"\n\nHe remembered the bleak northern town where fifteen years ago he had known her father as a patient for some minor ailment, and the friendship that grew out of the relationship. He remembered the child of nine or ten who sat on his knee and repeated to him the Russian fairy tales her mother told her; he recalled the charm, the wonder, the extraordinary power of belief. Her words brought back again that flowered Caucasian valley in the sunlight and this, again, flashed upon the screen the strange bright figure that had already once intercepted their glance, as though it somehow came between them...\n\n\"You have one advantage over me,\" he rejoined presently, \"for in my Clinique the people know that they need treatment, whereas in the Studio you catch your patients unawares. They do not know they're ill. You heal them without their being aware that they need healing.\"\n\n\"Yet some of our habitu\u00e9s have found their way later to your consulting-room,\" she reminded him.\n\n\"Merely to finish what you had first begun\u2014a sort of convalescence. You work in the big, raw world, I in a mere specialized corner of it.\"\n\nHe turned away, lest the power in her eyes overcome him. The traffic thundered past, the people crowded, jostling them. He could have stood there talking to her all day long, the London street forgotten or full of flowers and Eden's trees and rippling summer streams. The pale sunlight caught her face beside him and made it shine...\n\nHe longed to take her in his arms and fly through the dawn for ever, for his clean mind saw her without clothing, her hair loose in the wind, her white shape fleeing from him, yet beckoning across a gleaming shoulder that he must overtake and capture her...\n\n\"I'm on my way to St. Dunstan's,\" he heard the musical voice. \"A friend of father's... Come with me, will you?\" And with her muff she touched his arm, trying to make him turn her way. But just as he felt the touch he saw the bright figure again. Swifter than himself and far more powerful, it leaped dancing past and carried her away before his very eyes. She waved her hand, her eyes faded like stars into the distance of some unearthly spring\u2014and she was gone. A pang of peculiar anguish seized him, as the mental picture flashed with the speed of light and vanished. For the figure seemed of elemental power, taking its own with perfect ease...\n\nHe shook his head. \"I'll come to see you to-morrow instead,\" he told her. \"I'll come to the Studio in the afternoon, if you'll both be in. I'd like to bring a friend with me, if I may.\"\n\n\"Good-bye then.\" She took his hand and kept it. \"I shall expect you to tell me all about this\u2014friend. I knew you had something on your mind, for your thoughts have been elsewhere all the time.\"\n\n\"Julian LeVallon,\" he replied quickly. \"He's staying with me indefinitely.\" His face grew stern a moment about the mouth. \"I think he may need you,\" he added with abrupt significance.\n\n\"Julian LeVallon,\" she repeated, the name sounding very musical the way her slightly foreign accent touched it \"And what nationality may that be?\"\n\nDr. Fillery hesitated. \"His parents, Nayan, I believe, were English,\" he said. \"He has lived all his life in the Jura Mountains, alone with an old scholar, poet and geologist, who brought him up. Of our modern life he knows little. I think you may\u2014\" He broke off. \"His mother died when he was born,\" he concluded.\n\n\"And of women he knows nothing,\" she replied, understandingly, \"so that he will probably fall in love with the first he sees\u2014with Nayan.\"\n\n\"I hope so, Nayan, and he will be safe with you.\"\n\nShe watched her companion's face for a minute or two with her clear searching eyes. She smiled. But his own face wore a mask now; no figure this time flashed between their deep understanding gaze.\n\n\"A woman, you think, can teach and help him more than a man,\" she said, without lowering her eyes.\n\n\"Probably\u2014perhaps, at any rate. The material, I must warn you at once, is new and strange. I want him to meet you.\"\n\n\"Then I am in the Firm,\" was all she answered, \"and you can't do without me.\" She let go the hand she had held all this time, and turned from him, looking once across her shoulder as he, too, went upon his way.\n\n\"About three o'clock we shall expect you\u2014and Mr. Julian LeVallon,\" she added. \"The Prometheans are coming too, as of course you know, but that won't matter. Father has let the Studio to them.\"\n\n\"The more the merrier,\" he answered, raised his hat, and went on at a rapid pace up Baker Street.\n\nBut with him up the London street went a flock of thoughts, hopes, fears and memories that were hard to disentangle. Lost, forgotten dreams went with him too. He had known that one day he must be \"executed,\" yet with his own hands he had just slipped the noose about his neck. Detachment from life, he realized, keeping aloof from the emotions that touch one's fellow beings, can only be, after all, a pose. In his case it was evidently a pose assumed for safety and self-protection, an artificial attitude he wore to keep his heart from error. His love, born of some far unearthly valley, undoubtedly consumed him, while yet he said it nay...\n\nHe had himself suggested bringing together the girl and \"N. H.\" There had been no need to do this. Yet he had deliberately offered it, and she had instantly accepted. Even while he said the words there was a volcano of emotion in him, several motives fighting to combine. The fear for himself, being selfish, he had set aside at once; there was also the fear for her\u2014the odd certainty in him that at last her woman's nature would be waked; lastly, the fear for \"N. H.\" himself. And here he clashed with his promise to Devonham. Behind the simple proposal lay these various threads of motive, emotion and qualification.\n\nNow, as he hurried along the street, they rushed to and fro about his mind, each at its own speed and with its own impetuous strength. It was the last one, however, the certainty that her mere presence must evoke the \"N. H.\" personality, banishing the commonplace LeVallon; it was this that, in the end, perhaps troubled him most. An intuitive conviction assured him that this was bound to be the result of their meeting. LeVallon would sink down out of sight; \"N. H.\" would emerge triumphant and vital, bringing his elemental power with him. The girl would summon him...\n\n\"I must tell Paul first,\" he decided. \"I must consult his judgment. Otherwise I'm breaking my promise. If Paul is against it, I will send an excuse...\"\n\nWith this proviso, he dismissed the matter from his mind, noting only how clearly it revealed his own keen desire to let LeVallon disappear and \"N. H.\" become active. He himself yearned for the interest, stimulus and companionship of the strange new being that was \"N. H.\"\n\nThe other aspect of the problem he dismissed quickly too: he would lose Nayan. Yes, but he had never possessed the right to hold her. He was strong, indifferent, detached... His life in any case was a sacrifice upon the altar of a mistake with regard to which he had not been consulted. His whole existence must be passed in worship before this altar, unless he was to admit himself a failure. His ideal possession of the girl, he consoled himself, need know no change. To watch her womanhood, hitherto untouched by any man, to watch this bloom and ripen at the bidding of another must mean pain. But he faced the loss. And a curious sense of compensation lay in it somewhere\u2014the strange notion that she and he would share \"N. H.\" in a sense between them. He was already aware of a deep subtle kinship between the three of them, a kinship hardly of this physical world. And, after all, the interests of \"N. H.\" must come first. He had chosen his life, accepted it, at any rate; he must remain true to his high ideal. This strange being, blown by the winds of chance into his keeping, must be his first consideration.\n\n\"LeVallon\" needed no special help, neither from himself, nor from her, nor from others. \"LeVallon\" was ordinary enough, if not commonplace, his only interest being at those thin places in his being where the submerged personality of \"N. H.\" peeped through. Paul Devonham, he felt convinced, was wrong in thinking \"N. H.\" to be the transient manifestation.\n\nIt was the reverse that Dr. Fillery believed to be the truth. He saw in \"N. H.\" almost a new type of being altogether. In that physical body warred two personalities certainly, but \"N. H.\" was the important one, and LeVallon merely the transient outer one, masquerading on the surface merely, a kind of automatic and mechanical personality, gleaned, picked up, trained and educated, as it were, by the few years spent among the human herd.\n\nAnd this \"N. H.\" needed help, the best, the wisest possible. Both male and female help \"N. H.\" demanded. He, Edward Fillery, could supply the former, but the latter could be furnished only by some woman in whom innocence, truth and a natural mother-love\u2014the three deepest feminine qualities\u2014were happily combined. Nayan possessed them all. \"N. H.,\" the strange bright messenger, bringing perhaps glad tidings into life, had need of her.\n\nAnd Fillery, as his thoughts ran down these sad and happy paths of that lost valley in his blood, realized the meaning of the flashing intuition that had pained yet gladdened him half an hour before with its convincing symbolic picture.\n\nThis private Eden secreted in his depths he revealed to no one, though Paul, his intimate friend and keen assistant, divined its general neighbourhood and geography to some extent. It was the girl who invariably opened its ivory gates for him. They had but to meet and talk a moment, when, with a sudden drift of wonder, beauty, wildness, this Khaketian inheritance rose before him. Its sunny brilliance, its flowers, its perfumes seduced and caught him away. The unearthly mood stole over him. Thought took wings of imagination and soared beyond the planet. He foresaw, easily, the effect she would produce upon \"LeVallon.\"\n\nHe came back to earth again at the door of the Home, smiling, as so often before, at these brief wanderings in his secret Eden, yet perfectly able to pigeon-hole the experience, each detail explained, labelled, docketed, and therefore harmless...\n\nHe found Devonham in the study and at once told him of his suggestion and its possible results, and his assistant, resting before lunch after a long morning's work, looked up at him with his quick, observant air. Noticing the light in the eyes, the softer expression about the mouth, the general appearance of a strong and recent stimulus, he easily divined their origin, and showed his pleasure in his face. He longed for his old friend to be humanized and steadied by some deep romance. There was a curious new watchful attitude also about him, though cleverly concealed.\n\n\"I'm glad the Khilkoffs are back in town,\" he said easily. \"As for LeVallon\u2014he's been quiet and uninteresting all the morning. He needs the human touch, as I already said, and the Studio atmosphere, especially if the Prometheans are to be there, seems the very thing.\"\n\n\"And Nayan\u2014?\"\n\n\"Her influence is good for any man, young or old, and if LeVallon worships at her shrine like the rest of 'em, so much the better. You remember my Notes. Nothing will help towards his finding his real self quicker than an abandoned passion\u2014unreturned.\"\n\n\"Unreturned?\"\n\n\"You can't think she will give to LeVallon what so many\u2014?\"\n\n\"But may she not,\" the other interrupted, \"stimulate 'N. H.' rather than LeVallon?\"\n\nDevonham was surprised\u2014he had quickly divined the subconscious fear and jealousy. For this detached, impersonal attitude he was not prepared. Only the keenest observer could have noticed the sharp, anxious watchfulness he hid so well.\n\n\"Edward, there's only one thing I feel we\u2014you rather\u2014have to be careful about. And the girl has nothing to do with that. In your blood, remember, lies an unearthly spiritual vagrancy which you must not, dare not, communicate to him, if you ever hope to see him cured.\"\n\nDevonham regarded him keenly as he said it. He was as earnest as his chief, but the difference between the two men was fundamental, probably unbridgeable as well. The affection, trust, respect each felt for the other was sincere. Devonham, however, having never known a thought, a feeling, much less an actual experience, outside the normal gamut of humanity, regarded all such as pathogenic. Fillery, who had tasted the amazing, dangerous sweetness of such experiences, in his own being, had another standard.\n\n\"You must not exaggerate,\" observed Fillery, slowly. \"Your phrase, though, is good. 'Spiritual vagrancy' is an apt description, I admit. Yet to the 'spiritual,' if it exists, the whole universe lies open, remember, too.\"\n\nThey laughed together. Then, suddenly, Devonham rose, and a new inexpressible uneasiness was in his face. He thrust his hands deep into his trouser pockets, turned his eyes hard upon the floor, stood with his legs apart. Abruptly turning, he came a full step closer. \"Edward,\" he said, furious with himself, and yet fiercely determined to be honest, \"I may as well tell you frankly\u2014though explanation lies beyond me\u2014there's something in this\u2014this case I don't quite like.\" Behind his lowered eyelids his observation never failed.\n\nQuick as a flash, his companion took him up. \"For yourself, for others, or for himself?\" he asked, while a secret touch of joy ran through him.\n\n\"For myself perhaps,\" was the immediate rejoinder. \"It's intolerable. It's the panic sense he touches in me. I admit it frankly. I've had\u2014once or twice\u2014the desire to turn and run. But what I mean is\u2014we've got to be uncommonly careful with him,\" he ended lamely.\n\n\"LeVallon you refer to? Or 'N. H.'?\"\n\n\"'N. H.'\"\n\n\"The panic sense,\" repeated Fillery to himself more than to his friend. \"The old, old thing. I understand.\"\n\n\"Also,\" Devonham went on presently, \"I must tell you that since he came here there's been a change in every patient in the building\u2014without exception.\" He looked over his shoulder as though he heard a sound. He listened certainly, but his mind was sharply centred on his friend.\n\n\"For the better, yes,\" said Fillery at once. \"Increased vitality, I've noticed too.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" whispered the other, still listening.\n\nThere came a pause between them.\n\n\"And when we have found the real, the central self,\" pursued Fillery presently. \"When we have found the essential being\u2014what is it?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" replied Devonham with extraordinary emphasis. \"What is it?\" But even then he did not look up to meet the other's glance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 324", + "text": "The meeting with Dr. Fillery and his friends, the Khilkoffs, father and daughter, had, for one reason or another, to be postponed for a week, during which brief time even, no single day wasted, LeVallon's education proceeded rapidly. He was exceedingly quick to learn the usages of civilized society in a big city, adapting himself with an ease born surely of quick intelligence to the requirements and conventions of ordinary life.\n\nIn his perception of the rights of others, particularly, he showed a natural aptitude; he had good manners, that is, instinctively; in certain houses where Fillery took him purposely, he behaved with a courtesy and tact that belong usually to what England calls a gentleman. Except to Fillery and Devonham, he talked little, but was an excellent and sympathetic listener, a quality that helped him to make his way. With Mrs. Soames, the stern and even forbidding matron, he made such headway, that it was noticed with a surprise, including laughter. He might have been her adopted son.\n\n\"She's got a new pet,\" said Devonham, with a laugh. \"Mason taught him well. His aptitude for natural history is obvious; after a few years' study he'll make a name for himself. The 'N. H.' side will disappear now more and more, unless you stimulate it for your own ends\u2014\" He broke off, speaking lightly still, but with a carelessness some might have guessed assumed.\n\n\"You forget,\" put in his Chief, \"I promised.\"\n\nDevonham looked at him shrewdly. \"I doubt,\" he said, \"whether you can help yourself, Edward,\" the expression in his eyes for a moment almost severe.\n\nFillery remained thoughtful, making no immediate reply.\n\n\"We must remember,\" he said presently, \"that he's now in the quiescent state. Nothing has again occurred to bring 'N. H.' uppermost again.\"\n\nDevonham turned upon his friend. \"I see no reason why 'N. H.'\"\u2014he spoke with emphasis\u2014\"should ever get uppermost again. In my opinion we can make this quiescent state\u2014LeVallon\u2014the permanent one.\"\n\n\"We can't keep him in a cage like Mrs. Soames's mice and parrot. Are you, for instance, against my taking him to the Studio? Do you think it's a mistake to let him meet the Prometheans?\"\n\n\"That's just where Mason went wrong,\" returned Devonham. \"He kept him in a cage. The boy met only a few peasants, trees, plants, animals and birds. The sun, making him feel happy, became his deity. The rain he hated. The wind inspired and invigorated him. If we now introduce the human element wisely, I see no danger. If he can stand the Khi\u2014the Studio and the Prometheans, he can stand anything. He may be considered cured.\"\n\nThe door opened and a tall, radiant figure with bright eyes and untidy shining hair came into the room, carrying an open book.\n\n\"Mrs. Soames says I've nothing to do with stars,\" said a deep musical voice, \"and that I had better stick to animals and plants. She says that star-gazing never was good for anyone except astronomers who warn us about tides, eclipses and dangerous comets.\"\n\nHe held out the big book, open at an enlarged stellar photograph. \"What, please, is a galaxy, a star that is suddenly brilliant, then disappears in a few weeks, and a nebula?\"\n\nBefore either of the astonished men could answer, LeVallon turned to Devonham, his face wearing the gravity and intense curiosity of a child. \"And, please, are you the only sort of being in the universe? Mrs. Soames says that the earth is the only inhabited place. Aren't there other beings besides you anywhere? The Earth is such a little planet, and the solar system, according to this book, is one of the smallest too.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" Devonham said gently, \"do not bother your head with useless speculations. Our only valuable field of study is this planet, for it is all we know or ever can know. Whether the universe holds other beings or not, can be of no importance to us at present.\"\n\nLeVallon stared fixedly at him, saying nothing. Something of his natural radiance dimmed a little. \"Then what are all these things that I remember I've forgotten?\" he asked, his blue eyes troubled.\n\n\"It will take you all your lifetime to understand beings like me, and like yourself and like Dr. Fillery. Don't waste time speculating about possible inhabitants in other stars.\"\n\nHe spoke good-humouredly, but firmly, as one who laid down certain definite lines to be followed, while Dr. Fillery, watching, made no audible comment. Once long ago he had asked his own father a somewhat similar question.\n\n\"But I shall so soon get to the end of you,\" replied LeVallon, a disappointed expression on his face. \"I may speculate then?\" he asked.\n\n\"When you get to the end of me and of yourself and of Dr. Fillery\u2014yes, then you may speculate to your heart's content,\" said Devonham in a kindly tone. \"But it will take you longer than you think perhaps. Besides, there are women, too, remember. You will find them more complicated still.\"\n\nA curious look stole into the other's eager eyes. He turned suddenly towards the older man who had his confidence so completely. There was in the movement, in the incipient gesture that he made with his arms, his hands, almost with his head and face as well, something of appeal that set the doctor's nerves alert. And the change of voice\u2014it was lower now and more musical than before\u2014increased the nameless message that flashed to his brain and heart. There was a hint of song, of chanting almost, in the tone. There was music in him. For the voice, Fillery realized suddenly, brought in the over-tones, somewhat in the way good teachers of singing and voice production know. There was the depth, sonority, singing quality which means that the \"harmonics\" are made audible, as with a violin played in perfect tune. The sound seemed produced not by the vocal cords alone, but by the entire being, so to speak. Yet, \"LeVallon's\" voice had not this rich power, he noticed. Its appearance was a sign that \"N. H.\" was stirring into activity and utterance.\n\n\"Women, yes,\" the young man repeated to himself. \"Women\u2014bring back something. Their eyes make me remember\u2014\" he turned abruptly to the open book upon the doctor's knee. \"It's something to do with stars, these memories,\" he went on eagerly, the voice resonant. \"Stars, women, memories... where are they all gone to...? Why have I lost...? What is it that...?\"\n\nIt seemed as if a veil passed from his face, a thin transparency that dimmed the shining effect his hair and eyes and radiant health produced. A far-away expression followed it.\n\n\"'N. H.'!\" Devonham quickly flashed the whispered warning. And in the same instant, Fillery rose, holding out the open book.\n\n\"Come, LeVallon,\" he said, putting a hand upon his shoulder, \"we'll go into my room for an hour, and I'll tell you all about the galaxies and nebul\u00e6. You shall ask as many questions as you like. Devonham is a very busy man and has duties to attend to just now.\"\n\nHe moved across to open the door, and LeVallon, his face changing more and more, went with him; the light in his eyes increased; he smiled, the far-away expression passed a little.\n\n\"Dr. Devonham is quite right in what he says about useless speculations,\" continued Fillery, as they went out arm in arm together, \"but we can play a bit with thought and imagination, for all that\u2014you and I. 'Let your thought wander like an insect which is allowed to fly in the air, but is at the same time confined by a thread.' Come along, we'll have an hour's play. We'll travel together among the golden stars, eh?\"\n\n\"Play!\" exclaimed the youth, looking up with flashing eyes. \"Ah! in the Spring we play! Our work with sap, roots, crystals, fire, all finished out of sight, so that their results followed of their own accord.\" He was talking at great speed in a low voice, a deep, rolling voice, and half to himself. \"Spring is our holiday, the forms made perfect and ready for the power to rush through, and we rush with it, playing everywhere\u2014\"\n\n\"Spring is the wine of life, yes,\" put in Fillery, caught away momentarily by something behind the words he listened to, as though a rhythm swept him. \"Creative life racing up and flooding into every form and body everywhere. It brings wonder, joy\u2014play, as you call it.\"\n\n\"We\u2014we build the way\u2014\" The youth broke off abruptly as they reached the study door. Something flowed down and back in him, emptying face and manner of a mood which had striven for utterance, then passed. He returned to the previous talk about the stars again:\n\n\"Who attends to them? Who looks after them?\" he inquired, a deep, peculiar interest in his manner, his eyes turning a little darker.\n\n\"What we call the laws of Nature,\" was the reply, \"which are, after all, merely our 'descriptive formul\u00e6 summing up certain regularities of recurrence,' the laws under which they were first set alight and then sent whirling into space. Under these same laws they will all eventually burn out and come to rest. They will be dead.\"\n\n\"Dead,\" repeated the other, as though he did not understand. \"They are the children of the laws,\" he stated, rather than asked. \"Are the laws kind and faithful? They never tire?\"\n\nFillery explained with one-half of his nature, and still as to a child. The other half of him lay under firm restraint according to his promise. He outlined in general terms man's knowledge of the stars. \"The laws never tire,\" he said.\n\n\"But the stars end! They burn out, stop, and die! You said so.\"\n\nThe other replied with something judicious and cautious about time and its immense duration. But he was startled.\n\n\"And those who attend to the laws,\" came then the words that startled him, \"who keeps them working so that they do not tire?\"\n\nIt was something in the tone of voice perhaps that, once again, produced in his listener the extraordinary sudden feeling that Humanity was, after all, but an insignificant, a microscopic detail in the Universe; that it was, say, a mere ant-heap in the colossal jungle crowded with other minuter as well as immenser life of every sort and kind, and, moreover, that \"N. H.\" was aware of this \"other life,\" or at least of some vast section of it, and had been, if he were not still, associated with it. The two letters by which he was designated acquired a deeper meaning than before.\n\nA rich glow came into the young face, and into the eyes, growing ever darker, a look of burning; the skin had the effect of radiating; the breathing became of a sudden deep and rhythmical. The whole figure seemed to grow larger, expanding as though it extended already and half filled the room. Into the atmosphere about it poured, as though heat and light rushed through it, a strange effect of power.\n\n\"You'd like to visit them, perhaps\u2014wouldn't you?\" asked Fillery gently.\n\n\"I feel\u2014\" began the other, then stopped short.\n\n\"You feel it would interest you,\" the doctor helped\u2014then saw his mistake.\n\n\"I feel,\" repeated the youth. The sentence was complete. \"I am there.\"\n\n\"Ah! when you feel you're there, you are there?\"\n\nThe other nodded.\n\nHe leaned forward. \"I know,\" he whispered as with sudden joy. \"You help me to remember, Fillery.\" The voice, though whispering, was strong; it vibrated full of over-tones and under-tones. The sound of the \"F\" was like a wind in branches. \"You wonderful, you know too! It is the same with flowers, with everything. We build with wind and fire.\" He stopped, rubbing a hand across his forehead a moment. \"Wind and fire,\" he went on, but this time to himself, \"my splendid mighty ones...\" Dropping his hand, he flashed an amazing look of enthusiasm and power into his companion's face. The look held in concentrated form something of the power that seemed pulsing and throbbing in his atmosphere. \"Help me to remember, dear Fillery,\" his voice rang out aloud like singing. \"Remember with me why we both are here. When we remember we can go back where we belong.\"\n\nThe glow went from his face and eyes as though an inner lamp had been suddenly extinguished. The power left both voice and atmosphere. He sank back in his chair, his great sensitive hands spread over the table where the star charts lay, as through the open window came the crash and clatter of an aeroplane tearing, like some violent, monstrous insect, through the sunlight.\n\nA look of pain came into his eyes. \"It goes again. I've lost it.\"\n\n\"We were talking about the stars and the laws of Nature,\" said Fillery quickly, though his voice was shaking, \"when that noisy flying-machine disturbed us.\" He leaned over, taking his companion's hand. His heart was beating. He smelt the open spaces. The blood ran wildly in his veins. It was with the utmost difficulty he found simple, common words to use. \"You must not ask too much at once. We will learn slowly\u2014there is so much we have to learn together.\"\n\nLeVallon's smile was beautiful, but it was the smile of \"LeVallon\" again only.\n\n\"Thank you, dear Fillery,\" he replied, and the talk continued as between a tutor and his backward pupil... But for some time afterwards the \"tutor's\" mind and heart, while attending to LeVallon now, went travelling, it seemed, with \"N. H.\" There was this strange division in his being... for \"N. H.\" appealed with power to a part of him, perhaps the greatest, that had never yet found expression, much less satisfaction.\n\nMany a talk together of this kind, with occasional semi-irruptions of \"N. H.,\" he had already enjoyed with his new patient, and LeVallon was by now fairly well instructed in the general history of our little world, briefly but picturesquely given. Evolution had been outlined and explained, the rise of man sketched vividly, the great war, and the planet's present state of chaos described in a way that furnished a clear enough synopsis of where humanity now stood. LeVallon was able to hold his own in conversation with others; he might pass for a simple-minded but not ill-informed young man, and both Paul Devonham and Edward Fillery, though each for different reasons, were, therefore, well satisfied with the young human being entrusted to their care, a human being to be eventually discharged from the Home, healed and cured of extravagances, made harmonious with himself, able to make his own way in the world alone. To Devonham it appeared already certain that, within a reasonable time, LeVallon would find himself happily at home among his fellow kind, a normal, even a gifted young man with a future before him. \"N. H.\" would disappear and be forgotten, absorbed back into the parent Self. To his colleague, on the other hand, another vision of his future opened. Sooner or later it was LeVallon that would disappear and \"N. H.\" remain in full control, a strange, possibly a new type of being, not alone marvellously gifted, but who might even throw light upon a vista of research and knowledge hitherto unknown to humanity, and with benefits for the Race as yet beyond the reach of any wildest prophecy.\n\nBoth men, therefore, went gladly with him to the Khilkoff Studio that early November afternoon, anxious to observe him, his conduct, attitude, among the curious set of people to be found there on the Prometheans' Society day, and to note any reactions he might show in such a milieu. Each felt fully justified in doing so, though they would have kept an ordinary \"hysterical\" patient safely from the place. LeVallon, however, betrayed no trace of hysteria in any meaning of the word, big or little; he was stable as a navvy, betraying no undesirable reaction to the various well-known danger points. The visit might be something of an experiment perhaps, but an experiment, a test, they were justified in taking. Yet Devonham on no account would have allowed his chief to go alone. He had insisted on accompanying them.\n\nAnd to both men, as they went towards Chelsea, their quiet companion with them, came the feeling that the visit might possibly prove one of them right, the other wrong. Fillery expected that Nayan Khilkoff alone, to say nothing of the effect of the other queer folk who might be present, must surely evoke the \"N. H.\" personality now lying quiescent and inactive below the threshold of LeVallon. The charm and beauty of the girl he had never known to fail with any male, for she had that in her which was bound to stimulate the highest in the opposite sex. The excitement of the wild, questing, picturesque, if unbalanced, minds who would fill the place, must also, though in quite another way, affect the real self of anyone who came in contact with their fantastic and imaginative atmosphere. Attraction or repulsion must certainly be felt. He expected at any rate a vital clue.\n\n\"Ivan Khilkoff,\" he told LeVallon, as they went along in the car, \"is a Russian, a painter and sculptor of talent, a good-hearted and silent sort of old fellow, who has remained very poor because he refuses to advertise himself or commercialize his art, and because his work is not the kind of thing the English buy. His daughter, Nayan, teaches the piano and Russian. She is beautiful and sweet and pure, but of an independent and rather impersonal character. She has never fallen in love, for instance, though most men fall in love with her. I hope you may like and understand each other.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said LeVallon, listening attentively, but with no great interest apparently. \"I will try very much to like her and her father too.\"\n\n\"The Studio is a very big one, it is really two studios knocked into one, their living rooms opening out of it. One half of the place, being so large, they sometimes let out for meetings, dances and that sort of thing, earning a little money in that way. It is rented this evening by a Society called the Prometheans\u2014a group of people whose inquisitive temperaments lead them to believe, or half believe\u2014\"\n\n\"To imagine, if not deliberately to manufacture,\" put in Devonham.\n\n\"\u2014to imagine, let us call it,\" continued the other with a twinkle, \"that there are other worlds, other powers, other states of consciousness and knowledge open to them outside and beyond the present ones we are familiar with.\"\n\n\"They know these?\" asked LeVallon, looking up with signs of interest. \"They have experienced them?\"\n\n\"They know and experience,\" replied Fillery, \"according to their imaginations and desires, those with a touch of creative imagination claiming the most definite results, those without it being merely imitative. They report their experiences, that is, but cannot\u2014or rarely show the results to others. You will hear their talk and judge accordingly. They are interesting enough in their way. They have, at any rate, one thing of value\u2014that they are open to new ideas. Such people have existed in every age of the world's history, but after an upheaval, such as the great war has been, they become more active and more numerous, because the nervous system, reacting from a tremendous strain, produces exaggeration. Any world is better than an uncomfortable one in revolution, they think. They are, as a rule, sincere and honest folk. They add a touch of colour to the commonplace\u2014\"\n\n\"Tuppence coloured,\" murmured Devonham below his breath.\n\n\"And they believe so much in other worlds to conquer, other regions, bigger states of consciousness, other powers,\" concluded Fillery, ignoring the interruption, \"that they are half in this world, half in the next. Hence Dr. Devonham's name, the name by which he sometimes laughs at them\u2014of Half Breeds.\"\n\nLeVallon's eyes, he saw, were very big; his interest and attention were excited.\n\n\"They will probably welcome you with open arms,\" he added, \"if you care to join them. They consider themselves pioneers of a larger life. They are not mere spiritualists\u2014oh no! They are familiar with all the newest theories, and realize that an alternative hypothesis can explain all so-called psychic phenomena without dragging spirits in. It is in exaggerating results they go mostly wrong.\"\n\n\"Eccentrics,\" Devonham remarked, \"out of the circle, and hysterical to a man. They accomplish nothing. They are invariably dreamers, usually of doubtful morals and honesty, and always unworthy of serious attention. But they may amuse you for an hour.\"\n\n\"We all find it difficult to believe what we have never experienced,\" mentioned Fillery, turning to his colleague with a hearty laugh, in which the latter readily joined, for their skirmishes usually brought in laughter at the end. Just now, moreover, they were talking with a purpose, and it was wise and good that LeVallon should listen and take in what he could\u2014hearing both sides. He watched and listened certainly with open eyes and ears, as he sat between them on the wide front seat, but saying, as usual, very little.\n\nThe car turned down a narrow lane with slackening speed and slowed up before a dingy building with faded Virginia creepers sprawling about stained dirty walls. The neighbourhood was depressing, patched and dishevelled, and almost bordering on a slum. The November light was passing into early twilight.\n\n\"You,\" said LeVallon abruptly, turning round and staring at Devonham, \"make everything seem unreal to me. I do not understand you. You know so much. Why is so little real to you?\"\n\nBut Devonham, in the act of getting out of the car, made no reply, and probably had not heard the words, or, if he had heard, thought them more suitable for Fillery." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 325", + "text": "The Prometheans were evidently in full attendance; possibly the rumour had reached them that Dr. Fillery was coming. No one announced the latter's arrival, there was no servant visible; the party hung up their hats and coats in a passage, then walked into the lofty, dim-lit studio which was already filled with people and the hum of many voices.\n\nAt once, standing in a hesitating group beside the door, they were observed by everyone in the room. All asked, it seemed, \"Who is this stranger they have brought?\" Fillery caught the curious atmosphere in that first moment, an instant whiff, as it were, of excitement, interest, something picturesque, if possibly foolish, fantastic, too, yet faintly stimulating, breathing along his extremely sensitive nerves.\n\nHe glanced at his companions. Devonham, it struck him, looked more than ever like a floor-walker come to supervise, say, a Department where the sales and assistants were not satisfactory or\u2014he laughed inwardly as the simile occurred to him\u2014a free-thinker entering a church whose teaching he disapproved, even despised, and whose congregation touched his contemptuous pity. \"Who would ever guess,\" thought his friend and colleague, \"the sincerity and depth of knowledge in that insignificant appearance? Paul hides his value well!\" He noticed, in his quick fashion, touched by humour, the hard challenging eyes, the aquiline nose on which a pair of pince-nez balanced uneasily, the narrow shoulders, the poorly fitting clothes. The heart, of course, remained invisible. Yet suddenly he felt glad that Devonham was with him. \"Nothing unstable there,\" he reflected, \"and stability combined with competence is rare.\" This rapid judgment, it occurred to him, was possibly a warning from his own subconscious being... A red flag signalled, flickered, vanished.\n\nHe glanced next at LeVallon, towering above the other. LeVallon was now well dressed in London clothes that suited him, though, for that matter, any clothes must have looked well upon a male figure so virile and upstanding. His great shoulders, his leanness, covered so beautifully with muscle, his height, his colouring, his radiant air; above all, his strange, big penetrating eyes, marked him as a figure one would notice anywhere. He stood, somehow, alone, apart, though the ingredients that contributed to this strange air of aloofness would be hard to define.\n\nIt was chiefly, perhaps, the poise of the great powerful frame that helped towards this odd setting in isolation and independence. Motionless, he gazed about him quietly, but it was the way he stood that singled him out from other men. Even in his stillness there was grace; neither hands nor feet, though it was difficult to describe exactly how he placed them or used them, were separate from this poise of perfect balance. To put it colloquially, he knew what to do with his extremities. Self-consciousness, in sight of this ardent throng, the first he had encountered at close, intimate quarters, was entirely absent.\n\nThis Fillery noticed instantly, but other impressions followed during the few brief seconds while they waited by the door; and first, the odd effect of tremendous power he managed to convey. Nothing could have been less aggressive than the tentative, questioning, half inquiring, half wondering attitude in which he stood, waiting to be introduced to the buzzing throng of humans; yet there hung about him like an atmosphere this potential strength, of confidence, of superiority, even of beauty too, that not only contributed much to the aloofness already mentioned, but also contrived to make the others, men and women, in the crowded room\u2014insignificant. Somehow they seemed pale and ineffective against a larger grandeur, a scale entirely beyond their reach.\n\n\"Gigantic\" was the word that leaped into the mind, but another perhaps leaped with it\u2014\"elemental.\"\n\nFillery was aware of envy, oddly enough, of pride as well. His heart warmed more than ever to him. Almost, he could have then and there recalled his promise given to Devonham, cancelling it contemptuously with a word of self-apology for his smallness and his lack of faith...\n\nLeVallon, aware of a sympathetic mind occupied closely with himself, turned in that moment, and their eyes met squarely; a smile of deep, inner understanding passed swiftly between them over Devonham's head and shoulders. In which moment, exactly, a short, bearded man, detaching himself from the crowd, came forward and greeted them with sincere pleasure in his voice and manner. He was broad-shouldered, lean, his clothes hung loosely; his glance was keen but kindly. Introductions followed, and Khilkoff's sharp eye rested for some seconds with unconcealed admiration upon LeVallon, as he held his hand. His discerning sculptor's glance seemed to appraise his stature and proportions, while he bade him welcome to the Studio. His big head and short neck, his mane of hair, the width of his face, with its squat nose and high cheek-bones, the half ferocious eyes, the heavy jaw and something sprawling about the mouth, gave him a leonine expression. And his voice was not unlike a deep-toned growl, for all its cordiality.\n\nA stir, meanwhile, ran through the room, more heads turned in their direction; they had long ago been observed; they were being now examined.\n\n\"Nayan,\" Khilkoff was saying, while he still held LeVallon's hand as though its size and grip contented him, \"had a late Russian lesson. She will be here shortly, and very glad to make your acquaintance,\" looking up at LeVallon, as the new-comer. His gruffness and brevity had something pleasing in them. \"To-day the Studio is not entirely mine,\" he explained. \"I want you to come when I'm alone. Some studies I made in Sark this summer may interest you.\" He turned to Fillery. \"That lonely place was good for both of us,\" he said; \"it gave me new life and inspiration, and Nayan benefited immensely too. She looks more like a nymph than ever.\"\n\nHe shook hands with Devonham, smiling more grimly. \"I'm surprised you, too, have honoured us,\" he exclaimed with genuine surprise. \"Come to damn them all as usual, probably! Good! Your common-sense and healthy criticism are needed in these days\u2014cool, cleaning winds in an over-heated conservatory.\" He broke off abruptly and looked down at LeVallon's hand he was still holding. He examined it for a second with care and admiration, then turned his eye upon the young man's figure. He grunted.\n\n\"When I know you better,\" he said, with a growl of earnest meaning, \"I shall ask a favour, a great favour, of you. So, beware!\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" replied LeVallon, and at the sound of his voice the sculptor's interest deepened. A gleam shone in his eye.\n\n\"You've begun some work,\" said Fillery, \"and models are hard to come by, I imagine.\" His eye never left LeVallon.\n\nKhilkoff chuckled. \"Thought-reader!\" he exclaimed. \"If Povey heard that, he'd make you join the Society at once\u2014as honorary member or vice-president. Anything to get you in. Dr. Fillery understands us all too well,\" he went on to LeVallon. \"In Sark, that lonely island in the sea, I began four figures\u2014four elemental figures\u2014of earth, air, fire and water\u2014a group, of course. The air figure, I've done\u2014\"\n\n\"With Nayan as model,\" suggested Fillery, smiling.\n\n\"One morning, yes, I caught her bathing from a rock, hair streaming in the wind, no clothes on, white foam from the big breakers fluttering about her, slim, shining, unconscious and half dancing, fierce sunlight all over her. Ah\"\u2014he broke off\u2014\"here's Povey coming. I mustn't monopolize you all. Devonham, you know most of 'em. Make yourselves at home.\" He turned to LeVallon again, with a touch of something gentler, almost of respect, thought Fillery, as he noticed the delicate change of voice and manner quickly. \"Come, Mr. LeVallon,\" he said courteously, \"I should like to show you the figure as I've done it. We'll go for a moment into my own private rooms. But it's a model for fire I'm looking for, as Fillery guessed. You may be interested.\" He led him off. LeVallon went with evident content, and the advance of skirmishes that were already approaching for introductions was temporarily defeated.\n\nFor the three men standing by the door had formed a noticeable group, and Khilkoff's presence added to their value. Dr. Fillery, known and much respected, regarded with a touch of awe by many, had not come for nothing, it was doubtless argued; his colleague, moreover, accompanied him, and he, too, was known to the Society, though not much cultivated by its members owing to his downright, critical way of talking. They deemed him prejudiced, unsympathetic. It was the third member of the group, LeVallon, who had quickly caught all eyes, and the attention immediately paid to him by their host set the value of a special and important guest upon him instantly. All watched him led away by Khilkoff to the private quarters of the Studio, where none at first presumed to follow them; but it was the eyes of the women that remained glued to the open door where they had disappeared, waiting with careful interest for their reappearance. In particular Lady Gleeson, the \"pretty Lady Gleeson,\" watched from the corner where she sat alone, sipping some refreshment.\n\nFillery and Devonham, having observed the signs about them, exchanged a glance; their charge was safe for the moment, at any rate; they felt relieved; yet it was for the entry of Nayan, the daughter, that both waited with interest and impatience, as, meanwhile, the bolder ones among the crowd came up one by one and captured them.\n\n\"Oh, Dr. Fillery, I am glad to see you here. I thought you were always too busy for unscientific people like us. Yet, in a way, we're all seekers, are we not? I've been reading your Physiology book, and I did so want to ask you about something in it. I wonder if you'd mind.\"\n\nHe shook hands with a young-old woman, wearing bobbed hair and glasses, and speaking with an intense, respectful, yet self-apologetic manner.\n\n\"You've forgotten me, but I quite understand. You see so many people. I'm Miss Lance. I sent you my little magazine, 'Simplicity,' once, and you acknowledged it so sweetly, though, of course, I understood you had not the time to write for it.\" She continued for several minutes, smiling up at him, her hands clasping and unclasping themselves behind a back clothed with some glittering coloured material that rather fascinated him by its sheen. She kept raising herself on her toes and sinking back again in a series of jerky rhythms.\n\nHe gave her his delightful smile.\n\n\"Oh, Dr. Fillery!\" she exclaimed, with pleasure, leading him to a divan, upon which he let himself down in such a position that he could observe the door from the street as well as the door where LeVallon had disappeared. \"This is really too good-natured of you. Your book set me on fire simply\"\u2014her eyes wandering to the other door\u2014\"and what a wonderful looking person you've brought with you\u2014\"\n\n\"I fear it's not very easy reading,\" he interposed patiently.\n\n\"To me it was too delightful for words,\" she rattled on, pleased by the compliment implied. \"I devour all your books and always review them myself in the magazine. I wouldn't trust them to anyone else. I simply can't tell you how physiology stimulates me. Humanity needs imaginative books, especially just now.\" She broke off with a deprecatory smile. \"I do what I can,\" she added, as he made no remark, \"to make them known, though in such a very small way, I fear.\" Her interest, however, was divided, the two powerful attractions making her quite incoherent. \"Your friend,\" she ventured again, \"he must be Eastern perhaps? Or is that merely sunburn? He looks most unusual.\"\n\n\"Sunburn merely, Miss Lance. You must have a chat with him later.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you, thank you, Dr. Fillery. I do so love unusual people...\"\n\nHe listened gravely. He was gentle, while she confided to him her little inner hopes and dreams about the \"simple life.\" She introduced adjectives she believed would sound correct, if spoken very quickly, until, between the torrent of \"psychical,\" \"physiological\" and once or twice, \"psychological,\" she became positively incoherent in a final entanglement from which there was no issue but a convulsive gesture. None the less, she was bathed in bliss. She monopolized the great man for a whole ten minutes on a divan where everybody could see that they talked earnestly, intimately, perhaps even intellectually, together side by side.\n\nHe observed the room, meanwhile, without her noticing it, scanning the buzzing throng with interest. There was confusion somewhere, something was lacking, no system prevailed; he was aware of a general sense of waiting for a leader. All looked, he knew, for Nayan to appear. Without her presence, there was no centre, for, though not a member of the Society herself, she was the heart always of their gatherings, without which they straggled somewhat aimlessly. And \"heart,\" he remembered, with a smile that Miss Lance took proudly for herself, was the appropriate word. Nayan mothered them. They were but children, after all...\n\n\"When you talk of a 'New Age,' what exactly do you mean? I wish you'd define the term for me,\" Devonham meanwhile was saying to an interlocutor, not far away, while with a corner of his eye he watched both Fillery and the private door. He still stood near the entrance, looking more than ever like a disapproving floor-walker in a big department store, and it was with H. Millington Povey that he talked, the Honorary Secretary of the Society. The Secretary had aimed at Fillery, but Miss Lance had been too quick for him. He was obliged to put up with Devonham as second best, and his temper suffered accordingly. He was in aggressive mood.\n\nPovey, facing him, was talking with almost violent zeal. A small, thin, nervous man, on the verge of middle age, his head prematurely bald, with wildish tufts of patchy hair, a thin, scraggy neck that he lengthened and shortened between high hunched shoulders, Povey resembled an eager vulture. His keen bright eyes, hooked nose, and a habit of twisting head and neck apart from his body, which held motionless, increased this likeness to a bird of prey. Possessed of considerable powers of organization, he kept the Society together. It was he who insisted upon some special \"psychic gift\" as a qualification of membership; an applicant must prove this gift to a committee of Povey's choosing, though these proofs were never circulated for general reading in the Society's Reports. Talkers, dreamers, faddists were not desired; a member must possess some definite abnormal power before he could be elected. He must be clairvoyant or clairaudient, an automatic writer, trance-painter, medium, ghost-seer, prophet, priest or king.\n\nMembers, therefore, stated their special qualification to each other without false modesty: \"I'm a trance medium,\" for instance; \"Oh, really! I see auras, of course\"; while others had written automatic poetry, spoken in trance\u2014\"inspirational speakers,\" that is\u2014photographed a spirit, appeared to someone at a distance, or dreamed a prophetic dream that later had come true. Mediums, spirit-photographers, and prophetic dreamers were, perhaps, the most popular qualifications to offer, but there were many who remembered past lives and not a few could leave their bodies consciously at will.\n\nMemberships cost two guineas, the hat was occasionally passed round for special purposes, there was a monthly dinner in Soho, when members stood up, like saved sinners at a revivalist meeting, and gave personal testimony of conversion or related some new strange incident. The Prometheans were full of stolen fire and life.\n\nAmong them were ambitious souls who desired to start a new religion, deeming the Church past hope. Others, like the water-dowsers and telepathists, were humbler. There was an Inner Circle which sought to revive the Mysteries, and gave very private performances of dramatic and symbolic kind, based upon recovered secret knowledge, at the solstices and equinoxes. New Thought members despised these, believing nothing connected with the past had value; they looked ahead; \"live in the present,\" \"do it now\" was their watchword. Astrologers were numerous too. These cast horoscopes, or, for a small fee, revealed one's secret name, true colour, lucky number, day of the week and month, and so forth. One lady had a tame \"Elemental.\" Students of Magic and Casters of Spells, wearers of talismans and intricate designs in precious or inferior metal, according to taste and means, were well represented, and one and all believed, of course, in spirits.\n\nNone, however, belonged to any Sect of the day, whatever it might be; they wore no labels; they were seekers, questers, inquirers whom no set of rules or dogmas dared confine within fixed limits. An entirely open mind and no prejudices, they prided themselves, distinguished them.\n\n\"Define it in scientific terms, this New Age\u2014I cannot,\" replied Povey in his shrill voice, \"for science deals only with the examination of the known. Yet you only have to look round you at the world to-day to see its obvious signs. Humanity is changing, new powers everywhere\u2014\"\n\nDevonham interrupted unkindly, before the other could assume he had proved something by merely stating it:\n\n\"What are these signs, if I may ask?\" he questioned sharply. \"For if you can name them, we can examine them \u2014er\u2014scientifically.\" He used the word with malice, knowing it was ever on the Promethean lips.\n\n\"There you are, at cross-purposes at once,\" declared Povey. \"I refer to hints, half-lights, intuitions, signs that only the most sensitive among us, those with psychic divination, with spiritual discernment\u2014that only the privileged and those developed in advance of the Race\u2014can know. And, instantly you produce your microscope, as though I offered you the muscles of a tadpole to dissect.\"\n\nThey glared at one another. \"We shall never get progress your way,\" Povey fumed, withdrawing his head and neck between his shoulders.\n\n\"Returning to the Middle Ages, on the other hand,\" mentioned Devonham, \"seems like advancing in a circle, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Dr. Devonham,\" interrupted a pretty, fair-haired girl with an intense manner, \"forgive me for breaking up your interesting talk, but you come so seldom, you know, and there's a lady here who is dying to be introduced. She has just seen crimson flashing in your aura, and she wants to ask\u2014do you mind very much?\" She smiled so sweetly at him, and at Mr. Povey, too, who was said to be engaged to her, though none believed it, that annoyance was not possible. \"She says she simply must ask you if you were feeling anger. Anger, you know, produces red or crimson in one's visible atmosphere,\" she explained charmingly. She led him off, forgetting, however, her purpose en route, since they presently sat down side by side in a quiet corner and began to enjoy what seemed an interesting t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate, while the aura-seeing lady waited impatiently and observed them, without the aid of clairvoyance, from a distance.\n\n\"And your qualifications for membership?\" asked Devonham. \"I wonder if I may ask\u2014?\"\n\n\"But you'd laugh at me, if I told you,\" she answered simply, fingering a silver talisman that hung from her neck, a six-pointed star with zodiacal signs traced round a rose, rosa mystica, evidently. \"I'm so afraid of doctors.\"\n\nDevonham shook his head decidedly, asserting vehemently his interest, whereupon she told him her little private dream delightfully, without pose or affectation, yet shyly and so sincerely that he proved his assertion by a genuine interest.\n\n\"And does that protect you among your daily troubles?\" he asked, pointing to her little silver talisman. He had already commented sympathetically upon her account of saving her new puppies from drowning, having dreamed the night before that she saw them gasping in a pail of water, the cruel under-gardener looking on. \"Do you wear it always, or only on special occasions like this?\"\n\n\"Oh, Miss Milligan made that,\" she told him, blushing a little. \"She's rather poor. She earns her living by designing\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\n\n\"But I don't mean that. She tells you your Sign and works it in metal for you. I bought one. Mine is Pisces.\" She became earnest. \"I was born in Pisces, you see.\"\n\n\"And what does Pisces do for you?\" he inquired, remembering the heightened colour. The sincerity of this Rose Mystica delighted him, and he already anticipated her reply with interest. Here, he felt, was the credulous, religious type in its naked purity, forced to believe in something marvellous.\n\n\"Well, if you wear your Sign next your skin it brings good luck\u2014it makes the things you want happen.\" The blush reappeared becomingly. She did not lower her eyes.\n\n\"Have your things happened then?\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"Well, I've had an awfully good time ever since I wore it\u2014\"\n\n\"Proposals?\" he asked gently.\n\n\"Dr. Devonham!\" she exclaimed. \"How ever did you guess?\" She looked very charming in her innocent confusion.\n\nHe laughed. \"If you don't take it off at once,\" he told her solemnly, \"you may get another.\"\n\n\"It was two in a single week,\" she confided a little tremulously. \"Fancy!\"\n\n\"The important thing, then,\" he suggested, \"is to wear your talisman at the right moment, and with the right person.\"\n\nBut she corrected him promptly.\n\n\"Oh, no. It brings the right moment and the right person together, don't you see, and if the other person is a Pisces person, you understand each other, of course, at once.\"\n\n\"Would that I too were Pisces!\" he exclaimed, seeing that she was flattered by his interest. \"I'm probably\"\u2014taking a sign at random\u2014\"Scorpio.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said with grave disappointment, \"I'm afraid you're Capricornus, you know. I can tell by your nose and eyes\u2014and cleverness. But\u2014I wanted really to ask you,\" she went on half shyly, \"if I might\u2014\" She stuck fast.\n\n\"You want to know,\" he said, glancing at her with quick understanding, \"who he is.\" He pointed to the door. \"Isn't that it?\"\n\nShe nodded her head, while a divine little blush spread over her face. Devonham became more interested. \"Why?\" he asked. \"Did he impress you so?\"\n\n\"Rather,\" she replied with emphasis, and there was something in her earnestness curiously convincing. A sincere impression had been registered.\n\n\"His appearance, you mean?\"\n\nShe nodded again; the blush deepened; but it was not, he saw, an ordinary blush. The sensitive young girl had awe in her. \"He's a friend of Dr. Fillery's,\" he told her; \"a young man who's lived in the wilds all his life. But, tell me\u2014why are you so interested? Did he make any particular impression on you?\"\n\nHe watched her. His own thoughts dropped back suddenly to a strange memory of woods and mountains... a sunset, a blazing fire... a hint of panic.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, her tone lower, \"he did.\"\n\n\"Something very definite?\"\n\nShe made no answer.\n\n\"What did you see?\" he persisted gently. From woods and mountains, memory stepped back to a railway station and a customs official...\n\nHer manner, obviously truthful, had deep wonder, mystery, even worship in it. He was aware of a nervous reaction he disliked, almost a chill. He listened for her next words with an interest he could hardly account for.\n\n\"Wings,\" she replied, an odd hush in her voice. \"I thought of wings. He seemed to carry me off the earth with great rushing wings, as the wind blows a leaf. It was too lovely: I felt like a dancing flame. I thought he was\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" Something in his mind held its breath a moment.\n\n\"You won't laugh, Dr. Devonham, will you? I thought\u2014for a second\u2014of\u2014an angel.\" Her voice died away.\n\nFor a second the part of his mood that held its breath struggled between anger and laughter. A moment's confusion in him there certainly was.\n\n\"That makes two in the room,\" he said gently, recovering himself. He smiled. But she did not hear the playful compliment; she did not see the smile. \"You've a delightful, poetic little soul,\" he added under his breath, watching the big earnest eyes whose rapt expression met his own so honestly. Having made her confession she was still engrossed, absorbed, he saw, in her own emotion... So this was the picture that LeVallon, by his mere appearance alone, left upon an impressionable young girl, an impression, he realized, that was profound and true and absolute, whatever value her own individual interpretation of it might have. Her mention of space, wind, fire, speed, he noticed in particular\u2014\"off the earth... rushing wind... dancing flame... an angel!\"\n\nIt was easy, of course, to jeer. Yet, somehow, he did not jeer at all.\n\nShe relapsed into silence, which proved how great had been the emotional discharge accompanying the confession, temporarily exhausting her. Dr. Devonham keenly registered the small, important details.\n\n\"Entertaining an angel unawares in a Chelsea Studio,\" he said, laughingly; then reminding her presently that there was a lady who was \"dying to be introduced\" to him, made his escape, and for the next ten minutes found himself listening to a disquisition on auras which described \"visible atmospheres whose colour changes with emotion... radioactivity... the halo worn by saints\"... the effect of light noticed about very good people and of blackness that the wicked emanated, and ending up with the \"radiant atmosphere that shone round the figure of Christ and was believed to show the most lovely and complicated geometrical designs.\"\n\n\"God geometrizes\u2014you, doubtless, know the ancient saying?\" Mrs. Towzer said it like a challenge.\n\n\"I have heard it,\" admitted her listener shortly, his first opportunity of making himself audible. \"Plato said some other fine things too\u2014\"\n\n\"I felt sure you were feeling cross just now,\" the lady went on, \"because I saw lines and arrows of crimson darting and flashing through your aura while you were talking to Mr. Povey. He is very annoying sometimes, isn't he? I often wonder where all our subscriptions go to. I never could understand a balance-sheet. Can you?\"\n\nBut Devonham, having noticed Dr. Fillery moving across the room, did not answer, even if he heard the question. Fillery, he saw, was now standing near the door where Khilkoff and LeVallon had disappeared to see the sculpture, an oddly rapt expression on his face. He was talking with a member called Father Collins. The buzz of voices, the incessant kaleidoscope of colour and moving figures, made the atmosphere a little electric. Extricating himself with a neat excuse, he crossed towards his colleague, but the latter was already surrounded before he reached him. A forest of coloured scarves, odd coiffures, gleaming talismans, intervened; he saw men's faces of intense, eager, preoccupied expression, old and young, long hair and bald; there was a new perfume in the air, incense evidently; tea, coffee, lemonade were being served, with stronger drink for the few who liked it, and cigarettes were everywhere. The note everywhere was exalt\u00e9 rather.\n\nOut of the excited throng his eyes then by chance, apparently, picked up the figure of Lady Gleeson, smoking her cigarette alone in a big armchair, a half-empty glass of wine-cup beside her. She caught his attention instantly, this \"pretty Lady Gleeson,\" although personally he found neither title nor adjective justified. The dark hair framed a very white skin. The face was shallow, trivial, yet with a direct intensity in the shining eyes that won for her the reputation of being attractive to certain men. Her smile added to the notoriety she loved, a curious smile that lifted the lip oddly, showing the little pointed teeth. To him, it seemed somehow a face that had been over-kissed; everything had been kissed out of it; the mouth, the lips, were worn and barren in an appearance otherwise still young. She was very expensively dressed, and deemed her legs of such symmetry that it were a shame to hide them; clad in tight silk stockings, and looking like strips of polished steel, they were now visible almost to the knee, where the edge of the skirt, neatly trimmed in fur, cut them off sharply. Some wag in the Society, paraphrasing the syllables of her name, wittily if unkindly, had christened her fille de joie. When she heard it she was rather pleased than otherwise.\n\nLady Gleeson, too, he saw now, was watching the private door. The same moment, as so often occurred between himself and his colleague at some significant point in time and space, he was aware of Fillery's eye upon his own across the intervening heads and shoulders. Fillery, also, had noticed that Lady Gleeson watched that door. His changed position in the room was partly explained.\n\nA slightly cynical smile touched Dr. Devonham's lips, but vanished again quickly, as he approached the lady, bowed politely, and asked if he might bring her some refreshment. He was too discerning to say \"more\" refreshment. But she dotted every i, she had no half tones.\n\n\"Thanks, kind Dr. Devonham,\" she said in a decided tone, her voice thin, a trifle husky, yet not entirely unmusical. It held a strange throaty quality. \"It's so absurdly light,\" she added, holding out the glass she first emptied. \"The mystics don't hold with anything strong apparently. But I'm tired, and you discovered it. That's clever of you. It'll do me good.\"\n\nHe, malevolently, assured her that it would.\n\n\"Who's your friend?\" she asked point blank, with an air that meant to have a proper answer, as he brought the glass and took a chair near her. \"He looks unusual. More like a hurdle-race champion than a visionary.\" A sneer lurked in the voice. She fixed her determined clear grey eyes upon his, eyes sparkling with interest, curiosity in life, desire, the last-named quality of unmistakable kind. \"I think I should like to know him perhaps.\" It was mentioned as a favour to the other.\n\nDevonham, who disliked and disapproved of all these people collectively, felt angry suddenly with Fillery for having brought LeVallon among them. It was after all a foolish experiment; the atmosphere was dangerous for anyone of unstable, possibly of hysterical temperament. He had vengeance to discharge. He answered with deliberate malice, leading her on that he might watch her reactions. She was so transparently sincere.\n\n\"I hardly think Mr. LeVallon would interest you,\" he said lightly. \"He is neither modern nor educated. He has spent his life in the backwoods, and knows nothing but plants and stars and weather and\u2014animals. You would find him dull.\"\n\n\"No man with a face and figure like that can be dull,\" she said quickly, her eyes alight.\n\nHe glanced at her rings, the jewelry round her neck, her expensive gown that would keep a patient for a year or two. He remembered her millionaire South African husband who was her foolish slave. She lived, he knew, entirely for her own small, selfish pleasure. Although he meant to use her, his gorge rose. He produced his happiest smile.\n\n\"You are a keen observer, Lady Gleeson,\" he remarked. \"He doesn't look quite ordinary, I admit.\" After a pause he added, \"It's a curious thing, but Mr. LeVallon doesn't care for the charms that we other men succumb to so easily. He seems indifferent. What he wants is knowledge only... Apparently he's more interested in stars than in girls.\"\n\n\"Rubbish,\" she rejoined. \"He hasn't met any in his woods, that's all.\"\n\nHer directness rather disconcerted him. At the same time, it charmed him a little, though he did not know it. His dislike of the woman, however, remained. The idle, self-centred rich annoyed him. They were so useless. The fabulous jewelry hanging upon such trash now stirred his bile. He was conscious of the lust for pleasure in her.\n\n\"Yet, after all, he's rather an interesting fellow perhaps,\" he told her, as with an air of sudden enthusiasm. \"Do you know he talks of rather wonderful things, too. Mere dreams, of course, yet, for all that, out of the ordinary. He has vague memories, it seems, of another state of existence altogether. He speaks sometimes of\u2014of marvellous women, compared to whom our women here, our little dressed-up dolls, seem commonplace and insignificant.\" And, to his keen enjoyment, Lady Gleeson took the bait with open mouth. She recrossed her shapely legs. She wriggled a little in her chair. Her be-ringed fingers began fidgeting along the priceless necklace.\n\n\"Just what I should expect,\" she replied in her throaty voice, \"from a young man who looks as he does.\"\n\nShe began to play her own cards then, mentioning that her husband was interested in Dr. Fillery's Clinique. Devonham, however, at once headed her off. He described the work of the Home with enthusiasm. \"It's fortunate that Dr. Fillery is rich,\" he observed carelessly, \"and can follow out his own ideas exactly as he likes. I, personally, should never have joined him had he been dependent upon the mere philanthropist.\"\n\n\"How wise of you,\" she returned. \"And I should never have joined this mad Society but for the chance of coming across unusual people. Now, your Mr. LeVallon is one. You may introduce him to me,\" she repeated as an ultimatum.\n\nHer directness was the one thing he admired in her. At her own level, she was real. He was aware of the semi-erotic atmosphere about these Meetings and realized that Lady Gleeson came in search of excitement, also that she was too sincere to hide it. She wore her insignia unconcealed. Her talisman was of base metal, the one cheap thing she wore, yet real. This foolish woman, after all, might be of use unwittingly. She might capture LeVallon, if only for a moment, before Nayan Khilkoff enchanted him with that wondrous sweetness to which no man could remain indifferent. For he had long ago divined the natural, unspoken passion between his Chief and the daughter of his host, and with his whole heart he desired to advance it.\n\n\"My husband, too, would like to meet him, I'm sure,\" he heard her saying, while he smiled at the reappearance of the gilded bait. \"My husband, you know, is interested in spirit photography and Dr. Frood's unconscious theories.\"\n\nHe rose, without even a smile. \"I'll try and find him at once,\" he said, \"and bring him to you. I only hope,\" he added as an afterthought, \"that Miss Khilkoff hasn't monopolized him already\u2014\"\n\n\"She hasn't come,\" Lady Gleeson betrayed herself. Instinctively she knew her rival, he saw, with an inward chuckle, as he rose to fetch the desired male.\n\nHe found him the centre of a little group just inside the door leading into the sculptor's private studio, where Khilkoff had evidently been showing his new group of elemental figures. Fillery, a few feet away, observing everything at close range, was still talking eagerly with Father Collins. LeVallon and Kempster, the pacifist, were in the middle of an earnest talk, of which Devonham caught an interesting fragment. Kempster's qualification for membership was an occasional display of telepathy. He was a neat little man exceedingly well dressed, over-dressed in fact, for his tailor's dummy appearance betrayed that he thought too much about his personal appearance. LeVallon, towering over him like some flaming giant, spoke quietly, but with rare good sense, it seemed. Fillery's condensed education had worked wonders on his mind. Devonham was astonished. About the pair others had collected, listening, sometimes interjecting opinions of their own, many women among them leaning against the furniture or sitting on cushions and movable, dump-like divans on the floor. It was a picturesque little scene. But LeVallon somehow dwarfed the others.\n\n\"I really think,\" Kempster was saying, \"we might now become a comfortable little third-rate Power\u2014like Spain, for instance\u2014enjoy ourselves a bit, live on our splendid past, and take the sun in ease.\" He looked about him with a self-satisfied smirk, as though he had himself played a fine r\u00f4le in the splendid past.\n\nLeVallon's reply surprised him perhaps, but it surprised Devonham still more. The real, the central self, LeVallon, he thought with satisfaction, was waking and developing. His choice of words was odd too.\n\n\"No, no! You\u2014the English are the leaders of the world; the best quality is in you. If you give up, the world goes down and backwards.\" The deep, musical tones vibrated through the little room. The speaker, though so quiet, had the air of a powerful athlete, ready to strike. His pose was admirable. Faces turned up and stared. There was a murmur of approval.\n\n\"We're so tired of that talk,\" replied Kempster, no whit disconcerted by the evident signs of his unpopularity. \"Each race should take its turn. We've borne the white man's burden long enough. Why not drop it, and let another nation do its bit? We've earned a rest, I think.\" His precise, high voice was persuasive. He was a good public speaker, wholly impervious to another point of view. But the resonant tones of LeVallon's rejoinder seemed to bury him, voice, exquisite clothes and all.\n\n\"There is no other\u2014unless you hand it back to weaker shoulders. No other race has the qualities of generosity, of big careless courage of the unselfish kind required. Above all, you alone have the chivalry.\"\n\nTwo things Devonham noted as he heard: behind the natural resonance in the big voice lay a curious deepness that made him think of thunder, a volume of sound suppressed, potential, roaring, which, if let loose, might overwhelm, submerge. It belonged to an earnestness as yet unsuspected in him, a strength of conviction based on a great purpose that was evidently subconscious in him, as though he served it, belonged to it, without realizing that he did so. He stood there like some new young prophet, proclaiming a message not entirely his own. Also he said \"you\" in place of the natural \"we.\"\n\nDevonham listened attentively. Here, too, at any rate, was an exchange of ideas above the \"psychic\" level he so disliked.\n\nLeVallon, he noticed at once, showed no evidence of emotion, though his eyes shone brightly and his voice was earnest.\n\n\"America\u2014\" began Kempster, but was knocked down by a fact before he could continue.\n\n\"Has deliberately made itself a Province again. America saw the ideal, then drew back, afraid. It is once more provincial, cut off from the planet, a big island again, concerned with local affairs of its own. Your Democracy has failed.\"\n\n\"As it always must,\" put in Kempster, glad perhaps to shift the point, when he found no ready answer. \"The wider the circle from which statesmen are drawn, the lower the level of ability. We should be patriotic for ideas, not for places. The success of one country means the downfall of another. That's not spiritual...\" He continued at high speed, but Devonham missed the words. He was too preoccupied with the other's language, penetration, point of view. LeVallon had, indeed, progressed. There was nothing of the alternative personality in this, nothing of the wild, strange, nature-being whom he called \"N. H.\"\n\n\"Patriotism, of course, is vulgar rubbish,\" he heard Kempster finishing his tirade. \"It is local, provincial. The world is a whole.\"\n\nBut LeVallon did not let him escape so easily. It was admirable really. This half-educated countryman from the woods and mountains had a clear, concentrated mind. He had risen too. Whence came his comprehensive outlook?\n\n\"Chivalry\u2014you call it sporting instinct\u2014is the first essential of a race that is to lead the world. It is a topmost quality. Your race has it. It has come down even into your play. It is instinctive in you more than any other. And chivalry is unselfish. It is divine. You have conquered the sun. The hot races all obey you.\"\n\nThe thunder broke through the strange but simple words which, in that voice, and with that quiet earnestness, carried some weight of meaning in them that print cannot convey. The women gazed at him with unconcealed, if not with understanding admiration. \"Lead us, inspire us, at any rate!\" their eyes said plainly; \"but love us, O love us, passionately, above all!\"\n\nDevonham, hardly able to believe his ears and eyes, turned to see if Fillery had heard the scrap of talk. Judging by the expression on his face, he had not heard it. Father Collins seemed saying things that held his attention too closely. Yet Fillery, for all his apparent absorption, had heard it, though he read it otherwise than his somewhat literal colleague. It was, nevertheless, an interesting revelation to him, since it proved to him again how unreal \"LeVallon\" was; how easily, quickly this educated simulacrum caught up, assimilated and reproduced as his own, yet honestly, whatever was in the air at the moment. For the words he had spoken were not his own, but Fillery's. They lay, or something like them lay, unuttered in Fillery's mind just at that very moment. Yet, even while listening attentively to Father Collins, his close interest in LeVallon was so keen, so watchful, that another portion of his mind was listening to this second conversation, even taking part in it inaudibly. LeVallon caught his language from the air...\n\nDevonham made his opportunity, leading LeVallon off to be introduced to Lady Gleeson, who still sat waiting for them on the divan in the outer studio.\n\nAs they made their way through the buzzing throng into the larger room, Devonham guessed suddenly that Lady Gleeson must somehow have heard in advance that LeVallon would be present; her flair for new men was singular; the sexual instinct, unduly developed, seemed aware of its prey anywhere within a big radius. He owed his friend a hint of guidance possibly. \"A little woman,\" he explained as they crossed over, \"who has a weakness for big men and will probably pay you compliments. She comes here to amuse herself with what she calls 'the freaks.' Sometimes she lends her great house for the meetings. Her husband's a millionaire.\" To which the other, in his deep, quiet voice, replied: \"Thank you, Dr. Devonham.\"\n\n\"She's known as 'the pretty Lady Gleeson.'\"\n\n\"That?\" exclaimed the other, looking towards her.\n\n\"Hush!\" his companion warned him.\n\nAs they approached, Lady Gleeson, waiting with keen impatience, saw them coming and made her preparations. The frown of annoyance at the long delay was replaced by a smile of welcome that lifted the upper lip on one side only, showing the white even teeth with odd effect. She stared at LeVallon, thought Devonham, as a wolf eyes its prey. Deftly lowering her dress\u2014betraying thereby that she knew it was too high, and a detail now best omitted from the picture\u2014she half rose from her seat as they came up. The instinctive art of deference, though instantly corrected, did not escape Paul Devonham's too observant eye.\n\n\"You were kind enough to say I might introduce my friend,\" murmured he. \"Mr. LeVallon is new to our big London, and a stranger among all these people.\"\n\nLeVallon bowed in his calm, dignified fashion, saying no word, but Lady Gleeson put her hand out, and, finding his own, shook it with her air of brilliant welcome. Determination lay in her smile and in her gesture, in her voice as well, as she said familiarly at once: \"But, Mr. LeVallon, how tall are you, really? You seem to me a perfect giant.\" She made room for him beside her on the divan. \"Everybody here looks undersized beside you!\" She became intense.\n\n\"I am six feet and three inches,\" he replied literally, but without expression in his face. There was no smile. He was examining her as frankly as she examined him. Devonham was examining the pair of them. The lack of interest, the cold indifference in LeVallon, he reflected, must put the young woman on her mettle, accustomed as she was to quick submission in her victims.\n\nLeVallon, however, did not accept the offered seat; perhaps he had not noticed the invitation. He showed no interest, though polite and gentle.\n\n\"He towers over all of us,\" Devonham put in, to help an awkward pause. Yet he meant it more than literally; the empty prettiness of the shallow little face before him, the triviality of Miss Rosa Mystica, the cheapness of Povey, Kempster, Mrs. Towzer, the foolish air of otherworldly expectancy in the whole room, of deliberate exaggeration, of eyes big with wonder for sensation as story followed story\u2014all this came upon him with its note of poverty and tawdriness as he used the words.\n\nSomething in the atmosphere of LeVallon had this effect\u2014whence did it come? he questioned, puzzled\u2014of dwarfing all about him.\n\n\"All London, remember, isn't like this,\" he heard Lady Gleeson saying, a dangerous purr audible in the throaty voice. \"Do sit down here and tell me what you think about it. I feel you don't belong here quite, do you know? London cramps you, doesn't it? And you find the women dull and insipid?\" She deliberately made more room, patting the cushions invitingly with a flashing hand, that alone, thought Devonham contemptuously, could have endowed at least two big Cliniques. \"Tell me about yourself, Mr. LeVallon. I'm dying to hear about your life in the woods and mountains. Do talk to me. I am so bored!\"\n\nWhat followed surprised Devonham more than any of the three perhaps. He ascribed it to what Fillery had called the \"natural gentleman,\" while Lady Gleeson, doubtless, ascribed it to her own personal witchery.\n\nWith that easy grace of his he sat down instantly beside her on the low divan, his height and big frame contriving the awkward movement without a sign of clumsiness. His indifference was obvious\u2014to Devonham, but the vain eyes of the woman did not notice it.\n\n\"That's better,\" she again welcomed him with a happy laugh. She edged closer a little. \"Now, do make yourself comfortable\"\u2014she arranged the cushions again\u2014\"and please tell me about your wild life in the forests, or wherever it was. You know a lot about the stars, I hear.\" She devoured his face and figure with her shining eyes.\n\nThe upper lip was lifted for a second above a gleaming tooth. Devonham had the feeling she was about to eat him, licking her lips already in anticipation. He himself would be dismissed, he well knew, in another moment, for Lady Gleeson would not tolerate a third person at the meal. Before he was sent about his business, however, he had the good fortune to hear LeVallon's opening answer to the foolish invitation. Amazement filled him. He wished Fillery could have heard it with him, seen the play of expression on the faces too\u2014the bewilderment of sensational hunger for something new in Lady Gleeson's staring eyes, arrested instantaneously; the calm, cold look of power, yet power tempered by a touch of pity, in LeVallon's glance, a glance that was only barely aware of her proximity. He smiled as he spoke, and the smile increased his natural radiance. He looked extraordinarily handsome, yet with a new touch of strangeness that held even the cautious doctor momentarily almost spellbound.\n\n\"Stars\u2014yes, but I rarely see them here in London, and they seem so far away. They comfort me. They bring me\u2014they and women bring me\u2014nearest to a condition that is gone from me. I have lost it.\" He looked straight into her face, so that she blinked and screwed up her eyes, while her breathing came more rapidly. \"But stars and women,\" he went on, his voice vibrating with music in spite of its quietness, \"remind me that it is recoverable. Both give me this sweet message. I read it in stars and in the eyes of women. And it is true because no words convey it. For women cannot express themselves, I see; and stars, too, are silent\u2014here.\"\n\nThe same soft thunder as before sounded below the gently spoken words; Lady Gleeson was trembling a little; she made a movement by means of which she shifted herself yet nearer to her companion in what seemed a natural and unconscious way. It was doubtless his proximity rather than his words that stirred her. Her face was set, though the lips quivered a trifle and the voice was less shrill than usual as she spoke, holding out her empty glass.\n\n\"Thank you, Dr. Devonham,\" she said icily.\n\nThe determined gesture, a toss of the head, with the glare of sharp impatience in the eyes, he could not ignore; yet he accepted his curt dismissal slowly enough to catch her murmured words to LeVallon:\n\n\"How wonderful! How wonderful you are! And what sort of women...?\" followed him as he moved away. In his heart rose again an uncomfortable memory of a Jura valley blazing in the sunset, and of a half-naked figure worshipping before a great wood fire on the rocks... He fancied he caught, too, in the voice, a suggestion of a lilt, a chanting resonance, that increased his uneasiness further. One thing was certain: it was not quite the ordinary \"LeVallon\" that answered the silly woman. The reaction was of a different kind. Was, then, the other self awake and stirring? Was it \"N. H.\" after all, as his colleague claimed?\n\nAllowing a considerable interval to pass, he returned with a glass\u2014of lemonade\u2014reaching the divan in its dim-lit corner just in time to see a flashing hand withdrawn quickly from LeVallon's arm, and to intercept a glance that told him the intrigue evidently had not developed altogether according to Lady Gleeson's plan, although her air was one of confidence and keenest self-satisfaction. LeVallon sat like a marble figure, cold, indifferent, looking straight before him, listening, if only with half an ear, to a stream of words whose import it was not difficult to guess.\n\nThis Devonham's practised eye read in the flashing look she shot at him, and in the quick way she thanked him.\n\n\"Coffee, dear Dr. Devonham, I asked for.\"\n\nHer move was so quick, his desire to watch them a moment longer together so keen, that for an instant he appeared to hesitate. It was more than appearance; he did hesitate\u2014an instant merely, yet long enough for Lady Gleeson to shoot at him a second swift glance of concentrated virulence, and also long enough for LeVallon to spring lightly to his feet, take the glass from his hand and vanish in the direction of the refreshment table before anything could prevent. \"I will get your coffee for you,\" still sounded in the air, so quickly was the adroit man\u0153uvre executed. LeVallon had cleverly escaped.\n\n\"How stupid of me,\" said Devonham quickly, referring to the pretended mistake. Lady Gleeson made no reply. Her inward fury betrayed itself, however, in the tight-set lips and the hard glitter of her brilliant little eyes. \"He won't be a moment,\" the other added. \"Do you find him interesting? He's not very talkative as a rule, but perhaps with you\u2014\" He hardly knew what words he used.\n\nThe look she gave him stopped him, so intense was the bitterness in the eyes. His interruption, then, must indeed have been worse\u2014or better?\u2014timed than he had imagined. She made no pretence of speaking. Turning her glance in the direction whence the coffee must presently appear, she waited, and Devonham might have been a dummy for all the sign she gave of his being there. He had made an enemy for life, he felt, a feeling confirmed by what almost immediately then followed. Neither the coffee nor its bearer came that evening to pretty Lady Gleeson in the way she had desired. She laid the blame at Devonham's door.\n\nFor at that moment, as he stood before her, secretly enjoying her anger a little, yet feeling foolish, perhaps, as well, a chord sounded on the piano, and a hush passed instantly over the entire room. Someone was about to sing. Nayan Khilkoff had come in, unnoticed, by the door of the private room. Her singing invariably formed a part of these entertainments. The song, too, was the one invariably asked for, its music written by herself.\n\nAll talk and movement stopped at the sound of the little prelude, as though a tap had been turned off. Even Devonham, most unmusical of men, prepared to listen with enjoyment. He tried to see Nayan at the piano, but too many people came between. He saw, instead, LeVallon standing close at his side, the cup of coffee in his hand. He had that instant returned.\n\n\"For Lady Gleeson. Will you pass it to her? Who's going to sing?\" he whispered all in the same breath. And Devonham told him, as he bent down to give the cup. \"Nayan Khilkoff. Hush! It's a lovely song. I know it\u2014'The Vagrant's Epitaph.'\"\n\nThey stood motionless to listen, as the pure voice of the girl, singing very simply but with the sweetness and truth of sincere feeling, filled the room. Every word, too, was clearly audible:\n\n\u2003\"Change was his mistress; Chance his counsellor.\n\n\u2003Love could not hold him; Duty forged no chain.\n\n\u2003The wide seas and the mountains called him,\n\n\u2003And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain.\n\n\u2003\"Sweet hands might tremble!\u2014aye, but he must go.\n\n\u2003Revel might hold him for a little space;\n\n\u2003But, turning past the laughter and the lamps,\n\n\u2003His eyes must ever catch the luring Face.\n\n\u2003\"Dear eyes might question! Yea, and melt again;\n\n\u2003Rare lips a-quiver, silently implore\n\n\u2003But he must ever turn his furtive head,\n\n\u2003And hear that other summons at the door.\n\n\u2003\"Change was his mistress; Chance his counsellor.\n\n\u2003The dark firs knew his whistle up the trail.\n\n\u2003Why tarries he to-day?... And yesternight\n\n\u2003Adventure lit her stars without avail.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 326", + "text": "Lady Gleeson, owing to an outraged vanity and jealousy she was unable to control, missed the final scene, for before the song was actually finished she was gone. Being near a passage that was draped only by a curtain, she slipped out easily, flung herself into a luxurious motor, and vanished into the bleak autumn night.\n\nShe had seen enough. Her little heart raged with selfish fury. What followed was told her later by word of mouth.\n\nNever could she forgive herself that she had left the studio before the thing had happened. She blamed Devonham for that too.\n\nFor LeVallon, it appears, having passed the cup of coffee to her through a third person\u2014in itself an insult of indifference and neglect\u2014stood absorbed in the words and music of the song. Being head and shoulders above the throng, he easily saw the girl at the piano. No one, unless it was Fillery, a few yards away, watched him as closely as did Devonham and Lady Gleeson, though all three for different reasons. It was Devonham, however, who made the most accurate note of what he saw, though Fillery's memory was possibly the truer, since his own inner being supplied the fuller and more sympathetic interpretation.\n\nLeVallon, tall and poised, stood there like a great figure shaped in bronze. He was very calm. His bright hair seemed to rise a little; his eyes, steady and wondering, gazed fixedly; his features, though set, were mobile in the sense that any instant they might leap into the alive and fluid expression of some strong emotion. His whole being, in a word, stood at attention, alert for instant action of some uncontrollable, perhaps terrific kind. \"He seemed like a glowing pillar of metal that must burst into flame the very next instant,\" as a Member told Lady Gleeson later.\n\nDevonham watched him. LeVallon seemed transfixed. He stared above the intervening tousled heads. He drew a series of deep breaths that squared his shoulders and made his chest expand. His very muscles ached apparently for instant action. An intensity of wondering joy and admiration that lit his face made the eyes shine like stars. He watched the singing girl as a tiger watches the keeper who brings its long-expected food. The instant the bar is up, it springs, it leaps, it carries off, devours. Only, in this case, there were no bars. Nor was the wild desire for nourishment of a carnal kind. It was companionship, it was intercourse with his own that he desired so intensely.\n\n\"He divines the motherhood in her,\" thought Fillery, watching closely, pain and happiness mingled in his heart. \"The protective, selfless, upbuilding power lies close to Nature.\" And as this flashed across him he caught a glimpse by chance of its exact opposite\u2014in Lady Gleeson's peering, glittering eyes\u2014the destructive lust, the selfish passion, the bird of prey.\n\n\"The dark firs knew his whistle up the trail,\" the song in that soft true voice drew to its close. LeVallon was trembling.\n\n\"Good Heavens!\" thought Devonham. \"Is it 'N. H.'? Is it 'N. H.,' after all, waking\u2014rising to take possession?\" He, too, trembled.\n\nIt was here that Lady Gleeson, close, intuitive observer of her escaping prey, rose up and slipped away, her going hardly noticed by the half-entranced, half-dreaming hearts about her, each intent upon its own small heaven of neat desire. She went as unobtrusively as an animal that is aware of untoward conditions and surroundings, showing her teeth, feeling her claws, yet knowing herself helpless. Not even Devonham, his mind ever keenly alert, observed her going. Fillery, alone, conscious of LeVallon's eyes across the room, took note of it. She left, her violent little will intent upon vengeance of a later victory that she still promised herself with concentrated passion.\n\nYet Devonham, though he failed to notice the slim animal of prey in exit, noticed this\u2014that the face he watched so closely changed quickly even as he watched, and that the new expression, growing upon it as heat grows upon metal set in a flame, was an expression he had seen before. He had seen it in that lonely mountain valley where a setting sun poured gold upon a burning pyre, upon a dancing, chanting figure, upon a human face he now watched in this ridiculous little Chelsea studio. The sharpness of the air, the very perfume, stole over him as he stared, perplexed, excited and uneasy. That strange, wild, innocent and tender face, that power, that infinite yearning! LeVallon had disappeared. It was \"N. H.\" that stood and watched the singer at the little modern piano.\n\nThen with the end of the song came the rush, the bustle of applause, the confusion of many people rising, trotting forward, all talking at once, all moving towards the singer\u2014when LeVallon, hitherto motionless as a statue, suddenly leaped past and through them like a vehement wind through a whirl of crackling dead leaves. Only his deft, skilful movement, of poise and perfect balance combined with accurate swiftness, could have managed it without bruised bodies and angry cries. There was no clumsiness, no visible effort, no appearance of undue speed. He seemed to move quietly, though he moved like fire. In a moment he was by the piano, and Nayan, in the act of rising from her stool, gazed straight up into his great lighted eyes.\n\nIt was singular how all made way for him, drew back, looked on. Confusion threatened. Emotion surged like a rising sea. Without a leader there might easily have been tumult; even a scene. But Fillery was there. His figure intervened at once.\n\n\"Nayan,\" he said in a steady voice, \"this is my friend, Mr. LeVallon. He wants to thank you.\"\n\nBut, before she could answer, LeVallon, his hand upon her arm, said quickly, yet so quietly that few heard the actual words, perhaps\u2014his voice resonant, his eyes alight with joy: \"You are here too\u2014with me, with Fillery. We are all exiles together. But you know the way out\u2014the way back! You remember!...\"\n\nShe stared with delicious wonder into his eyes as he went on:\n\n\"O star and woman! Your voice is wind and fire. Come!\" And he tried to seize her. \"We wilt go back together. We work here in vain!...\" His arms were round her; almost their faces touched.\n\nThe girl rose instantly, took a step towards him, then hung back; the stool fell over with a crash; a hubbub of voices rose in the room behind; Povey, Kempster, a dozen Members with them, pressed up; the women, with half-shocked, half-frightened eyes, gaped and gasped over the forest of intervening male shoulders. A universal shuffle followed. The confusion was absurd and futile. Both male and female stood aghast and stupid before what they saw, for behind the mere words and gestures there was something that filled the little scene with a strange shaking power, touching the panic sense.\n\nLeVallon lifted her across his shoulders.\n\nThe beautiful girl was radiant, the man wore the sudden semblance of a god. Their very stature increased. They stood alone. Yet Fillery, close by, stood with them. There seemed a magic circle none dared cross about the three. Something immense, unearthly, had come into the room, bursting its little space. Even Devonham, breaking with vehemence through the human ring, came to a sudden halt.\n\nIn a voice of thunder\u2014though it was not actually loud\u2014LeVallon cried:\n\n\"Their little personal loves! They cannot understand!\" He bore Nayan in his arms as wind might lift a loose flower and whirl it aloft. \"Come back with me, come home! The Sun forgets us here, the Wind is silent. There is no Fire. Our work, our service calls us.\" He turned to Fillery. \"You too. Come!\"\n\nHis voice boomed like a thundering wind against the astonished frightened faces staring at him. It rose to a cry of intense emotion: \"We are in little exile here! In our wrong place, cut off from the service of our gods! We will go back!\" He started, with the girl flung across his frame. He took one stride. The others shuffled back with one accord.\n\n\"The other summons at the door. But, Edward!\u2014you\u2014you too!\"\n\nIt was Nayan's voice, as the girl clung willingly to the great neck and arms, the voice of the girl all loved and worshipped and thought wonderful beyond temptation; it was this familiar sound that ran through the bewildered, startled throng like an electric shock. They could not believe their eyes, their ears. They stood transfixed.\n\nWithin their circle stood LeVallon, holding the girl, almost embracing her, while she lay helpless with happiness upon his huge enfolding arms. He paused, looked round at Fillery a moment. None dared approach. The men gazed, wondering, and with faculties arrested; the women stared, stock still, with beating hearts. All felt a lifting, splendid wonder they could not understand. Devonham, mute and motionless before an inexplicable thing, found himself bereft of judgment. Analysis and precedent, for once, both failed. He looked round in vain for Khilkoff.\n\nFillery alone seemed master of himself, a look of suffering and joy shone in his face; one hand lay steady upon LeVallon's arm.\n\nWithin the little circle these three figures formed a definite group, filling the beholders, for the first time in their so-called \"psychic\" experience, with the thrill of something utterly beyond their ken\u2014something genuine at last. For there seemed about the group, though emanating, as with shining power, from the figure of LeVallon chiefly, some radiating force, some elemental vigour they could not comprehend. Its presence made the scene possible, even right.\n\n\"Edward\u2014you too! What is it, O, what is it? There are flowers\u2014great winds! I see the fire\u2014!\"\n\nA searching tenderness in her tone broke almost beyond the limits of the known human voice.\n\nThere swept over the onlookers a wave of incredible emotion then, as they saw LeVallon move towards them, as though he would pass through them and escape. He seemed in that moment stupendous, irresistible. He looked divine. The girl lay in his arms like some young radiant child. He did not kiss her, no sign of a caress was seen; he did no ordinary, human thing. His towering figure, carrying his burden almost negligently, came out of the circle \"like a tide\" towards them, as one described it later\u2014or as a poem that appeared later in \"Simplicity\" began:\n\n\u2003\"With his hair of wind\n\n\u2003And his eyes of fire\n\n\u2003And his face of infinite desire...\"\n\nHe swept nearer. They stirred again in a confused and troubled shuffle, opening a way. They shrank back farther. They shivered, like crying shingle a vast wave draws back. Only Fillery stood still, making no sign or movement; upon his face that look of joy and pain\u2014wild joy and searching pain\u2014no one, perhaps, but Devonham understood.\n\n\"Wind and fire!\" boomed LeVallon's tremendous voice. \"We return to our divine, eternal service. O Wind and Fire! We come back at last!\" An immense rhythm swept across the room.\n\nThen it was, without announcement of word or action, that Nayan, suddenly leaping from the great enfolding arms, stood upright between the two figures, one hand outstretched towards\u2014Fillery.\n\nAt which moment, emerging apparently from nowhere, Khilkoff appeared upon the scene. During the music he had left the studio to find certain sketches he wished to show to LeVallon; he had witnessed nothing, therefore, of what had just occurred. He now stood still, staring in sheer surprise. The people in a ring, gazing with excited, rapt expression into the circle they thus formed, looked like an audience watching some performance that dazed and stupefied them, in which Fillery, LeVallon and Nayan\u2014his own daughter\u2014were the players. He took it for an impromptu charade, perhaps, something spontaneously arranged during his absence. Yet he was obviously staggered.\n\nAs he entered, the girl had just leaped from the arms that held her, and run towards Fillery, who stood erect and motionless in the centre of the circle; and LeVallon's wild splendid cry in that instant shook its grand music across the vaulted room. So well acted, so dramatic, so real was the scene thus interrupted that Khilkoff stood staring in silence, thinking chiefly, as he said afterwards, that the young man's pose and attitude were exactly\u2014magnificently\u2014what he wanted for the figure of Fire and Wind in his elemental group.\n\nThis enthusiastic thought, with the attempt to engrave it permanently in his memory, filled his mind completely for an instant, when there broke in upon it again that resonant voice, half cry, half chant, vibrating with depth and music, yet quiet too:\n\n\"Wind and Fire! My Wind and Fire! O Sun\u2014your messengers are come for us!... Oh, come with power and take us with you!...\" Its rhythm was gigantic.\n\nSo extraordinary was the volume, yet the sweetness, too, in the voice, though its actual loudness was not great\u2014so arresting was its quality, that Khilkoff, as he put it afterwards, thought he heard an entirely new sound, a sound his ears had never known before. He, like the rest of the astonished audience, was caught spell-bound. But for an instant only. For at once there followed another voice, releasing the momentary spell, and, with the accompanying action, warned him that what he saw was no mere game of acting. This was real.\n\n\"I hear that other summons at the door!...\"\n\nHer hands were outstretched, her eyes alight with yearning, she was oblivious of everyone but Fillery, LeVallon and herself.\n\nAnd her father, then, breaking through the crowding figures, packed shoulder to shoulder nearest to him, entered the circle. His mind was confused, perhaps, for vague ideas of some undesirable hypnotic influence, of some foolish experiment that had become too real, passed through it. He knew one thing only\u2014this scene, whether real or acted, pretence or sincere, must be stopped. The look on his daughter's face\u2014entirely new and strange to him\u2014was all the evidence he needed. He shouldered his way through like an angry bear, making inarticulate noises, growling.\n\nBut, before he reached the actors, before Nayan reached Fillery's side, and while the voice of the girl and of LeVallon still seemed to echo simultaneously in the air, a new thing happened that changed the scene completely. In these few brief seconds, indeed, so much was concentrated, and with such rapidity, that it was small wonder the reports of individual witnesses differed afterwards, almost as if each one had seen a separate detail of the crowded picture. Its incredibility, too, bewildered minds accustomed to imagined dreams rather than to real action.\n\nLeVallon, at any rate, all agreed, turned with that ease and swiftness peculiarly his own, caught Nayan again into the air, and with one arm swung her back across his shoulder. He moved, then, so irresistibly, with a great striding rush in the direction of the door into the street, and so rapidly, that the onlookers once more drew back instinctively pell mell, tumbling over each other in their frightened haste.\n\nThis, all agreed, had happened. One second they saw LeVallon carrying the girl off, the next\u2014a flash of intense and vivid brilliance entered the big studio, flooding all detail with a blaze of violent light. There was a loud report, there was a violent shock.\n\n\"The Messengers! Our Messengers!...\" The thunder of LeVallon's cry was audible.\n\nThe same instant this dazzling splendour, so sparkling it was almost painful, became eclipsed again. There was complete obliteration. Darkness descended like a blow. An inky blackness reigned. No single thing was visible. There came a terrific splitting sound.\n\nThe effect of overwhelming sudden blackness was natural enough. In every mind danced still the vivid memory of that last amazing picture they had seen: Khilkoff, with alarmed face, breaking violently into the circle where his daughter, Nayan, swinging from those giant shoulders, looked back imploringly at Dr. Fillery, who stood motionless as though carved in stone, a smile of curious happiness yet pain upon his features. Yet the figure of LeVallon dominated. His radiant beauty, his air of superb strength, his ease, his power, his wild swiftness. Something unearthly glowed about him. He looked a god. The extraordinary idea flashed into Fillery's mind that some big energy as of inter-stellar spaces lay about him, as though great Sirius called down along his light-years of distance into the little tumbled Chelsea room.\n\nThis was the picture, set one instant in dazzling violet brilliance, then drowned in blackness, that still hung shining with intense reality before every mind.\n\nThe following confusion had a moment of real and troubling panic; women screamed, some fell upon their knees; men called for light; various cries were heard; there was a general roar:\n\n\"To the door, all men to the door! He's controlled! There's an Elemental in him!\" It was Povey's shrill tones that pierced.\n\n\"Strike a match!\" shouted Kempster. \"The electric light has fused. Stay where you are. Don't move\u2014everybody.\"\n\n\"Lightning,\" the clear voice of Devonham was heard. \"Keep your heads. It's only a thunderstorm!\"\n\nMatches were struck, extinguished, lit again; a patch of dim light shone here and there upon a throng of huddled people; someone found a candle that shed a flickering glare upon the walls and ceiling, but only made the shadows chiefly visible. It was an unreal, fantastic scene.\n\nA moment later there descended a hurricane gust of wind against the building, with splintering glass as though from a hail of bullets, that extinguished candle and matches, and plunged the scene again into total darkness. A terrific clap of thunder, followed immediately by a rushing sound of rain that poured in a flood upon the floor, completed the scene of terror and confusion. The huge north window had blown in.\n\nThe consternation was, for some moments, dangerous, for true panic may become an unmanageable thing, and this panic was unquestionably real. The superstitious thread that lies in every human being, stretched and shivered, beginning to weave its swift, ominous pattern. The elements dominated the human too completely just then even for the sense of wonder that was usually so active in the Society's mental make-up to assert itself intelligently. Most of them lost their heads. All associated that picture of LeVallon and the girl with this terrific demonstration of overpowering elemental violence. Povey's startled cry had given them the lead. The human touch thus added the flavour of something both personal and supernatural.\n\nSome stood screaming, whimpering, unable to move; some were numb; others cried for help; not a few remained on their knees; the name of God was audible here and there; many collapsed and several women fainted. To one and all came the realization of that panic fear which dislocates and paralyses. This was a manifestation of elemental power that had intelligence somewhere driving too suggestively behind it...\n\nIt was Devonham and Khilkoff who kept their heads and saved the situation. The sudden storm was, indeed, of extreme violence and ferocity; the force of the wind, with the nearness of the terrible lightning and the consequent volume of the overwhelming thunder, were certainly bewildering. But a thunderstorm, they began to realize, was a thunderstorm.\n\n\"Everyone stay exactly where he is,\" suddenly shouted Khilkoff through the darkness. His voice brought comfort. \"I'll light candles in the inner studio.\" He did so a moment later; the faint light was reassuring; a pause in the storm came to his assistance, the wind had passed, the rain had ceased, there was no more lightning. With a whispered word to Devonham, he disappeared through the door into the passage: \"You look after 'em; I must find my girl.\"\n\n\"One by one, now,\" called Devonham. \"Take careful steps! Avoid the broken glass!\"\n\nVoices answered from dark corners, as the inner room began to fill; all saw the candle light and came to it by degrees. \"Povey, Kempster, Imson, Father Collins! Each man bring a lady with him. It's only a thunderstorm. Keep your heads!\"\n\nThe smaller room filled gradually, people with white faces and staring eyes coming, singly or in couples, within the pale radiance of the flickering candle light. Feet splashed through pools of water; the furniture, the clothing, were soaked; the heat in the air, despite the great broken window, was stifling. One or two women were helped, some were carried; there were cries and exclamations, a noise of splintered glass being trodden on or kicked aside; drinks were brought for those who had fainted; order was restored bit by bit. The collective consciousness resumed gradually its comforting sway. The herd found strength in contact. A single cry\u2014in a woman's voice\u2014\"Pan was among us!...\" was instantly smothered, drowned in a chorus of \"Hush! Hush!\" as though a mere name might bring a repetition of a terror none could bear again.\n\nThe entire scene had lasted perhaps five minutes, possibly less. The violent storm that had hung low over London, accumulating probably for hours, had dissipated itself in a single prodigious explosion, and was gone. Through the gaping north window, torn and shattered, shone the stars. More candles were brought and lighted, food and drink followed, a few cuts from broken glass were attended to, and calm in a measure came back to the battered and shaken yet thrilled and delighted Prometheans.\n\nBut all eyes looked for a couple who were not there; a hundred heads turned searching, for in every heart lay one chief question. Yet, oddly enough, none asked aloud; the names of Nayan and LeVallon were not spoken audibly; some touch of awe, it seemed, clung to a memory still burning in each individual mind; it was an awe that none would willingly revive just then. The whole occurrence had been too devastating, too sudden; it all had been too real.\n\nThere was little talk, nor was there the whispered discussion even that might have been expected; individual recovery was slow and hesitating. What had happened lay still too close for the comfort of detailed comparison or analysis by word of mouth. With common accord the matter was avoided. Discussions must wait. It would fill many days with wonder afterwards...\n\nIt was with a sense of general relief, therefore, that the throng of guests, bedraggled somewhat in appearance, eyes still bright with traces of uncommon excitement, their breath uneven and their attitude still nervous, saw the door into the passage open and frame the figure of their returning host. He held a lighted candle. His bearded face looked grim, but his slow deep voice was quiet and reassuring\u2014he smiled, his words were commonplace.\n\n\"You must excuse my daughter,\" he said firmly, \"but she sends her excuses, and begs to be forgiven for not coming to bid you all good-night. The lightning\u2014the electricity\u2014has upset her. I have advised her to go to bed.\"\n\nA sigh of relief from everybody came in answer. They were only too glad to take the hint and go.\n\n\"The little impromptu act we had prepared for you we cannot give now,\" he added, anticipating questions. \"The storm prevented the second part. We must give it another time instead.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 327", + "text": "Khilkoff, Edward Fillery and Paul Devonham, between them, it seems, were wise in their generation. The story spread that the scene in the Studio had been nothing but a bit of inspired impromptu acting, to which the coincidence of the storm had lent a touch of unexpected conviction where, otherwise, all would have ended in a laugh and a round or two of amused applause.\n\nThe spreading of an undesirable story, thus, was to a great extent prevented, its discussion remaining confined, chiefly, among the few startled witnesses. Yet the Prometheans, of course, knew a supernatural occurrence when they saw one. They were not to be so easily deprived of their treasured privilege. Thrilled to their marrows, individually and collectively, they committed their versions to writing, drew up reports, compared notes and, generally, made the feast last as long as possible. It was, moreover, a semi-sacred feast for them. Its value increased portentously. It bound the Society together with fresh life. It attracted many new members. Povey and his committee increased the subscription and announced an entrance fee in addition.\n\nThe various accounts offered by the Members, curious as these were, may be left aside for the moment, since the version of the occurrence as given by Edward Fillery comes first in interest. His report, however, was made only to himself; he mentioned it in full to no one, not even to Paul Devonham. He felt unable to share it with any living being. Only one result of his conclusions he shared openly enough with his assistant: he withdrew his promise.\n\nUpon certain details, the two men agreed with interest\u2014that everybody in the room, men and women, were on the qui vive the moment LeVallon made his entrance. His appearance struck a note. All were aware of an unusual presence. Interest and curiosity rose like a vapour, heads all turned one way as though the same wind blew them, there was a buzz and murmur of whispered voices, as though the figure of LeVallon woke into response the same taut wire in every heart. \"Who on earth is that? What is he?\" was legible in a hundred questioning eyes. All, in a word, were aware of something unaccustomed.\n\nUpon this detail\u2014and in support of the Society's claim to special \"psychic\" perception, it must be mentioned\u2014Fillery and Devonham were at one. But another detail, too, found them in agreement. It was not the tempest that caused the panic; it was LeVallon himself. Something about LeVallon had produced the abrupt and singular sense of panic terror.\n\nFillery was glad; he was satisfied, at any rate. The transient, unreal personality called \"LeVallon\" had disappeared and, as he believed, for ever; a surface apparition after all, it had been educated, superimposed, the result of imitation and quick learning, a phantom masquerading as an intelligent human being. It was merely an acquired surface-self, a physical, almost an automatic intelligence. The deep nature underneath had now broken out. It was the sudden irruption of \"N. H.\" that touched the subconscious self of everyone in the room with its strange authentic shock. \"N. H.\" was in full possession.\n\nTowards this real Self he felt attraction, yearning, even love. He had felt this from the very beginning. Why, or what it was, he did not pretend to know as yet. Towards \"N. H.\" he reacted as towards his own son, as to a comrade, ancient friend, proved intimate and natural playmate even. The strange tie was difficult to describe. In himself, though faint by comparison, lay something akin in sympathy and understanding... They belonged together in the same unknown region. The girl, of course, belonged there too, but more completely, more absolutely, even than himself. He foresaw the risks, the dangers. His heart, with a leap of joy, accepted the responsibilities.\n\nUnlike Devonham, he had not come that afternoon to scoff; his smile at the vagaries of what his assistant called \"hysterical psychics\" had no bitterness, no contempt. If their excesses were pathogenic often, he believed with Lombroso that genius and hysteria draw upon a common origin sometimes, also that, from among this unstable material, there emerged on occasions hints of undeniable value. To the want of balance was chiefly due the ineffectiveness of these hints. This class, dissatisfied with present things, kicking over the traces which herd together the dull normal crowd into the safe but uninteresting commonplace, but kicking, of course, too wildly, alone offered hints of powers that might one day, obedient to laws at present unknown, become of value to the race. They were temperamentally open to occasional, if misguided, inspiration, and all inspiration, the evidence overwhelmingly showed, is due to an intense, but hidden mental activity. The hidden nine-tenths of the self peeped out here and there periodically. These people were, at heart, alert to new ideas. The herd instinct was weak in them. They were individuals.\n\nFillery had not come to scoff. His chief purpose on this particular occasion had been to observe any reactions produced in LeVallon by the atmosphere of these unbalanced yet questing minds, and by the introduction to a girl, whose beauty, physical and moral, he considered far far above the standard of other women. Iraida Khilkoff, as he saw her, rose head and shoulders, like some magical flower in a fairy-tale, beyond her feminine kind.\n\nHis hopes had in both respects proved justified. LeVallon was gone. \"N. H.\" had swept up commandingly into full possession.\n\nIf it is the attitude of mind that interprets details in a given scene, it is the heart that determines their selection. Devonham saw collective hallucination, delusion, humbug\u2014useless and undesirable weeds, where his chief saw strange imperfect growths that might one day become flowers in a marvellous garden. That this garden blossomed upon the sunny slopes of a lost Caucasian valley had a significance he did not shirk. Always he was honest with himself. It was this symbolic valley he longed to people. Its radiant loveliness stirred a forgotten music in his heart, he watched golden bees sipping that wild azalea honey, of which even the natives may not rob them without the dangerous delight of exaltation; his nostrils caught the delicious perfumes, his cheek felt the touch of happy winds... as he stood by the door with Devonham and LeVallon, looking round the crowded Chelsea studio.\n\nAware of this association stirring in his blood, he believed he had himself well in hand; he knew already in advance that a spirit moved upon the face of those waters that were his inmost self; he had that intuitive divination which anticipates a change of spiritual weather. The wind was rising, the atmosphere lay prepared, already the flowers bent their heads one way. All his powers of self-control might well be called upon before the entertainment ended. Glancing a moment at LeVallon, tall, erect and poised beside him, he was conscious\u2014it was an instant of vivid self-revelation\u2014that he steadied himself in doing so. He borrowed, as it were, something of that poise, that calm simplicity, that potential energy, that modest confidence. Some latent power breathed through the great stalwart figure by his side; the strength was not his own; LeVallon emanated this power unconsciously.\n\nKhilkoff, as described, had then led the youth away to see the sculpture, Devonham was captured by a Member, and Fillery found himself alone. He looked about him, noticing here and there individuals whom he knew. Lady Gleeson he saw at once on her divan in the corner, with her cigarette, her jewels, her glass, her background of millions through which an indulgent husband floated like a shadow. His eye rested on her a second only, then passed in search of something less insignificant. Miss Lance, who had heard of his books and dared to pretend knowledge of them, monopolised him for ten minutes. A little tactful kindness managed her easily, while he watched the door where LeVallon had disappeared with Khilkoff, and through which Nayan might any moment now enter. Already his thoughts framed these two together in a picture; his heart saw them playing hand in hand among the flowers of the Hidden Valley, one flying, the other following, a radiance of sunny fire and a speed of lifting winds about them both, yet he himself, oddly enough, not far away. He, too, was somehow with them. While listening with his mind to what Miss Lance was saying, his heart went out playing with this splendid pair... He would not lose her finally, it seemed; some subtle kinship held them together in this trinity. The heart in him played wild against the mind.\n\nHe caught Devonham's eye upon him, and a sudden smile that Miss Lance fortunately appropriated to herself, ran over his too thoughtful face. For Devonham's attitude towards the case, his original Notes, his obvious concealment of experiences in the Jura Mountains, flashed across him with a flavour of something half comic, half pathetic. \"With all that knowledge, with all the accumulation of data, Paul stops short of Wonder!\" he thought to himself, his eyes fixed solemnly upon Miss Lance's face. He remembered Coleridge: \"All knowledge begins and ends with wonder, but the first wonder is the child of ignorance, while the second wonder is the parent of adoration.\" A thousand years, and the dear fellow will still regard adoration as hysteria! He chuckled audibly, to his companion's surprise, since the moment was not appropriate for chuckling.\n\nMaking his peace with his neighbour, he presently left her for a position nearer to the door, Father Collins providing the opportunity.\n\nFather Collins, as he was called, half affectionately, half in awe, as of a parent with a cane, was an individual. He had been evangelical, high church, Anglican, Roman Catholic, in turn, and finally Buddhist. Believing in reincarnation, he did not look for progress in humanity; the planet resembled a form at school\u2014individuals passed into it and out of it, but the average of the form remained the same. The fifth form was always the fifth form. Earth's history showed no advance as a whole, though individuals did. He looked forward, therefore, to no Utopia, nor shared the pessimism of the thinkers who despaired of progress.\n\nA man of intense convictions, yet open mind, he was not ashamed to move. Before the Buddhist phase, he had been icily agnostic. He thought, but also he felt. He had vision and intuition; he had investigated for himself. His mind was of the imaginative-scientific order. Buddhism, his latest phase, attracted him because it was \"a scientific, logical system rather than a religion based on revelation.\" He belonged eminently to the unstable. He found no resting place. He came to the meetings of the Society to listen rather than to talk. His net was far flung, catching anything and everything in the way of new ideas, experiments, theories, beliefs, especially powers. He tested for himself, then accepted or discarded. The more extravagant the theory, the greater its appeal to him. Behind a grim, even a repulsive ugliness, he hid a heart of milk and honey. In his face was nobility, yet something slovenly ran through it like a streak.\n\nHe loved his kind and longed to help them to the light. Although a rolling stone, spiritually, his naked sincerity won respect. He was composed, however, of several personalities, and hence, since these often clashed, he was accused of insincerity too. The essay that lost him his pulpit and parish, \"The Ever-moving Truth, or Proof Impossible,\" was the poignant confession of an honest intellect where faith and unbelief came face to face with facts. The Bishop, naturally, preferred the room of \"Father\" Collins to his company.\n\n\"I should like you to meet my friend,\" Fillery mentioned, after some preliminary talk. \"He would interest you. You might help him possibly.\" He mentioned a few essential details. \"Perhaps you will call one day\u2014you know my address\u2014and make his acquaintance. His mind, owing to his lonely and isolated youth, is tabula rasa. For the same reason, a primitive Nature is his Deity.\"\n\nFather Collins raised his bushy dark eyebrows.\n\n\"I took note of him the moment he came in,\" he replied. \"I was wondering who he was\u2014and what! I'll come one day with pleasure. The innocence on his face surprised me. Is he\u2014may I ask it\u2014friend or patient?\"\n\n\"Both.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said the other, without hesitation. He added: \"You are experimenting?\"\n\n\"Studying. I should value the help\u2014the view of a religious temperament.\"\n\nFather Collins looked grim to ugliness. The touch of nobility appeared.\n\n\"I know your ideals, Dr. Fillery; I know your work,\" he said gruffly. \"In you lies more true religion than in a thousand bishops. I should trust your treatment of an unusual case. If,\" he added slowly, \"I can help him, so much the better.\" He then looked up suddenly, his manner as if galvanized: \"Unless he can perhaps help us.\"\n\nThe words struck Fillery on the raw, as it were. They startled him. He stared into the other's eyes. \"What makes you think that? What do you mean exactly?\"\n\nFather Collins returned his gaze unflinchingly. He made an odd reply. \"Your friend,\" he said, \"looks to me\u2014like a man who\u2014might start a new religion\u2014Nature for instance\u2014back to Nature being, in my opinion, always a possible solution of over-civilization and its degeneracy.\" The streak of something slovenly crept into the nobility, smudging it, so to speak, with a blur.\n\nDr. Fillery, for a moment, waited, listening with his heart.\n\n\"And find a million followers at once,\" continued the other, as though he had not noticed. \"His voice, his manner, his stature, his face, but above all\u2014something he brings with him. Whatever his nature, he's a natural leader. And a sincere, unselfish leader is what people are asking for nowadays.\"\n\nHis black bushy eyebrows dropped, darkening the grim, clean-shaven face. \"You noticed, of course\u2014you\u2014the women's eyes?\" he mentioned. \"It isn't, you know, so much what a man says, nor entirely his looks, that excite favour or disfavour with women. It's something he emanates\u2014unconsciously. They can't analyze it, but they never fail to recognize it.\"\n\nFillery moved sideways a little, so that he could watch the inner studio better. The discernment of his companion was somewhat unexpected. It disconcerted him. All his knowledge, all his experience clustered about his mind as thick as bees, yet he felt unable to select the item he needed. The sunshine upon his Inner Valley burned a brighter fire. He saw the flowers glow. The wind ran sweet and magical. He began to watch himself more closely.\n\n\"LeVallon is an interesting being,\" he admitted finally, \"but you make big deductions surely. A mind like yours,\" he added, \"must have its reasons?\"\n\n\"Power,\" replied the other promptly; \"power. 'The earlier generations,' said Emerson, 'saw God face to face; we through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to Nature?' Your friend has this original relation, I feel; he stands close\u2014terribly close\u2014to Nature. He brings open spaces even into this bargain sale\u2014\" He drew a deep breath. \"There is a power about him\u2014\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" interrupted the other.\n\n\"Not of this earth.\"\n\n\"You mean that literally?\"\n\n\"Not of this earth quite\u2014not of humanity, so to speak,\" repeated Father Collins half irritably, as though his intelligence had been insulted. \"That's the best way I can describe how it strikes me. Ask one of the women. Ask Nayan, for instance. Whatever he is, your friend is elemental.\"\n\nLike a shock of fire the unusual words ran deep into Fillery's heart, but, at that same instant a stirring of the figures beyond the door caught his attention. His main interest revived. The inner door of the private studio, he thought, had opened.\n\n\"Elemental!\" he repeated, his interest torn in two directions simultaneously. He looked at his companion keenly, searchingly. \"You\u2014a man like you\u2014does not use such words\u2014\" He kept an eye upon the inner studio.\n\n\"Without meaning,\" the other caught him up at once. \"No. I mean it. Nor do I use such words idly to a man\u2014Fillery\u2014like you.\" He stopped. \"He has what you have,\" came the quick blunt statement; \"only in your case it's indirect, while in his it's direct\u2014essential.\"\n\nThey looked at each other. Two minds, packed with knowledge and softened with experience of their kind, though from different points of view, met each other fairly. A bridge existed. It was crossed. Few words were necessary, it seemed. Each understood the other.\n\n\"Elemental,\" repeated Fillery, his pulse quickening half painfully.\n\nAt which instant he knew the inner door had opened. Nayan had come in. The same instant almost she had gone out again. So quick, indeed, was the interval between her appearance and disappearance, that Fillery's version of what he then witnessed in those few seconds might have been ascribed by a third person who saw it with him to his imagination largely. Imaginative, at any rate, the version was; whether it was on that account unreal is another matter. The swift, tiny scene, however, no one witnessed but himself. Even Devonham, unusually alert with professional anxiety, missed it; as did also the watchful Lady Gleeson, whom jealousy made clairvoyante almost. Khilkoff and LeVallon, standing sideways to the door, were equally unaware that it had opened, then quickly closed again. None saw, apparently, the radiant, lovely outline.\n\nIt was a curtained door leading out of the far end of the inner studio into a passage which had an exit to the street; Fillery was so placed that he could see it over his companion's shoulder; Khilkoff, LeVallon and the little group about them stood in his direct line of sight against the dark background of the curtain. The light in this far corner was so dim that Fillery was not aware the curtained door had swung open until he actually saw the figure of Nayan Khilkoff framed suddenly in the clear space, the white passage wall behind her. She wore gloves, hat and furs, having come, evidently, straight from the street. Ten seconds, perhaps twenty, she stood there, gazing with a sudden fixed intensity at LeVallon, whose figure, almost close enough for touch, was sideways to her, the face in profile.\n\nShe stopped abruptly as though a shock ran through her. She remained motionless. She stared, an expression in her eyes as of life momentarily arrested by wild, glorious, intense surprise. The lips were parted; one gloved hand still held the swinging curtained door. To Fillery it seemed as if a flame leaped into her eyes. The entire face lit up. She seemed spellbound with delight.\n\nThis leap of light was the first sign he witnessed. The same second her eyes lifted a fraction of an inch, changed their focus, and, gazing past LeVallon, looked straight across the room into his own.\n\nIn his mind at that instant still rang the singular words of Father Collins; in his heart still hung the picture of the flowered valley: it was across this atmosphere the eyes of the girl flashed their message like a stroke of lightning. It came as a cry, almost a call for help, an audible message whose syllables fled down the valley, yearning sweet, yet a tone of poignant farewell within the following wind. It was a moment of delicious joy, of exquisite pain, of a blissful, searching dream beyond this world...\n\nHe stood spellbound himself a moment. The look in the girl's big eloquent eyes threatened a cherished dream that lay too close to his own life. He was aware of collapse, of ruin; that old peculiar anguish seized him. He remembered her words in Baker Street a few days before: \"Please bring your friend\"\u2014the accompanying pain they caused. And now he caught the echo on that following wind along the distant valley. The cry in her eyes came to him:\n\n\"Why\u2014O why\u2014do you bring this to me? It must take your place. It must put out\u2014You!\"\n\nThe reasoning and the inspirational self in him knew this momentary confusion, as the cry fled down the wind.\n\n\u2003\"O follow, follow\n\n\u2003Through the caverns hollow\n\n\u2003As the song floats, thou pursue\n\n\u2003Where the wild bee never flew...\"\n\nThe curtained door swung to again; the face and figure were no longer there; Nayan had withdrawn quickly, noticed by none but himself. She had gone up to make herself ready for her father's guests; in a few minutes she would come down again to play hostess as her custom was... It was so ordinary. It was so dislocating... For at that moment it seemed as if all the feminine forces of the universe, whatever these may be, focused in her, and poured against him their concentrated stream to allure, enchant, subdue. He trembled. He remembered Devonham's admission of the panic sense.\n\n\"It's the air,\" said a voice beside him, \"all this tobacco smoke and scent, and no ventilation.\"\n\nFather Collins was speaking, only he had completely forgotten that Father Collins was in the world. The steadying hand upon his arm made him realize that he had swayed a moment.\n\n\"The perfume chiefly,\" the voice continued. \"All this cheap nasty stuff these women use. It's enough to sicken any healthy man. Nobody knows his own smell, they say.\" He laughed a little.\n\nCollins was tactful. He talked on easily of nothing in particular, so that his companion might let the occasion slip, or comment on it, as he wished.\n\n\"Worse than incense.\" Fillery gave him the clue perhaps intentionally, certainly with gratitude. He made an effort. He found control. \"It intoxicates the imagination, doesn't it?\" That note of sweet farewell still hung with enchanting sadness in his brain. He still saw those yearning eyes. He heard that cry. And yet the conflict in his nature bewildered him\u2014as though he found two persons in him, one weeping while the other sang.\n\nFather Collins smiled, and Fillery then knew that he, too, had seen the girl framed in the doorway, intercepted the glance as well. No shadow of resentment crossed his heart as he heard him add: \"She, too, perhaps belongs elsewhere.\" The phrase, however, brought to his own personal dream the conviction of another understanding mind. \"As you yourself do, too,\" was added in a thrilling whisper suddenly.\n\nFillery turned with a start to meet his eye. \"But where?\"\n\n\"That is your problem,\" said Father Collins promptly. \"You are the expert\u2014even though you think\u2014mistakenly\u2014that your heart is robbed.\" His voice held the sympathy and tenderness of a woman taught by suffering. The nobility was in his face again, untarnished now. His words, his tone, his manner caught Fillery in amazement. It did not surprise him that Father Collins had been quick enough to understand, but it did surprise him that a man so entangled in one formal creed after another, so netted by the conventional thought of various religious Systems, and therefore stuffed with old, rigid, commonplace ideas\u2014it did, indeed surprise him to feel this sudden atmosphere of vision and prophecy that abruptly shone about him. The extravagant, fantastic side of the man he had forgotten.\n\n\"Where?\" he repeated, gazing at him. \"Where, indeed?\"\n\n\"Where the wild bee never flew... perhaps!\"\n\nFather Collins's eyebrows shot up as though worked by artificial springs. His eyes, changing extraordinarily, turned very keen. He seemed several persons at once. He looked like\u2014contradictory description\u2014a spiritual Jesuit. The ugly mouth\u2014thank Heaven, thought Fillery\u2014showed lines of hidden humour. His sanity, at any rate, was unquestioned. Father Collins watched the planet with his soul, not with his brain alone. But which of his many personalities was now in the ascendancy, no man, least of all himself, could tell. His companion, the expert in him automatically aware of the simultaneous irruption and disruption, waited almost professionally for any outburst that might follow. \"Arcades ambo,\" he reflected, making a stern attempt to keep his balance.\n\n\"The subconscious, remember, doesn't explain everything,\" came the words. \"Not everything,\" he added with emphasis. \"As with heredity\"\u2014he looked keenly half humorously, half sympathetically at the doctor\u2014\"there are gaps and lapses. The recent upheaval has been more than an inter-tribal war. It was a planetary event. It has shaken our nature fundamentally, radically. The human mind has been shocked, broken, dislocated. The prevalent hysteria is not an ordinary hysteria, nor are the new powers\u2014perhaps\u2014quite ordinary either.\"\n\n\"Mental history repeats itself,\" Fillery put in, now more master of himself again. \"Unbalance has always followed upheaval. The removal of known, familiar foundations always lets in extravagance of wildest dissatisfaction, search and question.\"\n\n\"Upheaval of this kind,\" rejoined the other gravely, \"there has never been since human beings walked the earth. Our fabulous old world trembles in the balance.\" And, as he said it, the dreamer shone in the light below the big, black eyebrows, noticed quickly by his companion. \"Old ideals have been smashed beyond recovery. The gods men knew have been killed, like Tommy, in the trenches. The past is likewise dead, its dreams of progress buried with it by a Black Maria. The human mind and heart stand everywhere empty and bereft, while their hungry and unanswered questions search the stars for something new.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said Fillery gently, half stirred, half amused by the odd language. \"You may be right. But mental history has always shown a desire for something new after each separate collapse. Signs and wonders are a recurrent hunger, remember. In the days of Abraham, of Paul, of Moses it was the same.\"\n\n\"Questions to-day,\" replied the other, \"are based on an immense accumulated knowledge unknown to Moses or to Abraham's time. The phenomenon, I grant you, is the same, but\u2014the shock, the dislocation, the shattering upheaval comes in the twentieth century upon minds grounded in deep scientific wisdom. It was formerly a shock to the superstitious ignorance of intuitive feeling merely. To-day it is organized scientific knowledge that meets the earthquake.\"\n\n\"You mentioned gaps and lapses,\" said Fillery, deeply interested, but still half professionally, perhaps, in spite of his preoccupations. \"You think, perhaps, those gaps\u2014?\" One eye watched the inner studio. The unstable in him gained more and more the upper hand.\n\n\"I mean,\" replied Father Collins, now fairly launched upon his secret hobby, evidently his qualification for membership in the Society, \"I mean, Edward Fillery, that the time is ripe, if ever, for a new revelation. If Man is the only type of being in the universe, well and good. We see his finish plainly, for the war has shown that progress is a myth. Man remains, in spite of all conceivable scientific knowledge, a savage, of low degree, irredeemable, and intellect, as a reconstructive force, but of small account.\"\n\n\"It seems so, I admit.\"\n\n\"But if\"\u2014Father Collins said it as calmly as though he spoke of some new food or hygienic treatment merely\u2014\"if mankind is not the only life in the universe, if, for instance, there exist\u2014and why not?\u2014other evolutionary systems besides our own somewhat trumpery type\u2014other schemes and other beings\u2014perhaps parallel, perhaps quite different\u2014perhaps in more direct contact with the sources of life\u2014a purer emanation, so to say\u2014\"\n\nHe hesitated, realizing perhaps that in speaking to a man of Edward Fillery's standing he must choose his words, or at least present his case convincingly, while aware that his inability to do so made him only more extravagant and incoherent.\n\n\"Yes, quite so,\" Fillery helped him, noting all the time the suppressed intensity, the half-concealed conviction of an id\u00e9e fixe behind the calmness, while the balance of his own attention remained concentrated on the group about LeVallon. \"If, as you suggest, there are other types of life\u2014\" He spoke encouragingly. He had noticed the slovenly streak spread and widen, breaking down, as it were, the structure of the face. He was aware also of the increasing insecurity in himself.\n\n\"Now is the moment,\" cried the other; \"now is the time for their appearance.\"\n\nHe turned as though he had hit a target unexpectedly.\n\n\"Now,\" he repeated, \"is the opportunity for their manifestation. The human mind lies open everywhere. It is blank, receptive, ready. On all sides it waits ready and inviting. The gaps are provided. If there is any other life, it should break through and come among us\u2014now!\"\n\nFillery, startled, withdrew for the first time his attention from that inner room. With keen eyes he gazed at his companion. With an abrupt, unpleasant shock it occurred to him that all he heard was borrowed, filched, stolen out of his own mind. Before words came to him, the other spoke:\n\n\"Your friend,\" he mentioned quietly, but with intentional significance, \"and patient.\"\n\n\"LeVallon!\"\n\nBut it was at this moment that Nayan Khilkoff, entering again without her hat and furs, had moved straight to the piano, seated herself, and began to sing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 328", + "text": "To retail the following scene as Dr. Fillery saw it in detail is not necessary, the sequence of acts, of physical events being already known. The reactions of his heart and mind, however, have importance. What he felt, thought, hoped and feared, what he believed as well, his point of view in a word, remain essential.\n\nEdward Fillery, being what he was, witnessed it from his own individual angle; his mind, with his heredity, his soul, with its mysterious background, these held the glasses to his eyes, adjusting, as with a Zeiss instrument, each eye separately. In his case the analyst and thinker checked the unstable dreamer with acute exactitude. This was his special gift. He studied himself best while studying others. His sight, moreover, was exceptionally keen, his glasses of consummate workmanship. He saw, it seems, considerably beyond the normal range. He believed, at least, that he did so.\n\nHe saw, for instance, that the girl, while her fingers ran over the keys before she sang, searched the room and found LeVallon in a second. Following her rapid glance, he took in the picture that she also saw\u2014LeVallon, coffee cup in hand, before Lady Gleeson languishing on the divan, and Devonham just beside them. LeVallon was obviously unaware of Lady Gleeson's presence; he had forgotten her existence. Devonham, a floor-walker with nothing particular to do at the moment, looked uncomfortable and ill at ease, scared a little, fearing a scene, a possible outbreak even. The meaning of the group was easily read. The girl herself, undoubtedly, read it clearly too.\n\nThis flashed upon the cinema screen, and Fillery divined it without the help of tedious letterpress.\n\nThe same instant he was aware that the girl and LeVallon looked for the first time straight into each other's faces, and that both seemed simultaneously caught into the air as though a star had lifted them. Not even a question lay in their clear eyes. It was an instantaneous understanding, so complete and perfect that the expression of happy surprise was too convincing to be missed even by the slow-witted Lady Gleeson. Vanity usually delays intelligence, and her vanity was abnormal. But she saw the expression on the two faces, and interpreted it aright. Fillery noticed that she squirmed; she would presently, he felt positive, disappear. Before the singing ended he had seen her slink away.\n\nThe song began. He had heard it before, \"The Vagrant's Epitaph,\" sung by the same clear, sweet voice, had felt his heart stirred by the true simple feeling she put into it. He knew every word and every bar; the music was her own. He loved it. Both words and music awoke in him invariably a picture of his own lost valley, a physical desire to be over the hills and far away with the homeless liberty of winds and stars and waters, and at the same time, its spiritual equivalent\u2014a yearning that the Race should discover the immense fair region of its greater hidden self and enjoy its new powers without restraint. All this was familiar to him. But now, as she sang, there came another, deeper meaning that sublimated the essential spirit of it, lifting it out of the known ditch of space and time. Never yet had he heard such yearning passion, such untold desire in her voice. The physical vagrancy changed subtly, exquisitely, to a symbol of a vaster meaning\u2014a spiritual vagrancy that suddenly captured him in bitter pain. \"Love could not hold him, Duty forged no chain\"\u2014as he listened to the sweetness, struck him between the joints of armour he had not realized before was so insecurely bound about him. The anguish of lonely souls, alien among their kind, hungry for companionship they might not find, unclothed, uncared for, desired of none and understanding none\u2014this rose tumultuously in his blood. \"The wide seas and the mountains called him...\" the words and music pierced him like a flame. \"Revel might hold him for a little space...\"\u2014her voice made it sound like a description of man's brief moment on the whirling planet, tasting adventure with men and women, playing a moment with love and hope and fear, till, \"turning past the laughter and the lamps,\" he heard that \"other summons at the door.\"\n\nThis bigger version, this deeper meaning, caught at him with power as he heard the song in the sweet, familiar voice, and realized in a flash that what he felt faintly LeVallon felt terrifically. His own detachment was a pose, a shadow, at best a bodiless yearning; in LeVallon it was a reality of consuming fire. Also it was an explanation of the girl's own singular aloofness from the world of admiring men. Both belonged, as Father Collins put it, \"elsewhere.\"\n\nHe watched them. LeVallon's eyes, he saw, remained fixed and motionless on the singer; her own did not leave the notes for a single moment; the words and music poured into the room like a shower of dancing silver. The personality of the girl flowed out with them to meet the newly-found companion they addressed. An extraordinary thing then happened: to Fillery it almost seemed that there formed then and there between them a new vehicle\u2014as it were, a body\u2014that gave expression to their own great secret. Something in each of them, unable to manifest through their minds, their brains, their earthly bodies, formed for itself an elastic subtle vehicle, using the sound, the words, the feeling for this purpose\u2014and as literally as a human spirit uses the familiar physical body for its manifestation.\n\nThe experience was amazing, but it was real. He watched it carefully. In the room about him, formed on the waves of this sweet singing, shaped by feeling that found normally no other expression, inspired by emotions, yearnings, desires alien to their normal kind, these two created between them a new vehicle or body that could and did express all this.\n\nThey heard that \"other summons at the door...\" And they were off.\n\nYet he, too, heard the summons, and in the depths of his being he answered to it. His essential weakness, wearing the guise of strength, rose naked...\n\nThese thoughts and feelings lay unexpressed, perhaps\u2014too deep actually, too remote from any experience he had yet known, to find actual words, even in his mind. What did find expression, in thought at any rate, was that, before his very eyes, he witnessed the transfiguring change come over Nayan. Like some flower that has been growing in the shade, then meets the flood of sunshine for the first time, she knew a fresh tide of life sweep over her entire being. She seemed to blossom, breaking almost into flower and fruit before his very eyes, as though sun and wind brought her into a sudden bloom of exquisite maturity. He was aware of rich, deep purple, the faint gold of fruits and flowers, the creamy softness of a rose, the amber of wild grapes bathed in sparkling dew. The luscious promise of the Spring matured about her whole presentment into full summer glory. And it was the sun and wind of LeVallon's enigmatic, stimulating presence close to her that caused the miracle. The essential flower of her life poured forth to meet his own, as he had always felt it must. LeVallon's was the mighty wind that lifted her, was the sun in whose heat she basked, expanded, soared. She experienced a strange increase of her natural vitality and being. Her consciousness knew an abrupt intensification.\n\nThe signs, in that brief moment, were as clear to Fillery's divining heart as though he read them in black printed letters on a page of whitest paper. He knew the cipher and the code. He watched the signals flash. They had not even spoken, yet the relationship was established beyond doubt. He witnessed the first exchange; the wireless message of joy and sympathy that flashed he intercepted.\n\nThrough his extremely rapid mind, as he watched, poured memories, reflections, judgments in concentrated form, yet calmly, steadily, though against a background of deep and troubled emotion. There seemed actually a disruption of his personality. Father Collins, standing beside him, divined nothing, he believed, of his agitation, standing, mere figure of a man, listening to the music with attentive pleasure; at least, he gave no outward sign...\n\nThe song drew to its close. Once Nayan raised her eyes, instantly finding those of LeVallon across the room, then shifting again for a fleeting second with a rapidly changing focus to his own. He met them without a quiver; he caught again her tender, searching question; he sent no answer back.\n\nIn his own heart burned, however, a score of questions that beat against his soul for answers. What was it that each had found thus intuitively within the other? Was it her maternal instinct only that was reached as with all other men hitherto, was it at last the woman in her that leaped towards its own divine, creative sun, or was it that hidden, nameless aspect of her which had never yet found a vehicle for manifestation among her own kind and had therefore remained hitherto unexpressed\u2014bodiless?\n\nThe answer to this he found easily enough. No jealousy stirred; pain for himself had been long ago uprooted. Yet pain of a kind he felt. Would LeVallon injure, drag her down, bring suffering, perhaps of an atrocious sort, into her hitherto so innocent life? Was she yet qualified to withstand the fierce fire, the rushing wind, that the full force of his strange nature must bring to bear upon her?\n\nHis questions went prophesying, flying like swift birds to such great distances that no audible answers could return. His pain, at any rate, chiefly was for her. He divined that she was frightened, yet exhilarated, before the unexpected apparition of an unusual presence. Accustomed to smaller jets of admiration from smaller men, this deep flood overwhelmed her. This motionless figure watching her among the shadows, listening to her singing, devouring her beauty with an innocence, power, worship she had never yet encountered\u2014could she, Fillery asked himself, withstand its elemental flood and not be broken by its waves?\n\nFor at the back of all his questions, haunting his prophecies, filling his hopes and fears with substance, stood one outstanding certainty:\n\nThe motionless figure in the shadows was not LeVallon. It was \"N. H.\"\n\nThe thing he had expected had now happened. Instinctively he turned to find his colleague.\n\nFor what followed, Fillery, of course, was as unprepared as anyone. In some way, difficult to describe, the whole thing had a strangely natural, almost an inevitable touch. The exaggeration that others felt he was not conscious of. He never, for a single moment, lost his head. The wonder of the elemental violence appealed and stimulated without once touching the sense of fear, much less of panic, in him.\n\nSearching for Devonham's familiar figure, he found it in the seat that Lady Gleeson had vacated shortly before, but the face turned away towards the inner room, so that it was not possible to catch his eye. It was an attentive, critical, almost anxious expression his chief surprised, and while a faint smile perhaps flitted across his own mouth, he became aware that Father Collins\u2014he had again completely forgotten his proximity\u2014was staring with a curious intentness at him. The same instant the song came to an end. Into the brief pause of a second before the applause burst forth, Father Collins's voice was suddenly audible in his ear:\n\n\"LeVallon's gone,\" Fillery was saying to himself, \"'N. H.' is in control,\" when his neighbour's words broke in. The two sentences were simultaneously in his mind:\n\n\"A man in his own place is the Ruler of his Fate!\"\n\nAnd Fillery's astonishment was only equalled by the fact that the grim face was soft with sympathy, and that in the eyes shone moisture that was close to tears. Before he could reply, however, the applause burst forth, making an uproar against which no voice could possibly contend. The subsequent events, following so swiftly, made rejoinder equally out of the question, nor did he see Father Collins again that evening.\n\nThese Fillery witnessed much as already described through Devonham's eyes. The storm, the panic took place as told. Yet a detail here and there belong to Fillery's version, for they were a part of his own being. He had, for instance, a warning that something was about to happen, although warning seems not quite the faithful word. He saw the Valley for one fleeting second, the three familiar figures, Nayan, \"N. H.,\" himself, flying through the bright sunshine before a wind that stirred a million flowers. In the farthest possible background of his mind it shone an instant. The shutter dropped again, it vanished.\n\nYet enough to set him on the alert. Into the air about him, into his heart as well, fell an exhilarating and immense refreshment. It rose, as it were, from the most deeply submerged portion of his own hidden being, now stirred, even actually summoned, into activity.\n\nThe shutter meanwhile rose and fell and rose again; the Valley reappeared and vanished, then reappeared again.\n\nFor the truth came smashing against him\u2014smashing his being open, and bursting the doors of his carefully instructed, carefully guarded nature. The doors flung from their hinges and a blinding light poured in and flooded the strangest possible hidden corners.\n\nHe saw what followed with an accuracy of observation impossible to anyone else, with an intimate sympathy the others could not feel\u2014because he himself took part in the entire scene. But the scene, for him, was not the Chelsea studio with its tobacco smoke and perfume, it was the Caucasian valley whence his own blood derived. Clean, fragrant winds swept past him across mighty space. The walls melted into distances of forest and mountain peaks, the ceiling was a dome of stainless blue, the floor ran deep in flowers. A drenching sunshine of crystal purity bathed the world. It was across bright emerald turf that he saw \"N. H.\" dance forward like a wind of power, cry with a joyful resonant voice to the radiant girl who stood laughing, half hiding, yet at the same time beckoning, that she should fly with him. He caught and lifted her, her hair, the whiteness of her skin flashing in the sun like some marvellous bird in the act of taking wing, for before he had touched her she leapt through the air to meet his outstretched arms. Yet one hand, one silvery arm, waved towards himself, towards Fillery; their fingers met and clasped; the three of them, three dancing, free and joyful figures, fled like the wind across the enormous mountains, but fled, he knew beyond all question\u2014home.\n\nHe saw this in the space of those few seconds in which Nayan was swung over the youth's shoulders beside the piano. The two scenes ran parallel, as it were, before his eyes, outer and inner sight keeping equal pace together. His balance and judgment here were never once disturbed. In the studio: he had just introduced LeVallon to the girl and the latter had caught her up. In the valley: she had leapt into his arms and the three of them were off.\n\nIt was this inner interpretation, keeping always level pace with what was happening outwardly, that furnished Fillery with the hint of an astounding explanation. The figure in the valley, it flashed to him, was, of course, \"N. H.\" in all his natural splendour, but a figure unknown surely to all records of humanity as such. Here danced and sang a happy radiant being, by whom the limitations of the human species were not experienced, even if the species were familiar to him at all. A being from another system, another evolution, an elemental being, whose ideal, development, mode of existence, were not those of men and women. \"N. H.\" was not a human being, a human soul, a human spirit. He belonged elsewhere and otherwise. Under the guise of LeVallon he had drifted in. He inhabited LeVallon's frame.\n\nIn the Studio, at this instant, Fillery heard him using the singular words already noted, and in the Studio they sounded, indeed, senseless, foolish, even mad. It was, he realized, an attempt to stammer in human language some meaning that lay beyond, outside it. In the Valley, however, and at the same moment, they sounded natural and true. The evolutionary system to which \"N. H.\" belonged, from which he had in some as yet unknown manner passed into humanity, but to which, though almost entirely forgotten, he yearned with his whole being to return\u2014this other system had, it seemed, its own conditions, its own methods of advance, its ideals and its duties. Were, then, its inhabitants\u2014this flashed upon him in the delicious wind and sunshine\u2014the workers in what men call the natural kingdoms, the builders of form and structure, the directing powers that expressed themselves through the elemental energies everywhere behind the laws of Nature? Was this their tireless and wondrous service in the planet, in the universe itself?\n\n\"N. H.\" called the girl to service, not to personal love. Alone, cut off from his own kind, alien and derelict amid the conditions of a humanity strange, perhaps unknown to him, he sought companionship where he could. Drawn instinctively to the more impersonal types, such as Fillery and the girl, he felt there the nearest approach to what he recognized as his own kind; their ideal of selfless service was a beacon that he understood; he would return to his own kingdom, carrying them both with him. From somewhere, at any rate, this all flashed into his too willing mind...\n\nAt which second precisely in Fillery's valley-vision, Khilkoff entered, and\u2014yet before he could take action\u2014the lightning struck and the sudden explosion of the ferocious storm blackened out both the outer and the inner scene.\n\nThe shock of elemental violence, the astounding revelation as well that an entirely new type had possibly come within his ken, this, combined with the emotional disturbance caused by the change produced in Nayan, seemed enough to upset the equilibrium of even the most balanced mind. The darkness added its touch of helplessness besides. Yet Fillery never for a moment lost his head. Two natures in him, cause of his radical instability, merged for a moment in amazing harmony. The panic now dominating all about him seemed so small a thing compared to the shattering discovery life had just offered to him. Across it, finding his way past kneeling women and shrieking girls, drenched to the skin by the flood of entering rain, moving over splintered glass, he found the figure he sought, as though by some instinctive sympathy. They came together in the darkness. Their hands met easily. A moment later they were in the street, and \"N. H.'s\" instinctive terror amid the sheets of falling water, an element hostile to his own natural fire, made it a simple matter to get him home\u2014in Lady Gleeson's motor car." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 329", + "text": "When relative order had been restored, Devonham realized, of course, that his colleague had cleverly spirited away their \"patient\"; also that the sculptor had carried off his daughter. Relieved to escape from the atmosphere of what he considered collective hysteria, he had borrowed mackintosh and umbrella, and declining several offers of a lift, had walked the four miles to his house in the rain and wind. The exercise helped to work off the emotion in him; his mind cleared healthily; personal bias gave way to honest and unprejudiced reflection; there was much that interested him deeply, at the same time puzzled and bewildered him beyond anything he had yet experienced. He reached the house with a mind steady if unsatisfied; but the emotions caused by prejudice had gone. His main anxiety centred about his chief.\n\nHe was glad to notice a light in an upper window, for it meant, he hoped, that LeVallon was now safely home. While his latchkey sought its hole, however, this light was extinguished, and when the door opened, it was Fillery himself who greeted him, a finger on his lips.\n\n\"Quietly!\" he whispered. \"I've just got him to bed and put his light out. He's asleep already.\" Paul noticed his manner instantly\u2014its happiness. There was a glow of mysterious joy and wonder in his atmosphere that made the other hostile at once.\n\nThey went together towards that inner room where so often together they had already talked both moon and sun to bed. Cold food lay on the table, and while they satisfied their hunger, the rain outside poured down with a steady drenching sound. The wind had dropped. The suburb lay silent and deserted. It was long past midnight. The house was very still, only the occasional step of a night-nurse audible in the passages and rooms upstairs. They would not be disturbed.\n\n\"You got him home all right, then?\" Paul asked presently, keeping his voice low.\n\nHe had been observing his friend closely; the evident pleasure and satisfaction in the face annoyed him; the light in the eyes at the same time profoundly troubled him. Not only did he love his chief for himself, he set high value on his work as well. It would be deplorable, a tragedy, if judgment were destroyed by personal bias and desire. He felt uneasy and distressed.\n\nFillery nodded, then gave an account of what had happened, but obviously an account of outward events merely; he did not wish, evidently, to argue or explain. The strong, rugged face was lit up, the eyes were shining; some inner enthusiasm pervaded his whole being. Evidently he felt very sure of something\u2014something that both pleased and stimulated him.\n\nHis account of what had happened was brief enough, little more than a statement of the facts.\n\nFinding himself close to LeVallon when the darkness came, he had kept hold of him and hurried him out of the house at once. The sudden blackness, it seemed, had made LeVallon quiet again, though he kept asking excitedly for the girl. When assured that he would soon see her, he became obedient as a lamb. The absence of light apparently had a calming influence. They found, of course, no taxis, but commandeered the first available private car, Fillery using the authoritative influence of his name. And it was Lady Gleeson's car, Lady Gleeson herself inside it. She had thought things over, put two and two together, and had come back. Her car might be of use. It was. For the rain was falling in sheets and bucketfuls, the road had become a river of water, and Fillery's automobile, ordered for an hour later, had not put in an appearance. It was the rain that saved the situation...\n\nAn exasperated expression crossed Devonham's face as he heard this detail emphasized. He had meant to listen without interruption. The enigmatical reference to the rain proved too much for him.\n\n\"Why 'the rain'? What d'you mean exactly, Edward?\"\n\n\"Water,\" was the reply, made in a significant tone that further annoyed his listener's sense of judgment. \"You remember the Channel, surely! Water and fire mutually destroy each other. They are hostile elements.\"\n\nThere was a look almost of amusement on his face as he said it. Devonham kept a tight hold upon his tongue. It was not impatience or surprise he felt, though both were strong; it was perhaps sorrow.\n\n\"And so Lady Gleeson drove you home?\"\n\nHe waited with devouring interest for further details. The throng of questions, criticisms and emotions surging in him he repressed with admirable restraint.\n\nLady Gleeson, yes, had driven the party home. Fillery made her sit on the back seat alone, while he occupied the front one, LeVallon beside him, but as far back among the deep cushions as possible. The doctor held his hand. At any other time, Devonham could have laughed; but he saw no comedy now. Lady Gleeson, it seemed, was awed by the seriousness of the \"Chief,\" whom, even at the best of times, she feared a little. Her vanity, however, persuaded her evidently that she was somehow the centre of interest.\n\nYet Devonham, as he listened, had difficulty in persuading himself that he was in the twentieth century, and that the man who spoke was his colleague and a man of the day as well.\n\n\"LeVallon talked little, and that little to himself or to me. He seemed unaware that a third person was present at all. Though quiet enough, there was suppressed vehemence still about him. He said various things: that 'she belonged to us,' for instance; that he 'knew his own'; that she was 'filled with fire in exile'; and that he would 'take her back.' Also that I, too, must go with them both. He often mentioned the sun, saying more than once that the sun had 'sent its messengers.' Obviously, it was not the ordinary sun he referred to, but some source of central heat and fire he seems aware of\u2014\"\n\n\"You, I suppose, Edward,\" put in his listener quickly, \"said nothing to encourage all this? Nothing that could suggest or stimulate?\"\n\nFillery ignored, even if he noticed, the tone of the question. \"I kept silence rather. I said very little. I let him talk. I had to keep an eye on the woman, too.\"\n\n\"You certainly had your hands full\u2014a dual personality and a nymphomaniac.\"\n\n\"She helped me, without knowing it. All he said about the girl, she evidently took to herself. When he begged me to keep the water out, she drew the window up the last half-inch... The water frightened him; she was sympathetic, and her sympathy seemed to reach him, though I doubt if he was aware of her presence at all until the last minute almost\u2014\"\n\n\"And 'at the last minute'?\"\n\n\"She leaned forward suddenly and took both his hands. I had let go of the one I held and was just about to open the door, when I heard her say excitedly that I must let her come and see him, or that he must call on her; she was sure she could help him; he must tell her everything... I turned to look... LeVallon, startled into what I believe was his first consciousness of her presence, stared into her eyes, and leaned forward among his cushions a little, so that their faces were close together. Before I could interfere, she had flung her bare arms about his neck and kissed him. She then sat back again, turning to me, and repeating again and again that he needed a woman's care and that she must help and mother him. She was excited, but she knew what she was saying. She showed neither shame nor the least confusion. She tasted\u2014of course with her it cannot last\u2014a bigger world. She was most determined.\"\n\n\"His reaction?\" inquired Devonham, amused in spite of his graver emotions of uneasiness and exasperation.\n\n\"None whatever. I scarcely think he realized he had been kissed. His interest was so entirely elsewhere. I saw his face a moment among the white ermine, the bare arms and jewels that enveloped him.\" Fillery frowned faintly. \"The car had almost stopped. Lady Gleeson was leaning back again. He looked at me, and his voice was intense and eager: 'Dear Fillery,' he said, 'we have found each other, I have found her. She knows, she remembers the way back. Here we can do so little.'\n\n\"Lady Gleeson, however, had interpreted the words in another way.\n\n\"'I'll come to-morrow to see you,' she said at once intensely. 'You must let me come,'\u2014the last words addressed to me, of course.\"\n\nThe two men looked at one another a moment in silence, and for the first time during the conversation they exchanged a smile...\n\n\"I got him to bed,\" Fillery concluded. \"In ten minutes he was sound asleep.\" And his eyes indicated the room overhead.\n\nHe leaned back, and quietly began to fill his pipe. The account was over.\n\nAs though a great spring suddenly released him, Paul Devonham stood up. His untidy hair hung wild, his glasses were crooked on his big nose, his tie askew. His whole manner bristled with accumulated challenge and disagreement.\n\n\"Who?\" he cried. \"Who? Edward, I ask you?\"\n\nHis colleague, yet knowing exactly what he meant, looked up questioningly. He looked him full in the face.\n\n\"Hush!\" he said quietly. \"You'll wake him.\"\n\nHe gazed with happy penetrating eyes at his companion. \"Paul,\" he added gently, \"do you really mean it? Have you still the faintest doubt?\"\n\nThe moment had drama in it of unusual kind. The conflict between these two honest and unselfish minds was vital. The moment, too, was chosen, the place as well\u2014this small, quiet room in a commonplace suburb of the greatest city on the planet, drenched by earthly rain and battered by earthly wind from the heart of an equinoctial storm; the mighty universe outside, breaking with wondrous, incredible impossibilities upon a mind that listened and a mind that could not hear; and upstairs, separated from them by a few carpenter's boards, an assortment of \"souls,\" either derelict and ruined, or gifted supernormally, masters of space and time perhaps, yet all waiting to be healed by the best knowledge known to the race\u2014and one among them, about whom the conflict raged... sound asleep... while wind and water stormed, while lightning fires lit the distant horizons, while the great sun lay hidden, and darkness crept soundlessly to and fro...\n\n\"Have you still the slightest doubt, Paul?\" repeated Fillery. \"You know the evidence. You have an open mind.\"\n\nThen Devonham, still standing over his Chief, let out the storm that had accumulated in him over-long. He talked like a book. He talked like several books. It seemed almost that he distrusted his own personal judgment.\n\n\"Edward,\" he began solemnly\u2014not knowing that he quoted\u2014\"you, above all men, understand the lower recesses of the human heart, that gloomy, gigantic oubliette in which our million ancestors writhe together inextricably, and each man's planetary past is buried alive\u2014\"\n\nFillery nodded quietly his acquiescence.\n\n\"You, of all men, know our packed, limitless subterranean life,\" Devonham went on, \"and its impenetrable depths. You understand telepathy, 'extended telepathy' as well, and how a given mind may tap not only forgotten individual memories, but memories of his family, his race, even planetary memories into the bargain, the memory, in fact, of every being that ever lived, right down to Adam, if you will\u2014\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" murmured the other, listening patiently, while he puffed his pipe and heard the rain and wind. \"I know all that. I know it, at any rate, as a possible theory.\"\n\n\"You also know,\" continued Devonham in a slightly less strident tone, \"your own\u2014forgive me, Edward\u2014your own idiosyncrasies, your weaknesses, your dynamic accumulated repressions, your strange physical heritage and spiritual\u2014I repeat the phrase\u2014your spiritual vagrancies towards\u2014towards\u2014\" He broke off suddenly, unable to find the words he wanted.\n\n\"I'm illegitimate, born of a pagan passion,\" mentioned the other calmly. \"In that sense, if you like, I have in me a 'complex' against the race, against humanity\u2014as such.\"\n\nHe smiled patiently, and it was the patience, the evident conviction of superiority that exasperated his cautious, accurate colleague.\n\n\"If I love humanity, I also tolerate it perhaps, for I try to heal it,\" added Fillery. \"But, believe me, Paul, I do not lose my scientific judgment.\"\n\n\"Edward,\" burst out the other, \"how can you think it possible, then\u2014that he is other than the result of tendencies transmitted by his mad parents, or acquired from Mason, who taught him all he knows, or\u2014if you will\u2014that he has these hysterical faculties\u2014supernormal as we may call them\u2014which tap some racial, even, if you will, some planetary past\u2014\"\n\nHe again broke off, unable to express his whole thought, his entire emotion, in a few words.\n\n\"I accept all that,\" said Fillery, still calmly, quietly, \"but perhaps now\u2014in the interest of truth\"\u2014his tone was grave, his words obviously chosen carefully\u2014\"if now I feel it necessary to go beyond it! My strange heritage,\" he added, \"is even possibly a help and guide. How,\" he asked, a trace of passion for the first time visible in his manner, \"shall we venture\u2014how decide\u2014for we are not wholly ignorant, you and I\u2014between what is possible and impossible? Is this trivial planet, then,\" he asked, his voice rising suddenly, ominously perhaps, \"our sole criterion? Dare we not venture\u2014beyond\u2014a little? The scientific mind should be the last to dogmatize as to the possibilities of this life of ours...\"\n\nThe authority of chief, the old tie of respectful and affectionate friendship, the admiring wonder that pertained to a daring speculator who had often proved himself right in face of violent opposition\u2014all these affected Devonham. He did not weaken, but for an instant he knew, perhaps, the existence of a vast, incredible horizon in his friend's mind, though one he dared not contemplate. Possibly, he understood in this passing moment a huger world, a new outlook that scorned limit, though yet an outlook that his accurate, smaller spirit shrank from.\n\nHe found, at any rate, his own words futile. \"You remember,\" he offered\u2014\"'We need only suppose the continuity of our own consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam.'\"\n\n\"Good, yes,\" said Fillery. \"But that 'mother sea,' what may it not include? Dare we set limits to it?\"\n\nAnd, as he said it, Fillery, emotion visible in him, rose suddenly from his chair. He stood up and faced his colleague.\n\n\"Let us come to the point,\" he said in a clear, steady voice. \"It all lies\u2014doesn't it?\u2014in that question you asked\u2014\"\n\n\"Who?\" came at once from Devonham's lips, as he stood, looking oddly stiff and rigid opposite his Chief. There was a touch of defiance in his tone. \"Who?\" He repeated his original question.\n\nNo pause intervened. Fillery's reply came sharp and firm:\n\n\"'N. H.,' \" he said.\n\nAn interval of silence followed, then, between the two men, as they looked into each other's eyes. Fillery waited for his assistant to speak, but no word came.\n\n\"LeVallon,\" the older man continued, \"is the transient, acquired personality. It does not interest us. There is no real LeVallon. The sole reality is\u2014'N. H.'\"\n\nHe spoke with the earnestness of deep conviction. There was still no reply or comment from the other.\n\n\"Paul,\" he continued, steadying his voice and placing a hand upon his colleague's shoulder, \"I am going to ask you to\u2014consider our arrangement\u2014cancelled. I must\u2014\"\n\nThen, before he could finish what he had to say, the other had said it for him:\n\n\"Edward, I give you back your promise.\"\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders ever so slightly, but there was no unpleasant, no antagonistic touch now either in voice or manner. There was, rather, a graver earnestness than there had been hitherto, a hint of reluctant acquiescence, but also there was an emotion that included certainly affection. No such fundamental disagreement had ever come between them during all their years of work together. \"You understand,\" he added slowly, \"what you are doing\u2014what is involved.\" His tone almost suggested that he spoke to a patient, a loved patient, but one over whom he had no control. He sighed.\n\n\"I belong, Paul, myself to the unstable\u2014if that is what you mean,\" said his old friend gently, \"and with all of danger, or of wonder, it involves.\"\n\nThe faint movement of the shoulders again was noticeable. \"We need not put it that way, Edward,\" was the quiet rejoinder; \"for that, if true, can only help your insight, your understanding, and your judgment.\" He hesitated a moment or two, searching his mind carefully for words. Fillery waited. \"But it involves\u2014I think\"\u2014he went on presently in a firmer voice\u2014\"his fate as well. He must become permanently\u2014one or other.\"\n\nNo pause followed. There was a smile of curious happiness on Fillery's face as he instantly answered in a tone of absolute conviction:\n\n\"There lies the root of our disagreement, Paul. There is no 'other.' I am positive for once. There is only one, and that one is\u2014'N. H.'\"\n\n\"Umph!\" his friend grunted. Behind the exclamation hid an attitude confirmed, as though he had come suddenly to a big decision.\n\n\"You see, Paul\u2014I know.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 330", + "text": "It was not long after the scene in the Studio that the Prometheans foregathered at dinner in the back room of the small French restaurant in Soho and discussed the event. The prices were moderate, conditions free and easy. It was a favourite haunt of Members.\n\nTo-night, moreover, there was likely to be a good attendance. The word had gone out.\n\nThe Studio scene had, of course, been the subject of much discussion already. The night of its occurrence it had been talked over till dawn in more than one flat, and during the following days the Society, as a whole, thought of little else. Those who had not been present had to be informed, and those who had witnessed it found it an absorbing topic of speculation. The first words that passed when one member met another in the street was: \"What did you make of that storm? Wasn't it amazing? Did your solar plexus vibrate? Mine did! And the light, the colour, the vibrations\u2014weren't they terrific? What do you think he is?\" It was rumoured that the Secretary was asking for individual reports. Excitement and interest were general, though the accounts of individual witnesses differed extraordinarily. It seemed impossible that all had seen and heard the same thing.\n\nThe back room was pleasantly filled to-night, for it was somehow known that Millington Povey, and possibly Father Collins, too, were coming. Miss Milligan, the astrologist, was there early, arriving with Mrs. Towzer, who saw auras and had already, it was rumoured, painted automatically a strange rendering of \"forces\" that were visible to her clairvoyantly during the occurrence. Miss Lance, in shining beads and a glittering scarf, arrived on their heels, an account of the scene in her pocket\u2014to be published in her magazine \"Simplicity\" after she had modified it according to what she picked up from hearing other, and better, descriptions.\n\nKempster, immaculate as ever, ordering his food as he ordered his clothes, like a connoisseur, was one of the first to establish himself in a comfortable seat. He knew how to look after himself, and was already eating in his neat dainty way while the others still stood about studying the big white menu with its illegible hieroglyphics in smudged violet ink. He supplemented his meals with special patent foods of vegetarian kind he brought with him. He had dried bananas in one pocket and spirit photographs in another, and he was invariably pulling out the wrong thing. Meat he avoided. \"A man is what he eats,\" he held, and animal blood was fatal to psychic development. To eat pig or cow was to absorb undesirable characteristics.\n\nNext to him sat Lattimer, a lanky man of thirty, with loose clothes, long hair, and eyes of strange intensity. Known as \"occultist and alchemist,\" he was also a chemist of some repute. His life was ruled by a master-desire and a master-fear: the former, that he might one day project his double consciously; the latter, that in his next earthly incarnation he might be\u2014the prospect made him shudder\u2014a woman. He sought to keep his thought as concrete as possible, the male quality.\n\nHe believed that the nervous centre of the physical body which controlled all such unearthly, if not definitely \"spiritual,\" impulses, was the solar plexus. For him it was the important portion of his anatomy, the seat of intuition. Brain came second.\n\n\"The fellow,\" he declared emphatically, \"stirred my solar plexus, my kundalini\u2014that's all I know.\" He referred, as all understood, to the latent power the yogis claim lies coiled, but only rarely manifested, in that great nervous centre.\n\nHis statement, he knew, would meet with general approval and understanding. It was the literal Kempster who spoiled his opening:\n\n\"Paul Devonham,\" said the latter, \"thinks it's merely a secondary personality that emerged. I had a long argument with him about it\u2014\"\n\n\"Never argue with the once-born,\" declared Povey flatly, producing his pet sentence. \"It's waste of time. Only older souls, with the experience of many earthly lives stored in their beings, are knowledgeable.\" He filled his glass and poured out for others, Lattimer and Mrs. Towzer alone declining, though for different reasons.\n\n\"It destroys the 'sight,'\" explained the former. \"Alcohol sets up coarse vibrations that ruin clairvoyance.\"\n\n\"I decided to deny myself till the war is over,\" was Mrs. Towzer's reason, and when Povey reminded her of the armistice, she mentioned that Turkey hadn't \"signed yet.\"\n\n\"I think his soul\u2014\" began Miss Lance.\n\n\"If he has a soul,\" put in Povey, electrically.\n\n\"\u2014is hardly in his body at all,\" concluded Miss Lance, less convincingly than originally intended.\n\n\"It was love at first sight. His sign is Fire and hers is Air,\" Miss Milligan said. \"That's certain. Of course they came together.\"\n\n\"A clear case of memory, at any rate,\" insisted Kempster. \"Two old souls meeting again for the first time for thousands of years, probably. Love at first sight, or hate, for that matter, is always memory, isn't it?\" He disliked the astrology explanation; it was not mysterious enough, too mathematical and exact to please him.\n\n\"Secondary personalities are invariably memories of former selves, of course,\" agreed young Dickson, the theosophist, who was on the verge now of becoming a psycho-analyst and had already discarded Freud for Jung. \"If not memories of past lives, then they're desires suppressed in this one.\"\n\n\"The less you think, the more you know,\" suggested Miss Lance. She distrusted intellect and believed that another faculty, called instinct or intuition, according to which word first occurred to her, was the way to knowledge. She was about to quote Bergson upside down, when Povey, foreseeing an interval of boredom, took command:\n\n\"One thing we know, at any rate,\" he began judiciously; \"we aren't the only beings in the universe. There are non-human intelligences, both vast and small. The old world-wide legends can't be built on nothing. In every age of history\u2014the reports are universal\u2014we have pretty good evidence for other forms of life than humans\u2014\"\n\n\"Though never yet in human form,\" put in Lattimer, yet sympathetically. \"Their bodies, I mean, aren't human,\" he added.\n\n\"Exactly. That's true. But the gods, the fauns, the satyrs, the elemental beings, as we call 'em\u2014sylphs, undines, gnomes and salamanders\u2014to say nothing of fairies et hoc genus omne\u2014there must be some reasonable foundation for their persistence through all the ages.\"\n\n\"They all belong to the Deva Evolution,\" Dickson mentioned with conviction. \"In the East it's been known and recognized for centuries, hasn't it? Another evolutionary system that runs parallel to ours. From planetary spirits down to elementals, they're concerned with the building up of form in the various kingdoms\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Povey interrupted impatiently. Dickson was stealing what he had meant to say himself and to say, he flattered himself, far better. \"We know all that, of course. They stand behind what we call the laws of nature, non-human activities and intelligences of every grade and kind. They work for humanity in a way, are in other space and time, deathless, of course, yet\u2014in some strange way, always eager to cross the gulf fixed between the two and so find a soul. They are impersonal in a sense, as impersonal as, say, wind and fire through which some of them operate as bodies.\"\n\nHe paused and looked about him, noting the interested attention he awaked.\n\n\"There may be times,\" he went on, \"there probably are certain occasions, when the gulf is more crossable than others.\" He laid down his knife and fork as a sympathetic murmur proved that the point he was leading up to was favourably understood already. \"We have had this war, for instance,\" he stated, his voice taking on a more significant and mysterious tone. \"Dislodged by the huge upheaval, man's soul is on the march again.\" He paused once more. \"They,\" he concluded, lowering his voice still more, and emphasizing the pronoun, \"are possibly already among us! Who knows?\"\n\nHe glanced round. \"We do; we know,\" was the expression on most faces. All knew precisely what he meant and to whom he referred, at any rate.\n\n\"You might get him to come and lecture to us,\" said Dickson, the first to break the pause. \"You might ask Dr. Fillery. You know him.\"\n\n\"That's an idea\u2014\" began the Secretary, when there was a commotion near the door. His face showed annoyance.\n\nIt was the arrival of Toogood that at this moment disturbed the atmosphere and robbed Povey of the effect he aimed at. It provided Kempster, however, with an idea at the same time. \"Here's a psychometrist!\" he exclaimed, making room for him. \"He might get a bit of his hair or clothing and psychometrize it. He might tell us about his past, if not exactly what he is.\"\n\nThe suggestion, however, found no seconder, for it seemed that the new arrival was not particularly welcomed. Judging by the glances, the varying shades of greeting, too, he was not fully trusted, perhaps, this broad, fleshy man of thirty-five, with complexion blotchy, an over-sensual mouth and eyes a trifle shifty. His claim to membership was two-fold: he remembered past lives, and had the strange power of psychometry. An arch\u00e6ologist by trade, his gift of psychometry\u2014by which he claimed to hold an object and tell its past, its pedigree, its history\u2014was of great use to him in his calling. Without further trouble he could tell whether such an object was genuine or sham. Dealers in antiquities offered him big fees\u2014but \"No, no; I cannot prostitute my powers, you see\"\u2014and he remained poor accordingly.\n\nIn his past lives he had been either a famous Pharaoh, or Cleopatra\u2014according to his audience of the moment and its male or female character\u2014but usually Cleopatra, because, on the whole, there was more money and less risk in her. He lectured\u2014for a fee. Lately, however, he had been Pharaoh, having got into grave trouble over the Cleopatra claim, even to the point of being threatened with expulsion from the Society. His attitude during the war, besides, had been unsatisfactory\u2014it was felt he had selfishly protected himself on the grounds of being physically unfit. Apart from arch\u00e6ology, too, his chief preoccupation, derived from past lives of course, was sex, in the form of other men's wives, his own wife and children being, naturally, very recent and somewhat negligible ties.\n\nHis gift of psychometry, none the less, was considered proved\u2014in spite of the backward and indifferent dealers. His mind was quick and not unsubtle. He became now au fait with the trend of the conversation in a very few seconds, but he had not been present at the Studio when the occurrence all discussed had taken place.\n\n\"Hair would be best,\" he advised tentatively, sipping his whisky-and-soda. He had already dined. \"It's a part of himself, you see. Better than mere clothing, I mean. It's extremely vital, hair. It grows after death.\"\n\n\"If I can get it for you, I will,\" said Povey. \"He may be lecturing for us before long. I'll try.\"\n\n\"With psychometry and a good photograph,\" Kempster suggested, \"a time exposure, if possible, we ought to get some evidence, at any rate. It's first-hand evidence we want, of course, isn't it? What do you think of this, for instance, I wonder?\" He turned to Lattimer, drawing something from his pocket and showing it. \"It's a time exposure at night of a haunted tree. You'll notice a queer sort of elemental form inside the trunk and branches. Oh!\" He replaced the shrivelled banana in his pocket, and drew out the photograph without a smile. \"This,\" he explained, waving it, \"is what I meant.\" They fell to discussing it.\n\nMeanwhile, Povey, anxious to resume his lecture, made an effort to recover his command of the group-atmosphere which Toogood had disturbed. The latter had a \"personal magnetism\" which made the women like him in spite of their distrust.\n\n\"I was just saying,\" he resumed, patting the elbow of the psychometrist, \"that this strange event we've been discussing\u2014you weren't present, I believe, at the time, but, of course, you've heard about it\u2014has features which seem to point to something radically new, or at least of very rare occurrence. As Lattimer mentioned, a human body has never yet, so far as we know, been occupied, obsessed, by a non-human entity, but that, after all, is no reason why it should not ever happen. What is a body, anyhow? What is an entity, too?\" Povey's thought was wandering, evidently; the thread of his first discourse was broken; he floundered. \"Man, anyway, is more than a mere chemical machine,\" he went on, \"a crystallization of the primitive nebul\u00e6, though the instrument he uses, the body he works through, is undoubtedly thus describable. Now, we know there are all kinds of non-human intelligences busy on our planet, in the Universe itself as well. Why, then, I ask, should not one of these\u2014?\"\n\nHe paused, unable to find himself, his confusion obvious. He was as glad of the interruption that was then provided by the arrival of Imson as his audience was. Toogood certainly was not sorry; he need find no immediate answer. He sipped his drink and made mental notes.\n\nImson arrived in a rough brown ulster with the collar turned up about his ears, a low flannel shirt, not strictly clean, lying loosely round his neck. His colourless face was of somewhat flabby texture, due probably to his diet, but its simple, honest expression was attractive, the smile engaging. The touch of foolishness might have been childlike innocence, even saintliness some thought, and though he was well over forty, the unlined skin made him look more like thirty. He enjoyed a physiognomy not unlike that of a horse or sheep. His big, brown eyes stared wide open at the world, expecting wonder and finding it. His hobby was inspirational poems. One lay in his breast pocket now. He burned to read it aloud.\n\nPat Imson's ideal was an odd one\u2014detachment; the desire to avoid all ties that must bring him back to future incarnations on the earth, to eschew making fresh Karma, in a word. He considered himself an \"old soul,\" and was rather weary of it all\u2014of existence and development, that is. To take no part in life meant to escape from those tangles for whose unravelling the law of rebirth dragged the soul back again and again. To sow no Causes was to have no harvest of Effects to reap with toil and perspiration. Action, of course, there must be, but \"indifference to results of action\" was the secret. Imson, none the less, was always entangled with wives and children. Having divorced one wife, and been divorced by another, he had recently married a third; a flock of children streamed behind him; he was a good father, if a strange husband.\n\n\"It's old Karma I have to work off,\" he would explain, referring to the wives. \"If I avoid the experience I shall only have to come back again. There's no good shirking old Karma.\" He gave this explanation to the wives themselves, not only to his friends. \"Face it and it's done with, worked off, you see.\" That is, it had to be done nicely, kindly, generously.\n\nAn entire absence of the sense of humour was, of course, his natural gift, yet a certain quaint wisdom helped to fill the dangerous vacuum. He was known usually as \"Pat.\"\n\n\"Come on, Pat,\" said Povey, making room for him at his side. \"How's Karma? We're just talking about LeVallon and the Studio business. What do you make of it? You were there, weren't you?\" The others listened, attentively, for Imson had a reputation for \"seeing true.\"\n\n\"I saw it, yes,\" replied Imson, ordering his dinner with indifference\u2014soup, fried potatoes, salad, cheese and coffee\u2014but declining the offered wine. The group waited for his next remark, but none was forthcoming. He sat crumbling his bread into the soup and stirring the mixture with his spoon.\n\n\"Did you see the light about him, Mr. Imson?\" asked Miss Lance. \"The brilliant aura of golden yellow that he wore? I thought\u2014it sounds exaggerated, I know\u2014but to me it seemed even brighter than the lightning. Did you notice it?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Imson slowly, putting his spoon down. \"I'm not often clairvoyant, you know. I did notice, however, a sort of radiance about him. But with hair like that, it's difficult to be certain\u2014\"\n\n\"Full of lovely patterns,\" said Mrs. Towzer. \"Geometrical patterns.\"\n\n\"Like astrological designs,\" mentioned Miss Milligan. \"He's Leo, of course\u2014fire.\"\n\n\"Almost as though he brought or caused the lightning\u2014as if it actually emanated out of his atmosphere somehow,\" claimed Miss Lance, for it was her conversation after all.\n\n\"I saw nothing of that,\" replied Imson quietly. \"No, I can't say I saw anything exactly like that.\" He added honestly, with his engaging smile that had earned for him in some quarters the nickname of \"The Sheep\": \"I was looking at Nayan, you see, most of the time.\"\n\nA smile flickered round the table, for rumour had it that the girl had once seemed to him as possible \"Karma.\"\n\n\"So was I,\" put in Kempster with kindly intention, though his sympathy was evidently not needed. Imson was too simple even to feel embarrassment. \"She came to life suddenly for the first time since I've known her. It was amazing.\" To which Imson, busy over his salad-dressing, made no reply.\n\nPovey, lighting his pipe and puffing out thick clouds of smoke, was cleverer. \"LeVallon's effect upon her, whatever it was, seemed instantaneous,\" he informed the table. \"I never saw a clearer case of two souls coming together in a flash.\"\n\n\"As I said just now,\" Kempster quickly mentioned.\n\n\"They are similar,\" said Imson, looking up, while the group waited expectantly.\n\n\"Similar,\" repeated Kempster. \"Ah!\"\n\n\"It was the surprise in her face that struck me most,\" observed Povey quickly, making an internal note of Imson's adjective, but knowing that indirect methods would draw him out better than point-blank questions. \"LeVallon showed it too. It was an unexpected recognition on both sides. They are 'similar,' as you say; both at the same stage of development, whatever that stage may be. The expression on both faces\u2014\"\n\n\"Escape,\" exclaimed Imson, giving at last the kernel of what he had to say. And the effect upon the group was electrical. A visible thrill ran round the Soho table.\n\n\"The very word,\" exclaimed Povey and Miss Lance together. \"Escape!\" But neither of them knew exactly what they meant, nor what Imson himself meant.\n\n\"LeVallon has, of course, already escaped,\" the latter went on quietly. \"He is no longer caught by causes and effects as we are here. He's got out of it all long ago\u2014if he was ever in it at all.\"\n\n\"If he ever was in it at all,\" said Povey quickly. \"You noticed that too. You're very discerning, Pat.\"\n\n\"Clairvoyant,\" mentioned Miss Lance.\n\n\"I've seen them in dreams like that,\" returned Imson calmly. \"I often see them, of course.\" He referred to his qualification for membership. \"The great figures I see in dream have just that unearthly expression.\"\n\n\"Unearthly,\" said Mrs. Towzer with excitement.\n\n\"Non-human,\" mentioned Kempster suggestively.\n\n\"Not of this world, anyhow,\" suggested Miss Lance mysteriously.\n\n\"Divine?\" inquired Miss Milligan below her breath.\n\n\"Really,\" murmured Toogood, \"I must get a bit of his hair and psychometrize it at once.\" He was sipping a second glass of whisky.\n\nImson looked round at each face in turn, apparently seeing nothing that need increase his attachment to the planet by way of fresh Karma.\n\n\"The Deva world,\" he said briefly, after a pause. \"Probably he's come to take Nayan off with him. She\u2014I always said so\u2014has a strong strain of the elemental kingdom in her. She may be his Devi. LeVallon, I'm sure, is here for the first time. He's one of the non-human evolution. He's slipped in. A Deva himself probably.\" It was as though he said that the waiter was Swiss or French, or that the proprietor's daughter had Italian blood in her.\n\nPovey looked round him with an air of triumph.\n\n\"Ah!\" he announced, as who should say, \"You all thought my version a bit wild, but here's confirmation from an unbiased witness.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, I can't be certain,\" Imson reminded the group. If he deceived them enough to change their lives in any respect, it involved fresh Karma for himself. Care was indicated. \"I can't be positive, can I?\" he hedged. \"Only\u2014I must say\u2014the great deva-figures I've seen in dream have exactly that look and expression.\"\n\n\"That's interesting, Pat,\" Povey put in, \"because, before you came, I was suggesting a similar explanation for his air of immense potential power. The elemental atmosphere he brought\u2014we all noticed it, of course.\"\n\n\"Elemental is the only word,\" Miss Lance inserted. \"A great Nature Being.\" She was thinking of her magazine. \"He struck me as being so close to Nature that he seemed literally part of it.\"\n\n\"That would explain the lightning and the strange cry he gave about 'messengers,'\" replied Imson, wiping the oil from his chin and sprinkling his petit suisse with powdered sugar. \"It's quite likely enough.\"\n\n\"I wish you'd jot down what you think\u2014a little report of what you saw and felt,\" the Secretary mentioned. \"It would be of great value. I thought of making a collection of the different versions and accounts.\"\n\n\"They might be published some day,\" thought Miss Lance. \"Let's all,\" she added aloud with emphasis.\n\nImson nodded agreement, making no audible reply, while the conversation ran on, gathering impetus as it went, growing wilder possibly, but also more picturesque. A man in the street, listening behind a curtain, must have deemed the talkers suffering from delusion, mad; a good psychologist, on the other hand, similarly screened, and knowing the antecedent facts, the Studio scene, at any rate, must have been struck by one outstanding detail\u2014the effect, namely, upon one and all of the person they discussed. They had seen him for an hour or so among a crowd, a young man whose name they hardly knew; only a few had spoken to him; there had been, it seemed, neither time nor opportunity for him to produce upon one and all the impression he undoubtedly had produced. For in every mind, upon every heart, LeVallon's mere presence had evidently graven an unforgettable image, scored an undecipherable hieroglyph. Each felt, it seemed, the hint of a personality their knowledge could not explain, nor any earthly explanation satisfy. The consciousness in each one, perhaps, had been quickened. Hence, possibly, the extravagance of their conversation. Yet, since all reported differently, collective hysteria seemed discounted." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 331", + "text": "Meanwhile, as the talk continued, and the wings of imaginative speculation fanned the thick tobacco smoke, others had dropped in, both male and female members, and the group now filled the little room to the walls. The same magnet drew them all, in each heart burned the same huge question mark: Who\u2014what\u2014is this LeVallon? What was the meaning of the scene in Khilkoff's Studio?\n\nHere, too, was a curious and significant fact about the gathering\u2014the amount of knowledge, true or otherwise, they had managed to collect about LeVallon. One way or another, no one could say exactly how, the Society had picked up an astonishing array of detail they now shared together. It was known where he had spent his youth, also how, and with whom, as well as something of the different views about him held by Dr. Devonham and Edward Fillery. To such temperaments as theirs the strange, the unusual, came automatically perhaps, percolating into their minds as though a collective power of thought-reading operated. Garbled, fanciful, askew, their information may have been, but a great deal of it was not far wrong.\n\nImson, for instance, provided an account of LeVallon's birth, to which all listened spellbound. He evaded all questions as to how he knew of it. \"His parents,\" he assured the room, \"practised the old forgotten magic; his father, at any rate, was an expert, if not an initiate, with all the rites and formul\u00e6 of ancient times in his memory. LeVallon was born as the result of an experiment, its origins dating back so far that they concerned life upon another planet, I believe, a planet nearer to the sun. The tremendous winds and heat were vehicles of deity, you see\u2014there.\"\n\n\"The parents, you mean, had former lives upon another planet?\" asked someone in a hushed tone. \"Or he himself?\"\n\n\"The parents\u2014and Mason. Mason was involved in the experiment that resulted in the birth of LeVallon here to-day.\"\n\n\"The experiment\u2014what was it exactly?\" inquired Lattimer, while Toogood surreptitiously made notes on his rather dirty cuff.\n\nImson shrugged his shoulders very slightly.\n\n\"Some of it came to me in sleep,\" he mentioned, producing a paper from his pocket and beginning to read it aloud before anyone could stop him.\n\n\u2003\"When the sun was younger, and moon and stars\n\n\u2003Were thrilled with my human birth,\n\n\u2003And the winds fled shouting the wondrous news\n\n\u2003As they circled the sea and the earth,\n\n\u2003\"From the fight for money and worldly fame\n\n\u2003I drew one magical soul\n\n\u2003Who came to me over the star-lit sea\n\n\u2003As the needle turns to the Pole.\n\n\u2003\"Conceived in the hour the stars foretold,\n\n\u2003This son of the winds I bore,\n\n\u2003And I taught him the secrets of\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" interrupted Povey audaciously, \"but the experiment you were telling us about\u2014?\"\n\nA murmur of approving voices helped him.\n\n\"Oh, the experiment, yes, well\u2014all I know is,\" he went on with conviction, calmly replacing the poem in his pocket, \"that it concerned an old rite, involving the evocation of some elemental being or nature-spirit the three of them had already evoked millions of years before, but had not banished again. The experiment they made to-day was to restore it to its proper sphere. In order to do so, they had to evoke it again, and, of course\"\u2014he glanced round, as though all present were familiar with the formula of magical practices\u2014\"it could come only through the channel of a human system.\"\n\n\"Of course, yes,\" murmured a dozen voices, while eyes grew bigger and a pin dropping must have been audible.\n\n\"Well\"\u2014Imson spoke very slowly now, each word clear as a bell\u2014\"the father, who was officiating, failed. He could not stand the strain. His heart stopped beating. He died\u2014just when it was there, he dropped dead.\"\n\n\"What happened to it?\" asked Povey, too interested to care that he no longer led the room. \"You said it could only use a human system as channel\u2014\"\n\n\"It did so,\" explained Imson.\n\nThe information produced a pause of several seconds. Some of the members, like Toogood, though openly, were making pencil notes upon cuffs or backs of envelopes.\n\n\"But the channel was neither Mason nor the woman.\" The effect of this negative information was as nothing compared to the startling interest produced by the speaker's next words: \"It took the easiest channel, the line of least resistance\u2014the unborn body of the child.\"\n\nPovey, seizing his opportunity, leaped into the silence:\n\n\"Whose body, now full grown, and named LeVallon, came to the Studio!\" he exclaimed, looking round at the group, as though he had himself given the explanation all had just listened to. \"A human body tenanted by a nature-spirit, one of the form-builders\u2014a Deva...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 332", + "text": "For all the wildness of the talk, this group of the Unstable was a coherent and consistent entity, using a language each item in it understood. They knew what they were after. Alcohol, coffee, tobacco, underfeeding, these helped or hindered, respectively, the expression of an ideal that, nevertheless, was common to them all; and if the minds represented were unbalanced, or merely speculative, poetic, one genuine quest and sympathy bound all together into a coherent, and who shall say unintelligent or valueless, unit. The unstable enjoyed an extreme sensitiveness to varied experience, with flexible adaptability to all possible new conditions, whereas the stable, with their rigid mental organizations, remained uninformed, stagnant, even fossilized.\n\nIn other rooms about the great lamp-lit city sat, doubtless, other similar groups at the very same moment, discussing the shibboleths of other faiths, of other dreams, of other ideas, systems, notions, philosophies, all interpretative of the earth in which little humanity dwells, cut off and isolated, apparently, from the rest of the stupendous universe. A listener, screened from view, a listener not in sympathy with the particular group he observed, and puzzled, therefore, by the language used, must have deemed he listened to harmless, if boring, madness. For each group uses its own language, and the lowest common denominator, though plainly printed in the world's old scriptures, has not yet become adopted by the world at large.\n\nInto this particular group, a little later in the evening, and when the wings of imagination had increased their sweep a trifle dangerously perhaps\u2014into the room, like the arrival of a policeman rather, dropped Father Collins. He came rarely to the Prometheans' restaurant. There was a general sense of drawing breath as he appeared. A pause followed. Something of the cold street air came with him. He wore his big black felt hat, his shabby opera cloak, and clutched firmly\u2014he had no gloves on\u2014the heavy gnarled stick he had cut for his collection in a Cingalese forest years ago, when he was studying with a Buddhist priest. The folds of his voluminous cloak, as he took it off, sent the hanging smoke-clouds in a whirl. His personality stirred the mental atmosphere as well. The women looked up and stared, respectful welcome in their eyes; several of the men rose to shake hands; there was a general shuffling of chairs.\n\n\"Bring another moulin \u00e0 vent and a clean glass,\" Povey said at once to the hovering waiter.\n\n\"It's raw and bitter in the street and a fog coming down thickly,\" mentioned Father Collins. He exhaled noisily and with comfortable relief, as he squeezed himself towards the chair Povey placed for him and looked round genially, nodding and shaking hands with those he knew. \"But you're warm and cosy enough in here\"\u2014he sat down with unexpected heaviness, and smiled at everybody\u2014\"and well fed, too, I'll be bound.\"\n\n\"'The body must be comfortable before the mind can enjoy itself,'\" said Phillipps, an untidy member who disliked asceticism. \"Starvation produces hallucination, not vision.\" His glance took in the unused glasses. His qualification was a vision of an uncle at the moment of death, and the uncle had left him money. He had written a wordy pamphlet describing it.\n\n\"I'll have an omelette, then, I think,\" Father Collins told the waiter, as the red wine arrived. \"And some fried potatoes. A bit of cheese to follow, and coffee, yes.\" He filled his glass. He had not come to argue or to preach, and Phillipps's challenge passed unnoticed. Phillipps, who had been leading the talk of late, resented the new arrival, but felt his annoyance modify as he saw his own glass generously filled. Povey, too, accepted a glass, while saying with a false vehemence, \"No, no,\" his finger against the rim.\n\nA change stole over the room, for the new personality was not negligible; he brought his atmosphere with him. The wild talk, it was felt now, would not be quite suitable. Father Collins had the reputation of being something of a scholar; they were not quite sure of him; none knew him very intimately; he had a rumoured past as well that lent a flavour of respect. One story had it that \"dabbling in magic\" had lost him his position in the Church. Yet he was deemed an asset to the Society.\n\nWhatever it was, the key changed sharply. Imson's eyes and ears grew wider, the hand of Miss Lance went instinctively to her hair and combs, Miss Milligan sought through her mind for a remark at once instructive and uncommon, Mrs. Towzer looked past him searchingly lest his aura escape her before she caught its colour, and Kempster, smoothing his immaculate coat, had an air of being in his present surroundings merely by chance. Toogood, quickly scanning his notes, wondered whether, if called upon, he was to be Pharaoh or Cleopatra. One and all, that is, took on a soberer gait. This semi-clerical visit complicated. The presence of Father Collins was a compliment. What he had to say\u2014about LeVallon and the Studio scene\u2014was, anyhow, assured of breathless interest.\n\nPovey led off. \"We were just talking over the other night,\" he observed, \"the night at the Studio, you remember. The storm and so on. It was a singular occurrence, though, of course, we needn't, we mustn't exaggerate it.\" And while he thus, as Secretary, set the note, Father Collins sipped his wine and beamed upon the group. He made no comment. \"You were there, weren't you?\" continued Povey, sipping his own comforting glass. \"I think I saw you. Fillery, you may have noticed,\" he added, \"brought\u2014a friend.\"\n\n\"LeVallon, yes,\" said the other in a tone that startled them. \"A most unusual fellow, wasn't he?\" He was attacking the omelette now. \"A Greek God, if ever I saw one,\" he added. And the silence in the crowded room became abruptly noticeable. Miss Milligan, feeling her zodiacal garter slipping, waited to pull it up. Imson's brown eyes grew wider. Kempster held his breath. Toogood borrowed a cigar and waited for someone to offer him a match before he lit it.\n\n\"Delicious,\" added Father Collins. \"Cooked to a turn.\" The omelette slid about his plate.\n\nBut the silence continued, and he realized the position suddenly. Emptying his glass and casually refilling it, he turned and faced the eager group about him.\n\n\"You want to know what I thought about it all,\" he said. \"You've been discussing LeVallon, Nayan and the rest, I see.\" He looked round as though he were in the lost pulpit that was his right. After a pause he asked point blank: \"And what do you all think of it? How did it strike you all? For myself, I confess\"\u2014he took another sip and paused\u2014\"I am full of wonder and question,\" he finished abruptly.\n\nIt was Imson, the fearless, wondering Pat Imson, who first found his tongue.\n\n\"We think,\" he ventured, \"LeVallon is probably of Deva origin.\"\n\nThe others, while admiring his courage, seemed unsympathetic suddenly. Such phraseology, probably meaningless to the respected guest, was out of place. Eyes were cast down, or looked generally elsewhere. Povey, remembering that the Society was not solely Eastern, glared at the speaker. Father Collins, however, was not perturbed.\n\n\"Possibly,\" he remarked with a courteous smile. \"The origin of us all is doubtful and confused. We know not whence we come, of course, and all that. Nor can we ever tell exactly who our neighbour is, or what. LeVallon,\" he went on, \"since you all ask me\"\u2014he looked round again\u2014\"is\u2014for me\u2014an undecipherable being. I am,\" he added, his words falling into open mouths and extended eyes and ears, \"somewhat puzzled. But more\u2014I am enormously stimulated and intrigued.\"\n\nAll gazed at him. Father Collins was in his element. The rapt silence that met him was precisely what he had a right to expect from his lost pulpit. He had come, probably, merely to listen and to watch. The opportunity provided by a respectful audience was too much for him. An inspiration tempted him.\n\n\"I am inclined to believe,\" he resumed suddenly in a simple tone, \"that he is\u2014a Messenger.\"\n\nThe sentence might have dropped from Sirius upon a listening planet. The babble that followed must, to an ordinary man, have seemed confusion. Everyone spoke with a rush into his neighbour's ear. All bubbled. \"I always thought so, I told you so, that was exactly what I meant just now\"\u2014and so on. All found their tongues, at any rate, if Povey, as Secretary, led the turmoil:\n\n\"Something outside our normal evolution, you mean?\" he asked judiciously. \"Such a conception is possible, of course.\"\n\n\"A Messenger!\" ran on the babel of male and female voices.\n\nIt was here that Father Collins failed. The \"unstable\" in him came suddenly uppermost. The \"ecstatic\" in his being took the reins. The wondering and expectant audience suited him. The red wine helped as well. When he said \"Messenger\" he had meant merely someone who brought a message. The expression of nobility merged more and more in the slovenly aspect. Like a priest in the pulpit, whom none can answer and to whom all must listen, he had his text, though that text had been suggested actually by the conversation he had just heard. He had not brought it with him. It occurred to him merely then and there. His mind reflected, in a word, the collective idea that was in the air about him, and he proceeded to sum it up and give expression to it. This was his gift, his fatal gift\u2014a ready sensitiveness, a plausible exposition. He caught the prevailing mood, the collective notion, then dramatized it. Before he left the pulpit he invariably, however, convinced himself that what he had said in it was true, inspired, a revelation\u2014for that moment.\n\n\"A Messenger,\" he announced, thrusting his glass aside with an impatient gesture as though noticing for the first time that it was there. \"A Messenger,\" he repeated, the automatic emphasis in his voice already persuading him that he believed what he was about to say, \"sent among us from who knows what distant sphere\"\u2014he drew himself up and looked about him\u2014\"and for who can guess on what mysterious and splendid mission.\"\n\nHis eye swept his audience, his hand removed the glass yet farther lest, it impede free gesture. It was, however, as Povey noticed, empty now. \"We, of course,\" he went on impressively, lowering his voice, \"we, a mere handful in the world, but alert and watchful, all of us\u2014we know that some great new teaching is expected\"\u2014he threw out another challenging glance\u2014\"but none of us can know whence it may come nor in what way it shall manifest.\" His voice dropped dramatically. \"Whether as a thief in the night, or with a blare of trumpets, none of us can tell. But\u2014we expect it and are ready. To us, therefore, perhaps, as to the twelve fishermen of old, may be entrusted the privilege of accepting it, the work of spreading it among a hostile and unbelieving world, even perhaps the final sacrifice of\u2014of suffering for it.\"\n\nHe paused, quickly took in the general effect of his words, picked up here and there a hint of question, and realized that he had begun on too exalted a note. Detecting this breath of caution in the collective mind that was his inspiration, he instantly shifted his key.\n\n\"LeVallon,\" he resumed, instinctively emphasizing the conviction in his voice so that the change of key might be less noticeable, \"undoubtedly\u2014believes himself to be\u2014some such divine Messenger...\" It was consummate hedging.\n\nThe sermon needs no full report. The audience, without realizing it, witnessed what is known as an \"inspirational address,\" where a speaker, naturally gifted with a certain facile eloquence, gathers his inspiration, takes his changing cues as well, from the collective mind that listens to him. Father Collins, quite honestly doubtless, altered his key automatically. He no longer said that LeVallon was a Messenger, but that he \"believed himself\" to be one. Like Balaam, he said things he had not at first thought of saying. He talked for some ten minutes without stopping. He said \"all sorts of things,\" according to the expression of critical doubt, of wonder, of question, of rejection or acceptance, on the particular face he gazed at. At regular intervals he inserted, with considerable effect, his favourite sentence: \"A man in his own place is the Ruler of his Fate.\"\n\nHe developed his idea that LeVallon \"believed himself to be such and such...\" but declared that the conception had been put into the youth during his life of exile in the mountains\u2014the Society had already acquired this information and extended it\u2014and had \"felt himself into\" the r\u00f4le until he had become its actual embodiment.\n\n\"He does not think, he does not reason,\" he explained. \"He feels\u2014he feels with. Now, to 'feel with' anything is to become it in the end. It is the only way of true knowledge, of course, of true understanding. If I want to understand, say, an Arab, I must feel with that Arab to the point\u2014for the moment\u2014of actually becoming him. And this strange youth has spent his time, his best years, mark you\u2014his creative years, feeling with the elemental forces of Nature until he has actually becomes\u2014at moments\u2014one with them.\"\n\nHe paused again and stared about him. He saw faces shocked, astonished, startled, but not hostile. He continued rapidly: \"There lies the danger. One may get caught, get stuck. Lose the desire to return to one's normal self. Which means, of course, remaining out of relation with one's environment\u2014mad. Only a man in his own place is the ruler of his luck...\"\n\nHe noticed suddenly the look of disappointment on several faces. He swiftly hedged.\n\n\"On the other hand,\" he went on, making his voice and manner more impressive than before, \"it may be\u2014who can say indeed?\u2014it may be that he is in relation with another environment altogether, a much vaster environment, an extended environment of which the rest of humanity is unaware. The privilege of tasting something of an extended environment some of us here already enjoy. What we all know as human activities are doubtless but a fragment of life\u2014the conscious phenomena merely of some larger whole of which we are aware in fleeting seconds only\u2014by mood, by hint, by suggestive hauntings, so to speak\u2014by faint shadows of unfamiliar, nameless shape cast across our daily life from some intenser sun we normally cannot see! LeVallon may be, as some of us think and hope, a Messenger to show us the way into a yet farther field of consciousness...\n\n\"It is a fine, a noble, an inspiring hope, at any rate,\" he assured the room. \"Unless some such Messenger comes into the world, showing us how to extend our knowledge, we can get no farther; we shall never know more than we know now; we shall only go on multiplying our channels for observing the same old things...\"\n\nHe closed his little address finally on a word as to what attitude should be adopted to any new experience of amazing and incredible kind. To a Society such as the one he had the honour of belonging to was left the guidance of the perverse and ignorant generations outside of it, \"the lethargic and unresponsive majority,\" as he styled them.\n\n\"We must not resist,\" he declared bravely. \"We must accept with confidence, above all without fear.\" He leaned back in his chair, somewhat exhausted, for the source of his inspiration was evidently weakening. His words came less spontaneously, less easily; he hesitated, sighed, looked from face to face for help he did not find. His glass was empty. \"We're here,\" he concluded lamely, \"without being consulted, and we may safely leave to the Powers that brought us here the results of such acceptance.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" agreed Povey, sighing audibly. \"Denial will get us nowhere.\" He filled up Father Collins's glass and his own. \"I think most of us are ready enough to accept any new experience that comes, and to accept it without fear.\" He drained his own glass and looked about him. \"But the point is\u2014how did LeVallon produce the effect upon us all\u2014the effect he did produce? He may be non-human, or he may be merely mad. He may, as Imson says, come to us by some godless chance from another evolutionary system\u2014of which, mind you, we have as yet no positive knowledge\u2014or he may be a Messenger, as Father Collins suggests, from some divine source, bringing new teaching. But, in the name of Magic, how did he manage it? In other words\u2014what is he?\"\n\nFor Povey could be very ruthless when he chose. It was this ruthlessness, perhaps, that made him such an efficient secretary. The note of extravagance in his language had possibly another inspiration.\n\nAn awkward pause, at any rate, followed his remarks. Father Collins had comforted and blessed the group. Povey introduced cold water rather.\n\n\"There's this\u2014and there's that,\" remarked Miss Milligan, tactfully.\n\n\"Those among us,\" added Miss Lance with sympathy, \"who have The Sight, know at least what they have seen. Still, I think we are indebted to Father Collins for\u2014his guidance.\"\n\n\"If we knew exactly what he is,\" mentioned Mrs. Towzer, referring to LeVallon, \"we should know exactly where we are.\"\n\nThey got up to go. There was a fumbling among crowded hat-pegs.\n\n\"What is he?\" offered Kempster. \"He certainly made us all sit up and take notice.\"\n\n\"No mere earthly figure,\" suggested Imson, \"could have produced the effect he did. In my poem\u2014it came to me in sleep\u2014\"\n\nFather Collins held his glass unsteadily to the light. \"A Messenger,\" he interrupted with authority, \"would affect us all differently, remember.\"\n\nThe talk continued in this fashion for a considerable time, while all searched for wraps and coats. The waiter brought the bill amid general confusion, but no one noticed him. All were otherwise engaged. Povey paid it finally, putting it down to the Entertainment Account.\n\n\"Remember,\" he said, as they stood in a group on the restaurant steps, each wondering who would provide a lift home, \"remember, we have all got to write out an account of what we saw and heard at the Studio. These reports will be valuable. They will appear in our 'Psychic Bulletin' first. Then I'll have them bound into a volume. And I shall try and get LeVallon to give us a lecture too. Tickets will be extra, of course, but each member can bring a friend. I'll let you all know the date in due course.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 333", + "text": "While the Prometheans thus, individually and collectively fermenting, floundered between old and new interpretations of a strange occurrence, in another part of London something was happening, of its kind so real, so interesting, that one and all would eagerly have renounced a favourite shibboleth or pet desire to witness it. Kempster would have eaten a raw beefsteak, Lattimer have agreed to rebirth as a woman, Mrs. Towzer have swallowed whisky neat, and even Toogood have written a signed confession that his \"psychometry,\" was intelligent guesswork.\n\nIt is the destiny, however, of such students of the wonderful to receive their data invariably at second or third hand; the data may deal with genuine occurrences, but the student seems never himself present at the time. From books, from reports, from accounts of someone who knew an actual witness, the student generally receives the version he then proceeds to study and elaborate.\n\nIn this particular instance, moreover, no version ever reached their ears at all, either at second or third hand, because the only witness of what happened was Edward Fillery, and he mentioned it to no one. Its reality, its interpretation likewise, remained authoritative only for that expert, if unstable, mind that experienced the one and divined the other.\n\nHis conversation with Devonham over, and the latter having retired to his room, Fillery paid a last visit to the patient who was now his private care, instead of merely an inmate of the institution that was half a Home and half a Spiritual Clinique. The figure lay sleeping quietly, the lean, muscular body bare to the wind that blew upon it from the open window. Graceful, motionless, both pillow and coverings rejected, \"N. H.\" breathed the calm, regular breath of deepest slumber. The light from the door just touched the face and folded hands, the features wore no expression of any kind, the hair, drawn back from the forehead and temples, almost seemed to shine.\n\nThrough the window came the rustle of the tossing branches, but the night air, though damp, was neither raw nor biting, and Fillery did not replace the sheets upon the great sleeping body. He withdrew as softly as he entered. Knowing he would not close an eye that night, he left the house silently and walked out into the deserted streets...\n\nThe rain had ceased, but the wet wind rushed in gusts against him, the soft blows and heavy moisture acting as balm to his somewhat tired nerves. As with great elemental hands, the windy darkness stroked him, soothing away the intense excitement he had felt, muting a thousand eager questions. They stroked his brain into a gentler silence gradually. \"Don't think, don't think,\" night whispered all about him, \"but feel, feel, feel. What you want to know will come to you by feeling now.\" He obeyed instinctively. Down the long, empty streets he passed, swinging his stick, tapping the lampposts, noting how steady their light held in the wind, noting the tossing trees in little gardens, noting occasionally rifts of moonlight between the racing clouds, but relinquishing all attempt to think.\n\nHe counted the steps between the lamp-posts as he swung along, leaving the kerb at each crossing with his left foot, taking the new one with his right, planting each boot safely in the centre of each paving stone, establishing, in a word, a sort of rhythm as he moved. He did so, however, without being consciously aware of it. He was not aware, indeed, of anything but that he swung along with this pleasant rhythmical stride that rested his body, though the exercise was vigorous.\n\nAnd the night laid her deep peace upon him as he went...\n\nThe streets grew narrower, twisted, turned and ran uphill; the houses became larger, spaced farther apart, less numerous, their gardens bigger, with groups of trees instead of isolated specimens. He emerged suddenly upon the open heath, tasting a newer, sweeter air. The huge city lay below him now, but the rough, shouting wind drowned its distant roar completely. For a time he stood and watched its twinkling lights across the vapours that hung between, then turned towards the little pond. He knew it well. Its waves flew dancing happily. The familiar outline of Jack Straw's Castle loomed beyond. The square enclosure of the anti-aircraft gun rattled with a metallic sound in the wind...\n\nHe had been walking for the best part of two hours now, thinking nothing but feeling only, and his surface-consciousness, perhaps, lay still, inactive. The mind was quiescent certainly, his being subdued and lulled by the rhythmic movement which had gained upon his entire system. The sails of his ship hung idly, becalmed above the profound deeps below. It was these deeps, the mysterious and inexhaustible region below the surface, that now began to stir. There stole upon him a dim prophetic sense as of horizons lifting and letting in new light. He glanced about him. The moon was brighter certainly, the flying scud was thinning, though the dawn was still some hours away. But it was not the light of moon or sun or stars he looked for; it was no outer light.\n\nThe little waves fell splashing at his feet. He watched them for a long time, keeping very still; his heart, his mind, his nerves, his muscles, all were very still... He became aware that new big powers were alert and close, hovering above the world, feathering the Race like wings of mighty birds. The waters were being troubled...\n\nHe turned and walked slowly, but ever with the same pleasant rhythm that was in him, to the pine trees, where he paused a minute, listening to the branches shaking and singing, then retraced his steps along the ridge, every yard of which, though blurred in darkness, he knew and recognized. Below, on his left lay London, on his right stretched the familiar country, though now invisible, past Hendon with its Welsh Harp, Wembley, and on towards Harrow, whose church steeple would catch the sunrise before very long. He reached the little pond again and heard its small waves rushing and tumbling in the south-west wind. He stood and watched them, listening to their musical wash and gurgle.\n\nThe waters, yes, were being troubled... Despite the buffeting wind, the world lay even stiller now about him; no single human being had he seen; even stiller than before, too, lay heart and mind within him; the latter held no single picture. He was aware, yes, of horizons lifting, of great powers alert and close; the interior light increased. He felt, but he did not think. Into the empty chamber of his being, swept and garnished, flashed suddenly, then, as in picture form, the memory of \"N. H.\" All that he knew about him came at once: Paul's notes and journey, the London scenes and talks, his own observations, deductions, questionings, his dreams, and fears and yearnings, his hope and wonder\u2014all came in a clapping instant, complete and simultaneous. Into his opened subconscious being floated the power and the presence of that bright messenger who brought glad tidings to his life.\n\n\"N. H.\" stood beside him, whispering with lips that were the darkness, and with words that were the wind. It was the power and presence of \"N. H.\" that lifted the horizon and let in light. His body lay sleeping miles away in that bed against an open window. This was his real presence. Without words, as without thought, understanding came. The appeal of \"N. H.\" was direct to the subliminal mind; it was the hidden nine-tenths he stimulated; hence came the intensification of consciousness in all who had to do with him. And it operated now. Fillery was aware of defying time and space, as though there were no limits to his being. Faith lights fires... Perception wandered down those dusky by-ways behind the mind that lead through trackless depths where the massed heritage of the world-soul, lit sometimes by a flashing light, reveal incredible, incalculable things. One of those flashes came now. Through the fissures, as it were, of his unstable being rose the marvellous, uncanny gleam. His eyes were opened and he saw.\n\nThe label, he realized, was incorrect, inadequate\u2014\"N. H.\" was a misnomer; more than human, both different to and greater than, came nearer to the truth. A being from other conditions certainly, belonging to another order; an order whose work was unremitting service rendered with joy and faithfulness; a hierarchy whose service included the entire universe, the stars and suns and nebul\u00e6, earth with her frail humanity but an insignificant fraction of it all...\n\nHe came, of course, from that central sea of energy whence all life, pushing irresistibly outwards into form, first arises. Like human beings, he came thence undoubtedly, but more directly than they, in more intimate relations, therefore, with the elemental powers that build up form and shape the destinies of matter. One only of a mighty host of varying degrees and powers, his services lay interwoven with the very heart and processes of Nature herself. The energies of heat and air, essentials of all life everywhere, were his handmaidens; he worked with fire and wind; in the forms he helped to build he set enthusiasm and energy aglow...\n\nFrom stars and fire-mist he came now into humanity, using the limited instrument of a human mechanism, a mechanism he must learn to master without breaking it. A human brain and nerves confined him. He could deal with essences only, those essential, buried, semi-elemental powers that lie ever waiting below the threshold of all human consciousness, linking men, did they but know it, direct with the sea of universal life which is inexhaustible, independent of space and time. The fraction of his nature which had manifested as a transient surface-personality\u2014LeVallon\u2014was gone for ever, merged in the real self below.\n\nHis origin was already forgotten; no memory of it lay in his present brain; he must suffer training, education, and he turned instinctively to those whose ideal, like his own, was one of impersonal service. To a woman he turned, and to a man. His recognition, guided by Nature, was sure and accurate. It must take time and patience, sympathy and love, faith, belief and trust, and the labour must be borne by one man chiefly\u2014by Fillery, into whose life had come this strange bright messenger carrying glad tidings... to prove at last that man was greater than he knew, that the hope for Humanity, for the deteriorating Race, for crumbling Civilization, lay in drawing out into full practical consciousness the divine powers concealed below the threshold of every single man and woman...\n\nBut how, in what practical manner, what instrument could they use? The human mechanism, the brain, the mind, afforded inadequate means of manifestation; new wines into old skins meant disaster; knowledge, power beyond the experience of the Race needed a better instrument than the one the Race had painfully evolved for present uses. New powers of unknown kinds, as already in those rare cases when the supernormal forces emerged, could only strain the machinery and cause disorder. A new order of consciousness required another, a different equipment. And the idea flashed into him, as in the Studio when he watched \"N. H.\" and the girl\u2014Father Collins had divined its possibility as well\u2014the idea of a group consciousness, a collective group-soul. What a single individual might not be able to resist at first without disaster, many\u2014a group in harmony\u2014two or three gathered together in unison\u2014these might provide the way, the means, the instrument\u2014the body.\n\n\"The personal merged in the impersonal,\" he exclaimed to the night about him, already aware that words, expression, failed even at this early stage of understanding. \"Beauty, Art! Where words, form, colour end, we shall construct, while yet using these as far as they go, a new vehicle, a new\u2014\"\n\n\"Good evenin',\" said a gruff voice. \"Good evenin', sir,\" it added more respectfully, after a second's inspection. \"Turned out quite fine after the storm.\"\n\nAware of the policeman suddenly, Fillery started and turned round abruptly. Evidently he had uttered his thoughts aloud, probably had cried and shouted them. He could think of nothing in the world to say.\n\n\"It was a terrible storm. I hardly ever see the likes of it.\" The man was looking at him still with doubtful curiosity.\n\n\"Extraordinary, yes.\" Dr. Fillery managed to find a few natural words. It was an early hour in the morning to be out, and his position by the pond, he now realized, might have suggested an undesirable intention. \"It made sleep impossible, and I came out to\u2014to take a walk. I'm a doctor, Dr. Fillery\u2014the Fillery Home.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said the man, apparently satisfied. He looked at the sky. \"All blown away again,\" he remarked, \"and the moon that nice and bright\u2014\"\n\nFillery offered something in reply, then moved away. The moon, he noticed, was indeed nice and bright now; the heavy lower vapours all had vanished, and thin cirrus clouds at a great height moved slowly before an upper wind; the stars shone clearly, and a faint line of colour gave a hint of dawn not far away.\n\nHe glanced at his watch. It was nearly half-past four.\n\n\"It's impossible, impossible,\" he thought to himself, the pictures he had been seeing still hanging before his eyes. \"It was all feeling\u2014merely feeling. My blood, my heritage asserting themselves upon an over-tired system! Too much repression evidently. I must find an outlet. My Caucasian Valley again!\"\n\nHe walked rapidly. His mind began to work, and thinking made an effort to replace feeling. He watched himself. His everyday surface-consciousness partially resumed its sway. The policeman, of course, had interrupted the flow and inrush of another state just at the moment when a flash of direct knowledge was about to blaze. It concerned \"N. H.,\" his new patient. In another moment he would have known exactly what and who he was, whence he came, the purpose and the powers that attended him. The policeman\u2014and inner laughter ran through him at this juxtaposition of the practical and the transcendental\u2014had interfered with an interesting expansion of his being. An extension of consciousness, perhaps a touch of cosmic consciousness, was on the way. The first faint quiver of its coming, magical with wondrous joy, had touched him. Its cause, its origin, he knew not, yet he could trace both to the effect produced upon him by \"N. H.\" Of that he was sure. This effect his reasoning mind, with busy analysis and criticism, had hitherto partially suppressed, even at its first manifestation in Charing Cross Station. To-night, criticism silent and analysis inactive, it had found an outlet, his own deep inner stillness had been its opportunity. Then came the practical, honest, simple policeman, the censor, who received so much a week to keep people in the way they ought to follow, the safe, broad way...\n\nHe smiled, as he walked rapidly along the deserted streets. He knew so well the method and process of these abnormal states in others. As he swung along, not tired now, but rested, rather, and invigorated, the rhythm of motion established itself again. \"N. H.\" a Nature Spirit! A Nature Being! Another order of life entering humanity for the first time, that humanity for whose welfare it\u2014or was it he?\u2014had worked, with hosts of similar beings, during incalculable ages...\n\nHe smiled, remembering the policeman again. There was always a policeman, or a censor. Oh, the exits beyond safe normal states of being, the exits into extended fields of consciousness, into an outer life which the majority, led by the best minds of the day, deny with an oath\u2014these were well guarded! His smile, as he thought of it, ran from his lips and settled in the eyes, lingering a moment there before it died away...\n\nHow quiet, yet unfamiliar, the suburb of the huge city lay about him in pale half-light. The Studio scene, how distant it seemed now in space and time; it had happened weeks ago in another city somewhere. Devonham, his cautious, experienced assistant, how far away! He belonged to another age. The Prometheans were part of a dream in childhood, a dream of pantomime or harlequinade whose extravagance yet conveyed symbolic meaning. Two figures alone retained a reality that refused to be dismissed\u2014a mysterious, enigmatic youth, a radiant girl\u2014with perhaps a third\u2014a broken priest...\n\nThe rhythm, meanwhile, gained upon him, and, as it did so, thinking once more withdrew and feeling stole back softly. His being became more harmonized, more one with itself, more open to inspiration... \"N. H.,\" whose work was service, service everywhere, not merely in that tiny corner of the universe called Humanity... \"N. H.,\" who could neither age nor die... What was the hidden link that bound them? Had they not served and played together in some lost Caucasian valley, leaped with the sun's hot fire, flown in the winds of dawn... sung, laughed and danced at their service, with a radiant sylph-like girl who had at last enticed them into the confinement of a limited human form?... Did not that valley symbolize, indeed, another state of existence, another order of consciousness altogether that lay beyond any known present experience or description...?\n\nThe dawn, meanwhile, grew nearer and a pallid light ran down the dreadful streets... He reached at length the foot of the hill upon whose shoulder his own house stood. The familiar sights stirred more familiar currents of feeling, and these in turn sought words...\n\nThe crowding houses, with their tight-shut windows, followed and pressed after as he climbed. They swarmed behind him. How choked and airless it all was. He thought of the heavy-footed routine of the thousands who occupied these pretentious buildings. Here lived a section of the greatest city on the planet, almost a separate little town, with marked characteristics, atmosphere, tastes and habits. How many, he wondered, behind those walls knew yearning, belief, imagination beyond the ruck and routine of familiar narrow thought? Rows upon rows, with their stunted, manufactured trees, hideous conservatories, bulging porches, ornamented windows\u2014his wings beat against them all with the burning desire to set their inmates free. They caged themselves in deliberately. A few thousand years ago these people lived in mud huts, before that in caves, before that again in trees. Now they were \"civilized.\" They dwelt in these cages. Oh, that he might tear away the thick dead bricks, and let in light and dew and stars, and the brave, free winds of heaven! Waken the deeper powers they carried unwittingly about with them through all their tedious sufferings! Teach them that they were greater than they knew!\n\nThe yearning was deep and true in him, as the houses followed and tried to bar his way. Many of the occupiers, he knew, would welcome help, would gaze with happy, astonished eyes at the wonder of their own greater selves set free. Not all, of course, were wingless. Yet the majority, he felt, were otherwise. They peered at him from behind thick curtains, hostile, sceptical, contented with their lot, averse to change. Mode, custom, habit chained them to the floor. He was aware of a collective obstinate grin of smug complacency, of dull resistance. Though a part of the community, of the race, of the world, of the universe itself, they denied their mighty brotherhood, and clung tenaciously to their idea of living apart, cut off and separate. They belonged to leagues, societies, clubs and circles, but the bigger oneness of the race they did not know. Of greater powers in themselves they had no faintest inkling. At the first sign of these, they would shuffle, sneer and turn away, grow frightened even.\n\nThe yearning to show them a bigger field of consciousness, to help them towards a realization of their buried powers, to let them out of their separate cages, beat through his being with a passionate sincerity... In a hundred thousand years perhaps! Perhaps in a million! He knew the slow gait that Nature loved. The trend of an Age is not to be stemmed by one man, nor by twelve, who see over the horizon. The futility of trying pained him. Yet, if no one ever tried! Oh, for a few swift strokes of awful sacrifice\u2014then freedom!\n\nThe words came back to him, and with them, from the same source, came others: \"I sit and I weave... I sit and I weave.\" ...Whose, then, was this divine, eternal patience?...\n\nThere could be, it seemed, no hurried growth, no instant escape, no sudden leap to heaven. Slowly, slowly, the Ages turned the wheel. \"Nor can other beings help,\" he remembered; \"they can only tell what their own part is.\" ...And as his clear mind saw the present Civilization like all its wonderful predecessors, tottering before his very eyes, threatening in its collapse, the extinction of knowledge so slowly, painfully, laboriously acquired, the deep heart in him rose as on wings of wind and fire, questing the stars above. There was this strange clash in him, as though two great divisions in his being struggled. A way of escape seemed just within his reach, only a little beyond the horizon of his actual knowledge. It fluttered marvellously; golden, alight, inviting. Its coming glory brushed his insight. It was simple, it was divine. There seemed a faint knocking against the doors of his mental and spiritual understanding...\n\n\"'N. H.'!\" he cried, \"Bright Messenger!\"\n\nHe paused a moment and stood still. A new sound lay suddenly in the night. It came, apparently, from far away, almost from the air above him. He listened. No, after all it was only steps. They came nearer. A pedestrian, muffled to the ears, went past, and the steps died away on the resounding pavement round the corner. Yet the sound continued, and was not the echo of the steps just gone. It was, moreover, he now felt convinced, in the air above him. It was continuous. It reminded him of the musical droning hum that a big bell leaves behind it, while a suggestion of rhythm, almost of melody, ran faintly through it too.\n\nSomebody's lines\u2014was it Shelley's?\u2014ran faintly in his mind, yet it was not his mind now that surged and rose to the new great rhythm:\n\n\u2003\"'Tis the deep music of the rolling world\n\n\u2003Kindling within the strings of the waved air\n\n\u2003\u00c6olian modulations...\n\n\u2003Clear, icy, keen awakening tones\n\n\u2003That pierce the sense\n\n\u2003And live within the soul...\"\n\nHe listened. It was a simple, natural, happy sound\u2014simple as running water, natural as wind, happy as the song of birds..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 334", + "text": "He became, again, vividly aware of the power and presence of \"N. H.\"\n\nHe was not far from his house now on the shoulder of the hill. He turned his eyes upwards, where the three-quarter moon sailed above transparent cirrus clouds that scarcely dimmed her light. Like dappled sands of silver, they sifted her soft shining, moving slowly across the heavens before an upper wind. The sound continued.\n\nFor a moment or two, in the pale light of dawn, he watched and listened, then lowered his gaze, caught his breath sharply, and stood stock still. He stared in front of him. Next, turning slowly, he stared right and left. He stared behind as well.\n\nYes, it was true. The lines and rows of crowding houses trembled, disappeared. The heavy buildings dissolved before his very eyes. The solid walls and roofs were gone, the chimneys, railings, doors and porches vanished. There were no more conservatories. There were no lamp-posts. The streets themselves had melted. He gazed in amazement and delight. The entire hill lay bare and open to the sky.\n\nAcross the rising upland swept a keen fresh morning wind. Yet bare they were not, this rising upland and this hill. As far as he could see, the landscape flowed waist-deep in flowers, whose fragrance lay upon the air; dew trembled, shimmering on a million petals of blue and gold, of orange, purple, violet; the very atmosphere seemed painted. Flowering trees, both singly and in groves, waved in the breeze, birds sang in chorus, there was a murmur of streams and falling waters. Yet that other sound rose too, rose from the entire hill and all upon it, a continuous gentle rhythm, as though, he felt, the actual scenery poured forth its being in spontaneous, natural expression of sound as well as of form and colour. It was the simplest, happiest music he had ever heard.\n\nUnable to deal with the rapture of delight that swept upon him, he stood stock still among the blossoms to his waist. Eyes, ears and nostrils were inadequate to report a beauty which, simple though it was, overbore nerves and senses accustomed to a lesser scale. Horizons indeed had lifted, the joy and confidence of fuller life poured in. His own being grew immense, stretched, widened, deepened, till it seemed to include all space. He was everywhere, or rather everything was happening somewhere in him all at once... In place of the heavy suburb lay this garden of primal beauty, while yet, in a sense, the suburb itself remained as well. Only\u2014it had flowered... revealing the subconscious soul the bricks and pavements hid... Its potential self had blossomed into loveliness and wonder.\n\nThe sound drew nearer. He was aware of movement. Figures were approaching; they were coming in his direction, coming towards him over the crest of the hill, nearer and nearer. Concealed by the forest of tall flowers, he watched them come. Yet as Presences he perceived them, rather than as figures, already borrowing power from them, as sails borrow from a rising wind. His consciousness expanded marvellously to let them in.\n\nTheir stature was conveyed to him, chiefly, at first, by the fact that these flowers, though rising to his own waist, did not cover the feet of them, yet that the flowers in the immediate line of their advance still swayed and nodded, as though no weight had lain upon their brilliance. The footsteps were of wind, the figures light as air; they shone; their radiant presences lit the acres. Their own atmosphere, too, came with them, as though the landscape moved and travelled with and in their being, as though the flowers, the natural beauty, emanated from them. The landscape was their atmosphere. They created, brought it with them. It seemed that they \"expressed\" the landscape and \"were\" the scenery, with all its multitudinous forms.\n\nThey approached with a great and easy speed that was not measurable. Over the crest of the living, sunlit hill they poured, with their bulk, their speed, their majesty, their sweet brimming joy. Fillery stood motionless watching them, his own joy touched with awed confusion, till wonder and worship mastered the final trace of fear.\n\nThough he perceived these figures first as they topped the skyline, he was aware that great space also stretched behind them, and that this immense perspective was in some way appropriate to their appearance. Born of a greater space than his \"mind\" could understand, they flowed towards him across that windy crest and at the same time from infinitely far beyond it. Above the continuous humming sound, he heard their music too, faint but mighty, filling the air with deep vibrations that seemed the natural expression of their joyful beings. Each figure was a chord, yet all combining in a single harmony that had volume without loudness. It seemed to him that their sound and colour and movement wove a new pattern upon space, a new outline, form or growth, perhaps a flower, a tree, perhaps a planet... They were creative. They expressed themselves naturally in a million forms.\n\nHe heard, he saw. He knew no other words to use. But the \"hearing\" was, rather, some kind of intimate possession so that his whole being filled and overbrimmed; and the \"sight\" was greater than the customary little irritation of the optic nerve\u2014it involved another term of space. He could describe the sight more readily than the hearing. The apparent contradiction of distance and proximity, of vast size yet intimacy, made him tremble in his hiding-place.\n\nHis \"sight,\" at any rate, perceived the approaching figures all round, all over, all at once, as they poured like a wave across the hill from far beyond its visible crest. For into this space below the horizon he saw as well, though, normally speaking, it was out of sight. Nor did he see one side only; he saw the backs of the towering forms as easily as the portion facing him; he saw behind them. It was not as with ordinary objects refracting light, the back and underneath and further edges invisible. All sides were visible at once. The space beyond, moreover, whence the mighty outlines issued, was of such immensity that he could think only of interstellar regions. Not to the little planet, then, did these magnificent shapes belong. They were of the Universe. The symbol of his valley, he knew suddenly, belonged here too.\n\nSilent with wonder, motionless with worship, he watched the singing flood of what he felt to be immense, non-human nature-life pour past him. The procession lasted for hours, yet was over in a minute's flash. All categories his mind knew hitherto were useless. The faces, in their power, their majesty, the splendour even of their extent, were both appalling, yet infinitely tender. They were filled with stars, blue distance, flowers, spirals of fire, space and air, interwoven too, with shining geometrical designs whose intricate patterns merged in a central harmony. They brought their own winds with them.\n\nYet of features precisely, he was not aware. Each face was, rather, an immense expression, but an expression that was permanent and could not change. These were immutable, eternal faces. He borrowed from human terms the only words that offered, while aware that he falsely introduced the personal into that which was essentially impersonal.\n\nThere stole over him a strange certainty that what he worshipped was the grandeur of joyful service working through unalterable law\u2014the great compassion of some untiring service that was deathless... He stood within the Universe, face to face with its elemental builders, guardians, its constructive artizans, the impersonal angelic powers... the region, the state, he now felt convinced, to which \"N. H.\" belonged, and whence, by some inexplicable chance, he had come to occupy a human body... And the sounds \u2014the flash came to him with lightning conviction\u2014were those essential rhythms which are the kernels of all visible, manifested forms..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 335", + "text": "He was not aware that he was moving, that he had left the spot where he had stood\u2014so long, yet for a single second only\u2014and had now reached the corner of a street again. The flowers were gone, and the trees and groves gone with them; no waters rippled past; there was no shining hill. The moon, the stars, the breaking dawn remained, but he saw windows, walls and villas once again, while his feet echoed on dead stone pavements...\n\nYet the figures had not wholly gone. Before a house, where he now paused a moment, the towering, flowing outlines were still faintly visible. Their singing still audible, their shapes still gently luminous, they stood grouped about an open window of the second story. In the front garden a big plane tree stirred its leafless branches; the tree and figures interpenetrated. Slowly then, the outlines grew dim and shadowy, indistinguishable almost from the objects in the twilight near them. Chimneys, walls and roofs stole in upon the great shapes with foreign, grosser details that obscured their harmony, confused their proportion, as with two sets of values. The eye refused to focus both at once. A roof, a chimney obtruded, while sight struggled, fluttered, then ended in confusion. The figures faded and melted out. They merged with the tree, the reddening sky, the murky air close to the house which a street lamp made visible. Suddenly they were lost\u2014they were no longer there.\n\nBut the rhythmical sound, though fainter, still continued\u2014and Fillery looked up.\n\nIt was a sound, he realized in a flash, evocative and summoning. Type called to type, brother to brother, across the universe. The house before him was his own, and the open window through which the music issued was the bedroom of \"N. H.\"\n\nHe stood transfixed. Both sides of his complex nature operated simultaneously. His mind worked more clearly\u2014the entire history of the \"case\" in that upstairs room passed through it: he was a doctor. But his speculative, emotional aspect, the dreamer in him, so greatly daring, all that poetic, transcendental, half-mystical part which classed him, he well knew, with the unstable; all this, long and dangerously repressed, worked with opposite, if equal pressure. From the subconscious rose violent hands as of wind and fire, lovely, fashioning, divine, tearing away the lid of the reasoning surface-consciousness that confined, confused them.\n\nTo disentangle, to define these separate functions, were a difficult problem even for the most competent psychiatrist. Creative imaginative powers, hitherto merely fumbling, half denied as well, now stretched their wings and soared. With them came a blinding clarity of sight that enabled him to focus a vast field of detail with extraordinary rapidity. Horizons had lifted, perspective deepened and lit up. In a few brief seconds, before his front door opened, a hundred details flashed towards a focus and shone concentrated:\n\nThe Vision, of course\u2014the Figures had now melted into the night\u2014had no objective reality. Suppressed passion had created them, forbidden yearnings had passed the Censor and dramatized a dream, set aside yet never explained, that heredity was responsible for. Both were born of his lost radiant valley. His Note Books held a thousand similar cases...\n\nBut the speculative dreamer flashed coloured lights against this common white. The prism blazed. From the inter-stellar spaces came these radiant figures, from Sirius, immense and splendid sun, from Aldebaran among the happy Hyades, from awful Betelgeuse, whose volume fills a Martian orbit. Their dazzling, giant grandeur was of stellar origin. Yet, equally, they came from the dreadful back gardens of those sordid houses. Nature was Nature everywhere, in the nebul\u00e6 as in the stifled plane tree of a city court. That he saw them as \"figures\" was but his own private, personal interpretation of a prophecy the whole Universe announced. They were not figures necessarily; they were Powers. And \"N. H.\" was of their kind.\n\nHe suddenly remembered the small, troubled earth whereon he lived\u2014a neglected corner of the universe that was in distress and cried frantically for help... Alcyone caught it in her golden arms perhaps; Sirius thundered against its little ears...\n\nHe found his latchkey and fumblingly inserted it, but, even while he did so, the state of the planet at the moment poured into his mind with swift, concentrated detail; he remembered the wireless excitement of the instant\u2014and smiled. Not that way would it come. The new order was of a spiritual kind. It would steal into men's hearts, not splutter along the waves of ether, as the \"dead\" are said to splutter to the \"living.\" The great impulse, the mighty invitation Nature sent out to return to simple, natural life, would come, without \"phenomena\" from within... He remembered Relativity\u2014that space is local, space and time not separate entities. He understood. He had just experienced it. Another, a fourth dimension! Space as a whole was annihilated! He smiled.\n\nHis latchkey turned.\n\nThe transmutation of metals flashed past him\u2014all substance one. His latchkey was upside down. He turned it round and reinserted it, and the results of advanced psychology rushed at him, as though the sun rushed over the horizon of some Eastern clime, covering all with the light of a new, fair dawn.\n\nIn a few seconds this accumulation of recent knowledge and discovery flooded his state of singular receptiveness\u2014as thinker and as poet. The Age was crumbling, civilization passing like its predecessors. The little planet lay certainly in distress. No true help lay within it; its reservoirs were empty. No adequate constructive men or powers were anywhere in sight. It was exhausted, dying. Unless new help, powers from a new, an inexhaustible source, came quickly... a new vehicle for their expression...\n\nAnd wonder took him by the throat... as the key turned in the lock with its familiar grating sound, and the door, without actual pressure on his part, swung open.\n\nPaul Devonham, a look of bright terror in his eyes, stood on the threshold." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 336", + "text": "The expression, not only of the face but of the whole person, he had seen once only in another human countenance\u2014a climber, who had slipped by his very side and dropped backward into empty space. The look of helpless bewilderment as hands and feet lost final touch with solidity, the air of terrible yet childlike amazement with which he began his descent of a thousand feet through a gulf of air\u2014the shock marked the face in a single second with what he now saw in his colleague's eyes. Only, with Devonham\u2014Fillery felt sure of his diagnosis\u2014the lost hold was mental.\n\nHis outward control, however, was admirable. Devonham's voice, apart from a certain tenseness in it, was quiet enough: \"I've been telephoning everywhere... There's been a\u2014a crisis\u2014\"\n\n\"Violence?\"\n\nBut the other shook his head. \"It's all beyond me quite,\" he said, with a wry smile. \"The first outbreak was nothing\u2014nothing compared to this.\" The continuous sound of humming which filled the hall, making the air vibrate oddly, grew louder. Devonham seized his friend's arm.\n\n\"Listen!\" he whispered. \"You hear that?\"\n\n\"I heard it outside in the street,\" Fillery said. \"What is it?\"\n\nDevonham glared at him. \"God knows,\" he said, \"I don't. He's been doing it, on and off, for a couple of hours. It began the moment you left, it seems. They're all about him\u2014these vibrations, I mean. He does it with his whole body somehow. And\"\u2014he hesitated\u2014\"there's meaning in it of some kind. Results, I mean,\" he jerked out with an effort.\n\n\"Visible?\" came the gentle question.\n\nDevonham started. \"How did you know?\" There was a thrust of intense curiosity in the eyes.\n\n\"I've had a similar experience myself, Paul. You opened the front door in the middle of it. The figures\u2014\"\n\n\"You saw figures?\" Devonham looked thunderstruck. In his heart was obviously a touch of panic.\n\nAs the two men stood gazing into each other's eyes a moment silently, the sound about them increased again, rising and falling, its great separate rhythmical waves almost distinguishable. In Fillery's mind rose patterns, outlines, forms of flowers, spirals, circles...\n\n\"He knows you're in the house,\" said Devonham in a curious voice, relieved apparently no answer came to his question. \"Better come upstairs at once and see him.\" But he did not turn to lead the way. \"That's not auditory hallucination, Edward, whatever else it is!\" He was still clinging to the rock, but the rock was crumbling beneath his desperate touch. Space yawned below him.\n\n\"Visual,\" suggested Fillery, as though he held out a feeble hand to the man whose whole weight already hung unsupported before the plunge. His friend spoke no word; but his expression made words unnecessary: \"We must face the facts,\" it said plainly, \"wherever these may lead. No shirking, no prejudice of mine or yours must interfere. There must be no faltering now.\"\n\nSo plainly was his passion for truth and knowledge legible in the expression of the shocked but honest mind, that Fillery felt compassion overpower the first attitude of privacy he had meant to take. This time he must share. The honesty of the other won his confidence too fully for him to hold back anything. There was no doubt in his mind that he read his colleague's state aright.\n\n\"A moment, Paul,\" he said in a low voice, \"before we go upstairs,\" and he put his hand out, oddly enough meeting Devonham's hand already stretched to meet it. He drew him aside into a corner of the hall, while the waves of sound surged round and over them like a sea. \"Let me first tell you,\" he went on, his voice trembling slightly, \"my own experience.\" It seemed to him that any moment he must see the birth of a new form, an outline, a \"body\" dance across before his very eyes.\n\n\"Neither auditory nor visual,\" murmured Devonham, burning to hear what was coming, yet at the same time shrinking from it by the laws of his personality. \"Hallucination of any kind, there is absolutely none. There's nothing transferred from your mind to his. This thing is real\u2014original.\"\n\nFillery tightened his grip a second on the hand he held.\n\n\"Paul,\" he said gravely, yet unable to hide the joy of recent ecstasy in his eyes, \"it is also\u2014new!\"\n\nThe low syllables seemed borne away and lifted beyond their reach by an immense vibration that swept softly past them. And so actual was this invisible wave that behind it lay the trough, the ebb, that awaits, as in the sea, the next advancing crest. Into this ebb, as it were, both men dropped simultaneously the same significant syllables: their lips uttered together:\n\n\"N. H.\" The wave of sound seemed to take their voices and increase them. It was the older man who added: \"Coming into full possession.\"\n\nThe two stood waiting, listening, their heads turned sideways, their bodies motionless, while the soft rhythmical uproar rose and fell about them. No sign escaped them for some minutes; no words, it seemed, occurred to either of them.\n\nThrough the transom over the front door stole the grey light of the late autumn dawn; the hall furniture was visible, chairs, hat-rack, wooden chests that held the motor rugs. A china bowl filled with visiting cards gleamed white beside it. Soon the milkman, uttering his comic earthly cry, would clatter down the area staircase, and the servants would be up. As yet, however, but for the big soft sound, the house was perfectly still. This part of it, almost a separate wing, was completely cut off from the main building. No one had been disturbed.\n\nFillery moved his head and looked at his companion. The expression of both face and figure arrested him. He had taken off his dinner jacket, and the old loose golfing coat he wore hung askew; he had one hand in a pocket of it, the other thrust deep into his trousers. His glasses hung down across his crumpled shirt-front, his black tie made an untidy cross. He looked, thought Fillery, whose sense of the ludicrous became always specially alert in his gravest moments, like an unhappy curate who had presided over some strenuous and worrying social gathering in the local town hall. Only one detail denied this picture\u2014the expression of something mysterious and awed in the sheet-white face. He was listening with sharp dislike yet eager interest. His repugnance betrayed itself in the tightened lips, the set of the angular shoulders; the panic was written in the glistening eyes. There were things in his face he could never, never tell. The struggle in him was natural to his type of mind: he had experienced something himself, and a personal experience opens new vistas in sympathy and understanding. But\u2014the experience ran contrary to every tenet of theory and practice he had ever known. The moment of new birth was painful. This was his colleague's diagnosis.\n\nFillery then suddenly realized that the gulf between them was without a bridge. To tell his own experience became at once utterly impossible. He saw this clearly. He could not speak of it to his assistant. It was, after all, incommunicable. The bridge of terms, language, feeling, did not exist between them. And, again, up flashed for a second his sense of the comic, this time in an odd touch of memory\u2014Povey's favourite sentence: \"Never argue with the once-born!\" Only to older souls was expression possible.\n\nFor the first time then his diagnosis wavered oddly. Why, for instance, did Paul persist in that curious, watchful stare...?\n\nDevonham, conscious of his chief's eyes and mind upon him, looked up. Somewhere in his expression was a glare, but nothing revealed his state of mind better than the fact that he stupidly contradicted himself:\n\n\"You're putting all this into him, Edward,\" a touch of anger, perhaps of fear, in the intense whispering voice. \"The hysteria of the studio upset him, of course. If you'd left him alone, as you promised, he'd have always stayed LeVallon. He'd be cured by now.\" Then, as Fillery made no reply or comment, he added, but this time only the anxiety of the doctor in his tone: \"Hadn't you better go up to him at once? He's your patient, not mine, remember!\"\n\nThe other took his arm. \"Not yet,\" he said quietly. \"He's best alone for the moment.\" He smiled, and it was the smile that invariably won him the confidence of even the most obstinate and difficult patient. He was completely master of himself again. \"Besides, Paul,\" he went on gently. \"I want to hear what you have to tell me. Some of it\u2014if not all. I want your Report. It is of value. I must have that first, you know.\"\n\nThey sat on the bottom stair together, while Devonham told briefly what had happened. He was glad to tell it, too. It was a relief to become the mere accurate observer again.\n\n\"I can summarize it for you in two words,\" he said: \"light and sound. The sound, at first, seemed wind\u2014wind rising, wind outside. With the light, was perceptible heat. The two seemed correlated. When the sound increased, the heat increased too. Then the sound became methodical, rhythmical\u2014it became almost musical. As it did so the light became coloured. Both\"\u2014he looked across at the ghostly hat-rack in the hall\u2014\"were produced\u2014by him.\"\n\n\"Items, please, Paul. I want an itemized account.\"\n\nDevonham fumbled in the big pockets of his coat and eventually lit a cigarette, though he did not in the least want to smoke. That watchful, penetrating stare persisted, none the less. Amid the anxiety were items of carelessness that almost seemed assumed.\n\n\"Mrs. Soames sent Nurse Robbins to fetch me,\" he resumed, his voice harshly, as it seemed, cutting across the waves of pleasant sound that poured down the empty stairs behind them and filled the hall with resonant vibrations. \"I went in, turned them both out, and closed the door. The room was filled with a soft, white light, rather pale in tint, that seemed to emanate from nowhere. I could trace it to no source. It was equally diffused, I mean, yet a kind of wave-like vibration ran through it in faint curves and circles. There was a sound, a sound like wind. A wind was in the room, moaning and sighing inside the walls\u2014a perfectly natural and ordinary sound, if it had been outside. The light moved and quivered. It lay in sheets. Its movement, I noticed, was in direct relation to the wind: the louder the volume of sound, the greater the movement of the air\u2014the brighter became the light, and vice versa. I could not take notes at the actual moment, but my memory\"\u2014a slight grimace by way of a smile indicated that forgetting was impossible\u2014\"is accurate, as you know.\"\n\nFillery did not interrupt, either by word or gesture.\n\n\"The increase of light was accompanied by colour, and the increase of sound led into a measure\u2014not actual bars, and never melody, but a distinct measure that involved rhythm. It was musical, as I said. The colour\u2014I'm coming to that\u2014then took on a very faint tinge of gold or orange, a little red in it sometimes, flame colour almost. The air was luminous\u2014it was radiant. At one time I half expected to see fire. For there was heat as well. Not an unpleasant heat, but a comforting, stimulating, agreeable heat like\u2014I was going to say, like the heat of a bright coal fire on a winter's day, but I think the better term is sunlight. I had an impression this heat must burst presently into actual flame. It never did so. The sheets of coloured light rose and fell with the volume of the sound. There were curves and waves and rising columns like spirals, but anything approaching a definite outline, form, or shape\"\u2014he broke off for a second\u2014\"figures,\" he announced abruptly, almost challengingly, staring at the white china bowl in front of him, \"I could not swear to.\"\n\nHe turned suddenly and stared at his chief with an expression half of question, half of challenge; then seemed to change his mind, shrugging his shoulders a very little. But Fillery made no sign. He did not answer. He laid one hand, however, upon the banisters, as though preliminary to getting to his feet. The sound about them had been gradually growing less, the vibrations were smaller, its waves perceptibly decreasing.\n\nDevonham finished his account in a lower voice, speaking rapidly, as though the words burnt his tongue:\n\n\"The sound, I had already discovered, issued from himself. He was lying on his back, the eyes wide open, the expression peaceful, even happy. The lips were closed. He was humming, continuously humming. Yet the sound came in some way I cannot describe, and could not examine or ascertain, from his whole body. I detected no vibration of the body. It lay half naked, only a corner of the sheet upon it. It lay quite still. The cause of the light and heat, the cause of the movement of air I have called wind\u2014I could not ascertain. They came through him, as it were.\" A slight shiver ran across his body, noticed by his companion, but eliciting no comment from him. \"I\u2014I took his pulse,\" concluded Devonham, sinking his voice now to a whisper, though a very clear one; \"it was very rapid and extraordinarily strong. He seemed entirely unconscious of my presence. I also\"\u2014again the faint shiver was perceptible\u2014\"felt his heart. It was\u2014I have never felt such perfect action, such power\u2014it was beating like an engine, like an engine. And the sense of vitality, of life in the room everywhere was\u2014electrical. I could have sworn it was packed to the walls with\u2014with others.\" Devonham never ceased to watch his companion keenly while he spoke.\n\nFillery then put his first question.\n\n\"And the effect upon yourself?\" he asked quietly. \"I mean\u2014any emotional disturbance? Anything, for instance, like what you saw in the Jura forests?\" He did not look at his colleague; he stood up; the sound about them had now ceased almost entirely and only faint, dying fragments of it reached them. \"Roughly speaking,\" he added, making a half movement to go upstairs. He understood the inner struggle going on; he wished to make it easy for him. For the complete account he did not press him.\n\nDevonham rose too; he walked over to the china bowl, took up a card, read it and let it fall again. The sun was over the horizon now, and a pallid light showed objects clearly. It showed the whiteness of the thin, tired face. He turned and walked slowly back across the hall. The first cart went clattering noisily down the street. At the same moment a final sound from the room upstairs came floating down into the chill early air.\n\n\"My interest, of course,\" began Devonham, his hands in his pockets, his body rigid, as he looked up into his companion's eyes, \"was very concentrated, my mind intensely active.\" He paused, then added cautiously: \"I may confess, however\u2014I must admit, that is, a certain increase of\u2014of\u2014well, a general sense of well-being, let me call it. The heat, you see. A feeling of peace, if you like it better\u2014beyond the\u2014fear,\" he blurted out finally, changing his hands from his coat to his trouser pockets, as though the new position protected him better from attack. \"Also\u2014I somehow expected\u2014any moment\u2014to see outlines, forms, something new!\" He stared frankly into the eyes of the man who, from the step above him, returned his gaze with equal frankness. \"And you\u2014Edward?\" he asked with great suddenness.\n\n\"Joy? Could you describe it as joy?\" His companion ignored the reference to new forms. He also ignored the sudden question. \"Any increase of\u2014?\"\n\n\"Vitality, you want to say. The word joy is meaningless, as you know.\"\n\n\"An intensification of consciousness in any way?\"\n\nBut Devonham had reached his limit of possible confession. He did not reply for a moment. He took a step forward and stood beside Fillery on the stairs. His manner had abruptly changed. It was as though he had come to a conclusion suddenly. His reply, when it came, was no reply at all:\n\n\"Heat and light are favourable, of course, to life,\" he remarked. \"You remember Joaquin Mueller: 'the optic nerve, under the action of light, acts as a stimulus to the organs of the imagination and fancy.'\"\n\nFillery smiled as he took his arm and they went quietly upstairs together. The quoting was a sign of returning confidence. He said something to himself about the absence of light, but so low it was under his breath almost, and even if his companion heard it, he made no comment: \"There was no moon at all to-night till well past three, and even then her light was of the faintest...\"\n\nNo sound was now audible. They entered a room that was filled with silence and with peace. A faint ray of morning sunlight showed the form of the patient sleeping calmly, the body entirely uncovered. There was an expression of quiet happiness upon the face whose perfect health suggested perhaps radiance. But there was a change as well, though indescribable\u2014there was power. He did not stir as they approached the bed. The breathing was regular and very deep.\n\nStanding beside him a moment, Fillery sniffed the air, then smiled. There was a perfume of wild flowers. There was, in spite of the cool morning air, a pleasant warmth.\n\n\"You notice\u2014anything?\" he whispered, turning to his colleague.\n\nDevonham likewise sniffed the air. \"The window's wide open,\" was the low rejoinder. \"There are conservatories at the back of every house all down the row.\"\n\nAnd they left the room on tiptoe, closing the door behind them very softly. Upon Devonham's face lay a curious expression, half anxiety, half pain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 337", + "text": "Dr. Fillery, lying on a couch in his patient's bedroom, snatched some four to five hours' sleep, though, if \"snatched,\" it was certainly enjoyed\u2014a deep, dreamless, reposeful slumber. He woke, refreshed in mind and body, and the first thing he saw, even before he had time to stretch a limb or move his head, was two great blue eyes gazing into his own across the room. They belonged, it first struck him, to some strange being that had followed him out of sleep\u2014he had not yet recovered full consciousness and the effects of sleep still hovered; then an earlier phrase recurred: to some divine great animal.\n\n\"N. H.,\" in his bed in the opposite corner, lay gazing at him. He returned the gaze. Into the blue eyes came at once a look of happy recognition, of contentment, almost a smile. Then they closed again in sleep.\n\nThe room was full of morning sunshine. Fillery rose quietly, and performed his toilet in his own quarters, but on returning after a hurried breakfast, the patient still slept soundly. He slept on for hours, he slept the morning through; but for the obvious evidences of perfect normal health, it might have been a state of coma. The body did not even change its position once.\n\nHe left Devonham in charge, and was on his way to visit some of the other cases, when Nurse Robbins stood before him. Miss Khilkoff had \"called to inquire after Mr. LeVallon,\" and was waiting downstairs in case Dr. Fillery could also see her.\n\nHe glanced at her pretty slim figure and delicate complexion, her hair, fine, plentiful and shiny, her dark eyes with a twinkle in them. She was an attractive, intelligent, experienced, young woman, tactful too, and of great use with extra sensitive patients. She was, of course, already hopelessly in love with her present \"case.\" His \"singing,\" so she called it to Mrs. Soames, had excited her \"like a glass of wine\u2014some music makes you feel like that\u2014so that you could love everybody in the world.\" She already called him Master.\n\n\"Please say I will be down at once,\" said Dr. Fillery, watching her for the first time with interest as he remembered these details Paul had told him. The girl, it now struck him, was intensely alive. There was a gain, an increase, in her appearance somewhere. He recalled also the matron's remark\u2014she was not usually loquacious with her nurses\u2014that \"he's no ordinary case, and I've seen a good few, haven't I? The way he understands animals and flowers alone proves that!\"\n\nDr. Fillery went downstairs.\n\nHis first rapid survey of the girl, exhaustive for all its quickness\u2014he knew her so well\u2014showed him that no outward signs of excitement were visible. Calm, poised, gentle as ever, the same generous tenderness in the eyes, the same sweet firmness in the mouth, the familiar steadiness that was the result of an inner surety\u2014all were there as though the wild scene of the night before had never been. Yet all those were heightened. Her beauty had curiously increased.\n\n\"Come into my study,\" he said, taking her hand and leading the way. \"We shan't be disturbed there. Besides, it's ours, isn't it? We mustn't forget that you are a member of the Firm.\"\n\nHe was aware of her soft beauty invading, penetrating him, aware, too, somehow, that she was in her most impersonal mood. But for all that, her nature could not hide itself, nor could signs of a certain, subtle change she had undergone fail to obtrude themselves. In a single night, it seemed, she had blossomed into a wondrous ripe maturity; like some strange flower that opens to the darkness, the bud had burst suddenly into full, sweet bloom, whose coming only moon and stars had witnessed. There was moonlight now in her dark mysterious eyes as she glanced at him; there was the gold of stars in her tender, yet curious smile, as she answered in her low voice\u2014\"Of course, I always was a partner in the Firm\"\u2014there was the grace and rhythm of a wild flower swaying in the wind, as she passed before him into the quiet room and sank into his own swinging armchair at the desk. But there was something else as well.\n\nA detail of his recent Vision slid past his inner sight again while he watched her... \"I thought\u2014I felt sure\u2014you would come,\" he said. He looked at her admiringly, but peace strong in his heart. \"The ordeal,\" he went on in a curious voice, \"would have been too much for most women, but you\"\u2014he smiled, and the sympathy in his voice increased\u2014\"you, I see, have only gained from it. You've mastered, conquered it. I wonder\"\u2014looking away from her almost as if speaking to himself\u2014\"have you wholly understood it?\"\n\nHe realized vividly in that moment what she, as a young, unmarried girl, had suffered before the eyes of all those prying eyes and gossiping tongues. His admiration deepened.\n\nShe did not take up his words, however. \"I've come to inquire,\" she said simply in an even voice, \"for father and myself. He wanted to know if you got home all right, and how Julian LeVallon is.\" The tone, the heightened colour in the cheek, as she spoke the name no one had yet used, explained, partly at least, to the experienced man who listened, the secret of her sudden blossoming. Also she used her father, though unconsciously, perhaps. \"He was afraid the electricity\u2014the lightning even\u2014had\"\u2014she hesitated, smiled a little, then added, as though she herself knew otherwise\u2014\"done something to him.\"\n\nFillery laughed with her then. \"As it has done to you,\" he thought, but did not speak the words. The need of formula was past. He thanked her, adding that it was sweet yet right that she had come herself, instead of writing or telephoning. \"And you may set your\u2014your father's mind at rest, for all goes well. The electricity, of course,\" he added, on his own behalf as well as hers, \"was\u2014more than most of us could manage. Electricity explains everything except itself, doesn't it?\"\n\nHe was inwardly examining her with an intense and accurate observation. She seemed the same, yet different. The sudden flowering into beauty was simply enough explained. It was another change he now became more and more aware of. In this way a ship, grown familiar during the long voyage, changes on coming into port. The decks and staircases look different when the vessel lies motionless at the dock. It becomes half recognizable, half strange. Gone is the old familiarity, gone also one's own former angle of vision. It is difficult to find one's way about her. Soon she will set sail again, but in another direction, and with new passengers using her decks, her corners, hatchways... telling their secrets of love and hate with that recklessness the open sea and sky make easy... And now with the girl before him\u2014he couldn't quite find his way about her as of old... it was the same familiar ship, yet it was otherwise, and he, a new passenger, acknowledged the freedom of sea and sky.\n\n\"And you\u2014Iraida?\" he asked. \"It was brave of you to come.\"\n\nShe liked evidently the use of her real name, for she smiled, aware all the time of his intent observation, aware probably also of his hidden pain, yet no sign of awkwardness in her; to this man she could talk openly, or, on the contrary, conceal her thoughts, sure of his tact and judgment. He would never intrude unwisely.\n\n\"It was natural, Edward,\" she observed frankly in return.\n\n\"Yes, I suppose it was. Natural is exactly the right word. You have perhaps found yourself at last,\" and again he used her real name, \"Iraida.\"\n\n\"It feels like that,\" she replied slowly. She paused. \"I have found, at least, something definite that I have to do. I feel that I\u2014must care for him.\" Her eyes, as she said it, were untroubled.\n\nThe well-known Nayan flashed back a moment in the words; he recognized\u2014to use his simile\u2014a familiar corner of the deck where he had sat and talked for hours beneath the quiet stars\u2014to someone who understood, yet remained ever impersonal. And the person he talked with came over suddenly and stood beside him and took his hand between her own soft gloved ones:\n\n\"You told me, Edward, he would need a woman to help him. That's what you mean by 'natural'\u2014isn't it? And I am she, perhaps.\"\n\n\"I think you are,\" came in a level tone.\n\n\"I know it,\" she said suddenly, both her eyes looking down upon his face. \"Yes, I suppose I know it.\"\n\n\"Because you\u2014need him,\" his voice, equally secure, made answer.\n\nStill keeping his hand tight between her own, her dark eyes still searching his, she made no sign that his blunt statement was accepted, much less admitted. Instead she asked a question he was not prepared for: \"You would like that, Edward? You wish it?\"\n\nShe was so close against his chair that her fur-trimmed coat brushed his shoulder; yet, though with eyes and touch and physical presence she was so near, he felt that she herself had gone far, far away into some other place. He drew his hand free. \"Iraida,\" he said quietly, \"I wish the best\u2014for him\u2014and for you. And I believe this is the best\u2014for him and you.\" He put his patient first. He was aware that the girl, for all her outer calmness, trembled.\n\n\"It is,\" she said, her voice as quiet as his own; and after a moment's hesitation, she went back to her seat again. \"If you think I can be of use,\" she added. \"I'm ready.\"\n\nA little pause fell between them, during which Dr. Fillery touched an electric bell beside his chair. Nurse Robbins appeared with what seemed miraculous swiftness. \"Still sleeping quietly, sir, and pulse normal again,\" she replied in answer to a question, then vanished as suddenly as she had come. He looked into the girl's eyes across the room. \"A competent, reliable nurse,\" he remarked, \"and, as you saw, a pretty woman.\" He glanced out of the window. \"She is unmarried.\" He mentioned it apparently to the sky.\n\nThe quick mind took in his meaning instantly. \"All women will be drawn to him irresistibly, of course,\" she said. \"But it is not that.\"\n\n\"No, no, of course it is not that,\" he agreed at once. \"I should like you to see him, though not, however, just yet\u2014\" He went on after a moment's reflection, and speaking slowly: \"I should like you to wait a little. It's best. There has been a\u2014a certain disturbance in his being\u2014\"\n\n\"It's his first experience,\" she began, \"of beauty\u2014\"\n\n\"Of beauty in women, yes,\" he finished for her. \"It is. We must avoid anything in the nature of a violent shock\u2014\"\n\n\"He has asked for me?\" she interrupted again, in her quiet way.\n\nHe shook his head. \"And we cannot be sure that it was you\u2014as you\u2014he sought and is affected by. The call he hears is, perhaps, hardly the call that sounds in most men's ears, I mean.\"\n\nThe hint of warning guidance was audible in his voice, as well as visible in his eyes and manner. The laughter they both betrayed, a grave and curious laughter perhaps, was brief, yet enough to conceal stranger emotions that rose like dumb, gazing figures almost before their eyes. Yet if she knew inner turmoil, emotion of any troubling sort, she concealed it perfectly.\n\n\"I am glad,\" the girl said presently. \"Oh, I am really glad. I think I understand, Edward.\" And, even while he sat silent for a bit, watching her with an ever-growing admiration that at the same time marvelled, he saw the wonder of great questions riding through her face. The recollection of what she had suffered publicly in the Studio a few hours before came into his mind again. In these questions, perhaps, lay the only signs of the hidden storm below the surface.\n\n\"Are there\u2014are there such things as Nature-Beings, Edward?\" she asked abruptly. \"We know this is his first experience. Are there then\u2014?\"\n\nHe was prepared a little for this kind of question by her eyes. \"We have no evidence, of course,\" he replied; \"not a scrap of evidence for anything of the sort. There are people, however, so close to Nature, so intimate with her, that we may say they are\u2014strangely, inexplicably akin.\"\n\n\"Has he a soul\u2014a human soul like ours?\" she asked point blank.\n\n\"He is perhaps\u2014not\u2014quite\u2014like us. That may be your task, Iraida,\" he added enigmatically. He watched her more closely than she knew.\n\nShe appeared to ponder his words for a few minutes; then she asked abruptly: \"And when do you think I ought to come and see him? You will let me know?\"\n\n\"I will let you know. A few days perhaps, perhaps a week, perhaps longer. Some education, I think, is necessary first.\" He gazed at her thoughtfully, and she returned his look, her dark eyes filled with the wonder that was both of a child and of a woman, and yet with a security of something that was of neither. \"It will be a\u2014a great effort to you,\" he ventured with significant and sympathetic understanding, \"after\u2014what happened. It is brave and generous of you\u2014\" He broke off.\n\nShe nodded, but at once afterwards shook her head. She rose then to go, but Dr. Fillery stopped her. He rose too.\n\n\"Nayan, I now want your help,\" he said with more emotion than he had yet shown. \"My responsibility, as you may guess, is not light\u2014and\u2014\"\n\n\"And he is in your sole charge, you mean.\" She had willingly resumed her seat, and made herself comfortable with a cushion he arranged for her. He was aware chiefly of her eyes, for in them glowed light and fire he had never seen there before\u2014but still in their depths.\n\n\"Well\u2014yes, partly,\" he replied, lighting a cigarette, \"though Paul is ready with help and sympathy whenever needed. But the charge, as you call it, is not mine alone: it is ours.\"\n\n\"Ours!\" She started, though almost imperceptibly, as she repeated his word.\n\n\"Subconsciously,\" he said in a firm voice, \"we three are similar. We are together. We obey half instinctively the unknown laws of\"\u2014he hesitated a moment\u2014\"of some unknown state of being.\" He added then a singular sentence, though so low it seemed almost to himself: \"Had we been man and wife, Iraida, our child must have been\u2014like him.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, leaning forward a little in her chair, increased warmth, yet no blush, upon her skin. \"Yes, Edward, we three are somehow together in this, aren't we? Oh, I feel it. It pours over me like a great wind, a wind with heat in it.\" Her hands clasped her knee, as they gazed at one another for a moment's silence. \"I feel it,\" she repeated presently. \"I'm sure of it, quite sure.\"\n\nShe stretched out a spirit hand, as it were, for an instant across the impersonal barrier between them, but he did not take it, pretending he did not see it.\n\n\"Ours, Nayan,\" he emphasized, again using the name that belonged to everyone. \"Therefore, you see, I want you to tell me\u2014if you will\u2014what you felt, experienced, perceived\u2014in the Studio last night.\" After watching her a little, he qualified: \"Another day, if you would like to think it over. But some time, without fail. For my part, I will confess\u2014though I think you already know it\u2014that I brought him there on purpose\u2014\"\n\n\"To see my effect upon him, Edward.\"\n\n\"But in his interest, and in the interest of my possible future treatment. His effect upon yourself was not my motive. You believe that.\"\n\n\"I know, I know. And I will tell you gladly. Indeed, I want to.\"\n\nHe was aware, as she said it, that it would be a satisfaction to her to talk; she would welcome the relief of confession; she could speak to him as doctor now, as professional man, as healer, and this, too, without betraying the impersonal attitude she evidently wore and had adopted possibly\u2014he wondered?\u2014in self-protection. \"Tell me exactly what it is you would like to know, please, Edward,\" she added, and instinctively moved to the sofa, so that he might occupy the professional swinging chair at the desk.\n\n\"What you saw, Nayan,\" he began, accepting the change of position without comment, because he knew it helped her. \"What you saw is of value, I think, first.\"\n\nHe had all his usual self-control again, for he was now on his throne, his seat of power; his inner attitude changed subtly; he was examining two patients\u2014the girl and himself. She sat before him demure, obedient, honest, very sweet but very strong; if her perfume reached him he did not notice it, the appeal of her loveliness went past him, he did not see her eyes. He had a very comely and intelligent young woman facing him, and the glow, as it were, of an intense inner activity, strongly suppressed, was the chief quality in her that he noted. But his new attitude made other things, too, stand out sharply: he realized there was confusion in her own mind and heart. Her being was not wholly at one with itself. This impersonal r\u00f4le meant safety until she was sure of herself; and so far she had been entirely and admirably non-committal. No girl, he remembered, could look back upon what she had experienced in the Studio, upon what she had herself said and done, before a crowd of onlookers too, without deep feelings of a mixed and even violent kind. That scene with a young man she had never seen before must bring painful memories; if it was love at first sight the memories must be more painful still. But was it a case of this sudden, rapturous love? What, indeed, were her feelings? What at any rate was her dominant feeling? She had felt his appeal beyond all question, but was it as Nayan or as Iraida that she felt it?\n\nShe was non-committal and impersonal, conscious that therein safety lay\u2014until, having become one with herself, harmonious, she could feel absolutely sure. One hint only had she dropped\u2014it was Nayan speaking\u2014that her mothering, maternal instinct was needed and that she must obey its prompting. She must \"care\" for him...\n\nDr. Fillery, meanwhile, though he might easily have probed and made discoveries without her knowing that he did so, was not the man to use his powers now. Unless she gave of her own free will, he would not ask. He would close eyes and ears even to any chance betrayal or unconscious revelation.\n\n\"When you first looked in, for instance? You had just come in from the street, I think. You opened the door on your way upstairs. Do you remember?\"\n\nShe remembered perfectly. \"I wanted to see who was there. You, I think, were chiefly in my thoughts\u2014I was wondering if you had come.\" Her voice was even, her eyes quite steady; she chose her next words slowly: \"I saw\u2014to my intense surprise\u2014a figure of light.\"\n\n\"Shining, you mean? A shining figure?\"\n\nShe nodded her head, as one little hand put back a straying wisp of dark hair from her forehead. \"A figure like flame,\" she agreed. \"I saw it quite clearly. I saw everything else quite clearly too\u2014the inner room, various people standing about, the piano, the thick smoke, everything as usual. I saw you. You were in the big outer room beyond, but your face was very distinct. You were staring\u2014staring straight at me.\"\n\n\"True,\" put in Dr. Fillery; \"I saw you in the doorway plainly.\"\n\n\"In the foreground, by itself apart somehow, though surrounded by people, was this shining, radiant outline. I thought it was a Vision\u2014the first thing of that sort I had ever seen in my life.\"\n\n\"That was your very first impression\u2014even before you had time to think?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It struck you as unusual?\"\n\n\"I cannot say more than that. I knew by the light it was unusual. Then it moved\u2014talking to Povey or Kempster or someone\u2014and I realized in a flash who it was. I knew it must be your friend, the man you had promised to bring\u2014Ju\u2014\"\n\n\"And then\u2014?\" he asked quickly, before she could pronounce the name.\n\n\"And then\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped, and her eyes looked away from him, not in the sense that they moved but that their focus changed as though she looked at something else, at something within herself, no longer, therefore, at the face in front of her. He waited; he understood that she was searching among deep, strange, seething memories; he let her search; and, watching closely, he presently saw the sight return into her eyes from its inward plunge.\n\n\"And when you knew who it was,\" he asked very quietly, \"were you still surprised? Did he look as you expected him to look, for instance?\"\n\n\"I had expected nothing, you see, Edward, because I had not been consciously thinking about his coming. No mental picture was present in me at all. But the moment I realized who it was, the light seemed to go\u2014I just saw a young man standing there, with his head turned sideways to me. The light, I suppose, lasted for a second only\u2014that first second. As to how he looked? Well, he looked, not only bigger\u2014he is bigger than most men,\" she went on, \"but he looked\"\u2014her voice hushed instinctively a little on the adjective\u2014\"different.\"\n\nHer companion made a gesture of agreement, waiting in silence for what was to follow.\n\n\"He looked so extraordinary, so wonderful,\" she resumed, gazing steadily into his eyes, \"that I\u2014I can hardly put it into words, Edward, unless I use childish language.\" She broke off and sighed, and something, he fancied, in her wavered for a second, though it was certainly neither the voice nor the eyes. A faint trembling again perhaps ran through her body. Her account was so deliberately truthful that it impressed him more than he quite understood. He was aware of pathos in her, of some vague trouble very poignant yet inexplicable. A breath of awe, it seemed, entered the room and moved between them.\n\n\"The childish words are probably the best, the right ones,\" he told her gently.\n\n\"An angel,\" she said instantly in a hushed tone, \"I thought of an angel. There is no other word I can find. But somehow a helpless one. An angel\u2014out of place.\"\n\nHe looked hard at her, his manner encouraging though grave; he said no word; he did not smile.\n\n\"Someone not of this earth quite,\" she added. \"Not a man, at any rate.\"\n\nStill more gently, he then asked her what she felt.\n\n\"At first I couldn't move,\" she went on, her voice normal again. \"I must have stood there ten minutes fully, perhaps longer\"\u2014her listener did not correct the statement\u2014\"when I suddenly recovered and looked about for you, Edward, but could not see you. I needed you, but could not find you. I remember feeling somehow that I had lost you. I tried to call for you\u2014in my heart. There was no answer... Then\u2014then I closed the door quietly and went upstairs to change from my street clothes.\"\n\nShe paused and passed a hand slowly across her forehead. Dr. Fillery asked casually a curious question:\n\n\"Do you remember how you got upstairs, Nayan?\"\n\nHer hand dropped instantly; she started. \"It's very odd you should ask me that, Edward,\" she said, gazing at him with a slightly rising colour in her face, an increase of fire glowing in her eyes; \"very odd indeed. I was just trying to think how I could describe it to you. No. Actually I do not remember how I got upstairs. All I know is\u2014I was suddenly in my room.\" A new intensity appeared in voice and manner. \"It seemed to me I flew\u2014or that\u2014something\u2014carried me.\"\n\n\"Yes, Nayan, yes. It's quite natural you should have felt like that.\"\n\n\"Is it? I remember so little of what I actually felt. I wonder\u2014I wonder,\" she went on softly, with an air almost of talking to herself, \"if it will ever come back again\u2014what I felt then\u2014\"\n\n\"Such moments of subliminal excitement,\" Dr. Fillery reminded her gently, \"have the effect of obliterating memory sometimes\u2014\"\n\n\"Excitement,\" she caught him up. \"Yes, I suppose it was excitement. But it was more, much more, than that. Stimulated\u2014I think that's the word really. I felt caught away somewhere, caught away, caught up\u2014as if into the rest of myself\u2014into the whole of myself. I became vast\"\u2014she smiled curiously\u2014\"if you know what I mean\u2014in several places at once, perhaps, is better. It was an immense feeling\u2014no, I mean a feeling of immensity\u2014\"\n\n\"Happy?\" His voice was low.\n\nHer eyes answered even before her words, as the memory came back a little in response to his cautious suggestion.\n\n\"A new feeling altogether,\" she replied, returning his clear gaze with her frank, innocent eyes that had grown still more brilliant. \"A feeling I have never known before.\" She talked more rapidly now, leaning forward a little in her chair. \"I felt in the open air somehow, with flowers, trees, hot burning sunshine and sweet winds rushing to and fro. It was something bigger than happiness\u2014a sort of intoxicating joy, I think. It was liberty, but of an enormous spiritual kind. I wanted to dance\u2014I believe I did dance\u2014yes, I'm sure I did, and with hardly anything on my body. I wanted to sing\u2014I sang downstairs, of course\u2014\"\n\n\"I heard,\" he put in briefly. He did not add that she had never sung like that before.\n\n\"The moment I came into the room, yes, I remember I went straight to the piano without a word to anyone.\" She reflected a moment. \"I suppose I had to. There was something new in me I could only express by music\u2014rhythm, that is, not language.\"\n\n\"It was natural,\" Dr. Fillery said again. \"Quite natural, I think.\"\n\n\"Yes, Edward, I suppose it was,\" she answered, then sank back in her chair, as though she had told him all there was to tell.\n\nDr. Fillery smoked in silence for a few minutes, then rose and touched the bell as before, and, as before, Nurse Robbins appeared with the same miraculous speed. There was a brief colloquy at the door; the woman was gone again, and the doctor turned back into the room with a look of satisfaction on his face. All, apparently, was going well upstairs. He did not sit down, however; he stood looking out of the window at the drab wintry sky of motionless clouds, his back to his companion. It was midday, but the light, while making all things visible, was not light; there was no shine, no touch of radiance, no hint of sparkle beneath the canopy of sullen cloud. The English winter's day was visible, no more than that. Yet it was not the English day, nor the clouds, nor the bleak dead atmosphere he looked at. In a single second his sight travelled far, far away, covering an enormous interval in space and time, in condition too. He saw a radiant world of sun-drenched flowers \"tossing with random airs of an unearthly wind\"; he saw a foam of forest leaves shaking and dancing against a deep blue sky; he say a valley whose streams and emerald turf knew not the touch of human feet... The familiar symbols he saw, but inflamed with new meaning.\n\n\"Thank you, Edward, thank you\"\u2014she was just behind him, her hands upon his shoulders. \"You understand everything in the world!\" she added, \"and out of it,\" but too low for him to hear.\n\nHe came back with an effort, turning towards her. They were standing level now and very close, eyes looking into eyes. He felt her breath upon his face, her perfume rose about him, her lips were moving just in front of him\u2014yet, for a second, he did not know who she was. It was as though she had not come with him out of that valley, not come back with him... An insatiable longing seized him\u2014to return and find her, stay with her. The ache of an intolerable yearning was in his heart, yet a sudden flash of understanding that brought a bigger, almost an unearthly joy in its train. At the call of some service, some duty, some help to be rendered to humanity, the three of them together\u2014he, \"N. H.,\" the girl\u2014were in temporary exile from their rightful home. The scent of wild flowers rose about him. He suddenly remembered, recognized, and gave a little start. He had left her behind in the valley\u2014Iraida; it was Nayan who now stood before him.\n\nHe uttered a dry little laugh. \"You startled me, Nayan. I was thinking. I didn't hear you.\" She had just thanked him for something\u2014oh, yes\u2014because he had left her alone for a moment, giving her time to collect herself after the long cross-examination.\n\nHe took both her hands in his.\n\n\"Our patient then\u2014isn't it?\" he asked in a firm voice, looking deep into her luminous eyes. He saw no fire in them now.\n\n\"I'll do all I can, Edward.\"\n\nShe returned the pressure of his hands. His keen insight, operating in spite of himself, had read her clearly. It was mother, child and woman he had always known. The three, however, were already in process of disentanglement. For the first time during their long acquaintance, what now stood so close before him was\u2014the woman. Yet behind the woman like an enveloping shadow stood the mother too. And behind both, again, stood another wild, gigantic, lovely possibility. Was it, then, the child that he had left playing in the radiant valley?... The child, he knew, was his always, always, even if the woman was another's... He laughed softly. These, after all, were but transitory states in human, earthly evolution, concerned with play, with a production of bodies and so forth...\n\nHe had lost himself in her deep eyes. Her gaze lay all over him, over his entire being, like a warm soft covering that blessed and healed. She was so close that it seemed he drew her breath in with his own. She made a movement then, a tiny gesture. He let go the hands his own had held so long. He turned from the window and from her. He was trembling.\n\n\"What came later,\" he resumed in his calm, almost in his professional voice, \"you probably do not remember?\" He went towards his desk. \"We need not talk about that. No doubt, in your mind, it all remains a blurred impression\u2014\"\n\nShe interrupted, following him across the room. \"What happened, Edward,\" she said very quietly in her lowest tone, \"I know. It was all told to me. But my memory, as you say, is so faint as to be worthless really. What I do remember is this\"\u2014she tapped her open palm with two fingers slowly, as she spoke the words\u2014\"light, heat, a smell of flowers and a rushing wind that lifted me into some kind of exhilarating liberty where I felt\u2014the intense joy of knowing myself somehow free\u2014and greater, oh, far greater\u2014than I am\u2014now.\" Then she suddenly whispered again too low for him to catch\u2014\"angelic.\" A smile, as of glory, rippled across her face.\n\nHis voice, coming quickly, was cool, its tone measured:\n\n\"And you will come to see him the moment I let you know,\" he interrupted abruptly. \"It may be a few days, it may be a week. The instant it seems wise\u2014\" He was entirely practical again.\n\nShe went to the door with him. \"I'll come, of course,\" she answered, as he opened the door.\n\n\"I'll let myself out, Edward\u2014please. I know the way. There's no good being a partner if one doesn't know the way out\u2014\" She laughed.\n\n\"And in, remember!\" he called down the little passage after her, as, with a smile and a wave of the hand, she was gone.\n\nHe went back to his desk, drew a piece of paper towards him, and jotted a few notes down in briefest fashion. The expression on his rugged face was enigmatical perhaps, but the sternness at least was clear to read, and it was this, combining with an extraordinary tenderness, that drew out its nobility:\n\n\"Intensification of consciousness, involving increased activity of every centre; hearing, sight, touch and smell, all affected. Slight exteriorization of consciousness also took place. No signs of split or divided personality, but an increase of coherence rather. The central self active\u2014aware of greater powers in time and space, hence sense of joy, heat, light, sound, motion. Distinct subliminal up-rush, followed by customary loss of memory later. Her whole being, together with neglected tracts as yet untouched by experience\u2014her entire being\u2014reached simultaneously. Knew herself for the first time a woman\u2014but something more as well. Unearthly complex, visible.\n\n\"Appeal made direct to subconscious self. Unfavourable reactions\u2014none. Favourable reactions\u2014increased physical and mental strength...\"\n\nHe laid down his pencil as with a gesture of impatience at its uselessness, and sat back in the chair, thinking.\n\nThe effect \"N. H.\" had upon other people was here again confirmed. That, at least, seemed reasonably clear. Vitality was increased; heart and mind caught up an extra gear; thought leaped, if extravagantly, towards speculation; emotion deepened, if ecstatically, towards belief. All the normal reactions of the system were speeded up and strengthened. Consciousness was intensified.\n\nMore than this\u2014with some it was extended, and subliminal powers were set free. In his own experience this had been the case; the sight, hearing, even a mild degree of divination, had opened in his being. It had, similarly, taken place with Devonham, an unlikely subject, who fought against acknowledging it. Father Collins, too, he suspected\u2014he recalled his behaviour and strange language\u2014had known also a temporary extension of faculty outside the normal field. He remembered, again, the Customs official, Charing Cross Station, and a dozen other minor instances... Indications as yet were slight, he realized, but they were valuable.\n\nSuch abnormal experiences, moreover, each one interpreted, respectively, in the terms of his own individual being, of his own temperament, his own personal shibboleths. The law governing unusual experience operated invariably.\n\nWas not his own particular \"vision\" easily explained? It might indeed, had it happened earlier, have found a place in his own book of Advanced Psychology. He reflected rapidly: He believed the industrial system lay at the root of Civilization's crumbling, and that man must return to Nature\u2014therefore his yearnings dramatized themselves in personified representations of the beauty of Nature.\n\nHe could trace every detail of his Vision to some intense but unrealized yearning, to some deep hope, desire, dream, as yet unfulfilled. Always these yearnings and wishes unfulfilled!\n\nColour, form and sound again\u2014he used them one and all in his treatment of special cases, and felt hurt by the ignorant scoffing and denial of his brother doctors. Hence their present dramatization.\n\nHis immense belief, again, in the results upon the Race when once the subliminal powers should have reached the stage where they could be used at will for practical purposes\u2014this, in its turn, led him to hope, perhaps to believe, that this strange \"Case\" might prove to be some fabulous bright messenger who brought glad tidings... All, all was explicable enough!\n\nA smile stole over his face; he began to laugh quietly to himself...\n\nYes, he could explain all, trace all to something or other in his being, yet\u2014he knew that the real explanation... well\u2014his cleverest intellectual explanation and analysis were worthless after all. For here lay something utterly beyond his knowledge and experience...\n\nThe note of another searcher recurred to him.\n\n\"Each human being has within himself that restless creative phantasy which is ever engaged in assuaging the harshness of reality... Whoever gives himself unsparingly and carefully to self-observation will realize that there dwells within him something which would gladly hide up and cover all that is difficult and questionable in life, and thus procure an easy and free path. Insanity grants the upper hand to this something. When once it is uppermost, reality is more or less quickly driven out.\"\n\nBut he knew quite well that although he belonged to what he called the \"Unstable,\" the \"something\" which Jung referred to had by no means obtained \"the upper hand.\" The vista opening to his inner sight led towards a new reality... Ah! If he could only persuade Paul Devonham to see what he saw...!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 338", + "text": "Lady Gleeson had heard from a Promethean what had transpired in the studio after she had left, and her interest was immensely stimulated. These details she had not known when she had driven her hero home, and had felt so strangely drawn to him that she had kissed him in front of Dr. Fillery as though she caressed a prisoner under the eyes of the warder.\n\nShe made her little plans accordingly. It was some days, however, before they bore fruit. The telephone at last rang. It was Dr. Fillery. The nerves in her quivered with anticipation.\n\nDevonham, it appeared, had been away, and her \"kind letters and presents,\" he regretted to find, had remained unanswered and unacknowledged. Mr. LeVallon had been in the country, too, with his colleague, and letters had not been forwarded. Oh, it would \"do him good to see people.\" It would be delightful if she could spare a moment to look in. Perhaps for a cup of tea to-morrow? No, to-morrow she was engaged. The next day then. The next day it was. In the morning arrived a brief letter from Mr. LeVallon himself: \"You will come to tea to-morrow. I thank you.\u2014Julian LeVallon.\"\n\nYet there was something both in Dr. Fillery's voice, as in this enigmatic letter, that she did not like. She felt puzzled somewhere. The excitement of a novel intrigue with this unusual youth, none the less, was stimulating. She decided to go to tea. She put off a couple of engagements in order to be free.\n\nA servant let her in. She went upstairs. There was no sign of Dr. Fillery nor, thank heaven, of Devonham either. Tea, she saw, was laid for two in the private sitting-room. LeVallon, seated in an arm-chair by the open window, looked \"magnificent and overpowering,\" as she called it. He rose at once to greet her. \"Thank you,\" he said in his great voice. \"I am glad to see you.\" He said it perfectly, as though it had been taught him. He took her hand. Her ravishing smile, perhaps, he did not notice. His face, at any rate, was grave.\n\nHis height, his broad shoulders, his inexperienced eyes and manner again delighted Lady Gleeson.\n\nThe effect upon her receptive temperament, at any rate, was instantaneous. That he showed no cordiality, did not smile, and that his manner was constrained, meant nothing to her\u2014or meant what she wished it to mean. He was somewhat overcome, of course, she reflected, that she was here at all. She began at once. Sitting composedly on the edge of the table, so that her pretty silk stockings were visible to the extent she thought just right, she dangled her slim legs and looked him straight in the eyes. She was full of confidence. Her attitude said plainly: \"I'm taking a lot of trouble, but you're worth it.\"\n\n\"Mr. LeVallon,\" she purred in a teasing yet determined voice, \"why do you ignore me?\" There was an air of finality about the words. She meant to know.\n\nLeVallon met her eyes with a look of puzzled surprise, but did not answer. He stood in front of her. He looked really magnificent, a perfect study of the athlete in repose. He might have been a fine Greek statue.\n\n\"Why,\" she repeated, her lip quivering slightly, \"do you ignore me? I want the truth,\" she added. She was delighted to see how taken aback he was. \"You don't dislike me.\" It was not a question.\n\nInto his eyes stole an expression she could not exactly fathom. She judged, however, that he felt awkward, foolish. Her interest doubtless robbed him of any savoir faire he might possess. This talk face to face was a little too much for any young man, but for a simple country youth it was, of course, more than disconcerting.\n\n\"I'm Lady Gleeson,\" she informed him, smiling precisely in the way she knew had troubled so many other men. \"Angela,\" she added softly. \"You've had my books and flowers and letters. Yet you continue to ignore me. Why, please?\" With a different smile and a pathetic, childish, voice: \"Have I offended you somehow? Do I displease you?\"\n\nLeVallon stared at her as though he was not quite certain who she actually was, yet as though he ought to know, and that her words now reminded him. He stared at her with what she called his \"awkward and confused\" expression, but which Fillery, had he been present, would have recognized as due to his desire to help a pitiful and hungry creature\u2014that, in a word, his instinct for service had been a little stirred.\n\nThe scene was certainly curious and unusual.\n\nLeVallon, with his great strength and dignity, yet something tender, pathetic in his bearing, stood staring at her. Lady Gleeson, brimming with a sense of easy victory, sat on the table-edge, her pretty legs well forward, knowing herself divinely gowned. She had her victim, surely, at a disadvantage. She felt at the same time a faint uneasiness she could not understand. She concealed it, however.\n\n\"I suffer here,\" he said suddenly in a quiet tone.\n\nShe gave a start. It was the phrase he had used before. She thrilled. She hitched her skirt a fraction higher.\n\n\"Julian, poor boy,\" she said\u2014then stared at him. \"How innocent you are!\" She said it with apparent impulse, though her little frenzied mind was busy calculating. There came a pause. He said nothing. He was, apparently, quite innocent, extraordinarily, exasperatingly innocent.\n\nIn a low voice, smiling shyly, she added\u2014as though it cost her a great effort:\n\n\"You do not recognize what is yours.\"\n\n\"You are sacred!\" he replied with startling directness, as though he suddenly understood, yet was stupidly perplexed. \"You already have your man.\"\n\nLady Gleeson gulped down a spasm of laughter. How slow these countrymen could be! Yet she must not shock him. He was suffering, besides. This yokel from the woods and mountains needed a little coaxing. It was natural enough. She must explain and teach, it seemed. Well\u2014he was worth the trouble. His beauty was mastering her already. She loved, in particular, his innocence, his shyness, his obvious respect. She almost felt herself a magnanimous woman.\n\n\"My man!\" she mentioned. \"Oh, he's finished with me long ago. He's bored. He has gone elsewhere. I am alone\"\u2014she added with an impromptu inspiration\u2014\"and free to choose.\"\n\n\"It must be pain and loneliness to you.\"\n\nLeVallon looked, she thought, embarrassed. He was struggling with himself, of course. She left the table and came up close to him. She stood on tiptoe, so that her breath might touch his face. Her eyes shone with fire. Her voice trembled a little. It was very low.\n\n\"I choose\u2014you,\" she whispered. She cast down her shining eyes. Her lips took on a prim, inviting turn. She knew she was irresistible like that. She stood back a step, as if expecting some tumultuous onslaught. She waited.\n\nBut the onslaught did not come. LeVallon, towering above her, merely stared. His arms hung motionless. There was, indeed, expression in his face, but it was not the expression that she expected, longed for, deemed her due. It puzzled her, as something entirely new.\n\n\"Me!\" he repeated, in an even tone. He gazed at her in a peculiar way. Was it appraisement? Was it halting wonder at his marvellous good fortune? Was it that he hesitated, judging her? He seemed, she thought once for an instant, curiously indifferent. Something in his voice startled her.\n\nThe moment's pause, at any rate, was afflicting. Her spirit burned within her. Only her supreme belief in herself prevented a premature explosion. Yet something troubled her as well. A tremor ran through her. LeVallon, she remembered, was\u2014LeVallon.\n\nHis own thought and feeling lay hidden from her blunt perception since she read no signs unless they were painfully obvious. But in his mind\u2014in his feeling, rather, since he did not think\u2014ran evidently the sudden knowledge of what her meaning was. He understood. But also, perhaps he remembered what Fillery had told him.\n\nFor a long time he kept silent, the emotions in him apparently at grips. Was he suddenly going to carry her away as he had done to that \"little Russian poseuse\"? She watched him. He was intensely busy with what occupied his mind, for though he did not speak, his lips were moving. She watched him, impatience and wonder in her, impatience at his slowness, wonder as to what he would do and say when at last his simple mind had decided. And again the odd touch of fear stole over her. Something warned her. This young man thrilled her, but he certainly was strange. This was, indeed, a new experience. Whatever was he thinking about? What in the world was he going to say? His lips were still moving. There was a light in his face. She imagined the very words, could almost read them, hear them. There! Then she heard them, heard some at any rate distinctly: \"You are an animal. Yet you walk upright...\"\n\nThe scene that followed went like lightning.\n\nBefore Lady Gleeson could move or speak, however, he also said another thing that for one pulsing second, and for the first time in her life, made her own utter worthlessness become appallingly clear to her. It explained the touch of fear. Even her one true thing, her animal passion, was a trumpery affair:\n\n\"There is nothing in you I can work with,\" he said with gentle, pitying sympathy. \"Nothing I can use.\"\n\nThen Lady Gleeson blazed. Vanity instantly restored self-confidence. It seemed impossible to believe her ears.\n\nWhat had he done? What had he said that caused the explosion? He watched her abrupt, spasmodic movements with amazement. They were so ugly, so unrhythmical. Their violence was so wasteful.\n\n\"You insult me!\" she cried, making these violent movements of her whole body that, to him, were unintelligible. \"How dare you? You\u2014\" The breath choked her.\n\n\"Cad,\" he helped her, so suddenly that another mind not far away might almost have dropped the word purposely into his own. \"I am so pained,\" he added, \"so pained.\" He gazed at her as though he longed to help. \"For you, I know, are valuable to him who holds you sacred\u2014to\u2014your husband.\"\n\nLady Gleeson simply could not credit her ears. This neat, though unintentional, way of transferring the epithet to her who deserved it, left her speechless. Her fury increased with her inability to express it. She could have struck him, killed him on the spot. Her face changed from white to crimson like some toy with a trick of light inside it. She seemed to emit sparks. She was transfixed. And the shiver that ran through her was, perhaps, for once, both sexual and spiritual at once.\n\n\"You insult me,\" she cried again helplessly. \"You insult me!\"\n\n\"If there was something in you I could work with\u2014help\u2014\" he began, his face showing a tender sympathy that enraged her even more. He started suddenly, looking closer into her blazing eyes. \"Ah,\" he said quickly below his breath, \"the fire\u2014the little fire!\" His expression altered. But Lady Gleeson, full of her grievance, did not catch the words, it seemed.\n\n\"\u2014In my tenderest, my most womanly feelings,\" she choked on, yet noticing the altered expression on his face. \"How dare you?\" Her voice became shrill and staccato. Then suddenly\u2014mistaking the look in his eyes for shame\u2014she added: \"You shall apologize. You shall apologize at once!\" She screamed the words. They were the only ones that her outraged feelings found.\n\n\"You show yourself, my fire,\" he was saying softly in his deep resonant voice. \"Oh, I see and worship now; I understand a little.\"\n\nHis look astonished her even in the middle of her anger\u2014the pity, kindness, gentleness in it. The bewilderment she did not notice. It was the evident desire to be of service to her, to help and comfort, that infuriated her. The superiority was more than she could stand.\n\n\"And on your knees,\" she yelped; \"on your knees, too!\"\n\nDrawing herself up, she pointed to the carpet with an air of some tragedy queen to whom a lost self-respect came slowly back. \"Down there!\" she added, as the gleaming buckle on her shoe indicated the spot. She did not forget to show her pretty stockings as well.\n\nThe picture was comic in the extreme, yet with a pathetic twist about it that, had she possessed a single grain of humour, must have made her feel foolish and shamed until she died, for his kneeling position rendered her insignificance so obvious it was painful in the extreme. LeVallon clasped his hands; his face, wearing a dignity and tenderness that emphasized its singular innocence and beauty, gazed up into her trivial prettiness, as she sat on the edge of the table behind her, glaring down at him with angry but still hungry eyes.\n\n\"I should have helped and worshipped,\" his deep voice thrilled. \"I am ashamed. Always\u2014you are sacred, wonderful. I did not recognize your presence calling me. I did not hear nor understand. I am ashamed.\"\n\nThe strange words she did not comprehend, even if she heard them properly. For one moment she knew a dreadful feeling that they were not addressed to her at all, but the sense of returning triumph, the burning desire to extract from him the last ounce of humiliation, to make him suffer as much as in her power lay, these emotions deadened any perceptions of a subtler kind. He was kneeling at her feet, stammering his abject apology, and the sight was wine and food to her. Though she could have crushed him with her foot, she could equally have flung herself in utter abandonment before his glorious crouching strength. She adored the scene. He looked magnificent on his knees. He was. She believed she, too, looked magnificent.\n\n\"You apologize to me,\" she said in a trembling voice, tense with mingled passions.\n\n\"Oh, with what sadness for my mistake you cannot know,\" was his strange reply. His voice rang with sincerity, his eyes held a yearning that almost lent him radiance. Yet it was the sense of power he gave that thrilled Lady Gleeson most. For she could not understand it. Again a passing hint of something remote, incalculable, touched her sense of awe. She shivered slightly. LeVallon did not move.\n\nAppeased, yet puzzled, she lowered her face, now pale and intense with eagerness, towards his own, hardly conscious that she did so, while the faint idea again went past her that he addressed his astonishing words elsewhere. Blind vanity at once dismissed the notion, though the shock of its brief disthroning had been painful. She found satisfaction for her wounded soul. A man who had scorned her, now squirmed before her beauty on his knees, desiring her\u2014but too late.\n\n\"You have some manhood, after all!\" she exclaimed, still fierce, the upper lip just revealing the shining little teeth. Her power at last had touched him. He suffered. And she was glad.\n\n\"I worship,\" he repeated, looking through her this time, if not actually past her. \"You are sacred, the source of all my life and power.\" His pain, his worship, the aching passion in him made her forget the insult. Upon that face upturned so close to hers, she now breathed softly.\n\n\"I'll try,\" she said more calmly. \"I'll try and forgive you\u2014just this once.\" The suffering in his eyes, so close against her own, dawned more and more on her. \"There, now,\" she added impulsively, \"perhaps I will forgive you\u2014altogether!\"\n\nIt was a moment of immense and queenly generosity. She felt sublime.\n\nLeVallon, however, made no rejoinder; one might have thought he had not heard; only his head sank lower a little before her.\n\nShe had him at her mercy now; the rapt and wonderful expression in his eyes delighted her. She bent slightly nearer and made as though to kiss him, when a new idea flashed suddenly through her mind. This forgiveness was a shade too quick, too easy. Oh, she knew men. She was not without experience.\n\nShe acted with instant decision upon her new idea, as though delay might tempt her to yield too soon. She straightened up with a sudden jerk, touched his cheek with her hand, then, with a swinging swish of her skirts, but without a single further word, she swept across the room. She went out, throwing him a last glance just before she closed the door. At his kneeling figure and upturned face she flung this last glance of murderous fascination.\n\nBut LeVallon did not move or turn his head; he made no sign; his attitude remained precisely as before, face upturned, hands clasped, his expression rapt and grave as ever. His voice continued:\n\n\"I worship you for ever. I did not know you in that little shape. O wondrous central fire, teach me to be aware of you with awe, with joy, with love, even in the smallest things. O perfect flame behind all form...\"\n\nFor a long time his deep tones poured their resonant vibration through the room. There came an answering music, low, faint, continuous, a long, deep rhythm running in it. There was a scent of flowers, of open space, a fragrance of a mountain top. The sounds, the perfume, the touch of cool refreshing wind rose round him, increasing with every minute, till it seemed as though some energy informed them. At the centre he knelt steadily, light glowing faintly in his face and on his skin. A vortex of energy swept round him. He drew upon it. His own energy was increased and multiplied. He seemed to grow more radiant...\n\nA few minutes later the door opened softly and Dr. Fillery looked in, hesitated for a second, then advanced into the room. He paused before the kneeling figure. It was noticeable that he was not startled and that his face wore no expression of surprise. A smile indeed lay on his lips. He noticed the scent of flowers, a sweetness in the air as after rain; he felt the immense vitality, the exhilaration, the peace and power too. He had made no sound, but the other, aware of his presence, rose to his feet.\n\n\"I disturbed you,\" said Fillery. \"I'm sorry. Shall I go?\"\n\n\"I was worshipping,\" replied \"N. H.\" \"No, do not go. There was a little flash\"\u2014he looked about him for an instant as if slightly bewildered\u2014\"a little sign\u2014something I might have helped\u2014but it has gone again. Then I worshipped, asking for more power. You notice it?\" he asked, with a radiant smile.\n\n\"I notice it,\" said Fillery, smiling back. He paused a moment. His eye took in the tea-things and saw they were untouched; he felt the tea-pot. It was still warm. \"Come,\" he said happily; \"we'll have some tea together. I'll send for a fresh brew.\" He rang the bell, then arranged the chairs a little differently. \"Your visitor?\" he asked. \"You are expecting someone?\"\n\n\"N. H.\" looked round him suddenly. \"Oh!\" he exclaimed, \"but\u2014she has gone!\"\n\nHis surprise was comical, but the expression on the face changed in his rapid way at once. \"I remember now. Your Lady Gleeson came,\" he added, a touch of gentle sadness in his voice, \"I gave her pain. You had told me. I forgot\u2014\"\n\n\"You did well,\" Fillery commented with smiling approval as though the entire scene was known to him, \"you did very well. It is a pity, only, that she left too soon. If she had stayed for your worship\u2014your wind and fire might have helped\u2014\"\n\n\"N. H.\" shook his head. \"There is nothing I can work with,\" he replied. \"She is empty. She destroys only. Why,\" he added, \"does she walk upright?\"\n\nBut Lady Gleeson held very different views upon the recent scene. This magnificent young male she had put in his place, but she had not finished with him. No such being had entered her life before. She was woman enough to see he was unusual. But he was magnificent as well, and, secretly, she loved his grand indifference.\n\nShe left the house, however, with but an uncertain feeling that the honours were with her. Two days without a word, a sign, from her would bring him begging to her little feet.\n\nBut the \"begging\" did not come. The bell was silent, the post brought no humble, passionate, abandoned letter. She fumed. She waited. Her husband, recently returned to London and immensely preoccupied with his concessions, her maid too, were aware that Lady Gleeson was impatient. The third, the fourth day came, but still no letter.\n\nWhereupon it occurred to her that she had possibly gone too far. Having left him on his knees, he was, perhaps, still kneeling in his heart, even prostrate with shame and disappointment. Afraid to write, afraid to call, he knew not what to do. She had evidently administered too severe a lesson. Her callers, meanwhile, convinced her that she was irresistible. There was no woman like her in the world. She had, of course, been too harsh and cruel with this magnificent and innocent youth from the woods and mountains...\n\nThus it was that, on the fourth day, feeling magnanimous and generous, big-hearted too, she wrote to him. It would be foolish, in any case, to lose him altogether merely for a moment's pride:\n\n\u2002\"Dear Mr. LeVallon,\u2014I feel I must send you a tiny word to let you know that I really have forgiven you. You behaved, you know, in a way that no man of my acquaintance has ever done before. But I feel sure now you did not really mean it. Your forest and mountain gods have not taught you to understand civilized women. So\u2014I forgive.\n\n\u2002\"Please forget it all, as I have forgotten it.\u2014Yours,\n\n\u2002\"Angela Gleeson.\n\n\u2002\"P. S.\u2014And you may come and see me soon.\"\n\nTo which, two days later, came the reply:\n\n\u2002\"Dear Lady Gleeson,\u2014I thank you.\n\n\u2002Julian LeVallon.\"\n\nWithin an hour of its receipt, she wrote:\n\n\u2002\"Dear Julian,\u2014I am so glad you understand. I knew you would. You may come and see me. I will prove to you that you are really forgiven. There is no need to feel embarrassed. I am interested in you and can help you. Believe me, you need a woman's guidance. All\u2014all I have, is yours.\n\n\u2002\"I shall be at home this afternoon\u2014alone\u2014from 4 to 7 o'clock. I shall expect you. My love to you and your grand wild gods!\u2014Yours,\n\n\u2002\"Angela.\n\n\u2002\"P. S.\u2014I want you to tell me more about your gods. Will you?\"\n\nShe sent it by special messenger, \"Reply\" underlined on the envelope. He did not appear at the appointed hour, but the next morning she received his letter. It came by ordinary post. The writing on the envelope was not his. Either Devonham or Fillery had addressed it. And a twinge of unaccustomed emotion troubled her. Intuition, it seems, survives even in the coarsest, most degraded feminine nature, ruins of some divine prerogative perhaps. Lady Gleeson, at any rate, flinched uneasily before she opened the long expected missive:\n\n\u2002\"Dear Lady Gleeson,\u2014Be sure that you are always under the protection of the gods even if you do not know them. They are impersonal. They come to you through passion but not through that love of the naked body which is lust. I can work with passion because it is creative, but not with lust, for it is destructive only. Your suffering is the youth and ignorance of the young uncreative animal. I can strive with young animals and can help them. But I cannot work with them. I beg you, listen. I love in you the fire, though it is faint and piti-ful.\n\n\u2002\"Julian.\"\n\nLady Gleeson read this letter in front of the looking-glass, then stared at her reflection in the mirror.\n\nShe was dazed. But in spite of the language she thought \"silly,\" she caught the blunt refusal of her generous offer. She understood. Yet, unable to believe it, she looked at her reflection again\u2014then, impulsively, went downstairs to see her husband.\n\nIt really was more than she could bear. The man was mad, but that did not excuse him.\n\n\"He is a beast,\" she informed her husband, tearing up the letter angrily before his eyes in the library, while he watched her with a slavish admiration that increased her fury. \"He is nothing but an animal,\" she added. \"He's a\u2014a\u2014\"\n\n\"Who?\" came the question, as though it had been asked before. For Sir George wore a stolid and a patient expression on his kindly face.\n\n\"That man LeVallon,\" she told him. \"One of Dr. Fillery's cases I tried to\u2014to help. Now he's written to me\u2014\"\n\nGeorge looked up with infinite patience and desire in his kindly gaze.\n\n\"Cut him out,\" he said dryly, as though he was accustomed to such scenes. \"Let him rip. Why bother, anyway, with 'patients'?\"\n\nAnd he crossed the room to comfort her, knowing that presently the reaction must make him seem more desirable than he really was...\n\n\"Never in my house again,\" she sighed, as he approached her lovingly, his fingers in his close brown beard. \"He is simply a beast\u2014an animal!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 339", + "text": "It was, perhaps, some cosmic humour in the silent, beautiful stars which planned that Nayan's visit should follow upon the very heels of Lady Gleeson's call. Those vast Intelligences who note the fall of even a feather, watching and guarding the Race so closely that they may be said in human terms to love it, arranged the details possibly, enjoying the result with their careless, sunny laughter. At any rate, Dr. Fillery quickly sent her word, and she came. To lust \"N. H.\" had not reacted. How would it be with love?\n\nThe beautiful girl entered the room slowly, shyly, as though, certain of herself, she was not quite certain what she was about to meet. Fillery had told her she could help, that she was needed; therefore she came. There was no thought of self in her. Her first visit to Julian LeVallon after his behaviour in the Studio had no selfish motive in it. Her self-confidence, however, went only to a certain point; in the interview with Fillery she had easily controlled herself; she was not so sure that her self-control would be adequate now. Though calm outwardly, an inexpressible turmoil surged within.\n\nShe remembered his strength, virility and admiration\u2014as a woman; his ingenuous, childlike innocence, an odd appealing helplessness in it somewhere, touched the mother in her. That she divined this latter was, perhaps, the secret of her power over men. Independent of all they had to offer, she touched the highest in them by making them feel they had need of the highest in herself. She obtained thus, without desiring it, the influence that Lady Gleeson, her antithesis, lacked. They called her Nayan the Impersonal. The impersonal in her, nevertheless, that which had withstood the cunning onslaught of every type of male successfully, had received a fundamental shock. Both her modesty and dignity had been assailed, and in public. Others, women among them, had witnessed her apparent yielding to LeVallon's violence and seen her carried in his arms; they had noted her obvious willingness, had heard her sympathetic cry. She knew quite well what the women thought\u2014Lady Gleeson had written a little note of sympathy\u2014the men as well, and yet she came at Fillery's call to visit, perhaps to help, the offender who had caused it all.\n\nAs she opened the door every nerve she possessed was tingling. The mother in her yearned, but the woman in her sent the blood rushing from her heart in pride, in resentment, in something of anger as well. How had he dared to seize her in that awful way? The outrage and the love both tore at her. Yet Nayan was not the kind to shirk self-revelation when it came. She brought some hidden secret with her, although as yet herself uncertain what that secret was.\n\nFillery met her on the threshold with his sweet tact and sympathy as usual. He had an authoritative and paternal air that helped and comforted her, and, as she took his hand at once, the look she gave him was more kind and tender than she knew. The last trace of self, at any rate, went out of her as she felt his touch.\n\n\"Here I am,\" she said; \"you sent for me. I promised you.\"\n\nHe replied in a low tone: \"There's no need to refer to anything, of course. Assume\u2014I suggest\u2014that he has forgotten all that happened, and you\u2014have forgotten too.\"\n\nHe was aware of nothing but her eyes. The softness, the delicate perfume, the perfect voice, even the fur and flowers\u2014all were summed up in her eyes alone. In those eyes he could have lost himself perhaps for ever.\n\nHe led her into the room, a certain abruptness in his manner.\n\n\"I shall leave you alone,\" he whispered, using his professional voice. \"It is best that he should see you quite alone. I shall not be far away, but you will find him perfectly quiet. He understands that you are\"\u2014his tone changed upon the adjective\u2014\"sacred.\"\n\n\"Sacred,\" she murmured to herself, repeating the word, \"sacred.\"\n\nThey smiled. And the door closed behind her. Across the room rose the tall figure of the man she had come to see, dressed in dark blue, a low white shirt open at the neck, a blue tie that matched the strong, clear eyes, the wondrous hair crowning the whole like a flame. The slant of wintry sunlight by chance just caught the great figure as it rose, lightly, easily, as though it floated up out of the floor before her.\n\nAnd, as by magic, the last uncertainty in her disappeared; she knew herself akin to this radiant shape of blue and gold; knew also\u2014mysteriously\u2014in a way entirely beyond her to explain\u2014knew why Edward Fillery was dear to her. Was it that something in the three of them pertained to a common origin? The conviction, half thought, half feeling, rose in her as she looked into the blue eyes facing her and took the outstretched hand.\n\n\"You strange lost being! No one will understand you\u2014here...\"\n\nThe words flashed through her mind of their own accord, instantly, spontaneously, yet were almost forgotten the same second in the surge of more commonplace feeling that rose after. Only the \"here\" proved their origin not entirely forgotten. It was the selfless, mothering instinct that now dominated, but the division in her being had, none the less, been indicated as by a white piercing light that searched her inmost nature. That added \"here\" laid bare, she felt, some part of her which, with all other men, was clothed and covered away.\n\nRealized though dimly, this troubled her clear mind, as she took the chair he offered, the conviction that she must tend and care for, even love this strange youth, as though he were in exile and none but herself could understand him. She heard the deep resonant voice in the air in front of her:\n\n\"I am not lost now,\" he said, with his radiant smile, and as if he perceived her thought from the expression in her face. \"I wished to take you away\u2014to take you back. I wish it still.\"\n\nHe stood gazing down at her. The deep tones, the shining eyes, the towering stature with its quiet strength\u2014these, added to the directness of the language, confused her for a moment. The words were so entirely unexpected. Fillery had led her to suppose otherwise. Yet before the blazing innocence in his face and manner, her composure at once returned. She found no words at first. She smiled up into his eyes, then pointed to a chair. Seated he would be more manageable, she felt. His upright stature was so overpowering.\n\n\"You had forgotten\u2014\" he went on, obeying her wish and sitting down, \"but I could not know that you had forgotten. I apologize\"\u2014the word sounded oddly on his lips, as though learned recently\u2014\"for making you suffer.\"\n\n\"Forgotten!\"\n\nA swift intuition, due to some as yet undecipherable kinship, told her that the word bore no reference to the Studio scene. Some larger meaning, scaled to an immenser map, came with it. An unrealized emotion stirred faintly in her as she heard. Her first sight of him as a figure of light returned.\n\n\"But that is all forgiven now,\" she replied calmly in her firm, gentle voice. \"We need not speak of it. You understand now\"\u2014she ended lamely\u2014\"that it is not possible\u2014\"\n\nHe listened intently, gravely, as though with a certain effort, his head bent forward to catch every syllable. And as he bent, peering, listening, he might have been some other-worldly being staring down through a window in the sky into the small confusions of earth's affairs.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, the moment she stopped speaking, \"I understand now. I shall never make you suffer again. Only\u2014I could not know that you had forgotten\u2014so completely.\"\n\n\"Forgotten?\" she again repeated in spite of herself, for the way he uttered the word again stirred that nameless, deep emotion in her. Their attitudes respectively were changing. She no longer felt that she could \"mother\" this great figure before her.\n\n\"Where we belong,\" he answered in his great quiet voice. \"There,\" he added, in a way that made it the counterpart of her own spontaneous and intuitive \"here.\" \"It is so easy. I had forgotten too. But Fillery, dear Fillery, helps me to remember, and the stars and flowers and wind, these help me too. And then you\u2014when I saw you I suddenly remembered more. I was so happy. I remembered what I had left to come among men and women. I knew that Fillery and you belonged 'there' with me. You, both, had come down for a little time, come down 'here,' but had remained too long. You had become almost as men and women are. I remembered everything when I saw your eyes. I was so happy in a moment, as I looked at you, that I felt I must go back, go home. The central fire called me, called us all three. I wanted to escape and take you with me. I knew by your eyes that you were ready. You called to Fillery. We were off.\"\n\nHe paused a moment, while she listened in breathless silence.\n\n\"Then, suddenly, you refused. You resisted. Something prevented. The Messengers were there when suddenly\"\u2014an expression of yearning pain clouded his great eyes a moment\u2014\"you forgot again. I forgot too, forgot everything. The darkness came. It was cold. My enemy, the water, caught me.\"\n\nHe stopped, and passed his hands across his forehead, sighing, his eyes fixed upon vacancy as with an intense effort to recover something. \"And I still forget,\" he went on, the yearning now transferred from the eyes to the lowered voice. \"I can remember nothing again. All, all is gone from me.\" The light in his face actually grew dimmer as he slowly uttered the words. He leaned back in his big arm-chair. Again, it occurred to her, it was as if he drew back from that window in the sky.\n\nA curious hollow, empty of life, seemed to drop into the room between them as his voice ceased.\n\nWhile he had been speaking, the girl watched and listened with intense interest and curiosity. She remembered he was a \"patient,\" yet no touch of uneasiness or nervousness was in her. His strange words, meaningless as they might seem, woke deep echoes of some dim buried recognition in her. It amazed and troubled her. This young man, this sinner against the conventions whom she had come to comfort and forgive, held the reins already. What had happened, what was happening, and how did he contrive it? She was aware of a clear, divining knowledge in him, a power, a directness she could not fathom. He seemed to read her inside out. It was more than uncanny; it was spiritual. It mastered her.\n\nDuring his speech he remained very still, without gesture, without change of expression in his face; he made no movement; only his voice deepened and grew rhythmical. And a power emanated from him she hardly dared resist, much less deny. His voice, his words, reached depths in her she scarcely knew herself. He was so strong, so humble, so simple, yet so strangely peaceful. And\u2014suddenly she realized it\u2014so far beyond her, yet akin. She became aware that the figure seated in the chair, watching her, talking, was but a fraction of his whole self. He was\u2014the word occurred to her\u2014immense. Was she, too, immense?\n\nMore than troubled, she was profoundly stimulated. The mothering instinct in her for the first time seemed to fail a little. The woman in her trembled, not quite sure of itself. But, besides these two, there was another part of her that listened and felt joy\u2014a white, radiant joy which, if she allowed, must become ecstasy. Whence came this hint of unearthly rapture? Again there rose before her the two significant words: \"There\" and \"Here.\"\n\n\"I do not quite understand,\" she replied, after a moment's pause, looking into his eyes steadily, her voice firm, her young face very sweet; \"I do not fully understand, perhaps. But I sympathize.\" Then she added suddenly, with a little smile: \"But, at any rate, I did not come to make you apologize\u2014Julian. Please be sure of that. I came to see if I might be of any use\u2014if there was anything I might do to make\u2014\"\n\nHis quick interruption transfixed her.\n\n\"You came,\" he said in a distinct, low tone, \"because you love me and wish me to love you. But we do love already, you, dear Fillery, and I\u2014only our love is in that great Service where we all three belong. It is not of this\u2014it is not here\u2014\" making an impatient gesture with his hand to indicate his general surroundings.\n\nHe broke off instantly, noticing the expression in her face.\n\nShe had realized suddenly, as he spoke, the blind fury of reproduction that sweeps helpless men and women everywhere into union, then flings them aside exhausted, useless, its purpose accomplished. Though herself never yet caught by it, the vivid realization made her turn from life with pity and revulsion. Yet\u2014were these thoughts her own? Whence did they come, if not? And what was this new blind thing straining in her mind for utterance, bursting upwards like a flame, threatening to split it asunder even in its efforts to escape? \"What are these words we use?\" darted across her. \"What do they mean? What is it we're talking about really? I don't know quite. Yet it's real, yes, real and true. Only it's beyond our words. It's something I know, but have forgotten...\" That was his word again: \"Forgotten\"! While they used words together, something in her went stumbling, groping, thrusting towards a great shining revelation for which no words existed. And a strange, deep anguish seized her suddenly.\n\n\"Oh!\" he cried, \"I make you suffer again. The fire leaves you. You are white. I\u2014I will apologize\"\u2014he slipped on to his knees before her\u2014\"but you do not understand. It was not your sacredness I spoke of.\" Already on his knees before her, but level with her face owing to his great stature, gazing into her eyes with an expression of deep tenderness, humility, almost suffering, he added: \"It was our other love, I meant, our great happy service, the thing we have forgotten. You came, I thought, to help me to remember that. The way home\u2014I saw you knew.\" The light streamed back into his face and eyes.\n\nThe tumult and confusion in the girl were natural enough. Her resourcefulness, however, did not fail her at this curious and awkward moment. His words, his conduct were more than she could fathom, yet behind both she divined a source of remote inspiration she had never known before in any \"man.\" The beauty and innocence on the face arrested her faculties for a second. That nameless emotion stirred again. A glimmer of some faint, distant light, whose origin she could not guess, passed flickering across her inner tumult. Some faculty she could not name, at any rate, blew suddenly to white heat in her. This youth on his knees before her had spoken truth. Without knowing it even herself, she had given him her love, a virgin love, a woman's love hitherto unawakened in her by any other man, but a love not of this earth quite\u2014because of him who summoned it into sudden flower.\n\nYet at the same time he denied the need of it! He spoke of some marvellous great shining Service that was different from the love of man and woman.\n\nThis too, as some forgotten, lost ideal, she knew was also true.\n\nHer mind, her heart, her experience, her deepest womanly nature, these, she realized in a glowing instant of extraordinary divination, were at variance in her. She trembled; she knew not what to do or say or think. And again, it came to her, that the visible shape before her was but the insignificant fraction of a being whose true life spread actively and unconfined through infinite space.\n\nShe then did something that was prompted, though she did not know it thus, by her singleness of heart, her purity of soul and body, her unique and natural instinct to be of use, of service, to others\u2014the accumulated practice and effort of her entire life provided the action along a natural line of least resistance: she bent down and put her arm and hand round his great shoulder. She lowered her face. She kissed him most tenderly, with a mother's love, a woman's secret passion perhaps, but yet with something else as well she could not name\u2014an unearthly yearning for a greater Ideal than anything she had yet known on earth among humanity... It was the invisible she kissed.\n\nAnd LeVallon, she realized with immense relief, justified her action, for he did not return the kiss. At the same time she had known quite well it would be thus. That kiss trembled, echoed, in her own greater unrealized self as well.\n\n\"What is it,\" she whispered, a mysterious passion surging up in her as she raised him to his feet, \"that you remember and wish to recover\u2014for us all? Can you tell me? What is this great, happy, deathless service that we have forgotten?\" Her voice trembled a little. An immense sense of joy, of liberty, shook out its sunlit wings.\n\nHis expression, as he rose, was something between that of a child and a faithful yearning animal, but of a \"divine animal,\" though she did not know the phrase. Its purity, its sweetness, its power\u2014it was the power she noticed chiefly\u2014were superb.\n\n\"I cannot tell, I cannot remember,\" his voice said softly, for all its resonant, virile depth. \"It is some state we all have come from\u2014into this. We are strangers here. This brain and intellect, this coarse, thick feeling, this selfishness, this want of harmony and working together\u2014all this is new and strange to us. It is of blind and clumsy children. This love of one single person for one other single person\u2014it is so pitiful. We three have come into this for a time, a little time. It is pain and misery. It is prison. Each one works only for himself. There is no joy. They know nothing of our great Service. We cannot show them. Let us go back\u2014\"\n\nAnother pause fell between them, another of those singular hollows she had felt before. But this time the hollow was not empty. It was brimmed with surging life. The gulf between her earthly state and another that was nameless, a gulf usually unbridgeable, the fixed gulf, as an old book has it, which may not be crossed without danger to the Race, for whose protection it exists\u2014this childhood simile occurred to her. And a sense of awe stirred in her being. It was the realization that this gulf or hollow now brimmed with life, that it could be crossed, that she might step over into another place\u2014the sense of awe rose thence, yet came certainly neither from the woman nor the mother in her.\n\n\"I am of another place,\" LeVallon went on, plucking the thought naked from her inmost being. \"For I am come here recently, and the purpose of my coming is hidden from me, and memory is dark. But it is not entirely dark. Sometimes I half remember. Stars, flowers, fire, wind, women\u2014here and there\u2014bring light into the darkness. Oh,\" he cried suddenly, \"how wonderful they are\u2014how wonderful you are\u2014on that account to me!\"\n\nThe voice held a strange, evoking power perhaps. A thousand yearnings she had all her life suppressed because they interfered with her duty\u2014as she conceived it\u2014here and now, fluttered like rising flames within her as she listened. His voice now increased in volume and rhythm, though still quiet and low-pitched; it was as if a great wind poured behind it with tremendous vibrations, through it, lifting her out of a limited, cramped, everyday self. A delicious warmth of happy comfort, of acceptance, of enthusiasm glowed in her. And LeVallon's face, she saw, had become radiant, almost as though it emanated light. This light entered her being and brought joy again.\n\n\"Joy!\" he said, reading her thought and feeling. \"Joy!\"\n\n\"Joy! Another place!\" she heard herself repeating, her eyes now fixed upon his own.\n\nShe felt lighter, caught up and away a little, lifted above the solid earth; as if it was heat that lightened, and wind that bore her upwards. Everything in her became intensified.\n\n\"Another state, another place\"\u2014her voice seemed to borrow something of the rhythm in his own, though she did not notice it\u2014\"but not away from earth, this beautiful earth?\" With a happy smile she added, \"I love the dear kind earth, I love it.\"\n\nThe light on his face increased:\n\n\"The earth we love and serve,\" he said, \"is beautiful, but here\"\u2014he looked about him round the room, at the trees waving through the window, at the misty sky above draping the pale light of the sun\u2014\"here I am on the surface only. There is confusion and struggle. Everything quarrels against everything else. It is discord and disorder. There is no harmony. Here, on the surface, everything is separate. There is no working together. It is all pain, each little part fighting for itself. Here\u2014I am outside\u2014there is no joy.\"\n\nIt was the phrase \"I am outside\" that flashed something more of his meaning into her. His full meaning lay beyond actual words perhaps; but this phrase fell like a shock into that inmost self which she had deliberately put away.\n\n\"You are from inside, yes,\" she exclaimed, marvelling afterwards that she had said it; \"within\u2014nearer to the centre\u2014!\"\n\nAnd he took the abrupt interruption as though they both understood and spoke of the same one thing together, having found a language born of similar great yearnings and of forgotten knowledge, times, states, conditions, places.\n\n\"I come,\" he said, his voice, his bright smile alive with the pressure of untold desire, \"from another place that is\u2014yes\u2014inside, nearer to the centre. I have forgotten almost everything. I remember only that there was harmony, love, work and happiness all combined in the perfect liberty of our great service. We served the earth. We helped the life upon it. There was no end, no broken fragments, no failure.\" The voice touched chanting. \"There was no death.\"\n\nHe rose suddenly and came over to her side, and instinctively the girl stood up. What she felt and thought as she heard the strange language he used, she hardly knew herself. She only knew in that moment an immense desire to help her kind, an intensification of that great ideal of impersonal service which had always been the keynote of her life. This became vividly stimulated in her. It rose like a dominating, overmastering passion. The sense of ineffectual impotence, of inability to accomplish anything of value against the stolid odds life set against her, the uselessness of her efforts with the majority, in a word, seemed brushed away, as though greater powers of limitless extent were now at last within her reach. This blazed in her like fire. It shone in her big dark eyes that looked straight into his as they stood facing one another.\n\n\"And that service,\" he went on in his deep vibrating, half-singing tone, \"I see in dear Fillery and in you. I know my own kind. We three, at least, belong. I know my own.\" The voice seemed to shake her like a wind.\n\nAt the last two words her soul leaped within her. It seemed quite natural that his great arm should take her breast and shoulder and that his lips should touch her cheek and hair. For there was worship in both gestures.\n\n\"Our greater service,\" she whispered, trembling, \"tell me of that. What is it?\" His touch against her was like the breath of fire.\n\nHer womanly instincts, so-called, her maternal love, her feminine impulses deserted her. She was aware solely at that moment of the proximity of a being who called her to a higher, to, at any rate, a different state, to something beyond the impoverished conditions of humanity as she had hitherto experienced it, to something she had ever yearned and longed for without knowing what it was. An extraordinary sense of enormous liberty swept over her again.\n\nHis voice broke and the rhythm failed.\n\n\"I cannot tell you,\" he replied mournfully, the light fading a little from his eyes and face. \"I have forgotten. That other place is hidden from me. I am in exile,\" he added slowly, \"but with you and\u2014Fillery.\" His blue eyes filled with moisture; the expression of troubled loneliness was one she had never seen before on any human face. \"I suffer,\" he added gently. \"We all suffer.\"\n\nAnd, at the sight of it, the yearning to help, to comfort, to fulfil her r\u00f4le as mother, returned confusingly, and rose in her like a tide. He was so big and strong and splendid. He was so helpless. It was, perhaps, the innocence in the great blue eyes that conquered her\u2014for the first time in her life.\n\nBut behind, beside the mother in her, stirred also the natural woman. And beyond this again, rose the accumulated power of the entire Race. The instinct of all the women of the planet since the world began drove at her. Not easily may an individual escape the deep slavery of the herd.\n\nThe young girl wavered and hesitated. Caught by so many emotions that whirled her as in a vortex, the direction of the resultant impetus hung doubtful for some time. During the half hour's talk, she had entered deeper water than she had ever dared or known before. Life hitherto, so far as men were concerned, had been a simple and an easy thing that she had mastered without difficulty. Her real self lay still unscarred within her. Freely she had given the mothering care and sympathy that were so strong in her, the more freely because the men who asked of her were children, one and all, children who needed her, but from whom she asked nothing in return. If they fell in love, as they usually did, she knew exactly how to lift their emotion in a way that saved them pain while it left herself untouched. None reached her real being, which thus remained unscathed, for none offered the lifting glory that she craved.\n\nHere, for the first time facing her, stood a being of another type; and that unscathed self in her went trembling at the knowledge. Here was a power she could not play with, could not dominate, but a power that could play with her as easily as the hurricane with the flying leaf. It was not his words, his strange beauty, his great strength that mastered her, though these brought their contribution doubtless. The power she felt emanated unconsciously from him, and was used unconsciously. It was all about him. She realized herself a child before him, and this realization sweetened, though it confused her being. He so easily touched depths in her she had hardly recognized herself. He could so easily lift her to terrific heights... Various sides of her became dominant in turn...\n\nThe inmost tumult of a good woman's heart is not given to men to read, perhaps, but the final impetus resulting from the whirlpool tossed her at length in a very definite direction. She found her feet again. The determining factor that decided the issue of the struggle was a small and very human one. He appealed to the woman in her, yet what stirred the woman was the vital and afflicting factor that\u2014he did not need her.\n\nHe wished to help, to lift her towards some impersonal ideal that remained his secret. He wished to give\u2014he could give\u2014while she, for her part, had nothing that he needed. Indeed, he asked for nothing. He was as independent of her as she was independent of these other men.\n\nAnd the woman, now faced for the first time with this entirely new situation, decided automatically\u2014that he should learn to need her. He must. Though she had nothing that he wanted from her, she must on that very account give all. The sacrifice which stands ready for the fire in every true feminine heart was lighted there and then. She had found her master and her god. Half measures were not possible to her. She stood naked at the altar. But in her sacrifice he, too, the priest, the deity, the master, he also should find love.\n\nSuch is the woman's power, however, to conceal from herself the truth, that she did not recognize at first what this decision was. She disguised it from her own heart, yet quite honestly. She loved him and gave him all she had to give for ever and ever: even though he did not ask nor need her love. This she grasped. Her r\u00f4le must be one of selfless sacrifice. But the deliberate purpose behind her real decision she disguised from herself with complete success. It lay there none the less, strong, vital, very simple. She would teach him love.\n\nAlone of all men, Edward Fillery could have drawn up this motive from its inmost hiding place in her deep subconscious being, and have made it clear to her. Dr. Fillery, had he been present, would have discerned it in her, as, indeed, he did discern it later. He had, for that matter, already felt its prophecy with a sinking heart when he planned bringing them together: Iraida might suffer at LeVallon's hands.\n\nBut Fillery, apparently, was not present, and Nayan Khilkoff remained unaware of self-deception. LeVallon \"needs your care and sympathy; you can help him,\" she remembered. This she believed, and Love did the rest.\n\nSo intricate, so complex were the emotions in her that she realized one thing only\u2014she must give all without thought of self. \"When half gods go the gods arrive\" sang in her heart. She was a woman, one of a mighty and innumerable multitude, and collective instinct urged her irresistibly. But it hid at the same time with lovely care the imperishable desire and intention that the arriving god should\u2014must\u2014love her in return.\n\nThe youth stood facing her while this tumult surged within her heart and mind. Outwardly calm, she still gazed into the clear blue eyes that shone with moisture as he repeated, half to himself and half to her:\n\n\"We are in exile here; we suffer. We have forgotten.\"\n\nHis hands were stretched towards her, and she took them in her own and held them a moment.\n\n\"But you and I,\" he went on, \"you and I and Fillery\u2014shall remember again\u2014soon. We shall know why we are here. We shall do our happy work together here. We shall then return\u2014escape.\"\n\nHis deep tones filled the air. At the sound of the other name a breath of sadness, of disappointment, touched her coldly. The familiar name had faded. It was, as always, dear. But its potency had dimmed...\n\nThe sun was down and a soft dusk covered all. A faint wind rustled in the garden trees through the open window.\n\n\"Fillery,\" she murmured, \"Edward Fillery!\u2014 He loved me. He has loved me always.\"\n\nThe little words\u2014they sounded little for the first time\u2014she uttered almost in a whisper that went lost against the figure of LeVallon towering above her through the twilight.\n\n\"We are together,\" his great voice caught her whisper in the immense vibration, drowning it. \"The love of our happy impersonal service brings us all together. We have forgotten, but we shall remember soon.\"\n\nIt seemed to her that he shone now in the dusky air. Light came about his face and shoulders. An immense vitality poured into her through his hands. The sense of strange kinship was overpowering. She felt, though not in terms of size or physical strength, a pigmy before him, while yet another thing rose in gigantic and limitless glory as from some inner heart he quickened in her. This sense of exaltation, of delirious joy that tempted sweetly, came upon her. He must love her, need her in the end...\n\n\"Julian,\" she murmured softly, drawn irresistibly closer. \"The gods have brought you to me.\" Her feet went nearer of their own accord, but there was no movement, no answering pressure, in the hands she held. \"You shall never know loneliness again, never while I am here. The gods\u2014your gods\u2014have brought us together.\"\n\n\"Our gods,\" she heard his answer, \"are the same.\" The words trembled against her actual breast, so close she was now leaning against him. \"Even if lost, it is they who sent us here. I know their messengers\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off, standing back from her, dropping her hands, or, rather, drawing his own away.\n\n\"Hark!\" he cried. The voice deep and full, yet without loudness, thrilled her. She watched him with terror and amazement, as he turned to the open window, throwing his arms out suddenly to the darkening sky against which the trees loomed still and shapeless. His figure was wrapped in a faint radiance as of silvery moonlight. She was aware of heat about her, a comforting, inspiring warmth that pervaded her whole being, as from within. The same moment the bulk of the big tree shook and trembled, and a steady wind came pouring into the room. It seemed to her the wind, the heat, poured through that tree.\n\nAnd the inner heart in her grew clear an instant. This wind, this heat, increased her being marvellously. The exaltation in her swept out and free. She saw him, dropped from alien skies upon the little teeming earth. The sense of his remoteness from the life about them, of her own remoteness too, flashed over her like wind and fire. An immense ideal blazed, then vanished. It flamed beyond her grasp. It beckoned with imperishable loveliness, then faded instantly. Wind caught it up once more. With the fire an overpowering joy rose in her.\n\n\"Julian!\" she cried aloud. \"Son of Wind and Fire!\"\n\nAt the words, which had come to her instinctively, he turned with a sudden gesture she could not quite interpret, while there broke upon his face a smile, strange and lovely, that caught up the effect of light about him and seemed to focus in his brilliant eyes. His happiness was beyond all question, his admiration, wonder too; yet the quality she chiefly looked and expected\u2014was not there.\n\nShe chilled. The joy, she was acutely conscious, was not a personal joy.\n\n\"You,\" he said gently, happily, emphasizing the word, \"you are not pitiful,\" and the rustle of the shaking trees outside the window merged their voice in his and carried it outward into space. It was as if the wind itself had spoken. Across the garden dusk there shot a sudden effect of light, as though a flame had flickered somewhere in the sky, then passed back into the growing night. There was a scent of flowers in the air. \"You,\" he cried, with an exultation that carried her again beyond herself. \"You are not pitiful.\"\n\n\"Julian\u2014!\" she stammered, longing for his arms. She half drew away. The blood flowed down and back in her. \"Not pitiful!\" she repeated faintly.\n\nFor it was to her suddenly as if that sighing wind that entered the room from the outer sky had borne him away from her. That wind was a messenger. It came from that distant state, that other region where he belonged, a state, a region compared to which the beings of earth were trumpery and tinsel-dressed. It came to remind him of his home and origin. The little earth, the myriad confused figures struggling together on its surface, he saw as \"pitiful.\" From that window in the sky whence he looked down he watched them...!\n\nShe knew the feeling in him, knew it, because some part of her, though faint and deeply hidden, was akin. Yet she was not wholly \"pitiful.\" He had discerned in her this faint, hidden strain of vaster life, had stirred and strengthened it by his words, his presence. Yet it was not vital enough in her to stand alone. When wind and fire, his elements, breathed forth from it, she was afraid.\n\n\"You are not pitiful,\" he had said, yet pitiful, for all that, she knew herself to be. On that breath of sighing wind he swept away from her, far, far away where, as yet, she could not follow. And her dream of personal love swept with it. Some ineffable hint of a divine, impersonal glory she had known went with him from her heart. The personal was too strong in her. It was human love she desired both to give and ask.\n\nUnspoken words flared through her heart and being: \"Julian, you have no soul, no human soul. But I will give you one, for I will teach you love\u2014\"\n\nHe turned upon her like a hurricane of windy fire.\n\n\"Soul!\" he cried, catching the word out of her naked heart. \"Oh, be not caught with that pitiful delusion. It is this idea of soul that binds you hopelessly to selfish ends and broken purposes. This thing you call soul is but the dream of human vanity and egoism. It is worse than love. Both bind you endlessly to limited desires and blind ambitions. They are of children.\"\n\nHe rose, like some pillar of whirling flame and wind, beside her.\n\n\"Come out with me,\" he cried, \"come back! You teach me to remember! Our elemental home calls sweetly to us, our elemental service waits. We belong to those vast Powers. They are eternal. They know no binding and they have no death. Their only law is service, that mighty service which builds up the universe. The stars are with us, the nebul\u00e6 and the central fires are their throne and altar. The soul you dream of in your little circle is but an idle dream of the Race that ties your feet lest you should fly and soar. The personal has bandaged all your eyes. Nayan, come back with me. You once worked with me there\u2014you, I and Fillery together.\"\n\nHis voice, though low, had that which was terrific in it. The volume of its sound appalled her. Its low vibrations shook her heart.\n\n\"Soul,\" she said very softly, courage sure in her, but tears close in her burning eyes, \"is my only hope. I live for it. I am ready to die for it. It is my life!\"\n\nHe gazed at her a moment with a tenderness and sympathy she hardly understood, for their origin lay hidden beyond her comprehension. She knew one thing only\u2014that he looked adorable and glorious, a being brought by the wise powers of life, whatever these might be, into the keeping of her love and care. The mother and the woman merged in her. His redemption lay within her gentle hands, if it lay at the same time upon an altar that was her awful sacrifice.\n\n\"Son of wind and fire!\" she cried, though emotion made her voice dwindle to a breathless whisper. \"You called to my love, yet my love is personal. I have nothing else to give you. Julian, come back! O stay with me. Your wind and fire frighten, for they take you away. Service I know, but your service\u2014O what is it? For it leaves the bed, the hearthstone cold\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped abruptly, wondering suddenly at her own words. What was this rhythm that had caught her mind and heart into an unknown, a daring form of speech?\n\nBut the wind ran again through the open window fluttering the curtains and the skirts about her feet. It sighed and whispered. It was no earthly wind. She saw him once again go from her on its quiet wings. He left her side, he left her heart. And an icy realization of his loneliness, his exile, stirred in her... For a moment, as she looked up into his shining face silhouetted in the dusk against the window, there rose tumultuously in her that maternal feeling which had held all men safely at a distance hitherto. Like a wave, it mastered her. She longed to take him in her arms, to shield him from a world that was not his, to bless and comfort him with all she had to give, to have the right to brush that wondrous hair, to open those lids at dawn and close them with a kiss at night. This ancient passion rose in her, bringing, though she did not recognize it, the great woman in its train. She walked up to him with both hands outstretched:\n\n\"All my nights,\" she said, with no reddening of the cheek, \"are as our wedding night!\"\n\nHe heard, he saw, but the words held no meaning for him.\n\n\"Julian! Stay with me\u2014stay here!\" She put her arms about him.\n\n\"And forget\u2014!\" he cried, an inexpressible longing in his voice. He bent, none the less, beneath the pressure of her clinging arms; he lowered his face to hers.\n\n\"I will teach you love,\" she murmured, her cheek against his own. \"You do not know how sweet, how wonderful it is. All your strange wisdom you shall show me, and I will learn willingly, if only I may teach you\u2014love.\"\n\n\"You would teach me to forget,\" he said in a voice of curious pain, \"just as you\u2014are forgetting now.\"\n\nHe gently unclasped her hands from about his neck, and went over to the open window, while she sank into a chair, watching him. She again heard the wind, but again no common, earthly wind, go singing past the walls.\n\n\"But I will teach you to remember,\" he said, his great figure half turning towards her again, his voice sounding as though it were in that sighing breath of wind that passed and died away into the silence of the sky.\n\nThe strange difficulty, the immensity, of her self-appointed task, grew suddenly crystal clear in her mind. Amid the whirling, aching pain and yearning that she felt it stood forth sharp and definite. It was imperious. She loved, and she must teach him love. This was the one thing needful in his case. Her own deep, selfless heart would guide her.\n\nThere was pain in her, but there was no fear. Above the conventions she felt herself, naked and unashamed. The sense of a new immense liberty he had brought lifted her into a region where she could be natural without offence. He had flung wide the gates of life, setting free those strange, ultimate powers which had lain hidden and unrealized hitherto, and with them was quickened, too, that mysterious and awful hint which, beckoning ever towards some vaster life, had made the world as she found it unsatisfactory, pale, of meagre value.\n\nAs the strange drift of wind passed off into the sky, she moved across the room and stood beside him, its dying chant still humming in her ears. That song of the wind, she understood, was symbolic of what she had to fight, for his being, though linked to a divine service she could not understand, lay in Nature and apart from human things:\n\n\"Think, Julian,\" she murmured, her face against his shoulder so that the sweet perfume as of flowers he exhaled came over her intoxicatingly, \"think what we could do together for the world\u2014for all these little striving ignorant troubled people in it\u2014for everybody! You and I together working, helping, lifting them all up\u2014!\"\n\nHe made no movement, and she took his great arm and drew it round her neck, placing the hand against her cheek. He looked down at her then, his eyes peering into her face.\n\n\"That,\" he said in a deep, gentle voice that vibrated through her whole body, \"yes, that we will do. It is the service\u2014the service of our gods. It is why I called you. From the first I saw it in you, and in\u2014\"\n\nBefore he could speak the name she kissed his lips, pulling his head lower in order to reach them: \"Think, Julian,\" she whispered, his eyes so close to hers that they seemed to burn them, \"think what our child might be!\"\n\nThe wind came back across the tossing trees with a rush of singing. Her hair fluttered across their two faces, as it entered the room, drove round the inner walls, then, with a cry, flew out again into the empty sky. She felt as if the wind had answered her, for other answer there came none. Far away in the spaces of that darkening sky the wind rushed sailing, sailing with its impersonal song of power and of triumph... She did not remember any further spoken words. She remembered only, as she went homewards down the street, that Julian had opened the door upon some unspoken understanding that she had lost him because she dared not follow recklessly where he led, and that the steady draught, it seemed, had driven forcibly behind her\u2014as though the wind had blown her out.\n\nIt was only much later she realized that the figure who had then overtaken her, supported, comforted with kind ordinary words she hardly understood at the moment and yet vaguely welcomed, finally leaving her at the door of her father's house in Chelsea, was the figure of Edward Fillery." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 340", + "text": "As upon a former occasion some twenty-four hours before, \"N. H.\" seemed hardly aware that his visitor had left, though this time there was the vital difference\u2014that what was of value had not gone at all. The essence of the girl, it seemed, was still with him. It remained. The physical presence was to him apparently the least of all.\n\nHe returned to his place at the open window of the darkening room, while night, with her cooler airs, passed over the world on tiptoe. He drew deep breaths, opened his arms, and seemed to shake himself, as though glad to be free of recent little awkward and unnatural gestures that had irked him. There was happiness in his face. \"She is a builder, though she has forgotten,\" ran his thought with pleasure, \"and I can work with her. Like Fillery, she builds up, constructs; we are all three in the same service, and the gods are glad. I love her... yes... but she\"\u2014his thoughts grew troubled and confused\u2014\"she speaks of another love that is a tight and binding little thing... that catches and confines. It is for one person only... one person for one other... For two... only for two persons!... What is its meaning then?\"\n\nOf her words and acts he had understood evidently a small part only; much that she had said and done he had not comprehended, although in it somewhere there had certainly lain a sweet, faint, troubling pleasure that was new to him.\n\nHis thought wavered, flickered out and vanished. For a long time he leaned against the window with his images, thinking with his heart, for when alone and not stirred by the thinking of others close to him, he became of a curious childlike innocence, knowing nothing. His \"thinking\" with others present seemed but a reflection of their thinking. The way he caught up the racial thinking, appearing swiftly intelligent at the time (as with Fillery's mind), passed the instant he was alone. He became open, then, to bigger rhythms that the little busy thinkers checked and interrupted. But this greater flow of images, of rhythms, this thinking with the heart\u2014what was it, and with what things did it deal? He did not know. He had forgotten. To his present brain it was alien. He grasped only that it was concerned with the rhythms of fire and wind apparently, though hardly, perhaps, of that crude form in which men know them, but of an inner, subtler, more vital heat and air which lie in and behind all forms and help to shape them\u2014and of Intelligences which use these as their vehicles, their instruments, their bodies.\n\nIn his \"images\" he was aware of these Intelligences, perceived them with his entire being, shared their activities and nature: behind all so-called forms and shapes, whether of people, flowers, minerals, of insects or of stars, of a bird, a butterfly or a nebula, but also of those mental shapes which are born of thought and mood and heart\u2014this host of Intelligences, great and small, all delving together, building, constructing, involved in a vast impersonal service which was deathless. This seemed the mighty call that thundered through him, fire and wind merely the agencies with which he, in particular, knew instinctively his duties lay.\n\nFor his work, these images taught him, was to increase life by making the \"body\" it used as perfect as he could. The more perfect the form, the instrument, the greater the power manifesting through it. A poor, imperfect form stopped the flow of this manifesting life, as though a current were held up and delayed. For instance, his own form, his present body, now irked, delayed and hampered him, although he knew not how or why or whence he had come to be using it at this moment on the earth. The instinctive desire to escape from it lay in him, and also the instinctive recognition that two others, similarly caught and imprisoned, must escape with him...\n\nThe images, the rhythms, poured through him in a mighty flood, as he leaned by the open window, his great figure, his whole nature too, merging in the space, the wind, the darkness of the soft-moving night beyond... Yet darkness troubled him too; it always seemed unfamiliar, new, something he had never been accustomed to. In darkness he became quiet, very gentle, feeling his way, as it were, uneasily.\n\nHe was aware, however, that Fillery was near, though not, perhaps, that he was actually in the room, seated somewhere among the shadows, watching him. He felt him close in the same way he felt the girl still close, whether distance between them in space was actually great or small. The essential in all three was similar, their yearnings, hopes, intentions, purposes were akin; their longing for some service, immense, satisfying, it seemed, connected them. The voice, however, did not startle when it sounded behind him from an apparently empty room:\n\n\"The love she spoke of you do not understand, of course. Perhaps you do not need it...\"\n\nThe voice, as well as the feeling that lay behind, hardly disturbed the images and rhythms in their wondrous flow. Rather, they seemed a part of them. \"N. H.\" turned. He saw Dr. Fillery distinctly, sitting motionless among the shadows by the wall.\n\n\"It is, for you, a new relationship, and seems small, cramping and unnecessary\u2014\"\n\n\"What is it?\" \"N. H.\" asked. \"What is this love she seeks to hold me with, saying that I need it? Dear Fillery,\" he added, moving nearer, \"will you tell me what it is? I found it sweet and pleasant, yet I fear it.\"\n\n\"It is,\" was the reply, \"in its best form, the highest quality we know\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah! I felt the fire in it,\" interrupted \"N. H.\" smiling. \"I smelt the flowers.\" His smile seemed faintly luminous across the gloom.\n\n\"Because it was the best,\" replied the other gently. \"In its best form it means, sometimes, the complete sacrifice of one being for the welfare of another. There is no self in it at all.\" He felt the eyes of his companion fixed upon him in the darkness of the quiet room; he felt likewise that he was bewildered and perplexed. \"As, for instance, the mother for her child,\" he went on. \"That is the purest form of it we know.\"\n\n\"One being feels it for one other only,\" \"N. H.\" repeated apparently ignoring the reference to maternal love. \"Each wants the other for himself alone! Each lives for the other only, the rest excluded! It is always two and two. Is that what she means?\"\n\n\"She would not like it if you had the same feeling for another\u2014woman,\" Fillery explained. \"She would feel jealousy\u2014which means she would grudge sharing you with another. She would resent it, afraid of losing you.\"\n\n\"Two and two, and two and two,\" the words floated through the shadows. The ideal seemed to shock and hurt him; he could not understand it. \"She asks for the whole of me\u2014all to herself. It is lower than insects, flowers even. It is against Nature. So small, so separate\u2014\"\n\n\"But Nature,\" interrupted Dr. Fillery, after an interval of silence between them, \"is not concerned with what we call love. She is indifferent to it. Her purpose is merely the continuance of the Race, and she accomplishes this by making men and women attractive to one another. This, too,\" he explained, \"we call love, though it is love in its weakest, least enduring form.\"\n\n\"That,\" replied \"N. H.,\" \"I know and understand. She builds the best form she can.\"\n\n\"And once the form is built,\" agreed the other, \"and Nature's aim fulfilled, this kind of love usually fades out and dies. It is a physical thing entirely, like the two atoms we read about together a few days ago which rush together automatically to produce a third thing.\" He lowered his voice suddenly. \"There was a great teacher once,\" he went on, \"who told us that we should love everybody, everybody, and that in the real life there was no marriage, as we call it, nor giving in marriage.\"\n\nIt seemed that, as he said the words, the darkness lifted, and a faint perfume of flowers floated through the air.\n\n\"N. H.\" made no comment or reply. He sat still, listening.\n\n\"I love her,\" he whispered suddenly. \"I love her in that way\u2014because I want everybody else to love her too\u2014as I do, and as you do. But I do not want her for myself alone. Do you? You do not, of course. I feel you are as I am. You are happy that I love her.\"\n\n\"There is morality,\" said Fillery presently in a low voice, glad at that moment of the darkness. \"There is what we call morality.\"\n\n\"Tell me, dear Fillery, what that is. Is it bigger than your 'love'?\"\n\nDr. Fillery explained briefly, while his companion listened intently, making no comment. It was evidently as strange and new to him as human love. \"We have invented it,\" he added at the end, \"to protect ourselves, our mothers, our families, our children. It is, you see, a set of rules devised for the welfare of the Race. For though a few among us do not need such rules, the majority do. It is, in a word, the acknowledgment of the rights of others.\"\n\n\"It had to be invented!\" exclaimed \"N. H.,\" with a sigh that seemed to trouble the darkness as with the sadness of something he could scarcely believe. \"And these rules are needed still! Is the Race at that stage only? It does not move, then?\"\n\nInto the atmosphere, as the low-spoken words were audible, stole again that mysterious sense of the insignificance of earth and all its manifold activities, human and otherwise, and with it, too, a remarkable breath of some larger reality, starry-bright, that lay shining just beyond all known horizons. Fillery shivered in spite of himself. It seemed to him for an instant that the great figure looming opposite through the darkness extended, spread, gathering into its increased proportions the sky, the trees, the darkened space outside; that it no longer sat there quite alone. He recalled his colleague's startling admission\u2014the touch of panic terror.\n\n\"Slowly, if at all,\" he said louder, though wondering why he raised his voice. \"Yet there is some progress.\"\n\nHe had the feeling it would be better to turn on the light, as though this conversation and the strange sensations it produced in him would be impossible in a full blaze. He made a movement, indeed, to find the switch. It was the sound of his companion's voice that made him pause, for the words came at him as though a wave of heat moved through the air. He knew intuitively that the other's intense inner activity had increased. He let his hand drop. He listened. Their thoughts, he was convinced, had mingled and been mutually shared again. There was a faint sound like music behind it.\n\n\"We have worked such a little time as yet,\" fell the words into the silence. \"If only\u2014oh! if only I could remember more!\"\n\n\"A little time!\" thought Fillery to himself, knowing that the other meant the millions of years Nature had used to evoke her myriad forms. \"Try to remember,\" he added in a whisper.\n\n\"What I do remember, I cannot even tell,\" was the reply, the voice strangely deepening. \"No words come to me.\" He paused a moment, then went on: \"I am of the first, the oldest. I know that. The earth was hot and burning\u2014burning, burning still. It was soft with heat when I was summoned from\u2014from other work just completed. With a vast host I came. Our Service summoned us. We began at the beginning. I am of the oldest. The earth was still hot\u2014burning, burning\u2014\"\n\nThe voice failed suddenly.\n\n\"I cannot remember. Dear Fillery, I cannot remember. It hurts me. My head pains. Our work\u2014our service\u2014yes, there is progress. The ages, as you call them\u2014but it is such a little time as yet\u2014\" The voice trailed off, the figure lost its suggestion of sudden vastness, the darkness emptied. \"I am of the oldest\u2014that I remember only...\" It ceased as though it drifted out upon the passing wind outside.\n\n\"Then you have been working,\" said Fillery, his voice still almost a whisper, \"you and your great host, for thousands of years\u2014in the service of this planet\u2014\" He broke off, unable to find his words, it seemed.\n\n\"Since the beginning,\" came the steady answer. \"Years I do not know. Since the beginning. Yet we have only just begun\u2014oh!\" he cried, \"I cannot remember! It is impossible! It all goes lost among my words, and in this darkness I am confused and entangled with your own little thinking. I suffer with it.\" Then suddenly: \"My eyes are hot and wet, dear Fillery. What happens to them?\" He stood up, putting both hands to his face. Fillery stood up too. He trembled.\n\n\"Don't try,\" he said soothingly; \"do not try to remember any more. It will come back to you soon, but it won't come back by any deliberate effort.\"\n\nHe comforted him as best he could, realizing that the curious dialogue had lasted long enough. But he did not produce a disconcerting blaze by turning the light on suddenly; he led his companion gently to the door, so that the darkness might pass more gradually. The lights in the corridor were shaded and inoffensive. It was only in the bedroom that he noticed the bright tears, as \"N. H.,\" examining them with curious interest in the mirror, exclaimed more to himself than to Fillery: \"She had them too. I saw them in her eyes when she spoke to me of love, the love she will teach me because she said I needed it.\"\n\n\"Tears,\" said Fillery, his voice shaking. \"They come from feeling pain.\"\n\n\"It is a little thing,\" returned \"N. H.,\" smiling at himself, then turning to his friend, his great blue eyes shining wonderfully through their moisture. \"Then she felt what I felt\u2014we felt together. When she comes to-morrow I will show her these tears and she will be glad I love. And she will bring tears of her own, and you will have some too, and we shall all love together. It is not difficult, is it?\"\n\n\"Not very,\" agreed Fillery, smiling in his turn; \"it is not very difficult.\" He was again trembling.\n\n\"She will be happy that we all love.\"\n\n\"I\u2014hope so.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 341", + "text": "It was curious how easily tears came to the eyes of this strange being, and for causes so different that they were not easy to explain. He did not cry; it was merely that the hot tears welled up.\n\nEven with Devonham once it happened too. The lesson in natural history was over. Devonham had just sketched the outline of the various kingdoms, with the animal kingdom and man's position in it, according to present evolutionary knowledge, and had then said something about the earth's place in the solar system, and the probable relation of this system to the universe at large\u2014an admirable bird's-eye view, as it were, without a hint of speculative imagination in it anywhere\u2014when \"N. H.,\" after intent listening in irresponsive silence, asked abruptly:\n\n\"What does it believe?\" Then, as Devonham stared at him, a little puzzled at first, he repeated: \"That is what the Race knows. But what does it believe?\"\n\n\"Believe,\" said Devonham, \"believe. Ah! you mean what is its religion, its faith, its speculations!\"\u2014and proceeded to give the briefest possible answer he felt consistent with his duty. The less his pupil's mind was troubled with such matters, the better, in his opinion.\n\n\"And their God?\" the young man inquired abruptly, as soon as the recital was over. He had listened closely, as he always did, but without a sign of interest, merely waiting for the end, much as a child who is bored by a poor fairy tale, yet wishes to know exactly how it is all going to finish. \"They know Him?\" He leaned forward.\n\nDevonham, not quite liking the form of the question, nor the more eager manner accompanying it, hesitated a moment, thinking perhaps what he ought to say. He did not want this mind, now opening, to be filled with ideas that could be of no use to it, nor help in its formation; least of all did he desire it to be choked and troubled with the dead theology of man-made notions concerning a tumbling personal Deity. Creeds, moreover, were a matter of faith, of auto-suggestion as he called it, being obviously divorced from any process of reason. He had, nevertheless, a question to answer and a duty to perform. His hesitation passed in compromise. He was, as has been seen, too sincere, too honest, to possess much sense of humour.\n\n\"The Race,\" he said, \"or rather that portion of it into which you have been born, believes\u2014on paper\"\u2014he emphasized the qualification\u2014\"in a paternal god; but its real god, the god it worships, is Knowledge. Not a Knowledge that exists for its own sake,\" he went on blandly, \"but that brings possessions, power, comfort and a million needless accessories into life. That god it worships, as you see, with energy and zeal. Knowledge and work that shall result in acquisition, in pleasure, that is the god of the Race on this side of the planet where you find yourself.\"\n\n\"And the God on paper?\" asked \"N. H.,\" making no comment, though he had listened attentively and had understood. \"The God that is written about on paper, and believed in on paper?\"\n\n\"The printed account of this god,\" replied Devonham, \"describes an omnipotent and perfect Being who has existed always. He created the planet and everything upon it, but created it so imperfectly that he had to send later a smaller god to show how much better he might have created us. In doing this, he offered us an extremely difficult and laborious method of improvement, a method of escaping from his own mistake, but a method so painful and unrealizable that it is contrary to our very natures\u2014as he made them first.\" He almost smacked his lips as he said it.\n\n\"The big God, the first one,\" asked \"N. H.\" at once. \"Have they seen and known Him? Have they complained?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Devonham, \"they have not. Those who believe in him accept things as he made them.\"\n\n\"And the smaller lesser God\u2014how did He arrive?\" came the odd question.\n\n\"He was born like you and me, but without a father. No male had his mother ever known.\"\n\n\"He was recognized as a god?\" The pupil showed interest, but no emotion, much less excitement.\n\n\"By a few. The rest, afraid because he told them their possessions were worthless, killed him quickly.\"\n\n\"And the few?\"\n\n\"They obeyed his teaching, or tried to, and believed that they would live afterwards for ever and ever in happiness\u2014\"\n\n\"And the others? The many?\"\n\n\"The others, according to the few, would live afterwards for ever and ever\u2014in pain.\"\n\n\"It is a demon story,\" said \"N. H.,\" smiling.\n\n\"It is printed, believed, taught,\" replied Devonham, \"by an immense organization to millions of people\u2014\"\n\n\"Free?\" inquired his pupil.\n\n\"The teachers are paid, but very little\u2014\"\n\n\"The teachers believe it, though?\"\n\n\"Y-yes\u2014at least some of them\u2014probably,\" replied Devonham, after brief consideration.\n\n\"And the millions\u2014do they worship this God?\"\n\n\"They do, on paper, yes. They worship the first big God. They go once or twice a week into special buildings, dressed in their best clothes as for a party, and pray and sing and tell him he is wonderful and they themselves are miserable and worthless, and then ask him in abject humility for all sorts of things they want.\"\n\n\"Do they get them?\"\n\n\"They ask for different things, you see. One wants fine weather for his holidays, another wants rain for his crops. The prayers in which they ask are printed by the Government.\"\n\n\"They ask for this planet only?\"\n\n\"This planet conceives itself alone inhabited. There are no other living beings anywhere. The Earth is the centre of the universe, the only globe worth consideration.\"\n\nAlthough \"N. H.\" asked these quick questions, his interest was obviously not much engaged, the first sharp attention having passed. Then he looked fixedly at Devonham and said, with a sudden curious smile: \"What you say is always dead. I understand the sounds you use, but the meaning cannot get into me\u2014inside, I mean. But I thank you for the sound.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause, during which Devonham, accustomed to strange remarks and comments from his pupil, betrayed no sign of annoyance or displeasure. He waited to see if any further questions would be forthcoming. He was observing a phenomenon; his attitude was scientific.\n\n\"But, in sending this lesser God,\" resumed \"N. H.\" presently, \"how did the big One excuse himself?\"\n\n\"He didn't. He told the Race it was so worthless that nothing else could save it. He looked on while the lesser God was killed. He is very proud about it, and claims the thanks and worship of the Race because of it.\"\n\n\"The lesser God\u2014poor lesser God!\" observed \"N. H.\" \"He was bigger than the other.\" He thought a moment. \"How pitiful,\" he added.\n\n\"Much bigger,\" agreed Devonham, pleased with his pupil's acumen, his voice, even his manner, changing a little as he continued. \"For then came the wonder of it all. The lesser God's teachings were so new and beautiful that the position of the other became untenable. The Race disowned him. It worshipped the lesser one in his place.\"\n\n\"Tell me, tell me, please,\" said \"N. H.,\" as though he noticed and understood the change of tone at once. \"I listen. The dear Fillery spoke to me of a great Teacher. I feel a kind, deep joy move in me. Tell me, please.\"\n\nAgain Devonham hesitated a moment, for he recognized signs that made him ill at ease a little, because he did not understand them. Following a scientific textbook with his pupil was well and good, but he had no desire to trespass on what he considered as Fillery's territory. \"N. H.\" was his pupil, not his patient. He had already gone too far, he realized. After a moment's reflection, however, he decided it was wiser to let the talk run out its natural course, instead of ending it abruptly. He was as thorough as he was sincere, and whatever his own theories and prejudices might be in this particular case, he would not shirk an issue, nor treat it with the smallest dishonesty. He put the glasses straight on his big nose.\n\n\"The new teachings,\" he said, \"were so beautiful that, if faithfully practised by everybody, the world would soon become a very different place to what it is.\"\n\n\"Did the Race practise them?\" came the question in a voice that held a note of softness, almost of wonder.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"They were too difficult and painful and uncomfortable. The new God, moreover, only came here 2,000 years ago, whereas men have existed on earth for at least 400,000.\"\n\n\"N. H.\" asked abruptly what the teachings were, and Devonham, growing more and more uneasy as he noted the signs of increasing intensity and disturbance in his pupil, recited, if somewhat imperfectly, the main points of the Sermon on the Mount. As he did so \"N. H.\" began to murmur quietly to himself, his eyes grew large and bright, his face lit up, his whole body trembled. He began that deep, rhythmical breathing which seemed to affect the atmosphere about him so that his physical appearance increased and spread. The skin took on something of radiance, as though an intense inner happiness shone through it. Then, suddenly, to Devonham's horror, he began to hum.\n\nThough a normal, ordinary sound enough, it reminded him of that other sound he had once shared with Fillery, when he sat on the stairs, staring at a china bowl filled with visiting cards, while the dawn broke after a night of exhaustion and bewilderment. That sound, of course, he had long since explained and argued away\u2014it was an auditory hallucination conveyed to his mind by LeVallon, who originated it. Interesting and curious, it was far from inexplicable. It was disquieting, however, for it touched in him a vague sense of alarm, as though it paved the way for that odd panic terror he had been amazed to discover hidden away deeply in some unrealized corner of his being.\n\nThis humming he now listened to, though normal and ordinary enough\u2014there were no big vibrations with it, for one thing\u2014was too suggestive of that other sound for him to approve of it. His mind rapidly sought some way of stopping it. A command, above all an impatient, harsh command, was out of the question, yet a request seemed equally not the right way. He fumbled in his mind to find the wise, proper words. He stretched his hand out, as though to lay it quietly upon his companion's shoulder\u2014but realized suddenly he could not\u2014almost he dared not\u2014touch him.\n\nThe same instant \"N. H.\" rose. He pushed his chair back and stood up.\n\nDevonham, justly proud of his equable temperament and steady nerves, admits that only a great effort of self-control enabled him to sit quietly and listen. He listened, watched, and made mental notes to the best of his ability, but he was frightened a little. The outburst was so sudden. He is not sure that his report of what he heard, made later to Fillery, was a verbatim, accurate one:\n\n\"Justice we know,\" cried \"N. H.\" in his half-chanting voice that seemed to boom with resonance, \"but this\u2014this mercy, gentle kindness, beauty\u2014this unknown loveliness\u2014we did not know it!\" He went to the open window, and threw his arms wide, as though he invoked the sun. \"Dimly we heard of it. We strive, we strive, we weave and build and fashion while the whirl of centuries flies on. This lesser God\u2014he came among us, too, making our service sweeter, though we did not understand. Our work grew wiser and more careful, we built lovelier forms, and knew not why we did so. His mighty rhythms touched us with their power and happy light. Oh, my great messengers of wind and fire, bring me the memory I have lost! Oh, where, where\u2014?\"\n\nHe shook himself, as though his clothes, perhaps his body even, irked him. It was a curious coincidence, thought Devonham, as he watched and listened, too surprised and puzzled to interfere either by word or act, that a cloud, at that very moment, passed from the face of the sun, and a gust of wind shook all the branches of the lime trees in the garden. \"N. H.\" stood drenched in the white clear sunshine. His flaming hair was lifted by the wind.\n\n\"Behind, beyond the Suns He dwells and burns for ever. Oh, the mercy, kindness, the strange beauty of this personal love\u2014what is it? These have been promised to us too\u2014!\"\n\nHe broke off abruptly, bowed his great head and shoulders, and sank upon his knees in an attitude of worship. Then, stretching his arms out to the sky, the face raised into the flood of sunlight, while his voice became lower, softer, almost hushed, he spoke again:\n\n\"Our faithful service, while the circles swallow the suns, shall lift us too! You, who sent me here to help this little, dying Race, oh, help me to remember\u2014!\"\n\nHis passion was a moving sight; the words, broken through with fragments of his chanting, singing, had the blood of some infinite, intolerable yearning in them.\n\nDevonham, meanwhile, having heard outbursts of this strange kind before with others, had recovered something of his equanimity. He felt more sure of himself again. The touch of fear had left him. He went over to the window. The attack, as he deemed it, was passing. A thick cloud hid the sun again. \"There, there,\" he said soothingly, laying both hands upon the other's shoulders, then taking the arms to help him rise. \"I told you His teachings were very beautiful\u2014that the world would become a kind of heaven if people lived them.\" His voice seemed not his own; beside the volume and music of the other's it had a thin, rasping, ugly sound.\n\n\"N. H.\" was on his feet, gazing down into his face; to Devonham's amazement there were tears in the eyes that met his own.\n\n\"And many people do live them\u2014try to, rather,\" he added gently. \"There are thousands who really worship this lesser God to-day. You can't go far wrong yourself if you take Him as your model an\u2014\"\n\n\"How He must have suffered!\" came the astonishing interruption, the voice quiet and more natural again. \"There was no way of telling what he knew. He had no words, of course. You are all so difficult, so caged, so\u2014dead!\"\n\nDevonham smiled. \"He used parables.\" He paused a moment, then went on \"Men have existed on the planet, science tells us, for at least 400,000 years, whereas He came here only 2,000 years ago\u2014\"\n\n\"Came here,\" interrupted the pupil, as though the earth were but one of a thousand places visited, a hint of contempt and pity somewhere in his tone and gesture. \"We made His way ready then! We prepared, we built! It was for that our work went on and on so faithfully.\"\n\nHe broke off...\n\nDevonham experienced a curious sensation as he heard. In that instant it seemed to him that he was conscious of the movement of the earth through space. He was aware that the planet on which he stood was rushing forward at eighteen miles a second through the sky. He felt himself carried forward with it.\n\n\"What was His name?\" he heard \"N. H.\" asking. It was as though he was aware of the enormous interval in space traversed by the rolling earth between the first and last words of the sudden question. It trailed through an immense distance towards him, after him, yet at the same time ever with him.\n\n\"His name\u2014oh\u2014Jesus Christ, we call him,\" wondering at the same moment why he used the pronoun \"we.\"\n\n\"Jesus\u2014Christ!\"\n\n\"N. H.\" repeated the name with such intensity and power that the sound, borne by deep vibrations, seemed to surge and circle forth into space while the earth rushed irresistibly onwards. A faintly imaginative idea occurred to Devonham for the first time in his life\u2014it was as though the earth herself had opened her green lips and uttered the great name. With this came also the amazing and disconcerting conviction that Nature and humans were expressions of one and the same big simple energy, and that while their forms, their bodies, differed, the life manifesting through them was identical, though its degree might vary. For an instant this was of such overpowering conviction as to be merely obvious.\n\nIt passed as quickly as it came, though he still was dimly conscious that he had travelled with the earth through another huge stretch of space. Then this sense of movement also passed. He looked up. \"N. H.\" was in his chair again at the table, reading quietly his book on natural history. But in his eyes the moisture of tears was still visible.\n\nDevonham adjusted his glasses, blew his nose, went quickly to another room to jot down his notes of the talk, the reactions, the general description, and in doing so dismissed from his mind the slight uneasy effects of what had been a \"curious hallucination,\" caused evidently by an \"unexplained stimulation\" of the motor centres in the brain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 342", + "text": "The full account of \"N. H.,\" with all he said and did, his effect upon others, his general activities in a word, it is impossible to compress intelligibly into the compass of these notes. A complete report Edward Fillery indeed accumulated, but its publication, he realized, must await that leisure for which his busy life provided little opportunity. His eyes, mental and physical, were never off his \"patient,\" and \"N. H.,\" aware of it, leaped out to meet the observant sympathy, giving all he could, concealing nothing, yet debarred, it seemed, by the rigid limitations of his own mental and physical machinery, as similarly by that of his hearers, from contributing more than suggestive and tantalizing hints. Of the use of parable he, obviously, had no knowledge.\n\nHis relations with others, perhaps, offered the most significant comments on his personality. Fillery was at some pains to collect these. The reactions were various, yet one and all showed this in common, a curious verdict but unanimous: that his effect, namely, was greatest when he was not there. Not in his actual presence, which promised rather than fulfilled, was his power so dominating upon mind and imagination as after the door was closed and he was gone. The withdrawal of his physical self, its absence\u2014as Fillery had himself experienced one night on Hampstead Heath as well as on other occasions\u2014brought his real presence closer.\n\nIt was Nayan who first drew attention to this remarkable characteristic. She spoke about him often now with Dr. Fillery, for as the weeks passed and she realized the uselessness, the impossibility, of the plan she had proposed to herself, she found relief in talking frankly about him to her older friend.\n\n\"Always, always after I leave him,\" she confessed, \"a profound and searching melancholy gets hold of me, poignant as death, yet an extraordinary unrealized beauty behind it somewhere. It steals into my very blood and bones. I feel an intense dissatisfaction with the world, with people as they are, and a burning scorn for all that is small, unworthy, petty, mean\u2014and yet a hopelessness of ever attaining to that something which he knows and lives so easily.\" She sighed, gazing into his eyes a moment. \"Or of ever making others see it,\" she added.\n\n\"And that 'something,'\" he asked, \"can you define it?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It's in me, within reach even, but\u2014the word he used is the only one\u2014forgotten.\"\n\n\"Perhaps\u2014has it ever occurred to you?\u2014that he simply cannot describe it. There are no words, no means at his disposal\u2014no human terms?\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she murmured.\n\n\"Desirable, though?\" he urged her gently.\n\nShe clasped her hands, smiling. \"Heavenly,\" she murmured, closing her eyes a moment as though to try and recall it. \"Yet when I'm with him,\" she went on, \"he never quite realizes for me the state of wonder and delight his presence promises. His personality suggests rather than fulfils.\" She paused, a wistful, pained expression in her dark eyes. \"The failure,\" she added quickly, lest she seem to belittle him of whom she spoke, \"of course lies in myself. I refuse, you see\u2014I can't say why, though I feel it's wise\u2014to let myself be dominated by that strange, lost part of me he stimulates.\"\n\n\"True,\" interposed Dr. Fillery. \"I understand. Yet to have felt this even is a sign\u2014\"\n\n\"That he stirs the deepest, highest in me? This hint of divine beauty in the unrealized under-self?\"\n\nHe nodded. There was an odd touch of sadness in their talk. \"I've watched him with many types of people,\" he went on thoughtfully, almost as though thinking aloud in his rapid way, \"I've talked with him on many subjects. The meanness, jealousy, insignificance of the Race shocks and amazes him. He cannot understand it. He asked me once 'But is no one born noble? To be splendid is such an effort with them!' Splendour of conduct, he noticed, is a calculated, rarely a spontaneous splendour. The general resistance to new ideas also puzzles him. 'They fear a rhythm they have never felt before,' as he put it. 'To adopt a new rhythm, they think, must somehow injure them.' That the Race respects a man because he possesses much equally bewilders him. 'No one serves willingly or naturally,' he observed, 'or unless someone else receives money for drawing attention loudly to it.' Any notion of reward, of advertisement, in its widest meaning, is foreign to his nature.\"\n\nHe broke off. Another pause fell between them, the girl the first to break it:\n\n\"He suffers,\" she said in a low voice. \"Here\u2014he suffers,\" and her face yearned with the love and help she longed to pour out beyond all thought of self or compensation, and at the same time with the pain of its inevitable frustration; and, watching her, Dr. Fillery understood that this very yearning was another proof of the curious impetus, the intensification of being, that \"N. H.\" caused in everyone. Yet he winced, as though anticipating the question she at once then put to him:\n\n\"You are afraid for him, Edward?\" her eyes calmly, searchingly on his. \"His future troubles you?\"\n\nHe turned to her with abrupt intensity. \"If you, Iraida, could not enchain him\u2014\" He broke off. He shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"I have no power,\" she confessed. \"An insatiable longing burns like a fire in him. Nothing he finds here on earth, among men and women, can satisfy it.\" A faint blush stole up her neck and touched her cheeks. \"He is different. I have no power to keep him here.\" Her voice sank suddenly to a whisper, as though a breath of awe passed into her. \"He is here now at this very moment, I believe. He is with us as we talk together. I feel him.\" Almost a visible thrill passed through her. \"And close, so very close\u2014to you.\"\n\nDr. Fillery made no sign by word or gesture, but something in his very silence gave assent.\n\n\"And not alone,\" she added, still under her breath. It seemed she looked about her, though she did not actually move or turn her head. \"Others\u2014of his kind, Edward\u2014come with him. They are always with him\u2014I think sometimes.\" Her whisper was fainter still.\n\n\"You feel that too!\" He said it abruptly, his voice louder and almost challenging. Then he added incongruously, as though saying it to himself this time, \"That's what I mean. I've known it for a long time\u2014\"\n\nHe looked at the girl sharply with unconcealed admiration. \"It does not frighten you?\" he asked, and in reply she said the very thing he felt sure she would say, hoping for it even while he shrank:\n\n\"Escape,\" he heard in a low, clear voice, half a question, half an exclamation, and saw the blood leave her face.\n\nThe instinctive \"Hush!\" that rose to his lips he did not utter. The sense of loss, of searching pain, the word implied he did not show. Instead, he spoke in his natural, everyday tone again:\n\n\"The body irks him, of course, and he may try to rid himself of it. Its limitations to him are a prison, for his true consciousness he finds outside it. The explanation,\" he added to himself, \"of many a case of suicidal mania probably. I've often wondered\u2014\"\n\nHe took her hand, aware by the pallor of her face what her feelings were. \"Death, you see, Nayan, has no meaning for him, as it has for us who think consciousness out of the body impossible, and he is puzzled by our dread of it. 'We,' he said once, 'have nothing that decays. We may be stationary, or advance, or retreat, but we can never end.' He derives\u2014oh, I'm convinced of it\u2014from another order. Here\u2014amongst us\u2014he is inarticulate, unable to express himself, hopeless, helpless, in prison. Oh, if only\u2014\"\n\n\"He loves you,\" she said quickly, releasing her hand. \"I suppose he realizes the eternal part of you and identifies himself with that. In you, Edward, lies something very close to what he is, akin\u2014he needs it terribly, just as you\u2014\" She became confused.\n\n\"Love, as we understand it,\" he interrupted, his voice shaking a little, \"he does not, cannot know, for he serves another law, another order of being.\"\n\n\"That's how I feel it too.\"\n\nShe shivered slightly, but she did not turn away, and her eyes kept all their frankness.\n\n\"Our humanity,\" she murmured, \"writes upon his heart in ink that quickly fades\u2014\"\n\n\"And leaves no trace,\" he caught her up hurriedly. \"His one idea is to help, to render service. It is as natural to him as for water to run down hill. He seeks instinctively to become one with the person he seeks to aid. As with us an embrace is an attempt at union, so he seeks, by some law of his own being, to become identified with those whom he would help. And he helps by intensifying their consciousness\u2014somewhat as heat and air increase ordinary physical vitality. Only, first there must be something for him to work on. Energy, even bad, vicious, wrongly used, he can work on. Mere emptiness prevents him. You remember Lady Gleeson\u2014\"\n\n\"We\u2014most of us\u2014are too empty,\" she put in with quiet resignation. \"Our sense of that divine beauty is too faint\u2014\"\n\n\"Rather,\" came the quick correction, \"he stands too close to us. His effect is too concentrated. The power at such close quarters disturbs and overbalances.\"\n\n\"That's why, then, I always feel it strongest when he's left.\"\n\nHe glanced at her keenly.\n\n\"In his presence,\" she explained, \"it's always as though I saw only a part of him, even of his physical appearance, out of the corner of my eye, as it were, and sometimes\u2014\" She hesitated. He did not help her this time. \"As if those others, many others, similar to himself, but invisible, crowding space about us, were intensely active.\" Her voice hushed again. \"He brings them with him\u2014as now. I feel it, Edward, now. I feel them close.\" She looked round the empty room, peering through the window into the quiet evening sky. Dr. Fillery also turned away. He sighed again. \"Have you noticed, too,\" he went on presently, yet half as if following his own thoughts, and a trifle incongruously, \"the speed and lightness his very movements convey, and how he goes down the street with that curious air of drawing things after him, along with him, as trains and motors draw the loose leaves and dust\u2014\"\n\n\"Whirling,\" her quick whisper startled him a little, as she turned abruptly from the window and gazed straight at him. He smiled, instantly recovering himself. \"A good word, yes\u2014whirling\u2014but in the plural. As though there were vortices about him.\"\n\nIt was her turn to smile. \"That might one day carry him away,\" she exclaimed. They smiled together then, they even laughed, but somewhere in their laughter, like the lengthening shadows of the spring day outside, lay an incommunicable sadness neither of them could wholly understand.\n\n\"Yet the craving for beauty,\" she said suddenly, \"that he leaves behind in me\"\u2014her voice wavered\u2014\"an intolerable yearning that nothing can satisfy\u2014nothing\u2014here. An infinite desire, it seems, for\u2014for\u2014\"\n\nDr. Fillery took her hand again gently, looking down steadily into the clear eyes that sought his own, and the light glistening in their moisture was similar, he fancied for a moment, to the fire in another pair of shining eyes that never failed to stir the unearthly dreams in him.\n\n\"It lies beyond any words of ours,\" he said softly. \"Don't struggle to express it, Iraida. To the flower, the star, we are wise to leave their own expression in their own particular field, for we cannot better it.\"\n\nA sound of rising wind, distant yet ominous, went past the window, as for a moment then the girl came closer till she was almost in his arms, and though he did not accept her, equally he did not shrink from the idea of acceptance\u2014for the first time since they had known one another. There was a smell of flowers; almost in that wailing wind he was aware of music.\n\n\"Together,\" he heard her whisper, while a faint shiver\u2014was it of joy or terror?\u2014ran through her nerves. \"All of us\u2014when the time comes\u2014together.\" She made an abrupt movement. \"Just as we are together now! Listen!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"We call it wind,\" she whispered. \"But of course\u2014really\u2014it's behind\u2014beyond\u2014inside\u2014isn't it?\"\n\nDr. Fillery, holding her closely, made no answer. Then he laughed, let go her hands, and said in his natural tone again, breaking an undesirable spell intentionally, though with a strong effort: \"We are in space and time, remember. Iraida. Let us obey them happily until another certain and practical thing is shown us.\"\n\nThe faint sound that had been rising about them in the air died down again.\n\nThey looked into each other's eyes, then drew apart, though with a movement so slight it was scarcely perceptible. It was Nayan and Dr. Fillery once more, but not before the former had apparently picked out the very thought that had lain, though unexpressed, in the latter's deepest mind\u2014its sudden rising the cause of his deliberate change of attitude. For she had phrased it, given expression to it, though from an angle very different to his own. And her own word, \"escape,\" used earlier in the conversation, had deliberately linked on with it, as of intentional purpose.\n\n\"He must go back. The time is coming when he must go back. We are not ready for him here\u2014not yet.\"\n\nSomewhat in this fashion, though without any actual words, had the idea appeared in letters of fire that leaped and flickered through a mist of anguish, of loss, of loneliness, rising out of the depths within him. He knew whence they came, he divined their origin at once, and the sound, though faint and distant at first, confirmed him. Swiftly behind them, moreover, born of no discoverable antecedents, it seemed, rose simultaneously the phrase that Father Collins loved: \"A Being in his own place is the ruler of his fate.\" Father Collins, for all his faults and strangeness, was a personality, a consciousness, that might prove of value. His extraordinarily swift receptiveness, his undoubted telepathic powers, his fluid, sensitive, protean comprehension of possibilities outside the human walls, above the earthly ceiling, so to speak... Value suddenly attached itself to Father Collins, as though the name had been dropped purposely into his mind by someone. He was surprised to find this thought in him. It was not for the first time, however, Dr. Fillery remembered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 343", + "text": "In Nayan's father, again, an artist, though not a particularly subtle one perhaps, lay a deep admiration, almost a love, he could not explain. \"There's something about him in a sense immeasurable, something not only untamed but untamable,\" he phrased it. \"His gentleness conceals it as a summer's day conceals a thunderstorm. To me it's almost like an incarnation of the primal forces at work in the hearts of my own people\"\u2014he grew sad\u2014\"and as dangerous probably.\" He was speaking to his daughter, who repeated the words later to Dr. Fillery. The study of Fire in the elemental group had failed. \"He's too big, too vast, too formless, to get into any shape or outline my tools can manage, even by suggestion. He dominates the others\u2014Earth, Air, Water\u2014and dwarfs them.\"\n\n\"But fire ought to,\" she put in. \"It's the most powerful and splendid, the most terrific of them all. Isn't it? It regenerates. It purifies. I love fire\u2014\"\n\nHer father smiled in his beard, noticing the softness in her manner, rather than in her voice. The awakening in her he had long since understood sympathetically, if more profoundly than she knew, and welcomed.\n\n\"He won't hurt you, child. He won't harm Nayushka any more than a summer's day can hurt her. I see him thus sometimes,\" he mumbled on half to himself, though she heard and stored the words in her memory; \"as an entire day, a landscape even, I often see him. A stretch of being rather than a point; a rushing stream rather than a single isolated wave harnessed and confined in definite form\u2014as we understand being here,\" he added curiously. \"No, he'll neither harm nor help you,\" he went on; \"nor any of us for that matter. A dozen nations, a planet, a star he might help or harm\"\u2014he laughed aloud suddenly in a startled way at his own language\u2014\"but an individual never!\" And he abruptly took her in his arms and kissed her, drying her tears with his own rough handkerchief. \"Not even a fire-worshipper,\" he added with gruff tenderness, \"like you!\"\n\n\"There's more of divinity in fire than in any other earthly thing we know,\" she replied as he held her, \"for it takes into itself the sweetest essence of all it touches.\" She looked up at him with a smile. \"That's why you can't get it into your marble perhaps.\" To which her father made the significant rejoinder: \"And because none of us has the least conception what 'divine' and 'divinity' really mean, though we're always using the words! It's odd, anyhow,\" he finished reflectively, \"that I can model the fellow better from memory than when he's standing there before my eyes. At close quarters he confuses me with too many terrific unanswerable questions.\"\n\nTo multiply the verdicts and impressions Fillery jotted down is unnecessary. In his own way he collected; in his own way he wrote them down. About \"N. H.,\" all agreed in their various ways of expressing it, was that vital suggestion of agelessness, of deathlessness, of what men call eternal youth: the vigorous grace of limbs and movements, the deep simple joy of confidence and power. None could picture him tired, or even wearing out, yet ever with a faint hint of painful conflict due to immense potentialities\u2014\"a day compressed into a single minute,\" as Khilkoff phrased it\u2014straining, but vainly, to express themselves through a limited form that was inadequate to their use. A storm of passionate hope and wonder seemed ever ready to tear forth from behind the calm of the great quiet eyes, those green-blue changing eyes, which none could imagine lightless or unlamping; and about his whole presentment a surplus of easy, overflowing energy from an inexhaustible source pressing its gifts down into him spontaneously, fire and wind its messengers; yet that the human machinery using these\u2014mind, body, nerves\u2014was ill adapted to their full expression. To every individual having to do with him was given a push, a drive, an impetus that stimulated that individual's chief characteristic, intensifying it.\n\nThis to imaginative and discerning sight. But even upon ordinary folk, aware only of the surface things that deliberately hit them, was left a startling impression as of someone waving a strange, unaccustomed banner that made them halt and stare before passing on\u2014uncomfortably. He had that nameless quality, apart from looks or voice or manner, which arrested attention and drew the eyes of the soul, wonderingly, perhaps uneasily, upon itself. He left a mark. Something defined him from all others, leaving him silhouetted in the mind, and those who had looked into his eyes could not forget that they had done so. Up rose at once the great unanswerable questions that, lying ever at the back of daily life, the majority find it most comfortable to leave undisturbed\u2014but rose in red ink or italics. He started into an awareness of greater life. And the effect remained, was greatest even, after he had passed on." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 344", + "text": "It was, of course, Father Collins, a frequent caller now at the Home, betraying his vehement interest in long talks with Dr. Fillery and in what interviews with \"N. H.\" the latter permitted him\u2014it was this protean being whose mind, amid wildest speculations, formed the most positive conclusions. The Prometheans, he believed, were not far wrong in their instinctive collective judgment. \"N. H.\" was not a human being; the occupant of that magnificent body was not a human spirit like the rest of us.\n\n\"Nor is he the only one walking the streets to-day,\" he affirmed mysteriously. \"In shops and theatres, trains and buses, tucked in among the best families,\" he laughed, although in earnest, \"and even in suburbia I have come across other human bodies similarly inhabited. What they are and where they come from exactly, we cannot know, but their presence among us is indubitable.\"\n\n\"You mean you recognize them?\" inquired Dr. Fillery calmly.\n\n\"One unmistakable sign they possess in common\u2014they are invariably inarticulate, helpless, lost. The brain, the five senses, the human organs\u2014all they have to work through\u2014are useless to express the knowledge and powers natural to them. Electricity might as well try to manifest itself through a gas-pipe, or music through a stone. One and all, too, possess strange glimmerings of another state where they are happy and at home, something of the glory \u00e0 la Wordsworth, a Golden Age idea almost, a state compared to which humanity seems a tin-pot business, yet a state of which no single descriptive terms occur to them.\"\n\n\"Of which, however, they can tell us nothing?\"\n\n\"Memory, of course, is lost. Their present brain can have no records, can it? Only those of us who have perhaps at some time, in some earlier existence possibly, shared such a state can have any idea of what they're driving at.\"\n\nHe glanced at Fillery with a significant raising of his bushy eyebrows.\n\n\"There have been no phenomena, I'm glad to say,\" put in the doctor, aware some comment was due from him, \"no physical phenomena, I mean.\"\n\n\"Nor could there be,\" pursued the other, delighted. \"He has not got the apparatus. With all such beings, their power, rather than perceived, is felt. Sex, as with us, they also cannot know, for they are neither male nor female.\" He paused, as the other did not help him. \"Enigmas they must always be to us. We may borrow from the East and call them devas, or class them among nature spirits of legend and the rest, but we can, at any rate, welcome them, and perhaps even learn from them.\"\n\n\"Learn from them?\" echoed Fillery sharply.\n\n\"They are essentially natural, you see, whereas we are artificial, and becoming more so with every century, though we call it civilization. If we lived closer to nature we might get better results, I mean. Primitive man, I'm convinced, did get certain results, but he was a poor instrument. Modern man, in some ways, is a better, finer instrument to work through, only he is blind to the existence of any beings but himself. A bridge, however, might be built, I feel. 'N. H.' seems to me in close touch with these curious beings, if\"\u2014he lowered his voice\u2014\"he is not actually one of them. The wind and fire he talks about are, of course, not what we mean. It is heat and rhythm, in some more essential form, he refers to. If 'N. H.' is some sort of nature spirit, or nature-being, he is of a humble type, concerned with humble duties in the universe\u2014\"\n\n\"There are, you think, then, higher, bigger kinds?\" inquired the listener, his face and manner showing neither approval nor disapproval.\n\nFather Collins raised his hands and face and shoulders, even his eyebrows. His spirits rose as well.\n\n\"If they exist at all\u2014and the assumption explains plausibly the amazing intelligence behind all natural phenomena\u2014they include every grade, of course, from the insignificant fairies, so called, builders of simple forms, to the immense planetary spirits and vast Intelligences who guide and guard the welfare of the greater happenings.\" His eyes shone, his tone matched in enthusiasm his gestures. \"A stupendous and magnificent hierarchy,\" he cried, \"but all, all under God, of course, who maketh his angels spirits and his ministers a flaming fire. Ah, think of it,\" he went on, becoming lyrical almost as wonder fired him, \"think of it now especially in the spring! The vast abundance and insurgence of life pouring up on all sides into forms and bodies, and all led, directed, fashioned by this host of invisible, yet not unknowable, Intelligences! Think of the prolific architecture, the delicacy, the grandeur, the inspiring beauty that are involved...!\"\n\n\"You said just now a bridge might be built,\" Dr. Fillery interrupted, while the other paused a second for breath.\n\nFather Collins, nailed down to a positive statement, hesitated and looked about him. But the hesitation passed at once.\n\n\"It is the question merely,\" he went on more composedly, \"of providing the apparatus, the means of manifestation, the instrument, the\u2014body. Isn't it? Our evolution and theirs are two separate\u2014different things.\"\n\n\"I suppose so. No force can express itself without a proper apparatus.\"\n\n\"Certain of these Intelligences are so immense that only a series of events, long centuries, a period of history, as we call it, can provide the means, the body indeed, through which they can express themselves. An entire civilization may be the 'body' used by an archetypal power. Others, again\u2014like 'N. H.' probably\u2014since I notice that it is usually the artist, the artistic temperament he affects most\u2014require beauty for their expression\u2014beauty of form and outline, of sound, of colour.\"\n\nHe paused for effect, but no comment came.\n\n\"Our response to beauty, our thrill, our lift of delight and wonder before any manifestation of beauty\u2014these are due only to our perception, though usually unrecognized except by artists, of the particular Intelligence thus trying to express itself\u2014\"\n\nDr. Fillery suddenly leaned forward, listening with a new expression on his face. He betrayed, however, no sign of what he thought of his voluble visitor. An idea, none the less, had struck him like a flash between the eyes of the mind.\n\n\"You mean,\" he interposed patiently, \"that just as your fairies use form and colour to express themselves in nature, we might use beauty of a mental order to\u2014to\u2014\"\n\n\"To build a body of expression, yes, an instrument in a collective sense, through which 'N. H.' might express whatever of knowledge, wisdom and power he has\u2014\"\n\n\"Will you explain yourself a little more definitely?\"\n\nFather Collins beamed. He continued with an air of intense conviction:\n\n\"The Artist is ever an instrument merely, and for the most part an unconscious one; only the greatest artist is a conscious instrument. No man is an artist at all until he transcends both nature and himself; that is, until he interprets both nature and himself in the unknown terms of that greater Power whence himself and nature emanate. He is aware of the majestic source, aware that the universe, in bulk and in detail, is an expression of it, itself a limited instrument; but aware, further\u2014and here he proves himself great artist\u2014of the stupendous, lovely, central Power whose message stammers, broken and partial, through the inadequate instruments of ephemeral appearances.\n\n\"He creates, using beauty in form, sound, colour, a better and more perfect instrument, provides this central Power with a means of fuller expression.\n\n\"The message no longer stammers, halts, suggests; it flows, it pours, it sings. He has fashioned a vehicle for its passage. His art has created a body it can use. He has transcended both nature and himself. The picture, poem, harmony that has become the body for this revelation is alone great art.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" came the patient comment that was asked for.\n\n\"One thing is certain: only human knowledge, expressed in human terms, can come through a human brain. No mind, no intellect, can convey a message that transcends human experience and reason. Art, however, can. It can supply the vehicle, the body. But, even here, the great artist cannot communicate the secret of his Vision; he cannot talk about it, tell it to others. He can only show the result.\"\n\n\"Results,\" interrupted Dr. Fillery in a curious tone; \"what results, exactly, would you look for?\" There was a burning in his eyes. His skin was tingling.\n\n\"What else but a widening, deepening, heightening of our present consciousness,\" came the instant reply. \"An extension of faculty, of course, making entirely new knowledge available. A group of great artists, each contributing his special vision, respectively, of form, colour, words, proportion, could together create a 'body' to express a Power transcending the accumulated wisdom of the world. The race could be uplifted, taught, redeemed.\"\n\n\"You have already given some attention to this strange idea?\" suggested his listener, watching closely the working of the other's face. \"You have perhaps even experimented\u2014 A ceremonial of some sort, you mean? A performance, a ritual\u2014or what?\"\n\nFather Collins lowered his voice, becoming more earnest, more impressive:\n\n\"Beauty, the arts,\" he whispered, \"can alone provide a vehicle for the expression of those Intelligences which are the cosmic powers. A performance of some sort\u2014possibly\u2014since there must be sound and movement. A bridge between us, between our evolution and their own, might, I believe, be thus constructed. Art is only great when it provides a true form for the expression of an eternal cosmic power. By combining\u2014we might provide a means for their manifestation\u2014\"\n\n\"A body of thought, as it were, through which our 'N. H.' might become articulate? Is that your idea?\"\n\nBehind the question lay something new, it seemed, as though, while listening to the exposition of an odd mystical conception, his mind had been busy with a preoccupation, privately but simultaneously, of his own. \"In what way precisely do you suggest the arts might combine to provide this 'body'?\" he asked, a faint tremor noticeable in the lowered voice.\n\n\"That,\" replied Father Collins promptly, never at a loss, \"we should have to think about. Inspiration will come to us\u2014probably through him. Ceremonial, of course, has always been an attempt in this direction, only it has left the world so long that people no longer know how to construct a real one. The ceremonials of to-day are ugly, vulgar, false. The words, music, colour, gestures\u2014everything must combine in perfect harmony and proportion to be efficacious. It is a forgotten method.\"\n\n\"And results\u2014how would they come?\"\n\n\"The new wisdom and knowledge that result are suddenly there in the members of the group. The Power has expressed itself. Not through the brain, of course, but, rather, that the new ideas, having been acted out, are suddenly there. There has been an extension of consciousness. A group consciousness has been formed, and\u2014\"\n\n\"And there you are!\" Dr. Fillery, moving his foot unperceived, had touched a bell beneath the table. The foot, however, groped and fumbled, as though unsure of itself.\n\n\"You learn to swim\u2014by swimming, not by talking about it.\" Father Collins was prepared to talk on for another hour. \"If we can devise the means\u2014and I feel sure we can\u2014we shall have formed a bridge between the two evolutions\u2014\"\n\nNurse Robbins entered with apologies. A case upstairs demanded the doctor's instant attendance. Dr. Devonham was engaged.\n\n\"One thing,\" insisted Father Collins, as they shook hands and he got up to go, \"one thing only you would have to fear.\" He was very earnest. Evidently the signs of struggle, of fierce conflict in the other's face he did not notice.\n\n\"And that is?\" A hand was on the door.\n\n\"If successful\u2014if we provide this means of expression for him\u2014we provide also the means of losing him.\"\n\n\"Death?\" He opened the door with rough, unnecessary violence.\n\n\"Escape. He would no longer need the body he now uses. He would remember\u2014and be gone. In his place you would have\u2014LeVallon again only. I'm afraid,\" he added, \"that he already is remembering\u2014!\"\n\nHis final words, as Nurse Robbins deftly hastened his departure in the hall, were a promise to communicate the results of his further reflections, and a suggestion that his cottage by the river would be a quiet spot in which to talk the matter over again.\n\nBut Dr. Fillery, having thanked Nurse Robbins for her prompt attendance to his bell, returned to the room and sat for some time in a strange confusion of anxious thoughts. A singular idea took shape in him\u2014that Father Collins had again robbed his mind of its unspoken content. That sensitive receptive nature had first perceived, then given form to the vague, incoherent dreams that lurked in the innermost recesses of his hidden self.\n\nYet, if that were so\u2014and if \"N. H.\" already was \"remembering\"\u2014!\n\nA wave of shadow crept upon him, darkening his hope, his enthusiasm, his very life. For another part of him knew quite well the value to be attributed to what Father Collins had said.\n\nInstinctively his mind sought for Devonham. But it did not occur to him at the moment to wonder why this was so." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 345", + "text": "Spring had come with her sweet torment of delight, her promises, her passion, and London lay washed and perfumed beneath April's eager sun. An immense, persuasive glamour was in the sky. The whole earth caught up a swifter gear, as the magic of rich creative life poured out of \"dead\" soil into flower, insect, bird and animal. The prodigious stream omitted no single form; every \"body\" pulsed and blossomed at full strength. The hidden powers in each seed emerged. And it was from the inanimate body of the earth this flood of increased vitality rose.\n\nInto Edward Fillery, strolling before breakfast over the wet lawn of the enclosed garden, the tide of new life rose likewise. It was very early, the flush of dawn still near enough for the freshness of the new day to be everywhere. The greater part of the huge city was asleep. He was alone with the first birds, the dew, the pearl and gold of the sun's slanting rays. He saw the slates and chimneys glisten. Spring, like a visible presence, was passing across the town, bringing the amazing message that all obey yet no man understands.\n\n\u2003\"This is its touch upon the blossomed rose,\n\n\u2003The fashion of its hand shaped lotus-leaves;\n\n\u2003In dark soil and the silence of the seeds\n\n\u2003The robe of spring it weaves.\n\n\u2003\"It maketh and unmaketh, mending all;\n\n\u2003What it hath wrought is better than had been;\n\n\u2003Slow grows the splendid pattern that it plans,\n\n\u2003Its wistful hands between.\"\n\nThe lines came to his memory, while upon his mind fell lovely and wonderful impressions. It was as though the subconsciousness of the earth herself emerged with the spring, producing new life, new splendour everywhere. Out of a single patch of soil the various roots drew material they then fashioned into such different and complicated outlines as daisy, lily, rose, and a hundred types of tree. From the same bit of soil emerged these intricate patterns and designs, these different forms. At this very moment, while his feet left dark tracks across the silvery lawn, the process was going steadily forward all over England. Beneath those very feet up rushed the power into all conceivable bodies. Colour, music, form, marvellously organized, making no mistakes, were turning the world into a vast, delicious garden.\n\nForm, colour, sound! From his own hidden region rose again the flaming hope and prophecy. He stooped and picked a daisy, examining with rapt attention its perfect little body. Who, what made this astonishing thing, that was yet among the humbler forms? What intelligence devised its elaborate outline, guarded, cared for, tended it, ensured its growth and welfare? He gazed at its white rays tipped with crimson, its several hundred florets, its composite design. The spring life had been pouring through it until he picked it. Through the huge mass of earth's body its tiny roots had drawn the life it needed. This power was now cut off. It would die. The process, as with everything else, was \"automatic and unintelligent!\" It seemed an incredible explanation. The old familiar question troubled him, but he saw it abruptly now from a new angle.\n\n\"We built it,\" came a voice so close that it seemed behind him, for when at first he turned, startled, and yet not startled, he saw no figure standing; \"we who work in darkness, yet who never die, the Hidden Ones who build and weave inside and out of sight. You have destroyed our work of ages...\"\n\nA pang of sudden regret and anguish seized him. He stood still and stared in the direction whence he thought the voice had come, but no form, no outline, no body that could have produced a sound, a voice, was visible. A blackbird flew with its shrill whistle over the enclosing wall, and the gardener, up unusually early, was now moving slowly past the elms at the far end, some two hundred yards away. The old man, he remembered, had been telling him only the day before that the life in his plants this year had been prodigious and successful beyond his whole experience. It puzzled him. Something of reverence, of superstition almost, had lain in the man's voice and eyes.\n\n\"Who are you?\" whispered Fillery, still holding the \"dead\" broken flower in his hand and staring about him. He was aware that the sound from which the voice had come, detaching itself, as it were, into articulate syllables out of a general continuous volume, had not ceased. It was all about him, softly murmuring. Was it in himself perhaps? An intense inner activity, like the pressure of an enveloping tide, that was also in space, in the soil, the body of the planet, rose in him too. And it seemed to him that his mind was suddenly in process of being shaped and fashioned into a new \"body of understanding\"; a new instrument of understanding.\n\n\u2003\"This is its work upon the things ye see:\n\n\u2003The unseen things are more; men's hearts and minds,\n\n\u2003The thoughts of peoples and their ways and wills,\n\n\u2003These, too, the great Law binds.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he exclaimed, this time with acceptance that omitted the doubt he had first felt. \"I know who you are\"... and even as he said the words, there dropped into him, it seemed, some knowledge, some hint, some wonder that lay, he well knew, outside all human experience. It was as though some cosmic power brushed gently against and through his being, but a power so alien to known human categories that to attempt its expression in human terms\u2014language, reason, imagination even\u2014were to mutilate it. Yet, even for its partial, broken manifestation, human terms were alone available, since without these it must remain unperceived, he himself unaware of its existence.\n\nHe was, however, aware of its presence, its existence. All that was left to him therefore was his own personal interpretation. Herein, evidently, lay the truth for him; this was the meaning of his \"acceptance.\" It was, in some way, a renewal of that other vision he called the Flower Hill and Flower Music experience.\n\n\"I know you,\" he repeated, his voice merging curiously in the general underlying murmur of the morning. \"You belong to the bodiless, the deathless ones who work and build and weave eternally. Form, sound, colour are your instruments, the elements your tools. You wove this flower,\" he fingered the dying daisy, \"as you also shaped this body\"\u2014he tapped his breast\u2014\"and\u2014you built as well this mind\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped dead. Two things arrested him: the feeling that the ideas were not primarily his own, but derived from a source outside himself; and a sudden intensification of the flaming hope and prophecy that burst up as with new meaning into the words \"mind\" and \"body.\"\n\nThe broken body of the flower slipped from his fingers and fell upon the body of the earth. He looked down at its now empty form through which no life flowed, and his eye passed then to his own body beating with intense activity, and thence to the bodies of the trees, the darting birds, the gigantic sun now peering magnificently along the heavens. Body! A body was a form through which life expressed itself, a vehicle of expression by means of which life manifested, an instrument it used. But a body of thought was a true phrase too. And with the words, shaped automatically in his brain, a new light flashed and flooded him with its waves.\n\n\"A body of thought, a mental body\"\u2014the phrase went humming and flowing strangely through him. A body of thought! Father Collins, he remembered, had used some such wild language, only it had seemed empty words without intelligible meaning. Whence came the intense new meaning that so suddenly attached itself to the familiar phrase? Whence came the thrilling deep conviction that new, greater knowledge was hovering near, and that for its expression a new body must be devised? And what was this new knowledge, this new power? Whence came the amazing certainty in him that a new way was being shown to him, a means of progress for humanity that must otherwise flounder always to its average level of growth, development, then invariably collapse again?\n\n\"We built it,\" ran past him through the air again, or rose perhaps from the stirred depths of his own subconscious being, or again, dropped from a hidden rushing star. \"The more perfect and adequate the form, the greater the flow of life, of knowledge, of power it can express. No mind, no intellect, can convey a message that transcends human experience. Yet there is a way.\"\n\nThe new knowledge was there, if only the new vehicle suited to its expression could be devised...\n\nThe stream of life pouring through him became more and more intense; some power of perception seemed growing into white heat within him; transcending the limited senses; becoming incandescent. This tide of sound, inaudible to ordinary ears, was the music which is inseparable from the rhythm that underlies all forms, the music of the earth's manifold activities now pouring in vibrations huge and tiny all round and through him. He turned instinctively.\n\n\"You...!\" exclaimed the doctor in him, as though rebuke, reproval stirred. \"You here...!\"\n\nIt seemed to him that the figure of \"N. H.,\" embodying as it were a ray of sunlight, stood beside him.\n\n\"We,\" came the answer, with a smile that took the sparkling sunlight through the very face. \"We are all about you,\" added the voice with a rhythm that swamped all denial, all objection, bringing an exultant exhilaration in their place. \"We come from what always seems to you a Valley of sun and flowers, where we work and play behind the appearances you call the world.\"\n\n\"The world,\" repeated Fillery. \"The universe as well.\"\n\nThe voice, the illusion of actual words, both died away, merging in some perplexing fashion into another appearance, perhaps equally an illusion so far as the senses were concerned\u2014the phenomenon men call sight. Instead of hearing, that is, he now suddenly saw. Something in the arrangement of light caught his attention, holding it. The deep, central self in him, that which interprets and de-codes the reports the senses bring, employed another mode.\n\nThe figure of \"N. H.\" still was definite enough in form indeed, yet at the same time taking the rays into itself as though it were a body of light. There was no transparency, of course, nor was this clear radiance seen by Fillery for the first time, but rather that his natural shining was caught up and intensified by the morning sunshine. A body of light, none the less, seemed a true description of what Fillery now saw. This sunshine filled the air, the space all round him, the entire lawn and garden shone in a sparkling flood of dancing brilliance. It blazed. The figure of \"N. H.\" was merely a portion of this blazing. As a focus, but one of many, he now thought of it. And about each focus was the toss and fling of lovely, ever-rising spirals.\n\nAcross the main stream came then another pulsing movement, hardly discernible at first, and similar to an under-swell that moves the sea against the wave\u2014so that the eye perceives it only when not looking for it. This contrary motion, it soon became apparent, went in numerous, almost countless directions, so that, within and below its complicated wave-tracery, he was aware of yet other motions, crossing and interlacing at various speeds, until the space about him seemed to whirl with myriad rhythms, yet without the least confusion. These rhythms were of a hundred different magnitudes, from the very tiny to the gigantic, and while the smallest were of a radiant brilliance that made the sunshine pale, the larger ones seemed distant, their light of an intenser quality, though of a quality he had never seen before. These were strangely diffused, these bigger ones\u2014\"distant\" was the word that occurred to him, although that inner brilliance which occurs in dreams, in imaginative moments, the nameless glow that colours mental vision, described them better. Moreover they wore colours the human eye had never seen, while the smallest rhythms were lit with the familiar colours of the prism.\n\nHe stood absorbed, fascinated, drinking in the amazing spectacle, as though the glowing spirals of fire communicated to his inmost being a heat and glory of creative power. He was aware of the creative stream of spring in his own heart, pouring from the body of the earth on which he stood, drenching mind, nerves and even muscles with concentrated life. His subconscious being rose and stretched its wings. All, all was possible. A sensation of divine deathlessness possessed him. The limitations of his ordinary human faculties and powers were overborne, so that he felt he could never again face the mournful prison that caged him in. The meaning of escape became plain to him.\n\nHe saw the invisible building Intelligences at work.\n\nHe was aware then suddenly of purpose, of intention. The seeming welter of the waves of coloured light, of the immense and tiny rhythms, the intricate streams of vibrating, pulsing, throbbing movements were, he now perceived, marvellously co-ordinated. There was a focus, a vortex, towards which all rushed with a power so prodigious that a sense of terror touched him. He suddenly became conscious of a pattern forming before his eyes, hanging in empty space, shining, soft with light and beauty. It became, he saw, a geometric design. An idea of crystals, frost-forms, a spider's web hung with glistening dewdrops shot across his memory. The spirals whirled and sang about it.\n\nThis outline, he next perceived, was the focus to which the light, heat, colour all contributed their particular touch and quality. It glowed now in the centre of the vortex. So overwhelming, however, was the sense of the stupendous power involved that, as he phrased it afterwards, it seemed he watched the formation of some mighty sun. It was the whirling of those billion-miled sheets of incandescent fires that attend the birth of a nebula he watched. The power, at any rate, was gigantic.\n\nHe stood trembling before a revelation that left him lost, shelterless, bereft of any help that his little self might summon\u2014when, suddenly, with an emotion of strange tenderness, he saw the great rhythms become completely dominated by the very smallest of all. The same instant the pattern grew sharply outlined, perfect in every detail, as though the focus of powerful glasses cleared\u2014and the pattern hung a moment exquisitely fashioned in space beneath his eyes before it sank slowly to the ground. It remained in an upright position on the grass at his feet\u2014a daisy, growing in the earth, alive, its tiny delicate face taking the sunlight and the morning wind.\n\nWith a shock he then realized another thing: it was the very daisy he had broken, uprooted, killed a few minutes before.\n\nHe stooped, one hand outstretched as though to finger its wee white petals, but found instead that he was listening\u2014listening to a sweet faint music that rose from the surface of the lawn, from grass and flowers, running in waves and circles, like the vibrations of gentle wind across a thousand strings. It was similar, though less in volume, to the sound he had heard in the presence of \"N. H.\" He rose slowly to an upright position, dazed, bewildered, yet rapt with the wonder of the whole experience.\n\n\"N. H.!\" he heard his voice exclaim, its sound merging in the growing volume of music all about him. \"N. H.!\" he cried again. \"This is your work, your service...!\"\n\nBut he could not see him; his figure was no longer differentiated from the ever-moving sea of light that filled space wherever he looked. The same play of brilliance shone and glistened everywhere, whirling, ever shifting as in vortices of intricate geometrical designs, dancing, interpenetrating, and with a magnificence of colour that caught his breath away. There were remarkable flashings, and two of these flashings blazed suddenly together, forming an immense physiognomy, an expression, rather, as of a mighty face. The same instant there were a hundred of these mighty brilliant visages that pierced through the sea of whirling colour and gazed upon him, close, terrific, with a power and beauty that left thought without even a ghost of language to describe them. Their glory lay beyond all earthly terms. He recognized them. These mighty outlines he had seen before.\n\nHis mind then made an effort; he tried to think; memory and reason strove with emotion and sensation. The forms, the faces, the powers at once grew fainter. They faded slowly. The whirling vortices withdrew in some extraordinary way, the colour paled, the sound grew thinner, ever more distant, the great weaving designs dissolved. The lovely spirals all were gone. He saw the garden trees again, the flower beds. Space emptied, showing the morning sunshine on roofs and chimney-pots.\n\n\"We have rebuilt, remade it,\" he heard faintly, but he heard also the roar and boom of the gigantic rhythms as they withdrew, not spatially, so much as from his consciousness that was now contracting once more, till only the fainter sounds of the smaller singing patterns, the Flower Music as he had come to call it, reached his ears. Words and music, like voices known in dreams, seemed interwoven. He remembered the huge faces, with their bright confidence and glory, rising through the sunlight, peering as through a mirror at him, radiant and of imperishable beauty. The words, perhaps, he attached himself, his own interpretations of their ringing motions.\n\nThe sounds died away. He reeled. The expansion and subsequent contraction of consciousness had been too rapid, the whole experience too intense. He swayed, unsure of his own identity. He remembered vaguely that tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks, that the destruction of a lovely form had caused him a peculiar anguish, and that its recreation produced an intolerable joy, bringing tears of happiness. An arm caught him as he swayed. The accents of a voice he knew were audible close beside him. But at first he did not understand the words, feeling only a dull pain they caused.\n\n\"Their imperishable beauty! Their divine loveliness!\" he stammered, recognizing the face and voice. He flung his arms wide, gazing into the now empty air above the London garden. \"The great service they eternally fulfil\u2014oh, that we all might\u2014\" He made a gesture towards the other houses with their sightless, shuttered windows.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" came in the familiar tones. \"But come in now, come in, Edward, with me. I beg you\u2014before it is too late.\" Paul Devonham's voice shook so that it was hardly recognizable. The skin of his face was white. He wore a haggard look.\n\n\"Too late!\" repeated the other; \"it is always too late. The world will never see. Their eyes are blinded.\" An intolerable emotion swept him. He stared suddenly at his colleague, an immense surprise in him. \"But you, Paul!\" he exclaimed. \"You understand! Even you\u2014!\"\n\nDevonham led him slowly into the house. There was protection in his manner, in voice and gesture there was deep affection, respect as well, but behind and through these flickered the signs of another unmistakable emotion that Fillery at first could hardly credit\u2014of pity, was it? Of something at any rate he dared not contemplate.\n\n\"Even I,\" came in quick, low tones, \"even I, Edward, understand. You forget. I was once alone with him\"\u2014the voice sank to a rapid whisper\u2014\"in the mountain valley.\" Devonham's expression was curious. He raised his tone again. \"But\u2014not now, not now, I beg of you. Not yet, at any rate. You will be cast out, judged insane, your work destroyed, your career ruined, your reputation\u2014\" His excitement betrayed itself in his bright eyes and unusual gestures. He was shaken to the core. Fillery turned upon him. They were in the corridor now. He flung his arm free of the restraining hand.\n\n\"You know!\" he cried, \"yet would keep silent!\" His voice choked. \"You saw what I saw: new sources open, the offer made, the channels accessible at our very door, yet you would refuse\u2014\"\n\n\"Not one in ten million,\" came the hard rejoinder, \"would believe.\" The voice trembled. \"We have no proof. Their laws of manifestation are unknown to us, and such glimpses are but glimpses\u2014useless and dangerous.\" He whispered suddenly: \"Besides\u2014what are they? What, after all, are we dealing with?\"\n\n\"We can experiment,\" interrupted his companion quickly.\n\n\"How? Of what possible value?\"\n\n\"You felt what I felt? In your own being you experienced the revelation too, and yet you use such words! New forces, new faculties, Beings from another order of incalculable powers to ennoble, to bless, to inspire! The creation of higher forms through which new, greater life and knowledge, shall manifest!\"\n\nHe could hardly find the words he sought, so bright was the hope and wonder in his heart still. \"Think\u2014at a time like this\u2014what humanity might gain. Creative powers, Paul, creative! Acting directly on the subconscious selves of everybody, intensifying every individual, whether he understands and believes or not! The gods, Paul\u2014and nothing less\u2014 You saw the daisy\u2014\"\n\nDevonham seized both of his companion's hands, as he heard the torrent of wild, incoherent words: \"You'll have the entire world against you,\" he interrupted. \"Why seek crucifixion for a dream?\" Then, as his hands were again flung off, he turned, a finger suddenly on his lips. \"Hush, hush, Edward!\" he whispered. \"The house is sleeping still. You'll wake them all.\"\n\nThere was a new, strange authority about him. Dr. Fillery controlled himself. They went upstairs on tiptoe.\n\n\"Listen!\" murmured Devonham, as they reached the first-floor landing. \"That's what woke me first and led me to his room, but only to find it empty. He was already gone. I saw him join you on the lawn. I watched from the open window. Then\u2014I lost him... Listen!\" He was trembling like a child.\n\nThe sound still echoed faintly, distant, rising and falling, sweet and very lovely, and hardly to be distinguished from the musical hum of wind that sighs and whispers across the strings of an \u00e6olian harp. To one man came incredible sensations as they paused a moment. Dim though the landing was, there still seemed a tender luminous glow pervading it.\n\n\"They're everywhere,\" murmured Fillery, \"everywhere and always about us, though in different space. Through and behind and inside everything that happens, helping, building, constructing ceaselessly. Oh, Paul, how can you doubt and question value? Behind every single form and body, physical or mental, they operate divinely\u2014\"\n\n\"Mental! Edward, for God's sake\u2014\"\n\nDevonham stepped nearer to him with such abruptness that his companion stopped. The pallor of the assistant's face so close arrested his words a moment. They held their breath, listening together side by side. The sounds grew fainter, died away in the stillness of the early morning, then ceased altogether. It was not the first time they had listened thus to the strange music, nor was it the first time that Fillery entered the room alone. As once before, his colleague remained outside, watching, waiting, half seduced, it seemed, yet vehemently against a sympathetic attitude. He watched his chief go in, he saw the expression on his face. Upon his own, behind a mild expectancy, lay a look of pain.\n\n\"Empty!\" He heard the startled exclamation.\n\nAnd instantly Devonham was at his side, a firm hand upon his arm, his eyes taking in an unused bed, a window opened wide, a glow of light and heat the early sunshine could not possibly explain. The perfume, as of flowers in the air, he noted too, and a sense of lightness, freshness, sweetness about the atmosphere that produced happiness, exhilaration. The room throbbed, as it were, with invisible waves of some communicable power even he could not deny. But of \"N. H.,\" the recent occupant, there was no sign.\n\n\"In the garden still. I lost sight of him somehow. I told you.\"\n\nFillery crossed quickly to the window, his colleague with him, looking out upon a lawn and paths that held no figure anywhere. The gardener was not in sight. Only the birds were visible among the daisies. The quiet sunlight lay as usual upon leaves and flowers waving in the breeze. \"He came in,\" Fillery went on rapidly under his breath. \"He must have slipped back when\u2014\"\n\nThe sound of steps and voices behind them in the corridor brought both men round with a quick movement, as Nurse Robbins, her arm linked in that of \"N. H.,\" stood in the open doorway. Her face was radiant, her eyes alight, her breath came unevenly, and one might have thought her caught midway in some ecstatic dance that still left its joy and bliss stamped on her pretty face. Only she looked more than pretty; there was beauty, a fairy loveliness about her that betrayed an intense experience of some inner kind.\n\nAt the sight of the two doctors she rapidly composed herself, leading her companion quietly into the room. \"He was upstairs, sir,\" she said respectfully but breathlessly somewhat, and addressing herself, Fillery noticed, to Devonham and not to himself. \"He was going from room to room, talking to the patients\u2014er\u2014singing to them. It was the singing woke me\u2014\"\n\n\"Upstairs!\" exclaimed Devonham. \"He has been up there!\"\n\nShe broke off as Fillery came forward and took \"N. H.\" by the hands, dismissing her with a gesture she was quick to understand. Devonham went with her hurriedly, intent upon a personal inspection at once.\n\n\"Your service called you,\" said Fillery quietly, the moment they were alone. \"I understand!\" Through the contact of the hands waves of power entered him, it seemed. About the face was light, as though fire glowed behind the very skin and eyes, producing the effect almost of a halo.\n\n\"They came for me, and I must go.\" The voice was deep and wonderful, with prolonged vibrations. \"I have found my own. I must return where my service needs me, for here I can do so little.\"\n\n\"To your own place where you are ruler of your fate,\" the other said slowly. \"Here you\u2014\"\n\n\"Here,\" came the quick interruption, while the voice lost its resonance, fading as it were in sadness, \"here I\u2014die.\" Even the radiance of his face, although he smiled, dimmed a little on that final word. \"I can help where I belong\u2014not here.\" The light returned, the music came back into the amazing voice.\n\n\"The daisy,\" whispered Fillery, joy rising in him strangely.\n\n\"Nature,\" floated through the air like music, \"is my place. With human beings I cannot work. It is too much, and I only should destroy. They are not ready yet, for our great rhythms injure them, and they cannot understand.\"\n\nTrembling with emotions he could neither define nor control, Fillery led him to the window.\n\n\"Even in this little back-garden of a London house,\" he murmured, \"among, so to speak, the humble buttercups and daisies of our life! The creative Intelligences at work, building, ever building the best forms they can. You re-make a broken daisy\"\u2014his voice rose, as the great shining face so close lit with its flaming smile\u2014\"you re-make as well our broken minds. In the subconscious hides our creative power that you stimulate. It is with that and that alone you work. It hides in all of us, though the artist alone perceives or can use it. It is with that you work\u2014\"\n\n\"With you, dear Fillery, I can work, for you help me to remember. You feel the big rhythms that we bring.\"\n\nDr. Fillery started, peered about him, listened hard. Was it the trees, shaking in the morning wind, that rustled? Was it a voice? The dancing leaves reflected the sunshine from a thousand facets. The sound accompanied, rather than interrupted, his own speech. He turned back to \"N. H.\" with passionate enthusiasm.\n\n\"Using beauty\u2014the artists\u2014the creative powers of the Race,\" he went on, \"we shall create together a new body, a new vehicle, through which your powers can express themselves. The intellect cannot serve you... it is the creative imagination of those who know beauty that you seek. You are inarticulate in this wretched body. We shall make a new one\u2014\"\n\n\"They have come for me and I must go\u2014\"\n\n\"We will work together. Oh, stay\u2014stay with me\u2014!\"\n\n\"I have found the way. I have remembered. I must go back\u2014\"\n\nThe wind died down, the leaves stopped rustling, the sunshine seemed to pale as though a cloud passed over the sky. The words he had heard resolved themselves into the morning sounds, the singing of the birds. Had they been words at all? Bewilderment, like a pain, rushed over him. He knew himself suddenly imprisoned, caught.\n\n\"I have remembered,\" he heard in quiet tones, but the voice dead, no resonance, no music in it. And across the room he saw suddenly Paul Devonham just inside the door, returned from his inspection. Beside him stood\u2014LeVallon.\n\nAn extraordinary reaction instantly took place in him. A lid was raised, a shutter lifted, a wall fell flat. He hardly knew how to describe it. Was it due to the look of anxiety, of tenderness, of affectionate, of protective care he saw plainly upon his colleague's face? He could not say. He only knew for certain in that instant that Paul Devonham's main preoccupation was with\u2014himself; that the latter regarded him exactly as he regarded any other\u2014yes, that was the only word\u2014any other patient; that he looked after him, tended, guarded, cared for him\u2014and that this watchful, experienced observation had been going on now for a long, long time.\n\nThe authority in his manner became abruptly clear as day. Devonham watched over him; also he watched him. For days, for weeks, this had been his attitude. For the first time, in this instant, as he saw him lead away LeVallon into his own room and close the door, Fillery now perceived this. He experienced a violent revulsion of mind. In a flash a hundred details of the recent past occurred to him, chief among them the fact that, more and more, the control of the Home and its occupants had been taken over, Fillery himself only too willing, by his assistant. A moment of appalling doubt rose like a black cloud...\n\nHe heard Paul telling LeVallon to begin his breakfast, just as the door closed, and he noted the authoritative tone of voice. The next minute he and his colleague were alone together.\n\n\"Paul,\" said the chief quickly, but with a calm assurance that anticipated a favourable answer, \"they, at any rate, are all right?\"\n\nDevonham nodded his head. \"No harm done,\" he replied briefly. \"In fact, as you know, he rather stimulates them than otherwise.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHe felt, for the first time in their years of close relationship, a breath of suspicion enter him. There was a look upon his colleague's face he could not quite define. It baffled him.\n\n\"Of course, I know\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped, for the undecipherable look had strengthened suddenly. He thought of a gaoler.\n\n\"Paul,\" he said quickly, \"what's the matter? What's wrong with you?\"\n\nHe drew back a pace or two and watched him.\n\n\"With me\u2014nothing, Edward. Nothing at all.\" The tone was grave with anxiety, yet had this new authority in it.\n\nA feeling of intolerable insecurity came upon him, a sensation as though he balanced on air, yet its cause, its origin, easily explained: the support of his colleague's mind was taken from him. Paul's attitude was clear as day to him. He was a gaoler... He recalled again the recent detail, brightly significant\u2014that Nurse Robbins had turned to Paul, rather than to himself.\n\n\"With\u2014me, then\u2014you think?\" His voice hardly sounded like his own. He looked about him for support, found an arm-chair, sat down in it. \"You're strange, Paul, very strange,\" he whispered. \"What do you mean by 'there's something wrong with me'?\"\n\nDevonham's expression cleared slightly and a kindly, sympathetic smile appeared, then vanished. The grave look that Fillery disliked reappeared.\n\n\"What d'you mean, Paul Devonham?\" came the repetition, in a louder, more challenging voice. \"You're watching me\u2014as though I were\"\u2014he laughed without a trace of mirth\u2014\"a patient.\" He leaned forward. \"Paul, you've been watching me for a long time. Out with it, now. What is it?\"\n\nDevonham, who had kept silent, drew some papers from his pocket, a bundle of rolled sheets.\n\n\"Of course,\" he said gently, \"I always watch you. For that's how I learn. I learn from you, Edward, more than from anybody I know.\"\n\nBut Dr. Fillery, his eyes fixed upon the sheaf of papers, had recognized them. His own writing was visible along the uneven edges. They were the description he had set down of his adventure on Flower Hill, of the scenes between \"N. H.\" and Lady Gleeson, between \"N. H.\" and Nayan, the autobiographical description with \"N. H.\" and Nurse Robbins soon after his arrival, when Fillery had so amazingly found his own mind\u2014as he believed\u2014identified with his patient's.\n\nDevonham snapped off the elastic band that held the sheaf together. \"Edward, I've read them. We have no secrets, of course. I've read them carefully. Every word\u2014my dear fellow.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" replied the other, while something in him wavered horribly. \"I'm glad. They were meant for you to read, for of course we have no secrets. I\u2014I do not expect you to agree. We have never quite seen eye to eye\u2014have we?\" His voice shook. \"You terrible iconoclast,\" he added, betraying thus the nature of the fear that changed his voice, then recognizing with vexation that he had done so. \"You believe nothing. You never will believe anything. You cannot understand. With joy you would destroy what I and others believe\u2014wouldn't you, Paul\u2014?\"\n\nThe deep sadness, the gravity on the face in front of him stopped the tirade.\n\n\"I would save you, Edward,\" came the earnest, gentle words, \"from yourself. The powers of auto-suggestion, as we know in our practice\u2014don't we?\u2014are limitless. If you call that destroying\u2014\"\n\nFrom the adjoining room the clatter of knives and forks was audible. Dr. Fillery listened a moment with a smile.\n\n\"Paul,\" he asked, his voice firm and sure again, \"is your chief patient in that room,\" indicating the door with his head, \"or\u2014in this?\"\n\n\"In this,\" was the reply. \"A wise man is always his own patient and 'Physician, heal thyself' his motto.\" He sat down beside his chief. His manner changed; there was affection, deep solicitude, something of passionate entreaty even in voice and eyes and gestures. \"There are features here,\" he said in lowered tones, \"Edward, we have not understood, perhaps even we can never understand; but we have not, I think, sufficiently guarded against one thing\u2014auto-suggestion. The r\u00f4le it plays in life is immense, incalculable; it is in everything we do and think, above all in everything we believe. It is peculiarly powerful and active in\u2014er\u2014unusual things\u2014\"\n\n\"The sound\u2014the sounds\u2014you've heard them yourself,\" broke in his companion.\n\nDevonham shrugged his thin shoulders. \"He sings\u2014in a peculiar way.\" As an aside, he said it, returning to his main sermon instantly. \"Let us leave details out,\" he cried; \"it is the principle that concerns us. Edward, your complex against humanity lies hard and rigid in you still. It has never found that full recognition by yourself which can resolve it. Your work, your noble work, is but a partial expression. The kernel of this old complex in you remains unrelieved, undischarged\u2014because still unrecognized. And, further, you are continually adding to the repression which\"\u2014even Devonham paused a second before using such a word to such a man\u2014\"is poisoning you, Edward, poisoning you, I repeat.\"\n\n\"You saw\u2014you saw the rebuilding of\u2014the daisy\"\u2014an odd whisper of insecurity ran through the quiet words, a statement rather than a question\u2014\"you realize, at any rate, that chance has brought us into contact with Powers, creative Powers, of a new order\u2014\"\n\n\"Let us omit all details just now,\" interrupted the other, a troubled, indecipherable look on his face. \"The undoubted telepathy between your mind and mine nullifies any such\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014powers of which we all have some faint counterpart, at any rate, in our subliminal selves.\" Fillery had not heard the interruption. \"Powers by means of which we may build for the Race new forms, new mental bodies, new vehicles for life, for God, to manifest through\u2014more perfect, more receptive\u2014\"\n\nDevonham had suddenly seized both his hands and was leaning closer to him. Something compelling, authoritative, peculiarly convincing for a moment had its undeniable effect, again stopping the flow of hurried, passionate, eager words.\n\n\"There is one new form, new body,\" and the intensity in voice and eyes drove the meaning deep, deep into his listener's mind and heart. \"I wish to see you build. One, and one only\u2014physical, mental, spiritual. But you cannot build it, Edward\u2014alone!\"\n\n\"Paul!\" The other held up a warning hand; the expression in his eyes was warning too. Their effect upon Devonham, however, was nil. He was talking with a purpose nothing could alter.\n\n\"She is still waiting for you,\" he went on with determination, \"and already you have kept her waiting\u2014overlong.\" In the tone, in the hard clear eyes as well, lay a suggestion almost of tears.\n\nHe opened the door into the breakfast-room, but Fillery caught his arm and stopped him. They could hear Nurse Robbins speaking, as she attended as usual to her patient's wants. Coffee was being poured out. There was a sound of knives and plates and cups.\n\n\"One minute, Paul, one minute before we go in.\" He drew him aside. \"And what, Doctor Devonham, may I ask, would you prescribe?\" There was a curious mixture of gentle sarcasm, of pity, of patient tolerance, yet at the same time of sincere, even anxious, interest in the question. The face and manner betrayed that he waited for the answer with something more than curiosity.\n\nThere was no hesitancy in Devonham. He judged the moment ripe, perhaps; he was aware that his words would be listened to, appreciated, understood certainly, and possibly, obeyed.\n\n\"Expression,\" he said convincingly, but in a lowered voice. \"The fullest expression, everywhere and always. Let it all come. Accept the lot, believe the lot, welcome the lot, and thus\"\u2014he could not conceal the note of passionate entreaty, of deep affection\u2014\"avoid every atom of repression. In the end\u2014in the long run\u2014your own best judgment must prevail.\"\n\nThey smiled into each other's eyes for a moment in silence, while, instinctively and automatically, their hands joined in a steady clasp.\n\n\"Bless you, old fellow,\" murmured the chief. \"As if I didn't know! It's the treatment you've been trying on me for weeks and months. As if I hadn't noticed!\"\n\nAs they entered the breakfast-room, Nurse Robbins, with flushed face and sparkling eyes, was pouring out the coffee, leaning close over her patient's shoulder as she did so. Fresh roses were in her cheeks as well as on the table.\n\n\"This is its touch upon the blossomed maid,\" whispered Fillery, with the quick hint of humour that belongs only to the sane. At the same time the light remark was produced, he well knew, by a part of himself that sought to remain veiled from recognition. Any other triviality would have done as well to cloak the sharp pain that swept him, and to lead his listener astray. For in that instant, as they entered, he saw at the table not \"N. H.,\" but LeVallon\u2014the backward, ignorant, commonplace LeVallon, an empty, untaught personality, yet so receptive that anything\u2014anything\u2014could be transferred to him by a strong, vivid mind, a mind, for instance, like his own...\n\nThe sight, for a swift instant, was intolerable and devastating. He balanced again on air that gave him no support. He wavered, almost swayed. \"N. H.,\" in that horrible and painful second, did not exist, and never had existed. The unstable mind, he comforted himself, experiences dislocating extremes of attitude... for, at the same time as he saw himself shaking and wavering without solid support, he saw the figure of Paul Devonham, big, important, authoritative, dominating the uncertainties of life with calm, steady power.\n\nIn a fraction of a second all this came and went. He sat down beside LeVallon, his eyes still twinkling with his trivial little joke.\n\n\"'N. H.,'\" he whispered to Devonham quickly, \"has\u2014escaped at last.\"\n\n\"LeVallon,\" came the whispered reply as quickly, \"is cured at last.\" And, to conceal an intolerable rush of pain, of loss, of loneliness that threatened tears, he pointed to the dropped eyes and blushing cheeks of the pretty nurse across the table." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 346", + "text": "To Edward Fillery, the deep pain of frustration baffling all his mental processes, the end had come with a strange, bewildering swiftness. He knew there had been a prolonged dislocation of his being, possibly, even a partial loss of memory with regard to much that went on about him, but he could not, did not, admit that no value or reality had attached to his experiences. The central self in him had projected a limb, an arm, that, feeling its way across the confining wall of the prison house, groping towards an unbelievably wonderful revelation of new possibilities, had abruptly now withdrawn again. The dissociation in his personality was over. He was, in other words, no longer aware of \"N. H.\" Like Devonham, he now did not \"perceive\" \"N. H.,\" but only LeVallon. But, unlike Devonham, he had perceived him...\n\nHe had met half-way a mighty and magnificent Vision. Its truth and beauty remained for him enduring. The revelation had come and gone. That its close was sudden, simple, undramatic, above all untheatrical, satisfied him. \"N. H.\" had \"escaped,\" leaving the commonplace LeVallon in his place. But, at least, he had known \"N. H.\"\n\nHis whole being, an odd, sweet, happy pain in him, yearned ever to the glorious memory of it all. The melancholy, the peculiar shyness he felt, were not without an indefinite pleasure. His nature still vibrated to those haunting and inspiring rhythms, but his normal, earthly faculties, he flattered himself, were in no sense permanently disorganized. Professionally, he still cared for LeVallon, disenchanted dust though he might be, compared to \"N. H.\" ...He approved of Devonham's proposal to take him for a few days to the sea. He also approved of Paul's advice that he should accept Father Collins' invitation to spend a day or two at his country cottage. The Khilkoffs would be there, father and daughter. The Home, in charge of an assistant, could be reached in a few hours in case of need. The magic of Devonham's wise, controlling touch lay in every detail, it seemed...\n\nHe saw the trio\u2014for Nurse Robbins was of the party\u2014off to Seaford. \"The final touches to his cure,\" Paul mentioned slyly, with a smile, as the guard whistled. But of whose cure he did not explain. \"He'll bathe in the sea,\" he added, the reference obvious this time. \"And\u2014when we return\u2014I shall be best man. I've already promised!\" There was a triumph of skilled wisdom in both sentences.\n\n\"The time isn't ripe yet, Edward, for too magnificent ideas. And your ideas have been a shade too magnificent, perhaps.\" He talked on lightly, even carelessly. And, as usual, there was purpose, meaning, \"treatment\"\u2014his friend easily discerned it now\u2014in every detail of his attitude.\n\nFillery laughed. Through his mind ran Povey's sentence, \"Never argue with the once-born!\" but aloud he said, \"At any rate, I've no idea that I'm Emperor of Japan or\u2014or the Archangel Gabriel!\" And the other, pleased and satisfied that a touch of humour showed itself, shook hands firmly, affectionately, through the window as the train moved off. LeVallon raised his hat to his chief and smiled\u2014an ordinary smile..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 347", + "text": "With the speed and incongruity of a dream these few days slipped by, their happenings vivid enough, yet all set to a curiously small scale, a cramped perspective, blurred a little as by a fading light. Only one thing retained its brilliance, its intense reality, its place in the bigger scale, its vast perspective remaining unchanged. The same immense sweet rhythm swept Iraida and himself inevitably together. Some deep obsession that hitherto prevented had been withdrawn.\n\nShe had called that very morning\u2014Paul's touch visible here again, he believed, though he had not asked. He looked on and smiled. After the ordeal of breakfast with Devonham and LeVallon her visit was announced. It was Paul, after a little talk downstairs, who showed her in. With the radiance of a spring wild-flower opening to the early sunshine, her unexpected visit to his study seemed clothed. Unexpected, yes, but surely inevitable as well. With the sweet morning wind through the open window, it seemed, she came to him, the letter of invitation from Father Collins in her hand. His own lay among his correspondence, still untouched. Her perfume rose about him as she explained something he hardly heard or followed.\n\n\"You'll come, Edward, won't you? You'll come too.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he answered. But it was a song he heard, and no dull spoken words. She ran dancing towards him through a million flowers; her hair flew loose along the scented winds; her white limbs glowed with fire. He danced to meet her. It was in the Valley that he caught her hands and met her eyes. \"It's happened,\" he heard himself saying. \"It's happened at last\u2014just as you said it must. Escape! He has escaped!\"\n\n\"But we shall follow after\u2014when the time comes, Edward.\"\n\n\"Where the wild bee never flew!\"...\n\n\"When the time comes,\" she repeated.\n\nHer voice, her smile, her eyes brought him back sharply into the little room. The furniture showed up again. The Valley faded. He noticed suddenly that for the first time she wore no flowers in her dress as usual.\n\n\"Iraida!\" he exclaimed. \"Then\u2014you knew!\"\n\nShe bent her head, smiling divinely. She took both his hands in hers. At her touch every obstacle between them melted. His own private, personal inhibition he saw as the trivial barriers a little child might raise. His complex against humanity, as Paul called it, had disappeared. Their minds, their beings, their natures became most strangely one, he felt, and yet quite naturally. There was nothing they did not share.\n\n\"With the first dawn,\" he heard her say in a low voice. \"Never\u2014never again,\" he seemed to hear, \"shall we destroy his\u2014their\u2014work of ages.\"\n\n\"A flower,\" he whispered, \"has no need to wear a flower!\" He was convinced that she too had shared an experience similar to his own, perhaps had even seen the bright, marvellous Deva faces peering, shining... He did not ask. She said no more. Life flowed between them in an untroubled stream..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 348", + "text": "Like the flow of a stream, indeed, things went past him, yet with incidents and bits of conversation thus picked out with vivid sharpness. The dissociation of his being was still noticeable here and there, he supposed. The swell after the storm took time to settle down. Slowly, however, the waves that had been projected, leaping to heaven, returned to the safe, quiet dead level of the normal calm... The depths lay still once more. And his melancholy passed a little, lifted. He knew, at any rate, those depths were now accessible.\n\n\"I've seen over the wall a moment,\" he said to himself. \"Paul is both right and wrong. What I've seen lies too far ahead of the Race to be intelligible or of use. I should be cast out, crucified, my other, simpler work destroyed. To control rhythms so powerful, so different to anything we now know, is not yet possible. They would shatter, rather than construct.\" He smiled sadly, yet with resignation. There was pain and humour in his eyes. \"I should be regarded as a Promethean merely, an extremist Promethean, and probably be locked up for contravening some County Council bye-law or offending Church and State. That's where he, perhaps, is right\u2014Paul!\" He thought of him with affection and pity, with understanding love. \"How wise and faithful, how patient and how skilled\u2014within his limits. The stable are the useful; the stable are the leaders; the stable rule the world. People with steady if unvisioned eyes like Paul, with money like Lady Gleeson... But, oh!\"\u2014he sighed\u2014\"how slow, ye gods! how slow!\"..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 349", + "text": "The visit was a strange one. Nayan sat between him and her father in the motor. It was not far from London, the ancient little house among the trees where Father Collins secreted himself from time to time upon occasional \"retreats.\"\n\nWithin the grounds it might have been the centre of the New Forest, but for the sound of tramcar bells that sometimes came jangling faintly through the thick screen of leaves. There were old-world paved courtyards with sweet playing fountains, miniature lawns, tangles of flowers, small sunken gardens with birds of cut box and yew, stone nymphs, and a shaggy, moss-grown Pan, whose hand that once held the pipes had broken off. Suburbia lay outside, yet, by walking wisely, it was possible to move among these delights for half an hour, great trees ever rustling overhead, and a clear small stream winding peacefully in and out with gentle lapping murmurs. Nature here lay undisturbed as it had lain for centuries.\n\nThe little ancient house, moreover, seemed to have grown up with the green things out of the soil, so naturally, it all belonged together. The garden ran indoors, it seemed, through open doors and windows. Butterflies floated from courtyard into drawing-room and out again, leaves blew through dining-room windows, scurrying to another little bit of lawn; the sun and wind, even the fountains' spray, found the walls no obstacle as though unaware of them. Bees murmured, swallows hung below the eaves. It was, indeed, a healing spot, a natural retreat...\n\n\"I really believe the river rises in your library,\" exclaimed Fillery, after a tour of inspection with his host, \"and my bedroom is in the heart of that big chestnut across the lawn. Do my feet touch carpet, grass, or bark when I get out of bed in the morning?\"\n\n\"I've learnt more here,\" began Father Collins, \"than at all the conferences and learned meetings I ever attended...\"\n\nThe group of four stood in the twilight by the playing fountain where the dignified stone Pan watched the paved little court, listening to the splash of the water and the wind droning among the leaves. The lap of the winding stream came faintly to them. The stillness cast a spell about them, dropping a screen against the outer world.\n\n\"Hark!\" said Father Collins, holding a curved hand to his ear. \"You hear the music...?\"\n\n\u2003\"'Why, in the leafy greenwood lone\n\n\u2003Sit you, rustic Pan, and drone\n\n\u2003On a dulcet resonant reed?'\"\n\nHe paused, peering across to the stone figure as for an answer. All stood listening, waiting, only wind and water breaking the silence. The bats were now flitting; overhead hung the saffron arch of fading sunset. In a deep ringing voice, very gruff and very low, Father Collins gave the answer:\n\n\u2003\"'So that yonder cows may feed\n\n\u2003Up the dewy mountain passes,\n\n\u2003Gathering the feathered grasses.'\n\n\"That's Pan's work,\" he said, laughing pleasantly, \"Pan and all his splendid hierarchy. Always at work, though invisibly, with music, colour, beauty!...\"\n\nIt was scraps like this that stood out in Fillery's memory, adding to his conviction that Paul had enlisted even this strange priest in his deep-laid plan...\n\n\"Each man is saturated with certain ideas, thoughts, phrases in a line of his own. These constitute his groove. To go outside it makes him feel homeless and uncomfortable. Accustomed to its measurements and safe within them, he interprets all he hears, reads, observes, according to his particular familiar shibboleths, to which, as to a standard of infallible criticism, he brings slavishly all that is offered for the consideration of his judgment. A new Idea stands little chance of being comprehended, much less adopted. Tell him new things about the stars, the Stock Exchange, the Stigmata\u2014up crops his Standard of approval or disapproval. He cannot help himself. His judgment, based upon the limited content of his groove, operates automatically. He condemns. An entirely new idea is barely glanced at before it is rejected for the rubbish heap. How, then, can progress come swiftly to a Race composed of such individuals? Mass-judgment, herd-opinion governs everything. He who has original ideas is outcast, and dwells lonely as the moon. How slow, ye Gods! How slow!\"...\n\nOnly Fillery could not remember, could not be certain, whether it was his host or himself that used the words. Father Collins, as usual, was saying \"all sorts of things,\" but addressed himself surely, to old Khilkoff most of the time, the Russian, half angry, half amused, growling out his comments and replies as he sat smoking heavily and enjoying the peaceful night scene in his own fashion...\n\nIt was odd, none the less, how much that the wild priest gabbled coincided with his own, with Fillery's, thoughts at the moment. A peculiar melancholy, a mood of shyness never known before, lay still upon him. The beauty of the silent girl beside him overpowered him a little; too wonderful to hold, to own, she seemed. Yet they were deliciously, uncannily akin. All his former self-created denials and suppressions, hesitations and refusals had vanished. \"N. H.\"\u2014He wondered?\u2014had provided him with the fullest expression he had ever known. A boundless relief poured over him. He was aware of wholesome desire rising behind his old high admiration and respect...\n\nHe watched her once standing close to Pan's broken outline among the shadows, touching the mossy arm with white fingers, and he imagined for an instant that she held the vanished pipes.\n\n\"After an experience with Other Beings,\" Father Collins's endless drone floated to him, \"shyness, they say, is felt. Silence descends upon the whole nature\"... to which, a little later, came the growling comment with its foreign accent: \"Talk may be pleasurable\u2014sometimes\u2014but it is profitable rarely...\"\n\nThe talk flowed past and over him, occasional phrases, like islands rising out of a stream, inviting his attention momentarily to land and listen... The girl, he now saw, no longer stood beside the broken stone figure. She was wandering idly towards the farther garden and the trees.\n\nHe burned to rise and go to her, but something held him. What was it? What could it be? Some strange hard little obstacle prevented. Then, suddenly, he knew what it was that stopped him: he was waiting for that familiar pet sentence. Once he heard that, the impetus to move, the power to overcome his strange shyness, the certainty that his whole being was at last one with itself again, would come to him. It made him laugh inwardly while he recognized the validity of the detail\u2014final symptoms of the obstructing inhibitions, of the obstinate original complex.\n\nThe outline of the girl was lost now, merged in the shadows beyond. He stirred, but could not get up to go. A fury of impatience burned in him. Father Collins, he felt, dawdled outrageously. He was talking\u2014jawing, Fillery called it\u2014about extraordinary experiences. \"Gradually, as consciousness more and more often extends, the organs to record such extensions will be formed, you see... If our inventive faculties were turned inwards, instead of outwards for gain and comfort as they now are, we might know the gods...\"\n\nThe sculptor's growl, though the words were this time inaudible, had a bite in them. The other voice poured on like thick, slow oil:\n\n\"What, anyhow, is it, then, that urges us on in spite of all obstacles, denials, failures...?\"\n\nThen came something that seemed leading up to the pet sentence that was the signal he waited for\u2014nearer to it, at any rate:\n\n\"...It's childish, surely, to go on merely seeking more of what we have already. We should seek something new...\"\n\nA call, it seemed, came to him on the wind from the dark trees. But still he could not move.\n\nBut, at last, out of a prolonged jumble of the two voices, one growling, the other high pitched, came the signal he somehow waited for. Even now, however, the speaker delayed it as long as possible. He was doing it, of course, on purpose. This was intentional, obviously.\n\n\"...Yes, but a thing out of its right place is without power, life, means of expression\u2014robbed of its context which alone gives it meaning\u2014robbed, so to speak, of its arms and legs\u2014without a body...\"\n\nThere, at least, was the definite proof that Father Collins was doing this of deliberate, set purpose!\n\n\"Go on! Yes, but, for God's sake, say it! I want to be off!\" Fillery believed he shrieked the words, but apparently they were inaudible. They remained unnoticed, at any rate.\n\n\"...Hence the value of order, tidiness, you see. Often a misplaced thing is invisible until replaced where it belongs. It is, as we say, lost. No movement is meaningless, no walk without purpose. All your movements tend towards your proper place...\"\n\nA breeze blew the fountain spray aside so that its splashing ceased for a brief second. From the rustling leaves beyond came a faint murmur as of distant piping. But\u2014into the second's pause had leaped the pet sentence:\n\n\"Only a being in his own place is the ruler of his fate.\"\n\nThe signal! He was aware that the Russian cleared his throat and spat unmusically, aware also that Father Collins, a queer smile just discernible on his face in the gloom, turned his head with a gesture that might well have been an understanding nod. Both sound and gesture, however, were already behind him. He was released. He was across the paved courtyard, past the fountain, past the stone figure of the silent old rough god\u2014and off!\n\nAnd as he went, finding his way instinctively among the dark trees, that pet sentence went with him like a clarion call, as though sweet piping music played it everywhere about him. A thousand memories shut down with a final snap. In the stage of his mind came a black-out upon a host of inhibitions. There was an immense and glorious sense of relief as though bitter knots were suddenly disentangled, and some iron kernel of resistance that had weighted him for years flowed freely at last in a stream of happy molten gold...\n\nHe found her easily. Where the trees thinned at the farther edge he saw her figure, long before he came up with her, outlined against the fading saffron. He saw her turn. He saw her arms outstretched. He came up with her the same minute, and they stood in silence for a long time, watching the darkness bend and sink upon the landscape.\n\nFor, here, at this one edge of the tiny estate, the real open country showed. Beyond them, in the twilight, lay the silent fields like a gigantic brown and yellow carpet whose shaken folds still seemed to tremble and run on beneath the growing moon. Along a farther ridge the trees and hedges passed in a ragged procession of strange figures, defined sharply against the sky\u2014witches, queens and goblins on the prowl, the ancient fairyland of the English countryside.\n\nThey still stood silent, side by side, touching almost, their heat and perfume and atmosphere intermingling, looking out across the quiet scene. He was aware that her mind stole into his most sweetly, and that without knowing it his hand had found her own, and that, presently, she leaned a little against him. Their eyes, their mental sight as well, saw the same things, he knew. The first stars peeped out, and they looked up at them as one being looks, together.\n\n\"The wonder that you saw\u2014in him,\" he heard himself saying. It was a statement, not a question.\n\n\"Was yourself, of course,\" her voice, like his own, in the rustle of the leaves, came softly. It continued his own thought rather than replied to it. \"The part you've held down and hidden away all these years.\"\n\nHer divination came to him with staggering effect. \"You always knew then?\"\n\n\"Always. The first day we met you took me into the firm.\"\n\nHe was aware that everything about him pulsed and throbbed with life, intelligence in every stick and stone. Angelic beings marched on their wondrous business through the sky. A mighty host pursued their endless service with a network of huge and tiny rhythms. The spirals of creative fire soared and danced...\n\nThe moon emerged, sailing, sailing, as though no wind could stop her lovely flight. She fled the stars themselves. The clouds turned round to look at her, as, clearing their hair, she passed onwards with her radiant smile. Heading into the bare bosom of the sky, she blazed in her triumph of loneliness, her icy prow set towards some far, unknown, unearthly goal, which is the reason why men love her so.\n\n\"And my theories\u2014our theories?\" he murmured into the ear against his lips. \"The way that has been shown to us?\"\n\nBoth arms were now about her, and he held her so close that her words were but a warm perfumed breath to cover his face as her hair was covering his eyes.\n\n\"We shall follow it together... dear.\"\n\nIt was as if some angel, stepping down the sky, came near enough to fold them in a great rhythm of fire and wind. Bright, mighty faces in a crowd rose round them, and, through her hair, he saw familiar visible outlines of all the common things melt out, showing for one gorgeous instant the flashings and whirlings that was the workshop of Their deathless service.\n\n\"Look! Look!\" he whispered, pointing from the darkening earth to the stars and sailing moon above. \"They're everywhere! You can see them too? The bright messengers?\"\n\nFor answer, she came yet closer against his side, holding him more tightly to her, lifting her lips to his, so that in her very eyes he saw the marvellous fire shine and flash. \"We shall build together, you and I,\" she whispered very softly, \"and with Their help, the sweetest and most perfect body ever known...\"\n\nBut behind the magic of her words and voice, behind their meaning and the steadying, understanding sympathy he easily divined, he heard another sound, familiar as a dream, yet fraught with some haunting significance he already was forgetting\u2014almost had entirely forgotten. From the centre of the earth it seemed to rise, a magnificent, deep, stupendous rhythm that created, at least, the impression of a voice:\n\n\"I weave and I weave...!\" rolled forth, as though the planet uttered. He stood waiting, transfixed, listening intently.\n\n\"You heard?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Everything,\" she said, tight in his arms at once again, her lips on his. \"The very beating of your heart\u2014your inmost thoughts as well.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nCertain houses, like certain persons, manage somehow to proclaim at once their character for evil. In the case of the latter, no particular feature need betray them; they may boast an open countenance and an ingenuous smile; and yet a little of their company leaves the unalterable conviction that there is something radically amiss with their being: that they are evil. Willy nilly, they seem to communicate an atmosphere of secret and wicked thoughts which makes those in their immediate neighbourhood shrink from them as from a thing diseased.\n\nAnd, perhaps, with houses the same principle is operative, and it is the aroma of evil deeds committed under a particular roof, long after the actual doers have passed away, that makes the gooseflesh come and the hair rise. Something of the original passion of the evil-doer, and of the horror felt by his victim, enters the heart of the innocent watcher, and he becomes suddenly conscious of tingling nerves, creeping skin, and a chilling of the blood. He is terror-stricken without apparent cause.\n\nThere was manifestly nothing in the external appearance of this particular house to bear out the tales of the horror that was said to reign within. It was neither lonely nor unkempt. It stood, crowded into a corner of the square, and looked exactly like the houses on either side of it. It had the same number of windows as its neighbours; the same balcony overlooking the gardens; the same white steps leading up to the heavy black front door; and, in the rear, there was the same narrow strip of green, with neat box borders, running up to the wall that divided it from the backs of the adjoining houses. Apparently, too, the number of chimney pots on the roof was the same; the breadth and angle of the eaves; and even the height of the dirty area railings.\n\nAnd yet this house in the square, that seemed precisely similar to its fifty ugly neighbours, was as a matter of fact entirely different\u2014horribly different.\n\nWherein lay this marked, invisible difference is impossible to say. It cannot be ascribed wholly to the imagination, because persons who had spent some time in the house, knowing nothing of the facts, had declared positively that certain rooms were so disagreeable they would rather die than enter them again, and that the atmosphere of the whole house produced in them symptoms of a genuine terror; while the series of innocent tenants who had tried to live in it and been forced to decamp at the shortest possible notice, was indeed little less than a scandal in the town.\n\nWhen Shorthouse arrived to pay a \"week-end\" visit to his Aunt Julia in her little house on the sea-front at the other end of the town, he found her charged to the brim with mystery and excitement. He had only received her telegram that morning, and he had come anticipating boredom; but the moment he touched her hand and kissed her apple-skin wrinkled cheek, he caught the first wave of her electrical condition. The impression deepened when he learned that there were to be no other visitors, and that he had been telegraphed for with a very special object.\n\nSomething was in the wind, and the \"something\" would doubtless bear fruit; for this elderly spinster aunt, with a mania for psychical research, had brains as well as will power, and by hook or by crook she usually managed to accomplish her ends. The revelation was made soon after tea, when she sidled close up to him as they paced slowly along the sea-front in the dusk.\n\n\"I've got the keys,\" she announced in a delighted, yet half awesome voice. \"Got them till Monday!\"\n\n\"The keys of the bathing-machine, or\u2014?\" he asked innocently, looking from the sea to the town. Nothing brought her so quickly to the point as feigning stupidity.\n\n\"Neither,\" she whispered. \"I've got the keys of the haunted house in the square\u2014and I'm going there to-night.\"\n\nShorthouse was conscious of the slightest possible tremor down his back. He dropped his teasing tone. Something in her voice and manner thrilled him. She was in earnest.\n\n\"But you can't go alone\u2014\" he began.\n\n\"That's why I wired for you,\" she said with decision.\n\nHe turned to look at her. The ugly, lined, enigmatical face was alive with excitement. There was the glow of genuine enthusiasm round it like a halo. The eyes shone. He caught another wave of her excitement, and a second tremor, more marked than the first, accompanied it.\n\n\"Thanks, Aunt Julia,\" he said politely; \"thanks awfully.\"\n\n\"I should not dare to go quite alone,\" she went on, raising her voice; \"but with you I should enjoy it immensely. You're afraid of nothing, I know.\"\n\n\"Thanks so much,\" he said again. \"Er\u2014is anything likely to happen?\"\n\n\"A great deal has happened,\" she whispered, \"though it's been most cleverly hushed up. Three tenants have come and gone in the last few months, and the house is said to be empty for good now.\"\n\nIn spite of himself Shorthouse became interested. His aunt was so very much in earnest.\n\n\"The house is very old indeed,\" she went on, \"and the story\u2014an unpleasant one\u2014dates a long way back. It has to do with a murder committed by a jealous stableman who had some affair with a servant in the house. One night he managed to secrete himself in the cellar, and when everyone was asleep, he crept upstairs to the servants' quarters, chased the girl down to the next landing, and before anyone could come to the rescue threw her bodily over the banisters into the hall below.\"\n\n\"And the stableman\u2014?\"\n\n\"Was caught, I believe, and hanged for murder; but it all happened a century ago, and I've not been able to get more details of the story.\"\n\nShorthouse now felt his interest thoroughly aroused; but, though he was not particularly nervous for himself, he hesitated a little on his aunt's account.\n\n\"On one condition,\" he said at length.\n\n\"Nothing will prevent my going,\" she said firmly; \"but I may as well hear your condition.\"\n\n\"That you guarantee your power of self-control if anything really horrible happens. I mean\u2014that you are sure you won't get too frightened.\"\n\n\"Jim,\" she said scornfully, \"I'm not young, I know, nor are my nerves; but with you I should be afraid of nothing in the world!\"\n\nThis, of course, settled it, for Shorthouse had no pretensions to being other than a very ordinary young man, and an appeal to his vanity was irresistible. He agreed to go.\n\nInstinctively, by a sort of sub-conscious preparation, he kept himself and his forces well in hand the whole evening, compelling an accumulative reserve of control by that nameless inward process of gradually putting all the emotions away and turning the key upon them\u2014a process difficult to describe, but wonderfully effective, as all men who have lived through severe trials of the inner man well understand. Later, it stood him in good stead.\n\nBut it was not until half-past ten, when they stood in the hall, well in the glare of friendly lamps and still surrounded by comforting human influences, that he had to make the first call upon this store of collected strength. For, once the door was closed, and he saw the deserted silent street stretching away white in the moonlight before them, it came to him clearly that the real test that night would be in dealing with two fears instead of one. He would have to carry his aunt's fear as well as his own. And, as he glanced down at her sphinx-like countenance and realised that it might assume no pleasant aspect in a rush of real terror, he felt satisfied with only one thing in the whole adventure\u2014that he had confidence in his own will and power to stand against any shock that might come.\n\nSlowly they walked along the empty streets of the town; a bright autumn moon silvered the roofs, casting deep shadows; there was no breath of wind; and the trees in the formal gardens by the sea-front watched them silently as they passed along. To his aunt's occasional remarks Shorthouse made no reply, realising that she was simply surrounding herself with mental buffers\u2014saying ordinary things to prevent herself thinking of extra-ordinary things. Few windows showed lights, and from scarcely a single chimney came smoke or sparks. Shorthouse had already begun to notice everything, even the smallest details. Presently they stopped at the street corner and looked up at the name on the side of the house full in the moonlight, and with one accord, but without remark, turned into the square and crossed over to the side of it that lay in shadow.\n\n\"The number of the house is thirteen,\" whispered a voice at his side; and neither of them made the obvious reference, but passed across the broad sheet of moonlight and began to march up the pavement in silence.\n\nIt was about half-way up the square that Shorthouse felt an arm slipped quietly but significantly into his own, and knew then that their adventure had begun in earnest, and that his companion was already yielding imperceptibly to the influences against them. She needed support.\n\nA few minutes later they stopped before a tall, narrow house that rose before them into the night, ugly in shape and painted a dingy white. Shutterless windows, without blinds, stared down upon them, shining here and there in the moonlight. There were weather streaks in the wall and cracks in the paint, and the balcony bulged out from the first floor a little unnaturally. But, beyond this generally forlorn appearance of an unoccupied house, there was nothing at first sight to single out this particular mansion for the evil character it had most certainly acquired.\n\nTaking a look over their shoulders to make sure they had not been followed, they went boldly up the steps and stood against the huge black door that fronted them forbiddingly. But the first wave of nervousness was now upon them, and Shorthouse fumbled a long time with the key before he could fit it into the lock at all. For a moment, if truth were told, they both hoped it would not open, for they were a prey to various unpleasant emotions as they stood there on the threshold of their ghostly adventure. Shorthouse, shuffling with the key and hampered by the steady weight on his arm, certainly felt the solemnity of the moment. It was as if the whole world\u2014for all experience seemed at that instant concentrated in his own consciousness\u2014were listening to the grating noise of that key. A stray puff of wind wandering down the empty street woke a momentary rustling in the trees behind them, but otherwise this rattling of the key was the only sound audible; and at last it turned in the lock and the heavy door swung open and revealed a yawning gulf of darkness beyond.\n\nWith a last glance at the moonlit square, they passed quickly in, and the door slammed behind them with a roar that echoed prodigiously through empty halls and passages. But, instantly, with the echoes, another sound made itself heard, and Aunt Julia leaned suddenly so heavily upon him that he had to take a step backwards to save himself from falling.\n\nA man had coughed close beside them\u2014so close that it seemed they must have been actually by his side in the darkness.\n\nWith the possibility of practical jokes in his mind, Shorthouse at once swung his heavy stick in the direction of the sound; but it met nothing more solid than air. He heard his aunt give a little gasp beside him.\n\n\"There's someone here,\" she whispered; \"I heard him.\"\n\n\"Be quiet!\" he said sternly. \"It was nothing but the noise of the front door.\"\n\n\"Oh! get a light\u2014quick!\" she added, as her nephew, fumbling with a box of matches, opened it upside down and let them all fall with a rattle on to the stone floor.\n\nThe sound, however, was not repeated; and there was no evidence of retreating footsteps. In another minute they had a candle burning, using an empty end of a cigar case as a holder; and when the first flare had died down he held the impromptu lamp aloft and surveyed the scene. And it was dreary enough in all conscience, for there is nothing more desolate in all the abodes of men than an unfurnished house dimly lit, silent, and forsaken, and yet tenanted by rumour with the memories of evil and violent histories.\n\nThey were standing in a wide hall-way; on their left was the open door of a spacious dining-room, and in front the hall ran, ever narrowing, into a long, dark passage that led apparently to the top of the kitchen stairs. The broad uncarpeted staircase rose in a sweep before them, everywhere draped in shadows, except for a single spot about half-way up where the moonlight came in through the window and fell on a bright patch on the boards. This shaft of light shed a faint radiance above and below it, lending to the objects within its reach a misty outline that was infinitely more suggestive and ghostly than complete darkness. Filtered moonlight always seems to paint faces on the surrounding gloom, and as Shorthouse peered up into the well of darkness and thought of the countless empty rooms and passages in the upper part of the old house, he caught himself longing again for the safety of the moonlit square, or the cosy, bright drawing-room they had left an hour before. Then realising that these thoughts were dangerous, he thrust them away again and summoned all his energy for concentration on the present.\n\n\"Aunt Julia,\" he said aloud, severely, \"we must now go through the house from top to bottom and make a thorough search.\"\n\nThe echoes of his voice died away slowly all over the building, and in the intense silence that followed he turned to look at her. In the candle-light he saw that her face was already ghastly pale; but she dropped his arm for a moment and said in a whisper, stepping close in front of him\u2014\n\n\"I agree. We must be sure there's no one hiding. That's the first thing.\"\n\nShe spoke with evident effort, and he looked at her with admiration.\n\n\"You feel quite sure of yourself? It's not too late\u2014\"\n\n\"I think so,\" she whispered, her eyes shifting nervously toward the shadows behind. \"Quite sure, only one thing\u2014\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You must never leave me alone for an instant.\"\n\n\"As long as you understand that any sound or appearance must be investigated at once, for to hesitate means to admit fear. That is fatal.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" she said, a little shakily, after a moment's hesitation. \"I'll try\u2014\"\n\nArm in arm, Shorthouse holding the dripping candle and the stick, while his aunt carried the cloak over her shoulders, figures of utter comedy to all but themselves, they began a systematic search.\n\nStealthily, walking on tip-toe and shading the candle lest it should betray their presence through the shutterless windows, they went first into the big dining-room. There was not a stick of furniture to be seen. Bare walls, ugly mantel-pieces and empty grates stared at them. Everything, they felt, resented their intrusion, watching them, as it were, with veiled eyes; whispers followed them; shadows flitted noiselessly to right and left; something seemed ever at their back, watching, waiting an opportunity to do them injury. There was the inevitable sense that operations which went on when the room was empty had been temporarily suspended till they were well out of the way again. The whole dark interior of the old building seemed to become a malignant Presence that rose up, warning them to desist and mind their own business; every moment the strain on the nerves increased.\n\nOut of the gloomy dining-room they passed through large folding doors into a sort of library or smoking-room, wrapt equally in silence, darkness, and dust; and from this they regained the hall near the top of the back stairs.\n\nHere a pitch black tunnel opened before them into the lower regions, and\u2014it must be confessed\u2014they hesitated. But only for a minute. With the worst of the night still to come it was essential to turn from nothing. Aunt Julia stumbled at the top step of the dark descent, ill lit by the flickering candle, and even Shorthouse felt at least half the decision go out of his legs.\n\n\"Come on!\" he said peremptorily, and his voice ran on and lost itself in the dark, empty spaces below.\n\n\"I'm coming,\" she faltered, catching his arm with unnecessary violence.\n\nThey went a little unsteadily down the stone steps, a cold, damp air meeting them in the face, close and mal-odorous. The kitchen, into which the stairs led along a narrow passage, was large, with a lofty ceiling. Several doors opened out of it\u2014some into cupboards with empty jars still standing on the shelves, and others into horrible little ghostly back offices, each colder and less inviting than the last. Black beetles scurried over the floor, and once, when they knocked against a deal table standing in a corner, something about the size of a cat jumped down with a rush and fled, scampering across the stone floor into the darkness. Everywhere there was a sense of recent occupation, an impression of sadness and gloom.\n\nLeaving the main kitchen, they next went towards the scullery. The door was standing ajar, and as they pushed it open to its full extent Aunt Julia uttered a piercing scream, which she instantly tried to stifle by placing her hand over her mouth. For a second Shorthouse stood stock-still, catching his breath. He felt as if his spine had suddenly become hollow and someone had filled it with particles of ice.\n\nFacing them, directly in their way between the doorposts, stood the figure of a woman. She had dishevelled hair and wildly staring eyes, and her face was terrified and white as death.\n\nShe stood there motionless for the space of a single second. Then the candle flickered and she was gone\u2014gone utterly\u2014and the door framed nothing but empty darkness.\n\n\"Only the beastly jumping candle-light,\" he said quickly, in a voice that sounded like someone else's and was only half under control. \"Come on, aunt. There's nothing there.\"\n\nHe dragged her forward. With a clattering of feet and a great appearance of boldness they went on, but over his body the skin moved as if crawling ants covered it, and he knew by the weight on his arm that he was supplying the force of locomotion for two. The scullery was cold, bare, and empty; more like a large prison cell than anything else. They went round it, tried the door into the yard, and the windows, but found them all fastened securely. His aunt moved beside him like a person in a dream. Her eyes were tightly shut, and she seemed merely to follow the pressure of his arm. Her courage filled him with amazement. At the same time he noticed that a certain odd change had come over her face, a change which somehow evaded his power of analysis.\n\n\"There's nothing here, aunty,\" he repeated aloud quickly. \"Let's go upstairs and see the rest of the house. Then we'll choose a room to wait up in.\"\n\nShe followed him obediently, keeping close to his side, and they locked the kitchen door behind them. It was a relief to get up again. In the hall there was more light than before, for the moon had travelled a little further down the stairs. Cautiously they began to go up into the dark vault of the upper house, the boards creaking under their weight.\n\nOn the first floor they found the large double drawing-rooms, a search of which revealed nothing. Here also was no sign of furniture or recent occupancy; nothing but dust and neglect and shadows. They opened the big folding doors between front and back drawing-rooms and then came out again to the landing and went on upstairs.\n\nThey had not gone up more than a dozen steps when they both simultaneously stopped to listen, looking into each other's eyes with a new apprehension across the flickering candle flame. From the room they had left hardly ten seconds before came the sound of doors quietly closing. It was beyond all question; they heard the booming noise that accompanies the shutting of heavy doors, followed by the sharp catching of the latch.\n\n\"We must go back and see,\" said Shorthouse briefly, in a low tone, and turning to go downstairs again.\n\nSomehow she managed to drag after him, her feet catching in her dress, her face livid.\n\nWhen they entered the front drawing-room it was plain that the folding doors had been closed\u2014half a minute before. Without hesitation Shorthouse opened them. He almost expected to see someone facing him in the back room; but only darkness and cold air met him. They went through both rooms, finding nothing unusual. They tried in every way to make the doors close of themselves, but there was not wind enough even to set the candle flame flickering. The doors would not move without strong pressure. All was silent as the grave. Undeniably the rooms were utterly empty, and the house utterly still.\n\n\"It's beginning,\" whispered a voice at his elbow which he hardly recognised as his aunt's.\n\nHe nodded acquiescence, taking out his watch to note the time. It was fifteen minutes before midnight; he made the entry of exactly what had occurred in his notebook, setting the candle in its case upon the floor in order to do so. It took a moment or two to balance it safely against the wall.\n\nAunt Julia always declared that at this moment she was not actually watching him, but had turned her head towards the inner room, where she fancied she heard something moving; but, at any rate, both positively agreed that there came a sound of rushing feet, heavy and very swift\u2014and the next instant the candle was out!\n\nBut to Shorthouse himself had come more than this, and he has always thanked his fortunate stars that it came to him alone and not to his aunt too. For, as he rose from the stooping position of balancing the candle, and before it was actually extinguished, a face thrust itself forward so close to his own that he could almost have touched it with his lips. It was a face working with passion; a man's face, dark, with thick features, and angry, savage eyes. It belonged to a common man, and it was evil in its ordinary normal expression, no doubt, but as he saw it, alive with intense, aggressive emotion, it was a malignant and terrible human countenance.\n\nThere was no movement of the air; nothing but the sound of rushing feet\u2014stockinged or muffled feet; the apparition of the face; and the almost simultaneous extinguishing of the candle.\n\nIn spite of himself, Shorthouse uttered a little cry, nearly losing his balance as his aunt clung to him with her whole weight in one moment of real, uncontrollable terror. She made no sound, but simply seized him bodily. Fortunately, however, she had seen nothing, but had only heard the rushing feet, for her control returned almost at once, and he was able to disentangle himself and strike a match.\n\nThe shadows ran away on all sides before the glare, and his aunt stooped down and groped for the cigar case with the precious candle. Then they discovered that the candle had not been blown out at all; it had been crushed out. The wick was pressed down into the wax, which was flattened as if by some smooth, heavy instrument.\n\nHow his companion so quickly overcame her terror, Shorthouse never properly understood; but his admiration for her self-control increased tenfold, and at the same time served to feed his own dying flame\u2014for which he was undeniably grateful. Equally inexplicable to him was the evidence of physical force they had just witnessed. He at once suppressed the memory of stories he had heard of \"physical mediums\" and their dangerous phenomena; for if these were true, and either his aunt or himself was unwittingly a physical medium, it meant that they were simply aiding to focus the forces of a haunted house already charged to the brim. It was like walking with unprotected lamps among uncovered stores of gun-powder.\n\nSo, with as little reflection as possible, he simply relit the candle and went up to the next floor. The arm in his trembled, it is true, and his own tread was often uncertain, but they went on with thoroughness, and after a search revealing nothing they climbed the last flight of stairs to the top floor of all.\n\nHere they found a perfect nest of small servants' rooms, with broken pieces of furniture, dirty cane-bottomed chairs, chests of drawers, cracked mirrors, and decrepit bedsteads. The rooms had low sloping ceilings already hung here and there with cobwebs, small windows, and badly plastered walls\u2014a depressing and dismal region which they were glad to leave behind.\n\nIt was on the stroke of midnight when they entered a small room on the third floor, close to the top of the stairs, and arranged to make themselves comfortable for the remainder of their adventure. It was absolutely bare, and was said to be the room\u2014then used as a clothes closet\u2014into which the infuriated groom had chased his victim and finally caught her. Outside, across the narrow landing, began the stairs leading up to the floor above, and the servants' quarters where they had just searched.\n\nIn spite of the chilliness of the night there was something in the air of this room that cried for an open window. But there was more than this. Shorthouse could only describe it by saying that he felt less master of himself here than in any other part of the house. There was something that acted directly on the nerves, tiring the resolution, enfeebling the will. He was conscious of this result before he had been in the room five minutes, and it was in the short time they stayed there that he suffered the wholesale depletion of his vital forces, which was, for himself, the chief horror of the whole experience.\n\nThey put the candle on the floor of the cupboard, leaving the door a few inches ajar, so that there was no glare to confuse the eyes, and no shadow to shift about on walls and ceiling. Then they spread the cloak on the floor and sat down to wait, with their backs against the wall.\n\nShorthouse was within two feet of the door on to the landing; his position commanded a good view of the main staircase leading down into the darkness, and also of the beginning of the servants' stairs going to the floor above; the heavy stick lay beside him within easy reach.\n\nThe moon was now high above the house. Through the open window they could see the comforting stars like friendly eyes watching in the sky. One by one the clocks of the town struck midnight, and when the sounds died away the deep silence of a windless night fell again over everything. Only the boom of the sea, far away and lugubrious, filled the air with hollow murmurs.\n\nInside the house the silence became awful; awful, he thought, because any minute now it might be broken by sounds portending terror. The strain of waiting told more and more severely on the nerves; they talked in whispers when they talked at all, for their voices aloud sounded queer and unnatural. A chilliness, not altogether due to the night air, invaded the room, and made them cold. The influences against them, whatever these might be, were slowly robbing them of self-confidence, and the power of decisive action; their forces were on the wane, and the possibility of real fear took on a new and terrible meaning. He began to tremble for the elderly woman by his side, whose pluck could hardly save her beyond a certain extent.\n\nHe heard the blood singing in his veins. It sometimes seemed so loud that he fancied it prevented his hearing properly certain other sounds that were beginning very faintly to make themselves audible in the depths of the house. Every time he fastened his attention on these sounds, they instantly ceased. They certainly came no nearer. Yet he could not rid himself of the idea that movement was going on somewhere in the lower regions of the house. The drawing-room floor, where the doors had been so strangely closed, seemed too near; the sounds were further off than that. He thought of the great kitchen, with the scurrying black-beetles, and of the dismal little scullery; but, somehow or other, they did not seem to come from there either. Surely they were not outside the house!\n\nThen, suddenly, the truth flashed into his mind, and for the space of a minute he felt as if his blood had stopped flowing and turned to ice.\n\nThe sounds were not downstairs at all; they were upstairs\u2014upstairs, somewhere among those horrid gloomy little servants' rooms with their bits of broken furniture, low ceilings, and cramped windows\u2014upstairs where the victim had first been disturbed and stalked to her death.\n\nAnd the moment he discovered where the sounds were, he began to hear them more clearly. It was the sound of feet, moving stealthily along the passage overhead, in and out among the rooms, and past the furniture.\n\nHe turned quickly to steal a glance at the motionless figure seated beside him, to note whether she had shared his discovery. The faint candle-light coming through the crack in the cupboard door, threw her strongly-marked face into vivid relief against the white of the wall. But it was something else that made him catch his breath and stare again. An extraordinary something had come into her face and seemed to spread over her features like a mask; it smoothed out the deep lines and drew the skin everywhere a little tighter so that the wrinkles disappeared; it brought into the face\u2014with the sole exception of the old eyes\u2014an appearance of youth and almost of childhood.\n\nHe stared in speechless amazement\u2014amazement that was dangerously near to horror. It was his aunt's face indeed, but it was her face of forty years ago, the vacant innocent face of a girl. He had heard stories of that strange effect of terror which could wipe a human countenance clean of other emotions, obliterating all previous expressions; but he had never realised that it could be literally true, or could mean anything so simply horrible as what he now saw. For the dreadful signature of overmastering fear was written plainly in that utter vacancy of the girlish face beside him; and when, feeling his intense gaze, she turned to look at him, he instinctively closed his eyes tightly to shut out the sight.\n\nYet, when he turned a minute later, his feelings well in hand, he saw to his intense relief another expression; his aunt was smiling, and though the face was deathly white, the awful veil had lifted and the normal look was returning.\n\n\"Anything wrong?\" was all he could think of to say at the moment. And the answer was eloquent, coming from such a woman.\n\n\"I feel cold\u2014and a little frightened,\" she whispered.\n\nHe offered to close the window, but she seized hold of him and begged him not to leave her side even for an instant.\n\n\"It's upstairs, I know,\" she whispered, with an odd half laugh; \"but I can't possibly go up.\"\n\nBut Shorthouse thought otherwise, knowing that in action lay their best hope of self-control.\n\nHe took the brandy flask and poured out a glass of neat spirit, stiff enough to help anybody over anything. She swallowed it with a little shiver. His only idea now was to get out of the house before her collapse became inevitable; but this could not safely be done by turning tail and running from the enemy. Inaction was no longer possible; every minute he was growing less master of himself, and desperate, aggressive measures were imperative without further delay. Moreover, the action must be taken towards the enemy, not away from it; the climax, if necessary and unavoidable, would have to be faced boldly. He could do it now; but in ten minutes he might not have the force left to act for himself, much less for both!\n\nUpstairs, the sounds were meanwhile becoming louder and closer, accompanied by occasional creaking of the boards. Someone was moving stealthily about, stumbling now and then awkwardly against the furniture.\n\nWaiting a few moments to allow the tremendous dose of spirits to produce its effect, and knowing this would last but a short time under the circumstances, Shorthouse then quietly got on his feet, saying in a determined voice\u2014\n\n\"Now, Aunt Julia, we'll go upstairs and find out what all this noise is about. You must come too. It's what we agreed.\"\n\nHe picked up his stick and went to the cupboard for the candle. A limp form rose shakily beside him breathing hard, and he heard a voice say very faintly something about being \"ready to come.\" The woman's courage amazed him; it was so much greater than his own; and, as they advanced, holding aloft the dripping candle, some subtle force exhaled from this trembling, white-faced old woman at his side that was the true source of his inspiration. It held something really great that shamed him and gave him the support without which he would have proved far less equal to the occasion.\n\nThey crossed the dark landing, avoiding with their eyes the deep black space over the banisters. Then they began to mount the narrow staircase to meet the sounds which, minute by minute, grew louder and nearer. About half-way up the stairs Aunt Julia stumbled and Shorthouse turned to catch her by the arm, and just at that moment there came a terrific crash in the servants' corridor overhead. It was instantly followed by a shrill, agonised scream that was a cry of terror and a cry for help melted into one.\n\nBefore they could move aside, or go down a single step, someone came rushing along the passage overhead, blundering horribly, racing madly, at full speed, three steps at a time, down the very staircase where they stood. The steps were light and uncertain; but close behind them sounded the heavier tread of another person, and the staircase seemed to shake.\n\nShorthouse and his companion just had time to flatten themselves against the wall when the jumble of flying steps was upon them, and two persons, with the slightest possible interval between them, dashed past at full speed. It was a perfect whirlwind of sound breaking in upon the midnight silence of the empty building.\n\nThe two runners, pursuer and pursued, had passed clean through them where they stood, and already with a thud the boards below had received first one, then the other. Yet they had seen absolutely nothing\u2014not a hand, or arm, or face, or even a shred of flying clothing.\n\nThere came a second's pause. Then the first one, the lighter of the two, obviously the pursued one, ran with uncertain footsteps into the little room which Shorthouse and his aunt had just left. The heavier one followed. There was a sound of scuffling, gasping, and smothered screaming; and then out on to the landing came the step\u2014of a single person treading weightily.\n\nA dead silence followed for the space of half a minute, and then was heard a rushing sound through the air. It was followed by a dull, crashing thud in the depths of the house below\u2014on the stone floor of the hall.\n\nUtter silence reigned after. Nothing moved. The flame of the candle was steady. It had been steady the whole time, and the air had been undisturbed by any movement whatsoever. Palsied with terror, Aunt Julia, without waiting for her companion, began fumbling her way downstairs; she was crying gently to herself, and when Shorthouse put his arm round her and half carried her he felt that she was trembling like a leaf. He went into the little room and picked up the cloak from the floor, and, arm in arm, walking very slowly, without speaking a word or looking once behind them, they marched down the three flights into the hall.\n\nIn the hall they saw nothing, but the whole way down the stairs they were conscious that someone followed them; step by step; when they went faster IT was left behind, and when they went more slowly IT caught them up. But never once did they look behind to see; and at each turning of the staircase they lowered their eyes for fear of the following horror they might see upon the stairs above.\n\nWith trembling hands Shorthouse opened the front door, and they walked out into the moonlight and drew a deep breath of the cool night air blowing in from the sea.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Haunted Island by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nThe following events occurred on a small island of isolated position in a large Canadian lake, to whose cool waters the inhabitants of Montreal and Toronto flee for rest and recreation in the hot months. It is only to be regretted that events of such peculiar interest to the genuine student of the psychical should be entirely uncorroborated. Such unfortunately, however, is the case.\n\nOur own party of nearly twenty had returned to Montreal that very day, and I was left in solitary possession for a week or two longer, in order to accomplish some important \"reading\" for the law which I had foolishly neglected during the summer.\n\nIt was late in September, and the big trout and maskinonge were stirring themselves in the depths of the lake, and beginning slowly to move up to the surface waters as the north winds and early frosts lowered their temperature. Already the maples were crimson and gold, and the wild laughter of the loons echoed in sheltered bays that never knew their strange cry in the summer.\n\nWith a whole island to oneself, a two-storey cottage, a canoe, and only the chipmunks, and the farmer's weekly visit with eggs and bread, to disturb one, the opportunities for hard reading might be very great. It all depends!\n\nThe rest of the party had gone off with many warnings to beware of Indians, and not to stay late enough to be the victim of a frost that thinks nothing of forty below zero. After they had gone, the loneliness of the situation made itself unpleasantly felt. There were no other islands within six or seven miles, and though the mainland forests lay a couple of miles behind me, they stretched for a very great distance unbroken by any signs of human habitation. But, though the island was completely deserted and silent, the rocks and trees that had echoed human laughter and voices almost every hour of the day for two months could not fail to retain some memories of it all; and I was not surprised to fancy I heard a shout or a cry as I passed from rock to rock, and more than once to imagine that I heard my own name called aloud.\n\nIn the cottage there were six tiny little bedrooms divided from one another by plain unvarnished partitions of pine. A wooden bedstead, a mattress, and a chair, stood in each room, but I only found two mirrors, and one of these was broken.\n\nThe boards creaked a good deal as I moved about, and the signs of occupation were so recent that I could hardly believe I was alone. I half expected to find someone left behind, still trying to crowd into a box more than it would hold. The door of one room was stiff, and refused for a moment to open, and it required very little persuasion to imagine someone was holding the handle on the inside, and that when it opened I should meet a pair of human eyes.\n\nA thorough search of the floor led me to select as my own sleeping quarters a little room with a diminutive balcony over the verandah roof. The room was very small, but the bed was large, and had the best mattress of them all. It was situated directly over the sitting-room where I should live and do my \"reading,\" and the miniature window looked out to the rising sun. With the exception of a narrow path which led from the front door and verandah through the trees to the boat-landing, the island was densely covered with maples, hemlocks, and cedars. The trees gathered in round the cottage so closely that the slightest wind made the branches scrape the roof and tap the wooden walls. A few moments after sunset the darkness became impenetrable, and ten yards beyond the glare of the lamps that shone through the sitting-room windows\u2014of which there were four\u2014you could not see an inch before your nose, nor move a step without running up against a tree.\n\nThe rest of that day I spent moving my belongings from my tent to the sitting-room, taking stock of the contents of the larder, and chopping enough wood for the stove to last me for a week. After that, just before sunset, I went round the island a couple of times in my canoe for precaution's sake. I had never dreamed of doing this before, but when a man is alone he does things that never occur to him when he is one of a large party.\n\nHow lonely the island seemed when I landed again! The sun was down, and twilight is unknown in these northern regions. The darkness comes up at once. The canoe safely pulled up and turned over on her face, I groped my way up the little narrow pathway to the verandah. The six lamps were soon burning merrily in the front room; but in the kitchen, where I \"dined,\" the shadows were so gloomy, and the lamplight was so inadequate, that the stars could be seen peeping through the cracks between the rafters.\n\nI turned in early that night. Though it was calm and there was no wind, the creaking of my bedstead and the musical gurgle of the water over the rocks below were not the only sounds that reached my ears. As I lay awake, the appalling emptiness of the house grew upon me. The corridors and vacant rooms seemed to echo innumerable footsteps, shufflings, the rustle of skirts, and a constant undertone of whispering. When sleep at length overtook me, the breathings and noises, however, passed gently to mingle with the voices of my dreams.\n\nA week passed by, and the \"reading\" progressed favourably. On the tenth day of my solitude, a strange thing happened. I awoke after a good night's sleep to find myself possessed with a marked repugnance for my room. The air seemed to stifle me. The more I tried to define the cause of this dislike, the more unreasonable it appeared. There was something about the room that made me afraid. Absurd as it seems, this feeling clung to me obstinately while dressing, and more than once I caught myself shivering, and conscious of an inclination to get out of the room as quickly as possible. The more I tried to laugh it away, the more real it became; and when at last I was dressed, and went out into the passage, and downstairs into the kitchen, it was with feelings of relief, such as I might imagine would accompany one's escape from the presence of a dangerous contagious disease.\n\nWhile cooking my breakfast, I carefully recalled every night spent in the room, in the hope that I might in some way connect the dislike I now felt with some disagreeable incident that had occurred in it. But the only thing I could recall was one stormy night when I suddenly awoke and heard the boards creaking so loudly in the corridor that I was convinced there were people in the house. So certain was I of this, that I had descended the stairs, gun in hand, only to find the doors and windows securely fastened, and the mice and black-beetles in sole possession of the floor. This was certainly not sufficient to account for the strength of my feelings.\n\nThe morning hours I spent in steady reading; and when I broke off in the middle of the day for a swim and luncheon, I was very much surprised, if not a little alarmed, to find that my dislike for the room had, if anything, grown stronger. Going upstairs to get a book, I experienced the most marked aversion to entering the room, and while within I was conscious all the time of an uncomfortable feeling that was half uneasiness and half apprehension. The result of it was that, instead of reading, I spent the afternoon on the water paddling and fishing, and when I got home about sundown, brought with me half a dozen delicious black bass for the supper-table and the larder.\n\nAs sleep was an important matter to me at this time, I had decided that if my aversion to the room was so strongly marked on my return as it had been before, I would move my bed down into the sitting-room, and sleep there. This was, I argued, in no sense a concession to an absurd and fanciful fear, but simply a precaution to ensure a good night's sleep. A bad night involved the loss of the next day's reading,\u2014a loss I was not prepared to incur.\n\nI accordingly moved my bed downstairs into a corner of the sitting-room facing the door, and was moreover uncommonly glad when the operation was completed, and the door of the bedroom closed finally upon the shadows, the silence, and the strange fear that shared the room with them.\n\nThe croaking stroke of the kitchen clock sounded the hour of eight as I finished washing up my few dishes, and closing the kitchen door behind me, passed into the front room. All the lamps were lit, and their reflectors, which I had polished up during the day, threw a blaze of light into the room.\n\nOutside the night was still and warm. Not a breath of air was stirring; the waves were silent, the trees motionless, and heavy clouds hung like an oppressive curtain over the heavens. The darkness seemed to have rolled up with unusual swiftness, and not the faintest glow of colour remained to show where the sun had set. There was present in the atmosphere that ominous and overwhelming silence which so often precedes the most violent storms.\n\nI sat down to my books with my brain unusually clear, and in my heart the pleasant satisfaction of knowing that five black bass were lying in the ice-house, and that to-morrow morning the old farmer would arrive with fresh bread and eggs. I was soon absorbed in my books.\n\nAs the night wore on the silence deepened. Even the chipmunks were still; and the boards of the floors and walls ceased creaking. I read on steadily till, from the gloomy shadows of the kitchen, came the hoarse sound of the clock striking nine. How loud the strokes sounded! They were like blows of a big hammer. I closed one book and opened another, feeling that I was just warming up to my work.\n\nThis, however, did not last long. I presently found that I was reading the same paragraphs over twice, simple paragraphs that did not require such effort. Then I noticed that my mind began to wander to other things, and the effort to recall my thoughts became harder with each digression. Concentration was growing momentarily more difficult. Presently I discovered that I had turned over two pages instead of one, and had not noticed my mistake until I was well down the page. This was becoming serious. What was the disturbing influence? It could not be physical fatigue. On the contrary, my mind was unusually alert, and in a more receptive condition than usual. I made a new and determined effort to read, and for a short time succeeded in giving my whole attention to my subject. But in a very few moments again I found myself leaning back in my chair, staring vacantly into space.\n\nSomething was evidently at work in my sub-consciousness. There was something I had neglected to do. Perhaps the kitchen door and windows were not fastened. I accordingly went to see, and found that they were! The fire perhaps needed attention. I went in to see, and found that it was all right! I looked at the lamps, went upstairs into every bedroom in turn, and then went round the house, and even into the ice-house. Nothing was wrong; everything was in its place. Yet something was wrong! The conviction grew stronger and stronger within me.\n\nWhen I at length settled down to my books again and tried to read, I became aware, for the first time, that the room seemed growing cold. Yet the day had been oppressively warm, and evening had brought no relief. The six big lamps, moreover, gave out heat enough to warm the room pleasantly. But a chilliness, that perhaps crept up from the lake, made itself felt in the room, and caused me to get up to close the glass door opening on to the verandah.\n\nFor a brief moment I stood looking out at the shaft of light that fell from the windows and shone some little distance down the pathway, and out for a few feet into the lake.\n\nAs I looked, I saw a canoe glide into the pathway of light, and immediately crossing it, pass out of sight again into the darkness. It was perhaps a hundred feet from the shore, and it moved swiftly.\n\nI was surprised that a canoe should pass the island at that time of night, for all the summer visitors from the other side of the lake had gone home weeks before, and the island was a long way out of any line of water traffic.\n\nMy reading from this moment did not make very good progress, for somehow the picture of that canoe, gliding so dimly and swiftly across the narrow track of light on the black waters, silhouetted itself against the background of my mind with singular vividness. It kept coming between my eyes and the printed page. The more I thought about it the more surprised I became. It was of larger build than any I had seen during the past summer months, and was more like the old Indian war canoes with the high curving bows and stern and wide beam. The more I tried to read, the less success attended my efforts; and finally I closed my books and went out on the verandah to walk up and down a bit, and shake the chilliness out of my bones.\n\nThe night was perfectly still, and as dark as imaginable. I stumbled down the path to the little landing wharf, where the water made the very faintest of gurgling under the timbers. The sound of a big tree falling in the mainland forest, far across the lake, stirred echoes in the heavy air, like the first guns of a distant night attack. No other sound disturbed the stillness that reigned supreme.\n\nAs I stood upon the wharf in the broad splash of light that followed me from the sitting-room windows, I saw another canoe cross the pathway of uncertain light upon the water, and disappear at once into the impenetrable gloom that lay beyond. This time I saw more distinctly than before. It was like the former canoe, a big birch-bark, with high-crested bows and stern and broad beam. It was paddled by two Indians, of whom the one in the stern\u2014the steerer\u2014appeared to be a very large man. I could see this very plainly; and though the second canoe was much nearer the island than the first, I judged that they were both on their way home to the Government Reservation, which was situated some fifteen miles away upon the mainland.\n\nI was wondering in my mind what could possibly bring any Indians down to this part of the lake at such an hour of the night, when a third canoe, of precisely similar build, and also occupied by two Indians, passed silently round the end of the wharf. This time the canoe was very much nearer shore, and it suddenly flashed into my mind that the three canoes were in reality one and the same, and that only one canoe was circling the island!\n\nThis was by no means a pleasant reflection, because, if it were the correct solution of the unusual appearance of the three canoes in this lonely part of the lake at so late an hour, the purpose of the two men could only reasonably be considered to be in some way connected with myself. I had never known of the Indians attempting any violence upon the settlers who shared the wild, inhospitable country with them; at the same time, it was not beyond the region of possibility to suppose... But then I did not care even to think of such hideous possibilities, and my imagination immediately sought relief in all manner of other solutions to the problem, which indeed came readily enough to my mind, but did not succeed in recommending themselves to my reason.\n\nMeanwhile, by a sort of instinct, I stepped back out of the bright light in which I had hitherto been standing, and waited in the deep shadow of a rock to see if the canoe would again make its appearance. Here I could see, without being seen, and the precaution seemed a wise one.\n\nAfter less than five minutes the canoe, as I had anticipated, made its fourth appearance. This time it was not twenty yards from the wharf, and I saw that the Indians meant to land. I recognised the two men as those who had passed before, and the steerer was certainly an immense fellow. It was unquestionably the same canoe. There could be no longer any doubt that for some purpose of their own the men had been going round and round the island for some time, waiting for an opportunity to land. I strained my eyes to follow them in the darkness, but the night had completely swallowed them up, and not even the faintest swish of the paddles reached my ears as the Indians plied their long and powerful strokes. The canoe would be round again in a few moments, and this time it was possible that the men might land. It was well to be prepared. I knew nothing of their intentions, and two to one (when the two are big Indians!) late at night on a lonely island was not exactly my idea of pleasant intercourse.\n\nIn a corner of the sitting-room, leaning up against the back wall, stood my Marlin rifle, with ten cartridges in the magazine and one lying snugly in the greased breech. There was just time to get up to the house and take up a position of defence in that corner. Without an instant's hesitation I ran up to the verandah, carefully picking my way among the trees, so as to avoid being seen in the light. Entering the room, I shut the door leading to the verandah, and as quickly as possible turned out every one of the six lamps. To be in a room so brilliantly lighted, where my every movement could be observed from outside, while I could see nothing but impenetrable darkness at every window, was by all laws of warfare an unnecessary concession to the enemy. And this enemy, if enemy it was to be, was far too wily and dangerous to be granted any such advantages.\n\nI stood in the corner of the room with my back against the wall, and my hand on the cold rifle-barrel. The table, covered with my books, lay between me and the door, but for the first few minutes after the lights were out the darkness was so intense that nothing could be discerned at all. Then, very gradually, the outline of the room became visible, and the framework of the windows began to shape itself dimly before my eyes.\n\nAfter a few minutes the door (its upper half of glass), and the two windows that looked out upon the front verandah, became specially distinct; and I was glad that this was so, because if the Indians came up to the house I should be able to see their approach, and gather something of their plans. Nor was I mistaken, for there presently came to my ears the peculiar hollow sound of a canoe landing and being carefully dragged up over the rocks. The paddles I distinctly heard being placed underneath, and the silence that ensued thereupon I rightly interpreted to mean that the Indians were stealthily approaching the house...\n\nWhile it would be absurd to claim that I was not alarmed\u2014even frightened\u2014at the gravity of the situation and its possible outcome, I speak the whole truth when I say that I was not overwhelmingly afraid for myself. I was conscious that even at this stage of the night I was passing into a psychical condition in which my sensations seemed no longer normal. Physical fear at no time entered into the nature of my feelings; and though I kept my hand upon my rifle the greater part of the night, I was all the time conscious that its assistance could be of little avail against the terrors that I had to face. More than once I seemed to feel most curiously that I was in no real sense a part of the proceedings, nor actually involved in them, but that I was playing the part of a spectator\u2014a spectator, moreover, on a psychic rather than on a material plane. Many of my sensations that night were too vague for definite description and analysis, but the main feeling that will stay with me to the end of my days is the awful horror of it all, and the miserable sensation that if the strain had lasted a little longer than was actually the case my mind must inevitably have given way.\n\nMeanwhile I stood still in my corner, and waited patiently for what was to come. The house was as still as the grave, but the inarticulate voices of the night sang in my ears, and I seemed to hear the blood running in my veins and dancing in my pulses.\n\nIf the Indians came to the back of the house, they would find the kitchen door and window securely fastened. They could not get in there without making considerable noise, which I was bound to hear. The only mode of getting in was by means of the door that faced me, and I kept my eyes glued on that door without taking them off for the smallest fraction of a second.\n\nMy sight adapted itself every minute better to the darkness. I saw the table that nearly filled the room, and left only a narrow passage on each side. I could also make out the straight backs of the wooden chairs pressed up against it, and could even distinguish my papers and inkstand lying on the white oilcloth covering. I thought of the gay faces that had gathered round that table during the summer, and I longed for the sunlight as I had never longed for it before.\n\nLess than three feet to my left the passage-way led to the kitchen, and the stairs leading to the bedrooms above commenced in this passage-way, but almost in the sitting-room itself. Through the windows I could see the dim motionless outlines of the trees: not a leaf stirred, not a branch moved.\n\nA few moments of this awful silence, and then I was aware of a soft tread on the boards of the verandah, so stealthy that it seemed an impression directly on my brain rather than upon the nerves of hearing. Immediately afterwards a black figure darkened the glass door, and I perceived that a face was pressed against the upper panes. A shiver ran down my back, and my hair was conscious of a tendency to rise and stand at right angles to my head.\n\nIt was the figure of an Indian, broad-shouldered and immense; indeed, the largest figure of a man I have ever seen outside of a circus hall. By some power of light that seemed to generate itself in the brain, I saw the strong dark face with the aquiline nose and high cheek-bones flattened against the glass. The direction of the gaze I could not determine; but faint gleams of light as the big eyes rolled round and showed their whites, told me plainly that no corner of the room escaped their searching.\n\nFor what seemed fully five minutes the dark figure stood there, with the huge shoulders bent forward so as to bring the head down to the level of the glass; while behind him, though not nearly so large, the shadowy form of the other Indian swayed to and fro like a bent tree. While I waited in an agony of suspense and agitation for their next movement little currents of icy sensation ran up and down my spine and my heart seemed alternately to stop beating and then start off again with terrifying rapidity. They must have heard its thumping and the singing of the blood in my head! Moreover, I was conscious, as I felt a cold stream of perspiration trickle down my face, of a desire to scream, to shout, to bang the walls like a child, to make a noise, or do anything that would relieve the suspense and bring things to a speedy climax.\n\nIt was probably this inclination that led me to another discovery, for when I tried to bring my rifle from behind my back to raise it and have it pointed at the door ready to fire, I found that I was powerless to move. The muscles, paralysed by this strange fear, refused to obey the will. Here indeed was a terrifying complication!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 350", + "text": "There was a faint sound of rattling at the brass knob, and the door was pushed open a couple of inches. A pause of a few seconds, and it was pushed open still further. Without a sound of footsteps that was appreciable to my ears, the two figures glided into the room, and the man behind gently closed the door after him.\n\nThey were alone with me between the four walls. Could they see me standing there, so still and straight in my corner? Had they, perhaps, already seen me? My blood surged and sang like the roll of drums in an orchestra; and though I did my best to suppress my breathing, it sounded like the rushing of wind through a pneumatic tube.\n\nMy suspense as to the next move was soon at an end\u2014only, however, to give place to a new and keener alarm. The men had hitherto exchanged no words and no signs, but there were general indications of a movement across the room, and whichever way they went they would have to pass round the table. If they came my way they would have to pass within six inches of my person. While I was considering this very disagreeable possibility, I perceived that the smaller Indian (smaller by comparison) suddenly raised his arm and pointed to the ceiling. The other fellow raised his head and followed the direction of his companion's arm. I began to understand at last. They were going upstairs, and the room directly overhead to which they pointed had been until this night my bedroom. It was the room in which I had experienced that very morning so strange a sensation of fear, and but for which I should then have been lying asleep in the narrow bed against the window.\n\nThe Indians then began to move silently around the room; they were going upstairs, and they were coming round my side of the table. So stealthy were their movements that, but for the abnormally sensitive state of the nerves, I should never have heard them. As it was, their cat-like tread was distinctly audible. Like two monstrous black cats they came round the table toward me, and for the first time I perceived that the smaller of the two dragged something along the floor behind him. As it trailed along over the floor with a soft, sweeping sound, I somehow got the impression that it was a large dead thing with outstretched wings, or a large, spreading cedar branch. Whatever it was, I was unable to see it even in outline, and I was too terrified, even had I possessed the power over my muscles, to move my neck forward in the effort to determine its nature.\n\nNearer and nearer they came. The leader rested a giant hand upon the table as he moved. My lips were glued together, and the air seemed to burn in my nostrils. I tried to close my eyes, so that I might not see as they passed me; but my eyelids had stiffened, and refused to obey. Would they never get by me? Sensation seemed also to have left my legs, and it was as if I were standing on mere supports of wood or stone. Worse still, I was conscious that I was losing the power of balance, the power to stand upright, or even to lean backwards against the wall. Some force was drawing me forward, and a dizzy terror seized me that I should lose my balance, and topple forward against the Indians just as they were in the act of passing me.\n\nEven moments drawn out into hours must come to an end some time, and almost before I knew it the figures had passed me and had their feet upon the lower step of the stairs leading to the upper bedrooms. There could not have been six inches between us, and yet I was conscious only of a current of cold air that followed them. They had not touched me, and I was convinced that they had not seen me. Even the trailing thing on the floor behind them had not touched my feet, as I had dreaded it would, and on such an occasion as this I was grateful even for the smallest mercies.\n\nThe absence of the Indians from my immediate neighbourhood brought little sense of relief. I stood shivering and shuddering in my corner, and, beyond being able to breathe more freely, I felt no whit less uncomfortable. Also, I was aware that a certain light, which, without apparent source or rays, had enabled me to follow their every gesture and movement, had gone out of the room with their departure. An unnatural darkness now filled the room, and pervaded its every corner so that I could barely make out the positions of the windows and the glass doors.\n\nAs I said before, my condition was evidently an abnormal one. The capacity for feeling surprise seemed, as in dreams, to be wholly absent. My senses recorded with unusual accuracy every smallest occurrence, but I was able to draw only the simplest deductions.\n\nThe Indians soon reached the top of the stairs, and there they halted for a moment. I had not the faintest clue as to their next movement. They appeared to hesitate. They were listening attentively. Then I heard one of them, who by the weight of his soft tread must have been the giant, cross the narrow corridor and enter the room directly overhead\u2014my own little bedroom. But for the insistence of that unaccountable dread I had experienced there in the morning, I should at that very moment have been lying in the bed with the big Indian in the room standing beside me.\n\nFor the space of a hundred seconds there was silence, such as might have existed before the birth of sound. It was followed by a long quivering shriek of terror, which rang out into the night, and ended in a short gulp before it had run its full course. At the same moment the other Indian left his place at the head of the stairs, and joined his companion in the bedroom. I heard the \"thing\" trailing behind him along the floor. A thud followed, as of something heavy falling, and then all became as still and silent as before.\n\nIt was at this point that the atmosphere, surcharged all day with the electricity of a fierce storm, found relief in a dancing flash of brilliant lightning simultaneously with a crash of loudest thunder. For five seconds every article in the room was visible to me with amazing distinctness, and through the windows I saw the tree trunks standing in solemn rows. The thunder pealed and echoed across the lake and among the distant islands, and the flood-gates of heaven then opened and let out their rain in streaming torrents.\n\nThe drops fell with a swift rushing sound upon the still waters of the lake, which leaped up to meet them, and pattered with the rattle of shot on the leaves of the maples and the roof of the cottage. A moment later, and another flash, even more brilliant and of longer duration than the first, lit up the sky from zenith to horizon, and bathed the room momentarily in dazzling whiteness. I could see the rain glistening on the leaves and branches outside. The wind rose suddenly, and in less than a minute the storm that had been gathering all day burst forth in its full fury.\n\nAbove all the noisy voices of the elements, the slightest sounds in the room overhead made themselves heard, and in the few seconds of deep silence that followed the shriek of terror and pain I was aware that the movements had commenced again. The men were leaving the room and approaching the top of the stairs. A short pause, and they began to descend. Behind them, tumbling from step to step, I could hear that trailing \"thing\" being dragged along. It had become ponderous!\n\nI awaited their approach with a degree of calmness, almost of apathy, which was only explicable on the ground that after a certain point Nature applies her own an\u00e6sthetic, and a merciful condition of numbness supervenes. On they came, step by step, nearer and nearer, with the shuffling sound of the burden behind growing louder as they approached.\n\nThey were already half-way down the stairs when I was galvanised afresh into a condition of terror by the consideration of a new and horrible possibility. It was the reflection that if another vivid flash of lightning were to come when the shadowy procession was in the room, perhaps when it was actually passing in front of me, I should see everything in detail, and worse, be seen myself! I could only hold my breath and wait\u2014wait while the minutes lengthened into hours, and the procession made its slow progress round the room.\n\nThe Indians had reached the foot of the staircase. The form of the huge leader loomed in the doorway of the passage, and the burden with an ominous thud had dropped from the last step to the floor. There was a moment's pause while I saw the Indian turn and stoop to assist his companion. Then the procession moved forward again, entered the room close on my left, and began to move slowly round my side of the table. The leader was already beyond me, and his companion, dragging on the floor behind him the burden, whose confused outline I could dimly make out, was exactly in front of me, when the cavalcade came to a dead halt. At the same moment, with the strange suddenness of thunderstorms, the splash of the rain ceased altogether, and the wind died away into utter silence.\n\nFor the space of five seconds my heart seemed to stop beating, and then the worst came. A double flash of lightning lit up the room and its contents with merciless vividness.\n\nThe huge Indian leader stood a few feet past me on my right. One leg was stretched forward in the act of taking a step. His immense shoulders were turned toward his companion, and in all their magnificent fierceness I saw the outline of his features. His gaze was directed upon the burden his companion was dragging along the floor; but his profile, with the big aquiline nose, high cheek-bone, straight black hair and bold chin, burnt itself in that brief instant into my brain, never again to fade.\n\nDwarfish, compared with this gigantic figure, appeared the proportions of the other Indian, who, within twelve inches of my face, was stooping over the thing he was dragging in a position that lent to his person the additional horror of deformity. And the burden, lying upon a sweeping cedar branch which he held and dragged by a long stem, was the body of a white man. The scalp had been neatly lifted, and blood lay in a broad smear upon the cheeks and forehead.\n\nThen, for the first time that night, the terror that had paralysed my muscles and my will lifted its unholy spell from my soul. With a loud cry I stretched out my arms to seize the big Indian by the throat, and, grasping only air, tumbled forward unconscious upon the ground.\n\nI had recognised the body, and the face was my own!...\n\nIt was bright daylight when a man's voice recalled me to consciousness. I was lying where I had fallen, and the farmer was standing in the room with the loaves of bread in his hands. The horror of the night was still in my heart, and as the bluff settler helped me to my feet and picked up the rifle which had fallen with me, with many questions and expressions of condolence, I imagine my brief replies were neither self-explanatory nor even intelligible.\n\nThat day, after a thorough and fruitless search of the house, I left the island, and went over to spend my last ten days with the farmer; and when the time came for me to leave, the necessary reading had been accomplished, and my nerves had completely recovered their balance.\n\nOn the day of my departure the farmer started early in his big boat with my belongings to row to the point, twelve miles distant, where a little steamer ran twice a week for the accommodation of hunters. Late in the afternoon I went off in another direction in my canoe, wishing to see the island once again, where I had been the victim of so strange an experience.\n\nIn due course I arrived there, and made a tour of the island. I also made a search of the little house, and it was not without a curious sensation in my heart that I entered the little upstairs bedroom. There seemed nothing unusual.\n\nJust after I re-embarked, I saw a canoe gliding ahead of me around the curve of the island. A canoe was an unusual sight at this time of the year, and this one seemed to have sprung from nowhere. Altering my course a little, I watched it disappear around the next projecting point of rock. It had high curving bows, and there were two Indians in it. I lingered with some excitement, to see if it would appear again round the other side of the island; and in less than five minutes it came into view. There were less than two hundred yards between us, and the Indians, sitting on their haunches, were paddling swiftly in my direction.\n\nI never paddled faster in my life than I did in those next few minutes. When I turned to look again, the Indians had altered their course, and were again circling the island.\n\nThe sun was sinking behind the forests on the mainland, and the crimson-coloured clouds of sunset were reflected in the waters of the lake, when I looked round for the last time, and saw the big bark canoe and its two dusky occupants still going round the island. Then the shadows deepened rapidly; the lake grew black, and the night wind blew its first breath in my face as I turned a corner, and a projecting bluff of rock hid from my view both island and canoe.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Case Of Eavesdropping by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nJim Shorthouse was the sort of fellow who always made a mess of things. Everything with which his hands or mind came into contact issued from such contact in an unqualified and irremediable state of mess. His college days were a mess: he was twice rusticated. His schooldays were a mess: he went to half a dozen, each passing him on to the next with a worse character and in a more developed state of mess. His early boyhood was the sort of mess that copy-books and dictionaries spell with a big \"M,\" and his babyhood\u2014ugh! was the embodiment of howling, yowling, screaming mess.\n\nAt the age of forty, however, there came a change in his troubled life, when he met a girl with half a million in her own right, who consented to marry him, and who very soon succeeded in reducing his most messy existence into a state of comparative order and system.\n\nCertain incidents, important and otherwise, of Jim's life would never have come to be told here but for the fact that in getting into his \"messes\" and out of them again he succeeded in drawing himself into the atmosphere of peculiar circumstances and strange happenings. He attracted to his path the curious adventures of life as unfailingly as meat attracts flies, and jam wasps. It is to the meat and jam of his life, so to speak, that he owes his experiences; his after-life was all pudding, which attracts nothing but greedy children. With marriage the interest of his life ceased for all but one person, and his path became regular as the sun's instead of erratic as a comet's.\n\nThe first experience in order of time that he related to me shows that somewhere latent behind his disarranged nervous system there lay psychic perceptions of an uncommon order. About the age of twenty-two\u2014I think after his second rustication\u2014his father's purse and patience had equally given out, and Jim found himself stranded high and dry in a large American city. High and dry! And the only clothes that had no holes in them safely in the keeping of his uncle's wardrobe.\n\nCareful reflection on a bench in one of the city parks led him to the conclusion that the only thing to do was to persuade the city editor of one of the daily journals that he possessed an observant mind and a ready pen, and that he could \"do good work for your paper, sir, as a reporter.\" This, then, he did, standing at a most unnatural angle between the editor and the window to conceal the whereabouts of the holes.\n\n\"Guess we'll have to give you a week's trial,\" said the editor, who, ever on the lookout for good chance material, took on shoals of men in that way and retained on the average one man per shoal. Anyhow it gave Jim Shorthouse the wherewithal to sew up the holes and relieve his uncle's wardrobe of its burden.\n\nThen he went to find living quarters; and in this proceeding his unique characteristics already referred to\u2014what theosophists would call his Karma\u2014began unmistakably to assert themselves, for it was in the house he eventually selected that this sad tale took place.\n\nThere are no \"diggings\" in American cities. The alternatives for small incomes are grim enough\u2014rooms in a boarding-house where meals are served, or in a room-house where no meals are served\u2014not even breakfast. Rich people live in palaces, of course, but Jim had nothing to do with \"sich-like.\" His horizon was bounded by boarding-houses and room-houses; and, owing to the necessary irregularity of his meals and hours, he took the latter.\n\nIt was a large, gaunt-looking place in a side street, with dirty windows and a creaking iron gate, but the rooms were large, and the one he selected and paid for in advance was on the top floor. The landlady looked gaunt and dusty as the house, and quite as old. Her eyes were green and faded, and her features large.\n\n\"Waal,\" she twanged, with her electrifying Western drawl, \"that's the room, if you like it, and that's the price I said. Now, if you want it, why, just say so; and if you don't, why, it don't hurt me any.\"\n\nJim wanted to shake her, but he feared the clouds of long-accumulated dust in her clothes, and as the price and size of the room suited him, he decided to take it.\n\n\"Anyone else on this floor?\" he asked.\n\nShe looked at him queerly out of her faded eyes before she answered.\n\n\"None of my guests ever put such questions to me before,\" she said; \"but I guess you're different. Why, there's no one at all but an old gent that's stayed here every bit of five years. He's over thar,\" pointing to the end of the passage.\n\n\"Ah! I see,\" said Shorthouse feebly. \"So I'm alone up here?\"\n\n\"Reckon you are, pretty near,\" she twanged out, ending the conversation abruptly by turning her back on her new \"guest,\" and going slowly and deliberately downstairs.\n\nThe newspaper work kept Shorthouse out most of the night. Three times a week he got home at 1 a.m., and three times at 3 a.m. The room proved comfortable enough, and he paid for a second week. His unusual hours had so far prevented his meeting any inmates of the house, and not a sound had been heard from the \"old gent\" who shared the floor with him. It seemed a very quiet house.\n\nOne night, about the middle of the second week, he came home tired after a long day's work. The lamp that usually stood all night in the hall had burned itself out, and he had to stumble upstairs in the dark. He made considerable noise in doing so, but nobody seemed to be disturbed. The whole house was utterly quiet, and probably everybody was asleep. There were no lights under any of the doors. All was in darkness. It was after two o'clock.\n\nAfter reading some English letters that had come during the day, and dipping for a few minutes into a book, he became drowsy and got ready for bed. Just as he was about to get in between the sheets, he stopped for a moment and listened. There rose in the night, as he did so, the sound of steps somewhere in the house below. Listening attentively, he heard that it was somebody coming upstairs\u2014a heavy tread, and the owner taking no pains to step quietly. On it came up the stairs, tramp, tramp, tramp\u2014evidently the tread of a big man, and one in something of a hurry.\n\nAt once thoughts connected somehow with fire and police flashed through Jim's brain, but there were no sounds of voices with the steps, and he reflected in the same moment that it could only be the old gentleman keeping late hours and tumbling upstairs in the darkness. He was in the act of turning out the gas and stepping into bed, when the house resumed its former stillness by the footsteps suddenly coming to a dead stop immediately outside his own room.\n\nWith his hand on the gas, Shorthouse paused a moment before turning it out to see if the steps would go on again, when he was startled by a loud knocking on his door. Instantly, in obedience to a curious and unexplained instinct, he turned out the light, leaving himself and the room in total darkness.\n\nHe had scarcely taken a step across the room to open the door, when a voice from the other side of the wall, so close it almost sounded in his ear, exclaimed in German, \"Is that you, father? Come in.\"\n\nThe speaker was a man in the next room, and the knocking, after all, had not been on his own door, but on that of the adjoining chamber, which he had supposed to be vacant.\n\nAlmost before the man in the passage had time to answer in German, \"Let me in at once,\" Jim heard someone cross the floor and unlock the door. Then it was slammed to with a bang, and there was audible the sound of footsteps about the room, and of chairs being drawn up to a table and knocking against furniture on the way. The men seemed wholly regardless of their neighbour's comfort, for they made noise enough to waken the dead.\n\n\"Serves me right for taking a room in such a cheap hole,\" reflected Jim in the darkness. \"I wonder whom she's let the room to!\"\n\nThe two rooms, the landlady had told him, were originally one. She had put up a thin partition\u2014just a row of boards\u2014to increase her income. The doors were adjacent, and only separated by the massive upright beam between them. When one was opened or shut the other rattled.\n\nWith utter indifference to the comfort of the other sleepers in the house, the two Germans had meanwhile commenced to talk both at once and at the top of their voices. They talked emphatically, even angrily. The words \"Father\" and \"Otto\" were freely used. Shorthouse understood German, but as he stood listening for the first minute or two, an eavesdropper in spite of himself, it was difficult to make head or tail of the talk, for neither would give way to the other, and the jumble of guttural sounds and unfinished sentences was wholly unintelligible. Then, very suddenly, both voices dropped together; and, after a moment's pause, the deep tones of one of them, who seemed to be the \"father,\" said, with the utmost distinctness\u2014\n\n\"You mean, Otto, that you refuse to get it?\"\n\nThere was a sound of someone shuffling in the chair before the answer came. \"I mean that I don't know how to get it. It is so much, father. It is too much. A part of it\u2014\"\n\n\"A part of it!\" cried the other, with an angry oath, \"a part of it, when ruin and disgrace are already in the house, is worse than useless. If you can get half you can get all, you wretched fool. Half-measures only damn all concerned.\"\n\n\"You told me last time\u2014\" began the other firmly, but was not allowed to finish. A succession of horrible oaths drowned his sentence, and the father went on, in a voice vibrating with anger\u2014\n\n\"You know she will give you anything. You have only been married a few months. If you ask and give a plausible reason you can get all we want and more. You can ask it temporarily. All will be paid back. It will re-establish the firm, and she will never know what was done with it. With that amount, Otto, you know I can recoup all these terrible losses, and in less than a year all will be repaid. But without it... You must get it, Otto. Hear me, you must. Am I to be arrested for the misuse of trust moneys? Is our honoured name to be cursed and spat on?\" The old man choked and stammered in his anger and desperation.\n\nShorthouse stood shivering in the darkness and listening in spite of himself. The conversation had carried him along with it, and he had been for some reason afraid to let his neighbourhood be known. But at this point he realised that he had listened too long and that he must inform the two men that they could be overheard to every single syllable. So he coughed loudly, and at the same time rattled the handle of his door. It seemed to have no effect, for the voices continued just as loudly as before, the son protesting and the father growing more and more angry. He coughed again persistently, and also contrived purposely in the darkness to tumble against the partition, feeling the thin boards yield easily under his weight, and making a considerable noise in so doing. But the voices went on unconcernedly, and louder than ever. Could it be possible they had not heard?\n\nBy this time Jim was more concerned about his own sleep than the morality of overhearing the private scandals of his neighbours, and he went out into the passage and knocked smartly at their door. Instantly, as if by magic, the sounds ceased. Everything dropped into utter silence. There was no light under the door and not a whisper could be heard within. He knocked again, but received no answer.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he began at length, with his lips close to the keyhole and in German, \"please do not talk so loud. I can overhear all you say in the next room. Besides, it is very late, and I wish to sleep.\"\n\nHe paused and listened, but no answer was forthcoming. He turned the handle and found the door was locked. Not a sound broke the stillness of the night except the faint swish of the wind over the skylight and the creaking of a board here and there in the house below. The cold air of a very early morning crept down the passage, and made him shiver. The silence of the house began to impress him disagreeably. He looked behind him and about him, hoping, and yet fearing, that something would break the stillness. The voices still seemed to ring on in his ears; but that sudden silence, when he knocked at the door, affected him far more unpleasantly than the voices, and put strange thoughts in his brain\u2014thoughts he did not like or approve.\n\nMoving stealthily from the door, he peered over the banisters into the space below. It was like a deep vault that might conceal in its shadows anything that was not good. It was not difficult to fancy he saw an indistinct moving to-and-fro below him. Was that a figure sitting on the stairs peering up obliquely at him out of hideous eyes? Was that a sound of whispering and shuffling down there in the dark halls and forsaken landings? Was it something more than the inarticulate murmur of the night?\n\nThe wind made an effort overhead, singing over the skylight, and the door behind him rattled and made him start. He turned to go back to his room, and the draught closed the door slowly in his face as if there were someone pressing against it from the other side. When he pushed it open and went in, a hundred shadowy forms seemed to dart swiftly and silently back to their corners and hiding-places. But in the adjoining room the sounds had entirely ceased, and Shorthouse soon crept into bed, and left the house with its inmates, waking or sleeping, to take care of themselves, while he entered the region of dreams and silence.\n\nNext day, strong in the common sense that the sunlight brings, he determined to lodge a complaint against the noisy occupants of the next room and make the landlady request them to modify their voices at such late hours of the night and morning. But it so happened that she was not to be seen that day, and when he returned from the office at midnight it was, of course, too late.\n\nLooking under the door as he came up to bed he noticed that there was no light, and concluded that the Germans were not in. So much the better. He went to sleep about one o'clock, fully decided that if they came up later and woke him with their horrible noises he would not rest till he had roused the landlady and made her reprove them with that authoritative twang, in which every word was like the lash of a metallic whip.\n\nHowever, there proved to be no need for such drastic measures, for Shorthouse slumbered peacefully all night, and his dreams\u2014chiefly of the fields of grain and flocks of sheep on the far-away farms of his father's estate\u2014were permitted to run their fanciful course unbroken.\n\nTwo nights later, however, when he came home tired out, after a difficult day, and wet and blown about by one of the wickedest storms he had ever seen, his dreams\u2014always of the fields and sheep\u2014were not destined to be so undisturbed.\n\nHe had already dozed off in that delicious glow that follows the removal of wet clothes and the immediate snuggling under warm blankets, when his consciousness, hovering on the borderland between sleep and waking, was vaguely troubled by a sound that rose indistinctly from the depths of the house, and, between the gusts of wind and rain, reached his ears with an accompanying sense of uneasiness and discomfort. It rose on the night air with some pretence of regularity, dying away again in the roar of the wind to reassert itself distantly in the deep, brief hushes of the storm.\n\nFor a few minutes Jim's dreams were coloured only\u2014tinged, as it were, by this impression of fear approaching from somewhere insensibly upon him. His consciousness, at first, refused to be drawn back from that enchanted region where it had wandered, and he did not immediately awaken. But the nature of his dreams changed unpleasantly. He saw the sheep suddenly run huddled together, as though frightened by the neighbourhood of an enemy, while the fields of waving corn became agitated as though some monster were moving uncouthly among the crowded stalks. The sky grew dark, and in his dream an awful sound came somewhere from the clouds. It was in reality the sound downstairs growing more distinct.\n\nShorthouse shifted uneasily across the bed with something like a groan of distress. The next minute he awoke, and found himself sitting straight up in bed\u2014listening. Was it a nightmare? Had he been dreaming evil dreams, that his flesh crawled and the hair stirred on his head?\n\nThe room was dark and silent, but outside the wind howled dismally and drove the rain with repeated assaults against the rattling windows. How nice it would be\u2014the thought flashed through his mind\u2014if all winds, like the west wind, went down with the sun! They made such fiendish noises at night, like the crying of angry voices. In the daytime they had such a different sound. If only\u2014\n\nHark! It was no dream after all, for the sound was momentarily growing louder, and its cause was coming up the stairs. He found himself speculating feebly what this cause might be, but the sound was still too indistinct to enable him to arrive at any definite conclusion.\n\nThe voice of a church clock striking two made itself heard above the wind. It was just about the hour when the Germans had commenced their performance three nights before. Shorthouse made up his mind that if they began it again he would not put up with it for very long. Yet he was already horribly conscious of the difficulty he would have of getting out of bed. The clothes were so warm and comforting against his back. The sound, still steadily coming nearer, had by this time become differentiated from the confused clamour of the elements, and had resolved itself into the footsteps of one or more persons.\n\n\"The Germans, hang 'em!\" thought Jim. \"But what on earth is the matter with me? I never felt so queer in all my life.\"\n\nHe was trembling all over, and felt as cold as though he were in a freezing atmosphere. His nerves were steady enough, and he felt no diminution of physical courage, but he was conscious of a curious sense of malaise and trepidation, such as even the most vigorous men have been known to experience when in the first grip of some horrible and deadly disease. As the footsteps approached this feeling of weakness increased. He felt a strange lassitude creeping over him, a sort of exhaustion, accompanied by a growing numbness in the extremities, and a sensation of dreaminess in the head, as if perhaps the consciousness were leaving its accustomed seat in the brain and preparing to act on another plane. Yet, strange to say, as the vitality was slowly withdrawn from his body, his senses seemed to grow more acute.\n\nMeanwhile the steps were already on the landing at the top of the stairs, and Shorthouse, still sitting upright in bed, heard a heavy body brush past his door and along the wall outside, almost immediately afterwards the loud knocking of someone's knuckles on the door of the adjoining room.\n\nInstantly, though so far not a sound had proceeded from within, he heard, through the thin partition, a chair pushed back and a man quickly cross the floor and open the door.\n\n\"Ah! it's you,\" he heard in the son's voice. Had the fellow, then, been sitting silently in there all this time, waiting for his father's arrival? To Shorthouse it came not as a pleasant reflection by any means.\n\nThere was no answer to this dubious greeting, but the door was closed quickly, and then there was a sound as if a bag or parcel had been thrown on a wooden table and had slid some distance across it before stopping.\n\n\"What's that?\" asked the son, with anxiety in his tone.\n\n\"You may know before I go,\" returned the other gruffly. Indeed his voice was more than gruff: it betrayed ill-suppressed passion.\n\nShorthouse was conscious of a strong desire to stop the conversation before it proceeded any further, but somehow or other his will was not equal to the task, and he could not get out of bed. The conversation went on, every tone and inflexion distinctly audible above the noise of the storm.\n\nIn a low voice the father continued. Jim missed some of the words at the beginning of the sentence. It ended with: \"...but now they've all left, and I've managed to get up to you. You know what I've come for.\" There was distinct menace in his tone.\n\n\"Yes,\" returned the other; \"I have been waiting.\"\n\n\"And the money?\" asked the father impatiently.\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"You've had three days to get it in, and I've contrived to stave off the worst so far\u2014but to-morrow is the end.\"\n\nNo answer.\n\n\"Speak, Otto! What have you got for me? Speak, my son; for God's sake, tell me.\"\n\nThere was a moment's silence, during which the old man's vibrating accents seemed to echo through the rooms. Then came in a low voice the answer\u2014\n\n\"I have nothing.\"\n\n\"Otto!\" cried the other with passion, \"nothing!\"\n\n\"I can get nothing,\" came almost in a whisper.\n\n\"You lie!\" cried the other, in a half-stifled voice. \"I swear you lie. Give me the money.\"\n\nA chair was heard scraping along the floor. Evidently the men had been sitting over the table, and one of them had risen. Shorthouse heard the bag or parcel drawn across the table, and then a step as if one of the men was crossing to the door.\n\n\"Father, what's in that? I must know,\" said Otto, with the first signs of determination in his voice. There must have been an effort on the son's part to gain possession of the parcel in question, and on the father's to retain it, for between them it fell to the ground. A curious rattle followed its contact with the floor. Instantly there were sounds of a scuffle. The men were struggling for the possession of the box. The elder man with oaths, and blasphemous imprecations, the other with short gasps that betokened the strength of his efforts. It was of short duration, and the younger man had evidently won, for a minute later was heard his angry exclamation.\n\n\"I knew it. Her jewels! You scoundrel, you shall never have them. It is a crime.\"\n\nThe elder man uttered a short, guttural laugh, which froze Jim's blood and made his skin creep. No word was spoken, and for the space of ten seconds there was a living silence. Then the air trembled with the sound of a thud, followed immediately by a groan and the crash of a heavy body falling over on to the table. A second later there was a lurching from the table on to the floor and against the partition that separated the rooms. The bed quivered an instant at the shock, but the unholy spell was lifted from his soul and Jim Shorthouse sprang out of bed and across the floor in a single bound. He knew that ghastly murder had been done\u2014the murder by a father of his son.\n\nWith shaking fingers but a determined heart he lit the gas, and the first thing in which his eyes corroborated the evidence of his ears was the horrifying detail that the lower portion of the partition bulged unnaturally into his own room. The glaring paper with which it was covered had cracked under the tension and the boards beneath it bent inwards towards him. What hideous load was behind them, he shuddered to think.\n\nAll this he saw in less than a second. Since the final lurch against the wall not a sound had proceeded from the room, not even a groan or a foot-step. All was still but the howl of the wind, which to his ears had in it a note of triumphant horror.\n\nShorthouse was in the act of leaving the room to rouse the house and send for the police\u2014in fact his hand was already on the door-knob\u2014when something in the room arrested his attention. Out of the corner of his eyes he thought he caught sight of something moving. He was sure of it, and turning his eyes in the direction, he found he was not mistaken.\n\nSomething was creeping slowly towards him along the floor. It was something dark and serpentine in shape, and it came from the place where the partition bulged. He stooped down to examine it with feelings of intense horror and repugnance, and he discovered that it was moving toward him from the other side of the wall. His eyes were fascinated, and for the moment he was unable to move. Silently, slowly, from side to side like a thick worm, it crawled forward into the room beneath his frightened eyes, until at length he could stand it no longer and stretched out his arm to touch it. But at the instant of contact he withdrew his hand with a suppressed scream. It was sluggish\u2014and it was warm! and he saw that his fingers were stained with living crimson.\n\nA second more, and Shorthouse was out in the passage with his hand on the door of the next room. It was locked. He plunged forward with all his weight against it, and, the lock giving way, he fell headlong into a room that was pitch dark and very cold. In a moment he was on his feet again and trying to penetrate the blackness. Not a sound, not a movement. Not even the sense of a presence. It was empty, miserably empty!\n\nAcross the room he could trace the outline of a window with rain streaming down the outside, and the blurred lights of the city beyond. But the room was empty, appallingly empty; and so still. He stood there, cold as ice, staring, shivering listening. Suddenly there was a step behind him and a light flashed into the room, and when he turned quickly with his arm up as if to ward off a terrific blow he found himself face to face with the landlady. Instantly the reaction began to set in.\n\nIt was nearly three o'clock in the morning, and he was standing there with bare feet and striped pyjamas in a small room, which in the merciful light he perceived to be absolutely empty, carpetless, and without a stick of furniture, or even a window-blind. There he stood staring at the disagreeable landlady. And there she stood too, staring and silent, in a black wrapper, her head almost bald, her face white as chalk, shading a sputtering candle with one bony hand and peering over it at him with her blinking green eyes. She looked positively hideous.\n\n\"Waal?\" she drawled at length, \"I heard yer right enough. Guess you couldn't sleep! Or just prowlin' round a bit\u2014is that it?\"\n\nThe empty room, the absence of all traces of the recent tragedy, the silence, the hour, his striped pyjamas and bare feet\u2014everything together combined to deprive him momentarily of speech. He stared at her blankly without a word.\n\n\"Waal?\" clanked the awful voice.\n\n\"My dear woman,\" he burst out finally, \"there's been something awful\u2014\" So far his desperation took him, but no farther. He positively stuck at the substantive.\n\n\"Oh! there hasn't been nothin',\" she said slowly still peering at him. \"I reckon you've only seen and heard what the others did. I never can keep folks on this floor long. Most of 'em catch on sooner or later\u2014that is, the ones that's kind of quick and sensitive. Only you being an Englishman I thought you wouldn't mind. Nothin' really happens; it's only thinkin' like.\"\n\nShorthouse was beside himself. He felt ready to pick her up and drop her over the banisters, candle and all.\n\n\"Look there,\" he said, pointing at her within an inch of her blinking eyes with the fingers that had touched the oozing blood; \"look there, my good woman. Is that only thinking?\"\n\nShe stared a minute, as if not knowing what he meant.\n\n\"I guess so,\" she said at length.\n\nHe followed her eyes, and to his amazement saw that his fingers were as white as usual, and quite free from the awful stain that had been there ten minutes before. There was no sign of blood. No amount of staring could bring it back. Had he gone out of his mind? Had his eyes and ears played such tricks with him? Had his senses become false and perverted? He dashed past the landlady, out into the passage, and gained his own room in a couple of strides. Whew!... the partition no longer bulged. The paper was not torn. There was no creeping, crawling thing on the faded old carpet.\n\n\"It's all over now,\" drawled the metallic voice behind him. \"I'm going to bed again.\"\n\nHe turned and saw the landlady slowly going downstairs again, still shading the candle with her hand and peering up at him from time to time as she moved. A black, ugly, unwholesome object, he thought, as she disappeared into the darkness below, and the last flicker of her candle threw a queer-shaped shadow along the wall and over the ceiling.\n\nWithout hesitating a moment, Shorthouse threw himself into his clothes and went out of the house. He preferred the storm to the horrors of that top floor, and he walked the streets till daylight. In the evening he told the landlady he would leave next day, in spite of her assurances that nothing more would happen.\n\n\"It never comes back,\" she said\u2014\"that is, not after he's killed.\"\n\nShorthouse gasped.\n\n\"You gave me a lot for my money,\" he growled.\n\n\"Waal, it aren't my show,\" she drawled. \"I'm no spirit medium. You take chances. Some'll sleep right along and never hear nothin'. Others, like yourself, are different and get the whole thing.\"\n\n\"Who's the old gentleman?\u2014does he hear it?\" asked Jim.\n\n\"There's no old gentleman at all,\" she answered coolly. \"I just told you that to make you feel easy like in case you did hear anythin'. You were all alone on the floor.\"\n\n\"Say now,\" she went on, after a pause in which Shorthouse could think of nothing to say but unpublishable things, \"say now, do tell, did you feel sort of cold when the show was on, sort of tired and weak, I mean, as if you might be going to die?\"\n\n\"How can I say?\" he answered savagely; \"what I felt God only knows.\"\n\n\"Waal, but He won't tell,\" she drawled out. \"Only I was wonderin' how you really did feel, because the man who had that room last was found one morning in bed\u2014\"\n\n\"In bed?\"\n\n\"He was dead. He was the one before you. Oh! You don't need to get rattled so. You're all right. And it all really happened, they do say. This house used to be a private residence some twenty-five years ago, and a German family of the name of Steinhardt lived here. They had a big business in Wall Street, and stood 'way up in things.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said her listener.\n\n\"Oh yes, they did, right at the top, till one fine day it all bust and the old man skipped with the boodle\u2014\"\n\n\"Skipped with the boodle?\"\n\n\"That's so,\" she said; \"got clear away with all the money, and the son was found dead in his house, committed soocide it was thought. Though there was some as said he couldn't have stabbed himself and fallen in that position. They said he was murdered. The father died in prison. They tried to fasten the murder on him, but there was no motive, or no evidence, or no somethin'. I forget now.\"\n\n\"Very pretty,\" said Shorthouse.\n\n\"I'll show you somethin' mighty queer any-ways,\" she drawled, \"if you'll come upstairs a minute. I've heard the steps and voices lots of times; they don't pheaze me any. I'd just as lief hear so many dogs barkin'. You'll find the whole story in the newspapers if you look it up\u2014not what goes on here, but the story of the Germans. My house would be ruined if they told all, and I'd sue for damages.\"\n\nThey reached the bedroom, and the woman went in and pulled up the edge of the carpet where Shorthouse had seen the blood soaking in the previous night.\n\n\"Look thar, if you feel like it,\" said the old hag. Stooping down, he saw a dark, dull stain in the boards that corresponded exactly to the shape and position of the blood as he had seen it.\n\nThat night he slept in a hotel, and the following day sought new quarters. In the newspapers on file in his office after a long search he found twenty years back the detailed story, substantially as the woman had said, of Steinhardt & Co.'s failure, the absconding and subsequent arrest of the senior partner, and the suicide, or murder, of his son Otto. The landlady's room-house had formerly been their private residence.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Keeping His Promise by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nIt was eleven o'clock at night, and young Marriott was locked into his room, cramming as hard as he could cram. He was a \"Fourth Year Man\" at Edinburgh University and he had been ploughed for this particular examination so often that his parents had positively declared they could no longer supply the funds to keep him there.\n\nHis rooms were cheap and dingy, but it was the lecture fees that took the money. So Marriott pulled himself together at last and definitely made up his mind that he would pass or die in the attempt, and for some weeks now he had been reading as hard as mortal man can read. He was trying to make up for lost time and money in a way that showed conclusively he did not understand the value of either. For no ordinary man\u2014and Marriott was in every sense an ordinary man\u2014can afford to drive the mind as he had lately been driving his, without sooner or later paying the cost.\n\nAmong the students he had few friends or acquaintances, and these few had promised not to disturb him at night, knowing he was at last reading in earnest. It was, therefore, with feelings a good deal stronger than mere surprise that he heard his door-bell ring on this particular night and realised that he was to have a visitor. Some men would simply have muffled the bell and gone on quietly with their work. But Marriott was not this sort. He was nervous. It would have bothered and pecked at his mind all night long not to know who the visitor was and what he wanted. The only thing to do, therefore, was to let him in\u2014and out again\u2014as quickly as possible.\n\nThe landlady went to bed at ten o'clock punctually, after which hour nothing would induce her to pretend she heard the bell, so Marriott jumped up from his books with an exclamation that augured ill for the reception of his caller, and prepared to let him in with his own hand.\n\nThe streets of Edinburgh town were very still at this late hour\u2014it was late for Edinburgh\u2014and in the quiet neighbourhood of F\u2014 Street, where Marriott lived on the third floor, scarcely a sound broke the silence. As he crossed the floor, the bell rang a second time, with unnecessary clamour, and he unlocked the door and passed into the little hallway with considerable wrath and annoyance in his heart at the insolence of the double interruption.\n\n\"The fellows all know I'm reading for this exam. Why in the world do they come to bother me at such an unearthly hour?\"\n\nThe inhabitants of the building, with himself, were medical students, general students, poor Writers to the Signet, and some others whose vocations were perhaps not so obvious. The stone staircase, dimly lighted at each floor by a gas-jet that would not turn above a certain height, wound down to the level of the street with no pretence at carpet or railing. At some levels it was cleaner than at others. It depended on the landlady of the particular level.\n\nThe acoustic properties of a spiral staircase seem to be peculiar. Marriott, standing by the open door, book in hand, thought every moment the owner of the footsteps would come into view. The sound of the boots was so close and so loud that they seemed to travel disproportionately in advance of their cause. Wondering who it could be, he stood ready with all manner of sharp greetings for the man who dared thus to disturb his work. But the man did not appear. The steps sounded almost under his nose, yet no one was visible.\n\nA sudden queer sensation of fear passed over him\u2014a faintness and a shiver down the back. It went, however, almost as soon as it came, and he was just debating whether he would call aloud to his invisible visitor, or slam the door and return to his books, when the cause of the disturbance turned the corner very slowly and came into view.\n\nIt was a stranger. He saw a youngish man short of figure and very broad. His face was the colour of a piece of chalk and the eyes, which were very bright, had heavy lines underneath them. Though the cheeks and chin were unshaven and the general appearance unkempt, the man was evidently a gentleman, for he was well dressed and bore himself with a certain air. But, strangest of all, he wore no hat, and carried none in his hand; and although rain had been falling steadily all the evening, he appeared to have neither overcoat nor umbrella.\n\nA hundred questions sprang up in Marriott's mind and rushed to his lips, chief among which was something like \"Who in the world are you?\" and \"What in the name of heaven do you come to me for?\" But none of these questions found time to express themselves in words, for almost at once the caller turned his head a little so that the gas light in the hall fell upon his features from a new angle. Then in a flash Marriott recognised him.\n\n\"Field! Man alive! Is it you?\" he gasped.\n\nThe Fourth Year Man was not lacking in intuition, and he perceived at once that here was a case for delicate treatment. He divined, without any actual process of thought, that the catastrophe often predicted had come at last, and that this man's father had turned him out of the house. They had been at a private school together years before, and though they had hardly met once since, the news had not failed to reach him from time to time with considerable detail, for the family lived near his own and between certain of the sisters there was great intimacy. Young Field had gone wild later, he remembered hearing about it all\u2014drink, a woman, opium, or something of the sort\u2014he could not exactly call to mind.\n\n\"Come in,\" he said at once, his anger vanishing. \"There's been something wrong, I can see. Come in, and tell me all about it and perhaps I can help\u2014\" He hardly knew what to say, and stammered a lot more besides. The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings. But he had a man's heart for all that.\n\nHe led the way across the hall, shutting the front door carefully behind him, and noticed as he did so that the other, though certainly sober, was unsteady on his legs, and evidently much exhausted. Marriott might not be able to pass his examinations, but he at least knew the symptoms of starvation\u2014acute starvation, unless he was much mistaken\u2014when they stared him in the face.\n\n\"Come along,\" he said cheerfully, and with genuine sympathy in his voice. \"I'm glad to see you. I was going to have a bite of something to eat, and you're just in time to join me.\"\n\nThe other made no audible reply, and shuffled so feebly with his feet that Marriott took his arm by way of support. He noticed for the first time that the clothes hung on him with pitiful looseness. The broad frame was literally hardly more than a frame. He was as thin as a skeleton. But, as he touched him, the sensation of faintness and dread returned. It only lasted a moment, and then passed off, and he ascribed it not unnaturally to the distress and shock of seeing a former friend in such a pitiful plight.\n\n\"Better let me guide you. It's shamefully dark\u2014this hall. I'm always complaining,\" he said lightly, recognising by the weight upon his arm that the guidance was sorely needed, \"but the old cat never does anything except promise.\" He led him to the sofa, wondering all the time where he had come from and how he had found out the address. It must be at least seven years since those days at the private school when they used to be such close friends.\n\n\"Now, if you'll forgive me for a minute,\" he said, \"I'll get supper ready\u2014such as it is. And don't bother to talk. Just take it easy on the sofa. I see you're dead tired. You can tell me about it afterwards, and we'll make plans.\"\n\nThe other sat down on the edge of the sofa and stared in silence, while Marriott got out the brown loaf, scones, and huge pot of marmalade that Edinburgh students always keep in their cupboards. His eyes shone with a brightness that suggested drugs, Marriott thought, stealing a glance at him from behind the cupboard door. He did not like yet to take a full square look. The fellow was in a bad way, and it would have been so like an examination to stare and wait for explanations. Besides, he was evidently almost too exhausted to speak. So, for reasons of delicacy\u2014and for another reason as well which he could not exactly formulate to himself\u2014he let his visitor rest apparently unnoticed, while he busied himself with the supper. He lit the spirit lamp to make cocoa, and when the water was boiling he drew up the table with the good things to the sofa, so that Field need not have even the trouble of moving to a chair.\n\n\"Now, let's tuck in,\" he said, \"and afterwards we'll have a pipe and a chat. I'm reading for an exam, you know, and I always have something about this time. It's jolly to have a companion.\"\n\nHe looked up and caught his guest's eyes directed straight upon his own. An involuntary shudder ran through him from head to foot. The face opposite him was deadly white and wore a dreadful expression of pain and mental suffering.\n\n\"By Gad!\" he said, jumping up, \"I quite forgot. I've got some whisky somewhere. What an ass I am. I never touch it myself when I'm working like this.\"\n\nHe went to the cupboard and poured out a stiff glass which the other swallowed at a single gulp and without any water. Marriott watched him while he drank it, and at the same time noticed something else as well\u2014Field's coat was all over dust, and on one shoulder was a bit of cobweb. It was perfectly dry; Field arrived on a soaking wet night without hat, umbrella, or overcoat, and yet perfectly dry, even dusty. Therefore he had been under cover. What did it all mean? Had he been hiding in the building?...\n\nIt was very strange. Yet he volunteered nothing; and Marriott had pretty well made up his mind by this time that he would not ask any questions until he had eaten and slept. Food and sleep were obviously what the poor devil needed most and first\u2014he was pleased with his powers of ready diagnosis\u2014and it would not be fair to press him till he had recovered a bit.\n\nThey ate their supper together while the host carried on a running one-sided conversation, chiefly about himself and his exams and his \"old cat\" of a landlady, so that the guest need not utter a single word unless he really wished to\u2014which he evidently did not! But, while he toyed with his food, feeling no desire to eat, the other ate voraciously. To see a hungry man devour cold scones, stale oatcake, and brown bread laden with marmalade was a revelation to this inexperienced student who had never known what it was to be without at least three meals a day. He watched in spite of himself, wondering why the fellow did not choke in the process.\n\nBut Field seemed to be as sleepy as he was hungry. More than once his head dropped and he ceased to masticate the food in his mouth. Marriott had positively to shake him before he would go on with his meal. A stronger emotion will overcome a weaker, but this struggle between the sting of real hunger and the magical opiate of overpowering sleep was a curious sight to the student, who watched it with mingled astonishment and alarm. He had heard of the pleasure it was to feed hungry men, and watch them eat, but he had never actually witnessed it, and he had no idea it was like this. Field ate like an animal\u2014gobbled, stuffed, gorged. Marriott forgot his reading, and began to feel something very much like a lump in his throat.\n\n\"Afraid there's been awfully little to offer you, old man,\" he managed to blurt out when at length the last scone had disappeared, and the rapid, one-sided meal was at an end. Field still made no reply, for he was almost asleep in his seat. He merely looked up wearily and gratefully.\n\n\"Now you must have some sleep, you know,\" he continued, \"or you'll go to pieces. I shall be up all night reading for this blessed exam. You're more than welcome to my bed. To-morrow we'll have a late breakfast and\u2014and see what can be done\u2014and make plans\u2014I'm awfully good at making plans, you know,\" he added with an attempt at lightness.\n\nField maintained his \"dead sleepy\" silence, but appeared to acquiesce, and the other led the way into the bedroom, apologising as he did so to this half-starved son of a baronet\u2014whose own home was almost a palace\u2014for the size of the room. The weary guest, however, made no pretence of thanks or politeness. He merely steadied himself on his friend's arm as he staggered across the room, and then, with all his clothes on, dropped his exhausted body on the bed. In less than a minute he was to all appearances sound asleep.\n\nFor several minutes Marriott stood in the open door and watched him; praying devoutly that he might never find himself in a like predicament, and then fell to wondering what he would do with his unbidden guest on the morrow. But he did not stop long to think, for the call of his books was imperative, and happen what might, he must see to it that he passed that examination.\n\nHaving again locked the door into the hall, he sat down to his books and resumed his notes on materia medica where he had left off when the bell rang. But it was difficult for some time to concentrate his mind on the subject. His thoughts kept wandering to the picture of that white-faced, strange-eyed fellow, starved and dirty, lying in his clothes and boots on the bed. He recalled their schooldays together before they had drifted apart, and how they had vowed eternal friendship\u2014and all the rest of it. And now! What horrible straits to be in. How could any man let the love of dissipation take such hold upon him?\n\nBut one of their vows together Marriott, it seemed, had completely forgotten. Just now, at any rate, it lay too far in the background of his memory to be recalled.\n\nThrough the half-open door\u2014the bedroom led out of the sitting-room and had no other door\u2014came the sound of deep, long-drawn breathing, the regular, steady breathing of a tired man, so tired that, even to listen to it made Marriott almost want to go to sleep himself.\n\n\"He needed it,\" reflected the student, \"and perhaps it came only just in time!\"\n\nPerhaps so; for outside the bitter wind from across the Forth howled cruelly and drove the rain in cold streams against the window-panes, and down the deserted streets. Long before Marriott settled down again properly to his reading, he heard distantly, as it were, through the sentences of the book, the heavy, deep breathing of the sleeper in the next room.\n\nA couple of hours later, when he yawned and changed his books, he still heard the breathing, and went cautiously up to the door to look round.\n\nAt first the darkness of the room must have deceived him, or else his eyes were confused and dazzled by the recent glare of the reading lamp. For a minute or two he could make out nothing at all but dark lumps of furniture, the mass of the chest of drawers by the wall, and the white patch where his bath stood in the centre of the floor.\n\nThen the bed came slowly into view. And on it he saw the outline of the sleeping body gradually take shape before his eyes, growing up strangely into the darkness, till it stood out in marked relief\u2014the long black form against the white counterpane.\n\nHe could hardly help smiling. Field had not moved an inch. He watched him a moment or two and then returned to his books. The night was full of the singing voices of the wind and rain. There was no sound of traffic; no hansoms clattered over the cobbles, and it was still too early for the milk carts. He worked on steadily and conscientiously, only stopping now and again to change a book, or to sip some of the poisonous stuff that kept him awake and made his brain so active, and on these occasions Field's breathing was always distinctly audible in the room. Outside, the storm continued to howl, but inside the house all was stillness. The shade of the reading lamp threw all the light upon the littered table, leaving the other end of the room in comparative darkness. The bedroom door was exactly opposite him where he sat. There was nothing to disturb the worker, nothing but an occasional rush of wind against the windows, and a slight pain in his arm.\n\nThis pain, however, which he was unable to account for, grew once or twice very acute. It bothered him; and he tried to remember how, and when, he could have bruised himself so severely, but without success.\n\nAt length the page before him turned from yellow to grey, and there were sounds of wheels in the street below. It was four o'clock. Marriott leaned back and yawned prodigiously. Then he drew back the curtains. The storm had subsided and the Castle Rock was shrouded in mist. With another yawn he turned away from the dreary outlook and prepared to sleep the remaining four hours till breakfast on the sofa. Field was still breathing heavily in the next room, and he first tip-toed across the floor to take another look at him.\n\nPeering cautiously round the half-opened door his first glance fell upon the bed now plainly discernible in the grey light of morning. He stared hard. Then he rubbed his eyes. Then he rubbed his eyes again and thrust his head farther round the edge of the door. With fixed eyes he stared harder still, and harder.\n\nBut it made no difference at all. He was staring into an empty room.\n\nThe sensation of fear he had felt when Field first appeared upon the scene returned suddenly, but with much greater force. He became conscious, too, that his left arm was throbbing violently and causing him great pain. He stood wondering, and staring, and trying to collect his thoughts. He was trembling from head to foot.\n\nBy a great effort of the will he left the support of the door and walked forward boldly into the room.\n\nThere, upon the bed, was the impress of a body, where Field had lain and slept. There was the mark of the head on the pillow, and the slight indentation at the foot of the bed where the boots had rested on the counterpane. And there, plainer than ever\u2014for he was closer to it\u2014was the breathing!\n\nMarriott tried to pull himself together. With a great effort he found his voice and called his friend aloud by name!\n\n\"Field! Is that you? Where are you?\"\n\nThere was no reply; but the breathing continued without interruption, coming directly from the bed. His voice had such an unfamiliar sound that Marriott did not care to repeat his questions, but he went down on his knees and examined the bed above and below, pulling the mattress off finally, and taking the coverings away separately one by one. But though the sounds continued there was no visible sign of Field, nor was there any space in which a human being, however small, could have concealed itself. He pulled the bed out from the wall, but the sound stayed where it was. It did not move with the bed.\n\nMarriott, finding self-control a little difficult in his weary condition, at once set about a thorough search of the room. He went through the cupboard, the chest of drawers, the little alcove where the clothes hung\u2014everything. But there was no sign of anyone. The small window near the ceiling was closed; and, anyhow, was not large enough to let a cat pass. The sitting-room door was locked on the inside; he could not have got out that way. Curious thoughts began to trouble Marriott's mind, bringing in their train unwelcome sensations. He grew more and more excited; he searched the bed again till it resembled the scene of a pillow fight; he searched both rooms, knowing all the time it was useless,\u2014and then he searched again. A cold perspiration broke out all over his body; and the sound of heavy breathing, all this time, never ceased to come from the corner where Field had lain down to sleep.\n\nThen he tried something else. He pushed the bed back exactly into its original position\u2014and himself lay down upon it just where his guest had lain. But the same instant he sprang up again in a single bound. The breathing was close beside him, almost on his cheek, and between him and the wall! Not even a child could have squeezed into the space.\n\nHe went back into his sitting-room, opened the windows, welcoming all the light and air possible, and tried to think the whole matter over quietly and clearly. Men who read too hard, and slept too little, he knew were sometimes troubled with very vivid hallucinations. Again he calmly reviewed every incident of the night; his accurate sensations; the vivid details; the emotions stirred in him; the dreadful feast\u2014no single hallucination could ever combine all these and cover so long a period of time. But with less satisfaction he thought of the recurring faintness, and curious sense of horror that had once or twice come over him, and then of the violent pains in his arm. These were quite unaccountable.\n\nMoreover, now that he began to analyse and examine, there was one other thing that fell upon him like a sudden revelation: During the whole time Field had not actually uttered a single word! Yet, as though in mockery upon his reflections, there came ever from that inner room the sound of the breathing, long-drawn, deep, and regular. The thing was incredible. It was absurd.\n\nHaunted by visions of brain fever and insanity, Marriott put on his cap and macintosh and left the house. The morning air on Arthur's Seat would blow the cobwebs from his brain; the scent of the heather, and above all, the sight of the sea. He roamed over the wet slopes above Holyrood for a couple of hours, and did not return until the exercise had shaken some of the horror out of his bones, and given him a ravening appetite into the bargain.\n\nAs he entered he saw that there was another man in the room, standing against the window with his back to the light. He recognised his fellow-student Greene, who was reading for the same examination.\n\n\"Read hard all night, Marriott,\" he said, \"and thought I'd drop in here to compare notes and have some breakfast. You're out early?\" he added, by way of a question. Marriott said he had a headache and a walk had helped it, and Greene nodded and said \"Ah!\" But when the girl had set the steaming porridge on the table and gone out again, he went on with rather a forced tone, \"Didn't know you had any friends who drank, Marriott?\"\n\nThis was obviously tentative, and Marriott replied drily that he did not know it either.\n\n\"Sounds just as if some chap were 'sleeping it off' in there, doesn't it, though?\" persisted the other, with a nod in the direction of the bedroom, and looking curiously at his friend. The two men stared steadily at each other for several seconds, and then Marriott said earnestly\u2014\n\n\"Then you hear it too, thank God!\"\n\n\"Of course I hear it. The door's open. Sorry if I wasn't meant to.\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't mean that,\" said Marriott, lowering his voice. \"But I'm awfully relieved. Let me explain. Of course, if you hear it too, then it's all right; but really it frightened me more than I can tell you. I thought I was going to have brain fever, or something, and you know what a lot depends on this exam. It always begins with sounds, or visions, or some sort of beastly hallucination, and I\u2014\"\n\n\"Rot!\" ejaculated the other impatiently. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Now, listen to me, Greene,\" said Marriott, as calmly as he could, for the breathing was still plainly audible, \"and I'll tell you what I mean, only don't interrupt.\" And thereupon he related exactly what had happened during the night, telling everything, even down to the pain in his arm. When it was over he got up from the table and crossed the room.\n\n\"You hear the breathing now plainly, don't you?\" he said. Greene said he did. \"Well, come with me, and we'll search the room together.\" The other, however, did not move from his chair.\n\n\"I've been in already,\" he said sheepishly; \"I heard the sounds and thought it was you. The door was ajar\u2014so I went in.\"\n\nMarriott made no comment, but pushed the door open as wide as it would go. As it opened, the sound of breathing grew more and more distinct.\n\n\"Someone must be in there,\" said Greene under his breath.\n\n\"Someone is in there, but where?\" said Marriott. Again he urged his friend to go in with him. But Greene refused point-blank; said he had been in once and had searched the room and there was nothing there. He would not go in again for a good deal.\n\nThey shut the door and retired into the other room to talk it all over with many pipes. Greene questioned his friend very closely, but without illuminating result, since questions cannot alter facts.\n\n\"The only thing that ought to have a proper, a logical, explanation is the pain in my arm,\" said Marriott, rubbing that member with an attempt at a smile. \"It hurts so infernally and aches all the way up. I can't remember bruising it, though.\"\n\n\"Let me examine it for you,\" said Greene. \"I'm awfully good at bones in spite of the examiners' opinion to the contrary.\" It was a relief to play the fool a bit, and Marriott took his coat off and rolled up his sleeve.\n\n\"By George, though, I'm bleeding!\" he exclaimed. \"Look here! What on earth's this?\"\n\nOn the forearm, quite close to the wrist, was a thin red line. There was a tiny drop of apparently fresh blood on it. Greene came over and looked closely at it for some minutes. Then he sat back in his chair, looking curiously at his friend's face.\n\n\"You've scratched yourself without knowing it,\" he said presently.\n\n\"There's no sign of a bruise. It must be something else that made the arm ache.\"\n\nMarriott sat very still, staring silently at his arm as though the solution of the whole mystery lay there actually written upon the skin.\n\n\"What's the matter? I see nothing very strange about a scratch,\" said Greene, in an unconvincing sort of voice. \"It was your cuff links probably. Last night in your excitement\u2014\"\n\nBut Marriott, white to the very lips, was trying to speak. The sweat stood in great beads on his forehead. At last he leaned forward close to his friend's face.\n\n\"Look,\" he said, in a low voice that shook a little. \"Do you see that red mark? I mean underneath what you call the scratch?\"\n\nGreene admitted he saw something or other, and Marriott wiped the place clean with his handkerchief and told him to look again more closely.\n\n\"Yes, I see,\" returned the other, lifting his head after a moment's careful inspection. \"It looks like an old scar.\"\n\n\"It is an old scar,\" whispered Marriott, his lips trembling. \"Now it all comes back to me.\"\n\n\"All what?\" Greene fidgeted on his chair. He tried to laugh, but without success. His friend seemed bordering on collapse.\n\n\"Hush! Be quiet, and\u2014I'll tell you,\" he said. \"Field made that scar.\"\n\nFor a whole minute the two men looked each other full in the face without speaking.\n\n\"Field made that scar!\" repeated Marriott at length in a louder voice.\n\n\"Field! You mean\u2014last night?\"\n\n\"No, not last night. Years ago\u2014at school, with his knife. And I made a scar in his arm with mine.\" Marriott was talking rapidly now.\n\n\"We exchanged drops of blood in each other's cuts. He put a drop into my arm and I put one into his\u2014\"\n\n\"In the name of heaven, what for?\"\n\n\"It was a boys' compact. We made a sacred pledge, a bargain. I remember it all perfectly now. We had been reading some dreadful book and we swore to appear to one another\u2014I mean, whoever died first swore to show himself to the other. And we sealed the compact with each other's blood. I remember it all so well\u2014the hot summer afternoon in the playground, seven years ago\u2014and one of the masters caught us and confiscated the knives\u2014and I have never thought of it again to this day\u2014\"\n\n\"And you mean\u2014\" stammered Greene.\n\nBut Marriott made no answer. He got up and crossed the room and lay down wearily upon the sofa, hiding his face in his hands.\n\nGreene himself was a bit non-plussed. He left his friend alone for a little while, thinking it all over again. Suddenly an idea seemed to strike him. He went over to where Marriott still lay motionless on the sofa and roused him. In any case it was better to face the matter, whether there was an explanation or not. Giving in was always the silly exit.\n\n\"I say, Marriott,\" he began, as the other turned his white face up to him. \"There's no good being so upset about it. I mean\u2014if it's all an hallucination we know what to do. And if it isn't\u2014well, we know what to think, don't we?\"\n\n\"I suppose so. But it frightens me horribly for some reason,\" returned his friend in a hushed voice. \"And that poor devil\u2014\"\n\n\"But, after all, if the worst is true and\u2014and that chap has kept his promise\u2014well, he has, that's all, isn't it?\"\n\nMarriott nodded.\n\n\"There's only one thing that occurs to me,\" Greene went on, \"and that is, are you quite sure that\u2014that he really ate like that\u2014I mean that he actually ate anything at all?\" he finished, blurting out all his thought.\n\nMarriott stared at him for a moment and then said he could easily make certain. He spoke quietly. After the main shock no lesser surprise could affect him.\n\n\"I put the things away myself,\" he said, \"after we had finished. They are on the third shelf in that cupboard. No one's touched 'em since.\"\n\nHe pointed without getting up, and Greene took the hint and went over to look.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said, after a brief examination; \"just as I thought. It was partly hallucination, at any rate. The things haven't been touched. Come and see for yourself.\"\n\nTogether they examined the shelf. There was the brown loaf, the plate of stale scones, the oatcake, all untouched. Even the glass of whisky Marriott had poured out stood there with the whisky still in it.\n\n\"You were feeding\u2014no one,\" said Greene \"Field ate and drank nothing. He was not there at all!\"\n\n\"But the breathing?\" urged the other in a low voice, staring with a dazed expression on his face.\n\nGreene did not answer. He walked over to the bedroom, while Marriott followed him with his eyes. He opened the door, and listened. There was no need for words. The sound of deep, regular breathing came floating through the air. There was no hallucination about that, at any rate. Marriott could hear it where he stood on the other side of the room.\n\nGreene closed the door and came back. \"There's only one thing to do,\" he declared with decision. \"Write home and find out about him, and meanwhile come and finish your reading in my rooms. I've got an extra bed.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" returned the Fourth Year Man; \"there's no hallucination about that exam; I must pass that whatever happens.\"\n\nAnd this was what they did.\n\nIt was about a week later when Marriott got the answer from his sister. Part of it he read out to Greene\u2014\n\n\"It is curious,\" she wrote, \"that in your letter you should have enquired after Field. It seems a terrible thing, but you know only a short while ago Sir John's patience became exhausted, and he turned him out of the house, they say without a penny. Well, what do you think? He has killed himself. At least, it looks like suicide. Instead of leaving the house, he went down into the cellar and simply starved himself to death... They're trying to suppress it, of course, but I heard it all from my maid, who got it from their footman... They found the body on the 14th and the doctor said he had died about twelve hours before... He was dreadfully thin...\"\n\n\"Then he died on the 13th,\" said Greene.\n\nMarriott nodded.\n\n\"That's the very night he came to see you.\"\n\nMarriott nodded again.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ With Intent To Steal by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nTo sleep in a lonely barn when the best bedrooms in the house were at our disposal, seemed, to say the least, unnecessary, and I felt that some explanation was due to our host.\n\nBut Shorthouse, I soon discovered, had seen to all that; our enterprise would be tolerated, not welcomed, for the master kept this sort of thing down with a firm hand. And then, how little I could get this man, Shorthouse, to tell me. There was much I wanted to ask and hear, but he surrounded himself with impossible barriers. It was ludicrous; he was surely asking a good deal of me, and yet he would give so little in return, and his reason\u2014that it was for my good\u2014may have been perfectly true, but did not bring me any comfort in its train. He gave me sops now and then, however, to keep up my curiosity, till I soon was aware that there were growing up side by side within me a genuine interest and an equally genuine fear; and something of both these is probably necessary to all real excitement.\n\nThe barn in question was some distance from the house, on the side of the stables, and I had passed it on several of my journeyings to and fro wondering at its forlorn and untarred appearance under a r\u00e9gime where everything was so spick and span; but it had never once occurred to me as possible that I should come to spend a night under its roof with a comparative stranger, and undergo there an experience belonging to an order of things I had always rather ridiculed and despised.\n\nAt the moment I can only partially recall the process by which Shorthouse persuaded me to lend him my company. Like myself, he was a guest in this autumn house-party, and where there were so many to chatter and to chaff, I think his taciturnity of manner had appealed to me by contrast, and that I wished to repay something of what I owed. There was, no doubt, flattery in it as well, for he was more than twice my age, a man of amazingly wide experience, an explorer of all the world's corners where danger lurked, and\u2014most subtle flattery of all\u2014by far the best shot in the whole party, our host included.\n\nAt first, however, I held out a bit.\n\n\"But surely this story you tell,\" I said, \"has the parentage common to all such tales\u2014a superstitious heart and an imaginative brain\u2014and has grown now by frequent repetition into an authentic ghost story? Besides, this head gardener of half a century ago,\" I added, seeing that he still went on cleaning his gun in silence, \"who was he, and what positive information have you about him beyond the fact that he was found hanging from the rafters, dead?\"\n\n\"He was no mere head gardener, this man who passed as such,\" he replied without looking up, \"but a fellow of splendid education who used this curious disguise for his own purposes. Part of this very barn, of which he always kept the key, was found to have been fitted up as a complete laboratory, with athanor, alembic, cucurbite, and other appliances, some of which the master destroyed at once\u2014perhaps for the best\u2014and which I have only been able to guess at\u2014\"\n\n\"Black Arts,\" I laughed.\n\n\"Who knows?\" he rejoined quietly. \"The man undoubtedly possessed knowledge\u2014dark knowledge\u2014that was most unusual and dangerous, and I can discover no means by which he came to it\u2014no ordinary means, that is. But I have found many facts in the case which point to the exercise of a most desperate and unscrupulous will; and the strange disappearances in the neighbourhood, as well as the bones found buried in the kitchen garden, though never actually traced to him, seem to me full of dreadful suggestion.\"\n\nI laughed again, a little uncomfortably perhaps, and said it reminded one of the story of Giles de Rays, mar\u00e9chal of France, who was said to have killed and tortured to death in a few years no less than one hundred and sixty women and children for the purposes of necromancy, and who was executed for his crimes at Nantes. But Shorthouse would not \"rise,\" and only returned to his subject.\n\n\"His suicide seems to have been only just in time to escape arrest,\" he said.\n\n\"A magician of no high order then,\" I observed sceptically, \"if suicide was his only way of evading the country police.\"\n\n\"The police of London and St. Petersburg rather,\" returned Shorthouse; \"for the headquarters of this pretty company was somewhere in Russia, and his apparatus all bore the marks of the most skilful foreign make. A Russian woman then employed in the household\u2014governess, or something\u2014vanished, too, about the same time and was never caught. She was no doubt the cleverest of the lot. And, remember, the object of this appalling group was not mere vulgar gain, but a kind of knowledge that called for the highest qualities of courage and intellect in the seekers.\"\n\nI admit I was impressed by the man's conviction of voice and manner, for there is something very compelling in the force of an earnest man's belief, though I still affected to sneer politely.\n\n\"But, like most Black Magicians, the fellow only succeeded in compassing his own destruction\u2014that of his tools, rather, and of escaping himself.\"\n\n\"So that he might better accomplish his objects elsewhere and otherwise,\" said Shorthouse, giving, as he spoke, the most minute attention to the cleaning of the lock.\n\n\"Elsewhere and otherwise,\" I gasped.\n\n\"As if the shell he left hanging from the rafter in the barn in no way impeded the man's spirit from continuing his dreadful work under new conditions,\" he added quietly, without noticing my interruption. \"The idea being that he sometimes revisits the garden and the barn, chiefly the barn\u2014\"\n\n\"The barn!\" I exclaimed; \"for what purpose?\"\n\n\"Chiefly the barn,\" he finished, as if he had not heard me, \"that is, when there is anybody in it.\"\n\nI stared at him without speaking, for there was a wonder in me how he would add to this.\n\n\"When he wants fresh material, that is\u2014he comes to steal from the living.\"\n\n\"Fresh material!\" I repeated aghast. \"To steal from the living!\" Even then, in broad daylight, I was foolishly conscious of a creeping sensation at the roots of my hair, as if a cold breeze were passing over my skull.\n\n\"The strong vitality of the living is what this sort of creature is supposed to need most,\" he went on imperturbably, \"and where he has worked and thought and struggled before is the easiest place for him to get it in. The former conditions are in some way more easily reconstructed\u2014\" He stopped suddenly, and devoted all his attention to the gun. \"It's difficult to explain, you know, rather,\" he added presently, \"and, besides, it's much better that you should not know till afterwards.\"\n\nI made a noise that was the beginning of a score of questions and of as many sentences, but it got no further than a mere noise, and Shorthouse, of course, stepped in again.\n\n\"Your scepticism,\" he added, \"is one of the qualities that induce me to ask you to spend the night there with me.\"\n\n\"In those days,\" he went on, in response to my urging for more information, \"the family were much abroad, and often travelled for years at a time. This man was invaluable in their absence. His wonderful knowledge of horticulture kept the gardens\u2014French, Italian, English\u2014in perfect order. He had carte blanche in the matter of expense, and of course selected all his own underlings. It was the sudden, unexpected return of the master that surprised the amazing stories of the countryside before the fellow, with all his cleverness, had time to prepare or conceal.\"\n\n\"But is there no evidence, no more recent evidence, to show that something is likely to happen if we sit up there?\" I asked, pressing him yet further, and I think to his liking, for it showed at least that I was interested. \"Has anything happened there lately, for instance?\"\n\nShorthouse glanced up from the gun he was cleaning so assiduously, and the smoke from his pipe curled up into an odd twist between me and the black beard and oriental, sun-tanned face. The magnetism of his look and expression brought more sense of conviction to me than I had felt hitherto, and I realised that there had been a sudden little change in my attitude and that I was now much more inclined to go in for the adventure with him. At least, I thought, with such a man, one would be safe in any emergency; for he is determined, resourceful, and to be depended upon.\n\n\"There's the point,\" he answered slowly; \"for there has apparently been a fresh outburst\u2014an attack almost, it seems,\u2014quite recently. There is evidence, of course, plenty of it, or I should not feel the interest I do feel, but\u2014\" he hesitated a moment, as though considering how much he ought to let me know, \"but the fact is that three men this summer, on separate occasions, who have gone into that barn after nightfall, have been accosted\u2014\"\n\n\"Accosted?\" I repeated, betrayed into the interruption by his choice of so singular a word.\n\n\"And one of the stablemen\u2014a recent arrival and quite ignorant of the story\u2014who had to go in there late one night, saw a dark substance hanging down from one of the rafters, and when he climbed up, shaking all over, to cut it down\u2014for he said he felt sure it was a corpse\u2014the knife passed through nothing but air, and he heard a sound up under the eaves as if someone were laughing. Yet, while he slashed away, and afterwards too, the thing went on swinging there before his eyes and turning slowly with its own weight, like a huge joint on a spit. The man declares, too, that it had a large bearded face, and that the mouth was open and drawn down like the mouth of a hanged man.\"\n\n\"Can we question this fellow?\"\n\n\"He's gone\u2014gave notice at once, but not before I had questioned him myself very closely.\"\n\n\"Then this was quite recent?\" I said, for I knew Shorthouse had not been in the house more than a week.\n\n\"Four days ago,\" he replied. \"But, more than that, only three days ago a couple of men were in there together in full daylight when one of them suddenly turned deadly faint. He said that he felt an overmastering impulse to hang himself; and he looked about for a rope and was furious when his companion tried to prevent him\u2014\"\n\n\"But he did prevent him?\"\n\n\"Just in time, but not before he had clambered on to a beam. He was very violent.\"\n\nI had so much to say and ask that I could get nothing out in time, and Shorthouse went on again.\n\n\"I've had a sort of watching brief for this case,\" he said with a smile, whose real significance, however, completely escaped me at the time, \"and one of the most disagreeable features about it is the deliberate way the servants have invented excuses to go out to the place, and always after dark; some of them who have no right to go there, and no real occasion at all\u2014have never been there in their lives before probably\u2014and now all of a sudden have shown the keenest desire and determination to go out there about dusk, or soon after, and with the most paltry and foolish excuses in the world. Of course,\" he added, \"they have been prevented, but the desire, stronger than their superstitious dread, and which they cannot explain, is very curious.\"\n\n\"Very,\" I admitted, feeling that my hair was beginning to stand up again.\n\n\"You see,\" he went on presently, \"it all points to volition\u2014in fact to deliberate arrangement. It is no mere family ghost that goes with every ivied house in England of a certain age; it is something real, and something very malignant.\"\n\nHe raised his face from the gun barrel, and for the first time his eye caught mine in the full. Yes, he was very much in earnest. Also, he knew a great deal more than he meant to tell.\n\n\"It's worth tempting\u2014and fighting, I think,\" he said; \"but I want a companion with me. Are you game?\" His enthusiasm undoubtedly caught me, but I still wanted to hedge a bit.\n\n\"I'm very sceptical,\" I pleaded.\n\n\"All the better,\" he said, almost as if to himself. \"You have the pluck; I have the knowledge\u2014\"\n\n\"The knowledge?\"\n\nHe looked round cautiously as if to make sure that there was no one within earshot.\n\n\"I've been in the place myself,\" he said in a lowered voice, \"quite lately\u2014in fact only three nights ago\u2014the day the man turned queer.\"\n\nI stared.\n\n\"But\u2014I was obliged to come out\u2014\"\n\nStill I stared.\n\n\"Quickly,\" he added significantly.\n\n\"You've gone into the thing pretty thoroughly,\" was all I could find to say, for I had almost made up my mind to go with him, and was not sure that I wanted to hear too much beforehand.\n\nHe nodded. \"It's a bore, of course, but I must do everything thoroughly\u2014or not at all.\"\n\n\"That's why you clean your own gun, I suppose?\"\n\n\"That's why, when there's any danger, I take as few chances as possible,\" he said, with the same enigmatical smile I had noticed before; and then he added with emphasis, \"And that is also why I ask you to keep me company now.\"\n\nOf course, the shaft went straight home, and I gave my promise without further ado.\n\nOur preparations for the night\u2014a couple of rugs and a flask of black coffee\u2014were not elaborate, and we found no difficulty, about ten o'clock, in absenting ourselves from the billiard-room without attracting curiosity. Shorthouse met me by arrangement under the cedar on the back lawn, and I at once realised with vividness what a difference there is between making plans in the daytime and carrying them out in the dark. One's common-sense\u2014at least in matters of this sort\u2014is reduced to a minimum, and imagination with all her attendant sprites usurps the place of judgment. Two and two no longer make four\u2014they make a mystery, and the mystery loses no time in growing into a menace. In this particular case, however, my imagination did not find wings very readily, for I knew that my companion was the most unmovable of men\u2014an unemotional, solid block of a man who would never lose his head, and in any conceivable state of affairs would always take the right as well as the strong course. So my faith in the man gave me a false courage that was nevertheless very consoling, and I looked forward to the night's adventure with a genuine appetite.\n\nSide by side, and in silence, we followed the path that skirted the East Woods, as they were called, and then led across two hay fields, and through another wood, to the barn, which thus lay about half a mile from the Lower Farm. To the Lower Farm, indeed, it properly belonged; and this made us realise more clearly how very ingenious must have been the excuses of the Hall servants who felt the desire to visit it.\n\nIt had been raining during the late afternoon, and the trees were still dripping heavily on all sides, but the moment we left the second wood and came out into the open, we saw a clearing with the stars overhead, against which the barn outlined itself in a black, lugubrious shadow. Shorthouse led the way\u2014still without a word\u2014and we crawled in through a low door and seated ourselves in a soft heap of hay in the extreme corner.\n\n\"Now,\" he said, speaking for the first time, \"I'll show you the inside of the barn, so that you may know where you are, and what to do, in case anything happens.\"\n\nA match flared in the darkness, and with the help of two more that followed I saw the interior of a lofty and somewhat rickety-looking barn, erected upon a wall of grey stones that ran all round and extended to a height of perhaps four feet. Above this masonry rose the wooden sides, running up into the usual vaulted roof, and supported by a double tier of massive oak rafters, which stretched across from wall to wall and were intersected by occasional uprights. I felt as if we were inside the skeleton of some antediluvian monster whose huge black ribs completely enfolded us. Most of this, of course, only sketched itself to my eye in the uncertain light of the flickering matches, and when I said I had seen enough, and the matches went out, we were at once enveloped in an atmosphere as densely black as anything that I have ever known. And the silence equalled the darkness.\n\nWe made ourselves comfortable and talked in low voices. The rugs, which were very large, covered our legs; and our shoulders sank into a really luxurious bed of softness. Yet neither of us apparently felt sleepy. I certainly didn't, and Shorthouse, dropping his customary brevity that fell little short of gruffness, plunged into an easy run of talking that took the form after a time of personal reminiscences. This rapidly became a vivid narration of adventure and travel in far countries, and at any other time I should have allowed myself to become completely absorbed in what he told. But, unfortunately, I was never able for a single instant to forget the real purpose of our enterprise, and consequently I felt all my senses more keenly on the alert than usual, and my attention accordingly more or less distracted. It was, indeed, a revelation to hear Shorthouse unbosom himself in this fashion, and to a young man it was of course doubly fascinating; but the little sounds that always punctuate even the deepest silence out of doors claimed some portion of my attention, and as the night grew on I soon became aware that his tales seemed somewhat disconnected and abrupt\u2014and that, in fact, I heard really only part of them.\n\nIt was not so much that I actually heard other sounds, but that I expected to hear them; this was what stole the other half of my listening. There was neither wind nor rain to break the stillness, and certainly there were no physical presences in our neighbourhood, for we were half a mile even from the Lower Farm; and from the Hall and stables, at least a mile. Yet the stillness was being continually broken\u2014perhaps disturbed is a better word\u2014and it was to these very remote and tiny disturbances that I felt compelled to devote at least half my listening faculties.\n\nFrom time to time, however, I made a remark or asked a question, to show that I was listening and interested; but, in a sense, my questions always seemed to bear in one direction and to make for one issue, namely, my companion's previous experience in the barn when he had been obliged to come out \"quickly.\"\n\nApparently I could not help myself in the matter, for this was really the one consuming curiosity I had; and the fact that it was better for me not to know it made me the keener to know it all, even the worst.\n\nShorthouse realised this even better than I did. I could tell it by the way he dodged, or wholly ignored, my questions, and this subtle sympathy between us showed plainly enough, had I been able at the time to reflect upon its meaning, that the nerves of both of us were in a very sensitive and highly-strung condition. Probably, the complete confidence I felt in his ability to face whatever might happen, and the extent to which also I relied upon him for my own courage, prevented the exercise of my ordinary powers of reflection, while it left my senses free to a more than usual degree of activity.\n\nThings must have gone on in this way for a good hour or more, when I made the sudden discovery that there was something unusual in the conditions of our environment. This sounds a roundabout mode of expression, but I really know not how else to put it. The discovery almost rushed upon me. By rights, we were two men waiting in an alleged haunted barn for something to happen; and, as two men who trusted one another implicitly (though for very different reasons), there should have been two minds keenly alert, with the ordinary senses in active co-operation. Some slight degree of nervousness, too, there might also have been, but beyond this, nothing. It was therefore with something of dismay that I made the sudden discovery that there was something more, and something that I ought to have noticed very much sooner than I actually did notice it.\n\nThe fact was\u2014Shorthouse's stream of talk was wholly unnatural. He was talking with a purpose. He did not wish to be cornered by my questions, true, but he had another and a deeper purpose still, and it grew upon me, as an unpleasant deduction from my discovery, that this strong, cynical, unemotional man by my side was talking\u2014and had been talking all this time\u2014to gain a particular end. And this end, I soon felt clearly, was to convince himself. But, of what?\n\nFor myself, as the hours wore on towards midnight, I was not anxious to find the answer; but in the end it became impossible to avoid it, and I knew as I listened, that he was pouring forth this steady stream of vivid reminiscences of travel\u2014South Seas, big game, Russian exploration, women, adventures of all sorts\u2014because he wished the past to reassert itself to the complete exclusion of the present. He was taking his precautions. He was afraid.\n\nI felt a hundred things, once this was clear to me, but none of them more than the wish to get up at once and leave the barn. If Shorthouse was afraid already, what in the world was to happen to me in the long hours that lay ahead?... I only know that, in my fierce efforts to deny to myself the evidence of his partial collapse, the strength came that enabled me to play my part properly, and I even found myself helping him by means of animated remarks upon his stories, and by more or less judicious questions. I also helped him by dismissing from my mind any desire to enquire into the truth of his former experience; and it was good I did so, for had he turned it loose on me, with those great powers of convincing description that he had at his command, I verily believe that I should never have crawled from that barn alive. So, at least, I felt at the moment. It was the instinct of self-preservation, and it brought sound judgment.\n\nHere, then, at least, with different motives, reached, too, by opposite ways, we were both agreed upon one thing, namely, that temporarily we would forget. Fools we were, for a dominant emotion is not so easily banished, and we were for ever recurring to it in a hundred ways direct and indirect. A real fear cannot be so easily trifled with, and while we toyed on the surface with thousands and thousands of words\u2014mere words\u2014our sub-conscious activities were steadily gaining force, and would before very long have to be properly acknowledged. We could not get away from it. At last, when he had finished the recital of an adventure which brought him near enough to a horrible death, I admitted that in my uneventful life I had never yet been face to face with a real fear. It slipped out inadvertently, and, of course, without intention, but the tendency in him at the time was too strong to be resisted. He saw the loophole, and made for it full tilt.\n\n\"It is the same with all the emotions,\" he said. \"The experiences of others never give a complete account. Until a man has deliberately turned and faced for himself the fiends that chase him down the years, he has no knowledge of what they really are, or of what they can do. Imaginative authors may write, moralists may preach, and scholars may criticise, but they are dealing all the time in a coinage of which they know not the actual value. Their listener gets a sensation\u2014but not the true one. Until you have faced these emotions,\" he went on, with the same race of words that had come from him the whole evening, \"and made them your own, your slaves, you have no idea of the power that is in them\u2014hunger, that shows lights beckoning beyond the grave; thirst, that fills with mingled ice and fire; passion, love, loneliness, revenge, and\u2014\" He paused for a minute, and though I knew we were on the brink I was powerless to hold him. \"...and fear,\" he went on\u2014\"fear... I think that death from fear, or madness from fear, must sum up in a second of time the total of all the most awful sensations it is possible for a man to know.\"\n\n\"Then you have yourself felt something of this fear,\" I interrupted; \"for you said just now\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not mean physical fear,\" he replied; \"for that is more or less a question of nerves and will, and it is imagination that makes men cowards. I mean an absolute fear, a physical fear one might call it, that reaches the soul and withers every power one possesses.\"\n\nHe said a lot more, for he, too, was wholly unable to stem the torrent once it broke loose; but I have forgotten it; or, rather, mercifully I did not hear it, for I stopped my ears and only heard the occasional words when I took my fingers out to find if he had come to an end. In due course he did come to an end, and there we left it, for I then knew positively what he already knew: that somewhere here in the night, and within the walls of this very barn where we were sitting, there was waiting Something of dreadful malignancy and of great power. Something that we might both have to face ere morning, and Something that he had already tried to face once and failed in the attempt.\n\nThe night wore slowly on; and it gradually became more and more clear to me that I could not dare to rely as at first upon my companion, and that our positions were undergoing a slow process of reversal. I thank Heaven this was not borne in upon me too suddenly; and that I had at least the time to readjust myself somewhat to the new conditions. Preparation was possible, even if it was not much, and I sought by every means in my power to gather up all the shreds of my courage, so that they might together make a decent rope that would stand the strain when it came. The strain would come, that was certain, and I was thoroughly well aware\u2014though for my life I cannot put into words the reasons for my knowledge\u2014that the massing of the material against us was proceeding somewhere in the darkness with determination and a horrible skill besides.\n\nShorthouse meanwhile talked without ceasing. The great quantity of hay opposite\u2014or straw, I believe it actually was\u2014seemed to deaden the sound of his voice, but the silence, too, had become so oppressive that I welcomed his torrent and even dreaded the moment when it would stop. I heard, too, the gentle ticking of my watch. Each second uttered its voice and dropped away into a gulf, as if starting on a journey whence there was no return. Once a dog barked somewhere in the distance, probably on the Lower Farm; and once an owl hooted close outside and I could hear the swishing of its wings as it passed overhead. Above me, in the darkness, I could just make out the outline of the barn, sinister and black, the rows of rafters stretching across from wall to wall like wicked arms that pressed upon the hay. Shorthouse, deep in some involved yarn of the South Seas that was meant to be full of cheer and sunshine, and yet only succeeded in making a ghastly mixture of unnatural colouring, seemed to care little whether I listened or not. He made no appeal to me, and I made one or two quite irrelevant remarks which passed him by and proved that he was merely uttering sounds. He, too, was afraid of the silence.\n\nI fell to wondering how long a man could talk without stopping... Then it seemed to me that these words of his went falling into the same gulf where the seconds dropped, only they were heavier and fell faster. I began to chase them. Presently one of them fell much faster than the rest, and I pursued it and found myself almost immediately in a land of clouds and shadows. They rose up and enveloped me, pressing on the eyelids... It must have been just here that I actually fell asleep, somewhere between twelve and one o'clock, because, as I chased this word at tremendous speed through space, I knew that I had left the other words far, very far behind me, till, at last, I could no longer hear them at all. The voice of the story-teller was beyond the reach of hearing; and I was falling with ever increasing rapidity through an immense void.\n\nA sound of whispering roused me. Two persons were talking under their breath close beside me. The words in the main escaped me, but I caught every now and then bitten-off phrases and half sentences, to which, however, I could attach no intelligible meaning. The words were quite close\u2014at my very side in fact\u2014and one of the voices sounded so familiar, that curiosity overcame dread, and I turned to look. I was not mistaken; it was Shorthouse whispering. But the other person, who must have been just a little beyond him, was lost in the darkness and invisible to me. It seemed then that Shorthouse at once turned up his face and looked at me and, by some means or other that caused me no surprise at the time, I easily made out the features in the darkness. They wore an expression I had never seen there before; he seemed distressed, exhausted, worn out, and as though he were about to give in after a long mental struggle. He looked at me, almost beseechingly, and the whispering of the other person died away.\n\n\"They're at me,\" he said.\n\nI found it quite impossible to answer; the words stuck in my throat. His voice was thin, plaintive, almost like a child's.\n\n\"I shall have to go. I'm not as strong as I thought. They'll call it suicide, but, of course, it's really murder.\" There was real anguish in his voice, and it terrified me.\n\nA deep silence followed these extraordinary words, and I somehow understood that the Other Person was just going to carry on the conversation\u2014I even fancied I saw lips shaping themselves just over my friend's shoulder\u2014when I felt a sharp blow in the ribs and a voice, this time a deep voice, sounded in my ear. I opened my eyes, and the wretched dream vanished. Yet it left behind it an impression of a strong and quite unusual reality.\n\n\"Do try not to go to sleep again,\" he said sternly. \"You seem exhausted. Do you feel so?\" There was a note in his voice I did not welcome,\u2014less than alarm, but certainly more than mere solicitude.\n\n\"I do feel terribly sleepy all of a sudden,\" I admitted, ashamed.\n\n\"So you may,\" he added very earnestly; \"but I rely on you to keep awake, if only to watch. You have been asleep for half an hour at least\u2014and you were so still\u2014I thought I'd wake you\u2014\"\n\n\"Why?\" I asked, for my curiosity and nervousness were altogether too strong to be resisted. \"Do you think we are in danger?\"\n\n\"I think they are about here now. I feel my vitality going rapidly\u2014that's always the first sign. You'll last longer than I, remember. Watch carefully.\"\n\nThe conversation dropped. I was afraid to say all I wanted to say. It would have been too unmistakably a confession; and intuitively I realised the danger of admitting the existence of certain emotions until positively forced to. But presently Shorthouse began again. His voice sounded odd, and as if it had lost power. It was more like a woman's or a boy's voice than a man's, and recalled the voice in my dream.\n\n\"I suppose you've got a knife?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes\u2014a big clasp knife; but why?\" He made no answer. \"You don't think a practical joke likely? No one suspects we're here,\" I went on. Nothing was more significant of our real feelings this night than the way we toyed with words, and never dared more than to skirt the things in our mind.\n\n\"It's just as well to be prepared,\" he answered evasively. \"Better be quite sure. See which pocket it's in\u2014so as to be ready.\"\n\nI obeyed mechanically, and told him. But even this scrap of talk proved to me that he was getting further from me all the time in his mind. He was following a line that was strange to me, and, as he distanced me, I felt that the sympathy between us grew more and more strained. He knew more; it was not that I minded so much\u2014but that he was willing to communicate less. And in proportion as I lost his support, I dreaded his increasing silence. Not of words\u2014for he talked more volubly than ever, and with a fiercer purpose\u2014but his silence in giving no hint of what he must have known to be really going on the whole time.\n\nThe night was perfectly still. Shorthouse continued steadily talking, and I jogged him now and again with remarks or questions in order to keep awake. He paid no attention, however, to either.\n\nAbout two in the morning a short shower fell, and the drops rattled sharply on the roof like shot. I was glad when it stopped, for it completely drowned all other sounds and made it impossible to hear anything else that might be going on. Something was going on, too, all the time, though for the life of me I could not say what. The outer world had grown quite dim\u2014the house-party, the shooters, the billiard-room, and the ordinary daily incidents of my visit. All my energies were concentrated on the present, and the constant strain of watching, waiting, listening, was excessively telling.\n\nShorthouse still talked of his adventures, in some Eastern country now, and less connectedly. These adventures, real or imaginary, had quite a savour of the Arabian Nights, and did not by any means make it easier for me to keep my hold on reality. The lightest weight will affect the balance under such circumstances, and in this case the weight of his talk was on the wrong scale. His words were very rapid, and I found it overwhelmingly difficult not to follow them into that great gulf of darkness where they all rushed and vanished. But that, I knew, meant sleep again. Yet, it was strange I should feel sleepy when at the same time all my nerves were fairly tingling. Every time I heard what seemed like a step outside, or a movement in the hay opposite, the blood stood still for a moment in my veins. Doubtless, the unremitting strain told upon me more than I realised, and this was doubly great now that I knew Shorthouse was a source of weakness instead of strength, as I had counted. Certainly, a curious sense of languor grew upon me more and more, and I was sure that the man beside me was engaged in the same struggle. The feverishness of his talk proved this, if nothing else. It was dreadfully hard to keep awake.\n\nBut this time, instead of dropping into the gulf, I saw something come up out of it! It reached our world by a door in the side of the barn furthest from me, and it came in cautiously and silently and moved into the mass of hay opposite. There, for a moment, I lost it, but presently I caught it again higher up. It was clinging, like a great bat, to the side of the barn. Something trailed behind it, I could not make out what... It crawled up the wooden wall and began to move out along one of the rafters. A numb terror settled down all over me as I watched it. The thing trailing behind it was apparently a rope.\n\nThe whispering began again just then, but the only words I could catch seemed without meaning; it was almost like another language. The voices were above me, under the roof. Suddenly I saw signs of active movement going on just beyond the place where the thing lay upon the rafter. There was something else up there with it! Then followed panting, like the quick breathing that accompanies effort, and the next minute a black mass dropped through the air and dangled at the end of the rope.\n\nInstantly, it all flashed upon me. I sprang to my feet and rushed headlong across the floor of the barn. How I moved so quickly in the darkness I do not know; but, even as I ran, it flashed into my mind that I should never get at my knife in time to cut the thing down, or else that I should find it had been taken from me. Somehow or other\u2014the Goddess of Dreams knows how\u2014I climbed up by the hay bales and swung out along the rafter. I was hanging, of course, by my arms, and the knife was already between my teeth, though I had no recollection of how it got there. It was open. The mass, hanging like a side of bacon, was only a few feet in front of me, and I could plainly see the dark line of rope that fastened it to the beam. I then noticed for the first time that it was swinging and turning in the air, and that as I approached it seemed to move along the beam, so that the same distance was always maintained between us. The only thing I could do\u2014for there was no time to hesitate\u2014was to jump at it through the air and slash at the rope as I dropped.\n\nI seized the knife with my right hand, gave a great swing of my body with my legs and leaped forward at it through the air. Horrors! It was closer to me than I knew, and I plunged full into it, and the arm with the knife missed the rope and cut deeply into some substance that was soft and yielding. But, as I dropped past it, the thing had time to turn half its width so that it swung round and faced me\u2014and I could have sworn as I rushed past it through the air, that it had the features of Shorthouse.\n\nThe shock of this brought the vile nightmare to an abrupt end, and I woke up a second time on the soft hay-bed to find that the grey dawn was stealing in, and that I was exceedingly cold. After all I had failed to keep awake, and my sleep, since it was growing light, must have lasted at least an hour. A whole hour off my guard!\n\nThere was no sound from Shorthouse, to whom, of course, my first thoughts turned; probably his flow of words had ceased long ago, and he too had yielded to the persuasions of the seductive god. I turned to wake him and get the comfort of companionship for the horror of my dream, when to my utter dismay I saw that the place where he had been was vacant. He was no longer beside me.\n\nIt had been no little shock before to discover that the ally in whom lay all my faith and dependence was really frightened, but it is quite impossible to describe the sensations I experienced when I realised he had gone altogether and that I was alone in the barn. For a minute or two my head swam and I felt a prey to a helpless terror. The dream, too, still seemed half real, so vivid had it been! I was thoroughly frightened\u2014hot and cold by turns\u2014and I clutched the hay at my side in handfuls, and for some moments had no idea in the world what I should do.\n\nThis time, at least, I was unmistakably awake, and I made a great effort to collect myself and face the meaning of the disappearance of my companion. In this I succeeded so far that I decided upon a thorough search of the barn, inside and outside. It was a dreadful undertaking, and I did not feel at all sure of being able to bring it to a conclusion, but I knew pretty well that unless something was done at once, I should simply collapse.\n\nBut, when I tried to move, I found that the cold, and fear, and I know not what else unholy besides, combined to make it almost impossible. I suddenly realised that a tour of inspection, during the whole of which my back would be open to attack, was not to be thought of. My will was not equal to it. Anything might spring upon me any moment from the dark corners, and the growing light was just enough to reveal every movement I made to any who might be watching. For, even then, and while I was still half dazed and stupid, I knew perfectly well that someone was watching me all the time with the utmost intentness. I had not merely awakened; I had been awakened.\n\nI decided to try another plan; I called to him. My voice had a thin weak sound, far away and quite unreal, and there was no answer to it. Hark, though! There was something that might have been a very faint voice near me!\n\nI called again, this time with greater distinctness, \"Shorthouse, where are you? can you hear me?\"\n\nThere certainly was a sound, but it was not a voice. Something was moving. It was someone shuffling along, and it seemed to be outside the barn. I was afraid to call again, and the sound continued. It was an ordinary sound enough, no doubt, but it came to me just then as something unusual and unpleasant. Ordinary sounds remain ordinary only so long as one is not listening to them; under the influence of intense listening they become unusual, portentous, and therefore extraordinary. So, this common sound came to me as something uncommon, disagreeable. It conveyed, too, an impression of stealth. And with it there was another, a slighter sound.\n\nJust at this minute the wind bore faintly over the field the sound of the stable clock, a mile away. It was three o'clock; the hour when life's pulses beat lowest; when poor souls lying between life and death find it hardest to resist. Vividly I remember this thought crashing through my brain with a sound of thunder, and I realised that the strain on my nerves was nearing the limit, and that something would have to be done at once if I was to reclaim my self-control at all.\n\nWhen thinking over afterwards the events of this dreadful night, it has always seemed strange to me that my second nightmare, so vivid in its terror and its nearness, should have furnished me with no inkling of what was really going on all this while; and that I should not have been able to put two and two together, or have discovered sooner than I did what this sound was and where it came from. I can well believe that the vile scheming which lay behind the whole experience found it an easy trifle to direct my hearing amiss; though, of course, it may equally well have been due to the confused condition of my mind at the time and to the general nervous tension under which I was undoubtedly suffering.\n\nBut, whatever the cause for my stupidity at first in failing to trace the sound to its proper source, I can only say here that it was with a shock of unexampled horror that my eye suddenly glanced upwards and caught sight of the figure moving in the shadows above my head among the rafters. Up to this moment I had thought that it was somebody outside the barn, crawling round the walls till it came to a door; and the rush of horror that froze my heart when I looked up and saw that it was Shorthouse creeping stealthily along a beam, is something altogether beyond the power of words to describe.\n\nHe was staring intently down upon me, and I knew at once that it was he who had been watching me.\n\nThis point was, I think, for me the climax of feeling in the whole experience; I was incapable of any further sensation\u2014that is any further sensation in the same direction. But here the abominable character of the affair showed itself most plainly, for it suddenly presented an entirely new aspect to me. The light fell on the picture from a new angle, and galvanised me into a fresh ability to feel when I thought a merciful numbness had supervened. It may not sound a great deal in the printed letter, but it came to me almost as if it had been an extension of consciousness, for the Hand that held the pencil suddenly touched in with ghastly effect of contrast the element of the ludicrous. Nothing could have been worse just then. Shorthouse, the masterful spirit, so intrepid in the affairs of ordinary life, whose power increased rather than lessened in the face of danger\u2014this man, creeping on hands and knees along a rafter in a barn at three o'clock in the morning, watching me all the time as a cat watches a mouse! Yes, it was distinctly ludicrous, and while it gave me a measure with which to gauge the dread emotion that caused his aberration, it stirred somewhere deep in my interior the strings of an empty laughter.\n\nOne of those moments then came to me that are said to come sometimes under the stress of great emotion, when in an instant the mind grows dazzlingly clear. An abnormal lucidity took the place of my confusion of thought, and I suddenly understood that the two dreams which I had taken for nightmares must really have been sent me, and that I had been allowed for one moment to look over the edge of what was to come; the Good was helping, even when the Evil was most determined to destroy.\n\nI saw it all clearly now. Shorthouse had overrated his strength. The terror inspired by his first visit to the barn (when he had failed) had roused the man's whole nature to win, and he had brought me to divert the deadly stream of evil. That he had again underrated the power against him was apparent as soon as he entered the barn, and his wild talk, and refusal to admit what he felt, were due to this desire not to acknowledge the insidious fear that was growing in his heart. But, at length, it had become too strong. He had left my side in my sleep\u2014had been overcome himself, perhaps, first in his sleep, by the dreadful impulse. He knew that I should interfere, and with every movement he made, he watched me steadily, for the mania was upon him and he was determined to hang himself. He pretended not to hear me calling, and I knew that anything coming between him and his purpose would meet the full force of his fury\u2014the fury of a maniac, of one, for the time being, truly possessed.\n\nFor a minute or two I sat there and stared. I saw then for the first time that there was a bit of rope trailing after him, and that this was what made the rustling sound I had noticed. Shorthouse, too, had come to a stop. His body lay along the rafter like a crouching animal. He was looking hard at me. That whitish patch was his face.\n\nI can lay claim to no courage in the matter, for I must confess that in one sense I was frightened almost beyond control. But at the same time the necessity for decided action, if I was to save his life, came to me with an intense relief. No matter what animated him for the moment, Shorthouse was only a man; it was flesh and blood I had to contend with and not the intangible powers. Only a few hours before I had seen him cleaning his gun, smoking his pipe, knocking the billiard balls about with very human clumsiness, and the picture flashed across my mind with the most wholesome effect.\n\nThen I dashed across the floor of the barn and leaped upon the hay bales as a preliminary to climbing up the sides to the first rafter. It was far more difficult than in my dream. Twice I slipped back into the hay, and as I scrambled up for the third time I saw that Shorthouse, who thus far had made no sound or movement, was now busily doing something with his hands upon the beam. He was at its further end, and there must have been fully fifteen feet between us. Yet I saw plainly what he was doing; he was fastening the rope to the rafter. The other end, I saw, was already round his neck!\n\nThis gave me at once the necessary strength, and in a second I had swung myself on to a beam, crying aloud with all the authority I could put into my voice\u2014\n\n\"You fool, man! What in the world are you trying to do? Come down at once!\"\n\nMy energetic actions and words combined had an immediate effect upon him for which I blessed Heaven; for he looked up from his horrid task, stared hard at me for a second or two, and then came wriggling along like a great cat to intercept me. He came by a series of leaps and bounds and at an astonishing pace, and the way he moved somehow inspired me with a fresh horror, for it did not seem the natural movement of a human being at all, but more, as I have said, like that of some lithe wild animal.\n\nHe was close upon me. I had no clear idea of what exactly I meant to do. I could see his face plainly now; he was grinning cruelly; the eyes were positively luminous, and the menacing expression of the mouth was most distressing to look upon. Otherwise it was the face of a chalk man, white and dead, with all the semblance of the living human drawn out of it. Between his teeth he held my clasp knife, which he must have taken from me in my sleep, and with a flash I recalled his anxiety to know exactly which pocket it was in.\n\n\"Drop that knife!\" I shouted at him, \"and drop after it yourself\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you dare to stop me!\" he hissed, the breath coming between his lips across the knife that he held in his teeth. \"Nothing in the world can stop me now\u2014I have promised\u2014and I must do it. I can't hold out any longer.\"\n\n\"Then drop the knife and I'll help you,\" I shouted back in his face. \"I promise\u2014\"\n\n\"No use,\" he cried, laughing a little, \"I must do it and you can't stop me.\"\n\nI heard a sound of laughter, too, somewhere in the air behind me. The next second Shorthouse came at me with a single bound.\n\nTo this day I cannot quite tell how it happened. It is still a wild confusion and a fever of horror in my mind, but from somewhere I drew more than my usual allowance of strength, and before he could well have realised what I meant to do, I had his throat between my fingers. He opened his teeth and the knife dropped at once, for I gave him a squeeze he need never forget. Before, my muscles had felt like so much soaked paper; now they recovered their natural strength, and more besides. I managed to work ourselves along the rafter until the hay was beneath us, and then, completely exhausted, I let go my hold and we swung round together and dropped on to the hay, he clawing at me in the air even as we fell.\n\nThe struggle that began by my fighting for his life ended in a wild effort to save my own, for Shorthouse was quite beside himself, and had no idea what he was doing. Indeed, he has always averred that he remembers nothing of the entire night's experiences after the time when he first woke me from sleep. A sort of deadly mist settled over him, he declares, and he lost all sense of his own identity. The rest was a blank until he came to his senses under a mass of hay with me on the top of him.\n\nIt was the hay that saved us, first by breaking the fall and then by impeding his movements so that I was able to prevent his choking me to death.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Wood Of The Dead by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nOne summer, in my wanderings with a knapsack, I was at luncheon in the room of a wayside inn in the western country, when the door opened and there entered an old rustic, who crossed close to my end of the table and sat himself down very quietly in the seat by the bow window. We exchanged glances, or, properly speaking, nods, for at the moment I did not actually raise my eyes to his face, so concerned was I with the important business of satisfying an appetite gained by tramping twelve miles over a difficult country.\n\nThe fine warm rain of seven o'clock, which had since risen in a kind of luminous mist about the tree tops, now floated far overhead in a deep blue sky, and the day was settling down into a blaze of golden light. It was one of those days peculiar to Somerset and North Devon, when the orchards shine and the meadows seem to add a radiance of their own, so brilliantly soft are the colourings of grass and foliage.\n\nThe inn-keeper's daughter, a little maiden with a simple country loveliness, presently entered with a foaming pewter mug, enquired after my welfare, and went out again. Apparently she had not noticed the old man sitting in the settle by the bow window, nor had he, for his part, so much as once turned his head in our direction.\n\nUnder ordinary circumstances I should probably have given no thought to this other occupant of the room; but the fact that it was supposed to be reserved for my private use, and the singular thing that he sat looking aimlessly out of the window, with no attempt to engage me in conversation, drew my eyes more than once somewhat curiously upon him, and I soon caught myself wondering why he sat there so silently, and always with averted head.\n\nHe was, I saw, a rather bent old man in rustic dress, and the skin of his face was wrinkled like that of an apple; corduroy trousers were caught up with a string below the knee, and he wore a sort of brown fustian jacket that was very much faded. His thin hand rested upon a stoutish stick. He wore no hat and carried none, and I noticed that his head, covered with silvery hair, was finely shaped and gave the impression of something noble.\n\nThough rather piqued by his studied disregard of my presence, I came to the conclusion that he probably had something to do with the little hostel and had a perfect right to use this room with freedom, and I finished my luncheon without breaking the silence and then took the settle opposite to smoke a pipe before going on my way.\n\nThrough the open window came the scents of the blossoming fruit trees; the orchard was drenched in sunshine and the branches danced lazily in the breeze; the grass below fairly shone with white and yellow daisies, and the red roses climbing in profusion over the casement mingled their perfume with the sweetly penetrating odour of the sea.\n\nIt was a place to dawdle in, to lie and dream away a whole afternoon, watching the sleepy butterflies and listening to the chorus of birds which seemed to fill every corner of the sky. Indeed, I was already debating in my mind whether to linger and enjoy it all instead of taking the strenuous pathway over the hills, when the old rustic in the settle opposite suddenly turned his face towards me for the first time and began to speak.\n\nHis voice had a quiet dreamy note in it that was quite in harmony with the day and the scene, but it sounded far away, I thought, almost as though it came to me from outside where the shadows were weaving their eternal tissue of dreams upon the garden floor. Moreover, there was no trace in it of the rough quality one might naturally have expected, and, now that I saw the full face of the speaker for the first time, I noted with something like a start that the deep, gentle eyes seemed far more in keeping with the timbre of the voice than with the rough and very countrified appearance of the clothes and manner. His voice set pleasant waves of sound in motion towards me, and the actual words, if I remember rightly, were\u2014\n\n\"You are a stranger in these parts?\" or \"Is not this part of the country strange to you?\"\n\nThere was no \"sir,\" nor any outward and visible sign of the deference usually paid by real country folk to the town-bred visitor, but in its place a gentleness, almost a sweetness, of polite sympathy that was far more of a compliment than either.\n\nI answered that I was wandering on foot through a part of the country that was wholly new to me, and that I was surprised not to find a place of such idyllic loveliness marked upon my map.\n\n\"I have lived here all my life,\" he said, with a sigh, \"and am never tired of coming back to it again.\"\n\n\"Then you no longer live in the immediate neighbourhood?\"\n\n\"I have moved,\" he answered briefly, adding after a pause in which his eyes seemed to wander wistfully to the wealth of blossoms beyond the window; \"but I am almost sorry, for nowhere else have I found the sunshine lie so warmly, the flowers smell so sweetly, or the winds and streams make such tender music...\"\n\nHis voice died away into a thin stream of sound that lost itself in the rustle of the rose-leaves climbing in at the window, for he turned his head away from me as he spoke and looked out into the garden. But it was impossible to conceal my surprise, and I raised my eyes in frank astonishment on hearing so poetic an utterance from such a figure of a man, though at the same time realising that it was not in the least inappropriate, and that, in fact, no other sort of expression could have properly been expected from him.\n\n\"I am sure you are right,\" I answered at length, when it was clear he had ceased speaking; \"or there is something of enchantment here\u2014of real fairy-like enchantment\u2014that makes me think of the visions of childhood days, before one knew anything of\u2014of\u2014\"\n\nI had been oddly drawn into his vein of speech, some inner force compelling me. But here the spell passed and I could not catch the thoughts that had a moment before opened a long vista before my inner vision.\n\n\"To tell you the truth,\" I concluded lamely, \"the place fascinates me and I am in two minds about going further\u2014\"\n\nEven at this stage I remember thinking it odd that I should be talking like this with a stranger whom I met in a country inn, for it has always been one of my failings that to strangers my manner is brief to surliness. It was as though we were figures meeting in a dream, speaking without sound, obeying laws not operative in the everyday working world, and about to play with a new scale of space and time perhaps. But my astonishment passed quickly into an entirely different feeling when I became aware that the old man opposite had turned his head from the window again, and was regarding me with eyes so bright they seemed almost to shine with an inner flame. His gaze was fixed upon my face with an intense ardour, and his whole manner had suddenly become alert and concentrated. There was something about him I now felt for the first time that made little thrills of excitement run up and down my back. I met his look squarely, but with an inward tremor.\n\n\"Stay, then, a little while longer,\" he said in a much lower and deeper voice than before; \"stay, and I will teach you something of the purpose of my coming.\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly. I was conscious of a decided shiver.\n\n\"You have a special purpose then\u2014in coming back?\" I asked, hardly knowing what I was saying.\n\n\"To call away someone,\" he went on in the same thrilling voice, \"someone who is not quite ready to come, but who is needed elsewhere for a worthier purpose.\" There was a sadness in his manner that mystified me more than ever.\n\n\"You mean\u2014?\" I began, with an unaccountable access of trembling.\n\n\"I have come for someone who must soon move, even as I have moved.\"\n\nHe looked me through and through with a dreadfully piercing gaze, but I met his eyes with a full straight stare, trembling though I was, and I was aware that something stirred within me that had never stirred before, though for the life of me I could not have put a name to it, or have analysed its nature. Something lifted and rolled away. For one single second I understood clearly that the past and the future exist actually side by side in one immense Present; that it was I who moved to and fro among shifting, protean appearances.\n\nThe old man dropped his eyes from my face, and the momentary glimpse of a mightier universe passed utterly away. Reason regained its sway over a dull, limited kingdom.\n\n\"Come to-night,\" I heard the old man say, \"come to me to-night into the Wood of the Dead. Come at midnight\u2014\"\n\nInvoluntarily I clutched the arm of the settle for support, for I then felt that I was speaking with someone who knew more of the real things that are and will be, than I could ever know while in the body, working through the ordinary channels of sense\u2014and this curious half-promise of a partial lifting of the veil had its undeniable effect upon me.\n\nThe breeze from the sea had died away outside, and the blossoms were still. A yellow butterfly floated lazily past the window. The song of the birds hushed\u2014I smelt the sea\u2014I smelt the perfume of heated summer air rising from fields and flowers, the ineffable scents of June and of the long days of the year\u2014and with it, from countless green meadows beyond, came the hum of myriad summer life, children's voices, sweet pipings, and the sound of water falling.\n\nI knew myself to be on the threshold of a new order of experience\u2014of an ecstasy. Something drew me forth with a sense of inexpressible yearning towards the being of this strange old man in the window seat, and for a moment I knew what it was to taste a mighty and wonderful sensation, and to touch the highest pinnacle of joy I have ever known. It lasted for less than a second, and was gone; but in that brief instant of time the same terrible lucidity came to me that had already shown me how the past and future exist in the present, and I realised and understood that pleasure and pain are one and the same force, for the joy I had just experienced included also all the pain I ever had felt, or ever could feel...\n\nThe sunshine grew to dazzling radiance, faded, passed away. The shadows paused in their dance upon the grass, deepened a moment, and then melted into air. The flowers of the fruit trees laughed with their little silvery laughter as the wind sighed over their radiant eyes the old, old tale of its personal love. Once or twice a voice called my name. A wonderful sensation of lightness and power began to steal over me.\n\nSuddenly the door opened and the inn-keeper's daughter came in. By all ordinary standards, her's was a charming country loveliness, born of the stars and wild-flowers, of moonlight shining through autumn mists upon the river and the fields; yet, by contrast with the higher order of beauty I had just momentarily been in touch with, she seemed almost ugly. How dull her eyes, how thin her voice, how vapid her smile, and insipid her whole presentment.\n\nFor a moment she stood between me and the occupant of the window seat while I counted out the small change for my meal and for her services; but when, an instant later, she moved aside, I saw that the settle was empty and that there was no longer anyone in the room but our two selves.\n\nThis discovery was no shock to me; indeed, I had almost expected it, and the man had gone just as a figure goes out of a dream, causing no surprise and leaving me as part and parcel of the same dream without breaking of continuity. But, as soon as I had paid my bill and thus resumed in very practical fashion the thread of my normal consciousness, I turned to the girl and asked her if she knew the old man who had been sitting in the window seat, and what he had meant by the Wood of the Dead.\n\nThe maiden started visibly, glancing quickly round the empty room, but answering simply that she had seen no one. I described him in great detail, and then, as the description grew clearer, she turned a little pale under her pretty sunborn and said very gravely that it must have been the ghost.\n\n\"Ghost! What ghost?\"\n\n\"Oh, the village ghost,\" she said quietly, coming closer to my chair with a little nervous movement of genuine alarm, and adding in a lower voice, \"He comes before a death, they say!\"\n\nIt was not difficult to induce the girl to talk, and the story she told me, shorn of the superstition that had obviously gathered with the years round the memory of a strangely picturesque figure, was an interesting and peculiar one.\n\nThe inn, she said, was originally a farmhouse, occupied by a yeoman farmer, evidently of a superior, if rather eccentric, character, who had been very poor until he reached old age, when a son died suddenly in the Colonies and left him an unexpected amount of money, almost a fortune.\n\nThe old man thereupon altered no whit his simple manner of living, but devoted his income entirely to the improvement of the village and to the assistance of its inhabitants; he did this quite regardless of his personal likes and dislikes, as if one and all were absolutely alike to him, objects of a genuine and impersonal benevolence. People had always been a little afraid of the man, not understanding his eccentricities, but the simple force of this love for humanity changed all that in a very short space of time; and before he died he came to be known as the Father of the Village and was held in great love and veneration by all.\n\nA short time before his end, however, he began to act queerly. He spent his money just as usefully and wisely, but the shock of sudden wealth after a life of poverty, people said, had unsettled his mind. He claimed to see things that others did not see, to hear voices, and to have visions. Evidently, he was not of the harmless, foolish, visionary order, but a man of character and of great personal force, for the people became divided in their opinions, and the vicar, good man, regarded and treated him as a \"special case.\" For many, his name and atmosphere became charged almost with a spiritual influence that was not of the best. People quoted texts about him; kept when possible out of his way, and avoided his house after dark. None understood him, but though the majority loved him, an element of dread and mystery became associated with his name, chiefly owing to the ignorant gossip of the few.\n\nA grove of pine trees behind the farm\u2014the girl pointed them out to me on the slope of the hill\u2014he said was the Wood of the Dead, because just before anyone died in the village he saw them walk into that wood, singing. None who went in ever came out again. He often mentioned the names to his wife, who usually published them to all the inhabitants within an hour of her husband's confidence; and it was found that the people he had seen enter the wood\u2014died. On warm summer nights he would sometimes take an old stick and wander out, hatless, under the pines, for he loved this wood, and used to say he met all his old friends there, and would one day walk in there never to return. His wife tried to break him gently off this habit, but he always had his own way; and once, when she followed and found him standing under a great pine in the thickest portion of the grove, talking earnestly to someone she could not see, he turned and rebuked her very gently, but in such a way that she never repeated the experiment, saying\u2014\n\n\"You should never interrupt me, Mary, when I am talking with the others; for they teach me, remember, wonderful things, and I must learn all I can before I go to join them.\"\n\nThis story went like wild-fire through the village, increasing with every repetition, until at length everyone was able to give an accurate description of the great veiled figures the woman declared she had seen moving among the trees where her husband stood. The innocent pine-grove now became positively haunted, and the title of \"Wood of the Dead\" clung naturally as if it had been applied to it in the ordinary course of events by the compilers of the Ordnance Survey.\n\nOn the evening of his ninetieth birthday the old man went up to his wife and kissed her. His manner was loving, and very gentle, and there was something about him besides, she declared afterwards, that made her slightly in awe of him and feel that he was almost more of a spirit than a man.\n\nHe kissed her tenderly on both cheeks, but his eyes seemed to look right through her as he spoke.\n\n\"Dearest wife,\" he said, \"I am saying good-bye to you, for I am now going into the Wood of the Dead, and I shall not return. Do not follow me, or send to search, but be ready soon to come upon the same journey yourself.\"\n\nThe good woman burst into tears and tried to hold him, but he easily slipped from her hands, and she was afraid to follow him. Slowly she saw him cross the field in the sunshine, and then enter the cool shadows of the grove, where he disappeared from her sight.\n\nThat same night, much later, she woke to find him lying peacefully by her side in bed, with one arm stretched out towards her, dead. Her story was half believed, half doubted at the time, but in a very few years afterwards it evidently came to be accepted by all the countryside. A funeral service was held to which the people flocked in great numbers, and everyone approved of the sentiment which led the widow to add the words, \"The Father of the Village,\" after the usual texts which appeared upon the stone over his grave.\n\nThis, then, was the story I pieced together of the village ghost as the little inn-keeper's daughter told it to me that afternoon in the parlour of the inn.\n\n\"But you're not the first to say you've seen him,\" the girl concluded; \"and your description is just what we've always heard, and that window, they say, was just where he used to sit and think, and think, when he was alive, and sometimes, they say, to cry for hours together.\"\n\n\"And would you feel afraid if you had seen him?\" I asked, for the girl seemed strangely moved and interested in the whole story.\n\n\"I think so,\" she answered timidly. \"Surely, if he spoke to me. He did speak to you, didn't he, sir?\" she asked after a slight pause.\n\n\"He said he had come for someone.\"\n\n\"Come for someone,\" she repeated. \"Did he say\u2014\" she went on falteringly.\n\n\"No, he did not say for whom,\" I said quickly, noticing the sudden shadow on her face and the tremulous voice.\n\n\"Are you really sure, sir?\"\n\n\"Oh, quite sure,\" I answered cheerfully. \"I did not even ask him.\" The girl looked at me steadily for nearly a whole minute as though there were many things she wished to tell me or to ask. But she said nothing, and presently picked up her tray from the table and walked slowly out of the room.\n\nInstead of keeping to my original purpose and pushing on to the next village over the hills, I ordered a room to be prepared for me at the inn, and that afternoon I spent wandering about the fields and lying under the fruit trees, watching the white clouds sailing out over the sea. The Wood of the Dead I surveyed from a distance, but in the village I visited the stone erected to the memory of the \"Father of the Village\"\u2014who was thus, evidently, no mythical personage\u2014and saw also the monuments of his fine unselfish spirit: the schoolhouse he built, the library, the home for the aged poor, and the tiny hospital.\n\nThat night, as the clock in the church tower was striking half-past eleven, I stealthily left the inn and crept through the dark orchard and over the hayfield in the direction of the hill whose southern slope was clothed with the Wood of the Dead. A genuine interest impelled me to the adventure, but I also was obliged to confess to a certain sinking in my heart as I stumbled along over the field in the darkness, for I was approaching what might prove to be the birth-place of a real country myth, and a spot already lifted by the imaginative thoughts of a considerable number of people into the region of the haunted and ill-omened.\n\nThe inn lay below me, and all round it the village clustered in a soft black shadow unrelieved by a single light. The night was moonless, yet distinctly luminous, for the stars crowded the sky. The silence of deep slumber was everywhere; so still, indeed, that every time my foot kicked against a stone I thought the sound must be heard below in the village and waken the sleepers.\n\nI climbed the hill slowly, thinking chiefly of the strange story of the noble old man who had seized the opportunity to do good to his fellows the moment it came his way, and wondering why the causes that operate ceaselessly behind human life did not always select such admirable instruments. Once or twice a night-bird circled swiftly over my head, but the bats had long since gone to rest, and there was no other sign of life stirring.\n\nThen, suddenly, with a singular thrill of emotion, I saw the first trees of the Wood of the Dead rise in front of me in a high black wall. Their crests stood up like giant spears against the starry sky; and though there was no perceptible movement of the air on my cheek I heard a faint, rushing sound among their branches as the night breeze passed to and fro over their countless little needles. A remote, hushed murmur rose overhead and died away again almost immediately; for in these trees the wind seems to be never absolutely at rest, and on the calmest day there is always a sort of whispering music among their branches.\n\nFor a moment I hesitated on the edge of this dark wood, and listened intently. Delicate perfumes of earth and bark stole out to meet me. Impenetrable darkness faced me. Only the consciousness that I was obeying an order, strangely given, and including a mighty privilege, enabled me to find the courage to go forward and step in boldly under the trees.\n\nInstantly the shadows closed in upon me and \"something\" came forward to meet me from the centre of the darkness. It would be easy enough to meet my imagination half-way with fact, and say that a cold hand grasped my own and led me by invisible paths into the unknown depths of the grove; but at any rate, without stumbling, and always with the positive knowledge that I was going straight towards the desired object, I pressed on confidently and securely into the wood. So dark was it that, at first, not a single star-beam pierced the roof of branches overhead; and, as we moved forward side by side, the trees shifted silently past us in long lines, row upon row, squadron upon squadron, like the units of a vast, soundless army.\n\nAnd, at length, we came to a comparatively open space where the trees halted upon us for a while, and, looking up, I saw the white river of the sky beginning to yield to the influence of a new light that now seemed spreading swiftly across the heavens.\n\n\"It is the dawn coming,\" said the voice at my side that I certainly recognised, but which seemed almost like a whispering from the trees, \"and we are now in the heart of the Wood of the Dead.\"\n\nWe seated ourselves on a moss-covered boulder and waited the coming of the sun. With marvellous swiftness, it seemed to me, the light in the east passed into the radiance of early morning, and when the wind awoke and began to whisper in the tree tops, the first rays of the risen sun fell between the trunks and rested in a circle of gold at our feet.\n\n\"Now, come with me,\" whispered my companion in the same deep voice, \"for time has no existence here, and that which I would show you is already there!\"\n\nWe trod gently and silently over the soft pine needles. Already the sun was high over our heads, and the shadows of the trees coiled closely about their feet. The wood became denser again, but occasionally we passed through little open bits where we could smell the hot sunshine and the dry, baked pine needles. Then, presently, we came to the edge of the grove, and I saw a hayfield lying in the blaze of day, and two horses basking lazily with switching tails in the shafts of a laden hay-waggon.\n\nSo complete and vivid was the sense of reality, that I remember the grateful realisation of the cool shade where we sat and looked out upon the hot world beyond.\n\nThe last pitchfork had tossed up its fragrant burden, and the great horses were already straining in the shafts after the driver, as he walked slowly in front with one hand upon their bridles. He was a stalwart fellow, with sunburned neck and hands. Then, for the first time, I noticed, perched aloft upon the trembling throne of hay, the figure of a slim young girl. I could not see her face, but her brown hair escaped in disorder from a white sun-bonnet, and her still browner hands held a well-worn hay rake. She was laughing and talking with the driver, and he, from time to time, cast up at her ardent glances of admiration\u2014glances that won instant smiles and soft blushes in response.\n\nThe cart presently turned into the roadway that skirted the edge of the wood where we were sitting. I watched the scene with intense interest and became so much absorbed in it that I quite forgot the manifold, strange steps by which I was permitted to become a spectator.\n\n\"Come down and walk with me,\" cried the young fellow, stopping a moment in front of the horses and opening wide his arms. \"Jump! and I'll catch you!\"\n\n\"Oh, oh,\" she laughed, and her voice sounded to me as the happiest, merriest laughter I had ever heard from a girl's throat. \"Oh, oh! that's all very well. But remember I'm Queen of the Hay, and I must ride!\"\n\n\"Then I must come and ride beside you,\" he cried, and began at once to climb up by way of the driver's seat. But, with a peal of silvery laughter, she slipped down easily over the back of the hay to escape him, and ran a little way along the road. I could see her quite clearly, and noticed the charming, natural grace of her movements, and the loving expression in her eyes as she looked over her shoulder to make sure he was following. Evidently, she did not wish to escape for long, certainly not for ever.\n\nIn two strides the big, brown swain was after her, leaving the horses to do as they pleased. Another second and his arms would have caught the slender waist and pressed the little body to his heart. But, just at that instant, the old man beside me uttered a peculiar cry. It was low and thrilling, and it went through me like a sharp sword.\n\nHe had called her by her own name\u2014and she had heard.\n\nFor a second she halted, glancing back with frightened eyes. Then, with a brief cry of despair, the girl swerved aside and dived in swiftly among the shadows of the trees.\n\nBut the young man saw the sudden movement and cried out to her passionately\u2014\n\n\"Not that way, my love! Not that way! It's the Wood of the Dead!\"\n\nShe threw a laughing glance over her shoulder at him, and the wind caught her hair and drew it out in a brown cloud under the sun. But the next minute she was close beside me, lying on the breast of my companion, and I was certain I heard the words repeatedly uttered with many sighs: \"Father, you called, and I have come. And I come willingly, for I am very, very tired.\"\n\nAt any rate, so the words sounded to me, and mingled with them I seemed to catch the answer in that deep, thrilling whisper I already knew: \"And you shall sleep, my child, sleep for a long, long time, until it is time for you to begin the journey again.\"\n\nIn that brief second of time I had recognised the face and voice of the inn-keeper's daughter, but the next minute a dreadful wail broke from the lips of the young man, and the sky grew suddenly as dark as night, the wind rose and began to toss the branches about us, and the whole scene was swallowed up in a wave of utter blackness.\n\nAgain the chill fingers seemed to seize my hand, and I was guided by the way I had come to the edge of the wood, and crossing the hayfield still slumbering in the starlight, I crept back to the inn and went to bed.\n\nA year later I happened to be in the same part of the country, and the memory of the strange summer vision returned to me with the added softness of distance. I went to the old village and had tea under the same orchard trees at the same inn.\n\nBut the little maid of the inn did not show her face, and I took occasion to enquire of her father as to her welfare and her whereabouts.\n\n\"Married, no doubt,\" I laughed, but with a strange feeling that clutched at my heart.\n\n\"No, sir,\" replied the inn-keeper sadly, \"not married\u2014though she was just going to be\u2014but dead. She got a sunstroke in the hayfields, just a few days after you were here, if I remember rightly, and she was gone from us in less than a week.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\n\"When I was a medical student,\" began the doctor, half turning towards his circle of listeners in the firelight, \"I came across one or two very curious human beings; but there was one fellow I remember particularly, for he caused me the most vivid, and I think the most uncomfortable, emotions I have ever known.\n\n\"For many months I knew Smith only by name as the occupant of the floor above me. Obviously his name meant nothing to me. Moreover I was busy with lectures, reading, cliniques and the like, and had little leisure to devise plans for scraping acquaintance with any of the other lodgers in the house. Then chance brought us curiously together, and this fellow Smith left a deep impression upon me as the result of our first meeting. At the time the strength of this first impression seemed quite inexplicable to me, but looking back at the episode now from a stand-point of greater knowledge I judge the fact to have been that he stirred my curiosity to an unusual degree, and at the same time awakened my sense of horror\u2014whatever that may be in a medical student\u2014about as deeply and permanently as these two emotions were capable of being stirred at all in the particular system and set of nerves called ME.\n\n\"How he knew that I was interested in the study of languages was something I could never explain, but one day, quite unannounced, he came quietly into my room in the evening and asked me point-blank if I knew enough Hebrew to help him in the pronunciation of certain words.\n\n\"He caught me along the line of least resistance, and I was greatly flattered to be able to give him the desired information; but it was only when he had thanked me and was gone that I realised I had been in the presence of an unusual individuality. For the life of me I could not quite seize and label the peculiarities of what I felt to be a very striking personality, but it was borne in upon me that he was a man apart from his fellows, a mind that followed a line leading away from ordinary human intercourse and human interests, and into regions that left in his atmosphere something remote, rarefied, chilling.\n\n\"The moment he was gone I became conscious of two things\u2014an intense curiosity to know more about this man and what his real interests were, and secondly, the fact that my skin was crawling and that my hair had a tendency to rise.\"\n\nThe doctor paused a moment here to puff hard at his pipe, which, however, had gone out beyond recall without the assistance of a match; and in the deep silence, which testified to the genuine interest of his listeners, someone poked the fire up into a little blaze, and one or two others glanced over their shoulders into the dark distances of the big hall.\n\n\"On looking back,\" he went on, watching the momentary flames in the grate, \"I see a short, thick-set man of perhaps forty-five, with immense shoulders and small, slender hands. The contrast was noticeable, for I remember thinking that such a giant frame and such slim finger bones hardly belonged together. His head, too, was large and very long, the head of an idealist beyond all question, yet with an unusually strong development of the jaw and chin. Here again was a singular contradiction, though I am better able now to appreciate its full meaning, with a greater experience in judging the values of physiognomy. For this meant, of course, an enthusiastic idealism balanced and kept in check by will and judgment\u2014elements usually deficient in dreamers and visionaries.\n\n\"At any rate, here was a being with probably a very wide range of possibilities, a machine with a pendulum that most likely had an unusual length of swing.\n\n\"The man's hair was exceedingly fine, and the lines about his nose and mouth were cut as with a delicate steel instrument in wax. His eyes I have left to the last. They were large and quite changeable, not in colour only, but in character, size, and shape. Occasionally they seemed the eyes of someone else, if you can understand what I mean, and at the same time, in their shifting shades of blue, green, and a nameless sort of dark grey, there was a sinister light in them that lent to the whole face an aspect almost alarming. Moreover, they were the most luminous optics I think I have ever seen in any human being.\n\n\"There, then, at the risk of a wearisome description, is Smith as I saw him for the first time that winter's evening in my shabby student's rooms in Edinburgh. And yet the real part of him, of course, I have left untouched, for it is both indescribable and un-get-atable. I have spoken already of an atmosphere of warning and aloofness he carried about with him. It is impossible further to analyse the series of little shocks his presence always communicated to my being; but there was that about him which made me instantly on the qui vive in his presence, every nerve alert, every sense strained and on the watch. I do not mean that he deliberately suggested danger, but rather that he brought forces in his wake which automatically warned the nervous centres of my system to be on their guard and alert.\n\n\"Since the days of my first acquaintance with this man I have lived through other experiences and have seen much I cannot pretend to explain or understand; but, so far in my life, I have only once come across a human being who suggested a disagreeable familiarity with unholy things, and who made me feel uncanny and 'creepy' in his presence; and that unenviable individual was Mr. Smith.\n\n\"What his occupation was during the day I never knew. I think he slept until the sun set. No one ever saw him on the stairs, or heard him move in his room during the day. He was a creature of the shadows, who apparently preferred darkness to light. Our landlady either knew nothing, or would say nothing. At any rate she found no fault, and I have since wondered often by what magic this fellow was able to convert a common landlady of a common lodging-house into a discreet and uncommunicative person. This alone was a sign of genius of some sort.\n\n\"'He's been here with me for years\u2014long before you come, an' I don't interfere or ask no questions of what doesn't concern me, as long as people pays their rent,' was the only remark on the subject that I ever succeeded in winning from that quarter, and it certainly told me nothing nor gave me any encouragement to ask for further information.\n\n\"Examinations, however, and the general excitement of a medical student's life for a time put Mr. Smith completely out of my head. For a long period he did not call upon me again, and for my part, I felt no courage to return his unsolicited visit.\n\n\"Just then, however, there came a change in the fortunes of those who controlled my very limited income, and I was obliged to give up my ground-floor and move aloft to more modest chambers on the top of the house. Here I was directly over Smith, and had to pass his door to reach my own.\n\n\"It so happened that about this time I was frequently called out at all hours of the night for the maternity cases which a fourth-year student takes at a certain period of his studies, and on returning from one of these visits at about two o'clock in the morning I was surprised to hear the sound of voices as I passed his door. A peculiar sweet odour, too, not unlike the smell of incense, penetrated into the passage.\n\n\"I went upstairs very quietly, wondering what was going on there at this hour of the morning. To my knowledge Smith never had visitors. For a moment I hesitated outside the door with one foot on the stairs. All my interest in this strange man revived, and my curiosity rose to a point not far from action. At last I might learn something of the habits of this lover of the night and the darkness.\n\n\"The sound of voices was plainly audible, Smith's predominating so much that I never could catch more than points of sound from the other, penetrating now and then the steady stream of his voice. Not a single word reached me, at least, not a word that I could understand, though the voice was loud and distinct, and it was only afterwards that I realised he must have been speaking in a foreign language.\n\n\"The sound of footsteps, too, was equally distinct. Two persons were moving about the room, passing and repassing the door, one of them a light, agile person, and the other ponderous and somewhat awkward. Smith's voice went on incessantly with its odd, monotonous droning, now loud, now soft, as he crossed and re-crossed the floor. The other person was also on the move, but in a different and less regular fashion, for I heard rapid steps that seemed to end sometimes in stumbling, and quick sudden movements that brought up with a violent lurching against the wall or furniture.\n\n\"As I listened to Smith's voice, moreover, I began to feel afraid. There was something in the sound that made me feel intuitively he was in a tight place, and an impulse stirred faintly in me\u2014very faintly, I admit\u2014to knock at the door and inquire if he needed help.\n\n\"But long before the impulse could translate itself into an act, or even before it had been properly weighed and considered by the mind, I heard a voice close beside me in the air, a sort of hushed whisper which I am certain was Smith speaking, though the sound did not seem to have come to me through the door. It was close in my very ear, as though he stood beside me, and it gave me such a start, that I clutched the banisters to save myself from stepping backwards and making a clatter on the stairs.\n\n\"'There is nothing you can do to help me,' it said distinctly, 'and you will be much safer in your own room.'\n\n\"I am ashamed to this day of the pace at which I covered the flight of stairs in the darkness to the top floor, and of the shaking hand with which I lit my candles and bolted the door. But, there it is, just as it happened.\n\n\"This midnight episode, so odd and yet so trivial in itself, fired me with more curiosity than ever about my fellow-lodger. It also made me connect him in my mind with a sense of fear and distrust. I never saw him, yet I was often, and uncomfortably, aware of his presence in the upper regions of that gloomy lodging-house. Smith and his secret mode of life and mysterious pursuits, somehow contrived to awaken in my being a line of reflection that disturbed my comfortable condition of ignorance. I never saw him, as I have said, and exchanged no sort of communication with him, yet it seemed to me that his mind was in contact with mine, and some of the strange forces of his atmosphere filtered through into my being and disturbed my equilibrium. Those upper floors became haunted for me after dark, and, though outwardly our lives never came into contact, I became unwillingly involved in certain pursuits on which his mind was centred. I felt that he was somehow making use of me against my will, and by methods which passed my comprehension.\n\n\"I was at that time, moreover, in the heavy, unquestioning state of materialism which is common to medical students when they begin to understand something of the human anatomy and nervous system, and jump at once to the conclusion that they control the universe and hold in their forceps the last word of life and death. I 'knew it all,' and regarded a belief in anything beyond matter as the wanderings of weak, or at best, untrained minds. And this condition of mind, of course, added to the strength of this upsetting fear which emanated from the floor below and began slowly to take possession of me.\n\n\"Though I kept no notes of the subsequent events in this matter, they made too deep an impression for me ever to forget the sequence in which they occurred. Without difficulty I can recall the next step in the adventure with Smith, for adventure it rapidly grew to be.\"\n\nThe doctor stopped a moment and laid his pipe on the table behind him before continuing. The fire had burned low, and no one stirred to poke it. The silence in the great hall was so deep that when the speaker's pipe touched the table the sound woke audible echoes at the far end among the shadows.\n\n\"One evening, while I was reading, the door of my room opened and Smith came in. He made no attempt at ceremony. It was after ten o'clock and I was tired, but the presence of the man immediately galvanised me into activity. My attempts at ordinary politeness he thrust on one side at once, and began asking me to vocalise, and then pronounce for him, certain Hebrew words; and when this was done he abruptly inquired if I was not the fortunate possessor of a very rare Rabbinical Treatise, which he named.\n\n\"How he knew that I possessed this book puzzled me exceedingly; but I was still more surprised to see him cross the room and take it out of my book-shelf almost before I had had time to answer in the affirmative. Evidently he knew exactly where it was kept. This excited my curiosity beyond all bounds, and I immediately began asking him questions; and though, out of sheer respect for the man, I put them very delicately to him, and almost by way of mere conversation, he had only one reply for the lot. He would look up at me from the pages of the book with an expression of complete comprehension on his extraordinary features, would bow his head a little and say very gravely\u2014\n\n\"'That, of course, is a perfectly proper question,'\u2014which was absolutely all I could ever get out of him.\n\n\"On this particular occasion he stayed with me perhaps ten or fifteen minutes. Then he went quickly downstairs to his room with my Hebrew Treatise in his hand, and I heard him close and bolt his door.\n\n\"But a few moments later, before I had time to settle down to my book again, or to recover from the surprise his visit had caused me, I heard the door open, and there stood Smith once again beside my chair. He made no excuse for his second interruption, but bent his head down to the level of my reading lamp and peered across the flame straight into my eyes.\n\n\"'I hope,' he whispered, 'I hope you are never disturbed at night?'\n\n\"'Eh?' I stammered, 'disturbed at night? Oh no, thanks, at least, not that I know of\u2014'\n\n\"'I'm glad,' he replied gravely, appearing not to notice my confusion and surprise at his question. 'But, remember, should it ever be the case, please let me know at once.'\n\n\"And he was gone down the stairs and into his room again.\n\n\"For some minutes I sat reflecting upon his strange behaviour. He was not mad, I argued, but was the victim of some harmless delusion that had gradually grown upon him as a result of his solitary mode of life; and from the books he used, I judged that it had something to do with medi\u00e6val magic, or some system of ancient Hebrew mysticism. The words he asked me to pronounce for him were probably 'Words of Power,' which, when uttered with the vehemence of a strong will behind them, were supposed to produce physical results, or set up vibrations in one's own inner being that had the effect of a partial lifting of the veil.\n\n\"I sat thinking about the man, and his way of living, and the probable effects in the long-run of his dangerous experiments, and I can recall perfectly well the sensation of disappointment that crept over me when I realised that I had labelled his particular form of aberration, and that my curiosity would therefore no longer be excited.\n\n\"For some time I had been sitting alone with these reflections\u2014it may have been ten minutes or it may have been half an hour\u2014when I was aroused from my reverie by the knowledge that someone was again in the room standing close beside my chair. My first thought was that Smith had come back again in his swift, unaccountable manner, but almost at the same moment I realised that this could not be the case at all. For the door faced my position, and it certainly had not been opened again.\n\n\"Yet, someone was in the room, moving cautiously to and fro, watching me, almost touching me. I was as sure of it as I was of myself, and though at the moment I do not think I was actually afraid, I am bound to admit that a certain weakness came over me and that I felt that strange disinclination for action which is probably the beginning of the horrible paralysis of real terror. I should have been glad to hide myself, if that had been possible, to cower into a corner, or behind a door, or anywhere so that I could not be watched and observed.\n\n\"But, overcoming my nervousness with an effort of the will, I got up quickly out of my chair and held the reading lamp aloft so that it shone into all the corners like a searchlight.\n\n\"The room was utterly empty! It was utterly empty, at least, to the eye, but to the nerves, and especially to that combination of sense perception which is made up by all the senses acting together, and by no one in particular, there was a person standing there at my very elbow.\n\n\"I say 'person,' for I can think of no appropriate word. For, if it was a human being, I can only affirm that I had the overwhelming conviction that it was not, but that it was some form of life wholly unknown to me both as to its essence and its nature. A sensation of gigantic force and power came with it, and I remember vividly to this day my terror on realising that I was close to an invisible being who could crush me as easily as I could crush a fly, and who could see my every movement while itself remaining invisible.\n\n\"To this terror was added the certain knowledge that the 'being' kept in my proximity for a definite purpose. And that this purpose had some direct bearing upon my well-being, indeed upon my life, I was equally convinced; for I became aware of a sensation of growing lassitude as though the vitality were being steadily drained out of my body. My heart began to beat irregularly at first, then faintly. I was conscious, even within a few minutes, of a general drooping of the powers of life in the whole system, an ebbing away of self-control, and a distinct approach of drowsiness and torpor.\n\n\"The power to move, or to think out any mode of resistance, was fast leaving me, when there rose, in the distance as it were, a tremendous commotion. A door opened with a clatter, and I heard the peremptory and commanding tones of a human voice calling aloud in a language I could not comprehend. It was Smith, my fellow-lodger, calling up the stairs; and his voice had not sounded for more than a few seconds, when I felt something withdrawn from my presence, from my person, indeed from my very skin. It seemed as if there was a rushing of air and some large creature swept by me at about the level of my shoulders. Instantly the pressure on my heart was relieved, and the atmosphere seemed to resume its normal condition.\n\n\"Smith's door closed quietly downstairs, as I put the lamp down with trembling hands. What had happened I do not know; only, I was alone again and my strength was returning as rapidly as it had left me.\n\n\"I went across the room and examined myself in the glass. The skin was very pale, and the eyes dull. My temperature, I found, was a little below normal and my pulse faint and irregular. But these smaller signs of disturbance were as nothing compared with the feeling I had\u2014though no outward signs bore testimony to the fact\u2014that I had narrowly escaped a real and ghastly catastrophe. I felt shaken, somehow, shaken to the very roots of my being.\"\n\nThe doctor rose from his chair and crossed over to the dying fire, so that no one could see the expression on his face as he stood with his back to the grate, and continued his weird tale.\n\n\"It would be wearisome,\" he went on in a lower voice, looking over our heads as though he still saw the dingy top floor of that haunted Edinburgh lodging-house; \"it would be tedious for me at this length of time to analyse my feelings, or attempt to reproduce for you the thorough examination to which I endeavoured then to subject my whole being, intellectual, emotional, and physical. I need only mention the dominant emotion with which this curious episode left me\u2014the indignant anger against myself that I could ever have lost my self-control enough to come under the sway of so gross and absurd a delusion. This protest, however, I remember making with all the emphasis possible. And I also remember noting that it brought me very little satisfaction, for it was the protest of my reason only, when all the rest of my being was up in arms against its conclusions.\n\n\"My dealings with the 'delusion,' however, were not yet over for the night; for very early next morning, somewhere about three o'clock, I was awakened by a curiously stealthy noise in the room, and the next minute there followed a crash as if all my books had been swept bodily from their shelf on to the floor.\n\n\"But this time I was not frightened. Cursing the disturbance with all the resounding and harmless words I could accumulate, I jumped out of bed and lit the candle in a second, and in the first dazzle of the flaring match\u2014but before the wick had time to catch\u2014I was certain I saw a dark grey shadow, of ungainly shape, and with something more or less like a human head, drive rapidly past the side of the wall farthest from me and disappear into the gloom by the angle of the door.\n\n\"I waited one single second to be sure the candle was alight, and then dashed after it, but before I had gone two steps, my foot stumbled against something hard piled up on the carpet and I only just saved myself from falling headlong. I picked myself up and found that all the books from what I called my 'language shelf' were strewn across the floor. The room, meanwhile, as a minute's search revealed, was quite empty. I looked in every corner and behind every stick of furniture, and a student's bedroom on a top floor, costing twelve shillings a week, did not hold many available hiding-places, as you may imagine.\n\n\"The crash, however, was explained. Some very practical and physical force had thrown the books from their resting-place. That, at least, was beyond all doubt. And as I replaced them on the shelf and noted that not one was missing, I busied myself mentally with the sore problem of how the agent of this little practical joke had gained access to my room, and then escaped again. For my door was locked and bolted.\n\n\"Smith's odd question as to whether I was disturbed in the night, and his warning injunction to let him know at once if such were the case, now of course returned to affect me as I stood there in the early morning, cold and shivering on the carpet; but I realised at the same moment how impossible it would be for me to admit that a more than usually vivid nightmare could have any connection with himself. I would rather stand a hundred of these mysterious visitations than consult such a man as to their possible cause.\n\n\"A knock at the door interrupted my reflections, and I gave a start that sent the candle grease flying.\n\n\"'Let me in,' came in Smith's voice.\n\n\"I unlocked the door. He came in fully dressed. His face wore a curious pallor. It seemed to me to be under the skin and to shine through and almost make it luminous. His eyes were exceedingly bright.\n\n\"I was wondering what in the world to say to him, or how he would explain his visit at such an hour, when he closed the door behind him and came close up to me\u2014uncomfortably close.\n\n\"'You should have called me at once,' he said in his whispering voice, fixing his great eyes on my face.\n\n\"I stammered something about an awful dream, but he ignored my remark utterly, and I caught his eye wandering next\u2014if any movement of those optics can be described as 'wandering'\u2014to the book-shelf. I watched him, unable to move my gaze from his person. The man fascinated me horribly for some reason. Why, in the devil's name, was he up and dressed at three in the morning? How did he know anything had happened unusual in my room? Then his whisper began again.\n\n\"'It's your amazing vitality that causes you this annoyance,' he said, shifting his eyes back to mine.\n\n\"I gasped. Something in his voice or manner turned my blood into ice.\n\n\"'That's the real attraction,' he went on. 'But if this continues one of us will have to leave, you know.'\n\n\"I positively could not find a word to say in reply. The channels of speech dried up within me. I simply stared and wondered what he would say next. I watched him in a sort of dream, and as far as I can remember, he asked me to promise to call him sooner another time, and then began to walk round the room, uttering strange sounds, and making signs with his arms and hands until he reached the door. Then he was gone in a second, and I had closed and locked the door behind him.\n\n\"After this, the Smith adventure drew rapidly to a climax. It was a week or two later, and I was coming home between two and three in the morning from a maternity case, certain features of which for the time being had very much taken possession of my mind, so much so, indeed, that I passed Smith's door without giving him a single thought.\n\n\"The gas jet on the landing was still burning, but so low that it made little impression on the waves of deep shadow that lay across the stairs. Overhead, the faintest possible gleam of grey showed that the morning was not far away. A few stars shone down through the sky-light. The house was still as the grave, and the only sound to break the silence was the rushing of the wind round the walls and over the roof. But this was a fitful sound, suddenly rising and as suddenly falling away again, and it only served to intensify the silence.\n\n\"I had already reached my own landing when I gave a violent start. It was automatic, almost a reflex action in fact, for it was only when I caught myself fumbling at the door handle and thinking where I could conceal myself quickest that I realised a voice had sounded close beside me in the air. It was the same voice I had heard before, and it seemed to me to be calling for help. And yet the very same minute I pushed on into the room, determined to disregard it, and seeking to persuade myself it was the creaking of the boards under my weight or the rushing noise of the wind that had deceived me.\n\n\"But hardly had I reached the table where the candles stood when the sound was unmistakably repeated: 'Help! help!' And this time it was accompanied by what I can only describe as a vivid tactile hallucination. I was touched: the skin of my arm was clutched by fingers.\n\n\"Some compelling force sent me headlong downstairs as if the haunting forces of the whole world were at my heels. At Smith's door I paused. The force of his previous warning injunction to seek his aid without delay acted suddenly and I leant my whole weight against the panels, little dreaming that I should be called upon to give help rather than to receive it.\n\n\"The door yielded at once, and I burst into a room that was so full of a choking vapour, moving in slow clouds, that at first I could distinguish nothing at all but a set of what seemed to be huge shadows passing in and out of the mist. Then, gradually, I perceived that a red lamp on the mantelpiece gave all the light there was, and that the room which I now entered for the first time was almost empty of furniture.\n\n\"The carpet was rolled back and piled in a heap in the corner, and upon the white boards of the floor I noticed a large circle drawn in black of some material that emitted a faint glowing light and was apparently smoking. Inside this circle, as well as at regular intervals outside it, were curious-looking designs, also traced in the same black, smoking substance. These, too, seemed to emit a feeble light of their own.\n\n\"My first impression on entering the room had been that it was full of\u2014people, I was going to say; but that hardly expresses my meaning. Beings, they certainly were, but it was borne in upon me beyond the possibility of doubt, that they were not human beings. That I had caught a momentary glimpse of living, intelligent entities I can never doubt, but I am equally convinced, though I cannot prove it, that these entities were from some other scheme of evolution altogether, and had nothing to do with the ordinary human life, either incarnate or discarnate.\n\n\"But, whatever they were, the visible appearance of them was exceedingly fleeting. I no longer saw anything, though I still felt convinced of their immediate presence. They were, moreover, of the same order of life as the visitant in my bedroom of a few nights before, and their proximity to my atmosphere in numbers, instead of singly as before, conveyed to my mind something that was quite terrible and overwhelming. I fell into a violent trembling, and the perspiration poured from my face in streams.\n\n\"They were in constant motion about me. They stood close to my side; moved behind me; brushed past my shoulder; stirred the hair on my forehead; and circled round me without ever actually touching me, yet always pressing closer and closer. Especially in the air just over my head there seemed ceaseless movement, and it was accompanied by a confused noise of whispering and sighing that threatened every moment to become articulate in words. To my intense relief, however, I heard no distinct words, and the noise continued more like the rising and falling of the wind than anything else I can imagine.\n\n\"But the characteristic of these 'Beings' that impressed me most strongly at the time, and of which I have carried away the most permanent recollection, was that each one of them possessed what seemed to be a vibrating centre which impelled it with tremendous force and caused a rapid whirling motion of the atmosphere as it passed me. The air was full of these little vortices of whirring, rotating force, and whenever one of them pressed me too closely I felt as if the nerves in that particular portion of my body had been literally drawn out, absolutely depleted of vitality, and then immediately replaced\u2014but replaced dead, flabby, useless.\n\n\"Then, suddenly, for the first time my eyes fell upon Smith. He was crouching against the wall on my right, in an attitude that was obviously defensive, and it was plain he was in extremities. The terror on his face was pitiable, but at the same time there was another expression about the tightly clenched teeth and mouth which showed that he had not lost all control of himself. He wore the most resolute expression I have ever seen on a human countenance, and, though for the moment at a fearful disadvantage, he looked like a man who had confidence in himself, and, in spite of the working of fear, was waiting his opportunity.\n\n\"For my part, I was face to face with a situation so utterly beyond my knowledge and comprehension, that I felt as helpless as a child, and as useless.\n\n\"'Help me back\u2014quick\u2014into that circle,' I heard him half cry, half whisper to me across the moving vapours.\n\n\"My only value appears to have been that I was not afraid to act. Knowing nothing of the forces I was dealing with I had no idea of the deadly perils risked, and I sprang forward and caught him by the arms. He threw all his weight in my direction, and by our combined efforts his body left the wall and lurched across the floor towards the circle.\n\n\"Instantly there descended upon us, out of the empty air of that smoke-laden room, a force which I can only compare to the pushing, driving power of a great wind pent up within a narrow space. It was almost explosive in its effect, and it seemed to operate upon all parts of my body equally. It fell upon us with a rushing noise that filled my ears and made me think for a moment the very walls and roof of the building had been torn asunder. Under its first blow we staggered back against the wall, and I understood plainly that its purpose was to prevent us getting back into the circle in the middle of the floor.\n\n\"Pouring with perspiration, and breathless, with every muscle strained to the very utmost, we at length managed to get to the edge of the circle, and at this moment, so great was the opposing force, that I felt myself actually torn from Smith's arms, lifted from my feet, and twirled round in the direction of the windows as if the wheel of some great machine had caught my clothes and was tearing me to destruction in its revolution.\n\n\"But, even as I fell, bruised and breathless, against the wall, I saw Smith firmly upon his feet in the circle and slowly rising again to an upright position. My eyes never left his figure once in the next few minutes.\n\n\"He drew himself up to his full height. His great shoulders squared themselves. His head was thrown back a little, and as I looked I saw the expression on his face change swiftly from fear to one of absolute command. He looked steadily round the room and then his voice began to vibrate. At first in a low tone, it gradually rose till it assumed the same volume and intensity I had heard that night when he called up the stairs into my room.\n\n\"It was a curiously increasing sound, more like the swelling of an instrument than a human voice; and as it grew in power and filled the room, I became aware that a great change was being effected slowly and surely. The confusion of noise and rushings of air fell into the roll of long, steady vibrations not unlike those caused by the deeper pedals of an organ. The movements in the air became less violent, then grew decidedly weaker, and finally ceased altogether. The whisperings and sighings became fainter and fainter, till at last I could not hear them at all; and, strangest of all, the light emitted by the circle, as well as by the designs round it, increased to a steady glow, casting their radiance upwards with the weirdest possible effect upon his features. Slowly, by the power of his voice, behind which lay undoubtedly a genuine knowledge of the occult manipulation of sound, this man dominated the forces that had escaped from their proper sphere, until at length the room was reduced to silence and perfect order again.\n\n\"Judging by the immense relief which also communicated itself to my nerves I then felt that the crisis was over and Smith was wholly master of the situation.\n\n\"But hardly had I begun to congratulate myself upon this result, and to gather my scattered senses about me, when, uttering a loud cry, I saw him leap out of the circle and fling himself into the air\u2014as it seemed to me, into the empty air. Then, even while holding my breath for dread of the crash he was bound to come upon the floor, I saw him strike with a dull thud against a solid body in mid-air, and the next instant he was wrestling with some ponderous thing that was absolutely invisible to me, and the room shook with the struggle.\n\n\"To and fro they swayed, sometimes lurching in one direction, sometimes in another, and always in horrible proximity to myself, as I leaned trembling against the wall and watched the encounter.\n\n\"It lasted at most but a short minute or two, ending as suddenly as it had begun. Smith, with an unexpected movement, threw up his arms with a cry of relief. At the same instant there was a wild, tearing shriek in the air beside me and something rushed past us with a noise like the passage of a flock of big birds. Both windows rattled as if they would break away from their sashes. Then a sense of emptiness and peace suddenly came over the room, and I knew that all was over.\n\n\"Smith, his face exceedingly white, but otherwise strangely composed, turned to me at once.\n\n\"'God!\u2014if you hadn't come\u2014You deflected the stream; broke it up\u2014' he whispered. 'You saved me.'\"\n\nThe doctor made a long pause. Presently he felt for his pipe in the darkness, groping over the table behind us with both hands. No one spoke for a bit, but all dreaded the sudden glare that would come when he struck the match. The fire was nearly out and the great hall was pitch dark.\n\nBut the story-teller did not strike that match. He was merely gaining time for some hidden reason of his own. And presently he went on with his tale in a more subdued voice.\n\n\"I quite forget,\" he said, \"how I got back to my own room. I only know that I lay with two lighted candles for the rest of the night, and the first thing I did in the morning was to let the landlady know I was leaving her house at the end of the week.\n\n\"Smith still has my Rabbinical Treatise. At least he did not return it to me at the time, and I have never seen him since to ask for it.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Suspicious Gift by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nBlake had been in very low water for months\u2014almost under water part of the time\u2014due to circumstances he was fond of saying were no fault of his own; and as he sat writing in his room on \"third floor back\" of a New York boarding-house, part of his mind was busily occupied in wondering when his luck was going to turn again.\n\nIt was his room only in the sense that he paid the rent. Two friends, one a little Frenchman and the other a big Dane, shared it with him, both hoping eventually to contribute something towards expenses, but so far not having accomplished this result. They had two beds only, the third being a mattress they slept upon in turns, a week at a time. A good deal of their irregular \"feeding\" consisted of oatmeal, potatoes, and sometimes eggs, all of which they cooked on a strange utensil they had contrived to fix into the gas jet. Occasionally, when dinner failed them altogether, they swallowed a little raw rice and drank hot water from the bathroom on the top of it, and then made a wild race for bed so as to get to sleep while the sensation of false repletion was still there. For sleep and hunger are slight acquaintances as they well knew. Fortunately all New York houses are supplied with hot air, and they only had to open a grating in the wall to get a plentiful, if not a wholesome amount of heat.\n\nThough loneliness in a big city is a real punishment, as they had severally learnt to their cost, their experiences, three in a small room for several months, had revealed to them horrors of quite another kind, and their nerves had suffered according to the temperament of each. But, on this particular evening, as Blake sat scribbling by the only window that was not cracked, the Dane and the Frenchman, his companions in adversity, were in wonderful luck. They had both been asked out to a restaurant to dine with a friend who also held out to one of them a chance of work and remuneration. They would not be back till late, and when they did come they were pretty sure to bring in supplies of one kind or another. For the Frenchman never could resist the offer of a glass of absinthe, and this meant that he would be able to help himself plentifully from the free-lunch counters, with which all New York bars are furnished, and to which any purchaser of a drink is entitled to help himself and devour on the spot or carry away casually in his hand for consumption elsewhere. Thousands of unfortunate men get their sole subsistence in this way in New York, and experience soon teaches where, for the price of a single drink, a man can take away almost a meal of chip potatoes, sausage, bits of bread, and even eggs. The Frenchman and the Dane knew their way about, and Blake looked forward to a supper more or less substantial before pulling his mattress out of the cupboard and turning in upon the floor for the night.\n\nMeanwhile he could enjoy a quiet and lonely evening with the room all to himself.\n\nIn the daytime he was a reporter on an evening newspaper of sensational and lying habits. His work was chiefly in the police courts; and in his spare hours at night, when not too tired or too empty, he wrote sketches and stories for the magazines that very rarely saw the light of day on their printed and paid-for sentences. On this particular occasion he was deep in a most involved tale of a psychological character, and had just worked his way into a sentence, or set of sentences, that completely baffled and muddled him.\n\nHe was fairly out of his depth, and his brain was too poorly supplied with blood to invent a way out again. The story would have been interesting had he written it simply, keeping to facts and feelings, and not diving into difficult analysis of motive and character which was quite beyond him. For it was largely autobiographical, and was meant to describe the adventures of a young Englishman who had come to grief in the usual manner on a Canadian farm, had then subsequently become bar-keeper, sub-editor on a Methodist magazine, a teacher of French and German to clerks at twenty-five cents per hour, a model for artists, a super on the stage, and, finally, a wanderer to the goldfields.\n\nBlake scratched his head, and dipped the pen in the inkpot, stared out through the blindless windows, and sighed deeply. His thoughts kept wandering to food, beefsteak and steaming vegetables. The smell of cooking that came from a lower floor through the broken windows was a constant torment to him. He pulled himself together and again attacked the problem.\n\n\"...for with some people,\" he wrote, \"the imagination is so vivid as to be almost an extension of consciousness...\" But here he stuck absolutely. He was not quite sure what he meant by the words, and how to finish the sentence puzzled him into blank inaction. It was a difficult point to decide, for it seemed to come in appropriately at this point in his story, and he did not know whether to leave it as it stood, change it round a bit, or take it out altogether. It might just spoil its chances of being accepted: editors were such clever men. But, to rewrite the sentence was a grind, and he was so tired and sleepy. After all, what did it matter? People who were clever would force a meaning into it; people who were not clever would pretend\u2014he knew of no other classes of readers. He would let it stay, and go on with the action of the story. He put his head in his hands and began to think hard.\n\nHis mind soon passed from thought to reverie. He fell to wondering when his friends would find work and relieve him of the burden\u2014he acknowledged it as such\u2014of keeping them, and of letting another man wear his best clothes on alternate Sundays. He wondered when his \"luck\" would turn. There were one or two influential people in New York whom he could go and see if he had a dress suit and the other conventional uniforms. His thoughts ran on far ahead, and at the same time, by a sort of double process, far behind as well. His home in the \"old country\" rose up before him; he saw the lawn and the cedars in sunshine; he looked through the familiar windows and saw the clean, swept rooms. His story began to suffer; the psychological masterpiece would not make much progress unless he pulled up and dragged his thoughts back to the treadmill. But he no longer cared; once he had got as far as that cedar with the sunshine on it, he never could get back again. For all he cared, the troublesome sentence might run away and get into someone else's pages, or be snuffed out altogether.\n\nThere came a gentle knock at the door, and Blake started. The knock was repeated louder. Who in the world could it be at this late hour of the night? On the floor above, he remembered, there lived another Englishman, a foolish, second-rate creature, who sometimes came in and made himself objectionable with endless and silly chatter. But he was an Englishman for all that, and Blake always tried to treat him with politeness, realising that he was lonely in a strange land. But to-night, of all people in the world, he did not want to be bored with Perry's cackle, as he called it, and the \"Come in\" he gave in answer to the second knock had no very cordial sound of welcome in it.\n\nHowever, the door opened in response, and the man came in. Blake did not turn round at once, and the other advanced to the centre of the room, but without speaking. Then Blake knew it was not his enemy, Perry, and turned round.\n\nHe saw a man of about forty standing in the middle of the carpet, but standing sideways so that he did not present a full face. He wore an overcoat buttoned up to the neck, and on the felt hat which he held in front of him fresh rain-drops glistened. In his other hand he carried a small black bag. Blake gave him a good look, and came to the conclusion that he might be a secretary, or a chief clerk, or a confidential man of sorts. He was a shabby-respectable-looking person. This was the sum-total of the first impression, gained the moment his eyes took in that it was not Perry; the second impression was less pleasant, and reported at once that something was wrong.\n\nThough otherwise young and inexperienced, Blake\u2014thanks, or curses, to the police court training\u2014knew more about common criminal blackguardism than most men of fifty, and he recognised that there was somewhere a suggestion of this undesirable world about the man. But there was more than this. There was something singular about him, something far out of the common, though for the life of him Blake could not say wherein it lay. The fellow was out of the ordinary, and in some very undesirable manner.\n\nAll this, that takes so long to describe, Blake saw with the first and second glance. The man at once began to speak in a quiet and respectful voice.\n\n\"Are you Mr. Blake?\" he asked.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Mr. Arthur Blake?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Mr. Arthur Herbert Blake?\" persisted the other, with emphasis on the middle name.\n\n\"That is my full name,\" Blake answered simply, adding, as he remembered his manners; \"but won't you sit down, first, please?\"\n\nThe man advanced with a curious sideways motion like a crab and took a seat on the edge of the sofa. He put his hat on the floor at his feet, but still kept the bag in his hand.\n\n\"I come to you from a well-wisher,\" he went on in oily tones, without lifting his eyes. Blake, in his mind, ran quickly over all the people he knew in New York who might possibly have sent such a man, while waiting for him to supply the name. But the man had come to a full stop and was waiting too.\n\n\"A well-wisher of mine?\" repeated Blake, not knowing quite what else to say.\n\n\"Just so,\" replied the other, still with his eyes on the floor. \"A well-wisher of yours.\"\n\n\"A man or\u2014\" he felt himself blushing, \"or a woman?\"\n\n\"That,\" said the man shortly, \"I cannot tell you.\"\n\n\"You can't tell me!\" exclaimed the other, wondering what was coming next, and who in the world this mysterious well-wisher could be who sent so discreet and mysterious a messenger.\n\n\"I cannot tell you the name,\" replied the man firmly. \"Those are my instructions. But I bring you something from this person, and I am to give it to you, to take a receipt for it, and then to go away without answering any questions.\"\n\nBlake stared very hard. The man, however, never raised his eyes above the level of the second china knob on the chest of drawers opposite. The giving of a receipt sounded like money. Could it be that some of his influential friends had heard of his plight? There were possibilities that made his heart beat. At length, however, he found his tongue, for this strange creature was determined apparently to say nothing more until he had heard from him.\n\n\"Then, what have you got for me, please?\" he asked bluntly.\n\nBy way of answer the man proceeded to open the bag. He took out a parcel wrapped loosely in brown paper, and about the size of a large book. It was tied with string, and the man seemed unnecessarily long untying the knot. When at last the string was off and the paper unfolded, there appeared a series of smaller packages inside. The man took them out very carefully, almost as if they had been alive, Blake thought, and set them in a row upon his knees. They were dollar bills. Blake, all in a flutter, craned his neck forward a little to try and make out their denomination. He read plainly the figures 100.\n\n\"There are ten thousand dollars here,\" said the man quietly.\n\nThe other could not suppress a little cry.\n\n\"And they are for you.\"\n\nBlake simply gasped. \"Ten thousand dollars!\" he repeated, a queer feeling growing up in his throat. \"Ten thousand. Are you sure? I mean\u2014you mean they are for me?\" he stammered. He felt quite silly with excitement, and grew more so with every minute, as the man maintained a perfect silence. Was it not a dream? Wouldn't the man put them back in the bag presently and say it was a mistake, and they were meant for somebody else? He could not believe his eyes or his ears. Yet, in a sense, it was possible. He had read of such things in books, and even come across them in his experience of the courts\u2014the erratic and generous philanthropist who is determined to do his good deed and to get no thanks or acknowledgment for it. Still, it seemed almost incredible. His troubles began to melt away like bubbles in the sun; he thought of the other fellows when they came in, and what he would have to tell them; he thought of the German landlady and the arrears of rent, of regular food and clean linen, and books and music, of the chance of getting into some respectable business, of\u2014well, of as many things as it is possible to think of when excitement and surprise fling wide open the gates of the imagination.\n\nThe man, meanwhile, began quietly to count over the packages aloud from one to ten, and then to count the bills in each separate packet, also from one to ten. Yes, there were ten little heaps, each containing ten bills of a hundred-dollar denomination. That made ten thousand dollars. Blake had never seen so much money in a single lump in his life before; and for many months of privation and discomfort he had not known the \"feel\" of a twenty-dollar note, much less of a hundred-dollar one. He heard them crackle under the man's fingers, and it was like crisp laughter in his ears. The bills were evidently new and unused.\n\nBut, side by side with the excitement caused by the shock of such an event, Blake's caution, acquired by a year of vivid New York experience, was meanwhile beginning to assert itself. It all seemed just a little too much out of the likely order of things to be quite right. The police courts had taught him the amazing ingenuity of the criminal mind, as well as something of the plots and devices by which the unwary are beguiled into the dark places where blackmail may be levied with impunity. New York, as a matter of fact, just at that time was literally undermined with the secret ways of the blackmailers, the green-goods men, and other police-protected abominations; and the only weak point in the supposition that this was part of some such proceeding was the selection of himself\u2014a poor newspaper reporter\u2014as a victim. It did seem absurd, but then the whole thing was so out of the ordinary, and the thought once having entered his mind, was not so easily got rid of. Blake resolved to be very cautious.\n\nThe man meanwhile, though he never appeared to raise his eyes from the carpet, had been watching him closely all the time.\n\n\"If you will give me a receipt I'll leave the money at once,\" he said, with just a vestige of impatience in his tone, as if he were anxious to bring the matter to a conclusion as soon as possible.\n\n\"But you say it is quite impossible for you to tell me the name of my well-wisher, or why she sends me such a large sum of money in this extraordinary way?\"\n\n\"The money is sent to you because you are in need of it,\" returned the other; \"and it is a present without conditions of any sort attached. You have to give me a receipt only to satisfy the sender that it has reached your hands. The money will never be asked of you again.\"\n\nBlake noticed two things from this answer: first, that the man was not to be caught into betraying the sex of the well-wisher; and secondly, that he was in some hurry to complete the transaction. For he was now giving reasons, attractive reasons, why he should accept the money and make out the receipt.\n\nSuddenly it flashed across his mind that if he took the money and gave the receipt before a witness, nothing very disastrous could come of the affair. It would protect him against blackmail, if this was, after all, a plot of some sort with blackmail in it; whereas, if the man were a madman, or a criminal who was getting rid of a portion of his ill-gotten gains to divert suspicion, or if any other improbable explanation turned out to be the true one, there was no great harm done, and he could hold the money till it was claimed, or advertised for in the newspapers. His mind rapidly ran over these possibilities, though, of course, under the stress of excitement, he was unable to weigh any of them properly; then he turned to his strange visitor again and said quietly\u2014\n\n\"I will take the money, although I must say it seems to me a very unusual transaction, and I will give you for it such a receipt as I think proper under the circumstances.\"\n\n\"A proper receipt is all I want,\" was the answer.\n\n\"I mean by that a receipt before a proper witness\u2014\"\n\n\"Perfectly satisfactory,\" interrupted the man, his eyes still on the carpet. \"Only, it must be dated, and headed with your address here in the correct way.\"\n\nBlake could see no possible objection to this, and he at once proceeded to obtain his witness. The person he had in his mind was a Mr. Barclay, who occupied the room above his own; an old gentleman who had retired from business and who, the landlady always said, was a miser, and kept large sums secreted in his room. He was, at any rate, a perfectly respectable man and would make an admirable witness to a transaction of this sort. Blake made an apology and rose to fetch him, crossing the room in front of the sofa where the man sat, in order to reach the door. As he did so, he saw for the first time the other side of his visitor's face, the side that had been always so carefully turned away from him.\n\nThere was a broad smear of blood down the skin from the ear to the neck. It glistened in the gaslight.\n\nBlake never knew how he managed to smother the cry that sprang to his lips, but smother it he did. In a second he was at the door, his knees trembling, his mind in a sudden and dreadful turmoil.\n\nHis main object, so far as he could recollect afterwards, was to escape from the room as if he had noticed nothing, so as not to arouse the other's suspicions. The man's eyes were always on the carpet, and probably, Blake hoped, he had not noticed the consternation that must have been written plainly on his face. At any rate he had uttered no cry.\n\nIn another second he would have been in the passage, when suddenly he met a pair of wicked, staring eyes fixed intently and with a cunning smile upon his own. It was the other's face in the mirror calmly watching his every movement.\n\nInstantly, all his powers of reflection flew to the winds, and he thought only upon the desirability of getting help at once. He tore upstairs, his heart in his mouth. Barclay must come to his aid. This matter was serious\u2014perhaps horribly serious. Taking the money, or giving a receipt, or having anything at all to do with it became an impossibility. Here was crime. He felt certain of it.\n\nIn three bounds he reached the next landing and began to hammer at the old miser's door as if his very life depended on it. For a long time he could get no answer. His fists seemed to make no noise. He might have been knocking on cotton wool, and the thought dashed through his brain that it was all just like the terror of a nightmare.\n\nBarclay, evidently, was still out, or else sound asleep. But the other simply could not wait a minute longer in suspense. He turned the handle and walked into the room. At first he saw nothing for the darkness, and made sure the owner of the room was out; but the moment the light from the passage began a little to disperse the gloom, he saw the old man, to his immense relief, lying asleep on the bed.\n\nBlake opened the door to its widest to get more light and then walked quickly up to the bed. He now saw the figure more plainly, and noted that it was dressed and lay only upon the outside of the bed. It struck him, too, that he was sleeping in a very odd, almost an unnatural, position.\n\nSomething clutched at his heart as he looked closer. He stumbled over a chair and found the matches. Calling upon Barclay the whole time to wake up and come downstairs with him, he blundered across the floor, a dreadful thought in his mind, and lit the gas over the table. It seemed strange that there was no movement or reply to his shouting. But it no longer seemed strange when at length he turned, in the full glare of the gas, and saw the old man lying huddled up into a ghastly heap on the bed, his throat cut across from ear to ear.\n\nAnd all over the carpet lay new dollar bills, crisp and clean like those he had left downstairs, and strewn about in little heaps.\n\nFor a moment Blake stood stock-still, bereft of all power of movement. The next, his courage returned, and he fled from the room and dashed downstairs, taking five steps at a time. He reached the bottom and tore along the passage to his room, determined at any rate to seize the man and prevent his escape till help came.\n\nBut when he got to the end of the little landing he found that his door had been closed. He seized the handle, fumbling with it in his violence. It felt slippery and kept turning under his fingers without opening the door, and fully half a minute passed before it yielded and let him in headlong.\n\nAt the first glance he saw the room was empty, and the man gone!\n\nScattered upon the carpet lay a number of the bills, and beside them, half hidden under the sofa where the man had sat, he saw a pair of gloves\u2014thick, leathern gloves\u2014and a butcher's knife. Even from the distance where he stood the blood-stains on both were easily visible.\n\nDazed and confused by the terrible discoveries of the last few minutes, Blake stood in the middle of the room, overwhelmed and unable to think or move. Unconsciously he must have passed his hand over his forehead in the natural gesture of perplexity, for he noticed that the skin felt wet and sticky. His hand was covered with blood! And when he rushed in terror to the looking-glass, he saw that there was a broad red smear across his face and forehead. Then he remembered the slippery handle of the door and knew that it had been carefully moistened!\n\nIn an instant the whole plot became clear as daylight, and he was so spellbound with horror that a sort of numbness came over him and he came very near to fainting. He was in a condition of utter helplessness, and had anyone come into the room at that minute and called him by name he would simply have dropped to the floor in a heap.\n\n\"If the police were to come in now!\" The thought crashed through his brain like thunder, and at the same moment, almost before he had time to appreciate a quarter of its significance, there came a loud knocking at the front door below. The bell rang with a dreadful clamour; men's voices were heard talking excitedly, and presently heavy steps began to come up the stairs in the direction of his room.\n\nIt was the police!\n\nAnd all Blake could do was to laugh foolishly to himself\u2014and wait till they were upon him. He could not move nor speak. He stood face to face with the evidence of his horrid crime, his hands and face smeared with the blood of his victim, and there he was standing when the police burst open the door and came noisily into the room.\n\n\"Here it is!\" cried a voice he knew. \"Third floor back! And the fellow caught red-handed!\"\n\nIt was the man with the bag leading in the two policemen.\n\nHardly knowing what he was doing in the fearful stress of conflicting emotions, he made a step forward. But before he had time to make a second one, he felt the heavy hand of the law descend upon both shoulders at once as the two policemen moved up to seize him. At the same moment a voice of thunder cried in his ear\u2014\n\n\"Wake up, man! Wake up! Here's the supper, and good news too!\"\n\nBlake turned with a start in his chair and saw the Dane, very red in the face, standing beside him, a hand on each shoulder, and a little further back he saw the Frenchman leering happily at him over the end of the bed, a bottle of beer in one hand and a paper package in the other.\n\nHe rubbed his eyes, glancing from one to the other, and then got up sleepily to fix the wire arrangement on the gas jet to boil water for cooking the eggs which the Frenchman was in momentary danger of letting drop upon the floor.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nIt was never quite clear to me how Jim Shorthouse managed to get his private secretaryship; but, once he got it, he kept it, and for some years he led a steady life and put money in the savings bank.\n\nOne morning his employer sent for him into the study, and it was evident to the secretary's trained senses that there was something unusual in the air.\n\n\"Mr. Shorthouse,\" he began, somewhat nervously, \"I have never yet had the opportunity of observing whether or not you are possessed of personal courage.\"\n\nShorthouse gasped, but he said nothing. He was growing accustomed to the eccentricities of his chief. Shorthouse was a Kentish man; Sidebotham was \"raised\" in Chicago; New York was the present place of residence.\n\n\"But,\" the other continued, with a puff at his very black cigar, \"I must consider myself a poor judge of human nature in future, if it is not one of your strongest qualities.\"\n\nThe private secretary made a foolish little bow in modest appreciation of so uncertain a compliment. Mr. Jonas B. Sidebotham watched him narrowly, as the novelists say, before he continued his remarks.\n\n\"I have no doubt that you are a plucky fellow and\u2014\" He hesitated, and puffed at his cigar as if his life depended upon it keeping alight.\n\n\"I don't think I'm afraid of anything in particular, sir\u2014except women,\" interposed the young man, feeling that it was time for him to make an observation of some sort, but still quite in the dark as to his chief's purpose.\n\n\"Humph!\" he grunted. \"Well, there are no women in this case so far as I know. But there may be other things that\u2014that hurt more.\"\n\n\"Wants a special service of some kind, evidently,\" was the secretary's reflection. \"Personal violence?\" he asked aloud.\n\n\"Possibly (puff), in fact (puff, puff) probably.\"\n\nShorthouse smelt an increase of salary in the air. It had a stimulating effect.\n\n\"I've had some experience of that article, sir,\" he said shortly; \"but I'm ready to undertake anything in reason.\"\n\n\"I can't say how much reason or unreason there may prove to be in this particular case. It all depends.\"\n\nMr. Sidebotham got up and locked the door of his study and drew down the blinds of both windows. Then he took a bunch of keys from his pocket and opened a black tin box. He ferreted about among blue and white papers for a few seconds, enveloping himself as he did so in a cloud of blue tobacco smoke.\n\n\"I feel like a detective already,\" Shorthouse laughed.\n\n\"Speak low, please,\" returned the other, glancing round the room. \"We must observe the utmost secrecy. Perhaps you would be kind enough to close the registers,\" he went on in a still lower voice. \"Open registers have betrayed conversations before now.\"\n\nShorthouse began to enter into the spirit of the thing. He tiptoed across the floor and shut the two iron gratings in the wall that in American houses supply hot air and are termed \"registers.\" Mr. Sidebotham had meanwhile found the paper he was looking for. He held it in front of him and tapped it once or twice with the back of his right hand as if it were a stage letter and himself the villain of the melodrama.\n\n\"This is a letter from Joel Garvey, my old partner,\" he said at length. \"You have heard me speak of him.\"\n\nThe other bowed. He knew that many years before Garvey & Sidebotham had been well known in the Chicago financial world. He knew that the amazing rapidity with which they accumulated a fortune had only been surpassed by the amazing rapidity with which they had immediately afterwards disappeared into space. He was further aware\u2014his position afforded facilities\u2014that each partner was still to some extent in the other's power, and that each wished most devoutly that the other would die.\n\nThe sins of his employer's early years did not concern him, however. The man was kind and just, if eccentric; and Shorthouse, being in New York, did not probe to discover more particularly the sources whence his salary was so regularly paid. Moreover, the two men had grown to like each other and there was a genuine feeling of trust and respect between them.\n\n\"I hope it's a pleasant communication, sir,\" he said in a low voice.\n\n\"Quite the reverse,\" returned the other, fingering the paper nervously as he stood in front of the fire.\n\n\"Blackmail, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\" Mr. Sidebotham's cigar was not burning well; he struck a match and applied it to the uneven edge, and presently his voice spoke through clouds of wreathing smoke.\n\n\"There are valuable papers in my possession bearing his signature. I cannot inform you of their nature; but they are extremely valuable to me. They belong, as a matter of fact, to Garvey as much as to me. Only I've got them\u2014\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"Garvey writes that he wants to have his signature removed\u2014wants to cut it out with his own hand. He gives reasons which incline me to consider his request\u2014\"\n\n\"And you would like me to take him the papers and see that he does it?\"\n\n\"And bring them back again with you,\" he whispered, screwing up his eyes into a shrewd grimace.\n\n\"And bring them back again with me,\" repeated the secretary. \"I understand perfectly.\"\n\nShorthouse knew from unfortunate experience more than a little of the horrors of blackmail. The pressure Garvey was bringing to bear upon his old enemy must be exceedingly strong. That was quite clear. At the same time, the commission that was being entrusted to him seemed somewhat quixotic in its nature. He had already \"enjoyed\" more than one experience of his employer's eccentricity, and he now caught himself wondering whether this same eccentricity did not sometimes go\u2014further than eccentricity.\n\n\"I cannot read the letter to you,\" Mr. Sidebotham was explaining, \"but I shall give it into your hands. It will prove that you are my\u2014er\u2014my accredited representative. I shall also ask you not to read the package of papers. The signature in question you will find, of course, on the last page, at the bottom.\"\n\nThere was a pause of several minutes during which the end of the cigar glowed eloquently.\n\n\"Circumstances compel me,\" he went on at length almost in a whisper, \"or I should never do this. But you understand, of course, the thing is a ruse. Cutting out the signature is a mere pretence. It is nothing. What Garvey wants are the papers themselves.\"\n\nThe confidence reposed in the private secretary was not misplaced. Shorthouse was as faithful to Mr. Sidebotham as a man ought to be to the wife that loves him.\n\nThe commission itself seemed very simple. Garvey lived in solitude in the remote part of Long Island. Shorthouse was to take the papers to him, witness the cutting out of the signature, and to be specially on his guard against any attempt, forcible or otherwise, to gain possession of them. It seemed to him a somewhat ludicrous adventure, but he did not know all the facts and perhaps was not the best judge.\n\nThe two men talked in low voices for another hour, at the end of which Mr. Sidebotham drew up the blinds, opened the registers and unlocked the door.\n\nShorthouse rose to go. His pockets were stuffed with papers and his head with instructions; but when he reached the door he hesitated and turned.\n\n\"Well?\" said his chief.\n\nShorthouse looked him straight in the eye and said nothing.\n\n\"The personal violence, I suppose?\" said the other. Shorthouse bowed.\n\n\"I have not seen Garvey for twenty years,\" he said; \"all I can tell you is that I believe him to be occasionally of unsound mind. I have heard strange rumours. He lives alone, and in his lucid intervals studies chemistry. It was always a hobby of his. But the chances are twenty to one against his attempting violence. I only wished to warn you\u2014in case\u2014I mean, so that you may be on the watch.\"\n\nHe handed his secretary a Smith and Wesson revolver as he spoke. Shorthouse slipped it into his hip pocket and went out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 351", + "text": "A drizzling cold rain was falling on fields covered with half-melted snow when Shorthouse stood, late in the afternoon, on the platform of the lonely little Long Island station and watched the train he had just left vanish into the distance.\n\nIt was a bleak country that Joel Garvey, Esq., formerly of Chicago, had chosen for his residence and on this particular afternoon it presented a more than usually dismal appearance. An expanse of flat fields covered with dirty snow stretched away on all sides till the sky dropped down to meet them. Only occasional farm buildings broke the monotony, and the road wound along muddy lanes and beneath dripping trees swathed in the cold raw fog that swept in like a pall of the dead from the sea.\n\nIt was six miles from the station to Garvey's house, and the driver of the rickety buggy Shorthouse had found at the station was not communicative. Between the dreary landscape and the drearier driver he fell back upon his own thoughts, which, but for the spice of adventure that was promised, would themselves have been even drearier than either. He made up his mind that he would waste no time over the transaction. The moment the signature was cut out he would pack up and be off. The last train back to Brooklyn was 7.15; and he would have to walk the six miles of mud and snow, for the driver of the buggy had refused point-blank to wait for him.\n\nFor purposes of safety, Shorthouse had done what he flattered himself was rather a clever thing. He had made up a second packet of papers identical in outside appearance with the first. The inscription, the blue envelope, the red elastic band, and even a blot in the lower left-hand corner had been exactly reproduced. Inside, of course, were only sheets of blank paper. It was his intention to change the packets and to let Garvey see him put the sham one into the bag. In case of violence the bag would be the point of attack, and he intended to lock it and throw away the key. Before it could be forced open and the deception discovered there would be time to increase his chances of escape with the real packet.\n\nIt was five o'clock when the silent Jehu pulled up in front of a half-broken gate and pointed with his whip to a house that stood in its own grounds among trees and was just visible in the gathering gloom. Shorthouse told him to drive up to the front door but the man refused.\n\n\"I ain't runnin' no risks,\" he said; \"I've got a family.\"\n\nThis cryptic remark was not encouraging, but Shorthouse did not pause to decipher it. He paid the man, and then pushed open the rickety old gate swinging on a single hinge, and proceeded to walk up the drive that lay dark between close-standing trees. The house soon came into full view. It was tall and square and had once evidently been white, but now the walls were covered with dirty patches and there were wide yellow streaks where the plaster had fallen away. The windows stared black and uncompromising into the night. The garden was overgrown with weeds and long grass, standing up in ugly patches beneath their burden of wet snow. Complete silence reigned over all. There was not a sign of life. Not even a dog barked. Only, in the distance, the wheels of the retreating carriage could be heard growing fainter and fainter.\n\nAs he stood in the porch, between pillars of rotting wood, listening to the rain dripping from the roof into the puddles of slushy snow, he was conscious of a sensation of utter desertion and loneliness such as he had never before experienced. The forbidding aspect of the house had the immediate effect of lowering his spirits. It might well have been the abode of monsters or demons in a child's wonder tale, creatures that only dared to come out under cover of darkness. He groped for the bell-handle, or knocker, and finding neither, he raised his stick and beat a loud tattoo on the door. The sound echoed away in an empty space on the other side and the wind moaned past him between the pillars as if startled at his audacity. But there was no sound of approaching footsteps and no one came to open the door. Again he beat a tattoo, louder and longer than the first one; and, having done so, waited with his back to the house and stared across the unkempt garden into the fast gathering shadows.\n\nThen he turned suddenly, and saw that the door was standing ajar. It had been quietly opened and a pair of eyes were peering at him round the edge. There was no light in the hall beyond and he could only just make out the shape of a dim human face.\n\n\"Does Mr. Garvey live here?\" he asked in a firm voice.\n\n\"Who are you?\" came in a man's tones.\n\n\"I'm Mr. Sidebotham's private secretary. I wish to see Mr. Garvey on important business.\"\n\n\"Are you expected?\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" he said impatiently, thrusting a card through the opening. \"Please take my name to him at once, and say I come from Mr. Sidebotham on the matter Mr. Garvey wrote about.\"\n\nThe man took the card, and the face vanished into the darkness, leaving Shorthouse standing in the cold porch with mingled feelings of impatience and dismay. The door, he now noticed for the first time, was on a chain and could not open more than a few inches. But it was the manner of his reception that caused uneasy reflections to stir within him\u2014reflections that continued for some minutes before they were interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps and the flicker of a light in the hall.\n\nThe next instant the chain fell with a rattle, and gripping his bag tightly, he walked into a large ill-smelling hall of which he could only just see the ceiling. There was no light but the nickering taper held by the man, and by its uncertain glimmer Shorthouse turned to examine him. He saw an undersized man of middle age with brilliant, shifting eyes, a curling black beard, and a nose that at once proclaimed him a Jew. His shoulders were bent, and, as he watched him replacing the chain, he saw that he wore a peculiar black gown like a priest's cassock reaching to the feet. It was altogether a lugubrious figure of a man, sinister and funereal, yet it seemed in perfect harmony with the general character of its surroundings. The hall was devoid of furniture of any kind, and against the dingy walls stood rows of old picture frames, empty and disordered, and odd-looking bits of wood-work that appeared doubly fantastic as their shadows danced queerly over the floor in the shifting light.\n\n\"If you'll come this way, Mr. Garvey will see you presently,\" said the Jew gruffly, crossing the floor and shielding the taper with a bony hand. He never once raised his eyes above the level of the visitor's waistcoat, and, to Shorthouse, he somehow suggested a figure from the dead rather than a man of flesh and blood. The hall smelt decidedly ill.\n\nAll the more surprising, then, was the scene that met his eyes when the Jew opened the door at the further end and he entered a room brilliantly lit with swinging lamps and furnished with a degree of taste and comfort that amounted to luxury. The walls were lined with handsomely bound books, and armchairs were arranged round a large mahogany desk in the middle of the room. A bright fire burned in the grate and neatly framed photographs of men and women stood on the mantelpiece on either side of an elaborately carved clock. French windows that opened like doors were partially concealed by warm red curtains, and on a sideboard against the wall stood decanters and glasses, with several boxes of cigars piled on top of one another. There was a pleasant odour of tobacco about the room. Indeed, it was in such glowing contrast to the chilly poverty of the hall that Shorthouse already was conscious of a distinct rise in the thermometer of his spirits.\n\nThen he turned and saw the Jew standing in the doorway with his eyes fixed upon him, somewhere about the middle button of his waistcoat. He presented a strangely repulsive appearance that somehow could not be attributed to any particular detail, and the secretary associated him in his mind with a monstrous black bird of prey more than anything else.\n\n\"My time is short,\" he said abruptly; \"I hope Mr. Garvey will not keep me waiting.\"\n\nA strange flicker of a smile appeared on the Jew's ugly face and vanished as quickly as it came. He made a sort of deprecating bow by way of reply. Then he blew out the taper and went out, closing the door noiselessly behind him.\n\nShorthouse was alone. He felt relieved. There was an air of obsequious insolence about the old Jew that was very offensive. He began to take note of his surroundings. He was evidently in the library of the house, for the walls were covered with books almost up to the ceiling. There was no room for pictures. Nothing but the shining backs of well-bound volumes looked down upon him. Four brilliant lights hung from the ceiling and a reading lamp with a polished reflector stood among the disordered masses of papers on the desk.\n\nThe lamp was not lit, but when Shorthouse put his hand upon it he found it was warm. The room had evidently only just been vacated.\n\nApart from the testimony of the lamp, however, he had already felt, without being able to give a reason for it, that the room had been occupied a few moments before he entered. The atmosphere over the desk seemed to retain the disturbing influence of a human being; an influence, moreover, so recent that he felt as if the cause of it were still in his immediate neighbourhood. It was difficult to realise that he was quite alone in the room and that somebody was not in hiding. The finer counterparts of his senses warned him to act as if he were being observed; he was dimly conscious of a desire to fidget and look round, to keep his eyes in every part of the room at once, and to conduct himself generally as if he were the object of careful human observation.\n\nHow far he recognised the cause of these sensations it is impossible to say; but they were sufficiently marked to prevent his carrying out a strong inclination to get up and make a search of the room. He sat quite still, staring alternately at the backs of the books, and at the red curtains; wondering all the time if he was really being watched, or if it was only the imagination playing tricks with him.\n\nA full quarter of an hour passed, and then twenty rows of volumes suddenly shifted out towards him, and he saw that a door had opened in the wall opposite. The books were only sham backs after all, and when they moved back again with the sliding door, Shorthouse saw the figure of Joel Garvey standing before him.\n\nSurprise almost took his breath away. He had expected to see an unpleasant, even a vicious apparition with the mark of the beast unmistakably upon its face; but he was wholly unprepared for the elderly, tall, fine-looking man who stood in front of him\u2014well-groomed, refined, vigorous, with a lofty forehead, clear grey eyes, and a hooked nose dominating a clean shaven mouth and chin of considerable character\u2014a distinguished looking man altogether.\n\n\"I'm afraid I've kept you waiting, Mr. Shorthouse,\" he said in a pleasant voice, but with no trace of a smile in the mouth or eyes. \"But the fact is, you know, I've a mania for chemistry, and just when you were announced I was at the most critical moment of a problem and was really compelled to bring it to a conclusion.\"\n\nShorthouse had risen to meet him, but the other motioned him to resume his seat. It was borne in upon him irresistibly that Mr. Joel Garvey, for reasons best known to himself, was deliberately lying, and he could not help wondering at the necessity for such an elaborate misrepresentation. He took off his overcoat and sat down.\n\n\"I've no doubt, too, that the door startled you,\" Garvey went on, evidently reading something of his guest's feelings in his face. \"You probably had not suspected it. It leads into my little laboratory. Chemistry is an absorbing study to me, and I spend most of my time there.\" Mr. Garvey moved up to the armchair on the opposite side of the fireplace and sat down.\n\nShorthouse made appropriate answers to these remarks, but his mind was really engaged in taking stock of Mr. Sidebotham's old-time partner. So far there was no sign of mental irregularity and there was certainly nothing about him to suggest violent wrong-doing or coarseness of living. On the whole, Mr. Sidebotham's secretary was most pleasantly surprised, and, wishing to conclude his business as speedily as possible, he made a motion towards the bag for the purpose of opening it, when his companion interrupted him quickly\u2014\n\n\"You are Mr. Sidebotham's private secretary, are you not?\" he asked.\n\nShorthouse replied that he was. \"Mr. Sidebotham,\" he went on to explain, \"has entrusted me with the papers in the case and I have the honour to return to you your letter of a week ago.\" He handed the letter to Garvey, who took it without a word and deliberately placed it in the fire. He was not aware that the secretary was ignorant of its contents, yet his face betrayed no signs of feeling. Shorthouse noticed, however, that his eyes never left the fire until the last morsel had been consumed. Then he looked up and said, \"You are familiar then with the facts of this most peculiar case?\"\n\nShorthouse saw no reason to confess his ignorance.\n\n\"I have all the papers, Mr. Garvey,\" he replied, taking them out of the bag, \"and I should be very glad if we could transact our business as speedily as possible. If you will cut out your signature I\u2014\"\n\n\"One moment, please,\" interrupted the other. \"I must, before we proceed further, consult some papers in my laboratory. If you will allow me to leave you alone a few minutes for this purpose we can conclude the whole matter in a very short time.\"\n\nShorthouse did not approve of this further delay, but he had no option than to acquiesce, and when Garvey had left the room by the private door he sat and waited with the papers in his hand. The minutes went by and the other did not return. To pass the time he thought of taking the false packet from his coat to see that the papers were in order, and the move was indeed almost completed, when something\u2014he never knew what\u2014warned him to desist. The feeling again came over him that he was being watched, and he leaned back in his chair with the bag on his knees and waited with considerable impatience for the other's return. For more than twenty minutes he waited, and when at length the door opened and Garvey appeared, with profuse apologies for the delay, he saw by the clock that only a few minutes still remained of the time he had allowed himself to catch the last train.\n\n\"Now I am completely at your service,\" he said pleasantly; \"you must, of course, know, Mr. Shorthouse, that one cannot be too careful in matters of this kind\u2014especially,\" he went on, speaking very slowly and impressively, \"in dealing with a man like my former partner, whose mind, as you doubtless may have discovered, is at times very sadly affected.\"\n\nShorthouse made no reply to this. He felt that the other was watching him as a cat watches a mouse.\n\n\"It is almost a wonder to me,\" Garvey added, \"that he is still at large. Unless he has greatly improved it can hardly be safe for those who are closely associated with him.\"\n\nThe other began to feel uncomfortable. Either this was the other side of the story, or it was the first signs of mental irresponsibility.\n\n\"All business matters of importance require the utmost care in my opinion, Mr. Garvey,\" he said at length, cautiously.\n\n\"Ah! then, as I thought, you have had a great deal to put up with from him,\" Garvey said, with his eyes fixed on his companion's face. \"And, no doubt, he is still as bitter against me as he was years ago when the disease first showed itself?\"\n\nAlthough this last remark was a deliberate question and the questioner was waiting with fixed eyes for an answer, Shorthouse elected to take no notice of it. Without a word he pulled the elastic band from the blue envelope with a snap and plainly showed his desire to conclude the business as soon as possible. The tendency on the other's part to delay did not suit him at all.\n\n\"But never personal violence, I trust, Mr. Shorthouse,\" he added.\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to hear it,\" Garvey said in a sympathetic voice, \"very glad to hear it. And now,\" he went on, \"if you are ready we can transact this little matter of business before dinner. It will only take a moment.\"\n\nHe drew a chair up to the desk and sat down, taking a pair of scissors from a drawer. His companion approached with the papers in his hand, unfolding them as he came. Garvey at once took them from him, and after turning over a few pages he stopped and cut out a piece of writing at the bottom of the last sheet but one.\n\nHolding it up to him Shorthouse read the words \"Joel Garvey\" in faded ink.\n\n\"There! That's my signature,\" he said, \"and I've cut it out. It must be nearly twenty years since I wrote it, and now I'm going to burn it.\"\n\nHe went to the fire and stooped over to burn the little slip of paper, and while he watched it being consumed Shorthouse put the real papers in his pocket and slipped the imitation ones into the bag. Garvey turned just in time to see this latter movement.\n\n\"I'm putting the papers back,\" Shorthouse said quietly; \"you've done with them, I think.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" he replied as, completely deceived, he saw the blue envelope disappear into the black bag and watched Shorthouse turn the key. \"They no longer have the slightest interest for me.\" As he spoke he moved over to the sideboard, and pouring himself out a small glass of whisky asked his visitor if he might do the same for him. But the visitor declined and was already putting on his overcoat when Garvey turned with genuine surprise on his face.\n\n\"You surely are not going back to New York to-night, Mr. Shorthouse?\" he said, in a voice of astonishment.\n\n\"I've just time to catch the 7.15 if I'm quick.\"\n\n\"But I never heard of such a thing,\" Garvey said. \"Of course I took it for granted that you would stay the night.\"\n\n\"It's kind of you,\" said Shorthouse, \"but really I must return to-night. I never expected to stay.\"\n\nThe two men stood facing each other. Garvey pulled out his watch.\n\n\"I'm exceedingly sorry,\" he said; \"but, upon my word, I took it for granted you would stay. I ought to have said so long ago. I'm such a lonely fellow and so little accustomed to visitors that I fear I forgot my manners altogether. But in any case, Mr. Shorthouse, you cannot catch the 7.15, for it's already after six o'clock, and that's the last train to-night.\" Garvey spoke very quickly, almost eagerly, but his voice sounded genuine.\n\n\"There's time if I walk quickly,\" said the young man with decision, moving towards the door. He glanced at his watch as he went. Hitherto he had gone by the clock on the mantelpiece. To his dismay he saw that it was, as his host had said, long after six. The clock was half an hour slow, and he realised at once that it was no longer possible to catch the train.\n\nHad the hands of the clock been moved back intentionally? Had he been purposely detained? Unpleasant thoughts flashed into his brain and made him hesitate before taking the next step. His employer's warning rang in his ears. The alternative was six miles along a lonely road in the dark, or a night under Garvey's roof. The former seemed a direct invitation to catastrophe, if catastrophe there was planned to be. The latter\u2014well, the choice was certainly small. One thing, however, he realised, was plain\u2014he must show neither fear nor hesitancy.\n\n\"My watch must have gained,\" he observed quietly, turning the hands back without looking up. \"It seems I have certainly missed that train and shall be obliged to throw myself upon your hospitality. But, believe me, I had no intention of putting you out to any such extent.\"\n\n\"I'm delighted,\" the other said. \"Defer to the judgment of an older man and make yourself comfortable for the night. There's a bitter storm outside, and you don't put me out at all. On the contrary it's a great pleasure. I have so little contact with the outside world that it's really a god-send to have you.\"\n\nThe man's face changed as he spoke. His manner was cordial and sincere. Shorthouse began to feel ashamed of his doubts and to read between the lines of his employer's warning. He took off his coat and the two men moved to the armchairs beside the fire.\n\n\"You see,\" Garvey went on in a lowered voice, \"I understand your hesitancy perfectly. I didn't know Sidebotham all those years without knowing a good deal about him\u2014perhaps more than you do. I've no doubt, now, he filled your mind with all sorts of nonsense about me\u2014probably told you that I was the greatest villain unhung, eh? and all that sort of thing? Poor fellow! He was a fine sort before his mind became unhinged. One of his fancies used to be that everybody else was insane, or just about to become insane. Is he still as bad as that?\"\n\n\"Few men,\" replied Shorthouse, with the manner of making a great confidence, but entirely refusing to be drawn, \"go through his experiences and reach his age without entertaining delusions of one kind or another.\"\n\n\"Perfectly true,\" said Garvey. \"Your observation is evidently keen.\"\n\n\"Very keen indeed,\" Shorthouse replied, taking his cue neatly; \"but, of course, there are some things\"\u2014and here he looked cautiously over his shoulder\u2014\"there are some things one cannot talk about too circumspectly.\"\n\n\"I understand perfectly and respect your reserve.\"\n\nThere was a little more conversation and then Garvey got up and excused himself on the plea of superintending the preparation of the bedroom.\n\n\"It's quite an event to have a visitor in the house, and I want to make you as comfortable as possible,\" he said. \"Marx will do better for a little supervision. And,\" he added with a laugh as he stood in the doorway, \"I want you to carry back a good account to Sidebotham.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 352", + "text": "The tall form disappeared and the door was shut. The conversation of the past few minutes had come somewhat as a revelation to the secretary. Garvey seemed in full possession of normal instincts. There was no doubt as to the sincerity of his manner and intentions. The suspicions of the first hour began to vanish like mist before the sun. Sidebotham's portentous warnings and the mystery with which he surrounded the whole episode had been allowed to unduly influence his mind. The loneliness of the situation and the bleak nature of the surroundings had helped to complete the illusion. He began to be ashamed of his suspicions and a change commenced gradually to be wrought in his thoughts. Anyhow a dinner and a bed were preferable to six miles in the dark, no dinner, and a cold train into the bargain.\n\nGarvey returned presently. \"We'll do the best we can for you,\" he said, dropping into the deep armchair on the other side of the fire. \"Marx is a good servant if you watch him all the time. You must always stand over a Jew, though, if you want things done properly. They're tricky and uncertain unless they're working for their own interest. But Marx might be worse, I'll admit. He's been with me for nearly twenty years\u2014cook, valet, housemaid, and butler all in one. In the old days, you know, he was a clerk in our office in Chicago.\"\n\nGarvey rattled on and Shorthouse listened with occasional remarks thrown in. The former seemed pleased to have somebody to talk to and the sound of his own voice was evidently sweet music in his ears. After a few minutes, he crossed over to the sideboard and again took up the decanter of whisky, holding it to the light. \"You will join me this time,\" he said pleasantly, pouring out two glasses, \"it will give us an appetite for dinner,\" and this time Shorthouse did not refuse. The liquor was mellow and soft and the men took two glasses apiece.\n\n\"Excellent,\" remarked the secretary.\n\n\"Glad you appreciate it,\" said the host, smacking his lips. \"It's very old whisky, and I rarely touch it when I'm alone. But this,\" he added, \"is a special occasion, isn't it?\"\n\nShorthouse was in the act of putting his glass down when something drew his eyes suddenly to the other's face. A strange note in the man's voice caught his attention and communicated alarm to his nerves. A new light shone in Garvey's eyes and there flitted momentarily across his strong features the shadow of something that set the secretary's nerves tingling. A mist spread before his eyes and the unaccountable belief rose strong in him that he was staring into the visage of an untamed animal. Close to his heart there was something that was wild, fierce, savage. An involuntary shiver ran over him and seemed to dispel the strange fancy as suddenly as it had come. He met the other's eye with a smile, the counterpart of which in his heart was vivid horror.\n\n\"It is a special occasion,\" he said, as naturally as possible, \"and, allow me to add, very special whisky.\"\n\nGarvey appeared delighted. He was in the middle of a devious tale describing how the whisky came originally into his possession when the door opened behind them and a grating voice announced that dinner was ready. They followed the cassocked form of Marx across the dirty hall, lit only by the shaft of light that followed them from the library door, and entered a small room where a single lamp stood upon a table laid for dinner. The walls were destitute of pictures, and the windows had Venetian blinds without curtains. There was no fire in the grate, and when the men sat down facing each other Shorthouse noticed that, while his own cover was laid with its due proportion of glasses and cutlery, his companion had nothing before him but a soup plate, without fork, knife, or spoon beside it.\n\n\"I don't know what there is to offer you,\" he said; \"but I'm sure Marx has done the best he can at such short notice. I only eat one course for dinner, but pray take your time and enjoy your food.\"\n\nMarx presently set a plate of soup before the guest, yet so loathsome was the immediate presence of this old Hebrew servitor, that the spoonfuls disappeared somewhat slowly. Garvey sat and watched him.\n\nShorthouse said the soup was delicious and bravely swallowed another mouthful. In reality his thoughts were centred upon his companion, whose manners were giving evidence of a gradual and curious change. There was a decided difference in his demeanour, a difference that the secretary felt at first, rather than saw. Garvey's quiet self-possession was giving place to a degree of suppressed excitement that seemed so far inexplicable. His movements became quick and nervous, his eye shifting and strangely brilliant, and his voice, when he spoke, betrayed an occasional deep tremor. Something unwonted was stirring within him and evidently demanding every moment more vigorous manifestation as the meal proceeded.\n\nIntuitively Shorthouse was afraid of this growing excitement, and while negotiating some uncommonly tough pork chops he tried to lead the conversation on to the subject of chemistry, of which in his Oxford days he had been an enthusiastic student. His companion, however, would none of it. It seemed to have lost interest for him, and he would barely condescend to respond. When Marx presently returned with a plate of steaming eggs and bacon the subject dropped of its own accord.\n\n\"An inadequate dinner dish,\" Garvey said, as soon as the man was gone; \"but better than nothing, I hope.\"\n\nShorthouse remarked that he was exceedingly fond of bacon and eggs, and, looking up with the last word, saw that Garvey's face was twitching convulsively and that he was almost wriggling in his chair. He quieted down, however, under the secretary's gaze and observed, though evidently with an effort\u2014\n\n\"Very good of you to say so. Wish I could join you, only I never eat such stuff. I only take one course for dinner.\"\n\nShorthouse began to feel some curiosity as to what the nature of this one course might be, but he made no further remark and contented himself with noting mentally that his companion's excitement seemed to be rapidly growing beyond his control. There was something uncanny about it, and he began to wish he had chosen the alternative of the walk to the station.\n\n\"I'm glad to see you never speak when Marx is in the room,\" said Garvey presently. \"I'm sure it's better not. Don't you think so?\"\n\nHe appeared to wait eagerly for the answer.\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" said the puzzled secretary.\n\n\"Yes,\" the other went on quickly. \"He's an excellent man, but he has one drawback\u2014a really horrid one. You may\u2014but, no, you could hardly have noticed it yet.\"\n\n\"Not drink, I trust,\" said Shorthouse, who would rather have discussed any other subject than the odious Jew.\n\n\"Worse than that a great deal,\" Garvey replied, evidently expecting the other to draw him out. But Shorthouse was in no mood to hear anything horrible, and he declined to step into the trap.\n\n\"The best of servants have their faults,\" he said coldly.\n\n\"I'll tell you what it is if you like,\" Garvey went on, still speaking very low and leaning forward over the table so that his face came close to the flame of the lamp, \"only we must speak quietly in case he's listening. I'll tell you what it is\u2014if you think you won't be frightened.\"\n\n\"Nothing frightens me,\" he laughed. (Garvey must understand that at all events.) \"Nothing can frighten me,\" he repeated.\n\n\"I'm glad of that; for it frightens me a good deal sometimes.\"\n\nShorthouse feigned indifference. Yet he was aware that his heart was beating a little quicker and that there was a sensation of chilliness in his back. He waited in silence for what was to come.\n\n\"He has a horrible predilection for vacuums,\" Garvey went on presently in a still lower voice and thrusting his face farther forward under the lamp.\n\n\"Vacuums!\" exclaimed the secretary in spite of himself. \"What in the world do you mean?\"\n\n\"What I say of course. He's always tumbling into them, so that I can't find him or get at him. He hides there for hours at a time, and for the life of me I can't make out what he does there.\"\n\nShorthouse stared his companion straight in the eyes. What in the name of Heaven was he talking about?\n\n\"Do you suppose he goes there for a change of air, or\u2014or to escape?\" he went on in a louder voice.\n\nShorthouse could have laughed outright but for the expression of the other's face.\n\n\"I should not think there was much air of any sort in a vacuum,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"That's exactly what I feel,\" continued Garvey with ever growing excitement. \"That's the horrid part of it. How the devil does he live there? You see\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you ever followed him there?\" interrupted the secretary. The other leaned back in his chair and drew a deep sigh.\n\n\"Never! It's impossible. You see I can't follow him. There's not room for two. A vacuum only holds one comfortably. Marx knows that. He's out of my reach altogether once he's fairly inside. He knows the best side of a bargain. He's a regular Jew.\"\n\n\"That is a drawback to a servant, of course\u2014\" Shorthouse spoke slowly, with his eyes on his plate.\n\n\"A drawback,\" interrupted the other with an ugly chuckle, \"I call it a draw-in, that's what I call it.\"\n\n\"A draw-in does seem a more accurate term,\" assented Shorthouse. \"But,\" he went on, \"I thought that nature abhorred a vacuum. She used to, when I was at school\u2014though perhaps\u2014it's so long ago\u2014\"\n\nHe hesitated and looked up. Something in Garvey's face\u2014something he had felt before he looked up\u2014stopped his tongue and froze the words in his throat. His lips refused to move and became suddenly dry. Again the mist rose before his eyes and the appalling shadow dropped its veil over the face before him. Garvey's features began to burn and glow. Then they seemed to coarsen and somehow slip confusedly together. He stared for a second\u2014it seemed only for a second\u2014into the visage of a ferocious and abominable animal; and then, as suddenly as it had come, the filthy shadow of the beast passed off, the mist melted out, and with a mighty effort over his nerves he forced himself to finish his sentence.\n\n\"You see it's so long since I've given attention to such things,\" he stammered. His heart was beating rapidly, and a feeling of oppression was gathering over it.\n\n\"It's my peculiar and special study on the other hand,\" Garvey resumed. \"I've not spent all these years in my laboratory to no purpose, I can assure you. Nature, I know for a fact,\" he added with unnatural warmth, \"does not abhor a vacuum. On the contrary, she's uncommonly fond of 'em, much too fond, it seems, for the comfort of my little household. If there were fewer vacuums and more abhorrence we should get on better\u2014a damned sight better in my opinion.\"\n\n\"Your special knowledge, no doubt, enables you to speak with authority,\" Shorthouse said, curiosity and alarm warring with other mixed feelings in his mind; \"but how can a man tumble into a vacuum?\"\n\n\"You may well ask. That's just it. How can he? It's preposterous and I can't make it out at all. Marx knows, but he won't tell me. Jews know more than we do. For my part I have reason to believe\u2014\" He stopped and listened. \"Hush! here he comes,\" he added, rubbing his hands together as if in glee and fidgeting in his chair.\n\nSteps were heard coming down the passage, and as they approached the door Garvey seemed to give himself completely over to an excitement he could not control. His eyes were fixed on the door and he began clutching the tablecloth with both hands. Again his face was screened by the loathsome shadow. It grew wild, wolfish. As through a mask, that concealed, and yet was thin enough to let through a suggestion of, the beast crouching behind, there leaped into his countenance the strange look of the animal in the human\u2014the expression of the were-wolf, the monster. The change in all its loathsomeness came rapidly over his features, which began to lose their outline. The nose flattened, dropping with broad nostrils over thick lips. The face rounded, filled, and became squat. The eyes, which, luckily for Shorthouse, no longer sought his own, glowed with the light of untamed appetite and bestial greed. The hands left the cloth and grasped the edges of the plate, and then clutched the cloth again.\n\n\"This is my course coming now,\" said Garvey, in a deep guttural voice. He was shivering. His upper lip was partly lifted and showed the teeth, white and gleaming.\n\nA moment later the door opened and Marx hurried into the room and set a dish in front of his master. Garvey half rose to meet him, stretching out his hands and grinning horribly. With his mouth he made a sound like the snarl of an animal. The dish before him was steaming, but the slight vapour rising from it betrayed by its odour that it was not born of a fire of coals. It was the natural heat of flesh warmed by the fires of life only just expelled. The moment the dish rested on the table Garvey pushed away his own plate and drew the other up close under his mouth. Then he seized the food in both hands and commenced to tear it with his teeth, grunting as he did so. Shorthouse closed his eyes, with a feeling of nausea. When he looked up again the lips and jaw of the man opposite were stained with crimson. The whole man was transformed. A feasting tiger, starved and ravenous, but without a tiger's grace\u2014this was what he watched for several minutes, transfixed with horror and disgust.\n\nMarx had already taken his departure, knowing evidently what was not good for the eyes to look upon, and Shorthouse knew at last that he was sitting face to face with a madman.\n\nThe ghastly meal was finished in an incredibly short time and nothing was left but a tiny pool of red liquid rapidly hardening. Garvey leaned back heavily in his chair and sighed. His smeared face, withdrawn now from the glare of the lamp, began to resume its normal appearance. Presently he looked up at his guest and said in his natural voice\u2014\n\n\"I hope you've had enough to eat. You wouldn't care for this, you know,\" with a downward glance.\n\nShorthouse met his eyes with an inward loathing, and it was impossible not to show some of the repugnance he felt. In the other's face, however, he thought he saw a subdued, cowed expression. But he found nothing to say.\n\n\"Marx will be in presently,\" Garvey went on. \"He's either listening, or in a vacuum.\"\n\n\"Does he choose any particular time for his visits?\" the secretary managed to ask.\n\n\"He generally goes after dinner; just about this time, in fact. But he's not gone yet,\" he added, shrugging his shoulders, \"for I think I hear him coming.\"\n\nShorthouse wondered whether vacuum was possibly synonymous with wine cellar, but gave no expression to his thoughts. With chills of horror still running up and down his back, he saw Marx come in with a basin and towel, while Garvey thrust up his face just as an animal puts up its muzzle to be rubbed.\n\n\"Now we'll have coffee in the library, if you're ready,\" he said, in the tone of a gentleman addressing his guests after a dinner party.\n\nShorthouse picked up the bag, which had lain all this time between his feet, and walked through the door his host held open for him. Side by side they crossed the dark hall together, and, to his disgust, Garvey linked an arm in his, and with his face so close to the secretary's ear that he felt the warm breath, said in a thick voice\u2014\n\n\"You're uncommonly careful with that bag, Mr. Shorthouse. It surely must contain something more than the bundle of papers.\"\n\n\"Nothing but the papers,\" he answered, feeling the hand burning upon his arm and wishing he were miles away from the house and its abominable occupants.\n\n\"Quite sure?\" asked the other with an odious and suggestive chuckle. \"Is there any meat in it, fresh meat\u2014raw meat?\"\n\nThe secretary felt, somehow, that at the least sign of fear the beast on his arm would leap upon him and tear him with his teeth.\n\n\"Nothing of the sort,\" he answered vigorously. \"It wouldn't hold enough to feed a cat.\"\n\n\"True,\" said Garvey with a vile sigh, while the other felt the hand upon his arm twitch up and down as if feeling the flesh. \"True, it's too small to be of any real use. As you say, it wouldn't hold enough to feed a cat.\"\n\nShorthouse was unable to suppress a cry. The muscles of his fingers, too, relaxed in spite of himself and he let the black bag drop with a bang to the floor. Garvey instantly withdrew his arm and turned with a quick movement. But the secretary had regained his control as suddenly as he had lost it, and he met the maniac's eyes with a steady and aggressive glare.\n\n\"There, you see, it's quite light. It makes no appreciable noise when I drop it.\" He picked it up and let it fall again, as if he had dropped it for the first time purposely. The ruse was successful.\n\n\"Yes. You're right,\" Garvey said, still standing in the doorway and staring at him. \"At any rate it wouldn't hold enough for two,\" he laughed. And as he closed the door the horrid laughter echoed in the empty hall.\n\nThey sat down by a blazing fire and Shorthouse was glad to feel its warmth. Marx presently brought in coffee. A glass of the old whisky and a good cigar helped to restore equilibrium. For some minutes the men sat in silence staring into the fire. Then, without looking up, Garvey said in a quiet voice\u2014\n\n\"I suppose it was a shock to you to see me eat raw meat like that. I must apologise if it was unpleasant to you. But it's all I can eat and it's the only meal I take in the twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"Best nourishment in the world, no doubt; though I should think it might be a trifle strong for some stomachs.\"\n\nHe tried to lead the conversation away from so unpleasant a subject, and went on to talk rapidly of the values of different foods, of vegetarianism and vegetarians, and of men who had gone for long periods without any food at all. Garvey listened apparently without interest and had nothing to say. At the first pause he jumped in eagerly.\n\n\"When the hunger is really great on me,\" he said, still gazing into the fire, \"I simply cannot control myself. I must have raw meat\u2014the first I can get\u2014\" Here he raised his shining eyes and Shorthouse felt his hair beginning to rise.\n\n\"It comes upon me so suddenly too. I never can tell when to expect it. A year ago the passion rose in me like a whirlwind and Marx was out and I couldn't get meat. I had to get something or I should have bitten myself. Just when it was getting unbearable my dog ran out from beneath the sofa. It was a spaniel.\"\n\nShorthouse responded with an effort. He hardly knew what he was saying and his skin crawled as if a million ants were moving over it.\n\nThere was a pause of several minutes.\n\n\"I've bitten Marx all over,\" Garvey went on presently in his strange quiet voice, and as if he were speaking of apples; \"but he's bitter. I doubt if the hunger could ever make me do it again. Probably that's what first drove him to take shelter in a vacuum.\" He chuckled hideously as he thought of this solution of his attendant's disappearances.\n\nShorthouse seized the poker and poked the fire as if his life depended on it. But when the banging and clattering was over Garvey continued his remarks with the same calmness. The next sentence, however, was never finished. The secretary had got upon his feet suddenly.\n\n\"I shall ask your permission to retire,\" he said in a determined voice; \"I'm tired to-night; will you be good enough to show me to my room?\"\n\nGarvey looked up at him with a curious cringing expression behind which there shone the gleam of cunning passion.\n\n\"Certainly,\" he said, rising from his chair. \"You've had a tiring journey. I ought to have thought of that before.\"\n\nHe took the candle from the table and lit it, and the fingers that held the match trembled.\n\n\"We needn't trouble Marx,\" he explained. \"That beast's in his vacuum by this time.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 353", + "text": "They crossed the hall and began to ascend the carpetless wooden stairs. They were in the well of the house and the air cut like ice. Garvey, the flickering candle in his hand throwing his face into strong outline, led the way across the first landing and opened a door near the mouth of a dark passage. A pleasant room greeted the visitor's eyes, and he rapidly took in its points while his host walked over and lit two candles that stood on a table at the foot of the bed. A fire burned brightly in the grate. There were two windows, opening like doors, in the wall opposite, and a high canopied bed occupied most of the space on the right. Panelling ran all round the room reaching nearly to the ceiling and gave a warm and cosy appearance to the whole; while the portraits that stood in alternate panels suggested somehow the atmosphere of an old country house in England. Shorthouse was agreeably surprised.\n\n\"I hope you'll find everything you need,\" Garvey was saying in the doorway. \"If not, you have only to ring that bell by the fireplace. Marx won't hear it of course, but it rings in my laboratory, where I spend most of the night.\"\n\nThen, with a brief good-night, he went out and shut the door after him. The instant he was gone Mr. Sidebotham's private secretary did a peculiar thing. He planted himself in the middle of the room with his back to the door, and drawing the pistol swiftly from his hip pocket levelled it across his left arm at the window. Standing motionless in this position for thirty seconds he then suddenly swerved right round and faced in the other direction, pointing his pistol straight at the keyhole of the door. There followed immediately a sound of shuffling outside and of steps retreating across the landing.\n\n\"On his knees at the keyhole,\" was the secretary's reflection. \"Just as I thought. But he didn't expect to look down the barrel of a pistol and it made him jump a little.\"\n\nAs soon as the steps had gone downstairs and died away across the hall, Shorthouse went over and locked the door, stuffing a piece of crumpled paper into the second keyhole which he saw immediately above the first. After that, he made a thorough search of the room. It hardly repaid the trouble, for he found nothing unusual. Yet he was glad he had made it. It relieved him to find no one was in hiding under the bed or in the deep oak cupboard; and he hoped sincerely it was not the cupboard in which the unfortunate spaniel had come to its vile death. The French windows, he discovered, opened on to a little balcony. It looked on to the front, and there was a drop of less than twenty feet to the ground below. The bed was high and wide, soft as feathers and covered with snowy sheets\u2014very inviting to a tired man; and beside the blazing fire were a couple of deep armchairs.\n\nAltogether it was very pleasant and comfortable; but, tired though he was, Shorthouse had no intention of going to bed. It was impossible to disregard the warning of his nerves. They had never failed him before, and when that sense of distressing horror lodged in his bones he knew there was something in the wind and that a red flag was flying over the immediate future. Some delicate instrument in his being, more subtle than the senses, more accurate than mere presentiment, had seen the red flag and interpreted its meaning.\n\nAgain it seemed to him, as he sat in an armchair over the fire, that his movements were being carefully watched from somewhere; and, not knowing what weapons might be used against him, he felt that his real safety lay in a rigid control of his mind and feelings and a stout refusal to admit that he was in the least alarmed.\n\nThe house was very still. As the night wore on the wind dropped. Only occasional bursts of sleet against the windows reminded him that the elements were awake and uneasy. Once or twice the windows rattled and the rain hissed in the fire, but the roar of the wind in the chimney grew less and less and the lonely building was at last lapped in a great stillness. The coals clicked, settling themselves deeper in the grate, and the noise of the cinders dropping with a tiny report into the soft heap of accumulated ashes was the only sound that punctuated the silence.\n\nIn proportion as the power of sleep grew upon him the dread of the situation lessened; but so imperceptibly, so gradually, and so insinuatingly that he scarcely realised the change. He thought he was as wide awake to his danger as ever. The successful exclusion of horrible mental pictures of what he had seen he attributed to his rigorous control, instead of to their true cause, the creeping over him of the soft influences of sleep. The faces in the coals were so soothing; the armchair was so comfortable; so sweet the breath that gently pressed upon his eyelids; so subtle the growth of the sensation of safety. He settled down deeper into the chair and in another moment would have been asleep when the red flag began to shake violently to and fro and he sat bolt upright as if he had been stabbed in the back.\n\nSomeone was coming up the stairs. The boards creaked beneath a stealthy weight.\n\nShorthouse sprang from the chair and crossed the room swiftly, taking up his position beside the door, but out of range of the keyhole. The two candles flared unevenly on the table at the foot of the bed. The steps were slow and cautious\u2014it seemed thirty seconds between each one\u2014but the person who was taking them was very close to the door. Already he had topped the stairs and was shuffling almost silently across the bit of landing.\n\nThe secretary slipped his hand into his pistol pocket and drew back further against the wall, and hardly had he completed the movement when the sounds abruptly ceased and he knew that somebody was standing just outside the door and preparing for a careful observation through the keyhole.\n\nHe was in no sense a coward. In action he was never afraid. It was the waiting and wondering and the uncertainty that might have loosened his nerves a little. But, somehow, a wave of intense horror swept over him for a second as he thought of the bestial maniac and his attendant Jew; and he would rather have faced a pack of wolves than have to do with either of these men.\n\nSomething brushing gently against the door set his nerves tingling afresh and made him tighten his grasp on the pistol. The steel was cold and slippery in his moist fingers. What an awful noise it would make when he pulled the trigger! If the door were to open how close he would be to the figure that came in! Yet he knew it was locked on the inside and could not possibly open. Again something brushed against the panel beside him and a second later the piece of crumpled paper fell from the keyhole to the floor, while the piece of thin wire that had accomplished this result showed its point for a moment in the room and was then swiftly withdrawn.\n\nSomebody was evidently peering now through the keyhole, and realising this fact the spirit of attack entered into the heart of the beleaguered man. Raising aloft his right hand he brought it suddenly down with a resounding crash upon the panel of the door next the keyhole\u2014a crash that, to the crouching eavesdropper, must have seemed like a clap of thunder out of a clear sky. There was a gasp and a slight lurching against the door and the midnight listener rose startled and alarmed, for Shorthouse plainly heard the tread of feet across the landing and down the stairs till they were lost in the silences of the hall. Only, this time, it seemed to him there were four feet instead of two.\n\nQuickly stuffing the paper back into the keyhole, he was in the act of walking back to the fireplace when, over his shoulder, he caught sight of a white face pressed in outline against the outside of the window. It was blurred in the streams of sleet, but the white of the moving eyes was unmistakable. He turned instantly to meet it, but the face was withdrawn like a flash, and darkness rushed in to fill the gap where it had appeared.\n\n\"Watched on both sides,\" he reflected.\n\nBut he was not to be surprised into any sudden action, and quietly walking over to the fireplace as if he had seen nothing unusual he stirred the coals a moment and then strolled leisurely over to the window. Steeling his nerves, which quivered a moment in spite of his will, he opened the window and stepped out on to the balcony. The wind, which he thought had dropped, rushed past him into the room and extinguished one of the candles, while a volley of fine cold rain burst all over his face. At first he could see nothing, and the darkness came close up to his eyes like a wall. He went a little farther on to the balcony and drew the window after him till it clashed. Then he stood and waited.\n\nBut nothing touched him. No one seemed to be there. His eyes got accustomed to the blackness and he was able to make out the iron railing, the dark shapes of the trees beyond, and the faint light coming from the other window. Through this he peered into the room, walking the length of the balcony to do so. Of course he was standing in a shaft of light and whoever was crouching in the darkness below could plainly see him. Below?\u2014That there should be anyone above did not occur to him until, just as he was preparing to go in again, he became aware that something was moving in the darkness over his head. He looked up, instinctively raising a protecting arm, and saw a long black line swinging against the dim wall of the house. The shutters of the window on the next floor, whence it depended, were thrown open and moving backwards and forwards in the wind. The line was evidently a thickish cord, for as he looked it was pulled in and the end disappeared in the darkness.\n\nShorthouse, trying to whistle to himself, peered over the edge of the balcony as if calculating the distance he might have to drop, and then calmly walked into the room again and closed the window behind him, leaving the latch so that the lightest touch would cause it to fly open. He relit the candle and drew a straight-backed chair up to the table. Then he put coal on the fire and stirred it up into a royal blaze. He would willingly have folded the shutters over those staring windows at his back. But that was out of the question. It would have been to cut off his way of escape.\n\nSleep, for the time, was at a disadvantage. His brain was full of blood and every nerve was tingling. He felt as if countless eyes were upon him and scores of stained hands were stretching out from the corners and crannies of the house to seize him. Crouching figures, figures of hideous Jews, stood everywhere about him where shelter was, creeping forward out of the shadows when he was not looking and retreating swiftly and silently when he turned his head. Wherever he looked, other eyes met his own, and though they melted away under his steady, confident gaze, he knew they would wax and draw in upon him the instant his glances weakened and his will wavered.\n\nThough there were no sounds, he knew that in the well of the house there was movement going on, and preparation. And this knowledge, inasmuch as it came to him irresistibly and through other and more subtle channels than those of the senses kept the sense of horror fresh in his blood and made him alert and awake.\n\nBut, no matter how great the dread in the heart, the power of sleep will eventually overcome it. Exhausted nature is irresistible, and as the minutes wore on and midnight passed, he realised that nature was vigorously asserting herself and sleep was creeping upon him from the extremities.\n\nTo lessen the danger he took out his pencil and began to draw the articles of furniture in the room. He worked into elaborate detail the cupboard, the mantelpiece, and the bed, and from these he passed on to the portraits. Being possessed of genuine skill, he found the occupation sufficiently absorbing. It kept the blood in his brain, and that kept him awake. The pictures, moreover, now that he considered them for the first time, were exceedingly well painted. Owing to the dim light, he centred his attention upon the portraits beside the fireplace. On the right was a woman, with a sweet, gentle face and a figure of great refinement; on the left was a full-size figure of a big handsome man with a full beard and wearing a hunting costume of ancient date.\n\nFrom time to time he turned to the windows behind him, but the vision of the face was not repeated. More than once, too, he went to the door and listened, but the silence was so profound in the house that he gradually came to believe the plan of attack had been abandoned. Once he went out on to the balcony, but the sleet stung his face and he only had time to see that the shutters above were closed, when he was obliged to seek the shelter of the room again.\n\nIn this way the hours passed. The fire died down and the room grew chilly. Shorthouse had made several sketches of the two heads and was beginning to feel overpoweringly weary. His feet and his hands were cold and his yawns were prodigious. It seemed ages and ages since the steps had come to listen at his door and the face had watched him from the window. A feeling of safety had somehow come to him. In reality he was exhausted. His one desire was to drop upon the soft white bed and yield himself up to sleep without any further struggle.\n\nHe rose from his chair with a series of yawns that refused to be stifled and looked at his watch. It was close upon three in the morning. He made up his mind that he would lie down with his clothes on and get some sleep. It was safe enough, the door was locked on the inside and the window was fastened. Putting the bag on the table near his pillow he blew out the candles and dropped with a sense of careless and delicious exhaustion upon the soft mattress. In five minutes he was sound asleep.\n\nThere had scarcely been time for the dreams to come when he found himself lying side-ways across the bed with wide open eyes staring into the darkness. Someone had touched him, and he had writhed away in his sleep as from something unholy. The movement had awakened him.\n\nThe room was simply black. No light came from the windows and the fire had gone out as completely as if water had been poured upon it. He gazed into a sheet of impenetrable darkness that came close up to his face like a wall.\n\nHis first thought was for the papers in his coat and his hand flew to the pocket. They were safe; and the relief caused by this discovery left his mind instantly free for other reflections.\n\nAnd the realisation that at once came to him with a touch of dismay was, that during his sleep some definite change had been effected in the room. He felt this with that intuitive certainty which amounts to positive knowledge. The room was utterly still, but the corroboration that was speedily brought to him seemed at once to fill the darkness with a whispering, secret life that chilled his blood and made the sheet feel like ice against his cheek.\n\nHark! This was it; there reached his ears, in which the blood was already buzzing with warning clamour, a dull murmur of something that rose indistinctly from the well of the house and became audible to him without passing through walls or doors. There seemed no solid surface between him, lying on the bed, and the landing; between the landing and the stairs, and between the stairs and the hall beyond.\n\nHe knew that the door of the room was standing open! Therefore it had been opened from the inside. Yet the window was fastened, also on the inside.\n\nHardly was this realised when the conspiring silence of the hour was broken by another and a more definite sound. A step was coming along the passage. A certain bruise on the hip told Shorthouse that the pistol in his pocket was ready for use and he drew it out quickly and cocked it. Then he just had time to slip over the edge of the bed and crouch down on the floor when the step halted on the threshold of the room. The bed was thus between him and the open door. The window was at his back.\n\nHe waited in the darkness. What struck him as peculiar about the steps was that there seemed no particular desire to move stealthily. There was no extreme caution. They moved along in rather a slipshod way and sounded like soft slippers or feet in stockings. There was something clumsy, irresponsible, almost reckless about the movement.\n\nFor a second the steps paused upon the threshold, but only for a second. Almost immediately they came on into the room, and as they passed from the wood to the carpet Shorthouse noticed that they became wholly noiseless. He waited in suspense, not knowing whether the unseen walker was on the other side of the room or was close upon him. Presently he stood up and stretched out his left arm in front of him, groping, searching, feeling in a circle; and behind it he held the pistol, cocked and pointed, in his right hand. As he rose a bone cracked in his knee, his clothes rustled as if they were newspapers, and his breath seemed loud enough to be heard all over the room. But not a sound came to betray the position of the invisible intruder.\n\nThen, just when the tension was becoming unbearable, a noise relieved the gripping silence. It was wood knocking against wood, and it came from the farther end of the room. The steps had moved over to the fireplace. A sliding sound almost immediately followed it and then silence closed again over everything like a pall.\n\nFor another five minutes Shorthouse waited, and then the suspense became too much. He could not stand that open door! The candles were close beside him and he struck a match and lit them, expecting in the sudden glare to receive at least a terrific blow. But nothing happened, and he saw at once that the room was entirely empty. Walking over with the pistol cocked he peered out into the darkness of the landing and then closed the door and turned the key. Then he searched the room\u2014bed, cupboard, table, curtains, everything that could have concealed a man; but found no trace of the intruder. The owner of the footsteps had disappeared like a ghost into the shadows of the night. But for one fact he might have imagined that he had been dreaming: the bag had vanished!\n\nThere was no more sleep for Shorthouse that night. His watch pointed to 4 a.m. and there were still three hours before daylight. He sat down at the table and continued his sketches. With fixed determination he went on with his drawing and began a new outline of the man's head. There was something in the expression that continually evaded him. He had no success with it, and this time it seemed to him that it was the eyes that brought about his discomfiture. He held up his pencil before his face to measure the distance between the nose and the eyes, and to his amazement he saw that a change had come over the features. The eyes were no longer open. The lids had closed!\n\nFor a second he stood in a sort of stupefied astonishment. A push would have toppled him over. Then he sprang to his feet and held a candle close up to the picture. The eye-lids quivered, the eye-lashes trembled. Then, right before his gaze, the eyes opened and looked straight into his own. Two holes were cut in the panel and this pair of eyes, human eyes, just fitted them.\n\nAs by a curious effect of magic, the strong fear that had governed him ever since his entry into the house disappeared in a second. Anger rushed into his heart and his chilled blood rose suddenly to boiling point. Putting the candle down, he took two steps back into the room and then flung himself forward with all his strength against the painted panel. Instantly, and before the crash came, the eyes were withdrawn, and two black spaces showed where they had been. The old huntsman was eyeless. But the panel cracked and split inwards like a sheet of thin cardboard; and Shorthouse, pistol in hand, thrust an arm through the jagged aperture and, seizing a human leg, dragged out into the room\u2014the Jew!\n\nWords rushed in such a torrent to his lips that they choked him. The old Hebrew, white as chalk, stood shaking before him, the bright pistol barrel opposite his eyes, when a volume of cold air rushed into the room, and with it a sound of hurried steps. Shorthouse felt his arm knocked up before he had time to turn, and the same second Garvey, who had somehow managed to burst open the window came between him and the trembling Marx. His lips were parted and his eyes rolled strangely in his distorted face.\n\n\"Don't shoot him! Shoot in the air!\" he shrieked. He seized the Jew by the shoulders.\n\n\"You damned hound,\" he roared, hissing in his face. \"So I've got you at last. That's where your vacuum is, is it? I know your vile hiding-place at last.\" He shook him like a dog. \"I've been after him all night,\" he cried, turning to Shorthouse, \"all night, I tell you, and I've got him at last.\"\n\nGarvey lifted his upper lip as he spoke and showed his teeth. They shone like the fangs of a wolf. The Jew evidently saw them too, for he gave a horrid yell and struggled furiously.\n\nBefore the eyes of the secretary a mist seemed to rise. The hideous shadow again leaped into Garvey's face. He foresaw a dreadful battle, and covering the two men with his pistol he retreated slowly to the door. Whether they were both mad, or both criminal, he did not pause to inquire. The only thought present in his mind was that the sooner he made his escape the better.\n\nGarvey was still shaking the Jew when he reached the door and turned the key, but as he passed out on to the landing both men stopped their struggling and turned to face him. Garvey's face, bestial, loathsome, livid with anger; the Jew's white and grey with fear and horror;\u2014both turned towards him and joined in a wild, horrible yell that woke the echoes of the night. The next second they were after him at full speed.\n\nShorthouse slammed the door in their faces and was at the foot of the stairs, crouching in the shadow, before they were out upon the landing. They tore shrieking down the stairs and past him, into the hall; and, wholly unnoticed, Shorthouse whipped up the stairs again, crossed the bedroom and dropped from the balcony into the soft snow.\n\nAs he ran down the drive he heard behind him in the house the yells of the maniacs; and when he reached home several hours later Mr. Sidebotham not only raised his salary but also told him to buy a new hat and overcoat, and send in the bill to him.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nThe utter loneliness of our moose-camp on Skeleton Lake had impressed us from the beginning\u2014in the Quebec backwoods, five days by trail and canoe from civilisation\u2014and perhaps the singular name contributed a little to the sensation of eeriness that made itself felt in the camp circle when once the sun was down and the late October mists began rising from the lake and winding their way in among the tree trunks.\n\nFor, in these regions, all names of lakes and hills and islands have their origin in some actual event, taking either the name of a chief participant, such as Smith's Ridge, or claiming a place in the map by perpetuating some special feature of the journey or the scenery, such as Long Island, Deep Rapids, or Rainy Lake.\n\nAll names thus have their meaning and are usually pretty recently acquired, while the majority are self-explanatory and suggest human and pioneer relations. Skeleton Lake, therefore, was a name full of suggestion, and though none of us knew the origin or the story of its birth, we all were conscious of a certain lugubrious atmosphere that haunted its shores and islands, and but for the evidences of recent moose tracks in its neighbourhood we should probably have pitched our tents elsewhere.\n\nFor several hundred miles in any direction we knew of only one other party of whites. They had journeyed up on the train with us, getting in at North Bay, and hailing from Boston way. A common goal and object had served by way of introduction. But the acquaintance had made little progress. This noisy, aggressive Yankee did not suit our fancy much as a possible neighbour, and it was only a slight intimacy between his chief guide, Jake the Swede, and one of our men that kept the thing going at all. They went into camp on Beaver Creek, fifty miles and more to the west of us.\n\nBut that was six weeks ago, and seemed as many months, for days and nights pass slowly in these solitudes and the scale of time changes wonderfully. Our men always seemed to know by instinct pretty well \"whar them other fellows was movin',\" but in the interval no one had come across their trails, or once so much as heard their rifle shots.\n\nOur little camp consisted of the professor, his wife, a splendid shot and keen woods-woman, and myself. We had a guide apiece, and hunted daily in pairs from before sunrise till dark.\n\nIt was our last evening in the woods, and the professor was lying in my little wedge tent, discussing the dangers of hunting alone in couples in this way. The flap of the tent hung back and let in fragrant odours of cooking over an open wood fire; everywhere there were bustle and preparation, and one canoe already lay packed with moose horns, her nose pointing southwards.\n\n\"If an accident happened to one of them,\" he was saying, \"the survivor's story when he returned to camp would be entirely unsupported evidence, wouldn't it? Because, you see\u2014\"\n\nAnd he went on laying down the law after the manner of professors, until I became so bored that my attention began to wander to pictures and memories of the scenes we were just about to leave: Garden Lake, with its hundred islands; the rapids out of Round Pond; the countless vistas of forest, crimson and gold in the autumn sunshine; and the starlit nights we had spent watching in cold, cramped positions for the wary moose on lonely lakes among the hills. The hum of the professor's voice in time grew more soothing. A nod or a grunt was all the reply he looked for. Fortunately, he loathed interruptions. I think I could almost have gone to sleep under his very nose; perhaps I did sleep for a brief interval.\n\nThen it all came about so quickly, and the tragedy of it was so unexpected and painful, throwing our peaceful camp into momentary confusion, that now it all seems to have happened with the uncanny swiftness of a dream.\n\nFirst, there was the abrupt ceasing of the droning voice, and then the running of quick little steps over the pine needles, and the confusion of men's voices; and the next instant the professor's wife was at the tent door, hatless, her face white, her hunting bloomers bagging at the wrong places, a rifle in her hand, and her words running into one another anyhow.\n\n\"Quick, Harry! It's Rushton. I was asleep and it woke me. Something's happened. You must deal with it!\"\n\nIn a second we were outside the tent with our rifles.\n\n\"My God!\" I heard the professor exclaim, as if he had first made the discovery. \"It is Rushton!\"\n\nI saw the guides helping\u2014dragging\u2014a man out of a canoe. A brief space of deep silence followed in which I heard only the waves from the canoe washing up on the sand; and then, immediately after, came the voice of a man talking with amazing rapidity and with odd gaps between his words. It was Rushton telling his story, and the tones of his voice, now whispering, now almost shouting, mixed with sobs and solemn oaths and frequent appeals to the Deity, somehow or other struck the false note at the very start, and before any of us guessed or knew anything at all. Something moved secretly between his words, a shadow veiling the stars, destroying the peace of our little camp, and touching us all personally with an undefinable sense of horror and distrust.\n\nI can see that group to this day, with all the detail of a good photograph: standing half-way between the firelight and the darkness, a slight mist rising from the lake, the frosty stars, and our men, in silence that was all sympathy, dragging Rushton across the rocks towards the camp fire. Their moccasins crunched on the sand and slipped several times on the stones beneath the weight of the limp, exhausted body, and I can still see every inch of the pared cedar branch he had used for a paddle on that lonely and dreadful journey.\n\nBut what struck me most, as it struck us all, was the limp exhaustion of his body compared to the strength of his utterance and the tearing rush of his words. A vigorous driving-power was there at work, forcing out the tale, red-hot and throbbing, full of discrepancies and the strangest contradictions; and the nature of this driving-power I first began to appreciate when they had lifted him into the circle of firelight and I saw his face, grey under the tan, terror in the eyes, tears too, hair and beard awry, and listened to the wild stream of words pouring forth without ceasing.\n\nI think we all understood then, but it was only after many years that anyone dared to confess what he thought.\n\nThere was Matt Morris, my guide; Silver Fizz, whose real name was unknown, and who bore the title of his favourite drink; and huge Hank Milligan\u2014all ears and kind intention; and there was Rushton, pouring out his ready-made tale, with ever-shifting eyes, turning from face to face, seeking confirmation of details none had witnessed but himself\u2014and one other.\n\nSilver Fizz was the first to recover from the shock of the thing, and to realise, with the natural sense of chivalry common to most genuine back-woodsmen, that the man was at a terrible disadvantage. At any rate, he was the first to start putting the matter to rights.\n\n\"Never mind telling it just now,\" he said in a gruff voice, but with real gentleness; \"get a bite t'eat first and then let her go afterwards. Better have a horn of whisky too. It ain't all packed yet, I guess.\"\n\n\"Couldn't eat or drink a thing,\" cried the other. \"Good Lord, don't you see, man, I want to talk to someone first? I want to get it out of me to someone who can answer\u2014answer. I've had nothing but trees to talk with for three days, and I can't carry it alone any longer. Those cursed, silent trees\u2014I've told it 'em a thousand times. Now, just see here, it was this way. When we started out from camp\u2014\"\n\nHe looked fearfully about him, and we realised it was useless to stop him. The story was bound to come, and come it did.\n\nNow, the story itself was nothing out of the way; such tales are told by the dozen round any camp fire where men who have knocked about in the woods are in the circle. It was the way he told it that made our flesh creep. He was near the truth all along, but he was skimming it, and the skimming took off the cream that might have saved his soul.\n\nOf course, he smothered it in words\u2014odd words, too\u2014melodramatic, poetic, out-of-the-way words that lie just on the edge of frenzy. Of course, too, he kept asking us each in turn, scanning our faces with those restless, frightened eyes of his, \"What would you have done?\" \"What else could I do?\" and \"Was that my fault?\" But that was nothing, for he was no milk-and-water fellow who dealt in hints and suggestions; he told his story boldly, forcing his conclusions upon us as if we had been so many wax cylinders of a phonograph that would repeat accurately what had been told us, and these questions I have mentioned he used to emphasise any special point that he seemed to think required such emphasis.\n\nThe fact was, however, the picture of what had actually happened was so vivid still in his own mind that it reached ours by a process of telepathy which he could not control or prevent. All through his true-false words this picture stood forth in fearful detail against the shadows behind him. He could not veil, much less obliterate, it. We knew; and, I always thought, he knew that we knew.\n\nThe story itself, as I have said, was sufficiently ordinary. Jake and himself, in a nine-foot canoe, had upset in the middle of a lake, and had held hands across the upturned craft for several hours, eventually cutting holes in her ribs to stick their arms through and grasp hands lest the numbness of the cold water should overcome them. They were miles from shore, and the wind was drifting them down upon a little island. But when they got within a few hundred yards of the island, they realised to their horror that they would after all drift past it.\n\nIt was then the quarrel began. Jake was for leaving the canoe and swimming. Rushton believed in waiting till they actually had passed the island and were sheltered from the wind. Then they could make the island easily by swimming, canoe and all. But Jake refused to give in, and after a short struggle\u2014Rushton admitted there was a struggle\u2014got free from the canoe\u2014and disappeared without a single cry.\n\nRushton held on and proved the correctness of his theory, and finally made the island, canoe and all, after being in the water over five hours. He described to us how he crawled up on to the shore, and fainted at once, with his feet lying half in the water; how lost and terrified he felt upon regaining consciousness in the dark; how the canoe had drifted away and his extraordinary luck in finding it caught again at the end of the island by a projecting cedar branch. He told us that the little axe\u2014another bit of real luck\u2014had caught in the thwart when the canoe turned over, and how the little bottle in his pocket holding the emergency matches was whole and dry. He made a blazing fire and searched the island from end to end, calling upon Jake in the darkness, but getting no answer; till, finally, so many half-drowned men seemed to come crawling out of the water on to the rocks, and vanish among the shadows when he came up with them, that he lost his nerve completely and returned to lie down by the fire till the daylight came.\n\nHe then cut a bough to replace the lost paddles, and after one more useless search for his lost companion, he got into the canoe, fearing every moment he would upset again, and crossed over to the mainland. He knew roughly the position of our camping place, and after paddling day and night, and making many weary portages, without food or covering, he reached us two days later.\n\nThis, more or less, was the story, and we, knowing whereof he spoke, knew that every word was literally true, and at the same time went to the building up of a hideous and prodigious lie.\n\nOnce the recital was over, he collapsed, and Silver Fizz, after a general expression of sympathy from the rest of us, came again to the rescue.\n\n\"But now, Mister, you jest got to eat and drink whether you've a mind to, or no.\"\n\nAnd Matt Morris, cook that night, soon had the fried trout and bacon, and the wheat cakes and hot coffee passing round a rather silent and oppressed circle. So we ate round the fire, ravenously, as we had eaten every night for the past six weeks, but with this difference: that there was one among us who was more than ravenous\u2014and he gorged.\n\nIn spite of all our devices he somehow kept himself the centre of observation. When his tin mug was empty, Morris instantly passed the tea-pail; when he began to mop up the bacon grease with the dough on his fork, Hank reached out for the frying pan; and the can of steaming boiled potatoes was always by his side. And there was another difference as well: he was sick, terribly sick before the meal was over, and this sudden nausea after food was more eloquent than words of what the man had passed through on his dreadful, foodless, ghost-haunted journey of forty miles to our camp. In the darkness he thought he would go crazy, he said. There were voices in the trees, and figures were always lifting themselves out of the water, or from behind boulders, to look at him and make awful signs. Jake constantly peered at him through the underbrush, and everywhere the shadows were moving, with eyes, footsteps, and following shapes.\n\nWe tried hard to talk of other things, but it was no use, for he was bursting with the rehearsal of his story and refused to allow himself the chances we were so willing and anxious to grant him. After a good night's rest he might have had more self-control and better judgment, and would probably have acted differently. But, as it was, we found it impossible to help him.\n\nOnce the pipes were lit, and the dishes cleared away, it was useless to pretend any longer. The sparks from the burning logs zigzagged upwards into a sky brilliant with stars. It was all wonderfully still and peaceful, and the forest odours floated to us on the sharp autumn air. The cedar fire smelt sweet and we could just hear the gentle wash of tiny waves along the shore. All was calm, beautiful, and remote from the world of men and passion. It was, indeed, a night to touch the soul, and yet, I think, none of us heeded these things. A bull-moose might almost have thrust his great head over our shoulders and have escaped unnoticed. The death of Jake the Swede, with its sinister setting, was the real presence that held the centre of the stage and compelled attention.\n\n\"You won't p'raps care to come along, Mister,\" said Morris, by way of a beginning; \"but I guess I'll go with one of the boys here and have a hunt for it.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Hank. \"Jake an' I done some biggish trips together in the old days, and I'll do that much for'm.\"\n\n\"It's deep water, they tell me, round them islands,\" added Silver Fizz; \"but we'll find it, sure pop,\u2014if it's thar.\"\n\nThey all spoke of the body as \"it.\"\n\nThere was a minute or two of heavy silence, and then Rushton again burst out with his story in almost the identical words he had used before. It was almost as if he had learned it by heart. He wholly failed to appreciate the efforts of the others to let him off.\n\nSilver Fizz rushed in, hoping to stop him, Morris and Hank closely following his lead.\n\n\"I once knew another travellin' partner of his,\" he began quickly; \"used to live down Moosejaw Rapids way\u2014\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" said Hank.\n\n\"Kind o' useful sort er feller,\" chimed in Morris.\n\nAll the idea the men had was to stop the tongue wagging before the discrepancies became so glaring that we should be forced to take notice of them, and ask questions. But, just as well try to stop an angry bull-moose on the run, or prevent Beaver Creek freezing in mid-winter by throwing in pebbles near the shore. Out it came! And, though the discrepancy this time was insignificant, it somehow brought us all in a second face to face with the inevitable and dreaded climax.\n\n\"And so I tramped all over that little bit of an island, hoping he might somehow have gotten in without my knowing it, and always thinking I heard that awful last cry of his in the darkness\u2014and then the night dropped down impenetrably, like a damn thick blanket out of the sky, and\u2014\"\n\nAll eyes fell away from his face. Hank poked up the logs with his boot, and Morris seized an ember in his bare fingers to light his pipe, although it was already emitting clouds of smoke. But the professor caught the ball flying.\n\n\"I thought you said he sank without a cry,\" he remarked quietly, looking straight up into the frightened face opposite, and then riddling mercilessly the confused explanation that followed.\n\nThe cumulative effect of all these forces, hitherto so rigorously repressed, now made itself felt, and the circle spontaneously broke up, everybody moving at once by a common instinct. The professor's wife left the party abruptly, with excuses about an early start next morning. She first shook hands with Rushton, mumbling something about his comfort in the night.\n\nThe question of his comfort, however, devolved by force of circumstances upon myself, and he shared my tent. Just before wrapping up in my double blankets\u2014for the night was bitterly cold\u2014he turned and began to explain that he had a habit of talking in his sleep and hoped I would wake him if he disturbed me by doing so.\n\nWell, he did talk in his sleep\u2014and it disturbed me very much indeed. The anger and violence of his words remain with me to this day, and it was clear in a minute that he was living over again some portion of the scene upon the lake. I listened, horror-struck, for a moment or two, and then understood that I was face to face with one of two alternatives: I must continue an unwilling eavesdropper, or I must waken him. The former was impossible for me, yet I shrank from the latter with the greatest repugnance; and in my dilemma I saw the only way out of the difficulty and at once accepted it.\n\nCold though it was, I crawled stealthily out of my warm sleeping-bag and left the tent, intending to keep the old fire alight under the stars and spend the remaining hours till daylight in the open.\n\nAs soon as I was out I noticed at once another figure moving silently along the shore. It was Hank Milligan, and it was plain enough what he was doing: he was examining the holes that had been cut in the upper ribs of the canoe. He looked half ashamed when I came up with him, and mumbled something about not being able to sleep for the cold. But, there, standing together beside the over-turned canoe, we both saw that the holes were far too small for a man's hand and arm and could not possibly have been cut by two men hanging on for their lives in deep water. Those holes had been made afterwards.\n\nHank said nothing to me and I said nothing to Hank, and presently he moved off to collect logs for the fire, which needed replenishing, for it was a piercingly cold night and there were many degrees of frost.\n\nThree days later Hank and Silver Fizz followed with stumbling footsteps the old Indian trail that leads from Beaver Creek to the southwards. A hammock was slung between them, and it weighed heavily. Yet neither of the men complained; and, indeed, speech between them was almost nothing. Their thoughts, however, were exceedingly busy, and the terrible secret of the woods which formed their burden weighed far more heavily than the uncouth, shifting mass that lay in the swinging hammock and tugged so severely at their shoulders.\n\nThey had found \"it\" in four feet of water not more than a couple of yards from the lee shore of the island. And in the back of the head was a long, terrible wound which no man could possibly have inflicted upon himself.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Listener ]\n\nSept. 4.: I have hunted all over London for rooms suited to my income\u2014\u00a3120 a year\u2014and have at last found them. Two rooms, without modern conveniences, it is true, and in an old, ramshackle building, but within a stone's throw of P\u2014 Place and in an eminently respectable street. The rent is only \u00a325 a year. I had begun to despair when at last I found them by chance.\n\nThe chance was a mere chance, and unworthy of record. I had to sign a lease for a year, and I did so willingly. The furniture from our old place in Hampshire, which has been stored so long, will just suit them.\n\nOct. 1.: Here I am in my two rooms, in the centre of London, and not far from the offices of the periodicals, where occasionally I dispose of an article or two. The building is at the end of a cul-de-sac. The alley is well paved and clean, and lined chiefly with the backs of sedate and institutional-looking buildings. There is a stable in it. My own house is dignified with the title of \"Chambers\". I feel as if one day the honour must prove too much for it, and it will swell with pride\u2014and fall asunder. It is very old. The floor of my sitting-room has valleys and low hills on it, and the top of the door slants away from the ceiling with a glorious disregard of what is usual.\n\nThey must have quarrelled\u2014fifty years ago\u2014and have been going apart ever since.\n\nOct. 2.: My landlady is old and thin, with a faded, dusty face. She is uncommunicative. The few words she utters seem to cost her pain. Probably her lungs are half choked with dust. She keeps my rooms as free from this commodity as possible, and has the assistance of a strong girl who brings up the breakfast and lights the fire. As I have said already, she is not communicative.\n\nIn reply to pleasant efforts on my part she informed me briefly that I was the only occupant of the house at present. My rooms had not been occupied for some years. There had been other gentlemen upstairs, but they had left.\n\nShe never looks straight at me when she speaks, but fixes her dim eyes on my middle waistcoat button, till I get nervous and begin to think it isn't on straight, or is the wrong sort of button altogether.\n\nOct. 8.: My week's book is nicely kept, and so far is reasonable. Milk and sugar 7d., bread 6d., butter 8d., marmalade 6d., eggs 1s. 8d., laundress 2s. 9d., oil 6d., attendance 5s.; total 12s. 2d.\n\nThe landlady has a son who, she told me, is \"somethink on a homnibus\". He comes occasionally to see her. I think he drinks, for he talks very loud, regardless of the hour of the day or night, and tumbles about over the furniture downstairs.\n\nAll the morning I sit indoors writing\u2014articles; verses for the comic papers; a novel I've been \"at\" for three years, and concerning which I have dreams; a children's book, in which the imagination has free rein; and another book which is to last as long as myself, since it is an honest record of my soul's advance or retreat in the struggle of life. Besides these, I keep a book of poems which I use as a safety valve, and concerning which I have no dreams whatsoever.\n\nBetween the lot I am always occupied. In the afternoons I generally try to take a walk for my health's sake, through Regent's Park, into Kensington Gardens, or farther afield to HampsteadHeath.\n\nOct. 10.: Everything went wrong to-day. I have two eggs for breakfast. This morning one of them was bad. I rang the bell for Emily. When she came in I was reading the paper, and, without looking up, I said, \"Egg's bad.\" \"Oh, is it, sir? \" she said; \"I'll get another one,\" and went out, taking the egg with her. I waited my breakfast for her return, which was in five minutes. She put the new egg on the table and went away. But, when I looked down, I saw that she had taken away the good egg and left the bad one\u2014all green and yellow\u2014in the slop basin. I rang again.\n\n\"You've taken the wrong egg,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh!\" she exclaimed; \"I thought the one I took down didn't smell so very bad.\" In due time she returned with the good egg, and I resumed my breakfast with two eggs, but less appetite. It was all very trivial, to be sure, but so stupid that I felt annoyed. The character of that egg influenced everything I did. I wrote a bad article, and tore it up. I got a bad headache. I used bad words\u2014to myself. Everything was bad, so I \"chucked\" work and went for a long walk.\n\nI dined at a cheap chop-house on my way back, and reached home about nine o'clock.\n\nRain was just beginning to fall as I came in, and the wind was rising. It promised an ugly night. The alley looked dismal and dreary, and the hall of the house, as I passed through it, felt chilly as a tomb. It was the first stormy night I had experienced in my new quarters. The draughts were awful. They came criss-cross, met in the middle of the room, and formed eddies and whirlpools and cold silent currents that almost lifted the hair of my head. I stuffed up the sashes of the windows with neckties and odd socks, and sat over the smoky fire to keep warm. First I tried to write, but found it too cold. My hand turned to ice on the paper.\n\nWhat tricks the wind did play with the old place! It came rushing up the forsaken alley with a sound like the feet of a hurrying crowd of people who stopped suddenly at the door. I felt as if a lot of curious folk had arranged themselves just outside and were staring up at my windows.\n\nThen they took to their heels again and fled whispering and laughing down the lane, only, however, to return with the next gust of wind and repeat their impertinence. On the other side of my room a single square window opens into a sort of shaft, or well, that measures about six feet across to the back wall of another house. Down this funnel the wind dropped, and puffed and shouted. Such noises I never heard before. Between these two entertainments I sat over the fire in a great-coat, listening to the deep booming in the chimney. It was like being in a ship at sea, and I almost looked for the floor to rise in undulations and rock to and fro.\n\nOct. 12.: I wish I were not quite so lonely\u2014and so poor. And yet I love both my loneliness and my poverty. The former makes me appreciate the companionship of the wind and rain, while the latter preserves my liver and prevents me wasting time in dancing attendance upon women.\n\nPoor, ill-dressed men are not acceptable \"attendants\".\n\nMy parents are dead, and my only sister is\u2014no, not dead exactly, but married to a very rich man. They travel most of the time, he to find his health, she to lose herself. Through sheer neglect on her part she has long passed out of my life. The door closed when, after an absolute silence of five years, she sent me a cheque for \u00a350 at Christmas. It was signed by her husband! I returned it to her in a thousand pieces and in an unstamped envelope. So at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that it cost her something! She wrote back with a broad quill pen that covered a whole page with three lines, \"You are evidently as cracked as ever, and rude and ungrateful into the bargain.\" It had always been my special terror lest the insanity of my father's family should leap across the generations and appear in me. This thought haunted me, and she knew it. So after this little exchange of civilities the door slammed, never to open again. I heard the crash it made, and, with it, the falling from the walls of my heart of many little bits of china with their own peculiar value\u2014rare china, some of it, that only needed dusting. The same walls, too, carried mirrors in which I used sometimes to see reflected the misty lawns of childhood, the daisy chains, the wind-torn blossoms scattered through the orchard by warm rains, the robbers' cave in the long walk, and the hidden store of apples in the hayloft. She was my inseparable companion then\u2014but, when the door slammed, the mirrors cracked across their entire length, and the visions they held vanished for ever. Now I am quite alone. At forty one cannot begin all over again to build up careful friendships, and all others are comparatively worthless.\n\nOct. 14.: My bedroom is 10 by 10. It is below the level of the front room, and a step leads down into it. Both rooms are very quiet on calm nights, for there is no traffic down this forsaken alley-way. In spite of the occasional larks of the wind, it is a most sheltered strip. At its upper end, below my windows, all the cats of the neighbourhood congregate as soon as darkness gathers. They lie undisturbed on the long ledge of a blind window of the opposite building, for after the postman has come and gone at 9.30, no footsteps ever dare to interrupt their sinister conclave, no step but my own, or sometimes the unsteady footfall of the son who \"is somethink on a homnibus\".\n\nOct. 15.: I dined at an \"A.B.C.\" shop on poached eggs and coffee, and then went for a stroll round the outer edge of Regent's Park. It was ten o'clock when I got home.1 counted no less than thirteen cats, all of a dark colour, crouching under the lee side of the alley walls. It was a cold night, and the stars shone like points of ice in a blue-black sky. The cats turned their heads and stared at me in silence as I passed. An odd sensation of shyness took possession of me under the glare of so many pairs of unblinking eyes. As I fumbled with the latch-key they jumped noise-lessly down and pressed against my legs, as if anxious to be let in. But I slammed the door in their faces and ran quickly upstairs. The front room, as I entered to grope for the matches, felt as cold as a stone vault, and the air held an unusual dampness.\n\nOct. 17.: For several days I have been working on a ponderous article that allows no play for the fancy. My imagination requires a judicious rein; I am afraid to let it loose, for it carries me sometimes into appalling places beyond the stars and beneath the world. No one realises the danger more than I do. But what a foolish thins to write here\u2014for there is no one to know, no one to realize! My mind of late has held unusual thoughts, thoughts I have never had before, about medicines and drugs and the treatment of strange illnesses. I cannot imagine their source.\n\nAt no time in my life have I dwelt upon such ideas now constantly throng my brain. I have had no exercise lately, for the weather has been shocking; and all my afternoons have been spent in the reading-room of the British Museum, where I have a reader's ticket.\n\nI have made an unpleasant discovery: there are rats in the house. At night from my bed I have heard them scampering across the hills and valleys of the front room, and my sleep has been a good deal disturbed in consequence.\n\nOct. 19.: The landlady, I find, has a little boy with her, probably her son's child. In fine weather he plays in the alley, and draws a wooden cart over the cobbles. One of the wheels is off, and it makes a most distracting noise. After putting up with it as long as possible, I found it was getting on my nerves, and I could not write. So I rang the bell. Emily answered it.\n\n\"Emily, will you ask the little fellow to make less noise? It's impossible to work.\"\n\nThe girl went downstairs, and soon afterwards the child was called in by the kitchen door. I felt rather a brute for spoiling his play. In a few minutes, however, the noise began again, and I felt that he was the brute. He dragged the broken toy with a string over the stones till the rattling noise jarred every nerve in my body. It became unbearable, and I rang the bell a second time.\n\n\"That noise must be put a stop to!\" I said to the girl, with decision.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" she grinned, \"I know; but one of the wheels is hoff. The men in the stable offered to mend it for 'im, but he wouldn't let them. He says he likes it that way.\"\n\n\"I can't help what he likes. The noise must stop. I can't write.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; I'll tell Mrs. Monson.\"\n\nThe noise stopped for the day then.\n\nOct. 23.: Every day for the past week that cart has rattled over the stones, till I have come to think of it as a huge carrier's van with four wheels and two horses; and every morning I have been obliged to ring the bell and have it stopped. The last time Mrs. Monson herself came up, and said she was sorry I had been annoyed; the sounds should not occur again. With rare discursiveness she went on to ask if I was comfortable, and how I liked the rooms. I replied cautiously. I mentioned the rats. She said they were mice. I spoke of the draughts. She said, \"Yes, it were a draughty 'ouse.\" I referred to the cats, and she said they had been as long as she could remember. By way of conclusion, she informed me that the house was over two hundred years old, and that the last gentleman who had occupied my rooms was a painter who \"'ad real Jimmy Bueys and Raffles 'anging all hover the walls\". It took me some moments to discern that Cimabue and Raphael were in the woman's mind.\n\nOct. 24.: Last night the son who is \"somethink on a homnibus\" came in. He had evidently been drinking, for I heard loud and angry voices below in the kitchen long after I had gone to bed. Once, too, I caught the singular words rising up to me through the floor, \"Burning from top to bottom is the only thing that'll ever make this 'ouse right.\" I knocked on the floor, and the voices ceased suddenly, though later I again heard their clamour in my dreams.\n\nThese rooms are very quiet, almost too quiet sometimes. On windless nights they are silent as the grave, and the house might be miles in the country. The roar of London's traffic reaches me only in heavy, distant vibrations. It holds an ominous note sometimes, like that of an approaching army, or an immense tidal-wave very far away thundering in the night.\n\nOct. 27.: Mrs. Monson, though admirably silent, is a foolish, fussy woman. She does such stupid things. In dusting the room she puts all my things in the wrong places. The ash-trays, which should be on the writing-table, she sets in a silly row on the mantelpiece. The pen-tray, which should be beside the inkstand, she hides away cleverly among the books on my reading-desk.\n\nMy gloves she arranges daily in idiotic array upon a half-filled bookshelf, and I always have to rearrange them on the low table by the door. She places my armchair at impossible angles between the fire and the light, and the tablecloth\u2014the one with Trinity Hall stains\u2014she puts on the table in such a fashion that when I look at it I feel as if my tie and all my clothes were on crooked and awry. She exasperates me. Her very silence and meekness are irritating.\n\nSometimes I feel inclined to throw the inkstand at her, just to bring an expression into her watery eyes and a squeak from those colourless lips. Dear me! What violent expressions I am making use of! How very foolish of me! And yet it almost seems as if the words were not my own, but had been spoken into my ear\u2014I mean, I never make use of such terms naturally.\n\nOct. 30.: I have been here a month. The place does not agree with me, I think. My headaches are more frequent and violent, and my nerves are a perpetual source of discomfort and annoyance.\n\nI have conceived a great dislike for Mrs. Monson, a feeling I am certain she reciprocates.\n\nSomehow, the impression comes frequently to me that there are goings on in this house of which I know nothing, and which she is careful to hide from me.\n\nLast night her son slept in the house, and this morning as I was standing at the window I saw him go out. He glanced up and caught my eye. It was a loutish figure and a singularly repulsive face that I saw, and he gave me the benefit of a very unpleasant leer. At least, so I imagined.\n\nEvidently I am getting absurdly sensitive to trifles, and I suppose it is my disordered nerves making themselves felt. In the British Museum this afternoon I noticed several people at the readers' table staring at me and watching every movement I made. Whenever I looked up from my books I found their eyes upon me. It seemed to me unnecessary and unpleasant, and I left earlier than was my custom. When I reached the door I threw back a last look into the room, and saw every head at the table turned in my direction. It annoyed me very much, and yet I know it is foolish to take note of such things. When I am well they pass me by. I must get more regular exercise. Of late I have had next to none.\n\nNov. 2.: The utter stillness of this house is beginning to oppress me. I wish there were other fellows living upstairs. No footsteps ever sound overhead, and no tread ever passes my door to go up the next flight of stairs. I am beginning to feel some curiosity to go up myself and see what the upper rooms are like. I feel lonely here and isolated, swept into a deserted corner of the world and forgotten... Once I actually caught myself gazing into the long, cracked mirrors, trying to sec the sunlight dancing beneath the trees in the orchard. But only deep shadows seemed to congregate there now, and I soon desisted.\n\nIt has been very dark all day, and no wind stirring. The fogs have begun. I had to use a reading-lamp all this morning. There was no cart to be heard to-day. I actually missed it. This morning, in the gloom and silence, I think I could almost have welcomed it. After all, the sound is a very human one, and this empty house at the end of the alley holds other noises that are not quite so satisfactory.\n\nI have never once seen a policeman in the lane, and the postmen always hurry out with no evidence of a desire to loiter.\n\n10 p.m.: As I write this I hear no sound but the deep murmur of the distant traffic and the low sighing of the wind. The two sounds melt into one another. Now and again a cat raises its shrill, uncanny cry upon the darkness. The cats are always there under my windows when the darkness falls. The wind is dropping into the funnel with a noise like the sudden sweeping of immense distant wings. It is a dreary night. I feel lost and forgotten.\n\nNov. 3\u2014From my windows I can see arrivals. When anyone comes to the door I can just see the hat and shoulders and the hand on the bell. Only two fellows have been to see me since I came here two months ago. Both of them I saw from the window before they came tip, and heard their voices asking if I was in. Neither of them ever came back.\n\nI have finished the ponderous article. On reading it through, however, I was dissatisfied with it, and drew my pencil through almost every page. There were strange expressions and ideas in that I could not explain, and viewed with amazement, not to say alarm. They did not sound like my very own, and I could not remember having written them. Can it be that my memory is beginning to be affected?\n\nMy pens are never to be found. That stupid old woman puts them in a different place each day. I must give her due credit for finding so many new hiding places; such ingenuity is wonderful. I have told her repeatedly, but she always says, \"I'll speak to Emily, sir.\" Emily always says, \"I'll tell Mrs. Monson, sir.\" Their foolishness makes me irritable and scatters all my thoughts. I should like to stick the lost pens into them and turn them out, blind-eyed, to be scratched and mauled by those thousand hungry cats. Whew! What a ghastly thought! Where in the world did it come from? Such an idea is no more my own than it is the policeman's. Yet I felt I had to write it. It was like a voice singing in my head, and my pen wouldn't stop till the last word was finished. What ridiculous nonsense! I must and will restrain myself. I must take more regular exercise; my nerves and liver plague me horribly.\n\nNov. 4.: I attended a curious lecture in the French quarter on \"Death\", but the room was so hot and I was so weary that I fell asleep. The only part I heard, however, touched my imagination vividly. Speaking of suicides, the lecturer said that self-murder was no escape from the miseries of the present, but only a preparation of greater sorrow for the future. Suicides, he declared, cannot shirk their responsibilities so easily. They must return to take up life exactly where they laid it so violently down, but with the added pain and punishment of their weakness. Many of them wander the earth in unspeakable misery till they can reclothe themselves in the body of someone else\u2014generally a lunatic, or weak-minded person, who cannot resist the hideous obsession. This is their only means of escape. Surely a weird and horrible idea! I wish I had slept all the time and not heard it at all. My mind is morbid enough without such ghastly fancies. Such mischievous propaganda should be stopped by the police. I'll write to the Times and suggest it.\n\nGood idea!\n\nI walked home through Greek Street, Soho, and imagined that a hundred years had slipped back into place and De Quincey was still there, haunting the night with invocations to his \"just, subtle, and mighty\" drug. His vast dreams seemed to hover not very far away. Once started in my brain, the pictures refused to go away; and I saw him sleeping in that cold, tenantless mansion with the strange little waif who was afraid of its ghosts, both together in the shadows under a single horseman's cloak; or wandering in the companionship of the spectral Anne; or, later still, on his way to the eternal rendezvous at the foot of Great Titchfield Street, the rendezvous she never was able to keep. What an unutterable gloom, what an untold horror of sorrow and suffering comes over me as I try to realise something of what that man\u2014boy he then was\u2014must have taken into his lonely heart.\n\nAs I came up the alley I saw a light in the top window, and a head and shoulders thrown in an exaggerated shadow upon the blind. I wondered what the son could be doing up there at such an hour.\n\nNov. 5.: This morning, while writing, someone came up the creaking stairs and knocked cautiously at my door. Thinking it was the landlady, I said, \"Come in!\" The knock was repeated, and I cried louder, \"Come in, come in!\" But no one turned the handle, and I continued my writing with a vexed \"Well, stay out, then!\" under my breath. Went on writing? I tried to, but my thoughts had suddenly dried up at their source. I could not set down a single word. It was a dark, yellow-fog morning, and there was little enough inspiration in the air as it was, but that stupid woman standing just outside my door waiting to be told again to come in roused a spirit of vexation that filled my head to the exclusion of all else. At last I jumped up and opened the door myself.\n\n\"What do you want, and why in the world don't you come in?\" I cried out. But the words dropped into empty air. There was no one there. The fog poured up the dingy staircase in deep yellow coils, but there was no sign of a human being anywhere.\n\nI slammed the door, with imprecations upon the house and its noises, and went back to my work. A few minutes later Emily came in with a letter.\n\n\"Were you or Mrs. Monson outside a few minutes ago knocking at my door?\" \"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\n\n\"Mrs. Monson's gone to market, and there's no one but me and the child in the 'ole 'ouse, and I've been washing the dishes for the last hour, sir.\"\n\nI fancied the girl's face turned a shade paler. She fidgeted towards the door with a glance over her shoulder.\n\n\"Wait, Emily,\" I said, and then told her what I had heard. She stared stupidly at me, though her eyes shifted now and then over the articles in the room.\n\n\"Who was it? \"I asked when I had come to the end. \"Mrs. Monson says it's honly mice,\" she said, as if repeating a learned lesson.\n\n\"Mice!\" I exclaimed, \"it's nothing of the sort. Someone was feeling about outside my door. Who was it? Is the son in the house?\"\n\nHer whole manner changed suddenly, and she became earnest instead of evasive. She seemed anxious to tell the truth.\n\n\"Oh no, sir; there's no one in the house at all but you and me and the child, and there couldn't 'ave been nobody at your door. As for them knocks\u2014\" She stopped abruptly, as though she had said too much.\n\n\"Well, what about the knocks?\" I said more gently.\n\n\"Of course,\" she stammered, \"the knocks isn't mice, nor the footsteps neither, but then\u2014\"\n\nAgain she came to a full halt.\n\n\"Anything wrong with the house?\"\n\n\"Lor', no, sir; the drains is splendid!\"\n\n\"I don't mean drains, girl. I mean, did anything\u2014anything bad ever happen here?\"\n\nShe flushed up to the roots of her hair, and then turned suddenly pale again. She was obviously in considerable distress, and there was something she was anxious, yet afraid to tell\u2014 some forbidden thing she was not allowed to mention.\n\n\"I don't mind what it was, only I should like to know,\" I said encouragingly.\n\nRaising her frightened eyes to my face, she began to blurt out something about \"that which 'appened once to a gentleman that lived hupstairs\", when a shrill voice calling her name sounded below.\n\n\"Emily, Emily!\" It was the returning landlady, and the girl tumbled downstairs as if pulled backwards by a rope, leaving me full of conjectures as to what in the world could have happened to a gentleman upstairs that could in so curious a manner affect my ears downstairs.\n\nNov. 10.: I have done capital work; have finished the ponderous article and had it accepted for the Review, and another one ordered. I feel well and cheerful, and have had regular exercise and good sleep; no headaches, no nerves, no liver! Those pills the chemist recommended are wonderful. I can watch the child playing with his cart and feel no annoyance; sometimes I almost feel inclined to join him. Even the grey-faced landlady rouses pity in me; I am sorry for her: so worn, so weary, so oddly put together, just like the building. She looks as if she had once suffered some shock of terror, and was momentarily dreading another. When I spoke to her to-day very gently about not putting the pens in the ash-tray and the gloves on the hook-shelf she raised her faint eyes to mine for the first time, and said with the ghost of a smile, \"I'll try and re-member, sir.\" I felt inclined to pat her on the back and say, \"Come, cheer up and be jolly. Life's not so bad after all.\" Oh! I am much better. There's nothing like open air and success and good sleep. They build up as if by magic the portions of the heart eaten down by despair and unsatisfied yearnings. Even to the cats I feel friendly. When I came in at eleven o'clock to-night they followed me to the door in a stream, and I stooped down to stroke the one nearest to me.\n\nBah! The brute hissed and spat, and struck at me with her paws. The claw caught my hand and drew blood in a thin line. The others danced sideways into the darkness, screeching, as though I had done them an injury. I believe these cats really hate me. Perhaps they are only waiting to be reinforced. Then they will attack me. Ha, ha! In spite of the momentary annoyance, this fancy sent me laughing upstairs to my room.\n\nThe fire was out, and the room seemed unusually cold. As I groped my way over to the mantelpiece to find the matches I realised all at once that there was another person standing beside me in the darkness. I could, of course, see nothing, but my fingers, feeling along the ledge, came into forcible contact with something that was at once withdrawn. It was cold and moist. I could have sworn it was somebody's hand. My flesh began to creep instantly.\n\n\"Who's that?\" I exclaimed in a loud voice.\n\nMy voice dropped into the silence like a pebble into a deep well. There was no answer, but at the same moment I heard someone moving away from me across the room in the direction of the door. It was a confused sort of footstep, and the sound of garments brushing the furniture on the way. The same second my hand stumbled upon the match-box, and I struck a light. I expected to see Mrs. Monson, or Emily, or perhaps the son who is something on an omnibus. But the flare of the gas-jet illumined an empty room; there was not a sign of a person anywhere. I felt the hair stir upon my head, and instinctively I backed tip against the wall, lest something should approach me from behind. I was distinctly alarmed. But the next minute I recovered myself. The door was open on to the landing, and I crossed the room, not without some inward trepidation, and went out. The light from the room fell upon the stairs, but there was no one to be seen anywhere, nor was there any sound on the creaking wooden staircase to indicate a departing creature.\n\nI was in the act of turning to go in again when a sound overhead caught my ear. It was a very faint sound, not unlike the sigh of wind; yet it could not have been the wind, for the night was still as the grave. Though it was not repeated, I resolved to go upstairs and see for myself what it all meant. Two senses had been affected\u2014touch and hearing\u2014and I could not believe that I had been deceived. So, with a lighted candle, I went stealthily forth on my unpleasant journey into the upper regions of this queer little old house.\n\nOn the first landing there was only one door, and it was locked. On the second there was also only one door, but when I turned the handle it opened. There came forth to meet me the chill musty air that is characteristic of a long unoccupied room. With it there came an indescribable odour. I use the adjective advisedly. Though very faint, diluted as it were, it was nevertheless an odour that made my gorge rise. I had never smelt anything like it before, and I cannot describe it.\n\nThe room was small and square, close under the roof, with a sloping ceiling and two tiny windows. It was cold as the grave, without a shred of carpet or a stick of furniture. The icy atmosphere and the nameless odour combined to make the room abominable to me, and, after lingering a moment to see that it contained no cupboards or corners into which a person might have crept for concealment, I made haste to shut the door, and went downstairs again to bed.\n\nEvidently I had been deceived after all as to the noise.\n\nIn the night I had a foolish but very vivid dream. I dreamed that the landlady and another person, dark and not properly visible, entered my room on all fours, followed by a horde of immense cats. They attacked me as I lay in bed, and murdered me, and then dragged my body upstairs and deposited it on the floor of that cold little square room under the roof.\n\nNov. 11.: Since my talk with Emily\u2014the unfinished talk\u2014I have hardly once set eyes on her. Mrs. Monson now attends wholly to my wants. As usual, she does everything exactly as I don't like it done. It is all too utterly trivial to mention, but it is exceedingly irritating. Like small doses of morphine often repeated, she has finally a cumulative effect.\n\nNov. 12.: This morning I woke early, and came into the front room to get a book, meaning to read in bed till it was time to get tip. Emily was laying the fire.\n\n\"Good morning!\" I said cheerfully. \"Mind you make a good fire. It's very cold.\"\n\nThe girl turned and showed me a startled face. It was not Emily at all!\n\n\"Where's Emily? \" I exclaimed.\n\n\"You mean the girl as was 'ere before me?\"\n\n\"Has Emily left?\"\n\n\"I came on the 6th,\" she replied sullenly, \"and she'd gone then.\" I got my book and went back to bed. Emily must have been sent away almost immediately after our conversation. This reflection kept coming between me and the printed page. I was glad when it was time to get up.\n\nSuch prompt energy, such merciless decision, seemed to argue something of importance\u2014to somebody.\n\nNov. 13.: The wound inflicted by the cat's claw has swollen, and causes me annoyance and some pain. It throbs and itches. I'm afraid my blood must be in poor condition, or it would have healed by now. I opened it with a penknife soaked in an antiseptic solution, and cleansed it thoroughly. I have heard unpleasant stories of the results of wounds inflicted by cats.\n\nNov. 14.: In spite of the curious effect this house certainly exercises upon my nerves, I like it. It is lonely and deserted in the very heart of London, but it is also for that reason quiet to work in. I wonder why it is so cheap. Some people might he suspicious, but I did not even ask the reason. No answer is better than a lie. If only I could remove the cats from the outside and the rats from the inside. I feel that I shall grow accustomed more and more to its peculiarities, and shall die here. Ah, that expression reads queerly and gives a wrong impression: I meant live and die here. I shall renew the lease from year to year till one of us crumbles to pieces. From present indications the building will be the first to go.\n\nNov. 16.: It is abominable the way my nerves go up and down with me\u2014and rather discouraging. This morning I woke to find my clothes scattered about the room, and a cane chair overturned beside the bed. My coat and waistcoat looked just as if they had been tried on by someone in the night. I had horribly vivid dreams, too, in which someone covering his face with his hands kept coming close up to me, crying out as if in pain. \"Where can I find covering? Oh,.who will clothe me?\" How silly, and yet it frightened me a little. It was so dreadfully real. It is now over a year since I last walked in my sleep and woke up with such a shock on the cold pavement of Earl's Court Road, where I then lived. I thought I was cured, but evidently not. This discovery has rather a disquieting effect upon me. To-night I shall resort to the old trick of tying my toe to the bed-post.\n\nNov. 17.: Last night I was again troubled by most oppressive dreams. Someone seemed to be moving in the night up and down my room, sometimes passing into the front room, and then returning to stand beside the bed and stare intently down upon me. I was being watched by this person all night long. I never actually awoke, though I was often very near it. I suppose it was a nightmare from indigestion, for this morning I have one of my old vile headaches. Yet all my clothes lay about the floor when I awoke, where they had evidently been flung (had I so tossed them?) during the dark hours, and my trousers trailed over the step into the front room.\n\nWorse than this, though\u2014I fancied I noticed about the room in the morning that strange, fetid odour. Though very faint, its mere suggestion is foul and nauseating. 'What in the world can it be, I wonder?... In future I shall lock my door.\n\nNov. 26.: I have accomplished a lot of good work during this past week, and have also managed to get regular exercise. I have felt well and in an equable state of mind. Only two things have occurred to disturb my equanimity. The first is trivial in itself, and no doubt to be easily explained. The upper window where I saw the light on the night of November 4, with the shadow of a large head and shoulders upon the blind, is one of the windows in the square room under the roof. In reality it has no blind at all!\n\nHere is the other thing. I was coming home last night in a fresh fall of snow about eleven o'clock, my umbrella low down over my head. Half-way up the alley, where the snow was wholly untrodden, I saw a man's legs in front of me. The umbrella hid the rest of his figure, but on raising it I saw that he was tall and broad and was walking, as I was, towards the door of my house. He could not have been four feet ahead of me. I had thought the alley was empty when I entered it, but might of course have been mistaken very easily.\n\nA sudden gust of wind compelled me to lower the umbrella, and when I raised it again, not half a minute later, there was no longer any man to be seen. With a few more steps I reached the door. It was closed as usual. I then noticed with a sudden sensation of dismay that the surface of the freshly fallen snow was unbroken. My own foot-marks were the only ones to be seen anywhere, and though I retraced my way to tile point where I had first seen the man, I could find no slightest impression of any other boots. Feeling creepy and uncomfortable, I went upstairs, and was glad to get into bed.\n\nNov. 28.: With the fastening of my bedroom door the disturbances ceased. I am convinced that I walked in my sleep. Probably I untied my toe and then tied it up again. The fancied security of the locked door would alone have been enough to restore sleep to my troubled spirit and enable me to rest quietly.\n\nLast night, however, the annoyance was suddenly renewed another and more aggressive form. I woke in the darkness with the impression that someone was standing outside my bedroom door listening. As I became more awake the impression grew into positive knowledge.\n\nThough there was no appreciable sound of moving or breathing, I was so convinced of the propinquity of a listener that I crept out of bed and approached the door. As I did so there came faintly from the next room the unmistakable sound of someone retreating stealthily across the floor. Yet, as I heard it, it was neither the tread of a man nor a regular footstep, but rather, it seemed to me, a confused sort of crawling, almost as of someone on his hands and knees.\n\nI unlocked the door in less than a second, and passed quickly into the front room, and I could feel, as by the subtlest imaginable vibrations upon my nerves, that the spot I was standing in had just that instant been vacated! The Listener had moved; he was now behind the other door, standing in the passage. Yet this door was also closed. I moved swiftly, and as silently as possible, across the floor, and turned the handle. A cold rush of air met me from the passage and sent shiver after shiver down my back. There was no one in the doorway; there was no one on the little landing; there was no one moving down the staircase. Yet I had been so quick that this midnight Listener could not be very far away, and I felt that if I persevered I should eventually come face to face with him. And the courage that came so opportunely to overcome my nervousness and horror seemed born of the unwelcome conviction that it was somehow necessary for my safety as well as my sanity that I should find this intruder and force his secret from him. For was it not the intent action of his mind upon my own, in concentrated listening, that had awakened me with such a vivid realisation of his presence?\n\nAdvancing across the narrow landing, I peered down into the well of the little house. There was nothing to be seen; no one was moving in the darkness. How cold the oilcloth was to my bare feet.\n\nI cannot say what it was that suddenly drew my eyes upwards. I only know that, without apparent reason, I looked up and saw a person about half-way up the next turn of the stairs, leaning forward over the balustrade and staring straight into my face. It was a man. He appeared to be clinging to the rail rather than standing on the stairs. The gloom made it impossible to see much beyond the general outline, but the head and shoulders were seemingly enormous, and stood sharply silhouetted against the skylight in the roof immediately above. The idea flashed into my brain in a moment that I was looking into the visage of something monstrous. The huge skull, the mane-like hair, the wide-humped shoulders, suggested, in a way I did not pause to analyse, that which was scarcely human; and for some seconds, fascinated by horror, I returned the gaze and stared into the dark, inscrutable countenance above me, without knowing exactly where I was or what I was doing.\n\nThen I realised in quite a new way that I was face to face with the secret midnight Listener, and I steeled myself as best I could for what was about to come.\n\nThe source of the rash courage that came to me at this awful moment will ever be to me an inexplicable mystery. Though shivering with fear, and my forehead wet with an unholy dew, I resolved to advance. Twenty questions leaped to my lips: What are you? What do you want?\n\nWhy do you listen and watch? Why do you come into my room? But none of them found articulate utterance.\n\nI began forthwith to climb the stairs, and with the first signs of my advance he drew himself back into the shadows and began to move. He retreated as swiftly as I advanced. I heard the sound of his crawling motion a few steps ahead of me, ever maintaining the same distance. When I reached the landing he was half-way up the next flight, and when I was halfway up the next flight he had already arrived at the top landing. I then heard him open the door of the little square room under the roof and go in. Immediately, though the door did not close after him, the sound of his moving entirely ceased.\n\nAt this moment I longed for a light, or a stick, or any weapon whatsoever; but I had none of these things, and it was impossible to go back. So I marched steadily up the rest of the stairs, and in less than a minute found myself standing in the gloom face to face with the door through which this creature had just entered.\n\nFor a moment I hesitated. The door was about half-way open, and the Listener was standing evidently in his favourite attitude just behind it\u2014listening. To search through that dark room for him seemed hopeless; to enter the same small space where he was seemed horrible. The very idea filled me with loathing, and I almost decided to turn back.\n\nIt is strange at such times how trivial things impinge on the consciousness with a shock as of something important and immense. Something\u2014it may have been a beetle or a mouse\u2014scuttled over the bare boards behind me. The door moved a quarter of an inch, closing. My decision came back with a sudden rush, as it were, and thrusting out a foot, I kicked the door so that it swung sharply back to its full extent, and permitted me to walk forward slowly into the aperture of profound blackness beyond. What a queer soft sound my bare feet made on the boards! How the blood sang and buzzed in my head!\n\nI was inside. The darkness closed over me, hiding even the windows. I began to grope my way round the walls in a thorough search; but in order to prevent all possibility of the other's escape, I first of all closed the door.\n\nThere we were, we two, shut in together between four walls, within a few feet of one another.\n\nBut with what, with whom, was I thus momentarily imprisoned? A new light flashed suddenly over the affair with a swift, illuminating brilliance\u2014and I knew I was a fool, an utter fool! I was wide awake at last, and the horror was evaporating. My cursed nerves again; a dream, a nightmare, and the old result\u2014walking in my sleep. The figure was a dream-figure. Many a time before had the actors in my dreams stood before me for some moments after I was awake...\n\nThere was a chance match in my pyjamas' pocket, and I struck it on the wall. The room was utterly empty. It held not even a shadow. I went quickly down to bed, cursing my wretched nerves and my foolish, vivid dreams. But as soon as ever I was asleep again, the same uncouth figure of a man crept back to my bedside, and bending over me with his immense head close to my ear, whispered repeatedly in my dreams, \"I want your body; I want its covering. I'm waiting for it, and listening always.\" Words scarcely less foolish than the dream.\n\nBut I wonder what that queer odour was up in the square room. I noticed it again, and stronger than ever before, and it seemed to be also in my bedroom when I woke this morning.\n\nNov. 29.: Slowly, as moonbeams rise over a misty sea in June, the thought is entering my mind that my nerves and somnambulistic dreams do not adequately account for the influence this house exercises upon me. It holds me as with a fine, invisible net. I cannot escape if I would. It draws me, and it means to keep me.\n\nNov. 30.: The post this morning brought me a letter from Aden, forwarded from my old rooms in Earl's Court. It was from Chapter, my former Trinity chum, who is on his way home from the East, and asks for my address. I sent it to him at the hotel he mentioned, \"to await arrival\".\n\nAs I have already said, my windows command a view of the alley, and I can see an arrival without difficulty. This morning, while I was busy writing, the sound of footsteps coming up the alley filled me with a sense of vague alarm that I could in no way account for. I went over to the window, and saw a man standing below waiting for the door to be opened. His shoulders were broad, his top-hat glossy, and his overcoat fitted beautifully round the collar. All this I could see, but no more. Presently the door was opened, and the shock to my nerves was unmistakable when I heard a man's voice ask, \"Is Mr. \u2014 still here?\" mentioning my name. I could not catch the answer, but it could only have been in the affirmative, for the man entered the hall and the door shut to behind him. But I waited in vain for the sound of his steps on the stairs. There was no sound of any kind. It seemed to me so strange that I opened my door and looked out. No one was anywhere to be seen. I walked across the narrow landing, and looked through the window that commands the whole length of the alley. There was no sign of a human being, coming or going.\n\nThe lane was deserted. Then I deliberately walked downstairs into the kitchen, and asked the grey-faced landlady if a gentleman had just that minute called for me.\n\nThe answer, given with an odd, weary sort of smile, was \"No!\"\n\nDec. 1.: I feel genuinely alarmed and uneasy over the state of my nerves. Dreams are dreams, but never before have I had dreams in broad daylight.\n\nI am looking forward very much to Chapter's arrival. He is a capital fellow, vigorous, healthy, with no nerves, and even less imagination; and he has \u00a32,000 a year into the bargain.\n\nPeriodically he makes me offers\u2014the last was to travel round the world with him as secretary, which was a delicate way of paying my expenses and giving me some pocket-money\u2014offers, however, which I invariably decline. I prefer to keep his friendship. Women could not come between us; money might\u2014 therefore I give it no opportunity. Chapter always laughed at what he called my \"fancies\", being himself possessed only of that thin-blooded quality of imagination which is ever associated with the prosaic-minded man. Yet, if taunted with this obvious lack, his wrath is deeply stirred. His psychology is that of the crass materialist\u2014always a rather funny article. It will afford me genuine relief, none the less, to hear the cold judgment his mind will have to pass upon the story of this house as I shall have it to tell.\n\nDec. 2.: The strangest part of it all I have not referred to in this brief diary. Truth to tell, I have been afraid to set it down in black and white. I have kept it in the background of my thoughts, preventing it as far as possible from taking shape. In spite of my efforts, however, it has continued to grow stronger.\n\nNow that I come to face the issue squarely it is harder to express than I imagined. Like a half-remembered melody that trips in the head but vanishes the moment you try to sing it, these thoughts form a group in the background of my mind, behind my mind, as it were, and refuse to come forward. They are crouching ready to spring, but the actual leap never takes place.\n\nIn these rooms, except when my mind is strongly concentrated on my own work, I find myself suddenly dealing in thoughts and ideas that are not my own! New, strange conceptions, wholly foreign to my temperament, are for ever cropping up in my head. What precisely they are is of no particular importance. The point is that they are entirely apart from the channel in which my thoughts have hitherto been accustomed to flow. Especially they come when my mind is at rest, unoccupied; when I'm dreaming over the fire, or sitting with a book which fails to hold my attention. Then these thoughts which are not mine spring into life and make me feel exceedingly uncomfortable. Sometimes they are so strong that I almost feel as if someone were in the room beside me, thinking aloud.\n\nEvidently my nerves and liver are shockingly out of order. I must work harder and take more vigorous exercise. The horrid thoughts never come when my mind is much occupied. But they are always there\u2014 waiting and as it were alive.\n\nWhat I have attempted to describe above came first upon me gradually after I had been some days in the house, and then grew steadily in strength. The other strange thing has come to me only twice in all these weeks. It appals me. It is the consciousness of the propinquity of some deadly and loathsome disease. It comes over me like a wave of fever heat, and then passes off, leaving me cold and trembling. The air seems for a few seconds to become tainted. So penetrating and convincing is the thought of this sickness, that on both occasions my brain has turned momentarily dizzy, and through my mind, like flames of white heat, have flashed the ominous names of all the dangerous illnesses I know. I can no more explain these visitations than I can fly, yet I know there is no dreaming about the clammy skin and palpitating heart which they always leave as witnesses of their brief visit.\n\nMost strongly of all was I aware of this nearness of a mortal sickness when, on the night of the 28th, I went upstairs in pursuit of the listening figure. When we were shut in together in that little square room under the roof, I felt that I was face to face with the actual essence of this invisible and malignant disease. Such a feeling never entered my heart before, and I pray to God it never may again.\n\nThere! Now I have confessed. I have given some expression at least to the feelings that so far I have been afraid to see in my own writing. For\u2014since I can no longer deceive myself\u2014the experiences of that night (28th) were no more a dream than my daily breakfast is a dream; and the trivial entry in this diary by which I sought to explain away an occurrence that caused me unutterable horror was due solely to my desire not to acknowledge in words what I really felt and believed to be true. The increase that would have accrued to my horror by so doing might have been more than I could stand.\n\nDec. 3.: I wish Chapter would come. My facts are all ready marshalled, and I can see his cool, grey eyes fixed incredulously on my face as I relate them: the knocking at my door, the well-dressed caller, the light in the upper window and the shadow upon the blind, the man who preceded me in the snow, the scattering of my clothes at night, Emily's arrested confession, the landlady's suspicious reticence, the midnight listener on the stairs, and those awful subsequent words in my sleep; and above all, and hardest to tell, the presence of the abominable sickness, and the stream of thoughts and ideas that are not my own.\n\nI can see Chapter's face, and I can almost hear his deliberate words, \"You've been at the tea again, and underfeeding, I expect, as usual. Better see my nerve doctor, and then come with me to the south of France.\" For this fellow, who knows nothing of disordered liver or high-strung nerves, goes regularly to a great nerve specialist with the periodical belief that his nervous system is beginning to decay.\n\nDec. 5.: Ever since the incident of the Listener, I have kept a night-light burning in my bedroom, and my sleep has been undisturbed. Last night, however, I was subjected to a far worse annoyance. I woke suddenly, and saw a man in front of the dressing-table regarding himself in the mirror. The door was locked, as usual. I knew at once it was the Listener, and the blood turned to ice in my veins. Such a wave of horror and dread swept over me that it seemed to turn me rigid in the bed, and I could neither move nor speak. I noted, however, that the odour I so abhorred was strong in the room.\n\nThe man seemed to be tall and broad. He was stooping forward over the mirror. His back was turned to me, but in the glass I saw the reflection of a huge head and face illumined fitfully by the flicker of the night-light. The spectral grey of very early morning stealing in round the edges of the curtains lent an additional horror to the picture, for it fell upon hair that was tawny and mane-like, hanging loosely about a face whose swollen, rugose features bore the once seen never-forgotten leonine expression of\u2014I dare not write down that awful word. But, byway of corroborative proof, I saw in the faint mingling of the two lights that there were several bronze-coloured blotches on the cheeks which the man was evidently examining with great care in the glass. The lips were pale and very thick and large. One hand I could not see, but the other rested on the ivory back of my hairbrush. Its muscles were strangely contracted, the fingers thin to emaciation, the back of the hand closely puckered up. It was like a big grey spider crouching to spring, or the claw of a great bird.\n\nThe full realisation that I was alone in the room with this nameless creature, almost within arm's reach of him, overcame me to such a degree that, when he suddenly turned and regarded me with small beady eyes, wholly out of proportion to the grandeur of their massive setting, I sat bolt upright in bed, uttered a loud cry, and then fell back in a dead swoon of terror upon the bed.\n\nDec. 5.: ... When I came to this morning, the first thing I noticed was that my clothes were strewn all over the floor... I find it difficult to put my thoughts together, and have sudden accesses of violent trembling. I determined that I would go at once to Chapter's hotel and find out when he is expected. I cannot refer to what happened in the night; it is too awful, and I have to keep my thoughts rigorously away from it. I feel light-headed and queer, couldn't eat any breakfast, and have twice vomited with blood. While dressing to go out, a hansom rattled up noisily over the cobbles, and a minute later the door opened, and to my great joy in walked the very subject of my thoughts.\n\nThe sight of his strong face and quiet eyes had an immediate effect upon me, and I grew calmer again. His very handshake was a sort of tonic. But, as I listened eagerly to the deep tones of his reassuring voice, and the visions of the night-time paled a little, I began to realise how very hard it was going to be to tell him my wild intangible tale. Some men radiate an animal vigour that destroys the delicate woof of a vision and effectually prevents its reconstruction.\n\nChapter was one of these men.\n\nWe talked of incidents that had filled the interval since we last met, and he told me something of his travels. He talked and I listened. But, so full was I of the horrid thing I had to tell, that I made a poor listener. I was for ever watching my opportunity to leap in and explode it all under his nose.\n\nBefore very long, however, it was borne in upon me that he too was merely talking for time.\n\nHe too held something of importance in the background of his mind, something too weighty to let fall till the right moment presented itself. So that during the whole of the first half-hour we were both waiting for the psychological moment in which properly to release our respective bombs; and the intensity of our minds' action set up opposing forces that merely sufficed to hold one another in check\u2014and nothing more. As soon as I realised this, therefore, I resolved to yield.\n\nI renounced for the time my purpose of telling my story, and had the satisfaction of seeing that his mind, released from the restraint of my own, at once began to make preparations for the dis-charge of its momentous burden. The talk grew less and less magnetic; the interest waned; the descriptions of his travels became less alive. There were pauses between his sentences. Presently he repeated himself. His words clothed no living thoughts. The pauses grew longer. Then the interest dwindled altogether and went out like a candle in the wind. His voice ceased, and he looked up squarely into my face with serious and anxious eyes.\n\nThe psychological moment had come at last!\n\n\"I say\u2014\" he began, and then stopped short.\n\nI made an unconscious gesture of encouragement, but said no word. I dreaded the impending disclosure exceedingly. A dark shadow seemed to precede it.\n\n\"I say,\" he blurted out at last, \"what in the world made you ever come to this place\u2014to these rooms, I mean?\"\n\n\"They're cheap, for one thing,\" I began, \"and central and\u2014\"\n\n\"They're too cheap,\" he interrupted. \"Didn't you ask what made 'em so cheap?\"\n\n\"It never occurred to me at the time.\"\n\nThere was a pause in which he avoided my eyes.\n\n\"For God's sake, go on, man, and tell it!\" I cried, for the suspense was getting more than I could stand in my nervous condition.\n\n\"This was where Blount lived so long,\" he said quietly, \"and where he\u2014died. You know, in the old days I often used to come here and see him, and do what I could to alleviate his\u2014\" He stuck fast again.\n\n\"Well!\" I said with a great effort. \"Please go on\u2014faster.\"\n\n\"But,\" Chapter went on, turning his face to the window with a perceptible shiver, \"he finally got so terrible I simply couldn't stand it, though I always thought I could stand anything. It got on my nerves and made me dream, and haunted me day and night.\"\n\nI stared at him, and said nothing. I had never heard of Blount in my life, and didn't know what he was talking about. But, all the same, I was trembling, and my mouth had become strangely dry.\n\n\"This is the first time I've been back here since,\" he said almost in a whisper, \"and, 'pon my word, it gives me the creeps. I swear it isn't fit for a man to live in. I never saw you look so bad, old man.\"\n\n\"I've got it for a year,\" I jerked out, with a forced laugh; \"signed the lease and all. I thought it was rather a bargain.\"\n\nChapter shuddered, and buttoned his overcoat up to his neck. Then he spoke in a low voice, looking occasionally behind him as though he thought someone was listening. I too could have sworn someone else was in the room with us.\n\n\"He did it himself, you know, and no one blamed him a bit; his sufferings were awful. For the last two years he used to wear a veil when he went out, and even then it was always in a closed carriage. Even the attendant who had nursed him for so long was at length obliged to leave. The extremities of both the lower limbs were gone, dropped off, and he moved about the ground on all fours with a sort of crawling motion. The odour, too, was\u2014\"\n\nI was obliged to interrupt him here. I could hear no more details of that sort. My skin was moist, I felt hot and cold by turns, for at last I was beginning to understand.\n\n\"Poor devil,\" Chapter went on; \"I used to keep my eyes closed as much as possible. He always begged to be allowed to take his veil off, and asked if I minded very much. I used to stand by the open window. He never touched me, though. He rented the whole house. Nothing would induce him to leave it.\"\n\n\"Did he occupy\u2014these very rooms?\"\n\n\"No. He had the little room on the top floor, the square one just under the roof. He preferred it because it was dark. These rooms were too near the ground, and he was afraid people might see him through the windows. A crowd had been known to follow him up to the very door, and then stand below the windows in the hope of catching a glimpse of his face.\"\n\n\"But there were hospitals.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't go near one, and they didn't like to force him. You know, they say it's not contagious, so there was nothing to prevent his staying here if he wanted to. He spent all his time reading medical books, about drugs and so on. His head and face were something appalling, just like a lion's.\"\n\nI held up my hand to arrest further description.\n\n\"He was a burden to the world, and he knew it. One night I suppose he realised it too keenly to wish to live. He had the free use of drugs\u2014and in the morning he was found dead on the floor.\n\nTwo years ago, that was, and they said then he had still several years to live.\"\n\n\"Then, in Heaven's name!\" I cried, unable to bear the suspense any longer, \"tell me what it was he had, and be quick about it.\"\n\n\"I thought you knew!\" he exclaimed, with genuine surprise. \"I thought you knew!\"\n\nHe leaned forward and our eyes met. In a scarcely audible whisper I caught the words his lips seemed almost afraid to utter:\n\n\"He was a leper!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Max Hensing - Bacteriologist and Murderer", + "text": "Besides the departmental men on the New York Vulture, there were about twenty reporters for general duty, and Williams had worked his way up till he stood easily among the first half-dozen; for, in addition to being accurate and painstaking, he was able to bring to his reports of common things that touch of imagination and humour which just lifted them out of the rut of mere faithful recording. Moreover, the city editor (anglice news editor) appreciated his powers, and always tried to give him assignments that did himself and the paper credit, and he was justified now in expecting to be relieved of the hack jobs that were usually allotted to new men.\n\nHe was therefore puzzled and a little disappointed one morning as he saw his inferiors summoned one after another to the news desk to receive the best assignments of the day, and when at length his turn came, and the city editor asked him to cover \"the Hensig story\", he gave a little start of vexation that almost betrayed him into asking what the devil \"the Hensig story\" was. For it is the duty of every morning newspaper man \u2014 in New York at least \u2014 to have made himself familiar with all the news of the day before he shows himself at the office, and though Williams had already done this, he could not recall either the name or the story.\n\n\"You can run to a hundred or a hundred and fifty, Mr. Williams. Cover the trial thoroughly, and get good interviews with Hensig and the lawyers. There'll be no night assignment for you till the case is over.\"\n\nWilliams was going to ask if there were any private \"tips\" from the District Attorney's office, but the editor was already speaking with Weekes, who wrote the daily \"weather story\", and he went back slowly to his desk, angry and disappointed, to read up the Hensig case and lay his plans for the day accordingly. At any rate, he reflected, it looked like \"a soft job\", and as there was to be no second assignment for him that night, he would get off by eight o'clock, and be able to dine and sleep for once like a civilised man. And that was something.\n\nIt took him some time, however, to discover that the Hensig case was only a murder story. And this increased his disgust. It was tucked away in the corners of most of the papers, and little importance was attached to it. A murder trial is not first-class news unless there are very special features connected with it, and Williams had already covered scores of them. There was a heavy sameness about them that made it difficult to report them interestingly, and as a rule they were left to the tender mercies of the \"flimsy\" men \u2014 the Press Associations \u2014 and no paper sent a special man unless the case was distinctly out of the usual. Moreover, a hundred and fifty meant a column and a half, and Williams, not being a space man, earned the same money whether he wrote a stickful or a page; so that he felt doubly aggrieved, and walked out into the sunny open spaces opposite Newspaper Row heaving a deep sigh and cursing the boredom of his trade.\n\nMax Hensig, he found, was a German doctor accused of murdering his second wife by injecting arsenic. The woman had been buried several weeks when the suspicious relatives got the body exhumed, and a quantity of the poison had been found in her. Williams recalled something about the arrest, now he came to think of it; but he felt no special interest in it, for ordinary murder trials were no longer his legitimate work, and he scorned them. At first, of course, they had thrilled him horribly, and some of his interviews with the prisoners, especially just before execution, had deeply impressed his imagination and kept him awake at nights. Even now he could not enter the gloomy Tombs Prison, or cross the Bridge of Sighs leading from it to the courts, without experiencing a real sensation, for its huge Egyptian columns and massive walls closed round him like death; and the first time he walked down Murderers' Row, and came in view of the cell doors, his throat was dry, and he had almost turned and run out of the building. The first time, too, that he covered the trial of a Negro and listened to the man's hysterical speech before sentence was pronounced, he was absorbed with interest, and his heart leaped. The wild appeals to the Deity, the long invented words, the ghastly pallor under the black skin, the rolling eyes, and the torrential sentences all seemed to him to be something tremendous to describe for his sensational sheet; and the stickfull that was eventually printed \u2014 written by the flimsy man too \u2014 had given him quite a new standard of the relative value of news and of the quality of the satiated public palate. He had reported the trials of a Chinaman, stolid as wood; of an Italian who had been too quick with his knife; and of a farm girl who had done both her parents to death in their beds, entering their room stark naked, so that no stains should betray her; and at the beginning these things haunted him for days.\n\nBut that was all months ago, when he first came to New York. Since then his work had been steadily in the criminal courts, and he had grown a second skin. An execution in the electric chair at Sing Sing could still unnerve him somewhat, but mere murder no longer thrilled or excited him, and he could be thoroughly depended on to write a good \"murder story\"\u2014 an account that his paper could print without blue pencil.\n\nAccordingly he entered the Tombs Prison with nothing stronger than the feeling of vague oppression that gloomy structure always stirred in him, and certainly with no particular emotion connected with the prisoner he was about to interview; and when he reached the second iron door, where a warder peered at him through a small grating, he heard a voice behind him, and turned to find the Chronicle man at his heels.\n\n\"Hullo, Senator! What good trail are you following down here?\" he cried, for the other got no small assignments, and never had less than a column on the Chronicle front page at space rates.\n\n\"Same as you, I guess \u2014 Hensig,\" was the reply.\n\n\"But there's no space in Hensig,\" said Williams with surprise. \"Are you back on salary again?\"\n\n\"Not much,\" laughed the Senator \u2014 no one knew his real name, but he was always called Senator. \"But Hensig's good for two hundred easy. There's a whole list of murders behind him, we hear, and this is the first time he's been caught.\"\n\n\"Poison?\"\n\nThe Senator nodded in reply, turning to ask the warder some question about another case, and Williams waited for him in the corridor, impatiently rather, for he loathed the musty prison odour. He watched the Senator as he talked, and was distinctly glad he had come. They were good friends: he had helped Williams when he first joined the small army of newspaper men and was not much welcomed, being an Englishman. Common origin and goodheartedness mixed themselves delightfully in his face, and he always made Williams think of a friendly, honest cart-horse \u2014 stolid, strong, with big and simple emotions.\n\n\"Get a hustle on, Senator,\" he said at length impatiently.\n\nThe two reporters followed the warder down the flagged corridor, past a row of dark cells, each with its occupant, until the man, swinging his keys in the direction indicated, stopped and pointed: \"Here's your gentleman,\" he said, and then moved on down the corridor, leaving them staring through the bars at a frail, slim young man, pacing to and fro. He had flaxen hair and very bright blue eyes; his skin was white, and his face wore so open and innocent an expression that one would have said he could not twist a kitten's tail without wincing.\n\n\"From the Chronicle and Vulture,\" explained Williams, by way of introduction, and the talk at once began in the usual way.\n\nThe man in the cell ceased his restless pacing up and down, and stopped opposite the bars to examine them. He stared straight into Williams's eyes for a moment, and the reporter noted a very different expression from the one he had first seen. It actually made him shift his position and stand a little to one side. But the movement was wholly instinctive. He could not have explained why he did it.\n\n\"Guess you vish me to say I did it, and then egsplain to you how I did it,\" the young doctor said coolly, with a marked German accent. \"But I haf no copy to gif you shust now. You see at the trial it is nothing but spite \u2014 and shealosy of another woman. I lofed my vife. I vould not haf gilled her for anything in the vorld \u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, of course, of course, Dr. Hensig,\" broke in the Senator, who was more experienced in the ways of difficult interviewing. \"We quite understand that. But, you know, in New York the newspapers try a man as much as the courts, and we thought you might like to make a statement to the public which we should be very glad to print for you. It may help your case \u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing can help my case in this tamned country where shustice is to he pought mit tollars!\" cried the prisoner, with a sudden anger and an expression of face still further belying the first one; \"nothing except a lot of money. But I tell you now two things you may write for your public: One is, no motive can be shown for the murder, because I lofed Zinka and vished her to live alvays. And the other is \u2014\" He stopped a moment and stared steadily at Williams making shorthand notes \u2014\" that with my knowledge \u2014 my egceptional knowledge \u2014 of poisons and pacteriology I could have done it in a dozen ways without pumping arsenic into her body. That is a fool's way of killing. It is clumsy and childish and sure of discofery! See?\"\n\nHe turned away, as though to signify that the interview was over, and sat down on his wooden bench.\n\n\"Seems to have taken a fancy to you,\" laughed the Senator, as they went off to get further interviews with the lawyers. \"He never looked at me once.\"\n\n\"He's got a bad face \u2014 the face of a devil. I don't feel complimented,\" said Williams shortly. \"I'd hate to be in his power.\"\n\n\"Same here,\" returned the other. \"Let's go into Silver Dollars and wash the dirty taste out.\"\n\nSo, after the custom of reporters, they made their way up the Bowery and went into a saloon that had gained a certain degree of fame because the Tammany owner had let a silver dollar into each stone of the floor. Here they washed away most of the \"dirty taste\" left by the Tombs atmosphere and Hensig, and then went on to Steve Brodie's, another saloon a little higher up the same street.\n\n\"There'll be others there,\" said the Senator, meaning drinks as well as reporters, and Williams, still thinking over their interview, silently agreed.\n\nBrodie was a character; there was always something lively going on in his place. He had the reputation of having once jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge and reached the water alive. No one could actually deny it, and no one could prove that it really happened: and anyhow, he had enough imagination and personality to make the myth live and to sell much bad liquor on the strength of it. The walls of his saloon were plastered with lurid oil-paintings of the bridge, the height enormously magnified, and Steve's body in midair, an expression of a happy puppy on his face.\n\nHere, as expected, they found \"Whitey\" Fife, of the Recorder, and Galusha Owen, of the World. \"Whitey\", as his nickname implied, was an albino, and clever. He wrote the daily \"weather story\" for his paper, and the way he spun a column out of rain, wind, and temperature was the envy of everyone except the Weather Clerk, who objected to being described as \"Farmer Dunne, cleaning his rat-tail file\", and to having his dignified office referred to in the public press as \"a down-country farm\". But the public liked it, and laughed, and \"Whitey\" was never really spiteful.\n\nOwen, too, when sober, was a good man who had long passed the rubicon of hack assignments. Yet both these men were also on the Hensig story. And Williams, who had already taken an instinctive dislike to the case, was sorry to see this, for it meant frequent interviewing and the possession, more or less, of his mind and imagination. Clearly, he would have much to do with this German doctor. Already, even at this stage, he began to hate him.\n\nThe four reporters spent an hour drinking and talking. They fell at length to discussing the last time they had chanced to meet on the same assignment \u2014 a private lunatic asylum owned by an incompetent quack without a licence, and where most of the inmates, not mad in the first instance, and all heavily paid for by relatives who wished them out of the way, had gone mad from ill-treatment. The place had been surrounded before dawn by the Board of Health officers, and the quasi-doctor arrested as he opened his front door. It was a splendid newspaper \"story\", of course.\n\n\"My space bill ran to sixty dollars a day for nearly a week,\" said Whitey Fife thickly, and the others laughed, because Whitey wrote most of his stuff by cribbing it from the evening papers.\n\n\"A dead cinch,\" said Galusha Owen, his dirty flannel collar poking up through his long hair almost to his ears. \"I 'faked' the whole of the second day without going down there at all.\"\n\nHe pledged Whitey for the tenth time that morning, and the albino leered happily across the table at him, and passed him a thick compliment before emptying his glass.\n\n\"Hensig's going to be good, too,\" broke in the Senator, ordering a round of gin-fizzes, and Williams gave a little start of annoyance to hear the name brought up again. \"He'll make good stuff at the trial. I never saw a cooler hand. You should've heard him talk about poisons and bacteriology, and boasting he could kill in a dozen ways without fear of being caught. I guess he was telling the truth right enough!\"\n\n\"That so?\" cried Galusha and Whitey in the same breath, not having done a stroke of work so far on the case.\n\n\"Run down to the Tombsh angetaninerview,\" added Whitey, turning with a sudden burst of enthusiasm to his companion. His white eyebrows and pink eyes fairly shone against the purple of his tipsy face.\n\n\"No, no,\" cried the Senator; \"don't spoil a good story. You're both as full as ticks. I'll match with Williams which of us goes. Hensig knows us already, and we'll all 'give up' in this story right along. No 'beats'.\"\n\nSo they decided to divide news till the case was finished, and to keep no exclusive items to themselves; and Williams, having lost the toss, swallowed his gin-fizz and went back to the Tombs to get a further talk with the prisoner on his knowledge of expert poisoning and bacteriology.\n\nMeanwhile his thoughts were very busy elsewhere.\n\nHe had taken no part in the noisy conversation in the barroom, because something lay at the back of his mind, bothering him, and claiming attention with great persistence. Something was at work in his deeper consciousness, something that had impressed him with a vague sense of unpleasantness and nascent fear, reaching below that second skin he had grown.\n\nAnd, as he walked slowly through the malodorous slum streets that lay between the Bowery and the Tombs, dodging the pullers-in outside the Jew clothing stores, and nibbling at a bag of peanuts he caught up off an Italian push-cart en route, this \"something\" rose a little higher out of its obscurity, and began to play with the roots of the ideas floating higgledypiggledy on the surface of his mind. He thought he knew what it was, but could not make quite sure. From the roots of his thoughts it rose a little higher, so that he clearly felt it as something disagreeable. Then, with a sudden rush, it came to the surface, and poked its face before him so that he fully recognised it.\n\nThe blond visage of Dr. Max Hensig rose before him, cool, smiling, and implacable.\n\nSomehow, he had expected it would prove to be Hensig \u2014 this unpleasant thought that was troubling him. He was not really surprised to have labelled it, because the man's personality had made an unwelcome impression upon him at the very start. He stopped nervously in the Street, and looked round. He did not expect to see anything out of the way, or to find that he was being followed. It was not that exactly. The act of turning was merely the outward expression of a sudden inner discomfort, and a man with better nerves, or nerves more under control, would not have turned at all.\n\nBut what caused this tremor of the nerves? Williams probed and searched within himself. It came, he felt, from some part of his inner being he did not understand; there had been an intrusion, an incongruous intrusion, into the stream of his normal consciousness. Messages from this region always gave him pause; and in this particular case he saw no reason why he should think specially of Dr. Hensig with alarm \u2014 this light-haired stripling with blue eyes and drooping moustache. The faces of other murderers had haunted him once or twice because they were more than ordinarily bad, or because their case possessed unusual features of horror. But there was nothing so very much out of the way about Hensig \u2014 at least, if there was, the reporter could not seize and analyse it. There seemed no adequate reason to explain his emotion. Certainly, it had nothing to do with the fact that he was merely a murderer, for that stirred no thrill in him at all, except a kind of pity, and a wonder how the man would meet his execution. It must, he argued, be something to do with the personality of the man, apart from any particular deed or characteristic.\n\nPuzzled, and still a little nervous, he stood in the road, hesitating. In front of him the dark walls of the Tombs rose in massive steps of granite. Overhead white summer clouds sailed across a deep blue sky; the wind sang cheerfully among the wires and chimney-pots, making him think of fields and trees; and down the Street surged the usual cosmopolitan New York crowd of laughing Italians, surly Negroes, hebrews chattering Yiddish, tough-looking hooligans with that fighting lurch of the shoulders peculiar to New York roughs, Chinamen, taking little steps like boys \u2014 and every other sort of nondescript imaginable. It was early June, and there were faint odours of the sea and of sea-beaches in the air. Williams caught himself shivering a little with delight at the sight of the sky and scent of the wind.\n\nThen he looked back at the great prison, rightly named the Tombs, and the sudden change of thought from the fields to the cells, from life to death, somehow landed him straight into the discovery of what caused this attack of nervousness:\n\nHensig was no ordinary murderer! That was it.\n\nThere was something quite out of the ordinary about him. The man was a horror, pure and simple, standing apart from normal humanity. The knowledge of this rushed over him like a revelation, bringing unalterable conviction in its train. Something of it had reached him in that first brief interview, but without explaining itself sufficiently to be recognised, and since then it had been working in his system, like a poison, and was now causing a disturbance, not having been assimilated. A quicker temperament would have labelled it long before. Now, Williams knew well that he drank too much, and had more than a passing acquaintance with drugs; his nerves were shaky at the best of times. His life on the newspapers afforded no opportunity of cultivating pleasant social relations, but brought him all the time into contact with the seamy side of life \u2014 the criminal, the abnormal, the unwholesome in human nature. He knew, too, that strange thoughts, id\u00e9es fixes and what not, grew readily in such a soil as this, and, not wanting these, he had formed a habit \u2014 peculiar to himself \u2014 of deliberately sweeping his mind clean once a week of all that had haunted, obsessed, or teased him, of the horrible or unclean, during his work; and his eighth day, his holiday, he invariably spent in the woods, walking, building fires, cooking a meal in the open, and getting all the country air and the exercise he possibly could. He had in this way kept his mind free from many unpleasant pictures that might otherwise have lodged there abidingly, and the habit of thus cleansing his imagination had proved more than once of real value to him.\n\nSo now he laughed to himself, and turned on those whizzing brooms of his, trying to forget these first impressions of Hensig, and simply going in, as he did a hundred other times, to get an ordinary interview with an ordinary prisoner. This habit, being nothing more nor less than the practice of suggestion, was more successful sometimes than others. This time \u2014 since fear is less susceptible to suggestion than other emotions \u2014 it was less so.\n\nWilliams got his interview, and came away fairly creeping with horror. Hensig was all that he had felt, and more besides. He belonged, the reporter felt convinced, to that rare type of deliberate murderer, coldblooded and calculating, who kills for a song, delights in killing, and gives its whole intellect to the consideration of each detail, glorying in evading detection and revelling in the notoriety of the trial, if caught. At first he had answered reluctantly, but as Williams plied his questions intelligently, the young doctor warmed up and became enthusiastic with a sort of cold intellectual enthusiasm, till at last he held forth like a lecturer, pacing his cell, gesticulating, explaining with admirable exposition how easy murder could be to a man who knew his business. And he did know his business! No man, in these days of inquests and post-mortem examination, would inject poisons that might be found weeks afterwards in the viscera of the victim. No man who knew his business!\n\n\"What is more easy,\" he said, holding the bars with his long white fingers and gazing into the reporter's eyes, \"than to take a disease germ ('cherm' he pronounced it) of typhus, plague, or any cherm you blease, and make so virulent a culture that no medicine in the vorld could counteract it; a really powerful microbe \u2014 and then scratch the skin of your victim with a pin? And who could drace it to you, or accuse you of murder?\"\n\nWilliams, as he watched and heard, was glad the bars were between them; but, even so, something invisible seemed to pass from the prisoner's atmosphere and lay an icy finger on his heart. He had come into contact with every possible kind of crime and criminal, and had interviewed scores of men who, for jealousy, greed, passion or other comprehensible emotion, had killed and paid the penalty of killing. He understood that. Any man with strong passions was a potential killer. But never before bad he met a man who in cold blood, deliberately, under no emotion greater than boredom, would destroy a human life and then boast of his ability to do it. Yet this, he felt sure, was what Hensig had done, and what his vile words shadowed forth and betrayed. Here was something outside humanity, something terrible, monstrous; and it made him shudder. This young doctor, he felt, was a fiend incarnate, a man who thought less of human life than the lives of flies in summer, and who would kill with as steady a hand and cool a brain as though he were performing a common operation in the hospital.\n\nThus the reporter left the prison gates with a vivid impression in his mind, though exactly how his conclusion was reached was more than he could tell. This time the mental brooms failed to act. The horror of it remained.\n\nOn the way out into the street he ran against Policeman Dowling of the ninth precinct, with whom he had been fast friends since the day he wrote a glowing account of Dowling's capture of a \"greengoods-man\", when Dowling had been so drunk that he nearly lost his prisoner altogether. The policeman had never forgotten the good turn; it had promoted him to plain clothes; and he was always ready to give the reporter any news he had.\n\n\"Know of anything good today?\" he asked by way of habit.\n\n\"Bet your bottom dollar I do,\" replied the coarsefaced Irish policeman; \"one of the best, too. I've got Hensig!\"\n\nDowling spoke with pride and affection. He was mighty pleased, too, because his name would be in the paper every day for a week or more, and a big case helped the chances of promotion.\n\nWilliams cursed inwardly. Apparently there was no escape from this man Hensig.\n\n\"Not much of a case, is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"It's a jim dandy, that's what it is,\" replied the other, a little offended. \"Hensig may miss the Chair because the evidence is weak, but he's the worst I've ever met. Why, he'd poison you as soon as spit in your eye, and if he's got a heart at all he keeps it on ice.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"Oh, they talk pretty freely to us sometimes,\" the policeman said, with a significant wink.\n\n\"Can't be used against them at the trial, and it kind o' relieves their mind, I guess. But I'd just as soon not have heard most of what that guy told me \u2014 see? Come in,\" he added, looking round cautiously; \"I'll set 'em up and tell you a bit.\"\n\nWilliams entered the side-door of a saloon with him, but not too willingly.\n\n\"A glarss of Scotch for the Englishman,\" ordered the officer facetiously, \"and I'll take a horse's collar with a dash of peach bitters in it \u2014 just what you'd notice, no more.\" He flung down a half-dollar, and the bar-tender winked and pushed it back to him across the counter.\n\n\"What's yours, Mike?\" he asked him.\n\n\"I'll take a cigar,\" said the bar-tender, pocketing the proffered dime and putting a cheap cigar in his waistcoat pocket, and then moving off to allow the two men elbowroom to talk in.\n\nThey talked in low voices with heads close together for fifteen minutes, and then the reporter set up another round of drinks. The bar-tender took his money. Then they talked a bit longer, Williams rather white about the gills and the policeman very much in earnest.\n\n\"The boys are waiting for me up at Brodie's,\" said Williams at length. \"I must be off.\"\n\n\"That's so,\" said Dowling, straightening up. \"We'll just liquor up again to show there's no ill-feeling. And mind you see me every morning before the case is called. Trial begins tomorrow.\"\n\nThey swallowed their drinks, and again the bartender took a ten-cent piece and pocketed a cheap cigar.\n\n\"Don't print what I've told you, and don't give it up to the other reporters,\" said Dowling as they separated. \"And if you want confirmation jest take the cars and run down to Amityville, Long Island, and you'll find what I've said is O.K. every time.\"\n\nWilliams went back to Steve Brodie's, his thoughts whizzing about him like bees in a swarm. What he had heard increased tenfold his horror of the man. Of course, Dowling may have lied or exaggerated, but he thought not. It was probably all true, and the newspaper offices knew something about it when they sent good men to cover the case. Williams wished to Heaven he had nothing to do with the thing; but meanwhile he could not write what he had heard, and all the other reporters wanted was the result of his interview. That was good for half a column, even expurgated.\n\nHe found the Senator in the middle of a story to Galusha, while Whitey Fife was knocking cocktail glasses off the edge of the table and catching them just before they reached the floor, pretending they were Steve Brodie jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge. He had promised to set up the drinks for the whole bar if he missed, and just as Williams entered a glass smashed to atoms on the stones, and a roar of laughter went up from the room. Five or six men moved up to the bar and took their liquor, Williams included, and soon after Whitey and Galusha went off to get some lunch and sober up, having first arranged to meet Williams later in the evening and get the \"story\" from him.\n\n\"Get much?\" asked the Senator.\n\n\"More than I care about,\" replied the other, and then told his friend the story.\n\nThe Senator listened with intense interest, making occasional notes from time to time, and asking a few questions. Then, when Williams had finished, he said quietly:\n\n\"I guess Dowling's right. Let's jump on a car and go down to Amityville, and see what they think about him down there.\"\n\nAmityville was a scattered village some twenty miles away on Long Island, where Dr. Hensig had lived and practised for the last year or two, and where Mrs. Hensig No. 2 had come to her suspicious death. The neighbours would be sure to have plenty to say, and though it might not prove of great value, it would be certainly interesting. So the two reporters went down there, and interviewed anyone and everyone they could find, from the man in the drug-store to the parson and the undertaker, and the stories they heard would fill a book.\n\n\"Good stuff,\" said the Senator, as they journeyed back to New York on the steamer, \"but nothing we can use, I guess.\" His face was very grave, and he seemed troubled in his mind.\n\n\"Nothing the District Attorney can use either at the trial,\" observed Williams.\n\n\"It's simply a devil \u2014 not a man at all,\" the other continued, as if talking to himself. \"Utterly unmoral! I swear I'll make MacSweater put me to another job.\" For the stories they had heard showed Dr. Hensig as a man who openly boasted that he could kill without detection; that no enemy of his lived long; that, as a doctor, he had, or ought to have, the right over life and death; and that if a person was a nuisance, or a trouble to him, there was no reason he should not put them away, provided he did it without rousing suspicion. Of course he had not shouted these views aloud in the market-place, but he had let people know that he held them, and held them seriously. They had fallen from him in conversation, in unguarded moments, and were clearly the natural expression of his mind and views. And many people in the village evidently had no doubt that he had put them into practice more than once.\n\n\"There's nothing to give up to Whitey or Galusha, though,\" said the Senator decisively, \"and there's hardly anything we can use in our story.\"\n\n\"I don't think I should care to use it anyhow,\" Williams said, with rather a forced laugh.\n\nThe Senator looked round sharply by way of question.\n\n\"Hensig may be acquitted and get out,\" added Williams.\n\n\"Same here. I guess you're dead right,\" he said slowly, and then added more cheerfully, \"Let's go and have dinner in Chinatown, and write our copy together.\"\n\nSo they went down Pell Street, and turned up some dark wooden stairs into a Chinese restaurant, smelling strongly of opium and of cooking not Western. Here at a little table on the sanded floor they ordered chou chop suey and chou om dong in brown bowls, and washed it down with frequent doses of the fiery white whisky, and then moved into a corner and began to cover their paper with pencil writing for the consumption of the great American public in the morning.\n\n\"There's not much to choose between Hensig and that,\" said the Senator, as one of the degraded white women who frequent Chinatown entered the room and sat down at an empty table to order whisky. For, with four thousand Chinamen in the quarter, there is not a single Chinese woman.\n\n\"All the difference in the world,\" replied Williams, following his glance across the smoky room.\n\n\"She's been decent once, and may be again some day, but that damned doctor has never been anything but what he is \u2014 a soulless, intellectual devil. He doesn't belong to humanity at all. I've got a horrid idea that \u2014\"\n\n\"How do you spell 'bacteriology', two r's or one?\" asked the Senator, going on with his scrawly writing of a story that would be read with interest by thousands next day.\n\n\"Two r's and one k,\" laughed the other. And they wrote on for another hour, and then went to turn it into their respective offices in Park Row." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 355", + "text": "The trial of Max Hensig lasted two weeks, for his relations supplied money, and he got good lawyers and all manner of delays. From a newspaper point of view it fell utterly flat, and before the end of the fourth day most of the papers had shunted their big men on to other jobs more worthy of their powers. From Williams's point of view, however, it did not fall flat, and he was kept on it till the end. A reporter, of course, has no right to indulge in editorial remarks, especially when a case is still sub judice, but in New York journalism and the dignity of the law have a standard all their own, and into his daily reports there crept the distinct flavour of his own conclusions. Now that new men, with whom he had no agreement to \"give up\", were covering the story for the other papers, he felt free to use any special knowledge in his possession, and a good deal of what he had heard at Amityville and from officer Dowling somehow managed to creep into his writing.\n\nSomething of the horror and loathing he felt for this doctor also betrayed itself, more by inference than actual statement, and no one who read his daily column could come to any other conclusion than that Hensig was a calculating, cool-headed murderer of the most dangerous type.\n\nThis was a little awkward for the reporter, because it was his duty every morning to interview the prisoner in his cell, and get his views on the conduct of the case in general and on his chances of escaping the Chair in particular.\n\nYet Hensig showed no embarrassment. All the newspapers were supplied to him, and he evidently read every word that Williams wrote. He must have known what the reporter thought about him, at least so far as his guilt or innocence was concerned, but he expressed no opinion as to the fairness of the articles, and talked freely of his chances of ultimate escape. The very way in which he glorified in being the central figure of a matter that bulked so large in the public eye seemed to the reporter an additional proof of the man's perversity. His vanity was immense. He made most careful toilets, appearing every day in a clean shirt and a new tie, and never wearing the same suit on two consecutive days. He noted the descriptions of his personal appearance in the Press, and was quite offended if his clothes and bearing in court were not referred to in detail. And he was unusually delighted and pleased when any of the papers stated that he looked smart and self-possessed, or showed great self-control \u2014 which some of them did.\n\n\"They make a hero of me,\" he said one morning when Williams went to see him as usual before court opened, \"and if I go to the Chair \u2014 which I tink I not do, you know \u2014 you shall see something fine. Berhaps they electrocute a corpse only!\"\n\nAnd then, with dreadful callousness, he began to chaff the reporter about the tone of his articles \u2014 for the first time.\n\n\"I only report what is said and done in court,\" stammered Williams, horribly uncomfortable, \"and I am always ready to write anything you care to say \u2014\" \"I haf no fault to find,\" answered Hensig, his cold blue eyes fixed on the reporter's face through the bars, \"none at all. You tink I haf killed, and you show it in all your sendences. Haf you ever seen a man in the Chair, I ask you?\"\n\nWilliams was obliged to say he had.\n\n\"Ach was! You haf indeed!\" said the doctor coolly. \"It's instantaneous, though,\" the other added quickly, \"and must be quite painless\" This was not exactly what he thought, but what else could he say to the poor devil who might presently be strapped down into it with that horrid band across his shaved head!\n\nHensig laughed, and turned away to walk up and down the narrow cell. Suddenly he made a quick movement and sprang like a panther close up to the bars, pressing his face between them with an expression that was entirely new. Williams started back a pace in spite of himself.\n\n\"There are worse ways of dying than that,\" he said in a low voice, with a diabolical look in his eyes: \"slower ways that are bainful much more. I shall get oudt. I shall not be conficted. I shall get oudt, and then perhaps I come and tell you apout them.\" The hatred in his voice and expression was unmistakable, but almost at once the face changed back to the cold pallor it usually wore, and the extraordinary doctor was laughing again and quietly discussing his lawyers and their good or bad points. After all, then, that skin of indifference was only assumed, and the man really resented bitterly the tone of his articles. He liked the publicity, but was furious with Williams for having come to a conclusion and for letting that conclusion show through his reports.\n\nThe reporter was relieved to get out into the fresh air. He walked briskly up the stone steps to the courtroom, still haunted by the memory of that odious white face pressing between the bars and the dreadful look in the eyes that had come and gone so swiftly. And what did those words mean exactly? Had he heard them right? Were they a threat?\n\n\"There are slower and more painful ways of dying, and if I get out I shall perhaps come and tell you about them.\"\n\nThe work of reporting the evidence helped to chase the disagreeable vision, and the compliments of the city editor on the excellence of his \"story,\" with its suggestion of a possible increase of salary, gave his mind quite a different turn; yet always at the back of his consciousness there remained the vague, unpleasant memory that he had roused the bitter hatred of this man, and, as he thought, of a man who was a veritable monster. There may have been something hypnotic, a little perhaps, in this obsessing and haunting idea of the man's steely wickedness, intellectual and horribly skilful, moving freely through life with something like a god's power and with a list of unproved and unprovable murders behind him. Certainly it impressed his imagination with very vivid force, and he could not think of this doctor, young, with unusual knowledge and out-of-the-way skill, yet utterly unmoral, free to work his will on men and women who displeased him, and almost safe from detection \u2014 he could not think of it all without a shudder and a crawling of the skin. He was exceedingly glad when the last day of the trial was reached and he no longer was obliged to seek the daily interview in the cell, or to sit all day in the crowded court watching the detestable white face of the prisoner in the dock and listening to the web of evidence closing round him, but just failing to hold him tight enough for the Chair. For Hensig was acquitted, though the jury sat up all night to come to a decision, and the final interview Williams had with the man immediately before his release into the street was the pleasantest and yet the most disagreeable of all.\n\n\"I knew I get oudt all right,\" said Hensig with a slight laugh, but without showing the real relief he must have felt. \"No one peliefed me guilty but my vife's family and yourself, Mr. Vulture reporter. I read efery day your repordts. You chumped to a conglusion too quickly, I tink \u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, we write what we're told to write \u2014\"\n\n\"Berhaps some day you write anozzer story, or berhaps you read the story someone else write of your own trial. Then you understand better what you make me feel.\"\n\nWilliams hurried on to ask the doctor for his opinion of the conduct of the trial, and then inquired what his plans were for the future. The answer to the question caused him genuine relief.\n\n\"Ach! I return of course to Chermany,\" he said. \"People here are now afraid of me a liddle. The newspapers haf killed me instead of the Chair. Goot-bye, Mr. Vulture reporter, goot-bye!\"\n\nAnd Williams wrote out his last interview with as great a relief, probably, as Hensig felt when he heard the foreman of the jury utter the words \"Not guilty\"; but the line that gave him most pleasure was the one announcing the intended departure of the acquitted man for Germany." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 356", + "text": "The New York public want sensational reading in their daily life, and they get it, for the newspaper that refused to furnish it would fail in a week, and New York newspaper proprietors do not pose as philanthropists. Horror succeeds horror, and the public interest is never for one instant allowed to faint by the way.\n\nLike any other reporter who betrayed the smallest powers of description, Williams realised this fact with his very first week on the Vulture. His daily work became simply a series of sensational reports of sensational happenings; he lived in a perpetual whirl of exciting arrests, murder trials, cases of blackmail, divorce, forgery, arson, corruption, and every other kind of wickedness imaginable. Each case thrilled him a little less than the preceding one; excess of sensation had simply numbed him; he became, not callous, but irresponsive, and had long since reached the stage when excitement ceases to betray judgment, as with inexperienced reporters it was apt to do.\n\nThe Hensig case, however, for a long time lived in his imagination and haunted him. The bald facts were buried in the police files at Mulberry Street headquarters and in the newspaper office \"morgues\", while the public, thrilled daily by fresh horrors, forgot the very existence of the evil doctor a couple of days after the acquittal of the central figure. But for Williams it was otherwise. The personality of the heartless and calculating murderer \u2014 the intellectual poisoner, as he called him \u2014 had made a deep impression on his imaginations and for many weeks his memory kept him alive as a moving and actual horror in his life. The words he had heard him titter, with their covert threats and ill-concealed animosity, helped, no doubt, to vivify the recollection and to explain why Hensig stayed in his thoughts and haunted his dreams with a persistence that reminded him of his very earliest cases on the paper. With time, however, even Hensig began to fade away into the confused background of piled up memories of prisoners and prison scenes, and at length the memory became so deeply buried that it no longer troubled him at all.\n\nThe summer passed, and Williams came back from his hard-earned holiday of two weeks in the Maine backwoods. New York was at its best, and the thousands who had been forced to stay and face its torrid summer heats were beginning to revive tinder the spell of the brilliant autumn days. Cool sea breezes swept over its burnt streets from the Lower Bay, and across the splendid flood of the Hudson River the woods on the Palisades of New Jersey had turned to crimson and gold. The air was electric, sharp, sparkling, and the life of the city began to pulse anew with its restless and impetuous energy. Bronzed faces from sea and mountains thronged the streets, health and light-heartedness showed in every eye, for autumn in New York wields a potent magic not to be denied, and even the East Side slums, where the unfortunates crowd in their squalid thousands, bad the appearance of having been swept and cleansed. Along the water-fronts especially the powers of sea and sun and scented winds combined to work an irresistible fever in the hearts of all who chafed within their prison walls.\n\nAnd in Williams, perhaps more than in most, there was something that responded vigorously to the influences of hope and cheerfulness everywhere abroad. Fresh with the vigour of his holiday and full of good resolutions for the coming winter he felt released from the evil spell of irregular living, and as he crossed one October morning to Staten Island in the big double-ender ferry-boat, his heart was light, and his eye wandered to the blue waters and the hazy line of woods beyond with feelings of pure gladness and delight.\n\nHe was on his way to Quarantine to meet an incoming liner for the Vulture. A Jew-baiting member of the German Reichstag was coming to deliver a series of lectures in New York on his favourite subject, and the newspapers who deemed him worthy of notice at all were sending him fair warning that his mission would be tolerated perhaps, but not welcomed. The Jews were good citizens and America a \"free country\" and his meetings in the Cooper Union Hall would meet with derision certainly, and violence possibly.\n\nThe assignment was a pleasant one, and Williams had instructions to poke fun at the officious and interfering German, and advise him to return to Bremen by the next steamer without venturing among flying eggs and dead cats on the platform. He entered fully into the spirit of the job and was telling the Quarantine doctor about it as they steamed down the bay in the little tug to meet the huge liner just anchoring inside Sandy Hook.\n\nThe decks of the ship were crowded with passengers watching the arrival of the puffing tug, and just as they drew alongside in the shadow Williams suddenly felt his eyes drawn away from the swinging rope ladder to some point about half-way down the length of the vessel. There, among the intermediate passengers on the lower deck, he saw a face staring at him with fixed intentness. The eyes were bright blue, and the skin, in that row of bronzed passengers, showed remarkably white. At once, and with a violent rush of blood from the heart, he recognised Hensig.\n\nIn a moment everything about him changed: the blue waters of the bay turned black, the light seemed to leave the sun, and all the old sensations of fear and loathing came over him again like the memory of some great pain. He shook himself, and clutched the rope ladder to swing up after the Health Officer, angry, and yet genuinely alarmed at the same time, to realise that the return of this man could so affect him. His interview with the Jew-baiter was of the briefest possible description, and he hurried through to catch the Quarantine tug back to Staten Island, instead of steaming up the bay with the great liner into dock, as the other reporters did. He had caught no second glimpse of the hated German, and he even went so far as to harbour a faint hope that he might have been deceived, and that some trick of resemblance in another face had caused a sort of subjective hallucination. At any rate, the days passed into weeks, and October slipped into November, and there was no recurrence of the distressing vision. Perhaps, after all, it was a stranger only; or, if it was Hensig, then he had forgotten all about the reporter, and his return had no connection necessarily with the idea of revenge.\n\nNone the less, however, Williams felt uneasy. He told his friend Dowling, the policeman.\n\n\"Old news,\" laughed the Irishman. \"Headquarters are keeping an eye on him as a suspect. Berlin wants a man for two murders \u2014 goes by the name of Brunner \u2014 and from their description we think it's this feller Hensig. Nothing certain yet, but we're on his trail. I'm on his trail,\" he added proudly, \"and don't you forget it! I'll let you know anything when the time comes, but mum's the word just now!\" One night, not long after this meeting, Williams and the Senator were covering a big fire on the West Side docks. They were standing on the outskirts of the crowd watching the immense flames that a shouting wind seemed to carry half-way across the river. The surrounding shipping was brilliantly lit up and the roar was magnificent. The Senator, having come out with none of his own, borrowed his friend's overcoat for a moment to protect him from spray and flying cinders while he went inside the fire lines for the latest information obtainable. It was after midnight, and the main story had been telephoned to the office; all they had now to do was to send in the latest details and corrections to be written up at the news desk.\n\n\"I'll wait for you over at the corner!\" shouted Williams, in moving off through a scene of indescribable confusion and taking off his fire badge as he went.\n\nThis conspicuous brass badge, issued to reporters by the Fire Department, gave them the right to pass within the police cordon in the pursuit of information, and at their own risk. Hardly had he unpinned it from his coat when a hand dashed out of the crowd surging up against him and made a determined grab at it. He turned to trace the owner, but at that instant a great lurching of the mob nearly carried him off his feet, and he only just succeeded in seeing the arm withdrawn, having failed of its object, before he was landed with a violent push upon the pavement he had been aiming for.\n\nThe incident did not strike him as particularly odd, for in such a crowd there are many who covet the privilege of getting closer to the blaze. He simply laughed and put the badge safely in his pocket, and then stood to watch the dying flames until his friend came to join him with the latest details.\n\nYet, though time was pressing and the Senator had little enough to do, it was fully half an hour before he came lumbering up through the darkness. Williams recognised him some distance away by the check ulster he wore \u2014 his own.\n\nBut was it the Senator, after all? The figure moved oddly and with a limp, as though injured. A few feet off it stopped and peered at Williams through the darkness.\n\n\"That you, Williams?\" asked a gruff voice.\n\n\"I thought you were someone else for a moment,\" answered the reporter, relieved to recognise his friend, and moving forward to meet him. \"But what's wrong? Are you hurt?\"\n\nThe Senator looked ghastly in the lurid glow of the fire. His face was white, and there was a little trickle of blood on the forehead.\n\n\"Some fellow nearly did for me,\" he said; \"deliberately pushed me clean off the edge of the dock. If I hadn't fallen on to a broken pile and found a boat, I'd have been drowned sure as God made little apples. Think I know who it was, too. Think! I mean I know, because I saw his damned white face and heard what he said.\"\n\n\"Who in the world was it? What did he want?\" stammered the other.\n\nThe Senator took his arm, and lurched into the saloon behind them for some brandy. As he did so he kept looking over his shoulder.\n\n\"Quicker we're off from this dirty neighbourhood, the better,\" he said.\n\nThen he turned to Williams, looking oddly at him over the glass, and answering his questions.\n\n\"Who was it? \u2014 why, it was Hensig! And what did he want? \u2014 well, he wanted you!\"\n\n\"Me! Hensig!\" gasped the other.\n\n\"Guess he mistook me for you,\" went on the Senator, looking behind him at the door. \"The crowd was so thick I cut across by the edge of the dock. It was quite dark. There wasn't a soul near me. I was running. Suddenly what I thought was a stump got up in front of me, and, Gee whiz, man! I tell you it was Hensig, or I'm a drunken Dutchman. I looked bang into his face. 'Good-pye, Mr. Vulture reporter,' he said, with a damned laugh, and gave me a push that sent me backwards clean over the edge.\"\n\nThe Senator paused for breath, and to empty his second glass.\n\n\"My overcoat!\" exclaimed Williams faintly.\n\n\"Oh, he'd been following you right enough, I guess.\"\n\nThe Senator was not really injured, and the two men walked back towards Broadway to find a telephone, passing through a region of dimly-lighted streets known as Little Africa, where the negroes lived, and where it was safer to keep the middle of the road, thus avoiding sundry dark alley-ways opening off the side. They talked hard all the way.\n\n\"He's after you, no doubt,\" repeated the Senator. \"I guess he never forgot your report of his trial. Better keep your eye peeled!\" he added with a laugh.\n\nBut Williams didn't feel a bit inclined to laugh, and the thought that it certainly was Hensig he had seen on the steamer, and that he was following him so closely as to mark his check ulster and make an attempt on his life, made him feel horribly uncomfortable, to say the least. To be stalked by such a man was terrible. To realise that he was marked down by that white-faced, cruel wretch, merciless and implacable, skilled in the manifold ways of killing by stealth \u2014 that somewhere in the crowds of the great city he was watched and waited for, hunted, observed: here was an obsession really to torment and become dangerous. Those light-blue eyes, that keen intelligence, that mind charged with revenge, had been watching him ever since the trial, even from across the sea. The idea terrified him. It brought death into his thoughts for the first time with a vivid sense of nearness and reality \u2014 far greater than anything he had experienced when watching others die.\n\nThat night, in his dingy little room in the East Nineteenth Street boarding-house, Williams went to bed in a blue funk, and for days afterwards he went about his business in a continuation of the same blue funk. It was useless to deny it. He kept his eyes everywhere, thinking he was being watched and followed. A new face in the office, at the boarding-house table, or anywhere on his usual beat, made him jump. His daily work was haunted; his dreams were all nightmares; he forgot all his good resolutions, and plunged into the old indulgences that helped him to forget his distress. It took twice as much liquor to make him jolly, and four times as much to make him reckless. Not that he really was a drunkard, or cared to drink for its own sake, but he moved in a thirsty world of reporters, policemen, reckless and loose-living men and women, whose form of greeting was \"What'll you take?\" and method of reproach \"Oh, he's sworn off!\" Only now he was more careful how much he took, counting the cocktails and fizzes poured into him during the course of his day's work, and was anxious never to lose control of himself. He must be on the watch. He changed his eating and drinking haunts, and altered any habits that could give a clue to the devil on his trail. He even went so far as to change his boardinghouse. His emotion \u2014 the emotion of fear \u2014 changed everything. It tinged the outer world with gloom, draping it in darker colours, stealing something from the sunlight, reducing enthusiasm, and acting as a heavy drag, as it were, upon all the normal functions of life.\n\nThe effect upon his imagination, already diseased by alcohol and drugs, was, of course, exceedingly strong. The doctor's words about developing a germ until it became too powerful to be touched by any medicine, and then letting it into the victim's system by means of a pin-scratch \u2014 this possessed him more than anything else. The idea dominated his thoughts; it seemed so clever, so cruel, so devilish. The \"accident\" at the fire had been, of course, a real accident, conceived on the spur of the moment \u2014 the result of a chance meeting and a foolish mistake. Hensig had no need to resort to such clumsy methods. When the right moment came he would adopt a far simpler, safer plan.\n\nFinally, he became so obsessed by the idea that Hensig was following him, waiting for his opportunity, that one day he told the news editor the whole story. His nerves were so shaken that he could not do his work properly.\n\n\"That's a good story. Make two hundred of it,\" said the editor at once. \"Fake the name, of course. Mustn't mention Hensig, or there'll be a libel suit.\" But Williams was in earnest, and insisted so forcibly that Treherne, though busy as ever, took him aside into his room with the glass door.\n\n\"Now, see here, Williams, you're drinking too much,\" he said; \"that's about the size of it. Steady up a bit on the wash, and Hensig's face will disappear.\"\n\nHe spoke kindly, but sharply. He was young himself, awfully keen, with much knowledge of human nature and a rare \"nose for news\". He understood the abilities of his small army of men with intuitive judgment. That they drank was nothing to him, provided they did their work. Everybody in that world drank, and the man who didn't was hooked upon with suspicion.\n\nWilliams explained rather savagely that the face was no mere symptom of delirium tremens and the editor spared him another two minutes before rushing out to tackle the crowd of men waiting for him at the news desk.\n\n\"That so? You don't say!\" he asked, with more interest. \"Well, I guess Hensig's simply trying to razzle-dazzle you. You tried to kill him by your reports, and he wants to scare you by way of revenge. But he'll never dare do anything. Throw him a good bluff, and he'll give in like a baby. Everything's pretence in this world. But I rather like the idea of the germs. That's original!\"\n\nWilliams, a little angry at the other's flippancy, told the story of the Senator's adventure and the changed overcoat.\n\n\"May be, may be,\" replied the hurried editor; \"but the Senator drinks Chinese whisky, and a man who does that might imagine anything on God's earth. Take a tip, Williams, from an old hand, and let up a bit on the liquor. Drop cocktails and keep to straight whisky, and never drink on an empty stomach. Above all, don't mix!\"\n\nHe gave him a keen look and was off. \"Next time you see this German,\" cried Treherne from the door, \"go up and ask him for an interview on what it feels like to escape from the Chair \u2014 just to show him you don't care a red cent. Talk about having him watched and followed \u2014 suspected man \u2014 and all that sort of flim-flam. Pretend to warn him. It'll turn the tables and make him digest a bit. See?\" Williams sauntered out into the street to report a meeting of the Rapid Transit Commissioners, and the first person he met as he ran down the office steps was \u2014 Max Hensig.\n\nBefore he could stop, or swerve aside, they were face to face. His head swam for a moment and he began to tremble. Then some measure of self-possession returned, and he tried instinctively to act on the editor's advice. No other plan was ready, so he drew on the last force that had occupied his mind. It was that \u2014 or running.\n\nHensig, he noticed, looked prosperous; he wore a fur overcoat and cap. His face was whiter than ever, and his blue eyes burned like coals.\n\n\"Why! Dr. Hensig, you're back in New York! \"he exclaimed. \"When did you arrive? I'm glad \u2014 I suppose \u2014 I mean \u2014 er \u2014 will you come and have a drink?\" he concluded desperately. It was very foolish, but for the life of him he could think of nothing else to say. And the last thing in the world he wished was that his enemy should know that he was afraid.\n\n\"I tink not, Mr. Vulture reporder, tanks,\" he answered coolly; \"but I sit py and vatch you drink.\"\n\nHis self-possession was as perfect, as it always was. But Williams, more himself now, seized on the refusal and moved on, saying something about having a meeting to go to.\n\n\"I walk a liddle way with you, berhaps,\" Hensig said, following him down the pavement.\n\nIt was impossible to prevent him, and they started side by side across City Hall Park towards Broadway. It was after four o'clock: the dusk was falling: the little park was thronged with people walking in all directions, everyone in a terrific hurry as usual. Only Hensig seemed calm and unmoved among that racing, tearing life about them. He carried an atmosphere of ice about with him: it was his voice and manner that produced this impression; his mind was alert, watchful, determined, always sure of itself. Williams wanted to run. He reviewed swiftly in his mind a dozen ways of getting rid of him quickly, yet knowing well they were all futile. He put his hands in his overcoat pockets \u2014 the check ulster \u2014 and watched sideways every movement of his companion.\n\n\"Living in New York again, aren't you?\" he began.\n\n\"Not as a doctor any more,\" was the reply. \" I now teach and study. Also I write sciendific hooks a liddle \u2014\"\n\n\"What about?\"\n\n\"Cherms,\" said the other, looking at him and laughing. \"Disease cherms, their culture and development.\" He put the accent on the \"op\".\n\nWilliams walked more quickly. With a great effort he tried to put Treherne's advice into practice. \"You care to give me an interview any time \u2014 on your special subjects?\" he asked, as naturally as he could.\n\n\"Oh yes; with much bleasure. I lif in Harlem now, if you will call von day \u2014\"\n\n\"Our office is best,\" interrupted the reporter. \"Paper, desks, library, all handy for use, you know.\"\n\n\"If you're afraid \u2014\" began Hensig. Then, without finishing the sentence, he added with a laugh, \"I haf no arsenic there. You not tink me any more a pungling boisoner? You haf changed your mind about all dat?\"\n\nWilliams felt his flesh beginning to creep. How could he speak of such a matter! His own wife, too!\n\nHe turned quickly and faced him, standing still for a moment so that the throng of people deflected into two streams past them. He felt it absolutely imperative upon him to say something that should convince the German he was not afraid.\n\n\"I suppose you are aware, Dr. Hensig, that the police know you have returned, and that you are being watched probably?\" he said in a low voice, forcing himself to meet the odious blue eyes.\n\n\"And why not, bray?\" he asked imperturbably.\n\n\"They may suspect something \u2014\"\n\n\"Susbected \u2014 already again? Ach was!\" said the German.\n\n\"I only wished to warn you \u2014\" stammered Williams, who always found it difficult to remain self-possessed under the other's dreadful stare.\n\n\"No boliceman see what I do \u2014 or catch me again,\" he laughed quite horribly. \"But I tank you all the same.\"\n\nWilliams turned to catch a Broadway car going at full speed. He could not stand another minute with this man, who affected him so disagreeably.\n\n\"I call at the office one day to gif you interview!\" Hensig shouted as he dashed off, and the next minute he was swallowed up in the crowd, and Williams, with mixed feelings and a strange inner trembling, went to cover the meeting of the Rapid Transit Board.\n\nBut, while he reported the proceedings mechanically, his mind was busy with quite other thoughts. Hensig was at his side the whole time. He felt quite sure, however unlikely it seemed, that there was no fancy in his fears, and that he had judged the German correctly. Hensig hated him, and would put him out of the way if he could. He would do it in such a way that detection would be almost impossible. He would not shoot or poison in the ordinary way, or resort to any clumsy method. He would simply follow, watch, wait his opportunity, and then act with utter callousness and remorseless determination. And Williams already felt pretty certain of the means that would be employed: \"Cherms!\"\n\nThis meant proximity. He must watch everyone who came close to him in trains, cars, restaurants \u2014 anywhere and everywhere. It could be done in a second: only a slight scratch would be necessary, and the disease would be in his blood with such strength that the chances of recovery would be slight. And what could he do? He could not have Hensig watched or arrested. He had no story to tell to a magistrate, or to the police, for no one would listen to such a tale. And, if he were stricken down by sudden illness, what was more likely than to say he had caught the fever in the ordinary course of his work, since he was always frequenting noisome dens and the haunts of the very poor, the foreign and filthy slums of the East Side, and the hospitals, morgues, and cells of all sorts and conditions of men? No; it was a disagreeable situation, and Williams, young, shaken in nerve, and easily impressionable as he was, could not prevent its obsession of his mind and imagination.\n\n\"If I get suddenly ill,\" he told the Senator, his only friend in the whole city, \"and send for you, look carefully for a scratch on my body. Tell Dowling, and tell the doctor the story.\"\n\n\"You think Hensig goes about with a little bottle of plague germs in his vest pockets\" laughed the other reporter, ready to scratch you with a pin?\"\n\n\"Some damned scheme like that, I'm sure.\" \"Nothing could be proved anyway. He wouldn't keep the evidence in his pocket till he was arrested, would he?\"\n\nDuring the next week or two Williams ran against Hensig twice \u2014 accidentally. The first time it happened just outside his own boarding-house \u2014 the new one. Hensig had his foot on the stone steps as if just about to come up, but quick as a flash he turned his face away and moved on down the Street. This was about eight o'clock in the evening, and the hall light fell through the opened door upon his face. The second time it was not so clear: the reporter was covering a case in the courts, a case of suspicious death in which a woman was chief prisoner, and he thought he saw the doctor's white visage watching him from among the crowd at the back of the court-room. When he looked a second time, however, the face had disappeared, and there was no sign afterwards of its owner in the lobby or corridor.\n\nThat same day he met Dowling in the building; he was promoted now, and was always in plain clothes. The detective drew him aside into a corner. The talk at once turned upon the German.\n\n\"We're watching him too,\" he said. \"Nothing you can use yet, but he's changed his name again, and never stops at the same address for more than a week or two. I guess he's Brunner right enough, the man Berlin's looking for. He's a holy terror if ever there was one.\"\n\nDowling was happy as a schoolboy to be in touch with such a promising case.\n\n\"What's he up to now in particular?\" asked the other.\n\n\"Something pretty black,\" said the detective. \"But I can't tell you yet awhile. He calls himself Schmidt now, and he's dropped the 'Doctor'. We may take him any day \u2014 just waiting for advices from Germany.\"\n\nWilliams told his story of the overcoat adventure with the Senator, and his belief that Hensig was waiting for a suitable opportunity to catch him alone.\n\n\"That's dead likely too,\" said Dowling, and added carelessly, \"I guess we'll have to make some kind of a case against him anyway, just to get him out of the way. He's dangerous to be around huntin' on the loose.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 357", + "text": "So gradual sometimes are the approaches of fear that the processes by which it takes possession of a man's soul are often too insidious to be recognised, much less to be dealt with, until their object has been finally accomplished and the victim has lost the power to act. And by this time the reporter, who had again plunged into excess, felt so nerveless that, if he met Hensig face to face, he could not answer for what he might do. He might assault his tormentor violently \u2014 one result of terror \u2014 or he might find himself powerless to do anything at all but yield, like a bird fascinated before a snake.\n\nHe was always thinking now of the moment when they would meet, and of what would happen; for he was just as certain that they must meet eventually, and that Hensig would try to kill him, as that his next birthday would find him twenty-five years old. That meeting, he well knew, could be delayed only, not prevented, and his changing again to another boarding-house, or moving altogether to a different city, could only postpone the final accounting between them. It was bound to come.\n\nA reporter on a New York newspaper has one day in seven to himself. Williams's day off was Monday, and he was always glad when it came. Sunday was especially arduous for him, because in addition to the unsatisfactory nature of the day's assignments, involving private interviewing which the citizens pretended to resent on their day of rest, he had the task in the evening of reporting a difficult sermon in a Brooklyn church. Having only a column and a half at his disposal, he had to condense as he went along, and the speaker was so rapid, and so fond of lengthy quotations, that the reporter found his shorthand only just equal to the task. It was usually after halfpast nine o'clock when he left the church, and there was still the labour of transcribing his notes in the office against time.\n\nThe Sunday following the glimpse of his tormentor's face in the court-room he was busily condensing the wearisome periods of the preacher. Sitting at a little table immediately under the pulpit, when he glanced up during a brief pause and let his eye wander over the congregation and up to the crowded galleries. Nothing was farther at the moment from his much-occupied brain than the doctor of Amityville, and it was such an unexpected shock to encounter his fixed stare up there among the occupants of the front row, watching him with an evil smile, that his senses temporarily deserted him. The next sentence of the preacher was wholly lost, and his shorthand during the brief remainder of the sermon was quite illegible, he found, when he came to transcribe it at the office.\n\nIt was after one o'clock in the morning when he finished, and he went out feeling exhausted and rather shaky. In the all-night drug-store at the corner he indulged accordingly in several more glasses of whisky than usual, and talked a long time with the man who guarded the back room and served liquor to the few who knew the pass-word, since the shop had really no licence at all. The true reason for this delay he recognised quite plainly: he was afraid of the journey home along the dark and emptying streets. The lower end of New York is practically deserted after ten o'clock: it has no residences, no theatres, no caf\u00e9s, and only a few travellers from late ferries share it with reporters, a sprinkling of policemen, and the ubiquitous ne'er-do-wells who haunt the saloon doors. The newspaper world of Park Row was, of course, alive with light and movement, but once outside that narrow zone and the night descended with an effect of general darkness.\n\nWilliams thought of spending three dollars on a cab, but dismissed the idea because of its extravagance. Presently Galusha Owens came in \u2014 too drunk to be of any use, though, as a companion. Besides, he lived in Harlem, which was miles beyond Nineteenth Street, where Williams had to go. He took another rye whisky \u2014 his fourth \u2014 and looked cautiously through the coloured glass windows into the Street. No one was visible. Then he screwed up his nerves another twist or two, and made a bolt for it, taking the steps in a sort of flying leap \u2014 and running full tilt into a man whose figure seemed almost to have risen out of the very pavement.\n\nHe gave a cry and raised his fists to strike.\n\n\"Where's your hurry?\" laughed a familiar voice. \"Is the Prince of Wales dead?\" It was the Senator, most welcome of all possible appearances.\n\n\"Come in and have a horn,\" said Williams, \"and then I'll walk home with you.\" He was immensely glad to see him, for only a few streets separated their respective boarding-houses.\n\n\"But he'd never sit out a long sermon just for the pleasure of watching you,\" observed the Senator after hearing his friend's excited account.\n\n\"That man'll take any trouble in the world to gain his end,\" said the other with conviction. \"He's making a study of all my movements and habits. He's not the sort to take chances when it's a matter of life and death. I'll bet he's not far away at this moment.\"\n\n\"Rats!\" exclaimed the Senator, laughing in rather a forced way. \"You're getting the jumps with your Hensig and death. Have another rye.\" They finished their drinks and went out together, crossing City Hall Park diagonally towards Broadway, and then turning north. They crossed Canal and Grand Streets, deserted and badly lighted. Only a few drunken loiterers passed them. Occasionally a policeman on the corner, always close to the side-door of a saloon, of course, recognised one or other of them and called good night. Otherwise there was no one, and they seemed to have this part of Manhattan Island pretty well to themselves. The presence of the Senator, ever cheery and kind, keeping close to his friend all the way, the effect of the half-dozen whiskies, and the sight of the guardians of the law, combined to raise the reporter's spirits somewhat: and when they reached Fourteenth Street, with its better light and greater traffic, and saw Union Square lying just beyond, close to his own street, he felt a distinct increase of courage and no objection to going on alone. \"Good night!\" cried the Senator cheerily. \"Get home safe; I turn off here anyway.\" He hesitated a moment before turning down the street, and then added, \"You feel O.K., don't you?\" \"You may get double rates for an exclusive bit of news if you come on and see me assaulted,\" Williams replied, laughing aloud, and then waiting to see the last of his friend. But the moment the Senator was gone the laughter disappeared. He went on alone, crossing the square among the trees and walking very quickly.\n\nOnce or twice he turned to see if anybody were following him, and his eyes scanned carefully as he passed every occupant of the park benches where a certain number of homeless loafers always find their night's lodging. But there was nothing apparently to cause him alarm, and in a few minutes more he would be safe in the little back bedroom of his own house. Over the way he saw the lights of Burbacher's saloon, where respectable Germans drank Rhine wine and played chess till all hours. He thought of going in for a night-cap, hesitating for a moment, but finally going on. When he got to the end of the square, however, and saw the dark opening of East Eighteenth Street, he thought after all he would go back and have another drink. He hovered for a moment on the kerbstone and then turned; his will often slipped a cog now in this way.\n\nIt was only when he was on his way back that he realised the truth: that his real reason for turning back and avoiding the dark open mouth of the street was because he was afraid of something its shadows might conceal. This dawned upon him quite suddenly. If there had been a light at the corner of the street he would never have turned back at all. And as this passed through his mind, already somewhat fuddled with what he had drunk, he became aware that the figure of a man had slipped forward out of the dark space he had just refused to enter, and was following him down the street. The man was pressing, too, close into the houses, using any protection of shadow or railing that would enable him to move unseen.\n\nBut the moment Williams entered the bright section of pavement opposite the wine-room windows he knew that this man had come close up behind him, with a little silent run, and he turned at once to face him. He saw a slim man with dark hair and blue eyes, and recognised him instantly.\n\n\"It's very late to be coming home,\" said the man at once. \"I thought I recognised my reporder friend from the Vulture.\" These were the actual words, and the voice was meant to be pleasant, but what Williams thought he heard, spoken in tones of ice, was something like, \"At last I've caught you! You are in a state of collapse nervously, and you are exhausted. I can do what I please with you.\" For the face and the voice were those of Hensig the Tormentor, and the dyed hair only served to emphasise rather grotesquely the man's features and make the pallor of the skin greater by contrast.\n\nHis first instinct was to turn and run, his second to fly at the man and strike him. A terror beyond death seized him. A pistol held to his head, or a waving bludgeon, he could easily have faced; but this odious creature, slim, limp, and white of face, with his terrible suggestion of cruelty, literally appalled him so that he could think of nothing intelligent to do or to say. This accurate knowledge of his movements, too, added to his distress \u2014 this waiting for him at night when he was tired and foolish from excess. At that moment he knew all the sensations of the criminal a few hours before his execution: the bursts of hysterical terror, the inability to realise his position, to hold his thoughts steady, the helplessness of it all. Yet, in the end, the reporter heard his own voice speaking with a rather weak and unnatural kind of tone and accompanied by a gulp of forced laughter \u2014 heard himself stammering the ever-ready formula: \"I was going to have a drink before turning in \u2014 will you join me?\"\n\nThe invitation, he realised afterwards, was prompted by the one fact that stood forth clearly in his mind at the moment \u2014 the thought, namely, that whatever he did or said, he must never let Hensig for one instant imagine that he felt afraid and was so helpless a victim.\n\nSide by side they moved down the street, for Hensig had acquiesced in the suggestion, and Williams already felt dazed by the strong, persistent will of his companion. His thoughts seemed to be flying about somewhere outside his brain, beyond control, scattering wildly. He could think of nothing further to say, and had the smallest diversion furnished the opportunity he would have turned and run for his life through the deserted streets.\n\n\"A glass of lager,\" he heard the German say, \"I take berhaps that with you. You know me in spite of \u2014\" he added, indicating by a movement the changed colour of his hair and moustache. \"Also, I gif you now the interview you asked for, if you like.\"\n\nThe reporter agreed feebly, finding nothing adequate to reply. He turned helplessly and looked into his face with something of the sensations a bird may feel when it runs at last straight into the jaws of the reptile that has fascinated it. The fear of weeks settled down upon him, focussing about his heart. It was, of course, an effect of hypnotism, he remembered thinking vaguely through the befuddlement of his drink \u2014 this culminating effect of an evil and remorseless personality acting upon one that was diseased and extra receptive. And while he made the suggestion and heard the other's acceptance of it, he knew perfectly well that he was falling in with the plan of the doctor's own making, a plan that would end in an assault upon his person, perhaps a technical assault only \u2014 a mere touch \u2014 still, an assault that would be at the same time an attempt at murder. The alcohol buzzed in his ears. He felt strangely powerless. He walked steadily to his doom, side by side with his executioner.\n\nAny attempt to analyse the psychology of the situation was utterly beyond him. But, amid the whirl of emotion and the excitement of the whisky, he dimly grasped the importance of two fundamental things.\n\nAnd the first was that, though he was now muddled and frantic, yet a moment would come when his will would be capable of one supreme effort to escape, and that therefore it would be wiser for the present to waste no atom of volition on temporary half-measures. He would play dead dog. The fear that now paralysed him would accumulate till it reached the point of saturation: that would be the time to strike for his life. For just as the coward may reach a stage where he is capable of a sort of frenzied heroism that no ordinarily brave man could compass, so the victim of fear, at a point varying with his balance of imagination and physical vigour, will reach a state where fear leaves him and he becomes numb to its effect from sheer excess of feeling it. It is the point of saturation. He may then turn suddenly calm and act with a judgment and precision that simply bewilder the object of the attack. It is, of course, the inevitable swing of the pendulum, the law of equal action and reaction.\n\nHazily, tipsily perhaps, Williams was conscious of this potential power deep within him, below the superficial layers of smaller emotions \u2014 could he but be sufficiently terrified to reach it and bring it to the surface where it must result in action.\n\nAnd, as a consequence of this foresight of his sober subliminal self, he offered no opposition to the least suggestion of his tormentor, but made up his mind instinctively to agree to all that he proposed. Thus he lost no atom of the force he might eventually call upon, by friction over details which in any case he would yield in the end. And at the same tune he felt intuitively that his utter weakness might even deceive his enemy a little and increase the chances of his single effort to escape when the right moment arrived.\n\nThat Williams was able to \"imagine\" this true psychology, yet wholly unable to analyse it, simply showed that on occasion he could be psychically active. His deeper subliminal self, stirred by the alcohol and the stress of emotion, was guiding him, and would continue to guide him in proportion as he let his fuddled normal self slip into the background without attempt to interfere.\n\nAnd the second fundamental thing he grasped \u2014 due even more than the first to psychic intuition \u2014 was the certainty that he could drink more, up to a certain point, with distinct advantage to his power and lucidity \u2014 but up to a given point only. After that would come unconsciousness, a single sip too much and he would cross the frontier \u2014 a very narrow one. It was as though he knew intuitively that \"the drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness\". At present he was only fuddled and fearful, but additional stimulant would inhibit the effects of the other emotions, give him unbounded confidence, clarify his judgment and increase his capacity to a stage far beyond the normal. Only \u2014 he must stop in time.\n\nHis chances of escape, therefore, so far as he could understand, depended on these two things: he must drink till he became self-confident and arrived at the abnormally clear-minded stage of drunkenness; and he must wait for the moment when Hensig had so filled him up with fear that he no longer could react to it. Then would be the time to strike. Then his will would be free and have judgment behind it. These were the two things standing up clearly somewhere behind that great confused turmoil of mingled fear and alcohol.\n\nThus for the moment, though with scattered forces and rather wildly feeble thoughts, he moved down the street beside the man who hated him and meant to kill him. He had no purpose at all but to agree and to wait. Any attempt he made now could end only in failure.\n\nThey talked a little as they went, the German calm, chatting as though he were merely an agreeable acquaintance, but behaving with the obvious knowledge that he held his victim secure, and that his struggles would prove simply rather amusing. He even laughed about his dyed hair, saying by way of explanation that he had done it to please a woman who told him it would make him look younger. Williams knew this was a lie, and that the police had more to do with the change than a woman; but the man's vanity showed throuogh the explanation, and was a vivid little self-revelation.\n\nHe objected to entering Burbacher's, saying that he (Burbacher) paid no blackmail to the police, and might be raided for keeping open after hours.\n\n\"I know a nice quiet blace on T'ird Avenue. We go there,\" he said.\n\nWilliams, walking unsteadily and shaking inwardly, still groping, too, feebly after a way of escape, turned down the side street with him. He thought of the men he had watched walking down the short corridor from the cell to the \"Chair\" at Sing Sing, and wondered if they felt as he did. It was like going to his own execution.\n\n\"I haf a new disgovery in bacteriology \u2014 in cherms,\" the doctor went on, \"and it will make me famous, for it is very imbortant. I gif it you egsclusive for the Vulture, as you are a friend.\" He became technical, and the reporter's mind lost itself among such words as \"toxins\", \"alkaloids\", and the like. But he realised clearly enough that Hensig was playing with him and felt absolutely sure of his victim. When he lurched badly, as he did more than once, the German took his arm by way of support, and at the vile touch of the man it was all Williams could do not to scream or strike out blindly.\n\nThey turned up Third Avenue and stopped at the side door of a cheap saloon. He noticed the name of Schumacher over the porch, but all lights were out except a feeble glow that came through the glass fanlight. A man pushed his face cautiously round the half-opened door, and after a brief examination let them in with a whispered remark to be quiet. It was the usual formula of the Tammany saloonkeeper, who paid so much a month to the police to be allowed to keep open all night, provided there was no noise or fighting. It was now well after one o'clock in the morning, and the streets were deserted.\n\nThe reporter was quite at home in the sort of place they had entered; otherwise the sinister aspect of a drinking \"joint\" after hours, with its gloom and general air of suspicion, might have caused him some extra alarm. A dozen men, unpleasant of countenance, were standing at the bar, where a single lamp gave just enough light to enable them to see their glasses. The bar-tender gave Hensig a swift glance of recognition as they walked along the sanded floor.\n\n\"Come,\" whispered the German; \"we go to the back room. I know the bass-word,\" he laughed, leading the way.\n\nThey walked to the far end of the bar and opened a door into a brightly lit room with about a dozen tables in it, at most of which men sat drinking with highly painted women, talking loudly, quarrelling, singing, and the air thick with smoke. No one took any notice of them as they went down the room to a table in the corner farthest from the door \u2014 Hensig chose it; and when the single waiter came up with \"Was nehmen die Herren?\" and a moment later brought the rye whisky they both asked for, Williams swallowed his own without the \"chaser\" of soda water, and ordered another on the spot.\n\n\"It'sh awfully watered,\" he said rather thickly to his companion, \"and I'm tired.\"\n\n\"Cocaine, under the circumstances, would help you quicker, berhaps!\" replied the German with an expression of amusement. Good God! Was there nothing about him the man had not found out? He must have been shadowing him for days; it was at least a week since Williams had been to the First Avenue drug store to get the wicked bottle refilled. Had he been on his trail every night when he left the office to go home? This idea of remorseless persistence made him shudder.\n\n\"Then we finish quickly if you are tired,\" the doctor continued, \"and tomorrow you can show me your repordt for gorrections if you make any misdakes berhaps. I gif you the address to-night pefore we leave.\"\n\nThe increased ugliness of his speech and accent betrayed his growing excitement. Williams drank his whisky, again without water, and called for yet another, clinking glasses with the murderer opposite, and swallowing half of this last glass, too, while Hensig merely tasted his own, looking straight at him over the performance with his evil eyes.\n\n\"I can write shorthand,\" began the reporter, trying to appear at his ease.\n\n\"Ach, I know, of course.\"\n\nThere was a mirror behind the table, and he took a quick glance round the room while the other began searching in his coat pocket for the papers he had with him. Williams lost no single detail of his movements, but at the same time managed swiftly to get the \"note\" of the other occupants of the tables.\n\nDegraded and besotted faces he saw, almost without exception, and not one to whom he could appeal for help with any prospect of success. It was a further shock, too, to realise that he preferred the more or less bestial countenances round him to the intellectual and ascetic face opposite. They were at least human, whereas he was something quite outside the pale; and this preference for the low creatures, otherwise loathsome to him, brought his mind by sharp contrast to a new and vivid realisation of the personality before him. He gulped down his drink, and again ordered it to be refilled.\n\nBut meanwhile the alcohol was beginning to key him up out of the dazed and negative state into which his first libations and his accumulations of fear had plunged him. His brain became a shade clearer. There was even a faint stirring of the will. He had already drunk enough under normal circumstances to be simply reeling, but to-night the emotion of fear inhibited the effects of the alcohol, keeping him singularly steady. Provided he did not exceed a given point, he could go on drinking till he reached the moment of high power when he could combine all his forces into the single consummate act of cleverly calculated escape. If he missed this psychological moment he would collapse.\n\nA sudden crash made him jump. It was behind him against the other wall. In the mirror he saw that a middle-aged man had lost his balance and fallen off his chair, foolishly intoxicated, and that two women were ostensibly trying to lift him up, but really were going swiftly through his pockets as he lay in a heap on the floor. A big man who had been asleep the whole evening in the corner stopped snoring and woke up to look and laugh, but no one interfered. A man must take care of himself in such a place and with such company, or accept the consequences. The big man composed himself again for sleep, sipping his glass a little first, and the noise of the room continued as before. It was a case of \"knock-out drops\" in the whisky, put in by the women, however, rather than by the saloon-keeper. Williams remembered thinking he had nothing to fear of that kind. Hensig's method would be far more subtle and clever \u2014 cherms! A scratch with a pin and a germ!\n\n\"I haf zome notes here of my disgovery,\" he went on, smiling significantly at the interruption, and taking some papers out of an inner pocket. \"But they are written in Cherman, so I dranslate for you. You haf paper and benzil?\"\n\nThe reporter produced the sheaf of office copy paper he always carried about with him, and prepared to write. The rattle of the elevated trains outside and the noisy buzz of drunken conversation inside formed the background against which he heard the German's steely insistent voice going on ceaselessly with the \"dranslation and egsplanation\".\n\nFrom time to time people left the room, and new customers reeled in. When the clatter of incipient fighting and smashed glasses became too loud, Hensig waited till it was quiet again. He watched every new arrival keenly. They were very few now, for the night had passed into early morning and the room was gradually emptying. The waiter took snatches of sleep in his chair by the door; the big man still snored heavily in the angle of the wall and window. When he was the only one left, the proprietor would certainly close up. He had not ordered a drink for an hour at least. Williams, however, drank on steadily, always aiming at the point when he would be at the top of his power, full of confidence and decision. That moment was undoubtedly coming nearer all the time. Yes, but so was the moment Hensig was waiting for. He, too, felt absolutely confident, encouraging his companion to drink more, and watching his gradual collapse with unmasked glee. He betrayed his gloating quite plainly now: he held his victim too securely to feel anxious; when the big man reeled out they would be alone for a brief minute or two unobserved \u2014 and meanwhile he allowed himself to become a little too careless from over-confidence. And Williams noted that too.\n\nFor slowly the will of the reporter began to assert itself, and with this increase of intelligence he of course appreciated his awful position more keenly, and therefore, felt more fear. The two main things he was waiting for were coming perceptibly within reach: to reach the saturation point of terror and the culminating moment of the alcohol. Then, action and escape!\n\nGradually, thus, as he listened and wrote, he passed from the stage of stupid, negative terror into that of active, positive terror. The alcohol kept driving hotly at those hidden centres of imagination within, which, once touched, begin to reveal: in other words, he became observant, critical, alert. Swiftly the power grew. His lucidity increased till he became almost conscious of the workings of the other man's mind, and it was like sitting opposite a clock whose wheels and needles he could just hear clicking. His eyes seemed to spread their power of vision all over his skin; he could see what was going on without actually looking. In the same way he heard all that passed in the room without turning his head. Every moment he became clearer in mind. He almost touched clairvoyance. The presentiment earlier in the evening that this stage would come was at last being actually fulfilled.\n\nFrom time to time he sipped his whisky, but more cautiously than at first, for he knew that this keen psychical activity was the forerunner of helpless collapse. Only for a minute or two would he be at the top of his power. The frontier was a dreadfully narrow one, and already he had lost control of his fingers, and was scrawling a shorthand that bore no resemblance to the original system of its inventor. As the white light of this abnormal perceptiveness increased, the horror of his position became likewise more and more vivid. He knew that he was fighting for his life with a soulless and malefic being who was next door to a devil. The sense of fear was being magnified now with every minute that passed. Presently the power of perceiving would pass into doing; he would strike the blow for his life, whatever form that blow might take.\n\nAlready he was sufficiently master of himself to act \u2014 to act in the sense of deceiving. He exaggerated his drunken writing and thickness of speech, his general condition of collapse: and this power of hearing the workings of the other man's mind showed him that he was successful. Hensig was a little deceived. He proved this by increased carelessness, and by allowing the expression of his face to become plainly exultant.\n\nWilliams's faculties were so concentrated upon the causes operating in the terrible personality opposite to him, that he could spare no part of his brain for the explanations and sentences that came from his lips. He did not hear or understand a hundredth part of what the doctor was saying, but occasionally he caught up the end of a phrase and managed to ask a blundering question out of it; and Hensig, obviously pleased with his increasing obfuscation, always answered at some length, quietly watching with pleasure the reporter's foolish hieroglyphics upon the paper.\n\nThe whole thing, of course, was an utter blind.\n\nHensig had no discovery at all. He was talking scientific jargon, knowing full well that those shorthand notes would never be transcribed, and that he himself would be out of harm's way long before his victim's senses had cleared sufficiently to tell him that he was in the grasp of a deadly sickness which no medicines could prevent ending in death.\n\nWilliams saw and felt all this clearly. It somehow came to him, rising up in that clear depth of his mind that was stirred by the alcohol, and yet beyond the reach, so far, of its deadly confusion. He understood perfectly well that Hensig was waiting for a moment to act; that he would do nothing violent, but would carry out his murderous intention in such an innocent way that the victim would have no suspicions at the moment, and would only realise later that he had been poisoned and \u2014\n\nHark! What was that? There was a change.\n\nSomething had happened. It was like the sound of a gong, and the reporter's fear suddenly doubled. Hensig's scheme had moved forward a step. There was no sound actually, but his senses seemed grouped together into one, and for some reason his perception of the change came by way of audition. Fear brimmed up perilously near the breaking-point. But the moment for action had not quite come yet, and he luckily saved himself by the help of another and contrary emotion. He emptied his glass, spilling half of it purposely over his coat, and burst out laughing in Hensig's face. The vivid picture rose before him of Whitey Fife catching cocktail glasses off the edge of Steve Brodie's table.\n\nThe laugh was admirably careless and drunken, but the German was startled and looked up suspiciously. He had not expected this, and through lowered eyelids Williams observed an expression of momentary uncertainty on his features, as though he felt he was not absolutely master of the situation after all, as he imagined.\n\n\"Su'nly thought of Whitey Fife knocking Stevebrodie off'sh Brooklyn Bridsh in a cocock'tail glashh \u2014\" Williams explained in a voice hopelessly out of control. \"You know Whhhiteyfife, of coursh, don't you? \u2014 ha, ha, ha!\"\n\nNothing could have helped him more in putting Hensig off the scent. His face resumed its expression of certainty and cold purpose. The waiter, wakened by the noise, stirred uneasily in his chair, and the big man in the corner indulged in a gulp that threatened to choke him as he sat with his head sunk upon his chest. But otherwise the empty room became quiet again. The German resumed his confident command of the situation. Williams, he saw, was drunk enough to bring him easily into his net.\n\nNone the less, the reporter's perception had not been at fault. There was a change. Hensig was about to do something, and his mind was buzzing with preparations. The victim, now within measuring distance of his supreme moment \u2014 the point where terror would release his will, and alcohol would inspire him beyond possibility of error \u2014 saw everything as in the clear light of day. Small things led him to the climax: the emptied room; the knowledge that shortly the saloon would close; the grey light of day stealing under the chinks of door and shutter; the increased vileness of the face gleaming at him opposite in the paling gas glare. Ugh! How the air reeked of stale spirits, the fumes of cigar smoke, and the cheap scents of the vanished women. The floor was strewn with sheets of paper, absurdly scrawled over. The table had patches of wet, and cigarette ash lay over everything. His hands and feet were icy, his eyes burning hot. His heart thumped like a soft hammer. Hensig was speaking in quite a changed voice now. He had been leading up to this point for hours. No one was there to see, even if anything was to be seen \u2014 which was unlikely. The big man still snored; the waiter was asleep too. There was silence in the outer room, and between the walls of the inner there was \u2014 Death.\n\n\"Now, Mr. Vulture reporder, I show you what I mean all this time to egsplain,\" he was saying in his most metallic voice.\n\nHe drew a blank sheet of the reporter's paper towards him across the little table, avoiding carefully the wet splashes.\n\n\"Lend me your bencil von moment, please. Yes?\" Williams, simulating almost total collapse, dropped the pencil and shoved it over the polished wood as though the movement was about all he could manage. With his head sunk forward upon his chest he watched stupidly. Hensig began to draw some kind of outline; his touch was firm, and there was a smile on his lips.\n\n\"Here, you see, is the human arm,\" he said, sketching rapidly; \"and here are the main nerves, and here the artery. Now, my discovery, as I haf peen egsplaining to you, is simply \u2014\" He dropped into a torrent of meaningless scientific phrases, during which the other purposely allowed his hand to lie relaxed upon the table, knowing perfectly well that in a moment Hensig would seize it \u2014 for the purposes of illustration.\n\nHis terror was so intense that, for the first time this awful night, he was within an ace of action. The point of saturation had been almost reached. Though apparently sodden drunk, his mind was really at the highest degree of clear perception and judgment, and in another moment \u2014 the moment Hensig actually began his final assault \u2014 the terror would provide the reporter with the extra vigour and decision necessary to strike his one blow. Exactly how he would do it, or what precise form it would take, he had no idea; that could be left to the inspiration of the moment; he only knew that his strength would last just long enough to bring this about, and that then he would collapse in utter intoxication upon the floor.\n\nHensig dropped the pencil suddenly: it clattered away to a corner of the room, showing it had been propelled with force, not merely allowed to fall, and he made no attempt to pick it up. Williams, to test his intention, made a pretended movement to stoop after it, and the other, as he imagined he would, stopped him in a second.\n\n\"I haf another,\" he said quickly, diving into his inner pocket and producing a long dark pencil. Williams saw in a flash, through his half-closed eyes, that it was sharpened at one end, while the other end was covered by a little protective cap of transparent substance like glass, a third of an inch long. He heard it click as it struck a button of the coat, and also saw that by a very swift motion of the fingers, impossible to be observed by a drunken man, Hensig removed the cap so that the end was free. Something gleamed there for a moment, something like a point of shining metal \u2014 the point of a pin.\n\n\"Gif me your hand von minute and I drace the nerve up the arm I speak apout,\" the doctor continued in that steely voice that showed no sign of nervousness, though he was on the edge of murder. \"So, I show you much petter vot I mean.\"\n\nWithout a second's hesitation \u2014 for the moment for action had not quite come \u2014 he lurched forward and stretched his arm clumsily across the table. Hensig seized the fingers in his own and turned the palm uppermost. With his other hand he pointed the pencil at the wrist, and began moving it a little up towards the elbow, pushing the sleeve back for the purpose. His touch was the touch of death. On the point of the black pin, engrafted into the other end of the pencil, Williams knew there clung the germs of some deadly disease, germs unusually powerful from special culture; and that within the next few seconds the pencil would turn and the pin would accidentally scratch his wrist and let the virulent poison into his blood.\n\nHe knew this, yet at the same time he managed to remain master of himself. For he also realised that at last, just in the nick of time, the moment he had been waiting for all through these terrible hours had actually arrived, and he was ready to act.\n\nAnd the little unimportant detail that furnished the extra quota of fear necessary to bring him to the point was \u2014 touch. It was the touch of Hensig's hand that did it, setting every nerve a-quiver to its utmost capacity, filling him with a black horror that reached the limits of sensation.\n\nIn that moment Williams regained his self-control and became absolutely sober. Terror removed its paralysing inhibitions, having led him to the point where numbness succeeds upon excess, and sensation ceases to register in the brain. The emotion of fear was dead, and he was ready to act with all the force of his being \u2014 that force, too, raised to a higher power after long repression.\n\nMoreover, he could make no mistake, for at the same time be had reached the culminating effect of the alcohol, and a sort of white light filled his mind, showing him clearly what to do and how to do it. He felt master of himself, confident, capable of anything. He followed blindly that inner guidance he had been dimly conscious of the whole night, and what he did he did instinctively, as it were, without deliberate plan.\n\nHe was waiting for the pencil to turn so that the pin pointed at his vein. Then, when Hensig was wholly concentrated upon the act of murder, and thus oblivious of all else, he would find his opportunity. For at this supreme moment the German's mind would be focussed on the one thing. He would notice nothing else round him. He would be open to successful attack. But this \u2014 supreme moment would hardly last more than five seconds at most!\n\nThe reporter raised his eyes and stared for the first time steadily into his opponent's eyes, till the room faded out and he saw only the white skin in a blaze of its own light. Thus staring, he caught in himself the full stream of venom, hatred, and revenge that had been pouring at him across the table for so long \u2014 caught and held it for one instant, and then returned it into the other's brain with all its original force and the added impetus of his own recovered will behind it.\n\nHensig felt this, and for a moment seemed to waver; he was surprised out of himself by the sudden change in his victim's attitude. The same instant, availing himself of a diversion caused by the big man in the corner waking noisily and trying to rise, he slowly turned the pencil round so that the point of the pin was directed at the hand lying in his. The sleepy waiter was helping the drunken man to cross to the door, and the diversion was all in his favour.\n\nBut Williams knew what he was doing. He did not even tremble.\n\n\"When that pin scratches me,\" he said aloud in a firm, sober voice, \"it means \u2014 death.\"\n\nThe German could not conceal his surprise on hearing the change of voice, but he still felt sure of his victim, and clearly wished to enjoy his revenge thoroughly. After a moment's hesitation he replied, speaking very low:\n\n\"You tried, I tink, to get me conficted, and now I punish you, dat is all.\"\n\nHis fingers moved, and the point of the pin descended a little lower. Williams felt the faintest imaginable prick on his skin \u2014 or thought he did. The German had lowered his head again to direct the movement of the pin properly. But the moment of Hensig's concentration was also the moment of his own attack. And it had come.\n\n\"But the alcohol will counteract it!\" he burst out, with a loud and startling laugh that threw the other completely off his guard. The doctor lifted his face in amazement. That same instant the hand that lay so helplessly and tipsily in his turned like a flash of lightning, and, before he knew what had happened, their positions were reversed. Williams held his wrist, pencil and all, in a grasp of iron. And from the reporter's other hand the German received a terrific smashing blow in the face that broke his glasses and dashed him back with a howl of pain against the wall.\n\nThere was a brief passage of scramble and wild blows, during which both table and chairs were sent flying, and then Williams was aware that a figure behind him had stretched forth an arm and was holding a bright silvery thing close to Hensig's bleeding face. Another glance showed him that it was a pistol, and that the man holding it was the big drunken man who had apparently slept all night in the corner of the room. Then, in a flash, he recognised him as Dowling's partner \u2014 a headquarters detective. The reporter stepped back, his head swimming again. He was very unsteady on his feet.\n\n\"I've been watching your game all the evening,\" he heard the headquarters man saying as he slipped the handcuffs over the German's unresisting wrists. \"We have been on your trail for weeks, and I might jest as soon have taken you when you left the Brooklyn church a few hours ago, only I wanted to see what you were up to \u2014 see? You're wanted in Berlin for one or two little dirty tricks, but our advices only came last night. Come along now.\"\n\n\"You'll get nozzing,\" Hensig replied very quietly, wiping his bloody face with the corner of his sleeve. \"See, I have scratched myself!\"\n\nThe detective took no notice of this remark, not understanding it, probably, but Williams noticed the direction of the eyes, and saw a scratch on his wrist, slightly bleeding. Then he understood that in the struggle the pin had accidentally found another destination than the one intended for it. But he remembered nothing more after that, for the reaction set in with a rush. The strain of that awful night left him utterly limp, and the accumulated effect of the alcohol, now that all was past, overwhelmed him like a wave, and he sank in a heap upon the floor, unconscious." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 358", + "text": "The illness that followed was simply \"nerves,\" and he got over it in a week or two, and returned to his work on the paper. He at once made inquiries, and found that Hensig's arrest had hardly been noticed by the papers. There was no interesting feature about it, and New York was already in the throes of a new horror. But Dowling, that enterprising Irishman \u2014 always with an eye to promotion and the main chance \u2014 Dowling had something to say about it.\n\n\"No luck, Mr. English,\" he said ruefully, \"no luck at all. It would have been a mighty good story, but it never got in the papers. That damned German, Schmidt, alias Brunner, alias Hensig, died in the prison hospital before we could even get him remanded for further inquiries \u2014\"\n\n\"What did be die of?\" interrupted the reporter quickly.\n\n\"Black typhus. I think they call it. But it was terribly swift, and he was dead in four days. The doctor said he'd never known such a case.\"\n\n\"I'm glad he's out of the way,\" observed Williams.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Dowling said hesitatingly; \"but it was a jim dandy of a story, an' he might have waited a little bit longer jest so as I got something out of it for meself.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Willows", + "text": "After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.\n\nIn high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.\n\nHappy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerably which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.\n\nProperly speaking, this fascinating part of the river's life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying-pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius), and so under the frowning heights of Thelsen on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.\n\nRacing along at twelve kilometers an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters\u2014sure sign of flood\u2014sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszony) showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brucke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swamp-land beyond\u2014the land of the willows.\n\nThe change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing-hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilization within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of humankind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic\u2014a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.\n\nThough still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping-ground for the night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on the hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.\n\n\"What a river!\" I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had traveled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.\n\n\"Won't stand much nonsense now, will it?\" he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.\n\nI lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements\u2014water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun\u2014thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming traveling companion as my friend, the Swede.\n\nWe had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the grown of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.\n\nHow, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew up-stream and tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.\n\nIt was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.\n\nAnd a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognize the newcomer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.\n\nThis was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.\n\nMuch, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river's vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.\n\nBut now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within seeming distance almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometers farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.\n\n\"If you take a side channel,\" said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying provisions, \"you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase.\"\n\nThe rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest, the officer's prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly gale.\n\nIt was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex up stream.\n\nI stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me; it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.\n\nThe rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.\n\nAltogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.\n\nA rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous; many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had it directly to do with the power of the driving wind\u2014this shouting hurricane that might almost carry up a few acres of willows into the air and scatter them like so much chaff over the landscape. The wind was simply enjoying itself, for nothing rose out of the flat landscape to stop it, and I was conscious of sharing its great game with a kind of pleasurable excitement. Yet this novel emotion had nothing to do with the wind. Indeed, so vague was the sense of distress I experienced, that it was impossible to trace it to its source and deal with it accordingly, though I was aware somehow that it had to do with my realization of our utter insignificance before this unrestrained power of the elements about me. The huge-grown river had something to do with it too\u2014a vague, unpleasant idea that we had somehow trifled with these great elemental forces in whose power we lay helpless every hour of the day and night. For here, indeed, they were gigantically at play together, and the sight appealed to the imagination.\n\nBut my emotion, so far as I could understand it, seemed to attach itself more particularly to the willow bushes, to these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening. And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.\n\nGreat revelations of nature, of course, never fail to impress in one way or another, and I was no stranger to moods of the kind. Mountains overawe and oceans terrify, while the mystery of great forests exercises a spell peculiarly its own. But all these, at one point or another, somewhere link on intimately with human life and human experience. They stir comprehensible, even if alarming, emotions. They tend on the whole to exalt.\n\nWith this multitude of willows, however, it was something far different, I felt. Some essence emanated from them that besieged the heart. A sense of awe awakened, true, but of awe touched somewhere by a vague terror. Their serried ranks, growing everywhere darker about me as the shadows deepened, moving furiously yet softly in the wind, woke in me the curious and unwelcome suggestion that we had trespassed here upon the borders of an alien world, a world where we were intruders, a world where we were not wanted or invited to remain\u2014where we ran grave risks perhaps!\n\nThe feeling, however, though it refused to yield its meaning entirely to analysis, did not at the time trouble me by passing into menace. Yet it never left me quite, even during the very practical business of putting up the tent in a hurricane of wind and building a fire for the stew-pot. It remained, just enough to bother and perplex, and to rob a most delightful camping-ground of a good portion of its charm. To my companion, however, I said nothing, for he was a man I considered devoid of imagination. In the first place, I could never have explained to him what I meant, and in the second, he would have laughed stupidly at me if I had.\n\nThere was a slight depression in the center of the island, and here we pitched the tent. The surrounding willows broke the wind a bit.\n\n\"A poor camp,\" observed the imperturbable Swede when at last the tent stood upright, \"no stones and precious little firewood. I'm for moving on early tomorrow\u2014eh? This sand won't hold anything.\"\n\nBut the experience of a collapsing tent at midnight had taught us many devices, and we made the cozy gipsy house as safe as possible, and then set about collecting a store of wood to last till bed-time. Willow bushes drop no branches, and driftwood was our only source of supply. We hunted the shores pretty thoroughly. Everywhere the banks were crumbling as the rising flood tore at them and carried away great portions with a splash and a gurgle.\n\n\"The island's much smaller than when we landed,\" said the accurate Swede. \"It won't last long at this rate. We'd better drag the canoe close to the tent, and be ready to start at a moment's notice. I shall sleep in my clothes.\"\n\nHe was a little distance off, climbing along the bank, and I heard his rather jolly laugh as he spoke.\n\n\"By Jove!\" I heard him call, a moment later, and turned to see what had caused his exclamation. But for the moment he was hidden by the willows, and I could not find him.\n\n\"What in the world's this?\" I heard him cry again, and this time his voice had become serious.\n\nI ran up quickly and joined him on the bank. He was looking over the river, pointing at something in the water.\n\n\"Good heavens, it's a man's body!\" he cried excitedly. \"Look!\"\n\nA black thing, turning over and over in the foaming waves, swept rapidly past. It kept disappearing and coming up to the surface again. It was about twenty feet from the shore, and just as it was opposite to where we stood it lurched round and looked straight at us. We saw its eyes reflecting the sunset, and gleaming an odd yellow as the body turned over. Then it gave a swift, gulping plunge, and dived out of sight in a flash.\n\n\"An otter, by gad!\" we exclaimed in the same breath, laughing.\n\nIt was an otter, alive, and out on the hunt; yet it had looked exactly like the body of a drowned man turning helplessly in the current. Far below it came to the surface once again, and we saw its black skin, wet and shining in the sunlight.\n\nThen, too, just as we turned back, our arms full of driftwood, another thing happened to recall us to the river bank. This time it really was a man, and what was more, a man in a boat. Now a small boat on the Danube was an unusual sight at any time, but here in this deserted region, and at flood time, it was so unexpected as to constitute a real event. We stood and stared.\n\nWhether it was due to the slanting sunlight, or the refraction from the wonderfully illumined water, I cannot say, but, whatever the cause, I found it difficult to focus my sight properly upon the flying apparition. It seemed, however, to be a man standing upright in a sort of flat-bottomed boat, steering with a long oar, and being carried down the opposite shore at a tremendous pace. He apparently was looking across in our direction, but the distance was too great and the light too uncertain for us to make out very plainly what he was about. It seemed to me that he was gesticulating and making signs at us. His voice came across the water to us shouting something furiously, but the wind drowned it so that no single word was audible. There was something curious about the whole appearance\u2014man, boat, signs, voice\u2014that made an impression on me out of all proportion to its cause.\n\n\"He's crossing himself!\" I cried. \"Look, he's making the sign of the Cross!\"\n\n\"I believe you're right,\" the Swede said, shading his eyes with his hand and watching the man out of sight. He seemed to be gone in a moment, melting away down there into the sea of willows where the sun caught them in the bend of the river and turned them into a great crimson wall of beauty. Mist, too, had begun to ruse, so that the air was hazy.\n\n\"But what in the world is he doing at nightfall on this flooded river?\" I said, half to myself. \"Where is he going at such a time, and what did he mean by his signs and shouting? D'you think he wished to warn us about something?\"\n\n\"He saw our smoke, and thought we were spirits probably,\" laughed my companion. \"These Hungarians believe in all sorts of rubbish; you remember the shopwoman at Pressburg warning us that no one ever landed here because it belonged to some sort of beings outside man's world! I suppose they believe in fairies and elementals, possibly demons, too. That peasant in the boat saw people on the islands for the first time in his life,\" he added, after a slight pause, \"and it scared him, that's all.\"\n\nThe Swede's tone of voice was not convincing, and his manner lacked something that was usually there. I noted the change instantly while he talked, though without being able to label it precisely.\n\n\"If they had enough imagination,\" I laughed loudly\u2014I remember trying to make as much noise as I could\u2014\"they might well people a place like this with the old gods of antiquity. The Romans must have haunted all this region more or less with their shrines and sacred groves and elemental deities.\"\n\nThe subject dropped and we returned to our stew-pot, for my friend was not given to imaginative conversation as a rule. Moreover, just then I remember feeling distinctly glad that he was not imaginative; his stolid, practical nature suddenly seemed to me welcome and comforting. It was an admirable temperament, I felt; he could steer down rapids like a red Indian, shoot dangerous bridges and whirlpools better than any white man I ever saw in a canoe. He was a grand fellow for an adventurous trip, a tower of strength when untoward things happened. I looked at his strong face and light curly hair as he staggered along under his pile of driftwood (twice the size of mine!), and I experienced a feeling of relief. Yes, I was distinctly glad just then that the Swede was\u2014what he was, and that he never made remarks that suggested more than they said.\n\n\"The river's still rising, though,\" he added, as if following out some thoughts of his own, and dropping his load with a gasp. \"This island will be under water in two days if it goes on.\"\n\n\"I wish the wind would go down,\" I said. \"I don't care a fig for the river.\"\n\nThe flood, indeed, had no terrors for us; we could get off at ten minutes' notice, and the more water the better we liked it. It meant an increasing current and the obliteration of the treacherous shingle-beds that so often threatened to tear the bottom out of our canoe.\n\nContrary to our expectations, the wind did not go down with the sun. It seemed to increase with the darkness, howling overhead and shaking the willows round us like straws. Curious sounds accompanied it sometimes, like the explosion of heavy guns, and it fell upon the water and the island in great flat blows of immense power. It made me think of the sounds a planet must make, could we only hear it, driving along through space.\n\nBut the sky kept wholly clear of clouds, and soon after supper the full moon rose up in the east and covered the river and the plain of shouting willows with a light like the day.\n\nWe lay on the sandy patch beside the fire, smoking, listening to the noises of the night round us, and talking happily of the journey we had already made, and of our plans ahead. The map lay spread in the door of the tent, but the high wind made it hard to study, and presently we lowered the curtain and extinguished the lantern. The firelight was enough to smoke and see each other's faces by, and the sparks flew about overhead like fireworks. A few yards beyond, the river gurgled and hissed, and from time to time a heavy splash announced the falling away of further portions of the bank.\n\nOur talk, I noticed, had to do with the faraway scenes and incidents of our first camps in the Black Forest, or of other subjects altogether remote from the present setting, for neither of us spoke of the actual moment more than was necessary\u2014almost as though we had agreed tacitly to avoid discussion of the camp and its incidents. Neither the otter nor the boatman, for instance, received the honor of a single mention, though ordinarily these would have furnished discussion for the greater part of the evening. They were, of course, distinct events in such a place.\n\nThe scarcity of wood made it a business to keep the fire going, for the wind, that drove the smoke in our faces wherever we sat, helped at the same time to make a forced draught. We took it in turn to make some foraging expeditions into the darkness, and the quantity the Swede brought back always made me feel that he took an absurdly long time finding it; for the fact was I did not care much about being left alone, and yet it always seemed to be my turn to grub about among the bushes or scramble along the slippery banks in the moonlight. The long day's battle with wind and water\u2014such wind and such water!\u2014had tired us both, and an early bed was the obvious program. Yet neither of us made the move for the tent. We lay there, tending the fire, talking in desultory fashion, peering about us into the dense willow bushes, and listening to the thunder of wind and river. The loneliness of the place had entered our very bones, and silence seemed natural, for after a bit the sound of our voices became a trifle unreal and forced; whispering would have been the fitting mode of communication, I felt, and the human voice, always rather absurd amid the roar of the elements, now carried with it something almost illegitimate. It was like talking out loud in church, or in some place where it was not lawful, perhaps not quite safe, to be overheard.\n\nThe eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. And we, in our rashness, had dared to invade it, even to make use of it! Something more than the power of its mystery stirred in me as I lay on the sand, feet to fire, and peered up through the leaves at the stars. For the last time I rose to get firewood.\n\n\"When this has burnt up,\" I said firmly, \"I shall turn in,\" and my companion watched me lazily as I moved off into the surrounding shadows.\n\nFor an unimaginative man I thought he seemed unusually receptive that night, unusually open to suggestion of things other than sensory. He too was touched by the beauty and loneliness of the place. I was not altogether pleased, I remember, to recognize this slight change in him, and instead of immediately collecting sticks, I made my way to the far point of the island where the moonlight on plain and river could be seen to better advantage. The desire to be alone had come suddenly upon me; my former dread returned in force; there was a vague feeling in me I wished to face and probe to the bottom.\n\nWhen I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere \"scenery\" could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.\n\nI gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing\u2014but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible.\n\nThere they stood in the moonlight, like a vast army surrounding our camp, shaking their innumerable silver spears defiantly, formed all ready for an attack.\n\nThe psychology of places, for some imaginations at least, is very vivid; for the wanderer, especially, camps have their \"note\" either of welcome or rejection. At first it may not always be apparent, because the busy preparations of tent and cooking prevent, but with the first pause\u2014after supper usually\u2014it comes and announces itself. And the note of this willow-camp now became unmistakably plain to me; we were interlopers, trespassers; we were not welcomed. The sense of unfamiliarity grew upon me as I stood there watching. We touched the frontier of a region where our presence was resented. For a night's lodging we might perhaps be tolerated; but for a prolonged and inquisitive stay\u2014No! by all the gods of the trees and wilderness, no! We were the first human influences upon this island, and we were not wanted. The willows were against us.\n\nStrange thoughts like these, bizarre fancies, borne I know not whence, found lodgment in my mind as I stood listening. What, I thought, if, after all, these crouching willows proved to be alive; if suddenly they should rise up, like a swarm of living creatures, marshaled by the gods whose territory we had invaded, sweep towards us off the vast swamps, booming overhead in the night\u2014and then settle down! As I looked it was so easy to imagine they actually moved, crept nearer, retreated a little, huddled together in masses, hostile, waiting for the great wind that should finally start them a-running. I could have sworn their aspect changed a little, and their ranks deepened and pressed more closely together.\n\nThe melancholy shrill cry of a night-bird sounded overhead, and suddenly I nearly lost my balance as the piece of bank I stood upon fell with a great splash into the river, undermined by the flood. I stepped back just in time, and went on hunting for firewood again, half laughing at the odd fancies that crowded so thickly into my mind and cast their spell upon me. I recalled the Swede's remark about moving on next day, and I was just thinking that I fully agreed with him, when I turned with a start and saw the subject of my thoughts standing immediately in front of me. He was quite close. The roar of the elements had covered his approach." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 360", + "text": "\"You've been gone so long,\" he shouted above the wind, \"I thought something must have happened to you.\"\n\nBut there was that in his tone, and a certain look in his face as well, that conveyed to me more than his usual words, and in a flash I understood the real reason for his coming. It was because the spell of the place had entered his soul too, and he did not like being alone.\n\n\"River still rising,\" he cried, pointing to the flood in the moonlight, \"and the wind's simply awful.\"\n\nHe always said the same things, but it was the cry for companionship that gave the real importance to his words.\n\n\"Lucky,\" I cried back, \"our tent's in the hollow. I think it'll hold all right.\" I added something about the difficulty of finding wood, in order to explain my absence, but the wind caught my words and flung them across the river, so that he did not hear, but just looked at me through the branches, nodding his head.\n\n\"Lucky if we get away without disaster!\" he shouted, or words to that effect; and I remember feeling half angry with him for putting the thought into words, for it was exactly what I felt myself. There was disaster impending somewhere, and the sense of presentiment lay unpleasantly upon me.\n\nWe went back to the fire and made a final blaze, poking it up with our feet. We took a last look round. But for the wind the heat would have been unpleasant. I put this thought into words, and I remember my friend's reply struck me oddly: that he would rather have the heat, the ordinary July weather, than this \"diabolical wind.\"\n\nEverything was snug for the night; the canoe lying turned over beside the tent, with both yellow paddles beneath her; the provision sack hanging from a willow-stem, and the washed-up dishes removed to a safe distance from the fire, all ready for the morning meal.\n\nWe smothered the embers of the fire with sand, and then turned in. The flap of the tent door was up, and I saw the branches and the stars and the white moonlight. The shaking willows and the heavy buffetings of the wind against our taut little house were the last things I remembered as sleep came down and covered all with its soft and delicious forgetfulness.\n\nSuddenly I found myself lying awake, peering from my sandy mattress through the door of the tent. I looked at my watch pinned against the canvas, and saw by the bright moonlight that it was past twelve o'clock\u2014the threshold of a new day\u2014and I had therefore slept a couple of hours. The Swede was asleep still beside me; the wind howled as before; something plucked at my heart and made me feel afraid. There was a sense of disturbance in my immediate neighborhood.\n\nI sat up quickly and looked out. The trees were swaying violently to and fro as the gusts smote them, but our little bit of green canvas lay snugly safe in the hollow, for the wind passed over it without meeting enough resistance to make it vicious. The feeling of disquietude did not pass, however, and I crawled quietly out of the tent to see if our belongings were safe. I moved carefully so as not to waken my companion. A curious excitement was on me.\n\nI was half-way out, kneeling on all fours, when my eye first took in that the tops of the bushes opposite, with their moving tracery of leaves, made shapes against the sky. I sat back on my haunches and stared. It was incredible, surely, but there, opposite and slightly above me, were shapes of some indeterminate sort among the willows, and as the branches swayed in the wind they seemed to group themselves about these shapes, forming a series of monstrous outlines that shifted rapidly beneath the moon. Close, about fifty feet in front of me, I saw these things.\n\nMy first instinct was to waken my companion, that he too might see them, but something made me hesitate\u2014the sudden realization, probably, that I should not welcome corroboration; and meanwhile I crouched there staring in amazement with smarting eyes. I was wide awake. I remember saying to myself that I was not dreaming.\n\nThey first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of the bushes\u2014immense, bronze-colored, moving, and wholly independent of the swaying of the branches. I saw them plainly and noted, now I came to examine them more calmly, that they were very much larger than human, and indeed that something in their appearance proclaimed them to be not human at all. Certainly they were not merely the moving tracery of the branches against the moonlight. They shifted independently. They rose upwards in a continuous stream from earth to sky, vanishing utterly as soon as they reached the dark of the sky. They were interlaced one with another, making a great column, and I saw their limbs and huge bodies melting in and out of each other, forming this serpentine line that bent and swayed and twisted spirally with the contortions of the wind-tossed trees. They were nude, fluid shapes, passing up the bushes, within the leaves almost\u2014rising up in a living column into the heavens. Their faces I never could see. Unceasingly they poured upwards, swaying in great bending curves, with a hue of dull bronze upon their skins.\n\nI stared, trying to force every atom of vision from my eyes. For a long time I thought they must every moment disappear and resolve themselves into the movements of the branches and prove to be an optical illusion. I searched everywhere for a proof of reality, when all the while I understood quite well that the standard of reality had changed. For the longer I looked the more certain I became that these figures were real and living, though perhaps not according to the standards that the camera and the biologist would insist upon.\n\nFar from feeling fear, I was possessed with a sense of awe and wonder such as I have never known. I seemed to be gazing at the personified elemental forces of this haunted and primeval region. Our intrusion had stirred the powers of the place into activity. It was we who were the cause of the disturbance, and my brain filled to bursting with stories and legends of the spirits and deities of places that have been acknowledged and worshipped by men in all ages of the world's history. But, before I could arrive at any possible explanation, something impelled me to go farther out, and I crept forward on the sand and stood upright. I felt the ground still warm under my bare feet; the wind tore at my hair and face; and the sound of the river burst upon my ears with a sudden roar. These things, I knew, were real, and proved that my senses were acting normally. Yet the figures still rose from earth to heaven, silent, majestically, in a great spiral of grace and strength that overwhelmed me at length with a genuine deep emotion of worship. I felt that I must fall down and worship\u2014absolutely worship.\n\nPerhaps in another minute I might have done so, when a gust of wind swept against me with such force that it blew me sideways, and I nearly stumbled and fell. It seemed to shake the dream violently out of me. At least it gave me another point of view somehow. The figures still remained, still ascended into heaven from the heart of the night, but my reason at last began to assert itself. It must be a subjective experience, I argued\u2014none the less real for that, but still subjective. The moonlight and the branches combined to work out these pictures upon the mirror of my imagination, and for some reason I projected them outwards and made them appear objective. I knew this must be the case, of course. I took courage, and began to move forward across the open patches of sand. By Jove, though, was it all hallucination? Was it merely subjective? Did not my reason argue in the old futile way from the little standard of the known?\n\nI only know that great column of figures ascended darkly into the sky for what seemed a very long period of time, and with a very complete measure of reality as most men are accustomed to gauge reality. Then suddenly they were gone!\n\nAnd, once they were gone and the immediate wonder of their great presence had passed, fear came down upon me with a cold rush. The esoteric meaning of this lonely and haunted region suddenly flamed up within me, and I began to tremble dreadfully. I took a quick look round\u2014a look of horror that came near to panic\u2014calculating vainly ways of escape; and then, realizing how helpless I was to achieve anything really effective, I crept back silently into the tent and lay down again upon my sandy mattress, first lowering the door-curtain to shut out the sight of the willows in the moonlight, and then burying my head as deeply as possible beneath the blankets to deaden the sound of the terrifying wind.\n\nAs though further to convince me that I had not been dreaming, I remember that it was a long time before I fell again into a troubled and restless sleep; and even then only the upper crust of me slept, and underneath there was something that never quite lost consciousness, but lay alert and on the watch.\n\nBut this second time I jumped up with a genuine start of terror. It was neither the wind nor the river that woke me, but the slow approach of something that caused the sleeping portion of me to grow smaller and smaller till at last it vanished altogether, and I found myself sitting bolt upright\u2014listening.\n\nOutside there was a sound of multitudinous little patterings. They had been coming, I was aware, for a long time, and in my sleep they had first become audible. I sat there nervously wide awake as though I had not slept at all. It seemed to me that my breathing came with difficulty, and that there was a great weight upon the surface of my body. In spite of the hot night, I felt clammy with cold and shivered. Something surely was pressing steadily against the sides of the tent and weighing down upon it from above. Was it the body of the wind? Was this the pattering rain, the dripping of the leaves? The spray blown from the river by the wind and gathering in big drops? I thought quickly of a dozen things.\n\nThen suddenly the explanation leaped into my mind: a bough from the poplar, the only large tree on the island, had fallen with the wind. Still half caught by the other branches, it would fall with the next gust and crush us, and meanwhile its leaves brushed and tapped upon the tight canvas surface of the tent. I raised a loose flap and rushed out, calling to the Swede to follow.\n\nBut when I got out and stood upright I saw that the tent was free. There was no hanging bough; there was no rain or spray; nothing approached.\n\nA cold, grey light filtered down through the bushes and lay on the faintly gleaming sand. Stars still crowded the sky directly overhead, and the wind howled magnificently, but the fire no longer gave out any glow, and I saw the east reddening in streaks through the trees. Several hours must have passed since I stood there before watching the ascending figures, and the memory of it now came back to me horribly, like an evil dream. Oh, how tired it made me feel, that ceaseless raging wind! Yet, though the deep lassitude of a sleepless night was on me, my nerves were tingling with the activity of an equally tireless apprehension, and all idea of repose was out of the question. The river I saw had risen further. Its thunder filled the air, and a fine spray made itself felt through my thin sleeping shirt.\n\nYet nowhere did I discover the slightest evidence of anything to cause alarm. This deep, prolonged disturbance in my heart remained wholly unaccounted for.\n\nMy companion had not stirred when I called him, and there was no need to waken him now. I looked about me carefully, noting everything; the turned-over canoe; the yellow paddles\u2014two of them, I'm certain; the provision sack and the extra lantern hanging together from the tree; and, crowding everywhere about me, enveloping all, the willows, those endless, shaking willows. A bird uttered its morning cry, and a string of duck passed with whirring flight overhead in the twilight. The sand whirled, dry and stinging, about my bare feet in the wind.\n\nI walked round the tent and then went out a little way into the bush, so that I could see across the river to the farther landscape, and the same profound yet indefinable emotion of distress seized upon me again as I saw the interminable sea of bushes stretching to the horizon, looking ghostly and unreal in the wan light of dawn. I walked softly here and there, still puzzling over that odd sound of infinite pattering, and of that pressure upon the tent that had wakened me. It must have been the wind, I reflected\u2014the wind bearing upon the loose, hot sand, driving the dry particles smartly against the taut canvas\u2014the wind dropping heavily upon our fragile roof.\n\nYet all the time my nervousness and malaise increased appreciably.\n\nI crossed over to the farther shore and noted how the coast-line had altered in the night, and what masses of sand the river had torn away. I dipped my hands and feet into the cool current, and bathed my forehead. Already there was a glow of sunrise in the sky and the exquisite freshness of coming day. On my way back I passed purposely beneath the very bushes where I had seen the column of figures rising into the air, and midway among the clumps I suddenly found myself overtaken by a sense of vast terror. From the shadows a large figure went swiftly by. Someone passed me, as sure as ever man did\u2026.\n\nIt was a great staggering blow from the wind that helped me forward again, and once out in the more open space, the sense of terror diminished strangely. The winds were about and walking, I remember saying to myself, for the winds often move like great presences under the trees. And altogether the fear that hovered about me was such an unknown and immense kind of fear, so unlike anything I had ever felt before, that it woke a sense of awe and wonder in me that did much to counteract its worst effects; and when I reached a high point in the middle of the island from which I could see the wide stretch of river, crimson in the sunrise, the whole magical beauty of it all was so overpowering that a sort of wild yearning woke in me and almost brought a cry up into the throat.\n\nBut this cry found no expression, for as my eyes wandered from the plain beyond to the island round me and noted our little tent half hidden among the willows, a dreadful discovery leaped out at me, compared to which my terror of the walking winds seemed as nothing at all.\n\nFor a change, I thought, had somehow come about in the arrangement of the landscape. It was not that my point of vantage gave me a different view, but that an alteration had apparently been effected in the relation of the tent to the willows, and of the willows to the tent. Surely the bushes now crowded much closer\u2014unnecessarily, unpleasantly close. They had moved nearer.\n\nCreeping with silent feet over the shifting sands, drawing imperceptibly nearer by soft, unhurried movements, the willows had come closer during the night. But had the wind moved them, or had they moved of themselves? I recalled the sound of infinite small patterings and the pressure upon the tent and upon my own heart that caused me to wake in terror. I swayed for a moment in the wind like a tree, finding it hard to keep my upright position on the sandy hillock. There was a suggestion here of personal agency, of deliberate intention, of aggressive hostility, and it terrified me into a sort of rigidity.\n\nThen the reaction followed quickly. The idea was so bizarre, so absurd, that I felt inclined to laugh. But the laughter came no more readily than the cry, for the knowledge that my mind was so receptive to such dangerous imaginings brought the additional terror that it was through our minds and not through our physical bodies that the attack would come, and was coming.\n\nThe wind buffeted me about, and, very quickly it seemed, the sun came up over the horizon, for it was after four o'clock, and I must have stood on that little pinnacle of sand longer than I knew, afraid to come down to close quarters with the willows. I returned quietly, creepily, to the tent, first taking another exhaustive look round and\u2014yes, I confess it\u2014making a few measurements. I paced out on the warm sand the distances between the willows and the tent, making a note of the shortest distance particularly.\n\nI crawled stealthily into my blankets. My companion, to all appearances, still slept soundly, and I was glad that this was so. Provided my experiences were not corroborated, I could find strength somehow to deny them, perhaps. With the daylight I could persuade myself that it was all a subjective hallucination, a fantasy of the night, a projection of the excited imagination.\n\nNothing further came in to disturb me, and I fell asleep almost at once, utterly exhausted, yet still in dread of hearing again that weird sound of multitudinous pattering, or of feeling the pressure upon my heart that had made it difficult to breathe.\n\nThe sun was high in the heavens when my companion woke me from a heavy sleep and announced that the porridge was cooked and there was just time to bathe. The grateful smell of frizzling bacon entered the tent door.\n\n\"River still rising,\" he said, \"and several islands out in mid-stream have disappeared altogether. Our own island's much smaller.\"\n\n\"Any wood left?\" I asked sleepily.\n\n\"The wood and the island will finish tomorrow in a dead heat,\" he laughed, \"but there's enough to last us till then.\"\n\nI plunged in from the point of the island, which had indeed altered a lot in size and shape during the night, and was swept down in a moment to the landing-place opposite the tent. The water was icy, and the banks flew by like the country from an express train. Bathing under such conditions was an exhilarating operation, and the terror of the night seemed cleansed out of me by a process of evaporation in the brain. The sun was blazing hot; not a cloud showed itself anywhere; the wind, however, had not abated one little jot.\n\nQuite suddenly then the implied meaning of the Swede's words flashed across me, showing that he no longer wished to leave post-haste, and had changed his mind. \"Enough to last till tomorrow\"\u2014he assumed we should stay on the island another night. It struck me as odd. The night before he was so positive the other way. How had the change come about?\n\nGreat crumblings of the banks occurred at breakfast, with heavy splashings and clouds of spray which the wind brought into our frying-pan, and my fellow-traveler talked incessantly about the difficulty the Vienna-Pesth steamers must have to find the channel in flood. But the state of his mind interested and impressed me far more than the state of the river or the difficulties of the steamers. He had changed somehow since the evening before. His manner was different\u2014a trifle excited, a trifle shy, with a sort of suspicion about his voice and gestures. I hardly know how to describe it now in cold blood, but at the time I remember being quite certain of one thing\u2014that he had become frightened?\n\nHe ate very little breakfast, and for once omitted to smoke his pipe. He had the map spread open beside him, and kept studying its markings.\n\n\"We'd better get off sharp in an hour,\" I said presently, feeling for an opening that must bring him indirectly to a partial confession at any rate. And his answer puzzled me uncomfortably: \"Rather! If they'll let us.\"\n\n\"Who'll let us? The elements?\" I asked quickly, with affected indifference.\n\n\"The powers of this awful place, whoever they are,\" he replied, keeping his eyes on the map. \"The gods are here, if they are anywhere at all in the world.\"\n\n\"The elements are always the true immortals,\" I replied, laughing as naturally as I could manage, yet knowing quite well that my face reflected my true feelings when he looked up gravely at me and spoke across the smoke:\n\n\"We shall be fortunate if we get away without further disaster.\"\n\nThis was exactly what I had dreaded, and I screwed myself up to the point of the direct question. It was like agreeing to allow the dentist to extract the tooth; it had to come anyhow in the long run, and the rest was all pretence.\n\n\"Further disaster! Why, what's happened?\"\n\n\"For one thing\u2014the steering paddle's gone,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"The steering paddle gone!\" I repeated, greatly excited, for this was our rudder, and the Danube in flood without a rudder was suicide. \"But what\u2014\"\n\n\"And there's a tear in the bottom of the canoe,\" he added, with a genuine little tremor in his voice.\n\nI continued staring at him, able only to repeat the words in his face somewhat foolishly. There, in the heat of the sun, and on this burning sand, I was aware of a freezing atmosphere descending round us. I got up to follow him, for he merely nodded his head gravely and led the way towards the tent a few yards on the other side of the fireplace. The canoe still lay there as I had last seen her in the night, ribs uppermost, the paddles, or rather, the paddle, on the sand beside her.\n\n\"There's only one,\" he said, stooping to pick it up. \"And here's the rent in the base-board.\"\n\nIt was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that I had clearly noticed two paddles a few hours before, but a second impulse made me think better of it, and I said nothing. I approached to see.\n\nThere was a long, finely made tear in the bottom of the canoe where a little slither of wood had been neatly taken clean out; it looked as if the tooth of a sharp rock or snag had eaten down her length, and investigation showed that the hole went through. Had we launched out in her without observing it we must inevitably have foundered. At first the water would have made the wood swell so as to close the hole, but once out in mid-stream the water must have poured in, and the canoe, never more than two inches above the surface, would have filled and sunk very rapidly.\n\n\"There, you see an attempt to prepare a victim for the sacrifice,\" I heard him saying, more to himself than to me, \"two victims rather,\" he added as he bent over and ran his fingers along the slit.\n\nI began to whistle\u2014a thing I always do unconsciously when utterly nonplussed\u2014and purposely paid no attention to his words. I was determined to consider them foolish.\n\n\"It wasn't there last night,\" he said presently, straightening up from his examination and looking anywhere but at me.\n\n\"We must have scratched her in landing, of course,\" I stopped whistling to say. \"The stones are very sharp.\"\n\nI stopped abruptly, for at that moment he turned round and met my eye squarely. I knew just as well as he did how impossible my explanation was. There were no stones, to begin with.\n\n\"And then there's this to explain too,\" he added quietly, handing me the paddle and pointing to the blade.\n\nA new and curious emotion spread freezingly over me as I took and examined it. The blade was scraped down all over, beautifully scraped, as though someone had sand-papered it with care, making it so thin that the first vigorous stroke must have snapped it off at the elbow.\n\n\"One of us walked in his sleep and did this thing,\" I said feebly, \"or\u2014or it has been filed by the constant stream of sand particles blown against it by the wind, perhaps.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said the Swede, turning away, laughing a little, \"you can explain everything.\"\n\n\"The same wind that caught the steering paddle and flung it so near the bank that it fell in with the next lump that crumbled,\" I called out after him, absolutely determined to find an explanation for everything he showed me.\n\n\"I see,\" he shouted back, turning his head to look at me before disappearing among the willow bushes.\n\nOnce alone with these perplexing evidences of personal agency, I think my first thoughts took the form of \"One of us must have done this thing, and it certainly was not I.\" But my second thought decided how impossible it was to suppose, under all the circumstances, that either of us had done it. That my companion, the trusted friend of a dozen similar expeditions, could have knowingly had a hand in it, was a suggestion not to be entertained for a moment. Equally absurd seemed the explanation that this imperturbable and densely practical nature had suddenly become insane and was busied with insane purposes.\n\nYet the fact remained that what disturbed me most, and kept my fear actively alive even in this blaze of sunshine and wild beauty, was the clear certainty that some curious alteration had come about in his mind\u2014that he was nervous, timid, suspicious, aware of goings on he did not speak about, watching a series of secret and hitherto unmentionable events\u2014waiting, in a word, for a climax that he expected, and, I thought, expected very soon. This grew up in my mind intuitively\u2014I hardly knew how.\n\nI made a hurried examination of the tent and its surroundings, but the measurements of the night remained the same. There were deep hollows formed in the sand I now noticed for the first time, basin-shaped and of various depths and sizes, varying from that of a tea-cup to a large bowl. The wind, no doubt, was responsible for these miniature craters, just as it was for lifting the paddle and tossing it towards the water. The rent in the canoe was the only thing that seemed quite inexplicable; and, after all, it was conceivable that a sharp point had caught it when we landed. The examination I made of the shore did not assist this theory, but all the same I clung to it with that diminishing portion of my intelligence which I called my \"reason.\" An explanation of some kind was an absolute necessity, just as some working explanation of the universe is necessary\u2014however absurd\u2014to the happiness of every individual who seeks to do his duty in the world and face the problems of life. The simile seemed to me at the time an exact parallel.\n\nI at once set the pitch melting, and presently the Swede joined me at the work, though under the best conditions in the world the canoe could not be safe for traveling till the following day. I drew his attention casually to the hollows in the sand.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"I know. They're all over the island. But you can explain them, no doubt!\"\n\n\"Wind, of course,\" I answered without hesitation. \"Have you never watched those little whirlwinds in the street that twist and twirl everything into a circle? This sand's loose enough to yield, that's all.\"\n\nHe made no reply, and we worked on in silence for a bit. I watched him surreptitiously all the time, and I had an idea he was watching me. He seemed, too, to be always listening attentively to something I could not hear, or perhaps for something that he expected to hear, for he kept turning about and staring into the bushes, and up into the sky, and out across the water where it was visible through the openings among the willows. Sometimes he even put his hand to his ear and held it there for several minutes. He said nothing to me, however, about it, and I asked no questions. And meanwhile, as he mended that torn canoe with the skill and address of a red Indian, I was glad to notice his absorption in the work, for there was a vague dread in my heart that he would speak of the changed aspect of the willows. And, if he had noticed that, my imagination could no longer be held a sufficient explanation of it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 361", + "text": "At length, after a long pause, he began to talk.\n\n\"Queer thing,\" he added in a hurried sort of voice, as though he wanted to say something and get it over. \"Queer thing. I mean, about that otter last night.\"\n\nI had expected something so totally different that he caught me with surprise, and I looked up sharply.\n\n\"Shows how lonely this place is. Otters are awfully shy things\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't mean that, of course,\" he interrupted. \"I mean\u2014do you think\u2014did you think it really was an otter?\"\n\n\"What else, in the name of Heaven, what else?\"\n\n\"You know, I saw it before you did, and at first it seemed\u2014so much bigger than an otter.\"\n\n\"The sunset as you looked up-stream magnified it, or something,\" I replied.\n\nHe looked at me absently a moment, as though his mind were busy with other thoughts.\n\n\"It had such extraordinary yellow eyes,\" he went on half to himself.\n\n\"That was the sun too,\" I laughed, a trifle boisterously. \"I suppose you'll wonder next if that fellow in the boat\u2014\"\n\nI suddenly decided not to finish the sentence. He was in the act again of listening, turning his head to the wind, and something in the expression of his face made me halt. The subject dropped, and we went on with our caulking. Apparently he had not noticed my unfinished sentence. Five minutes later, however, he looked at me across the canoe, the smoking pitch in his hand, his face exceedingly grave.\n\n\"I did rather wonder, if you want to know,\" he said slowly, \"what that thing in the boat was. I remember thinking at the time it was not a man. The whole business seemed to rise quite suddenly out of the water.\"\n\nI laughed again boisterously in his face, but this time there was impatience, and a strain of anger too, in my feeling.\n\n\"Look here now,\" I cried, \"this place is quite queer enough without going out of our way to imagine things! That boat was an ordinary boat, and the man in it was an ordinary man, and they were both going down-stream as fast as they could lick. And that otter was an otter, so don't let's play the fool about it!\"\n\nHe looked steadily at me with the same grave expression. He was not in the least annoyed. I took courage from his silence.\n\n\"And, for Heaven's sake,\" I went on, \"don't keep pretending you hear things, because it only gives me the jumps, and there's nothing to hear but the river and this cursed old thundering wind.\"\n\n\"You fool!\" he answered in a low, shocked voice, \"you utter fool. That's just the way all victims talk. As if you didn't understand just as well as I do!\" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of resignation. \"The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it.\"\n\nMy little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not he. Up to a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. He knew from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed the point of his words about the necessity of there being a victim, and that we ourselves were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all pretence thenceforward, but thenceforward likewise my fear increased steadily to the climax.\n\n\"But you're quite right about one thing,\" he added, before the subject passed, \"and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to think about it, because what one thinks finds expression in words, and what one says, happens.\"\n\nThat afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood of rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes, and we fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew perceptibly smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and splashes. The weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and then for the first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating. Clouds began to gather in the south-west, spreading thence slowly over the sky.\n\nThis lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the silence that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a manner quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything in its own way then; it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the wind noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes, rising, falling always beating out some sort of great elemental tune; whereas the river's song lay between three notes at most\u2014dull pedal notes, that held a lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow seemed to me, in my then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the music of doom.\n\nIt was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright sunlight took everything out of the landscape that made for cheerfulness; and since this particular landscape had already managed to convey the suggestion of something sinister, the change of course was all the more unwelcome and noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening outlook became distinctly more alarming, and I found myself more than once calculating how soon after sunset the full moon would get up in the east, and whether the gathering clouds would greatly interfere with her lighting of the little island.\n\nWith this general hush of the wind\u2014though it still indulged in occasional brief gusts\u2014the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. The forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of night. They were focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon ourselves. For thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present themselves.\n\nI had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing spell of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet, in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of darkness.\n\nThe canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the day, and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to the base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five o'clock onwards I busied myself with the stew-pot and preparations for dinner, it being my turn to cook that night. We had potatoes, onions, bits of bacon fat to add flavor, and a general thick residue from former stews at the bottom of the pot; with black bread broken up into it the result was most excellent, and it was followed by a stew of plums with sugar and a brew of strong tea with dried milk. A good pile of wood lay close at hand, and the absence of wind made my duties easy. My companion sat lazily watching me, dividing his attentions between cleaning his pipe and giving useless advice\u2014an admitted privilege of the off-duty man. He had been very quiet all the afternoon, engaged in re-caulking the canoe, strengthening the tent ropes, and fishing for driftwood while I slept. No more talk about undesirable things had passed between us, and I think his only remarks had to do with the gradual destruction of the island, which he declared was not fully a third smaller than when we first landed.\n\nThe pot had just begun to bubble when I heard his voice calling to me from the bank, where he had wandered away without my noticing. I ran up.\n\n\"Come and listen,\" he said, \"and see what you make of it.\" He held his hand cupwise to his ear, as so often before.\n\n\"Now do you hear anything?\" he asked, watching me curiously.\n\nWe stood there, listening attentively together. At first I heard only the deep note of the water and the hissings rising from its turbulent surface. The willows, for once, were motionless and silent. Then a sound began to reach my ears faintly, a peculiar sound\u2014something like the humming of a distant gong. It seemed to come across to us in the darkness from the waste of swamps and willows opposite. It was repeated at regular intervals, but it was certainly neither the sound of a bell nor the hooting of a distant steamer. I can liken it to nothing so much as to the sound of an immense gong, suspended far up in the sky, repeating incessantly its muffled metallic note, soft and musical, as it was repeatedly struck. My heart quickened as I listened.\n\n\"I've heard it all day,\" said my companion. \"While you slept this afternoon it came all round the island. I hunted it down, but could never get near enough to see\u2014to localize it correctly. Sometimes it was overhead, and sometimes it seemed under the water. Once or twice, too, I could have sworn it was not outside at all, but within myself\u2014you know\u2014the way a sound in the fourth dimension is supposed to come.\"\n\nI was too much puzzled to pay much attention to his words. I listened carefully, striving to associate it with any known familiar sound I could think of, but without success. It changed in the direction, too, coming nearer, and then sinking utterly away into remote distance. I cannot say that it was ominous in quality, because to me it seemed distinctly musical, yet I must admit it set going a distressing feeling that made me wish I had never heard it.\n\n\"The wind blowing in those sand-funnels,\" I said determined to find an explanation, \"or the bushes rubbing together after the storm perhaps.\"\n\n\"It comes off the whole swamp,\" my friend answered. \"It comes from everywhere at once.\" He ignored my explanations. \"It comes from the willow bushes somehow\u2014\"\n\n\"But now the wind has dropped,\" I objected. \"The willows can hardly make a noise by themselves, can they?\"\n\nHis answer frightened me, first because I had dreaded it, and secondly, because I knew intuitively it was true.\n\n\"It is because the wind has dropped we now hear it. It was drowned before.\n\nIt is the cry, I believe, of the\u2014\"\n\nI dashed back to my fire, warned by the sound of bubbling that the stew was in danger, but determined at the same time to escape further conversation. I was resolute, if possible, to avoid the exchanging of views. I dreaded, too, that he would begin about the gods, or the elemental forces, or something else disquieting, and I wanted to keep myself well in hand for what might happen later. There was another night to be faced before we escaped from this distressing place, and there was no knowing yet what it might bring forth.\n\n\"Come and cut up bread for the pot,\" I called to him, vigorously stirring the appetizing mixture. That stew-pot held sanity for us both, and the thought made me laugh.\n\nHe came over slowly and took the provision sack from the tree, fumbling in its mysterious depths, and then emptying the entire contents upon the ground-sheet at his feet.\n\n\"Hurry up!\" I cried; \"it's boiling.\"\n\nThe Swede burst out into a roar of laughter that startled me. It was forced laughter, not artificial exactly, but mirthless.\n\n\"There's nothing here!\" he shouted, holding his sides.\n\n\"Bread, I mean.\"\n\n\"It's gone. There is no bread. They've taken it!\"\n\nI dropped the long spoon and ran up. Everything the sack had contained lay upon the ground-sheet, but there was no loaf.\n\nThe whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his. The stain of psychical pressure caused it\u2014this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve. And with both of us it ceased quite suddenly.\n\n\"How criminally stupid of me!\" I cried, still determined to be consistent and find an explanation. \"I clean forgot to buy a loaf at Pressburg. That chattering woman put everything out of my head, and I must have left it lying on the counter or\u2014\"\n\n\"The oatmeal, too, is much less than it was this morning,\" the Swede interrupted.\n\nWhy in the world need he draw attention to it? I thought angrily.\n\n\"There's enough for tomorrow,\" I said, stirring vigorously, \"and we can get lots more at Komorn or Gran. In twenty-four hours we shall be miles from here.\"\n\n\"I hope so\u2014to God,\" he muttered, putting the things back into the sack, \"unless we're claimed first as victims for the sacrifice,\" he added with a foolish laugh. He dragged the sack into the tent, for safety's sake, I suppose, and I heard him mumbling to himself, but so indistinctly that it seemed quite natural for me to ignore his words.\n\nOur meal was beyond question a gloomy one, and we ate it almost in silence, avoiding one another's eyes, and keeping the fire bright. Then we washed up and prepared for the night, and, once smoking, our minds unoccupied with any definite duties, the apprehension I had felt all day long became more and more acute. It was not then active fear, I think, but the very vagueness of its origin distressed me far more that if I had been able to ticket and face it squarely. The curious sound I have likened to the note of a gong became now almost incessant, and filled the stillness of the night with a faint, continuous ringing rather than a series of distinct notes. At one time it was behind and at another time in front of us. Sometimes I fancied it came from the bushes on our left, and then again from the clumps on our right. More often it hovered directly overhead like the whirring of wings. It was really everywhere at once, behind, in front, at our sides and over our heads, completely surrounding us. The sound really defies description. But nothing within my knowledge is like that ceaseless muffled humming rising off the deserted world of swamps and willows.\n\nWe sat smoking in comparative silence, the strain growing every minute greater. The worst feature of the situation seemed to me that we did not know what to expect, and could therefore make no sort of preparation by way of defense. We could anticipate nothing. My explanations made in the sunshine, moreover, now came to haunt me with their foolish and wholly unsatisfactory nature, and it was more and more clear to us that some kind of plain talk with my companion was inevitable, whether I liked it or not. After all, we had to spend the night together, and to sleep in the same tent side by side. I saw that I could not get along much longer without the support of his mind, and for that, of course, plain talk was imperative. As long as possible, however, I postponed this little climax, and tried to ignore or laugh at the occasional sentences he flung into the emptiness.\n\nSome of these sentences, moreover, were confoundedly disquieting to me, coming as they did to corroborate much that I felt myself; corroboration, too\u2014which made it so much more convincing\u2014from a totally different point of view. He composed such curious sentences, and hurled them at me in such an inconsequential sort of way, as though his main line of thought was secret to himself, and these fragments were mere bits he found it impossible to digest. He got rid of them by uttering them. Speech relieved him. It was like being sick.\n\n\"There are things about us, I'm sure, that make for disorder, disintegration, destruction, our destruction,\" he said once, while the fire blazed between us. \"We've strayed out of a safe line somewhere.\"\n\nAnd, another time, when the gong sounds had come nearer, ringing much louder than before, and directly over our heads, he said as though talking to himself:\n\n\"I don't think a gramophone would show any record of that. The sound doesn't come to me by the ears at all. The vibrations reach me in another manner altogether, and seem to be within me, which is precisely how a fourth dimensional sound might be supposed to make itself heard.\"\n\nI purposely made no reply to this, but I sat up a little closer to the fire and peered about me into the darkness. The clouds were massed all over the sky, and no trace of moonlight came through. Very still, too, everything was, so that the river and the frogs had things all their own way.\n\n\"It has that about it,\" he went on, \"which is utterly out of common experience. It is unknown. Only one thing describes it really; it is a non-human sound; I mean a sound outside humanity.\"\n\nHaving rid himself of this indigestible morsel, he lay quiet for a time, but he had so admirably expressed my own feeling that it was a relief to have the thought out, and to have confined it by the limitation of words from dangerous wandering to and fro in the mind.\n\nThe solitude of that Danube camping-place, can I ever forget it? The feeling of being utterly alone on an empty planet! My thoughts ran incessantly upon cities and the haunts of men. I would have given my soul, as the saying is, for the \"feel\" of those Bavarian villages we had passed through by the score; for the normal, human commonplaces; peasants drinking beer, tables beneath the trees, hot sunshine, and a ruined castle on the rocks behind the red-roofed church. Even the tourists would have been welcome.\n\nYet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had \"strayed,\" as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peep-hole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called \"our lives,\" yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure\u2014a sacrifice.\n\nIt took us in different fashion, each according to the measure of his sensitiveness and powers of resistance. I translated it vaguely into a personification of the mightily disturbed elements, investing them with the horror of a deliberate and malefic purpose, resentful of our audacious intrusion into their breeding-place; whereas my friend threw it into the unoriginal form at first of a trespass on some ancient shrine, some place where the old gods still held sway, where the emotional forces of former worshippers still clung, and the ancestral portion of him yielded to the old pagan spell.\n\nAt any rate, here was a place unpolluted by men, kept clean by the winds from coarsening human influences, a place where spiritual agencies were within reach and aggressive. Never, before or since, have I been so attacked by indescribable suggestions of a \"beyond region,\" of another scheme of life, another revolution not parallel to the human. And in the end our minds would succumb under the weight of the awful spell, and we should be drawn across the frontier into their world.\n\nSmall things testified to the amazing influence of the place, and now in the silence round the fire they allowed themselves to be noted by the mind. The very atmosphere had proved itself a magnifying medium to distort every indication: the otter rolling in the current, the hurrying boatman making signs, the shifting willows, one and all had been robbed of its natural character, and revealed in something of its other aspect\u2014as it existed across the border to that other region. And this changed aspect I felt was now not merely to me, but to the race. The whole experience whose verge we touched was unknown to humanity at all. It was a new order of experience, and in the true sense of the word unearthly.\n\n\"It's the deliberate, calculating purpose that reduces one's courage to zero,\" the Swede said suddenly, as if he had been actually following my thoughts. \"Otherwise imagination might count for much. But the paddle, the canoe, the lessening food\u2014\"\n\n\"Haven't I explained all that once?\" I interrupted viciously.\n\n\"You have,\" he answered dryly; \"you have indeed.\"\n\nHe made other remarks too, as usual, about what he called the \"plain determination to provide a victim\"; but, having now arranged my thoughts better, I recognized that this was simply the cry of his frightened soul against the knowledge that he was being attacked in a vital part, and that he would be somehow taken or destroyed. The situation called for a courage and calmness of reasoning that neither of us could compass, and I have never before been so clearly conscious of two persons in me\u2014the one that explained everything, and the other that laughed at such foolish explanations, yet was horribly afraid.\n\nMeanwhile, in the pitchy night the fire died down and the wood pile grew small. Neither of us moved to replenish the stock, and the darkness consequently came up very close to our faces. A few feet beyond the circle of firelight it was inky black. Occasionally a stray puff of wind set the willows shivering about us, but apart from this not very welcome sound a deep and depressing silence reigned, broken only by the gurgling of the river and the humming in the air overhead.\n\nWe both missed, I think, the shouting company of the winds.\n\nAt length, at a moment when a stray puff prolonged itself as though the wind were about to rise again, I reached the point for me of saturation, the point where it was absolutely necessary to find relief in plain speech, or else to betray myself by some hysterical extravagance that must have been far worse in its effect upon both of us. I kicked the fire into a blaze, and turned to my companion abruptly. He looked up with a start.\n\n\"I can't disguise it any longer,\" I said; \"I don't like this place, and the darkness, and the noises, and the awful feelings I get. There's something here that beats me utterly. I'm in a blue funk, and that's the plain truth. If the other shore was\u2014different, I swear I'd be inclined to swim for it!\"\n\nThe Swede's face turned very white beneath the deep tan of sun and wind. He stared straight at me and answered quietly, but his voice betrayed his huge excitement by its unnatural calmness. For the moment, at any rate, he was the strong man of the two. He was more phlegmatic, for one thing.\n\n\"It's not a physical condition we can escape from by running away,\" he replied, in the tone of a doctor diagnosing some grave disease; \"we must sit tight and wait. There are forces close here that could kill a herd of elephants in a second as easily as you or I could squash a fly. Our only chance is to keep perfectly still. Our insignificance perhaps may save us.\"\n\nI put a dozen questions into my expression of face, but found no words. It was precisely like listening to an accurate description of a disease whose symptoms had puzzled me.\n\n\"I mean that so far, although aware of our disturbing presence, they have not found us\u2014not 'located' us, as the Americans say,\" he went on. \"They're blundering about like men hunting for a leak of gas. The paddle and canoe and provisions prove that. I think they feel us, but cannot actually see us. We must keep our minds quiet\u2014it's our minds they feel. We must control our thoughts, or it's all up with us.\"\n\n\"Death, you mean?\" I stammered, icy with the horror of his suggestion.\n\n\"Worse\u2014by far,\" he said. \"Death, according to one's belief, means either annihilation or release from the limitations of the senses, but it involves no change of character. You don't suddenly alter just because the body's gone. But this means a radical alteration, a complete change, a horrible loss of oneself by substitution\u2014far worse than death, and not even annihilation. We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin\"\u2014horrors! he was using my very own phrase, my actual words\u2014\"so that they are aware of our being in their neighborhood.\"\n\n\"But who are aware?\" I asked.\n\nI forgot the shaking of the willows in the windless calm, the humming overhead, everything except that I was waiting for an answer that I dreaded more than I can possibly explain.\n\nHe lowered his voice at once to reply, leaning forward a little over the fire, an indefinable change in his face that made me avoid his eyes and look down upon the ground.\n\n\"All my life,\" he said, \"I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region\u2014not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind\u2014where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs, the rise and fall of nations, the destinies of empires, the fate of armies and continents, are all as dust in the balance; vast purposes, I mean, that deal directly with the soul, and not indirectly with more expressions of the soul\u2014\"\n\n\"I suggest just now\u2014\" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that had to come.\n\n\"You think,\" he said, \"it is the spirit of the elements, and I thought perhaps it was the old gods. But I tell you now it is\u2014neither. These would be comprehensible entities, for they have relations with men, depending upon them for worship or sacrifice, whereas these beings who are now about us have absolutely nothing to do with mankind, and it is mere chance that their space happens just at this spot to touch our own.\"\n\nThe mere conception, which his words somehow made so convincing, as I listened to them there in the dark stillness of that lonely island, set me shaking a little all over. I found it impossible to control my movements.\n\n\"And what do you propose?\" I began again.\n\n\"A sacrifice, a victim, might save us by distracting them until we could get away,\" he went on, \"just as the wolves stop to devour the dogs and give the sleigh another start. But\u2014I see no chance of any other victim now.\"\n\nI stared blankly at him. The gleam in his eye was dreadful. Presently he continued." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 362", + "text": "\"It's the willows, of course. The willows mask the others, but the others are feeling about for us. If we let our minds betray our fear, we're lost, lost utterly.\" He looked at me with an expression so calm, so determined, so sincere, that I no longer had any doubts as to his sanity. He was as sane as any man ever was. \"If we can hold out through the night,\" he added, \"we may get off in the daylight unnoticed, or rather, undiscovered.\"\n\n\"But you really think a sacrifice would\u2014\"\n\nThat gong-like humming came down very close over our heads as I spoke, but it was my friend's scared face that really stopped my mouth.\n\n\"Hush!\" he whispered, holding up his hand. \"Do not mention them more than you can help. Do not refer to them by name. To name is to reveal; it is the inevitable clue, and our only hope lies in ignoring them, in order that they may ignore us.\"\n\n\"Even in thought?\" He was extraordinarily agitated.\n\n\"Especially in thought. Our thoughts make spirals in their world. We must keep them out of our minds at all costs if possible.\"\n\nI raked the fire together to prevent the darkness having everything its own way. I never longed for the sun as I longed for it then in the awful blackness of that summer night.\n\n\"Were you awake all last night?\" he went on suddenly.\n\n\"I slept badly a little after dawn,\" I replied evasively, trying to follow his instructions, which I knew instinctively were true, \"but the wind, of course\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. But the wind won't account for all the noises.\"\n\n\"Then you heard it too?\"\n\n\"The multiplying countless little footsteps I heard,\" he said, adding, after a moment's hesitation, \"and that other sound\u2014\"\n\n\"You mean above the tent, and the pressing down upon us of something tremendous, gigantic?\"\n\nHe nodded significantly.\n\n\"It was like the beginning of a sort of inner suffocation?\" I said.\n\n\"Partly, yes. It seemed to me that the weight of the atmosphere had been altered\u2014had increased enormously, so that we should have been crushed.\"\n\n\"And that,\" I went on, determined to have it all out, pointing upwards where the gong-like note hummed ceaselessly, rising and falling like wind. \"What do you make of that?\"\n\n\"It's their sound,\" he whispered gravely. \"It's the sound of their world, the humming in their region. The division here is so thin that it leaks through somehow. But, if you listen carefully, you'll find it's not above so much as around us. It's in the willows. It's the willows themselves humming, because here the willows have been made symbols of the forces that are against us.\"\n\nI could not follow exactly what he meant by this, yet the thought and idea in my mind were beyond question the thought and idea in his. I realized what he realized, only with less power of analysis than his. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him at last about my hallucination of the ascending figures and the moving bushes, when he suddenly thrust his face again close into mine across the firelight and began to speak in a very earnest whisper. He amazed me by his calmness and pluck, his apparent control of the situation. This man I had for years deemed unimaginative, stolid!\n\n\"Now listen,\" he said. \"The only thing for us to do is to go on as though nothing had happened, follow our usual habits, go to bed, and so forth; pretend we feel nothing and notice nothing. It is a question wholly of the mind, and the less we think about them the better our chance of escape. Above all, don't think, for what you think happens!\"\n\n\"All right,\" I managed to reply, simply breathless with his words and the strangeness of it all; \"all right, I'll try, but tell me one more thing first. Tell me what you make of those hollows in the ground all about us, those sand-funnels?\"\n\n\"No!\" he cried, forgetting to whisper in his excitement. \"I dare not, simply dare not, put the thought into words. If you have not guessed I am glad. Don't try to. They have put it into my mind; try your hardest to prevent their putting it into yours.\"\n\nHe sank his voice again to a whisper before he finished, and I did not press him to explain. There was already just about as much horror in me as I could hold. The conversation came to an end, and we smoked our pipes busily in silence.\n\nThen something happened, something unimportant apparently, as the way is when the nerves are in a very great state of tension, and this small thing for a brief space gave me an entirely different point of view. I chanced to look down at my sand-shoe\u2014the sort we used for the canoe\u2014and something to do with the hole at the toe suddenly recalled to me the London shop where I had bought them, the difficulty the man had in fitting me, and other details of the uninteresting but practical operation. At once, in its train, followed a wholesome view of the modern skeptical world I was accustomed to move in at home. I thought of roast beef, and ale, motor-cars, policemen, brass bands, and a dozen other things that proclaimed the soul of ordinariness or utility. The effect was immediate and astonishing even to myself. Psychologically, I suppose, it was simply a sudden and violent reaction after the strain of living in an atmosphere of things that to the normal consciousness must seem impossible and incredible. But, whatever the cause, it momentarily lifted the spell from my heart, and left me for the short space of a minute feeling free and utterly unafraid. I looked up at my friend opposite.\n\n\"You damned old pagan!\" I cried, laughing aloud in his face. \"You imaginative idiot! You superstitious idolater! You\u2014\"\n\nI stopped in the middle, seized anew by the old horror. I tried to smother the sound of my voice as something sacrilegious. The Swede, of course, heard it too\u2014the strange cry overhead in the darkness\u2014and that sudden drop in the air as though something had come nearer.\n\nHe had turned ashen white under the tan. He stood bolt upright in front of the fire, stiff as a rod, staring at me.\n\n\"After that,\" he said in a sort of helpless, frantic way, \"we must go! We can't stay now; we must strike camp this very instant and go on\u2014down the river.\"\n\nHe was talking, I saw, quite wildly, his words dictated by abject terror\u2014the terror he had resisted so long, but which had caught him at last.\n\n\"In the dark?\" I exclaimed, shaking with fear after my hysterical outburst, but still realizing our position better than he did. \"Sheer madness! The river's in flood, and we've only got a single paddle. Besides, we only go deeper into their country! There's nothing ahead for fifty miles but willows, willows, willows!\"\n\nHe sat down again in a state of semi-collapse. The positions, by one of those kaleidoscopic changes nature loves, were suddenly reversed, and the control of our forces passed over into my hands. His mind at last had reached the point where it was beginning to weaken.\n\n\"What on earth possessed you to do such a thing?\" he whispered with the awe of genuine terror in his voice and face.\n\nI crossed round to his side of the fire. I took both his hands in mine, kneeling down beside him and looking straight into his frightened eyes.\n\n\"We'll make one more blaze,\" I said firmly, \"and then turn in for the night. At sunrise we'll be off full speed for Komorn. Now, pull yourself together a bit, and remember your own advice about not thinking fear!\"\n\nHe said no more, and I saw that he would agree and obey. In some measure, too, it was a sort of relief to get up and make an excursion into the darkness for more wood. We kept close together, almost touching, groping among the bushes and along the bank. The humming overhead never ceased, but seemed to me to grow louder as we increased our distance from the fire. It was shivery work!\n\nWe were grubbing away in the middle of a thickish clump of willows where some driftwood from a former flood had caught high among the branches, when my body was seized in a grip that made me half drop upon the sand. It was the Swede. He had fallen against me, and was clutching me for support. I heard his breath coming and going in short gasps.\n\n\"Look! By my soul!\" he whispered, and for the first time in my experience I knew what it was to hear tears of terror in a human voice. He was pointing to the fire, some fifty feet away. I followed the direction of his finger, and I swear my heart missed a beat.\n\nThere, in front of the dim glow, something was moving.\n\nI saw it through a veil that hung before my eyes like the gauze drop-curtain used at the back of a theater\u2014hazily a little. It was neither a human figure nor an animal. To me it gave the strange impression of being as large as several animals grouped together, like horses, two or three, moving slowly. The Swede, too, got a similar result, though expressing it differently, for he thought it was shaped and sized like a clump of willow bushes, rounded at the top, and moving all over upon its surface\u2014\"coiling upon itself like smoke,\" he said afterwards.\n\n\"I watched it settle downwards through the bushes,\" he sobbed at me. \"Look, by God! It's coming this way! Oh, oh!\"\u2014he gave a kind of whistling cry. \"They've found us.\"\n\nI gave one terrified glance, which just enabled me to see that the shadowy form was swinging towards us through the bushes, and then I collapsed backwards with a crash into the branches. These failed, of course, to support my weight, so that with the Swede on top of me we fell in a struggling heap upon the sand. I really hardly knew what was happening. I was conscious only of a sort of enveloping sensation of icy fear that plucked the nerves out of their fleshly covering, twisted them this way and that, and replaced them quivering. My eyes were tightly shut; something in my throat choked me; a feeling that my consciousness was expanding, extending out into space, swiftly gave way to another feeling that I was losing it altogether, and about to die.\n\nAn acute spasm of pain passed through me, and I was aware that the Swede had hold of me in such a way that he hurt me abominably. It was the way he caught at me in falling.\n\nBut it was the pain, he declared afterwards, that saved me; it caused me to forget them and think of something else at the very instant when they were about to find me. It concealed my mind from them at the moment of discovery, yet just in time to evade their terrible seizing of me. He himself, he says, actually swooned at the same moment, and that was what saved him.\n\nI only know that at a later date, how long or short is impossible to say, I found myself scrambling up out of the slippery network of willow branches, and saw my companion standing in front of me holding out a hand to assist me. I stared at him in a dazed way, rubbing the arm he had twisted for me. Nothing came to me to say, somehow.\n\n\"I lost consciousness for a moment or two,\" I heard him say. \"That's what saved me. It made me stop thinking about them.\"\n\n\"You nearly broke my arm in two,\" I said, uttering my only connected thought at the moment. A numbness came over me.\n\n\"That's what saved you!\" he replied. \"Between us, we've managed to set them off on a false tack somewhere. The humming has ceased. It's gone\u2014for the moment at any rate!\"\n\nA wave of hysterical laughter seized me again, and this time spread to my friend too\u2014great healing gusts of shaking laughter that brought a tremendous sense of relief in their train. We made our way back to the fire and put the wood on so that it blazed at once. Then we saw that the tent had fallen over and lay in a tangled heap upon the ground.\n\nWe picked it up, and during the process tripped more than once and caught our feet in sand.\n\n\"It's those sand-funnels,\" exclaimed the Swede, when the tent was up again and the firelight lit up the ground for several yards about us. \"And look at the size of them!\"\n\nAll round the tent and about the fireplace where we had seen the moving shadows there were deep funnel-shaped hollows in the sand, exactly similar to the ones we had already found over the island, only far bigger and deeper, beautifully formed, and wide enough in some instances to admit the whole of my foot and leg.\n\nNeither of us said a word. We both knew that sleep was the safest thing we could do, and to bed we went accordingly without further delay, having first thrown sand on the fire and taken the provision sack and the paddle inside the tent with us. The canoe, too, we propped in such a way at the end of the tent that our feet touched it, and the least motion would disturb and wake us.\n\nIn case of emergency, too, we again went to bed in our clothes, ready for a sudden start.\n\nIt was my firm intention to lie awake all night and watch, but the exhaustion of nerves and body decreed otherwise, and sleep after a while came over me with a welcome blanket of oblivion. The fact that my companion also slept quickened its approach. At first he fidgeted and constantly sat up, asking me if I \"heard this\" or \"heard that.\" He tossed about on his cork mattress, and said the tent was moving and the river had risen over the point of the island, but each time I went out to look I returned with the report that all was well, and finally he grew calmer and lay still. Then at length his breathing became regular and I heard unmistakable sounds of snoring\u2014the first and only time in my life when snoring has been a welcome and calming influence.\n\nThis, I remember, was the last thought in my mind before dozing off.\n\nA difficulty in breathing woke me, and I found the blanket over my face. But something else besides the blanket was pressing upon me, and my first thought was that my companion had rolled off his mattress on to my own in his sleep. I called to him and sat up, and at the same moment it came to me that the tent was surrounded. That sound of multitudinous soft pattering was again audible outside, filling the night with horror.\n\nI called again to him, louder than before. He did not answer, but I missed the sound of his snoring, and also noticed that the flap of the tent was down. This was the unpardonable sin. I crawled out in the darkness to hook it back securely, and it was then for the first time I realized positively that the Swede was not here. He had gone.\n\nI dashed out in a mad run, seized by a dreadful agitation, and the moment I was out I plunged into a sort of torrent of humming that surrounded me completely and came out of every quarter of the heavens at once. It was that same familiar humming\u2014gone mad! A swarm of great invisible bees might have been about me in the air. The sound seemed to thicken the very atmosphere, and I felt that my lungs worked with difficulty.\n\nBut my friend was in danger, and I could not hesitate.\n\nThe dawn was just about to break, and a faint whitish light spread upwards over the clouds from a thin strip of clear horizon. No wind stirred. I could just make out the bushes and river beyond, and the pale sandy patches. In my excitement I ran frantically to and fro about the island, calling him by name, shouting at the top of my voice the first words that came into my head. But the willows smothered my voice, and the humming muffled it, so that the sound only traveled a few feet round me. I plunged among the bushes, tripping headlong, tumbling over roots, and scraping my face as I tore this way and that among the preventing branches.\n\nThen, quite unexpectedly, I came out upon the island's point and saw a dark figure outlined between the water and the sky. It was the Swede. And already he had one foot in the river! A moment more and he would have taken the plunge.\n\nI threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my strength. Of course he struggled furiously, making a noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about \"going inside to Them,\" and \"taking the way of the water and the wind,\" and God only knows what more besides, that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with horror and amazement as I listened. But in the end I managed to get him into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and cursing upon the mattress where I held him until the fit had passed.\n\nI think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering outside\u2014I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business perhaps. For he had just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said, for all the world just like a frightened child:\n\n\"My life, old man\u2014it's my life I owe you. But it's all over now anyhow.\n\nThey've found a victim in our place!\"\n\nThen he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my eyes. He simply collapsed, and began to snore again as healthily as though nothing had happened and he had never tried to offer his own life as a sacrifice by drowning. And when the sunlight woke him three hours later\u2014hours of ceaseless vigil for me\u2014it became so clear to me that he remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted to do, that I deemed it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.\n\nHe woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already high in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the preparation of the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head and making some remark about the extra coldness of the water.\n\n\"River's falling at last,\" he said, \"and I'm glad of it.\"\n\n\"The humming has stopped too,\" I said.\n\nHe looked up at me quietly with his normal expression. Evidently he remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.\n\n\"Everything has stopped,\" he said, \"because\u2014\"\n\nHe hesitated. But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.\n\n\"Because 'They've found another victim'?\" I said, forcing a little laugh.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he answered, \"exactly! I feel as positive of it as though\u2014as though\u2014I feel quite safe again, I mean,\" he finished.\n\nHe began to look curiously about him. The sunlight lay in hot patches on the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly rose to feet.\n\n\"Come,\" he said; \"I think if we look, we shall find it.\"\n\nHe started off on a run, and I followed him. He kept to the banks, poking with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little back-waters, myself always close on his heels.\n\n\"Ah!\" he exclaimed presently, \"ah!\"\n\nThe tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the water and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some twisted willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away. A few hours before the spot must have been under water.\n\n\"See,\" he said quietly, \"the victim that made our escape possible!\"\n\nAnd when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant, and the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned, but a few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island somewhere about the hour of the dawn\u2014at the very time the fit had passed.\n\n\"We must give it a decent burial, you know.\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for there was something about the appearance of that poor drowned man that turned me cold.\n\nThe Swede glanced up sharply at me, an undecipherable expression on his face, and began clambering down the bank. I followed him more leisurely. The current, I noticed, had torn away much of the clothing from the body, so that the neck and part of the chest lay bare.\n\nHalfway down the bank my companion suddenly stopped and held up his hand in warning; but either my foot slipped, or I had gained too much momentum to bring myself quickly to a halt, for I bumped into him and sent him forward with a sort of leap to save himself. We tumbled together on to the hard sand so that our feet splashed into the water. And, before anything could be done, we had collided a little heavily against the corpse.\n\nThe Swede uttered a sharp cry. And I sprang back as if I had been shot.\n\nAt the moment we touched the body there rose from its surface the loud sound of humming\u2014the sound of several hummings\u2014which passed with a vast commotion as of winged things in the air about us and disappeared upwards into the sky, growing fainter and fainter till they finally ceased in the distance. It was exactly as though we had disturbed some living yet invisible creatures at work.\n\nMy companion clutched me, and I think I clutched him, but before either of us had time properly to recover from the unexpected shock, we saw that a movement of the current was turning the corpse round so that it became released from the grip of the willow roots. A moment later it had turned completely over, the dead face uppermost, staring at the sky. It lay on the edge of the main stream. In another moment it would be swept away.\n\nThe Swede started to save it, shouting again something I did not catch about a \"proper burial\"\u2014and then abruptly dropped upon his knees on the sand and covered his eyes with his hands. I was beside him in an instant.\n\nI saw what he had seen.\n\nFor just as the body swung round to the current the face and the exposed chest turned full towards us, and showed plainly how the skin and flesh were indented with small hollows, beautifully formed, and exactly similar in shape and kind to the sand-funnels that we had found all over the island.\n\n\"Their mark!\" I heard my companion mutter under his breath. \"Their awful mark!\"\n\nAnd when I turned my eyes again from his ghastly face to the river, the current had done its work, and the body had been swept away into mid-stream and was already beyond our reach and almost out of sight, turning over and over on the waves like an otter.\n\n\u2042\n\n[The Insanity of Jones (A Study in Reincarnation) ]\n\nAdventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind.\n\nFor only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.\n\nSome, however, are born with this awful certainty in their hearts, and are called to no apprenticeship, and to this select company Jones undoubtedly belonged.\n\nAll his life he had realised that his senses brought to him merely a more or less interesting set of sham appearances; that space, as men measure it, was utterly misleading; that time, as the clock ticked it in a succession of minutes, was arbitrary nonsense; and, in fact, that all his sensory perceptions were but a clumsy representation of real things behind the curtain \u2014 things he was for ever trying to get at, and that sometimes he actually did get at.\n\nHe had always been tremblingly aware that he stood on the borderland of another region, a region where time and space were merely forms of thought, where ancient memories lay open to the sight, and where the forces behind each human life stood plainly revealed and he could see the hidden springs at the very heart of the world. Moreover, the fact that he was a clerk in a fire insurance office, and did his work with strict attention, never allowed him to forget for one moment that, just beyond the dingy brick walls where the hundred men scribbled with pointed pens beneath the electric lamps, there existed this glorious region where the important part of himself dwelt and moved and had its being. For in this region he pictured himself playing the part of a spectator to his ordinary workaday life, watching, like a king, the stream of events, but untouched in his own soul by the dirt, the noise, and the vulgar commotion of the outer world.\n\nAnd this was no poetic dream merely. Jones was not playing prettily with idealism to amuse himself. It was a living, working belief. So convinced was he that the external world was the result of a vast deception practised upon him by the gross senses, that when he stared at a great building like St. Paul's he felt it would not very much surprise him to see it suddenly quiver like a shape of jelly and then melt utterly away, while in its place stood all at once revealed the mass of colour, or the great intricate vibrations, or the splendid sound \u2014 the spiritual idea \u2014 which it represented in stone.\n\nFor something in this way it was that his mind worked.\n\nYet, to all appearances, and in the satisfaction of all business claims, Jones was normal and unenterprising. He felt nothing but contempt for the wave of modern psychism. He hardly knew the meaning of such words as \"clairvoyance\" and \"clairaudience.\" He had never felt the least desire to join the Theosophical Society and to speculate in theories of astral-plane life, or elementals. He attended no meetings of the Psychical Research Society, and knew no anxiety as to whether his \"aura\" was black or blue; nor was he conscious of the slightest wish to mix in with the revival of cheap occultism which proves so attractive to weak minds of mystical tendencies and unleashed imaginations.\n\nThere were certain things he knew, but none he cared to argue about; and he shrank instinctively from attempting to put names to the contents of this other region, knowing well that such names could only limit and define things that, according to any standards in use in the ordinary world, were simply undefinable and illusive.\n\nSo that, although this was the way his mind worked, there was clearly a very strong leaven of common sense in Jones. In a word, the man the world and the office knew as Jones was Jones. The name summed him up and labelled him correctly \u2014 John Enderby Jones.\n\nAmong the things that he knew, and therefore never cared to speak or speculate about, one was that he plainly saw himself as the inheritor of a long series of past lives, the net result of painful evolution, always as himself, of course, but in numerous different bodies each determined by the behaviour of the preceding one. The present John Jones was the last result to date of all the previous thinking, feeling, and doing of John Jones in earlier bodies and in other centuries. He pretended to no details, nor claimed distinguished ancestry, for he realised his past must have been utterly commonplace and insignificant to have produced his present; but he was just as sure he had been at this weary game for ages as that he breathed, and it never occurred to him to argue, to doubt, or to ask questions. And one result of this belief was that his thoughts dwelt upon the past rather than upon the future; that he read much history, and felt specially drawn to certain periods whose spirit he understood instinctively as though he had lived in them; and that he found all religions uninteresting because, almost without exception, they start from the present and speculate ahead as to what men shall become, instead of looking back and speculating why men have got here as they are.\n\nIn the insurance office he did his work exceedingly well, but without much personal ambition. Men and women he regarded as the impersonal instruments for inflicting upon him the pain or pleasure he had earned by his past workings, for chance had no place in his scheme of things at all; and while he recognised that the practical world could not get along unless every man did his work thoroughly and conscientiously, he took no interest in the accumulation of fame or money for himself, and simply, therefore, did his plain duty, with indifference as to results.\n\nIn common with others who lead a strictly impersonal life, he possessed the quality of utter bravery, and was always ready to face any combination of circumstances, no matter how terrible, because he saw in them the just working-out of past causes he had himself set in motion which could not be dodged or modified. And whereas the majority of people had little meaning for him, either by way of attraction or repulsion, the moment he met some one with whom he felt his past had been vitally interwoven his whole inner being leapt up instantly and shouted the fact in his face, and he regulated his life with the utmost skill and caution, like a sentry on watch for an enemy whose feet could already be heard approaching.\n\nThus, while the great majority of men and women left him uninfluenced \u2014 since he regarded them as so many souls merely passing with him along the great stream of evolution \u2014 there were, here and there, individuals with whom he recognised that his smallest intercourse was of the gravest importance. These were persons with whom he knew in every fibre of his being he had accounts to settle, pleasant or otherwise, arising out of dealings in past lives; and into his relations with these few, therefore, he concentrated as it were the efforts that most people spread over their intercourse with a far greater number. By what means he picked out these few individuals only those conversant with the startling processes of the subconscious memory may say, but the point was that Jones believed the main purpose, if not quite the entire purpose, of his present incarnation lay in his faithful and thorough settling of these accounts, and that if he sought to evade the least detail of such settling, no matter how unpleasant, he would have lived in vain, and would return to his next incarnation with this added duty to perform. For according to his beliefs there was no Chance, and could be no ultimate shirking, and to avoid a problem was merely to waste time and lose opportunities for development.\n\nAnd there was one individual with whom Jones had long understood clearly he had a very large account to settle, and towards the accomplishment of which all the main currents of his being seemed to bear him with unswerving purpose. For, when he first entered the insurance office as a junior clerk ten years before, and through a glass door had caught sight of this man seated in an inner room, one of his sudden overwhelming flashes of intuitive memory had burst up into him from the depths, and he had seen, as in a flame of blinding light, a symbolical picture of the future rising out of a dreadful past, and he had, without any act of definite volition, marked down this man for a real account to be settled.\n\n\"With that man I shall have much to do,\" he said to himself, as he noted the big face look up and meet his eye through the glass. \"There is something I cannot shirk \u2014 a vital relation out of the past of both of us.\"\n\nAnd he went to his desk trembling a little, and with shaking knees, as though the memory of some terrible pain had suddenly laid its icy hand upon his heart and touched the scar of a great horror. It was a moment of genuine terror when their eyes had met through the glass door, and he was conscious of an inward shrinking and loathing that seized upon him with great violence and convinced him in a single second that the settling of this account would be almost, perhaps, more than he could manage.\n\nThe vision passed as swiftly as it came, dropping back again into the submerged region of his consciousness; but he never forgot it, and the whole of his life thereafter became a sort of natural though undeliberate preparation for the fulfilment of the great duty when the time should be ripe.\n\nIn those days \u2014 ten years ago \u2014 this man was the Assistant Manager, but had since been promoted as Manager to one of the company's local branches; and soon afterwards Jones had likewise found himself transferred to this same branch. A little later, again, the branch at Liverpool, one of the most important, had been in peril owing to mismanagement and defalcation, and the man had gone to take charge of it, and again, by mere chance apparently, Jones had been promoted to the same place. And this pursuit of the Assistant Manager had continued for several years, often, too, in the most curious fashion; and though Jones had never exchanged a single word with him, or been so much as noticed indeed by the great man, the clerk understood perfectly well that these moves in the game were all part of a definite purpose. Never for one moment did he doubt that the Invisibles behind the veil were slowly and surely arranging the details of it all so as to lead up suitably to the climax demanded by justice, a climax in which himself and the Manager would play the leading roles.\n\n\"It is inevitable,\" he said to himself, \"and I feel it may be terrible; but when the moment comes I shall be ready, and I pray God that I may face it properly and act like a man.\"\n\nMoreover, as the years passed, and nothing happened, he felt the horror closing in upon him with steady increase, for the fact was Jones hated and loathed the Manager with an intensity of feeling he had never before experienced towards any human being. He shrank from his presence, and from the glance of his eyes, as though he remembered to have suffered nameless cruelties at his hands; and he slowly began to realise, moreover, that the matter to be settled between them was one of very ancient standing, and that the nature of the settlement was a discharge of accumulated punishment which would probably be very dreadful in the manner of its fulfilment.\n\nWhen, therefore, the chief cashier one day informed him that the man was to be in London again \u2014 this time as General Manager of the head office \u2014 and said that he was charged to find a private secretary for him from among the best clerks, and further intimated that the selection had fallen upon himself, Jones accepted the promotion quietly, fatalistically, yet with a degree of inward loathing hardly to be described. For he saw in this merely another move in the evolution of the inevitable Nemesis which he simply dared not seek to frustrate by any personal consideration; and at the same time he was conscious of a certain feeling of relief that the suspense of waiting might soon be mitigated. A secret sense of satisfaction, therefore, accompanied the unpleasant change, and Jones was able to hold himself perfectly well in hand when it was carried into effect and he was formally introduced as private secretary to the General Manager.\n\nNow the Manager was a large, fat man, with a very red face and bags beneath his eyes. Being short-sighted, he wore glasses that seemed to magnify his eyes, which were always a little bloodshot. In hot weather a sort of thin slime covered his cheeks, for he perspired easily. His head was almost entirely bald, and over his turn-down collar his great neck folded in two distinct reddish collops of flesh. His hands were big and his fingers almost massive in thickness.\n\nHe was an excellent business man, of sane judgment and firm will, without enough imagination to confuse his course of action by showing him possible alternatives; and his integrity and ability caused him to be held in universal respect by the world of business and finance. In the important regions of a man's character, however, and at heart, he was coarse, brutal almost to savagery, without consideration for others, and as a result often cruelly unjust to his helpless subordinates.\n\nIn moments of temper, which were not infrequent, his face turned a dull purple, while the top of his bald head shone by contrast like white marble, and the bags under his eyes swelled till it seemed they would presently explode with a pop. And at these times he presented a distinctly repulsive appearance.\n\nBut to a private secretary like Jones, who did his duty regardless of whether his employer was beast or angel, and whose mainspring was principle and not emotion, this made little difference. Within the narrow limits in which any one could satisfy such a man, he pleased the General Manager; and more than once his piercing intuitive faculty, amounting almost to clairvoyance, assisted the chief in a fashion that served to bring the two closer together than might otherwise have been the case, and caused the man to respect in his assistant a power of which he possessed not even the germ himself. It was a curious relationship that grew up between the two, and the cashier, who enjoyed the credit of having made the selection, profited by it indirectly as much as any one else.\n\nSo for some time the work of the office continued normally and very prosperously. John Enderby Jones received a good salary, and in the outward appearance of the two chief characters in this history there was little change noticeable, except that the Manager grew fatter and redder, and the secretary observed that his own hair was beginning to show rather greyish at the temples.\n\nThere were, however, two changes in progress, and they both had to do with Jones, and are important to mention.\n\nOne was that he began to dream evilly. In the region of deep sleep, where the possibility of significant dreaming first develops itself, he was tormented more and more with vivid scenes and pictures in which a tall thin man, dark and sinister of countenance, and with bad eyes, was closely associated with himself. Only the setting was that of a past age, with costumes of centuries gone by, and the scenes had to do with dreadful cruelties that could not belong to modern life as he knew it.\n\nThe other change was also significant, but is not so easy to describe, for he had in fact become aware that some new portion of himself, hitherto unawakened, had stirred slowly into life out of the very depths of his consciousness. This new part of himself amounted almost to another personality, and he never observed its least manifestation without a strange thrill at his heart.\n\nFor he understood that it had begun to watch the Manager!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 363", + "text": "It was the habit of Jones, since he was compelled to work among conditions that were utterly distasteful, to withdraw his mind wholly from business once the day was over. During office hours he kept the strictest possible watch upon himself, and turned the key on all inner dreams, lest any sudden uprush from the deeps should interfere with his duty. But, once the working day was over, the gates flew open, and he began to enjoy himself.\n\nHe read no modern books on the subjects that interested him, and, as already said, he followed no course of training, nor belonged to any society that dabbled with half-told mysteries; but, once released from the office desk in the Manager's room, he simply and naturally entered the other region, because he was an old inhabitant, a rightful denizen, and because he belonged there. It was, in fact, really a case of dual personality; and a carefully drawn agreement existed between Jones-of-the-fire-insurance-office and Jones-of-the-mysteries, by the terms of which, under heavy penalties, neither region claimed him out of hours.\n\nFor the moment he reached his rooms under the roof in Bloomsbury, and had changed his city coat to another, the iron doors of the office clanged far behind him, and in front, before his very eyes, rolled up the beautiful gates of ivory, and he entered into the places of flowers and singing and wonderful veiled forms. Sometimes he quite lost touch with the outer world, forgetting to eat his dinner or go to bed, and lay in a state of trance, his consciousness working far out of the body. And on other occasions he walked the streets on air, half-way between the two regions, unable to distinguish between incarnate and discarnate forms, and not very far, probably, beyond the strata where poets, saints, and the greatest artists have moved and thought and found their inspiration. But this was only when some insistent bodily claim prevented his full release, and more often than not he was entirely independent of his physical portion and free of the real region, without let or hindrance.\n\nOne evening he reached home utterly exhausted after the burden of the day's work. The Manager had been more than usually brutal, unjust, ill-tempered, and Jones had been almost persuaded out of his settled policy of contempt into answering back. Everything seemed to have gone amiss, and the man's coarse, underbred nature had been in the ascendant all day long: he had thumped the desk with his great fists, abused, found fault unreasonably, uttered outrageous things, and behaved generally as he actually was \u2014 beneath the thin veneer of acquired business varnish. He had done and said everything to wound all that was woundable in an ordinary secretary, and though Jones fortunately dwelt in a region from which he looked down upon such a man as he might look down on the blundering of a savage animal, the strain had nevertheless told severely upon him, and he reached home wondering for the first time in his life whether there was perhaps a point beyond which he would be unable to restrain himself any longer.\n\nFor something out of the usual had happened. At the close of a passage of great stress between the two, every nerve in the secretary's body tingling from undeserved abuse, the Manager had suddenly turned full upon him, in the corner of the private room where the safes stood, in such a way that the glare of his red eyes, magnified by the glasses, looked straight into his own. And at this very second that other personality in Jones \u2014 the one that was ever watching\u2014 rose up swiftly from the deeps within and held a mirror to his face.\n\nA moment of flame and vision rushed over him, and for one single second \u2014 one merciless second of clear sight \u2014 he saw the Manager as the tall dark man of his evil dreams, and the knowledge that he had suffered at his hands some awful injury in the past crashed through his mind like the report of a cannon.\n\nIt all flashed upon him and was gone, changing him from fire to ice, and then back again to fire; and he left the office with the certain conviction in his heart that the time for his final settlement with the man, the time for the inevitable retribution, was at last drawing very near.\n\nAccording to his invariable custom, however, he succeeded in putting the memory of all this unpleasantness out of his mind with the changing of his office coat, and after dozing a little in his leather chair before the fire, he started out as usual for dinner in the Soho French restaurant, and began to dream himself away into the region of flowers and singing, and to commune with the Invisibles that were the very sources of his real life and being.\n\nFor it was in this way that his mind worked, and the habits of years had crystallised into rigid lines along which it was now necessary and inevitable for him to act.\n\nAt the door of the little restaurant he stopped short, a half-remembered appointment in his mind. He had made an engagement with some one, but where, or with whom, had entirely slipped his memory. He thought it was for dinner, or else to meet just after dinner, and for a second it came back to him that it had something to do with the office, but, whatever it was, he was quite unable to recall it, and a reference to his pocket engagement book showed only a blank page. Evidently he had even omitted to enter it; and after standing a moment vainly trying to recall either the time, place, or person, he went in and sat down.\n\nBut though the details had escaped him, his subconscious memory seemed to know all about it, for he experienced a sudden sinking of the heart, accompanied by a sense of foreboding anticipation, and felt that beneath his exhaustion there lay a centre of tremendous excitement. The emotion caused by the engagement was at work, and would presently cause the actual details of the appointment to reappear.\n\nInside the restaurant the feeling increased, instead of passing: some one was waiting for him somewhere \u2014 some one whom he had definitely arranged to meet. He was expected by a person that very night and just about that very time. But by whom? Where? A curious inner trembling came over him, and he made a strong effort to hold himself in hand and to be ready for anything that might come.\n\nAnd then suddenly came the knowledge that the place of appointment was this very restaurant, and, further, that the person he had promised to meet was already here, waiting somewhere quite close beside him.\n\nHe looked up nervously and began to examine the faces round him. The majority of the diners were Frenchmen, chattering loudly with much gesticulation and laughter; and there was a fair sprinkling of clerks like himself who came because the prices were low and the food good, but there was no single face that he recognised until his glance fell upon the occupant of the corner seat opposite, generally filled by himself.\n\n\"There's the man who's waiting for me!\" thought Jones instantly.\n\nHe knew it at once. The man, he saw, was sitting well back into the corner, with a thick overcoat buttoned tightly up to the chin. His skin was very white, and a heavy black beard grew far up over his cheeks. At first the secretary took him for a stranger, but when he looked up and their eyes met, a sense of familiarity flashed across him, and for a second or two Jones imagined he was staring at a man he had known years before. For, barring the beard, it was the face of an elderly clerk who had occupied the next desk to his own when he first entered the service of the insurance company, and had shown him the most painstaking kindness and sympathy in the early difficulties of his work. But a moment later the illusion passed, for he remembered that Thorpe had been dead at least five years. The similarity of the eyes was obviously a mere suggestive trick of memory.\n\nThe two men stared at one another for several seconds, and then Jones began to act instinctively, and because he had to. He crossed over and took the vacant seat at the other's table, facing him; for he felt it was somehow imperative to explain why he was late, and how it was he had almost forgotten the engagement altogether.\n\nNo honest excuse, however, came to his assistance, though his mind had begun to work furiously.\n\n\"Yes, you are late,\" said the man quietly, before he could find a single word to utter. \"But it doesn't matter. Also, you had forgotten the appointment, but that makes no difference either.\"\n\n\"I knew \u2014 that there was an engagement,\" Jones stammered, passing his hand over his forehead; \"but somehow \u2014\"\n\n\"You will recall it presently,\" continued the other in a gentle voice, and smiling a little. \"It was in deep sleep last night we arranged this, and the unpleasant occurrences of today have for the moment obliterated it.\"\n\nA faint memory stirred within him as the man spoke, and a grove of trees with moving forms hovered before his eyes and then vanished again, while for an instant the stranger seemed to be capable of self-distortion and to have assumed vast proportions, with wonderful flaming eyes.\n\n\"Oh!\" he gasped. \"It was there \u2014 in the other region?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the other, with a smile that illumined his whole face. \"You will remember presently, all in good time, and meanwhile you have no cause to feel afraid.\"\n\nThere was a wonderful soothing quality in the man's voice, like the whispering of a great wind, and the clerk felt calmer at once. They sat a little while longer, but he could not remember that they talked much or ate anything. He only recalled afterwards that the head waiter came up and whispered something in his ear, and that he glanced round and saw the other people were looking at him curiously, some of them laughing, and that his companion then got up and led the way out of the restaurant.\n\nThey walked hurriedly through the streets, neither of them speaking; and Jones was so intent upon getting back the whole history of the affair from the region of deep sleep, that he barely noticed the way they took. Yet it was clear he knew where they were bound for just as well as his companion, for he crossed the streets often ahead of him, diving down alleys without hesitation, and the other followed always without correction.\n\nThe pavements were very full, and the usual night crowds of London were surging to and fro in the glare of the shop lights, but somehow no one impeded their rapid movements, and they seemed to pass through the people as if they were smoke. And, as they went, the pedestrians and traffic grew less and less, and they soon passed the Mansion House and the deserted space in front of the Royal Exchange, and so on down Fenchurch Street and within sight of the Tower of London, rising dim and shadowy in the smoky air.\n\nJones remembered all this perfectly well, and thought it was his intense preoccupation that made the distance seem so short. But it was when the Tower was left behind and they turned northwards that he began to notice how altered everything was, and saw that they were in a neighbourhood where houses were suddenly scarce, and lanes and fields beginning, and that their only light was the stars overhead. And, as the deeper consciousness more and more asserted itself to the exclusion of the surface happenings of his mere body during the day, the sense of exhaustion vanished, and he realised that he was moving somewhere in the region of causes behind the veil, beyond the gross deceptions of the senses, and released from the clumsy spell of space and time.\n\nWithout great surprise, therefore, he turned and saw that his companion had altered, had shed his overcoat and black hat, and was moving beside him absolutely without sound. For a brief second he saw him, tall as a tree, extending through space like a great shadow, misty and wavering of outline, followed by a sound like wings in the darkness; but, when he stopped, fear clutching at his heart, the other resumed his former proportions, and Jones could plainly see his normal outline against the green field behind.\n\nThen the secretary saw him fumbling at his neck, and at the same moment the black beard came away from the face in his hand.\n\n\"Then you are Thorpe!\" he gasped, yet somehow without overwhelming surprise.\n\nThey stood facing one another in the lonely lane, trees meeting overhead and hiding the stars, and a sound of mournful sighing among the branches.\n\n\"I am Thorpe,\" was the answer in a voice that almost seemed part of the wind. \"And I have come out of our far past to help you, for my debt to you is large, and in this life I had but small opportunity to repay.\"\n\nJones thought quickly of the man's kindness to him in the office, and a great wave of feeling surged through him as he began to remember dimly the friend by whose side he had already climbed, perhaps through vast ages of his soul's evolution.\n\n\"To help me now?\" he whispered.\n\n\"You will understand me when you enter into your real memory and recall how great a debt I have to pay for old faithful kindnesses of long ago,\" sighed the other in a voice like falling wind.\n\n\"Between us, though, there can be no question of debt,\" Jones heard himself saying, and remembered the reply that floated to him on the air and the smile that lightened for a moment the stern eyes facing him.\n\n\"Not of debt, indeed, but of privilege.\"\n\nJones felt his heart leap out towards this man, this old friend, tried by centuries and still faithful. He made a movement to seize his hand. But the other shifted like a thing of mist, and for a moment the clerk's head swam and his eyes seemed to fail.\n\n\"Then you are dead?\" he said under his breath with a slight shiver.\n\n\"Five years ago I left the body you knew,\" replied Thorpe. \"I tried to help you then instinctively, not fully recognising you. But now I can accomplish far more.\"\n\nWith an awful sense of foreboding and dread in his heart, the secretary was beginning to understand.\n\n\"It has to do with \u2014 with \u2014?\"\n\n\"Your past dealings with the Manager,\" came the answer, as the wind rose louder among the branches overhead and carried off the remainder of the sentence into the air.\n\nJones's memory, which was just beginning to stir among the deepest layers of all, shut down suddenly with a snap, and he followed his companion over fields and down sweet-smelling lanes where the air was fragrant and cool, till they came to a large house, standing gaunt and lonely in the shadows at the edge of a wood. It was wrapped in utter stillness, with windows heavily draped in black, and the clerk, as he looked, felt such an overpowering wave of sadness invade him that his eyes began to burn and smart, and he was conscious of a desire to shed tears.\n\nThe key made a harsh noise as it turned in the lock, and when the door swung open into a lofty hall they heard a confused sound of rustling and whispering, as of a great throng of people pressing forward to meet them. The air seemed full of swaying movement, and Jones was certain he saw hands held aloft and dim faces claiming recognition, while in his heart, already oppressed by the approaching burden of vast accumulated memories, he was aware of the uncoiling of something that had been asleep for ages.\n\nAs they advanced he heard the doors close with a muffled thunder behind them, and saw that the shadows seemed to retreat and shrink away towards the interior of the house, carrying the hands and faces with them. He heard the wind singing round the walls and over the roof, and its wailing voice mingled with the sound of deep, collective breathing that filled the house like the murmur of a sea; and as they walked up the broad staircase and through the vaulted rooms, where pillars rose like the stems of trees, he knew that the building was crowded, row upon row, with the thronging memories of his own long past.\n\n\"This is the House of the Past,\" whispered Thorpe beside him, as they moved silently from room to room; \"the house of your past. It is full from cellar to roof with the memories of what you have done, thought, and felt from the earliest stages of your evolution until now.\n\n\"The house climbs up almost to the clouds, and stretches back into the heart of the wood you saw outside, but the remoter halls are filled with the ghosts of ages ago too many to count, and even if we were able to waken them you could not remember them now. Some day, though, they will come and claim you, and you must know them, and answer their questions, for they can never rest till they have exhausted themselves again through you, and justice has been perfectly worked out.\n\n\"But now follow me closely, and you shall see the particular memory for which I am permitted to be your guide, so that you may know and understand a great force in your present life, and may use the sword of justice, or rise to the level of a great forgiveness, according to your degree of power.\"\n\nIcy thrills ran through the trembling clerk, and as he walked slowly beside his companion he heard from the vaults below, as well as from more distant regions of the vast building, the stirring and sighing of the serried ranks of sleepers, sounding in the still air like a chord swept from unseen strings stretched somewhere among the very foundations of the house.\n\nStealthily, picking their way among the great pillars, they moved up the sweeping staircase and through several dark corridors and halls, and presently stopped outside a small door in an archway where the shadows were very deep.\n\n\"Remain close by my side, and remember to utter no cry,\" whispered the voice of his guide, and as the clerk turned to reply he saw his face was stern to whiteness and even shone a little in the darkness.\n\nThe room they entered seemed at first to be pitchy black, but gradually the secretary perceived a faint reddish glow against the farther end, and thought he saw figures moving silently to and fro.\n\n\"Now watch!\" whispered Thorpe, as they pressed close to the wall near the door and waited. \"But remember to keep absolute silence. It is a torture scene.\"\n\nJones felt utterly afraid, and would have turned to fly if he dared, for an indescribable terror seized him and his knees shook; but some power that made escape impossible held him remorselessly there, and with eyes glued on the spots of light he crouched against the wall and waited.\n\nThe figures began to move more swiftly, each in its own dim light that shed no radiance beyond itself, and he heard a soft clanking of chains and the voice of a man groaning in pain. Then came the sound of a door closing, and thereafter Jones saw but one figure, the figure of an old man, naked entirely, and fastened with chains to an iron framework on the floor. His memory gave a sudden leap of fear as he looked, for the features and white beard were familiar, and he recalled them as though of yesterday.\n\nThe other figures had disappeared, and the old man became the centre of the terrible picture. Slowly, with ghastly groans; as the heat below him increased into a steady glow, the aged body rose in a curve of agony, resting on the iron frame only where the chains held wrists and ankles fast. Cries and gasps filled the air, and Jones felt exactly as though they came from his own throat, and as if the chains were burning into his own wrists and ankles, and the heat scorching the skin and flesh upon his own back. He began to writhe and twist himself.\n\n\"Spain!\" whispered the voice at his side, \"and four hundred years ago.\"\n\n\"And the purpose?\" gasped the perspiring clerk, though he knew quite well what the answer must be.\n\n\"To extort the name of a friend, to his death and betrayal,\" came the reply through the darkness.\n\nA sliding panel opened with a little rattle in the wall immediately above the rack, and a face, framed in the same red glow, appeared and looked down upon the dying victim. Jones was only just able to choke a scream, for he recognised the tall dark man of his dreams. With horrible, gloating eyes he gazed down upon the writhing form of the old man, and his lips moved as in speaking, though no words were actually audible.\n\n\"He asks again for the name,\" explained the other, as the clerk struggled with the intense hatred and loathing that threatened every moment to result in screams and action. His ankles and wrists pained him so that he could scarcely keep still, but a merciless power held him to the scene.\n\nHe saw the old man, with a fierce cry, raise his tortured head and spit up into the face at the panel, and then the shutter slid back again, and a moment later the increased glow beneath the body, accompanied by awful writhing, told of the application of further heat. There came the odour of burning flesh; the white beard curled and burned to a crisp; the body fell back limp upon the red-hot iron, and then shot up again in fresh agony; cry after cry, the most awful in the world, rang out with deadened sound between the four walls; and again the panel slid back creaking, and revealed the dreadful face of the torturer.\n\nAgain the name was asked for, and again it was refused; and this time, after the closing of the panel, a door opened, and the tall thin man with the evil face came slowly into the chamber. His features were savage with rage and disappointment, and in the dull red glow that fell upon them he looked like a very prince of devils. In his hand he held a pointed iron at white heat.\n\n\"Now the murder!\" came from Thorpe in a whisper that sounded as if it was outside the building and far away.\n\nJones knew quite well what was coming, but was unable even to close his eyes. He felt all the fearful pains himself just as though he were actually the sufferer; but now, as he stared, he felt something more besides; and when the tall man deliberately approached the rack and plunged the heated iron first into one eye and then into the other, he heard the faint fizzing of it, and felt his own eyes burst in frightful pain from his head. At the same moment, unable longer to control himself, he uttered a wild shriek and dashed forward to seize the torturer and tear him to a thousand pieces. Instantly, in a flash, the entire scene vanished; darkness rushed in to fill the room, and he felt himself lifted off his feet by some force like a great wind and borne swiftly away into space.\n\nWhen he recovered his senses he was standing just outside the house and the figure of Thorpe was beside him in the gloom. The great doors were in the act of closing behind him, but before they shut he fancied he caught a glimpse of an immense veiled figure standing upon the threshold, with flaming eyes, and in his hand a bright weapon like a shining sword of fire.\n\n\"Come quickly now \u2014 all is over!\" Thorpe whispered.\n\n\"And the dark man \u2014?\" gasped the clerk, as he moved swiftly by the other's side.\n\n\"In this present life is the Manager of the company.\"\n\n\"And the victim?\"\n\n\"Was yourself!\"\n\n\"And the friend he \u2014I refused to betray?\"\n\n\"I was that friend,\" answered Thorpe, his voice with every moment sounding more and more like the cry of the wind. \"You gave your life in agony to save mine.\"\n\n\"And again, in this life, we have all three been together?\"\n\n\"Yes. Such forces are not soon or easily exhausted, and justice is not satisfied till all have reaped what they sowed.\"\n\nJones had an odd feeling that he was slipping away into some other state of consciousness. Thorpe began to seem unreal. Presently he would be unable to ask more questions. He felt utterly sick and faint with it all, and his strength was ebbing.\n\n\"Oh, quick!\" he cried, \"now tell me more. Why did I see this? What must I do?\"\n\nThe wind swept across the field on their right and entered the wood beyond with a great roar, and the air round him seemed filled with voices and the rushing of hurried movement.\n\n\"To the ends of justice,\" answered the other, as though speaking out of the centre of the wind and from a distance, \"which sometimes is entrusted to the hands of those who suffered and were strong. One wrong cannot be put right by another wrong, but your life has been so worthy that the opportunity is given to \u2014\"\n\nThe voice grew fainter and fainter, already it was far overhead with the rushing wind.\n\n\"You may punish or \u2014\" Here Jones lost sight of Thorpe's figure altogether, for he seemed to have vanished and melted away into the wood behind him. His voice sounded far across the trees, very weak, and ever rising.\n\n\"Or if you can rise to the level of a great forgiveness \u2014\"\n\nThe voice became inaudible... The wind came crying out of the wood again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 364", + "text": "Jones shivered and stared about him. He shook himself violently and rubbed his eyes. The room was dark, the fire was out; he felt cold and stiff. He got up out of his armchair, still trembling, and lit the gas. Outside the wind was howling, and when he looked at his watch he saw that it was very late and he must go to bed.\n\nHe had not even changed his office coat; he must have fallen asleep in the chair as soon as he came in, and he had slept for several hours. Certainly he had eaten no dinner, for he felt ravenous." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 365", + "text": "Next day, and for several weeks thereafter, the business of the office went on as usual, and Jones did his work well and behaved outwardly with perfect propriety. No more visions troubled him, and his relations with the Manager became, if anything, somewhat smoother and easier.\n\nTrue, the man looked a little different, because the clerk kept seeing him with his inner and outer eye promiscuously, so that one moment he was broad and red-faced, and the next he was tall, thin, and dark, enveloped, as it were, in a sort of black atmosphere tinged with red. While at times a confusion of the two sights took place, and Jones saw the two faces mingled in a composite countenance that was very horrible indeed to contemplate. But, beyond this occasional change in the outward appearance of the Manager, there was nothing that the secretary noticed as the result of his vision, and business went on more or less as before, and perhaps even with a little less friction.\n\nBut in the rooms under the roof in Bloomsbury it was different, for there it was perfectly clear to Jones that Thorpe had come to take up his abode with him. He never saw him, but he knew all the time he was there. Every night on returning from his work he was greeted by the well-known whisper, \"Be ready when I give the sign!\" and often in the night he woke up suddenly out of deep sleep and was aware that Thorpe had that minute moved away from his bed and was standing waiting and watching somewhere in the darkness of the room. Often he followed him down the stairs, though the dim gas jet on the landings never revealed his outline; and sometimes he did not come into the room at all, but hovered outside the window, peering through the dirty panes, or sending his whisper into the chamber in the whistling of the wind.\n\nFor Thorpe had come to stay, and Jones knew that he would not get rid of him until he had fulfilled the ends of justice and accomplished the purpose for which he was waiting.\n\nMeanwhile, as the days passed, he went through a tremendous struggle with himself, and came to the perfectly honest decision that the \"level of a great forgiveness\" was impossible for him, and that he must therefore accept the alternative and use the secret knowledge placed in his hands \u2014 and execute justice. And once this decision was arrived at, he noticed that Thorpe no longer left him alone during the day as before, but now accompanied him to the office and stayed more or less at his side all through business hours as well. His whisper made itself heard in the streets and in the train, and even in the Manager's room where he worked; sometimes warning, sometimes urging, but never for a moment suggesting the abandonment of the main purpose, and more than once so plainly audible that the clerk felt certain others must have heard it as well as himself.\n\nThe obsession was complete. He felt he was always under Thorpe's eye day and night, and he knew he must acquit himself like a man when the moment came, or prove a failure in his own sight as well in the sight of the other.\n\nAnd now that his mind was made up, nothing could prevent the carrying out of the sentence. He bought a pistol, and spent his Saturday afternoons practising at a target in lonely places along the Essex shore, marking out in the sand the exact measurements of the Manager's room. Sundays he occupied in like fashion, putting up at an inn overnight for the purpose, spending the money that usually went into the savings bank on travelling expenses and cartridges. Everything was done very thoroughly, for there must be no possibility of failure; and at the end of several weeks he had become so expert with his six-shooter that at a distance of 25 feet, which was the greatest length of the Manager's room, he could pick the inside out of a halfpenny nine times out of a dozen, and leave a clean, unbroken rim.\n\nThere was not the slightest desire to delay. He had thought the matter over from every point of view his mind could reach, and his purpose was inflexible. Indeed, he felt proud to think that he had been chosen as the instrument of justice in the infliction of so well-deserved and so terrible a punishment. Vengeance may have had some part in his decision, but he could not help that, for he still felt at times the hot chains burning his wrists and ankles with fierce agony through to the bone. He remembered the hideous pain of his slowly roasting back, and the point when he thought death must intervene to end his suffering, but instead new powers of endurance had surged up in him, and awful further stretches of pain had opened up, and unconsciousness seemed farther off than ever. Then at last the hot irons in his eyes... It all came back to him, and caused him to break out in icy perspiration at the mere thought of it... the vile face at the panel... the expression of the dark face... His fingers worked. His blood boiled. It was utterly impossible to keep the idea of vengeance altogether out of his mind.\n\nSeveral times he was temporarily baulked of his prey. Odd things happened to stop him when he was on the point of action. The first day, for instance, the Manager fainted from the heat. Another time when he had decided to do the deed, the Manager did not come down to the office at all. And a third time, when his hand was actually in his hip pocket, he suddenly heard Thorpe's horrid whisper telling him to wait, and turning, he saw that the head cashier had entered the room noiselessly without his noticing it. Thorpe evidently knew what he was about, and did not intend to let the clerk bungle the matter.\n\nHe fancied, moreover, that the head cashier was watching him. He was always meeting him in unexpected corners and places, and the cashier never seemed to have an adequate excuse for being there. His movements seemed suddenly of particular interest to others in the office as well, for clerks were always being sent to ask him unnecessary questions, and there was apparently a general design to keep him under a sort of surveillance, so that he was never much alone with the Manager in the private room where they worked. And once the cashier had even gone so far as to suggest that he could take his holiday earlier than usual if he liked, as the work had been very arduous of late and the heat exceedingly trying.\n\nHe noticed, too, that he was sometimes followed by a certain individual in the streets, a careless-looking sort of man, who never came face to face with him, or actually ran into him, but who was always in his train or omnibus, and whose eye he often caught observing him over the top of his newspaper, and who on one occasion was even waiting at the door of his lodgings when he came out to dine.\n\nThere were other indications too, of various sorts, that led him to think something was at work to defeat his purpose, and that he must act at once before these hostile forces could prevent.\n\nAnd so the end came very swiftly, and was thoroughly approved by Thorpe.\n\nIt was towards the close of July, and one of the hottest days London had ever known, for the City was like an oven, and the particles of dust seemed to burn the throats of the unfortunate toilers in street and office. The portly Manager, who suffered cruelly owing to his size, came down perspiring and gasping with the heat. He carried a light-coloured umbrella to protect his head.\n\n\"He'll want something more than that, though!\" Jones laughed quietly to himself when he saw him enter.\n\nThe pistol was safely in his hip pocket, every one of its six chambers loaded.\n\nThe Manager saw the smile on his face, and gave him a long steady look as he sat down to his desk in the corner. A few minutes later he touched the bell for the head cashier \u2014 a single ring \u2014 and then asked Jones to fetch some papers from another safe in the room upstairs.\n\nA deep inner trembling seized the secretary as he noticed these precautions, for he saw that the hostile forces were at work against him, and yet he felt he could delay no longer and must act that very morning, interference or no interference. However, he went obediently up in the lift to the next floor, and while fumbling with the combination of the safe, known only to himself, the cashier, and the Manager, he again heard Thorpe's horrid whisper just behind him:\n\n\"You must do it today! You must do it today!\"\n\nHe came down again with the papers, and found the Manager alone. The room was like a furnace, and a wave of dead heated air met him in the face as he went in. The moment he passed the doorway he realised that he had been the subject of conversation between the head cashier and his enemy. They had been discussing him. Perhaps an inkling of his secret had somehow got into their minds. They had been watching him for days past. They had become suspicious.\n\nClearly, he must act now, or let the opportunity slip by perhaps for ever. He heard Thorpe's voice in his ear, but this time it was no mere whisper, but a plain human voice, speaking out loud.\n\n\"Now!\" it said. \"Do it now!\"\n\nThe room was empty. Only the Manager and himself were in it.\n\nJones turned from his desk where he had been standing, and locked the door leading into the main office. He saw the army of clerks scribbling in their shirt-sleeves, for the upper half of the door was of glass. He had perfect control of himself, and his heart was beating steadily.\n\nThe Manager, hearing the key turn in the lock, looked up sharply.\n\n\"What's that you're doing?\" he asked quickly.\n\n\"Only locking the door, sir,\" replied the secretary in a quite even voice.\n\n\"Why? Who told you to \u2014?\"\n\n\"The voice of Justice, sir,\" replied Jones, looking steadily into the hated face.\n\nThe Manager looked black for a moment, and stared angrily across the room at him. Then suddenly his expression changed as he stared, and he tried to smile. It was meant to be a kind smile evidently, but it only succeeded in being frightened.\n\n\"That is a good idea in this weather,\" he said lightly, \"but it would be much better to lock it on the outside, wouldn't it, Mr. Jones?\"\n\n\"I think not, sir. You might escape me then. Now you can't.\"\n\nJones took his pistol out and pointed it at the other's face. Down the barrel he saw the features of the tall dark man, evil and sinister. Then the outline trembled a little and the face of the Manager slipped back into its place. It was white as death, and shining with perspiration.\n\n\"You tortured me to death four hundred years ago,\" said the clerk in the same steady voice, \"and now the dispensers of justice have chosen me to punish you.\"\n\nThe Manager's face turned to flame, and then back to chalk again. He made a quick movement towards the telephone bell, stretching out a hand to reach it, but at the same moment Jones pulled the trigger and the wrist was shattered, splashing the wall behind with blood.\n\n\"That's one place where the chains burnt,\" he said quietly to himself. His hand was absolutely steady, and he felt that he was a hero.\n\nThe Manager was on his feet, with a scream of pain, supporting himself with his right hand on the desk in front of him, but Jones pressed the trigger again, and a bullet flew into the other wrist, so that the big man, deprived of support, fell forward with a crash on to the desk.\n\n\"You damned madman!\" shrieked the Manager. \"Drop that pistol!\"\n\n\"That's another place,\" was all Jones said, still taking careful aim for another shot.\n\nThe big man, screaming and blundering, scrambled beneath the desk, making frantic efforts to hide, but the secretary took a step forward and fired two shots in quick succession into his projecting legs, hitting first one ankle and then the other, and smashing them horribly.\n\n\"Two more places where the chains burnt,\" he said, going a little nearer.\n\nThe Manager, still shrieking, tried desperately to squeeze his bulk behind the shelter of the opening beneath the desk, but he was far too large, and his bald head protruded through on the other side. Jones caught him by the scruff of his great neck and dragged him yelping out on to the carpet. He was covered with blood, and flopped helplessly upon his broken wrists.\n\n\"Be quick now!\" cried the voice of Thorpe.\n\nThere was a tremendous commotion and banging at the door, and Jones gripped his pistol tightly. Something seemed to crash through his brain, clearing it for a second, so that he thought he saw beside him a great veiled figure, with drawn sword and flaming eyes, and sternly approving attitude.\n\n\"Remember the eyes! Remember the eyes!\" hissed Thorpe in the air above him.\n\nJones felt like a god, with a god's power. Vengeance disappeared from his mind. He was acting impersonally as an instrument in the hands of the Invisibles who dispense justice and balance accounts. He bent down and put the barrel close into the other's face, smiling a little as he saw the childish efforts of the arms to cover his head. Then he pulled the trigger, and a bullet went straight into the right eye, blackening the skin. Moving the pistol two inches the other way, he sent another bullet crashing into the left eye. Then he stood upright over his victim with a deep sigh of satisfaction.\n\nThe Manager wriggled convulsively for the space of a single second, and then lay still in death.\n\nThere was not a moment to lose, for the door was already broken in and violent hands were at his neck. Jones put the pistol to his temple and once more pressed the trigger with his finger.\n\nBut this time there was no report. Only a little dead click answered the pressure, for the secretary had forgotten that the pistol had only six chambers, and that he had used them all. He threw the useless weapon on to the floor, laughing a little out loud, and turned, without a struggle, to give himself up.\n\n\"I had to do it,\" he said quietly, while they tied him. \"It was simply my duty! And now I am ready to face the consequences, and Thorpe will be proud of me. For justice has been done and the gods are satisfied.\"\n\nHe made not the slightest resistance, and when the two policemen marched him off through the crowd of shuddering little clerks in the office, he again saw the veiled figure moving majestically in front of him, making slow sweeping circles with the flaming sword, to keep back the host of faces that were thronging in upon him from the Other Region.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Dance of Death ]\n\nBrowne went to the dance feeling genuinely depressed, for the doctor had just warned him that his heart was weak and that he must be exceedingly careful in the matter of exertion.\n\n\"Dancing?\" he asked, with that assumed lightness some natures affect in the face of a severe shock\u2014the plucky instinct to conceal pain.\n\n\"Well\u2014in moderation, perhaps,\" hummed the doctor. \"Not wildly!\" he added, with a smile that betrayed something more than mere professional sympathy.\n\nAt any other time Browne would probably have laughed, but the doctor's serious manner put a touch of ice on the springs of laughter. At the age of twenty-six one hardly realises death; life is still endless; and it is only old people who have \"hearts\" and such-like afflictions. So it was that the professional dictum came as a real shock; and with it too, as a sudden revelation, came that little widening of sympathy for others that is part of every deep experience as the years roll up and pass.\n\nAt first he thought of sending an excuse. He went about carefully, making the 'buses stop dead before he got out, and going very slowly up steps. Then gradually he grew more accustomed to the burden of his dread secret: the commonplace events of the day; the hated drudgery of the office, where he was an underpaid clerk; the contact with other men who bore similar afflictions with assumed indifference; the faultfinding of the manager, making him fearful of his position\u2014all this helped to reduce the sense of first alarm, and, instead of sending an excuse, he went to the dance, as we have seen, feeling deeply depressed, and moving all the time as if he carried in his side a brittle glass globe that the least jarring might break into a thousand pieces.\n\nThe spontaneous jollity natural to a boy and girl dance served, however, to emphasise vividly the contrast of his own mood, and to make him very conscious again of his little hidden source of pain. But, though he would gladly have availed himself of a sympathetic ear among the many there whom he knew intimately, he nevertheless exercised the restraint natural to his character, and avoided any reference to the matter that bulked so largely in his consciousness. Once or twice he was tempted, but a prevision of the probable conversation that would ensue stopped him always in time: \"Oh, I am so sorry, Mr. Browne, and you mustn't dance too hard, you know,\" and then his careless laugh as he remarked that it didn't matter a bit, and his little joke as he whirled his partner off for another spin.\n\nHe knew, of course, there was nothing very sensational about being told that one's heart was weak.\n\nEven the doctor had smiled a little; and he now recalled more than one acquaintance who had the same trouble and made light of it. Yet it sounded in Browne's life a note of profound and sinister gloom. It snatched beyond his reach at one fell swoop all that he most loved and enjoyed, destroying a thousand dreams, and painting the future a dull drab colour without hope. He was an idealist at heart, hating the sordid routine of the life he led as a business underling. His dreams were of the open air, of mountains, forests, and great plains, of the sea, and of the lonely places of the world. Wind and rain spoke intimately to his soul, and the storms of heaven, as he heard them raging at. Night round his high room in Bloomsbury, stirred savage yearnings that haunted him for days afterwards with the voices of the desert. Sometimes during the lunch hour, when he escaped temporarily from the artificial light and close air of his high office stool, to see the white clouds sailing by overhead, and to hear the wind singing in the wires, it set such a fever in his blood that for the remainder of the afternoon he found it impossible to concentrate on his work, and thus exasperated the loud-voiced manager almost to madness.\n\nHaving no expectations, and absolutely no practical business ability, he was fortunate, however, in having a \"place\" at all, and the hard fact that promotion was unlikely made him all the more careful to keep his dreams in their place, to do his work as well as possible, and to save what little he could.\n\nHis holidays were the only points of light in an otherwise dreary existence. And one day, when he should have saved enough, he looked forward vaguely to a life close to Nature, perhaps a shepherd on a hundred hills, a dweller in the woods, within sound of his beloved trees and waters, where the smell of the earth and camp fire would be ever in his nostrils, and the running stream always ready to bear his boat swiftly away into happiness.\n\nAnd now the knowledge that he had a weak heart came to spoil everything. It shook his dream to the very foundations. It depressed him utterly. Any moment the blow might fall. It might catch him in the water, swimming, or half-way up the mountain, or midway in one of his lonely tramps, just when his enjoyment depended most upon his being reckless and forgetful of bodily limitations\u2014that freedom of the spirit in the wilderness he so loved. He might even be forced to spend his holiday, to say nothing of the dream of the far future, in some farmhouse \"quietly,\" instead of gloriously in the untrodden wilds. The thought made him angry with pain. All day he was haunted and dismayed, and all day he heard the wind whispering among branches and the water lapping somewhere against sandy banks in the sun.\n\nThe dance was a small subscription affair, hastily arranged and happily informal. It took place in a large hall that was used in the daytime as a gymnasium, but the floor was good and the music more than good. Foils and helmets hung round the walls, and high up under the brown rafters were ropes, rings, and trapezes coiled away out of reach, their unsightliness further concealed by an array of brightly coloured f lags. Only the light was not of the best, for the hall was very long, and the gallery at the far end loomed in a sort of twilight that was further deepened by the shadows of the f lags overhead. But its benches afforded excellent sitting-out places, where strong light was not always an essential to happiness, and no one dreamed of finding fault.\n\nAt first he danced cautiously, but by degrees the spirit of the time and place relieved his depression and helped him to forget. He had probably exaggerated the importance of his malady.\n\nLots of other fellows, even as young as he was, had weak hearts and thought nothing of it. All the time, however, there was an undercurrent of sadness and disappointment not to be denied.\n\nSomething had gone out of life. A note of darkness had crept in. He found his partners dull, and they no doubt found him still duller.\n\nYet this dance, with nothing apparently to distinguish it from a hundred others, stood out in all his experience with an indelible red mark against it. It is a common trick of Nature\u2014and a profoundly significant one\u2014that, just when despair is deepest, she waves a wand before the weary eyes and does her best to waken an impossible hope. Her idea, presumably, being to keep her victim going actively to the very end of the chapter, lest through indifference he should lose something of the lesson she wishes to teach.\n\nThus it was that, midway in the dance, Browne's listless glance fell upon a certain girl whose appearance instantly galvanised him into a state of keenest possible desire. A f lash of white light entered his heart and set him all on fire to know her. She attracted him tremendously. She was dressed in pale green, and always danced with the same man\u2014a man about his own height and colouring, whose face, however, he never could properly see. They sat out together much of the time\u2014always in the gallery where the shadows were deepest. The girl's face he saw clearly, and there was something about her that simply lifted him bodily out of himself and sent strange thrills of delight coursing over him like shocks of electricity. Several times their eyes met, and when this happened he could not tear his glance away. She fascinated him, and all the forces in his being merged into a single desire to be with her, to dance with her, speak with her, and to know her name. Especially he wondered who the man was she so favoured; he reminded him so oddly of himself. No one knows precisely what he himself looks like, but this tall dark figure, whose face he never could contrive to see, started the strange thought in him that it was his own double.\n\nIn vain he sought to compass an introduction to this girl. No one seemed to know her. Her dress, her hair, and a certain wondrous slim grace made him think of a young tree waving in the wind; of ivy leaves; of something that belonged to the life of the woods rather than to ordinary humanity. She possessed him, filling his thoughts with wild woodland dreams. Once, too, he was certain when their eyes met that she smiled at him, and the call was so well-nigh irresistible that he almost dropped his partner's arm to run after her.\n\nBut it seemed impossible to obtain an introduction from any one.\n\n\"Do you know who that girl is over there?\" he asked one of his partners while sitting out a square dance, half exhausted with his exertions; \"the one up there in the gallery?\" \"In pink?\"\n\n\"No, the one in green, I mean.\" \"Oh, next the wall-flower lady in red!\"\n\n\"In the gallery, not under it,\" he explained impatiently.\n\n\"I can't see up there. It's so dark,\" returned the girl after a careful survey through glasses. I don't think I see any one at all.\"\n\n\"It is rather dark,\" he remarked.\n\n\"Why? Do you know who she is!\" she asked foolishly.\n\nHe did not like to insist. It seemed so rude to his partner. But this sort of thing happened once or twice. Evidently no one knew this girl in green, or else he described her so inaccurately that the people he asked looked at some one else instead.\n\n\"In that green sort of ivy-looking dress,\" he tried another.\n\n\"With the rose in her hair and the red nose? Or the one sitting out?\" After that he gave it up finally. His partners seemed to sniff a little when he asked. Evidently la d\u00e9sir\u00e9e was not a popular maiden. Soon after, too, she disappeared and he lost sight of her. Yet the thought that she might have gone home made his heart sink into a sort of horrible blackness.\n\nHe lingered on much later than he intended in the hope of getting an introduction, but at last, when he had filled all his engagements, or nearly all, he made up his mind to slip out and go home. It was already late, and he had to be in the office\u2014that hateful office\u2014punctually at nine o'clock. He felt tired, awfully tired, more so than ever before at a dance. It was, of course, his weak heart. He still dawdled a little while, however, hoping for another glimpse of the sylph in green, hungering for a last look that he could carry home with him and perhaps mingle with his dreams. The mere thought of her filled him with pain and joy, and a sort of rarefied delight he had never known before. But he could not wait for ever, and it was already close upon two o'clock in the morning. His rooms were only a short distance down the street; he would light a cigarette and stroll home. No; he had forgotten for a moment; without a cigarette: the doctor had been very stern on that point.\n\nHe was in the act of turning his back on the whirl of dancing figures, when the f lags at the far end of the room parted for an instant in the moving air, and his eye rested upon the gallery just visible among the shadows.\n\nA great pain ran swiftly through his heart as he looked.\n\nThere were only two figures seated there: the tall dark man, who was his double, and the ivy girl in green. She was looking straight at him down the length of the room, and even at that distance he could see that she smiled.\n\nHe stopped short. The f lags waved back again and hid the picture, but on the instant he made up his mind to act. There, among all this dreary crowd of dancing dolls, was some one he really wanted to know, to speak with, to touch\u2014some one who drew him beyond all he had ever known, and made his soul cry aloud. The room was filled with automatic lay-figures, but here was some one alive. He must know her. It was impossible to go home without speech, utterly impossible.\n\nA fresh stab of pain, worse than the first, gave him momentary pause. He leant against the wall for an instant just under the clock, where the hands pointed to two, waiting for the swooning blackness to go. Then he passed on, disregarding it utterly. It supplied him, in truth, with the extra little impetus he needed to set the will into vigorous action, for it reminded him forcibly of what might happen. His time might be short; he had known few enough of the good things of life; he would seize what he could. He had no introduction, but\u2014to the devil with the conventions. The risk was nothing. To meet her eyes at close quarters, to hear her voice, to know something of the perfume of that hair and dress\u2014what was the risk of a snub compared to that? He slid down the side of the long room, dodging the dancers as best he could. The tall man, he noted, had left the gallery, but the girl sat on alone. He made his way quickly up the wooden steps, light as air, trembling with anticipation. His heart beat like a quick padded hammer, and the blood played a tambourine in his ears. It was odd he did not meet the tall man on the stairs, but doubtless there was another exit from the gallery that he had not observed. He topped the stairs and turned the corner. By Jove, she was still there, a few feet in front of him, sitting with her arms upon the railing, peering down upon the dancers below. His eyes swain for a moment, and something clutched at the very roots of his being.\n\nBut he did not hesitate. He went up quite close past the empty seats, meaning to ask naturally and simply if he might beg for the pleasure of a dance. Then, when he was within a few feet of her side, the girl suddenly turned and faced him, and the words died away on his lips. They seemed absolutely foolish and inadequate.\n\n\"Yes, I am ready,\" she said quietly, looking straight into his eyes; \"but what a long time you were in coming. Was it such a great effort to leave?\" The form of the question struck him as odd, but he was too happy to pause. He became transfigured with joy. The sound of her voice instantly drowned all the clatter of the ball-room, and seemed to him the only thing in the whole world. It did not break on the consonants like most human speech. It f lowed smoothly; it was the sound of wind among branches, of water running over pebbles. It swept into him and caught him away, so that for a moment he saw his beloved woods and hills and seas. The stars were somewhere in it too, and the murmur of the plains.\n\nBy the gods! Here was a girl he could speak with in the words of silence; she stretched every string in his soul and then played on them. His spirit expanded with life and happiness. She would listen gladly to all that concerned him. To her he could talk openly about his poor broken heart, for she would sympathise. Indeed, it was all he could do to prevent himself running forward at once with his arms outstretched to take her. There was a perfume of earth and woods about her.\n\n\"Oh, I am so awfully glad\u2014\" he began lamely, his eyes on her face. Then, remembering something of earthly manners, he added:\n\n\"My name\u2014er\u2014is\u2014\"\n\nSomething unusual\u2014something indescribable\u2014in her gesture stopped him. She had moved to give him space at her side.\n\n\"Your name!\" she laughed, drawing her green skirts with a soft rustle like leaves along the bench to make room; \"but you need no name now, you know!\" Oh, the wonder of it! She understood him. He sat down with a feeling that he had been f lying in a free wind and was resting among the tops of trees. The room faded out temporarily.\n\n\"But my name, if you like to know, is Issidy,\" she said, still smiling.\n\n\"Miss Issidy,\" he stammered, making another attempt at the forms of worldly politeness.\n\n\"Not Miss Issidy,\" she laughed aloud merrily. It surely was the sound of wind in poplars.\n\n\"Issidy is my first name; so if you call me anything, you must call me that.\" The name was pure music in his ears, but though he blundered about in his memory to find his own, it had utterly vanished; for the life of him he could not recollect what his friends called him.\n\nHe stared a moment, vaguely wondering, almost beside himself with delight. No other girls he had known\u2014ye heavens above! There were no longer any other girls! He had never known any other girl than this one. Here was his universe, framed in a green dress, with a voice of sea and wind, eyes like the sun, and movements of bending grasses. All else was mere shadow and fantasy. For the first time in his existence he was alive, and knew that he was alive.\n\n\"I was sure you would come to me,\" she was saying. \"You couldn't help yourself.\" Her eyes were always on his face.\n\n\"I was afraid at first\u2014\"\n\n\"But your thoughts,\" she interrupted softly, \"your thoughts were up here with me all the time.\"\n\n\"You knew that!\" he cried, delighted.\n\n\"I felt them,\" she replied simply. \"They\u2014you kept me company, for I have been alone here all the evening. I know no one else here\u2014yet.\"\n\nHer words amazed him. He was just going to ask who the tall dark man was, when he saw that she was rising to her feet and that she wanted to dance.\n\n\"But my heart\u2014\" he stammered.\n\n\"It won't hurt your poor heart to dance with me, you know,\" she laughed. \"You may trust me. I shall know how to take care of it.\"\n\nBrowne felt simply ecstatic; it was too wonderful to be true; it was impossible\u2014this meeting in London, at an ordinary dull dance, in the twentieth century. He would wake up presently from a dream of silver and gold. Yet he felt even then that she was drawing his arm about her waist for the dance, and with that first magical touch he almost lost consciousness and passed with her into a state of pure spirit.\n\nIt puzzled him for a moment how they reached the floor so quickly and found themselves among the whirling couples. He had no recollection of coming down the stairs. But meanwhile he was dancing on wings, and the girl in green beside him seemed to fly too, and as he pressed her to his heart he found it impossible to think of anything else in the world but that\u2014that and his astounding happiness.\n\nAnd the music was within them, rather than without; indeed they seemed to make their own music out of their swift whirling movements, for it never ceased and he never grew tired. His heart had ceased to pain him. Other curious things happened, too, but he hardly noticed them; or, rather, they no longer seemed strange. In that crowded ball-room they never once touched other people. His partner required no steering. She made no sound. Then suddenly he realised that his own feet made no sound either. They skimmed the floor with noiseless feet like spirits dancing.\n\nNo one else appeared to take the least notice of them. Most of the faces seemed, indeed, strange to him now, as though he had not seen them before, but once or twice he could have sworn that he passed couples who were dancing almost as happily and lightly as themselves, couples he had known in past years, couples who were dead.\n\nGradually the room emptied of its original comers, and others filled their places, silently, with airy graceful movements and happy faces, till the whole floor at length was covered with the soundless feet and whirling forms of those who had already left the world. And, as the artificial light faded away, there came in its place a soft white light that filled the room with beauty and made all the faces look radiant. And, once, as they skimmed past a mirror, he saw that the girl beside him was not there\u2014that he seemed to be dancing alone, clasping no one; yet when he glanced down, there was her magical face at his shoulder and he felt her little form pressing up against him.\n\nSuch dancing, too, he had never even dreamed about, for it was like swinging with the treetops in the winds.\n\nThen they danced farther out, ever swifter and swifter, past the shadows beneath the gallery, under the motionless hanging f lags\u2014and out into the night. The walls were behind them. They were off their feet and the wind was in their hair. They were rising, rising, rising towards the stars.\n\nHe felt the cool air of the open sky on his cheeks, and when he looked down, as they cleared the summit of the dark-lying hills, he saw that Issidy had melted away into himself and they had become one being. And he knew then that his heart would never pain him again on earth, or cause him to fear for any of his beloved dreams." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 366", + "text": "But the manager of the \"hateful office\" only knew two days later why Browne had not turned up to his desk, nor sent any word to explain his absence. He read it in the paper\u2014how he had dropped down dead at a dance, suddenly stricken by heart disease. It happened just before two o'clock in the morning.\n\n\"Well,\" thought the manager, \"he's no loss to us anyhow. He had sno real business instincts. Smith will do his work much better\u2014and for less money too.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ May Day Eve ]\n\nIt was in the spring when I at last found time from the hospital work to visit my friend, the old folk-lorist, in his country isolation, and I rather chuckled to myself, because in my bag I was taking down a book that utterly refuted all his tiresome pet theories of magic and the powers of the soul.\n\nThese theories were many and various, and had often troubled me. In the first place, I scorned them for professional reasons, and, in the second, because I had never been able to argue quite well enough to convince or to shake his faith, in even the smallest details, and any scientific knowledge I brought to bear only fed him with confirmatory data. To find such a book, therefore, and to know that it was safely in my bag, wrapped up in brown paper and addressed to him, was a deep and satisfactory joy, and I speculated a good deal during the journey how he would deal with the overwhelming arguments it contained against the existence of any important region outside the world of sensory perceptions.\n\nSpeculative, too, I was whether his visionary habits and absorbing experiments would permit him to remember my arrival at all, and I was accordingly relieved to hear from the solitary porter that the \"professor\" had sent a \"veeckle\" to meet me, and that I was thus free to send my bag and walk the four miles to the house across the hills.\n\nIt was a calm, windless evening, just after sunset, the air warm and scented, and delightfully still. The train, already sinking into distance, carried away with it the noise of crowds and cities and the last suggestions of the stressful life behind me, and from the little station on the moorland I stepped at once into the world of silent, growing things, tinkling sheepbells, shepherds, and wild, desolate spaces.\n\nMy path lay diagonally across the turfy hills. It slanted a mile or so to the summit, wandered vaguely another two miles among gorse-bushes along the crest, passed Tom Bassett's cottage by the pines, and then dropped sharply down on the other side through rather thin woods to the ancient house where the old folk-lorist lived and dreamed himself into his impossible world of theory and fantasy. I fell to thinking busily about him during the first part of the ascent, and convinced myself, as usual, that, but for his generosity to the poor, and his benign aspect, the peasantry must undoubtedly have regarded him as a wizard who speculated in souls and had dark dealings with the world of faery.\n\nThe path I knew tolerably well. I had already walked it once before\u2014a winter's day some years ago\u2014and from the cottage onward felt sure of my way; but for the first mile or so there were so many cross cattle-tracks, and the light had become so dim that I felt it wise to inquire more particularly. And this I was fortunately able to do of a man who with astonishing suddenness rose from the grass where he had been lying behind a clump of bushes, and passed a few yards in front of me at a high pace downhill toward the darkening valley.\n\nHe was in such a state of hurry that I called out loudly to him, fearing to be too late, but on hearing my voice he turned sharply, and seemed to arrive almost at once beside me. In a single instant he was standing there, quite close, looking, with a smile and a certain expression of curiosity, I thought, into my face. I remember thinking that his features, pale and wholly untanned, were rather wonderful for a countryman, and that the eyes were those of a foreigner; his great swiftness, too, gave me a distinct sensation\u2014 something almost of a start\u2014though I knew my vision was at fault at the best of times, and of course especially so in the deceptive twilight of the open hillside.\n\nMoreover\u2014as the way often is with such instructions\u2014the words did not stay in my mind very clearly after he had uttered them, and the rapid, panther-like movements of the man as he quickly vanished down the hill again left me with little more than a sweeping gesture indicating the line I was to follow. No doubt his sudden rising from behind the gorse-bush, his curious swiftness, and the way he peered into my face, and even touched me on the shoulder, all combined to distract my attention somewhat from the actual words he used; and the fact that I was travelling at a wrong angle, and should have come out a mile too far to the right, helped to complete my feeling that his gesture, pointing the way, was sufficient.\n\nOn the crest of the ridge, panting a little with the unwonted exertion, I lay down to rest a moment on the grass beside a flaming yellow gorse-bush. There was still a good hour before I should be looked for at the house; the grass was very soft, the peace and silence soothing. I lingered, and lit a cigarette. And it was just then, I think, that my subconscious memory gave back the words, the actual words, the man had spoken, and the heavy significance of the personal pronoun, as he had emphasised it in his odd foreign voice, touched me with a sense of vague amusement: \"The safest way for you now,\" he had said, as though I was so obviously a townsman and might be in danger on the lonely hills after dark. And the quick way he had reached my side, and then slipped off again like a shadow down the steep slope, completed a definite little picture in my mind. Then other thoughts and memories rose up and formed a series of pictures, following each other in rapid succession, and forming a chain of reflections undirected by the will and without purpose or meaning. I fell, that is, into a pleasant reverie.\n\nBelow me, and infinitely far away, it seemed, the valley lay silent under a veil of blue evening haze, the lower end losing itself among darkening hills whose peaks rose here and there like giant plumes that would surely nod their great heads and call to one another once the final shadows were down. The village lay, a misty patch, in which lights already twinkled. A sound of rooks faintly cawing, of sea-gulls crying far up in the sky, and of dogs barking at a great distance rose up out of the general murmur of evening voices. Odours of farm and field and open spaces stole to my nostrils, and everything contributed to the feeling that I lay on the top of the world, nothing between me and the stars, and that all the huge, free things of the earth\u2014hills, valleys, woods, and sloping fields\u2014 lay breathing deeply about me.\n\nA few sea-gulls\u2014in daytime hereabouts they fill the air\u2014still circled and wheeled within range of sight, uttering from time to time sharp, petulant cries; and far in the distance there was just visible a shadowy line that showed where the sea lay.\n\nThen, as I lay gazing dreamily into this still pool of shadows at my feet, something rose up, something sheet-like, vast, imponderable, off the whole surface of the mapped-out country, moved with incredible swiftness down the valley, and in a single instant climbed the hill where I lay and swept by me, yet without hurry, and in a sense without speed. Veils in this way rose one after another, filling the cups between the hills, shrouding alike fields, village, and hillside as they passed, and settled down somewhere into the gloom behind me over the ridge, or slipped off like vapour into the sky.\n\nWhether it was actually mist rising from the surface of the fast-cooling ground, or merely the earth giving up her heat to the night, I could not determine. The coming of the darkness is ever a series of mysteries. I only know that this indescribable vast stirring of the landscape seemed to me as though the earth were unfolding immense sable wings from her sides, and lifting them for silent, gigantic strokes so that she might fly more swiftly from the sun into the night. The darkness, at any rate, did drop down over everything very soon afterward, and I rose up hastily to follow my pathway, realising with a degree of wonder strangely new to me the magic of twilight, the blue open depths into the valley below, and the pale yellow heights of the watery sky above.\n\nI walked rapidly, a sense of chilliness about me, and soon lost sight of the valley altogether as I got upon the ridge proper of these lonely and desolate hills.\n\nIt could not have been more than fifteen minutes that I lay there in reverie, yet the weather, I at once noticed, had changed very abruptly, for mist was seething here and there about me, rising somewhere from smaller valleys in the hills beyond, and obscuring the path, while overhead there was plainly a sound of wind tearing past, far up, with a sound of high shouting. A moment before it had been the stillness of a warm spring night, yet now everything had changed; wet mist coated me, raindrops smartly stung my face, and a gusty wind, descending out of cool heights, began to strike and buffet me, so that I buttoned my coat and pressed my hat more firmly upon my head.\n\nThe change was really this\u2014and it came to me for the first time in my life with the power of a real conviction\u2014that everything about me seemed to have become suddenly alive.\n\nIt came oddly upon me\u2014prosaic, matter-of-fact, materialistic doctor that I was\u2014this realisation that the world about me had somehow stirred into life; oddly, I say, because Nature to me had always been merely a more or less definite arrangement of measurement, weight, and colour, and this new presentation of it was utterly foreign to my temperament. A valley to me was always a valley; a hill, merely a hill; a field, so many acres of flat surface, grass or ploughed, drained well or drained ill; whereas now, with startling vividness, came the strange, haunting idea that after all they could be something more than valley, hill, and field; that what I had hitherto perceived by these names were only the veils of something that lay concealed within, something alive. In a word, that the poetic sense I had always rather sneered at, in others, or explained away with some shallow physiological label, had apparently suddenly opened up in myself without any obvious cause.\n\nAnd, the more I puzzled over it, the more I began to realise that its genesis dated from those few minutes of reverie lying under the gorse-bush (reverie, a thing I had never before in all my life indulged in!), or, now that I came to reflect more accurately, from my brief interview with that wild-eyed, swift-moving, shadowy man of whom I had first inquired the way.\n\nI recalled my singular fancy that veils were lifting off the surface of the hills and fields, and a tremor of excitement accompanied the memory. Such a thing had never before been possible to my practical intelligence, and it made me feel suspicious\u2014suspicious about myself. I stood still a moment\u2014I looked about me into the gathering mist, above me to the vanishing stars, below me to the hidden valley, and then sent an urgent summons to my individuality, as I had always known it, to arrest and chase these undesirable fancies.\n\nBut I called in vain. No answer came. Anxiously, hurriedly, confusedly, too, I searched for my normal self, but could not find it; and this failure to respond induced in me a sense of uneasiness that touched very nearly upon the borders of alarm.\n\nI pushed on faster and faster along the turfy track among the gorse-bushes with a dread that I might lose the way altogether, and a sudden desire to reach home as soon as might be. Then, without warning, I emerged unexpectedly into clear air again, and the vapour swept past me in a rushing wall and rose into the sky. Anew I saw the lights of the village behind me in the depths, here and there a line of smoke rising against the pale yellow sky, and stars overhead peering down through thin wispy clouds that stretched their wind-signs across the night.\n\nAfter all, it had been nothing but a stray bit of sea-fog driving up from the coast, for the other side of the hills, I remembered, dipped their chalk cliffs straight into the sea, and strange lost winds must often come a-wandering this way with the sharp changes of temperature about sunset. None the less, it was disconcerting to know that mist and storm lay hiding within possible reach, and I walked on smartly for a sight of Tom Bassett's cottage and the lights of the Manor House in the valley a short mile beyond.\n\nThe clearing of the air, however, lasted but a very brief while, and vapour was soon rising about me as before, hiding the path and making bushes and stone walls look like running shadows. It came, driven apparently, by little independent winds up the many side gullies, and it was very cold, touching my skin like a wet sheet. Curious great shapes, too, it assumed as the wind worked to and fro through it: forms of men and animals; grotesque, giant outlines; ever shifting and running along the ground with silent feet, or leaping into the air with sharp cries as the gusts twisted them inwardly and lent them voice. More and more I pushed my pace, and more and more darkness and vapour obliterated the landscape. The going was not otherwise difficult, and here and there cowslips glimmered in patches of dancing yellow, while the springy turf made it easy to keep up speed; yet in the gloom I frequently tripped and plunged into prickly gorse near the ground, so that from shin to knee was soon a-tingle with sharp pain. Odd puffs and spits of rain stung my face, and the periods of utter stillness were always followed by little shouting gusts of wind, each time from a new direction. Troubled is perhaps too strong a word, but flustered I certainly was; and though I recognised that it was due to my being in an environment so remote from the town life I was accustomed to, I found it impossible to stifle altogether the feeling of malaise that had crept into my heart, and I looked about with increasing eagerness for the lighted windows of Bassett's cottage.\n\nMore and more, little pin-pricks of distress and confusion accumulated, adding to my realisation of being away from streets and shop-windows, and things I could classify and deal with. The mist, too, distorted as well as concealed, played tricks with sounds as well as with sights. And, once or twice, when I stumbled upon some crouching sheep, they got up without the customary alarm and hurry of sheep, and moved off slowly into the darkness, but in such a singular way that I could almost have sworn they were not sheep at all, but human beings crawling on all-fours, looking back and grimacing at me over their shoulders as they went. On these occasions\u2014for there were more than one\u2014I never could get close enough to feel their woolly wet backs, as I should have liked to do; and the sound of their tinkling bells came faintly through the mist, sometimes from one direction, sometimes from another, sometimes all round me as though a whole flock surrounded me; and I found it impossible to analyse or explain the idea I received that they were not sheep-bells at all, but something quite different.\n\nBut mist and darkness, and a certain confusion of the senses caused by the excitement of an utterly strange environment, can account for a great deal. I pushed on quickly. The conviction that I had strayed from the route grew, nevertheless, for occasionally there was a great commotion of seagulls about me, as though I had disturbed them in their sleeping-places. The air filled with their plaintive cries, and I heard the rushing of multitudinous wings, sometimes very close to my head, but always invisible owing to the mist. And once, above the swishing of the wet wind through the gorse-bushes, I was sure I caught the faint thunder of the sea and the distant crashing of waves rolling up some steep-throated gully in the cliffs. I went cautiously after this, and altered my course a little away from the direction of the sound.\n\nYet, increasingly all the time, it came to me how the cries of the sea-birds sounded like laughter, and how the everlasting wind blew and drove about me with a purpose, and how the low bushes persistently took the shape of stooping people, moving stealthily past me, and how the mist more and more resembled huge protean figures escorting me across the desolate hills, silently, with immense footsteps. For the inanimate world now touched my awakened poetic sense in a manner hitherto unguided, and became fraught with the pregnant messages of a dimly concealed life. I readily understood, for the first time, how easily a superstitious peasantry might people their world, and how even an educated mind might favour an atmosphere of legend. I stumbled along, looking anxiously for the lights of the cottage.\n\nSuddenly, as a shape of writhing mist whirled past, I received so direct a stroke of wind that it was palpably a blow in the face. Something swept by with a shrill cry into the darkness. It was impossible to prevent jumping to one side and raising an arm by way of protection, and I was only just quick enough to catch a glimpse of the sea-gull as it raced past, with suddenly altered flight, beating its powerful wings over my head. Its white body looked enormous as the mist swallowed it. At the same moment a gust tore my hat from my head and flung the flap of my coat across my eyes. But I was well-trained by this time, and made a quick dash after the retreating black object, only to find on overtaking it that I held a prickly branch of gorse. The wind combed my hair viciously. Then, out of a corner of my eye, I saw my hat still rolling, and grabbed swiftly at it; but just as I closed on it, the real hat passed in front of me, turning over in the wind like a ball, and I instantly released my first capture to chase it. Before it was within reach, another one shot between my feet so that I stepped on it. The grass seemed covered with moving hats, yet each one, when I seized it, turned into a piece of wood, or a tiny gorse-bush, or a black rabbit hole, till my hands were scored with prickles and running blood. In the darkness, I reflected, all objects looked alike, as though by general conspiracy.\n\nI straightened up and took a long breath, mopping the blood with my handkerchief. Then something tapped at my feet, and on looking down, there was the hat within easy reach, and I stooped down and put it on my head again. Of course, there were a dozen ways of explaining my confusion and stupidity, and I walked along wondering which to select. My eyesight, for one thing\u2014and under such conditions why seek further? It was nothing, after all, and the dizziness was a momentary effect caused by the effort and stooping.\n\nBut for all that, I shouted aloud, on the chance that a wandering shepherd might hear me; and of course no answer came, for it was like calling in a padded room, and the mist suffocated my voice and killed its resonance.\n\nIt was really very discouraging: I was cold and wet and hungry; my legs and clothes torn by the gorse, my hands scratched and bleeding; the wind brought water to my eyes by its constant buffeting, and my skin was numb from contact with the chill mist. Fortunately I had matches, and after some difficulty, by crouching under a wall, I caught a swift glimpse of my watch, and saw that it was but little after eight o'clock. Supper I knew was at nine, and I was surely over halfway by this time. But here again was another instance of the way everything seemed in a conspiracy against me to appear otherwise than ordinary, for in the gleam of the match my watch-glass showed as the face of a little old gray man, uncommonly like the folk-lorist himself, peering up at me with an expression of whimsical laughter. My own reflection it could not possibly have been, for I am clean-shaven, and this face looked up at me through a running tangle of gray hair. Yet a second and third match revealed only the white surface with the thin black hands moving across it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 367", + "text": "And it was at this point, I well remember, that I reached what was for me the true heart of the adventure, the little fragment of real experience I learned from it and took back with me to my doctor's life in London, and that has remained with me ever since, and helped me to a new sympathetic insight into the intricacies of certain curious mental cases I had never before really understood.\n\nFor it was sufficiently obvious by now that a curious change had been going forward in me for some time, dating, so far as I could focus my thoughts sufficiently to analyse, from the moment of my speech with that hurrying man of shadow on the hillside. And the first deliberate manifestation of the change, now that I looked back, was surely the awakening in my prosaic being of the \"poetic thrill\"; my sudden amazing appreciation of the world around me as something alive. From that moment the change in me had worked ahead subtly, swiftly. Yet, so natural had been the beginning of it, that although it was a radically new departure for my temperament, I was hardly aware at first of what had actually come about; and it was only now, after so many encounters, that I was forced at length to acknowledge it.\n\nIt came the more forcibly too, because my very commonplace ideas of beauty had hitherto always been associated with sunshine and crude effects; yet here this new revelation leaped to me out of wind and mist and desolation on a lonely hillside, out of night, darkness, and discomfort. New values rushed upon me from all sides. Everything had changed, and the very simplicity with which the new values presented themselves proved to me how profound the change, the readjustment, had been. In such trivial things the evidence had come that I was not aware of it until repetition forced my attention: the veils rising from valley and hill; the mountain tops as personalities that shout or murmur in the darkness; the crying of the sea birds and of the living, purposeful wind; above all, the feeling that Nature about me was instinct with a life differing from my own in degree rather than in kind; everything, from the conspiracy of the gorse-bushes to the disappearing hat, showed that a fundamental attitude of mind in me had changed\u2014and changed, too, without my knowledge or consent.\n\nMoreover, at the same time the deep sadness of beauty had entered my heart like a stroke; for all this mystery and loveliness, I realized poignantly was utterly independent and careless of me, as me; and that while I must pass, decay, grow old, these manifestations would remain for ever young and unalterably potent. And thus gradually had I become permeated with the recognition of a region hitherto unknown to me, and that I had always depreciated in others and especially, it now occurred to me, in my friend the old folk-lorist.\n\nHere surely, I thought, was the beginning of conditions which, carried a little further, must become pathogenic. That the change was real and pregnant I had no doubt whatever. My consciousness was expanding and I had caught it in the very act. I had of course read much concerning the changes of personality, swift, kaleidoscopic\u2014had come across something of it in my practice\u2014and had listened to the folk-lorist holding forth like a man inspired upon ways and means of reaching concealed regions of the human consciousness, and opening it to the knowledge of things called magical, so that one became free of a larger universe. But it was only now for the first time, on these bare hills, in touch with the wind and the rain, that I realized in how simple a fashion the frontiers of consciousness could shift this way and that, or with what touch of genuine awe the certainty might come that one stood on the borderland of new, untried, perhaps dangerous, experiences.\n\nAt any rate, it did now come to me that my consciousness had shifted its frontiers very considerably, and that whatever might happen must seem not abnormal, but quite simple and inevitable, and of course utterly true. This very simplicity, however, doing no violence to my being, brought with it none the less a sense of dread and discomfort; and my dim awareness that unknown possibilities were about me in the night puzzled and distressed me perhaps more than I cared to admit." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 368", + "text": "All this that takes so long to describe became apparent to me in a few seconds. What I had always despised ascended the throne.\n\nBut with the finding of Bassett's cottage, as a sign-post close to home, my former sang-froid, my stupidity, would doubtless return, and my relief was therefore considerable when at length a faint gleam of light appeared through the mist, against which the square dark shadow of the chimney-line pointed upwards. After all, I had not strayed so very far out of the way. Now I could definitely ascertain where I was wrong.\n\nQuickening my pace, I scrambled over a broken stone wall, and almost ran across the open bit of grass to the door. One moment the black outline of the cottage was there in front of me, and the next, when I stood actually against it\u2014there was nothing! I laughed to think how utterly I had been deceived. Yet not utterly, for as I groped back again over the wall, the cottage loomed up a little to the left, with its windows lighted and friendly, and I had only been mistaken in my angle of approach after all. Yet again, as I hurried to the door, the mist drove past and thickened a second time\u2014and the cottage was not where I had seen it!\n\nMy confusion increased a lot after that. I scrambled about in all directions, rather foolishly hurried, and over countless stone walls it seemed, and completely dazed as to the true points of the compass. Then suddenly, just when a kind of despair came over me, the cottage stood there solidly before my eyes, and I found myself not two feet from the door. Was ever mist before so deceptive? And there, just behind it, I made out the row of pines like a dark wave breaking through the night. I sniffed the wet resinous odour with joy, and a genuine thrill ran through me as I saw the unmistakable yellow light of the windows. At last I was near home and my troubles would soon be over.\n\nA cloud of birds rose with shrill cries off the roof and whirled into the darkness when I knocked with my stick on the door, and human voices, I was almost certain, mingled somewhere with them, though it was impossible to tell whether they were within the cottage or outside. It all sounded confusedly with a rush of air like a little whirlwind, and I stood there rather alarmed at the clamour of my knocking. By way, too, of further proof that my imagination had awakened, the significance of that knocking at the door set something vibrating within me that most surely had never vibrated before, so that I suddenly realized with what atmosphere of mystical suggestion is the mere act of knocking surrounded\u2014knocking at a door\u2014both for him who knocks, wondering what shall be revealed on opening, and for him who stands within, waiting for the summons of the knocker. I only know that I hesitated a lot before making up my mind to knock a second time.\n\nAnd, anyhow, what happened subsequently came in a sort of haze. Words and memory both failed me when I try to record it truthfully, so that even the faces are difficult to visualise again, the words almost impossible to hear.\n\nBefore I knew it the door was open and before I could frame the words of my first brief question, I was within the threshold, and the door was shut behind me.\n\nI had expected the little dark and narrow hallway of a cottage, oppressive of air and odour, but instead I came straight into a room that was full of light and full of\u2014people. And the air tasted like the air about a mountain-top.\n\nTo the end I never saw what produced the light, nor understood how so many men and women found space to move comfortably to and fro, and pass each other as they did, within the confines of those four walls. An uncomfortable sense of having intruded upon some private gathering was, I think, my first emotion; though how the poverty-stricken countryside could have produced such an assemblage puzzled me beyond belief. And my second emotion\u2014if there was any division at all in the wave of wonder that fairly drenched me\u2014was feeling a sort of glory in the presence of such an atmosphere of splendid and vital youth. Everything vibrated, quivered, shook about me, and I almost felt myself as an aged and decrepit man by comparison.\n\nI know my heart gave a great fiery leap as I saw them, for the faces that met me were fine, vigourous, and comely, while burning everywhere through their ripe maturity shone the ardours of youth and a kind of deathless enthusiasm. Old, yet eternally young they were, as rivers and mountains count their years by thousands, yet remain ever youthful; and the first effect of all those pairs of eyes lifted to meet my own was to send a whirlwind of unknown thrills about my heart and make me catch my breath with mingled terror and delight. A fear of death, and at the same time a sensation of touching something vast and eternal that could never die, surged through me.\n\nA deep hush followed my entrance as all turned to look at me. They stood, men and women, grouped about a table, and something about them\u2014not their size alone\u2014conveyed the impression of being gigantic, giving me strangely novel realisations of freedom, power, and immense existence more or less than human.\n\nI can only record my thoughts and impressions as they came to me and as I dimly now remember them. I had expected to see old Tom Bassett crouching half asleep over a peat fire, a dim lamp on the table beside him, and instead this assembly of tall and splendid men and women stood there to greet me, and stood in silence. It was little wonder that at first the ready question died upon my lips, and I almost forgot the words of my own language.\n\n\"I thought this was Tom Bassett's cottage!\" I managed to ask at length, and looked straight at the man nearest me across the table. He had wild hair falling about his shoulders and a face of clear beauty. His eyes, too, like all the rest, seemed shrouded by something veil-like that reminded me of the shadowy man of whom I had first inquired the way. They were shaded\u2014and for some reason I was glad they were.\n\nAt the sound of my voice, unreal and thin, there was a general movement throughout the room, as though everyone changed places, passing each other like those shapes of fluid sort I had seen outside in the mist. But no answer came. It seemed to me that the mist even penetrated into the room about me and spread inwardly over my thoughts.\n\n\"Is this the way to the Manor House?\" I asked again, louder, fighting my inward confusion and weakness. \"Can no one tell me?\"\n\nThen apparently everyone began to answer at once, or rather, not to answer directly, but to speak to each other in such a way that I could easily overhear. The voices of the men were deep, and of the women wonderfully musical, with a slow rhythm like that of the sea, or of the wind through the pine-trees outside. But the unsatisfactory nature of what they said only helped to increase my sense of confusion and dismay.\n\n\"Yes,\" said one; \"Tom Bassett was here for a while with the sheep, but his home was not here.\"\n\n\"He asks the way to a house when he does not even know the way to his own mind!\" another voice said, sounding overhead it seemed.\n\n\"And could he recognise the signs if we told him?\" came in the singing tones of a woman's voice close behind me.\n\nAnd then, with a noise more like running water, or wind in the wings of birds, than anything else I could liken it to, came several voices together:\n\n\"And what sort of way does he seek? The splendid way, or merely the easy?\"\n\n\"Or the short way of fools!\"\n\n\"But he must have some credentials, or he never could have got as far as this,\" came from another.\n\nA laugh ran round the room at this, though what there was to laugh at I could not imagine. It sounded like wind rushing about the hills. I got the impression too that the roof was somehow open to the sky, for their laughter had such a spacious quality in it, and the air was so cool and fresh, and moving about in currents and waves.\n\n\"It was I who showed him the way,\" cried a voice belonging to someone who was looking straight into my face over the table. \"It was the safest way for him once he had got so far\u2014\"\n\nI looked up and met his eye, and the sentence remained unfinished. It was the hurrying, shadowy man of the hillside. He had the same shifting outline as the others now, and the same veiled and shaded eyes, and as I looked the sense of terror stirred and grew in me. I had come in to ask for help, but now I was only anxious to be free of them all and out again in the rain and darkness on the moor. Thoughts of escape filled my brain, and I searched quickly for the door through which I had entered. But nowhere could I discover it again. The walls were bare; not even the windows were visible. And the room seemed to fill and empty of these figures as the waves of the sea fill and empty a cavern, crowding one upon another, yet never occupying more space, or less. So the coming and going of these men and women always evaded me.\n\nAnd my terror became simply a terror that the veils of their eyes might lift, and that they would look at me with their clear, naked sight. I became horribly aware of their eyes. It was not that I felt them evil, but that I feared the new depths in me their merciless and terrible insight would stir into life. My consciousness had expanded quite enough for one night! I must escape at all costs and claim my own self again, however limited. I must have sanity, even if with limitations, but sanity at any price.\n\nBut meanwhile, though I tried hard to find my voice again, there came nothing but a thin piping sound that was like reeds whistling where winds meet about a corner. My throat was contracted, and I could only produce the smallest and most ridiculous of noises. The power of movement, too, was far less than when I first came in, and every moment it became more difficult to use my muscles, so that I stood there, stiff and awkward, face to face with this assemblage of shifting, wonderful people.\n\n\"And now,\" continued the voice of the man who had last spoken, \"and now the safest way for him will be through the other door, where he shall see that which he may more easily understand.\"\n\nWith a great effort I regained the power of movement, while at the same time a burst of anger and a determination to be done with it all and to overcome my dreadful confusion drove me forward.\n\nHe saw me coming, of course, and the others indeed opened up and made a way for me, shifting to one side or the other whenever I came too near them, and never allowing me to touch them. But at last, when I was close in front of the man, ready both to speak and act, he was no longer there. I never saw the actual change\u2014but instead of a man it was a woman! And when I turned with amazement, I saw that the other occupants walking like figures in some ancient ceremony, were moving slowly toward the far end of the room. One by one, as they filed past, they raised their calm, passionless faces to mine, immensely vital, proud, austere, and then, without further word or gesture, they opened the door I had lost and disappeared through it one by one into the darkness of the night beyond. And as they went it seemed that the mist swallowed them up and a gust of wind caught them away, and the light also went with them, leaving me alone with the figure who had last spoken.\n\nMoreover it was just here that a most disquieting thought flashed through my brain with unreasoning conviction, shaking my personality, as it were, to the foundations: viz., that I had hitherto been spending my life in the pursuit of false knowledge, in the mere classifying and labelling of effects, the analysis of results, scientific so called; whereas it was the folk-lorist, and such like, who with their dreams and prayers were all the time on the path of real knowledge, the trail of causes; that the one was merely adding to the mechanical comfort and safety of the body, ultimately degrading the highest part of man, and never advancing the type, while the other\u2014but then I had never yet believed in a soul\u2014and now was no time to begin, terror or no terror. Clearly, my thoughts were wandering." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 369", + "text": "It was at this moment the sound of the purring first reached me\u2014deep, guttural purring\u2014that made me think at once of some large concealed animal. It was precisely what I had heard many a time at the Zoological Gardens, and I had visions of cows chewing the cud, or horses munching hay in a stall outside the cottage. It was certainly an animal sound, and one of pleasure and contentment.\n\nSemi-darkness filled the room. Only a very faint moonlight, struggling through the mist, came through the window, and I moved back instinctively toward the support of the wall against my back.\n\nSomewhere, through openings, came the sound of the night driving over the roof, and far above I had visions of those everlasting winds streaming by with clouds as large as continents on their wings. Something in me wanted to sing and shout, but something else in me at the same time was in a very vivid state of unreasoning terror. I felt immense, yet tiny, confident, yet timid; a part of huge, universal forces, yet an utterly small, personal, and very limited being.\n\nIn the corner of the room on my right stood the woman. Her face was hid by a mass of tumbling hair, that made me think of living grasses on a field in June. Thus her head was partially turned from me, and the moonlight, catching her outline, just revealed it against the wall like an impressionist picture. Strange hidden memories stirred in the depths of me, and for a moment I felt that I knew all about her. I stared about me quickly, nervously, trying to take in everything at once. Then the purring sound grew much louder and closer, and I forgot my notion that this woman was no stranger to me and that I knew her as well as I knew myself. That purring thing was in the room close beside me. Between us two, indeed, it was, for I now saw that her arm nearest to me was raised, and that she was pointing to the wall in front of us.\n\nFollowing the direction of her hand, I saw that the wall was transparent, and that I could see through a portion of it into a small square space beyond, as though I was looking through gauze instead of bricks. This small inner space was lighted, and on stooping down I saw that it was a sort of cupboard or cell-like cage let into the wall. The thing that purred was there in the centre of it.\n\nI looked closer. It was a being, apparently a human being, crouched down in its narrow cage, feeding. I saw the body stooping over a quantity of coarse-looking, piled-up substance that was evidently food. It was like a man huddled up. There it squatted, happy and contented, with the minimum of air, light, and space, dully satisfied with its prisoned cage behind the bars, utterly unconscious of the vast world about it, grunting with pleasure, purring like a great cat, scornfully ignorant of what might lie beyond. The cell, moreover, I saw was a perfect masterpiece of mechanical contrivance and inventive ingenuity\u2014the very last word in comfort, safety and scientific skill. I was in the act of trying to fit in my memory some of the details of its construction and arrangement, when I made a chance noise, and at once became too agitated to note carefully what I saw. For at the noise the creature turned, and I saw that it was a human being\u2014a man. I was aware of a face close against my own as it pressed forward, but a face with embryonic features impossible to describe and utterly loathsome, with eyes, ears, nose and skin, only just sufficiently alive and developed to transfer the minimum of gross sensation to the brain. The mouth, however, was large and thick-lipped, and the jaws were still moving in the act of slow mastication.\n\nI shrank back, shuddering with mingled pity and disgust, and at the same moment the woman beside me called me softly by my own name. She had moved forward a little so that she stood quite close to me, full in the thin stream of moonlight that fell across the floor, and I was conscious of a swift transition from hell to heaven as my gaze passed from that embryonic visage to a countenance so refined, so majestic, so divinely sensitive in its strength, that it was like turning from the face of a devil to look upon the features of a goddess.\n\nAt the same instant I was aware that both beings\u2014the creature and the woman\u2014were moving rapidly toward me.\n\nA pain like a sharp sword dived deep down into me and twisted horribly through my heart, for as I saw them coming I realized in one swift moment of terrible intuition that they had their life in me, that they were born of my own being, and were indeed projections of myself. They were portions of my consciousness projected outwardly into objectivity, and their degree of reality was just as great as that of any other part of me.\n\nWith a dreadful swiftness they rushed toward me, and in a single second had merged themselves into my own being; and I understood in some marvellous manner beyond the possibility of doubt that they were symbolic of my own soul: the dull animal part of me that had hitherto acknowledged nothing beyond its cage of minute sensations, and the higher part, almost out of reach, and in touch with the stars, that for the first time had feebly awakened into life during my journey over the hill." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 370", + "text": "I forget altogether how it was that I escaped, whether by the window or the door. I only know I found myself a moment later making great speed over the moor, followed by screaming birds and shouting winds, straight on the track downhill toward the Manor House. Something must have guided me, for I went with the instinct of an animal, having no uncertainties as to turnings, and saw the welcome lights of windows before I had covered another mile. And all the way I felt as though a great sluice gate had been opened to let a flood of new perceptions rush like a sea over my inner being, so that I was half ashamed and half delighted, partly angry, yet partly happy.\n\nServants met me at the door, several of them, and I was aware at once of an atmosphere of commotion in the house. I arrived breathless and hatless, wet to the skin, my hands scratched and my boots caked with mud.\n\n\"We made sure you were lost, sir,\" I heard the old butler say, and I heard my own reply, faintly, like the voice of someone else:\n\n\"I thought so too.\"\n\nA minute later I found myself in the study, with the old folk-lorist standing opposite. In his hands he held the book I had brought down for him in my bag, ready addressed. There was a curious smile on his face.\n\n\"It never occurred to me that you would dare to walk\u2014to-night of all nights,\" he was saying.\n\nI stared without a word. I was bursting with the desire to tell him something of what had happened and try to be patient with his explanations, but when I sought for words and sentences my story seemed suddenly flat and pointless, and the details of my adventure began to evaporate and melt away, and seemed hard to remember.\n\n\"I had an exciting walk,\" I stammered, still a little breathless from running. \"The weather was all right when I started from the station.\"\n\n\"The weather is all right still,\" he said, \"though you may have found some evening mist on the top of the hills. But it's not that I meant.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"I meant,\" he said, still laughing quizzically, \"that you were a very brave man to walk to-night over the enchanted hills, because this is May Day eve, and on May Day eve, you know, They have power over the minds of men, and can put glamour upon the imagination\u2014\"\n\n\"Who\u2014'they?' What do you mean?\"\n\nHe put my book down on the table beside him and looked quietly for a moment into my eyes, and as he did so the memory of my adventure began to revive in detail, and I thought quickly of the shadowy man who had shown me the way first. What could it have been in the face of the old folk-lorist that made me think of this man? A dozen things ran like flashes through my excited mind, and while I attempted to seize them I heard the old man's voice continue. He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to me.\n\n\"The elemental beings you have always scoffed at, of course; they who operate ceaselessly behind the screen of appearances, and who fashion and mould the moods of the mind. And an extremist like you\u2014for extremes are always dangerously weak\u2014is their legitimate prey.\"\n\n\"Pshaw!\" I interrupted him, knowing that my manner betrayed me hopelessly, and that he had guessed much. \"Any man may have subjective experiences, I suppose\u2014\"\n\nThen I broke off suddenly. The change in his face made me start; it had taken on for the moment so exactly the look of the man on the hillside. The eyes gazing so steadily into mine had shadows in them, I thought.\n\n\"Glamour!\" he was saying, \"all glamour! One of them must have come very close to you, or perhaps touched you.\" Then he asked sharply, \"Did you meet anyone? Did you speak with anyone?\"\n\n\"I came by Tom Bassett's cottage,\" I said. \"I didn't feel quite sure of my way and I went in and asked.\"\n\n\"All glamour,\" he repeated to himself, and then aloud to me, \"and as for Bassett's cottage, it was burnt down three years ago, and nothing stands there now but broken, roof less walls\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped because I had seized him by the arm. In the shadows of the lamp-lit room behind him I thought I caught sight of dim forms moving past the book-shelves. But when my eye tried to focus them they faded and slipped away again into ceiling and walls. The details of the hill-top cottage, however, started into life again at the sight, and I seized my friend's arm to tell him. But instantly, when I tried, it all faded away again as though it had been a dream, and I could recall nothing intelligible to repeat to him.\n\nHe looked at me and laughed.\n\n\"They always obliterate the memory afterwards,\" he said gently, \"so that little remains beyond a mood, or an emotion, to show how profoundly deep their touch has been. Though sometimes part of the change remains and becomes permanent\u2014as I hope in your case it may.\"\n\nThen, before I had time to answer, to swear, or to remonstrate, he stepped briskly past me and closed the door into the hall, and then drew me aside farther into the room. The change that I could not understand was still working in his face and eyes.\n\n\"If you have courage enough left to come with me,\" he said, speaking very seriously, \"we will go out again and see more. Up till midnight, you know, there is still the opportunity, and with me perhaps you won't feel so\u2014so\u2014\"\n\nIt was impossible somehow to refuse; everything combined to make me go. We had a little food and then went out into the hall, and he clapped a wide-awake on his gray hairs. I took a cloak and seized a walking-stick from the stand. I really hardly knew what I was doing. The new world I had awakened to seemed still a-quiver about me.\n\nAs we passed out on to the gravel drive the light from the hall windows fell upon his face, and I saw that the change I had been so long observing was nearing its completeness, for there breathed about him that keen, wonderful atmosphere of eternal youth I had felt upon the inmates of the cottage. He seemed to have gone back forty years; a veil was gathering over his eyes; and I could have sworn that somehow his stature had increased, and that he moved beside me with a vigour and power I had never seen in him before.\n\nAnd as we began to climb the hill together in silence I saw that the stars were clear overhead and there was no mist, that the trees stood motionless without wind, and that beyond us on the summit of the hills there were lights dancing to and fro, appearing and disappearing like the inflection of stars in water.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Miss Slumbubble \u2013 and Claustrophobia ]\n\nMiss Daphne Slumbubble was a nervous lady of uncertain age who invariably went abroad in the spring. It was her one annual holiday, and she slaved for it all the rest of the year, saving money by the many sad devices known only to those who find their incomes after forty \"barely enough,\" and always hoping that something would one day happen to better her dreary condition of cheap tea, tin loaves, and weekly squabbles with the laundress.\n\nThis spring holiday was the only time she really lived in the whole year, and she half starved herself for months immediately after her return, so as to put by quickly enough money for the journey in the following year. Once those six pounds were safe she felt better. After that she only had to save so many sums of four francs, each four francs meaning another day in the little cheap pension she always went to on the flowery slopes of the Alps of Valais.\n\nMiss Slumbubble was exceedingly conscious of the presence of men. They made her nervous and afraid. She thought in her heart that all men were untrustworthy, not excepting policemen and clergymen, for in her early youth she had been cruelly deceived by a man to whom she had unreservedly given her heart. He had suddenly gone away and left her without a word of explanation, and some months later had married another woman and allowed the announcement to appear in the papers. It is true that he had hardly once spoken to Daphne. But that was nothing.\n\nFor the way he looked at her, the way he walked about the room, the very way he avoided her at the tea-parties where she used to meet him at her rich sister's house\u2014indeed, everything he did or left undone, brought convincing proof to her fluttering heart that he loved her secretly, and that he knew she loved him. His near presence disturbed her dreadfully, so much so that she invariably spilt her tea if he came even within scenting-distance of her; and once, when he crossed the room to offer her bread and butter, she was so certain the very way he held the plate interpreted his silent love, that she rose from her chair, looked straight into his eyes\u2014and took the whole plate in a state of delicious confusion!\n\nBut all this was years ago, and she had long since learned to hold her grief in subjection and to prevent her life being too much embittered by the treachery\u2014she felt it was treachery\u2014of one man. She still, however, felt anxious and self-conscious in the presence of men, especially of silent, unmarried men, and to some extent it may be said that this fear haunted her life. It was shared, however, with other fears, probably all equally baseless. Thus, she lived in constant dread of fire, of railway accidents, of runaway cabs, and of being locked into a small, confined space. The former fears she shared, of course, with many other persons of both sexes, but the latter, the dread of confined spaces, was entirely due, no doubt, to a story she had heard in early youth to the effect that her father had once suffered from that singular nervous malady, claustrophobia (the fear of closed spaces), the terror of being caught in a confined place without possibility of escape.\n\nThus it was clear that Miss Daphne Slumbubble, this good, honest soul with jet flowers in her bonnet and rows of coloured photographs of Switzerland on her bedroom mantelpiece, led a life unnecessarily haunted.\n\nThe thought of the annual holiday, however, compensated for all else. In her lonely room behind Warwick Square she stewed through the dusty heat of summer, fought her way pluckily through the freezing winter fogs, and then, with the lengthening days, worked herself steadily into a fever heat of joyous anticipation as she counted the hours to the taking of her ticket in the first week of May. When the day came her happiness was so great that she wished for nothing else in the world. Even her name ceased to trouble her, for once on the other side of the Channel it sounded quite different on the lips of the foreigners, while in the little pension she was known as \"Mlle. Daphne,\" and the mere sound brought music into her heart. The odious surname belonged to the sordid London life. It had nothing to do with the glorious days that Mlle. Daphne spent among the mountain tops.\n\nThe platform at Victoria was already crowded when she arrived a good hour before the train started, and got her tiny faded trunk weighed and labelled. She was so excited that she talked unnecessarily to any one who would listen\u2014to any one in station uniform, that is. Already in fancy she saw the blue sky above the shining snow peaks, heard the tinkling cow-bells, and sniffed the odours of pinewood and sawmill. She imagined the cheerful table d'h\u00f4te room with its wooden floor and rows of chairs; the diligence winding up the hot white road far below; the fragrant caf\u00e9 complet in her bedroom at 7.30\u2014 and then the long mornings with sketch-book and poetry-book under the forest shade, the clouds trailing slowly across the great cliffs, and the air always humming with the echoes of falling water.\n\n\"And you feel sure the passage will be calm, do you?\" she asked the porter for the third time, as she bustled to and fro by his side.\n\n\"Well, there ain't no wind 'ere, at any rate, Miss,\" he replied cheerfully, putting her small box on a barrow.\n\n\"Such a lot of people go by this train, don't they?\" she piped.\n\n\"Oh, a tidy few. This is the season for foreign parts, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes; and the trains on the other side will be very full, too, I dare say,\" she said, following him down the platform with quick, pattering footsteps, chirping all the way like a happy bird.\n\n\"Quite likely, Miss.\"\n\n\"I shall go in a 'Ladies only,' you know. I always do every year. I think it's safer, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I'll see to it all for yer, Miss,\" replied the patient porter. \"But the train ain't in yet, not for another 'arf hour or so.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you; then I'll be here when it comes. 'Ladies only,' remember, and second class, and a corner seat facing the engine\u2014no, back to the engine, I mean; and I do hope the Channel will be smooth. Do you think the wind\u2014?\"\n\nBut the porter was out of hearing by this time, and Miss Slumbubble went wandering about the platform watching the people arrive, studying the blue and yellow advertisements of the C\u00f4te d'azur, and waggling her jet beads with delight\u2014with passionate delight\u2014as she thought of her own little village in time high Alps where the snow crept down to a few hundred feet above the church and the meadows were greener than any in the whole wide world.\n\n\"I've put yer wraps in a 'Lidies only,' Miss,\" said the porter at length, when the train came in, \"and you've got the corner back to the engine all to yerself, an' quite comfortable. Thank you, Miss.\" He touched his cap and pocketed his sixpence, and the fussy little traveller went off to take up her position outside the carriage door for another half hour before the train started. She was always very nervous about trains; not only fearful of possible accidents to the engine and carriages, but of untoward happenings to the occupants of corridor-less compartments during long journeys without stops. The mere sight of a railway station, with its smoke and whistling and luggage, was sufficient to set her imagination in the direction of possible disaster.\n\nThe careful porter had piled all her belongings neatly in the corner for her: three newspapers, a magazine and a novel, a little bag to carry food in, two bananas and a Bath bun in paper, a bundle of wraps tied with a long strap, an umbrella, a bottle of Yanatas, an opera-glass (for the mountains), and a camera. She counted them all over, rearranged them a little differently, and then sighed a bit, partly from excitement, partly by way of protest at time delay.\n\nA number of people came up and eyed the compartment critically and seemed on the point of getting in, but no one actually took possession. One lady put her umbrella in the corner, and then came tearing down the platform a few minutes later to take it away again, as though she had suddenly heard the train was not to start at all. There was much bustling to and fro, and a good deal of French was audible, and the sound of it thrilled Miss Daphne with happiness, for it was another delightful little anticipation of what was to come. Even the language sounded like a holiday, and brought with it a whiff of mountains and the subtle pleasures of sweet freedom.\n\nThen a fat Frenchman arrived and inspected the carriage, and attempted to climb in. But she instantly pounced upon him in courageous dismay.\n\n\"Mais, c'est pour dames, m'sieur!\" she cried, pronouncing it \"dam.\"\n\n\"Oh, damn!\" he exclaimed in English; \"I didn't notice.\" And the rudeness of the man\u2014it was the fur coat over his arm made her think he was French\u2014set her all in a flutter, so that she jumped in and took her seat hurriedly, and spread her many parcels in a protective and prohibitive way about her.\n\nFor the tenth time she opened her black beaded bag and took out her purse and made sure her ticket was in it, and then counted over her belongings.\n\n\"I do hope,\" she murmured, \"I do hope that stupid porter has put in my luggage all right, and that the Channel won't be rough. Porters are so stupid. One ought never to lose sight of them till the luggage is actually in. I think I'd better pay the extra fare and go first class on the boat if it is rough. I can carry all my own packages, I think.\"\n\nAt that moment the man came for tickets. She searched everywhere for her own, but could not find it.\n\n\"I'm certain I had it a moment ago,\" she said breathlessly, while the man stood waiting at the open door. \"I know I had it\u2014only this very minute. Dear me, what can I have done with it? Ah here it is!\"\n\nThe man took so long examining the little tourist cover that she was afraid something must he wrong with it, and when at last he tore out a leaf and handed back the rest a sort of panic seized her.\n\n\"It's all right, isn't it, guard? I mean I'm all right, am I not?\" she asked.\n\nThe guard closed the door and locked it.\n\n\"All right for Folkestone, ma'am,\" he said, and was gone.\n\nThere was much whistling and shouting and running up and down the platform, and the inspector was standing with his hand raised and the whistle at his lips, waiting to blow and looking cross. Suddenly her own porter flew past with an empty barrow. She dashed her head out of the window and hailed him.\n\n\"You're sure you put my luggage in aren't, you?\" she cried. The man did not or would not hear, and as the train moved slowly off she bumped her head against an old lady standing on the platform who was looking the other way and waving to some one in a front carriage.\n\n\"Ooh!\" cried Miss Slumbubble, straightening her bonnet, \"you really should look where you're looking, madam!\"\u2014and then, realising she had said something foolish, she withdrew into the carriage and sank back in a fluster on the cushions.\n\n\"Oh!\" she gasped again, \"oh dear! I'm actually off at last. It's too good to be true. Oh, that horrid London!\"\n\nThen she counted her money over again, examined her ticket once more, and touched each of her many packages with a long finger in a cotton glove, saying, \"That's there, and that, and that, and\u2014that!\" And then turning and pointing at herself she added, with a little happy laugh, \"and that!\"\n\nThe train gathered speed, and the dirty roofs and sea of ugly chimneys flew by as the dreary miles of depressing suburbs revealed themselves through the windows. She put all her parcels up in the rack and then took them all down again; and after a bit she put a few up\u2014a carefully selected few that she would not need till Folkestone\u2014and arranged the others, some upon the seat beside her, and some opposite. The paper bag of bananas she kept in her lap, where it grew warmer and warmer and more and more dishevelled in appearance.\n\n\"Actually off at last!\" she murmured again, catching her breath a little in her joy. \"Paris, Berne, Thun, Frutigen,\" she gave herself a little hug that made the jet beads rattle; \"then the long diligence journey up those gorgeous mountains,\" she knew every inch of the way, \"and a clear fifteen days at the pension, or even eighteen days, if I can get the cheaper room. Wheeeee! Can it be true? Can it be really true?\" In her happiness she made sounds just like a bird.\n\nShe looked out of the window, where green fields had replaced the rows of streets. She opened her novel and tried to read. She played with the newspapers in a vain attempt to keep her eye on any one column. It was all in vain. A scene of wild beauty held her inner eye and made all else dull and uninteresting. The train sped on\u2014slowly enough to her\u2014yet every moment of the journey, every turn of the creaking wheels that brought her nearer, every little detail of the familiar route, became a source of keenest anticipatory happiness to her. She no longer cared about her name, or her silent and faithless lover of long ago, or of anything in the world but the fact that her absorbing little annual passion was now once again in a fair way to be gratified.\n\nThen, quite suddenly, Miss Slumbubble realised her actual position, and felt afraid, unreasonably afraid. For the first time she became conscious that she was alone, alone in the compartment of an express train, and not even of a corridor express train.\n\nHitherto the excitement of getting off had occupied her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and if she had realised her solitude at all, she had realised it pleasurably. But now, in the first pause for breath as it were, when she had examined her packages, counted her money, glared at her ticket, and all the rest of it for the twentieth time, she leaned back in her seat and knew with a distinct shock that she was alone in a railway carriage on a comparatively long journey, alone for the first time in her life in a rattling, racing, shrieking train. She sat bolt upright and tried to collect herself a little.\n\nOf all the emotions, that of fear is probably the least susceptible to the power of suggestion, certainly of auto-suggestion; and of vague fear that has no obvious cause this is especially true. With a fear of known origin one can argue, humour it, pacify, turn on the hose of ridicule\u2014in a word, suggest that it depart; but with a fear that rises stealthily out of no comprehensible causes the mind finds itself at a complete loss. The mere assertion \"I am not afraid\" is as useless and empty as the subtler kind of suggestion that lies in affecting to ignore it altogether. Searching for the cause, moreover, tends to confuse the mind, and searching in vain, to terrify.\n\nMiss Slumbubble pulled herself sharply together, and began to search for what made her afraid, but for a long time she searched in vain.\n\nAt first she searched externally: she thought perhaps it had something to do with one of her pack ages, and she placed them all out in a row on the seat in front of her and examined each in turn, bananas, camera, food bag, black bead bag, &c. &c. But she discovered nothing among them to cause alarm.\n\nThen she searched internally: her thoughts, her rooms in London, her pension, her money, ticket, plans in general, her future, her past, her health, her religion, anything and everything among the events of her inner life she passed in review, yet found nothing that could have caused this sudden sense of being troubled and afraid.\n\nMoreover, as she vainly searched, her fear increased. She got into a regular nervous flurry.\n\n\"I declare if I'm not all in a perspiration!\" she exclaimed aloud, and shifted down the dirty cushions to another place, looking anxiously about her as she did so. She probed everywhere in her thoughts to find the reason of her fear, but could think of nothing. Yet in her soul there was a sense of growing distress.\n\nShe found her new seat no more comfortable than the one before it, and shifted in turn into all the corners of the carriage, and down the middle as well, till at last she had tried every possible part of it. In each place she felt less at ease than in the one before. She got up and looked into the empty racks, under the seats, beneath the heavy cushions, which she lifted with difficulty. Then she put all the packages back again into the rack, dropping several of them in her nervous hurry, and being obliged to kneel on the floor to recover them from under the seats. This made her breathless. Moreover, the dust got into her throat and made her cough. Her eyes smarted and she grew uncomfortably warm. Then, quite accidentally, she caught sight of her reflection in the coloured picture of Boulogne under the rack, and the appearance she presented added greatly to her dismay. She looked so unlike herself, and wore such an odd expression. It was almost like the face of another person altogether.\n\nThe sense of alarm, once wakened, is fed by anything and everything, from a buzzing fly to a dark cloud in the sky. The woman collapsed on to the seat behind her in a distressing fluster of nervous fear.\n\nBut Miss Daphne Slumbubble had pluck. She was not so easily dismayed after all. She had read somewhere that terror was sometimes dispersed by the loud and strong affirmation of one's own name. She believed much that she read, provided it was plainly and vigorously expressed, and she acted at once on this knowledge.\n\n\"I am Daphne Slumbubble!\" she affirmed in a firm, confident tone of voice, sitting stiffly on the edge of the seat; \"I am not afraid\u2014of anything.\" She added the last two words as an afterthought. \"I am Daphne Slumbubble, and I have paid for my ticket, and know where I am going, and my luggage is in the van, and I have all my smaller things here!\" She enumerated them one by one; she omitted nothing.\n\nYet the sound of her own voice, and especially of her own name, added apparently to her distress. It sounded oddly, like a voice outside the carriage. Everything seemed suddenly to have become strange, and unfamiliar, and unfriendly. She moved across to the opposite corner and looked out of the window: trees, fields, and occasional country houses flew past in endless swift succession. The country looked charming; she saw rooks flying and farm-horses moving laboriously over the fields. What in the world was there to feel afraid of? What in the world made her so restless and fidgety and frightened? Once again she examined her packages, her ticket, her money. All was right.\n\nThen she dashed across to the window and tried to open it. The sash stuck. She pulled and pulled in vain. The sash refused to yield. She ran to the other window, with a like result. Both were closed. Both refused to open. Her fear grew. She was locked in! The windows would not open. Something was wrong with the carriage. She suddenly recalled the way every one had examined it and refused to enter. There must be something the matter with the carriage\u2014something she had omitted to observe. Terror ran like a flame through her. She trembled and was ready to cry.\n\nShe ran up and down between the cushioned seats like a bird in a cage, casting wild glances at the racks and under the seats and out of the windows. A sudden panic took her, and she tried to open the door. It was locked. She flew to the other door. That, too, was locked. Good Heavens, both were locked! She was locked in. She was a prisoner. She was caught in a closed space. The mountains were out of her reach\u2014the free open woods\u2014the wide fields, the scented winds of heaven. She was caught, hemmed in, celled, restricted like a prisoner in a dungeon. The thought maddened her. The feeling that she could not reach the open spaces of sky and forest, of field and blue horizon, struck straight into her soul and touched all that she held most dear. She screamed. She ran down between the cushioned seats and screamed aloud.\n\nOf course, no one heard her. The thunder of the train killed the feeble sound of her voice. Her voice was the cry of the imprisoned person.\n\nThen quite suddenly she understood what it all meant. There was nothing wrong with the carriage, or with her parcels, or with the train. She sat down abruptly upon the dirty cushions and faced the position there and then. It had nothing to do with her past or her future, her ticket or her money, her religion or her health. It was something else entirely. She knew what it was, and the knowledge brought icy terror at once. She had at last labelled the source of her consternation, and the discovery increased rather than lessened her distress.\n\nIt was the fear of closed spaces. It was claustrophobia!\n\nThere could no longer be any doubt about it. She was shut in. She was enclosed in a narrow space from which she could not escape. The walls and floor and ceiling shut her in implacably. The doors was fastened; the windows were sealed, there was no escape.\n\n\"That porter might have told me!\" she exclaimed inconsequently, mopping her face. Then the foolishness of the saying dawned upon her, and she thought her mind must be going. That was the effect of claustrophobia, she remembered: the mind went, and one said and did foolish things. Oh, to get out into a free open space, uncornered! Here she was trapped, horribly trapped.\n\n\"The guard man should never have locked me in\u2014never!\" she cried, and ran up and down between the seats, throwing her weight first against the door and then against the other. Of course, fortunately, neither of them yielded.\n\nThinking food might calm her, perhaps, she took down the banana bag and peeled the squashy overripe fruit, munching it with part of the Bath bun from the other bag, and sitting midway on the forward seat. Suddenly the right-hand window dropped with a bang and a rattle. It had only been stuck after all, and her efforts, aided by the shaking of the train, had completed its undoing, or rather its unclosing. Miss Slumbubble shrieked, and dropped her banana and bun.\n\nBut the shock passed in a moment when she saw what had happened, and that the window was open and the sweet air pouring in from the flying fields. She rushed up and put her head out. This was followed by her hand, for she meant to open the door from the outside if possible. Whatever happened, the one imperative thing was that she must get into open space. The handle turned easily enough, but the door was locked higher up and she could not make it budge. She put her head farther out, so that the wind tore the jet bonnet off her head and left it twirling in the dusty whirlwind on the line far behind, and this sensation of the air whistling past her ears and through her flying hair somehow or other managed to make her feel wilder than ever. In fact, she completely lost her head, and began to scream at the top of her voice:\n\n\"I'm locked in! I'm a prisoner! Help, help!\" she yelled.\n\nA window opened in the next compartment and a young man put his head out.\n\n\"What the deuce is the matter? Are you being murdered?\" he shouted down the wind.\n\n\"I'm locked in! I'm locked in!\" screamed the hatless lady, wrestling furiously with the obdurate door handle.\n\n\"Don't open the door!\" cried the young man anxiously.\n\n\"I can't, you idiot! I can't!\"\n\n\"Wait a moment and I'll come to you. Don't try to get out. I'll climb along the foot-board. Keep calm, madam, keep calm. I'll save you.\"\n\nHe disappeared from view. Good Heavens! He meant to crawl out and come to her carriage by the window! A man, a young man, would shortly be in the compartment with her. Locked in, too! No, it was impossible. That was worse than the claustrophobia, and she could not endure such a thing for a moment.\n\nThe young man would certainly kill her and steal all her packages.\n\nShe ran once or twice frantically up and down the narrow floor. Then she looked out of the window. \"Oh, bless my heart and soul!\" she cried out, \"he's out already!\"\n\nThe young man, evidently thinking the lady was being assaulted, had climbed out of the window and was pluckily coming to her rescue. He was already on the foot-board, swinging by the brass bars on the side of the coach as the train rocked down the line at a fearful pace.\n\nBut Miss Slumbubble took a deep breath and a sudden determination. She did, in fact, the only thing left to her to do. She pulled the communication cord once, twice three times, and then drew the window up with a sudden snap just before the young man's head appeared round the corner of the sash. Then, stepping backwards, she trod on the slippery banana bag and fell flat on her back upon the dirty floor between the seats.\n\nThe train slackened speed almost immediately and came to a stop. Miss Slumbubble still sat on the floor, staring in a dazed fashion at her toes. She realised the enormity of her offence, and was thoroughly frightened. She had actually pulled the cord! \u2014the cord that is meant to be seen but not touched, the little chain that meant a \u00a35 fine and all sorts of dire consequences.\n\nShe heard voices shouting and doors opening, and a moment later a key rattled near her head, and she saw the guard swinging up on to the steps of the carriage. The door was wide open, and the young man from the next compartment was explaining volubly what he seen and heard.\n\n\"I thought it was murder,\" he was saying.\n\nBut the guard pushed quickly into the carriage and lifted the panting and dishevelled lady on to the seat.\n\n\"Now, what's all this about? Was it you that pulled the cord, ma'am?\" he asked somewhat roughly. \"It's serious stoppin' a train like this, you know, a mail train.\"\n\nNow Miss Daphne did not mean to tell a lie. It was not deliberate, that is to say. It seemed to slip out of its own accord as the most natural and obvious thing to say. For she was terrified at what she had done, and had to find a good excuse. Yet, how in the world could she describe to this stupid and hurried official all she had gone through? Moreover, he would be so certain to think she was merely drunk.\n\n\"It was a man,\" she said, falling back instinctively upon her natural enemy. \"There's a man somewhere!\" She glanced round at the racks and under the seats. The guard followed her eyes.\n\n\"I don't see no man,\" he declared; \"all I know is you've stopped the mail train without any visible or reasonable cause. \"I'll be obliged with your name and address, ma'am, if you please,\" he added, taking a dirty note-book from his pocket and wetting the blunt pencil in his mouth.\n\n\"Let me get air\u2014at once,\" she said. \"I must have air first. Of course you shall have my name. The whole affair is disgraceful.\" She was getting her wits back. She moved to the door.\n\n\"That may be, ma'am,\" the man said, \"but I've my duty to perform, and I must report the facts, and then get the train on as quick as possible. You must stay in the carriage, please. We've been waiting 'ere a bit too long already.\"\n\nMiss Slumbubble met her fate calmly. She realised it was not fair to keep all the passengers waiting while she got a little fresh air. There was a brief confabulation between the two guards, which ended by the one who had first come taking his seat in her carriage, while the other blew his whistle and the train started off again and flew at great speed the remaining miles to Folkestone.\n\n\"Now I'll take the name and address, if you please, ma'am,\" he said politely. \"Daphny, yes, thank you; Daphny without a hef, all right, thank you.\"\n\nHe wrote it all down laboriously while the hatless little lady sat opposite, indignant, excited, ready to he voluble the moment she could think what was best to say, and above all fearful that her holiday would he delayed, if not prevented altogether.\n\nPresently the guard looked up at her and put his note-book away in an inner pocket. It was just after he had entered the number of the carriage.\n\n\"You see, ma'am,\" he explained with sudden suavity, \"this communication cord is only for cases of real danger, and if I report this, as I should do, it means a 'eavy fine. You must 'ave just pulled it as a sort of hexperiment, didn't you?\"\n\nSomething in the man's voice caught her ear there was a change in it; his manner, too, had altered somehow. He suddenly seemed to have become apologetic. She was quick to notice the change, though she could not understand what caused it. It began, she fancied, from the moment he entered the number of the carriage in his notebook.\n\n\"It's the delay to the train I've got to explain,\" he continued, as if speaking to himself, \"and I can't put it all on to the engine-driver\u2014\"\n\n\"Perhaps we shall make it up and there won't be any delay,\" ventured Miss Slumbubble, carefully smoothing her hair and rearranging the stray hairpins.\n\n\"\u2014and I don't want to get no one into any kind of trouble, least of all myself,\" he continued, wholly ignoring the interruption. Then he turned round in his seat and stared hard at his companion with rather a worried, puzzled expression of countenance and a shrug of the shoulders that was distinctly apologetic. Plainly, she thought, he was preparing the way for a compromise\u2014for a tip!\n\nThe train was slackening speed; already it was in the cutting where it reverses and is pushed backwards on to the pier. Miss Slumbubble was desperate. She had never tipped a man before in her life except for obvious and recognised services, and this seemed to her like compounding a felony, or some such dreadful thing. Yet so much was at stake: she might be detained at Folkestone for days before the matter came into court, to say nothing of a \u00a35 fine, which meant that her holiday would be utterly stopped. The blue and white mountains swam into her field of vision, and she heard the wind in the pine forest.\n\n\"Perhaps you would give this to your wife,\" she said timidly, holding out a sovereign.\n\nThe guard looked at it and shook his head.\n\n\"I 'aven't got a wife, exackly,\" he said; \"but it isn't money I want. What I want is to 'ush this little matter up as quietly as possible. I may lose my job over this\u2014but if you'll agree to say nothing about it, I think I can square the driver and t'other guard.\"\n\n\"I won't say anything, of course,\" stammered the astonished lady. \"But I don't think I quite understand\u2014\"\n\n\"You couldn't understand either till I tell you,\" he replied, looking greatly relieved; \"but the fact is, I never noticed the carriage till I come to put the number down, and then I see it's the very one\u2014the very same number\u2014\"\n\n\"What number?\"\n\nHe stared at her for a moment without speaking. Then he appeared to take a great decision.\n\n\"Well, I'm in your 'ands anyhow, ma'am, and I may as well tell you the lot, and then we both 'elps the other out. It's this way, you see. You ain't the first to try and jump out of this carriage\u2014not by a long ways. It's been done before by a good number\u2014\"\n\n\"Gracious!\"\n\n\"But the first who did it was that German woman, Binckmann\u2014\"\n\n\"Binckmann, the woman who was found on the line last year, and the carriage door open?\" cried Miss Slumbubble, aghast.\n\n\"That's her. This was the carriage she jumped from, and they tried to say it was murder, but couldn't find any one who could have done it, and then they said she must have been crazy. And since then this carriage was said to be 'aunted, because so many other people tried to do the same thing and throw theirselves out too, till the company changed the number\u2014\"\n\n\"To this number?\" cried the excited spinster, pointing to the figures on the door.\n\n\"That's it, ma'am. And if you look you'll see this number don't follow on with the others. Even then the thing didn't stop, and we got orders to let no one in. That's where I made my mistake. I left the door unlocked, and they put you in. If this gets in the papers I'll be dismissed for sure. The company's awful strict about that.\"\n\n\"I'm terrified!\" exclaimed Miss Slumbubble, \"for that's exactly what I felt\u2014\"\n\n\"That you'd got to jump out, you mean?\" asked the guard.\n\n\"Yes. The terror of being shut in.\"\n\n\"That's what the doctors said Binckmann had\u2014the fear of being shut up in a tight place. They gave it some long name, but that's what it was: she couldn't abide being closed in. Now, here we are at the pier, ma'am, and, if you'll allow me, I'll help you to carry your little bits of luggage.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you, guard, thank you,\" she said faintly, taking his proffered hand and getting out with infinite relief on to the platform.\n\n\"Tchivalry ain't dead yet, Miss,\" he replied gallantly, as he loaded himself up within her packages and led the way down to the steamer.\n\nTen minutes later the deep notes of the syren echoed across the pier, and the paddles began to churn the green sea. And Miss Daphne Slumbubble, hatless but undismayed, went abroad to flutter the remnants of her faded youth before the indifferent foreigners in the cheap pension among the Alps." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 371", + "text": "\"And what is it makes you think I could be of use in this particular case?\" asked Dr. John Silence, looking across somewhat sceptically at the Swedish lady in the chair facing him.\n\n\"Your sympathetic heart and your knowledge of occultism\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, please\u2014that dreadful word!\" he interrupted, holding up a finger with a gesture of impatience.\n\n\"Well, then,\" she laughed, \"your wonderful clairvoyant gift and your trained psychic knowledge of the processes by which a personality may be disintegrated and destroyed\u2014these strange studies you've been experimenting with all these years\u2014\"\n\n\"If it's only a case of multiple personality I must really cry off,\" interrupted the doctor again hastily, a bored expression in his eyes.\n\n\"It's not that; now, please, be serious, for I want your help,\" she said; \"and if I choose my words poorly you must be patient with my ignorance. The case I know will interest you, and no one else could deal with it so well. In fact, no ordinary professional man could deal with it at all, for I know of no treatment nor medicine that can restore a lost sense of humour!\"\n\n\"You begin to interest me with your 'case,'\" he replied, and made himself comfortable to listen.\n\nMrs. Sivendson drew a sigh of contentment as she watched him go to the tube and heard him tell the servant he was not to be disturbed.\n\n\"I believe you have read my thoughts already,\" she said; \"your intuitive knowledge of what goes on in other people's minds is positively uncanny.\"\n\nHer friend shook his head and smiled as he drew his chair up to a convenient position and prepared to listen attentively to what she had to say. He closed his eyes, as he always did when he wished to absorb the real meaning of a recital that might be inadequately expressed, for by this method he found it easier to set himself in tune with the living thoughts that lay behind the broken words.\n\nBy his friends John Silence was regarded as an eccentric, because he was rich by accident, and by choice\u2014a doctor. That a man of independent means should devote his time to doctoring, chiefly doctoring folk who could not pay, passed their comprehension entirely. The native nobility of a soul whose first desire was to help those who could not help themselves, puzzled them. After that, it irritated them, and, greatly to his own satisfaction, they left him to his own devices.\n\nDr. Silence was a free-lance, though, among doctors, having neither consulting-room, bookkeeper, nor professional manner. He took no fees, being at heart a genuine philanthropist, yet at the same time did no harm to his fellow-practitioners, because he only accepted unremunerative cases, and cases that interested him for some very special reason. He argued that the rich could pay, and the very poor could avail themselves of organised charity, but that a very large class of ill-paid, self-respecting workers, often followers of the arts, could not afford the price of a week's comforts merely to be told to travel. And it was these he desired to help: cases often requiring special and patient study\u2014things no doctor can give for a guinea, and that no one would dream of expecting him to give.\n\nBut there was another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the \"Psychic Doctor.\"\n\nIn order to grapple with cases of this peculiar kind, he had submitted himself to a long and severe training, at once physical, mental, and spiritual. What precisely this training had been, or where undergone, no one seemed to know,\u2014for he never spoke of it, as, indeed, he betrayed no single other characteristic of the charlatan,\u2014but the fact that it had involved a total disappearance from the world for five years, and that after he returned and began his singular practice no one ever dreamed of applying to him the so easily acquired epithet of quack, spoke much for the seriousness of his strange quest and also for the genuineness of his attainments.\n\nFor the modern psychical researcher he felt the calm tolerance of the \"man who knows.\" There was a trace of pity in his voice\u2014contempt he never showed\u2014when he spoke of their methods.\n\n\"This classification of results is uninspired work at best,\" he said once to me, when I had been his confidential assistant for some years. \"It leads nowhere, and after a hundred years will lead nowhere. It is playing with the wrong end of a rather dangerous toy. Far better, it would be, to examine the causes, and then the results would so easily slip into place and explain themselves. For the sources are accessible, and open to all who have the courage to lead the life that alone makes practical investigation safe and possible.\"\n\nAnd towards the question of clairvoyance, too, his attitude was significantly sane, for he knew how extremely rare the genuine power was, and that what is commonly called clairvoyance is nothing more than a keen power of visualising.\n\n\"It connotes a slightly increased sensibility, nothing more,\" he would say. \"The true clairvoyant deplores his power, recognising that it adds a new horror to life, and is in the nature of an affliction. And you will find this always to be the real test.\"\n\nThus it was that John Silence, this singularly developed doctor, was able to select his cases with a clear knowledge of the difference between mere hysterical delusion and the kind of psychical affliction that claimed his special powers. It was never necessary for him to resort to the cheap mysteries of divination; for, as I have heard him observe, after the solution of some peculiarly intricate problem\u2014\n\n\"Systems of divination, from geomancy down to reading by tea-leaves, are merely so many methods of obscuring the outer vision, in order that the inner vision may become open. Once the method is mastered, no system is necessary at all.\"\n\nAnd the words were significant of the methods of this remarkable man, the keynote of whose power lay, perhaps, more than anything else, in the knowledge, first, that thought can act at a distance, and, secondly, that thought is dynamic and can accomplish material results.\n\n\"Learn how to think,\" he would have expressed it, \"and you have learned to tap power at its source.\"\n\nTo look at\u2014he was now past forty\u2014he was sparely built, with speaking brown eyes in which shone the light of knowledge and self-confidence, while at the same time they made one think of that wondrous gentleness seen most often in the eyes of animals. A close beard concealed the mouth without disguising the grim determination of lips and jaw, and the face somehow conveyed an impression of transparency, almost of light, so delicately were the features refined away. On the fine forehead was that indefinable touch of peace that comes from identifying the mind with what is permanent in the soul, and letting the impermanent slip by without power to wound or distress; while, from his manner,\u2014so gentle, quiet, sympathetic,\u2014few could have guessed the strength of purpose that burned within like a great flame.\n\n\"I think I should describe it as a psychical case,\" continued the Swedish lady, obviously trying to explain herself very intelligently, \"and just the kind you like. I mean a case where the cause is hidden deep down in some spiritual distress, and\u2014\"\n\n\"But the symptoms first, please, my dear Svenska,\" he interrupted, with a strangely compelling seriousness of manner, \"and your deductions afterwards.\"\n\nShe turned round sharply on the edge of her chair and looked him in the face, lowering her voice to prevent her emotion betraying itself too obviously.\n\n\"In my opinion there's only one symptom,\" she half whispered, as though telling something disagreeable\u2014\"fear\u2014simply fear.\"\n\n\"Physical fear?\"\n\n\"I think not; though how can I say? I think it's a horror in the psychical region. It's no ordinary delusion; the man is quite sane; but he lives in mortal terror of something\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't know what you mean by his 'psychical region,'\" said the doctor, with a smile; \"though I suppose you wish me to understand that his spiritual, and not his mental, processes are affected. Anyhow, try and tell me briefly and pointedly what you know about the man, his symptoms, his need for help, my peculiar help, that is, and all that seems vital in the case. I promise to listen devotedly.\"\n\n\"I am trying,\" she continued earnestly, \"but must do so in my own words and trust to your intelligence to disentangle as I go along. He is a young author, and lives in a tiny house off Putney Heath somewhere. He writes humorous stories\u2014quite a genre of his own: Pender\u2014you must have heard the name\u2014Felix Pender? Oh, the man had a great gift, and married on the strength of it; his future seemed assured. I say 'had,' for quite suddenly his talent utterly failed him. Worse, it became transformed into its opposite. He can no longer write a line in the old way that was bringing him success\u2014\"\n\nDr. Silence opened his eyes for a second and looked at her.\n\n\"He still writes, then? The force has not gone?\" he asked briefly, and then closed his eyes again to listen.\n\n\"He works like a fury,\" she went on, \"but produces nothing\"\u2014she hesitated a moment\u2014\"nothing that he can use or sell. His earnings have practically ceased, and he makes a precarious living by book-reviewing and odd jobs\u2014very odd, some of them. Yet, I am certain his talent has not really deserted him finally, but is merely\u2014\"\n\nAgain Mrs. Sivendson hesitated for the appropriate word.\n\n\"In abeyance,\" he suggested, without opening his eyes.\n\n\"Obliterated,\" she went on, after a moment to weigh the word, \"merely obliterated by something else\u2014\"\n\n\"By some one else?\"\n\n\"I wish I knew. All I can say is that he is haunted, and temporarily his sense of humour is shrouded\u2014gone\u2014replaced by something dreadful that writes other things. Unless something competent is done, he will simply starve to death. Yet he is afraid to go to a doctor for fear of being pronounced insane; and, anyhow, a man can hardly ask a doctor to take a guinea to restore a vanished sense of humour, can he?\"\n\n\"Has he tried any one at all\u2014?\"\n\n\"Not doctors yet. He tried some clergymen and religious people; but they know so little and have so little intelligent sympathy. And most of them are so busy balancing on their own little pedestals\u2014\"\n\nJohn Silence stopped her tirade with a gesture.\n\n\"And how is it that you know so much about him?\" he asked gently.\n\n\"I know Mrs. Pender well\u2014I knew her before she married him\u2014\"\n\n\"And is she a cause, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Not in the least. She is devoted; a woman very well educated, though without being really intelligent, and with so little sense of humour herself that she always laughs at the wrong places. But she has nothing to do with the cause of his distress; and, indeed, has chiefly guessed it from observing him, rather than from what little he has told her. And he, you know, is a really lovable fellow, hard-working, patient\u2014altogether worth saving.\"\n\nDr. Silence opened his eyes and went over to ring for tea. He did not know very much more about the case of the humorist than when he first sat down to listen; but he realised that no amount of words from his Swedish friend would help to reveal the real facts. A personal interview with the author himself could alone do that.\n\n\"All humorists are worth saving,\" he said with a smile, as she poured out tea. \"We can't afford to lose a single one in these strenuous days. I will go and see your friend at the first opportunity.\"\n\nShe thanked him elaborately, effusively, with many words, and he, with much difficulty, kept the conversation thenceforward strictly to the teapot.\n\nAnd, as a result of this conversation, and a little more he had gathered by means best known to himself and his secretary, he was whizzing in his motor-car one afternoon a few days later up the Putney Hill to have his first interview with Felix Pender, the humorous writer who was the victim of some mysterious malady in his \"psychical region\" that had obliterated his sense of the comic and threatened to wreck his life and destroy his talent. And his desire to help was probably of equal strength with his desire to know and to investigate.\n\nThe motor stopped with a deep purring sound, as though a great black panther lay concealed within its hood, and the doctor\u2014the \"psychic doctor,\" as he was sometimes called\u2014stepped out through the gathering fog, and walked across the tiny garden that held a blackened fir tree and a stunted laurel shrubbery. The house was very small, and it was some time before any one answered the bell. Then, suddenly, a light appeared in the hall, and he saw a pretty little woman standing on the top step begging him to come in. She was dressed in grey, and the gaslight fell on a mass of deliberately brushed light hair. Stuffed, dusty birds, and a shabby array of African spears, hung on the wall behind her. A hat-rack, with a bronze plate full of very large cards, led his eye swiftly to a dark staircase beyond. Mrs. Pender had round eyes like a child's, and she greeted him with an effusiveness that barely concealed her emotion, yet strove to appear naturally cordial. Evidently she had been looking out for his arrival, and had outrun the servant girl. She was a little breathless.\n\n\"I hope you've not been kept waiting\u2014I think it's most good of you to come\u2014\" she began, and then stopped sharp when she saw his face in the gaslight. There was something in Dr. Silence's look that did not encourage mere talk. He was in earnest now, if ever man was.\n\n\"Good evening, Mrs. Pender,\" he said, with a quiet smile that won confidence, yet deprecated unnecessary words, \"the fog delayed me a little. I am glad to see you.\"\n\nThey went into a dingy sitting-room at the back of the house, neatly furnished but depressing. Books stood in a row upon the mantelpiece. The fire had evidently just been lit. It smoked in great puffs into the room.\n\n\"Mrs. Sivendson said she thought you might be able to come,\" ventured the little woman again, looking up engagingly into his face and betraying anxiety and eagerness in every gesture. \"But I hardly dared to believe it. I think it is really too good of you. My husband's case is so peculiar that\u2014well, you know, I am quite sure any ordinary doctor would say at once the asylum\u2014\"\n\n\"Isn't he in, then?\" asked Dr. Silence gently.\n\n\"In the asylum?\" she gasped. \"Oh dear, no\u2014not yet!\"\n\n\"In the house, I meant,\" he laughed.\n\nShe gave a great sigh.\n\n\"He'll be back any minute now,\" she replied, obviously relieved to see him laugh; \"but the fact is, we didn't expect you so early\u2014I mean, my husband hardly thought you would come at all.\"\n\n\"I am always delighted to come\u2014when I am really wanted, and can be of help,\" he said quickly; \"and, perhaps, it's all for the best that your husband is out, for now that we are alone you can tell me something about his difficulties. So far, you know, I have heard very little.\"\n\nHer voice trembled as she thanked him, and when he came and took a chair close beside her she actually had difficulty in finding words with which to begin.\n\n\"In the first place,\" she began timidly, and then continuing with a nervous incoherent rush of words, \"he will be simply delighted that you've really come, because he said you were the only person he would consent to see at all\u2014the only doctor, I mean. But, of course, he doesn't know how frightened I am, or how much I have noticed. He pretends with me that it's just a nervous breakdown, and I'm sure he doesn't realise all the odd things I've noticed him doing. But the main thing, I suppose\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, the main thing, Mrs. Pender,\" he said, encouragingly, noticing her hesitation.\n\n\"\u2014is that he thinks we are not alone in the house. That's the chief thing.\"\n\n\"Tell me more facts\u2014just facts.\"\n\n\"It began last summer when I came back from Ireland; he had been here alone for six weeks, and I thought him looking tired and queer\u2014ragged and scattered about the face, if you know what I mean, and his manner worn out. He said he had been writing hard, but his inspiration had somehow failed him, and he was dissatisfied with his work. His sense of humour was leaving him, or changing into something else, he said. There was something in the house, he declared, that\"\u2014she emphasised the words\u2014\"prevented his feeling funny.\"\n\n\"Something in the house that prevented his feeling funny,\" repeated the doctor. \"Ah, now we're getting to the heart of it!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she resumed vaguely, \"that's what he kept saying.\"\n\n\"And what was it he did that you thought strange?\" he asked sympathetically. \"Be brief, or he may be here before you finish.\"\n\n\"Very small things, but significant it seemed to me. He changed his workroom from the library, as we call it, to the sitting-room. He said all his characters became wrong and terrible in the library; they altered, so that he felt like writing tragedies\u2014vile, debased tragedies, the tragedies of broken souls. But now he says the same of the sitting-room, and he's gone back to the library.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"You see, there's so little I can tell you,\" she went on, with increasing speed and countless gestures. \"I mean it's only very small things he does and says that are queer. What frightens me is that he assumes there is some one else in the house all the time\u2014some one I never see. He does not actually say so, but on the stairs I've seen him standing aside to let some one pass; I've seen him open a door to let some one in or out; and often in our bedrooms he puts chairs about as though for some one else to sit in. Oh\u2014oh yes, and once or twice,\" she cried\u2014\"once or twice\u2014\"\n\nShe paused, and looked about her with a startled air.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Once or twice,\" she resumed hurriedly, as though she heard a sound that alarmed her, \"I've heard him running\u2014coming in and out of the rooms breathless as if something were after him\u2014\"\n\nThe door opened while she was still speaking, cutting her words off in the middle, and a man came into the room. He was dark and clean-shaven, sallow rather, with the eyes of imagination, and dark hair growing scantily about the temples. He was dressed in a shabby tweed suit, and wore an untidy flannel collar at the neck. The dominant expression of his face was startled\u2014hunted; an expression that might any moment leap into the dreadful stare of terror and announce a total loss of self-control.\n\nThe moment he saw his visitor a smile spread over his worn features, and he advanced to shake hands.\n\n\"I hoped you would come; Mrs. Sivendson said you might be able to find time,\" he said simply. His voice was thin and needy. \"I am very glad to see you, Dr. Silence. It is 'Doctor,' is it not?\"\n\n\"Well, I am entitled to the description,\" laughed the other, \"but I rarely get it. You know, I do not practise as a regular thing; that is, I only take cases that specially interest me, or\u2014\"\n\nHe did not finish the sentence, for the men exchanged a glance of sympathy that rendered it unnecessary.\n\n\"I have heard of your great kindness.\"\n\n\"It's my hobby,\" said the other quickly, \"and my privilege.\"\n\n\"I trust you will still think so when you have heard what I have to tell you,\" continued the author, a little wearily. He led the way across the hall into the little smoking-room where they could talk freely and undisturbed.\n\nIn the smoking-room, the door shut and privacy about them, Fender's attitude changed somewhat, and his manner became very grave. The doctor sat opposite, where he could watch his face. Already, he saw, it looked more haggard. Evidently it cost him much to refer to his trouble at all.\n\n\"What I have is, in my belief, a profound spiritual affliction,\" he began quite bluntly, looking straight into the other's eyes.\n\n\"I saw that at once,\" Dr. Silence said.\n\n\"Yes, you saw that, of course; my atmosphere must convey that much to any one with psychic perceptions. Besides which, I feel sure from all I've heard, that you are really a soul-doctor, are you not, more than a healer merely of the body?\"\n\n\"You think of me too highly,\" returned the other; \"though I prefer cases, as you know, in which the spirit is disturbed first, the body afterwards.\"\n\n\"I understand, yes. Well, I have experienced a curious disturbance in\u2014not in my physical region primarily. I mean my nerves are all right, and my body is all right. I have no delusions exactly, but my spirit is tortured by a calamitous fear which first came upon me in a strange manner.\"\n\nJohn Silence leaned forward a moment and took the speaker's hand and held it in his own for a few brief seconds, closing his eyes as he did so. He was not feeling his pulse, or doing any of the things that doctors ordinarily do; he was merely absorbing into himself the main note of the man's mental condition, so as to get completely his own point of view, and thus be able to treat his case with true sympathy. A very close observer might perhaps have noticed that a slight tremor ran through his frame after he had held the hand for a few seconds.\n\n\"Tell me quite frankly, Mr. Pender,\" he said soothingly, releasing the hand, and with deep attention in his manner, \"tell me all the steps that led to the beginning of this invasion. I mean tell me what the particular drug was, and why you took it, and how it affected you\u2014\"\n\n\"Then you know it began with a drug!\" cried the author, with undisguised astonishment.\n\n\"I only know from what I observe in you, and in its effect upon myself. You are in a surprising psychical condition. Certain portions of your atmosphere are vibrating at a far greater rate than others. This is the effect of a drug, but of no ordinary drug. Allow me to finish, please. If the higher rate of vibration spreads all over, you will become, of course, permanently cognisant of a much larger world than the one you know normally. If, on the other hand, the rapid portion sinks back to the usual rate, you will lose these occasional increased perceptions you now have.\"\n\n\"You amaze me!\" exclaimed the author; \"for your words exactly describe what I have been feeling\u2014\"\n\n\"I mention this only in passing, and to give you confidence before you approach the account of your real affliction,\" continued the doctor. \"All perception, as you know, is the result of vibrations; and clairvoyance simply means becoming sensitive to an increased scale of vibrations. The awakening of the inner senses we hear so much about means no more than that. Your partial clairvoyance is easily explained. The only thing that puzzles me is how you managed to procure the drug, for it is not easy to get in pure form, and no adulterated tincture could have given you the terrific impetus I see you have acquired. But, please proceed now and tell me your story in your own way.\"\n\n\"This Cannabis indica,\" the author went on, \"came into my possession last autumn while my wife was away. I need not explain how I got it, for that has no importance; but it was the genuine fluid extract, and I could not resist the temptation to make an experiment. One of its effects, as you know, is to induce torrential laughter\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes: sometimes.\"\n\n\"\u2014I am a writer of humorous tales, and I wished to increase my own sense of laughter\u2014to see the ludicrous from an abnormal point of view. I wished to study it a bit, if possible, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Tell me!\"\n\n\"I took an experimental dose. I starved for six hours to hasten the effect, locked myself into this room, and gave orders not to be disturbed. Then I swallowed the stuff and waited.\"\n\n\"And the effect?\"\n\n\"I waited one hour, two, three, four, five hours. Nothing happened. No laughter came, but only a great weariness instead. Nothing in the room or in my thoughts came within a hundred miles of a humorous aspect.\"\n\n\"Always a most uncertain drug,\" interrupted the doctor. \"We make very small use of it on that account.\"\n\n\"At two o'clock in the morning I felt so hungry and tired that I decided to give up the experiment and wait no longer. I drank some milk and went upstairs to bed. I felt flat and disappointed. I fell asleep at once and must have slept for about an hour, when I awoke suddenly with a great noise in my ears. It was the noise of my own laughter! I was simply shaking with merriment. At first I was bewildered and thought I had been laughing in dreams, but a moment later I remembered the drug, and was delighted to think that after all I had got an effect. It had been working all along, only I had miscalculated the time. The only unpleasant thing then was an odd feeling that I had not waked naturally, but had been wakened by some one else\u2014deliberately. This came to me as a certainty in the middle of my noisy laughter and distressed me.\"\n\n\"Any impression who it could have been?\" asked the doctor, now listening with close attention to every word, very much on the alert.\n\nPender hesitated and tried to smile. He brushed his hair from his forehead with a nervous gesture.\n\n\"You must tell me all your impressions, even your fancies; they are quite as important as your certainties.\"\n\n\"I had a vague idea that it was some one connected with my forgotten dream, some one who had been at me in my sleep, some one of great strength and great ability\u2014of great force\u2014quite an unusual personality\u2014and, I was certain, too\u2014a woman.\"\n\n\"A good woman?\" asked John Silence quietly.\n\nPender started a little at the question and his sallow face flushed; it seemed to surprise him. But he shook his head quickly with an indefinable look of horror.\n\n\"Evil,\" he answered briefly, \"appallingly evil, and yet mingled with the sheer wickedness of it was also a certain perverseness\u2014the perversity of the unbalanced mind.\"\n\nHe hesitated a moment and looked up sharply at his interlocutor. A shade of suspicion showed itself in his eyes.\n\n\"No,\" laughed the doctor, \"you need not fear that I'm merely humouring you, or think you mad. Far from it. Your story interests me exceedingly and you furnish me unconsciously with a number of clues as you tell it. You see, I possess some knowledge of my own as to these psychic byways.\"\n\n\"I was shaking with such violent laughter,\" continued the narrator, reassured in a moment, \"though with no clear idea what was amusing me, that I had the greatest difficulty in getting up for the matches, and was afraid I should frighten the servants overhead with my explosions. When the gas was lit I found the room empty, of course, and the door locked as usual. Then I half dressed and went out on to the landing, my hilarity better under control, and proceeded to go downstairs. I wished to record my sensations. I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth so as not to scream aloud and communicate my hysterics to the entire household.\"\n\n\"And the presence of this\u2014this\u2014?\"\n\n\"It was hanging about me all the time,\" said Pender, \"but for the moment it seemed to have withdrawn. Probably, too, my laughter killed all other emotions.\"\n\n\"And how long did you take getting downstairs?\"\n\n\"I was just coming to that. I see you know all my 'symptoms' in advance, as it were; for, of course, I thought I should never get to the bottom. Each step seemed to take five minutes, and crossing the narrow hall at the foot of the stairs\u2014well, I could have sworn it was half an hour's journey had not my watch certified that it was a few seconds. Yet I walked fast and tried to push on. It was no good. I walked apparently without advancing, and at that rate it would have taken me a week to get down Putney Hill.\"\n\n\"An experimental dose radically alters the scale of time and space sometimes\u2014\"\n\n\"But, when at last I got into my study and lit the gas, the change came horridly, and sudden as a flash of lightning. It was like a douche of icy water, and in the middle of this storm of laughter\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes; what?\" asked the doctor, leaning forward and peering into his eyes.\n\n\"\u2014I was overwhelmed with terror,\" said Pender, lowering his reedy voice at the mere recollection of it.\n\nHe paused a moment and mopped his forehead. The scared, hunted look in his eyes now dominated the whole face. Yet, all the time, the corners of his mouth hinted of possible laughter as though the recollection of that merriment still amused him. The combination of fear and laughter in his face was very curious, and lent great conviction to his story; it also lent a bizarre expression of horror to his gestures.\n\n\"Terror, was it?\" repeated the doctor soothingly.\n\n\"Yes, terror; for, though the Thing that woke me seemed to have gone, the memory of it still frightened me, and I collapsed into a chair. Then I locked the door and tried to reason with myself, but the drug made my movements so prolonged that it took me five minutes to reach the door, and another five to get back to the chair again. The laughter, too, kept bubbling up inside me\u2014great wholesome laughter that shook me like gusts of wind\u2014so that even my terror almost made me laugh. Oh, but I may tell you, Dr. Silence, it was altogether vile, that mixture of fear and laughter, altogether vile!\n\n\"Then, all at once, the things in the room again presented their funny side to me and set me off laughing more furiously than ever. The bookcase was ludicrous, the arm-chair a perfect clown, the way the clock looked at me on the mantelpiece too comic for words; the arrangement of papers and inkstand on the desk tickled me till I roared and shook and held my sides and the tears streamed down my cheeks. And that footstool! Oh, that absurd footstool!\"\n\nHe lay back in his chair, laughing to himself and holding up his hands at the thought of it, and at the sight of him Dr. Silence laughed, too.\n\n\"Go on, please,\" he said, \"I quite understand. I know something myself of the hashish laughter.\"\n\nThe author pulled himself together and resumed, his face growing quickly grave again.\n\n\"So, you see, side by side with this extravagant, apparently causeless merriment, there was also an extravagant, apparently causeless terror. The drug produced the laughter, I knew; but what brought in the terror I could not imagine. Everywhere behind the fun lay the fear. It was terror masked by cap and bells; and I became the playground for two opposing emotions, armed and fighting to the death. Gradually, then, the impression grew in me that this fear was caused by the invasion\u2014so you called it just now\u2014of the 'person' who had wakened me: she was utterly evil; inimical to my soul, or at least to all in me that wished for good. There I stood, sweating and trembling, laughing at everything in the room, yet all the while with this white terror mastering my heart. And this creature was putting\u2014putting her\u2014\"\n\nHe hesitated again, using his handkerchief freely.\n\n\"Putting what?\"\n\n\"\u2014putting ideas into my mind,\" he went on glancing nervously about the room. \"Actually tapping my thought-stream so as to switch off the usual current and inject her own. How mad that sounds! I know it, but it's true. It's the only way I can express it. Moreover, while the operation terrified me, the skill with which it was accomplished filled me afresh with laughter at the clumsiness of men by comparison. Our ignorant, bungling methods of teaching the minds of others, of inculcating ideas, and so on, overwhelmed me with laughter when I understood this superior and diabolical method. Yet my laughter seemed hollow and ghastly, and ideas of evil and tragedy trod close upon the heels of the comic. Oh, doctor, I tell you again, it was unnerving!\"\n\nJohn Silence sat with his head thrust forward to catch every word of the story which the other continued to pour out in nervous, jerky sentences and lowered voice.\n\n\"You saw nothing\u2014no one\u2014all this time?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not with my eyes. There was no visual hallucination. But in my mind there began to grow the vivid picture of a woman\u2014large, dark-skinned, with white teeth and masculine features, and one eye\u2014the left\u2014so drooping as to appear almost closed. Oh, such a face\u2014!\"\n\n\"A face you would recognise again?\"\n\nPender laughed dreadfully.\n\n\"I wish I could forget it,\" he whispered, \"I only wish I could forget it!\" Then he sat forward in his chair suddenly, and grasped the doctor's hand with an emotional gesture.\n\n\"I must tell you how grateful I am for your patience and sympathy,\" he cried, with a tremor in his voice, \"and\u2014that you do not think me mad. I have told no one else a quarter of all this, and the mere freedom of speech\u2014the relief of sharing my affliction with another\u2014has helped me already more than I can possibly say.\"\n\nDr. Silence pressed his hand and looked steadily into the frightened eyes. His voice was very gentle when he replied.\n\n\"Your case, you know, is very singular, but of absorbing interest to me,\" he said, \"for it threatens, not your physical existence but the temple of your psychical existence\u2014the inner life. Your mind would not be permanently affected here and now, in this world; but in the existence after the body is left behind, you might wake up with your spirit so twisted, so distorted, so befouled, that you would be spiritually insane\u2014a far more radical condition than merely being insane here.\"\n\nThere came a strange hush over the room, and between the two men sitting there facing one another.\n\n\"Do you really mean\u2014Good Lord!\" stammered the author as soon as he could find his tongue.\n\n\"What I mean in detail will keep till a little later, and I need only say now that I should not have spoken in this way unless I were quite positive of being able to help you. Oh, there's no doubt as to that, believe me. In the first place, I am very familiar with the workings of this extraordinary drug, this drug which has had the chance effect of opening you up to the forces of another region; and, in the second, I have a firm belief in the reality of supersensuous occurrences as well as considerable knowledge of psychic processes acquired by long and painful experiment. The rest is, or should be, merely sympathetic treatment and practical application. The hashish has partially opened another world to you by increasing your rate of psychical vibration, and thus rendering you abnormally sensitive. Ancient forces attached to this house have attacked you. For the moment I am only puzzled as to their precise nature; for were they of an ordinary character, I should myself be psychic enough to feel them. Yet I am conscious of feeling nothing as yet. But now, please continue, Mr. Pender, and tell me the rest of your wonderful story; and when you have finished, I will talk about the means of cure.\"\n\nPender shifted his chair a little closer to the friendly doctor and then went on in the same nervous voice with his narrative.\n\n\"After making some notes of my impressions I finally got upstairs again to bed. It was four o'clock in the morning. I laughed all the way up\u2014at the grotesque banisters, the droll physiognomy of the staircase window, the burlesque grouping of the furniture, and the memory of that outrageous footstool in the room below; but nothing more happened to alarm or disturb me, and I woke late in the morning after a dreamless sleep, none the worse for my experiment except for a slight headache and a coldness of the extremities due to lowered circulation.\"\n\n\"Fear gone, too?\" asked the doctor.\n\n\"I seemed to have forgotten it, or at least ascribed it to mere nervousness. Its reality had gone, anyhow for the time, and all that day I wrote and wrote and wrote. My sense of laughter seemed wonderfully quickened and my characters acted without effort out of the heart of true humour. I was exceedingly pleased with this result of my experiment. But when the stenographer had taken her departure and I came to read over the pages she had typed out, I recalled her sudden glances of surprise and the odd way she had looked up at me while I was dictating. I was amazed at what I read and could hardly believe I had uttered it.\"\n\n\"And why?\"\n\n\"It was so distorted. The words, indeed, were mine so far as I could remember, but the meanings seemed strange. It frightened me. The sense was so altered. At the very places where my characters were intended to tickle the ribs, only curious emotions of sinister amusement resulted. Dreadful innuendoes had managed to creep into the phrases. There was laughter of a kind, but it was bizarre, horrible, distressing; and my attempt at analysis only increased my dismay. The story, as it read then, made me shudder, for by virtue of these slight changes it had come somehow to hold the soul of horror, of horror disguised as merriment. The framework of humour was there, if you understand me, but the characters had turned sinister, and their laughter was evil.\"\n\n\"Can you show me this writing?\"\n\nThe author shook his head.\n\n\"I destroyed it,\" he whispered. \"But, in the end, though of course much perturbed about it, I persuaded myself that it was due to some after-effect of the drug, a sort of reaction that gave a twist to my mind and made me read macabre interpretations into words and situations that did not properly hold them.\"\n\n\"And, meanwhile, did the presence of this person leave you?\"\n\n\"No; that stayed more or less. When my mind was actively employed I forgot it, but when idle, dreaming, or doing nothing in particular, there she was beside me, influencing my mind horribly\u2014\"\n\n\"In what way, precisely?\" interrupted the doctor.\n\n\"Evil, scheming thoughts came to me, visions of crime, hateful pictures of wickedness, and the kind of bad imagination that so far has been foreign, indeed impossible, to my normal nature\u2014\"\n\n\"The pressure of the Dark Powers upon the personality,\" murmured the doctor, making a quick note.\n\n\"Eh? I didn't quite catch\u2014\"\n\n\"Pray, go on. I am merely making notes; you shall know their purport fully later.\"\n\n\"Even when my wife returned I was still aware of this Presence in the house; it associated itself with my inner personality in most intimate fashion; and outwardly I always felt oddly constrained to be polite and respectful towards it\u2014to open doors, provide chairs and hold myself carefully deferential when it was about. It became very compelling at last, and, if I failed in any little particular, I seemed to know that it pursued me about the house, from one room to another, haunting my very soul in its inmost abode. It certainly came before my wife so far as my attentions were concerned.\n\n\"But, let me first finish the story of my experimental dose, for I took it again the third night, and underwent a very similar experience, delayed like the first in coming, and then carrying me off my feet when it did come with a rush of this false demon-laughter. This time, however, there was a reversal of the changed scale of space and time; it shortened instead of lengthened, so that I dressed and got downstairs in about twenty seconds, and the couple of hours I stayed and worked in the study passed literally like a period of ten minutes.\"\n\n\"That is often true of an overdose,\" interjected the doctor, \"and you may go a mile in a few minutes, or a few yards in a quarter of an hour. It is quite incomprehensible to those who have never experienced it, and is a curious proof that time and space are merely forms of thought.\"\n\n\"This time,\" Pender went on, talking more and more rapidly in his excitement, \"another extraordinary effect came to me, and I experienced a curious changing of the senses, so that I perceived external things through one large main sense-channel instead of through the five divisions known as sight, smell, touch, and so forth. You will, I know, understand me when I tell you that I heard sights and saw sounds. No language can make this comprehensible, of course, and I can only say, for instance, that the striking of the clock I saw as a visible picture in the air before me. I saw the sounds of the tinkling bell. And in precisely the same way I heard the colours in the room, especially the colours of those books in the shelf behind you. Those red bindings I heard in deep sounds, and the yellow covers of the French bindings next to them made a shrill, piercing note not unlike the chattering of starlings. That brown bookcase muttered, and those green curtains opposite kept up a constant sort of rippling sound like the lower notes of a wood-horn. But I only was conscious of these sounds when I looked steadily at the different objects, and thought about them. The room, you understand, was not full of a chorus of notes; but when I concentrated my mind upon a colour, I heard, as well as saw, it.\"\n\n\"That is a known, though rarely obtained, effect of Cannabis indica,\" observed the doctor. \"And it provoked laughter again, did it?\"\n\n\"Only the muttering of the cupboard-bookcase made me laugh. It was so like a great animal trying to get itself noticed, and made me think of a performing bear\u2014which is full of a kind of pathetic humour, you know. But this mingling of the senses produced no confusion in my brain. On the contrary, I was unusually clear-headed and experienced an intensification of consciousness, and felt marvellously alive and keen-minded.\n\n\"Moreover, when I took up a pencil in obedience to an impulse to sketch\u2014a talent not normally mine\u2014I found that I could draw nothing but heads, nothing, in fact, but one head\u2014always the same\u2014the head of a dark-skinned woman, with huge and terrible features and a very drooping left eye; and so well drawn, too, that I was amazed, as you may imagine\u2014\"\n\n\"And the expression of the face\u2014?\"\n\nPender hesitated a moment for words, casting about with his hands in the air and hunching his shoulders. A perceptible shudder ran over him.\n\n\"What I can only describe as\u2014blackness,\" he replied in a low tone; \"the face of a dark and evil soul.\"\n\n\"You destroyed that, too?\" queried the doctor sharply.\n\n\"No; I have kept the drawings,\" he said, with a laugh, and rose to get them from a drawer in the writing-desk behind him.\n\n\"Here is all that remains of the pictures, you see,\" he added, pushing a number of loose sheets under the doctor's eyes; \"nothing but a few scrawly lines. That's all I found the next morning. I had really drawn no heads at all\u2014nothing but those lines and blots and wriggles. The pictures were entirely subjective, and existed only in my mind which constructed them out of a few wild strokes of the pen. Like the altered scale of space and time it was a complete delusion. These all passed, of course, with the passing of the drug's effects. But the other thing did not pass. I mean, the presence of that Dark Soul remained with me. It is here still. It is real. I don't know how I can escape from it.\"\n\n\"It is attached to the house, not to you personally. You must leave the house.\"\n\n\"Yes. Only I cannot afford to leave the house, for my work is my sole means of support, and\u2014well, you see, since this change I cannot even write. They are horrible, these mirthless tales I now write, with their mockery of laughter, their diabolical suggestion. Horrible? I shall go mad if this continues.\"\n\nHe screwed his face up and looked about the room as though he expected to see some haunting shape.\n\n\"This influence in this house induced by my experiment, has killed in a flash, in a sudden stroke, the sources of my humour, and though I still go on writing funny tales\u2014I have a certain name you know\u2014my inspiration has dried up, and much of what I write I have to burn\u2014yes, doctor, to burn, before any one sees it.\"\n\n\"As utterly alien to your own mind and personality?\"\n\n\"Utterly! As though some one else had written it\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"And shocking!\" He passed his hand over his eyes a moment and let the breath escape softly through his teeth. \"Yet most damnably clever in the consummate way the vile suggestions are insinuated under cover of a kind of high drollery. My stenographer left me of course\u2014and I've been afraid to take another\u2014\"\n\nJohn Silence got up and began to walk about the room leisurely without speaking; he appeared to be examining the pictures on the wall and reading the names of the books lying about. Presently he paused on the hearthrug, with his back to the fire, and turned to look his patient quietly in the eyes. Pender's face was grey and drawn; the hunted expression dominated it; the long recital had told upon him.\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Pender,\" he said, a curious glow showing about his fine, quiet face; \"thank you for the sincerity and frankness of your account. But I think now there is nothing further I need ask you.\" He indulged in a long scrutiny of the author's haggard features drawing purposely the man's eyes to his own and then meeting them with a look of power and confidence calculated to inspire even the feeblest soul with courage. \"And, to begin with,\" he added, smiling pleasantly, \"let me assure you without delay that you need have no alarm, for you are no more insane or deluded than I myself am\u2014\"\n\nPender heaved a deep sigh and tried to return the smile.\n\n\"\u2014and this is simply a case, so far as I can judge at present, of a very singular psychical invasion, and a very sinister one, too, if you perhaps understand what I mean\u2014\"\n\n\"It's an odd expression; you used it before, you know,\" said the author wearily, yet eagerly listening to every word of the diagnosis, and deeply touched by the intelligent sympathy which did not at once indicate the lunatic asylum.\n\n\"Possibly,\" returned the other, \"and an odd affliction, too, you'll allow, yet one not unknown to the nations of antiquity, nor to those moderns, perhaps, who recognise the freedom of action under certain pathogenic conditions between this world and another.\"\n\n\"And you think,\" asked Pender hastily, \"that it is all primarily due to the Cannabis? There is nothing radically amiss with myself\u2014nothing incurable, or\u2014?\"\n\n\"Due entirely to the overdose,\" Dr. Silence replied emphatically, \"to the drug's direct action upon your psychical being. It rendered you ultra-sensitive and made you respond to an increased rate of vibration. And, let me tell you, Mr. Pender, that your experiment might have had results far more dire. It has brought you into touch with a somewhat singular class of Invisible, but of one, I think, chiefly human in character. You might, however, just as easily have been drawn out of human range altogether, and the results of such a contingency would have been exceedingly terrible. Indeed, you would not now be here to tell the tale. I need not alarm you on that score, but mention it as a warning you will not misunderstand or underrate after what you have been through.\n\n\"You look puzzled. You do not quite gather what I am driving at; and it is not to be expected that you should, for you, I suppose, are the nominal Christian with the nominal Christian's lofty standard of ethics, and his utter ignorance of spiritual possibilities. Beyond a somewhat childish understanding of 'spiritual wickedness in high places,' you probably have no conception of what is possible once you break-down the slender gulf that is mercifully fixed between you and that Outer World. But my studies and training have taken me far outside these orthodox trips, and I have made experiments that I could scarcely speak to you about in language that would be intelligible to you.\"\n\nHe paused a moment to note the breathless interest of Pender's face and manner. Every word he uttered was calculated; he knew exactly the value and effect of the emotions he desired to waken in the heart of the afflicted being before him.\n\n\"And from certain knowledge I have gained through various experiences,\" he continued calmly, \"I can diagnose your case as I said before to be one of psychical invasion.\"\n\n\"And the nature of this\u2014er\u2014invasion?\" stammered the bewildered writer of humorous tales.\n\n\"There is no reason why I should not say at once that I do not yet quite know,\" replied Dr. Silence. \"I may first have to make one or two experiments\u2014\"\n\n\"On me?\" gasped Pender, catching his breath.\n\n\"Not exactly,\" the doctor said, with a grave smile, \"but with your assistance, perhaps. I shall want to test the conditions of the house\u2014to ascertain, impossible, the character of the forces, of this strange personality that has been haunting you\u2014\"\n\n\"At present you have no idea exactly who\u2014what\u2014why\u2014\" asked the other in a wild flurry of interest, dread and amazement.\n\n\"I have a very good idea, but no proof rather,\" returned the doctor. \"The effects of the drug in altering the scale of time and space, and merging the senses have nothing primarily to do with the invasion. They come to any one who is fool enough to take an experimental dose. It is the other features of your case that are unusual. You see, you are now in touch with certain violent emotions, desires, purposes, still active in this house, that were produced in the past by some powerful and evil personality that lived here. How long ago, or why they still persist so forcibly, I cannot positively say. But I should judge that they are merely forces acting automatically with the momentum of their terrific original impetus.\"\n\n\"Not directed by a living being, a conscious will, you mean?\"\n\n\"Possibly not\u2014but none the less dangerous on that account, and more difficult to deal with. I cannot explain to you in a few minutes the nature of such things, for you have not made the studies that would enable you to follow me; but I have reason to believe that on the dissolution at death of a human being, its forces may still persist and continue to act in a blind, unconscious fashion. As a rule they speedily dissipate themselves, but in the case of a very powerful personality they may last a long time. And, in some cases\u2014of which I incline to think this is one\u2014these forces may coalesce with certain non-human entities who thus continue their life indefinitely and increase their strength to an unbelievable degree. If the original personality was evil, the beings attracted to the left-over forces will also be evil. In this case, I think there has been an unusual and dreadful aggrandisement of the thoughts and purposes left behind long ago by a woman of consummate wickedness and great personal power of character and intellect. Now, do you begin to see what I am driving at a little?\"\n\nPender stared fixedly at his companion, plain horror showing in his eyes. But he found nothing to say, and the doctor continued\u2014\n\n\"In your case, predisposed by the action of the drug, you have experienced the rush of these forces in undiluted strength. They wholly obliterate in you the sense of humour, fancy, imagination,\u2014all that makes for cheerfulness and hope. They seek, though perhaps automatically only, to oust your own thoughts and establish themselves in their place. You are the victim of a psychical invasion. At the same time, you have become clairvoyant in the true sense. You are also a clairvoyant victim.\"\n\nPender mopped his face and sighed. He left his chair and went over to the fireplace to warm himself.\n\n\"You must think me a quack to talk like this, or a madman,\" laughed Dr. Silence. \"But never mind that. I have come to help you, and I can help you if you will do what I tell you. It is very simple: you must leave this house at once. Oh, never mind the difficulties; we will deal with those together. I can place another house at your disposal, or I would take the lease here off your hands, and later have it pulled down. Your case interests me greatly, and I mean to see you through, so that you have no anxiety, and can drop back into your old groove of work tomorrow! The drug has provided you, and therefore me, with a shortcut to a very interesting experience. I am grateful to you.\"\n\nThe author poked the fire vigorously, emotion rising in him like a tide. He glanced towards the door nervously.\n\n\"There is no need to alarm your wife or to tell her the details of our conversation,\" pursued the other quietly. \"Let her know that you will soon be in possession again of your sense of humour and your health, and explain that I am lending you another house for six months. Meanwhile I may have the right to use this house for a night or two for my experiment. Is that understood between us?\"\n\n\"I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart,\" stammered Pender, unable to find words to express his gratitude.\n\nThen he hesitated for a moment, searching the doctor's face anxiously.\n\n\"And your experiment with the house?\" he said at length.\n\n\"Of the simplest character, my dear Mr. Pender. Although I am myself an artificially trained psychic, and consequently aware of the presence of discarnate entities as a rule, I have so far felt nothing here at all. This makes me sure that the forces acting here are of an unusual description. What I propose to do is to make an experiment with a view of drawing out this evil, coaxing it from its lair, so to speak, in order that it may exhaust itself through me and become dissipated for ever. I have already been inoculated,\" he added; \"I consider myself to be immune.\"\n\n\"Heavens above!\" gasped the author, collapsing on to a chair.\n\n\"Hell beneath! might be a more appropriate exclamation,\" the doctor laughed. \"But, seriously, Mr. Pender, this is what I propose to do\u2014with your permission.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" cried the other, \"you have my permission and my best wishes for success. I can see no possible objection, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But what?\"\n\n\"I pray to Heaven you will not undertake this experiment alone, will you?\"\n\n\"Oh, dear, no; not alone.\"\n\n\"You will take a companion with good nerves, and reliable in case of disaster, won't you?\"\n\n\"I shall bring two companions,\" the doctor said.\n\n\"Ah, that's better. I feel easier. I am sure you must have among your acquaintances men who\u2014\"\n\n\"I shall not think of bringing men, Mr. Pender.\"\n\nThe other looked up sharply.\n\n\"No, or women either; or children.\"\n\n\"I don't understand. Who will you bring, then?\"\n\n\"Animals,\" explained the doctor, unable to prevent a smile at his companion's expression of surprise\u2014\"two animals, a cat and a dog.\"\n\nPender stared as if his eyes would drop out upon the floor, and then led the way without another word into the adjoining room where his wife was awaiting them for tea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 372", + "text": "A few days later the humorist and his wife, with minds greatly relieved, moved into a small furnished house placed at their free disposal in another part of London; and John Silence, intent upon his approaching experiment, made ready to spend a night in the empty house on the top of Putney Hill. Only two rooms were prepared for occupation: the study on the ground floor and the bedroom immediately above it; all other doors were to be locked, and no servant was to be left in the house. The motor had orders to call for him at nine o'clock the following morning.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, his secretary had instructions to look up the past history and associations of the place, and learn everything he could concerning the character of former occupants, recent or remote.\n\nThe animals, by whose sensitiveness he intended to test any unusual conditions in the atmosphere of the building, Dr. Silence selected with care and judgment. He believed (and had already made curious experiments to prove it) that animals were more often, and more truly, clairvoyant than human beings. Many of them, he felt convinced, possessed powers of perception far superior to that mere keenness of the senses common to all dwellers in the wilds where the senses grow specially alert; they had what he termed \"animal clairvoyance,\" and from his experiments with horses, dogs, cats, and even birds, he had drawn certain deductions, which, however, need not be referred to in detail here.\n\nCats, in particular, he believed, were almost continuously conscious of a larger field of vision, too detailed even for a photographic camera, and quite beyond the reach of normal human organs. He had, further, observed that while dogs were usually terrified in the presence of such phenomena, cats on the other hand were soothed and satisfied. They welcomed manifestations as something belonging peculiarly to their own region.\n\nHe selected his animals, therefore, with wisdom so that they might afford a differing test, each in its own way, and that one should not merely communicate its own excitement to the other. He took a dog and a cat.\n\nThe cat he chose, now full grown, had lived with him since kittenhood, a kittenhood of perplexing sweetness and audacious mischief. Wayward it was and fanciful, ever playing its own mysterious games in the corners of the room, jumping at invisible nothings, leaping sideways into the air and falling with tiny moccasined feet on to another part of the carpet, yet with an air of dignified earnestness which showed that the performance was necessary to its own well-being, and not done merely to impress a stupid human audience. In the middle of elaborate washing it would look up, startled, as though to stare at the approach of some Invisible, cocking its little head sideways and putting out a velvet pad to inspect cautiously. Then it would get absent-minded, and stare with equal intentness in another direction (just to confuse the onlookers), and suddenly go on furiously washing its body again, but in quite a new place. Except for a white patch on its breast it was coal black. And its name was\u2014Smoke.\n\n\"Smoke\" described its temperament as well as its appearance. Its movements, its individuality, its posing as a little furry mass of concealed mysteries, its elfin-like elusiveness, all combined to justify its name; and a subtle painter might have pictured it as a wisp of floating smoke, the fire below betraying itself at two points only\u2014the glowing eyes.\n\nAll its forces ran to intelligence\u2014secret intelligence, the wordless incalculable intuition of the Cat. It was, indeed, the cat for the business in hand.\n\nThe selection of the dog was not so simple, for the doctor owned many; but after much deliberation he chose a collie, called Flame from his yellow coat. True, it was a trifle old, and stiff in the joints, and even beginning to grow deaf, but, on the other hand, it was a very particular friend of Smoke's, and had fathered it from kittenhood upwards so that a subtle understanding existed between them. It was this that turned the balance in its favour, this and its courage. Moreover, though good-tempered, it was a terrible fighter, and its anger when provoked by a righteous cause was a fury of fire, and irresistible.\n\nIt had come to him quite young, straight from the shepherd, with the air of the hills yet in its nostrils, and was then little more than skin and bones and teeth. For a collie it was sturdily built, its nose blunter than most, its yellow hair stiff rather than silky, and it had full eyes, unlike the slit eyes of its breed. Only its master could touch it, for it ignored strangers, and despised their pattings\u2014when any dared to pat it. There was something patriarchal about the old beast. He was in earnest, and went through life with tremendous energy and big things in view, as though he had the reputation of his whole race to uphold. And to watch him fighting against odds was to understand why he was terrible.\n\nIn his relations with Smoke he was always absurdly gentle; also he was fatherly; and at the same time betrayed a certain diffidence or shyness. He recognised that Smoke called for strong yet respectful management. The cat's circuitous methods puzzled him, and his elaborate pretences perhaps shocked the dog's liking for direct, undisguised action. Yet, while he failed to comprehend these tortuous feline mysteries, he was never contemptuous or condescending; and he presided over the safety of his furry black friend somewhat as a father, loving, but intuitive, might superintend the vagaries of a wayward and talented child. And, in return, Smoke rewarded him with exhibitions of fascinating and audacious mischief.\n\nAnd these brief descriptions of their characters are necessary for the proper understanding of what subsequently took place.\n\nWith Smoke sleeping in the folds of his fur coat, and the collie lying watchful on the seat opposite, John Silence went down in his motor after dinner on the night of November 15th.\n\nAnd the fog was so dense that they were obliged to travel at quarter speed the entire way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 373", + "text": "It was after ten o'clock when he dismissed the motor and entered the dingy little house with the latchkey provided by Pender. He found the hall gas turned low, and a fire in the study. Books and food had also been placed ready by the servant according to instructions. Coils of fog rushed in after him through the open door and filled the hall and passage with its cold discomfort.\n\nThe first thing Dr. Silence did was to lock up Smoke in the study with a saucer of milk before the fire, and then make a search of the house with Flame. The dog ran cheerfully behind him all the way while he tried the doors of the other rooms to make sure they were locked. He nosed about into corners and made little excursions on his own account. His manner was expectant. He knew there must be something unusual about the proceeding, because it was contrary to the habits of his whole life not to be asleep at this hour on the mat in front of the fire. He kept looking up into his master's face, as door after door was tried, with an expression of intelligent sympathy, but at the same time a certain air of disapproval. Yet everything his master did was good in his eyes, and he betrayed as little impatience as possible with all this unnecessary journeying to and fro. If the doctor was pleased to play this sort of game at such an hour of the night, it was surely not for him to object. So he played it, too; and was very busy and earnest about it into the bargain.\n\nAfter an uneventful search they came down again to the study, and here Dr. Silence discovered Smoke washing his face calmly in front of the fire. The saucer of milk was licked dry and clean; the preliminary examination that cats always make in new surroundings had evidently been satisfactorily concluded. He drew an arm-chair up to the fire, stirred the coals into a blaze, arranged the table and lamp to his satisfaction for reading, and then prepared surreptitiously to watch the animals. He wished to observe them carefully without their being aware of it.\n\nNow, in spite of their respective ages, it was the regular custom of these two to play together every night before sleep. Smoke always made the advances, beginning with grave impudence to pat the dog's tail, and Flame played cumbrously, with condescension. It was his duty, rather than pleasure; he was glad when it was over, and sometimes he was very determined and refused to play at all.\n\nAnd this night was one of the occasions on which he was firm.\n\nThe doctor, looking cautiously over the top of his book, watched the cat begin the performance. It started by gazing with an innocent expression at the dog where he lay with nose on paws and eyes wide open in the middle of the floor. Then it got up and made as though it meant to walk to the door, going deliberately and very softly. Flame's eyes followed it until it was beyond the range of sight, and then the cat turned sharply and began patting his tail tentatively with one paw. The tail moved slightly in reply, and Smoke changed paws and tapped it again. The dog, however, did not rise to play as was his wont, and the cat fell to parting it briskly with both paws. Flame still lay motionless.\n\nThis puzzled and bored the cat, and it went round and stared hard into its friend's face to see what was the matter. Perhaps some inarticulate message flashed from the dog's eyes into its own little brain, making it understand that the programme for the night had better not begin with play. Perhaps it only realised that its friend was immovable. But, whatever the reason, its usual persistence thenceforward deserted it, and it made no further attempts at persuasion. Smoke yielded at once to the dog's mood; it sat down where it was and began to wash.\n\nBut the washing, the doctor noted, was by no means its real purpose; it only used it to mask something else; it stopped at the most busy and furious moments and began to stare about the room. Its thoughts wandered absurdly. It peered intently at the curtains; at the shadowy corners; at empty space above; leaving its body in curiously awkward positions for whole minutes together. Then it turned sharply and stared with a sudden signal of intelligence at the dog, and Flame at once rose somewhat stiffly to his feet and began to wander aimlessly and restlessly to and fro about the floor. Smoke followed him, padding quietly at his heels. Between them they made what seemed to be a deliberate search of the room.\n\nAnd, here, as he watched them, noting carefully every detail of the performance over the top of his book, yet making no effort to interfere, it seemed to the doctor that the first beginnings of a faint distress betrayed themselves in the collie, and in the cat the stirrings of a vague excitement.\n\nHe observed them closely. The fog was thick in the air, and the tobacco smoke from his pipe added to its density; the furniture at the far end stood mistily, and where the shadows congregated in hanging clouds under the ceiling, it was difficult to see clearly at all; the lamplight only reached to a level of five feet from the floor, above which came layers of comparative darkness, so that the room appeared twice as lofty as it actually was. By means of the lamp and the fire, however, the carpet was everywhere clearly visible.\n\nThe animals made their silent tour of the floor, sometimes the dog leading, sometimes the cat; occasionally they looked at one another as though exchanging signals; and once or twice, in spite of the limited space, he lost sight of one or other among the fog and the shadows. Their curiosity, it appeared to him, was something more than the excitement lurking in the unknown territory of a strange room; yet, so far, it was impossible to test this, and he purposely kept his mind quietly receptive lest the smallest mental excitement on his part should communicate itself to the animals and thus destroy the value of their independent behaviour.\n\nThey made a very thorough journey, leaving no piece of furniture unexamined, or unsmelt. Flame led the way, walking slowly with lowered head, and Smoke followed demurely at his heels, making a transparent pretence of not being interested, yet missing nothing. And, at length, they returned, the old collie first, and came to rest on the mat before the fire. Flame rested his muzzle on his master's knee, smiling beatifically while he patted the yellow head and spoke his name; and Smoke, coming a little later, pretending he came by chance, looked from the empty saucer to his face, lapped up the milk when it was given him to the last drop, and then sprang upon his knees and curled round for the sleep it had fully earned and intended to enjoy.\n\nSilence descended upon the room. Only the breathing of the dog upon the mat came through the deep stillness, like the pulse of time marking the minutes; and the steady drip, drip of the fog outside upon the window-ledges dismally testified to the inclemency of the night beyond. And the soft crashings of the coals as the fire settled down into the grate became less and less audible as the fire sank and the flames resigned their fierceness.\n\nIt was now well after eleven o'clock, and Dr. Silence devoted himself again to his book. He read the words on the printed page and took in their meaning superficially, yet without starting into life the correlations of thought and suggestions that should accompany interesting reading. Underneath, all the while, his mental energies were absorbed in watching, listening, waiting for what might come. He was not over-sanguine himself, yet he did not wish to be taken by surprise. Moreover, the animals, his sensitive barometers, had incontinently gone to sleep.\n\nAfter reading a dozen pages, however, he realised that his mind was really occupied in reviewing the features of Pender's extraordinary story, and that it was no longer necessary to steady his imagination by studying the dull paragraphs detailed in the pages before him. He laid down his book accordingly, and allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the features of the Case. Speculations as to the meaning, however, he rigorously suppressed, knowing that such thoughts would act upon his imagination like wind upon the glowing embers of a fire.\n\nAs the night wore on the silence grew deeper and deeper, and only at rare intervals he heard the sound of wheels on the main road a hundred yards away, where the horses went at a walking pace owing to the density of the fog. The echo of pedestrian footsteps no longer reached him, the clamour of occasional voices no longer came down the side street. The night, muffled by fog, shrouded by veils of ultimate mystery, hung about the haunted villa like a doom. Nothing in the house stirred. Stillness, in a thick blanket, lay over the upper storeys. Only the mist in the room grew more dense, he thought, and the damp cold more penetrating. Certainly, from time to time, he shivered.\n\nThe collie, now deep in slumber, moved occasionally,\u2014grunted, sighed, or twitched his legs in dreams. Smoke lay on his knees, a pool of warm, black fur, only the closest observation detecting the movement of his sleek sides. It was difficult to distinguish exactly where his head and body joined in that circle of glistening hair; only a black satin nose and a tiny tip of pink tongue betrayed the secret.\n\nDr. Silence watched him, and felt comfortable. The collie's breathing was soothing. The fire was well built, and would burn for another two hours without attention. He was not conscious of the least nervousness. He particularly wished to remain in his ordinary and normal state of mind, and to force nothing. If sleep came naturally, he would let it come\u2014and even welcome it. The coldness of the room, when the fire died down later, would be sure to wake him again; and it would then be time enough to carry these sleeping barometers up to bed. From various psychic premonitions he knew quite well that the night would not pass without adventure; but he did not wish to force its arrival; and he wished to remain normal, and let the animals remain normal, so that, when it came, it would be unattended by excitement or by any straining of the attention. Many experiments had made him wise. And, for the rest, he had no fear.\n\nAccordingly, after a time, he did fall asleep as he had expected, and the last thing he remembered, before oblivion slipped up over his eyes like soft wool, was the picture of Flame stretching all four legs at once, and sighing noisily as he sought a more comfortable position for his paws and muzzle upon the mat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 374", + "text": "It was a good deal later when he became aware that a weight lay upon his chest, and that something was pencilling over his face and mouth. A soft touch on the cheek woke him. Something was patting him.\n\nHe sat up with a jerk, and found himself staring straight into a pair of brilliant eyes, half green, half black. Smoke's face lay level with his own; and the cat had climbed up with its front paws upon his chest.\n\nThe lamp had burned low and the fire was nearly out, yet Dr. Silence saw in a moment that the cat was in an excited state. It kneaded with its front paws into his chest, shifting from one to the other. He felt them prodding against him. It lifted a leg very carefully and patted his cheek gingerly. Its fur, he saw, was standing ridgewise upon its back; the ears were flattened back somewhat; the tail was switching sharply. The cat, of course, had wakened him with a purpose, and the instant he realised this, he set it upon the arm of the chair and sprang up with a quick turn to face the empty room behind him. By some curious instinct, his arms of their own accord assumed an attitude of defence in front of him, as though to ward off something that threatened his safety. Yet nothing was visible. Only shapes of fog hung about rather heavily in the air, moving slightly to and fro.\n\nHis mind was now fully alert, and the last vestiges of sleep gone. He turned the lamp higher and peered about him. Two things he became aware of at once: one, that Smoke, while excited, was pleasurably excited; the other, that the collie was no longer visible upon the mat at his feet. He had crept away to the corner of the wall farthest from the window, and lay watching the room with wide-open eyes, in which lurked plainly something of alarm.\n\nSomething in the dog's behaviour instantly struck Dr. Silence as unusual, and, calling him by name, he moved across to pat him. Flame got up, wagged his tail, and came over slowly to the rug, uttering a low sound that was half growl, half whine. He was evidently perturbed about something, and his master was proceeding to administer comfort when his attention was suddenly drawn to the antics of his other four-footed companion, the cat.\n\nAnd what he saw filled him with something like amazement.\n\nSmoke had jumped down from the back of the arm-chair and now occupied the middle of the carpet, where, with tail erect and legs stiff as ramrods, it was steadily pacing backwards and forwards in a narrow space, uttering, as it did so, those curious little guttural sounds of pleasure that only an animal of the feline species knows how to make expressive of supreme happiness. Its stiffened legs and arched back made it appear larger than usual, and the black visage wore a smile of beatific joy. Its eyes blazed magnificently; it was in an ecstasy.\n\nAt the end of every few paces it turned sharply and stalked back again along the same line, padding softly, and purring like a roll of little muffled drums. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against the ankles of some one who remained invisible. A thrill ran down the doctor's spine as he stood and stared. His experiment was growing interesting at last.\n\nHe called the collie's attention to his friend's performance to see whether he too was aware of anything standing there upon the carpet, and the dog's behaviour was significant and corroborative. He came as far as his master's knees and then stopped dead, refusing to investigate closely. In vain Dr. Silence urged him; he wagged his tail, whined a little, and stood in a half-crouching attitude, staring alternately at the cat and at his master's face. He was, apparently, both puzzled and alarmed, and the whine went deeper and deeper down into his throat till it changed into an ugly snarl of awakening anger.\n\nThen the doctor called to him in a tone of command he had never known to be disregarded; but still the dog, though springing up in response, declined to move nearer. He made tentative motions, pranced a little like a dog about to take to water, pretended to bark, and ran to and fro on the carpet. So far there was no actual fear in his manner, but he was uneasy and anxious, and nothing would induce him to go within touching distance of the walking cat. Once he made a complete circuit, but always carefully out of reach; and in the end he returned to his master's legs and rubbed vigorously against him. Flame did not like the performance at all: that much was quite clear.\n\nFor several minutes John Silence watched the performance of the cat with profound attention and without interfering. Then he called to the animal by name.\n\n\"Smoke, you mysterious beastie, what in the world are you about?\" he said, in a coaxing tone.\n\nThe cat looked up at him for a moment, smiling in its ecstasy, blinking its eyes, but too happy to pause. He spoke to it again. He called to it several times, and each time it turned upon him its blazing eyes, drunk with inner delight, opening and shutting its lips, its body large and rigid with excitement. Yet it never for one instant paused in its short journeys to and fro.\n\nHe noted exactly what it did: it walked, he saw, the same number of paces each time, some six or seven steps, and then it turned sharply and retraced them. By the pattern of the great roses in the carpet he measured it. It kept to the same direction and the same line. It behaved precisely as though it were rubbing against something solid. Undoubtedly, there was something standing there on that strip of carpet, something invisible to the doctor, something that alarmed the dog, yet caused the cat unspeakable pleasure.\n\n\"Smokie!\" he called again, \"Smokie, you black mystery, what is it excites you so?\"\n\nAgain the cat looked up at him for a brief second, and then continued its sentry-walk, blissfully happy, intensely preoccupied. And, for an instant, as he watched it, the doctor was aware that a faint uneasiness stirred in the depths of his own being, focusing itself for the moment upon this curious behaviour of the uncanny creature before him.\n\nThere rose in him quite a new realisation of the mystery connected with the whole feline tribe, but especially with that common member of it, the domestic cat\u2014their hidden lives, their strange aloofness, their incalculable subtlety. How utterly remote from anything that human beings understood lay the sources of their elusive activities. As he watched the indescribable bearing of the little creature mincing along the strip of carpet under his eyes, coquetting with the powers of darkness, welcoming, maybe, some fearsome visitor, there stirred in his heart a feeling strangely akin to awe. Its indifference to human kind, its serene superiority to the obvious, struck him forcibly with fresh meaning; so remote, so inaccessible seemed the secret purposes of its real life, so alien to the blundering honesty of other animals. Its absolute poise of bearing brought into his mind the opium-eater's words that \"no dignity is perfect which does not at some point ally itself with the mysterious\"; and he became suddenly aware that the presence of the dog in this foggy, haunted room on the top of Putney Hill was uncommonly welcome to him. He was glad to feel that Flame's dependable personality was with him. The savage growling at his heels was a pleasant sound. He was glad to hear it. That marching cat made him uneasy.\n\nFinding that Smoke paid no further attention to his words, the doctor decided upon action. Would it rub against his leg, too? He would take it by surprise and see.\n\nHe stepped quickly forward and placed himself upon the exact strip of carpet where it walked.\n\nBut no cat is ever taken by surprise! The moment he occupied the space of the Intruder, setting his feet on the woven roses midway in the line of travel, Smoke suddenly stopped purring and sat down. If lifted up its face with the most innocent stare imaginable of its green eyes. He could have sworn it laughed. It was a perfect child again. In a single second it had resumed its simple, domestic manner; and it gazed at him in such a way that he almost felt Smoke was the normal being, and his was the eccentric behaviour that was being watched. It was consummate, the manner in which it brought about this change so easily and so quickly.\n\n\"Superb little actor!\" he laughed in spite of himself, and stooped to stroke the shining black back. But, in a flash, as he touched its fur, the cat turned and spat at him viciously, striking at his hand with one paw. Then, with a hurried scutter of feet, it shot like a shadow across the floor and a moment later was calmly sitting over by the window-curtains washing its face as though nothing interested it in the whole world but the cleanness of its cheeks and whiskers.\n\nJohn Silence straightened himself up and drew a long breath. He realised that the performance was temporarily at an end. The collie, meanwhile, who had watched the whole proceeding with marked disapproval, had now lain down again upon the mat by the fire, no longer growling. It seemed to the doctor just as though something that had entered the room while he slept, alarming the dog, yet bringing happiness to the cat, had now gone out again, leaving all as it was before. Whatever it was that excited its blissful attentions had retreated for the moment.\n\nHe realised this intuitively. Smoke evidently realised it, too, for presently he deigned to march back to the fireplace and jump upon his master's knees. Dr. Silence, patient and determined, settled down once more to his book. The animals soon slept; the fire blazed cheerfully; and the cold fog from outside poured into the room through every available chink and crannie.\n\nFor a long time silence and peace reigned in the room and Dr. Silence availed himself of the quietness to make careful notes of what had happened. He entered for future use in other cases an exhaustive analysis of what he had observed, especially with regard to the effect upon the two animals. It is impossible here, nor would it be intelligible to the reader unversed in the knowledge of the region known to a scientifically trained psychic like Dr. Silence, to detail these observations. But to him it was clear, up to a certain point\u2014for the rest he must still wait and watch. So far, at least, he realised that while he slept in the chair\u2014that is, while his will was dormant\u2014the room had suffered intrusion from what he recognised as an intensely active Force, and might later be forced to acknowledge as something more than merely a blind force, namely, a distinct personality.\n\nSo far it had affected himself scarcely at all, but had acted directly upon the simpler organisms of the animals. It stimulated keenly the centres of the cat's psychic being, inducing a state of instant happiness (intensifying its consciousness probably in the same way a drug or stimulant intensifies that of a human being); whereas it alarmed the less sensitive dog, causing it to feel a vague apprehension and distress.\n\nHis own sudden action and exhibition of energy had served to disperse it temporarily, yet he felt convinced\u2014the indications were not lacking even while he sat there making notes\u2014that it still remained near to him, conditionally if not spatially, and was, as it were, gathering force for a second attack.\n\nAnd, further, he intuitively understood that the relations between the two animals had undergone a subtle change: that the cat had become immeasurably superior, confident, sure of itself in its own peculiar region, whereas Flame had been weakened by an attack he could not comprehend and knew not how to reply to. Though not yet afraid, he was defiant\u2014ready to act against a fear that he felt to be approaching. He was no longer fatherly and protective towards the cat. Smoke held the key to the situation; and both he and the cat knew it.\n\nThus, as the minutes passed, John Silence sat and waited, keenly on the alert, wondering how soon the attack would be renewed, and at what point it would be diverted from the animals and directed upon himself.\n\nThe book lay on the floor beside him, his notes were complete. With one hand on the cat's fur, and the dog's front paws resting against his feet, the three of them dozed comfortably before the hot fire while the night wore on and the silence deepened towards midnight.\n\nIt was well after one o'clock in the morning when Dr. Silence turned the lamp out and lighted the candle preparatory to going up to bed. Then Smoke suddenly woke with a loud sharp purr and sat up. It neither stretched, washed nor turned: it listened. And the doctor, watching it, realised that a certain indefinable change had come about that very moment in the room. A swift readjustment of the forces within the four walls had taken place\u2014a new disposition of their personal equations. The balance was destroyed, the former harmony gone. Smoke, most sensitive of barometers, had been the first to feel it, but the dog was not slow to follow suit, for on looking down he noted that Flame was no longer asleep. He was lying with eyes wide open, and that same instant he sat up on his great haunches and began to growl.\n\nDr. Silence was in the act of taking the matches to re-light the lamp when an audible movement in the room behind him made him pause. Smoke leaped down from his knee and moved forward a few paces across the carpet. Then it stopped and stared fixedly; and the doctor stood up on the rug to watch.\n\nAs he rose the sound was repeated, and he discovered that it was not in the room as he first thought, but outside, and that it came from more directions than one. There was a rushing, sweeping noise against the window-panes, and simultaneously a sound of something brushing against the door\u2014out in the hall. Smoke advanced sedately across the carpet, twitching his tail, and sat down within a foot of the door. The influence that had destroyed the harmonious conditions of the room had apparently moved in advance of its cause. Clearly, something was about to happen.\n\nFor the first time that night John Silence hesitated; the thought of that dark narrow hall-way, choked with fog, and destitute of human comfort, was unpleasant. He became aware of a faint creeping of his flesh. He knew, of course, that the actual opening of the door was not necessary to the invasion of the room that was about to take place, since neither doors nor windows, nor any other solid barriers could interpose an obstacle to what was seeking entrance. Yet the opening of the door would be significant and symbolic, and he distinctly shrank from it.\n\nBut for a moment only. Smoke, turning with a show of impatience, recalled him to his purpose, and he moved past the sitting, watching creature, and deliberately opened the door to its full width.\n\nWhat subsequently happened, happened in the feeble and flickering light of the solitary candle on the mantlepiece.\n\nThrough the opened door he saw the hall, dimly lit and thick with fog. Nothing, of course, was visible\u2014nothing but the hat-stand, the African spears in dark lines upon the wall and the high-backed wooden chair standing grotesquely underneath on the oilcloth floor. For one instant the fog seemed to move and thicken oddly; but he set that down to the score of the imagination. The door had opened upon nothing.\n\nYet Smoke apparently thought otherwise, and the deep growling of the collie from the mat at the back of the room seemed to confirm his judgment.\n\nFor, proud and self-possessed, the cat had again risen to his feet, and having advanced to the door, was now ushering some one slowly into the room. Nothing could have been more evident. He paced from side to side, bowing his little head with great empressement and holding his stiffened tail aloft like a flag-staff. He turned this way and that, mincing to and fro, and showing signs of supreme satisfaction. He was in his element. He welcomed the intrusion, and apparently reckoned that his companions, the doctor and the dog, would welcome it likewise.\n\nThe Intruder had returned for a second attack.\n\nDr. Silence moved slowly backwards and took up his position on the hearthrug, keying himself up to a condition of concentrated attention.\n\nHe noted that Flame stood beside him, facing the room, with body motionless, and head moving swiftly from side to side with a curious swaying movement. His eyes were wide open, his back rigid, his neck and jaws thrust forward, his legs tense and ready to leap. Savage, ready for attack or defence, yet dreadfully puzzled and perhaps already a little cowed, he stood and stared, the hair on his spine and sides positively bristling outwards as though a wind played through it. In the dim firelight he looked like a great yellow-haired wolf, silent, eyes shooting dark fire, exceedingly formidable. It was Flame, the terrible.\n\nSmoke, meanwhile, advanced from the door towards the middle of the room, adopting the very slow pace of an invisible companion. A few feet away it stopped and began to smile and blink its eyes. There was something deliberately coaxing in its attitude as it stood there undecided on the carpet, clearly wishing to effect some sort of introduction between the Intruder and its canine friend and ally. It assumed its most winning manners, purring, smiling, looking persuasively from one to the other, and making quick tentative steps first in one direction and then in the other. There had always existed such perfect understanding between them in everything. Surely Flame would appreciate Smoke's intention now, and acquiesce.\n\nBut the old collie made no advances. He bared his teeth, lifting his lips till the gums showed, and stood stockstill with fixed eyes and heaving sides. The doctor moved a little farther back, watching intently the smallest movement, and it was just then he divined suddenly from the cat's behaviour and attitude that it was not only a single companion it had ushered into the room, but several. It kept crossing over from one to the other, looking up at each in turn. It sought to win over the dog to friendliness with them all. The original Intruder had come back with reinforcements. And at the same time he further realised that the Intruder was something more than a blindly acting force, impersonal though destructive. It was a Personality, and moreover a great personality. And it was accompanied for the purposes of assistance by a host of other personalities, minor in degree, but similar in kind.\n\nHe braced himself in the corner against the mantelpiece and waited, his whole being roused to defence, for he was now fully aware that the attack had spread to include himself as well as the animals, and he must be on the alert. He strained his eyes through the foggy atmosphere, trying in vain to see what the cat and dog saw; but the candlelight threw an uncertain and flickering light across the room and his eyes discerned nothing. On the floor Smoke moved softly in front of him like a black shadow, his eyes gleaming as he turned his head, still trying with many insinuating gestures and much purring to bring about the introductions he desired.\n\nBut it was all in vain. Flame stood riveted to one spot, motionless as a figure carved in stone.\n\nSome minutes passed, during which only the cat moved, and then there came a sharp change. Flame began to back towards the wall. He moved his head from side to side as he went, sometimes turning to snap at something almost behind him. They were advancing upon him, trying to surround him. His distress became very marked from now onwards, and it seemed to the doctor that his anger merged into genuine terror and became overwhelmed by it. The savage growl sounded perilously like a whine, and more than once he tried to dive past his master's legs, as though hunting for a way of escape. He was trying to avoid something that everywhere blocked the way.\n\nThis terror of the indomitable fighter impressed the doctor enormously; yet also painfully; stirring his impatience; for he had never before seen the dog show signs of giving in, and it distressed him to witness it. He knew, however, that he was not giving in easily, and understood that it was really impossible for him to gauge the animal's sensations properly at all. What Flame felt, and saw, must be terrible indeed to turn him all at once into a coward. He faced something that made him afraid of more than his life merely. The doctor spoke a few quick words of encouragement to him, and stroked the bristling hair. But without much success. The collie seemed already beyond the reach of comfort such as that, and the collapse of the old dog followed indeed very speedily after this.\n\nAnd Smoke, meanwhile, remained behind, watching the advance, but not joining in it; sitting, pleased and expectant, considering that all was going well and as it wished. It was kneading on the carpet with its front paws\u2014slowly, laboriously, as though its feet were dipped in treacle. The sound its claws made as they caught in the threads was distinctly audible. It was still smiling, blinking, purring.\n\nSuddenly the collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom. The next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly against walls and furniture. But that bark was significant; the doctor had heard it before and knew what it meant: for it was the cry of the fighter against odds and it meant that the old beast had found his courage again. Possibly it was only the courage of despair, but at any rate the fighting would be terrific. And Dr. Silence understood, too, that he dared not interfere. Flame must fight his own enemies in his own way.\n\nBut the cat, too, had heard that dreadful bark; and it, too, had understood. This was more than it had bargained for. Across the dim shadows of that haunted room there must have passed some secret signal of distress between the animals. Smoke stood up and looked swiftly about him. He uttered a piteous meow and trotted smartly away into the greater darkness by the windows. What his object was only those endowed with the spirit-like intelligence of cats might know. But, at any rate, he had at last ranged himself on the side of his friend. And the little beast meant business.\n\nAt the same moment the collie managed to gain the door. The doctor saw him rush through into the hall like a flash of yellow light. He shot across the oilcloth, and tore up the stairs, but in another second he appeared again, flying down the steps and landing at the bottom in a tumbling heap, whining, cringing, terrified. The doctor saw him slink back into the room again and crawl round by the wall towards the cat. Was, then, even the staircase occupied? Did They stand also in the hall? Was the whole house crowded from floor to ceiling?\n\nThe thought came to add to the keen distress he felt at the sight of the collie's discomfiture. And, indeed, his own personal distress had increased in a marked degree during the past minutes, and continued to increase steadily to the climax. He recognised that the drain on his own vitality grew steadily, and that the attack was now directed against himself even more than against the defeated dog, and the too much deceived cat.\n\nIt all seemed so rapid and uncalculated after that\u2014the events that took place in this little modern room at the top of Putney Hill between midnight and sunrise\u2014that Dr. Silence was hardly able to follow and remember it all. It came about with such uncanny swiftness and terror; the light was so uncertain; the movements of the black cat so difficult to follow on the dark carpet, and the doctor himself so weary and taken by surprise\u2014that he found it almost impossible to observe accurately, or to recall afterwards precisely what it was he had seen or in what order the incidents had taken place. He never could understand what defect of vision on his part made it seem as though the cat had duplicated itself at first, and then increased indefinitely, so that there were at least a dozen of them darting silently about the floor, leaping softly on to chairs and tables, passing like shadows from the open door to the end of the room, all black as sin, with brilliant green eyes flashing fire in all directions. It was like the reflections from a score of mirrors placed round the walls at different angles. Nor could he make out at the time why the size of the room seemed to have altered, grown much larger, and why it extended away behind him where ordinarily the wall should have been. The snarling of the enraged and terrified collie sounded sometimes so far away; the ceiling seemed to have raised itself so much higher than before, and much of the furniture had changed in appearance and shifted marvellously.\n\nIt was all so confused and confusing, as though the little room he knew had become merged and transformed into the dimensions of quite another chamber, that came to him, with its host of cats and its strange distances, in a sort of vision.\n\nBut these changes came about a little later, and at a time when his attention was so concentrated upon the proceedings of Smoke and the collie, that he only observed them, as it were, subconsciously. And the excitement, the flickering candlelight, the distress he felt for the collie, and the distorting atmosphere of fog were the poorest possible allies to careful observation.\n\nAt first he was only aware that the dog was repeating his short dangerous bark from time to time, snapping viciously at the empty air, a foot or so from the ground. Once, indeed, he sprang upwards and forwards, working furiously with teeth and paws, and with a noise like wolves fighting, but only to dash back the next minute against the wall behind him. Then, after lying still for a bit, he rose to a crouching position as though to spring again, snarling horribly and making short half-circles with lowered head. And Smoke all the while meowed piteously by the window as though trying to draw the attack upon himself.\n\nThen it was that the rush of the whole dreadful business seemed to turn aside from the dog and direct itself upon his own person. The collie had made another spring and fallen back with a crash into the corner, where he made noise enough in his savage rage to waken the dead before he fell to whining and then finally lay still. And directly afterwards the doctor's own distress became intolerably acute. He had made a half movement forward to come to the rescue when a veil that was denser than mere fog seemed to drop down over the scene, draping room, walls, animals and fire in a mist of darkness and folding also about his own mind. Other forms moved silently across the field of vision, forms that he recognised from previous experiments, and welcomed not. Unholy thoughts began to crowd into his brain, sinister suggestions of evil presented themselves seductively. Ice seemed to settle about his heart, and his mind trembled. He began to lose memory\u2014memory of his identity, of where he was, of what he ought to do. The very foundations of his strength were shaken. His will seemed paralysed.\n\nAnd it was then that the room filled with this horde of cats, all dark as the night, all silent, all with lamping eyes of green fire. The dimensions of the place altered and shifted. He was in a much larger space. The whining of the dog sounded far away, and all about him the cats flew busily to and fro, silently playing their tearing, rushing game of evil, weaving the pattern of their dark purpose upon the floor. He strove hard to collect himself and remember the words of power he had made use of before in similar dread positions where his dangerous practice had sometimes led; but he could recall nothing consecutively; a mist lay over his mind and memory; he felt dazed and his forces scattered. The deeps within were too troubled for healing power to come out of them.\n\nIt was glamour, of course, he realised afterwards, the strong glamour thrown upon his imagination by some powerful personality behind the veil; but at the time he was not sufficiently aware of this and, as with all true glamour, was unable to grasp where the true ended and the false began. He was caught momentarily in the same vortex that had sought to lure the cat to destruction through its delight, and threatened utterly to overwhelm the dog through its terror.\n\nThere came a sound in the chimney behind him like wind booming and tearing its way down. The windows rattled. The candle flickered and went out. The glacial atmosphere closed round him with the cold of death, and a great rushing sound swept by overhead as though the ceiling had lifted to a great height. He heard the door shut. Far away it sounded. He felt lost, shelterless in the depths of his soul. Yet still he held out and resisted while the climax of the fight came nearer and nearer... He had stepped into the stream of forces awakened by Pender and he knew that he must withstand them to the end or come to a conclusion that it was not good for a man to come to. Something from the region of utter cold was upon him.\n\nAnd then quite suddenly, through the confused mists about him, there slowly rose up the Personality that had been all the time directing the battle. Some force entered his being that shook him as the tempest shakes a leaf, and close against his eyes\u2014clean level with his face\u2014he found himself staring into the wreck of a vast dark Countenance, a countenance that was terrible even in its ruin.\n\nFor ruined it was, and terrible it was, and the mark of spiritual evil was branded everywhere upon its broken features. Eyes, face and hair rose level with his own, and for a space of time he never could properly measure, or determine, these two, a man and a woman, looked straight into each other's visages and down into each other's hearts.\n\nAnd John Silence, the soul with the good, unselfish motive, held his own against the dark discarnate woman whose motive was pure evil, and whose soul was on the side of the Dark Powers.\n\nIt was the climax that touched the depth of power within him and began to restore him slowly to his own. He was conscious, of course, of effort, and yet it seemed no superhuman one, for he had recognised the character of his opponent's power, and he called upon the good within him to meet and overcome it. The inner forces stirred and trembled in response to his call. They did not at first come readily as was their habit, for under the spell of glamour they had already been diabolically lulled into inactivity, but come they eventually did, rising out of the inner spiritual nature he had learned with so much time and pain to awaken to life. And power and confidence came with them. He began to breathe deeply and regularly, and at the same time to absorb into himself the forces opposed to him, and to turn them to his own account. By ceasing to resist, and allowing the deadly stream to pour into him unopposed, he used the very power supplied by his adversary and thus enormously increased his own.\n\nFor this spiritual alchemy he had learned. He understood that force ultimately is everywhere one and the same; it is the motive behind that makes it good or evil; and his motive was entirely unselfish. He knew\u2014provided he was not first robbed of self-control\u2014how vicariously to absorb these evil radiations into himself and change them magically into his own good purposes. And, since his motive was pure and his soul fearless, they could not work him harm.\n\nThus he stood in the main stream of evil unwittingly attracted by Pender, deflecting its course upon himself; and after passing through the purifying filter of his own unselfishness these energies could only add to his store of experience, of knowledge, and therefore of power. And, as his self-control returned to him, he gradually accomplished this purpose, even though trembling while he did so.\n\nYet the struggle was severe, and in spite of the freezing chill of the air, the perspiration poured down his face. Then, by slow degrees, the dark and dreadful countenance faded, the glamour passed from his soul, the normal proportions returned to walls and ceiling, the forms melted back into the fog, and the whirl of rushing shadow-cats disappeared whence they came.\n\nAnd with the return of the consciousness of his own identity John Silence was restored to the full control of his own will-power. In a deep, modulated voice he began to utter certain rhythmical sounds that slowly rolled through the air like a rising sea, filling the room with powerful vibratory activities that whelmed all irregularities of lesser vibrations in its own swelling tone. He made certain sigils, gestures and movements at the same time. For several minutes he continued to utter these words, until at length the growing volume dominated the whole room and mastered the manifestation of all that opposed it. For just as he understood the spiritual alchemy that can transmute evil forces by raising them into higher channels, so he knew from long study the occult use of sound, and its direct effect upon the plastic region wherein the powers of spiritual evil work their fell purposes. Harmony was restored first of all to his own soul, and thence to the room and all its occupants.\n\nAnd, after himself, the first to recognise it was the old dog lying in his corner. Flame began suddenly uttering sounds of pleasure, that \"something\" between a growl and a grunt that dogs make upon being restored to their master's confidence. Dr. Silence heard the thumping of the collie's tail against the floor. And the grunt and the thumping touched the depth of affection in the man's heart, and gave him some inkling of what agonies the dumb creature had suffered.\n\nNext, from the shadows by the window, a somewhat shrill purring announced the restoration of the cat to its normal state. Smoke was advancing across the carpet. He seemed very pleased with himself, and smiled with an expression of supreme innocence. He was no shadow-cat, but real and full of his usual and perfect self-possession. He marched along, picking his way delicately, but with a stately dignity that suggested his ancestry with the majesty of Egypt. His eyes no longer glared; they shone steadily before him, they radiated, not excitement, but knowledge. Clearly he was anxious to make amends for the mischief to which he had unwittingly lent himself owing to his subtle and electric constitution.\n\nStill uttering his sharp high purrings he marched up to his master and rubbed vigorously against his legs. Then he stood on his hind feet and pawed his knees and stared beseechingly up into his face. He turned his head towards the corner where the collie still lay, thumping his tail feebly and pathetically.\n\nJohn Silence understood. He bent down and stroked the creature's living fur, noting the line of bright blue sparks that followed the motion of his hand down its back. And then they advanced together towards the corner where the dog was.\n\nSmoke went first and put his nose gently against his friend's muzzle, purring while he rubbed, and uttering little soft sounds of affection in his throat. The doctor lit the candle and brought it over. He saw the collie lying on its side against the wall; it was utterly exhausted, and foam still hung about its jaws. Its tail and eyes responded to the sound of its name, but it was evidently very weak and overcome. Smoke continued to rub against its cheek and nose and eyes, sometimes even standing on its body and kneading into the thick yellow hair. Flame replied from time to time by little licks of the tongue, most of them curiously misdirected.\n\nBut Dr. Silence felt intuitively that something disastrous had happened, and his heart was wrung. He stroked the dear body, feeling it over for bruises or broken bones, but finding none. He fed it with what remained of the sandwiches and milk, but the creature clumsily upset the saucer and lost the sandwiches between its paws, so that the doctor had to feed it with his own hand. And all the while Smoke meowed piteously.\n\nThen John Silence began to understand. He went across to the farther side of the room and called aloud to it.\n\n\"Flame, old man! come!\"\n\nAt any other time the dog would have been upon him in an instant, barking and leaping to the shoulder. And even now he got up, though heavily and awkwardly, to his feet. He started to run, wagging his tail more briskly. He collided first with a chair, and then ran straight into a table. Smoke trotted close at his side, trying his very best to guide him. But it was useless. Dr. Silence had to lift him up into his own arms and carry him like a baby. For he was blind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 375", + "text": "It was a week later when John Silence called to see the author in his new house, and found him well on the way to recovery and already busy again with his writing. The haunted look had left his eyes, and he seemed cheerful and confident.\n\n\"Humour restored?\" laughed the doctor, as soon as they were comfortably settled in the room overlooking the Park.\n\n\"I've had no trouble since I left that dreadful place,\" returned Pender gratefully; \"and thanks to you\u2014\"\n\nThe doctor stopped him with a gesture.\n\n\"Never mind that,\" he said, \"we'll discuss your new plans afterwards, and my scheme for relieving you of the house and helping you settle elsewhere. Of course it must be pulled down, for it's not fit for any sensitive person to live in, and any other tenant might be afflicted in the same way you were. Although, personally, I think the evil has exhausted itself by now.\"\n\nHe told the astonished author something of his experiences in it with the animals.\n\n\"I don't pretend to understand,\" Pender said, when the account was finished, \"but I and my wife are intensely relieved to be free of it all. Only I must say I should like to know something of the former history of the house. When we took it six months ago I heard no word against it.\"\n\nDr. Silence drew a typewritten paper from his pocket.\n\n\"I can satisfy your curiosity to some extent,\" he said, running his eye over the sheets, and then replacing them in his coat; \"for by my secretary's investigations I have been able to check certain information obtained in the hypnotic trance by a 'sensitive' who helps me in such cases. The former occupant who haunted you appears to have been a woman of singularly atrocious life and character who finally suffered death by hanging, after a series of crimes that appalled the whole of England and only came to light by the merest chance. She came to her end in the year 1798, for it was not this particular house she lived in, but a much larger one that then stood upon the site it now occupies, and was then, of course, not in London, but in the country. She was a person of intellect, possessed of a powerful, trained will, and of consummate audacity, and I am convinced availed herself of the resources of the lower magic to attain her ends. This goes far to explain the virulence of the attack upon yourself, and why she is still able to carry on after death the evil practices that formed her main purpose during life.\"\n\n\"You think that after death a soul can still consciously direct\u2014\" gasped the author.\n\n\"I think, as I told you before, that the forces of a powerful personality may still persist after death in the line of their original momentum,\" replied the doctor; \"and that strong thoughts and purposes can still react upon suitably prepared brains long after their originators have passed away.\n\n\"If you knew anything of magic,\" he pursued, \"you would know that thought is dynamic, and that it may call into existence forms and pictures that may well exist for hundreds of years. For, not far removed from the region of our human life is another region where float the waste and drift of all the centuries, the limbo of the shells of the dead; a densely populated region crammed with horror and abomination of all descriptions, and sometimes galvanised into active life again by the will of a trained manipulator, a mind versed in the practices of lower magic. That this woman understood its vile commerce, I am persuaded, and the forces she set going during her life have simply been accumulating ever since, and would have continued to do so had they not been drawn down upon yourself, and afterwards discharged and satisfied through me.\n\n\"Anything might have brought down the attack, for, besides drugs, there are certain violent emotions, certain moods of the soul, certain spiritual fevers, if I may so call them, which directly open the inner being to a cognisance of this astral region I have mentioned. In your case it happened to be a peculiarly potent drug that did it.\n\n\"But now, tell me,\" he added, after a pause, handing to the perplexed author a pencil drawing he had made of the dark countenance that had appeared to him during the night on Putney Hill\u2014\"tell me if you recognise this face?\"\n\nPender looked at the drawing closely, greatly astonished. He shuddered a little as he looked.\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" he said, \"it is the face I kept trying to draw\u2014dark, with the great mouth and jaw, and the drooping eye. That is the woman.\"\n\nDr. Silence then produced from his pocket-book an old-fashioned woodcut of the same person which his secretary had unearthed from the records of the Newgate Calendar. The woodcut and the pencil drawing were two different aspects of the same dreadful visage. The men compared them for some moments in silence.\n\n\"It makes me thank God for the limitations of our senses,\" said Pender quietly, with a sigh; \"continuous clairvoyance must be a sore affliction.\"\n\n\"It is indeed,\" returned John Silence significantly, \"and if all the people nowadays who claim to be clairvoyant were really so, the statistics of suicide and lunacy would be considerably higher than they are. It is little wonder,\" he added, \"that your sense of humour was clouded, with the mind-forces of that dead monster trying to use your brain for their dissemination. You have had an interesting adventure, Mr. Felix Pender, and, let me add, a fortunate escape.\"\n\nThe author was about to renew his thanks when there came a sound of scratching at the door, and the doctor sprang up quickly.\n\n\"It's time for me to go. I left my dog on the step, but I suppose\u2014\"\n\nBefore he had time to open the door, it had yielded to the pressure behind it and flew wide open to admit a great yellow-haired collie. The dog, wagging his tail and contorting his whole body with delight, tore across the floor and tried to leap up upon his owner's breast. And there was laughter and happiness in the old eyes; for they were clear again as the day.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Ancient Sorceries ]\n\nThere are, it would appear, certain wholly unremarkable persons, with none of the characteristics that invite adventure, who yet once or twice in the course of their smooth lives undergo an experience so strange that the world catches its breath\u2014and looks the other way! And it was cases of this kind, perhaps, more than any other, that fell into the wide-spread net of John Silence, the psychic doctor, and, appealing to his deep humanity, to his patience, and to his great qualities of spiritual sympathy, led often to the revelation of problems of the strangest complexity, and of the profoundest possible human interest.\n\nMatters that seemed almost too curious and fantastic for belief he loved to trace to their hidden sources. To unravel a tangle in the very soul of things\u2014and to release a suffering human soul in the process\u2014was with him a veritable passion. And the knots he untied were, indeed, after passing strange.\n\nThe world, of course, asks for some plausible basis to which it can attach credence\u2014something it can, at least, pretend to explain. The adventurous type it can understand: such people carry about with them an adequate explanation of their exciting lives, and their characters obviously drive them into the circumstances which produce the adventures. It expects nothing else from them, and is satisfied. But dull, ordinary folk have no right to out-of-the-way experiences, and the world having been led to expect otherwise, is disappointed with them, not to say shocked. Its complacent judgment has been rudely disturbed.\n\n\"Such a thing happened to that man!\" it cries\u2014\"a commonplace person like that! It is too absurd! There must be something wrong!\"\n\nYet there could be no question that something did actually happen to little Arthur Vezin, something of the curious nature he described to Dr. Silence. Outwardly or inwardly, it happened beyond a doubt, and in spite of the jeers of his few friends who heard the tale, and observed wisely that \"such a thing might perhaps have come to Iszard, that crack-brained Iszard, or to that odd fish Minski, but it could never have happened to commonplace little Vezin, who was fore-ordained to live and die according to scale.\"\n\nBut, whatever his method of death was, Vezin certainly did not \"live according to scale\" so far as this particular event in his otherwise uneventful life was concerned; and to hear him recount it, and watch his pale delicate features change, and hear his voice grow softer and more hushed as he proceeded, was to know the conviction that his halting words perhaps failed sometimes to convey. He lived the thing over again each time he told it. His whole personality became muffled in the recital. It subdued him more than ever, so that the tale became a lengthy apology for an experience that he deprecated. He appeared to excuse himself and ask your pardon for having dared to take part in so fantastic an episode. For little Vezin was a timid, gentle, sensitive soul, rarely able to assert himself, tender to man and beast, and almost constitutionally unable to say No, or to claim many things that should rightly have been his. His whole scheme of life seemed utterly remote from anything more exciting than missing a train or losing an umbrella on an omnibus. And when this curious event came upon him he was already more years beyond forty than his friends suspected or he cared to admit.\n\nJohn Silence, who heard him speak of his experience more than once, said that he sometimes left out certain details and put in others; yet they were all obviously true. The whole scene was unforgettably cinematographed on to his mind. None of the details were imagined or invented. And when he told the story with them all complete, the effect was undeniable. His appealing brown eyes shone, and much of the charming personality, usually so carefully repressed, came forward and revealed itself. His modesty was always there, of course, but in the telling he forgot the present and allowed himself to appear almost vividly as he lived again in the past of his adventure.\n\nHe was on the way home when it happened, crossing northern France from some mountain trip or other where he buried himself solitary-wise every summer. He had nothing but an unregistered bag in the rack, and the train was jammed to suffocation, most of the passengers being unredeemed holiday English. He disliked them, not because they were his fellow-countrymen, but because they were noisy and obtrusive, obliterating with their big limbs and tweed clothing all the quieter tints of the day that brought him satisfaction and enabled him to melt into insignificance and forget that he was anybody. These English clashed about him like a brass band, making him feel vaguely that he ought to be more self-assertive and obstreperous, and that he did not claim insistently enough all kinds of things that he didn't want and that were really valueless, such as corner seats, windows up or down, and so forth.\n\nSo that he felt uncomfortable in the train, and wished the journey were over and he was back again living with his unmarried sister in Surbiton.\n\nAnd when the train stopped for ten panting minutes at the little station in northern France, and he got out to stretch his legs on the platform, and saw to his dismay a further batch of the British Isles debouching from another train, it suddenly seemed impossible to him to continue the journey. Even his flabby soul revolted, and the idea of staying a night in the little town and going on next day by a slower, emptier train, flashed into his mind. The guard was already shouting \"en voiture\" and the corridor of his compartment was already packed when the thought came to him. And, for once, he acted with decision and rushed to snatch his bag.\n\nFinding the corridor and steps impassable, he tapped at the window (for he had a corner seat) and begged the Frenchman who sat opposite to hand his luggage out to him, explaining in his wretched French that he intended to break the journey there. And this elderly Frenchman, he declared, gave him a look, half of warning, half of reproach, that to his dying day he could never forget; handed the bag through the window of the moving train; and at the same time poured into his ears a long sentence, spoken rapidly and low, of which he was able to comprehend only the last few words: \"\u00e0 cause du sommeil et \u00e0 cause des chats.\"\n\nIn reply to Dr. Silence, whose singular psychic acuteness at once seized upon this Frenchman as a vital point in the adventure, Vezin admitted that the man had impressed him favourably from the beginning, though without being able to explain why. They had sat facing one another during the four hours of the journey, and though no conversation had passed between them\u2014Vezin was timid about his stuttering French\u2014he confessed that his eyes were being continually drawn to his face, almost, he felt, to rudeness, and that each, by a dozen nameless little politenesses and attentions, had evinced the desire to be kind. The men liked each other and their personalities did not clash, or would not have clashed had they chanced to come to terms of acquaintance. The Frenchman, indeed, seemed to have exercised a silent protective influence over the insignificant little Englishman, and without words or gestures betrayed that he wished him well and would gladly have been of service to him.\n\n\"And this sentence that he hurled at you after the bag?\" asked John Silence, smiling that peculiarly sympathetic smile that always melted the prejudices of his patient, \"were you unable to follow it exactly?\"\n\n\"It was so quick and low and vehement,\" explained Vezin, in his small voice, \"that I missed practically the whole of it. I only caught the few words at the very end, because he spoke them so clearly, and his face was bent down out of the carriage window so near to mine.\"\n\n\"'\u00c0 cause du sommeil et \u00e0 cause des chats'?\" repeated Dr. Silence, as though half speaking to himself.\n\n\"That's it exactly,\" said Vezin; \"which, I take it, means something like 'because of sleep and because of the cats,' doesn't it?\"\n\n\"Certainly, that's how I should translate it,\" the doctor observed shortly, evidently not wishing to interrupt more than necessary.\n\n\"And the rest of the sentence\u2014all the first part I couldn't understand, I mean\u2014was a warning not to do something\u2014not to stop in the town, or at some particular place in the town, perhaps. That was the impression it made on me.\"\n\nThen, of course, the train rushed off, and left Vezin standing on the platform alone and rather forlorn.\n\nThe little town climbed in straggling fashion up a sharp hill rising out of the plain at the back of the station, and was crowned by the twin towers of the ruined cathedral peeping over the summit. From the station itself it looked uninteresting and modern, but the fact was that the mediaeval position lay out of sight just beyond the crest. And once he reached the top and entered the old streets, he stepped clean out of modern life into a bygone century. The noise and bustle of the crowded train seemed days away. The spirit of this silent hill-town, remote from tourists and motor-cars, dreaming its own quiet life under the autumn sun, rose up and cast its spell upon him. Long before he recognised this spell he acted under it. He walked softly, almost on tiptoe, down the winding narrow streets where the gables all but met over his head, and he entered the doorway of the solitary inn with a deprecating and modest demeanour that was in itself an apology for intruding upon the place and disturbing its dream.\n\nAt first, however, Vezin said, he noticed very little of all this. The attempt at analysis came much later. What struck him then was only the delightful contrast of the silence and peace after the dust and noisy rattle of the train. He felt soothed and stroked like a cat.\n\n\"Like a cat, you said?\" interrupted John Silence, quickly catching him up.\n\n\"Yes. At the very start I felt that.\" He laughed apologetically. \"I felt as though the warmth and the stillness and the comfort made me purr. It seemed to be the general mood of the whole place\u2014then.\"\n\nThe inn, a rambling ancient house, the atmosphere of the old coaching days still about it, apparently did not welcome him too warmly. He felt he was only tolerated, he said. But it was cheap and comfortable, and the delicious cup of afternoon tea he ordered at once made him feel really very pleased with himself for leaving the train in this bold, original way. For to him it had seemed bold and original. He felt something of a dog. His room, too, soothed him with its dark panelling and low irregular ceiling, and the long sloping passage that led to it seemed the natural pathway to a real Chamber of Sleep\u2014a little dim cubby hole out of the world where noise could not enter. It looked upon the courtyard at the back. It was all very charming, and made him think of himself as dressed in very soft velvet somehow, and the floors seemed padded, the walls provided with cushions. The sounds of the streets could not penetrate there. It was an atmosphere of absolute rest that surrounded him.\n\nOn engaging the two-franc room he had interviewed the only person who seemed to be about that sleepy afternoon, an elderly waiter with Dundreary whiskers and a drowsy courtesy, who had ambled lazily towards him across the stone yard; but on coming downstairs again for a little promenade in the town before dinner he encountered the proprietress herself. She was a large woman whose hands, feet, and features seemed to swim towards him out of a sea of person. They emerged, so to speak. But she had great dark, vivacious eyes that counteracted the bulk of her body, and betrayed the fact that in reality she was both vigorous and alert. When he first caught sight of her she was knitting in a low chair against the sunlight of the wall, and something at once made him see her as a great tabby cat, dozing, yet awake, heavily sleepy, and yet at the same time prepared for instantaneous action. A great mouser on the watch occurred to him.\n\nShe took him in with a single comprehensive glance that was polite without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was extraordinarily supple in spite of its proportions, for it turned so easily to follow him, and the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.\n\n\"But when she looked at me, you know,\" said Vezin, with that little apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly deprecating gesture of the shoulders that was characteristic of him, \"the odd notion came to me that really she had intended to make quite a different movement, and that with a single bound she could have leaped at me across the width of that stone yard and pounced upon me like some huge cat upon a mouse.\"\n\nHe laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made a note in his book without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a tone as though he feared he had already told too much and more than we could believe.\n\n\"Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and I felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then added that dinner was at seven o'clock, and that they were very early people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey that late hours were not encouraged.\"\n\nEvidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give him the impression that here he would be \"managed,\" that everything would be arranged and planned for him, and that he had nothing to do but fall into the groove and obey. No decided action or sharp personal effort would be looked for from him. It was the very reverse of the train. He walked quietly out into the street feeling soothed and peaceful. He realised that he was in a milieu that suited him and stroked him the right way. It was so much easier to be obedient. He began to purr again, and to feel that all the town purred with him.\n\nAbout the streets of that little town he meandered gently, falling deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that characterised it. With no special aim he wandered up and down, and to and fro. The September sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down winding alleyways, fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he caught fairylike glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows and yellow copses lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the past held very potently here, he felt.\n\nThe streets were full of picturesquely garbed men and women, all busy enough, going their respective ways; but no one took any notice of him or turned to stare at his obviously English appearance. He was even able to forget that with his tourist appearance he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted more and more into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and unimportant and unselfconscious. It was like becoming part of a softly coloured dream which he did not even realise to be a dream.\n\nOn the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble fields like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of ancient fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught glimpses of their quiet movements far below.\n\nHe sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the waves of murmurs and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by the leaves of the plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out of which it grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a being lying there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it dozed.\n\nAnd, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum. Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played, and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a conductor. No definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind through an Aeolian harp. It was part of the place and scene, just as the dying sunlight and faintly breathing wind were part of the scene and hour, and the mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced here and there by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous booming of the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that was almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.\n\nThere was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it all. The music seemed to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in the rigging of invisible ships; or\u2014and the simile leaped up in his thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion\u2014a chorus of animals, of wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and singing as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard the wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music to one another and the moon in chorus.\n\nIt was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night, rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of these half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress his musical soul like fiddles out of tune.\n\nHe listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.\n\n\"There was nothing to alarm?\" put in Dr. Silence briefly.\n\n\"Absolutely nothing,\" said Vezin; \"but you know it was all so fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed. Perhaps, too,\" he continued, gently explanatory, \"it was this stirring of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back, the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could not account for in the least, even then.\"\n\n\"Incidents, you mean?\"\n\n\"Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was just after sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an opalescent sky of gold and red. The dusk was running down the twisted streets. All round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its level rising with the darkness. The spell of this kind of scene, you know, can be very moving, and it was so that night. Yet I felt that what came to me had nothing directly to do with the mystery and wonder of the scene.\"\n\n\"Not merely the subtle transformations of the spirit that come with beauty,\" put in the doctor, noticing his hesitation.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Vezin went on, duly encouraged and no longer so fearful of our smiles at his expense. \"The impressions came from somewhere else. For instance, down the busy main street where men and women were bustling home from work, shopping at stalls and barrows, idly gossiping in groups, and all the rest of it, I saw that I aroused no interest and that no one turned to stare at me as a foreigner and stranger. I was utterly ignored, and my presence among them excited no special interest or attention.\n\n\"And then, quite suddenly, it dawned upon me with conviction that all the time this indifference and inattention were merely feigned. Everybody as a matter of fact was watching me closely. Every movement I made was known and observed. Ignoring me was all a pretence\u2014an elaborate pretence.\"\n\nHe paused a moment and looked at us to see if we were smiling, and then continued, reassured\u2014\n\n\"It is useless to ask me how I noticed this, because I simply cannot explain it. But the discovery gave me something of a shock. Before I got back to the inn, however, another curious thing rose up strongly in my mind and forced my recognition of it as true. And this, too, I may as well say at once, was equally inexplicable to me. I mean I can only give you the fact, as fact it was to me.\"\n\nThe little man left his chair and stood on the mat before the fire. His diffidence lessened from now onwards, as he lost himself again in the magic of the old adventure. His eyes shone a little already as he talked.\n\n\"Well,\" he went on, his soft voice rising somewhat with his excitement, \"I was in a shop when it came to me first\u2014though the idea must have been at work for a long time subconsciously to appear in so complete a form all at once. I was buying socks, I think,\" he laughed, \"and struggling with my dreadful French, when it struck me that the woman in the shop did not care two pins whether I bought anything or not. She was indifferent whether she made a sale or did not make a sale. She was only pretending to sell.\n\n\"This sounds a very small and fanciful incident to build upon what follows. But really it was not small. I mean it was the spark that lit the line of powder and ran along to the big blaze in my mind.\n\n\"For the whole town, I suddenly realised, was something other than I so far saw it. The real activities and interests of the people were elsewhere and otherwise than appeared. Their true lives lay somewhere out of sight behind the scenes. Their busy-ness was but the outward semblance that masked their actual purposes. They bought and sold, and ate and drank, and walked about the streets, yet all the while the main stream of their existence lay somewhere beyond my ken, underground, in secret places. In the shops and at the stalls they did not care whether I purchased their articles or not; at the inn, they were indifferent to my staying or going; their life lay remote from my own, springing from hidden, mysterious sources, coursing out of sight, unknown. It was all a great elaborate pretence, assumed possibly for my benefit, or possibly for purposes of their own. But the main current of their energies ran elsewhere. I almost felt as an unwelcome foreign substance might be expected to feel when it has found its way into the human system and the whole body organises itself to eject it or to absorb it. The town was doing this very thing to me.\n\n\"This bizarre notion presented itself forcibly to my mind as I walked home to the inn, and I began busily to wonder wherein the true life of this town could lie and what were the actual interests and activities of its hidden life.\n\n\"And, now that my eyes were partly opened, I noticed other things too that puzzled me, first of which, I think, was the extraordinary silence of the whole place. Positively, the town was muffled. Although the streets were paved with cobbles the people moved about silently, softly, with padded feet, like cats. Nothing made noise. All was hushed, subdued, muted. The very voices were quiet, low-pitched like purring. Nothing clamorous, vehement or emphatic seemed able to live in the drowsy atmosphere of soft dreaming that soothed this little hill-town into its sleep. It was like the woman at the inn\u2014an outward repose screening intense inner activity and purpose.\n\n\"Yet there was no sign of lethargy or sluggishness anywhere about it. The people were active and alert. Only a magical and uncanny softness lay over them all like a spell.\"\n\nVezin passed his hand across his eyes for a moment as though the memory had become very vivid. His voice had run off into a whisper so that we heard the last part with difficulty. He was telling a true thing obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.\n\n\"I went back to the inn,\" he continued presently in a louder voice, \"and dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of reality receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and incomprehensible. I regretted having left the train so impulsively. An adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature. Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling of alarm mingled itself with my wonder\u2014alarm for the stability of what I had for forty years recognised as my 'personality.'\n\n\"I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome, blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures, and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 376", + "text": "Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not decide to leave. Decisions were always very difficult for him and he sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of leaving the train. It seemed as though some one else must have arranged it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy Frenchman who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood that long sentence ending so strangely with \"\u00e0 cause du sommeil et \u00e0 cause des chats.\" He wondered what it all meant.\n\nMeanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay, and what it was all about. But his limited French and his constitutional hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole anybody and ask questions. He was content to observe, and watch, and remain negative.\n\nThe weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He wandered about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to him every day that he was never free himself from observation. The town watched him as a cat watches a mouse. And he got no nearer to finding out what they were all so busy with or where the main stream of their activities lay. This remained hidden. The people were as soft and mysterious as cats.\n\nBut that he was continually under observation became more evident from day to day.\n\nFor instance, when he strolled to the end of the town and entered a little green public garden beneath the ramparts and seated himself upon one of the empty benches in the sun, he was quite alone\u2014at first. Not another seat was occupied; the little park was empty, the paths deserted. Yet, within ten minutes of his coming, there must have been fully twenty persons scattered about him, some strolling aimlessly along the gravel walks, staring at the flowers, and others seated on the wooden benches enjoying the sun like himself. None of them appeared to take any notice of him; yet he understood quite well they had all come there to watch. They kept him under close observation. In the street they had seemed busy enough, hurrying upon various errands; yet these were suddenly all forgotten and they had nothing to do but loll and laze in the sun, their duties unremembered. Five minutes after he left, the garden was again deserted, the seats vacant. But in the crowded street it was the same thing again; he was never alone. He was ever in their thoughts.\n\nBy degrees, too, he began to see how it was he was so cleverly watched, yet without the appearance of it. The people did nothing directly. They behaved obliquely. He laughed in his mind as the thought thus clothed itself in words, but the phrase exactly described it. They looked at him from angles which naturally should have led their sight in another direction altogether. Their movements were oblique, too, so far as these concerned himself. The straight, direct thing was not their way evidently. They did nothing obviously. If he entered a shop to buy, the woman walked instantly away and busied herself with something at the farther end of the counter, though answering at once when he spoke, showing that she knew he was there and that this was only her way of attending to him. It was the fashion of the cat she followed. Even in the dining-room of the inn, the be-whiskered and courteous waiter, lithe and silent in all his movements, never seemed able to come straight to his table for an order or a dish. He came by zigzags, indirectly, vaguely, so that he appeared to be going to another table altogether, and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.\n\nVezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to realize these things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took their d\u00e9jeuner and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they entered the room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the doorway, peering about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he wondered which table they were making for, and at the last minute making almost a little quick run to their particular seats. And again he thought of the ways and methods of cats.\n\nOther small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer, soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him exceedingly. It may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. Once he followed two elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from across the street\u2014quite near the inn this was\u2014and saw them turn the corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet when he sharply followed on their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only opening through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards away, which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.\n\nAnd in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected them. Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when his head appeared over the wall. And even then none of them turned to look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their voices, he thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of fighting animals, almost of cats.\n\nThe whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more\u2014it began rather to frighten him.\n\nOut of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him. Yet the vital matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him.\n\nOnce or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each individual going his or her own way. It was always the same: he never could learn what their main interest was. The cathedral was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted. They shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to. The booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little caf\u00e9s desolate. Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the bustle.\n\n\"Can it be,\" he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that he should have dared to think anything so odd, \"can it be that these people are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real life, and come out honestly only with the dusk? That during the day they make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true life begins? Have they the souls of night-things, and is the whole blessed town in the hands of the cats?\"\n\nThe fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay. Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being. Something utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into certain of his minor actions. Something exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance.\n\nAnd, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the dusk from their shop doors, moving sentry-wise to and fro at the corners of the streets, yet always vanishing silently like shadows at his near approach. And as the inn invariably closed its doors at ten o'clock he had never yet found the opportunity he rather half-heartedly sought to see for himself what account the town could give of itself at night.\n\n\"\u2014\u00e0 cause du sommeil et \u00e0 cause des chats\"\u2014the words now rang in his ears more and more often, though still as yet without any definite meaning.\n\nMoreover, something made him sleep like the dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 377", + "text": "It was, I think, on the fifth day\u2014though in this detail his story sometimes varied\u2014that he made a definite discovery which increased his alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax. Before that he had already noticed that a change was going forward and certain subtle transformations being brought about in his character which modified several of his minor habits. And he had affected to ignore them. Here, however, was something he could no longer ignore; and it startled him.\n\nAt the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision. The discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to nothing. He found it impossible to make up his mind. For, on this fifth day, he realised that he had stayed long enough in the town and that for reasons he could only vaguely define to himself it was wiser and safer that he should leave.\n\nAnd he found that he could not leave!\n\nThis is difficult to describe in words, and it was more by gesture and the expression of his face that he conveyed to Dr. Silence the state of impotence he had reached. All this spying and watching, he said, had as it were spun a net about his feet so that he was trapped and powerless to escape; he felt like a fly that had blundered into the intricacies of a great web; he was caught, imprisoned, and could not get away. It was a distressing sensation. A numbness had crept over his will till it had become almost incapable of decision. The mere thought of vigorous action\u2014action towards escape\u2014began to terrify him. All the currents of his life had turned inwards upon himself, striving to bring to the surface something that lay buried almost beyond reach, determined to force his recognition of something he had long forgotten\u2014forgotten years upon years, centuries almost ago. It seemed as though a window deep within his being would presently open and reveal an entirely new world, yet somehow a world that was not unfamiliar. Beyond that, again, he fancied a great curtain hung; and when that too rolled up he would see still farther into this region and at last understand something of the secret life of these extraordinary people.\n\n\"Is this why they wait and watch?\" he asked himself with rather a shaking heart, \"for the time when I shall join them\u2014or refuse to join them? Does the decision rest with me after all, and not with them?\"\n\nAnd it was at this point that the sinister character of the adventure first really declared itself, and he became genuinely alarmed. The stability of his rather fluid little personality was at stake, he felt, and something in his heart turned coward.\n\nWhy otherwise should he have suddenly taken to walking stealthily, silently, making as little sound as possible, for ever looking behind him? Why else should he have moved almost on tiptoe about the passages of the practically deserted inn, and when he was abroad have found himself deliberately taking advantage of what cover presented itself? And why, if he was not afraid, should the wisdom of staying indoors after sundown have suddenly occurred to him as eminently desirable? Why, indeed?\n\nAnd, when John Silence gently pressed him for an explanation of these things, he admitted apologetically that he had none to give.\n\n\"It was simply that I feared something might happen to me unless I kept a sharp look-out. I felt afraid. It was instinctive,\" was all he could say. \"I got the impression that the whole town was after me\u2014wanted me for something; and that if it got me I should lose myself, or at least the Self I knew, in some unfamiliar state of consciousness. But I am not a psychologist, you know,\" he added meekly, \"and I cannot define it better than that.\"\n\nIt was while lounging in the courtyard half an hour before the evening meal that Vezin made this discovery, and he at once went upstairs to his quiet room at the end of the winding passage to think it over alone. In the yard it was empty enough, true, but there was always the possibility that the big woman whom he dreaded would come out of some door, with her pretence of knitting, to sit and watch him. This had happened several times, and he could not endure the sight of her. He still remembered his original fancy, bizarre though it was, that she would spring upon him the moment his back was turned and land with one single crushing leap upon his neck. Of course it was nonsense, but then it haunted him, and once an idea begins to do that it ceases to be nonsense. It has clothed itself in reality.\n\nHe went upstairs accordingly. It was dusk, and the oil lamps had not yet been lit in the passages. He stumbled over the uneven surface of the ancient flooring, passing the dim outlines of doors along the corridor\u2014doors that he had never once seen opened\u2014rooms that seemed never occupied. He moved, as his habit now was, stealthily and on tiptoe.\n\nHalf-way down the last passage to his own chamber there was a sharp turn, and it was just here, while groping round the walls with outstretched hands, that his fingers touched something that was not wall\u2014something that moved. It was soft and warm in texture, indescribably fragrant, and about the height of his shoulder; and he immediately thought of a furry, sweet-smelling kitten. The next minute he knew it was something quite different.\n\nInstead of investigating, however,\u2014his nerves must have been too overwrought for that, he said,\u2014he shrank back as closely as possible against the wall on the other side. The thing, whatever it was, slipped past him with a sound of rustling and, retreating with light footsteps down the passage behind him, was gone. A breath of warm, scented air was wafted to his nostrils.\n\nVezin caught his breath for an instant and paused, stockstill, half leaning against the wall\u2014and then almost ran down the remaining distance and entered his room with a rush, locking the door hurriedly behind him. Yet it was not fear that made him run: it was excitement, pleasurable excitement. His nerves were tingling, and a delicious glow made itself felt all over his body. In a flash it came to him that this was just what he had felt twenty-five years ago as a boy when he was in love for the first time. Warm currents of life ran all over him and mounted to his brain in a whirl of soft delight. His mood was suddenly become tender, melting, loving.\n\nThe room was quite dark, and he collapsed upon the sofa by the window, wondering what had happened to him and what it all meant. But the only thing he understood clearly in that instant was that something in him had swiftly, magically changed: he no longer wished to leave, or to argue with himself about leaving. The encounter in the passage-way had changed all that. The strange perfume of it still hung about him, bemusing his heart and mind. For he knew that it was a girl who had passed him, a girl's face that his fingers had brushed in the darkness, and he felt in some extraordinary way as though he had been actually kissed by her, kissed full upon the lips.\n\nTrembling, he sat upon the sofa by the window and struggled to collect his thoughts. He was utterly unable to understand how the mere passing of a girl in the darkness of a narrow passage-way could communicate so electric a thrill to his whole being that he still shook with the sweetness of it. Yet, there it was! And he found it as useless to deny as to attempt analysis. Some ancient fire had entered his veins, and now ran coursing through his blood; and that he was forty-five instead of twenty did not matter one little jot. Out of all the inner turmoil and confusion emerged the one salient fact that the mere atmosphere, the merest casual touch, of this girl, unseen, unknown in the darkness, had been sufficient to stir dormant fires in the centre of his heart, and rouse his whole being from a state of feeble sluggishness to one of tearing and tumultuous excitement.\n\nAfter a time, however, the number of Vezin's years began to assert their cumulative power; he grew calmer, and when a knock came at length upon his door and he heard the waiter's voice suggesting that dinner was nearly over, he pulled himself together and slowly made his way downstairs into the dining-room.\n\nEvery one looked up as he entered, for he was very late, but he took his customary seat in the far corner and began to eat. The trepidation was still in his nerves, but the fact that he had passed through the courtyard and hall without catching sight of a petticoat served to calm him a little. He ate so fast that he had almost caught up with the current stage of the table d'h\u00f4te, when a slight commotion in the room drew his attention.\n\nHis chair was so placed that the door and the greater portion of the long salle \u00e0 manger were behind him, yet it was not necessary to turn round to know that the same person he had passed in the dark passage had now come into the room. He felt the presence long before he heard or saw any one. Then he became aware that the old men, the only other guests, were rising one by one in their places, and exchanging greetings with some one who passed among them from table to table. And when at length he turned with his heart beating furiously to ascertain for himself, he saw the form of a young girl, lithe and slim, moving down the centre of the room and making straight for his own table in the corner. She moved wonderfully, with sinuous grace, like a young panther, and her approach filled him with such delicious bewilderment that he was utterly unable to tell at first what her face was like, or discover what it was about the whole presentment of the creature that filled him anew with trepidation and delight.\n\n\"Ah, Ma'mselle est de retour!\" he heard the old waiter murmur at his side, and he was just able to take in that she was the daughter of the proprietress, when she was upon him, and he heard her voice. She was addressing him. Something of red lips he saw and laughing white teeth, and stray wisps of fine dark hair about the temples; but all the rest was a dream in which his own emotion rose like a thick cloud before his eyes and prevented his seeing accurately, or knowing exactly what he did. He was aware that she greeted him with a charming little bow; that her beautiful large eyes looked searchingly into his own; that the perfume he had noticed in the dark passage again assailed his nostrils, and that she was bending a little towards him and leaning with one hand on the table at this side. She was quite close to him\u2014that was the chief thing he knew\u2014explaining that she had been asking after the comfort of her mother's guests, and now was introducing herself to the latest arrival\u2014himself.\n\n\"M'sieur has already been here a few days,\" he heard the waiter say; and then her own voice, sweet as singing, replied\u2014\n\n\"Ah, but M'sieur is not going to leave us just yet, I hope. My mother is too old to look after the comfort of our guests properly, but now I am here I will remedy all that.\" She laughed deliciously. \"M'sieur shall be well looked after.\"\n\nVezin, struggling with his emotion and desire to be polite, half rose to acknowledge the pretty speech, and to stammer some sort of reply, but as he did so his hand by chance touched her own that was resting upon the table, and a shock that was for all the world like a shock of electricity, passed from her skin into his body. His soul wavered and shook deep within him. He caught her eyes fixed upon his own with a look of most curious intentness, and the next moment he knew that he had sat down wordless again on his chair, that the girl was already half-way across the room, and that he was trying to eat his salad with a dessert-spoon and a knife.\n\nLonging for her return, and yet dreading it, he gulped down the remainder of his dinner, and then went at once to his bedroom to be alone with his thoughts. This time the passages were lighted, and he suffered no exciting contretemps; yet the winding corridor was dim with shadows, and the last portion, from the bend of the walls onwards, seemed longer than he had ever known it. It ran downhill like the pathway on a mountain side, and as he tiptoed softly down it he felt that by rights it ought to have led him clean out of the house into the heart of a great forest. The world was singing with him. Strange fancies filled his brain, and once in the room, with the door securely locked, he did not light the candles, but sat by the open window thinking long, long thoughts that came unbidden in troops to his mind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 378", + "text": "This part of the story he told to Dr. Silence, without special coaxing, it is true, yet with much stammering embarrassment. He could not in the least understand, he said, how the girl had managed to affect him so profoundly, and even before he had set eyes upon her. For her mere proximity in the darkness had been sufficient to set him on fire. He knew nothing of enchantments, and for years had been a stranger to anything approaching tender relations with any member of the opposite sex, for he was encased in shyness, and realised his overwhelming defects only too well. Yet this bewitching young creature came to him deliberately. Her manner was unmistakable, and she sought him out on every possible occasion. Chaste and sweet she was undoubtedly, yet frankly inviting; and she won him utterly with the first glance of her shining eyes, even if she had not already done so in the dark merely by the magic of her invisible presence.\n\n\"You felt she was altogether wholesome and good!\" queried the doctor. \"You had no reaction of any sort\u2014for instance, of alarm?\"\n\nVezin looked up sharply with one of his inimitable little apologetic smiles. It was some time before he replied. The mere memory of the adventure had suffused his shy face with blushes, and his brown eyes sought the floor again before he answered.\n\n\"I don't think I can quite say that,\" he explained presently. \"I acknowledged certain qualms, sitting up in my room afterwards. A conviction grew upon me that there was something about her\u2014how shall I express it?\u2014well, something unholy. It is not impurity in any sense, physical or mental, that I mean, but something quite indefinable that gave me a vague sensation of the creeps. She drew me, and at the same time repelled me, more than\u2014than\u2014\"\n\nHe hesitated, blushing furiously, and unable to finish the sentence.\n\n\"Nothing like it has ever come to me before or since,\" he concluded, with lame confusion. \"I suppose it was, as you suggested just now, something of an enchantment. At any rate, it was strong enough to make me feel that I would stay in that awful little haunted town for years if only I could see her every day, hear her voice, watch her wonderful movements, and sometimes, perhaps, touch her hand.\"\n\n\"Can you explain to me what you felt was the source of her power?\" John Silence asked, looking purposely anywhere but at the narrator.\n\n\"I am surprised that you should ask me such a question,\" answered Vezin, with the nearest approach to dignity he could manage. \"I think no man can describe to another convincingly wherein lies the magic of the woman who ensnares him. I certainly cannot. I can only say this slip of a girl bewitched me, and the mere knowledge that she was living and sleeping in the same house filled me with an extraordinary sense of delight.\n\n\"But there's one thing I can tell you,\" he went on earnestly, his eyes aglow, \"namely, that she seemed to sum up and synthesise in herself all the strange hidden forces that operated so mysteriously in the town and its inhabitants. She had the silken movements of the panther, going smoothly, silently to and fro, and the same indirect, oblique methods as the townsfolk, screening, like them, secret purposes of her own\u2014purposes that I was sure had me for their objective. She kept me, to my terror and delight, ceaselessly under observation, yet so carelessly, so consummately, that another man less sensitive, if I may say so\"\u2014he made a deprecating gesture\u2014\"or less prepared by what had gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always still, always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare and laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest parts of the public streets.\"\n\nTheir intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter which had so violently disturbed the little man's equilibrium. He was naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as her mother's representative she naturally had to do with the guests in the hotel. It was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie should spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty, she was French, and\u2014she obviously liked him.\n\nAt the same time, there was something indescribable\u2014a certain indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times\u2014that made him try hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though he were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.\n\nAnd though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of this dreamy mediaeval town, losing more and more of his recognisable personality. Soon, he felt, the Curtain within would roll up with an awful rush, and he would find himself suddenly admitted into the secret purposes of the hidden life that lay behind it all. Only, by that time, he would have become transformed into an entirely different being.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, he noticed various little signs of the intention to make his stay attractive to him: flowers in his bedroom, a more comfortable arm-chair in the corner, and even special little extra dishes on his private table in the dining-room. Conversations, too, with \"Mademoiselle Ils\u00e9\" became more and more frequent and pleasant, and although they seldom travelled beyond the weather, or the details of the town, the girl, he noticed, was never in a hurry to bring them to an end, and often contrived to interject little odd sentences that he never properly understood, yet felt to be significant.\n\nAnd it was these stray remarks, full of a meaning that evaded him, that pointed to some hidden purpose of her own and made him feel uneasy. They all had to do, he felt sure, with reasons for his staying on in the town indefinitely.\n\n\"And has M'sieur not even yet come to a decision?\" she said softly in his ear, sitting beside him in the sunny yard before d\u00e9jeuner, the acquaintance having progressed with significant rapidity. \"Because, if it's so difficult, we must all try together to help him!\"\n\nThe question startled him, following upon his own thoughts. It was spoken with a pretty laugh, and a stray bit of hair across one eye, as she turned and peered at him half roguishly. Possibly he did not quite understand the French of it, for her near presence always confused his small knowledge of the language distressingly. Yet the words, and her manner, and something else that lay behind it all in her mind, frightened him. It gave such point to his feeling that the town was waiting for him to make his mind up on some important matter.\n\nAt the same time, her voice, and the fact that she was there so close beside him in her soft dark dress, thrilled him inexpressibly.\n\n\"It is true I find it difficult to leave,\" he stammered, losing his way deliciously in the depths of her eyes, \"and especially now that Mademoiselle Ils\u00e9 has come.\"\n\nHe was surprised at the success of his sentence, and quite delighted with the little gallantry of it. But at the same time he could have bitten his tongue off for having said it.\n\n\"Then after all you like our little town, or you would not be pleased to stay on,\" she said, ignoring the compliment.\n\n\"I am enchanted with it, and enchanted with you,\" he cried, feeling that his tongue was somehow slipping beyond the control of his brain. And he was on the verge of saying all manner of other things of the wildest description, when the girl sprang lightly up from her chair beside him, and made to go.\n\n\"It is soupe \u00e0 l'onion to-day!\" she cried, laughing back at him through the sunlight, \"and I must go and see about it. Otherwise, you know, M'sieur will not enjoy his dinner, and then, perhaps, he will leave us!\"\n\nHe watched her cross the courtyard, moving with all the grace and lightness of the feline race, and her simple black dress clothed her, he thought, exactly like the fur of the same supple species. She turned once to laugh at him from the porch with the glass door, and then stopped a moment to speak to her mother, who sat knitting as usual in her corner seat just inside the hall-way.\n\nBut how was it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were? Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that made her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and dreadful scenery, wielding a sceptre over the red glare of some tempestuous orgy? And why did this slender stripling of a girl, graceful as a willow, lithe as a young leopard, assume suddenly an air of sinister majesty, and move with flame and smoke about her head, and the darkness of night beneath her feet?\n\nVezin caught his breath and sat there transfixed. Then, almost simultaneously with its appearance, the queer notion vanished again, and the sunlight of day caught them both, and he heard her laughing to her mother about the soupe \u00e0 l'onion, and saw her glancing back at him over her dear little shoulder with a smile that made him think of a dew-kissed rose bending lightly before summer airs.\n\nAnd, indeed, the onion soup was particularly excellent that day, because he saw another cover laid at his small table, and, with fluttering heart, heard the waiter murmur by way of explanation that \"Ma'mselle Ils\u00e9 would honour M'sieur to-day at d\u00e9jeuner, as her custom sometimes is with her mother's guests.\"\n\nSo actually she sat by him all through that delirious meal, talking quietly to him in easy French, seeing that he was well looked after, mixing the salad-dressing, and even helping him with her own hand. And, later in the afternoon, while he was smoking in the courtyard, longing for a sight of her as soon as her duties were done, she came again to his side, and when he rose to meet her, she stood facing him a moment, full of a perplexing sweet shyness before she spoke\u2014\n\n\"My mother thinks you ought to know more of the beauties of our little town, and I think so too! Would M'sieur like me to be his guide, perhaps? I can show him everything, for our family has lived here for many generations.\"\n\nShe had him by the hand, indeed, before he could find a single word to express his pleasure, and led him, all unresisting, out into the street, yet in such a way that it seemed perfectly natural she should do so, and without the faintest suggestion of boldness or immodesty. Her face glowed with the pleasure and interest of it, and with her short dress and tumbled hair she looked every bit the charming child of seventeen that she was, innocent and playful, proud of her native town, and alive beyond her years to the sense of its ancient beauty.\n\nSo they went over the town together, and she showed him what she considered its chief interest: the tumble-down old house where her forebears had lived; the sombre, aristocratic-looking mansion where her mother's family dwelt for centuries, and the ancient market-place where several hundred years before the witches had been burnt by the score. She kept up a lively running stream of talk about it all, of which he understood not a fiftieth part as he trudged along by her side, cursing his forty-five years and feeling all the yearnings of his early manhood revive and jeer at him. And, as she talked, England and Surbiton seemed very far away indeed, almost in another age of the world's history. Her voice touched something immeasurably old in him, something that slept deep. It lulled the surface parts of his consciousness to sleep, allowing what was far more ancient to awaken. Like the town, with its elaborate pretence of modern active life, the upper layers of his being became dulled, soothed, muffled, and what lay underneath began to stir in its sleep. That big Curtain swayed a little to and fro. Presently it might lift altogether...\n\nHe began to understand a little better at last. The mood of the town was reproducing itself in him. In proportion as his ordinary external self became muffled, that inner secret life, that was far more real and vital, asserted itself. And this girl was surely the high-priestess of it all, the chief instrument of its accomplishment. New thoughts, with new interpretations, flooded his mind as she walked beside him through the winding streets, while the picturesque old gabled town, softly coloured in the sunset, had never appeared to him so wholly wonderful and seductive.\n\nAnd only one curious incident came to disturb and puzzle him, slight in itself, but utterly inexplicable, bringing white terror into the child's face and a scream to her laughing lips. He had merely pointed to a column of blue smoke that rose from the burning autumn leaves and made a picture against the red roofs, and had then run to the wall and called her to his side to watch the flames shooting here and there through the heap of rubbish. Yet, at the sight of it, as though taken by surprise, her face had altered dreadfully, and she had turned and run like the wind, calling out wild sentences to him as she ran, of which he had not understood a single word, except that the fire apparently frightened her, and she wanted to get quickly away from it, and to get him away too.\n\nYet five minutes later she was as calm and happy again as though nothing had happened to alarm or waken troubled thoughts in her, and they had both forgotten the incident.\n\nThey were leaning over the ruined ramparts together listening to the weird music of the band as he had heard it the first day of his arrival. It moved him again profoundly as it had done before, and somehow he managed to find his tongue and his best French. The girl leaned across the stones close beside him. No one was about. Driven by some remorseless engine within he began to stammer something\u2014he hardly knew what\u2014of his strange admiration for her. Almost at the first word she sprang lightly off the wall and came up smiling in front of him, just touching his knees as he sat there. She was hatless as usual, and the sun caught her hair and one side of her cheek and throat.\n\n\"Oh, I'm so glad!\" she cried, clapping her little hands softly in his face, \"so very glad, because that means that if you like me you must also like what I do, and what I belong to.\"\n\nAlready he regretted bitterly having lost control of himself. Something in the phrasing of her sentence chilled him. He knew the fear of embarking upon an unknown and dangerous sea.\n\n\"You will take part in our real life, I mean,\" she added softly, with an indescribable coaxing of manner, as though she noticed his shrinking. \"You will come back to us.\"\n\nAlready this slip of a child seemed to dominate him; he felt her power coming over him more and more; something emanated from her that stole over his senses and made him aware that her personality, for all its simple grace, held forces that were stately, imposing, august. He saw her again moving through smoke and flame amid broken and tempestuous scenery, alarmingly strong, her terrible mother by her side. Dimly this shone through her smile and appearance of charming innocence.\n\n\"You will, I know,\" she repeated, holding him with her eyes.\n\nThey were quite alone up there on the ramparts, and the sensation that she was overmastering him stirred a wild sensuousness in his blood. The mingled abandon and reserve in her attracted him furiously, and all of him that was man rose up and resisted the creeping influence, at the same time acclaiming it with the full delight of his forgotten youth. An irresistible desire came to him to question her, to summon what still remained to him of his own little personality in an effort to retain the right to his normal self.\n\nThe girl had grown quiet again, and was now leaning on the broad wall close beside him, gazing out across the darkening plain, her elbows on the coping, motionless as a figure carved in stone. He took his courage in both hands.\n\n\"Tell me, Ils\u00e9,\" he said, unconsciously imitating her own purring softness of voice, yet aware that he was utterly in earnest, \"what is the meaning of this town, and what is this real life you speak of? And why is it that the people watch me from morning to night? Tell me what it all means? And, tell me,\" he added more quickly with passion in his voice, \"what you really are\u2014yourself?\"\n\nShe turned her head and looked at him through half-closed eyelids, her growing inner excitement betraying itself by the faint colour that ran like a shadow across her face.\n\n\"It seems to me,\"\u2014he faltered oddly under her gaze\u2014\"that I have some right to know\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly she opened her eyes to the full. \"You love me, then?\" she asked softly.\n\n\"I swear,\" he cried impetuously, moved as by the force of a rising tide, \"I never felt before\u2014I have never known any other girl who\u2014\"\n\n\"Then you have the right to know,\" she calmly interrupted his confused confession, \"for love shares all secrets.\"\n\nShe paused, and a thrill like fire ran swiftly through him. Her words lifted him off the earth, and he felt a radiant happiness, followed almost the same instant in horrible contrast by the thought of death. He became aware that she had turned her eyes upon his own and was speaking again.\n\n\"The real life I speak of,\" she whispered, \"is the old, old life within, the life of long ago, the life to which you, too, once belonged, and to which you still belong.\"\n\nA faint wave of memory troubled the deeps of his soul as her low voice sank into him. What she was saying he knew instinctively to be true, even though he could not as yet understand its full purport. His present life seemed slipping from him as he listened, merging his personality in one that was far older and greater. It was this loss of his present self that brought to him the thought of death.\n\n\"You came here,\" she went on, \"with the purpose of seeking it, and the people felt your presence and are waiting to know what you decide, whether you will leave them without having found it, or whether\u2014\"\n\nHer eyes remained fixed upon his own, but her face began to change, growing larger and darker with an expression of age.\n\n\"It is their thoughts constantly playing about your soul that makes you feel they watch you. They do not watch you with their eyes. The purposes of their inner life are calling to you, seeking to claim you. You were all part of the same life long, long ago, and now they want you back again among them.\"\n\nVezin's timid heart sank with dread as he listened; but the girl's eyes held him with a net of joy so that he had no wish to escape. She fascinated him, as it were, clean out of his normal self.\n\n\"Alone, however, the people could never have caught and held you,\" she resumed. \"The motive force was not strong enough; it has faded through all these years. But I\"\u2014she paused a moment and looked at him with complete confidence in her splendid eyes\u2014\"I possess the spell to conquer you and hold you: the spell of old love. I can win you back again and make you live the old life with me, for the force of the ancient tie between us, if I choose to use it, is irresistible. And I do choose to use it. I still want you. And you, dear soul of my dim past\"\u2014she pressed closer to him so that her breath passed across his eyes, and her voice positively sang\u2014\"I mean to have you, for you love me and are utterly at my mercy.\"\n\nVezin heard, and yet did not hear; understood, yet did not understand. He had passed into a condition of exaltation. The world was beneath his feet, made of music and flowers, and he was flying somewhere far above it through the sunshine of pure delight. He was breathless and giddy with the wonder of her words. They intoxicated him. And, still, the terror of it all, the dreadful thought of death, pressed ever behind her sentences. For flames shot through her voice out of black smoke and licked at his soul.\n\nAnd they communicated with one another, it seemed to him, by a process of swift telepathy, for his French could never have compassed all he said to her. Yet she understood perfectly, and what she said to him was like the recital of verses long since known. And the mingled pain and sweetness of it as he listened were almost more than his little soul could hold.\n\n\"Yet I came here wholly by chance\u2014\" he heard himself saying.\n\n\"No,\" she cried with passion, \"you came here because I called to you. I have called to you for years, and you came with the whole force of the past behind you. You had to come, for I own you, and I claim you.\"\n\nShe rose again and moved closer, looking at him with a certain insolence in the face\u2014the insolence of power.\n\nThe sun had set behind the towers of the old cathedral and the darkness rose up from the plain and enveloped them. The music of the band had ceased. The leaves of the plane trees hung motionless, but the chill of the autumn evening rose about them and made Vezin shiver. There was no sound but the sound of their voices and the occasional soft rustle of the girl's dress. He could hear the blood rushing in his ears. He scarcely realised where he was or what he was doing. Some terrible magic of the imagination drew him deeply down into the tombs of his own being, telling him in no unfaltering voice that her words shadowed forth the truth. And this simple little French maid, speaking beside him with so strange authority, he saw curiously alter into quite another being. As he stared into her eyes, the picture in his mind grew and lived, dressing itself vividly to his inner vision with a degree of reality he was compelled to acknowledge. As once before, he saw her tall and stately, moving through wild and broken scenery of forests and mountain caverns, the glare of flames behind her head and clouds of shifting smoke about her feet. Dark leaves encircled her hair, flying loosely in the wind, and her limbs shone through the merest rags of clothing. Others were about her, too, and ardent eyes on all sides cast delirious glances upon her, but her own eyes were always for One only, one whom she held by the hand. For she was leading the dance in some tempestuous orgy to the music of chanting voices, and the dance she led circled about a great and awful Figure on a throne, brooding over the scene through lurid vapours, while innumerable other wild faces and forms crowded furiously about her in the dance. But the one she held by the hand he knew to be himself, and the monstrous shape upon the throne he knew to be her mother.\n\nThe vision rose within him, rushing to him down the long years of buried time, crying aloud to him with the voice of memory reawakened... And then the scene faded away and he saw the clear circle of the girl's eyes gazing steadfastly into his own, and she became once more the pretty little daughter of the innkeeper, and he found his voice again.\n\n\"And you,\" he whispered tremblingly\u2014\"you child of visions and enchantment, how is it that you so bewitch me that I loved you even before I saw?\"\n\nShe drew herself up beside him with an air of rare dignity.\n\n\"The call of the Past,\" she said; \"and besides,\" she added proudly, \"in the real life I am a princess\u2014\"\n\n\"A princess!\" he cried.\n\n\"\u2014and my mother is a queen!\"\n\nAt this, little Vezin utterly lost his head. Delight tore at his heart and swept him into sheer ecstasy. To hear that sweet singing voice, and to see those adorable little lips utter such things, upset his balance beyond all hope of control. He took her in his arms and covered her unresisting face with kisses.\n\nBut even while he did so, and while the hot passion swept him, he felt that she was soft and loathsome, and that her answering kisses stained his very soul... And when, presently, she had freed herself and vanished into the darkness, he stood there, leaning against the wall in a state of collapse, creeping with horror from the touch of her yielding body, and inwardly raging at the weakness that he already dimly realised must prove his undoing.\n\nAnd from the shadows of the old buildings into which she disappeared there rose in the stillness of the night a singular, long-drawn cry, which at first he took for laughter, but which later he was sure he recognised as the almost human wailing of a cat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 379", + "text": "For a long time Vezin leant there against the wall, alone with his surging thoughts and emotions. He understood at length that he had done the one thing necessary to call down upon him the whole force of this ancient Past. For in those passionate kisses he had acknowledged the tie of olden days, and had revived it. And the memory of that soft impalpable caress in the darkness of the inn corridor came back to him with a shudder. The girl had first mastered him, and then led him to the one act that was necessary for her purpose. He had been waylaid, after the lapse of centuries\u2014caught, and conquered.\n\nDimly he realised this, and sought to make plans for his escape. But, for the moment at any rate, he was powerless to manage his thoughts or will, for the sweet, fantastic madness of the whole adventure mounted to his brain like a spell, and he gloried in the feeling that he was utterly enchanted and moving in a world so much larger and wilder than the one he had ever been accustomed to.\n\nThe moon, pale and enormous, was just rising over the sea-like plain, when at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in its purple reaches.\n\nThe cathedral appeared unreal in a silver mist. He moved softly, keeping to the shadows; but the streets were all deserted and very silent; the doors were closed, the shutters fastened. Not a soul was astir. The hush of night lay over everything; it was like a town of the dead, a churchyard with gigantic and grotesque tombstones.\n\nWondering where all the busy life of the day had so utterly disappeared to, he made his way to a back door that entered the inn by means of the stables, thinking thus to reach his room unobserved. He reached the courtyard safely and crossed it by keeping close to the shadow of the wall. He sidled down it, mincing along on tiptoe, just as the old men did when they entered the salle \u00e0 manger. He was horrified to find himself doing this instinctively. A strange impulse came to him, catching him somehow in the centre of his body\u2014an impulse to drop upon all fours and run swiftly and silently. He glanced upwards and the idea came to him to leap up upon his window-sill overhead instead of going round by the stairs. This occurred to him as the easiest, and most natural way. It was like the beginning of some horrible transformation of himself into something else. He was fearfully strung up.\n\nThe moon was higher now, and the shadows very dark along the side of the street where he moved. He kept among the deepest of them, and reached the porch with the glass doors.\n\nBut here there was light; the inmates, unfortunately, were still about. Hoping to slip across the hall unobserved and reach the stairs, he opened the door carefully and stole in. Then he saw that the hall was not empty. A large dark thing lay against the wall on his left. At first he thought it must be household articles. Then it moved, and he thought it was an immense cat, distorted in some way by the play of light and shadow. Then it rose straight up before him and he saw that it was the proprietress.\n\nWhat she had been doing in this position he could only venture a dreadful guess, but the moment she stood up and faced him he was aware of some terrible dignity clothing her about that instantly recalled the girl's strange saying that she was a queen. Huge and sinister she stood there under the little oil lamp; alone with him in the empty hall. Awe stirred in his heart, and the roots of some ancient fear. He felt that he must bow to her and make some kind of obeisance. The impulse was fierce and irresistible, as of long habit. He glanced quickly about him. There was no one there. Then he deliberately inclined his head toward her. He bowed.\n\n\"Enfin! M'sieur s'est donc d\u00e9cid\u00e9. C'est bien alors. J'en suis contente.\"\n\nHer words came to him sonorously as through a great open space.\n\nThen the great figure came suddenly across the flagged hall at him and seized his trembling hands. Some overpowering force moved with her and caught him.\n\n\"On pourrait faire un p'tit tour ensemble, n'est-ce pas? Nous y allons cette nuit et il faut s'exercer un peu d'avance pour cela. Ils\u00e9, Ils\u00e9, viens donc ici. Viens vite!\"\n\nAnd she whirled him round in the opening steps of some dance that seemed oddly and horribly familiar. They made no sound on the stones, this strangely assorted couple. It was all soft and stealthy. And presently, when the air seemed to thicken like smoke, and a red glare as of flame shot through it, he was aware that some one else had joined them and that his hand the mother had released was now tightly held by the daughter. Ils\u00e9 had come in answer to the call, and he saw her with leaves of vervain twined in her dark hair, clothed in tattered vestiges of some curious garment, beautiful as the night, and horribly, odiously, loathsomely seductive.\n\n\"To the Sabbath! to the Sabbath!\" they cried. \"On to the Witches' Sabbath!\"\n\nUp and down that narrow hall they danced, the women on each side of him, to the wildest measure he had ever imagined, yet which he dimly, dreadfully remembered, till the lamp on the wall flickered and went out, and they were left in total darkness. And the devil woke in his heart with a thousand vile suggestions and made him afraid.\n\nSuddenly they released his hands and he heard the voice of the mother cry that it was time, and they must go. Which way they went he did not pause to see. He only realised that he was free, and he blundered through the darkness till he found the stairs and then tore up them to his room as though all hell was at his heels.\n\nHe flung himself on the sofa, with his face in his hands, and groaned. Swiftly reviewing a dozen ways of immediate escape, all equally impossible, he finally decided that the only thing to do for the moment was to sit quiet and wait. He must see what was going to happen. At least in the privacy of his own bedroom he would be fairly safe. The door was locked. He crossed over and softly opened the window which gave upon the courtyard and also permitted a partial view of the hall through the glass doors.\n\nAs he did so the hum and murmur of a great activity reached his ears from the streets beyond\u2014the sound of footsteps and voices muffled by distance. He leaned out cautiously and listened. The moonlight was clear and strong now, but his own window was in shadow, the silver disc being still behind the house. It came to him irresistibly that the inhabitants of the town, who a little while before had all been invisible behind closed doors, were now issuing forth, busy upon some secret and unholy errand. He listened intently.\n\nAt first everything about him was silent, but soon he became aware of movements going on in the house itself. Rustlings and cheepings came to him across that still, moonlit yard. A concourse of living beings sent the hum of their activity into the night. Things were on the move everywhere. A biting, pungent odour rose through the air, coming he knew not whence. Presently his eyes became glued to the windows of the opposite wall where the moonshine fell in a soft blaze. The roof overhead, and behind him, was reflected clearly in the panes of glass, and he saw the outlines of dark bodies moving with long footsteps over the tiles and along the coping. They passed swiftly and silently, shaped like immense cats, in an endless procession across the pictured glass, and then appeared to leap down to a lower level where he lost sight of them. He just caught the soft thudding of their leaps. Sometimes their shadows fell upon the white wall opposite, and then he could not make out whether they were the shadows of human beings or of cats. They seemed to change swiftly from one to the other. The transformation looked horribly real, for they leaped like human beings, yet changed swiftly in the air immediately afterwards, and dropped like animals.\n\nThe yard, too, beneath him, was now alive with the creeping movements of dark forms all stealthily drawing towards the porch with the glass doors. They kept so closely to the wall that he could not determine their actual shape, but when he saw that they passed on to the great congregation that was gathering in the hall, he understood that these were the creatures whose leaping shadows he had first seen reflected in the windowpanes opposite. They were coming from all parts of the town, reaching the appointed meeting-place across the roofs and tiles, and springing from level to level till they came to the yard.\n\nThen a new sound caught his ear, and he saw that the windows all about him were being softly opened, and that to each window came a face. A moment later figures began dropping hurriedly down into the yard. And these figures, as they lowered themselves down from the windows, were human, he saw; but once safely in the yard they fell upon all fours and changed in the swiftest possible second into\u2014cats\u2014huge, silent cats. They ran in streams to join the main body in the hall beyond.\n\nSo, after all, the rooms in the house had not been empty and unoccupied.\n\nMoreover, what he saw no longer filled him with amazement. For he remembered it all. It was familiar. It had all happened before just so, hundreds of times, and he himself had taken part in it and known the wild madness of it all. The outline of the old building changed, the yard grew larger, and he seemed to be staring down upon it from a much greater height through smoky vapours. And, as he looked, half remembering, the old pains of long ago, fierce and sweet, furiously assailed him, and the blood stirred horribly as he heard the Call of the Dance again in his heart and tasted the ancient magic of Ils\u00e9 whirling by his side.\n\nSuddenly he started back. A great lithe cat had leaped softly up from the shadows below on to the sill close to his face, and was staring fixedly at him with the eyes of a human. \"Come,\" it seemed to say, \"come with us to the Dance! Change as of old! Transform yourself swiftly and come!\" Only too well he understood the creature's soundless call.\n\nIt was gone again in a flash with scarcely a sound of its padded feet on the stones, and then others dropped by the score down the side of the house, past his very eyes, all changing as they fell and darting away rapidly, softly, towards the gathering point. And again he felt the dreadful desire to do likewise; to murmur the old incantation, and then drop upon hands and knees and run swiftly for the great flying leap into the air. Oh, how the passion of it rose within him like a flood, twisting his very entrails, sending his heart's desire flaming forth into the night for the old, old Dance of the Sorcerers at the Witches' Sabbath! The whirl of the stars was about him; once more he met the magic of the moon. The power of the wind, rushing from precipice and forest, leaping from cliff to cliff across the valleys, tore him away... He heard the cries of the dancers and their wild laughter, and with this savage girl in his embrace he danced furiously about the dim Throne where sat the Figure with the sceptre of majesty...\n\nThen, suddenly, all became hushed and still, and the fever died down a little in his heart. The calm moonlight flooded a courtyard empty and deserted. They had started. The procession was off into the sky. And he was left behind\u2014alone.\n\nVezin tiptoed softly across the room and unlocked the door. The murmur from the streets, growing momentarily as he advanced, met his ears. He made his way with the utmost caution down the corridor. At the head of the stairs he paused and listened. Below him, the hall where they had gathered was dark and still, but through opened doors and windows on the far side of the building came the sound of a great throng moving farther and farther into the distance.\n\nHe made his way down the creaking wooden stairs, dreading yet longing to meet some straggler who should point the way, but finding no one; across the dark hall, so lately thronged with living, moving things, and out through the opened front doors into the street. He could not believe that he was really left behind, really forgotten, that he had been purposely permitted to escape. It perplexed him.\n\nNervously he peered about him, and up and down the street; then, seeing nothing, advanced slowly down the pavement.\n\nThe whole town, as he went, showed itself empty and deserted, as though a great wind had blown everything alive out of it. The doors and windows of the houses stood open to the night; nothing stirred; moonlight and silence lay over all. The night lay about him like a cloak. The air, soft and cool, caressed his cheek like the touch of a great furry paw. He gained confidence and began to walk quickly, though still keeping to the shadowed side. Nowhere could he discover the faintest sign of the great unholy exodus he knew had just taken place. The moon sailed high over all in a sky cloudless and serene.\n\nHardly realising where he was going, he crossed the open market-place and so came to the ramparts, whence he knew a pathway descended to the high road and along which he could make good his escape to one of the other little towns that lay to the northward, and so to the railway.\n\nBut first he paused and gazed out over the scene at his feet where the great plain lay like a silver map of some dream country. The still beauty of it entered his heart, increasing his sense of bewilderment and unreality. No air stirred, the leaves of the plane trees stood motionless, the near details were defined with the sharpness of day against dark shadows, and in the distance the fields and woods melted away into haze and shimmering mistiness.\n\nBut the breath caught in his throat and he stood stockstill as though transfixed when his gaze passed from the horizon and fell upon the near prospect in the depth of the valley at his feet. The whole lower slopes of the hill, that lay hid from the brightness of the moon, were aglow, and through the glare he saw countless moving forms, shifting thick and fast between the openings of the trees; while overhead, like leaves driven by the wind, he discerned flying shapes that hovered darkly one moment against the sky and then settled down with cries and weird singing through the branches into the region that was aflame.\n\nSpellbound, he stood and stared for a time that he could not measure. And then, moved by one of the terrible impulses that seemed to control the whole adventure, he climbed swiftly upon the top of the broad coping, and balanced a moment where the valley gaped at his feet. But in that very instant, as he stood hovering, a sudden movement among the shadows of the houses caught his eye, and he turned to see the outline of a large animal dart swiftly across the open space behind him, and land with a flying leap upon the top of the wall a little lower down. It ran like the wind to his feet and then rose up beside him upon the ramparts. A shiver seemed to run through the moonlight, and his sight trembled for a second. His heart pulsed fearfully. Ils\u00e9 stood beside him, peering into his face.\n\nSome dark substance, he saw, stained the girl's face and skin, shining in the moonlight as she stretched her hands towards him; she was dressed in wretched tattered garments that yet became her mightily; rue and vervain twined about her temples; her eyes glittered with unholy light. He only just controlled the wild impulse to take her in his arms and leap with her from their giddy perch into the valley below.\n\n\"See!\" she cried, pointing with an arm on which the rags fluttered in the rising wind towards the forest aglow in the distance. \"See where they await us! The woods are alive! Already the Great Ones are there, and the dance will soon begin! The salve is here! Anoint yourself and come!\"\n\nThough a moment before the sky was clear and cloudless, yet even while she spoke the face of the moon grew dark and the wind began to toss in the crests of the plane trees at his feet. Stray gusts brought the sounds of hoarse singing and crying from the lower slopes of the hill, and the pungent odour he had already noticed about the courtyard of the inn rose about him in the air.\n\n\"Transform, transform!\" she cried again, her voice rising like a song. \"Rub well your skin before you fly. Come! Come with me to the Sabbath, to the madness of its furious delight, to the sweet abandonment of its evil worship! See! the Great Ones are there, and the terrible Sacraments prepared. The Throne is occupied. Anoint and come! Anoint and come!\"\n\nShe grew to the height of a tree beside him, leaping upon the wall with flaming eyes and hair strewn upon the night. He too began to change swiftly. Her hands touched the skin of his face and neck, streaking him with the burning salve that sent the old magic into his blood with the power before which fades all that is good.\n\nA wild roar came up to his ears from the heart of the wood, and the girl, when she heard it, leaped upon the wall in the frenzy of her wicked joy.\n\n\"Satan is there!\" she screamed, rushing upon him and striving to draw him with her to the edge of the wall. \"Satan has come. The Sacraments call us! Come, with your dear apostate soul, and we will worship and dance till the moon dies and the world is forgotten!\"\n\nJust saving himself from the dreadful plunge, Vezin struggled to release himself from her grasp, while the passion tore at his reins and all but mastered him. He shrieked aloud, not knowing what he said, and then he shrieked again. It was the old impulses, the old awful habits instinctively finding voice; for though it seemed to him that he merely shrieked nonsense, the words he uttered really had meaning in them, and were intelligible. It was the ancient call. And it was heard below. It was answered.\n\nThe wind whistled at the skirts of his coat as the air round him darkened with many flying forms crowding upwards out of the valley. The crying of hoarse voices smote upon his ears, coming closer. Strokes of wind buffeted him, tearing him this way and that along the crumbling top of the stone wall; and Ils\u00e9 clung to him with her long shining arms, smooth and bare, holding him fast about the neck. But not Ils\u00e9 alone, for a dozen of them surrounded him, dropping out of the air. The pungent odour of the anointed bodies stifled him, exciting him to the old madness of the Sabbath, the dance of the witches and sorcerers doing honour to the personified Evil of the world.\n\n\"Anoint and away! Anoint and away!\" they cried in wild chorus about him. \"To the Dance that never dies! To the sweet and fearful fantasy of evil!\"\n\nAnother moment and he would have yielded and gone, for his will turned soft and the flood of passionate memory all but overwhelmed him, when\u2014so can a small thing after the whole course of an adventure\u2014he caught his foot upon a loose stone in the edge of the wall, and then fell with a sudden crash on to the ground below. But he fell towards the houses, in the open space of dust and cobblestones, and fortunately not into the gaping depth of the valley on the farther side.\n\nAnd they, too, came in a tumbling heap about him, like flies upon a piece of food, but as they fell he was released for a moment from the power of their touch, and in that brief instant of freedom there flashed into his mind the sudden intuition that saved him. Before he could regain his feet he saw them scrabbling awkwardly back upon the wall, as though bat-like they could only fly by dropping from a height, and had no hold upon him in the open. Then, seeing them perched there in a row like cats upon a roof, all dark and singularly shapeless, their eyes like lamps, the sudden memory came back to him of Ils\u00e9's terror at the sight of fire.\n\nQuick as a flash he found his matches and lit the dead leaves that lay under the wall.\n\nDry and withered, they caught fire at once, and the wind carried the flame in a long line down the length of the wall, licking upwards as it ran; and with shrieks and wailings, the crowded row of forms upon the top melted away into the air on the other side, and were gone with a great rush and whirring of their bodies down into the heart of the haunted valley, leaving Vezin breathless and shaken in the middle of the deserted ground.\n\n\"Ils\u00e9!\" he called feebly; \"Ils\u00e9!\" for his heart ached to think that she was really gone to the great Dance without him, and that he had lost the opportunity of its fearful joy. Yet at the same time his relief was so great, and he was so dazed and troubled in mind with the whole thing, that he hardly knew what he was saying, and only cried aloud in the fierce storm of his emotion...\n\nThe fire under the wall ran its course, and the moonlight came out again, soft and clear, from its temporary eclipse. With one last shuddering look at the ruined ramparts, and a feeling of horrid wonder for the haunted valley beyond, where the shapes still crowded and flew, he turned his face towards the town and slowly made his way in the direction of the hotel.\n\nAnd as he went, a great wailing of cries, and a sound of howling, followed him from the gleaming forest below, growing fainter and fainter with the bursts of wind as he disappeared between the houses." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 380", + "text": "\"It may seem rather abrupt to you, this sudden tame ending,\" said Arthur Vezin, glancing with flushed face and timid eyes at Dr. Silence sitting there with his notebook, \"but the fact is\u2014er\u2014from that moment my memory seems to have failed rather. I have no distinct recollection of how I got home or what precisely I did.\n\n\"It appears I never went back to the inn at all. I only dimly recollect racing down a long white road in the moonlight, past woods and villages, still and deserted, and then the dawn came up, and I saw the towers of a biggish town and so came to a station.\n\n\"But, long before that, I remember pausing somewhere on the road and looking back to where the hill-town of my adventure stood up in the moonlight, and thinking how exactly like a great monstrous cat it lay there upon the plain, its huge front paws lying down the two main streets, and the twin and broken towers of the cathedral marking its torn ears against the sky. That picture stays in my mind with the utmost vividness to this day.\n\n\"Another thing remains in my mind from that escape\u2014namely, the sudden sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made, standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.\n\n\"For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a caf\u00e9 on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I reached London.\"\n\n\"And how long altogether,\" asked John Silence quietly, \"do you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?\"\n\nVezin looked up sheepishly.\n\n\"I was coming to that,\" he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his body. \"In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been September 15th,\u2014instead of which it was only September 10th!\"\n\n\"So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?\" queried the doctor.\n\nVezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.\n\n\"I must have gained time somewhere,\" he said at length\u2014\"somewhere or somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can't explain it. I can only give you the fact.\"\n\n\"And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back to the place?\"\n\n\"Last autumn, yes,\" murmured Vezin; \"and I have never dared to go back. I think I never want to.\"\n\n\"And, tell me,\" asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to say, \"had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the subject?\"\n\n\"Never!\" declared Vezin emphatically. \"I had never given a thought to such matters so far as I know\u2014\"\n\n\"Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Never\u2014before my adventure; but I have since,\" he replied significantly.\n\nThere was, however, something still on the man's mind that he wished to relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him the marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched him with her anointed hands.\n\nHe took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing. And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar mark, though not quite so clearly defined.\n\n\"That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,\" he whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 381", + "text": "It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin's story. Since hearing it, the doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his secretaries had discovered that Vezin's ancestors had actually lived for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by scores.\n\n\"It seems strange,\" continued the doctor, \"that Vezin should have remained ignorant of all this; but, on the other hand, it was not the kind of history that successive generations would have been anxious to keep alive, or to repeat to their children. Therefore I am inclined to think he still knows nothing about it.\n\n\"The whole adventure seems to have been a very vivid revival of the memories of an earlier life, caused by coming directly into contact with the living forces still intense enough to hang about the place, and, by a most singular chance, too, with the very souls who had taken part with him in the events of that particular life. For the mother and daughter who impressed him so strangely must have been leading actors, with himself, in the scenes and practices of witchcraft which at that period dominated the imaginations of the whole country.\n\n\"One has only to read the histories of the times to know that these witches claimed the power of transforming themselves into various animals, both for the purposes of disguise and also to convey themselves swiftly to the scenes of their imaginary orgies. Lycanthropy, or the power to change themselves into wolves, was everywhere believed in, and the ability to transform themselves into cats by rubbing their bodies with a special salve or ointment provided by Satan himself, found equal credence. The witchcraft trials abound in evidences of such universal beliefs.\"\n\nDr. Silence quoted chapter and verse from many writers on the subject, and showed how every detail of Vezin's adventure had a basis in the practices of those dark days.\n\n\"But that the entire affair took place subjectively in the man's own consciousness, I have no doubt,\" he went on, in reply to my questions; \"for my secretary who has been to the town to investigate, discovered his signature in the visitors' book, and proved by it that he had arrived on September 8th, and left suddenly without paying his bill. He left two days later, and they still were in possession of his dirty brown bag and some tourist clothes. I paid a few francs in settlement of his debt, and have sent his luggage on to him. The daughter was absent from home, but the proprietress, a large woman very much as he described her, told my secretary that he had seemed a very strange, absent-minded kind of gentleman, and after his disappearance she had feared for a long time that he had met with a violent end in the neighbouring forest where he used to roam about alone.\n\n\"I should like to have obtained a personal interview with the daughter so as to ascertain how much was subjective and how much actually took place with her as Vezin told it. For her dread of fire and the sight of burning must, of course, have been the intuitive memory of her former painful death at the stake, and have thus explained why he fancied more than once that he saw her through smoke and flame.\"\n\n\"And that mark on his skin, for instance?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Merely the marks produced by hysterical brooding,\" he replied, \"like the stigmata of the religieuses, and the bruises which appear on the bodies of hypnotised subjects who have been told to expect them. This is very common and easily explained. Only it seems curious that these marks should have remained so long in Vezin's case. Usually they disappear quickly.\"\n\n\"Obviously he is still thinking about it all, brooding, and living it all over again,\" I ventured.\n\n\"Probably. And this makes me fear that the end of his trouble is not yet. We shall hear of him again. It is a case, alas! I can do little to alleviate.\"\n\nDr. Silence spoke gravely and with sadness in his voice.\n\n\"And what do you make of the Frenchman in the train?\" I asked further\u2014\"the man who warned him against the place, \u00e0 cause du sommeil et \u00e0 cause des chats? Surely a very singular incident?\"\n\n\"A very singular incident indeed,\" he made answer slowly, \"and one I can only explain on the basis of a highly improbable coincidence\u2014\"\n\n\"Namely?\"\n\n\"That the man was one who had himself stayed in the town and undergone there a similar experience. I should like to find this man and ask him. But the crystal is useless here, for I have no slightest clue to go upon, and I can only conclude that some singular psychic affinity, some force still active in his being out of the same past life, drew him thus to the personality of Vezin, and enabled him to fear what might happen to him, and thus to warn him as he did.\n\n\"Yes,\" he presently continued, half talking to himself, \"I suspect in this case that Vezin was swept into the vortex of forces arising out of the intense activities of a past life, and that he lived over again a scene in which he had often played a leading part centuries before. For strong actions set up forces that are so slow to exhaust themselves, they may be said in a sense never to die. In this case they were not vital enough to render the illusion complete, so that the little man found himself caught in a very distressing confusion of the present and the past; yet he was sufficiently sensitive to recognise that it was true, and to fight against the degradation of returning, even in memory, to a former and lower state of development.\n\n\"Ah yes!\" he continued, crossing the floor to gaze at the darkening sky, and seemingly quite oblivious of my presence, \"subliminal up-rushes of memory like this can be exceedingly painful, and sometimes exceedingly dangerous. I only trust that this gentle soul may soon escape from this obsession of a passionate and tempestuous past. But I doubt it, I doubt it.\"\n\nHis voice was hushed with sadness as he spoke, and when he turned back into the room again there was an expression of profound yearning upon his face, the yearning of a soul whose desire to help is sometimes greater than his power." + }, + { + "title": "The Nemesis of Fire", + "text": "By some means which I never could fathom, John Silence always contrived to keep the compartment to himself, and as the train had a clear run of two hours before the first stop, there was ample time to go over the preliminary facts of the case. He had telephoned to me that very morning, and even through the disguise of the miles of wire the thrill of incalculable adventure had sounded in his voice.\n\n\"As if it were an ordinary country visit,\" he called, in reply to my question; \"and don't forgot to bring your gun.\"\n\n\"With blank cartridges, I suppose?\" for I knew his rigid principles with regard to the taking of life, and guessed that the guns were merely for some obvious purpose of disguise.\n\nThen he thanked me for coming, mentioned the train, snapped down the receiver, and left me, vibrating with the excitement of anticipation, to do my packing. For the honour of accompanying Dr. John Silence on one of his big cases was what many would have considered an empty honour\u2014and risky. Certainly the adventure held all manner of possibilities, and I arrived at Waterloo with the feelings of a man who is about to embark on some dangerous and peculiar mission in which the dangers he expects to run will not be the ordinary dangers to life and limb, but of some secret character difficult to name and still more difficult to cope with.\n\n\"The Manor House has a high sound,\" he told me, as we sat with our feet up and talked, \"but I believe it is little more than an overgrown farmhouse in the desolate heather country beyond D\u2014, and its owner, Colonel Wragge, a retired soldier with a taste for books, lives there practically alone, I understand, with an elderly invalid sister. So you need not look forward to a lively visit, unless the case provides some excitement of its own.\"\n\n\"Which is likely?\"\n\nBy way of reply he handed me a letter marked \"Private.\" It was dated a week ago, and signed \"Yours faithfully, Horace Wragge.\"\n\n\"He heard of me, you see, through Captain Anderson,\" the doctor explained modestly, as though his fame were not almost world-wide; \"you remember that Indian obsession case\u2014\"\n\nI read the letter. Why it should have been marked private was difficult to understand. It was very brief, direct, and to the point. It referred by way of introduction to Captain Anderson, and then stated quite simply that the writer needed help of a peculiar kind and asked for a personal interview\u2014a morning interview, since it was impossible for him to be absent from the house at night. The letter was dignified even to the point of abruptness, and it is difficult to explain how it managed to convey to me the impression of a strong man, shaken and perplexed. Perhaps the restraint of the wording, and the mystery of the affair had something to do with it; and the reference to the Anderson case, the horror of which lay still vivid in my memory, may have touched the sense of something rather ominous and alarming. But, whatever the cause, there was no doubt that an impression of serious peril rose somehow out of that white paper with the few lines of firm writing, and the spirit of a deep uneasiness ran between the words and reached the mind without any visible form of expression.\n\n\"And when you saw him\u2014?\" I asked, returning the letter as the train rushed clattering noisily through Clapham Junction.\n\n\"I have not seen him,\" was the reply. \"The man's mind was charged to the brim when he wrote that; full of vivid mental pictures. Notice the restraint of it. For the main character of his case psychometry could be depended upon, and the scrap of paper his hand has touched is sufficient to give to another mind\u2014a sensitive and sympathetic mind\u2014clear mental pictures of what is going on. I think I have a very sound general idea of his problem.\"\n\n\"So there may be excitement, after all?\"\n\nJohn Silence waited a moment before he replied.\n\n\"Something very serious is amiss there,\" he said gravely, at length. \"Some one\u2014not himself, I gather,\u2014has been meddling with a rather dangerous kind of gunpowder. So\u2014yes, there may be excitement, as you put it.\"\n\n\"And my duties?\" I asked, with a decidedly growing interest. \"Remember, I am your 'assistant.'\"\n\n\"Behave like an intelligent confidential secretary. Observe everything, without seeming to. Say nothing\u2014nothing that means anything. Be present at all interviews. I may ask a good deal of you, for if my impressions are correct this is\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off suddenly.\n\n\"But I won't tell you my impressions yet,\" he resumed after a moment's thought. \"Just watch and listen as the case proceeds. Form your own impressions and cultivate your intuitions. We come as ordinary visitors, of course,\" he added, a twinkle showing for an instant in his eye; \"hence, the guns.\"\n\nThough disappointed not to hear more, I recognised the wisdom of his words and knew how valueless my impressions would be once the powerful suggestion of having heard his own lay behind them. I likewise reflected that intuition joined to a sense of humour was of more use to a man than double the quantity of mere \"brains,\" as such.\n\nBefore putting the letter away, however, he handed it back, telling me to place it against my forehead for a few moments and then describe any pictures that came spontaneously into my mind.\n\n\"Don't deliberately look for anything. Just imagine you see the inside of the eyelid, and wait for pictures that rise against its dark screen.\"\n\nI followed his instructions, making my mind as nearly blank as possible. But no visions came. I saw nothing but the lines of light that pass to and fro like the changes of a kaleidoscope across the blackness. A momentary sensation of warmth came and went curiously.\n\n\"You see\u2014what?\" he asked presently.\n\n\"Nothing,\" I was obliged to admit disappointedly; \"nothing but the usual flashes of light one always sees. Only, perhaps, they are more vivid than usual.\"\n\nHe said nothing by way of comment or reply.\n\n\"And they group themselves now and then,\" I continued, with painful candour, for I longed to see the pictures he had spoken of, \"group themselves into globes and round balls of fire, and the lines that flash about sometimes look like triangles and crosses\u2014almost like geometrical figures. Nothing more.\"\n\nI opened my eyes again, and gave him back the letter.\n\n\"It makes my head hot,\" I said, feeling somehow unworthy for not seeing anything of interest. But the look in his eyes arrested my attention at once.\n\n\"That sensation of heat is important,\" he said significantly.\n\n\"It was certainly real, and rather uncomfortable,\" I replied, hoping he would expand and explain. \"There was a distinct feeling of warmth\u2014internal warmth somewhere\u2014oppressive in a sense.\"\n\n\"That is interesting,\" he remarked, putting the letter back in his pocket, and settling himself in the corner with newspapers and books. He vouchsafed nothing more, and I knew the uselessness of trying to make him talk. Following his example I settled likewise with magazines into my corner. But when I closed my eyes again to look for the flashing lights and the sensation of heat, I found nothing but the usual phantasmagoria of the day's events\u2014faces, scenes, memories,\u2014and in due course I fell asleep and then saw nothing at all of any kind.\n\nWhen we left the train, after six hours' travelling, at a little wayside station standing without trees in a world of sand and heather, the late October shadows had already dropped their sombre veil upon the landscape, and the sun dipped almost out of sight behind the moorland hills. In a high dogcart, behind a fast horse, we were soon rattling across the undulating stretches of an open and bleak country, the keen air stinging our cheeks and the scents of pine and bracken strong about us. Bare hills were faintly visible against the horizon, and the coachman pointed to a bank of distant shadows on our left where he told us the sea lay. Occasional stone farmhouses, standing back from the road among straggling fir trees, and large black barns that seemed to shift past us with a movement of their own in the gloom, were the only signs of humanity and civilisation that we saw, until at the end of a bracing five miles the lights of the lodge gates flared before us and we plunged into a thick grove of pine trees that concealed the Manor House up to the moment of actual arrival.\n\nColonel Wragge himself met us in the hall. He was the typical army officer who had seen service, real service, and found himself in the process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years. The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The whole appearance of the man at once clothed the adventure with gravity and importance. A matter that gave such a man cause for serious alarm, I felt, must be something real and of genuine moment.\n\nHis speech and manner, as he welcomed us, were like his letter, simple and sincere. He had a nature as direct and undeviating as a bullet. Thus, he showed plainly his surprise that Dr. Silence had not come alone.\n\n\"My confidential secretary, Mr. Hubbard,\" the doctor said, introducing me, and the steady gaze and powerful shake of the hand I then received were well calculated, I remember thinking, to drive home the impression that here was a man who was not to be trifled with, and whose perplexity must spring from some very real and tangible cause. And, quite obviously, he was relieved that we had come. His welcome was unmistakably genuine.\n\nHe led us at once into a room, half library, half smoking-room, that opened out of the low-ceilinged hall. The Manor House gave the impression of a rambling and glorified farmhouse, solid, ancient, comfortable, and wholly unpretentious. And so it was. Only the heat of the place struck me as unnatural. This room with the blazing fire may have seemed uncomfortably warm after the long drive through the night air; yet it seemed to me that the hall itself, and the whole atmosphere of the house, breathed a warmth that hardly belonged to well-filled grates or the pipes of hot air and water. It was not the heat of the greenhouse; it was an oppressive heat that somehow got into the head and mind. It stirred a curious sense of uneasiness in me, and I caught myself thinking of the sensation of warmth that had emanated from the letter in the train.\n\nI heard him thanking Dr. Silence for having come; there was no preamble, and the exchange of civilities was of the briefest description. Evidently here was a man who, like my companion, loved action rather than talk. His manner was straightforward and direct. I saw him in a flash: puzzled, worried, harassed into a state of alarm by something he could not comprehend; forced to deal with things he would have preferred to despise, yet facing it all with dogged seriousness and making no attempt to conceal that he felt secretly ashamed of his incompetence.\n\n\"So I cannot offer you much entertainment beyond that of my own company, and the queer business that has been going on here, and is still going on,\" he said, with a slight inclination of the head towards me by way of including me in his confidence.\n\n\"I think, Colonel Wragge,\" replied John Silence impressively, \"that we shall none of us find the time hangs heavy. I gather we shall have our hands full.\"\n\nThe two men looked at one another for the space of some seconds, and there was an indefinable quality in their silence which for the first time made me admit a swift question into my mind; and I wondered a little at my rashness in coming with so little reflection into a big case of this incalculable doctor. But no answer suggested itself, and to withdraw was, of course, inconceivable. The gates had closed behind me now, and the spirit of the adventure was already besieging my mind with its advance guard of a thousand little hopes and fears.\n\nExplaining that he would wait till after dinner to discuss anything serious, as no reference was ever made before his sister, he led the way upstairs and showed us personally to our rooms; and it was just as I was finishing dressing that a knock came at my door and Dr. Silence entered.\n\nHe was always what is called a serious man, so that even in moments of comedy you felt he never lost sight of the profound gravity of life, but as he came across the room to me I caught the expression of his face and understood in a flash that he was now in his most grave and earnest mood. He looked almost troubled. I stopped fumbling with my black tie and stared.\n\n\"It is serious,\" he said, speaking in a low voice, \"more so even than I imagined. Colonel Wragge's control over his thoughts concealed a great deal in my psychometrising of the letter. I looked in to warn you to keep yourself well in hand\u2014generally speaking.\"\n\n\"Haunted house?\" I asked, conscious of a distinct shiver down my back.\n\nBut he smiled gravely at the question.\n\n\"Haunted House of Life more likely,\" he replied, and a look came into his eyes which I had only seen there when a human soul was in the toils and he was thick in the fight of rescue. He was stirred in the deeps.\n\n\"Colonel Wragge\u2014or the sister?\" I asked hurriedly, for the gong was sounding.\n\n\"Neither directly,\" he said from the door. \"Something far older, something very, very remote indeed. This thing has to do with the ages, unless I am mistaken greatly, the ages on which the mists of memory have long lain undisturbed.\"\n\nHe came across the floor very quickly with a finger on his lips, looking at me with a peculiar searchingness of gaze.\n\n\"Are you aware yet of anything\u2014odd here?\" he asked in a whisper. \"Anything you cannot quite define, for instance. Tell me, Hubbard, for I want to know all your impressions. They may help me.\"\n\nI shook my head, avoiding his gaze, for there was something in the eyes that scared me a little. But he was so in earnest that I set my mind keenly searching.\n\n\"Nothing yet,\" I replied truthfully, wishing I could confess to a real emotion; \"nothing but the strange heat of the place.\"\n\nHe gave a little jump forward in my direction.\n\n\"The heat again, that's it!\" he exclaimed, as though glad of my corroboration. \"And how would you describe it, perhaps?\" he asked quickly, with a hand on the door knob.\n\n\"It doesn't seem like ordinary physical heat,\" I said, casting about in my thoughts for a definition.\n\n\"More a mental heat,\" he interrupted, \"a glowing of thought and desire, a sort of feverish warmth of the spirit. Isn't that it?\"\n\nI admitted that he had exactly described my sensations.\n\n\"Good!\" he said, as he opened the door, and with an indescribable gesture that combined a warning to be ready with a sign of praise for my correct intuition, he was gone.\n\nI hurried after him, and found the two men waiting for me in front of the fire.\n\n\"I ought to warn you,\" our host was saying as I came in, \"that my sister, whom you will meet at dinner, is not aware of the real object of your visit. She is under the impression that we are interested in the same line of study\u2014folklore\u2014and that your researches have led to my seeking acquaintance. She comes to dinner in her chair, you know. It will be a great pleasure to her to meet you both. We have few visitors.\"\n\nSo that on entering the dining-room we were prepared to find Miss Wragge already at her place, seated in a sort of bath-chair. She was a vivacious and charming old lady, with smiling expression and bright eyes, and she chatted all through dinner with unfailing spontaneity. She had that face, unlined and fresh, that some people carry through life from the cradle to the grave; her smooth plump cheeks were all pink and white, and her hair, still dark, was divided into two glossy and sleek halves on either side of a careful parting. She wore gold-rimmed glasses, and at her throat was a large scarab of green jasper that made a very handsome brooch.\n\nHer brother and Dr. Silence talked little, so that most of the conversation was carried on between herself and me, and she told me a great deal about the history of the old house, most of which I fear I listened to with but half an ear.\n\n\"And when Cromwell stayed here,\" she babbled on, \"he occupied the very rooms upstairs that used to be mine. But my brother thinks it safer for me to sleep on the ground floor now in case of fire.\"\n\nAnd this sentence has stayed in my memory only because of the sudden way her brother interrupted her and instantly led the conversation on to another topic. The passing reference to fire seemed to have disturbed him, and thenceforward he directed the talk himself.\n\nIt was difficult to believe that this lively and animated old lady, sitting beside me and taking so eager an interest in the affairs of life, was practically, we understood, without the use of her lower limbs, and that her whole existence for years had been passed between the sofa, the bed, and the bath-chair in which she chatted so naturally at the dinner table. She made no allusion to her affliction until the dessert was reached, and then, touching a bell, she made us a witty little speech about leaving us \"like time, on noiseless feet,\" and was wheeled out of the room by the butler and carried off to her apartments at the other end of the house.\n\nAnd the rest of us were not long in following suit, for Dr. Silence and myself were quite as eager to learn the nature of our errand as our host was to impart it to us. He led us down a long flagged passage to a room at the very end of the house, a room provided with double doors, and windows, I saw, heavily shuttered. Books lined the walls on every side, and a large desk in the bow window was piled up with volumes, some open, some shut, some showing scraps of paper stuck between the leaves, and all smothered in a general cataract of untidy foolscap and loose-half sheets.\n\n\"My study and workroom,\" explained Colonel Wragge, with a delightful touch of innocent pride, as though he were a very serious scholar. He placed arm-chairs for us round the fire. \"Here,\" he added significantly, \"we shall be safe from interruption and can talk securely.\"\n\nDuring dinner the manner of the doctor had been all that was natural and spontaneous, though it was impossible for me, knowing him as I did, not to be aware that he was subconsciously very keenly alert and already receiving upon the ultra-sensitive surface of his mind various and vivid impressions; and there was now something in the gravity of his face, as well as in the significant tone of Colonel Wragge's speech, and something, too, in the fact that we three were shut away in this private chamber about to listen to things probably strange, and certainly mysterious\u2014something in all this that touched my imagination sharply and sent an undeniable thrill along my nerves. Taking the chair indicated by my host, I lit my cigar and waited for the opening of the attack, fully conscious that we were now too far gone in the adventure to admit of withdrawal, and wondering a little anxiously where it was going to lead.\n\nWhat I expected precisely, it is hard to say. Nothing definite, perhaps. Only the sudden change was dramatic. A few hours before the prosaic atmosphere of Piccadilly was about me, and now I was sitting in a secret chamber of this remote old building waiting to hear an account of things that held possibly the genuine heart of terror. I thought of the dreary moors and hills outside, and the dark pine copses soughing in the wind of night; I remembered my companion's singular words up in my bedroom before dinner; and then I turned and noted carefully the stern countenance of the Colonel as he faced us and lit his big black cigar before speaking.\n\nThe threshold of an adventure, I reflected as I waited for the first words, is always the most thrilling moment\u2014until the climax comes.\n\nBut Colonel Wragge hesitated\u2014mentally\u2014a long time before he began. He talked briefly of our journey, the weather, the country, and other comparatively trivial topics, while he sought about in his mind for an appropriate entry into the subject that was uppermost in the thoughts of all of us. The fact was he found it a difficult matter to speak of at all, and it was Dr. Silence who finally showed him the way over the hedge.\n\n\"Mr. Hubbard will take a few notes when you are ready\u2014you won't object,\" he suggested; \"I can give my undivided attention in this way.\"\n\n\"By all means,\" turning to reach some of the loose sheets on the writing table, and glancing at me. He still hesitated a little, I thought. \"The fact is,\" he said apologetically, \"I wondered if it was quite fair to trouble you so soon. The daylight might suit you better to hear what I have to tell. Your sleep, I mean, might be less disturbed, perhaps.\"\n\n\"I appreciate your thoughtfulness,\" John Silence replied with his gentle smile, taking command as it were from that moment, \"but really we are both quite immune. There is nothing, I think, that could prevent either of us sleeping, except\u2014an outbreak of fire, or some such very physical disturbance.\"\n\nColonel Wragge raised his eyes and looked fixedly at him. This reference to an outbreak of fire I felt sure was made with a purpose. It certainly had the desired effect of removing from our host's manner the last signs of hesitancy.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" he said. \"Of course, I know nothing of your methods in matters of this kind\u2014so, perhaps, you would like me to begin at once and give you an outline of the situation?\"\n\nDr. Silence bowed his agreement. \"I can then take my precautions accordingly,\" he added calmly.\n\nThe soldier looked up for a moment as though he did not quite gather the meaning of these words; but he made no further comment and turned at once to tackle a subject on which he evidently talked with diffidence and unwillingness.\n\n\"It's all so utterly out of my line of things,\" he began, puffing out clouds of cigar smoke between his words, \"and there's so little to tell with any real evidence behind it, that it's almost impossible to make a consecutive story for you. It's the total cumulative effect that is so\u2014so disquieting.\" He chose his words with care, as though determined not to travel one hair's breadth beyond the truth.\n\n\"I came into this place twenty years ago when my elder brother died,\" he continued, \"but could not afford to live here then. My sister, whom you met at dinner, kept house for him till the end, and during all these years, while I was seeing service abroad, she had an eye to the place\u2014for we never got a satisfactory tenant\u2014and saw that it was not allowed to go to ruin. I myself took possession, however, only a year ago.\n\n\"My brother,\" he went on, after a perceptible pause, \"spent much of his time away, too. He was a great traveller, and filled the house with stuff he brought home from all over the world. The laundry\u2014a small detached building beyond the servants' quarters\u2014he turned into a regular little museum. The curios and things I have cleared away\u2014they collected dust and were always getting broken\u2014but the laundry-house you shall see tomorrow.\"\n\nColonel Wragge spoke with such deliberation and with so many pauses that this beginning took him a long time. But at this point he came to a full stop altogether. Evidently there was something he wished to say that cost him considerable effort. At length he looked up steadily into my companion's face.\n\n\"May I ask you\u2014that is, if you won't think it strange,\" he said, and a sort of hush came over his voice and manner, \"whether you have noticed anything at all unusual\u2014anything queer, since you came into the house?\"\n\nDr. Silence answered without a moment's hesitation.\n\n\"I have,\" he said. \"There is a curious sensation of heat in the place.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" exclaimed the other, with a slight start. \"You have noticed it. This unaccountable heat\u2014\"\n\n\"But its cause, I gather, is not in the house itself\u2014but outside,\" I was astonished to hear the doctor add.\n\nColonel Wragge rose from his chair and turned to unhook a framed map that hung upon the wall. I got the impression that the movement was made with the deliberate purpose of concealing his face.\n\n\"Your diagnosis, I believe, is amazingly accurate,\" he said after a moment, turning round with the map in his hands. \"Though, of course, I can have no idea how you should guess\u2014\"\n\nJohn Silence shrugged his shoulders expressively. \"Merely my impression,\" he said. \"If you pay attention to impressions, and do not allow them to be confused by deductions of the intellect, you will often find them surprisingly, uncannily, accurate.\"\n\nColonel Wragge resumed his seat and laid the map upon his knees. His face was very thoughtful as he plunged abruptly again into his story.\n\n\"On coming into possession,\" he said, looking us alternately in the face, \"I found a crop of stories of the most extraordinary and impossible kind I had ever heard\u2014stories which at first I treated with amused indifference, but later was forced to regard seriously, if only to keep my servants. These stories I thought I traced to the fact of my brother's death\u2014and, in a way, I think so still.\"\n\nHe leant forward and handed the map to Dr. Silence.\n\n\"It's an old plan of the estate,\" he explained, \"but accurate enough for our purpose, and I wish you would note the position of the plantations marked upon it, especially those near the house. That one,\" indicating the spot with his finger, \"is called the Twelve Acre Plantation. It was just there, on the side nearest the house, that my brother and the head keeper met their deaths.\"\n\nHe spoke as a man forced to recognise facts that he deplored, and would have preferred to leave untouched\u2014things he personally would rather have treated with ridicule if possible. It made his words peculiarly dignified and impressive, and I listened with an increasing uneasiness as to the sort of help the doctor would look to me for later. It seemed as though I were a spectator of some drama of mystery in which any moment I might be summoned to play a part.\n\n\"It was twenty years ago,\" continued the Colonel, \"but there was much talk about it at the time, unfortunately, and you may, perhaps, have heard of the affair. Stride, the keeper, was a passionate, hot-tempered man but I regret to say, so was my brother, and quarrels between them seem to have been frequent.\"\n\n\"I do not recall the affair,\" said the doctor. \"May I ask what was the cause of death?\" Something in his voice made me prick up my ears for the reply.\n\n\"The keeper, it was said, from suffocation. And at the inquest the doctors averred that both men had been dead the same length of time when found.\"\n\n\"And your brother?\" asked John Silence, noticing the omission, and listening intently.\n\n\"Equally mysterious,\" said our host, speaking in a low voice with effort. \"But there was one distressing feature I think I ought to mention. For those who saw the face\u2014I did not see it myself\u2014and though Stride carried a gun its chambers were undischarged\u2014\" He stammered and hesitated with confusion. Again that sense of terror moved between his words. He stuck.\n\n\"Yes,\" said the chief listener sympathetically.\n\n\"My brother's face, they said, looked as though it had been scorched. It had been swept, as it were, by something that burned\u2014blasted. It was, I am told, quite dreadful. The bodies were found lying side by side, faces downwards, both pointing away from the wood, as though they had been in the act of running, and not more than a dozen yards from its edge.\"\n\nDr. Silence made no comment. He appeared to be studying the map attentively.\n\n\"I did not see the face myself,\" repeated the other, his manner somehow expressing the sense of awe he contrived to keep out of his voice, \"but my sister unfortunately did, and her present state I believe to be entirely due to the shock it gave to her nerves. She never can be brought to refer to it, naturally, and I am even inclined to think that the memory has mercifully been permitted to vanish from her mind. But she spoke of it at the time as a face swept by flame\u2014blasted.\"\n\nJohn Silence looked up from his contemplation of the map, but with the air of one who wished to listen, not to speak, and presently Colonel Wragge went on with his account. He stood on the mat, his broad shoulders hiding most of the mantelpiece.\n\n\"They all centred about this particular plantation, these stories. That was to be expected, for the people here are as superstitious as Irish peasantry, and though I made one or two examples among them to stop the foolish talk, it had no effect, and new versions came to my ears every week. You may imagine how little good dismissals did, when I tell you that the servants dismissed themselves. It was not the house servants, but the men who worked on the estate outside. The keepers gave notice one after another, none of them with any reason I could accept; the foresters refused to enter the wood, and the beaters to beat in it. Word flew all over the countryside that Twelve Acre Plantation was a place to be avoided, day or night.\n\n\"There came a point,\" the Colonel went on, now well in his swing, \"when I felt compelled to make investigations on my own account. I could not kill the thing by ignoring it; so I collected and analysed the stories at first hand. For this Twelve Acre Wood, you will see by the map, comes rather near home. Its lower end, if you will look, almost touches the end of the back lawn, as I will show you tomorrow, and its dense growth of pines forms the chief protection the house enjoys from the east winds that blow up from the sea. And in olden days, before my brother interfered with it and frightened all the game away, it was one of the best pheasant coverts on the whole estate.\"\n\n\"And what form, if I may ask, did this interference take?\" asked Dr. Silence.\n\n\"In detail, I cannot tell you, for I do not know\u2014except that I understand it was the subject of his frequent differences with the head keeper; but during the last two years of his life, when he gave up travelling and settled down here, he took a special interest in this wood, and for some unaccountable reason began to build a low stone wall around it. This wall was never finished, but you shall see the ruins tomorrow in the daylight.\"\n\n\"And the result of your investigations\u2014these stories, I mean?\" the doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.\n\n\"Yes, I'm coming to that,\" he said slowly, \"but the wood first, for this wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large boulders\u2014old Druid stones, I'm told. At another place there's a small pond. There's nothing distinctive about it that I could mention\u2014just an ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood\u2014only the trees are a bit twisted in the trunks, some of 'em, and very dense. Nothing more.\n\n\"And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all odd\u2014such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make out how these people got such notions into their heads.\"\n\nHe paused a moment to relight his cigar.\n\n\"There's no regular path through it,\" he resumed, puffing vigorously, \"but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound\u2014most of 'em said that, in fact\u2014and another man saw shapes flitting in and out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms\u2014always queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the whole wood was lit up, and one fellow\u2014he's still here and you shall see him\u2014has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals\u2014\"\n\n\"What kind of stars?\" put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that made me start.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them since.\"\n\nHe stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze\u2014welcome for its blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already a strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect and far from comforting.\n\n\"Of course,\" he went on, straightening up again on the mat, \"this was all commonplace enough\u2014this seeing lights and figures at night. Most of these fellows drink, and imagination and terror between them may account for almost anything. But others saw things in broad daylight. One of the woodmen, a sober, respectable man, took the shortcut home to his midday meal, and swore he was followed the whole length of the wood by something that never showed itself, but dodged from tree to tree, always keeping out of sight, yet solid enough to make the branches sway and the twigs snap on the ground. And it made a noise, he declared\u2014but really\"\u2014the speaker stopped and gave a short laugh\u2014\"it's too absurd\u2014\"\n\n\"Please!\" insisted the doctor; \"for it is these small details that give me the best clues always.\"\n\n\"\u2014it made a crackling noise, he said, like a bonfire. Those were his very words: like the crackling of a bonfire,\" finished the soldier, with a repetition of his short laugh.\n\n\"Most interesting,\" Dr. Silence observed gravely. \"Please omit nothing.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he went on, \"and it was soon after that the fires began\u2014the fires in the wood. They started mysteriously burning in the patches of coarse white grass that cover the more open parts of the plantation. No one ever actually saw them start, but many, myself among the number, have seen them burning and smouldering. They are always small and circular in shape, and for all the world like a picnic fire. The head keeper has a dozen explanations, from sparks flying out of the house chimneys to the sunlight focusing through a dewdrop, but none of them, I must admit, convince me as being in the least likely or probable. They are most singular, I consider, most singular, these mysterious fires, and I am glad to say that they come only at rather long intervals and never seem to spread.\n\n\"But the keeper had other queer stories as well, and about things that are verifiable. He declared that no life ever willingly entered the plantation; more, that no life existed in it at all. No birds nested in the trees, or flew into their shade. He set countless traps, but never caught so much as a rabbit or a weasel. Animals avoided it, and more than once he had picked up dead creatures round the edges that bore no obvious signs of how they had met their death.\n\n\"Moreover, he told me one extraordinary tale about his retriever chasing some invisible creature across the field one day when he was out with his gun. The dog suddenly pointed at something in the field at his feet, and then gave chase, yelping like a mad thing. It followed its imaginary quarry to the borders of the wood, and then went in\u2014a thing he had never known it to do before. The moment it crossed the edge\u2014it is darkish in there even in daylight\u2014it began fighting in the most frenzied and terrific fashion. It made him afraid to interfere, he said. And at last, when the dog came out, hanging its tail down and panting, he found something like white hair stuck to its jaws, and brought it to show me. I tell you these details because\u2014\"\n\n\"They are important, believe me,\" the doctor stopped him. \"And you have it still, this hair?\" he asked.\n\n\"It disappeared in the oddest way,\" the Colonel explained. \"It was curious looking stuff, something like asbestos, and I sent it to be analysed by the local chemist. But either the man got wind of its origin, or else he didn't like the look of it for some reason, because he returned it to me and said it was neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral, so far as he could make out, and he didn't wish to have anything to do with it. I put it away in paper, but a week later, on opening the package\u2014it was gone! Oh, the stories are simply endless. I could tell you hundreds all on the same lines.\"\n\n\"And personal experiences of your own, Colonel Wragge?\" asked John Silence earnestly, his manner showing the greatest possible interest and sympathy.\n\nThe soldier gave an almost imperceptible start. He looked distinctly uncomfortable.\n\n\"Nothing, I think,\" he said slowly, \"nothing\u2014er\u2014I should like to rely on. I mean nothing I have the right to speak of, perhaps\u2014yet.\"\n\nHis mouth closed with a snap. Dr. Silence, after waiting a little to see if he would add to his reply, did not seek to press him on the point.\n\n\"Well,\" he resumed presently, and as though he would speak contemptuously, yet dared not, \"this sort of thing has gone on at intervals ever since. It spreads like wildfire, of course, mysterious chatter of this kind, and people began trespassing all over the estate, coming to see the wood, and making themselves a general nuisance. Notices of man-traps and spring-guns only seemed to increase their persistence; and\u2014think of it,\" he snorted, \"some local Research Society actually wrote and asked permission for one of their members to spend a night in the wood! Bolder fools, who didn't write for leave, came and took away bits of bark from the trees and gave them to clairvoyants, who invented in their turn a further batch of tales. There was simply no end to it all.\"\n\n\"Most distressing and annoying, I can well believe,\" interposed the doctor.\n\n\"Then suddenly, the phenomena ceased as mysteriously as they had begun, and the interest flagged. The tales stopped. People got interested in something else. It all seemed to die out. This was last July. I can tell you exactly, for I've kept a diary more or less of what happened.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"But now, quite recently, within the past three weeks, it has all revived again with a rush\u2014with a kind of furious attack, so to speak. It has really become unbearable. You may imagine what it means, and the general state of affairs, when I say that the possibility of leaving has occurred to me.\"\n\n\"Incendiarism?\" suggested Dr. Silence, half under his breath, but not so low that Colonel Wragge did not hear him.\n\n\"By Jove, sir, you take the very words out of my mouth!\" exclaimed the astonished man, glancing from the doctor to me and from me to the doctor, and rattling the money in his pocket as though some explanation of my friend's divining powers were to be found that way.\n\n\"It's only that you are thinking very vividly,\" the doctor said quietly, \"and your thoughts form pictures in my mind before you utter them. It's merely a little elementary thought-reading.\"\n\nHis intention, I saw, was not to perplex the good man, but to impress him with his powers so as to ensure obedience later.\n\n\"Good Lord! I had no idea\u2014\" He did not finish the sentence, and dived again abruptly into his narrative.\n\n\"I did not see anything myself, I must admit, but the stories of independent eye-witnesses were to the effect that lines of light, like streams of thin fire, moved through the wood and sometimes were seen to shoot out precisely as flames might shoot out\u2014in the direction of this house. There,\" he explained, in a louder voice that made me jump, pointing with a thick finger to the map, \"where the westerly fringe of the plantation comes up to the end of the lower lawn at the back of the house\u2014where it links on to those dark patches, which are laurel shrubberies, running right up to the back premises\u2014that's where these lights were seen. They passed from the wood to the shrubberies, and in this way reached the house itself. Like silent rockets, one man described them, rapid as lightning and exceedingly bright.\"\n\n\"And this evidence you spoke of?\"\n\n\"They actually reached the sides of the house. They've left a mark of scorching on the walls\u2014the walls of the laundry building at the other end. You shall see 'em tomorrow.\" He pointed to the map to indicate the spot, and then straightened himself and glared about the room as though he had said something no one could believe and expected contradiction.\n\n\"Scorched\u2014just as the faces were,\" the doctor murmured, looking significantly at me.\n\n\"Scorched\u2014yes,\" repeated the Colonel, failing to catch the rest of the sentence in his excitement.\n\nThere was a prolonged silence in the room, in which I heard the gurgling of the oil in the lamp and the click of the coals and the heavy breathing of our host. The most unwelcome sensations were creeping about my spine, and I wondered whether my companion would scorn me utterly if I asked to sleep on the sofa in his room. It was eleven o'clock, I saw by the clock on the mantelpiece. We had crossed the dividing line and were now well in the movement of the adventure. The fight between my interest and my dread became acute. But, even if turning back had been possible, I think the interest would have easily gained the day.\n\n\"I have enemies, of course,\" I heard the Colonel's rough voice break into the pause presently, \"and have discharged a number of servants\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not that,\" put in John Silence briefly.\n\n\"You think not? In a sense I am glad, and yet\u2014there are some things that can be met and dealt with\u2014\"\n\nHe left the sentence unfinished, and looked down at the floor with an expression of grim severity that betrayed a momentary glimpse of character. This fighting man loathed and abhorred the thought of an enemy he could not see and come to grips with. Presently he moved over and sat down in the chair between us. Something like a sigh escaped him. Dr. Silence said nothing.\n\n\"My sister, of course, is kept in ignorance, as far as possible, of all this,\" he said disconnectedly, and as if talking to himself. \"But even if she knew she would find matter-of-fact explanations. I only wish I could. I'm sure they exist.\"\n\nThere came then an interval in the conversation that was very significant. It did not seem a real pause, or the silence real silence, for both men continued to think so rapidly and strongly that one almost imagined their thoughts clothed themselves in words in the air of the room. I was more than a little keyed up with the strange excitement of all I had heard, but what stimulated my nerves more than anything else was the obvious fact that the doctor was clearly upon the trail of discovery. In his mind at that moment, I believe, he had already solved the nature of this perplexing psychical problem. His face was like a mask, and he employed the absolute minimum of gesture and words. All his energies were directed inwards, and by those incalculable methods and processes he had mastered with such infinite patience and study, I felt sure he was already in touch with the forces behind these singular phenomena and laying his deep plans for bringing them into the open, and then effectively dealing with them.\n\nColonel Wragge meanwhile grew more and more fidgety. From time to time he turned towards my companion, as though about to speak, yet always changing his mind at the last moment. Once he went over and opened the door suddenly, apparently to see if any one were listening at the keyhole, for he disappeared a moment between the two doors, and I then heard him open the outer one. He stood there for some seconds and made a noise as though he were sniffing the air like a dog. Then he closed both doors cautiously and came back to the fireplace. A strange excitement seemed growing upon him. Evidently he was trying to make up his mind to say something that he found it difficult to say. And John Silence, as I rightly judged, was waiting patiently for him to choose his own opportunity and his own way of saying it. At last he turned and faced us, squaring his great shoulders, and stiffening perceptibly.\n\nDr. Silence looked up sympathetically.\n\n\"Your own experiences help me most,\" he observed quietly.\n\n\"The fact is,\" the Colonel said, speaking very low, \"this past week there have been outbreaks of fire in the house itself. Three separate outbreaks\u2014and all\u2014in my sister's room.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the doctor said, as if this was just what he had expected to hear.\n\n\"Utterly unaccountable\u2014all of them,\" added the other, and then sat down. I began to understand something of the reason of his excitement. He was realising at last that the \"natural\" explanation he had held to all along was becoming impossible, and he hated it. It made him angry.\n\n\"Fortunately,\" he went on, \"she was out each time and does not know. But I have made her sleep now in a room on the ground floor.\"\n\n\"A wise precaution,\" the doctor said simply. He asked one or two questions. The fires had started in the curtains\u2014once by the window and once by the bed. The third time smoke had been discovered by the maid coming from the cupboard, and it was found that Miss Wragge's clothes hanging on the hooks were smouldering. The doctor listened attentively, but made no comment.\n\n\"And now can you tell me,\" he said presently, \"what your own feeling about it is\u2014your general impression?\"\n\n\"It sounds foolish to say so,\" replied the soldier, after a moment's hesitation, \"but I feel exactly as I have often felt on active service in my Indian campaigns: just as if the house and all in it were in a state of siege; as though a concealed enemy were encamped about us\u2014in ambush somewhere.\" He uttered a soft nervous laugh. \"As if the next sign of smoke would precipitate a panic\u2014a dreadful panic.\"\n\nThe picture came before me of the night shadowing the house, and the twisted pine trees he had described crowding about it, concealing some powerful enemy; and, glancing at the resolute face and figure of the old soldier, forced at length to his confession, I understood something of all he had been through before he sought the assistance of John Silence.\n\n\"And tomorrow, unless I am mistaken, is full moon,\" said the doctor suddenly, watching the other's face for the effect of his apparently careless words.\n\nColonel Wragge gave an uncontrollable start, and his face for the first time showed unmistakable pallor.\n\n\"What in the world\u2014?\" he began, his lip quivering.\n\n\"Only that I am beginning to see light in this extraordinary affair,\" returned the other calmly, \"and, if my theory is correct, each month when the moon is at the full should witness an increase in the activity of the phenomena.\"\n\n\"I don't see the connection,\" Colonel Wragge answered almost savagely, \"but I am bound to say my diary bears you out.\" He wore the most puzzled expression I have ever seen upon an honest face, but he abhorred this additional corroboration of an explanation that perplexed him.\n\n\"I confess,\" he repeated, \"I cannot see the connection.\"\n\n\"Why should you?\" said the doctor, with his first laugh that evening. He got up and hung the map upon the wall again. \"But I do\u2014because these things are my special study\u2014and let me add that I have yet to come across a problem that is not natural, and has not a natural explanation. It's merely a question of how much one knows\u2014and admits.\"\n\nColonel Wragge eyed him with a new and curious respect in his face. But his feelings were soothed. Moreover, the doctor's laugh and change of manner came as a relief to all, and broke the spell of grave suspense that had held us so long. We all rose and stretched our limbs, and took little walks about the room.\n\n\"I am glad, Dr. Silence, if you will allow me to say so, that you are here,\" he said simply, \"very glad indeed. And now I fear I have kept you both up very late,\" with a glance to include me, \"for you must be tired, and ready for your beds. I have told you all there is to tell,\" he added, \"and tomorrow you must feel perfectly free to take any steps you think necessary.\"\n\nThe end was abrupt, yet natural, for there was nothing more to say, and neither of these men talked for mere talking's sake.\n\nOut in the cold and chilly hall he lit our candles and took us upstairs. The house was at rest and still, every one asleep. We moved softly. Through the windows on the stairs we saw the moonlight falling across the lawn, throwing deep shadows. The nearer pine trees were just visible in the distance, a wall of impenetrable blackness.\n\nOur host came for a moment to our rooms to see that we had everything. He pointed to a coil of strong rope lying beside the window, fastened to the wall by means of an iron ring. Evidently it had been recently put in.\n\n\"I don't think we shall need it,\" Dr. Silence said, with a smile.\n\n\"I trust not,\" replied our host gravely. \"I sleep quite close to you across the landing,\" he whispered, pointing to his door, \"and if you\u2014if you want anything in the night you will know where to find me.\"\n\nHe wished us pleasant dreams and disappeared down the passage into his room, shading the candle with his big muscular hand from the draughts.\n\nJohn Silence stopped me a moment before I went.\n\n\"You know what it is?\" I asked, with an excitement that even overcame my weariness.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"I'm almost sure. And you?\"\n\n\"Not the smallest notion.\"\n\nHe looked disappointed, but not half as disappointed as I felt.\n\n\"Egypt,\" he whispered, \"Egypt!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 383", + "text": "Nothing happened to disturb me in the night\u2014nothing, that is, except a nightmare in which Colonel Wragge chased me amid thin streaks of fire, and his sister always prevented my escape by suddenly rising up out of the ground in her chair\u2014dead. The deep baying of dogs woke me once, just before the dawn, it must have been, for I saw the window frame against the sky; there was a flash of lightning, too, I thought, as I turned over in bed. And it was warm, for October oppressively warm.\n\nIt was after eleven o'clock when our host suggested going out with the guns, these, we understood, being a somewhat thin disguise for our true purpose. Personally, I was glad to be in the open air, for the atmosphere of the house was heavy with presentiment. The sense of impending disaster hung over all. Fear stalked the passages, and lurked in the corners of every room. It was a house haunted, but really haunted; not by some vague shadow of the dead, but by a definite though incalculable influence that was actively alive, and dangerous. At the least smell of smoke the entire household quivered. An odour of burning, I was convinced, would paralyse all the inmates. For the servants, though professedly ignorant by the master's unspoken orders, yet shared the common dread; and the hideous uncertainty, joined with this display of so spiteful and calculated a spirit of malignity, provided a kind of black doom that draped not only the walls, but also the minds of the people living within them.\n\nOnly the bright and cheerful vision of old Miss Wragge being pushed about the house in her noiseless chair, chatting and nodding briskly to every one she met, prevented us from giving way entirely to the depression which governed the majority. The sight of her was like a gleam of sunshine through the depths of some ill-omened wood, and just as we went out I saw her being wheeled along by her attendant into the sunshine of the back lawn, and caught her cheery smile as she turned her head and wished us good sport.\n\nThe morning was October at its best. Sunshine glistened on the dew-drenched grass and on leaves turned golden-red. The dainty messengers of coming hoar-frost were already in the air, a search for permanent winter quarters. From the wide moors that everywhere swept up against the sky, like a purple sea splashed by the occasional grey of rocky clefts, there stole down the cool and perfumed wind of the west. And the keen taste of the sea ran through all like a master-flavour, borne over the spaces perhaps by the seagulls that cried and circled high in the air.\n\nBut our host took little interest in this sparkling beauty, and had no thought of showing off the scenery of his property. His mind was otherwise intent, and, for that matter, so were our own.\n\n\"Those bleak moors and hills stretch unbroken for hours,\" he said, with a sweep of the hand; \"and over there, some four miles,\" pointing in another direction, \"lies S[...] Bay, a long, swampy inlet of the sea, haunted by myriads of seabirds. On the other side of the house are the plantations and pine-woods. I thought we would get the dogs and go first to the Twelve Acre Wood I told you about last night. It's quite near.\"\n\nWe found the dogs in the stable, and I recalled the deep baying of the night when a fine bloodhound and two great Danes leaped out to greet us. Singular companions for guns, I thought to myself, as we struck out across the fields and the great creatures bounded and ran beside us, nose to ground.\n\nThe conversation was scanty. John Silence's grave face did not encourage talk. He wore the expression I knew well\u2014that look of earnest solicitude which meant that his whole being was deeply absorbed and preoccupied. Frightened, I had never seen him, but anxious often\u2014it always moved me to witness it\u2014and he was anxious now.\n\n\"On the way back you shall see the laundry building,\" Colonel Wragge observed shortly, for he, too, found little to say. \"We shall attract less attention then.\"\n\nYet not all the crisp beauty of the morning seemed able to dispel the feelings of uneasy dread that gathered increasingly about our minds as we went.\n\nIn a very few minutes a clump of pine trees concealed the house from view, and we found ourselves on the outskirts of a densely grown plantation of conifers. Colonel Wragge stopped abruptly, and, producing a map from his pocket, explained once more very briefly its position with regard to the house. He showed how it ran up almost to the walls of the laundry building\u2014though at the moment beyond our actual view\u2014and pointed to the windows of his sister's bedroom where the fires had been. The room, now empty, looked straight on to the wood. Then, glancing nervously about him, and calling the dogs to heel, he proposed that we should enter the plantation and make as thorough examination of it as we thought worth while. The dogs, he added, might perhaps be persuaded to accompany us a little way\u2014and he pointed to where they cowered at his feet\u2014but he doubted it. \"Neither voice nor whip will get them very far, I'm afraid,\" he said. \"I know by experience.\"\n\n\"If you have no objection,\" replied Dr. Silence, with decision, and speaking almost for the first time, \"we will make our examination alone\u2014Mr. Hubbard and myself. It will be best so.\"\n\nHis tone was absolutely final, and the Colonel acquiesced so politely that even a less intuitive man than myself must have seen that he was genuinely relieved.\n\n\"You doubtless have good reasons,\" he said.\n\n\"Merely that I wish to obtain my impressions uncoloured. This delicate clue I am working on might be so easily blurred by the thought-currents of another mind with strongly preconceived ideas.\"\n\n\"Perfectly. I understand,\" rejoined the soldier, though with an expression of countenance that plainly contradicted his words. \"Then I will wait here with the dogs; and we'll have a look at the laundry on our way home.\"\n\nI turned once to look back as we clambered over the low stone wall built by the late owner, and saw his straight, soldierly figure standing in the sunlit field watching us with a curiously intent look on his face. There was something to me incongruous, yet distinctly pathetic, in the man's efforts to meet all far-fetched explanations of the mystery with contempt, and at the same time in his stolid, unswerving investigation of it all. He nodded at me and made a gesture of farewell with his hand. That picture of him, standing in the sunshine with his big dogs, steadily watching us, remains with me to this day.\n\nDr. Silence led the way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely together in serried ranks, and I followed sharp at his heels. The moment we were out of sight he turned and put down his gun against the roots of a big tree, and I did likewise.\n\n\"We shall hardly want these cumbersome weapons of murder,\" he observed, with a passing smile.\n\n\"You are sure of your clue, then?\" I asked at once, bursting with curiosity, yet fearing to betray it lest he should think me unworthy. His own methods were so absolutely simple and untheatrical.\n\n\"I am sure of my clue,\" he answered gravely. \"And I think we have come just in time. You shall know in due course. For the present\u2014be content to follow and observe. And think, steadily. The support of your mind will help me.\"\n\nHis voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death with a sort of happiness and pride. I would have followed him anywhere at that moment. At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread seriousness. I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind.\n\n\"You still have no strong impressions?\" he asked. \"Nothing happened in the night, for instance? No vivid dreamings?\"\n\nHe looked closely for my answer, I was aware.\n\n\"I slept almost an unbroken sleep. I was tremendously tired, you know, and, but for the oppressive heat\u2014\"\n\n\"Good! You still notice the heat, then,\" he said to himself, rather than expecting an answer. \"And the lightning?\" he added, \"that lightning out of a clear sky\u2014that flashing\u2014did you notice that?\"\n\nI answered truly that I thought I had seen a flash during a moment of wakefulness, and he then drew my attention to certain facts before moving on.\n\n\"You remember the sensation of warmth when you put the letter to your forehead in the train; the heat generally in the house last evening, and, as you now mention, in the night. You heard, too, the Colonel's stories about the appearances of fire in this wood and in the house itself, and the way his brother and the gamekeeper came to their deaths twenty years ago.\"\n\nI nodded, wondering what in the world it all meant.\n\n\"And you get no clue from these facts?\" he asked, a trifle surprised.\n\nI searched every corner of my mind and imagination for some inkling of his meaning, but was obliged to admit that I understood nothing so far.\n\n\"Never mind, you will later. And now,\" he added, \"we will go over the wood and see what we can find.\"\n\nHis words explained to me something of his method. We were to keep our minds alert and report to each other the least fancy that crossed the picture-gallery of our thoughts. Then, just as we started, he turned again to me with a final warning.\n\n\"And, for your safety,\" he said earnestly, \"imagine now\u2014and for that matter, imagine always until we leave this place\u2014imagine with the utmost keenness, that you are surrounded by a shell that protects you. Picture yourself inside a protective envelope, and build it up with the most intense imagination you can evoke. Pour the whole force of your thought and will into it. Believe vividly all through this adventure that such a shell, constructed of your thought, will and imagination, surrounds you completely, and that nothing can pierce it to attack.\"\n\nHe spoke with dramatic conviction, gazing hard at me as though to enforce his meaning, and then moved forward and began to pick his way over the rough, tussocky ground into the wood. And meanwhile, knowing the efficacy of his prescription, I adopted it to the best of my ability.\n\nThe trees at once closed about us like the night. Their branches met overhead in a continuous tangle, their stems crept closer and closer, the brambly undergrowth thickened and multiplied. We tore our trousers, scratched our hands, and our eyes filled with fine dust that made it most difficult to avoid the clinging, prickly network of branches and creepers. Coarse white grass that caught our feet like string grew here and there in patches. It crowned the lumps of peaty growth that stuck up like human heads, fantastically dressed, thrusting up at us out of the ground with crests of dead hair. We stumbled and floundered among them. It was hard going, and I could well conceive it impossible to find a way at all in the night-time. We jumped, when possible, from tussock to tussock, and it seemed as though we were springing among heads on a battlefield, and that this dead white grass concealed eyes that turned to stare as we passed.\n\nHere and there the sunlight shot in with vivid spots of white light, dazzling the sight, but only making the surrounding gloom deeper by contrast. And on two occasions we passed dark circular places in the grass where fires had eaten their mark and left a ring of ashes. Dr. Silence pointed to them, but without comment and without pausing, and the sight of them woke in me a singular realisation of the dread that lay so far only just out of sight in this adventure.\n\nIt was exhausting work, and heavy going. We kept close together. The warmth, too, was extraordinary. Yet it did not seem the warmth of the body due to violent exertion, but rather an inner heat of the mind that laid glowing hands of fire upon the heart and set the brain in a kind of steady blaze. When my companion found himself too far in advance, he waited for me to come up. The place had evidently been untouched by hand of man, keeper, forester or sportsman, for many a year; and my thoughts, as we advanced painfully, were not unlike the state of the wood itself\u2014dark, confused, full of a haunting wonder and the shadow of fear.\n\nBy this time all signs of the open field behind us were hid. No single gleam penetrated. We might have been groping in the heart of some primeval forest. Then, suddenly, the brambles and tussocks and stringlike grass came to an end; the trees opened out; and the ground began to slope upwards towards a large central mound. We had reached the middle of the plantation, and before us stood the broken Druid stones our host had mentioned. We walked easily up the little hill, between the sparser stems, and, resting upon one of the ivy-covered boulders, looked round upon a comparatively open space, as large, perhaps, as a small London Square.\n\nThinking of the ceremonies and sacrifices this rough circle of prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my companion's face with an unspoken question. But he read my thought and shook his head.\n\n\"Our mystery has nothing to do with these dead symbols,\" he said, \"but with something perhaps even more ancient, and of another country altogether.\"\n\n\"Egypt?\" I said half under my breath, hopelessly puzzled, but recalling his words in my bedroom.\n\nHe nodded. Mentally I still floundered, but he seemed intensely preoccupied and it was no time for asking questions; so while his words circled unintelligibly in my mind I looked round at the scene before me, glad of the opportunity to recover breath and some measure of composure. But hardly had I time to notice the twisted and contorted shapes of many of the pine trees close at hand when Dr. Silence leaned over and touched me on the shoulder. He pointed down the slope. And the look I saw in his eyes keyed up every nerve in my body to its utmost pitch.\n\nA thin, almost imperceptible column of blue smoke was rising among the trees some twenty yards away at the foot of the mound. It curled up and up, and disappeared from sight among the tangled branches overhead. It was scarcely thicker than the smoke from a small brand of burning wood.\n\n\"Protect yourself! Imagine your shell strongly,\" whispered the doctor sharply, \"and follow me closely.\"\n\nHe rose at once and moved swiftly down the slope towards the smoke, and I followed, afraid to remain alone. I heard the soft crunching of our steps on the pine needles. Over his shoulder I watched the thin blue spiral, without once taking my eyes off it. I hardly know how to describe the peculiar sense of vague horror inspired in me by the sight of that streak of smoke pencilling its way upwards among the dark trees. And the sensation of increasing heat as we approached was phenomenal. It was like walking towards a glowing yet invisible fire.\n\nAs we drew nearer his pace slackened. Then he stopped and pointed, and I saw a small circle of burnt grass upon the ground. The tussocks were blackened and smouldering, and from the centre rose this line of smoke, pale, blue, steady. Then I noticed a movement of the atmosphere beside us, as if the warm air were rising and the cooler air rushing in to take its place: a little centre of wind in the stillness. Overhead the boughs stirred and trembled where the smoke disappeared. Otherwise, not a tree sighed, not a sound made itself heard. The wood was still as a graveyard. A horrible idea came to me that the course of nature was about to change without warning, had changed a little already, that the sky would drop, or the surface of the earth crash inwards like a broken bubble. Something, certainly, reached up to the citadel of my reason, causing its throne to shake.\n\nJohn Silence moved forward again. I could not see his face, but his attitude was plainly one of resolution, of muscles and mind ready for vigorous action. We were within ten feet of the blackened circle when the smoke of a sudden ceased to rise, and vanished. The tail of the column disappeared in the air above, and at the same instant it seemed to me that the sensation of heat passed from my face, and the motion of the wind was gone. The calm spirit of the fresh October day resumed command.\n\nSide by side we advanced and examined the place. The grass was smouldering, the ground still hot. The circle of burned earth was a foot to a foot and a half in diameter. It looked like an ordinary picnic fireplace. I bent down cautiously to look, but in a second I sprang back with an involuntary cry of alarm, for, as the doctor stamped on the ashes to prevent them spreading, a sound of hissing rose from the spot as though he had kicked a living creature. This hissing was faintly audible in the air. It moved past us, away towards the thicker portion of the wood in the direction of our field, and in a second Dr. Silence had left the fire and started in pursuit.\n\nAnd then began the most extraordinary hunt of invisibility I can ever conceive.\n\nHe went fast even at the beginning, and, of course, it was perfectly obvious that he was following something. To judge by the poise of his head he kept his eyes steadily at a certain level\u2014just above the height of a man\u2014and the consequence was he stumbled a good deal over the roughness of the ground. The hissing sound had stopped. There was no sound of any kind, and what he saw to follow was utterly beyond me. I only know, that in mortal dread of being left behind, and with a biting curiosity to see whatever there was to be seen, I followed as quickly as I could, and even then barely succeeded in keeping up with him.\n\nAnd, as we went, the whole mad jumble of the Colonel's stories ran through my brain, touching a sense of frightened laughter that was only held in check by the sight of this earnest, hurrying figure before me. For John Silence at work inspired me with a kind of awe. He looked so diminutive among these giant twisted trees, while yet I knew that his purpose and his knowledge were so great, and even in hurry he was dignified. The fancy that we were playing some queer, exaggerated game together met the fact that we were two men dancing upon the brink of some possible tragedy, and the mingling of the two emotions in my mind was both grotesque and terrifying.\n\nHe never turned in his mad chase, but pushed rapidly on, while I panted after him like a figure in some unreasoning nightmare. And, as I ran, it came upon me that he had been aware all the time, in his quiet, internal way, of many things that he had kept for his own secret consideration; he had been watching, waiting, planning from the very moment we entered the shade of the wood. By some inner, concentrated process of mind, dynamic if not actually magical, he had been in direct contact with the source of the whole adventure, the very essence of the real mystery. And now the forces were moving to a climax. Something was about to happen, something important, something possibly dreadful. Every nerve, every sense, every significant gesture of the plunging figure before me proclaimed the fact just as surely as the skies, the winds, and the face of the earth tell the birds the time to migrate and warn the animals that danger lurks and they must move.\n\nIn a few moments we reached the foot of the mound and entered the tangled undergrowth that lay between us and the sunlight of the field. Here the difficulties of fast travelling increased a hundredfold. There were brambles to dodge, low boughs to dive under, and countless tree trunks closing up to make a direct path impossible. Yet Dr. Silence never seemed to falter or hesitate. He went, diving, jumping, dodging, ducking, but ever in the same main direction, following a clean trail. Twice I tripped and fell, and both times, when I picked myself up again, I saw him ahead of me, still forcing a way like a dog after its quarry. And sometimes, like a dog, he stopped and pointed\u2014human pointing it was, psychic pointing, and each time he stopped to point I heard that faint high hissing in the air beyond us. The instinct of an infallible dowser possessed him, and he made no mistakes.\n\nAt length, abruptly, I caught up with him, and found that we stood at the edge of the shallow pond Colonel Wragge had mentioned in his account the night before. It was long and narrow, filled with dark brown water, in which the trees were dimly reflected. Not a ripple stirred its surface.\n\n\"Watch!\" he cried out, as I came up. \"It's going to cross. It's bound to betray itself. The water is its natural enemy, and we shall see the direction.\"\n\nAnd, even as he spoke, a thin line like the track of a water-spider, shot swiftly across the shiny surface; there was a ghost of steam in the air above; and immediately I became aware of an odour of burning.\n\nDr. Silence turned and shot a glance at me that made me think of lightning. I began to shake all over.\n\n\"Quick!\" he cried with excitement, \"to the trail again! We must run around. It's going to the house!\"\n\nThe alarm in his voice quite terrified me. Without a false step I dashed round the slippery banks and dived again at his heels into the sea of bushes and tree trunks. We were now in the thick of the very dense belt that ran around the outer edge of the plantation, and the field was near; yet so dark was the tangle that it was some time before the first shafts of white sunlight became visible. The doctor now ran in zigzags. He was following something that dodged and doubled quite wonderfully, yet had begun, I fancied, to move more slowly than before.\n\n\"Quick!\" he cried. \"In the light we shall lose it!\"\n\nI still saw nothing, heard nothing, caught no suggestion of a trail; yet this man, guided by some interior divining that seemed infallible, made no false turns, though how he failed to crash headlong into the trees has remained a mystery to me ever since. And then, with a sudden rush, we found ourselves on the skirts of the wood with the open field lying in bright sunshine before our eyes.\n\n\"Too late!\" I heard him cry, a note of anguish in his voice. \"It's out\u2014and, by God, it's making for the house!\"\n\nI saw the Colonel standing in the field with his dogs where we had left him. He was bending double, peering into the wood where he heard us running, and he straightened up like a bent whip released. John Silence dashed passed, calling him to follow.\n\n\"We shall lose the trail in the light,\" I heard him cry as he ran. \"But quick! We may yet get there in time!\"\n\nThat wild rush across the open field, with the dogs at our heels, leaping and barking, and the elderly Colonel behind us running as though for his life, shall I ever forget it? Though I had only vague ideas of the meaning of it all, I put my best foot forward, and, being the youngest of the three, I reached the house an easy first. I drew up, panting, and turned to wait for the others. But, as I turned, something moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in that moment I swear I experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock of surprise and terror I have ever known, or can conceive as possible.\n\nFor the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, I could see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on to the back lawn, and there I saw no less a sight than the figure of Miss Wragge\u2014running. Even at that distance it was plain that she had seen me, and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait of a terror-stricken woman. She had recovered the use of her legs.\n\nHer face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general expression was one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes, always bright, shone with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the merriment of a child, yet was singularly ghastly. And that very second, as she fled past me into her brother's arms behind, I smelt again most unmistakably the odour of burning, and to this day the smell of smoke and fire can come very near to turning me sick with the memory of what I had seen.\n\nFast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of herself, and able to speak\u2014which the old lady could not do\u2014but with a face almost, if not quite, as fearful.\n\n\"We were down by the bushes in the sun,\"\u2014she gasped and screamed in reply to Colonel Wragge's distracted questionings,\u2014\"I was wheeling the chair as usual when she shrieked and leaped\u2014I don't know exactly\u2014I was too frightened to see\u2014Oh, my God! she jumped clean out of the chair\u2014and ran! There was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she hid her face and jumped. She didn't make a sound\u2014she didn't cry out, or make a sound. She just ran.\"\n\nBut the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few minutes later, and while I was still standing in the hall temporarily bereft of speech and movement; for while the doctor, the Colonel and the attendant were half-way up the staircase, helping the fainting woman to the privacy of her room, and all in a confused group of dark figures, there sounded a voice behind me, and I turned to see the butler, his face dripping with perspiration, his eyes starting out of his head.\n\n\"The laundry's on fire!\" he cried; \"the laundry building's a-caught!\"\n\nI remember his odd expression \"a-caught,\" and wanting to laugh, but finding my face rigid and inflexible.\n\n\"The devil's about again, s'help me Gawd!\" he cried, in a voice thin with terror, running about in circles.\n\nAnd then the group on the stairs scattered as at the sound of a shot, and the Colonel and Dr. Silence came down three steps at a time, leaving the afflicted Miss Wragge to the care of her single attendant.\n\nWe were out across the front lawn in a moment and round the corner of the house, the Colonel leading, Silence and I at his heels, and the portly butler puffing some distance in the rear, getting more and more mixed in his addresses to God and the devil; and the moment we passed the stables and came into view of the laundry building, we saw a wicked-looking volume of smoke pouring out of the narrow windows, and the frightened women-servants and grooms running hither and thither, calling aloud as they ran.\n\nThe arrival of the master restored order instantly, and this retired soldier, poor thinker perhaps, but capable man of action, had the matter in hand from the start. He issued orders like a martinet, and, almost before I could realise it, there were streaming buckets on the scene and a line of men and women formed between the building and the stable pump.\n\n\"Inside,\" I heard John Silence cry, and the Colonel followed him through the door, while I was just quick enough at their heels to hear him add, \"the smoke's the worst part of it. There's no fire yet, I think.\"\n\nAnd, true enough, there was no fire. The interior was thick with smoke, but it speedily cleared and not a single bucket was used upon the floor or walls. The air was stifling, the heat fearful.\n\n\"There's precious little to burn in here; it's all stone,\" the Colonel exclaimed, coughing. But the doctor was pointing to the wooden covers of the great cauldron in which the clothes were washed, and we saw that these were smouldering and charred. And when we sprinkled half a bucket of water on them the surrounding bricks hissed and fizzed and sent up clouds of steam. Through the open door and windows this passed out with the rest of the smoke, and we three stood there on the brick floor staring at the spot and wondering, each in our own fashion, how in the name of natural law the place could have caught fire or smoked at all. And each was silent\u2014myself from sheer incapacity and befuddlement, the Colonel from the quiet pluck that faces all things yet speaks little, and John Silence from the intense mental grappling with this latest manifestation of a profound problem that called for concentration of thought rather than for any words.\n\nThere was really nothing to say. The facts were indisputable.\n\nColonel Wragge was the first to utter.\n\n\"My sister,\" he said briefly, and moved off. In the yard I heard him sending the frightened servants about their business in an excellently matter-of-fact voice, scolding some one roundly for making such a big fire and letting the flues get over-heated, and paying no heed to the stammering reply that no fire had been lit there for several days. Then he dispatched a groom on horseback for the local doctor.\n\nThen Dr. Silence turned and looked at me. The absolute control he possessed, not only over the outward expression of emotion by gesture, change of colour, light in the eyes, and so forth, but also, as I well knew, over its very birth in his heart, the masklike face of the dead he could assume at will, made it extremely difficult to know at any given moment what was at work in his inner consciousness. But now, when he turned and looked at me, there was no sphinx-expression there, but rather the keen triumphant face of a man who had solved a dangerous and complicated problem, and saw his way to a clean victory.\n\n\"Now do you guess?\" he asked quietly, as though it were the simplest matter in the world, and ignorance were impossible.\n\nI could only stare stupidly and remain silent. He glanced down at the charred cauldron-lids, and traced a figure in the air with his finger. But I was too excited, or too mortified, or still too dazed, perhaps, to see what it was he outlined, or what it was he meant to convey. I could only go on staring and shaking my puzzled head.\n\n\"A fire-elemental,\" he cried, \"a fire-elemental of the most powerful and malignant kind\u2014\"\n\n\"A what?\" thundered the voice of Colonel Wragge behind us, having returned suddenly and overheard.\n\n\"It's a fire-elemental,\" repeated Dr. Silence more calmly, but with a note of triumph in his voice he could not keep out, \"and a fire-elemental enraged.\"\n\nThe light began to dawn in my mind at last. But the Colonel\u2014who had never heard the term before, and was besides feeling considerably worked up for a plain man with all this mystery he knew not how to grapple with\u2014the Colonel stood, with the most dumfoundered look ever seen on a human countenance, and continued to roar, and stammer, and stare.\n\n\"And why,\" he began, savage with the desire to find something visible he could fight\u2014\"why, in the name of all the blazes\u2014?\" and then stopped as John Silence moved up and took his arm.\n\n\"There, my dear Colonel Wragge,\" he said gently, \"you touch the heart of the whole thing. You ask 'Why.' That is precisely our problem.\" He held the soldier's eyes firmly with his own. \"And that, too, I think, we shall soon know. Come and let us talk over a plan of action\u2014that room with the double doors, perhaps.\"\n\nThe word \"action\" calmed him a little, and he led the way, without further speech, back into the house, and down the long stone passage to the room where we had heard his stories on the night of our arrival. I understood from the doctor's glance that my presence would not make the interview easier for our host, and I went upstairs to my own room\u2014shaking.\n\nBut in the solitude of my room the vivid memories of the last hour revived so mercilessly that I began to feel I should never in my whole life lose the dreadful picture of Miss Wragge running\u2014that dreadful human climax after all the non-human mystery in the wood\u2014and I was not sorry when a servant knocked at my door and said that Colonel Wragge would be glad if I would join them in the little smoking-room.\n\n\"I think it is better you should be present,\" was all Colonel Wragge said as I entered the room. I took the chair with my back to the window. There was still an hour before lunch, though I imagine that the usual divisions of the day hardly found a place in the thoughts of any one of us.\n\nThe atmosphere of the room was what I might call electric. The Colonel was positively bristling; he stood with his back to the fire, fingering an unlit black cigar, his face flushed, his being obviously roused and ready for action. He hated this mystery. It was poisonous to his nature, and he longed to meet something face to face\u2014something he could gauge and fight. Dr. Silence, I noticed at once, was sitting before the map of the estate which was spread upon a table. I knew by his expression the state of his mind. He was in the thick of it all, knew it, delighted in it, and was working at high pressure. He recognised my presence with a lifted eyelid, and the flash of the eye, contrasted with his stillness and composure, told me volumes.\n\n\"I was about to explain to our host briefly what seems to me afoot in all this business,\" he said without looking up, \"when he asked that you should join us so that we can all work together.\" And, while signifying my assent, I caught myself wondering what quality it was in the calm speech of this undemonstrative man that was so full of power, so charged with the strange, virile personality behind it and that seemed to inspire us with his own confidence as by a process of radiation.\n\n\"Mr. Hubbard,\" he went on gravely, turning to the soldier, \"knows something of my methods, and in more than one\u2014er\u2014interesting situation has proved of assistance. What we want now\"\u2014and here he suddenly got up and took his place on the mat beside the Colonel, and looked hard at him\u2014\"is men who have self-control, who are sure of themselves, whose minds at the critical moment will emit positive forces, instead of the wavering and uncertain currents due to negative feelings\u2014due, for instance, to fear.\"\n\nHe looked at us each in turn. Colonel Wragge moved his feet farther apart, and squared his shoulders; and I felt guilty but said nothing, conscious that my latent store of courage was being deliberately hauled to the front. He was winding me up like a clock.\n\n\"So that, in what is yet to come,\" continued our leader, \"each of us will contribute his share of power, and ensure success for my plan.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of anything I can see,\" said the Colonel bluntly.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" I heard myself say, as it were automatically, \"for anything,\" and then added, feeling the declaration was lamely insufficient, \"and everything.\"\n\nDr. Silence left the mat and began walking to and fro about the room, both hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket. Tremendous vitality streamed from him. I never took my eyes off the small, moving figure; small yes,\u2014and yet somehow making me think of a giant plotting the destruction of worlds. And his manner was gentle, as always, soothing almost, and his words uttered quietly without emphasis or emotion. Most of what he said was addressed, though not too obviously, to the Colonel.\n\n\"The violence of this sudden attack,\" he said softly, pacing to and fro beneath the bookcase at the end of the room, \"is due, of course, partly to the fact that tonight the moon is at the full\"\u2014here he glanced at me for a moment\u2014\"and partly to the fact that we have all been so deliberately concentrating upon the matter. Our thinking, our investigation, has stirred it into unusual activity. I mean that the intelligent force behind these manifestations has realised that some one is busied about its destruction. And it is now on the defensive: more, it is aggressive.\"\n\n\"But 'it'\u2014what is 'it'?\" began the soldier, fuming. \"What, in the name of all that's dreadful, is a fire-elemental?\"\n\n\"I cannot give you at this moment,\" replied Dr. Silence, turning to him, but undisturbed by the interruption, \"a lecture on the nature and history of magic, but can only say that an Elemental is the active force behind the elements,\u2014whether earth, air, water, or fire,\u2014it is impersonal in its essential nature, but can be focused, personified, ensouled, so to say, by those who know how\u2014by magicians, if you will\u2014for certain purposes of their own, much in the same way that steam and electricity can be harnessed by the practical man of this century.\n\n\"Alone, these blind elemental energies can accomplish little, but governed and directed by the trained will of a powerful manipulator they may become potent activities for good or evil. They are the basis of all magic, and it is the motive behind them that constitutes the magic 'black' or 'white'; they can be the vehicles of curses or of blessings, for a curse is nothing more than the thought of a violent will perpetuated. And in such cases\u2014cases like this\u2014the conscious, directing will of the mind that is using the elemental stands always behind the phenomena\u2014\"\n\n\"You think that my brother\u2014!\" broke in the Colonel, aghast.\n\n\"Has nothing whatever to do with it\u2014directly. The fire-elemental that has here been tormenting you and your household was sent upon its mission long before you, or your family, or your ancestors, or even the nation you belong to\u2014unless I am much mistaken\u2014was even in existence. We will come to that a little later; after the experiment I propose to make we shall be more positive. At present I can only say we have to deal now, not only with the phenomenon of Attacking Fire merely, but with the vindictive and enraged intelligence that is directing it from behind the scenes\u2014vindictive and enraged,\"\u2014he repeated the words.\n\n\"That explains\u2014\" began Colonel Wragge, seeking furiously for words he could not find quickly enough.\n\n\"Much,\" said John Silence, with a gesture to restrain him.\n\nHe stopped a moment in the middle of his walk, and a deep silence came down over the little room. Through the windows the sunlight seemed less bright, the long line of dark hills less friendly, making me think of a vast wave towering to heaven and about to break and overwhelm us. Something formidable had crept into the world about us. For, undoubtedly, there was a disquieting thought, holding terror as well as awe, in the picture his words conjured up: the conception of a human will reaching its deathless hand, spiteful and destructive, down through the ages, to strike the living and afflict the innocent.\n\n\"But what is its object?\" burst out the soldier, unable to restrain himself longer in the silence. \"Why does it come from that plantation? And why should it attack us, or any one in particular?\" Questions began to pour from him in a stream.\n\n\"All in good time,\" the doctor answered quietly, having let him run on for several minutes. \"But I must first discover positively what, or who, it is that directs this particular fire-elemental. And, to do that, we must first\"\u2014he spoke with slow deliberation\u2014\"seek to capture\u2014to confine by visibility\u2014to limit its sphere in a concrete form.\"\n\n\"Good heavens almighty!\" exclaimed the soldier, mixing his words in his unfeigned surprise.\n\n\"Quite so,\" pursued the other calmly; \"for in so doing I think we can release it from the purpose that binds it, restore it to its normal condition of latent fire, and also\"\u2014he lowered his voice perceptibly \u2014\"also discover the face and form of the Being that ensouls it.\"\n\n\"The man behind the gun!\" cried the Colonel, beginning to understand something, and leaning forward so as not to miss a single syllable.\n\n\"I mean that in the last resort, before it returns to the womb of potential fire, it will probably assume the face and figure of its Director, of the man of magical knowledge who originally bound it with his incantations and sent it forth upon its mission of centuries.\"\n\nThe soldier sat down and gasped openly in his face, breathing hard; but it was a very subdued voice that framed the question.\n\n\"And how do you propose to make it visible? How capture and confine it? What d'ye mean, Dr. John Silence?\"\n\n\"By furnishing it with the materials for a form. By the process of materialisation simply. Once limited by dimensions, it will become slow, heavy, visible. We can then dissipate it. Invisible fire, you see, is dangerous and incalculable; locked up in a form we can perhaps manage it. We must betray it\u2014to its death.\"\n\n\"And this material?\" we asked in the same breath, although I think I had already guessed.\n\n\"Not pleasant, but effective,\" came the quiet reply; \"the exhalations of freshly spilled blood.\"\n\n\"Not human blood!\" cried Colonel Wragge, starting up from his chair with a voice like an explosion. I thought his eyes would start from their sockets.\n\nThe face of Dr. Silence relaxed in spite of himself, and his spontaneous little laugh brought a welcome though momentary relief.\n\n\"The days of human sacrifice, I hope, will never come again,\" he explained. \"Animal blood will answer the purpose, and we can make the experiment as pleasant as possible. Only, the blood must be freshly spilled and strong with the vital emanations that attract this peculiar class of elemental creature. Perhaps\u2014perhaps if some pig on the estate is ready for the market\u2014\"\n\nHe turned to hide a smile; but the passing touch of comedy found no echo in the mind of our host, who did not understand how to change quickly from one emotion to another. Clearly he was debating many things laboriously in his honest brain. But, in the end, the earnestness and scientific disinterestedness of the doctor, whose influence over him was already very great, won the day, and he presently looked up more calmly, and observed shortly that he thought perhaps the matter could be arranged.\n\n\"There are other and pleasanter methods,\" Dr. Silence went on to explain, \"but they require time and preparation, and things have gone much too far, in my opinion, to admit of delay. And the process need cause you no distress: we sit round the bowl and await results. Nothing more. The emanations of blood\u2014which, as Levi says, is the first incarnation of the universal fluid\u2014furnish the materials out of which the creatures of discarnate life, spirits if you prefer, can fashion themselves a temporary appearance. The process is old, and lies at the root of all blood sacrifice. It was known to the priests of Baal, and it is known to the modern ecstasy dancers who cut themselves to produce objective phantoms who dance with them. And the least gifted clairvoyant could tell you that the forms to be seen in the vicinity of slaughter-houses, or hovering above the deserted battlefields, are\u2014well, simply beyond all description. I do not mean,\" he added, noticing the uneasy fidgeting of his host, \"that anything in our laundry-experiment need appear to terrify us, for this case seems a comparatively simple one, and it is only the vindictive character of the intelligence directing this fire-elemental that causes anxiety and makes for personal danger.\"\n\n\"It is curious,\" said the Colonel, with a sudden rush of words, drawing a deep breath, and as though speaking of things distasteful to him, \"that during my years among the Hill Tribes of Northern India I came across\u2014personally came across\u2014instances of the sacrifices of blood to certain deities being stopped suddenly, and all manner of disasters happening until they were resumed. Fires broke out in the huts, and even on the clothes, of the natives\u2014and\u2014and I admit I have read, in the course of my studies,\"\u2014he made a gesture toward his books and heavily laden table,\u2014\"of the Yezidis of Syria evoking phantoms by means of cutting their bodies with knives during their whirling dances\u2014enormous globes of fire which turned into monstrous and terrible forms\u2014and I remember an account somewhere, too, how the emaciated forms and pallid countenances of the spectres, that appeared to the Emperor Julian, claimed to be the true Immortals, and told him to renew the sacrifices of blood 'for the fumes of which, since the establishment of Christianity, they had been pining'\u2014that these were in reality the phantoms evoked by the rites of blood.\"\n\nBoth Dr. Silence and myself listened in amazement, for this sudden speech was so unexpected, and betrayed so much more knowledge than we had either of us suspected in the old soldier.\n\n\"Then perhaps you have read, too,\" said the doctor, \"how the Cosmic Deities of savage races, elemental in their nature, have been kept alive through many ages by these blood rites?\"\n\n\"No,\" he answered; \"that is new to me.\"\n\n\"In any case,\" Dr. Silence added, \"I am glad you are not wholly unfamiliar with the subject, for you will now bring more sympathy, and therefore more help, to our experiment. For, of course, in this case, we only want the blood to tempt the creature from its lair and enclose it in a form\u2014\"\n\n\"I quite understand. And I only hesitated just now,\" he went on, his words coming much more slowly, as though he felt he had already said too much, \"because I wished to be quite sure it was no mere curiosity, but an actual sense of necessity that dictated this horrible experiment.\"\n\n\"It is your safety, and that of your household, and of your sister, that is at stake,\" replied the doctor. \"Once I have seen, I hope to discover whence this elemental comes, and what its real purpose is.\"\n\nColonel Wragge signified his assent with a bow.\n\n\"And the moon will help us,\" the other said, \"for it will be full in the early hours of the morning, and this kind of elemental-being is always most active at the period of full moon. Hence, you see, the clue furnished by your diary.\"\n\nSo it was finally settled. Colonel Wragge would provide the materials for the experiment, and we were to meet at midnight. How he would contrive at that hour\u2014but that was his business. I only know we both realised that he would keep his word, and whether a pig died at midnight, or at noon, was after all perhaps only a question of the sleep and personal comfort of the executioner.\n\n\"Tonight, then, in the laundry,\" said Dr. Silence finally, to clinch the plan; \"we three alone\u2014and at midnight, when the household is asleep and we shall be free from disturbance.\"\n\nHe exchanged significant glances with our host, who, at that moment, was called away by the announcement that the family doctor had arrived, and was ready to see him in his sister's room.\n\nFor the remainder of the afternoon John Silence disappeared. I had my suspicions that he made a secret visit to the plantation and also to the laundry building; but, in any case, we saw nothing of him, and he kept strictly to himself. He was preparing for the night, I felt sure, but the nature of his preparations I could only guess. There was movement in his room, I heard, and an odour like incense hung about the door, and knowing that he regarded rites as the vehicles of energies, my guesses were probably not far wrong.\n\nColonel Wragge, too, remained absent the greater part of the afternoon, and, deeply afflicted, had scarcely left his sister's bedside, but in response to my inquiry when we met for a moment at tea-time, he told me that although she had moments of attempted speech, her talk was quite incoherent and hysterical, and she was still quite unable to explain the nature of what she had seen. The doctor, he said, feared she had recovered the use of her limbs, only to lose that of her memory, and perhaps even of her mind.\n\n\"Then the recovery of her legs, I trust, may be permanent, at any rate,\" I ventured, finding it difficult to know what sympathy to offer. And he replied with a curious short laugh, \"Oh yes; about that there can be no doubt whatever.\"\n\nAnd it was due merely to the chance of my overhearing a fragment of conversation\u2014unwillingly, of course\u2014that a little further light was thrown upon the state in which the old lady actually lay. For, as I came out of my room, it happened that Colonel Wragge and the doctor were going downstairs together, and their words floated up to my ears before I could make my presence known by so much as a cough.\n\n\"Then you must find a way,\" the doctor was saying with decision; \"for I cannot insist too strongly upon that\u2014and at all costs she must be kept quiet. These attempts to go out must be prevented\u2014if necessary, by force. This desire to visit some wood or other she keeps talking about is, of course, hysterical in nature. It cannot be permitted for a moment.\"\n\n\"It shall not be permitted,\" I heard the soldier reply, as they reached the hall below.\n\n\"It has impressed her mind for some reason\u2014\" the doctor went on, by way evidently of soothing explanation, and then the distance made it impossible for me to hear more.\n\nAt dinner Dr. Silence was still absent, on the public plea of a headache, and though food was sent to his room, I am inclined to believe he did not touch it, but spent the entire time fasting.\n\nWe retired early, desiring that the household should do likewise, and I must confess that at ten o'clock when I bid my host a temporary good-night, and sought my room to make what mental preparation I could, I realised in no very pleasant fashion that it was a singular and formidable assignation, this midnight meeting in the laundry building, and that there were moments in every adventure of life when a wise man, and one who knew his own limitations, owed it to his dignity to withdraw discreetly. And, but for the character of our leader, I probably should have then and there offered the best excuse I could think of, and have allowed myself quietly to fall asleep and wait for an exciting story in the morning of what had happened. But with a man like John Silence, such a lapse was out of the question, and I sat before my fire counting the minutes and doing everything I could think of to fortify my resolution and fasten my will at the point where I could be reasonably sure that my self-control would hold against all attacks of men, devils, or elementals." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 384", + "text": "At a quarter before midnight, clad in a heavy ulster, and with slippered feet, I crept cautiously from my room and stole down the passage to the top of the stairs. Outside the doctor's door I waited a moment to listen. All was still; the house in utter darkness; no gleam of light beneath any door; only, down the length of the corridor, from the direction of the sick-room, came faint sounds of laughter and incoherent talk that were not things to reassure a mind already half a-tremble, and I made haste to reach the hall and let myself out through the front door into the night.\n\nThe air was keen and frosty, perfumed with night smells, and exquisitely fresh; all the million candles of the sky were alight, and a faint breeze rose and fell with far-away sighings in the tops of the pine trees. My blood leaped for a moment in the spaciousness of the night, for the splendid stars brought courage; but the next instant, as I turned the corner of the house, moving stealthily down the gravel drive, my spirits sank again ominously. For, yonder, over the funereal plumes of the Twelve Acre Plantation, I saw the broken, yellow disc of the half-moon just rising in the east, staring down like some vast Being come to watch upon the progress of our doom. Seen through the distorting vapours of the earth's atmosphere, her face looked weirdly unfamiliar, her usual expression of benignant vacancy somehow a-twist. I slipped along by the shadows of the wall, keeping my eyes upon the ground.\n\nThe laundry-house, as already described, stood detached from the other offices, with laurel shrubberies crowding thickly behind it, and the kitchen-garden so close on the other side that the strong smells of soil and growing things came across almost heavily. The shadows of the haunted plantation, hugely lengthened by the rising moon behind them, reached to the very walls and covered the stone tiles of the roof with a dark pall. So keenly were my senses alert at this moment that I believe I could fill a chapter with the endless small details of the impression I received\u2014shadows, odour, shapes, sounds\u2014in the space of the few seconds I stood and waited before the closed wooden door.\n\nThen I became aware of some one moving towards me through the moonlight, and the figure of John Silence, without overcoat and bareheaded, came quickly and without noise to join me. His eyes, I saw at once, were wonderfully bright, and so marked was the shining pallor of his face that I could hardly tell when he passed from the moonlight into the shade.\n\nHe passed without a word, beckoning me to follow, and then pushed the door open, and went in.\n\nThe chill air of the place met us like that of an underground vault; and the brick floor and whitewashed walls, streaked with damp and smoke, threw back the cold in our faces. Directly opposite gaped the black throat of the huge open fireplace, the ashes of wood fires still piled and scattered about the hearth, and on either side of the projecting chimney-column were the deep recesses holding the big twin cauldrons for boiling clothes. Upon the lids of these cauldrons stood the two little oil lamps, shaded red, which gave all the light there was, and immediately in front of the fireplace there was a small circular table with three chairs set about it. Overhead, the narrow slit windows, high up the walls, pointed to a dim network of wooden rafters half lost among the shadows, and then came the dark vault of the roof. Cheerless and unalluring, for all the red light, it certainly was, reminding me of some unused conventicle, bare of pews or pulpit, ugly and severe, and I was forcibly struck by the contrast between the normal uses to which the place was ordinarily put, and the strange and medieval purpose which had brought us under its roof tonight.\n\nPossibly an involuntary shudder ran over me, for my companion turned with a confident look to reassure me, and he was so completely master of himself that I at once absorbed from his abundance, and felt the chinks of my failing courage beginning to close up. To meet his eye in the presence of danger was like finding a mental railing that guided and supported thought along the giddy edges of alarm.\n\n\"I am quite ready,\" I whispered, turning to listen for approaching footsteps.\n\nHe nodded, still keeping his eyes on mine. Our whispers sounded hollow as they echoed overhead among the rafters.\n\n\"I'm glad you are here,\" he said. \"Not all would have the courage. Keep your thoughts controlled, and imagine the protective shell round you\u2014round your inner being.\"\n\n\"I'm all right,\" I repeated, cursing my chattering teeth.\n\nHe took my hand and shook it, and the contact seemed to shake into me something of his supreme confidence. The eyes and hands of a strong man can touch the soul. I think he guessed my thought, for a passing smile flashed about the corners of his mouth.\n\n\"You will feel more comfortable,\" he said, in a low tone, \"when the chain is complete. The Colonel we can count on, of course. Remember, though,\" he added warningly, \"he may perhaps become controlled\u2014possessed\u2014when the thing comes, because he won't know how to resist. And to explain the business to such a man\u2014!\" He shrugged his shoulders expressively. \"But it will only be temporary, and I will see that no harm comes to him.\"\n\nHe glanced round at the arrangements with approval.\n\n\"Red light,\" he said, indicating the shaded lamps, \"has the lowest rate of vibration. Materialisations are dissipated by strong light\u2014won't form, or hold together\u2014in rapid vibrations.\"\n\nI was not sure that I approved altogether of this dim light, for in complete darkness there is something protective\u2014the knowledge that one cannot be seen, probably\u2014which a half-light destroys, but I remembered the warning to keep my thoughts steady, and forbore to give them expression.\n\nThere was a step outside, and the figure of Colonel Wragge stood in the doorway. Though entering on tiptoe, he made considerable noise and clatter, for his free movements were impeded by the burden he carried, and we saw a large yellowish bowl held out at arms' length from his body, the mouth covered with a white cloth. His face, I noted, was rigidly composed. He, too, was master of himself. And, as I thought of this old soldier moving through the long series of alarms, worn with watching and wearied with assault, unenlightened yet undismayed, even down to the dreadful shock of his sister's terror, and still showing the dogged pluck that persists in the face of defeat, I understood what Dr. Silence meant when he described him as a man \"to be counted on.\"\n\nI think there was nothing beyond this rigidity of his stern features, and a certain greyness of the complexion, to betray the turmoil of the emotions that were doubtless going on within; and the quality of these two men, each in his own way, so keyed me up that, by the time the door was shut and we had exchanged silent greetings, all the latent courage I possessed was well to the fore, and I felt as sure of myself as I knew I ever could feel.\n\nColonel Wragge set the bowl carefully in the centre of the table.\n\n\"Midnight,\" he said shortly, glancing at his watch, and we all three moved to our chairs.\n\nThere, in the middle of that cold and silent place, we sat, with the vile bowl before us, and a thin, hardly perceptible steam rising through the damp air from the surface of the white cloth and disappearing upwards the moment it passed beyond the zone of red light and entered the deep shadows thrown forward by the projecting wall of chimney.\n\nThe doctor had indicated our respective places, and I found myself seated with my back to the door and opposite the black hearth. The Colonel was on my left, and Dr. Silence on my right, both half facing me, the latter more in shadow than the former. We thus divided the little table into even sections, and sitting back in our chairs we awaited events in silence.\n\nFor something like an hour I do not think there was even the faintest sound within those four walls and under the canopy of that vaulted roof. Our slippers made no scratching on the gritty floor, and our breathing was suppressed almost to nothing; even the rustle of our clothes as we shifted from time to time upon our seats was inaudible. Silence smothered us absolutely\u2014the silence of night, of listening, the silence of a haunted expectancy. The very gurgling of the lamps was too soft to be heard, and if light itself had sound, I do not think we should have noticed the silvery tread of the moonlight as it entered the high narrow windows and threw upon the floor the slender traces of its pallid footsteps.\n\nColonel Wragge and the doctor, and myself too for that matter, sat thus like figures of stone, without speech and without gesture. My eyes passed in ceaseless journeys from the bowl to their faces, and from their faces to the bowl. They might have been masks, however, for all the signs of life they gave; and the light steaming from the horrid contents beneath the white cloth had long ceased to be visible.\n\nThen presently, as the moon rose higher, the wind rose with it. It sighed, like the lightest of passing wings, over the roof; it crept most softly round the walls; it made the brick floor like ice beneath our feet. With it I saw mentally the desolate moorland flowing like a sea about the old house, the treeless expanse of lonely hills, the nearer copses, sombre and mysterious in the night. The plantation, too, in particular I saw, and imagined I heard the mournful whisperings that must now be a-stirring among its tree-tops as the breeze played down between the twisted stems. In the depth of the room behind us the shafts of moonlight met and crossed in a growing network.\n\nIt was after an hour of this wearing and unbroken attention, and I should judge about one o'clock in the morning, when the baying of the dogs in the stableyard first began, and I saw John Silence move suddenly in his chair and sit up in an attitude of attention. Every force in my being instantly leaped into the keenest vigilance. Colonel Wragge moved too, though slowly, and without raising his eyes from the table before him.\n\nThe doctor stretched his arm out and took the white cloth from the bowl.\n\nIt was perhaps imagination that persuaded me the red glare of the lamps grew fainter and the air over the table before us thickened. I had been expecting something for so long that the movement of my companions, and the lifting of the cloth, may easily have caused the momentary delusion that something hovered in the air before my face, touching the skin of my cheeks with a silken run. But it was certainly not a delusion that the Colonel looked up at the same moment and glanced over his shoulder, as though his eyes followed the movements of something to and fro about the room, and that he then buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him and his eyes sought my own face first, and then the doctor's. And it was no delusion that his face seemed somehow to have turned dark, become spread as it were with a shadowy blackness. I saw his lips tighten and his expression grow hard and stern, and it came to me then with a rush that, of course, this man had told us but a part of the experiences he had been through in the house, and that there was much more he had never been able to bring himself to reveal at all. I felt sure of it. The way he turned and stared about him betrayed a familiarity with other things than those he had described to us. It was not merely a sight of fire he looked for; it was a sight of something alive, intelligent, something able to evade his searching; it was a person. It was the watch for the ancient Being who sought to obsess him.\n\nAnd the way in which Dr. Silence answered his look\u2014though it was only by a glance of subtlest sympathy\u2014confirmed my impression.\n\n\"We may be ready now,\" I heard him say in a whisper, and I understood that his words were intended as a steadying warning, and braced myself mentally to the utmost of my power.\n\nYet long before Colonel Wragge had turned to stare about the room, and long before the doctor had confirmed my impression that things were at last beginning to stir, I had become aware in most singular fashion that the place held more than our three selves. With the rising of the wind this increase to our numbers had first taken place. The baying of the hounds almost seemed to have signalled it. I cannot say how it may be possible to realise that an empty place has suddenly become\u2014not empty, when the new arrival is nothing that appeals to any one of the senses; for this recognition of an \"invisible,\" as of the change in the balance of personal forces in a human group, is indefinable and beyond proof. Yet it is unmistakable. And I knew perfectly well at what given moment the atmosphere within these four walls became charged with the presence of other living beings besides ourselves. And, on reflection, I am convinced that both my companions knew it too.\n\n\"Watch the light,\" said the doctor under his breath, and then I knew too that it was no fancy of my own that had turned the air darker, and the way he turned to examine the face of our host sent an electric thrill of wonder and expectancy shivering along every nerve in my body.\n\nYet it was no kind of terror that I experienced, but rather a sort of mental dizziness, and a sensation as of being suspended in some remote and dreadful altitude where things might happen, indeed were about to happen, that had never before happened within the ken of man. Horror may have formed an ingredient, but it was not chiefly horror, and in no sense ghostly horror.\n\nUncommon thoughts kept beating on my brain like tiny hammers, soft yet persistent, seeking admission; their unbidden tide began to wash along the far fringes of my mind, the currents of unwonted sensations to rise over the remote frontiers of my consciousness. I was aware of thoughts, and the fantasies of thoughts, that I never knew before existed. Portions of my being stirred that had never stirred before, and things ancient and inexplicable rose to the surface and beckoned me to follow. I felt as though I were about to fly off, at some immense tangent, into an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. And so singular was the result produced upon me that I was uncommonly glad to anchor my mind, as well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the doctor at my side, for there, I realised, I could draw always upon the forces of sanity and safety.\n\nWith a vigorous effort of will I returned to the scene before me, and tried to focus my attention, with steadier thoughts, upon the table, and upon the silent figures seated round it. And then I saw that certain changes had come about in the place where we sat.\n\nThe patches of moonlight on the floor, I noted, had become curiously shaded; the faces of my companions opposite were not so clearly visible as before; and the forehead and cheeks of Colonel Wragge were glistening with perspiration. I realised further, that an extraordinary change had come about in the temperature of the atmosphere. The increased warmth had a painful effect, not alone on Colonel Wragge, but upon all of us. It was oppressive and unnatural. We gasped figuratively as well as actually.\n\n\"You are the first to feel it,\" said Dr. Silence in low tones, looking across at him. \"You are in more intimate touch, of course\u2014\"\n\nThe Colonel was trembling, and appeared to be in considerable distress. His knees shook, so that the shuffling of his slippered feet became audible. He inclined his head to show that he had heard, but made no other reply. I think, even then, he was sore put to it to keep himself in hand. I knew what he was struggling against. As Dr. Silence had warned me, he was about to be obsessed, and was savagely, though vainly, resisting.\n\nBut, meanwhile, a curious and whirling sense of exhilaration began to come over me. The increasing heat was delightful, bringing a sensation of intense activity, of thoughts pouring through the mind at high speed, of vivid pictures in the brain, of fierce desires and lightning energies alive in every part of the body. I was conscious of no physical distress, such as the Colonel felt, but only of a vague feeling that it might all grow suddenly too intense\u2014that I might be consumed\u2014that my personality as well as my body, might become resolved into the flame of pure spirit. I began to live at a speed too intense to last. It was as if a thousand ecstasies besieged me\u2014\n\n\"Steady!\" whispered the voice of John Silence in my ear, and I looked up with a start to see that the Colonel had risen from his chair. The doctor rose too. I followed suit, and for the first time saw down into the bowl. To my amazement and horror I saw that the contents were troubled. The blood was astir with movement.\n\nThe rest of the experiment was witnessed by us standing. It came, too, with a curious suddenness. There was no more dreaming, for me at any rate.\n\nI shall never forget the figure of Colonel Wragge standing there beside me, upright and unshaken, squarely planted on his feet, looking about him, puzzled beyond belief, yet full of a fighting anger. Framed by the white walls, the red glow of the lamps upon his streaming cheeks, his eyes glowing against the deathly pallor of his skin, breathing hard and making convulsive efforts of hands and body to keep himself under control, his whole being roused to the point of savage fighting, yet with nothing visible to get at anywhere\u2014he stood there, immovable against odds. And the strange contrast of the pale skin and the burning face I had never seen before, or wish to see again.\n\nBut what has left an even sharper impression on my memory was the blackness that then began crawling over his face, obliterating the features, concealing their human outline, and hiding him inch by inch from view. This was my first realisation that the process of materialisation was at work. His visage became shrouded. I moved from one side to the other to keep him in view, and it was only then I understood that, properly speaking, the blackness was not upon the countenance of Colonel Wragge, but that something had inserted itself between me and him, thus screening his face with the effect of a dark veil. Something that apparently rose through the floor was passing slowly into the air above the table and above the bowl. The blood in the bowl, moreover, was considerably less than before.\n\nAnd, with this change in the air before us, there came at the same time a further change, I thought, in the face of the soldier. One-half was turned towards the red lamps, while the other caught the pale illumination of the moonlight falling aslant from the high windows, so that it was difficult to estimate this change with accuracy of detail. But it seemed to me that, while the features\u2014eyes, nose, mouth\u2014remained the same, the life informing them had undergone some profound transformation. The signature of a new power had crept into the face and left its traces there\u2014an expression dark, and in some unexplained way, terrible.\n\nThen suddenly he opened his mouth and spoke, and the sound of this changed voice, deep and musical though it was, made me cold and set my heart beating with uncomfortable rapidity. The Being, as he had dreaded, was already in control of his brain, using his mouth.\n\n\"I see a blackness like the blackness of Egypt before my face,\" said the tones of this unknown voice that seemed half his own and half another's. \"And out of this darkness they come, they come.\"\n\nI gave a dreadful start. The doctor turned to look at me for an instant, and then turned to centre his attention upon the figure of our host, and I understood in some intuitive fashion that he was there to watch over the strangest contest man ever saw\u2014to watch over and, if necessary, to protect.\n\n\"He is being controlled\u2014possessed,\" he whispered to me through the shadows. His face wore a wonderful expression, half triumph, half admiration.\n\nEven as Colonel Wragge spoke, it seemed to me that this visible darkness began to increase, pouring up thickly out of the ground by the hearth, rising up in sheets and veils, shrouding our eyes and faces. It stole up from below\u2014an awful blackness that seemed to drink in all the radiations of light in the building, leaving nothing but the ghost of a radiance in their place. Then, out of this rising sea of shadows, issued a pale and spectral light that gradually spread itself about us, and from the heart of this light I saw the shapes of fire crowd and gather. And these were not human shapes, or the shapes of anything I recognised as alive in the world, but outlines of fire that traced globes, triangles, crosses, and the luminous bodies of various geometrical figures. They grew bright, faded, and then grew bright again with an effect almost of pulsation. They passed swiftly to and fro through the air, rising and falling, and particularly in the immediate neighbourhood of the Colonel, often gathering about his head and shoulders, and even appearing to settle upon him like giant insects of flame. They were accompanied, moreover, by a faint sound of hissing\u2014the same sound we had heard that afternoon in the plantation.\n\n\"The fire-elementals that precede their master,\" the doctor said in an undertone. \"Be ready.\"\n\nAnd while this weird display of the shapes of fire alternately flashed and faded, and the hissing echoed faintly among the dim rafters overhead, we heard the awful voice issue at intervals from the lips of the afflicted soldier. It was a voice of power, splendid in some way I cannot describe, and with a certain sense of majesty in its cadences, and, as I listened to it with quickly beating heart, I could fancy it was some ancient voice of Time itself, echoing down immense corridors of stone, from the depths of vast temples, from the very heart of mountain tombs.\n\n\"I have seen my divine Father, Osiris,\" thundered the great tones. \"I have scattered the gloom of the night. I have burst through the earth, and am one with the starry Deities!\"\n\nSomething grand came into the soldier's face. He was staring fixedly before him, as though seeing nothing.\n\n\"Watch,\" whispered Dr. Silence in my ear, and his whisper seemed to come from very far away.\n\nAgain the mouth opened and the awesome voice issued forth.\n\n\"Thoth,\" it boomed, \"has loosened the bandages of Set which fettered my mouth. I have taken my place in the great winds of heaven.\"\n\nI heard the little wind of night, with its mournful voice of ages, sighing round the walls and over the roof.\n\n\"Listen!\" came from the doctor at my side, and the thunder of the voice continued\u2014\n\n\"I have hidden myself with you, O ye stars that never diminish. I remember my name\u2014in\u2014the\u2014House\u2014of\u2014Fire!\"\n\nThe voice ceased and the sound died away. Something about the face and figure of Colonel Wragge relaxed, I thought. The terrible look passed from his face. The Being that obsessed him was gone.\n\n\"The great Ritual,\" said Dr. Silence aside to me, very low, \"the Book of the Dead. Now it's leaving him. Soon the blood will fashion it a body.\"\n\nColonel Wragge, who had stood absolutely motionless all this time, suddenly swayed, so that I thought he was going to fall,\u2014and, but for the quick support of the doctor's arm, he probably would have fallen, for he staggered as in the beginning of collapse.\n\n\"I am drunk with the wine of Osiris,\" he cried,\u2014and it was half with his own voice this time\u2014\"but Horus, the Eternal Watcher, is about my path\u2014for\u2014safety.\" The voice dwindled and failed, dying away into something almost like a cry of distress.\n\n\"Now, watch closely,\" said Dr. Silence, speaking loud, \"for after the cry will come the Fire!\"\n\nI began to tremble involuntarily; an awful change had come without warning into the air; my legs grew weak as paper beneath my weight and I had to support myself by leaning on the table. Colonel Wragge, I saw, was also leaning forward with a kind of droop. The shapes of fire had vanished all, but his face was lit by the red lamps and the pale, shifting moonlight rose behind him like mist.\n\nWe were both gazing at the bowl, now almost empty; the Colonel stooped so low I feared every minute he would lose his balance and drop into it; and the shadow, that had so long been in process of forming, now at length began to assume material outline in the air before us.\n\nThen John Silence moved forward quickly. He took his place between us and the shadow. Erect, formidable, absolute master of the situation, I saw him stand there, his face calm and almost smiling, and fire in his eyes. His protective influence was astounding and incalculable. Even the abhorrent dread I felt at the sight of the creature growing into life and substance before us, lessened in some way so that I was able to keep my eyes fixed on the air above the bowl without too vivid a terror.\n\nBut as it took shape, rising out of nothing as it were, and growing momentarily more defined in outline, a period of utter and wonderful silence settled down upon the building and all it contained. A hush of ages, like the sudden centre of peace at the heart of the travelling cyclone, descended through the night, and out of this hush, as out of the emanations of the steaming blood, issued the form of the ancient being who had first sent the elemental of fire upon its mission. It grew and darkened and solidified before our eyes. It rose from just beyond the table so that the lower portions remained invisible, but I saw the outline limn itself upon the air, as though slowly revealed by the rising of a curtain. It apparently had not then quite concentrated to the normal proportions, but was spread out on all sides into space, huge, though rapidly condensing, for I saw the colossal shoulders, the neck, the lower portion of the dark jaws, the terrible mouth, and then the teeth and lips\u2014and, as the veil seemed to lift further upon the tremendous face\u2014I saw the nose and cheek bones. In another moment I should have looked straight into the eyes\u2014\n\nBut what Dr. Silence did at that moment was so unexpected, and took me so by surprise, that I have never yet properly understood its nature, and he has never yet seen fit to explain in detail to me. He uttered some sound that had a note of command in it\u2014and, in so doing, stepped forward and intervened between me and the face. The figure, just nearing completeness, he therefore hid from my sight\u2014and I have always thought purposely hid from my sight.\n\n\"The fire!\" he cried out. \"The fire! Beware!\"\n\nThere was a sudden roar as of flame from the very mouth of the pit, and for the space of a single second all grew light as day. A blinding flash passed across my face, and there was heat for an instant that seemed to shrivel skin, and flesh, and bone. Then came steps, and I heard Colonel Wragge utter a great cry, wilder than any human cry I have ever known. The heat sucked all the breath out of my lungs with a rush, and the blaze of light, as it vanished, swept my vision with it into enveloping darkness.\n\nWhen I recovered the use of my senses a few moments later I saw that Colonel Wragge with a face of death, its whiteness strangely stained, had moved closer to me. Dr. Silence stood beside him, an expression of triumph and success in his eyes. The next minute the soldier tried to clutch me with his hand. Then he reeled, staggered, and, unable to save himself, fell with a great crash upon the brick floor.\n\nAfter the sheet of flame, a wind raged round the building as though it would lift the roof off, but then passed as suddenly as it came. And in the intense calm that followed I saw that the form had vanished, and the doctor was stooping over Colonel Wragge upon the floor, trying to lift him to a sitting position.\n\n\"Light,\" he said quietly, \"more light. Take the shades off.\"\n\nColonel Wragge sat up and the glare of the unshaded lamps fell upon his face. It was grey and drawn, still running heat, and there was a look in the eyes and about the corners of the mouth that seemed in this short space of time to have added years to its age. At the same time, the expression of effort and anxiety had left it. It showed relief.\n\n\"Gone!\" he said, looking up at the doctor in a dazed fashion, and struggling to his feet. \"Thank God! it's gone at last.\" He stared round the laundry as though to find out where he was. \"Did it control me\u2014take possession of me? Did I talk nonsense?\" he asked bluntly. \"After the heat came, I remember nothing\u2014\"\n\n\"You'll feel yourself again in a few minutes,\" the doctor said. To my infinite horror I saw that he was surreptitiously wiping sundry dark stains from the face. \"Our experiment has been a success and\u2014\"\n\nHe gave me a swift glance to hide the bowl, standing between me and our host while I hurriedly stuffed it down under the lid of the nearest cauldron.\n\n\"\u2014and none of us the worse for it,\" he finished.\n\n\"And fires?\" he asked, still dazed, \"there'll be no more fires?\"\n\n\"It is dissipated\u2014partly, at any rate,\" replied Dr. Silence cautiously.\n\n\"And the man behind the gun,\" he went on, only half realising what he was saying, I think; \"have you discovered that?\"\n\n\"A form materialised,\" said the doctor briefly. \"I know for certain now what the directing intelligence was behind it all.\"\n\nColonel Wragge pulled himself together and got upon his feet. The words conveyed no clear meaning to him yet. But his memory was returning gradually, and he was trying to piece together the fragments into a connected whole. He shivered a little, for the place had grown suddenly chilly. The air was empty again, lifeless.\n\n\"You feel all right again now,\" Dr. Silence said, in the tone of a man stating a fact rather than asking a question.\n\n\"Thanks to you\u2014both, yes.\" He drew a deep breath, and mopped his face, and even attempted a smile. He made me think of a man coming from the battlefield with the stains of fighting still upon him, but scornful of his wounds. Then he turned gravely towards the doctor with a question in his eyes. Memory had returned and he was himself again.\n\n\"Precisely what I expected,\" the doctor said calmly; \"a fire-elemental sent upon its mission in the days of Thebes, centuries before Christ, and tonight, for the first time all these thousands of years, released from the spell that originally bound it.\"\n\nWe stared at him in amazement, Colonel Wragge opening his lips for words that refused to shape themselves.\n\n\"And, if we dig,\" he continued significantly, pointing to the floor where the blackness had poured up, \"we shall find some underground connection\u2014a tunnel most likely\u2014leading to the Twelve Acre Wood. It was made by\u2014your predecessor.\"\n\n\"A tunnel made by my brother!\" gasped the soldier. \"Then my sister should know\u2014she lived here with him\u2014\" He stopped suddenly.\n\nJohn Silence inclined his head slowly. \"I think so,\" he said quietly. \"Your brother, no doubt, was as much tormented as you have been,\" he continued after a pause in which Colonel Wragge seemed deeply preoccupied with his thoughts, \"and tried to find peace by burying it in the wood, and surrounding the wood then, like a large magic circle, with the enchantments of the old formulae. So the stars the man saw blazing\u2014\"\n\n\"But burying what?\" asked the soldier faintly, stepping backwards towards the support of the wall.\n\nDr. Silence regarded us both intently for a moment before he replied. I think he weighed in his mind whether to tell us now, or when the investigation was absolutely complete.\n\n\"The mummy,\" he said softly, after a moment; \"the mummy that your brother took from its resting place of centuries, and brought home\u2014here.\"\n\nColonel Wragge dropped down upon the nearest chair, hanging breathlessly on every word. He was far too amazed for speech.\n\n\"The mummy of some important person\u2014a priest most likely\u2014protected from disturbance and desecration by the ceremonial magic of the time. For they understood how to attach to the mummy, to lock up with it in the tomb, an elemental force that would direct itself even after ages upon any one who dared to molest it. In this case it was an elemental of fire.\"\n\nDr. Silence crossed the floor and turned out the lamps one by one. He had nothing more to say for the moment. Following his example, I folded the table together and took up the chairs, and our host, still dazed and silent, mechanically obeyed him and moved to the door.\n\nWe removed all traces of the experiment, taking the empty bowl back to the house concealed beneath an ulster.\n\nThe air was cool and fragrant as we walked to the house, the stars beginning to fade overhead and a fresh wind of early morning blowing up out of the east where the sky was already hinting of the coming day. It was after five o'clock.\n\nStealthily we entered the front hall and locked the door, and as we went on tiptoe upstairs to our rooms, the Colonel, peering at us over his candle as he nodded good-night, whispered that if we were ready the digging should be begun that very day.\n\nThen I saw him steal along to his sister's room and disappear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 385", + "text": "But not even the mysterious references to the mummy, or the prospect of a revelation by digging, were able to hinder the reaction that followed the intense excitement of the past twelve hours, and I slept the sleep of the dead, dreamless and undisturbed. A touch on the shoulder woke me, and I saw Dr. Silence standing beside the bed, dressed to go out.\n\n\"Come,\" he said, \"it's tea-time. You've slept the best part of a dozen hours.\"\n\nI sprang up and made a hurried toilet, while my companion sat and talked. He looked fresh and rested, and his manner was even quieter than usual.\n\n\"Colonel Wragge has provided spades and pickaxes. We're going out to unearth this mummy at once,\" he said; \"and there's no reason we should not get away by the morning train.\"\n\n\"I'm ready to go tonight, if you are,\" I said honestly.\n\nBut Dr. Silence shook his head.\n\n\"I must see this through to the end,\" he said gravely, and in a tone that made me think he still anticipated serious things, perhaps. He went on talking while I dressed.\n\n\"This case is really typical of all stories of mummy-haunting, and none of them are cases to trifle with,\" he explained, \"for the mummies of important people\u2014kings, priests, magicians\u2014were laid away with profoundly significant ceremonial, and were very effectively protected, as you have seen, against desecration, and especially against destruction.\n\n\"The general belief,\" he went on, anticipating my questions, \"held, of course, that the perpetuity of the mummy guaranteed that of its Ka,\u2014the owner's spirit,\u2014but it is not improbable that the magical embalming was also used to retard reincarnation, the preservation of the body preventing the return of the spirit to the toil and discipline of earth-life; and, in any case, they knew how to attach powerful guardian-forces to keep off trespassers. And any one who dared to remove the mummy, or especially to unwind it\u2014well,\" he added, with meaning, \"you have seen\u2014and you will see.\"\n\nI caught his face in the mirror while I struggled with my collar. It was deeply serious. There could be no question that he spoke of what he believed and knew.\n\n\"The traveller-brother who brought it here must have been haunted too,\" he continued, \"for he tried to banish it by burial in the wood, making a magic circle to enclose it. Something of genuine ceremonial he must have known, for the stars the man saw were of course the remains of the still flaming pentagrams he traced at intervals in the circle. Only he did not know enough, or possibly was ignorant that the mummy's guardian was a fire-force. Fire cannot be enclosed by fire, though, as you saw, it can be released by it.\"\n\n\"Then that awful figure in the laundry?\" I asked, thrilled to find him so communicative.\n\n\"Undoubtedly the actual Ka of the mummy operating always behind its agent, the elemental, and most likely thousands of years old.\"\n\n\"And Miss Wragge\u2014?\" I ventured once more.\n\n\"Ah, Miss Wragge,\" he repeated with increased gravity, \"Miss Wragge\u2014\"\n\nA knock at the door brought a servant with word that tea was ready, and the Colonel had sent to ask if we were coming down. The thread was broken. Dr. Silence moved to the door and signed to me to follow. But his manner told me that in any case no real answer would have been forthcoming to my question.\n\n\"And the place to dig in,\" I asked, unable to restrain my curiosity, \"will you find it by some process of divination or\u2014?\"\n\nHe paused at the door and looked back at me, and with that he left me to finish my dressing.\n\nIt was growing dark when the three of us silently made our way to the Twelve Acre Plantation; the sky was overcast, and a black wind came out of the east. Gloom hung about the old house and the air seemed full of sighings. We found the tools ready laid at the edge of the wood, and each shouldering his piece, we followed our leader at once in among the trees. He went straight forward for some twenty yards and then stopped. At his feet lay the blackened circle of one of the burned places. It was just discernible against the surrounding white grass.\n\n\"There are three of these,\" he said, \"and they all lie in a line with one another. Any one of them will tap the tunnel that connects the laundry\u2014the former Museum\u2014with the chamber where the mummy now lies buried.\"\n\nHe at once cleared away the burnt grass and began to dig; we all began to dig. While I used the pick, the others shovelled vigorously. No one spoke. Colonel Wragge worked the hardest of the three. The soil was light and sandy, and there were only a few snake-like roots and occasional loose stones to delay us. The pick made short work of these. And meanwhile the darkness settled about us and the biting wind swept roaring through the trees overhead.\n\nThen, quite suddenly, without a cry, Colonel Wragge disappeared up to his neck.\n\n\"The tunnel!\" cried the doctor, helping to drag him out, red, breathless, and covered with sand and perspiration. \"Now, let me lead the way.\" And he slipped down nimbly into the hole, so that a moment later we heard his voice, muffled by sand and distance, rising up to us.\n\n\"Hubbard, you come next, and then Colonel Wragge\u2014if he wishes,\" we heard.\n\n\"I'll follow you, of course,\" he said, looking at me as I scrambled in.\n\nThe hole was bigger now, and I got down on all-fours in a channel not much bigger than a large sewer-pipe and found myself in total darkness. A minute later a heavy thud, followed by a cataract of loose sand, announced the arrival of the Colonel.\n\n\"Catch hold of my heel,\" called Dr. Silence, \"and Colonel Wragge can take yours.\"\n\nIn this slow, laborious fashion we wormed our way along a tunnel that had been roughly dug out of the shifting sand, and was shored up clumsily by means of wooden pillars and posts. Any moment, it seemed to me, we might be buried alive. We could not see an inch before our eyes, but had to grope our way feeling the pillars and the walls. It was difficult to breathe, and the Colonel behind me made but slow progress, for the cramped position of our bodies was very severe.\n\nWe had travelled in this way for ten minutes, and gone perhaps as much as ten yards, when I lost my grasp of the doctor's heel.\n\n\"Ah!\" I heard his voice, sounding above me somewhere. He was standing up in a clear space, and the next moment I was standing beside him. Colonel Wragge came heavily after, and he too rose up and stood. Then Dr. Silence produced his candles and we heard preparations for striking matches.\n\nYet even before there was light, an indefinable sensation of awe came over us all. In this hole in the sand, some three feet under ground, we stood side by side, cramped and huddled, struck suddenly with an over whelming apprehension of something ancient, something formidable, something incalculably wonderful, that touched in each one of us a sense of the sublime and the terrible even before we could see an inch before our faces. I know not how to express in language this singular emotion that caught us here in utter darkness, touching no sense directly, it seemed, yet with the recognition that before us in the blackness of this underground night there lay something that was mighty with the mightiness of long past ages.\n\nI felt Colonel Wragge press in closely to my side, and I understood the pressure and welcomed it. No human touch, to me at least, has ever been more eloquent.\n\nThen the match flared, a thousand shadows fled on black wings, and I saw John Silence fumbling with the candle, his face lit up grotesquely by the flickering light below it.\n\nI had dreaded this light, yet when it came there was apparently nothing to explain the profound sensations of dread that preceded it. We stood in a small vaulted chamber in the sand, the sides and roof shored with bars of wood, and the ground laid roughly with what seemed to be tiles. It was six feet high, so that we could all stand comfortably, and may have been ten feet long by eight feet wide. Upon the wooden pillars at the side I saw that Egyptian hieroglyphics had been rudely traced by burning.\n\nDr. Silence lit three candles and handed one to each of us. He placed a fourth in the sand against the wall on his right, and another to mark the entrance to the tunnel. We stood and stared about us, instinctively holding our breath.\n\n\"Empty, by God!\" exclaimed Colonel Wragge. His voice trembled with excitement. And then, as his eyes rested on the ground, he added, \"And footsteps\u2014look\u2014footsteps in the sand!\"\n\nDr. Silence said nothing. He stooped down and began to make a search of the chamber, and as he moved, my eyes followed his crouching figure and noted the queer distorted shadows that poured over the walls and ceiling after him. Here and there thin trickles of loose sand ran fizzing down the sides. The atmosphere, heavily charged with faint yet pungent odours, lay utterly still, and the flames of the candles might have been painted on the air for all the movement they betrayed.\n\nAnd, as I watched, it was almost necessary to persuade myself forcibly that I was only standing upright with difficulty in this little sand-hole of a modern garden in the south of England, for it seemed to me that I stood, as in vision, at the entrance of some vast rock-hewn Temple far, far down the river of Time. The illusion was powerful, and persisted. Granite columns, that rose to heaven, piled themselves about me, majestically uprearing, and a roof like the sky itself spread above a line of colossal figures that moved in shadowy procession along endless and stupendous aisles. This huge and splendid fantasy, borne I knew not whence, possessed me so vividly that I was actually obliged to concentrate my attention upon the small stooping figure of the doctor, as he groped about the walls, in order to keep the eye of imagination on the scene before me.\n\nBut the limited space rendered a long search out of the question, and his footsteps, instead of shuffling through loose sand, presently struck something of a different quality that gave forth a hollow and resounding echo. He stooped to examine more closely.\n\nHe was standing exactly in the centre of the little chamber when this happened, and he at once began scraping away the sand with his feet. In less than a minute a smooth surface became visible\u2014the surface of a wooden covering. The next thing I saw was that he had raised it and was peering down into a space below. Instantly, a strong odour of nitre and bitumen, mingled with the strange perfume of unknown and powdered aromatics, rose up from the uncovered space and filled the vault, stinging the throat and making the eyes water and smart.\n\n\"The mummy!\" whispered Dr. Silence, looking up into our faces over his candle; and as he said the word I felt the soldier lurch against me, and heard his breathing in my very ear.\n\n\"The mummy!\" he repeated under his breath, as we pressed forward to look.\n\nIt is difficult to say exactly why the sight should have stirred in me so prodigious an emotion of wonder and veneration, for I have had not a little to do with mummies, have unwound scores of them, and even experimented magically with not a few. But there was something in the sight of that grey and silent figure, lying in its modern box of lead and wood at the bottom of this sandy grave, swathed in the bandages of centuries and wrapped in the perfumed linen that the priests of Egypt had prayed over with their mighty enchantments thousands of years before\u2014something in the sight of it lying there and breathing its own spice-laden atmosphere even in the darkness of its exile in this remote land, something that pierced to the very core of my being and touched that root of awe which slumbers in every man near the birth of tears and the passion of true worship.\n\nI remember turning quickly from the Colonel, lest he should see my emotion, yet fail to understand its cause, turn and clutch John Silence by the arm, and then fall trembling to see that he, too, had lowered his head and was hiding his face in his hands.\n\nA kind of whirling storm came over me, rising out of I know not what utter deeps of memory, and in a whiteness of vision I heard the magical old chauntings from the Book of the Dead, and saw the Gods pass by in dim procession, the mighty, immemorial Beings who were yet themselves only the personified attributes of the true Gods, the God with the Eyes of Fire, the God with the Face of Smoke. I saw again Anubis, the dog-faced deity, and the children of Horus, eternal watcher of the ages, as they swathed Osiris, the first mummy of the world, in the scented and mystic bands, and I tasted again something of the ecstasy of the justified soul as it embarked in the golden Boat of Ra, and journeyed onwards to rest in the fields of the blessed.\n\nAnd then, as Dr. Silence, with infinite reverence, stooped and touched the still face, so dreadfully staring with its painted eyes, there rose again to our nostrils wave upon wave of this perfume of thousands of years, and time fled backwards like a thing of naught, showing me in haunted panorama the most wonderful dream of the whole world.\n\nA gentle hissing became audible in the air, and the doctor moved quickly backwards. It came close to our faces and then seemed to play about the walls and ceiling.\n\n\"The last of the Fire\u2014still waiting for its full accomplishment,\" he muttered; but I heard both words and hissing as things far away, for I was still busy with the journey of the soul through the Seven Halls of Death, listening for echoes of the grandest ritual ever known to men.\n\nThe earthen plates covered with hieroglyphics still lay beside the mummy, and round it, carefully arranged at the points of the compass, stood the four jars with the heads of the hawk, the jackal, the cynocephalus, and man, the jars in which were placed the hair, the nail parings, the heart, and other special portions of the body. Even the amulets, the mirror, the blue clay statues of the Ka, and the lamp with seven wicks were there. Only the sacred scarabaeus was missing.\n\n\"Not only has it been torn from its ancient resting-place,\" I heard Dr. Silence saying in a solemn voice as he looked at Colonel Wragge with fixed gaze, \"but it has been partially unwound,\"\u2014he pointed to the wrappings of the breast,\u2014\"and\u2014the scarabaeus has been removed from the throat.\"\n\nThe hissing, that was like the hissing of an invisible flame, had ceased; only from time to time we heard it as though it passed backwards and forwards in the tunnel; and we stood looking into each other's faces without speaking.\n\nPresently Colonel Wragge made a great effort and braced himself. I heard the sound catch in his throat before the words actually became audible.\n\n\"My sister,\" he said, very low. And then there followed a long pause, broken at length by John Silence.\n\n\"It must be replaced,\" he said significantly.\n\n\"I knew nothing,\" the soldier said, forcing himself to speak the words he hated saying. \"Absolutely nothing.\"\n\n\"It must be returned,\" repeated the other, \"if it is not now too late. For I fear\u2014I fear\u2014\"\n\nColonel Wragge made a movement of assent with his head.\n\n\"It shall be,\" he said.\n\nThe place was still as the grave.\n\nI do not know what it was then that made us all three turn round with so sudden a start, for there was no sound audible to my ears, at least.\n\nThe doctor was on the point of replacing the lid over the mummy, when he straightened up as if he had been shot.\n\n\"There's something coming,\" said Colonel Wragge under his breath, and the doctor's eyes, peering down the small opening of the tunnel, showed me the true direction.\n\nA distant shuffling noise became distinctly audible coming from a point about half-way down the tunnel we had so laboriously penetrated.\n\n\"It's the sand falling in,\" I said, though I knew it was foolish.\n\n\"No,\" said the Colonel calmly, in a voice that seemed to have the ring of iron, \"I've heard it for some time past. It is something alive\u2014and it is coming nearer.\"\n\nHe stared about him with a look of resolution that made his face almost noble. The horror in his heart was overmastering, yet he stood there prepared for anything that might come.\n\n\"There's no other way out,\" John Silence said.\n\nHe leaned the lid against the sand, and waited. I knew by the masklike expression of his face, the pallor, and the steadiness of the eyes, that he anticipated something that might be very terrible\u2014appalling.\n\nThe Colonel and myself stood on either side of the opening. I still held my candle and was ashamed of the way it shook, dripping the grease all over me; but the soldier had set his into the sand just behind his feet.\n\nThoughts of being buried alive, of being smothered like rats in a trap, of being caught and done to death by some invisible and merciless force we could not grapple with, rushed into my mind. Then I thought of fire\u2014of suffocation\u2014of being roasted alive. The perspiration began to pour from my face.\n\n\"Steady!\" came the voice of Dr. Silence to me through the vault.\n\nFor five minutes, that seemed fifty, we stood waiting, looking from each other's faces to the mummy, and from the mummy to the hole, and all the time the shuffling sound, soft and stealthy, came gradually nearer. The tension, for me at least, was very near the breaking point when at last the cause of the disturbance reached the edge. It was hidden for a moment just behind the broken rim of soil. A jet of sand, shaken by the close vibration, trickled down on to the ground; I have never in my life seen anything fall with such laborious leisure. The next second, uttering a cry of curious quality, it came into view.\n\nAnd it was far more distressingly horrible than anything I had anticipated.\n\nFor the sight of some Egyptian monster, some god of the tombs, or even of some demon of fire, I think I was already half prepared; but when, instead, I saw the white visage of Miss Wragge framed in that round opening of sand, followed by her body crawling on all fours, her eyes bulging and reflecting the yellow glare of the candles, my first instinct was to turn and run like a frantic animal seeking a way of escape.\n\nBut Dr. Silence, who seemed no whit surprised, caught my arm and steadied me, and we both saw the Colonel then drop upon his knees and come thus to a level with his sister. For more than a whole minute, as though struck in stone, the two faces gazed silently at each other: hers, for all the dreadful emotion in it, more like a gargoyle than anything human; and his, white and blank with an expression that was beyond either astonishment or alarm. She looked up; he looked down. It was a picture in a nightmare, and the candle, stuck in the sand close to the hole, threw upon it the glare of impromptu footlights.\n\nThen John Silence moved forward and spoke in a voice that was very low, yet perfectly calm and natural.\n\n\"I am glad you have come,\" he said. \"You are the one person whose presence at this moment is most required. And I hope that you may yet be in time to appease the anger of the Fire, and to bring peace again to your household, and,\" he added lower still so that no one heard it but myself, \"safety to yourself.\"\n\nAnd while her brother stumbled backwards, crushing a candle into the sand in his awkwardness, the old lady crawled farther into the vaulted chamber and slowly rose upon her feet.\n\nAt the sight of the wrapped figure of the mummy I was fully prepared to see her scream and faint, but on the contrary, to my complete amazement, she merely bowed her head and dropped quietly upon her knees. Then, after a pause of more than a minute, she raised her eyes to the roof and her lips began to mutter as in prayer. Her right hand, meanwhile, which had been fumbling for some time at her throat suddenly came away, and before the gaze of all of us she held it out, palm upwards, over the grey and ancient figure outstretched below. And in it we beheld glistening the green jasper of the stolen scarabaeus.\n\nHer brother, leaning heavily against the wall behind, uttered a sound that was half cry, half exclamation, but John Silence, standing directly in front of her, merely fixed his eyes on her and pointed downwards to the staring face below.\n\n\"Replace it,\" he said sternly, \"where it belongs.\"\n\nMiss Wragge was kneeling at the feet of the mummy when this happened. We three men all had our eyes riveted on what followed. Only the reader who by some remote chance may have witnessed a line of mummies, freshly laid from their tombs upon the sand, slowly stir and bend as the heat of the Egyptian sun warms their ancient bodies into the semblance of life, can form any conception of the ultimate horror we experienced when the silent figure before us moved in its grave of lead and sand. Slowly, before our eyes, it writhed, and, with a faint rustling of the immemorial cerements, rose up, and, through sightless and bandaged eyes, stared across the yellow candlelight at the woman who had violated it.\n\nI tried to move\u2014her brother tried to move\u2014but the sand seemed to hold our feet. I tried to cry\u2014her brother tried to cry\u2014but the sand seemed to fill our lungs and throat. We could only stare\u2014and, even so, the sand seemed to rise like a desert storm and cloud our vision...\n\nAnd when I managed at length to open my eyes again, the mummy was lying once more upon its back, motionless, the shrunken and painted face upturned towards the ceiling, and the old lady had tumbled forward and was lying in the semblance of death with her head and arms upon its crumbling body.\n\nBut upon the wrappings of the throat I saw the green jasper of the sacred scarabaeus shining again like a living eye.\n\nColonel Wragge and the doctor recovered themselves long before I did, and I found myself helping them clumsily and unintelligently to raise the frail body of the old lady, while John Silence carefully replaced the covering over the grave and scraped back the sand with his foot, while he issued brief directions.\n\nI heard his voice as in a dream; but the journey back along that cramped tunnel, weighted by a dead woman, blinded with sand, suffocated with heat, was in no sense a dream. It took us the best part of half an hour to reach the open air. And, even then, we had to wait a considerable time for the appearance of Dr. Silence. We carried her undiscovered into the house and up to her own room.\n\n\"The mummy will cause no further disturbance,\" I heard Dr. Silence say to our host later that evening as we prepared to drive for the night train, \"provided always,\" he added significantly, \"that you, and yours, cause it no disturbance.\"\n\nIt was in a dream, too, that we left.\n\n\"You did not see her face, I know,\" he said to me as we wrapped our rugs about us in the empty compartment. And when I shook my head, quite unable to explain the instinct that had come to me not to look, he turned toward me, his face pale, and genuinely sad.\n\n\"Scorched and blasted,\" he whispered.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Secret Worship ]\n\nHarris, the silk merchant, was in South Germany on his way home from a business trip when the idea came to him suddenly that he would take the mountain railway from Strassbourg and run down to revisit his old school after an interval of something more than thirty years. And it was to this chance impulse of the junior partner in Harris Brothers of St. Paul's Churchyard that John Silence owed one of the most curious cases of his whole experience, for at that very moment he happened to be tramping these same mountains with a holiday knapsack, and from different points of the compass the two men were actually converging towards the same inn.\n\nNow, deep down in the heart that for thirty years had been concerned chiefly with the profitable buying and selling of silk, this school had left the imprint of its peculiar influence, and, though perhaps unknown to Harris, had strongly coloured the whole of his subsequent existence. It belonged to the deeply religious life of a small Protestant community (which it is unnecessary to specify), and his father had sent him there at the age of fifteen, partly because he would learn the German requisite for the conduct of the silk business, and partly because the discipline was strict, and discipline was what his soul and body needed just then more than anything else.\n\nThe life, indeed, had proved exceedingly severe, and young Harris benefited accordingly; for though corporal punishment was unknown, there was a system of mental and spiritual correction which somehow made the soul stand proudly erect to receive it, while it struck at the very root of the fault and taught the boy that his character was being cleaned and strengthened, and that he was not merely being tortured in a kind of personal revenge.\n\nThat was over thirty years ago, when he was a dreamy and impressionable youth of fifteen; and now, as the train climbed slowly up the winding mountain gorges, his mind travelled back somewhat lovingly over the intervening period, and forgotten details rose vividly again before him out of the shadows. The life there had been very wonderful, it seemed to him, in that remote mountain village, protected from the tumults of the world by the love and worship of the devout Brotherhood that ministered to the needs of some hundred boys from every country in Europe. Sharply the scenes came back to him. He smelt again the long stone corridors, the hot pinewood rooms, where the sultry hours of summer study were passed with bees droning through open windows in the sunshine, and German characters struggling in the mind with dreams of English lawns\u2014and then the sudden awful cry of the master in German\u2014\n\n\"Harris, stand up! You sleep!\"\n\nAnd he recalled the dreadful standing motionless for an hour, book in hand, while the knees felt like wax and the head grew heavier than a cannon-ball.\n\nThe very smell of the cooking came back to him\u2014the daily Sauerkraut, the watery chocolate on Sundays, the flavour of the stringy meat served twice a week at Mittagessen; and he smiled to think again of the half-rations that was the punishment for speaking English. The very odour of the milk-bowls,\u2014the hot sweet aroma that rose from the soaking peasant-bread at the six-o'clock breakfast,\u2014came back to him pungently, and he saw the huge Speisesaal with the hundred boys in their school uniform, all eating sleepily in silence, gulping down the coarse bread and scalding milk in terror of the bell that would presently cut them short\u2014and, at the far end where the masters sat, he saw the narrow slit windows with the vistas of enticing field and forest beyond.\n\nAnd this, in turn, made him think of the great barnlike room on the top floor where all slept together in wooden cots, and he heard in memory the clamour of the cruel bell that woke them on winter mornings at five o'clock and summoned them to the stone-flagged Waschkammer, where boys and masters alike, after scanty and icy washing, dressed in complete silence.\n\nFrom this his mind passed swiftly, with vivid picture-thoughts, to other things, and with a passing shiver he remembered how the loneliness of never being alone had eaten into him, and how everything\u2014work, meals, sleep, walks, leisure\u2014was done with his \"division\" of twenty other boys and under the eyes of at least two masters. The only solitude possible was by asking for half an hour's practice in the cell-like music rooms, and Harris smiled to himself as he recalled the zeal of his violin studies.\n\nThen, as the train puffed laboriously through the great pine forests that cover these mountains with a giant carpet of velvet, he found the pleasanter layers of memory giving up their dead, and he recalled with admiration the kindness of the masters, whom all addressed as Brother, and marvelled afresh at their devotion in burying themselves for years in such a place, only to leave it, in most cases, for the still rougher life of missionaries in the wild places of the world.\n\nHe thought once more of the still, religious atmosphere that hung over the little forest community like a veil, barring the distressful world; of the picturesque ceremonies at Easter, Christmas, and New Year; of the numerous feast-days and charming little festivals. The Beschehr-Fest, in particular, came back to him,\u2014the feast of gifts at Christmas,\u2014when the entire community paired off and gave presents, many of which had taken weeks to make or the savings of many days to purchase. And then he saw the midnight ceremony in the church at New Year, with the shining face of the Prediger in the pulpit,\u2014the village preacher who, on the last night of the old year, saw in the empty gallery beyond the organ loft the faces of all who were to die in the ensuing twelve months, and who at last recognised himself among them, and, in the very middle of his sermon, passed into a state of rapt ecstasy and burst into a torrent of praise.\n\nThickly the memories crowded upon him. The picture of the small village dreaming its unselfish life on the mountain-tops, clean, wholesome, simple, searching vigorously for its God, and training hundreds of boys in the grand way, rose up in his mind with all the power of an obsession. He felt once more the old mystical enthusiasm, deeper than the sea and more wonderful than the stars; he heard again the winds sighing from leagues of forest over the red roofs in the moonlight; he heard the Brothers' voices talking of the things beyond this life as though they had actually experienced them in the body; and, as he sat in the jolting train, a spirit of unutterable longing passed over his seared and tired soul, stirring in the depths of him a sea of emotions that he thought had long since frozen into immobility.\n\nAnd the contrast pained him,\u2014the idealistic dreamer then, the man of business now,\u2014so that a spirit of unworldly peace and beauty known only to the soul in meditation laid its feathered finger upon his heart, moving strangely the surface of the waters.\n\nHarris shivered a little and looked out of the window of his empty carriage. The train had long passed Hornberg, and far below the streams tumbled in white foam down the limestone rocks. In front of him, dome upon dome of wooded mountain stood against the sky. It was October, and the air was cool and sharp, woodsmoke and damp moss exquisitely mingled in it with the subtle odours of the pines. Overhead, between the tips of the highest firs, he saw the first stars peeping, and the sky was a clean, pale amethyst that seemed exactly the colour all these memories clothed themselves with in his mind.\n\nHe leaned back in his corner and sighed. He was a heavy man, and he had not known sentiment for years; he was a big man, and it took much to move him, literally and figuratively; he was a man in whom the dreams of God that haunt the soul in youth, though overlaid by the scum that gathers in the fight for money, had not, as with the majority, utterly died the death.\n\nHe came back into this little neglected pocket of the years, where so much fine gold had collected and lain undisturbed, with all his semispiritual emotions aquiver; and, as he watched the mountain-tops come nearer, and smelt the forgotten odours of his boyhood, something melted on the surface of his soul and left him sensitive to a degree he had not known since, thirty years before, he had lived here with his dreams, his conflicts, and his youthful suffering.\n\nA thrill ran through him as the train stopped with a jolt at a tiny station and he saw the name in large black lettering on the grey stone building, and below it, the number of metres it stood above the level of the sea.\n\n\"The highest point on the line!\" he exclaimed. \"How well I remember it\u2014Sommerau\u2014Summer Meadow. The very next station is mine!\"\n\nAnd, as the train ran downhill with brakes on and steam shut off, he put his head out of the window and one by one saw the old familiar landmarks in the dusk. They stared at him like dead faces in a dream. Queer, sharp feelings, half poignant, half sweet, stirred in his heart.\n\n\"There's the hot, white road we walked along so often with the two Br\u00fcder always at our heels,\" he thought; \"and there, by Jove, is the turn through the forest to 'Die Galgen,' the stone gallows where they hanged the witches in olden days!\"\n\nHe smiled a little as the train slid past.\n\n\"And there's the copse where the Lilies of the Valley powdered the ground in spring; and, I swear,\"\u2014he put his head out with a sudden impulse\u2014\"if that's not the very clearing where Calame, the French boy, chased the swallow-tail with me, and Bruder Pagel gave us half-rations for leaving the road without permission, and for shouting in our mother tongues!\" And he laughed again as the memories came back with a rush, flooding his mind with vivid detail.\n\nThe train stopped, and he stood on the grey gravel platform like a man in a dream. It seemed half a century since he last waited there with corded wooden boxes, and got into the train for Strassbourg and home after the two years' exile. Time dropped from him like an old garment and he felt a boy again. Only, things looked so much smaller than his memory of them; shrunk and dwindled they looked, and the distances seemed on a curiously smaller scale.\n\nHe made his way across the road to the little Gasthaus, and, as he went, faces and figures of former schoolfellows,\u2014German, Swiss, Italian, French, Russian,\u2014slipped out of the shadowy woods and silently accompanied him. They flitted by his side, raising their eyes questioningly, sadly, to his. But their names he had forgotten. Some of the Brothers, too, came with them, and most of these he remembered by name\u2014Bruder R\u00f6st, Bruder Pagel, Bruder Schliemann, and the bearded face of the old preacher who had seen himself in the haunted gallery of those about to die\u2014Bruder Gysin. The dark forest lay all about him like a sea that any moment might rush with velvet waves upon the scene and sweep all the faces away. The air was cool and wonderfully fragrant, but with every perfumed breath came also a pallid memory...\n\nYet, in spite of the underlying sadness inseparable from such an experience, it was all very interesting, and held a pleasure peculiarly its own, so that Harris engaged his room and ordered supper feeling well pleased with himself, and intending to walk up to the old school that very evening. It stood in the centre of the community's village, some four miles distant through the forest, and he now recollected for the first time that this little Protestant settlement dwelt isolated in a section of the country that was otherwise Catholic. Crucifixes and shrines surrounded the clearing like the sentries of a beleaguering army. Once beyond the square of the village, with its few acres of field and orchard, the forest crowded up in solid phalanxes, and beyond the rim of trees began the country that was ruled by the priests of another faith. He vaguely remembered, too, that the Catholics had showed sometimes a certain hostility towards the little Protestant oasis that flourished so quietly and benignly in their midst. He had quite forgotten this. How trumpery it all seemed now with his wide experience of life and his knowledge of other countries and the great outside world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred.\n\nThere were only two others besides himself at supper. One of them, a bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and Harris kept out of his way because he was English. He feared he might be in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would perhaps talk on the subject. The other traveller, however, was a Catholic priest. He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of \"the cloth\" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. Harris mentioned by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. He ascribed it to his difference of belief.\n\n\"Yes,\" went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was so full, \"and it was a curious experience for an English boy to be dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners. I well remember the loneliness and intolerable Heimweh of it at first.\" His German was very fluent.\n\nThe priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and smiled. It was a nice face. He explained quietly that he did not belong here, but was making a tour of the parishes of Wurttemberg and Baden.\n\n\"It was a strict life,\" added Harris. \"We English, I remember, used to call it Gef\u00e4ngnisleben\u2014prison life!\"\n\nThe face of the other, for some unaccountable reason, darkened. After a slight pause, and more by way of politeness than because he wished to continue the subject, he said quietly\u2014\n\n\"It was a flourishing school in those days, of course. Afterwards, I have heard\u2014\" He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the odd look\u2014it almost seemed a look of alarm\u2014came back into his eyes. The sentence remained unfinished.\n\nSomething in the tone of the man seemed to his listener uncalled for\u2014in a sense reproachful, singular. Harris bridled in spite of himself.\n\n\"It has changed?\" he asked. \"I can hardly believe\u2014\"\n\n\"You have not heard, then?\" observed the priest gently, making a gesture as though to cross himself, yet not actually completing it. \"You have not heard what happened there before it was abandoned\u2014?\"\n\nIt was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest seemed to him so offensive\u2014so disproportionately offensive\u2014that he hardly noticed the concluding sentence. He recalled the old bitterness and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" he interrupted with a forced laugh, \"Unsinn! You must forgive me, sir, for contradicting you. But I was a pupil there myself. I was at school there. There was no place like it. I cannot believe that anything serious could have happened to\u2014to take away its character. The devotion of the Brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off suddenly, realising that his voice had been raised unduly and that the man at the far end of the table might understand German; and at the same moment he looked up and saw that this individual's eyes were fixed upon his face intently. They were peculiarly bright. Also they were rather wonderful eyes, and the way they met his own served in some way he could not understand to convey both a reproach and a warning. The whole face of the stranger, indeed, made a vivid impression upon him, for it was a face, he now noticed for the first time, in whose presence one would not willingly have said or done anything unworthy. Harris could not explain to himself how it was he had not become conscious sooner of its presence.\n\nBut he could have bitten off his tongue for having so far forgotten himself. The little priest lapsed into silence. Only once he said, looking up and speaking in a low voice that was not intended to be overheard, but that evidently was overheard, \"You will find it different.\" Presently he rose and left the table with a polite bow that included both the others.\n\nAnd, after him, from the far end rose also the figure in the tweed suit, leaving Harris by himself.\n\nHe sat on for a bit in the darkening room, sipping his coffee and smoking his fifteen-pfennig cigar, till the girl came in to light the oil lamps. He felt vexed with himself for his lapse from good manners, yet hardly able to account for it. Most likely, he reflected, he had been annoyed because the priest had unintentionally changed the pleasant character of his dream by introducing a jarring note. Later he must seek an opportunity to make amends. At present, however, he was too impatient for his walk to the school, and he took his stick and hat and passed out into the open air.\n\nAnd, as he crossed before the Gasthaus, he noticed that the priest and the man in the tweed suit were engaged already in such deep conversation that they hardly noticed him as he passed and raised his hat.\n\nHe started off briskly, well remembering the way, and hoping to reach the village in time to have a word with one of the Br\u00fcder. They might even ask him in for a cup of coffee. He felt sure of his welcome, and the old memories were in full possession once more. The hour of return was a matter of no consequence whatever.\n\nIt was then just after seven o'clock, and the October evening was drawing in with chill airs from the recesses of the forest. The road plunged straight from the railway clearing into its depths, and in a very few minutes the trees engulfed him and the clack of his boots fell dead and echoless against the serried stems of a million firs. It was very black; one trunk was hardly distinguishable from another. He walked smartly, swinging his holly stick. Once or twice he passed a peasant on his way to bed, and the guttural \"Gruss Got,\" unheard for so long, emphasised the passage of time, while yet making it seem as nothing. A fresh group of pictures crowded his mind. Again the figures of former schoolfellows flitted out of the forest and kept pace by his side, whispering of the doings of long ago. One reverie stepped hard upon the heels of another. Every turn in the road, every clearing of the forest, he knew, and each in turn brought forgotten associations to life. He enjoyed himself thoroughly.\n\nHe marched on and on. There was powdered gold in the sky till the moon rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of a river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the forest caverns across the years.\n\nThen, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing.\n\nHe walked faster. There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church next to the Gasthof der Br\u00fcdergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight, standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more than a quarter of a century.\n\nHe passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him prisoner for two years\u2014two unbroken years of discipline and homesickness. Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it was here he had first begun to live and learn values. Not a single footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces crowded to the windows to greet him\u2014closed windows that really reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.\n\nThis, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the corners. For a long time he stood and stared. Then, presently, he came to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in the windows of the Bruderstube.\n\nHe turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.\n\nAlmost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut something of a figure?\n\n\"I'll try once more,\" he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open.\n\nA tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in silence.\n\n\"I must apologise\u2014it is somewhat late,\" he began a trifle pompously, \"but the fact is I am an old pupil. I have only just arrived and really could not restrain myself.\" His German seemed not quite so fluent as usual. \"My interest is so great. I was here in '70.\"\n\nThe other opened the door wider and at once bowed him in with a smile of genuine welcome.\n\n\"I am Bruder Kalkmann,\" he said quietly in a deep voice. \"I myself was a master here about that time. It is a great pleasure always to welcome a former pupil.\" He looked at him very keenly for a few seconds, and then added, \"I think, too, it is splendid of you to come\u2014very splendid.\"\n\n\"It is a very great pleasure,\" Harris replied, delighted with his reception.\n\nThe dimly lighted corridor with its flooring of grey stone, and the familiar sound of a German voice echoing through it,\u2014with the peculiar intonation the Brothers always used in speaking,\u2014all combined to lift him bodily, as it were, into the dream-atmosphere of long-forgotten days. He stepped gladly into the building and the door shut with the familiar thunder that completed the reconstruction of the past. He almost felt the old sense of imprisonment, of aching nostalgia, of having lost his liberty.\n\nHarris sighed involuntarily and turned towards his host, who returned his smile faintly and then led the way down the corridor.\n\n\"The boys have retired,\" he explained, \"and, as you remember, we keep early hours here. But, at least, you will join us for a little while in the Bruderstube and enjoy a cup of coffee.\" This was precisely what the silk merchant had hoped, and he accepted with an alacrity that he intended to be tempered by graciousness. \"And to-morrow,\" continued the Bruder, \"you must come and spend a whole day with us. You may even find acquaintances, for several pupils of your day have come back here as masters.\"\n\nFor one brief second there passed into the man's eyes a look that made the visitor start. But it vanished as quickly as it came. It was impossible to define. Harris convinced himself it was the effect of a shadow cast by the lamp they had just passed on the wall. He dismissed it from his mind.\n\n\"You are very kind, I'm sure,\" he said politely. \"It is perhaps a greater pleasure to me than you can imagine to see the place again. Ah,\"\u2014he stopped short opposite a door with the upper half of glass and peered in\u2014\"surely there is one of the music rooms where I used to practise the violin. How it comes back to me after all these years!\"\n\nBruder Kalkmann stopped indulgently, smiling, to allow his guest a moment's inspection.\n\n\"You still have the boys' orchestra? I remember I used to play 'zweite Geige' in it. Bruder Schliemann conducted at the piano. Dear me, I can see him now with his long black hair and\u2014and\u2014\" He stopped abruptly. Again the odd, dark look passed over the stern face of his companion. For an instant it seemed curiously familiar.\n\n\"We still keep up the pupils' orchestra,\" he said, \"but Bruder Schliemann, I am sorry to say\u2014\" he hesitated an instant, and then added, \"Bruder Schliemann is dead.\"\n\n\"Indeed, indeed,\" said Harris quickly. \"I am sorry to hear it.\" He was conscious of a faint feeling of distress, but whether it arose from the news of his old music teacher's death, or\u2014from something else\u2014he could not quite determine. He gazed down the corridor that lost itself among shadows. In the street and village everything had seemed so much smaller than he remembered, but here, inside the school building, everything seemed so much bigger. The corridor was loftier and longer, more spacious and vast, than the mental picture he had preserved. His thoughts wandered dreamily for an instant.\n\nHe glanced up and saw the face of the Bruder watching him with a smile of patient indulgence.\n\n\"Your memories possess you,\" he observed gently, and the stern look passed into something almost pitying.\n\n\"You are right,\" returned the man of silk, \"they do. This was the most wonderful period of my whole life in a sense. At the time I hated it\u2014\" He hesitated, not wishing to hurt the Brother's feelings.\n\n\"According to English ideas it seemed strict, of course,\" the other said persuasively, so that he went on.\n\n\"\u2014Yes, partly that; and partly the ceaseless nostalgia, and the solitude which came from never being really alone. In English schools the boys enjoy peculiar freedom, you know.\"\n\nBruder Kalkmann, he saw, was listening intently.\n\n\"But it produced one result that I have never wholly lost,\" he continued self-consciously, \"and am grateful for.\"\n\n\"Ach! Wie so, denn?\"\n\n\"The constant inner pain threw me headlong into your religious life, so that the whole force of my being seemed to project itself towards the search for a deeper satisfaction\u2014a real resting-place for the soul. During my two years here I yearned for God in my boyish way as perhaps I have never yearned for anything since. Moreover, I have never quite lost that sense of peace and inward joy which accompanied the search. I can never quite forget this school and the deep things it taught me.\"\n\nHe paused at the end of his long speech, and a brief silence fell between them. He feared he had said too much, or expressed himself clumsily in the foreign language, and when Bruder Kalkmann laid a hand upon his shoulder, he gave a little involuntary start.\n\n\"So that my memories perhaps do possess me rather strongly,\" he added apologetically; \"and this long corridor, these rooms, that barred and gloomy front door, all touch chords that\u2014that\u2014\" His German failed him and he glanced at his companion with an explanatory smile and gesture. But the Brother had removed the hand from his shoulder and was standing with his back to him, looking down the passage.\n\n\"Naturally, naturally so,\" he said hastily without turning round. \"Es ist doch selbstverst\u00e4ndlich. We shall all understand.\"\n\nThen he turned suddenly, and Harris saw that his face had turned most oddly and disagreeably sinister. It may only have been the shadows again playing their tricks with the wretched oil lamps on the wall, for the dark expression passed instantly as they retraced their steps down the corridor, but the Englishman somehow got the impression that he had said something to give offence, something that was not quite to the other's taste. Opposite the door of the Bruderstube they stopped. Harris realised that it was late and he had possibly stayed talking too long. He made a tentative effort to leave, but his companion would not hear of it.\n\n\"You must have a cup of coffee with us,\" he said firmly as though he meant it, \"and my colleagues will be delighted to see you. Some of them will remember you, perhaps.\"\n\nThe sound of voices came pleasantly through the door, men's voices talking together. Bruder Kalkmann turned the handle and they entered a room ablaze with light and full of people.\n\n\"Ah,\u2014but your name?\" he whispered, bending down to catch the reply; \"you have not told me your name yet.\"\n\n\"Harris,\" said the Englishman quickly as they went in. He felt nervous as he crossed the threshold, but ascribed the momentary trepidation to the fact that he was breaking the strictest rule of the whole establishment, which forbade a boy under severest penalties to come near this holy of holies where the masters took their brief leisure.\n\n\"Ah, yes, of course\u2014Harris,\" repeated the other as though he remembered it. \"Come in, Herr Harris, come in, please. Your visit will be immensely appreciated. It is really very fine, very wonderful of you to have come in this way.\"\n\nThe door closed behind them and, in the sudden light which made his sight swim for a moment, the exaggeration of the language escaped his attention. He heard the voice of Bruder Kalkmann introducing him. He spoke very loud, indeed, unnecessarily,\u2014absurdly loud, Harris thought.\n\n\"Brothers,\" he announced, \"it is my pleasure and privilege to introduce to you Herr Harris from England. He has just arrived to make us a little visit, and I have already expressed to him on behalf of us all the satisfaction we feel that he is here. He was, as you remember, a pupil in the year '70.\"\n\nIt was a very formal, a very German introduction, but Harris rather liked it. It made him feel important and he appreciated the tact that made it almost seem as though he had been expected.\n\nThe black forms rose and bowed; Harris bowed; Kalkmann bowed. Every one was very polite and very courtly. The room swam with moving figures; the light dazzled him after the gloom of the corridor, there was thick cigar smoke in the atmosphere. He took the chair that was offered to him between two of the Brothers, and sat down, feeling vaguely that his perceptions were not quite as keen and accurate as usual. He felt a trifle dazed perhaps, and the spell of the past came strongly over him, confusing the immediate present and making everything dwindle oddly to the dimensions of long ago. He seemed to pass under the mastery of a great mood that was a composite reproduction of all the moods of his forgotten boyhood.\n\nThen he pulled himself together with a sharp effort and entered into the conversation that had begun again to buzz round him. Moreover, he entered into it with keen pleasure, for the Brothers\u2014there were perhaps a dozen of them in the little room\u2014treated him with a charm of manner that speedily made him feel one of themselves. This, again, was a very subtle delight to him. He felt that he had stepped out of the greedy, vulgar, self-seeking world, the world of silk and markets and profit-making\u2014stepped into the cleaner atmosphere where spiritual ideals were paramount and life was simple and devoted. It all charmed him inexpressibly, so that he realised\u2014yes, in a sense\u2014the degradation of his twenty years' absorption in business. This keen atmosphere under the stars where men thought only of their souls, and of the souls of others, was too rarefied for the world he was now associated with. He found himself making comparisons to his own disadvantage,\u2014comparisons with the mystical little dreamer that had stepped thirty years before from the stern peace of this devout community, and the man of the world that he had since become,\u2014and the contrast made him shiver with a keen regret and something like self-contempt.\n\nHe glanced round at the other faces floating towards him through tobacco smoke\u2014this acrid cigar smoke he remembered so well: how keen they were, how strong, placid, touched with the nobility of great aims and unselfish purposes. At one or two he looked particularly. He hardly knew why. They rather fascinated him. There was something so very stern and uncompromising about them, and something, too, oddly, subtly, familiar, that yet just eluded him. But whenever their eyes met his own they held undeniable welcome in them; and some held more\u2014a kind of perplexed admiration, he thought, something that was between esteem and deference. This note of respect in all the faces was very flattering to his vanity.\n\nCoffee was served presently, made by a black-haired Brother who sat in the corner by the piano and bore a marked resemblance to Bruder Schliemann, the musical director of thirty years ago. Harris exchanged bows with him when he took the cup from his white hands, which he noticed were like the hands of a woman. He lit a cigar, offered to him by his neighbour, with whom he was chatting delightfully, and who, in the glare of the lighted match, reminded him sharply for a moment of Bruder Pagel, his former room-master.\n\n\"Es ist wirklich merkw\u00fcrdig,\" he said, \"how many resemblances I see, or imagine. It is really very curious!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" replied the other, peering at him over his coffee cup, \"the spell of the place is wonderfully strong. I can well understand that the old faces rise before your mind's eye\u2014almost to the exclusion of ourselves perhaps.\"\n\nThey both laughed presently. It was soothing to find his mood understood and appreciated. And they passed on to talk of the mountain village, its isolation, its remoteness from worldly life, its peculiar fitness for meditation and worship, and for spiritual development\u2014of a certain kind.\n\n\"And your coming back in this way, Herr Harris, has pleased us all so much,\" joined in the Bruder on his left. \"We esteem you for it most highly. We honour you for it.\"\n\nHarris made a deprecating gesture. \"I fear, for my part, it is only a very selfish pleasure,\" he said a trifle unctuously.\n\n\"Not all would have had the courage,\" added the one who resembled Bruder Pagel.\n\n\"You mean,\" said Harris, a little puzzled, \"the disturbing memories\u2014?\"\n\nBruder Pagel looked at him steadily, with unmistakable admiration and respect. \"I mean that most men hold so strongly to life, and can give up so little for their beliefs,\" he said gravely.\n\nThe Englishman felt slightly uncomfortable. These worthy men really made too much of his sentimental journey. Besides, the talk was getting a little out of his depth. He hardly followed it.\n\n\"The worldly life still has some charms for me,\" he replied smilingly, as though to indicate that sainthood was not yet quite within his grasp.\n\n\"All the more, then, must we honour you for so freely coming,\" said the Brother on his left; \"so unconditionally!\"\n\nA pause followed, and the silk merchant felt relieved when the conversation took a more general turn, although he noted that it never travelled very far from the subject of his visit and the wonderful situation of the lonely village for men who wished to develop their spiritual powers and practise the rites of a high worship. Others joined in, complimenting him on his knowledge of the language, making him feel utterly at his ease, yet at the same time a little uncomfortable by the excess of their admiration. After all, it was such a very small thing to do, this sentimental journey.\n\nThe time passed along quickly; the coffee was excellent, the cigars soft and of the nutty flavour he loved. At length, fearing to outstay his welcome, he rose reluctantly to take his leave. But the others would not hear of it. It was not often a former pupil returned to visit them in this simple, unaffected way. The night was young. If necessary they could even find him a corner in the great Schlafzimmer upstairs. He was easily persuaded to stay a little longer. Somehow he had become the centre of the little party. He felt pleased, flattered, honoured.\n\n\"And perhaps Bruder Schliemann will play something for us\u2014now.\"\n\nIt was Kalkmann speaking, and Harris started visibly as he heard the name, and saw the black-haired man by the piano turn with a smile. For Schliemann was the name of his old music director, who was dead. Could this be his son? They were so exactly alike.\n\n\"If Bruder Meyer has not put his Amati to bed, I will accompany him,\" said the musician suggestively, looking across at a man whom Harris had not yet noticed, and who, he now saw, was the very image of a former master of that name.\n\nMeyer rose and excused himself with a little bow, and the Englishman quickly observed that he had a peculiar gesture as though his neck had a false join on to the body just below the collar and feared it might break. Meyer of old had this trick of movement. He remembered how the boys used to copy it.\n\nHe glanced sharply from face to face, feeling as though some silent, unseen process were changing everything about him. All the faces seemed oddly familiar. Pagel, the Brother he had been talking with, was of course the image of Pagel, his former room-master, and Kalkmann, he now realised for the first time, was the very twin of another master whose name he had quite forgotten, but whom he used to dislike intensely in the old days. And, through the smoke, peering at him from the corners of the room, he saw that all the Brothers about him had the faces he had known and lived with long ago\u2014R\u00f6st, Fluheim, Meinert, Rigel, Gysin.\n\nHe stared hard, suddenly grown more alert, and everywhere saw, or fancied he saw, strange likenesses, ghostly resemblances,\u2014more, the identical faces of years ago. There was something queer about it all, something not quite right, something that made him feel uneasy. He shook himself, mentally and actually, blowing the smoke from before his eyes with a long breath, and as he did so he noticed to his dismay that every one was fixedly staring. They were watching him.\n\nThis brought him to his senses. As an Englishman, and a foreigner, he did not wish to be rude, or to do anything to make himself foolishly conspicuous and spoil the harmony of the evening. He was a guest, and a privileged guest at that. Besides, the music had already begun. Bruder Schliemann's long white fingers were caressing the keys to some purpose.\n\nHe subsided into his chair and smoked with half-closed eyes that yet saw everything.\n\nBut the shudder had established itself in his being, and, whether he would or not, it kept repeating itself. As a town, far up some inland river, feels the pressure of the distant sea, so he became aware that mighty forces from somewhere beyond his ken were urging themselves up against his soul in this smoky little room. He began to feel exceedingly ill at ease.\n\nAnd as the music filled the air his mind began to clear. Like a lifted veil there rose up something that had hitherto obscured his vision. The words of the priest at the railway inn flashed across his brain unbidden: \"You will find it different.\" And also, though why he could not tell, he saw mentally the strong, rather wonderful eyes of that other guest at the supper-table, the man who had overheard his conversation, and had later got into earnest talk with the priest. He took out his watch and stole a glance at it. Two hours had slipped by. It was already eleven o'clock.\n\nSchliemann, meanwhile, utterly absorbed in his music, was playing a solemn measure. The piano sang marvellously. The power of a great conviction, the simplicity of great art, the vital spiritual message of a soul that had found itself\u2014all this, and more, were in the chords, and yet somehow the music was what can only be described as impure\u2014atrociously and diabolically impure. And the piece itself, although Harris did not recognise it as anything familiar, was surely the music of a Mass\u2014huge, majestic, sombre? It stalked through the smoky room with slow power, like the passage of something that was mighty, yet profoundly intimate, and as it went there stirred into each and every face about him the signature of the enormous forces of which it was the audible symbol. The countenances round him turned sinister, but not idly, negatively sinister: they grew dark with purpose. He suddenly recalled the face of Bruder Kalkmann in the corridor earlier in the evening. The motives of their secret souls rose to the eyes, and mouths, and foreheads, and hung there for all to see like the black banners of an assembly of ill-starred and fallen creatures. Demons\u2014was the horrible word that flashed through his brain like a sheet of fire.\n\nWhen this sudden discovery leaped out upon him, for a moment he lost his self-control. Without waiting to think and weigh his extraordinary impression, he did a very foolish but a very natural thing. Feeling himself irresistibly driven by the sudden stress to some kind of action, he sprang to his feet\u2014and screamed! To his own utter amazement he stood up and shrieked aloud!\n\nBut no one stirred. No one, apparently, took the slightest notice of his absurdly wild behaviour. It was almost as if no one but himself had heard the scream at all\u2014as though the music had drowned it and swallowed it up\u2014as though after all perhaps he had not really screamed as loudly as he imagined, or had not screamed at all.\n\nThen, as he glanced at the motionless, dark faces before him, something of utter cold passed into his being, touching his very soul... All emotion cooled suddenly, leaving him like a receding tide. He sat down again, ashamed, mortified, angry with himself for behaving like a fool and a boy. And the music, meanwhile, continued to issue from the white and snakelike fingers of Bruder Schliemann, as poisoned wine might issue from the weirdly fashioned necks of antique phials.\n\nAnd, with the rest of them, Harris drank it in.\n\nForcing himself to believe that he had been the victim of some kind of illusory perception, he vigorously restrained his feelings. Then the music presently ceased, and every one applauded and began to talk at once, laughing, changing seats, complimenting the player, and behaving naturally and easily as though nothing out of the way had happened. The faces appeared normal once more. The Brothers crowded round their visitor, and he joined in their talk and even heard himself thanking the gifted musician.\n\nBut, at the same time, he found himself edging towards the door, nearer and nearer, changing his chair when possible, and joining the groups that stood closest to the way of escape.\n\n\"I must thank you all tausendmal for my little reception and the great pleasure\u2014the very great honour you have done me,\" he began in decided tones at length, \"but I fear I have trespassed far too long already on your hospitality. Moreover, I have some distance to walk to my inn.\"\n\nA chorus of voices greeted his words. They would not hear of his going,\u2014at least not without first partaking of refreshment. They produced pumpernickel from one cupboard, and rye-bread and sausage from another, and all began to talk again and eat. More coffee was made, fresh cigars lighted, and Bruder Meyer took out his violin and began to tune it softly.\n\n\"There is always a bed upstairs if Herr Harris will accept it,\" said one.\n\n\"And it is difficult to find the way out now, for all the doors are locked,\" laughed another loudly.\n\n\"Let us take our simple pleasures as they come,\" cried a third. \"Bruder Harris will understand how we appreciate the honour of this last visit of his.\"\n\nThey made a dozen excuses. They all laughed, as though the politeness of their words was but formal, and veiled thinly\u2014more and more thinly\u2014a very different meaning.\n\n\"And the hour of midnight draws near,\" added Bruder Kalkmann with a charming smile, but in a voice that sounded to the Englishman like the grating of iron hinges.\n\nTheir German seemed to him more and more difficult to understand. He noted that they called him \"Bruder\" too, classing him as one of themselves.\n\nAnd then suddenly he had a flash of keener perception, and realised with a creeping of his flesh that he had all along misinterpreted\u2014grossly misinterpreted all they had been saying. They had talked about the beauty of the place, its isolation and remoteness from the world, its peculiar fitness for certain kinds of spiritual development and worship\u2014yet hardly, he now grasped, in the sense in which he had taken the words. They had meant something different. Their spiritual powers, their desire for loneliness, their passion for worship, were not the powers, the solitude, or the worship that he meant and understood. He was playing a part in some horrible masquerade; he was among men who cloaked their lives with religion in order to follow their real purposes unseen of men.\n\nWhat did it all mean? How had he blundered into so equivocal a situation? Had he blundered into it at all? Had he not rather been led into it, deliberately led? His thoughts grew dreadfully confused, and his confidence in himself began to fade. And why, he suddenly thought again, were they so impressed by the mere fact of his coming to revisit his old school? What was it they so admired and wondered at in his simple act? Why did they set such store upon his having the courage to come, to \"give himself so freely,\" \"unconditionally\" as one of them had expressed it with such a mockery of exaggeration?\n\nFear stirred in his heart most horribly, and he found no answer to any of his questionings. Only one thing he now understood quite clearly: it was their purpose to keep him here. They did not intend that he should go. And from this moment he realised that they were sinister, formidable and, in some way he had yet to discover, inimical to himself, inimical to his life. And the phrase one of them had used a moment ago\u2014\"this last visit of his\"\u2014rose before his eyes in letters of flame.\n\nHarris was not a man of action, and had never known in all the course of his career what it meant to be in a situation of real danger. He was not necessarily a coward, though, perhaps, a man of untried nerve. He realised at last plainly that he was in a very awkward predicament indeed, and that he had to deal with men who were utterly in earnest. What their intentions were he only vaguely guessed. His mind, indeed, was too confused for definite ratiocination, and he was only able to follow blindly the strongest instincts that moved in him. It never occurred to him that the Brothers might all be mad, or that he himself might have temporarily lost his senses and be suffering under some terrible delusion. In fact, nothing occurred to him\u2014he realised nothing\u2014except that he meant to escape\u2014and the quicker the better. A tremendous revulsion of feeling set in and overpowered him.\n\nAccordingly, without further protest for the moment, he ate his pumpernickel and drank his coffee, talking meanwhile as naturally and pleasantly as he could, and when a suitable interval had passed, he rose to his feet and announced once more that he must now take his leave. He spoke very quietly, but very decidedly. No one hearing him could doubt that he meant what he said. He had got very close to the door by this time.\n\n\"I regret,\" he said, using his best German, and speaking to a hushed room, \"that our pleasant evening must come to an end, but it is now time for me to wish you all good-night.\" And then, as no one said anything, he added, though with a trifle less assurance, \"And I thank you all most sincerely for your hospitality.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" replied Kalkmann instantly, rising from his chair and ignoring the hand the Englishman had stretched out to him, \"it is we who have to thank you; and we do so most gratefully and sincerely.\"\n\nAnd at the same moment at least half a dozen of the Brothers took up their position between himself and the door.\n\n\"You are very good to say so,\" Harris replied as firmly as he could manage, noticing this movement out of the corner of his eye, \"but really I had no conception that\u2014my little chance visit could have afforded you so much pleasure.\" He moved another step nearer the door, but Bruder Schliemann came across the room quickly and stood in front of him. His attitude was uncompromising. A dark and terrible expression had come into his face.\n\n\"But it was not by chance that you came, Bruder Harris,\" he said so that all the room could hear; \"surely we have not misunderstood your presence here?\" He raised his black eyebrows.\n\n\"No, no,\" the Englishman hastened to reply, \"I was\u2014I am delighted to be here. I told you what pleasure it gave me to find myself among you. Do not misunderstand me, I beg.\" His voice faltered a little, and he had difficulty in finding the words. More and more, too, he had difficulty in understanding their words.\n\n\"Of course,\" interposed Bruder Kalkmann in his iron bass, \"we have not misunderstood. You have come back in the spirit of true and unselfish devotion. You offer yourself freely, and we all appreciate it. It is your willingness and nobility that have so completely won our veneration and respect.\" A faint murmur of applause ran round the room. \"What we all delight in\u2014what our great Master will especially delight in\u2014is the value of your spontaneous and voluntary\u2014\"\n\nHe used a word Harris did not understand. He said \"Opfer.\" The bewildered Englishman searched his brain for the translation, and searched in vain. For the life of him he could not remember what it meant. But the word, for all his inability to translate it, touched his soul with ice. It was worse, far worse, than anything he had imagined. He felt like a lost, helpless creature, and all power to fight sank out of him from that moment.\n\n\"It is magnificent to be such a willing\u2014\" added Schliemann, sidling up to him with a dreadful leer on his face. He made use of the same word\u2014\"Opfer.\"\n\n\"God! What could it all mean?\" \"Offer himself!\" \"True spirit of devotion!\" \"Willing,\" \"unselfish,\" \"magnificent!\" Opfer, Opfer, Opfer! What in the name of heaven did it mean, that strange, mysterious word that struck such terror into his heart?\n\nHe made a valiant effort to keep his presence of mind and hold his nerves steady. Turning, he saw that Kalkmann's face was a dead white. Kalkmann! He understood that well enough. Kalkmann meant \"Man of Chalk\": he knew that. But what did \"Opfer\" mean? That was the real key to the situation. Words poured through his disordered mind in an endless stream\u2014unusual, rare words he had perhaps heard but once in his life\u2014while \"Opfer,\" a word in common use, entirely escaped him. What an extraordinary mockery it all was!\n\nThen Kalkmann, pale as death, but his face hard as iron, spoke a few low words that he did not catch, and the Brothers standing by the walls at once turned the lamps down so that the room became dim. In the half light he could only just discern their faces and movements.\n\n\"It is time,\" he heard Kalkmann's remorseless voice continue just behind him. \"The hour of midnight is at hand. Let us prepare. He comes! He comes; Bruder Asmodelius comes!\" His voice rose to a chant.\n\nAnd the sound of that name, for some extraordinary reason, was terrible\u2014utterly terrible; so that Harris shook from head to foot as he heard it. Its utterance filled the air like soft thunder, and a hush came over the whole room. Forces rose all about him, transforming the normal into the horrible, and the spirit of craven fear ran through all his being, bringing him to the verge of collapse.\n\nAsmodelius! Asmodelius! The name was appalling. For he understood at last to whom it referred and the meaning that lay between its great syllables. At the same instant, too, he suddenly understood the meaning of that unremembered word. The import of the word \"Opfer\" flashed upon his soul like a message of death.\n\nHe thought of making a wild effort to reach the door, but the weakness of his trembling knees, and the row of black figures that stood between, dissuaded him at once. He would have screamed for help, but remembering the emptiness of the vast building, and the loneliness of the situation, he understood that no help could come that way, and he kept his lips closed. He stood still and did nothing. But he knew now what was coming.\n\nTwo of the Brothers approached and took him gently by the arm.\n\n\"Bruder Asmodelius accepts you,\" they whispered; \"are you ready?\"\n\nThen he found his tongue and tried to speak. \"But what have I to do with this Bruder Asm\u2014Asmo\u2014?\" he stammered, a desperate rush of words crowding vainly behind the halting tongue.\n\nThe name refused to pass his lips. He could not pronounce it as they did. He could not pronounce it at all. His sense of helplessness then entered the acute stage, for this inability to speak the name produced a fresh sense of quite horrible confusion in his mind, and he became extraordinarily agitated.\n\n\"I came here for a friendly visit,\" he tried to say with a great effort, but, to his intense dismay, he heard his voice saying something quite different, and actually making use of that very word they had all used: \"I came here as a willing Opfer,\" he heard his own voice say, \"and I am quite ready.\"\n\nHe was lost beyond all recall now! Not alone his mind, but the very muscles of his body had passed out of control. He felt that he was hovering on the confines of a phantom or demon-world,\u2014a world in which the name they had spoken constituted the Master-name, the word of ultimate power.\n\nWhat followed he heard and saw as in a nightmare.\n\n\"In the half light that veils all truth, let us prepare to worship and adore,\" chanted Schliemann, who had preceded him to the end of the room.\n\n\"In the mists that protect our faces before the Black Throne, let us make ready the willing victim,\" echoed Kalkmann in his great bass.\n\nThey raised their faces, listening expectantly, as a roaring sound, like the passing of mighty projectiles, filled the air, far, far away, very wonderful, very forbidding. The walls of the room trembled.\n\n\"He comes! He comes! He comes!\" chanted the Brothers in chorus.\n\nThe sound of roaring died away, and an atmosphere of still and utter cold established itself over all. Then Kalkmann, dark and unutterably stern, turned in the dim light and faced the rest.\n\n\"Asmodelius, our Hauptbruder, is about us,\" he cried in a voice that even while it shook was yet a voice of iron; \"Asmodelius is about us. Make ready.\"\n\nThere followed a pause in which no one stirred or spoke. A tall Brother approached the Englishman; but Kalkmann held up his hand.\n\n\"Let the eyes remain uncovered,\" he said, \"in honour of so freely giving himself.\" And to his horror Harris then realised for the first time that his hands were already fastened to his sides.\n\nThe Brother retreated again silently, and in the pause that followed all the figures about him dropped to their knees, leaving him standing alone, and as they dropped, in voices hushed with mingled reverence and awe, they cried, softly, odiously, appallingly, the name of the Being whom they momentarily expected to appear.\n\nThen, at the end of the room, where the windows seemed to have disappeared so that he saw the stars, there rose into view far up against the night sky, grand and terrible, the outline of a man. A kind of grey glory enveloped it so that it resembled a steel-cased statue, immense, imposing, horrific in its distant splendour; while, at the same time, the face was so spiritually mighty, yet so proudly, so austerely sad, that Harris felt as he stared, that the sight was more than his eyes could meet, and that in another moment the power of vision would fail him altogether, and he must sink into utter nothingness.\n\nSo remote and inaccessible hung this figure that it was impossible to gauge anything as to its size, yet at the same time so strangely close, that when the grey radiance from its mightily broken visage, august and mournful, beat down upon his soul, pulsing like some dark star with the powers of spiritual evil, he felt almost as though he were looking into a face no farther removed from him in space than the face of any one of the Brothers who stood by his side.\n\nAnd then the room filled and trembled with sounds that Harris understood full well were the failing voices of others who had preceded him in a long series down the years. There came first a plain, sharp cry, as of a man in the last anguish, choking for his breath, and yet, with the very final expiration of it, breathing the name of the Worship\u2014of the dark Being who rejoiced to hear it. The cries of the strangled; the short, running gasp of the suffocated; and the smothered gurgling of the tightened throat, all these, and more, echoed back and forth between the walls, the very walls in which he now stood a prisoner, a sacrificial victim. The cries, too, not alone of the broken bodies, but\u2014far worse\u2014of beaten, broken souls. And as the ghastly chorus rose and fell, there came also the faces of the lost and unhappy creatures to whom they belonged, and, against that curtain of pale grey light, he saw float past him in the air, an array of white and piteous human countenances that seemed to beckon and gibber at him as though he were already one of themselves.\n\nSlowly, too, as the voices rose, and the pallid crew sailed past, that giant form of grey descended from the sky and approached the room that contained the worshippers and their prisoner. Hands rose and sank about him in the darkness, and he felt that he was being draped in other garments than his own; a circlet of ice seemed to run about his head, while round the waist, enclosing the fastened arms, he felt a girdle tightly drawn. At last, about his very throat, there ran a soft and silken touch which, better than if there had been full light, and a mirror held to his face, he understood to be the cord of sacrifice\u2014and of death.\n\nAt this moment the Brothers, still prostrate upon the floor, began again their mournful, yet impassioned chanting, and as they did so a strange thing happened. For, apparently without moving or altering its position, the huge Figure seemed, at once and suddenly, to be inside the room, almost beside him, and to fill the space around him to the exclusion of all else.\n\nHe was now beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling as of death\u2014the death of the soul\u2014stirred in his heart. His thoughts no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, and he knew it.\n\nThe dreadfully chanting voices rose about him in a wave: \"We worship! We adore! We offer!\" The sounds filled his ears and hammered, almost meaningless, upon his brain.\n\nThen the majestic grey face turned slowly downwards upon him, and his very soul passed outwards and seemed to become absorbed in the sea of those anguished eyes. At the same moment a dozen hands forced him to his knees, and in the air before him he saw the arm of Kalkmann upraised, and felt the pressure about his throat grow strong.\n\nIt was in this awful moment, when he had given up all hope, and the help of gods or men seemed beyond question, that a strange thing happened. For before his fading and terrified vision there slid, as in a dream of light,\u2014yet without apparent rhyme or reason\u2014wholly unbidden and unexplained,\u2014the face of that other man at the supper table of the railway inn. And the sight, even mentally, of that strong, wholesome, vigorous English face, inspired him suddenly with a new courage.\n\nIt was but a flash of fading vision before he sank into a dark and terrible death, yet, in some inexplicable way, the sight of that face stirred in him unconquerable hope and the certainty of deliverance. It was a face of power, a face, he now realised, of simple goodness such as might have been seen by men of old on the shores of Galilee; a face, by heaven, that could conquer even the devils of outer space.\n\nAnd, in his despair and abandonment, he called upon it, and called with no uncertain accents. He found his voice in this overwhelming moment to some purpose; though the words he actually used, and whether they were in German or English, he could never remember. Their effect, nevertheless, was instantaneous. The Brothers understood, and that grey Figure of evil understood.\n\nFor a second the confusion was terrific. There came a great shattering sound. It seemed that the very earth trembled. But all Harris remembered afterwards was that voices rose about him in the clamour of terrified alarm\u2014\n\n\"A man of power is among us! A man of God!\"\n\nThe vast sound was repeated\u2014the rushing through space as of huge projectiles\u2014and he sank to the floor of the room, unconscious. The entire scene had vanished, vanished like smoke over the roof of a cottage when the wind blows.\n\nAnd, by his side, sat down a slight un-German figure,\u2014the figure of the stranger at the inn,\u2014the man who had the \"rather wonderful eyes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 386", + "text": "When Harris came to himself he felt cold. He was lying under the open sky, and the cool air of field and forest was blowing upon his face. He sat up and looked about him. The memory of the late scene was still horribly in his mind, but no vestige of it remained. No walls or ceiling enclosed him; he was no longer in a room at all. There were no lamps turned low, no cigar smoke, no black forms of sinister worshippers, no tremendous grey Figure hovering beyond the windows.\n\nOpen space was about him, and he was lying on a pile of bricks and mortar, his clothes soaked with dew, and the kind stars shining brightly overhead. He was lying, bruised and shaken, among the heaped-up d\u00e9bris of a ruined building.\n\nHe stood up and stared about him. There, in the shadowy distance, lay the surrounding forest, and here, close at hand, stood the outline of the village buildings. But, underfoot, beyond question, lay nothing but the broken heaps of stones that betokened a building long since crumbled to dust. Then he saw that the stones were blackened, and that great wooden beams, half burnt, half rotten, made lines through the general d\u00e9bris. He stood, then, among the ruins of a burnt and shattered building, the weeds and nettles proving conclusively that it had lain thus for many years.\n\nThe moon had already set behind the encircling forest, but the stars that spangled the heavens threw enough light to enable him to make quite sure of what he saw. Harris, the silk merchant, stood among these broken and burnt stones and shivered.\n\nThen he suddenly became aware that out of the gloom a figure had risen and stood beside him. Peering at him, he thought he recognised the face of the stranger at the railway inn.\n\n\"Are you real?\" he asked in a voice he hardly recognised as his own.\n\n\"More than real\u2014I'm friendly,\" replied the stranger; \"I followed you up here from the inn.\"\n\nHarris stood and stared for several minutes without adding anything. His teeth chattered. The least sound made him start; but the simple words in his own language, and the tone in which they were uttered, comforted him inconceivably.\n\n\"You're English too, thank God,\" he said inconsequently. \"These German devils\u2014\" He broke off and put a hand to his eyes. \"But what's become of them all\u2014and the room\u2014and\u2014and\u2014\" The hand travelled down to his throat and moved nervously round his neck. He drew a long, long breath of relief. \"Did I dream everything\u2014everything?\" he said distractedly.\n\nHe stared wildly about him, and the stranger moved forward and took his arm. \"Come,\" he said soothingly, yet with a trace of command in the voice, \"we will move away from here. The high-road, or even the woods will be more to your taste, for we are standing now on one of the most haunted\u2014and most terribly haunted\u2014spots of the whole world.\"\n\nHe guided his companion's stumbling footsteps over the broken masonry until they reached the path, the nettles stinging their hands, and Harris feeling his way like a man in a dream. Passing through the twisted iron railing they reached the path, and thence made their way to the road, shining white in the night. Once safely out of the ruins, Harris collected himself and turned to look back.\n\n\"But, how is it possible?\" he exclaimed, his voice still shaking. \"How can it be possible? When I came in here I saw the building in the moonlight. They opened the door. I saw the figures and heard the voices and touched, yes touched their very hands, and saw their damned black faces, saw them far more plainly than I see you now.\" He was deeply bewildered. The glamour was still upon his eyes with a degree of reality stronger than the reality even of normal life. \"Was I so utterly deluded?\"\n\nThen suddenly the words of the stranger, which he had only half heard or understood, returned to him.\n\n\"Haunted?\" he asked, looking hard at him; \"haunted, did you say?\" He paused in the roadway and stared into the darkness where the building of the old school had first appeared to him. But the stranger hurried him forward.\n\n\"We shall talk more safely farther on,\" he said. \"I followed you from the inn the moment I realised where you had gone. When I found you it was eleven o'clock\u2014\"\n\n\"Eleven o'clock,\" said Harris, remembering with a shudder.\n\n\"\u2014I saw you drop. I watched over you till you recovered consciousness of your own accord, and now\u2014now I am here to guide you safely back to the inn. I have broken the spell\u2014the glamour\u2014\"\n\n\"I owe you a great deal, sir,\" interrupted Harris again, beginning to understand something of the stranger's kindness, \"but I don't understand it all. I feel dazed and shaken.\" His teeth still chattered, and spells of violent shivering passed over him from head to foot. He found that he was clinging to the other's arm. In this way they passed beyond the deserted and crumbling village and gained the high-road that led homewards through the forest.\n\n\"That school building has long been in ruins,\" said the man at his side presently; \"it was burnt down by order of the Elders of the community at least ten years ago. The village has been uninhabited ever since. But the simulacra of certain ghastly events that took place under that roof in past days still continue. And the 'shells' of the chief participants still enact there the dreadful deeds that led to its final destruction, and to the desertion of the whole settlement. They were devil-worshippers!\"\n\nHarris listened with beads of perspiration on his forehead that did not come alone from their leisurely pace through the cool night. Although he had seen this man but once before in his life, and had never before exchanged so much as a word with him, he felt a degree of confidence and a subtle sense of safety and well-being in his presence that were the most healing influences he could possibly have wished after the experience he had been through. For all that, he still felt as if he were walking in a dream, and though he heard every word that fell from his companion's lips, it was only the next day that the full import of all he said became fully clear to him. The presence of this quiet stranger, the man with the wonderful eyes which he felt now, rather than saw, applied a soothing anodyne to his shattered spirit that healed him through and through. And this healing influence, distilled from the dark figure at his side, satisfied his first imperative need, so that he almost forgot to realise how strange and opportune it was that the man should be there at all.\n\nIt somehow never occurred to him to ask his name, or to feel any undue wonder that one passing tourist should take so much trouble on behalf of another. He just walked by his side, listening to his quiet words, and allowing himself to enjoy the very wonderful experience after his recent ordeal, of being helped, strengthened, blessed. Only once, remembering vaguely something of his reading of years ago, he turned to the man beside him, after some more than usually remarkable words, and heard himself, almost involuntarily it seemed, putting the question: \"Then are you a Rosicrucian, sir, perhaps?\" But the stranger had ignored the words, or possibly not heard them, for he continued with his talk as though unconscious of any interruption, and Harris became aware that another somewhat unusual picture had taken possession of his mind, as they walked there side by side through the cool reaches of the forest, and that he had found his imagination suddenly charged with the childhood memory of Jacob wrestling with an angel,\u2014wrestling all night with a being of superior quality whose strength eventually became his own.\n\n\"It was your abrupt conversation with the priest at supper that first put me upon the track of this remarkable occurrence,\" he heard the man's quiet voice beside him in the darkness, \"and it was from him I learned after you left the story of the devil-worship that became secretly established in the heart of this simple and devout little community.\"\n\n\"Devil-worship! Here\u2014!\" Harris stammered, aghast.\n\n\"Yes\u2014here;\u2014conducted secretly for years by a group of Brothers before unexplained disappearances in the neighbourhood led to its discovery. For where could they have found a safer place in the whole wide world for their ghastly traffic and perverted powers than here, in the very precincts\u2014under cover of the very shadow of saintliness and holy living?\"\n\n\"Awful, awful!\" whispered the silk merchant, \"and when I tell you the words they used to me\u2014\"\n\n\"I know it all,\" the stranger said quietly. \"I saw and heard everything. My plan first was to wait till the end and then to take steps for their destruction, but in the interest of your personal safety,\"\u2014he spoke with the utmost gravity and conviction,\u2014\"in the interest of the safety of your soul, I made my presence known when I did, and before the conclusion had been reached\u2014\"\n\n\"My safety! The danger, then, was real. They were alive and\u2014\" Words failed him. He stopped in the road and turned towards his companion, the shining of whose eyes he could just make out in the gloom.\n\n\"It was a concourse of the shells of violent men, spiritually developed but evil men, seeking after death\u2014the death of the body\u2014to prolong their vile and unnatural existence. And had they accomplished their object you, in turn, at the death of your body, would have passed into their power and helped to swell their dreadful purposes.\"\n\nHarris made no reply. He was trying hard to concentrate his mind upon the sweet and common things of life. He even thought of silk and St. Paul's Churchyard and the faces of his partners in business.\n\n\"For you came all prepared to be caught,\" he heard the other's voice like some one talking to him from a distance; \"your deeply introspective mood had already reconstructed the past so vividly, so intensely, that you were en rapport at once with any forces of those days that chanced still to be lingering. And they swept you up all unresistingly.\"\n\nHarris tightened his hold upon the stranger's arm as he heard. At the moment he had room for one emotion only. It did not seem to him odd that this stranger should have such intimate knowledge of his mind.\n\n\"It is, alas, chiefly the evil emotions that are able to leave their photographs upon surrounding scenes and objects,\" the other added, \"and who ever heard of a place haunted by a noble deed, or of beautiful and lovely ghosts revisiting the glimpses of the moon? It is unfortunate. But the wicked passions of men's hearts alone seem strong enough to leave pictures that persist; the good are ever too lukewarm.\"\n\nThe stranger sighed as he spoke. But Harris, exhausted and shaken as he was to the very core, paced by his side, only half listening. He moved as in a dream still. It was very wonderful to him, this walk home under the stars in the early hours of the October morning, the peaceful forest all about them, mist rising here and there over the small clearings, and the sound of water from a hundred little invisible streams filling in the pauses of the talk. In after life he always looked back to it as something magical and impossible, something that had seemed too beautiful, too curiously beautiful, to have been quite true. And, though at the time he heard and understood but a quarter of what the stranger said, it came back to him afterwards, staying with him till the end of his days, and always with a curious, haunting sense of unreality, as though he had enjoyed a wonderful dream of which he could recall only faint and exquisite portions.\n\nBut the horror of the earlier experience was effectually dispelled; and when they reached the railway inn, somewhere about three o'clock in the morning, Harris shook the stranger's hand gratefully, effusively, meeting the look of those rather wonderful eyes with a full heart, and went up to his room, thinking in a hazy, dream-like way of the words with which the stranger had brought their conversation to an end as they left the confines of the forest\u2014\n\n\"And if thought and emotion can persist in this way so long after the brain that sent them forth has crumbled into dust, how vitally important it must be to control their very birth in the heart, and guard them with the keenest possible restraint.\"\n\nBut Harris, the silk merchant, slept better than might have been expected, and with a soundness that carried him half-way through the day. And when he came downstairs and learned that the stranger had already taken his departure, he realised with keen regret that he had never once thought of asking his name.\n\n\"Yes, he signed the visitors' book,\" said the girl in reply to his question.\n\nAnd he turned over the blotted pages and found there, the last entry, in a very delicate and individual handwriting\u2014\n\n\"John Silence, London.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Camp of the Dog", + "text": "Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at Waxholm. But it is only after Waxholm that the true islands begin, so to speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course of a hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart of this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer holiday. A veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no wider than a country lane, or, again, so far that an expanse stretched like the open sea for miles.\n\nAlthough the larger islands boasted farms and fishing stations, the majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the very heart of primitive forest.\n\nThe particular islands to which we had camping rights by virtue of paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage, bathing, night-lines, and what-not, shall have what description is necessary as the story proceeds; but, so far as paying rent was concerned, we might equally well have pitched our tents on any one of a hundred others that clustered about us as thickly as a swarm of bees.\n\nIt was in the blaze of an evening in July, the air clear as crystal, the sea a cobalt blue, when we left the steamer on the borders of civilisation and sailed away with maps, compasses, and provisions for the little group of dots in the Sk\u00e4g\u00e5rd that were to be our home for the next two months. The dinghy and my Canadian canoe trailed behind us, with tents and dunnage carefully piled aboard, and when the point of cliff intervened to hide the steamer and the Waxholm hotel we realised for the first time that the horror of trains and houses was far behind us, the fever of men and cities, the weariness of streets and confined spaces. The wilderness opened up on all sides into endless blue reaches, and the map and compasses were so frequently called into requisition that we went astray more often than not and progress was enchantingly slow. It took us, for instance, two whole days to find our crescent-shaped home, and the camps we made on the way were so fascinating that we left them with difficulty and regret, for each island seemed more desirable than the one before it, and over all lay the spell of haunting peace, remoteness from the turmoil of the world, and the freedom of open and desolate spaces.\n\nAnd so many of these spots of world-beauty have I sought out and dwelt in, that in my mind remains only a composite memory of their faces, a true map of heaven, as it were, from which this particular one stands forth with unusual sharpness because of the strange things that happened there, and also, I think, because anything in which John Silence played a part has a habit of fixing itself in the mind with a living and lasting quality of vividness.\n\nFor the moment, however, Dr. Silence was not of the party. Some private case in the interior of Hungary claimed his attention, and it was not till later\u2014the 15th of August, to be exact\u2014that I had arranged to meet him in Berlin and then return to London together for our harvest of winter work. All the members of our party, however, were known to him more or less well, and on this third day as we sailed through the narrow opening into the lagoon and saw the circular ridge of trees in a gold and crimson sunset before us, his last words to me when we parted in London for some unaccountable reason came back very sharply to my memory, and recalled the curious impression of prophecy with which I had first heard them:\n\n\"Enjoy your holiday and store up all the force you can,\" he had said as the train slipped out of Victoria; \"and we will meet in Berlin on the 15th\u2014unless you should send for me sooner.\"\n\nAnd now suddenly the words returned to me so clearly that it seemed I almost heard his voice in my ear: \"Unless you should send for me sooner\"; and returned, moreover, with a significance I was wholly at a loss to understand that touched somewhere in the depths of my mind a vague sense of apprehension that they had all along been intended in the nature of a prophecy.\n\nIn the lagoon, then, the wind failed us this July evening, as was only natural behind the shelter of the belt of woods, and we took to the oars, all breathless with the beauty of this first sight of our island home, yet all talking in somewhat hushed voices of the best place to land, the depth of water, the safest place to anchor, to put up the tents in, the most sheltered spot for the camp-fires, and a dozen things of importance that crop up when a home in the wilderness has actually to be made.\n\nAnd during this busy sunset hour of unloading before the dark, the souls of my companions adopted the trick of presenting themselves very vividly anew before my mind, and introducing themselves afresh.\n\nIn reality, I suppose, our party was in no sense singular. In the conventional life at home they certainly seemed ordinary enough, but suddenly, as we passed through these gates of the wilderness, I saw them more sharply than before, with characters stripped of the atmosphere of men and cities. A complete change of setting often furnishes a startlingly new view of people hitherto held for well-known; they present another facet of their personalities. I seemed to see my own party almost as new people\u2014people I had not known properly hitherto, people who would drop all disguises and henceforth reveal themselves as they really were. And each one seemed to say: \"Now you will see me as I am. You will see me here in this primitive life of the wilderness without clothes. All my masks and veils I have left behind in the abodes of men. So, look out for surprises!\"\n\nThe Reverend Timothy Maloney helped me to put up the tents, long practice making the process easy, and while he drove in pegs and tightened ropes, his coat off, his flannel collar flying open without a tie, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was cut out for the life of a pioneer rather than the church. He was fifty years of age, muscular, blue-eyed and hearty, and he took his share of the work, and more, without shirking. The way he handled the axe in cutting down saplings for the tent-poles was a delight to see, and his eye in judging the level was unfailing.\n\nBullied as a young man into a lucrative family living, he had in turn bullied his mind into some semblance of orthodox beliefs, doing the honours of the little country church with an energy that made one think of a coal-heaver tending china; and it was only in the past few years that he had resigned the living and taken instead to cramming young men for their examinations. This suited him better. It enabled him, too, to indulge his passion for spells of \"wild life,\" and to spend the summer months of most years under canvas in one part of the world or another where he could take his young men with him and combine \"reading\" with open air.\n\nHis wife usually accompanied him, and there was no doubt she enjoyed the trips, for she possessed, though in less degree, the same joy of the wilderness that was his own distinguishing characteristic. The only difference was that while he regarded it as the real life, she regarded it as an interlude. While he camped out with his heart and mind, she played at camping out with her clothes and body. None the less, she made a splendid companion, and to watch her busy cooking dinner over the fire we had built among the stones was to understand that her heart was in the business for the moment and that she was happy even with the detail.\n\nMrs. Maloney at home, knitting in the sun and believing that the world was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with willing pleasure, for in spite of his general appearance of debility he was as happy to be in camp as any of them.\n\nBut more than any other member of the party, Joan Maloney, the daughter, was the one who seemed a natural and genuine part of the landscape, who belonged to it all just in the same way that the trees and the moss and the grey rocks running out into the water belonged to it. For she was obviously in her right and natural setting, a creature of the wilds, a gipsy in her own home.\n\nTo any one with a discerning eye this would have been more or less apparent, but to me, who had known her during all the twenty-two years of her life and was familiar with the ins and outs of her primitive, utterly un-modern type, it was strikingly clear. To see her there made it impossible to imagine her again in civilisation. I lost all recollection of how she looked in a town. The memory somehow evaporated. This slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the grace of the woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing the fire, or stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly seemed the only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home; in London she became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll overdressed and moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here she was alive all over.\n\nI forget altogether how she was dressed, just as I forget how any particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on any one of the boulders that lay about the Camp. She looked just as wild and natural and untamed as everything else that went to make up the scene, and more than that I cannot say.\n\nPretty, she was decidedly not. She was thin, skinny, dark-haired, and possessed of great physical strength in the form of endurance. She had, too, something of the force and vigorous purpose of a man, tempestuous sometimes and wild to passionate, frightening her mother, and puzzling her easy-going father with her storms of waywardness, while at the same time she stirred his admiration by her violence. A pagan of the pagans she was besides, and with some haunting suggestion of old-world pagan beauty about her dark face and eyes. Altogether an odd and difficult character, but with a generosity and high courage that made her very lovable.\n\nIn town life she always seemed to me to feel cramped, bored, a devil in a cage, in her eyes a hunted expression as though any moment she dreaded to be caught. But up in these spacious solitudes all this disappeared. Away from the limitations that plagued and stung her, she would show at her best, and as I watched her moving about the Camp I repeatedly found myself thinking of a wild creature that had just obtained its freedom and was trying its muscles.\n\nPeter Sangree, of course, at once went down before her. But she was so obviously beyond his reach, and besides so well able to take care of herself, that I think her parents gave the matter but little thought, and he himself worshipped at a respectful distance, keeping admirable control of his passion in all respects save one; for at his age the eyes are difficult to master, and the yearning, almost the devouring, expression often visible in them was probably there unknown even to himself. He, better than any one else, understood that he had fallen in love with something most hard of attainment, something that drew him to the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. It, no doubt, was a secret and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship from afar; only I think he suffered more than any one guessed, and that his want of vitality was due in large measure to the constant stream of unsatisfied yearning that poured for ever from his soul and body. Moreover, it seemed to me, who now saw them for the first time together, that there was an unnamable something\u2014an elusive quality of some kind\u2014that marked them as belonging to the same world, and that although the girl ignored him she was secretly, and perhaps unknown to herself, drawn by some attribute very deep in her own nature to some quality equally deep in his.\n\nThis, then, was the party when we first settled down into our two months' camp on the island in the Baltic Sea. Other figures flitted from time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man, sometimes another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in the clergyman's tent, but they came for short periods only, and they went without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played no important part in what subsequently happened.\n\nThe weather favoured us that night, so that by sunset the tents were up, the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected and chopped into lengths, and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for lighting on the trees. Sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of balsam boughs for the women's beds, and had cleared little paths of brushwood from their tents to the central fireplace. All was prepared for bad weather. It was a cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat down to and ate under the stars, and, according to the clergyman, the only meal fit to eat we had seen since we left London a week before.\n\nThe deep stillness, after that roar of steamers, trains, and tourists, held something that thrilled, for as we lay round the fire there was no sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the soft lapping of the waves along the shore and against the sides of the boat in the lagoon. The ghostly outline of her white sails was just visible through the trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm anchorage, her sheets flapping gently against the mast. Beyond lay the dim blue shapes of other islands floating in the night, and from all the great spaces about us came the murmur of the sea and the soft breathing of great woods. The odours of the wilderness\u2014smells of wind and earth, of trees and water, clean, vigorous, and mighty\u2014were the true odours of a virgin world unspoilt by men, more penetrating and more subtly intoxicating than any other perfume in the whole world. Oh!\u2014and dangerously strong, too, no doubt, for some natures!\n\n\"Ahhh!\" breathed out the clergyman after supper, with an indescribable gesture of satisfaction and relief. \"Here there is freedom, and room for body and mind to turn in. Here one can work and rest and play. Here one can be alive and absorb something of the earth-forces that never get within touching distance in the cities. By George, I shall make a permanent camp here and come when it is time to die!\"\n\nThe good man was merely giving vent to his delight at being under canvas. He said the same thing every year, and he said it often. But it more or less expressed the superficial feelings of us all. And when, a little later, he turned to compliment his wife on the fried potatoes, and discovered that she was snoring, with her back against a tree, he grunted with content at the sight and put a ground-sheet over her feet, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to fall asleep after dinner, and then moved back to his own corner, smoking his pipe with great satisfaction.\n\nAnd I, smoking mine too, lay and fought against the most delicious sleep imaginable, while my eyes wandered from the fire to the stars peeping through the branches, and then back again to the group about me. The Rev. Timothy soon let his pipe go out, and succumbed as his wife had done, for he had worked hard and eaten well. Sangree, also smoking, leaned against a tree with his gaze fixed on the girl, a depth of yearning in his face that he could not hide, and that really distressed me for him. And Joan herself, with wide staring eyes, alert, full of the new forces of the place, evidently keyed up by the magic of finding herself among all the things her soul recognised as \"home,\" sat rigid by the fire, her thoughts roaming through the spaces, the blood stirring about her heart. She was as unconscious of the Canadian's gaze as she was that her parents both slept. She looked to me more like a tree, or something that had grown out of the island, than a living girl of the century; and when I spoke across to her in a whisper and suggested a tour of investigation, she started and looked up at me as though she heard a voice in her dreams.\n\nSangree leaped up and joined us, and without waking the others we three went over the ridge of the island and made our way down to the shore behind. The water lay like a lake before us still coloured by the sunset. The air was keen and scented, wafting the smell of the wooded islands that hung about us in the darkening air. Very small waves tumbled softly on the sand. The sea was sown with stars, and everywhere breathed and pulsed the beauty of the northern summer night. I confess I speedily lost consciousness of the human presences beside me, and I have little doubt Joan did too. Only Sangree felt otherwise, I suppose, for presently we heard him sighing; and I can well imagine that he absorbed the whole wonder and passion of the scene into his aching heart, to swell the pain there that was more searching even than the pain at the sight of such matchless and incomprehensible beauty.\n\nThe splash of a fish jumping broke the spell.\n\n\"I wish we had the canoe now,\" remarked Joan; \"we could paddle out to the other islands.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I said; \"wait here and I'll go across for it,\" and was turning to feel my way back through the darkness when she stopped me in a voice that meant what it said.\n\n\"No; Mr. Sangree will get it. We will wait here and cooee to guide him.\"\n\nThe Canadian was off in a moment, for she had only to hint of her wishes and he obeyed.\n\n\"Keep out from shore in case of rocks,\" I cried out as he went, \"and turn to the right out of the lagoon. That's the shortest way round by the map.\"\n\nMy voice travelled across the still waters and woke echoes in the distant islands that came back to us like people calling out of space. It was only thirty or forty yards over the ridge and down the other side to the lagoon where the boats lay, but it was a good mile to coast round the shore in the dark to where we stood and waited. We heard him stumbling away among the boulders, and then the sounds suddenly ceased as he topped the ridge and went down past the fire on the other side.\n\n\"I didn't want to be left alone with him,\" the girl said presently in a low voice. \"I'm always afraid he's going to say or do something\u2014\" She hesitated a moment, looking quickly over her shoulder towards the ridge where he had just disappeared\u2014\"something that might lead to unpleasantness.\"\n\nShe stopped abruptly.\n\n\"You frightened, Joan!\" I exclaimed, with genuine surprise. \"This is a new light on your wicked character. I thought the human being who could frighten you did not exist.\" Then I suddenly realised she was talking seriously\u2014looking to me for help of some kind\u2014and at once I dropped the teasing attitude.\n\n\"He's very far gone, I think, Joan,\" I added gravely. \"You must be kind to him, whatever else you may feel. He's exceedingly fond of you.\"\n\n\"I know, but I can't help it,\" she whispered, lest her voice should carry in the stillness; \"there's something about him that\u2014that makes me feel creepy and half afraid.\"\n\n\"But, poor man, it's not his fault if he is delicate and sometimes looks like death,\" I laughed gently, by way of defending what I felt to be a very innocent member of my sex.\n\n\"Oh, but it's not that I mean,\" she answered quickly; \"it's something I feel about him, something in his soul, something he hardly knows himself, but that may come out if we are much together. It draws me, I feel, tremendously. It stirs what is wild in me\u2014deep down\u2014oh, very deep down,\u2014yet at the same time makes me feel afraid.\"\n\n\"I suppose his thoughts are always playing about you,\" I said, \"but he's nice-minded and\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" she interrupted impatiently, \"I can trust myself absolutely with him. He's gentle and singularly pure-minded. But there's something else that\u2014\" She stopped again sharply to listen. Then she came up close beside me in the darkness, whispering\u2014\n\n\"You know, Mr. Hubbard, sometimes my intuitions warn me a little too strongly to be ignored. Oh, yes, you needn't tell me again that it's difficult to distinguish between fancy and intuition. I know all that. But I also know that there's something deep down in that man's soul that calls to something deep down in mine. And at present it frightens me. Because I cannot make out what it is; and I know, I know, he'll do something some day that\u2014that will shake my life to the very bottom.\" She laughed a little at the strangeness of her own description.\n\nI turned to look at her more closely, but the darkness was too great to show her face. There was an intensity, almost of suppressed passion, in her voice that took me completely by surprise.\n\n\"Nonsense, Joan,\" I said, a little severely; \"you know him well. He's been with your father for months now.\"\n\n\"But that was in London; and up here it's different\u2014I mean, I feel that it may be different. Life in a place like this blows away the restraints of the artificial life at home. I know, oh, I know what I'm saying. I feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one's nature begins to melt and flow. Surely you must understand what I mean!\"\n\n\"Of course I understand,\" I replied, yet not wishing to encourage her in her present line of thought, \"and it's a grand experience\u2014for a short time. But you're overtired to-night, Joan, like the rest of us. A few days in this air will set you above all fears of the kind you mention.\"\n\nThen, after a moment's silence, I added, feeling I should estrange her confidence altogether if I blundered any more and treated her like a child\u2014\n\n\"I think, perhaps, the true explanation is that you pity him for loving you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy, vigorous animal for what is weak and timid. If he came up boldly and took you by the throat and shouted that he would force you to love him\u2014well, then you would feel no fear at all. You would know exactly how to deal with him. Isn't it, perhaps, something of that kind?\"\n\nThe girl made no reply, and when I took her hand I felt that it trembled a little and was cold.\n\n\"It's not his love that I'm afraid of,\" she said hurriedly, for at this moment we heard the dip of a paddle in the water, \"it's something in his very soul that terrifies me in a way I have never been terrified before,\u2014yet fascinates me. In town I was hardly conscious of his presence. But the moment we got away from civilisation, it began to come. He seems so\u2014so real up here. I dread being alone with him. It makes me feel that something must burst and tear its way out\u2014that he would do something\u2014or I should do something\u2014I don't know exactly what I mean, probably,\u2014but that I should let myself go and scream\u2014\"\n\n\"Joan!\"\n\n\"Don't be alarmed,\" she laughed shortly; \"I shan't do anything silly, but I wanted to tell you my feelings in case I needed your help. When I have intuitions as strong as this they are never wrong, only I don't know yet what it means exactly.\"\n\n\"You must hold out for the month, at any rate,\" I said in as matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage, for her manner had somehow changed my surprise to a subtle sense of alarm. \"Sangree only stays the month, you know. And, anyhow, you are such an odd creature yourself that you should feel generously towards other odd creatures,\" I ended lamely, with a forced laugh.\n\nShe gave my hand a sudden pressure. \"I'm glad I've told you at any rate,\" she said quickly under her breath, for the canoe was now gliding up silently like a ghost to our feet, \"and I'm glad you're here, too,\" she added as we moved down towards the water to meet it.\n\nI made Sangree change into the bows and got into the steering seat myself, putting the girl between us so that I could watch them both by keeping their outlines against the sea and stars. For the intuitions of certain folk\u2014women and children usually, I confess\u2014I have always felt a great respect that has more often than not been justified by experience; and now the curious emotion stirred in me by the girl's words remained somewhat vividly in my consciousness. I explained it in some measure by the fact that the girl, tired out by the fatigue of many days' travel, had suffered a vigorous reaction of some kind from the strong, desolate scenery, and further, perhaps, that she had been treated to my own experience of seeing the members of the party in a new light\u2014the Canadian, being partly a stranger, more vividly than the rest of us. But, at the same time, I felt it was quite possible that she had sensed some subtle link between his personality and her own, some quality that she had hitherto ignored and that the routine of town life had kept buried out of sight. The only thing that seemed difficult to explain was the fear she had spoken of, and this I hoped the wholesome effects of camp-life and exercise would sweep away naturally in the course of time.\n\nWe made the tour of the island without speaking. It was all too beautiful for speech. The trees crowded down to the shore to hear us pass. We saw their fine dark heads, bowed low with splendid dignity to watch us, forgetting for a moment that the stars were caught in the needled network of their hair. Against the sky in the west, where still lingered the sunset gold, we saw the wild toss of the horizon, shaggy with forest and cliff, gripping the heart like the motive in a symphony, and sending the sense of beauty all a-shiver through the mind\u2014all these surrounding islands standing above the water like low clouds, and like them seeming to post along silently into the engulfing night. We heard the musical drip-drip of the paddle, and the little wash of our waves on the shore, and then suddenly we found ourselves at the opening of the lagoon again, having made the complete circuit of our home.\n\nThe Reverend Timothy had awakened from sleep and was singing to himself; and the sound of his voice as we glided down the fifty yards of enclosed water was pleasant to hear and undeniably wholesome. We saw the glow of the fire up among the trees on the ridge, and his shadow moving about as he threw on more wood.\n\n\"There you are!\" he called aloud. \"Good again! Been setting the night-lines, eh? Capital! And your mother's still fast asleep, Joan.\"\n\nHis cheery laugh floated across the water; he had not been in the least disturbed by our absence, for old campers are not easily alarmed.\n\n\"Now, remember,\" he went on, after we had told our little tale of travel by the fire, and Mrs. Maloney had asked for the fourth time exactly where her tent was and whether the door faced east or south, \"every one takes their turn at cooking breakfast, and one of the men is always out at sunrise to catch it first. Hubbard, I'll toss you which you do in the morning and which I do!\" He lost the toss. \"Then I'll catch it,\" I said, laughing at his discomfiture, for I knew he loathed stirring porridge. \"And mind you don't burn it as you did every blessed time last year on the Volga,\" I added by way of reminder.\n\nMrs. Maloney's fifth interruption about the door of her tent, and her further pointed observation that it was past nine o'clock, set us lighting lanterns and putting the fire out for safety.\n\nBut before we separated for the night the clergyman had a time-honoured little ritual of his own to go through that no one had the heart to deny him. He always did this. It was a relic of his pulpit habits. He glanced briefly from one to the other of us, his face grave and earnest, his hands lifted to the stars and his eyes all closed and puckered up beneath a momentary frown. Then he offered up a short, almost inaudible prayer, thanking Heaven for our safe arrival, begging for good weather, no illness or accidents, plenty of fish, and strong sailing winds.\n\nAnd then, unexpectedly\u2014no one knew why exactly\u2014he ended up with an abrupt request that nothing from the kingdom of darkness should be allowed to afflict our peace, and no evil thing come near to disturb us in the night-time.\n\nAnd while he uttered these last surprising words, so strangely unlike his usual ending, it chanced that I looked up and let my eyes wander round the group assembled about the dying fire. And it certainly seemed to me that Sangree's face underwent a sudden and visible alteration. He was staring at Joan, and as he stared the change ran over it like a shadow and was gone. I started in spite of myself, for something oddly concentrated, potent, collected, had come into the expression usually so scattered and feeble. But it was all swift as a passing meteor, and when I looked a second time his face was normal and he was looking among the trees.\n\nAnd Joan, luckily, had not observed him, her head being bowed and her eyes tightly closed while her father prayed.\n\n\"The girl has a vivid imagination indeed,\" I thought, half laughing, as I lit the lanterns, \"if her thoughts can put a glamour upon mine in this way\"; and yet somehow, when we said good-night, I took occasion to give her a few vigorous words of encouragement, and went to her tent to make sure I could find it quickly in the night in case anything happened. In her quick way the girl understood and thanked me, and the last thing I heard as I moved off to the men's quarters was Mrs. Maloney crying that there were beetles in her tent, and Joan's laughter as she went to help her turn them out.\n\nHalf an hour later the island was silent as the grave, but for the mournful voices of the wind as it sighed up from the sea. Like white sentries stood the three tents of the men on one side of the ridge, and on the other side, half hidden by some birches, whose leaves just shivered as the breeze caught them, the women's tents, patches of ghostly grey, gathered more closely together for mutual shelter and protection. Something like fifty yards of broken ground, grey rock, moss and lichen, lay between, and over all lay the curtain of the night and the great whispering winds from the forests of Scandinavia.\n\nAnd the very last thing, just before floating away on that mighty wave that carries one so softly off into the deeps of forgetfulness, I again heard the voice of John Silence as the train moved out of Victoria Station; and by some subtle connection that met me on the very threshold of consciousness there rose in my mind simultaneously the memory of the girl's half-given confidence, and of her distress. As by some wizardry of approaching dreams they seemed in that instant to be related; but before I could analyse the why and the wherefore, both sank away out of sight again, and I was off beyond recall.\n\n\"Unless you should send for me sooner.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 388", + "text": "Whether Mrs. Maloney's tent door opened south or east I think she never discovered, for it is quite certain she always slept with the flap tightly fastened; I only know that my own little \"five by seven, all silk\" faced due east, because next morning the sun, pouring in as only the wilderness sun knows how to pour, woke me early, and a moment later, with a short run over soft moss and a flying dive from the granite ledge, I was swimming in the most sparkling water imaginable.\n\nIt was barely four o'clock, and the sun came down a long vista of blue islands that led out to the open sea and Finland. Nearer by rose the wooded domes of our own property, still capped and wreathed with smoky trails of fast-melting mist, and looking as fresh as though it was the morning of Mrs. Maloney's Sixth Day and they had just issued, clean and brilliant, from the hands of the great Architect.\n\nIn the open spaces the ground was drenched with dew, and from the sea a cool salt wind stole in among the trees and set the branches trembling in an atmosphere of shimmering silver. The tents shone white where the sun caught them in patches. Below lay the lagoon, still dreaming of the summer night; in the open the fish were jumping busily, sending musical ripples towards the shore; and in the air hung the magic of dawn\u2014silent, incommunicable.\n\nI lit the fire, so that an hour later the clergyman should find good ashes to stir his porridge over, and then set forth upon an examination of the island, but hardly had I gone a dozen yards when I saw a figure standing a little in front of me where the sunlight fell in a pool among the trees.\n\nIt was Joan. She had already been up an hour, she told me, and had bathed before the last stars had left the sky. I saw at once that the new spirit of this solitary region had entered into her, banishing the fears of the night, for her face was like the face of a happy denizen of the wilderness, and her eyes stainless and shining. Her feet were bare, and drops of dew she had shaken from the branches hung in her loose-flying hair. Obviously she had come into her own.\n\n\"I've been all over the island,\" she announced laughingly, \"and there are two things wanting.\"\n\n\"You're a good judge, Joan. What are they?\"\n\n\"There's no animal life, and there's no\u2014water.\"\n\n\"They go together,\" I said. \"Animals don't bother with a rock like this unless there's a spring on it.\"\n\nAnd as she led me from place to place, happy and excited, leaping adroitly from rock to rock, I was glad to note that my first impressions were correct. She made no reference to our conversation of the night before. The new spirit had driven out the old. There was no room in her heart for fear or anxiety, and Nature had everything her own way.\n\nThe island, we found, was some three-quarters of a mile from point to point, built in a circle, or wide horseshoe, with an opening of twenty feet at the mouth of the lagoon. Pine-trees grew thickly all over, but here and there were patches of silver birch, scrub oak, and considerable colonies of wild raspberry and gooseberry bushes. The two ends of the horseshoe formed bare slabs of smooth granite running into the sea and forming dangerous reefs just below the surface, but the rest of the island rose in a forty-foot ridge and sloped down steeply to the sea on either side, being nowhere more than a hundred yards wide.\n\nThe outer shore-line was much indented with numberless coves and bays and sandy beaches, with here and there caves and precipitous little cliffs against which the sea broke in spray and thunder. But the inner shore, the shore of the lagoon, was low and regular, and so well protected by the wall of trees along the ridge that no storm could ever send more than a passing ripple along its sandy marges. Eternal shelter reigned there.\n\nOn one of the other islands, a few hundred yards away\u2014for the rest of the party slept late this first morning, and we took to the canoe\u2014we discovered a spring of fresh water untainted by the brackish flavour of the Baltic, and having thus solved the most important problem of the Camp, we next proceeded to deal with the second\u2014fish. And in half an hour we reeled in and turned homewards, for we had no means of storage, and to clean more fish than may be stored or eaten in a day is no wise occupation for experienced campers.\n\nAnd as we landed towards six o'clock we heard the clergyman singing as usual and saw his wife and Sangree shaking out their blankets in the sun, and dressed in a fashion that finally dispelled all memories of streets and civilisation.\n\n\"The Little People lit the fire for me,\" cried Maloney, looking natural and at home in his ancient flannel suit and breaking off in the middle of his singing, \"so I've got the porridge going\u2014and this time it's not burnt.\"\n\nWe reported the discovery of water and held up the fish.\n\n\"Good! Good again!\" he cried. \"We'll have the first decent breakfast we've had this year. Sangree'll clean 'em in no time, and the Bo'sun's Mate\u2014\"\n\n\"Will fry them to a turn,\" laughed the voice of Mrs. Maloney, appearing on the scene in a tight blue jersey and sandals, and catching up the frying-pan. Her husband always called her the Bo'sun's Mate in Camp, because it was her duty, among others, to pipe all hands to meals.\n\n\"And as for you, Joan,\" went on the happy man, \"you look like the spirit of the island, with moss in your hair and wind in your eyes, and sun and stars mixed in your face.\" He looked at her with delighted admiration. \"Here, Sangree, take these twelve, there's a good fellow, they're the biggest; and we'll have 'em in butter in less time than you can say Baltic island!\"\n\nI watched the Canadian as he slowly moved off to the cleaning pail. His eyes were drinking in the girl's beauty, and a wave of passionate, almost feverish, joy passed over his face, expressive of the ecstasy of true worship more than anything else. Perhaps he was thinking that he still had three weeks to come with that vision always before his eyes; perhaps he was thinking of his dreams in the night. I cannot say. But I noticed the curious mingling of yearning and happiness in his eyes, and the strength of the impression touched my curiosity. Something in his face held my gaze for a second, something to do with its intensity. That so timid, so gentle a personality should conceal so virile a passion almost seemed to require explanation.\n\nBut the impression was momentary, for that first breakfast in Camp permitted no divided attentions, and I dare swear that the porridge, the tea, the Swedish \"flatbread,\" and the fried fish flavoured with points of frizzled bacon, were better than any meal eaten elsewhere that day in the whole world.\n\nThe first clear day in a new camp is always a furiously busy one, and we soon dropped into the routine upon which in large measure the real comfort of every one depends. About the cooking-fire, greatly improved with stones from the shore, we built a high stockade consisting of upright poles thickly twined with branches, the roof lined with moss and lichen and weighted with rocks, and round the interior we made low wooden seats so that we could lie round the fire even in rain and eat our meals in peace. Paths, too, outlined themselves from tent to tent, from the bathing places and the landing stage, and a fair division of the island was decided upon between the quarters of the men and the women. Wood was stacked, awkward trees and boulders removed, hammocks slung, and tents strengthened. In a word, Camp was established, and duties were assigned and accepted as though we expected to live on this Baltic island for years to come and the smallest detail of the Community life was important.\n\nMoreover, as the Camp came into being, this sense of a community developed, proving that we were a definite whole, and not merely separate human beings living for a while in tents upon a desert island. Each fell willingly into the routine. Sangree, as by natural selection, took upon himself the cleaning of the fish and the cutting of the wood into lengths sufficient for a day's use. And he did it well. The pan of water was never without a fish, cleaned and scaled, ready to fry for whoever was hungry; the nightly fire never died down for lack of material to throw on without going farther afield to search.\n\nAnd Timothy, once reverend, caught the fish and chopped down the trees. He also assumed responsibility for the condition of the boat, and did it so thoroughly that nothing in the little cutter was ever found wanting. And when, for any reason, his presence was in demand, the first place to look for him was\u2014in the boat, and there, too, he was usually found, tinkering away with sheets, sails, or rudder and singing as he tinkered.\n\n'Nor was the \"reading\" neglected; for most mornings there came a sound of droning voices form the white tent by the raspberry bushes, which signified that Sangree, the tutor, and whatever other man chanced to be in the party at the time, were hard at it with history or the classics.\n\nAnd while Mrs. Maloney, also by natural selection, took charge of the larder and the kitchen, the mending and general supervision of the rough comforts, she also made herself peculiarly mistress of the megaphone which summoned to meals and carried her voice easily from one end of the island to the other; and in her hours of leisure she daubed the surrounding scenery on to a sketching block with all the honesty and devotion of her determined but unreceptive soul.\n\nJoan, meanwhile, Joan, elusive creature of the wilds, became I know not exactly what. She did plenty of work in the Camp, yet seemed to have no very precise duties. She was everywhere and anywhere. Sometimes she slept in her tent, sometimes under the stars with a blanket. She knew every inch of the island and kept turning up in places where she was least expected\u2014for ever wandering about, reading her books in sheltered corners, making little fires on sunless days to \"worship by to the gods,\" as she put it, ever finding new pools to dive and bathe in, and swimming day and night in the warm and waveless lagoon like a fish in a huge tank. She went bare-legged and bare-footed, with her hair down and her skirts caught up to the knees, and if ever a human being turned into a jolly savage within the compass of a single week, Joan Maloney was certainly that human being. She ran wild.\n\nSo completely, too, was she possessed by the strong spirit of the place that the little human fear she had yielded to so strangely on our arrival seemed to have been utterly dispossessed. As I hoped and expected, she made no reference to our conversation of the first evening. Sangree bothered her with no special attentions, and after all they were very little together. His behaviour was perfect in that respect, and I, for my part, hardly gave the matter another thought. Joan was ever a prey to vivid fancies of one kind or another, and this was one of them. Mercifully for the happiness of all concerned, it had melted away before the spirit of busy, active life and deep content that reigned over the island. Every one was intensely alive, and peace was upon all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 389", + "text": "Meanwhile the effect of the camp-life began to tell. Always a searching test of character, its results, sooner or later, are infallible, for it acts upon the soul as swiftly and surely as the hypo bath upon the negative of a photograph. A readjustment of the personal forces takes place quickly; some parts of the personality go to sleep, others wake up: but the first sweeping change that the primitive life brings about is that the artificial portions of the character shed themselves one after another like dead skins. Attitudes and poses that seemed genuine in the city drop away. The mind, like the body, grows quickly hard, simple, uncomplex. And in a camp as primitive and close to nature as ours was, these effects became speedily visible.\n\nSome folk, of course, who talk glibly about the simple life when it is safely out of reach, betray themselves in camp by for ever peering about for the artificial excitements of civilisation which they miss. Some get bored at once; some grow slovenly; some reveal the animal in most unexpected fashion; and some, the select few, find themselves in very short order and are happy.\n\nAnd, in our little party, we could flatter ourselves that we all belonged to the last category, so far as the general effect was concerned. Only there were certain other changes as well, varying with each individual, and all interesting to note.\n\nIt was only after the first week or two that these changes became marked, although this is the proper place, I think, to speak of them. For, having myself no other duty than to enjoy a well-earned holiday, I used to load my canoe with blankets and provisions and journey forth on exploration trips among the islands of several days together; and it was on my return from the first of these\u2014when I rediscovered the party, so to speak\u2014that these changes first presented themselves vividly to me, and in one particular instance produced a rather curious impression.\n\nIn a word, then, while every one had grown wilder, naturally wilder, Sangree, it seemed to me, had grown much wilder, and what I can only call unnaturally wilder. He made me think of a savage.\n\nTo begin with, he had changed immensely in mere physical appearance, and the full brown cheeks, the brighter eyes of absolute health, and the general air of vigour and robustness that had come to replace his customary lassitude and timidity, had worked such an improvement that I hardly knew him for the same man. His voice, too, was deeper and his manner bespoke for the first time a greater measure of confidence in himself. He now had some claims to be called nice-looking, or at least to a certain air of virility that would not lessen his value in the eyes of the opposite sex.\n\nAll this, of course, was natural enough, and most welcome. But, altogether apart from this physical change, which no doubt had also been going forward in the rest of us, there was a subtle note in his personality that came to me with a degree of surprise that almost amounted to shock.\n\nAnd two things\u2014as he came down to welcome me and pull up the canoe\u2014leaped up in my mind unbidden, as though connected in some way I could not at the moment divine\u2014first, the curious judgment formed of him by Joan; and secondly, that fugitive expression I had caught in his face while Maloney was offering up his strange prayer for special protection from Heaven.\n\nThe delicacy of manner and feature\u2014to call it by no milder term\u2014which had always been a distinguishing characteristic of the man, had been replaced by something far more vigorous and decided, that yet utterly eluded analysis. The change which impressed me so oddly was not easy to name. The others\u2014singing Maloney, the bustling Bo'sun's Mate, and Joan, that fascinating half-breed of undine and salamander\u2014all showed the effects of a life so close to nature; but in their case the change was perfectly natural and what was to be expected, whereas with Peter Sangree, the Canadian, it was something unusual and unexpected.\n\nIt is impossible to explain how he managed gradually to convey to my mind the impression that something in him had turned savage, yet this, more or less, is the impression that he did convey. It was not that he seemed really less civilised, or that his character had undergone any definite alteration, but rather that something in him, hitherto dormant, had awakened to life. Some quality, latent till now\u2014so far, at least, as we were concerned, who, after all, knew him but slightly\u2014had stirred into activity and risen to the surface of his being.\n\nAnd while, for the moment, this seemed as far as I could get, it was but natural that my mind should continue the intuitive process and acknowledge that John Silence, owing to his peculiar faculties, and the girl, owing to her singularly receptive temperament, might each in a different way have divined this latent quality in his soul, and feared its manifestation later.\n\nOn looking back to this painful adventure, too, it now seems equally natural that the same process, carried to its logical conclusion, should have wakened some deep instinct in me that, wholly without direction from my will, set itself sharply and persistently upon the watch from that very moment. Thenceforward the personality of Sangree was never far from my thoughts, and I was for ever analysing and searching for the explanation that took so long in coming.\n\n\"I declare, Hubbard, you're tanned like an aboriginal, and you look like one, too,\" laughed Maloney.\n\n\"And I can return the compliment,\" was my reply, as we all gathered round a brew of tea to exchange news and compare notes.\n\nAnd later, at supper, it amused me to observe that the distinguished tutor, once clergyman, did not eat his food quite as \"nicely\" as he did at home\u2014he devoured it; that Mrs. Maloney ate more, and, to say the least, with less delay, than was her custom in the select atmosphere of her English dining-room; and that while Joan attacked her tin plateful with genuine avidity, Sangree, the Canadian, bit and gnawed at his, laughing and talking and complimenting the cook all the while, and making me think with secret amusement of a starved animal at its first meal. While, from their remarks about myself, I judged that I had changed and grown wild as much as the rest of them.\n\nIn this and in a hundred other little ways the change showed, ways difficult to define in detail, but all proving\u2014not the coarsening effect of leading the primitive life, but, let us say, the more direct and unvarnished methods that became prevalent. For all day long we were in the bath of the elements\u2014wind, water, sun\u2014and just as the body became insensible to cold and shed unnecessary clothing, the mind grew straightforward and shed many of the disguises required by the conventions of civilisation.\n\nAnd in each, according to temperament and character, there stirred the life-instincts that were natural, untamed, and, in a sense\u2014savage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 390", + "text": "So it came about that I stayed with our island party, putting off my second exploring trip from day to day, and I think that this far-fetched instinct to watch Sangree was really the cause of my postponement.\n\nFor another ten days the life of the Camp pursued its even and delightful way, blessed by perfect summer weather, a good harvest of fish, fine winds for sailing, and calm, starry nights. Maloney's selfish prayer had been favourably received. Nothing came to disturb or perplex. There was not even the prowling of night animals to vex the rest of Mrs. Maloney; for in previous camps it had often been her peculiar affliction that she heard the porcupines scratching against the canvas, or the squirrels dropping fir-cones in the early morning with a sound of miniature thunder upon the roof of her tent. But on this island there was not even a squirrel or a mouse. I think two toads and a small and harmless snake were the only living creatures that had been discovered during the whole of the first fortnight. And these two toads in all probability were not two toads, but one toad.\n\nThen, suddenly, came the terror that changed the whole aspect of the place\u2014the devastating terror.\n\nIt came, at first, gently, but from the very start it made me realise the unpleasant loneliness of our situation, our remote isolation in this wilderness of sea and rock, and how the islands in this tideless Baltic ocean lay about us like the advance guard of a vast besieging army. Its entry, as I say, was gentle, hardly noticeable, in fact, to most of us: singularly undramatic it certainly was. But, then, in actual life this is often the way the dreadful climaxes move upon us, leaving the heart undisturbed almost to the last minute, and then overwhelming it with a sudden rush of horror. For it was the custom at breakfast to listen patiently while each in turn related the trivial adventures of the night\u2014how they slept, whether the wind shook their tent, whether the spider on the ridge pole had moved, whether they had heard the toad, and so forth\u2014and on this particular morning Joan, in the middle of a little pause, made a truly novel announcement:\n\n\"In the night I heard the howling of a dog,\" she said, and then flushed up to the roots of her hair when we burst out laughing. For the idea of there being a dog on this forsaken island that was only able to support a snake and two toads was distinctly ludicrous, and I remember Maloney, half-way through his burnt porridge, capping the announcement by declaring that he had heard a \"Baltic turtle\" in the lagoon, and his wife's expression of frantic alarm before the laughter undeceived her.\n\nBut the next morning Joan repeated the story with additional and convincing detail.\n\n\"Sounds of whining and growling woke me,\" she said, \"and I distinctly heard sniffing under my tent, and the scratching of paws.\"\n\n\"Oh, Timothy! Can it be a porcupine?\" exclaimed the Bo'sun's Mate with distress, forgetting that Sweden was not Canada.\n\nBut the girl's voice had sounded to me in quite another key, and looking up I saw that her father and Sangree were staring at her hard. They, too, understood that she was in earnest, and had been struck by the serious note in her voice.\n\n\"Rubbish, Joan! You are always dreaming something or other wild,\" her father said a little impatiently.\n\n\"There's not an animal of any size on the whole island,\" added Sangree with a puzzled expression. He never took his eyes from her face.\n\n\"But there's nothing to prevent one swimming over,\" I put in briskly, for somehow a sense of uneasiness that was not pleasant had woven itself into the talk and pauses. \"A deer, for instance, might easily land in the night and take a look round\u2014\"\n\n\"Or a bear!\" gasped the Bo'sun's Mate, with a look so portentous that we all welcomed the laugh.\n\nBut Joan did not laugh. Instead, she sprang up and called to us to follow.\n\n\"There,\" she said, pointing to the ground by her tent on the side farthest from her mother's; \"there are the marks close to my head. You can see for yourselves.\"\n\nWe saw plainly. The moss and lichen\u2014for earth there was hardly any\u2014had been scratched up by paws. An animal about the size of a large dog it must have been, to judge by the marks. We stood and stared in a row.\n\n\"Close to my head,\" repeated the girl, looking round at us. Her face, I noticed, was very pale, and her lip seemed to quiver for an instant. Then she gave a sudden gulp\u2014and burst into a flood of tears.\n\nThe whole thing had come about in the brief space of a few minutes, and with a curious sense of inevitableness, moreover, as though it had all been carefully planned from all time and nothing could have stopped it. It had all been rehearsed before\u2014had actually happened before, as the strange feeling sometimes has it; it seemed like the opening movement in some ominous drama, and that I knew exactly what would happen next. Something of great moment was impending.\n\nFor this sinister sensation of coming disaster made itself felt from the very beginning, and an atmosphere of gloom and dismay pervaded the entire Camp from that moment forward.\n\nI drew Sangree to one side and moved away, while Maloney took the distressed girl into her tent, and his wife followed them, energetic and greatly flustered.\n\nFor thus, in undramatic fashion, it was that the terror I have spoken of first attempted the invasion of our Camp, and, trivial and unimportant though it seemed, every little detail of this opening scene is photographed upon my mind with merciless accuracy and precision. It happened exactly as described. This was exactly the language used. I see it written before me in black and white. I see, too, the faces of all concerned with the sudden ugly signature of alarm where before had been peace. The terror had stretched out, so to speak, a first tentative feeler toward us and had touched the hearts of each with a horrid directness. And from this moment the Camp changed.\n\nSangree in particular was visibly upset. He could not bear to see the girl distressed, and to hear her actually cry was almost more than he could stand. The feeling that he had no right to protect her hurt him keenly, and I could see that he was itching to do something to help, and liked him for it. His expression said plainly that he would tear in a thousand pieces anything that dared to injure a hair of her head.\n\nWe lit our pipes and strolled over in silence to the men's quarters, and it was his odd Canadian expression \"Gee whiz!\" that drew my attention to a further discovery.\n\n\"The brute's been scratching round my tent too,\" he cried, as he pointed to similar marks by the door and I stooped down to examine them. We both stared in amazement for several minutes without speaking.\n\n\"Only I sleep like the dead,\" he added, straightening up again, \"and so heard nothing, I suppose.\"\n\nWe traced the paw-marks from the mouth of his tent in a direct line across to the girl's, but nowhere else about the Camp was there a sign of the strange visitor. The deer, dog, or whatever it was that had twice favoured us with a visit in the night, had confined its attentions to these two tents. And, after all, there was really nothing out of the way about these visits of an unknown animal, for although our own island was destitute of life, we were in the heart of a wilderness, and the mainland and larger islands must be swarming with all kinds of four-footed creatures, and no very prolonged swimming was necessary to reach us. In any other country it would not have caused a moment's interest\u2014interest of the kind we felt, that is. In our Canadian camps the bears were for ever grunting about among the provision bags at night, porcupines scratching unceasingly, and chipmunks scuttling over everything.\n\n\"My daughter is overtired, and that's the truth of it,\" explained Maloney presently when he rejoined us and had examined in turn the other paw-marks. \"She's been overdoing it lately, and camp-life, you know, always means a great excitement to her. It's natural enough, if we take no notice she'll be all right.\" He paused to borrow my tobacco pouch and fill his pipe, and the blundering way he filled it and spilled the precious weed on the ground visibly belied the calm of his easy language. \"You might take her out for a bit of fishing, Hubbard, like a good chap; she's hardly up to the long day in the cutter. Show her some of the other islands in your canoe, perhaps. Eh?\"\n\nAnd by lunch-time the cloud had passed away as suddenly, and as suspiciously, as it had come.\n\nBut in the canoe, on our way home, having till then purposely ignored the subject uppermost in our minds, she suddenly spoke to me in a way that again touched the note of sinister alarm\u2014the note that kept on sounding and sounding until finally John Silence came with his great vibrating presence and relieved it; yes, and even after he came, too, for a while.\n\n\"I'm ashamed to ask it,\" she said abruptly, as she steered me home, her sleeves rolled up, her hair blowing in the wind, \"and ashamed of my silly tears too, because I really can't make out what caused them; but, Mr. Hubbard, I want you to promise me not to go off for your long expeditions\u2014just yet. I beg it of you.\" She was so in earnest that she forgot the canoe, and the wind caught it sideways and made us roll dangerously. \"I have tried hard not to ask this,\" she added, bringing the canoe round again, \"but I simply can't help myself.\"\n\nIt was a good deal to ask, and I suppose my hesitation was plain; for she went on before I could reply, and her beseeching expression and intensity of manner impressed me very forcibly.\n\n\"For another two weeks only\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Sangree leaves in a fortnight,\" I said, seeing at once what she was driving at, but wondering if it was best to encourage her or not.\n\n\"If I knew you were to be on the island till then,\" she said, her face alternately pale and blushing, and her voice trembling a little, \"I should feel so much happier.\"\n\nI looked at her steadily, waiting for her to finish.\n\n\"And safer,\" she added almost in a whisper; \"especially\u2014at night, I mean.\"\n\n\"Safer, Joan?\" I repeated, thinking I had never seen her eyes so soft and tender. She nodded her head, keeping her gaze fixed on my face.\n\nIt was really difficult to refuse, whatever my thoughts and judgment may have been, and somehow I understood that she spoke with good reason, though for the life of me I could not have put it into words.\n\n\"Happier\u2014and safer,\" she said gravely, the canoe giving a dangerous lurch as she leaned forward in her seat to catch my answer. Perhaps, after all, the wisest way was to grant her request and make light of it, easing her anxiety without too much encouraging its cause.\n\n\"All right, Joan, you queer creature; I promise,\" and the instant look of relief in her face, and the smile that came back like sunlight to her eyes, made me feel that, unknown to myself and the world, I was capable of considerable sacrifice after all.\n\n\"But, you know, there's nothing to be afraid of,\" I added sharply; and she looked up in my face with the smile women use when they know we are talking idly, yet do not wish to tell us so.\n\n\"You don't feel afraid, I know,\" she observed quietly.\n\n\"Of course not; why should I?\"\n\n\"So, if you will just humour me this once I\u2014I will never ask anything foolish of you again as long as I live,\" she said gratefully.\n\n\"You have my promise,\" was all I could find to say.\n\nShe headed the nose of the canoe for the lagoon lying a quarter of a mile ahead, and paddled swiftly; but a minute or two later she paused again and stared hard at me with the dripping paddle across the thwarts.\n\n\"You've not heard anything at night yourself, have you?\" she asked.\n\n\"I never hear anything at night,\" I replied shortly, \"from the moment I lie down till the moment I get up.\"\n\n\"That dismal howling, for instance,\" she went on, determined to get it out, \"far away at first and then getting closer, and stopping just outside the Camp?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"Because, sometimes I think I almost dreamed it.\"\n\n\"Most likely you did,\" was my unsympathetic response.\n\n\"And you don't think father has heard it either, then?\"\n\n\"No. He would have told me if he had.\"\n\nThis seemed to relieve her mind a little. \"I know mother hasn't,\" she added, as if speaking to herself, \"for she hears nothing\u2014ever.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 391", + "text": "It was two nights after this conversation that I woke out of deep sleep and heard sounds of screaming. The voice was really horrible, breaking the peace and silence with its shrill clamour. In less than ten seconds I was half dressed and out of my tent. The screaming had stopped abruptly, but I knew the general direction, and ran as fast as the darkness would allow over to the women's quarters, and on getting close I heard sounds of suppressed weeping. It was Joan's voice. And just as I came up I saw Mrs. Maloney, marvellously attired, fumbling with a lantern. Other voices became audible in the same moment behind me, and Timothy Maloney arrived, breathless, less than half dressed, and carrying another lantern that had gone out on the way from being banged against a tree. Dawn was just breaking, and a chill wind blew in from the sea. Heavy black clouds drove low overhead.\n\nThe scene of confusion may be better imagined than described. Questions in frightened voices filled the air against this background of suppressed weeping. Briefly\u2014Joan's silk tent had been torn, and the girl was in a state bordering upon hysterics. Somewhat reassured by our noisy presence, however,\u2014for she was plucky at heart,\u2014she pulled herself together and tried to explain what had happened; and her broken words, told there on the edge of night and morning upon this wild island ridge, were oddly thrilling and distressingly convincing.\n\n\"Something touched me and I woke,\" she said simply, but in a voice still hushed and broken with the terror of it, \"something pushing against the tent; I felt it through the canvas. There was the same sniffing and scratching as before, and I felt the tent give a little as when wind shakes it. I heard breathing\u2014very loud, very heavy breathing\u2014and then came a sudden great tearing blow, and the canvas ripped open close to my face.\"\n\nShe had instantly dashed out through the open flap and screamed at the top of her voice, thinking the creature had actually got into the tent. But nothing was visible, she declared, and she heard not the faintest sound of an animal making off under cover of the darkness. The brief account seemed to exercise a paralysing effect upon us all as we listened to it. I can see the dishevelled group to this day, the wind blowing the women's hair, and Maloney craning his head forward to listen, and his wife, open-mouthed and gasping, leaning against a pine tree.\n\n\"Come over to the stockade and we'll get the fire going,\" I said; \"that's the first thing,\" for we were all shaking with the cold in our scanty garments. And at that moment Sangree arrived wrapped in a blanket and carrying his gun; he was still drunken with sleep.\n\n\"The dog again,\" Maloney explained briefly, forestalling his questions; \"been at Joan's tent. Torn it, by Gad! this time. It's time we did something.\" He went on mumbling confusedly to himself.\n\nSangree gripped his gun and looked about swiftly in the darkness. I saw his eyes aflame in the glare of the flickering lanterns. He made a movement as though to start out and hunt\u2014and kill. Then his glance fell on the girl crouching on the ground, her face hidden in her hands, and there leaped into his features an expression of savage anger that transformed them. He could have faced a dozen lions with a walking stick at that moment, and again I liked him for the strength of his anger, his self-control, and his hopeless devotion.\n\nBut I stopped him going off on a blind and useless chase.\n\n\"Come and help me start the fire, Sangree,\" I said, anxious also to relieve the girl of our presence; and a few minutes later the ashes, still growing from the night's fire, had kindled the fresh wood, and there was a blaze that warmed us well while it also lit up the surrounding trees within a radius of twenty yards.\n\n\"I heard nothing,\" he whispered; \"what in the world do you think it is? It surely can't be only a dog!\"\n\n\"We'll find that out later,\" I said, as the others came up to the grateful warmth; \"the first thing is to make as big a fire as we can.\"\n\nJoan was calmer now, and her mother had put on some warmer, and less miraculous, garments. And while they stood talking in low voices Maloney and I slipped off to examine the tent. There was little enough to see, but that little was unmistakable. Some animal had scratched up the ground at the head of the tent, and with a great blow of a powerful paw\u2014a paw clearly provided with good claws\u2014had struck the silk and torn it open. There was a hole large enough to pass a fist and arm through.\n\n\"It can't be far away,\" Maloney said excitedly. \"We'll organise a hunt at once; this very minute.\"\n\nWe hurried back to the fire, Maloney talking boisterously about his proposed hunt. \"There's nothing like prompt action to dispel alarm,\" he whispered in my ear; and then turned to the rest of us.\n\n\"We'll hunt the island from end to end at once,\" he said, with excitement; \"that's what we'll do. The beast can't be far away. And the Bo'sun's Mate and Joan must come too, because they can't be left alone. Hubbard, you take the right shore, and you, Sangree, the left, and I'll go in the middle with the women. In this way we can stretch clean across the ridge, and nothing bigger than a rabbit can possibly escape us.\" He was extraordinarily excited, I thought. Anything affecting Joan, of course, stirred him prodigiously. \"Get your guns and we'll start the drive at once,\" he cried. He lit another lantern and handed one each to his wife and Joan, and while I ran to fetch my gun I heard him singing to himself with the excitement of it all.\n\nMeanwhile the dawn had come on quickly. It made the flickering lanterns look pale. The wind, too, was rising, and I heard the trees moaning overhead and the waves breaking with increasing clamour on the shore. In the lagoon the boat dipped and splashed, and the sparks from the fire were carried aloft in a stream and scattered far and wide.\n\nWe made our way to the extreme end of the island, measured our distances carefully, and then began to advance. None of us spoke. Sangree and I, with cocked guns, watched the shore lines, and all within easy touch and speaking distance. It was a slow and blundering drive, and there were many false alarms, but after the best part of half an hour we stood on the farther end, having made the complete tour, and without putting up so much as a squirrel. Certainly there was no living creature on that island but ourselves.\n\n\"I know what it is!\" cried Maloney, looking out over the dim expanse of grey sea, and speaking with the air of a man making a discovery; \"it's a dog from one of the farms on the larger islands\"\u2014he pointed seawards where the archipelago thickened\u2014\"and it's escaped and turned wild. Our fires and voices attracted it, and it's probably half starved as well as savage, poor brute!\"\n\nNo one said anything in reply, and he began to sing again very low to himself.\n\nThe point where we stood\u2014a huddled, shivering group\u2014faced the wider channels that led to the open sea and Finland. The grey dawn had broken in earnest at last, and we could see the racing waves with their angry crests of white. The surrounding islands showed up as dark masses in the distance, and in the east, almost as Maloney spoke, the sun came up with a rush in a stormy and magnificent sky of red and gold. Against this splashed and gorgeous background black clouds, shaped like fantastic and legendary animals, filed past swiftly in a tearing stream, and to this day I have only to close my eyes to see again that vivid and hurrying procession in the air. All about us the pines made black splashes against the sky. It was an angry sunrise. Rain, indeed, had already begun to fall in big drops.\n\nWe turned, as by a common instinct, and, without speech, made our way back slowly to the stockade, Maloney humming snatches of his songs, Sangree in front with his gun, prepared to shoot at a moment's notice, and the women floundering in the rear with myself and the extinguished lanterns.\n\nYet it was only a dog!\n\nReally, it was most singular when one came to reflect soberly upon it all. Events, say the occultists, have souls, or at least that agglomerate life due to the emotions and thoughts of all concerned in them, so that cities, and even whole countries, have great astral shapes which may become visible to the eye of vision; and certainly here, the soul of this drive\u2014this vain, blundering, futile drive\u2014stood somewhere between ourselves and\u2014laughed.\n\nAll of us heard that laugh, and all of us tried hard to smother the sound, or at least to ignore it. Every one talked at once, loudly, and with exaggerated decision, obviously trying to say something plausible against heavy odds, striving to explain naturally that an animal might so easily conceal itself from us, or swim away before we had time to light upon its trail. For we all spoke of that \"trail\" as though it really existed, and we had more to go upon than the mere marks of paws about the tents of Joan and the Canadian. Indeed, but for these, and the torn tent, I think it would, of course, have been possible to ignore the existence of this beast intruder altogether.\n\nAnd it was here, under this angry dawn, as we stood in the shelter of the stockade from the pouring rain, weary yet so strangely excited\u2014it was here, out of this confusion of voices and explanations, that\u2014very stealthily\u2014the ghost of something horrible slipped in and stood among us. It made all our explanations seem childish and untrue; the false relation was instantly exposed. Eyes exchanged quick, anxious glances, questioning, expressive of dismay. There was a sense of wonder, of poignant distress, and of trepidation. Alarm stood waiting at our elbows. We shivered.\n\nThen, suddenly, as we looked into each other's faces, came the long, unwelcome pause in which this new arrival established itself in our hearts.\n\nAnd, without further speech, or attempt at explanation, Maloney moved off abruptly to mix the porridge for an early breakfast; Sangree to clean the fish; myself to chop wood and tend the fire; Joan and her mother to change their wet garments; and, most significant of all, to prepare her mother's tent for its future complement of two.\n\nEach went to his duty, but hurriedly, awkwardly, silently; and this new arrival, this shape of terror and distress stalked, viewless, by the side of each.\n\n\"If only I could have traced that dog,\" I think was the thought in the minds of all.\n\nBut in Camp, where every one realises how important the individual contribution is to the comfort and well-being of all, the mind speedily recovers tone and pulls itself together.\n\nDuring the day, a day of heavy and ceaseless rain, we kept more or less to our tents, and though there were signs of mysterious conferences between the three members of the Maloney family, I think that most of us slept a good deal and stayed alone with his thoughts. Certainly, I did, because when Maloney came to say that his wife invited us all to a special \"tea\" in her tent, he had to shake me awake before I realised that he was there at all.\n\nAnd by supper-time we were more or less even-minded again, and almost jolly. I only noticed that there was an undercurrent of what is best described as \"jumpiness,\" and that the merest snapping of a twig, or plop of a fish in the lagoon, was sufficient to make us start and look over our shoulders. Pauses were rare in our talk, and the fire was never for one instant allowed to get low. The wind and rain had ceased, but the dripping of the branches still kept up an excellent imitation of a downpour. In particular, Maloney was vigilant and alert, telling us a series of tales in which the wholesome humorous element was especially strong. He lingered, too, behind with me after Sangree had gone to bed, and while I mixed myself a glass of hot Swedish punch, he did a thing I had never known him do before\u2014he mixed one for himself, and then asked me to light him over to his tent. We said nothing on the way, but I felt that he was glad of my companionship.\n\nI returned alone to the stockade, and for a long time after that kept the fire blazing, and sat up smoking and thinking. I hardly knew why; but sleep was far from me for one thing, and for another, an idea was taking form in my mind that required the comfort of tobacco and a bright fire for its growth. I lay against a corner of the stockade seat, listening to the wind whispering and to the ceaseless drip-drip of the trees. The night, otherwise, was very still, and the sea quiet as a lake. I remember that I was conscious, peculiarly conscious, of this host of desolate islands crowding about us in the darkness, and that we were the one little spot of humanity in a rather wonderful kind of wilderness.\n\nBut this, I think, was the only symptom that came to warn me of highly strung nerves, and it certainly was not sufficiently alarming to destroy my peace of mind. One thing, however, did come to disturb my peace, for just as I finally made ready to go, and had kicked the embers of the fire into a last effort, I fancied I saw, peering at me round the farther end of the stockade wall, a dark and shadowy mass that might have been\u2014that strongly resembled, in fact\u2014the body of a large animal. Two glowing eyes shone for an instant in the middle of it. But the next second I saw that it was merely a projecting mass of moss and lichen in the wall of our stockade, and the eyes were a couple of wandering sparks from the dying ashes I had kicked. It was easy enough, too, to imagine I saw an animal moving here and there between the trees, as I picked my way stealthily to my tent. Of course, the shadows tricked me.\n\nAnd though it was after one o'clock, Maloney's light was still burning, for I saw his tent shining white among the pines.\n\nIt was, however, in the short space between consciousness and sleep\u2014that time when the body is low and the voices of the submerged region tell sometimes true\u2014that the idea which had been all this while maturing reached the point of an actual decision, and I suddenly realised that I had resolved to send word to Dr. Silence. For, with a sudden wonder that I had hitherto been so blind, the unwelcome conviction dawned upon me all at once that some dreadful thing was lurking about us on this island, and that the safety of at least one of us was threatened by something monstrous and unclean that was too horrible to contemplate. And, again remembering those last words of his as the train moved out of the platform, I understood that Dr. Silence would hold himself in readiness to come.\n\n\"Unless you should send for me sooner,\" he had said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 392", + "text": "I found myself suddenly wide awake. It is impossible to say what woke me, but it was no gradual process, seeing that I jumped from deep sleep to absolute alertness in a single instant. I had evidently slept for an hour and more, for the night had cleared, stars crowded the sky, and a pallid half-moon just sinking into the sea threw a spectral light between the trees.\n\nI went outside to sniff the air, and stood upright. A curious impression that something was astir in the Camp came over me, and when I glanced across at Sangree's tent, some twenty feet away, I saw that it was moving. He too, then, was awake and restless, for I saw the canvas sides bulge this way and that as he moved within.\n\nThe flap pushed forward. He was coming out, like myself, to sniff the air; and I was not surprised, for its sweetness after the rain was intoxicating. And he came on all fours, just as I had done. I saw a head thrust round the edge of the tent.\n\nAnd then I saw that it was not Sangree at all. It was an animal. And the same instant I realised something else too\u2014it was the animal; and its whole presentment for some unaccountable reason was unutterably malefic.\n\nA cry I was quite unable to suppress escaped me, and the creature turned on the instant and stared at me with baleful eyes. I could have dropped on the spot, for the strength all ran out of my body with a rush. Something about it touched in me the living terror that grips and paralyses. If the mind requires but the tenth of a second to form an impression, I must have stood there stockstill for several seconds while I seized the ropes for support and stared. Many and vivid impressions flashed through my mind, but not one of them resulted in action, because I was in instant dread that the beast any moment would leap in my direction and be upon me. Instead, however, after what seemed a vast period, it slowly turned its eyes from my face, uttered a low whining sound, and came out altogether into the open.\n\nThen, for the first time, I saw it in its entirety and noted two things: it was about the size of a large dog, but at the same time it was utterly unlike any animal that I had ever seen. Also, that the quality that had impressed me first as being malefic was really only its singular and original strangeness. Foolish as it may sound, and impossible as it is for me to adduce proof, I can only say that the animal seemed to me then to be\u2014not real.\n\nBut all this passed through my mind in a flash, almost subconsciously, and before I had time to check my impressions, or even properly verify them, I made an involuntary movement, catching the tight rope in my hand so that it twanged like a banjo string, and in that instant the creature turned the corner of Sangree's tent and was gone into the darkness.\n\nThen, of course, my senses in some measure returned to me, and I realised only one thing: it had been inside his tent!\n\nI dashed out, reached the door in half a dozen strides, and looked in. The Canadian, thank God! lay upon his bed of branches. His arm was stretched outside, across the blankets, the fist tightly clenched, and the body had an appearance of unusual rigidity that was alarming. On his face there was an expression of effort, almost of painful effort, so far as the uncertain light permitted me to see, and his sleep seemed to be very profound. He looked, I thought, so stiff, so unnaturally stiff, and in some indefinable way, too, he looked smaller\u2014shrunken.\n\nI called to him to wake, but called many times in vain. Then I decided to shake him, and had already moved forward to do so vigorously when there came a sound of footsteps padding softly behind me, and I felt a stream of hot breath burn my neck as I stooped. I turned sharply. The tent door was darkened and something silently swept in. I felt a rough and shaggy body push past me, and knew that the animal had returned. It seemed to leap forward between me and Sangree\u2014in fact, to leap upon Sangree, for its dark body hid him momentarily from view, and in that moment my soul turned sick and coward with a horror that rose from the very dregs and depths of life, and gripped my existence at its central source.\n\nThe creature seemed somehow to melt away into him, almost as though it belonged to him and were a part of himself, but in the same instant\u2014that instant of extraordinary confusion and terror in my mind\u2014it seemed to pass over and behind him, and, in some utterly unaccountable fashion, it was gone. And the Canadian woke and sat up with a start.\n\n\"Quick! You fool!\" I cried, in my excitement, \"the beast has been in your tent, here at your very throat while you sleep like the dead. Up, man! Get your gun! Only this second it disappeared over there behind your head. Quick! or Joan\u2014!\"\n\nAnd somehow the fact that he was there, wide-awake now, to corroborate me, brought the additional conviction to my own mind that this was no animal, but some perplexing and dreadful form of life that drew upon my deeper knowledge, that much reading had perhaps assented to, but that had never yet come within actual range of my senses.\n\nHe was up in a flash, and out. He was trembling, and very white. We searched hurriedly, feverishly, but found only the traces of paw-marks passing from the door of his own tent across the moss to the women's. And the sight of the tracks about Mrs. Maloney's tent, where Joan now slept, set him in a perfect fury.\n\n\"Do you know what it is, Hubbard, this beast?\" he hissed under his breath at me; \"it's a damned wolf, that's what it is\u2014a wolf lost among the islands, and starving to death\u2014desperate. So help me God, I believe it's that!\"\n\nHe talked a lot of rubbish in his excitement. He declared he would sleep by day and sit up every night until he killed it. Again his rage touched my admiration; but I got him away before he made enough noise to wake the whole Camp.\n\n\"I have a better plan than that,\" I said, watching his face closely. \"I don't think this is anything we can deal with. I'm going to send for the only man I know who can help. We'll go to Waxholm this very morning and get a telegram through.\"\n\nSangree stared at me with a curious expression as the fury died out of his face and a new look of alarm took its place.\n\n\"John Silence,\" I said, \"will know\u2014\"\n\n\"You think it's something\u2014of that sort?\" he stammered.\n\n\"I am sure of it.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause. \"That's worse, far worse than anything material,\" he said, turning visibly paler. He looked from my face to the sky, and then added with sudden resolution, \"Come; the wind's rising. Let's get off at once. From there you can telephone to Stockholm and get a telegram sent without delay.\"\n\nI sent him down to get the boat ready, and seized the opportunity myself to run and wake Maloney. He was sleeping very lightly, and sprang up the moment I put my head inside his tent. I told him briefly what I had seen, and he showed so little surprise that I caught myself wondering for the first time whether he himself had seen more going on than he had deemed wise to communicate to the rest of us.\n\nHe agreed to my plan without a moment's hesitation, and my last words to him were to let his wife and daughter think that the great psychic doctor was coming merely as a chance visitor, and not with any professional interest.\n\nSo, with frying-pan, provisions, and blankets aboard, Sangree and I sailed out of the lagoon fifteen minutes later, and headed with a good breeze for the direction of Waxholm and the borders of civilisation." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 393", + "text": "Although nothing John Silence did ever took me, properly speaking, by surprise, it was certainly unexpected to find a letter from Stockholm waiting for me. \"I have finished my Hungary business,\" he wrote, \"and am here for ten days. Do not hesitate to send if you need me. If you telephone any morning from Waxholm I can catch the afternoon steamer.\"\n\nMy years of intercourse with him were full of \"coincidences\" of this description, and although he never sought to explain them by claiming any magical system of communication with my mind, I have never doubted that there actually existed some secret telepathic method by which he knew my circumstances and gauged the degree of my need. And that this power was independent of time in the sense that it saw into the future, always seemed to me equally apparent.\n\nSangree was as much relieved as I was, and within an hour of sunset that very evening we met him on the arrival of the little coasting steamer, and carried him off in the dinghy to the camp we had prepared on a neighbouring island, meaning to start for home early next morning.\n\n\"Now,\" he said, when supper was over and we were smoking round the fire, \"let me hear your story.\" He glanced from one to the other, smiling.\n\n\"You tell it, Mr. Hubbard,\" Sangree interrupted abruptly, and went off a little way to wash the dishes, yet not so far as to be out of earshot. And while he splashed with the hot water, and scraped the tin plates with sand and moss, my voice, unbroken by a single question from Dr. Silence, ran on for the next half-hour with the best account I could give of what had happened.\n\nMy listener lay on the other side of the fire, his face half hidden by a big sombrero; sometimes he glanced up questioningly when a point needed elaboration, but he uttered no single word till I had reached the end, and his manner all through the recital was grave and attentive. Overhead, the wash of the wind in the pine branches filled in the pauses; the darkness settled down over the sea, and the stars came out in thousands, and by the time I finished the moon had risen to flood the scene with silver. Yet, by his face and eyes, I knew quite well that the doctor was listening to something he had expected to hear, even if he had not actually anticipated all the details.\n\n\"You did well to send for me,\" he said very low, with a significant glance at me when I finished; \"very well,\"\u2014and for one swift second his eye took in Sangree,\u2014\"for what we have to deal with here is nothing more than a werewolf\u2014rare enough, I am glad to say, but often very sad, and sometimes very terrible.\"\n\nI jumped as though I had been shot, but the next second was heartily ashamed of my want of control; for this brief remark, confirming as it did my own worst suspicions, did more to convince me of the gravity of the adventure than any number of questions or explanations. It seemed to draw close the circle about us, shutting a door somewhere that locked us in with the animal and the horror, and turning the key. Whatever it was had now to be faced and dealt with.\n\n\"No one has been actually injured so far?\" he asked aloud, but in a matter-of-fact tone that lent reality to grim possibilities.\n\n\"Good heavens, no!\" cried the Canadian, throwing down his dishcloths and coming forward into the circle of firelight. \"Surely there can be no question of this poor starved beast injuring anybody, can there?\"\n\nHis hair straggled untidily over his forehead, and there was a gleam in his eyes that was not all reflection from the fire. His words made me turn sharply. We all laughed a little short, forced laugh.\n\n\"I trust not, indeed,\" Dr. Silence said quietly. \"But what makes you think the creature is starved?\" He asked the question with his eyes straight on the other's face. The prompt question explained to me why I had started, and I waited with just a tremor of excitement for the reply.\n\nSangree hesitated a moment, as though the question took him by surprise. But he met the doctor's gaze unflinchingly across the fire, and with complete honesty.\n\n\"Really,\" he faltered, with a little shrug of the shoulders, \"I can hardly tell you. The phrase seemed to come out of its own accord. I have felt from the beginning that it was in pain and\u2014starved, though why I felt this never occurred to me till you asked.\"\n\n\"You really know very little about it, then?\" said the other, with a sudden gentleness in his voice.\n\n\"No more than that,\" Sangree replied, looking at him with a puzzled expression that was unmistakably genuine. \"In fact, nothing at all, really,\" he added, by way of further explanation.\n\n\"I am glad of that,\" I heard the doctor murmur under his breath, but so low that I only just caught the words, and Sangree missed them altogether, as evidently he was meant to do.\n\n\"And now,\" he cried, getting on his feet and shaking himself with a characteristic gesture, as though to shake out the horror and the mystery, \"let us leave the problem till to-morrow and enjoy this wind and sea and stars. I've been living lately in the atmosphere of many people, and feel that I want to wash and be clean. I propose a swim and then bed. Who'll second me?\" And two minutes later we were all diving from the boat into cool, deep water, that reflected a thousand moons as the waves broke away from us in countless ripples.\n\nWe slept in blankets under the open sky, Sangree and I taking the outside places, and were up before sunrise to catch the dawn wind. Helped by this early start we were half-way home by noon, and then the wind shifted to a few points behind us so that we fairly ran. In and out among a thousand islands, down narrow channels where we lost the wind, out into open spaces where we had to take in a reef, racing along under a hot and cloudless sky, we flew through the very heart of the bewildering and lonely scenery.\n\n\"A real wilderness,\" cried Dr. Silence from his seat in the bows where he held the jib sheet. His hat was off, his hair tumbled in the wind, and his lean brown face gave him the touch of an Oriental. Presently he changed places with Sangree, and came down to talk with me by the tiller.\n\n\"A wonderful region, all this world of islands,\" he said, waving his hand to the scenery rushing past us, \"but doesn't it strike you there's something lacking?\"\n\n\"It's\u2014hard,\" I answered, after a moment's reflection. \"It has a superficial, glittering prettiness, without\u2014\" I hesitated to find the word I wanted.\n\nJohn Silence nodded his head with approval.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said. \"The picturesqueness of stage scenery that is not real, not alive. It's like a landscape by a clever painter, yet without true imagination. Soulless\u2014that's the word you wanted.\"\n\n\"Something like that,\" I answered, watching the gusts of wind on the sails. \"Not dead so much, as without soul. That's it.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he went on, in a voice calculated, it seemed to me, not to reach our companion in the bows, \"to live long in a place like this\u2014long and alone\u2014might bring about a strange result in some men.\"\n\nI suddenly realised he was talking with a purpose and pricked up my ears.\n\n\"There's no life here. These islands are mere dead rocks pushed up from below the sea\u2014not living land; and there's nothing really alive on them. Even the sea, this tideless, brackish sea, neither salt water nor fresh, is dead. It's all a pretty image of life without the real heart and soul of life. To a man with too strong desires who came here and lived close to nature, strange things might happen.\"\n\n\"Let her out a bit,\" I shouted to Sangree, who was coming aft. \"The wind's gusty and we've got hardly any ballast.\"\n\nHe went back to the bows, and Dr. Silence continued\u2014\n\n\"Here, I mean, a long sojourn would lead to deterioration, to degeneration. The place is utterly unsoftened by human influences, by any humanising associations of history, good or bad. This landscape has never awakened into life; it's still dreaming in its primitive sleep.\"\n\n\"In time,\" I put in, \"you mean a man living here might become brutal?\"\n\n\"The passions would run wild, selfishness become supreme, the instincts coarsen and turn savage probably.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"In other places just as wild, parts of Italy for instance, where there are other moderating influences, it could not happen. The character might grow wild, savage too in a sense, but with a human wildness one could understand and deal with. But here, in a hard place like this, it might be otherwise.\" He spoke slowly, weighing his words carefully.\n\nI looked at him with many questions in my eyes, and a precautionary cry to Sangree to stay in the fore part of the boat, out of earshot.\n\n\"First of all there would come callousness to pain, and indifference to the rights of others. Then the soul would turn savage, not from passionate human causes, or with enthusiasm, but by deadening down into a kind of cold, primitive, emotionless savagery\u2014by turning, like the landscape, soulless.\"\n\n\"And a man with strong desires, you say, might change?\"\n\n\"Without being aware of it, yes; he might turn savage, his instincts and desires turn animal. And if\"\u2014he lowered his voice and turned for a moment towards the bows, and then continued in his most weighty manner\u2014\"owing to delicate health or other predisposing causes, his Double\u2014you know what I mean, of course\u2014his etheric Body of Desire, or astral body, as some term it\u2014that part in which the emotions, passions and desires reside\u2014if this, I say, were for some constitutional reason loosely joined to his physical organism, there might well take place an occasional projection\u2014\"\n\nSangree came aft with a sudden rush, his face aflame, but whether with wind or sun, or with what he had heard, I cannot say. In my surprise I let the tiller slip and the cutter gave a great plunge as she came sharply into the wind and flung us all together in a heap on the bottom. Sangree said nothing, but while he scrambled up and made the jib sheet fast my companion found a moment to add to his unfinished sentence the words, too low for any ear but mine\u2014\n\n\"Entirely unknown to himself, however.\"\n\nWe righted the boat and laughed, and then Sangree produced the map and explained exactly where we were. Far away on the horizon, across an open stretch of water, lay a blue cluster of islands with our crescent-shaped home among them and the safe anchorage of the lagoon. An hour with this wind would get us there comfortably, and while Dr. Silence and Sangree fell into conversation, I sat and pondered over the strange suggestions that had just been put into my mind concerning the \"Double,\" and the possible form it might assume when dissociated temporarily from the physical body.\n\nThe whole way home these two chatted, and John Silence was as gentle and sympathetic as a woman. I did not hear much of their talk, for the wind grew occasionally to the force of a hurricane and the sails and tiller absorbed my attention; but I could see that Sangree was pleased and happy, and was pouring out intimate revelations to his companion in the way that most people did\u2014when John Silence wished them to do so.\n\nBut it was quite suddenly, while I sat all intent upon wind and sails, that the true meaning of Sangree's remark about the animal flared up in me with its full import. For his admission that he knew it was in pain and starved was in reality nothing more or less than a revelation of his deeper self. It was in the nature of a confession. He was speaking of something that he knew positively, something that was beyond question or argument, something that had to do directly with himself. \"Poor starved beast\" he had called it in words that had \"come out of their own accord,\" and there had not been the slightest evidence of any desire to conceal or explain away. He had spoken instinctively\u2014from his heart, and as though about his own self.\n\nAnd half an hour before sunset we raced through the narrow opening of the lagoon and saw the smoke of the dinner-fire blowing here and there among the trees, and the figures of Joan and the Bo'sun's Mate running down to meet us at the landing-stage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 394", + "text": "Everything changed from the moment John Silence set foot on that island; it was like the effect produced by calling in some big doctor, some great arbiter of life and death, for consultation. The sense of gravity increased a hundredfold. Even inanimate objects took upon themselves a subtle alteration, for the setting of the adventure\u2014this deserted bit of sea with its hundreds of uninhabited islands\u2014somehow turned sombre. An element that was mysterious, and in a sense disheartening, crept unbidden into the severity of grey rock and dark pine forest and took the sparkle from the sunshine and the sea.\n\nI, at least, was keenly aware of the change, for my whole being shifted, as it were, a degree higher, becoming keyed up and alert. The figures from the background of the stage moved forward a little into the light\u2014nearer to the inevitable action. In a word this man's arrival intensified the whole affair.\n\nAnd, looking back down the years to the time when all this happened, it is clear to me that he had a pretty sharp idea of the meaning of it from the very beginning. How much he knew beforehand by his strange divining powers, it is impossible to say, but from the moment he came upon the scene and caught within himself the note of what was going on amongst us, he undoubtedly held the true solution of the puzzle and had no need to ask questions. And this certitude it was that set him in such an atmosphere of power and made us all look to him instinctively; for he took no tentative steps, made no false moves, and while the rest of us floundered he moved straight to the climax. He was indeed a true diviner of souls.\n\nI can now read into his behaviour a good deal that puzzled me at the time, for though I had dimly guessed the solution, I had no idea how he would deal with it. And the conversations I can reproduce almost verbatim, for, according to my invariable habit, I kept full notes of all he said.\n\nTo Mrs. Maloney, foolish and dazed; to Joan, alarmed, yet plucky; and to the clergyman, moved by his daughter's distress below his usual shallow emotions, he gave the best possible treatment in the best possible way, yet all so easily and simply as to make it appear naturally spontaneous. For he dominated the Bo'sun's Mate, taking the measure of her ignorance with infinite patience; he keyed up Joan, stirring her courage and interest to the highest point for her own safety; and the Reverend Timothy he soothed and comforted, while obtaining his implicit obedience, by taking him into his confidence, and leading him gradually to a comprehension of the issue that was bound to follow.\n\nAnd Sangree\u2014here his wisdom was most wisely calculated\u2014he neglected outwardly because inwardly he was the object of his unceasing and most concentrated attention. Under the guise of apparent indifference his mind kept the Canadian under constant observation.\n\nThere was a restless feeling in the Camp that evening and none of us lingered round the fire after supper as usual. Sangree and I busied ourselves with patching up the torn tent for our guest and with finding heavy stones to hold the ropes, for Dr. Silence insisted on having it pitched on the highest point of the island ridge, just where it was most rocky and there was no earth for pegs. The place, moreover, was midway between the men's and women's tents, and, of course, commanded the most comprehensive view of the Camp.\n\n\"So that if your dog comes,\" he said simply, \"I may be able to catch him as he passes across.\"\n\nThe wind had gone down with the sun and an unusual warmth lay over the island that made sleep heavy, and in the morning we assembled at a late breakfast, rubbing our eyes and yawning. The cool north wind had given way to the warm southern air that sometimes came up with haze and moisture across the Baltic, bringing with it the relaxing sensations that produced enervation and listlessness.\n\nAnd this may have been the reason why at first I failed to notice that anything unusual was about, and why I was less alert than normally; for it was not till after breakfast that the silence of our little party struck me and I discovered that Joan had not yet put in an appearance. And then, in a flash, the last heaviness of sleep vanished and I saw that Maloney was white and troubled and his wife could not hold a plate without trembling.\n\nA desire to ask questions was stopped in me by a swift glance from Dr. Silence, and I suddenly understood in some vague way that they were waiting till Sangree should have gone. How this idea came to me I cannot determine, but the soundness of the intuition was soon proved, for the moment he moved off to his tent, Maloney looked up at me and began to speak in a low voice.\n\n\"You slept through it all,\" he half whispered.\n\n\"Through what?\" I asked, suddenly thrilled with the knowledge that something dreadful had happened.\n\n\"We didn't wake you for fear of getting the whole Camp up,\" he went on, meaning, by the Camp, I supposed, Sangree. \"It was just before dawn when the screams woke me.\"\n\n\"The dog again?\" I asked, with a curious sinking of the heart.\n\n\"Got right into the tent,\" he went on, speaking passionately but very low, \"and woke my wife by scrambling all over her. Then she realised that Joan was struggling beside her. And, by God! the beast had torn her arm; scratched all down the arm she was, and bleeding.\"\n\n\"Joan injured?\" I gasped.\n\n\"Merely scratched\u2014this time,\" put in John Silence, speaking for the first time; \"suffering more from shock and fright than actual wounds.\"\n\n\"Isn't it a mercy the doctor was here?\" said Mrs. Maloney, looking as if she would never know calmness again. \"I think we should both have been killed.\"\n\n\"It has been a most merciful escape,\" Maloney said, his pulpit voice struggling with his emotion. \"But, of course, we cannot risk another\u2014we must strike Camp and get away at once\u2014\"\n\n\"Only poor Mr. Sangree must not know what has happened. He is so attached to Joan and would be so terribly upset,\" added the Bo'sun's Mate distractedly, looking all about in her terror.\n\n\"It is perhaps advisable that Mr. Sangree should not know what has occurred,\" Dr. Silence said with quiet authority, \"but I think, for the safety of all concerned, it will be better not to leave the island just now.\" He spoke with great decision and Maloney looked up and followed his words closely.\n\n\"If you will agree to stay here a few days longer, I have no doubt we can put an end to the attentions of your strange visitor, and incidentally have the opportunity of observing a most singular and interesting phenomenon\u2014\"\n\n\"What!\" gasped Mrs. Maloney, \"a phenomenon?\u2014you mean that you know what it is?\"\n\n\"I am quite certain I know what it is,\" he replied very low, for we heard the footsteps of Sangree approaching, \"though I am not so certain yet as to the best means of dealing with it. But in any case it is not wise to leave precipitately\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, Timothy, does he think it's a devil\u2014?\" cried the Bo'sun's Mate in a voice that even the Canadian must have heard.\n\n\"In my opinion,\" continued John Silence, looking across at me and the clergyman, \"it is a case of modern lycanthropy with other complications that may\u2014\" He left the sentence unfinished, for Mrs. Maloney got up with a jump and fled to her tent fearful she might hear a worse thing, and at that moment Sangree turned the corner of the stockade and came into view.\n\n\"There are footmarks all round the mouth of my tent,\" he said with excitement. \"The animal has been here again in the night. Dr. Silence, you really must come and see them for yourself. They're as plain on the moss as tracks in snow.\"\n\nBut later in the day, while Sangree went off in the canoe to fish the pools near the larger islands, and Joan still lay, bandaged and resting, in her tent, Dr. Silence called me and the tutor and proposed a walk to the granite slabs at the far end. Mrs. Maloney sat on a stump near her daughter, and busied herself energetically with alternate nursing and painting.\n\n\"We'll leave you in charge,\" the doctor said with a smile that was meant to be encouraging, \"and when you want us for lunch, or anything, the megaphone will always bring us back in time.\"\n\nFor, though the very air was charged with strange emotions, every one talked quietly and naturally as with a definite desire to counteract unnecessary excitement.\n\n\"I'll keep watch,\" said the plucky Bo'sun's Mate, \"and meanwhile I find comfort in my work.\" She was busy with the sketch she had begun on the day after our arrival. \"For even a tree,\" she added proudly, pointing to her little easel, \"is a symbol of the divine, and the thought makes me feel safer.\" We glanced for a moment at a daub which was more like the symptom of a disease than a symbol of the divine\u2014and then took the path round the lagoon.\n\nAt the far end we made a little fire and lay round it in the shadow of a big boulder. Maloney stopped his humming suddenly and turned to his companion.\n\n\"And what do you make of it all?\" he asked abruptly.\n\n\"In the first place,\" replied John Silence, making himself comfortable against the rock, \"it is of human origin, this animal; it is undoubted lycanthropy.\"\n\nHis words had the effect precisely of a bombshell. Maloney listened as though he had been struck.\n\n\"You puzzle me utterly,\" he said, sitting up closer and staring at him.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" replied the other, \"but if you'll listen to me for a few moments you may be less puzzled at the end\u2014or more. It depends how much you know. Let me go further and say that you have underestimated, or miscalculated, the effect of this primitive wild life upon all of you.\"\n\n\"In what way?\" asked the clergyman, bristling a trifle.\n\n\"It is strong medicine for any town-dweller, and for some of you it has been too strong. One of you has gone wild.\" He uttered these last words with great emphasis.\n\n\"Gone savage,\" he added, looking from one to the other.\n\nNeither of us found anything to reply.\n\n\"To say that the brute has awakened in a man is not a mere metaphor always,\" he went on presently.\n\n\"Of course not!\"\n\n\"But, in the sense I mean, may have a very literal and terrible significance,\" pursued Dr. Silence. \"Ancient instincts that no one dreamed of, least of all their possessor, may leap forth\u2014\"\n\n\"Atavism can hardly explain a roaming animal with teeth and claws and sanguinary instincts,\" interrupted Maloney with impatience.\n\n\"The term is of your own choice,\" continued the doctor equably, \"not mine, and it is a good example of a word that indicates a result while it conceals the process; but the explanation of this beast that haunts your island and attacks your daughter is of far deeper significance than mere atavistic tendencies, or throwing back to animal origin, which I suppose is the thought in your mind.\"\n\n\"You spoke just now of lycanthropy,\" said Maloney, looking bewildered and anxious to keep to plain facts evidently; \"I think I have come across the word, but really\u2014really\u2014it can have no actual significance to-day, can it? These superstitions of mediaeval times can hardly\u2014\"\n\nHe looked round at me with his jolly red face, and the expression of astonishment and dismay on it would have made me shout with laughter at any other time. Laughter, however, was never farther from my mind than at this moment when I listened to Dr. Silence as he carefully suggested to the clergyman the very explanation that had gradually been forcing itself upon my own mind.\n\n\"However mediaeval ideas may have exaggerated the idea is not of much importance to us now,\" he said quietly, \"when we are face to face with a modern example of what, I take it, has always been a profound fact. For the moment let us leave the name of any one in particular out of the matter and consider certain possibilities.\"\n\nWe all agreed with that at any rate. There was no need to speak of Sangree, or of any one else, until we knew a little more.\n\n\"The fundamental fact in this most curious case,\" he went on, \"is that the 'Double' of a man\u2014\"\n\n\"You mean the astral body? I've heard of that, of course,\" broke in Maloney with a snort of triumph.\n\n\"No doubt,\" said the other, smiling, \"no doubt you have;\u2014that this Double, or fluidic body of a man, as I was saying, has the power under certain conditions of projecting itself and becoming visible to others. Certain training will accomplish this, and certain drugs likewise; illnesses, too, that ravage the body may produce temporarily the result that death produces permanently, and let loose this counterpart of a human being and render it visible to the sight of others.\n\n\"Every one, of course, knows this more or less to-day; but it is not so generally known, and probably believed by none who have not witnessed it, that this fluidic body can, under certain conditions, assume other forms than human, and that such other forms may be determined by the dominating thought and wish of the owner. For this Double, or astral body as you call it, is really the seat of the passions, emotions and desires in the psychical economy. It is the Passion Body; and, in projecting itself, it can often assume a form that gives expression to the overmastering desire that moulds it; for it is composed of such tenuous matter that it lends itself readily to the moulding by thought and wish.\"\n\n\"I follow you perfectly,\" said Maloney, looking as if he would much rather be chopping firewood elsewhere and singing.\n\n\"And there are some persons so constituted,\" the doctor went on with increasing seriousness, \"that the fluid body in them is but loosely associated with the physical, persons of poor health as a rule, yet often of strong desires and passions; and in these persons it is easy for the Double to dissociate itself during deep sleep from their system, and, driven forth by some consuming desire, to assume an animal form and seek the fulfilment of that desire.\"\n\nThere, in broad daylight, I saw Maloney deliberately creep closer to the fire and heap the wood on. We gathered in to the heat, and to each other, and listened to Dr. Silence's voice as it mingled with the swish and whirr of the wind about us, and the falling of the little waves.\n\n\"For instance, to take a concrete example,\" he resumed; \"suppose some young man, with the delicate constitution I have spoken of, forms an overpowering attachment to a young woman, yet perceives that it is not welcomed, and is man enough to repress its outward manifestations. In such a case, supposing his Double be easily projected, the very repression of his love in the daytime would add to the intense force of his desire when released in deep sleep from the control of his will, and his fluidic body might issue forth in monstrous or animal shape and become actually visible to others. And, if his devotion were dog-like in its fidelity, yet concealing the fires of a fierce passion beneath, it might well assume the form of a creature that seemed to be half dog, half wolf\u2014\"\n\n\"A werewolf, you mean?\" cried Maloney, pale to the lips as he listened.\n\nJohn Silence held up a restraining hand. \"A werewolf,\" he said, \"is a true psychical fact of profound significance, however absurdly it may have been exaggerated by the imaginations of a superstitious peasantry in the days of unenlightenment, for a werewolf is nothing but the savage, and possibly sanguinary, instincts of a passionate man scouring the world in his fluidic body, his passion body, his body of desire. As in the case at hand, he may not know it\u2014\"\n\n\"It is not necessarily deliberate, then?\" Maloney put in quickly, with relief.\n\n\"\u2014It is hardly ever deliberate. It is the desires released in sleep from the control of the will finding a vent. In all savage races it has been recognised and dreaded, this phenomenon styled 'Wehr Wolf,' but to-day it is rare. And it is becoming rarer still, for the world grows tame and civilised, emotions have become refined, desires lukewarm, and few men have savagery enough left in them to generate impulses of such intense force, and certainly not to project them in animal form.\"\n\n\"By Gad!\" exclaimed the clergyman breathlessly, and with increasing excitement, \"then I feel I must tell you\u2014what has been given to me in confidence\u2014that Sangree has in him an admixture of savage blood\u2014of Red Indian ancestry\u2014\"\n\n\"Let us stick to our supposition of a man as described,\" the doctor stopped him calmly, \"and let us imagine that he has in him this admixture of savage blood; and further, that he is wholly unaware of his dreadful physical and psychical infirmity; and that he suddenly finds himself leading the primitive life together with the object of his desires; with the result that the strain of the untamed wild-man in his blood\u2014\"\n\n\"Red Indian, for instance,\" from Maloney.\n\n\"Red Indian, perfectly,\" agreed the doctor; \"the result, I say, that this savage strain in him is awakened and leaps into passionate life. What then?\"\n\nHe looked hard at Timothy Maloney, and the clergyman looked hard at him.\n\n\"The wild life such as you lead here on this island, for instance, might quickly awaken his savage instincts\u2014his buried instincts\u2014and with profoundly disquieting results.\"\n\n\"You mean his Subtle Body, as you call it, might issue forth automatically in deep sleep and seek the object of its desire?\" I said, coming to Maloney's aid, who was finding it more and more difficult to get words.\n\n\"Precisely;\u2014yet the desire of the man remaining utterly unmalefic\u2014pure and wholesome in every sense\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah!\" I heard the clergyman gasp.\n\n\"The lover's desire for union run wild, run savage, tearing its way out in primitive, untamed fashion, I mean,\" continued the doctor, striving to make himself clear to a mind bounded by conventional thought and knowledge; \"for the desire to possess, remember, may easily become importunate, and, embodied in this animal form of the Subtle Body which acts as its vehicle, may go forth to tear in pieces all that obstructs, to reach to the very heart of the loved object and seize it. Au fond, it is nothing more than the aspiration for union, as I said\u2014the splendid and perfectly clean desire to absorb utterly into itself\u2014\"\n\nHe paused a moment and looked into Maloney's eyes.\n\n\"To bathe in the very heart's blood of the one desired,\" he added with grave emphasis.\n\nThe fire spurted and crackled and made me start, but Maloney found relief in a genuine shudder, and I saw him turn his head and look about him from the sea to the trees. The wind dropped just at that moment and the doctor's words rang sharply through the stillness.\n\n\"Then it might even kill?\" stammered the clergyman presently in a hushed voice, and with a little forced laugh by way of protest that sounded quite ghastly.\n\n\"In the last resort it might kill,\" repeated Dr. Silence. Then, after another pause, during which he was clearly debating how much or how little it was wise to give to his audience, he continued: \"And if the Double does not succeed in getting back to its physical body, that physical body would wake an imbecile\u2014an idiot\u2014or perhaps never wake at all.\"\n\nMaloney sat up and found his tongue.\n\n\"You mean that if this fluid animal thing, or whatever it is, should be prevented getting back, the man might never wake again?\" he asked, with shaking voice.\n\n\"He might be dead,\" replied the other calmly. The tremor of a positive sensation shivered in the air about us.\n\n\"Then isn't that the best way to cure the fool\u2014the brute\u2014?\" thundered the clergyman, half rising to his feet.\n\n\"Certainly it would be an easy and undiscoverable form of murder,\" was the stern reply, spoken as calmly as though it were a remark about the weather.\n\nMaloney collapsed visibly, and I gathered the wood over the fire and coaxed up a blaze.\n\n\"The greater part of the man's life\u2014of his vital forces\u2014goes out with this Double,\" Dr. Silence resumed, after a moment's consideration, \"and a considerable portion of the actual material of his physical body. So the physical body that remains behind is depleted, not only of force, but of matter. You would see it small, shrunken, dropped together, just like the body of a materialising medium at a seance. Moreover, any mark or injury inflicted upon this Double will be found exactly reproduced by the phenomenon of repercussion upon the shrunken physical body lying in its trance\u2014\"\n\n\"An injury inflicted upon the one you say would be reproduced also on the other?\" repeated Maloney, his excitement growing again.\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" replied the other quietly; \"for there exists all the time a continuous connection between the physical body and the Double\u2014a connection of matter, though of exceedingly attenuated, possibly of etheric, matter. The wound travels, so to speak, from one to the other, and if this connection were broken the result would be death.\"\n\n\"Death,\" repeated Maloney to himself, \"death!\" He looked anxiously at our faces, his thoughts evidently beginning to clear.\n\n\"And this solidity?\" he asked presently, after a general pause; \"this tearing of tents and flesh; this howling, and the marks of paws? You mean that the Double\u2014?\"\n\n\"Has sufficient material drawn from the depleted body to produce physical results? Certainly!\" the doctor took him up. \"Although to explain at this moment such problems as the passage of matter through matter would be as difficult as to explain how the thought of a mother can actually break the bones of the child unborn.\"\n\nDr. Silence pointed out to sea, and Maloney, looking wildly about him, turned with a violent start. I saw a canoe, with Sangree in the stern-seat, slowly coming into view round the farther point. His hat was off, and his tanned face for the first time appeared to me\u2014to us all, I think\u2014as though it were the face of some one else. He looked like a wild man. Then he stood up in the canoe to make a cast with the rod, and he looked for all the world like an Indian. I recalled the expression of his face as I had seen it once or twice, notably on that occasion of the evening prayer, and an involuntary shudder ran down my spine.\n\nAt that very instant he turned and saw us where we lay, and his face broke into a smile, so that his teeth showed white in the sun. He looked in his element, and exceedingly attractive. He called out something about his fish, and soon after passed out of sight into the lagoon.\n\nFor a time none of us said a word.\n\n\"And the cure?\" ventured Maloney at length.\n\n\"Is not to quench this savage force,\" replied Dr. Silence, \"but to steer it better, and to provide other outlets. This is the solution of all these problems of accumulated force, for this force is the raw material of usefulness, and should be increased and cherished, not by separating it from the body by death, but by raising it to higher channels. The best and quickest cure of all,\" he went on, speaking very gently and with a hand upon the clergyman's arm, \"is to lead it towards its object, provided that object is not unalterably hostile\u2014to let it find rest where\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly, and the eyes of the two men met in a single glance of comprehension.\n\n\"Joan?\" Maloney exclaimed, under his breath.\n\n\"Joan!\" replied John Silence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 395", + "text": "We all went to bed early. The day had been unusually warm, and after sunset a curious hush descended on the island. Nothing was audible but that faint, ghostly singing which is inseparable from a pinewood even on the stillest day\u2014a low, searching sound, as though the wind had hair and trailed it o'er the world.\n\nWith the sudden cooling of the atmosphere a sea fog began to form. It appeared in isolated patches over the water, and then these patches slid together and a white wall advanced upon us. Not a breath of air stirred; the firs stood like flat metal outlines; the sea became as oil. The whole scene lay as though held motionless by some huge weight in the air; and the flames from our fire\u2014the largest we had ever made\u2014rose upwards, straight as a church steeple.\n\nAs I followed the rest of our party tent-wards, having kicked the embers of the fire into safety, the advance guard of the fog was creeping slowly among the trees, like white arms feeling their way. Mingled with the smoke was the odour of moss and soil and bark, and the peculiar flavour of the Baltic, half salt, half brackish, like the smell of an estuary at low water.\n\nIt is difficult to say why it seemed to me that this deep stillness masked an intense activity; perhaps in every mood lies the suggestion of its opposite, so that I became aware of the contrast of furious energy, for it was like moving through the deep pause before a thunderstorm, and I trod gently lest by breaking a twig or moving a stone I might set the whole scene into some sort of tumultuous movement. Actually, no doubt, it was nothing more than a result of overstrung nerves.\n\nThere was no more question of undressing and going to bed than there was of undressing and going to bathe. Some sense in me was alert and expectant. I sat in my tent and waited. And at the end of half an hour or so my waiting was justified, for the canvas suddenly shivered, and some one tripped over the ropes that held it to the earth. John Silence came in.\n\nThe effect of his quiet entry was singular and prophetic: it was just as though the energy lying behind all this stillness had pressed forward to the edge of action. This, no doubt, was merely the quickening of my own mind, and had no other justification; for the presence of John Silence always suggested the near possibility of vigorous action, and as a matter of fact, he came in with nothing more than a nod and a significant gesture.\n\nHe sat down on a corner of my ground-sheet, and I pushed the blanket over so that he could cover his legs. He drew the flap of the tent after him and settled down, but hardly had he done so when the canvas shook a second time, and in blundered Maloney.\n\n\"Sitting in the dark?\" he said self-consciously, pushing his head inside, and hanging up his lantern on the ridge-pole nail. \"I just looked in for a smoke. I suppose\u2014\"\n\nHe glanced round, caught the eye of Dr. Silence, and stopped. He put his pipe back into his pocket and began to hum softly\u2014that underbreath humming of a nondescript melody I knew so well and had come to hate.\n\nDr. Silence leaned forward, opened the lantern and blew the light out. \"Speak low,\" he said, \"and don't strike matches. Listen for sounds and movements about the Camp, and be ready to follow me at a moment's notice.\" There was light enough to distinguish our faces easily, and I saw Maloney glance again hurriedly at both of us.\n\n\"Is the Camp asleep?\" the doctor asked presently, whispering.\n\n\"Sangree is,\" replied the clergyman, in a voice equally low. \"I can't answer for the women; I think they're sitting up.\"\n\n\"That's for the best.\" And then he added: \"I wish the fog would thin a bit and let the moon through; later\u2014we may want it.\"\n\n\"It is lifting now, I think,\" Maloney whispered back. \"It's over the tops of the trees already.\"\n\nI cannot say what it was in this commonplace exchange of remarks that thrilled. Probably Maloney's swift acquiescence in the doctor's mood had something to do with it; for his quick obedience certainly impressed me a good deal. But, even without that slight evidence, it was clear that each recognised the gravity of the occasion, and understood that sleep was impossible and sentry duty was the order of the night.\n\n\"Report to me,\" repeated John Silence once again, \"the least sound, and do nothing precipitately.\"\n\nHe shifted across to the mouth of the tent and raised the flap, fastening it against the pole so that he could see out. Maloney stopped humming and began to force the breath through his teeth with a kind of faint hissing, treating us to a medley of church hymns and popular songs of the day.\n\nThen the tent trembled as though some one had touched it.\n\n\"That's the wind rising,\" whispered the clergyman, and pulled the flap open as far as it would go. A waft of cold damp air entered and made us shiver, and with it came a sound of the sea as the first wave washed its way softly along the shores.\n\n\"It's got round to the north,\" he added, and following his voice came a long-drawn whisper that rose from the whole island as the trees sent forth a sighing response. \"The fog'll move a bit now. I can make out a lane across the sea already.\"\n\n\"Hush!\" said Dr. Silence, for Maloney's voice had risen above a whisper, and we settled down again to another long period of watching and waiting, broken only by the occasional rubbing of shoulders against the canvas as we shifted our positions, and the increasing noise of waves on the outer coast-line of the island. And over all whirred the murmur of wind sweeping the tops of the trees like a great harp, and the faint tapping on the tent as drops fell from the branches with a sharp pinging sound.\n\nWe had sat for something over an hour in this way, and Maloney and I were finding it increasingly hard to keep awake, when suddenly Dr. Silence rose to his feet and peered out. The next minute he was gone.\n\nRelieved of the dominating presence, the clergyman thrust his face close into mine. \"I don't much care for this waiting game,\" he whispered, \"but Silence wouldn't hear of my sitting up with the others; he said it would prevent anything happening if I did.\"\n\n\"He knows,\" I answered shortly.\n\n\"No doubt in the world about that,\" he whispered back; \"it's this 'Double' business, as he calls it, or else it's obsession as the Bible describes it. But it's bad, whichever it is, and I've got my Winchester outside ready cocked, and I brought this too.\" He shoved a pocket Bible under my nose. At one time in his life it had been his inseparable companion.\n\n\"One's useless and the other's dangerous,\" I replied under my breath, conscious of a keen desire to laugh, and leaving him to choose. \"Safety lies in following our leader\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not thinking of myself,\" he interrupted sharply; \"only, if anything happens to Joan to-night I'm going to shoot first\u2014and pray afterwards!\"\n\nMaloney put the book back into his hip-pocket, and peered out of the doorway. \"What is he up to now, in the devil's name, I wonder!\" he added; \"going round Sangree's tent and making gestures. How weird he looks disappearing in and out of the fog.\"\n\n\"Just trust him and wait,\" I said quickly, for the doctor was already on his way back. \"Remember, he has the knowledge, and knows what he's about. I've been with him through worse cases than this.\"\n\nMaloney moved back as Dr. Silence darkened the doorway and stooped to enter.\n\n\"His sleep is very deep,\" he whispered, seating himself by the door again. \"He's in a cataleptic condition, and the Double may be released any minute now. But I've taken steps to imprison it in the tent, and it can't get out till I permit it. Be on the watch for signs of movement.\" Then he looked hard at Maloney. \"But no violence, or shooting, remember, Mr. Maloney, unless you want a murder on your hands. Anything done to the Double acts by repercussion upon the physical body. You had better take out the cartridges at once.\"\n\nHis voice was stern. The clergyman went out, and I heard him emptying the magazine of his rifle. When he returned he sat nearer the door than before, and from that moment until we left the tent he never once took his eyes from the figure of Dr. Silence, silhouetted there against sky and canvas.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, the wind came steadily over the sea and opened the mist into lanes and clearings, driving it about like a living thing.\n\nIt must have been well after midnight when a low booming sound drew my attention; but at first the sense of hearing was so strained that it was impossible exactly to locate it, and I imagined it was the thunder of big guns far out at sea carried to us by the rising wind. Then Maloney, catching hold of my arm and leaning forward, somehow brought the true relation, and I realised the next second that it was only a few feet away.\n\n\"Sangree's tent,\" he exclaimed in a loud and startled whisper.\n\nI craned my head round the corner, but at first the effect of the fog was so confusing that every patch of white driving about before the wind looked like a moving tent and it was some seconds before I discovered the one patch that held steady. Then I saw that it was shaking all over, and the sides, flapping as much as the tightness of the ropes allowed, were the cause of the booming sound we had heard. Something alive was tearing frantically about inside, banging against the stretched canvas in a way that made me think of a great moth dashing against the walls and ceiling of a room. The tent bulged and rocked.\n\n\"It's trying to get out, by Jupiter!\" muttered the clergyman, rising to his feet and turning to the side where the unloaded rifle lay. I sprang up too, hardly knowing what purpose was in my mind, but anxious to be prepared for anything. John Silence, however, was before us both, and his figure slipped past and blocked the doorway of the tent. And there was some quality in his voice next minute when he began to speak that brought our minds instantly to a state of calm obedience.\n\n\"First\u2014the women's tent,\" he said low, looking sharply at Maloney, \"and if I need your help, I'll call.\"\n\nThe clergyman needed no second bidding. He dived past me and was out in a moment. He was labouring evidently under intense excitement. I watched him picking his way silently over the slippery ground, giving the moving tent a wide berth, and presently disappearing among the floating shapes of fog.\n\nDr. Silence turned to me. \"You heard those footsteps about half an hour ago?\" he asked significantly.\n\n\"I heard nothing.\"\n\n\"They were extraordinarily soft\u2014almost the soundless tread of a wild creature. But now, follow me closely,\" he added, \"for we must waste no time if I am to save this poor man from his affliction and lead his werewolf Double to its rest. And, unless I am much mistaken\"\u2014he peered at me through the darkness, whispering with the utmost distinctness\u2014\"Joan and Sangree are absolutely made for one another. And I think she knows it too\u2014just as well as he does.\"\n\nMy head swam a little as I listened, but at the same time something cleared in my brain and I saw that he was right. Yet it was all so weird and incredible, so remote from the commonplace facts of life as commonplace people know them; and more than once it flashed upon me that the whole scene\u2014people, words, tents, and all the rest of it\u2014were delusions created by the intense excitement of my own mind somehow, and that suddenly the sea-fog would clear off and the world become normal again.\n\nThe cold air from the sea stung our cheeks sharply as we left the close atmosphere of the little crowded tent. The sighing of the trees, the waves breaking below on the rocks, and the lines and patches of mist driving about us seemed to create the momentary illusion that the whole island had broken loose and was floating out to sea like a mighty raft.\n\nThe doctor moved just ahead of me, quickly and silently; he was making straight for the Canadian's tent where the sides still boomed and shook as the creature of sinister life raced and tore about impatiently within. A little distance from the door he paused and held up a hand to stop me. We were, perhaps, a dozen feet away.\n\n\"Before I release it, you shall see for yourself,\" he said, \"that the reality of the werewolf is beyond all question. The matter of which it is composed is, of course, exceedingly attenuated, but you are partially clairvoyant\u2014and even if it is not dense enough for normal sight you will see something.\"\n\nHe added a little more I could not catch. The fact was that the curiously strong vibrating atmosphere surrounding his person somewhat confused my senses. It was the result, of course, of his intense concentration of mind and forces, and pervaded the entire Camp and all the persons in it. And as I watched the canvas shake and heard it boom and flap I heartily welcomed it. For it was also protective.\n\nAt the back of Sangree's tent stood a thin group of pine trees, but in front and at the sides the ground was comparatively clear. The flap was wide open and any ordinary animal would have been out and away without the least trouble. Dr. Silence led me up to within a few feet, evidently careful not to advance beyond a certain limit, and then stooped down and signalled to me to do the same. And looking over his shoulder I saw the interior lit faintly by the spectral light reflected from the fog, and the dim blot upon the balsam boughs and blankets signifying Sangree; while over him, and round him, and up and down him, flew the dark mass of \"something\" on four legs, with pointed muzzle and sharp ears plainly visible against the tent sides, and the occasional gleam of fiery eyes and white fangs.\n\nI held my breath and kept utterly still, inwardly and outwardly, for fear, I suppose, that the creature would become conscious of my presence; but the distress I felt went far deeper than the mere sense of personal safety, or the fact of watching something so incredibly active and real. I became keenly aware of the dreadful psychic calamity it involved. The realisation that Sangree lay confined in that narrow space with this species of monstrous projection of himself\u2014that he was wrapped there in the cataleptic sleep, all unconscious that this thing was masquerading with his own life and energies\u2014added a distressing touch of horror to the scene. In all the cases of John Silence\u2014and they were many and often terrible\u2014no other psychic affliction has ever, before or since, impressed me so convincingly with the pathetic impermanence of the human personality, with its fluid nature, and with the alarming possibilities of its transformations.\n\n\"Come,\" he whispered, after we had watched for some minutes the frantic efforts to escape from the circle of thought and will that held it prisoner, \"come a little farther away while I release it.\"\n\nWe moved back a dozen yards or so. It was like a scene in some impossible play, or in some ghastly and oppressive nightmare from which I should presently awake to find the blankets all heaped up upon my chest.\n\nBy some method undoubtedly mental, but which, in my confusion and excitement, I failed to understand, the doctor accomplished his purpose, and the next minute I heard him say sharply under his breath, \"It's out! Now watch!\"\n\nAt this very moment a sudden gust from the sea blew aside the mist, so that a lane opened to the sky, and the moon, ghastly and unnatural as the effect of stage limelight, dropped down in a momentary gleam upon the door of Sangree's tent, and I perceived that something had moved forward from the interior darkness and stood clearly defined upon the threshold. And, at the same moment, the tent ceased its shuddering and held still.\n\nThere, in the doorway, stood an animal, with neck and muzzle thrust forward, its head poking into the night, its whole body poised in that attitude of intense rigidity that precedes the spring into freedom, the running leap of attack. It seemed to be about the size of a calf, leaner than a mastiff, yet more squat than a wolf, and I can swear that I saw the fur ridged sharply upon its back. Then its upper lip slowly lifted, and I saw the whiteness of its teeth.\n\nSurely no human being ever stared as hard as I did in those next few minutes. Yet, the harder I stared the clearer appeared the amazing and monstrous apparition. For, after all, it was Sangree\u2014and yet it was not Sangree. It was the head and face of an animal, and yet it was the face of Sangree: the face of a wild dog, a wolf, and yet his face. The eyes were sharper, narrower, more fiery, yet they were his eyes\u2014his eyes run wild; the teeth were longer, whiter, more pointed\u2014yet they were his teeth, his teeth grown cruel; the expression was flaming, terrible, exultant\u2014yet it was his expression carried to the border of savagery\u2014his expression as I had already surprised it more than once, only dominant now, fully released from human constraint, with the mad yearning of a hungry and importunate soul. It was the soul of Sangree, the long suppressed, deeply loving Sangree, expressed in its single and intense desire\u2014pure utterly and utterly wonderful.\n\nYet, at the same time, came the feeling that it was all an illusion. I suddenly remembered the extraordinary changes the human face can undergo in circular insanity, when it changes from melancholia to elation; and I recalled the effect of hascheesh, which shows the human countenance in the form of the bird or animal to which in character it most approximates; and for a moment I attributed this mingling of Sangree's face with a wolf to some kind of similar delusion of the senses. I was mad, deluded, dreaming! The excitement of the day, and this dim light of stars and bewildering mist combined to trick me. I had been amazingly imposed upon by some false wizardry of the senses. It was all absurd and fantastic; it would pass.\n\nAnd then, sounding across this sea of mental confusion like a bell through a fog, came the voice of John Silence bringing me back to a consciousness of the reality of it all\u2014\n\n\"Sangree\u2014in his Double!\"\n\nAnd when I looked again more calmly, I plainly saw that it was indeed the face of the Canadian, but his face turned animal, yet mingled with the brute expression a curiously pathetic look like the soul seen sometimes in the yearning eyes of a dog,\u2014the face of an animal shot with vivid streaks of the human.\n\nThe doctor called to him softly under his breath\u2014\n\n\"Sangree! Sangree, you poor afflicted creature! Do you know me? Can you understand what it is you're doing in your 'Body of Desire'?\"\n\nFor the first time since its appearance the creature moved. Its ears twitched and it shifted the weight of its body on to the hind legs. Then, lifting its head and muzzle to the sky, it opened its long jaws and gave vent to a dismal and prolonged howling.\n\nBut, when I heard that howling rise to heaven, the breath caught and strangled in my throat and it seemed that my heart missed a beat; for, though the sound was entirely animal, it was at the same time entirely human. But, more than that, it was the cry I had so often heard in the Western States of America where the Indians still fight and hunt and struggle\u2014it was the cry of the Redskin!\n\n\"The Indian blood!\" whispered John Silence, when I caught his arm for support; \"the ancestral cry.\"\n\nAnd that poignant, beseeching cry, that broken human voice, mingling with the savage howl of the brute beast, pierced straight to my very heart and touched there something that no music, no voice, passionate or tender, of man, woman or child has ever stirred before or since for one second into life. It echoed away among the fog and the trees and lost itself somewhere out over the hidden sea. And some part of myself\u2014something that was far more than the mere act of intense listening\u2014went out with it, and for several minutes I lost consciousness of my surroundings and felt utterly absorbed in the pain of another stricken fellow-creature.\n\nAgain the voice of John Silence recalled me to myself.\n\n\"Hark!\" he said aloud. \"Hark!\"\n\nHis tone galvanised me afresh. We stood listening side by side.\n\nFar across the island, faintly sounding through the trees and brushwood, came a similar, answering cry. Shrill, yet wonderfully musical, shaking the heart with a singular wild sweetness that defies description, we heard it rise and fall upon the night air.\n\n\"It's across the lagoon,\" Dr. Silence cried, but this time in full tones that paid no tribute to caution. \"It's Joan! She's answering him!\"\n\nAgain the wonderful cry rose and fell, and that same instant the animal lowered its head, and, muzzle to earth, set off on a swift easy canter that took it off into the mist and out of our sight like a thing of wind and vision.\n\nThe doctor made a quick dash to the door of Sangree's tent, and, following close at his heels, I peered in and caught a momentary glimpse of the small, shrunken body lying upon the branches but half covered by the blankets\u2014the cage from which most of the life, and not a little of the actual corporeal substance, had escaped into that other form of life and energy, the body of passion and desire.\n\nBy another of those swift, incalculable processes which at this stage of my apprenticeship I failed often to grasp, Dr. Silence reclosed the circle about the tent and body.\n\n\"Now it cannot return till I permit it,\" he said, and the next second was off at full speed into the woods, with myself close behind him. I had already had some experience of my companion's ability to run swiftly through a dense wood, and I now had the further proof of his power almost to see in the dark. For, once we left the open space about the tents, the trees seemed to absorb all the remaining vestiges of light, and I understood that special sensibility that is said to develop in the blind\u2014the sense of obstacles.\n\nAnd twice as we ran we heard the sound of that dismal howling drawing nearer and nearer to the answering faint cry from the point of the island whither we were going.\n\nThen, suddenly, the trees fell away, and we emerged, hot and breathless, upon the rocky point where the granite slabs ran bare into the sea. It was like passing into the clearness of open day. And there, sharply defined against sea and sky, stood the figure of a human being. It was Joan.\n\nI at once saw that there was something about her appearance that was singular and unusual, but it was only when we had moved quite close that I recognised what caused it. For while the lips wore a smile that lit the whole face with a happiness I had never seen there before, the eyes themselves were fixed in a steady, sightless stare as though they were lifeless and made of glass.\n\nI made an impulsive forward movement, but Dr. Silence instantly dragged me back.\n\n\"No,\" he cried, \"don't wake her!\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I replied aloud, struggling in his grasp.\n\n\"She's asleep. It's somnambulistic. The shock might injure her permanently.\"\n\nI turned and peered closely into his face. He was absolutely calm. I began to understand a little more, catching, I suppose, something of his strong thinking.\n\n\"Walking in her sleep, you mean?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"She's on her way to meet him. From the very beginning he must have drawn her\u2014irresistibly.\"\n\n\"But the torn tent and the wounded flesh?\"\n\n\"When she did not sleep deep enough to enter the somnambulistic trance he missed her\u2014he went instinctively and in all innocence to seek her out\u2014with the result, of course, that she woke and was terrified\u2014\"\n\n\"Then in their heart of hearts they love?\" I asked finally.\n\nJohn Silence smiled his inscrutable smile. \"Profoundly,\" he answered, \"and as simply as only primitive souls can love. If only they both come to realise it in their normal waking states his Double will cease these nocturnal excursions. He will be cured, and at rest.\"\n\nThe words had hardly left his lips when there was a sound of rustling branches on our left, and the very next instant the dense brushwood parted where it was darkest and out rushed the swift form of an animal at full gallop. The noise of feet was scarcely audible, but in that utter stillness I heard the heavy panting breath and caught the swish of the low bushes against its sides. It went straight towards Joan\u2014and as it went the girl lifted her head and turned to meet it. And the same instant a canoe that had been creeping silently and unobserved round the inner shore of the lagoon, emerged from the shadows and defined itself upon the water with a figure at the middle thwart. It was Maloney.\n\nIt was only afterwards I realised that we were invisible to him where we stood against the dark background of trees; the figures of Joan and the animal he saw plainly, but not Dr. Silence and myself standing just beyond them. He stood up in the canoe and pointed with his right arm. I saw something gleam in his hand.\n\n\"Stand aside, Joan girl, or you'll get hit,\" he shouted, his voice ringing horribly through the deep stillness, and the same instant a pistol-shot cracked out with a burst of flame and smoke, and the figure of the animal, with one tremendous leap into the air, fell back in the shadows and disappeared like a shape of night and fog. Instantly, then, Joan opened her eyes, looked in a dazed fashion about her, and pressing both hands against her heart, fell with a sharp cry into my arms that were just in time to catch her.\n\nAnd an answering cry sounded across the lagoon\u2014thin, wailing, piteous. It came from Sangree's tent.\n\n\"Fool!\" cried Dr. Silence, \"you've wounded him!\" and before we could move or realise quite what it meant, he was in the canoe and half-way across the lagoon.\n\nSome kind of similar abuse came in a torrent from my lips, too\u2014though I cannot remember the actual words\u2014as I cursed the man for his disobedience and tried to make the girl comfortable on the ground. But the clergyman was more practical. He was spreading his coat over her and dashing water on her face.\n\n\"It's not Joan I've killed at any rate,\" I heard him mutter as she turned and opened her eyes and smiled faintly up in his face. \"I swear the bullet went straight.\"\n\nJoan stared at him; she was still dazed and bewildered, and still imagined herself with the companion of her trance. The strange lucidity of the somnambulist still hung over her brain and mind, though outwardly she appeared troubled and confused.\n\n\"Where has he gone to? He disappeared so suddenly, crying that he was hurt,\" she asked, looking at her father as though she did not recognise him. \"And if they've done anything to him\u2014they have done it to me too\u2014for he is more to me than\u2014\"\n\nHer words grew vaguer and vaguer as she returned slowly to her normal waking state, and now she stopped altogether, as though suddenly aware that she had been surprised into telling secrets. But all the way back, as we carried her carefully through the trees, the girl smiled and murmured Sangree's name and asked if he was injured, until it finally became clear to me that the wild soul of the one had called to the wild soul of the other and in the secret depths of their beings the call had been heard and understood. John Silence was right. In the abyss of her heart, too deep at first for recognition, the girl loved him, and had loved him from the very beginning. Once her normal waking consciousness recognised the fact they would leap together like twin flames, and his affliction would be at an end; his intense desire would be satisfied; he would be cured.\n\nAnd in Sangree's tent Dr. Silence and I sat up for the remainder of the night\u2014this wonderful and haunted night that had shown us such strange glimpses of a new heaven and a new hell\u2014for the Canadian tossed upon his balsam boughs with high fever in his blood, and upon each cheek a dark and curious contusion showed, throbbing with severe pain although the skin was not broken and there was no outward and visible sign of blood.\n\n\"Maloney shot straight, you see,\" whispered Dr. Silence to me after the clergyman had gone to his tent, and had put Joan to sleep beside her mother, who, by the way, had never once awakened. \"The bullet must have passed clean through the face, for both cheeks are stained. He'll wear these marks all his life\u2014smaller, but always there. They're the most curious scars in the world, these scars transferred by repercussion from an injured Double. They'll remain visible until just before his death, and then with the withdrawal of the subtle body they will disappear finally.\"\n\nHis words mingled in my dazed mind with the sighs of the troubled sleeper and the crying of the wind about the tent. Nothing seemed to paralyse my powers of realisation so much as these twin stains of mysterious significance upon the face before me.\n\nIt was odd, too, how speedily and easily the Camp resigned itself again to sleep and quietness, as though a stage curtain had suddenly dropped down upon the action and concealed it; and nothing contributed so vividly to the feeling that I had been a spectator of some kind of visionary drama as the dramatic nature of the change in the girl's attitude.\n\nYet, as a matter of fact, the change had not been so sudden and revolutionary as appeared. Underneath, in those remoter regions of consciousness where the emotions, unknown to their owners, do secretly mature, and owe thence their abrupt revelation to some abrupt psychological climax, there can be no doubt that Joan's love for the Canadian had been growing steadily and irresistibly all the time. It had now rushed to the surface so that she recognised it; that was all.\n\nAnd it has always seemed to me that the presence of John Silence, so potent, so quietly efficacious, produced an effect, if one may say so, of a psychic forcing-house, and hastened incalculably the bringing together of these two \"wild\" lovers. In that sudden awakening had occurred the very psychological climax required to reveal the passionate emotion accumulated below. The deeper knowledge had leaped across and transferred itself to her ordinary consciousness, and in that shock the collision of the personalities had shaken them to the depths and shown her the truth beyond all possibility of doubt.\n\n\"He's sleeping quietly now,\" the doctor said, interrupting my reflections. \"If you will watch alone for a bit I'll go to Maloney's tent and help him to arrange his thoughts.\" He smiled in anticipation of that \"arrangement.\" \"He'll never quite understand how a wound on the Double can transfer itself to the physical body, but at least I can persuade him that the less he talks and 'explains' to-morrow, the sooner the forces will run their natural course now to peace and quietness.\"\n\nHe went away softly, and with the removal of his presence Sangree, sleeping heavily, turned over and groaned with the pain of his broken head.\n\nAnd it was in the still hour just before the dawn, when all the islands were hushed, the wind and sea still dreaming, and the stars visible through clearing mists, that a figure crept silently over the ridge and reached the door of the tent where I dozed beside the sufferer, before I was aware of its presence. The flap was cautiously lifted a few inches and in looked\u2014Joan.\n\nThat same instant Sangree woke and sat up on his bed of branches. He recognised her before I could say a word, and uttered a low cry. It was pain and joy mingled, and this time all human. And the girl too was no longer walking in her sleep, but fully aware of what she was doing. I was only just able to prevent him springing from his blankets.\n\n\"Joan, Joan!\" he cried, and in a flash she answered him, \"I'm here\u2014I'm with you always now,\" and had pushed past me into the tent and flung herself upon his breast.\n\n\"I knew you would come to me in the end,\" I heard him whisper.\n\n\"It was all too big for me to understand at first,\" she murmured, \"and for a long time I was frightened\u2014\"\n\n\"But not now!\" he cried louder; \"you don't feel afraid now of\u2014of anything that's in me\u2014\"\n\n\"I fear nothing,\" she cried, \"nothing, nothing!\"\n\nI led her outside again. She looked steadily into my face with eyes shining and her whole being transformed. In some intuitive way, surviving probably from the somnambulism, she knew or guessed as much as I knew.\n\n\"You must talk to-morrow with John Silence,\" I said gently, leading her towards her own tent. \"He understands everything.\"\n\nI left her at the door, and as I went back softly to take up my place of sentry again with the Canadian, I saw the first streaks of dawn lighting up the far rim of the sea behind the distant islands.\n\nAnd, as though to emphasise the eternal closeness of comedy to tragedy, two small details rose out of the scene and impressed me so vividly that I remember them to this very day. For in the tent where I had just left Joan, all aquiver with her new happiness, there rose plainly to my ears the grotesque sounds of the Bo'sun's Mate heavily snoring, oblivious of all things in heaven or hell; and from Maloney's tent, so still was the night, where I looked across and saw the lantern's glow, there came to me, through the trees, the monotonous rising and falling of a human voice that was beyond question the sound of a man praying to his God.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Victim of Higher Space ]\n\n\"There's a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir,\" said the new man.\n\n\"Why 'extraordinary'?\" asked Dr. Silence, drawing the tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard. His eyes twinkled pleasantly. \"Why 'extraordinary,' Barker?\" he repeated encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man's eyes.\n\n\"He's so\u2014so thin, sir. I could hardly see 'im at all\u2014at first. He was inside the house before I could ask the name,\" he added, remembering strict orders.\n\n\"And who brought him here?\"\n\n\"He come alone, sir, in a closed cab. He pushed by me before I could say a word\u2014making no noise not what I could hear. He seemed to move so soft like\u2014\"\n\nThe man stopped short with obvious embarrassment, as though he had already said enough to jeopardise his new situation, but trying hard to show that he remembered the instructions and warnings he had received with regard to the admission of strangers not properly accredited.\n\n\"And where is the gentleman now?\" asked Dr. Silence, turning away to conceal his amusement.\n\n\"I really couldn't exactly say, sir. I left him standing in the 'all\u2014\"\n\nThe doctor looked up sharply. \"But why in the hall, Barker? Why not in the waiting-room?\" He fixed his piercing though kindly eyes on the man's face. \"Did he frighten you?\" he asked quickly.\n\n\"I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I seemed to lose sight of him, as it were\u2014\" The man stammered, evidently convinced by now that he had earned his dismissal. \"He come in so funny, just like a cold wind,\" he added boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master full in the face.\n\nThe doctor made an internal note of the man's halting description; he was pleased that the slight signs of psychic intuition which had induced him to engage Barker had not entirely failed at the first trial. Dr. Silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants, from secretary to serving man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole by their occasional flashes of insight.\n\n\"So the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?\"\n\n\"That was it, I think, sir,\" repeated the man stolidly.\n\n\"And he brings no kind of introduction to me\u2014no letter or anything?\" asked the doctor, with feigned surprise, as though he knew what was coming.\n\nThe man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced an envelope.\n\n\"I beg pardon, sir,\" he said, greatly flustered; \"the gentleman handed me this for you.\"\n\nIt was a note from a discerning friend, who had never yet sent him a case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another.\n\n\"Please see the bearer of this note,\" the brief message ran, \"though I doubt if even you can do much to help him.\"\n\nJohn Silence paused a moment, so as to gather from the mind of the writer all that lay behind the brief words of the letter. Then he looked up at his servant with a graver expression than he had yet worn.\n\n\"Go back and find this gentleman,\" he said, \"and show him into the green study. Do not reply to his question, or speak more than actually necessary; but think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly as you can, Barker. You remember what I told you about the importance of thinking, when I engaged you. Put curiosity out of your mind, and think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can.\"\n\nHe smiled, and Barker, who had recovered his composure in the doctor's presence, bowed silently and went out.\n\nThere were two different reception-rooms in Dr. Silence's house. One (intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when really they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. It was, however, rarely used. The other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of mind. And this room was the one in which Dr. Silence interviewed the majority of his \"queer\" cases, and the one into which he had directed Barker to show his present caller.\n\nTo begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since its immovability tended to impart this same excellent characteristic to the occupant. Patients invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate their language. The inflexibility of the chair helped to counteract this. After repeated endeavours to drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning themselves to sitting quietly. And with the futility of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind.\n\nUpon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the chair. The effect upon the excitable patient was rapid, admirable, and harmless. The green study was further provided with a secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible to observe his patient's face before it had assumed that mask the features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person. A man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and this expression is the man himself. It disappears the moment another person joins him. And Dr. Silence often learned more from a few moments' secret observation of a face than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards.\n\nA very light, almost a dancing, step followed Barker's heavy tread towards the green room, and a moment afterwards the man came in and announced that the gentleman was waiting. He was still pale and his manner nervous.\n\n\"Never mind, Barker\" the doctor said kindly; \"if you were not psychic the man would have had no effect upon you at all. You only need training and development. And when you have learned to interpret these feelings and sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a great sympathy.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; thank you, sir!\" And Barker bowed and made his escape, while Dr. Silence, an amused smile lurking about the corners of his mouth, made his way noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to the spy-hole in the door of the green study.\n\nThis spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a view of almost the entire room, and, looking through it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves, and umbrella lying on a chair by the table, but searched at first in vain for their owner.\n\nThe windows were both closed and a brisk fire burned in the grate. There were various signs\u2014signs intelligible at least to a keenly intuitive soul\u2014that the room was occupied, yet so far as human beings were concerned, it was empty, utterly empty. No one sat in the chairs; no one stood on the mat before the fire; there was no sign even that a patient was anywhere close against the wall, examining the Bocklin reproductions\u2014as patients so often did when they thought they were alone\u2014and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole. Ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. It was undeniable.\n\nYet Dr. Silence was quite well aware that a human being was in the room. His psychic apparatus never failed in letting him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. Even in the dark he could tell that. And he now knew positively that his patient\u2014the patient who had alarmed Barker, and had then tripped down the corridor with that dancing footstep\u2014was somewhere concealed within the four walls commanded by his spy-hole. He also realised\u2014and this was most unusual\u2014that this individual whom he desired to watch knew that he was being watched. And, further, that the stranger himself was also watching! In fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was being observed\u2014and by an observer as keen and trained as himself.\n\nAn inkling of the true state of the case began to dawn upon him, and he was on the verge of entering\u2014indeed, his hand already touched the door-knob\u2014when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a slight movement. Directly opposite, between him and the fireplace, something stirred. He watched very attentively and made certain that he was not mistaken. An object on the mantelpiece\u2014it was a blue vase\u2014disappeared from view. It passed out of sight together with the portion of the marble mantelpiece on which it rested. Next, that part of the fire and grate and brass fender immediately below it vanished entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of them.\n\nDr. Silence then understood that something between him and these objects was slowly coming into being, something that concealed them and obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of sight between them and himself.\n\nHe quietly awaited further results before going in.\n\nFirst he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing itself from just above the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached the woolly fire-mat. This line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. It was no shadow; it was something substantial. It defined itself more and more. Then suddenly, at the top of the line, and about on a level with the face of the clock, he saw a round luminous disc gazing steadily at him. It was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there against the spy-hole. And it was bright with intelligence. Dr. Silence held his breath for a moment\u2014and stared back at it.\n\nThen, like some one moving out of deep shadow into light, he saw the figure of a man come sliding sideways into view, a whitish face following the eye, and the perpendicular line he had first observed broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being. It was the patient. He had apparently been standing there in front of the fire all the time. A second eye had followed the first, and both of them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a sly twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the doctor to maintain his position any longer.\n\nHe opened the door and went in quickly. As he did so he noticed for the first time the sound of a German band coming in gaily through the open ventilators. In some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music connected itself with the patient he was about to interview. This sort of prevision was not unfamiliar to him. It always explained itself later.\n\nThe man, he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe\u2014his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant\u2014that is, good\u2014vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. There was evidently something wholly out of the usual in the state of his thoughts. Yet, though strange, it was not altogether distressing; it was not the impression that the broken and violent atmosphere of the insane produces upon the mind. Dr. Silence realised in a flash that here was a case of absorbing interest that might require all his powers to handle properly.\n\n\"I was watching you through my little peep-hole\u2014as you saw,\" he began, with a pleasant smile, advancing to shake hands. \"I find it of the greatest assistance sometimes\u2014\"\n\nBut the patient interrupted him at once. His voice was hurried and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in unexpected fashion. One moment it thundered, the next it almost squeaked.\n\n\"I understand without explanation,\" he broke in rapidly. \"You get the true note of a man in this way\u2014when he thinks himself unobserved. I quite agree. Only, in my case, I fear, you saw very little. My case, as you of course grasp, Dr. Silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably peculiar. Indeed, unless Sir William had positively assured me\u2014\"\n\n\"My friend has sent you to me,\" the doctor interrupted gravely, with a gentle note of authority, \"and that is quite sufficient. Pray, be seated, Mr.\u2014\"\n\n\"Mudge\u2014Racine Mudge,\" returned the other.\n\n\"Take this comfortable one, Mr. Mudge,\" leading him to the fixed chair, \"and tell me your condition in your own way and at your own pace. My whole day is at your service if you require it.\"\n\nMr. Mudge moved towards the chair in question and then hesitated.\n\n\"You will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons,\" he said, before sitting down. \"I do not need them. Also I ought to mention that anything you think of vividly will reach my mind. That is apparently part of my peculiar case.\" He sat down with a sigh and arranged his thin legs and body into a position of comfort. Evidently he was very sensitive to the thoughts of others, for the picture of the green buttons had only entered the doctor's mind for a second, yet the other had instantly snapped it up. Dr. Silence noticed, too, that Mr. Mudge held on tightly with both hands to the arms of the chair.\n\n\"I'm rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor,\" he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably. \"It suits me admirably. The fact is\u2014and this is my case in a nutshell\u2014which is all that a doctor of your marvellous development requires\u2014the fact is, Dr. Silence, I am a victim of Higher Space. That's what's the matter with me\u2014Higher Space!\"\n\nThe two looked at each other for a space in silence, the little patient holding tightly to the arms of the chair which \"suited him admirably,\" and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere positively trembling with the waves of some unknown activity; while the doctor smiled kindly and sympathetically, and put his whole person as far as possible into the mental condition of the other.\n\n\"Higher Space,\" repeated Mr. Mudge, \"that's what it is. Now, do you think you can help me with that?\"\n\nThere was a pause during which the men's eyes steadily searched down below the surface of their respective personalities. Then Dr. Silence spoke.\n\n\"I am quite sure I can help,\" he answered quietly; \"sympathy must always help, and suffering always owns my sympathy. I see you have suffered cruelly. You must tell me all about your case, and when I hear the gradual steps by which you reached this strange condition, I have no doubt I can be of assistance to you.\"\n\nHe drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. His whole being radiated kindness, intelligence, desire to help.\n\n\"For instance,\" he went on, \"I feel sure it was the result of no mere chance that you became familiar with the terrors of what you term Higher Space; for Higher Space is no mere external measurement. It is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space is a mythical state.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands with pleasure, \"the relief it is to be able to talk to some one who can understand! Of course what you say is the utter truth. And you are right that no mere chance led me to my present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged and deliberate study. Yet chance in a sense now governs it. I mean, my entering the condition of Higher Space seems to depend upon the chance of this and that circumstance. For instance, the mere sound of that German band sent me off. Not that all music will do so, but certain sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch, and off I go. Wagner's music always does it, and that band must have been playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I'll come to all that later. Only first, I must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole.\"\n\nJohn Silence looked up with a start, for Mr. Mudge's back was to the door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker glued to the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard Barker snuffle away along the passage.\n\n\"Now,\" continued the little man in the chair, \"I can begin. You have managed to put me completely at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my whole case without shame or reserve. You will understand. But you must be patient with me if I go into details that are already familiar to you\u2014details of Higher Space, I mean\u2014and if I seem stupid when I have to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really therefore indescribable.\"\n\n\"My dear friend,\" put in the other calmly, \"that goes without saying. To know Higher Space is an experience that defies description, and one is obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. But, pray, proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words.\"\n\nAn immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost in the depths of the chair. Such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once. He leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin, scale-like voice.\n\n\"My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father an Essex bargeman,\" he said abruptly. \"Hence my name\u2014Racine and Mudge. My father died before I ever saw him. My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom. I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without education. This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my true love\u2014mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. These, however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like the memory of what I had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and I simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects, I understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to me. It was simply memory. It was simply re-collecting the memories of what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to teach me.\"\n\nIn his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair forward a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the recital of his singular \"disease.\"\n\n\"The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of Gauss\u2014that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are together greater than two right angles, if drawn upon immense curvatures\u2014the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky\u2014all these I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the verge of my\u2014my new world, my Higher Space possibilities\u2014in a word, my disease!\n\n\"How I got there,\" he resumed after a brief pause, during which he appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, \"is more than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.\n\n\"Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbing the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of new efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with the exception of one man\u2014a 'dreamer,' the world called him\u2014whose audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, I found no one to guide or help.\n\n\"You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance with a new development of space should prove a source of misery and terror.\"\n\nMr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and might any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and disappear form view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces, sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every word and every gesture with deep attention.\n\n\"This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space\u2014to Higher Space. A closed box only seems closed. There is a way in and out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin.\"\n\n\"You tell me no new thing,\" the doctor interposed gently.\n\n\"Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and lies partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all objects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see their three measurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is concealed from us, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round it I have not really made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. But, once we learn to see in Higher Space, objects will appear as they actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!\n\n\"Now, you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming to.\"\n\n\"I am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered,\" observed the doctor soothingly, \"for I have made similar experiments myself, and only stopped just in time\u2014\"\n\n\"You are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, and sympathise,\" exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further excitability.\n\n\"Well,\" he resumed, after a moment's pause, \"I procured the implements and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and I followed the instructions carefully till I had arrived at a working conception of four-dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are cubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw it mentally, for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or my hands and feet handle it.\n\n\"So, at least, I thought,\" he added, making a wry face. \"I had reached the stage, you see, when I could imagine in a new dimension. I was able to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to all we know\u2014the shape of the tessaract. I could perceive in four dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see all its sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side and base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak. And this tessaract was bounded by cubes! Moreover, I also saw its content\u2014its insides.\"\n\n\"You were not yourself able to enter this new world,\" interrupted Dr. Silence.\n\n\"Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a spiritual condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially.\"\n\nMr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair. \"From this starting point,\" he resumed, \"I began my studies and experiments, and continued them for years. I had money, and I was without friends. I lived in solitude and experimented. My intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere reason more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that I began to advance. And what I learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into language, since it all describes experiences transcending the experiences of men. It is only some of the results\u2014what you would call the symptoms of my disease\u2014that I can give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.\n\n\"I can only tell you, Dr. Silence\"\u2014his manner became exceedingly impressive\u2014\"that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what they call in the Yoga books 'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as himself; how men are all really one; and why the utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul.\"\n\nHe paused a moment and drew breath.\n\n\"Your speculations have been my own long ago,\" the doctor said quietly. \"I fully realise the force of your words. Men are doubtless not separate at all\u2014in the sense they imagine\u2014\"\n\n\"All this about the very much Higher Space I only dimly, very dimly, conceived, of course,\" the other went on, raising his voice again by jerks; \"but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of\u2014the simpler disaster\u2014oh, dear, how shall I put it\u2014?\"\n\nHe stammered and showed visible signs of distress.\n\n\"It was simply this,\" he resumed with a sudden rush of words, \"that, accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one day slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back again. I discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but an expression\u2014a projection\u2014of my higher four-dimensional body!\n\n\"Now you understand what I meant much earlier in our talk when I spoke of chance. I cannot control my entrance or exit. Certain people, certain human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires even\u2014the radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all, the vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a state of what I can only describe as an intense and terrific inner vibration\u2014and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles to all our known directions! Off in the direction the cube takes when it begins to trace the outlines of the new figure! Off into my breathless and semi-divine Higher Space! Off, inside myself, into the world of four dimensions!\"\n\nHe gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair.\n\n\"And there,\" he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions, \"there I have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they do something which I cannot find words to describe properly or intelligibly to you\u2014and then, behold, I am back again. First, that is, I disappear. Then I reappear.\"\n\n\"Just so,\" exclaimed Dr. Silence, \"and that is why a few\u2014\"\n\n\"Why a few moments ago,\" interrupted Mr. Mudge, taking the words out of his mouth, \"you found me gone, and then saw me return. The music of that wretched German band sent me off. Your intense thinking about me brought me back\u2014when the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you approach the peep-hole and I saw Barker's intention of doing so later. For me no interiors are hidden. I see inside. When in that state the content of your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!\"\n\nMr. Mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. A light trembling ran over the surface of his small body like wind over grass. He still held tightly to the arms of the chair.\n\n\"At first,\" he presently resumed, \"my new experiences were so vividly interesting that I felt no alarm. There was no room for it. The alarm came a little later.\"\n\n\"Then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to experience yourself as a normal portion of it?\" asked the doctor, leaning forward, deeply interested.\n\nMr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.\n\n\"I did,\" he whispered, \"undoubtedly I did. I am coming to all that. It began first at night, when I realised that sleep brought no loss of consciousness\u2014\"\n\n\"The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only the body becomes unconscious,\" interposed John Silence.\n\n\"Yes, we know that\u2014theoretically. At night, of course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how, simply because the brain stays behind and receives no record. But I found that, while remaining conscious, I also retained memory. I had attained to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night I regularly, with the first approaches of drowsiness, entered nolens volens the four-dimensional world.\n\n\"For a time this happened regularly, and I could not control it; though later I found a way to regulate it better. Apparently sleep is unnecessary in the higher\u2014the four-dimensional\u2014body. Yes, perhaps. But I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. For, unable to control my movements, I wandered to and fro, attracted, owing to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this new world that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful waste and drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see that I cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and beings in it. More than that, I cannot even remember them. I cannot now picture them to myself even, but can recall only the memory of the impression they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. To be in several places at once, for instance\u2014\"\n\n\"Perfectly,\" interrupted John Silence, noticing the increase of the other's excitement, \"I understand exactly. But now, please, tell me a little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you.\"\n\n\"It's not the disappearing and reappearing per se that I mind,\" continued Mr. Mudge, \"so much as certain other things. It's seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees, children; all that I have considered beautiful in life\u2014everything, from a human face to a cathedral\u2014appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all I have known before. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be terrible, but I assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. To be so confused in geography as to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the next at Clapham Junction\u2014or possibly at both places simultaneously\u2014is absurdly terrifying. Your imagination will readily furnish other details without my multiplying my experiences now. But you have no idea what it all means, and how I suffer.\"\n\nMr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. He still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into this other space he had been talking about.\n\nJohn Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and had made many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect upon him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with him something of that breathless Higher-Space condition he had been describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a basis of truth for their origin.\n\nAfter a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left him for a single second.\n\n\"It almost seems a pity,\" he said at length, \"to cure you, Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose your life in the process\u2014that is, your life here in the world of three dimensions\u2014you would lose thereby nothing of great value\u2014you will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know\u2014and you might gain what is infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you speak of.\"\n\nThe perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply.\n\n\"Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course.\"\n\nMr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. A wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously in motion like a field of grass.\n\n\"You are merely talking to gain time,\" he said hurriedly, in a shaking voice. \"This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is again coming down the street, and if it plays\u2014if it plays Wagner\u2014I shall be off in a twinkling.\"\n\n\"Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to block the entrances.\"\n\n\"True, true, utterly true!\" exclaimed the little man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the chair. \"But how, in the name of space, is that to be done?\"\n\n\"By concentration. They are all within you, these entrances, although outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way.\"\n\n\"Quick, quick!\" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. \"How is this concentration to be effected?\"\n\n\"This little book,\" continued Dr. Silence calmly, \"will explain to you the way.\" He tapped the cover. \"Let me now read out to you certain simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely from my own personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these instructions and you will no longer enter the state of Higher Space. The entrances will be blocked effectively.\"\n\nMr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John Silence cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice.\n\nBut before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A sound of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house\u2014the March from Tannh\u00e4user. Odd as it may seem that a German band should twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner, it was nevertheless the fact.\n\nMr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. A piteous look that was not far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows followed it\u2014the grey of fear. He began to struggle convulsively.\n\n\"Hold me fast! Catch me! For God's sake, keep me here! I'm on the rush already. Oh, it's frightful!\" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice as thin as a reed.\n\nDr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before he could cover the space between them, Mr. Racine Mudge, screaming and struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. He disappeared like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own being. It was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice of dream, a voice of vision and unreality.\n\n\"Alcohol, alcohol!\" it cried, \"give me alcohol! It's the quickest way. Alcohol, before I'm out of reach!\"\n\nThe doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action, remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space above the chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. Then, before his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within.\n\n\"Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!\" cried the faint voice in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece. He understood that in Mudge's present condition one side of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he had been hearing described at such length.\n\nBut the next moment\u2014the very same moment it almost seemed\u2014the German band stopped midway in its tune\u2014and there was Mr. Mudge back in his chair again, gasping and panting!\n\n\"Quick!\" he shrieked, \"stop that band! Send it away! Catch hold of me! Block the entrances! Block the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh, oh-h-h-h!!!\"\n\nThe music had begun again. It was merely a temporary interruption. The Tannh\u00e4user March started again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played against time.\n\nBut the brief interruption gave Dr. Silence a moment in which to collect his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through half a bar, he had flung forward upon the chair and held Mr. Racine Mudge, the struggling little victim of Higher Space, in a grip of iron. His arms went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part of the chair at the same time. He was not a big man, yet he seemed to smother Mudge completely.\n\nYet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath him, it began to melt and slip away like air or water. The wood of the arm-chair somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and those of Mudge. The phenomenon known as the passage of matter through matter took place. The little man seemed actually to get mixed up in his own being. Dr. Silence could just see his face beneath him. It puckered and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. He heard the thin, reedy voice cry in his ear to \"Block the entrances, block the entrances!\" and then\u2014but how in the world describe what is indescribable?\n\nJohn Silence half rose up to watch. Racine Mudge, his face distorted beyond all recognition, was making a marvellous inward movement, as though doubling back upon himself. He turned funnel-wise like water in a whirling vortex, and then appeared to break up somewhat as a reflection breaks up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. He went neither forward nor backwards, neither to the right nor the left, neither up nor down. But he went. He went utterly. He simply flashed away out of sight like a vanishing projectile.\n\nAll but one leg! Dr. Silence just had the time and the presence of mind to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it disappeared, and to this he held on for several seconds like grim death. Yet all the time he knew it was a foolish and useless thing to do.\n\nThe foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next it seemed\u2014this was the only way he could describe it\u2014inside his own skin and bones, and at the same time outside his hand and all round it. It seemed mixed up in some amazing way with his own flesh and blood. Then it was gone, and he was tightly grasping a draught of heated air.\n\n\"Gone! gone! gone!\" cried a thick, whispering voice, somewhere deep within his own consciousness. \"Lost! lost! lost!\" it repeated, growing fainter and fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and the last signs of Mr. Racine Mudge vanished with it.\n\nJohn Silence locked his red book and replaced it in the cabinet, which he fastened with a click, and when Barker answered the bell he inquired if Mr. Mudge had left a card upon the table. It appeared that he had, and when the servant returned with it, Dr. Silence read the address and made a note of it. It was in North London.\n\n\"Mr. Mudge has gone,\" he said quietly to Barker, noticing his expression of alarm.\n\n\"He's not taken his 'at with him, sir.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mudge requires no hat where he is now,\" continued the doctor, stooping to poke the fire. \"But he may return for it\u2014\"\n\n\"And the humbrella, sir.\"\n\n\"And the umbrella.\"\n\n\"He didn't go out my way, sir, if you please,\" stuttered the amazed servant, his curiosity overcoming his nervousness.\n\n\"Mr. Mudge has his own way of coming and going, and prefers it. If he returns by the door at any time remember to bring him instantly to me, and be kind and gentle with him and ask no questions. Also, remember, Barker, to think pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately of him while he is away. Mr. Mudge is a very suffering gentleman.\"\n\nBarker bowed and went out of the room backwards, gasping and feeling round the inside of his collar with three very hot fingers of one hand.\n\nIt was two days later when he brought in a telegram to the study. Dr. Silence opened it, and read as follows:\n\n\"Bombay. Just slipped out again. All safe. Have blocked entrances. Thousand thanks. Address Cooks, London.\u2014MUDGE.\"\n\nDr. Silence looked up and saw Barker staring at him bewilderingly. It occurred to him that somehow he knew the contents of the telegram.\n\n\"Make a parcel of Mr. Mudge's things,\" he said briefly, \"and address them Thomas Cook & Sons, Ludgate Circus. And send them there exactly a month from to-day and marked 'To be called for.'\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Barker, leaving the room with a deep sigh and a hurried glance at the waste-paper basket where his master had dropped the pink paper.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Lost Valley ]\n\nMark and Stephen, twins, were remarkable even of their kind: they were not so much one soul split in twain, as two souls fashioned in precisely the same mould. Their characters were almost identical\u2014 tastes, hopes, fears, desires, everything. They even liked the same food, wore the same kind of hats, ties, suits; and, strongest link of all, of course disliked the same things too. At the age of thirty-five neither had married, for they invariably liked the same woman; and when a certain type of girl appeared upon their horizon they talked it over frankly, agreed it was impossible to separate, and together turned their backs upon her for a change of scene before she could endanger their peace.\n\nFor their love for one another was unbounded\u2014irresistible as a force of nature, tender beyond words\u2014and their one keen terror was that they might one day be separated.\n\nTo look at, even for twins, they were uncommonly alike. Even their eyes were similar: that grey-green of the sea that sometimes changes to blue, and at night becomes charged with shadows. And both faces were of the same strong type with aquiline noses, stern-lipped mouths, and jaws well marked. They possessed imagination, real imagination of the winged kind, and at the same time the fine controlling will without which such a gift is apt to prove a source of weakness. Their emotions, too, were real and living: not the sort that merely tickle the surface of the heart, but the sort that plough.\n\nBoth had private means, yet both had studied medicine because it interested them, Mark specializing in diseases of eye and ear, Stephen in mental and nervous cases; and they carried on a select, even a distinguished, practice in the same house in Wimpole Street with their names on the brass plate thus: Dr. Mark Winters, Dr. Stephen Winters.\n\nIn the summer of 1900 they went abroad together as usual for the months of July and August. It was their custom to explore successive ranges of mountains, collecting the folklore and natural history of the region into small volumes, neatly illustrated with Stephen's photographs. And this particular year they chose the Jura, that portion of it, rather, that lies between the Lac de Joux, Baulmes and Fleurier. For, obviously, they could not exhaust a whole range in a single brief holiday. They explored it in sections, year by year. And they invariably chose for their headquarters quiet, unfashionable places where there was less danger of meeting attractive people who might break in upon the happiness of their profound brotherly devotion\u2014the incalculable, mystical devotion of twins.\n\n\"For abroad, you know,\" Mark would say, \"people have an insinuating way with them that is often hard to withstand. The chilly English reserve disappears. Acquaintanceship becomes intimacy before one has time to weigh it.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Stephen added. \"The conventions that protect one at home suddenly wear thin, don't they? And one becomes soft and open to attack\u2014unexpected attack,\"\n\nThey looked up and laughed, reading each other's thoughts like trained telepathists. What each meant was the dread that one should, after all, be taken and the other left\u2014by a woman.\n\n\"Though at our age, you know, one is almost immune,\" Mark observed; while Stephen smiling philosophically\u2014\n\n\"Or ought to be.\"\n\n\"Is,\" quoth Mark decisively. For by common consent Mark played the r\u00f4le of the elder brother.\n\nHis character, if anything, was a shade more practical. He was slightly more critical of life, perhaps, Stephen being ever more apt to accept without analysis, even without reflection. But Stephen had that richer heritage of dreams which comes from an imagination loved for its own sake." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 396", + "text": "In the peasant's chalet, where they had a sitting-room and two bedrooms, they were very comfortable. It stood on the edge of the forests that run along the slopes of Chasseront, on the side of Les Rasses farthest from Ste Croix. Marie Petavel provided them with the simple cooking they liked; and they spent their days walking, climbing, exploring, Mark collecting legend and folklore, Stephen making his natural history studies, with the little maps and surveys he drew so cleverly. Even this was only a division of labour, for each was equally interested in the occupation of the other; and they shared results in the long evenings, when expeditions brought them back in time, smoking in the rickety wooden balcony, comparing notes, shaping chapters, happy as two children, They brought the enthusiasm of boys to all they did, and they enjoyed the days apart almost as much as those they spent together. After separate expeditions each invariably returned with surprises which awakened the other's interest\u2014even amazement.\n\nThus, the life of the foreign element in the hotels\u2014unpicturesque in the daytime, noisy and overdressed at night\u2014passed them by. The glimpses they caught as they passed these caravansarais, when gaieties were the order of the evening, made them value their peaceful retreat among the skirts of the forest. They brought no evening dress with them, not even \"le smoking.\"\n\n\"The atmosphere of these huge hotels simply poisons the mountains,\" quoth Stephen. \"All that 'haunted' feeling goes.\"\n\n\"Those people,\" agreed Mark, with scorn in his eyes, \"would be far happier at Trouville or Dieppe, gambling, flirting, and the rest.\"\n\nFeeling, thus, secure from that jealousy which lies so terribly close to the surface of all giant devotions where the entire life depends upon exclusive possession, the brothers regarded with indifference the signs of this gayer world about them. In that throng there was no one who could introduce an element of danger into their lives\u2014no woman, at least, either of them could like would be found there!\n\nFor this thought must be emphasized, though not exaggerated. Certain incidents in the past, from which only their strength of will had made escape possible, proved the danger to be a real one. (Usually, too, it was some un-English woman: to wit, the Budapesth adventure, or the incident in London with the Greek girl who was first Mark's patient and then Stephen's.) Neither of them made definite reference to the danger, though undoubtedly it was present in their minds more or less vividly whenever they came to a new place: this singular dream that one day a woman would carry off one, leave the other lonely. It was instinctive, probably just as the dread of the wolf is instinctive in the deer. The curious fact, though natural enough, was that each brother feared for the other and not for himself. Had anyone told Mark that some day he would marry, Mark would have shrugged his shoulders with a smile, and replied, \"No; but I'm awfully afraid Stephen may!\" And vice vers\u00e2." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 397", + "text": "Then, out of a clear sky, the bolt fell\u2014upon Stephen. Catching him utterly unawares, it sent him fairly reeling. For Stephen, even more than his brother, possessed that glorious yet fatal gift, common to poets and children, by which out of a few insignificant details the soul builds for itself a whole sweet heaven to dwell in.\n\nIt was at the end of their first month, a month of unclouded happiness together. Since their exploration of the Abruzzi, two years before, they had never \u00e9njoyed anything so much. And not a soul had come to disturb their privacy. Plans were being mooted for moving their head-quarters some miles farther towards the Val de Travers and the Creux du Van; only the day of departure, indeed, remained to be fixed, when Stephen, coming home from an afternoon of photography alone, saw, with bewildering and arresting suddenness\u2014a Face. And with the effect of a blow full upon the heart it literally struck him.\n\nHow such a thing can come upon a strong man, a man of balanced mind, healthy in nerves and spirit, and in a single moment change his serenity into a state of feverish and passionate desire for possession, is a mystery that lies too deep for philosophy or Science to explain. It turned him dizzy with a sudden and tempestuous delight\u2014a veritable sickness of the soul, wondrous sweet as it was deadly. Rare enough, of course, such instances may be, but that they happen is undeniable.\n\nHe was making his way home in the dusk somewhat wearily. The sun had already dipped below the horizon of France behind him. Across the open country that stretched away to the distant mountains of the Rhone Valley, the moonlight climbed with wings of ghostly radiance that fanned their way into the clefts and pine-woods of the Jura all about him. Cool airs of night stirred and whispered; lights twinkled through the openings among the trees, and all was scented like a garden.\n\nHe must have strayed considerably from the right trail\u2014path there was none\u2014for instead of Striking the mountain road that led straight to his chalet, he suddenly emerged into a pool of electric light that shone round one of the smaller wooden hotels by the borders of the forest. He recognized it at once, because he and his brother always avoided it deliberately. Not so gay or crowded as the larger caravansarais, it was nevertheless full of people of the kind they did not care about. Stephen was a good half-mile out of his way.\n\nWhen the mind is empty and the body tired it would seem that the system is sensitive to impressions with an acuteness impossible when these are vigorously employed. The face of this girl, framed against the glass of the hotel verandah, rushed out towards him with a sudden invading glory, and took the most complete imaginable possession of this temporary employment of his spirit. Before he could think or act, accept or reject, it had lodged itself eternally at the very centre of his being. He stopped, as before an unexpected flash of lightning, caught his breath\u2014and stared.\n\nA little apart from the throng of \"dressy\" folk who sat there in the glitter of the electric light, this face of melancholy dark splendour rose close before his eyes, all soft and wondrous as though the beauty the night\u2014of forest, stars and moon-rise\u2014had dropped down and focussed itself within the compass of a single human countenance. Framed within a corner pane of the big windows, peering sideways into the darkness, the vision of this girl, not twenty feet from where he stood, produced upon him a shock of the most convincing delight he had ever known. It was almost as though he saw some one who had dropped down among all these hotel people from another world. And from another world, in a sense, she undoubtedly was; for her face held in it nothing that belonged to the European countries he knew. She was of the East. The magic of other suns swept into his soul with the vision; the pageantry of other skies flashed brilliantly and was gone. Torches flamed in recesses of his being hitherto dark.\n\nThe incongruous surroundings unquestionably deepened the contrast to her advantage, but what made this first sight of her so extraordinarily arresting was the curious chance that where she sat the glare of the electric light did not touch her. She was in shadow from the shoulders downwards. Only, as she leaned backwards against the window, the face and neck turned slightly, there fell upon her exquisite Eastern features the soft glory of the rising moon. And comely she was in Stephen's eyes as nothing in his life had hitherto seemed comely. Apart from the vulgar throng as an exotic is apart from the weeds that choke its growth, this face seemed to swim towards him along the pathway of the slanting moonbeams. And, with it, came literally herself. Some released projection of his consciousness flew forth to meet her. The sense of nearness took his breath away with the faintness of too great happiness. She was in his arms, and his lips were buried in her scented hair. The sensation was vivid with pain and joy, as an ecstasy. And of the nature of true ecstasy, perhaps, it was: for he stood, it seemed, outside himself.\n\nHe remained there riveted in the patch of moonlight at the forest edge, for perhaps a whole minute, perhaps two, before he realized what had happened. Then came a second shock that was even more conquering than the first, for the girl, he saw, was not only gazing into his very face, she was also rising, as with an incipient gesture of recognition. As though she knew him, the little head bent itself forward gently, gracefully, and the dear eyes positively smiled.\n\nThe impetuous yearning that leaped full-fledged into his blood taught him in that instant the spiritual secret that pain and pleasure are fundamentally the same force. His attempt at self-control, made instinctively, was utterly overwhelmed. Something flashed to him from her eyes that melted the very roots of resolve; he staggered backwards, catching at the nearest tree for support, and in so doing left the patch of moonlight and stood concealed from view within the deep shadows behind.\n\nIncredible as it must seem in these days of starved romance, this man of strength and firm character, who had hitherto known of such attacks only vicariously from the description of others, now reeled back against the trunk of a pine-tree knowing all the sweet faintness of an overpowering love at first sight.\n\n\"For that, by God, I'd let myself waste utterly to death! To bring her an instant's happiness I'd suffer torture for a century\u2014!\"\n\nFor the words, with their clumsy, concentrated passion were out before he realized what he was saying, what he was doing; but, once out, he knew how pitifully inadequate they were to express a tithe of what was in him like a rising storm. All words dropped away from him; the breath that came and went so quickly clothed no further speech.\n\nWith his retreat into the shadows the girl had sat down again, but she still gazed steadily at the place where he had stood. Stephen, who had lost the power of further movement, also stood and stared. The picture, meanwhile, was being traced with hot iron upon plastic deeps in his soul of which he had never before divined the existence. And, again, with the magic of this master-yearning, it seemed that he drew her out from that horde of hotel guests till she stood close before his eyes, warm, perfumed, caressing. The delicate, sharp splendour of her face, already dear beyond all else in life, flamed there within actual touch of his lips. He turned giddy with the joy, wonder and mystery of it all. The frontiers of his being melted\u2014then extended to include her.\n\nFrom the words a lover fights among to describe the face he worships one divines only a little of the picture; these dimly-coloured symbols conceal more beauty than they reveal. And of this dark, young oval face, first seen sideways in the moonlight, with drooping lids over the almond-shaped eyes, soft cloudy hair, all enwrapped with the haunting and penetrating mystery of love, Stephen never attempted to analyze the ineffable secret. He just accepted it with a plunge of utter self-abandonment. He only realized vaguely by way of detail that the little nose, without being Jewish, curved singularly down towards a chin daintily chiselled in firmness; that the mouth held in its lips the invitation of all womankind as expressed in another race, a race alien to his own\u2014an Eastern race; and that something untamed, almost savage, in the face was corrected by the exquisite tenderness of the large dreamy, brown eyes. The mighty revolution of love spread its soft tide into every corner of his being.\n\nMoreover, that gesture of welcome, so utterly unexpected yet so spontaneous (so natural, it seemed to him now!), the smile of recognition that had so deliciously perplexed him, he accepted in the same way. The girl had felt what he had felt, and had betrayed herself even as he had done by a sudden, uncontrollable movement of revelation and delight; and to explain it otherwise by any vulgar standard of worldly wisdom, would be to rob it of all its dear modesty, truth and wonder. She yearned to know him, even as he yearned to know her.\n\nAnd all this in the little space, as men count time, of two minutes, even less.\n\nHow he was able at the moment to restrain all precipitate and impulsive action, Stephen has never properly understood. There was a fight, and it was short, painful and confused. But it ended on a note of triumphant joy\u2014the rapture of happiness to come.\n\nWith a great effort he remembers that he found the use of his feet and continued his journey homewards, passing out once more into the moonlight. The girl in the verandah followed his disappearing figure with her turning head; she craned her neck to watch till he disappeared beyond the angle of vision; she even waved her little dark hand.\n\n\"I shall be late,\" ran the thought sharply through Stephen's mind. It was cold; vivid wit keen pain. \"Mark will wonder what in the world has become of me\u2014!\"\n\nFor, with swift and terrible reaction, the meaning of it all\u2014the possible consequences of The Face\u2014swept over his heart and drowned it in a flood of icy water. In estimating his brotherly love, even the of the twin, he had never conceived such a thing as this\u2014had never reckoned with the possibility of a force that could make all else in the world seem so trivial...\n\nMark, had he been there, with his more critical attitude to life, might have analyzed something of it anyway. But Mark was not there. And Stephen had \u2014seen.\n\nThose mighty strings of life upon which, as upon an instrument, the heart of man lies stretched had been set powerfully a-quiver. The new vibrations poured and beat through him. Something within him swiftly disintegrated; in its place something else grew marvellously. The Face had established dominion over the secret places of his soul; thence-forward the process was automatic and inevitable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 398", + "text": "Then, spectre-like and cold, the image of his rose before his inner vision. The profound brotherly love of the twin confronted him in the path.\n\nHe stumbled among the roots and stones, searching for the means of self-control, but finding them with difficulty. Windows had opened everywhere in his soul; he looked out through them upon a new world, immense and gloriously coloured. Behind him in the shadows, as his vision searched and his heart sang, reared the single thought that hitherto had dominated his life: his love for Mark. It had already grown indisputably dim.\n\nFor both passions were genuine and commanding, the one built up through thirty-five years of devotion cemented by ten thousand associations and sacrifices, the other dropping out of heaven upon him with a suddenness simply appalling. And from the very first instant he understood that both could not live. One must die to feed the other...\n\nOn the staircase was the perfume of a strange tobacco, and, to his surprise and intense relief, when he entered the ch\u00e2let he found that his brother for the first time was not alone. A small, dark man stood talking earnestly with him by the open window\u2014the window where Mark had obviously been watching with anxiety for his arrival. Before introducing him to the stranger, Mark at once gave expression to his relief.\n\n\"I was beginning to be afraid something had happened to you,\" he said quietly enough, but in a way that the other understood. And after a moment's pause, in which he searched Stephen's face keenly, he added, \"but we didn't wait supper as you see, and old Petavel has kept yours all hot and ready for you in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"I\u2014er\u2014lost my way,\" Stephen said quickly, glancing from Mark to the stranger, wondering vaguely who he was. \"I got confused somehow in the dusk\u2014\"\n\nMark, remembering his manners now that his anxiety was set at rest, hastened to introduce him\u2014a Professor in a Russian University, interested in folklore and legend, who had read their book on the Abruzzi and discovered quite by chance that they were neighbours here in the forest. He was staying in a little hotel at Les Rasses, and had ventured to come up and introduce himself. Stephen was far too occupied trying to conceal his new battling emotions to notice that Mark and the stranger seemed on quite familiar terms. He was so fearful lest the perturbations of his own heart should betray him that he had no power to detect anything subtle or unusual in anybody else.\n\n\"Professor Samarianz comes originally from Tiflis,\" Mark was explaining, \"and has been telling me the most fascinating things about the legends and folklore of the Caucasus. We really must go there another year, Stephen... Mr. Samarianz most kindly has promised me letters to helpful people. He tells me, too, of a charming and exquisite legend of a 'Lost Valley' that exists hereabouts, where the spirits of all who die by their own hands, or otherwise suffer violent deaths, find perpetual peace\u2014the peace denied them by all the religions, that is...\"\n\nMark went on talking for some minutes while Stephen took off his knapsack and exchanged a few words with their visitor, who spoke excellent English. He was not quite sure what he said, but hoped he talked quietly and sensibly enough, in spite of the passions that waged war so terrifically in his breast. He noticed, however, that the man's face held an unusual charm, though he could not detect wherein its secret specifically lay. Presently, with excuses of hunger, he went into the kitchen for his supper, hugely relieved to find the opportunity to collect his thoughts a little; and when he returned twenty minutes later he found that his brother was alone. Professor Samarianz had taken his leave. In the room still lingered the perfume of his peculiarly flavoured cigarettes.\n\nMark, after listening with half an ear to his brother's description of the day, began pouring out his new interest; he was full of the Caucasus, and its folklore, and of the fortunate chance that had brought the stranger their way. The legend of the \"Lost Valley\" in the Jura, too, particularly interested him, and he spoke of his astonishment that he had hitherto come across no trace anywhere of the story.\n\n\"And fancy,\" he exclaimed, after a recital that lasted half-an-hour, \"the man came up from one of those little hotels on the edge of the forest\u2014that noisy one we have always been so careful to avoid. You never know where your luck hides, do you?\" he added, with a laugh.\n\n\"You never do, indeed,\" replied Stephen quietly, now wholly master of himself, or, at least, of his voice and eyes.\n\nAnd, to his secret satisfaction and delight, it was Mark who provided the excuses for staying on in the chalet, instead of moving further down the valley as they had intended. Besides, it would have been unnatural and absurd to leave without investigating so picturesque a legend as the \"Lost Valley.\"\n\n\"We're uncommonly happy here,\" Mark added quietly; \"why not stay on a bit?\"\n\n\"Why not, indeed?\" answered Stephen, trusting that the fearful inner storm instantly roused again by the prospect did not betray itself.\n\n\"You're not very keen, perhaps, old fellow?\" suggested Mark gently.\n\n\"On the contrary\u2014I am, very,\" was the reply.\n\n\"Good. Then we'll stay.\"\n\nThe words were spoken after a pause of some seconds. Stephen, who was down at the end of the room sorting his specimens by the lamp, looked up sharply. Mark's face, where he sat on the window-ledge in the dusk, was hardly visible. It must have something in his voice that had shot into Stephen's heart with a flash of sudden warning.\n\nA sensation of cold passed swiftly over him and was gone. Had he already betrayed himself? Was the subtle, almost telepathic sympathy between the twins developed to such a point that emotions could be thus transferred with the minimum of word or gesture, within the very shades of their silence even? And another thought: Was there something different in Mark to\u2014something in him also that had changed? Or was it merely his own raging, heaving passion, though so sternly repressed, that distorted his judgment and made him imaginative?\n\nWhat stood so darkly in the room\u2014between them?\n\nA sudden and fearful pain seared him inwardly as he realized, practically, and with cruelly acute comprehension, that one of these two loves in his heart must inevitably die to feed the other; and that it might have to be\u2014Mark. The complete meaning of it came home to him. And at the thought all his deep love of thirty years rose in a tide within him, flooding through the gates of life, seeking to overwhelm and merge in itself all obstacles that threatened to turn it aside. Unshed tears burned behind his eyes. He ached with a degree of actual, physical pain.\n\nAfter a moment of savage self-control he turned and crossed the room; but before he had covered half the distance that separated him from the window where his brother sat smoking, the rush of burning words\u2014were they to have been of confession, of self-reproach, or of renewed devotion?\u2014swept away from him, so that he wholly forgot them. In their place came the ordinary dead phrases of convention. He hardly heard them himself, though his lips uttered them.\n\n\"Come along, Mark, old chap,\" he said, conscious that his voice trembled, and that another face slipped imperiously in front of the one his eyes looked upon; \"it's time to go to bed. I'm dead tired like yourself.\"\n\n\"You are right,\" Mark replied, looking at him steadily as he turned towards the lamplight. \"Besides, the night air's getting chilly\u2014and we've been sitting in a draught, you know, all along.\"\n\nFor the first time in their lives the eyes of the two brothers could not quite find each other. Neither gaze hit precisely the middle of the other. It was as though a veil hung down between them and a deliberate act of focus was necessary. They looked one another straight in the face as usual, but with an effort\u2014with momentary difficulty. The room, too, as Mark had said, was cold, and the lamp, exhausted of its oil, was beginning to smell. Both light and heat were going. It was certainly time for bed.\n\nThe brothers went out together, arm in arm, and the long shadows of the pines, thrown by the rising moon through the window, fell across the floor like arms that waved. And from the black branches outside, the wind caught up a shower of sighs and dropped them about the roofs and walls as they made their way to their bedrooms on opposite sides of the little corridor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 399", + "text": "Four hours later, when the moon was high overhead and the room held but a single big shadow, the door opened softly and in came\u2014Stephen. He was dressed. He crossed the floor stealthily, unfastened the windows, and let himself out upon the balcony. A minute afterwards he had disappeared into the forest beyond the strip of vegetable garden at the back of the ch\u00e2let.\n\nIt was two o'clock in the morning, and no sleep had touched his eyes. For his heart burned, ached, and fought within him, and he felt the need of open spaces and the great forces of the night and mountains. No such battle had he ever known before. He remembered his brother saying years ago, with a half serious, half playful, \"...for if ever one of us comes a cropper in love, old fellow, it will be time for the other to\u2014go!\" And by \"go\" they both understood the ultimate meaning of the word.\n\nThrough the glades of forest, sweet-scented by night, he made his way till he reached the spot where that Face of soft splendour had first blessed his soul with its mysterious glory. There he sat down and, with his back against the very tree that had supported him a few hours ago, he drove his thoughts forward into battle with the whole strength of his will and character behind him. Very quietly, and with all the care, precision and steadiness of mind that he would have brought to bear upon a difficult \"case\" at Wimpole Street, he faced the situation and wrestled with it. The emotions during four hours' tossing upon a sleepless bed had worn themselves out a little. He was, in one sense of the word, calm, master of himself. The facts, with the huge issue that lay in their hands, he saw naked. And, as he thus saw them, he discerned how very, very far he had already travelled down the sweet path that led him toward the girl\u2014and away from his brother.\n\nDetails about her, of course, he knew none; whether she was free even; for he only knew that he loved, and that his entire life was already breaking with the yearning to sacrifice itself for that love. That was the naked fact. The problem bludgeoned him. Could he do anything to hold back the flood still rising, to arrest its terrific flow? Could he divert its torrent, and take it, girl and all, to offer upon the altar of that other love\u2014the devotion of the twin for its twin, the mysterious affinity that hitherto had ruled and directed all the currents of his soul?\n\nThere was no question of undoing what had already been done. Even if he never saw that face again, or heard the accents of those beloved lips; if he never was to know the magic of touch, the perfume of close thought, or the strange blessedness of telling her his burning message and hearing the murmur of her own\u2014the fact of love was already accomplished between them. That was ineradicable. He had seen. The sensitive plate had received its undying picture.\n\nFor this was no foolish passion arising from the mere propinquity that causes so many of the world's misfit marriages. It was a profound and mystical union already accomplished, psychical in the utter sense, inevitable as the marriage of wind and fire. He almost heard his soul laugh as he thought of the revolution effected in an instant of time by the message of a single glance. What had science, or his own special department of science, to say to this tempest of force that invaded him, and swept with its beautiful terrors of wind and lightning the furthest recesses of his being? This whirlwind that so shook him, that so deliciously wounded him, that already made the thought of sacrificing his brother seem sweet\u2014what was there to say to it, or do with it, or think of it?\n\nNothing, nothing, nothing!... He could only lie in its arms and rest, with that peace, deeper than all else in life, which the mystic knows when he is conscious that the everlasting arms are about him and that his union with the greatest force of the world is accomplished.\n\nYet Stephen struggled like a lion. His will rose up and opposed itself to the whole invasion... and in the end his will of steel, trained as all men of character train their wills against the difficulties of life, did actually produce a certain, definite result. This result was almost a tour de force, perhaps, yet it seemed valid. By its aid Stephen forced himself into a position he felt intuitively was an impossible one, but in which nevertheless he determined, by a deliberate act of almost incredible volition, that he would remain fixed. He decided to conquer his obsession, and to remain true to Mark...\n\nThe distant ridges of the dim blue Jura were tipped with the splendours of the coming dawn when at length he rose, chilly and exhausted, to retrace his steps to the ch\u00e2let.\n\nHe realized fully the meaning of the resolve he had come to. And the knowledge of it froze something within him into a stiffness that was like the stiffness of death. The pain in his heart battling against the resolution was atrocious. He had estimated, or thought so, at least, the meaning of his sacrifice. As a matter of fact his decision was entirely artificial, of course, and his resolve dictated by a moral code rather than by the living forces that direct life and can alone make its changes permanent. Stephen had in him the stuff of the hero; and, having said that, one has said all that language can say.\n\nOn the way home in the cool white dawn, as he crossed the open spaces of meadow where the mist rose and the dew lay like rain, he suddenly thought of her lying dead\u2014dead, that is, as he had thus decided she was to be dead\u2014for him. And instantly, as by a word of command, the entire light went out of the landscape and out of the world. His soul turned wintry, and all the sweetness of his life went bleak. For it was the ancient soul in him that loved, and to deny it was to deny life itself. He had pronounced upon himself a sentence of death by starvation\u2014a lingering and prolonged death accompanied by tortures of the most exquisite description. And along this path he really believed at the moment his little human will could hold him firm.\n\nHe made his way through the dew-drenched grass with the elation caused by so vast a sacrifice singing curiously in his blood. The splendour of the mountain sunrise and all the vital freshness of the dawn was in his heart. He was upon the ch\u00e2let almost before he knew it, and there on the balcony, waiting to receive him, his grey dressing-gown wrapped about his ears in the sharp air, stood\u2014Mark!\n\nAnd, somehow or other, at the sight, all this false elation passed and dropped. Stephen looked up at him, standing suddenly still there in his tracks, as he might have looked up at his executioner. The picture had restored him most abruptly, with sharpest pain, to reality again.\n\n\"Like me, you couldn't sleep, eh?\" Mark called softly, so as not to waken the peasants who slept on the ground floor.\n\n\"Have you been lying awake, too?\" Stephen replied.\n\n\"All night. I haven't closed an eye.\" Then Mark added, as his brother came up the wooden steps towards him, \"I knew\u2014you were awake I felt it. I knew, too\u2014you had gone out.\"\n\nA silence passed between them. Both had spoken quietly, naturally, neither expressing surprise.\n\n\"Yes,\" Stephen said slowly at length; \"we always reflect each other's pai\u2014each other's moods\u2014\" He stopped abruptly, leaving the sentence unfinished.\n\nTheir eyes met as of old. Stephen knew an instant of quite freezing terror in which he felt that his brother had divined the truth. Then Mark took his arm and led the way indoors on tiptoe.\n\n\"Look here, Stevie, old fellow,\" he said, with extraordinary tenderness \"there's no good saying anything, but I know perfectly well that you're unhappy about something; and so, of course, I am unhappy too.\" He paused, as though searching for words. Under ordinary circumstances Stephen would have caught his precise thought, but now the tumult of suppressed emotion in him clouded his divining power. He felt his arm clutched in a sudden vice. They drew closer to one another. Neither spoke. Then Mark, low and hurriedly, said\u2014he almost mumbled it\u2014\"It's all my fault really, all my fault\u2014dear old boy!\"\n\nStephen turned in amazement and stared. What in the world did his brother mean? What was he talking about? Before he could find speech, however, Mark continued, speaking distinctly now, and with evidences of strong emotion in his voice\u2014\n\n\"I'll tell you what we'll do,\" he exclaimed, with sudden decision; \"we'll go away; we'll leave! We've stayed here a bit too long, perhaps. Eh? What d'you say to that?\"\n\nStephen did not notice how sharply Mark searched his face. At the thought of separation all his mighty resolution dropped like a house of cards. His entire life seemed to melt away and run in a stream of impetuous yearning towards the Face.\n\nBut he answered quietly, sustaining his purpose artificially by a force of will that seemed to break and twist his life at the source with extraordinary pain. He could not have endured the strain for more than a few seconds. His voice sounded strange and distant.\n\n\"All right; at the end of the week,\" he said\u2014the faintness in him was dreadful, filling him with cold\u2014\"and that'll give us just three days to make our plans, won't it?\"\n\nMark nodded his head. Both faces were lined and drawn like the faces of old men; only there was no one there to remark upon it\u2014nor upon the fixed sternness that had dropped so suddenly upon their eyes and lips.\n\nArm in arm they entered the chalet and went to their bedrooms without another word. The sun, as they went, rose close over the tree-tops and dropped its first rays upon the spot where they had just stood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 400", + "text": "They came down in dressing-gowns to a very late breakfast. They were quiet, grave and slightly preoccupied. Neither made the least reference to their meeting at sunrise. New lines had graved themselves upon their faces, identical hues it seemed, drawing the mouth down at the corners with a touch of grimness where hitherto had been merely firmness.\n\nAnd the eyes of both saw new things, new distances, new terrors. Something, feared till now only as a possibility, had come close, and stood at their elbows for the first time as an actuality. Sleep, in which changes offered to the soul during the day are confirmed and ratified, had established this new element in their personal equation. They had changed\u2014if not towards one another, then towards something else.\n\nBut Stephen saw the matter only from his own point of view. For the first time in his memory he seemed to have lost the intuitive sympathy which enabled him to see things from his brother's point of view as well. The change, he felt positive, was in himself, not in Mark.\n\n\"He knows\u2014he feels\u2014something in me has altered dreadfully, but he doesn't yet understand what,\" his thoughts ran. \"Pray to God he need never know\u2014at least until I have utterly conquered it!\"\n\nFor he still held with all the native tenacity of his strong will to the course he had so heroically chosen. The degree of self-deception his imagination brought into the contest seemed incredible when his mind looked back upon it all from the calmness of the end. But at the time he genuinely hoped, wished, intended to conquer, even believed that he would conquer.\n\nMark, he noticed, reacted in little ways that curiously betrayed his mental perturbation, and at any other time might have roused his brother's suspicions. He put sugar in Stephen's coffee, for instance; he forgot to bring him a cigarette when he went to the cupboard to get one for himself; he said and did numerous little things that were contrary to his habits, or to the habits of his twin.\n\nIn all of which, however, Stephen saw only the brotherly reaction to the change he was conscious of in himself. Nothing happened to convince him that anything in Mark had suffered revolution. With the mystical devotion peculiar to the twin he was too keenly aware of his own falling away to imagine the falling away of the other. He, Stephen, was the guilty one, and he suffered atrociously. Moreover, the pain of his renunciation was heightened by the sense that his ideal love for Mark had undergone a change\u2014that he was making this fatal sacrifice, therefore, for something that perhaps no longer existed. This, however, he did not realize yet as an accomplished fact. Even if it were true, the resolution he had come to, acted by way of hypnotic suggestion to conceal it. At the same time it added enormously to the confusion and perplexity of his mind.\n\nThat day for the brothers was practically a dies non. They spent what was left of the morning over many aimless and unnecessary little duties, somewhat after the way of women. Although neither referred to the decision to leave at the end of the week, both acted upon it in desultory fashion, almost as though they wished to make a point of proving to one another that it was not forgotten\u2014not wholly forgotten, at any rate. They made a brave pretence of collecting various things with a view to ultimate packing. No word was spoken, however, that bore more closely upon it than occasional phrases such as, \"When the time comes to go\"\u2014\"when we leave\"\u2014\"better put that out, or it will be forgotten, you know.\"\n\nThe sentences dropped from their mouths alternately at long intervals, the only one deceived being the utterer. It was not unlike the pretence of schoolboys, only more elaborate and infinitely more clumsy and ill-done. Stephen, at any other time, would probably have laughed aloud. Yet the curious thing was that he noticed the pretence only in his own case. Mark, he thought, was genuine, though perhaps not too eager. \"He's agreed to leave, the dear old chap, because he thinks I want it, and not for himself,\" he said. And the idea of the small brotherly sacrifice pleased, yet pained him horribly at the same time. For it tended to rehabilitate the old love which stood in the way of the new one.\n\nHe began, however, to take less trouble to sort and find his things for packing; he wrote letters, put out photographs to print in the sun, even studied his maps for expeditions, making occasional remarks thereon aloud which Mark did not negative. Presently, he forgot altogether about packing. Mark said nothing. Mark followed his example, however.\n\nDuring the afternoon both lay down and slept, meeting again for tea at five. It was rare that they found themselves in for tea. Mark to-day made a special little ritual of it; he made it over their own spirit-lam\u2014almost tenderly, looking after his brother's wants like a woman. And the little meal was hardly over when a boy in hotel livery arrived with a note\u2014an invitation from Professor Samarianz.\n\n\"He has looked up a lot of his papers,\" observed Mark carelessly as he tossed the note down, \"and suggests my coming in for dinner, so that he can show mc everything afterwards without hurry.\"\n\n\"I should accept,\" said Stephen. \"It might be valuable for us if we go to the Caucasus later.\"\n\nMark hesitated a minute or two, telling the boy to wait in the kitchen. \"I think I'll go in after dinner instead,\" he decided presently. There was a trace of eagerness in his manner which Stephen, however, did not notice.\n\n\"Take your note-book and pump the old boy dry,\" Stephen added, with a slight laugh. \"I shall go to bed early myself probably.\" And Mark, stuffing the note into his pocket, laughed back and consented, to the other's great relief.\n\nIt was very late when Mark returned from the visit, but his brother did not hear him come, having taken a draught to ensure sleeping. And next morning Mark was so full of the interesting information he had collected, and would continue to collect, that the question of leaving at the end of the week dropped of its own accord without further ado. Neither of the brothers made the least pretence of packing. Both wished and intended to stay on where they were.\n\n\"I shall look up Samarianz again this afternoon,\" Mark said casually during the morning, \"and\u2014if you've no objection\u2014I might bring him back to supper. He's the most obliging fellow I've ever met, and crammed with information.\"\n\nStephen, signifying his agreement, took his camera, his specimen-tin and his geological hammer and went out with bread and chocolate in his knapsack for the rest of the afternoon by himself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 401", + "text": "Moreover, he not only set out bravely, but for many hours held true, keeping so rigid a control over his feelings that it seemed literally to cost him blood. All the time, however, a passionate yearning most craftily attacked him, and the very memory he strove to smother rose with a persistence that ridiculed repression. Like snowflakes, whose individual weight is inappreciable but their cumulative burden irresistible, the thoughts of her gathered behind his spirit, ready at a given moment to overwhelm; and it was on the way home again in the evening that the temptation came upon him like a tidal wave that made the mere idea of resistance seemed utterly absurd.\n\nHe remembered wondering with a kind of wild delight whether it could be possible for any human will to withstand such a tempest of pressure as that which took him by the shoulders and literally pushed him out of his course towards the little hotel on the edge of the forest.\n\nIt was utterly inconsistent, of course, and he made no pretence of argument or excuse. He hardly knew, indeed, what he expected to see or do; his mind, at least, framed no definite idea. But far within him that deep heart which refused to be stifled cried out for a drop of the living water that was now its very life. And, chiefly, he wanted to see. If only he could see her once again\u2014even from a distance\u2014the merest glimpse\u2014! With one more sight of her that should charge his memory to the brim for life be might face the future with more courage perhaps. Ah! that perhaps!... For she was drawing him with those million invisible cords of love that persuade a man he is acting of his own volition when actually he is but obeying the inevitable forces that bind the planets and the suns.\n\nAnd this time there was no hurry; there was a good hour before Mark would expect him home for supper; he could sit among the shadows of the wood, and wait.\n\nIn his pocket were the field-glasses, and he realized with a sudden secret shame that it was not by accident that they were there. He stumbled, even before he got within a quarter of a mile of the place, for the idea that perhaps he would see her again made him ridiculously happy, and like a school-boy he positively trembled, tripping over roots and misjudging the distance of his steps. It was all part of a great whirling dream in which his soul sang and shouted the first delirious nonsense that came into his head. The possibility of his eyes again meeting hers produced a sensation of triumph and exultation that only one word describes\u2014intoxication.\n\nAs he approached the opening in the trees whence the hotel was so easily visible, he went more slowly, moving even on tiptoe. It was instinctive; for he was nearing a place made holy by his love. Picking his way almost stealthily, he found the very tree; then leaned against it while his eyes searched eagerly for a sign of her in the glass verandah. The swiftness and accuracy of sight at such a time may be cause for wonder, but it is beyond question that in less than a single second he knew that the throng of moving figures did not contain the one he sought. She was not among them.\n\nAnd he was just preparing to make himself comfortable for an extended watch when a sound or movement, perhaps both, somewhere among the trees on his right attracted his attention. There was a faint rustling; a twig snapped.\n\nStephen turned sharply. Under a big spruce, not half-a-dozen yards away, something moved\u2014then rose up. At first, owing to the gloom, he took it for an animal of some kind, but the same second he saw that it was a human figure. It was two human figures, standing close together. Then one moved apart from the other; he saw the outline of a man against a space of sky between the trees. And a voice spoke\u2014a voice charged with great tenderness, yet driven by high passion\u2014\n\n\"But it's nothing, nothing! I shall not be gone two minutes. And to save you an instant's discomfort you know that I would run the whole circle of the earth! Wait here for me\u2014!\"\n\nThat was all; but the voice and figure caused Stephen's heart to stop beating as though it had been suddenly plunged into ice, for they were the voice and the figure of his brother Mark.\n\nQuickly running down the slope towards the hotel, Mark disappeared.\n\nThe other figure, leaning against the tree, was the figure of a girl; and Stephen, even in that first instant of fearful bewilderment, understood why it was that the face of the man Samarianz had so charmed him. For this, of course, was his daughter. And then the whole thing flashed mercilessly clear upon his inner vision, and he knew that Mark, too, had been swept from his feet, and was undergoing the same fierce tortures, and fighting the same dread battle, as himself...\n\nThere seemed to be no conscious act of recognition. The fire that flamed through him and set his frozen heart so fearfully beating again, hammering against his ribs, left him apparently without volition or any power of cerebral action at all. She stood there, not half-a-dozen yards away from where he sat all huddled upon the ground, stood there in all her beauty, her mystery, her wonder, near enough for him to have taken her almost with a single leap into his arms;\u2014stood there, veiled a little by the shadows of the dusk\u2014waiting for the return of\u2014Mark!\n\nHe remembers what happened with the blurred indistinctness common to moments of overwhelming passion. For in the next few seconds, that mocked all scale of time, he lived through a series of concentrated emotions that burned his brain too vividly for precise recollection. He rose to his feet unsteadily, his hand upon the rough bark of the tree. Absurd details only seem to remain of these few moments: that a foot was \"asleep\" with pins and needles up to the knee, and that his slouch hat fell from his head, filling him with fury because it hid her from him for the fraction of a second. These odd details he remembers.\n\nAnd then, as though the driving-power of the universe had deliberately pushed him from behind, he was advancing slowly, with short, broken steps, towards the tree where the girl stood with her back half turned against him.\n\nHe did not know her name, had never heard her voice, had never even stood close enough to \"feel\" her atmosphere; yet, so deeply had his love and imagination already prepared the little paths of intimacy within him, that he felt he was moving towards some one whom he had known ever since he could remember, and who belonged to him as utterly as if from the beginning of time his possession of her had been absolute. Had they shared together a whole series of previous lives, the sensation could not have been more convincing and complete.\n\nAnd out of all this whirlwind and tumult two small actions, he remembers, were delivered: a confused cry that was no definite word came from his lips, and\u2014he opened his arms to take her to his heart. Whereupon, of course, she turned with a quick start, and became for the first time aware of his near presence.\n\n\"Oh, oh! But how so softly quick you return!\" she cried falteringly, looking into his eyes with a smile both of welcome and alarm. \"You a little frightened me, I tell you.\"\n\nIt was just the voice he had known would come, with the curiously slow, dragging tone of its broken English, the words lingering against the lips as if loath to leave, the soft warmth of their sound in the throat like a caress. The next instant he held her smothered in his arms, his face buried in the scented hair about her neck.\n\nThere was an unbelievable time of forgetfulness in which touch, perfume, and a healing power that emanated from her blessed the depths of his soul with a peace that calmed all pain, stilled all tumult\u2014a moment in which Time itself for once stopped its remorseless journey, and the very processes of life stood still to watch. Then there was a frightened cry, and she had pushed him from her. She stood there, her soft eyes puzzled and surprised, looking hard at him; panting a little, her breast heaving.\n\nAnd Stephen understood then, if he had not already understood before. The gesture of recognition in the hotel verandah two days ago, and this glorious realization of it that now seemed to have happened a century ago, shared a common origin. They were intended for another, and on both occasions the girl had taken him for his brother Mark.\n\nAnd, turning sharply, almost falling with the abruptness of it all, as the girl's lips uttered that sudden cry, he saw close beside them the very person for whom they were intended. Mark had come up the slope behind them unobserved, carrying upon his arm the little red cloak he had been to fetch.\n\nIt was as though a wind of ice had struck him in the face. The revulsion of feeling with which Stephen saw the return of his brother passed rapidly into a state of numbness where all emotion whatsoever ebbed like the tides of death. He lost momentarily the power of realization. He forgot who he was, what he was doing there. He was dazed by the fact that Mark had so completely forestalled him. His life shook and tottered upon its foundations...\n\nThen the face and figurer of his brother swayed before his eyes like the branch of a tree, as an attack of passing dizziness seized him. It may have been a mere hazard that led his fingers to close, moist and clammy, upon the geological hammer at his belt. Certainly, he let it go again almost at once...\n\nAnd, when the tide of emotion returned upon him with the dreadful momentum it had gathered during the interval, the possibility of his yielding to wild impulse and doing something mad or criminal, was obviated by the swift enactment of an exceedingly poignant little drama that made both brothers forget themselves in their desire to save the girl.\n\nIn sweetest bewilderment, like a frightened little child or animal, the girl looked from one brother to the other. Her eyes shone in the dusk. Strangely appealing her loveliness was in that moment of seeking some explanation of the double vision. She made a movement first towards Mark\u2014turned halfway in her steps and ran, startled, upon Stephen\u2014then, with a sharp scream of fear, dropped in a heap to the ground midway between the two.\n\nHer indecision of half-a-second, however, seemed to Stephen to have lasted many minutes. Had she fallen finally into the arms of his brother, he felt nothing on earth could have prevented his leaping upon him with the hands of a murderer. As it was\u2014mercifully\u2014the singular beauty of her little Eastern face, touched as it was by the white terror of her soul, momentarily arrested all other feeling in him. A shudder of fearful admiration passed through him as he saw her sway and fall. Thus might have dropped some soft angel from the skies. .\n\nIt was Mark, however, with his usual decision, who brought some possibility of focus back to his mind; and he did it with an action and a sentence so utterly unexpected, so incongruous amid this whirlwind of passion, that had he seen it on the stage or read it in a novel, he must surely have burst out laughing. For, in that very second after the dear form swayed and fell, while the eyes of the brothers met across her in one swift look that held the possibilities of the direst results, Mark, his face abruptly clearing to calmness, stooped down beside the prostrate girl, and, looking up at Stephen steadily, said in a gentle voice, but with his most deliberate professional manner\u2014\n\n'One of us, perhaps, had better\u2014go'\n\n\"Stephen, old fellow, this is\u2014my patient. One of us, perhaps, had better\u2014go.\"\n\nHe bent down to loosen the dress at the throat and chafe the cold hands, and Stephen, uncertain exactly what he did, and trembling like a child, turned and disappeared among the thick trees in the direction of their little house. For he understood only one thing clearly in that awful moment: that he must either kill\u2014or not see. And his will, well-nigh breaking beneath the pressure, was just able to take the latter course.\n\n\"Go! \" it said peremptorily.\n\nAnd the little word sounded through the depths of his soul like the tolling of a last bell." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 402", + "text": "\"This is my patient!\" The dreadful comedy of the phrase, the grim mockery of the professional manner, the contrast between the words that some one ought to have uttered and the words Mark actually had uttered\u2014all this had the effect of restoring Stephen to some measure of sanity. No one but his brother, he felt, could have said the thing so exactly calculated to relieve the choking passion of the situation. It was an inspiration\u2014yet horrible in its bizarre mingling of true and false.\n\n\"But it's all like a thing in a dream,\" he heard an inner voice murmur as he stumbled homewards without once looking back; \"the kind of thing people say and do in the rooms of strange sleep-houses. We are all surely in a dream, and presently I shall wake up\u2014!\"\n\nThe voice continued talking, but he did not listen. A web of confusion began to spin itself about his thoughts, and there stole over him an odd sensation of remoteness from the actual things of life. It was surely one of those vivid, haunting dreams he sometimes had when his spirit seemed to take part in real scenes, with real people, only far, far away, and on quite another scale of time and values.\n\n\"I shall find myself in my bed at Wimpole Street!\" he exclaimed. He even tried to escape from the pain closing about him like a vice\u2014tried to escape by waking up, only to find, of course, that the effort drove him more closely to the reality of his position.\n\nYet the texture of a dream certainly ran through the whole thing; the outlandish proportions of dream-events showed themselves everywhere; the tiny causes and prodigious effects: the terrific power of the Face upon his soul; the uncanny semi-quenching of his love for Mark; the ridiculous way he had come upon these two in the forest, with the nightmare discovery that they had known one another for days; and then the sight of that dear, magical face dropping through the dusky forest air between the two of them. Moreover\u2014just when the dream ought to have ended with his sudden awakening, it had taken this abrupt and inconsequent turn, and Mark had uttered the language of\u2014well, the impossible and rather horrible language of the nightmare world\u2014\n\n\"This is my patient...\"\n\nMoreover, his face of ice as he said it; yet, at the same time, the wisdom, the gentleness of the decision that lay behind the words: the desire to relieve an impossibly painful situation. And then\u2014the other words, meant kindly, even meant nobly, but charged for all that with the naked cruelty of life\u2014\n\n\"One of its, perhaps, had better\u2014go.\"\n\nAnd he had gone\u2014fortunately, he had gone...\n\nYet an hour later, after lying motionless upon his bed seeking with all his power for a course of action his will could follow and his mind approve, it was no dream-voice that called softly to him through the keyhole\u2014\n\n\"Stevie, old fellow... she is well... she is all right now. She leaves in the morning with her father... the first thing... very early...\"\n\nAnd then, after a pause in which Stephen said nothing lest he should at the same time say all\u2014\n\n\"...and it is best, perhaps... we should not see one another... you and I... for a bit. Let us go our ways... till to-morrow night. Then we shall be... alone together again... you and I... as of old...\"\n\nThe voice of Mark did not tremble; but it sounded far away and unreal, almost like wind in the keyhole, thin, reedy, sighing; oddly broken and interrupted.\n\nI'm yours, Stevie, old fellow, always yours,\" it added far down the corridor, more like the voice of dream again than ever.\n\nBut, though he made no reply at the moment, Stephen welcomed and approved both the proposal and the spirit in which it was made; and next day, soon after sunrise, he left the ch\u00e2let very quietly and went off alone into the mountains with his thoughts, and with the pain that all night long had simply been eating him alive." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 403", + "text": "It is impossible to know precisely what he felt all that morning in the mountains. His emotions charged like wild bulls to and fro. He seemed conscious only of two master-feelings first, that his life now belonged beyond possibility of change or control\u2014to another; yet, secondly, that his will, tried and tempered weapon of steel that it was, held firm.\n\nThus his powerful feelings flung him from one wall of his dreadful prison to another without possible means of escape. For his position involved a fundamental contradiction: the new love owned him, yet his will cried, \"I love Mark; I hold true to that; in the end I shall conquer!\" He refused, that is, to capitulate, or rather to acknowledge that he had capitulated. And meanwhile, even while he cried, his inmost soul listened, watched, and laughed, well content to abide the issue.\n\nBut if his feelings were in too great commotion for clear analysis, his thoughts, on the other hand, were painfully definite\u2014some of them, at least; and, as the physical exercise lessened the assaults of emotion, these stood forth in sharp relief against the confusion of his inner world. It was now clear as the day, for instance, that Mark had been through a battle similar to his own. The chance meeting with the Professor had led to the acquaintance with his daughter. Then, swiftly and inevitably, just as it would have happened to Stephen in his place, love had accomplished its full magic. And Mark had been afraid to tell him. The twins had travelled the same path, only personal feeling having clouded their usual intuition, neither had divined the truth.\n\nStephen saw it now with pitiless clarity: his brother's frequent visits to the hotel, omitting to mention that the notes of invitation probably also included himself; the desire, nay, the intention to stay on; the delay in packing\u2014and a dozen other details stood out clearly. He remembered, too, with a pang how Mark had not slept that memorable night; he recalled their enigmatical conversation on the balcony as the sun rose... and all the rest of the miserable puzzle.\n\nAnd, as he realized from his own torments what Mark must also have suffered\u2014be suffering now\u2014he was conscious of a strengthening of his will to conquer. The thought linked him fiercely again to his twin; for nothing in their lives had yet been separate, and the chain of their spiritual intimacy was of incalculably vast strength. They would win\u2014win back to one another's side again. Mark would conquer her. He, Stephen, would also in the end conquer... her...!\n\nBut with the thought of her lying thus dead to him, and his life cold and empty without her, came the inevitable revulsion of feeling. It was the anarchy of love. The Face, the perfume, the rushing power of her melancholy dear eyes, with their singular touch of proud languor\u2014in a word, all the amazing magic that had swept himself and Mark from their feet, tore back upon him with such an invasion of entreaty and command, that he sat down upon the very rocks where he was and buried his face in his hands, literally groaning with the pain of it. For the thought lacerated within. To give her up was a sheer impossibility;... to give up his brother was equally inconceivable. The weight of thirty-five years' love and associations thus gave battle against the telling blow of a single moment. Behind the first lay all that life had built into the woof of his personality hitherto, but beyond the second lay the potent magic, the huge seductive invitation of what he might become in the future\u2014with her.\n\nThe contest, in the nature of the forces engaged, was an unequal one. Yet all that morning as he wandered aimlessly over ridge and summit, and across the high Jura pastures above the forests, meeting no single human being, he fought with himself as only men with innate energy of soul know how to fight\u2014bitterly, savagely, blindly. He did not stop to realize that he was somewhat in the position of a fly that strives to push from its appointed course the planet on which it rides through space. For the tides of life itself bore him upon their crest, and at thirty-five these tides are at the full.\n\nThus, gradually it was, then, as the hopelessness of the struggle became more and more apparent, that the door of the only alternative opened slightly and let him peer through. Once ajar, however, it seemed the same second wide open; he was through;\u2014and it was closed\u2014behind him.\n\nFor a different nature the alternative might have taken a different form. As has been seen, he was too strong a man to drift merely; a definite way out that could commend itself to a man of action had to be found; and, though the raw material of heroism may have been in him, he made no claim to a martyrdom that should last as long as life itself. And this alternative dawned upon him now as the grey light of a last morning must dawn upon the condemned prisoner: given Stephen, and given this particular problem, it was the only way out.\n\nHe envisaged it thus suddenly with a kind of ultimate calmness and determination that was characteristic of the man. And in every way it was characteristic of the man, for it involved the precise combination of courage and cowardice, weakness and strength, selfishness and sacrifice, that expressed the true resultant of all the forces at work in his soul. To him, at the moment of his rapid decision, however, it seemed that the dominant motive was the sacrifice to be offered upon the altar of his love for Mark. The twisted notion possessed him that in this way he might atone in some measure for the waning of his brotherly devotion. His love for the girl, her possible love for him\u2014both were to be sacrificed to obtain the happiness the eventual happiness\u2014of these other two. Long, long ago Mark had himself said that under such circumstances one or other of them would have to\u2014go. And the decision Stephen had come to was that the one to \"go\" was\u2014himself.\n\nThis day among the woods and mountains should be his last on earth. By the evening of the following day Mark should be free.\n\n\"I'll give my life for him.\"\n\nHis face was grey and set as he said it. He stood on the high ridge, bathed by sun and wind. He looked over the fair world of wooded vales and mountains at his feet, but his eyes, turned inwards, saw only his brother\u2014and that sweet Eastern face\u2014then darkness.\n\n\"He will understand\u2014and perforce accept it\u2014and with time, yes, with time, the new happiness shall fill his soul utterly\u2014and hers. It is for her, too, that I give it. It must\u2014under these unparalleled circumstances be right...!\n\nAnd although there was no single cloud in the sky, the landscape at his feet suddenly went dark and sunless from one horizon to the other." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 404", + "text": "Then, having come into the gloom of this terrible decision, his imaginative nature at once bounded to the opposite extreme, and a kind of exaltation possessed him. The stereotyped verdict of a coroner's jury might in this instance have been true. The prolonged stress of emotion under which he had so long been labouring had at last produced a condition of mind that could only he considered\u2014unsound.\n\nA cool wind swept his face as he let his tired eyes wander over the leagues of silent forest below. The blue Jura with its myriad folded valleys lay about him like the waves of a giant sea ready to swallow up the little atom of his life within its deep heart of forgetfulness. Clear away into France he saw on the one side where, beyond the fortress of Pontarlier, white clouds sailed the horizon before a westerly wind; and, on the other, towards the white-robed Alps rising mistily through the haze of the autumn sunshine. Between these extreme distances lay all that world of a hundred intricate valleys, curiously winding, deeply wooded, little inhabited\u2014a region of soft, confusing loveliness where a traveller might well lose himself for days together before he discovered a way out of so vast a maze.\n\n'The souls of the unhappy dead find... peace'\n\nAnd, as he gazed, there passed across his mind, like the dim memory of something heard in childhood, that legend of the \"Lost Valley\" in which the souls of the unhappy dead find the deep peace that is denied to them by all the religions\u2014and to which hundreds, who have not yet the sad right of entry, seek to find the mournful forest gates. The memory was vivid, but swiftly engulfed by others and forgotten. They chased each other in rapid succession across his mind, as clouds at sunset pass before a high wind, merging on the horizon in a common mass.\n\nThen, slowly, at length, he turned and made his way down the mountain-side in the direction of the French frontier for a last journey upon the sweet surface of the world he loved. In his soul was the one dominant feeling: this singular exaltation arising from the knowledge that in the long run his great sacrifice must ensure the happiness of the two beings he loved more than all else in life.\n\nAt the solitary farm where an hour later he had his lunch of bread and cheese and milk, he learned that he had wandered many miles out of the routes with which he was more or less familiar. He had been walking faster than he knew all these hours of battle. A physical weariness came upon him that made him conscious of every muscle in his body as he realized what a long road over mountain and valley he had to retrace. But, with the heaviness of fatigue, ran still that sense of interior spiritual exaltation. Something in him walked on air with springs of steel\u2014something that was independent of the dragging limbs and the aching back. For the rest, his sensations seemed numb. His great Decision stood black before him, blocking the way. Thoughts and feelings forsook him as rats leave a sinking ship. The time for these-was past. Two overmastering desires, however, clung fast: one, to see Mark again, and be with him; the other, to be once more\u2014with her. These two desires left no room for others. With the former, indeed, it was almost as though Mark had called aloud to him by name.\n\nHe stood a moment where the depth of the valley he had to thread lay like a twisting shadow at his feet; it ran, soft and dim, through the slanting sunshine. From the whole surface of the woods rose a single murmur; like the whirring of voices heard in a dream, he thought. The individual purring of separate trees was merged. Peace, most ancient and profound, lay in it, and its hushed whisper soothed his spirit.\n\nHe hurried his pace a little. The cool wind that had swept his face on the heights earlier in the afternoon followed him down, urging him forwards with deliberate pressure, as though a thousand soft hands were laid upon his back. And there were spirits in the wind that day. He heard their voices; and far below he traced by the motion of the tree-tops where they coiled upwards to him through miles of forest. His way, meanwhile, dived down through dense growths of spruce and pine into a region unfamiliar. There was an aspect of the scenery that almost suggested it was unknown\u2014an undiscovered corner of the world. The countless signs that mark the passage of humanity were absent, or at least did not obtrude themselves upon him. Something remote from life, alien, at any rate, to the normal life he had hitherto known, began to steal gently over his burdened soul...\n\nIn this way, perhaps, the effect of his dreadful Decision already showed its influence upon his mind and senses. So very soon now he would be\u2014going!\n\nThe sadness of autumn lay all about him, and the loneliness of this secluded vale spoke to him of the melancholy of things that die\u2014of vanished springs, of summers unfulfilled, of things for ever incomplete and unsatisfying. Human effort, he felt, this valley had never known. No hoofs had ever pressed the mossy turf of these forest clearings; no traffic of peasants or woodsmen won echoes from these limestone cliffs. All was hushed, lonely, deserted.\n\nAnd yet\u2014? The depths to which it apparently plunged astonished him more and more. Nowhere more than a half-mile across, each turn of the shadowy trail revealed new distances below. With spots of a haunting, fairy loveliness too: for here and there, on isolated patches of lawn-like grass, stood wild lilac bushes, rounded by the wind; willows from the swampy banks of the stream waved pale hands; firs, dark and erect, guarded their eternal secrets on the heights. In one little opening, standing all by itself, he found a lime-tree; while beyond it, shining among the pines, was a group of shimmering beeches. And, although there was no wild life, there were flowers; he saw clumps of them\u2014tall, graceful, blue flowers whose name he did not know, nodding in dream across the foaming water of the little torrent.\n\nAnd his thoughts ran incessantly to Mark. Never before had he been conscious of so imperious a desire to see him, to hear his voice, to stand at his side. At moments it almost obliterated that other great desire... Again he increased his pace. And the path plunged more and more deeply into the heart of the mountains, sinking ever into deeper silence, ever into an atmosphere of deeper peace. For no sound could reach him here without first passing along great distances that were cushioned with soft wind, and padded, as it were, with a million feathery pine-tops. A sense of peace that was beyond reach of all possible disturbance began to cover his breaking life with a garment as of softest shadows. Never before had he experienced anything approaching the wonder and completeness of it. It was a peace, still as the depths of the sea which are motionless because they cannot move\u2014cannot even tremble. It was a peace unchangeable\u2014what some have called, perhaps, the Peace of God...\n\n\"Soon the turn must come,\" he thought, yet without a trace of impatience or alarm, \"and the road wind upwards again to cross the last ridge!\" But he cared little enough; for this enveloping peace drowned him, hiding even the fear of death.\n\nAnd still the road sank downwards into the sleep-laden atmosphere of the crowding trees, and with it his thoughts, oddly enough, sank deeper and deeper into dim recesses of his own being. As though a secret sympathy lay between the path that dived and the thoughts that plunged. Only, from time to time, the thought of his brother Mark brought him back to the surface with a violent rush. Dreadfully, in those moments, he wanted him\u2014to feel his warm, strong hand within his own\u2014to ask his forgiveness\u2014perhaps, too, to grant his own... he hardly knew.\n\n\"But is there no end to this delicious valley?\" he wondered, with something between vagueness and confusion in his mind. \"Does it never stop, and the path climb again to the mountains beyond?\" Drowsily, divorced from any positive interest, the question passed through his thoughts. Underfoot the grass already grew thickly enough to muffle the sound of his footsteps. The trail even had vanished, swallowed by moss. His feet sank in.\n\n\"I wish Mark were with me now\u2014to see and feel all this\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped short and looked keenly about him for a moment, leaving the thought incomplete. A deep sighing, instantly caught by the wind and merged in the soughing of the trees, had sounded close beside him. Was it perhaps himself that sighed\u2014unconsciously? His heart was surely charged enough!...\n\nA faint smile played over his lips\u2014instantly frozen, however, as another sigh, more distinct than the first, and quite obviously external to himself, passed him closely in the darkening air. More like deep breathing, though, it was, than sighing... It was nothing but the wind, of course. Stephen hurried on again, not surprised that he had been so easily deceived, for this valley was full of sighings and breathings\u2014of trees and wind. It ventured upon no louder noise. Noise of any kind, indeed, seemed impossible and forbidden in this muted vale. And so deeply had he descended now, that the sunshine, silver rather than golden, already streamed past far over his head along the ridges, and no gleam found its way to where he was. The shadows, too, no longer blue and purple, had changed to black, as though woven of some delicate substance that had definite thickness, like a veil. Across the opposite slope, one of the mountain summits in the western sky already dropped its monstrous shadow fringed with pines. The day was rapidly drawing in." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 405", + "text": "And here, very gradually, there began to dawn upon his overwrought mind certain curious things. They pierced clean through the mingled gloom and exaltation that characterized his mood. And they made the skin upon his back a little to\u2014stir and crawl.\n\nFor he now became distinctly aware that the emptiness of this lonely valley was only apparent. It is impossible to say through what sense, or combination of senses, this singular certainty was brought to him that the valley was not really as forsaken and deserted as it seemed\u2014that, on the contrary, it was the very reverse. It came to him suddenly\u2014as a certainty. The valley as a matter of fact was\u2014full. Packed, thronged and crowded it was to the very brim of its mighty wooded walls\u2014with life. It was now borne in upon him, with an inner conviction that left no room for doubt, that on all sides living things\u2014persons\u2014were jostling him, rubbing elbows, watching all his movements, and only waiting till the darkness came to reveal themselves.\n\nMoreover, with this eerie discovery came also the further knowledge that a vast multitude of others, again, with pallid faces and yearning eyes, with arms outstretched and groping feet, were searching everywhere for the way of entrance that he himself had found so easily. All about him, he felt, were people by the hundred, by the thousand, seeking with a kind of restless fever for the narrow trail that led down into the valley, longing with an intensity that heat upon his soul in a million waves, for the rest, the calm silence of the place\u2014but most of all for its strange, deep, and unalterable peace.\n\nHe, alone of all these, had found the Entrance; he, and one other.\n\nFor out of this singular conviction grew another even more singular: his brother Mark was also somewhere in this valley with him. Mark, too, was wandering like himself in and out among its intricate dim turns. He had said but a short time ago, \"I wish Mark were here!\" Mark was here. And it was precisely then\u2014while he stood still a moment, trying to face these overwhelming obsessions and deal with them\u2014that the figure of a man, moving swiftly through the trees, passed him with a great gliding stride, and with averted face. Stephen started horribly, catching his breath. In an instant the man was gone again, swallowed up by the crowding pines.\n\nWith a quick movement of pursuit and a cry that should make the man turn, he sprang forward\u2014but stopped again almost the same moment, realizing that the extraordinary speed at which the man had shot past him rendered pursuit out of the question. He had been going downhill into the valley; by this time he was already far, far ahead. But in that momentary glimpse of him he had seen enough to know. The face was turned away, and the shadows under the trees were heavy, but the figure was beyond question the figure of\u2014his brother Mark.\n\n'Strange, deep, and unalterable peace'\n\nIt was his brother, yet not his brother. It was Mark\u2014but Mark altered. And the alteration was in some way\u2014awful; just as the silent speed at which he had moved\u2014the impossible speed in so dense a forest\u2014was likewise awful. Then, still shaking inwardly with the suddenness of it all, Stephen realized that when he called aloud he had uttered certain definite words. And these words now came back to him\u2014\n\n\"Mark, Mark! Don't go yet! Don't go\u2014without me!\"\n\nBefore, however, he could act, a most curious and unaccountable sensation of deadly faintness and pain came upon him, without cause, without explanation, so that he dropped backwards in momentary collapse, and but for the closeness of the tree stems would have fallen full length to the ground. From the centre of the heart it came, spreading thence throughout his whole being like a swift and dreadful fever. All the muscles of his body relaxed; icy perspiration burst forth upon his skin; the pulses of life seemed suddenly reduced to the threshold beyond which they stop. There was a thick, rushing sound in his ears and his mind went utterly blank.\n\nThese were the sensations of death by suffocation. He knew this as certainly as though another doctor stood by his side and labelled each spasm, explained each successive sinking of the vital flame. He was passing through the last throes of a dying man. And then into his mind, thus deliberately left blank, rushed at lightning speed a whole series of the pictures of his past life. Even while his breath failed, he saw his thirty-five years pictorially, successively, yet in some queer fashion at once, pass through the lighted chambers of his brain. In this way, it is said, they pass through the brain of a drowning man during the last seconds before death.\n\nChildhood rose about him with its scenes, figures, voices; the Kentish lawns where he had played with Mark in stained overalls; the summer-house where they had tea, the hay-fields where they romped. The scent of lime and walnut, of garden pinks, and roses by the tumbled rockery came back to his nostrils... He heard the voices of grown-ups in the distance... faint barking of dogs... the carriage wheels upon the gravel drive... and then the sharp summons from the opened window\u2014\"Time to come in now! Time to come in!\"...\n\nTime to come in now. It all drove before him as of yesterday on the scented winds of childhood's summer days... He heard his brother's voice\u2014dreadfully faint and far away\u2014calling him by name in the shrill accents of the boy: \"Stevie\u2014I say, you might shut up... and play properly...\"\n\nAnd then followed the panorama of the thirty years, all the chief events drawn in steel-like lines of white and black, vivid in sunshine, alive\u2014right down to the present moment with the portentous dark shadow of his terrible Decision closing the series like a cloud.\n\nYes, like a smothering black cloud that blocked the way. There was nothing visible beyond it. There, for him, life ceased\u2014\n\nOnly, as he gazed with inward-turned eyes that could not close even if they would, he saw to his amazement that the black cloud suddenly opened, and into a space of clear light there swam the vision, radiant as morning, of that dark young Eastern face\u2014the face that held for him all the beauty in the world. The eyes instantly found his own, and smiled. Behind her, moreover, and beyond, before the moving vapours closed upon it, he saw a long vista of brilliance, crowded with pictures he could but half discern\u2014as though, in spite of himself and his Decision, life continued\u2014as though, too, it continued with her.\n\nAnd instantly, with the sight and thought of her, the consuming faintness passed; strength returned to his body with the glow of life; the pain went; the pictures vanished; the cloud was no more. In his blood the pulses of life once again beat strong, and the blackness left his soul. The smile of those beloved eyes had been charged with the invitation to live. Although his determination remained unshaken, there shone behind it the joy of this potent magic: life with her...\n\nWith a strong effort, at length he recovered himself and continued on his way. More or less familiar, of course, with the psychology of vision, he dimly understood that his experiences had been in some measure subjective\u2014within himself. To find the line of demarcation, however, was beyond him. That Mark had wandered out to fight his own battle upon the mountains, and so come into this same valley, was well within the bounds of coincidence. But the nameless and dreadful alteration discerned in that swift moment of his passing\u2014that remained inexplicable. Only he no longer thought about it. The glory of that sweet vision had bewildered him beyond any possibility of reason or analysis.\n\nHis watch told him that the hour was past five o'clock\u2014ten minutes past, to be exact. He still had several hours before reaching the country he was familiar with nearer home. Following the trail at an increased pace, he presently saw patches of meadow glimmering between the thinning trees, and knew that the bottom of the valley was at last in sight.\n\n\"And Mark, God bless him, is down there too\u2014somewhere!\" he exclaimed aloud. \"I shall surely find him.\" For, strange to say, nothing could have persuaded him that his twin was not wandering among the shadows of this peaceful and haunted valley with himself, and\u2014that he would shortly find him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 406", + "text": "And a few minutes later he passed from the forest as through an open door and found himself before a farmhouse standing in a patch of bright green meadow against the mountain-side. He was in need both of food and information.\n\nThe ch\u00e2let, less lumbering and picturesque than those found in the Alps, had, nevertheless, the appearance of being exceedingly ancient. It was not toy-like\u2014as the Jura ch\u00e2lets sometimes are. Solidly built, its balcony and overhanging roof supported by immense beams of deeply stained wood, it stood so that the back walls merged into the mountain slope behind, and the arms of pine, spruce and fir seemed stretched out to include it among their shadows. A last ray of sunshine, dipping between two far summits overhead, touched it with pale gold, bringing out the rich beauty of the heavily-dyed beams. Though no one was visible at the moment, and no smoke rose from the shingled chimney, it had the appearance of being occupied, and Stephen approached it with the caution due to the first evidence of humanity he had come across since he entered the valley.\n\nUnder the shadow of the broad balcony roof he noticed that the door, like that of a stable, was in two parts, and, wondering rather to find it closed, he knocked firmly upon the upper half.\n\nUnder the pressure of a second knock this upper half yielded slightly, though without opening. The lower half, however, evidently barred and bolted, remained unmoved.\n\nThe third time he knocked with more force than he intended, and the knock sounded loud and clamorous as a summons. From within, as though great spaces stretched beyond, came a murmur of voices, faint and muffled, and then almost immediately\u2014the footsteps of some one coming softly up to open.\n\nBut, instead of the heavy brown door opening, there came a voice. He heard it, petrified with amazement. For it was a voice he knew\u2014hushed, soft, lingering. His heart, hammering atrociously, seemed to leave its place, and cut his breath away.\n\n\"Stephen!\" it murmured, calling him by name, \"what are you doing here so soon? And what is it that you want?\"\n\nThe knowledge that only this dark door separated him from her, at first bereft him of all power of speech or movement; and the possible significance of her words escaped him. Through the sweet confusion that turned his spirit faint he only remembered, flash-like, that she and her father were indeed to have left the hotel that very morning. After that his thought stopped dead.\n\nThen, also flash-like, swept back upon him the memory of the figure that had passed him with averted face\u2014and, with it, the clear conviction that at this moment Mark, too, was somewhere in this very valley, even close beside him. More: Mark was in this chalet\u2014with her.\n\nThe torrent of speech that instantly crowded to his lips was almost too thick for utterance.\n\n\"Open, open, open!\" was all he heard intelligibly from the throng of words that poured out. He raised his hands to push and force; but her reply again stopped him.\n\n\"Even if I open\u2014you may not enter yet,\" came the whisper through the door. And this time he could almost have sworn that it sounded within himself rather than without.\n\n\"I must enter,\" he cried. \"Open to me, I say!\"\n\n\"But you are trembling\u2014\"\n\n\"Open to me, O my life! Open to me!\"\n\n\"But your heart\u2014it is shaking.\"\n\n\"Because you\u2014you are so near,\" came in passionate, stammering tones. \"Because you stand there beside me!\" And then, before she could answer, or his will control the words, he had added: \"And because Mark\u2014my brother\u2014is in there\u2014with you\u2014\"\n\n\"Hush, hush!\" came the soft, astonishing reply. \"He is in here, true; but he is not with me. And it is for my sake that he has come\u2014for my sake and for yours. My soul, alas! has led him to the gates...\"\n\nBut Stephen's emotions had reached the breaking-point, and the necessity for action was upon him like a storm. He drew back a pace so as to fling himself better against the closed door, when to his utter surprise, it moved. The upper half swung slowly outwards, and he\u2014saw.\n\nHe was aware of a vast room, with closely shuttered windows, that seemed to stretch beyond the walls into the wooded mountain-side, thronged with moving figures, like forms of life gently gliding to and fro in some huge darkened tank; and there, framed against this opening\u2014the girl herself. She stood, visible to the waist, radiant in the solitary beam of sunshine that reached the chalet, smiling down wondrously into his face with the same exquisite beauty in her eyes that he had seen before in the vision of the cloud: with, too, that supreme invitation in them\u2014the invitation to live.\n\nThe loveliness blinded him. He could see the down upon her little dark cheeks where the sunlight kissed them; there was the cloud of hair upon her neck where his lips had lain; there, too, the dear, slight breast that not twenty-four hours ago had known the pressure of his arms.\n\nAnd, once again, driven forward by the love that triumphed over all obstacles, real or artificial, he advanced headlong with outstretched arms to take her.\n\n\"Kat\u00fda!\" he cried, never thinking how passing strange it was that he knew her name at all, much more the endearing and shortened form of it. \"Kat\u00fda!\"\n\nBut the young girl held up her little brown hand against him with a gesture that was more strong to restrain than any number of bolted doors.\n\n\"Not here,\" she murmured, with her grave smile, while behind the words he caught in that darkened room the alternate hush and sighing as of a thousand sleepers. \"Not here! You cannot see him now; for these are the Reception Halls of Death and here I stand in the Vestibule of the Beyond. Our way... your way and mine... lies farther yet... traced there since the beginning of the world... together...\"\n\nIn quaintly broken English it was spoken, but his mind remembers the singular words in their more perfect form. Even this, however, came later. At the moment he only felt the twofold wave of love surge through him with a tide of power that threatened to break him asunder: he must hold her to his heart; he must come instantly to his brother's side, meet his eyes, have speech with him. The desire to enter that great darkened room and force a path through the dimly gliding forms to his brother became irresistible, while tearing upon its heels came like a fever of joy the meaning of the words she had just uttered, and especially of that last word:\n\n\"Together!\"\n\nThen, for an instant, all the forces in his being turned negative so that his will refused to act.\n\nThe excess of feeling numbed him. A flying interval of knowledge, calm and certain, came to him. The exaltation of spirit which produced the pictures of all this spiritual clairvoyance moved a stage higher, and he realized that he witnessed an order of things pertaining to the world of eternal causes rather than of temporary effects. Some one had lifted the Veil.\n\nWith a feeling that he could only wait and let things take their extraordinary course, he stood still. For an instant, even less, he must have hidden his eyes in his hand, for when, a moment later, he again looked up, he saw that the half of the swinging door which had been open, was now closed. He stood alone upon the balcony. And the sunshine had faded entirely from the scene.\n\nIt was here, it seems, that the last vestige of self-control disappeared. He flung himself against the door; and the door met his assault like a wall of solid rock. Crying aloud alternately the names of his two loved ones, he turned, scarcely knowing what he did, and ran into the meadow. Dusk was about the chalet, drawing the encircling forests closer. Soon the true darkness would stalk down the slopes. The walls of the valley reared, it seemed, up to heaven.\n\nStill calling, he ran about the walls, searching wildly for a way of entrance, his mind charged with bewildering fragments of what he had heard: \"The Reception Halls of Death\" \u2014\"The Vestibule of the Beyond\" \u2014\"You cannot see him now\" \u2014\"Our way lies farther \u2014and together!\"...\n\nAnd, on the far side of the ch\u00e2let, by the corner that touched the trees, he suddenly stopped, feeling his gaze drawn upwards, and there, pressed close against the window-pane of an upper room, saw that some one was peering down upon him.\n\nWith a sensation of freezing terror he realized that he was staring straight into the eyes of his brother Mark. Bent a little forward with the effort to look down, the face, pale and motionless, gazed into his own, but without the least sign of recognition. Not a feature moved: and although but a few feet separated the brothers, the face wore the dim, misty appearance of great distance. It was like the face of a man called suddenly from deep sleep\u2014dazed, perplexed; nay, more\u2014frightened and horribly distraught.\n\nWhat Stephen read upon it, however, in that first moment of sight, was the signature of the great, eternal question men have asked since the beginning of time, yet never heard the answer. And into the heart of the twin the pain of it plunged like a sword.\n\n\"Mark!\" he stammered, in that low voice the valley seemed to exact; \"Mark! Is that really you?\" Tears swam already in his eyes, and yearning in a hood choked his utterance.\n\nAnd Mark, with a dreadful, steady stare that still held no touch of recognition, gazed down upon him from the closed window of that upper chamber, motionless, unblinking as an image of stone. It was almost like an imitation figure of himself\u2014only with the effect of some added alteration. For alteration certainly there was\u2014awful and unknown alteration\u2014though Stephen was utterly unable to detect wherein it lay. And he remembered how the figure had passed him in the woods with averted face.\n\nHe made then, it seems, some violent sign or other, in response to which his brother at last moved\u2014slowly opening the window. He leaned forward, stooping with lowered head and shoulders over the sill, while Stephen ran up against the wall beneath and craned up towards him. The two faces drew close; their eyes met clean and straight. Then the lips of Mark moved, and the distraught look half vanished within the borders of a little smile of puzzled and affectionate wonder.\n\n\"Stevie, old fellow,\" issued a tiny, far-away voice; \"but where are you? I see you\u2014so dimly?\"\n\nIt was like a voice crying faintly down half-a-mile of distance. He shuddered to hear it.\n\n\"I'm here, Mark\u2014close to you,\" he whispered.\n\n\"I hear your voice, I feel your presence,\" came the reply like a man talking in his sleep, \"but I see you\u2014as through a glass darkly. And I want to see you all clear, and close\u2014\"\n\n\"But you! Where are you?\" interrupted Stephen, with anguish.\n\n\"Alone; quite alone\u2014over here. And it's cold, oh, so cold!\" The words came gently, half veiling a complaint. The wind caught them and ran round the walls towards the forest, wailing as it went.\n\n\"But how did you come, how did you come?\" Stephen raised himself on tiptoe to catch the answer. But there was no answer. The face receded a little, and as it did so the wind, passing up the walls again, stirred the hair on the forehead. Stephen saw it move. He thought, too, the head moved with it, shaking slightly to and fro.\n\n\"Oh, but tell me, my dear, dear brother! Tell me\u2014!\" he cried, sweating horribly, his limbs shaking.\n\nMark made a curious gesture, withdrawing at the same time a little farther into the room behind, so that he now stood upright, half in shadow by the window. The alteration in him proclaimed itself more plainly, though still without betraying its exact nature. There was something about him that was terrible. And the air that came from the open window upon Stephen was so freezing that it seemed to turn the perspiration on his face into ice.\n\n\"I do not know; I do not remember,\" he heard the tiny voice inside the room, ever withdrawing. \"Besides\u2014I may not speak with you\u2014yet; it is so difficult\u2014and it hurts.\"\n\nStephen stretched out his body, the arms scraping the wooden walls above his head, trying to climb the smooth and slippery surface.\n\n\"For the love of God! \" he cried with passion, \"tell me what it all means and what you are doing here\u2014you and\u2014and\u2014oh, and all three of us?\" The words rang out through the silent valley.\n\nBut the other stood there motionless again by the window, his face distraught and dazed as though the effort of speech had already been too much for him. His image had begun to fade a little. He seemed, without moving, yet to be retreating into some sort of interior distance. Presently, it seemed, he would disappear altogether.\n\n\"I don't know,\" came the voice at length, fainter than before, half muffled. \"I have been asleep, I think. I have just waked up, and come across from somewhere else\u2014where we were all together, you and I and\u2014and\u2014\"\n\nLike his brother, he was unable to speak the name. He ended the sentence a moment later in a whisper that was only just audible. \"But I cannot tell you how I came,\" he said, \"for I do not know the words.\"\n\nStephen, then, with a violent leap tried to reach the window-sill and pull himself up. The distance was too great, however, and he fell back upon the grass, only just keeping his feet.\n\n\"I'm coming in to you,\" he cried out very loud. \"Wait there for me! For the love of heaven, wait till I come to you. I'll break the doors in\u2014!\"\n\nOnce again Mark made that singular gesture; again he seemed to recede a little farther into a kind of veiled perspective that caused his appearance to fade still more; and, from an incredible distance\u2014a distance that somehow conveyed an idea of appalling height\u2014his thin, tiny voice floated down upon his brother from the fading lips of shadow.\n\n\"Old fellow, don't you come! You are not ready\u2014and it is too cold here. I shall wait, Stevie, I shall wait for you. Later\u2014I mean farther from hear\u2014we shall one day all three be together... Only you cannot understand now. I am here for your sake, old fellow, and for hers. She loves us both, but it is... you... she loves... the best...\"\n\nThe whispering voice rose suddenly on these last words into a long high cry that the wind instantly caught away and buried far in the smothering silences of the woods. For, at the same moment, Mark had come with a swift rush back to the window, had leaned out and stretched both hands towards his brother underneath. And his face had cleared and smiled. Caught within that smile, the awful change in him had vanished.\n\nStephen turned and made a mad rush round the chalet to find the door he would batter in with his hands and feet and body. He searched in vain, however, for in the shadows the supporting beams of the building were indistinguishable from the stems of the trees behind; the roof sank away, blotted out by the gloom of the branches, and the darkness now wove forest, sky and mountain into a uniform black sheet against which no item was separately visible.\n\nThere was no ch\u00e2let any longer. He was simply battering with bruised hands and feet upon the solid trunks of pines and spruces in his path; which he continued to do, calling ever aloud for Mark, until finally he grew dizzy with exhaustion and fell to the ground in a state of semi-consciousness.\n\nAnd for the best part of half-an-hour he lay there motionless upon the moss, while the vast hands of Night drew the cloak of her softest darkness over valley and mountain, covering his small body with as much care as she covered the sky, the hemisphere, and all those leagues of velvet forest." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 407", + "text": "It was not long before he came to himself again\u2014shivering with cold, for the perspiration had dried upon him where he lay. He got up and ran. The night was now fairly down, and the keen air stung his cheeks. But, with a sure instinct not to be denied, he took the direction of home.\n\nHe travelled at an extraordinary pace, considering the thickness of the trees and the darkness. How he got out of the valley he does not remember; nor how he found his way over the intervening ridges that lay between him and the country he knew. At the back of his mind crashed and tumbled the loose fragments of all he had seen and heard, forming as yet no coherent pattern. For himself, indeed, the details were of small interest. He was a man under sentence of death. His determination, in spite of everything, remained unshaken. In a few short hours he would be gone.\n\nYet, with the habit of the professional mind, he tried a little to sort out things. During that state of singular exaltation, for instance, he understood vaguely that his deep longings had somehow translated themselves into act and scene. For these longings were life; his decision negatived them; hence, they dramatized themselves pictorially with what vividness his imagination allowed.\n\nThey were dramatized inventions, singularly elaborate, of the emotions that burned so fiercely within. All were projections of his consciousness, maimed and incomplete, masquering as persons before his inner vision, it began with the singular sensations of death by drowning he had experienced. From that moment the other forces at work in the problem had taken their cue and played their part more or less convincingly, according to their strength...\n\nHe thought and argued a great deal as he hurried homewards through the night. But all the time he knew that it was untrue. He had no real explanation at all!\n\nFrom the high ridges, cold and bleak under the stars, swept by the free wind of night, he ran almost the entire way. It was downhill. And during that violent descent of nearly an hour the details of his \"going\" shaped themselves. Until then he had formed no definite plans. Now he settled everything. He chose the very pool where the water coiled and bubbled as in a cauldron just where the little torrent made a turn above their house; he decided upon the very terms of the letter he would leave behind. He would put it on the kitchen table so that they should know where to find him.\n\nHe urged his pace tremendously, for the idea that his brother would have left\u2014that he would find him gone\u2014haunted him. It grew, doubtless, out of that singular, detailed vision that had come upon him in his great weakness in the valley. He was terrified that he would not see his brother again\u2014that he had already gone dehiberately after her.\n\n\"I must see Mark once more. I must get home before he leaves!\" flashed the strong thought continually in his mind, making him run like a deer down the winding trail.\n\nIt was after ten o'clock when he reached the little clearing behind the chalet, panting with exhaustion, blinded with perspiration. There was no light visible; all the windows were dark; but presently he made out a figure moving to and fro below the balcony. It was not Mark\u2014he saw that in a flash. It moved oddly. A sound of moaning reached him at the same time. And then he saw that it was the figure of the peasant woman who cooked for them, Marie Petavel.\n\nAnd the instant he saw who it was, and heard her moaning, he knew what had happened. Mark had left a letter to explain\u2014and gone: gone after the girl. His heart sank into death.\n\nThe woman came forward heavily through the darkness, the dew-drenched grass swishing audibly against her skirts. And the words he heard were precisely what he had expected to hear, though patois and excitement rendered them difficult\u2014\n\n\"Your brother\u2014oh your poor brother, Monsieur le Docteur\u2014he\u2014has gone!\"\n\nAnd then he saw the piece of white paper glimmering in her hands as she stood quite close. He took it mechanically from her. It was the letter Mark had left behind to explain.\n\nBut before Stephen had time to read it, a man with a lantern came out of the barn that stood behind the house. It was her husband. He came slowly towards them.\n\n\"We searched for you, oh, we searched,\" he said in a thick voice, \"my son went as far as Buttes even, and hasn't come back yet. You've been long, too long away.\n\nHe stopped short and glanced down at his wife, telling her roughly to cease her stupid weeping. Stephen, shaking inwardly, with an icy terror in his blood, began to feel that things were not precisely as he had anticipated. Something else was the matter. The expression in the face of the peasant as the lantern's glare fell upon it came to him suddenly with the shock of a revelation.\n\n\"You have told monsieur\u2014all?\" the man whispered, stooping to his wife. She shook her head; and her husband led the way without another word. The interval of a few seconds seemed endless to Stephen; he was trembling all over like a man with the ague. Behind them the old woman floundered through the wet grass, moaning to herself.\n\n\"No one would have believed it could have happened\u2014anything of that sort,\" the man mumbled. The lantern was unsteady in his hand. The next minute the barn, like some monstrous animal, rose against the stars, and the huge wooden doors gaped wide before them.\n\nThe peasant, uncovering his head, went first, and Stephen, following with stumbling footsteps, saw the shadows of the beams and posts shift across the boarded floor. Against the wall, whither the man led, was a small littered heap of hay, and upon this, covered by a white sheet, was stretched a human body. The peasant drew back the sheet gently with his heavy brown hand, stooping close over it so that the lantern threw its light full upon the act.\n\nAnd Stephen, tumbling forward, scarcely knowing what he did, without further warning or preparation, looked down upon the face of his brother Mark. The eyes stared fixedly into\u2014nothing; the features wore the distraught expression he had seen upon them a few hours before through the window-pane of that upper chamber.\n\n\"We found him in that deep pool just where the stream makes the quick turn above the house,\" the peasant whispered. \"He left a bit of paper on the kitchen table to say where he would be. It was after dark when we got there. His watch had stopped, though, long before\u2014\" He muttered on unintelligibly.\n\nStephen looked up at the man, unable to utter a word, and the man replied to the unspoken question\u2014\"At ten minutes past five the watch had stopped,\" he said. \"That was when the water reached it.\"\n\nBy the flicker of the lantern, then, sitting beside that still figure covered with the sheet, Stephen read the letter Mark had left for him\u2014\n\n\"Stevie, old fellow, one of us, you know, has got to\u2014go; and it is better, I think, that it should not be you. I know all you have been through, for I have fought and suffered every step with you. I have been along the same path, loving her too much for you, and you too much for her. And I leave her to you, boy, because I am convinced she now loves you even as she first believed she loved me. But all that evening she cried incessantly for you. More I cannot explain to you now; she will do that. And she need never know more than that I have withdrawn in your favour: she need never know how. Perhaps, one day, when there is no marriage or giving in marriage, we may all three be together, and happy. I have often wondered, as you know...\"\n\nThe remainder of the sentence was scratched out and illegible.\n\n\"...And, if it be possible, old fellow, of course I shall wait.\"\n\nThen came more words blackened out.\n\n\"...I am now going, within a few minutes of writing this last word to you of blessing and forgiveness (for I know you will want that, although there is nothing, nothing to forgive!)\u2014going down into that Lost Valley her father told us about\u2014the Valley hidden among these mountains we love\u2014the Lost Valley where even the unhappy dead find peace. There I shall wait for you both.\u2014MARK.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 408", + "text": "Several weeks later, before he took the train eastwards, Stephen retraced his steps to the farmhouse where he had bought milk and asked for directions. Thence for some distance he followed the path he well remembered. At a point, however, the confusion of the woods grew strangely upon him. The mountains, true to the map, were not true to his recollections. The trail stopped; high, unknown ridges intervened; and no such deep and winding valley as he had travelled that afternoon for so many hours was anywhere to be found. The map, the peasants, the very configuration of the landscape even, denied its existence.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Wendigo ]\n\nA considerable number of hunting parties were out that year without finding so much as a fresh trail; for the moose were uncommonly shy, and the various Nimrods returned to the bosoms of their respective families with the best excuses the facts or their imaginations could suggest. Dr. Cathcart, among others, came back without a trophy; but he brought instead the memory of an experience which he declares was worth all the bull-moose that had ever been shot. But then Cathcart, of Aberdeen, was interested in other things besides moose\u2014amongst them the vagaries of the human mind. This particular story, however, found no mention in his book on Collective Hallucination for the simple reason (so he confided once to a fellow colleague) that he himself played too intimate a part in it to form a competent judgment of the affair as a whole.\n\nBesides himself and his guide, Hank Davis, there was young Simpson, his nephew, a divinity student destined for the \"Wee Kirk\" (then on his first visit to Canadian backwoods), and the latter's guide, D\u00e9fago. Joseph D\u00e9fago was a French \"Canuck\", who had strayed from his native Province of Quebec years before, and had got caught in Rat Portage when the Canadian Pacific Railway was a-building; a man who, in addition to his unparalleled knowledge of woodcraft and bush-lore, could also sing the old voyageur songs and tell a capital hunting yarn into the bargain. He was deeply susceptible, moreover, to that singular spell which the wilderness lays upon certain lonely natures, and he loved the wild solitudes with a kind of romantic passion that amounted almost to an obsession. The life of the backwoods fascinated him\u2014whence, doubtless, his surpassing efficiency in dealing with their mysteries.\n\nOn this particular expedition he was Hank's choice. Hank knew him and swore by him. He also swore at him, \"jest as a pal might\", and since he had a vocabulary of picturesque, if utterly meaningless, oaths, the conversation between the two stalwart and hardy woodsmen was often of a rather lively description. This river of expletives however, Hank agreed to dam a little out of respect for his old \"hunting boss\", Dr. Cathcart, whom of course he addressed after the fashion of the country as \"Doc\"; and also because he understood that young Simpson was already a \"bit of a parson\". He had, however, one objection to D\u00e9fago, and one only\u2014which was, that the French Canadian sometimes exhibited what Hank described as \"the output of a cursed and dismal mind\", meaning apparently that he sometimes was true to type, Latin type, and suffered fits of a kind of silent moroseness when nothing could induce him to titter speech. D\u00e9fago, that is to say, was imaginative and melancholy. And, as a rule, it was too long a spell of \"civilisation\" that induced the attacks, for a few days of the wilderness invariably cured them.\n\nThis, then, was the party of four that found themselves in camp the last week in October of that \"shy moose year\" 'wa yup in the wilderness north of Rat Portage\u2014a forsaken and desolate country. There was also Punk, an Indian, who had accompanied Dr. Cathcart and Hank on their hunting trips in previous years, and who acted as cook. His duty was merely to stay in camp, catch fish, and prepare venison steaks and coffee at a few minutes' notice. He dressed in the worn-out clothes bequeathed to him by former patrons, and, except for his coarse black hair and dark skin, he looked in these city garments no more like a real redskin than a stage negro looks like a real African. For all that, however, Punk had in him still the instincts of his dying race; his taciturn silence and his endurance survived; also his superstition.\n\nThe party round the blazing fire that night were despondent, for a week had passed without a single sign of recent moose discovering itself. D\u00e9fago had sung his song and plunged into a story, but Hank, in bad humour, reminded him so often that \"he kep' mussing-up the fac's so, that it was 'most all nothin' but a petred-out lie\", that the Frenchman had finally subsided into a sulky silence which nothing seemed likely to break. Dr. Cathcart and his nephew were fairly done after an exhausting day. Punk was washing up the dishes, grunting to himself under the lean-to of branches, where he later also slept. No one troubled to stir the slowly dying fire. Overhead the stars were brilliant in a sky quite wintry, and there was so little wind that ice was already forming stealthily along the shores of the still lake behind them. The silence of the vast listening forest stole forward and enveloped them.\n\nHank broke in suddenly with his nasal voice.\n\n\"I'm in favour of breaking new ground to-morrow, Doc,\" he observed with energy, looking across at his employer. \"We don't stand a chance around here.\"\n\n\"Agreed,\" said Cathcart, always a man of few words. \"Think the idea's good.\"\n\n\"Sure pop, it's good,\" Hank resumed with confidence. \"S'pose, now, you and I strike west, up Garden Lake way for a change! None of us ain't touched that quiet bit o' land yet\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm with you.\"\n\n\"And you, D\u00e9fago, take Mr. Simpson along in the small canoe, skip across the lake, portage over into Fifty Island Water, and take a good squint down that thar southern shore. The moose 'yarded' there like hell last year, and for all we know they may be doin' it agin this year jest to spite us.\"\n\nD\u00e9fago, keeping his eyes on the fire, said nothing by way of reply. He was still offended, possibly, about his interrupted story.\n\n\"No one's been up that way this year, an' I'll lay my bottom dollar on that!\" Hank added with emphasis, as though he had a reason for knowing. He looked over at his partner sharply. \"Better take the little silk tent and stay away a couple o' nights,\" he concluded, as though the matter were definitely settled. For Hank was recognised as general organiser of the hunt, and in charge of the party.\n\nIt was obvious to anyone that D\u00e9fago did not jump at the plan, but his silence seemed to convey something more than ordinary disapproval, and across his sensitive dark face there passed a curious expression like a flash of firelight\u2014not so quickly, however, that the three men had not time to catch it. \"He funked for some reason I thoughts,\" Simpson said afterwards in the tent he shared with his uncle. Dr. Cathcart made no immediate reply, although the look had interested him enough at the time for him to make a mental note of it. The expression had caused him a passing uneasiness he could not quite account for at the moment.\n\nBut Hank, of course, had been the first to notice it, and the odd thing was that instead of becoming explosive or angry over the other's reluctance, he at once began to humour him a bit.\n\n\"But there ain't no speshul reason why no one's been up there this year,\" he said, with a perceptible hush in his tone; \"not the reason you mean, anyway! Las' year it was the fires that kep' folks out, and this year I guess\u2014I guess it jest happened so, that's all!\" His manner was clearly meant to be encouraging.\n\nJoseph D\u00e9fago raised his eyes a moment, then dropped them again. A breath of wind stole out of the forest and stirred the embers into a passing blaze. Dr. Cathcart again noticed the expression in the guide's face, and again he did not like it. But this time the nature of the look betrayed itself. In those eyes for an instant, he caught the gleam of a man scared in his very soul. It disquieted him more than he cared to admit.\n\n\"Bad Indians up that way?\" he asked, with a laugh to ease matters a little, while Simpson too sleepy to notice this subtle by-play moved off to bed with a prodigious yawn; \"or\u2014or anything wrong with the country?\" he added, when his nephew was out of hearing.\n\nHank met his eye with something less than his usual frankness.\n\n\"He's jest skeered,\" he replied good-humouredy, \"skeered stiff about some ole feery tale! That's all, ain't it, ole pard?\" And he gave D\u00e9fago a friendly kick on the moccasined foot that lay nearest the fire.\n\nD\u00e9fago looked up quickly, as from an interrupted reverie, a reverie, however, that had not prevented his seeing all that went on about him.\n\n\"Skeered\u2014 nuthin'!\" he answered, with a flush of defiance. \"There's nuthin' in the Bush that can skeer Joseph D\u00e9fago, and don't you forget it!\" And the natural energy with which he spoke made it impossible to know whether he told the whole truth or only a part of it.\n\nHank turned towards the doctor. He was just going to add something when he stopped abruptly and looked round. A sound close behind them in the darkness made all three start. It was old Punk, who had moved up from his lean-to while they talked and now stood there just beyond the circle of firelight\u2014listening.\n\n\"'Nother time, Doc!\" Hank whispered, with a wink, \"when the gallery ain't stepped down into the stalls!\" And, springing to his feet, he slapped the Indian on the back and cried noisily, \"Come up t' the fire an' warm yer dirty red skin a bit.\" He dragged him towards the blaze and threw more wood on. \"That was a mighty good feed you give us an hour or two back,\" he continued heartily, as though to set the man's thoughts on another scent, \"and it ain't Christian to let you stand out there freezin' yer ole soul to hell while we're gettin' all good an' toasted! Punk moved in and warmed his feet, smiling darkly at the other's volubility which he only half understood, but saying nothing. And presently Dr. Cathcart, seeing that further conversation was impossible, followed his nephew's example and moved off to the tent leaving the three men smoking over the now blazing fire.\n\nIt is not easy to undress in a small tent without waking one's companion, and Cathcart, hardened and warmblooded as he was in spite of his fifty odd years, did what Hank would have described as \"considerable of his twilight\" in the open. He noticed, during the process, that Punk had meanwhile gone back to his lean-to, and that Hank and D\u00e9fago were at it hammer and tongs, or, rather, hammer and anvil, the little French Canadian being the anvil. It was all very like the conventional stage picture of Western melodrama: the fire lighting up their aces with patches of alternate red and black; D\u00e9fago, in slouch hat and moccasins in the part of the \"badlands' \"villain; Hank, open-faced and hatless, with that reckless fling of his shoulders, the honest and deceived hero; and old Punk, eavesdropping in the background, supplying the atmosphere of mystery. The doctor smiled as he noticed the details; but at the same time something deep within him\u2014he hardly knew what\u2014shrank a little, as though an almost imperceptible breath of warning had touched the surface of his soul and was gone again before he could seize it. Probably it was traceable to the \"scared expression\" he had seen in the eyes of D\u00e9fago; \"probably\"\u2014for this hint of fugitive emotion otherwise escaped his usually so keen analysis. D\u00e9fago, he was vaguely aware, might cause trouble somehow... He was not as steady a guide as Hank, for instance... Further than that he could not get...\n\nHe watched the men a moment longer before diving into the stuffy tent where Simpson already slept soundly. Hank, he saw, was swearing like a mad African in a New York nigger saloon; but it was the swearing of \"affection\". The ridiculous oaths flew freely now that the cause of their obstruction was asleep. Presently he put his arm almost tenderly upon his comrade's shoulder, and they moved off together into the shadows where their tent stood faintly glimmering. Punk, too, a moment later followed their example and disappeared between his odorous blankets in the opposite direction.\n\nDr. Cathcart then likewise turned in, weariness and sleep still fighting in his mind with an obscure curiosity to know what it was had scared D\u00e9fago about the country up Fifty Island Water way\u2014wondering, too, why Punk's presence had prevented the completion of what Hank had to say. Then sleep overtook him. He would know to-morrow. Hank would tell him the story while they trudged after the elusive moose.\n\nDeep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odours of coming winter. White men, with their dull scent, might never have divined them; the fragrance of the wood-fire would have concealed from them these almost electrical hints of moss and bark and hardening swamp a hundred miles away. Even Hank and D\u00e9fago, subtly in league with the soul of the woods as they were, would probably have spread their delicate nostrils in vain.\n\nBut an hour later, when all slept like the dead, old Punk crept from his blankets and went down to the shore of the lake like a shadow\u2014silently, as only Indian blood can move. He raised his head and looked about him. The thick darkness rendered sight of small avail, but, like the animals, he possessed other senses that darkness could not mute. He listened\u2014then sniffed the air. Motionless as a hemlock-stem he stood there. After five minutes again he lifted his head and sniffed, and yet once again. A tingling of the wonderful nerves that betrayed itself by no outer sign, ran through him as he tasted the keen air. Then, merging his figure into the surrounding blackness in a way that only wild men and animals understand, he turned, still moving like a shadow, and went stealthily back to his lean-to and his bed.\n\nAnd soon after he slept, the change of wind he had divined stirred gently the reflection of the stars within the lake. Rising among the far ridges of the country beyond Fifty Island Water, it came from the direction in which he had stared, and it passed over the sleeping camp with a faint and sighing murmur through the tops of the big trees that was almost too delicate to be audible. With it, down the desert paths of night, though too faint, too high even for the Indian's hair-like nerves, there passed a curious, thin odour, strangely disquieting, an odour of something that seemed unfamiliar\u2014utterly unknown.\n\nThe French Canadian and the man of Indian blood each stirred uneasily in his sleep just about this time, though neither of them woke. Then the ghost of that unforgettably strange odour passed away and was lost among the leagues of tenantless forest beyond.\n\nIn the morning the camp was astir before the sun. There had been a light fall of snow during the night and the air was sharp. Punk had done his duty betimes, for the odours of coffee and fried bacon reached every tent. All were in good spirits.\n\n\"Wind's shifted!\" cried Hank vigorously, watching Simpson and his guide already loading the small canoe. \"It's across the lake\u2014dead right for you fellers. And the snow'll make bully trails! If there's any moose mussing around up thar, they'll not get so much as a tail-end scent of you with the wind as it is. Good luck, Monsieur D\u00e9fago!\" he added, facetiously giving the name its French pronunciation for once, \"bonne chance!\"\n\nD\u00e9fago returned the good wishes, apparently in the best of spirits, the silent mood gone.\n\nBefore eight o'clock old Punk had the camp to himself, Cathcart and Hank were far along the trail that led westwards, while the canoe that carried D\u00e9fago and Simpson, with silk tent and grub for two days, was already a dark speck bobbing on the bosom of the lake, going due east.\n\nThe wintry sharpness of the air was tempered now by a sun that topped the wooded ridges and blazed with a luxurious warmth upon the world of lake and forest below; loons flew skimming through the sparkling spray that the wind lifted; divers shook their dripping heads to the sun and popped smartly out of sight again; and as far as eye could reach rose the leagues of endless, crowding Bush, desolate in its lonely sweep and grandeur, untrodden by foot of man, and stretching its mighty and unbroken carpet right up to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay.\n\nSimpson, who saw it all for the first time as he paddled hard in the bows of the dancing canoe, was enchanted by its austere beauty. His heart drank in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungs drank in the cool and perfumed wind. Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his native chanties, D\u00e9fago steered the craft of birchbark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such occasions men lose the superficial, wordly distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common end. Simpson, the employer, and D\u00e9fago the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply\u2014two men, the \"guider\" and the \"guided\". Superior knowledge, of course, assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought into the quasi-subordinate position. He never dreamed of objecting when D\u00e9fago dropped the \"Mr.,\" and addressed him as \"Say, Simpson,\" or \"Simpson, boss,\" which was invariably the case before they reached the farther shore after a stiff paddle of twelve miles against a head wind. He only laughed, and liked it; then ceased to notice it at all.\n\nFor this \"divinity student\" was a young man of parts and character, though as yet, of course, untravelled; and on this trip\u2014the first time he had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland\u2014the huge scale of things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he realised, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.\n\nSimpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he held the new .303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of faultless, gleaming barrels. The three days' journey to their headquarters, by lake and portage, had carried the process a stage farther. And now that he was about to plunge beyond even the fringe of wilderness where they were camped into the virgin heart of uninhabited regions as vast as Europe itself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an effect of delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable of appreciating. It was himself and D\u00e9fago against a multitude\u2014at least, against a Titan!\n\nThe bleak splendours of these remote and lonely forests rather overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality of the tangled backwoods which can only he described as merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his own utter helplessness.\n\nOnly D\u00e9fago, as a symbol of a distant civilization where man was master, stood between him and a pitiless death by exhaustion and starvation.\n\nIt was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch D\u00e9fago turn over the canoe upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceed to \"blaze\" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of an almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, \"Say, Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by these marks;\u2014then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home camp agin, see?\"\n\nIt was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said it without any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to express the youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that was symbolic of the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in it. He was alone with D\u00e9fago in a primitive world: that was all. The canoe, another symbol of man's ascendancy, was now to be left behind. Those small yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the only indications of its hiding-place.\n\nMeanwhile, shouldering the packs between them, each man carrying his own rifle, they followed the slender trail over rocks and fallen trunks and across half-frozen swamps; skirting numerous lakes that fairly gemmed the forest, their borders fringed with mist; and towards five o'clock found themselves suddenly on the edge of the woods, looking out across a large sheet of water in front of them, dotted with pine-clad islands of all describable shapes and sizes.\n\n\"Fifty Island Water,\" announced D\u00e9fago wearily, \"and the sun jest goin' to dip his bald old head into it!\" he added, with unconscious poetry: and immediately they set about pitching camp for the night.\n\nIn a very few minutes, under those skilful hands that never made a movement too much or a movement too little, the silk tent stood taut and cosy, the beds of balsam boughs ready laid, and a brisk cooking-fire burned with the minimum of smoke. While the young Scotchman cleaned the fish they had caught trolling behind the canoe, D\u00e9fago \"guessed\" he would \"jest as soon\" take a turn through the Bush for indications of moose. \"May come across a trunk where they bin and rubbed horns,\" he said, as he moved off, \"or feedin' on the last of the maple leaves\"\u2014and he was gone.\n\nHis small figure melted away like a shadow in the dusk, while Simpson noted with a kind of admiration how easily the forest absorbed him into herself. A few steps, it seemed, and he was no longer visible.\n\nYet there was little underbrush hereabouts; the trees stood somewhat apart, well spaced; and in the clearings grew silver-birch and maple, spear-like and slender, against the immense stems of spruce and hemlock. But for occasional prostrate monsters, and the boulders of grey rock that thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the ground, it might well have been a bit of park in the Old Country. Almost, one might have seen in it the hand of man. A little to the right, however, began the great burnt section, miles in extent, proclaiming its real character\u2014brul\u00e9, as it is called, where the fires of the previous year had raged for weeks, and the blackened stumps now rose gaunt and ugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic match-heads stuck into the ground, savage and desolate beyond words. The perfume of charcoal and rain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about it.\n\nThe dusk rapidly deepened; the glades grew dark; the crackling of the fire and the wash of little waves along the rocky lake shore were the only sounds audible. The wind had dropped with the sun, and in all that vast world of branches nothing stirred. Any moment, it seemed, the woodland gods, who are to be worshipped in silence and loneliness, might sketch their mighty and terrific outlines among the trees. In front, through doorways pillared by huge straight stems, lay the stretch of Fifty Island Water, a crescent-shaped lake some fifteen miles from tip to tip, and perhaps five miles across where they were camped. A sky of rose and saffron, more clear than any atmosphere Simpson had ever known, still dropped its pale streaming fires across the waves, where the islands\u2014a hundred, surely, rather than fifty\u2014floated like the fairy barques of some enchanted fleet. Fringed with pines, whose crests fingered most delicately the sky, they almost seemed to move upwards as the light faded\u2014about to weigh anchor and navigate the pathways of the heavens instead of the currents of their native and desolate lake.\n\nAnd strips of coloured cloud, like flaunting pennons, signalled their departure to the stars...\n\nThe beauty of the scene was strangely uplifting. Simpson smoked the fish and burnt his fingers into the bargain in his efforts to enjoy it and at the same time tend the frying-pan and the fire. Yet, ever at the back of his thoughts, lay that other aspect of the wilderness: the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man. The sense of his utter loneliness, now that even D\u00e9fago had gone, came close as he looked about him and listened for the sound of his companion's returning footsteps.\n\nThere was pleasure in the sensation, yet with it a perfectly comprehensible alarm. And instinctively the thought stirred in him: \"What should I \u2014could I, do\u2014if anything happened and he did not come back\u2014?\"\n\nThey enjoyed their well-earned supper, eating untold quantities of fish, and drinking unmilked tea strong enough to kill men who had not covered thirty miles of hard \"going\", eating little on the way. And when it was over, they smoked and told stories round the blazing fire, laughing, stretching weary limbs, and discussing plans for the morrow. D\u00e9fago was in excellent spirits, though disappointed at having no signs of moose to report. But it was dark and he had not gone far. The brul\u00e9, too, was bad. His clothes and hands were smeared with charcoal. Simpson, watching him, realised with renewed vividness their position\u2014alone together in the wilderness.\n\n\"D\u00e9fago,\" he said presently, \"these woods, you know, are a bit too big to feel quite at home in\u2014to feel comfortable in, I mean!... Eh?\" He merely gave expression to the mood of the moment; he was hardly prepared for the earnestness, the solemnity even, with which the guide took him up.\n\n\"You've hit it right, Simpson, boss,\" he replied, fixing his searching brown eyes on his face, \"and that's the truth, sure. There's no end to 'em\u2014no end at all.\" Then he added in a lowered tone as if to himself, \"There's lots found out that, and gone plumb to pieces!\"\n\nBut the man's gravity of manner was not quite to the other's liking; it was a little too suggestive for this scenery and setting; he was sorry he had broached the subject. He remembered suddenly how his uncle had told him that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of the wilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them so fiercely that they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to their death. And he had a shrewd idea that his companion held something in sympathy with that queer type. He led the conversation on to other topics, on to Hank and the doctor, for instance, and the natural rivalry as to who should get the first sight of moose.\n\n\"If they went doo west,\" observed D\u00e9fago carelessly, \"there's sixty miles between us now\u2014with ole Punk at halfway house eatin' himself full to bustin' with fish and corfee.\" They laughed together over the picture. But the casual mention of those sixty miles again made Simpson realise the prodigious scale of this land where they hunted; sixty miles was a mere step; two hundred little more than a step. Stories of lost hunters rose persistently before his memory. The passion and mystery of homeless and wandering men, seduced by the beauty of great forests, swept his soul in a way too vivid to be quite pleasant. He wondered vaguely whether it was the mood of his companion that invited the unwelcome suggestion with such persistence.\n\n\"Sing us a song, D\u00e9fago, if you're not too tired,\" he asked; one of those old voyageur songs you sang the other night.\" He handed his tobacco pouch to the guide and then filled his own pipe, while the Canadian, nothing loth, sent his light voice across the lake in one of those plaintive, almost melancholy chanties with which lumbermen and trappers lessen the burden of their labour. There was an appealing and romantic flavour about it, something that recalled the atmosphere of the old pioneer days when Indians and wilderness were leagued together, battles frequent, and the Old Country farther off than it is to-day. The sound travelled pleasantly over the water, but the forest at their backs seemed to swallow it down with a single gulp that permitted neither echo nor resonance.\n\nIt was in the middle of the third verse that Simpson noticed something unusual\u2014something that brought his thoughts back with a rush from far-away scenes. A curious change had come into the man's voice. Even before he knew what it was, uneasiness caught him, and looking up quickly, he saw that D\u00e9fago, though still singing, was peering about him into the Bush, as though he heard or saw something. His voice grew fainter\u2014dropped to a hush\u2014 then ceased altogether. The same instant, with a movement amazingly alert, he started to his feet and stood upright\u2014sniffing the air. Like a dog scenting game, he drew the air into his nostrils in short, sharp breaths, turning quickly as he did so in all directions, and finally \"pointing\" down the lake shore, eastwards. It was a performance unpleasantly suggestive and at the same time singularly dramatic. Simpson's heart fluttered disagreeably as he watched it.\n\n\"Lord, man! How you made me jump!\" he exclaimed, on his feet beside him the same instant, and peering over his shoulder into the sea of darkness. \"What's up? Are you frightened\u2014?\"\n\nEven before the question was out of his mouth he knew it was foolish, for any man with a pair of eyes in his head could see that the Canadian had turned white down to his very gills. Not even sunburn and the glare of the fire could hide that.\n\nThe student felt himself trembling a little, weakish in the knees. \"What's up?\" he repeated quickly. \"D'you smell moose? Or anything queer, anything\u2014wrong?\" He lowered his voice instinctively.\n\nThe forest pressed round him with its encircling wall; the nearer tree-stems gleamed like bronze in the firelight; beyond that\u2014blackness, and, so far as he could tell, a silence of death. Just behind them a passing puff of wind lifted a single leaf, looked at it, then laid it softly down again without disturbing the rest of the covey. It seemed as if a million invisible causes had combined just to produce that single visible effect. Other life pulsed about them\u2014and was gone.\n\nD\u00e9fago turned abruptly; the livid hue of his face had turned to a dirty grey.\n\n\"I never said I heered\u2014or smelt\u2014nuthin',\" he said slowly and emphatically, in an oddly altered voice that conveyed somehow a touch of defiance. \"I was only\u2014takin' a look round\u2014so to speak. It's always a mistake to be too previous with yer questions.\" Then he added suddenly with obvious effort, in his more natural voice, \"Have you got the matches, Boss Simpson?\" and proceeded to light the pipe he had half filled just before he began to sing.\n\nWithout speaking an other word they sat down again by the fire. D\u00e9fago changing his side so that he could face the direction the wind came from. For even a tenderfoot could tell that. D\u00e9fago changed his position in order to hear and smell\u2014all there was to be heard and smelt. And, since he now faced the lake with his back to the trees it was evidently nothing in the forest that had sent so strange and sudden a warning to his marvellously trained nerves.\n\n\"Guess now I don't feel like singing any,\" he explained presently of his own accord. \"That song kinder brings back memories that's troublesome to me; I never oughter've begun it. It sets me on t' imagining things, see?\"\n\nClearly the man was still fighting with some profoundly moving emotion. He wished to excuse himself in the eyes of the other. But the explanation, in that it was only a part of the truth, was a lie, and he knew perfectly well that Simpson was not deceived by it. For nothing could explain away the livid terror that had dropped over his face while he stood there sniffing the air. And nothing\u2014no amount of blazing fire, or chatting on ordinary subjects\u2014could make that camp exactly as it had been before. The shadow of an unknown horror, naked if unguessed, that had flashed for an instant in the face and gestures of the guide, had also communicated itself, vaguely and therefore more potently, to his companion. The guide's visible efforts to dissemble the truth only made things worse. Moreover, to add to the younger man's uneasiness, was the difficulty, nay, the impossibility he felt of asking questions, and also his complete ignorance as to the cause... Indians, wild animals, forest fires\u2014all these, he knew, were wholly out of the question. His imagination searched vigorously, but in vain..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 409", + "text": "Yet, somehow or other, after another long spell of smoking, talking and roasting themselves before the great fire, the shadow that had so suddenly invaded their peaceful camp began to lift. Perhaps D\u00e9fago's efforts, or the return of his quiet and normal attitude acomplished this; perhaps Simpson himself had exaggerated the affair out of all proportion to the truth; or possibly the vigorous air of the wilderness brought its own powers of healing. Whatever the cause, the feeling of immediate horror seemed to have passed away as mysteriously as it had come, for nothing occurred to feed it. Simpson began to feel that he had permitted himself the unreasoning terror of a child. He put it down partly to a certain subconscious excitement that this wild and immense scenery generated in his blood, partly to the spell of solitude, and partly to over fatigue. The pallor of the guide's face was, of course, uncommonly hard to explain, yet it might have been due in some way to an effect of firelight, or his own imagination... He gave it the benefit of the doubt; he was Scotch.\n\nWhen a somewhat unordinary emotion has disappeared, the mind always finds a dozen ways of explaining away its causes... Simpson lit a vast pipe and tried to laugh to himself. On getting home to Scotland it would make quite a good story. He did not realise that this laughter was a sign that terror still lurked in the recesses of his soul\u2014that, in fact, it was merely one of the conventional signs by which a man, seriously alarmed, tries to persuade himself that he is not so.\n\nD\u00e9fago, however, heard that low laughter and looked up with surprise on his face. The two men stood, side by side, kicking the embers about before going to bed. It was ten o'clock\u2014a late hour for hunters to be still awake.\n\n\"What's ticklin' yer?\" he asked in his ordinary tone, yet gravely.\n\n\"I\u2014I was thinking of our little toy woods at home, just at that moment,\" stammered Simpson, coming back to what really dominated his mind, and startled by the question, \"and comparing them to\u2014to all this,\" and he swept his arm round to indicate the Bush.\n\nA pause followed in which neither of them said anything.\n\n\"All the same I wouldn't laugh about it, if I was you,\" D\u00e9fago added, looking over Simpson's shoulder into the shadows. \"There's places in there nobody won't never see into\u2014nobody knows what lives in there either.\"\n\n\"Too big\u2014too far off?\" The suggestion in the guide's manner was immense and horrible.\n\nD\u00e9fago nodded. The expression on his face was dark. He, too, felt uneasy. The younger man understood that in a hinterland of this size there might well be depths of wood that would never in the life of the world be known or trodden. The thought was not exactly the sort he welcomed. In a loud voice, cheerfully, he suggested that it was time for bed. But the guide lingered, tinkering with the fire, arranging the stones needlessly, doing a dozen things that did not really need doing. Evidently there was something he wanted to say, yet found it difficult to \"get at\".\n\n\"Say, you, Boss Simpson,\" he began suddenly, as the last shower of sparks went up into the air, \"you don't\u2014smell nothing, do you\u2014nothing pertickler, I mean?\" The commonplace question, Simpson realised, veiled a dreadfully serious thought in his mind. A shiver ran down his back.\n\n\"Nothing but this burning wood,\" he replied firmly, kicking again at the embers. The sound of his own foot made him start.\n\n\"And all the evenin' you ain't smelt\u2014nothing?\" persisted the guide, peering at him through the gloom; \"nothing extrordiny, and different to anything else you ever smelt before?\"\n\n\"No, no, man; nothing at all! \" he replied aggressively, half angrily.\n\nD\u00e9fago's face cleared. \"That's good! \" he exclaimed, with evident relief. \"That's good to hear.\"\n\n\"Have you?\" asked Simpson sharply, and the same instant regretted the question.\n\nThe Canadian came closer in the darkness. He shook his head. \"I guess not,\" he said, though without overwhelming conviction. \"It must've been jest that song of mine that did it. It's the song they sing in lumber-camps and god-forsaken places like that, when they're skeered the Wendigo's somewheres around, doin' a bit of swift, travellin'\u2014\"\n\n\"And what's the Wendigo, pray?\" Simpson asked quickly, irritated because again he could not prevent that sudden shiver of the nerves. He knew that he was close upon the man's terror and the cause of it. Yet a rushing passionate curiosity overcame his better judgment, and his fear.\n\nD\u00e9fago turned swiftly and looked at him as though he were suddenly about to shriek. His eyes shone, his mouth was wide open. Yet all he said, or whispered rather, for his voice sank very low, was:\n\n\"It's nuthin'\u2014nuthin' but what those lousy fellers believe when they've bin hittin' the bottle too long\u2014a sort of great animal that lives up yonder,\" he jerked his head northwards, \"quick as lightning in its tracks, an' bigger'n anything else in the Bush, an' ain't supposed to be very good to look at\u2014that's all!\"\n\n\"A backwoods' superstition\" began Simpson, moving hastily towards the tent in order to shake off the hand of the guide that clutched his arm. \"Come, come, hurry up for God's sake, and get the lantern going! It's time we were in bed and asleep if we're to be up with the sun to-morrow...\"\n\nThe guide was close on his heels. \"I'm coming,\" he answered out of the darkness, \"I'm coming.\" And after a slight delay he appeared with the lantern and hung it from a nail in the front pole of the tent. The shadows of a hundred trees shifted their places quickly as he did so, and when he stumbled over the rope, diving swiftly inside, the whole tent trembled as though a gust of wind struck it.\n\nThe two men lay down, without undressing, upon their beds of soft balsam boughs, cunningly arranged. Inside, all was warm and cosy, but outside the world of crowding trees pressed close about them, marshalling their million shadows, and smothering the little tent that stood there like a wee white shell facing the ocean of tremendous forest.\n\nBetween the two lonely figures within, however, there pressed another shadow that was not a shadow from the night. It was the Shadow cast by the strange Fear, never wholly exorcised, that had leaped suddenly upon D\u00e9fago in the middle of his singing. And Simpson, as he lay there, watching the darkness through the open flap of the tent, ready to plunge into the fragrant abyss of sleep, knew first that unique and profound stillness of a primeval forest when no wind stirs... and when the night has weight and substance that enters into the soul to bind a veil about it... Then sleep took him...\n\nThus it seemed to him, at least. Yet it was true that the lap of the water, just beyond the tent door, still beat time with his lessening pulses when he realised that he was lying with his eyes open and that another sound had recently introduced itself with cunning softness between the splash and murmur of the little waves.\n\nAnd, long before he understood what this sound was, it had stirred in him the centres of pity and alarm. He listened intently, though at first in vain, for the running blood beat all its drums too noisily in his ears. Did it come, he wondered, from the lake, or from the woods?...\n\nThen, suddenly, with a rush and a flutter of the heart, he knew that it was close beside him in the tent; and, when he turned over for a better hearing, it focused itself unmistakably not two feet away. It was a sound of weeping: D\u00e9fago upon his bed of branches was sobbing in the darkness as though his heart would break, the blankets evidently stuffed against his mouth to stifle it.\n\nAnd his first feeling, before he could think or reflect, was the rush of a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous\u2014and so vain! Tears\u2014in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? He thought of a little child crying in mid-Atlantic... Then, of course, with fuller realisation, and the memory of what had gone before, came the descent of the terror upon him, and his blood ran cold.\n\n\"D\u00e9fago,\" he whispered quickly, \"what's the matter?\" He tried to make his voice very gentle.\n\n\"Are you in pain\u2014unhappy\u2014?\" There was no reply, but the sounds ceased abruptly. He stretched his hand out and touched him. The body did not stir.\n\n\"Are you awake?\" for it occurred to him that the man was crying in his sleep. \"Are you cold?\" He noticed that his feet, which were uncovered, projected beyond the mouth of the tent. He spread an extra fold of his own blankets over them. The guide had slipped down in his bed, and the branches seemed to have been dragged with him. He was afraid to pull the body back again, for fear of waking him.\n\nOne or two tentative questions he ventured softly, but though he waited for several minutes there came no reply, nor any sign of movement. Presently he heard his regular and quiet breathing, and putting his hand again gently on the breast, felt the steady rise and fall beneath.\n\n\"Let me know if anything's wrong,\" he whispered, \"or if I can do anything. Wake me at once if you feel\u2014queer.\"\n\nHe hardly knew quite what to say. He lay down again, thinking and wondering what it all meant. D\u00e9fago, of course, had been crying in his sleep. Some dream or other had afflicted him. Yet never in his life would he forget that pitiful sound of sobbing, and the feeling that the whole awful wilderness of woods listened...\n\nHis own mind busied itself for a long time with the recent events, of which this took its mysterious place as one, and though this reason successfully argued away all unwelcome suggestions, a sensation of uneasiness remained, resisting ejection, very deep-seated\u2014peculiar beyond ordinary.\n\nBut sleep, in the long run, proves greater than all emotions. His thoughts soon wandered again; he lay there, warm as a toast, exceedingly weary; the night soothed and comforted, blunting the edges of memory and alarm. Half an hour later he was oblivious of everything in the outer world about him.\n\nYet sleep, in this case, was his great enemy, concealing all approaches, smothering the warning of his nerves.\n\nAs, sometimes in a nightmare, events crowd upon each other's heels with a conviction of dreadfullest reality, yet some inconsistent detail accuses the whole display of incompleteness and disguise, so the events that now followed, though they actually happened, persuaded the mind somehow that the detail which could explain them had been overlooked in the confusion, and that therefore they were but partly true, the rest delusion. At the back of the sleeper's mind something remains awake, ready to let slip the judgment, \"All this is not quite real; when you wake up you'll understand.\"\n\nAnd thus, in a way, it was with Simpson. The events, not wholly inexplicable or incredible in themselves, yet remain for the man who saw and heard them a sequence of separate facts of cold horror, because the little piece that might have made the puzzle clear lay concealed or overlooked.\n\nSo far as he can recall, it was a violent movement, running downwards through the tent towards the door, that first woke him and made him aware that his companion was sitting bolt upright beside him\u2014quivering. Hours must have passed, for it was the pale gleam of the dawn that revealed his outline against the canvas. This time the man was not crying; he was quaking like a leaf; the trembling he felt plainly through the blankets down the entire length of his own body. D\u00e9fago had huddled down against him for protection, shrinking away from something that apparently concealed itself near the door-flaps of the little tent.\n\nSimpson thereupon called out in a loud voice some question or other\u2014in the first bewilderment of waking he does not remember exactly what\u2014and the man made no reply. The atmosphere and feeling of true nightmare lay horribly about him, making movement and speech both difficult. At first, indeed, he was not sure where he was\u2014whether in one of the earlier camps, or at home in his bed at Aberdeen. The sense of confusion was very troubling.\n\nAnd next\u2014almost simultaneous with his waking, it seemed\u2014the profound stillness of the dawn outside was shattered by a most uncommon sound. It came without warning, or audible approach; and it was unspeakably dreadful. It was a voice, Simpson declares, possibly a human voice; hoarse yet plaintive\u2014a soft, roaring voice close outside the tent, overhead rather than upon the ground, of immense volume, while in some strange way most penetratingly and seductively sweet. It rang out, too, in three separate and distinct notes, or cries, that bore in some odd fashion a resemblance, far-fetched yet recognisable, to the name of the guide: \"D\u00e9\u2014fa\u2014 go!\"\n\nThe student admits he is unable to describe it quite intelligently, for it was unlike any sound he had ever heard in his life, and combined a blending of such contrary qualities. \"A sort of windy, crying voice,\" he calls it, \"as of something lonely and untamed, wild and of abominable power...\"\n\nAnd, even before it ceased, dropping back into the great gulfs of silence, the guide beside him had sprung to his feet with an answering though unintelligible cry. He blundered against the tent-pole with violence, shaking the whole structure, spreading his arms out frantically for more room, and kicking his legs impetuously free of the clinging blankets. For a second, perhaps two, he stood upright by the door, his outline dark against the pallor of the dawn; then, with a furious, rushing speed, before his companion could move a hand to stop him, he shot with a plunge through the flaps of canvas\u2014and was gone. And as he went\u2014so astonishingly fast that the voice could actually be heard dying in the distance\u2014he called aloud in tones of anguished terror that at the same time held something strangely like the frenzied exultation of delight:\n\n\"Oh! oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire! Oh! oh! This height and fiery speed!\"\n\nAnd then the distance quickly buried it, and the deep silence of very early morning descended upon the forest as before.\n\nIt had all come about with such rapidity that, but for the evidence of the empty bed beside him, Simpson could almost have believed it to have been the memory of a nightmare carried over from sleep. He still felt the warm pressure of that vanished body against his side; there lay the twisted blankets in a heap; the very tent yet trembled with the vehemence of the impetuous departure. The strange words rang in his ears, as though he still heard them in the distance\u2014wild language of a suddenly stricken mind. Moreover, it was not only the senses of sight and hearing that reported uncommon things to his brain, for even while the man cried and ran, he had become aware that a strange perfume, faint yet pungent, pervaded the interior of the tent. And it was at this point, it seems, brought to himself by the consciousness that his nostrils were taking this distressing odour down into his throat, that he found his courage, sprang quickly to his feet\u2014and went out.\n\nThe grey light of dawn that dropped, cold and glimmering, between the trees revealed the scene tolerably well. There stood the tent behind him, soaked with dew; the dark ashes of the fire, still warm; the lake, white beneath a coating of mist, the islands rising darkly out of it like objects packed in wool; and patches of snow beyond among the clearer spaces of the Bush\u2014everything cold, still, waiting for the sun. But nowhere a sign of the vanished guide\u2014 still, doubtless, flying at frantic speed through the frozen woods. There was not even the sound of disappearing footsteps, nor the echoes of the dying voice. He had gone\u2014utterly.\n\nThere was nothing; nothing but the sense of his recent presence, so strongly left behind about the cam; and\u2014 this penetrating, all-pervading odour.\n\nAnd even this was now rapidly disappearing in its turn. In spite of his exceeding mental perturbation, Simpson struggled hard to detect its nature, and define it, but the ascertaining of an elusive scent, not recognised subconsciously and at once, is a very subtle operation of the mind.\n\nAnd he failed. It was gone before he could properly seize or name it. Approximate description, even, seems to have been difficult, for it was unlike any smell he knew. Acrid rather, not unlike the odour of a lion, he thinks, yet softer and not wholly unpleasing, with something almost sweet in it that reminded him of the scent of decaying garden leaves, earth, and the myriad, nameless perfumes that make up the odour of a big forest. Yet the \"odour of lions\" is the phrase with which he usually sums it all up.\n\nThen\u2014it was wholly gone, and he found himself standing by the ashes of the fire in a state of amazement and stupid terror that left him the helpless prey of anything that chose to happen. Had a musk-rat poked its pointed muzzle over a rock, or a squirrel scuttled in that instant down the bark of a tree, he would most likely have collapsed without more ado and fainted. For he felt about the whole affair the touch somewhere of a great Outer Horror\u2014and his scattered powers had not as yet had time to collect themselves into a definite attitude of fighting self-control.\n\nNothing did happen, however. A great kiss of wind ran softly through the awakening forest, and a few maple leaves here and there rustled tremblingly to earth. The sky seemed to grow suddenly much lighter. Simpson felt the cool air upon his cheek and uncovered head; realised that he was shivering with the cold; and, making a great effort, realised next that he was alone in the Bush\u2014and that he was called upon to take immediate steps to find and succour his vanished companion.\n\nMake an effort, accordingly, he did, though an ill-calculated and futile one. With that wilderness of trees about him, the sheet of water cutting him off behind, and the horror of that wild cry in his blood, he did what any other inexperienced man would have done in similar bewilderment: he ran about, without any sense of direction, like a frantic child, and called loudly without ceasing the name of the guide:\n\n\"D\u00e9fago! D\u00e9fago! D\u00e9fago!\" he yelled, and the trees gave him back the name as often as he shouted, only a little softened\u2014\"D\u00e9fago! D\u00e9fago! D\u00e9fago!\"\n\nHe followed the trail that lay for a short distance across the patches of snow, and then lost it again where the trees grew too thickly for snow to lie. He shouted till he was hoarse, and till the sound of his own voice in all that unanswering and listening world began to frighten him. His confusion increased in direct ratio to the violence of his efforts. His distress became formidably acute, till at length his exertions defeated their own object, and from sheer exhaustion he headed back to the camp again. It remains a wonder that he ever found his way. It was with great difficulty, and only after numberless false clues, that he at last saw the white tent between the trees, and so reached safety.\n\nExhaustion then applied its own remedy, and he grew calmer. He made the fire and breakfasted. Hot coffee and bacon put a little sense and judgment into him again, and he realised that he had been behaving like a boy. He now made another, and more successful attempt to face the situation collectedly, and, a nature naturally plucky coming to his assistance, he decided that he must first make as thorough a search as possible, failing success in which, he must find his way to the home camp as best he could and bring help.\n\nAnd this was what he did. Taking food, matches and rifle with him, and a small axe to blaze the trees against his return journey, he set forth. It was eight o'clock when he started, the sun shining over the tops of the trees in a sky without clouds. Pinned to a stake by the fire he left a note in case D\u00e9fago returned while he was away.\n\nThis time, according to a careful plan, he took a new direction, intending to make a wide sweep that must sooner or later cut into indications of the guide's trail; and, before he had gone a quarter of a mile he came across the tracks of a large animal in the snow, and beside it the light and smaller tracks of what were beyond question human feet\u2014 the feet of D\u00e9fago. The relief he at once experienced was natural, though brief; for at first sight he saw in these tracks a simple explanation of the whole matter: these big marks had surely been left by a bull moose that, wind against it, had blundered upon the camp, and uttered its singular cry of warning and alarm the moment its mistake was apparent. D\u00e9fago, in whom the hunting instinct was developed to the point of uncanny perfection, had scented the brute coming down the wind hours before. His excitement and disappearance were due, of course, to\u2014to his\u2014\n\nThen the impossible explanation at which he grasped faded, as common sense showed him mercilessly that none of this was true. No guide, much less a guide like D\u00e9fago, could have acted in so irrational a way, going off even without his rifle...! The whole affair demanded a far more complicated elucidation, when he remembered the details of it all\u2014the cry of terror, the amazing language, the grey face of horror when his nostrils first caught the new odour; that muffled sobbing in the darkness, and\u2014for this, too, now came back to him dimly\u2014the man's original aversion for this particular bit of country.\n\nBesides, now that he examined them closer, these were not the tracks of a moose at all! Hank had explained to him the outline of a bull's hoofs, of a cow's or calf's, too, for that matter; he had drawn them clearly on a strip of birch bark.\n\nAnd these were wholly different. They were big, round, ample, and with no pointed outline as of sharp hoofs. He wondered for a moment whether bear-tracks were like that. There was no other animal he could think of, for caribou did not come so far south at this season, and, even if they did, would leave hoof-marks.\n\nThey were ominous signs\u2014these mysterious writings left in the snow by the unknown creature that had lured a human being away from safety\u2014and when he coupled them in his imagination with that haunting sound that broke the stillness of the dawn, a momentary dizziness shook his mind, distressing him again beyond belief. He felt the threatening aspect of it all. And, stooping down to examine the marks more closely, he caught a faint whiff of that sweet yet pungent odour that made him instantly straighten up again, fighting a sensation almost of nausea.\n\nThen his memory played him another evil trick. He suddenly recalled those uncovered feet projecting beyond the edge of the tent, and the body's appearance of having been dragged towards the opening: the man's shrinking from something by the door when he woke later. The details now beat against his trembling mind with concerted attack. They seemed to gather in those deep spaces of the silent forest about him, where the host of trees stood waiting, listening, watching to see what he would do. The woods were closing round him.\n\nWith the persistence of true pluck, however, Simpson went forward, following the tracks as best he could, smothering these ugly emotions that sought to weaken his will. He blazed innumerable trees as he went, ever fearful of being unable to find the way back, and calling aloud at intervals of a few seconds the name of the guide. The dull tapping of the axe upon the massive trunks, and the unnatural accents of his own voice became at length sounds that he even dreaded to make, dreaded to hear. For they drew attention without ceasing to his presence and exact whereabouts, and if it were really the case that something was hunting himself down in the same way that he was hunting down another\u2014\n\nWith a strong effort, he crushed the thought out the instant it rose. It was the beginning, he realised, of a bewilderment utterly diabolical in kind that would speedily destroy him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 410", + "text": "Although the snow was not continuous, lying merely in shallow flurries over the more open spaces, he found no difliculty in following the tracks for the first few miles. They were straight as a ruled line wherever the trees permitted. The stride soon began to increase in length, till it finally assumed proportions that seemed absolutely impossible for any ordinary animal to have made. Like huge flying leaps they became. One of these he measured, and though he knew that \"stretch\" of eighteen feet must be somehow wrong, he was at a complete loss to understand why he found no signs on the snow between the extreme points. But what perplexed him even more, making him feel his vision had gone utterly awry, was that D\u00e9fago's stride increased in the same manner, and finally covered the same incredible distances. It looked as if the great beast had lifted him with it and carried him across these astonishing intervals. Simpson, who was much longer in the limb, found that he could not compass even half the stretch by taking a running jump.\n\nAnd the sight of these huge tracks, running side by side, silent evidence of a dreadful journey in which terror or madness had urged to impossible results, was profoundly moving. It shocked him in the secret depths of his soul. It was the most horrible thing his eyes had ever looked upon. He began to follow them mechanically, absent-mindedly almost, ever peering over his shoulder to see if he, too, were being followed by something with a gigantic tread... And soon it came about that he no longer quite realised what it was they signified\u2014these impressions left upon the snow by something nameless and untamed, always accompanied by the footmarks of the little French Canadian, his guide, his comrade, the man who had shared his tent a few hours before, chatting, laughing, even singing by his side...\n\nFor a man of his years and inexperience, only a canny Scot, perhaps, grounded in common sense and established in logic, could have preserved even that measure of balance that this youth somehow or other did manage to preserve through the whole adventure. Otherwise, two things he presently noticed, while forging pluckily ahead, must have sent him headlong back to the comparative safety of his tent, instead of only making his hands close more tightly upon the rifle-stock, while his heart, trained for the Wee Kirk, sent a wordless prayer winging its way to heaven. Both tracks, he saw, had undergone a change, and this change, so far as it concerned the footsteps of the man, was in some undecipherable manner\u2014appalling.\n\nIt was in the bigger tracks he first noticed this, and for a long time he could not quite believe his eyes. Was it the blown leaves that produced odd effects of light and shade, or that the dry snow, drifting like finely-ground rice about the edges, cast shadows and high lights? Or was it actually the fact that the great marks had become faintly coloured? For round about the deep, plunging holes of the animal there now appeared a mysterious, reddish tinge that was more like an effect of light than of anything that dyed the substance of the snow itself. Every mark had it, and had it increasingly\u2014this indistinct fiery tinge that painted a new touch of ghastliness into the picture.\n\nBut when, wholly unable to explain or credit it, he turned his attention to the other tracks to discover if they, too, bore similar witness, he noticed that these had meanwhile undergone a change that was infinitely worse, and charged with far more horrible suggestion. For, in the last hundred yards or so, he saw that they had grown gradually into the semblance of the parent tread.\n\nImperceptibly the change had come about, yet unmistakably. It was hard to see where the change first began. The result, however, was beyond question. Smaller, neater, more cleanly modelled, they formed now an exact and careful duplicate of the larger tracks beside them. The feet that produced them had, therefore, also changed. And something in his mind reared up with loathing and with terror as he saw it.\n\nSimpson, for the first time, hesitated; then, ashamed of his alarm and indecision, took a few hurried steps ahead; the next instant stopped dead in his tracks. Immediately in front of him all signs of the trail ceased; both tracks came to an abrupt end. On all sides, for a hundred yards and more, he searched in vain for the least indication of their continuance. There was\u2014nothing.\n\nThe trees were very thick just there, big trees all of them, spruce, cedar, hemlock; there was no underbrush. He stood, looking about him, all distraught; bereft of any power of judgment.\n\nThen he set to work again, and again, and yet again, but always with the same result: nothing. The feet that printed the surface of the snow thus far had now, apparently, left the ground!\n\nAnd it was in that moment of distress and confusion that the whip of terror laid its most nicely calculated lash about his heart. It dropped with deadly effect upon the sorest spot of all, completely unnerving him. He had been secretly dreading all the time that it would come\u2014and come it did.\n\nFar overhead, muted by great height and distance, strangely thinned and wailing, he heard the crying voice of D\u00e9fago, the guide.\n\nThe sound dropped upon him out of that still, wintry sky with an effect of dismay and terror unsurpassed. The rifle fell to his feet. He stood motionless an instant, listening as it were with his whole body, then staggered back against the nearest tree for support, disorganised hopelessly in mind and spirit. To him, in that moment, it seemed the most shattering and dislocating experience he had ever known, so that his heart emptied itself of all feeling whatsoever as by a sudden draught.\n\n\"Oh! oh! This fiery height! Oh, my feet of fire! My burning feet of fire...!\" ran in far, beseeching accents of indescribable appeal this voice of anguish down the sky. Once it called\u2014then silence through all the listening wilderness of trees.\n\nAnd Simpson, scarcely knowing what he did, presently found himself running wildly to and fro, searching, calling, tripping over roots and boulders, and flinging himself in a frenzy of undirected pursuit after the Caller. Behind the screen of memory and emotion with which experience veils events, he plunged, distracted and half-deranged, picking up false lights like a ship at sea, terror in his eyes and heart and soul. For the Panic of the Wilderness had called to him in that far voice\u2014the Power of untamed Distance\u2014the Enticement of the Desolation that destroys. He knew in that moment all the pains of someone hopelessly and irretrievably lost, suffering the lust and travail of a soul in the final Loneliness. A vision of D\u00e9fago, eternally hunted, driven and pursued across the skiey vastness of those ancient forests fled like a flame across the dark ruin of his thoughts...\n\nIt seemed ages before he could find anything in the chaos of his disorganised sensations to which he could anchor himself steady for a moment, and think...\n\nThe cry was not repeated; his own hoarse calling brought no response; the inscrutable forces of the Wild had summoned their victim beyond recall\u2014and held him fast." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 411", + "text": "Yet he searched and called, it seems, for hours afterwards, for it was late in the afternoon when at length he decided to abandon a useless pursuit and return to his camp on the shores of Fifty Island Water. Even then he went with reluctance, that crying voice still echoing in his ears. With difficulty he found his rifle and the homeward trail. The concentration necessary to follow the badly blazed trees, and a biting hunger that gnawed, helped to keep his mind steady. Otherwise, he admits, the temporary aberration he had suffered might have been prolonged to the point of positive disaster. Gradually the ballast shifted back again, and he regained something that approached his normal equilibrium.\n\nBut for all that the journey through the gathering dusk was miserably haunted. He heard innumerable following footsteps; voices that laughed and whispered; and saw figures crouching behind trees and boulders, making signs to one another for a concerted attack the moment he had passed. The creeping murmur of the wind made him start and listen. He went stealthily, trying to hide where possible, and making as little sound as he could. The shadows of the woods, hitherto protective or covering merely, had now become menacing, challenging; and the pageantry in his frightened mind masked a host of possibilities that were all the more ominous for being obscure. The presentiment of a nameless doom lurked ill-concealed behind every detail of what had happened.\n\nIt was really admirable how he emerged victor in the end; men of riper powers and experience might have come through the ordeal with less success. He had himself tolerably well in hand, all things considered, and his plan of action proves it. Sleep being absolutely out of the question, and travelling an unknown trail in the darkness equally impracticable, he sat up the whole of that night, rifle in hand, before a fire he never for a single moment allowed to die down. The severity of the haunted vigil marked his soul for life; but it was successfully accomplished; and with the very first signs of dawn he set forth upon the long return journey to the home-camp to get help. As before, he left a written note to explain his absence, and to indicate where he had left a plentiful cache of food and matches\u2014though he had no expectation that any human hands would find them!\n\nHow Simpson found his way alone by lake and forest might well make a story in itself, for to hear him tell it is to know the passionate loneliness of soul that a man can feel when the Wilderness holds him in the hollow of its illimitable hand\u2014and laughs. It is also to admire his indomitable pluck.\n\nHe claims no skill, declaring that he followed the almost invisible trail mechanically, and without thinking. And this, doubtless, is the truth. He relied upon the guiding of the unconscious mind, which is instinct. Perhaps, too, some sense of orientation, known to animals and primitive men, may have helped as well, for through all that tangled region he succeeded in reaching the exact spot where D\u00e9fago had hidden the canoe nearly three days before with the remark,\n\n\"Strike doo west across the lake into the sun to find the camp.\"\n\nThere was not much sun left to guide him, but he used his compass to the best of his ability, embarking in the frail craft for the last twelve miles of his journey with a sensation of immense relief that the forest was at last behind him. And, fortunately, the water was calm; he took his line across the centre of the lake instead of coasting round the shores for another twenty miles. Fortunately, too, the other hunters were back. The light of their fires furnished a steering-point without which he might have searched all night long for the actual position of the camp.\n\nIt was close upon midnight all the same when his canoe grated on the sandy cove, and Hank, Punk and his uncle, disturbed in their sleep by his cries, ran quickly down and helped a very exhausted and broken specimen of Scotch humanity over the rocks towards a dying fire.\n\nThe sudden entrance of his prosaic uncle into this world of wizardry and horror that had haunted him without interruption now for two days and two nights, had the immediate effect of giving to the affair an entirely new aspect. The sound of that crisp \"Hulloa, my boy! And what's up now?\" and the grasp of that dry and vigorous hand introduced another standard of judgment. A revulsion of feeling washed through him. He realised that he had let himself \"go\" rather badly. He even felt vaguely ashamed of himself. The native hard-headedness of his race reclaimed him.\n\nAnd this doubtless explains why he found it so hard to tell that group round the fire\u2014everything. He told enough, however, for the immediate decision to be arrived at that a relief party must start at the earliest possible moment, and that Simpson, in order to guide it capably, must first have food and, above all, sleep. Dr. Cathcart observing the lad's condition more shrewdly than his patient knew, gave him a very slight injection of morphine. For six hours he slept like the dead.\n\nFrom the description carefully written out afterwards by this student of divinity, it appears that the account he gave to the astonished group omitted sundry vital and important details, He declares that, with his uncle's wholesome, matter-of-fact countenance staring him in the face, he simply had not the courage to mention them. Thus, all the search-party gathered, it would seem, was that D\u00e9fago had suffered in the night an acute and inexplicable attack of mania, had imagined himself \"called\" by someone or something, and had plunged into the Bush after it without food or rifle, where he must die a horrible and lingering death by cold arid starvation unless he could be found and rescued in rime. \"In time\", moreover, meant \"at once\".\n\nIn the course of the following day, however\u2014they were off by seven, leaving Punk in charge with instructions to have food and fire always ready\u2014Simpson found it possible to tell his uncle a good deal more of the story's true inwardness, without divining that it was drawn out of him as a matter of fact by a very subtle form of cross-examination. By the time they reached the beginning of the trail, where the canoe was laid up against the return journey, he had mentioned how D\u00e9fago spoke vaguely of \"something he called a 'Wendigo'\"; how he cried in his sleep; how he imagined an unusual scent about the camp; and had betrayed other symptoms of mental excitement. He also admitted the bewildering effect of \"that extraordinary odour\" upon himself, \"pungent and acrid like the odour of lions\". And by the time they were within an easy hour of Fifty Island Water he had let slip the further fact\u2014a foolish avowal of his own hysterical condition, as he felt afterwards\u2014that he had heard the vanished guide call \"for help\". He omitted the singular phrases used, for he simply could not bring himself to repeat the preposterous language. Also, while describing how the man's footsteps in the snow had gradually assumed an exact miniature likeness of the animal's plunging tracks, he left out the fact that they measured a wholly incredible distance. It seemed a question, nicely balanced between individual pride and honesty, what he should reveal and what suppress. He mentioned the fiery tinge in the snow, for instance, yet shrank from telling that body and bed had been partly dragged out of the tent...\n\nWith the net result that Dr. Cathcart, adroit psychologist that he fancied himself to be, had assured him clearly enough exactly where his mind, influenced by loneliness, bewilderment and terror, had yielded to the strain and invited delusion. While praising his conduct, he managed at the same time to point out where, when, and how his mind had gone astray. He made his nephew think himself finer than he was by judicious praise, yet more foolish than he was by minimising the value of his evidence. Like many another materialist, that is, he lied cleverly on the basis of insufficient knowledge, because the knowledge supplied seemed to his own particular intelligence inadmissible.\n\n\"The spell of these terrible solitudes,\" he said, \" cannot leave any mind untouched, any mind, that is, possessed of the higher imaginative qualities. It has worked upon yours exactly as it worked upon my own when I was your age. The animal that haunted your little camp was undoubtedly a moose, for the 'belling' of a moose may have, sometimes, a very peculiar quality of sound. The coloured appearance of the big tracks was obviously a defect of vision in your own eyes produced by excitement. The size and stretch of the tracks we shall prove when we come to them. But the hallucination of an audible voice, of course, is one of the commonest forms of delusion due to mental excitement\u2014 an excitement, my dear boy, perfectly excusable, and, let me add, wonderfully controlled by you under the circumstances. For the rest, I am bound to say, you have acted with a splendid courage, for the terror of feeling oneself lost in this wilderness is nothing short of awful, and, had I been in your place, I don't for a moment believe I could have behaved with one quarter of your wisdom and decision. The only thing I find it uncommonly difficult to explain is\u2014that\u2014damned odour.\"\n\n\"It made me feel sick, I assure you,\" declared his nephew, \"positively dizzy!\" His uncle's attitude of calm omniscience, merely because he knew more psychological formul\u00e6, made him slightly defiant. It was so easy to be wise in the explanation of an experience one has not personally witnessed. \"A kind of desolate and terrible odour is the only way I can describe it,\" he concluded, glancing at the features of the quiet, unemotional man beside him.\n\n\"I can only marvel,\" was the reply, \"that under the circumstances it did not seem to you even worse.\" The dry words, Simpson knew, hovered between the truth, and his uncle's interpretation of \"the truth\"." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 412", + "text": "And so at last they came to the little camp and found the tent still standing, the remains of the fire, and the piece of paper pinned to a stake beside it\u2014untouched. The cache, poorly contrived by inexperienced hands, however, had been discovered and opened\u2014by musk rats, mink and squirrel. The matches lay scattered about the opening. but the food had been taken to the last crumb.\n\n\"Well, fellers, he ain't here,\" exclaimed Hank loudly after his fashion, \"and that's as sartain as the coal supply down below! But whar he's got to by this time is 'bout as onsartain as the trade in crowns in t'other place.\" The presence of a divinity student was no barrier to his language at such a time, though for the reader's sake it may be severely edited. \"I propose,\" he added, \"that we start out at once an' hunt for'm like hell!\"\n\nThe gloom of D\u00e9fago's probable fate oppressed the whole party with a sense of dreadful gravity the moment they saw the familiar signs of recent occupancy. Especially the tent. with the bed of balsam branches still smoothed and flattened by the pressure of his body, seemed to bring his presence near to them. Simpson, feeling vaguely as if his word were somehow at stake, went about explaining particulars in a hushed tone. He was much calmer now, though over-wearied with the strain of his many journeys. His uncle's method of explaining\u2014\"explaining away\", rather\u2014the details still fresh in his haunted memory helped, too, to put ice upon his emotions.\n\n\"And that's the direction he ran off in,\" he said to his two companions, pointing in the direction where the guide had vanished that morning in the grey dawn. \"Straight down there he ran like a deer, in between the birch and the hemlock...\n\nHank and Dr. Cathcart exchanged glances.\n\n\"And it was about two miles down there, in a straight line,\" continued the other, speaking with something of the former terror in his voice, \"that I followed his trail to the place where\u2014it stopped\u2014dead!\"\n\n\"And where you heered him callin' an' caught the stench, an' all the rest of the wicked entertainment,\" cried Hank, with a volubility that betrayed his keen distress.\n\n\"And where your excitement overcame you to the point of producing illusions,\" added Dr. Cathcart under his breath, yet not so low that his nephew did not hear it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 413", + "text": "It was early in the afternoon, for they had travelled quickly, and there were still a good two hours of daylight left. Dr. Cathcart and Hank lost no time in beginning the search, but Simpson was too exhausted to accompany them. They would follow the blazed marks on the trees, and where possible, his footsteps. Meanwhile the best thing he could do was to keep a good fire going, and rest.\n\nBut after something like three hours' search, the darkness already down, the two men returned to camp with nothing to report. Fresh snow had covered all signs, and though they had followed the blazed trees to the spot where Simpson had turned back, they had not discovered the smallest indications of a human being\u2014or, for that matter, of an animal. There were no fresh tracks of any kind; the snow lay undisturbed.\n\nIt was difficult to know what was best to do, though in reality there was nothing more they could do. They might stay and search for weeks without much chance of success. The fresh snow destroyed their only hope, and they gathered round the fire for supper, a gloomy and despondent party. The facts, indeed, were sad enough, for D\u00e9fago had a wife at Rat Portage, and his earnings were the family's sole means of support.\n\nNow that the whole truth in all its ugliness was out, it seemed useless to deal in further disguise or pretence. They talked openly of the facts and probabilities. It was not the first time, even in the experience of Dr. Cathcart, that a man had yielded to the singular seduction of the Solitudes and gone out of his mind; D\u00e9fago, moreover, was pre disposed to something of the sort, for he already had the touch of melancholia in his blood, and his fibre was weakened by bouts of drinking that often lasted for weeks at a time. Something on this trip\u2014one might never know precisely what\u2014had sufficed to push him over the line, that was all. And he had gone, gone off into the great wilderness of trees and lakes to die by starvation and exhaustion. The chances against his finding camp again were overwhelming; the delirium that was upon him would also doubtless have increased, and it was quite likely he might do violence to himself and so hasten his cruel fate. Even while they talked, indeed, the end had probably come. On the suggestion of Hank, his old pal, however, they proposed to wait a little longer and devote the whole of the following day, from dawn to darkness, to the most systematic search they could devise. They would divide the territory between them. They discussed their plan in great detail. All that men could do they would do.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, they talked about the particular form in which the singular Panic of the Wilderness had made its attack upon the mind of the unfortunate guide. Hank, though familiar with the legend in its general outline, obviously did not welcome the turn the conversation had taken. He contributed little, though that little was illuminating. For he admitted that a story ran over all this section of country to the effect that several Indians had \"seen the Wendigo\" along the shores of Fifty Island Water in the \"fall\" of last year, and that this was the true reason of D\u00e9fago's disinclination to hunt there. Hank doubtless felt that he had in a sense helped his old pal to death by over-persuading him. \"When an Indian goes crazy,\" he explained, talking to himself more than to the others, it seemed, \"it's always put that he's 'seen the Wendigo'. An' pore old D\u00e9fago was superstitious down to his very heels...!\"\n\nAnd then Simpson, feeling the atmosphere more sympathetic, told over again the full story of his astonishing tale; he left out no details this time; he mentioned his own sensations and gripping fears. He only omitted the strange language used.\n\n\"But D\u00e9fago surely had already told you all these details of the Wendigo legend, my dear fellow,\" insisted the doctor. \"I mean, he had talked about it, and thus put into your mind the ideas which your own excitement afterwards developed?\"\n\nWhereupon Simpson again repeated the facts. D\u00e9fago, he declared, had barely mentioned the beast. He, Simpson, knew nothing of the story, and, so far as he remembered, had never even read about it. Even the word was unfamiliar.\n\nOf course he was telling the truth, and Dr. Cathcart was reluctantly compelled to admit the singular character of the whole affair. He did not do this in words so much as in manner, however. He kept his back against a good, stout tree; he poked the fire into a blaze the moment it showed signs of dying down; he was quicker than any of them to notice the least sound in the night about them\u2014a fish jumping in the lake, a twig snapping in the bush, the dropping of occasional fragments of frozen snow from the branches overhead where the heat loosened them. His voice, too, changed a little in quality, becoming a shade less confident, lower also in tone. Fear, to put it plainly, hovered close about that little camp, and though all three would have been glad to speak of other matters, the only thing they seemed able to discuss was this\u2014the source of their fear. They tried other subjects in vain; there was nothing to say about them. Hank was the most honest of the group; he said next to nothing. He never once, however, turned his back to the darkness. His face was always to the forest, and when wood was needed he didn't go farther than was necessary to get it.\n\nA wall of silence wrapped them in, for the snow, though not thick, was sufficient to deaden any noise, and the frost held things pretty tight besides. No sound but their voices and the soft roar of the flames made itself heard. Only, from time to time, something soft as the flutter of a pine-moth's wings went past them through the air. No one seemed anxious to go to bed. The hours slipped towards midnight.\n\n\"The legend is picturesque enough,\" observed the doctor after one of the longer pauses, speaking to break it rather than because he had anything to say, \"for the Wendigo is simply the Call of the Wild personified, which some natures hear to their own destruction.\"\n\n\"That's about it,\" Hank said presently. \"An' there's no misunderstandin' when you hear it. It calls you by name right 'nough.\"\n\nAnother pause followed. Then Dr. Cathcart came back to the forbidden subject with a rush that made the others jump.\n\n\"The allegory is significant,\" he remarked, looking about him into the darkness, \"for the Voice, they say, resembles all the minor sounds of the Bush\u2014wind, falling water, cries of animals, and so forth. And, once the victim hears that\u2014 he's off for good, of course! His most vulnerable points, moreover, are said to be the feet and the eyes; the feet, you see, for the lust of wandering, and the eyes for the lust of beauty. The poor beggar goes at such a dreadful speed that he bleeds beneath the eyes, and his feet burn.\"\n\nDr. Cathcart, as he spoke, continued to peer uneasily into the surrounding gloom. His voice sank to a hushed tone.\n\n\"The Wendigo,\" he added, \"is said to burn his feet\u2014 owing to the friction, apparently caused by its tremendous velocity\u2014till they drop off, and new ones form exactly like its own.\"\n\nSimpson listened in horrified amazement; but it was the pallor on Hank's face that fascinated him most. He would willingly have stopped his ears and closed his eyes, had he dared.\n\n\"It don't always keep to the ground neither,\" came in Hank's slow, heavy drawl, \"for it goes so high that he thinks the stars have set him all a-fire. An' it'll take great thumpin' jumps sometimes, an' run along the tops of the trees, carrying its partner with it, an' then droppin' him jest as a fish-hawk'll drop a pickerel to kill it before eatin'. An' its food, of all the muck in the whole Bush is\u2014moss!\" And he laughed a short, unnatural laugh. \"It's a moss-eater, is the Wendigo,\" he added, looking up excitedly into the faces of his companions, \"moss-eater,\" he repeated, with a string of the most outlandish oaths he could invent.\n\nBut Simpson now understood the true purpose of all this talk. What these two men, each strong and \"experienced\" in his own way, dreaded more than anything else was\u2014silence. They were talking against time. They were also talking against darkness, against the invasion of panic, against the admission reflection might bring that they were in an enemy's country\u2014against anything, in fact, rather than allow their inmost thoughts to assume control. He himself, already initiated by the awful vigil with terror, was beyond both of them in this respect. He had reached the stage where he was immune. But these two, the scoffing, analytical doctor, and the honest, dogged backwoodsman, each sat trembling in the depths of his being.\n\nThus the hours passed; and thus, with lowered voices and a kind of taut inner resistance of spirit, this little group of humanity sat in the jaws of the wilderness and talked foolishly of the terrible and haunting legend. It was an unequal contest, all things considered, for the wilderness had already the advantage of first attack\u2014and of a hostage. The fate of their comrade hung over them with a steadily increasing weight of oppression that finally became insupportable.\n\nIt was Hank, after a pause longer than the preceding ones that no one seemed able to break, who first let loose all this pent-up emotion in very unexpected fashion, by springing suddenly to his feet and letting out the most ear-shattering yell imaginable into the night. He could not contain himself any longer, it seemed. To make it carry even beyond an ordinary cry he interrupted its rhythm by shaking the palm of his hand before his mouth.\n\n\"That's for D\u00e9fago,\" he said, looking down at the other two with a queer, defiant laugh, \"for it's my belief\"\u2014the sandwiched oaths may be omitted\u2014\"that my old partner's not far from us at this very minute.\"\n\nThere was a vehemence and recklessness about his performance that made Simpson, too, start to his feet in amazement, and betrayed even the doctor into letting the pipe slip from between his lips. Hank's face was ghastly, but Cathcart's showed a sudden weakness\u2014a loosening of all his faculties, as it were. Then a momentary anger blazed into his eyes, and he too, though with deliberation born of habitual self-control, got upon his feet and faced the excited guide. For this was unpermissible, foolish, dangerous, and he meant to stop it in the bud.\n\nWhat might have happened in the next minute or two one may speculate about, yet never definitely know, for in the instant of profound silence that followed Hank's roaring voice, and as though in answer to it, something went past through the darkness of the sky overhead at terrific speed\u2014something of necessity very large, for it displaced much air, while down between the trees there fell a faint and windy cry of a human voice, calling in tones of indescribable anguish and appeal:\n\n\"Oh, oh! this fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire!\"\n\nWhite to the very edge of his shirt, Hank looked stupidly about him like a child. Dr. Cathcart uttered some kind of unintelligible cry, turning as he did so with an instinctive movement of blind terror towards the protection of the tent, then halting in the act as though frozen. Simpson, alone of the three, retained his presence of mind a little. His own horror was too deep to allow of any immediate reaction. He had heard that cry before.\n\nTurning to his stricken companions, he said almost calmly:\n\n\"That's exactly the cry I heard\u2014the very words he used!\"\n\nThen, lifting his face to the sky, he cried aloud, \"D\u00e9fago, D\u00e9fago! Come down here to us! Come down\u2014!\"\n\nAnd before there was time for anybody to take definite action one way or another, there came the sound of something dropping heavily between the trees, striking the branches on the way down, and landing with a dreadful thud upon the frozen earth below. The crash and thunder of it was really terrific.\n\n\"That's him, s'help me the good Gawd!\" came from Hank in a whispering cry half choked, his hand going automatically towards the hunting-knife in his belt. \"And he's coming! He's coming!\" he added, with an irrational laugh of terror, as the sounds of heavy footsteps crunching over the snow became distinctly audible, approaching through the blackness towards the circle of light.\n\nAnd while the steps, with their stumbling motion, moved nearer and nearer upon them, the three men stood round that fire, motionless and dumb. Dr. Cathcart had the appearance as of a man suddenly withered; even his eyes did not move. Hank, suffering shockingly, seemed on the verge again of violent action; yet did nothing. He, too, was hewn of stone. Like stricken children they seemed. The picture was hideous. And, meanwhile, their owner still invisible, the footsteps came closer, crunching the frozen snow. It was endless\u2014too prolonged to be quite real\u2014this measured and pitiless approach. It was accursed.\n\nThen at length the darkness, having thus laboriously conceived, brought forth\u2014a figure. It drew forward into the zone of uncertain light where fire and shadows mingled, not ten feet away; then halted, staring at them fixedly. The same instant it started forward again with the spasmodic motion as of a thing moved by wires, and coming up closer to them, full into the glare of the fire, they perceived then that\u2014it was a man; and apparently that this man was\u2014 D\u00e9fago.\n\nSomething like a skin of horror almost perceptibly drew down in that moment over every face, and three pairs of eyes shone through it as though they saw across the frontiers of normal vision into the Unknown.\n\nD\u00e9fago advanced, his tread faltering and uncertain; he made his way straight up to them as a group first, then turned sharply and peered close into the face of Simpson. The sound of a voice issued from his lips:\n\n\"Here I am, Boss Simpson. I heered someone calling me.\" It was a faint, dried up voice, made wheezy and breathless as by immense exertion. \"I'm havin' a reg'lar hell-fire kind of a trip, I am.\" And he laughed, thrusting his head forward into the other's face.\n\nBut that laugh started the machinery of the group of wax-work figures with the wax-white skins. Hank immediately sprang forward with a stream of oaths so far-fetched that Simpson did not recognise them as English at all, but thought he had lapsed into Indian or some other lingo. He only realised that Hank's presence, thrust thus between them, was welcome\u2014uncommonly welcome. Dr. Cathcart, though more calmly and leisurely, advanced behind him, heavily stumbling.\n\nSimpson seems hazy as to what was actually said and done in those next few seconds, for the eyes of that detestable and blasted visage peering at such close quarters into his own utterly bewildered his senses at first. He merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trained will of the older men that forced them into action in defiance of all emotional stress. He watched them moving as behind a glass that half destroyed their reality; it was dream-like, perverted. Yet, through the torrent of Hank's meaningless phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle's tone of authority\u2014hard and forced\u2014saying several things about food and warmth, blankets, whisky and the rest... and, further, that whiffs of that penetrating, unaccustomed odour, vile, yet sweetly bewildering, assailed his nostrils during all that followed.\n\nIt was no less a person than himself, however\u2014less experienced and adroit than the others though he was\u2014who gave instinctive utterance to the sentence that brought a measure of relief into the ghastly situation by expressing the doubt and thought in each one's heart.\n\n\"It is\u2014 YOU, isn't it D\u00e9fago?\" he asked under his breath, horror breaking his speech.\n\nAnd at once Cathcart burst out with the loud answer before the other had time to move his lips. \"Of course it is! Of course it is! Only\u2014can't you see\u2014he's nearly dead with exhaustion, cold and terror. Isn't that enough to change a man beyond all recognition?\" It was said in order to convince himself as much as to convince the others. The over-emphasis alone proved that. And continually, while he spoke and acted, he held a handkerchief to his nose. That odour pervaded the whole camp.\n\nFor the \"D\u00e9fago\" who sat huddled by the big fire, wrapped in blankets, drinking hot whisky and holding food in wasted hands, was no more like the guide they had last seen alive than the picture of a man of sixty is like a daguerreotype of his early youth in the costume of another generation. Nothing really can describe that ghastly caricature, that parody, masquerading there in the firelight as D\u00e9fago. From the ruins of the dark and awful memories he still retains, Simpson declares that the face was more animal than human, the features drawn about into wrong proportions, the skin loose and hanging, as though he had been subjected to extraordinary pressures and tensions. It made him think vaguely of those bladder-faces blown up by the hawkers on Ludgate Hill, that change their expression as they swell, and as they collapse emit a faint and wailing imitation of a voice. Both face and voice suggested some such abominable resemblance. But Cathcart long afterwards, seeking to describe the indescribable, asserts that thus might have looked a face and body that had been in air so rarified that, the weight of atmosphere being removed, the entire structure threatened to fly asunder and become\u2014incoherent...\n\nIt was Hank, though all distraught and shaking with a tearing volume of emotion he could neither handle nor understand, who brought things to a head without much ado. He went off to a little distance from the fire, apparently so that the light should not dazzle him too much, and shading his eyes for a moment with both hands, shouted in a loud voice that held anger and affection dreadfully mingled:\n\n\"You ain't D\u00e9fago! You ain't D\u00e9fago at all! I don't give a \u2014 damn, but that ain't you, my ole pal of twenty years!\" He glared upon the huddled figure as though he would destroy him with his eyes. \"An' if it is I'll swab the floor of hell with a wad of cotton-wool on a toothpick, s'help me the good Gawd!\" he added, with a violent fling of horror and disgust.\n\nIt was impossible to silence him. He stood there shouting like one possessed, horrible to see, horrible to hear\u2014because it was the truth. He repeated himself in fifty different ways, each more outlandish than the last. The woods rang with echoes. At one time it looked as if he meant to fling himself upon \"the intruder\", for his hand continually jerked towards the long hunting-knife in his belt.\n\nBut in the end he did nothing, and the whole tempest completed itself very nearly with tears. Hank's voice suddenly broke, he collapsed on the ground, and Cathcart somehow or other persuaded him at last to go into the tent and lie quiet. The remainder of the affair, indeed, was witnessed by him from behind the canvas, his white and terrified face peeping through the crack of the tent door-flap.\n\nThen Dr. Cathcart, closely followed by his nephew who so far had kept his courage better than all of them, went up with a determined air and stood opposite to the figure of D\u00e9fago huddled over the fire. He looked him squarely in the face and spoke. At first his voice was firm.\n\n\"D\u00e9fago, tell us what's happened\u2014just a little, so that we can know bow best to help you?\" he asked in a tone of authority, almost of command. And at that point, it was command. At once afterwards, however, it changed in quality, for the figure turned up to him a face so piteous, so terrible and so little like humanity, that the doctor shrank back from him as from something spiritually unclean. Simpson watching close behind him says he got the impression of a mask that was on the verge of dropping off, and that underneath they would discover something black and diabolical, revealed in utter nakedness. \"Out with it, man, out with it!\" Cathcart cried, terror running neck and neck with entreaty. \"None of us can stand this much longer...! \" It was the cry of instinct over reason.\n\nAnd then \"D\u00e9fago\", smiling whitely, answered in that thin and fading voice that already seemed passing over into a sound of quite another character\u2014 \"I seen that great Wendigo thing,\" he whispered, sniffing the air about him exactly like an animal. \"I been with it too\u2014\"\n\nWhether the poor devil would have said more, or whether Dr. Cathcart would have continued the impossible cross-examination cannot be known, for at that moment the voice of Hank was heard yelling at the top of his shout from behind the canvas that concealed all but his terrified eyes. Such a howling was never heard.\n\n\"His feet! Oh, Gawd, his feet! Look at his great changed\u2014feet!\"\n\nD\u00e9fago, shuffling where he sat, had moved in such a way that for the first time his legs were in full light and his feet were visible. Yet Simpson had no time, himself, to see properly what Hank had seen. And Hank has never seen fit to tell. That same instant, with a leap like that of a frightened tiger, Cathcart was upon him, bundling the folds of blanket about his legs with such speed that the young student caught little more than a passing glimpse of something dark and oddly massed where moccasined feet ought to have been, and saw even that but with uncertain vision.\n\nThen, before the doctor had time to do more, or Simpson time to even think a question, much less ask it, D\u00e9fago was standing upright in front of them, balancing with pain arid difficulty, and upon his shapeless and twisted visage an expression so dark and so malicious that it was, in the true sense, monstrous.\n\n\"Now you seen it too,\" he wheezed, \"you seen my fiery, burning feet! And now\u2014that is, unless you kin save me an' prevent\u2014it's 'bout time for\u2014\"\n\nHis piteous and beseeching voice was interrupted by a sound that was like the roar of wind coming across the lake. The trees overhead shook their tangled branches. The blazing fire bent its flames as before a blast. And something swept with a terrific, rushing noise about the little camp and seemed to surround it entirely in a single moment of time. D\u00e9fago shook the clinging blankets from his body, turned towards the woods behind, and with the same stumbling motion that had brought him\u2014was gone: gone, before anyone could move muscle to prevent him, gone with an amazing, blundering swiftness that left no time to act. The darkness positively swallowed him; and less than a dozen seconds later, above the roar of the swaying trees and the shout of the sudden wind, all three men, watching and listening with stricken hearts, heard a cry that seemed to drop down upon them from a great height of sky and distance\u2014 \"Oh, oh! This fiery height! Oh, oh! My feet of fire! My burning feet of fire...!\" then died away, into untold space and silence.\n\nDr. Cathcart\u2014suddenly master of himself, and therefore of the others\u2014was just able to seize Hank violently by the arm as he tried to dash headlong into the Bush.\n\n\"But I want ter know, \u2014 you!\" shrieked the guide. \"I want ter see! That ain't him at all, but some \u2014 devil that's shunted into his place...!\"\n\nSomehow or other\u2014he admits he never quite knew how he accomplished it\u2014he managed to keep him in the tent and pacify him. The doctor, apparently, had reached the stage where reaction had set in and allowed his own innate force to conquer. Certainly he \"managed\" Hank admirably. It was his nephew, however, hitherto so wonderfully controlled, who gave him most cause for anxiety, for the cumulative strain had now produced a condition of lachrymose hysteria which made it necessary to isolate him upon a bed of boughs and blankets as far removed from Hank as was possible under the circumstances.\n\nAnd there he lay, as the watches of that haunted night passed over the lonely camp, crying startled sentences, and fragments of sentences, into the folds of his blankets. A quantity of gibberish about speed and height and fire mingled oddly with biblical memories of the class-room. \"People with broken faces all on fire are coming at a most awful, awful, pace towards the camp!\" he would moan one minute; and the next would sit up and stare into the woods, intently listening, and whisper, \"How terrible in the wilderness are\u2014are the feet of them that\u2014\" until his uncle came across to change the direction of his thoughts and comfort him.\n\nThe hysteria, fortunately, proved but temporary. Sleep cured him, just as it cured Hank.\n\nTill the first signs of daylight came, soon after five o'clock, Dr. Cathcart kept his vigil. His face was the colour of chalk and there were strange flushes beneath the eyes. An appalling terror of the soul battled with his will all through those silent hours. These were some of the outer signs...\n\nAt dawn he lit the fire himself, made breakfast, and woke the others, and by seven they were well on their way back to the home camp\u2014three perplexed and afflicted men, but each in his own way having reduced his inner turmoil to a condition of more or less systematised order again.\n\nThey talked little, and then only of the most wholesome and common things, for their minds were charged with painful thoughts that clamoured for explanation, though no one dared refer to them. Hank, being nearest to primitive conditions, was the first to find himself, for he was also less complex. In Dr. Carthcart \"civilisation\" championed his forces against an attack singular enough. To this day, perhaps, he is not quite sure of certain things. Anyhow, he took longer to \"find himself\".\n\nSimpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what be termed years later in a sermon \"savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists\".\n\nWith his uncle he never discussed the matter in detail, for the barrier between the two types of mind made it difficult. Only once, years later, something led them to the frontier of the subject\u2014of a single detail of the subject, rather:\n\n\"Can't you even tell me what\u2014they were like?\" he asked; and the reply, though conceived in wisdom, was not encouraging, \"It is far better you should not try to know, or to find out.\"\n\nWell\u2014that odour\u2014?\" persisted the nephew. \"What do you make of that?\"\n\nDr. Cathcart looked at him and raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"Odours,\" he replied, \"are not so easy as sounds and sights of telepathic communication. I make as much, or as little, probably, as you do yourself.\"\n\nHe was not quite so glib as usual with his explanations. That was all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 414", + "text": "At the fall of day, cold, exhausted, famished, the party caMe to the end of the long portage and dragged themselves into a camp that at first glimpse seemed empty. Fire there was none, and no Punk came forward to welcome them. The emotional capacity of all three was too over-spent to recognise either surprise or annoyance; but the cry of spontaneous affection that burst from the lips of Hank, as he rushed ahead of them towards the fireplace, came probably as a warning that the cud of the amazing affair was not quite yet. And both Cathcart and his nephew confessed afterwards that when they saw him kneel down in his excitement and embrace something that reclined, gently moving, beside the extinguished ashes, they felt in their very bones that this \"something\" would prove to be D\u00e9fago\u2014the true Ddago returned.\n\nAnd so, indeed, it was.\n\nIt is soon told. Exhausted to the point of emaciation, the French Canadian\u2014what was left of him, that is\u2014fumbled among the ashes, trying to make a fire. His body crouched there, the weak fingers obeying feebly the instinctive habit of a lifetime with twigs and matches. But there was no longer any mind to direct the simple operation. The mind had fled beyond recall. And with it, too, had fled memory. Not only recent events, but all previous life was a blank.\n\nThis time it was the real man, though incredibly and horribly shrunken. On his face was no expression of any kind whatever\u2014fear, welcome, or recognition. He did not seem to know who it was that embraced him, or who it was that fed, warmed and spoke to him the words of comfort and relief. Forlorn and broken beyond all reach of human aid, the little man did meekly as he was bidden. The \"something\" that had constituted him \"individual\" had vanished for ever.\n\nIn some ways it was more terribly moving than anything they had yet seen\u2014that idiot smile as he drew wads of coarse moss from his swollen cheeks and told them that he was \"a damned moss-eater\" ; the continued vomiting of even the simplest food; and, worst of all, the piteous and childish voice of complaint in which he told them that his feet pained him\u2014\"burn like fire\"\u2014which was natural enough when Dr. Cathcart examined them and found that both were dreadfully frozen. Beneath the eyes there were faint indications of recent bleeding.\n\nThe details of how he survived the prolonged exposure, of where he had been, or of how he covered the great distance from one camp to the other, including an immense detour of the lake on foot since he had no canoe\u2014all this remains unknown. His memory had vanished completely.\n\nAnd before the end of the winter whose beginning witnessed this strange occurrence, D\u00e9fago, bereft of mind, memory and soul, had gone with it. He lingered only a few weeks.\n\nAnd what Punk was able to contribute to the story throws no further light upon it. He was cleaning fish by the lake shore about five o'clock in the evening\u2014an hour, that is, before the search party returned\u2014when he saw this shadow of the guide picking its way weakly into camp.\n\nIn advance of him, he declares, came the faint whiff of a certain singular odour.\n\nThat same instant old Punk started for home. He covered the entire journey of three days as only Indian blood could have covered it. The terror of a whole race drove him. He knew what it all meant. D\u00e9fago had \"seen the Wendigo\".\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Old Clothes ]\n\nImaginative children with their odd questionings of life and their delicate nervous systems must be often a source of greater anxiety than delight to their parents, and Aileen, the child of my widowed cousin, impressed me from the beginning as being a strangely vivid specimen of her class. Moreover, the way she took to me from the first pl-aced quasi-avuncular responsibilities upon my shoulders (in her mother's eyes), that I had no right, even as I had no inclination, to shirk. Indeed, I loved the queer, wayward, mysterious little being. Only it was not always easy to advise; and her somewhat marked peculiarities certainly called for advice of a skilled and special order.\n\nIt was not merely that her make-believe was unusually sincere and haunting, and that she would talk by the hour with invisible playmates (touching them, putting up her lips to be kissed, opening doors for them to pass in and out, and setting chairs, footstools and even flowers for them), for many children in my experience have done as much and done it with a vast sincerity; but that she also accepted what they told her with so steady a degree of conviction that their words influenced her life and, accordingly, her health.\n\nThey told her stories, apparently, in which she herself played a central part, stories, moreover, that were neither comforting nor wise. She would sit in a corner of the room, as both her mother and myself can vouch, face to face with some make-believe Occupant of the chair so carefully arranged; the footstool had been placed with precision, and sometimes she would move it a little this way or that; the table whereon rested the invisible elbows was beside her with a jar of flowers that changed according to the particular visitor. And there she would wait motionless, perhaps an hour at a time, staring up into the viewless features of the person who was talking with her\u2014who was telling her a story in which she played an exceedingly poignant part. Her face altered with the run of emotions, her eyes grew large and moist, and sometimes frightened; rarely she laughed, and rarely asked a whispered question, but more often sat there, tense and eager, uncannily absorbed in the inaudible tale falling from invisible lips\u2014the tale of her own adventures.\n\nBut it was the terror inspired by these singular recitals that affected her delicate health as early as the age of eight, and when, owing to her mother's well-meant but ill-advised ridicule, she indulged them with more secrecy, the effect upon her nerves and character became so acute that I was summoned down upon a special advisory visit I scarcely appreciated.\n\n\"Now, George, what do you think I had better do? Dr. Hale insists upon more exercise and more companionship, sea air and all the rest of it, but none of these things seem to do any good.\"\n\n\"Have you taken her into your confidence, or rather has she taken you into hers?\" I ventured mildly.\n\nThe question seemed to give offence a little.\n\n\"Of course,\" was the emphatic answer. \"The child has no secrets from her mother. She is perfectly devoted to me.\"\n\n\"But you have tried to laugh her out of it, haven't you now?\"\n\n\"Yes. But with such success that she holds these conversations far less than she used to\u2014\"\n\n\"Or more secretly?\" was my comment, that was met with a superior shrug of the shoulders.\n\nThen, after a further pause, in which my cousins distress and my own affectionate interest in the whimsical imagination of my little niece combined to move me, I tried again\u2014\n\n\"Make-believe,\" I observed, \"is always a bit puzzling to us older folk, because, though we indulge in it all our lives, We no longer believe in it; whereas children like Aileen\u2014\"\n\nShe interrupted me quickly\u2014\n\n\"You know what I feel anxious about,\" she said, lowering her voice. \"I think there may be cause for serious alarm.\" Then she added frankly, looking up with grave eyes into my face,\n\n\"George, I want your help\u2014your best help, please. You've always been a true friend.\"\n\nI gave it to her in calculated words.\n\n\"Theresa,\" I said with grave emphasis, \"there is no trace of insanity on either side of the family, and my own opinion is that Aileen is perfectly well-balanced in spite of this too highly developed imagination. But, above all things, you must not drive it inwards by making fun of it. Lead it out. E\u2014ducate it. Guide it by intelligent sympathy. Get her to tell you all about it, and so on. I think Aileen wants careful observing, perhaps\u2014but nothing more.\"\n\nFor some minutes she watched my face in silence, her eyes intent, her features slightly twitching. I knew at once from her manner what she was driving at. She approached the subject with awkwardness and circumlocution, for it was something she dreaded, not feeling sure whether it was of heaven or of hell.\n\n\"You are very wonderful, George,\" she said at length, \"and you have theories about almost everything\u2014\"\n\n\"Speculations,\" I admitted.\n\n\"And your hypnotic power is helpful, you know. Now\u2014if\u2014if you thought it safe, and that Providence would not be offended\u2014\"\n\n\"Theresa,\" I stopped her firmly before she had committed herself to the point where she would feel hurt by a refusal, \"let me say at once that I do not consider a child a fit subject for hypnotic experiment, and I feel quite sure that an intelligent person like yourself will agree with me that it's unpermissible.\"\n\n\"I was only thinking of a little 'suggestion,' \" she murmured.\n\n\"Which would come far better from the mother.\"\n\n\"If the mother had not already lost her power by using ridicule,\" she confessed meekly.\n\n\"Yes, you never should have laughed. Why did you, I wonder?\"\n\nAn expression came into her eyes that I knew to be invariably with hysterical temperaments the precursor of tears. She looked round to make sure no one was listening.\n\n\"George,\" she whispered, and into the dusk of that September evening passed some shadow between us that left behind an atmosphere of sudden and inexplicable chill, \"George, I wish\u2014I wish it was quite clear to me that it really is all make-believe, I mean\u2014\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" I said, with a severity that was assumed to hide my own uneasiness. But the tears came the same instant in a flood that made any intelligent explanation out of the question.\n\n\"But, that can't be right,\" she said. \"I always loved you so that's why I stole this.\" And she shot him.\n\nThe terror of the mother for her own blood burst forth.\n\n\"I'm frightened\u2014horribly frightened,\" she said between the sobs.\n\n\"I'll go up and see the child myself,\" I said comfortingly at length when the storm had subsided. \"I'll run up to the nursery. You mustn't be alarmed. Aileen's all right. I think I can help you in the matter a good deal.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 415", + "text": "In the nursery as usual Aileen was alone. I found her sitting by the open window, an empty chair opposite to her. She was staring at it\u2014into it, but it is not easy to describe the certainty she managed to convey that there was some one sitting in that chair, talking with her. It was her manner that did it. She rose quickly, with a start as I came in, and made a half gesture in the direction of the empty chair as though to shake hands, then corrected herself quickly, and gave a friendly little nod of farewell or dismissal\u2014then turned towards me. Incredible as it must sound, that chair looked at once slightly otherwise. It was empty.\n\n\"Aileen, what in the world are you up to?\"\n\n\"You know, uncle,\" she replied, without hesitation.\n\n\"Oh, rather! I know! \" I said, trying to get into her mood so as later to get her out of it, \"because I do the same thing with the people in my own stories. I talk to them too\u2014\"\n\nShe came up to my side, as though it were a matter of life and death.\n\n\"But do they answer?\"\n\nI realized the overwhelming sincerity, even the seriousness, of the question to her mind. The shadow evoked down-stairs by my cousin had followed me up here. It touched me on the shoulder.\n\n\"Unless they answer,\" I told her, \"they are not really alive, and the story hangs fire when people read it.\"\n\nShe watched me very closely a moment as we leaned out of the open window where the rich perfume of the Portuguese laurels came up from the lawns below. The proximity of the child brought a distinct atmosphere of its own, an atmosphere charged with suggestions, almost with faint pictures, as of things I had once known. I had often felt this before, and did not altogether welcome it, for the pictures seemed framed in some emotional setting that invariably escaped my analysis. I understood in a vague way what it was about the child that made her mother afraid. There flashed across me a fugitive sensation, utterly elusive yet painfully real, that she knew moments of suffering by rights she ought not to have known. Bizarre and unreasonable as the conception was, it was convincing. And it touched a profound sympathy in me.\n\nAileen undoubtedly was aware of this sympathy.\n\n\"It's Philip that talks to me most of the time,\" she volunteered, \"and he's always, always explaining\u2014but never quite finishes.\"\n\n\"Explaining what, dear little Child of the Moon?\" I urged gently, giving her a name she used to love when she was smaller.\n\n\"Why he couldn't come in time to save me, of course,\" she said. \"You see, they cut off both his hands.\"\n\nI shall never forget the sensation these words of a child's mental adventure caused me, nor the kind of bitter reality they forced into me that they were true, and not merely a detail of some attempted rescue of a \"Princess in a Tower.\" A vivid rush of thought seemed to focus my consciousness upon my own two wrists, as though I felt the pain of the operation she mentioned, and with a swift instinct that slipped into action before I could control it, I had hidden both hands from her sight in my coat pockets.\n\n\"And what else does 'Philip' tell you?\" I asked gently.\n\nHer face flushed. Tears came into her eyes, then fled away again lest they should fall from their softly-coloured nests.\n\n\"That he loved me so awfully,\" she replied; \"and that he loved me to the very end, and that all his life after I was gone, and after they cut his hands off, he did nothing but pray for me\u2014from the end of the world where he went to hide\u2014\"\n\nI shook myself free with an effort from the enveloping atmosphere of tragedy, realizing that her imagination must be driven along brighter channels and that my duty must precede my interest.\n\n\"But you must get Philip to tell you all his funny and jolly adventures, too,\" I said, \"the ones he had, you know, when his hands grew again\u2014\"\n\nThe expression that came into her face literally froze my blood.\n\n\"That's only making-up stories,\" she said icily. \"They never did grow again. There were no happy or funny adventures.\"\n\nI cast about in my mind for an inspiration how to help her mind into more wholesome ways of invention. I realized more than ever before the profundity of my affection for this strange, fatherless child, and how I would give my whole soul if I could help her and teach her joy. It was a real love that swept me, rooted in things deeper than I realized.\n\nBut, before the right word was given me to speak, I felt her nestle up against my side, and heard her utter the very phrase that for some time I had been dreading in the secret places of my soul she would utter. The sentence seemed to shake me within. I knew a hurried, passing moment of unspeakable pain that is utterly beyond me to reason about.\n\n\"You know,\" was what she said, \"because it's you who are Philip!\"\n\nAnd the way she said it\u2014so quietly, the words touched somehow with a gentle though compassionate scorn, yet made golden by a burning love that filled her little person to the brim\u2014robbed me momentarily of all power of speech. I could only bend down and put my arm about her and kiss her head that came up barely to the level of my chin. I swear I loved that child as I never loved any other human being.\n\n\"Then Philip is going to teach you all sorts of jolly adventures with his new hands,\" I remember saying, with blundering good intention, \"because he's no longer sad, and is full of fun, and loves you twice as much as ever!\"\n\nAnd I caught her up and carried her down the long stairs of the house out into the garden, where we joined the dogs and romped together until the face of the motherly Kempster at an upper window shouted down something stupid about bed-time, supper, or the rest of it, and Aileen, flushed yet with brighter eyes, ran into the house and, turning at the door, showed me her odd little face wreathed in smiles and laughter.\n\nFor a long time I paced to and fro with a cigar between the box hedges of the old-time garden, thinking of the child and her queer imaginings, and of the profoundly moving and disquieting sensations she stirred in me at the same time. Her face flitted by my side through the shadows. She was not pretty, properly speaking, but her appearance possessed an original charm that appealed to me strongly. Her head was big and in some way old-fashioned; her eyes, dark but not large, were placed close together, and she had a wide mouth that was certainly not beautiful. But the look of distressed and yearning passion that sometimes swept over these features, not otherwise prepossessing, changed her look into sudden beauty, a beauty of the soul, a soul that knew suffering and was acquainted with grief. This, at least, is the way my own mind saw the child, and therefore the only way I can hope to make others see her. Were I a painter I might put her upon canvas in some imaginary portrait and call it, perhaps, \"Reincarnation\"\u2014for I have never seen anything in child-life that impressed me so vividly with that odd idea of an old soul come back to the world in a new young body\u2014a new Suit of Clothes.\n\nBut when I talked with my cousin after dinner, and consoled her with the assurance that Aileen was gifted with an unusually vivid imagination which time and ourselves must train to some more practical end\u2014while I said all this, and more besides, two sentences the child had made use of kept ringing in my head. One\u2014when she told me with merciless perception that I was only \"making-up\" stories; and the other, when she had informed me with that quiet rush of certainty and conviction that \"Philip\" was\u2014myself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 416", + "text": "A big-game expedition of some months put an end temporarily to my avuncular responsibilities; at least so far as action was concerned, for there were certain memories that held curiously vivid among all the absorbing turmoil of our camp life. Often, lying awake in my tent at night, or even following the tracks of our prey through the jungle, these pictures would jump out upon me and claim attention. Aileen's little face of suffering would come between me and the sight of my rifle; or her assurance that I was the \"Philip\" of her imagination would attack me with an accent of reality that seemed queer enough until I analyzed it away. And more than once I found myself thinking of her dark and serious countenance when she told how \"Philip\" had loved her to the end, and would have saved her if they had not cut off his hands. My own Imagination, it seemed, was weaving the details of her child's invention into a story, for I never could think of this latter detail without positively experiencing a sensation of smarting pain in my wrists...!\n\nWhen I returned to England in the spring they had moved, I found, into a house by the sea, a tumbled-down old rookery of a building my cousin's father had rarely occupied during his lifetime, nor she been able to let since it had passed into her possession. An urgent letter summoned me thither, and I travelled down the very day after my arrival to the bleak Norfolk coast with a sense of foreboding in my heart that increased almost to a presentiment when the cab entered the long drive and I recognized the grey and gloomy walls of the old mansion. The sea air swept the gardens with its salt wash, and the moan of the surf was audible even up to the windows.\n\n\"I wonder what possessed her to come here?\" was the first thought in my mind. \"Surely the last place in the world to bring a morbid or too-sensitive child to!\" My further dread that something had happened to the little child I loved so tenderly was partly dispelled, however, when my cousin met me at the door with open arms and smiling face, though the welcome I soon found, was chiefly due to the relief she gained from my presence. Something had happened to little Aileen, though not the final disaster that I dreaded. She had suffered from nervous attacks of so serious a character during my absence that the doctor had insisted upon sea air, and my cousin, not with the best judgment, had seized upon the idea of making the old house serve the purpose. She had made a wing habitable for a few weeks; she hoped the entire change of scene would fill the little girl's mind with new and happier ideas. Instead\u2014the result had been exactly the reverse. The child had wept copiously and hysterically the moment she set eyes on the old walls and smelt the odour of the sea.\n\nBut before we had been talking ten minutes there was a cry and a sound of rushing footsteps, and a scampering figure, with dark, flying hair, had dived headlong into my arms, and Aileen was sobbing\u2014\n\n\"Oh, you've come, you've come at last! I am so awfully glad. I thought it would be the same as before, and you'd get caught.\" She ran from me next and kissed her mother, laughing with pleasure through her tears, and was gone from the room as quickly as she had come.\n\nI caught my cousin's glance of frightened amazement.\n\n\"Now isn't that odd?\" she exclaimed in a hushed voice. \"Isn't that odd? Those are the tears of happiness,\u2014the first time I've seen her smile since we came here last week.\"\n\nBut it rather nettled me, I think. \"Why odd?\" I asked. \"Aileen loves me, it's delightful to\u2014\"\n\n\"Not that, not that!\" she said quickly. \"It's odd, I meant, she should have found you out so soon. She didn't even know you were back in England, and I'd sent her off to play on the sands with Kempster and the dogs so as to be sure of an opportunity of telling you everything before you saw her.\"\n\nOur eyes met squarely, yet not with complete sympathy or comprehension.\n\n\"You see, she knew perfectly well you were here\u2014the instant you came.\"\n\n\"But there's nothing in that,\" I asserted. \"Children know things just as animals do. She scented her favourite uncle from the shore like a dog!\" And I laughed in her face.\n\nThat laugh perhaps was a mistake on my part. Its well-meant cheerfulness was possibly overdone. Even to myself it did not ring quite true.\n\n\"I do believe you are in league with her\u2014against me,\" was the remark that greeted it, accompanied by an increase of that expression of fear in the eyes I had divined the moment we met upon the doorstep. Finding nothing genuine to say in reply, I kissed the top of her head.\n\nIn due course, after the tea things had been removed, I learned the exact state of affairs, and even making due allowance for my cousin's excited exaggerations, there were things that seemed to me inexplicable enough on any ground of normal explanation. Slight as the details may seem when set down seriatim, their cumulative effect upon my own mind touched an impressive and disagreeable climax that I did my best to conceal from outward betrayal. As I sat in the great shadowy room, listening to my cousin's jerky description of \"childish\" things, it was borne in upon me that they might well have the profoundest possible significance. I watched her eager, frightened face, lit only by the flickering flames the sharp spring evening made necessary, and thought of the subject of our conversation flitting about the dreary halls and corridors of the huge old building, a little figure of tragedy, laughing, crying and dreaming in a world entirely her own\u2014and there stirred in me an unwelcome recognition of those mutinous and dishevelled forces that lie but thinly screened behind the common-place details of life and that now seemed ready to burst forth and play their mysterious r\u00f4le before our very eyes.\n\n\"Tell me exactly what has happened,\" I urged, with decision but sympathy.\n\n\"There's so little, when it's put into words, George; but\u2014well, the thing that first upset me was that she\u2014knew the whole place, though she's never been here before. She knew every passage and staircase, many of them that I did not know myself; she showed us an underground passage to the sea, that father himself didn't know; and she actually drew a scrawl of the house as it used to be three hundred years ago when the other wing was standing where the copper beeches grow now. It's accurate, too.\"\n\nIt seemed impossible to explain to a person of my cousin's temperament the theories of pre-natal memory and the like, or the possibility of her own knowledge being communicated telepathically to the brain of her own daughter. I said therefore very little, but listened with an uneasiness that grew horribly.\n\n\"She found her way about the gardens instantly, as if she had played in them all her life; and she keeps drawing figures of people\u2014men and women\u2014in old costumes, the sort of thing our ancestors wore, you know\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, well, well!\" I interrupted impatiently; \"what can be more natural? She is old enough to have seen pictures she can remember enough to copy\u2014?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she resumed calmly, but with a calmness due to the terror that ate her very soul and swallowed up all minor emotions; \"of course, but one of the faces she gets is\u2014a portrait.\"\n\nShe rose suddenly and came closer to me across the big stone hearth, lowering her voice to a whisper, \"George,\" she whispered, \"it's the very image of that awful\u2014de Lorne!\n\nThe announcement, I admit, gave me a thrill, for that particular ancestor on my father's side had largely influenced my boyhood imagination by the accounts of his cruelty wickedness in days gone by. But I think now the shiver that ran down my back was due to the thought of my little Aileen practising her memory and pencil upon so vile an object. That, and my cousin's pale visage of alarm, combined to shake me. I said, however, what seemed wise and reasonable at the moment.\n\n\"You'll be claiming next, Theresa, that the house is haunted,\" I suggested.\n\nShe shrugged her shoulders with an indifference that was very eloquent of the strength of this other more substantial terror.\n\n\"That would be so easy to deal with,\" she said, without even looking up. \"A ghost stays in one place. Aileen could hardly take it about with her.\"\n\nI think we both enjoyed the pause that followed. It gave me time to collect my forces for what I knew was coming. It gave her time to get her further facts into some pretence of coherence.\n\n\"I told you about the belt?\" she asked at length, weakly, and as though unutterable things she longed to disown forced the question to her unwilling lips.\n\nThe sentence shot into me like the thrust of a naked sword... I shook my head.\n\n\"Well, even a year or two ago she had that strange dislike of wearing a belt with her frocks. 'We thought it was a whim, and did not humour her. Belts are necessary, you know, George,\" she tried to smile feebly. \"But now it has come to such a point that I've had to give in.\"\n\n\"She dislikes a belt round her waist, you mean?\" I asked, fighting a sudden inexplicable spasm in my heart.\n\n\"It makes her scream. The moment anything encloses her waist she sets up such a hubbub, and struggles so, and hides away, and I've been obliged to yield.\"\n\n\"But really, Theresa\u2014!\"\n\n\"She declares it fastens her in, and she will never get free again, and all kinds of other things. Oh, her fear is dreadful, poor child. Her face gets that sort of awful grey, don't you know? Even Kempster, who if anything is too firm, had to give in.\"\n\n\"And what else, pray?\" I disliked hearing these details intensely. It made me ache with a kind of anger that I could not at once relieve the child's pain.\n\n\"The way she spoke to me after Dr. Hale had left\u2014you know how awfully kind and gentle he is, and how Aileen likes him and even plays with him and sits on his knee? Well, he was talking about her diet, regulating it and so forth, teasing her that she mustn't eat this and that, and the rest of it, when she turned that horrid grey again and jumped oft his knee with her scream\u2014that thin wailing scream she has that goes through me like a knife, George\u2014and flew to the nursery and locked herself in with\u2014what do you think?\u2014with all the bread, apples, cold meat and other eatables she could find!\"\n\n\"Eatables!\" I exclaimed, aware of another spasm of vivid pain.\n\n\"When I coaxed her out, hours later, she was trembling like a leaf and fell into my arms utterly exhausted, and all I could get her to tell me was this\u2014which she repeated again and again with a sort of beseeching, appealing tone that made my heart bleed\u2014\"\n\nShe hesitated an instant.\n\n\"Tell me at once.\"\n\n\"'I shall starve again, I shall starve again,' were the words she used. She kept repeating it over and over between her sobs. 'I shall be without anything to eat. I shall starve!' And, would you believe it, while she hid in that nursery cupboard she had crammed so much cake and stuff into her little self that she was violently sick for a couple of days. Moreover, she now hates the sight of Dr. Hale so much, poor man, that it's useless for him to see her. It does more harm than good.\"\n\nI had risen and begun to walk up and down the hall while she told me this. I said very little. In my mind strange thoughts tore and raced, standing erect before me out of unbelievably immense depths of shadow. There was nothing very pregnant I found to say, however, for theories and speculations are of small avail as practical help\u2014unless two minds see eye to eye in them.\n\n\"And the rest?\" I asked gently, coming behind the chair and resting both hands upon her shoulders. She got up at once and faced me. I was afraid to show too much sympathy lest the tears should come.\n\n\"Oh, George,\" she exclaimed, \"I am relieved you have come. You are really strong and comforting. To feel your great hands on my shoulders gives me courage. But, you know, truly and honestly I am frightened out of my very wits by the child\u2014\"\n\n\"You won't stay here, of course?\"\n\n\"We leave at the end of this week,\" she replied. \"You will not desert me till then, I know. And Aileen will be all right as long as you are here, for you have the most extraordinary effect on her for good.\"\n\n\"Bless her little suffering imagination,\" I said. \"You can count on me. I'll send to town to-night for my things.\"\n\nAnd then she told me about the room. It was simple enough, but it conveyed a more horrible certainty of something true than all the other details put together. For there was a room on the ground floor, intended to be used on wet days when the nursery was too far for muddy boots\u2014and into this room Aileen could not go. Why? No one could tell. The facts were that the first moment the child ran in, her mother close behind, she stopped, swayed, and nearly fell. Then, with shrieks that were even heard outside by the gardeners sweeping the gravel path, she flung herself headlong against the wall, against a particular corner of it that is to say, and beat it with her little fists until the skin broke and left stains upon the paper. It all happened in less than a minute. The words she cried so frantically her mother was too shocked and flabbergasted to remember, or even to hear properly. Aileen nearly upset her in her bewildered efforts next to find the door and escape. And the first thing she did when escape was accomplished, was to drop in a dead faint upon the stone floor of the passage outside.\n\n\"Now, is that all make-believe?\" whispered Theresa, unable to keep the shudder from her lips.\n\n\"Is that all merely part of a story she has make up and plays a part in?\"\n\nWe looked one another straight in the eyes for a space of some seconds. The dread in the mother's heart leaped out to swell a terror in my own\u2014a terror of another kind, but greater.\n\n\"It is too late to-night,\" I said at length, \"for it would only excite her unnecessarily; but to-morrow I will talk with Aileen. And\u2014if it seems wise\u2014I might\u2014I might be able to help in other ways too,\" I added.\n\nSo I did talk to her\u2014next day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 417", + "text": "I always had her confidence, this little dark-eyed maid, and there was an intimacy between us that made play and talk very delightful. Yet as a rule, without giving myself a satisfactory reason, I preferred talking with her in the sunlight. She was not eerie, bless her little heart of queerness and mystery, but she had a way of suggesting other ways of life and existence shouldering about us that made me look round in the dark and wonder what the shadows concealed or what waited round the next corner.\n\nWe were on the lawn, where the bushy yews drop thick shade, the soft air making tea possible out of doors, my cousin out driving to distant calls; and Aileen had invited herself and was messing about with my manuscripts in a way that vexed me, for I had been reading my fairy tales to her and she kept asking me questions that shamed my limited powers. I remember, too, that I was glad the collie ran to and fro past us, scampering and barking after the swallows on the lawn.\n\n\"Only some of your stories are true, aren't they?\" she asked abruptly.\n\n\"How do you know that, young critic?\" I had been waiting for an opening supplied by herself.\n\nAnything forced on my part she would have suspected.\n\n\"Oh, I can tell.\"\n\nThen she came up and whispered without any hint of invitation on my part, \"Uncle, it is true, isn't it, that I've been in other places with you? And isn't it only the things we did there that make the true stories?\"\n\nThe opening was delivered all perfect and complete into my hands. I cannot conceive how it was I availed myself of it so queerly\u2014I mean, how it was that the words and the name slipped out of their own accord as though I was saying something in a dream.\n\n\"Of course, my little Lady Aileen, because in imagination, you see, we\u2014\"\n\nBut before I had time to finish the sentence with which I hoped to coax out the true inwardness of her own distress, she was upon me in a heap.\n\n\"Oh,\" she cried, with a sudden passionate outburst, \"then you do know my name? You know all the story\u2014 our story!\n\nShe was very excited, face flushed, eyes dancing, all the emotions of a life charged to the brim with experience playing through her little person.\n\n\"Of course, Miss Inventor, I know your name,\" I said quickly, puzzled, and with a sudden dismay that was hideous, clutching at my throat.\n\n\"And all that we did in this place?\" she went on, pointing with increased excitement to the thick, ivy-grown walls of the old house.\n\nMy own emotion grew extraordinarily, a swift, rushing uneasiness upsetting all my calculations. For it suddenly came back to me that in calling her \"Lady Aileen\" I had not pronounced the name quite as usual. My tongue had played a trick with the consonants and vowels, though at the moment of utterance I had somehow failed to notice the change. \"Aileen\" and \"Helen\" are almost interchangeable sounds...! And it was \"Lady Helen\" that I had actually said.\n\nThe discovery took my breath away for an instant\u2014and the way she had leaped upon the name to claim it.\n\n\"No one else, you see, knows me as 'Lady Helen,' \" she continued whispering, \"because that's only in our story, isn't it? And now I'm just Aileen Langton. But as long as you know, it's all right. Oh, I am so awf'ly glad you knew, most awf'ly, awf'ly glad.\"\n\nI was momentarily at a loss for words. Keenly desirous to guide the child's \"pain-stories\" into wiser channels, and thus help her to relief, I hesitated a moment for the right clue. I murmured something soothing about \"our story,\" while in my mind I searched vigorously for the best way of leading her on to explain all her terror of the belt, the fear of starvation, the room that made her scream, and all the rest. All that I was most anxious to get out of her little tortured mind and then replace it by some brighter dream.\n\nBut the insidious experience had shaken my confidence a little, and these explicable emotions destroyed my elder wisdom. The little Inventor had caught me away into the reality of her own \"story\" with a sense of conviction that was even beyond witchery. And the next sentence she almost instantly let loose upon me completed my discomfiture\u2014\n\n\"With you,\" she said, still half whispering, \"with you I could even go into the room. I never could\u2014alone\u2014!\"\n\nThe spring wind whispering in the yews behind us brought in that moment something upon me from vanished childhood days that made me tremble. Some wave of lost passion\u2014lost because I guessed not its origin or nature\u2014surged through the depths of me, sending faint messages to the surface of my consciousness. Aileen, little mischief-maker, changed before my very eyes as she stood there close\u2014changed into a tall sad figure that beckoned to me across seas of time and distance, with the haze of ages in her eyes and gestures,... I was obliged to focus my gaze upon her with a deliberate effort to see her again as the tumble-haired girl I was accustomed to...\n\nThen, sitting in the creaky garden chair, I drew her down upon my knee, determined to win the whole story from her mind. My back was to the house; she was perched at an angle, however, that enabled her to command the doors and windows. I mention this because, scarcely had I begun my attack, when I saw that her attention wandered, and that she seemed curiously uneasy. Once or twice, as she shifted her position to get a view of something that was going on over my shoulder, I was aware that a slight shiver passed from her small person down to my knees. She seemed to be expecting something\u2014with dread.\n\n\"We'll make a special expedition, armed to the teeth,\" I said, with a laugh, referring to her singular words about the room. \"We'll send Pat in first to bark at the cobwebs, and we'll take lots of provisions and\u2014and water in case of a siege\u2014and a file\u2014\"\n\nI cannot pretend to understand why I chose those precise words\u2014or why it was as though other thoughts than those I had intended rose up, clamouring for expression. It seemed all I could manage not to say a lot of other things about the room that could only have frightened instead of relieving her.\n\n\"Will you talk into the wall too?\" she asked, turning her eyes down suddenly upon me with a little rush and flame of passion. And though I had not the faintest conception what she meant, the question sent an agony of yearning pain through me. \"Talking into the wall,\" I instantly grasped, referred to the core of her trouble, the very central idea that frightened her and provided the suffering and terror of all her imaginings.\n\nBut I had no time to follow up the clue thus mysteriously offered to me, for almost at the same moment her eyes fixed themselves upon something behind me with an expression of tense horror, as though she saw the approach of a danger that might\u2014kill.\n\n\"Oh, oh!\" she cried under her breath, \"he's coming! He's coming to take me! Uncle George\u2014Philip\u2014!\"\n\nThe same impulse operated upon us simultaneously, it seems, for I sprang up with my fists clenched at the very instant she shot off my knee and stood with all her muscles rigid as though to resist attack. She was shaking dreadfully. Her face went the colour of linen.\n\n\"Who's coming\u2014?\" I began sharply, then stopped as I saw the figure of a man moving towards us from the house. It was the butler\u2014the new butler who had arrived only that very afternoon. It is impossible to say what there was in his swift and silent approach that was\u2014abominable. The man was upon us, it seemed, almost as soon as I caught sight of him, and the same moment Aileen, with a bursting cry, looking wildly about her for a place to hide in, plunged headlong into my arms and buried her face in my coat.\n\nHorribly perplexed, yet mortified that the servant should see my little friend in such a state, I did my best to pretend that it was all part of some mad game or other, and catching her up in my arms, I ran, calling the collie to follow with, \"Come on, Pat! She's our prisoner!\"\u2014and only set her down when we were under the limes at the far end of the lawn. She was all white and ghostly from her terror, still looking frantically about her, trembling in such a way that I thought any minute she must collapse in a dead faint. She clung to me with very tight fingers. How I hated that man. Judging by the sudden violence of my loathing he might have been some monster who wanted to torture her...\n\n\"Let's go away, oh, much farther, ever so far away!\" she whispered, and I took her by the hand, comforting her as best I could with words, while realizing that the thing she wanted was my big arm about her to protect. My heart ached, oh, so fiercely, for her, but the odd thing about it was that I could not find anything of real comfort to say that I felt would be true. If I \"made up\" soothing rubbish, it would not deceive either of us and would only shake her confidence in me, so that I should lose any power I had to help. Had a tiger come upon her out of the wood I might as well have assured her it would not bite!\n\nI did stammer something, however\u2014\n\n\"It's only the new butler. He startled me, too; he came so softly, didn't he?\" Oh! how eagerly I searched for a word that might make the thing seem as ordinary as possible\u2014yet how vainly.\n\n\"But you know who he is\u2014 really!\" she said in a crying whisper, running down the path and dragging me after her; \"and if he gets me again... oh! oh!\" and she shrieked aloud in the anguish of her fear.\n\nThat fear chased both of us down the winding path between the bushes.\n\n\"Aileen, darling,\" I cried, surrounding her with both arms and holding her very tight, \"you need not be afraid. I'll always save you. I'll always be with you, dear child.\"\n\n\"Keep me in your big arms, always, always, won't you, Uncle\u2014Philip?\" She mixed both names. The choking stress of her voice wrung me dreadfully. \"Always, always, like in our story,\" she pleaded, hiding her little face again in my coat.\n\nI really was at a complete loss to know what best to do; I hardly dared to bring her back to the house; the sight of the man, I felt, might be fatal to her already too delicately balanced reason, for I dreaded a fit or seizure if she chanced to run across him when I was not with her. My mind was easily made up on one point, however.\n\n\"I'll send him away at once, Aileen,\" I told her. \"When you wake up to-morrow he'll be gone. Of course mother won't keep him.\"\n\nThis assurance seemed to bring her some measure of comfort, and at last, without having dared to win the whole story from her as I had first hoped, I got her back to the house by covert ways, and saw her myself up-stairs to her own quarters. Also I took it upon myself to give the necessary orders. She must set no eye upon the man. Only, why was it that in my heart of hearts I longed for him to do something outrageous that should make it possible for me to break his very life at its source and kill him...?\n\nBut my cousin, alarmed to the point of taking even frantic measures, finally had a sound suggestion to offer, namely that I should take the afflicted little child away with me the very next day, run down to Harwich and carry her off for a week of absolute change across the North Sea. And I, meanwhile, had reached the point where I had persuaded myself that the experiment I had hitherto felt unable to consent to had now become a permissible, even a necessary one. Hypnotism should win the story from that haunted mind without her being aware of it, and provided I could drive her deep enough into the trance state, I could then further wipe the memory from her outer consciousness so completely that she might know at last some happiness of childhood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 418", + "text": "It was after ten o'clock, and I was still sitting in the big hail before the fire of logs, talking with lowered voice. My cousin sat opposite to me in a deep arm-chair. We had discussed the matter pretty fully, and the deep uneasiness we felt clothed not alone our minds but the very building with gloom. The fact that, instinctively, neither of us referred to the possible assistance of doctors is eloquent, I think, of the emotion that troubled us both so profoundly, the emotion, I mean, that sprang from the vivid sense of the reality of it all. No child's make-believe merely could have thus caught us away, or spread a net that entangled our minds to such a point of confusion and dismay. It was perfectly comprehensible to mc now that my cousin should have cried in very helplessness before the convincing effects of the little girl's calamitous distress.\n\nAileen was living through a Reality, not an Invention. This was the fact that haunted the shadowy halls and corridors behind us. Already I hated the very building. It seemed charged to the roof with the memories of melancholy and ancient pain that swept my heart with shivering, cold winds.\n\nPurposely, however, I affected some degree of cheerfulness, and concealed from my cousin any mention of the attacks that certain emotions and alarms had made upon myself: I said nothing of my replacing \"Lady Aileen\" with \"Lady Helen,\" nothing of my passing for \"Philip,\" or of my sudden dashes of quasi-memory arising from the child's inclusion of myself in her \"story,\" and my own singular acceptance of the r\u00f4le. I did not consider it wise to mention all that the sight of the new servant with his sinister dark face and his method of stealthy approach had awakened in my thoughts. None the less these things started constantly to the surface of my mind and doubtless betrayed themselves somewhere in my \"atmosphere,\" sufficiently at least for a woman's intuition to divine them. I spoke passingly of the \"room,\" and of Aileen's singular aversion for it, and of her remark about \"talking to the wall.\" Yet strange thoughts pricked their way horribly into both our minds. In the hall the stuffed heads of deer and fox and badger stared upon us like masks of things still alive beneath their fur and dead skin.\n\n\"But what disturbs me more than all the rest of her delusions put together,\" said my cousin, peering at me with eyes that made no pretence of hiding dark things, \"is her extraordinary knowledge of this place. I assure you, George, it was the most uncanny thing I've ever known when she showed me over and asked questions as if she had actually lived here.\" Her voice sank to a whisper, and she looked up startled. It seemed to me for a moment that some one was coming near to listen, moving stealthily upon us along the dark approaches to the hall.\n\n\"I can understand you found it strange,\" I began quickly. But she interrupted me at once. Clearly it gave her a certain relief to say the things and get them out of her mind where they hid, breeding new growths of abhorrence.\n\n\"George,\" she cried aloud, \"there's a limit to imagination. Aileen knows. That's the awful thing\u2014.\"\n\nSomething sprang into my throat. My eyes moistened.\n\n\"The horror of the belt\u2014\" she whispered, loathing her own words.\n\n\"Leave that thought alone,\" I said with decision. The detail pained me inexpressibly\u2014beyond belief.\n\n\"I wish I could,\" she answered, \"but if you had seen the look on her face when she struggled\u2014and the\u2014the frenzy she got into about the food and starving\u2014I mean when Dr. Hale spoke\u2014oh, if you had seen all that, you would understand that I\u2014\"\n\nShe broke off with a start. Some one had entered the hall behind us and was standing in the doorway at the far end. The listener had moved upon us from the dark. Theresa, though her back was turned, had felt the presence and was instantly upon her feet.\n\n\"You need not sit up, Porter,\" she said, in a tone that only thinly veiled the fever of apprehension behind, \"we will put the lights out,\" and the man withdrew like a shadow. She exchanged a quick glance with me. A sensation of darkness that seemed to have come with the servant's presence was gone. It is wholly beyond me to explain why neither myself nor my cousin found anything to say for some minutes. But it was still more a mystery, I think, why the muscles of my two hands should have contracted involuntarily with a force that drove the nails into my palms, and why the violent impulse should have leaped into my blood to fling myself upon the man and strangle the life out of his neck before he could take another breath. I have never before or since experienced this apparently causeless desire to throttle anybody. I hope I never may again.\n\n\"He hangs about rather,\" was all my cousin said presently. \"He's always watching us\u2014\" But my own thoughts were horribly busy, and I was marvelling how it was this ugly and sinister creature had ever come to be accepted in the story that Aileen lived, and that I was slowly coming to believe in.\n\nIt was a relief to me when, towards midnight. Theresa rose to go to bed. We had skirted through the horrors of the child's possessing misery without ever quite facing it, and as we stood there lighting the candles, our voices whispering, our minds charged with the strain of thoughts neither of us had felt it wise to utter, my cousin started back against the wall and stared up into the darkness above where the staircase climbed the well of the house. She uttered a cry. At first I thought she was going to collapse. I was only just in time to catch the candle.\n\nAll the emotions of fearfulness she had repressed during our long talk came out in that brief cry, and when I looked up to discover the cause I saw a small white figure come slowly down the wide staircase and just about to step into the hall. It was Aileen, with bare feet, her dark hair tumbling down over her nightgown, her eyes wide open, an expression in them of anguished expectancy that her tender years could never possibly have known. She was walking steadily, yet somehow not quite as a child walks.\n\n\"Stop!\" I whispered peremptorily to my cousin, putting my hand quickly over her mouth, and holding her back from the first movement of rescue, \"don't wake her. She's walking in her sleep.\"\n\nAileen passed us like a white shadow, scarcely audible, and went straight across the hall. She was utterly unaware of our presence. Avoiding all obstructions of chairs and tables, moving with decision and purpose, the little figure dipped into the shadows at the far end and disappeared from view in the mouth of the corridor that had once\u2014three hundred years ago\u2014led into the wing where now the copper beeches grew upon open lawns. It was clearly a way familiar to her.\n\nAnd the instant I recovered from my surprise and moved after her to act, Theresa found her voice and cried aloud\u2014a voice that broke the midnight silence with shrill discordance\u2014\n\n\"George, oh, George! She's going to that awful room...!\"\n\n\"Bring the candle and come after me,\" I replied from halfway down the hall, \"but do not interrupt unless I call for you,\" and was after the child at a pace to which the most singular medley of emotions I have ever known urged me imperiously. A sense of tragic disaster gripped my very vitals. All that I did seemed to rise out of some subconscious region of the mind where the haunting passions of a deeply buried past stirred in their sleep and woke.\n\n\"Helen!\" I cried, \"Lady Helen!\" I was close upon the gliding figure. Aileen turned and for the first time saw me with eyes that seemed to waver between sleep and waking. They gazed straight at me over the flickering candle flame, then hesitated. In similar fashion the gesture of her little hands towards me was arrested before it had completed itself. She saw me, knew my presence, yet was uncertain who I was. It was astonishing the way I actually surprised this momentary indecision between the two personalities in her\u2014caught the two phases of her consciousness at grips\u2014discerned the Aileen of Today in the act of waking to know me as her \"Uncle George,\" and that other Aileen of her great dark story, the \"Helen\" of some far Yesterday, that drew her in this condition of somnambulism to the scene in the past where our two lives were linked in her imagination. For it was quite clear to me that the child was dreaming in her sleep the action of the story she lived through in the vivid moments of her waking terror.\n\nBut the choice was swift. I just had time to signal Theresa to set the candle upon a shelf and wait, when she came up, stretched her hands out in completion of the original gesture, and fell into my arms with a smothered cry of love and anguish that, coming from those childish lips, I think is the most thrilling human sound I have ever known. She knew and saw me, but not as \"Uncle\" George of this present life.\n\n\"Oh, Philip! \"she cried, \"then you have come after all\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course, dear heart,\" I whispered. \"Of course I have come. Did I not give my promise that I would?\"\n\nHer eyes searched my face, and then settled upon my hands that held her little cold wrists so tightly.\n\n\"But\u2014but,\" she stammered in comment, \"they are not cut! They have made you whole again! You will save me and get me out, and we\u2014we\u2014\"\n\nThe expressions of her face ran together into a queer confusion of perplexity, and she seemed to totter on her feet. In another instant she would probably have wakened; again she felt the touch of uncertainty and doubt as to my identity. Her hands resisted the pressure of my own; she drew back half a step; into her eyes rose the shallower consciousness of the present. Once awake it would drive out the profoundly strange passion and mystery that haunted the corridors of thought and memory and plunged so obscurely into the inmost recesses of her being. For, once awake, I realized that I should lose her, lose the opportunity of getting the complete story. The chance was unique. I heard my cousin's footsteps approaching behind us down the passage on tiptoe\u2014and I came to an immediate decision.\n\nIn the state of deep sleep, of course, the trance condition is very close, and many experiments had taught me that the human spirit can be subjected to the influence of hypnotism far more speedily when asleep than when awake; for if hypnotism means chiefly\u2014as I then held it to mean\u2014the merging of the little ineffectual surface-consciousness with the deep sea of the greater subliminal consciousness below, then the process has already been partially begun in normal slumber and its completion need be no very long or difficult matter. It was Aileen's very active subconsciousness that \"invented\" or \"remembered\" the dark story which haunted her life, her subconscious region too readily within tap... By deepening her sleep state I could learn the whole story...\n\nStopping her mother's approach with a sign that I intended she should clearly understand, and which accordingly she did understand, I took immediate steps to plunge the spirit of this little sleep-walking child down again into the subconscious region that had driven her thus far, and wherein lay the potentialities of all her powers, of memory, knowledge and belief. Only the simplest passes were necessary, for she yielded quickly and easily; that first look came back into her eyes; she no longer wavered or hesitated, but drew close against me, with the name of \"Philip\" upon her lips, and together we moved down the long passage till we reached the door of her horrid room of terror.\n\nAnd there, whether it was that Theresa's following with the candle disturbed the child\u2014for the subconscious tie with the mother is of such unalterable power\u2014or whether anxiety weakened my authority over her fluctuating mental state, I noticed that she again wavered and hesitated, looking up with eyes that saw partly \"Uncle George,\" partly the \"Philip\" she remembered.\n\n\"We'll go in,\" I said firmly, \"and you shall see that there is nothing to be afraid of.\" I opened the door, and the candle from behind threw a triangle of light into the darkness. It fell upon a bare floor, pictureless walls, and just tipped the high white ceiling overhead. I pushed the door still wider open and we went in hand in hand, Aileen shaking like a leaf in the wind.\n\nHow the scene lives in my mind, even as I write it to-day so many years after it took place: the little child in her nightgown facing me in that empty room of the ancient building, all the passionate emotions of a tragic history in the small young eyes, her mother like a ghost in the passage, afraid to come in, the tossing shadows thrown by the candle and the soft moan of the night wind against the outside walls.\n\nI made further passes over the small flushed face and pressed my thumbs gently along the temples. \"Sleep! \" I commanded; \"sleep\u2014and remember!\" My will poured over her being to control and protect. She passed still deeper into the trance condition in which the somnambulistic lucidity manifests itself and the deeper self gives up its dead. Her eyes grew wider, rounder, charged with memories as they fastened themselves upon my own. The present, which a few minutes before had threatened to claim her consciousness by waking her, faded. She saw me no longer as her familiar Uncle George, but as the faithful friend and lover of her great story, Philip, the man who had come to save her. There she stood in the atmosphere of bygone days, in the very room where she had known great suffering\u2014this room that three centuries ago had led by a corridor into the wing of the house where now the beeches grew upon the lawns.\n\nShe came up close and put her thin bare arms about my neck and stared with peering, searching eyes into mine.\n\n\"Remember what happened here,\" I said resolutely. \"Remember, and tell me.\"\n\nHer brows contracted slightly as with the effort, and she whispered, glancing over her shoulder towards the farther end where the corridor once began, \"It hurts a little, but I\u2014I'm in your arms, Philip dear, and you will get me out, I know\u2014\"\n\n\"I hold you safe and you are in no danger, little one,\" I answered. \"You can remember and speak without it hurting you. Tell me.\"\n\nThe suggestion, of course, operated instantly, for her face cleared, and she dropped a great sigh of relief. From time to time I continued the passes that held the trance condition firm.\n\nThen she spoke in a low, silvery little tone that cut into me like a sword and searched my inmost parts. I seemed to bleed internally. I could have sworn that she spoke of things I knew as though I had lived through them.\n\n\"This was when I last saw you,\" she said, \"this was the room where you were to fetch me and carry me away into happiness and safety from\u2014him,\" and it was the voice and words of no mere child that said it; \"and this was where you did come on that night of snow and wind. Through that window you entered;\" she pointed to the deep, embrasured window behind us. \"Can't you hear the storm? How it howls and screams! And the boom of the surf on the beach below... You left the horses outside, the swift horses that were to carry us to the sea and away from all his cruelties, and then\u2014\"\n\nShe hesitated and searched for words or memories; her face darkened with pain and loathing.\n\n\"Tell me the rest,\" I ordered, \"but forget all your own pain.\" And she smiled up at me with an expression of unbelievable tenderness and confidence while I drew the frail form closer.\n\n\"You remember, Philip,\" she went on, \"you know just what it was, and how he and his men seized you the moment you stepped inside, and how you struggled and called for me, and heard me answer\u2014\"\n\n\"Far away\u2014outside\u2014\" I interrupted quickly, helping her out of some flashing memory in my own deep heart that seemed to burn and leave a scar. \"You answered from the lawn!\"\n\n\"You thought it was the lawn, but really, you see, it was there\u2014in there,\" and she pointed to the side of the room on my right. She shook dreadfully, and her voice dwindled most oddly in volume, as though coming from a distance\u2014almost muffled.\n\n\"In there?\" I asked it with a shudder that put ice and fire mingled in my blood.\n\n\"In the wall,\" she whispered. \"You see, some one had betrayed us, and he knew you were coming. He walled me up alive in there, and only left two little holes for my eyes so that I could see. You heard my voice calling through those holes, but you never knew where I was. And then\u2014\"\n\nHer knees gave way, and I had to hold her. She looked suddenly with torture in her eyes down the length of the room\u2014towards the old wing of the house.\n\n\"You won't let him come,\" she pleaded beseechingly, and in her voice was the agony of death.\n\n\"I thought I heard him. Isn't that his footsteps in the corridor?\" She listened fearfully, her eyes trying to pierce the wall and see out on to the lawn.\n\n\"No one is coming, dear heart,\" I said, with conviction and authority. \"Tell it all. Tell me everything.\"\n\n\"I saw the whole of it because I could not close my eyes,\" she continued. \"There was an iron band round my waist fastening me in\u2014an iron belt I never could escape from. The dust got into my mouth\u2014I bit the bricks. My tongue was scraped and bleeding, but before they put in the last stones to smother me I saw them\u2014cut both your hands off so that you could never save me\u2014never let me out.\"\n\nShe dashed without warning from my side and flew up to the wall, beating it with her hands and crying aloud\u2014\n\n\"Oh, you poor, poor thing. I know how awful it was. I remember\u2014when I was in you and you wore and carried me, poor, poor body! That thunder of the last brick as they drove it in against the mouth, and the iron clamp that cut into the waist, and the suffocation and hunger and thirst!\"\n\n\"What are you talking to in there?\" I asked sternly, crushing down the tears.\n\n\"The body I was in\u2014the one he walled up\u2014my body\u2014my own body!\"\n\nShe flew back to my side. But even before my cousin had uttered that \"mother-cry\" that broke in upon the child's deeper consciousness, disturbing the memories, I had given the command with all the force of my being to \"forget\" the pain. And only those few who are familiar with the instantaneous changes of emotion that can be produced by suggestion under hypnosis will understand that Aileen came back to me from that moment of \"talking to the wall\" with laughter on her lips and in her eyes.\n\nThe small white figure with the cascade of dark hair tumbling over the nightgown ran up and jumped into my arms.\n\n\"But I saved you,\" I cried, \"you were never properly walled-up; I got you out and took you away from him over the sea, and we were happy ever afterwards, like the people in the fairy tales.\" I drove the words into her with my utmost force, and inevitably she accepted them as the truth, for she clung to me with love and laughter all over her child's face of mystery, the horror fading out, the pain swept clean away. With kaleidoscopic suddenness the change came.\n\n\"So they never really cut your poor dead hands off at all,\" she said hesitatingly.\n\n\"Look! How could they? There they are! And I first showed them to her and then pressed them against her little cheeks, drawing her mouth up to be kissed. \"They're big enough still and strong enough to carry you off to bed and stroke you into so deep a sleep that when you wake in the morning you will have forgotten everything about your dark story, about Philip, Lady Helen, the iron belt, the starvation, your cruel old husband, and all the rest of it. You'll wake up happy and jolly just like any other child\u2014\"\n\n\"If you say so, of course I shall,\" she answered, smiling into my eyes.\n\nAnd it was just then there came in that touch of abomination that so nearly made my experiment a failure, for it came with a black force that threatened at first to discount all my \"suggestion\" and make it of no account. My new command that she should forget had apparently not yet fully registered itself in her being; the tract of deeper consciousness that constructed the \"Story\" had not sunk quite below the threshold. Thus she was still open to any detail of her former suffering that might obtrude itself with sufficient force. And such a detail did obtrude itself. This touch of abomination was calculated with a really superhuman ingenuity.\n\n\"Hark!\" she cried\u2014and it was that scream in a whisper that only utter terror can produce\u2014\"Hark! I hear his steps! He's coming! Oh, I told you he was coming! He's in that passage!\" pointing down the room. And she first sprang from my arms as though something burned her, and then almost instantly again flew back to my protection. In that interval of a few seconds she tore into the middle of the room, put her hand to her ear to listen, and then shaded her eyes in the act of peering down through the wall at the far end. She stared at the very place where in olden days the corridor had led into the vanished wing. The window my great-uncle had built into the wall now occupied the exact spot where the opening had been.\n\nTheresa then for the first time came forward with a rush into the room, dropping the candle-grease over the floor. She clutched me by the arm. The three of us stood there\u2014listening\u2014listening apparently to nought but the sighing of the sea-wind about the walls, Aileen with her eyes buried in my coat. I was standing erect trying in vain to catch the new sound. I remember my cousin's face of chalk with the fluttering eyes and the candle held aslant.\n\nThen suddenly she raised her hand and pointed over my shoulder. I thought her jaw would drop from her face. And she and the child both spoke in the same breath the two sharp phrases that brought the climax of the vile adventure upon us in that silent room of night.\n\nThey were like two pistol-shots.\n\n\"My God! There's a face watching us...!\" I heard her voice, all choked and dry.\n\nAnd at the same second, Aileen\u2014 \"Oh, oh! He's seen us!... He's here! Look... He'll get me... hide your hands, hide your poor hands!\"\n\nAnd, turning to the place my cousin stared at, I saw sure enough that a face\u2014apparently a living human face\u2014was pressed against the window-pane, framed between two hands as it tried to peer upon us into the semi-obscurity of the room. I saw the swift momentary rolling of the two eyes as the candle glare fell upon them, and caught a glimpse even of the hunched-up shoulders behind, as their owner, standing outside upon the lawn, stooped down a little to see better. And though the apparition instantly withdrew, I recognized it beyond question as the dark and evil countenance of the butler. His breath still stained the window.\n\n'Oh, oh! He's seen us! . . He's here! . . Hide your hands!'\n\nYet the strange thing was that Aileen, struggling violently to bury herself amid the scanty folds of my coat, could not possibly have seen what we saw, for her face was turned from the window the entire time, and from the way I held her she could never for a single instant have been in a position to know. It all took place behind her back... A moment later, with her eyes still hidden against me, I was carrying her swiftly in my arms across the hall and up the main staircase to the night nursery.\n\nMy difficulty with her was, of course, while she hovered between the two states of sleep and waking, for once I got her into bed and plunged her deeply again into the trance condition, I was easily able to control her slightest thought or emotion. Within ten minutes she was sleeping peacefully, her little face smoothed of all anxiety or terror, and my imperious command ringing from end to end of her consciousness that when she woke next morning all should be forgotten. She was finally to forget... utterly and completely.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, of course, the man, when I went with loathing and anger in my heart to his room in the servants' quarters, had a perfectly plausible explanation. He was in the act of getting ready for bed, he declared, when the noise had aroused his suspicions, and, as in duty bound, he had made a tour of the house outside, thinking to discover burglars...\n\nWith a month's wages in his pocket, and a considerable degree of wonder in his soul, probably\u2014for the man was guilty of nothing worse than innocently terrifying a child's imagination!\u2014he went back to London the following day; and a few hours later I myself was travelling with Aileen and old Kempster over the blue waves of the North Sea, carrying her off, curiously enough, to freedom and happiness in the very way her \"imagination\" had pictured her escape in the \"story\" of long ago, when she was Lady Helen, held in bondage by a cruel husband, and I was Philip, her devoted lover.\n\nOnly this time her happiness was lasting and complete. Hypnotic suggestion had wiped from her mind the last vestige of her dreadful memories; her face was wreathed in jolly smiles; her enjoyment of the journey and our week in Antwerp was absolutely unclouded; she played and laughed with all the radiance of an unhaunted childhood, and her imagination was purged and healed.\n\nAnd when we got back her mother had again moved her household gods to the original family mansion where she had first lived. Thither it was I took the restored child, and there it was my cousin and I looked up the old family records and verified certain details of the history of De Lorne, that wicked and semi-fabulous ancestor whose portrait hung in the dark corner of the stairs. That his life was evil to the brim I had always understood, but neither myself nor Theresa had known\u2014at least had not consciously remembered\u2014that he had married twice, and that his first wife, Lady Helen, had mysteriously disappeared, and Sir Philip Lansing, a neighbouring knight, supposed to be her lover, had soon afterwards emigrated to France and left his lands and property to go to ruin.\n\nBut another discovery I made, and kept to myself, had to do with that \"room of terror\" in the old Norfolk house where, on the plea of necessary renovation, I had the stones removed, and in the very spot where Aileen used to beat her hands against the bricks and \"talk to the wall,\" the workmen under my own eyes laid bare the skeleton of a woman, fastened to the granite by means of a narrow iron band that encircled the waist\u2014the skeleton of some unfortunate who had been walled-up alive and had come to her dreadful death by the pangs of hunger, thirst and suffocation centuries ago.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Perspective ]\n\nThe amount of duty and pleasure combined in Alpine summer chaplaincies of a month each just suited the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He was still young enough to climb\u2014carefully; and genuine enough to enjoy seeing the crowd of holiday-makers having a good time. As a rule he was on the Entertainment Committee that organized the tennis, dances, and gymkhanas. During the week one would hardly have guessed his calling. On Sundays he appeared a bronzed, lean, vigorous figure in the pulpit of the hot little wooden church, and people liked to see him. His sermons, never over ten minutes, were the same four every year: one for each Sunday of the month; and when he passed on to another month's duty in the next place he repeated them. The surroundings suggested them obviously: Beauty, Rest, Power, Majesty; and they were more like little confidential talks than sermons. Moreover, incidents from the life of the place\u2014the escape of a tourist, the accident to a guide, and what not, usually came ready to hand to point a moral. One summer, however, there occurred a singular adventure that he has never yet been able to introduce into a sermon. Only in private conversation with souls as full of faith as himself does he ever mention it. And the short recital always begins with a sentence more or less as follows\u2014\n\nTalking of the wondrous ways of God, and the little understanding of the children of men, I am always struck by the huge machinery He sometimes adopts to accomplish such delicate and apparently insignificant ends. I remember once when I was doing summer 'duty' in a Swiss resort high up among the mountains of the Valais...\"\n\nAnd then follows the curious occurrence I was once privileged to hear, and have obtained permission to re-tell, duly disguised.\n\nIn the particular mountain village where he was taking a month's duty at the time, his church was full every Sunday, so full indeed that twice a week he held afternoon services for those who cared to worship more quietly. And to these little ceremonies, beloved of his own heart, came two persons regularly who attracted his attention in spite of himself. They sat together at the back; shared the same books, although there was no necessity to do so; courted the shadowy corners of the pews: in a word, they came to worship one another, not to worship God.\n\nBut the clergyman took a broad view. Courtships fostered in the holy atmosphere of the sacred building were more likely to be true than those fanned to flame in the feverish surroundings of the dance-room. And true love is ever an offering to God. He knew the couple, too. The man, quiet, earnest, well over forty; the girl, young, dashing, spirited, leader in mischief, hard to believe sincere, flirting with more than one. In spite of the careful concealment with which she covered their proceedings, choosing the deserted afternoon service rather than the glare of the garden or ball-room for their talks, the couple were marked. The difference in their ages, characters, and appearance singled them out, as much as the general knowledge that she was rich, vain, flighty, while he was poor, strenuous, living a life of practical charity in London, that precluded gaiety or pleasure, so called.\n\n\"What can she see in that dull man twice her age?\" the elder women said to one another\u2014the answer generally being that it probably amused the girl to turn him so easily round her little finger.\n\n\"What a chance for her fortune to be well spent,\" reflected one or two. While the men, when they said anything at all, contented themselves with: \"Pretty hard hit, isn't he? A fine fellow though! Hope he gets her!\"\n\nIt is always somewhat pathetic to see a man of real value fall before the conquering beauty of an ordinary young girl of the world. The clergyman, however, with an eye for spiritual values, even deeply hidden, divined that beneath her lightness and love for conquest's sake there lay the desire for something more real. And he guessed, though at first the wish may have been father to the thought only, that it was the elder man's fine zeal and power that attracted the butterfly in spite of herself towards a life that was more worth living. Hers, after all, he felt, was a soul worth \"saving\"; and this middle-aged man, perhaps, was the force God brought into her life to provide her with the opportunity of escape\u2014could she but seize it.\n\nSo far Ambleside's story runs along ordinary lines enough. One sees his man and girl without further detail. From this point, however, it slips into a stride where the sense of proportion seems somehow lost, or else \"man's little understanding \" is too close to the thing to obtain the proper perspective. If any one but this devout and clear-headed clergyman told the tale, one might say \"Fancy,\" \"Delusion,\" or any other description that seemed suitable. But to hear him tell it, with that air of conviction and truth, in those short, abrupt, even jerky sentences, that left so much to the imagination, and with that pallor of the skin that threw into such vivid contrast the fire burn-ing in his far-seeing blue eyes\u2014to sit close to him and hear the story grow in that tense low voice, was to know beyond all question that he spoke of something real and actual, in the same sense that a train or St. Paul's Cathedral are real and actual.\n\nWhat he saw, he really saw: though the sight may have been of a kind unfamiliar to the majority. He was used as a real pawn in a real game. The girl's life and soul were rescued, so to speak, by the marriage brought about, and her forces of mind and spirit lifted bodily for what they were worth into the scheme that God had ordained for them from the beginning of the world. Only\u2014the machinery brought to bear upon the end in view seemed so prodigious, so extraordinary, so unnecessary... One thinks of the sentence with which Ambleside always began his tale. One wonders. But no one who heard the tale ever asked questions at its close. There was absolutely nothing to say.\n\nEven to the smallest details the affair seemed thought out and planned, for that particular Tuesday Ambleside started without the guide-porter who usually carried his telescope, camera, and lunch. He went off at six a.m., with merely an ice-axe and a small knapsack containing food and Shetland vest for the summit.\n\nIt was one of those days towards the end of August when some quality in the atmosphere\u2014usually sign of approaching rain\u2014brings the mountains uncannily close, yet, at the same time, sets out every detail of pinnacle, precipice, and ridge with a terror of size and grandeur that makes one realize their true and gigantic scale. They press up close, yet at the same time stand away in the depths of the sky like unattainable masses in some dream world. This mingling of proximity and distance has a confusing effect upon the eye. When Ambleside toiled up the zigzags without actually looking beyond, he felt that the towering massif of the Valais Alps all about him loomed very close; but when he stopped for breath and raised his eyes steadily into their detail, he felt that their distance was too great to be conquered by any little two-legged being like himself merely taking steps. And as he rose out of the valley into the clearer strata of air this effect increased. The whole scale of the chain of Alps about him seemed raised to an immeasurably higher power than he had ever known. He felt like an insect crawling over the craters of the moon. The prodigious splendours of the scenery all round oppressed him more than ever before with his own futile littleness, yet at the same time made him conscious of the grandeur of his soul before the God who had set him and his kind above all this chaos of tumbled planet.\n\nHe thought of the mountains as part of the \"garment of God,\" and of nature as expressing some portion of the Deity not intended to be expressed by man\u2014all part of His purpose, alive with His informing will. This glory of the inanimate Alps linked on to some stranger glory in himself that interpreted for him, as in a mystical revelation, God's thundering message and purpose known in the great forms and moods of nature. Closely in touch with the spirit of the mountains he was; glad to be alone.\n\nThis, in a sentence, expresses his mood: that the mountains accepted him. Forces in his deepest being that were akin to the life of the planet on which he made his tiny track rose up and triumphed. Over the treacherous Pas d'Iliez, where he usually felt giddy and unsafe, he felt this morning only exhilaration. The gulf yawning at his feet touched him with its splendour, not its terror.\n\nThus, feeling inclined to shout and run, he eventually reached the desolate valley of rock and shale that lies, unrelieved by a single blade of grass, between the glacier-covered slopes that shut it in impassably on three sides. The bed of this valley lies some 7,000 feet above the sea. The peaks and ridges that rear about it reach 12,000 feet. Here, being a good climber, he rested for the first time at the end of two hours' steady ascent. The air nipped. The loneliness and desolation were very impressive. Beyond him hung the glaciers like immense thick blankets of blue-white upon the steep slopes, dropping from time to time lumps of ice into the shale-strewn valley below. For the sun shining in a cloudless sky was fierce. The clergyman, before attacking the long snow-field that began at his very feet, took out his blue spectacles and disentangled the cord. He ate some chocolate, and took the dried prunes from his knapsack, knowing that thirst would soon be upon him, and that ice-water was not for drinking.\n\n\"What a mite I am, to be sure, amid all this appalling wilderness!\" he exclaimed; \"and how splendid to be able to hold my own!\"\n\nAnd then it was, just as he stood up to arrange the glasses on his forehead, ready to pull down at a moment's notice, that he became aware of something that was strange\u2014unaccustomed. Through the giant splendours of the scorching August day, across all this stupendous scenery of desolation and loneliness, something fine as a needle, delicate as a hair, had begun picking at his mind. The idea came to him that he was no longer alone. Like a man who hears his name called out of darkness he turned instinctively to find the speaker; almost as though some one had been calling to him for a considerable time, and he had only just had his attention drawn to it. He looked keenly up and down the immense, deserted valley.\n\nIn every direction, however, he saw nothing but miles of rock, dazzling snow-fields, dark precipices, and endless peaks cutting the blue sky overhead with teeth that gleamed like burnished steel. It was desolation everywhere. The gentle wind that fanned his cheek made no sound against the stones. There was neither tree nor grass for it to rustle through. No bird's wing whirred the air; and the far-off falling of a hundred cascades was of too regular and monotonous a character to have taken on the quality of a voice or the rhythm of uttered words. He examined, so far as he could, the enormous sides of mountain about him, and the great soaring ridges. It was just possible some climber in distress had spied him out, and shouted down upon him from the heights. But he searched in vain. There was no moving human figure. The sound, if sound it had been, was not repeated; only he was no longer alone, as before. That, at least, was certain... He nibbled more chocolate, put a couple of sour prunes into his mouth to suck, arranged the blue snow-glass over his eyes, and started on again for a steady pull up to the next ridge.\n\nAnd as he rose the scale of the surrounding mountains rose appallingly with him. The true distance of the peaks proclaimed itself; the tremendous reaches that from below appeared telescoped up into a little space opened up and stretched themselves. The hour grew into two. It was considerably after twelve before he reached the ar\u00eate where he had promised himself lunch. And all the way, without ceasing, the idea that he was being accompanied remained insistent in his mind. It troubled and perplexed him. Perhaps it frightened him a little, too. More than once it came close enough to make him pause and consider whether he should continue or turn back.\n\nFor the curious part of it was that this idea exercised a direct and deliberate effect upon him. By a hundred little details that seemed to be spontaneous until he examined them, it kept suggesting somehow that he should change his route. Something in his consciousness grew that had not been there before. He thought of a bird bringing tiny morsels of grass and twig until a nest formed. In this way the steady stream of thoughts from somewhere outside himself came nesting in his brain until at length they acquired the consistency of an impression, next of a distinct desire, lastly, the momentum of a definite intention. They acted upon his volition, stirring softly among the roots of his will. Before he realized how it had quite come about he had changed his mind.\n\nInstead of going on to the top as I intended, he said to himself, as he sat on the dizzy ledge munching hard-boiled eggs and sugar sandwiches, \"I shall strike off to the left and find my way back into the valley again. That, I think, would be\u2014nicer!\"\n\nHe had no real reason; he invented none.\n\nAnd the moment he said it there was a sense of pressure removed, a consciousness of relief, the knowledge, in a word, that he was following a route that it was desired he should follow.\n\nTo a man, of course, whose habit it was to seek often the will of a personal Deity he worshipped, there was nothing very out of the way in all this, although he never remembered to have felt any guidance so distinctly and forcibly indicated before. The feeling that he was being \"guided\" now became a certainty, and in order to follow instructions as well as possible he made his will of no account and opened himself to receive the slightest token this other Directing Agency might care to vouchsafe.\n\nAfter lunch, therefore, he struck out a diagonal course across a steep snow-slope that would eventually bring him down again to the valley a little nearer its head. And before he had gone a hundred yards he ran into the track of another climber. The marks were a couple of days old, perhaps, for in their hollows lay little heaps of fine snow-dust, freshly blown. Judging by the size there had been two men. He noted the trace of the ice-axe and the occasional streak of the trailing rope. The men had made straight for the valley far below. Here and there they had glissaded. Here and there, too, they had also tumbled gloriously, for the snow was tossed about by their floundering. Yet there was no danger; no precipices intervened; the snow sloped without a break right down into the shale below.\n\n\"I'll follow their example,\" said the Rev. Phillip Ambleside. He strapped on the extra leather seat he carried for sliding and sat down. A moment later he was rushing at high speed over the hard surface. There were hollows of softer snow, however, which stopped him from time to time, drifts as it were into which he plunged, and from which he emerged, wet and shivering. Then he stood up and leaned on his axe, trying to glissade on his feet. For this, however, the surface was not smooth enough. The result was he tumbled, rolled, slid, sat down, and took immense gliding strides. It was very exhilarating. He revelled in it.\n\nBut all the while he kept his eyes sharply about him, for in his heart he felt that he was obeying that guiding Influence so strongly impressed upon him\u2014the Power that had persuaded him to change his route, and was now leading him to some particular point with some particular purpose. Now, too, for the first time a vague sense of calamity touched him. Once introduced, it grew. Soon it amounted to a positive foreboding, a presentiment of disaster almost. He could not avoid the idea that he was being led by supernatural means to the scene of some catastrophe where he was to prove of use\u2014a rescue, an arrival in the nick of time to save some one. He actually looked about him already for\u2014yes, for the body. And through his sub-conscious mind, with the force of habit, ran the magnificent use he could make of it all in a future sermon.\n\nYet nothing came. The tracks of the other men stretched clear and unbroken into the valley of rocks below. He traced the wavering thin line the whole way down.\n\n\"It's nothing to do with these men, at any rate,\" he said to himself, as he sat down for the final slide that should take him to the bottom of the slope. \"No accident could possibly have happened here. The snow's too soft, and there are no rocks to fall over or\u2014\"\n\nThe sentence, or the thought, remained unfinished, for the mouth of the Rev. Phillip was stopped temporarily with wet snow as he lost his balance and rushed sideways with an undignified plunge into a drifted hollow. His eyes were blinded, his feet twisted, the skin of his back drenched and icy. He rose spluttering and gasping. Luckily his axe had a leather loop, or he would have lost it; as it was, his slouch hat was already a hundred feet below, sliding and turning like a top on its way to the bottom, followed by the snow-goggles.\n\nAnd in the act of brushing himself free of snow the truth came to him. It was as though a hand had struck him on the back and pointed\u2014as though a voice had uttered the five words: \"This is the place. Look!\"\n\nSwiftly, searchingly, keenly he looked, and saw\u2014nothing; nothing, at least, that explained the impression of disaster that had possessed him. There was no body certainly, nor any sign of an accident; no place, indeed, where an accident could possibly have come about. He dug quickly in the loose snow with his axe, but the snow was barely two feet deep in this particular hollow, and all round it was a hard surface of smoothly and tightly-packed stuff that was almost ice. Nothing bigger than a cat could have lain buried there!\n\n\"This is the place! Look well!\" the words seemed to ring in his ears.\n\nYet the more he looked and saw nothing, the more strongly beat this message upon his brain.\n\nThis was the place where he was to come, where he was to fulfil some purpose, to find something, do something, accomplish the end intended by the Will that had so carefully guided him all day. The feeling was positive; not to be denied. It was, at the same time, distressingly vast\u2014mighty.\n\nFixing himself securely against his axe, he stood and stared. The sun beat back into his face from the glittering snow on all sides. Tremendous black precipices towered not far behind him; to his left rolled the frozen mass of the huge glacier, its pinnacles of tottering ice catching the afternoon sun; to his right stretched into bewildering distance the interminable and desolate reaches of shale and moraine till the eye rested upon summits of a dozen peaks that literally swam in the sky where white clouds streamed westwards. There was no sound but falling water, no sign of humanity except the single track of those other climbers, no indication of any disturbance upon the vast face of nature that spread all about him, immense, still, terrific.\n\nThen, piercing the monotony of the falling water, a faint sound of fluttering, heard for the first time, reached his ear. He turned as at the sound of a pistol-shot in the direction whence it came\u2014but again saw nothing. The sound ceased. From the slope below came a breath of icy wind that made him shiver, and with it, he fancied, came the faint hissing noise of his sliding hat and spectacles. This, perhaps, was the sound he had heard as \"fluttering.\"\n\nAt length after prolonged and vain searching, the clergyman decided there was nothing for him to do but continue his journey, for the sun was getting low, and he had a long way to go before dusk could be regarded with equanimity. He felt exhausted, wearied, impatient too if the truth were told, yet ashamed of his impatience.\n\n\"If this is all real,\" he argued under his breath, \"why isn't it made clear what I'm to do?\"\n\nAnd immediately upon the heels of the thought came again that faint and curious sound of something fluttering.\n\nNow, there can be no question that he understood perfectly well that this sound of fluttering had a direct connection with the whole purpose of the day\u2014that it was the clue to his presence in this particular spot, and that he had been forced to halt here by means of his fall in order that he might investigate something or other on this very spot. He knew it; he felt it. But he was too impatient, too cold, too weary to spend any further time over it all. Alarm, too, was plucking uneasily at his reins.\n\nSo this time he affected to ignore the sound. Leaning back on his axe he threw his body into position for sliding down to the bottom of the slope. In another second he would have started\u2014when something that froze him into the immobility of a terror worse than death arrested him with a power beyond anything he had ever known before in his life\u2014a Power that seemed to carry behind it the pressure of the entire universe.\n\nThere, close beside him in this mountain wilderness, had risen up suddenly a Face\u2014close as the handle of the ice-axe he so tightly grasped, yet at the same time so far away, so immense, so stupendous in scale that he has never understood to this day how it was he could have perceived that it was\u2014a Face. Yet a face it undoubtedly was, a living face; and its eyes\u2014its regard, at any rate, for eyes he divined rather than saw\u2014were focussed upon some object that lay at his very feet.\n\nClammy with fear, his heart thumping dreadfully, he dropped back upon the snow. Without looking at any particular detail he became aware that the entire world of giant scenery about him was involved in the building up of this appalling Countenance, whose gaze was directed upon a tiny point immediately before him\u2014the point, he now perceived, whence proceeded that familiar little sound of fluttering.\n\nWords obviously fail him when he attempts to describe the terror of this Visage that rose about him through the day. Pallid and immense, it seemed to stretch itself against the wastes of grey rock, with entire slopes of snow upon the cheeks, ridged and furrowed by precipice and cliff, with torn clouds of flying hair that streaked the blue, and the expanse of glaciers for the splendid brows. Across it the dark line of two moraines tilted for eyebrows, and the massive columns of compressed strata embedded in the whole structure of the mountain chain bulged for the muscles of the awful neck... Moreover, the shoulders upon which it all rested\u2014the vast framework of body that he divined below\u2014the dizzy drop in space where such fearful limbs must seek their resting-place\u2014\"\n\nHis mind went reeling. The titanic proportions of this Countenance of splendour threatened in some horrible way to overwhelm his life. Its calmness, its iron immobility, its remorseless fixity of mien petrified him. The thought that he had dared to question it, to put himself in opposition to its purpose, even to be impatient with it\u2014this turned all his soul within him soft and dead with a kind of ultimate terror that bereft him of any clear memory, perhaps momentarily, too, of consciousness.\n\nThe clergyman thinks he fainted. Exactly what happened, probably, he never knew nor realized. All that he can say in attempting to describe it is that he found his own eyes caught up and carried away in the gigantic stream of vision that this Face of Mountains poured upon the ground\u2014caught up and directed upon a tiny little white object that fluttered in the wind at his very feet.\n\nHe saw what the Face was looking at and wished him to look at. It made him see what it saw.\n\nFor there, in front of him, unnoticed hitherto, lay a scrap of paper half embedded in the snow.\n\nAutomatically he stooped and picked it up. It was an envelope bearing the printed inscription of an hotel in the village. It was sealed. On the outside in a fine handwriting, he read the Christian name of a man. Opening the corner he saw inside a small lock of dark-coloured hair. And this was all...!\n\nThen it was just at this moment that the snow where his feet rested gave way, and he started off at full speed to slide to the bottom of the slope, where he only just stopped himself in time to prevent shooting with a violent collision into a mass of shale and loose stones.\n\nIn less than thirty seconds it had all happened... and the swift descent and tumble had shaken him back as it were into a normal state of mind. But the oppression that had burdened him all day was gone. The mountains looked as usual. An indescribable sense of relief came over him. He felt a free agent once more\u2014no longer guided, pushed, directed. He had fulfilled the purpose.\n\nPutting the little envelope in his inside pocket he picked up his slouch hat and snow-goggles, ate some chocolate and dried prunes, and started off at a brisk pace for his return journey of three hours to the village and\u2014dinner. And the whole way home the grandeur of that face, with its splendid pallor, and its expression of majesty, haunted him with indescribable sensations. With it, however, all the time ran the accompanying thought: \"What a tremendous business for so small a result! All that vast man\u0153uvring, all that terror of the imagination, and all that complex pressure upon my insignificant spirit merely in the end to find a wisp of girl's hair in an envelope evidently fallen from the pocket of some careless climber!\"\n\nThe more the Rev. Phihlip Ambleside thought about it, the more bewildered he felt. He was uncommonly glad, however, to get in before dark. The memory of that Mountain Countenance was no agreeable companion for the forest paths and lonely slopes through which his way led in the dusk." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 419", + "text": "That same night it so happened, before he was able to take any steps to trace the owner of the little envelope, there was a Bal de T\u00eates at the principal hotel. Although the clergyman was on the Entertainment Committee which organized the simple gaieties of the place, he held that honorary position only as a personal compliment to himself; he did not at a rule take an active part in the detail, nor did he as a general rule attend the balls.\n\nThis particular night, however, he strolled down to the hotel, and after a little conversation with one or two friends in the hail he made his way to a secluded corner of the glass gallery where the dancers sat out between times, and lit his pipe for a quiet smoke. From behind the shelter of a large sham palm he was able to see all he wanted of the ball-room, to hear the music, and to take in the pleasant sight of all the people enjoying themselves. And the sight did him good. He liked to see it. A number were in costume, which added to the picturesqueness of the scene. Perhaps he sat more in the shadows than he knew, or perhaps the dancers who came to \"sit out\" near him in the gallery did not realize how their voices carried. Several couples, as the evening advanced, came so close to him that, had he wished, he could have overheard easily every word they uttered. He did not wish, however. His mind was busy with thoughts of its own. That haunting scene of desolation in the mountains obsessed him still; and about ten o'clock, his pipe being finished, he was on the point of getting up to leave, when two dancers came and sat down immediately behind him and began to talk in such very distinct tones that it was impossible to avoid hearing every single word they uttered.\n\nThe clergyman pushed his chair aside to make room to go, when, in doing so, he threw a passing glance at the couple\u2014and instantly recognized them. The girl, a Carmen, and a very becoming Carmen, was the one who frequented his afternoon services, and the man, who wore simple evening dress and was not in costume at all, was the middle-aged Englishman who had been at her heels like a slave all the summer. They were absorbed in one another, and evidently unaware of his presence.\n\nTo say that he hesitated would not be true. Some force beyond himself simply took him by the shoulders and pushed him back into the chair. Against his own will\u2014for Mr. Ambleside was no eavesdropper\u2014he remained there deliberately to listen.\n\nIn telling the story he tells it just like this, making no excuses for conduct that was certainly dishonourable. He declares he could not help himself; the instinct was too imperious to be disobeyed. Again, as in the afternoon, he understood that he was merely being used as a pawn in the game, a game of great importance to some Intelligence that saw through to the distant end.\n\nThe man was quiet, but tremendously in earnest, with the kind of steady manner that no woman likes unless she finds it in her to respond with a similar sincerity. Under the bronze his skin showed pale a little. He began to speak the instant they sat down; and in his voice was passion.\n\n\"I want you, and I want your money, and I want your life and soul\u2014everything,\" he said, evidently continuing a conversation; \"your youth and energy, your talents, your will, all that is you and yours\u2014 all.\" His voice was pitched very low, yet without tremor. He was playing the whole stake, as a strong man of middle age plays it when he is utterly in earnest. \"For my scheme, for our scheme, for God's scheme I want you; and no one else but you will do. I want you to awake, and change your life, and be your true, fine self. We can make a success, you and I, a success for ourselves and for others. I shall never give you up until\u2014until you give yourself to the world, or\"\u2014his voice dropped very low\u2014\"to another.\"\n\nThe clergyman waited breathlessly for the answer. The man's words vibrated with such suppressed fire that only a serious reply could be forthcoming. But for a space Carmen merely toyed with her fan, the little red spangled fan that swung from a single finger. Behind the black domino her eyes sparkled, but the expression of her face was hidden.\n\n\"The difference in age is nothing,\" he continued almost sternly. \"For me, you are the woman, and for you I will prove that I am the man. I see clean through to the great soul hidden in you. I can bring it out. I can make you real\u2014a soul of value in the big order of God's purposes. What can these boys ever be, or do, for you? I've got a big, useful, practical scheme that can use you, just as it can use me. And my great unselfish love has picked you out of the whole world as the one woman necessary. Will you come to me?\"\n\nStill the girl was silent. She tapped him on the knee two or three times, would-be playfully, with the tip of her fan. Her head was bent down a little.\n\n\"And I'm strong,\" he went on earnestly; \"I'm a man. The power in me recognizes and calls to the power in you. Let me hold you and mould you, and let's take the fine, high life together. Drop this life of child's play you've been leading. Come to me; my arms are hungry for you! But I want you for a higher purpose than my own happiness\u2014though I swear I can make you happy as no woman in this world has ever before been happy. And without you,\" he added more softly after a slight pause, \"this splendid scheme of mine, of ours, can come to nothing. For I cannot do it alone\u2014and there is only one You in the world. Answer me now. It was to-night, remember, you promised. I leave tomorrow, and London days lie far ahead. Give me your answer to go back with.\"\n\nIt was a curious way to make love. The reverend gentleman thought he had never heard anything quite like it. An ordinarily frivolous girl, of course, would have been impatient long ago. But the fine passion of the man broke everywhere through his rather lame words, and set something in the air about them aflame. The violins sounded thin and trashy compared to the rhythm of this earnest voice; all the glitter of the ball-room seemed cheap\u2014the costume of Carmen absurdly incongruous. Mr. Ambleside slipped back somehow into the key of the afternoon when Cosmic Powers had held direct communion with his soul. He understood that he was meant to listen. Something big was in progress, something important in a high sense. He did listen\u2014to every word. It was Carmen speaking now; but her voice marred the picture. It was thin, trifling, even affected.\n\n\"It's very flattering,\" she simpered, \"but\u2014don't you see\u2014it means the end of all my fun and enjoyment in life. You're so fearfully in earnest. You'd exhaust me in the first week!\" She cocked her pretty head on one side, holding the fan against her cheek. Something, nevertheless, belied the lightness of her words, the listener felt.\n\n\"But I'll teach you a different kind of happiness,\" replied the man eagerly, \"so that you'll never again want this passing excitement, this 'unrest which men miscall delight.' Give me your answer\u2014now. I see it in your eyes. Let me go away to-morrow with this great new happiness in my heart.\" He leaned forward. \"Let your real self speak out once for all!\" He took her fan away and she made no resistance. She clasped her hands in her lap, still looking at him mischievously through her mask.\n\n\"Let's wait till we meet later in town,\" she sighed at length prettily, coaxingly. \"I shall be able to enjoy myself here then for the rest of the summer first\u2014I feel so young for such a programme.\"\n\nBut the man cut her short.\n\n\"Now,\" he said, holding her steadily with his eyes. \"You said that to me a year ago, remember. I have waited ever since. It is your youth I want.\"\n\nThe girl played with him for another ten minutes, while the clergyman listened, wondering greatly at the other's patience. Clearly, she delighted to feel his great love beating up against the citadel she meant in the end to yield. The lighter side of her was vastly interested and amused by it; but all the time the deeper part was ready with its answer. It was only that the \"child\" in her wanted to enjoy itself a little longer before it capitulated for ever to the strength that should take her captive, and lead her by sharp ways of sacrifice to the high r\u00f4le she was meant to fill.\n\nIt would all have vexed and wearied Mr. Ambleside exceedingly, but for this singular feeling that it was part of some much larger scheme of which he might never know the whole perhaps, but in which he was playing his little part with a secret thrill. Through the tawdry glitter of that scented ball-room he saw again that terrible white-lipped Face, and felt the measure of this great purpose rolling past him\u2014 immense, remorseless\u2014which, for all its splendour, could include even so small a thing as this vain and silly girl. The tide of it rose about him with a flood of power. He glanced at the small black domino of the Carmen opposite him... he saw the little flashing eyes, the pert lips and mouth\u2014thinking with something like a shudder of that of her Countenance in the hollow of whose eyes hid tempests, yet which could look down upon a tiny fluttering paper, because that paper was an item of importance in its great scheme of which both beginning and end were nevertheless veiled...\n\nHis thoughts must have wandered for a time. The conversation, at any rate, had meanwhile taken a singular turn. The girl was on her feet, the man facing her.\n\n\"Then what is this test of yours?\" he was saying, half serious, half laughing\u2014\"this test which you say will prove how much I care?\"\n\nThe girl put back between her lips the small red rose that was part of the Carmen costume. Either it was that the stalk made her lisp a little, or else that a sudden rush of the violins in the waltz drowned her words. The Reverend Phillip, standing there trembling\u2014he never quite understood why he should have awaited her answer so nervously\u2014only caught the second half of her phrase.\n\n\"...that I gave you in this very room six weeks ago, and that you promised to carry about with you always?\" he heard the end of her sentence, in a voice that for the first time that evening was serious; \"because, if you've kept your word in a small thing like that I can trust you to keep it in bigger things. It was a part of myself, you know, that little bit of hair!\" She laughed deliciously in his face, raising herself on tiptoe with her hands behind her back. \"You said so yourself, didn't you? You promised it should never, never leave you.\"\n\nThe man made a curiously sudden gesture as though a pain beyond his control passed through him. His hands were on the back of a chair. The chair squeaked audibly along the polished floor beneath a violent momentary pressure. He looked straight into his companion's eyes, but made no immediate reply.\n\nCarmen's gaze behind the black mask became hard. With a truly feminine idiocy she was obviously playing this whim as a serious move in the game.\n\n\"For if you have lost that,\" she continued, her face flushing beneath the paint, \"how can you expect to keep the rest of me, the important part of me?\" She spoke as though she believed that he, too, was half-playing\u2014that the next minute he would put his hand into his pocket and produce it. His delay, his awkwardness, above all his silence, angered her. For the surface of her self-contradictory character was obviously\u2014minx.\n\nAfter a pause that seemed interminable the man spoke, and for the first time his deep voice shook a little.\n\n\"This time to-morrow night you shall have it,\" he said.\n\n\"But you're leaving, you said, in the morning!\" The tone was piqued and shrill.\n\n\"I shall stay another day\u2014on purpose.\" A pause followed.\n\n\"Then you really have lost it\u2014envelope and all\u2014with your name in my writing on the outside, and my hair for all to recognize who find it\u2014and to sneer.\"\n\nHer eyes flashed as she said it. The girl was disappointed, incensed, furious. It was all silly enough, of course, and utterly out of proportion. But how silly and childish real life is apt to be at such moments, only those who have reached middle age and have observed closely can know. At the time, to the clergyman who stood there listening and observing, it seemed genuinely poignant, even tragic.\n\n\"Until the day before yesterday it had never left me for a single instant,\" he said at length. \"I was in the mountains\u2014glissading with your brother. It fell out of my pocket with a lot of other papers. I lost it on the upper snow slopes of the Dents Blenches\u2014\"\n\nThe rest of his words were drowned by an inrush of people, for the band was beginning a two-step and couples were sorting themselves and seeking their partners. A Frenchman, dressed as Napoleon, came up to claim his dance. Carmen was swept away. Scornfully, angrily, with concentrated resentment in her voice and manner, she turned upon her heel and from the lips that bit the stalk of the small red rose came the significant words\u2014\n\n\"And with it you have also lost\u2014me!\"\n\nShe was gone. Perhaps the Reverend Phillip Ambleside only imagined the tears in her voice. He never knew, and had no time to think, for he found himself looking straight into the eyes of the lover, thus absurdly rejected, and who now became aware of his close presence for the first time. Even then the absurdity of the whole situation did not wholly reveal itself. It came later with reflection. At the moment he felt that it was all like a vivid and singular dream in which the values and proportions were oddly exaggerated, yet in which the sense of tragedy was distressingly real. His heart went out to the faithful and patient man who was being so trifled with, yet who might be in danger of losing by virtue of his very simplicity what was to be of real value in his life\u2014and scheme.\n\n\"It's my move now,\" was the thought in his mind as he took a step forward.\n\nThe other, embarrassed and annoyed to discover that the whole scene had probably been overheard, made an awkward movement to withdraw, but before he could do so, the clergyman approached him. Only one step was necessary. He moved up from behind a palm, and drawing his hand from an inner pocket, he handed across to him a white envelope bearing the printed name of the hotel and a neat inscription in feminine writing just below it.\n\n\"I found this on the snow slopes of the Dents Blanches this afternoon,\" he said courteously. The other stared him steadily in the face\u2014his colour coming and going quickly. \"Take it to her and say that after all it was you\u2014you, who were applying the test\u2014that you wished to see if for so small a thing she was ready to reject so true a love. And, pray, pardon this interference which\u2014er\u2014chance has placed in my power. The matter, I need hardly say, is entirely between yourself and me.\"\n\nThe man took the paper awkwardly, a soft smile of gratitude and comprehension dawning in his eyes. He began to stammer a few words, but the clergyman did not stay to listen. He bowed politely and left him.\n\nHe went out of the hotel into the night, and a wind from the surrounding snow slopes brushed his face with its touch of great spaces. He looked up and saw the crowding stars, brilliant as in winter. The mountains in this faint light seemed incredibly close. Slowly he walked up the village street to his rooms in the chalet by the church.\n\nAnd suddenly the true, proportion of normal things in this little life returned to him, and with it a sharp realization of the triviality of the scene he had been forced to witness\u2014and of the horrible grandeur of the means by which he had been dragged, by the scruff of his priestly neck as it were, so awkwardly into the middle of it all: merely to provide a scrap of evidence the loss of which threatened to bring about a foolish estrangement, and might conceivably have prevented a marriage of apparently insignificant importance.\n\nHe felt as though the machinery of the entire solar system had been employed to help a pair of ants carry a pine-needle too heavy for them to the top of the nest.\n\nAnd then a moment's reflection brought to him another thought. For who could say what the result of this marriage might be? Who could say that from just the exact combination of those two forces\u2014the earnest man, and the lighter girl\u2014a son might not be born who should shake the world and lead some cherished purpose of Deity to completion? For, truly, of the threads which weave into the pattern of life and out again, men see but the tiny section immediately beneath their eyes. The majority focus their gaze upon some detail\u2014thus losing the view of the whole. The beginning and the end are for ever hidden; and what appears insignificant and out of proportion when caught alone at close quarters, may reveal all the splendour of the Eternal Purpose when surveyed with the proper perspective\u2014of the Infinite. The Reverend Philhip Ambleside felt as if for a moment he had been lifted to a height whence he had caught perhaps a glimpse of these larger horizons.\n\nWith his faith vastly strengthened, but his nerves considerably shaken, the clergyman went to bed and slept the sleep of a just man who has done his duty by chance as it were, He had helped forward a purpose of which he really understood nothing, but which, he somehow felt, was bigger than anything with which he had so far been connected in his life. Some day\u2014his faith whispered it next morning while he was preparing his sermon\u2014he would see the matter with proper perspective, and would understand." + }, + { + "title": "The Terror of the Twins", + "text": "That the man's hopes had built upon a son to inherit his name and estates\u2014a single son, that is\u2014was to be expected; but no one could have foreseen the depth and bitterness of his disappointment, the cold, implacable fury, when there arrived instead\u2014twins. For, though the elder legally must inherit, that other ran him so deadly close. A daughter would have been a more reasonable defeat. But twins\u2014! To miss his dream by so feeble a device\u2014!\n\nThe complete frustration of a hope deeply cherished for years may easily result in strange fevers of the soul, but the violence of the father's hatred, existing as it did side by side with a love he could not deny, was something to set psychologists thinking. More than unnatural, it was positively uncanny. Being a man of rigid self-control, however, it operated inwardly, and doubtless along some morbid line of weakness little suspected even by those nearest to him, preying upon his thought to such dreadful extent that finally the mind gave way. The suppressed rage and bitterness deprived him, so the family decided, of his reason, and he spent the last years of his life under restraint. He was possessed naturally of immense forces\u2014of will, feeling, desire; his dynamic value truly tremendous, driving through life like a great engine; and the intensity of this concentrated and buried hatred was guessed by few. The twins themselves, however, knew it. They divined it, at least, for it operated ceaselessly against them side by side with the genuine soft love that occasionally sweetened it, to their great perplexity. They spoke of it only to each other, though.\n\n'At twenty-one,' Edward, the elder, would remark sometimes, unhappily, 'we shall know more.' 'Too much,' Ernest would reply, with a rush of unreasoning terror the thought never failed to evoke\u2014in him. 'Things father said always happened\u2014in life.' And they paled perceptibly. For the hatred, thus compressed into a veritable bomb of psychic energy, had found at the last a singular expression in the cry of the father's distraught mind. On the occasion of their final visit to the asylum, preceding his death by a few hours only, very calmly, but with an intensity that drove the words into their hearts like points of burning metal, he had spoken. In the presence of the attendant, at the door of the dreadful padded cell, he said it: 'You are not two, but one. I still regard you as one. And at the coming of age, by h\u2014, you shall find it out!'\n\nThe lads perhaps had never fully divined that icy hatred which lay so well concealed against them, but that this final sentence was a curse, backed by all the man's terrific force, they quite well realised; and accordingly, almost unknown to each other, they had come to dread the day inexpressibly. On the morning of that twenty-first birthday\u2014their father gone these five years into the Unknown, yet still sometimes so strangely close to them\u2014they shared the same biting, inner terror, just as they shared all other emotions of their life\u2014intimately, without speech. During the daytime they managed to keep it at a distance; but when the dusk fell about the old house they knew the stealthy approach of a kind of panic sense. Their self-respect weakened swiftly... and they persuaded their old friend, and once tutor, the vicar, to sit up with them till midnight... He had humoured them to that extent, willing to forgo his sleep, and at the same time more than a little interested in their singular belief\u2014that before the day was out, before midnight struck, that is, the curse of that terrible man would somehow come into operation against them.\n\nFestivities over and the guests departed, they sat up in the library, the room usually occupied by their father, and little used since. Mr. Curtice, a robust man of fifty-five, and a firm believer in spiritual principalities and powers, dark as well as good, affected (for their own good) to regard the youths' obsession with a kindly cynicism. 'I do not think it likely for one moment,' he said gravely, 'that such a thing would be permitted. All spirits are in the hands of God, and the violent ones more especially.' To which Edward made the extraordinary reply: 'Even if father does not come himself he will\u2014 send!' And Ernest agreed: 'All this time he's been making preparations for this very day. We've both known it for a long time\u2014by odd things that have happened, by our dreams, by nasty little dark hints of various kinds, and by these persistent attacks of terror that come from nowhere, especially of late. Haven't we, Edward?' Edward assenting with a shudder. 'Father has been at us of late with renewed violence. To-night it will be a regular assault upon our lives, or minds, or souls!'\n\n'Strong personalities may possibly leave behind them forces that continue to act,' observed Mr. Curtice with caution, while the brothers replied almost in the same breath: 'That's exactly what we feel so curiously. Though\u2014nothing has actually happened yet, you know, and it's a good many years now since\u2014'\n\nThis was the way the twins spoke of it all. And it was their profound conviction that had touched their old friend's sense of duty. The experiment should justify itself\u2014and cure them. Meanwhile none of the family knew. Everything was planned secretly.\n\nThe library was the quietest room in the house. It had shuttered bow-windows, thick carpets, heavy doors. Books lined the walls, and there was a capacious open fireplace of brick in which the woodlogs blazed and roared, for the autumn night was chilly. Round this the three of them were grouped, the clergyman reading aloud from the Book of Job in low tones; Edward and Ernest, in dinner-jackets, occupying deep leather arm-chairs, listening. They looked exactly what they were\u2014Cambridge 'undergrads', their faces pale against their dark hair, and alike as two peas. A shaded lamp behind the clergyman threw the rest of the room into shadow. The reading voice was steady, even monotonous, but something in it betrayed an underlying anxiety, and although the eyes rarely left the printed page, they took in every movement of the young men opposite, and noted every change upon their faces. It was his aim to produce an unexciting atmosphere, yet to miss nothing; if anything did occur to see it from the very beginning. Not to be taken by surprise was his main idea... And thus, upon this falsely peaceful scene, the minutes passed the hour of eleven and slipped rapidly along towards midnight.\n\nThe novel element in his account of this distressing and dreadful occurrence seems to be that what happened\u2014happened without the slightest warning or preparation. There was no gradual presentiment of any horror; no strange blast of cold air; no dwindling of heat or light; no shaking of windows or mysterious tapping upon furniture. Without preliminaries it fell with its black trappings of terror upon the scene.\n\nThe clergyman had been reading aloud for some considerable time, one or other of the twins\u2014Ernest usually\u2014making occasional remarks, which proved that his sense of dread was disappearing. As the time grew short and nothing happened they grew more at their ease. Edward, indeed, actually nodded, dozed, and finally fell asleep. It was a few minutes before midnight. Ernest, slightly yawning, was stretching himself in the big chair. 'Nothing's going to happen,' he said aloud, in a pause. 'Your good influence has prevented it.' He even laughed now. 'What superstitious asses we've been, sir; haven't we\u2014?'\n\nCurtice, then, dropping his Bible, looked hard at him under the lamp. For in that second, even while the words sounded, there had come about a most abrupt and dreadful change; and so swiftly that the clergyman, in spite of himself, was taken utterly by surprise and had no time to think. There had swooped down upon the quiet library\u2014so he puts it\u2014an immense hushing silence, so profound that the peace already reigning there seemed clamour by comparison; and out of this enveloping stillness there rose through the space about them a living and abominable Invasion\u2014soft, motionless, terrific. It was as though vast engines, working at full speed and pressure, yet too swift and delicate to be appreciable to any definite sense, had suddenly dropped down upon them\u2014from nowhere. 'It made me think,' the vicar used to say afterwards, 'of the Mauretania machinery compressed into a nutshell, yet losing none of its awful power.'\n\n'...haven't we?' repeated Ernest, still laughing. And Curtice, making no audible reply, heard the true answer in his heart: 'Because everything has already happened\u2014 even as you feared.'\n\nYet, to the vicar's supreme astonishment, Ernest still noticed\u2014nothing!\n\n'Look,' the boy added, 'Eddy's sound asleep\u2014sleeping like a pig. Doesn't say much for your reading, you know, sir!' And he laughed again\u2014lightly, even foolishly. But that laughter jarred, for the clergyman understood now that the sleep of the elder twin was either feigned\u2014or unnatural.\n\nAnd while the easy words fell so lightly from his lips, the monstrous engines worked and pulsed against him and against his sleeping brother, all their huge energy concentrated down into points fine as Suggestion, delicate as Thought. The Invasion affected everything. The very objects in the room altered incredibly, revealing suddenly behind their normal exteriors horrid little hearts of darkness. It was truly amazing, this vile metamorphosis. Books, chairs, pictures, all yielded up their pleasant aspect, and betrayed, as with silent mocking laughter, their inner soul of blackness\u2014their decay. This is how Curtice tries to body forth in words what he actually witnessed... And Ernest, yawning, talking lightly, half foolishly\u2014still noticed nothing!\n\nFor all this, as described, came about in something like ten seconds; and with it swept into the clergyman's mind, like a blow, the memory of that sinister phrase used more than once by Edward: 'If father doesn't come, he will certainly\u2014 send.' And Curtice understood that he had done both\u2014both sent and come himself... That violent mind, released from its spell of madness in the body, yet still retaining the old implacable hatred, was now directing the terrible, unseen assault. This silent room, so hushed and still, was charged to the brim. The horror of it, as he said later, 'seemed to peel the very skin from my back.'... And, while Ernest noticed nothing, Edward slept!... The soul of the clergyman, strong with the desire to help or save, yet realising that he was alone against a Legion, poured out in wordless prayer to his Deity. The clock just then, whirring before it struck, made itself audible.\n\n'By Jove! It's all right, you see!' exclaimed Ernest, his voice oddly fainter and lower than before. 'There's midnight\u2014and nothing's happened. Bally nonsense, all of it!' His voice had dwindled curiously in volume. 'I'll get the whisky and soda from the hall.' His relief was great and his manner showed it. But in him somewhere was a singular change. His voice, manner, gestures, his very tread as he moved over the thick carpet toward the door, all showed it. He seemed less real, less alive, reduced somehow to littleness, the voice without timbre or quality, the appearance of him diminished in some fashion quite ghastly. His presence, if not actually shrivelled, was at least impaired. Ernest had suffered a singular and horrible decrease...\n\nThe clock was still whirring before the strike. One heard the chain running up softly. Then the hammer fell upon the first stroke of midnight.\n\n'I'm off,' he laughed faintly from the door; 'it's all been pure funk\u2014on my part, at least...!' He passed out of sight into the hall. The Power that throbbed so mightily about the room followed him out. Almost at the same moment Edward woke up. But he woke with a tearing and indescribable cry of pain and anguish on his lips: 'Oh, oh, oh! But it hurts! It hurts! I can't hold you; leave me. It's breaking me asunder\u2014'\n\nThe clergyman had sprung to his feet, but in the same instant everything had become normal once more\u2014the room as it was before, the horror gone. There was nothing he could do or say, for there was no longer anything to put right, to defend, or to attack. Edward was speaking; his voice, deep and full as it never had been before: 'By Jove, how that sleep has refreshed me! I feel twice the chap I was before\u2014twice the chap. I feel quite splendid. Your voice, sir, must have hypnotised me to sleep...' He crossed the room with great vigour. 'Where's\u2014er\u2014where's\u2014\n\nErnie, by the bye?' he asked casually, hesitating\u2014almost searching\u2014for the name. And a shadow as of a vanished memory crossed his face and was gone. The tone conveyed the most complete indifference where once the least word or movement of his twin had wakened solicitude, love. 'Gone away, I suppose\u2014gone to bed, I mean, of course.'\n\n'Edward... had suffered an incredible accession to his existing personality'\n\nCurtice has never been able to describe the dreadful conviction that overwhelmed him as he stood there staring, his heart in his mouth\u2014the conviction, the positive certainty, that Edward had changed interiorly, had suffered an incredible accession to his existing personality. But he knew it as he watched. His mind, spirit, soul had most wonderfully increased. Something that hitherto the lad had known from the outside only, or by the magic of loving sympathy, had now passed, to be incorporated with his own being. And, being himself, it required no expression. Yet this visible increase was somehow terrible. Curtice shrank back from him. The instinct\u2014he has never grasped the profound psychology of that, nor why it turned his soul dizzy with a kind of nausea\u2014the instinct to strike him where he stood, passed, and a plaintive sound from the hall stealing softly into the room between them, sent all that was left to him of self-possession into his feet. He turned and ran. Edward followed him\u2014very leisurely.\n\nThey found Ernest, or what had been Ernest, crouching behind the table in the hail, weeping foolishly to himself. On his face lay blackness. The mouth was open, the jaw dropped; he dribbled hopelessly; and from the face had passed all signs of intelligence\u2014of spirit.\n\nFor a few weeks he lingered on, regaining no sign of spiritual or mental life before the poor body, hopelessly disorganised, released what was left of him, from pure inertia\u2014from complete and utter loss of vitality.\n\nAnd the horrible thing\u2014so the distressed family thought, at least\u2014was that all those weeks Edward showed an indifference that was singularly brutal and complete. He rarely even went to visit him. I believe, too, it is true that he only once spoke of him by name; and that was when he said\u2014'Ernie? Oh, but Ernie is much better and happier where he is\u2014!'\n\nThe Man from the 'Gods'\n\nThat there was something wrong with all his work Le Maistre well knew. Words and music, as the critics never failed to remind him, \"just missed\" that nameless \"something\" which would have made them good\u2014perhaps great. Moreover, he was sane enough to realize that the blame lay not with an uncomprehending public, but simply with himself. The spark of inspiration that was beyond question in all his work never gathered to the flame stage. Thus his productions warmed people, but did not light them. He understood well enough what was lacking\u2014and that no amount of mere painstaking \"work\" could put it right.\n\nBut on one occasion Le Maistre achieved a singular and startling success. As a sober record of fact, concealed by initials, it was reported in the Proceedings of the French Psychological Society for that year; and people who believed in the Subliminal Self, the Higher Ego, and all that consoling teaching about an attainable God within, made great havoc with the facts.\n\nThe way it came about, moreover, probably has a profound psychical significance. In any case, the result remains as the very best kind of tangible proof; for it was the only great thing he ever really achieved\u2014this Fairy Play (so called); and its beauty was absolutely arresting.\n\nHe was something over fifty when he wrote it in its original form. The central idea came to him with the quick flash of a genuine inspiration; so did most of the music; but, in the working out of both, the fire had become smothered. The spark had never gathered into flame. The result was mediocrity. Yet, like so many artists, he confused what was in his mind and imagination with what he had actually set down upon paper; for, when he went over the score to himself, he heard the original beauty in his thoughts and believed he had transferred into his work his own memory of that beauty. The music and words themselves, however, had not caught it. Thus, those who heard the preliminary recital in his rooms were more or less bored according to their powers of divination.\n\n\"It's fine; it's original,\" they remarked, shaking their heads as they went home after the performance; \"but just misses it!\"\n\nThe transformation that changed the common lead into gold as by some mysterious process of spiritual alchemy came about as follows:\u2014\n\nThe little play was finished, and Le Maistre, having his eye upon a certain manager, went to that particular theatre one night in order to study the \"feel\" of it\u2014to catch the flavour of the house, the size of the stage, and any other details he could. The management had given him a dress circle box, and he saw admirably. It was characteristic of the man, rather, that he put himself to this far-fetched kind of trouble. During the performance his mind was keenly at work. Yet he saw nothing of what was going on before his eyes; he had come with a definite purpose; he saw his own play all the time, heard his own music; watched his own creatures come on and go off among his own scenery.\n\nAt the same time the music, light and colour provided a stimulus that acted upon his own imagination, and set all the finer machinery of his own creative genius working. Sub-consciously he revised his own work, with the illuminating result 'that a white light shone through his mind and showed up all the flaws, all the places where he had \"missed it\"; all the passages where he had trailed off into banality. And a tremendous desire went crashing through his being to revise his work in the light of this knowledge. \"I felt,\" he said, \"as though a great prayer had gone out of me\u2014a cry, as it were, to my higher self to come to my assistance. Never in my life have I wished anything so intensely before.\"\n\nThen, in that curious fashion with which many artists must be familiar, it all faded again, and the reaction set in. The effort had no doubt exhausted him. He turned his attention to the actual performances on the stage before him, and lost the power to visualize his own piece. But the play\u2014trivial, vulgar and untrue to life\u2014wearied him; and he withdrew into the back of the box, and incontinently\u2014fell asleep upon the little plush sofa!\n\nWhen a considerable time later he woke up, the entire theatre was dark and empty; the piece was over; the audience had gone home to a man; and the building was deserted.\n\nLe Maistre at once realized what had happened, though he could not understand why the final applause had not waked him, and hurried into his overcoat. A faint glimmer pervaded the vast auditorium, for as he leaned over the edge he could just make out the rows of empty stalls, the scattered white patches where the discarded programmes lay, the music-stands of the orchestra, and the exit doors of glass where the pit began. The air still smelt unpleasantly of a crowd\u2014wraps, furs, stale scent and cigarettes.\n\nThen he struck a match and saw by his watch that it was two o'clock in the morning. He had slept three hours!\n\nHe pushed open the door and passed out into the passage, his one idea being how he could get out into the street, or how he would spend the time if he did not get out. He felt hungry, stiff and a trifle chilly. Feeling his way along by the backs of the upper circle seats, he advanced slowly and carefully, his footsteps making no sound upon the soft carpet, and so came at last to the first exit door. It was locked and barred. He tried the next door with the same result. There was no other exit\u2014nothing but that narrow semi-circular gangway between the wall and the seats, a box at either end, and pillars at intervals to mark the distance. \"Like the exercise-walk in a prison-yard,\" he thought to himself, laughing. No single light was left burning anywhere in the building. Even the hall was in darkness. He saw the gilt-framed pictures of actors and actresses on the walls; a faint rumble from the streets reached him too\u2014voices, traffic, footsteps, wind. Then he turned back into the theatre and carefully made his way down the aisle to the front, feeling the steps first with his toe, and peered over into the body of the house. A sea of shadows swam to and fro below him. Here and there certain stalls picked themselves out of the general gloom almost as though they were occupied; he could easily imagine he saw figures still sitting in them...\n\nAnd it was here, just at this point, he said, that he began for the first time to feel a little uneasy. A slight tremor of the nerves passed over him, and sitting down in one of the front-row seats he considered the situation carefully and deliberately. There was not much to consider. He was shut in for the rest of the night; the dress circle seemed to be the limits of his prison; he could get neither up nor down; there was no escape till the morning. The prospect was not pleasant; still, it was not very terrible, and his sense of humour would easily have carried him through with credit, but for one thing\u2014 this curiously disturbing sense of something he could not quite define: of something that was going to happen, it seemed...\n\nIt was too vague, too remote for him to deal with squarely. His mind, always keenly imaginative and pictorial, preferred to see it in the terms of a picture. He thought of the Thames as he had sometimes seen it from the Chelsea Embankment in the dusk when dark barges, too far for their outline to be defined, come looming up through the mist. In this way thoughts lie in the depths of the mind; in this way they rise gradually before the consciousness; in this way the cause of his present discomfort would presently reach the point where he would recognize it and understand. In similar fashion, he felt this \"something\" that moved at the back of his mind, coming slowly forward.\n\nA sudden idea came to him\u2014\n\n\"If I could climb down to the auditorium floor I might find a door open somewhere, or escape by way of the orchestra, perhaps!\"\n\nAnd the idea of action was pleasant; though how he climbed over the edge of the box in the dark and swarmed down the slippery pillar, landing with a crash upon the rim of the stage box below, he never quite understood. With a plunge he dropped backwards into the dark space, kicking over as he did so a couple of chairs, which fell with a loud clatter and woke resounding echoes all through the empty building. That clatter seemed prodigious. He held his breath for several seconds to listen, standing motionless against the wall with the distinct idea that all this noise would attract attention to himself, and that if, after all, there was any one watching him\u2014that if among those shadows some one\u2014\n\n\"Ah!\" he exclaimed quickly. \"Now I've got it! There is some one watching me in another part of the building. That's why I felt uneasy\u2014\"\n\nThat tumble into the box had shaken the thought up to the surface of his mind. The picture had emerged from the mist, and he recognized the cause of his uneasiness. All this time, though none of his senses had yet proved it to him, the mind of another person, perhaps the eyes too, had been focused upon him. He was not alone.\n\nLe Maistre felt no alarm, he said, but rather a definite thrill of exhilaration, as though the idea of this other person came to him with a sense of pleasurable excitement. His first instinct to sit concealed in the corner of the box and await events he dismissed almost at once in favour of some kind of prompt action. Stumbling in the gloom, he made his way down to the orchestra, and while groping cautiously among the crowded easels, his hand touched a tiny knob, and a dozen lights that bent over the music folios, like little heads screened under black bonnets, sprang into brilliance. The first thing he noticed was that the fire curtain was down, closing the cavernous mouth of the stage.\n\nThe shaded lights, however, were so carefully arranged that they fell only upon the music, and the main body of the theatre still yawned in comparative darkness behind him. Vast and unfriendly it seemed; charged to the brim with faint shufflings and whispers as though an audience sat there stealthily turning over programmes. The stalls faced him like fixed but living beings; the balconies frowned down upon him; the boxes\u2014especially the upper ones\u2014had an air of concealing people behind their curtains. Far overhead, glimmered a huge skylight; he heard the wind sighing across it like wind in the rigging of a ship. And, more than once, he fancied he caught the faint tread of footsteps moving about among the stalls and gangways.\n\nRegretting that he had turned the lights up (they made himself so conspicuous, so easily visible!), he made an instinctive movement to turn them out again; but he touched the wrong knob, so that a row of lights flashed out up under the roof. In that topmost gallery of all, known as \"the gods,\" a little line of starry lights leaped into being, and the first thing he noticed as he looked up was the figure of a man leaning over the edge of the railing\u2014watching him.\n\nThe same moment he saw that this figure was making a movement of some kind\u2014a gesture. It beckoned to him. So his feeling that some one was in the theatre with him was justified. There had been a man in the gods all the time.\n\nLe Maistre admitted frankly that, in his first surprise, he collapsed backwards upon the stool usually occupied by the second 'cello. But his alarm passed with a strange swiftness, and gave place almost immediately to a peculiar and deep-seated thrill. The instant he perceived this dim figure of a man up there under the roof his heart leaped with an emotion that was partly delight, partly pleasurable anticipation, and partly\u2014most curious of all\u2014awe. And in a voice that was unlike his own, and that carried across the intervening space, for all its faintness, with perfect ease, he heard the words driven out of him as if by command of some deeper instinct than he understood yet the very last words that he could have imagined as appropriate\u2014\n\n\"You're up there in the gods!\" he called out. \"Won't you come down to me here?\"\n\nAnd then the figure withdrew, and he heard the sound of the footsteps descending the winding passages and stairs behind, as their owner obeyed him and came.\n\nAlarmed, yet curiously exultant, Le Maistre stood up among the music-easels to await his coming. He was extraordinarily alert, prepared. He fumbled again with the little switch-board under the conductor's desk, for he wished to see the man face to face in full light\u2014not to be gradually approached in darkness. But the only thing that came of the button he pressed was a creaking noise behind him, and when he turned quickly to examine, lo and behold, he saw the huge fire-curtain rising slowly and majestically into the air. And, as it rose, revealing the stage beyond, he got the distinct impression that this very stage, now empty, had a moment before been crowded with a throng of living people, and that even now they were there concealed among the wings within a few feet of where he stood, waiting the summons to appear.\n\nMoreover, this discovery, far from causing him the kind of amazement that might have been expected, only communicated, for the second time within the space of a few minutes, another thrill of delight. Again this lightning sense of exhilaration swept him from head to foot.\n\nThe footsteps, meanwhile, came nearer; sometimes disappearing behind a thickness of walls that rendered them inaudible, and at other times starting suddenly into greater clearness as they came down from floor to floor. Le Maistre, unable to endure the suspense any longer, felt impelled to go forward and meet them half-way. An intense desire to see this stranger face to face came upon him. He climbed awkwardly over the orchestra railing and made his way past the first rows of the stalls. Already the steps sounded upon the same floor as himself. Hardly a dozen yards, to judge by the fall of these oddly cushioned footsteps, could now separate them. He moved more slowly, and the stranger moved more slowly too\u2014entering at last the gangway in which he stood.\n\n\"And it is from this point,\" to use the words of the report he afterwards wrote for the society, \"that my memory begins to fade somewhat, or rather, that the sense of bewilderment grew so astonishingly disturbing that I find it difficult to look back and recall with accuracy the true sequence of what followed. My normal measurement of the passage of time changed too, I think; all went so swiftly, almost as in a dream, though at the time it did not appear to me to be short or hurried. But\u2014describe the sense of glory, wonder and happiness that enveloped me as in a cloud, I simply cannot. As well might a hashish-eater attempt during the dulness of next morning to reconstruct the phantasmal wonder of all he experienced the night before. Only, this was no phantasy; it was real and actual, and more palpitatingly vivid than any other experience of my life.\n\n\"I stood waiting in the gangway while this other person\u2014the stranger\u2014came towards me along the narrow space between the wall and the main body of seats. The footsteps were unhurried and regular. It was very dark; all I could see were two faint patches of light where the exit doors of the pit glimmered beyond. First one patch of light, then the other, was temporarily obscured as he passed in front of these doors. Down he moved steadily towards me through the gloom, and at the barrier of velvet rope that separated the stalls from the pit, he stopped\u2014just near enough for me to distinguish the head and shoulders of a man about my own height and about my own size. He stood facing me there, some ten or twelve feet away.\n\n\"For a few seconds there was complete silence\u2014like the silence in a mine, I remember thinking\u2014and I instinctively clenched my fists, almost expecting something violent to happen. But the next instant the man spoke; and the moment I heard his voice all traces of fear left me, and I felt nothing but this peculiarly delightful sense of exhilaration I have already mentioned. It ran through me like the flush of a generous wine, rousing all my faculties, critical and imaginative, to their highest possible power, yet at the same time so bewildering me for the moment that I scarcely realized what I was saying, doing, or thinking. From this point I went through the whole scene without hesitation or dismay\u2014certainly without a thought of disobeying. I mean, it was a pleasure to me to help it all forward, rather than to seek to prevent.\n\n\"'Here I am,' said the man in a voice wholly wonderful. 'You called me down, and I have come!'\n\n\"'You have come from up there\u2014from the gods,' I heard myself reply.\n\n\"'I have come from up there\u2014from the gods,' he answered; and his sentence seemed to mean so much more than mine did, although we used identical words.\n\n\"I held on to the back of the stall nearest to me. I could think for the moment of nothing further to say. The idea of what was coming thrilled me inexpressibly, though I could only hazard wild guesses as to its character.\n\n\"'Are you ready then?' he asked.\n\n\"'Ready! Ready for what?'\n\n\"'For the rehearsal,' he said, 'the secret rehearsal.'\n\n\"'The secret rehearsal?' I stammered, pretending, as a child pretends in order to heighten its joy, that I did not understand.\n\n\"'\u2014of your play, you know; your fairy play,' he finished the sentence.\n\n\"Then he moved towards me a few steps, and, hardly knowing why, I retreated. It was still impossible to see his face. The curious idea came to me that there was something odd about the man that prevented, and that would always prevent, me getting closer to him, and that perhaps I should never see his face completely at all. I cannot point to anything definite that caused this impression; I can merely report that it was so.\n\n\"'Look!' he went on, 'every one is ready and waiting. The moment the music starts we can begin. You will find a violin down there; the rehearsal can go on at once.'\n\n\"And although it struck me at the time as most curious he should be aware of the fact, it seemed quite natural, because I do play the violin, and in fact compose all my melodies first on that instrument before Iput a pen to paper. At the same time I can remember faintly protesting\u2014\n\n\"' I?' I remember asking; 'I'm to play?'\n\n\"'Certainly,' replied this soft-spoken figure among the shadows. 'You're to play. Who else, pray? And see! Every one is ready and waiting.'\n\n\"I was far too happily bewildered to object further; there seemed, indeed, no time for reflection at all; I felt impelled, driven forward as it were, to go through with the adventure and to ask no questions. Besides, I wanted to go through with it. I felt the old power of the first inspiration upon me\u2014only heightened; I felt in me the supreme and splendid confidence that I could do it all better than I had ever dreamed\u2014do it perfectly as it should be done. I was borne forwards upon a wave of inspiration that nothing in the whole world could interfere with.\n\n\"And, as I turned to obey, I saw for the first time that the stage was brilliantly lighted; that the scenery was the scenery already chosen by my mind; that the performers thronged the wings, and the opening characters were actually standing in their places waiting for the signal of the music to begin. The performers, moreover, I perceived, were identical in figure, feature and bearing with those ideal performers who had already enacted the play upon the inner stage of my imagination. It was all, in fact, precisely as the original inspiration had come to me weeks ago before the fires of beauty had faded during the wearisome toil of working it all out in limited terms upon the paper.\n\n\"The power that drove me forward, and at the same time filled me with this splendour of untrammelled creation, refused me, however, the least moment for consideration. I could only make my way into the orchestra and pick up the first violin-case that came to hand, belonging, doubtless, to some member of the band I had listened to earlier in the evening; and all eyes were fixed upon me from the stage as I clambered into the conductor's seat and drew the bow across the strings to tune the instrument. At the first sound I realized that my fingers, accustomed to the harsh tones of my own cheaper fiddle, were now feeling their way over the exquisite nervous system of a genuine Guarnierius that responded instantly to the lightest touch; and that the bow in my right hand was so perfectly balanced that even the best Tourte ever made could only seem like a strip of raw, unfinished wood by comparison. For the bow 'swam' over the strings, the sound streamed, smooth as honey, past my ears, and my fingers found the new intervals as easily as if they had never known any other key-board. Harmonics, double-stopping and arpeggios issued from my efforts as perfectly as trills from the throat of a bird.\n\n\"In that moment I lived; I understood much; I heard my soul singing within me... I finished tuning, and tapped sharply on the back of the violin to indicate that I was ready, and in the slight pause that ensued before I actually played the opening bars, I became aware that the stalls behind me, the boxes, the dress circle, and the whole house in fact right up to the 'gods,' were crowded with eager listeners; and, further, that the stranger\u2014that man among the shadows in the background\u2014standing ever beyond the reach of the light, still remained in some mysterious and potent fashion intimately in touch with my inner self, directing, helping, inspiring the performance from beginning to end.\n\n\"And, in front of me, upon the conductor's desk, lay the score of my own music in clearest manuscript, no longer crossed out and corrected as it lay in my rooms after all the first passion of beauty had been ground out of it, but lovely and perfect as the original inspiration had rushed flame-like into my soul months before.\n\n\"The whole performance from that moment\u2014'rehearsal' seems no adequate word to describe it\u2014went with the smoothness of a dream from beginning to end. Just as the music was my own music made perfect, so the words and songs were the mature expression of the original conception before my blundering efforts had confined them, stammering and incomplete, in broken form. Moreover\u2014more wonderful still\u2014I noticed the very places in my score where I had floundered, and where, in the laborious process of composition, the first inspiration had failed me and I had filled in with what was mediocre and banal. It was as if a master pointed out to me with the simplicity of true power the passages where the commonplace might pass\u2014could\u2014did pass\u2014by deft, inspired touches into what was fine, moving, noble.\n\nThe lesson was a sublime one; at the time, however, it all seemed so ridiculously simple and easy that I felt I could never again write anything that was not great and splendid.\n\n\"Moreover, the acting, speaking and dancing provided the perfect medium for my ideas; and the whole performance was the consummate representation of my first conception; even the scenery shifted swiftly and noiselessly, and the intervals between the acts were hardly noticeable.\n\n\"And the end came with a curious abruptness, bringing me to myself\u2014my limited, stammering, caged little self, as, it seemed, after these moments of intoxicating expression\u2014with a sharp sense of pain that all was over; and I became aware that, without hurry, without noise, the entire audience that filled the huge building had risen to their feet like one man, and that thousands of hands were clapping silently the measure of their intense appreciation. From floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall, flew a great wave of emotion that swept their praise into me, gathered and focused into a single mighty draught of applause. It was, I remember thinking, all their thoughts of joy, their feelings of gratitude, beating in upon my soul in that form of praise which is the artist's only adequate reward; and it reminded me of nothing so much as the whirring of innumerable soft wings all rising through the air at the same moment. Pictorially, in this fashion, it came before my mind.\n\n\"Violin in hand, I rose too, and turned to face the auditorium, for I realized that they were calling for the author\u2014for him who had ministered so adequately to their pleasure\u2014and that I must be prepared to say something in reply. I had, indeed, made my first bow, and was already casting about in my mind for suitable words, when, for the first time during the whole adventure\u2014something in me hesitated. Either it was that the sea of glimmering faces frightened me, or that I was obeying instinctively some faint warning that it was not myself, but some other, who was the true author of the play, and that it was for him these thousands before me clamoured and called.\n\n\"But when, still hesitating in confusion, I turned again towards the stage, I saw that the great fire curtain had meanwhile descended and that a footstep, regular and unhurried, was at that very moment coming forward towards the footlights. I heard the tread. I knew at once who it was. The stranger from the shadows behind me who had directed the entire performance was now moving to the front. It was he for whom the audience clamoured; it was he who was the true author of the play!\n\n\"And instantly I clamoured with them, forgetting my own small pain in a kind of delightful exultation that I, too, owed this man everything, and that I should at last see him face to face and join my thanks and gratitude to theirs.\n\n\"Almost that same instant he appeared and stood before the centre of the curtains, the glare of the footlights casting upwards into his face. And he looked, not at the great throng behind and beyond me, but down into my own face, into my own eyes, smiling, approving, his expression radiant with a glory I have never seen before or since upon any human countenance.\n\n\"And the stranger, I then realized\u2014was myself!\n\n\"What happened next is so difficult to describe\u2014 though I scarcely know why it should be so\u2014that I cannot hope to convey the reality of it properly, or paint the instantaneous manner in which he vanished and was gone. He neither faded nor moved. But in a second that seemed to have no perceptible duration he was beside me\u2014with me\u2014in me; and this swift way he became suddenly merged into myself has always seemed to me the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. The wave of delight and exultation swept into me anew. I felt for one brief moment that I was as a god\u2014with a god's power of perfect expression.\n\n\"But for one second only; for, at once, a new sound, terrible and overwhelming, rose in a flood and tore me away from all that I had ever known. And the sound was ugly and distressing... and darkness followed it...\n\n\"It was real clapping this time, the clapping of human hands... and an indifferent orchestra was playing a noisy march just below me with a great blare of brass out of tune. The lights were up all over the theatre; the audience, busy with wraps and overcoats and applause, were hurrying out. I saw the actors and actresses of the play bowing and scraping before the curtain; and the sight of the perspiration trickling down over the grease-paint of the leading man directly beneath my box struck me like a blow in the face. Then came the frantic whistling for broughams and taxicabs and the hoarse shouting from the street where men cried the evening papers in the roar of the outer world. I picked up my opera-hat, which had rolled into the middle of the floor while I had slept upon the sofa, scrambled into my overcoat, rushed out into the street, and told the driver of the first taxicab I found to drive for his life at double rates...\n\n\"And all that night, before the memory of the wonder and the glory faded, I worked upon my score of words and music, striving to get down on the paper something at least of what had been shown to me. How much, or how little I succeeded it is now impossible to say. As I have already explained in this report, the memory faded with distressing swiftness. But I did my best. I hope\u2014I believe\u2014I am told, at least\u2014that there is something in the work that people like...\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Man Who Played Upon The Leaf ]\n\nWhere the Jura pine-woods push the fringe of their purple cloak down the slopes till the vineyards stop them lest they should troop into the lake of Neuch\u00e2tel, you may find the village where lived the Man Who Played upon the Leaf.\n\nMy first sight of him was genuinely prophetic\u2014 that spring evening in the garden caf\u00e9 of the little mountain auberge. But before I saw him I heard him, and ever afterwards the sound and the sight have remained inseparable in my mind.\n\nJean Grospierre and Louis Favre were giving me confused instructions\u2014the vin rouge of Neuch\u00e2tel is heady, you know\u2014as to the best route up the T\u00eate-de-Rang, when a thin, wailing music, that at first I took to be rising wind, made itself heard suddenly among the apple trees at the end of the garden, and riveted my attention with a thrill of I know not what.\n\nFavre's description of the bridle path over Mont Racine died away; then Grospierre's eyes wandered as he, too, stopped to listen; and at the same moment a mongrel dog of indescribably forlorn appearance came whining about our table under the walnut tree.\n\n\"It's Perret 'Comment-va,' the man who plays on the leaf,\" said Favre.\n\n\"And his cursed dog,\" added Grospierre, with a shrug of disgust. And, after a pause, they fell again to quarrelling about my complicated path up the T\u00eate-de-Rang.\n\nI turned from them in the direction of the sound.\n\nThe dusk was falling. Through the trees I saw the vineyards sloping down a mile or two to the dark blue lake with its distant-shadowed shore and the white line of misty Alps in the sky beyond. Behind us the forests rose in folded purple ridges to the heights of Boudry and La Tourne, soft and thick like carpets of cloud. There was no one about in the cabaret. I heard a horse's hoofs in the village street, a rattle of pans from the kitchen, and the soft roar of a train climbing the mountain railway through gathering darkness towards France\u2014and, singing through it all, like a thread of silver through a dream, this sweet and windy music.\n\nBut at first there was nothing to be seen. The Man Who Played on the Leaf was not visible, though I stared hard at the place whence the sound apparently proceeded. The effect, for a moment, was almost ghostly.\n\nThen, down there among the shadows of fruit trees and small pines, something moved, and I became aware with a start that the little sapin I had been looking at all the time was really not a tree, but a man\u2014hatless, with dark face, loose hair, and wearing a p\u00e9lerine over his shoulders. How he had produced this singularly vivid impression and taken upon himself the outline and image of a tree is utterly beyond me to describe. It was, doubtless, some swift suggestion in my own imagination that deceived me... Yet he was thin, small, straight, and his flying hair and spreading p\u00e9lerine somehow pictured themselves in the network of dusk and background into the semblance, I suppose, of branches.\n\nI merely record my impression with the truest available words\u2014also my instant persuasion that this first view of the man was, after all, significant and prophetic: his dominant characteristics presented themselves to me symbolically. I saw the man first as a tree; I heard his music first as wind.\n\nThen, as he came slowly towards us, it was clear that he produced the sound by blowing upon a leaf held to his lips between tightly closed hands. And at his heel followed the mongrel dog.\n\n\"The inseparables!\" sneered Grospierre, who did not appreciate the interruption. He glanced contemptuously at the man and the dog, his face and manner, it seemed to me, conveying a merest trace, however, of superstitious fear. \"The tune your father taught you, hein?\" he added, with a cruel allusion I did not at the moment understand.\n\n\"Hush!\" Favre said; \"he plays thunderingly well all the same!\" His glass had not been emptied quite so often, and in his eyes as he listened there was a touch of something that was between respect and wonder.\n\n\"The music of the devil,\" Grospierre muttered as he turned with the gesture of surly impatience to the wine and the rye bread. \"It makes me dream at night. Ooua!\"\n\nThe man, paying no attention to the gibes, came closer, continuing his leaf-music, and as I watched and listened the thrill that had first stirred in me grew curiously. To look at, he was perhaps forty, perhaps fifty; worn, thin, broken; and something seizingly pathetic in his appearance told its little wordless story into the air. The stamp of the outcast was mercilessly upon him. But the eyes were dark and fine. They proclaimed the possession of something that was neither worn nor broken, something that was proud to be outcast, and welcomed it.\n\n\"He's cracky, you know,\" explained Favre, \"and half blind. He lives in that hut on the edge of the forest\"\u2014pointing with his thumb toward C\u00f4tendard\u2014\"and plays on the leaf for what he can earn.\"\n\nWe listened for five minutes perhaps while this singular being stood there in the dusk and piped his weird tunes; and if imagination had influenced my first sight of him it certainly had nothing to do with what I now heard. For it was unmistakable; the man played, not mere tunes and melodies, but the clean, strong, elemental sounds of Nature\u2014especially the crying voices of wind. It was the raw material, if you like, of what the masters have used here and there\u2014Wagner, and so forth\u2014but by him heard closely and wonderfully, and produced with marvellous accuracy. It was now the notes of birds or the tinkle and rustle of sounds heard in groves and copses, and now the murmur of those airs that lose their way on summer noons among the tree tops; and then, quite incredibly, just as the man came closer and the volume increased, it grew to the crying of bigger winds and the whispering rush of rain among tossed branches...\n\nHow he produced it passed my comprehension, but I think he somehow mingled his own voice with the actual notes of the vibrating edge of the leaf; perhaps, too, that the strange passion shaking behind it all in the depths of the bewildered spirit poured out and reached my mind by ways unknown and incalculable.\n\nI must have momentarily lost myself in the soft magic of it, for I remember coming back with a start to notice that the man had stopped, and that his melancholy face was turned to me with a smile of comprehension and sympathy that passed again almost before I had time to recognize it, and certainly before I had time to reply. And this time I am ready to admit that it was my own imagination, singularly stirred, that translated his smile into the words that no one else heard\u2014\n\n\"I was playing for you\u2014because you understand.\"\n\nFavre was standing up and I saw him give the man the half loaf of coarse bread that was on the table, offering also his own partly-emptied wine-glass. \"I haven't the sou to-day,\" he was saying, \"but if you're hungry, mon brave\u2014\" And the man, refusing the wine, took the bread with an air of dignity that precluded all suggestion of patronage or favour, and ought to have made Favre feel proud that he had offered it.\n\n\"And that for his son!\" laughed the stupid Grospierre, tossing a cheese-rind to the dog, \"or for his forest god!\"\n\nThe music was about me like a net that still held my words and thoughts in a delicate bondage\u2014which is my only explanation for not silencing the coarse guide in the way he deserved; but a few minutes later, when the men had gone into the inn, I crossed to the end of the garden, and there, where the perfumes of orchard and forest deliciously mingled, I came upon the man sitting on the grass beneath an apple-tree. The dog, wagging its tail, was at his feet, as he fed it with the best and largest portions of the bread. For himself, it seemed, he kept nothing but the crust, and\u2014what I could hardly believe, had I not actually witnessed it\u2014the cur, though clearly hungry, had to be coaxed with smiles and kind words to eat what it realized in some dear dog-fashion was needed even more by its master. A pair of outcasts they looked indeed, sharing dry bread in the back garden of the village inn; but in the soft, discerning eyes of that mangy creature there was an expression that raised it, for me at least, far beyond the ranks of common curdom; and in the eyes of the man, half-witted and pariah as he undoubtedly was, a look that set him somewhere in a lonely place where he heard the still, small voices of the world and moved with the elemental tides of life that are never outcast and that include the farthest suns.\n\nHe took the franc I offered; and, closer, I perceived that his eyes, for all their moments of fugitive brilliance, were indeed half sightless, and that perhaps he saw only well enough to know men as trees walking. In the village some said he saw better than most, that he saw in the dark, possibly even into the peopled regions beyond this world, and there were reasons\u2014uncanny reasons\u2014to explain the belief. I only know, at any rate, that from this first moment of our meeting he never failed to recognize me at a considerable distance, and to be aware of my whereabouts even in the woods at night; and the best explanation I ever heard, though of course unscientific, was Louis Favre's whispered communication that \"he sees with the whole surface of his skin!\"\n\nHe took the franc with the same air of grandeur that he took the bread, as though he conferred a favour, yet was grateful. The beauty of that gesture has often come back to me since with a sense of wonder for the sweet nobility that I afterwards understood inspired it. At the time, however, he merely looked up at me with the remark, \"C'est ponr le Dieu\u2014 merci!\"\n\nHe did not say \"le bon Dieu,\" as every one else did.\n\nAnd though I had meant to get into conversation with him, I found no words quickly enough, for he at once stood up and began to play again on his leaf; and while he played his thanks and gratitude, or the thanks and gratitude of his God, that shaggy mongrel dog stopped eating and sat up beside him to listen.\n\nBoth fixed their eyes upon me as the sounds of wind and birds and forest poured softly and wonderfully about my ears... so that, when it was over and I went down the quiet street to my pension, I was aware that some tiny sense of bewilderment had crept into the profounder regions of my consciousness and faintly disturbed my normal conviction that I belonged to the common world of men as of old. Some aspect of the village, especially of the human occupants in it, had secretly changed for me.\n\nThose pearly spaces of sky, where the bats flew over the red roofs, seemed more alive, more exquisite than before; the smells of the open stables where the cows stood munching, more fragrant than usual of sweet animal life that included myself delightfully, keenly; the last chatterings of the sparrows under the eaves of my own pension more intimate and personal...\n\nAlmost as if those strands of elemental music the man played on his leaf had for the moment made me free of the life of the earth, as distinct from the life of men...\n\nI can only suggest this, and leave the rest to the care of the imaginative reader; for it is impossible to say along what inner byways of fancy I reached the conclusion that when the man spoke of \"the God,\" and not \"the good God,\" he intended to convey his sense of some great woodland personality\u2014some Spirit of the Forests whom he knew and loved and worshipped, and whom, he was intuitively aware, I also knew and loved and worshipped.\n\nDuring the next few weeks I came to learn more about this poor, half-witted man. In the village he was known as Perret \"Comment-va,\" the Man Who Plays on the Leaf; but when the people wished to be more explicit they described him as the man \"without parents and without God.\" The origin of \"Comment-va\" I never discovered, but the other titles were easily explained\u2014he was illegitimate and outcast. The mother had been a wandering Italian girl and the father a loose-living b\u00fbcheron, who was, it seems, a standing disgrace to the community. I think the villagers were not conscious of their severity; the older generation of farmers and vignerons had pity, but the younger ones and those of his own age were certainly guilty, if not of deliberate cruelty, at least of a harsh neglect and the utter withholding of sympathy. It was like the thoughtless cruelty of children, due to small unwisdom, and to that absence of charity which is based on ignorance. They could not in the least understand this crazy, picturesque being who wandered day and night in the forests and spoke openly, though never quite intelligibly, of worshipping another God than their own anthropomorphic deity. People looked askance at him because he was queer; a few feared him; one or two I found later\u2014all women\u2014felt vaguely that there was something in him rather wonderful, they hardly knew what, that lifted him beyond the reach of village taunts and sneers. But from all he was remote, alien, solitary\u2014an outcast and a pariah.\n\nIt so happened that I was very busy at the time, seeking the seclusion of the place for my work, and rarely going out until the day was failing; and so it was, I suppose, that my sight of the man was always associated with a gentle dusk, long shadows and slanting rays of sunlight. Every time I saw that thin, straight, yet broken figure, every time the music of the leaf reached me, there came too, the inexplicable thrill of secret wonder and delight that had first accompanied his presence, and with it the subtle suggestion of a haunted woodland life, beautiful with new values. To this day I see that sad, dark face moving about the street, touched with melancholy, yet with the singular light of an inner glory that sometimes lit flames in the poor eyes. Perhaps\u2014the fancy entered my thoughts sometimes when I passed him\u2014those who are half out of their minds, as the saying goes, are at the same time half in another region whose penetrating loveliness has so bewildered and amazed them that they no longer can play their dull part in our commonplace world; and certainly for me this man's presence never failed to convey an awareness of some hidden and secret beauty that he knew apart from the ordinary haunts and pursuits of men.\n\nOften I followed him up into the woods\u2014in spite of the menacing growls of the dog, who invariably showed his teeth lest I should approach too close\u2014with a great longing to know what he did there and how he spent his time wandering in the great forests, sometimes, I was assured, staying out entire nights or remaining away for days together. For in these Jura forests that cover the mountains from Neuch\u00e2tel to Yverdon, and stretch thickly up to the very frontiers of France, you may walk for days without finding a farm or meeting more than an occasional b\u00fbcheron. And at length, after weeks of failure, and by some process of sympathy he apparently communicated in turn to the dog, it came about that I was\u2014 accepted. I was allowed to follow at a distance, to listen and, if I could, to watch.\n\nI make use of the conditional, because once in the forest this man had the power of concealing himself in the same way that certain animals and insects conceal themselves by choosing places instinctively where the colour of their surroundings merge into their outlines and obliterate them. So long as he moved all was well; but the moment he stopped and a chance dell or cluster of trees intervened I lost sight of him, and more than once passed within a foot of his presence without knowing it, though the dog was plainly there at his feet. And the instant I turned at the sound of the leaf, there he was, leaning against some dark tree-stem, part of a shadow perhaps, growing like a forest-thing out of the thick moss that hid his feet, or merging with extraordinary intimacy into the fronds of some drooping pine bough! Moreover, this concealment was never intentional, it seems, but instinctive. The life to which he belonged took him close to its heart, draping about the starved and wasted shoulders the cloak of kindly sympathy which the world of men denied him.\n\nAnd, while I took my place some little way off upon a fallen stem, and the dog sat looking up into his face with its eyes of yearning and affection, Perret \"Comment-va\" would take a leaf from the nearest ivy, raise it between tightly pressed palms to his lips and begin that magic sound that seemed to rise out of the forest-voices themselves rather than to be a thing apart.\n\nIt was a late evening towards the end of May when I first secured this privilege at close quarters, and the memory of it lives in me still with the fragrance and wonder of some incredible dream. The forest just there was scented with wild lilies of the valley which carpeted the more open spaces with their white bells and big, green leaves; patches of violets and pale anemone twinkled down the mossy stairways of every glade; and through slim openings among the pine-stems I saw the shadowed blues of the lake beyond and the far line of the high Alps, soft and cloud-like in the sky. Already the woods were drawing the dusk out of the earth to cloak themselves for sleep, and in the east a rising moon stared close over the ground between the big trees, dropping trails of faint and yellowish silver along the moss. Distant cow-bells, and an occasional murmur of village voices, reached the ear. But a deep hush lay over all that mighty slope of mountain forest, and even the footsteps of ourselves and the dog had come to rest.\n\nThen, as sounds heard in a dream, a breeze stirred the topmost branches of the pines, filtering down to us as from the wings of birds. It brought new odours of sky and sun-kissed branches with it. A moment later it lost itself in the darkening aisles of forest beyond; and out of the stillness that followed, I heard the strange music of the leaf rising about us with its extraordinary power of suggestion.\n\nAnd, turning to see the face of the player more closely, I saw that it had marvellously changed, had become young, unlined, soft with joy. The spirit of the immense woods possessed him, and he was at peace...\n\nWhile he played, too, he swayed a little to and fro, just as a slender sapin sways in wind, and a revelation came to me of that strange beauty of combined sound and movement\u2014trees bending while they sing, branches trembling and a-whisper, children that laugh while they dance. And, oh, the crying, plaintive notes of that leaf, and the profound sense of elemental primitive sound that they woke in the penetralia of the imagination, subtly linking simplicity to grandeur! Terribly yet sweetly penetrating, how they searched the heart through, and troubled the very sources of life! Often and often since have I wondered what it was in that singular music that made me know the distant Alps listened in their sky-spaces, and that the purple slopes of Boudry and Mont Racine bore it along the spires of their woods as though giant harp strings stretched to the far summits of Chasseral and the arid wastes of T\u00eate de Rang.\n\nIn the music this outcast played upon the leaf there was something of a wild, mad beauty that plunged like a knife to the home of tears, and at the same time sang out beyond them\u2014something coldly elemental, close to the naked heart of life. The truth, doubtless, was that his strains, making articulate the sounds of Nature, touched deep, primitive yearnings that for many are buried beyond recall. And between the airs, even between the bars, there fell deep weeping silences when the sounds merged themselves into the sigh of wind or the murmur of falling water, just as the strange player merged his body into the form and colour of the trees about him.\n\nAnd when at last he ceased, I went close to him, hardly knowing what it was I wanted so much to ask or say. He straightened up at my approach. The melancholy dropped its veil upon his face instantly.\n\n\"But that was beautiful\u2014unearthly!\" I faltered. \"You never have played like that in the village\u2014\"\n\nAnd for a second his eyes lit up as he pointed to the dark spaces of forest behind us:\n\n\"In there,\" he said softly, \"there is light!\"\n\n\"You hear true music in these woods,\" I ventured, hoping to draw him out; \"this music you play\u2014this exquisite singing of winds and trees?\"\n\nHe looked at me with a puzzled expression and I knew, of course, that I had blundered with my banal words. Then, before I could explain or alter, there floated to us through the trees a sound of church bells from villages far away; and instantly, as he heard, his face grew dark, as though he understood in some vague fashion that it was a symbol of the faith of those parents who had wronged him, and of the people who continually made him suffer. Something of this, I feel sure, passed through his tortured mind, for he looked menacingly about him, and the dog, who caught the shadow of all his moods, began to growl angrily.\n\n\"My music,\" he said, with a sudden abruptness that was almost fierce, \"is for my God.\"\n\n\"Your God of the Forests?\" I said, with a real sympathy that I believe reached him.\n\n\"Pour s\u00fbr! Pour s\u00fbr! I play it all over the world\"\u2014he looked about him down the slopes of villages and vineyards\u2014\"and for those who understand\u2014those who belong\u2014to come.\"\n\nHe was, I felt sure, going to say more, perhaps to unbosom himself to me a little; and I might have learned something of the ritual this self-appointed priest of Pan followed in his forest temples\u2014when, the sound of the bells swelled suddenly on the wind, and he turned with an angry gesture and made to go. Their insolence, penetrating even to the privacy of his secret woods, was too much for him.\n\n\"And you find many?\" I asked.\n\nPerret \"Comment-va\" shrugged his shoulders and smiled pityingly.\n\n\"Moi. Puis le chien\u2014puis maintenant\u2014 vous!\"\n\nHe was gone the same minute, as if the branches stretched out dark arms to draw him away among them,... and on my way back to the village, by the growing light of the moon, I heard far away in that deep world of a million trees the echoes of a weird, sweet music, as this unwitting votary of Pan piped and fluted to his mighty God upon an ivy leaf.\n\nAnd the last thing I actually saw was the mongrel cur turning back from the edge of the forest to look at me for a moment of hesitation. He thought it was time now that I should join the little band of worshippers and follow them to the haunted spots of worship.\n\n\"Moi\u2014puis le chien\u2014puis maintenant\u2014 vous!\"\n\nFrom that moment of speech a kind of unexpressed intimacy between us came into being, and whenever we passed one another in the street he would give me a swift, happy look, and jerk his head significantly towards the forests. The feeling that, perhaps, in his curious lonely existence I counted for something important made me very careful with him. From time to time I gave him a few francs, and regularly twice a week when I knew he was away, I used to steal unobserved to his hut on the edge of the forest and put parcels of food inside the door\u2014 salam\u00e9, cheese, bread; and on one or two occasions when I had been extravagant with my own tea, pieces of plum-cake\u2014what the Colombier baker called plume-cak'!\n\nHe never acknowledged these little gifts, and 1 sometimes wondered to what use he put them, for though the dog remained well favoured, so far as any cur can be so, he himself seemed to waste away more rapidly than ever. I found, too, that he did receive help from the village\u2014official help\u2014but that after the night when he was caught on the church steps with an oil can, kindling-wood and a box of matches, this help was reduced by half, and the threat made to discontinue it altogether. Yet I feel sure there was no inherent maliciousness in the Man who Played upon the Leaf, and that his hatred of an \"alien\" faith was akin to the mistaken zeal that in other days could send poor sinners to the stake for the ultimate safety of their souls.\n\nTwo things, moreover, helped to foster the tender belief I had in his innate goodness: first, that all the children of the village loved him and were unafraid, to the point of playing with him and pulling him about as though he were a big dog; and, secondly, that his devotion for the mongrel hound, his equal and fellow-worshipper, went to the length of genuine self-sacrifice. I could never forget how he fed it with the best of the bread, when his own face was pinched and drawn with hunger; and on other occasions I saw many similar proofs of his unselfish affection. His love for that mongrel, never uttered, in my presence at least, perhaps unrecognized as love even by himself, must surely have risen in some form of music or incense to sweeten the very halls of heaven.\n\nIn the woods I came across him anywhere and everywhere, sometimes so unexpectedly that it occurred to me he must have followed me stealthily for long distances. And once, in that very lonely stretch above the mountain railway, towards Mont-mollin, where the trees are spaced apart with an effect of cathedral aisles and Gothic arches, he caught me suddenly and did something that for a moment caused me a thrill of genuine alarm.\n\nWild lilies of the valley grow very thickly thereabouts, and the ground falls into a natural hollow that shuts it off from the rest of the forest with a peculiar and delightful sense of privacy; and when I came across it for the first time I stopped with a sudden feeling of quite bewildering enchantment\u2014with a kind of childish awe that caught my breath as though I had slipped through some fairy door or blundered out of the ordinary world into a place of holy ground where solemn and beautiful things were the order of the day.\n\nI waited a moment and looked about me. It was utterly still. The haze of the day had given place to an evening clarity of atmosphere that gave the world an appearance of having just received its finishing touches of pristine beauty. The scent of the lilies was overpoweringly sweet. But the whole first impression\u2014before I had time to argue it away\u2014was that I stood before some mighty chancel steps on the eve of a secret festival of importance, and that all was prepared and decorated with a view to the coming ceremony. The hush was the most delicate and profound imaginable\u2014almost forbidding. I was a rude disturber.\n\nThen, without any sound of approaching footsteps, my hat was lifted from my head, and when I turned with a sudden start of alarm, there before me stood Perret \"Comment-va,\" the Man Who Played upon the Leaf.\n\nAn extraordinary air of dignity hung about him. His face was stern, yet rapt; something in his eyes genuinely impressive; and his whole appearance produced the instant impression\u2014it touched me with a fleeting sense of awe\u2014that here I had come upon him in the very act\u2014had surprised this poor, broken being in some dramatic moment when his soul sought to find its own peculiar region, and to transform itself into loveliness through some process of outward worship.\n\nHe handed the hat back to me without a word, and I understood that I had unwittingly blundered into the secret place of his strange cult, some shrine, as it were, haunted doubly by his faith and imagination, perhaps even into his very Holy of Hoies. His own head, as usual, was bared. I could no more have covered myself again than I could have put my hat on in Communion service of my own church.\n\n\"But\u2014this wonderful place\u2014this peace, this silence!\" I murmured, with the best manner of apology for the intrusion I could muster on the instant. \"May I stay a little with you, perhaps\u2014and see?\"\n\nAnd his face passed almost immediately, when he realized that I understood, into that soft and happy expression the woods invariably drew out upon it\u2014 the look of the soul, complete and healed.\n\n\"Hush!\" he whispered, his face solemn with the mystery of the listening trees; \"Vous \u00eates un pen en retard\u2014mais pourtant...\"\n\nAnd lifting the leaf to his lips he played a soft and whirring music that had for its undercurrent the sotinds of running water and singing wind mingled exquisitely together. It was half chant, half song, solemn enough for the dead, yet with a strain of soaring joy in it that made me think of children and a perfect faith. The music blessed me, and the leagues of forest, listening, poured about us all their healing forces.\n\n'As the nymphs stepped to the measure of his tune'\n\nI swear it would not have greatly surprised me to see the shaggy flanks of Pan himself disappearing behind the moss-grown boulders that lay about the hollows, or to have caught the flutter of white limbs as the nymphs stepped to the measure of his tune through the mosaic of slanting sunshine and shadow beyond.\n\nInstead, I saw only that picturesque madman playing upon his ivy leaf, and at his feet the faithful dog staring up without blinking into his face, from time to time turning to make sure that I listened and understood.\n\nBut the desolate places drew him most, and no distance seemed too great either for himself or his dog.\n\nIn this part of the Jura there is scenery of a sombre and impressive grandeur that, in its way, is quite as majestic as the revelation of far bigger mountains. The general appearance of soft blue pine woods is deceptive. The Boudry cliffs, slashed here and there with inaccessible couloirs, are undeniably grand, and in the sweep of the Creux du Van precipices there is a splendid terror quite as solemn as that of the Matter-horn itself. The shadows of its smooth, circular walls deny the sun all day, and the winds, caught within the 700ft. sides of its huge amphitheatre, as in the hollow of some awful cup, boom and roar with the crying of lost thunders.\n\nI often met him in these lonely fastnesses, wearing that half-bewildered, half-happy look of the wandering child; and one day in particular, when I risked my neck scrambling up the most easterly of the Boudry couloirs, I learned afterwards that he had spent the whole time\u2014four hours and more\u2014on the little Champ de Tr\u00e9mont at the bottom, watching me with his dog till I arrived in safety at the top. His fellow-worshippers were few, he explained, and worth keeping; though it was ever inexplicable to me how his poor damaged eyes performed the marvels of sight they did.\n\nAnd another time, at night, when, I admit, no sane man should have been abroad, and I had lost my way coming home from a climb along the torn and precipitous ledges of La Tourne, I heard his leaf thinly piercing the storm, always in front of me yet never overtaken, a sure though invisible guide. The cliffs on that descent are sudden and treacherous. The torrent of the Areuse, swollen with the melting snows, thundered ominously far below; and the forests swung their vast wet cloaks about them with torrents of blinding rain and clouds of darkness\u2014yet all fragrant with warm wind as a virgin world answering to its first spring tempest. There he was, the outcast with his leaf, playing to his God amid all these crashings and bellowings...\n\nIn the night, too, when skies were quiet and stars a-gleam, or in the still watches before the dawn, I would sometimes wake with the sound of clustered branches combing faint music from the gently-rising wind, and figure to myself that strange, lost creature wandering with his dog and leaf, his pelerine, his flying hair, his sweet, rapt expression of an inner glory, out there among the world of swaying trees he loved so well. And then my first soft view of the man would come back to me when I had seen him in the dusk as a tree; as though by some queer optical freak my outer and my inner vision had mingled so that I perceived both his broken body and his soul of magic. For the mysterious singing of the leaf, heard in such moments from my window while the world slept, expressed absolutely the inmost cry of that lonely and singular spirit, damaged in the eyes of the village beyond repair, but in the sight of the wood-gods he so devoutly worshipped, made whole with their own peculiar loveliness and fashioned after the image of elemental things.\n\nThe spring wonder was melting into the peace of the long summer days when the end came. The vineyards had begun to dress themselves in green, and the forest in those soft blues when individual trees lose their outline in the general body of the mountain. The lake was indistinguishable from the sky; the Jura peaks and ridges gone a-soaring into misty distances; the white Alps withdrawn into inaccessible and remote solitudes of heaven. I was making reluctant preparations for leaving\u2014dark London already in my thoughts\u2014when the news came. I forget who first put it into actual words. It had been about the village all the morning, and something of it was in every face as I went down the street. But the moment I came out and saw the dog on my doorstep, looking up at me with puzzled and beseeching eyes, I knew that something untoward had happened; and when he bit at my boots and caught my trousers in his teeth, pulling me in the direction of the forest, a sudden sense of poignant bereavement shot through my heart that I found it hard to explain, and that must seem incredible to those who have never known how potent may be the conviction of a sudden intuition.\n\nI followed the forlorn creature whither it led, but before a hundred yards lay behind us I had learned the facts from half-a-dozen mouths. That morning, very early, before the countryside was awake, the first mountain train, swiftly descending the steep incline below Chambrelien, had caught Perret \"Comment-va\" just where the Mont Racine sentier crosses the line on the way to his best-beloved woods, and in one swift second had swept him into eternity. The spot was in the direct line he always took to that special woodland shrine\u2014his Holy Place.\n\nAnd the manner of his death was characteristic of what I had divined in the man from the beginning; for he had given up his life to save his dog\u2014this mongrel and faithful creature that now tugged so piteously at my trousers. Details, too, were not lacking; the engine-driver had not failed to tell the story at the next station, and the news had travelled up the mountain-side in the way that all such news travels\u2014swiftly. Moreover, the woman who lived at the hut beside the crossing, and lowered the wooden barriers at the approach of all trains, had witnessed the whole sad scene from the beginning.\n\nAnd it is soon told. Neither she nor the engine-driver knew exactly how the dog got caught in the rails, but both saw that it was caught, and both saw plainly how the figure of the half-witted wanderer, hatless as usual and with cape flying, moved deliberately across the line to release it. It all happened in a moment. The man could only have saved himself by leaving the dog to its fate. The shrieking whistle had as little effect upon him as the powerful breaks had upon the engine in those few available moments. Yet, in the fraction of a second before the engine caught them, the dog somehow leapt free, and the soul of the Man Who Played upon the Leaf passed into the presence of his God\u2014singing.\n\nAs soon as it realized that I followed willingly, the beastie left me and trotted on ahead, turning every few minutes to make sure that I was coming. But I guessed our destination without difficulty. We passed the Pontarlier railway first, then climbed for half-an-hour and crossed the mountain line about a mile above the scene of the disaster, and so eventually entered the region of the forest, still quivering with innumerable flowers, where in the shaded heart of trees we approached the spot of lilies that I knew\u2014the place where a few weeks before the devout worshipper had lifted the hat from my head because the earth whereon I stood was holy ground. We stood in the pillared gateway of his Holy of Holies. The cool airs, perfumed beyond belief, stole out of the forest to meet us on the very threshold, for the trees here grew so thickly that only patches of the summer blaze found an entrance. And this time I did not wait on the outskirts, but followed my four-footed guide to a group of mossy boulders that stood in the very centre of the hollow.\n\nAnd there, as the dog raised its eyes to mine, soft with the pain of its great unanswerable question, I saw in a cleft of the grey rock the ashes of many hundred fires; and, placed about them in careful array, an assortment of the sacrifices he had offered, doubtless in sharp personal deprivation, to his deity:\u2014bits of mouldy bread, half-loaves, untouched portions of cheese, salam\u00e9 with the skin uncut\u2014most of it exactly as I had left it in his hut; and last of all, wrapped in the original white paper, the piece of Colombier plume-cak', and a row of ten silver francs round the edge...\n\nI learned afterwards, too, that among the almost unrecognizable remains on the railway, untouched by the devouring terror of the iron, they had found a hand\u2014tightly clasping in its dead fingers a crumpled ivy leaf...\n\nMy efforts to find a home for the dog delayed my departure, I remember, several days; but in the autumn when I returned it was only to hear that the creature had refused to stay with any one, and finally had escaped into the forest and deliberately starved itself to death. They found its skeleton, Louis Favre told me, in a rocky hollow on the lower slopes of Mont Racine in the direction of Montmollin. But Louis Favre did not know, as I knew, that this hollow had received other sacrifices as well, and was consecrated ground.\n\nAnd somewhere, if you search well the Jura slopes between Champ du Moulin, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau had his temporary house, and C\u00f4tendard where he visited Lord Wemyss when \"Milord Mar\u00e9chal Keith\" was Governor of the Principality of Neuch\u00e2tel under Frederic II, King of Prussia\u2014if you look well these haunted slopes, somewhere between the vineyards and the gleaming limestone heights, you shall find the forest glade where lie the bleached bones of the mongrel dog, and the little village cemetery that holds the remains of the Man Who Played upon the Leaf to the honour of the Great God Pan.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Price of Wiggins's Orgy ]\n\nIt happened to be a Saturday when Samuel Wiggins drew the first cash sum on account of his small legacy\u2014some twenty pounds, ten in gold and ten in notes. It felt in his pocket like a bottled-up prolongation of life. Never before had he seen so many dreams within practical reach. It produced in him a kind of high and elusive exaltation of the spirit. From time to time he put his hand down to make the notes crackle and let his fingers play through the running sovereigns as children play through sand.\n\nFor twenty years he had been secretary to a philanthropist interested in feeding\u2014feeding the poor. Soup kitchens had been the keynote of those twenty years, the distribution of victuals his sole objective. And now he had his reward\u2014a legacy of \u00a3100 a year for the balance of his days.\n\nTo him it was riches. He wore a shortish frock-coat, a low, spreading collar, a black made-up tie, and boots with elastic sides. On this particular day he wore also a new pair of rather bright yellow leather gloves. He was unmarried, over forty, bald, plump in the body, and possessed of a simple and emotional heart almost childlike. His brown eyes shone in a face that was wrinkled and dusty\u2014all his dreams driven inwards by the long years of uninspired toil for another.\n\nFor the first time in his life, released from the dingy purlieus of soup kitchens and the like, he wandered towards evening among the gay and lighted streets of the \"West End\"\u2014Piccadilly Circus where the flaming lamps positively hurt the eyes, and Leicester Square. It was bewildering and delightful, this freedom. It went to his head. Yet he ought to have known better.\n\n\"I'm going to dine at a restaurant to-night, by Jove,\" he said to himself, thinking of the gloomy boarding-house where he usually sat between a missionary and a typewriter. He fingered his money. \"I'm going to celebrate my legacy. I've earned it.\" The thought of a motor-car flashed absurdly through his mind; it was followed by another: a holiday in Spain, Italy, Hungary\u2014one of those sunny countries where music was cheap, in the open air, and of the romantic kind he loved. These thoughts show the kind of exaltation that possessed him.\n\n\"It's nearly, though not quite, \u00a32 a week,\" he repeated to himself for the fiftieth time, reflecting upon his legacy. \"I simply can't believe it!\"\n\nAfter indecision that threatened to be endless, he turned at length through the swinging glass doors of a big and rather gorgeous restaurant. Only once before in his life had he dined at a big London restaurant\u2014a Railway Hotel! Passing with some hesitation through the gaudy caf\u00e9 where a number of foreigners sat drinking at little marble tables, he entered the main dining-room, long, lofty, and already thronged. Here the light and noise and movement dazed him considerably, and for the life of him he could not decide upon a table. The people all looked so prosperous and important; the waiters so like gentlemen in evening dress\u2014the kind that came to the philanthropist's table. The roar of voices, eating, knives and forks, rose about him and filled him with a certain dismay. It was all rather overwhelming.\n\n\"I should have liked a smaller place better,\" he murmured, \"but still\u2014\" And again he fingered his money to gain confidence.\n\nThe choice of a table was intimidating, for he was absurdly retiring, was Wiggins; more at home with papers and the reports of philanthropic societies; his holidays spent in a boarding-house at Worthing with his sister and her invalid husband. Then relief came in the form of a sub-head waiter who, spying his helplessness, inquired with a bland grandeur of manner if he \"looked perhaps for some one?\"\n\n\"Oh, a table, thanks, only a table\u2014\"\n\nThe man, washing his hands in mid-air, swept down the crowded aisles and found one without the least difficulty. It emerged from nowhere so easily that Wiggins felt he had been a fool not to discover it alone. He wondered if he ought to tip the man half-a-crown now or later, but, before he could decide, another occupied his place, bland and smiling, with black eyes and plush-like hair, bending low before him and holding out a large pink programme.\n\nHe examined it, feeling that he ought to order dishes with outlandish names just to show that he knew his way about. Before he could steady his eye upon a single line, however, a third waiter, very youthful, suggested in broken English that Wiggins should leave his hat, coat and umbrella elsewhere. This he did willingly, though without grace or dispatch, for the yellow gloves stuck ridiculously to his hands. Then he sat down and turned to the menu again.\n\nIt was a very ordinary restaurant really, in spite of the vast height of the gilded ceiling, the scale of its sham magnificence and the excessive glitter of its hundred lights. The menu, disguised by various expensive and recherch\u00e9 dishes (which when ordered were invariably found to be \"off \"), was even more ordinary than the hall. But to the dazed Wiggins the words looked like a series of death-sentences printed in different languages, but all meaning the same thing: order me\u2014or die! That waiter standing over him was the executioner. Unless he speedily ordered something really worth the proprietor's while to provide, the head waiter would be summoned and he, Wiggins, would be beheaded. Those stars against certain cheap dishes meant that they could only be ordered by privileged persons, and those crosses\u2014\n\n\"This is vairy nice this sevening, sir,\" said the waiter, suddenly bending and pointing with a dirty finger to a dish that Wiggins found buried in a list uncommonly like \"Voluntary Subscriptions\" in his reports. It was entitled \"Lancashire Hot-Pot... 2/0\"\u2014two shillings, not two pounds, as he first imagined! He leaped at it.\n\n\"Yes, thanks; that'll do, then\u2014for to-night,\" he said, and the waiter ambled away indifferently, looking all round the room in search of sympathy.\n\nBy degrees, however, the other recovered his self-possession, and realized that to spend his legacy on mere Hot-Pot was to admit he knew not the values of life. He called the plush-headed waiter back and with a rush of words ordered some oysters, soup, a fried sole, and half a partridge to follow.\n\n\"Then ze 'Ot-Pot, sir?\" queried the man, with respect.\n\n\"I'll see about that later.\"\n\nFor he was already wondering what he should drink, knowing nothing of wines and vintages. At luncheon with the philanthropist he sometimes had a glass of sherry; at Worthing with his sister he drank beer. But now he wanted something really good, something generous that would help him to celebrate. He would have ordered champagne as a conciliation to the waiter, now positively obsequious, but some one had told him once that there was not enough champagne in the world to go round, and that hotels and restaurants were supplied with \"something rather bad.\" Burgundy, he felt, would be more the thing\u2014rich, sunny, full-bodied.\n\nHe studied the wine-card till his head swam. A waiter, while he was thus engaged, sidled up and watched him from an angle. Wiggins, looking up distractedly at the same moment, caught his eye. Whew! It was the Head Waiter himself, a man of quite infinite presence, who at once bowed himself forward, and with a gentle but commanding manner drew his attention to the wines he could \"especially recommend.\" Something in the man's face struck him momentarily as familiar\u2014vaguely familiar\u2014then passed.\n\nNow Wiggins, as has been said, did not know one wine from another; but the spirit of his foolish pose fairly had him by the throat at last, and each time this condescending individual indicated a new vintage he shook his head knowingly and shrugged his shoulders with the air of a connoisseur. This pantomime continued for several minutes.\n\n\"Something really good, you know,\" he mumbled after a while, determined to justify himself in the eyes of this high official who was taking such pains. \"A rare wine\u2014er\u2014with body in it.\" Then he added, with a sudden impulse of confidence, \"It's Saturday night, remember!\" And he smiled knowingly, making a gesture that a man of the world was meant to understand.\n\nWhy he should have said this remains a mystery. Perhaps it was a semi-apologetic reference to the supposed habit of men to indulge themselves on a Saturday because they need not rise early to work next day. Perhaps it was meant in some way to excuse all the trouble he was giving. In any case, there can be no question that the manner of the Head Waiter instantly changed in a subtle way difficult to describe, and from mere official politeness passed into deferential attention. He bowed slightly. He increased his distance by an inch or two. Wiggins, noticing it and slightly bewildered, repeated his remark, for want of something to say more than anything else. \"It's Saturday night, of course,\" he repeated, murmuring, yet putting more meaning into the words than they could reasonably hold.\n\n\"As Monsieur says,\" the man replied, with a marked respect in his tone not there before; \"and we\u2014close early.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the other, gaining confidence pleasantly, \"you close early.\"\n\nHe had quite forgotten the fact, even if he ever knew it, but he spoke with decision. Glancing up from the wine-list, he caught the man's eye; then instantly lowered his gaze, for the Head Waiter was staring at him in a fixed and curious manner that seemed unnecessary. And once again that passing touch of familiarity appeared upon the features and was gone.\n\n\"Monsieur is here for the first time, if I may ask?\" came next.\n\n\"Er\u2014yes, I am,\" he replied, thinking all this attention a trifle excessive.\n\n\"Ah, pardon, of course, I understand,\" the Head Waiter added softly. \"A new\u2014a recent member, then\u2014?\"\n\nA little non-plussed, a little puzzled, Wiggins agreed with a nod of the head. He did not know that head waiters referred to customers as \"members.\" For an instant it occurred to him that possibly he was being mistaken for somebody else. It was really\u2014but at that moment the oysters arrived. The Head Waiter said something in rapid Italian to his subordinate\u2014something that obviously increased that plush-headed person's desire to please\u2014bent over with his best manner to murmur, \"And I will get monsieur the wine he will like, the right kind of wine!\" and was gone.\n\nIt was a new and delightful sensation. Wiggins, feeling proud, pleased and important under the effect of this excellent service and attention, turned to his oysters. The wine would come presently. And, meanwhile, the music had begun..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 421", + "text": "He began to enjoy himself thoroughly, and the wine\u2014still, fragrant, soft\u2014soon ran in his veins and drove out the last vestige of his absurd shyness. Behind the palm trees, somewhere out of sight, the orchestra played soothingly, and if the selections were somewhat bizarre it made no difference to him. He drank in the sound just as he drank in the wine\u2014eagerly. Both fed the consciousness that he was enjoying himself, and the Danse Macabre gave him as much pleasure as did the Boh\u00e8me, the Strauss Waltz, or Donizetti. Everything\u2014wine, music, food, people\u2014served to intensify his interest in himself. He examined his face in the big mirrors and realized what a dog he was and what a good time he was having. He watched the other customers, finding them splendid and distinguished. The whole place was really fine\u2014he would come again and again, always ordering the same wine, for it was certainly an unusual wine, as the Head Waiter had called it, \"the right kind.\" The price of it he never asked, for in his pocket lay the price of a whole case. His hand slipped down to finger the sovereigns\u2014hot and slippery now\u2014and the notes, somewhat moist and crumpled... The needles of the big staring clock meanwhile swung onwards...\n\nThus, aided by the tactful and occasional superintendence of the Head Waiter from a distance, the evening passed along in a happy rush of pleasurable emotion. The half-partridge had vanished, and Wiggins toyed now with a wonderful-looking \"sweet\"\u2014the most expensive he could find. He did not eat much of it, but liked to see it on his plate. The wine helped things enormously. He had ordered another half-bottle some time ago, delighted to find that it exhilarated without confusing him. And every one else in the place was enjoying himself in the same way. He was thrilled to discover this.\n\nOnly one thing jarred a little. A very big man, with a round, clean-shaven face inclined to fatness, stared at him more than he cared about from a table in the corner diagonally across the room. He had only come in half-an-hour ago. His face was somehow or other dog-like\u2014something between a boar-hound and a pup, Wiggins thought. Each time he looked up the fellow's large and rather fierce eyes were fixed upon him, then lingeringly withdrawn. It was unpleasant to be stared at in this way by an offensive physiognomy.\n\nBut most of the time he was too full of personal visions conjured up by the wine to trouble long about external matters. His head was simply brimming over with thoughts and ideas\u2014about himself, about soup-kitchens, feeding the poor, the change of life effected by the legacy, and a thousand other details. Once or twice, however, in sharp, clear moments when the tide of alcohol ebbed a little, other questions assailed him: Why should the Head Waiter have become so obsequious and attentive? What was it in his face that seemed familiar? What was there about the remark \"It's Saturday evening\" to change his manner? And\u2014what was it about the dinner, the restaurant and the music that seemed just a little out of the ordinary?\n\nOr was he merely thinking nonsense? And was it his imagination that this man stared so oddly? The alcohol rushed deliciously in his veins.\n\nThe vague uneasiness, however, was a passing matter, for the orchestra was tearing madly through a Csardas, and his thoughts and feelings were swept away in the wild rhythm. He drank his bottle out and ordered another. Was it the second or the third? He could not remember. Counting always made his head ache. He did not care anyhow. \"Let 'er go! I'm enjoying myself! I've got a fat legacy\u2014money lying in the bank\u2014money I haven't earned!\" The carefulness of years was destroyed in as many minutes. \"That music's simply spiffing!\"\n\nThen he glanced up and caught the clean-shaven face hearing down upon him across the shimmering room like the muzzle of a moving gun. He tried to meet it, but found he could not focus it properly. The same moment he saw that he was mistaken; the man was merely staring at him. Two faces swam and wobbled into one. This movement, and the appearance of coming towards him, were both illusions produced by the alcohol. He drank another glass quickly to steady his vision\u2014and then another...\n\n\"I'll call for my bill. Itshtime to go...!\" he murmured aloud later, with a very deep sigh. He looked about him for the waiter, who instantly appeared\u2014with coffee and liqueurs, however.\n\n\"Dear me, yes. Qui' forgot I or'ered those,\" he observed offhand, smiling in the man's face, willing and anxious to say a lot of things, but not quite certain what.\n\n\"My bill,\" was what he said finally, \"mush b'off!\"\n\nThe waiter laughed pleasantly, but very politely, in reply. Wiggins repeated his remark about his bill.\n\n\"Oh, that will be all right, sir,\" returned the man, as though no such thing as payment was ever heard of in this restaurant. It was rather confusing. Wiggins laughed to himself, drank his liqueur and forgot about everything except the ballet music of D\u00e9libes the strings were sprinkling in a silver shower about the hall. His mind ran after them through the glittering air.\n\n\"Just fancy if I could catch 'em and take 'em home in a bunch,\" he said to himself, immensely pleased. He was enjoying himself hugely by now.\n\nAnd then, suddenly, he became aware that the place was rapidly thinning, lights being lowered, good-nights being said, and that everybody seemed\u2014drunk.\n\n\"P'rapsh they've all got legacies!\" he thought, flushing with excitement.\n\nHe rose unsteadily to his feet and was delighted to find that he was not in the least\u2014drunk. He at once respected himself.\n\n\"Itsh really 'sgusting that fellows can't stop when they've had 'nough!\" he murmured, making his way with steps that required great determination towards the door, and remembering before he got halfway that he had not paid his bill. Turning in a half-circle that brought an unnecessary quantity of the room round with him, he made his way back, lost his way, fumbled about in the increasing gloom, and found himself face to face with the\u2014Head Waiter. The unexpected meeting braced him astonishingly. The dignity of the man had curiously increased.\n\n\"I'm looking for my bill,\" observed Wiggins thickly, wondering for the twentieth time of whom the man's face reminded him; \"you haven't seen it about anywhere, I shuppose?\" He sat down with more dignity than he could have supposed possible and produced a \u00a35 note from his pocket, the lining of the pocket coming out with it like a dirty glove.\n\nMost of the guests had gone out by this time, and the big hall was very dark. Two lights only remained, and these, reflected from mirror to mirror, made its proportions seem vast and unreal. They flew from place to place, too, distressingly\u2014these lights.\n\n\"Half-a-crown will settle that, sir,\" replied the man, with a respectful bow.\n\n\"Nonshense! \" replied the other. \"Why, I ordered Lancashire hotch-potch, grilled shole, a\u2014a bird or something of the kind, and the wine\u2014\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, sir, but\u2014if you will permit me to say so\u2014the others will soon be here now, and\u2014as there will be a specially large attendance, perhaps you would like to make sure of your place.\" He pocketed the half-crown with a bow, pointed to the far, dim corner of the room, and stepped aside a little to make space for Wiggins to pass.\n\nAnd Wiggins did pass\u2014though it is not quite clear how he managed to dodge the flying tables. With deep sighs, hot, confused and puzzled, but too obfuscated to understand what it was all about, he obeyed the directions, at the same time wondering uneasily how it was he had forgotten what was a-foot. He wandered towards the end of the hall with the uncertainty of a butterfly that makes many feints before it settles... At a vast distance off the Head Waiter was moving to close the main doors, utterly oblivious now of his existence. He felt glad of that. Something about that fellow was disagreeable\u2014downright nasty. This suddenly came over him with a flood of conviction. The man was more than peculiar: he was sinister... The air smelt horribly of cooked food, tobacco smoke, breathing crowds, scented women and the rest. Whiffs of it, hot and f\u0153tid, brought him a little to his senses... Then suddenly he noticed that the big man with the face that was dark and smooth like the muzzle of a cannon, was watching him keenly from a table on the other side where an electric light still burned.\n\n\"By George! There he is again, that feller! Wonder whatsh he's smiling at me for. Looking for'sh bill too, p'raps\u2014 Now, in a Soup Kishen nothing of the kind\u2014\"\n\nHe bowed in return, smiling insolently, holding himself steady by a chair to do so. He shoved and stumbled his way on into the shadows, half-mingling with the throng passing out into the street. Then, making a sharp turn back into the room unobserved, he took a few uncertain steps and collapsed silently and helplessly upon a chair that was hidden behind a big palm-tree in a dark corner.\n\nAnd the last thing he remembered as he sank, boneless, like soft hay, into that corner was that the sham palm-tree bowed towards him, then ran off into the ceiling, and from that elevation, which in no way diminished its size, bowed to him yet again...\n\nIt was just after his eyes closed that the door in the gilt panelling at the end of the room softly opened and a woman entered on tiptoe. She was followed by other women and several girls; these, again, from time to time, by men, all dressed in black, all silent, and all ushered by the majestic Head Waiter to their places. The big man with the face like a gun-muzzle superintended. And each individual, on entering, was held there at the secret doorway until a certain sentence had passed his lips. Evidently a password: \"It is Saturday night,\" said the one being admitted, \"and we close early,\" replied the Head Waiter and the big man. And then the door was closed until the next soft tapping came.\n\nBut Wiggins, plunged in the stupor of the first sleep, knew none of all this. His frock-coat was bunched about his neck, his black tie under his ear, his feet resting higher than his head. He looked like a collapsed air-ship in a hedge, and he snored heavily." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 422", + "text": "It was about an hour later when he opened his eyes, climbed painfully and heavily to his feet, staggered back against the wall utterly bewildered\u2014and stared. At the far end of the great hall, its loftiness now dim, was a group of people. The big mirrors on all sides reflected them with the effect of increasing their numbers indefinitely. They stood and sat upon an improvised platform. The electric lights, shaded with black, dropped a pale glitter upon their faces. They were systematically grouped, the big man in the centre, the Head Waiter at a small table just behind him. The former was speaking in low, measured tones.\n\nIn his dark and distant corner Wiggins first of all seized the carafe and quenched his feverish thirst. Next he advanced slowly and with the utmost caution to a point nearer the group where he could hear what was being said. He was still a good deal confused in mind, and had no idea what the hour was or what he had been doing in the meantime. There were some twenty or thirty people, he saw, of both sexes, well dressed, many of them distinguished in appearance, and all wearing black; even their gloves were black; some of the women, too, wore black veils\u2014very thick. But in all the faces without exception there was something\u2014was it about the lips and mouths?\u2014that was peculiar and\u2014repellent.\n\nObviously this was a meeting of some kind. Some society had hired the hall for a private gathering. Wiggins, understanding this, began to feel awkward. He did not wish to intrude; he had no right to listen; yet to make himself known was to betray that he was still very considerably intoxicated. The problem presented itself in these simple terms to his dazed intelligence. He was also aware of another fact: about these black-robed people there was something which made him secretly and horribly\u2014afraid.\n\nThe big man with the smooth face like a gun-muzzle sat down after a softly-uttered speech, and the group, instead of applauding with their hands, waved black handkerchiefs. The fluttering sound of them trickled along the wastes of hall towards the concealed eavesdropper. Then the Head Waiter rose to introduce the next speaker, and the instant Wiggins saw him he understood what it was in his face that was familiar. For the false beard no longer adorned his lips, the wig that altered the shape of his forehead and the appearance of his eyes had been removed, and the likeness he bore to the philanthropist, Wiggins's late employer, was too remarkable to be ignored. Wiggins just repressed a cry, but a low gasp apparently did escape him, for several members of the group turned their heads in his direction and stared.\n\nThe Head Waiter, meanwhile, saved him from immediate discovery by beginning to speak. The words were plainly audible, and the resemblance of the voice to that other voice he knew now to be stopped with dust, was one of the most dreadful experiences he had ever known. Each word, each trick of expression came as a new and separate shock.\n\n\"...and the learned Doctor will say a few words upon the rationale of our subject,\" he concluded, turning with a graceful bow to make room for a distinguished-looking old gentleman who advanced shambling from the back of the improvised platform.\n\nWhat Wiggins then heard\u2014in somewhat disjointed sentences owing to the buzzing in his ears\u2014was at first apparently meaningless. Yet it was freighted, he knew, with a creeping and sensational horror that would fully reveal itself the instant he discovered the clue. The old clever-faced scoundrel was saying vile things. He knew it. But the key to the puzzle being missing, he could not quite guess what it was all about. The Doctor, gravely and with balanced phrases, seemed to be speaking of the fads of the day with regard to food and feeding. He ridiculed vegetarianism, and all the other isms. He said that one and all were based upon ignorance and fallacy, declaring that the time had at last come in the history of the race when a rational system of feeding was a paramount necessity. The physical and psychical conditions of the times demanded it, and the soul of man could never be emancipated until it was adopted. He himself was proud to be one of the founders of their audacious and secret Society, revolutionary and pioneer in the best sense, to which so many of the medical fraternity now belonged, and so many of the brave women too, who were in the van of the feminist movements of the times. He said a great deal in this vein. Wiggins, listening in growing amazement and uneasiness, waited for the clue to it all.\n\nIn conclusion, the speaker referred solemnly to the fact that there was a stream of force in their Society which laid them open to the melancholy charge of being called \"hysterical.\" \"But after all,\" he cried, with rising enthusiasm and in accents that rang down the hall, \"a Society without hysteria is a dull Society, just as a woman without hysteria is a dull woman. Neither the Society nor the woman need yield to the tendency; but that it is present potentially infers the faculty, so delicious in the eyes of all sane men\u2014the faculty of running to extremes. It is a sign of life, and of very vivid life. It is not for nothing, dear friends, that we are named the \u2014\" But the buzzing in Wiggins's ears was so loud at this moment that he missed the name. It sounded to him something between \"Can-I-believes\" and \"Camels,\" but for the life of him he could not overtake the actual word. The Doctor had uttered it, moreover, in a lowered voice\u2014a suddenly lowered voice... When the noise in his ears had passed he heard the speaker bring his address to an end in these words: \"...and I will now ask the secretaries to make their reports from their various sections, after which, I understand\"\u2014his tone grew suddenly thick and clouded\u2014\"we are to be regaled with a collation\u2014a sacramental collation\u2014of the usual kind...\" His voice hushed away to nothing. His mouth was working most curiously. A wave of excitement unquestionably ran over the faces of the others. Their mouths also worked oddly. Dark and sombre things were afoot in that hall.\n\nWiggins crouched a little lower behind the edge of the overhanging table-cloth and listened. He was perspiring now, but there were touches of icy horror fingering about in the neighbourhood of his heart. His mental and physical discomfort were very great, for the conviction that he was about to witness some dreadful scene\u2014black as the garments of the participants in it\u2014grew rapidly within him. He devised endless plans for escape, only to reject them the instant they were formed. There was no escape possible. He had to wait till the end.\n\nA charming young woman was on her feet, addressing the audience in silvery tones; sweet and comely she was, her beauty only marred by that singular leer that visited the lips and mouths of all of them. The flesh of his back began to crawl as he listened. He would have given his whole year's legacy to be out of it, for behind that voice of silver and sweetness there crowded even to her lips the rush of something that was unutterable\u2014loathsome. Wiggins felt it. The uncertainty as to its exact nature only added to his horror and distress.\n\n\"...so this question of supply, my friends,\" she was saying, \"is becoming more and more difficult. It resolves itself into a question of ways and means.\" She looked round upon her audience with a touch of nervous apprehension before she continued. \"In my particular sphere of operations\u2014West Kensington\u2014 I have regretfully to report that the suspicions and activity of the police, the foolish, old-fashioned police, have now rendered my monthly contributions no longer possible. There have been too many disappearances of late\u2014\" She paused, casting her eyes down. Wiggins felt his hair rise, drawn by a shivery wind. The words \"contributions\" and \"disappearances\" brought with them something quite freezing.\n\n\"... As you know,\" the girl resumed, \"it is to the doctors that we must look chiefly for our steadier supplies, and unfortunately in my sphere of operations we have but one doctor who is a member... I do not like to\u2014to resign my position, but I must ask for lenient consideration of my failure\"\u2014her voice sank lower still\u2014\"...my failure to furnish to-night the materials\u2014\" She began to stammer and hesitate dreadfully; her voice shook; an ashen pallor spread to her very lips. \"...the elements for our customary feast\u2014\"\n\nA movement of disapproval ran over the audience like a wave; murmurs of dissent and resentment were heard. As the girl paled more perceptibly the singular beauty of her face stood out with an effect of almost shining against that dark background of shadows and black garments. In spite of himself, and forgetting caution for the moment, Wiggins peeped over the edge of the table to see her better. She was a lady, he saw, high-bred and spirited. That pallor, and the timidity it bespoke, was but evidence of a highly sensitive nature facing a situation of peculiar difficulty\u2014and danger. He read in her attitude, in the poise of that slim figure standing there before disapproval and possible disaster, the bearing and proud courage of a type that would face execution with calmness and dignity. Wiggins was amazed that this thought should flash through him so vividly\u2014from nowhere. Born of the feverish aftermath of alcohol, perhaps\u2014yet born inevitably, too, of this situation before his eyes.\n\nWith a thrill he realized that the girl was speaking again, her voice steady, but faint with the gravity of her awful position.\n\n\"... and I ask for that justice in consideration of my failure which\u2014the difficulties of the position demand. I have had to choose between that bold and ill-considered action which might have betrayed us all to the authorities, and\u2014the risk of providing nothing for to-night.\"\n\nShe sat down. Wiggins understood that it was a question of life and death. The air about him turned icy. He felt the perspiration trickling on several different parts of his body at once.\n\nAn old lady rose instantly to reply; her face was stern and dreadful, although the signature of breeding and culture was plainly there in the delicate lines about the nostrils and forehead. Her mien held something implacable. She was dressed in black silk that rustled, and she was certainly well over sixty; but what made Wiggins squirm there in his narrow hiding-place was the extraordinary resemblance she bore to Mrs. Sturgis, the superintendent of one of his late employer's soup kitchens. It was all diabolically grotesque. She glanced round upon the group of members, who clearly regarded her as a leader. The machinery of the whole dreadful scene then moved quicker.\n\n\"Then are we to understand from the West Kensington secretary,\" she began in firm, even tones, \"that for to-night there is\u2014nothing?\" The young girl bowed her head without rising from her chair.\n\n\"I beg to move, then, Mr. Chairman,\" continued the terrible old lady in iron accents, \"that the customary procedure be followed, and that a Committee of Three be appointed to carry it into immediate effect.\" The words fell like bomb-shells into the deserted spaces of the hall.\n\n\"I second the motion,\" was heard in a man's voice.\n\n\"Those in favour of the motion will show their hands,\" announced the big chairman with the clean-shaven face.\n\nSeveral score of black-gloved hands waved in the air, with the effect of plumes upon a jolting hearse.\n\n\"And those who oppose it?\"\n\nNo single hand was raised. An appalling hush fell upon the group.\n\n\"I appoint Signor Carnamorte as chairman of the sub-committee, with power to choose his associates,\" said the big man. And the \"Head Waiter\" bowed his acceptance of the duty imposed upon him. There was at once then a sign of hurried movement, and the figure of the young girl was lost momentarily to view as several members surged round her. The next instant they fell away and she stood clear, her hands bound. Her voice, soft as before but very faint, was audible through the hush.\n\n\"I claim the privilege belonging to the female members of the Society,\" she said calmly; \"the right to find, if possible, a substitute.\"\n\n\"Granted,\" answered the chairman gravely. \"The customary ten minutes will be allowed you in which to do so. Meanwhile, the preparations must proceed in the usual way.\"\n\nWith a dread that ate all other emotions, Wiggins watched keenly from his concealment, and the preparations that he saw in progress, though simple enough in themselves, filled him with a sense of ultimate horror that was freezing. The Committee of Three were very busy with something at the back of the improvised platform, something that was heavy and, on being touched, emitted a metallic and sonorous ring. As in the strangling terror and heat of nightmare the full meaning of events is often kept concealed until the climax, so Wiggins knew that this simple sound portended something that would only be revealed to him later\u2014something appalling as Satan\u2014sinister as the grave. That ring of metal was the Gong of Death. He heard it in his own heart, and the shock was so great that he could not prevent an actual physical movement. His jerking leg drove sharply against a chair. The chair\u2014squeaked.\n\nThe sound pierced the deep silence of the big hall with so shrill a note that of course everybody heard it. Wiggins, expecting to have the whole crew of these black-robed people about his ears, held his breath in an agony of suspense. All those pairs of eyes, he felt, were searching the spot where he lay so thinly hidden by the table-cloth. But no steps came towards him. A voice, however, spoke: the voice of the girl: she had heard the sound and had divined its cause.\n\n\"Loosen my bonds,\" she cried, \"for there is some one yonder among the shadows. I have found a substitute! And\u2014I swear to Heaven\u2014 he is plump!\"\n\nThe sentence was so extraordinary, that Wiggins felt a spring of secret merriment touched somewhere deep within him, and a gush of uncontrollable laughter came up in his throat so suddenly that before he could get his hand to his mouth, it rang down the long dim hall and betrayed him beyond all question of escape. Behind it lay the strange need of violent expression. He had to do something. The life of this slender and exquisite girl was in danger. And the nightmare strain of the whole scene, the hints and innuendoes of a dark purpose, the implacable nature of the decree that threatened so fair a life\u2014all resulted in a pressure that was too much for him. Had he not laughed, he would certainly have shrieked aloud. And the next minute he did shriek aloud. The screams followed his laughter with a dreadful clamour, and at the same instant he staggered noisily to his feet and rose into full view from behind the table. Everybody then saw him.\n\nAcross the length of that dimly-lighted hall he faced the group of people in all their hideous reality, and what he saw cleared from his fuddled brain the last fumes of the alcohol. The white visage of each member seemed already close upon him. He saw the glimmering pallor of their skins against the black clothes, the eyes ashine, the mouths working, fingers pointing at him. There was the Head Waiter, more than ever like the dead philanthropist whose life had been spent in feeding others; there the odious smooth face of the big chairman; there the stern-lipped old lady who demanded the sentence of death. The whole silent crew of them stared darkly at him, and in front of them, like some fair lily growing amid decay, stood the girl with the proud and pallid face, calm and self-controlled. Immediately beyond her, a little to one side, Wiggins next perceived the huge iron cauldron, already swinging from its mighty tripod, waiting to receive her into its capacious jaws. Beneath it gleamed and flickered the flames from a dozen spirit-lamps.\n\n\"My substitute!\" rang out her clear voice. \"My substitute! Unloose my hands! And seize him before he can escape!\"\n\n\"He cannot escape!\" cried a dozen angry voices.\n\n\"In darkness!\" thundered the chairman, and at the same moment every light was extinguished from the switch-board\u2014every light but one. The bulb immediately behind him in the wall was left burning.\n\nAnd the crew were upon him, coming swiftly and stealthily down the empty aisles between the tables. He saw their forms advance and shift by the gleam of the lamps beneath the awful cauldron. With the advance came, too, the sound of rushing, eager breathing. He imagined, though he could not see, those evil mouths a-working. And at this moment the subconscious part of him that had kept the secret all this time, suddenly revealed in letters of flame the name of the Society which fifteen minutes before he had failed to catch. The subconscious self, that supreme stage manager, that arch conspirator, rose and struck him in the face as it were out of the darkness, so that he understood, with a shock of nauseous terror, the terrible nature of the net in which he was caught.\n\nFor this Secret Society, meeting for their awful rites in a great public restaurant of mid-London, were maniacs of a rare and singular description\u2014vilely mad on one point but sane on all the rest. They were Cannibals!\n\nNever before had he run with such speed, agility and recklessness; never before had he guessed that he could leap tables, clear chairs with the flying manner of a hurdle race, and dodge palms and flower-pots as an athlete of twenty dodges collisions in the football field. But in each dark corner where he sought a temporary refuge, the electric light on the wall above immediately sprang into brilliance, one of the crew having remained by the switchboard to control this diabolically ingenious method of keeping him ever in sight.\n\nFor a long time, however, he evaded his crowding and clumsy pursuers. It was a vile and ghastly chase. His flying frock-coat streamed out behind him, and he felt the elastic side of his worn boots split under the unusual strain of the twisting, turning ankles as he leaped and ran. His pursuers, it seemed, sought to prolong the hunt on purpose. The passion of the chase was in their blood. Round and round that hall, up and down, over tables and under chairs, behind screens, shaking the handles of doors\u2014all immovable, past gleaming dish-covers on the wheeled joint-tables, taking cover by swing doors, curtains, palms, everything and anything, Wiggins flew for his life from the pursuing forces of a horrible death.\n\nAnd at last they caught him. Breathless and exhausted, he collapsed backwards against the wall in a dark corner. But the light instantly flashed out above him. He lay in full view, and in another second the advancing horde\u2014he saw their eyes and mouths so close\u2014would be upon him, when something utterly unexpected happened: his head in falling struck against a hard projecting substance and\u2014a bell rang sharply out. It was a telephone!\n\nHow he ever managed to get the receiver to his lips, or why the answering exchange came so swiftly he does not pretend to know. He had just time to shout, \"Help! help! Send police X... Restaurant! Murder! Cannibals!\" when he was seized violently by the collar, his arms and legs grasped by a dozen pairs of hands, and a struggle began that he knew from the start must prove hopeless.\n\nThe fact that help might be on the way, however, gave him courage. Wiggins smashed right and left, screamed, kicked, bit and butted. His frock coat was ripped from his back with a whistling tear of cloth and lining, and he found himself free at the edge of a group that clawed and beat everywhere about him. The dim light was now in his favour. He shot down the hall again like a hare, leaping tables on the way, and flinging dish-covers, carafes, menus at the pursuing crowd as fast as he could lay hands upon them.\n\nThen came a veritable pandemonium of smashed glass and crockery, while a grip of iron caught his arms behind and pinioned them beyond all possibility of moving. Turning quickly, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of a big blue policeman, the door into the street open beside him. The crowd became at once inextricably mixed up and jumbled together. The chairman, and the girl who was to have been eaten, melted into a single person. The philanthropist and the old lady slid into each other. It was a horrible bit of confusion. He felt deadly sick and dizzy. Everything dropped away from his sight then, and darkness tore up round him from the carpet. He remembered nothing more for a long time.\n\nPerhaps the most vivid recollection of what occurred afterwards\u2014he remembers it to this day, and his memory may be trusted, for he never touched wine again\u2014was the weary smile of the magistrate, and the still more weary voice as he said in the court two days later\u2014\n\n\"Forty shillings, and be bound over to keep the peace in two sureties for six months. And \u00a35 to the proprietor of the restaurant to pay damages for the broken windows and crockery. Next case...!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Carlton's Drive ]\n\nIt is difficult, of course, to estimate the effect of such a thing upon another's temperament. The change seemed bewilderingly sudden; yet spiritual chemistry is a process incalculable, past finding out, and the results in this case were undeniable. Carlton had changed in the course of a brief year or two. And he dates it from that drive. He knows.\n\nHe told it to a few intimates only. Those who know his face as it is to-day, serene and strong, yet recall how it was scored and beaten with the ravages of dissipation a few years before (so that the human seemed almost to have dropped back into the beast), can scarcely credit his identity. Now\u2014its calm austerity, softened by the greatest yearning known to men, the yearning to save, proclaim at a glance the splendid revolution; whereas then! The memory is unpleasant; exceedingly wonderful the contrast. His life was inoffensive enough, negatively, at least, till the money came; then, with the inheritance, his innate sensuality broke out. Yet it seemed a prodigious step for a man to make in so brief a time: from that life of depravity that stained his face and smothered his soul, to the Brotherhood of Devotion he founded, and himself led full charge against the vice of the world! But not incomprehensible, perhaps. He did nothing by halves. It was the swing of the pendulum.\n\nHe was somewhere about thirty, his nerves shattered by the savagery of concentrated fast living, his system too exhausted to respond even to unusual stimulant, when he found himself one early spring morning on the pavement beside St. George's Hospital. He had been up all night, and was making his way homewards on foot, his pockets stuffed with the proceeds of lucky gambling; and how he happened to be standing at that particular spot, watching the traffic, at eight in the morning, is not clear. Probably, seduced by the sweetness of the air, he had wandered, driven by gusts of mood as by gusts of wind. Though he had drunk steadily since mid-night he was not so much intoxicated as fuddled\u2014stupid. He was on the south corner, where the 'buses stop in their journey westwards. The sun poured a flood of light down Piccadilly; the street was brisk with pedestrians going to work; the hospital side-entrance behind him already astir. Across the road the trees in the park shimmered in a wave of fluttering green. The pride of life was in the June air. In his own heart, however, was a loathsome satiety\u2014sign of the first death.\n\nIn a line with the trees opposite stood a solitary hansom. A faint surprise that it should be there at such an hour jostled in his sodden brain with the idea that he might as well drive home\u2014when, suddenly, he became aware that the man perched on the box was looking at him across the street with a fixity of manner that was both singular and offensive. Carlton felt his own gaze, blear-eyed and troubled, somehow caught and held\u2014uncomfortably. The other's eyes were fastened upon his own\u2014had been fastened for some time\u2014sinisterly, and with a purpose. Just at this moment, however, a sharp spasm of pain and faintness, due to exhaustion and debauch, shot through him, so that he reeled, half staggering, and, before he quite knew what he was doing, he had nodded to the driver, and saw that the horse was already turning with clattering hoofs to cross the slippery street. A minute later he had climbed heavily in, noticing vaguely that the driver wore all black, the horse was black, and on the whip was a strip of cr\u00eape that fluttered in the breeze. As he got in, too, the effort strained him. But, more than that, something that was cold and terrible\u2014\"like a hand of ragged steel,\" he described it afterwards\u2014clutched at his heart. It puzzled him; but he was too \"done\" to think; and he lurched back wearily on the cushions as the horse started forward with the jerkiness of long habit.\n\n\"Same address, sir?\" the man called down through the trap. His voice was harsh \"like iron\"; and Carlton, supposing that he recognized a fare, replied testily, \"Of course, you fool! And let her rip\u2014to the devil!\" The spasm of strange pain had passed. He only felt tired to brokenness, sick with his corrupt and unsatisfying life, a dull, incomprehensible anger burning in him against the world, the driver\u2014and himself.\n\nThe hansom swung forwards over the smooth, uncrowded streets like a ship with a breeze behind her, for the horse was fresh, and the man drove well. He took off his opera hat and let the cool wind fan his face. That drive of a mile to his rooms was the most soothing and restful he had ever known. But, after a while, braced, perhaps, by the morning wind, he began to notice that they were following a strange route through streets he did not recognize. He had been lolling in the corner with half-closed eyes; now he sat up and looked about him. Time had passed. He ought to have reached home long ago. They were going at a tremendous and unholy pace, too. He poked open the trap sharply.\n\n\"Hi, hi!\" he called out angrily; \"are you drunk? Where, in the name of \u2014 are you driving to?\"\n\n\"It's all right, sir; it's the shortest way. The usual roads are closed.\"\n\nThe man's voice\u2014deep, with a curious rumbling note\u2014had such conviction and authority in it that Carlton accepted the explanation with a growl and flung himself back into his soft corner. Again, however, for a single second, that cold thing of steel moved horribly in his heart. He felt as if the \"ragged hand \" had given it another twist. Then it passed, and he gave himself up to the swinging motion of the drive. The hansom tore along now; it was delightful. Curious, though, that all the known streets should be \"up\"! Positively the houses were getting less, as though he was driving out into the country. Perhaps, too, the feeling of laisser aller that came over him was caused by some inhibition of the will due to prolonged excesses. Canton admits it was unlike his normal self not to force the man to drive where he wanted; but he felt lulled, lazy, indifferent. \"Let the fool take his own way!\" his thought ran; \"I shan't pay him any more for it!\"\n\nSomebody was waving to him from the pavement with a coloured parasol\u2014a girl he knew, one of his sort; gay and smiling, tripping along quickly. With a momentary surprise that she should be thus early astir, he smiled through the window and waved his hand. It gave him pleasure to see she was going in the same direction as himself. The instant he passed her the horse leaped forward with increased speed, so that the hansom rattled, shaking him a little as it lurched from side to side.\n\n\"Steady on, idiot!\" he shouted, \"or you'll smash me up before I get to the end!\" And he was just going to bang open the trap and swear, when his attention was caught by another salutation from the pavement. It was a man this time\u2014running hard; a man who played, drank, and the rest of it even harder than himself, a man who shared his trips to Paris. He was radiant and gesticulating. \"Good journey, old man!\" he heard him cry as the hansom shot past; \"Hurry up! We're coming, too! We shall be there together!\" Canton did not quite like this greeting. It reminded him for a second that he was a bit uncertain where the mad driver was heading for. It gave him a passing uneasiness\u2014almost immediately forgotten, however. The pace was too delicious to bring to an end just yet. Presently he would call the fellow to order with a vengeance, but meanwhile\u2014\"let her rip!\" His friends were all going the same way; it must be all right. His thoughts, he admits, were somewhat mixed; for great speed destroys calm judgment; it exhilarated, but it also bewildered. The pace, assuredly, had something to do with his mental confusion, for it was terrific. Yet he saw on the pavement, from time to time, more friends and acquaintances, and somehow at the moment it did not strike him as too peculiar that they should be there, all moving hurriedly in the same direction. He had an odd feeling that they all knew of some destination agreed upon; that he, too, knew it; but that it was not \"playing the game\" to admit that he knew. Yet about some of them\u2014their hurried steps, their gay faces, their waving hands\u2014there was a queer fugitive suggestion of sadness, even of fear. One or two touched the source of horror in him even. It hardly surprised him that the horse, steaming and sweating, should start forward with a frightened leap as each figure in turn was sighted and left behind. Probably he was himself too much a part of the wild, exhilarating rush to realize how singular it was. Certainly, it seemed as though some faculty of his mind was suspended during that drive.\n\nBut at last, after passing another friend, the horse gave a leap that really frightened him, flinging him against the boards. It was a man, twice his own age, who more than any other had helped him in his evil living, not by doing likewise, but by smothering his first remorse with a smile and a sentence: \"Of course, my boy, sow your wild oats! You'll settle down later. No man is worth his salt who hasn't sown his wild oats!\" He was sliding along\u2014a kind of crawl, with something loathsome in his motion that suggested the reptile. Carlton nodded to him. The same second the horse gave its terrible bound. The whip for the first time slashed down across its flanks. He saw the strip of cr\u00eape, black against the green and sunny landscape. For by now all houses were left behind, and they were rushing at a mad pace along a broad country road, growing momentarily steeper, and\u2014downhill.\n\nAt the same moment he caught his own face in the glass. To his utter horror he saw that a black veil, cr\u00eape-like, hung over the upper part, already hiding the eyes, and that it was moving downwards, slowly creeping. The hand of steel turned again within him. He knew that it was Death.\n\nYet, most singular of all, he instantly found in himself the power to believe it was not there. His hand brushed it off. His face was young, clean, and smiling once more... And now the hansom flew. The horse was running away; he heard the driver shouting to it, and the shouting sounded like a song. The man was drunk after all. Mingled with his song, too, came a confused murmur of voices behind\u2014far away. What in the world did it all mean? Dashing aside the little curtain he looked back out of the window, and the first thing he saw was a face pressed close against the glass, staring straight into his eyes with a beseeching, pitiful expression. Good God! It was the face of his mother. He swore; the face melted away\u2014and he then saw that the whole country behind him was black, and through it, down the darkened road, ran the figures he had passed. But how changed! The girl was no longer gay and smiling; her face was old, streaked with evil, and with one hand she clutched her heart as she ran\u2014trying in vain to stop. Behind her were the others\u2014worn and broken, with bloodshot eyes and toothless gums, all grinning dreadfully, all racing down the ever-steepening descent, yet all trying frantically to stop. One or two, however, still ran with a brave show as if they wished to; debonair, holding themselves with a certain appearance of dignity and pleasure. And some\u2014the old man of the \"wild oats\" sentence at their head\u2014were close upon the hansom, pushing it... The face of his mother slid once again upon the glass, between their evil, outstretched hands and himself, but less close, less visible than before...\n\nCarlton knew a spasm of pain that was terrible. He sat up. He flung open the doors, and his eyes measured the leap. But the faculty of mind that had all the time been in suspension returned a little, and he saw that to jump was\u2014impossible. He smashed the trap open with his fist and cried out, \"Stop! I tell you, stop!\"\n\n\"Can't stop here, sir,\" the driver answered, peering down at him out of the square opening that let in\u2014darkness. \"It's not allowed. It's not usual, either.\"\n\n\"Stop, I say,\" thundered Canton, trying to rise and strike him.\n\nBut the driver laughed through that square of blackness.\n\n\"Can't be done, sir. You told me 'same address.' There's no stopping now!\"\n\nCanton's clenched fist was close to the man's eyes when the fingers grew limp and opened. He sank back upon the seat again. The face peering down upon him was\u2014his own.\n\nAnd in this supreme moment it was that some secret reserve of soul, hitherto untainted\u2014stirred into life, he declares, by the sight of his mother's face at the window\u2014rose and offered itself to him. He accepted it. His will moved in its sleep and woke.\n\n\"But I say you shall stop! \" he cried, catching the reins in both hands, and, when they snapped, seizing the rims, and even the spokes, of the wheels. His great strength acted like a brake. The hansom reeled, shook, then slackened. It was a most curious thing, but the force that twisted his heart with its hand of \"ragged steel\" seemed to lend him its power. His will moved and gripped; the machinery groaned, but worked. Canton did nothing by halves; he put his life into his efforts; the skin was torn like paper from his hands. The hansom stopped with a trembling jerk and flung him out upon his face in the mud. And the same second he saw the horse and driver, both torn from their fastenings, whirled past him overhead to disappear into a gulf that yawned dreadfully under his very eyes, blacker than night, deeper than all things...\n\nAnd when, at length, he rose to his feet, he found that he was tied with bands of iron to the shafts. Slowly, with vast efforts, groaning and sweating, he turned and began painfully to reclimb the huge and toilsome ascent, dragging the awful weight behind him... towards the Light.\n\nFor the glare that suddenly broke through the sky was the sunshine coming through the windows of the hospital room\u2014St. George's Hospital\u2014where they had carried him when he fainted on the pavement half-an-hour before.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Eccentricity of Simon Parnacute ]\n\nIt was one of those mornings in early spring when even the London streets run beauty. The day, passing through the sky with clouds of flying hair, touched every one with the magic of its own irresponsible gaiety, as it alternated between laughter and the tears of sudden showers.\n\nIn the parks the trees, faintly clothed with gauze, were busying themselves shyly with the thoughts of coming leaves. The air held a certain sharpness, but the sun swam through the dazzling blue spaces with bursts of almost summer heat; and a wind, straight from the haunted south, laid its soft persuasion upon all, bringing visions too fair to last\u2014long thoughts of youth, of cowslip-meadows, white sails, waves on yellow sand, and other pictures innumerable and enchanting.\n\nSo potent, indeed, was this spell of awakening spring that even Simon Parnacute, retired Professor of Political Economy\u2014elderly, thin-faced, and ruminating in his big skull those large questions that concern the polity of nations\u2014formed no exception to the general rule. For, as he slowly made his way down the street that led from his apartment to the Little Park, he was fully aware that this magic of the spring was in his own blood too, and that the dust which had accumulated with the years upon the surface of his soul was being stirred by one of the softest breezes he had ever felt in the whole course of his arduous and tutorial career.\n\nAnd\u2014it so happened\u2014just as he reached the foot of the street where the houses fell away towards the open park, the sun rushed out into one of the sudden blue spaces of the sky, and drenched him in a wave of delicious heat that for all the world was like the heat of July.\n\nProfessor Parnacute, once lecturer, now merely ponderer, was an exact thinker, dealing carefully with the facts of life as he saw them. He was a good man and a true. He dealt in large emotions, becoming for one who studied nations rather than individuals, and of all diplomacies of the heart he was rudely ignorant. He lived always at the centre of the circle\u2014his own circle\u2014and ec-centricity was a thing to him utterly abhorrent. Convention ruled him, body, soul and mind. To know a disordered thought, or an unwonted emotion, troubled him as much as to see a picture crooked on a wall, or a man's collar projecting beyond his overcoat. Eccentricity was the symptom of a disease.\n\nThus, as he reached the foot of the street and felt the sun and wind upon his withered cheeks, this unexpected call of the spring came to him sharply as something altogether out of place and illegitimate\u2014symptom of an irregular condition of mind that must be instantly repressed. And it was just here, while the crowd jostled and delayed him, that there smote upon his ear the song incarnate of the very spring whose spell he was in the ad of relegating to its proper place in his personal economy: he heard the entrancing singing of a bird!\n\nTransfixed with wonder and delight, he stood for a whole minute and listened. Then, slowly turning, he found himself staring straight into the small beseeching eyes of a\u2014thrush; a thrush in a cage that hung upon the outside wall of a bird-fancier's shop behind him.\n\nPerhaps he would not have lingered more than these few seconds, however, had not the crowd held him momentarily prisoner in a spot immediately opposite the shop, where his head, too, was exactly on a level with the hanging cage. Thus he was perforce obliged to stand, and watch, and listen; and, as he did so, the bird's rapturous and appealing song played upon the feelings already awakened by the spring, urging them upwards and outwards to a point that grew perilously moving.\n\nBoth sound and sight caught and held him spellbound.\n\nThe bird, once well-favoured perhaps, he perceived was now thin and bedraggled, its feathers disarraved by continual flitting along its perch, and by endless fluttering of wings and body against the bars of its narrow cage. There was not room to open both wings properly; it frequently dashed itself against the sides of its wooden prison; and all the force of its vain and passionate desire for freedom shone in the two small and glittering eyes which gazed beseechingly through the bars at the passers-by. It looked broken and worn with the ceaseless renewal of the futile struggle. Hopping along the bar, cocking its dainty little head on one side, and looking straight into the Professor's eyes, it managed (by some inarticulate magic known only to the eyes of creatures in prison) to spell out the message of its pain\u2014the poignant longing for the freedom of the open sky, the lift of the great winds, the glory of the sun upon its lustreless feathers.\n\nNow it so chanced that this combined onslaught of sight and sound caught the elderly Professor along the line of least resistance\u2014the line of an untried, and therefore unexhausted, sensation. Here, apparently, was an emotion hitherto unrealized, and so not yet regulated away into atrophy.\n\nFor, with an intuition as singular as it was searching, he suddenly understood something of the passion of the wild Caged Things of the world, and realized in a flash of passing vision something of their unutterable pain.\n\nIn one swift moment of genuine mystical sympathy he felt with their peculiar quality of unsatisfied longing exactly as though it were his own; the longing, not only of captive birds and animals, but of anguished men and women, trapped by circumstance, confined by weakness, cabined by character and temperament, all yearning for a freedom they knew not how to reach\u2014caged by the smallness of their desires, by the impotence of their wills, by the pettiness of their souls\u2014caged in bodies from which death alone could finally bring release.\n\nSomething of all this found its way into the elderly Professor's heart as he stood watching the pantomime of the captive thrush\u2014the Caged Thing;\u2014and, after a moment's hesitation that represented a vast amount of condensed feeling, he deliberately entered the low doorway of the shop and inquired the price of the bird.\n\n\"The thrush\u2014er\u2014singing in the small cage,\" he stammered.\n\n\"One and six only, sir,\" replied the coarse, red-faced man who owned the shop, looking up from a rabbit that he was pushing with clumsy fingers into a box; \"only one shilling and sixpence,\"\u2014and then went on with copious remarks upon thrushes in general and the superior qualities of this one in particular. \"Been 'ere four months and sings just lovely,\" he added, by way of climax.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Parnacute quietly, trying to persuade himself that he did not feel mortified by his impulsive and eccentric action; \"then I will purchase the bird\u2014at once\u2014er\u2014if you please.\"\n\n\"Couldn't go far wrong, sir,\" said the man, shoving the rabbit to one side, and going outside to fetch the thrush.\n\n\"No, I shall not require the cage, but\u2014er\u2014you may put him in a cardboard box perhaps, so that I can carry him easily.\"\n\nHe referred to the bird as \"him,\" though at any other time he would have said \"it,\" and the change, noted surreptitiously as it were, added to his general sense of confusion. It was too late, however, to alter his mind, and after watching the man force the bird with gross hands into a cardboard box, he gathered up the noose of string with which it was tied and walked with as much dignity and self-respect as he could muster out of the shop.\n\nBut the moment he got into the street with this living parcel under his arm\u2014he both heard and felt the scuttling of the bird's feet\u2014the realization that he had been guilty of what he considered an outrageous act of eccentricity almost overwhelmed him. For he had succumbed in most regrettable fashion to a momentary impulse, and had bought the bird in order to release it.\n\n\"Dear me!\" he thought, \"how ever could I have allowed myself to do so eccentric and impulsive a thing!\"\n\nAnd, but for the fact that it would merely have accentuated his eccentricity, he would then and there have returned to the shop and given back the bird.\n\nThat, however, being now clearly impossible, he crossed the road and entered the Little Park by the first iron gateway he could find. He walked down the gravel path, fumbling with the string. In another minute the bird would have been out, when he chanced to glance round in order to make sure he was unobserved and saw against the shrubbery on his left\u2014a policeman.\n\nThis, he felt, was most vexatious, for he had hoped to complete the transaction unseen. Straightening himself up, he nervously fastened the string again, and walked on slowly as though nothing had happened, searching for a more secluded spot where he should be entirely free from observation.\n\nProfessor Parnacute now became aware that his vexation\u2014primarily caused by his act of impulse, and increased by the fact that he was observed\u2014had become somewhat acute. It was extraordinary, he reflected, how policemen had this way of suddenly outlining themselves in the least appropriate\u2014the least necessary\u2014places. There was no reason why a policeman should have been standing against that innocent shrubbery, where there was nothing to do, no one to watch. At almost any other point in the Little Park he might have served some possibly useful purpose, and yet, forsooth, he must select the one spot where he was not wanted\u2014where his presence, indeed, was positively objectionable.\n\nThe policeman, meanwhile, watched him steadily as he retreated with the obnoxious parcel. He carried it upside down now without knowing it. He felt as though he had been detected in a crime. He watched the policeman, too, out of the corner of his eye, longing to be done with the whole business.\n\n\"That policeman is a tremendous fellow,\" he thought to himself. \"I have never seen a constable so large, so stalwart. He must be the policeman of the district\"\u2014whatever that might mean\u2014\"a veritable wall and tower of defence.\" The helmet made him think of a battering ram, and the buttons on his overcoat of the muzzles of guns.\n\nHe moved away round the corner with as much innocence as he could assume, as though he were carrying a package of books or some new article of apparel.\n\nIt is, no doubt, the duty of every alert constable to observe as acutely as possible the course of events passing before his eyes, yet this particular Bobby seemed far more interested than the circumstances warranted in Parnacute's cardboard box. He kept his gaze remorselessly upon it. Perhaps, thought the Professor, he heard the scutterings of the frightened bird within. Perhaps he thought it was a cat going to be drowned in the ornamental water. Perhaps\u2014oh, dreadful idea!\u2014he thought it was a baby!\n\nThe suspicions of an intelligent policeman, however, being past finding out, Simon Parnacute wisely ignored them, and just then passed round a corner where he was screened from this persistent observer by a dense growth of rhododendron bushes.\n\nSeizing the opportune moment, and acting with a prompt decision born of the dread of the reappearing policeman, he cut the string, opened the lid of the box, and an instant later had the intense satisfaction of seeing the imprisoned thrush hop upon the cardboard edge and then fly with a beautiful curving dip and a whirr of wings off into the open sky. It turned once as it flew, and its bright brown eye looked at him. Then it was gone, lost in the sunshine that blazed over the shrubberies and beckoned it out over their waving tops across the river.\n\nThe prisoner was free. For the space of a whole minute, the Professor stood still, conscious of a sense of genuine relief. That sound of wings, that racing sweep of the little quivering body escaping into limitless freedom, that penetrating look of gratitude from the wee brown eyes\u2014these stirred in him again the same prodigious emotion he had experienced for the first time that afternoon outside the bird-fanciers' shop. The release of the \"caged creature\" provided him with a kind of vicarious experience of freedom and delight such as he had never before known in his whole life. It almost seemed as though he had escaped himself\u2014out of his \"circle.\"\n\nThen, as he faced about, with the empty box dangling in his hand, the first thing he saw, coming slowly down the path towards him with measured tread, was\u2014the big policeman.\n\nSomething very stern, something very forbidding, hung like an atmosphere of warning about this guardian of the law in a blue uniform. It brought him back sharply to the rigid facts of life, and the soft beauty of the spring day vanished and left him untouched. He accepted the reminder that life is earnest, and that eccentricities are invitations to disaster. Sooner or later the Policeman is bound to make his appearance.\n\nHowever, this particular constable, of course, passed him without word or gesture, and as soon as he came to one of the little wire baskets provided for the purpose, the Professor dropped his box into it, and then made his way slowly and thoughtfully back to his apartment and his luncheon.\n\nBut the eccentricity of which he had been guilty circled and circled in his mind, reminding him with merciless insistence of a foolish act he should not have committed, and plaguing him with remorseless little stabs for having indulged in an impulsive and irregular proceeding.\n\nFor, to him, the inevitableness of life came as a fact to which he was resigned, rather than as a force to be appropriated for the ends of his own soul; and the sight of the happy bird escaping into sky and sunshine, with the figure of the inflexible and stern-lipped policeman in the background, made a deep impression upon him that would sooner or later be certain to bear fruit.\n\n\"Dear me,\" thought the Professor of Political Economy, giving mental expression to this sentiment, \"I shall pay for this in the long run! Without question I shall pay for it!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 423", + "text": "If it may be taken that there is no Chance, playing tricksy-wise behind the scenes of existence, but that all events falling into the lives of men are the calculated results of adequate causes, then Mr. Simon Parnacute, late Professor of Political Economy in C\u2014 College, certainly did pay for his spring aberration, in the sense that he caught a violent chill which brought him to bed and speedily developed into pneumonia.\n\nIt was the evening of the sixth day, and he lay weary and feverish in his bedroom on the top floor of the building which held his little self-contained apartment. The nurse was down-stairs having her tea. A shaded lamp stood beside the bed, and through the window\u2014the blinds being not yet drawn\u2014he saw the sea of roofs and chimney-pots, and the stream of wires, sharply outlined against a sunset sky of gold and pink. High and thin above the dusk floated long strips of coloured cloud, and the first stars twinkled through the April vapours that gathered with the approach of night.\n\nPresently the door opened and some one came in softly half-way across the room, and then stopped. The Professor turned wearily and saw that the maid stood there and was trying to speak. She seemed flustered, he noticed, and her face was rather white.\n\n\"What's the matter now, Emily?\" he asked feebly, yet irritably.\n\n\"Please, Professor\u2014there's a gentleman\u2014\" and there she stuck.\n\n\"Some one to see me? The doctor again already?\" queried the patient, wondering in a vague, absent way why the girl should seem so startled.\n\nAs he spoke there was a sound of footsteps on the landing outside\u2014heavy footsteps.\n\n\"But please, Professor, sir, it's not the doctor,\" the maid faltered, \"only I couldn't get his name, and I couldn't stop him, an' he said you expected him\u2014 and I think he looks like\u2014\"\n\nThe approaching footsteps frightened the girl so much that she could not find words to complete her description. They were just outside the door now.\n\n\"\u2014like a perliceman! \" she finished with a rush, backing towards the door as though she feared the Professor would leap from his bed to demolish her.\n\n\"A policeman! \" gasped Mr. Parnacute, unable to believe his ears. \"A policeman, Emily! In my apartment?\"\n\nAnd before the sick man could find words to express his particular annoyance that any stranger (above all a constable) should intrude at such a time, the door was pushed wide open, the girl had vanished with a flutter of skirts, and the tall figure of a man stood in full view upon the threshold, and stared steadily across the room at the occupant of the bed on the other side.\n\nIt was indeed a policeman, and a very large policeman. Moreover, it was the policeman.\n\nThe instant the Professor recognized the familiar form of the man from the park his anger, for some quite unaccountable reason, vanished almost entirely; the sharp vexation he had felt a moment before died away; and, sinking back exhausted among the pillows, he only found breath to ask him to close the door and come in. The fact was, astonishment had used up the small store of energy at his disposal, and for the moment he could think of nothing else to do.\n\nThe policeman closed the door quietly and moved forward towards the centre of the room, so that the circle of light from the shaded lamp at the head of the bed reached his figure but fell just short of his face.\n\nThe invalid sat up in bed again and stared. As nothing seemed to happen he recovered his scattered wits a little.\n\n\"You are the policeman from the park, unless I mistake?\" he asked feebly, with mingled pomposity and resentment.\n\nThe big man bowed in acknowledgment and removed his helmet, holding it before him in his hand. His face was peculiarly bright, almost as though it reflected the glow of a bull's-eye lantern concealed somewhere about his huge person.\n\n\"I thought I recognized you,\" went on the Professor, exasperated a little by the other's self-possession. \"Are you perhaps aware that I am ill\u2014too ill to see strangers, and that to force your way up in this fashion\u2014!\" He left the sentence unfinished for lack of suitable expletives.\n\n\"You are certainly ill,\" replied the constable, speaking for the first time; \"but then\u2014I am not a stranger.\" His voice was wonderfully pitched and modulated for a policeman.\n\n\"Then, by what right, pray, do you dare to intrude upon me at such a time?\" snapped the other, ignoring the latter statement.\n\n\"My duty, sir,\" the man replied, with a rather wonderful dignity, \"knows nothing of time or place.\"\n\nProfessor Parnacute looked at him a little more closely as he stood there helmet in hand. He was something more, he gathered, than an ordinary constable; an inspector perhaps. He examined him carefully; but he understood nothing about differences in uniform, of bands or stars upon sleeve and collar.\n\n\"If you are here in the prosecution of your duty, then,\" exclaimed the man of careful mind, searching feverishly for some possible delinquency on the part of his small staff of servants, \"pray be seated and state your business; but as briefly as possible. My throat pains me, and my strength is low.\" He spoke with less acerbity. The dignity of the visitor began to impress him in some vague fashion he did not understand.\n\nThe big figure in blue bowed again, but made no sign of advance.\n\n\"You come from X\u2014 Station, I presume?\" Parnacute added, mentioning the police station round the corner. He sank deeper into his pillows, conscious that his strength was becoming exhausted.\n\n\"From Headquarters\u2014I come,\" replied the colossus in a deep voice.\n\nThe Professor had only the vaguest idea what Headquarters meant, yet the phrase conveyed an importance that somehow was not lost upon him. Meanwhile his impatience grew with his exhaustion.\n\n\"I must request you, officer, to state your business with dispatch,\" he said tartly, \"or to come again when 1 am better able to attend to you. Next week, no doubt\u2014\"\n\n\"There is no time but the present,\" returned the other, with an odd choice of words that escaped the notice of his perplexed hearer, as he produced from a capacious pocket in the tail of his overcoat a notebook bound with some shining metal like gold.\n\n\"Your name is Parnacute?\" he asked, consulting the book.\n\n\"Yes,\" answered the other, with the resignation of exhaustion.\n\n\"Simon Parnacute?\"\n\n\"Of course, yes.\"\n\n\"And on the third of April last,\" he went on, looking keenly over the top of the note-book at the sick man, \"you, Simon Parnacute, entered the shop of Theodore Spinks in the Lower P\u2014\n\nRoad, and purchased from him a certain living creature?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" answered the Professor, beginning to feel hot at the discovery of his folly.\n\n\"A bird?\"\n\n\"A bird.\"\n\n\"A thrush?\"\n\n\"A thrush.\"\n\n\"A singing thrush?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, it was a singing thrush, if you must know.\"\n\n\"In money you paid for this thrush the sum of one shilling and six pennies?\" He emphasized the \"and\" just as the bird-fancier had done.\n\n\"One and six, yes.\"\n\n\"But in true value,\" said the policeman, speaking with grave emphasis, \"it cost you a great deal more?\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\" He winced internally at the memory.\n\nHe was so astonished, too, that the visit had to do with himself and not with some of his servants.\n\n\"You paid for it with your heart?\" insisted the other.\n\nThe Professor made no reply. He started. He almost writhed under the sheets.\n\n\"Am I right?\" asked the policeman.\n\n\"That is the fact, I suppose,\" he said in a low voice, sorely puzzled by the catechism.\n\n\"You carried this bird away in a cardboard box to E\u2014 Gardens by the river, and there you gave it freedom and watched it fly away?\"\n\n\"Your statement is correct, I think, in every particular. But really\u2014this absurd cross-examination, my good man!\"\n\n\"And your motive in so doing,\" continued the policeman, his voice quite drowning the invalid's feeble tones, \"was the unselfish one of releasing an imprisoned and tortured creature?\"\n\nSimon Parnacute looked up with the greatest possible surprise.\n\n\"I think\u2014well, well!\u2014perhaps it was,\" he murmured apologetically. \"The extraordinary singing\u2014it was extraordinary, you know, and the sight of the little thing beating its wings pained me.\"\n\nThe big policeman put away his note-book suddenly, and moved closer to the bed so that his face entered the circle of lamplight.\n\n\"In that case,\" he cried, \"you are my man!\"\n\n\"I am your man!\" exclaimed the Professor, with an uncontrollable start.\n\n\"The man I want,\" repeated the other, smiling. His voice had suddenly grown soft and wonderful, like the ringing of a silver gong, and into his face had come an expression of wistful tenderness that made it positively beautiful. It shone. Never before, out of a picture, had he seen such a look upon a human countenance, or heard such tones issue from the lips of a human being. He thought, swiftly and confusedly, of a woman, of the woman he had never found\u2014of a dream, an enchantment as of music or vision upon the senses.\n\n\"Wants me!\" he thought with alarm. \"What have I done now? What new eccentricity have I been guilty of?\"\n\nStrange, bewildering ideas crowded into his mind, blurred in outline, preposterous in character. A sensation of cold caught at his fever and overmastered it, bathing him in perspiration, making him tremble, yet not with fear. A new and curious delight had begun to pluck at his heart-strings.\n\nThen an extravagant suspicion crossed his brain, yet a suspicion not wholly unwarranted.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked sharply, looking up. \"Are you really only a policeman?\"\n\nThe man drew himself up so that he appeared, if possible, even huger than before.\n\n\"I am a World-Policeman,\" he answered, \"a guardian, perhaps, rather than a detective.\"\n\n\"Heavens above!\" cried the Professor, thinking of madness and the crimes committed in madness.\n\n\"Yes,\" he went on in those calm, musical tones that before long began to have a reassuring effect upon his listener, \"and it is my duty, among many others, to keep an eye upon eccentric people; to lock them up when necessary, and when their sentences have expired, to release them. Also,\" he added impressively, \"as in your case, to let them out of their cages without pain\u2014when they've earned it.\"\n\n\"Gracious goodness me!\" exclaimed Parnacute, unaccustomed to the use of expletives, but unable to think of anything else to say.\n\n\"And sometimes to see that their cages do not destroy them\u2014and that they do not beat themselves to death against the bars,\" he went on, smiling quite wonderfully. \"Our duties are varied and numerous. I am one of a large force.\"\n\nThe man learned in political economy felt as though his head were spinning. He thought of calling for help. Indeed, he had already made a motion with his hand towards the bell when a gesture on the part of his strange visitor restrained him.\n\n\"Then why do you want me, if I may ask?\" he faltered instead.\n\n\"To mark you down; and when the time comes to let you out of your cage easily, comfortably, without pain. That's one reward for your kindness to the bird.\"\n\nThe Professor's fears had now quite disappeared. The policeman seemed perfectly harmless after all.\n\n\"It's very kind of you,\" he said feebly, drawing his arm back beneath the bed-clothes. \"Only\u2014er\u2014I was not aware, exactly, that I lived in a cage.\"\n\nHe looked up resignedly into the man's face.\n\n\"You only realize that when you get out,\" he replied. \"They're all like that. The bird didn't quite understand what was wrong; it only knew that it felt miserable. Same with you. You feel unhappy in that body of yours, and in that little careful mind you regulate so nicely; but, for the life of you, you don't quite know what it is that's wrong. You want space, freedom, a taste of liberty. You want to fly, that's what you want!\" he cried, raising his voice.\n\n\"I\u2014want\u2014to\u2014fly?\" gasped the invalid.\n\n\"Oh,\" smiling again, \"we World-Policemen have thousands of cases just like yours. Our field is a large one, a very large one indeed.\"\n\nHe stepped into the light more fully and turned sideways.\n\n\"Here's my badge, if you care to see it,\" he said proudly.\n\nHe stooped a little so that the Professor's beady eyes could easily focus themselves upon the collar of his overcoat. There, just like the lettering upon the collar of an ordinary London policeman, only in bright gold instead of silver, shone the constellation of the Pleiades. Then he turned and showed the other side, and Parnacute saw the constellation of Orion slanting upwards, as he had often seen it tilting across the sky at night.\n\n\"Those are my badges,\" he repeated proudly, straightening himself up again and moving back into the shadow.\n\n\"And very fine they are, too,\" said the Professor, his increasing exhaustion suggesting no better observation. But with the sight of those starry figures had come to him a strange whiff of the open skies, space, and wind\u2014the winds of the world.\n\n\"So that when the time comes,\" the 'World-Policeman resumed, \"you may have confidence. I will let you out without pain or fear just as you let out the bird. And, meanwhile, you may as well realize that you live in a cage just as cramped and shut away from light and freedom as the thrush did.\"\n\n\"Thank you; I will certainly try,\" whispered Parnacute, almost fainting with fatigue.\n\nThere followed a pause, during which the policeman put on his helmet, tightened his belt, and then began to search vigorously for something in his coattail pockets.\n\n\"And now,\" ventured the sick man, feeling half fearful, half happy, though without knowing exactly why, \"is there anything more I can do for you, Mr. World-Policeman?\" He was conscious that his words were peculiar yet he could not help it. They seemed to slip out of their own accord.\n\n\"There's nothing more you can do for me, sir, thank you,\" answered the man in his most silvery tones. \"But there's something more I can do for you! And that is to give you a preliminary taste of freedom, so that you may realize you do live in a cage, and be less confused and puzzled when you come to make the final Escape.\"\n\nParnacute caught his breath sharply\u2014staring open-mouthed.\n\nWith a single stride the policeman covered the space between himself and the bed. Before the withered, fever-stricken little Professor could utter a word or a cry, he had caught up the wasted body out of the bed, shaken the bed-clothes off him like paper from a parcel, and slung him without ceremony across his gigantic shoulders. Then he crossed the room, and producing the key from his coat-tail pocket, he put it straight into the solid wall of the room. He turned it, and the entire side of the house opened like a door.\n\nFor one second Simon Parnacute looked back and saw the lamp, and the fire, and the bed. And in the bed he saw his own body lying motionless in profound slumber.\n\nThen, as the policeman balanced, hovering upon the giddy edge, he looked outward and saw the network of street-lamps far below, and heard the deep roar of the city smite upon his ears like the thunder of a sea.\n\nThe next moment the man stepped out into space, and he saw that they were rising up swiftly towards the dark vault of sky, where stars twinkled down upon them between streaks of thin flying clouds." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 424", + "text": "Once outside, floating in the night, the policeman gave his shoulder a mighty jerk and tossed his small burden into free space.\n\n\"Jump away!\" he cried. \"You're quite safe!\"\n\nThe Professor dropped like a bullet towards the pavement; then suddenly began to rise again, like a balloon. All traces of fever or bodily discomfort had left him utterly. He felt light as air, and strong as lightning.\n\n'The policeman... tossed his small burden into free space'\n\n\"Now, where shall we go to?\" The voice sounded above him.\n\nSimon Parnacute was no flyer. He had never indulged in those strange flying-dreams that form a weird pleasure in the sleep-lives of many people. He was terrified beyond belief until he found that he did not crash against the earth, and that he had within him the power to regulate his movements, to rise or sink at will. Then, of course, the wildest fury of delight and freedom he had ever known flashed all over him and burned in his brain like an intoxication.\n\n\"The big cities, or the stars?\" asked the World-Policeman.\n\n\"No, no,\" he cried, \"the country\u2014the open country! And other lands!\"\n\nFor Simon Parnacute had never travelled. Incredible as it may seem, the Professor had never in his life been farther out of England than in a sailing-boat at Southend. His body had travelled even less than his imagination. With this suddenly increased capacity for motion, the desire to race about and see became a passion.\n\n\"Woods! Mountains! Seas! Deserts! Anything but houses and people!\" he shouted, rising upwards to his companion without the smallest effort.\n\nAn intense longing to see the desolate, unfrequented regions of the earth seized him and tore its way out into words strangely unlike his normal and measured mode of speech. All his life he had paced to and fro in a formal little garden with the most precise paths imaginable. Now he wanted a trackless world. The reaction was terrific. The desire of the Arab for the desert, of the gipsy for the open heaths, the \"desire of the snipe for the wilderness\"\u2014the longing of the eternal wanderer\u2014possessed his soul and found vent in words.\n\nIt was just as though the passion of the released thrush were reproducing itself in him and becoming articulate.\n\n\"I am haunted by the faces of the world's forgotten places,\" he cried aloud impetuously.\n\n\"Beaches lying in the moonlight, all forsaken in the moonlight\u2014\"\n\nHis utterance, like the bird's, had become lyrical.\n\n\"Can this be what the thrush felt?\" he wondered.\n\n\"Let's be off then,\" the policeman called back. \"There's no time but the present, remember.\" He rushed through space like a huge projectile. He made a faint whistling noise as he went. Parnacute followed suit. The lightest desire, he found, gave him instantly the ease and speed of thought.\n\nThe policeman had taken off his helmet, overcoat and belt, and dropped them down somewhere into a London street. He now appeared as a mere blue outline of a man, scarcely discernible against the dark sky\u2014an outline filled with air. The Professor glanced down at himself and saw that he, too, was a mere outline of a man\u2014a pallid outline filled with the purple air of night.\n\n\"Now then,\" sang out this \"Bobby-of-the-World.\"\n\nSide by side they shot up with a wild rush, and the lights of London, town and suburbs, flashed away beneath them in streaming lines and patches. In a second darkness filled the huge gap, pouring behind them like a mighty wave. Other streams and patches of light succeeded quickly, blurred and faint, like lamps of railway stations from a night express, as other towns dropped past them in a series and were swallowed up in the gulf behind.\n\nA cool salt air smote their faces, and Parnacute heard the soft crashing of waves as they crossed the Channel, and swept on over the fields and forests of France, glimmering below like the squares of a mighty chess-hoard. Like toys, village after village shot by, smelling of peat-smoke, cattle, and the faint windiness of coming spring.\n\nSometimes they passed below the clouds and lost the stars, sometimes above them and lost the world; sometimes over forests roaring like the sea, sometimes above vast plains still and silent as the grave; but always Parnacute saw the constellations of Orion and Pleiades shining on the coat-collar of the soaring policeman, their little patterns picked out as with tiny electric lamps.\n\nBelow them lay the huge map of the earth, raised, scarred, darkly coloured, and breathing\u2014a map alive.\n\nThen came the Jura, soft and purple, carpeted with forests, rolling below them like a dream, and they looked down into slumbering valleys and heard far below the tumbling of water and the singing of countless streams.\n\n\"Glory, glory!\" cried the Professor. \"And do the birds know this?\"\n\n\"Not the imprisoned ones,\" was the reply. And presently they whipped across large gleaming bodies of water as the lakes of Switzerland approached. Then, entering the zones of icy atmosphere, they looked down and saw white towers and pinnacles of silver, and the forms of scarred and mighty glaciers that rose and fell among the fields of eternal snow, folding upon the mountains in vast procession.\n\n\"I think\u2014I'm frightened!\" gasped Parnacute, clutching at his companion, but seizing only the frigid air.\n\nThe policeman shouted with laughter.\n\n\"This is nothing\u2014compared to Mars or the moon,\" he cried, soaring till the Alps looked like a patch of snowdrops shining in a Surrey garden. \"You'll soon get accustomed to it.\"\n\nThe Professor of Political Economy rose after him. But presently they sank again in an immense curving sweep and touched the tops of the highest mountains with their toes. This sent them instantly aloft again, bounding with the impetus of rockets, and so they careered on through the perfumed, pathless night till they came to Italy and left the Alps behind them like the shadowy wall of another world that had silently moved up close to them through space.\n\n\"Mother of Mountains!\" shouted the delighted man of colleges. \"And did the thrush know this too?\"\n\n\"It has you to thank, if so,\" the policeman answered.\n\n\"And I have you to thank.\"\n\n\"No\u2014yourself,\" replied his flying guide.\n\nAnd then the desert! They had crossed the scented Mediterranean and reached the zones of sand. It rose in clouds and sheets as a mighty wind stirred across the leagues of loneliness that stretched below them into blue distance. It whirled about them and stung their faces,\n\n\"Thin ropes of sand which crumble ere they bind!\" cried the Professor with a peal of laughter, not knowing what he said in the delirium of his pleasure.\n\nThe hot smell of the sand excited him; the knowledge that for hundreds of miles he could not see a house or a human being thrilled him dizzily with the incalculable delight of freedom. The splendour of the night, mystical and incommunicable, overcame him. He rose, laughing wildly, shaking the sand from his hair, and taking gigantic curves into the starry space about him. He remembered vividly the sight of those bedraggled wings in the little cramped cage\u2014and then looked down and realized that here the winds sank exhausted from the very weariness of too much space. Oh, that he could tear away the bars of every cage the world had ever known\u2014set free all captive creatures\u2014restore to all wild, winged life the liberty of open spaces that is theirs by right!\n\nHe cried again to the stars and winds and deserts, but his words found no intelligible expression, for their passion was too great to be confined in any known medium. The World-Policeman alone understood, perhaps, for he flew down in circles round the little Professor and laughed and laughed and laughed.\n\nAnd it seemed as if tremendous figures formed themselves out of the sky to listen, and bent down to lift him with a single sweep of their immense arms from the earth to the heavens. Such was the torrential power and delight of escape in him, that he almost felt as if he could skim the icy abysses of Death itself\u2014without being ever caught...\n\nThe colossal shapes of Egypt, terrible and monstrous, passed far below in huge and shadowy procession, and the desolate Lybian Mountains drew him hovering over their wastes of stone...\n\nAnd this was only a beginning! Asia, India, and the Southern Seas all lay within reach! All could be visited in turn. The interstellar spaces, the far planets, and the white moon were yet to know!\n\n\"We must be thinking of turning soon,\" he heard the voice of his companion, and then remembered how his own body, hot and feverish, lay in that stuffy little room at the other end of Europe. It was indeed caged\u2014the withered body in the room, and himself in the withered body\u2014doubly caged. He laughed and shuddered. The wind swept through him, licking him clean. He rose again in the ecstasy of free flight, following the lead of the policeman on the homeward journey, and the mountains below became a purple line on the map. In a series of great sweeps they rested on the top of the Pyramid, and then upon the forehead of the Sphinx, and so onwards, touching the earth at intervals, till they heard once more the waves upon the coast-line, and soared aloft again across the sea, racing through Spain and over the Pyrenees. The thin blue outline of the policeman kept ever at his side.\n\n\"From all the far blue hills of heaven these winds of freedom blow!\" he shouted into space, following it with a peal of laughter that made his guide circle round and round him, chuckling as he flew. A curious, silvery chuckle it was\u2014yet it sounded as though it came to him through a much greater distance than before. It came, as it were, through barriers. .\n\nThe picture of the bird-fancier's shop came again vividly before him. He saw the beseeching and frightened little eyes; heard the ceaseless pattering of the imprisoned feet, wings beating against the bars, and soft furry bodies pushing vainly to get out. He saw the red face of Theodore Spinks, the proprietor, gloating over the scene of captive life that gave him the means to live\u2014the means to enjoy his own little measure of freedom. He saw the sea-gull drooping in its corner, and the owl, its eyes filled with the dust of the street, its feathered ears twitching;\u2014and then he thought again of the caged human beings of the world\u2014men, women and children, and a pain, like the pain of a whole universe, burned in his soul and set his heart aflame with yearning... to set them all instantly free.\n\nAnd, unable to find words to give expression to what he felt, he found relief again in his strange, impetuous singing.\n\nSimon Parnacute, Professor of Political Economy, sang in mid-heaven!\n\nBut this was the last vivid memory he knew. It all began to fade a little after that. It changed swiftly like a dream when the body nears the point of waking. He tried to seize and hold it, to delay the moment when it must end; but the power was beyond him. He felt heavy and tired, and flew closer to the ground; the intervals between the curves of flight grew smaller and smaller, the impetus weaker and weaker as he became every moment more dense and stupid. His progress across the fields of the south of England, as he made his way almost laboriously homewards, became rather a series of long, low leaps than actual flight. More and more often he found himself obliged to touch the earth to acquire the necessary momentum. The big policeman seemed suddenly to have quite melted away into the blue of night.\n\nThen he heard a door open in the sky over his head. A star came down rather too close and half blinded his eyes. Instinctively he called for help to his friend, the world-policeman.\n\n\"It's time, for your soup now,\" was the only answer he got. And it did not seem the right answer, or the right voice either. A terror of being permanently lost came over him, and he cried out again louder than before.\n\n\"And the medicine first,\" dropped the thin, shrill voice out of endless space.\n\nIt was not the policeman's voice at all. He knew now, and understood. A sensation of weariness, of sickening disgust and boredom came over him. He looked up. The sky had turned white; he saw curtains and walls and a bright lamp with a red shade. This was the star that had nearly blinded him\u2014a lamp merely, in a sick-room!\n\nAnd, standing at the farther end of the room, he saw the figure of the nurse in cap and apron.\n\nBelow him lay his body in the bed. His sensation of disgust and boredom became a positive horror. But he sank down exhausted into it\u2014into his cage.\n\n\"Take this soup, sir, after the medicine, and then perhaps you'll get another bit of sleep,\" the nurse was saying with gentle authority, bending over him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 425", + "text": "The progress of Professor Parnacute towards recovery was slow and tedious, for the illness had been severe and it left him with a dangerously weak heart. And at night he still had the delights of the flying dreams. Only, by this time, he had learned to fly alone. His phantom friend, the big World-Policeman, no longer accompanied him.\n\nAnd his chief occupation during these weary hours of convalescence was curious and, the nurse considered, not very suitable for an invalid: for he spent the time with endless calculations, poring over the list of his few investments, and adding up times without number the total of his savings of nearly forty years. The bed was strewn with papers and documents; pencils were always getting lost among the clothes; and each time the nurse collected the paraphernalia and put them aside, he would wait till she was out of the room, and then crawl over to the table and carry them all back into bed with him.\n\nThen, finally, she gave up fighting with him, and acquiesced, for his restlessness increased and he could not sleep unless his beloved half-sheets and pencils lay strewn upon the counterpane within instant reach.\n\nEven to the least observant it was clear that the Professor was hatching the preliminary details of a profound plot.\n\nAnd his very first visitor, as soon as he was permitted to see anybody, was a gentleman with parchment skin and hard, dry, peeping eyes who came by special request\u2014a solicitor, from the firm of Messrs. Costa & Delay.\n\n\"I will ascertain the price of the shop and stock-in-trade and inform you of the result at the earliest opportunity, Professor Parnacute,\" said the man of law in his gritty, professional voice, as he at length took his departure and left the sick-room with the expressionless face of one to whom the eccentricities of human nature could never be new or surprising.\n\n\"Thank you; I shall be most anxious to hear,\" replied the other, turning in his long easy-chair to save his papers, and at the same time to defend himself against the chiding of the good-natured nurse.\n\n\"I knew I should have to pay for it,\" he murmured, thinking of his original sin; \"but I hope,\"\u2014here he again consulted his pencilled figures\u2014\"I think I can manage it\u2014just. Though with Consols so low\u2014\" He fell to musing again. \"Still, I can always sublet the shop, of course, as they suggest,\" he concluded with a sigh, turning to appeal to the bewildered nurse and finding for the first time that she had gone out of the room.\n\nHe fell to pondering deeply. Presently the \"list enclosed\" by the solicitors caught his eye among the pillows, and he began listlessly to examine it. It was type-written and covered several sheets of foolscap. It was split up into divisions headed as \"Lot 1, Lot 2, Lot 3,\" and so on. He began to read slowly half aloud to himself; then with increasing excitement\u2014\n\n\"50 Linnets, guaranteed not straight from the fields; all caged.\"\n\n\"10 fierce singing Linnets.\"\n\n\"10 grand cock Throstles, just on song.\"\n\n\"5 Pear-Tree Goldfinches, with deep, square blazes, well buttoned and mooned.\"\n\n\"4 Devonshire Woodlarks, guaranteed full song; caged three months.\"\n\nThe Professor sat up and gripped the paper tightly. His face wore a pained, intent expression. A convulsive movement of his fingers, automatic perhaps, crumpled the sheet and nearly tore it across. He went on reading, shedding rugs and pillows as though they oppressed him. His breath came a little faster.\n\n\"5 cock Blackbirds, full plumage, lovely songsters.\"\n\n\"1 Song-Thrush, show-cage and hamper; splendid whistler, picked bird.\"\n\n\"1 beautiful, large upstanding singing Skylark; sings all day; been caged positively five months.\"\n\nSimon Parnacute uttered a curious little cry. It was deep down in his throat. He was conscious of a burning desire to be rich\u2014a millionaire; powerful\u2014an autocratic monarch. After a pause he brought back his attention with an effort to the type-written page and the consideration of further.\n\n\"Lots\"\u2014\n\n\"3 cock Skylarks; can hear them 200 yards off when singing.\"\n\n\"Two hundred yards off when singing,\" muttered the Professor into his one remaining pillow.\n\nHe read on, kicking his feet, somewhat viciously for a sick man, against the wicker rest at the end of the lounge chair.\n\n\"1 special, select, singing cock Skylark; guaranteed caged three months; sings his wild note.\"\n\nHe suddenly dashed the list aside. The whole chair creaked and groaned with the violence of his movement. He kicked three times running at the wicker foot-rest, and evidently rejoiced that it was still stiff enough to make it worth while to kick again\u2014harder.\n\n\"Oh, that I had all the money in the world!\" he cried to himself, letting his eyes wander to the window and the clear blue spaces between the clouds; \"all the money in the world!\" he repeated with growing excitement. He saw one of London's sea-gulls circling high, high up. He watched it for some minutes, till it sailed against a dazzling bit of white cloud and was lost to view.\n\n\"' Sings his wild note'\u2014' guaranteed caged three months'\u2014' can be heard two hundred yards oft.' \" The phrases burned in his brain like consuming flames.\n\nAnd so the list went on. He was glancing over the last page when his eye fell suddenly upon an item that described a lot of\u2014\n\n\"8 Linnets caged four months; raving with song.\"\n\nHe dropped the list, rose with difficulty from his chair and paced the room, muttering to himself \"raving with song, raving with song, raving with song.\" His hollow cheeks were flushed, his eyes aglow.\n\n\"Caged, caged, caged,\" he repeated under his breath, while his thoughts travelled to that racing flight across Europe, over seas and mountains.\n\n\"Sings his wild note!\" He heard again the whistling wind about his ears as he flew through the zones of heated air above the desert sands.\n\n\"Raving with song!\" He remembered the passion of his own cry\u2014that strange lyrical outburst of his heart when the magic of freedom caught him, and he had soared at will through the unchartered regions of the night.\n\nAnd then he saw once more the blinking owl, its eyes blinded by the dust of the London street, its feathery ears twitching as it heard the wind sighing past the open doorway of the dingy shop.\n\nAnd again the thrush looked into his face and poured out the rapture of its spring song.\n\nAnd half-an-hour later he was so exhausted by the unwonted emotion and exercise that the nurse herself was obliged to write at his dictation the letter he sent in reply to the solicitors, Messrs. Costa & Delay in Southampton Row.\n\nBut the letter was posted that night and the Professor, still mumbling to himself about \"having to pay for it,\" went to bed with the first hour of the darkness, and plunged straight into another of his delightful flying dreams almost the very moment his eyes had closed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 426", + "text": "\"...Thus, all the animals have been disposed of according to your instructions,\" ran the final letter from the solicitors, \"and we beg to append list of items so allotted, together with country addresses to which they have been sent. We think you may feel assured that they are now in homes where they will be well cared for.\n\n\u2002\"We still retain the following animals against your further instructions\u2014\n\n\u20022 Zonure Lizards,\n\n\u20021 Angulated Tortoise,\n\n\u20022 Mealy Rosellas,\n\n\u20022 Scaly-breasted Lorikcets.\n\n\u2002\"With regard to these we should advise...\n\n\"The caged birds, meanwhile, which you intend the children shall release, are being cared for satisfactorily; and the premises will be ready for taking over as from June 1...\n\nAnd, with the assistance of the nurse, he then began to issue a steady stream of letters to the parents of children he knew in the country, carefully noting and tabulating the replies, and making out little white labels inscribed in plain lettering with the words \"Lot 1,\" \"Lot 2,\" and so on, precisely as though he were in the animal business himself, and were getting ready for a sale.\n\nBut the sale which took place a fortnight later on June 1 was no ordinary sale.\n\nIt was a brilliant hot day when Simon Parnacute, still worn and shaky from his recent illness, made his way towards the shop of the \"retired\" bird-fancier. The sale of the premises and stock-in-trade, and the high price obtained, had made quite a stir in the \"Fancy,\" but of that the Professor was sublimely ignorant as he crossed the street in front of a truculent motor-omnibus and stood before the dingy three-storey red-brick house.\n\nHe produced the key sent to him by Messrs. Costa & Delay, and opened the door. It was cool after the glare of the burning street, and delightfully silent. He remembered the chorus of crying birds that had greeted his last appearance. The silence now was eloquent.\n\n\"Good, good,\" he said to himself, with a quiet smile, as he noticed the temporary counter built across the front room for cloaks and parcels, \"very good indeed.\"\n\nThen he went up-stairs, climbing painfully, for he was still easily exhausted. There was hardly a stick of furniture in the house, nor an inch of carpet on the floor and stairs, but the rooms had been swept and scrubbed; everything was fresh and scrupulously clean, and the tenant to whom he was to sub-let could have no fault to find on that score.\n\nIn the first-floor rooms he saw with pleasure the flowers arranged about the boards as he had directed. The air was sweet and perfumed. The windows at the back\u2014the sills deep with jars of roses\u2014opened upon a small bit of green garden, and Parnacute looked out and saw the blue sky and the clouds floating lazily across it.\n\n\"Good, very good,\" he exclaimed again, sitting down on the stairs a moment to recover his breath. The excitement and the heat of the day tired him. And, as he sat, he put his hand to his ear and listened attentively. A sound of birds singing reached him faintly from the upper part of the house.\n\n\"Ah!\" he said, drawing a deep breath, and colour coming into his cheeks. \"Ah! Now I hear them.\"\n\nThe sound of singing came nearer, as on a passing wind. He climbed laboriously to the top floor, and then, after resting again, scrambled up a ladder through an open skylight on to the roof. The moment he put his perspiring face above the tiles a wild chorus of singing birds greeted him with a sound like a whole country-side in spring.\n\n\"If only my friend, the park policeman, could see this!\" he said aloud, with a delighted chuckle, \"and hear it!\" He sought a precarious resting-place upon the butt of a chimney-stack, mopping his forehead.\n\nAll around him the sea of London roofs and chimneys rolled away in a black sea, but here, like an oasis in a desert, was a roof of limited extent, and not very high compared to others, converted into a perfect garden. Flowers\u2014but why describe them, when he himself did not even know the names? It was enough that his orders had been carried out to his entire satisfaction, and that this little roof was a world of living colour, moving in the wind, scenting the air, welcoming the sunshine.\n\nEverywhere among the pots and boxes of flowers stood the cages. And in the cages the thrushes and blackbirds, the larks and linnets, poured their hearts out with a chorus of song that was more exquisite, he thought, than anything he had ever heard. And there in the corner by the big chimney, carefully shaded from the glare, stood the large cage containing the owls.\n\n\"I can almost believe they have guessed my purpose after all,\" exclaimed the Professor.\n\nFor a long time he sat there, leaning against the chimney, oblivious of a blackened collar, listening to the singing, and feasting his eyes upon the garden of flowers all about him. Then the sound of a bell ringing down-stairs roused him suddenly into action, and he climbed with difficulty down again to the hall door.\n\n\"Here they come,\" he thought, greatly excited. \"Dear me, I do trust I shall not make any mistakes.\"\n\nHe felt in his pocket for his note-book, and then opened the door into the street.\n\n\"Oh, it's only you!\" he exclaimed, as his nurse came in with her arms full of parcels.\n\n\"Only me,\" she laughed, \"but I've brought the lemonade and the biscuits. The others will be here now any minute. It's after three. There's just time to arrange the glasses and plates. We must expect about fifty according to the letters you got. And mind you don't get over-tired.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm all right! \" he answered.\n\nShe ran up-stairs. Before her steps had sounded once on the floor above, a carriage-and-pair stopped at the door, and a footman came up smartly and asked if Professor Parnacute was at home.\n\n\"Indeed I am,\" answered the old man, blushing and laughing at the same time, and then going down himself to the carriage to welcome the little girl and boy who got out. He bowed stiffly and awkwardly to the pretty lady in the victoria, who thanked him for his kindness with a speech he did not hear properly, and then led his callers into the house. They were very shy at first, and hardly knew what to make of it all, but once inside, the boy's sense of adventure was stirred by the sight of the empty shop, and the counter, and the strange array of flowers upon the floor.\n\nHe remembered the letter his father had read out from Professor Parnacute a week ago.\n\n\"My Lot is No. 7, isn't it, Mr. Professor?\" he cried. \"I let out a cage of linnets, and get a guinea-pig and a mealy-something-or-other as a present, don't I?\"\n\nMr. Parnacute, shaky and beaming, consulted his note-book hurriedly, and replied that this was \"perfectly correct.\"\n\n\"Master Edwin Burton,\" he read out; \"to release\u2014Lot 7. To take away\u2014one guinea-pig, and one mealy rosella.\"\n\n\"I'm Lot 8, please,\" piped the voice of the little girl, standing with wide-open eyes beside him.\n\n\"Oh, are you, my dear?\" said he; \"yes, yes, I believe you are.\" He fumbled anew with the notebook. \"Here it is,\" he added, reading aloud again\u2014\"Miss Angelina Burton;\" he peered closely in the gloom to decipher the writing; \"To release\u2014Lot 8\u2014that's woodlarks, my dear, you know. To take away\u2014one angulated tortoise. Quite correct, yes; quite correct.\"\n\nHe called to the nurse up-stairs to show the children their presents hidden away in boxes among the flowers\u2014their rosella and tortoise\u2014and then went again to the door to receive his other guests, who now began to arrive in a steady stream. To the number of twenty or thirty they came, and not one of them appeared to be much over twelve. And the majority of them left their elders at the door and came in unattended.\n\nThe marshalling of this array of youngsters among the birds and flowers was a matter of some difficulty, but here the nurse came to the Professor's assistance with energy and experience, so that his strength was economized and the children were arranged without danger to any one.\n\nAnd upon that little roof the sight was certainly a unique one. There they all stood, an extraordinary patchwork of colour for the tiles of South-west London\u2014the bright frocks of the girls, the plumage of the birds, the blues and yellows and scarlets of the flowers; while the singing and voices sent up a chorus that brought numerous surprised faces to the windows of the higher buildings about them, and made people stop in the street below and ask themselves with startled faces where in the world these sounds came from this still June afternoon!\n\n\"Now!\" cried Simon Parnacute, when all lots and owners had been placed carefully side by side. \"The moment I give the word of command, open your cages and let the prisoners escape! And point in the direction of the park.\"\n\nThe children stooped and picked up their cages. The voices and the singing in a hundred busy little throats ceased. A hush fell upon the roof and upon the strange gathering. The sun poured blazingly down over everything, and the Professor's face streamed.\n\n\"One,\" he cried, his voice tremulous with excitement, \"two, three\u2014and away!\"\n\n'The... prisoners shot out like a cloud into the air'\n\nThere was a rattling sound of opening doors and wire bars\u2014and then a sudden burst of half-suppressed, long-drawn \"Ahhhhs.\" At once there followed a rush of fluttering feathers, a rapid vibration of the air, and the small host of prisoners shot out like a cloud into the air, and a moment later with a great whirring of wings had disappeared over the walls beyond the forest of chimneys and were lost to view. Blackbirds, thrushes, linnets and finches were gone in a twinkling, so that the eye could hardly follow them. Only the sea-gulls, puzzled by their sudden freedom, with wings still stiff after their cramped quarters, lingered on the edge of the roof for a few minutes, and looked about them in a dazed fashion, until they, too, realized their liberty and sailed off into the open sky to search for splendours of the sea.\n\nA second hush, deeper even than the first, fell over all for a moment, and then the children with one accord burst into screams of delight and explanation, shouting, for all who cared to listen, the details of how their birds, respectively, had flown; where they had gone; what they thought and looked like; and a hundred other details as to where they would build their nests and the number of eggs they would lay.\n\nAnd then came the descent for the presents and refreshment. One by one they approached the Professor, holding out the tickets with the number of their \"lot\" and the description of animal they were to receive and find a home for. The few accompanied by elders came first.\n\n\"The owls, I think?\" said the pink-faced clergyman who had chaperoned other children besides his own, picking his way across the roof as the crowd tapered off down the skylight.\n\n\"Two owls,\" he repeated, with a smile. \"In the windy towers of my belfry under the Mendips, I hope\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, the very thing, the very place,\" replied Parnacute, with pleasure, remembering his correspondent. For, of course, the owls had not been released with the other birds.\n\n\"And for my little girl you thought, perhaps, a lorikeet\u2014\"\n\n\"A scaly-breasted lorikeet, papa,\" she interrupted, with a degree of excitement too intense for smiles, and pronouncing the name as she had learned it\u2014in a single word; \"and a lizard.\"\n\nThey moved off towards the trap-door, the owl cage under the clergyman's arm. They would receive the lorikeet and lizard down-stairs from the nurse on presenting their ticket.\n\n\"And remember,\" added Parnacute slyly, addressing the child, \"to comb their feathered trousers with a very fine comb!\"\n\nThe clergyman turned a moment at the skylight as he helped the owls and children to squeeze through.\n\n\"I shall have something to say about this in my sermon next Sunday,\" he said. He smiled as his head disappeared.\n\n\"Oh, but, my dear sir\u2014\" cried the Professor, tripping over a flower-pot in his pleasure and embarrassment, and just reaching the skylight in time to add, \"And, remember, there are cakes and lemonade on the floor below!\"\n\nThe animals had all been provided with happy homes; the last cab had driven away, and the nurse had gone to find the flower-man. Parnacute had strewn the roof with food, and with moss and hair-material for nesting, in case any of the birds returned. He stood alone and watched the sunset pour its gold over the myriad houses\u2014the cages of the men and women of London town. He felt exhausted; the sky was soothing and pleasant to behold...\n\nHe sat down to rest, conscious of a great weakness now that the excitement was over and the reaction had begun to set in. Probably he had exerted himself unduly.\n\nHis mind reverted to his first impulsive eccentricity of two months before.\n\n\"I knew I should pay for it,\" he murmured, with a smile, \"and I have. But it was worth it.\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly and caught his breath a moment. He was thoroughly over-tired; the excitement of it all had been too much for him. He must get home as quickly as possible to rest. The nurse would be back any minute now.\n\nA sound of wings rapidly beating the air passed overhead, and he looked up and saw a flight of pigeons wheeling by. He fancied, too, that he just caught the notes of a thrush singing far away in the park at the end of the street. He recalled the phrases of that dreadfully haunting list. \"Wild singing note,\" \"Can be heard two hundred yards off,\" \"Raving with song.\" A momentary spasm passed through his frame. Far up in the air the sea-gulls still circled, making their way with all the splendour of real freedom to the sea.\n\n\"To-night,\" he thought, \"they will roost on the marshes, or perched upon the lonely cliffs.\n\nGood, good, very good!\"\n\nHe got up, stiffly and with difficulty, to watch the pigeons better, and to hear the thrush, and, as he did so, the bell rang down-stairs to admit the nurse and the flower-man.\n\n\"Odd,\" he thought; \"I gave her the key!\"\n\nHe made his way towards the skylight, picking his way with uncertain tread between the flower-boxes; but before he could reach it a head and shoulders suddenly appeared above the opening.\n\n\"Odd,\" he thought again, \"that she should have come up so quickly\u2014\"\n\nBut he did not complete the thought. It was not the nurse at all. A very different figure followed the emerging head and shoulders, and there in front of him on the roof stood\u2014a policeman.\n\nIt was the policeman.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Parnacute quietly, \"it's you!\" A wild tumult of yearning and happiness caught at his heart and made it impossible to think of anything else to say.\n\nThe big blue figure smiled his shining smile.\n\n\"One more flight, sir,\" said the silvery, ringing voice respectfully, \"and the last.\"\n\nThe pigeons wheeled past overhead with a sharp whirring of wings. Both men looked up significantly at their vanishing outline over the roofs. A deep silence fell between them. Parnacute was aware that he was smiling and contented.\n\n\"I am quite ready, I think,\" he said in a low tone. \"You promised\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes,\" returned the other in the voice that was like the ringing of a silver gong, \"I promised\u2014without pain.\"\n\nThe Policeman moved softly over to him; he made no sound; the constellations of Orion and the Pleiades shone on his coat-collar. There was another whirring rush as the pigeons swept again overhead and wheeled abruptly, but this time there was no one on the roof to watch them go, and it seemed that their flying wedge, as they flashed away, was larger and darker than before...\n\nAnd when the nurse returned with the man for the boxes, they came up to the roof and found the body of Simon Parnacute, late Professor of Political Economy, lying face upwards among the flowers. The human cage was empty. Some one had opened the door.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Man Whom The Trees Loved ]\n\nHe painted trees as by some special divining instinct of their essential qualities. He understood them. He knew why in an oak forest, for instance, each individual was utterly distinct from its fellows, and why no two beeches in the whole world were alike. People asked him down to paint a favourite lime or silver birch, for he caught the individuality of a tree as some catch the individuality of a horse. How he managed it was something of a puzzle, for he never had painting lessons, his drawing was often wildly inaccurate, and, while his perception of a Tree Personality was true and vivid, his rendering of it might almost approach the ludicrous. Yet the character and personality of that particular tree stood there alive beneath his brush\u2014shining, frowning, dreaming, as the case might be, friendly or hostile, good or evil. It emerged.\n\nThere was nothing else in the wide world that he could paint; flowers and landscapes he only muddled away into a smudge; with people he was helpless and hopeless; also with animals. Skies he could sometimes manage, or effects of wind in foliage, but as a rule he left these all severely alone. He kept to trees, wisely following an instinct that was guided by love. It was quite arresting, this way he had of making a tree look almost like a being\u2014alive. It approached the uncanny.\n\n'Yes, Sanderson knows what he's doing when he paints a tree!' thought old David Bittacy, C.B., late of the Woods and Forests. 'Why, you can almost hear it rustle. You can smell the thing. You can hear the rain drip through its leaves. You can almost see the branches move. It grows.' For in this way somewhat he expressed his satisfaction, half to persuade himself that the twenty guineas were well spent (since his wife thought otherwise), and half to explain this uncanny reality of life that lay in the fine old cedar framed above his study table.\n\nYet in the general view the mind of Mr. Bittacy was held to be austere, not to say morose. Few divined in him the secretly tenacious love of nature that had been fostered by years spent in the forests and jungles of the eastern world. It was odd for an Englishman, due possibly to that Eurasian ancestor. Surreptitiously, as though half ashamed of it, he had kept alive a sense of beauty that hardly belonged to his type, and was unusual for its vitality. Trees, in particular, nourished it. He, also, understood trees, felt a subtle sense of communion with them, born perhaps of those years he had lived in caring for them, guarding, protecting, nursing, years of solitude among their great shadowy presences. He kept it largely to himself, of course, because he knew the world he lived in. He also kept it from his wife\u2014to some extent. He knew it came between them, knew that she feared it, was opposed. But what he did not know, or realise at any rate, was the extent to which she grasped the power which they wielded over his life. Her fear, he judged, was simply due to those years in India, when for weeks at a time his calling took him away from her into the jungle forests, while she remained at home dreading all manner of evils that might befall him. This, of course, explained her instinctive opposition to the passion for woods that still influenced and clung to him. It was a natural survival of those anxious days of waiting in solitude for his safe return.\n\nFor Mrs. Bittacy, daughter of an evangelical clergyman, was a self-sacrificing woman, who in most things found a happy duty in sharing her husband's joys and sorrows to the point of self-obliteration. Only in this matter of the trees she was less successful than in others. It remained a problem difficult of compromise.\n\nHe knew, for instance, that what she objected to in this portrait of the cedar on their lawn was really not the price he had given for it, but the unpleasant way in which the transaction emphasised this breach between their common interests\u2014the only one they had, but deep.\n\nSanderson, the artist, earned little enough money by his strange talent; such cheques were few and far between. The owners of fine or interesting trees who cared to have them painted singly were rare indeed; and the 'studies' that he made for his own delight he also kept for his own delight. Even were there buyers, he would not sell them. Only a few, and these peculiarly intimate friends, might even see them, for he disliked to hear the undiscerning criticisms of those who did not understand. Not that he minded laughter at his craftmanship\u2014he admitted it with scorn\u2014but that remarks about the personality of the tree itself could easily wound or anger him. He resented slighting observations concerning them, as though insults offered to personal friends who could not answer for themselves. He was instantly up in arms.\n\n'It really is extraordinary,' said a Woman who Understood, 'that you can make that cypress seem an individual, when in reality all cypresses are so exactly alike.'\n\nAnd though the bit of calculated flattery had come so near to saying the right, true thing, Sanderson flushed as though she had slighted a friend beneath his very nose. Abruptly he passed in front of her and turned the picture to the wall.\n\n'Almost as queer,' he answered rudely, copying her silly emphasis, 'as that you should have imagined individuality in your husband, Madame, when in reality all men are so exactly alike!'\n\nSince the only thing that differentiated her husband from the mob was the money for which she had married him, Sanderson's relations with that particular family terminated on the spot, chance of prospective 'orders' with it. His sensitiveness, perhaps, was morbid. At any rate the way to reach his heart lay through his trees. He might be said to love trees. He certainly drew a splendid inspiration from them, and the source of a man's inspiration, be it music, religion, or a woman, is never a safe thing to criticise.\n\n'I do think, perhaps, it was just a little extravagant, dear,' said Mrs. Bittacy, referring to the cedar cheque, 'when we want a lawn-mower so badly too. But, as it gives you such pleasure\u2014'\n\n'It reminds me of a certain day, Sophia,' replied the old gentleman, looking first proudly at herself, then fondly at the picture, 'now long gone by. It reminds me of another tree\u2014that Kentish lawn in the spring, birds singing in the lilacs, and some one in a muslin frock waiting patiently beneath a certain cedar\u2014not the one in the picture, I know, but 'I was not waiting' she said indignantly, 'I was picking fir-cones for the schoolroom fire.'\n\n'Fir-cones, my dear, do not grow on cedars, and schoolroom fires were not made in June in my young days.'\n\n'And anyhow it isn't the same cedar.'\n\n'It has made me fond of all cedars for its sake,' he answered, 'and it reminds me that you are the same young girl still.'\n\nShe crossed the room to his side, and together they looked out of the window where, upon the lawn of their Hampshire cottage, a ragged Lebanon stood in solitary state.\n\n'You're as full of dreams as ever,' she said gently, 'and I don't regret the cheque a bit\u2014really. Only it would have been more real if it had been the original tree, wouldn't it?'\n\n'That was blown down long ago. I passed the place last year, and there's not a sign of it left,' he replied tenderly. And presently, when he released her from his side, she went up to the wall and carefully dusted the picture Sanderson had made of the cedar on their present lawn. She went all round the frame with her tiny handkerchief, standing on tiptoe to reach the top rim.\n\n'What I like about it,' said the old fellow to himself when his wife had left the room,' is the way he has made it live. All trees have it, of course, but a cedar taught it to me first\u2014the \" something \" trees possess that make them know I'm there when I stand close and watch. I suppose I felt it then because I was in love, and love reveals life everywhere.' He glanced a moment at the Lebanon looming gaunt and sombre through the gathering dusk. A curious wistful expression danced a moment through his eyes. 'Yes, Sanderson has seen it as it is' he murmured, 'solemnly dreaming there its dim hidden life against the Forest edge, and as different from that other tree in Kent as I am from\u2014from the vicar, say. It's quite a stranger, too. I don't know anything about it really. That other cedar I loved; this old fellow I respect. Friendly though\u2014yes, on the whole quite friendly. He's painted the friendliness right enough. He saw that. I'd like to know that man better,' he added. 'I'd like to ask him how he saw so clearly that it stands there between this cottage and the Forest\u2014yet somehow more in sympathy with us than with the mass of woods behind\u2014a sort of go-between. That I never noticed before. I see it now\u2014through his eyes. It stands there like a sentinel\u2014protective rather.'\n\nHe turned away abruptly to look through the window. He saw the great encircling mass of gloom that was the Forest, fringing their little lawn. It pressed up closer in the darkness. The prim garden with its formal beds of flowers seemed an impertinence almost\u2014some little coloured insect that sought to settle on a sleeping monster\u2014some gaudy fly that danced impudently down the edge of a great river that could engulf it with a toss of its smallest wave. That Forest with its thousand years of growth and its deep spreading being was some such slumbering monster, yes. Their cottage and garden stood too near its running lip. When the winds were strong and lifted its shadowy skirts of black and purple... He loved this feeling of the Forest Personality; he had always loved it.\n\n'Queer,' he reflected, 'awfully queer, that trees should bring me such a sense of dim, vast living! I used to feel it particularly, I remember, in India; in Canadian woods as well; but never in little English woods till here. And Sanderson's the only man I ever knew who felt it too. He's never said so, but there's the proof,' and he turned again to the picture that he loved. A thrill of unaccustomed life ran through him as he looked. 'I wonder, by Jove, I wonder,' his thoughts ran on, 'whether a tree\u2014er\u2014in any lawful meaning of the term can be\u2014alive. I remember some writing fellow telling me long ago that trees had once been moving things, animal organisms of some sort, that had stood so long feeding, sleeping, dreaming, or something, in the same place, that they had lost the power to get away...!'\n\nFancies flew pell-mell about his mind, and, lighting a cheroot, he dropped into an armchair beside the open window and let them play. Outside the blackbirds whistled in the shrubberies across the lawn. He smelt the earth and trees and flowers, the perfume of mown grass, and the bits of open heath-land far away in the heart of the woods. The summer wind stirred very faintly through the leaves. But the great New Forest hardly raised her sweeping skirts of black and purple shadow.\n\nMr. Bittacy, however, knew intimately every detail of that wilderness of trees within. He knew all the purple coombs splashed with yellow waves of gorse; sweet with juniper and myrtle, and gleaming with clear and dark-eyed pools that watched the sky. There hawks hovered, circling hour by hour, and the flicker of the peewit's flight with its melancholy, petulant cry, deepened the sense of stillness.\n\nHe knew the solitary pines, dwarfed, tufted, vigorous, that sang to every lost wind, travellers like the gipsies who pitched their bush-like tents beneath them; he knew the shaggy ponies, with foals like baby centaurs; the chattering jays, the milky call of cuckoos in the spring, and the boom of the bittern from the lonely marshes. The undergrowth of watching hollies, he knew too, strange and mysterious, with their dark, suggestive beauty, and the yellow shimmer of their pale dropped leaves.\n\nHere all the Forest lived and breathed in safety, secure from mutilation. No terror of the axe could haunt the peace of its vast subconscious life, no terror of devastating Man afflict it with the dread of premature death. It knew itself supreme; it spread and preened itself without concealment. It set no spires to carry warnings, for no wind brought messages of alarm as it bulged outwards to the sun and stars.\n\nBut, once its leafy portals left behind, the trees of the countryside were otherwise.' The houses threatened them; they knew themselves in danger. The roads were no longer glades of silent turf, but noisy, cruel ways by which men came to attack them. They were civilised, cared for\u2014but cared for in order that some day they might be put to death. Even in the villages, where the solemn and immemorial repose of giant chestnuts aped security, the tossing of a silver birch against their mass, impatient in the littlest wind, brought warning. Dust clogged their leaves. The inner humming of their quiet life became inaudible beneath the scream and shriek of clattering traffic. They longed and prayed to enter the great Peace of the Forest yonder, but they could not move. They knew, moreover, that the Forest with its august, deep splendour despised and pitied them. They were a thing of artificial gardens, and belonged to beds of flowers all forced to grow one way...\n\n'I'd like to know that artist fellow better,' was the thought upon which he returned at length to the things of practical life. 'I wonder if Sophia would mind him here for a bit\u2014?' He rose with the sound of the gong, brushing the ashes from his speckled waistcoat. He pulled the waistcoat down. He was slim and spare in figure, active in his movements. In the dim light, but for that silvery moustache, he might easily have passed for a man of forty. 'I'll suggest it to her anyhow,' he decided on his way upstairs to dress. His thought really was that Sanderson could probably explain this world of things he had always felt about\u2014trees. A man who could paint the soul of a cedar in that way must know it all.\n\n'Why not?' she gave her verdict later over the bread-and-butter pudding; 'unless you think he'd find it dull without companions.'\n\n'He would paint all day in the Forest, dear. I'd like to pick his brains a bit, too, if I could manage it.'\n\n'You can manage anything, David,' was what she answered, for this elderly childless couple used an affectionate politeness long since deemed old-fashioned. The remark, however, displeased her, making her feel uneasy, and she did not notice his rejoinder, smiling his pleasure and content\u2014'Except yourself and our bank account, my dear.' This passion of his for trees was of old a bone of contention, though very mild contention. It frightened her. That was the truth. The Bible, her Baedeker for earth and heaven, did not mention it. Her husband, while humouring her, could never alter that instinctive dread she had. He soothed, but never changed her. She liked the woods, perhaps as spots for shade and picnics, but she could not, as he did, love them.\n\nAnd after dinner, with a lamp beside the open window, he read aloud from The Times the evening post had brought, such fragments as he thought might interest her. The custom was invariable, except on Sundays, when, to please his wife, he dozed over Tennyson or Farrar as their mood might be. She knitted while he read, asked gentle questions, told him his voice was a 'lovely reading voice,' and enjoyed the little discussions that occasions prompted because he always let her win them with 'Ah, Sophia, I had never thought of it quite in that way before; but now you mention it I must say I think there's something in it...'\n\nFor David Bittacy was wise. It was long after marriage, during his months of loneliness spent with trees and forests in India, his wife waiting at home in the Bungalow, that his other, deeper side had developed the strange passion that she could not understand. And after one or two serious attempts to let her share it with him, he had given up and learned to hide it from her. He learned, that is, to speak of it only casually; for since she knew it was there, to keep silence altogether would only increase her pain. So from time to time he skimmed the surface just to let her show him where he was wrong and think she won the day. It remained a debatable land of compromise. He listened with patience to her criticisms, her excursions and alarms, knowing that while it gave her satisfaction, it could not change himself. The thing lay in him too deep and true for change. But, for peace' sake, some meeting-place was desirable, and he found it thus.\n\nIt was her one fault in his eyes, this religious mania carried over from her up-bringing, and it did no serious harm. Great emotion could shake it sometimes out of her. She clung to it because her father taught it her and not because she had thought it out for herself. Indeed, like many women, she never really thought at all, but merely reflected the images of others' thinking which she had learned to see. So, wise in his knowledge of human nature, old David Bittacy accepted the pain of being obliged to keep a portion of his inner life shut off from the woman he deeply loved. He regarded her little biblical phrases as oddities that still clung to a rather fine, big soul\u2014like horns and little useless things some animals have not yet lost in the course of evolution while they have outgrown their use.\n\n'My dear, what is it? You frightened me! ' She asked it suddenly, sitting up so abruptly that her cap dropped sideways almost to her ear. For David Bittacy behind his crackling paper had uttered a sharp exclamation of surprise. He had flowered the sheet and was staring at her over the tops of his gold glasses.\n\n'Listen to this, if you please,' he said, a note of eagerness in his voice, 'listen to this, my dear Sophia. It's from an address by Francis Darwin before the Royal Society. He is president, you know, and son of the great Darwin. Listen carefully, I beg you. It is most significant.'\n\n'I am listening, David,' she said with some astonishment, looking up. She stopped her knitting.\n\nFor a second she glanced behind her. Something had suddenly changed in the room, and it made her feel wide awake, though before she had been almost dozing. Her husband's voice and manner had introduced this new thing. Her instincts rose in warning. 'Do read it, dear.' He took a deep breath, looking first again over the rims of his glasses to make quite sure of her attention. He had evidently come across something of genuine interest, although herself she often found the passages from these 'Addresses' somewhat heavy.\n\nIn a deep, emphatic voice he read aloud:\n\n\"It is impossible to know whether or not plants are conscious; but it is consistent with the doctrine of continuity that in all living things there is something psychic, and if we accept this point of view.\"\n\n'If', she interrupted, scenting danger.\n\nHe ignored the interruption as a thing of slight value he was accustomed to.\n\n\"If we accept this point of view,\" 'he continued,' \"we must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves\"\n\nHe laid the paper down and steadily stared at her. Their eyes met. He had italicised the last phrase.\n\nFor a minute or two his wife made no reply or comment. They stared at one another in silence. He waited for the meaning of the words to reach her understanding with full import. Then he turned and read them again in part, while she, released from that curious driving look in his eyes, instinctively again glanced over her shoulder round the room. It was almost as if she felt some one had come in to them unnoticed.\n\n'We must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves.'\n\n'If', she repeated lamely, feeling before the stare of those questioning eyes she must say something, but not yet having gathered her wits together quite.\n\n'Consciousness' he rejoined. And then he added gravely: 'That, my dear, is the statement of a scientific man of the Twentieth Century.'\n\nMrs. Bittacy sat forward in her chair so that her silk flounces crackled louder than the newspaper. She made a characteristic little sound between sniffing and snorting. She put her shoes closely together, with her hands upon her knees.\n\n'David,' she said quietly, 'I think these scientific men are simply losing their heads. There is nothing in the Bible that I can remember about any such thing whatsoever.'\n\n'Nothing, Sophia, that I can remember either,' he answered patiently. Then, after a pause, he added, half to himself perhaps more than to her: 'And, now that I come to think about it, it seems that Sanderson once said something to me that was similar.'\n\n'Then Mr. Sanderson is a wise and thoughtful man, and a safe man,' she quickly took him up, 'if he said that.'\n\nFor she thought her husband referred to her remark about the Bible, and not to her judgment of the scientific men. And he did not correct her mistake.\n\n'And plants, you see, dear, are not the same thing as trees,' she drove her advantage home, 'not quite, that is.'\n\n'I agree,' said David quietly; 'but both belong to the great vegetable kingdom.'\n\nThere was a moment's pause before she answered.\n\n'Pah! the vegetable kingdom, indeed!' She tossed her pretty old head. And into the words she put a degree of contempt that, could the vegetable kingdom have heard it, might have made it feel ashamed for covering a third of the world with its wonderful tangled network of roots and branches, delicate shaking leaves, and its millions of spires that caught the sun and wind and rain. Its very right to existence seemed in question." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 427", + "text": "SANDERSON accordingly came down, and on the whole his short visit was a success. Why he came at all was a mystery to those who heard of it, for he never paid visits and was certainly not the kind of man to court a customer. There must have been something in Bittacy he liked.\n\nMrs. Bittacy was glad when he left. He brought no dress-suit for one thing, not even a dinner-jacket, and he wore very low collars with big balloon ties like a Frenchman, and let his hair grow longer than was nice, she felt. Not that these things were important, but that she considered them symptoms of something a little disordered. The ties were unnecessarily flowing.\n\nFor all that he was an interesting man, and, in spite of his eccentricities of dress and so forth, a gentleman. 'Perhaps,' she reflected in her genuinely charitable heart, 'he had other uses for the twenty guineas, an invalid sister or an old mother to support!' She had no notion of the cost of brushes, frames, paints, and canvases. Also she forgave him much for the sake of his beautiful eyes and his eager enthusiasm of manner. So many men of thirty were already blase.\n\nStill, when the visit was over, she felt relieved. She said nothing about his coming a second time, and her husband, she was glad to notice, had likewise made no suggestion. For, truth to tell, the way the younger man engrossed the older, keeping him out for hours in the Forest, talking on the lawn in the blazing sun, and in the evenings when the damp of dusk came creeping out from the surrounding woods, all regardless of his age and usual habits, was not quite to her taste. Of course, Mr. Sanderson did not know how easily those attacks of Indian fever came back, but David surely might have told him.\n\nThey talked trees from morning till night. It stirred in her the old subconscious trail of dread, a trail that led ever into the darkness of big woods; and such feelings, as her early evangelical training taught her, were temptings. To regard them in any other way was to play with danger.\n\nHer mind, as she watched these two, was charged with curious thoughts of dread she could not understand, yet feared the more on that account. The way they studied that old mangy cedar was a trifle unnecessary, unwise, she felt. It was disregarding the sense of proportion which deity had set upon the world for men's safe guidance.\n\nEven after dinner they smoked their cigars upon the low branches that swept down and touched the lawn, until at length she insisted on their coming in. Cedars, she had somewhere heard, were not safe after sundown; it was not wholesome to be too near them; to sleep beneath them was even dangerous, though what the precise danger was she had forgotten. The upas was the tree she really meant.\n\nAt any rate she summoned David in, and Sanderson came presently after him.\n\nFor a long time, before deciding on this peremptory step, she had watched them surreptitiously from the drawing-room window\u2014her husband and her guest. The dusk enveloped them with its damp veil of gauze. She saw the glowing tips of their cigars, and heard the drone of voices. Bats flitted overhead, and big, silent moths whirred softly over the rhododendron blossoms. And it came suddenly to her, while she watched, that her husband had somehow altered these last few days\u2014since Mr. Sanderson's arrival in fact. A change had come over him, though what it was she could not say. She hesitated, indeed, to search. That was the instinctive dread operating in her. Provided it passed she would rather not know. Small things, of course, she noticed; small outward signs. He had neglected The Times for one thing, left off his speckled waistcoats for another. He was absent-minded sometimes; showed vagueness in practical details where hitherto he showed decision. And\u2014he had begun to talk in his sleep again.\n\nThese and a dozen other small peculiarities came suddenly upon her with the rush of a combined attack. They brought with them a faint distress that made her shiver. Momentarily her mind was startled, then confused, as her eyes picked out the shadowy figures in the dusk, the cedar covering them, the Forest close at their backs. And then, before she could think, or seek internal guidance as her habit was, this whisper, muffled and very hurried, ran across her brain: 'It's Mr. Sanderson. Call David in at once!'\n\nAnd she had done so. Her shrill voice crossed the lawn and died away into the Forest, quickly smothered. No echo followed it. The sound fell dead against the rampart of a thousand listening trees.\n\n'The damp is so very penetrating, even in summer,' she murmured when they came obediently. She was half surprised at her own audacity, half repentant. They came so meekly at her call. 'And my husband is sensitive to fever from the East. No, please do not throw away your cigars. We can sit by the open window and enjoy the evening while you smoke.'\n\nShe was very talkative for a moment; subconscious excitement was the cause.\n\n'It is so still\u2014so wonderfully still,' she went on, as no one spoke, 'so peaceful, and the air so very sweet... and God is always near to those who need His aid.' The words slipped out before she realised quite what she was saying, yet fortunately, in time to lower her voice, for no one heard them. They were, perhaps, an instinctive expression of relief. It flustered her that she could have said the thing at all.\n\nSanderson brought her shawl and helped to arrange the chairs; she thanked him in her old-fashioned, gentle way, declining the lamps which he had offered to light. 'They attract the moths and insects so, I think!'\n\nThe three of them sat there in the gloaming, Mr. Bittacy's white moustache and his wife's yellow shawl gleaming at either end of the little horseshoe, Sanderson with his wild black hair and shining eyes midway between them. The painter went on talking softly, continuing evidently the conversation begun with his host beneath the cedar. Mrs. Bittacy, on her guard, listened\u2014uneasily.\n\n'For trees, you see, rather conceal themselves in daylight. They reveal themselves fully only after sunset. I never know a tree,' he bowed here slightly towards the lady as though to apologise for something he felt she would not quite understand or like, 'until I've seen it in the night. Your cedar, for instance,' looking towards her husband again so that Mrs. Bittacy caught the gleaming of his turned eyes, 'I failed with badly at first, because I did it in the morning. You shall see to-morrow what I mean\u2014that first sketch is upstairs in my portfolio; it's quite another tree to the one you bought. That view'\u2014he leaned forward, lowering his voice\u2014' I caught one morning about two o'clock in very faint moonlight and the stars. I saw the naked being of the thing.'\n\n'You mean that you went out, Mr. Sanderson, at that hour?' the old lady asked with astonishment and mild rebuke. She did not care particularly for his choice of adjectives either.\n\n'I fear it was rather a liberty to take in another's house, perhaps,' he answered courteously. 'But, having chanced to wake, I saw the tree from my window, and made my way downstairs.'\n\n'It's a wonder Boxer didn't bite you; he sleeps loose in the hall,' she said.\n\n'On the contrary. The dog came out with me. I hope,' he added, 'the noise didn't disturb you, though it's rather late to say so. I feel quite guilty.' His white teeth showed in the dusk as he smiled. A smell of earth and flowers stole in through the window on a breath of wandering air.\n\nMrs. Bittacy said nothing at the moment. 'We both sleep like tops,' put in her husband, laughing. 'You're a courageous man, though, Sanderson; and, by Jove, the picture justifies you. Few artists would have taken so much trouble, though I read once that Holman Hunt, Rossetti, or some one of that lot, painted all night in his orchard to get an effect of moo'nlight that he wanted.'\n\nHe chattered on. His wife was glad to hear his voice; it made her feel more easy in her mind. But presently the other held the floor again, and her thoughts grew darkened and afraid. Instinctively she feared the influence on her husband. The mystery and wonder that lie in woods, in forests, in great gatherings of trees everywhere, seemed so real and present while he talked.\n\n'The Night transfigures all things in a way,' he was saying; 'but nothing so searchingly as trees. From behind a veil that sunlight hangs before them in the day they emerge and show themselves. Even buildings do that\u2014in a measure\u2014but trees particularly. In the daytime they sleep; at night they wake, they manifest, turn active\u2014live. You remember,' turning politely again in the direction of his hostess, 'how clearly Henley understood that?'\n\n'That socialist person, you mean?' asked the lady. Her tone and accent made the substantive sound criminal. It almost hissed, the way she uttered it.\n\n'The poet, yes,' replied the artist tactfully, 'the friend of Stevenson, you remember, Stevenson who wrote those charming children's verses.'\n\nHe quoted in a low voice the lines he meant. It was, for once, the time, the place, and the setting all together. The words floated out across the lawn towards the wall of blue darkness where the big Forest swept the little garden with its league-long curve that was like the shore-line of a sea. A wave of distant sound that was like surf accompanied his voice, as though the wind was fain to listen too:\n\nNot to the staring Day, For all the importunate questionings he pursues. In his big, violent voice, Shall those mild things of bulk and multitude, The trees\u2014God's sentinels... Yield of their huge, unutterable selves. But at the word Of the ancient, sacerdotal Night, Night of the many secrets, whose effect\u2014Transfiguring, hierophantic, dread\u2014Themselves alone may fully apprehend, They tremble and are changed: In each the uncouth, individual soul Looms forth and glooms Essential, and, their bodily presences Touched with inordinate significance, Wearing the darkness like a livery Of some mysterious and tremendous guild, They brood\u2014they menace\u2014they appal.\n\nThe voice of Mrs. Bittacy presently broke the silence that followed.\n\n'I like that part about God's sentinels' she murmured. There was no sharpness in her tone; it was hushed and quiet. The truth, so musically uttered, muted her shrill objections though it had not lessened her alarm. Her husband made no comment; his cigar, she noticed, had gone out.\n\n'And old trees in particular,' continued the artist, as though to himself, 'have very definite personalities. You can offend, wound, please them; the moment you stand within their shade you feel whether they come out to you, or whether they withdraw.' He turned abruptly towards his host. 'You know that singular essay of Prentice Mulford's, no doubt, \"God in the Trees \"\u2014extravagant perhaps, but yet with a fine true beauty in it? You've never read it, no?' he asked.\n\nBut it was Mrs. Bittacy who answered; her husband keeping his curious deep silence.\n\n\"I never did!\" It fell like a drip of cold water from the face muffled in the yellow shawl; even a child could have supplied the remainder of the unspoken thought.\n\n'Ah' said Sanderson gently, 'but there is \"God\" in the trees, God in a very subtle aspect and sometimes\u2014I have known the trees express it too\u2014that which is not God\u2014dark and terrible. Have you ever noticed, too, how clearly trees show what they want\u2014choose their companions, at least? How beeches, for instance, allow no life too near them\u2014birds or squirrels in their boughs, nor any growth beneath? The silence in the beech wood is quite terrifying often! And how pines like bilberry bushes at their feet and sometimes little oaks\u2014all trees making a clear, deliberate choice, and holding firmly to it? Some trees obviously\u2014it's very strange and marked\u2014seem to prefer the human.'\n\nThe old lady sat up crackling, for this was more than she could permit. Her stiff silk dress emitted little sharp reports.\n\n'We know,' she answered, 'that He was said to have walked in the garden in the cool of the evening'\u2014the gulp betrayed the effort that it cost her\u2014' but we are nowhere told that He hid in the trees, or anything like that. Trees, after all, we must remember, are only large vegetables.'\n\n'True,' was the soft answer, 'but in everything that grows, has life, that is, there's mystery past all finding out. The wonder that lies hidden in our own souls lies also hidden, I venture to assert, in the stupidity and silence of a mere potato.'\n\nThe observation was not meant to be amusing. It was not amusing. No one laughed. On the contrary, the words conveyed in too literal a sense the feeling that haunted all that conversation. Each one in his own way realised\u2014with beauty, with wonder, with alarm\u2014that the talk had somehow brought the whole vegetable kingdom nearer to that of man. Some link had been established between the two. It was not wise, with that great Forest listening at their very doors, to speak so plainly. The Forest edged up closer while they did so.\n\nAnd Mrs. Bittacy, anxious to interrupt the horrid spell, broke suddenly in upon it with a matter-of-fact suggestion. She did not like her husband's prolonged silence, stillness. He seemed so negative\u2014so changed.\n\n'David,' she said, raising her voice, 'I think you're feeling the dampness. It's grown chilly. The fever comes so suddenly, you know, and it might be wise to take the tincture. I'll go and get it, dear, at once. It's better.' And before he could object she had left the room to bring the homoeopathic dose that she believed in, and that, to please her, he swallowed by the tumbler-full from week to week.\n\nAnd the moment the door closed behind her, Sanderson began again, though now in quite a different tone. Mr. Bittacy sat up in his chair. The two men obviously resumed the conversation\u2014the real conversation interrupted beneath the cedar\u2014and left aside the sham one which was so much dust merely thrown in the old lady's eyes.\n\n'Trees love you, that's the fact,' he said earnestly. 'Your service to them all these years abroad has made them know you.'\n\n'Know me?'\n\n'Made them, yes,'\u2014he paused a moment, then added,\u2014'made them aware of your presence; aware of a force outside themselves that deliberately seeks their welfare, don't you see?'\n\n'By Jove, Sanderson\u2014!' This put into plain language actual sensations he had felt, yet had never dared to phrase in words before. 'They get into touch with me, as it were?' he ventured, laughing at his own sentence, yet laughing only with his lips.\n\n'Exactly,' was the quick, emphatic reply. 'They seek to blend with something they feel instinctively to be good for them, helpful to their essential beings, encouraging to their best expression\u2014their life.'\n\n'Good Lord, Sir!' Bittacy heard himself saying, 'but you're putting my own thoughts into words. D'you know, I've felt something like that for years. As though\u2014' he looked round to make sure his wife was not there, then finished the sentence\u2014' as though the trees were after me!'\n\n'\"Amalgamate\" seems the best word, perhaps,' said Sanderson slowly. 'They would draw you to themselves. Good forces, you see, always seek to merge; evil to separate; that's why Good in the end must always win the day\u2014everywhere. The accumulation in the long run becomes overwhelming. Evil tends to separation, dissolution, death. The comradeship of trees, their instinct to run together, is a vital symbol. Trees in a mass are good; alone, you may take it generally, are\u2014well, dangerous. Look at a monkey-puzzler, or better still, a holly. Look at it, watch it, understand it. Did you ever see more plainly an evil thought made visible? They're wicked. Beautiful too, oh yes! There's a strange, miscalculated beauty often in evil'\n\n'That cedar, then?'\n\n'Not evil, no; but alien, rather. Cedars grow in forests all together. The poor thing has drifted, that is all.'\n\nThey were getting rather deep. Sanderson, talking against time, spoke so fast. It was too condensed. Bittacy hardly followed that last bit. His mind floundered among his own less definite, less sorted thoughts, till presently another sentence from the artist startled him into attention again.\n\n'That cedar will protect you here, though, because' you both have humanised it by your thinking so lovingly of its presence. The others can't get past it, as it were.'\n\n'Protect me!' he exclaimed. 'Protect me from their love?'\n\nSanderson laughed. 'We're getting rather mixed,' he said; 'we're talking of one thing in the terms of another really. But what I mean is\u2014you see\u2014that their love for you, their \" awareness \" of your personality and presence involves the idea of winning you\u2014across the border\u2014into themselves\u2014into their world of living. It means, in a way, taking you over.'\n\nThe ideas the artist started in his mind ran furious wild races to and fro. It was like a maze sprung suddenly into movement. The whirling of the intricate lines bewildered him. They went so fast, leaving but half an explanation of their goal. He followed first one, then another, but a new one always dashed across to intercept before he could get anywhere.\n\n'But India,' he said, presently in a lower voice, 'India is so far away\u2014from this little English forest. The trees, too, are utterly different for one thing?'\n\nThe rustle of skirts warned of Mrs. Bittacy's approach. This was a sentence he could turn round another way in case she came up and pressed for explanation.\n\n'There is communion among trees all the world over,' was the strange quick reply. 'They always know.'\n\n'They always know! You think then?'\n\n'The winds, you see\u2014the great, swift carriers! They have their ancient rights of way about the world. An easterly wind, for instance, carrying on stage by stage as it were\u2014linking dropped messages and meanings from land to land like the birds\u2014an easterly wind'\n\nMrs. Bittacy swept in upon them with the tumbler\u2014\n\n'There, David,' she said, 'that will ward off any beginnings of attack. Just a spoonful, dear. Oh, oh! not all' for he had swallowed half the contents at a single gulp as usual; 'another dose before you go to bed, and the balance in the morning, first thing when you wake.'\n\nShe turned to her guest, who put the tumbler down for her upon a table at his elbow. She had heard them speak of the east wind. She emphasised the warning she had misinterpreted. The private part of the conversation came to an abrupt end.\n\n'It is the one thing that upsets him more than any other\u2014an east wind,' she said, 'and I am glad, Mr. Sanderson, to hear you think so too.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 428", + "text": "A DEEP hush followed, in the middle of which an owl was heard calling its muffled note in the forest. A big moth whirred with a soft collision against one of the windows. Mrs. Bittacy started slightly, but no one spoke. Above the trees the stars were faintly visible. From the distance came the barking of a dog.\n\nBittacy, relighting his cigar, broke the little spell of silence that had caught all three.\n\n'It's rather a comforting thought,' he said, throwing the match out of the window, 'that life is about us everywhere, and that there is really no dividing line between what we call organic and inorganic.'\n\n'The universe, yes,' said Sanderson, 'is all one, really. We're puzzled by the gaps we cannot see across, but as a fact, I suppose, there are no gaps at all.'\n\nMrs. Bittacy rustled ominously, holding her peace meanwhile. She feared long words she did not understand. Beelzebub lay hid among too many syllables.\n\n'In trees and plants especially, there dreams an exquisite life that no one yet has proved unconscious.'\n\n'Or conscious either, Mr. Sanderson,' she neatly interjected. 'It's only man that was made after His image, not shrubberies and things...'\n\nHer husband interposed without delay. 'It is not necessary,' he explained suavely, 'to say that they're alive in the sense that we are alive. At the same time,' with an eye to his wife, 'I see no harm in holding, dear, that all created things contain some measure of His life Who made them. It's only beautiful to hold that He created nothing dead. We are not pantheists for all that! 'he added soothingly.\n\n'Oh, no! Not that, I hope!' The word alarmed her. It was worse than pope. Through her puzzled mind stole a stealthy, dangerous thing... like a panther.\n\n'I like to think that even in decay there's life,' the painter murmured. 'The falling apart of rotten wood breeds sentiency; there's force and motion in the falling of a dying leaf, in the breaking up and crumbling of everything indeed. And take an inert stone: it's crammed with heat and weight, and potencies of all sorts. What holds its particles together indeed? We understand it as little as gravity or why a needle always turns to the \" North.\" Both things may be a mode of life...'\n\n'You think a compass has a soul, Mr. Sanderson?' exclaimed the lady with a crackling of her silk flounces that conveyed a sense of outrage even more plainly than her tone. The artist smiled to himself in the darkness, but it was Bittacy who hastened to reply.\n\n'Our friend merely suggests that these mysterious agencies,' he said quietly, 'may be due to some kind of life we cannot understand. Why should water only run downhill? Why should trees grow at right angles to the surface of the ground and towards the sun? Why should the worlds spin for ever on their axes? Why should fire change the form of everything it touches without really destroying them? To say these things follow the law of their being explains nothing. Mr. Sanderson merely suggests\u2014poetically, my dear, of course\u2014that these may be manifestations of life, though life at a different stage to ours.'\n\n'The \"breath of life,\" we read, \"He breathed into them.\" These things do not breathe.' She said it with triumph.\n\nThen Sanderson put in a word. But he spoke rather to himself or to his host than by way of serious rejoinder to the ruffled lady.\n\n'But plants do breathe too, you know,' he said. 'They breathe, they eat, they digest, they move about, and they adapt themselves to their environment as men and animals do. They have a nervous system too... at least a complex system of nuclei which have some of the qualities of nerve cells. They may have memory too. Certainly, they know definite action in response to stimulus. And though this may be physiological, no one has proved that it is only that, and not\u2014psychological.'\n\nHe did not notice, apparently, the little gasp that was audible behind the yellow shawl. Bittacy cleared his throat, threw his extinguished cigar upon the lawn, crossed and recrossed his legs.\n\n'And in trees,' continued the other, 'behind a great forest, for instance,' pointing towards the woods, 'may stand a rather splendid Entity that manifests through all the thousand individual trees\u2014some huge collective life, quite as minutely and delicately organised as our own. It might merge and blend with ours under certain conditions, so that we could understand it by being it, for a time at least. It might even engulf human vitality into the immense whirlpool of its own vast dreaming life. The pull of a big forest on a man can be tremendous and utterly overwhelming.'\n\nThe mouth of Mrs. Bittacy was heard to close with a snap. Her shawl, and particularly her crackling dress, exhaled the protest that burned within her like a pain. She was too distressed to be overawed, but at the same time too confused 'mid the litter of words and meanings half understood, to find immediate phrases she could use. Whatever the actual meaning of his language might be, however, and whatever subtle dangers lay concealed behind them meanwhile, they certainly wove a kind of gentle spell with the glimmering darkness that held all three delicately enmeshed there by that open window. The odours of dewy lawn, flowers, trees, and earth formed part of it.\n\n'The moods,' he continued, 'that people waken in us are due to their hidden life affecting our own. Deep calls to deep. A person, for instance, joins you in an empty room: you both instantly change. The new arrival, though in silence, has caused a change of mood. May not the moods of Nature touch and stir us in virtue of a similar prerogative? The sea, the hills, the desert, wake passion, joy, terror, as the case may be; for a few, perhaps,' he glanced significantly at his host so that Mrs. Bittacy again caught the turning of his eyes, 'emotions of a curious, flaming splendour that are quite nameless. Well... whence come these powers? Surely from nothing that is... dead! Does not the influence of a forest, its sway and strange ascendancy over certain minds, betray a direct manifestation of life? It lies otherwise beyond all explanation, this mysterious emanation of big woods. Some natures, of course, deliberately invite it. The authority of a host of trees,'\u2014his voice grew almost solemn as he said the words\u2014' is something not to be denied. One feels it here, I think, particularly.'\n\nThere was considerable tension in the air as he ceased speaking. Mr. Bittacy had not intended that the talk should go so far. They had drifted. He did not wish to see his wife unhappy or afraid, and he was aware\u2014acutely so\u2014that her feelings were stirred to a point he did not care about. Something in her, as he put it, was 'working up' towards explosion.\n\nHe sought to generalise the conversation, diluting this accumulated emotion by spreading it.\n\n'The sea is His and He made it,' he suggested vaguely, hoping Sanderson would take the hint, 'and with the trees it is the same...'\n\n'The whole gigantic vegetable kingdom, yes,' the artist took him up, 'all at the service of man, for food, for shelter and for a thousand purposes of his daily life. Is it not striking what a lot of the globe they cover... exquisitely organised life, yet stationary, always ready to our hand when we want them, never running away? But the taking them, for all that, not so easy. One man shrinks from picking flowers, another from cutting down trees. And, it's curious that most of the forest tales and legends are dark, mysterious, and somewhat ill-omened. The forest-beings are rarely gay and harmless. The forest life was felt as terrible. Tree-worship still survives to-day. Woodcutters... those who take the life of trees... you see, a race of haunted men...'\n\nHe stopped abruptly, a singular catch in his voice. Bittacy felt something even before the sentences were over. His wife, he knew, felt it still more strongly. For it was in the middle of the heavy silence following upon these last remarks, that Mrs. Bittacy, rising with a violent abruptness from her chair, drew the attention of the others to something moving towards them across the lawn. It came silently. In outline it was large and curiously spread. It rose high, too, for the sky above the shrubberies, still pale gold from the sunset, was dimmed by its passage. She declared afterwards that it moved in 'looping circles,' but what she perhaps meant to convey was 'spirals.'\n\nShe screamed faintly. 'It's come at last! And it's you that brought it!'\n\nShe turned excitedly, half afraid, half angry, to Sanderson. With a breathless sort of gasp she said it, politeness all forgotten. 'I knew it... if you went on. I knew it. Oh! Oh!' And she cried again, 'Your talking has brought it out!' The terror that shook her voice was rather dreadful.\n\nBut the confusion of her vehement words passed unnoticed in the first surprise they caused. For a moment nothing happened.\n\n'What is it you think you see, my dear?' asked her husband, startled. Sanderson said nothing. All three leaned forward, the men still sitting, but Mrs. Bittacy had rushed hurriedly to the window, placing herself of a purpose, as it seemed, between her husband and the lawn. She pointed. Her little hand made a silhouette against the sky, the yellow shawl hanging from the arm like a cloud.\n\n'Beyond the cedar\u2014between it and the lilacs.' The voice had lost its shrillness; it was thin and hushed. 'There... now you see it going round upon itself again\u2014going back, thank God!... going back to the Forest.' It sank to a whisper, shaking. She repeated, with a great dropping sigh of relief\u2014'Thank God! I thought... at first... it was coming here... to us!... David... to you'\n\nShe stepped back from the window, her movements confused, feeling in the darkness for the support of a chair, and finding her husband's outstretched hand instead. 'Hold me, dear, hold me, please... tight. Do not let me go.' She was in what he called afterwards 'a regular state.' He drew her firmly down upon her chair again.\n\n'Smoke, Sophie, my dear,' he said quickly, trying to make his voice calm and natural. 'I see it, yes. It's smoke blowing over from the gardener's cottage...'\n\n'But, David,'\u2014and there was new horror in her whisper now\u2014'it made a noise. It makes it still. I hear it swishing.' Some such word she used\u2014swishing, sishing, rushing, or something of the kind. 'David, I'm very frightened. It's something awful! That man has called it out...!'\n\n'Hush, hush,' whispered her husband. He stroked her trembling hand beside him.\n\n'It is in the wind,' said Sanderson, speaking for the first time, very quietly. The expression on his face was not visible in the gloom, but his voice was soft and unafraid. At the sound of it, Mrs. Bittacy started violently again. Bittacy drew his chair a little forward to obstruct her view of him. He felt bewildered himself, a little, hardly knowing quite what to say or do. It was all so very curious and sudden.\n\nBut Mrs. Bittacy was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she saw came from the enveloping forest just beyond their little garden. It emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as with a purpose, stealthily, difficultly. Then something stopped it. It could not advance beyond the cedar. The cedar\u2014this impression remained with her afterwards too\u2014prevented, kept it back. Like a rising sea the Forest had surged a moment in their direction through the covering darkness, and this visible movement was its first wave. Thus to her mind it seemed... like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten and mystify her in childhood on the sands. The outward surge of some enormous Power was what she felt... something to which every instinct in her being rose in opposition because it threatened her and hers. In that moment she realised the Personality of the Forest... menacing.\n\nIn the stumbling movement that she made away from the window and towards the bell she barely caught the sentence Sanderson\u2014or was it her husband?\u2014murmured to himself: 'It came because we talked of it; our thinking made it aware of us and brought it out. But the cedar stops it. It cannot cross the lawn, you see...'\n\nAll three were standing now, and her husband's voice broke in with authority while his wife's fingers touched the bell.\n\n'My dear, I should not say anything to Thompson.' The anxiety he felt was manifest in his voice, but his outward composure had returned. 'The gardener can go...'\n\nThen Sanderson cut him short. 'Allow me,' he said quickly. 'I'll see if anything's wrong.' And before either of them could answer or object, he was gone, leaping out by the open window. They saw his figure vanish with a run across the lawn into the darkness.\n\nA moment later the maid entered, in answer to the bell, and with her came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall.\n\n'The lamps,' said her master shortly, and as she softly closed the door behind her, they heard the wind pass with a mournful sound of singing round the outer walls. A rustle of foliage from the distance passed within it.\n\n'You see, the wind is rising. It was the wind!' He put a comforting arm about her, distressed to feel that she was trembling. But he knew that he was trembling too, though with a kind of odd elation rather than alarm. 'And it was smoke that you saw coming from Stride's cottage, or from the rubbish heaps he's been burning in the kitchen garden. The noise we heard was the branches rustling in the wind. Why should you be so nervous?'\n\nA thin whispering voice answered him:\n\n'I was afraid for you, dear. Something frightened me for you. That man makes me feel so uneasy and uncomfortable for his influence upon you. It's very foolish, I know. I think... I'm tired; I feel so overwrought and restless.' The words poured out in a hurried jumble and she kept turning to the window while she spoke.\n\n'The strain of having a visitor,' he said soothingly, 'has taxed you. We're so unused to having people in the house. He goes to-morrow.' He warmed her cold hands between his own, stroking them tenderly. More, for the life of him, he could not say or do. The joy of a strange, internal excitement made his heart beat faster. He knew not what it was. He knew only, perhaps, whence it came.\n\nShe peered close into his face through the gloom, and said a curious thing. 'I thought, David, for a moment... you seemed... different. My nerves are all on edge to-night.' She made no further reference to her husband's visitor.\n\nA sound of footsteps from the lawn warned of Sanderson's return, as he answered quickly in a lowered tone\u2014' There's no need to be afraid on my account, dear girl. There's nothing wrong with me, I assure you; I never felt so well and happy in my life.'\n\nThompson came in with the lamps and brightness, and scarcely had she gone again when Sanderson in turn was seen climbing through the window.\n\n'There's nothing,' he said lightly, as he closed it behind him. 'Somebody's been burning leaves, and the smoke is drifting a little through the trees. The wind,' he added, glancing at his host a moment significantly, but in so discreet a way that Mrs. Bittacy did not observe it, 'the wind, too, has begun to roar... in the Forest... further out.'\n\nBut Mrs. Bittacy noticed about him two things which increased her uneasiness. She noticed the shining of his eyes, because a similar light had suddenly come into her husband's; and she noticed, too, the apparent depth of meaning he put into those simple words that' the wind had begun to roar in the Forest... further out.' Her mind retained the disagreeable impression that he meant more than he said. In his tone lay quite another implication. It was not actually 'wind ' he spoke of, and it would not remain 'further out'... rather, it was coming in. Another impression she got too\u2014still more unwelcome\u2014was that her husband understood his hidden meaning." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 429", + "text": "'David, dear,' she observed gently as soon as they were alone upstairs, 'I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get rid of it.' The tremor in her voice caught all his tenderness.\n\nHe turned to look at her. 'Of what kind, my dear? You're so imaginative sometimes, aren't you?'\n\n'I think,' she hesitated, stammering a little, confused, still frightened, 'I mean\u2014isn't he a hypnotist, or full of those theofosical ideas, or something of the sort? You know what I mean\u2014'\n\nHe was too accustomed to her little confused alarms to explain them away seriously as a rule, or to correct her verbal inaccuracies, but to-night he felt she needed careful, tender treatment. He soothed her as best he could.\n\n'But there's no harm in that, even if he is,' he answered quietly. 'Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear.' There was no trace of impatience in his voice.\n\n'That's what I mean,' she replied, the texts he dreaded rising in an unuttered crowd behind the words. 'He's one of those things that we are warned would come\u2014one of those-Latter-Day things.' For her mind still bristled with the bogeys of Antichrist and Prophecy, and she had only escaped the Number of the Beast, as it were, by the skin of her teeth. The Pope drew most of her fire usually, because she could understand him; the target was plain and she could shoot. But this tree-and-forest business was so vague and horrible. It terrified her. 'He makes me think,' she went on, 'of Principalities and Powers in high places, and of things that walk in darkness. I did not like the way he spoke of trees getting alive in the night, and all that; it made me think of wolves in sheep's clothing. And when I saw that awful thing in the sky above the lawn\u2014'\n\nBut he interrupted her at once, for that was something he had decided it was best to leave unmentioned. Certainly it was better not discussed.\n\n'He only meant, I think, Sophie,' he put in gravely, yet with a little smile, 'that trees may have a measure of conscious life\u2014rather a nice idea on the whole, surely,\u2014something like that bit we read in the Times the other night, you remember\u2014and that a big forest may possess a sort of Collective Personality. Remember, he's an artist, and poetical.'\n\n'It's dangerous,' she said emphatically. 'I feel it's playing with fire, unwise, unsafe\u2014'\n\n'Yet all to the glory of God,' he urged gently. 'We must not shut our ears and eyes to knowledge\u2014of any kind, must we?'\n\n'With you, David, the wish is always farther than the thought,' she rejoined. For, like the child who thought that ' suffered under Pontius Pilate' was 'suffered under a bunch of violets,' she heard her proverbs phonetically and reproduced them thus. She hoped to convey her warning in the quotation. 'And we must always try the spirits whether they be of God,' she added tentatively.\n\n'Certainly, dear, we can always do that,' he assented, getting into bed.\n\nBut, after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David Bittacy settling down to sleep with an excitement in his blood that was new and bewilderingly delightful, realised that perhaps he had not said quite enough to comfort her. She was lying awake by his side, still frightened. He put his head up in the darkness.\n\n'Sophie,' he said softly, 'you must remember, too, that in any case between us and\u2014and all that sort of thing\u2014there is a great gulf fixed, a gulf that cannot be crossed\u2014er\u2014while we are still in the body.'\n\nAnd hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy was not asleep. She heard the sentence, only she said nothing because she felt her thought was better unexpressed. She was afraid to hear the words in the darkness. The Forest outside was listening and might hear them too\u2014the Forest that was 'roaring further out.'\n\nAnd the thought was this: That gulf, of course, existed, but Sanderson had somehow bridged it.\n\nIt was much later that night when she awoke out of troubled, uneasy dreams and heard a sound that twisted her very nerves with fear. It passed immediately with full waking, for, listen as she might, there was nothing audible but the inarticulate murmur of the night. It was in her dreams she heard it, and the dreams had vanished with it. But the sound was recognisable, for it was that rushing noise that had come across the lawn; only this time closer. Just above her face while she slept had passed this murmur as of rustling branches in the very room, a sound of foliage whispering. 'A going in the tops of the mulberry trees,' ran through her mind. She had dreamed that she lay beneath a spreading tree somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand soft lips of green; and the dream continued for a moment even after waking.\n\nShe sat up in bed and stared about her. The window was open at the top; she saw the stars; the door, she remembered, was locked as usual; the room, of course, was empty. The deep hush of the summer night lay over all, broken only by another sound that now issued from the shadows close beside the bed, a human sound, yet unnatural, a sound that seized the fear with which she had waked and instantly increased it. And, although it was one she recognised as familiar, at first she could not name it. Some seconds certainly passed\u2014and, they were very long ones\u2014before she understood that it was her husband talking in his sleep.\n\nThe direction of the voice confused and puzzled her, moreover, for it was not, as she first supposed, beside her. There was distance in it. The next minute, by the light of the sinking candle flame, she saw his white figure standing out in the middle of the room, half-way towards the window. The candlelight slowly grew. She saw him move then nearer to the window, with arms outstretched. His speech was low and mumbled, the words running together too much to be distinguishable.\n\nAnd she shivered. To her, sleep-talking was uncanny to the point of horror; it was like the talking of the dead, mere parody of a living voice, unnatural.\n\n'David!' she whispered, dreading the sound of her own voice, and half afraid to interrupt him and see his face. She could not bear the sight of the wide-opened eyes. 'David, you're walking in your sleep. Do\u2014come back to bed, dear, please!'\n\nHer whisper seemed so dreadfully loud in the still darkness. At the sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her. His widely-opened eyes stared into her own without recognition; they looked through her into something beyond; it was as though he knew the direction of the sound, yet could not see her. They were shining, she noticed, as the eyes of Sanderson had shone several hours ago; and his face was flushed, distraught. Anxiety was written upon every feature. And, instantly, recognising that the fever was upon him, she forgot her terror temporarily in practical considerations. He came back to bed without waking. She closed his eyelids. Presently he composed himself quietly to sleep, or rather to deeper sleep. She contrived to make him swallow something from the tumbler beside the bed.\n\nThen she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air blow in too fresh and keen. She put the candle where it could not reach him. The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a little, but all through her under-being ran the warnings of a curious alarm. And it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand and pulling the string of the blind with the other, that her husband sat up again in bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly audible. The eyes had opened wide again. He pointed. She stood stock still and listened, her shadow distorted on the blind. He did not come out towards her as at first she feared.\n\nThe whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too, beyond all she had ever known.\n\n'They are roaring in the Forest further out... and I... must go and see.' He stared beyond her as he said it, to the woods. 'They are needing me. They sent for me...' Then his eyes wandering back again to things within the room, he lay down, his purpose suddenly changed. And that change was horrible as well, more horrible, perhaps, because of its revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her.\n\nThe singular phrase chilled her blood; for a moment she was utterly terrified. That tone of the somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked. Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the window-sill, shaking in every limb. She had an awful feeling for a moment that something was coming in to fetch him.\n\n'Not yet, then,' she heard in a much lower voice from the bed, 'but later. It will be better so... I shall go later...'\n\nThe words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her so long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to have brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to think about. They gave it form; they brought it closer; they sent her thoughts to her Deity in a wild, deep prayer for help and guidance. For here was a direct, unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes and claims her husband recognised while he kept them almost wholly to himself.\n\nBy the time she reached his side and knew the comfort of his touch, the eyes had closed again, this time of their own accord, and the head lay calmly back upon the pillows. She gently straightened the bed clothes. She watched him for some minutes, shading the candle carefully with one hand. There was a smile of strangest peace upon the face.\n\nThen, blowing out the candle, she knelt down and prayed before getting back into bed. But no sleep came to her. She lay awake all night thinking, wondering, praying, until at length with the chorus of the birds and the glimmer of the dawn upon the green blind, she fell into a slumber of complete exhaustion.\n\nBut while she slept the wind continued roaring in the Forest further out. The sound came closer\u2014sometimes very close indeed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 430", + "text": "With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away. Mrs. Bittacy soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind. It did not strike her that this change was sudden, for it came about quite naturally. For one thing her husband never spoke of the matter, and for another she remembered how many things in life that had seemed inexplicable and singular at the time turned out later to have been quite commonplace.\n\nMost of it, certainly, she put down to the presence of the artist and to his wild, suggestive talk. With his welcome removal, the world turned ordinary again and safe. The fever, though it lasted as usual a short time only, had not allowed of her husband's getting up to say good-bye, and she had conveyed his regrets and adieux. In the morning Mr. Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough. In his town hat and gloves, as she saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming.\n\n'After all,' she thought as she watched the pony-cart bear him off, 'he's only an artist!' What she had thought he might be otherwise her slim imagination did not venture to disclose. Her change of feeling was wholesome and refreshing. She felt a little ashamed of her behaviour. She gave him a smile\u2014genuine because the relief she felt was genuine\u2014as he bent over her hand and kissed it, but she did not suggest a second visit, and her husband, she noted with satisfaction and relief had said nothing either.\n\nThe little household fell again into the normal and sleepy routine to which it was accustomed. The name of Arthur Sanderson was rarely if ever mentioned. Nor, for her part, did she mention to her husband the incident of his walking in his sleep and the wild words he used. But to forget it was equally impossible. Thus it lay buried deep within her like a centre of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious symptom, waiting to spread at the first favourable opportunity. She prayed against it every night and morning: prayed that she might forget it\u2014that God would keep her husband safe from harm.\n\nFor in spite of much surface foolishness that many might have read as weakness, Mrs. Bittacy had balance, sanity, and a fine deep faith. She was greater than she knew. Her love for her husband and her God were somehow one, an achievement only possible to a single-hearted nobility of soul.\n\nThere followed a summer of great violence and beauty; of beauty, because the refreshing rains at night prolonged the glory of the spring and spread it all across July, keeping the foliage young and sweet; of violence, because the winds that tore about the south of England brushed the whole country into dancing movement. They swept the woods magnificently, and kept them roaring with a perpetual grand voice. Their deepest notes seemed never to leave the sky. They sang and shouted, and torn leaves raced and fluttered through the air long before their usually appointed time. Many a tree, after days of this roaring and dancing, fell exhausted to the ground. The cedar on the lawn gave up two limbs that fell upon successive days, at the same hour too\u2014just before dusk. The wind often makes its most boisterous effort at that time, before it drops with the sun, and these two huge branches lay in dark ruin covering half the lawn. They spread across it and towards the house. They left an ugly gaping space upon the tree, so that the Lebanon looked unfinished, half destroyed, a monster shorn of its old-time comeliness and splendour. Far more of the Forest was now visible than before; it peered through the breach of the broken defences. They could see from the windows of the house now\u2014especially from the drawing-room and bedroom windows\u2014straight out into the glades and depths beyond.\n\nMrs. Bittacy's niece and nephew, who were staying on a visit at the time, enjoyed themselves immensely helping the gardeners carry off the fragments. It took two days to do this, for Mr. Bittacy insisted on the branches being moved entire. He would not allow them to be chopped; also, he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his superintendence the unwieldy masses were dragged to the edge of the garden and arranged upon the frontier line between the Forest and the lawn. The children were delighted with the scheme. They entered into it with enthusiasm. At all costs this defence against the inroads of the Forest must be made secure. They caught their uncle's earnestness, felt even something of a hidden motive that he had, and the visit, usually rather dreaded, became the visit of their lives instead. It was Aunt Sophia this time who seemed discouraging and dull.\n\n'She's got so old and funny,' opined Stephen.\n\nBut Alice, who felt in the silent displeasure of her aunt some secret thing that half alarmed her, said:\n\n'I think she's afraid of the woods. She never comes into them with us, you see.'\n\n'All the more reason then for making this wall impreg\u2014all fat and thick and solid,' he concluded, unable to manage the longer word. 'Then nothing\u2014simply nothing\u2014can get through. Can't it, Uncle David?'\n\nAnd Mr. Bittacy, jacket discarded and working in his speckled waistcoat, went puffing to their aid, arranging the massive limb of the cedar like a hedge.\n\n'Come on,' he said,' whatever happens, you know, we must finish before it's dark. Already the wind is roaring in the Forest further out.' And Alice caught the phrase and instantly echoed it. 'Stevie,' she cried below her breath, 'look sharp, you lazy lump. Didn't you hear what Uncle David said? It'll come in and catch us before we've done!'\n\nThey worked like Trojans, and, sitting beneath the wistaria tree that climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Bittacy with her knitting watched them, calling from time to time insignificant messages of counsel and advice. The messages passed, of course, unheeded. Mostly, indeed, they were unheard, for the workers were too absorbed. She warned her husband not to get too hot, Alice not to tear her dress, Stephen not to strain his back with pulling. Her mind hovered between the homoeopathic medicine-chest upstairs and her anxiety to see the business finished.\n\nFor this breaking up of the cedar had stirred again her slumbering alarms. It revived memories of the visit of Mr. Sanderson that had been sinking into oblivion; she recalled his queer and odious way of talking, and many things she hoped forgotten drew their heads up from that subconscious region to which all forgetting is impossible. They looked at her and nodded. They were full of life; they had no intention of being pushed aside and buried permanently. 'Now look!' they whispered, 'didn't we tell you so?' They had been merely waiting the right moment to assert their presence. And all her former vague distress crept over her. Anxiety, uneasiness returned. That dreadful sinking of the heart came too.\n\nThis incident of the cedar's breaking up was actually so unimportant, and yet her husband's attitude towards it made it so significant. There was nothing that he said in particular, or did, or left undone that frightened her, but his general air of earnestness seemed so unwarranted. She felt that he deemed the thing important. He was so exercised about it. This evidence of sudden concern and interest, buried all the summer from her sight and knowledge, she realised now had been buried purposely; he had kept it intentionally concealed. Deeply submerged in him there ran this tide of other thoughts, desires, hopes. What were they? Whither did they lead? The accident to the tree betrayed it most unpleasantly; and, doubtless, more than he was aware.\n\nShe watched his grave and serious face as he worked there with the children, and as she watched she felt afraid. It vexed her that the children worked so eagerly. They unconsciously supported him. The thing she feared she would not even name. But it was waiting.\n\nMoreover, as far as her puzzled mind could deal with a dread so vague and incoherent, the collapse of the cedar somehow brought it nearer. The fact that, all so ill-explained and formless, the thing yet lay in her consciousness, out of reach but moving and alive, filled her with a kind of puzzled, dreadful wonder. Its presence was so very real, its power so gripping, its partial concealment so abominable. Then, out of the dim confusion, she grasped one thought and saw it stand quite clear before her eyes. She found difficulty in clothing it in words, but its meaning perhaps was this: That cedar stood in their life for something friendly; its downfall meant disaster; a sense of some protective influence about the cottage, and about her husband in particular, was thereby weakened.\n\n'Why do you fear the big winds so?' he had asked her several days before, after a particularly boisterous day; and the answer she gave surprised her while she gave it. One of those heads poked up unconsciously, and let slip the truth:\n\n'Because, David, I feel they\u2014bring the Forest with them,' she faltered. 'They blow something from the trees\u2014into the mind\u2014into the house.'\n\nHe looked at her keenly for a moment.\n\n'That must be why I love them then,' he answered. 'They blow the souls of the trees about the sky like clouds.'\n\nThe conversation dropped. She had never heard him talk in quite that way before.\n\nAnd another time, when he had coaxed her to go with him down one of the nearer glades, she asked why he took the small hand-axe with him, and what he wanted it for.\n\n'To cut the ivy that clings to the trunks and takes their life away,' he said.\n\n'But can't the verdurers do that?' she asked. 'That's what they're paid for, isn't it?'\n\nWhereupon he explained that ivy was a parasite the trees knew not how to fight alone, and that the verdurers were careless and did not do it thoroughly. They gave a chop here and there, leaving the tree to do the rest for itself if it could.\n\n'Besides, I like to do it for them. I love to help them and protect,' he added, the foliage rustling all about his quiet words as they went.\n\nAnd these stray remarks, as his attitude towards the broken cedar, betrayed this curious, subtle change that was going forward in his personality. Slowly and surely all the summer it had increased.\n\nIt was growing\u2014the thought startled her horribly\u2014just as a tree grows, the outer evidence from day to day so slight as to be unnoticeable, yet the rising tide so deep and irresistible. The alteration spread all through and over him, was in both mind and actions, sometimes almost in his face as well. Occasionally, thus, it stood up straight outside himself and frightened her. His life was somehow becoming linked so intimately with trees, and with all that trees signified. His interests became more and more their interests, his activity combined with theirs, his thoughts and feelings theirs, his purpose, hope, desire, his fate His fate! The darkness of some vague, enormous terror dropped its shadow on her when she thought of it. Some instinct in her heart she dreaded infinitely more than death\u2014for death meant sweet translation for his soul\u2014came gradually to associate the thought of him with the thought of trees, in particular with these Forest trees. Sometimes, before she could face the thing, argue it away, or pray it into silence, she found the thought of him running swiftly through her mind like a thought of the Forest itself, the two most intimately linked and joined together, each a part and complement of the other, one being.\n\nThe idea was too dim for her to see it face to face. Its mere possibility dissolved the instant she focussed it to get the truth behind it. It was too utterly elusive, mad, protaean. Under the attack of even a minute's concentration the very meaning of it vanished, melted away. The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever find, beyond the touch of definite thought. Her mind was unable to grapple with it. But, while it vanished, the trail of its approach and disappearance flickered a moment before her shaking vision. The horror certainly remained.\n\nReduced to the simple human statement that her temperament sought instinctively it stood perhaps at this: Her husband loved her, and he loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts of him she did not know. She loved her God and him. He loved the trees and her.\n\nThus, in guise of some faint, distressing compromise, the matter shaped itself for her perplexed mind in the terms of conflict. A silent, hidden battle raged, but as yet raged far away. The breaking of the cedar was a visible outward fragment of a distant and mysterious encounter that was coming daily closer to them both. The wind, instead of roaring in the Forest further out, now came nearer, booming in fitful gusts about its edge and frontiers.\n\nMeanwhile the summer dimmed. The autumn winds went sighing through the woods; leaves turned to golden red, and the evenings were drawing in with cosy shadows before the first sign of anything seriously untoward made its appearance. It came then with a flat, decided kind of violence that indicated mature preparation beforehand. It was not impulsive nor ill-considered. In a fashion it seemed expected, and indeed inevitable. For within a fortnight of their annual change to the little village of Seillans above St. Raphael\u2014a change so regular for the past ten years that it was not even discussed between them\u2014David Bittacy abruptly refused to go-Thompson had laid the tea-table, prepared the spirit lamp beneath the urn, pulled down the blinds in that swift and silent way she had, and left the room. The lamps were still unlit. The fire-light shone on the chintz armchairs, and Boxer lay asleep on the black horse-hair rug. Upon the walls the gilt picture frames gleamed faintly, the pictures themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittacy had warmed the teapot and was in the act of pouring the water in to heat the cups when her husband, looking up from his chair across the hearth, made the abrupt announcement:\n\n'My dear,' he said, as though following a train of thought of which she only heard this final phrase, 'it's really quite impossible for me to go.'\n\nAnd so abrupt, inconsequent, it sounded that she at first misunderstood. She thought he meant go out into the garden or the woods. But her heart leaped all the same. The tone of his voice was ominous.\n\n'Of course not,' she answered, 'it would be most unwise. Why should you?' She referred to the mist that always spread on autumn nights upon the lawn; but before she finished the sentence she knew that he referred to something else. And her heart then gave its second horrible leap.\n\n'David! You mean abroad?' she gasped.\n\n'I mean abroad, dear, yes.'\n\nIt reminded her of the tone he used when saying good-bye years ago before one of those jungle expeditions she dreaded. His voice then was so serious, so final. It was serious and final now. For several moments she could think of nothing to say. She busied herself with the teapot. She had filled one cup with hot water till it overflowed, and she emptied it slowly into the slop-basin, trying with all her might not to let him see the trembling of her hand. The firelight and the dimness of the room both helped her. But in any case he would hardly have noticed it. His thoughts were far away..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 431", + "text": "Mrs. Bittacy had never liked their present home. She preferred a flat, more open country that left approaches clear. She liked to see things coming. This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and pleasant place to settle down in. The sea-coast, with treeless downs behind and a clear horizon in front, as at Eastbourne, say, was her ideal of a proper home.\n\nIt was curious, this instinctive aversion she felt to being shut in\u2014by trees especially; a kind of claustrophobia almost; probably due, as has been said, to the days in India when the trees took her husband off and surrounded him with dangers. In those weeks of solitude the feeling had matured. She had fought it in her fashion, but never conquered it. Apparently routed, it had a way of creeping back in other forms. In this particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had passed. They laughed in her face.\n\nShe never lost knowledge of the fact that the leagues of forest lay about their cottage like a mighty wall, a crowding, watching, listening presence that shut them in from freedom and escape. Far from morbid naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when it went\u2014went only to watch her from another point of view. It was in abeyance\u2014hidden round the corner.\n\nThe Forest never let her go completely. It was ever ready to encroach. All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way\u2014towards their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and merge them in itself. Its great, deep-breathing soul resented the mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. And every wind that blew its thundering message over the huge sounding-board of the million, shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had angered its great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.\n\nAll this she never framed in words; the subtleties of language lay far beyond her reach. But instinctively she felt it; and more besides. It troubled her profoundly. Chiefly, moreover, for her husband. Merely for herself, the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David's peculiar interest in the trees that gave the special invitation.\n\nJealousy, then, in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this aversion and dislike, for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to. Her husband's passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires, hopes. All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and guardianship of trees. He knew them, understood their secret life and nature, 'managed' them intuitively as other men 'managed' dogs and horses. He could not live for long away from them without a strange, acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and fed and soothed his deepest moods. Trees influenced the sources of his life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him. Cut off from them he languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may pine in the flat monotony of the plains.\n\nThis she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances for. She had yielded gently, even sweetly, to his choice of their English home; for in the little island there is nothing that suggests the woods of wilder countries so nearly as the New Forest. It has the genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendour, the loneliness, and here and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as Bittacy of the Department knew them.\n\nIn a single detail only had he yielded to her wishes. He consented to a cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it. And for a dozen years now they had dwelt in peace and happiness at the lips of this great spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees.\n\nOnly with the last two years or so\u2014with his own increasing age, and physical decline perhaps\u2014had come this marked growth of passionate interest in the welfare of the Forest. She had watched it grow, at first had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as sincerity permitted, then had argued mildly, and finally come to realise that its treatment lay altogether beyond her powers, and so had come to fear it with all her heart.\n\nThe six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each regarded very differently of course. For her husband it meant a painful exile that did his health no good; he yearned for his trees\u2014the sight and sound and smell of them; but for herself it meant release from a haunting dread\u2014escape. To renounce those six weeks by the sea on the sunny, shining coast of France, was almost more than this little woman, even with her unselfishness, could face.\n\nAfter the first shock of the announcement, she reflected as deeply as her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret\u2014and made up her mind. Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to renouncement. The discipline would certainly be severe\u2014she did not dream at the moment how severe!\u2014but this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it, too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed was of the martyr order. Her husband should never know the cost. In all but this one passion his unselfishness was ever as great as her own. The love she had borne him all these years, like the love she bore her anthropomorphic deity, was deep and real. She loved to suffer for them both. Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular. It did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection. Something higher than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the beginning.\n\n'I feel, Sophia, it would be really more than I could manage,' he said slowly, gazing into the fire over the tops of his stretched-out muddy boots.\n\n'My duty and my happiness lie here with the Forest and with you. My life is deeply rooted in this place. Something I can't define connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make me ill\u2014might even kill me. My hold on life would weaken; here is my source of supply. I cannot explain it better than that.' He looked up steadily into her face across the table so that she saw the gravity of his expression and the shining of his steady eyes.\n\n'David, you feel it as strongly as that!' she said, forgetting the tea things altogether.\n\n'Yes,' he replied, 'I do. And it's not of the body only; I feel it in my soul.'\n\nThe reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow-covered room like an actual Presence and stood beside them. It came not by the windows or the door, but it filled the entire space between the walls and ceiling. It took the heat from the fire before her face. She felt suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened. She almost felt the rush of foliage in the wind. It stood between them.\n\n'There are things\u2014some things,' she faltered, 4 we are not intended to know, I think.' The words expressed her general attitude to life, not alone to this particular incident.\n\nAnd after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as though he had not heard it\u2014\n\n'I cannot explain it better than that, you see,' his grave voice answered. 'There is this deep, tremendous link,\u2014some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy and\u2014alive. If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able to\u2014forgive.' His tone grew tender, gentle, soft.\n\n'My selfishness, I know, must seem quite unforgivable. I cannot help it somehow; these trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me live, and if I go.'\n\nThere was a little sound of collapse in his voice. He stopped abruptly, and sank back in his chair. And, at that, a distinct lump came up into her throat which she had great difficulty in managing while she went over and put her arms about him.\n\n'My dear,' she murmured, 'God will direct. We will accept His guidance. He has always shown the way before.'\n\n'My selfishness afflicts me' he began, but she would not let him finish.\n\n'David, He will direct. Nothing shall harm you. You've never once been selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things. The way will open that is best for you\u2014for both of us.' She kissed him; she would not let him speak; her heart was in her throat, and she felt for him far more than for herself.\n\nAnd then he had suggested that she should go alone perhaps for a shorter time, and stay in her brother's villa with the children, Alice and Stephen. It was always open to her as she well knew.\n\n'You need the change,' he said, when the lamps had been lit and the servant had gone out again; 'you need it as much as I dread it. I could manage somehow till you returned, and should feel happier that way if you went. I cannot leave this Forest that I love so well. I even feel, Sophie dear'\u2014he sat up straight and faced her as he half whispered it\u2014'that I can never leave it again. My life and happiness lie here together.'\n\nAnd even while scorning the idea that she could leave him alone with the Influence of the Forest all about him to have its unimpeded way, she felt the pangs of that subtle jealousy bite keen and close. He loved the Forest better than herself, for he placed it first. Behind the words, moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy. The terror Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her very eyes. For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment, conveyed the unutterable implication that while he could not spare the trees, they equally could not spare him. The vividness with which he managed to conceal and yet betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed the border between presentiment and warning into positive alarm.\n\nHe clearly felt that the trees would miss him\u2014the trees he tended, guarded, watched over, loved.\n\n'David, I shall stay here with you. I think you need me really,\u2014don't you?' Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.\n\n'Now more than ever, dear. God bless you for your sweet unselfishness. And your sacrifice/ he added, 'is all the greater because you cannot understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay.'\n\n'Perhaps in the spring instead ' she said, with a tremor in the voice.\n\n'In the spring\u2014perhaps,' he answered gently, almost beneath his breath. 'For they will not need me then. All the world can love them in the spring. It's in the winter that they're lonely and neglected. I wish to stay with them particularly then. I even feel I ought to\u2014and I must.'\n\nAnd in this way, without further speech, the decision was made. Mrs. Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions. Yet she could not bring herself to show more sympathy than was necessary. She felt, for one thing, that if she did, it might lead him to speak freely, and to tell her things she could not possibly bear to know. And she dared not take the risk of that." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 432", + "text": "This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and marked at the same time the line between her husband's negative and aggressive state. She almost felt she had done wrong to yield; he grew so bold, concealment all discarded. He went, that is, quite openly to the woods, forgetting all his duties, all his former occupations. He even sought to coax her to go with him. The hidden thing blazed out without disguise. And, while she trembled at his energy, she admired the virile passion he displayed. Her jealousy had long ago retired before her fear, accepting the second place. Her one desire now was to protect. The wife turned wholly mother.\n\nHe said so little, but\u2014he hated to come in. From morning to night he wandered in the Forest; often he went out after dinner; his mind was charged with trees\u2014their foliage, growth, development; their wonder, beauty, strength; their loneliness in isolation, their power in a herded mass. He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the danger from the boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness, and the soft, moist tenderness that a south wind left upon their thinning boughs. He spoke all day of their sensations: how they drank the fading sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the kiss of stars. The dew could bring them half the passion of the night, but frost sent them plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes of a later coming softness in their roots. They nursed the life they carried\u2014insects, larvae, chrysalis\u2014and when the skies above them melted, he spoke of them standing \"motionless in an ecstasy of rain,\" or in the noon of sunshine 'self-poised upon their prodigy of shade.'\n\nAnd once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice, and heard him\u2014wide awake, not talking in his sleep\u2014but talking towards the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon:\n\n\u2003O art thou sighing for Lebanon\n\n\u2003In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East?\n\n\u2003Sighing for Lebanon,\n\nDark cedar; and, when, half charmed, half terrified, she turned and called to him by name, he merely said\u2014\n\n'My dear, I felt the loneliness\u2014suddenly realised it\u2014the alien desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England when all her Eastern brothers call to her in sleep.' And the answer seemed so queer, so' un-evangelical,' that she waited in silence till he slept again. The poetry passed her by. It seemed unnecessary and out of place. It made her ache with suspicion, fear, jealousy.\n\nThe fear, however, seemed somehow all lapped up and banished soon afterwards by her unwilling admiration of the rushing splendour of her husband's state. Her anxiety, at any rate, shifted from the religious to the medical. She thought he might be losing his steadiness of mind a little. How often in her prayers she offered thanks for the guidance that had made her stay with him to help and watch is impossible to say. It certainly was twice a day.\n\nShe even went so far once, when Mr. Mortimer, the vicar, called, and brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor\u2014as to tell the professional man privately some symptoms of her husband's queerness. And his answer that there was ' nothing he could prescribe for' added not a little to her sense of unholy bewilderment. No doubt Sir James had never been ' consulted ' under such unorthodox conditions before. His sense of what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as a skilled instrument that might help the race.\n\n'No fever, you think?' she asked insistently with hurry, determined to get something from him.\n\n'Nothing that I can deal with, as I told you, Madam,' replied the offended allopathic Knight.\n\nEvidently he did not care about being invited to examine patients in this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee most problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse; to know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was most unusual, in abominable taste besides. Of course it was. But the drowning woman seized the only straw she could.\n\nFor now the aggressive attitude of her husband overcame her to the point where she found it difficult even to question him. Yet in the house he was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her sacrifice as easy as possible.\n\n'David, you really are unwise to go out now. The night is damp and very chilly. The ground is soaked in dew. You'll catch your death of cold.'\n\nHis face lightened. 'Won't you come with me, dear,\u2014just for once? I'm only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beech that stands so lonely by itself.'\n\nShe had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had passed that evil group of hollies where the gipsies camped. Nothing else would grow there, but the hollies throve upon the stony soil.\n\n'David, the beech is all right and safe.' She had learned his phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love. 'There's no wind to-night.'\n\n'But it's rising,' he answered, 'rising in the east. I heard it in the bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out when the wind's upon them from the east.'\n\nShe sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as she heard him say it. For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar, intimate way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten tight against her very skin and flesh. She shivered. How could he possibly know such things?\n\nYet, in all else, and in the relations of his daily life, he was sane and reasonable, loving, kind and tender. It was only on the subject of the trees he seemed unhinged and queer. Most curiously it seemed that, since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different fashion, his departure from the normal had increased. Why else did he watch them as a man might watch a sickly child? Why did he linger especially in the dusk to catch their 'mood of night' as he called it? Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the wind appeared to rise?\n\nAs she put it so frequently now to herself\u2014How could he possibly know such things?\n\nHe went. As she closed the front door after him she heard the distant roaring in the Forest...\n\nAnd then it suddenly struck her: How could she know them too?\n\nIt dropped upon her like a blow that she felt at once all over, upon body, heart and mind. The discovery rushed out from its ambush to overwhelm. The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her faculties. But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived, and her being rose into aggressive opposition. A wild yet calculated courage like that which animates the leaders of splendid forlorn hopes flamed in her little person\u2014flamed grandly, and invincible. While knowing herself insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power at her back which moves the worlds. The faith that filled her was the weapon in her hands, and the right by which she claimed it; but the spirit of utter, selfless sacrifice that characterised her life was the means by which she mastered its immediate use. For a kind of white and faultless intuition guided her to the attack. Behind her stood her Bible and her God.\n\nHow so magnificent a divination came to her at all may well be a matter for astonishment, though some clue of explanation lies, perhaps, in the very simpleness of her nature. At any rate, she saw quite clearly certain things; saw them in moments only\u2014after prayer, in the still silence of the night, or when left alone those long hours in the house with her knitting and her thoughts\u2014and the guidance which then flashed into her remained, even after the manner of its coming was forgotten.\n\nThey came to her, these things she saw, formless, wordless; she could not put them into any kind of language; but by the very fact of being uncaught in sentences they retained their original clear vigour.\n\nHours of patient waiting brought the first, and the others followed easily afterwards, by degrees, on subsequent days, a little and a little. Her husband had been gone since early morning, and had taken his luncheon with him. She was sitting by the tea things, the cups and teapot warmed, the muffins in the fender keeping hot, all ready for his return, when she realised quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts\u2014was enormous as the sea. It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were, the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle. Out yonder\u2014in the Forest further out\u2014the thing that was ever roaring at the centre was dreadfully increasing.\n\nThe sense of definite battle, too\u2014battle between herself and the Forest for his soul\u2014came with it. Its presentment was as clear as though Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the cottage was surrounded. 'Please, ma'am, there are trees come up about the house,' she might have suddenly announced. And equally might have heard her own answer: 'It's all right, Thompson. The main body is still far away.'\n\nImmediately upon its heels, then, came another truth, with a close reality that shocked her. She saw that jealousy was not confined to the human and animal world alone, but ran through all creation. The Vegetable Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest. Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the window\u2014standing there in the silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn\u2014this Forest understood it equally. The remorseless, branching power that sought to keep exclusively for itself the thing it loved and needed, spread like a running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots. In humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some blind tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the ice. Their number was a host with endless reinforcements, and once it realised its passion was returned the power increased... Her husband loved the trees... They had become aware of it... They would take him from her in the end...\n\nThen, while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the front door, she saw a third thing clearly;\u2014realised the widening of the gap between herself and him. This other love had made it. All these weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life to stay by his side and help him, he had been slowly, surely\u2014drawing away. The estrangement was here and now\u2014a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing; there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the empty distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed his face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving while she watched\u2014moving away from her.\n\nThey had their tea in silence then. She asked no questions, he volunteered no information of his day. The heart was big within her, and the terrible loneliness of age spread through her like a rising icy mist. She watched him, filling all his wants. His hair was untidy and his boots were caked with blackish mud. He moved with a restless, swaying motion that somehow blanched her cheek and sent a miserable shivering down her back. It reminded her of trees. His eyes were very bright.\n\nHe brought in with him an odour of the earth and forest that seemed to choke her and make it difficult to breathe; and\u2014what she noticed with a climax of almost uncontrollable alarm\u2014upon his face beneath the lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think of moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows. It was his new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and in which she had no part.\n\nIn his coat was a spray of faded yellow beech leaves. 'I brought this from the Forest for you,' he said, with all the air that belonged to his little acts of devotion long ago. And she took the spray of leaves mechanically with a smile and a murmured ' thank you, dear,' as though he had unknowingly put into her hands the weapon for her own destruction and she had accepted it.\n\nAnd when the tea was over and he left the room, he did not go to his study, or to change his clothes. She heard the front door softly shut behind him as he again went out towards the Forest.\n\nA moment later she was in her room upstairs, kneeling beside the bed\u2014the side he slept on\u2014and praying wildly through a flood of tears that God would save and keep him to her. Wind brushed the window panes behind her while she knelt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 433", + "text": "One sunny November morning, when the strain had reached a pitch that made repression almost unmanageable, she came to an impulsive decision, and obeyed it. Her husband had again gone out with luncheon for the day. She took adventure in her hands and followed him. The power of seeing-clear was strong upon her, forcing her up to some unnatural level of understanding. To stay indoors and wait inactive for his return seemed suddenly impossible. She meant to know what he knew, feel what he felt, put herself in his place. She would dare the fascination of the Forest\u2014share it with him. It was greatly daring; but it would give her greater understanding how to help and save him and therefore greater Power. She went upstairs a moment first to pray.\n\nIn a thick, warm skirt, and wearing heavy boots\u2014those walking boots she used with him upon the mountains about Seillans\u2014she left the cottage by the back way and turned towards the Forest. She could not actually follow him, for he had started off an hour before and she knew not exactly his direction. What was so urgent in her was the wish to be with him in the woods, to walk beneath the leafless branches just as he did: to be there when he was there, even though not together. For it had come to her that she might thus share with him for once this horrible mighty life and breathing of the trees he loved. In winter, he had said, they needed him particularly; and winter now was coming. Her love must bring her something of what he felt himself\u2014the huge attraction, the suction and the pull of all the trees. Thus, in some vicarious fashion, she might share, though unknown to himself, this very thing that' was taking him away from her. She might thus even lessen its attack upon himself.\n\nThe impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected.\n\nThe air was very still, the sky a cold pale blue, but cloudless. The entire Forest stood silent, at attention. It knew perfectly well that she had come. It knew the moment when she entered; watched and followed her; and behind her something dropped without a sound and shut her in. Her feet upon the glades of mossy grass fell silently, as the oaks and beeches shifted past in rows and took up their positions at her back. It was not pleasant, this way they grew so dense behind her the instant she had passed. She realised that they gathered in an evergrowing army, massed, herded, trooped, between her and the cottage, shutting off escape. They let her pass so easily, but to get out again she would know them differently\u2014thick, crowded, branches all drawn and hostile. Already their increasing numbers bewildered her. In front, they looked so sparse and scattered, with open spaces where the sunshine fell; but when she turned it seemed they stood so close together, a serried army, darkening the sunlight.\n\nThey blocked the day, collected all the shadows, stood with their leafless and forbidding rampart like the night. They swallowed down into themselves the very glade by which she came. For when she glanced behind her\u2014rarely\u2014the way she had come was shadowy and lost.\n\nYet the morning sparkled overhead, and a glance of excitement ran quivering through the entire day. It was what she always knew as 'children's weather,' so clear and harmless, without a sign of danger, nothing ominous to threaten or alarm. Steadfast in her purpose, looking back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittacy marched slowly and deliberately into the heart of the silent woods, deeper, ever deeper...\n\nAnd then, abruptly, in an open space where the sunshine fell unhindered, she stopped. It was one of the breathing-places of the forest. Dead, withered bracken lay in patches of unsightly grey. There were bits of heather too. All round the trees stood looking on\u2014oak, beech, holly, ash, pine, larch, with here and there small groups of juniper. On the lips of this breathing-space of the woods she stopped to rest, disobeying her instinct for the first time. For the other instinct in her was to go on. She did not really want to rest.\n\nThis was the little act that brought it to her\u2014the wireless message from a vast Emitter.\n\n'I've been stopped,' she thought to herself with a horrid qualm.\n\nShe looked about her in this quiet, ancient place. Nothing stirred. There was no life nor sign of life; no birds sang; no rabbits scuttled off at her approach. The stillness was bewildering, and gravity hung down upon it like a heavy curtain. It hushed the heart in her. Could this be part of what her husband felt\u2014this sense of thick entanglement with stems, boughs, roots, and foliage?\n\n'This has always been as it is now,' she thought, yet not knowing why she thought it. 'Ever since the Forest grew it has been still and secret here. It has never changed.' The curtain of silence drew closer while she said it, thickening round her. 'For a thousand years\u2014I'm here with a thousand years. And behind this place stand all the forests of the world!'\n\nSo foreign to her temperament were such thoughts, and so alien to all she had been taught to look for in Nature, that she strove against them. She made an effort to oppose. But they clung and haunted just the same; they refused to be dispersed. The curtain hung dense and heavy as though its texture thickened. The air with difficulty came through.\n\nAnd then she thought that curtain stirred. There was movement somewhere. That obscure dim thing which ever broods behind the visible appearances of trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and stared about her, listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague, faint alteration spread over them, at first so slight she scarcely would admit it, then growing steadily, though still obscurely, outwards. 'They tremble and are changed,' flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They had turned in her direction. That was it. They saw her.\n\nIn this way the change expressed itself in her groping, terrified thought. Till now it had been otherwise: she had looked at them from her own point of view; now they looked at her from theirs. They stared her in the face and eyes; they stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they watched her. Hitherto in life she had watched them variously, in superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested. Now they read into her the things they actually were, and not merely another's interpretation of them.\n\nThey seemed in their motionless silence there instinct with life, a life, moreover, that breathed about her a species of terrible soft enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to the brain. The Forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In this secluded breathing-spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad, vast sight upon the intruder. They shouted at her in the silence. For she wanted to look back at them, but it was like staring at a crowd, and her glance merely shifted from one tree to another, hurriedly, finding in none the one she sought. They saw her so easily, each and all. The rows that stood behind her also stared. But she could not return the gaze. Her husband, she realised, could. And their steady stare shocked her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so much of her: she saw of them\u2014so little.\n\nHer efforts to return their gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground; and then she closed them altogether. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they would go.\n\nBut the sight of the trees came even into that inner darkness behind the fastened lids, for there was no escaping it. Outside, in the light, she still knew that the leaves of the hollies glittered smoothly, that the dead foliage of the oaks hung crisp in the air above her, that the needles of the little junipers were pointing all one way. The spread perception of the Forest was focussed on herself, and no mere shutting of the eyes could hide its scattered yet concentrated stare\u2014the all-inclusive vision of great woods.\n\nThere was no wind, yet here and there a single leaf hanging by its dried-up stalk shook all alone with great rapidity\u2014rattling. It was the sentry drawing attention to her presence. And then, again, as once long weeks before, she felt their Being as a tide about her. The tide had turned. That memory of her childhood sands came back, when the nurse said, 'The tide has turned now; we must go in,' and she saw the mass of piled-up waters, green and heaped to the horizon, and realised that it was slowly coming in. The gigantic mass of it, too vast for hurry, loaded with massive purpose, she used to feel, was moving towards herself. The fluid body of the sea was creeping along beneath the sky to the very spot upon the yellow sands where she stood and played. The sight and thought of it had always overwhelmed her with a sense of awe\u2014as though her puny self were the object of the whole sea's advance. 'The tide has turned; we had better now go in.'\n\nThis was happening now about her\u2014the same thing was happening in the woods\u2014slow, sure, and steady, and its motion as little discernible as the sea's. The tide had turned. The small human presence that had ventured among its green and mountainous depths, moreover, was its objective.\n\nThat all was clear within her while she sat and waited with tight-shut lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization of something more. The presence that it sought was after all not hers. It was the presence of some one other than herself. And then she understood. Her eyes had opened with a click, it seemed; but the sound, in reality, was outside herself. Across the clearing where the sunshine lay so calm and still, she saw the figure of her husband moving among the trees\u2014a man, like a tree, walking.\n\nWith hands behind his back, and head uplifted, he moved quite slowly, as though absorbed in his own thoughts. Hardly fifty paces separated them, but he had no inkling of her presence there so near. With mind intent and senses all turned inwards, he marched past her like a figure in a dream, and like a figure in a dream she saw him go. Love, yearning, pity rose in a storm within her, but as in nightmare she found no words or movement possible. She sat and watched him go\u2014go from her\u2014go into the deeper reaches of the green enveloping woods. Desire to save, to bid him stop and turn, ran in a passion through her being, but there was nothing she could do. She saw him go away from her, go of his own accord and willingly beyond her; she saw the branches drop about his steps and hide him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The trees covered him. The tide just took him, all unresisting and content to go. Upon the bosom of the green soft sea he floated away beyond her reach of vision. Her eyes could follow him no longer. He was gone.\n\nAnd then for the first time she realised, even at that distance, that the look upon his face was one of peace and happiness\u2014rapt, and caught away in joy, a look of youth. That expression now he never showed to her. But she had known it. Years ago, in the early days of their married life, she had seen it on his face. Now it no longer obeyed the summons of her presence and her love. The woods alone could call it forth; it answered to the trees; the Forest had taken every part of him\u2014from her\u2014his very heart and soul...\n\nHer sight that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory now came back to outer things again. She looked about her, and her love, returning empty-handed and unsatisfied, left her open to the invading of the bleakest terror she had ever known. That such things could be real and happen found her helpless utterly. Terror invaded the quietest corners of her heart, that had never yet known quailing. She could not\u2014for moments at any rate\u2014reach either her Bible or her God. Desolate in an empty world of fear she sat with eyes too dry and hot for tears, yet with a coldness as of ice upon her very flesh. She stared, unseeing, about her. That horror which stalks in the stillness of the noonday, when the glare of an artificial sunshine lights up the motionless trees, moved all about her. In front and behind she was aware of it. Beyond, this stealthy silence, just within the edge of it, the things of another world were passing. But she could not know them. Her husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe, yes, but for her they were out of reach. She might not share with him the very least of them. It seemed that behind and through the glare of this wintry noonday in the heart of the woods there brooded another universe of life and passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness hid it; but he moved with it all and understood. His love interpreted it.\n\nShe rose to her feet, tottered feebly, and collapsed again upon the moss. Yet for herself she felt no terror; no little personal fear could touch her whose anguish and deep longing streamed all out to him whom she so bravely loved. In this time of utter self-forgetfulness, when she realised that the battle was hopeless, thinking she had lost even her God, she found Him again quite close beside her like a little Presence in this terrible heart of the hostile Forest. But at first she did not recognise that He was there; she did not know Him in that strangely unacceptable guise. For He stood so very close, so very intimate, so very sweet and comforting, and yet so hard to understand\u2014as Resignation.\n\nOnce more she struggled to her feet, and this time turned successfully and slowly made her way along the mossy glade by which she came. And at first she marvelled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which she found the path. For a moment only, because almost at once she saw the truth. The trees were glad that she should go. They helped her on her way. The Forest did not want her.\n\nThe tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.\n\nAnd so, in another of those flashes of clear-vision that of late had lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole terrible thing complete.\n\nTill now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her\u2014to merge his life in theirs\u2014even to kill him in some mysterious way. This time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy of animals or humans. They wanted him because they loved him, but they did not want him dead. Full charged with his splendid life and enthusiasm they wanted him. They wanted him\u2014alive.\n\nIt was she who stood in their way, and it was she whom they intended to remove.\n\nThis was what brought the sense of abject helplessness. She stood upon the sands against an entire ocean slowly rolling in against her. For, as all the forces of a human being combine unconsciously to eject a grain of sand that has crept beneath the skin to cause discomfort, so the entire mass of what Sanderson had called the Collective Consciousness of the Forest strove to eject this human atom that stood across the path of its desire. Loving her husband, she had crept beneath its skin. It was her they would eject and take away; it was her they would destroy, not him. Him, whom they loved and needed, they would keep alive. They meant to take him living.\n\nShe reached the house in safety, though she never remembered how she found her way. It was made all simple for her. The branches almost urged her out.\n\nBut behind her, as she left the shadowed precincts, she felt as though some towering Angel of the Woods let fall across the threshold the flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that formed behind her a barrier, green, shimmering, and impassable. Into the Forest she never walked again.\n\nAnd she went about her daily duties with a calm and quietness that was a perpetual astonishment even to herself, for it hardly seemed of this world at all. She talked to her husband when he came in for tea\u2014after dark. Resignation brings a curious large courage\u2014when there is nothing more to lose. The soul takes risks, and dares. Is it a curious short-cut sometimes to the heights?\n\n'David, I went into the Forest, too, this morning; soon after you I went. I saw you there.'\n\n'Wasn't it wonderful?' he answered simply, inclining his head a little. There was no surprise or annoyance in his look; a mild and gentle ennui rather. He asked no real question. She thought of some garden tree the wind attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not want to bend\u2014the mild unwillingness with which it yields. She often saw him this way now, in the terms of trees.\n\n'It was very wonderful indeed, dear, yes,' she replied low, her voice not faltering though indistinct. 'But for me it was too\u2014too strange and big.'\n\nThe passion of tears lay just below the quiet voice all unbetrayed. Somehow she kept them back. There was a pause, and then he added:\n\n'I find it more and more so every day.' His voice passed through the lamp-lit room like a murmur of the wind in branches. The look of youth and happiness she had caught upon his face out there had wholly gone, and an expression of weariness was in its place, as of a man distressed vaguely at finding himself in uncongenial surroundings where he is slightly ill at ease. It was the house he hated\u2014coming back to rooms and walls and furniture. The ceilings and closed windows confined him. Yet, in it, no suggestion that he found her irksome. Her presence seemed of no account at all; indeed, he hardly noticed her. For whole Jong periods he lost her, did not know that she was there. He had no need of her. He lived alone. Each lived alone.\n\nThe outward signs by which she recognised that the awful battle was against her and the terms of surrender accepted were pathetic. She put the medicine-chest away upon the shelf; she gave the orders for his pocket-luncheon before he asked; she went to bed alone and early, leaving the front door unlocked, with milk and bread and butter in the hall beside the lamp\u2014all concessions that she felt impelled to make. For more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods. But she never slept until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards his careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so softly. Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her, she lay awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The thing against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete, a fact accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the Forest.\n\nMoreover, the time for evacuation\u2014her own evacuation\u2014seemed approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the rising tide she used to dread. At the high-water mark she stood waiting calmly\u2014waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn all those terrible days of early winter the encircling Forest watched it come, guiding its silent swell and currents towards her feet. Only she never once gave up her Bible or her praying. This complete resignation, moreover, had somehow brought to her a strange great understanding, and if she could not share her husband's horrible abandonment to powers outside himself, she could, and did, in some half-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings that might make such abandonment\u2014possible, yes, but more than merely possible\u2014in some extraordinary sense not evil.\n\nHitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp halves\u2014spirits good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool, that besides these definite classes, there might be other Powers as well, belonging definitely to neither one nor other. Her thought stopped dead at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her little mind, and, owing to the largeness of her heart, remained there unejected. It even brought a certain solace with it.\n\nThe failure\u2014or unwillingness, as she preferred to state it\u2014of her God to interfere and help, that also she came in a measure to understand. For here, she found it more and more possible to imagine, was perhaps no positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away from humankind, something alien and not commonly recognised. There was a gulf fixed between the two, and Mr. Sanderson had bridged it, by his talk, his explanations, his attitude of mind. Through these her husband had found the way into it. His temperament and natural passion for the woods had prepared the soul in him, and the moment he saw the way to go he took it\u2014the line of least resistance. Life was, of course, open to all, and her husband had the right to choose it where he would. He had chosen it\u2014away from her, away from other men, but not necessarily away from God. This was an enormous concession that she skirted, never really faced; it was too revolv-tionary to face. But its possibility peeped into her bewildered mind. It might delay his progress, or it might advance it. Who could know? And why should God, who ordered all things with such magnificent detail, from the pathway of a sun to the falling of a sparrow, object to his free choice, or interfere to hinder him and stop?\n\nShe came to realise resignation, that is, in another aspect. It gave her comfort, if not peace. She fought against all belittling of her God. It was, perhaps, enough that He\u2014knew.\n\n'You are not alone, dear, in the trees out there?' she ventured one night, as he crept on tiptoe into the room not far from midnight. 'God is with you?'\n\n'Magnificently' was the immediate answer, given with enthusiasm,' for He is everywhere. And I only wish that you'\n\nBut she stuffed the clothes against her ears. That invitation on his lips was more than she could bear to hear. It seemed like asking her to hurry to her own execution. She buried her face among the sheets and blankets, shaking all over like a leaf." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 434", + "text": "And so the thought that she was the one to go remained and grew. It was, perhaps, first sign of that weakening of the mind which indicated the singular manner of her going. For it was her mental opposition, the trees felt, that stood in their way. Once that was overcome, obliterated, her physical presence did not matter. She would be harmless.\n\nHaving accepted defeat, because she had come to feel that his obsession was not actually evil, she accepted at the same time the conditions of an atrocious loneliness. She stood now from her husband farther than from the moon. They had no visitors. Callers were few and far between, and less encouraged than before. The empty dark of winter was before them. Among the neighbours was none in whom, without disloyalty to her husband, she could confide. Mr. Mortimer, had he been single, might have helped her in this desert of solitude that preyed upon her mind, but his wife was there the obstacle; for Mrs. Mortimer wore sandals, believed that nuts were the complete food of man, and indulged in other idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the ' latter signs' which Mrs. Bittacy had been taught to dread as dangerous. She stood most desolately alone.\n\nSolitude, therefore, in which the mind unhindered feeds upon its own delusions, was the assignable cause of her gradual mental disruption and collapse.\n\nWith the definite arrival of the colder weather her husband gave up his rambles after dark; evenings, were spent together over the fire; he read The Times; they even talked about their postponed visit abroad in the coming spring. No restlessness was on him at the change; he seemed content and easy in his mind; spoke little of the trees and woods; enjoyed far better health than if there had been change of scene, and to herself was tender, kind, solicitous over trifles, as in the distant days of their first honeymoon.\n\nBut this deep calm could not deceive her; it meant, she fully understood, that he felt sure of himself, sure of her, and sure of the trees as well. It all lay buried in the depths of him, too secure and deep, too intimately established in his central being to permit of those surface fluctuations which betray disharmony within. His life was hid with trees. Even the fever, so dreaded in the damp of winter, left him free. She now knew why. The fever was due to their efforts to obtain him, his efforts to respond and go\u2014physical results of a fierce unrest he had never understood till Sanderson came with his wicked explanations. Now it was otherwise. The bridge was made. And\u2014he had gone.\n\nAnd she, brave, loyal, and consistent soul, found herself utterly alone, even trying to make his passage easy. It seemed that she stood at the bottom of some huge ravine that opened in her mind, the walls whereof instead of rock were trees that reached enormous to the sky, engulfing her. God alone knew that she was there. He watched, permitted, even perhaps approved. At any rate\u2014He knew.\n\nDuring those quiet evenings in the house, moreover, while they sat over the fire listening to the roaming winds about the house, her husband knew continual access to the world his alien love had furnished for him. Never for a single instant was he cut off from it. She gazed at the newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his cheroot curl up above the edge, noticed the little hole in his evening socks, and listened to the paragraphs he read aloud as of old. But this was all a veil he spread about himself of purpose. Behind it\u2014he escaped. It was the conjurer's trick to divert the sight to unimportant details while the essential thing went forward unobserved. He managed wonderfully; she loved him for the pains he took to spare her distress; but all the while she knew that the body lolling in that armchair before her eyes contained the merest fragment of his actual self. It was little better than a corpse. It was an empty shell. The essential soul of him was out yonder with the Forest\u2014farther out near that ever-roaring heart of it.\n\nAnd, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the slates and chimneys. The winds were always walking on the lawn and gravel paths; steps came and went and came again; some one seemed always talking in the woods, some one was in the building too. She passed them on the stairs, or running soft and muffled, very large and gentle, down the passages and landings after dusk, as though loose fragments of the Day had broken off and stayed there caught among the shadows, trying to get out. They blundered silently all about the house. They waited till she passed, then made a run for it. And her husband always knew. She saw him more than once deliberately avoid them\u2014because she was there. More than once, too, she saw him stand and listen when he thought she was not near, then heard herself the long bounding stride of their approach across the silent garden. Already he had heard them in the windy distance of the night, far, far away. They sped, she well knew, along that glade of mossy turf by which she last came out; it cushioned their tread exactly as it had cushioned her own.\n\nIt seemed to her the trees were always in the house with him, and in their very bedroom. He welcomed them, unaware that she also knew, and trembled.\n\nOne night in their bedroom it caught her unawares. She woke out of deep sleep and it came upon her before she could gather her forces for control.\n\nThe day had been wildly boisterous, but now the wind had dropped; only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon fell in a shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet. Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of mould and fallen leaves. The air was sharp\u2014heavy with odour.\n\nAnd she knew all this the instant that she woke; for it seemed to her that she had been elsewhere\u2014following her husband\u2014as though she had been out! There was no dream at all, merely this definite, haunting certainty. It dived away, lost, buried in the night. She sat upright in bed. She had come back.\n\nThe room shone pale in the moonlight reflected through the windows, for the blinds were up, and she saw her husband's form beside her, motionless in deep sleep. But what caught her unawares was the horrid thing that by this fact of sudden, unexpected waking she had surprised these other things in the room, beside the very bed, gathered close about him while he slept. It was their dreadful boldness\u2014herself of no account as it were\u2014that terrified her into screaming before she could collect her powers to prevent. She screamed before she realised what she did\u2014a long, high shriek of terror that filled the room, yet made so little actual sound. For wet and shimmering presences stood grouped all round that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green, spread bulk of them, their vague extension over walls and furniture. They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, mild yet thick, moving and turning within themselves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft rustling. In their sound was something very sweet and winning that fell into her with a spell of horrible enchantment. They were so mild, each one alone, yet so terrific in their combination. Cold seized her. The sheets against her body turned to ice.\n\nShe screamed a second time, though the sound hardly issued from her throat. The spell sank deeper, reaching to the heart; for it softened all the currents of her blood and took life from her in a stream\u2014towards themselves. Resistance in that moment seemed impossible.\n\nHer husband then stirred in his sleep, and woke. And, instantly, the forms drew up, erect, and gathered themselves in some amazing way together. They lessened in extent\u2014then scattered through the air like an effect of light when shadows seek to smother it. It was tremendous, yet most exquisite.\n\nA sheet of pale-green shadow that yet had form and substance filled the room. There was a rush of silent movement, as the Presences drew past her through the air,\u2014and they were gone.\n\nBut, clearest of all, she saw the manner of their going; for she recognised in their tumult of escape by the window open at the top, the same wide 'looping circles '\u2014spirals it seemed\u2014that she had seen upon the lawn those weeks ago when Sanderson had talked. The room once more was empty.\n\nIn the collapse that followed, she heard her husband's voice, as though coming from some great distance. Her own replies she heard as well. Both were so strange and unlike their normal speech, the very words unnatural:\n\n'What is it, dear? Why do you wake me now?' And his voice whispered it with a sighing sound, like wind in pine boughs.\n\n'A moment since something went past me through the air of the room. Back to the night outside it went.' Her voice, too, held the same note as of wind entangled among too many leaves.\n\n'My dear, it was the wind.'\n\n'But it called, David. It was calling you\u2014by name!'\n\n'The stir of the branches, dear, was what you heard. Now, sleep again, I beg you, sleep.'\n\n'It had a crowd of eyes all through and over it\u2014before and behind 'Her voice grew louder.\n\nBut his own in reply sank lower, far away, and oddly hushed.\n\n'The moonlight, dear, upon the sea of twigs and boughs in the rain, was what you saw.'\n\n'But it frightened me. I've lost my God\u2014and you\u2014I'm cold as death!'\n\n'My dear, it is the cold of the early morning hours. The whole world sleeps. Now sleep again yourself.'\n\nHe whispered close to her ear. She felt his hand stroking her. His voice was soft and very soothing. But only a part of him was there; only a part of him was speaking; it was a half-emptied body that lay beside her and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own singular choice of words. The horrible, dim enchantment of the trees was close about them in the room\u2014gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of winter, whispering round the human life they loved.\n\n'And let me sleep again,' she heard him murmur as he settled down among the clothes, 'sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from which you called me...'\n\nHis dreamy, happy tone, and that look of youth and joy she discerned upon his features even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as with the spell of those shining, mild green presences. It sank down into her. She felt sleep grope for her. On the threshold of slumber one of those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose cried faintly in her heart\u2014\n\n'There is joy in the Forest over one sinner that'\n\nThen sleep took her before she had time to realise even that she was vilely parodying one of her most precious texts, and that the irreverence was ghastly...\n\nAnd though she quickly slept again, her sleep was not as usual, dreamless. It was not woods and trees she dreamed of, but a small and curious dream that kept coming again and again upon her: that she stood upon a wee, bare rock in the sea, and that the tide was rising. The water first came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, completely covering her head.\n\nAnd then came explanation\u2014the sort of explanation dreams bring. She understood. For, beneath the water, she had seen the world of seaweed rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green\u2014long, sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading through the darkened watery depths the power of their ocean foliage. The Vegetable Kingdom was even in the sea. It was everywhere. Earth, air, and water helped it, way of escape there was none.\n\nAnd even underneath the sea she heard that terrible sound of roaring\u2014was it surf or wind or voices?\u2014further out, yet coming steadily towards her.\n\nAnd so, in the loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs. Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts. Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn into distance, she counted the days to Spring. She groped her way, stumbling down the long dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end lay a brilliant picture of the violet sea sparkling on the coast of France. There lay safety and escape for both of them, could she but hold on. Behind her the trees blocked up the other entrance. She never once looked back.\n\nShe drooped. Vitality passed from her, drawn out and away as by some steady suction. Immense and incessant was this sensation of her powers draining off. The taps were all turned on. Her personality, as it were, streamed steadily away, coaxed outwards by this Power that never wearied and seemed inexhaustible. It won her as the full moon wins the tide. She waned; she faded; she obeyed.\n\nAt first she watched the process, and recognised exactly what was going on. Her physical life, and that balance of the mind which depends on physical well-being, were being slowly undermined. She saw that clearly. Only the soul, dwelling like a star apart from these and independent of them, lay safe somewhere\u2014with her distant God. That she knew\u2014tranquilly. The spiritual love that linked her to her husband was safe from all attack. Later, in His good time, they would merge together again because of it. But, meanwhile, all of her that had kinship with the earth was slowly going. This separation was being remorselessly accomplished. Every part of her the trees could touch was being steadily drained from her. She was being\u2014removed.\n\nAfter a time, however, even this power of realisation went, so that she no longer ' watched the process' or knew exactly what was going on. The one satisfaction she had known\u2014the feeling that it was sweet to suffer for his sake\u2014went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of the trees... mid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind.\n\nShe slept badly; woke in the morning with hot and tired eyes; her head ached dully; she grew confused in thought and lost the clues of daily life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight, too, of that brilliant picture at the exit of the tunnel; it faded away into a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the merest point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that stretched behind, the power of the trees came close and caught her, twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at night, finding it difficult to breathe. There seemed wet leaves pressed against her mouth, and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her feet were heavy, half rooted, as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge creepers stretched along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves to sap their life and kill them.\n\nSlowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her. She feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were in league with it. They helped it everywhere.\n\n'Why don't you sleep, dear?' It was her husband now who played the r61e of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least aped the services of Jove. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging battle he had caused. 'What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless?'\n\n'The winds,' she whispered in the dark. For hours she had lain watching the tossing of the trees through the Windless windows. 'They go walking and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the time they call so loudly to you.'\n\nAnd his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that was now becoming almost permanent.\n\n'The trees excite them in the night. The winds are the great swift carriers. Go with them, dear\u2014and not against. You'll find sleep that way if you do.'\n\n'The storm is rising,' she began, hardly knowing what she said.\n\n'All the more then\u2014go with them. Don't resist. They'll take you to the trees, that's all.'\n\nResist! The word touched on the button of some text that once had helped her.\n\n'Resist the devil and he will flee from you,' she heard her whispered answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in a flood of hysterical weeping.\n\nBut her husband did not seem disturbed. Perhaps he did not hear it, for the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and the roaring of the Forest farther out came behind the blow, surging into the room. Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again. She slowly regained a sort of dull composure. Her face emerged from the tangle of sheets and blankets. With a growing terror over her\u2014she listened. The storm was rising. It came with a sudden and impetuous rush that made all further sleep for her impossible.\n\nAlone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened. That storm interpreted for her mind the climax. The Forest bellowed out its victory to the winds; the winds in turn proclaimed it to the Night.\n\nThe whole world knew of her complete defeat, her loss, her little human pain. This was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to.\n\nFor, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. There were sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time, and sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else the distant booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up\u2014the whole beleaguering host of them stood up\u2014and with the uproar of their million branches drummed the thundering message out across the night. It seemed as if they all had broken loose. Their roots swept trailing over field and hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With trunks upright they raced leaping through the sky. There was upheaval and adventure in the awful sound they made, and their cry was like the cry of a sea that has broken through its gates and poured loose upon the world...\n\nThrough it all her husband slept peacefully as though he heard it not. It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead. For he was out with all that clamouring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell, half emptied... And when the winter's morning stole upon the scene at length, with a pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it remained. The single giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It lay there like a mass of drift-wood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of a high springtide upon the sands\u2014remnant of some friendly, splendid vessel that once had sheltered men.\n\nAnd in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her husband's voice was in it.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The South Wind ]\n\nIt is impossible to say through which sense, or combination of senses, I knew that Someone was approaching\u2014was already near; but most probably it was the deep underlying 'mother-sense' including them all that conveyed the delicate warning. At any rate, the scene-shifters of my moods knew it too, for very swiftly they prepared the stage; then, ever soft-footed and invisible, stood aside to wait.\n\nAs I went down the village street on my way to bed after midnight, the high Alpine valley lay silent in its frozen stillness. For days it had now lain thus, even the mouths of its cataracts stopped with ice; and for days, too, the dry, tight cold had drawn up the nerves of the humans in it to a sharp, thin pitch of exhilaration that at last began to call for the gentler comfort of relaxation. The key had been a little too high, the inner tautness too prolonged. The tension of that implacable north-east wind, the bise noire, had drawn its twisted wires too long through our very entrails. We all sighed for some loosening of the bands\u2014the comforting touch of something damp, soft, Jess penetratingly acute.\n\nAnd now, as I turned, midway in the little journey from the inn to my room above La Poste, this sudden warning that Someone was approaching repeated its silent wireless message, and I paused to listen and to watch.\n\nYet at first I searched in vain. The village street lay empty\u2014a white ribbon between the black walls of the big-roofed chalets; there were no lights in any of the houses; the hotels stood gaunt and ugly with their myriad shuttered windows; and the church, topped by the Crown of Savoy in stone, was so engulfed by the shadows of the mountains that it seemed almost a part of them.\n\nBeyond, reared the immense buttresses of the Dent du Midi, terrible and stalwart against the sky, their feet resting among the crowding pines, their streaked precipices tilting up at violent angles towards the stars. The bands of snow, belting their enormous flanks, stretched for miles, faintly gleaming, like Saturn's rings. To the right I could just make out the pinnacles of the Dents Blanches, cruelly pointed; and, still farther, the Dent de Bonnaveau, as of iron and crystal, running up its gaunt and dreadful pyramid into relentless depths of night. Everywhere in the hard, black-sparkling air was the rigid spell of winter. It seemed as if this valley could never melt again, never know currents of warm wind, never taste the sun, nor yield its million flowers.\n\nAnd now, dipping down behind me out of the reaches of the darkness, the New Comer moved close, heralded by this subtle yet compelling admonition that had arrested me in my very tracks. For, just as I turned in at the door, kicking the crunched snow from my boots against the granite step, I knew that, from the heart of all this tightly frozen winter's night, the 'Someone' whose message had travelled so delicately in advance was now, quite suddenly, at my very heels. And while my eyes lifted to sift their way between the darkness and the snow I became aware that It was already coming down the village street. It ran on feathered feet, pressing close against the enclosing walls, yet at the same time spreading from side to side, brushing the window-panes, rustling against the doors, and even including the shingled roofs in its enveloping advent. It came, too\u2014against the wind...\n\nIt flew up close and passed me, very faintly singing, running down between the chalets and the church, very swift, very soft, neither man nor animal, neither woman, girl, nor child, turning the corner of the snowy road beyond the Cures house with a rushing, cantering motion, that made me think of a Body of water\u2014something of fluid and generous shape, too mighty to be confined in common forms. And, as it passed, it touched me\u2014touched me through all skin and flesh upon the naked nerves, loosening, relieving, setting free the congealed sources of life which the bise so long had mercilessly bound, so that magic currents, flowing and released, washed down all the secret byways of the spirit and flooded again with full tide into a thousand dried-up cisterns of the heart.\n\nThe thrill I experienced is quite incommunicable in words. I ran upstairs and opened all my windows wide, knowing that soon the Messenger would return with a million others\u2014only to find that already it had been there before me. Its taste was in the air, fragant and alive; in my very mouth\u2014and all the currents of the inner life ran sweet again, and full. Nothing in the whole village was quite the same as it had been before. The deeply slumbering peasants, even behind their shuttered windows and barred doors; the Curt, the servants at the inn, the consumptive man opposite, the children in the house behind the church, the horde of tourists in the caravanserai\u2014all knew\u2014more or less, according to the delicacy of their receiving apparatus\u2014that Something charged with fresh and living force had swept on viewless feet down the village street, passed noiselessly between the cracks of doors and windows, touched nerves and eyelids, and\u2014set them free. In response to the great Order of Release that the messenger had left everywhere behind her, even the dreams of the sleepers had shifted into softer and more flowing keys...\n\nAnd the Valley\u2014the Valley also knew! For, as I watched from my window, something loosened about the trees and stones and boulders; about the massed snows on the great slopes; about the roots of the hanging icicles that fringed and sheeted the dark cliffs; and down in the deepest beds of the killed and silent streams. Far overhead, across those desolate bleak shoulders of the mountains, ran some sudden softness like the rush of awakening life... and was gone. A touch, lithe yet dewy, as of silk and water mixed, dropped softly over all... and, silently, without resistance, the bise noire, utterly routed, went back to the icy caverns of the north and east, where it sleeps, hated of men, and dreams its keen black dreams of death and desolation...\n\n...And some five hours later, when I woke and looked towards the sunrise, I saw those strips of pearly grey, just tinged with red, the Messenger had been to summon... charged with the warm moisture that brings relief. On the wings of a rising South Wind they came down hurriedly to cap the mountains and to unbind the captive forces of life; then moved with flying streamers up our own valley, sponging from the thirsty woods their richest perfume...\n\nAnd farther down, in soft, wet fields, stood the leafless poplars, with little pools of water gemming the grass between and pouring their musical overflow through runnels of dark and sodden leaves to join the rapidly increasing torrents descending from the mountains. For across the entire valley ran magically that sweet and welcome message of relief which Job knew when he put the whole delicious tenderness and passion of it into less than a dozen words: 'He comforteth the earth with the south wind.'\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Sea Fit ]\n\nThe sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested, came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose. Overhead, in a cloudless sky, that ancient Enchantress, the full moon, watched their dance across the sheeted sands, guiding them carefully while she drew them up. For through that moonlight, through that roar of surf, there penetrated a singular note of earnestness and meaning\u2014almost as though these common processes of Nature were instinct with the flush of an unusual activity that sought audaciously to cross the borderland into some subtle degree of conscious life. A gauze of light vapour clung upon the surface of the sea, far out\u2014a transparent carpet through which the rollers drove shorewards in a moving pattern.\n\nIn the low-roofed bungalow among the sand-dunes the three men sat. Foregathered for Easter, they spent the day fishing and sailing, and at night told yarns of the days when life was younger. It was fortunate that there were three\u2014and later four\u2014because in the mouths of several witnesses an extraordinary thing shall be established\u2014when they agree. And although whisky stood upon the rough table made of planks nailed to barrels, it is childish to pretend that a few drinks invalidate evidence, for alcohol, up to a certain point, intensifies the consciousness, focusses the intellectual powers, sharpens observation; and two healthy men, certainly three, must have imbibed an absurd amount before they all see, or omit to see, the same things.\n\nThe other bungalows still awaited their summer occupants. Only the lonely tufted sand-dunes watched the sea, shaking their hair of coarse white grass to the winds. The men had the whole spit to themselves\u2014with the wind, the spray, the flying gusts of sand, and that great Easter full moon. There was Major Reese of the Gunners and his half-brother, Dr. Malcolm Reese, and Captain Erricson, their host, all men whom the kaleidoscope of life had jostled together a decade ago in many adventures, then flung for years apart about the globe. There was also Erricson's body-servant, 'Sinbad,' sailor of big seas, and a man who had shared on many a ship all the lust of strange adventure that distinguished his great blonde-haired owner\u2014an ideal servant and dog-faithful, divining his master's moods almost before they were born. On the present occasion, besides crew of the fishing-smack, he was cook, valet, and steward of the bungalow smoking-room as well.\n\n'Big Erricson,' Norwegian by extraction, student by adoption, wanderer by blood, a Viking reincarnated if ever there was one, belonged to that type of primitive man in whom burns an inborn love and passion for the sea that amounts to positive worship\u2014devouring tide, a lust and fever in the soul. 'All genuine votaries of the old sea-gods have it,' he used to say, by way of explaining his carelessness of worldly ambitions. 'We're never at our best away from salt water\u2014never quite right. I've got it bang in the heart myself. I'd do a bit before the mast sooner than make a million on shore. Simply can't help it, you see, and never could! It's our gods calling us to worship.' And he had never tried to 'help it,' which explains why he owned nothing in the world on land except this tumble-down, one-storey bungalow\u2014more like a ship's cabin than anything else, to which he sometimes asked his bravest and most faithful friends\u2014and a store of curious reading gathered in long, becalmed days at the ends of the world. Heart and mind, that is, carried a queer cargo. 'I'm sorry if you poor devils are uncomfortable in her. You must ask Sinbad for anything you want and don't see, remember.' As though Sinbad could have supplied comforts that were miles away, or converted a draughty wreck into a snug, taut, brand-new vessel.\n\nNeither of the Reeses had cause for grumbling on the score of comfort, however, for they knew the keen joys of roughing it, and both weather and sport besides had been glorious. It was on another score this particular evening that they found cause for uneasiness, if not for actual grumbling. Erricson had one of his queer sea fits on\u2014the Doctor was responsible for the term\u2014and was in the thick of it, plunging like a straining boat at anchor, talking in a way that made them both feel vaguely uncomfortable and distressed. Neither of them knew exactly perhaps why he should have felt this growing malaise, and each was secretly vexed with the other for confirming his own unholy instinct that something uncommon was astir. The loneliness of the sand-spit and that melancholy singing of the sea before their very door may have had something to do with it, seeing that both were landsmen; for Imagination is ever Lord of the Lonely Places, and adventurous men remain children to the last. But, whatever it was that affected both men in different fashion, Malcolm Reese, the doctor, had not thought it necessary to mention to his brother that Sinbad had tugged his sleeve on entering and whispered in his ear significantly: 'Full moon, sir, please, and he's better without too much! These high spring tides get him all caught off his feet sometimes\u2014clean sea-crazy '; and the man had contrived to let the doctor see the hilt of a small pistol he carried in his hip-pocket.\n\nFor Erricson had got upon his old subject: that the gods were not dead, but merely withdrawn, and that even a single true worshipper was enough to draw them down again into touch with the world, into the sphere of humanity, even into active and visible manifestation. He spoke of queer things he had seen in queerer places. He was serious, vehement, voluble; and the others had let it pour out unchecked, hoping thereby for its speedier exhaustion. They puffed their pipes in comparative silence, nodding from time to time, shrugging their shoulders, the soldier mystified and bewildered, the doctor alert and keenly watchful.\n\n'And I like the old idea,' he had been saying, speaking of these departed pagan deities, 'that sacrifice and ritual feed their great beings, and that death is only the final sacrifice by which the worshipper becomes absorbed into them. The devout worshipper'\u2014and there was a singular drive and power behind the words\u2014' s-hould go to his death singing, as to a wedding\u2014the wedding of his soul with the particular deity he has loved and served all his life.'\n\nHe swept his tow-coloured beard with one hand, turning his shaggy head towards the window, where the moonlight lay upon the procession of shaking waves. 'It's playing the whole game, I always think, man-fashion... I remember once, some years ago, down there off the coast by Yucatan'\n\nAnd then, before they could interfere, he told an extraordinary tale of something he had seen years ago, but told it with such a horrid earnestness of conviction\u2014for it was dreadful, though fine, this adventure\u2014that his listeners shifted in their wicker chairs, struck matches unnecessarily, pulled at their long glasses, and exchanged glances that attempted a smile yet did not quite achieve it. For the tale had to do with sacrifice of human life and a rather haunting pagan ceremonial of the sea, and at its close the room had changed in some indefinable manner\u2014was not exactly as it had been before perhaps\u2014as though the savage earnestness of the language had introduced some new element that made it less cosy, less cheerful, even less warm. A secret lust in the man's heart, born of the sea, and of his intense admiration of the pagan gods called a light into his eye not altogether pleasant.\n\n'They were great Powers, at any rate, those ancient fellows,' Erricson went on, refilling his huge pipe bowl; 'too great to disappear altogether, though to-day they may walk the earth in another manner.\n\nI swear they're still going it\u2014especially the '(he hesitated for a mere second) 'the old water Powers\u2014the Sea Gods. Terrific beggars, every one of 'em.'\n\n'Still move the tides and raise the winds, eh?' from the Doctor.\n\nErricson spoke again after a moment's silence, with impressive dignity. 'And I like, too, the way they manage to keep their names before us,' he went on, with a curious eagerness that did not escape the Doctor's observation, while it clearly puzzled the soldier. 'There's old Hu, the Druid god of justice, still alive in \"Hue and Cry\"; there's Typhon hammering his way against us in the typhoon; there's the mighty Hurakar, serpent god of the winds, you know, shouting to us in hurricane and ouragan; and there's' 'Venus still at it as hard as ever,' interrupted the Major, facetiously, though his brother did not laugh because of their host's almost sacred earnestness of manner and uncanny grimness of face. Exactly how he managed to introduce that element of gravity\u2014of conviction\u2014into such talk neither of his listeners quite understood, for in discussing the affair later they were unable to pitch upon any definite detail that betrayed it. Yet there it was, alive and haunting, even distressingly so. All day he had been silent and morose, but since dusk, with the turn of the tide, in fact, these queer sentences, half mystical, half unintelligible, had begun to pour from him, till now that cabin-like room among the sand-dunes fairly vibrated with the man's emotion. And at last Major Reese, with blundering good intention, tried to shift the key from this portentous subject of sacrifice to something that might eventually lead towards comedy and laughter, and so relieve this growing pressure of melancholy and incredible things. The Viking fellow had just spoken of the possibility of the old gods manifesting themselves visibly, audibly, physically, and so the Major caught him up and made light mention of spiritualism and the so-called ' materialisation seances,' where physical bodies were alleged to be built up out of the emanations of the medium and the sitters. This crude aspect of the Supernatural was the only possible link the soldier's mind could manage. He caught his brother's eye too late, it seems, for Malcolm Reese realised by this time that something untoward was afoot, and no longer needed the memory of Sinbad's warning to keep him sharply on the look-out. It was not the first time he had seen Erricson 'caught' by the sea; but he had never known him quite so bad, nor seen his face so flushed and white alternately, nor his eyes so oddly shining. So that Major Reese's well-intentioned allusion only brought wind to fire.\n\nThe man of the sea, once Viking, roared with a rush of boisterous laughter at the comic suggestion, then dropped his voice to a sudden hard whisper, awfully earnest, awfully intense. Any one must have started at the abrupt change and the life-and-death manner of the big man. His listeners undeniably both did.\n\n'Bunkum!' he shouted,' bunkum, and be damned to it all! There's only one real materialisation of these immense Outer Beings possible, and that's when the great embodied emotions, which are their sphere of action'\u2014his words became wildly incoherent, painfully struggling to get out\u2014' derived, you see, from their honest worshippers the world over\u2014constituting their Bodies, in fact\u2014come down into matter and get condensed, crystallised into form\u2014to claim that final sacrifice I spoke about just now, and to which any man might feel himself proud and honoured to be summoned... No dying in bed or fading out from old age, but to plunge full-blooded and alive into the great Body of the god who has deigned to descend and fetch you.'\n\nThe actual speech may have been even more rambling and incoherent than that. It came out in a torrent at white heat. Dr. Reese kicked his brother beneath the table, just in time. The soldier looked thoroughly uncomfortable and amazed, utterly at a loss to know how he had produced the storm. It rather frightened him.\n\n'I know it because I've seen it,' went on the sea man, his mind and speech slightly more under control. 'Seen the ceremonies that brought these whopping old Nature gods down into form\u2014seen 'em carry off a worshipper into themselves\u2014seen that worshipper, too, go off singing and happy to his death, proud and honoured to be chosen.'\n\n'Have you really\u2014by George!' the Major exclaimed. 'You tell us a queer thing, Erricson'; and it was then for the fifth time that Sinbad cautiously opened the door, peeped in and silently withdrew after giving a swiftly comprehensive glance round the room.\n\nThe night outside was windless and serene, only the growing thunder of the tide near the full woke muffled echoes among the sand-dunes.\n\n'Rites and ceremonies,' continued the other, his voice booming with a singular enthusiasm, but ignoring the interruption, 'are simply means of losing one's self by temporary ecstasy in the God of one's choice\u2014the God one has worshipped all one's life\u2014of being partially absorbed into his being. And sacrifice completes the process'\n\n'At death, you said?' asked Malcolm Reese, watching him keenly.\n\n'Or voluntary,' was the reply that came flash-like. 'The devotee becomes wedded to his Deity\u2014goes bang into him, you see, by fire or water or air\u2014as by a drop from a height\u2014according to the nature of the particular God; at-one-ment, of course. A man's death that! Fine, you know!'\n\nThe man's inner soul was on fire now. He was talking at a fearful pace, his eyes alight, his voice turned somehow into a kind of sing-song that chimed well, singularly well, with the booming of waves outside, and from time to time he turned to the window to stare at the sea and the moon-blanched sands. And then a look of triumph would come into his face\u2014that giant face framed by slow-moving wreaths of pipe smoke.\n\nSinbad entered for the sixth time without any obvious purpose, busied himself unnecessarily with the glasses and went out again, lingeringly. In the room he kept his eye hard upon his master. This time he contrived to push a chair and a heap of netting between him and the window. No one but Dr. Reese observed the manoeuvre. And he took the hint.\n\n'The port-holes fit badly, Erricson,' he laughed, but with a touch of authority. 'There's a five-knot breeze coming through the cracks worse than an old wreck!' And he moved up to secure the fastening better.\n\n'The room is confoundedly cold,' Major Reese put in; 'has been for the last half-hour, too.' The soldier looked what he felt\u2014cold\u2014distressed\u2014creepy. 'But there's no wind really, you know,' he added.\n\nCaptain Erricson turned his great bearded visage from one to the other before he answered; there was a gleam of sudden suspicion in his blue eyes. 'The beggar's got that back door open again. If he's sent for any one, as he did once before, I swear I'll drown him in fresh water for his impudence\u2014or perhaps\u2014can it be already that he expects?'\n\nHe left the sentence incomplete and rang the bell, laughing with a boisterousness that was clearly feigned. 4 Sinbad, what's this cold in the place? You've got the back door open. Not expecting any one, are you?'\n\n'Everything's shut tight, Captain. There's a bit of a breeze coming up from the east. And the tide's drawing in at a raging pace'\n\n'We can all hear that. But are you expecting any one? I asked,' repeated his master, suspiciously, yet still laughing. One might have said he was trying to give the idea that the man had some land flirtation on hand. They looked one another square in the eye for a moment, these two. It was the straight stare of equals who understood each other well.\n\n'Some one\u2014might be\u2014on the way, as it were, Captain. Couldn't say for certain.'\n\nThe voice almost trembled. By a sharp twist of the eye, Sinbad managed to shoot a lightning and significant look at the Doctor.\n\n'But this cold\u2014this freezing, damp cold in the place? Are you sure no one's come\u2014by the back ways? 'insisted the master. He whispered it. 'Across the dunes, for instance?' His voice conveyed awe and delight, both kept hard under.\n\n'It's all over the house, Captain, already,' replied the man, and moved across to put more sea-logs on the blazing fire. Even the soldier noticed then that their language was tight with allusion of another kind. To relieve the growing tension and uneasiness in his own mind he took up the word ' house' and made fun of it.\n\n'As though it were a mansion,' he observed, with a forced chuckle, 'instead of a mere sea-shell!'\n\nThen, looking about him, he added: 'But, all the same, you know, there is a kind of fog getting into the room\u2014from the sea, I suppose; coming up with the tide, or something, eh?' The air had certainly in the last twenty minutes turned thickish; it was not all tobacco smoke, and there was a moisture that began to precipitate on the objects in tiny, fine globules. The cold, too, fairly bit.\n\n'I'll take a look round' said Sinbad, significantly, and went out. Only the Doctor perhaps noticed that the man shook, and was white down to the gills. He said nothing, but moved his chair nearer to the window and to his host. It was really a little bit beyond comprehension how the wild words of this old sea-dog in the full sway of his 'sea fit' had altered the very air of the room as well as the personal equations of its occupants, for an extraordinary atmosphere of enthusiasm that was almost splendour pulsed about him, yet vilely close to something that suggested terror! Through the armour of every-day common sense that normally clothed the minds of these other two, had crept the faint wedges of a mood that made them vaguely wonder whether the incredible could perhaps sometimes\u2014by way of bewildering exceptions\u2014actually come to pass. The moods of their deepest life, that is to say, were already affected. An inner, and thoroughly unwelcome, change was in progress. And such psychic disturbances once started are hard to arrest. In this case it was well on the way before either the Army or Medicine had been willing to recognise the fact. There was something coming\u2014coming from the sand-dunes or the sea. And it was invited, welcomed at any rate, by Erricson. His deep, volcanic enthusiasm and belief provided the channel. In lesser degree they, too, were caught in it. Moreover, it was terrific, irresistible.\n\nAnd it was at this point\u2014as the comparing of notes afterwards established\u2014that Father Norden came in, Norden, the big man's nephew, having bicycled over from some point beyond Corfe Castle and raced along the hard Studland sand in the moonlight, and then hullood till a boat had ferried him across the narrow channel of Poole Harbour. Sinbad simply brought him in without any preliminary question or announcement. He could not resist the splendid night and the spring air, explained Norden. He felt sure his uncle could ' find a hammock ' for him somewhere aft, as he put it. He did not add that Sinbad had telegraphed for him just before sundown from the coast-guard hut. Dr. Reese already knew him, but he was introduced to the Major. Norden was a member of the Society of Jesus, an ardent, not clever, and unselfish soul.\n\nErricson greeted him with obviously mixed feelings, and with an extraordinary sentence: 'It doesn't really matter,' he exclaimed, after a few commonplaces of talk, 'for all religions are the same if you go deep enough. All teach sacrifice, and, without exception, all seek final union by absorption into their Deity.' And then, under his breath, turning sideways to'peer out of the window, he added a swift rush of half-smothered words that only Dr. Reese caught: 'The Army, the Church, the Medical Profession, and Labour\u2014if they would only all come! What a fine result, what a grand offering! Alone\u2014I seem so unworthy\u2014insignificant...!'\n\nBut meanwhile young Norden was speaking before any one could stop him, although the Major did make one or two blundering attempts. For once the Jesuit's tact was at fault. He evidently hoped to introduce a new mood\u2014to shift the current already established by the single force of his own personality. And he was not quite man enough to carry it off.\n\nIt was an error of judgment on his part. For the forces he found established in the room were too heavy to lift and alter, their impetus being already acquired. He did his best, anyhow. He began moving with the current\u2014it was not the first sea fit he had combated in this extraordinary personality\u2014then found, too late, that he was carried along with it himself like the rest of them.\n\n'Odd\u2014but couldn't find the bungalow at first,' he laughed, somewhat hardly. 'It's got a bit of sea-fog all to itself that hides it. I thought perhaps my pagan uncle'\n\nThe Doctor interrupted him hastily, with great energy. 'The fog does lie caught in these sand hollows\u2014like steam in a cup, you know,' he put in. But the other, intent on his own procedure, missed the cue. I thought it was smoke at first, and that you were up to some heathen ceremony or other,' laughing in Erricson's face; 'sacrificing to the full moon or the sea, or the spirits of the desolate places that haunt sand-dunes, eh?'\n\nNo one spoke for a second, but Erricson's face turned quite radiant.\n\n'My uncle's such a pagan, you know,' continued the priest, 'that as I flew along those deserted sands from Studland I almost expected to hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn... or see fair Thetis's tinsel-slippered feet...'\n\nErricson, suppressing violent gestures, highly excited, face happy as a boy's, was combing his great yellow beard with both hands, and the other two men had begun to speak at once, intent on stopping the flow of unwise allusion. Norden, swallowing a mouthful of cold soda-water, had put the glass down, spluttering over its bubbles, when the sound was first heard at the window. And in the back room the manservant ran, calling something aloud that sounded like 'It's coming, God save us, it's coming in...!' Though the Major swears some name was mentioned that he afterwards forgot\u2014Glaucus\u2014Proteus\u2014Pontus\u2014or some such word. The sound itself, however, was plain enough\u2014a kind of imperious tapping on the window-panes as of a multitude of objects. Blown sand it might have been or heavy spray or, as Norden suggested later, a great water-soaked branch of giant seaweed. Every one started up, but Erricson was first upon his feet, and had the window wide open in a twinkling. His voice roared forth over those moonlit sand-dunes and out towards the line of heavy surf ten yards below.\n\n'All along the shore of the Agean,' he bellowed, with a kind of hoarse triumph that shook the heart, 'that ancient cry once rang. But it was a lie, a thumping and audacious lie. And He is not the only one. Another still lives\u2014and, by Poseidon, He comes! He knows His own and His own know Him\u2014and His own shall go to meet Him...!'\n\nThat reference to the Agean 'cry'! It was so wonderful. Every one, of course, except the soldier, seized the allusion. It was a comprehensive, yet subtle, way of suggesting the idea. And meanwhile all spoke at once, shouted rather, for the Invasion was somehow\u2014monstrous.\n\n'Damn it\u2014that's a bit too much. Something's caught my throat!' The Major, like a man drowning, fought with the furniture in his amazement and dismay. Fighting was his first instinct, of course. 'Hurts so infernally\u2014takes the breath,' he cried, by way of explaining the extraordinarily violent impetus that moved him, yet half ashamed of himself for seeing nothing he could strike. But Malcolm Reese struggled to get between his host and the open window, saying in tense voice something like 'Don't let him get out! Don't let him get out!' While the shouts of warning from Sinbad in the little cramped back offices added to the general confusion. Only Father Norden stood quiet\u2014watching with a kind of admiring wonder the expression of magnificence that had flamed into the visage of Erricson.\n\n'Hark, you fools! Hark!' boomed the Viking figure, standing erect and splendid.\n\nAnd through that open window, along the far-drawn line of shore from Canford Cliffs to the chalk bluffs of Studland Bay, there certainly ran a sound that was no common roar of surf. It was articulate\u2014a message from the sea\u2014an announcement\u2014a thunderous warning of approach. No mere surf breaking on sand could have compassed so deep and multitudinous a voice of dreadful roaring\u2014far out over the entering tide, yet at the same time close in along the entire sweep of shore, shaking all the ocean, both depth and surface, with its deep vibrations. Into the bungalow chamber came\u2014the SEA!\n\nOut of the night, from the moonlit spaces where it had been steadily accumulating, into that little cabined room so full of humanity and tobacco smoke, came invisibly\u2014the Power of the Sea. Invisible, yes, but mighty, pressed forward by the huge draw of the moon, soft-coated with brine and moisture\u2014the great Sea. And with it, into the minds of those three other men, leaped instantaneously, not to be denied, overwhelming suggestions of water-power, the tear and strain of thousand-mile currents, the irresistible pull and rush of tides, the suction of giant whirlpools\u2014more, the massed and awful impetus of whole driven oceans. The air turned salt and briny, and a welter of seaweed clamped their very skins.\n\n'Glaucus! I come to Thee, great God of the deep Waterways... Father and Master! 'Erricson cried aloud in a voice that most marvellously conveyed supreme joy.\n\nThe little bungalow trembled as from a blow at the foundations, and the same second the big man was through the window and running down the moonlit sands towards the foam.\n\n'God in Heaven! Did you all see that?' shouted Major Reese, for the manner in which the great body slipped through the tiny window-frame was incredible. And then, first tottering with a sudden weakness, he recovered himself and rushed round by the door, followed by his brother. Sinbad, invisible, but not inaudible, was calling aloud from the passage at the back. Father Norden, slimmer than the others\u2014well controlled, too\u2014was through the little window before either of them reached the fringe of beach beyond the sand-dunes. They joined forces halfway down to the water's edge. The figure of Erricson, towering in the moonlight, flew before them, coasting rapidly along the wave-line.\n\nNo one of them said a word; they tore along side by side, Norden a trifle in advance. In front of them, head turned seawards, bounded Erricson in great flying leaps, singing as he ran, impossible to overtake.\n\nThen, what they witnessed all three witnessed; the weird grandeur of it in the moonshine was too splendid to allow the smaller emotions of personal alarm, it seems. At any rate, the divergence of opinion afterwards was unaccountably insignificant. For, on a sudden, that heavy roaring sound far out at sea came close in with a swift plunge of speed, followed simultaneously\u2014accompanied, rather\u2014by a dark line that was no mere wave moving: enormously, up and across, between the sea and sky it swept close in to shore. The moonlight caught it for a second as it passed, in a cliff of her bright silver.\n\nAnd Erricson slowed down, bowed his great head and shoulders, spread his arms out and...\n\nAnd what? For no one of those amazed witnesses could swear exactly what then came to pass. Upon this impossibility of telling it in language they all three agreed. Only those eyeless dunes of sand that watched, only the white and silent moon overhead, only that long, curved beach of empty and deserted shore retain the complete record, to be revealed some day perhaps when a later Science shall have learned to develop the photographs that Nature takes incessantly upon her secret plates. For Erricson's rough suit of tweed went out in ribbons across the air; his figure somehow turned dark like strips of tide-sucked seaweed; something enveloped and overcame him, half shrouding him from view. He stood for one instant upright, his hair wild in the moonshine, towering, with arms again outstretched; then bent forward, turned, drew out most curiously sideways, uttering the singing sound of tumbling waters. The next instant, curving over like a falling wave, he swept along the glistening surface of the sands\u2014and was gone. In fluid form, wave-like, his being slipped away into the Being of the Sea. A violent tumult convulsed the surface of the tide near in, but at once, and with amazing speed, passed careering away into the deeper water\u2014far out. To his singular death, as to a wedding, Erricson had gone, singing, and well content.\n\n'May God, who holds the sea and all its powers in the hollow of His mighty hand, take them both into Himself!' Norden was on his knees, praying fervently.\n\nThe body was never recovered... and the most curious thing of all was that the interior of the cabin, where they found Sinbad shaking with terror when they at length returned, was splashed and sprayed, almost soaked, with salt water. Up into the bigger dunes beside the bungalow, and far beyond the reach of normal tides, lay, too, a great streak and furrow as of a large invading wave, caking the dry sand. A hundred tufts of the coarse grass tussocks had been torn away.\n\nThe high tide that night, drawn by the Easter full moon, of course, was known to have been exceptional, for it fairly flooded Poole Harbour, flushing all the coves and bays towards the mouth of the Frome. And the natives up at Arne Bay and Wych always declare that the noise of the sea was heard far inland even up to the nine Barrows of the Purbeck Hills\u2014triumphantly singing.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Attic ]\n\nThe forest-girdled village upon the Jura slopes slept soundly, although it was not yet many minutes after ten o'clock. The clang of the couvre-feu had indeed just ceased, its notes swept far into the woods by a wind that shook the mountains. This wind now rushed down the deserted street. It howled about the old rambling building called La Citadelle, whose roof towered gaunt and humped above the smaller houses\u2014Chateau left unfinished long ago by Lord Wemyss, the exiled Jacobite. The families who occupied the various apartments listened to the storm and felt the building tremble. 'It's the mountain wind. It will bring the snow,' the mother said, without looking up from her knitting. 'And how sad it sounds.'\n\nBut it was not the wind that brought sadness as we sat round the open fire of peat. It was the wind of memories. The lamplight slanted along the narrow room towards the table where breakfast things lay ready for the morning. The double windows were fastened. At the far end stood a door ajar, and on the other side of it the two elder children lay asleep in the big bed. But beside the window was a smaller unused bed, that had been empty now a year. And to-night was the anniversary...\n\nAnd so the wind brought sadness and long thoughts. The little chap that used to lie there was already twelve months gone, far, far beyond the Hole where the Winds came from, as he called it; yet it seemed only yesterday that I went to tell him a tuck-up story, to stroke Riquette, the old motherly cat that cuddled against his back and laid a paw beside his pillow like a human being, and to hear his funny little earnest whisper say, 'Oncle, tu sais, j'ai pri\u00e9 pour Petavel.' For La Citadelle had its unhappy ghost\u2014of Petavel, the usurer, who had hanged himself in the attic a century gone by, and was known to walk its dreary corridors in search of peace\u2014and this wise Irish mother, calming the boy's fears with wisdom, had told him, 'If you pray for Petavel, you'll save his soul and make him happy, and he'll only love you.' And, thereafter, this little imaginative boy had done so every night. With a passionate seriousness he did it. He had wonderful, delicate ways like that. In all our hearts he made his fairy nests of wonder. In my own, I know, he lay closer than any joy imaginable, with his big blue eyes, his queer soft questionings, and his splendid child's unselfishness\u2014a sun-kissed flower of innocence that, had he lived, might have sweetened half a world.\n\n'Let's put more peat on,' the mother said, as a handful of rain like stones came flinging against the windows; 'that must be hail.' And she went on tiptoe to the inner room. 'They're sleeping like two puddings,' she whispered, coming presently back. But it struck me she had taken longer than to notice merely that; and her face wore an odd expression that made me uncomfortable. I thought she was somehow just about to laugh or cry. By the table a second she hesitated. I caught the flash of indecision as it passed. 'Pan,' she said suddenly\u2014it was a nickname, stolen from my tuck-up stories, he had given me\u2014' I wonder how Riquette got in.' She looked hard at me. 'It wasn't you, was it?' For we never let her come at night since he had gone. It was too poignant. The beastie always went cuddling and nestling into that empty bed. But this time it was not my doing, and I offered plausible explanations. 'But\u2014she's on the bed. Pan, would you be so kind ' She left the sentence unfinished, but I easily understood, for a lump had somehow risen in my own throat too, and I remembered now that she had come out from the inner room so quickly\u2014with a kind of hurried rush almost. I put' mere Riquette' out into the corridor. A lamp stood on the chair outside the door of another occupant further down, and I urged her gently towards it. She turned and looked at me\u2014straight up into my face; but, instead of going down as I suggested, she went slowly in the opposite direction. She stepped softly towards a door in the wall that led up broken stairs into the attics. There she sat down and waited. And so I left her, and came back hastily to the peat fire and companionship. The wind rushed in behind me and slammed the door.\n\nAnd we talked then somewhat busily of cheerful things; of the children's future, the excellence of the cheap Swiss schools, of Christmas presents, ski-ing, snow, tobogganing. I led the talk away from mournfulness; and when these subjects were exhausted I told stories of my own adventures in distant parts of the world. But 'mother' listened the whole time\u2014not to me. Her thoughts were all elsewhere. And her air of intently, secretly listening, bordered, I felt, upon the uncanny. For she often stopped her knitting and sat with her eyes fixed upon the air before her; she stared blankly at the wall, her head slightly on one side, her figure tense, attention strained\u2014elsewhere. Or, when my talk positively demanded it, her nod was oddly mechanical and her eyes looked through and past me. The wind continued very loud and roaring; but the fire glowed, the room was warm and cosy. Yet she shivered, and when I drew attention to it, her reply, 'I do feel cold, but I didn't know I shivered,' was given as though she spoke across the air to some one else. But what impressed me even more uncomfortably were her repeated questions about Riquette. When a pause in my tales permitted, she would look up with 'I wonder where Riquette went?' or, thinking of the inclement night, 'I hope mere Riquette's not out of doors. Perhaps Madame Favre has taken her in?' I offered to go and see. Indeed I was already half-way across the room when there came the heavy bang at the door that rooted me to the ground where I stood. It was not wind. It was something alive that made it rattle. There was a second blow. A thud on the corridor boards followed, and then a high, odd voice that at first was as human as the cry of a child.\n\nIt is undeniable that we both started, and for myself I can answer truthfully that a chill ran down my spine; but what frightened me more than the sudden noise and the eerie cry was the way ' mother' supplied the immediate explanation. For behind the words 'It's only Riquette; she sometimes springs at the door like that; perhaps we'd better Jet her in,' was a certain touch of uncanny quiet that made me feel she had known the cat would come, and knew also why she came. One cannot explain such impressions further. They leave their vital touch, then go their way. Into the little room, however, in that moment there came between us this uncomfortable sense that the night held other purposes than our own\u2014and that my companion was aware of them. There was something going on far, far removed from the routine of life as we were accustomed to it. Moreover, our usual routine was the eddy, while this was the main stream. It felt big, I mean.\n\nAnd so it was that the entrance of the familiar, friendly creature brought this thing both itself and 'mother' knew, but whereof I as yet was ignorant. I held the door wide. The draught rushed through behind her, and sent a shower of sparks about the fireplace. The lamp flickered and gave a little gulp. And Riquette marched slowly past, with all the impressive dignity of her kind, towards the other door that stood ajar. Turning the corner like a shadow, she disappeared into the room where the two children slept. We heard the soft thud with which she leaped upon the bed. Then, in a lull of the wind, she came back again and sat on the oilcloth, staring into 'mother's' face. She mewed and put a paw out, drawing the black dress softly with half-opened claws. And it was all so horribly suggestive and pathetic, it revived such poignant memories, that I got up impulsively\u2014I think I had actually said the words, 'We'd better put her out, mother, after all'\u2014when my companion rose to her feet and forestalled me. She said another thing instead. It took my breath away to hear it. 'She wants us to go with her. Pan, will you come too?' The surprise on my face must have asked the question, for I do not remember saying anything. 'To the attic' she said quietly.\n\nShe stood there by the table, a tall, grave figure dressed in black, and her face above the lamp-shade caught the full glare of light. Its expression positively stiffened me. She seemed so secure in her singular purpose. And her familiar appearance had so oddly given place to something wholly strange to me. She looked like another person\u2014almost with the unwelcome transformation of the sleep-walker about her. Cold came over me as I watched her, for I remembered suddenly her Irish second-sight, her story years ago of meeting a figure on the attic stairs, the figure of Petavel. And the idea of this motherly, sedate, and wholesome woman, absorbed day and night in prosaic domestic duties, and yet ' seeing' things, touched the incongruous almost to the point of alarm. It was so distressingly convincing.\n\nYet she knew quite well that I would come. Indeed, following the excited animal, she was already by the door, and a moment later, still without answering or protesting, I was with them in the draughty corridor. There was something inevitable in her manner that made it impossible to refuse. She took the lamp from its nail on the wall, and following our four-footed guide, who ran with obvious pleasure just in front, she opened the door into the courtyard. The wind nearly put the lamp out, but a minute later we were safe inside the passage that led up flights of creaky wooden stairs towards the world of tenantless attics overhead.\n\nAnd I shall never forget the way the excited Riquette first stood up and put her paws upon the various doors, trotted ahead, turned back to watch us coming, and then finally sat down and waited on the threshold of the empty, raftered space that occupied the entire length of the building underneath the roof. For her manner was more that of an intelligent dog than of a cat, and sometimes more like that of a human mind than either.\n\nWe had come up without a single word. The howling of the wind as we rose higher was like the roar of artillery. There were many broken stairs, and the narrow way was full of twists and turnings. It was a dreadful journey. I felt eyes watching us from all the yawning spaces of the darkness, and the noise of the storm smothered footsteps everywhere. Troops of shadows kept us company. But it was on the threshold of this big, chief attic, when 'mother' stopped abruptly to put down the lamp, that real fear took hold of me. For Riquette marched steadily forward into the middle of the dusty flooring, picking her way among the fallen tiles and mortar, as though she went towards\u2014some one. She purred loudly and uttered little cries of excited pleasure. Her tail went up into the air, and she lowered her head with the unmistakable intention of being stroked. Her lips opened and shut. Her green eyes smiled. She was being stroked.\n\nIt was an unforgettable performance. I would rather have witnessed an execution or a murder than watch that mysterious creature twist and turn about in the way she did. Her magnified shadow was as large as a pony on the floor and rafters. I wanted to hide the whole thing by extinguishing the lamp. For, even before the mysterious action began, I experienced the sudden rush of conviction that others besides ourselves were in this attic\u2014and standing very close to us indeed. And, although there was ice in my blood, there was also a strange swelling of the heart that only love and tenderness could bring.\n\nBut, whatever it was, my human companion, still silent, knew and understood. She saw. And her soft whisper that ran with the wind among the rafters, 'Il a pri\u00e9 pour Petavel et le bon Dieu l'a entendu,' did not amaze me one quarter as much as the expression I then caught upon her radiant face. Tears ran down the cheeks, but they were tears of happiness. Her whole figure seemed lit up. She opened her arms\u2014picture of great Motherhood, proud, blessed, and tender beyond words. I thought she was going to fall, for she took quick steps forward; but when I moved to catch her, she drew me aside instead with a sudden gesture that brought fear back in the place of wonder.\n\n'Let them pass,' she whispered grandly. 'Pan, don't you see... He's leading him into peace and safety... by the hand!' And her joy seemed to kill the shadows and fill the entire attic with white light. Then, almost simultaneously with her words, she swayed. I was in time to catch her, but as I did so, across the very spot where we had just been standing\u2014two figures, I swear, went past us like a flood of light.\n\nThere was a moment next of such confusion that I did not see what happened to Riquette, for the sight of my companion kneeling on the dusty boards and praying with a curious sort of passionate happiness, while tears pressed between her covering fingers\u2014the strange wonder of this made me utterly oblivious to minor details...\n\nWe were sitting round the peat fire again, and 'mother' was saying to me in the gentlest, tenderest whisper I ever heard from human lips\u2014' Pan, I think perhaps that's why God took him...' And when a little later we went in to make Riquette cosy in the empty bed, ever since kept sacred to her use, the mournfulness had lifted; and in the place of resignation was proud peace and joy that knew no longer sad or selfish questionings.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Heath Fire ]\n\nThe men at luncheon in Rennie's Surrey cottage that September day were discussing, of course, the heat. All agreed it had been exceptional. But nothing unusual was said until O'Hara spoke of the heath fires. They had been rather terrific, several in a single day, devouring trees and bushes, endangering human life, and spreading with remarkable rapidity. The flames, too, had been extraordinarily high and vehement for heath fires. And O'Hara's tone had introduced into the commonplace talk something new\u2014the element of mystery; it was nothing definite he said, but manner, eyes, hushed voice and the rest conveyed it. And it was genuine. What he felt reached the others rather than what he said. The atmosphere in the little room, with the honeysuckle trailing sweetly across the open windows, changed; the talk became of a sudden less casual, frank, familiar; and the men glanced at one another across the table, laughing still, yet with an odd touch of constraint marking little awkward, unfilled pauses. Being a group of normal Englishmen, they disliked mystery; it made them feel uncomfortable; for the things O'Hara hinted at had touched that kind 1 of elemental terror that lurks secretly in all human beings. Guarded by 'culture,' but never wholly concealed, the unwelcome thing made its presence known\u2014the hint of primitive dread that, for instance, great thunder-storms, tidal waves, or violent conflagrations rouse.\n\nAnd instinctively they fell at once to discussing the obvious causes of the fires. The stockbroker, scenting imagination, edged mentally away, sniffing. But the journalist was full of brisk information, 'simply given.'\n\n'The sun starts them in Canada, using a dew-drop as a lens,' he said, 'and an engine's spark, remember, carries an immense distance without losing its heat.'\n\n'But hardly miles,' said another, who had not been really listening.\n\n'It's my belief,' put in the critic keenly, 'that a lot were done on purpose. Bits of live coal wrapped in cloth were found, you know.' He was a little, weasel-faced iconoclast, dropping the acid of doubt and disbelief wherever he went, but offering nothing in the place of what he destroyed. His head was turret-shaped, lips tight and thin, nose and chin running to points like gimlets, with which he bored into the unremunerative clays of life.\n\n'The general unrest, yes,' the journalist supported him, and tried to draw the conversation on to labour questions. But their host preferred the fire talk. 'I must say,' he put in gravely, 'that some of the blazes hereabouts were uncommonly\u2014er\u2014queer. They started, I mean, so oddly. You remember, O'Hara, only last week that suspicious one over Kettlebury way?'\n\nIt seemed he wished to draw the artist out, and that the artist, feeling the general opposition, declined.\n\n'Why seek an unusual explanation at all?' the critic said at length, impatiently. 'It's all natural enough, if you ask me.' 'Natural! Oh yes!' broke in O'Hara, with a sudden vehemence that betrayed feeling none had as yet suspected; 'provided you don't limit the word to mean only what we understand. There's nothing anywhere\u2014unnatural.'\n\nA laugh cut short the threatened tirade, and the journalist expressed the general feeling with 'Oh you, Jim! You'd see a devil in a dust-storm, or a fairy in the tea-leaves of your cup!'\n\n'And why not, pray? Devils and fairies are every bit as true as formulae.'\n\nSome one tactfully guided them away from a profitless discussion, and they talked glibly of the damage done, the hideousness of the destroyed moors, the gaunt, black, ugly slopes, fifty-foot flames, roaring noises, and the splendour of the enormous smoke-clouds that had filled the skies. And Rennie, still hoping to coax O'Hara, repeated tales the beaters had brought in that crying, as though living things were caught, had been heard in places, and that some had seen tall shapes of fire passing headlong through the choking smoke. For the note O'Hara had struck refused to be ignored. It went on sounding underneath the commonest remark; and the atmosphere to the end retained that curious tinge that he had given to it\u2014of the strange, the ominous, the mysterious and unexplained. Until, at last, the artist, having added nothing further to the talk, got up with some abruptness and left the room. He complained briefly that the fever he had suffered from still bothered him and he would go and lie down a bit. The heat, he said, oppressed him.\n\nA silence followed his departure. The broker drew a sigh as though the market had gone up. But Rennie, old, comprehending friend, looked anxious. 'Excitement,' he said, 'not oppression, is the word he meant. He's always a bit strung up when that Black Sea fever gets him. He brought it with him from Batoum.' And another brief silence followed.\n\n'Been with you most of the summer, hasn't he? 'enquired the journalist, on the trail of a 'par,' 'painting those wild things of his that no one understands.' And their host, weighing a moment how much he might in fairness tell, replied\u2014among friends it was\u2014' Yes; and this summer they have been more\u2014er\u2014wild and wonderful than usual\u2014an extraordinary rush of colour splendid schemes, \"conceptions,\" I believe you critics call 'em, of fire, as though, in a way, the unusual heat had possessed him for interpretation.'\n\nThe group expressed its desultory interest by uninspired interjections.\n\n'That was what he meant just now when he said the fires had been mysterious, required explanation, or something\u2014the way they started, rather,' concluded Rennie.\n\nThen he hesitated. He laughed a moment, and it was an uneasy, apologetic little laugh. How to continue he hardly knew. Also, he wished to protect his friend from the cheap jeering of miscomprehension. 'He is very imaginative, you know,' he went on, quietly, as no one spoke. 'You remember that glorious mad thing he did of the Fallen Lucifer\u2014driving a star across the heavens till the heat of the descent set a light to half the planets, scorched the old moon to the white cinder that she now is, and passed close enough to earth to send our oceans up in a single jet of steam? Well, this time\u2014he's been at something every bit as wild, only truer\u2014finer. And what is it? Briefly, then, he's got the idea, it seems, that the unusual heat from the sun this year has penetrated deep enough\u2014in places\u2014especially on these unprotected heaths that retain their heat so cleverly\u2014to reach another kindred expression\u2014to waken a response\u2014in sympathy, you see\u2014from the central fires of the earth.'\n\nHe paused again a moment awkwardly, conscious how clumsily he expressed it. 'The parent getting into touch again with its lost child, eh? See the idea? Return of the Fire Prodigal, as it were?'\n\nHis listeners stared in silence, the broker looking his obvious relief that O'Hara was not on 'Change, the critic's eyes glancing sharply down that pointed, boring nose of his.\n\n'And the central fires have felt it and risen in response,' continued Rennie in a lower voice. 'You see the idea? It's big, to say the least. The volcanoes have answered too\u2014there's old Etna, the giant of 'em all, breaking out in fifty new mouths of flame. Heat is latent in everything, only waiting to be called out. That match you're striking, this coffee-pot, the warmth in our bodies, and so on\u2014their heat comes first from the sun, and is therefore an actual part of the sun, the origin of all heat and life. And so O'Hara, you know, who sees the universe as a single homogeneous One and\u2014and\u2014well, I give it up. Can't explain it, you see. You must get him to do that. But somehow this year\u2014cloudless\u2014the protecting armour of water all gone too\u2014the sun's rays managed to sink in and reach their kind buried deep below. Perhaps, later, we may get him to show us the studies that he's made\u2014whew!\u2014the most\u2014er\u2014amazing things you ever saw! The 'superiority' of unimaginative minds was inevitable, making Rennie regret that he had told so much. It was almost as if he had been untrue to his friend. But at length the group broke up for the afternoon. They left messages for O'Hara. Two motored, and the journalist took the train. The critic followed his sharp nose to London, where he might ferret out the failures that his mind delighted in. And when they were gone the host slipped quickly upstairs to find his friend. The heat was unbearable to suffocation, the little bedroom like an oven. But Jim O'Hara was not in it.\n\nFor, instead of lying down as he had said, a fierce revolt, stirred by the talk of those unvisioned minds below, had wakened, and the deep, sensitive, poet's soul in him had leaped suddenly to the acceptance of an impossible thing. He had escaped, driven forth by the secret call of wonder. He made full speed for the destroyed moors. Fever or no fever, he must see for himself. Did no one understand? Was he the only one?... Walking quickly, he passed the Frensham Ponds, came through that spot of loneliness and beauty, the Lion's Mouth, noting that even there the pool of water had dried up and the rushes waved in the hot air over a bed of hard, caked mud, and so reached within the hour the wide expanse of Thursley Common. On every side the world stretched dark and burnt, a cemetery of cinders. Great thrills rushed through his heart; and with the power of a tide that yet came at flashing speed the truth rose up in him... Half running now, he plunged forward another mile or two, and found himself, the only living thing, amid the great waste of heather-land. The blazing sunlight drenched it.\n\nIt lay, a sheet of weird dark beauty, spreading like a black, enormous garden as far as the eye could reach.\n\nThen, breathless, he paused and looked about him. Within his heart something, long smouldering, ran into sudden flame. Light blazed upon his inner world. For as the scorch of vehement passion may quicken tracts of human consciousness that lie ordinarily inert and unproductive, so here the surface of the earth had turned alive. He knew; he saw; he understood.\n\nHere, in these open sun-traps that gathered and retained the heat, the fire of the Universe had dropped and lain, increasing week by week. These parched, dry months, the soil, free from rejecting and protective moisture, had let it all accumulate till at length it had sunk downwards, inwards, and the sister fires below, responding to the touch of their ancient parent source, too long unfelt, had answered with a swift uprising roar. They had come up with answering joy, and here and there had actually reached the surface, and had leaped out with dancing cry, wild to escape from an age-long prison back to their huge, eternal origin.\n\nThis sunshine, ah! what was it? These farthing dips of heat men complained about in their tiny, cage-like houses! It scorched the grass and fields, yes; but the surface never held it long enough to let it sink to union with its kindred of the darker fires beneath! These cried for it, but union was ever denied and stifled by the weight of cooled and cooling rock. And the ages of separation had almost cooled remembrance too\u2014fire\u2014the kiss and strength of fire\u2014the flaming embrace and burning lips of the father sun himself. . He could have cried with the fierce delight of it all, and the picture he would paint rose there before him, burnt gloriously into the canvas of the entire heavens. Was not his own heat and life also from the sun?...\n\nHe stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. The world was still. It basked in the windless heat. No living thing stirred, for the common forms of life had fled away. Earth waited. He, too, waited. And then some touch of intuition, blown to white heat, supplied the link the pedestrian intellect missed, and he knew that what he waited for was on the way. For he would see. The message he should paint would come before his outer eye as well, though not, as he had first stupidly expected, on some grand, enormous scale. Rather would it be the equivalent of that still, small voice that once had inspired an entire nation...\n\nThe wind passed very softly across the un-burnt patch of heather where he lay; he heard it rustling in the skeletons of scorched birch trees, and in the gorse and furze bushes that the flame had left so ghostly pale. Farther off\" it sang in the isolated pines, dying away like surf upon some far-off reef. He smelt the bitter perfume of burnt soil, the pungent, acrid odour of beaten ashes. The purple-black of the moors yawned like openings in the side of the earth. In all directions for miles stretched the deep emptiness of the heather-lands, an immense, dark, magic garden, still black with the feet of wonder that had flown across it and left it so beautifully scarred. The shadow of the terrible embrace still trailed and lingered as though Midnight had screened a time of passion with this curtain of her softest plumes.\n\nAnd they had called it ugly, had spoken of its marred beauty, its hideousness! He laughed exultantly as he drank it in, for the weird and savage splendour everywhere broke loose and spread, passing from the earth into the receptive substance of his own mind. Even the roots of gorse and heather, like petrified, shadow-eating snakes, charged with the mystery of that eternal underworld whence they had risen, lay waiting for the return of the night of sleep whence Fire had wakened them. Lost ghosts of a salamander army that the flame had swept above the ground, they lay anguished and frightened in the glare of the unaccustomed sun...\n\nAnd waiting, he stared about him in the deep silence of the afternoon. Hazy with distance he saw the peak of Crooksbury, dim in its sheet of pines, waving a blue-plumed crest into the sky for signal; and close about him rose the more sombre glory of the lesser knolls and boulders, still cloaked in the swarthy magic of the smoke. Amid pools of ashes in the nearer hollows he saw the blue beauty of the fire-weed that rushes instantly into life behind all conflagrations. It was blowing softly in the wind. And here and there, set like emeralds upon some dusky bosom, lay the brilliant spires of young bracken that rose to clap a thousand tiny hands in the heart of exquisite desolation. In a cloud of green they rustled in the wind above the sea of black... And so within himself O'Hara realised the huge excitement of the flame this fragment of the earth had felt. For Fire, mysterious symbol of universal life, spirit that prodigally gives itself without itself diminishing, had passed in power across this ancient heather-land, leaving the soul of it all naked and unashamed. The sun had loved it. The fires below had risen up and answered. They had known that union with their source which some call death...\n\nAnd the fires were rising still. The poet's heart in him became suddenly and awfully aware. Ye stars of fire! This patch of unburnt heather where he lay had been untouched as yet, but now the flame in his soul had brought the little needed link and he would see. The thing of wonder that the Universe should teach him how to paint was already on the way. Called by the sun, tremendous, splendid parent, the central fires were still rising.\n\nAnd he turned, weakness and exultation racing for possession of him. The wind passed softly over his face, and with it came a faint, dry sound. It was distant and yet close beside him. At the stir of it there rose also in himself a strange vast thing that was bigger than the bulk of the moon and wide as the extension of swept forests, yet small and gentle as a blade of grass that pricks the lawn in spring. And he realised then that ' within' and 'without' had turned one, and that over the entire moorland arrived this thing that was happening too in a white-hot point of his own heart. He was linked with the sun and the farthest star, and in his little finger glowed the heat and fire of the universe itself. In sympathy his own fires were rising too.\n\nThe sound was born\u2014a faint, light noise of crackling in the heather at his feet. He bent his head and searched, and among the obscure and tiny underways of the roots he saw a tip of curling smoke rise slowly upwards. It moved in a thin, blue spiral past his face. Then terror took him that was like a terror of the mountains, yet with it at the same time a realisation of beauty that made the heart leap within him into dazzling radiance. For the incense of this fairy column of thin smoke drew his soul out with it\u2014upwards towards its source. He rose to his feet, trembling...\n\nHe watched the line rise slowly to the sky and vanish into blue. The whole expanse of blackened heather-land watched too. Wind sank away; the sunshine dropped to meet it. A sense of deep expectancy, profound and reverent, lay over all that sun-baked moor; and the entire sweep of burnt world about him knew with joy that what was taking place in that wee, isolated patch of Surrey heather was the thing the Hebrew mystic knew when the Soul of the Universe became manifest in the bush that burned, yet never was consumed. In that faint sound of crackling, as he stood aside to listen and to watch, O'Hara knew a form of the eternal Voice of Ages. There was no flame, but it seemed to him that all his inner being passed in fiery heat outwards towards its source... He saw the little patch of dried-up heather sink to the level of the black surface all about it\u2014a sifted pile of delicate, pale-blue ashes. The tiny spiral vanished; he watched it disappear, winding upwards out of sight in a little ghostly trail of beauty. So small and soft and simple was this wonder of the world. It was gone. And something in himself had broken, dropped in ashes, and passed also outwards like a tiny mounting flame.\n\nBut the picture O'Hara had thought himself designed to paint was never done. It was not even begun. The great canvas of 'The Fire Worshipper ' stood empty on the easel, for the artist had not strength to lift a brush. Within two days the final breath passed slowly from his lips. The strange fever that so perplexed the doctor by its rapid development and its fury took him so easily. His temperature was extraordinary. The heat, as of an internal fire, fairly devoured him, and the smile upon his face at the last\u2014so Rennie declared\u2014was the most perplexingly wonderful thing he had ever seen. 'It was like a great, white flame,' he said.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Messenger ]\n\nI never been afraid of ghostly things, attracted rather with a curious live interest, though it is always out of doors that strange Presences get nearest to me, and in Nature I have encountered warnings, messages, presentiments, and the like, that, by way of help or guidance, have later justified themselves. I have, therefore, welcomed them. But in the little rooms of houses things of much value rarely come, for the thick air chokes the wires, as it were, and distorts or mutilates the clear delivery.\n\nBut the other night, here in the carpenter's house, where my attic windows beckon to the mountains and the woods, I woke with the uncomfortably strong suggestion that something was on the way, and that I was not ready. It came along the by-ways of deep sleep. I woke abruptly, alarmed before I was even properly awake. Something was approaching with great swiftness\u2014and I was unprepared.\n\nAcross the lake there were faint signs of colour behind the distant Alps, but terraces of mist still lay grey above the vineyards, and the slim poplar, whose tip was level with my face, no more than rustled in the wind of dawn. A shiver, not brought to me by any wind, ran through my nerves, for I knew with a certainty no arguing could lessen nor dispel that something from immensely far away was deliberately now approaching me. The touch of wonder in advance of it was truly awful; its splendour, size, and grandeur belonged to conditions I had surely never known. It came through empty spaces\u2014from another world. While I lay asleep it had been already on the way.\n\nI stood there a moment, seeking for some outward sign that might betray its nature. The last stars were fading in the northern sky, and blue and dim lay the whole long line of the Jura, cloaked beneath still slumbering forests. There was a rumbling of a distant train. Now and then a dog barked in some outlying farm. The Night was up and walking, though as yet she moved but slowly from the sky. Shadows still draped the world. And the warning that had reached me first in sleep rushed through my tingling nerves once more with a certainty not far removed from shock. Something from another world was drawing every minute nearer, with a speed that made me tremble and half-breathless. It would presently arrive. It would stand close beside me and look straight into my face. Into these very eyes that searched the mist and shadow for an outward sign it would gaze intimately with a Message brought for me alone. But into these narrow walls it could only come with difficulty. The message would be maimed. There still was time for preparation. And I hurried into clothes and made my way downstairs and out into the open air.\n\nThus, at first, by climbing fast, I kept ahead of it, and soon the village lay beneath me in its nest of shadow, and the limestone ridges far above dropped nearer. But the awe and terrible deep wonder did not go. Along these mountain paths, whose every inch was so intimate that I could follow them even in the dark, this sense of breaking grandeur clung to my footsteps, keeping close. Nothing upon the earth\u2014familiar, friendly, well-known, little earth\u2014could have brought this sense that pressed upon the edges of true reverence. It was the awareness that some speeding messenger from spaces far, far beyond the world would presently stand close and touch me, would gaze into my little human eyes, would leave its message as of life or death, and then depart upon its fearful way again\u2014it was this that conveyed the feeling of apprehension that went with me.\n\nAnd instinctively, while rising higher and higher, I chose the darkest and most sheltered way. I sought the protection of the trees, and ran into the deepest vaults of the forest. The moss was soaking wet beneath my feet, and the thousand tapering spires of the pines dipped upwards into a sky already brightening with palest gold and crimson. There was a whispering and a rustling overhead as the trees, who know everything before it comes, announced to one another that the thing I sought to hide from was already very, very near. Plunging deeper into the woods to hide, this detail of sure knowledge followed me and laughed: that the speed of this august arrival was one which made the greatest speed I ever dreamed of a mere standing still...\n\nI hid myself where possible in the darkness that was growing every minute more rare. The air was sharp and exquisitely fresh. I heard birds calling. The low, wet branches kissed my face and hair. A sense of glad relief came over me that I had left the closeness of the little attic chamber, and that I should eventually meet this huge New-comer in the wide, free spaces of the mountains. There must be room where I could hold myself unmanacled to meet it... The village lay far beneath me, a patch of smoke and mist and soft red-brown roofs among the vineyards. And then my gaze turned upwards, and through a rift in the close-wrought ceiling of the trees I saw the clearness of the open sky. A strip of cloud ran through it, carrying off the Night's last little dream... and down into my heart dropped instantly that cold breath of awe I have known but once in life, when staring through the stupendous mouth within the Milky Way\u2014that opening into the outer spaces of eternal darkness, unlit by any single star, men call the Coal Hole.\n\nThe futility of escape then took me bodily, and I renounced all further flight. From this speeding Messenger there was no hiding possible. His splendid shoulders already brushed the sky. I heard the rushing of his awful wings... yet in that deep, significant silence with which light steps upon the clouds of morning.\n\nAnd simultaneously I left the woods behind me and stood upon a naked ridge of rock that all night long had watched the stars.\n\nThen terror passed away like magic. Cool winds from the valleys bore me up. I heard the tinkling of a thousand cowbells from pastures far below in a score of hidden valleys. The cold departed, and with it every trace of little fears. My eyes seemed for an instant blinded, and I knew that deep sense of joy which seems so 'unearthly' that it almost stains the sight with the veil of tears. The soul sank to her knees in prayer and worship.\n\nFor the messenger from another world had come. He stood beside me on that dizzy ledge. Warmth clothed me, and I knew myself akin to deity. He stood there, gazing straight into my little human eyes. He touched me everywhere. Above the distant Alps the sun came up. His eye looked close into my own.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Glamour of the Snow ]\n\nHibbert, always conscious of two worlds, was in this mountain village conscious of three. It lay on the slopes of the Valais Alps, and he had taken a room in the little post office, where he could be at peace to write his book, yet at the same time enjoy the winter sports and find companionship in the hotels when he wanted it.\n\nThe three worlds that met and mingled here seemed to his imaginative temperament very obvious, though it is doubtful if another mind less intuitively equipped would have seen them so well-defined. There was the world of tourist English, civilised, quasi-educated, to which he belonged by birth, at any rate; there was the world of peasants to which he felt himself drawn by sympathy\u2014for he loved and admired their toiling, simple life; and there was this other\u2014which he could only call the world of Nature. To this last, however, in virtue of a vehement poetic imagination, and a tumultuous pagan instinct fed by his very blood, he felt that most of him belonged. The others borrowed from it, as it were, for visits. Here, with the soul of Nature, hid his central life.\n\nBetween all three was conflict\u2014potential conflict. On the skating-rink each Sunday the tourists regarded the natives as intruders; in the church the peasants plainly questioned: 'Why do you come? We are here to worship; you to stare and whisper! 'For neither of these two worlds accepted the other. And neither did Nature accept the tourists, for it took advantage of their least mistakes, and indeed, even of the peasant-world 'accepted 'only those who were strong and bold enough to invade her savage domain with sufficient skill to protect themselves from several forms of\u2014death.\n\nNow Hibbert was keenly aware of this potential conflict and want of harmony; he felt outside, yet caught by it\u2014torn in the three directions because he was partly of each world, but wholly in only one. There grew in him a constant, subtle effort\u2014or, at least, desire\u2014to unify them and decide positively to which he should belong and live in. The attempt, of course, was largely subconscious. It was the natural instinct of a richly imaginative nature seeking the point of equilibrium, so that the mind could feel at peace and his brain be free to do good work.\n\nAmong the guests no one especially claimed his interest. The men were nice but undistinguished\u2014athletic schoolmasters, doctors snatching a holiday, good fellows all; the women, equally various\u2014the clever, the would-be-fast, the dare-to-be-dull, the women 'who understood,' and the usual pack of jolly dancing girls and ' flappers.' And Hibbert, with his forty odd years of thick experience behind him, got on well with the lot; he understood them all; they belonged to definite, predigested types that are the same the world over, and that he had met the world over long ago.\n\nBut to none of them did he belong. His nature was too 'multiple' to subscribe to the set of shibboleths of any one class. And, since all liked him, and felt that somehow he seemed outside of them\u2014spectator, looker - on\u2014all sought to claim him.\n\nIn a sense, therefore, the three worlds fought for him: natives, tourists, Nature...\n\nIt was thus began the singular conflict for the soul of Hibbert. In his own soul, however, it took place. Neither the peasants nor the tourists were conscious that they fought for anything. And Nature, they say, is merely blind and automatic.\n\nThe assault upon him of the peasants may be left out of account, for it is obvious that they stood no chance of success. The tourist world, however, made a gallant effort to subdue him to themselves. But the evenings in the hotel, when dancing was not in order, were\u2014English. The provincial imagination was set upon a throne and worshipped heavily through incense of the stupidest conventions possible. Hibbert used to go back early to his room in the post office to work.\n\n'It is a mistake on my part to have realised that there is any conflict at all,' he thought, as he crunched home over the snow at midnight after one of the dances. 'It would have been better to have kept outside it all and done my work. Better,' he added, looking back down the silent village street to the church tower, 'and\u2014safer.'\n\nThe adjective slipped from his mind before he was aware of it. He turned with an involuntary start and looked about him. He knew perfectly well what it meant\u2014this thought that had thrust its head up from the instinctive region. He understood, without being able to express it fully, the meaning that betrayed itself in the choice of the adjective. For if he had ignored the existence of this conflict he would at the same time have remained outside the arena. Whereas now he had entered the lists. Now this battle for his soul must have issue. And he knew that the spell of Nature was greater for him than all other spells in the world combined\u2014greater than love, revelry, pleasure, greater even than study. He had always been afraid to let himself go. His pagan soul dreaded her terrific powers of witchery even while he worshipped.\n\nThe little village already slept. The world lay smothered in snow. The chalet roofs shone white beneath the moon, and pitch-black shadows gathered against the walls of the church. His eye rested a moment on the square stone tower with its frosted cross that pointed to the sky: then travelled with a leap of many thousand feet to the enormous mountains that brushed the brilliant stars. Like a forest rose the huge peaks above the slumbering village, measuring the night and heavens. They beckoned him. And something born of the snowy desolation, born of the midnight and the silent grandeur, born of the great listening hollows of the night, something that lay 'twixt terror and wonder, dropped from the vast wintry spaces down into his heart\u2014and called him. Very softly, unrecorded in any word or thought his brain could compass, it laid its spell upon him. Fingers of snow brushed the surface of his heart. The power and quiet majesty of the winter's night appalled him...\n\nFumbling a moment with the big unwieldy key, he let himself in and went upstairs to bed. Two thoughts went with him\u2014apparently quite ordinary and sensible ones:\n\n'What fools these peasants are to sleep through such a night!' And the other:\n\n'Those dances tire me. I'll never go again.\n\nMy work only suffers in the morning.' The claims of peasants and tourists upon him seemed thus in a single instant weakened.\n\nThe clash of battle troubled half his dreams. Nature had sent her Beauty of the Night and won the first assault. The others, routed and dismayed, fled far away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 435", + "text": "'Don't go back to your dreary old post office. We're going to have supper in my room\u2014something hot. Come and join us. Hurry up!'\n\nThere had been an ice carnival, and the last party, tailing up the snow-slope to the hotel, called him. The Chinese lanterns smoked and sputtered on the wires; the band had long since gone. The cold was bitter and the moon came only momentarily between high, driving clouds. From the shed where the people changed from skates to snow-boots he shouted something to the effect that he was ' following '; but no answer came; the moving shadows of those who had called were already merged high up against the village darkness. The voices died away. Doors slammed. Hibbert found himself alone on the deserted rink.\n\nAnd it was then, quite suddenly, the impulse came to\u2014stay and skate alone. The thought of the stuffy hotel room, and of those noisy people with their obvious jokes and laughter, oppressed him. He felt a longing to be alone with the night, to taste her wonder all by himself there beneath the stars, gliding over the ice. It was not yet midnight, and he could skate for half an hour. That supper party, if they noticed his absence at all, would merely think he had changed his mind and gone to bed.\n\nIt was an impulse, yes, and not an unnatural one; yet even at the time it struck him that something more than impulse lay concealed behind it. More than invitation, yet certainly less than command, there was a vague queer feeling that he stayed because he had to, almost as though there was something he had forgotten, overlooked, left undone. Imaginative temperaments are often thus; and impulse is ever weakness. For with such ill-considered opening of the doors to hasty action may come an invasion of other forces at the same time\u2014forces merely waiting their opportunity perhaps!\n\nHe caught the fugitive warning even while he dismissed it as absurd, and the next minute he was whirling over the smooth ice in delightful curves and loops beneath the moon. There was no fear of collision. He could take his own speed and space as he willed. The shadows of the towering mountains fell across the rink, and a wind of ice came from the forests, where the snow lay ten feet deep. The hotel lights winked and went out. The village slept. The high wire netting could not keep out the wonder of the winter night that grew about him like a presence. He skated on and on, keen exhilarating pleasure in his tingling blood, and weariness all forgotten.\n\nAnd then, midway in the delight of rushing movement, he saw a figure gliding behind the wire netting, watching him. With a start that almost made him lose his balance\u2014for the abruptness of the new arrival was so unlocked for\u2014he paused and stared. Although the light was dim he made out that it was the figure of a woman and that she was feeling her way along the netting, trying to get in. Against the white background of the snow-field he watched her rather stealthy efforts as she passed with a silent step over the banked-up snow. She was tall and slim and graceful; he could see that even in the dark. And then, of course, he understood. It was another adventurous skater like himself, stolen down unawares from hotel or chalet, and searching for the opening. At once, making a sign and pointing with one hand, he turned swiftly and skated over to the little entrance on the other side.\n\nBut, even before he got there, there was a sound on the ice behind him and, with.an exclamation of amazement he could not suppress, he turned to see her swerving up to his side across the width of the rink. She had somehow found another way in.\n\nHibbert, as a rule, was punctilious, and in these free-and-easy places, perhaps, especially so. If only for his own protection he did not seek to make advances unless some kind of introduction paved the way. But for these two to skate together in the semi-darkness without speech, often of necessity brushing shoulders almost, was too absurd to think of. Accordingly he raised his cap and spoke. His actual words he seems unable to recall, nor what the girl said in reply, except that she answered him in accented English with some commonplace about doing figures at midnight on an empty rink. Quite natural it was, and right. She wore grey clothes of some kind, though not the customary long gloves or sweater, for indeed her hands were bare, and presently when he skated with her, he wondered with something like astonishment at their dry and icy coldness.\n\nAnd she was delicious to skate with\u2014supple, sure, and light, fast as a man yet with the freedom of a child, sinuous and steady at the same time. Her flexibility made him wonder, and when he asked where she had learned she murmured\u2014he caught the breath against his ear and recalled later that it was singularly cold\u2014that she could hardly tell, for she had been accustomed to the ice ever since she could remember.\n\nBut her face he never properly saw. A muffler of white fur buried her neck to the ears, and her cap came over the eyes. He only saw that she was young. Nor could he gather her hotel or chalet, for she pointed vaguely, when he asked her, up the slopes. 'Just over there ' she said, quickly taking his hand again. He did not press her; no doubt she wished to hide her escapade. And the touch of her hand thrilled him more than anything he could remember; even through his thick glove he felt the softness of that cold and delicate softness.\n\nThe clouds thickened over the mountains. It grew darker. They talked very little, and did not always skate together. Often they separated, curving about in corners by themselves, but always coming together again in the centre of the rink; and when she left him thus Hibbert was conscious of\u2014yes, of missing her. He found a peculiar satisfaction, almost a fascination, in skating by her side. It was quite an adventure\u2014these two strangers with the ice and snow and night!\n\nMidnight had long since sounded from the old church tower before they parted. She gave the sign, and he skated quickly to the shed, meaning to find a seat and help her take her skates off. Yet when he turned\u2014she had already gone. He saw her slim figure gliding away across the snow... and hurrying for the last time round the rink alone he searched in vain for the opening she had twice used in this curious way.\n\n'How very queer!' he thought, referring to the wire netting. 'She must have lifted it and wriggled under...!'\n\nWondering how in the world she managed it, what in the world had possessed him to be so free with her, and who in the world she was, he went up the steep slope to the post office and so to bed, her promise to come again another night still ringing delightfully in his ears. And curious were the thoughts and sensations that accompanied him. Most of all, perhaps, was the half suggestion of some dim memory that he had known this girl before, had met her somewhere, more\u2014that she knew him. For in her voice\u2014a low, soft, windy little voice it was, tender and soothing for all its quiet coldness\u2014there lay some faint reminder of two others he had known, both long since gone: the voice of the woman he had loved, and\u2014the voice of his mother.\n\nBut this time through his dreams there ran no clash of battle. He was conscious, rather, of something cold and clinging that made him think of sifting snowflakes climbing slowly with entangling touch and thickness round his feet. The snow, coming without noise, each flake so light and tiny none can mark the spot whereon it settles, yet the mass of it able to smother whole villages, wove through the very texture of his mind\u2014cold, bewildering, deadening effort with its clinging network of ten million feathery touches." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 436", + "text": "In the morning Hibbert realised he had done, perhaps, a foolish thing. The brilliant sunshine that drenched the valley made him see this, and the sight of his work-table with its typewriter, books, papers, and the rest, brought additional conviction. To have skated with a girl alone at midnight, no matter how innocently the thing had come about, was unwise\u2014unfair, especially to her. Gossip in these little winter resorts was worse than in a provincial town. He hoped no one had seen them. Luckily the night had been dark. Most likely none had heard the ring of skates.\n\nDeciding that in future he would be more careful, he plunged into work, and sought to dismiss the matter from his mind.\n\nBut in his times of leisure the memory returned persistently to haunt him. When he 'ski-d,' 'luged,' or danced in the evenings, and especially when he skated on the little rink, he was aware that the eyes of his mind forever sought this strange companion of the night. A hundred times he fancied that he saw her, but always sight deceived him. Her face he might not know, but he could hardly fail to recognise her figure. Yet nowhere among the others did he catch a glimpse of that slim young creature he had skated with alone beneath the clouded stars. He searched in vain. Even his inquiries as to the occupants of the private chalets brought no results. He had lost her. But the queer thing was that he felt as though she were somewhere close; he knew she had not really gone. While people came and left with every day, it never once occurred to him that she had left. On the contrary, he felt assured that they would meet again.\n\nThis thought he never quite acknowledged. Perhaps it was the wish that fathered it only. And, even when he did meet her, it was a question how he would speak and claim acquaintance, or whether she would recognise himself. It might be awkward. He almost came to dread a meeting, though ' dread,' of course, was far too strong a word to describe an emotion that was half delight, half wondering anticipation.\n\nMeanwhile the season was in full swing. Hibbert felt in perfect health, worked hard, ski-d, skated, luged, and at night danced fairly often\u2014in spite of his decision. This dancing was, however, an act of subconscious surrender; it really meant he hoped to find her among the whirling couples. He was searching for her without quite acknowledging it to himself; and the hotel-world, meanwhile, thinking it had won him over, teased and chaffed him. He made excuses in a similar vein; but all the time he watched and searched and\u2014waited.\n\nFor several days the sky held clear and bright and frosty, bitterly cold, everything crisp and sparkling in the sun; but there was no sign of fresh snow, and the ski-ers began to grumble. On the mountains was an icy crust that made 'running' dangerous; they wanted the frozen, dry, and powdery snow that makes for speed, renders steering easier and falling less severe. But the keen east wind showed no signs of changing for a whole ten days. Then, suddenly, Hibbert, who was delicately sensitive to the least change in earth or sky, was perhaps the first to feel it. Only he did not prophesy. He knew through every nerve in his body that moisture had crept into the air, was accumulating, and that presently a fall would come. For he responded to the moods of Nature like a fine barometer.\n\nAnd the knowledge, this time, brought into his heart a strange little wayward emotion that was hard to account for\u2014a feeling of unexplained uneasiness and disquieting joy. For behind it, woven through it rather, ran a faint exhilaration that connected remotely somewhere with that touch of delicious alarm, that tiny anticipating 'dread,' that so puzzled him when he thought of his next meeting with his skating companion of the night. It lay beyond all words, all telling, this queer relationship between the two; but somehow the girl and snow ran in a pair across his mind.\n\nPerhaps for imaginative writing-men, more than for other workers, the smallest change of mood betrays itself at once. His work at any rate revealed this slight shifting of emotional values in his soul. Not that his writing suffered, but that it altered, subtly as those changes of sky or sea or landscape that come with the passing of afternoon into evening\u2014imperceptibly. A subconscious excitement sought to push outwards and express itself... and, knowing the uneven effect such moods produced in his work, he laid his pen aside and took instead to reading that he had to do.\n\nMeanwhile the brilliance passed from the sunshine, the sky grew slowly overcast; by dusk the mountain tops came singularly close and sharp; the distant valley rose into absurdly near perspective. The moisture increased, rapidly approaching saturation point, when it must fall in snow. Hibbert watched and waited.\n\nAnd in the morning the world lay smothered beneath its fresh white carpet. It snowed heavily till noon, thickly, incessantly, chokingly, a foot or more; then the sky cleared, the sun came out in splendour, the wind shifted 'back to the east, and frost came down upon the mountains with its keenest and most biting tooth. The drop in the temperature was tremendous, but the ski-ers were jubilant. Next day the ' running ' would be fast and perfect. Already the mass was settling, and the surface freezing into those moss-like, powdery crystals that make the ski run almost of their own accord with the faint 'sishing 'as of a bird's wings through the air." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 437", + "text": "That night there was excitement in the little hotel-world, first because there was a bal costum\u00e9, but chiefly because the new snow had come. And Hibbert went\u2014felt drawn to go; he did not go in costume, but he wanted to talk about the slopes and ski-ing with the other men, and at the same time...\n\nAh, there was the truth, the deeper necessity that called. For the singular connection between the stranger and the snow again betrayed itself, utterly beyond explanation as before, but vital and insistent. Some hidden instinct in his pagan soul\u2014heaven knows how he phrased it even to himself, if he phrased it at all\u2014whispered that with the snow the girl would be somewhere about, would emerge from her hiding place, would even look for him.\n\nAbsolutely unwarranted it was. He laughed while he stood before the little glass and trimmed his moustache, tried to make his black tie sit straight, and shook down his dinner jacket so that it should lie upon the shoulders without a crease. His brown eyes were very bright. 'I look younger than I usually do,' he thought. It was unusual, even significant, in a man who had no vanity about his appearance and certainly never questioned his age or tried to look younger than he was. Affairs of the heart, with one tumultuous exception that left no fuel for lesser subsequent fires, had never troubled him. The forces of his soul and mind not called upon for ' work' and obvious duties, all went to Nature. The desolate, wild places of the earth were what he loved; night, and the beauty of the stars and snow. And this evening he felt their claims upon him mightily stirring. A rising wildness caught his blood, quickened his pulse, woke longing and passion too. But chiefly snow. The snow whirred softly through his thoughts like white, seductive dreams... For the snow had come; and She, it seemed, had somehow come with it\u2014into his mind.\n\nAnd yet he stood before that twisted mirror and pulled his tie and coat askew a dozen times, as though it mattered. 'What in the world is up with me?' he thought. Then, laughing a little, he turned before leaving the room to put his private papers in order. The green morocco desk that held them he took down from the shelf and laid upon the table. Tied to the lid was the visiting card with his brother's London address ' in case of accident.' On the way down to the hotel he wondered why he had done this, for though imaginative, he was not the kind of man who dealt in presentiments. Moods with him were strong, but ever held in leash.\n\n'It's almost like a warning,' he thought, smiling. He drew his thick coat tightly round the throat as the freezing air bit at him. 'Those warnings one reads of in stories sometimes...!'\n\nA delicious happiness was in his blood. Over the edge of the hills across the valley rose the moon. He saw her silver sheet the world of snow. Snow covered all. It smothered sound and distance. It smothered houses, streets, and human beings. It smothered\u2014life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 438", + "text": "In the hall there was light and bustle; people were already arriving from the other hotels and chalets, their costumes hidden beneath many wraps. Groups of men in evening dress stood about smoking, talking 'snow' and 'ski-ing.' The band was tuning up. The claims of the hotel-world clashed about him faintly as of old. At the big glass windows of the verandah, peasants stopped a moment on their way home from the caf\u00e9 to peer. Hibbert thought laughingly of that conflict he used to imagine. He laughed because it suddenly seemed so unreal. He belonged so utterly to Nature and the mountains, and especially to those desolate slopes where now the snow lay thick and fresh and sweet, that there was no question of a conflict at all. The power of the newly fallen snow had caught him, proving it without effort. Out there, upon those lonely reaches of the moonlit ridges, the snow lay ready\u2014masses and masses of it\u2014cool, soft, inviting. He longed for it. It awaited him. He thought of the intoxicating delight of ski-ing in the moonlight...\n\nThus, somehow, in vivid flashing vision, he thought of it while he stood there smoking with the other men and talking all the 'shop 'of ski-ing.\n\nAnd, ever mysteriously blended with this power of the snow, poured also through his inner being the power of the girl. He could not disabuse his mind of the insinuating presence of the two together. He remembered that queer skating-impulse of ten days ago, the impulse that had let her in. That any mind, even an imaginative one, could pass beneath the sway of such a fancy was strange enough; and Hibbert, while fully aware of the disorder, yet found a curious joy in yielding to it. This insubordinate centre that drew him towards old pagan beliefs had assumed command. With a kind of sensuous pleasure he let himself be conquered.\n\nAnd snow that night seemed in everybody's thoughts. The dancing couples talked of it; the hotel proprietors congratulated one another; it meant good sport and satisfied their guests; every one was planning trips and expeditions, talking of slopes and telemarks, of flying speed and distance, of drifts and crust and frost. Vitality and enthusiasm pulsed in the very air; all were alert and active, positive, radiating currents of creative life even into the stuffy atmosphere of that crowded ball-room. And the snow had caused it, the snow had brought it; all this discharge of eager sparkling energy was due primarily to the\u2014Snow.\n\nBut in the mind of Hibbert, by some swift alchemy of his pagan yearnings, this energy became transmuted. It rarefied itself, gleaming in white and crystal currents of passionate anticipation, which he transferred, as by a species of electrical imagination, into the personality of the girl\u2014the Girl of the Snow. She somewhere was waiting for him, expecting him, calling to him softly from those leagues of moonlit mountain. He remembered the touch of that cool, dry hand; the soft and icy breath against his cheek; the hush and softness of her presence in the way she came and the way she had gone again\u2014like a flurry of snow the wind sent gliding up the slopes. She, like himself, belonged out there. He fancied that he heard her little windy voice come sifting to him through the snowy branches of the trees, calling his name... that haunting little voice that dived straight to the centre of his life as once, long years ago, two other voices used to do...\n\nBut nowhere among the costumed dancers did he see her slender figure. He danced with one and all, distrait and absent, a stupid partner as each girl discovered, his eyes ever turning towards the door and windows, hoping to catch the luring face, the vision that did not come... and at length, hoping even against hope. For the ball-room thinned; groups left one by one, going home to their hotels and chalets; the band tired obviously; people sat drinking lemon-squashes at the little tables, the men mopping their foreheads, everybody ready for bed.\n\nIt was close on midnight. As Hibbert passed through the hall to get his overcoat and snow-boots, he saw men in the passage by the 'sport-room,' greasing their ski against an early start. Knapsack luncheons were being ordered by the kitchen swing doors. He sighed. Lighting a cigarette a friend offered him, he returned a confused reply to some question as to whether he could join their party in the morning. It seemed he did not hear it properly. He passed through the outer vestibule between the double glass doors, and went into the night.\n\nThe man who asked the question watched him go, an expression of anxiety momentarily in his eyes.\n\n'Don't think he heard you,' said another, laughing. 'You've got to shout to Hibbert, his mind's so full of his work.'\n\n'He works too hard,' suggested the first, 'full of queer ideas and dreams.'\n\nBut Hibbert's silence was not rudeness. He had not caught the invitation, that was all. The call of the hotel world had faded. He no longer heard it. Another wilder call was sounding in his ears.\n\nFor up the street he had seen a little figure moving. Close against the shadows of the baker's shop it glided\u2014white, slim, enticing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 439", + "text": "And at once into his mind passed the hush and softness of the snow\u2014yet with it a searching, crying wildness for the heights. He knew by some incalculable, swift instinct she would not meet him in the village street. It was not there, amid crowding houses, she would speak to him. Indeed, already she had disappeared, melted from view up the white vista of the moonlit road. Yonder, he divined, she waited where the highway narrowed abruptly into the mountain path beyond the chalets.\n\nIt did not even occur to him to hesitate; mad though it seemed, and was\u2014this sudden craving for the heights with her, at least for open spaces where the snow lay thick and fresh\u2014it was too imperious to be denied. He does not remember going up to his room, putting the sweater over his evening clothes, and getting into the fur gauntlet gloves and the helmet cap of wool. Most certainly he has no recollection of fastening on his ski; he must have done it automatically. Some faculty of normal observation was in abeyance, as it were. His mind was out beyond the village\u2014out with the snowy mountains and the moon.\n\nHenri D\u00e9fago, putting up the shutters over his caf\u00e9 windows, saw him pass, and wondered mildly: 'Un monsieur qui fait du ski \u00e0 cette heure! Il est Anglais, donc...! 'He shrugged his shoulders, as though a man had the right to choose his own way of death. And Marthe Perotti, the hunchback wife of the shoemaker, looking by chance from her window, caught his figure moving swiftly up the road. She had other thoughts, for she knew and believed the old traditions of the witches and snow-beings that steal the souls of men. She had even heard, 'twas said, the dreaded ' synagogue' pass roaring down the street at night, and now, as then, she hid her eyes. 'They've called to him... and he must go,' she murmured, making the sign of the cross.\n\nBut no one sought to stop him. Hibbert recalls only a single incident until he found himself beyond the houses, searching for her along the fringe of forest where the moonlight met the snow in a bewildering frieze of fantastic shadows. And the incident was simply this\u2014that he remembered passing the church. Catching the outline of its tower against the stars, he was aware of a faint sense of hesitation. A vague uneasiness came and went\u2014jarred unpleasantly across the flow of his excited feelings, chilling exhilaration. He caught the instant's discord, dismissed it, and\u2014passed on. The seduction of the snow smothered the hint before he realised that it had brushed the skirts of warning.\n\nAnd then he saw her. She stood there waiting in a little clear space of shining snow, dressed all in white, part of the moonlight and the glistening background, her slender figure just discernible.\n\n'I waited, for I knew you would come,' the silvery little voice of windy beauty floated down to him. 'You had to come.'\n\n'I'm ready,' he answered, 'I knew it too.'\n\nThe world of Nature caught him to its heart in those few words\u2014the wonder and the glory of the night and snow. Life leaped within him. The passion of his pagan soul exulted, rose in joy, flowed out to her. He neither reflected nor considered, but let himself go like the veriest schoolboy in the wildness of first love.\n\n'Give me your hand,' he cried, 'I'm coming...!'\n\n'A little farther on, a little higher,' came her delicious answer. 'Here it is too near the village\u2014and the church.'\n\nAnd the words seemed wholly right and natural; he did not dream of questioning them; he understood that, with this little touch of civilisation in sight, the familiarity he suggested was impossible. Once out upon the open mountains, 'mid the freedom of huge slopes and towering peaks, the stars and moon to witness and the wilderness of snow to watch, they could taste an innocence of happy intercourse free from the dead conventions that imprison literal minds.\n\nHe urged his pace, yet did not quite overtake her. The girl kept always just a little bit ahead of his best efforts... And soon they left the trees behind and passed on to the enormous slopes of the sea of snow that rolled in mountainous terror and beauty to the stars. The wonder of the white world caught him away. Under the steady moonlight it was more than haunting. It was a living, white, bewildering power that deliciously confused the senses and laid a spell of wild perplexity upon the heart. It was a personality that cloaked, and yet revealed, itself through all this sheeted whiteness of snow. It rose, went with him, fled before, and followed after. Slowly it dropped lithe, gleaming arms about his neck, gathering him in...\n\nCertainly some soft persuasion coaxed his very soul, urging him ever forwards, upwards, on towards the higher icy slopes. Judgment and reason left their throne, it seemed, completely, as in the madness of intoxication. The girl, slim and seductive, kept always just ahead, so that he never quite came up with her. He saw the white enchantment of her face and figure, something that streamed about her neck flying like a wreath of snow in the wind, and heard the alluring accents of her whispering voice that called from time to time: 'A little farther on, a little higher... Then we'll run home together!'\n\nSometimes he saw her hand stretched out to find his own, but each time, just as he came up with her, he saw her still in front, the hand and arm withdrawn. They took a gentle angle of ascent. The toil seemed nothing. In this crystal, wine - like air fatigue vanished. The sishing of the ski through the powdery surface of the snow was the only sound that broke the stillness; this, with his breathing and the rustle of her skirts, was all he heard. Cold moonshine, snow, and silence held the world. The sky was black, and the peaks beyond cut into it like frosted wedges of iron and steel. Far below the valley slept, the village long since hidden out of sight. He felt that he could never tire... The sound of the church clock rose from time to time faintly through the air\u2014more and more distant.\n\n'Give me your hand. It's time now to turn back.'\n\n'Just one more slope,' she laughed. 'That ridge above us. Then we'll make for home.' And her low voice mingled pleasantly with the purring of their ski. His own seemed harsh and ugly by comparison.\n\n'But I have never come so high before. It's glorious! This world of silent snow and moonlight\u2014and you. You're a child of the snow, I swear. Let me come up\u2014closer\u2014to see your face\u2014and touch your little hand.'\n\nHer laughter answered him.\n\n'Come on! A little higher. Here we're quite alone together.'\n\n'It's magnificent,' he cried. 'But why did you hide away so long? I've looked and searched for you in vain ever since we skated ' he was going to say 'ten days ago,' but the accurate memory of time had gone from him; he was not sure whether it was days or years or minutes. His thoughts of earth were scattered and confused.\n\n'You looked for me in the wrong places,' he heard her murmur just above him. 'You looked in places where I never go. Hotels and houses kill me. I avoid them.' She laughed\u2014a fine, shrill, windy little laugh.\n\n'I loathe them too'\n\nHe stopped. The girl had suddenly come quite close. A breath of ice passed through his very soul. She had touched him.\n\n'But this awful cold!' he cried out, sharply, 'this freezing cold that takes me. The wind is rising; it's a wind of ice. Come, let us turn...!'\n\nBut when he plunged forward to hold her, or at least to look, the girl was gone again. And something in the way she stood there a few feet beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made him shiver. The moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could not focus sight upon her face, although so close. The gleam of eyes he caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he looked beyond her\u2014out into space...\n\nThe sound of the church bell came up faintly from the valley far below, and he counted the strokes\u2014five. A sudden, curious weakness seized him as he listened. Deep within it was, deadly yet somehow sweet, and hard to resist. He felt like sinking down upon the snow and lying there... They nad been climbing for five hours... It was, of course, the warning of complete exhaustion.\n\nWith a great effort he fought and overcame it. It passed away as suddenly as it came.\n\n'We'll turn,' he said with a decision he hardly felt. 'It will be dawn before we reach the village again. Come at once. It's time for home.'\n\nThe sense of exhilaration had utterly left him. An emotion that was akin to fear swept coldly through him. But her whispering answer turned it instantly to terror\u2014a terror that gripped him horribly and turned him weak and unresisting.\n\n'Our home is\u2014here!' A burst of wild, high laughter, loud and shrill, accompanied the words. It was like a whistling wind. The wind had risen, and clouds obscured the moon. 'A little higher\u2014where we cannot hear the wicked bells,' she cried, and for the first time seized him deliberately by the hand. She moved, was suddenly close against his face. Again she touched him.\n\nAnd Hibbert tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the first time that the power of the snow\u2014that other power which does not exhilarate but deadens effort\u2014was upon him. The suffocating weakness that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire for life\u2014this was awfully upon him. His feet were heavy and entangled. He could not turn or move.\n\nThe girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that icy wind came with her. He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed, his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face. Her arms were round his neck. She drew him softly downwards to his knees. He sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. Her weight was upon him, smothering, delicious. The snow was to his waist... She kissed him softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face. And then she spoke his name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent of two others\u2014both taken over long ago by Death\u2014the voice of his mother, and of the woman he had loved.\n\nHe made one more feeble effort to resist. Then, realising even while he struggled that this soft weight about his heart was sweeter than anything life could ever bring, he let his muscles relax, and sank back into the soft oblivion of the covering snow. Her wintry kisses bore him into sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 440", + "text": "They say that men who know the sleep of exhaustion in the snow find no awakening on the hither side of death... The hours passed and the moon sank down below the white world's rim. Then, suddenly, there came a little crash upon his breast and neck, and Hibbert\u2014woke.\n\nHe slowly turned bewildered, heavy eyes upon the desolate mountains, stared dizzily about him, tried to rise. At first his muscles would not act; a numbing, aching pain possessed him. He uttered a long, thin cry for help, and heard its faintness swallowed by the wind. And then he understood vaguely why he was only warm\u2014not dead. For this very wind that took his cry had built up a sheltering mound of driven snow against his body while he slept. Like a curving wave it ran beside him. It was the breaking of its over-toppling edge that caused the crash, and the coldness of the mass against his neck that woke him.\n\nDawn kissed the eastern sky; pale gleams of gold shot every peak with splendour; but ice was in the air, and the dry and frozen snow blew like powder from the surface of the slopes. He saw the points of his ski projecting just below him. Then he\u2014remembered. It seems he had just strength enough to realise that, could he but rise and stand, he might fly with terrific impetus towards the woods and village far beneath. The ski would carry him. But if he failed and fell...!\n\nHow he contrived it Hibbert never knew; this fear of death somehow called out his whole available reserve force. He rose slowly, balanced a moment, then, taking the angle of an immense zigzag, started down the awful slopes like an arrow from a bow. And automatically the splendid muscles of the practised ski-er and athlete saved and guided him, for he was hardly conscious of controlling either speed or direction. The snow stung face and eyes like fine steel shot; ridge after ridge flew past; the summits raced across the sky; the valley leaped up with bounds to meet him. He scarcely felt the ground beneath his feet as the huge slopes and distance melted before the lightning speed of that descent from death to life.\n\nHe took it in four mile-long zigzags, and it was the turning at each corner that nearly finished him, for then the strain of balancing taxed to the verge of collapse the remnants of his strength.\n\nSlopes that have taken hours to climb can be descended in a short half-hour on ski, but Hibbert had lost all count of time. Quite other thoughts and feelings mastered him in that wild, swift dropping through the air that was like the flight of a bird. For ever close upon his heels came following forms and voices with the whirling snow-dust. He heard that little silvery voice of death and laughter at his back. Shrill and wild, with the whistling of the wind past his ears, he caught its pursuing tones; but in anger now, no longer soft and coaxing. And it was accompanied; she did not follow alone. It seemed a host of these flying figures of the snow chased madly just behind him. He felt them furiously smite his neck and cheeks, snatch at his hands and try to entangle his feet and ski in drifts. His eyes they blinded, and they caught his breath away.\n\nThe terror of the heights and snow and winter desolation urged him forward in the maddest race with death a human being ever knew; and so terrific was the speed that before the gold and crimson had left the summits to touch the ice-lips of the lower glaciers, he saw the friendly forest far beneath swing up and welcome him.\n\nAnd it was then, moving slowly along the edge of the woods, he saw a light. A man was carrying it. A procession of human figures was passing in a dark line laboriously through the snow. And\u2014he heard the sound of chanting.\n\nInstinctively, without a second's hesitation, he changed his course. No longer flying at an angle as before, he pointed his ski straight down the mountain-side. The dreadful steepness did not frighten him. He knew full well it meant a crashing tumble at the bottom, but he also knew it meant a doubling of his speed\u2014with safety at the end. For, though no definite thought passed through his mind, he understood that it was the village cur\u00e8 who carried that little gleaming lantern in the dawn, and that he was taking the Host to a chalet on the lower slopes\u2014to some peasant in extremis. He remembered her terror of the church and bells. She feared the holy symbols.\n\nThere was one last wild cry in his ears as he started, a shriek of the wind before his face, and a rush of stinging snow against closed eyelids\u2014and then he dropped through empty space. Speed took sight from him. It seemed he flew off\" the surface of the world.\n\nIndistinctly he recalls the murmur of men's voices, the touch of strong arms that lifted him, and the shooting pains as the ski were unfastened from the twisted ankle... for when he opened his eyes again to normal life he found himself lying in his bed at the post office with the doctor at his side. But for years to come the story of ' mad Hibbert's' ski-ing at night is recounted in that mountain village. He went, it seems, up slopes, and to a height that no man in his senses ever tried before. The tourists were agog about it for the rest of the season, and the very same day two of the bolder men went over the actual ground and photographed the slopes. Later Hibbert saw these photographs. He noticed one curious thing about them\u2014though he did not mention it to any one:\n\nThere was only a single track.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Return ]\n\nIt was curious\u2014that sense of dull uneasiness that came over him so suddenly, so stealthily at first he scarcely noticed it, but with such marked increase after a time that he presently got up and left the theatre. His seat was on the gangway of the dress circle, and he slipped out awkwardly in the middle of what seemed to be the best and jolliest song of the piece. The full house was shaking with laughter; so infectious was the gaiety that even strangers turned to one another as much as to say: 'Now, isn't that funny?'\n\nIt was curious, too, the way the feeling first got into him at all, here in the full swing of laughter, music, light-heartedness, for it came as a vague suggestion: 'I've forgotten something\u2014something I meant to do\u2014something of importance. What in the world was it, now?' And he thought hard, searching vainly through his mind; then dismissed it as the dancing caught his attention. It came back a little later again, during a passage of long-winded talk that bored him and set his attention free once more, but came more strongly this time, insisting on an answer. What could it have been that he had overlooked, left undone, omitted to see to? It went on nibbling at the subconscious part of him. Several times this happened, this dismissal and return, till at last the thing declared itself more plainly\u2014and he felt bothered, troubled, distinctly uneasy.\n\nHe was wanted somewhere. There was somewhere else he ought to be. That describes it best, perhaps. Some engagement of moment had entirely slipped his memory\u2014an engagement that involved another person, too. But where, what, with whom? And, at length, this vague uneasiness amounted to positive discomfort, so that he felt unable to enjoy the piece\u2014and left abruptly. Like a man to whom comes suddenly the horrible idea that the match he lit his cigarette with and flung into the waste-paper basket on leaving was not really out\u2014a sort of panic distress\u2014he jumped into a taxi-cab and hurried to his flat: to find everything in order, of course; no smoke, no fire, no smell of burning.\n\nBut his evening was spoilt. He sat smoking in his armchair at home\u2014this business man of forty, practical in mind, of character some called stolid\u2014cursing himself for an imaginative fool. It was now too late to go back to the theatre; the club bored him; he spent an hour with the evening papers, dipping into books, sipping a long cool drink; doing odds and ends about the flat; 'I'll go to bed early for a change,' he laughed, but really all the time fighting\u2014yes, deliberately fighting\u2014this strange attack of uneasiness that so insidiously grew upwards, outwards from the buried depths of him that sought so strenuously to deny it. It never occurred to him that he was ill. He was not ill. His health was thunderingly good. He was robust as a coal-heaver.\n\nThe flat was roomy, high up on the top floor, yet in a busy part of town, so that the roar of traffic mounted round it like a sea. Through the open windows came the fresh night air of June. He had never noticed before how sweet the London night air could be, and that not all the smoke and dust could smother a certain touch of wild fragrance that tinctured it with perfume\u2014yes, almost perfume\u2014as of the country. He swallowed a draught of it as he stood there, staring out across the tangled world of roofs and chimney-pots. He saw the procession of the clouds; he saw the stars; he saw the moonlight falling in a shower of silver spears upon the slates and wires and steeples. And something in him quickened\u2014something that had never stirred before.\n\nHe turned with a horrid start, for the uneasiness had of a sudden leaped within him like an animal. There was some one in the flat.\n\nInstantly, with action, even this slight action, the fancy vanished; but, all the same, he switched on the electric lights and made a search. For it seemed to him that some one had crept up close behind him while he stood there watching the Night\u2014some one, moreover, whose silent presence fingered with unerring touch both this new thing that had quickened in his heart and that sense of original deep uneasiness. He was amazed at himself, angry; indignant that he could be thus foolishly upset over nothing, yet at the same time profoundly distressed at this vehement growth of a new thing in his well-ordered personality. Growth? He dismissed the word the moment it occurred to him. But it had occurred to him. It stayed. While he searched the empty flat, the long passages, the gloomy bedroom at the end, the little hall where he kept his overcoats and golf sticks\u2014it stayed. Growth! It was oddly disquieting. Growth, to him, involved\u2014though he neither acknowledged nor recognised the truth perhaps\u2014some kind of undesirable changeableness, instability, unbalance.\n\nYet, singular as it all was, he realised that the uneasiness and the sudden appreciation of Beauty that was so new to him had both entered by the same door into his being. When he came back to the front room he noticed that he was perspiring. There were little drops of moisture on his forehead. And down his spine ran positively chills\u2014little, faint quivers of cold. He was shivering.\n\nHe lit his big meerschaum pipe, and left the lights all burning. The feeling that there was something he had overlooked, forgotten, left undone, had vanished. Whatever the original cause of this absurd uneasiness might be\u2014he called it absurd on purpose, because he now realised in the depths of him that it was really more vital than he cared about\u2014it was much nearer to discovery than before. It dodged about just below the threshold of discovery. It was as close as that. Any moment he would know what it was: he would remember. Yes, he would remember. Meanwhile, he was in the right place. No desire to go elsewhere afflicted him, as in the theatre. Here was the place, here in the flat.\n\nAnd then it was, with a kind of sudden burst and rush\u2014it seemed to him the only way to phrase it\u2014memory gave up her dead.\n\nAt first he only caught her peeping round the corner at him, drawing aside a corner of an enormous curtain, as it were; striving for more complete entrance as though the mass of it were difficult to move. But he understood; he knew; he recognised. It was enough for that. An entrance into his being\u2014heart, mind, soul\u2014was being attempted, and the entrance, because of his stolid temperament, was difficult of accomplishment. There was effort, strain. Something in him had first to be opened up, widened, made soft and ready as by an operation, before full entrance could be effected. This much he grasped, though for the life of him he could not have put it into words. Also, he knew who it was that sought an entrance. Deliberately from himself he withheld the name. But he knew, as surely as though Straughan stood in the room and faced him with a knife, saying, 'Let me in, let me in. I wish you to know I'm here. I'm clearing a way...! You recall our promise...?'\n\nHe rose from his chair and went to the open window again, the strange fear slowly passing. The cool air fanned his cheeks. Beauty, till now, had scarcely ever brushed the surface of his soul. He had never troubled his head about it. It passed him by, indifferent; and he had ever loathed the mouthy prating of it on others' lips. He was practical; beauty was for dreamers, for women, for men who had means and leisure. He had not exactly scorned it; rather it had never touched his life, to sweeten, cheer, uplift. Artists for him were like monks\u2014another sex almost, useless beings who never helped the world go round. He was for action always, work, activity, achievement\u2014as he saw them. He remembered Straughan vaguely\u2014Straughan, the ever impecunious, friend of his youth, always talking of colour, sound\u2014mysterious, ineffective things. He even forgot what they had quarrelled about, if they had quarrelled at all even; or why they had gone apart all these years ago. And, certainly, he had forgotten any promise. Memory, as yet, only peeped round the corner of that huge curtain at him, tentatively, suggestively, yet\u2014he was obliged to admit it\u2014somewhat winningly. He was conscious of this gentle, sweet seductiveness that now replaced his fear. And, as he stood now at the open window, peering over huge London, Beauty came close and smote him between the eyes. She came blindingly, with her train of stars and clouds and perfumes. Night, mysterious, myriad-eyed, and flaming across her sea of haunted shadows, invaded his heart and shook him with her immemorial wonder and delight. He found no words, of course, to clothe the new, unwonted sensations. He only knew that all his former dread, uneasiness, distress, and with them this idea of 'growth' that had seemed so repugnant to him, were merged, swept up, and gathered magnificently home into a wave of Beauty that enveloped him.\n\n'See it... and understand,' ran a secret inner whisper across his mind. He saw. He understood...\n\nHe went back and turned the lights out. Then he took his place again at that open window, drinking in the night. He saw a new world; a species of intoxication held him. He sighed... as his thoughts blundered for expression among words and sentences that knew him not. But the delight was there, the wonder, the mystery. He watched, with heart alternately tightening and expanding, the transfiguring play of moon and shadow over the sea of buildings. He saw the dance of the hurrying clouds, the open patches into outer space, the veiling and unveiling of that ancient silvery face; and he caught strange whispers of the hierophantic, sacerdotal Power that has echoed down the world since Time began and dropped strange magic phrases into every poet's heart since first 'God dawned on Chaos'\u2014the Beauty of the Night...\n\nA long time passed\u2014it may have been one hour, it may have been three\u2014when at length he turned away and went slowly to his bedroom. A deep peace lay over him. Something quite new and blessed had crept into his life and thought. He could not quite understand it all. He only knew that it uplifted. There was no longer the least sign of affliction or distress. Even the inevitable reaction that, of course, set in could not destroy that.\n\nAnd then, as he lay in bed, nearing the borderland of sleep, suddenly and without any obvious suggestion to bring it, he remembered another thing. He remembered the promise. Memory got past the big curtain for an instant, and showed her face. She looked into his eyes. It must have been a dozen years ago when Straughan and he had made that foolish, solemn promise that whoever died first should show himself, if possible, to the other.\n\nHe had utterly forgotten it\u2014till now. But Straughan had not forgotten it. The letter came three weeks later, from India. That very evening Straughan had died\u2014at nine o'clock. And he had come back\u2014in the Beauty that he loved.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Sand ]\n\nAs Felix Henriot came through the streets that January night the fog was stifling, but when he reached his little flat upon the top floor there came a sound of wind. Wind was stirring about the world. It blew against his windows, but at first so faintly that he hardly noticed it. Then, with an abrupt rise and fall like a wailing voice that sought to claim attention, it called him. He peered through the window into the blurred darkness, listening.\n\nThere is no cry in the world like that of the homeless wind. A vague excitement, scarcely to be analysed, ran through his blood. The curtain of fog waved momentarily aside. Henriot fancied a star peeped down at him.\n\n'It will change things a bit\u2014at last,' he sighed, settling back into his chair. 'It will bring movement!'\n\nAlready something in himself had changed. A restlessness, as of that wandering wind, woke in his heart\u2014the desire to be off and away. Other things could rouse this wildness too: falling water, the singing of a bird, an odour of wood-fire, a glimpse of winding road. But the cry of wind, always searching, questioning, travelling the world's great routes, remained ever the master-touch. High longing took his mood in hand. Mid seven millions he felt suddenly\u2014lonely.\n\n\u2003'I will arise and go now, for always night and day\n\n\u2003I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;\n\n\u2003While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,\n\n\u2003I hear it in the deep heart's core.'\n\nHe murmured the words over softly to himself. The emotion that produced Innisfree passed strongly through him. He too would be over the hills and far away. He craved movement, change, adventure\u2014somewhere far from shops and crowds and motor-'busses. For a week the fog had stifled London. This wind brought life.\n\nWhere should he go? Desire was long; his purse was short.\n\nHe glanced at his books, letters, newspapers. They had no interest now. Instead he listened. The panorama of other journeys rolled in colour through the little room, flying on one another's heels. Henriot enjoyed this remembered essence of his travels more than the travels themselves. The crying wind brought so many voices, all of them seductive:\n\nThere was a soft crashing of waves upon the Black Sea shores, where the huge Caucasus beckoned in the sky beyond; a rustling in the umbrella pines and cactus at Marseilles, whence magic steamers start about the world like flying dreams. He heard the plash of fountains upon Mount Ida's slopes, and the whisper of the tamarisk on Marathon. It was dawn once more upon the Ionian Sea, and he smelt the perfume of the Cyclades. Blue-veiled islands melted in the sunshine, and across the dewy lawns of Tempe, moistened by the spray of many waterfalls, he saw\u2014Great Heavens above!\u2014the dancing of white forms... or was it only mist the sunshine painted against Pelion?... 'Methought, among the lawns together, we wandered underneath the young grey dawn. And multitudes of dense white fleecy clouds shepherded by the slow, unwilling wind...'\n\nAnd then, into his stuffy room, slipped the singing perfume of a wall-flower on a ruined tower, and with it the sweetness of hot ivy. He heard the 'yellow bees in the ivy bloom.' Wind whipped over the open hills\u2014this very wind that laboured drearily through the London fog.\n\nAnd\u2014he was caught. The darkness melted from the city. The fog whisked off into an azure sky. The roar of traffic turned into booming of the sea. There was a whistling among cordage, and the floor swayed to and fro. He saw a sailor touch his cap and pocket the two-franc piece. The syren hooted\u2014ominous sound that had started him on many a journey of adventure\u2014and the roar of London became mere insignificant clatter of a child's toy carriages.\n\nHe loved that syren's call; there was something deep and pitiless in it. It drew the wanderers forth from cities everywhere: ' Leave your known world behind you, and come with me for better or for worse! The anchor is up; it is too late to change. Only\u2014beware! You shall know curious things\u2014and alone!'\n\nHenriot stirred uneasily in his chair. He turned with sudden energy to the shelf of guide-books, maps and time-tables\u2014possessions he most valued in the whole room. He was a happy-go-lucky, adventure-loving soul, careless of common standards, athirst ever for the new and strange.\n\n'That's the best of having a cheap flat,' he laughed, 'and no ties in the world. I can turn the key and disappear. No one cares or knows\u2014no one but the thieving caretaker. And he's long ago found out that there's nothing here worth taking!'\n\nThere followed then no lengthy indecision. Preparation was even shorter still. He was always ready for a move, and his sojourn in cities was but breathing-space while he gathered pennies for further wanderings. An enormous kit-bag\u2014sack-shaped, very worn and dirty\u2014emerged speedily from the bottom of a cupboard in the wall. It was of limitless capacity. The key and padlock rattled in its depths. Cigarette ashes covered everything while he stuffed it full of ancient, indescribable garments. And his voice, singing of those ' yellow bees in the ivy bloom,' mingled with the crying of the rising wind about his windows. His restlessness had disappeared by magic.\n\nThis time, however, there could be no haunted Pelion, nor shady groves of Tempe, for he lived in sophisticated times when money markets regulated movement sternly. Travelling was only for the rich; mere wanderers must pig it. He remembered instead an opportune invitation to the Desert. 'Objective' invitation, his genial hosts had called it, knowing his hatred of convention. And Helouan danced into letters of brilliance upon the inner map of his mind. For Egypt had ever held his spirit in thrall, though as yet he had tried in vain to touch the great buried soul of her. The excavators, the Egyptologists, the archaeologists most of all, plastered her grey ancient face with labels like hotel advertisements on travellers' portmanteaux. They told where she had come from last, but nothing of what she dreamed and thought and loved. The heart of Egypt lay beneath the sand, and the trifling robbery of little details that poked forth from tombs and temples brought no true revelation of her stupendous spiritual splendour. Henriot, in his youth, had searched and dived among what material he could find, believing once\u2014or half believing\u2014that the ceremonial of that ancient system veiled a weight of symbol that was reflected from genuine supersensual knowledge. The rituals, now taken literally, and so pityingly explained away, had once been genuine pathways of approach. But never yet, and least of all in his previous visits to Egypt itself, had he discovered one single person, worthy of speech, who caught at his idea. 'Curious,' they said, then turned away\u2014to go on digging in the sand. Sand smothered her world to-day. Excavators discovered skeletons. Museums everywhere stored them\u2014grinning, literal relics that told nothing.\n\nBut now, while he packed and sang, these hopes of enthusiastic younger days stirred again\u2014because the emotion that gave them birth was real and true in him. Through the morning mists upon the Nile an old pyramid bowed hugely at him across London roofs: 'Come,' he heard its awful whisper beneath the ceiling, 'I have things to show you, and to tell.' He saw the flock of them sailing the Desert like weird grey solemn ships that make no earthly port. And he imagined them as one: multiple expressions of some single unearthly portent they adumbrated in mighty form\u2014dead symbols of some spiritual conception long vanished from the world.\n\n'I mustn't dream like this,' he laughed, 'or I shall get absent-minded and pack fire-tongs instead of boots. It looks like a jumble sale already!'\n\nAnd he stood on a heap of things to wedge them down still tighter.\n\nBut the pictures would not cease. He saw the kites circling high in the blue air. A couple of white vultures flapped lazily away over shining miles. Felucca sails, like giant wings emerging from the ground, curved towards him from the Nile. The palm-trees dropped long shadows over Memphis. He felt the delicious, drenching heat, and the Khamasin, that over-wind from Nubia, brushed his very cheeks. In the little gardens the mish-mish was in bloom... He smelt the Desert... grey sepulchre of cancelled cycles... The stillness of her interminable reaches dropped down upon old London...\n\nThe magic of the sand stole round him in its silent-footed tempest.\n\nAnd while he struggled with that strange, capacious sack, the piles of clothing ran into shapes of gleaming Bedouin faces; London garments settled down with the mournful sound of camels' feet, half dropping wind, half water flowing underground\u2014sound that old Time has brought over into modern life and left a moment for our wonder and perhaps our tears.\n\nHe rose at length with the excitement of some deep enchantment in his eyes. The thought of Egypt plunged ever so deeply into him, carrying him into depths where he found it difficult to breathe, so strangely far away it seemed, yet indefinably familiar. He lost his way. A touch of fear came with it.\n\n'A sack like that is the wonder of the world,' he laughed again, kicking the unwieldy, sausage-shaped monster into a corner of the room, and sitting down to write the thrilling labels: 'Felix Henriot, Alexandria via Marseilles.' But his pen blotted the letters; there was sand in it. He rewrote the words. Then he remembered a dozen things he had left out. Impatiently, yet with confusion somewhere, he stuffed them in. They ran away into shifting heaps; they disappeared; they emerged suddenly again. It was like packing hot, dry, flowing sand. From the pockets of a coat\u2014he had worn it last summer down Dorset way\u2014out trickled sand. There was sand in-his mind and thoughts.\n\nAnd his dreams that night were full of winds, the old sad winds of Egypt, and of moving, sifting sand. Arabs and Afreets danced amazingly together across dunes he could never reach. For he could not follow fast enough. Something infinitely older than these ever caught his feet and held him back. A million tiny fingers stung and pricked him. Something flung a veil before his eyes. Once it touched him\u2014his face and hands and neck. 'Stay here with us/ he heard a host of muffled voices crying, but their sound was smothered, buried, rising through the ground. A myriad throats were choked. Till, at last, with a violent effort he turned and seized it. And then the thing he grasped at slipped between his fingers and ran easily away. It had a grey and yellow face, and it moved through all its parts. It flowed as water flows, and, yet was solid. It was centuries old.\n\nHe cried out to it. 'Who are you? What is your name? I surely know you... but I have forgotten...?'\n\nAnd it stopped, turning from far away its great uncovered countenance of nameless colouring. He caught a voice. It rolled and boomed and whispered like the wind. And then he woke, with a curious shaking in his heart, and a little touch of chilly perspiration on the skin.\n\nBut the voice seemed in the room still\u2014close beside him:\n\n'I am the Sand,' he heard, before it died away.\n\nAnd next he realised that the glitter of Paris lay behind him, and a steamer was taking him with much unnecessary motion across a sparkling sea towards Alexandria. Gladly he saw the Riviera fade below the horizon, with its hard bright sunshine, treacherous winds, and its smear of rich, conventional English. All restlessness now had left him. True vagabond still at forty, he only felt the unrest and discomfort of life when caught in the network of routine and rigid streets, no chance of breaking loose. He was off again at last, money scarce enough indeed, but the joy of wandering expressing itself in happy emotions of release. Every warning of calculation was stifled. He thought of the American woman who walked out of her Long Island house one summer's day to look at a passing sail\u2014and was gone eight years before she walked in again. Eight years of roving travel! He had always felt respect and admiration for that woman.\n\nFor Felix Henriot, with his admixture of foreign blood, was philosopher as well as vagabond, a strong poetic and religious strain sometimes breaking out through fissures in his complex nature. He had seen much life; had read many books. The passionate desire of youth to solve the world's big riddles had given place to a resignation filled to the brim with wonder. Anything might be true. Nothing surprised him. The most outlandish beliefs, for all he knew, might fringe truth somewhere. He had escaped that cheap cynicism with which disappointed men soothe their vanity when they realise that an intelligible explanation of the universe lies beyond their powers. He no longer expected final answers.\n\nFor him, even the smallest journeys held the spice of some adventure; all minutes were loaded with enticing potentialities. And they shaped for themselves somehow a dramatic form. 'It's like a story,' his friends said when he told his travels. It always was a story.\n\nBut the adventure that lay waiting for him where the silent streets of little Helouan kiss the great Desert's lips, was of a different kind to any Henriot had yet encountered. Looking back, he has often asked himself, 'How in the world can I accept it?'\n\nAnd, perhaps, he never yet has accepted it. It was sand that brought it. For the Desert, the stupendous thing that mothers little Helouan, produced it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 441", + "text": "He slipped through Cairo with the same relief that he left the Riviera, resenting its social vulgarity so close to the imperial aristocracy of the Desert; he settled down into the peace of soft and silent little Helouan. The hotel in which he had a room on the top floor had been formerly a Khedivial Palace. It had the air of a palace still. He felt himself in a country-house, with lofty ceilings, cool and airy corridors, spacious halls. Soft-footed Arabs attended to his wants; white walls let in light and air without a sign of heat; there was a feeling of a large, spread tent pitched on the very sand; and the wind that stirred the oleanders in the shady gardens also crept in to rustle the palm leaves of his favourite corner seat. Through the large windows where once the Khedive held high court, the sunshine blazed upon vistaed leagues of Desert.\n\nAnd from his bedroom windows he watched the sun dip into gold and crimson behind the swelling Libyan sands. This side of the pyramids he saw the Nile meander among palm groves and tilled fields. Across his balcony railings the Egyptian stars trooped down beside his very bed, shaping old constellations for his dreams; while, to the south, he looked out upon the vast untamable Body of the sands that carpeted the world for thousands of miles towards Upper Egypt, Nubia, and the dread Sahara itself.\n\nHe wondered again why people thought it necessary to go so far afield to know the Desert. Here, within half an hour of Cairo, it lay breathing solemnly at his very doors.\n\nFor little Helouan, caught thus between the shoulders of the Libyan and Arabian Deserts, is utterly sand-haunted. The Desert lies all round it like a sea. Henriot felt he never could escape from it, as he moved about the island whose coasts are washed with sand. Down each broad and shining street the two end houses framed a vista of its dim immensity\u2014glimpses of shimmering blue, or flame-touched purple. There were stretches of deep sea-green as well, far off upon its bosom. The streets were open channels of approach, and the eye ran down them as along the tube of a telescope laid to catch incredible distance out of space. Through them the Desert reached in with long, thin feelers towards the village. Its Being flooded into Helouan, and over it. Past walls and houses, churches and hotels, the sea of Desert pressed in silently with its myriad soft feet of sand. It poured in everywhere, through crack and slit and crannie. These were reminders of possession and ownership. And every passing wind that lifted eddies of dust at the street corners were messages from the quiet, powerful Thing that permitted Helouan to lie and dream so peacefully in the sunshine. Mere artificial oasis, its existence was temporary, held on lease, just for ninety-nine centuries or so.\n\nThis sea idea became insistent. For, in certain lights, and especially in the brief, bewildering dusk, the Desert rose\u2014swaying towards the small white houses. The waves of it ran for fifty miles without a break. It was too deep for foam or surface agitation, yet it knew the swell of tides. And underneath flowed resolute currents, linking distance to the centre. These many deserts were really one. A storm, just retreated, had tossed Helouan upon the shore and left it there to dry; but any morning he would wake to find it had been carried off again into the depths. Some fragment, at least, would disappear. The grim Mokattam Hills were rollers that ever threatened to topple down and submerge the sandy bar that men called Helouan.\n\nBeing soundless, and devoid of perfume, the Desert's message reached him through two senses only\u2014sight and touch; chiefly, of course, the former. Its invasion was concentrated through the eyes. And vision, thus uncorrected, went what pace it pleased. The Desert played with him. Sand stole into his being\u2014through the eyes.\n\nAnd so obsessing was this majesty of its close presence, that Henriot sometimes wondered how people dared their little social activities within its very sight and hearing; how they played golf and tennis upon reclaimed edges of its face, picnicked so blithely hard upon its frontiers, and danced at night while this stern, unfathomable Thing lay breathing just beyond the trumpery walls that kept it out. The challenge of their shallow admiration seemed presumptuous, almost provocative. Their pursuit of pleasure suggested insolent indifference. They ran fool-hardy hazards, he felt; for there was no worship in their vulgar hearts. With a mental shudder, sometimes he watched the cheap tourist horde go laughing, chattering past within view of its ancient, half-closed eyes. It was like defying deity.\n\nFor, to his stirred imagination the sublimity of the Desert dwarfed humanity. These people had been wiser to choose another place for the flaunting of their tawdry insignificance. Any minute this Wilderness, 'huddled in grey annihilation,' might awake and notice them...!\n\nIn his own hotel were several ' smart,' so-called ' Society' people who emphasised the protest in him to the point of definite contempt. Overdressed, the latest worldly novel under their arms, they strutted the narrow pavements of their tiny world, immensely pleased with themselves. Their vacuous minds expressed themselves in the slang of their exclusive circle\u2014value being the element excluded. The pettiness of their outlook hardly distressed him\u2014he was too familiar with it at home\u2014but their essential vulgarity, their innate ugliness, seemed more than usually offensive in the grandeur of its present setting. Into the mighty sands they took the latest London scandal, gabbling it over even among the Tombs and Temples.. And 'it was to laugh,' the pains they spent wondering whom they might condescend to know, never dreaming that they themselves were not worth knowing. Against the background of the noble Desert their titles seemed the cap and bells of clowns.\n\nAnd Henriot, knowing some of them personally, could not always escape their insipid company. Yet he was the gainer. They little guessed how their commonness heightened contrast, set mercilessly thus beside the strange, eternal beauty of the sand.\n\nOccasionally the protest in his soul betrayed itself in words, which of course they did not understand. 'He is so clever, isn't he?' And then, having relieved his feelings, he would comfort himself characteristically:\n\n'The Desert has not noticed them. The Sand is not aware of their existence. How should the sea take note of rubbish that lies above its tide-line?'\n\nFor Henriot drew near to its great shifting altars in an attitude of worship. The wilderness made him kneel in heart. Its shining reaches led to the oldest Temple in the world, and every journey that he made was like a sacrament. For him the Desert was a consecrated place. It was sacred.\n\nAnd his tactful hosts, knowing his peculiarities, left their house open to him when he cared to come\u2014they lived upon the northern edge of the oasis\u2014and he was as free as though he were absolutely alone. He blessed them; he rejoiced that he had come. Little Helouan accepted him. The Desert knew that he was there.\n\nFrom his corner of the big dining-room he could see the other guests, but his roving eye always returned to the figure of a solitary man who sat at an adjoining table, and whose personality stirred his interest. While affecting to look elsewhere, he studied him as closely as might be. There was something about the stranger that touched his curiosity\u2014a certain air of expectation that he wore. But it was more than that: it was anticipation, apprehension in it somewhere. The man was nervous, uneasy. His restless way of suddenly looking about him proved it. Henriot tried every one else in the room as well; but, though his thought settled on others too, he always came back to the figure of this solitary being opposite, who ate his dinner as if afraid of being seen, and glanced up sometimes as if fearful of being watched. Henriot's curiosity, before he knew it, became suspicion. There was mystery here. The table, he noticed, was laid for two.\n\n'Is he an actor, a priest of some strange religion, an enquiry agent, or just\u2014a crank? 'was the thought that first occurred to him. And the question suggested itself without amusement. The impression of subterfuge and caution he conveyed left his observer unsatisfied.\n\nThe face was clean shaven, dark, and strong; thick hair, straight yet bushy, was slightly unkempt; it was streaked with grey; and an unexpected mobility when he smiled ran over the features that he seemed to hold rigid by deliberate effort. The man was cut to no quite common measure. Henriot jumped to an intuitive conclusion: ' He's not here for pleasure or merely sight-seeing. Something serious has brought him out to Egypt.' For the face combined too ill-assorted qualities: an obstinate tenacity that might even mean brutality, and was certainly repulsive, yet, with it, an undecipherable dreaminess betrayed by lines of the mouth, but above all in the very light blue eyes, so rarely raised. Those eyes, he felt, had looked upon unusual things; ' dreaminess' was not an adequate description; 4 searching ' conveyed it better. The true source of the queer impression remained elusive. And hence, perhaps, the incongruous marriage in the face\u2014mobility laid upon a matter-of-fact foundation underneath. The face showed conflict.\n\nAnd Henriot, watching him, felt decidedly intrigued. 'I'd like to know that man, and all about him.' His name, he learned later, was Richard Vance; from Birmingham; a business man. But it was not the Birmingham he wished to know; it was the\u2014other: cause of the elusive, dreamy searching. Though facing one another at so short a distance, their eyes, however, did not meet. And this, Henriot well knew, was a sure sign that he himself was also under observation. Richard Vance, from Birmingham, was equally taking careful note of Felix Henriot, from London.\n\nThus, he could wait his time. They would come together later. An opportunity would certainly present itself. The first links in a curious chain had already caught; soon the chain would tighten, pull as though by chance, and bring their lives into one and the same circle. Wondering in particular for what kind of a companion the second cover was laid, Henriot felt certain that their eventual coming together was inevitable. He possessed this kind of divination from first impressions, and not uncommonly it proved correct.\n\nFollowing instinct, therefore, he took no steps towards acquaintance, and for several days, owing to the fact that he dined frequently with his hosts, he saw nothing more of Richard Vance, the business man from Birmingham. Then, one night, coming home late from his friend's house, he had passed along the great corridor, and was actually a step or so into his bedroom, when a drawling voice sounded close behind him. It was an unpleasant sound. It was very near him too.\n\n'I beg your pardon, but have you, by any chance, such a thing as a compass you could lend me?'\n\nThe voice was so close that he started. Vance stood within touching distance of his body. He had stolen up like a ghostly Arab, must have followed him, too, some little distance, for further down the passage the light of an open door\u2014he had passed it on his way\u2014showed where he came from.\n\n'Eh? I beg your pardon? A\u2014compass, did you say?' He felt disconcerted for a moment. How short the man was, now that he saw him standing. Broad and powerful too. Henriot looked down upon his thick head of hair. The personality and voice repelled him. Possibly his face, caught unawares, betrayed this.\n\n'Forgive my startling you,' said the other apologetically, while the softer expression danced in for a moment and disorganised the rigid set of the face. 'The soft carpet, you know. I'm afraid you didn't hear my tread. I wondered '\u2014he smiled again slightly at the nature of the request\u2014' if\u2014by any chance\u2014you had a pocket compass you could lend me?'\n\n'Ah, a compass, yes! Please don't apologise. I believe I have one\u2014if you'll wait a moment. Come in, won't you? I'll have a look.'\n\nThe other thanked him but waited in the passage. Henriot, it so happened, had a compass, and produced it after a moment's search.\n\n'I am greatly indebted to you\u2014if I may return it in the morning. You will forgive my disturbing you at such an hour. My own is broken, and I wanted\u2014er\u2014to find the true north.'\n\nHenriot stammered some reply, and the man was gone. It was all over in a minute. He locked his door and sat down in his chair to think. The little incident had upset him, though for the life of him he could not imagine why. It ought by rights to have been almost ludicrous, yet instead it was the exact reverse\u2014half threatening. Why should not a man want a compass? But, again, why should he? And at midnight? The voice, the eyes, the near presence\u2014what did they bring that set his nerves thus asking unusual questions? This strange impression that something grave was happening, something unearthly\u2014how was it born exactly? The man's proximity came like a shock. It had made him start. He brought\u2014thus the idea came unbidden to his mind\u2014something with him that galvanised him quite absurdly, as fear does, or delight, or great wonder. There was a music in his voice too\u2014a certain\u2014well, he could only call it lilt, that reminded him of plainsong, intoning, chanting. Drawling was not the word at all.\n\nHe tried to dismiss it as imagination, but it would not be dismissed. The disturbance in himself was caused by something not imaginary, but real. And then, for the first time, he discovered that the man had brought a faint, elusive suggestion of perfume with him, an aromatic odour, that made him think of priests and churches. The ghost of it still lingered in the air. Ah, here then was the origin of the notion that his voice had chanted: it was surely the suggestion of incense. But incense, intoning, a compass to find the true north\u2014at midnight in a Desert hotel!\n\nA touch of uneasiness ran through the curiosity and excitement that he felt.\n\nAnd he undressed for bed. 'Confound my old imagination,' he thought, 'what tricks it plays me! It'll keep me awake!'\n\nBut the questions, once started in his mind, continued. He must find explanation of one kind or another before he could lie down and sleep, and he found it at length in\u2014the stars. The man was an astronomer of sorts; possibly an astrologer into the bargain! Why not? The stars were wonderful above Helouan. Was there not an observatory on the Mokattam Hills, too, where tourists could use the telescopes on privileged days? He had it at last. He even stole out on to his balcony to see if the stranger perhaps was looking through some wonderful apparatus at the heavens. Their rooms were on the same side. But the shuttered windows revealed no stooping figure with eyes glued to a telescope. The stars blinked in their many thousands down upon the silent desert. The night held neither sound nor movement. There was a cool breeze blowing across the Nile from the Lybian Sands. It nipped; and he stepped back quickly into the room again. Drawing the mosquito curtains carefully about the bed, he put the light out and turned over to sleep.\n\nAnd sleep came quickly, contrary to his expectations, though it was a light and surface sleep. That last glimpse of the darkened Desert lying beneath the Egyptian stars had touched him with some hand of awful power that ousted the first, lesser excitement. It calmed and soothed him in one sense, yet in another, a sense he could not understand, it caught him in a net of deep, deep feelings whose mesh, while infinitely delicate, was utterly stupendous. His nerves this deeper emotion left alone: it reached instead to something infinite in him that mere nerves could neither deal with nor interpret. The soul awoke and whispered in him while his body slept.\n\nAnd the little, foolish dreams that ran to and fro across this veil of surface sleep brought oddly tangled pictures of things quite tiny and at the same time of others that were mighty beyond words. With these two counters Nightmare played. They interwove. There was the figure of this dark-faced man with the compass, measuring the sky to find the true north, and there were hints of giant Presences that hovered just outside some curious outline that he traced upon the ground, copied in some nightmare fashion from the heavens. The excitement caused by his visitor's singular request mingled with the profounder sensations his final look at the stars and Desert stirred. The two were somehow inter-related.\n\nSome hours later, before this surface sleep passed into genuine slumber, Henriot woke\u2014with an appalling feeling that the Desert had come creeping into his room and now stared down upon him where he lay in bed. The wind was crying audibly about the walls outside. A faint, sharp tapping came against the window panes.\n\nHe sprang instantly out of bed, not yet awake enough to feel actual alarm, yet with the nightmare touch still close enough to cause a sort of feverish, loose bewilderment. He switched the lights on. A moment later he knew the meaning of that curious tapping, for the rising wind was flinging tiny specks of sand against the glass. The idea that they had summoned him belonged, of course, to dream.\n\nHe opened the window, and stepped out on to the balcony. The stone was very cold under his bare feet. There was a wash of wind all over him. He saw the sheet of glimmering, pale desert near and far; and something stung his skin below the eyes.\n\n'The sand,' he whispered, 'again the sand; always the sand. Waking or sleeping, the sand is everywhere\u2014nothing but sand, sand, Sand...'\n\nHe rubbed his eyes. It was like talking in his sleep, talking to Someone who had questioned him just before he woke. But was he really properly awake? It seemed next day that he had dreamed it. Something enormous, with rustling skirts of sand, had just retreated far into the Desert. Sand went with it\u2014flowing, trailing, smothering the world. The wind died down.\n\nAnd Henriot went back to sleep, caught instantly away into unconsciousness; covered, blinded, swept over by this spreading thing of reddish brown with the great, grey face, whose Being was colossal yet quite tiny, and whose fingers, wings and eyes were countless as the stars.\n\nBut all night long it watched and waited, rising to peer above the little balcony, and sometimes entering the room and piling up beside his very pillow. He dreamed of Sand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 442", + "text": "For some days Henriot saw little of the man who came from Birmingham and pushed curiosity to a climax by asking for a compass in the middle of the night. For one thing, he was a good deal with his friends upon the other side of Helouan, and for another, he slept several nights in the Desert.\n\nHe loved the gigantic peace the Desert gave him. The world was forgotten there; and not the world merely, but all memory of it. Everything faded out. The soul turned inwards upon itself.\n\nAn Arab boy and donkey took out sleeping-bag, food and water to the Wadi Hof, a desolate gorge about an hour eastwards. It winds between cliffs whose summits rise some thousand feet above the sea. It opens suddenly, cut deep into the swaying world of level plateaux and undulating hills. It moves about too; he never found it in the same place twice\u2014like an arm of the Desert that shifted with the changing lights. Here he watched dawns and sunsets, slept through the mid-day heat, and enjoyed the unearthly colouring that swept Day and Night across the huge horizons. In solitude the Desert soaked down into him. At night the jackals cried in the darkness round his cautiously-fed camp fire\u2014small, because wood had to be carried\u2014and in the day-time kites circled overhead to inspect him, and an occasional white vulture flapped across the blue. The weird desolation of this rocky valley, he thought, was like the scenery of the moon. He took no watch with him, and the arrival of the donkey boy an hour after sunrise came almost from another planet, bringing thing of time and common life out of some distant gulf where they had lain forgotten among lost ages.\n\nThe short hour of twilight brought, too, a bewitchment into the silence that was a little less than comfortable. Full light or darkness he could manage, but this time of half things made him want to shut his eyes and hide. Its effect stepped over imagination. The mind got lost. He could not understand it. For the cliffs and boulders of discoloured limestone shone then with an inward glow that signalled to the Desert with veiled lanterns. The misshappen hills, carved by wind and rain into ominous outlines, stirred and nodded. In the morning light they retired into themselves, asleep. But at dusk the tide retreated. They rose from the sea, emerging naked, threatening. They ran together and joined shoulders, the entire army of them. And the glow of their sandy bodies, self-luminous, continued even beneath the stars. Only the moonlight drowned it. For the moonrise over the Mokattam Hills brought a white, grand loveliness that drenched the entire Desert. It drew a marvellous sweetness from the sand. It shone across a world as yet unfinished, whereon no life might show itself for ages yet to come. He was alone then upon an empty star, before the creation of things that breathed and moved.\n\nWhat impressed him, however, more than everything else was the enormous vitality that rose out of all this apparent death. There was no hint of the melancholy that belongs commonly to flatness; the sadness of wide, monotonous landscape was not here. The endless repetition of sweeping vale and plateau brought infinity within measurable comprehension. He grasped a definite meaning in the phrase ' world without end': the Desert had no end and no beginning. It gave him a sense of eternal peace, the silent peace that star-fields know. Instead of subduing the soul with bewilderment, it inspired with courage, confidence, hope. Through this sand which was the wreck of countless geological ages, rushed life that was terrific and uplifting, too huge to include melancholy, too deep to betray itself in movement. Here was the stillness of eternity. Behind the spread grey masque of apparent death lay stores of accumulated life, ready to break forth at any point. In the Desert he felt himself absolutely royal.\n\nAnd this contrast of Life, veiling itself in Death, was a contradiction that somehow intoxicated. The Desert exhilaration never left him. He was never alone. A companionship of millions went with him, and he felt the Desert close, as stars are close to one another, or grains of sand.\n\nIt was the Khamasin, the hot wind bringing sand, that drove him in\u2014with the feeling that these few days and nights had been immeasurable, and that he had been away a thousand years. He came back with the magic of the Desert in his blood, hotel-life tasteless and insipid by comparison. To human impressions thus he was fresh and vividly sensitive. His being, cleaned and sensitized by pure grandeur, 'felt' people\u2014for a time at any rate\u2014with an uncommon sharpness of receptive judgment. He returned to a life somehow mean and meagre, resuming insignificance with his dinner jacket. Out with the sand he had been regal; now, like a slave, he strutted self-concious and reduced.\n\nBut this imperial standard of the Desert stayed a little time beside him, its purity focussing judgment like a lens. The specks of smaller emotions left it clear at first, and as his eye wandered vaguely over the people assembled in the dining-room, it was arrested with a vivid shock upon two figures at the little table facing him.\n\nHe had forgotten Vance, the Birmingham man who sought the North at midnight with a pocket compass. He now saw him again, with an intuitive discernment entirely fresh. Before memory brought up hen clouding associations, some brilliance flashed a light upon him. 'That man,' Henriot thought, 'might have come with me. He would have understood and loved it!' But the thought was really this\u2014a moment's reflection spread it, rather: ' He belongs somewhere to the Desert; the Desert brought him out here.' And, again, hidden swiftly behind it like a movement running below water\u2014' What does he want with it? What is the deeper motive he conceals? For there is a deeper motive; and it is concealed.'\n\nBut it was the woman seated next him who absorbed his attention really, even while this thought flashed and went its way. The empty chair was occupied at last. Unlike his first encounter with the man, she looked straight at him. Their eyes met fully. For several seconds there was steady mutual inspection, while her penetrating stare, intent without being rude, passed searchingly all over his face. It was disconcerting. Crumbling his bread, he looked equally hard at her, unable to turn away, determined not to be the first to shift his gaze. And when at length she lowered her eyes he felt that many things had happened, as in a long period of intimate conversation. Her mind had judged him through and through. Questions and answer flashed. They were no longer strangers. For the rest of dinner, though he was careful to avoid direct inspection, he was aware that she felt his presence and was secretly speaking with him. She asked questions beneath her breath. The answers rose with the quickened pulses in his blood. Moreover, she explained Richard Vance. It was this woman's power that shone reflected in the man. She was the one who knew the big, unusual things. Vance merely echoed the rush of her vital personality.\n\nThis was the first impression that he got\u2014from the most striking, curious face he had ever seen in a woman. It remained very near him all through the meal: she had moved to his table, it seemed she sat beside him. Their minds certainly knew contact from that moment.\n\nIt is never difficult to credit strangers with the qualities and knowledge that oneself craves for, and no doubt Henriot's active fancy went busily to work. But, none the less, this thing remained and grew: that this woman was aware of the hidden things of Egypt he had always longed to know. There was knowledge and guidance she could impart. Her soul was searching among ancient things. Her face brought the Desert back into his thoughts. And with it came\u2014the sand.\n\nHere was the flash. The sight of her restored the peace and splendour he had left behind him in his Desert camps. The rest, of course, was what his imagination constructed upon this slender basis. Only,\u2014not all of it was imagination.\n\nNow, Henriot knew little enough of women, and had no pose of ' understanding' them. His experience was of the slightest; the love and veneration felt for his own mother had set the entire sex upon the heights. His affairs with women, if so they may be called, had been transient\u2014all but those of early youth, which having never known the devastating test of fulfilment, still remained ideal and superb. There was unconscious humour in his attitude\u2014from a distance; for he regarded women with wonder and respect, as puzzles that sweetened but complicated life, might even endanger it. He certainly was not a marrying man! But now, as he felt the presence of this woman so deliberately possess him, there came over him two clear, strong messages, each vivid with certainty. One was that banal suggestion of familiarity claimed by lovers and the like\u2014he had often heard of it\u2014' I have known that woman before; I have met her ages ago somewhere; she is strangely familiar to me'; and the other, growing out of it almost: ' Have nothing to do with her; she will bring you trouble and confusion; avoid her, and be warned';\u2014in fact, a distinct presentiment.\n\nYet, although Henriot dismissed both impressions as having no shred of evidence to justify them, the original clear judgment, as he studied her extraordinary countenance, persisted through all denials. The familiarity, and the presentiment, remained. There also remained this other\u2014an enormous imaginative leap!\u2014that she could teach him 'Egypt.'\n\nHe watched her carefully, in a sense fascinated. He could only describe the face as black, so dark it was with the darkness of great age. Elderly was the obvious, natural word; but elderly described the features only. The expression of the face wore centuries. Nor was it merely the coal-black eyes that betrayed an ancient, age-travelled soul behind them. The entire presentment mysteriously conveyed it. This woman's heart knew long-forgotten things\u2014the thought kept beating up against him. There were cheek-bones, oddly high, that made him think involuntarily of the well-advertised Pharaoh, Ramases; a square, deep jaw; and an aquiline nose that gave the final touch of power. For the power undeniably was there, and while the general effect had grimness in it, there was neither harshness nor any forbidding touch about it. There was an implacable sternness in the set of lips and jaw, and, most curious of all, the eyelids over the steady eyes of black were level as a ruler. This level framing made the woman's stare remarkable beyond description. Henriot thought of an idol carved in stone, stone hard and black, with eyes that stared across the sand into a world of things non-human, very far away, forgotten of men. The face was finely ugly. This strange dark beauty flashed flame about it.\n\nAnd, as the way ever was with him, Henriot next fell to constructing the possible lives of herself and her companion, though without much success. Imagination soon stopped dead. She was not old enough to be Vance's mother, and assuredly she was not his wife. His interest was more than merely piqued\u2014it was puzzled uncommonly. What was the contrast that made the man seem beside her\u2014vile? Whence came, too, the impression that she exercised some strong authority, though never directly exercised, that held him at her mercy? How did he guess that the man resented it, yet did not dare oppose, and that, apparently acquiescing good-humouredly, his will was deliberately held in abeyance, and that he waited sulkily, biding his time? There was furtiveness in every gesture and expression. A hidden motive lurked in him; un-worthiness somewhere; he was determined yet ashamed. He watched her ceaselessly and with such uncanny closeness.\n\nHenriot imagined he divined all this. He leaped to the guess that his expenses were being paid. A good deal more was being paid besides. She was a rich relation, from whom he had expectations; he was serving his seven years, ashamed of his servitude, ever calculating escape\u2014but, perhaps, no ordinary escape. A faint shudder ran over him. He drew in the reins of imagination.\n\nOf course, the probabilities were that he was hopelessly astray\u2014one usually is on such occasions\u2014but this time, it so happened, he was singularly right. Before one thing only his ready invention stopped every time. This vileness, this notion of unworthiness in Vance, could not be negative merely. A man with that face was no inactive weakling. The motive he was at such pains to conceal, betraying its existence by that very fact, moved, surely, towards aggressive action. Disguised, it never slept. Vance was sharply on the alert. He had a plan deep out of sight. And Henriot remembered how the man's soft approach along the carpeted corridor had made him start. He recalled the quasi shock it gave him. He thought again of the feeling of discomfort he had experienced.\n\nNext, his eager fancy sought to plumb the business these two had together in Egypt\u2014in the Desert. For the Desert, he felt convinced, had brought them out. But here, though he constructed numerous explanations, another barrier stopped him. Because he knew. This woman was in touch with that aspect of ancient Egypt he himself had ever sought in vain; and not merely with stones the sand had buried so deep, but with the meanings they once represented, buried so utterly by the sands of later thought.\n\nAnd here, being ignorant, he found no clue that could lead to any satisfactory result, for he possessed no knowledge that might guide him. He floundered\u2014until Fate helped him. And the instant Fate helped him, the warning and presentiment he had dismissed as fanciful, became real again. He hesitated. Caution acted. He would think twice before taking steps to form acquaintance. 'Better not,' thought whispered. 'Better leave them alone, this queer couple. They're after things that won't do you any good.' This idea of mischief, almost of danger, in their purposes was oddly insistent; for what could possibly convey it? But, while he hesitated, Fate, who sent the warning, pushed him at the same time into the circle of their lives: at first tentatively\u2014he might still have escaped; but soon urgently\u2014curiosity led him inexorably towards the end." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 443", + "text": "It was so simple a manoeuvre by which Fate began the innocent game. The woman left a couple of books behind her on the table one night, and Henriot, after a moment's hesitation, took them out after her. He knew the titles\u2014The House of the Master, and The House of the Hidden Places, both singular interpretations of the Pyramids that once had held his own mind spellbound. Their ideas had been since disproved, if he remembered rightly, yet the titles were a clue\u2014a clue to that imaginative part of his mind that was so busy constructing theories and had found its stride. Loose sheets of paper, covered with notes in a minute handwriting, lay between the pages; but these, of course, he did not read, noticing only that they were written round designs of various kinds\u2014intricate designs.\n\nHe discovered Vance in a corner of the smoking-lounge. The woman had disappeared.\n\nVance thanked him politely. 'My aunt is so forgetful sometimes,' he said, and took them with a covert eagerness that did not escape the other's observation. He folded up the sheets and put them carefully in his pocket. On one there was an ink-sketched map, crammed with detail, that might well have referred to some portion of the Desert. The points of the compass stood out boldly at the bottom.\n\nThere were involved geometrical designs again. Henriot saw them. They exchanged, then, the commonplaces of conversation, but these led to nothing further. Vance was nervous and betrayed impatience. He presently excused himself and left the lounge. Ten minutes later he passed through the outer hall, the woman beside him, and the pair of them, wrapped up in cloak and ulster, went out into the night. At the door, Vance turned and threw a quick, investigating glance in his direction. There seemed a hint of questioning in that glance; it might almost have been a tentative invitation. But, also, he wanted to see if their exit had been particularly noticed\u2014and by whom.\n\nThis, briefly told, was the first manoeuvre by which Fate introduced them. There was nothing in it. The details were so insignificant, so slight the conversation, so meagre the pieces thus added to Henriot's imaginative structure. Yet they somehow built it up and made it solid; the outline in his mind began to stand foursquare. That writing, those designs, the manner of the man, their going out together, the final curious look\u2014each and all betrayed points of a hidden thing. Subconsciously he was excavating their buried purposes. The sand was shifting. The concentration of his mind incessantly upon them removed it grain by grain and speck by speck. Tips of the smothered thing emerged. Presently a subsidence would follow with a rush and light would blaze upon its skeleton. He felt it stirring underneath his feet\u2014this flowing movement of light, dry, heaped-up sand. It was always\u2014sand.\n\nThen other incidents of a similar kind came about, clearing the way to a natural acquaintanceship. Henriot watched the process with amusement, yet with another feeling too that was only a little less than anxiety. A keen observer, no detail escaped him; he saw the forces of their lives draw closer. It made him think of the devices of young people who desire to know one another, yet cannot get a proper introduction. Fate condescended to such little tricks. They wanted a third person, he began to feel. A third was necessary to some plan they had on hand, and\u2014they waited to see if he could fill the place. This woman, with whom he had yet exchanged no single word, seemed so familiar to him, well known for years. They weighed and watched him, wondering if he would do.\n\nNone of the devices were too obviously used, but at length Henriot picked up so many forgotten articles, and heard so many significant phrases, casually let fall, that he began to feel like the villain in a machine-made play, where'the hero for ever drops clues his enemy is intended to discover.\n\nIntroduction followed inevitably. 'My aunt can tell you; she knows Arabic perfectly.' He had been discussing the meaning of some local name or other with a neighbour after dinner, and Vance had joined them. The neighbour moved away; these two were left standing alone, and he accepted a cigarette from the other's case. There was a rustle of skirts behind them. 'Here she comes,' said Vance; 'you will let me introduce you.' He did not ask for Henriot's name; he had already taken the trouble to find it out\u2014another little betrayal, and another clue.\n\nIt was in a secluded corner of the great hall, and Henriot turned to see the woman's stately figure coming towards them across the thick carpet that deadened her footsteps. She came sailing up, her black eyes fixed upon his face. Very erect, head upright, shoulders almost squared, she moved wonderfully well; there was dignity and power in her walk. She was dressed in black, and her face was like the night. He found it impossible to say what lent her this air of impressiveness and solemnity that was almost majestic. But there was this touch of darkness and of power in the way she came that made him think of some sphinx-like figure of stone, some idol motionless in all its parts but moving as a whole, and gliding across\u2014sand. Beneath those level lids her eyes stared hard at him. And a faint sensation of distress stirred in him deep, deep down. Where had he seen those eyes before?\n\nHe bowed, as she joined them, and Vance led the way to the armchairs in a corner of the lounge. The meeting, as the talk that followed, he felt, were all part of a preconceived plan. It had happened before. The woman, that is, was familiar to him\u2014to some part of his being that had dropped stitches of old, old memory.\n\nLady Statham! At first the name had disappointed him. So many folk wear titles, as syllables in certain tongues wear accents\u2014without them being mute, unnoticed, unpronounced. Nonentities, born to names, so often claim attention for their insignificance in this way. But this woman, had she been Jemima Jones, would have made the name distinguished and select. She was a big and sombre personality. Why was it, he wondered afterwards, that for a moment something in him shrank, and that his mind, metaphorically speaking, flung up an arm in self-protection? The instinct flashed and passed. But it seemed to him born of an automatic feeling that he must protect\u2014not himself, but the woman from the man. There was confusion in it all; links were missing. He studied her intently. She was a woman who had none of the external feminine signals in either dress or manner, no graces, no little womanly hesitations and alarms, no daintiness, yet neither anything distinctly masculine. Her charm was strong, possessing; only he kept forgetting that he was talking to a\u2014woman; and the thing she inspired in him included, with respect and wonder, somewhere also this curious hint of dread. This instinct to protect her fled as soon as it was born, for the interest of the conversation in which she so quickly plunged him obliterated all minor emotions whatsoever. Here, for the first time, he drew close to Egypt, the Egypt he had sought so long. It was not to be explained. He felt it.\n\nBeginning with commonplaces, such as 'You like Egypt? You find here what you expected?' she led him into better regions with 'One finds here what one brings.' He knew the delightful experience of talking fluently on subjects he was at home in, and to some one who understood. The feeling at first that to this woman he could not say mere anythings, slipped into its opposite\u2014that he could say everything. Strangers ten minutes ago, they were at once in deep and intimate talk together. He found his ideas readily followed, agreed with up to a point\u2014the point which permits discussion to start from a basis of general accord towards speculation. In the excitement of ideas he neglected the uncomfortable note that had stirred his caution, forgot the warning too. Her mind, moreover, seemed known to him; he was often aware of what she was going to say before he actually heard it; the current of her thoughts struck a familiar gait, and more than once he experienced vividly again the odd sensation that it all had happened before. The very sentences and phrases with which she pointed the turns of her unusual ideas were never wholly unexpected.\n\nFor her ideas were decidedly unusual, in the sense that she accepted without question speculations not commonly deemed worth consideration at all, indeed not ordinarily even known. Henriot knew them, because he had read in many fields. It was the strength of her belief that fascinated him. She offered no apologies. She knew. And while he talked, she listening with folded arms and her black eyes fixed upon his own, Richard Vance watched with vigilant eyes and listened too, ceaselessly alert. Vance joined in little enough, however, gave no opinions, his attitude one of general acquiescence. Twice, when pauses of slackening interest made it possible, Henriot fancied he surprised another quality in this negative attitude. Interpreting it each time differently, he yet dismissed both interpretations with a smile. His imagination leaped so absurdly to violent conclusions. They were not tenable: Vance was neither her keeper, nor was he in some fashion a detective. Yet in his manner was sometimes this suggestion of the detective order. He watched with such deep attention, and he concealed it so clumsily with an affectation of careless indifference.\n\nThere is nothing more dangerous than that impulsive intimacy strangers sometimes adopt when an atmosphere of mutual sympathy takes them by surprise, for it is akin to the false frankness friends affect when telling 'candidly' one another's faults. The mood is invariably regretted later. Henriot, however, yielded to it now with something like abandon. The pleasure of talking with this woman was so unexpected, and so keen.\n\nFor Lady Statham believed apparently in some Egypt of her dreams. Her interest was neither historical, archaeological, nor political. It was religious\u2014yet hardly of this earth at all. The conversation turned upon the knowledge of the ancient Egyptians from an unearthly point of view, and even while he talked he was vaguely aware that it was her mind talking through his own. She drew out his ideas and made him say them. But this he was properly aware of only afterwards\u2014that she had cleverly, mercilessly pumped him of all he had ever known or read upon the subject. Moreover, what Vance watched so intently was himself, and the reactions in himself this remarkable woman produced. That also he realised later.\n\nHis first impression that these two belonged to what may be called the 'crank' order was justified by the conversation. But, at least, it was interesting crankiness, and the belief behind it made it even fascinating. Long before the end he surprised in her a more vital form of his own attitude that anything may be true, since knowledge has never yet found final answers to any of the biggest questions.\n\nHe understood, from sentences dropped early in the talk, that she was among those few 'superstitious' folk who think that the old Egyptians came closer to reading the eternal riddles of the world than any others, and that their knowledge was a remnant of that ancient Wisdom Religion which existed in the superb, dark civilization of the sunken Atlantis, lost continent that once joined Africa to Mexico. Eighty thousand years ago the dim sands of Poseidonis, great island adjoining the main continent which itself had vanished a vast period before, sank down beneath the waves, and the t entire known world to-day was descended from its survivors. Hence the significant fact that all religions and ' mythological' systems begin with a story of a flood\u2014some cataclysmic upheaval that destroyed the world. Egypt itself was colonised by a group of Atlantean priests who brought their curious, deep knowledge with them. They had foreseen the cataclysm.\n\nLady Statham talked well, bringing into her great dream this strong, insistent quality of belief and fact. She knew, from Plato to Donelly, all that the minds of men have ever speculated upon the gorgeous legend. The evidence for such a sunken continent\u2014Henriot had skimmed it too in years gone by\u2014she made bewilderingly complete. He had heard Baconians demolish Shakespeare with an array of evidence equally overwhelming. It catches the imagination though not the mind. Yet out of her facts, as she presented them, grew a strange likelihood. The force of this woman's personality, and her calm and quiet way of believing all she talked about, took her listener to some extent\u2014further than ever before, certainly\u2014into the great dream after her. And the dream, to say the least, was a picturesque one, laden with wonderful possibilities. For as she talked the spirit of old Egypt moved up, staring down upon him out of eyes lidded so curiously level. Hitherto all had prated to him of the Arabs, their ancient faith and customs, and the splendour of the Bedouins, those Princes of the Desert. But what he sought, barely confessed in words even to himself, was something older far than this. And this strange, dark woman brought it close. Deeps in his soul, long slumbering, awoke. He heard forgotten questions.\n\nOnly in this brief way could he attempt to sum up the storm she roused in him.\n\nShe carried him far beyond mere outline, however, though afterwards he recalled the details with difficulty. So much more was suggested than actually expressed. She contrived to make the general modern scepticism an evidence of cheap mentality. It was so easy; the depth it affects to conceal, mere emptiness. 'We have tried all things, and found all wanting'\u2014the mind, as measuring instrument, merely confessed inadequate. Various shrewd judgments of this kind increased his respect, although her acceptance went so far beyond his own. And, while the label of credulity refused to stick to her, her sense of imaginative wonder enabled her to escape that dreadful compromise, a man's mind in a woman's temperament. She fascinated him.\n\nThe spiritual worship of the ancient Egyptians, she held, was a symbolical explanation of things generally alluded to as the secrets of life and death; their knowledge was a remnant of the wisdom of Atlantis. Material relics, equally misunderstood, still stood to-day at Karnac, Stonehenge, and in the mysterious writings on buried Mexican temples and cities, so significantly akin to the hieroglyphics upon the Egyptian tombs.\n\n'The one misinterpreted as literally as the other,' she suggested, 'yet both fragments of an advanced knowledge that found its grave in the sea. The Wisdom of that old spiritual system has vanished from the world, only a degraded literalism left of its undecipherable language. The jewel has been lost, and the casket is filled with sand, sand, sand.'\n\nHow keenly her black eyes searched his own as she said it, and how oddly she made the little word resound. The syllable drew out almost into chanting. Echoes answered from the depths within him, carrying it on and on across some desert of forgotten belief. Veils of sand flew everywhere about his mind. Curtains lifted. Whole hills of sand went shifting into level surfaces whence gardens of dim outline emerged to meet the sunlight.\n\n'But the sand may be removed.' It was her nephew, speaking almost for the first time, and the interruption had an odd effect, introducing a sharply practical element. For the tone expressed, so far as he dared express it, disapproval. It was a baited observation, an invitation to opinion.\n\n'We are not sand-diggers, Mr. Henriot,' put in Lady Statham, before he decided to respond. 'Our object is quite another one; and I believe\u2014I have a feeling,' she added almost questioningly, 'that you might be interested enough to help us perhaps.'\n\nHe only wondered the direct attack had not come sooner. Its bluntness hardly surprised him. He felt himself leap forward to accept it. A sudden subsidence had freed his feet.\n\nThen the warning operated suddenly\u2014for an instant. Henriot was interested; more, he was half seduced; but, as yet, he did not mean to be included in their purposes, whatever these might be. That shrinking dread came back a moment, and was gone again before he could question it. His eyes looked full at Lady Statham. 'What is it that you know?' they asked her. 'Tell me the things we once knew together, you and I. These words are merely trifling. And why does another man now stand in my place? For the sands heaped upon my memory are shifting, and it is you who are moving them away.'\n\nHis soul whispered it; his voice said quite another thing, although the words he used seemed oddly chosen:\n\n'There is much in the ideas of ancient Egypt that has attracted me ever since I can remember, though I have never caught up with anything definite enough to follow. There was majesty somewhere in their conceptions\u2014a large, calm majesty of spiritual dominion, one might call it perhaps. I am interested.'\n\nHer face remained expressionless as she listened, but there was grave conviction in the eyes that held him like a spell. He saw through them into dim, faint pictures whose background was always sand. He forgot that he was speaking with a woman, a woman who half an hour ago had been a stranger to him. He followed these faded mental pictures, though he never caught them up... It was like his dream in London.\n\nLady Statham was talking\u2014he had not noticed the means by which she effected the abrupt transition\u2014of familiar beliefs of old Egypt; of the Ka, or Double, by whose existence the survival of the soul was possible, even its return into manifested, physical life; of the astrology, or influence of the heavenly bodies upon all sublunar activities; of terrific forms of other life, known to the ancient worship of Atlantis, great Potencies that might be invoked by ritual and ceremonial, and of their lesser influence as recognised in certain lower forms, hence treated with veneration as the ' Sacred Animal' branch of this dim religion. And she spoke lightly of the modern learning which so glibly imagined it was the animals themselves that were looked upon as 'gods'\u2014the bull, the bird, the crocodile, the cat. 'It's there they all go so absurdly wrong,' she said, 'taking the symbol for the power symbolised. Yet natural enough. The mind to-day wears blinkers, studies only the details seen directly before it. Had none of us experienced love, we should think the first lover mad. Few to-day know the Powers they knew, hence deny them. If the world were deaf it would stand with mockery before a hearing group swayed by an orchestra, pitying both listeners and performers. It would deem our admiration of a great swinging bell mere foolish worship of form and movement. Similarly, with high Powers that once expressed themselves in common forms\u2014where best they could\u2014being themselves bodiless. The learned men classify the forms with painstaking detail. But deity has gone out of life. The Powers symbolised are no longer experienced.'\n\n'These Powers, you suggest, then\u2014their Kas, as it were\u2014may still\u2014'\n\nBut she waved aside the interruption. 'They are satisfied, as the common people were, with a degraded literalism,' she went on. 'Nut was the Heavens, who spread herself across the earth in the form of a woman; Shu, the vastness of space; the ibis typified Thoth, and Hathor was the Patron of the Western Hills; Khonsu, the moon, was personified, as was the deity of the Nile. But the high priest of Ra, the sun, you notice, remained ever the Great One of Visions.'\n\nThe High Priest, the Great One of Visions!\u2014How wonderfully again she made the sentence sing. She put splendour into it. The pictures shifted suddenly closer in his mind. He saw the grandeur of Memphis and Heliopolis rise against the stars and shake the sand of ages from their stern old temples.\n\n'You think it possible, then, to get into touch with these High Powers you speak of, Powers once manifested in common forms?'\n\nHenriot asked the question with a degree of conviction and solemnity that surprised himself. The scenery changed about him as he listened. The spacious halls of this former khedivial Palace melted into Desert spaces. He smelt the open wilderness, the sand that haunted Helouan. The soft-footed Arab servants moved across the hall in their white sheets like eddies of dust the wind stirred from the Libyan dunes. And over these two strangers close beside him stole a queer, indefinite alteration. Moods and emotions, nameless as unknown stars, rose through his soul, trailing dark mists of memory from unfathomable distances.\n\nLady Statham answered him indirectly. He found himself wishing that those steady eyes would sometimes close.\n\n'Love is known only by feeling it,' she said, her voice deepening a little. 'Behind the form you feel the person loved. The process is an evocation, pure and simple. An arduous ceremonial, involving worship and devotional preparation, is the means. It is a difficult ritual\u2014the only one acknowledged by the world as still effectual. Ritual is the passage way of the soul into the Infinite.'\n\nHe might have said the words himself. The thought lay in him while she uttered it. Evocation everywhere in life was as true as assimilation. Nevertheless, he stared his companion full in the eyes with a touch of almost rude amazement. But no further questions prompted themselves; or, rather, he declined to ask them. He recalled, somehow uneasily, that in ceremonial the points of the compass have significance, standing for forces and activities that sleep there until invoked, and a passing light fell upon that curious midnight request in the corridor upstairs. These two were on the track of undesirable experiments, he thought... They wished to include him too.\n\n'You go at night sometimes into the Desert? 'he heard\" himself saying. It was impulsive and miscalculated. His feeling that it would be wise to change the conversation resulted in giving it fresh impetus instead.\n\n'We saw you there\u2014in the Wadi Hof,' put in Vance, suddenly breaking his long silence; 'you too sleep out, then? It means, you know, the Valley of Fear.'\n\n'We wondered\u2014' It was Lady Statham's voice, and she leaned forward eagerly as she said it, then abruptly left the sentence incomplete. Henriot started; a sense of momentary acute discomfort again ran over him. The same second she continued, though obviously changing the phrase\u2014'we wondered how you spent your day there, during the heat. But you paint, don't you? You draw, I mean?'\n\nThe commonplace question, he realised in every fibre of his being, meant something they deemed significant. Was it his talent for drawing that they sought to use him for? Even as he answered with a simple affirmative, he had a flash of intuition that might be fanciful, yet that might be true: that this extraordinary pair were intent upon some ceremony of evocation that should summon into actual physical expression some Power\u2014some type of life\u2014known long ago to ancient worship, and that they even sought to fix its bodily outline with the pencil\u2014his pencil.\n\nA gateway of incredible adventure opened at his feet. He balanced on the edge of knowing unutterable things. Here was a clue that might lead him towards the hidden Egypt he had ever craved to know. An awful hand was beckoning. The sands were shifting. He saw the million eyes of the Desert watching him from beneath the level lids of centuries. Speck by speck, and grain by grain, the sand that smothered memory lifted the countless wrappings that embalmed it.\n\nAnd he was willing, yet afraid. Why in the world did he hesitate and shrink? Why was it that the presence of this silent, watching personality in the chair beside him kept caution still alive, with warning close behind? The pictures in his mind were gorgeously coloured. It was Richard Vance who somehow streaked them through with black. A thing of darkness, born of this man's unassertive presence, flitted ever across the scenery, marring its grandeur with something evil, petty, dreadful. He held a horrible thought alive. His mind was thinking venal purposes.\n\nIn Henriot himself imagination had grown curiously heated, fed by what had been suggested rather than actually said. Ideas of immensity crowded his brain, yet never assumed definite shape. They were familiar, even as this strange woman was familiar. Once, long, ago, he had known them well; had even practised them beneath these bright Egyptian stars. Whence came this prodigious glad excitement in his heart, this sense of mighty Powers coaxed down to influence the very details of daily life? Behind them, for all their vagueness, lay an archetypal splendour, fraught with forgotten meanings. He had always been aware of it in this mysterious land, but it had ever hitherto eluded him. It hovered everywhere. He had felt it brooding behind the towering Colossi at Thebes, in the skeletons of wasted temples, in the uncouth comeliness of the Sphinx, and in the crude terror of the Pyramids even. Over the whole of Egypt hung its invisible wings. These were but isolated fragments of the Body that might express it. And the Desert remained its cleanest, truest symbol. Sand knew it closest. Sand might even give it bodily form and outline.\n\nBut, while it escaped description in his mind, as equally it eluded visualisation in his soul, he felt that it combined with its vastness something infinitely small as well. Of such wee particles is the giant Desert born...\n\nHenriot started nervously in his chair, convicted once more of unconscionable staring; and at the same moment a group of hotel people, returning from a dance, passed through the hall and nodded him good-night. The scent of the women reached him; and with it the sound of their voices discussing personalities just left behind. A London atmosphere came with them. He caught trivial phrases, uttered in a drawling tone, and followed by the shrill laughter of a girl. They passed upstairs, discussing their little things, like marionettes upon a tiny stage.\n\nBut their passage brought him back to things of modern life, and to some standard of familiar measurement. The pictures that his soul had gazed at so deep within, he realised, were a pictorial transfer caught incompletely from this woman's vivid mind. He had seen the Desert as the grey, enormous Tomb where hovered still the Ka of ancient Egypt. Sand screened her visage with the veil of centuries. But She was there, and She was living. Egypt herself had pitched a temporary camp in him, and then moved on.\n\nThere was a momentary break, a sense of abruptness and dislocation. And then he became aware that Lady Statham had been speaking for some time before he caught her actual words, and that a certain change had come into her voice as also into her manner." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 444", + "text": "She was leaning closer to him, her face suddenly glowing and alive. Through the stone figure coursed the fires of a passion that deepened the coal-black eyes and communicated a hint of light\u2014of exaltation\u2014to her whole person. It was incredibly moving. To this deep passion was due the power he had felt. It was her entire life; she lived for it, she would die for it. Her calmness of manner enhanced its effect. Hence the strength of those first impressions that had stormed him. The woman had belief; however wild and strange, it was sacred to her. The secret of her influence was\u2014conviction.\n\nHis attitude shifted several points then. The wonder in him passed over into awe. The things she knew were real. They were not merely imaginative speculations.\n\n'I knew I was not wrong in thinking you in sympathy with this line of thought,' she was saying in lower voice, steady with earnestness, and as though she had read his mind. 'You, too, know, though perhaps you hardly realise that you know. It lies so deep in you that you only get vague feelings of it\u2014intimations of memory. Isn't that the case?'\n\nHenriot gave assent with his eyes; it was the truth.\n\n'What we know instinctively,' she continued, 'is simply what we are trying to remember. Knowledge is memory.' She paused a moment watching his face closely. 'At least, you are free from that cheap scepticism which labels these old beliefs as superstition.' It was not even a question.\n\n'I\u2014worship real belief\u2014of any kind,' he stammered, for her words and the close proximity of her atmosphere caused a strange upheaval in his heart that he could not account for. He faltered in his speech. 'It is the most vital quality in life\u2014rarer than deity.' He was using her own phrases even. 'It is creative. It constructs the world anew\u2014'\n\n'And may reconstruct the old.'\n\nShe said it, lifting her face above him a little, so that her eyes looked down into his own. It grew big and somehow masculine. It was the face of a priest, spiritual power in it. Where, oh where in the echoing Past had he known this woman's soul? He saw her in another setting, a forest of columns dim about her, towering above giant aisles. Again he felt the Desert had come close. Into this tent-like hall of the hotel came the sifting of tiny sand. It heaped softly about the very furniture against his feet, blocking the exits of door and window. It shrouded the little present. The wind that brought it stirred a veil that had hung for ages motionless...\n\nShe had been saying many things that he had missed while his mind went searching. 'There were types of life the Atlantean system knew it might revive\u2014life unmanifested to-day in any bodily form,' was the sentence he caught with his return to the actual present.\n\n'A type of life?' he whispered, looking about him, as though to see who it was had joined them; 'you mean a\u2014soul? Some kind of soul, alien to humanity, or to\u2014to any forms of living thing in the world to-day?' What she had been saying reached him somehow, it seemed, though he had not heard the words themselves. Still hesitating, he was yet so eager to hear. Already he felt she meant to include him in her purposes, and that in the end he must go willingly. So strong was her persuasion on his mind.\n\nAnd he felt as if he knew vaguely what was coming. Before she answered his curious question\u2014prompting it indeed\u2014rose in his mind that strange idea of the Group-Soul: the theory that big souls cannot express themselves in a single individual, but need an entire group for their full manifestation.\n\nHe listened intently. The reflection that this sudden intimacy was unnatural, he rejected, for many conversations were really gathered into one. Long watching and preparation on both sides had cleared the way for the ripening of acquaintance into confidence\u2014how long he dimly wondered? But if this conception of the Group-Soul was not new, the suggestion Lady Statham developed out of it was both new and startling\u2014and yet always so curiously familiar. Its value for him lay, not in far-fetched evidence that supported it, but in the deep belief which made it a vital asset in an honest inner life.\n\n'An individual,' she said quietly, 'one soul expressed completely in a single person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physical instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression. In the lower ranges of humanity\u2014certainly in animal and insect life\u2014one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands one Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the deep intelligence called instinct\u2014all as one. The life of any one lion is the life of all\u2014the lion group-soul that manifests itself in the entire genus. An ant-heap is a single Ant; through the bees spreads the consciousness of a single Bee.'\n\nHenriot knew what she was working up to. In his eagerness to hasten disclosure he interrupted\u2014\n\n'And there may be types of life that have no corresponding bodily expression at all, then?' he asked as though the question were forced out of him. 'They exist as Powers\u2014unmanifested on the earth to-day?'\n\n'Powers,' she answered, watching him closely with unswerving stare, 'that need a group to provide their body\u2014their physical expression\u2014if they came back.'\n\n'Came back!' he repeated below his breath.\n\nBut she heard him. 'They once had expression. Egypt, Atlantis knew them\u2014spiritual Powers that never visit the world to-day.'\n\n'Bodies,' he whispered softly, 'actual bodies?'\n\n'Their sphere of action, you see, would be their body. And it might be physical outline. So potent a descent of spiritual life would select materials for its body where it could find them. Our conventional notion of a body\u2014what is it? A single outline moving altogether in one direction. For little human souls, or fragments, this is sufficient. But for vaster types of soul an entire host would be required.'\n\n'A church?' he ventured. 'Some Body of belief, you surely mean?'\n\nShe bowed her head a moment in assent. She was determined he should seize her meaning fully.\n\n'A wave of spiritual awakening\u2014a descent of spiritual life upon a nation,' she answered slowly, 'forms itself a church, and the body of true believers are its sphere of action. They are literally its bodily expression. Each individual believer is a corpuscle in that Body. The Power has provided itself with a vehicle of manifestation. Otherwise we could not know it. And the more real the belief of each individual, the more perfect the expression of the spiritual life behind them all. A Group-soul walks the earth. Moreover, a nation naturally devout could attract a type of soul unknown to a nation that denies all faith. Faith brings back the gods... But to-day belief is dead, and Deity has left the world.'\n\nShe talked on and on, developing this main idea that in days of older faiths there were deific types of life upon the earth, evoked by worship and beneficial to humanity. They had long ago withdrawn because the worship which brought them down had died the death. The world had grown pettier. These vast centres of Spiritual Power found no 'Body 'in which they now could express themselves or manifest... Her thoughts and phrases poured over him like sand. It was always sand he felt\u2014burying the Present and uncovering the Past...\n\nHe tried to steady his mind upon familiar objects, but wherever he looked Sand stared him in the face. Outside these trivial walls the Desert lay listening. It lay waiting too. Vance himself had dropped out of recognition. He belonged to the world of things to-day. But this woman and himself stood thousands of years away, beneath the columns of a Temple in the sands. And the sands were moving. His feet went shifting with them... running down vistas of ageless memory that woke terror by their sheer immensity of distance...\n\n'Like a muffled voice that called to him through many veils and wrappings, he heard her describe the stupendous Powers that evocation might coax down again among the world of men.\n\n'To what useful end?' he asked at length, amazed at his own temerity, and because he knew instinctively the answer in advance. It rose through these layers of coiling memory in his soul.\n\n'The extension of spiritual knowledge and the widening of life,' she answered. 'The link with the 'unearthly kingdom\" wherein this ancient system went forever searching, would be re-established. Complete rehabilitation might follow. Portions\u2014little portions of these Powers\u2014expressed themselves naturally once in certain animal types, instinctive life that did not deny or reject them. The worship of sacred animals was the relic of a once gigantic system of evocation\u2014not of monsters,' and she smiled sadly, 'but of Powers that were willing and ready to descend when worship summoned them.'\n\nAgain, beneath his breath, Henriot heard himself murmur\u2014his own voice startled him as he whispered it: 'Actual bodily shape and outline?'\n\n'Material for bodies is everywhere,' she answered, equally low; 'dust to which we all return; sand, if you prefer it, fine, fine sand. Life moulds it easily enough, when that life is potent.'\n\nA certain confusion spread slowly through his mind as he heard her. He lit a cigarette and smoked some minutes in silence. Lady Statham and her nephew waited for him to speak. At length, after some inner battling and hesitation, he put the question that he knew they waited for. It was impossible to resist any longer.\n\n'It would be interesting to know the method,' he said, 'and to revive, perhaps, by experiment\u2014'\n\nBefore he could complete his thought, she took him up:\n\n'There are some who claim to know it,' she said gravely\u2014her eyes a moment masterful. 'A clue, thus followed, might lead to the entire reconstruction I spoke of.'\n\n'And the method?' he repeated faintly.\n\n'Evoke the Power by ceremonial evocation\u2014the ritual is obtainable\u2014and note the form it assumes. Then establish it. This shape or outline once secured, could then be made permanent\u2014a mould for its return at will\u2014its natural physical expression here on earth.'\n\n'Idol!' he exclaimed.\n\n'Image,' she replied at once. 'Life, before we can know it must have a body. Our souls, in order to manifest here, need a material vehicle.'\n\n'And\u2014to obtain this form or outline? ' he began; ' to fix it, rather?'\n\n'Would be required the clever pencil of a fearless looker-on\u2014some one not engaged in the actual evocation. This form, accurately made permanent in solid matter, say in stone, would provide a channel always open. Experiment, properly speaking, might then begin. The cisterns of Power behind would be accessible.'\n\n'An amazing proposition! ' Henriot exclaimed.\n\nWhat surprised him was that he felt no desire to laugh, and little even to doubt.\n\n'Yet known to every religion that ever deserved the name,' put in Vance like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his interruption\u2014a touch of darkness. He spoke eagerly.\n\nTo all the talk that followed, and there was much of it, Henriot listened with but half an ear. This one idea stormed through him with an uproar that killed attention. Judgment was held utterly in abeyance. He carried away from it some vague suggestion that this woman had hinted at previous lives she half remembered, and that every year she came to Egypt, haunting the sands and temples in the effort to recover lost clues. And he recalled afterwards that she said, 'This all came to me as a child, just as though it was something half remembered.' There was the further suggestion that he himself was not unknown to her; that they, too, had met before. But this, compared to the grave certainty of the rest, was merest fantasy that did not hold his attention. He answered, hardly knowing what he said. His preoccupation with other thoughts deep down was so intense, that he was probably barely polite, uttering empty phrases, with his mind elsewhere. His one desire was to escape and be alone, and it was with genuine relief that he presently excused himself and went upstairs to bed. The halls, he noticed, were empty; an Arab servant waited to put the lights out. He walked up, for the lift had long ceased running.\n\nAnd the magic of old Egypt stalked beside him. The studies that had fascinated his mind in earlier youth returned with the power that had subdued his mind in boyhood. The cult of Osiris woke in his blood again; Horus and Nephthys stirred in their long-forgotten centres. There revived in him, too long buried, the awful glamour of those liturgal rites and vast body of observances, those spells and formulae of incantation of the oldest known rescension that years ago had captured his imagination and belief\u2014the Book of the Dead. Trumpet voices called to his heart again across the desert of some dim past. There were forms of life\u2014impulses from the Creative Power which is the Universe\u2014other than the soul of man. They could be known. A spiritual exaltation, roused by the words and presence of this singular woman, shouted to him as he went.\n\nThen, as he closed his bedroom door, carefully locking it, there stood beside him\u2014Vance. The forgotten figure of Vance came up close\u2014the watching eyes, the simulated interest, the feigned belief, the detective mental attitude, these broke through the grandiose panorama, bringing darkness. Vance, strong personality that hid behind assumed nonentity for some purpose of his own, intruded with sudden violence, demanding an explanation of his presence.\n\nAnd, with an equal suddenness, explanation offered itself then and there. It came unsought, its horror of certainty utterly unjustified; and it came in this unexpected fashion:\n\nBehind the interest and acquiescence of the man ran\u2014fear: but behind the vivid fear ran another thing that Henriot now perceived was vile. For the first time in his life, Henriot knew it at close quarters, actual, ready to operate. Though familiar enough in daily life to be of common occurrence, Henriot had never realised it as he did now, so close and terrible. In the same way he had never realised that he would die\u2014vanish from the busy world of men and women, forgotten as though he had never existed, an eddy of wind-blown dust. And in the man named Richard Vance this thing was close upon blossom. Henriot could not name it to himself. Even in thought it appalled him.\n\nHe undressed hurriedly, almost with the child's idea of finding safety between the sheets. His mind undressed itself as well. The business of the day kid itself automatically aside; the will sank down; desire grew inactive. Henriot was exhausted. But, in that stage towards slumber when thinking stops, and only fugitive pictures pass across the mind in shadowy dance, his brain ceased shouting its mechanical explanations, and his soul unveiled a peering eye. Great limbs of memory, smothered by the activities of the Present, stirred their stiffened lengths through the sands of long ago\u2014sands this woman had begun to excavate from some far-off pre-existence they had surely known together. Vagueness and certainty ran hand in hand. Details were unrecoverable, but the emotions in which they were embedded moved.\n\nHe turned restlessly in his bed, striving to seize the amazing clues and follow them. But deliberate effort hid them instantly again; they retired instantly into the subconsciousness. With the brain of this body he now occupied they had nothing to do. The brain stored memories of each life only. This ancient script was graven in his soul. Subconsciousness alone could interpret and reveal. And it was his subconscious memory that Lady Statham had been so busily excavating.\n\nDimly it stirred and moved about the depths within him, never clearly seen, indefinite, felt as a yearning after unrecoverable knowledge. Against the darker background of Vance's fear and sinister purpose\u2014both of this present life, and recent\u2014he saw the grandeur of this woman's impossible dream, and knew, beyond argument or reason, that it was true. Judgment and will asleep, he left the impossibility aside, and took the grandeur. The Belief of Lady Statham was not credulity and superstition; it was Memory. Still to this day, over the sands of Egypt, hovered immense spiritual potencies, so vast that they could only know physical expression in a group\u2014in many. Their sphere of bodily manifestation must be a host, each individual unit in that host a corpuscle in the whole.\n\nThe wind, rising from the Lybian wastes across the Nile, swept up against the exposed side of the hotel, and made his windows rattle\u2014the old, sad winds of Egypt. Henriot got out of bed to fasten the outside shutters. He stood a moment and watched the moon floating down behind the Sakkara Pyramids. The Pleiades and Orion's Belt hung brilliantly; the Great Bear was close to the horizon. In the sky above the Desert swung ten thousand stars. No sounds rose from the streets of Helouan. The tide of sand was coming slowly in.\n\nAnd a flock of enormous thoughts swooped past him from fields of this unbelievable, lost memory. The Desert, pale in the moon, was coextensive with the night, too huge for comfort or understanding, yet charged to the brim with infinite peace. Behind its majesty of silence lay whispers of a vanished language that once could call with power upon mighty spiritual Agencies. Its skirts were folded now, but, slowly across the leagues of sand, they began to stir and rearrange themselves. He grew suddenly aware of this enveloping shroud of sand\u2014as the raw material of bodily expression: Form.\n\nThe sand was in his imagination and his mind. Shaking loosely the folds of its gigantic skirts, it rose; it moved a little towards him. He saw the eternal countenance of the Desert watching him\u2014immobile and unchanging behind these shifting veils the winds laid so carefully over it. Egypt, the ancient Egypt, turned in her vast sarcophagus of Desert, wakening from her sleep of ages at the Belief of approaching worshippers.\n\nOnly in this insignificant manner could he express a letter of the terrific language that crowded to seek expression through his soul... He closed the shutters and carefully fastened them. He turned to go back to bed, curiously trembling. Then, as he did so, the whole singular delusion caught him with a shock that held him motionless. Up rose the stupendous apparition of the entire Desert and stood behind him on that balcony. Swift as thought, in silence, the Desert stood on end against his very face. It towered across the sky, hiding Orion and the moon; it dipped below the horizons. The whole grey sheet of it rose up before his eyes and stood. Through its unfolding skirts ran ten thousand eddies of swirling sand as the creases of its grave-clothes smoothed themselves out in moonlight. And a bleak, scarred countenance, huge as a planet, gazed down into his own...\n\nThrough his dreamless sleep that night two things lay active and awake... in the subconscious part that knows no slumber. They were incongruous. One was evil, small and human; the other unearthly and sublime. For the memory of the fear that haunted Vance, and the sinister cause of it, pricked at him all night long. But behind, beyond this common, intelligible emotion, lay the crowding wonder that caught his soul with glory:\n\nThe Sand was stirring, the Desert was awake. Ready to mate with them in material form, brooded close the Ka of that colossal Entity that once expressed itself through the myriad life of ancient Egypt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 445", + "text": "Next day, and for several days following, Henriot kept out of the path of Lady Statham and her nephew. The acquaintanceship had grown too rapidly to be quite comfortable. It was easy to pretend that he took people at their face value, but it was a pose; one liked to know something of antecedents. It was otherwise difficult to 'place' them. And Henriot, for the life of him, could not 'place' these two. His Subconsciousness brought explanation when it came\u2014but the Subconsciousness is only temporarily active. When it retired he floundered without a rudder, in confusion.\n\nWith the flood of morning sunshine the value of much she had said evaporated. Her presence alone had supplied the key to the cipher. But while the indigestible portions he rejected, there remained a good deal he had already assimilated. The discomfort remained; and with it the grave, unholy reality of it all. It was something more than theory. Results would follow\u2014if he joined them. He would witness curious things.\n\nThe force with which it drew him brought hesitation. It operated in him like a shock that numbs at first by its abrupt arrival, and needs time to realise in the right proportions to the rest of life. These right proportions, however, did not come readily, and his emotions ranged between sceptical laughter and complete acceptance. The one detail he felt certain of was this dreadful thing he had divined in Vance. Trying hard to disbelieve it, he found he could not. It was true. Though without a shred of real evidence to support it, the horror of it remained. He knew it in his very bones.\n\nAnd this, perhaps, was what drove him to seek the comforting companionship of folk he understood and felt at home with. He told his host and hostess about the strangers, though omitting the actual conversation because they would merely smile in blank miscomprehension. But the moment he described the strong black eyes beneath the level eyelids, his hostess turned with a start, her interest deeply roused: ' Why, it's that awful Statham woman,' she exclaimed, 'that must be Lady Statham, and the man she calls her nephew.'\n\n'Sounds like it, certainly,' her husband added. 'Felix, you'd better clear out. They'll bewitch you too.'\n\nAnd Henriot bridled, yet wondering why he did so. He drew into his shell a little, giving the merest sketch of what had happened. But he listened closely while these two practical old friends supplied him with information in the gossiping way that human nature loves. No doubt there was much embroidery, and more perversion, exaggeration too, but the account evidently rested upon some basis of solid foundation for all that. Smoke and fire go together always.\n\n'He is her nephew right enough,' Mansfield corrected his wife, before proceeding to his own man's form of elaboration; 'no question about that, I believe. He's her favourite nephew, and she's as rich as a pig. He follows her out here every year, waiting for her empty shoes. But they are an unsavoury couple. I've met 'em in various parts, all over Egypt, but they always come back to Helouan in the end. And the stories about them are simply legion. You remember\u2014' he turned hesitatingly to his wife\u2014' some people, I heard,' he changed his sentence, 'were made quite ill by her.'\n\n'I'm sure Felix ought to know, yes,' his wife boldly took him up, 'my niece, Fanny, had the most extraordinary experience.' She turned to Henriot. 'Her room was next to Lady Statham in some hotel or other at Assouan or Edfu, and one night she woke and heard a kind of mysterious chanting or intoning next her. Hotel doors are so dreadfully thin. There was a funny smell too, like incense of something sickly, and a man's voice kept chiming in. It went on for hours, while she lay terrified in bed'\n\n'Frightened, you say?' asked Henriot.\n\n'Out of her skin, yes; she said it was so uncanny\u2014made her feel icy. She wanted to ring the bell, but was afraid to leave her bed. The room was full of\u2014of things, yet she could see nothing. She felt them, you see. And after a bit the sound of this sing-song voice so got on her nerves, it half dazed her\u2014a kind of enchantment\u2014she felt choked and suffocated. And then ' It was her turn to hesitate.\n\n'Tell it all,' her husband said, quite gravely too.\n\n'Well\u2014something came in. At least, she describes it oddly, rather; she said it made the door bulge inwards from the next room, but not the door alone; the walls bulged or swayed as if a huge thing pressed against them from the other side. And at the same moment her windows\u2014she had two big balconies, and the Venetian shutters were fastened\u2014both her windows darkened\u2014though it was two in the morning and pitch dark outside. She said it was all one thing\u2014trying to get in; just as water, you see, would rush in through every hole and opening it could find, and all at once. And in spite of her terror\u2014that's the odd part of it\u2014she says she felt a kind of splendour in her\u2014a sort of elation.'\n\n'She saw nothing?'\n\n'She says she doesn't remember. Her senses left her, I believe\u2014though she won't admit it.'\n\n'Fainted for a minute, probably,' said Mansfield.\n\n'So there it is,' his wife concluded, after a silence. 'And that's true. It happened to my niece, didn't it, John?'\n\nStories and legendary accounts of strange things that the presence of these two brought poured out then. They were obviously somewhat mixed, one account borrowing picturesque details from another, and all in disproportion, as when people tell stories in a language they are little familiar with. But, listening with avidity, yet also with uneasiness, somehow, Henriot put two and two together. Truth stood behind them somewhere. These two held traffic with the powers that ancient Egypt knew.\n\n'Tell Felix, dear, about the time you met the nephew\u2014horrid creature\u2014in the Valley of the Kings,' he heard his wife say presently. And Mansfield told it plainly enough, evidently glad to get it done, though.\n\n'It was some years ago now, and I didn't know who he was then, or anything about him. I don't know much more now\u2014except that he's a dangerous sort of charlatan-devil, I think. But I came across him one night up there by Thebes in the Valley of the Kings\u2014you know, where they buried all their Johnnies with so much magnificence and processions and masses, and all the rest. It's the most astounding, the most haunted place you ever saw, gloomy, silent, full of gorgeous lights and shadows that seem alive\u2014terribly impressive; it makes you creep and shudder. You feel old Egypt watching you.'\n\n'Get on, dear,' said his wife.\n\n'Well, I was coming home late on a blasted lazy donkey, dog-tired into the bargain, when my donkey boy suddenly ran for his life and left me alone. It was after sunset. The sand was red and shining, and the big cliffs sort of fiery. And my donkey stuck its four feet in the ground and wouldn't budge. Then, about fifty yards away, I saw a fellow\u2014European apparently\u2014doing something\u2014Heaven knows what, for I can't describe it\u2014among the boulders that lie all over the ground there. Ceremony, I suppose you'd call it. I was so interested that at first I watched. Then I saw he wasn't alone. There were a lot of moving things round him, towering big things, that came and went like shadows. That twilight is fearfully bewildering; perspective changes, and distance gets all confused. It's fearfully hard to see properly. I only remember that I got off my donkey and went up closer, and when I was within a dozen yards of him\u2014well, it sounds such rot, you know, but I swear the things suddenly rushed off and left him there alone. They went with a roaring noise like wind; shadowy but tremendously big, they were, and they vanished up against the fiery precipices as though they slipped bang into the stone itself. The only thing I can think of to describe 'em is\u2014well, those sand-storms the Khamasin raises\u2014the hot winds, you know.'\n\n'They probably were sand,' his wife suggested, burning to tell another story of her own.\n\n'Possibly, only there wasn't a breath of wind, and it was hot as blazes\u2014and\u2014I had such extraordinary sensations\u2014never felt anything like it before\u2014wild and exhilarated\u2014drunk, I tell you, drunk.'\n\n'You saw them? ' asked Henriot. 'You made out their shape at all, or outline?'\n\n'Sphinx,' he replied at once, 'for all the world like sphinxes. You know the kind of face and head these limestone strata in the Desert take\u2014great visages with square Egyptian head-dresses where the driven sand has eaten away the softer stuff beneath? You see it everywhere\u2014enormous idols they seem, with faces and eyes and lips awfully like the sphinx\u2014well, that's the nearest I can get to it.' He puffed his pipe hard. But there was no sign of levity in him. He told the actual truth as far as in him lay, yet half ashamed of what he told. And a good deal he left out, too.\n\n'She's got a face of the same sort, that Statham horror,' his wife said with a shiver. 'Reduce the size, and paint in awful black eyes, and you've got her exactly\u2014a living idol.' And all three laughed, yet a laughter without merriment in it.\n\n'And you spoke to the man?'\n\n'I did,' the Englishman answered,' though I confess I'm a bit ashamed of the way I spoke. Fact is, I was excited, thunderingly excited, and felt a kind of anger. I wanted to kick the beggar for practising such bally rubbish, and in such a place too. Yet all the time\u2014well, well, I believe it was sheer funk now,' he laughed; 'for I felt uncommonly queer out there in the dusk, alone with\u2014with that kind of business; and I was angry with myself for feeling it. Anyhow, I went up\u2014I'd lost my donkey boy as well, remember\u2014and slated him like a dog. I can't remember what I said exactly\u2014only that he stood and stared at me in silence. That made it worse\u2014seemed twice as real then. The beggar said no single word the whole time. He signed to me with one hand to clear out. And then, suddenly out of nothing\u2014she\u2014that woman\u2014appeared and stood beside him. I never saw her come. She must have been behind some boulder or other, for she simply rose out of the ground. She stood there and stared at me too\u2014bang in the face. She was turned towards the sunset\u2014what was left of it in the west\u2014and her black eyes shone like\u2014ugh! I can't describe it\u2014it was shocking.'\n\n'She spoke?'\n\n'She said five words\u2014and her voice\u2014it'll make you laugh\u2014it was metallic like a gong: \"You are in danger here.\" That's all she said. I simply turned and cleared out as fast as ever I could. But I had to go on foot. My donkey had followed its boy long before. I tell you\u2014smile as you may\u2014my blood was all curdled for an hour afterwards.'\n\nThen he explained that he felt some kind of explanation or apology was due, since the couple lodged in his own hotel, and how he approached the man in the smoking-room after dinner. A conversation resulted\u2014the man was quite intelligent after all\u2014of which only one sentence had remained in his mind.\n\n'Perhaps you can explain it, Felix. I wrote it down, as well as I could remember. The rest confused me beyond words or memory; though I must confess it did not seem\u2014well, not utter rot exactly. It was about astrology and rituals and the worship of the old Egyptians, and I don't know what else besides. Only, he made it intelligible and almost sensible, if only I could have got the hang of the thing enough to remember it. You know,' he added, as though believing in spite of himself, 'there is a lot of that wonderful old Egyptian religious business still hanging about in the atmosphere of this place, say what you like.'\n\n'But this sentence?' Henriot asked. And the other went off to get a note-book where he had written it down.\n\n'He was jawing, you see,' he continued when he came back, Henriot and his wife having kept silence meanwhile, 'about direction being of importance in religious ceremonies, West and North symbolising certain powers, or something of the kind, why people turn to the East and all that sort of thing, and speaking of the whole Universe as if it had living forces tucked away in it that expressed themselves somehow when roused up. That's how I remember it anyhow. And then he said this thing\u2014in answer to some fool question probably that I put.' And he read out of the note-book:\n\n'\"You were in danger because you came through the Gateway of the West, and the Powers from the Gateway of the East were at that moment rising, and therefore in direct opposition to you.\"\n\nThen came the following, apparently a simile offered by way of explanation. Mansfield read it in a shamefaced tone, evidently prepared for laughter:\n\n'\"Whether I strike you on the back or in the face determines what kind of answering force I rouse in you. Direction is significant.\" And he said it was the period called the Night of Power\u2014time when the Desert encroaches and spirits are close.'\n\nAnd tossing the book aside, he lit his pipe again and waited a moment to hear what might be said.\n\n'Can you explain such gibberish?' he asked at length, as neither of his listeners spoke. But Henriot said he couldn't. And the wife then took up her own tale of stories that had grown about this singular couple.\n\nThese were less detailed, and therefore less impressive, but all contributed something towards the atmosphere of reality that framed the entire picture. They belonged to the type one hears at every dinner party in Egypt\u2014stories of the vengeance mummies seem to take on those who robbed them, desecrating their peace of centuries; of a woman wearing a necklace of scarabs taken from a princess's tomb, who felt hands about her throat to strangle her; of little Ka figures, Pasht goddesses, amulets and the rest, that brought curious disaster to those who kept them. They are many and various, astonishingly circumstantial often, and vouched for by persons the reverse of credulous. The modern superstition that haunts the desert gullies with Afreets has nothing in common with them. They rest upon a basis of indubitable experience; and they remain\u2014inexplicable. And about the personalities of Lady Statham and her nephew they crowded like flies attracted by a dish of fruit. The Arabs, too, were afraid of her. She had difficulty in getting guides and dragomen.\n\n'My dear chap,' concluded Mansfield, 'take my advice and have nothing to do with 'em. There is a lot of queer business knocking about in this old country, and people like that know ways of reviving it somehow. It's upset you already; you looked scared, I thought, the moment you came in.' They laughed, but the Englishman was in earnest. 'I tell you what,' he added, 'we'll go off for a bit of shooting together. The fields along the Delta are packed with birds now: they're home early this year on their way to the North. What d'ye say, eh?'\n\nBut Henriot did not care about the quail shooting. He felt more inclined to be alone and think things out by himself. He had come to his friends for comfort, and instead they had made him uneasy and excited. His interest had suddenly doubled. Though half afraid, he longed to know what these two were up to\u2014to follow the adventure to the bitter end. He disregarded the warning of his host as well as the premonition in his own heart. The sand had caught his feet.\n\nThere were moments when he laughed in utter disbelief, but these were optimistic moods that did not last. He always returned to the feeling that truth lurked somewhere in the whole strange business, and that if he joined forces with them, as they seemed to wish, he would witness\u2014well, he hardly knew what\u2014but it enticed him as danger does the reckless man, or death the suicide. The sand had caught his mind.\n\nHe decided to offer himself to all they wanted\u2014his pencil too. He would see\u2014a shiver ran through him at the thought\u2014what they saw, and know some eddy of that vanished tide of power and splendour the ancient Egyptian priesthood knew, and that perhaps was even common experience in the far-off days of dim Atlantis. The sand had caught his imagination too. He was utterly sand-haunted." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 446", + "text": "And so he took pains, though without making definite suggestion, to place himself in the way of this woman and her nephew\u2014only to find that his hints were disregarded. They left him alone, if they did not actually avoid him. Moreover, he rarely came across them now. Only at night, or in the queer dusk hours, he caught glimpses of them moving hurriedly off from the hotel, and always desert-wards. And their disregard, well calculated, en-flamed his desire to the point when he almost decided to propose himself. Quite suddenly, then, the idea flashed through him\u2014how do they come, these odd revelations, when the mind lies receptive like a plate sensitised by anticipation?\u2014that they were waiting for a certain date, and, with the notion, came Mansfield's remark about 'the Night of Power,' believed in by the old Egyptian Calendar as a time when the supersensuous world moves close against the minds of men with all its troop of possibilities. And the thought, once lodged in its corner of imagination, grew strong. He looked it up. Ten days from now, he found, Leyel-el-Sud would be upon him, with a moon, too, at the full. And this strange hint of guidance he accepted. In his present mood, as he admitted, smiling to himself, he could accept anything. It was part of it, it belonged to the adventure. But, even while he persuaded himself that it was play, the solemn reality of what lay ahead increased amazingly, sketched darkly in his very soul.\n\nThese intervening days he spent as best he could\u2014impatiently, a prey to quite opposite emotions. In the blazing sunshine he thought of it and laughed; but at night he lay often sleepless, calculating chances of escape. He never did escape, however. The Desert that watched little Helouan with great, unwinking eyes watched also every turn and twist he made. Like this oasis, he basked in the sun of older time, and dreamed beneath forgotten moons. The sand at last had crept into his inmost heart. It sifted over him.\n\nSeeking a reaction from normal, everyday things, he made tourist trips; yet, while recognising the comedy in his attitude, he never could Jose sight of the grandeur that banked it up so hauntingly. These two contrary emotions grafted themselves on all he did and saw. He crossed the Nile at Bedras-hein, and went again to the Tomb-World of Sakkara; but through all the chatter of veiled and helmeted tourists, the bandar-log of our modern Jungle, ran this dark under-stream of awe their monkey methods could not turn aside. One world lay upon another, but this modern layer was a shallow crust that, like the phenomenon of the ' desert-film,' a mere angle of falling light could instantly obliterate. Beneath the sand, deep down, he passed along the Street of Tombs, as he had often passed before, moved then merely by historical curiosity and admiration, but now by emotions for which he found no name. He saw the enormous sarcophagi of granite in their gloomy chambers where the sacred bulls once lay, swathed and embalmed like human beings, and, in the flickering candle light, the mood of ancient rites surged round him, menacing his doubts and laughter. The least human whisper in these subterraneans, dug out first four thousand years ago, revived ominous Powers that stalked beside him, forbidding and pre-monitive. He gazed at the spots where Mariette, unearthing them forty years ago, found fresh as of yesterday the marks of fingers and naked feet\u2014of those who set the sixty-five ton slabs in position. And when he came up again into the sunshine he met the eternal questions of the pyramids, overtopping all his mental horizons. Sand blocked all the avenues of younger emotion, leaving the channels of something in him incalculably older, open and clean swept.\n\nHe slipped homewards, uncomfortable and followed, glad to be with a crowd\u2014because he was otherwise alone with more than he could dare to think about. Keeping just ahead of his companions, he crossed the desert edge where the ghost of Memphis walks under rustling palm trees that screen no stone left upon another of all its mile-long populous splendours. For here was a vista his imagination could realise; here he could know the comfort of solid ground his feet could touch. Gigantic Ramases, lying on his back beneath their shade and staring at the sky, similarly helped to steady his swaying thoughts. Imagination could deal with these. And daily thus he watched the busy world go to and fro to its scale of tips and bargaining, and gladly mingled with it, trying to laugh and study guidebooks, and listen to half-fledged explanations, but always seeing the comedy of his poor attempts. Not all those little donkeys, bells tinkling, beads shining, trotting beneath their comical burdens to the tune of shouting and belabouring, could stem this tide of deeper things the woman had let loose in the subconscious part of him. Everywhere he saw the mysterious camels go slouching through the sand, gurgling the water in their skinny, extended throats. Centuries passed between the enormous knee-stroke of their stride. And, every night, the sunsets restored the forbidding, graver mood, with their crimson, golden splendour, their strange green shafts of light, then\u2014sudden twilight that brought the Past upon him with an awful leap. Upon the stage then stepped the figures of this pair of human beings, chanting their ancient plain-song of incantation in the moonlit desert, and working their rites of unholy evocation as the priests had worked them centuries before in the sands that now buried Sakkara fathoms deep.\n\nThen one morning he woke with a question in his mind, as though it had been asked of him in sleep and he had waked just before the answer came. 'Why do I spend my time sight-seeing, instead of going alone into the Desert as before? What has made me change?'\n\nThis latest mood now asked for explanation. And the answer, coming up automatically, startled him. It was so clear and sure\u2014had been lying in the background all along. One word contained it:\n\nVance.\n\nThe sinister intentions of this man, forgotten in the rush of other emotions, asserted themselves again convincingly. The human horror, so easily comprehensible, had been smothered for the time by the hint of unearthly revelations. But it had operated all the time. Now it took the lead. He dreaded to be alone in the Desert with this dark picture in his mind of what Vance meant to bring there to completion. This abomination of a selfish human will returned to fix its terror in him. To be alone in the Desert meant to be alone with the, imaginative picture of what Vance\u2014he knew it with such strange certainty\u2014hoped to bring about there.\n\nThere was absolutely no evidence to justify the grim suspicion. It seemed indeed far fetched enough, this connection between the sand and the purpose of an evil-minded, violent man. But Henriot saw it true. He could argue it away in a few minutes\u2014easily. Yet the instant thought ceased, it returned, led up by intuition. It possessed him, filled his mind with horrible possibilities. He feared the Desert as he might have feared the scene of some atrocious crime. And, for the time, this dread of a merely human thing corrected the big seduction of the other\u2014the suggested 'super-natural.'\n\nSide by side with it, his desire to join himself to the purposes of the woman increased steadily. They kept out of his way apparently; the offer seemed withdrawn; he grew restless, unable to settle to anything for long, and once he asked the porter casually if they were leaving the hotel. Lady Statham had been invisible for days, and Vance was somehow never within speaking distance. He heard with relief that they had not gone\u2014but with dread as well. Keen excitement worked in him underground. He slept badly. Like a schoolboy, he waited for the summons to an important examination that involved portentous issues, and contradictory emotions disturbed his peace of mind abominably." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 447", + "text": "But it was not until the end of the week, when Vance approached him with purpose in his eyes and manner, that Henriot knew his fears unfounded, and caught himself trembling with sudden anticipation\u2014because the invitation, so desired yet so dreaded, was actually at hand. Firmly determined to keep caution uppermost, yet he went unresistingly to a secluded corner by the palms where they could talk in privacy. For prudence is of the mind, but desire is of the soul, and while his brain of to-day whispered wariness, voices in his heart of long ago shouted commands that he knew he must obey with joy.\n\nIt was evening and the stars were out. Helouan, with her fairy twinkling lights, lay silent against the Desert edge. The sand was at the flood. The period of the Encroaching of the Desert was at hand, and the deeps were all astir with movement. But in the windless air was a great peace. A calm of infinite stillness breathed everywhere. The flow of Time, before it rushed away backwards, stopped somewhere between the dust of stars and Desert. The mystery of sand touched every street with its unutterable softness.\n\nAnd Vance began without the smallest circumlocution. His voice was low, in keeping with the scene, but the words dropped with a sharp distinctness into the other's heart like grains of sand that pricked the skin before they smothered him. Caution they smothered instantly; resistance too.\n\n'I have a message for you from my aunt,' he said, as though he brought an invitation to a picnic. Henriot sat in shadow, but his companion's face was in a patch of light that followed them from the windows of the central hall. There was a shining in the light blue eyes that betrayed the excitement his quiet manner concealed. 'We are going\u2014the day after to-morrow\u2014to spend the night in the Desert; she wondered if, perhaps, you would care to join us?'\n\n'For your experiment?' asked Henriot bluntly.\n\nVance smiled with his lips, holding his eyes steady, though unable to suppress the gleam that flashed in them and was gone so swiftly. There was a hint of shrugging his shoulders.\n\n'It is the Night of Power\u2014in the old Egyptian Calendar, you know,' he answered with assumed lightness almost, 'the final moment of Leyel-el-Sud, the period of Black Nights when the Desert was held to encroach with\u2014with various possibilities of a supernatural order. She wishes to revive a certain practice of the old Egyptians. There may be curious results. At any rate, the occasion is a picturesque one\u2014better than this cheap imitation of London life.' And he indicated the lights, the signs of people in the hall dressed for gaieties and dances, the hotel orchestra that played after dinner.\n\nHenriot at the moment answered nothing, so great was the rush of conflicting emotions that came he knew not whence. Vance went calmly on. He spoke with a simple frankness that was meant to be disarming. Henriot never took his eyes off him. The two men stared steadily at one another.\n\n'She wants to know if you will come and help too\u2014in a certain way only: not in the experiment itself precisely, but by watching merely and\u2014' He hesitated an instant, half lowering his eyes.\n\n'Drawing the picture,' Henriot helped him deliberately.\n\n'Drawing what you see, yes,' Vance replied, the voice turned graver in spite of himself. 'She wants\u2014she hopes to catch the outlines of anything that happens\u2014'\n\n'Comes,'\n\n'Exactly. Determine the shape of anything that comes. You may remember your conversation of the other night with her. She is very certain of success.'\n\nThis was direct enough at any rate. It was as formal as an invitation to a dinner, and as guileless. The thing he thought he wanted lay within his reach. He had merely to say yes. He did say yes; but first he looked about him instinctively, as for guidance. He looked at the stars twinkling high above the distant Libyan Plateau; at the long arms of the Desert, gleaming weirdly white in the moonlight, and reaching towards him down every opening between the houses; at the heavy mass of the Mokattam Hills, guarding the Arabian Wilderness with strange, peaked barriers, their sand-carved ridges dark and still above the Wadi Hof.\n\nThese questionings attracted no response. The Desert watched him, but it did not answer. There was only the shrill whistling cry of the lizards, and the sing-song of a white-robed Arab gliding down the sandy street. And through these sounds he heard his own voice answer: ' I will come\u2014yes. But how can I help? Tell me what you propose\u2014your plan?'\n\nAnd the face of Vance, seen plainly in the electric glare, betrayed his satisfaction. The opposing things in the fellow's mind of darkness fought visibly in his eyes and skin. The sordid motive, planning a dreadful act, leaped to his face, and with it a flash of this other yearning that sought unearthly knowledge, perhaps believed it too. No wonder there was conflict written on his features.\n\nThen all expression vanished again; he leaned forward, lowering his voice.\n\n'You remember our conversation about there being types of life too vast to manifest in a single body, and my aunt's belief that these were known to certain of the older religious systems of the world?'\n\n'Perfectly.'\n\n'Her experiment, then, is to bring one of these great Powers back\u2014we possess the sympathetic ritual that can rouse some among them to activity\u2014and win it down into the sphere of our minds, our minds heightened, you see, by ceremonial to that stage of clairvoyant vision which can perceive them.'\n\n'And then?' They might have been discussing the building of a house, so naturally followed answer upon question. But the whole body of meaning in the old Egyptian symbolism rushed over him with a force that shook his heart. Memory came so marvellously with it.\n\n'If the Power floods down into our minds with sufficient strength for actual form, to note the outline of such form, and from your drawing model it later in permanent substance. Then we should have means of evoking it at will, for we should have its natural Body\u2014the form it built itself, its signature, image, pattern. A starting-point, you see, for more\u2014leading, she hopes, to a complete reconstruction.'\n\n'It might take actual shape\u2014assume a bodily form visible to the eye? ' repeated Henriot, amazed as before that doubt and laughter did not break through his mind.\n\n'We are on the earth,' was the reply, spoken unnecessarily low since no living thing was within earshot, 'we are in physical conditions, are we not? Even a human soul we do not recognise unless we see it in a body\u2014parents provide the outline, the signature, the sigil of the returning soul. This,' and he tapped himself upon the breast, 'is the physical signature of that type of life we call a soul. Unless there is life of a certain strength behind it, no body forms. And, without a body, we are helpless to control or manage it\u2014deal with it in any way. We could not know it, though being possibly aware of it.'\n\n'To be aware, you mean, is not sufficient?' For he noticed the italics Vance made use of.\n\n'Too vague, of no value for future use,' was the reply. 'But once obtain the form, and we have the natural symbol of that particular Power. And a symbol is more than image, it is a direct and concentrated expression of the life it typifies\u2014possibly terrific.'\n\n'It may be a body, then, this symbol you speak of.' 'Accurate vehicle of manifestation; but \"body\" seems the simplest word.'\n\nVance answered very slowly and deliberately, as though weighing how much he would tell. His language was admirably evasive. Few perhaps would have detected the profound significance the curious words he next used unquestionably concealed. Henriot's mind rejected them, but his heart accepted. For the ancient soul in him was listening and aware.\n\n'Life, using matter to express itself in bodily shape, first traces a geometrical pattern. From the lowest form in crystals, upwards to more complicated patterns in the higher organisations\u2014there is always first this geometrical pattern as skeleton. For geometry lies at the root of all possible phenomena; and is the mind's interpretation of a living movement towards shape that shall express it.' He brought his eyes closer to the other, lowering his voice again. 'Hence,' he said softly, 'the signs in all the old magical systems\u2014skeleton forms into which the Powers evoked descended; outlines those Powers automatically built up when using matter to express themselves. Such signs are material symbols of their bodiless existence. They attract the life they represent and interpret. Obtain the correct, true symbol, and the Power corresponding to it can approach\u2014once roused and made aware. It has, you see, a ready-made mould into which it can come down.'\n\n'Once roused and made aware?' repeated Hen riot questioningly, while this man went stammering the letters of a language that he himself had used too long ago to recapture fully.\n\n'Because they have left the world. They sleep, unmanifested. Their forms are no longer known to men. No forms exist on earth to-day that could contain them. But they may be awakened,' he added darkly. 'They are bound to answer to the summons, if such summons be accurately made.'\n\n'Evocation?' whispered Henriot, more distressed than he cared to admit.\n\nVance nodded. Leaning still closer to his companion's face, he thrust his lips forward, speaking eagerly, earnestly, yet somehow at the same time, horribly: 'And we want\u2014my aunt would ask\u2014your draughtsman's skill, or at any rate your memory afterwards, to establish the outline of anything that comes.'\n\nHe waited for the answer, still keeping his face uncomfortably close.\n\nHenriot drew back a little. But his mind was fully made up now. He had known from the beginning that he would consent, for the desire in him was stronger than all the caution in the world. The Past inexorably drew him into the circle of these other lives, and the little human dread Vance woke in him seemed just then insignificant by comparison. It was merely of To-day.\n\n'You two,' he said, trying to bring judgment into it, 'engaged in evocation, will be in a state of clairvoyant vision. Granted. But shall I, as an outsider, observing with unexcited mind, see anything, know anything, be aware of anything at all, let alone the drawing of it?'\n\n'Unless,' the reply came instantly with decision, 'the descent of Power is strong enough to take actual material shape, the experiment is a failure. Anybody can induce subjective vision. Such fantasies have no value though. They are born of an overwrought imagination.' And then he added quickly, as though to clinch the matter before caution and hesitation could take effect: ' You must watch from the heights above. We shall be in the valley\u2014the Wadi Hof is the place. You must not be too close'\n\n'Why not too close?' asked Henriot, springing forward like a flash before he could prevent the sudden impulse.\n\nWith a quickness equal to his own, Vance answered. There was no faintest sign that he was surprised. His self-control was perfect. Only the glare passed darkly through his eyes and went back again into the sombre soul that bore it.\n\n'For your own safety,' he answered low. 'The Power, the type of life, she would waken is stupendous. And if roused enough to be attracted by the patterned symbol into which she would decoy it down, it will take actual, physical expression. But how? Where is the Body of Worshippers through whom it can manifest? There is none. It will, therefore, press inanimate matter into the service. The terrific impulse to form itself a means of expression will force all loose matter at hand towards it\u2014sand, stones, all it can compel to yield\u2014everything must rush into the sphere of action in which it operates. Alone, we at the centre, and you, upon the outer fringe, will be safe. Only\u2014you must not come too close.'\n\nBut Henriot was no longer listening. His soul had turned to ice. For here, in this unguarded moment, the cloven hoof had plainly shown itself. In that suggestion of a particular kind of danger Vance had lifted a corner of the curtain behind which crouched his horrible intention. Vance desired a witness of the extraordinary experiment, but he desired this witness, not merely for the purpose of sketching possible shapes that might present themselves to excited vision. He desired a witness for another reason too. Why had Vance put that idea into his mind, this idea of so peculiar danger? It might well have lost him the very assistance he seemed so anxious to obtain.\n\nHenriot could not fathom it quite. Only one thing was clear to him. He, Henriot, was not the only one in danger.\n\nThey talked for long after that\u2014far into the night. The lights went out, and the armed patrol, pacing to and fro outside the iron railings that kept the desert back, eyed them curiously. But the only other thing he gathered of importance was the ledge upon the cliff-top where he was to stand and watch; that he was expected to reach there before sunset and wait till the moon concealed all glimmer in the western sky, and\u2014that the woman, who had been engaged for days in secret preparation of soul and body for the awful rite, would not be visible again until he saw her in the depths of the black valley far below, busy with this man upon audacious, ancient purposes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 448", + "text": "AN hour before sunset Henriot put his rugs and food upon a donkey, and gave the boy directions where to meet him\u2014a considerable distance from the appointed spot. He went himself on foot. He slipped in the heat along the sandy street, where strings of camels still go slouching, shuffling with their loads from the quarries that built the pyramids, and he felt that little friendly Helouan tried to keep him back. But desire now was far too strong for caution. The desert tide was rising. It easily swept him down the long white street towards the enormous deeps beyond. He felt the pull of a thousand miles before him; and twice a thousand years drove at his back.\n\nEverything still basked in the sunshine. He passed Al Hayat, the stately hotel that dominates the village like a palace built against the sky; and in its pillared colonnades and terraces he saw the throngs of people having late afternoon tea and listening to the music of a regimental band. Men in flannels were playing tennis, parties were climbing off donkeys after long excursions; there was laughter, talking, a babel of many voices. The gaiety called to him; the everyday spirit whispered to stay and join the crowd of lively human beings. Soon there would be merry dinner-parties, dancing, voices of pretty women, sweet white dresses, singing, and the rest. Soft eyes would question and turn dark. He picked out several girls he knew among the palms. But it was all many, oh so many leagues away; centuries lay between him and this modern world. An indescriable loneliness was in his heart. He went searching through the sands of forgotten ages, and wandering among the ruins of a vanished time. He hurried. Already the deeper water caught his breath.\n\nHe climbed the steep rise towards the plateau where the Observatory stands, and saw two of the officials whom he knew taking a siesta after their long day's work. He felt that his mind, too, had dived and searched among the heavenly bodies that live in silent, changeless peace remote from the world of men. They recognised him, these two whose eyes also knew tremendous distance close. They beckoned, waving the straws through which they sipped their drinks from tall glasses. Their voices floated down to him as from the star-fields. He saw the sun gleam upon the glasses, and heard the clink of the ice against the sides. The stillness was amazing. He waved an answer, and passed quickly on. He could not stop this sliding current of the years.\n\nThe tide moved faster, the draw of piled-up cycles urging it. He emerged upon the plateau, and met the cooler Desert air. His feet went crunching on the 'desert-film' that spread its curious dark shiny carpet as far as the eye could reach; it lay everywhere, unswept and smooth as when the feet of vanished civilizations trod its burning surface, then dipped behind the curtains Time pins against the stars. And here the body of the tide set all one way. There was a greater strength of current, draught and suction. He felt the powerful undertow. Deeper masses drew his feet sideways, and he felt the rushing of the central body of the sand. The sands were moving, from their foundation upwards. He went unresistingly with them.\n\nTurning a moment, he looked back at shining little Helouan in the blaze of evening light. The voices reached him very faintly, merged now in a general murmur. Beyond lay the strip of Delta vivid green, the palms, the roofs of Bedrashein, the blue laughter of the Nile with its flocks of curved felucca sails. Further still, rising above the yellow Lybian horizon, gloomed the vast triangles of a dozen Pyramids, cutting their wedge-shaped clefts out of a sky fast crimsoning through a sea of gold. Seen thus, their dignity imposed upon the entire landscape. They towered darkly, symbolic signatures of the ancient Powers that now watched him taking these little steps across their damaged territory.\n\nHe gazed a minute, then went on. He saw the big pale face of the moon in the east. Above the ever-silent Thing these giant symbols once interpreted, she rose, grand, effortless, half-terrible as themselves. And, with her, she lifted up this tide of the Desert that drew his feet across the sand to Wadi Hof. A moment later he dipped below the ridge that buried Helouan and Nile and Pyramids from sight. He entered the ancient waters. Time then, in an instant, flowed back behind his footsteps, obliterating every trace. And with it his mind went too. He stepped across the gulf of centuries, moving into the Past. The Desert lay before him\u2014an open tomb wherein his soul should read presently of things long vanished.\n\nThe strange half-lights of sunset began to play their witchery then upon the landscape. A purple glow came down upon the Mokattam Hills. Perspective danced its tricks of false, incredible deception. The soaring kites that were a mile away seemed suddenly close, passing in a moment from the size of gnats to birds with a fabulous stretch of wing. Ridges and cliffs rushed close without a hint of warning, and level places sank into declivities and basins that made him trip and stumble. That indescriable quality of the Desert, which makes timid souls avoid the hour of dusk, emerged; it spread everywhere, undisguised. And the bewilderment it brings is no vain, imagined thing, for it distorts vision utterly, and the effect upon the mind when familiar sight goes floundering is the simplest way in the world of dragging the anchor that grips reality. At the hour of sunset this bewilderment comes upon a man with a disconcerting swiftness. It rose now with all this weird rapidity. Henriot found himself enveloped at a moment's notice.\n\nBut, knowing well its effect, he tried to judge it and pass on. The other matters, the object of his journey chief of all, he refused to dwell upon with any imagination. Wisely, his mind, while never losing sight of it, declined to admit the exaggeration that over-elaborate thinking brings. 'I'm going to witness an incredible experiment in which two enthusiastic religious dreamers believe firmly,' he repeated to himself. 'I have agreed to draw\u2014anything I see. There may be truth in it, or they may be merely self-suggested vision due to an artificial exaltation of their minds. I'm interested\u2014perhaps against my better judgment. Yet I'll see the adventure out\u2014because I must?\n\nThis was the attitude he told himself to take. Whether it was the real one, or merely adopted to warm a cooling courage, he could not tell. The emotions were so complex and warring. His mind, automatically, kept repeating this comforting formula. Deeper than that he could not see to judge. For a man who knew the full content of his thought at such a time would solve some of the oldest psychological problems in the world. Sand had already buried judgment, and with it all attempt to explain the adventure by the standards acceptable to his brain of to-day. He steered subconsciously through a world of dim, huge, half-remembered wonders.\n\nThe sun, with that abrupt Egyptian suddenness, was below the horizon now. The pyramid field had swallowed it. Ra, in his golden boat, sailed distant seas beyond the Lybian wilderness. Henriot walked on and on, aware of utter loneliness. He was walking fields of dream, too remote from modern life to recall companionship he once had surely known. How dim it was, how deep and distant, how lost in this sea of an incalculable Past! He walked into the places that are soundless. The soundlessness of ocean, miles below the surface, was about him. He was with One only\u2014this unfathomable, silent thing where nothing breathes or stirs\u2014nothing but sunshine, shadow and the wind-borne sand. Slowly, in front, the moon climbed up the eastern sky, hanging above the silence\u2014silence that ran unbroken across the horizons to where Suez gleamed upon the waters of a sister sea in motion. That moon was glinting now upon the Arabian Mountains by its desolate shores. Southwards stretched the wastes of Upper Egypt a thousand miles to meet the Nubian wilderness. But over all these separate Deserts stirred the soft whisper of the moving sand\u2014deep murmuring message that Life was on the way to unwind Death. The Ka of Egypt, swathed in centuries of sand, hovered beneath the moon towards her ancient tenement.\n\nFor the transformation of the Desert now began in earnest. It grew apace. Before he had gone the first two miles of his hour's journey, the twilight caught the rocky hills and twisted them into those monstrous revelations of physiognomies they barely take the trouble to conceal even in the daytime. And, while he well understood the eroding agencies that have produced them, there yet rose in his mind a deeper interpretation lurking just behind their literal meanings. Here, through the motionless surfaces, that nameless thing the Desert ill conceals urged outwards into embryonic form and shape, akin, he almost felt, to those immense deific symbols of Other Life the Egyptians knew and worshipped. Hence, from the Desert, had first come, he felt, the unearthly life they typified in their monstrous figures of granite, evoked in their stately temples, and communed with in the ritual of their Mystery ceremonials.\n\nThis ' watching' aspect of the Lybian Desert is really natural enough; but it is just the natural, Henriot knew, that brings the deepest revelations. The surface limestones, resisting the erosion, block themselves ominously against the sky, while the softer sand beneath sets them on altared pedestals that define their isolation splendidly. Blunt and unconquerable, these masses now watched him pass between them. The Desert surface formed them, gave them birth. They rose, they saw, they sank down again\u2014waves upon a sea that carried forgotten life up from the depths below. Of forbidding, even menacing type, they somewhere mated with genuine grandeur. Unformed, according to any standard of human or of animal faces, they achieved an air of giant physiognomy which made them terrible. The unwinking stare of eyes\u2014lidless eyes that yet ever succeed in hiding\u2014looked out under well-marked, level eyebrows, suggesting a vision that included the motives and purposes of his very heart. They looked up grandly, understood why he was there, and then\u2014slowly withdrew their mysterious, penetrating gaze.\n\nThe strata built them so marvellously up; the heavy, threatening brows; thick lips, curved by the ages into a semblance of cold smiles; jowls drooping into sandy heaps that climbed against the cheeks; protruding jaws, and the suggestion of shoulders just about to lift the entire bodies out of the sandy beds\u2014this host of countenances conveyed a solemnity of expression that seemed everlasting, implacable as Death. Of human signature they bore no trace, nor was comparison possible between their kind and any animal life. They peopled the Desert here. And their smiles, concealed yet just discernible, went broadening with the darkness into a Desert laughter. The silence bore it underground. But Henriot was aware of it. The troop of faces slipped into that single, enormous countenance which is the visage of the Sand. And he saw it everywhere, yet nowhere.\n\nThus with the darkness grew his imaginative interpretation of the Desert. Yet there was construction in it, a construction, moreover, that was not entirely his own. Powers, he felt, were rising, stirring, wakening from sleep. Behind the natural faces that he saw, these other things peered gravely at him as he passed. They used, as it were, materials that lay ready to their hand. Imagination furnished these hints of outline, yet the Powers themselves were real. There was this amazing movement of the sand. By no other manner could his mind have conceived of such a thing, nor dreamed of this simple, yet dreadful method of approach.\n\nApproach! that was the word that first stood out and startled him. There was approach; something was drawing nearer. The Desert rose and walked beside him. For not alone these ribs of gleaming limestone contributed towards the elemental visages, but the entire hills, of which they were an outcrop, ran to assist in the formation, and were a necessary part of them. He was watched and stared at from behind, in front, on either side, and even from below. The sand that swept him on, kept even pace with him. It turned luminous too, with a patchwork of glimmering effect that was indescribably weird; lanterns glowed within its substance, and by their light he stumbled on, glad of the Arab boy he would presently meet at the appointed place.\n\nThe last torch of the sunset had flickered out, melting into the wilderness, when, suddenly opening at his feet, gaped the deep, wide gully known as Wadi Hof. Its curve swept past him.\n\nThis first impression came upon him with a certain violence: that the desolate valley rushed. He saw but a section of its curve and sweep, but through its entire length of several miles the Wadi fled away. The moon whitened it like snow, piling black shadows very close against the cliffs. In the flood of moonlight it went rushing past. It was emptying itself.\n\nFor a moment the stream of movement seemed to pause and look up into his face, then instantly went on again upon its swift career. It was like the procession of a river to the sea. The valley emptied itself to make way for what was coming. The approach, moreover, had already begun.\n\nConscious that he was trembling, he stood and gazed into the depths, seeking to steady his mind by the repetition of the little formula he had used before. He said it half aloud. But, while he did so, his heart whispered quite other things. Thoughts the woman and the man had sown rose up in a flock and fell upon him like a storm of sand. Their impetus drove off all support of ordinary ideas. They shook him where he stood, staring down into this river of strange invisible movement that was hundreds of feet in depth and a quarter of a mile across.\n\nHe sought to realise himself as he actually was to-day\u2014mere visitor to Helouan, tempted into this wild adventure with two strangers. But in vain. That seemed a dream, unreal, a transient detail picked out from the enormous Past that now engulfed him, heart and mind and soul. This was the reality.\n\nThe shapes and faces that the hills of sand built round him were the play of excited fancy only. By sheer force he pinned his thought against this fact: but further he could not get. There were Powers at work; they were being stirred, wakened somewhere into activity. Evocation had already begun. That sense of their approach as he had walked along from Helouan was not imaginary. A descent of some type of life, vanished from the world too long for recollection, was on the way,\u2014so vast that it would manifest itself in a group of forms, a troop, a host, an army. These two were near him somewhere at this very moment, already long at work, their minds driving beyond this little world. The valley was emptying itself\u2014for the descent of life their ritual invited.\n\nAnd the movement in the sand was likewise true. He recalled the sentences the woman had used. 'My body,' he reflected, 'like the bodies life makes use of everywhere, is mere upright heap of earth and dust and\u2014sand. Here in the Desert is the raw material, the greatest store of it in the world.'\n\nAnd on the heels of it came sharply that other thing: that this descending Life would press into its service all loose matter within its reach\u2014to form that sphere of action which would be in a literal sense its Body.\n\nIn the first few seconds, as he stood there, he realised all this, and realised it with an overwhelming conviction it was futile to deny. The fast-emptying valley would later brim with an unaccustomed and terrific life. Yet Death hid there too\u2014a little, ugly, insignificant death. With the name of Vance it flashed upon his mind and vanished, too tiny to be thought about in this torrent of grander messages that shook the depths within his soul. He bowed his head a moment, hardly knowing what he did. He could have waited thus a thousand years it seemed. He was conscious of a wild desire to run away, to hide, to efface himself utterly, his terror, his curiosity, his little wonder, and not be seen of anything. But it was all vain and foolish. The Desert saw him. The Gigantic knew that he was there. No escape was possible any longer. Caught by the sand, he stood amid eternal things. The river of movement swept him too.\n\nThese hills, now motionless as statues, would presently glide forward into the cavalcade, sway like vessels, and go past with the procession. At present only the contents, not the frame, of the Wadi moved. An immense soft brush of moonlight swept it empty for what was on the way... But presently the entire Desert would stand up and also go.\n\nThen, making a sideways movement, his feet kicked against something soft and yielding that lay heaped upon the Desert floor, and Henriot discovered the rugs the Arab boy had carefully set down before he made full speed for the friendly lights of Helouan. The sound of his departing footsteps had long since died away. He was alone.\n\nThe detail restored to him his consciousness of the immediate present, and, stooping, he gathered up the rugs and overcoat and began to make preparations for the night. But the appointed spot, whence he was to watch, lay upon the summit of the opposite cliffs. He must cross the Wadi bed and climb. Slowly and with labour he made his way down a steep cleft into the depth of the Wadi Hof, sliding and stumbling often, till at length he stood upon the floor of shining moonlight. It was very smooth; windless utterly; still as space; each particle of sand lay in its ancient place asleep. The movement, it seemed, had ceased.\n\nHe clambered next up the eastern side, through pitch-black shadows, and within the hour reached the ledge upon the top whence he could see below him, like a silvered map, the sweep of the valley bed. The wind nipped keenly here again, coming over the leagues of cooling sand. Loose boulders of splintered rock, started by his climbing, crashed and boomed into the depths. He banked the rugs behind him, wrapped himself in his overcoat, and lay down to wait. Behind him was a two-foot crumbling wall against which he leaned; in front a drop of several hundred feet through space. He lay upon a platform, therefore, invisible from the Desert at his back. Below, the curving Wadi formed a natural amphitheatre in which each separate boulder fallen from the cliffs, and even the little silla shrubs the camels eat, were plainly visible. He noted all the bigger ones among them. He counted them over half aloud.\n\nAnd the moving stream he had been unaware of when crossing the bed itself, now began again. The Wadi went rushing past before the broom of moonlight. Again, the enormous and the tiny combined in one single strange impression. For, through this conception of great movement, stirred also a roving, delicate touch that his imagination felt as bird-like. Behind the solid mass of the Desert's immobility flashed something swift and light and airy. Bizarre pictures interpreted it to him, like rapid snap-shots of a huge flying panorama: he thought of darting dragon-flies seen at Helouan, of children's little dancing feet, of twinkling butterflies\u2014of birds. Chiefly, yes, of a flock of birds in flight, whose separate units formed a single entity. The idea of the Group-Soul possessed his mind once more. But it came with a sense of more than curiosity or wonder. Veneration lay behind it, a veneration touched with awe. It rose in his deepest thought that here was the first hint of a symbolical representation. A symbol, sacred and inviolable, belonging to some ancient worship that he half remembered in his soul, stirred towards interpretation through all his being.\n\nHe lay there waiting, wondering vaguely where his two companions were, yet fear all vanished because he felt attuned to a scale of things too big to mate with definite dread. There was high anticipation in him, but not anxiety. Of himself, as Felix Henriot, indeed, he hardly seemed aware. He was some one else. Or, rather, he was himself at a stage he had known once far, far away in a remote pre-existence. He watched himself from dim summits of a Past, of which no further details were as yet recoverable.\n\nPencil and sketching-block lay ready to his hand. The moon rose higher, tucking the shadows ever more closely against the precipices. The silver passed into a sheet of snowy whiteness, that made every boulder clearly visible. Solemnity deepened everywhere into awe. The Wadi fled silently down the stream of hours. It was almost empty now. And then, abruptly, he was aware of change. The motion altered somewhere. It moved more quietly; pace slackened; the end of the procession that evacuated the depth and length of it went trailing past and turned the distant bend.\n\n'It's slowing up,' he whispered, as sure of it as though he had watched a regiment of soldiers filing by. The wind took off his voice like a flying feather of sound.\n\nAnd there was a change. It had begun. Night and the moon stood still to watch and listen. The wind dropped utterly away. The sand ceased its shifting movement. The Desert everywhere stopped still, and turned.\n\nSome curtain, then, that for centuries had veiled the world, drew softly up, leaving a shaded vista down which the eyes of his soul peered towards long-forgotten pictures. Still buried by the sands too deep for full recovery, he yet perceived dim portions of them\u2014things once honoured and loved passionately. For once they had surely been to him the whole of life, not merely a fragment for cheap wonder to inspect. And they were curiously familiar, even as the person of this woman who now evoked them was familiar. Hen riot made no pretence to more definite remembrance; but the haunting certainty rushed over him, deeper than doubt or denial, and with such force that he felt no effort to destroy it. Some lost sweetness of spiritual ambitions, lived for with this passionate devotion, and passionately worshipped as men to-day worship fame and money, revived in him with a tempest of high glory. Centres of memory stirred from an age-long sleep, so that he could have wept at their so complete obliteration hitherto. That such majesty had departed from the world as though it never had existed, was a thought for desolation and for tears. And though the little fragment he was about to witness might be crude in itself and incomplete, yet it was part of a vast system that once explored the richest realms of deity. The reverence in him contained a holiness of the night and of the stars; great, gentle awe lay in it too; for he stood, aflame with anticipation and humility, at the gateway of sacred things.\n\nAnd this was the mood, no thrill of cheap excitement or alarm to weaken in, in which he first became aware that two spots of darkness he had taken all along for boulders on the snowy valley bed, were actually something very different. They were Jiving figures. They moved. It was not the shadows slowly following the moonlight, but the stir of human beings who all these hours had been motionless as stone. He must have passed them unnoticed within a dozen yards when he crossed the Wadi bed, and a hundred times from this very ledge his eyes had surely rested on them without recognition. Their minds, he knew full well, had not been inactive as their bodies. The important part of the ancient ritual lay, he remembered, in the powers of the evoking mind.\n\nHere, indeed, was no effective nor theatrical approach of the principal figures. It had nothing in common with the cheap external ceremonial of modern days. In forgotten powers of the soul its grandeur lay, potent, splendid, true. Long before he came, perhaps all through the day, these two had laboured with their arduous preparations. They were there, part of the Desert, when hours ago he had crossed the plateau in the twilight. To them\u2014to this woman's potent working of old ceremonial\u2014had been due that singular rush of imagination he had felt. He had interpreted the Desert as alive. Here was the explanation. It was alive. Life was on the way. Long latent, her intense desire summoned it back to physical expression; and the effect upon him had steadily increased as he drew nearer to the centre where she would focus its revival and return. Those singular impressions of being watched and accompanied were explained. A priest of this old-world worship performed a genuine evocation; a Great One of Vision revived the cosmic Powers.\n\nHenriot watched the small figures far below him with a sense of dramatic splendour that only this association of far-off\" Memory could account for. It was their rising now, and the lifting of their arms to form a slow revolving outline, that marked the abrupt cessation of the larger river of movement; for the sweeping of the Wadi sank into sudden stillness, and these two, with motions not unlike some dance of deliberate solemnity, passed slowly through the moonlight to and fro. His attention fixed upon them both. All other movement ceased. They fastened the flow of Time against the Desert's body.\n\nWhat happened then? How could his mind interpret an experience so long denied that the power of expression, as of comprehension, has ceased to exist? How translate this symbolical representation, small detail though it was, of a transcendent worship entombed for most so utterly beyond recovery? Its splendour could never lodge in minds that conceive Deity perched upon a cloud within telephoning distance of fashionable churches. How should he phrase it even to himself, whose memory drew up pictures from so dim a past that the language fit to frame them lay unreachable and lost?\n\nHenriot did not know. Perhaps he never yet has known. Certainly, at the time, he did not even try to think. His sensations remain his own\u2014untranslatable; and even that instinctive description the mind gropes for automatically, floundered, halted, and stopped dead. Yet there rose within him somewhere, from depths long drowned in slumber, a reviving power by which he saw, divined and recollected\u2014remembered seemed too literal a word\u2014these elements of a worship he once had personally known. He, too, had worshipped thus. His soul had moved amid similar evocations in some aeonian past, whence now the sand was being cleared away. Symbols of stupendous meaning Mashed and went their way across the lifting mists. He hardly caught their meaning, so long it was since he had known them; yet they were familiar as the faces seen in dreams, and some hint of their spiritual significance left faint traces in his heart by means of which their grandeur reached towards interpretation. And all were symbols of a cosmic, deific nature; of Powers that only symbols can express\u2014prayer-books and sacraments used in the Wisdom Religion of an older time, but to-day known only in the decrepit, literal shell which is their degradation.\n\nGrandly the figures moved across the valley bed. The powers of the heavenly bodies once more joined them. They moved to the measure of a cosmic dance, whose rhythm was creative. The Universe partnered them.\n\nThere was this transfiguration of all common, external things. He realised that appearances were visible letters of a soundless language, a language he once had known. The powers of night and moon and desert sand married with points in the fluid stream of his inmost spiritual being that knew and welcomed them. He understood.\n\nOld Egypt herself stooped down from her uncovered throne. The stars sent messengers. There was commotion in the secret, sandy places of the desert. For the Desert had grown Temple. Columns reared against the sky. There rose, from leagues away, the chanting of the sand.\n\nThe temples, where once this came to pass, were gone, their ruin questioned by alien hearts that knew not their spiritual meaning. But here the entire Desert swept in to form a shrine, and the Majesty that once was Egypt stepped grandly back across ages of denial and neglect. The sand was altar, and the stars were altar lights. The moon lit up the vast recesses of the ceiling, and the wind from a thousand miles brought in the perfume of her incense. For with that faith which shifts mountains from their sandy bed, two passionate, believing souls invoked the Ka of Egypt.\n\nAnd the motions that they made, he saw, were definite harmonious patterns their dark figures traced upon the shining valley floor. Like the points of compasses, with stems invisible, and directed from the sky, their movements marked the outlines of great signatures of power\u2014the sigils of the type of life they would evoke. It would come as a Procession. No individual outline could contain it. It needed for its visible expression\u2014many. The descent of a group-soul, known to the worship of this mighty system, rose from its lair of centuries and moved hugely down upon them. The Ka, answering to the summons, would mate with sand. The Desert was its Body.\n\nYet it was not this that he had come to fix with block and pencil. Not yet was the moment when his skill might be of use. He waited, watched, and listened, while this river of half-remembered things went past him. The patterns grew beneath his eyes like music. Too intricate and prolonged to remember with accuracy later, he understood that they were forms of that root-geometry which lies behind all manifested life. The mould was being traced in outline. Life would presently inform it. And a singing rose from the maze of lines whose beauty was like the beauty of the constellations.\n\nThis sound was very faint at first, but grew steadily in volume. Although no echoes, properly speaking, were possible, these precipices caught stray notes that trooped in from the further sandy reaches. The figures certainly were chanting, but their chanting was not all he heard. Other sounds came to his ears from far away, running past him through the air from every side, and from incredible distances, all flocking down into the Wadi bed to join the parent note that summoned them. The Desert was giving voice. And memory, lifting her hood yet higher, showed more of her grey, mysterious face that searched his soul with questions. Had he so soon forgotten that strange union of form and sound which once was known to the evocative rituals of olden days?\n\nHenriot tried patiently to disentangle this desert-music that their intoning voices woke, from the humming of the blood in his own veins. But he succeeded only in part. Sand was already in the air. There was reverberation, rhythm, measure; there was almost the breaking of the stream into great syllables. But was it due, this strange reverberation, to the countless particles of sand meeting in midair about him, or\u2014to larger bodies, whose surfaces caught this friction of the sand and threw it back against his ears? The wind, now rising, brought particles that stung his face and hands, and filled his eyes with a minute fine dust that partially veiled the moonlight. But was not something larger, vaster these particles composed now also on the way?\n\nMovement and sound and flying sand thus merged themselves more and more in a single, whirling torrent. But Henriot sought no commonplace explanation of what he witnessed; and here was the proof that all happened in some vestibule of inner experience where the strain of question and answer had no business. One sitting beside him need not have seen anything at all. His host, for instance, from Helouan, need not have been aware. Night screened it; Helouan, as the whole of modern experience, stood in front of the screen. This thing took place behind it. He crouched motionless, watching in some reconstructed ante-chamber of the soul's pre-existence, while the torrent grew into a veritable tempest.\n\nYet Night remained unshaken; the veil of moonlight did not quiver; the stars dropped their slender golden pillars unobstructed. Calmness reigned everywhere as before. The stupendous representation passed on behind it all.\n\nBut the dignity of the little human movements that he watched had become now indescribable. The gestures of the arms and bodies invested themselves with consummate grandeur, as these two strode into the caverns behind manifested life and drew forth symbols that represented vanished Powers. The sound of their chanting voices broke in cadenced fragments against the shores of language. The words Henriot never actually caught, if words they were; yet he understood their purport\u2014these Names of Power to which the type of returning life gave answer as they approached. He remembered fumbling for his drawing materials, with such violence, however, that the pencil snapped in two between his fingers as he touched it. For now, even here, upon the outer fringe of the ceremonial ground, there was a stir of forces that set the very muscles working in him before he had become aware of it...\n\nThen came the moment when his heart leaped against his ribs with a sudden violence that was almost pain, standing a second later still as death. The lines upon the valley floor ceased their maze-like dance. All movement stopped. Sound died away. In the midst of this profound and dreadful silence the sigils lay empty there below him. They waited to be in-formed. For the moment of entrance had come at last. Life was close.\n\nAnd he understood why this return of life had all along suggested a Procession and could be no mere momentary flash of vision. From such appalling distance did it sweep down towards the present.\n\nUpon this network, then, of splendid lines, at length held rigid, the entire Desert reared itself with walls of curtained sand, that dwarfed the cliffs, the shouldering hills, the very sky. The Desert stood on end. As once before he had dreamed it from his balcony windows, it rose upright, towering, and close against his face. It built sudden ramparts to the stars that chambered the thing he witnessed behind walls no centuries could ever bring down crumbling into dust.\n\nHe himself, in some curious fashion, lay just outside, viewing it apart. As from a pinnacle, he peered within\u2014peered down with straining eyes into the vast picture-gallery Memory threw abruptly open. And the picture spaced its noble outline thus against the very stars. He gazed between columns, that supported the sky itself, like pillars of sand that swept across the field of vanished years. Sand poured and streamed aside, laying bare the Past.\n\nFor down the enormous vista into which he gazed, as into an avenue running a million miles towards a tiny point, he saw this moving Thing that came towards him, shaking loose the countless veils of sand the ages had swathed about it. The Ka of buried Egypt wakened out of sleep. She had heard the potent summons of her old, time-honoured ritual. She came. She stretched forth an arm towards the worshippers who evoked her. Out of the Desert, out of the leagues of sand, out of the immeasurable wilderness which was her mummied Form and Body, she rose and came. And this fragment of her he would actually see\u2014this little portion that was obedient to the stammered and broken Ceremonial. The partial revelation he would witness\u2014yet so vast, even this little bit of it, that it came as a Procession and a host.\n\nFor a moment there was nothing. And then the voice of the woman rose in a resounding cry that filled the Wadi to its furthest precipices, before it died away again to silence. That a human voice could produce such volume, accent, depth, seemed half incredible. The walls of towering sand swallowed it instantly. But the Procession of life, needing a group, a host, an army for its physical expression, reached at that moment the nearer end of the huge avenue. It touched the Present; it entered the world of men." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 449", + "text": "The entire range of Henriot's experience, read, imagined, dreamed, then fainted into unreality before the sheer wonder of what he saw. In the brief interval it takes to snap the fingers the climax was thus so hurriedly upon him. And, through it all, he was clearly aware of the pair of little human figures, man and woman, standing erect and commanding at the centre\u2014knew, too, that she directed and controlled, while he in some secondary fashion supported her\u2014and ever watched. But both were dim, dropped somewhere into a lesser scale. It was the knowledge of their presence, however, that alone enabled him to keep his powers in hand at all. But for these two human beings there within possible reach, he must have closed his eyes and swooned.\n\nFor a tempest that seemed to toss loose stars about the sky swept round about him, pouring up the pillared avenue in front of the procession. A blast of giant energy, of liberty, came through. Forwards and backwards, circling spirally about him like a whirlwind, came this revival of Life that sought to dip itself once more in matter and in form. It came to the accurate out-line of its form they had traced for it. He held his mind steady enough to realise that it was akin to what men call a ' descent' of some 'spiritual movement' that wakens a body of believers into faith\u2014a race, an entire nation; only that he experienced it in this brief, concentrated form before it has scattered down into ten thousand hearts. Here he knew its source and essence, behind the veil. Crudely, unmanageable as yet, he felt it, rushing loose behind appearances. There was this amazing impact of a twisting, swinging force that stormed down as though it would bend and coil the very ribs of the old stubborn hills. It sought to warm them with the stress of its own irresistible life-stream, to beat them into shape, and make pliable their obstinate resistance. Through all things the impulse poured and spread, like fire at white heat.\n\nYet nothing visible came as yet, no alteration in the actual landscape, no sign of change in things familiar to his eyes, while impetus thus fought against inertia. He perceived nothing form-al. Calm and untouched himself, he lay outside the circle of evocation, watching, waiting, scarcely daring to breathe, yet well aware that any minute the scene would transfer itself from memory that was subjective to matter that was objective.\n\nAnd then, in a flash, the bridge was built, and the transfer was accomplished. How or where he did not see, he could not tell. It was there before he knew it\u2014there before his normal, earthly sight. He saw it, as he saw the hands he was holding stupidly up to shield his face. For this terrific release of force long held back, long stored up, latent for centuries, came pouring down the empty Wadi bed prepared for its reception. Through stones and sand and boulders it came in an impetuous hurricane of power. The liberation of its life appalled him. All that was free, untied, responded instantly like chaff; loose objects fled towards it; there was a yielding in the hills and precipices; and even in the mass of Desert which provided their foundation. The hinges of the Sand went creaking in the night. It shaped for itself a bodily outline.\n\nYet, most strangely, nothing definitely moved. How could he express the violent contradiction? For the immobility was apparent only\u2014a sham, a counterfeit; while behind it the essential being of these things did rush and shift and alter. He saw the two things side by side: the outer immobility the senses commonly agree upon, and this amazing flying-out of their inner, invisible substance towards the vortex of attracting life that sucked them in. For stubborn matter turned docile before the stress of this returning life, taught somewhere to be plastic. It was being moulded into an approach to bodily outline. A mobile elasticity invaded rigid substance. The two officiating human beings, safe at the stationary centre, and himself, just outside the circle of operation, alone remained untouched and unaffected. But a few feet in any direction, for any one of them, meant\u2014instantaneous death. They would be absorbed into the vortex, mere corpuscles pressed into the service of this sphere of action of a mighty Body...\n\nHow these perceptions reached him with such conviction, Henriot could never say. He knew it, because he felt it. Something fell about him from the sky that already paled towards the dawn. The stars themselves, it seemed, contributed some part of the terrific, flowing impulse that conquered matter and shaped itself this physical expression.\n\nThen, before he was able to fashion any preconceived idea of what visible form this potent life might assume, he was aware of further change. It came at the briefest possible interval after the beginning\u2014this certainty that, to and fro about him, as yet however indeterminate, passed Magnitudes that were stupendous as the desert. There was beauty in them too, though a terrible beauty hardly of this earth at all. A fragment of old Egypt had returned\u2014a little portion of that vast Body of Belief that once was Egypt. Evoked by the worship of one human heart, passionately sincere, the Ka of Egypt stepped back to visit the material it once informed\u2014the Sand.\n\nYet only a portion came. Henriot clearly realised that. It stretched forth an arm. Finding no mass of worshippers through whom it might express itself completely, it pressed inanimate matter thus into its service.\n\nHere was the beginning the woman had spoken of\u2014little opening clue. Entire reconstruction lay perhaps beyond.\n\nAnd Henriot next realised that these Magnitudes in which this group-energy sought to clothe itself as visible form, were curiously familiar. It was not a new thing that he would see. Booming softly as they dropped downwards through the sky, with a motion the size of them rendered delusive, they trooped up the Avenue towards the central point that summoned them. He realised the giant flock of them\u2014descent of fearful beauty\u2014outlining a type of life denied to the world for ages, countless as this sand that blew against his skin. Careering over the waste of Desert moved the army of dark Splendours, that dwarfed any organic structure called a body men have ever known. He recognised them, cold in him of death, though the outlines reared higher than the pyramids, and towered up to hide whole groups of stars. Yes, he recognised them in their partial revelation, though he never saw the monstrous host complete. But, one of them, he realised, posing its eternal riddle to the sands, had of old been glimpsed sufficiently to seize its form in stone,\u2014yet poorly seized, as a doll may stand for the dignity of a human being or a child's toy represent an engine that draws trains...\n\nAnd he knelt there on his narrow ledge, the world of men forgotten. The power that caught him was too great a thing for wonder or for fear; he even felt no awe. Sensation of any kind that can be named or realised left him utterly. He forgot himself. He merely watched. The glory numbed him. Block and pencil, as the reason of his presence there at all, no longer existed...\n\nYet one small link remained that held him to some kind of consciousness of earthly things: he never lost sight of this\u2014that, being just outside the circle of evocation, he was safe, and that the man and woman, being stationary in its untouched centre, were also safe. But\u2014that a movement of six inches in any direction meant for any one of them instant death.\n\nWhat was it, then, that suddenly strengthened this solitary link so that the chain tautened and he felt the pull of it? Henriot could not say. He came back with the rush of a descending drop to the realisation\u2014dimly, vaguely, as from great distance\u2014that he was with these two, now at this moment, in the Wadi Hof, and that the cold of dawn was in the air about him. The chill breath of the Desert made him shiver.\n\nBut at first, so deeply had his soul been dipped in this fragment of ancient worship, he could remember nothing more. Somewhere lay a little spot of streets and houses; its name escaped him. He had once been there; there were many people, but insignificant people. Who were they? And what had he to do with them? All recent memories had been drowned in the tide that flooded him from an immeasurable Past.\n\nAnd who were they\u2014these two beings, standing on the white floor of sand below him? For a long time he could not recover their names. Yet he remembered them; and, thus robbed of association that names bring, he saw them for an instant naked, and knew that one of them was evil. One of them was vile. Blackness touched the picture there. The man, his name still out of reach, was sinister, impure and dark at the heart. And for this reason the evocation had been partial only. The admixture of an evil motive was the flaw that marred complete success.\n\nThe names then flashed upon him\u2014Lady Statham\u2014Richard Vance.\n\nVance! With a horrid drop from splendour into something mean and sordid, Henriot felt the pain of it. The motive of the man was so insignificant, his purpose so atrocious. More and more, with the name, came back\u2014his first repugnance, fear, suspicion. And human terror caught him. He shrieked. But, as in nightmare, no sound escaped his lips. He tried to move; a wild desire to interfere, to protect, to prevent, flung him forward\u2014close to the dizzy edge of the gulf below. But his muscles refused obedience to the will. The paralysis of common fear rooted him to the rocks.\n\nBut the sudden change of focus instantly destroyed the picture; and so vehement was the fall from glory into meanness, that it dislocated the machinery of clairvoyant vision. The inner perception clouded and grew dark. Outer and inner mingled in violent, inextricable confusion. The wrench seemed almost physical. It happened all at once, retreat and continuation for a moment somehow combined. And, if he did not definitely see the awful thing, at least he was aware that it had come to pass. He knew it as positively as though his eye were glued against a magnifying lens in the stillness of some laboratory. He witnessed it.\n\nThe supreme moment of evocation was close. Life, through that awful sandy vortex, whirled and raged. Loose particles showered and pelted, caught by the draught of vehement life that moulded the substance of the Desert into imperial outline\u2014when, suddenly, shot the little evil thing across that marred and blasted it.\n\nInto the whirlpool flew forward a particle of material that was a human being. And the Group-Soul caught and used it.\n\nThe actual accomplishment Henriot did not claim to see. He was a witness, but a witness who could give no evidence. Whether the woman was pushed of set intention, or whether some detail of sound and pattern was falsely used to effect the terrible result, he was helpless to determine. He pretends no itemised account. She went. In one second, with appalling swiftness, she disappeared, swallowed out of space and time within that awful maw\u2014one little corpuscle among a million through which the Life, now stalking the Desert wastes, moulded itself a troop-like Body. Sand took her.\n\nThere followed emptiness\u2014a hush of unutterable silence, stillness, peace. Movement and sound instantly retired whence they came. The avenues of Memory closed; the Splendours all went down into their sandy tombs...\n\nThe moon had sunk into the Libyan wilderness; the eastern sky was red. The dawn drew out that wondrous sweetness of the Desert, which is as sister to the sweetness that the moonlight brings. The Desert settled back to sleep, huge, unfathomable, charged to the brim with life that watches, waits, and yet conceals itself behind the ruins of apparent desolation. And the Wadi, empty at his feet, filled slowly with the gentle little winds that bring the sunrise.\n\nThen, across the pale glimmering of sand, Henriot saw a figure moving. It came quickly towards him, yet unsteadily, and with a hurry that was ugly. Vance was on the way to fetch him. And the horror of the man's approach struck him like a hammer in the face. He closed his eyes, sinking back to hide.\n\nBut, before he swooned, there reached him the clatter of the murderer's tread as he began to climb over the splintered rocks, and the faint echo of his voice, calling him by name\u2014falsely and in pretence\u2014for help.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Transfer ]\n\nThe child first began to cry in the early afternoon\u2014about three o'clock, to be exact. I remember the hour, because I had been listening with secret relief to the sound of the departing carriage. Those wheels fading into distance down the gravel drive with Mrs. Frene, and her daughter Gladys to whom I was governess, meant for me some hours' welcome rest, and the June day was oppressively hot. Moreover, there was this excitement in the little country household that had told upon us all, but especially upon myself. This excitement, running delicately behind all the events of the morning, was due to some mystery, and the mystery was of course kept concealed from the governess. I had exhausted myself with guessing and keeping on the watch. For some deep and unexplained anxiety possessed me, so that I kept thinking of my sister's dictum that I was really much too sensitive to make a good governess, and that I should have done far better as a professional clairvoyante.\n\nMr. Frene, senior, 'Uncle Frank,' was expected for an unusual visit from town about tea-time. That I knew. I also knew that his visit was concerned somehow with the future welfare of little Jamie, Gladys' seven -year-old brother. More than this, indeed, I never knew, and this missing link makes my story in a fashion incoherent\u2014an important bit of the strange puzzle left out. I only gathered that the visit of Uncle Frank was of a condescending nature, that Jamie was told he must be upon his very best behaviour to make a good impression, and that Jamie, who had never seen his uncle, dreaded him horribly already in advance. Then, trailing thinly through the dying crunch of the carriage wheels this sultry afternoon, I heard the curious little wail of the child's crying, with the effect, wholly unaccountable, that every nerve in my body shot its bolt electrically, bringing me to my feet with a tingling of unequivocal alarm. Positively, the water ran into my eyes. I recalled his white distress that morning when told that Uncle Frank was motoring down for tea and that he was to be 'very nice indeed ' to him. It had gone into me like a knife. All through the day, indeed, had run this nightmare quality of terror and vision.\n\n'The man with the 'normous face?' he had asked in a little voice of awe, and then gone speechless from the room in tears that no amount of soothing management could calm. That was all I saw; and what he meant by 'the 'normous face' gave me only a sense of vague presentiment. But it came as anti-climax somehow\u2014a sudden revelation of the mystery and excitement that pulsed beneath the quiet of the stifling summer day. I feared for him. For of all that commonplace household I loved Jamie best, though professionally I had nothing to do with him. He was a high-strung, ultra-sensitive child, and it seemed to me that no one understood him, least of all his honest, tender-hearted parents; so that his little wailing voice brought me from my bed to the window in a moment like a call for help.\n\nThe haze of June lay over that big garden like a blanket; the wonderful flowers, which were Mr. Frene's delight, hung motionless; the lawns, so soft and thick, cushioned all other sounds; only the limes and huge clumps of guelder roses hummed with bees. Through this muted atmosphere of heat and haze the sound of the child's crying floated faintly to my ears\u2014from a distance. Indeed, I wonder now that I heard it at all, for the next moment I saw him down beyond the garden, standing in his white sailor suit alone, two hundred yards away. He was down by the ugly patch where nothing grew\u2014the Forbidden Corner. A faintness then came over me at once, a faintness as of death, when I saw him there of all places\u2014where he never was allowed to go, and where, moreover, he was usually too terrified to go. To see him standing solitary in that singular spot, above all to hear him crying there, bereft me momentarily of the power to act. Then, before I could recover my composure sufficiently to call him in, Mr. Frene came round the corner from the Lower Farm with the dogs, and, seeing his son, performed that office for me. In his loud, good-natured, hearty voice he called him, and Jamie turned and ran as though some spell had broken just in time\u2014ran into the open arms of his fond but uncomprehending father, who carried him indoors on his shoulder, while asking 'what all this hubbub was about?' And, at their heels, the tail-less sheep-dogs followed, barking loudly, and performing what Jamie called their 'Gravel Dance,' because they ploughed up the moist, rolled gravel with their feet.\n\nI stepped back swiftly from the window lest I should be seen. Had I witnessed the saving of the child from fire or drowning the 'relief could hardly have been greater. Only Mr. Frene, I felt sure, would not say and do the right thing quite. He would protect the boy from his own vain imaginings, yet not with the explanation that could really heal. They disappeared behind the rose trees, making for the house. I saw no more till later, when Mr. Frene, senior, arrived.\n\nTo .describe the ugly patch as ' singular' is hard to justify, perhaps, yet some such word is what the entire family sought, though never\u2014oh, never!\u2014used. To Jamie and myself, though equally we never mentioned it, that treeless, flowerless spot was more than singular. It stood at the far end of the magnificent rose garden, a bald, sore place, where the black earth showed uglily in winter, almost like a piece of dangerous bog, and in summer baked and cracked with fissures where green lizards shot their fire in passing. In contrast to the rich luxuriance of the whole amazing garden it was like a glimpse of death amid life, a centre of disease that cried for healing lest it spread. But it never did spread. Behind it stood the thick wood of silver birches and, glimmering beyond, the orchard meadow, where the lambs played.\n\nThe gardeners had a very simple explanation of its barrenness\u2014that the water all drained off it owing to the lie of the slopes immediately about it, holding no remnant to keep the soil alive. I cannot say. It was Jamie\u2014Jamie who felt its spell and haunted it, who spent whole hours there, even while afraid, and for whom it was finally labelled ' strictly out of bounds' because it stimulated his already big imagination, not wisely but too darkly\u2014it was Jamie who buried ogres there and heard it crying in an earthy voice, swore that it shook its surface sometimes while he watched it, and secretly gave it food in the form of birds or mice or rabbits he found dead upon his wanderings. And it was Jamie who put so extraordinarily into words the feeling that the horrid spot had given me from the moment I first saw it.\n\n'It's bad, Miss Gould,' he told me.\n\n'But, Jamie, nothing in Nature is bad\u2014exactly; only different from the rest sometimes.'\n\n'Miss Gould, if you please, then it's empty. It's not fed. It's dying because it can't get the food it wants.'\n\nAnd when I stared into the little pale face where the eyes shone so dark and wonderful, seeking within myself for the right thing to say to him, he added, with an emphasis and conviction that made me suddenly turn cold: 'Miss Gould'\u2014he always used my name like this in all his sentences\u2014' it's hungry, don't you see? But I know what would make it feel all right.'\n\nOnly the conviction of an earnest child, perhaps, could have made so outrageous a suggestion worth listening to for an instant; but for me, who felt that things an imaginative child believed were important, it came with a vast disquieting shock of reality. Jamie, in this exaggerated way, had caught at the edge of a shocking fact\u2014a hint of dark, undiscovered truth had leaped into that sensitive imagination. Why there lay horror in the words I cannot say, but I think some power of darkness trooped across the suggestion of that sentence at the end, 'I know what would make it feel all right.' I remember that I shrank from asking explanation. Small groups of other words, veiled fortunately by his silence, gave life to an unspeakable possibility that hitherto had lain at the back of my own consciousness. The way it sprang to life proves, I think, that my mind already contained it. The blood rushed from my heart as I listened. I remember that my knees shook. Jamie's idea was\u2014had been all along\u2014my own as well.\n\nAnd now, as I lay down on my bed and thought about it all, I understood why the coming of his uncle involved somehow an experience that wrapped terror at its heart. With a sense of nightmare certainty that left me too weak to resist the preposterous idea, too shocked, indeed, to argue or reason it away, this certainty came with its full, black blast of conviction; and the only way I can put it into words, since nightmare horror really is not properly tellable at all, seems this: that there was something missing in that dying patch of garden; something lacking that it ever searched for; something, once found and taken, that would turn it rich and living as the rest; more\u2014that there was some living person who could do this for it. Mr. Frene, senior, in a word, 'Uncle Frank,' was this person who out of his abundant life could supply the lack\u2014unwittingly.\n\nFor this connection between the dying, empty patch and the person of this vigorous, wealthy, and successful man had already lodged itself in my sub-consciousness before I was aware of it. Clearly it must have lain there all along, though hidden. Jamie's words, his sudden pallor, his vibrating emotion of fearful anticipation had developed the plate, but it was his weeping alone there in the Forbidden Corner that had printed it. The photograph shone framed before me in the air. I hid my eyes. But for the redness\u2014the charm of my face goes to pieces unless my eyes are clear\u2014I could have cried. Jamie's words that morning about the 'normous face' came back upon me like a battering-ram.\n\nMr. Frene, senior, had been so frequently the subject of conversation in the family since I came, I had so often heard him discussed, and had then read so much about him in the papers\u2014his energy, his philanthropy, his success with everything he laid his hand to\u2014that a picture of the man had grown complete within me. I knew him as he was\u2014within; or, as my sister would have said\u2014clairvoyantly. And the only time I saw him (when I took Gladys to a meeting where he was chairman, and later felt his atmosphere and presence while for a moment he patronisingly spoke with her) had justified the portrait I had drawn. The rest, you may say, was a woman's wild imagining; but I think rather it was that kind of divining intuition which women share with children. If souls could be made visible, I would stake my life upon the truth and accuracy of my portrait.\n\nFor this Mr. Frene was a man who drooped alone, but grew vital in a crowd\u2014because he used their vitality. He was a supreme, unconscious artist in the science of taking the fruits of others' work and living\u2014for his own advantage. He vampired, unknowingly no doubt, every one with whom he came in contact; left them exhausted, tired, listless. Others fed him, so that while in a full room he shone, alone by himself and with no life to draw upon he languished and declined. In the man's immediate neighbourhood you felt his presence draining you; he took your ideas, your strength, your very words, and later used them for his own benefit and aggrandisement. Not evilly, of course; the man was good enough; but you felt that he was dangerous owing to the facile way he absorbed into himself all loose vitality that was to be had. His eyes and voice and presence devitalised you. Life, it seemed, not highly organised enough to resist, must shrink from his too near approach and hide away for fear of being appropriated, for fear, that is, of\u2014death.\n\nJamie, unknowingly, put in the finishing touch to my unconscious portrait. The man carried about with him some silent, compelling trick of drawing out all your reserves\u2014then swiftly pocketing them. At first you would be conscious of taut resistance; this would slowly shade off into weariness; the will would become flaccid; then you either moved away or yielded\u2014agreed to all he said with a sense of weakness pressing ever closer upon the edges of collapse. With a male antagonist it might be different, but even then the effort of resistance would generate force that he absorbed and not the other. He never gave out. Some instinct taught him how to protect himself from that. To human beings, I mean, he never gave out. This time it was a very different matter. He had no more chance than a fly before the wheels of a huge\u2014what Jamie used to call\u2014'attraction' engine.\n\nSo this was how I saw him\u2014a great human sponge, crammed and soaked with the life, or proceeds of life, absorbed from others\u2014stolen. My idea of a human vampire was satisfied. He went about carrying these accumulations of the life of others. In this sense his 'life' was not really his own. For the same reason, I think, it was not so fully under his control as he imagined.\n\nAnd in another hour this man would be here.\n\nI went to the window. My eye wandered to the empty patch, dull black there amid the rich luxuriance of the garden flowers. It struck me as a hideous bit of emptiness yawning to be filled and nourished. The idea of Jamie playing round its bare edge was loathsome. I watched the big summer clouds above, the stillness of the afternoon, the haze. The silence of the overheated garden was oppressive. I had never felt a day so stifling, motionless. It lay there waiting. The household, too, was waiting\u2014waiting for the coming of Mr. Frene from London in his big motor-car. And I shall never forget the sensation of icy shrinking and distress with which I heard the rumble of the car. He had arrived. Tea was all ready on the lawn beneath the lime trees, and Mrs. Frene and Gladys, back from their drive, were sitting in wicker chairs. Mr. Frene, junior, was in the hall to meet his brother, but Jamie, as I learned afterwards, had shown such hysterical alarm, offered such bold resistance, that it had been deemed wiser to keep him in his room. Perhaps, after all, his presence might not be necessary. The visit clearly had to do with something on the uglier side of life\u2014money, settlements, or what not; I never knew exactly; only that his parents were anxious, and that Uncle Frank had to be propitiated. It does not matter. That has nothing to do with the affair. What has to do with it\u2014or I should not be telling the story\u2014is that Mrs. Frene sent for me to come down ' in my nice white dress, if I didn't mind,' and that I was terrified, yet pleased, because it meant that a pretty face would be considered a welcome addition to the visitor's landscape. Also, most odd it was, I felt my presence was somehow inevitable, that in some way it was intended that I should witness what I did witness.\n\nAnd the instant I came upon the lawn\u2014I hesitate to set it down, it sounds so foolish, disconnected\u2014I could have sworn, as my eyes met his, that a kind of sudden darkness came, taking the summer brilliance out of everything, and that it was caused by troops of small black horses that raced about us from his person\u2014to attack.\n\nAfter a first momentary approving glance he took no further notice of me. The tea and talk went smoothly; I helped to pass the plates and cups, filling in pauses with little under-talk to Gladys. Jamie was never mentioned. Outwardly all seemed well, but inwardly everything was awful\u2014skirting the edge of things unspeakable, and so charged with danger that I could not keep my voice from trembling when I spoke.\n\nI watched his hard, bleak face; I noticed how thin he was, and the curious, oily brightness of his steady eyes. They did not glitter, but they drew you with a sort of soft, creamy shine like Eastern eyes. And everything he said or did announced what I may dare to call the suction of his presence. His nature achieved this result automatically. He dominated us all, yet so gently that until it was accomplished no one noticed it.\n\nBefore five minutes had passed, however, I was aware of one thing only. My mind focussed exclusively upon it, and so vividly that I marvelled the others did not scream, or run, or do something violent to prevent it. And it was this: that, separated merely by some dozen yards or so, this man, vibrating with the acquired vitality of others, stood within easy reach of that spot of yawning emptiness, waiting and eager to be filled. Earth scented her prey.\n\nThese two active 'centres' were within fighting distance; he so thin, so hard, so keen, yet really spreading large with the loose 'surround' of others' life he had appropriated, so practised and triumphant; that other so patient, deep, with so mighty a draw of the whole earth behind it, and\u2014ugh!\u2014so obviously aware that its opportunity at last had come.\n\nI saw it all as plainly as though I watched two great animals prepare for battle, both unconsciously; yet in some inexplicable way I saw it, of course, within me, and not externally. The conflict would be hideously unequal. Each side had already sent out emissaries, how long before I could not tell, for the first evidence he gave that something was going wrong with him was when his voice grew suddenly confused, he missed his words, and his lips trembled a moment and turned flabby. The next second his face betrayed that singular and horrid change, growing somehow loose about the bones of the cheek, and larger, so that I remembered Jamie's miserable phrase. The emissaries of the two kingdoms, the human and the vegetable, had met, I make it out, in that very second. For the first time in his long career of battening on others, Mr. Frene found himself pitted against a vaster kingdom than he knew and, so finding, shook inwardly in that little part that was his definite actual self. He felt the huge disaster coming.\n\n'Yes, John,' he was saying, in his drawling, self-congratulating voice, 'Sir George gave me that car\u2014gave it to me as a present. Wasn't it char?'\u2014and then broke off abruptly, stammered, drew breath, stood up, and looked uneasily about him. For a second there was a gaping pause. It was like the click which starts some huge machinery moving\u2014that instant's pause before it actually starts. The whole thing, indeed, then went with the rapidity of machinery running down and beyond control. I thought of a giant dynamo working silently and invisible.\n\n'What's that?' he cried, in a soft voice charged with alarm. 'What's that horrid place? And some one's crying there\u2014who is it?'\n\nHe pointed to the empty patch. Then, before any one could answer, he started across the lawn towards it, going every minute faster. Before any one could move he stood upon the edge. He leaned over\u2014peering down into it.\n\nIt seemed a few hours passed, but really they were seconds, for time is measured by the quality and not the quantity of sensations it contains. I saw it all with merciless, photographic detail, sharply etched amid the general confusion. Each side was intensely active, but only one side, the human, exerted all its force\u2014in resistance. The other merely stretched out a feeler, as it were, from its vast, potential strength; no more was necessary. It was such a soft and easy victory. Oh, it was rather pitiful! There was no bluster or great effort, on one side at least. Close by his side I witnessed it, for I, it seemed, alone had moved and followed him. No one else stirred, though Mrs. Frene clattered noisily with the cups, making some sudden impulsive gesture with her hands, and Gladys, I remember, gave a cry\u2014it was like a little scream\u2014'Oh, mother, it's the heat, isn't it?' Mr. Frene, her father, was speechless, pale as ashes.\n\nBut the instant I reached his side, it became clear what had drawn me there thus instinctively. Upon the other side, among the silver birches, stood little Jamie. He was watching. I experienced\u2014for him\u2014one of those moments that shake the heart; a liquid fear ran all over me, the more effective because unintelligible really. Yet I felt that if I could know all, and what lay actually behind, my fear would be more than justified; that the thing was awful, full of awe.\n\nAnd then it happened\u2014a truly wicked sight\u2014like watching a universe in action, yet all contained within a small square foot of space. I think he understood vaguely that if some one could only take his place he might be saved, and that was why, discerning instinctively the easiest substitute within reach, he saw the child and called aloud to him across the empty patch, 'James, my boy, come here!\u2014'\n\nHis voice was like a thin report, but somehow flat and lifeless, as when a rifle misses fire, sharp, yet weak; it had no 'crack' in it. It was really supplication. And, with amazement, I heard my own ring out imperious and strong, though I was not conscious of saying it, ( Jamie, don't move. Stay where you are!' But Jamie, the little child, obeyed neither of us. Moving up nearer to the edge, he stood there\u2014laughing! I heard that laughter, but could have sworn it did not come from him. The empty, yawning patch gave out that sound.\n\nMr. Frene turned sideways, throwing up his arms. I saw his hard, bleak face grow somehow wider, spread through the air, and downwards. A similar thing, I saw, was happening at the same time to his entire person, for it drew out into the atmosphere in a stream of movement. The face for a second made me think of those toys of green india-rubber that children pull. It grew enormous. But this was an external impression only. What actually happened, I clearly understood, was that all this vitality and life he had transferred from others to himself for years was now in turn being taken from him and transferred\u2014elsewhere.\n\nOne moment on the edge he wobbled horribly, then with that queer sideways motion, rapid yet ungainly, he stepped forward into the middle of the patch and fell heavily upon his face. His eyes, as he dropped, faded shockingly, and across the countenance was written plainly what I can only call an expression of destruction. He looked utterly destroyed. I caught a sound\u2014from Jamie?\u2014but this time not of laughter. It was like a gulp; it was deep and muffled and it dipped away into the earth. Again I thought of a troop of small black horses galloping away down a subterranean passage beneath my feet\u2014plunging into the depths\u2014their tramping growing fainter and fainter into buried distance. In my nostrils was a pungent smell of earth.\n\nAnd then\u2014all passed. I came back into myself. Mr. Frene, junior, was lifting his brother's head from the lawn where he had fallen from the heat, close beside the tea-table. He had never really moved from there. And Jamie, I learned afterwards, had been the whole time asleep upon his bed upstairs, worn out with his crying and unreasoning alarm. Gladys came running out with cold water, sponge and towel, brandy too\u2014all kinds of things. 'Mother, it was the heat, wasn't it?' I heard her whisper, but I did not catch Mrs. Frene's reply. From her face it struck me that she was bordering on collapse herself. Then the butler followed, and they just picked him up and carried him into the house. He recovered even before the doctor came.\n\nBut the queer thing to me is that I was convinced the others all had seen what I saw, only that no one said a word about it; and to this day no one has said a word. And that was, perhaps, the most horrid part of all.\n\nFrom that day to this I have scarcely heard a mention of Mr. Frene, senior. It seemed as if he dropped suddenly out of life. The papers never mentioned him. His activities ceased, as it were. His after-life, at any rate, became singularly ineffective. Certainly he achieved nothing worth public mention. But it may be only that, having left the employ of Mrs. Frene, there was no particular occasion for me to hear anything.\n\nThe after-life of that empty patch of garden, however, was quite otherwise. Nothing, so far as I know, was done to it by gardeners, or in the way of draining it or bringing in new earth, but even before I left in the following summer it had changed. It lay untouched, full of great, luscious, driving weeds and creepers, very strong, full-fed, and bursting thick with life.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Clairvoyance ]\n\nIn the darkest corner, where the firelight could not reach him, he sat listening to the stories. His young hostess occupied the corner on the other side; she was also screened by shadows; and between them stretched the horse-shoe of eager, frightened faces that seemed all eyes. Behind yawned the blackness of the big room, running as it were without a break into the night.\n\nSome one crossed on tiptoe and drew a blind up with a rattle, and at the sound all started: through the window, opened at the top, came a rustle of the poplar leaves that stirred like footsteps in the wind. 'There's a strange man walking past the shrubberies,' whispered a nervous girl; 'I saw him crouch and hide. I saw his eyes!' 'Nonsense!' came sharply from a male member of the group; 'it's far too dark to see. You heard the wind.' For mist had risen from the river just below the lawn, pressing close against the windows of the old house like a soft grey hand, and through it the stir of leaves was faintly audible... Then, while several called for lights, others remembered that the hop-pickers were still about in the lanes, and the tramps this autumn overbold and insolent. All, perhaps, wished secretly for the sun. Only the elderly man in the corner sat quiet and unmoved, contributing nothing. He had told no fearsome story. He had evaded, indeed, many openings expressly made for him, though fully aware that to his well-known interest in psychical things was partly due his presence in the week-end party. 'I never have experiences\u2014that way,' he said shortly when some one asked him point blank for a tale; 'I have no unusual powers.' There was perhaps the merest hint of contempt in his tone, but the hostess from her darkened corner quickly and tactfully covered his retreat. And he wondered. For he knew why she invited him. The haunted room, he was well aware, had been specially allotted to him.\n\nAnd then, most opportunely, the door opened noisily and the host came in. He sniffed at the darkness, rang at once for lamps, puffed at his big curved pipe, and generally, by his mere presence, made the group feel rather foolish. Light streamed past him from the corridor. His white hair shone like silver. And with him came the atmosphere of common sense, of shooting, agriculture, motors, and the rest. Age entered at that door. And his young wife sprang up instantly to greet him, as though his disapproval of this kind of entertainment might need humouring.\n\nIt may have been the light\u2014that witchery of half-lights from the fire and the corridor, or it may have been the abrupt entrance of the Practical upon the soft Imaginative that traced the outline with such pitiless, sharp conviction. At any rate, the contrast\u2014for those who had this inner clairvoyant sight all had been prating of so glibly!\u2014was unmistakably revealed. It was poignantly dramatic, pain somewhere in it\u2014naked pain. For, as she paused a moment there beside him in the light, of his childless wife of three years' standing, picture of youth and beauty, there stood upon the threshold of that room the presence of a true ghost story.\n\nAnd most marvellously she changed\u2014her lineaments, her very figure, her whole presentment. Etched against the gloom, the delicate, unmarked face shone suddenly keen and anguished, and a rich maturity, deeper than any mere age, flushed all her little person with its secret grandeur. Lines started into being upon the pale skin of the girlish face, lines of pleading, pity, and love the daylight did not show, and with them an air of magic tenderness that betrayed, though for a second only, the full soft glory of a motherhood denied, yet somehow mysteriously enjoyed. About her slenderness rose all the deep-bosomed sweetness of maternity, a potential mother of the world, and a mother, though she might know no dear fulfilment, who yet yearned to sweep into her immense embrace all the little helpless things that ever lived.\n\nLight, like emotion, can play strangest tricks. The change pressed almost upon the edge of revelation... Yet, when a moment later lamps were brought, it is doubtful if any but the silent guest who had told no marvellous tale, knew no psychical experience, and disclaimed the smallest clairvoyant faculty, had received and registered the vivid, poignant picture. For an instant it had flashed there, mercilessly clear for all to see who were not blind to subtle spiritual wonder thick with pain. And it was not so much mere picture of youth and age ill-matched, as of youth that yearned with the oldest craving in the world, and of age that had slipped beyond the power of sympathetically divining it. .' . . It passed, and all was as before.\n\nThe husband laughed with genial good-nature, not one whit annoyed. 'They've been frightening you with stories, child,' he said in his jolly way, and put a protective arm about her. 'Haven't they now? Tell me the truth. Much better,' he added, 'have joined me instead at billiards, or for a game of Patience, eh? 'She looked up shyly into his face, and he kissed her on the forehead. 'Perhaps they have\u2014a little, dear,' she said, 'but now that you've come, I feel all right again.' 'Another night of this,' he added in a graver tone, 'and you'd be at your old trick of putting guests to sleep in the haunted room. I was right after all, you see, to make it out of bounds.' He glanced fondly, paternally down upon her. Then he went over and poked the fire into a blaze. Some one struck up a waltz on the piano, and couples danced. All trace of nervousness vanished, and the butler presently brought in the tray with drinks and biscuits. And slowly the group dispersed. Candles were lit. They passed down the passage into the big hall, talking in lowered voices of to-morrow's plans. The laughter died away as they went up the stairs to bed, the silent guest and the young wife lingering a moment over the embers.\n\n'You have not, after all then, put me in your haunted room?' he asked quietly. 'You mentioned, you remember, in your letter\u2014'\n\n'I admit,' she replied at once, her manner gracious beyond her years, her voice quite different, 'that I wanted you to sleep there\u2014some one, I mean, who really knows, and is not merely curious. But\u2014forgive my saying so\u2014when I saw you '\u2014she laughed very slowly\u2014'and when you told no marvellous story like the others, I somehow felt\u2014'\n\n'But I never see anything' he put in hurriedly.\n\n'You feel, though,' she interrupted swiftly, the passionate tenderness in her voice but half suppressed. 'I can tell it from your\u2014'\n\n'Others, then,' he interrupted abruptly, almost bluntly, 'have slept there\u2014sat up, rather?'\n\n'Not recently. My husband stopped it.' She paused a second, then added, 'I had that room\u2014for a year\u2014when first we married.'\n\nThe other's anguished look flew back upon her little face like a shadow and was gone, while at the sight of it there rose in himself a sudden deep rush of wonderful amazement beckoning almost towards worship. He did not speak, for his voice would tremble.\n\n'I had to give it up,' she finished, very low.\n\n'Was it so terrible?' after a pause he ventured.\n\nShe bowed her head. 'I had to change,' she repeated softly.\n\n'And since then\u2014now\u2014you see nothing?' he asked.\n\nHer reply was singular. 'Because I will not, not because it's gone.'... He followed her in silence to the door, and as they passed along the passage, again that curious great pain of emptiness, of loneliness, of yearning rose upon him, as of a sea that never, never can swim beyond the shore to reach the flowers that it loves...\n\n'Hurry up, child, or a ghost will catch you,' cried her husband, leaning over the banisters, as the pair moved slowly up the stairs towards him. There was a moment's silence when they met. The guest took his lighted candle and went down the corridor. Good-nights were said again. They moved away, she to her loneliness, he to his un-haunted room. And at his door he turned. At the far end of the passage, silhouetted against the candle-light, he watched them\u2014the fine old man with his silvered hair and heavy shoulders, and the slim young wife with that amazing air as of some great bountiful mother of the world for whom the years yet passed hungry and unharvested. They turned the corner, and he went in and closed his door.\n\nSleep took him very quickly, and while the mist rose up and veiled the countryside, something else, veiled equally for all other sleepers in that house but two, drew on towards its climax... Some hours later he awoke; the world was still, and it seemed the whole house listened; for with that clear vision which some bring out of sleep, he remembered that there had been no direct denial, and of a sudden realised that this big, gaunt chamber where he lay was after all the haunted room. For him, however, the entire world, not merely separate rooms in it, was ever haunted; and he knew no terror to find the space about him charged with thronging life quite other than his own... He rose and lit the candle, crossed over to the window where the mist shone grey, knowing that no barriers of walls or door or ceiling could keep out this host of Presences that poured so thickly everywhere about him. It was like a wall of being, with peering eyes, small hands stretched out, a thousand pattering wee feet, and tiny voices crying in a chorus very faintly and beseeching... The haunted room! Was it not, rather, a temple vestibule, prepared and sanctified by yearning rites few men might ever guess, for all the childless women of the world? How could she know that he would understand\u2014this woman he had seen but twice in all his life? And how entrust to him so great a mystery that was her secret? Had she so easily divined in him a similar yearning to which, long years ago, death had denied fulfilment? Was she clairvoyant in the true sense, and did all faces bear on them so legibly this great map that sorrow traced?...\n\nAnd then, with awful suddenness, mere feelings dipped away, and something concrete happened. The handle of the door had faintly rattled. He turned. The round brass knob was slowly moving. And first, at the sight, something of common fear did grip him, as though his heart had missed a beat, but on the instant he heard the voice of his own mother, now long beyond the stars, calling to him to go softly yet with speed. He watched a moment the feeble efforts to undo the door, yet never afterwards could swear that he saw actual movement, for something in him, tragic as blindness, rose through a mist of tears and darkened vision utterly...\n\nHe went towards the door. He took the handle very gently, and very softly then he opened it. Beyond was darkness. He saw the empty passage, the edge of the banisters where the great hall yawned below, and, dimly, the outline of the Alpine photograph and the stuffed deer's head upon the wall. And then he dropped upon his knees and opened wide his arms to something that came in upon uncertain, viewless feet. All the young winds and flowers and dews of dawn passed with it... filling him to the brim... covering closely his breast and eyes and lips. There clung to him all the small beginnings of life that cannot stand alone... the little helpless hands and arms that have no confidence... and when the wealth of tears and love that flooded his heart seemed to break upon the frontiers of some mysterious yet impossible fulfilment, he rose and went with curious small steps towards the window to taste the cooling, misty air of that other dark Emptiness that waited so patiently there above the entire world. He drew the sash up. The air felt soft and tender as though there were somewhere children in it too\u2014children of stars and flowers, of mists and wings and music, all that the Universe contains unborn and tiny... And when at length he turned again the door was closed. The room was empty of any life but that which lay so wonderfully blessed within himself. And this, he felt, had marvellously increased and multiplied... Sleep then came back to him, and in the morning he left the house before the others were astir, pleading some overlooked engagement. For he had seen Ghosts indeed, but yet not ghosts that he could talk about with others round an open fire.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Golden Fly ]\n\nIt fell upon him out of a clear sky just when existence seemed on its very best behaviour, and he savagely resented the undeserved affliction of it. Involving him in an atrocious scandal that reflected directly upon his honour, it destroyed in a moment the erection his entire life had so laboriously built up\u2014his reputation. In the eyes of the world he was a broken, discredited man, at the very moment, moreover, when his most cherished ambitions touched fulfilment. And the cruelty of it appalled his sense of justice, for it was impossible to vindicate himself without inculpating others who were dearer to him than life. It seemed more than he could bear; and the grim course he contemplated\u2014decision itself as yet hung darkly waiting in the background\u2014appeared the only way of escape that offered.\n\nHe had discussed the matter with friends until his brain whirled. Their sympathy maddened him, with hints of qui s'excuse s'accuse and he turned at last in desperation to something that could not answer back. For the first time in his life he turned to Nature\u2014to that dead, inanimate Nature he had left to poets and rhapsodising women: 'I must face it alone,' he put it. For the Finger of God was a phrase without meaning to him, and his entire being contained no trace of the religious instinct. He was a business man, honest, selfish, and ambitious; and the collapse of his worldly position was paramount to the collapse of the universe itself\u2014his universe, at any rate. This 'crumbling of the universe ' was the thought he took out with him. He left the house by the path that led into solitude, and reached the heathery expanse that formed one of the breathing-places of the New Forest. There he flung himself down wearily in the shadow of a little pine-copse. And his crumbled universe lay down with him, for he could not escape it.\n\nTaking the pistol from the hip-pocket where it hurt him, he lay upon his back and watched the clouds. Half stunned, half dazed, he stared into the sky. The perfumed wind played softly on his eyes; he smelt the heather-honey; golden flies hung motionless in the air, like coloured pins fastening the sunshine against the blue curtain of the summer, while dragon-flies, like darting shuttles, wove across its pattern their threads of gleaming bronze. He heard the petulant crying of the peewits, and watched their tumbling flight. Below him tinkled a rivulet, its brown water rippling between banks of peaty earth. Everywhere was singing, peace, and careless unconcern.\n\nAnd this lordly indifference of Nature calmed and soothed him. Neither human pain nor the injustice of man could shift the key of the water, alter the peewits' cry a single tone, nor influence one fraction of an inch those cloudy frigates of vapour that sailed the sky. The earth bulged sunwards as she had bulged for centuries. The power of her steady gait, superbly calm, breathed everywhere with grandeur\u2014undismayed, unhasting, and supremel confident... And, like the flash of those golden flies, there leaped suddenly upon him this vivid thought: that his world of agony lay neatly buttoned up within the tiny space of his own brain. Outside himself it had no existence at all. His mind contained it\u2014the minute interior he called his heart. From this vaster world about him it lay utterly apart, like deeds in the black boxes of japanned tin he kept at the office, shut off from the universe, huddled in an overcrowded space within his skull.\n\nHow this commonplace thought reached him, garbed in such startling novelty, was odd enough; for it seemed as though the fierceness of his pain had burned away something. His thoughts it merely enflamed; but this other thing it consumed. Something that had obscured clear vision shrivelled before it as a piece of paper, eaten up by fire, dwindles down into a thimbleful of unimportant ashes. The thicket of his mind grew half transparent. At the farther end he saw, for the first time\u2014light. The perspective of his inner life, hitherto so enormous, telescoped into the proportions of a miniature. Just as momentous and significant as before, it was somehow abruptly different\u2014seen from another point of view. The suffering had burned up rubbish he himself had piled over the head of a little Fact. Like a point of metal that glows yet will not burn, he discerned in the depths of him the essential shining fact that not all this ruinous conflagration could destroy. And this brilliant, indestructible kernel was\u2014his Innocence. The rest was self-reared rubbish: opinion of the world. He had magnified an atom into a universe...\n\nPain, as it seemed, had cleared a way for the sublimity of Nature to approach him. The calm old Universe rolled past. The deep, majestic Day gave him a push, as though the shoulder of some star had brushed his own. He had thought his feelings were the world: instead, they were merely his way of looking at it. The actual 'world' was some glorious, unchanging thing he never saw direct. His attitude of mind was but a peephole into it. The choice of his particular peephole, moreover, lay surely within the power of his individual will. The anguish, centred upon so small a point, had seemed to affect the entire spread universe around him, whereas in reality it affected nothing but his attitude of mind towards it. The truism struck him like a blow between the eyes, that a man is what he thinks or feels himself to be. It leaped the barrier between words and meaning. The intellectual concept became a hard-edged fact, because he realised it\u2014for the first time in his very circumscribed life. And this dreadful pain that had made even suicide seem desirable was entirely a fabrication of his own mind. The universe about him rolled on just the same in the majesty of its eternal purpose. His tiny inner world was clouded, but the glory of this stupendous world about him was undimmed, untroubled, unaffected. Even death itself...\n\nWith a swift smash of the hand he crushed the golden fly that settled on his knee. The murder was done impulsively, utterly without intention. He watched the little point of gold quiver for a moment among the hairs of the rough tweed; then lie still for ever... but the scent of heather-honey filled the air as before; the wind passed sighing through the pines; the clouds still sailed their uncharted sea of blue. There lay the whole spread surface of the Forest in the sun. Only the attitude of the golden fly towards it all was gone. A single, tiny point of view had disappeared. Nature passed on calmly and unhasting; she took no note.\n\nThen, with a rush of awe, another thought flashed through him: Nature had taken note. There was a difference everywhere. Not a sparrow falleth, he remembered, without God knowing. God was certainly in Nature somewhere. His clumsy senses could not register this difference, yet it was there. His own small world, fed by these senses, was after all the merest little corner of Existence. To the whole of Existence, that included himself, the golden fly, the sun, and all the stars, he must somehow answer for his crime. It was a wanton interference with a sublime and sovereign Purpose that he now divined for the first time. He looked at the wee point of gold lying still and silent in the forest of hairs. He realised the enormity of his act. It could not have been graver had he put out the sun, or the little, insignificant flame of his own existence. He had done a criminal, evil thing, for he had put an end to a certain point of view; had wiped it out; made it impossible. Had the fly been quicker, less easily overwhelmed, or more tenacious of the scrap of universal life it used, Nature would at this instant be richer for its little contribution to the whole of things\u2014to which he himself also belonged. And wherein, he asked himself, did he differ from that fly in the importance, the significance of his contribution to the universe? The soul...? He had never given the question a single thought; but if the scrap of life he owned was called a soul, why should that point of golden glory not comprise one too? Its minute size, its trivial purpose, its few hours of apparently futile existence... these formed no true criterion...!\n\nSimilarly, the thought rushed over him, a Hand was being stretched out to crush himself. His pain was the shadow of its approach; anger in his heart, the warning. Unless he were quick enough, adroit and skilled enough, he also would be wiped out, while Nature continued her slow, unhasting way without him. His attitude towards the personal pain was really the test of his ability, of his merit\u2014of his right to survive. Pain teaches, pain develops, pain brings growth: he had heard it since his copybook days. But now he realised it, as again thought leaped the barrier between familiar words and meaning. In his attitude of mind to his catastrophe lay his salvation or his... death.\n\nIn some such confused and blundering fashion, because along unaccustomed channels, the truth charged into him to overwhelm, yet bringing with it an unwonted sense of joy that seemed to break a crust which long had held back\u2014life. Thus tapped, these sources gushed forth and bubbled over, spread about his being, flooded him with hope and courage, above all with\u2014calmness. Nature held forces just as real and living as human sympathy, and equally able to modify the soul. And Nature was always accessible. A sense of huge companionship, denied him by the littleness of his fellow-men, stole sweetly over him. It was amazingly uplifting, yet fear came close behind it, as he realised the presumption of his former attitude of cynical indifference. These Powers were aware of his petty insolence, yet had not crushed him... It was, of course, the awakening of the religious instinct in a man who hitherto had worshipped merely a rather low-grade form of intellect.\n\nAnd, while the enormous confusion of it shook him, this sense of incommunicable sweetness remained. Bright haunting eyes, with love in them, gazed at him from the blue; and this thing that came so close, stood also far away upon the line of the horizon. It was everywhere. It filled the hollows, but towered over him as well towards the pinnaces of cloud. It was in the sharpness of the peewits' cry, and in the water's murmur. It whispered in the pine-boughs, and blazed in every patch of sunlight. And it was glory, pure and simple. It filled him with a sense of strength for which he could find but one description\u2014Triumph.\n\nAnd so, first, the anger faded from his mind and crept away. Resentment then slunk after it. Revolt and disappointment also melted, and bitterness gave place to the most marvellous peace the man had ever known. Then came resignation to fill the empty places. Pain, as a means and not an end, had cleared the way, though the accomplishment was like a miracle. But Conversion is a miracle. No ordinary pain can bring it. This anguish he understood now in a new relation to life\u2014as something to be taken willingly into himself and dealt with, all regardless of public opinion. What people said and thought was in their world, not in his. It was less than nothing. The pain cultivated dormant tracts. The terror also purged. It disclosed...\n\nHe watched the wind, and even the wind brought revelation; for without obstacles in its path it would be silent. He watched the sunshine, and the sunshine taught him too; for without obstacles to fling it back against his eye, he could never see it. He would neither hear the tinkling water nor feel the summer heat unless both one and other overcame some reluctant medium in their pathways. And, similarly with his moral being\u2014his pain resulted from the friction of his personal ambitions against the stress of some noble Power that sought to lift him higher. That Power he could not know direct, but he recognised its strain against him by the resistance it generated in the inertia of his selfishness. His attitude of mind had switched completely round. It was what the preachers termed development through suffering.\n\nMoreover, he had acquired this energy of resistance somehow from the wind and sun and the beauty of a common summer's day. Their peace and strength had passed into himself. Unconsciously on his way home he drew upon it steadily. He tossed the pistol into a pool of water. Nature had healed him; and Nature, should he turn weak again, was always there. It was very wonderful. He wanted to sing...\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Special Delivery ]\n\nMeiklejohn, the curate, was walking through the Jura when this thing happened to him. There is only his word to vouch for it, for the inn and its proprietor are now both of the past, and the local record of the occurrence has long since assumed the proportions of a picturesque but inaccurate legend. As a true story, however, it stands out from those of its kidney by the fact that there seems to have been a deliberate intention in it. It saved a life\u2014a life the world had need of. And this singular rescue of a man of value to the best order of things makes one feel that there was some sense, even logic, in the affair.\n\nMoreover, Meiklejohn asserts that it was the only psychic experience he ever knew. Things of the sort were not a 'habit' with him. His rescue, thus, was not one of those meaningless interventions that puzzle the man in the street while they exhilarate the psychologist. It was a deliberate and very determined affair.\n\nMeiklejohn found himself that hot August night in one of the valleys that slip like blue shadows hidden among pine-woods between the Swiss frontier and France. He had passed Ste. Croix earlier in the day; Les Rasses had been left behind about four o'clock; Buttes, and the Val de Travers, where the cement of many a London street conies from, was his goal. But the light failed long before he reached it, and he stopped at an inn that appeared unexpectedly round a corner of the dusty road, built literally against the great cliffs that formed one wall of the valley. He was so footsore, and his knapsack so heavy, that he turned in without more ado.\n\nLe Guillaume Tell was the name of the inn\u2014dirty white walls, with thin, almost mangy vines scrambling over the door, and the stream brawling beneath shuttered windows with green and white stripes all patched by sun and rain. His room was sevenpence, his dinner of soup, omelette, fruit, cheese, and coffee, a franc. The prices suited his pocket and made him feel comfortable and at home. Immediately behind the hotel\u2014the only house visible, except the sawmill across the road, rose the ever-crumbling ridges and precipices that formed the flanks of Chasseront and ran on past La Sagne towards the grey Aiguilles de Baulmes. He was in the Jura fastnesses where tourists rarely penetrate.\n\nThrough the low doorway of the inn he carried with him the strong atmosphere of thoughts that had accompanied him all day\u2014dreams of how he intended to spend his life, plans of sacrifice and effort. For his hopes of great achievement, even then at twenty-five, were a veritable passion in him, and his desire to spend himself for humanity a devouring flame. So' occupied, indeed, was his mind with the emotions belonging to this line of thinking, that he hardly noticed the singular, though exceedingly faint, sense of alarm that stirred somewhere in the depths of his being as he passed within that doorway where the drooping vine-leaves clutched at his hat. He remembered it a little later. The sense of danger had been touched in him. He felt at the moment only a hint of discomfort, too vague to claim definite recognition. Yet it was there\u2014the instant he stepped within the threshold\u2014and afterwards he distinctly recalled its sudden and unaccountable advent.\n\nHis bedroom, though stuffy, as from windows long unopened, was clean; carpetless, of course, and primitive, with white pine floor and walls, and the short bed, smothered under its duvet, very creaky. And very short! For Meiklejohn was well over six feet.\n\n'I shall have to curl up, as usual, in a knot,' was his reflection as he measured the bed with his eye; 'though to-night I think\u2014after my twenty miles in this air\u2014'\n\nThe thought refused to complete itself. He was going to add that he was tired enough to have slept on a stone floor, but for some undefined reason the same sense of alarm that had tapped him on the shoulder as he entered the inn returned now when he contemplated the bed. A sharp repugnance for that bed, as sudden and unaccountable as it was curious, swept into him\u2014and was gone again before he had time to seize it wholly. It was in reality so slight that he dismissed it immediately as the merest fancy; yet, at the same time, he was aware that he would rather have slept on another bed, had there been one in the room\u2014and then the queer feeling that, after all, perhaps, he would not sleep there in the end at all. How this idea came to him he never knew. He records it, however, as part of the occurrence.\n\nAfter eight o'clock a few peasants, and workmen from the sawmill, came in to drink their demi-litre of red wine in the common room downstairs, to stare at the unexpected guest, and to smoke their vile tobacco. They were neither picturesque nor amusing\u2014simply dirty and slightly malodorous. At nine o'clock Meiklejohn knocked the ashes from his briar pipe upon the limestone window-ledge, and went upstairs, overpowered with sleep. The sense of alarm had utterly disappeared; his mind was busy once more with his great dreams of the future\u2014dreams that materialised themselves, as all the world knows, in the famous Meiklejohn Institutes...\n\nBerthoud, the proprietor, short and sturdy, with his faded brown coat and no collar, slightly confused with red wine and a 'tourist' guest, showed him the way up. For, of course, there was no femme de chambre.\n\n'You have the corridor all to yourself,' the man said; showed him the best corner of the landing to shout from in case he wanted anything\u2014there being no bell\u2014eyed his boots, knapsack, and flask with considerable curiosity, wished him good-night, and was gone. He went downstairs with a noise like a horse, thought the curate, as he locked the door after him.\n\nThe windows had been open now for a couple of hours, and the room smelt sweet with the odours of sawn wood and shavings, the resinous perfume of the surrounding hosts of pines, and the sharp, delicate touch of a lonely mountain valley where civilisation has not yet tainted the air. Whiffs of coarse tobacco, pungent without being offensive, came invisibly through the cracks of the floor. Primitive and simple it all was\u2014a sort of vigorous 'backwoods ' atmosphere. Yet, once again, as he turned to examine the room after Berthoud's steps had blundered down below into the passage, something rose faintly within him to set his nerves mysteriously a-quiver.\n\nOut of these perfectly simple conditions, without the least apparent cause, the odd feeling again came over him that he was\u2014in danger.\n\nThe curate was not much given to analysis. He was a man of action pure and simple, as a rule. But to-night, in spite of himself, his thoughts went plunging, searching, asking. For this singular message of dread that emanated as it were from the room, or from some article of furniture in the room perhaps\u2014that bed still touched his mind with a peculiar repugnance\u2014demanded somewhat insistently for an explanation. And the only explanation that suggested itself to his unimaginative mind was that the forces of nature hereabouts were\u2014overpowering; that, after the slum streets and factory chimneys of the last twelve months, these towering cliffs and smothering pine-forests communicated to his soul a word of grandeur that amounted to awe. Inadequate and far-fetched as the explanation seems, it was the only one that occurred to him; and its value in this remarkable adventure lies in the fact that he connected his sense of danger partly with the bed and partly with the mountains.\n\n'I felt once or twice,' he said afterwards, 'as though some powerful agency of a spiritual kind were all the time trying to beat into my stupid brain a message of warning.' And this way of expressing it is more true and graphic than many paragraphs of attempted analysis.\n\nMeiklejohn hung his clothes by the open window to air, washed, read his Bible, looked several times over his shoulder without apparent cause, and then knelt down to pray. He was a simple and devout soul; his Self lost in the yearning, young but sincere, to live for humanity. He prayed, as usual, with intense earnestness that his life might be preserved for use in the world, when in the middle of his prayer\u2014there came a knocking at the door.\n\nHastily rising from his knees, he opened. The sound of rushing water filled the corridor. He heard the voices of the workmen below in the drinking-room. But only darkness stood in the passages, filling the house to the very brim. No one was there. He returned to his interrupted devotions.\n\n'I imagined it,' he said to himself. He continued his prayers, however, longer than usual. At the back of his thoughts, dim, vague, half-defined only, lay this lurking sense of uneasiness\u2014that he was in danger. He prayed earnestly and simply, as a child might pray, for the preservation of his life...\n\nAgain, just as he prepared to get into bed, struggling to make the heaped-up duvet spread all over, came that knocking at the bedroom door. It was soft, wonderfully soft, and something within him thrilled curiously in response. He crossed the floor to open\u2014then hesitated. Suddenly he understood that that knocking at the door was connected with the sense of danger in his heart. In the region of subtle intuitions the two were linked. With this realisation there came over him, he declares, a singular mood in which, as in a revelation, he knew that Nature held forces that might somehow communicate directly and positively with\u2014human beings. This thought rushed upon him out of the night, as it were. It arrested his movements. He stood there upon the bare pine boards, hesitating to open the door.\n\nThe delay thus described lasted actually only a few seconds, but in those few seconds these thoughts tore rapidly and like fire through his mind. The beauty of this lost and mysterious valley was certainly in his veins. He felt the strange presence of the encircling forests, soft and splendid, their million branches sighing in the night airs. The crying of the falling water touched him. He longed to transfer their peace and power to the hearts of suffering thousands of men and women and children. The towering precipices that literally dropped their pale walls over the roof of the inn lifted his thoughts to their own wind-swept heights; he longed to convey their message of inflexible strength to the weak-kneed folk in the slums where he worked. He was peculiarly conscious of the presence of these forces of Nature\u2014the irresistible powers that regenerate as easily as they destroy.\n\nAll this, and far more, swept his soul like a huge wind as he stood there, waiting to open the door in answer to that mysterious soft knocking.\n\nAnd there, when at length he opened, stood the figure of a man\u2014staring at him and smiling.\n\nDisappointment seized him instantly. He had expected, almost believed, that he would see something un-ordinary; and instead, there stood a man who had merely mistaken the door of his room, and was now bowing his apology for the interruption. Then, to his amazement, he saw that the man beckoned: the figure was some one who sought to draw him out.\n\n'Come with me,' it seemed to say.\n\nBut Meiklejohn only realised this afterwards, he says, when it was too late and he had already shut the door in the stranger's face. For the man had withdrawn into the darkness a little, and the curate had taken the movement for a mere acknowledgment of his mistake instead of\u2014as he afterwards felt\u2014a sign that he should follow.\n\n'And the moment the door was shut,' he says, 'I felt that it would have been better for me to have gone out into the passage to see what he wanted. It came over me that the man had something important to say to me. I had missed it.'\n\nFor some seconds, it seemed, he resisted the inclination to go after him. He argued with himself; then turned to his bed, pulled back the sheets and heavy duvet, and was met sharply again with the sense of repugnance, almost of fear, as before. It leaped out upon him\u2014as though the drawing back of the blankets had set free some cold blast of .wind that struck him across the face and made him shiver.\n\nAt the same moment a shadow fell from behind his shoulder and dropped across the pillow and upper half of the bed. It may, of course, have been the magnified shadow of the moth that buzzed about the pale-yellow electric light in the ceiling. He does not pretend to know. It passed swiftly, however, and was gone; and Meiklejohn, feeling less sure of himself than ever before in his life, crossed the floor quickly, almost running, and opened the door to go after the man who had knocked\u2014twice. For in reality less than half a minute had passed since the shutting of the door and its reopening.\n\nBut the corridor was empty. He marched down the pine-board floor for some considerable distance. Below he saw the glimmer of the hall, and heard the voices of the peasants and workmen from the sawmill as they still talked and drank their red wine in the public room. That sound of falling water, as before, filled the air. Darkness reigned. But the person\u2014the messenger\u2014who had twice knocked at his door was gone utterly... Presently a door opened downstairs, and the peasants clattered out noisily. He turned and went back to bed. The electric light was switched off below. Silence fell. Conquering his strange repugnance, Meiklejohn, with a prayer on his lips, got into bed, and in less than ten minutes was sound asleep.\n\n'I admit,' he says, in telling the story, 'that what happened afterwards came so swiftly and so confusingly, yet with such a storm of overwhelming conviction of its reality, that its sequence may be somewhat blurred in my memory, while, at the same time, I see it after all these years as though it was a thing of yesterday. But in my sleep, first of all, I again heard that soft, mysterious tapping\u2014not in the course of a dream of any sort, but sudden and alone out of the dark blank of forgetfulness. I tried to wake. At first, however, the bonds of unconsciousness held me tight. I had to struggle in order to return to the waking world. There was a distinct effort before I opened my eyes; and in that slight interval I became aware that the person who had knocked at the door had meanwhile opened it and passed into the room. I had left the lock unturned. The person was close beside me in the darkness\u2014not in utter darkness, however, for a rising three-quarter moon shed its faint silver upon the floor in patches, and, as I sprang swiftly from the bed, I noticed something alive moving towards me across the carpetless boards. Upon the edges or a patch of moonlight, where the fringe of silver and shadow mingled, it stopped. Three feet away from it I, too, stopped, shaking in every muscle. It lay there crouching at my very feet, staring up at me. But was it man or was it animal? For at first I took it certainly for a human being on all fours; but the next moment, with a spasm of genuine terror that half stopped my breath, it was borne in upon me that the creature was\u2014nothing human. Only in this way can I describe it. It was identical with the human figure who had knocked before and beckoned to me to follow, but it was another presentation of that figure.\n\n'And it held (or brought, if you will) some tremendous message for me\u2014some message of tremendous importance, I mean. The first time I had argued, resisted, refused to listen. Now it had returned in a form that ensured obedience. Some quite terrific power emanated from it\u2014a power that I understood instinctively belonged to the mountains and the forests and the untamed elemental forces of Nature. Amazing as it may sound in cold blood, I can only say that I felt as though the towering precipices outside had sent me a direct warning\u2014that my life was in immediate danger.\n\n'For a space that seemed minutes, but was probably less than a few seconds, I stood there trembling on the bare boards, my eyes riveted upon the dark, uncouth shape that covered all the floor beyond. I saw no limbs or features, no suggestion of outline that I could connect with any living form I know, animate or inanimate. Yet it moved and stirred all the time\u2014whirled within itself I describes it best; and into my mind sprang a picture of an immense dark wheel, turning, spinning, whizzing so rapidly that it appears motionless, and uttering that low and ominous thunder that fills a great machinery-room of a factory. Then I thought of Ezekiel's vision of the Living Wheels...\n\n'And it must have been at this instant, I think, that the muttering and deep note that issued from it formed itself into words within me. At any rate, I heard a voice that spoke with unmistakable intelligence:\n\n'\"Come!\" it said. \"Come out\u2014at once!\" And the sense of power that accompanied the Voice was so splendid that my fear vanished and I obeyed instantly without thinking more. I followed; it led. It altered in shape. The door was open. It ran silently in a form that was more like a stream of deep black water than anything else I can think of\u2014out of the room, down the stairs, across the hall, and up to the deep shadows that lay against the door leading into the road. There I lost sight of it.'\n\nMeiklejohn's only desire, he says, then was to rush after it\u2014to escape. This he did. He understood that somehow it had passed through the door into the open air. Ten seconds later, perhaps even less, he, too, was in the open air. He acted almost automatically; reason, reflection, logic all swept away. Nowhere, however, in the soft moonlight about him was any sign of the extraordinary apparition that had succeeded in drawing him out of the inn, out of his bedroom, out of his\u2014bed. He stared in a dazed way at everything\u2014-just beginning to get control of his faculties a bit\u2014wondering what in the world it all meant. That huge spinning form, he felt convinced, lay hidden somewhere close beside him, waiting for the end. The danger it had enabled him to avoid was close at hand... He knew that, he says...\n\nThere lay the meadows, touched here and there with wisps of floating mist; the stream roared and tumbled down its rocky bed to his left; across the road the sawmill lifted its skeleton-like outline, moonlight shining on the dew-covered shingles of the roof, its lower part hidden in shadow. The cold air of the valley was exquisitely scented.\n\nTo the right, where his eye next wandered, he saw the thick black woods rising round the base of the precipices that soared into the sky, sheeted with silvery moonlight. His gaze ran up them to the far ridges that seemed to push the very stars farther into the heavens. Then, as he saw those stars crowding the night, he staggered suddenly backwards, seizing the wall of the road for support, and catching his breath. For the top of the cliff, he fancied, moved. A group of stars was for a fraction of a second\u2014hidden. The earth\u2014the scenery of the valley, at least\u2014turned about him. Something prodigious was happening to the solid structure of the world. The precipices seemed to bend over upon the valley. The far, uppermost ridge of those beetling cliffs shifted downwards. Meiklejohn declares that the way its movement hid momentarily a group of stars was the most startling\u2014for some reason horrible\u2014thing he had ever witnessed.\n\nThen came the roar and crash and thunder as the mass toppled, slid, and finally\u2014took the frightful plunge. How long the forces of rain and frost had been chiselling out the slow detachment of the giant slabs that fell, or whence came the particular extra little push that drove the entire mass out from the parent rock, no one can know. Only one thing is certain: that it was due to no chance, but to the nicely and exactly calculated results of balanced cause and effect. From the beginning of time it had been known\u2014it might have been accurately calculated, rather\u2014that this particular thousand tons of rock would break away from the crumbling tops of the precipices and crash downwards with the roar of many tempests into the lost and mysterious mountain valley where Meiklejohn the curate spent such and such a night of such and such a holiday. It was just as sure as the return of Halley's comet.\n\n'I watched it,' he says, 'because I couldn't do anything else. I would far rather have run\u2014I was so frightfully close to it all\u2014but I couldn't move a muscle. And in a few seconds it was over. A terrific wind knocked me backwards against the stone wall; there was a vast clattering of smaller stones, set rolling down the neighbouring couloirs; a steady roll of echoes ran thundering up and down the valley; and then all was still again exactly as it had been before. And the curious thing was\u2014ascertained a little later, as you may imagine, and not at once\u2014that the inn, being so closely built up against the cliffs, had almost entirely escaped. The great mass of rock and trees had taken a leap farther out, and filled the meadows, blocked the road, crushed the sawmill like a matchbox, and dammed up the stream; but the inn itself was almost untouched.\n\n'Almost\u2014for a single block of limestone, about the size of a grand piano, had dropped straight upon one corner of the roof and smashed its way through my bedroom, carrying everything it contained down to the level of the cellar, so terrific was the momentum of its crushing journey. Not a stick of the furniture was afterwards discoverable\u2014as such. The bed seems to have been caught by the very middle of the fallen mass.'\n\nThe confusion in Meiklejohn's mind may be imagined\u2014the rush of feeling and emotion that swept over him. Berthoud and the peasants mustered in less than a dozen minutes, talking, crying, praying. Then the stream, dammed up by the accumulation of rock, carried off the debris of the broken roof and walls in less than half an hour. The rock, however, that swept the room and the empty bed of Meiklejohn the curate into dust, still lies in the valley where it fell.\n\n'The only other thing that I remember,' he says, in telling the story, 'is that, as I stood there, shaking with excitement and the painful terror of it all, before Berthoud and the peasants had come to count over their number and learn that no one was missing\u2014while I stood there, leaning against the wall of the road, something rose out of the white dust at my feet, and, with a noise like the whirring of some immense projectile, passed swiftly and invisibly away up into space\u2014so far as I could judge, towards the distant ridges that reared their motionless outline in moonlight beneath the stars.'\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Destruction of Smith by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nTen years ago, in the western States of America, I once met Smith. But he was no ordinary member of the clan: he was Ezekiel B. Smith of Smithville. He was Smithville, for he founded it and made it live.\n\nIt was in the oil region, where towns spring up on the map in a few days like mushrooms, and may be destroyed again in a single night by fire and earthquake. On a hunting expedition Smith stumbled upon a natural oil well, and instantly staked his claim; a few months later he was rich, grown into affluence as rapidly as that patch of wilderness grew into streets and houses where you could buy anything from an evening's gambling to a tin of Boston baked pork-and-beans. Smith was really a tremendous fellow, a sort of human dynamo of energy and pluck, with rare judgment in his great square head\u2014the kind of judgment that in higher walks of life makes statesmen. His personality cut through the difficulties of life with the clean easy force of putting his whole life into anything he touched. 'God's own luck,' his comrades called it; but really it was sheer ability and character and personality. The man had power.\n\nFrom the moment of that 'oil find' his rise was very rapid, but while his brains went into a dozen other big enterprises, his heart remained in little Smithville, the flimsy mushroom town he had created.\n\nHis own life was in it. It was his baby. He spoke tenderly of its hideousness. Smithville was an intimate expression of his very self.\n\nEzekiel B. Smith I saw once only, for a few minutes; but I have never forgotten him. It was the moment of his death. And we came across him on a shooting trip where the forests melt away towards the vast plains of the Arizona desert. The personality of the man was singularly impressive. I caught myself thinking of a mountain, or of some elemental force of Nature so sure of itself that hurry is never necessary. And his gentleness was like the gentleness of women. Great strength often\u2014the greatest always\u2014has tenderness in it, a depth of tenderness unknown to pettier life.\n\nOur meeting was coincidence, for we were hunting in a region where distances are measured by hours and the chance of running across white men very rare. For many days our nightly camps were pitched in spots of beauty where the loneliness is akin to the loneliness of the Egyptian Desert. On one side the mountain slopes were smothered with dense forest, hiding wee meadows of sweet grass like English lawns; and on the other side, stretching for more miles than a man can count, ran the desolate alkali plains of Arizona where tufts of sage-brush are the only vegetation till you reach the lips of the Colorado Canyons. Our horses were tethered for the night beneath the stars. Two backwoodsmen were cooking dinner. The smell of bacon over a wood fire mingled with the keen and fragrant air\u2014when, suddenly, the horses neighed, signalling the approach of one of their own kind. Indians, white men\u2014probably another hunting party\u2014were within scenting distance, though it was long before my city ears caught any sound, and still longer before the cause itself entered the circle of our firelight.\n\nI saw a square-faced man, tanned like a redskin, in a hunting shirt and a big sombrero, climb down slowly from his horse and move towards us, keenly searching with his eyes; and at the same moment Hank, looking up from the frying-pan where the bacon and venison spluttered in a pool of pork-fat, exclaimed,\n\n'Why, it's Ezekiel B.!' The next words, addressed to Jake, who held the kettle, were below his breath: ' And if he ain't all broke up! Jest look at the eyes on him!' I saw what he meant\u2014the face of a human being distraught by some extraordinary emotion, a soul in violent distress, yet betrayal well kept under. Once, as a newspaper man, I had seen a murderer walk to the electric chair. The expression was similar. Death was behind the. eyes, not in them. Smith brought in with him\u2014terror.\n\nIn a dozen words we learned he had been hunting for some weeks, but was now heading for Tranter, a 'stop-off' station where you could flag the daily train 140 miles south-west. He was making for Smithville, the little town that was the apple of his eye. Something ' was wrong' with Smithville. No one asked him what\u2014it is the custom to wait till information is volunteered. But Hank, helping him presently to venison (which he hardly touched), said casually, 'Good hunting, Boss, your way?'; and the brief reply told much, and proved how eager he was to relieve his mind by speech. 'I'm glad to locate your camp, boys,' he said. 'That's luck. There's something going wrong'\u2014and a catch came into his voice\u2014'with Smithville.' Behind the laconic statement emerged somehow the terror the man experienced. For Smith to confess cowardice and in the same breath admit mere ' luck,' was equivalent to the hysteria that makes city people laugh or cry. It was genuinely dramatic. I have seen nothing more impressive by way of human tragedy\u2014though hard to explain why\u2014than this square-jawed, dauntless man, sitting there with the firelight on his rugged features, and saying this simple thing. For how in the world could he know it?\n\nIn the pause that followed, his Indians came gliding in, tethered the horses, and sat down without a word to eat what Hank distributed. But nothing was to be read on their impassive faces. Redskins, whatever they may feel, show little. Then Smith gave us another pregnant sentence. 'They heard it too,' he said, in a lower voice, indicating his three men; ' they saw it jest as I did.' He looked up into the starry sky a second. 'It's hard upon our trail right now,' he added, as though he expected something to drop upon us from the heavens. And from that moment I swear we all felt creepy. The darkness round our lonely camp hid terror in its folds; the wind that whispered through the dry sage-brush brought whispers and the shuffle of watching figures; and when the Indians went softly out to pitch the tents and get more wood for the fire, I remember feeling glad the duty was not mine. Yet this feeling of uneasiness is something one rarely experiences in the open. It belongs to houses, overwrought imaginations, and the presence of evil men. Nature gives peace and security. That we all felt it proves how real it was. And Smith, who felt it most, of course, had brought it.\n\n'There's something gone wrong with Smithville 'was an ominous statement of disaster. He said it just as a man in civilised lands might say, 'My wife is dying; a telegram's just come. I must take the train.' But how he felt so sure of it, a thousand miles away in this uninhabited corner of the wilderness, made us feel curiously uneasy. For it was an incredible thing\u2014yet true. We all felt that. Smith did not imagine things. A sense of gloomy apprehension settled over our lonely camp, as though things were about to happen. Already they stalked across the great black night, watching us with many eyes. The wind had risen, and there were sounds among the trees. I, for one, felt no desire to go to bed. The way Smith sat there, watching the sky and peering into the sheet of darkness that veiled the Desert, set my nerves all jangling. He expected something\u2014but what? It was following him. Across this tractless wilderness, apparently above him against the brilliant stars, Something was 'hard upon his trail.'\n\nThen, in the middle of painful silences, Smith suddenly turned loquacious\u2014further sign with him of deep mental disturbance. He asked questions like a schoolboy\u2014asked them of me too, as being 'an edicated man.' But there were such queer things to talk about round an Arizona camp-fire that Hank clearly wondered for his sanity. He knew about the 'wilderness madness' that attacks some folks. He let his green cigar go out and flashed me signals to be cautious. He listened intently, with the eyes of a puzzled child, half cynical, half touched with superstitious dread. For, briefly, Smith asked me what I knew about stories of dying men appearing at a distance to those who loved them much. He had read such tales, 'heard tell of 'em,' but' are they dead true, or are they jest little feery tales?' I satisfied him as best I could with one or two authentic stories. Whether he believed or not I cannot say; but his swift mind jumped in a flash to the point.\n\n'Then, if that kind o' stuff is true,' he asked, simply, 'it looks as though a feller had a dooplicate of himself\u2014sperrit maybe\u2014that gits loose and active at the time of death, and heads straight for the party it loves best. Ain't that so, Boss?' I admitted the theory was correct. And then he startled us with a final question that made Hank drop an oath below his breath\u2014sure evidence of uneasy excitement in the old backwoodsman. Smith whispered it, looking over his shoulder into the night: 'Ain't it jest possible then,' he asked, 'seeing that men an' Nature is all made of a piece like, that places too have this dooplicate appearance of theirselves that gits loose when they go under?'\n\nIt was difficult, under the circumstances, to explain that such a theory had been held to account for visions of scenery people sometimes have, and that a city may have a definite personality made up of all its inhabitants\u2014moods, thoughts, feelings, and passions of the multitude who go to compose its life and atmosphere, and that hence is due the odd changes in a man's individuality when he goes from one city to another. Nor was there any time to do so, for hardly had he asked his singular question when the horses whinnied, the Indians leaped to their feet as if ready for an attack, and Smith himself turned the colour of the ashes that lay in a circle of whitish-grey about the burning wood. There was an expression in his face of death, or, as the Irish peasants say, 'destroyed.'\n\n'That's Smithville,' he cried, springing to his feet, then tottering so that I thought he must fall into the flame; 'that's my baby town\u2014got loose and huntin' for me, who made it, and love it better'n anything on Gawd's green earth! ' And then he added with a kind of gulp in his throat as of a man who wanted to cry but couldn't: ' And it's going to bits\u2014it's dying\u2014and I'm not thar to save it!'\n\nHe staggered and I caught his arm. The sound of his frightened, anguished voice, and the shuffling of our many feet among the stones, died away into the night. We all stood, staring. The darkness came up closer. The horses ceased their whinnying. For a moment nothing happened. Then Smith turned slowly round and raised his head towards the stars as though he saw something. 'Hear that? ' he whispered. 'It's coming up close. That's what I've bin hearing now, on and off, two days and nights. Listen! ' His whispering voice broke horribly; the man was suffering atrociously. For a moment he became vastly, horribly animated\u2014then stood still as death.\n\nBut in the hollow silence, broken only by the sighing of the wind among the spruces, we at first heard nothing. Then, most curiously, something like rapid driven mist came trooping down the sky, and veiled a group of stars. With it, as from an enormous distance, but growing swiftly nearer, came noises that were beyond all question the noises of a city rushing through the heavens. From all sides they came; and with them there shot a reddish, streaked appearance across the misty veil that swung so rapidly and softly between the stars and our eyes. Lurid it was, and in some way terrible. A sense of helpless bewilderment came over me, scattering my faculties as in scenes of fire, when the mind struggles violently to possess itself and act for the best. Hank, holding his rifle ready to shoot, moved stupidly round the group, equally at a loss, and swearing incessantly below his breath. For this overwhelming certainty that Something living had come upon us from the sky possessed us all, and I, personally, felt as if a gigantic Being swept against me through the night, destructive and enveloping, and yet that it was not one, but many. Power of action left me. I could not even observe with accuracy what was going on. I stared, dizzy and bewildered, in all directions; but my power of movement was gone, and my feet refused to stir. Only I remember that the Redskins stood like figures of stone, unmoved.\n\nAnd the sounds about us grew into a roar. The distant murmur came past us like a sea. There was a babel of shouting. Here, in the deep old wilderness that knew no living human beings for hundreds of leagues, there was a tempest of voices calling, crying, shrieking; men's hoarse clamouring, and the high screaming of women and children. Behind it ran a booming sound like thunder. Yet all of it, while apparently so close above our heads, seemed in some inexplicable way far off in the distance\u2014muted, faint, thinning out among the quiet stars. More like a memory of turmoil and tumult it seemed than the actual uproar heard at first hand. And through it ran the crash of big things tumbling, breaking, falling in destruction with an awful detonating thunder of collapse. I thought the hills were toppling down upon us. A shrieking city, it seemed, fled past us through the sky.\n\nHow long it lasted it is impossible to say, for my power of measuring time had utterly vanished. A dreadful wild anguish summed up all the feelings I can remember. It seemed I watched, or read, or dreamed some desolating scene of disaster in which human life went overboard wholesale, as though one threw a hatful of insects into a blazing fire. This idea of burning, of thick suffocating smoke and savage flame, coloured the entire experience. And the next thing I knew was that it had passed away as completely as though it had never been at all; the stars shone down from an air of limpid clearness, and\u2014there was a smell of burning leather in my nostrils. I just stepped back in time to save my feet. I had moved in my excitement against the circle of hot ashes. Hank pushed me back roughly with the barrel of his rifle.\n\nBut, strangest of all, I understood, as by some flash of divine intuition, the reason of this abrupt cessation of the horrible tumult. The Personality of the town, set free and loosened in the moment of death, had returned to him who gave it birth, who loved it, and of whose life it was actually an expression. The Being of Smithville was literally a projection, an emanation of the dynamic, vital personality of its puissant creator. And, in death, it had returned on him with the shock of an accumulated power impossible for a human being to resist. For years he had provided it with life\u2014but gradually. It now rushed back to its source, thus concentrated, in a single terrific moment.\n\n'That's him,' I heard a voice saying from a great distance as it seemed. 'He's fired his last shot\u2014!' and saw Hank turning the body over with his rifle-butt. And, though the face itself was calm beneath the stars, there was an attitude of limbs and body that suggested the bursting of an enormous shell that had twisted every fibre by its awful force yet somehow left the body as a whole intact.\n\nWe carried 'it' to Tranter, and at the first real station along the line we got the news by telegraph: 'Smithville wiped out by fire. Burned two days and nights. Loss of life, 3000.' And all the way in my dreams I seemed still to hear that curious, dreadful cry of Smithville, the shrieking city rushing headlong through the sky.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Temptation of the Clay by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nSome men grow away from places, others grow into them: It is a curious and delicate matter. Before now, a man has been thrown out by his own property, yet his successor made immediately at home there. Once let Imagination dwell upon this psychology of places and it will travel very far. Here lies a great mystery, entangled with the mystery of life itself, delicately baited, too. Only the utterly obtuse, one thinks, can ignore the hint offered by Nature\u2014that there is this very definite relationship existing between places and human beings, and that the aggressive attitude is not always chiefly upon the side of the latter.\n\nSo it is that there are spots of country\u2014mere bits of scenery, a valley, plain, or river bank, estate or even garden\u2014that undeniably bid a man stay, and welcome; or for no ascertainable reason reject him, and make him anxious to leave. Campers, looking for a night's resting-place, know this well; and so may owners of estates and houses,\u2014campers on a larger scale, seeking to settle somewhere for the few years of a life-time. Neither one nor other, however, one thinks, unless he be a swift-minded poet with vivid divination, gets quite to the root of the matter.\n\nVery suggestive are the mysterious processes by which such results are sometimes brought about, a certain pathos in them too. For the rejected owner is usually of that hard intellectual type that is utterly insensible to the fairy flails of Beauty, and seeks, therefore, in vain through all his stores of logic for a reasonable cause and effect; whereas the accepted one, exquisitely adjusted though he may be to the seduction of the place that takes him in, yet is unable to tell in words what really happens, or to express a tithe of that sweet marvellous explanation that lies concealed within his heart. The one denies it, the other makes wild, poetic guesses; but neither really knows.\n\nDick Eliot understood something of the two points of view perhaps, because he experienced both acceptance and rejection; and this story, of how a place first welcomed him, then violently tossed him out again, is as queer a case of such relationship as one may ever hear. But, then, Dick Eliot combined in himself a measure of both types of mind; he was intellectual, and knew that two and two make four, but he was also mystical, and knew that they make five or nothing, or a million\u2014that everything is One, and One is everything. Neither was, perhaps, very strong in him, because life had not provided the opportunity for one or other's exclusive development; but both existed side by side in his general mental composition. And they resulted in a level so delicately poised that the apparent balance yet had instability at its roots.\n\nLeaving England at twenty-two or three\u2014there were misunderstandings with his University, where in classics and philosophy he had promised well; with his step-parents who regarded him as well lost; and in a sense, that yet did not affect his honour, with his country's law\u2014he had since met life in difficult, rough places. He had lived. All manner of experiences had been his; he had known starvation in strange cities, and had more than once been close to death\u2014queer kinds of death. But, also, he had been close to earth, and the earth had wonderfully taught him. The results of this teaching, not recognised at the time, came out later to puzzle and amaze him. For years he dwelt in the wilderness with life reduced to its essentials\u2014the big, crude, thundering facts of it\u2014so that he had come to regard scholarship, once so valued, as over-rated, and action as the sole reality. The poetic, mystical side of him passed into temporary abeyance. Worldly achievement and ambition led him. This, however, was a mood of youth only, a reaction due to the resentment of his exile, and to the grievance he cherished against the academic conventions\u2014so he deemed them\u2014that had cut him off from his inheritance.\n\nAt thirty, or thereabouts, he fell in love and married\u2014a vigorous personality of a woman with Red Indian in her blood, picked up in some wild escapade along the frontiers of Arizona and New Mexico; and, within six months of marriage, the death of an aunt had left him unexpected master of this little gem of an estate in the south of England where the following experience took place.\n\nThis impulsive action of an aunt whom he had seen but once, due to her wish to spite the other claimants rather than to any pretended love for himself, resulted in a radical change of life. He came home, ignored by his relations, and ignoring them in turn. The former love of books revived; the imaginative point of view re-asserted itself; he saw life from another angle. Action, after all, was but a part of it, another form of play. The mental life was the reality; he studied, meditated, wrote. Once more the deep, poetic mystery of things lit all his thoughts with wonder. Corrected by the hard experiences of his early years, the philosopher and dreamer in him assumed the upper hand, though the speculative dreams he indulged were more sanely regulated than before. The imagination was now more finely tempered.\n\nTo look at, he was sometimes obviously forty-five, yet at others could easily have passed for thirty:\u2014a tall, lean figure of a man; spare, as though the wilderness had taken that toll of him which no amount of subsequent easy living could efface. To see him was to think of men toiling in a hard, stern land where all things had to be conquered and nothing yielded of itself, where, moreover, human life was cheap and of small account. He was alert, always in training, cheeks thin, neck sinewy, knees ready instantly to turn a horse by grip alone, the reins unnecessary so that both hands were free to fight. The eyes were keen and dark, moustache clipped very short and partly grizzled; deep furrows marked the jaw and forehead; but the muscular hands were young, the fling of the shoulders young, the toss and set of the big head young as well. And he always dressed in riding breeches, with a strap about the waist instead of braces. You might see him hitch them up as he stepped back to leap the stream, or to take the pine knolls with a run downhill.\n\nIndeed, the imaginative side of him seemed almost incongruous; and that such a figure could conceal a mystical, tenderly poetic side not one man in a thousand need have guessed. But, in spite of these severer traits, the character, you felt, was tender enough upon its under side. It was merely that the control of the body and emotions acquired in the wilds had never been unlearned, and that no amount of softer living could let it be forgotten.\n\nAbout the rather grim and over-silent mouth, for instance, there were marks like the touches of a flower that sometimes made the sternness seem a clumsy mask. An intuitive woman, or a child, must have found him out at once." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 450", + "text": "After years spent as he had spent them among the conditions of primitive lands, Dick Eliot came back with his 'uncivilised' wife, to find that with the old established values of English 'County' existence they had little or nothing in common. Their ostracism by the neighbourhood has no place in this story, except to show how it threw them back intensely into the little property he had inherited. They lived there a dozen years, isolated, childless, knowing that solitude in a crowd which yet is never loneliness.\n\nThe 'Place,' as they always called it, took them, and welcome, to itself. The land, running to several hundred acres, was comparatively worthless, mere jumbled stretch of sand and pines and heathery hills; too remote from any building centre to be easily sold, and of no avail for agricultural purposes. For which, since he had just enough to live on quietly, both were grateful: they could keep it lovely and unspoilt. All round it, however, was an opulent, over-built-upon country that they loathed, since they felt that its quality, once admitted, would cause the Place to wither and die. The gross surfeit of prosperous houses, preserved woods, motoring hotels, and the rest would settle on its virgin face. Builders and business men would commercially appraise it, financiers undress it publicly so that it would know itself naked and ashamed. Deep down its soul would turn weakly and diseased, then disappear, and their own assuredly go with it.\n\nFor both had loved the Place at sight. She in particular loved it\u2014with a kind of rude enthusiasm she forced, as it were, upon his gentler character. Its combination of qualities fascinated her\u2014the old-world mellowness with the unkempt, untidy wildness. The way it kept alive that touch of the wilderness she had known from childhood, set in the midst of so much over-civilised country all about, gave her the feeling of having a little, precious secret world entirely to herself. She forced this view with all the vigour of her primitive poetry upon her husband till he accepted it as his own. It became his own; only she realised it more vitally than he did. The contrast laid a spell upon her, and she would not hear of going away. They lived there, in this miniature world, until they knew it with such close intimacy that it became identified with their very selves. She made him see it through her eyes, so that the place was haunted, saturated, invested with their moods of worship, love, and wonder. It became a little mystery-world that their feelings had turned living.\n\nThus when, after twelve years' happiness together, she died there, he stayed on, sole guardian as it were of all she had loved so dearly. Too vital a man to permit the slightest morbid growth which comes from brooding, he yet Jived among fond memories, aware of her presence in every nook and glade, in every tree, her voice in the tinkle of the stream, new values everywhere. Each ridge and valley, made familiar by her step and perfume, strengthened recollection, and more than ever before the Place seemed interwoven with herself and him, subtle expression of vanished joys. The Past stayed on in it; it did not move away; it remained the Present. Her death had doubly consecrated the little estate, making it, so to speak, a sacrament of dear communion. The only change, it seemed, was that he identified it with her being more than with himself or with the two of them. He guarded it unspoilt and sweet because of her who held it once so dear\u2014as another man might have kept a flower she had touched, a picture, or a dress that she had worn. Now it was doubly safe from the damage she had feared\u2014commercial spoliation. 'Keep the Place as it is, Dick,' she had so often said with a vehemence that belonged to her vigorous type, 'I'd hate to see it dirtied!' For her the civilised country round had always been 'dirty.' And he did so, almost with the feeling that he was keeping her person clean at the same time; for what a man thinks about is real, and he had come to regard the Place and herself as one.\n\nThrowing himself into definite work to occupy his mind, he kept it as the apple of his eye, living in solitude, and cared for only by a motherly old housekeeper (years ago his mother's maid) whose services he had by fortunate chance secured. He spent his leisure time in writing\u2014studies of obscure periods in forgotten history that, when published, merely added to the clutter of the world's huge mental lumber-room, to judge by the reviews. Once he made a journey to his haunts of youth, their youth, in Arizona, but only to return dissatisfied, with added pain. He settled down finally then, throwing himself with commendable energy into his studies, till the hurrying years brought him thus to forty-five.\n\nRarely he went to London and pored over musty volumes in the British Museum Reading-room, but after a day or two would hear the murmur of the mill-wheel singing round that portentous, dreary dome, and back he would come again, post-haste. And perhaps he chose his line of study, rather than more imaginative work, because it reasonably absorbed him, while yet it stole no single emotion from his past with her, nor trespassed upon the walking of one dear faint ghost." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 451", + "text": "And it was upon this gentle, solitary household that suddenly Manya Petrovski descended with her presence of wonder and of magic. Out of a clear blue sky she dropped upon him and made herself deliciously at home. Only daughter of his widowed sister, married to a Russian, she was fourteen at the time of her mother's death; and the duty seemed forced upon him with a conviction that admitted of no denial. He had never seen the child in his life, for she was born in the year that he returned to England, family relations simply non-existent; but he had heard of her, partly from Mrs. Coove, his housekeeper, and partly from tentative letters his sister wrote from time to time, aiming at reconciliation. He only knew that she was backward to the verge of being stupid, that she 'loved Nature and life out of doors,' and that she shared with her strange father a certain sulking moodiness that seemed to have been so strong in his own half-civilised Slav temperament. He also remembered that her mother, a curious mixture of puritanism and weakly dread of living, had brought her up strictly in the manufacturing city of the midlands where they dwelt 'wealthily,' surrounded by an atmosphere of artificiality that he deemed almost criminal. For his sister, fostering old-fashioned religious tendencies, believed that a visible Satan haunted the frontiers of her narrow orthodoxy, and would devour Manya as soon as look at her once she strayed outside. She too had claimed, he remembered, to love Nature, though her love of it consisted solely in looking cleverly out of windows at passing scenery she need never bother herself to reach. Her husband's violent tempers she had likewise ascribed to his possession by a devil, if not by the\u2014her own personal\u2014devil himself. And when this letter, written on her death-bed, came begging him, as the only possible relative, to take charge of the child, he accepted it, as his character was, unflinchingly, yet with the greatest possible reluctance. Significant, too, of his character was the detail that, out of many others surely far more important, first haunted him: 'She'll love Nature (by which he meant the Place) in the way her mother did\u2014artificially. We shan't get on a bit!'\u2014thus, instinctively, betraying what lay nearest to his heart.\n\nNone the less, he accepted the position without hesitation. There was no money; his sister's property was found to be mortgaged several times above its realisable value, and the child would come to him without a penny. He went headlong at the problem, as at so many other duties that had faced him\u2014puzzling, awkward duties\u2014with a kind of blundering delicacy native to his blood. 'Got to be done, no good dreaming about it,' he said to himself within a few hours of receiving the letter; and when a little later the telegram came announcing his sister's death, he added shortly with a grim expression, 'Here goes, then! ' In this plucky, yet not really impulsive decisiveness, the layer of character acquired in Arizona asserted itself. Action ousted dreaming.\n\nAnd in due course the preparations for the girl's reception were concluded. She would make the journey south alone, and Mrs. Coove would meet her. Moreover, evidence to himself at least of true welcome, Manya should have the bedroom which had been for years unoccupied\u2014his wife's.\n\nFor all that, he dreaded her arrival unspeakably. 'She'll be bored here. She'll dislike the Place-perhaps hate it. And I shall dislike her too.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 452", + "text": "Eliot ruled his little household well, because he ruled himself. No one, from the tri-weekly gardener to the rough half-breed Westerner who managed the modest stable, felt the least desire to trifle with him. Even Mrs. Coove, in the brief morning visits to his study, did not care about asking him to repeat some sentence that she had not quite caught or understood. Yet, in a sense, as with all such men, it was the woman who really managed him. 'Mrs.' Coove, big, motherly, spinster, divined the child beneath the grim exterior, and simply played with him. She it was who really ' ran' the household, relieving him of all domestic worries, and she it was, had he fallen ill\u2014which, even for a day, he never did\u2014who would have nursed him into health again with such tactfully concealed devotion that, while loving the nursing, he would never have guessed the devotion.\n\nSo it was largely upon Mrs. Coove that he secretly relied to welcome, manage, and look after his little orphaned niece, while, of course, pretending that he did it all himself.\n\n'She'll want a companion, sir, of sorts\u2014if I may make so bold\u2014some one to play with,' she told him when he had mentioned that later, of course, he would provide a ' governess or something' when he .had first 'sized up' the child.\n\nHe looked hard at her for a moment. He realised her meaning, that the hostile neighbourhood could be relied on to supply nothing of that kind.\n\n'Of course,' he said, as though he had thought of it himself.\n\n'She'll love the pony, sir, if she ain't one of the booky sort, which I seem to remember she ain't,' added Mrs. Coove, looking as usual as though just about to burst into tears. For her motherly face wore a lachrymose expression that was utterly deceptive. Her contempt for books, too, and writing folk was never quite successfully concealed.\n\nIn silence he watched the old woman wipe her moist hands upon a black apron, and the perplexities of his new duties grew visibly before his eyes. She had little notion that secretly her master stood a little in awe of her superior domestic knowledge.\n\n'The pony and the woods,' he suggested briefly.\n\n'A puppy or a kitten, sir, would help a bit\u2014for indoors, if I may make so bold,' the housekeeper ventured, with a passing gulp at her own audacity; ' and out of doors, sir, as you say, maybe she'll be 'appy enough. Her pore mother taught'\n\nThe long breath she had taken for this sentence she meant to use to the last gasp if possible. But her master cut her short.\n\n'Miss Manya arrives at six,' he said, turning to his books and papers. 'The dog-cart, with you in it, to meet her\u2014please.' The 'please' was added because he knew her vivid dislike of being too high from the ground, while judging correctly that the pleasure would more than compensate her for this risk of elevation. It was also intended to convey that he appreciated her help, but deplored her wordiness. Laconic even to surliness himself, he disliked long phrases. It was a perpetual wonder to him why even lazy people who detested effort would always use a dozen words where two were more effective.\n\nSo Mrs. Coove, accustomed to his ways, departed, with a curtsey that more than anything else resembled a sudden collapse of the knees beneath more than they could carry comfortably.\n\n'Thank you, sir; I'll see to it all right,' she said, obedient to his glance, beginning the sentence in the room but finishing it in the passage. She looked as though she would weep hopelessly once outside, whereas really she felt beaming pleasure. The compliment of being sent to meet Miss Manya made her forget her dread of the elevated, swaying dog-cart, as also of the silent half-breed groom who drove it. Full of importance she went off to make preparations.\n\nAnd later, when Mrs. Coove was on her way to the station five miles off, dangerously perched, as it seemed to her, in mid-air, he made his way out slowly into the woods, a vague feeling in him that there was something he must say good-bye to. The Place henceforth, with Manya in it, would be\u2014not quite the same. What change would come he could not say, but something of the secrecy, the long-loved tender privacy and wonder would depart. Another would share it with him, a trespasser, in a sense an outsider. And, as he roamed the little pine-grown vales, the mossy coverts, and the knee-high bracken, there stole into him this queer sensation that it all was part of a living Something that constituted almost a distinct entity. His wife inspired it, but, also, the Place had a personality of its own, apart from the qualities he had read into it. He realised, for the first time, that it too might take an attitude towards the new arrival. Everywhere, it seemed, there was an air of expectant readiness. It was aware... It might possibly resent it.\n\nAnd, for moments here and there, as he wandered, rose other ideas in him as well, brought for the first time into existence by the thought of the new arrival. This element, like a sudden shaft of sunlight on a landscape, discovered to him a new aspect of the mental picture. It was vague; yet perplexed him not a little. And it was this: that the thing he loved in all this little property, thinking it always as his own, was in reality what she had loved in it, the thing that she had made him see through the lens of her own more wild, poetic vision. What he was now saying good-bye to, the thing that the expected intruder might change, or even oust, was after all but a phantom memory\u2014the aspect she had built into it. This curious, painful doubt assailed him for the first time. Was his love and worship of the Place really an individual possession of his own, or had it been all these years but her interpretation of it that he enjoyed vicariously? The thought of Manya's presence here etched this possibility in sharp relief. Unwelcome, and instantly dismissed, the thought yet obtruded itself\u2014that his feelings had not been quite genuine, quite sincere, and that it was her memory, her so vital vision of the Place he loved rather than the Place itself at first hand.\n\nFor the idea that another was on the way to share it stirred the unconscious query: What precisely was it she would share?\n\nAnd behind it came a still more subtle questioning that he put away almost before it was clearly born: Was he really quite content with this unambitious guardianship of the dream-estate, and was the grievance of his exile so completely dead that he would, under all possible conditions, keep its loveliness inviolate and free from spoliation?\n\nThe coming of the child, with the new duties involved, and the probable later claims upon his meagre purse, introduced a worldly element that for so long had slept in him. He wondered. The ghosts all walked. But beside them walked other ghosts as well. And this new, strange pain of uncertainty came with them\u2014sinister though exceedingly faint suggestion that he had been worshipping a phantom fastened into his heart by a mind more vigorous than his own.\n\nAmbition, action, practical achievement stirred a little in their sleep.\n\nAnd on his way back he picked some bits of heather and bracken, a few larch twigs with little cones upon them, and several sprays of pine. These he carried into the house and up into the child's bedroom, where he stuck them about in pots and vases. The flowers Mrs. Coove had arranged he tossed away. For flowers in a room, or in a house at all, he never liked; they looked unnatural, artificial. Flowers and food together on a table seemed to him as dreadful as the sickly smelling wreaths people loved to put on coffins. But leaves were different; and earth was best of all. In his own room he had two wide, deep boxes of plain earth, watered daily, renewed from time to time, and more sweetly scented than any flowers in the world.\n\nOpening the windows to let in all the sun and air there was, he glanced round him with critical approval. To most the room must have seemed bare enough, yet he had put extra chairs and tables in it, a sofa too, because he thought the child would like them. Personally, he preferred space about him; his own quarters looked positively unfurnished; rooms were cramped enough as it was, and useless upholstery gave him a feeling of oppression. He still clung to essentials; and an empty room, like earth and sky, was fine and dignified.\n\nBut Manya, he well knew, might feel differently, and he sought to anticipate her wishes as best he might. For Manya came from a big house where the idea was to conceal every inch of empty space with something valuable and useless; and her playground had been gardens smothered among formal flowerbeds\u2014triangles, crescents, circles, anything that parodied Nature\u2014paths cut cleanly to neat patterns, and plants that acknowledged their shame by growing all exactly alike without a trace of individuality.\n\nHe moved to the open window, gazing out across the stretch of hill and heathery valley, thick with stately pines. The wind sighed softly past his ears. He heard the murmur of the droning mill-wheel, the drum and tinkle of falling water mingling with it. And the years that had passed since last he stood and looked forth from this window came up close and peered across his shoulder. The Past rose silently beside him and looked out too... He saw it all through other eyes that once had so large a share in fashioning it.\n\nAgain came this singular impression\u2014that, while he waited, the whole Place waited too. It knew that she was coming. Another pair of feet would run upon its face and surface, another voice wake all its little echoes, another mind seek to read its secret and share the mystery of its being.\n\n'If Manya doesn't like it!' struck with real pain across his heart. But the thought did not complete itself. Only, into the strong face came a momentary expression of helplessness that sat strangely there. Whether the child would like himself or not seemed a consideration of quite minor importance.\n\nA sound of wheels upon the gravel at the front of the house disturbed his deep reflections, and, shutting the door carefully behind him, he gave one last look round to see that all was right, and then went downstairs to meet her. The sigh that floated through his mind was not allowed to reach the lips; but another expression came up into his face. His lips became compressed, and resolution passed into his eyes. It was the look\u2014and how he would have laughed, perhaps, could he have divined it!\u2014the look of set determination that years ago he wore when in some lonely encampment among the Bad Lands something of danger was reported near.\n\nWith a sinking heart he went downstairs to meet his duty.\n\nBut in the hall, scattering his formal phrases to the winds, a boyish figure, yet with loose flying hair, ran up against him, then stepped sharply back. There was a moment's pitiless examination.\n\n'Uncle Dick!' he heard, cried softly. 'Is that what you're like? But how wonderful!' And he was aware that a pair of penetrating eyes, set wide apart in a grave but eager face, were mercilessly taking him in. It was he who was being 'sized up.' No redskin ever made a more rapid and thorough examination, nor, probably, a more accurate one.\n\n'Oh! I never thought you would look so kind and splendid!'\n\n'Me! 'he gasped, forgetting every single thing he had planned to say in front of this swift-moving creature who attacked him.\n\nShe came close up to him, her voice breathless still but if possible softer, eyes shining like two little lamps.\n\n'I expected\u2014from what Mother said\u2014you'd be\u2014-just Uncle Richard! And instead it's only Uncle\u2014Uncle Dick!'\n\nHere was unaffected sincerity indeed. He had dreaded\u2014he hardly knew why\u2014some simpering sentence of formality, or even tears at being lonely in a strange house. And, in place of either came this sort of cowboy verdict, straight as a blow from the shoulder. It took his breath away. In his heart something turned very soft and yearning. And yet he\u2014winced.\n\n'Nice drive?' he heard his gruff voice asking. For the life of him he could think of nothing else to say. And the answer came with a little peal of breathless laughter, increasing his amazement and confusion.\n\n'I drove all the way. I made the blackie let me. And the mothery person held on behind like a bolster. It was glorious.'\n\nAt the same moment two strong, quick arms, thin as a lariat, were round his neck. And he was being kissed\u2014once only, though it felt all over his face. She stood on tiptoe to reach him, pulling his head down towards her lips.\n\n'How are you, Uncle, please?'\n\n'Thanks, Manya,'. he said shortly, straightening up in an effort to keep his balance, 'all right. Glad you are, too. Mrs. Coove, your \" mothery person who held on like a bolster,\" will take you upstairs and wash you. Then food\u2014soon as you like.'\n\nHe had not indulged in such a long sentence for years. It increased his bewilderment to hear it. Something ill-regulated had broken loose.\n\nMrs. Coove, who had watched the scene from the background and doubtless heard the flattering description of herself, moved forward with a mountainous air of possession. Her face as usual seemed to threaten tears, but there was a gleam in her eyes which could only come from the joy of absolute approval. With a movement of her arm that seemed to gather the child in, she went laboriously upstairs. The back of her alone proved to any seeing eye that she had already passed willingly into the state of abject slavery that all instinctive mothers love.\n\n'We shan't be barely five minutes, sir,' she called respectfully when half-way up; and the way she glanced down upon her grim master, who stood still with feet wide apart watching them, spoke further her opinion\u2014and her joy at it\u2014that he too was caught within her toils. 'She'll manage you, sir, if I may make so bold,' was certainly the thought her words did not express.\n\nThey vanished round the corner\u2014the heavy tread and the light, pattering step. And he still stood on there, waiting in the hall. A mist rose just before his eyes; he did not see quite clearly. In his heart a surge of strong, deep feeling struggled upwards, but was instantly suppressed. Mdnya had said another thing that moved him far more than her childish appreciation of himself, something that stirred him to the depths most strangely.\n\nFor, when he asked her how she enjoyed the drive, the girl had replied with undeniable sincerity, looking straight into his eyes:\n\n'The last bit was like a fairy-tale. Uncle, how awfully this place must love you!'\n\nShe did not say, 'How you must love the place!' And\u2014she loathed the 'dirty' country all about.\n\nThen, the first rush of excitement over, a sort of shyness, curiously becoming, had settled down all over her like a cloud. It settled down upon himself as well. But\u2014she had said the perfect thing. And his doubts all vanished. It was\u2014yes, surely\u2014the Place she loved.\n\nAnd yet, when all was over, there passed through him an unpleasant afterthought\u2014as though Manya had applied a test by which already something in himself was found gravely wanting." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 453", + "text": "With its sharp, pine-grown declivities, its tumbling streams, stretches of open heather, and its miniature forests of bracken, the dream-estate was like a liliputian Scotland compressed into a few hundred acres. All was in exquisite proportion.\n\nThe old house of rough grey stone, set in one corner, looked out upon a wild, untidy garden that melted unobserved into woods of mystery beyond, and farther off rose sharp against the sky a series of peaked knolls and ridges that in certain lights looked like big hills many miles away. There were diminutive fairy valleys you could cross in twenty minutes; and several rivulets, wandering from the moorlands higher up, formed the single stream that once had worked the Mill.\n\nBut the Mill, standing a stone's-throw from the study windows, so that he heard the water singing and gurgling almost among his book-shelves, had for a century ground nothing more substantial than sunshine, air, and shadow. For the gold-dust of the stars is too fine for grinding. But it ground as well the dreams of the lonely occupant of the grey-toned house. And he let it stand there, falling gradually into complete decay, because beneath those crumbling wooden walls\u2014he remembered it as of yesterday\u2014the sudden stroke had come that in a moment, dropping as it seemed out of eternity, had robbed him of his chief possession\u2014fashioner of the greatest dream of all. The splash and murmur of the water, the drone of the creaking wheel in flood time, the white weed that gathered thickly over the pond formed by the ancient dam, and the red-brown tint of walls and rotting roof,\u2014all were like the colour of the water's singing, the colour of her memory, and the colour of his thinking too, made sweetly visible.\n\nIndeed, despite his best control, she still lurked everywhere, so that he could not recall a single experience of the past years without at the same time some vivid aspect of the scenery, as she saw it, rising up clearly to accompany it. In every corner stood the ghost of a still recoverable mood. Here he had suffered, fought, and prayed; here he had loved and hated; here he had lost and found. All the kaleidoscope aspects of growing older, of hopes and fears and disappointments, were visualised for him in terms of the Place where he had met and dealt with them for his soul's good or ill. But behind them always stood that Figure in Chief; it was she who directed the ghostly band; and she it was who coaxed the romantic scenery thus into the support of all his personal moods, and continued to do so with even greater power after she was gone.\n\nHis respect for the Place seemed, therefore, involved with his respect for himself and her. That tumbling stream had an inalienable right of way; that mill of golden-brown claimed ancient lights as truly as any mental palace of thoughts within his mind; and the little dips and rises in the woods were as sacred\u2014so he had always felt\u2014as were those twists and turns of character that he called his views of life and his beliefs. This blending of himself with the Place and her had been very carefully reared. The notion that its foundations were not impregnable for ever was a most disturbing one. That the mere arrival of an intruder could shake it, possibly shatter it, touched sacrilege. And for long he suppressed the outrageous notion so successfully that he almost entirely forgot about it.\n\nThis strip of vivid land whereon he dwelt acquired, moreover, a heightened charm from the character of the odious land surrounding it. For on all sides was that type of country best described as over-fed and over-lived-upon. The scenery was choked and smothered unto death; it breathed, if at all, the breath of a fading life pumped through it artificially and with labour. Heavily beneath the skies it lay\u2014acres of inert soil.\n\nThere were, indeed, people who admired it, calling it typical of something or other in the south of England; but for him these people, like the land itself, were bourgeois, dull, insipid, and phlegmatic as the back of a sheep. Like rooms in a big club, it was over-furnished with too solid upholstery\u2014thick, fat hedges, formal oak woods, lifeless copses stuck upon slopes from which successful crops had sucked long ago the last vestiges of spontaneous life; and spotted with self-satisfied modern cottages, 'improved ' beyond redemption, that made him think with laughter of some scattered group of city aldermen. 'They're pompous City magnates,' he used to tell his wife, 'strayed from the safety of Cornhill, and a little frightened by the wind and rain.'\n\nEverywhere, amid bushy trees that looked so pampered they were almost sham, stood ' country houses,' whole crops of them, dozing after heavy meals among gardens of sleek tulip and geraniums. They plastered themselves, with the atmosphere of small Crystal Palaces, upon every available opening, comfortably settled down and weighted with every conceivable modern appliance, and in ' Parks' all cut to measure like children's wooden toys. They stood there, heavy and respectable, living close to the ground, and in them, almost without exception, dwelt successful business men who owned a ' country seat.' From his uncivilised, wild-country point of view, they epitomised the soul of the entire scenery about them\u2014something gross and sluggish that involved stagnation. They brooded with an air of vulgar luxury that was too stupid even to be active. Here ' resided,' in a word, the wealthy.\n\nWhen he walked or drove through the five miles of opulent ugliness that lay between Mill House and the station, it seemed like crossing an inert stretch of adipose tissue, then lighting suddenly upon a pulsating nerve-centre. To step back into the fresh and hungry beauty of his pine valley, with its tumbling waters and its fragrance of wild loveliness, was an experience he never ceased to take delight in. The air at once turned keen, the trees gave out sharp perfumes, waters rustled, foliage sang. Oh! here was life, activity, and movement. Vital currents flowed through and over it. The grey house among the fir-trees, beckoning to the Mill beyond, was a place where things might happen and pass swiftly. Here was no stagnation possible. Thrills of beauty, denied by that grosser landscape, returned electrically upon the heart. With every breath he drew in wonder and enchantment.\n\nAnd all this, for some years now, he had enjoyed alone. Rather than diminishing with his middle age, the spell had increased. Then came this sudden question of another's intrusion upon his dream-estate, and he had dreaded painful alteration. The presence of another, most likely stupid, and certainly unsympathetic, must cause a desolating change. Alteration there was bound to be, or at the best a readjustment of values that would steal away the wild and accustomed flavour. He had dreaded the child's arrival unspeakably. It had turned him abruptly timid, and this timidity betrayed the sweetness of the treasure that he guarded. For it came close to fear\u2014the fear men know when they realise an attack they cannot, by any means within their power, hope to defeat.\n\nAnd alteration, as he apprehended, came; yet not the alteration he had dreaded. Manya's arrival had been a surprise that was pure joy. Its wonder almost woke suspicion. And the surprise, he found, grew into a series of surprises that at first took his breath away. The alchemy that her little shining presence brought persisted, grew from day to day, till it operated with such augmenting power that it changed himself as well. No stranger fairy-tale was ever written." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 454", + "text": "Next day he put his work aside and devoted himself whole-heartedly to the lonely child. It was not only duty now. She had stirred his love and pity from the first. They would get on together. Unconsciously, by saying the very thing to win him\u2014'Uncle, how the Place must love you!'\u2014she had struck the fundamental tone that made the three of them in harmony, and set the whole place singing. The sense of an intruding trespasser had vanished. The Place accepted her.\n\nIt was only later that he realised this completely and in detail, though on looking back he saw clearly that the verdict had been given instantly. For no revision changed it. 'I'm all right here with Uncle,' was the child's quick intuition, meeting his own halfway:\u2014' We three are all right here together.' For she leaped upon his beloved dream-estate and made it seem twice as wild and living as before. She delighted in its loneliness and mystery. She clapped her hands and laughed, pointed and asked questions, made her eyes round with wonder, and, in a word, put her own feelings from the start into each nook and corner where he took her. There was no shyness, no confusion; she made herself at home with a little air of possession that, instead of irritating as it might have done, was utterly enchanting. It was like the chorus of approval that increases a man's admiration for the woman he has chosen.\n\nShe brought her own interpretations, too, yet without destroying his own. They even differed from his own, yet only by showing him points and aspects he had not realised. The child saw things most oddly from another point of view. From the very first she began to say astonishing things. They piqued and puzzled him to the end, these things she said. He felt they unravelled something. In his own mind the personality of the Place and the memory of his wife had become confused and jumbled, as it were. Manya's remarks and questions disentangled something. Her child's divination cleared his perceptions with a singular directness. She had strong in her that divine curiosity of children which is as far removed from mere inquisitiveness as gold-dust from a vulgar - finished ornament. Wonder in her was vital and insatiable, and some of these questions that he could not answer stirred in him, even on that first day of acquaintance, almost the sense of respect.\n\nMorning and afternoon they spent together in visiting every corner of the woods and valleys; no inch was left without inspection; they followed the stream from the moorlands to the Mill, plunged through the bracken, leaped the high tufts of heather, and scrambled together down the precipitous sandpits. She did not jump as well as he did, but showed equal recklessness. And the depths of shadowy pinewood made her hushed and silent like himself. In her childish way she felt the wild charm of it all deeply. Not once did she cry ' How lovely ' or ' How wonderful'; but showed her happiness and pleasure by what she did.\n\n'Better than yesterday, eh?' he suggested once, to see what she would answer, yet sure it would be right.\n\nShe darted to his side. 'That was all stuffed,' she said, laconically as himself, and making a wry face. And then she added with a grave expression, half anxious and half solemn, 'Fancy, if that got in! Oh, Uncle!'\n\n'Couldn't,' he comforted himself and her, delighted secretly.\n\nBut it was on their way home to tea in the dusk, feeling as if they had known one another all their lives, so quickly had friendship been cemented, that she said her first genuinely strange thing. For a long time she had been silent by his side, apparently tired, when suddenly out popped this little criticism that showed her mind was actively working all the time.\n\n'Uncle, you have been busy\u2014keeping it so safe. I suppose you did most of it at night.'\n\nHe started. His own thoughts had been travelling in several directions at once.\n\n'I don't walk in my sleep,' he laughed.\n\n'I mean when the stars are shining,' she said. She felt it as delicately as that, then! She felt the dream quality in it. 'I mean, it loves you best when the sun has set and it comes out of its hole,' she added, as he said nothing.\n\n'Manya, it loves you too\u2014already,' he said gently.\n\nThen came the astonishing thing. The voice was curious; the words seemed to come from a long way off, taking time to reach him. They took time to reach her too, as though another had first whispered them. It almost seemed as though she listened while she said them. A sense of the uncanny touched him here in the shadowy dark wood:\n\n'It's a woman, you see, really, and that's why you're so fond of it. That's why it likes me too, and why I can play with it.'\n\nThe amazing judgment gave him pause at once, for he felt no child ought to know or say such things. It savoured of precociousness, even of morbidity, both of which his soul loathed. But reflection brought clearer judgment. The sentence revealed something he had already been very quick to divine, namely, that while the ordinary mind in her was undeveloped, backward, almost stunted, by her bringing up, another part of her was vividly aware. And this other part was taught of Nature; it was the fairy thing that children had the right to know. She stood close to the earth. Landscape and scenery brought her vivid impressions that fairytales, rather stupidly, translate into princes and princesses, ogres, giants, dragons. Manya, having been denied the fairy books, personified these impressions after her own fashion. What was it after all but the primitive instinct of early races that turned the moods of Nature into beings, calling them gods, or the instinct of a later day that personified the Supreme, calling it God? He himself had ' felt ' in very imaginative moments that bits of scenery, as with trees and even the heavenly bodies, could actually express such differences of temperament, seem positive or negative, almost male or female. And perhaps, in her original, child's fashion, she felt it too.\n\nThen Manya interrupted his reflections with a further observation that scattered his philosophising like an explosion. Something, as he heard it, came up close and brushed him. It made him start.\n\n'In some places, you see, Uncle, I feel shy all over. But here I could run about naked. I could undress.'\n\nHe burst out laughing. Instinctively he felt this was the best thing he could do. A sympathetic answer might have meant too much, yet silence would have made her feel foolish. His laughter turned the idea in her little mind all wholesome and natural.\n\n'Play here to your heart's content, for there's no one to disturb you,' he cried. 'And when I'm too busy,' he added, thinking it a happy inspiration, 'Mrs. Coove can.'\n\n'Oh,' she interrupted like a flash, 'but she's too bulgey. She could never jump like you, for one thing.'\n\n'True.'\n\n'Or play hide-and-seek. She couldn't fit in anywhere. She'd never be able to hide, you see.'\n\nAnd so they reached the house, like two friends who had found suddenly a new delight in life, and sat down to an enormous tea, with jam, buttered muffins, and a stodgy indigestible cake straight from the oven. His tea hitherto had consisted of one cup and two pieces of thin bread and butter. But the appetite of twenty-five had come back again.\n\nA new joy of life had come back with it. After so many years of brooding, dreaming, solitary working, he had grown over solemn, the sense of fun and humour atrophying. He had erected barriers between himself and all his kind, hedged himself in too much. The arrival of this child brought new impetus into the enclosure. Without destroying what imagination had prized so long, she shifted the old values into slightly different keys. Already he caught his thoughts running forward to construct her future\u2014what she might become, how he might help her to develop spiritually and materially\u2014yes, materially as well. His thoughts had hitherto run chiefly backwards.\n\nThis need not, indeed could not, involve being unfaithful to the past. But it did mean looking ahead instead of always looking back. It was more wholesome.\n\nYet what dawned upon him\u2014rather, what chiefly struck him out of his singular observations perhaps, was this: not only that the Place had whole-heartedly accepted her, but that she had instantly established some definite relation with it that was different to his own. It was even deeper, truer, more vital than his own; for it was somehow more natural. It had been discovered, though already there; and it was not, like his own, built up by imaginative emotion. Hence came his notion that she disentangled something; hence the respect he felt for her from the start; hence, too, the original, surprising things she sometimes said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 455", + "text": "For several days he watched and studied her, while she turned the Place into a private playground of her own with that air of sweet possession that had charmed him from the first. Backward and undeveloped she undeniably was, but, in view of her stupid, artificial bringing up, he understood this easily. Of books and facts, of knowledge taught in school, she was shockingly ignorant. The wrong part of her had been 'forced' at the wrong time; the 'play' side had been denied development, and, while gathering force underground, her little brain had learned by heart, but without real comprehension, things that belonged properly to a later stage. For if ever there was one, here was an elemental being, free of the earth, native of open places, called to the wisdom of the woods. It all had been suppressed in her. She now broke out and loose, bewildered, and a little rampant, wild rather, and over joyful. She revelled like an animal in new-found freedom.\n\nIn time she sobered. He led her wisely. Yet often she went too fast for him to follow, and slipped beyond his understanding altogether. For there were gaps in her nature, unfilled openings in her mind, loopholes through which she seemed to escape too easily, perhaps too completely, into her playground, certainly too rapidly for him to catch her up. It was then she said these things that so astonished him, making him feel she was somehow an eldritch soul that saw things, Nature especially, from a point of view he had never reached. Her sight of everything was original. A bird's-eye view he could understand; most primitive folk possessed it, and in his wife it had been vividly illuminating. But Manya had not got this bird's-eye view, the sweeping vision that takes in everything at a single glance from above. Her angle was another one, peculiar to herself. Laughing, he thought of it rather as seeing everything from below\u2014a fish's point of view!\n\nBrightness described her best\u2014eyes, skin, teeth, and lips all shone. Yet her manner was subdued, not effervescent, and in it this evidence of depth, a depth he could not always plumb. It was a nature that sparkled, but the sparkle was suppressed; and he loved the sparkle, while loving even more its suppression. It gathered till the point of flame was reached, and it was the possible out-rushing of this potential flame that won his deference, and sometimes stirred his awe. His dread had been considerable, anticipation keen; and the relief was in proportion. Here was a child he could both respect and love; and the sense of responsibility for the little being entrusted to his charge grew very strong indeed.\n\nIn due course he supplied a governess, Fr\u00e4ulein B\u00fchlke. She came from the neighbouring town, with her broad, flat German face, framed in flaxen hair that was glossy but not oiled, and smoothed down close to the skull across a shining parting. Mechanically devout, rather fussy, literal in mind, exceedingly worthy and conscientious, her formula was, 'You think that would be wise? Then I try it.' And the 'trying,' which the tone suggested would be delicate, was applied with a blundering directness that defeated its own end. Her method was thumping rather than insinuating, and her notion of delicacy was to state her meaning heavily, add to it, 'Try to believe that I know best, dear child,' and then conscientiously enforce it. Manya she understood as little as an okapi, but she was kind, affectionate, and patient; and though Eliot always meant to change her, he never did, for the getting of a suitable governess was more than he and Mrs. Coove could really manage. 'Der Hebe Gott weisst alles,' was the phrase with which she ended all their interviews. And if Manya's obedience showed a slight contempt, it was a contempt he did not think it wise entirely to check.\n\nFor he himself could never scold her. It was impossible. It felt as though he stepped upon a baby. Their relations were those of equals almost, each looking up to the other with respect and wonder. Her schoolroom life became a thing apart. So did the hours in his study. Her walks with the governess and his journeys to the British Museum were mere extensions of the schoolroom and the study. It was when they went out together, roaming about the Place at will, exploring, playing, building fires, and the rest, that their true enjoyment came\u2014enjoyment all the keener because each stuck valiantly to duty first.\n\nHer face, though not exactly pretty, had the charm of some wild intelligence he had never seen before. The nose, slightly tilted, wore a tiny platform at its tip. The mouth was firm, lips exquisitely cut, but it was in the dark, shining eyes that the expression of the soul ran into focus; though at times she knew long periods of silence that seemed almost sullen, when her eyes turned dead and coaly, and she seemed almost gone away from behind them. One day she was old as himself, another a mere baby; something was always escaping the leash and slipping off, then coming back with a rush of some astonishing sentence it had gone to fetch. Her physical appearance sometimes was elusive too, now tall, now short, her little body protean as her little soul.\n\nLike running water she was all over the house, not laughing much, not exactly gay or cheerful either, but somehow charged to the brim with a mysterious spirit of play\u2014grave, earnest play, yet airy with a consummate mischief sometimes that was the despair of Fr\u00e4ulein B\u00fchlke, who wore an expression then as though, after all, there were things God did not know. Yes, like running water through the rooms and corridors, and tumbling down the stairs behind the kitten or round the skirts of 'bulgey' Mother Coove. Swift and gentle always, yet with force enough to hurt you if you got in her way; almost to sting or slap. Soft, and very girlish to look at, she was really hard as a boy, flexible too as a willow branch, and with a rod of steel laced somewhere invisibly through her tenderness, unsuspected till occasion\u2014rarely\u2014betrayed its presence. It shifted its position too; one never knew where that firmness which is character would crop out and refuse to bend. For then the childishness would vanish. She became imperious as a little natural queen. The half-breed groom had a taste of this latter quality more than once, and afterwards worshipped the ground she walked on. To see them together, she in her dark-grey riding-habit, holding a little whip, and he with his sinister, wild face and half malignant manners, called up some picture of a child and a savage animal she had tamed.\n\nBut the thing Manya chiefly brought into his garden, and so also into the garden of his thoughts, was this new element of Play. She brought with her, not only the child's make-believe, but the child's conviction, earnestness, and sense of reality.\n\n'Tell me one thing,' she had a way of saying, sure preface to something of significant import that she had to ask, accompanied always by a darker expression in the eyes, puzzled or searching and not on any account to be evaded or lightly answered; ' Tell me one thing, Uncle: do these outside things come after us into the house as well?' ' Only when we allow them, or invite them in,' he replied, taking up her mood as seriously as herself, yet knowing her question to be a feint. She knew the true answer better than himself. She wished to see what he would say. Her sly laughter of approval told him that. 'They're already there, though, aren't they?' she whispered, and when he nodded agreement, she added, 'Of course; they're everywhere really all the time. They don't move about as we do.'\n\nBut she had often this singular way of seeing things, and saying them, from the original point of view whence she regarded them\u2014from beneath, as it were, topsy-turvy some might call it, almost a little mad, judged by the sheep-like vision of the majority, yet for herself entirely true, consistent, not imagined merely.\n\nHer literal use of words, too, was sometimes vividly illuminating\u2014as though she saw language directly', and robbed of the cloak with which familiar use has smothered it. She undressed phrases, making them shine out alone.\n\n'Moping, child?' he asked once, when one of her silent fits had been somewhat prolonged. 'Unhappy?'\n\n'No, Uncle. And I'm not moping.'\n\n'What is it, then?'\n\n'Fr\u00e4ulein told me I was self-ish, rather.'\n\n'That's all right,' he said to comfort her. 'Be yourself\u2014self-ish\u2014or you're nothing.'\n\nShe followed her own thought, perhaps not understanding him quite.\n\n'She said I must put my Self out more\u2014for others. Mother used to say it too.'\n\nHe turned and stared at her. The little face was very grave.\n\n'Eh?' he asked. 'Put your Self out?'\n\nManya nodded, fixing her eyes, half dreamy, upon his own. She had been far away. Now she was coming back.\n\n'So I'm learning,' she said, her voice coming as from a distance. 'It's so funny. But it's not really difficult\u2014a bit. I could teach you, I think, if you'd promise faithfully to practise regularly.'\n\nThere was a pause before he asked the next question.\n\n'How d'you do it, child?' came a little gruffly, for he felt queer emotion rising in him.\n\nShe shrugged her shoulders.\n\n'Oh, I couldn't tell you like that. I could only show you.'\n\nThere was a touch of weirdness about the child. It stole into him\u2014a faint sense of eeriness, as though she were letting him see through peepholes into that other world she knew so well.\n\n'Well,' he asked, more gently, 'what happens when you have put your Self\u2014er\u2014out? Other things come in, eh?'\n\n'How can I tell?' she answered like a flash. 4 I'm out.'\n\nHe stared at her, waiting for more. But nothing followed, and a minute later she was as usual, laughing, her brilliant eyes flashing with mischief, and presently went upstairs to get tidy for their evening meal that was something between an early dinner and high tea. Only at the door she paused a second to fling him another of her characteristic phrases:\n\n'I wonder, Uncle. Don't you?' For she certainly knew some natural way, born in her, of moving her Self aside and letting the tide of 'bigger things ' sweep in and use her. It was her incommunicable secret.\n\nAnd he did wonder a good deal. Wonder with him had never faded as with most men. It had often puzzled him why this divine curiosity about everything should disappear with the majority after twenty-five, instead, rather, of steadily increasing the more one knows. Familiarity with those few scattered details the world calls knowledge had never dulled its golden edge for him. Only Manya, and the things she asked and said, gave it a violent new impetus that was like youth returned. And her notion of putting one's Self out in order to let other things come in filled him with about as much wonder as he could comfortably hold just then. He dozed over the fire, thinking deeply, wishing that for a single moment he could stand where this child stood, see things from her point of view, learn the geography of the world she Jived in. The source of her inspiration was Nature of course. Yet he too stood close to Nature and was full of sympathetic understanding for her mystery and beauty. Did Manya then stand nearer than himself? Did she, perhaps, dwell inside it, while he examined from the outside only, a mere onlooker, though an appreciative and loving onlooker?\n\nIt came to him that things yielded up to her their essential meaning because she saw them from another side, and he recalled an illuminating line of Alice Meynell about a daisy, and how wonderful it must be to see from 'God's side,' even of such a simple thing.\n\nManya, moreover, saw everything in some amazing fashion as One. The facts of common knowledge men studied so laboriously in isolated groups were but the jewelled facets that hung glittering upon the enormous flanks of this One. The thought flashed through his mind. He remembered another thing she said, and then another; they began 4 to crowd his brain. 'I never dream because I know it all awake,' she told him once; and only that afternoon, when he asked her why she always stopped and stood straight before him\u2014a habit she had\u2014when he spoke seriously with her, she answered, 'Because I want to see you properly. I must be opposite for that! No one can see their own face, or what's next to them, can they?'\n\nTruth, and a philosophical truth! Of no particular importance, maybe, yet strange for a child to have discovered.\n\nEven her ideas of space were singularly original, direct, unhampered by the terms that smother meaning. 'Up' and 'down' perplexed her; 'left' and 'right' perpetually deceived her; even 'inside' and 'outside,' when she tried to express them, landed her in a chaos of confusion that to most could have seemed only sheer stupidity. She stood, as it were, in some attitude of naked knowledge behind thought, perception unfettered, untaught, in which she knew that space was only a way of talking about something that no one ever really understands. She saw space, felt it rather, in some absolute sense, not yet 'educated' to treat it relatively. She saw everything ' round,' as though her spatial perceptions were all circles. And circles are infinite, eternal.\n\nWith Time, too, it was somewhat similar. 'It'll come round again,' she said once, when he chided her for having left something undone earlier in the day; or, 'when I get back to it, Uncle,' in reply to his reminding her of a duty for the following day. To the end she was 'stupid ' about telling the time, and until he cured her of it her invariable answer to his question, 'what o'clock it was,' would be the literal truth that it was 'just now, Uncle,' or simply 'now,' as though she saw things from an absolute, and not a relative point of view. She was always saying things to prove it in this curious manner. And, while it made him sometimes feel uncomfortable in a way he could not quite define, it also increased his attitude of respect towards the secret, mysterious thing she hid so well, though without intending to hide it. She seemed in touch with eternal things\u2014more than other children\u2014not merely with a transient expression of them filtered down for normal human comprehension. Some giant thing she certainly knew. She lived it. Death, for instance, was a conception her mind failed to grasp. She could not realise it. People had 'left' or 'gone away,' perhaps, but somehow for her were always 'there.'\n\nThus started, his thoughts often travelled far, but always came up with a shock against that big black barrier\u2014the army of the dead. The dead, of course, were always somewhere\u2014if there was survival. But, though he had encountered strange phases of the spiritualistic movement in America, he had known nothing to justify the theory of interference from the other side of that black barrier. The deliverances of the mediums brought no conviction. He sometimes wondered, that was all. And in particular he wondered about that member of the great army who had been for years his close and dear companion. This was natural enough. Could it be that his thought, prolonged and concentrated, formed a prison-house from which escape was difficult? And had his own passionate thinking that ever associated her memory with the Place, detained one soul from farther flight elsewhere? Was this an explanation of that hint Mdnya so often brought him\u2014that her presence helped to disentangle, liberate, unravel...? Was the Place haunted in this literal sense? ." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 456", + "text": "Yet, perhaps, after all, the chief change she introduced was this vital resurrection of his sense of play. For Play is eternal, older than the stars, older even than dreams. She taught him afresh things he had already known, but long forgotten or laid aside. And all she knew came first direct from Nature, large and undiluted.\n\nHe learned, for instance, the secret of that deep quiet she possessed even in her wildest moments; and how it came from a practice in her mother's house, where all was rush and clamour about worldly 'horrid things '\u2014her practice of lying out at night to watch the stars. But not merely to watch them for a minute. She would watch for hours, following the constellations from the moment they loomed above the horizon till they set again at dawn. She saw them move slowly across the entire sky. For ' mother hurried and fussed ' her so, and by doing this she instinctively drew into her curious wild heart the deep delight of feeling that \u00a3 there was lots of room really, and no particular hurry about anything.' Her inspiration was profound, from ancient sources, natural.\n\nAnd her 'play,' for the same reason, was never foolish. It was creative play. It was the faculty by which the poets and dreamers re-create the world, and thus rejuvenate it. Adam knew it when he named the beasts, and Job, when he made rhymes about taking Leviathan with a hook, and sang his little heart-sweet songs about the conies and the hopping hills. In the wise it never dies, for it is most subtly allied to wisdom, and only the dreamless can divorce it quite. It is the natural, untaught poetry of the soul which laughs and weeps with Nature, knowing itself akin, seeing itself in everything and everything in itself. Manya in some amazing fashion, not yet educated out of her, knew Nature in herself.\n\nShe did naughty things too, as he learned from Mrs. Coove, when he felt obliged to lecture her, but they were invariably typical and explanatory of her close-to-Nature little being. And he understood what she felt so well that his lectures ended in laughter, with her grave defence ' Uncle, you'd have done the same yourself.' Once in particular, after a fortnight of parching drought, when the gush of warm rain came with its welcome, drenching soak, and the child ran out upon the balcony in her nightgown to feel it on her body too\u2014how could he prove her wrong, having felt the same delight himself? 'I was thirsty and dry all over. I had to do it,' she explained, puzzled, adding that of course she had changed afterwards and used the rough Turkey towel 'just as you do.'\n\nBut other things he did not understand so well; and one of these was her singular habit of imitating the sounds of Nature, with an accuracy, too, that often deceived even himself. The true sounds of Nature are only two\u2014water and wind, with their many variations. And Manya, by some trick of tone and breath, could reproduce them marvellously.\n\n'It's the way to get close,' she told him when he asked her why, 'the way to get inside. If you get the sound exact, you feel the same as they do, and know their things.' And the cryptic, yet deeply suggestive explanation contained a significant truth that yet just evaded his comprehension. They often played it together in the woods, though he never approached her own astonishing excellence. This, again, stirred something like awe in him; it was a little eerie, almost uncanny, to hear her ' doing trees,' or ' playing wind and water.'\n\nBut the strangest of all her odd, original tricks was one that he at length dissuaded her from practising because he felt it stimulated her imagination unwisely, and with too great conviction. It is not easy to describe, and to convey the complete success of the achievement is impossible without seeing the actual results. For she drew invisible things. Her designs, so clumsily done with a butt of pencil, or even the point of her stick in the sand, managed to suggest a meaning that somehow just escaped grasping by the mind. They made him think of puzzle-pictures that intentionally conceal a face or figure. Vague, fluid shapes that never quite achieved an actual form ran through these scattered tracings. She used points in the scenery to indicate an outline of something other than themselves, yet something they contained and clothed. His eye vainly tried to force into view the picture that he felt lay there hiding within these points.\n\nOn a large sheet of paper she would draw roughly details of the landscape\u2014tops of trees, the Mill roof, a boulder or a stretch of the stream, for instance\u2014and persuade these points to gather the blank space of paper between them into the semblance, the suggestion rather, of some vague figure, always vast and always very much alive. They marked, within their boundaries, an outline of some form that remained continually elusive. Yet the outline thus framed, whichever way you looked at it, even holding the paper upside down, still remained a figure; a figure, moreover, that moved. For the child had a way of turning the paper round so that the figure had an appearance of moving independently upon itself. The reality of the whole business was more than striking; and it was when she came to giving these figures names that Frene decided to put a stop to it.\n\nOne day another curious thing had happened. He had often thought about it since, and wondered whether its explanation lay in mere child's mischief, or in some power of discerning these invisible Presences that she drew.\n\nThey were returning together from a scramble in the gravel-pit which they pretended was a secret entrance to the centre of the world; and they were tired. Manya walked a little in front, as her habit was, so that she could turn and see him ' opposite' at a moment's notice when he said an interesting thing. Her red tam-o'-shanter, with the top-knot off, she carried in her hand, swinging it to and fro. From time to time she flicked it out sideways, as though to keep flies away. But there were no flies, for it was chilly and growing dark. The pines were thickly planted here, with sudden open spaces. Their footsteps fell soft and dead upon the needles. And sometimes she flung her arm out with an imperious, sudden gesture of defiance that made him feel suspicious and look over his shoulder. For it was like signing to some one who came close, some one he could not see, but whose presence was very real to her. The unwelcome conviction grew upon him. Some one, in the world she knew apart from him, accompanied them. A few minutes before she had been wild and romping, playing at ' mushrooms' with laughter and excitement. She loved doing this\u2014whirling round on her toes till her skirts were horizontal, then sinking with them ballooning round her to the ground, the tam-o'-shanter pulled down over her entire face so that she looked like a giant toadstool with a crimson top. But now she had turned suddenly grave and silent.\n\n'Uncle!' she exclaimed abruptly, turning sharply to face him, and using the hushed tone that was always prelude to some startling question, 'tell me one thing, please. What would you do if'\n\nShe broke off suddenly and sprang swiftly to one side.\n\n'Manya! if what?' He did not like the movement; it was so obviously done to avoid something that stood in her way\u2014between them\u2014very close. He almost jumped too. 'I can't tell you anything while you're darting about like a deer-fly. What d'you want to know?' he added with involuntary sharpness.\n\nShe stood facing him with her legs astride the path. She stared straight into his eyes. The dusk played tricks with her height, always delusive. It magnified her. She seemed to stand over him, towering up.\n\n'If some one kept walking close beside you under an umbrella,' she whispered earnestly, 'so that the face was hidden and you could never see it\u2014what would you do?'\n\n'Child! But what a question?' The carelessness in his tone was not quite natural. A shiver ran down his back.\n\nShe moved closer, so that he felt her breath and saw the gleam of her big, wide-opened eyes.\n\n'Would you knock up the umbrella with a bang,' she whispered, as though afraid she might be overheard, 'or just suddenly stoop and look beneath\u2014catching it that way?\u2014'\n\nHe stepped aside to pass her, but the child stepped with him, barring his movement of escape. She meant to have her answer.\n\n'Take it by surprise like that, I mean. Would you, Uncle?'\n\nHe stared blankly at her; the conviction in her voice and manner was disquieting.\n\n'Depends what kind of thing,' he said, seeing his mistake. He tried to banter, and yet at the same time seem serious. But to joke with Manya in this mood was never very successful. She resented it. And above all he did not want to lose her confidence.\n\n'Depends,' he said slowly, 'whether I felt it friendly or unfriendly; but I think\u2014er\u2014I should prefer to knock the brolly up.'\n\nFor a moment she appeared to weigh the wisdom of his judgment, then instantly rejecting it.\n\n'I shouldn't!' she answered like a flash. 'I should suddenly run up and stoop to see. I should catch it that way!'\n\nAnd, before he could add a word or make a movement to go on, she darted from beside him with a leap like a deer, flew forwards several yards among the trees, stooped suddenly down, then turned her head and face up sideways as though to peer beneath something that spread close to the ground. Her skirts ballooned about her like the mushroom, one hand supporting her on the earth, while the other, holding the tam-o'-shanter, shaded her eyes.\n\n'Oh! oh!' she cried the next instant, standing bolt upright again, 'it's a whole lot! And they've all gone like lightning\u2014gone off there!' She pointed all about her\u2014into the sky, towards the moors, back to the forest, even down into the earth\u2014a curious sweeping gesture; then hid her face behind both hands and came slowly to his side again.\n\n'It wasn't one, Uncle. It was a lot! ' she whispered through her fingers. Then she dropped her hands as a new explanation flashed into her. 'But p'raps, after all, it was only one! Oh, Uncle, I do believe it was only one. Just fancy\u2014how awfully splendid! I wonder!'\n\nNeither the hour nor the place seemed to him suitable for such a discussion. He put his arm round her and hurried out of the wood. He put the woods behind them, like a protective barrier; for his sake as well as hers; that much he clearly realised. He somehow made a shield of them.\n\nIn the garden, with the stars peeping through thin clouds, and the lights of the windows beckoning in front, he turned and said laughing, quickening his pace at the same time:\n\n'Rabbits, Manya, rabbits! All the rabbits here use brollies, and the bunnies too.' It was the best thing he could think of at the moment. Rather neat he thought it. But her instant answer took the wind out of his sham sails.\n\n'That's just the name for them! ' she cried, clapping her hands softly with delight. 'Now they needn't hide like that any more. We'll just pretend they're bunnies, and they'll feel disguised enough.'\n\nThey went into the house, and it was comforting to see the figure of Mother Coove filling the entire hall. At least there was no disguising her. But on the steps Manya halted a moment and gazed up in his face. She stood in front of him, deaf to Mrs. Coove's statements from the rear about wet boots. Her eyes, though shining with excitement, held a puzzled, wild expression.\n\n'Uncle,' she whispered, with sly laughter, standing on tiptoe to kiss him, 'I wonder!' then flew upstairs to change before he could find a suitable reply.\n\nBut he wondered too, wondered what it was the child had seen. For certainly she had seen something.\n\nYet the thought that finally stayed with him\u2014as after all the other queer adventures they had together\u2014was this unpleasant one, that his so willing acceptance of the little intruder involved the disapproval, even the resentment, of\u2014another. It haunted him. He never could get quite free of it. Another watched, another listened, another\u2014waited. And Manya knew." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 457", + "text": "Autumn passed into winter, and spring at last came round. The dream-estate was a garden of delight and loveliness, fresh green upon the larches and heather all abloom. The routine of the little household was established, and seemed as if it could never have been otherwise. The relationship between the elderly uncle and his little charge was perfect now, like that between a father and his only daughter, spoilt daughter, perhaps a little, who, knowing her power, yet never took advantage of it. He loved her as his own child; and that evasive 'something ' in her which had won his respect from the first still continued to elude him. He never caught it up. It had increased, too, in the long, dark months. Now, with the lengthening days, it came still more to the front, grown bolder, as though 'spring's sweet trouble in the ground' summoned it forth. This sympathy between her being and the Place had strengthened underground. The disentangling had gone on apace. With the first warm softness of the April days he woke abruptly to the fact, and faced it. The older memories had been replaced. It seemed to him almost as though his hold upon the Place had weakened. He loved it still, but loved it in some new way. And his conscience pricked him, for conscience had become identified with the trust of guardianship thus self-imposed. He had let something in, and though it was not the taint of outside country she had said would 'dirty ' it, it yet was alien. It was somehow hostile to the conditions of his original Deed of Trust.\n\nThen, into this little world, dropping like some stray bullet from a distant battle, came with a bang the person of John C. Murdoch. He came for a self-proposed visit of one day, being too 'rushed' to stay an hour longer. Chance had put him 'on the trail' of his old-time 'pard of a hundred camps,' and he couldn't miss looking him up, not' for all the money you could shake a stick at.' More like a shell than mere bullet he came\u2014explosively and with a kind of tempestuous energy. For his vitality and speed of action were terrific, and he was making money now 'dead easy'\u2014so easy, in fact, that it was 'like picking it up in the street.'\n\n'Then you've done well for yourself since those old days in Arizona,' said Eliot, really pleased to see him, for a truer ' partner' in difficult times he had never known; 'and I'm glad to hear it.'\n\n'That's so, Boss'\u2014he had always called the ' Englisher' thus because of his refined speech and manners\u2014' God ain't forgot me, and I've got grubstakes now all over Yurrup. Just raking it in, and if you want a bit, why, name the figger and it's yours.' He glanced round at the modest old-fashioned establishment, judging it evidence of unsuccess.\n\n'What line?' asked Eliot, dropping into the long-forgotten lingo.\n\n'Why, patents, bless your heart,' was the reply. 'They come to me as easy as mother's milk to baby, and if the heart don't wither in me first, I'll patent everything in sight. I'll patent the earth itself before I'm done.'\n\nAnd for a whole hour, smoking one strong green cigar upon another, he gave brief and picturesque descriptions of his various enterprises, with such energy and gusto, moreover, that there woke in Eliot something of the lust of battle he had known in the wild, early days, something of his zest for making a fortune, something too of the old bitter grievance\u2014in a word, the spirit of action, eager strife and keen achievement, which never had quite gone to sleep...\n\n'And now,' said Murdoch at length, 'tell me about yerself. You look fit and lively. You've had enough of my chin-music. Made yer pile and retired too? Isn't that it? Only you still like things kind o' modest and camp-like. Is that so?'\n\nBut Eliot found it difficult to tell. This side of him that life in England had revived, to the almost complete burial of the other, was one that Murdoch would not understand. For one thing, Murdoch had never seen it in his friend; the Arizona days had kept it deeply hidden. He listened with a kind of tolerant pity, while Eliot found himself giving the desired information almost in a tone of apology.\n\n'Every man to his liking,' the Westerner cut him short when he had heard less than half of the stammering tale, 'and your line ain't mine, I see. I'm no shadow-chaser\u2014never was. You've changed a lot. Why'\u2014looking round at the little pine-clad valley\u2014' I should think you'd rot to death in this place. There's not room to pitch a camp or feed a horse. I'd choke for want of air.' And he lit another cigar and spat neatly across ten feet of lawn.\n\nJohn Casanova Murdoch\u2014in the West he was called 'John Cass,' or just 'John C.,' but had resurrected the middle name for the benefit of Yurrup\u2014was a man of parts and character, tried courage, and unfailing in his friendship. 'Straight as you make 'em' was the verdict of the primitive country where a man's essential qualities are soon recognised, 'and without no frills.' And Eliot, whatever he may have thought, felt no resentment. He remembered the rough man's kindness to him when he had been a tenderfoot in more than one awkward place. John C. might 'rot to death' in this place, and might think the vulgar country round it 'great stuff,' but for all that his host liked to see and hear him. He remembered his skill as a mining prospector and an engineer; he was not surprised that he had at last 'struck oil.'\n\nThey talked of many things, but the visitor always brought the conversations round to his two great healthy ambitions, now on the way to full satisfaction: money and power. Upon some chance mention of religion, he waved his hand impatiently with enough vigour to knock a man down, and said, 'Religion! Hell! I only discuss facts.' And his definition of a 'fact' would no doubt have been a dollar bill, a mining 'proposition,' or a food-problem\u2014some scheme by which John C. could make a bit. Yet though he placed religion among the fantasies, he lived it in his way. He ranked the Pope with Barnum, each of them ' biggest in his own line of goods,' and 'Shakespeare was right enough, but might have made it shorter.'\n\nAnd Eliot, listening, felt the buried portion of his nature waken and revive. It caused him acute discomfort.\n\n'Now show me round the little hole a bit,' said Murdoch just before he left. 'I'd like to see the damage, just for old times' sake. It won't take above ten minutes if we hustle along.'\n\nThey hustled along. Eliot led the way with a curious deep uneasiness he could not quite explain. His heart sank within him. Gladly he would have escaped the painful duty, of Murdoch's vigorous energy constrained him. The whole way he felt ashamed, yet would have felt still more ashamed to have refused. He ' faced the music' as John Casanova Murdoch phrased it, and while doing so, that other music of his visitor's villainous nasal twang cut across the deep-noted murmur of the wind and water like a buzz-saw with a bit of wire trailing against its teeth.\n\nThe entire journey occupied but half an hour, for Eliot made short-cuts, instinctively avoiding certain places, and the whole time Murdoch talked. His business, practical soul expanded with good nature. 'The place ain't so bad, if you worked it up a bit,' he said, striking a match on the wall of the mill, and spitting into the clear water, 'but it's not much bigger than a chicken-run at present. If I was you, Boss, I'd have it cleaned up first.' Again he offered a cheque, thinking the unkempt appearance due to want of means. His uninvited opinions were freely offered, as willingly as he would have given money if his old ' pard ' had needed it; given kindly too, without the least desire to wound. He picked out the prettiest ' building sites,' and explained where an artificial lake could be made 'as easy as rolling off a log.' His patent wire would fence the gardens off ' and no one ever see it'; and his special concrete paving, from waste material that yielded a hundred per cent profit, would make paths ' so neat and pretty you could dance to heaven on 'em.' The place might be developed so as to 'knock the stuffing ' out of the country round about, and the estate become a 'puffect picture-book.'\n\n'You've got a gold mine here, and God never meant a gold mine to lie unnoticed like a roadside ditch. Only you'll need to gladden it up a bit first. You could make it hum as a picnic or amusement resort for the town people. Take it from me, Boss. It's so.'\n\nAnd the effect upon Eliot as he listened was curious; it was twofold. For while at first the chatter wounded him like insults aimed directly at the dead, at the same time, to his deep disgust, it stirred all his former love of practical, energetic action. The old lust and fever to be up and doing, helping the world go round, making money and worldly position, woke more and more, as Murdoch's vigorous, crude personality stung his will, stung also desires he thought for ever dead. It made him angry to find that they were not dead, and yet he felt that he was feeble not to resent the gross invasion, even cowardly not to resist the coarse attack and kick the vulgar intruder out. It was like a breach of trust to take it all so meekly without protesting, or at least without stating forcibly his position, as though he were not sufficiently sure of himself to protect his memories and his dead. But this was the truth: he was not sure of himself. The blinding light of this simple fellow's mind showed up the hidden inequalities to himself. Another discovered his essential instability to himself. This other side of him had existed all the time; and his attachment to the Place was partly artificial, built up largely by the vigorous assertion of the departed. His love had coloured it wonderfully all these years, but\u2014it was a love that had undergone a change. It had not faded, but grown otherwise. Another kind of love had to some extent replaced and weakened it. He felt mortified, ashamed, but more, he felt uneasy too.\n\nThe wrench was pain. 'If only she were here and I could explain it to her,' ran his thought over and over again, followed by the feeling that perhaps she was there, listening to it all\u2014and judging him.\n\nBehind the trees, a little distance away, he saw the flitting figure of Manya, watching them as they passed noisily along the pathways of her secret playground. Her attitude even at this distance expressed resentment. He imagined her indignant eyes. But, closer than that, another watched and followed, listened and disapproved\u2014that other whom she knew yet never spoke about, who was in league with her, and seemed more and more to him, like a phantom risen from the dead.\n\nWith difficulty, and with an uneasiness growing every minute now, he gave his attention to his talkative, well-meaning, though almost offensive guest, at once insufferable yet welcome. One moment he saw him in his camping-kit of twenty years ago, with big sombrero and pistols in his belt, and the next as he was to-day, reeking of luxury and money, in a London black tail-coat, white Homburg hat, diamonds shining on his fingers and in his gaudy speckled tie, his pointed patent-leather boots gleaming insolently through the bracken and heather.\n\nAnd through his silence crashed a noise of battle that he thought the entire Place must hear. But clear issue to the battle there was none. The opposing sides were matched with such deadly equality. Which was his real self lay in the balance, until at the last John Casanova unwittingly turned the scales.\n\nIt came about so quickly, with such calculated precision, as it were, that Eliot almost felt it had all been prepared beforehand and Murdoch had come down on purpose. It was like a sudden flank attack that swept him from his last defences. Help that could not reach him in the form of Manya signalled from the distance with her shining eyes, her red tam-o'-shanter the banner of reinforcements that arrived too late. For John C. stood triumphantly before him, a conqueror in his last dismantled fortress. His face alight with enthusiasm that was all excitement, he held his hands out towards him, cup-wise.\n\n'See here,' he said with excitement, but in a hard, dry tone that reminded Eliot of prospecting days in Arizona, 'Boss, will you take a look at this, please?'\n\nHe had been rooting about in the heather by the edge of the sand-pits. And he thrust his joined hands beneath the other's nose. Something the size of a hen's egg, something that shone a dirty white, lay in them against the thick gold rings. 'Didn't I tell you the place was a gol-darned gold mine? But what's the use o' talking? Will you look at this, now? ' He repeated it with the air of a man who has suddenly discovered the secret of the world. The voice was quiet with intense excitement kept hard under.\n\nAnd Eliot obeyed and looked. He saw his visitor, his Bond Street trousers turned up high enough to show the great muscles of his calves, the Homburg hat tilted across one eye, coat-sleeves pulled up and smeared with a whitish mud. There was perspiration on his forehead. It only needed the sombrero and the pistols to complete the picture of twenty years ago when Cass Murdoch, after weeks of heavy labour, found the first gold-dust in his pan. For John C. had found gold. It lay, a dirty lump of white earth, in his large spread hands. Those hands were the pan. The breeze that murmured through the pine trees came, sweet and keen, from leagues of open plain and virgin mountains far away... Eliot smelt the wood-fire smoke of camp... heard the crack of the rifle as some one killed the dinner...\n\n'Well, John C.,' he gasped, as he dropped back likewise into the vanished pocket of the years, 'what's your luck? Out with it, man, out with it!'\n\n'A fortune,' replied his visitor. 'Put yer finger on it right now, an' don't tell mother or burst out crying unless yer forced to! ' High pleasure was in his voice.\n\nHe stepped closer, transferring the lump of dirt into the hand his host unconsciously stretched open to receive it. It lay there a moment, looking even dirtier than before against the more delicate skin. Eliot felt it with finger and thumb. It was soft and sticky and a little moist. It stained the flesh.\n\nThen he looked up and stared into his companion's eyes\u2014blankly. A horrible excitement worked underground in him. But he did not even yet understand.\n\n'You've got it,' observed John C., with dry finality.\n\n'Got what? ' asked Eliot.\n\n'Got it right there in yer westkit pocket,' said the other, with an air of supreme satisfaction. His cigar had gone out. He lit it again in leisurely fashion, spat accurately at a distant frond of bracken, eyed the lump of dirt again with inimitable pride, and added, 'Got it without asking; the working soft and easy too; water-power on the spot, and the sea all close and handy for shipping it away.' He made a gesture to indicate the tumbling stream and the sea-coast a few miles beyond.\n\nThen, seeing that his host still stared with blank incomprehension, holding the little lump at arm's length as though it might bite or burn him, he deigned to explain, but with a note of condescending pity in his voice, as of a man explaining to a stupid child.\n\n'Clay,' he said calmly, 'and good stuff at that.'\n\n'Clay,' repeated Eliot, still a little dazed, though light was breaking on him. 'Bricks...?' he asked, with a dull sinking of the heart.\n\n'Bricks, nothing! ' snapped the other with impatient scorn, as though his friend were still a tenderfoot in Arizona. 'Good, white pottery clay, and soft as a baby's tongue. The best God ever laid down for man. Worth twice its weight in dust. And all to be had for the trouble of shovelling it out. Old pard, you've struck it good and hot this time; and here's my blessing on yer both.'\n\nEliot dropped the lump his fingers held so long and took half-heartedly the giant hand that squeezed his own. Across his brain ran visions of slender vases, exquisite white cups and bowls and pitchers, plates and sweet-rimmed basins, all fashioned in delicate-toned shades of glaze\u2014beautifully finished pottery\u2014' worth twice their weight in dust.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 458", + "text": "And half an hour later, when John Casanova Murdoch had boomed away in his luxurious motorcar like a departing thunderstorm, Eliot, coming back by the pinewood that led from the high road, heard a step behind him, and turned to find Manya's face looking over his very shoulder.\n\n'Uncle, who was that?' There was a touch of indignation in her voice that was almost contempt.\n\n'Man I knew in America\u2014years ago,' he' said shortly. He still felt dazed, bewildered. But shame and uneasiness came creeping up as well.\n\n'He won't come again, will he?'\n\n'Not again, Manya.'\n\nThe child took his arm, apparently only half relieved.\n\n'He was like a bit of the dirty country,' she said, and when he interrupted with ' Not quite so bad as that, Manya,' she asked abruptly with her usual intuition, 'Did he want to buy, or build, or something horrid like that?'\n\n'We haven't met for twenty years,' he said evasively. 'Used to hunt and camp together in America. He went to the goldfields with me.' He was debating all the while whether he should tell her all. He hardly knew what he thought. Like a powerful undertow there drove through the storm of strange emotions the tide of a decision he had already come to. It swept him from all his moorings, though as yet he would not acknowledge it even to himself.\n\n'Uncle,' she cried suddenly, stepping across the path, and looking anxiously into his face, 'tell me one thing: will anything be different?'\n\nAnd the simple question, or perhaps the eager, wistful expression in her voice and eyes, showed him the truth that there was no evading. He must tell her sometime. Why not now?\n\nHe decided to make a clean sweep of it.\n\n'Manya,' he began gently, 'this Place one day\u2014when I am gone, you know\u2014will be your own. But there'll be no money with it. You'll have very little to live on.'\n\nShe said nothing, just listening with a little air of boredom, as though she knew this already, yet felt no special interest in it. It belonged to the world of things she could not realise much. She nodded. They still stood there, face to face.\n\n'I've been anxious, child, for a long time about your future,' he went on, meeting her dark eyes with a distinct effort, for they seemed to read the shame he felt rising in his heart; 'and wondering what I could do to make you safe.'\n\n'I'm safe enough,' she interrupted, tossing her hair back and raising her chin a little.\n\n'But when I'm gone,' he said gravely, 'and Mrs. Coove has gone, and there's no one to look after you. Money's your only friend then.'\n\nShe seemed to reflect. She moved aside, and they walked on slowly towards the house.\n\n'That's a long way off, Uncle. I'm not afraid.'\n\n'But it's my duty to provide for you as well as possible,' he said firmly.\n\nAnd then he told her bluntly and in as few words as possible of the discovery of the clay.\n\nThe excitement at first in the child was so great that nothing would satisfy her but that they should at once turn back and see the place together. They did so, while he explained how ' Mr. Murdoch,' who was learned in strata, their depth and dip and outcrop, had declared that this deposit of fine white clay was very large. Its spread below the heather-roots might be tremendous. 'My aunt,' he said, 'your great-aunt Julia, lived all her life upon a gold mine here without knowing it, poor as a church mouse.'\n\nThis particularly thrilled her. 'How funny that she never felt it! 'was her curious verdict. 'Was she 'very deaf?'\n\n'Stone deaf, yes,' he replied, laughing, 'and short-sighted too.'\n\n'Ah!' said the child, as though things were thus explained. 'But she might have digged!'\n\nShe ran among the heather when he showed her the place, found lumps of clay, played ball with them and was wildly delighted. She treated the great discovery as a game; then as a splendid secret 'just between us two.' Mr. Murdoch wouldn't tell, would he? That seemed the only danger that she saw\u2014at first.\n\nBut her uncle knew quite well that this excitement was all false; and far from reassuring him, it merely delayed the deeper verdict that was bound to come with full comprehension. All the discovery involved had not reached her brain. As yet she realised only the novelty, the mystery, the wonder. The spot, moreover, where the great deposit showed its lip was beside the loveliest part of all the wood, and just where the child most loved to play.\n\nAt last, then, as her body grew tired and the excitement brought the natural physical reaction, he saw the change begin. She paused and looked about her half suspiciously, like an animal that suspects a trap. Her glance ran questioningly to where her uncle leaned, watching her, against a tree. She eyed him. He thought she suddenly looked different, though wherein the difference lay escaped him. He felt as if he were watching a wild animal, only half tamed, that distrusts its owner, and would next deny his mastership and wait its opportunity to spring. The simile, he knew, was exaggerated, but the picture rose within him none the less. Misgiving and uneasiness grew apace.\n\nAbruptly Manya stopped her wild playing and with the movement of a little panther ran towards him. She took up a position, as usual, directly opposite. With the strange air of dignity that sometimes clothed her, the figure of the child stood there among the darkening trees and asked him questions, keen, searching questions. He was grateful for the shadows, though he felt they did not screen his face from her piercing sight; but it was her imperious manner above all that made his defence seem so clumsily insincere, and the questions a veritable inquisition.\n\nBefore the flood of them, as before their pitiless scrutiny, he certainly quailed. Their keen directness convicted him almost of treachery, and he was hard put to it to persuade her and himself that it really was a sense of duty he obeyed in this decision to work the clay. 'I'm doing it all for her,' he repeated again and again to himself, and loathed, with a dash of terror, that curious sudden drive, as of a blow from outside, that sent his tongue into his cheek. But the terror, he dimly divined, was due to another feeling as well, equally vague yet equally persistent. For it seemed that while she listened to his explanations, another listened in the darkness too. Her resentment and distress he realised vividly; but he felt also the resentment and distress\u2014of another. And more than once, during this strange dialogue in the darkening wood, he knew the horrible sensation that this' other ' had come very close, so close as to slip between himself and the child. Almost\u2014that the child was being used as the instrument to express the vehement protest...!\n\nBut he faced the music, to use the lingo of John C., and spared himself nothing. He told Manya, though briefly, that workmen must swarm all through her secret playground, that machinery must grind and boom across the haunted valleys, that the water of her little stream must yield the power to turn great ugly wheels, and that perhaps even a little railway might be built to convey the loads of precious clay down to the sea where steamers would call for them. Acres of trees, too, would be swept away, and heather-land marred and scarred with pits and ditches and quarries. But the benefits in time would all be hers. He put it purposely at its worst, while emphasising as best he could the interest and excitement that must accompany the developments. The dream of many years was nevertheless shattered into bits in half an hour.\n\nThe child listened and understood. He was relieved, if puzzled at the same time, that she betrayed no emotion of disappointment or indignation. What she felt she dealt with in her own way\u2014inside. At the stream, however, on her way home, she paused a moment, watching it slip through the darkness underneath the old mill-wheel.\n\n'It won't run any more\u2014for itself,' she said in a low, trembling little voice, that was infinitely pathetic.\n\n'No; but it will run for you, Manya,' he answered, though the words had not been addressed really to him; ' working away busily for your future.'\n\nAnd then she burst into tears and hid her face against his coat. He found no further thing to say. He walked beside her, feeling like a criminal found out.\n\nBut at the end, as they neared the house side by side, she suddenly turned and asked another question that caused him a thrill of vivid surprise and discomfort\u2014so vivid, in fact, that it was fear.\n\nThey were standing just beneath her bedroom window then. Memory rushed back upon him with overwhelming force, and he glanced up instinctively at the empty panes of glass. It was almost as though he expected to see a face looking reproachfully down upon him. Through him like spears of ice, as he heard the words, there shot again the atrocious sensation that it was not Manya, the child, who asked the question, but that Other who had recently moved so close. For behind the tone, with no great effort to conceal it either, trailed a new accent that Manya never used. Greater than resentment, it was anger, and within the anger lay the touch of a yet stronger note\u2014the note of judgment.\n\n'But, tell me one thing, Uncle,' she asked in a whispering voice: 'will the Place let you?'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 459", + "text": "Motive, especially in complex natures, is often beyond reach of accurate discovery, and a mixed motive may prove quite impossible of complete disentanglement. But for the sense of shame that Eliot felt, he might never have discerned that with his genuine desire to provide for Manya's future there was also involved a secret satisfaction that he himself would profit too. The sight of gold demolishes pretence and artifice; and deep within he felt the old lust of possession and acquisition assert itself. All these years it had been buried, not destroyed. His love of the Place, his worship of Memory, his guardianship of the little dream-estate, compared to the prize of worldly treasure, were on the surface. They were artificial.\n\nThis little thing had proved it. The child's tears, her significant question above all, had shown him to himself. If not, whence came this sense of ignominy before her own purer passion, the loss of confidence, this inner quailing before Another who gazed reprovingly, resentfully, upon him from the shadows of the past? That note of menace in Manya's suggestive question was surely not her own. It haunted him. Day and night he heard it ringing in his brain. This new distrust of himself that he recognised read into it something almost vindictive and revengeful.\n\nBut Eliot, for all that, was not the man to give in easily. He resolutely dismissed this birth of morbid fancy. Clinging to the thought that his duty to his niece came first, he resisted the suggestion that imputed a grosser selfishness. Cass Murdoch, too, unwittingly helped; for the side of his character John C.'s visit had revived\u2014the love of fight and energetic action\u2014came valiantly to the rescue. To a great extent he persuaded himself that his motive was\u2014almost entirely\u2014a pure one. Preparations for developing the clay went forward steadily.\n\nManya too appeared to help him. She said no more distressing things; she showed keen interest in the coming and going of surveyors, architects, soil experts, and the like. And Murdoch's discovery was no false alarm; the bed of clay was deep and extensive as he prophesied, its quality very fine. Men came with pick and shovel; sample pits were dug; the stuff was tested and judged excellent; and the verdict of the manufacturers, to whom ' lots' were forwarded on approval, pronounced it admirable for a large and ready market. There was money in it, and the supply would last for years. The papers heralded the fortunate discoverer, and a moderate fortune undeniably was in sight.\n\nThe preparations, however, took time, and the finding of the initial capital, which Murdoch readily supplied, also took time, and spring meanwhile slipped into summer before the enterprise was fairly on its feet. Soft winds sighed lazily among the larches, and the scent of flowers pervaded every valley; the pine-trees basked in the sunshine, the pearly water laughed and sang; and at night the moon shot every glade with magic that was like the wings of moths whose flitting scattered everywhere the fine dust of a thousand silvery dreams. The beauty of the little haunted estate leaped into a rich maturity that was utterly enchanting, like wild flowers that are sweetest just before they die.\n\nAnd over Manya, too, there passed slowly a mysterious change, for it seemed as if for a time she had been standing still, and now with a sudden leap of beauty passed into the glory of young womanhood. With her short skirts and tumbled hair, her grave and wistful face, swinging idly that red tam-o'-shanter from which she was inseparable, he saw her one evening on the lawn outside his study window, and the change flashed into him across the moonlight with a positive shock. The child had suddenly grown up. A barrier stood between them.\n\nBut the barrier was not so sudden as it seemed, for, on looking back, he realised the daily, almost imperceptible manner of its growth. Its complete erection he realised now, but he had been aware of it for a long time\u2014ever since his decision to work the clay, in fact. Here was the proof her deceptive silence had concealed. She had felt it too deeply for words, for arguing, for disappointment volubly expressed; but it had struck into the roots of her little being and had changed her from within outwards. It had aged her. Reality had broken in upon her world of play and dream. He had destroyed her childhood at a single blow. She questioned, doubted, and grew old.\n\nBut though every one grows older in identically this way, by sudden leaps, as it were, due to the forcing impulse of some strong emotion, with Manya it brought no radical alteration. She deepened rather than definitely changed. The sense of wonder did not fade, but ripened. The crude facts of life could never satisfy a nature such as hers, and though she realised them now for the first time, they could not enter to destroy. They drove her more deeply into herself. That is, she dealt with them.\n\nAnd the change, though he devoted hours of pondering reflection over it, may be summed up briefly enough in so far as it affected himself. There was a difference in their relationship. He stood away from her; while she, on her side, drew nearer to something else that was not himself. With this elusive and mysterious Thing she lived daily. She took sides with it and with the Place, against himself. It went on largely, he felt, behind his back. She grew more and more identified with some active influence that had always been at work in all the wild gardened loveliness of the property, but was now more active than before. Stirred up and roused it was; he could almost imagine it\u2014aggressive. And Manya, always knowing it at closer quarters than himself, was now in definite league with it. There was opposition in it, though an opposition as yet inactive.\n\nAnd in the silent watches of the night sometimes, when imagination wove her pictures all unchecked, he again knew the haunting thought close beside his bed: that the mind and hand of the dead were here at work, using the delicate instrument of this rare, sensitive child to convey protest, resentment, warning. Over the little vales, from all the depth of forest, and above the spread of moorland just beyond, there breathed this atmosphere of disapproval.\n\nManya, never telling him much, now told him less than before; for he had forfeited the right to know.\n\nIf it made him smile a little to notice that she had made Mother Coove lengthen her dresses, it did not make him smile to learn that she still wore her old shorter ones once the darkness fell, or that she now went out to play in her wild corners of the woods chiefly after dusk. For he saw the significance of this simple manoeuvre, and divined its meaning. She felt shy now in the daylight. This new thing in the spirit of the Place had changed it all. She could not be abandoned as before, go naked and undressed as once she graphically put it. The vulgar influence from outside had come in. It stared offensively. It asked questions, leered, turned everything common and unclean.\n\nAnd she changed from time to time her playground as the workmen drove her out. She moved from place to place, seeking new corners and going farther into the moors and open spots. She followed the stream, for instance, nearer to its source where its waters still ran unstained. And from the neighbourhood of the sample pits that gaped like open sores amid the beauty, she withheld herself completely. Nothing could persuade her to come near them.\n\nTowards himself especially, her attitude was pregnant with suggestion, and though he made full allowance for the phantoms conscience raises, there always remained the certainty that the child, and another with her, watched him sharply from a distance. She was still affectionate and simple, even with a new touch of resigned docility that was very sweet, as though resolved to respect his older worldly wisdom, yet with an air of pity for his great mistake that was half contempt, half condescension. Her silence about the progress of the work made him feel small. It so mercilessly judged him. And, while the dignity he had always recognised in her increased, it seemed now partly borrowed\u2014his imagination leaned more and more towards this unwelcome explanation\u2014r from this invisible Companion who overshadowed her. He felt as though this silence temporarily blocked channels along which something would presently break out with violence and scorn to overwhelm him; till at last he came to regard her as a prisoner regards the foreman of the jury who has formed his verdict and is merely waiting to pronounce it\u2014Guilty. Behind her, as behind the foreman, gathered the composite decision of more than one, and the decision was hostile. It urged her on against him. Opposition accumulated towards positive attack. He dreaded some revelation through the child; and piling guess on guess he felt certain who was this active Influence that sought to use her as its instrument. The dead now, day and night, stood very close beside him.\n\nAnd meanwhile, things ran far from smoothly with the work itself. Unforeseen difficulties everywhere arose to baffle him. Even Murdoch made oppressive, troublesome conditions about the money that seemed unnecessary, insisting upon details of management with a touch of domineering interference that exasperated. Obstacles rose up automatically, involving, as it were, the very processes of Nature itself. There was a strike that delayed the railway builders for a month, and when they returned the heavy summer rains had washed yards of embankment down again. Soon afterwards a falling tree killed a workman, and there ensued compensation worries that threatened a law-suit. The clay itself, too, played them sudden tricks, proving faulty the maps the surveyors had drawn; its depths and direction were not as supposed, its angle to the lie of the slope deceptive, so that an extra branch of single line for the trucks became essential. And the money was insufficient; further advances became imperative, and, though readily forthcoming, involved more delay. The spirit of lonely peace and beauty departed from the Place, hiding its injured face among the moorland reaches further up. Obstruction, with turmoil and confusion at its back, rose up on every side to baffle him.\n\nThough the advance was steady enough on the whole, and the difficulties were only such as most similar enterprises encounter, Eliot was conscious more and more of this sense of obstacles deliberately interposed. It all seemed so nicely calculated to cause the maximum of trouble and delay. The interference was so cunningly manoeuvred. He brought all his old energy and force to meet them, but there was ever this curious sense of advised and determined opposition that began to sap his confidence.\n\n'More trouble, sir,' the foreman said one morning, when Eliot went down to view the work, unaccompanied as usual by Manya. 'There seems no end to it.'\n\n'What is it this time?' He abhorred these conversations now. It always seemed that Another stood behind his shoulder, listening.\n\n'The clay has gone,' was the curious answer. He said it as though it had gone purposely to spite them like a living thing.\n\n'Gone!' he exclaimed incredulously.\n\n'Sunk away, gone deeper than we expected,' was the answer. The man shrugged his shoulders as though something puzzled him. 'A kind of subsidence come in the night,' he added gloomily.\n\nThey stared at one another for a full minute with eyes that screened other meanings. Eliot felt a sort of fury rise within him. Somehow the idea of foul play crossed his mind, though instantly rejected as absurd.\n\n'With this loose sandy bottom, and a steep slope that ain't drained properly, you're never very sure of where you are,' said the man at length, feeling his position made some explanation necessary. He seemed to regard the Clay as something ever on the move.\n\n'I see,' said Eliot, grateful for a solution that he could apparently accept. They talked of ways and means to circumvent it.\n\n'Queerest job I ever come across, sir,' the foreman muttered, as at length Eliot turned away, pretending not to hear it.\n\nAnd scenes like this were frequent. Another time it was the white weed\u2014with the pretty little flower Manya loved to twine about her tam-o'-shanter\u2014that had gathered so thickly on the artificial ponds where the water was stored, that it clogged the machinery till the wheels refused to turn; and next, a group of men that quit working without any reasonable excuse\u2014open symptom of a hidden dissatisfaction that had been running underground for weeks. There was something about the job they didn't like. Rumours for a long time had been current\u2014queer, unsubstantiated rumours that those in authority chose to disregard. Superstition hereabouts was rife enough without encouraging it.\n\nTaken altogether, as products of a single hostile influence at work, these difficulties easily assumed in his imaginative mind the importance of a consciously directed opposition. He remembered often now those words of Manya, the last time she had opened her lips upon the subject. For she had credited the Place with the power of resisting him; only by ' the Place' she now meant this mysterious personal influence that she knew behind it.\n\nYet he persisted in his consciousness of doing right. His duty to the child was clear; her future was in his charge; and the fact that he meant to leave her everything proved that his motive, or part of it at least, was above suspicion. From John C. he also gathered comfort and support. He had only to imagine him standing by his side, repeating that remark about religion, to feel strong again in his determination. Cass Murdoch recognised no mystery or subtlety anywhere. He discussed only facts.\n\nThe consciousness that he was partly traitor none the less remained, and with it the feeling that the very Tradition he had nursed and worshipped all these years was up in arms against him. Manya, standing closer to Nature than himself, had divined this Tradition and, in some fashion curiously her own, had personified it. And this personification linked on with the dead. His love of the Beauty, and his love of a particular memory he had read into the Place, she had most marvellously disentangled. Both were genuine in him; yet he had suffered them in combination to produce a false and artificial Image existing only in his own imagination. There was conflict in his being. His motive was impure.\n\nBehind them stood the giant, naked thing the child divined that was\u2014Reality. She knew it face to face. What was it? The mere definite question which he permitted himself made him sometimes hesitate and wait, not unwilling to call a halt. He was aware that the child stood ever in the background, waiting her time with that sly laughter of superior knowledge. These obstacles and difficulties were sent as warnings; and while he disregarded them of set purpose, something deep within him paused to question\u2014and while it questioned, trembled. For protest, he seemed to discern, had become resentment, resentment grown into resistance; resistance into hostile opposition, and opposition now, with something horribly like anger at its back, was hinting already at a blank refusal that involved almost\u2014revenge.\n\nHitherto he had been hindered, impeded, thwarted merely; soon he could be deliberately overruled and stopped. Nature, ever defeating an impure motive, would rise up against him and cry finally No.\n\n'But, Uncle, tell me one thing: will the Place let you?' rang now often through his daily thoughts. He heard it more especially at night. At night, too, when sleep refused him, he surprised himself more than once framing sentences of explanation and defence. They rose automatically. They followed him even into his dreams. 'My duty to the child is plain. How can I help it? If you were here beside me now, would you not also approve?\u2014'\n\nFor the idea that she was beside him grew curiously persuasive, so that he almost expected to see her in the corridors or on the stairs, standing among the trees or waiting for him by the Mill itself where last she drew the breath of life.\n\nAnd by way of a climax came then Manya's request to change her room, and his own decision to move himself into the one she vacated. The reason she gave was that the ' trees made such a noise at night' she could not sleep, and since it had three windows, two of which were almost brushed by pine branches, the excuse, though discovered late, seemed natural enough. At any rate he did not press her further. She occupied a room now at the back where a single window gave a view far up into the moors. And, turning out the unnecessary furniture to suit his taste, he moved into the one she had vacated\u2014his wife's." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 460", + "text": "Summer passed in the leisurely, gorgeous way that sometimes marks its passage into autumn, and the work ploughed forward through the sea of difficulties. The conspiracy of obstacles continued. There was progress on the whole, but a progress that seemed to bring success no nearer. The beds of clay, however, were definitely determined now, and their extent and depth fulfilled the most sanguine expectations. The troubles lay with the railway, the men, water, weather, and a dozen things no one could have foreseen. These seemed far-fetched, and yet were natural enough. And they continued\u2014until Eliot, never a man who yielded easily, began to feel he had undertaken more than he could manage. He weakened. The idea came to him that he would sell his interest and leave the development to others.\n\nTo retire from the fight and acknowledge himself defeated was a step he could not lightly take. There was a bitterness in the thought that stung his pride and vanity. There was also the fact that if he held on and first established a paying business, he could obtain far more money\u2014for Manya. Yet he felt somehow that it was from Manya herself that the suggestion first had come. For the child gave hints in a hundred different ways that he could not possibly misunderstand. They were indirect, unconsciously given, and they followed invariably upon curious little personal accidents that about this time seemed almost a daily occurrence.\n\nAnd these little accidents, though perfectly natural taken one by one as they occurred, when regarded all together seemed to compose a formidable whole. They pointed an attack almost. The menace he had imagined was becoming aggressive. Some one who knew his habits was playing him tricks. Some one with intimate knowledge of the way he walked and ran and moved laid traps for him. And at each little ' accident' Manya laughed her strange, sly laughter\u2014precisely as a child who says 'I told you so! You brought it on yourself!' She had expected it, perhaps had seen it coming. And now, to avoid more grave disasters, she wanted him\u2014elsewhere. Her deep affection for him, sinner though he was in her eyes, sought to coax him out of the danger zone.\n\nWhen he slipped in jumping the stream\u2014he, who was sure-footed as a mountain goat!\u2014and turned his ankle; and when the heavy earth, loosened by the rains, rolled down upon him as he climbed the embankment, or when the splinter that entered his hand as he vaulted the fencing near the wharf, led to festering that made him carry his arm in a sling for days\u2014in every case it was the same: the child looked up at him and smiled her curious little smile of one who knew. She was in safety, but he stood in the line of fire. She knew who it was that laid the traps. She saw them being laid. It was always wood, earth, water thus that hurt him and never once an artificial contrivance of man.\n\n'Uncle, it wouldn't happen if you stayed away,' was what she said each time, though never phrased the same. And the obvious statement only just covered another meaning that her words contained. She knew worse things would come, and feared for him. 'There's no good hiding, Uncle Dick, because it's in the house as well.'\n\nHe grew to feel unwelcome in his own woods and garden, an intruder in his own moors and valleys, an element the Place rejected and wished elsewhere. The Place had begun to turn him out. And Manya, this queer mysterious child, in league with the secret Influence at work against him, was being used to point the warnings and convey the messages. Her silent attitude, more even than her actual words, was the messenger. The hints thus brought, moreover, now troubled themselves less and less with disguise. He realised them at last for what they were: and they were beyond equivocation\u2014threatening.\n\nAnd it was at this point that Eliot made the journey up to London to see Cass Murdoch, and feel his way towards escape. Retirement was the word he used, and the sentence John C. heard in the bar of the big hotel as they discussed clay and cocktails was 'sell my interest to more competent hands who will get quicker and bigger results than I can. The work and worry affect my health.'\n\nThe interview may be easily imagined, for John Casanova Murdoch was more than willing to buy him out, though the conditions, with one exception, have no special interest in this queer history: Eliot was to lease the Place for a period of years. And this meant leaving it.\n\nIn the train on his way back his emotions fought one another in a regular pitched battle. He stood in front of himself suddenly revealed\u2014a traitor. It seemed as if for a moment he saw things a little from his niece's inverted point of view, standing outside of Self and looking up. It provided him with unwelcome sensations that escaped analysis. Love and hate are one and the same force, according to the point in the current where one stands; repulsion becomes, from the opposite end, attraction; and a great love may be reversed into a great hate. There is no exact dividing line between heat and cold, no neat frontier where pleasure becomes pain, just as there is really no such absolute thing as left and right, uphill and downhill, above and below. Manya stood outside these relative distinctions men have invented for the common purposes of description. He understood at last that the power which had drawn his life into the Place as by a kind of absorption, was now inverted into a process of turning him out again as by a kind of determined elimination.\n\nIt was being accomplished, moreover, as he felt and phrased it to himself, from outside; by which perhaps he meant from beyond that fence which men presumptuously assume to contain all the life there is. But the dead stand also beyond that fence. And Manya, being so obviously in league with this hostile, eliminating Influence stood hand in hand, therefore, with\u2014the dead.\n\nBut for him The Dead meant only one." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 461", + "text": "He walked home from the station, which he reached at nine o'clock. Crossing the zone of the ' dirty' country, now successful invader of the dream-estate, he entered his property at length by the upper end of the Piney Valley. A passionate wind was searching the trees for music, and handfuls of rain were flung against the trunks like stones; but, on leaving the road the tempest seemed to pass out towards the sea, leaving an unexpected, sudden hush about his footsteps. The moon peered down through high, scudding clouds. It was partly that the storm was breaking up, and partly that the valley provided shelter; but it gave him the feeling that he had entered a little world prepared for his reception. He was expected, the principal figure in it. Attention everywhere focussed on himself. He felt like a prisoner who comes out of streets indifferent to his presence and enters a Court of Law. This ominous silence preceded the arrival of the Judge.\n\nThe path at once dipped downwards into a world of shadows where the splashes of moonlight peered up at him like faces on the ground. He heard the water murmuring out of sight; and it came about his ears like whispering from the body of the Court. There reigned, indeed, the same gentle peace and stillness he had known for years, but somewhere in it a brooding unaccustomed element that was certainly neither peace nor stillness. Something unwonted stirred slowly, very grandly, through the darkness.\n\nHe paused a moment to listen; he looked about him; he pushed aside the bracken with his stick, and his eyes glanced up among the lower branches of the trees. And everywhere, it seemed, he encountered other eyes\u2014eyes usually veiled, but now with lifted lids. Then he went on again, faster a little than before. A touch of childhood's terror chilled his blood. And it took at first a childhood's form. He thought of some big, savage animal that lurked in hiding, its presence turning the once friendly wood all otherwise and dreadful. A giant paw filled the little valley to the brim. The stir of the wind was the opening and shutting of its claws. The lips were drawn back to show the gums and teeth. Something opened; there came a rush of air. The awful spring would follow in a moment...\n\nAnother hood of memory lifted then and showed him Manya, as she played about the sand-pits\u2014then paused when the full discovery dawned upon her mind. She had eyed him. She had given him this similar impression of an animal waiting its opportunity to spring. But now it was the Place that waited to spring...\n\nHe banished the bizarre, exaggerated picture his imagination conjured up, but could not banish the emotion that produced it. The Place was different. Change spread all over it. Potential attack hummed through the very air. Thus might a man feel walking through a hostile crowd. But thus also might he feel in the presence of a friend to whom in a time of confidence he had betrayed himself too lavishly\u2014a friend now turned against him with this added power of knowing all his secrets. His own imagination leaped upon him, calling him coward, traitor, unfaithful steward. Fear made him bitterly regret the familiarity that years of unguarded dreaming had established between himself and\u2014and His mind hesitated horribly between the choice of pronouns; and when he finally chose the neuter, it seemed that a curious running laughter passed within the sounds of wind and water. It almost was like the mockery of Manya's laughter taken over by the dying storm.\n\nWhile he evaded the direct attack, his mind, however, continued searching for the word that should describe accurately, and so limit all this vague, distressing feeling of hostility. But for long he could not find it. The new element that breathed through the sombre intricacies of the glen played with him as it pleased until he could catch it in the proper word, and so imprison it. Branches seemed no longer soft and feathery: they bristled, pointed, stood rigid for a blow. The stream no longer murmured: it laughed and cried aloud. The shadows did not cover smoothly: they concealed; and the whole atmosphere of the Place, instead of welcoming, repelled.\n\nAnd then, quite suddenly, the word emerged and stood before his face: Disturbance.\n\nLess than disorder, yet more than mere disquietude, this word described the attitude he was conscious of. In its aggressive, threatening, sinister meaning, he accepted it as true.\n\nThere was Disturbance. Somewhere in those chains of iron that bind the operations of Nature within invariable, unyielding laws, a link had weakened. Disturbance was the result\u2014but a disturbance that somehow let in purpose. Urging everywhere through the manifestations of Nature in his dream-estate was the drive and stress of purposiveness.\n\nThe discovery of the word, moreover, announced the approach, though not yet the actual entrance, of the Judge. There were steps, and the steps were in himself. Some one walked upon his life.\n\nHe quickened his pace like a terrified child. With genuine relief at last he reached the house. But even in the friendly building he was aware of this keen discomfort at his heels. It penetrated easily. The Disturbance came in after him into the house itself. Hanging up coat and hat, he then passed into the Study, and the prosaic business of drinking milk and munching water-biscuits scattered the strange illusion for a time. It weakened, at any rate, for it never wholly disappeared. It waited.\n\nThe house was silent, every one in bed. He locked the front door carefully, stared at his face a moment in the hat-stand mirror\u2014wondering at a certain change in the expression of the features, though he could not name it\u2014and with his lighted candle went on tiptoe up to bed. But the instant he entered the room he was aware that the feeling of distress had already preceded him. He was forestalled. There was this dark disquiet in the very atmosphere of his bedroom. The Disturbance had established itself in these most private, intimate quarters that once had been his wife's. It was strongest here.\n\nDismissing a sharp desire to sleep in another room\u2014anywhere but in the place made sacred by long-worshipped memories\u2014he began to undress. He said to himself with a certain vehemence, 'I'll ignore the thing.' But it was fear that said it. A frightened child without a light might as well determine to ignore the darkness. For this thing was urgent everywhere about him, inside and outside, like the air he breathed. And the next minute, instead of ignoring it, he made an attempt to face it. He would drag the secret out. The fact was, both will and emotions were already in disorder. He knew not how or where to take the thing.\n\nThe attempt then showed him another thing. It was no secret. The terror in his heart and conscience made pretence of screening something that he really knew quite well. This aggressive, hostile Presence was a Presence that he recognised, and had recognised all along.\n\nAnd instinctively he turned to this side and to that, examining the room; for space in this room, he realised, was no longer 'quite as usual: there was a change in its conditions. Everything contained within it\u2014the very objects between the four walls\u2014were affected. He felt them altered; they had become otherwise. He himself was changed as well, become otherwise. And if anything alive\u2014another person or an animal even\u2014came in, they also, in some undetermined, startling way, would look otherwise than usual. They would look different.\n\nHurriedly he sought a concrete simile to steady his shaking mind on, and his mind provided this: That, if the temperature were suddenly lowered, the invisible moisture would at once appear, otherwise\u2014frost-crystals on the window-panes, snow, and so forth. The change would not be untrue or even distorted, no falseness in it anywhere, nor exaggeration\u2014only otherwise. And if the presence of the dead, whom he felt so close now in this room, turned visible owing to the changed conditions of the space about him, he would see\u2014but the thought remained unfinished in his mind...\n\nHe thrust the terror down into the depths. Yet the idea must have been very insistent in him, for he crossed the floor on tiptoe to lock the door securely, and stood already within easy reach of it, one hand actually stretched out, when there came a faint knocking on the panelling within a few inches of his very face. He saw the handle turn. With suggestive, dreadful stealthiness the door then opened, the merest crack at first, then gradually wider and wider. And the slowness was exasperating. The seconds dragged like hours. Had he not been spellbound he would have violently slammed it to again or torn it instead wide open.\n\nThere was just time in his bewildered mind to wonder what form this Presence from the dead would take, when he realised that the figure stood already by his side. She had crossed the threshold. With amazement he saw that it was Manya.\n\nShe came in swiftly. She was on the carpet close against him before he could speak a word or move. And she looked, as he had expected, otherwise: she looked extraordinary. The word came to him in the way she might herself have used it, getting its first meaning out\u2014extra-ordinary.\n\nAnd her appearance was\u2014might well have been, at least\u2014ludicrous. For she was dressed to go out, but in a fashion that at any other time must have been cause for laughter. Now it stood at the very opposite pole, however. It was superb. Her red tam-o'-shanter was perched carelessly, almost gaily, on her hair, which was already fashioned into plaits for the night, and underneath the garden jacket that he knew so well, he saw white drapery that plainly was her little nightgown. She had pulled her stockings on, but had not fastened them. They hung down, partly showing her skin below the knee. The boots flapped open, with no attempt to button them. Her hurry had been evidently great, and she looked at the first glance like some one surprised by a midnight call of fire.\n\nYet these details, which he took in at a single glance, stirred no faintest touch of amusement in him, for about her whole presentment was this other nameless -quality that showed her to him\u2014utterly otherwise than usual. It made him wince and shudder, yet pause in a wondering amazement too\u2014amazement that barely held back awe. He stared like a man struck suddenly dumb. The phrase the child so often used came back upon him with the force of a shock. The girl had put her Self out. This being that stood just opposite to his face was not Manya. It was another. It was the other!\n\nAnd both doubt and knowledge dropped down upon him in that fearful moment: knowledge, that it was the Influence she had been so long in league with, and that sought to use her as its instrument of protest; and doubt, as to exactly what\u2014or who\u2014this Influence really was.\n\nFor it came to him as being so enormously bigger and vaster than anything his mind could label ' the dead.' He felt in the presence of a multitude. He had once felt thus when seeing a single Redskin steal like a shadow round the camp, knowing that the night concealed a host of others. About her actual form and body, too, this sense of multitude also spread and trembled, only just concealed: and indescribable utterly. For the edges of the child were ill-defined and misty, so that he could not see exactly where her outline ceased. The candle-light played round and over her as though she filled the room. She might have been all through the air above him, behind as well as opposite, close in front as well. In a sense he felt that she had come to him through the open windows and from the night itself, and not merely along the passage and through the narrow door. She came from the entire Place.\n\nHe made a feverish struggling effort to concentrate his mind upon common words. He wanted to move backwards, but his feet refused to stir. The familiar sound of her name he uttered close into her face:\u2014\n\n'Manya! And at this hour of the night! 'he stammered.\n\nHis voice was thick and without resonance in his mouth, smothered like a sound in a closed box. And as he heard the name a kind of silent laughter reached him\u2014inaudible really, as though inside him\u2014sly laughter like her own. For the name had lost its known familiarity. It, too, was different and otherwise, though for the life of him he could not seize at first wherein the alteration lay.\n\nShe smiled, and her eyes, wide opened, were like stars. The breath came soft and windily between her lips, but no words with it. It was regular, deep, unhurried. There was something in her face that petrified him\u2014something, as it were, non-human. He began to forget who and where he was. Identity slipped from him like a dream.\n\nWith another effort, this time a more violent one, he strove to fasten upon things that were close and real in life. He felt the buttons down his coat fingering them desperately till they hurt his hands and escaped from his slippery moist skin.\n\n'Manya!' he repeated in a louder voice, while his mind plunged out to seek the child he had always known behind the familiar name.\n\nAnd this time she answered; but to his horror, the whole room, and even space beyond the actual room, seemed to answer with her. The name was repeated by her lips, yet came from the night beyond the open window too. He had made a question of it. The answer, repeating it, was assent.\n\n'Man y-a...' he heard all round him, while the head bent gently down and forward.\n\nThe shock of it restored to him some power of movement, and he stumbled back a 'step or two further from her side. It might well have been whimsical and cheap, this artificial play upon a name, but instead of either it was abominably significant. This motionless figure, so close that he could feel her breath upon his face, was positively in some astonishing way more than one. She was many. The laughter that lay behind the trivial little thing was a laughter both grand and terrible. It was the laughter of the sea, of the woods, of sand\u2014a host that no man counteth\u2014the laughter of a multitude.\n\nAnd he thrust out both his hands automatically lest she should touch him. He shook from head to toe. Contact with her person would break up his being into millions. The sensation of terror was both immense and acute, sweeping him beyond himself. Like her, he was becoming many\u2014becoming hundreds and thousands\u2014sand that none can number.\n\n'Child! 'he heard his voice repeating faintly, yet with an emphasis that spaced the words apart with slow distinctness, 'what does this mean?' In vain he tried to smother the beseeching note in it that was like a cry for help.\n\nHe stepped back another pace. She did not move. Composure then began to come back slowly to him, a little and a little. He remembered who he was, and where he was. He said to himself the commonplace thing: ' This is Manya, my little niece, and she ought to be asleep in bed.' It sounded ridiculous even in his mind, but he tried deliberately to think of ordinary things.\n\nAnd then he said it aloud: 'Do you realise where you are and what you are doing, child?' And then he added, gaining courage, a question of authority: 'Do you realize what time it is?'\n\nHer answer came again without hesitation, as from a long way off. A smile lit up the entire face, gleaming from her skin like moonlight. There were tears, he saw, upon the cheeks. But the face itself was radiant, wonderful.\n\n'The time,' she said, peering very softly into his eyes, 'is now.' And she took a slow-gliding step towards him, with a movement that frightened him beyond belief.\n\nBut by this time he had himself better in hand. He understood that the child was walking in her sleep. It was her little frame that was being worked and driven by\u2014Another. She was possessed. Something was speaking through the entranced physical body. Her answer regarding time was the answer absolute, not relative, the only true answer that could be given. Other answers would be similar. He understood that here was the long expected revelation, and that he must question her if he wished to hear it. He resolved to do so, but with a cold awe in his heart as though he were about to question\u2014Death.\n\nThey both retained their first positions, three feet apart, standing. The candle behind him on the table shed its flickering light across her altered features. Outside he heard the trees shaking and tossing in the gusts of rainy wind.\n\n'Who are you then?' he asked hesitatingly, in a low tone.\n\nThere was no reply. But effort, showing that she heard and tried to answer, traced a little frown above the eyebrows; and the eyes looked puzzled for a moment.\n\n'You mean,' he whispered, 'you cannot tell me?' The head bowed slowly once by way of assent.\n\n'You cannot find the word, the language?' he helped her. 'Is that it? 'He still whispered, afraid of his own voice.\n\n'Yes,' was the answer, spoken below the breath. Then instantly afterwards, straightening herself up with a vigorous movement that startled him horribly, she made a curious, rushing gesture of the whole body, spreading her arms out through the air about her. 'I am\u2014like that' the voice sprang out loud and clear.\n\nShe seemed by the gesture to gather space and the night into her wide embrace. She repeated it. The face smiled marvellously. Through this slim body, he realised, there rolled something ancient as the stars. It poured through space against him like a sea. It turned his little ideas of space all\u2014otherwise.\n\n'Tell me where you come from,' he asked quickly, eager yet dreading to hear.\n\n'From everywhere,' came the answer like a wind.\n\nHe paused, breathless with astonishment. He felt himself dwindling. Here was a vaster thing than he had contemplated. It was surely no single dis-carnate influence that possessed the child!\n\n'And\u2014for whom?' It was whispered as before. The figure stepped with a single gliding stride towards him, coming so close that he held his ground only by a tremendous effort of the will.\n\n'For you!' The voice came like a clap of wind again, at once soft yet thundering, filling the entire room.\n\n'For me,' he faltered. 'Your message is for me?'\n\nHe felt the assault of strange, violent sensations he had never known before and could not name. A boyhood's dream rushed back upon him for an instant. He recalled his misery and awe when he stood before the Judgment Throne for some unforgivable breach of trust which he could not explain because the dream concealed its nature. Only this was ten times greater, and his guilt beyond redemption.\n\n'And I,' he stammered, 'who am I?' Her eyes looked him all over like a stare of the big moon.\n\n'Toil? she answered, without pause or hesitation.\n\n'You do not know my name?' he insisted, still clinging to the clue that her he spoke with must be from the dead.\n\nThe little frown came back between the eyes. She nodded darkly.\n\n'You, she repeated, giving the answer absolute again, the only really true one.\n\nThe girl stood like a statue, serene and solemn. She stared through and beyond him, motionless but for a scarcely perceptible swaying, and calm as a meadow in the dawn. Enormous meanings passed from her eyes across the air, and sank down into him like meanings from a forest or a sea.\n\nFrom these, he realised, came her stupendous inspiration, and, so realising, he knew at last his deep mistake. For not so do the Dead return. They never, indeed, return, because from the heart that loved them they have never gone away, but only changed their magic intercourse in kind. And, had she known, she would have approved the wisdom of his great decision, while clearing his motive of all insincerity at the same time.\n\nIt was not she who brought the protest and the menace. It was something bigger by far, something awful and untamed. It was the Place itself. And behind the Place stood Nature. It was Nature that possessed the child and used her little lips and hands and body for its thundering message of disapproval.\n\nManya was possessed by Nature.\n\nAnd the shock of the discovery first turned him into stone. His body did not stir the fraction of an inch. In that moment of vivid realisation these two little human figures stood facing one another, motionless as columns; and, while so standing, the One who brought the Message for himself drew closer.\n\nFor several minutes he saw absolutely nothing. The approach was too big for any sensory perceptions he could recognise. And then, mercilessly, pitilessly, the power of sight returned.\n\nHe knew the touch of a giant, earthy hand was upon his arm. Beside him, in the flickering candle light, stood Nature. He looked into a host of mighty eyes that yet his imagination translated into merely two\u2014eyes set wide apart beneath enormous brows. He met the gaze of the Gigantic, the Patient, the Inexorable that saw him as he was, and judged him where he stood. And a melting ran through his body, as though the bones slipped from their accustomed places, leaving him utterly without support. He swayed, but did not fall. His physical frame stood upright to receive like a blow the revelation that was coming.\n\nAnd then, with a curious, deep sense of shame, he realised abruptly that his position in regard to her was inappropriate. He, at any rate, had no right to stand. His proper attitude must be a very different one.\n\nHe took her by the hand and, bending his head with an air of humble worship, led her slowly across the room. The touch of her was wonderful\u2014like touching wind\u2014all over him. With a reverence he guided her, all unresisting, to a high-backed chair beside the open window. She lowered herself upon it, and sat upright. She stared fixedly before her into space. No clothing in the world could have stolen from her childish face and figure the nameless air of grandeur that she wore. She was august.\n\nAnd he knelt before her. He raised his folded hands. A moment his eyes rested on the dispassionate little face, then looked beyond her into the night of wind and rain. His gaze returning then sought the eyes again.\n\nAnd the child, sweet little human interpreter of so vast a Mystery, bent her head downwards and looked into his heart. Wind stirred the hair upon her neck. He saw the bosom gently rise and fall.\n\n'What is it that you have to say to me?' he whispered, like a prayer for mercy. 'What is the message that you bring?'\n\nHer lips moved very slightly. The smile broke out again like moonlight across the lowered face. The words dropped through the sky. Very slowly, very distinctly, they fell into his open heart: simple as wind or rain.\n\n'Leave\u2014me\u2014as\u2014I\u2014am\u2014and\u2014as\u2014you\u2014found\u2014me. Leave\u2014us\u2014together\u2014as\u2014we\u2014are\u2014and\u2014as\u2014we\u2014were.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 462", + "text": "There came then a sudden blast that swept with a shout across the night; and through his mind passed also a tumult like a roaring wind. Both winds, it seemed to him, were in the room at once. He had the sensation of being lifted from the earth. The candle was extinguished. And then the sound and terror dipped away again into silence and into distance whence it came...\n\nHe found himself standing stiffly upright, though he had no recollection of rising from his knees. With an abruptness utterly disconcerting he was himself again. No item of memory had faded; he remembered the entire series of events. Only, he was in possession of his normal mind and powers, fear, awe, and wonder all departed. Manya, who had been walking in her sleep, was sitting close before him in the darkness. He could just distinguish her outline against the open window. But he was master of himself again. Even the wild improbability, the extravagance of his own actions, the very lunacy of the picture that the night now smothered, left him unbewildered. And the calmness that thus followed the complete transition proved to him that all he had witnessed, all that had happened, had been\u2014true. In no single detail was there falseness or distortion due to the excitement of a hysterical mood. It had been right and inevitable.\n\nHe lit the candle again quietly, with a hand that did not tremble. He saw Manya sitting on the high-backed chair with her head sunk forward on her breast. Gently he raised the face. The eyes were now closed, and the regular, deep breathing showed that the girl was sound asleep\u2014but with the normal sleep of tired childhood. The Immensity to which he had knelt and prayed in her was gone, gone from the room, gone out into the open darkness of the Place. It had visited her, it had used her, it had left her. But at the same time he understood, as by some infallible intuition, that the warning to depart she brought him was not yet complete. It had reached his mind, but not as yet his soul. In its fulness the Notice to Quit could not be delivered between close, narrow walls. Its delivery must be outside.\n\nHe looked at the sleeping child in silence for several minutes. She sat there in a semi-collapsed position and in momentary danger of falling from her chair. The lips were parted, the eyes tight shut, the red tam-o'-shanter dropping over one side of the face. Both hands were folded in her lap. By the light of two candles now he watched her, while the perspiration he had not been as yet aware of, dried upon his skin and made him shiver with the cold. And, after long hesitation, he woke her.\n\nWith difficulty the girl came to, stared up into his face with a blank expression, rubbed her eyes, and then, with returning consciousness of who and where she was, looked mightily astonished.\n\n'Manya, child,' he began gently, 'don't be frightened.'\n\n'I'm not,' she said at once. 'But where am I? Is that you, Uncle?'\n\n'Been walking in your sleep. It's all right. Nothing's happened. Come, I'll see you back to bed again.' And he made a gesture as though to take her hand.\n\nBut she avoided him. Still looking bewildered and perplexed, she said:\n\n'Oh\u2014I remember now\u2014I wanted to go out and see things. I want to go out still.' Then she added quickly as the thought struck her, 'But does Fr\u00e4ulein know? You haven't told Fr\u00e4ulein, Uncle, have you? I mean, you won't?'\n\nHe shook his head. This was no time for chiding.\n\n'I often go out like this\u2014at night, when you're all asleep. It's the only time now, since\u2014'\n\nHe stopped her instantly at that. 'You fell asleep while dreaming! Was that it?' He tried to laugh a little, but the laughter would not come.\n\n'I suppose so.' She glanced down at her extraordinary garments. But no smile came to the eyes or lips. Then she looked round her, and gazed for a minute through the open window. The rain had ceased, the wind had died away. Moist, fragrant air stole in with many perfumes. 'I don't remember quite. I was in bed. I had been asleep already, I think. Then\u2014something woke me.' She paused. 'There was something crying in the night.'\n\n'Something crying in the night?' he repeated quickly, half to himself.\n\nShe nodded. 'Crying for me,' she explained in a tone that sent a shudder all through him before he could prevent it. 'So I thought I'd go out and see. Uncle, I had to go out,' she added earnestly, still whispering, 'because they were crying\u2014to get at you. And unless I brought them\u2014unless they came through me,' she stopped abruptly, her eyes grew moist, she was on the verge of tears\u2014' it would have been so terrible for you, I mean\u2014'\n\nHe stiffened as he heard it. He made a violent effort at control, stopping her further explanation.\n\n'And you weren't afraid\u2014to go out like this into the dark? 'he asked, more to cover retreat than because he wanted to hear the reply.\n\n'I put myself out for you,' she answered simply. 'I let them come in. That way you couldn't get hurt. In me they had to come gently. They were an army. Only, nothing out of me could hurt you, Uncle.' She suddenly put her arms about his neck and kissed him. 'Oh, Uncle Dick, it was lucky I was there and ready, wasn't it?'\n\nAnd Eliot, remembering that great Disturbance in the woods, pressed the child tenderly to himself, praying that she might not understand his heart too well, nor feel the cold that made his entire body tremble like a leaf. He had thought of an angry animal Presence lurking in the darkness. It had been bigger than that, and a thousand times more dangerous!\n\n'You see,' she added with a little gasp for breath when he released her, 'they waked me up on purpose. I dressed at an awful rate. I got to the door\u2014I remember that perfectly well\u2014and then 'An expression of bewilderment came into her face again.\n\n'Yes,' he helped her, 'and then\u2014what?' 'Well, I forget exactly; but something stopped me. Something came all round me and took me in their arms. It was like arms of wind. I was lifted up and carried in the air. And after that I forget the rest, forget everything\u2014till now.'\n\nShe stopped. She took off her tam-o'-shanter and smoothed her untidy hair back from the forehead. And as he looked a moment at her\u2014this little human organism still vibrating with the passage of a universal Power that had obsessed her, making her far more than merely child, yet still leaving in her the sweetness of her simple love\u2014he came to a sudden, bold decision. He would face the thing complete. He would go outside.\n\n'Manya,' he whispered, looking hard at her, 'would you like to go out\u2014now\u2014with me? Come, child! Suppose we go together!'\n\nShe stared at him, then darted about the room with little springs of excitement. She clapped her hands softly, her eyes alight and shining.\n\n'Uncle Dick! You really mean it? Wouldn't it be grand!'\n\n'Of course, I mean it. See! I'm dressed and ready!' And he pointed to his boots and clothes.\n\n'It's the very best thing we can do, really,' she said, trying to speak gravely, but the mischievous element uppermost at the idea of the secret nocturnal journey. 'They'll see that you're not afraid, and you'll be safe then for ever and ever and ever! Hooray!'\n\nShe twirled the tam-o'-shanter in the air above her head, skipping in her childish joy.\n\n'And we'll go past Fr\u00e4ulein's door,' she insisted mischievously, as he took her outstretched hand and led the way on tiptoe down the dark front stairs.\n\n'Hush!' he whispered gruffly. 'Don't talk so loud.' She fastened up her garments, and they moved like shadows through the sleeping house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 463", + "text": "That journey he made with this ' child of Nature' among the dripping trees and along soaked paths was one that Eliot never forgot. For him its meaning was unmistakable. His early life again supplied a parallel. He had once seen a wretched man marched out of camp with two days' rations to shift for himself in the wilderness as best he might,\u2014a prisoner convicted of treachery, but whose life was spared on the chance that he might redeem it, or die in the attempt. He had seen it done by redskins, he had seen it done by white. And hanging had been better. Yet the crime\u2014stealing a horse, or sneaking another's 'grub -stakes '\u2014was one that civilisation punishes with a paltry fine, or condones daily as permissible ' business acumen.'\n\nIn primitive conditions it was a crime against the higher law. It was sinning against Nature. And Nature never is deceived.\n\nRichard Eliot was now being drummed out of camp. And the child who led him, mischief in her eyes and the joy of forbidden pleasure in her heart, was all unconscious of the awful r61e she played. Yet it was she who as well had pleaded for his life and saved him.\n\nNature turned him out; the Place rejected him; and Manya saw him safely to the confines of that wilderness of houses, ugliness, commercial desolation where he must wander till he re-made his soul or lost it altogether.\n\nThey cautiously opened the front door, and the damp air rushed to meet them.\n\n'Hush!' he repeated, closing it carefully behind him. But the child was already upon the lawn. Beyond her, dark blots against the sky, rose the massed outline of the little pointed hills. There were no stars anywhere, though the clouds were breaking into thinning troops; but it was not too dark to see, for a moon watched them somewhere from her place of hiding. The air was warm and very sweet, left breathing by the storm.\n\n'Hush, Manya!' he whispered again, ill at ease to see her go. She ran back, her feet inaudible upon the thick, wet lawn, and took his hand. 'We'll go by the Piney Valley,' she said, assuming leadership. And he made no objection, though this was the direction of the sample pits. It led also, he remembered, to the Mill\u2014the spot where she who had left him in charge had gone upon her long long journey.\n\nThey went forward side by side. The wind below them hummed gently in the tree-tops, but it did not reach their faces. The whole wet world lay breathing softly about them, exhausted by the tempest. It was very still. It watched them pass. There was no effort to detain them. And in Dick Eliot's heart was a pain that searched him like a pain of death itself.\n\nBut his companion, he now clearly realised, was merely the child again\u2014eerie, wonderful, eldritch, but still the little Manya that he knew so well. Mischief was in her heart, and the excitement of unlawful adventure in her blood; but nothing more. The vast obsessing Entity that had constituted her judge and executioner was now entirely gone. He was spared the added shame of knowing that she realised what she did.\n\nSometimes she left his side, to come back presently with a little rush of pleasurable alarm. He was uncertain whether he liked best her going from him or her sudden return. Their tread was now muffled by the needles as they went slowly down the pathways of the Piney Valley. The occasional snapping of small twigs alone betrayed their movements. Heavy branches, soaked like sponges, splashed showers on the ground when their shoulders brushed them in passing, and drops fell of their own weight with mysterious little thuds like footsteps everywhere about them in the woods.\n\nManya dived away from his side. She came back sometimes in front of him and sometimes behind. He never quite knew where she was. His mind, indeed, neglected her, for his thoughts were concentrated within himself. Her movements were the movements of a block of shadow, shifting here and there like shadows of trees and clouds in faint moonlight.\n\n'Uncle, tell me one thing,' he heard with a start, as she suddenly stood in front of him across the narrow pathway, and so close that he nearly bumped against her. 'Isn't there something here that's angry with you? Something you've done wrong to?'\n\n'Hush, child! Don't say such things! 'He felt the shiver run through him. He pushed her forward with his hands.\n\n'But they're being said\u2014all round us. Uncle, don't you hear them? ' she insisted.\n\n'I've always loved the Place. We've always been happy here together.' He whispered it, as though a terror was in him lest it should be overheard and\u2014contradicted.\n\nHer answer flabbergasted him. Her intuitions were so uncannily direct and piercing.\n\n'That's what I meant. You've been unkind. You've hurt it.'\n\n'Many a,' he repeated severely, 'you must not say such things. And you must not think them.'\n\n'I'm so awfully sorry, Uncle Dick,' she said softly in the dark, and promptly kissed him. The kiss went like a stab into his heart.\n\nThen she was gone again, and he caught her light footstep several yards in front, as though a shower of drops had fallen on the needles.\n\n'Uncle,' came her voice again close beside him. She stood on tiptoe and pulled his ear down to the level of her lips. 'Hold my hand tight. We're coming near now.' She was curiously excited.\n\n'To the Mill?' he asked, knowing quite well she meant another thing.\n\n'No, to the pits the men dug,' she answered, nestling in against him, while his own voice echoed faintly, 'Yes, the sample pits.' He felt like passing the hostile outposts of the Camp who would shoot him but for the presence of the appointed escort.\n\nA sigh of lonely wind went past them with its shower of drops. And these little hands of wind with their fingers of sweet rain helped forward his expulsion. The empty wilderness beyond lay waiting for his soul. It heard him coming.\n\nAnd a curious, deep revelation of the child's state of mind then rushed suddenly upon him. He knew that she expected something. And her answer to the question he put explained his own thought to himself.\n\n'What is it you expect, Manya?' he had asked unwisely.\n\n'Not expect exactly, Uncle, for that would be the wrong way. But I know.'\n\nAnd several kinds of fear shot through him as he heard it, for the words lifted a veil and let him see into her mind a moment. She had said another of her profoundly mystical truths. Expectation, anticipation, he divined, would provide a mould for what was coming, would give it shape, but yet not quite its natural shape. To anticipate keenly meant to attract too quickly: to force. The expectant desire would coax what was coming into an unnatural form that might be dreadful because not quite true. Let the thing approach in its own way, uninvited by imaginative dread. Let it come upon them as it would, deciding its own shape of arrival. To expect was to invite distortion. This flashed across him behind her simple words.\n\n'You fearful child!' he whispered, forcing an unnatural little laugh.\n\n'The soft, wet, sticky things, half yellow and half white,' she began, resenting his laughter, 'always moving, and never looking twice the same'\n\nThen, before he could stop her, she stopped of her own accord.\n\nShe clutched his arm. He understood that it was the closeness of the thing that had inspired the atrocious words. She held his arm so tightly that it hurt. They stood in the presence of others than themselves.\n\nYet these Others had not come to them. The movement of approach was not really movement at all. It was a condition in himself had altered so that he knew. Out here the veil had thinned a little, as it had thinned in the room an hour ago. And he saw space otherwise. This Power that in humanity lies normally inarticulate was breaking through. In the room its language had been a stammer; it was a stammer now. Or, in the terms of sight, it was a little fragment utterly inexplicable by itself, since the entire universe is necessary for its complete expression.\n\nYet Eliot did perceive the enormous thing behind\u2014the thing to which he had been unfaithful by prostituting his first original love. And the fact that it was interwoven with his ordinary little human feelings at the same time only added to the bewilderment of its stupendous reality.\n\nHe saw for a fleeting moment just as Many a saw\u2014from her immediate point of view.\n\n'It's here,' she whispered, in a voice that sounded most oddly everywhere; ' it's here, the angry thing you've hurt.'\n\nOn either side of the path, where the heatherland came close, he saw the openings the men had dug\u2014pale, luminous patches of whitish yellow. Between the bushy tufts they shone faintly gleaming against the night. Perspective, in that instant, became the merest trick of sight, a trivial mental jugglery. That slope of coal-black moor actually was extraordinarily near. The tree-tops were just as well beneath his feet, or he stood among their roots. Either was true. There was neither up nor down. The sky was in his hands, a little thing; or the stars and moon hid washed within the current of his blood. Size was illusion, as relative as time. No object in itself had any ' size' at all. He saw her universe, all true, as ever, but from another point of view. And the entire Place ran down here to a concentrated point. The sample pits pressed close against his face.\n\n'The pits,' she whispered, with a sound of wind and water in her breath.\n\nSo, for a moment, he saw from the point of view whence Manya always saw. He and the child and the Spirit of the Place stood side by side on that narrow shelf of darkness, sharing a joint and absolute comprehension. Her elemental aspect became his own, for his inner eye was against the peep-hole through which her Behind-the-Scenes was visible. He realised a new thing, grand as a field of stars.\n\nFor the Place here focussed almost into sentiency. Those slow moving forces that stir to growth in crystals, waken and breathe in plants, and first in the animal world know consciousness, here moved vast and inchoate, through the structure of the dream-estate he owned. Yet moved not blind and inarticulate. For the stress of some impulse, normally undivined by men, urged them towards articulate expression. Here was reaction approximate to those reactions of the nervous cells which in their ultimate result men call emotions. And this irresistible correspondence between the two appalled him.\n\nThe raw material of definite sensation here poured loose and terrible about him from the ground. In them, moreover, was anger, protest, warning, and a menacing resentment\u2014all directed against his mean, insignificant being. From these sample pits issued the menace and the warning, just as literally as there issued from them also the soft, white clay that would degrade the immemorial beauty he had once thought he loved with a clean, pure love. The pits were wounds. They drew all the feelings of the injured Place into the tenderness of sentient organs.\n\nBut behind the threatening anger he recognised a softer passion too. There was a sadness, a deep yearning, and a searching melancholy as well, that seemed to bear witness to his rejection with a sighing as of the sea and wood and hills.\n\nAnd here, doubtless, came in the interweaving of his own little human emotions. For an overpowering sorrow soaked his heart and mind. The judgment that found him wanting woke all his stores of infinite regret. It would have been better for him had he found that millstone which can save the soul, because it removes temptation.\n\n'It is too late,' breathed round him in three weeping voices that passed out between his lips as a single cry together. 'It is too late.'\n\nYet nothing happened; that is, he saw nothing\u2014nothing translatable by any words that he could find. Time dwindled and expanded curiously. The past ran on before him, and the future grouped itself behind his back. The seconds and minutes which men tick off from the apparent movement of the sun gave place to some condition within himself where they lay gathered for ever into the circle of the Present. He remembers no actual sequence of acts or movements. Duration drew its horns back into a single point... It is sure, however, that these two human beings marched presently on. They steadily became disentangled from the spot, and somehow or other moved away from the staring pits. For Eliot, looking back, recalls that it felt like walking past the mouths of loaded cannon; also that the pits watched them out of sight as portraits follow a moving figure with their expressionless stare. He thinks that he looked straight before him as he went. He is sure no single word was spoken\u2014until they left the trees behind and emerged into the open. The Mill, the old, familiar building, was the thing that first restored him to a normal world again. He saw its outline, humped and black, shouldering its way against the sky. He heard the water running under the wheel. But even the Mill, like a hooded figure, turned its face away. It expressed the melancholy of a multitude. And the woods were everywhere full of tears.\n\nManya, he realised then beside him, was making the humming sound of the water that flowed beneath that motionless wheel. Her voice became the voice of the Place\u2014the undifferentiated sound of Nature. It was the voice of dismissal and farewell. Here was the Gateway through which his soul passed out into the Wilderness.\n\nHe involuntarily stooped down to feel her, and she lifted her face up in the darkness and kissed him. But it was across a barrier that she kissed him. He already stood outside.\n\nAnd half an hour later they were indoors again and the house was still. Manya slept as soundly as the placid Fr\u00e4ulein B\u00fchlke or the motherly Mrs. Coove doubtless also slept.\n\nBut he lay battling with strange thoughts for hours. Night and the wind were oddly mingled with them; water, hills, and masses of strong landscape too. They rose before his mind's eye in a giant panorama, endlessly moving past beneath huge skies, and visible against a pale background of luminous, yellowish white. It had strange movements of its own, this yellowish background, like the swaying of a curtain on the stage; and sometimes it surged forwards with a smothering sweep that enveloped everything of beauty he had ever known. It then obliterated the world. Stars were extinguished; scenery turned to soil. The Spectre of the Clay he had invoked possessed the Place.\n\nHe lay there frightened in his sleepless bed and saw the dawn\u2014a helpless little mortal, destroyed by his faithlessness and breach of trust. And all night long there lay outside, yet watching him, something else that equally never slept\u2014agile, alert, unconquerable. Only it was no longer disturbed. For its purpose was accomplished. It had turned him out.\n\nAnd it is not necessary to tell how John Casanova Murdoch soon thereafter took the work in hand and developed the Place, as he expressed it, 'without a hitch.' For John C. had made no promises of love; nor had he pretended to establish with Nature that intimate relationship of trust and worship which invokes the spiritual laws. Nature took no note of him, for he worked frankly with her, and his motive, if not exalted, was at least a pure one. And the Clay, as he phrased it a little later in his expressive Western lingo, soon was 'paying hand over fist. The money was pouring in\u2014more money than you could shake a stick at!'\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Incredible Adventures by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nJohn Hendricks was bear-leading at the time. He had originally studied for Holy Orders, but had abandoned the Church later for private reasons connected with his faith, and had taken to teaching and tutoring instead. He was an honest, upstanding fellow of five-and-thirty, incorruptible, intelligent in a simple, straightforward way. He played games with his head, more than most Englishmen do, but he went through life without much calculation. He had qualities that made boys like and respect him; he won their confidence. Poor, proud, ambitious, he realised that fate offered him a chance when the Secretary of State for Scotland asked him if he would give up his other pupils for a year and take his son, Lord Ernie, round the world upon an educational trip that might make a man of him. For Lord Ernie was the only son, and the Marquess's influence was naturally great. To have deposited a regenerated Lord Ernie at the castle gates might have guaranteed Hendricks' future. After leaving Eton prematurely the lad had come under Hendricks' charge for a time, and with such excellent results\u2014'I'd simply swear by that chap, you know,' the boy used to say\u2014that his father, considerably impressed, and rather as a last resort, had made this proposition. And Hendricks, without much calculation, had accepted it. He liked 'Bindy' for himself. It was in his heart to 'make a man of him,' if possible. They had now been round the world together and had come up from Brindisi to the Italian Lakes, and so into Switzerland. It was middle October. With a week or two to spare they were making leisurely for the ancestral halls in Aberdeenshire.\n\nThe nine months' travel, Hendricks realised with keen disappointment, had accomplished, however, very little. The job had been exhausting, and he had conscientiously done his best. Lord Ernie liked him thoroughly, admiring his vigour with a smile of tolerant good-nature through his ceaseless cigarette smoke. They were almost like two boys together. 'You are a chap and a half, Mr. Hendricks. You really ought to be in the Cabinet with my father.' Hendricks would deliver up his useless parcel at the castle gates, pocket the thanks and the hard-earned fee, and go back to his arduous life of teaching and writing in dingy lodgings. It was a pity, even on the lowest grounds. The tutor, truth to tell, felt undeniably depressed. Hopeful by nature, optimistic, too, as men of action usually are, he cast about him, even at the last hour, for something that might stir the boy to life, wake him up, put zest and energy into him. But there was only Paris now between them and the end; and Paris certainly could not be relied upon for help. Bindy's desire for Paris even was not strong enough to count. No desire in him was ever strong. There lay the crux of the problem in a word\u2014Lord Ernie was without desire which is life.\n\nTall, well-built, handsome, he was yet such a feeble creature, without the energy to be either wild or vicious. Languid, yet certainly not decadent, life ran slowly, flabbily in him. He took to nothing. The first impression he made was fine\u2014then nothing. His only tastes, if tastes they could be called, were out-of-door tastes: he was vaguely interested in flying, yet not enough to master the mechanism of it; he liked motoring at high speed, being driven, not driving himself; and he loved to wander about in woods, making fires like a Red Indian, provided they lit easily, yet even this, not for the poetry of the thing nor for any love of adventure, but just 'because.' 'I like fire, you know; like to watch it burn.' Heat seemed to give him curious satisfaction, perhaps because the heat of life, he realised, was deficient in his six-foot body. It was significant, this love of fire in him, though no one could discover why. As a child he had a dangerous delight in fireworks\u2014anything to do with fire. He would watch a candle flame as though he were a fire-worshipper, but had never been known to make a single remark of interest about it. In a wood, as mentioned, the first thing he did was to gather sticks\u2014though the resulting fire was never part of any purpose. He had no purpose. There was no wind or fire of life in the lad at all. The fine body was inert.\n\nHendricks did wrong, of course, in going where he did\u2014to this little desolate village in the Jura Mountains\u2014though it was the first time all these trying months he had allowed himself a personal desire. But from Domo Dossola the Simplon Express would pass Lausanne, and from Lausanne to the Jura was but a step\u2014all on the way home, moreover. And what prompted him was merely a sentimental desire to revisit the place where ten years before he had fallen violently in love with the pretty daughter of the Pasteur, M. Leysin, in whose house he lodged. He had gone there to learn French. The very slight detour seemed pardonable.\n\nHis spiritless charge was easily persuaded.\n\n'We might go home by Pontarlier instead of B\u00e2le, and get a glimpse of the Jura,' he suggested. 'The line slides along its frontiers a bit, and then goes bang across it. We might even stop off a night on the way\u2014if you cared about it. I know a curious old village\u2014Villaret\u2014where I went at your age to pick up French.'\n\n'Top-hole,' replied Lord Ernie listlessly. 'All on the way to Paris, ain't it?'\n\n'Of course. You see there's a fortnight before we need get home.'\n\n'So there is, yes. Let's go.' He felt it was almost his own idea, and that he decided it.\n\n'If you'd really like it.'\n\n'Oh, yes. Why not? I'm sick of cities.' He flicked some dust off his coat sleeve with an immaculate silk handkerchief, then lit a cigarette. 'Just as you like,' he added with a drawl and a smile. 'I'm ready for anything.' There was no keenness, no personal desire, no choice in reality at all; flabby good-nature merely.\n\nA suggestion was invariably enough, as though the boy had no will of his own, his opposition rarely more than negative sulking that soon flattened out because it was forgotten. Indeed, no sign of positive life lay in him anywhere\u2014no vitality, aggression, coherence of desire and will; vacuous rather than imbecile; unable to go forward upon any definite line of his own, as though all wheels had slipped their cogs; a pasty soul that took good enough impressions, yet never mastered them for permanent use. Nothing stuck. He would never make a politician, much less a statesman. The family title would be borne by a nincompoop. Yet all the machinery was there, one felt\u2014if only it could be driven, made to go. It was sad. Lord Ernie was heir to great estates, with a name and position that might influence thousands.\n\nAnd Hendricks had been a good selection, with his virility and gentle, understanding firmness. He understood the problem. 'You'll do what no one else could,' the anxious father told him, 'for he worships you, and you can sting without hurting him. You'll put life and interest into him if anybody in this world can. I have great hopes of this tour. I shall always be in your debt, Mr. Hendricks.' And Hendricks had accepted the onerous duty in his big, high-minded way. He was conscientious to the backbone. This little side-trip was his sole deflection, if such it can be called even. 'Life, light and cheerful influences,' had been his instructions, 'nothing dull or melancholy; an occasional fling, if he wants it\u2014I'd welcome a fling as a good sign\u2014and as much intercourse with decent people, and stimulating sight-seeing as you can manage\u2014or can stand,' the Marquess added with a smile. 'Only you won't overtax the lad, will you? Above all, let him think he chooses and decides, when possible.'\n\nVillaret, however, hardly complied with these conditions; there was melancholy in it; Hendricks' mind\u2014whose reflexes the spongy nature of the empty lad absorbed too easily\u2014would be in a minor key. Yet a night could work no harm. Whence came, he wondered, the fleeting notion that it might do good? Was it, perhaps, that Leysin, the vigorous old Pasteur, might contribute something? Leysin had been a considerable force in his own development, he remembered; they had corresponded a little since; Leysin was out of the common, certainly, restless energy in him as of the sea. Hendricks found difficulty in sorting out his thoughts and motives, but Leysin was in them somewhere\u2014this idea that his energetic personality might help. His vitalising effect, at least, would counteract the melancholy.\n\nFor Villaret lay huddled upon unstimulating slopes, the robe of gloomy pine-woods sweeping down towards its poverty from bleak heights and desolate gorges. The peasants were morose, ill-living folk. It was a dark untaught corner in a range of otherwise fairy mountains, a backwater the sun had neglected to clean out. Superstitions, Hendricks remembered, of incredible kind still lingered there; a touch of the sinister hovered about the composite mind of its inhabitants. The Pasteur fought strenuously this blackness in their lives and thoughts; in the village itself with more or less success\u2014though even there the drinking and habits of living were utterly unsweetened\u2014but on the heights, among the somewhat arid pastures, the mountain men remained untamed, turbulent, even menacing. Hendricks knew this of old, though he had never understood too well. But he remembered how the English boys at la cure were forbidden to climb in certain directions, because the life in these scattered ch\u00e2lets was somehow loose and violent. There was danger there, the danger, however, never definitely stated. Those lonely ridges lay cursed beneath dark skies. He remembered, too, the savage dogs, the difficulty of approach, the aggressive attitude towards the plucky Pasteur's visits to these remote upland p\u00e2turages. They did not lie in his parish: Leysin made his occasional visits as man and missionary; for extraordinary rumours, Hendricks recalled, were rife, of some queer worship of their own these lawless peasants kept alive in their distant, windy territory, planted there first, the story had it, by some renegade priest whose name was now forgotten.\n\nHendricks himself had no personal experiences. He had been too deeply in love to trouble about outside things, however strange. But Marston's case had never quite left his memory\u2014Marston, who climbed up by unlawful ways, stayed away two whole days and nights, and came back suddenly with his air of being broken, shattered, appallingly used up, his face so lined and strained it seemed aged by twenty years, and yet with a singular new life in him, so vehement, loud, and reckless, it was like a kind of sober intoxication. He was packed off to England before he could relate anything. But he had suffered shocks. His white, passionate face, his boisterous new vigour, the way M. Leysin screened his view of the heights as he put him personally into the Paris train\u2014almost as though he feared the boy would see the hills and make another dash for them!\u2014made up an unforgettable picture in the mind.\n\nMoreover, between the sodden village and that string of evil ch\u00e2lets that lay in their dark line upon the heights there had been links. Exactly of what nature he never knew, for love made all else uninteresting; only, he remembered swarthy, dark-faced messengers descending into the sleepy hamlet from time to time, big, mountain-limbed fellows with wind in their hair and fire in their eyes; that their visits produced commotion and excitement of difficult kinds; that wild orgies invariably followed in their wake; and that, when the messengers went back, they did not go alone. There was life up there, whereas the village was moribund. And none who went ever cared to return. Cudrefin, the young giant vigneron, taken in this way, from the very side of his sweetheart too, came back two years later as a messenger himself. He did not even ask for the girl, who had meanwhile married another. 'There's life up there with us,' he told the drunken loafers in the 'Guillaume Tell,' 'wind and fire to make you spin to the devil\u2014or to heaven!' He was enthusiasm personified. In the village he had been merely drinking himself stupidly to death. Vaguely, too, Hendricks remembered visits of police from the neighbouring town, some of them on horseback, all armed, and that once even soldiers accompanied them, and on another occasion a bishop, or whatever the church dignitary was called, had arrived suddenly and promised radical assistance of a spiritual kind that had never materialised\u2014oh, and many other details that now trooped back with suggestions time had certainly not made smaller. For the love had passed along its way and gone, and he was free now to the invasion of other memories, dwarfed at the time by that dominating, sweet passion.\n\nYet all the tutor wanted now, this chance week in late October, was to see again the corner of the mossy forest where he had known that marvellous thing, first love; renew his link with Leysin who had taught him much; and see if, perchance, this man's stalwart, virile energy might possibly overflow with benefit into his listless charge. The expenses he meant to pay out of his own pocket. Those wild pagans on the heights\u2014even if they still existed\u2014there was no need to mention. Lord Ernie knew little French, and certainly no word of patois. For one night, or even two, the risk was negligible.\n\nWas there, indeed, risk at all of any sort? Was not this vague uneasiness he felt merely conscience faintly pricking? He could not feel that he was doing wrong. At worst, the youth might feel depression for a few hours\u2014speedily curable by taking the train.\n\nSomething, nevertheless, did gnaw at him in subconscious fashion, producing a sense of apprehension; and he came to the conclusion that this memory of the mountain tribe was the cause of it\u2014a revival of forgotten boyhood's awe. He glanced across at the figure of Bindy lounging upon the hotel lawn in an easy-chair, full in the sunshine, a newspaper at his feet. Reclining there, he looked so big and strong and handsome, yet in reality was but a painted lath without resistance, much less attack, in all his many inches. And suddenly the tutor recalled another thing, the link, however, undiscoverable, and it was this: that the boy's mother, a Canadian, had suffered once severely from a winter in Quebec, where the Marquess had first made her acquaintance. Frost had robbed her, if he remembered rightly, of a foot\u2014with the result, at any rate, that she had a wholesome terror of the cold. She sought heat and sun instinctively\u2014fire. Also, that asthma had been her sore affliction\u2014sheer inability to take a full, deep breath. This deficiency of heat and air, therefore, were in her mind. And he knew that Bindy's birth had been an anxious time, the anxiety justified, moreover, since she had yielded up her life for him.\n\nAnd so the singular thought flashed through him suddenly as he watched the reclining, languid boy, Cudrefin's descriptive phrase oddly singing in his head\u2014\n\n'Heat and fire, fire and wind\u2014why, it's the very thing he lacks! And he's always after them. I wonder\u2014!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 464", + "text": "The lumbering yellow diligence brought them up from the Lake shore, a long two hours, deposited them at the opening of the village street, and went its grinding, toiling way towards the frontier. They arrived in a blur of rain. It was evening. Lowering clouds drew night before her time upon the world, obscuring the distant summits of the Oberland, but lights twinkled here and there in the nearer landscape, mapping the gloom with signals. The village was very still. Above and below it, however, two big winds were at work, with curious results. For a lower wind from the east in gusty draughts drove the body of the lake into quick white horses which shone like wings against the deep basses Alpes, while a westerly current swept the heights immediately above the village. There was this odd division of two weathers, presaging a change. A narrow line of clear bright sky showed up the Jura outline finely towards the north, stars peeping sharply through the pale moist spaces. Hurrying vapours, driven by the upper westerly wind, concealed them thinly. They flashed and vanished. The entire ridge, five thousand feet in the air, had an appearance of moving through the sky. Between these opposing winds at different levels the village itself lay motionless, while the world slid past, as it were, in two directions.\n\n'The earth seems turning round,' remarked Lord Ernie. He had been reading a novel all day in train and steamer, and smoking endless cigarettes in the diligence, his companion and himself its only occupants. He seemed suddenly to have waked up. 'What is it?' he asked with interest.\n\nHendricks explained the queer effect of the two contrary winds. Columns of peat smoke rose in thin straight lines from the blur of houses, untouched by the careering currents above and below. The winds whirled round them.\n\nLord Ernie listened attentively to the explanation.\n\n'I feel as if I were spinning with it\u2014like a top,' he observed, putting his hand to his head a moment. 'And what are those lights up there?'\n\nHe pointed to the distant ridge, where fires were blazing as though stars had fallen and set fire to the trees. Several were visible, at regular intervals. The sharp summits of the limestone mountains cut hard into the clear spaces of northern sky thousands of feet above.\n\n'Oh, the peasants burning wood and stuff, I suppose,' the tutor told him.\n\nThe youth turned an instant, standing still to examine them with a shading hand.\n\n'People live up there?' he asked. There was surprise in his voice, and his body stiffened oddly as he spoke.\n\n'In mountain ch\u00e2lets, yes,' replied the other a trifle impatiently, noticing his attitude. 'Come along now,' he added, 'let's get to our rooms in the carpenter's house before the rain comes down. You can see the windows twinkling over there,' and he pointed to a building near the church. 'The storm will catch us.' They moved quickly down the deserted street together in the deepening gloom, passing little gardens, doors of open barns, straggling manure heaps, and courtyards of cobbled stones where the occasional figure of a man was seen. But Lord Ernie lingered behind, half loitering. Once or twice, to the other's increasing annoyance, he paused, standing still to watch the heights through openings between the tumble-down old houses. Half a dozen big drops of rain splashed heavily on the road.\n\n'Hurry up!' cried Hendricks, looking back, 'or we shall be caught. It's the mountain wind\u2014the coup de joran. You can hear it coming!' For the lad was peering across a low wall in an attitude of fixed attention. He made a gesture with one hand, as though he signalled towards the ridges where the fires blazed. Hendricks called pretty sharply to him then. It was possible, of course, that he misinterpreted the movement; it may merely have been that he passed his fingers through his hair, across his eyes, or used the palm to focus sight, for his hat was off and the light was quite uncertain. Only Hendricks did not like the lingering or the gesture. He put authority into his tone at once. 'Come along, will you; come along, Bindy!' he called.\n\nThe answer filled him with amazement.\n\n'All right, all right. I'll follow in a moment. I like this.'\n\nThe tutor went back a few steps towards him. The tone startled him.\n\n'Like what?' he asked.\n\nAnd Lord Ernie turned towards him with another face. There was fighting in it. There was resolution.\n\n'This, of course,' the boy answered steadily, but with excitement shut down behind, as he waved one arm towards the mountains. 'I've dreamed this sort of thing; I've known it somewhere. We've seen nothing like it all our stupid trip.' The flash in his brown eyes passed then, as he added more quietly, but with firmness: 'Don't wait for me; I'll follow.'\n\nHendricks stood still in his tracks. There was a decision in the voice and manner that arrested him. The confidence, the positive statement, the eager desire, the hint of energy\u2014all this was new. He had never encouraged the boy's habit of vivid dreaming, deeming the narration unwise. It flashed across him suddenly now that the 'deficiency' might be only on the surface. Energy and life hid, perhaps, subconsciously in him. Did the dreams betray an activity he knew not how to carry through and correlate with his everyday, external world? And were these dreams evidence of deep, hidden desire\u2014a clue, possibly, to the energy he sought and needed, the exact kind of energy that might set the inert machinery in motion and drive it?\n\nHe hesitated an instant, waiting in the road. He was on the verge of understanding something that yet just evaded him. Bindy's childish, instinctive love of fire, his passion for air, for rushing wind, for oceans of limitless\u2014\n\nThere came at that moment a deep roaring in the mountains. Far away, but rapidly approaching, the ominous booming of it filled the air. The westerly wind descended by the deep gorges, shaking the forests, shouting as it came. Clouds of white dust spiralled into the sky off the upper roads, spread into sheets like snow, and swept downwards with incredible velocity. The air turned suddenly cooler. More big drops of rain splashed and thudded on the roofs and road. There was a feeling of something violent and instantaneous about to happen, a sense almost of attack. The joran tore headlong down into the valley.\n\n'Come on, man,' he cried at the top of his voice. 'That's the joran! I know it of old! It's terrific. Run!' And he caught the lad, still lingering, by the arm.\n\nBut Lord Ernie shook himself free with an excitement almost violent.\n\n'I've been up there with those great fires,' he shouted. 'I know the whole blessed thing. But where was it? Where?' His face was white, eyes shining, manner strangely agitated. 'Big, naked fellows who dance like wind, and rushing women of fire, and\u2014'\n\nTwo things happened then, interrupting the boy's wild language. The joran reached the village and struck it; the houses shook, the trees bent double, and the cloud of limestone dust, painting the darkness white, swept on between Hendricks and the boy with extraordinary force, even separating them. There was a clatter of falling tiles, of banging doors and windows, and then a burst of icy rain that fell like iron shot on everything, raising actual spray. The air was in an instant thick. Everything drove past, roared, trembled. And, secondly\u2014just in that brief instant when man and boy were separated\u2014there shot between them with shadowy swiftness the figure of a man, hatless, with flying hair, who vanished with running strides into the darkness of the village street beyond\u2014all so rapidly that sight could focus the manner neither of his coming nor of his going. Hendricks caught a glimpse of a swarthy, elemental type of face, the swing of great shoulders, the leap of big loose limbs\u2014something rushing and elastic in the whole appearance\u2014but nothing he could claim for definite detail. The figure swept through the dust and wind like an animal\u2014and was gone. It was, indeed, only the contrast of Lord Ernie's whitened skin, of his graceful, half-elegant outline, that enabled him to recall the details that he did. The weather-beaten visage seemed to storm away. Bindy's delicate aristocratic face shone so pale and eager. But that a real man had passed was indubitable, for the boy made a flurried movement as though to follow. Hendricks caught his arm with a determined grip and pulled him back.\n\n'Who was that? Who was it?' Lord Ernie cried breathlessly, resisting with all his strength, but vainly.\n\n'Some mountain fellow, of course. Nothing to do with us.' And he dragged the boy after him down the road. For a second both seemed to have lost their heads. Hendricks certainly felt a gust of something strike him into momentary consternation that was half alarm.\n\n'From up there, where the fires are?' asked the boy, shouting above the wind and rain.\n\n'Yes, yes, I suppose so. Come along. We shall be soused. Are you mad?' For Bindy still held back with all his weight, trying to turn round and see. Hendricks used more force. There was almost a scuffle in the road.\n\n'All right, I'm coming. I only wanted to look a second. You needn't drag my arm out.' He ceased resistance, and they lurched forward together. 'But what a chap he was! He went like the wind. Did you see the light streaming out of him\u2014like fire?'\n\n'Like what?' shouted Hendricks, as they dashed now through the driving tempest.\n\n'Fire!' bawled the boy. 'It lit me up as he passed\u2014fire that lights but does not burn, and wind that blows the world along\u2014'\n\n'Button your coat and run!' interrupted the other, hurrying his pace, and pulling the lad forcibly after him.\n\n'Don't twist! You're hurting! I can run as well as you!' came back, with an energy Bindy had never shown before in his life. He was breathless, panting, charged with excitement still. 'It touched me as he passed\u2014fire that lights but doesn't burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame\u2014let me go, will you? Let go my hand.'\n\nHe dashed free and away. The torrential rain came down in sheets now from a windless sky, for the joran was already miles beyond them, tearing across the angry lake. They reached the carpenter's house, where their lodging was, soaked to the skin. They dried themselves, and ate the light supper of soup and omelette prepared for them\u2014ate it in their dressing-gowns. Lord Ernie went to bed with a hot-water bottle of rough stone. He declared with decision that he felt no chill. His excitement had somewhat passed.\n\n'But, I say, Mr. Hendricks,' he remarked, as he settled down with his novel and a cigarette, calmed and normal again, 'this is a place and a half, isn't it? It stirs me all up. I suppose it's the storm. What do you think?'\n\n'Electrical state of the air, yes,' replied the tutor briefly.\n\nSoon afterwards he closed the shutters on the weather side, said good-night, and went into his own room to unpack. The singular phrase Bindy had used kept singing through his head: 'Fire that lights but doesn't burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame'\u2014the first time he had said 'blows the world along.' Where on earth had the boy got hold of such queer words? He still saw the figure of that wild mountain fellow who had passed between them with the dust and wind and rain. There was confusion in the picture, or rather in his memory of it, perhaps. But it seemed to him, looking back now, that the man in passing had paused a second\u2014the briefest second merely\u2014and had spoken, or, at any rate, had stared closely a moment into Bindy's face, and that some communication had been between them in that moment of elemental violence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 465", + "text": "Pasteur Leysin Hendricks remembered very well. Even now in his old age he was a vigorous personality, but in his youth he had been almost revolutionary; wild enough, too, it was rumoured, until he had turned to God of his own accord as offering a larger field for his strenuous vitality. The little man was possessed of tireless life, a born leader of forlorn hopes, attack his m\u00e9tier, and heavy odds the conditions that he loved. Before settling down in this isolated spot\u2014pasteur de l'\u00e9glise ind\u00e9pendente in a protestant Canton\u2014he had been a missionary in remote pagan lands. His horizon was a big one, he had seen strange things. An uncouth being, with a large head upon a thin and wiry body supported by steely bowed legs, he had that courage which makes itself known in advance of any proof. Hendricks slipped over to la cure about nine o'clock and found him in his study. Lord Ernie was asleep; at least his light was out, no sound or movement audible from his room. The joran had swept the heavens of clouds. Stars shone brilliantly. The fires still blazed faintly upon the heights.\n\nThe visit was not unexpected, for Hendricks had already sent a message to announce himself, and the moment he sat down, met the Pasteur's eye, heard his voice, and observed his slight imperious gestures, he passed under the influence of a personality stronger than his own. Something in Leysin's atmosphere stretched him, lifting his horizon. He had come chiefly\u2014he now realised it\u2014to borrow help and explanation with regard to Lord Ernie; the events of two hours before had impressed him more than he quite cared to own, and he wished to talk about it. But, somehow, he found it difficult to state his case; no opening presented itself; or, rather, the Pasteur's mind, intent upon something of his own, was too preoccupied. In reply to a question presently, the tutor gave a brief outline of his present duties, but omitted the scene of excitement in the village street, for as he watched the furrowed face in the light of the study lamp, he realised both anxiety and spiritual high pressure at work below the surface there. He hesitated to intrude his own affairs at first. They discussed, nevertheless, the psychology of the boy, and the unfavourable chances of regeneration, while the old man's face lit up and flashed from time to time, until at length the truth came out, and Hendricks understood his friend's preoccupation.\n\n'What you're attempting with an individual,' Leysin exclaimed with ardour, 'is precisely what I'm attempting with a crowd. And it's difficult. For poor sinners make poor saints, and the lukewarm I will spue out of my mouth.' He made an abrupt, resentful gesture to signify his disgust and weariness, perhaps his contempt as well. 'Cut it down! Why cumbereth it the ground?'\n\n'A hard, uncharitable doctrine,' began the tutor, realising that he must discuss the Parish before he could introduce Bindy's case effectively. 'You mean, of course, that there's no material to work on?'\n\n'No energy to direct,' was the emphatic reply. 'My sheep here are\u2014real sheep; mere negative, drink-sodden loafers without desire. Hospital cases! I could work with tigers and wild beasts, but who ever trained a slug?'\n\n'Your proper place is on the heights,' suggested Hendricks, interrupting at a venture. 'There's scope enough up there, or used to be. Have they died out, those wild men of the mountains?' And hit by chance the target in the bull's-eye.\n\nThe old man's face turned younger as he answered quickly.\n\n'Men like that,' he exclaimed, 'do not die off. They breed and multiply.' He leaned forward across the table, his manner eager, fervent, almost impetuous with suppressed desire for action. 'There's evil thinking up there,' he said suggestively, 'but, by heaven, it's alive; it's positive, ambitious, constructive. With violent feeling and strong desire to work on, there's hope of some result. Upon vehement impulses like that, pagan or anything else, a man can work with a will. Those are the tigers; down here I have the slugs!'\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders and leaned back into his chair. Hendricks watched him, thinking of the stories told about his missionary days among savage and barbarian tribes.\n\n'Born of the vital landscape, I suppose?' he asked. 'Wind and frost and blazing sun. Their wild energy, I mean, is due to\u2014'\n\nA gesture from the old man stopped him. 'You know who started them upon their wild performances,' he said gravely in a lower voice; 'you know how that ambitious renegade priest from the Valais chose them for his nucleus, then died before he could lead them out, trained and competent, upon his strange campaign? You heard the story when you were with me as a boy\u2014?'\n\n'I remember Marston,' put in the other, uncommonly interested, 'Marston\u2014the boy who\u2014' He stopped because he hardly knew how to continue. There was a minute's silence. But it was not an empty silence, though no word broke it. Leysin's face was a study.\n\n'Ah, Marston, yes,' he said slowly, without looking up; 'you remember him. But that is at my door, too, I suppose. His father was ignorant and obstinate; I might have saved him otherwise.' He seemed talking to himself rather than to his listener. Pain showed in the lines about the rugged mouth. 'There was no one, you see, who knew how to direct the great life that woke in the lad. He took it back with him, and turned it loose into all manner of useless enterprises, and the doctors mistook his abrupt and fierce ambitions for\u2014for the hysteria which they called the vestibule of lunacy... Yet small characters may have big ideas... They didn't understand, of course... It was sad, sad, sad.' He hid his face in his hands a moment.\n\n'Marston went wrong, then, in the end?' for the other's manner suggested disaster of some kind. Hendricks asked it in a whisper. Leysin uncovered his face, looped his neck with one finger, and pointed to the ceiling.\n\n'Hanged himself!' murmured Hendricks, shocked.\n\nThe Pasteur nodded, but there was impatience, half anger in his tone.\n\n'They checked it, kept it in. Of course, it tore him!'\n\nThe two men looked into each other's eyes for a moment, and something in the younger of them shrank. This was all beyond his ken a little. An odd hint of bleak and cruel reality was in the air, making him shiver along nerves that were normally inactive. The uneasiness he felt about Lord Ernie became alarm. His conscience pricked him.\n\n'More than he could assimilate,' continued Leysin. 'It broke him. Yet, had outlets been provided, had he been taught how to use it, this elemental energy drawn direct from Nature\u2014' He broke off abruptly, struck perhaps by the expression in his listener's eyes. 'It seems incredible, doesn't it, in the twentieth century? I know.'\n\n'Evil?' asked Hendricks, stammering rather.\n\n'Why evil?' was the impatient reply. 'How can any force be evil? That's merely a question of direction.'\n\n'And the priest who discovered these forces and taught their use, then\u2014?'\n\n'Was genuinely spiritual and followed the truth in his own way. He was not necessarily evil.' The little Pasteur spoke with vehemence. 'You talk like the religion-primers in the kindergarten,' he went on. 'Listen. This man, sick and weary of his lukewarm flock, sought vital, stalwart systems who might be clean enough to use the elemental powers he had discovered how to attract. Only the bias of the users could make it \"evil\" by wrong use. His idea was big and even holy\u2014to train a corps that might regenerate the world. And he chose unreasoning, unintellectual types with a purpose\u2014primitive, giant men who could assimilate the force without risk of being shattered. Under his direction he intended they should prove as effective as the twelve disciples of old who were fisher-folk. And, had he gone on\u2014'\n\n'He, too, failed then?' asked the other, whose tangled thoughts struggled with incredulity and belief as he heard this strange new thing. 'He died, you mean?'\n\n'Maison de sant\u00e9,' was the laconic reply, 'strait-waistcoats, padded cells, and the rest; but still alive, I'm told. It was more than he could manage.'\n\nIt was a startling story, even in this brief outline, deep suggestion in it. The tutor's sense of being out of his depth increased. After nine months with a lifeless, devitalised human being, this was\u2014well, he seemed to have fallen in his sleep from a comfortable bed into a raging mountain torrent. Strong currents rushed through and over him. The lonely, peaceful village outside, sleeping beneath the stars, heightened the contrast.\n\n'Suppressed or misdirected energy again, I suppose,' he said in a low tone, respecting his companion's emotion. 'And these mountain men,' he asked abruptly, 'do they still keep up their\u2014practices?'\n\n'Their ceremonies, yes,' corrected the other, master of himself again. 'Turbulent moments of nature, storms and the like, stir them to clumsy rehearsals of once vital rituals\u2014not entirely ineffective, even in their incompleteness, but dangerous for that very reason. This joran, for instance, invariably communicates something of its atmospherical energy to themselves. They light their fires as of old. They blunder through what they remember of his ceremonies. With the glasses you may see them in their dozens, men and women, leaping and dancing. It's an amazing sight, great beauty in it, impossible to witness even from a distance without feeling the desire to take part in it. Even my people feel it\u2014the only time they ever get alive,'\u2014he jerked his big head contemptuously towards the street\u2014'or feel desire to act. And some one from the heights\u2014a messenger perhaps\u2014will be down later, this very evening probably, on the hunt\u2014'\n\n'On the hunt?' Hendricks asked it half below his breath. He felt a touch of awe as he heard this experienced, genuinely religious man speak with conviction of such curious things. 'On the hunt?' he repeated more eagerly.\n\n'Messengers do come down,' was the reply. 'A living belief always seeks to increase, to grow, to add to itself. Where there's conviction there's always propaganda.'\n\n'Ah, converts\u2014?'\n\nLeysin shrugged his big black shoulders. 'Desire to add to their number\u2014desire to save,' he said. 'The energy they absorb overflows, that's all.'\n\nThe Englishman debated several questions vaguely in his mind; only his mind, being disturbed, could not hold the balance exactly true. Leysin's influence, as of old, was upon him. A possibility, remote, seductive, dangerous, began to beckon to him, but from somewhere just outside his reasoning mind.\n\n'And they always know when one of their kind is near,' the voice slipped in between his tumbling thoughts, 'as though they get it instinctively from these universal elements they worship. They select their recruits with marvellous judgment and precision. No messenger ever goes back alone; nor has a recruit ever been known to return to the lazy squalor of the conditions whence he escaped.'\n\nThe younger man sat upright in his chair, suddenly alert, and the gesture that he made unconsciously might have been read by a keen psychiatrist as evidence of mental self-defence. He felt the forbidden impulse in him gathering force, and tried to call a halt. At any rate, he called upon the other man to be explicit. He enquired point-blank what this religion of the heights might be. What were these elements these people worshipped? In what did their wild ceremonies consist?\n\nAnd Leysin, breaking bounds, let his speech burst forth in a stream of explanation, learned of actual knowledge, as he claimed, and uttered with a vehement conviction that produced an undeniable effect upon his astonished listener. Told by no dreamer, but by a righteous man who lived, not merely preached his certain faith, Hendricks, before the half was heard, forgot what age and land he dwelt in. Whole blocks of conventional belief crumbled and fell away. Brick walls erected by routine to mark narrow paths of proper conduct\u2014safe, moral, advisable conduct\u2014thawed and vanished. Through the ruins, scrambling at him from huge horizons never recognised before, came all manner of marvellous possibilities. The little confinement of modern thought appalled him suddenly. Leysin spoke slowly, said little, was not even speculative. It was no mere magic of words that made the dim-lit study swim these deep waters beyond the ripple of pert creeds, but rather the overwhelming sense of sure conviction driving behind the statements. The little man had witnessed curious things, yes, in his missionary days, and that he had found truth in them in place of ignorant nonsense was remarkable enough. That silly superstitions prevalent among older nations could be signs really of their former greatness, linked mightily close to natural forces, was a startling notion, but it paved the way in Hendricks' receptive mind just then for the belief that certain so-called elements might be worshipped\u2014known intimately, that is\u2014to the uplifting advantage of the worshippers. And what elements more suitable for adoring imitation than wind and fire? For in a human body the first signs of what men term life are heat which is combustion, and breath which is a measure of wind. Life means fire, drawn first from the sun, and breathing, borrowed from the omnipresent air; there might credibly be ways of assaulting these elements and taking heaven by storm; of seizing from their inexhaustible stores an abnormal measure, of straining this huge raw supply into effective energy for human use\u2014vitality. Living with fire and wind in their most active moments; closely imitating their movements, following in their footsteps, understanding their 'laws of being,' going identically with them\u2014there lay a hint of the method. It was once, when men were primitively close to Nature, instinctual knowledge. The ceremony was the teaching. The Powers of fire, the Principalities of air, existed; and humanity could know their qualities by the ritual of imitation, could actually absorb the fierce enthusiasm of flame and the tireless energy of wind. Such transference was conceivable.\n\nLeysin, at any rate, somehow made it so. His description of what he had personally witnessed, both in wilder lands and here in this little mountain range of middle Europe, had a reality in it that was upsetting to the last degree. 'There is nothing more difficult to believe,' he said, 'yet more certainly true, than the effect of these singular elemental rites.' He laughed a short dry laugh. 'The mediaeval superstition that a witch could raise a storm is but a remnant of a once completely efficacious system,' he concluded, 'though how that strange being, the Valais priest, rediscovered the process and introduced it here, I have never been able to ascertain. That he did so results have proved. At any rate, it lets in life, life moreover in astonishing abundance; though, whether for destruction or regeneration, depends, obviously, upon the use the recipient puts it to. That's where direction comes in.'\n\nThe beckoning impulse in the tutor's bewildered thoughts drew closer. The moment for communicating it had come at last. Without more ado he took the opening. He told his companion the incident in the village street, the boy's abrupt excitement, his new-found energy, the curious words he used, the independence and vitality of his attitude. He told also of his parentage, of his mother's disabilities, his craving for rushing air in abundance, his love of fire for its own sake, of his magnificent physical machinery, yet of his uselessness.\n\nAnd Leysin, as he listened, seemed built on wires. Searching questions shot forth like blows into the other's mind. The Pasteur's sudden increase of enthusiasm was infectious. He leaped intuitively to the thing in Hendricks' thought. He understood the beckoning.\n\nThe tutor answered the questions as best he could, aware of the end in view with trepidation and a kind of mental breathlessness. Yes, unquestionably, Bindy had exchanged communication of some sort with the man, though his excitement had been evident even sooner.\n\n'And you saw this man yourself?' Leysin pressed him.\n\n'Indubitably\u2014a tall and hurrying figure in the dusk.'\n\n'He brought energy with him? The boy felt it and responded?'\n\nHendricks nodded. 'Became quite unmanageable for some minutes,' he replied.\n\n'He assimilated it though? There was no distress exactly?' Leysin asked sharply.\n\n'None\u2014that I could see. Pleasurable excitement, something aggressive, a rather wild enthusiasm. His will began to act. He used that curious phrase about wind and fire. He turned alive. He wanted to follow the man\u2014'\n\n'And the face\u2014how would you describe it? Did it bring terror, I mean, or confidence?'\n\n'Dark and splendid,' answered the other as truthfully as he could. 'In a certain sense, rushing, tempestuous, yet stern rather.'\n\n'A face like the heights,' suggested Leysin impatiently, 'a windy, fiery aspect in it, eh?'\n\n'The man swept past like the spirit of a storm in imaginative poetry\u2014' began the tutor, hunting through his thoughts for adequate description, then stopped as he saw that his companion had risen from his chair and begun to pace the floor.\n\nThe Pasteur paused a moment beside him, hands thrust deep into his pockets, head bent down, and shoulders forward. For twenty seconds he stared into his visitor's face intently, as though he would force into him the thought in his own mind. His features seemed working visibly, yet behind a mask of strong control.\n\n'Don't you see what it is? Don't you see?' he said in a lower, deeper tone. 'They knew. Even from a distance they were aware of his coming. He is one of themselves.' And he straightened up again. 'He belongs to them.'\n\n'One of them? One of the wind-and-fire lot?' the tutor stammered.\n\nThe restless little man returned to his chair opposite, full of suppressed and vigorous movement, as though he were strung on springs.\n\n'He's of them,' he continued, 'but in a peculiar and particular sense. More than merely a possible recruit, his empty organism would provide the very link they need, the perfect conduit.' He watched his companion's face with careful keenness. 'In the country where I first experienced this marvellous thing,' he added significantly, 'he would have been set apart as the offering, the sacrifice, as they call it there. The tribe would have chosen him with honour. He would have been the special bait to attract.'\n\n'Death?' whispered the other.\n\nBut Leysin shook his head. 'In the end, perhaps,' he replied darkly, 'for the vessel might be torn and shattered. But at first charged to the brim and crammed with energy\u2014with transformed vitality they could draw into themselves through him. A monster, if you will, but to them a deity; and superhuman, in our little sense, most certainly.'\n\nThen Hendricks faltered inwardly and turned away. No words came to him at the moment. In silence the minds of the two men, one a religious, the other a secular teacher, and each with a burden of responsibility to the race, kept pace together without speech. The religious, however, outstripped the pedagogue. What he next said seemed a little disconnected with what had preceded it, although Hendricks caught the drift easily enough\u2014and shuddered.\n\n'An organism needing heat,' observed Leysin calmly, 'can absorb without danger what would destroy a normal person. Alcohol, again, neither injures nor intoxicates\u2014up to a given point\u2014the system that really requires it.'\n\nThe tutor, perplexed and sorely tempted, felt that he drifted with a tide he found it difficult to stem.\n\n'Up to a point,' he repeated. 'That's true, of course.'\n\n'Up to a given point,' echoed the other, with significance that made his voice sound solemn. 'Then rescue\u2014in the nick of time.'\n\nHe waited two full minutes and more for an answer; then, as none was audible, he said another thing. His eyes were so intent upon the tutor's that the latter raised his own unwillingly, and understood thus all that lay behind the pregnant little sentence.\n\n'With a number it would not be possible, but with an individual it could be done. Brim the empty vessel first. Then rescue\u2014in the nick of time! Regeneration!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 466", + "text": "In the Englishman's mind there came a crash, as though something fell. There was dust, confusion, noise. Moral platitudes shouted at conventional admonitions. Warnings laughed and copy-book maxims shrivelled up. Above the lot, rising with a touch of grandeur, stood the pulpit figure of the little Pasteur, his big face shining clear through all the turmoil, strength and vision in the flaming eyes\u2014a commanding outline with spiritual audacity in his heart. And Hendricks saw then that the man himself was standing erect in the centre of the room, one finger raised to command attention\u2014listening. Some considerable interval must have passed while he struggled with his inner confusion.\n\nLeysin stood, intently listening, his big head throwing a grotesque shadow on wall and ceiling.\n\n'Hark!' he exclaimed, half whispering. 'Do you hear that? Listen.'\n\nA deep sound, confused and roaring, passed across the night, far away, and slightly booming. It entered the little room so that the air seemed to tremble a moment. To Hendricks it held something ominous.\n\n'The wind,' he whispered, as the noise died off into the distance; 'yet a moment ago the night was still enough. The stars were shining.' There was tense excitement in the room just then. It showed in Leysin's face, which had gone white as a cloth. Hendricks himself felt extraordinarily stirred.\n\n'Not wind, but human voices,' the older man said quickly. 'It's shouting. Listen!' and his eyes ran round the room, coming to rest finally in a corner where his hat and cloak hung from a nail. A gesture accompanied the look. He wanted to be out. The tutor half rose to take his leave. 'You have duties to-night elsewhere,' he stammered. 'I'm forgetting.' His own instinct was to get away himself with Bindy by the first early diligence. He was afraid of yielding.\n\n'Hush!' whispered Leysin peremptorily. 'Listen!'\n\nHe opened the window at the top, and through the crack, where the stars peeped brightly, there came, louder than before, the uproar of human voices floating through the night from far away. The air of the great pine forests came in with it. Hendricks listened intently a moment. He positively jumped to feel a hand upon his arm. Leysin's big head was thrust close up into his face.\n\n'That's the commotion in the village,' he whispered. 'A messenger has come and gone; some one has gone back with him. To-night I shall be needed\u2014down here, but to-morrow night when the great ritual takes place\u2014up there\u2014!'\n\nHendricks tried to push him away so as not to hear the words; but the little man seemed immovable as a rock. The impulse remained probably in the mind without making the muscles work. For the tutor, sorely tempted, longed to dare, yet faltered in his will.\n\n'\u2014if you felt like taking the risk,' the words continued seductively, 'we might place the empty vessel near enough to let it fill, then rescue it, charged with energy, in the nick of time.' And the Pasteur's eyes were aglow with enthusiasm, his voice even trembling at the thought of high adventure to save another's soul.\n\n'Watch merely?' Hendricks heard his own voice whisper, hardly aware that he was saying it, 'without taking part?' He said it thickly, stupidly, a man wavering and unsure of himself. 'It would be an experience,' he stammered. 'I've never\u2014'\n\n'Merely watch, yes; look on; let him see,' interrupted the other with eagerness. 'We must be very careful. It's worth trying\u2014a last resort.'\n\nThey still stood close together. Hendricks felt the little man's breath on his face as he peered up at him.\n\n'I admit the chance,' he began weakly.\n\n'There is no chance,' was the vigorous reply, 'there is only Providence. You have been guided.'\n\n'But as to risk and failure, what of them? What's involved?' he asked, recklessness increasing in him.\n\n'New wine in old bottles,' was the answer. 'But here, you tell me, the vessel is not damaged, but merely empty. The machinery is all right. If he merely watches, as from a little distance\u2014'\n\n'Yes, yes, the machinery is there, I agree. The boy has breeding, health, and all the physical qualities\u2014good blood and nerves and muscles. It's only that life refuses to stay and drive them.' His heart beat with violence even as he said it; he felt the energy and zeal from the older man pour into him. He was realising in himself on a smaller scale what might take place with the boy in large. But still he shrank. Leysin for the moment said no more. His spiritual discernment was equal to his boldness. Having planted the seed, he left it to grow or die. The decision was not for him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 467", + "text": "In the light of the single lamp the two men sat facing each other, listening, waiting, while Leysin talked occasionally, but in the main kept silence. Some time passed, though how long the tutor could not say. In his mind was wild confusion. How could he justify such a mad proposal? Yet how could he refuse the opening, preposterous though it seemed? The enticement was very great; temptation rushed upon him. Striving to recall his normal world, he found it difficult. The face of the old Marquess seemed a mere lifeless picture on a wall\u2014it watched but could not interfere. Here was an opportunity to take or leave. He fought the battle in terms of naked souls, while the ordinary four-cornered morality hid its face awhile. He heard himself explaining, delaying, hedging, half-toying with the problem. But the redemption of a soul was at stake, and he tried to forget the environment and conditions of modern thought and belief. Sentences flashed at him out of the battle: 'I must take him back worse than when I started, or\u2014what? A violent being like Marston, or a redeemed, converted system with new energy? It's a chance, and my last.' Moreover, odd, half-comic detail\u2014there was the support of the Church, of a protestant clergyman whose fundamental beliefs were similar to the evangelical persuasions of the boy's family. Conversion, as demoniacal possession, were both traditions of the blood. After all, the old Marquess might understand and approve. 'You took the opening God set in your way in His wisdom. You showed faith and courage. Far be it from me to condemn you.' The picture on the wall looked down at him and spoke the words.\n\nThe wild hypothesis of the intrepid little missionary-pasteur swept him with an effect like hypnotism. Then, suddenly, something in him seemed to decide finally for itself. He flung himself, morality and all, upon this vigorous other personality. He leaned across the table, his face close to the lamp. His voice shook as he spoke.\n\n'Would you?' he asked\u2014then knew the question foolish, and that such a man would shrink from nothing where the redemption of a soul was at stake; knew also that the question was proof that his own decision was already made.\n\nThere was something grotesque almost in the torrent of colloquial French Leysin proceeded to pour forth, while the other sat listening in amazement, half ashamed and half exhilarated. He looked at the stalwart figure, the wiry bowed legs as he paced the floor, the shortness of the coat-sleeves and the absence of shirt-cuffs round the powerful lean wrists. It was a great fighting man he watched, a man afraid of nothing in heaven or earth, prepared to lead a forlorn hope into a hostile unknown land. And the sight, combined with what he heard, set the seal upon his half-hearted decision. He would take the risk and go.\n\n'Pfui!' exclaimed the little Pasteur as though it might have been an oath, his loud whisper breaking through into a guttural sound, 'pfui! Bah! Would that my people had machinery like that so that I could use it! I've no material to work on, no force to direct, nothing but heavy, sodden clay. Jelly!' he cried, 'negative, useless, lukewarm stuff at best.' He lowered his voice suddenly, so as to listen at the same time. 'I might as well be a baker kneading dough,' he continued. 'They drink and yield and drink again; they never attack and drive; they're not worth labouring to save.' He struck the wooden table with his fist, making the lamp rattle, while his listener started and drew back. 'What good can weak souls, though spotless, be to God? The best have long ago gone up to them,' and he jerked his leonine old head towards the mountains. 'Where there's life there's hope,' he stamped his foot as he said it, 'but the lukewarm\u2014pfui!\u2014I will spue them out of my mouth!'\n\nHe paused by the window a moment, listened attentively, then resumed his pacing to and fro. Clearly, he longed for action. Indifference, half-heartedness had no place in his composition. And Hendricks felt his own slower blood take fire as he listened.\n\n'Ah!' cried Leysin louder, 'what a battle I could fight up there for God, could I but live among them, stem the flow of their dark strong vitality, then twist it round and up, up, up!' And he jerked his finger skywards. 'It's the great sinners we want, not the meek-faced saints. There's energy enough among those devils to bring a whole Canton to the great Footstool, could I but direct it.' He paused a moment, standing over his astonished visitor. 'Bring the boy up with you, and let him drink his fill. And pray, pray, I say, that he become a violent sinner first in order that later there shall be something worth offering to God. Over one sinner that repenteth\u2014'\n\nA rapid, nervous knocking interrupted the flow of words, and the figure of a woman stood upon the threshold. With the opening of the door came also again the roaring from the night outside. Hendricks saw the tall, somewhat dishevelled outline of the wife\u2014he remembered her vaguely, though she could hardly see him now in his darker corner\u2014and recalled the fact that she had been sent out to Leysin in his missionary days, a worthy, illiterate, but adoring woman. She wore a shawl, her hair was untidy, her eyes fixed and staring. Her husband's sturdy little figure, as he rose, stood level with her chin.\n\n'You hear it, Jules?' she whispered thickly. 'The joran has brought them down. You'll be needed in the village.' She said it anxiously, though Hendricks understood the patois with difficulty. They talked excitedly together a moment in the doorway, their outlines blocked against the corridor where a single oil lamp flickered. She warned, urging something; he expostulated. Fragments reached Hendricks in his corner. Clearly the woman worshipped her husband like a king, yet feared for his safety. He, for his part, comforted her, scolded a little, argued, told her to 'believe in God and go back to bed.'\n\n'They'll take you too, and you'll never return. It's not your parish anyhow...' a touch of anguish in her tone.\n\nBut Leysin was impatient to be off. He led her down the passage. 'My parish is wherever I can help. I belong to God. Nothing can harm me but to leave undone the work He gives me.' The steps went farther away as he guided her to the stairs. Outside the roar of voices rose and fell. Wind brought the drifting sound, wind carried it away. It was like the thunder of the sea.\n\nAnd the Englishman, using the little scene as a flashlight upon his own attitude, saw it for an instant as God might have seen it. Leysin's point of view was high, scanning a very wide horizon. His eye being single, the whole body was full of light. The risk, it suddenly seemed, was\u2014nothing; to shirk it, indeed, the merest cowardice.\n\nHe went up and seized the Pasteur's hand.\n\n'To-morrow,' he said, a trifle shakily perhaps, yet looking straight into his eyes. 'If we stay over\u2014I'll bring the lad with me\u2014provided he comes willingly.'\n\n'You will stay over,' interrupted the other with decision. 'Come to supper at seven. Come in mountain boots. Use persuasion, but not force. He shall see it from a distance\u2014without taking part.'\n\n'From a distance\u2014yes,' the tutor repeated, 'but without taking part.'\n\n'I know the signs,' the Pasteur broke in significantly. 'We can rescue him in the nick of time\u2014charged with energy and life, yet before the danger gets\u2014'\n\nA sudden clangour of bells drowned the whispering voice, cutting the sentence in the middle. It was like an alarm of fire. Leysin sprang sharply round.\n\n'The signal!' he cried; 'the signal from the church. Some one's been taken. I must go at once\u2014I shall be needed.' He had his hat and cloak on in a moment, was through the passage and into the street, Hendricks following at his heels. The whole place seemed alive. Yet the roadway was deserted, and no lights showed at the windows of the houses. Only from the farther end of the village, where stood the cabaret, came a roar of voices, shouting, crying, singing. The impression was that the population was centred there. Far in the starry sky a line of fires blazed upon the heights, throwing a lurid reflection above the deep black valley. Excitement filled the night.\n\n'But how extraordinary!' exclaimed Hendricks, hurrying to overtake his alert companion; 'what life there is about! Everything's on the rush.' They went faster, almost running. 'I feel the waves of it beating even here.' He followed breathlessly.\n\n'A messenger has come\u2014and gone,' replied Leysin in a sharp, decided voice. 'What you feel here is but the overflow. This is the aftermath. I must work down here with my people\u2014'\n\n'I'll work with you,' began the other. But Leysin stopped him.\n\n'Keep yourself for to-morrow night\u2014up there,' he said with grave authority, pointing to the fiery line upon the heights, and at the same time quickening his pace along the street. 'At the moment,' he cried, looking back, 'your place is yonder.' He jerked his head towards the carpenter's house among the vineyards. The next minute he was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 468", + "text": "And Hendricks, accredited tutor to a sprig of nobility in the twentieth century, asked himself suddenly how such things could possibly be. The adventure took on abruptly a touch of nightmare. Only the light in the sky above the cabaret windows, and the roar of voices where men drank and sang, brought home the reality of it all. With a shudder of apprehension he glanced at the lurid glare upon the mountains. He was committed now; not because he had merely promised, but because he had definitely made up his mind.\n\nLighting a match, he saw by his watch that the visit had lasted over two hours. It was after eleven. He hurried, letting himself in with the big house-key, and going on tiptoe up the granite stairs. In his mind rose a picture of the boy as he had known him all these weary, sight-seeing months\u2014the mild brown eyes, the facile indolence, the pliant, watery emotions of the listless creature, but behind him now, like storm clouds, the hopes, desires, fears the Pasteur's talk had conjured up. The yearning to save stirred strongly in his heart, and more and more of the little man's reckless spiritual audacity came with it. His own affection for the lad was genuine, but impatience and adventure pushed eagerly through the tenderness. If only, oh, if only he could put life into that great six-foot, big-boned frame! Some energy as of fire and wind into that inert machinery of mind and body! The idea was utterly incredible, but surely no harm could come of trying the experiment. There were the huge and elemental forces, of course, in Nature, and if... A sound in the bedroom, as he crept softly past the door, caught his attention, and he paused a moment to listen. Lord Ernie was not asleep, then, after all. He wondered why the sound got somehow at his heart. There was shuffling behind the door; there was a voice, too\u2014or was it voices? He knocked.\n\n'Who is it?' came at once, in a tone he hardly recognised. And, as he answered, 'It's I, Mr. Hendricks; let me in,' there followed a renewal of the shuffling, but without the sound of voices, and the door flew open\u2014it was not even locked. Lord Ernie stood before him, dressed to go out. In the faint starlight the tall ungainly figure filled the doorway, erect and huge, the shoulders squared, the trunk no longer drooping. The listlessness was gone. He stood upright, limbs straight and alert; the sagging limp had vanished from the knees. He looked, in this semi-darkness, like another person, almost monstrous. And the tutor drew back instinctively, catching an instant at his breath.\n\n'But, my dear boy! why aren't you asleep?' he stammered. He glanced half nervously about him. 'I heard you talking, surely?' He fumbled for a match; but, before he found it, the other had turned on the electric switch. The light flared out. There was no one else in the room. 'Is anything wrong with you? What's the matter?'\n\nBut the boy answered quietly, though in a deeper voice than Hendricks had ever known in him before:\n\n'I'm all right; only I couldn't sleep. I've been watching those fires on the mountains. I\u2014I wanted to go out and see.'\n\nHe still held the field-glasses in his hand, swinging them vigorously by the strap. The room was littered with clothes, just unpacked, the heavy shooting boots in the middle of the floor; and Hendricks, noticing these signs, felt a wave of excitement sweep through him, caught somehow from the presence of the boy. There was a sense of vitality in the room\u2014as though a rush of active movement had just passed through it. Both windows stood wide open, and the roar of voices was clearly audible. Lord Ernie turned his head to listen.\n\n'That's only the village people drinking and shouting,' said Hendricks, closely watching each movement that he made. 'It's perfectly natural, Bindy, that you feel too excited to sleep. We're in the mountains. The air stimulates tremendously\u2014it makes the heart beat faster.' He decided not to press the lad with questions.\n\n'But I never felt like this in the Rockies or the Himalayas,' came the swift rejoinder, as he moved to the window and looked out. 'There was nothing in India or Japan like that!' He swept his hand towards the wooded heights that towered above the village so close. He talked volubly. 'All those things we saw out there were sham\u2014done on purpose for tourists. Up there it's real. I've been watching through the glasses till\u2014I felt I simply must go out and join it. You can see men dancing round the fires, and big, rushing women. Oh, Mr. Hendricks, isn't it all glorious\u2014all too glorious and ripping for words!' And his brown eyes shone like lamps.\n\n'You mean that it's spontaneous, natural?' the other guided him, welcoming the new enthusiasm, yet still bewildered by the startling change. It was not mere nerves he saw. There was nothing morbid in it.\n\n'They're doing it, I mean, because they have to,' came the decided answer, 'and because they feel it. They're not just copying the world.' He put his hand upon the other's arm. There was dry heat in it that Hendricks felt even through his clothes. 'And that's what I want,' the boy went on, raising his voice; 'what I've always wanted without knowing it\u2014real things that can make me alive. I've often had it in my dreams, you know, but now I've found it.'\n\n'But I didn't know. You never told me of those dreams.'\n\nThe boy's cheeks flushed, so that the colour and the fire in his eyes made him positively splendid. He answered slowly, as out of some part he had hitherto kept deliberately concealed.\n\n'Because I never could get hold of it in words. It sounded so silly even to myself, and I thought Father would train it all away and laugh at it. It's awfully far down in me, but it's so real I knew it must come out one day, and that I should find it. Oh, I say, Mr. Hendricks,' and he lowered his voice, leaning out across the window-sill suddenly, 'that fills me up and feeds me'\u2014he pointed to the heights\u2014'and gives me life. The life I've seen till now was only a kind of show. It starved me. I want to go up there and feel it pouring through my blood.' He filled his lungs with the strong mountain air, and paused while he exhaled it slowly, as though tasting it with delight and understanding. Then he burst out again, 'I vote we go. Will you come with me? What d'you say. Eh?'\n\nThey stared at each other hard a moment. Something as primitive and irresistible as love passed through the air between them. With a great effort the older man kept the balance true.\n\n'Not to-night, not now,' he said firmly. 'It's too late. To-morrow, if you like\u2014with pleasure.'\n\n'But to-morrow night,' cried the boy with a rush, 'when the fires are blazing and the wind is loose. Not in the stupid daylight.'\n\n'All right. To-morrow night. And my old friend, Monsieur Leysin, shall be our guide. He knows the way, and he knows the people too.'\n\nLord Ernie seized his hands with enthusiasm. His vigour was so disconcerting that it seemed to affect his physical appearance. The body grew almost visibly; his very clothes hung on him differently; he was no longer a nonentity yawning beneath an ancient pedigree and title; he was an aggressive personality. The boy in him rushed into manhood, as it were, while still retaining boyish speech and gesture. It was uncanny. 'We'll go more than once, I vote; go again and again. This is a place and a half. It's my place with a vengeance\u2014!'\n\n'Not exactly the kind of place your father would wish you to linger in,' his tutor interrupted. 'But we might stay a day or two\u2014especially as you like it so.'\n\n'It's far better than the towns and the rotten embassies; better than fifty Simlas and Bombays and filthy Cairos,' cried the other eagerly. 'It's just the thing I need, and when I get home I'll show 'em something. I'll prove it. Why, they simply won't know me!' He laughed, and his face shone with a kind of vivid radiance in the glare of the electric light. The transformation was more than curious. Waiting a moment to see if more would follow, Hendricks moved slowly then towards the door, with the remark that it was advisable now to go to bed since they would be up late the following night\u2014when he noticed for the first time that the pillow and sheets were crumpled and that the bed had already been lain in. The first suspicion flashed back upon him with new certainty.\n\nLord Ernie was already taking off his heavy coat, preparatory to undressing. He looked up quickly at the altered tone of voice.\n\n'Bindy,' the tutor said with a touch of gravity, 'you were alone just now\u2014weren't you\u2014of course?'\n\nThe other sat up from stooping over his boots. With his hands resting on the bed behind him, he looked straight into his companion's eyes. Lying was not among his faults. He answered slowly after a decided interval.\n\n'I\u2014I was asleep,' he whispered, evidently trying to be accurate, yet hesitating how to describe the thing he had to say, 'and had a dream\u2014one of my real, vivid dreams when something happens. Only, this time, it was more real than ever before. It was'\u2014he paused, searching for words, then added\u2014'sweet and awful.'\n\nAnd Hendricks repeated the surprising sentence. 'Sweet and awful, Bindy! What in the world do you mean, boy?'\n\nLord Ernie seemed puzzled himself by the choice of words he used.\n\n'I don't know exactly,' he went on honestly, 'only I mean that it was awfully real and splendid, a bit of my own life somewhere\u2014somewhere else\u2014where it lies hidden away behind a lot of days and months that choke it up. I can never get at it except in woods and places, quite alone, hearing the wind or making fires, or\u2014in sleep.' He hid his face in his hands a moment, then looked up with a hint of censure in his eyes. 'Why didn't you tell me that such things were done? You never told me,' he repeated.\n\n'I didn't know it myself until this evening. Leysin\u2014'\n\n'I thought you knew everything,' Lord Ernie broke in in that same half-chiding tone.\n\n'Monsieur Leysin told me to-night for the first time,' said Hendricks firmly, 'that such people and such practices existed. Till now I had never dreamed that such superstitions survived anywhere in the world at all.' He resented the reproach. But he was also aware that the boy resented his authority. For the first time his ascendency seemed in question; his voice, his eye, his manner did not quell as formerly. 'So you mean, when you say \"sweet and awful,\" that it was very real to you?' he asked. He insisted now with purpose. 'Is that it, Bindy?'\n\nThe other replied eagerly enough. 'Yes, that's it, I think\u2014partly. This time it was more than dreaming. It was real. I got there. I remembered. That's what I meant. And after I woke up the thing still went on. The man seemed still in the room beside the bed, calling me to get up and go with him\u2014'\n\n'Man! What man?' The tutor leant upon the back of a chair to steady himself. The wind just then went past the open windows with a singing rush.\n\n'The dark man who passed us in the village, and who pointed to the fires on the heights. He came with the wind, you remember. He pulled my coat.'\n\nThe boy stood up as he said it. He came across the naked boarding, his step light and dancing. 'Fire that heats but does not burn, and wind that blows the heart alight, or something\u2014I forget now exactly. You heard it too.' He whispered the words with excitement, raising his arms and knees as in the opening movements of a dance.\n\nHendricks kept his own excitement down, but with a distinctly conscious effort.\n\n'I heard nothing of the kind,' he said calmly. 'I was only thinking of getting home dry. You say,' he asked with decision, 'that you heard those words?'\n\nLord Ernie stood back a little. It was not that he wished to conceal, but that he felt uncertain how to express himself. 'In the street,' he said, 'I heard nothing; the words rose up in my own head, as it were. But in the dream, and afterwards too, when I was wide awake, I heard them out loud, clearly: Fire that heats but does not burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame\u2014that's how it was.'\n\n'In French, Bindy? You heard it in French?'\n\n'Oh, it was no language at all. The eyes said it\u2014both times.' He spoke as naturally as though it was the Durbah he described again. Only this new aggressive certainty was in his voice and manner. 'Mr. Hendricks,' he went on eagerly, 'you understand what I mean, don't you? When certain people look at one, words start up in the mind as though one heard them spoken. I heard the words in my head, I suppose; only they seemed so familiar, as though I'd known them before\u2014always\u2014'\n\n'Of course, Bindy, I understand. But this man\u2014tell me\u2014did he stay on after you woke up? And how did he go?' He looked round at the barely furnished room for hiding-places. 'It was really the dream you carried on after waking, wasn't it?'\n\nThen Bindy laughed, but inwardly, as to himself. There was the faintest possible hint of derision in his voice. 'No doubt,' he said; 'only it was one of my big, real dreams. And how he went I can't explain at all, for I didn't see. You knocked at the door; I turned, and found myself standing in the room, dressed to go out. There was a rush of wind outside the window\u2014and when I looked he was no longer there. The same minute you came in. It was all as quick as that. I suppose I dressed\u2014in my sleep.'\n\nThey stood for several minutes, staring at each other without speaking. The tutor hesitated between several courses of action, unable, for the life of him, to decide upon any particular one. His instinct on the whole was to stop nothing, but to encourage all possible expression, while keeping rigorous watch and guard. Repression, it seemed to him just then, was the least desirable line to take. Somewhere there was truth in the affair. He felt out of his depth, his authority impaired, and under these temporary disadvantages he might so easily make a grave mistake, injuring instead of helping. While Lord Ernie finished his undressing he leaned out of the window, taking great draughts of the keen night air, watching the blazing fires and listening to the roar of voices, now dying down into the distance.\n\nAnd the voice of his thinking whispered to him, 'Let it all come out. Repress nothing. Let him have the entire adventure. If it's nonsense it can't injure, and if it's true it's inevitable.' He drew his head in and moved towards the door. 'Then it's settled,' he said quietly, as though nothing unusual had happened; 'we'll go up there to-morrow night\u2014with Monsieur Leysin to show us the way. And you'll go to sleep now, won't you? For to-morrow we may be up very late. Promise me, Bindy.'\n\n'I'm dead tired,' came the answer from the sheets. 'I certainly shan't dream any more, if that's what you mean. I promise.'\n\nHendricks turned the light out and went softly from the room. He could always trust the boy.\n\n'Good-night, Bindy,' he said.\n\n'Good-night,' came the drowsy reply.\n\nUpstairs he lingered a long time over his own undressing, listening, waiting, watching for the least sound below. But nothing happened. Once, for his own peace of mind, he stole stealthily downstairs to the boy's door; then, reassured by the heavy breathing that was distinctly audible, he went up finally and got into bed himself. The night was very still now. It was cool, and the stars were brilliant over lake and forest and mountain. No voices broke the silence. He only heard the tinkle of the little streams beyond the vineyards. And by midnight he was sound asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 469", + "text": "And next day broke as soft and brilliant as though October had stolen it from June; the Alps gleamed through an almost summery haze across the lake; the air held no hint of coming winter; and the Jura mountains wore the true blue of memory in Hendricks' mind. Patches of red and yellow splashed the great pine-woods here and there where beech and ash put autumn in the vast dark carpet.\n\nThe tutor woke clear-headed and refreshed. All that had happened the night before seemed out of proportion and unreasonable. There had been exaggerated emotion in it: in himself, because he returned to a place still charged with potent memories of youth; and in Lord Ernie, because the lad was overwrought by the electrical disturbance of the atmosphere. The nearness of the ancestral halls, which they both disliked, had emphasised it; the ominous, wild weather had favoured it; and the coincidence of these pagan rites of superstitious peasants had focused it all into a melodramatic form with an added touch of the supernatural that was highly picturesque and\u2014dangerously suggestive. Hendricks recovered his common sense; judgment asserted itself again.\n\nYet, for all that, certain things remained authentic. The effect upon the boy was not illusion, nor his words about fire and wind mere meaningless invention. There hid some undivined and significant correspondence between the gaps in his deficient nature and these two turbulent elements. The talk with Leysin, as the conduct of his wife, remained authentic; those facts were too steady to be dismissed, the Pasteur too genuinely in earnest to be catalogued in dream. Neither daylight nor common sense could dissipate their actuality. Truth lay somewhere in it all.\n\nThus the day, for the tutor, was a battle that shifted with varying fortune between doubt and certainty. In the morning his mind was decided: the wild experiment was unjustifiable; in the afternoon, as the sunshine grew faint and melancholy, it became 'interesting, for what harm could come of it?' but towards evening, when shadows lengthened across the purple forests and the trees stood motionless in the calm and windless air, the adventure seemed, as it had seemed the night before, not only justifiable, but right and necessary. It only became inevitable, however, when, after tea together on the balcony, Lord Ernie, mentioning the subject for the first time that day, asked pointedly what time the Pasteur expected them to supper; then, noticing the flash of hesitancy in his companion's eyes, added in his strange deep voice, 'You promised we should go.' Withdrawal after that was out of the question. To retract would have meant, for one thing, final loss of the boy's confidence\u2014a possibility not to be contemplated for a moment.\n\nUntil this moment no word of the preceding night had passed the lips of either. Lord Ernie had been quiet and preoccupied, silent rather, but never listless. He was peaceful, perhaps subdued a little, yet with a suppressed energy in his bearing that Hendricks watched with secret satisfaction. The tutor, closely observant, detected nothing out of gear; life stirred strongly in him; there was purpose, interest, will; there was desire; but there was nothing to cause alarm.\n\nAvailing himself then of the lad's absorption in his own affairs, he wandered forth alone upon his sentimental tour of inspection. No ghost of emotion rose to stalk beside him. That early tragedy, he now saw clearly, had been no more than youthful explosion of mere physical passion, wholesome and natural, but due chiefly to propinquity. His thoughts ran idly on; and he was even congratulating himself upon escape and freedom when, abruptly, he remembered a phrase Bindy had used the night before, and stumbled suddenly upon a clue when least expecting it.\n\nHe came to a sudden halt. The significance of it crashed through his mind and startled him. 'There are big rushing women...' It was the first reference to the other sex, as evidence of their attraction for him, Hendricks had ever known to pass his lips. Hitherto, though twenty years of age, the lad had never spoken of women as though he was aware of their terrible magic. He had not discovered them as females, necessary to every healthy male. It was not purity, of course, but ignorance: he had felt nothing. Something had now awakened sex in him, so that he knew himself a man, and naked. And it had revolutionised the world for him. This new life came from the roots, transforming listless indifference into positive desire; the will woke out of sleep, and all the currents of his system took aggressive form. For all energy, intellectual, emotional, or spiritual, is fundamentally one: it is primarily sexual.\n\nHendricks paused in his sentimental walk, marvelling that he had not realised sooner this simple truth. It brought a certain logical meaning even into the pagan rites upon the mountains, these ancient rites which symbolised the marriage of the two tremendous elements of wind and fire, heat and air. And the lad's quiet, busy mood that morning confirmed his simple discovery. It involved restraint and purpose. Lord Ernie was alive. Hendricks would take home with him to those ancestral halls a vessel bursting with energy\u2014creative energy. It was admirable that he should witness\u2014from a safe distance\u2014this primitive ceremony of crude pagan origin. It was the very thing. And the tutor hurried back to the house among the vineyards, aware that his responsibility had increased, but persuaded more than ever that his course was justified." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 470", + "text": "The sky held calm and cloudless through the day, the forests brooding beneath the hazy autumn sunshine. Indications that the second hurricane lay brewing among the heights were not wanting, however, to experienced eyes. Almost a preternatural silence reigned; there was a warm heaviness in the placid atmosphere; the surface of the lake was patched and streaky; the extreme clarity of the air an ominous omen. Distant objects were too close. Towards sunset, moreover, the streaks and patches vanished as though sucked below, while thin strips of tenuous cloud appeared from nowhere above the northern cliffs. They moved with great rapidity at an enormous height, touched with a lurid brilliance as the sun sank out of sight; and when Hendricks strolled over with Lord Ernie to la cure for supper there came a sudden rush of heated wind that set the branches sharply rattling, then died away as abruptly as it rose.\n\nThey seemed reflected, too, these disturbances, in the human atmospheres about the supper table\u2014there was suppression of various emotions, emotions presaging violence. Lord Ernie was exhilarated, Hendricks uneasy and preoccupied, the Pasteur grave and thoughtful. In Hendricks was another feeling as well\u2014that he had lightly summoned a storm which might carry him off his feet. The boy's excitement increased it, as wind-puffs fan a starting fire. His own judgment had somewhere played him false, betraying him into this incredible adventure. And yet he could not stop it. The Pasteur's influence was over him perhaps. He was ashamed to turn back. He was committed. The unusual circumstances found the weakness in his character.\n\nFor somewhere in the preposterous superstition there lay a big forgotten truth. He could not believe it, and yet he did believe it. The world had forgotten how to live truly close to Nature.\n\nA desultory conversation was carried on, chiefly between the two men, while the boy ate hungrily, and Mme. Leysin watched her husband with anxiety as she served the simple meal.\n\n'So you are coming with us, and you like to come?' the Pasteur observed quietly, Hendricks translating.\n\nLord Ernie replied with a gesture of unmistakable enthusiasm.\n\n'A wild lot of men and women,' Leysin went on, keeping his eye hard upon him, 'with an interesting worship of their own copied from very ancient times. They live on the heights, and mix little with us valley folk. You shall see their ceremonies to-night.'\n\n'They get the wind and fire into themselves, don't they?' asked the boy keenly, and somewhat to the distress of the translator who rendered it, 'They get into wind and fire.'\n\n'They worship wind and fire,' Leysin replied, 'and they do it by means of a wonderful dance that somehow imitates the leap of flame and the headlong rush of wind. If you copy the movements and gestures of a person you discover the emotion that causes them. You share it. Their idea is, apparently, that by imitating the movements they invite or attract the force\u2014draw these elemental powers into their systems, so that in the end\u2014'\n\nHe stopped suddenly, catching the tutor's eye. Lord Ernie seemed to understand without translation; he had laid down his knife and fork, and was leaning forward across the table, listening with deep absorption. His expression was alert with a new intelligence that was almost cunning. An acute sensibility seemed to have awakened in him.\n\n'As with laughing, I suppose?' he said in an undertone to Hendricks quickly. 'If you imitate a laugher, you laugh yourself in the end and feel all the jolly excitement of laughter. Is that what he means?'\n\nThe tutor nodded with assumed indifference. 'Imitation is always infectious,' he said lightly; 'but, of course, you will not imitate these wild people yourself, Bindy. We'll just look on from a distance.'\n\n'From a distance!' repeated the boy, obviously disappointed. 'What's the good of that?' A look of obstinacy passed across his altered face.\n\nHendricks met his eyes squarely. 'At a circus,' he said firmly, 'you just watch. You don't imitate the clown, do you?'\n\n'If you look on long enough, you do,' was the rather dogged reply.\n\n'Well, take the Russian dancers we saw in Moscow,' the other insisted patiently; 'you felt the power and beauty without jumping up and whirling in your stall?'\n\nBindy half glared at him. There was almost contempt in his quiet answer: 'But your mind whirled with them. And later your body would too; otherwise it's given you nothing.' He paused a second. 'I can only get the fun of riding by being on a horse's back and doing his movements exactly with him\u2014not by watching him.'\n\nHendricks smiled and shrugged his shoulders. He did not wish to discourage the enthusiasm lying behind this analysis. The uneasiness in him grew apace. He said something rapidly in French, using an undertone and laughter to confuse the actual words.\n\n'Of course we must not interfere with their ceremonies,' put in the Pasteur with decision. 'It's sacred to them. We can hide among the trees and watch. You would not leave your seat in church to imitate the priest, would you?' He glanced smilingly at the eager youth before him.\n\n'If he did something real, I would.' It was said with a bright flash in the eyes. 'Anything real I'd copy like a shot. Only, I never find it.'\n\nThe reply was disconcerting rather: and Hendricks, as he hurriedly translated, made a clatter with his knife and fork, for something in him rose to meet the truth behind the curious words. From that moment, as though catching a little of the boy's exhilaration, he passed under a kind of spell perhaps. It was, in spite of the exaggeration, oddly stimulating. This dull little meal at the village cure masked an accumulating vehemence, eager to break loose. He heard the old father's voice: 'Well done, Hendricks! You have accomplished wonders!' He would take back the boy\u2014alive...\n\nYet all the time there were streaks and patches on his soul as upon the surface of the lake that afternoon. There were signs of terror. He felt himself letting go, an increasing recklessness, a yielding up more and more of his own authority to that of this triumphant boy. Bindy understood the meaning of it all and felt secure; Hendricks faltered, hesitated, stood on the defensive. Yet, ever less and less. Already he accepted the other's guidance. Already Lord Ernie's leadership was in the ascendant. Conviction invariably holds dominion over doubt.\n\nThey ate little. It was near the end of the meal when the wind, falling from a clear and starlit sky, struck its first violent blow, dropping with the force of an explosion that shook the wooden house, and passing with a roar towards the distant lake. The oil lamp, suspended from the ceiling, trembled; the Pasteur looked apprehensively at the shuttered windows; and Lord Ernie, with startling abruptness, stood up. His eyes were shining. His voice was brisk, alert, and deep.\n\n'The wind, the wind!' he cried. 'Think what it'll be up there! We shall feel it on our bodies!' His enthusiasm was like a rush of air across the table. 'And the fire!' he went on. 'The flames will lick all over, and tear about the sky. I feel wild and full of them already! How splendid!' And the flame of the little lamp leaped higher in the chimney as he said it.\n\n'The violence of the coup de joran is extraordinary,' explained Leysin as he got up to turn down the wick, 'and the second outburst\u2014' The rest of his sentence was drowned by the noise of Hendricks' voice telling the boy to sit down and finish his supper. And at the same moment the Pasteur's wife came in as though a stroke of wind drove behind her down the passage. The door slammed in the draught. There was a momentary confusion in the room above which her voice rose shrill and frightened.\n\n'The fires are alight, Jules,' she whispered in her half-intelligible patois, 'the forest is burning all along the upper ridge.' Her face was pale and her speech came stumbling. She lowered her lips to her husband's ear. 'They'll be looking out for recruits to-night. Is it necessary, is it right for you to go?' She glanced uneasily at the English visitors. 'You know the danger\u2014'\n\nHe stopped her with a gesture. 'Those who look on at life accomplish nothing,' he answered impatiently. 'One must act, always act. Chances are sent to be taken, not stared at.' He rose, pushing past her into the passage, and as he did so she gave him one swift comprehensive look of tenderness and admiration, then hurried after him to find his hat and cloak. Willingly she would have kept him at home that night, yet gladly, in another sense, she saw him go. She fumbled in her movements, ready to laugh or cry or pray. Hendricks saw her pain and understood. It was singular how the woman's attitude intensified his own misgivings; her behaviour, the mere expression of her face alone, made the adventure so absolutely real.\n\nThree minutes later they were in the village street. Hendricks and Lord Ernie, the latter impatient in the road beyond, saw her tall figure stoop to embrace him. 'I shall pray all night: I shall watch from my window for your return. God, who speaks from the whirlwind, and whose pathway is the fire, will go with you. Remember the younger men; it is ever the younger men that they seek to take...!' Her words were half hysterical. The kiss was given and taken; the open doorway framed her outline a moment; then the buttress of the church blotted her out, and they were off." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 471", + "text": "And at once the curious confusion of strong wind was upon them. Gusts howled about the corners of the shuttered houses and tore noisily across the open yards. Dust whirled with the rapidity as of some spectral white machinery. A tile came clattering down about their feet, while overhead the roofs had an air of shifting, toppling, bending. The entire village seemed scooped up and shaken, then dropped upon the earth again in tottering fashion.\n\n'This way,' gasped the little Pasteur, blown sideways like a sail; 'follow me closely.' Almost arm-in-arm at first they hurried down the deserted street, past lampless windows and tight-fastened doors, and soon were beyond the cabaret in that open stretch between the village and the forest where the wind had unobstructed way. Far above them ran the fiery mountain ridge. They saw the glare reflected in the sky as the tempest first swept them all three together, then separated them in the same moment. They seemed to spin or whirl. 'It's far worse than I expected,' shouted their guide; 'here! Give me your hand!' then found, once disentangled from his flapping cloak, that no one stood beside him. For each of them it was a single fight to reach the shelter of the woods, where the actual ascent began. An instant the Pasteur seemed to hesitate. He glanced back at the lighted window of la cure across the fields, at the line of fire in the sky, at the figure disappearing in the blackness immediately ahead. 'Where's the boy?' he shouted. 'Don't let him get too far in front. Keep close. Wait till I come!' They staggered back against each other. 'Look how easily he's slipped ahead already!'\n\n'This howling wind\u2014' Hendricks shouted, as they advanced side by side, pushing their shoulders against the storm.\n\nThe rest of the sentence vanished into space. Leysin shoved him forward, pointing to where, some twenty yards in front, the figure of Lord Ernie, head down, was battling eagerly with the hurricane. Already he stood near to the shelter of the trees waving his arms with energy towards the summits where the fire blazed. He was calling something at the top of his voice, urging them to hurry. His voice rushed down upon them with a pelt of wind.\n\n'Don't let him get away from us,' bawled Leysin, holding his hands cup-wise to his mouth. 'Keep him in reach. He may see, but must not take part...' A blow full in the face that smote him like the flat of a great sword clapped the sentence short. 'That's your part. He won't obey me!' Hendricks heard it as they plunged across the windswept reach, panting, struggling, forcing their bodies sideways like two-legged crabs against the terrific force of the descending joran. They reached the protection of the forest wall without further attempt at speech. Here there was sudden peace and silence, for the tall, dense trees received the tempest's impact like a cushion, stopping it. They paused a moment to recover breath.\n\nBut although the first exhaustion speedily passed, that original confusion of strong wind remained\u2014in Hendricks' mind at least,\u2014for wind violent enough to be battled with has a scattering effect on thought and blows the very blood about. Something in him snapped its cables and blew out to sea. His breath drew in an impetuous quality from the tempest each time he filled his lungs. There was agitation in him that caused an odd exaggeration of the emotions. The boy, as they came up, leaped down from a boulder he had climbed. He opened his arms, making of his cloak a kind of sail that filled and flapped.\n\n'At last!' he cried, impatient, almost vexed. 'I thought you were never coming. The wind blew me along. We shall be late\u2014'\n\nThe tutor caught his arm with vigour. 'You keep by us, Ernest; d'you hear now? No rushing ahead like that. Leysin's the guide, not you.' He even shook him. But as he did so he was aware that he himself resisted something that he did not really want to resist, something that urged him forcibly; a little more and he would yield to it with pleasure, with abandon, finally with recklessness. A reaction of panic fear ran over him.\n\n'It was the wind, I tell you,' cried the boy, flinging himself free with a hint of insolence in his voice, 'for it's alive. I mean to see everything. The wind's our leader and the fire's our guide.' He made a movement to start on again.\n\n'You'll obey me,' thundered Hendricks, 'or else you'll go home. D'you understand?'\n\nWith exasperation, yet with uneasy delight, he noted the words Bindy made use of. It was in him that he might almost have uttered them himself. He stepped already into an entirely new world. Exhilaration caught him even now. Putting the brake on was mere pretence. He seized the lad by both shoulders and pushed him to the rear, then placed himself next, so that Leysin moved in front and led the way. The procession started, diving into the comparative shelter of the forest. 'Don't let him pass you,' he heard in rapid French; 'guide him, that's all. The power's already in his blood. Keep yourself in hand as well, and follow me closely.' The roar of the storm above them carried the words clean off the world.\n\nHere in the forest they moved, it seemed, along the floor of an ocean whose surface raged with dreadful violence; any moment one or other of them might be caught up to that surface and whirled off to destruction. For the procession was not one with itself. The darkness, the difficulty of hearing what each said, the feeling, too, that each climbed for himself, made everything seem at sixes and sevens. And the tutor, this secret exultation growing in his heart, denied the anxiety that kept it pace, and battled with his turbulent emotions, a divided personality. His power over the boy, he realised, had gravely weakened. A little time ago they had seemed somehow equal. Now, however, a complete reversal of their relative positions had taken place. The boy was sure of himself. While Leysin led at a steady mountaineer's pace on his wiry, short, bowed legs, Hendricks, a yard or two behind him, stumbled a good deal in the darkness, Lord Ernie forever on his heels, eager to push past. But Bindy never stumbled. There was no flagging in his muscles. He moved so lightly and with so sure a tread that he almost seemed to dance, and often he stopped aside to leap a boulder or to run along a fallen trunk. Path there was none. Occasional gusts of wind rushed gustily down into these depths of forest where they moved, and now, from time to time, as they rose nearer to the line of fire on the ridge, an increasing glare lit up the knuckled roots or glimmered on the bramble thickets and heavy beds of moss. It was astonishing how the little Pasteur never missed his way. Periods of thick silence alternated with moments when the storm swept down through gullies among the trees, reverberating like thunder in the hollows.\n\nSlowly they advanced, buffeted, driven, pushed, the wildness of some Walpurgis night growing upon all three. In the tutor's mind was this strange lift of increasing recklessness, the old proportion gone, the spiritual aspect of it troubling him to the point of sheer distress. He followed Leysin as blindly with his body as he followed this new Bindy eagerly with his mind. For this languid boy, now dancing to the tune of flooding life at his very heels, seemed magical in the true sense: energy created as by a wizard out of nothing. From lips that ordinarily sighed in listless boredom poured now a ceaseless stream of questions and ejaculations, ringing with enthusiasm. How long would it take to reach the fiery ridge? Why did they go so slowly? Would they arrive too late? Would their intrusion be welcomed or understood? Already one great change was effected\u2014accepted by Hendricks, too\u2014that the r\u00f4le of mere spectator was impossible. The answers Hendricks gave, indeed, grew more and more encouraging and sympathetic. He, too, was impatient with their leader's crawling pace. Some elemental spell of wind and fire urged him towards the open ridge. The pull became irresistible. He despised the Pasteur's caution, denied his wisdom, wholly rejected now the spirit of compromise and prudence. And once, as the hurricane brought down a flying burst of voices, he caught himself leaping upon a big grey boulder in their path. He leaped at the very moment that the boy behind him leaped, yet hardly realised that he did so; his feet danced without a conscious order from his brain. They met together on the rounded top, stumbled, clutched one another frantically, then slid with waving arms and flying cloaks down the slippery surface of damp moss\u2014laughing wildly.\n\n'Fool!' cried Hendricks, saving himself. 'What in the world\u2014?'\n\n'You called,' laughed Bindy, picking himself up and dropping back to his place in the rear again. 'It's the wind, not me; it's in our feet. Half the time you're shouting and jumping yourself!'\n\nAnd it was a few minutes after this that Lord Ernie suddenly forged ahead. He slipped in front as silently as a shadow before a moving candle in a room. Passing the tutor at a moment when his feet were entangled among roots and stones, he easily overtook the Pasteur and found himself in the lead. He never stumbled; there seemed steel springs in his legs.\n\nFrom Leysin, too breathless to interfere, came a cry of warning. 'Stop him! Take his hand!' his tired voice instantly smothered by the roaring skies. He turned to catch Hendricks by the cloak. 'You see that!' he shouted in alarm. 'For the love of God, don't lose sight of him! He must see, but not take part\u2014remember\u2014!'\n\nAnd Hendricks yelled after the vanishing figure, 'Bindy, go slow, go slow! Keep in touch with us.' But he quickened his pace instantly, as though to overtake the boy. He passed his companion the same minute, and was out of sight. 'I'll wait for you,' came back the boy's shrill answer through the thinning trees. And a flare of light fell with it from the sky, for the final climb of a steep five hundred feet had now begun, and overhead the naked ridge ran east and west with its line of blazing fires. Boulders and rocky ground replaced the pines and spruces.\n\n'But you'll never find the way,' shouted Leysin, while a deep trumpeting roar of the storm beyond muffled the remainder of the sentence.\n\nHendricks heard the next words close beside him from a clump of shadows. He was in touching distance of the excited boy.\n\n'The fires and the singing guide me. Only a fool could miss the way.'\n\n'But you are a\u2014'\n\nHe swallowed the unuttered word. A new, extraordinary respect was suddenly in him. That tall, virile figure, instinct with life, springing so cleverly through the choking darkness, guiding with decision and intelligence, almost infallible\u2014it was no fool that led them thus. He hurried after till his very sinews ached. His eyes, troubled and confused, strained through the trees to find him. But these same trees now fled past him in a torrent.\n\n'Bindy, Bindy!' he cried, at the top of his voice, yet not with the imperious tone the situation called for. The sentence dropped into a lull of wind. Instead of command there was entreaty, almost supplication, in it. 'Wait for me, I'm coming. We'll see the glorious thing together!'\n\nAnd then suddenly the forest lay behind him, with a belt of open pasture-land in front below the actual ridge. He felt the first great draught of heat, as a line of furnaces burst their doors with a mighty roar and turned the sky into a blaze of golden daylight. There was a crackling as of musketry. The flare shot up and burned the air about him, and the voices of a multitude, as yet invisible, drove through it like projectiles on the wind. This was the first impression, wholesale and terrific, that met him as he paused an instant on the edge of the sheltering forest and looked forward. Leysin and Lord Ernie seemed to leave his mind, forgotten in this first attack of splendour, but forgotten, as it were, the first with contempt, the latter with an overwhelming regret. For the Pasteur's mistake in that instant seemed obvious. In half measures lay the fatal error, and in compromise the danger. Bindy all along had known the better way and followed it. The lukewarm was the worthless.\n\n'Bindy, boy, where are you? I'm coming...' and stepping on to the grassy strip of ground, soft to his feet, he met a wind that fell upon his body with a shower of blows from all directions at once and beat him to his knees. He dropped, it seemed, into the cover of a sheltering rock, for there followed then a moment of sudden and delicious stillness in which the weary muscles recovered themselves and thought grew slightly steadier. Crouched thus close to the earth he no longer offered a target to the hurricane's attack. He peered upwards, making a screen of his hands.\n\nThe ridge, some fifty feet above him, he saw, ran in a generous platform along the mountain crest; it was wide and flat; between the enormous fires of piled-up wood that stretched for half a mile coiled a medley of dense smoke and tearing sparks. No human beings were visible, and yet he was aware of crowding life quite near. On hands and knees, crawling painfully, he then slowly retreated again into the shelter of the forest he had sought to leave. He stood up. The awful blaze was veiled by the roof of branches once more. But, as he rose, seizing a sapling to steady himself by, two hands caught him with violence from behind, and a familiar voice came shouting against his ear. Leysin, panting, dishevelled and half broken with the speed, stood beside him.\n\n'The boy! Where is he? We're just in time!' He roared the words to make them carry above the din. 'Hurry, hurry! I'll follow... My older legs... See, for the love of God, that he is not taken... I warned you!'\n\nAnd for a second, as he heard, Hendricks caught at the vanished sense of responsibility again. He saw the face of the old Marquess watching him among the tree trunks. He heard his voice, amazed, reproachful, furious: 'It was criminal of you, criminal\u2014!'\n\n'Where is the boy\u2014your boy?' again broke in the shout of the Pasteur with a slap of hurricane, as he staggered against the tutor, half collapsing, and trying to point the direction. 'Watch him, find him for the love of heaven before it is too late\u2014before they see him...!'\n\nThe tutor's normal and responsible self dived out of sight again as he heard the cry of weakness and alarm. It seemed the wind got under him, lifting him bodily from his feet. He did not pause to think. Like a man midway in a whirling prize-fight, he felt dazed but confident, only conscious of one thing\u2014that he must hold out to the end, take part in all the splendid fighting\u2014win. The lust of the arena, the pride of youth and battle, the impetuous recklessness of the charge in primitive war caught at his heart, brimming it with headlong courage. To play the game for all it might be worth seemed shouted everywhere about him, as the abandon of wind and fire rushed through him like a storm. He felt lifted above all possibility of little failure. The Marquess with his conventional traditions, the Pasteur with his considerations of half-way safety, both vanished utterly; safety, indeed, both for himself and for the boy in his charge lay in unconditional surrender. This was no time for little thought-out actions. It was all or nothing!\n\n'God bless the whirlwind and the fire!' he shouted, opening wide his arms.\n\nBut his voice was inaudible amid the uproar, and the forward movement of his body remained at first only in the brain. He turned to push the old man aside, even to strike him down if necessary. 'Lukewarm yourself and a coward!' rose in his throat, yet found no utterance, for in that moment a tall, slim figure, swift as a shadow, steady as a hawk, shot hard across the open space between the forest and the ridge. In the direction of the blazing platform it disappeared against a curtain of thick smoke, emerged for one second in a storm of light, then vanished finally behind a ruin of loose rocks. And Hendricks, his eyes wounded by heat and wind, his muscles paralysed, understood that the boy deliberately invited capture. The multitude that hid behind the smoke and fire, feeding the blazing heaps with eager hands, had become aware of him, and presently would appear to claim him. They would take him to themselves. Already answering flares ran east and west along the desolate ridge.\n\n'I'll join you! I'm coming! Wait for me!' he tried to cry. The uproar smothered it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 472", + "text": "And this uproar, he now perceived, was composed entirely of wind and fire. Here, on the roof of the hills beneath a starry sky, these two great elements expressed their nature with unhampered freedom, for there was neither rain to modify the one, nor solid obstacle to check the other. Their voices merged in a single sound\u2014the hollow boom of wind and the deep, resounding clap of flame. The splitting crackle of burning branches imitated the high, shrill whistle of the tearing gusts that, javelin-like, flew to and fro in darts of swifter sound. But one shout rose from the summit, no human cry distinguishable in it, nor amid the thousand lines of skeleton wood that pierced the golden background was any human outline visible. Fire and wind encouraged one another to madness, manifesting in prodigious splendour by themselves.\n\nThen, suddenly, before a gigantic canter of the wind, the driving smoke rolled upwards like a curtain, and the flames, ceasing their wild flapping, soared steadily in gothic windows of living gold towards the stars. In towering rows between columns of black night they transformed the empty space between them into a colossal temple aisle. They tapered aloft symmetrically into vanishing crests. And Hendricks stood upright. Rising so that his shoulders topped the edge of the boulder, and utterly contemptuous of Leysin's hand that sought with violence to drag him into shelter, he gazed as one who sees a vision. For at first he could only stand and stare, aware of sensation but not of thought. An enormous, overpowering conviction blew his whole being to white heat. Here was a supply of elemental power that human beings\u2014empty, needy, starved, deficient human beings\u2014could use. His love for the boy leaped headlong at the skirts of this terrific salvation. A majestic possibility stormed through him.\n\nYet it was no nightmare wonder that met his staring and half-shielded eyes, although some touch of awful dream seemed in it, set, moreover, to a scale that scantier minds might deem distortion. The heat from some thirty fires, placed at regular intervals, made midnight quiver with immense vibrations. Of varying, yet calculated size, these towering heaps emitted notes of measured and alternating depth, until the roar along the entire line produced a definite scale almost of melody, the near ones shrilly singing, those more distant booming with mountainous pedal notes. The consonance was monstrous, yet conformed to some magnificent diapason. This chord of fire-music paced the starlit sky, directed, but never overmastered, by the wind that measured it somehow into meaning. Repeated in quick succession, the notes now crashing in a mass, now singing alone in solitary beauty, the effect suggested an idea of ordered sequence, of gigantic rhythm. It seemed, indeed, as though some controlling agency, mastering excess, coerced both raging elements to express through this stupendous dance some definite idea. Here, as it were, was the alphabet of some natural, undifferentiated language, a language of sight and sound, predating speech, symbolical in the ultimate, deific sense. Some Lord of Fire and some Lord of Air were in command. Harnessed and regulated, these formless cohorts of energy that men call stupidly mere flame and wind, obeyed a higher power that had invoked them, yet a power that, by understanding their laws of being, held them most admirably in control.\n\nThis, at least, seems a hint of the explanation that flashed into Hendricks as he stared in amazed bewilderment from the shelter of the nearest boulder. He read a sentence in some natural, forgotten script. He watched a primitive ritual that once invoked the gods. He was aware of rhythm, and he was aware of system, though as yet he did not see the hand that wrote this marvellous sentence on the night. For still the human element remained invisible. He only realised\u2014in dim, blundering fashion\u2014that he witnessed a revelation of those two powers which, in large, lie at the foundations of the Universe, and, in little, are the basic essentials of human existence\u2014the powers behind heat and air. Fragments of that talk with Leysin stammered back across his mind, like letters in some stupendous word he dared not reconstruct entire. He shuddered and grew wise. Realms of forgotten being opened their doors before his dazzled sight. Vision fluttered into far, piercing vistas of ancient wonder, haunting and half-remembered, then lost its way in blindness that was pain. For a moment, it seemed, he was aware of majestic Presences behind the turmoil, shadowy but mighty, charged with a vague potentiality as of immense algebraical formulae, symbolical and beyond full comprehension, yet willing and able to be used for practical results. He felt the elements as nerves of a living Universe... Yet thinking was not really in him anywhere; feeling was all he knew. The world he moved in, as the script he read, belonged to conditions too utterly remote for reason to recover a single clue to their intelligible reconstruction. Glory, clean and strong as of primitive star-worship, passed between what he saw and all that he had ever known before. The curtain of conventional belief was rent in twain. The terrific thing was true...\n\nFor an unmeasured interval the tutor, oblivious of time and actual place, stood on the brink of this majestic pageant, staring with breathless awe, while the swaying of the entire scenery increased, like the sway of an ocean lifted to the sky by many winds. Then, suddenly, in one of those temporary lulls that passed between the beat of the great notes, his searching eyes discovered a new thing. The focus of his sight was altered, and he realised at last the source of the directing and the controlling power. Behind the fires and beyond the smoke he recognised the disc-like, shining ovals that upon this little earth stand in the image of the one, eternal Likeness. He saw the human faces, symbols of spiritual dominion over all lesser orders, each one possessed of belief, intelligence and will. Singly so feeble, together so invincible, this assemblage, unscorched by the fire and by the wind unmoved, seemed to him impressive beyond all possible words. And a further inkling of the truth flashed on him as he stared: that a group of humans, a crowd, combining upon a given object with concentrated purpose, possessed of that terrific power, certain faith, may know in themselves the energy to move great mountains, and therefore that lesser energy to guide the fluid forces of the elements. And a sense of cosmic exultation leaped into his being. For a moment he knew a touch of almost frenzy. Proud joy rose in him like a splendour of omnipotence. Humanity, it seemed to him, here came into a grand but long neglected corner of its kingdom as originally planned by Heaven. Into the hands of a weakling and deficient boy the guidance had been given.\n\nMotionless beneath the stars, lit by the glare till they shone like idols of yellow stone, and magnified by the sheets of flying, intolerable light the wind chased to and fro, these rows of faces appeared at first as a single line of undifferentiated fire against the background of the night. The eyes were all cast down in prayer, each mind focused steadily upon one clear idea\u2014the control and assimilation of two elemental powers. The crowd was one; feeling was one; desire, command and certain faith were one. The controlling power that resulted was irresistible.\n\nThen came a remarkable, concerted movement. With one accord the eyes all opened, blazing with reflected fire. A hundred human countenances rose in a single shining line. The men stood upright. Swarthy faces, tanned by sun and wind, heads uncovered, hair and beards tossing in the air, turned all one way. Mouths opened too. There came a roar that even the hurricane could not drown\u2014a word of command, it seemed, that sprang into the pulses of the dancing elements and reduced their turmoil to a wave of steadier movement. And at the same moment a hundred bodies, naked above the waist, arms outstretched and hands with the palms held upwards, swayed forwards through the smoke and fire. They came towards the spot where, half concealed from view, the tutor crouched and watched.\n\nAnd Hendricks, thinking himself discovered, first quailed, then rose to meet them. No power to resist was in him. It was, rather, willing response that he experienced. He stepped out from the shelter of the boulder and entered the brilliant glare. Hatless himself, shoulders squared, cloak, flying in the wind, he took three strides towards the advancing battalion\u2014then, undecided, paused. For the line, he saw, disregarded him as though he were not there at all. It was not him the worshippers sought. The entire troop swept past to a point some fifty feet below where the end of the ridge broke out of the thinning trees. Beautiful as a curving wave of flame, the figures streamed across the narrow, open space with a drilled precision as of some battle line, and Hendricks, with a sense of wild, secret triumph, saw them pause at the brink of the platformed ridge, form up their serried ranks yet closer, then open two hundred arms to welcome some one whom the darkness should immediately deliver. Simultaneously, from the covering trees, the tall, slim shadow of Lord Ernie darted out into the light.\n\n'Magnificent!' cried Hendricks, but his voice was smothered instantly in a mightier sound, and his movement forward seemed ineffective stumbling. The hundred voices thundered out a single note. Like a deer the boy leaped; like a tongue of flame he flew to join his own; and instantly was surrounded, borne shoulder-high upon those upturned palms, swept back in triumph towards the procession of enormous fires. Wrapped by smoke and sparks, lifted by wind, he became part of the monstrous rhythm that turned that mountain ridge alive. He stood upright upon the platform of interlacing arms; he swayed with their movements as a thing of wind and fire that flew. The shining faces vanished then, turned all towards the blazing piles so that the boy had the appearance of standing on a wall of living black. His outline was visible a moment against the sky, firelight between his wide-stretched legs, streaming from his hair and horizontal arms, issuing almost, as it seemed, from his very body. The next second he leaped to the ground, ran forward\u2014appallingly close\u2014between two heaped-up fires, flung both hands heavenwards, and\u2014knelt.\n\nAnd Hendricks, sympathetically following the boy's performance as though his own mind and body took part in it, experienced then a singular result: it seemed the heart in him began to roar. This was no rustle of excited blood that the little cavern of his skull increased, but a deeper sound that proclaimed the kinship of his entire being with the ritual. His own nature had begun to answer. From that moment he perceived the spectacle, not with the senses of sight and hearing, separately, but with his entire body\u2014synthetically. He became a part of this assembly that was itself one single instrument: a cosmic sounding-board for the rhythmical expression of impersonal Nature Powers. Leysin, he dimly realised, fixed in his churchy tenets, remained outside, apart, and compromising; Hendricks accepted and went with. All little customary feelings dipped utterly away, lost, false, denied, even as a unit in a crowd loses its normal characteristics in the greater mood that sways the whole. The fire no longer burned him, for he was the fire; nor did he stagger against the furious wind, because the wind was in his heart. He moved all over, alive in every point and corner. With his skin he breathed, his bones and tissue ran with glorious heat. He cried aloud. He praised. 'I am the whirlwind and I am the fire! Fire that lights but does not burn, and wind that blows the heart to flame!' His body sang it, or rather the elements sang it through his body; for the sound of his voice was not audible, and it was wind and fire that thundered forth his feeling in their crashing rhythm." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 473", + "text": "And so it was that he no longer saw this thing pictorially, nor in the little detached reports the individual senses brought, but knew it in himself complete, as a man knows love and passion. Memory afterwards translated these vast central feelings into pictures, but the pictures touched reality without containing it. Like a vision it happened all at once, as a room or landscape happens, and what happens all at once, coming through a synthesis of the senses, is not properly describable later. To instantaneous knowledge mere sequence is a falsehood. The sequence first comes in with the telling afterwards. That kneeling form, he understood, was the empty vessel to which conventional life had hitherto denied the heat and air it craved. The breath of life now poured at full tide into it, the fire of deity lit its heart of touchwood, wind blew into desire; and later flame would burst forth in action, consuming opposition. He must let it fill to the brim. It was not salvation, but creation. Then thought went out, extinguished by a puff of something greater...\n\nFor beyond the smoke and sparks, beyond the space the men had occupied, a new and gentler movement, lyrical with bird-like beauty, ran suddenly along the ridge. What Hendricks had taken for branches heaped in rows for the burning, stirred marvellously throughout their whole collective mass, stirred sweetly, too, and with an exquisite loveliness. The entire line rose gracefully into the air with a whirr as of sweeping birds. There was a soft and undulating motion as though a draught of flowing wind turned faintly visible, yet with an increasing brilliance, like shining lilies of flame that now flocked forward in a troop, bending deliciously all one way. And in the same second these tall lilies of fire revealed themselves as figures, naked above the waist, hair streaming on the wind, eyes alight and bare arms waving. Above the men's deep pedal bass their voices rose with clear, shrill sweetness on the storm. The band swept forwards swift as wind towards the kneeling boy. The long line curved about him foldingly. The women took him as the south wind takes a bird.\n\nThere may have been\u2014indeed, there was\u2014an interval, for Hendricks caught, again and again repeated, the boy's great cry of passionate delight above the tumult. Ringing and virile it rose to heaven, clear as a fine-wrought bell. And instantaneously the knitted figures of flame disentangled themselves again, the mass unfolded like an opening flower, and, as by a military word of command, dissolved itself once more into a long thin line of running fire. The women advanced, and the waiting men flowed forward in a stream to meet them. This interweaving of the figures was as easily accomplished as the mingling of light and heavy threads upon some living loom. Hands joining hands, all singing, these naked worshippers of fire and wind passed in and out among the blazing piles with a headlong precision that was torrential and yet orderly. The speed increased; the faces flashed and vanished, then flashed and passed again; each woman between two men, each man between two women, and Lord Ernie, radiantly alive, between two girls of rich, o'erflowing beauty. Their movements were undulating, like the undulations of fire, yet with sudden, unexpected upward leaps as when fire is partnered abruptly by a cantering wind. For the women were fire, and the men were wind. The imitative dance was in full swing. The marvellous wind and fire ritual unrolled its old-world magic.\n\nIt was awe-inspiring certainly, but for Hendricks, as he watched, the terror of big conflagrations was wholly absent: rather, he felt the sense of deep security that rhythmic movement causes. Bathed in a sea of elemental power, he burned to share the pagan splendour and the rush of primitive delight. It seemed he had a cosmic body in which new centres stirred to life, linking him on to this source of natural forces. Through these centres he drew the chaotic energy into nerves and blood and muscle, into the very substance of his thought, indeed, transmuting them into the magic of the will. Abundant and inexhaustible vigour filled the air, pouring freely into whatever empty receptacle lay at hand. Sheets of flame, whole separate fragments of it, torn at the edges, raced, loudly, hungrily flapping on vehement gusts of wind; curved as they flew; leaped, twisted, flashed and vanished. And the figures closely copied them. The women tossed their bodies aloft, then dipped suddenly to the earth, invisible, till the rushing men urged them into view again with wild impetuous swing, so that the entire line stretched and contracted like an immense elastic band of life, now knotted, now dissolved.\n\nYet, while of raging and terrific beauty, there was never that mad abandon which is disorder; but rather a kind of sacred natural revel that prohibited mere licence. There was even a singular austerity in it that betrayed a definite ritual and not mere reckless pageantry. No walls could possibly have contained it. In cathedral, temple, or measured space, however grand, it could only have seemed exaggerated and apostate; here, beneath the open sky, it was beautiful and true. For overhead the stars burned clear and steady, the constellations watching it from their immovable towers\u2014a representation of their own leisured and hierarchic dance in swifter miniature. And indeed this relationship it bore to a universal rhythm was the key, it seemed, to its deep significance; for the close imitation of natural movements seduced the colossal powers of fire and wind to swell human emotions till they became mould and vessel for this elemental manifestation in men and women. Golden yellow in the blaze, the limbs of the women flashed and passed; their hair flew dark a moment across gleaming breasts; and their waving arms tossed in ever-shifting patterns through the driving smoke. The fires boiled and roared, scattering torrents of showering sparks like stars; and amid it all the slim, white shoulders of the boy, his clothes torn from him, his eyes ablaze, and his lips opened to the singing as though he had known it always, drove to and fro on the crest of the ritual like some flying figure of wind and fire incarnate.\n\nAll of which, instantaneously yet in sequence, Hendricks witnessed, painted upon the wild night sky. A volcanic energy poured through him too. He knew a golden enthusiasm of immeasurable strength, of unconquerable hope, of irresistible delight. Wind set his feet to dancing, and fire swept across his face without a trace of burning.\n\nNature was part of him. He had stepped inside. No obstacle existed that could withstand for a single second the torrential energy that fired his heart and blood. There was lightning in his veins. He could sweep aside life's difficult barriers with the ease of a tornado, and shake the rubbish of doubt and care from the years with earthquake shocks. Empires he could mould, and play with nations, drive men and women before him like a flock of sheep, shatter convention, and dislocate the machinery time has foisted upon natural energies. He knew in himself the omnipotence of the lesser elemental deities. Yet, as sympathetic observer, he can but have felt a tithe of what Lord Ernie felt.\n\n'We are the whirlwind and we are the fire!' he cried aloud with the rushing worshippers. 'We are unconquerable and immense! We destroy the lukewarm and absorb the weak! For we can make evil into good by bending it all one way!...'\n\nThe roar swept thunderingly past him, catching at his voice and body. He felt himself snatched forward by the wind. The fire licked sweetly at him. It was the final abandonment. He plunged recklessly towards the surge of dancers..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 474", + "text": "What stopped him he did not know. Some hard and steely thing pricked sharply into him. An opposing power, fierce as a sword, stabbed at his heart\u2014and he heard a little sound quite close beside him, a sound that pierced the babel, reaching his consciousness as from far away.\n\n'Keep still! Cling tight to this old rock! Hold yourself in, or else they'll have you too!'\n\nIt was as if some insect scratched within his ear. His arm, that same instant, was violently seized. He came down with a crash. He had been half in the air. He had been dancing.\n\n'Turn your eyes away, away! Take hold of this big tree!' The voice cried furiously, but with a petty human passion in it that marred the world. There was an intolerable revulsion in him as he heard it. He felt himself dragged forcibly backwards. He lost his balance, stumbling among loose stones.\n\n'Loose me! Let me go!' he shouted, struggling like a wild animal, yet vainly, against the inflexible grip that held him. 'I am one with the fire that lights but does not burn. I am the wind that blows the worlds along! Damnation take you... Let me free!...'\n\nConfusion caught him, smothering speech and blinding sight. He fell backwards, away from the heat and wind. He was furious, but furious with he knew not whom or what. The interference had destroyed the rhythm, broken it into fragments. Violent impulses clashed through him without the will to choose or guide them. For power had deserted him and flowed elsewhere. He stood no longer in the stream of energy. He was emptied. And at first he could not tell whether his instinct was to return himself, to rescue his precious boy, or\u2014to crush the interfering object out of existence with what was left to him of raging anger. He turned, stood up, and flung the Pasteur aside with violence. He raised his feet to stamp and kill... when a phrase with meaning darted suddenly across his wild confusion and recalled him to some fragment of truer responsibility and life.\n\n'...There'll be only violence in him\u2014reckless violence instead of strength\u2014destructive. Save him before it is too late!'\n\n'It is too late,' he roared in answer. 'What devil hinders me?'\n\nBut his roar was feeble, and his ironed boots refused the stamping. Power slipped wholly out of him. The rhythm poured past, instead of through him. Interference had destroyed the circuit. More glimmerings of responsibility came back. He stooped like a drunken man and helped the other to his feet. The rapidity of the change was curious, proving that the spell had been put upon him from without. It was not, as with the boy, mere development of pre-existing tendencies.\n\n'Help me,' he implored suddenly instead, 'help me! There has been madness in me. For God's sake, help me to get him out!' It seemed the face of the old Marquess, stern and terrible, broke an instant through the smoky air, black with reproach and anger. And, with a violent effort of the will, Hendricks turned round to face the elemental orgy, bent on rescue. But this time the heat was intolerable and drove him back. The hair, hitherto untouched, now singed upon his head. Fire licked his very breath away. He bent double, covering his face with arms and cloak.\n\n'Pray!' shouted Leysin, dropping to his knees. 'It is the only way. My God is higher than this. Pray, pray!'\n\nAnd, automatically, Hendricks fell upon his knees beside him, though to pray he knew not how. For no real faith was in him as in the other, and his eye was far from single. The fast fading grandeur of what he had experienced still left its pagan tumult in his blood. The pretence of prayer could only have been blasphemy. He watched instead, letting the other invoke his mighty Deity alone, that Deity he had served unflinchingly all his life with faith and fasting, and with belief beyond assault.\n\nIt was an impressive picture, fraught with passionate drama. On his knees behind a sheltering boulder, a blackened pine-tree tossing scorched branches above his head, this righteous man prayed to his God, sure of his triumphant answer. Hendricks watched with an admiration that made him realise his own insignificance. The eyes were closed, the leonine big head set firm upon the diminutive body, the face now lit by flame, now veiled by smoke, the strong hands clasped together and upraised. He envied him. He recognised, too, that the elements themselves, with all their chaos of might and terror, were after all but servants of the Vastness which dips the butterflies in colour and puts down upon the breasts of little robins. And, because the Pasteur's life had been always prayer in action, his little human will invoked the Will of Greatness, merged with it, used it, and directed it steadily against the commotion of these unleashed elements. Certain of himself and of his God, the Pasteur never doubted. His prayer set instantly in action those forces which balance suns and keep the stars afloat.\n\nThus, trembling with terror that made him wholly ineffective, Hendricks watched, and, as he watched, became aware of the amazing change. For it seemed as if a stream of power, steady and in opposition to the tumult, now poured audaciously against the elemental rhythm, altering its direction, modifying gradually its stupendous impetus. There were pauses in the huge vibrations: they wavered, broke, and fled. They knew confusion, as when the prow of a steel-nosed vessel drives against the tide. The tide is vaster, but the steel is\u2014different. The whole sky shivered, as this new entering force, so small, so soft, yet of such incalculable energy, began at once its overmastering effect. Signs of violence or rout, or of anything disordered, had no part in it; excess before it slipped into willing harness; there was light that sponged away all glare, as when morning sunshine cleans a forest of its shadows. Some little whispering power sang marvellously as of old across the desolate big mountains, 'Peace! Be still!' turning the monstrous turbulence into obedient sweetness. And upon his face and hands Hendricks felt faint, delicate touches of some refreshing softness that he could not understand.\n\nYet not instantly was this harmony restored; at first there was the stress of vehement opposition. The night of wind and fire drove roaring through the sky. There were bursts of triumphant tumult, but convulsion in them and no true steadiness as before. The human figures hitherto had danced with that fluid appearance which belongs to fire, and with that instantaneous rush which is of wind, the men increasing the women, and the women answering with joy; limbs and faces had melted into each other till the circular ritual looked like a glowing wheel of flame rotating audibly. But slowly now the speed of the wheel decreased; the single utterance was marred by the crying of many voices, all at different pitch, discordant, inharmonious, dismayed. The fires somehow dwindled; there came pauses in the wind; and Hendricks became aware of a curious hissing noise, as more and more of these odd soft touches found his face and hands. Here and there, he saw, a figure stumbled, fell, then gathered itself clumsily together again with a frightened shout, breaking violently out of the circle. More and more these figures blundered and dropped out; and although they returned again, so that the dance apparently increased, these were but moments in the final violence of the dispersing hurricane. The rejected ones dashed back wildly into the wrong places; men and women no longer stood alternate, but in groups together, falsely related. The entire movement was dislocated; the ceremony grew rapidly incoherent; meaning forsook it. The composite instrument that had transmuted the elemental forces into human, emotional storage was imperfect, broken, out of tune. The disarray turned rout.\n\nAnd then it was, while Leysin continued without ceasing his burning and successful prayer, that his companion, conscious of returning harmony, rose to his feet, aware suddenly that he could also help. A portion of the powers he had absorbed still worked in him, but in a new direction. He felt confident and unafraid. He did not stumble. With unerring tread he advanced towards the lessening fires, feeling as he did so the cold soft touches multiply with a rush upon his skin. From all sides they came by hundreds, like messengers of help.\n\n'Ernest!' he cried aloud, and his voice, though little raised, carried resonantly above the dying turmoil; 'Ernest! Come back to us. Your father calls you!'\n\nAnd from threescore faces hurrying in confusion through the smoke, one paused and turned. It stood apart, hovering as though in air, while the mob of disordered figures rushed in a body along the ridge. Plunging like frightened cattle below the farther edge, then vanishing into thick darkness, they left behind them this one solitary face. A final dying flame licked out at it; a rush of smoke drove past to hide it; there was a high, wild scream\u2014and the figure shot forward with a headlong leap and fell with a crash at Hendricks' feet. Lord Ernie, blackened by smoke and scorched by fire, lay safe outside the danger zone.\n\nAnd Hendricks knelt beside him. Remorse and shame made him powerless to do more as he pulled the torn clothing over the neck and chest and heard his own heart begging for forgiveness. He realised his own weakness and faithlessness. A great temptation had found him wanting...\n\nIt was owing to Leysin that the rescue was complete. The Pasteur was instantly by his side.\n\n'Saved as by water,' he cried, as he folded his cloak about the prostrate body, and then raised the head and shoulders; 'saved by His ministers of rain. For His miracles are love, and work through natural laws.'\n\nHe made a sign to Hendricks. Carrying the boy between them, they scrambled down the slope into the shelter of the trees below. The cold, soft touches were then explained. The joran had dropped as suddenly as it rose, and the torrential rain that invariably follows now poured in rivers from the sky. Water, drenching the fires and padding the savage wind, had stopped the dancers midway in their frenzied ritual. It was the element they dreaded, for it was hostile. Rain soused the mountain ridge, extinguishing the last embers of the numerous fires. It rushed in rivulets between their feet. The heated earth gave out a hissing steam, and the only sound in the spaces where wind and fire had boomed and thundered a little while before was now the splash of water and the drip of quenching drops.\n\nIn the cover of the sheltering trees the body stirred, lifted its head, and sat up slowly. The eyes opened.\n\n'I'm cold. I'm frightened,' whispered a shivering voice. 'Where am I?'\n\nOnly the pelt and thud of the rain sounded behind the quavering words.\n\n'Where are the others? Have I been away? Hendricks\u2014Mr. Hendricks\u2014is that you\u2014?'\n\nHe stared about him, his face now a mere luminous disc in the thick darkness. No breath of wind was loose. They spoke to him till he answered with assurance, groping to find their hands with his own, his words confused and strange with hidden meaning for a time. 'I'm all right now,' he kept repeating. 'I know exactly. It was one of my big dreams... I suppose I fell asleep... and the rain woke me. Great heavens! What a night to be out.' And then he clambered vigorously to his feet with a sudden movement of great energy again, saying that hunger was in him and he must eat. There was no complaint of heat or cold, of burning or of bruises. The boy recovered marvellously. In ten minutes, breaking away from all support, he led, as they descended through the dripping forest in the gloom and chill of very early morning. It was the others who called to him for guidance in the tangled woods. Lord Ernie was in the lead. Throughout the difficult woods he was ever in front, and singing:\n\n'Fire that lights but does not burn! And wind that blows the heart to flame! They both are in me now for ever and ever! Oh, praise the Lord of Fire and the Lord of Wind...!'\n\nAnd this voice, now near, now distant, sounding through the dripping forest on their homeward journey, was an experience weird and unforgettable for those other two. Leysin, it seemed, had one sentence only which he kept repeating to himself\u2014'Heaven grant he may direct it all for good. For they have filled him to the brim, and he is become an instrument of power.'\n\nBut Hendricks, though he understood the risk, felt only confidence. Lord Ernie's regeneration had begun.\n\nSoaked and bedraggled, all three, they reached the village about two o'clock. The boy, utterly unmanageable, said an emphatic No to spirits, soup, or medical appliances. His skin, indeed, showed no signs of burning, nor was there the smallest symptom of cold or fever in him. 'I'm a perfect furnace,' he laughed; 'I feel health and strength personified.' And the brightness of his eyes, his radiant colour, the vigour of his voice and manner\u2014both in some way astonishing\u2014made all pretence of assistance unnecessary and absurd. 'It's like a new birth,' he cried to Hendricks, as he almost cantered beside him down the road to their house, 'and, by Jove, I'll wake 'em up at home and make the world go round. I know a hundred schemes. I tell you, sir, I'm simply bursting! For the first time I'm alive!'\n\nAnd an hour later, when the tutor peeped in upon him, the boy was calmly sleeping. The candle-light, shaded carefully with one hand, fell upon the face. There were new lines and a new expression in it. Will and purpose showed in the stern set of the lips and jaw. It was the face of a man, and of a man one would not lightly trifle with. Purpose, will, and power were established on their thrones. To such a man the entire world might one day bow the head.\n\n'If only it will last,' thought Hendricks, as, shaken, bewildered, and more than a little awed, he tiptoed out of the room again and went to bed. But through his dreams, sheeted in flame and veiled in angry smoke, the face of the old Marquess glowered upon him from a heavy sky above ancestral towers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 475", + "text": "From the obituary notices of the 9th Marquess of Oakham the following selections have their interest: He succeeded to his father, then in the Cabinet as Minister for Foreign Affairs, at the age of twenty-one. His career was brief but singular, the early magnificence of the younger Pitt offering a standard of comparison, though by no means a parallel, to his short record of astonishing achievement. His effect upon the world, first as Chief of the Government Labour Department and subsequently as Home Secretary, and Minister of War, is described as shattering, even cataclysmic. His public life lasted five years. He died at the age of twenty-nine. His personality was revolutionary and overwhelming.\n\nFor, judging by these extracts, he was a 'Napoleonic figure whose personal influence combined the impetus of Mirabeau and the dominance of Alexander. His authority held an incalculable element, precisely described as uncanny. His spirit was puissant, elemental, his activity irresistible.' Yet, according to another journal, 'he was, properly speaking, neither intellectual, astute, nor diplomatic, and possessed as little subtlety as might be expected of a miner whose psychology was called upon to explain the Trinity. In no sense was he Statesman, and even less strategist, yet his name swept Europe, changed the map of the Nearer East, its mere whisper among the Chancelleries convulsing men's counsels with an influence almost menacing.'\n\nHis enthusiasm appears to have been amazing. 'Some stupendous and untiring energy drove through him, paralysing attack, and rendering the bitterest and most skilful opposition nugatory. His hand was imperious, upsetting with a touch the chessboards set by the most able statecraft, and his voice was heard with a kind of reverence in every capital.'\n\nThe brevity of his astonishing career called for universal comment, as did the hypnotising effect of his singular ascendency. 'In five short years of power he achieved his sway. He rushed upon the world, he shook it, he retired,' as one journal picturesquely phrased it. 'The manner of his ending, moreover\u2014a stroke of lightning,\u2014seemed in keeping with his life. There was neither lingering, delay, nor warning. Of distinguished stock, noble, yet ordinary enough in all but name, his power is unexplained by heredity; his family furnished no approach to greatness, as history supplied no parallel to his dynamic intensity. Nor, we are informed, among his near of kin, does any inherit his volcanic energy.'\n\nThe world, however, was apparently well relieved of his tumultuous presence, for his influence was generally surveyed as 'destructive rather than constructive.' He was unmarried, and the title went to a nephew.\n\nThe cheaper journals abounded, of course, in details of his personal and private life that were freely copied into the foreign press, and supply curious material for the student of human nature and the psychologist. The amazing revelations no doubt were picturesquely exaggerated, yet the sub-stratum of truth in them all was generally admitted. No contradictions, at any rate, appeared. They read like the story of some primitive, wild giant let loose upon the world\u2014primitive, because his specific brain power was admittedly of no high order; wild, because he was in favour of fierce, spontaneous action, and his mere presence, on occasions, could stir a nation, not alone a crowd, to vehement, terrific methods. His energy seemed inexhaustible, his fire inextinguishable.\n\nLegends were rife, even before he died, among the peasantry of his Scotch estates, that he was in league with the devil. His habit of keeping enormous fires in his private rooms, fires that burned day and night from January to December, and in open hearths widened to thrice their natural size, stimulated the growth of this particular myth among those of his personal environment. All manner of stories raged. But it was his strange custom out-of-doors that provided the diabolical suggestion. For, 'behind a specially walled-in space on an open ridge, denuded of pines, in a distant part of the estate, a series of gigantic heaps of wood, all ready to ignite, were\u2014it was said\u2014kept in a state of constant preparedness. And on stormy nights, especially when winds were high, and invariably at the period of the equinoctial tempests, his lordship would himself light these tremendous bonfires, and spend the nocturnal hours in their blazing presence, communing, the stories variously relate, with the witches at their Sabbath, or with hordes of fire-spirits, who emerged from the Bottomless Pit in order to feed his soul with their unquenchable supplies. From these nightly orgies, it seems clear, at any rate, he returned at dawn with a splendour of energy that no one could resist, and with a mien whose grandeur invited worship rather than inspired alarm.'\n\nHis biography, it was further stated, would be written by Sir John Hendricks, Bt., who began life as Private Secretary to his father, the 8th Marquess, but whose rapid rise to position was due to his intimate association as trusted friend and adviser to the subject of these obituary notices. The biography, however, had not appeared, within five years of Lord Oakham's sudden death, and curiosity is only further stimulated by the suggestive whisper that it never will, and never can appear.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Sacrifice ]\n\nLimasson was a religious man, though of what depth and quality were unknown, since no trial of ultimate severity had yet tested him. An adherent of no particular creed, he yet had his gods; and his self-discipline was probably more rigorous than his friends conjectured. He was so reserved. Few guessed, perhaps, the desires conquered, the passions regulated, the inner tendencies trained and schooled\u2014not by denying their expression, but by transmuting them alchemically into nobler channels. He had in him the makings of an enthusiastic devotee, and might have become such but for two limitations that prevented. He loved his wealth, labouring to increase it to the neglect of other interests; and, secondly, instead of following up one steady line of search, he scattered himself upon many picturesque theories, like an actor who wants to play all parts rather than concentrate on one. And the more picturesque the part, the more he was attracted. Thus, though he did his duty unshrinkingly and with a touch of love, he accused himself sometimes of merely gratifying a sensuous taste in spiritual sensations. There was this unbalance in him that argued want of depth.\n\nAs for his gods\u2014in the end he discovered their reality by first doubting, then denying their existence.\n\nIt was this denial and doubt that restored them to their thrones, converting his dilettante skirmishes into genuine, deep belief; and the proof came to him one summer in early June when he was making ready to leave town for his annual month among the mountains.\n\nWith Limasson mountains, in some inexplicable sense, were a passion almost, and climbing so deep a pleasure that the ordinary scrambler hardly understood it. Grave as a kind of worship it was to him; the preparations for an ascent, the ascent itself in particular, involved a concentration that seemed symbolical as of a ritual. He not only loved the heights, the massive grandeur, the splendour of vast proportions blocked in space, but loved them with a respect that held a touch of awe. The emotion mountains stirred in him, one might say, was of that profound, incalculable kind that held kinship with his religious feelings, half realised though these were. His gods had their invisible thrones somewhere among the grim, forbidding heights. He prepared himself for this annual mountaineering with the same earnestness that a holy man might approach a solemn festival of his church.\n\nAnd the impetus of his mind was running with big momentum in this direction, when there fell upon him, almost on the eve of starting, a swift series of disasters that shook his being to its last foundations, and left him stunned among the ruins. To describe these is unnecessary. People said, 'One thing after another like that! What appalling luck! Poor wretch!' then wondered, with the curiosity of children, how in the world he would take it. Due to no apparent fault of his own, these disasters were so sudden that life seemed in a moment shattered, and his interest in existence almost ceased. People shook their heads and thought of the emergency exit. But Limasson was too vital a man to dream of annihilation. Upon him it had a different effect\u2014he turned and questioned what he called his gods. They did not answer or explain. For the first time in his life he doubted. A hair's breadth beyond lay definite denial.\n\nThe ruin in which he sat, however, was not material; no man of his age, possessed of courage and a working scheme of life, would permit disaster of a material order to overwhelm him. It was collapse of a mental, spiritual kind, an assault upon the roots of character and temperament. Moral duties laid suddenly upon him threatened to crush. His personal existence was assailed, and apparently must end. He must spend the remainder of his life caring for others who were nothing to him. No outlet showed, no way of escape, so diabolically complete was the combination of events that rushed his inner trenches. His faith was shaken. A man can but endure so much, and remain human. For him the saturation point seemed reached. He experienced the spiritual equivalent of that physical numbness which supervenes when pain has touched the limit of endurance. He laughed, grew callous, then mocked his silent gods.\n\nIt is said that upon this state of blank negation there follows sometimes a condition of lucidity which mirrors with crystal clearness the forces driving behind life at a given moment, a kind of clairvoyance that brings explanation and therefore peace. Limasson looked for this in vain. There was the doubt that questioned, there was the sneer that mocked the silence into which his questions fell; but there was neither answer nor explanation, and certainly not peace. There was no relief. In this tumult of revolt he did none of the things his friends suggested or expected; he merely followed the line of least resistance. He yielded to the impetus that was upon him when the catastrophe came. To their indignant amazement he went out to his mountains.\n\nAll marvelled that at such a time he could adopt so trivial a line of action, neglecting duties that seemed paramount; they disapproved. Yet in reality he was taking no definite action at all, but merely drifting with the momentum that had been acquired just before. He was bewildered with so much pain, confused with suffering, stunned with the crash that flung him helpless amid undeserved calamity. He turned to the mountains as a child to its mother, instinctively. Mountains had never failed to bring him consolation, comfort, peace. Their grandeur restored proportion whenever disorder threatened life. No calculation, properly speaking, was in his move at all; but a blind desire for a violent physical reaction such as climbing brings. And the instinct was more wholesome than he knew.\n\nIn the high upland valley among lonely peaks whither Limasson then went, he found in some measure the proportion he had lost. He studiously avoided thinking; he lived in his muscles recklessly. The region with its little Inn was familiar to him; peak after peak he attacked, sometimes with, but more often without a guide, until his reputation as a sane climber, a laurelled member of all the foreign Alpine Clubs, was seriously in danger. That he overdid it physically is beyond question, but that the mountains breathed into him some portion of their enormous calm and deep endurance is also true. His gods, meanwhile, he neglected utterly for the first time in his life. If he thought of them at all, it was as tinsel figures imagination had created, figures upon a stage that merely decorated life for those whom pretty pictures pleased. Only\u2014he had left the theatre and their make-believe no longer hypnotised his mind. He realised their impotence and disowned them. This attitude, however, was subconscious; he lent to it no substance, either of thought or speech. He ignored rather than challenged their existence.\n\nAnd it was somewhat in this frame of mind\u2014thinking little, feeling even less\u2014that he came out into the hotel vestibule after dinner one evening, and took mechanically the bundle of letters the porter handed to him. They had no possible interest for him; in a corner where the big steam-heater mitigated the chilliness of the hall, he idly sorted them. The score or so of other guests, chiefly expert climbing men, were trailing out in twos and threes from the dining-room; but he felt as little interest in them as in his letters: no conversation could alter facts, no written phrases change his circumstances. At random, then, he opened a business letter with a typewritten address\u2014it would probably be impersonal, less of a mockery, therefore, than the others with their tiresome sham condolences. And, in a sense, it was impersonal; sympathy from a solicitor's office is mere formula, a few extra ticks upon the universal keyboard of a Remington. But as he read it, Limasson made a discovery that startled him into acute and bitter sensation. He had imagined the limit of bearable suffering and disaster already reached. Now, in a few dozen words, his error was proved convincingly. The fresh blow was dislocating.\n\nThis culminating news of additional catastrophe disclosed within him entirely new reaches of pain, of biting, resentful fury. Limasson experienced a momentary stopping of the heart as he took it in, a dizziness, a violent sensation of revolt whose impotence induced almost physical nausea. He felt like\u2014death.\n\n'Must I suffer all things?' flashed through his arrested intelligence in letters of fire.\n\nThere was a sullen rage in him, a dazed bewilderment, but no positive suffering as yet. His emotion was too sickening to include the smaller pains of disappointment; it was primitive, blind anger that he knew. He read the letter calmly, even to the neat paragraph of machine-made sympathy at the last, then placed it in his inner pocket. No outward sign of disturbance was upon him; his breath came slowly; he reached over to the table for a match, holding it at arm's length lest the sulphur fumes should sting his nostrils.\n\nAnd in that moment he made his second discovery. The fact that further suffering was still possible included also the fact that some touch of resignation had been left in him, and therefore some vestige of belief as well. Now, as he felt the crackling sheet of stiff paper in his pocket, watched the sulphur die, and saw the wood ignite, this remnant faded utterly away. Like the blackened end of the match, it shrivelled and dropped off. It vanished. Savagely, yet with an external calmness that enabled him to light his pipe with untrembling hand, he addressed his futile deities. And once more in fiery letters there flashed across the darkness of his passionate thought:\n\n'Even this you demand of me\u2014this cruel, ultimate sacrifice?'\n\nAnd he rejected them, bag and baggage; for they were a mockery and a lie. With contempt he repudiated them for ever. The stage of doubt had passed. He denied his gods. Yet, with a smile upon his lips; for what were they after all but the puppets his religious fancy had imagined? They never had existed. Was it, then, merely the picturesque, sensational aspect of his devotional temperament that had created them? That side of his nature, in any case, was dead now, killed by a single devastating blow. The gods went with it.\n\nSurveying what remained of his life, it seemed to him like a city that an earthquake has reduced to ruins. The inhabitants think no worse thing could happen. Then comes the fire." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 476", + "text": "Two lines of thought, it seems, then developed parallel in him and simultaneously, for while underneath he stormed against this culminating blow, his upper mind dealt calmly with the project of a great expedition he would make at dawn. He had engaged no guide. As an experienced mountaineer, he knew the district well; his name was tolerably familiar, and in half an hour he could have settled all details, and retired to bed with instructions to be called at two. But, instead, he sat there waiting, unable to stir, a human volcano that any moment might break forth into violence. He smoked his pipe as quietly as though nothing had happened, while through the blazing depths of him ran ever this one self-repeating statement: 'Even this you demand of me, this cruel, ultimate sacrifice!...' His self-control, dynamically estimated, just then must have been very great and, thus repressed, the store of potential energy accumulated enormously.\n\nWith thought concentrated largely upon this final blow, Limasson had not noticed the people who streamed out of the salle \u00e0 manger and scattered themselves in groups about the hall. Some individual, now and again, approached his chair with the idea of conversation, then, seeing his absorption, turned away. Even when a climber whom he slightly knew reached across him with a word of apology for the matches, Limasson made no response, for he did not see him. He noticed nothing. In particular he did not notice two men who, from an opposite corner, had for some time been observing him. He now looked up\u2014by chance?\u2014and was vaguely aware that they were discussing him. He met their eyes across the hall, and started.\n\nFor at first he thought he knew them. Possibly he had seen them about in the hotel\u2014they seemed familiar\u2014yet he certainly had never spoken with them. Aware of his mistake, he turned his glance elsewhere, though still vividly conscious of their attention. One was a clergyman or a priest; his face wore an air of gravity touched by sadness, a sternness about the lips counteracted by a kindling beauty in the eyes that betrayed enthusiasm nobly regulated. There was a suggestion of stateliness in the man that made the impression very sharp. His clothing emphasised it. He wore a dark tweed suit that was strict in its simplicity. There was austerity in him somewhere.\n\nHis companion, perhaps by contrast, seemed inconsiderable in his conventional evening dress. A good deal younger than his friend, his hair, always a tell-tale detail, was a trifle long; the thin fingers that flourished a cigarette wore rings; the face, though picturesque, was flippant, and his entire attitude conveyed a certain insignificance. Gesture, that faultless language which challenges counterfeit, betrayed unbalance somewhere. The impression he produced, however, was shadowy compared to the sharpness of the other. 'Theatrical' was the word in Limasson's mind, as he turned his glance elsewhere. But as he looked away he fidgeted. The interior darkness caused by the dreadful letter rose about him. It engulfed him. Dizziness came with it...\n\nFar away the blackness was fringed with light, and through this light, stepping with speed and carelessness as from gigantic distance, the two men, suddenly grown large, came at him. Limasson, in self-protection, turned to meet them. Conversation he did not desire. Somehow he had expected this attack.\n\nYet the instant they began to speak\u2014it was the priest who opened fire\u2014it was all so natural and easy that he almost welcomed the diversion. A phrase by way of introduction\u2014and he was speaking of the summits. Something in Limasson's mind turned over. The man was a serious climber, one of his own species. The sufferer felt a certain relief as he heard the invitation, and realised, though dully, the compliment involved.\n\n'If you felt inclined to join us\u2014if you would honour us with your company,' the man was saying quietly, adding something then about 'your great experience' and 'invaluable advice and judgment.'\n\nLimasson looked up, trying hard to concentrate and understand.\n\n'The Tour du N\u00e9ant?' he repeated, mentioning the peak proposed. Rarely attempted, never conquered, and with an ominous record of disaster, it happened to be the very summit he had meant to attack himself next day.\n\n'You have engaged guides?' He knew the question foolish.\n\n'No guide will try it,' the priest answered, smiling, while his companion added with a flourish, 'but we\u2014we need no guide\u2014if you will come.'\n\n'You are unattached, I believe? You are alone?' the priest enquired, moving a little in front of his friend, as though to keep him in the background.\n\n'Yes,' replied Limasson. 'I am quite alone.'\n\nHe was listening attentively, but with only part of his mind. He realised the flattery of the invitation. Yet it was like flattery addressed to some one else. He felt himself so indifferent, so\u2014dead. These men wanted his skilful body, his experienced mind; and it was his body and mind that talked with them, and finally agreed to go. Many a time expeditions had been planned in just this way, but to-night he felt there was a difference. Mind and body signed the agreement, but his soul, listening elsewhere and looking on, was silent. With his rejected gods it had left him, though hovering close still. It did not interfere; it did not warn; it even approved; it sang to him from great distance that this expedition cloaked another. He was bewildered by the clashing of his higher and his lower mind.\n\n'At one in the morning, then, if that will suit you...' the older man concluded.\n\n'I'll see to the provisions,' exclaimed the younger enthusiastically, 'and I shall take my telephoto for the summit. The porters can come as far as the Great Tower. We're over six thousand feet here already, you see, so...' and his voice died away in the distance as his companion led him off.\n\nLimasson saw him go with relief. But for the other man he would have declined the invitation. At heart he was indifferent enough. What decided him really was the coincidence that the Tour du N\u00e9ant was the very peak he had intended to attack himself alone, and the curious feeling that this expedition cloaked another somehow\u2014almost that these men had a hidden motive. But he dismissed the idea\u2014it was not worth thinking about. A moment later he followed them to bed. So careless was he of the affairs of the world, so dead to mundane interests, that he tore up his other letters and tossed them into a corner of the room\u2014unread." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 477", + "text": "Once in his chilly bedroom he realised that his upper mind had permitted him to do a foolish thing; he had drifted like a schoolboy into an unwise situation. He had pledged himself to an expedition with two strangers, an expedition for which normally he would have chosen his companions with the utmost caution. Moreover, he was guide; they looked to him for safety, while yet it was they who had arranged and planned it. But who were these men with whom he proposed to run grave bodily risks? He knew them as little as they knew him. Whence came, he wondered, the curious idea that this climb was really planned by another who was no one of them?\n\nThe thought slipped idly across his mind; going out by one door, it came back, however, quickly by another. He did not think about it more than to note its passage through the disorder that passed with him just then for thinking. Indeed, there was nothing in the whole world for which he cared a single brass farthing. As he undressed for bed, he said to himself: 'I shall be called at one... but why am I going with these two on this wild plan?... And who made the plan?'...\n\nIt seemed to have settled itself. It came about so naturally and easily, so quickly. He probed no deeper. He didn't care. And for the first time he omitted the little ritual, half prayer, half adoration, it had always been his custom to offer to his deities upon retiring to rest. He no longer recognised them.\n\nHow utterly broken his life was! How blank and terrible and lonely! He felt cold, and piled his overcoats upon the bed, as though his mental isolation involved a physical effect as well. Switching off the light by the door, he was in the act of crossing the floor in the darkness when a sound beneath the window caught his ear. Outside there were voices talking. The roar of falling water made them indistinct, yet he was sure they were voices, and that one of them he knew. He stopped still to listen. He heard his own name uttered\u2014'John Limasson.' They ceased. He stood a moment shivering on the boards, then crawled into bed beneath the heavy clothing. But in the act of settling down, they began again. He raised himself again hurriedly to listen. What little wind there was passed in that moment down the valley, carrying off the roar of falling water; and into the moment's space of silence dropped fragments of definite sentences:\n\n'They are close, you say\u2014close down upon the world?' It was the voice of the priest surely.\n\n'For days they have been passing,' was the answer\u2014a rough, deep tone that might have been a peasant's, and a kind of fear in it, 'for all my flocks are scattered.'\n\n'The signs are sure? You know them?'\n\n'Tumult,' was the answer in much lower tones. 'There has been tumult in the mountains...'\n\nThere was a break then as though the voices sank too low to be heard. Two broken fragments came next, end of a question\u2014beginning of an answer.\n\n'...the opportunity of a lifetime?'\n\n'...if he goes of his own free will, success is sure. For acceptance is...'\n\nAnd the wind, returning, bore back the sound of the falling water, so that Limasson heard no more...\n\nAn indefinable emotion stirred in him as he turned over to sleep. He stuffed his ears lest he should hear more. He was aware of a sinking of the heart that was inexplicable. What in the world were they talking about, these two? What was the meaning of these disjointed phrases? There lay behind them a grave significance almost solemn. That 'tumult in the mountains' was somehow ominous, its suggestion terrible and mighty. He felt disturbed, uncomfortable, the first emotion that had stirred in him for days. The numbness melted before its faint awakening. Conscience was in it\u2014he felt vague prickings\u2014but it was deeper far than conscience. Somewhere out of sight, in a region life had as yet not plumbed, the words sank down and vibrated like pedal notes. They rumbled away into the night of undecipherable things. And, though explanation failed him, he felt they had reference somehow to the morrow's expedition: how, what, wherefore, he knew not; his name had been spoken\u2014then these curious sentences; that was all. Yet to-morrow's expedition, what was it but an expedition of impersonal kind, not even planned by himself? Merely his own plan taken and altered by others\u2014made over? His personal business, his personal life, were not really in it at all.\n\nThe thought startled him a moment. He had no personal life...!\n\nStruggling with sleep, his brain played the endless game of disentanglement without winning a single point, while the under-mind in him looked on and smiled\u2014because it knew. Then, suddenly, a great peace fell over him. Exhaustion brought it perhaps. He fell asleep; and next moment, it seemed, he was aware of a thundering at the door and an unwelcome growling voice, ''s ist bald ein Uhr, Herr! Aufstehen!'\n\nRising at such an hour, unless the heart be in it, is a sordid and depressing business; Limasson dressed without enthusiasm, conscious that thought and feeling were exactly where he had left them on going to sleep. The same confusion and bewilderment were in him; also the same deep solemn emotion stirred by the whispering voices. Only long habit enabled him to attend to detail, and ensured that nothing was forgotten. He felt heavy and oppressed, a kind of anxiety about him; the routine of preparation he followed gravely, utterly untouched by the customary joy; it was mechanical. Yet through it ran the old familiar sense of ritual, due to the practice of so many years, that cleansing of mind and body for a big Ascent\u2014like initiatory rites that once had been as important to him as those of some priest who approached the worship of his deity in the temples of ancient time. He performed the ceremony with the same care as though no ghost of vanished faith still watched him, beckoning from the air as formerly... His knapsack carefully packed, he took his ice-axe from beside the bed, turned out the light, and went down the creaking wooden stairs in stockinged feet, lest his heavy boots should waken the other sleepers. And in his head still rang the phrase he had fallen asleep on\u2014as though just uttered:\n\n'The signs are sure; for days they have been passing\u2014close down upon the world. The flocks are scattered. There has been tumult\u2014tumult in the mountains.' The other fragments he had forgotten. But who were 'they'? And why did the word bring a chill of awe into his blood?\n\nAnd as the words rolled through him Limasson felt tumult in his thoughts and feelings too. There had been tumult in his life, and all his joys were scattered\u2014joys that hitherto had fed his days. The signs were sure. Something was close down upon his little world\u2014passing\u2014sweeping. He felt a touch of terror.\n\nOutside in the fresh darkness of very early morning the strangers stood waiting for him. Rather, they seemed to arrive in the same instant as himself, equally punctual. The clock in the church tower sounded one. They exchanged low greetings, remarked that the weather promised to hold good, and started off in single file over soaking meadows towards the first belt of forest. The porter\u2014mere peasant, unfamiliar of face and not connected with the hotel\u2014led the way with a hurricane lantern. The air was marvellously sweet and fragrant. In the sky overhead the stars shone in their thousands. Only the noise of falling water from the heights, and the regular thud of their heavy boots broke the stillness. And, black against the sky, towered the enormous pyramid of the Tour du N\u00e9ant they meant to conquer.\n\nPerhaps the most delightful portion of a big ascent is the beginning in the scented darkness while the thrill of possible conquest lies still far off. The hours stretch themselves queerly; last night's sunset might be days ago; sunrise and the brilliance coming seem in another week, part of dim futurity like children's holidays. It is difficult to realise that this biting cold before the dawn, and the blazing heat to come, both belong to the same to-day.\n\nThere were no sounds as they toiled slowly up the zigzag path through the first fifteen hundred feet of pine-woods; no one spoke; the clink of nails and ice-axe points against the stones was all they heard. For the roar of water was felt rather than heard; it beat against the ears and the skin of the whole body at once. The deeper notes were below them now in the sleeping valley; the shriller ones sounded far above, where streams just born out of ponderous snow-beds tinkled sharply...\n\nThe change came delicately. The stars turned a shade less brilliant, a softness in them as of human eyes that say farewell. Between the highest branches the sky grew visible. A sighing air smoothed all their crests one way; moss, earth, and open spaces brought keen perfumes; and the little human procession, leaving the forest, stepped out into the vastness of the world above the tree-line. They paused while the porter stooped to put his lantern out. In the eastern sky was colour. The peaks and crags rushed closer.\n\nWas it the Dawn? Limasson turned his eyes from the height of sky where the summits pierced a path for the coming day, to the faces of his companions, pale and wan in the early twilight. How small, how insignificant they seemed amid this hungry emptiness of desolation. The stupendous cliffs fled past them, led by headstrong peaks crowned with eternal snows. Thin lines of cloud, trailing half way up precipice and ridge, seemed like the swish of movement\u2014as though he caught the earth turning as she raced through space. The four of them, timid riders on the gigantic saddle, clung for their lives against her titan ribs, while currents of some majestic life swept up at them from every side. He drew deep draughts of the rarefied air into his lungs. It was very cold. Avoiding the pallid, insignificant faces of his companions, he pretended interest in the porter's operations; he stared fixedly on the ground. It seemed twenty minutes before the flame was extinguished, and the lantern fastened to the pack behind. This Dawn was unlike any he had seen before.\n\nFor, in reality, all the while, Limasson was trying to bring order out of the extraordinary thoughts and feelings that had possessed him during the slow forest ascent, and the task was not crowned with much success. The Plan, made by others, had taken charge of him, he felt; and he had thrown the reins of personal will and interest loosely upon its steady gait. He had abandoned himself carelessly to what might come. Knowing that he was leader of the expedition, he yet had suffered the porter to go first, taking his own place as it was appointed to him, behind the younger man, but before the priest. In this order, they had plodded, as only experienced climbers plod, for hours without a rest, until half way up a change had taken place. He had wished it, and instantly it was effected. The priest moved past him, while his companion dropped to the rear\u2014the companion who forever stumbled in his speed, whereas the older man climbed surely, confidently. And thereafter Limasson walked more easily\u2014as though the relative positions of the three were of importance somehow. The steep ascent of smothering darkness through the woods became less arduous. He was glad to have the younger man behind him.\n\nFor the impression had strengthened as they climbed in silence that this ascent pertained to some significant Ceremony, and the idea had grown insistently, almost stealthily, upon him. The movements of himself and his companions, especially the positions each occupied relatively to the other, established some kind of intimacy that resembled speech, suggesting even question and answer. And the entire performance, while occupying hours by his watch, it seemed to him more than once, had been in reality briefer than the flash of a passing thought, so that he saw it within himself\u2014pictorially. He thought of a picture worked in colours upon a strip of elastic. Some one pulled the strip, and the picture stretched. Or some one released it again, and the picture flew back, reduced to a mere stationary speck. All happened in a single speck of time.\n\nAnd the little change of position, apparently so trivial, gave point to this singular notion working in his under-mind\u2014that this ascent was a ritual and a ceremony as in older days, its significance approaching revelation, however, for the first time\u2014now. Without language, this stole over him; no words could quite describe it. For it came to him that these three formed a unit, himself being in some fashion yet the acknowledged principal, the leader. The labouring porter had no place in it, for this first toiling through the darkness was a preparation, and when the actual climb began, he would disappear, while Limasson himself went first. This idea that they took part together in a Ceremony established itself firmly in him, with the added wonder that, though so often done, he performed it now for the first time with full comprehension, knowledge, truth. Empty of personal desire, indifferent to an ascent that formerly would have thrilled his heart with ambition and delight, he understood that climbing had ever been a ritual for his soul and of his soul, and that power must result from its sincere accomplishment. It was a symbolical ascent.\n\nIn words this did not come to him. He felt it, never criticising. That is, he neither rejected nor accepted. It stole most sweetly, grandly, over him. It floated into him while he climbed, yet so convincingly that he had felt his relative position must be changed. The younger man held too prominent a post, or at least a wrong one\u2014in advance. Then, after the change, effected mysteriously as though all recognised it, this line of certainty increased, and there came upon him the big, strange knowledge that all of life is a Ceremony on a giant scale, and that by performing the movements accurately, with sincere fidelity, there may come\u2014knowledge. There was gravity in him from that moment.\n\nThis ran in his mind with certainty. Though his thought assumed no form of little phrases, his brain yet furnished detailed statements that clinched the marvellous thing with simile and incident which daily life might apprehend: That knowledge arises from action; that to do the thing invites the teaching and explains it. Action, moreover, is symbolical; a group of men, a family, an entire nation, engaged in those daily movements which are the working out of their destiny, perform a Ceremony which is in direct relation somewhere to the pattern of greater happenings which are the teachings of the Gods. Let the body imitate, reproduce\u2014in a bedroom, in a wood\u2014anywhere\u2014the movements of the stars, and the meaning of those stars shall sink down into the heart. The movements constitute a script, a language. To mimic the gestures of a stranger is to understand his mood, his point of view\u2014to establish a grave and solemn intimacy. Temples are everywhere, for the entire earth is a temple, and the body, House of Royalty, is the biggest temple of them all. To ascertain the pattern its movements trace in daily life, could be to determine the relation of that particular ceremony to the Cosmos, and so learn power. The entire system of Pythagoras, he realised, could be taught without a single word\u2014by movements; and in everyday life even the commonest act and vulgarest movement are part of some big Ceremony\u2014a message from the Gods. Ceremony, in a word, is three-dimensional language, and action, therefore, is the language of the Gods. The Gods he had denied were speaking to him... passing with tumult close across his broken life... Their passage it was, indeed, that had caused the breaking!\n\nIn this cryptic, condensed fashion the great fact came over him\u2014that he and these other two, here and now, took part in some great Ceremony of whose ultimate object as yet he was in ignorance. The impact with which it dropped upon his mind was tremendous. He realised it most fully when he stepped from the darkness of the forest and entered the expanse of glimmering, early light; up till this moment his mind was being prepared only, whereas now he knew. The innate desire to worship which all along had been his, the momentum his religious temperament had acquired during forty years, the yearning to have proof, in a word, that the Gods he once acknowledged were really true, swept back upon him with that violent reaction which denial had aroused.\n\nHe wavered where he stood...\n\nLooking about him, then, while the others rearranged burdens the returning porter now discarded, he perceived the astonishing beauty of the time and place, feeling it soak into him as by the very pores of his skin. From all sides this beauty rushed upon him. Some radiant, wing\u00e9d sense of wonder sped past him through the silent air. A thrill of ecstasy ran down every nerve. The hair of his head stood up. It was far from unfamiliar to him, this sight of the upper mountain world awakening from its sleep of the summer night, but never before had he stood shuddering thus at its exquisite cold glory, nor felt its significance as now, so mysteriously within himself. Some transcendent power that held sublimity was passing across this huge desolate plateau, far more majestic than the mere sunrise among mountains he had so often witnessed. There was Movement. He understood why he had seen his companions insignificant. Again he shivered and looked about him, touched by a solemnity that held deep awe.\n\nPersonal life, indeed, was wrecked, destroyed, but something greater was on the way. His fragile alliance with a spiritual world was strengthened. He realised his own past insolence. He became afraid." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 478", + "text": "The treeless plateau, littered with enormous boulders, stretched for miles to right and left, grey in the dusk of very early morning. Behind him dropped thick guardian pine-woods into the sleeping valley that still detained the darkness of the night. Here and there lay patches of deep snow, gleaming faintly through thin rising mist; singing streams of icy water spread everywhere among the stones, soaking the coarse rough grass that was the only sign of vegetation. No life was visible; nothing stirred; nor anywhere was movement, but of the quiet trailing mist and of his own breath that drifted past his face like smoke. Yet through the splendid stillness there was movement; that sense of absolute movement which results in stillness\u2014it was owing to the stillness that he became aware of it\u2014so vast, indeed, that only immobility could express it. Thus, on the calmest day in summer, may the headlong rushing of the earth through space seem more real than when the tempest shakes the trees and water on its surface; or great machinery turn with such vertiginous velocity that it appears steady to the deceived function of the eye. For it was not through the eye that this solemn Movement made itself known, but rather through a massive sensation that owned his entire body as its organ. Within the league-long amphitheatre of enormous peaks and precipices that enclosed the plateau, piling themselves upon the horizon, Limasson felt the outline of a Ceremony extended. The pulses of its grandeur poured into him where he stood. Its vast design was knowable because they themselves had traced\u2014were even then tracing\u2014its earthly counterpart in little. And the awe in him increased.\n\n'This light is false. We have an hour yet before the true dawn,' he heard the younger man say lightly. 'The summits still are ghostly. Let us enjoy the sensation, and see what we can make of it.'\n\nAnd Limasson, looking up startled from his reverie, saw that the far-away heights and towers indeed were heavy with shadow, faint still with the light of stars. It seemed to him they bowed their awful heads and that their stupendous shoulders lowered. They drew together, shutting out the world.\n\n'True,' said his companion, 'and the upper snows still wear the spectral shine of night. But let us now move faster, for we travel very light. The sensations you propose will but delay and weaken us.'\n\nHe handed a share of the burdens to his companion and to Limasson. Slowly they all moved forward, and the mountains shut them in.\n\nAnd two things Limasson noted then, as he shouldered his heavier pack and led the way: first, that he suddenly knew their destination though its purpose still lay hidden; and, secondly, that the porter's leaving before the ascent proper began signified finally that ordinary climbing was not their real objective. Also\u2014the dawn was a lifting of inner veils from off his mind, rather than a brightening of the visible earth due to the nearing sun. Thick darkness, indeed, draped this enormous, lonely amphitheatre where they moved.\n\n'You lead us well,' said the priest a few feet behind him, as he picked his way unfalteringly among the boulders and the streams.\n\n'Strange that I do so,' replied Limasson in a low tone, 'for the way is new to me, and the darkness grows instead of lessening.' The language seemed hardly of his choosing. He spoke and walked as in a dream.\n\nFar in the rear the voice of the younger man called plaintively after them:\n\n'You go so fast, I can't keep up with you,' and again he stumbled and dropped his ice-axe among the rocks. He seemed for ever stooping to drink the icy water, or clambering off the trail to test the patches of snow as to quality and depth. 'You're missing all the excitement,' he cried repeatedly. 'There are a hundred pleasures and sensations by the way.'\n\nThey paused a moment for him to overtake them; he came up panting and exhausted, making remarks about the fading stars, the wind upon the heights, new routes he longed to try up dangerous couloirs, about everything, it seemed, except the work in hand. There was eagerness in him, the kind of excitement that saps energy and wastes the nervous force, threatening a probable collapse before the arduous object is attained.\n\n'Keep to the thing in hand,' replied the priest sternly. 'We are not really going fast; it is you who are scattering yourself to no purpose. It wears us all. We must husband our resources,' and he pointed significantly to the pyramid of the Tour du N\u00e9ant that gleamed above them at an incredible altitude.\n\n'We are here to amuse ourselves; life is a pleasure, a sensation, or it is nothing,' grumbled his companion; but there was a gravity in the tone of the older man that discouraged argument and made resistance difficult. The other arranged his pack for the tenth time, twisting his axe through an ingenious scheme of straps and string, and fell silently into line behind his leaders. Limasson moved on again... and the darkness at length began to lift. Far overhead, at first, the snowy summits shone with a hue less spectral; a delicate pink spread softly from the east; there was a freshening of the chilly wind; then suddenly the highest peak that topped the others by a thousand feet of soaring rock, stepped sharply into sight, half golden and half rose. At the same instant, the vast Movement of the entire scene slowed down; there came one or two terrific gusts of wind in quick succession; a roar like an avalanche of falling stones boomed distantly\u2014and Limasson stopped dead and held his breath.\n\nFor something blocked the way before him, something he knew he could not pass. Gigantic and unformed, it seemed part of the architecture of the desolate waste about him, while yet it bulked there, enormous in the trembling dawn, as belonging neither to plain nor mountain. Suddenly it was there, where a moment before had been mere emptiness of air. Its massive outline shifted into visibility as though it had risen from the ground. He stood stock still. A cold that was not of this world turned him rigid in his tracks. A few yards behind him the priest had halted too. Farther in the rear they heard the stumbling tread of the younger man, and the faint calling of his voice\u2014a feeble broken sound as of a man whom sudden fear distressed to helplessness.\n\n'We're off the track, and I've lost my way,' the words came on the still air. 'My axe is gone... let us put on the rope!... Hark! Do you hear that roar?' And then a sound as though he came slowly groping on his hands and knees.\n\n'You have exhausted yourself too soon,' the priest answered sternly. 'Stay where you are and rest, for we go no farther. This is the place we sought.'\n\nThere was in his tone a kind of ultimate solemnity that for a moment turned Limasson's attention from the great obstacle that blocked his farther way. The darkness lifted veil by veil, not gradually, but by a series of leaps as when some one inexpertly turns a wick. He perceived then that not a single Grandeur loomed in front, but that others of similar kind, some huger than the first, stood all about him, forming an enclosing circle that hemmed him in.\n\nThen, with a start, he recovered himself. Equilibrium and common sense returned. The trick that sight had played upon him, assisted by the rarefied atmosphere of the heights and by the witchery of dawn, was no uncommon one, after all. The long straining of the eyes to pick the way in an uncertain light so easily deceives perspective. Delusion ever follows abrupt change of focus. These shadowy encircling forms were but the rampart of still distant precipices whose giant walls framed the tremendous amphitheatre to the sky.\n\nTheir closeness was a mere gesture of the dusk and distance.\n\nThe shock of the discovery produced an instant's unsteadiness in him that brought bewilderment. He straightened up, raised his head, and looked about him. The cliffs, it seemed to him, shifted back instantly to their accustomed places; as though after all they had been close; there was a reeling among the topmost crags; they balanced fearfully, then stood still against a sky already faintly crimson. The roar he heard, that might well have seemed the tumult of their hurrying speed, was in reality but the wind of dawn that rushed against their ribs, beating the echoes out with angry wings. And the lines of trailing mist, streaking the air like proofs of rapid motion, merely coiled and floated in the empty spaces.\n\nHe turned to the priest, who had moved up beside him.\n\n'How strange,' he said, 'is this beginning of new light. My sight went all astray for a passing moment. I thought the mountains stood right across my path. And when I looked up just now it seemed they all ran back.' His voice was small and lost in the great listening air.\n\nThe man looked fixedly at him. He had removed his slouch hat, hot with the long ascent, and as he answered, a long thin shadow flitted across his features. A breadth of darkness dropped about them. It was as though a mask were forming. The face that now was covered had been\u2014naked. He was so long in answering that Limasson heard his mind sharpening the sentence like a pencil.\n\nHe spoke very slowly. 'They move perhaps even as Their powers move, and Their minutes are our years. Their passage ever is in tumult. There is disorder then among the affairs of men; there is confusion in their minds. There may be ruin and disaster, but out of the wreckage shall issue strong, fresh growth. For like a sea, They pass.'\n\nThere was in his mien a grandeur that seemed borrowed marvellously from the mountains. His voice was grave and deep; he made no sign or gesture; and in his manner was a curious steadiness that breathed through the language a kind of sacred prophecy.\n\nLong, thundering gusts of wind passed distantly across the precipices as he spoke. The same moment, expecting apparently no rejoinder to his strange utterance, he stooped and began to unpack his knapsack. The change from the sacerdotal language to this commonplace and practical detail was singularly bewildering.\n\n'It is the time to rest,' he added, 'and the time to eat. Let us prepare.' And he drew out several small packets and laid them in a row upon the ground. Awe deepened over Limasson as he watched, and with it a great wonder too. For the words seemed ominous, as though this man, upon the floor of some vast Temple, said: 'Let us prepare a sacrifice...!' There flashed into him, out of depths that had hitherto concealed it, a lightning clue that hinted at explanation of the entire strange proceeding\u2014of the abrupt meeting with the strangers, the impulsive acceptance of their project for the great ascent, their grave behaviour as though it were a Ceremonial of immense design, his change of position, the bewildering tricks of sight, and the solemn language, finally, of the older man that corroborated what he himself had deemed at first illusion. In a flying second of time this all swept through him\u2014and with it the sharp desire to turn aside, retreat, to run away.\n\nNoting the movement, or perhaps divining the emotion prompting it, the priest looked up quickly. In his tone was a coldness that seemed as though this scene of wintry desolation uttered words:\n\n'You have come too far to think of turning back. It is not possible. You stand now at the gates of birth\u2014and death. All that might hinder, you have so bravely cast aside. Be brave now to the end.'\n\nAnd, as Limasson heard the words, there dropped suddenly into him a new and awful insight into humanity, a power that unerringly discovered the spiritual necessities of others, and therefore of himself. With a shock he realised that the younger man who had accompanied them with increasing difficulty as they climbed higher and higher\u2014was but a shadow of reality. Like the porter, he was but an encumbrance who impeded progress. And he turned his eyes to search the desolate landscape.\n\n'You will not find him,' said his companion, 'for he is gone. Never, unless you weakly call, shall you see him again, nor desire to hear his voice.' And Limasson realised that in his heart he had all the while disapproved of the man, disliked him for his theatrical fondness of sensation and effect, more, that he had even hated and despised him. Starvation might crawl upon him where he had fallen and eat his life away before he would stir a finger to save him. It was with the older man he now had dreadful business in hand.\n\n'I am glad,' he answered, 'for in the end he must have proved my death\u2014our death!'\n\nAnd they drew closer round the little circle of food the priest had laid upon the rocky ground, an intimate understanding linking them together in a sympathy that completed Limasson's bewilderment. There was bread, he saw, and there was salt; there was also a little flask of deep red wine. In the centre of the circle was a miniature fire of sticks the priest had collected from the bushes of wild rhododendron. The smoke rose upwards in a thin blue line. It did not even quiver, so profound was the surrounding stillness of the mountain air, but far away among the precipices ran the boom of falling water, and behind it again, the muffled roar as of peaks and snow-fields that swept with a rolling thunder through the heavens.\n\n'They are passing,' the priest said in a low voice, 'and They know that you are here. You have now the opportunity of a lifetime; for, if you yield acceptance of your own free will, success is sure. You stand before the gates of birth and death. They offer you life.'\n\n'Yet... I denied Them!' He murmured it below his breath.\n\n'Denial is evocation. You called to them, and They have come. The sacrifice of your little personal life is all They ask. Be brave\u2014and yield it.'\n\nHe took the bread as he spoke, and, breaking it in three pieces, he placed one before Limasson, one before himself, and the third he laid upon the flame which first blackened and then consumed it.\n\n'Eat it and understand,' he said, 'for it is the nourishment that shall revive your fading life.'\n\nNext, with the salt, he did the same. Then, raising the flask of wine, he put it to his lips, offering it afterwards to his companion. When both had drunk there still remained the greater part of the contents. He lifted the vessel with both hands reverently towards the sky. He stood upright.\n\n'The blood of your personal life I offer to Them in your name. By the renunciation which seems to you as death shall you pass through the gates of birth to the life of freedom beyond. For the ultimate sacrifice that They ask of you is\u2014this.'\n\nAnd bending low before the distant heights, he poured the wine upon the rocky ground.\n\nFor a period of time Limasson found no means of measuring, so terrible were the emotions in his heart, the priest remained in this attitude of worship and obeisance. The tumult in the mountains ceased. An absolute hush dropped down upon the world. There seemed a pause in the inner history of the universe itself. All waited\u2014till he rose again. And, when he did so, the mask that had for hours now been spreading across his features, was accomplished. The eyes gazed sternly down into his own. Limasson looked\u2014and recognised. He stood face to face with the man whom he knew best of all others in the world... himself.\n\nThere had been death. There had also been that recovery of splendour which is birth and resurrection.\n\nAnd the sun that moment, with the sudden surprise that mountains only know, rushed clear above the heights, bathing the landscape and the standing figure with a stainless glory. Into the vast Temple where he knelt, as into that greater inner Temple which is mankind's true House of Royalty, there poured the completing Presence which is\u2014Light.\n\n'For in this way, and in this way only, shall you pass from death to life,' sang a chanting voice he recognised also now for the first time as indubitably his own.\n\nIt was marvellous. But the birth of light is ever marvellous. It was anguish; but the pangs of resurrection since time began have been accomplished by the sweetness of fierce pain. For the majority still lie in the pre-natal stage, unborn, unconscious of a definite spiritual existence. In the womb they grope and stifle, depending ever upon another. Denial is ever the call to life, a protest against continued darkness for deliverance. Yet birth is the ruin of all that has hitherto been depended on. There comes then that standing alone which at first seems desolate isolation. The tumult of destruction precedes release.\n\nLimasson rose to his feet, stood with difficulty upright, looked about him from the figure so close now at his side to the snowy summit of that Tour du N\u00e9ant he would never climb. The roar and thunder of Their passage was resumed. It seemed the mountains reeled.\n\n'They are passing,' sang the voice that was beside him and within him too, 'but They have known you, and your offering is accepted. When They come close upon the world there is ever wreckage and disaster in the affairs of men. They bring disorder and confusion into the mind, a confusion that seems final, a disorder that seems to threaten death. For there is tumult in Their Presence, and apparent chaos that seems the abandonment of order. Out of this vast ruin, then, there issues life in new design. The dislocation is its entrance, the dishevelment its strength. There has been birth...'\n\nThe sunlight dazzled his eyes. That distant roar, like a wind, came close and swept his face. An icy air, as from a passing star, breathed over him.\n\n'Are you prepared?' he heard.\n\nHe knelt again. Without a sign of hesitation or reluctance, he bared his chest to the sun and wind. The flash came swiftly, instantly, descending into his heart with unerring aim. He saw the gleam in the air, he felt the fiery impact of the blow, he even saw the stream gush forth and sink into the rocky ground, far redder than the wine..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 479", + "text": "He gasped for breath a moment, staggered, reeled, collapsed... and within the moment, so quickly did all happen, he was aware of hands that supported him and helped him to his feet. But he was too weak to stand. They carried him up to bed. The porter, and the man who had reached across him for the matches five minutes before, intending conversation, stood, one at his feet and the other at his head. As he passed through the vestibule of the hotel, he saw the people staring, and in his hand he crumpled up the unopened letters he had received so short a time ago.\n\n'I really think\u2014I can manage alone,' he thanked them. 'If you will set me down I can walk. I felt dizzy for a moment.'\n\n'The heat in the hall\u2014' the gentleman began in a quiet, sympathetic voice.\n\nThey left him standing on the stairs, watching a moment to see that he had quite recovered. Limasson walked up the two flights to his room without faltering. The momentary dizziness had passed. He felt quite himself again, strong, confident, able to stand alone, able to move forward, able to climb.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Damned ]\n\n'I'm over forty, Frances, and rather set in my ways,' I said good-naturedly, ready to yield if she insisted that our going together on the visit involved her happiness. 'My work is rather heavy just now too, as you know. The question is, could I work there\u2014with a lot of unassorted people in the house?'\n\n'Mabel doesn't mention any other people, Bill,' was my sister's rejoinder. 'I gather she's alone\u2014as well as lonely.'\n\nBy the way she looked sideways out of the window at nothing, it was obvious she was disappointed, but to my surprise she did not urge the point; and as I glanced at Mrs. Franklyn's invitation lying upon her sloping lap, the neat, childish handwriting conjured up a mental picture of the banker's widow, with her timid, insignificant personality, her pale grey eyes and her expression as of a backward child. I thought, too, of the roomy country mansion her late husband had altered to suit his particular needs, and of my visit to it a few years ago when its barren spaciousness suggested a wing of Kensington Museum fitted up temporarily as a place to eat and sleep in. Comparing it mentally with the poky Chelsea flat where I and my sister kept impecunious house, I realised other points as well. Unworthy details flashed across me to entice: the fine library, the organ, the quiet work-room I should have, perfect service, the delicious cup of early tea, and hot baths at any moment of the day\u2014without a geyser!\n\n'It's a longish visit, a month\u2014isn't it?' I hedged, smiling at the details that seduced me, and ashamed of my man's selfishness, yet knowing that Frances expected it of me. 'There are points about it, I admit. If you're set on my going with you, I could manage it all right.'\n\nI spoke at length in this way because my sister made no answer. I saw her tired eyes gazing into the dreariness of Oakley Street and felt a pang strike through me. After a pause, in which again she said no word, I added: 'So, when you write the letter, you might hint, perhaps, that I usually work all the morning, and\u2014er\u2014am not a very lively visitor! Then she'll understand, you see.' And I half-rose to return to my diminutive study, where I was slaving, just then, at an absorbing article on Comparative \u00c6sthetic Values in the Blind and Deaf.\n\nBut Frances did not move. She kept her grey eyes upon Oakley Street where the evening mist from the river drew mournful perspectives into view. It was late October. We heard the omnibuses thundering across the bridge. The monotony of that broad, characterless street seemed more than usually depressing. Even in June sunshine it was dead, but with autumn its melancholy soaked into every house between King's Road and the Embankment. It washed thought into the past, instead of inviting it hopefully towards the future. For me, its easy width was an avenue through which nameless slums across the river sent creeping messages of depression, and I always regarded it as Winter's main entrance into London\u2014fog, slush, gloom trooped down it every November, waving their forbidding banners till March came to rout them. Its one claim upon my love was that the south wind swept sometimes unobstructed up it, soft with suggestions of the sea. These lugubrious thoughts I naturally kept to myself, though I never ceased to regret the little flat whose cheapness had seduced us. Now, as I watched my sister's impassive face, I realised that perhaps she, too, felt as I felt, yet, brave woman, without betraying it.\n\n'And, look here, Fanny,' I said, putting a hand upon her shoulder as I crossed the room, 'it would be the very thing for you. You're worn out with catering and housekeeping. Mabel is your oldest friend, besides, and you've hardly seen her since he died\u2014'\n\n'She's been abroad for a year, Bill, and only just came back,' my sister interposed. 'She came back rather unexpectedly, though I never thought she would go there to live\u2014' She stopped abruptly. Clearly, she was only speaking half her mind. 'Probably,' she went on, 'Mabel wants to pick up old links again.'\n\n'Naturally,' I put in, 'yourself chief among them.' The veiled reference to the house I let pass. It involved discussing the dead man for one thing.\n\n'I feel I ought to go anyhow,' she resumed, 'and of course it would be jollier if you came too. You'd get in such a muddle here by yourself, and eat wrong things, and forget to air the rooms, and\u2014oh, everything!' She looked up laughing. 'Only,' she added, 'there's the British Museum\u2014?'\n\n'But there's a big library there,' I answered, 'and all the books of reference I could possibly want. It was of you I was thinking. You could take up your painting again; you always sell half of what you paint. It would be a splendid rest too, and Sussex is a jolly country to walk in. By all means, Fanny, I advise\u2014'\n\nOur eyes met, as I stammered in my attempts to avoid expressing the thought that hid in both our minds. My sister had a weakness for dabbling in the various 'new' theories of the day, and Mabel, who before her marriage had belonged to foolish societies for investigating the future life to the neglect of the present one, had fostered this undesirable tendency. Her amiable, impressionable temperament was open to every psychic wind that blew. I deplored, detested the whole business. But even more than this I abhorred the later influence that Mr. Franklyn had steeped his wife in, capturing her body and soul in his sombre doctrines. I had dreaded lest my sister also might be caught.\n\n'Now that she is alone again\u2014'\n\nI stopped short. Our eyes now made pretence impossible, for the truth had slipped out inevitably, stupidly, although unexpressed in definite language. We laughed, turning our faces a moment to look at other things in the room. Frances picked up a book and examined its cover as though she had made an important discovery, while I took my case out and lit a cigarette I did not want to smoke. We left the matter there. I went out of the room before further explanation could cause tension. Disagreements grow into discord from such tiny things\u2014wrong adjectives, or a chance inflection of the voice. Frances had a right to her views of life as much as I had. At least, I reflected comfortably, we had separated upon an agreement this time, recognised mutually, though not actually stated.\n\nAnd this point of meeting was, oddly enough, our way of regarding some one who was dead. For we had both disliked the husband with a great dislike, and during his three years' married life had only been to the house once\u2014for a week-end visit; arriving late on Saturday, we had left after an early breakfast on Monday morning. Ascribing my sister's dislike to a natural jealousy at losing her old friend, I said merely that he displeased me. Yet we both knew that the real emotion lay much deeper. Frances, loyal, honourable creature, had kept silence; and beyond saying that house and grounds\u2014he altered one and laid out the other\u2014distressed her as an expression of his personality somehow (\"distressed\" was the word she used), no further explanation had passed her lips.\n\nOur dislike of his personality was easily accounted for\u2014up to a point, since both of us shared the artist's point of view that a creed, cut to measure and carefully dried, was an ugly thing, and that a dogma to which believers must subscribe or perish everlastingly was a barbarism resting upon cruelty. But while my own dislike was purely due to an abstract worship of Beauty, my sister's had another twist in it, for with her 'new' tendencies, she believed that all religions were an aspect of truth and that no one, even the lowest wretch, could escape 'heaven' in the long run.\n\nSamuel Franklyn, the rich banker, was a man universally respected and admired, and the marriage, though Mabel was fifteen years his junior, won general applause; his bride was an heiress in her own right\u2014breweries\u2014and the story of her conversion at a revivalist meeting where Samuel Franklyn had spoken fervidly of heaven, and terrifyingly of sin, hell and damnation, even contained a touch of genuine romance. She was a brand snatched from the burning; his detailed eloquence had frightened her into heaven; salvation came in the nick of time; his words had plucked her from the edge of that lake of fire and brimstone where their worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched. She regarded him as a hero, sighed her relief upon his saintly shoulder, and accepted the peace he offered her with a grateful resignation.\n\nFor her husband was a 'religious man' who successfully combined great riches with the glamour of winning souls. He was a portly figure, though tall, with masterful, big hands, the fingers rather thick and red; and his dignity, that just escaped being pompous, held in it something that was implacable. A convinced assurance, almost remorseless, gleamed in his eyes when he preached especially, and his threats of hell fire must have scared souls stronger than the timid, receptive Mabel whom he married. He clad himself in long frock-coats that buttoned unevenly, big square boots, and trousers that invariably bagged at the knee and were a little short; he wore low collars, spats occasionally, and a tall black hat that was not of silk. His voice was alternately hard and unctuous; and he regarded theatres, ball-rooms and race-courses as the vestibule of that brimstone lake of whose geography he was as positive as of his great banking offices in the City. A philanthropist up to the hilt, however, no one ever doubted his complete sincerity; his convictions were ingrained, his faith borne out by his life\u2014as witness his name upon so many admirable Societies, as treasurer, patron, or heading the donation list. He bulked large in the world of doing good, a broad and stately stone in the rampart against evil. And his heart was genuinely kind and soft for others\u2014who believed as he did.\n\nYet, in spite of this true sympathy with suffering and his desire to help, he was narrow as a telegraph wire and unbending as a church pillar; he was intensely selfish; intolerant as an officer of the Inquisition, his bourgeois soul constructed a revolting scheme of heaven that was reproduced in miniature in all he did and planned. Faith was the sine qua non of salvation, and by 'faith' he meant belief in his own particular view of things\u2014'which faith, except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.' All the world but his own small, exclusive sect must be damned eternally\u2014a pity, but alas, inevitable. He was right.\n\nYet he prayed without ceasing, and gave heavily to the poor\u2014the only thing he could not give being big ideas to his provincial and suburban deity. Pettier than an insect, and more obstinate than a mule, he had also the superior, sleek humility of a 'chosen one.' He was churchwarden too. He read the Lessons in a 'place of worship,' either chilly or overheated, where neither organ, vestments, nor lighted candles were permitted, but where the odour of hair-wash on the boys' heads in the back rows pervaded the entire building.\n\nThis portrait of the banker, who accumulated riches both on earth and in heaven, may possibly be overdrawn, however, because Frances and I were 'artistic temperaments' that viewed the type with a dislike and distrust amounting to contempt. The majority considered Samuel Franklyn a worthy man and a good citizen. The majority, doubtless, held the saner view. A few years more, and he certainly would have been made a baronet. He relieved much suffering in the world, as assuredly as he caused many souls the agonies of torturing fear by his emphasis upon damnation. Had there been one point of beauty in him, we might have been more lenient; only we found it not, and, I admit, took little pains to search. I shall never forget the look of dour forgiveness with which he heard our excuses for missing Morning Prayers that Sunday morning of our single visit to The Towers. My sister learned that a change was made soon afterwards, prayers being 'conducted' after breakfast instead of before.\n\nThe Towers stood solemnly upon a Sussex hill amid park-like modern grounds, but the house cannot better be described\u2014it would be so wearisome for one thing\u2014than by saying that it was a cross between an overgrown, pretentious Norwood villa and one of those saturnine Institutes for cripples the train passes as it slinks ashamed through South London into Surrey. It was 'wealthily' furnished and at first sight imposing, but on closer acquaintance revealed a meagre personality, barren and austere. One looked for Rules and Regulations on the walls, all signed By Order. The place was a prison that shut out 'the world.' There was, of course, no billiard-room, no smoking-room, no room for play of any kind, and the great hall at the back, once a chapel which might have been used for dancing, theatricals, or other innocent amusements, was consecrated in his day to meetings of various kinds, chiefly brigades, temperance or missionary societies. There was a harmonium at one end\u2014on the level floor\u2014a raised dais or platform at the other, and a gallery above for the servants, gardeners and coachmen. It was heated with hot-water pipes, and hung with Dor\u00e9's pictures, though these latter were soon removed and stored out of sight in the attics as being too unspiritual. In polished, shiny wood, it was a representation in miniature of that poky exclusive Heaven he took about with him, externalising it in all he did and planned, even in the grounds about the house.\n\nChanges in The Towers, Frances told me, had been made during Mabel's year of widowhood abroad\u2014an organ put into the big hall, the library made liveable and recatalogued\u2014when it was permissible to suppose she had found her soul again and returned to her normal, healthy views of life, which included enjoyment and play, literature, music and the arts, without, however, a touch of that trivial thoughtlessness usually termed worldliness. Mrs. Franklyn, as I remembered her, was a quiet little woman, shallow, perhaps, and easily influenced, but sincere as a dog and thorough in her faithful friendships. Her tastes at heart were catholic, and that heart was simple and unimaginative. That she took up with the various movements of the day was sign merely that she was searching in her limited way for a belief that should bring her peace. She was, in fact, a very ordinary woman, her calibre a little less than that of Frances. I knew they used to discuss all kinds of theories together, but as these discussions never resulted in action, I had come to regard her as harmless. Still, I was not sorry when she married, and I did not welcome now a renewal of the former intimacy. The philanthropist had given her no children, or she would have made a good and sensible mother. No doubt she would marry again.\n\n'Mabel mentions that she's been alone at The Towers since the end of August,' Frances told me at tea-time; 'and I'm sure she feels out of it and lonely. It would be a kindness to go. Besides, I always liked her.'\n\nI agreed. I had recovered from my attack of selfishness. I expressed my pleasure.\n\n'You've written to accept,' I said, half statement and half question.\n\nFrances nodded. 'I thanked for you,' she added quietly, 'explaining that you were not free at the moment, but that later, if not inconvenient, you might come down for a bit and join me.'\n\nI stared. Frances sometimes had this independent way of deciding things. I was convicted, and punished into the bargain.\n\nOf course there followed argument and explanation, as between brother and sister who were affectionate, but the recording of our talk could be of little interest. It was arranged thus, Frances and I both satisfied. Two days later she departed for The Towers, leaving me alone in the flat with everything planned for my comfort and good behaviour\u2014she was rather a tyrant in her quiet way\u2014and her last words as I saw her off from Charing Cross rang in my head for a long time after she was gone:\n\n'I'll write and let you know, Bill. Eat properly, mind, and let me know if anything goes wrong.'\n\nShe waved her small gloved hand, nodded her head till the feather brushed the window, and was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 480", + "text": "After the note announcing her safe arrival a week of silence passed, and then a letter came; there were various suggestions for my welfare, and the rest was the usual rambling information and description Frances loved, generously italicised.\n\n'...and we are quite alone,' she went on in her enormous handwriting that seemed such a waste of space and labour, 'though some others are coming presently, I believe. You could work here to your heart's content. Mabel quite understands, and says she would love to have you when you feel free to come. She has changed a bit\u2014back to her old natural self: she never mentions him. The place has changed too in certain ways: it has more cheerfulness, I think. She has put it in, this cheerfulness, spaded it in, if you know what I mean; but it lies about uneasily and is not natural\u2014quite. The organ is a beauty. She must be very rich now, but she's as gentle and sweet as ever. Do you know, Bill, I think he must have frightened her into marrying him. I get the impression she was afraid of him.' This last sentence was inked out, but I read it through the scratching; the letters being too big to hide. 'He had an inflexible will beneath all that oily kindness which passed for spiritual. He was a real personality, I mean. I'm sure he'd have sent you and me cheerfully to the stake in another century\u2014for our own good. Isn't it odd she never speaks of him, even to me?' This, again, was stroked through, though without the intention to obliterate\u2014merely because it was repetition, probably. 'The only reminder of him in the house now is a big copy of the presentation portrait that stands on the stairs of the Multitechnic Institute at Peckham\u2014you know\u2014that life-size one with his fat hand sprinkled with rings resting on a thick Bible and the other slipped between the buttons of a tight frock-coat. It hangs in the dining-room and rather dominates our meals. I wish Mabel would take it down. I think she'd like to, if she dared. There's not a single photograph of him anywhere, even in her own room. Mrs. Marsh is here\u2014you remember her, his housekeeper, the wife of the man who got penal servitude for killing a baby or something,\u2014you said she robbed him and justified her stealing because the story of the unjust steward was in the Bible! How we laughed over that! She's just the same too, gliding about all over the house and turning up when least expected.'\n\nOther reminiscences filled the next two sides of the letter, and ran, without a trace of punctuation, into instructions about a Salamander stove for heating my work-room in the flat; these were followed by things I was to tell the cook, and by requests for several articles she had forgotten and would like sent after her, two of them blouses, with descriptions so lengthy and contradictory that I sighed as I read them\u2014'unless you come down soon, in which case perhaps you wouldn't mind bringing them; not the mauve one I wear in the evening sometimes, but the pale blue one with lace round the collar and the crinkly front. They're in the cupboard\u2014or the drawer, I'm not sure which\u2014of my bedroom. Ask Annie if you're in doubt. Thanks most awfully. Send a telegram, remember, and we'll meet you in the motor any time. I don't quite know if I shall stay the whole month\u2014alone. It all depends...' And she closed the letter, the italicised words increasing recklessly towards the end, with a repetition that Mabel would love to have me 'for myself,' as also to have a 'man in the house,' and that I only had to telegraph the day and the train... This letter, coming by the second post, interrupted me in a moment of absorbing work, and, having read it through to make sure there was nothing requiring instant attention, I threw it aside and went on with my notes and reading. Within five minutes, however, it was back at me again. That restless thing called 'between the lines' fluttered about my mind. My interest in the Balkan States\u2014political article that had been 'ordered'\u2014faded. Somewhere, somehow I felt disquieted, disturbed. At first I persisted in my work, forcing myself to concentrate, but soon found that a layer of new impressions floated between the article and my attention. It was like a shadow, though a shadow that dissolved upon inspection. Once or twice I glanced up, expecting to find some one in the room, that the door had opened unobserved and Annie was waiting for instructions. I heard the 'buses thundering across the bridge. I was aware of Oakley Street. Montenegro and the blue Adriatic melted into the October haze along that depressing Embankment that aped a river bank, and sentences from the letter flashed before my eyes and stung me. Picking it up and reading it through more carefully, I rang the bell and told Annie to find the blouses and pack them for the post, showing her finally the written description, and resenting the superior smile with which she at once interrupted, 'I know them, sir,' and disappeared.\n\nBut it was not the blouses: it was that exasperating thing 'between the lines' that put an end to my work with its elusive teasing nuisance. The first sharp impression is alone of value in such a case, for once analysis begins the imagination constructs all kinds of false interpretation. The more I thought, the more I grew fuddled. The letter, it seemed to me, wanted to say another thing; instead the eight sheets conveyed it merely. It came to the edge of disclosure, then halted. There was something on the writer's mind, and I felt uneasy. Studying the sentences brought, however, no revelation, but increased confusion only; for while the uneasiness remained, the first clear hint had vanished. In the end I closed my books and went out to look up another matter at the British Museum Library. Perhaps I should discover it that way\u2014by turning the mind in a totally new direction. I lunched at the Express Dairy in Oxford Street close by, and telephoned to Annie that I would be home to tea at five.\n\nAnd at tea, tired physically and mentally after breathing the exhausted air of the Rotunda for five hours, my mind suddenly delivered up its original impression, vivid and clear-cut; no proof accompanied the revelation; it was mere presentiment, but convincing. Frances was disturbed in her mind, her orderly, sensible, housekeeping mind; she was uneasy, even perhaps afraid; something in the house distressed her, and she had need of me. Unless I went down, her time of rest and change, her quite necessary holiday, in fact, would be spoilt. She was too unselfish to say this, but it ran everywhere between the lines. I saw it clearly now. Mrs. Franklyn, moreover\u2014and that meant Frances too\u2014would like a 'man in the house.' It was a disagreeable phrase, a suggestive way of hinting something she dared not state definitely. The two women in that great, lonely barrack of a house were afraid.\n\nMy sense of duty, affection, unselfishness, whatever the composite emotion may be termed, was stirred; also my vanity. I acted quickly, lest reflection should warp clear, decent judgment. 'Annie,' I said, when she answered the bell, 'you need not send those blouses by the post. I'll take them down to-morrow when I go. I shall be away a week or two, possibly longer.' And, having looked up a train, I hastened out to telegraph before I could change my fickle mind.\n\nBut no desire came that night to change my mind. I was doing the right, the necessary thing. I was even in something of a hurry to get down to The Towers as soon as possible. I chose an early afternoon train." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 481", + "text": "A telegram had told me to come to a town ten miles from the house, so I was saved the crawling train to the local station, and travelled down by an express. As soon as we left London the fog cleared off, and an autumn sun, though without heat in it, painted the landscape with golden browns and yellows. My spirits rose as I lay back in the luxurious motor and sped between the woods and hedges. Oddly enough, my anxiety of overnight had disappeared. It was due, no doubt, to that exaggeration of detail which reflection in loneliness brings. Frances and I had not been separated for over a year, and her letters from The Towers told so little. It had seemed unnatural to be deprived of those intimate particulars of mood and feeling I was accustomed to. We had such confidence in one another, and our affection was so deep. Though she was but five years younger than myself, I regarded her as a child. My attitude was fatherly. In return, she certainly mothered me with a solicitude that never cloyed. I felt no desire to marry while she was still alive. She painted in water-colours with a reasonable success, and kept house for me; I wrote, reviewed books and lectured on \u00e6sthetics; we were a humdrum couple of quasi-artists, well satisfied with life, and all I feared for her was that she might become a suffragette or be taken captive by one of these wild theories that caught her imagination sometimes, and that Mabel, for one, had fostered. As for myself, no doubt she deemed me a trifle solid or stolid\u2014I forget which word she preferred\u2014but on the whole there was just sufficient difference of opinion to make intercourse suggestive without monotony, and certainly without quarrelling. Drawing in deep draughts of the stinging autumn air, I felt happy and exhilarated. It was like going for a holiday, with comfort at the end of the journey instead of bargaining for centimes.\n\nBut my heart sank noticeably the moment the house came into view. The long drive, lined with hostile monkey trees and formal wellingtonias that were solemn and sedate, was mere extension of the miniature approach to a thousand semi-detached suburban 'residences'; and the appearance of The Towers, as we turned the corner with a rush, suggested a commonplace climax to a story that had begun interestingly, almost thrillingly. A villa had escaped from the shadow of the Crystal Palace, thumped its way down by night, grown suddenly monstrous in a shower of rich rain, and settled itself insolently to stay. Ivy climbed about the opulent red-brick walls, but climbed neatly and with disfiguring effect, sham as on a prison or\u2014the simile made me smile\u2014an orphan asylum. There was no hint of the comely roughness of untidy ivy on a ruin. Clipped, trained and precise it was, as on a brand-new protestant church. I swear there was not a bird's nest nor a single earwig in it anywhere. About the porch it was particularly thick, smothering a seventeenth-century lamp with a contrast that was quite horrible. Extensive glass-houses spread away on the farther side of the house; the numerous towers to which the building owed its name seemed made to hold school bells; and the window-sills, thick with potted flowers, made me think of the desolate suburbs of Brighton or Bexhill. In a commanding position upon the crest of a hill, it overlooked miles of undulating, wooded country southwards to the Downs, but behind it, to the north, thick banks of ilex, holly and privet protected it from the cleaner and more stimulating winds. Hence, though highly placed, it was shut in. Three years had passed since I last set eyes upon it, but the unsightly memory I had retained was justified by the reality. The place was deplorable.\n\nIt is my habit to express my opinions audibly sometimes, when impressions are strong enough to warrant it; but now I only sighed 'Oh, dear,' as I extricated my legs from many rugs and went into the house. A tall parlour-maid, with the bearing of a grenadier, received me, and standing behind her was Mrs. Marsh, the housekeeper, whom I remembered because her untidy back hair had suggested to me that it had been burnt. I went at once to my room, my hostess already dressing for dinner, but Frances came in to see me just as I was struggling with my black tie that had got tangled like a bootlace. She fastened it for me in a neat, effective bow, and while I held my chin up for the operation, staring blankly at the ceiling, the impression came\u2014I wondered, was it her touch that caused it?\u2014that something in her trembled. Shrinking perhaps is the truer word. Nothing in her face or manner betrayed it, nor in her pleasant, easy talk while she tidied my things and scolded my slovenly packing, as her habit was, questioning me about the servants at the flat. The blouses, though right, were crumpled, and my scolding was deserved. There was no impatience even. Yet somehow or other the suggestion of a shrinking reserve and holding back reached my mind. She had been lonely, of course, but it was more than that; she was glad that I had come, yet for some reason unstated she could have wished that I had stayed away. We discussed the news that had accumulated during our brief separation, and in doing so the impression, at best exceedingly slight, was forgotten. My chamber was large and beautifully furnished; the hall and dining-room of our flat would have gone into it with a good remainder; yet it was not a place I could settle down in for work. It conveyed the idea of impermanence, making me feel transient as in a hotel bedroom. This, of course, was the fact. But some rooms convey a settled, lasting hospitality even in a hotel; this one did not; and as I was accustomed to work in the room I slept in, at least when visiting, a slight frown must have crept between my eyes.\n\n'Mabel has fitted a work-room for you just out of the library,' said the clairvoyant Frances. 'No one will disturb you there, and you'll have fifteen thousand books all catalogued within easy reach. There's a private staircase too. You can breakfast in your room and slip down in your dressing-gown if you want to.' She laughed. My spirits took a turn upwards as absurdly as they had gone down.\n\n'And how are you?' I asked, giving her a belated kiss. 'It's jolly to be together again. I did feel rather lost without you, I'll admit.'\n\n'That's natural,' she laughed. 'I'm so glad.'\n\nShe looked well and had country colour in her cheeks. She informed me that she was eating and sleeping well, going out for little walks with Mabel, painting bits of scenery again, and enjoying a complete change and rest; and yet, for all her brave description, the words somehow did not quite ring true. Those last words in particular did not ring true. There lay in her manner, just out of sight, I felt, this suggestion of the exact reverse\u2014of unrest, shrinking, almost of anxiety. Certain small strings in her seemed over-tight. 'Keyed-up' was the slang expression that crossed my mind. I looked rather searchingly into her face as she was telling me this.\n\n'Only\u2014the evenings,' she added, noticing my query, yet rather avoiding my eyes, 'the evenings are\u2014well, rather heavy sometimes, and I find it difficult to keep awake.'\n\n'The strong air after London makes you drowsy,' I suggested, 'and you like to get early to bed.'\n\nFrances turned and looked at me for a moment steadily. 'On the contrary, Bill, I dislike going to bed\u2014here. And Mabel goes so early.' She said it lightly enough, fingering the disorder upon my dressing-table in such a stupid way that I saw her mind was working in another direction altogether. She looked up suddenly with a kind of nervousness from the brush and scissors. 'Billy,' she said abruptly, lowering her voice, 'isn't it odd, but I hate sleeping alone here? I can't make it out quite; I've never felt such a thing before in my life. Do you\u2014think it's all nonsense?' And she laughed, with her lips but not with her eyes; there was a note of defiance in her I failed to understand.\n\n'Nothing a nature like yours feels strongly is nonsense, Frances,' I replied soothingly.\n\nBut I, too, answered with my lips only, for another part of my mind was working elsewhere, and among uncomfortable things. A touch of bewilderment passed over me. I was not certain how best to continue. If I laughed she would tell me no more, yet if I took her too seriously the strings would tighten further. Instinctively, then, this flashed rapidly across me: that something of what she felt, I had also felt, though interpreting it differently. Vague it was, as the coming of rain or storm that announce themselves hours in advance with their hint of faint, unsettling excitement in the air. I had been but a short hour in the house,\u2014big, comfortable, luxurious house,\u2014but had experienced this sense of being unsettled, unfixed, fluctuating\u2014a kind of impermanence that transient lodgers in hotels must feel, but that a guest in a friend's home ought not to feel, be the visit short or long. To Frances, an impressionable woman, the feeling had come in the terms of alarm. She disliked sleeping alone, while yet she longed to sleep. The precise idea in my mind evaded capture, merely brushing through me, three-quarters out of sight; I realised only that we both felt the same thing, and that neither of us could get at it clearly. Degrees of unrest we felt, but the actual thing did not disclose itself. It did not happen.\n\nI felt strangely at sea for a moment. Frances would interpret hesitation as endorsement, and encouragement might be the last thing that could help her.\n\n'Sleeping in a strange house,' I answered at length, 'is often difficult at first, and one feels lonely. After fifteen months in our tiny flat one feels lost and uncared-for in a big house. It's an uncomfortable feeling\u2014I know it well. And this is a barrack, isn't it? The masses of furniture only make it worse. One feels in storage somewhere underground\u2014the furniture doesn't furnish. One must never yield to fancies, though\u2014'\n\nFrances looked away towards the windows; she seemed disappointed a little.\n\n'After our thickly-populated Chelsea,' I went on quickly, 'it seems isolated here.'\n\nBut she did not turn back, and clearly I was saying the wrong thing. A wave of pity rushed suddenly over me. Was she really frightened, perhaps? She was imaginative, I knew, but never moody; common sense was strong in her, though she had her times of hypersensitiveness. I caught the echo of some unreasoning, big alarm in her. She stood there, gazing across my balcony towards the sea of wooded country that spread dim and vague in the obscurity of the dusk. The deepening shadows entered the room, I fancied, from the grounds below. Following her abstracted gaze a moment, I experienced a curious sharp desire to leave, to escape. Out yonder was wind and space and freedom. This enormous building was oppressive, silent, still. Great catacombs occurred to me, things beneath the ground, imprisonment and capture. I believe I even shuddered a little.\n\nI touched her shoulder. She turned round slowly, and we looked with a certain deliberation into each other's eyes.\n\n'Fanny,' I asked, more gravely than I intended, 'you are not frightened, are you? Nothing has happened, has it?'\n\nShe replied with emphasis, 'Of course not! How could it\u2014I mean, why should I?' She stammered, as though the wrong sentence flustered her a second. 'It's simply\u2014that I have this ter\u2014this dislike of sleeping alone.'\n\nNaturally, my first thought was how easy it would be to cut our visit short. But I did not say this. Had it been a true solution, Frances would have said it for me long ago.\n\n'Wouldn't Mabel double-up with you?' I said instead, 'or give you an adjoining room, so that you could leave the door between you open? There's space enough, heaven knows.'\n\nAnd then, as the gong sounded in the hall below for dinner, she said, as with an effort, this thing:\n\n'Mabel did ask me\u2014on the third night\u2014after I had told her. But I declined.'\n\n'You'd rather be alone than with her?' I asked, with a certain relief.\n\nHer reply was so gravely given, a child would have known there was more behind it: 'Not that; but that she did not really want it.'\n\nI had a moment's intuition and acted on it impulsively. 'She feels it too, perhaps, but wishes to face it by herself\u2014and get over it?'\n\nMy sister bowed her head, and the gesture made me realise of a sudden how grave and solemn our talk had grown, as though some portentous thing were under discussion. It had come of itself\u2014indefinite as a gradual change of temperature. Yet neither of us knew its nature, for apparently neither of us could state it plainly. Nothing happened, even in our words.\n\n'That was my impression,' she said, '\u2014that if she yields to it she encourages it. And a habit forms so easily. Just think,' she added with a faint smile that was the first sign of lightness she had yet betrayed, 'what a nuisance it would be\u2014everywhere\u2014if everybody was afraid of being alone\u2014like that.'\n\nI snatched readily at the chance. We laughed a little, though it was a quiet kind of laughter that seemed wrong. I took her arm and led her towards the door.\n\n'Disastrous, in fact,' I agreed.\n\nShe raised her voice to its normal pitch again, as I had done. 'No doubt it will pass,' she said, 'now that you have come. Of course, it's chiefly my imagination.' Her tone was lighter, though nothing could convince me that the matter itself was light\u2014just then. 'And in any case,' tightening her grip on my arm as we passed into the bright enormous corridor and caught sight of Mrs. Franklyn waiting in the cheerless hall below, 'I'm very glad you're here, Bill, and Mabel, I know, is too.'\n\n'If it doesn't pass,' I just had time to whisper with a feeble attempt at jollity, 'I'll come at night and snore outside your door. After that you'll be so glad to get rid of me that you won't mind being alone.'\n\n'That's a bargain,' said Frances.\n\nI shook my hostess by the hand, made a banal remark about the long interval since last we met, and walked behind them into the great dining-room, dimly lit by candles, wondering in my heart how long my sister and I should stay, and why in the world we had ever left our cosy little flat to enter this desolation of riches and false luxury at all. The unsightly picture of the late Samuel Franklyn, Esq., stared down upon me from the farther end of the room above the mighty mantelpiece. He looked, I thought, like some pompous Heavenly Butler who denied to all the world, and to us in particular, the right of entry without presentation cards signed by his hand as proof that we belonged to his own exclusive set. The majority, to his deep grief, and in spite of all his prayers on their behalf, must burn and 'perish everlastingly.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 482", + "text": "With the instinct of the healthy bachelor I always try to make myself a nest in the place I live in, be it for long or short. Whether visiting, in lodging-house, or in hotel, the first essential is this nest\u2014one's own things built into the walls as a bird builds in its feathers. It may look desolate and uncomfortable enough to others, because the central detail is neither bed nor wardrobe, sofa nor arm-chair, but a good solid writing-table that does not wriggle, and that has wide elbow-room. And The Towers is vividly described for me by the single fact that I could not 'nest' there. I took several days to discover this, but the first impression of impermanence was truer than I knew. The feathers of the mind refused here to lie one way. They ruffled, pointed and grew wild.\n\nLuxurious furniture does not mean comfort; I might as well have tried to settle down in the sofa and arm-chair department of a big shop. My bedroom was easily managed; it was the private work-room, prepared especially for my reception, that made me feel alien and outcast. Externally, it was all one could desire: an ante-chamber to the great library, with not one, but two generous oak tables, to say nothing of smaller ones against the walls with capacious drawers. There were reading-desks, mechanical devices for holding books, perfect light, quiet as in a church, and no approach but across the huge adjoining room. Yet it did not invite.\n\n'I hope you'll be able to work here,' said my little hostess the next morning, as she took me in\u2014her only visit to it while I stayed in the house\u2014and showed me the ten-volume Catalogue. 'It's absolutely quiet and no one will disturb you.'\n\n'If you can't, Bill, you're not much good,' laughed Frances, who was on her arm. 'Even I could write in a study like this!'\n\nI glanced with pleasure at the ample tables, the sheets of thick blotting-paper, the rulers, sealing-wax, paper-knives, and all the other immaculate paraphernalia. 'It's perfect,' I answered with a secret thrill, yet feeling a little foolish. This was for Gibbon or Carlyle, rather than for my pot-boiling insignificancies. 'If I can't write masterpieces here, it's certainly not your fault,' and I turned with gratitude to Mrs. Franklyn. She was looking straight at me, and there was a question in her small pale eyes I did not understand. Was she noting the effect upon me, I wondered?\n\n'You'll write here\u2014perhaps a story about the house,' she said; 'Thompson will bring you anything you want; you only have to ring.' She pointed to the electric bell on the central table, the wire running neatly down the leg. 'No one has ever worked here before, and the library has been hardly used since it was put in. So there's no previous atmosphere to affect your imagination\u2014er\u2014adversely.'\n\nWe laughed. 'Bill isn't that sort,' said my sister; while I wished they would go out and leave me to arrange my little nest and set to work.\n\nI thought, of course, it was the huge listening library that made me feel so inconsiderable\u2014the fifteen thousand silent, staring books, the solemn aisles, the deep, eloquent shelves. But when the women had gone and I was alone, the beginning of the truth crept over me, and I felt that first hint of disconsolateness which later became an imperative No. The mind shut down, images ceased to rise and flow. I read, made copious notes, but I wrote no single line at The Towers. Nothing completed itself there. Nothing happened.\n\nThe morning sunshine poured into the library through ten long narrow windows; birds were singing; the autumn air, rich with a faint aroma of November melancholy that stung the imagination pleasantly, filled my ante-chamber. I looked out upon the undulating wooded landscape, hemmed in by the sweep of distant Downs, and I tasted a whiff of the sea. Rooks cawed as they floated above the elms, and there were lazy cows in the nearer meadows. A dozen times I tried to make my nest and settle down to work, and a dozen times, like a turning fastidious dog upon a hearth-rug, I rearranged my chair and books and papers. The temptation of the Catalogue and shelves, of course, was accountable for much, yet not, I felt, for all. That was a manageable seduction. My work, moreover, was not of the creative kind that requires absolute absorption; it was the mere readable presentation of data I had accumulated. My note-books were charged with facts ready to tabulate\u2014facts, too, that interested me keenly. A mere effort of the will was necessary, and concentration of no difficult kind. Yet, somehow, it seemed beyond me: something for ever pushed the facts into disorder... and in the end I sat in the sunshine, dipping into a dozen books selected from the shelves outside, vexed with myself and only half-enjoying it. I felt restless. I wanted to be elsewhere.\n\nAnd even while I read, attention wandered. Frances, Mabel, her late husband, the house and grounds, each in turn and sometimes all together, rose uninvited into the stream of thought, hindering any consecutive flow of work. In disconnected fashion came these pictures that interrupted concentration, yet presenting themselves as broken fragments of a bigger thing my mind already groped for unconsciously. They fluttered round this hidden thing of which they were aspects, fugitive interpretations, no one of them bringing complete revelation. There was no adjective, such as pleasant or unpleasant, that I could attach to what I felt, beyond that the result was unsettling. Vague as the atmosphere of a dream, it yet persisted, and I could not dissipate it. Isolated words or phrases in the lines I read sent questions scouring across my mind, sure sign that the deeper part of me was restless and ill at ease.\n\nRather trivial questions too\u2014half-foolish interrogations, as of a puzzled or curious child: Why was my sister afraid to sleep alone, and why did her friend feel a similar repugnance, yet seek to conquer it? Why was the solid luxury of the house without comfort, its shelter without the sense of permanence? Why had Mrs. Franklyn asked us to come, artists, unbelieving vagabonds, types at the farthest possible remove from the saved sheep of her husband's household? Had a reaction set in against the hysteria of her conversion? I had seen no signs of religious fervour in her; her atmosphere was that of an ordinary, high-minded woman, yet a woman of the world. Lifeless, though, a little, perhaps, now that I came to think about it: she had made no definite impression upon me of any kind. And my thoughts ran vaguely after this fragile clue.\n\nClosing my book, I let them run. For, with this chance reflection came the discovery that I could not see her clearly\u2014could not feel her soul, her personality. Her face, her small pale eyes, her dress and body and walk, all these stood before me like a photograph; but her Self evaded me. She seemed not there, lifeless, empty, a shadow\u2014nothing. The picture was disagreeable, and I put it by. Instantly she melted out, as though light thought had conjured up a phantom that had no real existence. And at that very moment, singularly enough, my eye caught sight of her moving past the window, going silently along the gravel path. I watched her, a sudden new sensation gripping me. 'There goes a prisoner,' my thought instantly ran, 'one who wishes to escape, but cannot.'\n\nWhat brought the outlandish notion, heaven only knows. The house was of her own choice, she was twice an heiress, and the world lay open at her feet. Yet she stayed\u2014unhappy, frightened, caught. All this flashed over me, and made a sharp impression even before I had time to dismiss it as absurd. But a moment later explanation offered itself, though it seemed as far-fetched as the original impression. My mind, being logical, was obliged to provide something, apparently. For Mrs. Franklyn, while dressed to go out, with thick walking-boots, a pointed stick, and a motor-cap tied on with a veil as for the windy lanes, was obviously content to go no farther than the little garden paths. The costume was a sham and a pretence. It was this, and her lithe, quick movements that suggested a caged creature\u2014a creature tamed by fear and cruelty that cloaked themselves in kindness\u2014pacing up and down, unable to realise why it got no farther, but always met the same bars in exactly the same place. The mind in her was barred.\n\nI watched her go along the paths and down the steps from one terrace to another, until the laurels hid her altogether; and into this mere imagining of a moment came a hint of something slightly disagreeable, for which my mind, search as it would, found no explanation at all. I remembered then certain other little things. They dropped into the picture of their own accord. In a mind not deliberately hunting for clues, pieces of a puzzle sometimes come together in this way, bringing revelation, so that for a second there flashed across me, vanishing instantly again before I could consider it, a large, distressing thought that I can only describe vaguely as a Shadow. Dark and ugly, oppressive certainly it might be described, with something torn and dreadful about the edges that suggested pain and strife and terror. The interior of a prison with two rows of occupied condemned cells, seen years ago in New York, sprang to memory after it\u2014the connection between the two impossible to surmise even. But the 'certain other little things' mentioned above were these: that Mrs. Franklyn, in last night's dinner talk, had always referred to 'this house,' but never called it 'home'; and had emphasised unnecessarily, for a well-bred woman, our 'great kindness' in coming down to stay so long with her. Another time, in answer to my futile compliment about the 'stately rooms,' she said quietly, 'It is an enormous house for so small a party; but I stay here very little, and only till I get it straight again.' The three of us were going up the great staircase to bed as this was said, and, not knowing quite her meaning, I dropped the subject. It edged delicate ground, I felt. Frances added no word of her own. It now occurred to me abruptly that 'stay' was the word made use of, when 'live' would have been more natural. How insignificant to recall! Yet why did they suggest themselves just at this moment?... And, on going to Frances's room to make sure she was not nervous or lonely, I realised abruptly, that Mrs. Franklyn, of course, had talked with her in a confidential sense that I, as a mere visiting brother, could not share. Frances had told me nothing. I might easily have wormed it out of her, had I not felt that for us to discuss further our hostess and her house merely because we were under the roof together, was not quite nice or loyal.\n\n'I'll call you, Bill, if I'm scared,' she had laughed as we parted, my room being just across the big corridor from her own. I had fallen asleep, thinking what in the world was meant by 'getting it straight again.'\n\nAnd now in my ante-chamber to the library, on the second morning, sitting among piles of foolscap and sheets of spotless blotting-paper, all useless to me, these slight hints came back and helped to frame the big, vague Shadow I have mentioned. Up to the neck in this Shadow, almost drowned, yet just treading water, stood the figure of my hostess in her walking costume. Frances and I seemed swimming to her aid. The Shadow was large enough to include both house and grounds, but farther than that I could not see... Dismissing it, I fell to reading my purloined book again. Before I turned another page, however, another startling detail leaped out at me: the figure of Mrs. Franklyn in the Shadow was not living. It floated helplessly, like a doll or puppet that has no life in it. It was both pathetic and dreadful.\n\nAny one who sits in reverie thus, of course, may see similar ridiculous pictures when the will no longer guides construction. The incongruities of dreams are thus explained. I merely record the picture as it came. That it remained by me for several days, just as vivid dreams do, is neither here nor there. I did not allow myself to dwell upon it. The curious thing, perhaps, is that from this moment I date my inclination, though not yet my desire, to leave. I purposely say 'to leave.' I cannot quite remember when the word changed to that aggressive, frantic thing which is escape." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 483", + "text": "We were left delightfully to ourselves in this pretentious country mansion with the soul of a villa. Frances took up her painting again, and, the weather being propitious, spent hours out of doors, sketching flowers, trees and nooks of woodland, garden, even the house itself where bits of it peered suggestively across the orchards. Mrs. Franklyn seemed always busy about something or other, and never interfered with us except to propose motoring, tea in another part of the lawn, and so forth. She flitted everywhere, preoccupied, yet apparently doing nothing. The house engulfed her rather. No visitors called. For one thing, she was not supposed to be back from abroad yet; and for another, I think, the neighbourhood\u2014her husband's neighbourhood\u2014was puzzled by her sudden cessation from good works. Brigades and temperance societies did not ask to hold their meetings in the big hall, and the vicar arranged the school-treats in another's field without explanation. The full-length portrait in the dining-room, and the presence of the housekeeper with the 'burnt' back-hair, indeed, were the only reminders of the man who once had lived here. Mrs. Marsh retained her place in silence, well-paid sinecure as it doubtless was, yet with no hint of that suppressed disapproval one might have expected from her. Indeed there was nothing positive to disapprove, since nothing 'worldly' entered grounds or building. In her master's lifetime she had been another 'brand snatched from the burning,' and it had then been her custom to give vociferous 'testimony' at the revival meetings where he adorned the platform and led in streams of prayer. I saw her sometimes on the stairs, hovering, wandering, half-watching and half-listening, and the idea came to me once that this woman somehow formed a link with the departed influence of her bigoted employer. She, alone among us, belonged to the house, and looked at home there. When I saw her talking\u2014oh, with such correct and respectful mien\u2014to Mrs. Franklyn, I had the feeling that for all her unaggressive attitude, she yet exerted some influence that sought to make her mistress stay in the building for ever\u2014live there. She would prevent her escape, prevent her 'getting it straight again,' thwart somehow her will to freedom, if she could. The idea in me was of the most fleeting kind. But another time, when I came down late at night to get a book from the library ante-chamber, and found her sitting in the hall\u2014alone\u2014the impression left upon me was the reverse of fleeting. I can never forget the vivid, disagreeable effect it produced upon me. What was she doing there at half-past eleven at night, all alone in the darkness? She was sitting upright, stiff, in a big chair below the clock. It gave me a turn. It was so incongruous and odd. She rose quietly as I turned the corner of the stairs, and asked me respectfully, her eyes cast down as usual, whether I had finished with the library, so that she might lock up. There was no more to it than that; but the picture stayed with me\u2014unpleasantly.\n\nThese various impressions came to me at odd moments, of course, and not in a single sequence as I now relate them. I was hard at work before three days were past, not writing, as explained, but reading, making notes, and gathering material from the library for future use. It was in chance moments that these curious flashes came, catching me unawares with a touch of surprise that sometimes made me start. For they proved that my under-mind was still conscious of the Shadow, and that far away out of sight lay the cause of it that left me with a vague unrest, unsettled, seeking to 'nest' in a place that did not want me. Only when this deeper part knows harmony, perhaps, can good brain work result, and my inability to write was thus explained. Certainly, I was always seeking for something here I could not find\u2014an explanation that continually evaded me. Nothing but these trivial hints offered themselves. Lumped together, however, they had the effect of defining the Shadow a little. I became more and more aware of its very real existence. And, if I have made little mention of Frances and my hostess in this connection, it is because they contributed at first little or nothing towards the discovery of what this story tries to tell. Our life was wholly external, normal, quiet, and uneventful; conversation banal\u2014Mrs. Franklyn's conversation in particular. They said nothing that suggested revelation. Both were in this Shadow, and both knew that they were in it, but neither betrayed by word or act a hint of interpretation. They talked privately, no doubt, but of that I can report no details.\n\nAnd so it was that, after ten days of a very commonplace visit, I found myself looking straight into the face of a Strangeness that defied capture at close quarters. 'There's something here that never happens,' were the words that rose in my mind, 'and that's why none of us can speak of it.' And as I looked out of the window and watched the vulgar blackbirds, with toes turned in, boring out their worms, I realised sharply that even they, as indeed everything large and small in the house and grounds, shared this strangeness, and were twisted out of normal appearance because of it. Life, as expressed in the entire place, was crumpled, dwarfed, emasculated. God's meanings here were crippled, His love of joy was stunted. Nothing in the garden danced or sang. There was hate in it. 'The Shadow,' my thought hurried on to completion, 'is a manifestation of hate; and hate is the Devil.' And then I sat back frightened in my chair, for I knew that I had partly found the truth.\n\nLeaving my books I went out into the open. The sky was overcast, yet the day by no means gloomy, for a soft, diffused light oozed through the clouds and turned all things warm and almost summery. But I saw the grounds now in their nakedness because I understood. Hate means strife, and the two together weave the robe that terror wears. Having no so-called religious beliefs myself, nor belonging to any set of dogmas called a creed, I could stand outside these feelings and observe. Yet they soaked into me sufficiently for me to grasp sympathetically what others, with more cabined souls (I flattered myself), might feel. That picture in the dining-room stalked everywhere, hid behind every tree, peered down upon me from the peaked ugliness of the bourgeois towers, and left the impress of its powerful hand upon every bed of flowers. 'You must not do this, you must not do that,' went past me through the air. 'You must not leave these narrow paths,' said the rigid iron railings of black. 'You shall not walk here,' was written on the lawns. 'Keep to the steps,' 'Don't pick the flowers; make no noise of laughter, singing, dancing,' was placarded all over the rose-garden, and 'Trespassers will be\u2014not prosecuted but\u2014destroyed' hung from the crest of monkey-tree and holly. Guarding the ends of each artificial terrace stood gaunt, implacable policemen, warders, gaolers. 'Come with us,' they chanted, 'or be damned eternally.'\n\nI remember feeling quite pleased with myself that I had discovered this obvious explanation of the prison-feeling the place breathed out. That the posthumous influence of heavy old Samuel Franklyn might be an inadequate solution did not occur to me. By 'getting the place straight again,' his widow, of course, meant forgetting the glamour of fear and foreboding his depressing creed had temporarily forced upon her; and Frances, delicately-minded being, did not speak of it because it was the influence of the man her friend had loved. I felt lighter; a load was lifted from me. 'To trace the unfamiliar to the familiar,' came back a sentence I had read somewhere, 'is to understand.' It was a real relief. I could talk with Frances now, even with my hostess, no danger of treading clumsily. For the key was in my hands. I might even help to dissipate the Shadow, 'to get it straight again.' It seemed, perhaps, our long invitation was explained!\n\nI went into the house laughing\u2014at myself a little. 'Perhaps after all the artist's outlook, with no hard and fast dogmas, is as narrow as the others! How small humanity is! And why is there no possible and true combination of all outlooks?'\n\nThe feeling of 'unsettling' was very strong in me just then, in spite of my big discovery which was to clear everything up. And at that moment I ran into Frances on the stairs, with a portfolio of sketches under her arm.\n\nIt came across me then abruptly that, although she had worked a great deal since we came, she had shown me nothing. It struck me suddenly as odd, unnatural. The way she tried to pass me now confirmed my new-born suspicion that\u2014well, that her results were hardly what they ought to be.\n\n'Stand and deliver!' I laughed, stepping in front of her. 'I've seen nothing you've done since you've been here, and as a rule you show me all your things. I believe they are atrocious and degrading!' Then my laughter froze.\n\nShe made a sly gesture to slip past me, and I almost decided to let her go, for the expression that flashed across her face shocked me. She looked uncomfortable and ashamed; the colour came and went a moment in her cheeks, making me think of a child detected in some secret naughtiness. It was almost fear.\n\n'It's because they're not finished then?' I said, dropping the tone of banter, 'or because they're too good for me to understand?' For my criticism of painting, she told me, was crude and ignorant sometimes. 'But you'll let me see them later, won't you?'\n\nFrances, however, did not take the way of escape I offered. She changed her mind. She drew the portfolio from beneath her arm instead. 'You can see them if you really want to, Bill,' she said quietly, and her tone reminded me of a nurse who says to a boy just grown out of childhood, 'you are old enough now to look upon horror and ugliness\u2014only I don't advise it.'\n\n'I do want to,' I said, and made to go downstairs with her. But, instead, she said in the same low voice as before, 'Come up to my room, we shall be undisturbed there.' So I guessed that she had been on her way to show the paintings to our hostess, but did not care for us all three to see them together. My mind worked furiously.\n\n'Mabel asked me to do them,' she explained in a tone of submissive horror, once the door was shut, 'in fact, she begged it of me. You know how persistent she is in her quiet way. I\u2014er\u2014had to.'\n\nShe flushed and opened the portfolio on the little table by the window, standing behind me as I turned the sketches over\u2014sketches of the grounds and trees and garden. In the first moment of inspection, however, I did not take in clearly why my sister's sense of modesty had been offended. For my attention flashed a second elsewhere. Another bit of the puzzle had dropped into place, defining still further the nature of what I called 'the Shadow.' Mrs. Franklyn, I now remembered, had suggested to me in the library that I might perhaps write something about the place, and I had taken it for one of her banal sentences and paid no further attention. I realised now that it was said in earnest. She wanted our interpretations, as expressed in our respective 'talents,' painting and writing. Her invitation was explained. She left us to ourselves on purpose.\n\n'I should like to tear them up,' Frances was whispering behind me with a shudder, 'only I promised\u2014' She hesitated a moment.\n\n'Promised not to?' I asked with a queer feeling of distress, my eyes glued to the papers.\n\n'Promised always to show them to her first,' she finished so low I barely caught it.\n\nI have no intuitive, immediate grasp of the value of paintings; results come to me slowly, and though every one believes his own judgment to be good, I dare not claim that mine is worth more than that of any other layman. Frances had too often convicted me of gross ignorance and error. I can only say that I examined these sketches with a feeling of amazement that contained revulsion, if not actually horror and disgust. They were outrageous. I felt hot for my sister, and it was a relief to know she had moved across the room on some pretence or other, and did not examine them with me. Her talent, of course, is mediocre, yet she has her moments of inspiration\u2014moments, that is to say, when a view of Beauty not normally her own flames divinely through her. And these interpretations struck me forcibly as being thus 'inspired'\u2014not her own. They were uncommonly well done; they were also atrocious. The meaning in them, however, was never more than hinted. There the unholy skill and power came in: they suggested so abominably, leaving most to the imagination. To find such significance in a bourgeois villa garden, and to interpret it with such delicate yet legible certainty, was a kind of symbolism that was sinister, even diabolical. The delicacy was her own, but the point of view was another's. And the word that rose in my mind was not the gross description of 'impure,' but the more fundamental qualification\u2014'un-pure.'\n\nIn silence I turned the sketches over one by one, as a boy hurries through the pages of an evil book lest he be caught.\n\n'What does Mabel do with them?' I asked presently in a low tone, as I neared the end. 'Does she keep them?'\n\n'She makes notes about them in a book and then destroys them,' was the reply from the end of the room. I heard a sigh of relief. 'I'm glad you've seen them, Bill. I wanted you to\u2014but was afraid to show them. You understand?'\n\n'I understand,' was my reply, though it was not a question intended to be answered. All I understood really was that Mabel's mind was as sweet and pure as my sister's, and that she had some good reason for what she did. She destroyed the sketches, but first made notes! It was an interpretation of the place she sought. Brother-like, I felt resentment, though, that Frances should waste her time and talent, when she might be doing work that she could sell. Naturally, I felt other things as well...\n\n'Mabel pays me five guineas for each one,' I heard. 'Absolutely insists.'\n\nI stared at her stupidly a moment, bereft of speech or wit.\n\n'I must either accept, or go away,' she went on calmly, but a little white. 'I've tried everything. There was a scene the third day I was here\u2014when I showed her my first result. I wanted to write to you, but hesitated\u2014'\n\n'It's unintentional, then, on your part\u2014forgive my asking it, Frances, dear?' I blundered, hardly knowing what to think or say. 'Between the lines' of her letter came back to me. 'I mean, you make the sketches in your ordinary way and\u2014the result comes out of itself, so to speak?'\n\nShe nodded, throwing her hands out like a Frenchman. 'We needn't keep the money for ourselves, Bill. We can give it away, but\u2014I must either accept or leave,' and she repeated the shrugging gesture. She sat down on the chair facing me, staring helplessly at the carpet.\n\n'You say there was a scene?' I went on presently. 'She insisted?'\n\n'She begged me to continue,' my sister replied very quietly. 'She thinks\u2014that is, she has an idea or theory that there's something about the place\u2014something she can't get at quite.' Frances stammered badly. She knew I did not encourage her wild theories.\n\n'Something she feels\u2014yes,' I helped her, more than curious.\n\n'Oh, you know what I mean, Bill,' she said desperately. 'That the place is saturated with some influence that she is herself too positive or too stupid to interpret. She's trying to make herself negative and receptive, as she calls it, but can't, of course, succeed. Haven't you noticed how dull and impersonal and insipid she seems, as though she had no personality? She thinks impressions will come to her that way. But they don't\u2014'\n\n'Naturally.'\n\n'So she's trying me\u2014us\u2014what she calls the sensitive and impressionable artistic temperament. She says that until she is sure exactly what this influence is, she can't fight it, turn it out, \"get the house straight,\" as she phrases it.'\n\nRemembering my own singular impressions, I felt more lenient than I might otherwise have done. I tried to keep impatience out of my voice.\n\n'And this influence, what\u2014whose is it?'\n\nWe used the pronoun that followed in the same breath, for I answered my own question at the same moment as she did:\n\n'His.' Our heads nodded involuntarily towards the floor, the dining-room being directly underneath.\n\nAnd my heart sank, my curiosity died away on the instant, I felt bored. A commonplace haunted house was the last thing in the world to amuse or interest me. The mere thought exasperated, with its suggestions of imagination, overwrought nerves, hysteria, and the rest. Mingled with my other feelings was certainly disappointment. To see a figure or feel a 'presence,' and report from day to day strange incidents to each other would be a form of weariness I could never tolerate.\n\n'But really, Frances,' I said firmly, after a moment's pause, 'it's too far-fetched, this explanation. A curse, you know, belongs to the ghost stories of early Victorian days.' And only my positive conviction that there was something after all worth discovering, and that it most certainly was not this, prevented my suggesting that we terminate our visit forthwith, or as soon as we decently could. 'This is not a haunted house, whatever it is,' I concluded somewhat vehemently, bringing my hand down upon her odious portfolio.\n\nMy sister's reply revived my curiosity sharply.\n\n'I was waiting for you to say that. Mabel says exactly the same. He is in it\u2014but it's something more than that alone, something far bigger and more complicated.' Her sentence seemed to indicate the sketches, and though I caught the inference I did not take it up, having no desire to discuss them with her just then, indeed, if ever.\n\nI merely stared at her and listened. Questions, I felt sure, would be of little use. It was better she should say her thought in her own way.\n\n'He is one influence, the most recent,' she went on slowly, and always very calmly, 'but there are others\u2014deeper layers, as it were\u2014underneath. If his were the only one, something would happen. But nothing ever does happen. The others hinder and prevent\u2014as though each were struggling to predominate.'\n\nI had felt it already myself. The idea was rather horrible. I shivered.\n\n'That's what is so ugly about it\u2014that nothing ever happens,' she said. 'There is this endless anticipation\u2014always on the dry edge of a result that never materialises. It is torture. Mabel is at her wits' end, you see. And when she begged me\u2014what I felt about my sketches\u2014I mean\u2014' She stammered badly as before.\n\nI stopped her. I had judged too hastily. That queer symbolism in her paintings, pagan and yet not innocent, was, I understood, the result of mixture. I did not pretend to understand, but at least I could be patient. I consequently held my peace. We did talk on a little longer, but it was more general talk that avoided successfully our hostess, the paintings, wild theories, and him\u2014until at length the emotion Frances had hitherto so successfully kept under burst vehemently forth again. It had hidden between her calm sentences, as it had hidden between the lines of her letter. It swept her now from head to foot, packed tight in the thing she then said.\n\n'Then, Bill, if it is not an ordinary haunted house,' she asked, 'what is it?'\n\nThe words were commonplace enough. The emotion was in the tone of her voice that trembled; in the gesture she made, leaning forward and clasping both hands upon her knees, and in the slight blanching of her cheeks as her brave eyes asked the question and searched my own with anxiety that bordered upon panic. In that moment she put herself under my protection. I winced.\n\n'And why,' she added, lowering her voice to a still and furtive whisper, 'does nothing ever happen? If only,'\u2014this with great emphasis\u2014'something would happen\u2014break this awful tension\u2014bring relief. It's the waiting I cannot stand.' And she shivered all over as she said it, a touch of wildness in her eyes.\n\nI would have given much to have made a true and satisfactory answer. My mind searched frantically for a moment, but in vain. There lay no sufficient answer in me. I felt what she felt, though with differences. No conclusive explanation lay within reach. Nothing happened. Eager as I was to shoot the entire business into the rubbish heap where ignorance and superstition discharge their poisonous weeds, I could not honestly accomplish this. To treat Frances as a child, and merely 'explain away' would be to strain her confidence in my protection, so affectionately claimed. It would further be dishonest to myself\u2014weak, besides\u2014to deny that I had also felt the strain and tension even as she did. While my mind continued searching, I returned her stare in silence; and Frances then, with more honesty and insight than my own, gave suddenly the answer herself\u2014an answer whose truth and adequacy, so far as they went, I could not readily gainsay:\n\n'I think, Bill, because it is too big to happen here\u2014to happen anywhere, indeed, all at once\u2014and too awful!'\n\nTo have tossed the sentence aside as nonsense, argued it away, proved that it was really meaningless, would have been easy\u2014at any other time or in any other place; and, had the past week brought me none of the vivid impressions it had brought me, this is doubtless what I should have done. My narrowness again was proved. We understand in others only what we have in ourselves. But her explanation, in a measure, I knew was true. It hinted at the strife and struggle that my notion of a Shadow had seemed to cover thinly.\n\n'Perhaps,' I murmured lamely, waiting in vain for her to say more. 'But you said just now that you felt the thing was \"in layers,\" as it were. Do you mean each one\u2014each influence\u2014fighting for the upper hand?'\n\nI used her phraseology to conceal my own poverty. Terminology, after all, was nothing, provided we could reach the idea itself.\n\nHer eyes said yes. She had her clear conception, arrived at independently, as was her way. And, unlike her sex, she kept it clear, unsmothered by too many words.\n\n'One set of influences gets at me, another gets at you. It's according to our temperaments, I think.' She glanced significantly at the vile portfolio. 'Sometimes they are mixed\u2014and therefore false. There has always been in me, more than in you, the pagan thing, perhaps, though never, thank God, like that.'\n\nThe frank confession of course invited my own, as it was meant to do. Yet it was difficult to find the words.\n\n'What I have felt in this place, Frances, I honestly can hardly tell you, because\u2014er\u2014my impressions have not arranged themselves in any definite form I can describe. The strife, the agony of vainly-sought escape, and the unrest\u2014a sort of prison atmosphere\u2014this I have felt at different times and with varying degrees of strength. But I find, as yet, no final label to attach. I couldn't say pagan, Christian, or anything like that, I mean, as you do. As with the blind and deaf, you may have an intensification of certain senses denied to me, or even another sense altogether in embryo\u2014'\n\n'Perhaps,' she stopped me, anxious to keep to the point, 'you feel it as Mabel does. She feels the whole thing complete.'\n\n'That also is possible,' I said very slowly. I was thinking behind my words. Her odd remark that it was 'big and awful' came back upon me as true. A vast sensation of distress and discomfort swept me suddenly. Pity was in it, and a fierce contempt, a savage, bitter anger as well. Fury against some sham authority was part of it.\n\n'Frances,' I said, caught unawares, and dropping all pretence, 'what in the world can it be?' I looked hard at her. For some minutes neither of us spoke.\n\n'Have you felt no desire to interpret it?' she asked presently.\n\n'Mabel did suggest my writing something about the house,' was my reply, 'but I've felt nothing imperative. That sort of writing is not my line, you know. My only feeling,' I added, noticing that she waited for more, 'is the impulse to explain, discover, get it out of me somehow, and so get rid of it. Not by writing, though\u2014as yet.' And again I repeated my former question: 'What in the world do you think it is?' My voice had become involuntarily hushed. There was awe in it.\n\nHer answer, given with slow emphasis, brought back all my reserve: the phraseology provoked me rather:\u2014\n\n'Whatever it is, Bill, it is not of God.'\n\nI got up to go downstairs. I believe I shrugged my shoulders, 'Would you like to leave, Frances? Shall we go back to town?' I suggested this at the door, and hearing no immediate reply, I turned back to look. Frances was sitting with her head bowed over and buried in her hands. The attitude horribly suggested tears. No woman, I realised, can keep back the pressure of strong emotion as long as Frances had done, without ending in a fluid collapse. I waited a moment uneasily, longing to comfort, yet afraid to act\u2014and in this way discovered the existence of the appalling emotion in myself, hitherto but half guessed. At all costs a scene must be prevented: it would involve such exaggeration and over-statement. Brutally, such is the weakness of the ordinary man, I turned the handle to go out, but my sister then raised her head. The sunlight caught her face, framed untidily in its auburn hair, and I saw her wonderful expression with a start. Pity, tenderness and sympathy shone in it like a flame. It was undeniable. There shone through all her features the imperishable love and yearning to sacrifice self for others which I have seen in only one type of human being. It was the great mother look.\n\n'We must stay by Mabel and help her get it straight,' she whispered, making the decision for us both.\n\nI murmured agreement. Abashed and half ashamed, I stole softly from the room and went out into the grounds. And the first thing clearly realised when alone was this: that the long scene between us was without definite result. The exchange of confidence was really nothing but hints and vague suggestion. We had decided to stay, but it was a negative decision not to leave rather than a positive action. All our words and questions, our guesses, inferences, explanations, our most subtle allusions and insinuations, even the odious paintings themselves, were without definite result. Nothing had happened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 484", + "text": "And instinctively, once alone, I made for the places where she had painted her extraordinary pictures; I tried to see what she had seen. Perhaps, now that she had opened my mind to another view, I should be sensitive to some similar interpretation\u2014and possibly by way of literary expression. If I were to write about the place, I asked myself, how should I treat it? I deliberately invited an interpretation in the way that came easiest to me\u2014writing.\n\nBut in this case there came no such revelation. Looking closely at the trees and flowers, the bits of lawn and terrace, the rose-garden and corner of the house where the flaming creeper hung so thickly, I discovered nothing of the odious, unpure thing her colour and grouping had unconsciously revealed. At first, that is, I discovered nothing. The reality stood there, commonplace and ugly, side by side with her distorted version of it that lay in my mind. It seemed incredible. I tried to force it, but in vain. My imagination, ploughed less deeply than hers, or to another pattern, grew different seed. Where I saw the gross soul of an overgrown suburban garden, inspired by the spirit of a vulgar, rich revivalist who loved to preach damnation, she saw this rush of pagan liberty and joy, this strange licence of primitive flesh which, tainted by the other, produced the adulterated, vile result.\n\nCertain things, however, gradually then became apparent, forcing themselves upon me, willy nilly. They came slowly, but overwhelmingly. Not that facts had changed, or natural details altered in the grounds\u2014this was impossible\u2014but that I noticed for the first time various aspects I had not noticed before\u2014trivial enough, yet for me, just then, significant. Some I remembered from previous days; others I saw now as I wandered to and fro, uneasy, uncomfortable,\u2014almost, it seemed, watched by some one who took note of my impressions. The details were so foolish, the total result so formidable. I was half aware that others tried hard to make me see. It was deliberate. My sister's phrase, 'one layer got at me, another gets at you,' flashed, undesired, upon me.\n\nFor I saw, as with the eyes of a child, what I can only call a goblin garden\u2014house, grounds, trees, and flowers belonged to a goblin world that children enter through the pages of their fairy tales. And what made me first aware of it was the whisper of the wind behind me, so that I turned with a sudden start, feeling that something had moved closer. An old ash tree, ugly and ungainly, had been artificially trained to form an arbour at one end of the terrace that was a tennis lawn, and the leaves of it now went rustling together, swishing as they rose and fell. I looked at the ash tree, and felt as though I had passed that moment between doors into this goblin garden that crouched behind the real one. Below, at a deeper layer perhaps, lay hidden the one my sister had entered.\n\nTo deal with my own, however, I call it goblin, because an odd aspect of the quaint in it yet never quite achieved the picturesque. Grotesque, probably, is the truer word, for everywhere I noticed, and for the first time, this slight alteration of the natural due either to the exaggeration of some detail, or to its suppression, generally, I think, to the latter. Life everywhere appeared to me as blocked from the full delivery of its sweet and lovely message. Some counter influence stopped it\u2014suppression; or sent it awry\u2014exaggeration. The house itself, mere expression, of course, of a narrow, limited mind, was sheer ugliness; it required no further explanation. With the grounds and garden, so far as shape and general plan were concerned, this was also true; but that trees and flowers and other natural details should share the same deficiency perplexed my logical soul, and even dismayed it. I stood and stared, then moved about, and stood and stared again. Everywhere was this mockery of a sinister, unfinished aspect. I sought in vain to recover my normal point of view. My mind had found this goblin garden and wandered to and fro in it, unable to escape.\n\nThe change was in myself, of course, and so trivial were the details which illustrated it, that they sound absurd, thus mentioned one by one. For me, they proved it, is all I can affirm. The goblin touch lay plainly everywhere: in the forms of the trees, planted at neat intervals along the lawns; in this twisted ash that rustled just behind me; in the shadow of the gloomy wellingtonias, whose sweeping skirts obscured the grass; but especially, I noticed, in the tops and crests of them. For here, the delicate, graceful curves of last year's growth seemed to shrink back into themselves. None of them pointed upwards. Their life had failed and turned aside just when it should have become triumphant. The character of a tree reveals itself chiefly at the extremities, and it was precisely here that they all drooped and achieved this hint of goblin distortion\u2014in the growth, that is, of the last few years. What ought to have been fairy, joyful, natural, was instead uncomely to the verge of the grotesque. Spontaneous expression was arrested. My mind perceived a goblin garden, and was caught in it. The place grimaced at me.\n\nWith the flowers it was similar, though far more difficult to detect in detail for description. I saw the smaller vegetable growth as impish, half-malicious. Even the terraces sloped ill, as though their ends had sagged since they had been so lavishly constructed; their varying angles gave a queerly bewildering aspect to their sequence that was unpleasant to the eye. One might wander among their deceptive lengths and get lost\u2014lost among open terraces!\u2014with the house quite close at hand. Unhomely seemed the entire garden, unable to give repose, restlessness in it everywhere, almost strife, and discord certainly.\n\nMoreover, the garden grew into the house, the house into the garden, and in both was this idea of resistance to the natural\u2014the spirit that says No to joy. All over it I was aware of the effort to achieve another end, the struggle to burst forth and escape into free, spontaneous expression that should be happy and natural, yet the effort for ever frustrated by the weight of this dark shadow that rendered it abortive. Life crawled aside into a channel that was a cul-de-sac, then turned horribly upon itself. Instead of blossom and fruit, there were weeds. This approach of life I was conscious of\u2014then dismal failure. There was no fulfilment. Nothing happened.\n\nAnd so, through this singular mood, I came a little nearer to understand the unpure thing that had stammered out into expression through my sister's talent. For the unpure is merely negative; it has no existence; it is but the cramped expression of what is true, stammering its way brokenly over false boundaries that seek to limit and confine. Great, full expression of anything is pure, whereas here was only the incomplete, unfinished, and therefore ugly. There was strife and pain and desire to escape. I found myself shrinking from house and grounds as one shrinks from the touch of the mentally arrested, those in whom life has turned awry. There was almost mutilation in it.\n\nPast items, too, now flocked to confirm this feeling that I walked, liberty captured and half-maimed, in a monstrous garden. I remembered days of rain that refreshed the countryside, but left these grounds, cracked with the summer heat, unsatisfied and thirsty; and how the big winds, that cleaned the woods and fields elsewhere, crawled here with difficulty through the dense foliage that protected The Towers from the North and West and East. They were ineffective, sluggish currents. There was no real wind. Nothing happened. I began to realise\u2014far more clearly than in my sister's fanciful explanation about 'layers'\u2014that here were many contrary influences at work, mutually destructive of one another. House and grounds were not haunted merely; they were the arena of past thinking and feeling, perhaps of terrible, impure beliefs, each striving to suppress the others, yet no one of them achieving supremacy because no one of them was strong enough, no one of them was true. Each, moreover, tried to win me over, though only one was able to reach my mind at all. For some obscure reason\u2014possibly because my temperament had a natural bias towards the grotesque\u2014it was the goblin layer. With me, it was the line of least resistance...\n\nIn my own thoughts this 'goblin garden' revealed, of course, merely my personal interpretation. I felt now objectively what long ago my mind had felt subjectively. My work, essential sign of spontaneous life with me, had stopped dead; production had become impossible. I stood now considerably closer to the cause of this sterility. The Cause, rather, turned bolder, had stepped insolently nearer. Nothing happened anywhere; house, garden, mind alike were barren, abortive, torn by the strife of frustrate impulse, ugly, hateful, sinful. Yet behind it all was still the desire of life\u2014desire to escape\u2014accomplish. Hope\u2014an intolerable hope\u2014I became startlingly aware\u2014crowned torture.\n\nAnd, realising this, though in some part of me where Reason lost her hold, there rose upon me then another and a darker thing that caught me by the throat and made me shrink with a sense of revulsion that touched actual loathing. I knew instantly whence it came, this wave of abhorrence and disgust, for even while I saw red and felt revolt rise in me, it seemed that I grew partially aware of the layer next below the goblin. I perceived the existence of this deeper stratum. One opened the way for the other, as it were. There were so many, yet all inter-related; to admit one was to clear the way for all. If I lingered I should be caught\u2014horribly. They struggled with such violence for supremacy among themselves, however, that this latest uprising was instantly smothered and crushed back, though not before a glimpse had been revealed to me, and the redness in my thoughts transferred itself to colour my surroundings thickly and appallingly\u2014with blood. This lurid aspect drenched the garden, smeared the terraces, lent to the very soil a tinge as of sacrificial rites, that choked the breath in me, while it seemed to fix me to the earth my feet so longed to leave. It was so revolting that at the same time I felt a dreadful curiosity as of fascination\u2014I wished to stay. Between these contrary impulses I think I actually reeled a moment, transfixed by a fascination of the Awful. Through the lighter goblin veil I felt myself sinking down, down, down into this turgid layer that was so much more violent and so much more ancient. The upper layer, indeed, seemed fairy by comparison with this terror born of the lust for blood, thick with the anguish of human sacrificial victims.\n\nUpper! Then I was already sinking; my feet were caught; I was actually in it! What atavistic strain, hidden deep within me, had been touched into vile response, giving this flash of intuitive comprehension, I cannot say. The coatings laid on by civilisation are probably thin enough in all of us. I made a supreme effort. The sun and wind came back. I could almost swear I opened my eyes. Something very atrocious surged back into the depths, carrying with it a thought of tangled woods, of big stones standing in a circle, motionless white figures, the one form bound with ropes, and the ghastly gleam of the knife. Like smoke upon a battlefield, it rolled away...\n\nI was standing on the gravel path below the second terrace when the familiar goblin garden danced back again, doubly grotesque now, doubly mocking, yet, by way of contrast, almost welcome. My glimpse into the depths was momentary, it seems, and had passed utterly away. The common world rushed back with a sense of glad relief, yet ominous now for ever, I felt, for the knowledge of what its past had built upon. In street, in theatre, in the festivities of friends, in music-room or playing-field, even indeed in church\u2014how could the memory of what I had seen and felt not leave its hideous trace? The very structure of my Thought, it seemed to me, was stained. What has been thought by others can never be obliterated until...\n\nWith a start my reverie broke and fled, scattered by a violent sound that I recognised for the first time in my life as wholly desirable. The returning motor meant that my hostess was back. Yet, so urgent had been my temporary obsession, that my first presentation of her was\u2014well, not as I knew her now. Floating along with a face of anguished torture I saw Mabel, a mere effigy captured by others' thinking, pass down into those depths of fire and blood that only just had closed beneath my feet. She dipped away. She vanished, her fading eyes turned to the last towards some saviour who had failed her. And that strange intolerable hope was in her face.\n\nThe mystery of the place was pretty thick about me just then. It was the fall of dusk, and the ghost of slanting sunshine was as unreal as though badly painted. The garden stood at attention all about me. I cannot explain it, but I can tell it, I think, exactly as it happened, for it remains vivid in me for ever\u2014that, for the first time, something almost happened, myself apparently the combining link through which it pressed towards delivery.\n\nI had already turned towards the house. In my mind were pictures\u2014not actual thoughts\u2014of the motor, tea on the verandah, my sister, Mabel\u2014when there came behind me this tumultuous, awful rush\u2014as I left the garden. The ugliness, the pain, the striving to escape, the whole negative and suppressed agony that was the Place, focused that second into a concentrated effort to produce a result. It was a blinding tempest of long-frustrate desire that heaved at me, surging appallingly behind me like an anguished mob. I was in the act of crossing the frontier into my normal self again, when it came, catching fearfully at my skirts. I might use an entire dictionary of descriptive adjectives yet come no nearer to it than this\u2014the conception of a huge assemblage determined to escape with me, or to snatch me back among themselves. My legs trembled for an instant, and I caught my breath\u2014then turned and ran as fast as possible up the ugly terraces.\n\nAt the same instant, as though the clanging of an iron gate cut short the unfinished phrase, I thought the beginning of an awful thing:\n\n'The Damned...'\n\nLike this it rushed after me from that goblin garden that had sought to keep me:\n\n'The Damned!'\n\nFor there was sound in it. I know full well it was subjective, not actually heard at all; yet somehow sound was in it\u2014a great volume, roaring and booming thunderously, far away, and below me. The sentence dipped back into the depths that gave it birth, unfinished. Its completion was prevented. As usual, nothing happened. But it drove behind me like a hurricane as I ran towards the house, and the sound of it I can only liken to those terrible undertones you may hear standing beside Niagara. They lie behind the mere crash of the falling flood, within it somehow, not audible to all\u2014felt rather than definitely heard.\n\nIt seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as I flew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them. It was in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the drooping wellingtonias. The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers, red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building. Into the structure of the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took it home. The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that had uttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that very moment I saw two maids in the act of closing them again.\n\nAnd on the verandah, as I arrived breathless, and shaken in my soul, Frances and Mabel, standing by the tea-table, looked up to greet me. In the faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock. They watched me coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticed the state in which I came. In the face of my hostess, however, I read another and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances. Mabel knew. She had experienced what I had experienced. She had heard that awful sentence I had heard, but heard it not for the first time; heard it, moreover, I verily believe, complete and to its dreadful end.\n\n'Bill, did you hear that curious noise just now?' Frances asked it sharply before I could say a word. Her manner was confused; she looked straight at me; and there was a tremor in her voice she could not hide.\n\n'There's wind about,' I said, 'wind in the trees and sweeping round the walls. It's risen rather suddenly.' My voice faltered rather.\n\n'No. It wasn't wind,' she insisted, with a significance meant for me alone, but badly hidden. 'It was more like distant thunder, we thought. How you ran too!' she added. 'What a pace you came across the terraces!'\n\nI knew instantly from the way she said it that they both had already heard the sound before and were anxious to know if I had heard it, and how. My interpretation was what they sought.\n\n'It was a curiously deep sound, I admit. It may have been big guns at sea,' I suggested, 'forts or cruisers practising. The coast isn't so very far, and with the wind in the right direction\u2014'\n\nThe expression on Mabel's face stopped me dead.\n\n'Like huge doors closing,' she said softly in her colourless voice, 'enormous metal doors shutting against a mass of people clamouring to get out.' The gravity, the note of hopelessness in her tones, was shocking.\n\nFrances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak. 'I'm cold,' she had said; 'I think I'll get a shawl.' Mabel and I were alone. I believe it was the first time we had been really alone since I arrived. She looked up from the teacups, fixing her pallid eyes on mine. She had made a question of the sentence.\n\n'You hear it like that?' I asked innocently. I purposely used the present tense.\n\nShe changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutely expressionless. My sister's step sounded on the floor of the room behind us.\n\n'If only\u2014' Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping out instinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind:\n\n'\u2014something would happen.'\n\nShe instantly corrected me. I had caught her thought, yet somehow phrased it wrongly.\n\n'We could escape!' She lowered her tone a little, saying it hurriedly. The 'we' amazed and horrified me; but something in her voice and manner struck me utterly dumb. There was ice and terror in it. It was a dying woman speaking\u2014a lost and hopeless soul.\n\nIn that atrocious moment I hardly noticed what was said exactly, but I remember that my sister returned with a grey shawl about her shoulders, and that Mabel said, in her ordinary voice again, 'It is chilly, yes; let's have tea inside,' and that two maids, one of them the grenadier, speedily carried the loaded trays into the morning-room and put a match to the logs in the great open fireplace. It was, after all, foolish to risk the sharp evening air, for dusk was falling steadily, and even the sunshine of the day just fading could not turn autumn into summer. I was the last to come in. Just as I left the verandah a large black bird swooped down in front of me past the pillars; it dropped from overhead, swerved abruptly to one side as it caught sight of me, and flapped heavily towards the shrubberies on the left of the terraces, where it disappeared into the gloom. It flew very low, very close. And it startled me, I think because in some way it seemed like my Shadow materialised\u2014as though the dark horror that was rising everywhere from house and garden, then settling back so thickly yet so imperceptibly upon us all, were incarnated in that whirring creature that passed between the daylight and the coming night.\n\nI stood a moment, wondering if it would appear again, before I followed the others indoors, and as I was in the act of closing the windows after me, I caught a glimpse of a figure on the lawn. It was some distance away, on the other side of the shrubberies, in fact where the bird had vanished. But in spite of the twilight that half magnified, half obscured it, the identity was unmistakable. I knew the housekeeper's stiff walk too well to be deceived. 'Mrs. Marsh taking the air,' I said to myself. I felt the necessity of saying it, and I wondered why she was doing so at this particular hour. If I had other thoughts they were so vague, and so quickly and utterly suppressed, that I cannot recall them sufficiently to relate them here.\n\nAnd, once indoors, it was to be expected that there would come explanation, discussion, conversation, at any rate, regarding the singular noise and its cause, some uttered evidence of the mood that had been strong enough to drive us all inside. Yet there was none. Each of us purposely, and with various skill, ignored it. We talked little, and when we did it was of anything in the world but that. Personally, I experienced a touch of that same bewilderment which had come over me during my first talk with Frances on the evening of my arrival, for I recall now the acute tension, and the hope, yet dread, that one or other of us must sooner or later introduce the subject. It did not happen, however; no reference was made to it even remotely. It was the presence of Mabel, I felt positive, that prohibited. As soon might we have discussed Death in the bedroom of a dying woman.\n\nThe only scrap of conversation I remember, where all was ordinary and commonplace, was when Mabel spoke casually to the grenadier asking why Mrs. Marsh had omitted to do something or other\u2014what it was I forget\u2014and that the maid replied respectfully that 'Mrs. Marsh was very sorry, but her 'and still pained her.' I enquired, though so casually that I scarcely know what prompted the words, whether she had injured herself severely, and the reply, 'She upset a lamp and burnt herself,' was said in a tone that made me feel my curiosity was indiscreet, 'but she always has an excuse for not doing things she ought to do.' The little bit of conversation remained with me, and I remember particularly the quick way Frances interrupted and turned the talk upon the delinquencies of servants in general, telling incidents of her own at our flat with a volubility that perhaps seemed forced, and that certainly did not encourage general talk as it may have been intended to do. We lapsed into silence immediately she finished.\n\nBut for all our care and all our calculated silence, each knew that something had, in these last moments, come very close; it had brushed us in passing; it had retired; and I am inclined to think now that the large dark thing I saw, riding the dusk, probably bird of prey, was in some sense a symbol of it in my mind\u2014that actually there had been no bird at all, I mean, but that my mood of apprehension and dismay had formed the vivid picture in my thoughts. It had swept past us, it had retreated, but it was now, at this moment, in hiding very close. And it was watching us." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 485", + "text": "Perhaps, too, it was mere coincidence that I encountered Mrs. Marsh, his housekeeper, several times that evening in the short interval between tea and dinner, and that on each occasion the sight of this gaunt, half-saturnine woman fed my prejudice against her. Once, on my way to the telephone, I ran into her just where the passage is somewhat jammed by a square table carrying the Chinese gong, a grandfather's clock and a box of croquet mallets. We both gave way, then both advanced, then again gave way\u2014simultaneously. It seemed impossible to pass. We stepped with decision to the same side, finally colliding in the middle, while saying those futile little things, half apology, half excuse, that are inevitable at such times. In the end she stood upright against the wall for me to pass, taking her place against the very door I wished to open. It was ludicrous.\n\n'Excuse me\u2014I was just going in\u2014to telephone,' I explained. And she sidled off, murmuring apologies, but opening the door for me while she did so. Our hands met a moment on the handle. There was a second's awkwardness\u2014it was so stupid. I remembered her injury, and by way of something to say, I enquired after it. She thanked me; it was entirely healed now, but it might have been much worse; and there was something about the 'mercy of the Lord' that I didn't quite catch. While telephoning, however\u2014a London call, and my attention focused on it\u2014I realised sharply that this was the first time I had spoken with her; also, that I had\u2014touched her.\n\nIt happened to be a Sunday, and the lines were clear. I got my connection quickly, and the incident was forgotten while my thoughts went up to London. On my way upstairs, then, the woman came back into my mind, so that I recalled other things about her\u2014how she seemed all over the house, in unlikely places often; how I had caught her sitting in the hall alone that night; how she was for ever coming and going with her lugubrious visage and that untidy hair at the back that had made me laugh three years ago with the idea that it looked singed or burnt; and how the impression on my first arrival at The Towers was that this woman somehow kept alive, though its evidence was outwardly suppressed, the influence of her late employer and of his sombre teachings. Somewhere with her was associated the idea of punishment, vindictiveness, revenge. I remembered again suddenly my odd notion that she sought to keep her present mistress here, a prisoner in this bleak and comfortless house, and that really, in spite of her obsequious silence, she was intensely opposed to the change of thought that had reclaimed Mabel to a happier view of life.\n\nAll this in a passing second flashed in review before me, and I discovered, or at any rate reconstructed, the real Mrs. Marsh. She was decidedly in the Shadow. More, she stood in the forefront of it, stealthily leading an assault, as it were, against The Towers and its occupants, as though, consciously or unconsciously, she laboured incessantly to this hateful end.\n\nI can only judge that some state of nervousness in me permitted the series of insignificant thoughts to assume this dramatic shape, and that what had gone before prepared the way and led her up at the head of so formidable a procession. I relate it exactly as it came to me. My nerves were doubtless somewhat on edge by now. Otherwise I should hardly have been a prey to the exaggeration at all. I seemed open to so many strange impressions.\n\nNothing else, perhaps, can explain my ridiculous conversation with her, when, for the third time that evening, I came suddenly upon the woman half-way down the stairs, standing by an open window as if in the act of listening. She was dressed in black, a black shawl over her square shoulders and black gloves on her big, broad hands. Two black objects, prayer-books apparently, she clasped, and on her head she wore a bonnet with shaking beads of jet. At first I did not know her, as I came running down upon her from the landing; it was only when she stood aside to let me pass that I saw her profile against the tapestry and recognised Mrs. Marsh. And to catch her on the front stairs, dressed like this, struck me as incongruous\u2014impertinent. I paused in my dangerous descent. Through the opened window came the sound of bells\u2014church bells\u2014a sound more depressing to me than superstition, and as nauseating. Though the action was ill-judged, I obeyed the sudden prompting\u2014was it a secret desire to attack, perhaps?\u2014and spoke to her.\n\n'Been to church, I suppose, Mrs. Marsh?' I said. 'Or just going, perhaps?'\n\nHer face, as she looked up a second to reply, was like an iron doll that moved its lips and turned its eyes, but made no other imitation of life at all.\n\n'Some of us still goes, sir,' she said unctuously.\n\nIt was respectful enough, yet the implied judgment of the rest of the world made me almost angry. A deferential insolence lay behind the affected meekness.\n\n'For those who believe no doubt it is helpful,' I smiled. 'True religion brings peace and happiness, I'm sure\u2014joy, Mrs. Marsh, JOY!' I found keen satisfaction in the emphasis.\n\nShe looked at me like a knife. I cannot describe the implacable thing that shone in her fixed, stern eyes, nor the shadow of felt darkness that stole across her face. She glittered. I felt hate in her. I knew\u2014she knew too\u2014who was in the thoughts of us both at that moment.\n\nShe replied softly, never forgetting her place for an instant:\n\n'There is joy, sir\u2014in 'eaven\u2014over one sinner that repenteth, and in church there goes up prayer to Gawd for those 'oo\u2014well, for the others, sir, 'oo\u2014'\n\nShe cut short her sentence thus. The gloom about her as she said it was like the gloom about a hearse, a tomb, a darkness of great hopeless dungeons. My tongue ran on of itself with a kind of bitter satisfaction:\n\n'We must believe there are no others, Mrs. Marsh. Salvation, you know, would be such a failure if there were. No merciful, all-foreseeing God could ever have devised such a fearful plan\u2014'\n\nHer voice, interrupting me, seemed to rise out of the bowels of the earth:\n\n'They rejected the salvation when it was hoffered to them, sir, on earth.'\n\n'But you wouldn't have them tortured for ever because of one mistake in ignorance,' I said, fixing her with my eye. 'Come now, would you, Mrs. Marsh? No God worth worshipping could permit such cruelty. Think a moment what it means.'\n\nShe stared at me, a curious expression in her stupid eyes. It seemed to me as though the 'woman' in her revolted, while yet she dared not suffer her grim belief to trip. That is, she would willingly have had it otherwise but for a terror that prevented.\n\n'We may pray for them, sir, and we do\u2014we may 'ope.' She dropped her eyes to the carpet.\n\n'Good, good!' I put in cheerfully, sorry now that I had spoken at all. 'That's more hopeful, at any rate, isn't it?'\n\nShe murmured something about Abraham's bosom, and the 'time of salvation not being for ever,' as I tried to pass her. Then a half gesture that she made stopped me. There was something more she wished to say\u2014to ask. She looked up furtively. In her eyes I saw the 'woman' peering out through fear.\n\n'Per'aps, sir,' she faltered, as though lightning must strike her dead, 'per'aps, would you think, a drop of cold water, given in His name, might moisten\u2014?'\n\nBut I stopped her, for the foolish talk had lasted long enough.\n\n'Of course,' I exclaimed, 'of course. For God is love, remember, and love means charity, tolerance, sympathy, and sparing others pain,' and I hurried past her, determined to end the outrageous conversation for which yet I knew myself entirely to blame. Behind me, she stood stock-still for several minutes, half bewildered, half alarmed, as I suspected. I caught the fragment of another sentence, one word of it, rather\u2014'punishment'\u2014but the rest escaped me. Her arrogance and condescending tolerance exasperated me, while I was at the same time secretly pleased that I might have touched some string of remorse or sympathy in her after all. Her belief was iron; she dared not let it go; yet somewhere underneath there lurked the germ of a wholesome revulsion. She would help 'them'\u2014if she dared. Her question proved it.\n\nHalf ashamed of myself, I turned and crossed the hall quickly lest I should be tempted to say more, and in me was a disagreeable sensation as though I had just left the Incurable Ward of some great hospital. A reaction caught me as of nausea. Ugh! I wanted such people cleansed by fire. They seemed to me as centres of contamination whose vicious thoughts flowed out to stain God's glorious world. I saw myself, Frances, Mabel too especially, on the rack, while that odious figure of cruelty and darkness stood over us and ordered the awful handles turned in order that we might be 'saved'\u2014forced, that is, to think and believe exactly as she thought and believed.\n\nI found relief for my somewhat childish indignation by letting myself loose upon the organ then. The flood of Bach and Beethoven brought back the sense of proportion. It proved, however, at the same time that there had been this growth of distortion in me, and that it had been provided apparently by my closer contact\u2014for the first time\u2014with that funereal personality, the woman who, like her master, believed that all holding views of God that differed from her own, must be damned eternally. It gave me, moreover, some faint clue perhaps, though a clue I was unequal to following up, to the nature of the strife and terror and frustrate influence in the house. That housekeeper had to do with it. She kept it alive. Her thought was like a spell she waved above her mistress's head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 486", + "text": "That night I was wakened by a hurried tapping at my door, and before I could answer, Frances stood beside my bed. She had switched on the light as she came in. Her hair fell straggling over her dressing-gown. Her face was deathly pale, its expression so distraught it was almost haggard. The eyes were very wide. She looked almost like another woman.\n\nShe was whispering at a great pace: 'Bill, Bill, wake up, quick!'\n\n'I am awake. What is it?' I whispered too. I was startled.\n\n'Listen!' was all she said. Her eyes stared into vacancy.\n\nThere was not a sound in the great house. The wind had dropped, and all was still. Only the tapping seemed to continue endlessly in my brain. The clock on the mantelpiece pointed to half-past two.\n\n'I heard nothing, Frances. What is it?' I rubbed my eyes; I had been very deeply asleep.\n\n'Listen!' she repeated very softly, holding up one finger and turning her eyes towards the door she had left ajar. Her usual calmness had deserted her. She was in the grip of some distressing terror.\n\nFor a full minute we held our breath and listened. Then her eyes rolled round again and met my own, and her skin went even whiter than before.\n\n'It woke me,' she said beneath her breath, and moving a step nearer to my bed. 'It was the Noise.' Even her whisper trembled.\n\n'The Noise!' The word repeated itself dully of its own accord. I would rather it had been anything in the world but that\u2014earthquake, foreign cannon, collapse of the house above our heads! 'The noise, Frances! Are you sure?' I was playing really for a little time.\n\n'It was like thunder. At first I thought it was thunder. But a minute later it came again\u2014from underground. It's appalling.' She muttered the words, her voice not properly under control.\n\nThere was a pause of perhaps a minute, and then we both spoke at once. We said foolish, obvious things that neither of us believed in for a second. The roof had fallen in, there were burglars downstairs, the safes had been blown open. It was to comfort each other as children do that we said these things; also it was to gain further time.\n\n'There's some one in the house, of course,' I heard my voice say finally, as I sprang out of bed and hurried into dressing-gown and slippers. 'Don't be alarmed. I'll go down and see,' and from the drawer I took a pistol it was my habit to carry everywhere with me. I loaded it carefully while Frances stood stock-still beside the bed and watched. I moved towards the open door.\n\n'You stay here, Frances,' I whispered, the beating of my heart making the words uneven, 'while I go down and make a search. Lock yourself in, girl. Nothing can happen to you. It was downstairs, you said?'\n\n'Underneath,' she answered faintly, pointing through the floor.\n\nShe moved suddenly between me and the door.\n\n'Listen! Hark!' she said, the eyes in her face quite fixed; 'it's coming again,' and she turned her head to catch the slightest sound. I stood there watching her, and while I watched her, shook. But nothing stirred. From the halls below rose only the whirr and quiet ticking of the numerous clocks. The blind by the open window behind us flapped out a little into the room as the draught caught it.\n\n'I'll come with you, Bill\u2014to the next floor,' she broke the silence. 'Then I'll stay with Mabel\u2014till you come up again.' The blind sank down with a long sigh as she said it.\n\nThe question jumped to my lips before I could repress it:\n\n'Mabel is awake. She heard it too?'\n\nI hardly know why horror caught me at her answer. All was so vague and terrible as we stood there playing the great game of this sinister house where nothing ever happened.\n\n'We met in the passage. She was on her way to me.'\n\nWhat shook in me, shook inwardly. Frances, I mean, did not see it. I had the feeling just then that the Noise was upon us, that any second it would boom and roar about our ears. But the deep silence held. I only heard my sister's little whisper coming across the room in answer to my question:\n\n'Then what is Mabel doing now?'\n\nAnd her reply proved that she was yielding at last beneath the dreadful tension, for she spoke at once, unable longer to keep up the pretence. With a kind of relief, as it were, she said it out, looking helplessly at me like a child:\n\n'She is weeping and gna\u2014'\n\nMy expression must have stopped her. I believe I clapped both hands upon her mouth, though when I realised things clearly again, I found they were covering my own ears instead. It was a moment of unutterable horror. The revulsion I felt was actually physical. It would have given me pleasure to fire off all the five chambers of my pistol into the air above my head; the sound\u2014a definite, wholesome sound that explained itself\u2014would have been a positive relief. Other feelings, though, were in me too, all over me, rushing to and fro. It was vain to seek their disentanglement; it was impossible. I confess that I experienced, among them, a touch of paralysing fear\u2014though for a moment only; it passed as sharply as it came, leaving me with a violent flush of blood to the face such as bursts of anger bring, followed abruptly by an icy perspiration over the entire body. Yet I may honestly avow that it was not ordinary personal fear I felt, nor any common dread of physical injury. It was, rather, a vast, impersonal shrinking\u2014a sympathetic shrinking\u2014from the agony and terror that countless others, somewhere, somehow, felt for themselves. The first sensation of a prison overwhelmed me in that instant, of bitter strife and frenzied suffering, and the fiery torture of the yearning to escape that was yet hopelessly uttered... It was of incredible power. It was real. The vain, intolerable hope swept over me.\n\nI mastered myself, though hardly knowing how, and took my sister's hand. It was as cold as ice, as I led her firmly to the door and out into the passage. Apparently she noticed nothing of my so near collapse, for I caught her whisper as we went. 'You are brave, Bill; splendidly brave.'\n\nThe upper corridors of the great sleeping house were brightly lit; on her way to me she had turned on every electric switch her hand could reach; and as we passed the final flight of stairs to the floor below, I heard a door shut softly and knew that Mabel had been listening\u2014waiting for us. I led my sister up to it. She knocked, and the door was opened cautiously an inch or so. The room was pitch black. I caught no glimpse of Mabel standing there. Frances turned to me with a hurried whisper, 'Billy, you will be careful, won't you?' and went in. I just had time to answer that I would not be long, and Frances to reply, 'You'll find us here\u2014' when the door closed and cut her sentence short before its end." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 487", + "text": "But it was not alone the closing door that took the final words. Frances\u2014by the way she disappeared I knew it\u2014had made a swift and violent movement into the darkness that was as though she sprang. She leaped upon that other woman who stood back among the shadows, for, simultaneously with the clipping of the sentence, another sound was also stopped\u2014stifled, smothered, choked back lest I should also hear it. Yet not in time. I heard it\u2014a hard and horrible sound that explained both the leap and the abrupt cessation of the whispered words.\n\nI stood irresolute a moment. It was as though all the bones had been withdrawn from my body, so that I must sink and fall. That sound plucked them out, and plucked out my self-possession with them. I am not sure that it was a sound I had ever heard before, though children, I half remembered, made it sometimes in blind rages when they knew not what they did. In a grown-up person certainly I had never known it. I associated it with animals rather\u2014horribly. In the history of the world, no doubt, it has been common enough, alas, but fortunately to-day there can be but few who know it, or would recognise it even when heard. The bones shot back into my body the same instant, but red-hot and burning; the brief instant of irresolution passed; I was torn between the desire to break down the door and enter, and to run\u2014run for my life from a thing I dared not face.\n\nOut of the horrid tumult, then, I adopted neither course. Without reflection, certainly without analysis of what was best to do for my sister, myself or Mabel, I took up my action where it had been interrupted. I turned from the awful door and moved slowly towards the head of the stairs. But that dreadful little sound came with me. I believe my own teeth chattered. It seemed all over the house\u2014in the empty halls that opened into the long passages towards the music-room, and even in the grounds outside the building. From the lawns and barren garden, from the ugly terraces themselves, it rose into the night, and behind it came a curious driving sound, incomplete, unfinished, as of wailing for deliverance, the wailing of desperate souls in anguish, the dull and dry beseeching of hopeless spirits in prison.\n\nThat I could have taken the little sound from the bedroom where I actually heard it, and spread it thus over the entire house and grounds, is evidence, perhaps, of the state my nerves were in. The wailing assuredly was in my mind alone. But the longer I hesitated, the more difficult became my task, and, gathering up my dressing-gown, lest I should trip in the darkness, I passed slowly down the staircase into the hall below. I carried neither candle nor matches; every switch in room and corridor was known to me. The covering of darkness was indeed rather comforting than otherwise, for if it prevented seeing, it also prevented being seen. The heavy pistol, knocking against my thigh as I moved, made me feel I was carrying a child's toy, foolishly. I experienced in every nerve that primitive vast dread which is the Thrill of darkness. Merely the child in me was comforted by that pistol.\n\nThe night was not entirely black; the iron bars across the glass front door were visible, and, equally, I discerned the big, stiff wooden chairs in the hall, the gaping fireplace, the upright pillars supporting the staircase, the round table in the centre with its books and flower-vases, and the basket that held visitors' cards. There, too, was the stick and umbrella stand and the shelf with railway guides, directory, and telegraph forms. Clocks ticked everywhere with sounds like quiet footfalls. Light fell here and there in patches from the floor above. I stood a moment in the hall, letting my eyes grow more accustomed to the gloom, while deciding on a plan of search. I made out the ivy trailing outside over one of the big windows... and then the tall clock by the front door made a grating noise deep down inside its body\u2014it was the Presentation clock, large and hideous, given by the congregation of his church\u2014and, dreading the booming strike it seemed to threaten, I made a quick decision. If others beside myself were about in the night, the sound of that striking might cover their approach.\n\nSo I tiptoed to the right, where the passage led towards the dining-room. In the other direction were the morning- and drawing-room, both little used, and various other rooms beyond that had been his, generally now kept locked. I thought of my sister, waiting upstairs with that frightened woman for my return. I went quickly, yet stealthily.\n\nAnd, to my surprise, the door of the dining-room was open. It had been opened. I paused on the threshold, staring about me. I think I fully expected to see a figure blocked in the shadows against the heavy sideboard, or looming on the other side beneath his portrait. But the room was empty; I felt it empty. Through the wide bow-windows that gave on to the verandah came an uncertain glimmer that even shone reflected in the polished surface of the dinner-table, and again I perceived the stiff outline of chairs, waiting tenantless all round it, two larger ones with high carved backs at either end. The monkey-trees on the upper terrace, too, were visible outside against the sky, and the solemn crests of the wellingtonias on the terraces below. The enormous clock on the mantelpiece ticked very slowly, as though its machinery were running down, and I made out the pale round patch that was its face. Resisting my first inclination to turn the lights up\u2014my hand had gone so far as to finger the friendly knob\u2014I crossed the room so carefully that no single board creaked, nor a single chair, as I rested a hand upon its back, moved on the parquet flooring. I turned neither to the right nor left, nor did I once look back.\n\nI went towards the long corridor, filled with priceless objets d'art, that led through various antechambers into the spacious music-room, and only at the mouth of this corridor did I next halt a moment in uncertainty. For this long corridor, lit faintly by high windows on the left from the verandah, was very narrow, owing to the mass of shelves and fancy tables it contained. It was not that I feared to knock over precious things as I went, but that, because of its ungenerous width, there would be no room to pass another person\u2014if I met one. And the certainty had suddenly come upon me that somewhere in this corridor another person at this actual moment stood. Here, somehow, amid all this dead atmosphere of furniture and impersonal emptiness, lay the hint of a living human presence; and with such conviction did it come upon me, that my hand instinctively gripped the pistol in my pocket before I could even think. Either some one had passed along this corridor just before me, or some one lay waiting at its farther end\u2014withdrawn or flattened into one of the little recesses, to let me pass. It was the person who had opened the door. And the blood ran from my heart as I realised it.\n\nIt was not courage that sent me on, but rather a strong impulsion from behind that made it impossible to retreat: the feeling that a throng pressed at my back, drawing nearer and nearer; that I was already half surrounded, swept, dragged, coaxed into a vast prison-house where there was wailing and gnashing of teeth, where their worm dieth not and their fire is not quenched. I can neither explain nor justify the storm of irrational emotion that swept me as I stood in that moment, staring down the length of the silent corridor towards the music-room at the far end, I can only repeat that no personal bravery sent me down it, but that the negative emotion of fear was swamped in this vast sea of pity and commiseration for others that surged upon me.\n\nMy senses, at least, were no whit confused; if anything, my brain registered impressions with keener accuracy than usual. I noticed, for instance, that the two swinging doors of baize that cut the corridor into definite lengths, making little rooms of the spaces between them, were both wide open\u2014in the dim light no mean achievement. Also that the fronds of a palm plant, some ten feet in front of me, still stirred gently from the air of some one who had recently gone past them. The long green leaves waved to and fro like hands. Then I went stealthily forward down the narrow space, proud even that I had this command of myself, and so carefully that my feet made no sound upon the Japanese matting on the floor.\n\nIt was a journey that seemed timeless. I have no idea how fast or slow I went, but I remember that I deliberately examined articles on each side of me, peering with particular closeness into the recesses of wall and window. I passed the first baize doors, and the passage beyond them widened out to hold shelves of books; there were sofas and small reading-tables against the wall. It narrowed again presently, as I entered the second stretch. The windows here were higher and smaller, and marble statuettes of classical subjects lined the walls, watching me like figures of the dead. Their white and shining faces saw me, yet made no sign. I passed next between the second baize doors. They, too, had been fastened back with hooks against the wall. Thus all doors were open\u2014had been recently opened.\n\nAnd so, at length, I found myself in the final widening of the corridor which formed an ante-chamber to the music-room itself. It had been used formerly to hold the overflow of meetings. No door separated it from the great hall beyond, but heavy curtains hung usually to close it off, and these curtains were invariably drawn. They now stood wide. And here\u2014I can merely state the impression that came upon me\u2014I knew myself at last surrounded. The throng that pressed behind me, also surged in front: facing me in the big room, and waiting for my entry, stood a multitude; on either side of me, in the very air above my head, the vast assemblage paused upon my coming. The pause, however, was momentary, for instantly the deep, tumultuous movement was resumed that yet was silent as a cavern underground. I felt the agony that was in it, the passionate striving, the awful struggle to escape. The semi-darkness held beseeching faces that fought to press themselves upon my vision, yearning yet hopeless eyes, lips scorched and dry, mouths that opened to implore but found no craved delivery in actual words, and a fury of misery and hate that made the life in me stop dead, frozen by the horror of vain pity. That intolerable, vain Hope was everywhere.\n\nAnd the multitude, it came to me, was not a single multitude, but many; for, as soon as one huge division pressed too close upon the edge of escape, it was dragged back by another and prevented. The wild host was divided against itself. Here dwelt the Shadow I had 'imagined' weeks ago, and in it struggled armies of lost souls as in the depths of some bottomless pit whence there is no escape. The layers mingled, fighting against themselves in endless torture. It was in this great Shadow I had clairvoyantly seen Mabel, but about its fearful mouth, I now was certain, hovered another figure of darkness, a figure who sought to keep it in existence, since to her thought were due those lampless depths of woe without escape... Towards me the multitudes now surged." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 488", + "text": "It was a sound and a movement that brought me back into myself. The great clock at the farther end of the room just then struck the hour of three. That was the sound. And the movement\u2014? I was aware that a figure was passing across the distant centre of the floor. Instantly I dropped back into the arena of my little human terror. My hand again clutched stupidly at the pistol butt. I drew back into the folds of the heavy curtain. And the figure advanced.\n\nI remember every detail. At first it seemed to me enormous\u2014this advancing shadow\u2014far beyond human scale; but as it came nearer, I measured it, though not consciously, by the organ pipes that gleamed in faint colours, just above its gradual soft approach. It passed them, already half-way across the great room. I saw then that its stature was that of ordinary men. The prolonged booming of the clock died away. I heard the footfall, shuffling upon the polished boards. I heard another sound\u2014a voice, low and monotonous, droning as in prayer. The figure was speaking. It was a woman. And she carried in both hands before her a small object that faintly shimmered\u2014a glass of water. And then I recognised her.\n\nThere was still an instant's time before she reached me, and I made use of it. I shrank back, flattening myself against the wall. Her voice ceased a moment, as she turned and carefully drew the curtains together behind her, closing them with one hand. Oblivious of my presence, though she actually touched my dressing-gown with the hand that pulled the cords, she resumed her dreadful, solemn march, disappearing at length down the long vista of the corridor like a shadow. But as she passed me, her voice began again, so that I heard each word distinctly as she uttered it, her head aloft, her figure upright, as though she moved at the head of a procession:\n\n'A drop of cold water, given in His name, shall moisten their burning tongues.'\n\nIt was repeated monotonously over and over again, droning down into the distance as she went, until at length both voice and figure faded into the shadows at the farther end.\n\nFor a time, I have no means of measuring precisely, I stood in that dark corner, pressing my back against the wall, and would have drawn the curtains down to hide me had I dared to stretch an arm out. The dread that presently the woman would return passed gradually away. I realised that the air had emptied, the crowd her presence had stirred into activity had retreated; I was alone in the gloomy under-spaces of the odious building... Then I remembered suddenly again the terrified women waiting for me on that upper landing; and realised that my skin was wet and freezing cold after a profuse perspiration. I prepared to retrace my steps. I remember the effort it cost me to leave the support of the wall and covering darkness of my corner, and step out into the grey light of the corridor. At first I sidled, then, finding this mode of walking impossible, turned my face boldly and walked quickly, regardless that my dressing-gown set the precious objects shaking as I passed. A wind that sighed mournfully against the high, small windows seemed to have got inside the corridor as well; it felt so cold; and every moment I dreaded to see the outline of the woman's figure as she waited in recess or angle against the wall for me to pass.\n\nWas there another thing I dreaded even more? I cannot say. I only know that the first baize doors had swung-to behind me, and the second ones were close at hand, when the great dim thunder caught me, pouring up with prodigious volume so that it seemed to roll out from another world. It shook the very bowels of the building. I was closer to it than that other time, when it had followed me from the goblin garden. There was strength and hardness in it, as of metal reverberation. Some touch of numbness, almost of paralysis, must surely have been upon me that I felt no actual terror, for I remember even turning and standing still to hear it better. 'That is the Noise,' my thought ran stupidly, and I think I whispered it aloud; 'the Doors are closing.'\n\nThe wind outside against the windows was audible, so it cannot have been really loud, yet to me it was the biggest, deepest sound I have ever heard, but so far away, with such awful remoteness in it, that I had to doubt my own ears at the same time. It seemed underground\u2014the rumbling of earthquake gates that shut remorselessly within the rocky Earth\u2014stupendous ultimate thunder. They were shut off from help again. The doors had closed.\n\nI felt a storm of pity, an agony of bitter, futile hate sweep through me. My memory of the figure changed then. The Woman with the glass of cooling water had stepped down from Heaven; but the Man\u2014or was it Men?\u2014who smeared this terrible layer of belief and Thought upon the world!...\n\nI crossed the dining-room\u2014it was fancy, of course, that held my eyes from glancing at the portrait for fear I should see it smiling approval\u2014and so finally reached the hall, where the light from the floor above seemed now quite bright in comparison. All the doors I closed carefully behind me; but first I had to open them. The woman had closed every one. Up the stairs, then, I actually ran, two steps at a time. My sister was standing outside Mabel's door. By her face I knew that she had also heard. There was no need to ask. I quickly made my mind up.\n\n'There's nothing,' I said, and detailed briefly my tour of search. 'All is quiet and undisturbed downstairs.' May God forgive me!\n\nShe beckoned to me, closing the door softly behind her. My heart beat violently a moment, then stood still.\n\n'Mabel,' she said aloud.\n\nIt was like the sentence of a judge, that one short word.\n\nI tried to push past her and go in, but she stopped me with her arm. She was wholly mistress of herself, I saw.\n\n'Hush!' she said in a lower voice. 'I've got her round again with brandy. She's sleeping quietly now. We won't disturb her.'\n\nShe drew me farther out into the landing, and as she did so, the clock in the hall below struck half-past three. I had stood, then, thirty minutes in the corridor below. 'You've been such a long time,' she said simply. 'I feared for you,' and she took my hand in her own that was cold and clammy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 489", + "text": "And then, while that dreadful house stood listening about us in the early hours of this chill morning upon the edge of winter, she told me, with laconic brevity, things about Mabel that I heard as from a distance. There was nothing so unusual or tremendous in the short recital, nothing indeed I might not have already guessed for myself. It was the time and scene, the inference, too, that made it so afflicting: the idea that Mabel believed herself so utterly and hopelessly lost\u2014beyond recovery damned.\n\nThat she had loved him with so passionate a devotion that she had given her soul into his keeping, this certainly I had not divined\u2014probably because I had never thought about it one way or the other. He had 'converted' her, I knew, but that she had subscribed whole-heartedly to that most cruel and ugly of his dogmas\u2014this was new to me, and came with a certain shock as I heard it. In love, of course, the weaker nature is receptive to all manner of suggestion. This man had 'suggested' his pet brimstone lake so vividly that she had listened and believed. He had frightened her into heaven; and his heaven, a definite locality in the skies, had its foretaste here on earth in miniature\u2014The Towers, house and garden. Into his dolorous scheme of a handful saved and millions damned, his enclosure, as it were, of sheep and goats, he had swept her before she was aware of it. Her mind no longer was her own. And it was Mrs. Marsh who kept the thought-stream open, though tempered, as she deemed, with that touch of craven, superstitious mercy.\n\nBut what I found it difficult to understand, and still more difficult to accept, was that, during her year abroad, she had been so haunted with a secret dread of that hideous after-death that she had finally revolted and tried to recover that clearer state of mind she had enjoyed before the religious bully had stunned her\u2014yet had tried in vain. She had returned to The Towers to find her soul again, only to realise that it was lost eternally. The cleaner state of mind lay then beyond recovery. In the reaction that followed the removal of his terrible 'suggestion,' she felt the crumbling of all that he had taught her, but searched in vain for the peace and beauty his teachings had destroyed. Nothing came to replace these. She was empty, desolate, hopeless; craving her former joy and carelessness, she found only hate and diabolical calculation. This man, whom she had loved to the point of losing her soul for him, had bequeathed to her one black and fiery thing\u2014the terror of the damned. His thinking wrapped her in this iron garment that held her fast.\n\nAll this Frances told me, far more briefly than I have here repeated it. In her eyes and gestures and laconic sentences lay the conviction of great beating issues and of menacing drama my own description fails to recapture. It was all so incongruous and remote from the world I lived in that more than once a smile, though a smile of pity, fluttered to my lips; but a glimpse of my face in the mirror showed rather the leer of a grimace. There was no real laughter anywhere that night. The entire adventure seemed so incredible, here, in this twentieth century\u2014but yet delusion, that feeble word, did not occur once in the comments my mind suggested though did not utter. I remembered that forbidding Shadow too; my sister's water-colours; the vanished personality of our hostess; the inexplicable, thundering Noise, and the figure of Mrs. Marsh in her midnight ritual that was so childish yet so horrible. I shivered in spite of my own 'emancipated' cast of mind.\n\n'There is no Mabel,' were the words with which my sister sent another shower of ice down my spine. 'He has killed her in his lake of fire and brimstone.'\n\nI stared at her blankly, as in a nightmare where nothing true or possible ever happened.\n\n'He killed her in his lake of fire and brimstone,' she repeated more faintly.\n\nA desperate effort was in me to say the strong, sensible thing which should destroy the oppressive horror that grew so stiflingly about us both, but again the mirror drew the attempted smile into the merest grin, betraying the distortion that was everywhere in the place.\n\n'You mean,' I stammered beneath my breath, 'that her faith has gone, but that the terror has remained?' I asked it, dully groping. I moved out of the line of the reflection in the glass.\n\nShe bowed her head as though beneath a weight; her skin was the pallor of grey ashes.\n\n'You mean,' I said louder, 'that she has lost her\u2014mind?'\n\n'She is terror incarnate,' was the whispered answer. 'Mabel has lost her soul. Her soul is\u2014there!' She pointed horribly below. 'She is seeking it...?'\n\nThe word 'soul' stung me into something of my normal self again.\n\n'But her terror, poor thing, is not\u2014cannot be\u2014transferable to us!' I exclaimed more vehemently. 'It certainly is not convertible into feelings, sights and\u2014even sounds!'\n\nShe interrupted me quickly, almost impatiently, speaking with that conviction by which she conquered me so easily that night.\n\n'It is her terror that has revived \"the Others.\" It has brought her into touch with them. They are loose and driving after her. Her efforts at resistance have given them also hope\u2014that escape, after all, is possible. Day and night they strive.'\n\n'Escape! Others!' The anger fast rising in me dropped of its own accord at the moment of birth. It shrank into a shuddering beyond my control. In that moment, I think, I would have believed in the possibility of anything and everything she might tell me. To argue or contradict seemed equally futile.\n\n'His strong belief, as also the beliefs of others who have preceded him,' she replied, so sure of herself that I actually turned to look over my shoulder, 'have left their shadow like a thick deposit over the house and grounds. To them, poor souls imprisoned by thought, it was hopeless as granite walls\u2014until her resistance, her effort to dissipate it\u2014let in light. Now, in their thousands, they are flocking to this little light, seeking escape. Her own escape, don't you see, may release them all!'\n\nIt took my breath away. Had his predecessors, former occupants of this house, also preached damnation of all the world but their own exclusive sect? Was this the explanation of her obscure talk of 'layers,' each striving against the other for domination? And if men are spirits, and these spirits survive, could strong Thought thus determine their condition even afterwards?\n\nSo many questions flooded into me that I selected no one of them, but stared in uncomfortable silence, bewildered, out of my depth, and acutely, painfully distressed. There was so odd a mixture of possible truth and incredible, unacceptable explanation in it all; so much confirmed, yet so much left darker than before. What she said did, indeed, offer a quasi-interpretation of my own series of abominable sensations\u2014strife, agony, pity, hate, escape\u2014but so far-fetched that only the deep conviction in her voice and attitude made it tolerable for a second even. I found myself in a curious state of mind. I could neither think clearly nor say a word to refute her amazing statements, whispered there beside me in the shivering hours of the early morning with only a wall between ourselves and\u2014Mabel. Close behind her words I remember this singular thing, however\u2014that an atmosphere as of the Inquisition seemed to rise and stir about the room, beating awful wings of black above my head.\n\nAbruptly, then, a moment's common-sense returned to me. I faced her.\n\n'And the Noise?' I said aloud, more firmly, 'the roar of the closing doors? We have all heard that! Is that subjective too?'\n\nFrances looked sideways about her in a queer fashion that made my flesh creep again. I spoke brusquely, almost angrily. I repeated the question, and waited with anxiety for her reply.\n\n'What noise?' she asked, with the frank expression of an innocent child. 'What closing doors?'\n\nBut her face turned from grey to white, and I saw that drops of perspiration glistened on her forehead. She caught at the back of a chair to steady herself, then glanced about her again with that sidelong look that made my blood run cold. I understood suddenly then. She did not take in what I said. I knew now. She was listening\u2014for something else.\n\nAnd the discovery revived in me a far stronger emotion than any mere desire for immediate explanation. Not only did I not insist upon an answer, but I was actually terrified lest she would answer. More, I felt in me a terror lest I should be moved to describe my own experiences below-stairs, thus increasing their reality and so the reality of all. She might even explain them too!\n\nStill listening intently, she raised her head and looked me in the eyes. Her lips opened to speak. The words came to me from a great distance, it seemed, and her voice had a sound like a stone that drops into a deep well, its fate though hidden, known.\n\n'We are in it with her, too, Bill. We are in it with her. Our interpretations vary\u2014because we are\u2014in parts of it only. Mabel is in it\u2014all.'\n\nThe desire for violence came over me. If only she would say a definite thing in plain King's English! If only I could find it in me to give utterance to what shouted so loud within me! If only\u2014the same old cry\u2014something would happen! For all this elliptic talk that dazed my mind left obscurity everywhere. Her atrocious meaning, none the less, flashed through me, though vanishing before it wholly divulged itself.\n\nIt brought a certain reaction with it. I found my tongue. Whether I actually believed what I said is more than I can swear to; that it seemed to me wise at the moment is all I remember. My mind was in a state of obscure perception less than that of normal consciousness.\n\n'Yes, Frances, I believe that what you say is the truth, and that we are in it with her'\u2014I meant to say it with loud, hostile emphasis, but instead I whispered it lest she should hear the trembling of my voice\u2014'and for that reason, my dear sister, we leave to-morrow, you and I\u2014to-day, rather, since it is long past midnight\u2014we leave this house of the damned. We go back to London.'\n\nFrances looked up, her face distraught almost beyond recognition. But it was not my words that caused the tumult in her heart. It was a sound\u2014the sound she had been listening for\u2014so faint I barely caught it myself, and had she not pointed I could never have known the direction whence it came. Small and terrible it rose again in the stillness of the night, the sound of gnashing teeth. And behind it came another\u2014the tread of stealthy footsteps. Both were just outside the door.\n\nThe room swung round me for a second. My first instinct to prevent my sister going out\u2014she had dashed past me frantically to the door\u2014gave place to another when I saw the expression in her eyes. I followed her lead instead; it was surer than my own. The pistol in my pocket swung uselessly against my thigh. I was flustered beyond belief and ashamed that I was so.\n\n'Keep close to me, Frances,' I said huskily, as the door swung wide and a shaft of light fell upon a figure moving rapidly. Mabel was going down the corridor. Beyond her, in the shadows on the staircase, a second figure stood beckoning, scarcely visible.\n\n'Before they get her! Quick!' was screamed into my ears, and our arms were about her in the same moment. It was a horrible scene. Not that Mabel struggled in the least, but that she collapsed as we caught her and fell with her dead weight, as of a corpse, limp, against us. And her teeth began again. They continued, even beneath the hand that Frances clapped upon her lips...\n\nWe carried her back into her own bedroom, where she lay down peacefully enough. It was so soon over... The rapidity of the whole thing robbed it of reality almost. It had the swiftness of something remembered rather than of something witnessed. She slept again so quickly that it was almost as if we had caught her sleep-walking. I cannot say. I asked no questions at the time; I have asked none since; and my help was needed as little as the protection of my pistol. Frances was strangely competent and collected... I lingered for some time uselessly by the door, till at length, looking up with a sigh, she made a sign for me to go.\n\n'I shall wait in your room next door,' I whispered, 'till you come.' But, though going out, I waited in the corridor instead, so as to hear the faintest call for help. In that dark corridor upstairs I waited, but not long. It may have been fifteen minutes when Frances reappeared, locking the door softly behind her. Leaning over the banisters, I saw her.\n\n'I'll go in again about six o'clock,' she whispered, 'as soon as it gets light. She is sound asleep now. Please don't wait. If anything happens I'll call\u2014you might leave your door ajar, perhaps.' And she came up, looking like a ghost.\n\nBut I saw her first safely into bed, and the rest of the night I spent in an armchair close to my opened door, listening for the slightest sound. Soon after five o'clock I heard Frances fumbling with the key, and, peering over the railing again, I waited till she reappeared and went back into her own room. She closed her door. Evidently she was satisfied that all was well.\n\nThen, and then only, did I go to bed myself, but not to sleep. I could not get the scene out of my mind, especially that odious detail of it which I hoped and believed my sister had not seen\u2014the still, dark figure of the housekeeper waiting on the stairs below\u2014waiting, of course, for Mabel." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 490", + "text": "It seems I became a mere spectator after that; my sister's lead was so assured for one thing, and, for another, the responsibility of leaving Mabel alone\u2014Frances laid it bodily upon my shoulders\u2014was a little more than I cared about. Moreover, when we all three met later in the day, things went on so exactly as before, so absolutely without friction or distress, that to present a sudden, obvious excuse for cutting our visit short seemed ill-judged. And on the lowest grounds it would have been desertion. At any rate, it was beyond my powers, and Frances was quite firm that she must stay. We therefore did stay. Things that happen in the night always seem exaggerated and distorted when the sun shines brightly next morning; no one can reconstruct the terror of a nightmare afterwards, nor comprehend why it seemed so overwhelming at the time.\n\nI slept till ten o'clock, and when I rang for breakfast, a note from my sister lay upon the tray, its message of counsel couched in a calm and comforting strain. Mabel, she assured me, was herself again and remembered nothing of what had happened; there was no need of any violent measures; I was to treat her exactly as if I knew nothing. 'And, if you don't mind, Bill, let us leave the matter unmentioned between ourselves as well. Discussion exaggerates; such things are best not talked about. I'm sorry I disturbed you so unnecessarily; I was stupidly excited. Please forget all the things I said at the moment.' She had written 'nonsense' first instead of 'things,' then scratched it out. She wished to convey that hysteria had been abroad in the night, and I readily gulped the explanation down, though it could not satisfy me in the smallest degree.\n\nThere was another week of our visit still, and we stayed it out to the end without disaster. My desire to leave at times became that frantic thing, desire to escape; but I controlled it, kept silent, watched and wondered. Nothing happened. As before, and everywhere, there was no sequence of development, no connection between cause and effect; and climax, none whatever. The thing swayed up and down, backwards and forwards like a great loose curtain in the wind, and I could only vaguely surmise what caused the draught or why there was a curtain at all. A novelist might mould the queer material into coherent sequence that would be interesting but could not be true. It remains, therefore, not a story but a history. Nothing happened.\n\nPerhaps my intense dislike of the fall of darkness was due wholly to my stirred imagination, and perhaps my anger when I learned that Frances now occupied a bed in our hostess's room was unreasonable. Nerves were unquestionably on edge. I was for ever on the look-out for some event that should make escape imperative, but yet that never presented itself. I slept lightly, left my door ajar to catch the slightest sound, even made stealthy tours of the house below-stairs while everybody dreamed in their beds. But I discovered nothing; the doors were always locked; I neither saw the housekeeper again in unreasonable times and places, nor heard a footstep in the passages and halls. The Noise was never once repeated. That horrible, ultimate thunder, my intensest dread of all, lay withdrawn into the abyss whence it had twice arisen. And though in my thoughts it was sternly denied existence, the great black reason for the fact afflicted me unbelievably. Since Mabel's fruitless effort to escape, the Doors kept closed remorselessly. She had failed; they gave up hope. For this was the explanation that haunted the region of my mind where feelings stir and hint before they clothe themselves in actual language. Only I firmly kept it there; it never knew expression.\n\nBut, if my ears were open, my eyes were opened too, and it were idle to pretend that I did not notice a hundred details that were capable of sinister interpretation had I been weak enough to yield. Some protective barrier had fallen into ruins round me, so that Terror stalked behind the general collapse, feeling for me through all the gaping fissures. Much of this, I admit, must have been merely the elaboration of those sensations I had first vaguely felt, before subsequent events and my talks with Frances had dramatised them into living thoughts. I therefore leave them unmentioned in this history, just as my mind left them unmentioned in that interminable final week.\n\nOur life went on precisely as before\u2014Mabel unreal and outwardly so still; Frances, secretive, anxious, tactful to the point of slyness, and keen to save to the point of self-forgetfulness. There were the same stupid meals, the same wearisome long evenings, the stifling ugliness of house and grounds, the Shadow settling in so thickly that it seemed almost a visible, tangible thing. I came to feel the only friendly things in all this hostile, cruel place were the robins that hopped boldly over the monstrous terraces and even up to the windows of the unsightly house itself. The robins alone knew joy; they danced, believing no evil thing was possible in all God's radiant world. They believed in everybody; their god's plan of life had no room in it for hell, damnation and lakes of brimstone. I came to love the little birds. Had Samuel Franklyn known them, he might have preached a different sermon, bequeathing love in place of terror!...\n\nMost of my time I spent writing; but it was a pretence at best, and rather a dangerous one besides. For it stirred the mind to production, with the result that other things came pouring in as well. With reading it was the same. In the end I found an aggressive, deliberate resistance to be the only way of feasible defence. To walk far afield was out of the question, for it meant leaving my sister too long alone, so that my exercise was confined to nearer home. My saunters in the grounds, however, never surprised the goblin garden again. It was close at hand, but I seemed unable to get wholly into it. Too many things assailed my mind for any one to hold exclusive possession, perhaps.\n\nIndeed, all the interpretations, all the 'layers,' to use my sister's phrase, slipped in by turns and lodged there for a time. They came day and night, and though my reason denied them entrance they held their own as by a kind of squatters' right. They stirred moods already in me, that is, and did not introduce entirely new ones; for every mind conceals ancestral deposits that have been cultivated in turn along the whole line of its descent. Any day a chance shower may cause this one or that to blossom. Thus it came to me, at any rate. After darkness the Inquisition paced the empty corridors and set up ghastly apparatus in the dismal halls; and once, in the library, there swept over me that easy and delicious conviction that by confessing my wickedness I could resume it later, since Confession is expression, and expression brings relief and leaves one ready to accumulate again. And in such mood I felt bitter and unforgiving towards all others who thought differently. Another time it was a Pagan thing that assaulted me\u2014so trivial yet oh, so significant at the time\u2014when I dreamed that a herd of centaurs rolled up with a great stamping of hoofs round the house to destroy it, and then woke to hear the horses tramping across the field below the lawns; they neighed ominously and their noisy panting was audible as if it were just outside my windows.\n\nBut the tree episode, I think, was the most curious of all\u2014except, perhaps, the incident with the children which I shall mention in a moment\u2014for its closeness to reality was so unforgettable. Outside the east window of my room stood a giant wellingtonia on the lawn, its head rising level with the upper sash. It grew some twenty feet away, planted on the highest terrace, and I often saw it when closing my curtains for the night, noticing how it drew its heavy skirts about it, and how the light from other windows threw glimmering streaks and patches that turned it into the semblance of a towering, solemn image. It stood there then so strikingly, somehow like a great old-world idol, that it claimed attention. Its appearance was curiously formidable. Its branches rustled without visibly moving and it had a certain portentous, forbidding air, so grand and dark and monstrous in the night that I was always glad when my curtains shut it out. Yet, once in bed, I had never thought about it one way or the other, and by day had certainly never sought it out.\n\nOne night, then, as I went to bed and closed this window against a cutting easterly wind, I saw\u2014that there were two of these trees. A brother wellingtonia rose mysteriously beside it, equally huge, equally towering, equally monstrous. The menacing pair of them faced me there upon the lawn. But in this new arrival lay a strange suggestion that frightened me before I could argue it away. Exact counterpart of its giant companion, it revealed also that gross, odious quality that all my sister's paintings held. I got the odd impression that the rest of these trees, stretching away dimly in a troop over the farther lawns, were similar, and that, led by this enormous pair, they had all moved boldly closer to my windows. At the same moment a blind was drawn down over an upper room; the second tree disappeared into the surrounding darkness. It was, of course, this chance light that had brought it into the field of vision, but when the black shutter dropped over it, hiding it from view, the manner of its vanishing produced the queer effect that it had slipped into its companion\u2014almost that it had been an emanation of the one I so disliked, and not really a tree at all! In this way the garden turned vehicle for expressing what lay behind it all!...\n\nThe behaviour of the doors, the little, ordinary doors, seems scarcely worth mention at all, their queer way of opening and shutting of their own accord; for this was accountable in a hundred natural ways, and to tell the truth, I never caught one in the act of moving. Indeed, only after frequent repetitions did the detail force itself upon me, when, having noticed one, I noticed all. It produced, however, the unpleasant impression of a continual coming and going in the house, as though, screened cleverly and purposely from actual sight, some one in the building held constant invisible intercourse with\u2014others.\n\nUpon detailed descriptions of these uncertain incidents I do not venture, individually so trivial, but taken all together so impressive and so insolent. But the episode of the children, mentioned above, was different. And I give it because it showed how vividly the intuitive child-mind received the impression\u2014one impression, at any rate\u2014of what was in the air. It may be told in a very few words. I believe they were the coachman's children, and that the man had been in Mr. Franklyn's service; but of neither point am I quite positive. I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls\u2014it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour\u2014and on hurrying up I found a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat, and two other children\u2014boys, one about twelve and one much younger\u2014gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose-trees. The girl was white and frightened, but the others were laughing and talking among themselves so busily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival. Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become too serious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in the girl's eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed. I unfastened her at once; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had not hurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale. She collapsed a moment upon the bench, then picked up her tiny skirts and dived away at full speed into the safety of the stable-yard. There was no response to my brief comforting, but she ran as though for her life, and I divined that some horrid boys' cruelty had been afoot. It was probably mere thoughtlessness, as cruelty with children usually is, but something in me decided to discover exactly what it was.\n\nAnd the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughed shyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told me frankly what their 'gime' had been. There was no vestige of shame in them, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality. That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there. To them, though make-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right and natural and in no sense cruel. Grown-ups did it too. It was necessary for her good.\n\n'We was going to burn her up, sir,' the older one informed me, answering my 'Why?' with the explanation, 'Because she wouldn't believe what we wanted 'er to believe.'\n\nAnd, game though it was, the feeling of reality about the little episode was so arresting, so terrific in some way, that only with difficulty did I confine my admonitions on this occasion to mere words. The boys slunk off, frightened in their turn, yet not, I felt, convinced that they had erred in principle. It was their inheritance. They had breathed it in with the atmosphere of their bringing-up. They would renew the salutary torture when they could\u2014till she 'believed' as they did.\n\nI went back into the house, afflicted with a passion of mingled pity and distress impossible to describe, yet on my short way across the garden was attacked by other moods in turn, each more real and bitter than its predecessor. I received the whole series, as it were, at once. I felt like a diver rising to the surface through layers of water at different temperatures, though here the natural order was reversed, and the cooler strata were uppermost, the heated ones below. Thus, I was caught by the goblin touch of the willows that fringed the field; by the sensuous curving of the twisted ash that formed a gateway to the little grove of sapling oaks where fauns and satyrs lurked to play in the moonlight before Pagan altars; and by the cloaking darkness, next, of the copse of stunted pines, close gathered each to each, where hooded figures stalked behind an awful cross. The episode with the children seemed to have opened me like a knife. The whole Place rushed at me.\n\nI suspect this synthesis of many moods produced in me that climax of loathing and disgust which made me feel the limit of bearable emotion had been reached, so that I made straight to find Frances in order to convince her that at any rate I must leave. For, although this was our last day in the house, and we had arranged to go next day, the dread was in me that she would still find some persuasive reason for staying on. And an unexpected incident then made my dread unnecessary. The front door was open and a cab stood in the drive; a tall, elderly man was gravely talking in the hall with the parlour-maid we called the Grenadier. He held a piece of paper in his hand. 'I have called to see the house,' I heard him say, as I ran up the stairs to Frances, who was peering like an inquisitive child over the banisters...\n\n'Yes,' she told me with a sigh, I know not whether of resignation or relief, 'the house is to be let or sold. Mabel has decided. Some Society or other, I believe\u2014'\n\nI was overjoyed: this made our leaving right and possible. 'You never told me, Frances!'\n\n'Mabel only heard of it a few days ago. She told me herself this morning. It is a chance, she says. Alone she cannot get it \"straight.\"'\n\n'Defeat?' I asked, watching her closely.\n\n'She thinks she has found a way out. It's not a family, you see, it's a Society, a sort of Community\u2014they go in for thought\u2014'\n\n'A Community!' I gasped. 'You mean religious?'\n\nShe shook her head. 'Not exactly,' she said smiling, 'but some kind of association of men and women who want a headquarters in the country\u2014a place where they can write and meditate\u2014think\u2014mature their plans and all the rest\u2014I don't know exactly what.'\n\n'Utopian dreamers?' I asked, yet feeling an immense relief come over me as I heard. But I asked in ignorance, not cynically. Frances would know. She knew all this kind of thing.\n\n'No, not that exactly,' she smiled. 'Their teachings are grand and simple\u2014old as the world too, really\u2014the basis of every religion before men's mind perverted them with their manufactured creeds\u2014'\n\nFootsteps on the stairs, and the sound of voices, interrupted our odd impromptu conversation, as the Grenadier came up, followed by the tall, grave gentleman who was being shown over the house. My sister drew me along the corridor towards her room, where she went in and closed the door behind me, yet not before I had stolen a good look at the caller\u2014long enough, at least, for his face and general appearance to have made a definite impression on me. For something strong and peaceful emanated from his presence; he moved with such quiet dignity; the glance of his eyes was so steady and reassuring, that my mind labelled him instantly as a type of man one would turn to in an emergency and not be disappointed. I had seen him but for a passing moment, but I had seen him twice, and the way he walked down the passage, looking competently about him, conveyed the same impression as when I saw him standing at the door\u2014fearless, tolerant, wise. 'A sincere and kindly character,' I judged instantly, 'a man whom some big kind of love has trained in sweetness towards the world; no hate in him anywhere.' A great deal, no doubt, to read in so brief a glance! Yet his voice confirmed my intuition, a deep and very gentle voice, great firmness in it too.\n\n'Have I become suddenly sensitive to people's atmospheres in this extraordinary fashion?' I asked myself, smiling, as I stood in the room and heard the door close behind me. 'Have I developed some clairvoyant faculty here?' At any other time I should have mocked.\n\nAnd I sat down and faced my sister, feeling strangely comforted and at peace for the first time since I had stepped beneath The Towers' roof a month ago. Frances, I then saw, was smiling a little as she watched me.\n\n'You know him?' I asked.\n\n'You felt it too?' was her question in reply. 'No,' she added, 'I don't know him\u2014beyond the fact that he is a leader in the Movement and has devoted years and money to its objects. Mabel felt the same thing in him that you have felt\u2014and jumped at it.'\n\n'But you've seen him before?' I urged, for the certainty was in me that he was no stranger to her.\n\nShe shook her head. 'He called one day early this week, when you were out. Mabel saw him. I believe\u2014' she hesitated a moment, as though expecting me to stop her with my usual impatience of such subjects\u2014'I believe he has explained everything to her\u2014the beliefs he embodies, she declares, are her salvation\u2014might be, rather, if she could adopt them.'\n\n'Conversion again!' For I remembered her riches, and how gladly a Society would gobble them.\n\n'The layers I told you about,' she continued calmly, shrugging her shoulders slightly\u2014'the deposits that are left behind by strong thinking and real belief\u2014but especially by ugly, hateful belief, because, you see\u2014there's more vital passion in that sort\u2014'\n\n'Frances, I don't understand a bit,' I said out loud, but said it a little humbly, for the impression the man had left was still strong upon me and I was grateful for the steady sense of peace and comfort he had somehow introduced. The horrors had been so dreadful. My nerves, doubtless, were more than a little overstrained. Absurd as it must sound, I classed him in my mind with the robins, the happy, confiding robins who believed in everybody and thought no evil! I laughed a moment at my ridiculous idea, and my sister, encouraged by this sign of patience in me, continued more fluently.\n\n'Of course you don't understand, Bill? Why should you? You've never thought about such things. Needing no creed yourself, you think all creeds are rubbish.'\n\n'I'm open to conviction\u2014I'm tolerant,' I interrupted.\n\n'You're as narrow as Sam Franklyn, and as crammed with prejudice,' she answered, knowing that she had me at her mercy.\n\n'Then, pray, what may be his, or his Society's beliefs?' I asked, feeling no desire to argue, 'and how are they going to prove your Mabel's salvation? Can they bring beauty into all this aggressive hate and ugliness?'\n\n'Certain hope and peace,' she said, 'that peace which is understanding, and that understanding which explains all creeds and therefore tolerates them.'\n\n'Toleration! The one word a religious man loathes above all others! His pet word is damnation\u2014'\n\n'Tolerates them,' she repeated patiently, unperturbed by my explosion, 'because it includes them all.'\n\n'Fine, if true,' I admitted, 'very fine. But how, pray, does it include them all?'\n\n'Because the key-word, the motto, of their Society is, \"There is no religion higher than Truth,\" and it has no single dogma of any kind. Above all,' she went on, 'because it claims that no individual can be \"lost.\" It teaches universal salvation. To damn outsiders is uncivilised, childish, impure. Some take longer than others\u2014it's according to the way they think and live\u2014but all find peace, through development, in the end. What the creeds call a hopeless soul, it regards as a soul having further to go. There is no damnation\u2014'\n\n'Well, well,' I exclaimed, feeling that she rode her hobby-horse too wildly, too roughly over me, 'but what is the bearing of all this upon this dreadful place, and upon Mabel? I'll admit that there is this atmosphere\u2014this\u2014er\u2014inexplicable horror in the house and grounds, and that if not of damnation exactly, it is certainly damnable. I'm not too prejudiced to deny that, for I've felt it myself.'\n\nTo my relief she was brief. She made her statement, leaving me to take it or reject it as I would.\n\n'The thought and belief its former occupants\u2014have left behind. For there has been coincidence here, a coincidence that must be rare. The site on which this modern house now stands was Roman, before that Early Britain, with burial mounds, before that again, Druid\u2014the Druid stones still lie in that copse below the field, the Tumuli among the ilexes behind the drive. The older building Sam Franklyn altered and practically pulled down was a monastery; he changed the chapel into a meeting hall, which is now the music room; but, before he came here, the house was occupied by Manetti, a violent Catholic without tolerance or vision; and in the interval between these two, Julius Weinbaum had it, Hebrew of most rigid orthodox type imaginable\u2014so they all have left their\u2014'\n\n'Even so,' I repeated, yet interested to hear the rest, 'what of it?'\n\n'Simply this,' said Frances with conviction, 'that each in turn has left his layer of concentrated thinking and belief behind him; because each believed intensely, absolutely, beyond the least weakening of any doubt\u2014the kind of strong belief and thinking that is rare anywhere to-day, the kind that wills, impregnates objects, saturates the atmosphere, haunts, in a word. And each, believing he was utterly and finally right, damned with equally positive conviction the rest of the world. One and all preached that implicitly if not explicitly. It's the root of every creed. Last of the bigoted, grim series came Samuel Franklyn.'\n\nI listened in amazement that increased as she went on. Up to this point her explanation was so admirable. It was, indeed, a pretty study in psychology if it were true.\n\n'Then why does nothing ever happen?' I enquired mildly. 'A place so thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!'\n\n'There lies the proof,' she went on in a lowered voice, 'the proof of the horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupant in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the moment there's an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative state, believing nothing positive herself, the place for the first time found itself free to reproduce its buried stores. Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest\u2014the most permanent and vital thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the world\u2014broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back. Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of agonised, bitter warring to find safety, peace\u2014salvation. The place is saturated by that appalling stream of thinking\u2014the terror of the damned. It concentrated upon Mabel, whose negative attitude furnished the channel of deliverance. You and I, according to our sympathy with her, were similarly involved. Nothing happened, because no one layer could ever gain the supremacy.'\n\nI was so interested\u2014I dare not say amused\u2014that I stared in silence while she paused a moment, afraid that she would draw rein and end the fairy tale too soon.\n\n'The beliefs of this man, of his Society rather, vigorously thought and therefore vigorously given out here, will put the whole place straight. It will act as a solvent. These vitriolic layers actively denied, will fuse and disappear in the stream of gentle, tolerant sympathy which is love. For each member, worthy of the name, loves the world, and all creeds go into the melting-pot; Mabel, too, if she joins them out of real conviction, will find salvation\u2014'\n\n'Thinking, I know, is of the first importance,' I objected, 'but don't you, perhaps, exaggerate the power of feeling and emotion which in religion are au fond always hysterical?'\n\n'What is the world,' she told me, 'but thinking and feeling? An individual's world is entirely what that individual thinks and believes\u2014interpretation. There is no other. And unless he really thinks and really believes, he has no permanent world at all. I grant that few people think, and still fewer believe, and that most take ready-made suits and make them do. Only the strong make their own things; the lesser fry, Mabel among them, are merely swept up into what has been manufactured for them. They get along somehow. You and I have made for ourselves, Mabel has not. She is a nonentity, and when her belief is taken from her, she goes with it.'\n\nIt was not in me just then to criticise the evasion, or pick out the sophistry from the truth. I merely waited for her to continue.\n\n'None of us have Truth, my dear Frances,' I ventured presently, seeing that she kept silent.\n\n'Precisely,' she answered, 'but most of us have beliefs. And what one believes and thinks affects the world at large. Consider the legacy of hatred and cruelty involved in the doctrines men have built into their creeds where the sine qua non of salvation is absolute acceptance of one particular set of views or else perishing everlastingly\u2014for only by repudiating history can they disavow it\u2014'\n\n'You're not quite accurate,' I put in. 'Not all the creeds teach damnation, do they? Franklyn did, of course, but the others are a bit modernised now surely?'\n\n'Trying to get out of it,' she admitted, 'perhaps they are, but damnation of unbelievers\u2014of most of the world, that is\u2014is their rather favourite idea if you talk with them.'\n\n'I never have.'\n\nShe smiled. 'But I have,' she said significantly, 'So, if you consider what the various occupants of this house have so strongly held and thought and believed, you need not be surprised that the influence they have left behind them should be a dark and dreadful legacy. For thought, you know, does leave\u2014'\n\nThe opening of the door, to my great relief, interrupted her, as the Grenadier led in the visitor to see the room. He bowed to both of us with a brief word of apology, looked round him, and withdrew, and with his departure the conversation between us came naturally to an end. I followed him out. Neither of us in any case, I think, cared to argue further." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 491", + "text": "And, so far as I am aware, the curious history of The Towers ends here too. There was no climax in the story sense. Nothing ever really happened. We left next morning for London. I only know that the Society in question took the house and have since occupied it to their entire satisfaction, and that Mabel, who became a member shortly afterwards, now stays there frequently when in need of repose from the arduous and unselfish labours she took upon herself under its aegis. She dined with us only the other night, here in our tiny Chelsea flat, and a jollier, saner, more interesting and happy guest I could hardly wish for. She was vital\u2014in the best sense; the lay-figure had come to life. I found it difficult to believe she was the same woman whose fearful effigy had floated down those dreary corridors and almost disappeared in the depths of that atrocious Shadow.\n\nWhat her beliefs were now I was wise enough to leave unquestioned, and Frances, to my great relief, kept the conversation well away from such inappropriate topics. It was clear, however, that the woman had in herself some secret source of joy, that she was now an aggressive, positive force, sure of herself, and apparently afraid of nothing in heaven or hell. She radiated something very like hope and courage about her, and talked as though the world were a glorious place and everybody in it kind and beautiful. Her optimism was certainly infectious.\n\nThe Towers were mentioned only in passing. The name of Marsh came up\u2014not the Marsh, it so happened, but a name in some book that was being discussed\u2014and I was unable to restrain myself. Curiosity was too strong. I threw out a casual enquiry Mabel could leave unanswered if she wished. But there was no desire to avoid it. Her reply was frank and smiling.\n\n'Would you believe it? She married,' Mabel told me, though obviously surprised that I remembered the housekeeper at all; 'and is happy as the day is long. She's found her right niche in life. A sergeant\u2014'\n\n'The army!' I ejaculated.\n\n'Salvation Army,' she explained merrily.\n\nFrances exchanged a glance with me. I laughed too, for the information took me by surprise. I cannot say why exactly, but I expected at least to hear that the woman had met some dreadful end, not impossibly by burning.\n\n'And The Towers, now called the Rest House,' Mabel chattered on, 'seems to me the most peaceful and delightful spot in England\u2014'\n\n'Really,' I said politely.\n\n'When I lived there in the old days\u2014while you were there, perhaps, though I won't be sure,' Mabel went on, 'the story got abroad that it was haunted. Wasn't it odd? A less likely place for a ghost I've never seen. Why, it had no atmosphere at all.' She said this to Frances, glancing up at me with a smile that apparently had no hidden meaning. 'Did you notice anything queer about it when you were there?'\n\nThis was plainly addressed to me.\n\n'I found it\u2014er\u2014difficult to settle down to anything,' I said, after an instant's hesitation. 'I couldn't work there\u2014'\n\n'But I thought you wrote that wonderful book on the Deaf and Blind while you stayed with me,' she asked innocently.\n\nI stammered a little. 'Oh no, not then. I only made a few notes\u2014er\u2014at The Towers. My mind, oddly enough, refused to produce at all down there. But\u2014why do you ask? Did anything\u2014was anything supposed to happen there?'\n\nShe looked searchingly into my eyes a moment before she answered:\n\n'Not that I know of,' she said simply.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Descent Into Egypt ]\n\nHe was an accomplished, versatile man whom some called brilliant. Behind his talents lay a wealth of material that right selection could have lifted into genuine distinction. He did too many things, however, to excel in one, for a restless curiosity kept him ever on the move. George Isley was an able man. His short career in diplomacy proved it; yet, when he abandoned this for travel and exploration, no one thought it a pity. He would do big things in any line. He was merely finding himself.\n\nAmong the rolling stones of humanity a few acquire moss of considerable value. They are not necessarily shiftless; they travel light; the comfortable pockets in the game of life that attract the majority are too small to retain them; they are in and out again in a moment. The world says, 'What a pity! They stick to nothing!' but the fact is that, like questing wild birds, they seek the nest they need. It is a question of values. They judge swiftly, change their line of flight, are gone, not even hearing the comment that they might have 'retired with a pension.'\n\nAnd to this homeless, questing type George Isley certainly belonged. He was by no means shiftless. He merely sought with insatiable yearning that soft particular nest where he could settle down in permanently. And to an accompaniment of sighs and regrets from his friends he found it; he found it, however, not in the present, but by retiring from the world 'without a pension,' unclothed with honours and distinctions. He withdrew from the present and slipped softly back into a mighty Past where he belonged. Why; how; obeying what strange instincts\u2014this remains unknown, deep secret of an inner life that found no resting-place in modern things. Such instincts are not disclosable in twentieth-century language, nor are the details of such a journey properly describable at all. Except by the few\u2014poets, prophets, psychiatrists and the like\u2014such experiences are dismissed with the neat museum label\u2014'queer.'\n\nSo, equally, must the recorder of this experience share the honour of that little label\u2014he who by chance witnessed certain external and visible signs of this inner and spiritual journey. There remains, nevertheless, the amazing reality of the experience; and to the recorder alone was some clue of interpretation possible, perhaps, because in himself also lay the lure, though less imperative, of a similar journey. At any rate the interpretation may be offered to the handful who realise that trains and motors are not the only means of travel left to our progressive race.\n\nIn his younger days I knew George Isley intimately. I know him now. But the George Isley I knew of old, the arresting personality with whom I travelled, climbed, explored, is no longer with us. He is not here. He disappeared\u2014gradually\u2014into the past. There is no George Isley. And that such an individuality could vanish, while still his outer semblance walks the familiar streets, normal apparently, and not yet fifty in the number of his years, seems a tale, though difficult, well worth the telling. For I witnessed the slow submergence. It was very gradual. I cannot pretend to understand the entire significance of it. There was something questionable and sinister in the business that offered hints of astonishing possibilities. Were there a corps of spiritual police, the matter might be partially cleared up, but since none of the churches have yet organised anything effective of this sort, one can only fall back upon variants of the blessed 'Mesopotamia,' and whisper of derangement, and the like. Such labels, of course, explain as little as most other clich\u00e9s in life. That well-groomed, soldierly figure strolling down Piccadilly, watching the Races, dining out\u2014there is no derangement there. The face is not melancholy, the eye not wild; the gestures are quiet and the speech controlled. Yet the eye is empty, the face expressionless. Vacancy reigns there, provocative and significant. If not unduly noticeable, it is because the majority in life neither expect, nor offer, more.\n\nAt closer quarters you may think questioning things, or you may think\u2014nothing; probably the latter. You may wonder why something continually expected does not make its appearance; and you may watch for the evidence of 'personality' the general presentment of the man has led you to expect. Disappointed, therefore, you may certainly be; but I defy you to discover the smallest hint of mental disorder, and of derangement or nervous affliction, absolutely nothing. Before long, perhaps, you may feel you are talking with a dummy, some well-trained automaton, a nonentity devoid of spontaneous life; and afterwards you may find that memory fades rapidly away, as though no impression of any kind has really been made at all. All this, yes; but nothing pathological. A few may be stimulated by this startling discrepancy between promise and performance, but most, accustomed to accept face values, would say, 'a pleasant fellow, but nothing in him much...' and an hour later forget him altogether.\n\nFor the truth is as you, perhaps, divined. You have been sitting beside no one, you have been talking to, looking at, listening to\u2014no one. The intercourse has conveyed nothing that can waken human response in you, good, bad or indifferent. There is no George Isley. And the discovery, if you make it, will not even cause you to creep with the uncanniness of the experience, because the exterior is so wholly pleasing. George Isley to-day is a picture with no meaning in it that charms merely by the harmonious colouring of an inoffensive subject. He moves undiscovered in the little world of society to which he was born, secure in the groove first habit has made comfortably automatic for him. No one guesses; none, that is, but the few who knew him intimately in early life. And his wandering existence has scattered these; they have forgotten what he was. So perfect, indeed, is he in the manners of the commonplace fashionable man, that no woman in his 'set' is aware that he differs from the type she is accustomed to. He turns a compliment with the accepted language of her text-book, motors, golfs and gambles in the regulation manner of his particular world. He is an admirable, perfect automaton. He is nothing. He is a human shell." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 492", + "text": "The name of George Isley had been before the public for some years when, after a considerable interval, we met again in a hotel in Egypt, I for my health, he for I knew not what\u2014at first. But I soon discovered: archaeology and excavation had taken hold of him, though he had gone so quietly about it that no one seemed to have heard. I was not sure that he was glad to see me, for he had first withdrawn, annoyed, it seemed, at being discovered, but later, as though after consideration, had made tentative advances. He welcomed me with a curious gesture of the entire body that seemed to shake himself free from something that had made him forget my identity. There was pathos somewhere in his attitude, almost as though he asked for sympathy. 'I've been out here, off and on, for the last three years,' he told me, after describing something of what he had been doing. 'I find it the most repaying hobby in the world. It leads to a reconstruction\u2014an imaginative reconstruction, of course, I mean\u2014of an enormous thing the world had entirely lost. A very gorgeous, stimulating hobby, believe me, and a very entic\u2014' he quickly changed the word\u2014'exacting one indeed.'\n\nI remember looking him up and down with astonishment. There was a change in him, a lack; a note was missing in his enthusiasm, a colour in the voice, a quality in his manner. The ingredients were not mixed quite as of old. I did not bother him with questions, but I noted thus at the very first a subtle alteration. Another facet of the man presented itself. Something that had been independent and aggressive was replaced by a certain emptiness that invited sympathy. Even in his physical appearance the change was manifested\u2014this odd suggestion of lessening. I looked again more closely. Lessening was the word. He had somehow dwindled. It was startling, vaguely unpleasant too.\n\nThe entire subject, as usual, was at his finger-tips; he knew all the important men; and had spent money freely on his hobby. I laughed, reminding him of his remark that Egypt had no attractions for him, owing to the organised advertisement of its somewhat theatrical charms. Admitting his error with a gesture, he brushed the objection easily aside. His manner, and a certain glow that rose about his atmosphere as he answered, increased my first astonishment. His voice was significant and suggestive. 'Come out with me,' he said in a low tone, 'and see how little the tourists matter, how inappreciable the excavation is compared to what remains to be done, how gigantic'\u2014he emphasised the word impressively\u2014'the scope for discovery remains.' He made a movement with his head and shoulders that conveyed a sense of the prodigious, for he was of massive build, his cast of features stern, and his eyes, set deep into the face, shone past me with a sombre gleam in them I did not quite account for. It was the voice, however, that brought the mystery in. It vibrated somewhere below the actual sound of it. 'Egypt,' he continued\u2014and so gravely that at first I made the mistake of thinking he chose the curious words on purpose to produce a theatrical effect\u2014'that has enriched her blood with the pageant of so many civilisations, that has devoured Persians, Greeks and Romans, Saracens and Mamelukes, a dozen conquests and invasions besides,\u2014what can mere tourists or explorers matter to her? The excavators scratch their skin and dig up mummies; and as for tourists!'\u2014he laughed contemptuously\u2014'flies that settle for a moment on her covered face, to vanish at the first signs of heat! Egypt is not even aware of them. The real Egypt lies underground in darkness. Tourists must have light, to be seen as well as to see. And the diggers\u2014!'\n\nHe paused, smiling with something between pity and contempt I did not quite appreciate, for, personally, I felt a great respect for the tireless excavators. And then he added, with a touch of feeling in his tone as though he had a grievance against them, and had not also 'dug' himself, 'Men who uncover the dead, restore the temples, and reconstruct a skeleton, thinking they have read its beating heart...' He shrugged his great shoulders, and the rest of the sentence may have been but the protest of a man in defence of his own hobby, but that there seemed an undue earnestness and gravity about it that made me wonder more than ever. He went on to speak of the strangeness of the land as a mere ribbon of vegetation along the ancient river, the rest all ruins, desert, sun-drenched wilderness of death, yet so breakingly alive with wonder, power and a certain disquieting sense of deathlessness. There seemed, for him, a revelation of unusual spiritual kind in this land where the Past survived so potently. He spoke almost as though it obliterated the Present.\n\nIndeed, the hint of something solemn behind his words made it difficult for me to keep up the conversation, and the pause that presently came I filled in with some word of questioning surprise, which yet, I think, was chiefly in concurrence. I was aware of some big belief in him, some enveloping emotion that escaped my grasp. Yet, though I did not understand, his great mood swept me... His voice lowered, then, as he went on to mention temples, tombs and deities, details of his own discoveries and of their effect upon him, but to this I listened with half an ear, because in the unusual language he had first made use of I detected this other thing that stirred my curiosity more\u2014stirred it uncomfortably.\n\n'Then the spell,' I asked, remembering the effect of Egypt upon myself two years before, 'has worked upon you as upon most others, only with greater power?'\n\nHe looked hard at me a moment, signs of trouble showing themselves faintly in his rugged, interesting face. I think he wanted to say more than he could bring himself to confess. He hesitated.\n\n'I'm only glad,' he replied after a pause, 'it didn't get hold of me earlier in life. It would have absorbed me. I should have lost all other interests. Now,'\u2014that curious look of helplessness, of asking sympathy, flitted like a shadow through his eyes\u2014'now that I'm on the decline... it matters less.'\n\nOn the decline! I cannot imagine by what blundering I missed this chance he never offered again; somehow or other the singular phrase passed unnoticed at the moment, and only came upon me with its full significance later when it was too awkward to refer to it. He tested my readiness to help, to sympathise, to share his inner life. I missed the clue. For, at the moment, a more practical consideration interested me in his language. Being of those who regretted that he had not excelled by devoting his powers to a single object, I shrugged my shoulders. He caught my meaning instantly. Oh, he was glad to talk. He felt the possibility of my sympathy underneath, I think.\n\n'No, no, you take me wrongly there,' he said with gravity. 'What I mean\u2014and I ought to know if any one does!\u2014is that while most countries give, others take away. Egypt changes you. No one can live here and remain exactly what he was before.'\n\nThis puzzled me. It startled, too, again. His manner was so earnest. 'And Egypt, you mean, is one of the countries that take away?' I asked. The strange idea unsettled my thoughts a little.\n\n'First takes away from you,' he replied, 'but in the end takes you away. Some lands enrich you,' he went on, seeing that I listened, 'while others impoverish. From India, Greece, Italy, all ancient lands, you return with memories you can use. From Egypt you return with\u2014nothing. Its splendour stupefies; it's useless. There is a change in your inmost being, an emptiness, an unaccountable yearning, but you find nothing that can fill the lack you're conscious of. Nothing comes to replace what has gone. You have been drained.'\n\nI stared; but I nodded a general acquiescence. Of a sensitive, artistic temperament this was certainly true, though by no means the superficial and generally accepted verdict. The majority imagine that Egypt has filled them to the brim. I took his deeper reading of the facts. I was aware of an odd fascination in his idea.\n\n'Modern Egypt,' he continued, 'is, after all, but a trick of civilisation,' and there was a kind of breathlessness in his measured tone, 'but ancient Egypt lies waiting, hiding, underneath. Though dead, she is amazingly alive. And you feel her touching you. She takes from you. She enriches herself. You return from Egypt\u2014less than you were before.'\n\nWhat came over my mind is hard to say. Some touch of visionary imagination burned its flaming path across my mind. I thought of some old Grecian hero speaking of his delicious battle with the gods\u2014battle in which he knew he must be worsted, but yet in which he delighted because at death his spirit would join their glorious company beyond this world. I was aware, that is to say, of resignation as well as resistance in him. He already felt the effortless peace which follows upon long, unequal battling, as of a man who has fought the rapids with a strain beyond his strength, then sinks back and goes with the awful mass of water smoothly and indifferently\u2014over the quiet fall.\n\nYet, it was not so much his words which clothed picturesquely an undeniable truth, as the force of conviction that drove behind them, shrouding my mind with mystery and darkness. His eyes, so steadily holding mine, were lit, I admit, yet they were calm and sane as those of a doctor discussing the symptoms of that daily battle to which we all finally succumb. This analogy occurred to me.\n\n'There is'\u2014I stammered a little, faltering in my speech\u2014'an incalculable element in the country... somewhere, I confess. You put it\u2014rather strongly, though, don't you?'\n\nHe answered quietly, moving his eyes from my face towards the window that framed the serene and exquisite sky towards the Nile.\n\n'The real, invisible Egypt,' he murmured, 'I do find rather\u2014strong. I find it difficult to deal with. You see,' and he turned towards me, smiling like a tired child, 'I think the truth is that Egypt deals with me.'\n\n'It draws\u2014' I began, then started as he interrupted me at once.\n\n'Into the Past.' He uttered the little word in a way beyond me to describe. There came a flood of glory with it, a sense of peace and beauty, of battles over and of rest attained. No saint could have brimmed 'Heaven' with as much passionately enticing meaning. He went willingly, prolonging the struggle merely to enjoy the greater relief and joy of the consummation.\n\nFor again he spoke as though a struggle were in progress in his being. I got the impression that he somewhere wanted help. I understood the pathetic quality I had vaguely discerned already. His character naturally was so strong and independent. It now seemed weaker, as though certain fibres had been drawn out. And I understood then that the spell of Egypt, so lightly chattered about in its sensational aspect, so rarely known in its naked power, the nameless, creeping influence that begins deep below the surface and thence sends delicate tendrils outwards, was in his blood. I, in my untaught ignorance, had felt it too; it is undeniable; one is aware of unaccountable, queer things in Egypt; even the utterly prosaic feel them. Dead Egypt is marvellously alive...\n\nI glanced past him out of the big windows where the desert glimmered in its featureless expanse of yellow leagues, two monstrous pyramids signalling from across the Nile, and for a moment\u2014inexplicably, it seemed to me afterwards\u2014I lost sight of my companion's stalwart figure that was yet so close before my eyes. He had risen from his chair; he was standing near me; yet my sight missed him altogether. Something, dim as a shadow, faint as a breath of air, rose up and bore my thoughts away, obliterating vision too. I forgot for a moment who I was; identity slipped from me. Thought, sight, feeling, all sank away into the emptiness of those sun-baked sands, sank, as it were, into nothingness, caught away from the Present, enticed, absorbed... And when I looked back again to answer him, or rather to ask what his curious words could mean\u2014he was no longer there. More than surprised\u2014for there was something of shock in the disappearance\u2014I turned to search. I had not seen him go. He had stolen from my side so softly, slipped away silently, mysteriously, and\u2014so easily. I remember that a faint shiver ran down my back as I realised that I was alone.\n\nWas it that, momentarily, I had caught a reflex of his state of mind? Had my sympathy induced in myself an echo of what he experienced in full\u2014a going backwards, a loss of present vigour, the enticing, subtle draw of those immeasurable sands that hide the living dead from the interruptions of the careless living...?\n\nI sat down to reflect and, incidentally, to watch the magnificence of the sunset; and the thing he had said returned upon me with insistent power, ringing like distant bells within my mind. His talk of the tombs and temples passed, but this remained. It stimulated oddly. His talk, I remembered, had always excited curiosity in this way. Some countries give, while others take away. What did he mean precisely? What had Egypt taken away from him? And I realised more definitely that something in him was missing, something he possessed in former years that was now no longer there. He had grown shadowy already in my thoughts. The mind searched keenly, but in vain... and after some time I left my chair and moved over to another window, aware that a vague discomfort stirred within me that involved uneasiness\u2014for him. I felt pity. But behind the pity was an eager, absorbing curiosity as well. He seemed receding curiously into misty distance, and the strong desire leaped in me to overtake, to travel with him into some vanished splendour that he had rediscovered. The feeling was a most remarkable one, for it included yearning\u2014the yearning for some nameless, forgotten loveliness the world has lost. It was in me too.\n\nAt the approach of twilight the mind loves to harbour shadows. The room, empty of guests, was dark behind me; darkness, too, was creeping across the desert like a veil, deepening the serenity of its grim, unfeatured face. It turned pale with distance; the whole great sheet of it went rustling into night. The first stars peeped and twinkled, hanging loosely in the air as though they could be plucked like golden berries; and the sun was already below the Libyan horizon, where gold and crimson faded through violet into blue. I stood watching this mysterious Egyptian dusk, while an eerie glamour seemed to bring the incredible within uneasy reach of the half-faltering senses... And suddenly the truth dropped into me. Over George Isley, over his mind and energies, over his thoughts and over his emotions too, a kind of darkness was also slowly creeping. Something in him had dimmed, yet not with age; it had gone out. Some inner night, stealing over the Present, obliterated it. And yet he looked towards the dawn. Like the Egyptian monuments his eyes turned\u2014eastwards.\n\nAnd so it came to me that what he had lost was personal ambition. He was glad, he said, that these Egyptian studies had not caught him earlier in life; the language he made use of was peculiar: 'Now I am on the decline it matters less.' A slight foundation, no doubt, to build conviction on, and yet I felt sure that I was partly right. He was fascinated, but fascinated against his will. The Present in him battled against the Past. Still fighting, he had yet lost hope. The desire not to change was now no longer in him...\n\nI turned away from the window so as not to see that grey, encroaching desert, for the discovery produced a certain agitation in me. Egypt seemed suddenly a living entity of enormous power. She stirred about me. She was stirring now. This flat and motionless land pretending it had no movement, was actually busy with a million gestures that came creeping round the heart. She was reducing him. Already from the complex texture of his personality she had drawn one vital thread that in its relation to the general woof was of central importance\u2014ambition. The mind chose the simile; but in my heart where thought fluttered in singular distress, another suggested itself as truer. 'Thread' changed to 'artery.' I turned quickly and went up to my room where I could be alone. The idea was somewhere ghastly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 493", + "text": "Yet, while dressing for dinner, the idea exfoliated as only a living thing exfoliates. I saw in George Isley this great question mark that had not been there formerly. All have, of course, some question mark, and carry it about, though with most it rarely becomes visible until the end. With him it was plainly visible in his atmosphere at the hey-day of his life. He wore it like a fine curved scimitar above his head. So full of life, he yet seemed willingly dead. For, though imagination sought every possible explanation, I got no further than the somewhat negative result\u2014that a certain energy, wholly unconnected with mere physical health, had been withdrawn. It was more than ambition, I think, for it included intention, desire, self-confidence as well. It was life itself. He was no longer in the Present. He was no longer here.\n\n'Some countries give while others take away... I find Egypt difficult to deal with. I find it...' and then that simple, uncomplex adjective\u2014'strong.' In memory and experience the entire globe was mapped for him; it remained for Egypt, then, to teach him this marvellous new thing. But not Egypt of to-day; it was vanished Egypt that had robbed him of his strength. He had described it as underground, hidden, waiting... I was again aware of a faint shuddering\u2014as though something crept secretly from my inmost heart to share the experience with him, and as though my sympathy involved a willing consent that this should be so. With sympathy there must always be a shedding of the personal self; each time I felt this sympathy, it seemed that something left me. I thought in circles, arriving at no definite point where I could rest and say 'that's it; I understand.' The giving attitude of a country was easily comprehensible; but this idea of robbery, of deprivation baffled me. An obscure alarm took hold of me\u2014for myself as well as for him.\n\nAt dinner, where he invited me to his table, the impression passed off a good deal, however, and I convicted myself of a woman's exaggeration; yet, as we talked of many a day's adventure together in other lands, it struck me that we oddly left the present out. We ignored to-day. His thoughts, as it were, went most easily backwards. And each adventure led, as by its own natural weight and impetus, towards one thing\u2014the enormous glory of a vanished age. Ancient Egypt was 'home' in this mysterious game life played with death. The specific gravity of his being, to say nothing for the moment of my own, had shifted lower, farther off, backwards and below, or as he put it\u2014underground. The sinking sensation I experienced was of a literal kind...\n\nAnd so I found myself wondering what had led him to this particular hotel. I had come out with an affected organ the specialist promised me would heal in the marvellous air of Helouan, but it was queer that my companion also should have chosen it. Its client\u00e8le was mostly invalid, German and Russian invalid at that. The Management set its face against the lighter, gayer side of life that hotels in Egypt usually encourage eagerly. It was a true rest-house, a place of repose and leisure, a place where one could remain undiscovered and unknown. No English patronised it. One might easily\u2014the idea came unbidden, suddenly\u2014hide in it.\n\n'Then you're doing nothing just now,' I asked, 'in the way of digging? No big expeditions or excavating at the moment?'\n\n'I'm recuperating,' he answered carelessly. 'I've have had two years up at the Valley of the Kings, and overdid it rather. But I'm by way of working at a little thing near here across the Nile.' And he pointed in the direction of Sakkh\u00e2ra, where the huge Memphian cemetery stretches underground from the Dach\u00fbr Pyramids to the Gizeh monsters, four miles lower down. 'There's a matter of a hundred years in that alone!'\n\n'You must have accumulated a mass of interesting material. I suppose later you'll make use of it\u2014a book or\u2014'\n\nHis expression stopped me\u2014that strange look in the eyes that had stirred my first uneasiness. It was as if something struggled up a moment, looked bleakly out upon the present, then sank away again.\n\n'More,' he answered listlessly, 'than I can ever use. It's much more likely to use me.' He said it hurriedly, looking over his shoulder as though some one might be listening, then smiled significantly, bringing his eyes back upon my own again. I told him that he was far too modest. 'If all the excavators thought like that,' I added, 'we ignorant ones should suffer.' I laughed, but the laughter was only on my lips.\n\nHe shook his head indifferently. 'They do their best; they do wonders,' he replied, making an indescribable gesture as though he withdrew willingly from the topic altogether, yet could not quite achieve it. 'I know their books; I know the writers too\u2014of various nationalities.' He paused a moment, and his eyes turned grave. 'I cannot understand quite\u2014how they do it,' he added half below his breath.\n\n'The labour, you mean? The strain of the climate, and so forth?' I said this purposely, for I knew quite well he meant another thing. The way he looked into my face, however, disturbed me so that I believe I visibly started. Something very deep in me sat up alertly listening, almost on guard.\n\n'I mean,' he replied, 'that they must have uncommon powers of resistance.'\n\nThere! He had used the very word that had been hiding in me! 'It puzzles me,' he went on, 'for, with one exception, they are not unusual men. In the way of gifts\u2014oh yes. It's in the way of resistance and protection that I mean. Self-protection,' he added with emphasis.\n\nIt was the way he said 'resistance' and 'self-protection' that sent a touch of cold through me. I learned later that he himself had made surprising discoveries in these two years, penetrating closer to the secret life of ancient sacerdotal Egypt than any of his predecessors or co-labourers\u2014then, inexplicably, had ceased. But this was told to me afterwards and by others. At the moment I was only conscious of this odd embarrassment. I did not understand, yet felt that he touched upon something intimately personal to himself. He paused, expecting me to speak.\n\n'Egypt, perhaps, merely pours through them,' I ventured. 'They give out mechanically, hardly realising how much they give. They report facts devoid of interpretation. Whereas with you it's the actual spirit of the past that is discovered and laid bare. You live it. You feel old Egypt and disclose her. That divining faculty was always yours\u2014uncannily, I used to think.'\n\nThe flash of his sombre eyes betrayed that my aim was singularly good. It seemed a third had silently joined our little table in the corner. Something intruded, evoked by the power of what our conversation skirted but ever left unmentioned. It was huge and shadowy; it was also watchful. Egypt came gliding, floating up beside us. I saw her reflected in his face and gaze. The desert slipped in through walls and ceiling, rising from beneath our feet, settling about us, listening, peering, waiting. The strange obsession was sudden and complete. The gigantic scale of her swam in among the very pillars, arches, and windows of that modern dining-room. I felt against my skin the touch of chilly air that sunlight never reaches, stealing from beneath the granite monoliths. Behind it came the stifling breath of the heated tombs, of the Serapeum, of the chambers and corridors in the pyramids. There was a rustling as of myriad footsteps far away, and as of sand the busy winds go shifting through the ages. And in startling contrast to this impression of prodigious size, Isley himself wore suddenly an air of strangely dwindling. For a second he shrank visibly before my very eyes. He was receding. His outline seemed to retreat and lessen, as though he stood to the waist in what appeared like flowing mist, only his head and shoulders still above the ground. Far, far away I saw him.\n\nIt was a vivid inner picture that I somehow transferred objectively. It was a dramatised sensation, of course. His former phrase 'now that I am declining' flashed back upon me with sharp discomfort. Again, perhaps, his state of mind was reflected into me by some emotional telepathy. I waited, conscious of an almost sensible oppression that would not lift. It seemed an age before he spoke, and when he did there was the tremor of feeling in his voice he sought nevertheless to repress. I kept my eyes on the table for some reason. But I listened intently.\n\n'It's you that have the divining faculty, not I,' he said, an odd note of distance even in his tone, yet a resonance as though it rose up between reverberating walls. 'There is, I believe, something here that resents too close inquiry, or rather that resists discovery\u2014almost\u2014takes offence.'\n\nI looked up quickly, then looked down again. It was such a startling thing to hear on the lips of a modern Englishman. He spoke lightly, but the expression of his face belied the careless tone. There was no mockery in those earnest eyes, and in the hushed voice was a little creeping sound that gave me once again the touch of goose-flesh. The only word I can find is 'subterranean': all that was mental in him had sunk, so that he seemed speaking underground, head and shoulders alone visible. The effect was almost ghastly.\n\n'Such extraordinary obstacles are put in one's way,' he went on, 'when the prying gets too close to the\u2014reality; physical, external obstacles, I mean. Either that, or\u2014the mind loses its assimilative faculties. One or other happens\u2014' his voice died down into a whisper\u2014'and discovery ceases of its own accord.'\n\nThe same minute, then, he suddenly raised himself like a man emerging from a tomb; he leaned across the table; he made an effort of some violent internal kind, on the verge, I fully believe, of a pregnant personal statement. There was confession in his attitude; I think he was about to speak of his work at Thebes and the reason for its abrupt cessation. For I had the feeling of one about to hear a weighty secret, the responsibility unwelcome. This uncomfortable emotion rose in me, as I raised my eyes to his somewhat unwillingly, only to find that I was wholly at fault. It was not me he was looking at. He was staring past me in the direction of the wide, unshuttered windows. The expression of yearning was visible in his eyes again. Something had stopped his utterance.\n\nAnd instinctively I turned and saw what he saw. So far as external details were concerned, at least, I saw it.\n\nAcross the glare and glitter of the uncompromising modern dining-room, past crowded tables, and over the heads of Germans feeding unpicturesquely, I saw\u2014the moon. Her reddish disc, hanging unreal and enormous, lifted the spread sheet of desert till it floated off the surface of the world. The great window faced the east, where the Arabian desert breaks into a ruin of gorges, cliffs, and flat-topped ridges; it looked unfriendly, ominous, with danger in it; unlike the serener sand-dunes of the Libyan desert, there lay both menace and seduction behind its flood of shadows. And the moonlight emphasised this aspect: its ghostly desolation, its cruelty, its bleak hostility, turning it murderous. For no river sweetens this Arabian desert; instead of sandy softness, it has fangs of limestone rock, sharp and aggressive. Across it, just visible in the moonlight as a thread of paler grey, the old camel-trail to Suez beckoned faintly. And it was this that he was looking at so intently.\n\nIt was, I know, a theatrical stage-like glimpse, yet in it a seductiveness most potent. 'Come out,' it seemed to whisper, 'and taste my awful beauty. Come out and lose yourself, and die. Come out and follow my moonlit trail into the Past... where there is peace and immobility and silence. My kingdom is unchanging underground. Come down, come softly, come through sandy corridors below this tinsel of your modern world. Come back, come down into my golden past...'\n\nA poignant desire stole through my heart on moonlit feet; I was personally conscious of a keen yearning to slip away in unresisting obedience. For it was uncommonly impressive, this sudden, haunting glimpse of the world outside. The hairy foreigners, uncouthly garbed, all busily eating in full electric light, provided a sensational contrast of emphatically distressing kind. A touch of what is called unearthly hovered about that distance through the window. There was weirdness in it. Egypt looked in upon us. Egypt watched and listened, beckoning through the moonlit windows of the heart to come and find her. Mind and imagination might flounder as they pleased, but something of this kind happened undeniably, whether expression in language fails to hold the truth or not. And George Isley, aware of being seen, looked straight into the awful visage\u2014fascinated.\n\nOver the bronze of his skin there stole a shade of grey. My own feeling of enticement grew\u2014the desire to go out into the moonlight, to leave my kind and wander blindly through the desert, to see the gorges in their shining silver, and taste the keenness of the cool, sharp air. Further than this with me it did not go, but that my companion felt the bigger, deeper draw behind this surface glamour, I have no reasonable doubt. For a moment, indeed, I thought he meant to leave the table; he had half risen in his chair; it seemed he struggled and resisted\u2014and then his big frame subsided again; he sat back; he looked, in the attitude his body took, less impressive, smaller, actually shrunken into the proportions of some minuter scale. It was as though something in that second had been drawn out of him, decreasing even his physical appearance. The voice, when he spoke presently with a touch of resignation, held a lifeless quality as though deprived of virile timbre.\n\n'It's always there,' he whispered, half collapsing back into his chair, 'it's always watching, waiting, listening. Almost like a monster of the fables, isn't it? It makes no movement of its own, you see. It's far too strong for that. It just hangs there, half in the air and half upon the earth\u2014a gigantic web. Its prey flies into it. That's Egypt all over. D'you feel like that too, or does it seem to you just imaginative rubbish? To me it seems that she just waits her time; she gets you quicker that way; in the end you're bound to go.'\n\n'There's power certainly,' I said after a moment's pause to collect my wits, my distress increased by the morbidness of his simile. 'For some minds there may be a kind of terror too\u2014for weak temperaments that are all imagination.' My thoughts were scattered, and I could not readily find good words. 'There is startling grandeur in a sight like that, for instance,' and I pointed to the window. 'You feel drawn\u2014as if you simply had to go.' My mind still buzzed with his curious words, 'In the end you're bound to go.' It betrayed his heart and soul. 'I suppose a fly does feel drawn,' I added, 'or a moth to the destroying flame. Or is it just unconscious on their part?'\n\nHe jerked his big head significantly. 'Well, well,' he answered, 'but the fly isn't necessarily weak, or the moth misguided. Over-adventurous, perhaps, yet both obedient to the laws of their respective beings. They get warnings too\u2014only, when the moth wants to know too much, the fire stops it. Both flame and spider enrich themselves by understanding the natures of their prey; and fly and moth return again and again until this is accomplished.'\n\nYet George Isley was as sane as the head waiter who, noticing our interest in the window, came up just then and enquired whether we felt a draught and would prefer it closed. Isley, I realised, was struggling to express a passionate state of soul for which, owing to its rarity, no adequate expression lies at hand. There is a language of the mind, but there is none as yet of the spirit. I felt ill at ease. All this was so foreign to the wholesome, strenuous personality of the man as I remembered it.\n\n'But, my dear fellow,' I stammered, 'aren't you giving poor old Egypt a bad name she hardly deserves? I feel only the amazing strength and beauty of it; awe, if you like, but none of this resentment you so mysteriously hint at.'\n\n'You understand, for all that,' he answered quietly; and again he seemed on the verge of some significant confession that might ease his soul. My uncomfortable emotion grew. Certainly he was at high pressure somewhere. 'And, if necessary, you could help. Your sympathy, I mean, is a help already.' He said it half to himself and in a suddenly lowered tone again.\n\n'A help!' I gasped. 'My sympathy! Of course, if\u2014'\n\n'A witness,' he murmured, not looking at me, 'some one who understands, yet does not think me mad.'\n\nThere was such appeal in his voice that I felt ready and eager to do anything to help him. Our eyes met, and my own tried to express this willingness in me; but what I said I hardly know, for a cloud of confusion was on my mind, and my speech went fumbling like a schoolboy's. I was more than disconcerted. Through this bewilderment, then, I just caught the tail-end of another sentence in which the words 'relief it is to have... some one to hold to... when the disappearance comes...' sounded like voices heard in dream. But I missed the complete phrase and shrank from asking him to repeat it.\n\nSome sympathetic answer struggled to my lips, though what it was I know not. The thing I murmured, however, seemed apparently well chosen. He leaned across and laid his big hand a moment on my own with eloquent pressure. It was cold as ice. A look of gratitude passed over his sunburned features. He sighed. And we left the table then and passed into the inner smoking-room for coffee\u2014a room whose windows gave upon columned terraces that allowed no view of the encircling desert. He led the conversation into channels less personal and, thank heaven, less intensely emotional and mysterious. What we talked about I now forget; it was interesting but in another key altogether. His old charm and power worked; the respect I had always felt for his character and gifts returned in force, but it was the pity I now experienced that remained chiefly in my mind. For this change in him became more and more noticeable. He was less impressive, less convincing, less suggestive. His talk, though so knowledgeable, lacked that spiritual quality that drives home. He was uncannily less real. And I went up to bed, uneasy and disturbed. 'It is not age,' I said to myself, 'and assuredly it is not death he fears, although he spoke of disappearance. It is mental\u2014in the deepest sense. It is what religious people would call soul. Something is happening to his soul.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 494", + "text": "And this word 'soul' remained with me to the end. Egypt was taking his soul away into the Past. What was of value in him went willingly; the rest, some lesser aspect of his mind and character, resisted, holding to the present. A struggle, therefore, was involved. But this was being gradually obliterated too.\n\nHow I arrived gaily at this monstrous conclusion seems to me now a mystery; but the truth is that from a conversation one brings away a general idea that is larger than the words actually heard and spoken. I have reported, naturally, but a fragment of what passed between us in language, and of what was suggested\u2014by gesture, expression, silence\u2014merely perhaps a hint. I can only assert that this troubling verdict remained a conviction in my mind. It came upstairs with me; it watched and listened by my side. That mysterious Third evoked in our conversation was bigger than either of us separately; it might be called the spirit of ancient Egypt, or it might be called with equal generalisation, the Past. This Third, at any rate, stood by me, whispering this astounding thing. I went out on to my little balcony to smoke a pipe and enjoy the comforting presence of the stars before turning in. It came out with me. It was everywhere. I heard the barking of dogs, the monotonous beating of a distant drum towards Bedraschien, the sing-song voices of the natives in their booths and down the dim-lit streets. I was aware of this invisible Third behind all these familiar sounds. The enormous night-sky, drowned in stars, conveyed it too. It was in the breath of chilly wind that whispered round the walls, and it brooded everywhere above the sleepless desert. I was alone as little as though George Isley stood beside me in person\u2014and at that moment a moving figure caught my eye below. My window was on the sixth story, but there was no mistaking the tall and soldierly bearing of the man who was strolling past the hotel. George Isley was going slowly out into the desert.\n\nThere was actually nothing unusual in the sight. It was only ten o'clock; but for doctor's orders I might have been doing the same myself. Yet, as I leaned over the dizzy ledge and watched him, a chill struck through me, and a feeling nothing could justify, nor pages of writing describe, rose up and mastered me. His words at dinner came back with curious force. Egypt lay round him, motionless, a vast grey web. His feet were caught in it. It quivered. The silvery meshes in the moonlight announced the fact from Memphis up to Thebes, across the Nile, from underground Sakkh\u00e2ra to the Valley of the Kings. A tremor ran over the entire desert, and again, as in the dining-room, the leagues of sand went rustling. It seemed to me that I caught him in the act of disappearing.\n\nI realised in that moment the haunting power of this mysterious still atmosphere which is Egypt, and some magical emanation of its mighty past broke over me suddenly like a wave. Perhaps in that moment I felt what he himself felt; the withdrawing suction of the huge spent wave swept something out of me into the past with it. An indescribable yearning drew something living from my heart, something that longed with a kind of burning, searching sweetness for a glory of spiritual passion that was gone. The pain and happiness of it were more poignant than may be told, and my present personality\u2014some vital portion of it, at any rate\u2014wilted before the power of its enticement.\n\nI stood there, motionless as stone, and stared. Erect and steady, knowing resistance vain, eager to go yet striving to remain, and half with an air of floating off the ground, he went towards the pale grey thread which was the track to Suez and the far Red Sea. There came upon me this strange, deep sense of pity, pathos, sympathy that was beyond all explanation, and mysterious as a pain in dreams. For a sense of his awful loneliness stole into me, a loneliness nothing on this earth could possibly relieve. Robbed of the Present, he sought this chimera of his soul, an unreal Past. Not even the calm majesty of this exquisite Egyptian night could soothe the dream away; the peace and silence were marvellous, the sweet perfume of the desert air intoxicating; but all these intensified it only.\n\nAnd though at a loss to explain my own emotion, its poignancy was so real that a sigh escaped me and I felt that tears lay not too far away. I watched him, yet felt I had no right to watch. Softly I drew back from the window with the sensation of eavesdropping upon his privacy; but before I did so I had seen his outline melt away into the dim world of sand that began at the very walls of the hotel. He wore a cloak of green that reached down almost to his heels, and its colour blended with the silvery surface of the desert's dark sea-tint. This sheen first draped and then concealed him. It covered him with a fold of its mysterious garment that, without seam or binding, veiled Egypt for a thousand leagues. The desert took him. Egypt caught him in her web. He was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 495", + "text": "Sleep for me just then seemed out of the question. The change in him made me feel less sure of myself. To see him thus invertebrate shocked me. I was aware that I had nerves.\n\nFor a long time I sat smoking by the window, my body weary, but my imagination irritatingly stimulated. The big sign-lights of the hotel went out; window after window closed below me; the electric standards in the streets were already extinguished; and Helouan looked like a child's white blocks scattered in ruin upon the nursery carpet. It seemed so wee upon the vast expanse. It lay in a twinkling pattern, like a cluster of glow-worms dropped into a negligible crease of the tremendous desert. It peeped up at the stars, a little frightened.\n\nThe night was very still. There hung an enormous brooding beauty everywhere, a hint of the sinister in it that only the brilliance of the blazing stars relieved. Nothing really slept. Grouped here and there at intervals about this dun-coloured world stood the everlasting watchers in solemn, tireless guardianship\u2014the soaring Pyramids, the Sphinx, the grim Colossi, the empty temples, the long-deserted tombs. The mind was aware of them, stationed like sentries through the night. 'This is Egypt; you are actually in Egypt,' whispered the silence. 'Eight thousand years of history lie fluttering outside your window. She lies there underground, sleepless, mighty, deathless, not to be trifled with. Beware! Or she will change you too!'\n\nMy imagination offered this hint: Egypt is difficult to realise. It remains outside the mind, a fabulous, half-legendary idea. So many enormous elements together refuse to be assimilated; the heart pauses, asking for time and breath; the senses reel a little; and in the end a mental torpor akin to stupefaction creeps upon the brain. With a sigh the struggle is abandoned and the mind surrenders to Egypt on her own terms. Alone the diggers and archaeologists, confined to definite facts, offer successful resistance. My friend's use of the words 'resistance' and 'protection' became clearer to me. While logic halted, intuition fluttered round this clue to the solution of the influences at work. George Isley realised Egypt more than most\u2014but as she had been.\n\nAnd I recalled its first effect upon myself, and how my mind had been unable to cope with the memory of it afterwards. There had come to its summons a colossal medley, a gigantic, coloured blur that merely bewildered. Only lesser points lodged comfortably in the heart. I saw a chaotic vision: sands drenched in dazzling light, vast granite aisles, stupendous figures that stared unblinking at the sun, a shining river and a shadowy desert, both endless as the sky, mountainous pyramids and gigantic monoliths, armies of heads, of paws, of faces\u2014all set to a scale of size that was prodigious. The items stunned; the composite effect was too unwieldy to be grasped. Something that blazed with splendour rolled before the eyes, too close to be seen distinctly\u2014at the same time very distant\u2014unrealised.\n\nThen, with the passing of the weeks, it slowly stirred to life. It had attacked unseen; its grip was quite tremendous; yet it could be neither told, nor painted, nor described. It flamed up unexpectedly\u2014in the foggy London streets, at the Club, in the theatre. A sound recalled the street-cries of the Arabs, a breath of scented air brought back the heated sand beyond the palm groves. Up rose the huge Egyptian glamour, transforming common things; it had lain buried all this time in deep recesses of the heart that are inaccessible to ordinary daily life. And there hid in it something of uneasiness that was inexplicable; awe, a hint of cold eternity, a touch of something unchanging and terrific, something sublime made lovely yet unearthly with shadowy time and distance. The melancholy of the Nile and the grandeur of a hundred battered temples dropped some unutterable beauty upon the heart. Up swept the desert air, the luminous pale shadows, the naked desolation that yet brims with sharp vitality. An Arab on his donkey tripped in colour across the mind, melting off into tiny perspective, strangely vivid. A string of camels stood in silhouette against the crimson sky. Great winds, great blazing spaces, great solemn nights, great days of golden splendour rose from the pavement or the theatre-stall, and London, dim-lit England, the whole of modern life, indeed, seemed suddenly reduced to a paltry insignificance that produced an aching longing for the pageantry of those millions of vanished souls. Egypt rolled through the heart for a moment\u2014and was gone.\n\nI remembered that some such fantastic experience had been mine. Put it as one may, the fact remains that for certain temperaments Egypt can rob the Present of some thread of interest that was formerly there. The memory became for me an integral part of personality; something in me yearned for its curious and awful beauty. He who has drunk of the Nile shall return to drink of it again... And if for myself this was possible, what might not happen to a character of George Isley's type? Some glimmer of comprehension came to me. The ancient, buried, hidden Egypt had cast her net about his soul. Grown shadowy in the Present, his life was being transferred into some golden, reconstructed Past, where it was real. Some countries give, while others take away. And George Isley was worth robbing...\n\nDisturbed by these singular reflections, I moved away from the open window, closing it. But the closing did not exclude the presence of the Third. The biting night air followed me in. I drew the mosquito curtains round the bed, but the light I left still burning; and, lying there, I jotted down upon a scrap of paper this curious impression as best I could, only to find that it escaped easily between the words. Such visionary and spiritual perceptions are too elusive to be trapped in language. Reading it over after an interval of years, it is difficult to recall with what intense meaning, what uncanny emotion, I wrote those faded lines in pencil. Their rhetoric seems cheap, their content much exaggerated; yet at the time truth burned in every syllable. Egypt, which since time began has suffered robbery with violence at the hands of all the world, now takes her vengeance, choosing her individual prey. Her time has come. Behind a modern mask she lies in wait, intensely active, sure of her hidden power. Prostitute of dead empires, she lies now at peace beneath the same old stars, her loveliness unimpaired, bejewelled with the beaten gold of ages, her breasts uncovered, and her grand limbs flashing in the sun. Her shoulders of alabaster are lifted above the sand-drifts; she surveys the little figures of to-day. She takes her choice...\n\nThat night I did not dream, but neither did the whole of me lie down in sleep. During the long dark hours I was aware of that picture endlessly repeating itself, the picture of George Isley stealing out into the moonlight desert. The night so swiftly dropped her hood about him; so mysteriously he merged into the unchanging thing which cloaks the past. It lifted. Some huge shadowy hand, gloved softly yet of granite, stretched over the leagues to take him. He disappeared.\n\nThey say the desert is motionless and has no gestures! That night I saw it moving, hurrying. It went tearing after him. You understand my meaning? No! Well, when excited it produces this strange impression, and the terrible moment is\u2014when you surrender helplessly\u2014you desire it shall swallow you. You let it come. George Isley spoke of a web. It is, at any rate, some central power that conceals itself behind the surface glamour folk call the spell of Egypt. Its home is not apparent. It dwells with ancient Egypt\u2014underground. Behind the stillness of hot windless days, behind the peace of calm, gigantic nights, it lurks unrealised, monstrous and irresistible. My mind grasped it as little as the fact that our solar system with all its retinue of satellites and planets rushes annually many million miles towards a star in Hercules, while yet that constellation appears no closer than it did six thousand years ago. But the clue dropped into me. George Isley, with his entire retinue of thought and life and feeling, was being similarly drawn. And I, a minor satellite, had become aware of the horrifying pull. It was magnificent... And I fell asleep on the crest of this enormous wave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 496", + "text": "The next few days passed idly; weeks passed too, I think; hidden away in this cosmopolitan hotel we lived apart, unnoticed. There was the feeling that time went what pace it pleased, now fast, now slow, now standing still. The similarity of the brilliant days, set between wondrous dawns and sunsets, left the impression that it was really one long, endless day without divisions. The mind's machinery of measurement suffered dislocation. Time went backwards; dates were forgotten; the month, the time of year, the century itself went down into undifferentiated life.\n\nThe Present certainly slipped away curiously. Newspapers and politics became unimportant, news uninteresting, English life so remote as to be unreal, European affairs shadowy. The stream of life ran in another direction altogether\u2014backwards. The names and faces of friends appeared through mist. People arrived as though dropped from the skies. They suddenly were there; one saw them in the dining-room, as though they had just slipped in from an outer world that once was real\u2014somewhere. Of course, a steamer sailed four times a week, and the journey took five days, but these things were merely known, not realised. The fact that here it was summer, whereas over there winter reigned, helped to make the distance not quite thinkable. We looked at the desert and made plans. 'We will do this, we will do that; we must go there, we'll visit such and such a place...' yet nothing happened. It always was to-morrow or yesterday, and we shared the discovery of Alice that there was no real 'to-day.' For our thinking made everything happen. That was enough. It had happened. It was the reality of dreams. Egypt was a dream-world that made the heart live backwards.\n\nIt came about, thus, that for the next few weeks I watched a fading life, myself alert and sympathetic, yet unable somehow to intrude and help. Noticing various little things by which George Isley betrayed the progress of the unequal struggle, I found my assistance negatived by the fact that I was in similar case myself. What he experienced in large and finally, I, too, experienced in little and for the moment. For I seemed also caught upon the fringe of the invisible web. My feelings were entangled sufficiently for me to understand... And the decline of his being was terrible to watch. His character went with it; I saw his talents fade, his personality dwindle, his very soul dissolve before the insidious and invading influence. He hardly struggled. I thought of those abominable insects that paralyse the motor systems of their victims and then devour them at their leisure\u2014alive. The incredible adventure was literally true, but, being spiritual, may not be told in the terms of a detective story. This version must remain an individual rendering\u2014an aspect of one possible version. All who know the real Egypt, that Egypt which has nothing to do with dams and Nationalists and the external welfare of the falaheen, will understand. The pilfering of her ancient dead she suffers still; she, in revenge, preys at her leisure on the living.\n\nThe occasions when he betrayed himself were ordinary enough; it was the glimpse they afforded of what was in progress beneath his calm exterior that made them interesting. Once, I remember, we had lunched together at Mena, and, after visiting certain excavations beyond the Gizeh pyramids, we made our way homewards by way of the Sphinx. It was dusk, and the main army of tourists had retired, though some few dozen sight-seers still moved about to the cries of donkey-boys and baksheesh. The vast head and shoulders suddenly emerged, riding undrowned above the sea of sand. Dark and monstrous in the fading light, it loomed, as ever, a being of non-human lineage; no amount of familiarity could depreciate its grandeur, its impressive setting, the lost expression of the countenance that is too huge to focus as a face. A thousand visits leave its power undiminished. It has intruded upon our earth from some uncommon world. George Isley and myself both turned aside to acknowledge the presence of this alien, uncomfortable thing. We did not linger, but we slackened pace. It was the obvious, inevitable thing to do. He pointed then, with a suddenness that made me start. He indicated the tourists standing round.\n\n'See,' he said, in a lowered tone, 'day and night you'll always find a crowd obedient to that thing. But notice their behaviour. People don't do that before any other ruin in the world I've ever seen.' He referred to the attempts of individuals to creep away alone and stare into the stupendous visage by themselves. At different points in the deep sandy basin were men and women, standing solitary, lying, crouching, apart from the main company where the dragomen mouthed their exposition with impertinent glibness.\n\n'The desire to be alone,' he went on, half to himself, as we paused a moment, 'the sense of worship which insists on privacy.'\n\nIt was significant, for no amount of advertising could dwarf the impressiveness of the inscrutable visage into whose eyes of stone the silent humans gazed. Not even the red-coat, standing inside one gigantic ear, could introduce the commonplace. But my companion's words let another thing into the spectacle, a less exalted thing, dropping a hint of horror about that sandy cup: It became easy, for a moment, to imagine these tourists worshipping\u2014against their will; to picture the monster noticing that they were there; that it might slowly turn its awful head; that the sand might visibly trickle from a stirring paw; that, in a word, they might be taken\u2014changed.\n\n'Come,' he whispered in a dropping tone, interrupting my fancies as though he half divined them, 'it is getting late, and to be alone with the thing is intolerable to me just now. But you notice, don't you,' he added, as he took my arm to hurry me away, 'how little the tourists matter? Instead of injuring the effect, they increase it. It uses them.'\n\nAnd again a slight sensation of chill, communicated possibly by his nervous touch, or possibly by his earnest way of saying these curious words, passed through me. Some part of me remained behind in that hollow trough of sand, prostrate before an immensity that symbolised the past. A curious, wild yearning caught me momentarily, an intense desire to understand exactly why that terror stood there, its actual meaning long ago to the hearts that set it waiting for the sun, what definite r\u00f4le it played, what souls it stirred and why, in that system of towering belief and faith whose indestructible emblem it still remained. The past stood grouped so solemnly about its menacing presentment. I was distinctly aware of this spiritual suction backwards that my companion yielded to so gladly, yet against his normal, modern self. For it made the past appear magnificently desirable, and loosened all the rivets of the present. It bodied forth three main ingredients of this deep Egyptian spell\u2014size, mystery, and immobility.\n\nYet, to my relief, the cheaper aspect of this Egyptian glamour left him cold. He remained unmoved by the commonplace mysterious; he told no mummy stories, nor ever hinted at the supernatural quality that leaps to the mind of the majority. There was no play in him. The influence was grave and vital. And, although I knew he held strong views with regard to the impiety of disturbing the dead, he never in my hearing attached any possible revengeful character to the energy of an outraged past. The current tales of this description he ignored; they were for superstitious minds or children; the deities that claimed his soul were of a grander order altogether. He lived, if it may be so expressed, already in a world his heart had reconstructed or remembered; it drew him in another direction altogether; with the modern, sensational view of life his spirit held no traffic any longer; he was living backwards. I saw his figure receding mournfully, yet never sentimentally, into the spacious, golden atmosphere of recaptured days. The enormous soul of buried Egypt drew him down. The dwindling of his physical appearance was, of course, a mental interpretation of my own; but another, stranger interpretation of a spiritual kind moved parallel with it\u2014marvellous and horrible. For, as he diminished outwardly and in his modern, present aspect, he grew within\u2014gigantic. The size of Egypt entered into him. Huge proportions now began to accompany any presentment of his personality to my inner vision. He towered. These two qualities of the land already obsessed him\u2014magnitude and immobility.\n\nAnd that awe which modern life ignores contemptuously woke in my heart. I almost feared his presence at certain times. For one aspect of the Egyptian spell is explained by sheer size and bulk. Disdainful of mere speed to-day, the heart is still uncomfortable with magnitude; and in Egypt there is size that may easily appal, for every detail shunts it laboriously upon the mind. It elbows out the present. The desert's vastness is not made comprehensible by mileage, and the sources of the Nile are so distant that they exist less on the map than in the imagination. The effort to realise suffers paralysis; they might equally be in the moon or Saturn. The undecorated magnificence of the desert remains unknown, just as the proportions of pyramid and temple, of pylons and Colossi approach the edge of the mind yet never enter in. All stand outside, clothed in this prodigious measurement of the past. And the old beliefs not only share this titanic effect upon the consciousness, but carry it stages further. The entire scale haunts with uncomfortable immensity, so that the majority run back with relief to the measurable details of a more manageable scale. Express trains, flying machines, Atlantic liners\u2014these produce no unpleasant stretching of the faculties compared to the influence of the Karnak pylons, the pyramids, or the interior of the Serapeum.\n\nClose behind this magnitude, moreover, steps the monstrous. It is revealed not in sand and stone alone, in queer effects of light and shadow, of glittering sunsets and of magical dusks, but in the very aspect of the bird and animal life. The heavy-headed buffaloes betray it equally with the vultures, the myriad kites, the grotesqueness of the mouthing camels. The rude, enormous scenery has it everywhere. There is nothing lyrical in this land of passionate mirages. Uncouth immensity notes the little human flittings. The days roll by in a tide of golden splendour; one goes helplessly with the flood; but it is an irresistible flood that sweeps backwards and below. The silent-footed natives in their coloured robes move before a curtain, and behind that curtain dwells the soul of ancient Egypt\u2014the Reality, as George Isley called it\u2014watching, with sleepless eyes of grey infinity. Then, sometimes the curtain stirs and lifts an edge; an invisible hand creeps forth; the soul is touched. And some one disappears." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 497", + "text": "The process of disintegration must have been at work a long time before I appeared upon the scene; the changes went forward with such rapidity.\n\nIt was his third year in Egypt, two of which had been spent without interruption in company with an Egyptologist named Moleson, in the neighbourhood of Thebes. I soon discovered that this region was for him the centre of attraction, or as he put it, of the web. Not Luxor, of course, nor the images of reconstructed Karnak; but that stretch of grim, forbidding mountains where royalty, earthly and spiritual, sought eternal peace for the physical remains. There, amid surroundings of superb desolation, great priests and mighty kings had thought themselves secure from sacrilegious touch. In caverns underground they kept their faithful tryst with centuries, guarded by the silence of magnificent gloom. There they waited, communing with passing ages in their sleep, till Ra, their glad divinity, should summon them to the fulfilment of their ancient dream. And there, in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, their dream was shattered, their lovely prophecies derided, and their glory dimmed by the impious desecration of the curious.\n\nThat George Isley and his companion had spent their time, not merely digging and deciphering like their practical confr\u00e8res, but engaged in some strange experiments of recovery and reconstruction, was matter for open comment among the fraternity. That incredible things had happened there was the big story of two Egyptian seasons at least. I heard this later only\u2014tales of utterly incredible kind, that the desolate vale of rock was seen repeopled on moonlit nights, that the smoke of unaccustomed fires rose to cap the flat-topped peaks, that the pageantry of some forgotten worship had been seen to issue from the openings of these hills, and that sounds of chanting, sonorous and marvellously sweet, had been heard to echo from those bleak, repellent precipices. The tales apparently were grossly exaggerated; wandering Bedouins brought them in; the guides and dragomen repeated them with mysterious additions; till they filtered down through the native servants in the hotels and reached the tourists with highly picturesque embroidery. They reached the authorities too. The only accurate fact I gathered at the time, however, was that they had abruptly ceased. George Isley and Moleson, moreover, had parted company. And Moleson, I heard, was the originator of the business. He was, at this time, unknown to me; his arresting book on 'A Modern Reconstruction of Sun-worship in Ancient Egypt' being my only link with his unusual mind. Apparently he regarded the sun as the deity of the scientific religion of the future which would replace the various anthropomorphic gods of childish creeds. He discussed the possibility of the zodiacal signs being some kind of Celestial Intelligences. Belief blazed on every page. Men's life is heat, derived solely from the sun, and men were, therefore, part of the sun in the sense that a Christian is part of his personal deity. And absorption was the end. His description of 'sun-worship ceremonials' conveyed an amazing reality and beauty. This singular book, however, was all I knew of him until he came to visit us in Helouan, though I easily discerned that his influence somehow was the original cause of the change in my companion.\n\nAt Thebes, then, was the active centre of the influence that drew my friend away from modern things. It was there, I easily guessed, that 'obstacles' had been placed in the way of these men's too close enquiry. In that haunted and oppressive valley, where profane and reverent come to actual grips, where modern curiosity is most busily organised, and even tourists are aware of a masked hostility that dogs the prying of the least imaginative mind\u2014there, in the neighbourhood of the hundred-gated city, had Egypt set the headquarters of her irreconcilable enmity. And it was there, amid the ruins of her loveliest past, that George Isley had spent his years of magical reconstruction and met the influence that now dominated his entire life.\n\nAnd though no definite avowal of the struggle betrayed itself in speech between us, I remember fragments of conversation, even at this stage, that proved his willing surrender of the present. We spoke of fear once, though with the indirectness of connection I have mentioned. I urged that the mind, once it is forewarned, can remain master of itself and prevent a thing from happening.\n\n'But that does not make the thing unreal,' he objected.\n\n'The mind can deny it,' I said. 'It then becomes unreal.'\n\nHe shook his head. 'One does not deny an unreality. Denial is a childish act of self-protection against something you expect to happen.' He caught my eye a moment. 'You deny what you are afraid of,' he said. 'Fear invites.' And he smiled uneasily. 'You know it must get you in the end.' And, both of us being aware secretly to what our talk referred, it seemed bold-blooded and improper; for actually we discussed the psychology of his disappearance. Yet, while I disliked it, there was a fascination about the subject that compelled attraction... 'Once fear gets in,' he added presently, 'confidence is undermined, the structure of life is threatened, and you\u2014go gladly. The foundation of everything is belief. A man is what he believes about himself; and in Egypt you can believe things that elsewhere you would not even think about. It attacks the essentials.' He sighed, yet with a curious pleasure; and a smile of resignation and relief passed over his rugged features and was gone again. The luxury of abandonment lay already in him.\n\n'But even belief,' I protested, 'must be founded on some experience or other.' It seemed ghastly to speak of his spiritual malady behind the mask of indirect allusion. My excuse was that he so obviously talked willingly.\n\nHe agreed instantly. 'Experience of one kind or another,' he said darkly, 'there always is. Talk with the men who live out here; ask any one who thinks, or who has the imagination which divines. You'll get only one reply, phrase it how they may. Even the tourists and the little commonplace officials feel it. And it's not the climate, it's not nerves, it's not any definite tendency that they can name or lay their finger on. Nor is it mere orientalising of the mind. It's something that first takes you from your common life, and that later takes common life from you. You willingly resign an unremunerative Present. There are no half-measures either\u2014once the gates are open.'\n\nThere was so much undeniable truth in this that I found no corrective by way of strong rejoinder. All my attempts, indeed, were futile in this way. He meant to go; my words could not stop him. He wanted a witness,\u2014he dreaded the loneliness of going\u2014but he brooked no interference. The contradictory position involved a perplexing state of heart and mind in both of us. The atmosphere of this majestic land, to-day so trifling, yesterday so immense, most certainly induced a lifting of the spiritual horizon that revealed amazing possibilities." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 498", + "text": "It was in the windless days of a perfect December that Moleson, the Egyptologist, found us out and paid a flying visit to Helouan. His duties took him up and down the land, but his time seemed largely at his own disposal. He lingered on. His coming introduced a new element I was not quite able to estimate; though, speaking generally, the effect of his presence upon my companion was to emphasise the latter's alteration. It underlined the change, and drew attention to it. The new arrival, I gathered, was not altogether welcome. 'I should never have expected to find you here,' laughed Moleson when they met, and whether he referred to Helouan or to the hotel was not quite clear. I got the impression he meant both; I remembered my fancy that it was a good hotel to hide in. George Isley had betrayed a slight involuntary start when the visiting card was brought to him at tea-time. I think he had wished to escape from his former co-worker. Moleson had found him out. 'I heard you had a friend with you and were contemplating further exper\u2014work,' he added. He changed the word 'experiment' quickly to the other.\n\n'The former, as you see, is true, but not the latter,' replied my companion dryly, and in his manner was a touch of opposition that might have been hostility. Their intimacy, I saw, was close and of old standing. In all they said and did and looked, there was an undercurrent of other meaning that just escaped me. They were up to something\u2014they had been up to something; but Isley would have withdrawn if he could!\n\nMoleson was an ambitious and energetic personality, absorbed in his profession, alive to the poetical as well as to the practical value of archaeology, and he made at first a wholly delightful impression upon me. An instinctive flair for his subject had early in life brought him success and a measure of fame as well. His knowledge was accurate and scholarly, his mind saturated in the lore of a vanished civilisation. Behind an exterior that was quietly careless, I divined a passionate and complex nature, and I watched him with interest as the man for whom the olden sun-worship of unscientific days held some beauty of reality and truth. Much in his strange book that had bewildered me now seemed intelligible when I saw the author. I cannot explain this more closely. Something about him somehow made it possible. Though modern to the finger-tips and thoroughly equipped with all the tendencies of the day, there seemed to hide in him another self that held aloof with a dignified detachment from the interests in which his 'educated' mind was centred. He read living secrets beneath museum labels, I might put it. He stepped out of the days of the Pharaohs if ever man did, and I realised early in our acquaintance that this was the man who had exceptional powers of 'resistance and self-protection,' and was, in his particular branch of work, 'unusual.' In manner he was light and gay, his sense of humour strong, with a way of treating everything as though laughter was the sanest attitude towards life. There is, however, the laughter that hides\u2014other things. Moleson, as I gathered from many clues of talk and manner and silence, was a deep and singular being. His experiences in Egypt, if any, he had survived admirably. There were at least two Molesons. I felt him more than double\u2014multiple.\n\nIn appearance tall, thin, and fleshless, with a dried-up skin and features withered as a mummy's, he said laughingly that Nature had picked him physically for his 'job'; and, indeed, one could see him worming his way down narrow tunnels into the sandy tombs, and writhing along sunless passages of suffocating heat without too much personal inconvenience. Something sinuous, almost fluid in his mind expressed itself in his body too. He might go in any direction without causing surprise. He might go backwards or forwards. He might go in two directions at once.\n\nAnd my first impression of the man deepened before many days were past. There was irresponsibility in him, insincerity somewhere, almost want of heart. His morality was certainly not to-day's, and the mind in him was slippery. I think the modern world, to which he was unattached, confused and irritated him. A sense of insecurity came with him. His interest in George Isley was the interest in a psychological 'specimen.' I remembered how in his book he described the selection of individuals for certain functions of that marvellous worship, and the odd idea flashed through me\u2014well, that Isley exactly suited some purpose of his re-creating energies. The man was keenly observant from top to toe, but not with his sight alone; he seemed to be aware of motives and emotions before he noticed the acts or gestures that these caused. I felt that he took me in as well. Certainly he eyed me up and down by means of this inner observation that seemed automatic with him.\n\nMoleson was not staying in our hotel; he had chosen one where social life was more abundant; but he came up frequently to lunch and dine, and sometimes spent the evening in Isley's rooms, amusing us with his skill upon the piano, singing Arab songs, and chanting phrases from the ancient Egyptian rituals to rhythms of his own invention. The old Egyptian music, both in harmony and melody, was far more developed than I had realised, the use of sound having been of radical importance in their ceremonies. The chanting in particular he did with extraordinary effect, though whether its success lay in his sonorous voice, his peculiar increasing of the vowel sounds, or in anything deeper, I cannot pretend to say. The result at any rate was of a unique description. It brought buried Egypt to the surface; the gigantic Presence entered sensibly into the room. It came, huge and gorgeous, rolling upon the mind the instant he began, and something in it was both terrible and oppressive. The repose of eternity lay in the sound. Invariably, after a few moments of that transforming music, I saw the Valley of the Kings, the deserted temples, titanic faces of stone, great effigies coifed with zodiacal signs, but above all\u2014the twin Colossi.\n\nI mentioned this latter detail.\n\n'Curious you should feel that too\u2014curious you should say it, I mean,' Moleson replied, not looking at me, yet with an air as if I had said something he expected. 'To me the Memnon figures express Egypt better than all the other monuments put together. Like the desert, they are featureless. They sum her up, as it were, yet leave the message unuttered. For, you see, they cannot.' He laughed a little in his throat. 'They have neither eyes nor lips nor nose; their features are gone.'\n\n'Yet they tell the secret\u2014to those who care to listen,' put in Isley in a scarcely noticeable voice. 'Just because they have no words. They still sing at dawn,' he added in a louder, almost a challenging tone. It startled me.\n\nMoleson turned round at him, opened his lips to speak, hesitated, stopped. He said nothing for a moment. I cannot describe what it was in the lightning glance they exchanged that put me on the alert for something other than was obvious. My nerves quivered suddenly, and a breath of colder air stole in among us. Moleson swung round to me again. 'I almost think,' he said, laughing when I complimented him upon the music, 'that I must have been a priest of Aton-Ra in an earlier existence, for all this comes to my finger-tips as if it were instinctive knowledge. Plotinus, remember, lived a few miles away at Alexandria with his great idea that knowledge is recollection,' he said, with a kind of cynical amusement. 'In those days, at any rate,' he added more significantly, 'worship was real and ceremonials actually expressed great ideas and teaching. There was power in them.' Two of the Molesons spoke in that contradictory utterance.\n\nI saw that Isley was fidgeting where he sat, betraying by certain gestures that uneasiness was in him. He hid his face a moment in his hands; he sighed; he made a movement\u2014as though to prevent something coming. But Moleson resisted his attempt to change the conversation, though the key shifted a little of its own accord. There were numerous occasions like this when I was aware that both men skirted something that had happened, something that Moleson wished to resume, but that Isley seemed anxious to postpone.\n\nI found myself studying Moleson's personality, yet never getting beyond a certain point. Shrewd, subtle, with an acute rather than a large intelligence, he was cynical as well as insincere, and yet I cannot describe by what means I arrived at two other conclusions as well about him: first, that this insincerity and want of heart had not been so always; and, secondly, that he sought social diversion with deliberate and un-ordinary purpose. I could well believe that the first was Egypt's mark upon him, and the second an effort at resistance and self-protection.\n\n'If it wasn't for the gaiety,' he remarked once in a flippant way that thinly hid significance, 'a man out here would go under in a year. Social life gets rather reckless\u2014exaggerated\u2014people do things they would never dream of doing at home. Perhaps you've noticed it,' he added, looking suddenly at me; 'Cairo and the rest\u2014they plunge at it as though driven\u2014a sort of excess about it somewhere.' I nodded agreement. The way he said it was unpleasant rather. 'It's an antidote,' he said, a sub-acid flavour in his tone. 'I used to loathe society myself. But now I find gaiety\u2014a certain irresponsible excitement\u2014of importance. Egypt gets on the nerves after a bit. The moral fibre fails. The will grows weak.' And he glanced covertly at Isley as with a desire to point his meaning. 'It's the clash between the ugly present and the majestic past, perhaps.' He smiled.\n\nIsley shrugged his shoulders, making no reply; and the other went on to tell stories of friends and acquaintances whom Egypt had adversely affected: Barton, the Oxford man, school teacher, who had insisted in living in a tent until the Government relieved him of his job. He took to his tent, roamed the desert, drawn irresistibly, practical considerations of the present of no avail. This yearning took him, though he could never define the exact attraction. In the end his mental balance was disturbed. 'But now he's all right again; I saw him in London only this year; he can't say what he felt or why he did it. Only\u2014he's different.' Of John Lattin, too, he spoke, whom agarophobia caught so terribly in Upper Egypt; of Malahide, upon whom some fascination of the Nile induced suicidal mania and attempts at drowning; of Jim Moleson, a cousin (who had camped at Thebes with himself and Isley), whom megalomania of a most singular type attacked suddenly in a sandy waste\u2014all radically cured as soon as they left Egypt, yet, one and all, changed and made otherwise in their very souls.\n\nHe talked in a loose, disjointed way, and though much he said was fantastic, as if meant to challenge opposition, there was impressiveness about it somewhere, due, I think, to a kind of cumulative emotion he produced.\n\n'The monuments do not impress merely by their bulk, but by their majestic symmetry,' I remember him saying. 'Look at the choice of form alone\u2014the Pyramids, for instance. No other shape was possible: dome, square, spires, all would have been hideously inadequate. The wedge-shaped mass, immense foundations and pointed apex were the mot juste in outline. Do you think people without greatness in themselves chose that form? There was no unbalance in the minds that conceived the harmonious and magnificent structures of the temples. There was stately grandeur in their consciousness that could only be born of truth and knowledge. The power in their images is a direct expression of eternal and essential things they knew.'\n\nWe listened in silence. He was off upon his hobby. But behind the careless tone and laughing questions there was this lurking passionateness that made me feel uncomfortable. He was edging up, I felt, towards some climax that meant life and death to himself and Isley. I could not fathom it. My sympathy let me in a little, yet not enough to understand completely. Isley, I saw, was also uneasy, though for reasons that equally evaded me.\n\n'One can almost believe,' he continued, 'that something still hangs about in the atmosphere from those olden times.' He half closed his eyes, but I caught the gleam in them. 'It affects the mind through the imagination. With some it changes the point of view. It takes the soul back with it to former, quite different, conditions, that must have been almost another kind of consciousness.'\n\nHe paused an instant and looked up at us. 'The intensity of belief in those days,' he resumed, since neither of us accepted the challenge, 'was amazing\u2014something quite unknown anywhere in the world to-day. It was so sure, so positive; no mere speculative theories, I mean;\u2014as though something in the climate, the exact position beneath the stars, the \"attitude\" of this particular stretch of earth in relation to the sun\u2014thinned the veil between humanity\u2014and other things. Their hierarchies of gods, you know, were not mere idols; animals, birds, monsters, and what-not, all typified spiritual forces and powers that influenced their daily life. But the strong thing is\u2014they knew. People who were scientific as they were did not swallow foolish superstitions. They made colours that could last six thousand years, even in the open air; and without instruments they measured accurately\u2014an enormously difficult and involved calculation\u2014the precession of the equinoxes. You've been to Denderah?'\u2014he suddenly glanced again at me. 'No! Well, the minds that realised the zodiacal signs could hardly believe, you know, that Hathor was a cow!'\n\nIsley coughed. He was about to interrupt, but before he could find words, Moleson was off again, some new quality in his tone and manner that was almost aggressive. The hints he offered seemed more than hints. There was a strange conviction in his heart. I think he was skirting a bigger thing that he and his companion knew, yet that his real object was to see in how far I was open to attack\u2014how far my sympathy might be with them. I became aware that he and George Isley shared this bigger thing. It was based, I felt, on some certain knowledge that experiment had brought them.\n\n'Think of the grand teaching of Aknahton, that young Pharaoh who regenerated the entire land and brought it to its immense prosperity. He taught the worship of the sun, but not of the visible sun. The deity had neither form nor shape. The great disk of glory was but the manifestation, each beneficent ray ending in a hand that blessed the world. It was a god of everlasting energy, love and power, yet men could know it at first hand in their daily lives, worshipping it at dawn and sunset with passionate devotion. No anthropomorphic idol masqueraded in that!'\n\nAn extraordinary glow was about him as he said it. The same minute he lowered his voice, shifting the key perceptibly. He kept looking up at me through half-closed eyelids.\n\n'And another thing they wonderfully knew,' he almost whispered, 'was that, with the precession of their deity across the equinoctial changes, there came new powers down into the world of men. Each cycle\u2014each zodiacal sign\u2014brought its special powers which they quickly typified in the monstrous effigies we label to-day in our dull museums. Each sign took some two thousand years to traverse. Each sign, moreover, involved a change in human consciousness. There was this relation between the heavens and the human heart. All that they knew. While the sun crawled through the sign of Taurus, it was the Bull they worshipped; with Aries, it was the ram that coifed their granite symbols. Then came, as you remember, with Pisces the great New Arrival, when already they sank from their grand zenith, and the Fish was taken as the emblem of the changing powers which the Christ embodied. For the human soul, they held, echoed the changes in the immense journey of the original deity, who is its source, across the Zodiac, and the truth of \"As above, so Below\" remains the key to all manifested life. And to-day the sun, just entering Aquarius, new powers are close upon the world. The old\u2014that which has been for two thousand years\u2014again is crumbling, passing, dying. New powers and a new consciousness are knocking at our doors. It is a time of change. It is also'\u2014he leaned forward so that his eyes came close before me\u2014'the time to make the change. The soul can choose its own conditions. It can\u2014'\n\nA sudden crash smothered the rest of the sentence. A chair had fallen with a clatter upon the wooden floor where the carpet left it bare. Whether Isley in rising had stumbled against it, or whether he had purposely knocked it over, I could not say. I only knew that he had abruptly risen and as abruptly sat down again. A curious feeling came to me that the sign was somehow prearranged. It was so sudden. His voice, too, was forced, I thought.\n\n'Yes, but we can do without all that, Moleson,' he interrupted with acute abruptness. 'Suppose we have a tune instead.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 499", + "text": "It was after dinner in his private room, and he had sat very silent in his corner until this sudden outburst. Moleson got up quietly without a word and moved over to the piano. I saw\u2014or was it imagination merely?\u2014a new expression slide upon his withered face. He meant mischief somewhere.\n\nFrom that instant\u2014from the moment he rose and walked over the thick carpet\u2014he fascinated me. The atmosphere his talk and stories had brought remained. His lean fingers ran over the keys, and at first he played fragments from popular musical comedies that were pleasant enough, but made no demand upon the attention. I heard them without listening. I was thinking of another thing\u2014his walk. For the way he moved across those few feet of carpet had power in it. He looked different; he seemed another man; he was changed. I saw him curiously\u2014as I sometimes now saw Isley too\u2014bigger. In some manner that was both enchanting and oppressive, his presence from that moment drew my imagination as by an air of authority it held.\n\nI left my seat in the far corner and dropped into a chair beside the window, nearer to the piano. Isley, I then noticed, had also turned to watch him. But it was George Isley not quite as he was now. I felt rather than saw the change. Both men had subtly altered. They seemed extended, their outlines shadowy.\n\nIsley, alert and anxious, glanced up at the player, his mind of earlier years\u2014for the expression of his face was plain\u2014following the light music, yet with difficulty that involved effort, almost struggle. 'Play that again, will you?' I heard him say from time to time. He was trying to take hold of it, to climb back to a condition where that music had linked him to the present, to seize a mental structure that was gone, to grip hold tightly of it\u2014only to find that it was too far forgotten and too fragile. It would not bear him. I am sure of it, and I can swear I divined his mood. He fought to realise himself as he had been, but in vain. In his dim corner opposite I watched him closely. The big black Bl\u00fcthner blocked itself between us. Above it swayed the outline, lean and half shadowy, of Moleson as he played. A faint whisper floated through the room. 'You are in Egypt.' Nowhere else could this queer feeling of presentiment, of anticipation, have gained a footing so easily. I was aware of intense emotion in all three of us. The least reminder of To-day seemed ugly. I longed for some ancient forgotten splendour that was lost.\n\nThe scene fixed my attention very steadily, for I was aware of something deliberate and calculated on Moleson's part. The thing was well considered in his mind, intention only half concealed. It was Egypt he interpreted by sound, expressing what in him was true, then observing its effect, as he led us cleverly towards\u2014the past. Beginning with the present, he played persuasively, with penetration, with insistent meaning too. He had that touch which conjured up real atmosphere, and, at first, that atmosphere termed modern. He rendered vividly the note of London, passing from the jingles of musical comedy, nervous rag-times and sensuous Tango dances, into the higher strains of concert rooms and 'cultured' circles. Yet not too abruptly. Most dexterously he shifted the level, and with it our emotion. I recognised, as in a parody, various ultra-modern thrills: the tumult of Strauss, the pagan sweetness of primitive Debussy, the weirdness and ecstasy of metaphysical Scriabin. The composite note of To-day in both extremes, he brought into this private sitting-room of the desert hotel, while George Isley, listening keenly, fidgeted in his chair.\n\n'\"Apr\u00e8s-midi d'un Faune,\"' said Moleson dreamily, answering the question as to what he played. 'Debussy's, you know. And the thing before it was from \"Til Eulenspiegel\"\u2014Strauss, of course.'\n\nHe drawled, swaying slowly with the rhythm, and leaving pauses between the words. His attention was not wholly on his listener, and in the voice was a quality that increased my uneasy apprehension. I felt distress for Isley somewhere. Something, it seemed, was coming; Moleson brought it. Unconsciously in his walk, it now appeared consciously in his music; and it came from what was underground in him. A charm, a subtle change, stole oddly over the room. It stole over my heart as well. Some power of estimating left me, as though my mind were slipping backwards and losing familiar, common standards.\n\n'The true modern note in it, isn't there?' he drawled; 'cleverness, I think\u2014intellectual\u2014surface ingenuity\u2014no depth or permanence\u2014just the sensational brilliance of To-day.' He turned and stared at me fixedly an instant. 'Nothing everlasting,' he added impressively. 'It tells everything it knows\u2014because it's small enough\u2014'\n\nAnd the room turned pettier as he said it; another, bigger shadow draped its little walls. Through the open windows came a stealthy gesture of eternity. The atmosphere stretched visibly. Moleson was playing a marvellous fragment from Scriabin's 'Prometheus.' It sounded thin and shallow. This modern music, all of it, was out of place and trivial. It was almost ridiculous. The scale of our emotion changed insensibly into a deeper thing that has no name in dictionaries, being of another age. And I glanced at the windows where stone columns framed dim sections of great Egypt listening outside. There was no moon; only deep draughts of stars blazed, hanging in the sky. I thought with awe of the mysterious knowledge that vanished people had of these stars, and of the Sun's huge journey through the Zodiac...\n\nAnd, with astonishing suddenness as of dream, there rose a pictured image against that starlit sky. Lifted into the air, between heaven and earth, I saw float swiftly past a panorama of the stately temples, led by Denderah, Edfu, Abou Simbel. It paused, it hovered, it disappeared. Leaving incalculable solemnity behind it in the air, it vanished, and to see so vast a thing move at that easy yet unhasting speed unhinged some sense of measurement in me. It was, of course, I assured myself, mere memory objectified owing to something that the music summoned, yet the apprehension rose in me that the whole of Egypt presently would stream past in similar fashion\u2014Egypt as she was in the zenith of her unrecoverable past. Behind the tinkling of the modern piano passed the rustling of a multitude, the tramping of countless feet on sand... It was singularly vivid. It arrested in me something that normally went flowing... And when I turned my head towards the room to call attention to my strange experience, the eyes of Moleson, I saw, were laid upon my own. He stared at me. The light in them transfixed me, and I understood that the illusion was due in some manner to his evocation. Isley rose at the same moment from his chair. The thing I had vaguely been expecting had shifted closer. And the same moment the musician abruptly changed his key.\n\n'You may like this better,' he murmured, half to himself, but in tones he somehow made echoing. 'It's more suited to the place.' There was a resonance in the voice as though it emerged from hollows underground. 'The other seems almost sacrilegious\u2014here.' And his voice drawled off in the rhythm of slower modulations that he played. It had grown muffled. There was an impression, too, that he did not strike the piano, but that the music issued from himself.\n\n'Place! What place?' asked Isley quickly. His head turned sharply as he spoke. His tone, in its remoteness, made me tremble.\n\nThe musician laughed to himself. 'I meant that this hotel seems really an impertinence,' he murmured, leaning down upon the notes he played upon so softly and so well; 'and that it's but the thinnest kind of pretence\u2014when you come to think of it. We are in the desert really. The Colossi are outside, and all the emptied temples. Or ought to be,' he added, raising his tone abruptly with a glance at me.\n\nHe straightened up and stared out into the starry sky past George Isley's shoulders.\n\n'That,' he exclaimed with betraying vehemence, 'is where we are and what we play to!' His voice suddenly increased; there was a roar in it. 'That,' he repeated, 'is the thing that takes our hearts away.' The volume of intonation was astonishing.\n\nFor the way he uttered the monosyllable suddenly revealed the man beneath the outer sheath of cynicism and laughter, explained his heartlessness, his secret stream of life. He, too, was soul and body in the past. 'That' revealed more than pages of descriptive phrases. His heart lived in the temple aisles, his mind unearthed forgotten knowledge; his soul had clothed itself anew in the seductive glory of antiquity: he dwelt with a quickening magic of existence in the reconstructed splendour of what most term only ruins. He and George Isley together had revivified a power that enticed them backwards; but whereas the latter struggled still, the former had already made his permanent home there. The faculty in me that saw the vision of streaming temples saw also this\u2014remorselessly definite. Moleson himself sat naked at that piano. I saw him clearly then. He no longer masqueraded behind his sneers and laughter. He, too, had long ago surrendered, lost himself, gone out, and from the place his soul now dwelt in he watched George Isley sinking down to join him. He lived in ancient, subterranean Egypt. This great hotel stood precariously on the merest upper crust of desert. A thousand tombs, a hundred temples lay outside, within reach almost of our very voices. Moleson was merged with 'that.'\n\nThis intuition flashed upon me like the picture in the sky; and both were true.\n\nAnd, meanwhile, this other thing he played had a surge of power in it impossible to describe. It was sombre, huge and solemn. It conveyed the power that his walk conveyed. There was distance in it, but a distance not of space alone. A remoteness of time breathed through it with that strange sadness and melancholy yearning that enormous interval brings. It marched, but very far away; it held refrains that assumed the rhythms of a multitude the centuries muted; it sang, but the singing was underground in passages that fine sand muffled. Lost, wandering winds sighed through it, booming. The contrast, after the modern, cheaper music, was dislocating. Yet the change had been quite naturally effected.\n\n'It would sound empty and monotonous elsewhere\u2014in London, for instance,' I heard Moleson drawling, as he swayed to and fro, 'but here it is big and splendid\u2014true. You hear what I mean,' he added gravely. 'You understand?'\n\n'What is it?' asked Isley thickly, before I could say a word. 'I forget exactly. It has tears in it\u2014more than I can bear.' The end of his sentence died away in his throat.\n\nMoleson did not look at him as he answered. He looked at me.\n\n'You surely ought to know,' he replied, the voice rising and falling as though the rhythm forced it. 'You have heard it all before\u2014that chant from the ritual we\u2014'\n\nIsley sprang up and stopped him. I did not hear the sentence complete. An extraordinary thought blazed into me that the voices of both men were not quite their own. I fancied\u2014wild, impossible as it sounds\u2014that I heard the twin Colossi singing to each other in the dawn. Stupendous ideas sprang past me, leaping. It seemed as though eternal symbols of the cosmos, discovered and worshipped in this ancient land, leaped into awful life. My consciousness became enveloping. I had the distressing feeling that ages slipped out of place and took me with them; they dominated me; they rushed me off my feet like water. I was drawn backwards. I, too, was changing\u2014being changed.\n\n'I remember,' said Isley softly, a reverence of worship in his voice. But there was anguish in it too, and pity; he let the present go completely from him; the last strands severed with a wrench of pain. I imagined I heard his soul pass weeping far away\u2014below.\n\n'I'll sing it,' murmured Moleson, 'for the voice is necessary. The sound and rhythm are utterly divine!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 500", + "text": "And forthwith his voice began a series of long-drawn cadences that seemed somehow the root-sounds of every tongue that ever was. A spell came over me I could touch and feel. A web encompassed me; my arms and feet became entangled; a veil of fine threads wove across my eyes. The enthralling power of the rhythm produced some magical movement in the soul. I was aware of life everywhere about me, far and near, in the dwellings of the dead, as also in the corridors of the iron hills. Thebes stood erect, and Memphis teemed upon the river banks. For the modern world fell, swaying, at this sound that restored the past, and in this past both men before me lived and had their being. The storm of present life passed o'er their heads, while they dwelt underground, obliterated, gone. Upon the wave of sound they went down into their recovered kingdom.\n\nI shivered, moved vigorously, half rose up, then instantly sank back again, resigned and helpless. For I entered by their side, it seemed, the conditions of their strange captivity. My thoughts, my feelings, my point of view were transplanted to another centre. Consciousness shifted in me. I saw things from another's point of view\u2014antiquity's.\n\nThe present forgotten but the past supreme, I lost Reality. Our room became a pin-point picture seen in a drop of water, while this subterranean world, replacing it, turned immense. My heart took on the gigantic, leisured stride of what had been. Proportions grew; size captured me; and magnitude, turned monstrous, swept mere measurement away. Some hand of golden sunshine picked me up and set me in the quivering web beside those other two. I heard the rustle of the settling threads; I heard the shuffling of the feet in sand; I heard the whispers in the dwellings of the dead. Behind the monotony of this sacerdotal music I heard them in their dim carved chambers. The ancient galleries were awake. The Life of unremembered ages stirred in multitudes about me.\n\nThe reality of so incredible an experience evaporates through the stream of language. I can only affirm this singular proof\u2014that the deepest, most satisfying knowledge the Present could offer seemed insignificant beside some stalwart majesty of the Past that utterly usurped it. This modern room, holding a piano and two figures of To-day, appeared as a paltry miniature pinned against a vast transparent curtain, whose foreground was thick with symbols of temple, sphinx and pyramid, but whose background of stupendous hanging grey slid off towards a splendour where the cities of the Dead shook off their sand and thronged space to its ultimate horizons... The stars, the entire universe, vibrating and alive, became involved in it. Long periods of time slipped past me. I seemed living ages ago... I was living backwards...\n\nThe size and eternity of Egypt took me easily. There was an overwhelming grandeur in it that elbowed out all present standards. The whole place towered and stood up. The desert reared, the very horizons lifted; majestic figures of granite rose above the hotel, great faces hovered and drove past; huge arms reached up to pluck the stars and set them in the ceilings of the labyrinthine tombs. The colossal meaning of the ancient land emerged through all its ruined details... reconstructed\u2014burningly alive...\n\nIt became at length unbearable. I longed for the droning sounds to cease, for the rhythm to lessen its prodigious sweep. My heart cried out for the gold of the sunlight on the desert, for the sweet air by the river's banks, for the violet lights upon the hills at dawn. And I resisted, I made an effort to return.\n\n'Your chant is horrible. For God's sake, let's have an Arab song\u2014or the music of To-day!'\n\nThe effort was intense, the result was\u2014nothing. I swear I used these words. I heard the actual sound of my voice, if no one else did, for I remember that it was pitiful in the way great space devoured it, making of its appreciable volume the merest whisper as of some bird or insect cry. But the figure that I took for Moleson, instead of answer or acknowledgment, merely grew and grew as things grow in a fairy tale. I hardly know; I certainly cannot say. That dwindling part of me which offered comments on the entire occurrence noted this extraordinary effect as though it happened naturally\u2014that Moleson himself was marvellously increasing.\n\nThe entire spell became operative all at once. I experienced both the delight of complete abandonment and the terror of letting go what had seemed real. I understood Moleson's sham laughter, and the subtle resignation of George Isley. And an amazing thought flashed birdlike across my changing consciousness\u2014that this resurrection into the Past, this rebirth of the spirit which they sought, involved taking upon themselves the guise of these ancient symbols each in turn. As the embryo assumes each evolutionary stage below it before the human semblance is attained, so the souls of those two adventurers took upon themselves the various emblems of that intense belief. The devout worshipper takes on the qualities of his deity. They wore the entire series of the old-world gods so potently that I perceived them, and even objectified them by my senses. The present was their pre-natal stage; to enter the past they were being born again.\n\nBut it was not Moleson's semblance alone that took on this awful change. Both faces, scaled to the measure of Egypt's outstanding quality of size, became in this little modern room distressingly immense. Distorting mirrors can suggest no simile, for the symmetry of proportion was not injured. I lost their human physiognomies. I saw their thoughts, their feelings, their augmented, altered hearts, the thing that Egypt put there while she stole their love from modern life. There grew an awful stateliness upon them that was huge, mysterious, and motionless as stone.\n\nFor Moleson's narrow face at first turned hawk-like in the semblance of the sinister deity, Horus, only stretched to tower above the toy-scaled piano; it was keen and sly and monstrous after prey, while a swiftness of the sunrise leaped from both the brilliant eyes. George Isley, equally immense of outline, was in general presentment more magnificent, a breadth of the Sphinx about his spreading shoulders, and in his countenance an inscrutable power of calm temple images. These were the first signs of obsession; but others followed. In rapid series, like lantern-slides upon a screen, the ancient symbols flashed one after another across these two extended human faces and were gone. Disentanglement became impossible. The successive signatures seemed almost superimposed as in a composite photograph, each appearing and vanished before recognition was even possible, while I interpreted the inner alchemy by means of outer tokens familiar to my senses. Egypt, possessing them, expressed herself thus marvellously in their physical aspect, using the symbols of her intense, regenerative power...\n\nThe changes merged with such swiftness into one another that I did not seize the half of them\u2014till, finally, the procession culminated in a single one that remained fixed awfully upon them both. The entire series merged. I was aware of this single masterful image which summed up all the others in sublime repose. The gigantic thing rose up in this incredible statue form. The spirit of Egypt synthesised in this monstrous symbol, obliterated them both. I saw the seated figures of the grim Colossi, dipped in sand, night over them, waiting for the dawn..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 501", + "text": "I made a violent effort, then, at self-assertion\u2014an effort to focus my mind upon the present. And, searching for Moleson and George Isley, its nearest details, I was aware that I could not find them. The familiar figures of my two companions were not discoverable.\n\nI saw it as plainly as I also saw that ludicrous, wee piano\u2014for a moment. But the moment remained; the Eternity of Egypt stayed. For that lonely and terrific pair had stooped their shoulders and bowed their awful heads. They were in the room. They imaged forth the power of the everlasting Past through the little structures of two human worshippers. Room, walls, and ceiling fled away. Sand and the open sky replaced them.\n\nThe two of them rose side by side before my bursting eyes. I knew not where to look. Like some child who confronts its giants upon the nursery floor, I turned to stone, unable to think or move. I stared. Sight wrenched itself to find the men familiar to it, but found instead this symbolising vision. I could not see them properly. Their faces were spread with hugeness, their features lost in some uncommon magnitude, their shoulders, necks, and arms grown vast upon the air. As with the desert, there was physiognomy yet no personal expression, the human thing all drowned within the mass of battered stone. I discovered neither cheeks nor mouth nor jaw, but ruined eyes and lips of broken granite. Huge, motionless, mysterious, Egypt informed them and took them to herself. And between us, curiously presented in some false perspective, I saw the little symbol of To-day\u2014the Bl\u00fcthner piano. It was appalling. I knew a second of majestic horror. I blenched. Hot and cold gushed through me. Strength left me, power of speech and movement too, as in a moment of complete paralysis.\n\nThe spell, moreover, was not within the room alone; it was outside and everywhere. The Past stood massed about the very walls of the hotel. Distance, as well as time, stepped nearer. That chanting summoned the gigantic items in all their ancient splendour. The shadowy concourse grouped itself upon the sand about us, and I was aware that the great army shifted noiselessly into place; that pyramids soared and towered; that deities of stone stood by; that temples ranged themselves in reconstructed beauty, grave as the night of time whence they emerged; and that the outline of the Sphinx, motionless but aggressive, piled its dim bulk upon the atmosphere. Immensity answered to immensity... There were vast intervals of time and there were reaches of enormous distance, yet all happened in a moment, and all happened within a little space. It was now and here. Eternity whispered in every second as in every grain of sand. Yet, while aware of so many stupendous details all at once, I was really aware of one thing only\u2014that the spirit of ancient Egypt faced me in these two terrific figures, and that my consciousness, stretched painfully yet gloriously, included all, as She also unquestionably included them\u2014and me.\n\nFor it seemed I shared the likeness of my two companions. Some lesser symbol, though of similar kind, obsessed me too. I tried to move, but my feet were set in stone; my arms lay fixed; my body was embedded in the rock. Sand beat sharply upon my outer surface, urged upwards in little flurries by a chilly wind. There was nothing felt: I heard the rattle of the scattering grains against my hardened body...\n\nAnd we waited for the dawn; for the resurrection of that unchanging deity who was the source and inspiration of all our glorious life... The air grew keen and fresh. In the distance a line of sky turned from pink to violet and gold; a delicate rose next flushed the desert; a few pale stars hung fainting overhead; and the wind that brought the sunrise was already stirring. The whole land paused upon the coming of its mighty God...\n\nInto the pause there rose a curious sound for which we had been waiting. For it came familiarly, as though expected. I could have sworn at first that it was George Isley who sang, answering his companion. There beat behind its great volume the same note and rhythm, only so prodigiously increased that, while Moleson's chant had waked it, it now was independent and apart. The resonant vibrations of what he sang had reached down into the places where it slept. They uttered synchronously. Egypt spoke. There was in it the deep muttering as of a thousand drums, as though the desert uttered in prodigious syllables. I listened while my heart of stone stood still. There were two voices in the sky. They spoke tremendously with each other in the dawn:\n\n'So easily we still remain possessors of the land... While the centuries roar past us and are gone.'\n\nSoft with power the syllables rolled forth, yet with a booming depth as though caverns underground produced them.\n\n'Our silence is disturbed. Pass on with the multitude towards the East... Still in the dawn we sing the old-world wisdom... They shall hear our speech, yet shall not hear it with their ears of flesh. At dawn our words go forth, searching the distances of sand and time across the sunlight... At dusk they return, as upon eagles' wings, entering again our lips of stone... Each century one syllable, yet no sentence yet complete. While our lips are broken with the utterance...'\n\nIt seemed that hours and months and years went past me while I listened in my sandy bed. The fragments died far away, then sounded very close again. It was as though mountain peaks sang to one another above clouds. Wind caught the muffled roar away. Wind brought it back... Then, in a hollow pause that lasted years, conveying marvellously the passage of long periods, I heard the utterance more clearly. The leisured roll of the great voice swept through me like a flood:\n\n'We wait and watch and listen in our loneliness. We do not close our eyes. The moon and stars sail past us, and our river finds the sea. We bring Eternity upon your broken lives... We see you build your little lines of steel across our territory behind the thin white smoke. We hear the whistle of your messengers of iron through the air... The nations rise and pass. The empires flutter westwards and are gone... The sun grows older and the stars turn pale... Winds shift the line of the horizons, and our River moves its bed. But we, everlasting and unchangeable, remain. Of water, sand and fire is our essential being, yet built within the universal air... There is no pause in life, there is no break in death. The changes bring no end. The sun returns... There is eternal resurrection... But our kingdom is underground in shadow, unrealised of your little day... Come, come! The temples still are crowded, and our Desert blesses you. Our River takes your feet. Our sand shall purify, and the fire of our God shall burn you sweetly into wisdom... Come, then, and worship, for the time draws near. It is the dawn...'\n\nThe voices died down into depths that the sand of ages muffled, while the flaming dawn of the East rushed up the sky. Sunrise, the great symbol of life's endless resurrection, was at hand. About me, in immense but shadowy array, stood the whole of ancient Egypt, hanging breathlessly upon the moment of adoration. No longer stern and terrible in the splendour of their long neglect, the effigies rose erect with passionate glory, a forest of stately stone. Their granite lips were parted and their ancient eyes were wide. All faced the east. And the sun drew nearer to the rim of the attentive Desert." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 502", + "text": "Emotion there seemed none, in the sense that I knew feeling. I knew, if anything, the ultimate secrets of two primitive sensations\u2014joy and awe... The dawn grew swiftly brighter. There was gold, as though the sands of Nubia spilt their brilliance on each shining detail; there was glory, as though the retreating tide of stars spilt their light foam upon the world; and there was passion, as though the beliefs of all the ages floated back with abandonment into the\u2014Sun. Ruined Egypt merged into a single temple of elemental vastness whose floor was the empty desert, but whose walls rose to the stars.\n\nAbruptly, then, chanting and rhythm ceased; they dipped below. Sand muffled them. And the Sun looked down upon its ancient world...\n\nA radiant warmth poured through me. I found that I could move my limbs again. A sense of triumphant life ran through my stony frame. For one passing second I heard the shower of gritty particles upon my surface like sand blown upwards by a gust of wind, but this time I could feel the sting of it upon my skin. It passed. The drenching heat bathed me from head to foot, while stony insensibility gave place with returning consciousness to flesh and blood. The sun had risen... I was alive, but I was\u2014changed.\n\nIt seemed I opened my eyes. An immense relief was in me. I turned; I drew a deep, refreshing breath; I stretched one leg upon a thick, green carpet. Something had left me; another thing had returned. I sat up, conscious of welcome release, of freedom, of escape.\n\nThere was some violent, disorganising break. I found myself; I found Moleson; I found George Isley too. He had got shifted in that room without my being aware of it. Isley had risen. He came upon me like a blow. I saw him move his arms. Fire flashed from below his hands; and I realised then that he was turning on the electric lights. They emerged from different points along the walls, in the alcove, beneath the ceiling, by the writing-table; and one had just that minute blazed into my eyes from a bracket close above me. I was back again in the Present among modern things.\n\nBut, while most of the details presented themselves gradually to my recovered senses, Isley returned with this curious effect of speed and distance\u2014like a blow upon the mind. From great height and from prodigious size\u2014he dropped. I seemed to find him rushing at me. Moleson was simply 'there'; there was no speed or sudden change in him as with the other. Motionless at the piano, his long thin hands lay down upon the keys yet did not strike them. But Isley came back like lightning into the little room, signs of the monstrous obsession still about his altering features. There was battle and worship mingled in his deep-set eyes. His mouth, though set, was smiling. With a shudder I positively saw the vastness slipping from his face as shadows from a stretch of broken cliff. There was this awful mingling of proportions. The colossal power that had resumed his being drew slowly inwards. There was collapse in him. And upon the sunburned cheek of his rugged face I saw a tear.\n\nPoignant revulsion caught me then for a moment. The present showed itself in rags. The reduction of scale was painful. I yearned for the splendour that was gone, yet still seemed so hauntingly almost within reach. The cheapness of the hotel room, the glaring ugliness of its tinsel decoration, the baseness of ideals where utility instead of beauty, gain instead of worship, governed life\u2014this, with the dwindled aspect of my companions to the insignificance of marionettes, brought a hungry pain that was at first intolerable. In the glare of light I noticed the small round face of the portable clock upon the mantelpiece, showing half-past eleven. Moleson had been two hours at the piano. And this measuring faculty of my mind completed the disillusionment. I was, indeed, back among present things. The mechanical spirit of To-day imprisoned me again.\n\nFor a considerable interval we neither moved nor spoke; the sudden change left the emotions in confusion; we had leaped from a height, from the top of the pyramid, from a star\u2014and the crash of landing scattered thought. I stole a glance at Isley, wondering vaguely why he was there at all; the look of resignation had replaced the power in his face; the tear was brushed away. There was no struggle in him now, no sign of resistance; there was abandonment only; he seemed insignificant. The real George Isley was elsewhere: he himself had not returned.\n\nBy jerks, as it were, and by awkward stages, then, we all three came back to common things again. I found that we were talking ordinarily, asking each other questions, answering, lighting cigarettes, and all the rest. Moleson played some commonplace chords upon the piano, while he leaned back listlessly in his chair, putting in sentences now and again and chatting idly to whichever of us would listen. And Isley came slowly across the room towards me, holding out cigarettes. His dark brown face had shadows on it. He looked exhausted, worn, like some soldier broken in the wars.\n\n'You liked it?' I heard his thin voice asking. There was no interest, no expression; it was not the real Isley who spoke; it was the little part of him that had come back. He smiled like a marvellous automaton.\n\nMechanically I took the cigarette he offered me, thinking confusedly what answer I could make.\n\n'It's irresistible,' I murmured; 'I understand that it's easier to go.'\n\n'Sweeter as well,' he whispered with a sigh, 'and very wonderful!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 503", + "text": "The hand that lit my cigarette, I saw, was trembling. A desire to do something violent woke in me suddenly\u2014to move energetically, to push or drive something away.\n\n'What was it?' I asked abruptly, in a louder, half-challenging voice, intended for the man at the piano. 'Such a performance\u2014upon others\u2014without first asking their permission\u2014seems to me unpermissible\u2014it's\u2014'\n\nAnd it was Moleson who replied. He ignored the end of my sentence as though he had not heard it. He strolled over to our side, taking a cigarette and pressing it carefully into shape between his long thin fingers.\n\n'You may well ask,' he answered quietly; 'but it's not so easy to tell. We discovered it'\u2014he nodded towards Isley\u2014'two years ago in the \"Valley.\" It lay beside a Priest, a very important personage, apparently, and was part of the Ritual he used in the worship of the sun. In the Museum now\u2014you can see it any day at the Boulak\u2014it is simply labelled \"Hymn to Ra.\" The period was Aknahton's.'\n\n'The words, yes,' put in Isley, who was listening closely.\n\n'The words?' repeated Moleson in a curious tone. 'There are no words. It's all really a manipulation of the vowel sounds. And the rhythm, or chanting, or whatever you like to call it, I\u2014I invented myself. The Egyptians did not write their music, you see.' He suddenly searched my face a moment with questioning eyes. 'Any words you heard,' he said, 'or thought you heard, were merely your own interpretation.'\n\nI stared at him, making no rejoinder.\n\n'They made use of what they called a \"root-language\" in their rituals,' he went on, 'and it consisted entirely of vowel sounds. There were no consonants. For vowel sounds, you see, run on for ever without end or beginning, whereas consonants interrupt their flow and break it up and limit it. A consonant has no sound of its own at all. Real language is continuous.'\n\nWe stood a moment, smoking in silence. I understood then that this thing Moleson had done was based on definite knowledge. He had rendered some fragment of an ancient Ritual he and Isley had unearthed together, and while he knew its effect upon the latter, he chanced it on myself. Not otherwise, I feel, could it have influenced me in the extraordinary way it did. In the faith and poetry of a nation lies its soul-life, and the gigantic faith of Egypt blazed behind the rhythm of that long, monotonous chant. There were blood and heart and nerves in it. Millions had heard it sung; millions had wept and prayed and yearned; it was ensouled by the passion of that marvellous civilisation that loved the godhead of the Sun, and that now hid, waiting but still alive, below the ground. The majestic faith of ancient Egypt poured up with it\u2014that tremendous, burning elaboration of the after-life and of Eternity that was the pivot of those spacious days. For centuries vast multitudes, led by their royal priests, had uttered this very form and ritual\u2014believed it, lived it, felt it. The rising of the sun remained its climax. Its spiritual power still clung to the great ruined symbols. The faith of a buried civilisation had burned back into the present and into our hearts as well.\n\nAnd a curious respect for the man who was able to produce this effect upon two modern minds crept over me, and mingled with the repulsion that I felt. I looked furtively at his withered, dried-up features. He wore some vague and shadowy impress still of what had just been in him. There was a stony appearance in his shrunken cheeks. He looked smaller. I saw him lessened. I thought of him as he had been so short a time before, imprisoned in his great stone captors that had obsessed him...\n\n'There's tremendous power in it,\u2014an awful power,' I stammered, more to break the oppressive pause than for any desire in me to speak with him. 'It brings back Egypt in some extraordinary way\u2014ancient Egypt, I mean\u2014brings it close\u2014into the heart.' My words ran on of their own accord almost. I spoke with a hush, unwittingly. There was awe in me. Isley had moved away towards the window, leaving me face to face with this strange incarnation of another age.\n\n'It must,' he replied, deep light still glowing in his eyes, 'for the soul of the old days is in it. No one, I think, can hear it and remain the same. It expresses, you see, the essential passion and beauty of that gorgeous worship, that splendid faith, that reasonable and intelligent worship of the sun, the only scientific belief the world has ever known. Its popular form, of course, was largely superstitious, but the sacerdotal form\u2014the form used by the priests, that is\u2014who understood the relationship between colour, sound and symbol, was\u2014'\n\nHe broke off suddenly, as though he had been speaking to himself. We sat down. George Isley leaned out of the window with his back to us, watching the desert in the moonless night.\n\n'You have tried its effect before upon\u2014others?' I asked point-blank.\n\n'Upon myself,' he answered shortly.\n\n'Upon others?' I insisted.\n\nHe hesitated an instant.\n\n'Upon one other\u2014yes,' he admitted.\n\n'Intentionally?' And something quivered in me as I asked it.\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders slightly. 'I'm merely a speculative archaeologist,' he smiled, 'and\u2014and an imaginative Egyptologist. My bounden duty is to reconstruct the past so that it lives for others.'\n\nAn impulse rose in me to take him by the throat.\n\n'You know perfectly well, of course, the magical effect it's sure\u2014likely at least\u2014to have?'\n\nHe stared steadily at me through the cigarette smoke. To this day I cannot think exactly what it was in this man that made me shudder.\n\n'I'm sure of nothing,' he replied smoothly, 'but I consider it quite legitimate to try. Magical\u2014the word you used\u2014has no meaning for me. If such a thing exists, it is merely scientific\u2014undiscovered or forgotten knowledge.' An insolent, aggressive light shone in his eyes as he spoke; his manner was almost truculent. 'You refer, I take it, to\u2014our friend\u2014rather than to yourself?'\n\nAnd with difficulty I met his singular stare. From his whole person something still emanated that was forbidding, yet overmasteringly persuasive. It brought back the notion of that invisible Web, that dim gauze curtain, that motionless Influence lying waiting at the centre for its prey, those monstrous and mysterious Items standing, alert and watchful, through the centuries. 'You mean,' he added lower, 'his altered attitude to life\u2014his going?'\n\nTo hear him use the words, the very phrase, struck me with sudden chill. Before I could answer, however, and certainly before I could master the touch of horror that rushed over me, I heard him continuing in a whisper. It seemed again that he spoke to himself as much as he spoke to me.\n\n'The soul, I suppose, has the right to choose its own conditions and surroundings. To pass elsewhere involves translation, not extinction.' He smoked a moment in silence, then said another curious thing, looking up into my face with an expression of intense earnestness. Something genuine in him again replaced the pose of cynicism. 'The soul is eternal and can take its place anywhere, regardless of mere duration. What is there in the vulgar and superficial Present that should hold it so exclusively; and where can it find to-day the belief, the faith, the beauty that are the very essence of its life\u2014where in the rush and scatter of this tawdry age can it make its home? Shall it flutter for ever in a valley of dry bones, when a living Past lies ready and waiting with loveliness, strength, and glory?' He moved closer; he touched my arm; I felt his breath upon my face. 'Come with us,' he whispered awfully; 'come back with us! Withdraw your life from the rubbish of this futile ugliness! Come back and worship with us in the spirit of the Past. Take up the old, old splendour, the glory, the immense conceptions, the wondrous certainty, the ineffable knowledge of essentials. It all lies about you still; it's calling, ever calling; it's very close; it draws you day and night\u2014calling, calling, calling...'\n\nHis voice died off curiously into distance on the word; I can hear it to this day, and the soft, droning quality in the intense yet fading tone: 'Calling, calling, calling.' But his eyes turned wicked. I felt the sinister power of the man. I was aware of madness in his thought and mind. The Past he sought to glorify I saw black, as with the forbidding Egyptian darkness of a plague. It was not beauty but Death that I heard calling, calling, calling.\n\n'It's real,' he went on, hardly aware that I shrank, 'and not a dream. These ruined symbols still remain in touch with that which was. They are potent to-day as they were six thousand years ago. The amazing life of those days brims behind them. They are not mere masses of oppressive stone; they express in visible form great powers that still are\u2014knowable.' He lowered his head, peered up into my face, and whispered. Something secret passed into his eyes.\n\n'I saw you change,' came the words below his breath, 'as you saw the change in us. But only worship can produce that change. The soul assumes the qualities of the deity it worships. The powers of its deity possess it and transform it into its own likeness. You also felt it. You also were possessed. I saw the stone-faced deity upon your own.'\n\nI seemed to shake myself as a dog shakes water from its body. I stood up. I remember that I stretched my hands out as though to push him from me and expel some creeping influence from my mind. I remember another thing as well. But for the reality of the sequel, and but for the matter-of-fact result still facing me to-day in the disappearance of George Isley\u2014the loss to the present time of all George Isley was\u2014I might have found subject for laughter in what I saw. Comedy was in it certainly. Yet it was both ghastly and terrific. Deep horror crept below the aspect of the ludicrous, for the apparent mimicry cloaked truth. It was appalling because it was real.\n\nIn the large mirror that reflected the room behind me I saw myself and Moleson; I saw Isley too in the background by the open window. And the attitude of all three was the attitude of hieroglyphics come to life. My arms indeed were stretched, but not stretched, as I had thought, in mere self-defence. They were stretched\u2014unnaturally. The forearms made those strange obtuse angles that the old carved granite wears, the palms of the hands held upwards, the heads thrown back, the legs advanced, the bodies stiffened into postures that expressed forgotten, ancient minds. The physical conformation of all three was monstrous; and yet reverence and truth dictated even the uncouthness of the gestures. Something in all three of us inspired the forms our bodies had assumed. Our attitudes expressed buried yearnings, emotions, tendencies\u2014whatever they may be termed\u2014that the spirit of the Past evoked.\n\nI saw the reflected picture but for a moment. I dropped my arms, aware of foolishness in my way of standing. Moleson moved forward with his long, significant stride, and at the same instant Isley came up quickly and joined us from his place by the open window. We looked into each other's faces without a word. There was this little pause that lasted perhaps ten seconds. But in that pause I felt the entire world slide past me. I heard the centuries rush by at headlong speed. The present dipped away. Existence was no longer in a line that stretched two ways; it was a circle in which ourselves, together with Past and Future, stood motionless at the centre, all details equally accessible at once. The three of us were falling, falling backwards...\n\n'Come!' said the voice of Moleson solemnly, but with the sweetness as of a child anticipating joy. 'Come! Let us go together, for the boat of Ra has crossed the Underworld. The darkness has been conquered. Let us go out together and find the dawn. Listen! It is calling, calling, calling...'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 504", + "text": "I was aware of rushing, but it was the soul in me that rushed. It experienced dizzy, unutterable alterations. Thousands of emotions, intense and varied, poured through me at lightning speed, each satisfyingly known, yet gone before its name appeared. The life of many centuries tore headlong back with me, and, as in drowning, this epitome of existence shot in a few seconds the steep slopes the Past had so laboriously built up. The changes flashed and passed. I wept and prayed and worshipped; I loved and suffered; I battled, lost and won. Down the gigantic scale of ages that telescoped thus into a few brief moments, the soul in me went sliding backwards towards a motionless, reposeful Past.\n\nI remember foolish details that interrupted the immense descent\u2014I put on coat and hat; I remember some one's words, strangely sounding as when some bird wakes up and sings at midnight\u2014'We'll take the little door; the front one's locked by now'; and I have a vague recollection of the outline of the great hotel, with its colonnades and terraces, fading behind me through the air. But these details merely flickered and disappeared, as though I fell earthwards from a star and passed feathers or blown leaves upon the way. There was no friction as my soul dropped backwards into time; the flight was easy and silent as a dream. I felt myself sucked down into gulfs whose emptiness offered no resistance... until at last the appalling speed decreased of its own accord, and the dizzy flight became a kind of gentle floating. It changed imperceptibly into a gliding motion, as though the angle altered. My feet, quite naturally, were on the ground, moving through something soft that clung to them and rustled while it clung.\n\nI looked up and saw the bright armies of the stars. In front of me I recognised the flat-topped, shadowy ridges; on both sides lay the open expanses of familiar wilderness; and beside me, one on either hand, moved two figures who were my companions. We were in the desert, but it was the desert of thousands of years ago. My companions, moreover, though familiar to some part of me, seemed strangers or half known. Their names I strove in vain to capture; Mosely, Ilson, sounded in my head, mingled together falsely. And when I stole a glance at them, I saw dark lines of mannikins unfilled with substance, and was aware of the grotesque gestures of living hieroglyphics. It seemed for an instant that their arms were bound behind their backs impossibly, and that their heads turned sharply across their lineal shoulders.\n\nBut for a moment only; for at a second glance I saw them solid and compact; their names came back to me; our arms were linked together as we walked. We had already covered a great distance, for my limbs were aching and my breath was short. The air was cold, the silence absolute. It seemed, in this faint light, that the desert flowed beneath our feet, rather than that we advanced by taking steps. Cliffs with hooded tops moved past us, boulders glided, mounds of sand slid by. And then I heard a voice upon my left that was surely Moleson speaking:\n\n'Towards Enet our feet are set,' he half sang, half murmured, 'towards Enet-te-nt\u014dr\u0113. There, in the House of Birth, we shall dedicate our hearts and lives anew.'\n\nAnd the language, no less than the musical intonation of his voice, enraptured me. For I understood he spoke of Denderah, in whose majestic temple recent hands had painted with deathless colours the symbols of our cosmic relationships with the zodiacal signs. And Denderah was our great seat of worship of the goddess Hathor, the Egyptian Aphrodite, bringer of love and joy. The falcon-headed Horus was her husband, from whom, in his home at Edfu, we imbibed swift kinds of power. And\u2014it was the time of the New Year, the great feast when the forces of the living earth turn upwards into happy growth.\n\nWe were on foot across the desert towards Denderah, and this sand we trod was the sand of thousands of years ago.\n\nThe paralysis of time and distance involved some amazing lightness of the spirit that, I suppose, touched ecstasy. There was intoxication in the soul. I was not divided from the stars, nor separate from this desert that rushed with us. The unhampered wind blew freshly from my nerves and skin, and the Nile, glimmering faintly on our right, lay with its lapping waves in both my hands. I knew the life of Egypt, for it was in me, over me, round me. I was a part of it. We went happily, like birds to meet the sunrise. There were no pits of measured time and interval that could detain us. We flowed, yet were at rest; we were endlessly alive; present and future alike were inconceivable; we were in the Kingdom of the Past.\n\nThe Pyramids were just a-building, and the army of Obelisks looked about them, proud of their first balance; Thebes swung her hundred gates upon the world. New, shining Memphis glittered with myriad reflections into waters that the tears of Isis sweetened, and the cliffs of Abou Simbel were still innocent of their gigantic progeny. Alone, the Sphinx, linking timelessness with time, brooded unguessed and underived upon an alien world. We marched within antiquity towards Denderah...\n\nHow long we marched, how fast, how far we went, I can remember as little as the marvellous speech that passed across me while my two companions spoke together. I only remember that suddenly a wave of pain disturbed my wondrous happiness and caused my calm, which had seemed beyond all reach of break, to fall away. I heard their voices abruptly with a kind of terror. A sensation of fear, of loss, of nightmare bewilderment came over me like cold wind. What they lived naturally, true to their inmost hearts, I lived merely by means of a temperamental sympathy. And the stage had come at which my powers failed. Exhaustion overtook me. I wilted. The strain\u2014the abnormal backwards stretch of consciousness that was put upon me by another\u2014gave way and broke. I heard their voices faint and horrible. My joy was extinguished. A glare of horror fell upon the desert and the stars seemed evil. An anguishing desire for the safe and wholesome Present usurped all this mad yearning to obtain the Past. My feet fell out of step. The rushing of the desert paused. I unlinked my arms. We stopped all three.\n\nThe actual spot is to this day well known to me. I found it afterwards, I even photographed it. It lies actually not far from Helouan\u2014a few miles at most beyond the Solitary Palm, where slopes of undulating sand mark the opening of a strange, enticing valley called the Wadi Gerraui. And it is enticing because it beckons and leads on. Here, amid torn gorges of a limestone wilderness, there is suddenly soft yellow sand that flows and draws the feet onward. It slips away with one too easily; always the next ridge and basin must be seen, each time a little farther. It has the quality of decoying. The cliffs say, No; but this streaming sand invites. In its flowing curves of gold there is enchantment.\n\nAnd it was here upon its very lips we stopped, the rhythm of our steps broken, our hearts no longer one. My temporary rapture vanished. I was aware of fear. For the Present rushed upon me with attack in it, and I felt that my mind was arrested close upon the edge of madness. Something cleared and lifted in my brain.\n\nThe soul, indeed, could 'choose its dwelling-place'; but to live elsewhere completely was the choice of madness, and to live divorced from all the sweet wholesome business of To-day involved an exile that was worse than madness. It was death. My heart burned for George Isley. I remembered the tear upon his cheek. The agony of his struggle I shared suddenly with him. Yet with him was the reality, with me a sympathetic reflection merely. He was already too far gone to fight...\n\nI shall never forget the desolation of that strange scene beneath the morning stars. The desert lay down and watched us. We stood upon the brink of a little broken ridge, looking into the valley of golden sand. This sand gleamed soft and wonderful in the starlight some twenty feet below. The descent was easy\u2014but I would not move. I refused to advance another step. I saw my companions in the mysterious half-light beside me peering over the edge, Moleson in front a little.\n\nAnd I turned to him, sure of the part I meant to play, yet conscious painfully of my helplessness. My personality seemed a straw in mid-stream that spun in a futile effort to arrest the flood that bore it. There was vivid human conflict in the moment's silence. It was an eddy that paused in the great body of the tide. And then I spoke. Oh, I was ashamed of the insignificance of my voice and the weakness of my little personality.\n\n'Moleson, we go no farther with you. We have already come too far. We now turn back.'\n\nBehind my words were a paltry thirty years. His answer drove sixty centuries against me. For his voice was like the wind that passed whispering down the stream of yellow sand below us. He smiled.\n\n'Our feet are set towards Enet-te-nt\u014dr\u0113. There is no turning back. Listen! It is calling, calling, calling!'\n\n'We will go home,' I cried, in a tone I vainly strove to make imperative.\n\n'Our home is there,' he sang, pointing with one long thin arm towards the brightening east, 'for the Temple calls us and the River takes our feet. We shall be in the House of Birth to meet the sunrise\u2014'\n\n'You lie,' I cried again, 'you speak the lies of madness, and this Past you seek is the House of Death. It is the kingdom of the underworld.'\n\nThe words tore wildly, impotently out of me. I seized George Isley's arm.\n\n'Come back with me,' I pleaded vehemently, my heart aching with a nameless pain for him. 'We'll retrace our steps. Come home with me! Come back! Listen! The Present calls you sweetly!'\n\nHis arm slipped horribly out of my grasp that had seemed to hold it so tightly. Moleson, already below us in the yellow sand, looked small with distance. He was gliding rapidly farther with uncanny swiftness. The diminution of his form was ghastly. It was like a doll's. And his voice rose up, faint as with the distance of great gulfs of space.\n\n'Calling... calling... You hear it for ever calling...'\n\nIt died away with the wind along that sandy valley, and the Past swept in a flood across the brightening sky. I swayed as though a storm was at my back. I reeled. Almost I went too\u2014over the crumbling edge into the sand.\n\n'Come back with me! Come home!' I cried more faintly. 'The Present alone is real. There is work, ambition, duty. There is beauty too\u2014the beauty of good living! And there is love! There is\u2014a woman... calling, calling...!'\n\nThat other voice took up the word below me. I heard the faint refrain sing down the sandy walls. The wild, sweet pang in it was marvellous.\n\n'Our feet are set for Enet-te-nt\u014dr\u0113. It is calling, calling...!'\n\nMy voice fell into nothingness. George Isley was below me now, his outline tiny against the sheet of yellow sand. And the sand was moving. The desert rushed again. The human figures receded swiftly into the Past they had reconstructed with the creative yearning of their souls.\n\nI stood alone upon the edge of crumbling limestone, helplessly watching them. It was amazing what I witnessed, while the shafts of crimson dawn rose up the sky. The enormous desert turned alive to the horizon with gold and blue and silver. The purple shadows melted into grey. The flat-topped ridges shone. Huge messengers of light flashed everywhere at once. The radiance of sunrise dazzled my outer sight.\n\nBut if my eyes were blinded, my inner sight was focused the more clearly upon what followed. I witnessed the disappearance of George Isley. There was a dreadful magic in the picture. The pair of them, small and distant below me in that little sandy hollow, stood out sharply defined as in a miniature. I saw their outlines neat and terrible like some ghastly inset against the enormous scenery. Though so close to me in actual space, they were centuries away in time. And a dim, vast shadow was about them that was not mere shadow of the ridges. It encompassed them; it moved, crawling over the sand, obliterating them. Within it, like insects lost in amber, they became visibly imprisoned, dwindled in size, borne deep away, absorbed.\n\nAnd then I recognised the outline. Once more, but this time recumbent and spread flat upon the desert's face, I knew the monstrous shapes of the twin obsessing symbols. The spirit of ancient Egypt lay over all the land, tremendous in the dawn. The sunrise summoned her. She lay prostrate before the deity. The shadows of the towering Colossi lay prostrate too. The little humans, with their worshipping and conquered hearts, lay deep within them.\n\nGeorge Isley I saw clearest. The distinctness, the reality were appalling. He was naked, robbed, undressed. I saw him a skeleton, picked clean to the very bones as by an acid. His life lay hid in the being of that mighty Past. Egypt had absorbed him. He was gone..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 505", + "text": "I closed my eyes, but I could not keep them closed. They opened of their own accord. The three of us were nearing the great hotel that rose yellow, with shuttered windows, in the early sunshine. A wind blew briskly from the north across the Mokattam Hills. There were soft cannon-ball clouds dotted about the sky, and across the Nile, where the mist lay in a line of white, I saw the tops of the Pyramids gleaming like mountain peaks of gold. A string of camels, laden with white stone, went past us. I heard the crying of the natives in the streets of Helouan, and as we went up the steps the donkeys arrived and camped in the sandy road beside their bersim till the tourists claimed them.\n\n'Good morning,' cried Abdullah, the man who owned them. 'You all go Sakkh\u00e2ra to-day, or Memphis? Beat'ful day to-day, and vair good donkeys!'\n\nMoleson went up to his room without a word, and Isley did the same. I thought he staggered a moment as he turned the passage corner from my sight. His face wore a look of vacancy that some call peace. There was radiance in it. It made me shudder. Aching in mind and body, and no word spoken, I followed their example. I went upstairs to bed, and slept a dreamless sleep till after sunset..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 506", + "text": "And I woke with a lost, unhappy feeling that a withdrawing tide had left me on the shore, alone and desolate. My first instinct was for my friend, George Isley. And I noticed a square, white envelope with my name upon it in his writing.\n\nBefore I opened it I knew quite well what words would be inside:\n\n'We are going up to Thebes,' the note informed me simply. 'We leave by the night train. If you care to\u2014' But the last four words were scratched out again, though not so thickly that I could not read them. Then came the address of the Egyptologist's house and the signature, very firmly traced, 'Yours ever, George Isley.' I glanced at my watch and saw that it was after seven o'clock. The night train left at half-past six. They had already started...\n\nThe pain of feeling forsaken, left behind, was deep and bitter, for myself; but what I felt for him, old friend and comrade, was even more intense, since it was hopeless. Fear and conventional emotion had stopped me at the very gates of an amazing possibility\u2014some state of consciousness that, realising the Past, might doff the Present, and by slipping out of Time, experience Eternity. That was the seduction I had escaped by the uninspired resistance of my pettier soul. Yet, he, my friend, yielding in order to conquer, had obtained an awful prize\u2014ah, I understood the picture's other side as well, with an unutterable poignancy of pity\u2014the prize of immobility which is sheer stagnation, the imagined bliss which is a false escape, the dream of finding beauty away from present things. From that dream the awakening must be rude indeed. Clutching at vanished stars, he had clutched the oldest illusion in the world. To me it seemed the negation of life that had betrayed him. The pity of it burned me like a flame.\n\nBut I did not 'care to follow' him and his companion. I waited at Helouan for his return, filling the empty days with yet emptier explanations. I felt as a man who sees what he loves sinking down into clear, deep water, still within visible reach, yet gone beyond recovery. Moleson had taken him back to Thebes; and Egypt, monstrous effigy of the Past, had caught her prey.\n\nThe rest, moreover, is easily told. Moleson I never saw again. To this day I have never seen him, though his subsequent books are known to me, with the banal fact that he is numbered with those energetic and deluded enthusiasts who start a new religion, obtain notoriety, a few hysterical followers and\u2014oblivion.\n\nGeorge Isley, however, returned to Helouan after a fortnight's absence. I saw him, knew him, talked and had my meals with him. We even did slight expeditions together. He was gentle and delightful as a woman who has loved a wonderful ideal and attained to it\u2014in memory. All roughness was gone out of him; he was smooth and polished as a crystal surface that reflects whatever is near enough to ask a picture. Yet his appearance shocked me inexpressibly: there was nothing in him\u2014nothing. It was the representation of George Isley that came back from Thebes; the outer simulacra; the shell that walks the London streets to-day. I met no vestige of the man I used to know. George Isley had disappeared.\n\nWith this marvellous automaton I lived another month. The horror of him kept me company in the hotel where he moved among the cosmopolitan humanity as a ghost that visits the sunlight yet has its home elsewhere.\n\nThis empty image of George Isley lived with me in our Helouan hotel until the winds of early March informed his physical frame that discomfort was in the air, and that he might as well move elsewhere\u2014elsewhere happening to be northwards.\n\nAnd he left just as he stayed\u2014automatically. His brain obeyed the conventional stimuli to which his nerves, and consequently his muscles, were accustomed. It sounds so foolish. But he took his ticket automatically; he gave the natural and adequate reasons automatically; he chose his ship and landing-place in the same way that ordinary people chose these things; he said good-bye like any other man who leaves casual acquaintances and 'hopes' to meet them again; he lived, that is to say, entirely in his brain. His heart, his emotions, his temperament and personality, that nameless sum-total for which the great sympathetic nervous system is accountable\u2014all this, his soul, had gone elsewhere. This once vigorous, gifted being had become a normal, comfortable man that everybody could understand\u2014a commonplace nonentity. He was precisely what the majority expected him to be\u2014ordinary; a good fellow; a man of the world; he was 'delightful.' He merely reflected daily life without partaking of it. To the majority it was hardly noticeable; 'very pleasant' was a general verdict. His ambition, his restlessness, his zeal had gone; that tireless zest whose driving power is yearning had taken flight, leaving behind it physical energy without spiritual desire. His soul had found its nest and flown to it. He lived in the chimera of the Past, serene, indifferent, detached. I saw him immense, a shadowy, majestic figure, standing\u2014ah, not moving!\u2014in a repose that was satisfying because it could not change. The size, the mystery, the immobility that caged him in seemed to me\u2014terrible. For I dared not intrude upon his awful privacy, and intimacy between us there was none. Of his experiences at Thebes I asked no single question\u2014it was somehow not possible or legitimate; he, equally, vouchsafed no word of explanation\u2014it was uncommunicable to a dweller in the Present. Between us was this barrier we both respected. He peered at modern life, incurious, listless, apathetic, through a dim, gauze curtain. He was behind it.\n\nPeople round us were going to Sakkh\u00e2ra and the Pyramids, to see the Sphinx by moonlight, to dream at Edfu and at Denderah. Others described their journeys to Assouan, Khartoum and Abou Simbel, and gave details of their encampments in the desert. Wind, wind, wind! The winds of Egypt blew and sang and sighed. From the White Nile came the travellers, and from the Blue Nile, from the Fayum, and from nameless excavations without end. They talked and wrote their books. They had the magpie knowledge of the present. The Egyptologists, big and little, read the writing on the wall and put the hieroglyphs and papyri into modern language. Alone George Isley knew the secret. He lived it.\n\nAnd the high passionate calm, the lofty beauty, the glamour and enchantment that are the spell of this thrice-haunted land, were in my soul as well\u2014sufficiently for me to interpret his condition. I could not leave, yet having left I could not stay away. I yearned for the Egypt that he knew. No word I uttered; speech could not approach it. We wandered by the Nile together, and through the groves of palms that once were Memphis. The sandy wastes beyond the Pyramids knew our footsteps; the Mokattam Ridges, purple at evening and golden in the dawn, held our passing shadows as we silently went by. At no single dawn or sunset was he to be found indoors, and it became my habit to accompany him\u2014the joy of worship in his soul was marvellous. The great, still skies of Egypt watched us, the hanging stars, the gigantic dome of blue; we felt together that burning southern wind; the golden sweetness of the sun lay in our blood as we saw the great boats take the northern breeze upstream. Immensity was everywhere and this golden magic of the sun...\n\nBut it was in the Desert especially, where only sun and wind observe the faint signalling of Time, where space is nothing because it is not divided, and where no detail reminds the heart that the world is called To-Day\u2014it was in the desert this curtain hung most visibly between us, he on that side, I on this. It was transparent. He was with a multitude no man can number. Towering to the moon, yet spreading backwards towards his burning source of life, drawn out by the sun and by the crystal air into some vast interior magnitude, the spirit of George Isley hung beside me, close yet far away, in the haze of olden days.\n\nAnd, sometimes, he moved. I was aware of gestures. His head was raised to listen. One arm swung shadowy across the sea of broken ridges. From leagues away a line of sand rose slowly. There was a rustling. Another\u2014an enormous\u2014arm emerged to meet his own, and two stupendous figures drew together. Poised above Time, yet throned upon the centuries, They knew eternity. So easily they remained possessors of the land. Facing the east, they waited for the dawn. And their marvellously forgotten singing poured across the world...\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Wayfarers ]\n\nI missed the train at Evian, and, after infinite trouble, discovered a motor that would take me, ice-axe and all, to Geneva. By hurrying, the connection might be just possible. I telegraphed to Haddon to meet me at the station, and lay back comfortably, dreaming of the precipices of Haute Savoie. We made good time; the roads were excellent, traffic of the slightest, when\u2014crash! There was an instant's excruciating pain, the sun went out like a snuffed candle, and I fell into something as soft as a bed of flowers and as yielding to my weight as warm water...\n\nIt was very warm. There was a perfume of flowers. My eyes opened, focused vividly upon a detailed picture for a moment, then closed again. There was no context\u2014at least, none that I could recall\u2014for the scene, though familiar as home, brought nothing that I definitely remembered. Broken away from any sequence, unattached to any past, unaware even of my own identity, I simply saw this picture as a camera snaps it off from the world, a scene apart, with meaning only for those who knew the context:\n\nThe warm, soft thing I lay in was a bed\u2014big, deep, comfortable; and the perfume came from flowers that stood beside it on a little table. It was in a stately, ancient chamber, with lofty ceiling and immense open fireplace of stone; old-fashioned pictures\u2014familiar portraits and engravings I knew intimately\u2014hung upon the walls; the floor was bare, with dignified, carved furniture of oak and mahogany, huge chairs and massive cupboards. And there were latticed windows set within deep embrasures of grey stone, where clambering roses patterned the sunshine that cast their moving shadows on the polished boards. With the perfume of the flowers there mingled, too, that delicate, elusive odour of age\u2014of wood, of musty tapestries in spacious halls and corridors, and of chambers long unopened to the sun and air.\n\nBy the door that stood ajar far away at the end of the room\u2014very far away it seemed\u2014an old lady, wearing a little cap of silk embroidery, was whispering to a man of stern, uncompromising figure, who, as he listened, bent down to her with a grave and even solemn face. A wide stone corridor was just visible through the crack of the open door behind her.\n\nThe picture flashed, and vanished. The numerous details I took in because they were well known to me already. That I could not supply the context was merely a trick of the mind, the kind of trick that dreams play. Darkness swamped vision again. I sank back into the warm, soft, comfortable bed of delicious oblivion. There was not the slightest desire to know; sleep and soft forgetfulness were all I craved.\n\nBut a little later\u2014or was it a very great deal later?\u2014when I opened my eyes again, there was a thin trail of memory. I remembered my name and age. I remembered vaguely, as though from some unpleasant dream, that I was on the way to meet a climbing friend in the Alps of Haute Savoie, and that there was need to hurry and be very active. Something had gone wrong, it seemed. There had been a stupid, violent disaster, pain in it somewhere, an accident. Where were my belongings? Where, for instance, was my precious ice-axe\u2014tried old instrument on which my life and safety depended? A rush of jumbled questions poured across my mind. The effort to sort them hurt atrociously...\n\nA figure stood beside my bed. It was the same old lady I had seen a moment ago\u2014or was it a month ago, even last year perhaps? And this time she was alone. Yet, though familiar to me as my own right hand, I could not for the life of me attract her name. Searching for it brought the pain again. Instead, I asked an easier question; it seemed the most important somehow, though a feeling of shame came with it, as though I knew I was talking nonsense:\n\n'My ice-axe\u2014is it safe? It should have stood any ordinary strain. It's ash...' My voice failed absurdly, caught away by a whisper half-way down my throat. What was I talking about? There was vile confusion somewhere.\n\nShe smiled tenderly, sweetly, as she placed her small, cool hand upon my forehead. Her touch calmed me as it always did, and the pain retreated a little.\n\n'All your things are safe,' she answered, in a voice so soft beneath the distant ceiling it was like a bird's note singing in the sky. 'And you are also safe. There is no danger now. The bullet has been taken out and all is going well. Only you must be patient, and lie very still, and rest.' And then she added the morsel of delicious comfort she knew quite well I waited for: 'Marion is near you all day long, and most of the night besides. She rarely leaves you. She is in and out all day.'\n\nI stared, thirsting for more. Memory put certain pieces in their place again. I heard them click together as they joined. But they only tried to join. There were several pieces missing. They must have been lost in the disaster. The pattern was too ridiculous.\n\n'I ought to tel\u2014telegraph\u2014' I began, seizing at a fragment that poked its end up, then plunged out of sight again before I could read more of it. The pieces fell apart; they would not hold together without these missing fragments. Anger flamed up in me.\n\n'They're badly made,' I said, with a petulance I was secretly ashamed of; 'you have chosen the wrong pieces! I'm not a child\u2014to be treated\u2014' A shock of heat tore through me, led by a point of iron, with blasting pain.\n\n'Sleep, my poor dear F\u00e9lix, sleep,' she murmured soothingly, while her tiny hand stroked my forehead, just in time to prevent that pointed, hot thing entering my heart. 'Sleep again now, and a little later you shall tell me their names, and I will send on horseback quickly\u2014'\n\n'Telegraph\u2014' I tried to say, but the word went lost before I could pronounce it. It was a nonsense word, caught up from dreams. Thought fluttered and went out.\n\n'I will send,' she whispered, 'in the quickest possible way. You shall explain to Marion. Sleep first a little longer; promise me to lie quite still and sleep. When you wake again, she will come to you at once.'\n\nShe sat down gently on the edge of the enormous bed, so that I saw her outline against the window where the roses clambered to come in. She bent over me\u2014or was it a rose that bent in the wind across the stone embrasure? I saw her clear blue eyes\u2014or was it two raindrops upon a withered rose-leaf that mirrored the summer sky?\n\n'Thank you,' my voice murmured with intense relief, as everything sank away and the old-world garden seemed to enter by the latticed windows. For there was a power in her way that made obedience sweet, and her little hand, besides, cushioned the attack of that cruel iron point so that I hardly felt its entrance. Before the fierce heat could reach me, darkness again put out the world...\n\nThen, after a prodigious interval, my eyes once more opened to the stately, old-world chamber that I knew so well; and this time I found myself alone. In my brain was a stinging, splitting sensation, as though Memory shook her pieces together with angry violence, pieces, moreover, made of clashing metal. A degrading nausea almost vanquished me. Against my feet was a heated metal body, too heavy for me to move, and bandages were tight round my neck and the back of my head. Dimly, it came back to me that hands had been about me hours ago, soft, ministering hands that I loved. Their perfume lingered still. Faces and names fled in swift procession past me, yet without my making any attempt to bid them stay. I asked myself no questions. Effort of any sort was utterly beyond me. I lay and watched and waited, helpless and strangely weak.\n\nOne or two things alone were clear. They came, too, without the effort to think them:\n\nThere had been a disaster; they had carried me into the nearest house; and\u2014the mountain heights, so keenly longed for, were suddenly denied me. I was being cared for by kind people somewhere far from the world's high routes. They were familiar people, yet for the moment I had lost the name. But it was the bitterness of losing my holiday climbing that chiefly savaged me, so that strong desire returned upon itself unfulfilled. And, knowing the danger of frustrated yearnings, and the curious states of mind they may engender, my tumbling brain registered a decision automatically:\n\n'Keep careful watch upon yourself,' it whispered.\n\nFor I saw the peaks that towered above the world, and felt the wind rise from the hidden valleys. The perfume of lonely ridges came to me, and I saw the snow against the blue-black sky. Yet I could not reach them. I lay, instead, broken and useless upon my back, in a soft, deep, comfortable bed. And I loathed the thought. A dull and evil fury rose within me. Where was Haddon? He would get me out of it if any one could. And where was my dear, old trusted ice-axe? Above all, who were these gentle, old-world people who cared for me?... And, with this last thought, came some fairy touch of sweetness so delicious that I was conscious of sudden resignation\u2014more, even of delight and joy.\n\nThis joy and anger ran races for possession of my mind, and I knew not which to follow: both seemed real, and both seemed true. The cruel confusion was an added torture. Two sets of places and people seemed to mingle.\n\n'Keep a careful watch upon yourself,' repeated the automatic caution.\n\nThen, with returning, blissful darkness, came another thing\u2014a tiny point of wonder, where light entered in. I thought of a woman... It was a vehement, commanding thought; and though at first it was very close and real\u2014as much of To-day as Haddon and my precious ice-axe\u2014the next second it was leagues away in another world somewhere. Yet, before the confusion twisted it all askew, I knew her; I remembered clearly even where she lived; that I knew her husband, too\u2014had stayed with them in\u2014in Scotland\u2014yes, in Scotland. Yet no word in this life had ever crossed my lips, for she was not free to come. Neither of us, with eyes or lips or gesture, had ever betrayed a hint to the other of our deeply hidden secret. And, although for me she was the woman, my great yearning\u2014long, long ago it was, in early youth\u2014had been sternly put aside and buried with all the vigour nature gave me. Her husband was my friend as well.\n\nOnly, now, the shock had somehow strained the prison bars, and the yearning escaped for a moment full-fledged, and vehement with passion long denied. The inhibition was destroyed. The knowledge swept deliciously upon me that we had the right to be together, because we always were together. I had the right to ask for her.\n\nMy mind was certainly a mere field of confused, ungoverned images. No thinking was possible, for it hurt too vilely. But this one memory stood out with violence. I distinctly remember that I called to her to come, and that she had the right to come because my need was so peremptory. To the one most loved of all this life had brought me, yet to whom I had never spoken because she was in another's keeping, I called for help, and called, I verily believe, aloud:\n\n'Please come!' Then, close upon its heels, the automatic warning again: 'Keep close watch upon yourself...!'\n\nIt was as though one great yearning had loosed the other that was even greater, and had set it free.\n\nDisappearing consciousness then followed the cry for an incalculable distance. Down into subterraneans within myself that were positively frightening it plunged away. But the cry was real; the yearning appeal held authority in it as of command. Love gave the right, supplied the power as well. For it seemed to me a tiny answer came, but from so far away that it was scarcely audible. And names were nowhere in it, either in answer or appeal.\n\n'I am always here. I have never, never left you!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 507", + "text": "The unconsciousness that followed was not complete, apparently. There was a memory of effort in it, of struggle, and, as it were, of searching. Some one was trying to get at me. I tossed in a troubled sea upon a piece of wreckage that another swimmer also fought to reach. Huge waves of transparent green now brought this figure nearer, now concealed it, but it came steadily on, holding out a rope. My exhaustion was too great for me to respond, yet this swimmer swept up nearer, brought by enormous rollers that threatened to engulf us both. The rope was for my safety, too. I saw hands outstretched. In the deep water I saw the outline of the body, and once I even saw the face. But for a second, merely. The wave that bore it crashed with a horrible roar that smothered us both and swept me from my piece of wreckage. In the violent flood of water the rope whipped against my feeble hands. I grasped it. A sense of divine security at once came over me\u2014an intolerable sweetness of utter bliss and comfort, then blackness and suffocation as of the grave. The white-hot point of iron struck me. It beat audibly against my heart. I heard the knocking. The pain brought me up to the surface, and the knocking of my dreams was in reality a knocking on the door. Some one was gently tapping.\n\nSuch was the confusion of images in my pain-racked mind, that I expected to see the old lady enter, bringing ropes and ice-axes, and followed by Haddon, my mountaineering friend; for I thought that I had fallen down a deep crevasse and had waited hours for help in the cold, blue darkness of the ice. I was too weak to answer, and the knocking for that matter was not repeated. I did not even hear the opening of the door, so softly did she move into the room. I only knew that before I actually saw her, this wave of intolerable sweetness drenched me once again with bliss and peace and comfort, my pain retreated, and I closed my eyes, knowing I should feel that cool and soothing hand upon my forehead.\n\nThe same minute I did feel it. There was a perfume of old gardens in the air. I opened my eyes to look the gratitude I could not utter, and saw, close against me\u2014not the old lady, but the young and lovely face my worship had long made familiar. With lips that smiled their yearning and eyes of brown that held tears of sympathy, she sat down beside me on the bed. The warmth and fragrance of her atmosphere enveloped me. I sank away into a garden where spring melts magically into summer. Her arms were round my neck. Her face dropped down, so that I felt her hair upon my cheek and eyes. And then, whispering my name twice over, she kissed me on the lips.\n\n'Marion,' I murmured.\n\n'Hush! Mother sends you this,' she answered softly. 'You are to take it all; she made it with her own hands. But I bring it to you. You must be quite obedient, please.'\n\nShe tried to rise, but I held her against my breast.\n\n'Kiss me again and I'll promise obedience always,' I strove to say. But my voice refused so long a sentence, and anyhow her lips were on my own before I could have finished it. Slowly, very carefully, she disentangled herself, and my arms sank back upon the coverlet. I sighed in happiness. A moment longer she stood beside my bed, gazing down with love and deep anxiety into my face.\n\n'And when all is eaten, all, mind, all,' she smiled, 'you are to sleep until the doctor comes this afternoon. You are much better. Soon you shall get up. Only, remember,' shaking her finger with a sweet pretence of looking stern, 'I shall exact complete obedience. You must yield your will utterly to mine. You are in my heart, and my heart must be kept very warm and happy.'\n\nHer eyes were tender as her mother's, and I loved the authority and strength that were so real in her. I remembered how it was this strength that had sealed the contract her beauty first drew up for me to sign. She bent down once more to arrange my pillows.\n\n'What happened to\u2014to the motor?' I asked hesitatingly, for my thoughts would not regulate themselves. The mind presented such incongruous fragments.\n\n'The\u2014what?' she asked, evidently puzzled. The word seemed strange to her. 'What is that?' she repeated, anxiety in her eyes.\n\nI made an effort to tell her, but I could not. Explanation was suddenly impossible. The whole idea dived away out of sight. It utterly evaded me. I had again invented a word that was without meaning. I was talking nonsense. In its place my dream came up. I tried to tell her how I had dreamed of climbing dangerous heights with a stranger, and had spoken another language with him than my own\u2014English, was it?\u2014at any rate, not my native French.\n\n'Darling,' she whispered close into my ear, 'the bad dreams will not come back. You are safe here, quite safe.' She put her little hand like a flower on my forehead and drew it softly down the cheek. 'Your wound is already healing. They took the bullet out four days ago. I have got it,' she added with a touch of shy embarrassment, and kissed me tenderly upon my eyes.\n\n'How long have you been away from me?' I asked, feeling exhaustion coming back.\n\n'Never once for more than ten minutes,' was the reply. 'I watched with you all night. Only this morning, while mother took my place, I slept a little. But, hush!' she said, with dear authority again; 'you are not to talk so much. You must eat what I have brought, then sleep again. You must rest and sleep. Good-bye, good-bye, my love. I shall come back in an hour, and I shall always be within reach of your dear voice.'\n\nHer tall, slim figure, dressed in the grey I loved, crossed silently to the door. She gave me one more look\u2014there was all the tenderness of passionate love in it\u2014and then was gone.\n\nI followed instructions meekly, and when a delicious sleep stole over me soon afterwards, I had forgotten utterly the ugly dream that I was climbing dangerous heights with another man, forgotten as well everything else, except that it seemed so many days since my love had come to me, and that my bullet wound would after all be healed in time for our wedding on the day so long, so eagerly waited for.\n\nAnd when, several hours later, her mother came in with the doctor\u2014his face less grave and solemn this time\u2014the news that I might get up next day and lie a little in the garden, did more to heal me than a thousand bandages or twice that quantity of medical instructions.\n\nI watched them as they stood a moment by the open door. They went out very slowly together, speaking in whispers. But the only thing I caught was the mother's voice, talking brokenly of the great wars. Napoleon, the doctor was saying in a low, hushed tone, was in full retreat from Moscow, though the news had only just come through. They passed into the corridor then, and there was a sound of weeping as the old lady murmured something about her son and the cruelty of Heaven. 'Both will be taken from me,' she was sobbing softly, while he stooped to comfort her; 'one in marriage, and the other in death.' They closed the door then, and I heard no more." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 508", + "text": "Convalescence seemed to follow very quickly then, for I was utterly obedient as I had promised, and never spoke of what could excite me to my own detriment\u2014the wars and my own unfortunate part in them. We talked instead of our love, our already too-long engagement, and of the sweet dream of happiness that life held waiting for us in the future. And, indeed, I was sufficiently weary of the world to prefer repose to much activity, for my body was almost incessantly in pain, and this old garden where we lay between high walls of stone, aloof from the busy world and very peaceful, was far more to my taste just then than wars and fighting.\n\nThe orchards were in blossom, and the winds of spring showered their rain of petals upon the long, new grass. We lay, half in sunshine, half in shade, beneath the poplars that lined the avenue towards the lake, and behind us rose the ancient grey stone towers where the jackdaws nested in the ivy and the pigeons cooed and fluttered from the woods beyond.\n\nThere was loveliness everywhere, but there was sadness too, for though we both knew that the wars had taken her brother whence there is no return, and that only her aged, failing mother's life stood between ourselves and the stately property, there hid a sadness yet deeper than either of these thoughts in both our hearts. And it was, I think, the sadness that comes with spring. For spring, with her lavish, short-lived promises of eternal beauty, is ever a symbol of passing human happiness, incomplete and always unfulfilled. Promises made on earth are playthings, after all, for children. Even while we make them so solemnly, we seem to know they are not meant to hold. They are made, as spring is made, with a glory of soft, radiant blossoms that pass away before there is time to realise them. And yet they come again with the return of spring, as unashamed and glorious as if Time had utterly forgotten.\n\nAnd this sadness was in her too. I mean it was part of her and she was part of it. Not that our love could change to pass or die, but that its sweet, so-long-desired accomplishment must hold away, and, like the spring, must melt and vanish before it had been fully known. I did not speak of it. I well understood that the depression of a broken body can influence the spirit with its poisonous melancholy, but it must have betrayed itself in my words and gestures, even in my manner too. At any rate, she was aware of it. I think, if truth be told, she felt it too. It seemed so painfully inevitable.\n\nMy recovery, meanwhile, was rapid, and from spending an hour or two in the garden, I soon came to spend the entire day. For the spring came on with a rush, and the warmth increased deliciously. While the cuckoos called to one another in the great beech-woods behind the ch\u00e2teau, we sat and talked and sometimes had our simple meals or coffee there together, and I particularly recall the occasion when solid food was first permitted me and she gave me a delicate young bondelle, fresh caught that very morning in the lake. There were leaves of sweet, crisp lettuce with it, and she picked the bones out for me with her own white hands.\n\nThe day was radiant, with a sky of cloudless blue, soft airs stirred the poplar crests; the little waves fell on the pebbly beach not fifty metres away, and the orchard floor was carpeted with flowers that seemed to have caught from heaven's stars the patterns of their yellow blossoms. The bees droned peacefully among the fruit trees; the air was full of musical deep hummings. My former vigour stirred delightfully in my blood, and I knew no pain, beyond occasional dull twinges in the head that came with a rush of temporary darkness over my mind. The scar was healed, however, and the hair had grown over it again. This temporary darkness alarmed her more than it alarmed me. There were grave complications, apparently, that I did not know of.\n\nBut the deep-lying sadness in me seemed independent of the glorious weather, due to causes so intangible, so far off that I never could dispel them by arguing them away. For I could not discover what they actually were. There was a vague, distressing sense of restlessness that I ought to have been elsewhere and otherwise, that we were together for a few days only, and that these few days I had snatched unlawfully from stern, imperative duties. These duties were immediate, but neglected. In a sense I had no right to this springtide of bliss her presence brought me. I was playing truant somehow, somewhere. It was not my absence from the regiment; that I know. It was infinitely deeper, set to some enormous scale that vaguely frightened me, while it deepened the sweetness of the stolen joy.\n\nLike a child, I sought to pin the sunny hours against the sky and make them stay. They passed with such a mocking swiftness, snatched momentarily from some big oblivion. The twilights swallowed our days together before they had been properly tasted, and on looking back, each afternoon of happiness seemed to have been a mere moment in a flying dream. And I must have somehow betrayed the aching mood, for Marion turned of a sudden and gazed into my face with yearning and anxiety in the sweet brown eyes.\n\n'What is it, dearest?' I asked, 'and why do your eyes bring questions?'\n\n'You sighed,' she answered, smiling a little sadly; 'and sighed so deeply. You are in pain again. The darkness, perhaps, is over you?' And her hand stole out to meet my own. 'You are in pain?'\n\n'Not physical pain,' I said, 'and not the darkness either. I see you clearly,' and would have told her more, as I carried her soft fingers to my lips, had I not divined from the expression in her eyes that she read my heart and knew all my strange, mysterious forebodings in herself.\n\n'I know,' she whispered before I could find speech, 'for I feel it too. It is the shadow of separation that oppresses you\u2014yet of no common, measurable separation you can understand. Is it not that?'\n\nLeaning over then, I took her close into my arms, since words in that moment were mere foolishness. I held her so that she could not get away; but even while I did so it was like trying to hold the spring, or fasten the flying hour with a fierce desire. All slipped from me, and my arms caught at the sunshine and the wind.\n\n'We have both felt it all these weeks,' she said bravely, as soon as I had released her, 'and we both have struggled to conceal it. But now\u2014' she hesitated for a second, and with so exquisite a tenderness that I would have caught her to me again but for my anxiety to hear her further words\u2014'now that you are well, we may speak plainly to each other, and so lessen our pain by sharing it.' And then she added, still more softly: 'You feel there is \"something\" that shall take you from me\u2014yet what it is you cannot discover nor divine. Tell me, F\u00e9lix\u2014all your thought, that I in turn may tell you mine.'\n\nHer voice floated about me in the sunny air. I stared at her, striving to focus the dear face more clearly for my sight. A shower of apple blossoms fell about us, and her words seemed floating past me like those passing petals of white. They drifted away. I followed them with difficulty and confusion. With the wind, I fancied, a veil of indefinable change slipped across her face and eyes.\n\n'Yet nothing that could alter feeling,' I answered; for she had expressed my own thought completely. 'Nor anything that either of us can control. Only\u2014perhaps, that everything must fade and pass away, just as this glory of the spring must fade and pass away\u2014'\n\n'Yet leaving its sweetness in us,' she caught me up passionately, 'and to come again, my beloved, to come again in every subsequent life, each time with an added sweetness in it too!' Her little face showed suddenly the courage of a lion in its eyes. Her heart was ever braver than my own, a vigorous, fighting soul. She spoke of lives, I prattled of days and hours merely.\n\nA touch of shame stole over me. But that delicate, swift change in her spread too. With a thrill of ominous warning I noticed how it rose and grew about her. From within, outwards, it seemed to pass\u2014like a shadow of great blue distance. Shadow was somewhere in it, so that she dimmed a little before my very eyes. The dreadful yearning searched and shook me, for I could not understand it, try as I would. She seemed going from me\u2014drifting like her words and like the apple blossoms.\n\n'But when we shall no longer be here to know it,' I made answer quickly, yet as calmly as I could, 'and when we shall have passed to some other place\u2014to other conditions\u2014where we shall not recognise the joy and wonder. When barriers of mist shall have rolled between us\u2014our love and passion so made-over that we shall not know each other'\u2014the words rushed out feverishly, half beyond control\u2014'and perhaps shall not even dare to speak to each other of our deep desire\u2014'\n\nI broke off abruptly, conscious that I was speaking out of some unfamiliar place where I floundered, helpless among strange conditions. I was saying things I hardly understood myself. Her bigger, deeper mood spoke through me, perhaps.\n\nHer darling face came back again; she moved close within reach once more.\n\n'Hush, hush!' she whispered, terror and love both battling in her eyes. 'It is the truth, perhaps, but you must not say such things. To speak them brings them closer. A chain is about our hearts, a chain of fashioning lives without number, but do not seek to draw upon it with anxiety or fear. To do so can only cause the pain of wrong entanglement, and interrupt the natural running of the iron links.' And she placed her hand swiftly upon my mouth, as though divining that the bleak attack of anguish was again upon me with its throbbing rush of darkness.\n\nBut for once I was disobedient and resisted. The physical pain, I realised vividly, was linked closely with this spiritual torture. One caused the other somehow. The disordered brain received, though brokenly, some hints of darker and unusual knowledge. It had stammered forth in me, but through her it flowed easily and clear. I saw the change move more swiftly then across her face. Some ancient look passed into both her eyes.\n\nAnd it was inevitable; I must speak out, regardless of mere bodily well-being.\n\n'We shall have to face them some day,' I cried, although the effort hurt abominably, 'then why not now?' And I drew her hand down and kissed it passionately over and over again. 'We are not children, to hide our faces among shadows and pretend we are invisible. At least we have the Present\u2014the Moment that is here and now. We stand side by side in the heart of this deep spring day. This sunshine and these flowers, this wind across the lake, this sky of blue and this singing of the birds\u2014all, all are ours now. Let us use the moment that Time gives, and so strengthen the chain you speak of that shall bring us again together times without number. We shall then, perhaps, remember. Oh, my heart, think what that would mean\u2014to remember!'\n\nExhaustion caught me, and I sank back among my cushions. But Marion rose up suddenly and stood beside me. And as she did so, another Sky dropped softly down upon us both, and I smelt again the incense of old, old gardens that brought long-forgotten perfumes, incredibly sweet, but with it an ache of far-off, passionate remembrance that was pain. This great ache of distance swept over me like a wave.\n\nI know not what grand change then was wrought upon her beauty, so that I saw her defiant and erect, commanding Fate because she understood it. She towered over me, but it was her soul that towered. The rush of internal darkness in me blotted out all else. The familiar, present sky grew dim, the sunshine faded, the lake and flowers and poplars dipped away. Conditions a thousand times more vivid took their place. She stood out, clear and shining in the glory of an undressed soul, brave and confident with an eternal love that separation strengthened but could never, never change. The deep sadness I abruptly realised, was very little removed from joy\u2014because, somehow, it was the condition of joy. I could not explain it more than that.\n\nAnd her voice, when she spoke, was firm with a note of steel in it; intense, yet devoid of the wasting anger that passion brings. She was determined beyond Death itself, upon a foundation sure and lasting as the stars. The heart in her was calm, because she knew. She was magnificent.\n\n'We are together\u2014always,' she said, her voice rich with the knowledge of some unfathomable experience, 'for separation is temporary merely, forging new links in the ancient chain of lives that binds our hearts eternally together.' She looked like one who has conquered the adversity Time brings, by accepting it. 'You speak of the Present as though our souls were already fitted now to bid it stay, needing no further fashioning. Looking only to the Future, you forget our ample Past that has made us what we are. Yet our Past is here and now, beside us at this very moment. Into the hollow cups of weeks and months, of years and centuries, Time pours its flood beneath our eyes. Time is our schoolroom... Are you so soon afraid? Does not separation achieve that which companionship never could accomplish? And how shall we dare eternity together if we cannot be strong in separation first?'\n\nI listened while a flood of memories broke up through film upon film and layer upon layer that had long covered them.\n\n'This Present that we seem to hold between our hands,' she went on in that earnest, distant voice, 'is our moment of sweet remembrance that you speak of, of renewal, perhaps, too, of reconciliation\u2014a fleeting instant when we may kiss again and say good-bye, but with strengthened hope and courage revived. But we may not stay together finally\u2014we cannot\u2014until long discipline and pain shall have perfected sympathy and schooled our love by searching, difficult tests, that it may last for ever.'\n\nI stretched my arms out dumbly to take her in. Her face shone down upon me, bathed in an older, fiercer sunlight. The change in her seemed in an instant then complete. Some big, soft wind blew both of us ten thousand miles away. The centuries gathered us back together.\n\n'Look, rather, to the Past,' she whispered grandly, 'where first we knew the sweet opening of our love. Remember, if you can, how the pain and separation have made it so worth while to continue. And be braver thence.'\n\nShe turned her eyes more fully upon my own, so that their light persuaded me utterly away with her. An immense new happiness broke over me. I listened, and with the stirrings of an ampler courage. It seemed I followed her down an interminable vista of remembrance till I was happy with her among the flowers and fields of our earliest pre-existence.\n\nHer voice came to me with the singing of birds and the hum of summer insects.\n\n'Have you so soon forgotten,' she sighed, 'when we knew together the perfume of the hanging Babylonian Gardens, or when the Hesperides were so soft to us in the dawn of the world? And do you not remember,' with a little rise of passion in her voice, 'the sweet plantations of Chaldea, and how we tasted the odour of many a drooping flower in the gardens of Alcinous and Adonis, when the bees of olden time picked out the honey for our eating? It is the fragrance of those first hours we knew together that still lies in our hearts to-day, sweetening our love to this apparent suddenness. Hence comes the full, deep happiness we gather so easily To-day... The breast of every ancient forest is torn with storms and lightning... that's why it is so soft and full of little gardens. You have forgotten too easily the glades of Lebanon, where we whispered our earliest secrets while the big winds drove their chariots down those earlier skies...'\n\nThere rose an indescribable tempest of remembrance in my heart as I strove to bring the pictures into focus; but words failed me, and the hand I eagerly stretched out to touch her own, met only sunshine and the rain of apple blossoms.\n\n'The myrrh and frankincense,' she continued in a sighing voice that seemed to come with the wind from invisible caverns in the sky, 'the grapes and pomegranates\u2014have they all passed from you, with the train of apes and peacocks, the tigers and the ibis, and the hordes of dark-faced slaves? And this little sun that plays so lightly here upon our woods of beech and pine\u2014does it bring back nothing of the old-time scorching when the olive slopes, the figs and ripening cornfields heard our vows and watched our love mature?... Our spread encampment in the Desert\u2014do not these sands upon our little beach revive its lonely majesty for you, and have you forgotten the gleaming towers of Semiramis... or, in Sardis, those strange lilies that first tempted our souls to their divine disclosure...?'\n\nConscious of a violent struggle between pain and joy, both too deep for me to understand, I rose to seize her in my arms. But the effort dimmed the flying pictures. The wind that bore her voice down the stupendous vista fled back into the caverns whence it came. And the pain caught me in a vice of agony so searching that I could not move a muscle. My tongue lay dry against my lips. I could not frame a word of any sentence...\n\nHer voice presently came back to me, but fainter, like a whisper from the stars. The light dimmed everywhere; I saw no more the vivid, shining scenery she had summoned. A mournful dusk instead crept down upon the world she had momentarily revived.\n\n'...we may not stay together,' I heard her little whisper, 'until long discipline shall have perfected sympathy, and schooled our love to last. For this love of ours is for ever, and the pain that tries it is the furnace that fashions precious stones...'\n\nAgain I stretched my arms out. Her face shone a moment longer in that forgotten fiercer sunlight, then faded very swiftly. The change, like a veil, passed over it. From the place of prodigious distance where she had been, she swept down towards me with such dizzy speed. As she was To-day I saw her again, more and more.\n\n'Pain and separation, then, are welcome,' I tried to stammer, 'and we will desire them'\u2014but my thought got no further into expression than the first two words. Aching blotted out coherent utterance.\n\nShe bent down very close against my face. Her fragrance was about my lips. But her voice ran off like a faint thrill of music, far, far away. I caught the final words, dying away as wind dies in high branches of a wood. And they reached me this time through the droning of bees and of waves that murmured close at hand upon the shore.\n\n'...for our love is of the soul, and our souls are moulded in Eternity. It is not yet, it is not now, our perfect consummation. Nor shall our next time of meeting know it. We shall not even speak... For I shall not be free...' was what I heard. She paused.\n\n'You mean we shall not know each other?' I cried, in an anguish of spirit that mastered the lesser physical pain.\n\nI barely caught her answer:\n\n'My discipline then will be in another's keeping\u2014yet only that I may come back to you... more perfect... in the end...'\n\nThe bees and waves then cushioned her whisper with their humming. The trail of a deeper silence led them far away. The rush of temporary darkness passed and lifted. I opened my eyes. My love sat close beside me in the shadow of the poplars. One hand held both my own, while with the other she arranged my pillows and stroked my aching head. The world dropped back into a tiny scale once more.\n\n'You have had the pain again,' Marion murmured anxiously, 'but it is better now. It is passing.' She kissed my cheek. 'You must come in...'\n\nBut I would not let her go. I held her to me with all the strength that was in me. 'I had it, but it's gone again. An awful darkness came with it,' I whispered in the little ear that was so close against my mouth. 'I've been dreaming,' I told her, as memory dipped away, 'dreaming of you and me\u2014together somewhere\u2014in old gardens, or forests\u2014where the sun was\u2014'\n\nBut she would not let me finish. I think, in any case, I could not have said more, for thought evaded me, and any language of coherent description was in the same instant beyond my power. Exhaustion came upon me, that vile, compelling nausea with it.\n\n'The sun here is too strong for you, dear love,' I heard her saying, 'and you must rest more. We have been doing too much these last few days. You must have more repose.' She rose to help me move indoors.\n\n'I have been unconscious then?' I asked, in the feeble whisper that was all I could manage.\n\n'For a little while. You slept, while I watched over you.'\n\n'But I was away from you! Oh, how could you let me sleep, when our time together is so short?'\n\nShe soothed me instantly in the way she knew we both loved so. I clung to her until she released herself again.\n\n'Not away from me,' she smiled, 'for I was with you in your dreaming.'\n\n'Of course, of course you were'; but already I knew not exactly why I said it, nor caught the deep meaning that struggled up into my words from such unfathomable distance.\n\n'Come,' she added, with her sweet authority again, 'we must go in now. Give me your arm, and I will send out for the cushions. Lean on me. I am going to put you back to bed.'\n\n'But I shall sleep again,' I said petulantly, 'and we shall be separated.'\n\n'We shall dream together,' she replied, as she helped me slowly and painfully towards the old grey walls of the ch\u00e2teau." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 509", + "text": "Half an hour later I slept deeply, peacefully, upon my bed in the big stately chamber where the roses watched beside the latticed windows.\n\nAnd to say I dreamed again is not correct, for it can only be expressed by saying that I saw and knew. The figures round the bed were actual, and in life. Nothing could be more real than the whisper of the doctor's voice\u2014that solemn, grave-faced man who was so tall\u2014as he said, sternly yet brokenly, to some one: 'You must say good-bye; and you had better say it now.' Nor could anything be more definite and sure, more charged with the actuality of living, than the figure of Marion, as she stooped over me to obey the terrible command. For I saw her face float down towards me like a star, and a shower of pale spring blossoms rained upon me with her hair. The perfume of old, old gardens rose about me as she slipped to her knees beside the bed and kissed my lips\u2014so softly it was like the breath of wind from lake and orchard, and so lingeringly it was as though the blossoms lay upon my mouth and grew into flowers that she planted there.\n\n'Good-bye, my love; be brave. It is only separation.'\n\n'It is death,' I tried to say, but could only feebly stir my lips against her own.\n\nI drew her breath of flowers into my mouth... and there came then the darkness which is final." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 510", + "text": "The voices grew louder. I heard a man struggling with an unfamiliar language. Turning restlessly, I opened my eyes\u2014upon a little, stuffy room, with white walls whereon no pictures hung. It was very hot. A woman was standing beside the bed, and the bed was very short. I stretched, and my feet kicked against the boarding at the end.\n\n'Yes, he is awake,' the woman said in French. 'Will you come in? The doctor said you might see him when he woke. I think he'll know you.' She spoke in French. I just knew enough to understand.\n\nAnd of course I knew him. It was Haddon. I heard him thanking her for all her kindness, as he blundered in. His French, if anything, was worse than my own. I felt inclined to laugh. I did laugh.\n\n'By Jove! old man, this is bad luck, isn't it? You've had a narrow shave. This good lady telegraphed\u2014'\n\n'Have you got my ice-axe? Is it all right?' I asked. I remembered clearly the motor accident\u2014everything.\n\n'The ice-axe is right enough,' he laughed, looking cheerfully at the woman, 'but what about yourself? Feel bad still? Any pain, I mean?'\n\n'Oh, I feel all right,' I answered, searching for the pain of broken bones, but finding none. 'What happened? I was stunned, I suppose?'\n\n'Bit stunned, yes,' said Haddon. 'You got a nasty knock on the head, it seems. The point of the axe ran into you, or something.'\n\n'Was that all?'\n\nHe nodded. 'But I'm afraid it's knocked our climbing on the head. Shocking bad luck, isn't it?'\n\n'I telegraphed last night,' the kind woman was explaining.\n\n'But I couldn't get here till this morning,' Haddon said. 'The telegram didn't find me till midnight, you see.' And he turned to thank the woman in his voluble, dreadful French. She kept a little pension on the shores of the lake. It was the nearest house, and they had carried me in there and got the doctor to me all within the hour. It proved slight enough, apart from the shock. It was not even concussion. I had merely been stunned. Sleep had cured me, as it seemed.\n\n'Jolly little place,' said Haddon, as he moved me that afternoon to Geneva, whence, after a few days' rest, we went on into the Alps of Haute Savoie, 'and lucky the old body was so kind and quick. Odd, wasn't it?' He glanced at me.\n\nSomething in his voice betrayed he hid another thought. I saw nothing 'odd' in it at all, only very tiresome.\n\n'What's its name?' I asked, taking a shot at a venture.\n\nHe hesitated a second. Haddon, the climber, was not skilled in the delicacies of tact.\n\n'Don't know its present name,' he answered, looking away from me across the lake, 'but it stands on the site of an old ch\u00e2teau\u2014destroyed a hundred years ago\u2014the Ch\u00e2teau de Bellerive.'\n\nAnd then I understood my old friend's absurd confusion. For Bellerive chanced also to be the name of a married woman I knew in Scotland\u2014at least, it was her maiden name, and she was of French extraction.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Day and Night Stories by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\n\"Je suis la premi\u00e8re au rendez-vous. Je vous attends.\"\n\nAs he got out of the train at the little wayside station he remembered the conversation as if it had been yesterday, instead of fifteen years ago\u2014and his heart went thumping against his ribs so violently that he almost heard it. The original thrill came over him again with all its infinite yearning. He felt it as he had felt it then\u2014not with that tragic lessening the interval had brought to each repetition of its memory. Here, in the familiar scenery of its birth, he realised with mingled pain and wonder that the subsequent years had not destroyed, but only dimmed it. The forgotten rapture flamed back with all the fierce beauty of its genesis, desire at white heat. And the shock of the abrupt discovery shattered time. Fifteen years became a negligible moment; the crowded experiences that had intervened seemed but a dream. The farewell scene, the conversation on the steamer's deck, were clear as of the day before. He saw the hand holding her big hat that fluttered in the wind, saw the flowers on the dress where the long coat was blown open a moment, recalled the face of a hurrying steward who had jostled them; he even heard the voices\u2014his own and hers:\n\n\"Yes,\" she said simply; \"I promise you. You have my word. I'll wait\u2014\"\n\n\"Till I come back to find you,\" he interrupted.\n\nSteadfastly she repeated his actual words, then added: \"Here; at home\u2014that is.\"\n\n\"I'll come to the garden gate as usual,\" he told her, trying to smile. \"I'll knock. You'll open the gate\u2014as usual\u2014and come out to me.\"\n\nThese words, too, she attempted to repeat, but her voice failed, her eyes filled suddenly with tears; she looked into his face and nodded. It was just then that her little hand went up to hold the hat on\u2014he saw the very gesture still. He remembered that he was vehemently tempted to tear his ticket up there and then, to go ashore with her, to stay in England, to brave all opposition\u2014when the siren roared its third horrible warning... and the ship put out to sea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 511", + "text": "Fifteen years, thick with various incident, had passed between them since that moment. His life had risen, fallen, crashed, then risen again. He had come back at last, fortune won by a lucky coup\u2014at thirty-five; had come back to find her, come back, above all, to keep his word. Once every three months they had exchanged the brief letter agreed upon: \"I am well; I am waiting; I am happy; I am unmarried. Yours\u2014.\" For his youthful wisdom had insisted that no \"man\" had the right to keep \"any woman\" too long waiting; and she, thinking that letter brave and splendid, had insisted likewise that he was free\u2014if freedom called him. They had laughed over this last phrase in their agreement. They put five years as the possible limit of separation. By then he would have won success, and obstinate parents would have nothing more to say.\n\nBut when the five years ended he was \"on his uppers\" in a western mining town, and with the end of ten in sight those uppers, though changed, were little better, apparently, than patched and mended. And it was just then, too, that the change which had been stealing over him betrayed itself. He realised it abruptly, a sense of shame and horror in him. The discovery was made unconsciously\u2014it disclosed itself. He was reading her letter as a labourer on a Californian fruit farm: \"Funny she doesn't marry\u2014some one else!\" he heard himself say. The words were out before he knew it, and certainly before he could suppress them. They just slipped out, startling him into the truth; and he knew instantly that the thought was fathered in him by a hidden wish. ... He was older. He had lived. It was a memory he loved.\n\nDespising himself in a contradictory fashion\u2014both vaguely and fiercely\u2014he yet held true to his boyhood's promise. He did not write and offer to release her, as he knew they did in stories. He persuaded himself that he meant to keep his word. There was this fine, stupid, selfish obstinacy in his character. In any case, she would misunderstand and think he wanted to set free\u2014himself. \"Besides\u2014I'm still\u2014awfully fond of her,\" he asserted. And it was true; only the love, it seemed, had gone its way. Not that another woman took it; he kept himself clean, held firm as steel. The love, apparently, just faded of its own accord; her image dimmed, her letters ceased to thrill, then ceased to interest him.\n\nSubsequent reflection made him realise other details about himself. In the interval he had suffered hardships, had learned the uncertainty of life that depends for its continuance on a little food, but that food often hard to come by, and had seen so many others go under that he held it more cheaply than of old. The wandering instinct, too, had caught him, slowly killing the domestic impulse; he lost his desire for a settled place of abode, the desire for children of his own, lost the desire to marry at all. Also\u2014he reminded himself with a smile\u2014he had lost other things: the expression of youth she was accustomed to and held always in her thoughts of him, two fingers of one hand, his hair! He wore glasses, too. The gentlemen-adventurers of life get scarred in those wild places where he lived. He saw himself a rather battered specimen well on the way to middle age.\n\nThere was confusion in his mind, however, and in his heart: a struggling complex of emotions that made it difficult to know exactly what he did feel. The dominant clue concealed itself. Feelings shifted. A single, clear determinant did not offer. He was an honest fellow. \"I can't quite make it out,\" he said. \"What is it I really feel? And why?\" His motive seemed confused. To keep the flame alight for ten long buffeting years was no small achievement; better men had succumbed in half the time. Yet something in him still held fast to the girl as with a band of steel that would not let her go entirely. Occasionally there came strong reversions, when he ached with longing, yearning, hope; when he loved her again; remembered passionately each detail of the far-off courtship days in the forbidden rectory garden beyond the small, white garden gate. Or was it merely the image and the memory he loved \"again\"? He hardly knew himself. He could not tell. That \"again\" puzzled him. It was the wrong word surely. ... He still wrote the promised letter, however; it was so easy; those short sentences could not betray the dead or dying fires. One day, besides, he would return and claim her. He meant to keep his word.\n\nAnd he had kept it. Here he was, this calm September afternoon, within three miles of the village where he first had kissed her, where the marvel of first love had come to both; three short miles between him and the little white garden gate of which at this very moment she was intently thinking, and behind which some fifty minutes later she would be standing, waiting for him. ...\n\nHe had purposely left the train at an earlier station; he would walk over in the dusk, climb the familiar steps, knock at the white gate in the wall as of old, utter the promised words, \"I have come back to find you,\" enter, and\u2014keep his word. He had written from Mexico a week before he sailed; he had made careful, even accurate calculations: \"In the dusk, on the sixteenth of September, I shall come and knock,\" he added to the usual sentences. The knowledge of his coming, therefore, had been in her possession seven days. Just before sailing, moreover, he had heard from her\u2014though not in answer, naturally. She was well; she was happy; she was unmarried; she was waiting.\n\nAnd now, as by some magical process of restoration\u2014possible to deep hearts only, perhaps, though even by them quite inexplicable\u2014the state of first love had blazed up again in him. In all its radiant beauty it lit his heart, burned unextinguished in his soul, set body and mind on fire. The years had merely veiled it. It burst upon him, captured, overwhelmed him with the suddenness of a dream. He stepped from the train. He met it in the face. It took him prisoner. The familiar trees and hedges, the unchanged countryside, the \"field-smells known in infancy,\" all these, with something subtly added to them, rolled back the passion of his youth upon him in a flood. No longer was he bound upon what he deemed, perhaps, an act of honourable duty; it was love that drove him, as it drove him fifteen years before. And it drove him with the accumulated passion of desire long forcibly repressed; almost as if, out of some fancied notion of fairness to the girl, he had deliberately, yet still unconsciously, said \"No\" to it; that she had not faded, but that he had decided, \"I must forget her.\" That sentence: \"Why doesn't she marry\u2014some one else?\" had not betrayed change in himself. It surprised another motive: \"It's not fair to\u2014her!\"\n\nHis mind worked with a curious rapidity, but worked within one circle only. The stress of sudden emotion was extraordinary. He remembered a thousand things\u2014yet, chief among them, those occasional reversions when he had felt he \"loved her again.\" Had he not, after all, deceived himself? Had she ever really \"faded\" at all? Had he not felt he ought to let her fade\u2014release her that way? And the change in himself?\u2014that sentence on the Californian fruit-farm\u2014what did they mean? Which had been true, the fading or the love?\n\nThe confusion in his mind was hopeless, but, as a matter of fact, he did not think at all: he only felt. The momentum, besides, was irresistible, and before the shattering onset of the sweet revival he did not stop to analyse the strange result. He knew certain things, and cared to know no others: that his heart was leaping, his blood running with the heat of twenty, that joy recaptured him, that he must see, hear, touch her, hold her in his arms\u2014and marry her. For the fifteen years had crumbled to a little thing, and at thirty-five he felt himself but twenty, rapturously, deliciously in love.\n\nHe went quickly, eagerly down the little street to the inn, still feeling only, not thinking anything. The vehement uprush of the old emotion made reflection of any kind impossible. He gave no further thought to those long years \"out there,\" when her name, her letters, the very image of her in his mind, had found him, if not cold, at least without keen response. All that was forgotten as though it had not been. The steadfast thing in him, this strong holding to a promise which had never wilted, ousted the recollection of fading and decay that, whatever caused them, certainly had existed. And this steadfast thing now took command. This enduring quality in his character led him. It was only towards the end of the hurried tea he first received the singular impression\u2014vague, indeed, but undeniably persistent\u2014the strange impression that he was being led.\n\nYet, though aware of this, he did not pause to argue or reflect. The emotional displacement in him, of course, had been more than considerable: there had been upheaval, a change whose abruptness was even dislocating, fundamental in a sense he could not estimate\u2014shock. Yet he took no count of anything but the one mastering desire to get to her as soon as possible, knock at the small, white garden gate, hear her answering voice, see the low wooden door swing open\u2014take her. There was joy and glory in his heart, and a yearning sweet delight. At this very moment she was expecting him. And he\u2014had come.\n\nBehind these positive emotions, however, there lay concealed all the time others that were of a negative character. Consciously, he was not aware of them, but they were there; they revealed their presence in various little ways that puzzled him. He recognised them absentmindedly, as it were; did not analyse or investigate them. For, through the confusion upon his faculties, rose also a certain hint of insecurity that betrayed itself by a slight hesitancy or miscalculation in one or two unimportant actions. There was a touch of melancholy, too, a sense of something lost. It lay, perhaps, in that tinge of sadness which accompanies the twilight of an autumn day, when a gentler, mournful beauty veils a greater beauty that is past. Some trick of memory connected it with a scene of early boyhood, when, meaning to see the sunrise, he overslept, and, by a brief half-hour, was just\u2014too late. He noted it merely, then passed on; he did not understand it; he hurried all the more, this hurry the only sign that it was noted. \"I must be quick,\" flashed up across his strongly positive emotions.\n\nAnd, due to this hurry, possibly, were the slight miscalculations that he made. They were very trivial. He rang for sugar, though the bowl stood just before his eyes, yet when the girl came in he forgot completely what he rang for\u2014and inquired instead about the evening trains to London. And, when the time-table was laid before him, he examined it without intelligence, then looked up suddenly into the maid's face with a question about flowers. Were there flowers to be had in the village anywhere? What kind of flowers? \"Oh, a bouquet or a\"\u2014he hesitated, searching for a word that tried to present itself, yet was not the word he wanted to make use of\u2014\"or a wreath\u2014of some sort?\" he finished. He took the very word he did not want to take. In several things he did and said, this hesitancy and miscalculation betrayed themselves\u2014such trivial things, yet significant in an elusive way that he disliked. There was sadness, insecurity somewhere in them. And he resented them, aware of their existence only because they qualified his joy. There was a whispered \"No\" floating somewhere in the dusk. Almost\u2014he felt disquiet. He hurried, more and more eager to be off upon his journey\u2014the final part of it.\n\nMoreover, there were other signs of an odd miscalculation\u2014dislocation, perhaps, properly speaking\u2014in him. Though the inn was familiar from his boyhood days, kept by the same old couple, too, he volunteered no information about himself, nor asked a single question about the village he was bound for. He did not even inquire if the rector\u2014her father\u2014still were living. And when he left he entirely neglected the gilt-framed mirror above the mantelpiece of plush, dusty pampas-grass in waterless vases on either side. It did not matter, apparently, whether he looked well or ill, tidy or untidy. He forgot that when his cap was off the absence of thick, accustomed hair must alter him considerably, forgot also that two fingers were missing from one hand, the right hand, the hand that she would presently clasp. Nor did it occur to him that he wore glasses, which must change his expression and add to the appearance of the years he bore. None of these obvious and natural things seemed to come into his thoughts at all. He was in a hurry to be off. He did not think. But, though his mind may not have noted these slight betrayals with actual sentences, his attitude, nevertheless, expressed them. This was, it seemed, the feeling in him: \"What could such details matter to her now? Why, indeed, should he give to them a single thought? It was himself she loved and waited for, not separate items of his external, physical image.\" As well think of the fact that she, too, must have altered\u2014outwardly. It never once occurred to him. Such details were of To-day. ... He was only impatient to come to her quickly, very quickly, instantly, if possible. He hurried.\n\nThere was a flood of boyhood's joy in him. He paid for his tea, giving a tip that was twice the price of the meal, and set out gaily and impetuously along the winding lane. Charged to the brim with a sweet picture of a small, white garden gate, the loved face close behind it, he went forward at a headlong pace, singing \"Nancy Lee\" as he used to sing it fifteen years before.\n\nWith action, then, the negative sensations hid themselves, obliterated by the positive ones that took command. The former, however, merely lay concealed; they waited. Thus, perhaps, does vital emotion, overlong restrained, denied, indeed, of its blossoming altogether, take revenge. Repressed elements in his psychic life asserted themselves, selecting, as though naturally, a dramatic form.\n\nThe dusk fell rapidly, mist rose in floating strips along the meadows by the stream; the old, familiar details beckoned him forwards, then drove him from behind as he went swiftly past them. He recognised others rising through the thickening air beyond; they nodded, peered, and whispered; sometimes they almost sang. And each added to his inner happiness; each brought its sweet and precious contribution, and built it into the reconstructed picture of the earlier, long-forgotten rapture. It was an enticing and enchanted journey that he made, something impossibly blissful in it, something, too, that seemed curiously\u2014inevitable.\n\nFor the scenery had not altered all these years, the details of the country were unchanged, everything he saw was rich with dear and precious association, increasing the momentum of the tide that carried him along. Yonder was the stile over whose broken step he had helped her yesterday, and there the slippery plank across the stream where she looked above her shoulder to ask for his support; he saw the very bramble bushes where she scratched her hand, a-blackberrying, the day before... and, finally, the weather-stained signpost, \"To the Rectory.\" It pointed to the path through the dangerous field where Farmer Sparrow's bull provided such a sweet excuse for holding, leading\u2014protecting her. From the entire landscape rose a steam of recent memory, each incident alive, each little detail brimmed with its cargo of fond association.\n\nHe read the rough black lettering on the crooked arm\u2014it was rather faded, but he knew it too well to miss a single letter\u2014and hurried forward along the muddy track; he looked about him for a sign of Farmer Sparrow's bull; he even felt in the misty air for the little hand that he might take and lead her into safety. The thought of her drew him on with such irresistible anticipation that it seemed as if the cumulative drive of vanished and unsated years evoked the tangible phantom almost. He actually felt it, soft and warm and clinging in his own, that was no longer incomplete and mutilated.\n\nYet it was not he who led and guided now, but, more and more, he who was being led. The hint had first betrayed its presence at the inn; it now openly declared itself. It had crossed the frontier into a positive sensation. Its growth, swiftly increasing all this time, had accomplished itself; he had ignored, somehow, both its genesis and quick development; the result he plainly recognised. She was expecting him, indeed, but it was more than expectation; there was calling in it\u2014she summoned him. Her thought and longing reached him along that old, invisible track love builds so easily between true, faithful hearts. All the forces of her being, her very voice, came towards him through the deepening autumn twilight. He had not noticed the curious physical restoration in his hand, but he was vividly aware of this more magical alteration\u2014that she led and guided him, drawing him ever more swiftly towards the little, white garden gate where she stood at this very moment, waiting. Her sweet strength compelled him; there was this new touch of something irresistible about the familiar journey, where formerly had been delicious yielding only, shy, tentative advance. He realised it\u2014inevitable.\n\nHis footsteps hurried, faster and ever faster; so deep was the allurement in his blood, he almost ran. He reached the narrow, winding lane, and raced along it. He knew each bend, each angle of the holly hedge, each separate incident of ditch and stone. He could have plunged blindfold down it at top speed. The familiar perfumes rushed at him\u2014dead leaves and mossy earth and ferns and dock leaves, bringing the bewildering currents of strong emotion in him all together as in a rising wave. He saw, then, the crumbling wall, the cedars topping it with spreading branches, the chimneys of the rectory. On his right bulked the outline of the old, grey church; the twisted, ancient yews, the company of gravestones, upright and leaning, dotting the ground like listening figures. But he looked at none of these. For, on his left, he already saw the five rough steps of stone that led from the lane towards a small, white garden gate. That gate at last shone before him, rising through the misty air. He reached it.\n\nHe stopped dead a moment. His heart, it seemed, stopped too, then took to violent hammering in his brain. There was a roaring in his mind, and yet a marvellous silence\u2014just behind it. Then the roar of emotion died away. There was utter stillness. This stillness, silence, was all about him. The world seemed preternaturally quiet.\n\nBut the pause was too brief to measure. For the tide of emotion had receded only to come on again with redoubled power. He turned, leaped forward, clambered impetuously up the rough stone steps, and flung himself, breathless and exhausted, against the trivial barrier that stood between his eyes and\u2014hers. In his wild, half violent impatience, however, he stumbled. That roaring, too, confused him. He fell forward, it seemed, for twilight had merged in darkness, and he misjudged the steps, the distances he yet knew so well. For a moment, certainly, he lay at full length upon the uneven ground against the wall; the steps had tripped him. And then he raised himself and knocked. His right hand struck upon the small, white garden gate. Upon the two lost fingers he felt the impact. \"I am here,\" he cried, with a deep sound in his throat as though utterance was choked and difficult. \"I have come back\u2014to find you.\"\n\nFor a fraction of a second he waited, while the world stood still and waited with him. But there was no delay. Her answer came at once: \"I am well. ... I am happy. ... I am waiting.\"\n\nAnd the voice was dear and marvellous as of old. Though the words were strange, reminding him of something dreamed, forgotten, lost, it seemed, he did not take special note of them. He only wondered that she did not open instantly that he might see her. Speech could follow, but sight came surely first! There was this lightning-flash of disappointment in him. Ah, she was lengthening out the marvellous moment, as often and often she had done before. It was to tease him that she made him wait. He knocked again; he pushed against the unyielding surface. For he noticed that it was unyielding; and there was a depth in the tender voice that he could not understand.\n\n\"Open!\" he cried again, but louder than before. \"I have come back to find you!\" And as he said it the mist struck cold and thick against his face.\n\nBut her answer froze his blood.\n\n\"I cannot open.\"\n\nAnd a sudden anguish of despair rose over him; the sound of her voice was strange; in it was faintness, distance\u2014as well as depth. It seemed to echo. Something frantic seized him then\u2014the panic sense.\n\n\"Open, open! Come out to me!\" he tried to shout. His voice failed oddly; there was no power in it. Something appalling struck him between the eyes. \"For God's sake, open. I'm waiting here! Open, and come out to me!\"\n\nThe reply was muffled by distance that already seemed increasing; he was conscious of freezing cold about him\u2014in his heart.\n\n\"I cannot open. You must come in to me. I'm here and\u2014waiting\u2014always.\"\n\nHe knew not exactly then what happened, for the cold grew deeper and the icy mist was in his throat. No words would come. He rose to his knees, and from his knees to his feet. He stooped. With all his force he knocked again; in a blind frenzy of despair he hammered and beat against the unyielding barrier of the small, white garden gate. He battered it till the skin of his knuckles was torn and bleeding\u2014the first two fingers of a hand already mutilated. He remembers the torn and broken skin, for he noticed in the gloom that stains upon the gate bore witness to his violence; it was not till afterwards that he remembered the other fact\u2014that the hand had already suffered mutilation, long, long years ago. The power of sound was feebly in him; he called aloud; there was no answer. He tried to scream, but the scream was muffled in his throat before it issued properly; it was a nightmare scream. As a last resort he flung himself bodily upon the unyielding gate, with such precipitate violence, moreover, that his face struck against its surface.\n\nFrom the friction, then, along the whole length of his cheek he knew that the surface was not smooth. Cold and rough that surface was; but also\u2014it was not of wood. Moreover, there was writing on it he had not seen before. How he deciphered it in the gloom, he never knew. The lettering was deeply cut. Perhaps he traced it with his fingers; his right hand certainly lay stretched upon it. He made out a name, a date, a broken verse from the Bible, and the words, \"died peacefully.\" The lettering was sharply cut with edges that were new. For the date was of a week ago; the broken verse ran, \"When the shadows flee away...\" and the small, white garden gate was unyielding because it was of\u2014stone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 512", + "text": "At the inn he found himself staring at a table from which the tea things had not been cleared away. There was a railway time-table in his hands, and his head was bent forwards over it, trying to decipher the lettering in the growing twilight. Beside him, still fingering a shilling, stood the serving-girl; her other hand held a brown tray with a running dog painted upon its dented surface. It swung to and fro a little as she spoke, evidently continuing a conversation her customer had begun. For she was giving information\u2014in the colourless, disinterested voice such persons use:\n\n\"We all went to the funeral, sir, all the country people went. The grave was her father's\u2014the family grave. ...\" Then, seeing that her customer was too absorbed in the time-table to listen further, she said no more but began to pile the tea things on to the tray with noisy clatter.\n\nTen minutes later, in the road, he stood hesitating. The signal at the station just opposite was already down. The autumn mist was rising. He looked along the winding road that melted away into the distance, then slowly turned and reached the platform just as the London train came in. He felt very old\u2014too old to walk six miles. ..." + }, + { + "title": "The Touch Of Pan by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "An idiot, Heber understood, was a person in whom intelligence had been arrested\u2014instinct acted, but not reason. A lunatic, on the other hand, was some one whose reason had gone awry\u2014the mechanism of the brain was injured. The lunatic was out of relation with his environment; the idiot had merely been delayed en route.\n\nBe that as it might, he knew at any rate that a lunatic was not to be listened to, whereas an idiot\u2014well, the one he fell in love with certainly had the secret of some instinctual knowledge that was not only joy, but a kind of sheer natural joy. Probably it was that sheer natural joy of living that reason argues to be untaught, degraded. In any case\u2014at thirty\u2014he married her instead of the daughter of a duchess he was engaged to. They lead to-day that happy, natural, vagabond life called idiotic, unmindful of that world the majority of reasonable people live only to remember.\n\nThough born into an artificial social clique that made it difficult, Heber had always loved the simple things. Nature, especially, meant much to him. He would rather see a woodland misty with bluebells than all the ch\u00e2teaux on the Loire; the thought of a mountain valley in the dawn made his feet lonely in the grandest houses. Yet in these very houses was his home established. Not that he under-estimated worldly things\u2014their value was too obvious\u2014but that it was another thing he wanted. Only he did not know precisely what he wanted until this particular idiot made it plain.\n\nHer case was a mild one, possibly; the title bestowed by implication rather than by specific mention. Her family did not say that she was imbecile or half-witted, but that she \"was not all there\" they probably did say. Perhaps she saw men as trees walking, perhaps she saw through a glass darkly. Heber, who had met her once or twice, though never yet to speak to, did not analyse her degree of sight, for in him, personally, she woke a secret joy and wonder that almost involved a touch of awe. The part of her that was not \"all there\" dwelt in an \"elsewhere\" that he longed to know about. He wanted to share it with her. She seemed aware of certain happy and desirable things that reason and too much thinking hide.\n\nHe just felt this instinctively without analysis. The values they set upon the prizes of life were similar. Money to her was just stamped metal, fame a loud noise of sorts, position nothing. Of people she was aware as a dog or bird might be aware\u2014they were kind or unkind. Her parents, having collected much metal and achieved position, proceeded to make a loud noise of sorts with some success; and since she did not contribute, either by her appearance or her tastes, to their ambitions, they neglected her and made excuses. They were ashamed of her existence. Her father in particular justified Nietzsche's shrewd remark that no one with a loud voice can listen to subtle thoughts.\n\nShe was, perhaps, sixteen\u2014for, though she looked it, eighteen or nineteen was probably more in accord with her birth certificate. Her mother was content, however, that she should dress the lesser age, preferring to tell strangers that she was childish, rather than admit that she was backward.\n\n\"You'll never marry at all, child, much less marry as you might,\" she said, \"if you go about with that rabbit expression on your face. That's not the way to catch a nice young man of the sort we get down to stay with us now. Many a chorus-girl with less than you've got has caught them easily enough. Your sister's done well. Why not do the same? There's nothing to be shy or frightened about.\"\n\n\"But I'm not shy or frightened, mother. I'm bored. I mean they bore me.\"\n\nIt made no difference to the girl; she was herself. The bored expression in the eyes\u2014the rabbit, not-all-there expression\u2014gave place sometimes to another look. Yet not often, nor with anybody. It was this other look that stirred the strange joy in the man who fell in love with her. It is not to be easily described. It was very wonderful. Whether sixteen or nineteen, she then looked\u2014a thousand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 514", + "text": "The house-party was of that up-to-date kind prevalent in Heber's world. Husbands and wives were not asked together. There was a cynical disregard of the decent (not the stupid) conventions that savoured of abandon, perhaps of decadence. He only went himself in the hope of seeing the backward daughter once again. Her millionaire parents afflicted him, the smart folk tired him. Their peculiar affectation of a special language, their strange belief that they were of importance, their treatment of the servants, their calculated self-indulgence, all jarred upon him more than usual. At bottom he heartily despised the whole vapid set. He felt uncomfortable and out of place. Though not a prig, he abhorred the way these folk believed themselves the climax of fine living. Their open immorality disgusted him, their indiscriminate love-making was merely rather nasty; he watched the very girl he was at last to settle down with behaving as the tone of the clique expected over her final fling\u2014and, bored by the strain of so much \"modernity,\" he tried to get away. Tea was long over, the sunset interval invited, he felt hungry for trees and fields that were not self-conscious\u2014and he escaped. The flaming June day was turning chill. Dusk hovered over the ancient house, veiling the pretentious new wing that had been added. And he came across the idiot girl at the bend of the drive, where the birch trees shivered in the evening wind. His heart gave a leap.\n\nShe was leaning against one of the dreadful statues\u2014it was a satyr\u2014that sprinkled the lawn. Her back was to him; she gazed at a group of broken pine trees in the park beyond. He paused an instant, then went on quickly, while his mind scurried to recall her name. They were within easy speaking range.\n\n\"Miss Elizabeth!\" he cried, yet not too loudly lest she might vanish as suddenly as she had appeared. She turned at once. Her eyes and lips were smiling welcome at him without pretence. She showed no surprise.\n\n\"You're the first one of the lot who's said it properly,\" she exclaimed, as he came up. \"Everybody calls me Elizabeth instead of Elspeth. It's idiotic. They don't even take the trouble to get a name right.\"\n\n\"It is,\" he agreed. \"Quite idiotic.\" He did not correct her. Possibly he had said Elspeth after all\u2014the names were similar. Her perfectly natural voice was grateful to his ear, and soothing. He looked at her all over with an open admiration that she noticed and, without concealment, liked. She was very untidy, the grey stockings on her vigorous legs were torn, her short skirt was spattered with mud. Her nut-brown hair, glossy and plentiful, flew loose about neck and shoulders. In place of the usual belt she had tied a coloured handkerchief round her waist. She wore no hat. What she had been doing to get in such a state, while her parents entertained a \"distinguished\" party, he did not know, but it was not difficult to guess. Climbing trees or riding bareback and astride was probably the truth. Yet her dishevelled state became her well, and the welcome in her face delighted him. She remembered him, she was glad. He, too, was glad, and a sense both happy and reckless stirred in his heart. \"Like a wild animal,\" he said, \"you come out in the dusk\u2014\"\n\n\"To play with my kind,\" she answered in a flash, throwing him a glance of invitation that made his blood go dancing.\n\nHe leaned against the statue a moment, asking himself why this young Cinderella of a parvenu family delighted him when all the London beauties left him cold. There was a lift through his whole being as he watched her, slim and supple, grace shining through the untidy modern garb\u2014almost as though she wore no clothes. He thought of a panther standing upright. Her poise was so alert\u2014one arm upon the marble ledge, one leg bent across the other, the hip-line showing like a bird's curved wing. Wild animal or bird, flashed across his mind: something untamed and natural. Another second, and she might leap away\u2014or spring into his arms.\n\nIt was a deep, stirring sensation in him that produced the mental picture. \"Pure and natural,\" a voice whispered with it in his heart, \"as surely as they are just the other thing!\" And the thrill struck with unerring aim at the very root of that unrest he had always known in the state of life to which he was called. She made it natural, clean, and pure. This girl and himself were somehow kin. The primitive thing broke loose in him.\n\nIn two seconds, while he stood with her beside the vulgar statue, these thoughts passed through his mind. But he did not at first give utterance to any of them. He spoke more formally, although laughter, due to his happiness, lay behind:\n\n\"They haven't asked you to the party, then? Or you don't care about it? Which is it?\"\n\n\"Both,\" she said, looking fearlessly into his face. \"But I've been here ten minutes already. Why were you so long?\"\n\nThis outspoken honesty was hardly what he expected, yet in another sense he was not surprised. Her eyes were very penetrating, very innocent, very frank. He felt her as clean and sweet as some young fawn that asks plainly to be stroked and fondled. He told the truth: \"I couldn't get away before. I had to play about and\u2014\" when she interrupted with impatience:\n\n\"They don't really want you,\" she exclaimed scornfully. \"I do.\"\n\nAnd, before he could choose one out of the several answers that rushed into his mind, she nudged him with her foot, holding it out a little so that he saw the shoelace was unfastened. She nodded her head towards it, and pulled her skirt up half an inch as he at once stooped down.\n\n\"And, anyhow,\" she went on as he fumbled with the lace, touching her ankle with his hand, \"you're going to marry one of them. I read it in the paper. It's idiotic. You'll be miserable.\"\n\nThe blood rushed to his head, but whether owing to his stooping or to something else, he could not say.\n\n\"I only came\u2014I only accepted,\" he said quickly, \"because I wanted to see you again.\"\n\n\"Of course. I made mother ask you.\"\n\nHe did an impulsive thing. Kneeling as he was, he bent his head a little lower and suddenly kissed the soft grey stocking\u2014then stood up and looked her in the face. She was laughing happily, no sign of embarrassment in her anywhere, no trace of outraged modesty. She just looked very pleased.\n\n\"I've tied a knot that won't come undone in a hurry\u2014\" he began, then stopped dead. For as he said it, gazing into her smiling face, another expression looked forth at him from the two big eyes of hazel. Something rushed from his heart to meet it. It may have been that playful kiss, it may have been the way she took it; but, at any rate, there was a strength in the new emotion that made him unsure of who he was and of whom he looked at. He forgot the place, the time, his own identity and hers. The lawn swept from beneath his feet, the English sunset with it. He forgot his host and hostess, his fellow guests, even his father's name and his own into the bargain. He was carried away upon a great tide, the girl always beside him. He left the shore-line in the distance, already half forgotten, the shore-line of his education, learning, manners, social point of view\u2014everything to which his father had most carefully brought him up as the scion of an old-established English family. This girl had torn up the anchor. Only the anchor had previously been loosened a little by his own unconscious and restless efforts. ...\n\nWhere was she taking him to? Upon what island would they land?\n\n\"I'm younger than you\u2014a good deal,\" she broke in upon his rushing mood. \"But that doesn't matter a bit, does it? We're about the same age really.\"\n\nWith the happy sound of her voice the extraordinary sensation passed\u2014or, rather, it became normal. But that it had lasted an appreciable time was proved by the fact that they had left the statue on the lawn, the house was no longer visible behind them, and they were walking side by side between the massive rhododendron clumps. They brought up against a five-barred gate into the park. They leaned upon the topmost bar, and he felt her shoulder touching his\u2014edging into it\u2014as they looked across to the grove of pines.\n\n\"I feel absurdly young,\" he said without a sign of affectation, \"and yet I've been looking for you a thousand years and more.\"\n\nThe afterglow lit up her face; it fell on her loose hair and tumbled blouse, turning them amber red. She looked not only soft and comely, but extraordinarily beautiful. The strange expression haunted the deep eyes again, the lips were a little parted, the young breast heaving slightly, joy and excitement in her whole presentment. And as he watched her he knew that all he had just felt was due to her close presence, to her atmosphere, her perfume, her physical warmth and vigour. It had emanated directly from her being.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, and laughed so that he felt her breath upon his face. He bent lower to bring his own on a level, gazing straight into her eyes that were fixed upon the field beyond. They were clear and luminous as pools of water, and in their centre, sharp as a photograph, he saw the reflection of the pine grove, perhaps a hundred yards away. With detailed accuracy he saw it, empty and motionless in the glimmering June dusk.\n\nThen something caught his eye. He examined the picture more closely. He drew slightly nearer. He almost touched her face with his own, forgetting for a moment whose were the eyes that served him for a mirror. For, looking intently thus, it seemed to him that there was a movement, a passing to and fro, a stirring as of figures among the trees. ... Then suddenly the entire picture was obliterated. She had dropped her lids. He heard her speaking\u2014the warm breath was again upon his face:\n\n\"In the heart of that wood dwell I.\"\n\nHis heart gave another leap\u2014more violent than the first\u2014for the wonder and beauty of the sentence caught him like a spell. There was a lilt and rhythm in the words that made it poetry. She laid emphasis upon the pronoun and the nouns. It seemed the last line of some delicious runic verse:\n\n\"In the heart of the wood\u2014dwell I. ...\"\n\nAnd it flashed across him: That living, moving, inhabited pine wood was her thought. It was thus she saw it. Her nature flung back to a life she understood, a life that needed, claimed her. The ostentatious and artificial values that surrounded her, she denied, even as the distinguished house-party of her ambitious, masquerading family neglected her. Of course she was unnoticed by them, just as a swallow or a wild-rose were unnoticed.\n\nHe knew her secret then, for she had told it to him. It was his own secret too. They were akin, as the birds and animals were akin. They belonged together in some free and open life, natural, wild, untamed. That unhampered life was flowing about them now, rising, beating with delicious tumult in her veins and his, yet innocent as the sunlight and the wind\u2014because it was as freely recognised.\n\n\"Elspeth!\" he cried, \"come, take me with you! We'll go at once. Come\u2014hurry\u2014before we forget to be happy, or remember to be wise again\u2014!\"\n\nHis words stopped half-way towards completion, for a perfume floated past him, born of the summer dusk, perhaps, yet sweet with a penetrating magic that made his senses reel with some remembered joy. No flower, no scented garden bush delivered it. It was the perfume of young, spendthrift life, sweet with the purity that reason had not yet stained. The girl moved closer. Gathering her loose hair between her fingers, she brushed his cheeks and eyes with it, her slim, warm body pressing against him as she leaned over laughingly.\n\n\"In the darkness,\" she whispered in his ear; \"when the moon puts the house upon the statue!\"\n\nAnd he understood. Her world lay behind the vulgar, staring day. He turned. He heard the flutter of skirts\u2014just caught the grey stockings, swift and light, as they flew behind the rhododendron masses. And she was gone.\n\nHe stood a long time, leaning upon that five-barred gate. ... It was the dressing-gong that recalled him at length to what seemed the present. By the conservatory door, as he went slowly in, he met his distinguished cousin\u2014who was helping the girl he himself was to marry to enjoy her \"final fling.\" He looked at his cousin. He realised suddenly that he was merely vicious. There was no sun and wind, no flowers\u2014there was depravity only, lust instead of laughter, excitement in place of happiness. It was calculated, not spontaneous. His mind was in it. Without joy it was. He was not natural.\n\n\"Not a girl in the whole lot fit to look at,\" he exclaimed with peevish boredom, excusing himself stupidly for his illicit conduct. \"I'm off in the morning.\" He shrugged his blue-blooded shoulders. \"These millionaires! Their shooting's all right, but their mixum-gatherum week-ends\u2014bah!\" His gesture completed all he had to say about this one in particular. He glanced sharply, nastily, at his companion. \"You look as if you'd found something!\" he added, with a suggestive grin. \"Or have you seen the ghost that was paid for with the house?\" And he guffawed and let his eyeglass drop. \"Lady Hermione will be asking for an explanation\u2014eh?\"\n\n\"Idiot!\" replied Heber, and ran upstairs to dress for dinner.\n\nBut the word was wrong, he remembered, as he closed his door. It was lunatic he had meant to say, yet something more as well. He saw the smart, modern philanderer somehow as a beast." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 515", + "text": "It was nearly midnight when he went up to bed, after an evening of intolerable amusement. The abandoned moral attitude, the common rudeness, the contempt of all others but themselves, the ugly jests, the horseplay of tasteless minds that passed for gaiety, above all the shamelessness of the women that behind the cover of fine breeding aped emancipation, afflicted him to a boredom that touched desperation.\n\nHe understood now with a clarity unknown before. As with his cousin, so with these. They took life, he saw, with a brazen effrontery they thought was freedom, while yet it was life that they denied. He felt vampired and degraded; spontaneity went out of him. The fact that the geography of bedrooms was studied openly seemed an affirmation of vice that sickened him. Their ways were nauseous merely. He escaped\u2014unnoticed.\n\nHe locked his door, went to the open window, and looked out into the night\u2014then started. For silver dressed the lawn and park, the shadow of the building lay dark across the elaborate garden, and the moon, he noticed, was just high enough to put the house upon the statue. The chimney-stacks edged the pedestal precisely.\n\n\"Odd!\" he exclaimed. \"Odd that I should come at the very moment\u2014!\" then smiled as he realised how his proposed adventure would be misinterpreted, its natural innocence and spirit ruined\u2014if he were seen. \"And some one would be sure to see me on a night like this. There are couples still hanging about in the garden.\" And he glanced at the shrubberies and secret paths that seemed to float upon the warm June air like islands.\n\nHe stood for a moment framed in the glare of the electric light, then turned back into the room; and at that instant a low sound like a bird-call rose from the lawn below. It was soft and flutey, as though some one played two notes upon a reed, a piping sound. He had been seen, and she was waiting for him. Before he knew it, he had made an answering call, of oddly similar kind, then switched the light out. Three minutes later, dressed in simpler clothes, with a cap pulled over his eyes, he reached the back lawn by means of the conservatory and the billiard-room. He paused a moment to look about him. There was no one, although the lights were still ablaze. \"I am an idiot,\" he chuckled to himself. \"I'm acting on instinct!\" He ran.\n\nThe sweet night air bathed him from head to foot; there was strength and cleansing in it. The lawn shone wet with dew. He could almost smell the perfume of the stars. The fumes of wine, cigars and artificial scent were left behind, the atmosphere exhaled by civilisation, by heavy thoughts, by bodies overdressed, unwisely stimulated\u2014all, all forgotten. He passed into a world of magical enchantment. The hush of the open sky came down. In black and white the garden lay, brimmed full with beauty, shot by the ancient silver of the moon, spangled with the stars' old-gold. And the night wind rustled in the rhododendron masses as he flew between them.\n\nIn a moment he was beside the statue, engulfed now by the shadow of the building, and the girl detached herself silently from the blur of darkness. Two arms were flung about his neck, a shower of soft hair fell on his cheek with a heady scent of earth and leaves and grass, and the same instant they were away together at full speed\u2014towards the pine wood. Their feet were soundless on the soaking grass. They went so swiftly that they made a whir of following wind that blew her hair across his eyes.\n\nAnd the sudden contrast caused a shock that put a blank, perhaps, upon his mind, so that he lost the standard of remembered things. For it was no longer merely a particular adventure; it seemed a habit and a natural joy resumed. It was not new. He knew the momentum of an accustomed happiness, mislaid, it may be, but certainly familiar. They sped across the gravel paths that intersected the well-groomed lawn, they leaped the flower-beds, so laboriously shaped in mockery, they clambered over the ornamental iron railings, scorning the easier five-barred gate into the park. The longer grass then shook the dew in soaking showers against his knees. He stooped, as though in some foolish effort to turn up something, then realised that his legs, of course, were bare. Her garment was already high and free, for she, too, was barelegged like himself. He saw her little ankles, wet and shining in the moonlight, and flinging himself down, he kissed them happily, plunging his face into the dripping, perfumed grass. Her ringing laughter mingled with his own, as she stooped beside him the same instant; her hair hung in a silver cloud; her eyes gleamed through its curtain into his; then, suddenly, she soaked her hands in the heavy dew and passed them over his face with a softness that was like the touch of some scented southern wind.\n\n\"Now you are anointed with the Night,\" she cried. \"No one will know you. You are forgotten of the world. Kiss me!\"\n\n\"We'll play for ever and ever,\" he cried, \"the eternal game that was old when the world was yet young,\" and lifting her in his arms he kissed her eyes and lips. There was some natural bliss of song and dance and laughter in his heart, an elemental bliss that caught them together as wind and sunlight catch the branches of a tree. She leaped from the ground to meet his swinging arms. He ran with her, then tossed her off and caught her neatly as she fell. Evading a second capture, she danced ahead, holding out one shining arm that he might follow. Hand in hand they raced on together through the clean summer moonlight. Yet there remained a smooth softness as of fur against his neck and shoulders, and he saw then that she wore skins of tawny colour that clung to her body closely, that he wore them too, and that her skin, like his own, was of a sweet dusky brown.\n\nThen, pulling her towards him, he stared into her face. She suffered the close gaze a second, but no longer, for with a burst of sparkling laughter again she leaped into his arms, and before he shook her free she had pulled and tweaked the two small horns that hid in the thick curly hair behind, and just above, the ears.\n\nAnd that wilful tweaking turned him wild and reckless. That touch ran down him deep into the mothering earth. He leaped and ran and sang with a great laughing sound. The wine of eternal youth flushed all his veins with joy, and the old, old world was young again with every impulse of natural happiness intensified with the Earth's own foaming tide of life.\n\nFrom head to foot he tingled with the delight of Spring, prodigal with creative power. Of course he could fly the bushes and fling wild across the open! Of course the wind and moonlight fitted close and soft about him like a skin! Of course he had youth and beauty for playmates, with dancing, laughter, singing, and a thousand kisses! For he and she were natural once again. They were free together of those long-forgotten days when \"Pan leaped through the roses in the month of June ...!\"\n\nWith the girl swaying this way and that upon his shoulders, tweaking his horns with mischief and desire, hanging her flying hair before his eyes, then bending swiftly over again to lift it, he danced to join the rest of their companions in the little moonlit grove of pines beyond. ..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 516", + "text": "They rose somewhat pointed, perhaps, against the moonlight, those English pines\u2014more with the shape of cypresses, some might have thought. A stream gushed down between their roots, there were mossy ferns, and rough grey boulders with lichen on them. But there was no dimness, for the silver of the moon sprinkled freely through the branches like the faint sunlight that it really was, and the air ran out to meet them with a heady fragrance that was wiser far than wine.\n\nThe girl, in an instant, was whirled from her perch on his shoulders and caught by a dozen arms that bore her into the heart of the jolly, careless throng. Whisht! Whew! Whir! She was gone, but another, fairer still, was in her place, with skins as soft and knees that clung as tightly. Her eyes were liquid amber, grapes hung between her little breasts, her arms entwined about him, smoother than marble, and as cool. She had a crystal laugh.\n\nBut he flung her off, so that she fell plump among a group of bigger figures lolling against a twisted root and roaring with a jollity that boomed like wind through the chorus of a song. They seized her, kissed her, then sent her flying. They were happier with their glad singing. They held stone goblets, red and foaming, in their broad-palmed hands.\n\n\"The mountains lie behind us!\" cried a figure dancing past. \"We are come at last into our valley of delight. Grapes, breasts, and rich red lips! Ho! Ho! It is time to press them that the juice of life may run!\" He waved a cluster of ferns across the air and vanished amid a cloud of song and laughter.\n\n\"It is ours. Use it!\" answered a deep, ringing voice. \"The valleys are our own. No climbing now!\" And a wind of echoing cries gave answer from all sides. \"Life! Life! Life! Abundant, flowing over\u2014use it, use it!\"\n\nA troop of nymphs rushed forth, escaped from clustering arms and lips they yet openly desired. He chased them in and out among the waving branches, while she who had brought him ever followed, and sped past him and away again. He caught three gleaming soft brown bodies, then fell beneath them, smothered, bubbling with joyous laughter\u2014next freed himself and, while they sought to drag him captive again, escaped and raced with a leap upon a slimmer, sweeter outline that swung up\u2014only just in time\u2014upon a lower bough, whence she leaned down above him with hanging net of hair and merry eyes. A few feet beyond his reach, she laughed and teased him\u2014the one who had brought him in, the one he ever sought, and who for ever sought him too. ...\n\nIt became a riotous glory of wild children who romped and played with an impassioned glee beneath the moon. For the world was young and they, her happy offspring, glowed with the life she poured so freely into them. All intermingled, the laughing voices rose into a foam of song that broke against the stars. The difficult mountains had been climbed and were forgotten. Good! Then, enjoy the luxuriant, fruitful valley and be glad! And glad they were, brimful with spontaneous energy, natural as birds and animals that obeyed the big, deep rhythm of a simpler age\u2014natural as wind and innocent as sunshine.\n\nYet, for all the untamed riot, there was a lift of beauty pulsing underneath. Even when the wildest abandon approached the heat of orgy, when the recklessness appeared excess\u2014there hid that marvellous touch of loveliness which makes the natural sacred. There was coherence, purpose, the fulfilling of an exquisite law: there was worship. The form it took, haply, was strange as well as riotous, yet in its strangeness dreamed innocence and purity, and in its very riot flamed that spirit which is divine.\n\nFor he found himself at length beside her once again; breathless and panting, her sweet brown limbs aglow from the excitement of escape denied; eyes shining like a blaze of stars, and pulses beating with tumultuous life\u2014helpless and yielding against the strength that pinned her down between the roots. His eyes put mastery on her own. She looked up into his face, obedient, happy, soft with love, surrendered with the same delicious abandon that had swept her for a moment into other arms. \"You caught me in the end,\" she sighed. \"I only played awhile.\"\n\n\"I hold you for ever,\" he replied, half wondering at the rough power in his voice.\n\nIt was here the hush of worship stole upon her little face, into her obedient eyes, about her parted lips. She ceased her wilful struggling.\n\n\"Listen!\" she whispered. \"I hear a step upon the glades beyond. The iris and the lily open; the earth is ready, waiting; we must be ready too! He is coming!\"\n\nHe released her and sprang up; the entire company rose too. All stood, all bowed the head. There was an instant's subtle panic, but it was the panic of reverent awe that preludes a descent of deity. For a wind passed through the branches with a sound that is the oldest in the world and so the youngest. Above it there rose the shrill, faint piping of a little reed. Only the first, true sounds were audible\u2014wind and water\u2014the tinkling of the dewdrops as they fell, the murmur of the trees against the air. This was the piping that they heard. And in the hush the stars bent down to hear, the riot paused, the orgy passed and died. The figures waited, kneeling then with one accord. They listened with\u2014the Earth.\n\n\"He comes. ... He comes...\" the valley breathed about them.\n\nThere was a footfall from far away, treading across a world unruined and unstained. It fell with the wind and water, sweetening the valley into life as it approached. Across the rivers and forests it came gently, tenderly, but swiftly and with a power that knew majesty.\n\n\"He comes. ... He comes ...!\" rose with the murmur of the wind and water from the host of lowered heads.\n\nThe footfall came nearer, treading a world grown soft with worship. It reached the grove. It entered. There was a sense of intolerable loveliness, of brimming life, of rapture. The thousand faces lifted like a cloud. They heard the piping close. And so He came.\n\nBut He came with blessing. With the stupendous Presence there was joy, the joy of abundant, natural life, pure as the sunlight and the wind. He passed among them. There was great movement\u2014as of a forest shaking, as of deep water falling, as of a cornfield swaying to the wind, yet gentle as of a harebell shedding its burden of dew that it has held too long because of love. He passed among them, touching every head. The great hand swept with tenderness each face, lingered a moment on each beating heart. There was sweetness, peace, and loveliness; but above all, there was\u2014life. He sanctioned every natural joy in them and blessed each passion with his power of creation. ... Yet each one saw him differently: some as a wife or maiden desired with fire, some as a youth or stalwart husband, others as a figure veiled with stars or cloaked in luminous mist, hardly attainable; others, again\u2014the fewest these, not more than two or three\u2014as that mysterious wonder which tempts the heart away from known familiar sweetness into a wilderness of undecipherable magic without flesh and blood. ...\n\nTo two, in particular, He came so near that they could feel his breath of hills and fields upon their eyes. He touched them with both mighty hands. He stroked the marble breasts, He felt the little hidden horns... and, as they bent lower so that their lips met together for an instant, He took her arms and twined them about the curved, brown neck that she might hold him closer still. ...\n\nAgain a footfall sounded far away upon an unruined world... and He was gone\u2014back into the wind and water whence He came. The thousand faces lifted; all stood up; the hush of worship still among them. There was a quiet as of the dawn. The piping floated over woods and fields, fading into silence. All looked at one another. ... And then once more the laughter and the play broke loose." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 517", + "text": "\"We'll go,\" she cried, \"and peep upon that other world where life hangs like a prison on their eyes!\" And, in a moment, they were across the soaking grass, the lawn and flower-beds, and close to the walls of the heavy mansion. He peered in through a window, lifting her up to peer in with him. He recognised the world to which outwardly he belonged; he understood; a little gasp escaped him; and a slight shiver ran down the girl's body into his own. She turned her eyes away. \"See,\" she murmured in his ear, \"it's ugly, it's not natural. They feel guilty and ashamed. There is no innocence!\" She saw the men; it was the women that he saw chiefly.\n\nLolling ungracefully, with a kind of boldness that asserted independence, the women smoked their cigarettes with an air of invitation they sought to conceal and yet showed plainly. He saw his familiar world in nakedness. Their backs were bare, for all the elaborate clothes they wore; they hung their breasts uncleanly; in their eyes shone light that had never known the open sun. Hoping they were alluring and desirable, they feigned a guilty ignorance of that hope. They all pretended. Instead of wind and dew upon their hair, he saw flowers grown artificially to ape wild beauty, tresses without lustre borrowed from the slums of city factories. He watched them man\u0153uvring with the men; heard dark sentences; caught gestures half delivered whose meaning should just convey that glimpse of guilt they deemed to increase pleasure. The women were calculating, but nowhere glad; the men experienced, but nowhere joyous. Pretended innocence lay cloaked with a veil of something that whispered secretly, clandestine, ashamed, yet with a brazen air that laid mockery instead of sunshine in their smiles. Vice masqueraded in the ugly shape of pleasure; beauty was degraded into calculated tricks. They were not natural. They knew not joy.\n\n\"The forward ones, the civilised!\" she laughed in his ear, tweaking his horns with energy. \"We are the backward!\"\n\n\"Unclean,\" he muttered, recalling a catchword of the world he gazed upon.\n\nThey were the civilised! They were refined and educated\u2014advanced. Generations of careful breeding, mate cautiously selecting mate, laid the polish of caste upon their hands and faces where gleamed ridiculous, untaught jewels\u2014rings, bracelets, necklaces hanging absurdly from every possible angle.\n\n\"But\u2014they are dressed up\u2014for fun,\" he exclaimed, more to himself than to the girl in skins who clung to his shoulders with her naked arms.\n\n\"Undressed!\" she answered, putting her brown hand in play across his eyes. \"Only they have forgotten even that!\" And another shiver passed through her into him. He turned and hid his face against the soft skins that touched his cheek. He kissed her body. Seizing his horns, she pressed him to her, laughing happily.\n\n\"Look!\" she whispered, raising her head again; \"they're coming out.\" And he saw that two of them, a man and a girl, with an interchange of secret glances, had stolen from the room and were already by the door of the conservatory that led into the garden. It was his wife to be\u2014and his distinguished cousin.\n\n\"Oh, Pan!\" she cried in mischief. The girl sprang from his arms and pointed. \"We will follow them. We will put natural life into their little veins!\"\n\n\"Or panic terror,\" he answered, catching the yellow panther skin and following her swiftly round the building. He kept in the shadow, though she ran full into the blaze of moonlight. \"But they can't see us,\" she called, looking over her shoulder a moment. \"They can only feel our presence, perhaps.\" And, as she danced across the lawn, it seemed a moonbeam slipped from a sapling birch tree that the wind curved earthwards, then tossed back against the sky.\n\nKeeping just ahead, they led the pair, by methods known instinctively to elemental blood yet not translatable\u2014led them towards the little grove of waiting pines. The night wind murmured in the branches; a bird woke into a sudden burst of song. These sounds were plainly audible. But four little pointed ears caught other, wilder notes behind the wind and music of the bird\u2014the cries and ringing laughter, the leaping footsteps and the happy singing of their merry kin within the wood.\n\nAnd the throng paused then amid the revels to watch the \"civilised\" draw near. They presently reached the trees, halted, looked about them, hesitated a moment\u2014then, with a hurried movement as of shame and fear lest they be caught, entered the zone of shadow.\n\n\"Let's go in here,\" said the man, without music in his voice. \"It's dry on the pine needles, and we can't be seen.\" He led the way; she picked up her skirts and followed over the strip of long wet grass. \"Here's a log all ready for us,\" he added, sat down, and drew her into his arms with a sigh of satisfaction. \"Sit on my knee; it's warmer for your pretty figure.\" He chuckled; evidently they were on familiar terms, for though she hesitated, pretending to be coy, there was no real resistance in her, and she allowed the ungraceful roughness. \"But are we quite safe? Are you sure?\" she asked between his kisses.\n\n\"What does it matter, even if we're not?\" he replied, establishing her more securely on his knees. \"But, as a matter of fact, we're safer here than in my own house.\" He kissed her hungrily. \"By Jove, Hermione, but you're divine,\" he cried passionately, \"divinely beautiful. I love you with every atom of my being\u2014with my soul.\"\n\n\"Yes, dear, I know\u2014I mean, I know you do, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But what?\" he asked impatiently.\n\n\"Those detectives\u2014\"\n\nHe laughed. Yet it seemed to annoy him. \"My wife is a beast, isn't she?\u2014to have me watched like that,\" he said quickly.\n\n\"They're everywhere,\" she replied, a sudden hush in her tone. She looked at the encircling trees a moment, then added bitterly: \"I hate her, simply hate her.\"\n\n\"I love you,\" he cried, crushing her to him, \"that's all that matters now. Don't let's waste time talking about the rest.\" She contrived to shudder, and hid her face against his coat, while he showered kisses on her neck and hair.\n\nAnd the solemn pine trees watched them, the silvery moonlight fell on their faces, the scent of new-mown hay went floating past.\n\n\"I love you with my very soul,\" he repeated with intense conviction. \"I'd do anything, give up anything, bear anything\u2014just to give you a moment's happiness. I swear it\u2014before God!\"\n\nThere was a faint sound among the trees behind them, and the girl sat up, alert. She would have scrambled to her feet, but that he held her tight.\n\n\"What the devil's the matter with you to-night?\" he asked in a different tone, his vexation plainly audible. \"You're as nervy as if you were being watched, instead of me.\"\n\nShe paused before she answered, her finger on her lip. Then she said slowly, hushing her voice a little:\n\n\"Watched! That's exactly what I did feel. I've felt it ever since we came into the wood.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, Hermione. It's too many cigarettes.\" He drew her back into his arms, forcing her head up so that he could kiss her better.\n\n\"I suppose it is nonsense,\" she said, smiling. \"It's gone now, anyhow.\"\n\nHe began admiring her hair, her dress, her shoes, her pretty ankles, while she resisted in a way that proved her practice. \"It's not me you love,\" she pouted, yet drinking in his praise. She listened to his repeated assurances that he loved her with his \"soul\" and was prepared for any sacrifice.\n\n\"I feel so safe with you,\" she murmured, knowing the moves in the game as well as he did. She looked up guiltily into his face, and he looked down with a passion that he thought perhaps was joy.\n\n\"You'll be married before the summer's out,\" he said, \"and all the thrill and excitement will be over. Poor Hermione!\" She lay back in his arms, drawing his face down with both hands, and kissing him on the lips. \"You'll have more of him than you can do with\u2014eh? As much as you care about, anyhow.\"\n\n\"I shall be much more free,\" she whispered. \"Things will be easier. And I've got to marry some one\u2014\"\n\nShe broke off with another start. There was a sound again behind them. The man heard nothing. The blood in his temples pulsed too loudly, doubtless.\n\n\"Well, what is it this time?\" he asked sharply.\n\nShe was peering into the wood, where the patches of dark shadow and moonlit spaces made odd, irregular patterns in the air. A low branch waved slightly in the wind.\n\n\"Did you hear that?\" she asked nervously.\n\n\"Wind,\" he replied, annoyed that her change of mood disturbed his pleasure.\n\n\"But something moved\u2014\"\n\n\"Only a branch. We're quite alone, quite safe, I tell you,\" and there was a rasping sound in his voice as he said it. \"Don't be so imaginative. I can take care of you.\"\n\nShe sprang up. The moonlight caught her figure, revealing its exquisite young curves beneath the smother of the costly clothing. Her hair had dropped a little in the struggle. The man eyed her eagerly, making a quick, impatient gesture towards her, then stopped abruptly. He saw the terror in her eyes.\n\n\"Oh, hark! What's that?\" she whispered in a startled voice. She put her finger up. \"Oh, let's go back. I don't like this wood. I'm frightened.\"\n\n\"Rubbish,\" he said, and tried to catch her by the waist.\n\n\"It's safer in the house\u2014my room\u2014or yours\u2014\" She broke off again. \"There it is\u2014don't you hear? It's a footstep!\" Her face was whiter than the moon.\n\n\"I tell you it's the wind in the branches,\" he repeated gruffly. \"Oh, come on, do. We were just getting jolly together. There's nothing to be afraid of. Can't you believe me?\" He tried to pull her down upon his knee again with force. His face wore an unpleasant expression that was half leer, half grin.\n\nBut the girl stood away from him. She continued to peer nervously about her. She listened.\n\n\"You give me the creeps,\" he exclaimed crossly, clawing at her waist again with passionate eagerness that now betrayed exasperation. His disappointment turned him coarse.\n\nThe girl made a quick movement of escape, turning so as to look in every direction. She gave a little scream.\n\n\"That was a step. Oh, oh, it's close beside us. I heard it. We're being watched!\" she cried in terror. She darted towards him, then shrank back. He did not try to touch her this time.\n\n\"Moonshine!\" he growled. \"You've spoilt my\u2014spoilt our chance with your silly nerves.\"\n\nBut she did not hear him apparently. She stood there shivering as with sudden cold.\n\n\"There! I saw it again. I'm sure of it. Something went past me through the air.\"\n\nAnd the man, still thinking only of his own pleasure frustrated, got up heavily, something like anger in his eyes. \"All right,\" he said testily; \"if you're going to make a fuss, we'd better go. The house is safer, possibly, as you say. You know my room. Come along!\" Even that risk he would not take. He loved her with his \"soul.\"\n\nThey crept stealthily out of the wood, the girl slightly in front of him, casting frightened backward glances. Afraid, guilty, ashamed, with an air as though they had been detected, they stole back towards the garden and the house, and disappeared from view.\n\nAnd a wind rose suddenly with a rushing sound, poured through the wood as though to cleanse it, swept out the artificial scent and trace of shame, and brought back again the song, the laughter, and the happy revels. It roared across the park, it shook the windows of the house, then sank away as quickly as it came. The trees stood motionless again, guarding their secret in the clean, sweet moonlight that held the world in dream until the dawn stole up and sunshine took the earth with joy." + }, + { + "title": "The Wings Of Horus by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "Binovitch had the bird in him somewhere: in his features, certainly, with his piercing eye and hawk-like nose; in his movements, with his quick way of flitting, hopping, darting; in the way he perched on the edge of a chair; in the manner he pecked at his food; in his twittering, high-pitched voice as well; and, above all, in his mind. He skimmed all subjects and picked their heart out neatly, as a bird skims lawn or air to snatch its prey. He had the bird's-eye view of everything. He loved birds and understood them instinctively; could imitate their whistling notes with astonishing accuracy. Their one quality he had not was poise and balance. He was a nervous little man; he was neurasthenic. And he was in Egypt by doctor's orders.\n\nSuch imaginative, unnecessary ideas he had! Such uncommon beliefs!\n\n\"The old Egyptians,\" he said laughingly, yet with a touch of solemn conviction in his manner, \"were a great people. Their consciousness was different from ours. The bird idea, for instance, conveyed a sense of deity to them\u2014of bird deity, that is: they had sacred birds\u2014hawks, ibis, and so forth\u2014and worshipped them.\" And he put his tongue out as though to say with challenge, \"Ha, ha!\"\n\n\"They also worshipped cats and crocodiles and cows,\" grinned Palazov. Binovitch seemed to dart across the table at his adversary. His eyes flashed; his nose pecked the air. Almost one could imagine the beating of his angry wings.\n\n\"Because everything alive,\" he half screamed, \"was a symbol of some spiritual power to them. Your mind is as literal as a dictionary and as incoherent. Pages of ink without connected meaning! Verb always in the infinitive! If you were an old Egyptian, you\u2014you\"\u2014he flashed and spluttered, his tongue shot out again, his keen eyes blazed\u2014\"you might take all those words and spin them into a great interpretation of life, a cosmic romance, as they did. Instead, you get the bitter, dead taste of ink in your mouth, and spit it over us like that\"\u2014he made a quick movement of his whole body as a bird that shakes itself\u2014\"in empty phrases.\"\n\nKhilkoff ordered another bottle of champagne, while Vera, his sister, said half nervously, \"Let's go for a drive; it's moonlight.\" There was enthusiasm at once. Another of the party called the head waiter and told him to pack food and drink in baskets. It was only eleven o'clock. They would drive out into the desert, have a meal at two in the morning, tell stories, sing, and see the dawn.\n\nIt was in one of those cosmopolitan hotels in Egypt which attract the ordinary tourists as well as those who are doing a \"cure,\" and all these Russians were ill with one thing or another. All were ordered out for their health, and all were the despair of their doctors. They were as unmanageable as a bazaar and as incoherent. Excess and bed were their routine. They lived, but none of them got better. Equally, none of them got angry. They talked in this strange personal way without a shred of malice or offence. The English, French, and Germans in the hotel watched them with remote amazement, referring to them as \"that Russian lot.\" Their energy was elemental. They never stopped. They merely disappeared when the pace became too fast, then reappeared again after a day or two, and resumed their \"living\" as before. Binovitch, despite his neurasthenia, was the life of the party. He was also a special patient of Dr. Plitzinger, the famous psychiatrist, who took a peculiar interest in his case. It was not surprising. Binovitch was a man of unusual ability and of genuine, deep culture. But there was something more about him that stimulated curiosity. There was this striking originality. He said and did surprising things.\n\n\"I could fly if I wanted to,\" he said once when the airmen came to astonish the natives with their biplanes over the desert, \"but without all that machinery and noise. It's only a question of believing and understanding\u2014\"\n\n\"Show us!\" they cried. \"Let's see you fly!\"\n\n\"He's got it! He's off again! One of his impossible moments.\"\n\nThese occasions when Binovitch let himself go always proved wildly entertaining. He said monstrously incredible things as though he really did believe them. They loved his madness, for it gave them new sensations.\n\n\"It's only levitation, after all, this flying,\" he exclaimed, shooting out his tongue between the words, as his habit was when excited; \"and what is levitation but a power of the air? None of you can hang an orange in space for a second, with all your scientific knowledge; but the moon is always levitated perfectly. And the stars. D'you think they swing on wires? What raised the enormous stones of ancient Egypt? D'you really believe it was heaped-up sand and ropes and clumsy leverage and all our weary and laborious mechanical contrivances? Bah! It was levitation. It was the powers of the air. Believe in those powers, and gravity becomes a mere nursery trick\u2014true where it is, but true nowhere else. To know the fourth dimension is to step out of a locked room and appear instantly on the roof or in another country altogether. To know the powers of the air, similarly, is to annihilate what you call weight\u2014and fly.\"\n\n\"Show us, show us!\" they cried, roaring with delighted laughter.\n\n\"It's a question of belief,\" he repeated, his tongue appearing and disappearing like a pointed shadow. \"It's in the heart; the power of the air gets into your whole being. Why should I show you? Why should I ask my deity to persuade your scoffing little minds by any miracle? For it is deity, I tell you, and nothing else. I know it. Follow one idea like that, as I follow my bird idea\u2014follow it with the impetus and undeviating concentration of a projectile\u2014and you arrive at power. You know deity\u2014the bird idea of deity, that is. They knew that. The old Egyptians knew it.\"\n\n\"Oh, show us, show us!\" they shouted impatiently, wearied of his nonsense-talk. \"Get up and fly! Levitate yourself, as they did! Become a star!\"\n\nBinovitch turned suddenly very pale, and an odd light shone in his keen brown eyes. He rose slowly from the edge of the chair where he was perched. Something about him changed. There was silence instantly.\n\n\"I will show you,\" he said calmly, to their intense amazement; \"not to convince your disbelief, but to prove it to myself. For the powers of the air are with me here. I believe. And Horus, great falcon-headed symbol, is my patron god.\"\n\nThe suppressed energy in his voice and manner was indescribable. There was a sense of lifting, upheaving power about him. He raised his arms; his face turned upward; he inflated his lungs with a deep, long breath, and his voice broke into a kind of singing cry, half prayer, half chant:\n\n\u2003\"O Horus,\n\n\u2003Bright-eyed deity of wind,\n\n\u2003Feather my soul\n\n\u2003Though earth's thick air,\n\n\u2003To know thy awful swiftness\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off suddenly. He climbed lightly and swiftly upon the nearest table\u2014it was in a deserted card-room, after a game in which he had lost more pounds than there are days in the year\u2014and leaped into the air. He hovered a second, spread his arms and legs in space, appeared to float a moment, then buckled, rushed down and forward, and dropped in a heap upon the floor, while every one roared with laughter.\n\nBut the laughter died out quickly, for there was something in his wild performance that was peculiar and unusual. It was uncanny, not quite natural. His body had seemed, as with Mordkin and Nijinski, literally to hang upon the air a moment. For a second he gave the distressing impression of overcoming gravity. There was a touch in it of that faint horror which appals by its very vagueness. He picked himself up unhurt, and his face was as grave as a portrait in the academy, but with a new expression in it that everybody noticed with this strange, half-shocked amazement. And it was this expression that extinguished the claps of laughter as wind that takes away the sound of bells. Like many ugly men, he was an inimitable actor, and his facial repertory was endless and incredible. But this was neither acting nor clever manipulation of expressive features. There was something in his curious Russian physiognomy that made the heart beat slower. And that was why the laughter died away so suddenly.\n\n\"You ought to have flown farther,\" cried some one. It expressed what all had felt.\n\n\"Icarus didn't drink champagne,\" another replied, with a laugh; but nobody laughed with him.\n\n\"You went too near to Vera,\" said Palazov, \"and passion melted the wax.\" But his face twitched oddly as he said it. There was something he did not understand, and so heartily disliked.\n\nThe strange expression on the features deepened. It was arresting in a disagreeable, almost in a horrible, way. The talk stopped dead; all stared; there was a feeling of dismay in everybody's heart, yet unexplained. Some lowered their eyes, or else looked stupidly elsewhere; but the women of the party felt a kind of fascination. Vera, in particular, could not move her sight away. The joking reference to his passionate admiration for her passed unnoticed. There was a general and individual sense of shock. And a chorus of whispers rose instantly:\n\n\"Look at Binovitch! What's happened to his face?\"\n\n\"He's changed\u2014he's changing!\"\n\n\"God! Why he looks like a\u2014bird!\"\n\nBut no one laughed. Instead, they chose the names of birds\u2014hawk, eagle, even owl. The figure of a man leaning against the edge of the door, watching them closely, they did not notice. He had been passing down the corridor, had looked in unobserved, and then had paused. He had seen the whole performance. He watched Binovitch narrowly, now with calm, discerning eyes. It was Dr Plitzinger, the great psychiatrist.\n\nFor Binovitch had picked himself up from the floor in a way that was oddly self-possessed, and precluded the least possibility of the ludicrous. He looked neither foolish nor abashed. He looked surprised, but also he looked half angry and half frightened. As some one had said, he \"ought to have flown farther.\" That was the incredible impression his acrobatics had produced\u2014incredible, yet somehow actual. This uncanny idea prevailed, as at a s\u00e9ance where nothing genuine is expected to happen, and something genuine, after all, does happen. There was no pretence in this: Binovitch had flown.\n\nAnd now he stood there, white in the face\u2014with terror and with anger white. He looked extraordinary, this little, neurasthenic Russian, but he looked at the same time half terrific. Another thing, not commonly experienced by men, was in him, breaking out of him, affecting directly the minds of his companions. His mouth opened; blood and fury shone in his blazing eyes; his tongue shot out like an ant-eater's, though even in that the comic had no place. His arms were spread like flapping wings, and his voice rose dreadfully:\n\n\"He failed me, he failed me!\" he tried to bellow. \"Horus, my falcon-headed deity, my power of the air, deserted me! Hell take him! Hell burn his wings and blast his piercing sight! Hell scorch him into dust for his false prophecies! I curse him\u2014I curse Horus!\"\n\nThe voice that should have roared across the silent room emitted, instead, this high-pitched, bird-like scream. The added touch of sound, the reality it lent, was ghastly. Yet it was marvellously done and acted. The entire thing was a bit of instantaneous inspiration\u2014his voice, his words, his gestures, his whole wild appearance. Only\u2014here was the reality that caused the sense of shock\u2014the expression on his altered features was genuine. That was not assumed. There was something new and alien in him, something cold and difficult to human life, something alert and swift and cruel, of another element than earth. A strange, rapacious grandeur had leaped upon the struggling features. The face looked hawk-like.\n\nAnd he came forward suddenly and sharply toward Vera, whose fixed, staring eyes had never once ceased watching him with a kind of anxious and devouring pain in them. She was both drawn and beaten back. Binovitch advanced on tiptoe. No doubt he still was acting, still pretending this mad nonsense that he worshipped Horus, the falcon-headed deity of forgotten days, and that Horus had failed him in his hour of need; but somehow there was just a hint of too much reality in the way he moved and looked. The girl, a little creature, with fluffy golden hair, opened her lips; her cigarette fell to the floor; she shrank back; she looked for a moment like some smaller, coloured bird trying to escape from a great pursuing hawk; she screamed. Binovitch, his arms wide, his bird-like face thrust forward, had swooped upon her. He leaped. Almost he caught her.\n\nNo one could say exactly what happened. Play, become suddenly and unexpectedly too real, confuses the emotions. The change of key was swift. From fun to terror is a dislocating jolt upon the mind. Some one\u2014it was Khilkoff, the brother\u2014upset a chair; everybody spoke at once; everybody stood up. An unaccountable feeling of disaster was in the air, as with those drinkers' quarrels that blaze out from nothing, and end in a pistol-shot and death, no one able to explain clearly how it came about. It was the silent, watching figure in the doorway who saved the situation. Before any one had noticed his approach, there he was among the group, laughing, talking, applauding\u2014between Binovitch and Vera. He was vigorously patting his patient on the back, and his voice rose easily above the general clamour. He was a strong, quiet personality; even in his laughter there was authority. And his laughter now was the only sound in the room, as though by his mere presence peace and harmony were restored. Confidence came with him. The noise subsided; Vera was in her chair again. Khilkoff poured out a glass of wine for the great man.\n\n\"The Czar!\" said Plitzinger, sipping his champagne, while all stood up, delighted with his compliment and tact. \"And to your opening night with the Russian ballet,\" he added quickly a second toast, \"or to your first performance at the Moscow Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Arts!\" Smiling significantly, he glanced at Binovitch; he clinked glasses with him. Their arms were already linked, but it was Palazov who noticed that the doctor's fingers seemed rather tight upon the creased black coat. All drank, looking with laughter, yet with a touch of respect, toward Binovitch, who stood there dwarfed beside the stalwart Austrian, and suddenly as meek and subdued as any mole. Apparently the abrupt change of key had taken his mind successfully off something else.\n\n\"Of course\u2014'The Fire-Bird,'\" exclaimed the little man, mentioning the famous Russian ballet. \"The very thing!\" he exclaimed. \"For us,\" he added, looking with devouring eyes at Vera. He was greatly pleased. He began talking vociferously about dancing and the rationale of dancing. They told him he was an undiscovered master. He was delighted. He winked at Vera and touched her glass again with his. \"We'll make our d\u00e9but together,\" he cried. \"We'll begin at Covent Garden, in London. I'll design the dresses and the posters 'The Hawk and the Dove!' Magnifique! I in dark grey, and you in blue and gold! Ah, dancing, you know, is sacred. The little self is lost, absorbed. It is ecstasy, it is divine. And dancing in air\u2014the passion of the birds and stars\u2014ah! they are the movements of the gods. You know deity that way\u2014by living it.\"\n\nHe went on and on. His entire being had shifted with a leap upon this new subject. The idea of realising divinity by dancing it absorbed him. The party discussed it with him as though nothing else existed in the world, all sitting now and talking eagerly together. Vera took the cigarette he offered her, lighting it from his own; their fingers touched; he was as harmless and normal as a retired diplomat in a drawing-room. But it was Plitzinger whose subtle man\u0153uvring had accomplished the change so cleverly, and it was Plitzinger who presently suggested a game of billiards, and led him off, full now of a fresh enthusiasm for cannons, balls, and pockets, into another room. They departed arm in arm, laughing and talking together.\n\nTheir departure, it seemed, made no great difference at first. Vera's eyes watched him out of sight, then turned to listen to Baron Minski, who was describing with gusto how he caught wolves alive for coursing purposes. The speed and power of the wolf, he said, was impossible to realise; the force of their awful leap, the strength of their teeth, which could bite through metal stirrup-fastenings. He showed a scar on his arm and another on his lip. He was telling truth, and everybody listened with deep interest. The narrative lasted perhaps ten minutes or more, when Minski abruptly stopped. He had come to an end; he looked about him; he saw his glass, and emptied it. There was a general pause. Another subject did not at once present itself. Sighs were heard; several fidgeted; fresh cigarettes were lighted. But there was no sign of boredom, for where one or two Russians are gathered together there is always life. They produce gaiety and enthusiasm as wind produces waves. Like great children, they plunge whole-heartedly into whatever interest presents itself at the moment. There is a kind of uncouth gambolling in their way of taking life. It seems as if they are always fighting that deep, underlying, national sadness which creeps into their very blood.\n\n\"Midnight!\" then exclaimed Palazov, abruptly, looking at his watch; and the others fell instantly to talking about that watch, admiring it and asking questions. For the moment that very ordinary timepiece became the centre of observation. Palazov mentioned the price. \"It never stops,\" he said proudly, \"not even under water.\" He looked up at everybody, challenging admiration. And he told how, at a country house, he made a bet that he would swim to a certain island in the lake, and won the bet. He and a girl were the winners, but as it was a horse they had bet, he got nothing out of it for himself, giving the horse to her. It was a genuine grievance in him. One felt he could have cried as he spoke of it. \"But the watch went all the time,\" he said delightedly, holding the gun-metal object in his hand to show, \"and I was twelve minutes in the water with my clothes on.\"\n\nYet this fragmentary talk was nothing but pretence. The sound of clicking billiard-balls was audible from the room at the end of the corridor. There was another pause. The pause, however, was intentional. It was not vacuity of mind or absence of ideas that caused it. There was another subject, an unfinished subject that each member of the group was still considering. Only no one cared to begin about it till at last, unable to resist the strain any longer, Palazov turned to Khilkoff, who was saying he would take a \"whisky-soda,\" as the champagne was too sweet, and whispered something beneath his breath; whereupon Khilkoff, forgetting his drink, glanced at his sister, shrugged his shoulders, and made a curious grimace. \"He's all right now\"\u2014his reply was just audible\u2014\"he's with Plitzinger.\" He cocked his head sidewise to indicate that the clicking of the billiard-balls still was going on.\n\nThe subject was out: all turned their heads; voices hummed and buzzed; questions were asked and answered or half answered; eyebrows were raised, shoulders shrugged, hands spread out expressively. There came into the atmosphere a feeling of presentiment, of mystery, of things half understood; primitive, buried instinct stirred a little, the kind of racial dread of vague emotions that might gain the upper hand if encouraged. They shrank from looking something in the face, while yet this unwelcome influence drew closer round them all. They discussed Binovitch and his astonishing performance. Pretty little Vera listened with large and troubled eyes, though saying nothing. The Arab waiter had put out the lights in the corridor, and only a solitary cluster burned now above their heads, leaving their faces in shadow. In the distance the clicking of the billiard-balls still continued.\n\n\"It was not play; it was real,\" exclaimed Minski vehemently. \"I can catch wolves,\" he blurted; \"but birds\u2014ugh!\u2014and human birds!\" He was half inarticulate. He had witnessed something he could not understand, and it had touched instinctive terror in him. \"It was the way he leaped that put the wolf first into my mind, only it was not a wolf at all.\" The others agreed and disagreed. \"It was play at first, but it was reality at the end,\" another whispered; \"and it was no animal he mimicked, but a bird, and a bird of prey at that!\"\n\nVera thrilled. In the Russian woman hides that touch of savagery which loves to be caught, mastered, swept helplessly away, captured utterly and deliciously by the one strong enough to do it thoroughly. She left her chair and sat down beside an older woman in the party, who took her arm quietly at once. Her little face wore a perplexed expression, mournful, yet somehow wild. It was clear that Binovitch was not indifferent to her.\n\n\"It's become an id\u00e9e fixe with him,\" this older woman said. \"The bird idea lives in his mind. He lives it in his imagination. Ever since that time at Edfu, when he pretended to worship the great stone falcons outside the temple\u2014the Horus figures\u2014he's been full of it.\" She stopped. The way Binovitch had behaved at Edfu was better left unmentioned at the moment, perhaps. A slight shiver ran round the listening group, each one waiting for some one else to focus their emotion, and so explain it by saying the convincing thing. Only no one ventured. Then Vera abruptly gave a little jump.\n\n\"Hark!\" she exclaimed, in a staccato whisper, speaking for the first time. She sat bolt upright. She was listening. \"Hark!\" she repeated. \"There it is again, but nearer than before. It's coming closer. I hear it.\" She trembled. Her voice, her manner, above all her great staring eyes, startled everybody. No one spoke for several seconds; all listened. The clicking of the billiard-balls had ceased. The halls and corridors lay in darkness, and gloom was over the big hotel. Everybody was in bed.\n\n\"Hear what?\" asked the older woman soothingly, yet with a perceptible quaver in her voice, too. She was aware that the girl's arm shook upon her own.\n\n\"Do you not hear it, too?\" the girl whispered.\n\nAll listened without speaking. All watched her paling face. Something wonderful, yet half terrible, seemed in the air about them. There was a dull murmur, audible, faint, remote, its direction hard to tell. It had come suddenly from nowhere. They shivered. That strange racial thrill again passed into the group, unwelcome, unexplained. It was aboriginal; it belonged to the unconscious primitive mind, half childish, half terrifying.\n\n\"What do you hear?\" her brother asked angrily\u2014the irritable anger of nervous fear.\n\n\"When he came at me,\" she answered very low, \"I heard it first. I hear it now again. Listen! He's coming.\"\n\nAnd at that minute, out of the dark mouth of the corridor, emerged two human figures, Plitzinger and Binovitch. Their game was over: they were going up to bed. They passed the open door of the card-room. But Binovitch was being half dragged, half restrained, for he was apparently attempting to run down the passage with flying, dancing leaps. He bounded. It was like a huge bird trying to rise for flight, while his companion kept him down by force upon the earth. As they entered the strip of light, Plitzinger changed his own position, placing himself swiftly between his companion and the group in the dark corner of the room. He hurried Binovitch along as though he sheltered him from view. They passed into the shadows down the passage. They disappeared. And every one looked significantly, questioningly, at his neighbour, though at first saying no word. It seemed that a curious disturbance of the air had followed them audibly.\n\nVera was the first to open her lips. \"You heard it then,\" she said breathlessly, her face whiter than the ceiling.\n\n\"Damn!\" exclaimed her brother furiously. \"It was wind against the outside walls\u2014wind in the desert. The sand is driving.\"\n\nVera looked at him. She shrank closer against the side of the older woman, whose arm was tight about her.\n\n\"It was not wind,\" she whispered simply. She paused. All waited uneasily for the completion of her sentence. They stared into her face like peasants who expected a miracle.\n\n\"Wings,\" she whispered. \"It was the sound of enormous wings.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 519", + "text": "And at four o'clock in the morning, when they all returned exhausted from their excursion into the desert, little Binovitch was sleeping soundly and peacefully in his bed. They passed his door on tiptoe. But he did not hear them. He was dreaming. His spirit was at Edfu, experiencing with that ancient deity who was master of all flying life those strange enjoyments upon which his own troubled human heart was passionately set. Safe with that mighty falcon whose powers his lips had scorned a few hours before, his soul, released in vivid dream, went sweetly flying. It was amazing, it was gorgeous. He skimmed the Nile at lightning speed. Dashing down headlong from the height of the great Pyramid, he chased with faultless accuracy a little dove that sought vainly to hide from his terrific pursuit beneath the palm trees. For what he loved must worship where he worshipped, and the majesty of those tremendous effigies had fired his imagination to the creative point where expression was imperative.\n\nThen suddenly, at the very moment of delicious capture, the dream turned horrible, becoming awful with the nightmare touch. The sky lost all its blue and sunshine. Far, far below him the little dove enticed him into nameless depths, so that he flew faster and faster, yet never fast enough to overtake it. Behind him came a great thing down the air, black, hovering, with gigantic wings outstretched. It had terrific eyes, and the beating of its feathers stole his wind away. It followed him, crowding space. He was aware of a colossal beak, curved like a scimitar and pointed wickedly like a tooth of iron. He dropped. He faltered. He tried to scream.\n\nThrough empty space he fell, caught by the neck. The huge spectral falcon was upon him. The talons were in his heart. And in sleep he remembered then that he had cursed. He recalled his reckless language. The curse of the ignorant is meaningless; that of the worshipper is real. This attack was on his soul. He had invoked it. He realised next, with a touch of ghastly horror, that the dove he chased was, after all, the bait that had lured him purposely to destruction, and awoke with a suffocating terror upon him, and his entire body bathed in icy perspiration. Outside the open window he heard a sound of wings retreating with powerful strokes into the surrounding darkness of the sky.\n\nThe nightmare made its impression upon Binovitch's impressionable and dramatic temperament. It aggravated his tendencies. He related it next day to Mme. de Dr\u00fchn, the friend of Vera, telling it with that somewhat boisterous laughter some minds use to disguise less kind emotions. But he received no encouragement. The mood of the previous night was not recoverable; it was already ancient history. Russians never make the banal mistake of repeating a sensation till it is exhausted; they hurry on to novelties. Life flashes and rushes with them, never standing still for exposure before the cameras of their minds. Mme. de Dr\u00fchn, however, took the trouble to mention the matter to Plitzinger, for Plitzinger, like Freud of Vienna, held that dreams revealed subconscious tendencies which sooner or later must betray themselves in action.\n\n\"Thank you for telling me,\" he smiled politely, \"but I have already heard it from him.\" He watched her eyes for a moment, really examining her soul. \"Binovitch, you see,\" he continued, apparently satisfied with what he saw, \"I regard as that rare phenomenon\u2014a genius without an outlet. His spirit, intensely creative, finds no adequate expression. His power of production is enormous and prolific; yet he accomplishes nothing.\" He paused an instant. \"Binovitch, therefore, is in danger of poisoning\u2014himself.\" He looked steadily into her face, as a man who weighs how much he may confide. \"Now,\" he continued, \"if we can find an outlet for him, a field wherein his bursting imaginative genius can produce results\u2014above all, visible results\"\u2014he shrugged his shoulders\u2014\"the man is saved. Otherwise\"\u2014he looked extraordinarily impressive\u2014\"there is bound to be sooner or later\u2014\"\n\n\"Madness?\" she asked very quietly.\n\n\"An explosion, let us say,\" he replied gravely. \"For instance, take this Horus obsession of his, quite wrong arch\u00e6ologically though it is. Au fond it is megalomania of a most unusual kind. His passionate interest, his love, his worship of birds, wholesome enough in itself, finds no satisfying outlet. A man who really loves birds neither keeps them in cages nor shoots them nor stuffs them. What, then, can he do? The commonplace bird-lover observes them through glasses, studies their habits, then writes a book about them. But a man like Binovitch, overflowing with this intense creative power of mind and imagination, is not content with that. He wants to know them from within. He wants to feel what they feel, to live their life. He wants to become them. You follow me? Not quite. Well, he seeks to be identified with the object of his sacred, passionate adoration. All genius seeks to know the thing itself from its own point of view. It desires union. That tendency, unrecognised by himself, perhaps, and therefore subconscious, hides in his very soul.\" He paused a moment. \"And the sudden sight of those majestic figures at Edfu\u2014that crystallisation of his id\u00e9e fixe in granite\u2014took hold of this excess in him, so to speak\u2014and is now focusing it toward some definite act. Binovitch sometimes\u2014feels himself a bird! You noticed what occurred last night?\"\n\nShe nodded; a slight shiver passed over her.\n\n\"A most curious performance,\" she murmured; \"an exhibition I never want to see again.\"\n\n\"The most curious part,\" replied the doctor coolly, \"was its truth.\"\n\n\"Its truth!\" she exclaimed beneath her breath. She was frightened by something in his voice and by the uncommon gravity in his eyes. It seemed to arrest her intelligence. She felt upon the edge of things beyond her. \"You mean that Binovitch did for a moment\u2014hang\u2014in the air?\" The other verb, the right one, she could not bring herself to use.\n\nThe great man's face was enigmatical. He talked to her sympathy, perhaps, rather than to her mind.\n\n\"Real genius,\" he said smilingly, \"is as rare as talent, even great talent, is common. It means that the personality, if only for one second, becomes everything; becomes the universe; becomes the soul of the world. It gets the flash. It is identified with the universal life. Being everything and everywhere, all is possible to it\u2014in that second of vivid realisation. It can brood with the crystal, grow with the plant, leap with the animal, fly with the bird: genius unifies all three. That is the meaning of 'creative.' It is faith. Knowing it, you can pass through fire and not be burned, walk on water and not sink, move a mountain, fly. Because you are fire, water, earth, air. Genius, you see, is madness in the magnificent sense of being superhuman. Binovitch has it.\"\n\nHe broke off abruptly, seeing he was not understood. Some great enthusiasm in him he deliberately suppressed.\n\n\"The point is,\" he resumed, speaking more carefully, \"that we must try to lead this passionate constructive genius of the man into some human channel that will absorb it, and therefore render it harmless.\"\n\n\"He loves Vera,\" the woman said, bewildered, yet seizing this point correctly.\n\n\"But would he marry her?\" asked Plitzinger at once.\n\n\"He is already married.\"\n\nThe doctor looked steadily at her a moment, hesitating whether he should utter all his thought.\n\n\"In that case,\" he said slowly after a pause, \"it is better he or she should leave.\"\n\nHis tone and manner were exceedingly impressive.\n\n\"You mean there's danger?\" she asked.\n\n\"I mean, rather,\" he replied earnestly, \"that this great creative flood in him, so curiously focused now upon his Horus-falcon-bird idea, may result in some act of violence\u2014\"\n\n\"Which would be madness,\" she said, looking hard at him.\n\n\"Which would be disastrous,\" he corrected her. And then he added slowly: \"Because in the mental moment of immense creation he might overlook material laws.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 520", + "text": "The costume ball two nights later was a great success. Palazov was a Bedouin, and Khilkoff an Apache; Mme. de Dr\u00fchn wore a national head-dress; Minski looked almost natural as Don Quixote; and the entire Russian \"set\" was cleverly, if somewhat extravagantly, dressed. But Binovitch and Vera were the most successful of all the two hundred dancers who took part. Another figure, a big man dressed as a Pierrot, also claimed exceptional attention, for though the costume was commonplace enough, there was something of dignity in his appearance that drew the eyes of all upon him. But he wore a mask, and his identity was not discoverable.\n\nIt was Binovitch and Vera, however, who must have won the prize, if prize there had been, for they not only looked their parts, but acted them as well. The former in his dark grey feather tunic, and his falcon mask, complete even to the brown hooked beak and tufted talons, looked fierce and splendid. The disguise was so admirable, yet so entirely natural, that it was uncommonly seductive. Vera, in blue and gold, a charming head-dress of a dove upon her loosened hair, and a pair of little dove-pale wings fluttering from her shoulders, her tiny twinkling feet and slender ankles well visible, too, was equally successful and admired. Her large and timid eyes, her flitting movements, her light and dainty way of dancing\u2014all added touches that made the picture perfect.\n\nHow Binovitch contrived his dress remained a mystery, for the layers of wings upon his back were real; the large black kites that haunt the Nile, soaring in their hundreds over Cairo and the bleak Mokattam Hills, had furnished them. He had procured them none knew how. They measured four feet across from tip to tip; they swished and rustled as he swept along; they were true falcons' wings. He danced with Nautch-girls and Egyptian princesses and Rumanian Gipsies; he danced well, with beauty, grace, and lightness. But with Vera he did not dance at all; with her he simply flew. A kind of passionate abandon was in him as he skimmed the floor with her in a way that made everybody turn to watch them. They seemed to leave the ground together. It was delightful, an amazing sight; but it was peculiar. The strangeness of it was on many lips. Somehow its queer extravagance communicated itself to the entire ball-room. They became the centre of observation. There were whispers.\n\n\"There's that extraordinary bird-man! Look! He goes by like a hawk. And he's always after that dove-girl. How marvellously he does it! It's rather awful. Who is he? I don't envy her.\"\n\nPeople stood aside when he rushed past. They got out of his way. He seemed forever pursuing Vera, even when dancing with another partner. Word passed from mouth to mouth. A kind of telepathic interest was established everywhere. It was a shade too real sometimes, something unduly earnest in the chasing wildness, something unpleasant. There was even alarm.\n\n\"It's rowdy; I'd rather not see it; it's quite disgraceful,\" was heard. \"I think it's horrible; you can see she's terrified.\"\n\nAnd once there was a little scene, trivial enough, yet betraying this reality that many noticed and disliked. Binovitch came up to claim a dance, programme clutched in his great tufted claws, and at the same moment the big Pierrot appeared abruptly round the corner with a similar claim. Those who saw it assert he had been waiting, and came on purpose, and that there was something protective and authoritative in his bearing. The misunderstanding was ordinary enough\u2014both men had written her name against the dance\u2014but \"No. 13, Tango\" also included the supper interval, and neither Hawk nor Pierrot would give way. They were very obstinate. Both men wanted her. It was awkward.\n\n\"The Dove shall decide between us,\" smiled the Hawk politely, yet his taloned fingers working nervously. Pierrot, however, more experienced in the ways of dealing with women, or more bold, said suavely:\n\n\"I am ready to abide by her decision\"\u2014his voice poorly cloaked this aggravating authority, as though he had the right to her\u2014\"only I engaged this dance before his Majesty Horus appeared upon the scene at all, and therefore it is clear that Pierrot has the right of way.\"\n\nAt once, with a masterful air, he took her off. There was no withstanding him. He meant to have her and he got her. She yielded meekly. They vanished among the maze of coloured dancers, leaving the Hawk, disconsolate and vanquished, amid the titters of the onlookers. His swiftness, as against this steady power, was of no avail.\n\nIt was then that the singular phenomenon was witnessed first. Those who saw it affirm that he changed absolutely into the part he played. It was dreadful; it was wicked. A frightened whisper ran about the rooms and corridors:\n\n\"An extraordinary thing is in the air!\"\n\nSome shrank away, while others flocked to see. There were those who swore that a curious, rushing sound was audible, the atmosphere visibly disturbed and shaken; that a shadow fell upon the spot the couple had vacated; that a cry was heard, a high, wild, searching cry: \"Horus! bright deity of wind,\" it began, then died away. One man was positive that the windows had been opened and that something had flown in. It was the obvious explanation. The thing spread horribly. As in a fire-panic, there was consternation and excitement. Confusion caught the feet of all the dancers. The music fumbled and lost time. The leading pair of tango dancers halted and looked round. It seemed that everybody pressed back, hiding, shuffling, eager to see, yet more eager not to be seen, as though something dangerous, hostile, terrible, had broken loose. In rows against the wall they stood. For a great space had made itself in the middle of the ball-room, and into this empty space appeared suddenly the Pierrot and the Dove.\n\nIt was like a challenge. A sound of applause, half voices, half clapping of gloved hands, was heard. The couple danced exquisitely into the arena. All stared. There was an impression that a set piece had been prepared, and that this was its beginning. The music again took heart. Pierrot was strong and dignified, no whit nonplussed by this abrupt publicity. The Dove, though faltering, was deliciously obedient. They danced together like a single outline. She was captured utterly. And to the man who needed her the sight was naturally agonizing\u2014the protective way the Pierrot held her, the right and strength of it, the mastery, the complete possession.\n\n\"He's got her!\" some one breathed too loud, uttering the thought of all. \"Good thing it's not the Hawk!\"\n\nAnd, to the absolute amazement of the throng, this sight was then apparent. A figure dropped through space. That high, shrill cry again was heard:\n\n\"Feather my soul... to know thy awful swiftness!\"\n\nIts singing loveliness touched the heart, its appealing, passionate sweetness was marvellous, as from the gallery this figure of a man, dressed as a strong, dark bird, shot down with splendid grace and ease. The feathers swept; the swings spread out as sails that take the wind. Like a hawk that darts with unerring power and aim upon its prey, this thing of mighty wings rushed down into the empty space where the two danced. Observed by all, he entered, swooping beautifully, stretching his wings like any eagle. He dropped. He fixed his point of landing with consummate skill close beside the astonished dancers. He landed.\n\nIt happened with such swiftness it brought the dazzle and blindness as when lightning strikes. People in different parts of the room saw different details; a few saw nothing at all after the first startling shock, closing their eyes, or holding their arms before their faces as in self-protection. The touch of panic fear caught the entire room. The nameless thing that all the evening had been vaguely felt was come. It had suddenly materialised.\n\nFor this incredible thing occurred in the full blaze of light upon the open floor. Binovitch, grown in some sense formidable, opened his dark, big wings about the girl. The long grey feathers moved, causing powerful draughts of wind that made a rushing sound. An aspect of the terrible was about him, like an emanation. The great beaked head was poised to strike, the tufted claws were raised like fingers that shut and opened, and the whole presentment of his amazing figure focused in an attitude of attack that was magnificent and terrible. No one who saw it doubted. Yet there were those who swore that it was not Binovitch at all, but that another outline, monstrous and shadowy, towered above him, draping his lesser proportions with two colossal wings of darkness. That some touch of strange divinity lay in it may be claimed, however confused the wild descriptions afterward. For many lowered their heads and bowed their shoulders. There was terror. There was also awe. The onlookers swayed as though some power passed over them through the air.\n\nA sound of wings was certainly in the room.\n\nThen some one screamed; a shriek broke high and clear; and emotion, ordinary human emotion, unaccustomed to terrific things, swept loose. The Hawk and Vera flew. Beaten back against the wall as by a stroke of whirlwind, the Pierrot staggered. He watched them go. Out of the lighted room they flew, out of the crowded human atmosphere, out of the heat and artificial light, the walled-in, airless halls that were a cage. All this they left behind. They seemed things of wind and air, made free happily of another element. Earth held them not. Toward the open night they raced with this extraordinary lightness as of birds, down the long corridor and on to the southern terrace, where great coloured curtains were hung suspended from the columns. A moment they were visible. Then the fringe of one huge curtain, lifted by the wind, showed their dark outline for a second against the starry sky. There was a cry, a leap. The curtain flapped again and closed. They vanished. And into the ball-room swept the cold draught of night air from the desert.\n\nBut three figures instantly were close upon their heels. The throng of half-dazed, half-stupefied onlookers, it seemed, projected them as though by some explosive force. The general mass held back, but, like projectiles, these three flung themselves after the fugitives down the corridor at high speed\u2014the Apache, Don Quixote, and, last of them, the Pierrot. For Khilkoff, the brother, and Baron Minski, the man who caught wolves alive, had been for some time keenly on the watch, while Dr. Plitzinger, reading the symptoms clearly, never far away, had been faithfully observant of every movement. His mask tossed aside, the great psychiatrist was now recognised by all. They reached the parapet just as the curtain flapped back heavily into place; the next second all three were out of sight behind it. Khilkoff was first, however, urged forward at frantic speed by the warning words the doctor had whispered as they ran. Some thirty yards beyond the terrace was the brink of the crumbling cliff on which the great hotel was built, and there was a drop of sixty feet to the desert floor below. Only a low stone wall marked the edge.\n\nAccounts varied. Khilkoff, it seems, arrived in time\u2014in the nick of time\u2014to seize his sister, virtually hovering on the brink. He heard the loose stones strike the sand below. There was no struggle, though it appears she did not thank him for his interference at first. In a sense she was beside\u2014outside\u2014herself. And he did a characteristic thing: he not only brought her back into the ball-room, but he danced her back. It was admirable. Nothing could have calmed the general excitement better. The pair of them danced in together as though nothing was amiss. Accustomed to the strenuous practice of his Cossack regiment, this young cavalry officer's muscles were equal to the semi-dead weight in his arms. At most the onlookers thought her tired, perhaps. Confidence was restored\u2014such is the psychology of a crowd\u2014and in the middle of a thrilling Viennese waltz he easily smuggled her out of the room, administered brandy, and got her up to bed. The absence of the Hawk, meanwhile, was hardly noticed; comments were made and then forgotten; it was Vera in whom the strange, anxious sympathy had centred. And, with her obvious safety, the moment of primitive, childish panic passed away. Don Quixote, too, was presently seen dancing gaily as though nothing untoward had happened; supper intervened; the incident was over; it had melted into the general wildness of the evening's irresponsibility. The fact that Pierrot did not appear again was noticed by no single person.\n\nBut Dr. Plitzinger was otherwise engaged, his heart and mind and soul all deeply exercised. A death-certificate is not always made out quite so simply as the public thinks. That Binovitch had died of suffocation in his swift descent through merely sixty feet of air was not conceivable; yet that his body lay so neatly placed upon the desert after such a fall was stranger still. It was not crumpled, it was not torn; no single bone was broken, no muscle wrenched; there was no bruise. There was no indenture in the sand. The figure lay sidewise as though in sleep, no sign of violence visible anywhere, the dark wings folded as a great bird folds them when it creeps away to die in loneliness. Beneath the Horus mask the face was smiling. It seemed he had floated into death upon the element he loved. And only Vera had seen the enormous wings that, hovering invitingly above the dark abyss, bore him so softly into another world. Plitzinger, that is, saw them, too, but he said firmly that they belonged to the big black falcons that haunt the Mokattam Hills and roost upon these ridges, close beside the hotel, at night. Both he and Vera, however, agreed on one thing: the high, sharp cry in the air above them, wild and plaintive, was certainly the black kite's cry\u2014the note of the falcon that passionately seeks its mate. It was the pause of a second, when she stood to listen, that made her rescue possible. A moment later and she, too, would have flown to death with Binovitch.\n\n1 The Russian is untranslatable. The phrase means, \"Give my life wings.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Initiation by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "A few years ago, on a Black Sea steamer heading for the Caucasus, I fell into conversation with an American. He mentioned that he was on his way to the Baku oilfields, and I replied that I was going up into the mountains. He looked at me questioningly a moment. \"Your first trip?\" he asked with interest. I said it was. A conversation followed; it was continued the next day, and renewed the following day, until we parted company at Batoum. I don't know why he talked so freely to me in particular. Normally, he was a taciturn, silent man. We had been fellow travellers from Marseilles, but after Constantinople we had the boat pretty much to ourselves. What struck me about him was his vehement, almost passionate, love of natural beauty\u2014in seas and woods and sky, but above all in mountains. It was like a religion in him. His taciturn manner hid deep poetic feeling.\n\nAnd he told me it had not always been so with him. A kind of friendship sprang up between us. He was a New York business man\u2014buying and selling exchange between banks\u2014but was English born. He had gone out thirty years before, and become naturalised. His talk was exceedingly \"American,\" slangy, and almost Western. He said he had roughed it in the West for a year or two first. But what he chiefly talked about was mountains. He said it was in the mountains an unusual experience had come to him that had opened his eyes to many things, but principally to the beauty that was now everything to him, and to the\u2014insignificance of death.\n\nHe knew the Caucasus well where I was going. I think that was why he was interested in me and my journey. \"Up there,\" he said, \"you'll feel things\u2014and maybe find out things you never knew before.\"\n\n\"What kind of things?\" I asked.\n\n\"Why, for one,\" he replied with emotion and enthusiasm in his voice, \"that living and dying ain't either of them of much account. That if you know Beauty, I mean, and Beauty is in your life, you live on in it and with it for others\u2014even when you're dead.\"\n\nThe conversation that followed is too long to give here, but it led to his telling me the experience in his own life that had opened his eyes to the truth of what he said. \"Beauty is imperishable,\" he declared, \"and if you live with it, why, you're imperishable too!\"\n\nThe story, as he told it verbally in his curious language, remains vividly in my memory. But he had written it down, too, he said. And he gave me the written account, with the remark that I was free to hand it on to others if I \"felt that way.\" He called it \"Initiation.\" It runs as follows." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 522", + "text": "In my own family this happened, for Arthur was my nephew. And a remote Alpine valley was the place. It didn't seem to me in the least suitable for such occurrences, except that it was Catholic, and the \"Church,\" I understand\u2014at least, scholars who ought to know have told me so\u2014has subtle Pagan origins incorporated unwittingly in its observations of certain Saints' Days, as well as in certain ceremonials. All this kind of thing is Dutch to me, a form of poetry or superstition, for I am interested chiefly in the buying and selling of exchange, with an office in New York City, just off Wall Street, and only come to Europe now occasionally for a holiday. I like to see the dear old musty cities, and go to the Opera, and take a motor run through Shakespeare's country or round the Lakes, get in touch again with London and Paris at the Ritz Hotels\u2014and then back again to the greatest city on earth, where for years now I've been making a good thing out of it. Repton and Cambridge, long since forgotten, had their uses. They were all right enough at the time. But I'm now \"on the make,\" with a good fat partnership, and have left all that truck behind me.\n\nMy half-brother, however\u2014he was my senior and got the cream of the family wholesale chemical works\u2014has stuck to the trade in the Old Country, and is making probably as much as I am. He approved my taking the chance that offered, and is only sore now because his son, Arthur, is on the stupid side. He agreed that finance suited my temperament far better than drugs and chemicals, though he warned me that all American finance was speculative and therefore dangerous. \"Arthur is getting on,\" he said in his last letter, \"and will some day take the director's place you would be in now had you cared to stay. But he's a plodder, rather.\" That meant, I knew, that Arthur was a fool. Business, at any rate, was not suited to his temperament. Five years ago, when I came home with a month's holiday to be used in working up connections in English banking circles, I saw the boy. He was fifteen years of age at the time, a delicate youth, with an artist's dreams in his big blue eyes, if my memory goes for anything, but with a tangle of yellow hair and features of classical beauty that would have made half the young girls of my New York set in love with him, and a choice of heiresses at his disposal when he wanted them.\n\nI have a clear recollection of my nephew then. He struck me as having grit and character, but as being wrongly placed. He had his grandfather's tastes. He ought to have been, like him, a great scholar, a poet, an editor of marvellous old writings in new editions. I couldn't get much out of the boy, except that he \"liked the chemical business fairly,\" and meant to please his father by \"knowing it thoroughly\" so as to qualify later for his directorship. But I have never forgotten the evening when I caught him in the hall, staring up at his grandfather's picture, with a kind of light about his face, and the big blue eyes all rapt and tender (almost as if he had been crying) and replying, when I asked him what was up: \"That was worth living for. He brought Beauty back into the world!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"I guess that's right enough. He did. But there was no money in it to speak of.\"\n\nThe boy looked at me and smiled. He twigged somehow or other that deep down in me, somewhere below the money-making instinct, a poet, but a dumb poet, lay in hiding. \"You know what I mean,\" he said. \"It's in you too.\"\n\nThe picture was a copy\u2014my father had it made\u2014of the presentation portrait given to Baliol, and \"the grandfather\" was celebrated in his day for the translations he made of Anacreon and Sappho, of Homer, too, if I remember rightly, as well as for a number of classical studies and essays that he wrote. A lot of stuff like that he did, and made a name at it too. His Lives of the Gods went into six editions. They said\u2014the big critics of his day\u2014that he was \"a poet who wrote no poetry, yet lived it passionately in the spirit of old-world, classical Beauty,\" and I know he was a wonderful fellow in his way and made the dons and schoolmasters all sit up. We're proud of him all right. After twenty-five years of successful \"exchange\" in New York City, I confess I am unable to appreciate all that, feeling more in touch with the commercial and financial spirit of the age, progress, development and the rest. But, still, I'm not ashamed of the classical old boy, who seems to have been a good deal of a Pagan, judging by the records we have kept. However, Arthur peering up at that picture in the dusk, his eyes half moist with emotion, and his voice gone positively shaky, is a thing I never have forgotten. He stimulated my curiosity uncommonly. It stirred something deep down in me that I hardly cared to acknowledge on Wall Street\u2014something burning.\n\nAnd the next time I saw him was in the summer of 1910, when I came to Europe for a two months' look around\u2014my wife at Newport with the children\u2014and hearing that he was in Switzerland, learning a bit of French to help him in the business, I made a point of dropping in upon him just to see how he was shaping generally and what new kinks his mind had taken on. There was something in Arthur I never could quite forget. Whenever his face came into my mind I began to think. A kind of longing came over me\u2014a desire for Beauty, I guess, it was. It made me dream.\n\nI found him at an English tutor's\u2014a lively old dog, with a fondness for the cheap native wines, and a financial interest in the tourist development of the village. The boys learnt French in the mornings, possibly, but for the rest of the day were free to amuse themselves exactly as they pleased and without a trace of supervision\u2014provided the parents footed the bills without demur.\n\nThis suited everybody all round; and as long as the boys came home with an accent and a vocabulary, all was well. For myself, having learned in New York to attend strictly to my own business\u2014exchange between different countries with a profit\u2014I did not deem it necessary to exchange letters and opinions with my brother\u2014with no chance of profit anywhere. But I got to know Arthur, and had a queer experience of my own into the bargain. Oh, there was profit in it for me. I'm drawing big dividends to this day on the investment.\n\nI put up at the best hotel in the village, a one-horse show, differing from the other inns only in the prices charged for a lot of cheap decoration in the dining-room, and went up to surprise my nephew with a call the first thing after dinner. The tutor's house stood some way back from the narrow street, among fields where there were more flowers than grass, and backed by a forest of fine old timber that stretched up several thousand feet to the snow. The snow at least was visible, peeping out far overhead just where the dark line of forest stopped; but in reality, I suppose, that was an effect of foreshortening, and whole valleys and pastures intervened between the trees and the snow-fields. The sunset, long since out of the valley, still shone on those white ridges, where the peaks stuck up like the teeth of a gigantic saw. I guess it meant five or six hours' good climbing to get up to them\u2014and nothing to do when you got there. Switzerland, anyway, seemed a poor country, with its little bit of watch-making, sour wines, and every square yard hanging upstairs at an angle of 60 degrees used for hay. Picture postcards, chocolate and cheap tourists kept it going apparently, but I dare say it was all right enough to learn French in\u2014and cheap as Hoboken to live in!\n\nArthur was out; I just left a card and wrote on it that I would be very pleased if he cared to step down to take luncheon with me at my hotel next day. Having nothing better to do, I strolled homewards by way of the forest.\n\nNow what came over me in that bit of dark pine forest is more than I can quite explain, but I think it must have been due to the height\u2014the village was 4,000 feet above sea-level\u2014and the effect of the rarefied air upon my circulation. The nearest thing to it in my experience is rye whisky, the queer touch of wildness, of self-confidence, a kind of whooping rapture and the reckless sensation of being a tin god of sorts that comes from a lot of alcohol\u2014a memory, please understand, of years before, when I thought it a grand thing to own the earth and paint the old town red. I seemed to walk on air, and there was a smell about those trees that made me suddenly\u2014well, that took my mind clean out of its accustomed rut. It was just too lovely and wonderful for me to describe it. I had got well into the forest and lost my way a bit. The smell of an old-world garden wasn't in it. It smelt to me as if some one had just that minute turned out the earth all fresh and new. There was moss and tannin, a hint of burning, something between smoke and incense, say, and a fine clean odour of pitch-pine bark when the sun gets on it after rain\u2014and a flavour of the sea thrown in for luck. That was the first I noticed, for I had never smelt anything half so good since my camping days on the coast of Maine. And I stood still to enjoy it. I threw away my cigar for fear of mixing things and spoiling it. \"If that could be bottled,\" I said to myself, \"it'd sell for two dollars a pint in every city in the Union!\"\n\nAnd it was just then, while standing and breathing it in, that I got the queer feeling of some one watching me. I kept quite still. Some one was moving near me. The sweat went trickling down my back. A kind of childhood thrill got hold of me.\n\nIt was very dark. I was not afraid exactly, but I was a stranger in these parts and knew nothing about the habits of the mountain peasants. There might be tough customers lurking around after dark on the chance of striking some guy of a tourist with money in his pockets. Yet, somehow, that wasn't the kind of feeling that came to me at all, for, though I had a pocket Browning at my hip, the notion of getting at it did not even occur to me. The sensation was new\u2014a kind of lifting, exciting sensation that made my heart swell out with exhilaration. There was happiness in it. A cloud that weighed seemed to roll off my mind, same as that light-hearted mood when the office door is locked and I'm off on a two months' holiday\u2014with gaiety and irresponsibility at the back of it. It was invigorating. I felt youth sweep over me.\n\nI stood there, wondering what on earth was coming on me, and half expecting that any moment some one would come out of the darkness and show himself; and as I held my breath and made no movement at all the queer sensation grew stronger. I believe I even resisted a temptation to kick up my heels and dance, to let out a flying shout as a man with liquor in him does. Instead of this, however, I just kept dead still. The wood was black as ink all round me, too black to see the tree-trunks separately, except far below where the village lights came up twinkling between them, and the only way I kept the path was by the soft feel of the pine-needles that were thicker than a Brussels carpet. But nothing happened, and no one stirred. The idea that I was being watched remained, only there was no sound anywhere except the roar of falling water that filled the entire valley. Yet some one was very close to me in the darkness.\n\nI can't say how long I might have stood there, but I guess it was the best part of ten minutes, and I remember it struck me that I had run up against a pocket of extra-rarefied air that had a lot of oxygen in it\u2014oxygen or something similar\u2014and that was the cause of my elation. The idea was nonsense, I have no doubt; but for the moment it half explained the thing to me. I realised it was all natural enough, at any rate\u2014and so moved on. It took a longish time to reach the edge of the wood, and a footpath led me\u2014oh, it was quite a walk, I tell you\u2014into the village street again. I was both glad and sorry to get there. I kept myself busy thinking the whole thing over again. What caught me all of a heap was that million-dollar sense of beauty, youth, and happiness. Never in my born days had I felt anything to touch it. And it hadn't cost a cent!\n\nWell, I was sitting there enjoying my smoke and trying to puzzle it all out, and the hall was pretty full of people smoking and talking and reading papers, and so forth, when all of a sudden I looked up and caught my breath with such a jerk that I actually bit my tongue. There was grandfather in front of my chair! I looked into his eyes. I saw him as clear and solid as the porter standing behind his desk across the lounge, and it gave me a touch of cold all down the back that I needn't forget unless I want to. He was looking into my face, and he had a cap in his hand, and he was speaking to me. It was my grandfather's picture come to life, only much thinner and younger and a kind of light in his eyes like fire.\n\n\"I beg your pardon, but you are\u2014Uncle Jim, aren't you?\"\n\nAnd then, with another jump of my nerves, I understood.\n\n\"You, Arthur! Well, I'm jiggered. So it is. Take a chair, boy. I'm right glad you found me. Shake! Sit down.\" And I shook his hand and pushed a chair up for him. I was never so surprised in my life. The last time I set eyes on him he was a boy. Now he was a young man, and the very image of his ancestor.\n\nHe sat down, fingering his cap. He wouldn't have a drink and he wouldn't smoke. \"All right,\" I said, \"let's talk then. I've lots to tell you and I've lots to hear. How are you, boy?\"\n\nHe didn't answer at first. He eyed me up and down. He hesitated. He was as handsome as a young Greek god.\n\n\"I say, Uncle Jim,\" he began presently, \"it was you\u2014just now\u2014in the wood\u2014wasn't it?\" It made me start, that question put so quietly.\n\n\"I have just come through that wood up there,\" I answered, pointing in the direction as well as I could remember, \"if that's what you mean. But why? You weren't there, were you?\" It gave me a queer sort of feeling to hear him say it. What in the name of heaven did he mean?\n\nHe sat back in his chair with a sigh of relief.\n\n\"Oh, that's all right then,\" he said, \"if it was you. Did you see,\" he asked suddenly; \"did you see\u2014anything?\"\n\n\"Not a thing,\" I told him honestly. \"It was far too dark.\" I laughed. I fancied I twigged his meaning. But I was not the sort of uncle to come prying on him. Life must be dull enough, I remembered, in this mountain village.\n\nBut he didn't understand my laugh. He didn't mean what I meant.\n\nAnd there came a pause between us. I discovered that we were talking different lingoes. I leaned over towards him.\n\n\"Look here, Arthur,\" I said in a lower voice, \"what is it, and what do you mean? I'm all right, you know, and you needn't be afraid of telling me. What d'you mean by\u2014did I see anything?\"\n\nWe looked each other squarely in the eye. He saw he could trust me, and I saw\u2014well, a whole lot of things, perhaps, but I felt chiefly that he liked me and would tell me things later, all in his own good time. I liked him all the better for that too.\n\n\"I only meant,\" he answered slowly, \"whether you really saw\u2014anything?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said straight, \"I didn't see a thing, but, by the gods, I felt something.\"\n\nHe started. I started too. An astonishing big look came swimming over his fair, handsome face. His eyes seemed all lit up. He looked as if he'd just made a cool million in wheat or cotton.\n\n\"I knew\u2014you were that sort,\" he whispered. \"Though I hardly remembered what you looked like.\"\n\n\"Then what on earth was it?\" I asked.\n\nHis reply staggered me a bit. \"It was just that,\" he said\u2014\"the Earth!\"\n\nAnd then, just when things were getting interesting and promising a dividend, he shut up like a clam. He wouldn't say another word. He asked after my family and business, my health, what kind of crossing I'd had, and all the rest of the common stock. It fairly bowled me over. And I couldn't change him either.\n\nI suppose in America we get pretty free and easy, and don't quite understand reserve. But this young man of half my age kept me in my place as easily as I might have kept a nervous customer quiet in my own office. He just refused to take me on. He was polite and cool and distant as you please, and when I got pressing sometimes he simply pretended he didn't understand. I could no more get him back again to the subject of the wood than a customer could have gotten me to tell him about the prospects of exchange being cheap or dear\u2014when I didn't know myself but wouldn't let him see I didn't know. He was charming, he was delightful, enthusiastic and even affectionate; downright glad to see me, too, and to chin with me\u2014but I couldn't draw him worth a cent. And in the end I gave up trying.\n\nAnd the moment I gave up trying he let down a little\u2014but only a very little.\n\n\"You'll stay here some time, Uncle Jim, won't you?\"\n\n\"That's my idea,\" I said, \"if I can see you, and you can show me round some.\"\n\nHe laughed with pleasure. \"Oh, rather. I've got lots of time. After three in the afternoon I'm free till\u2014any time you like. There's a lot to see,\" he added.\n\n\"Come along to-morrow then,\" I said. \"If you can't take lunch, perhaps you can come just afterwards. You'll find me waiting for you\u2014right here.\"\n\n\"I'll come at three,\" he replied, and we said good-night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 523", + "text": "He turned up sharp at three, and I liked his punctuality. I saw him come swinging down the dusty road; tall, deep-chested, his broad shoulders a trifle high, and his head set proudly. He looked like a young chap in training, a thoroughbred, every inch of him. At the same time there was a touch of something a little too refined and delicate for a man, I thought. That was the poetic, scholarly vein in him, I guess\u2014grandfather cropping out. This time he wore no cap. His thick light hair, not brushed back like the London shop-boys, but parted on the side, yet untidy for all that, suited him exactly and gave him a touch of wildness.\n\n\"Well,\" he asked, \"what would you like to do, Uncle Jim? I'm at your service, and I've got the whole afternoon till supper at seven-thirty.\" I told him I'd like to go through that wood. \"All right,\" he said, \"come along. I'll show you.\" He gave me one quick glance, but said no more. \"I'd like to see if I feel anything this time,\" I explained. \"We'll locate the very spot, maybe.\" He nodded.\n\n\"You know where I mean, don't you?\" I asked, \"because you saw me there?\" He just said yes, and then we started.\n\nIt was hot, and air was scarce. I remember that we went uphill, and that I realised there was considerable difference in our ages. We crossed some fields first\u2014smothered in flowers so thick that I wondered how much grass the cows got out of it!\u2014and then came to a sprinkling of fine young larches that looked as soft as velvet. There was no path, just a wild mountain side. I had very little breath on the steep zigzags, but Arthur talked easily\u2014and talked mighty well, too: the light and shade, the colouring, and the effect of all this wilderness of lonely beauty on the mind. He kept all this suppressed at home in business. It was safety valves. I twigged that. It was the artist in him talking. He seemed to think there was nothing in the world but Beauty\u2014with a big B all the time. And the odd thing was he took for granted that I felt the same. It was cute of him to flatter me that way. \"Daulis and the lone Cephissian vale,\" I heard; and a few moments later\u2014with a sort of reverence in his voice like worship\u2014he called out a great singing name: \"Astarte!\"\n\n\u2003\"Day is her face, and midnight is her hair,\n\n\u2003And morning hours are but the golden stair\n\n\u2003By which she climbs to Night.\"\n\nIt was here first that a queer change began to grow upon me too.\n\n\"Steady on, boy! I've forgotten all my classics ages ago,\" I cried.\n\nHe turned and gazed down on me, his big eyes glowing, and not a sign of perspiration on his skin.\n\n\"That's nothing,\" he exclaimed in his musical, deep voice. \"You know it, or you'd never have felt things in this wood last night; and you wouldn't have wanted to come out with me now!\"\n\n\"How?\" I gasped. \"How's that?\"\n\n\"You've come,\" he continued quietly, \"to the only valley in this artificial country that has atmosphere. This valley is alive\u2014especially this end of it. There's superstition here, thank God! Even the peasants know things.\"\n\nI stared at him. \"See here, Arthur,\" I objected. \"I'm not a Cath. And I don't know a thing\u2014at least it's all dead in me and forgotten\u2014about poetry or classics or your gods and pan\u2014pantheism\u2014in spite of grandfather\u2014\"\n\nHis face turned like a dream face.\n\n\"Hush!\" he said quickly. \"Don't mention him. There's a bit of him in you as well as in me, and it was here, you know, he wrote\u2014\"\n\nI didn't hear the rest of what he said. A creep came over me. I remembered that this ancestor of ours lived for years in the isolation of some Swiss forest where he claimed\u2014he used that setting for his writing\u2014he had found the exiled gods, their ghosts, their beauty, their eternal essences\u2014or something astonishing of that sort. I had clean forgotten it till this moment. It all rushed back upon me, a memory of my boyhood.\n\nAnd, as I say, a creep came over me\u2014something as near to awe as ever could be. The sunshine on that field of yellow daisies and blue forget-me-nots turned pale. That warm valley wind had a touch of snow in it. And, ashamed and frightened of my baby mood, I looked at Arthur, meaning to choke him off with all this rubbish\u2014and then saw something in his eyes that scared me stiff.\n\nI admit it. What's the use? There was an expression on his fine big face that made my blood go curdled. I got cold feet right there. It mastered me. In him, behind him, near him\u2014blest if I know which, through him probably\u2014came an enormous thing that turned me insignificant. It downed me utterly.\n\nIt was over in a second, the flash of a wing. I recovered instantly. No mere boy should come these muzzy tricks on me, scholar or no scholar. For the change in me was on the increase, and I shrank.\n\n\"See here, Arthur,\" I said plainly once again, \"I don't know what your game is, but\u2014there's something queer up here I don't quite get at. I'm only a business man, with classics and poetry all gone dry in me twenty years ago and more\u2014\"\n\nHe looked at me so strangely that I stopped, confused.\n\n\"But, Uncle Jim,\" he said as quietly as though we talked tobacco brands, \"you needn't be alarmed. It's natural you should feel the place. You and I belong to it. We've both got him in us. You're just as proud of him as I am, only in a different way.\" And then he added, with a touch of disappointment: \"I thought you'd like it. You weren't afraid last night. You felt the beauty then.\"\n\nFlattery is a darned subtle thing at any time. To see him standing over me in that superior way and talking down at my poor business mind\u2014well, it just came over me that I was laying my cards on the table a bit too early. After so many years of city life\u2014!\n\nAnyway, I pulled myself together. \"I was only kidding you, boy,\" I laughed. \"I feel this beauty just as much as you do. Only, I guess, you're more accustomed to it than I am. Come on now,\" I added with energy, getting upon my feet, \"let's push on and see the wood. I want to find that place again.\"\n\nHe pulled me with a hand of iron, laughing as he did so. Gee! I wished I had his teeth, as well as the muscles in his arm. Yet I felt younger, somehow, too\u2014youth flowed more and more into my veins. I had forgotten how sweet the winds and woods and flowers could be. Something melted in me. For it was Spring, and the whole world was singing like a dream. Beauty was creeping over me. I don't know. I began to feel all big and tender and open to a thousand wonderful sensations. The thought of streets and houses seemed like death. ...\n\nWe went on again, not talking much; my breath got shorter and shorter, and he kept looking about him as though he expected something. But we passed no living soul, not even a peasant; there were no chalets, no cattle, no cattle shelters even. And then I realised that the valley lay at our feet in haze and that we had been climbing at least a couple of hours. \"Why, last night I got home in twenty minutes at the outside,\" I said. He shook his head, smiling. \"It seemed like that,\" he replied, \"but you really took much longer. It was long after ten when I found you in the hall.\" I reflected a moment. \"Now I come to think of it, you're right, Arthur. Seems curious, though, somehow.\" He looked closely at me. \"I followed you all the way,\" he said.\n\n\"You followed me!\"\n\n\"And you went at a good pace too. It was your feelings that made it seem so short\u2014you were singing to yourself and happy as a dancing faun. We kept close behind you for a long way.\"\n\nI think it was \"we\" he said, but for some reason or other I didn't care to ask.\n\n\"Maybe,\" I answered shortly, trying uncomfortably to recall what particular capers I had cut. \"I guess that's right.\" And then I added something about the loneliness, and how deserted all this slope of mountain was. And he explained that the peasants were afraid of it and called it No Man's Land. From one year's end to another no human foot went up or down it; the hay was never cut; no cattle grazed along the splendid pastures; no chalet had even been built within a mile of the wood we slowly made for. \"They're superstitious,\" he told me. \"It was just the same a hundred years ago when he discovered it\u2014there was a little natural cave on the edge of the forest where he used to sleep sometimes\u2014I'll show it to you presently\u2014but for generations this entire mountain-side has been undisturbed. You'll never meet a living soul in any part of it.\" He stopped and pointed above us to where the pine wood hung in mid-air, like a dim blue carpet. \"It's just the place for Them, you see.\"\n\nAnd a thrill of power went smashing through me. I can't describe it. It drenched me like a waterfall. I thought of Greece\u2014Mount Ida and a thousand songs! Something in me\u2014it was like the click of a shutter\u2014announced that the \"change\" was suddenly complete. I was another man; or rather a deeper part of me took command. My very language showed it.\n\nThe calm of halcyon weather lay over all. Overhead the peaks rose clear as crystal; below us the village lay in a bluish smudge of smoke and haze, as though a great finger had rubbed them softly into the earth. Absolute loneliness fell upon me like a clap. From the world of human beings we seemed quite shut off. And there began to steal over me again the strange elation of the night before. ... We found ourselves almost at once against the edge of the wood.\n\nIt rose in front of us, a big wall of splendid trees, motionless as if cut out of dark green metal, the branches hanging stiff, and the crowd of trunks lost in the blue dimness underneath. I shaded my eyes with one hand, trying to peer into the solemn gloom. The contrast between the brilliant sunshine on the pastures and this region of heavy shadows blurred my sight.\n\n\"It's like the entrance to another world,\" I whispered.\n\n\"It is,\" said Arthur, watching me. \"We will go in. You shall pluck asphodel. ...\"\n\nAnd, before I knew it, he had me by the hand. We were advancing. We left the light behind us. The cool air dropped upon me like a sheet. There was a temple silence. The sun ran down behind the sky, leaving a marvellous blue radiance everywhere. Nothing stirred. But through the stillness there rose power, power that has no name, power that hides at the foundations somewhere\u2014foundations that are changeless, invisible, everlasting. What do I mean? My mind grew to the dimensions of a planet. We were among the roots of life\u2014whence issues that one thing in infinite guise that seeks so many temporary names from the protean minds of men.\n\n\"You shall pluck asphodel in the meadows this side of Erebus,\" Arthur was chanting. \"Hermes himself, the Psychopomp, shall lead, and Malahide shall welcome us.\"\n\nMalahide ...!\n\nTo hear him use that name, the name of our scholar-ancestor, now dead and buried close upon a century\u2014the way he half chanted it\u2014gave me the goose-flesh. I stopped against a tree-stem, thinking of escape. No words came to me at the moment, for I didn't know what to say; but, on turning to find the bright green slopes just left behind, I saw only a crowd of trees and shadows hanging thick as a curtain\u2014as though we had walked a mile. And it was a shock. The way out was lost. The trees closed up behind us like a tide.\n\n\"It's all right,\" said Arthur; \"just keep an open mind and a heart alive with love. It has a shattering effect at first, but that will pass.\" He saw I was afraid, for I shrank visibly enough. He stood beside me in his grey flannel suit, with his brilliant eyes and his great shock of hair, looking more like a column of light than a human being. \"It's all quite right and natural,\" he repeated; \"we have passed the gateway, and Hecate, who presides over gateways, will let us out again. Do not make discord by feeling fear. This is a pine wood, and pines are the oldest, simplest trees; they are true primitives. They are an open channel; and in a pine wood where no human life has ever been you shall often find gateways where Hecate is kind to such as us.\"\n\nHe took my hand\u2014he must have felt mine trembling, but his own was cool and strong and felt like silver\u2014and led me forward into the depths of a wood that seemed to me quite endless. It felt endless, that is to say. I don't know what came over me. Fear slipped away, and elation took its place. ... As we advanced over ground that seemed level, or slightly undulating, I saw bright pools of sunshine here and there upon the forest floor. Great shafts of light dropped in slantingly between the trunks. There was movement everywhere, though I never could see what moved. A delicious, scented air stirred through the lower branches. Running water sang not very far away. Figures I did not actually see; yet there were limbs and flowing draperies and flying hair from time to time, ever just beyond the pools of sunlight. ... Surprise went from me too. I was on air. The atmosphere of dream came round me, but a dream of something just hovering outside the world I knew\u2014a dream wrought in gold and silver, with shining eyes, with graceful beckoning hands, and with voices that rang like bells of music. ... And the pools of light grew larger, merging one into another, until a delicate soft light shone equably throughout the entire forest. Into this zone of light we passed together. Then something fell abruptly at our feet, as though thrown down... two marvellous, shining sprays of blossom such as I had never seen in all my days before!\n\n\"Asphodel!\" cried my companion, stooping to pick them up and handing one to me. I took it from him with a delight I could not understand. \"Keep it,\" he murmured; \"it is the sign that we are welcome. For Malahide has dropped these on our path.\"\n\nAnd at the use of that ancestral name it seemed that a spirit passed before my face and the hair of my head stood up. There was a sense of violent, unhappy contrast. A composite picture presented itself, then rushed away. What was it? My youth in England, music and poetry at Cambridge and my passionate love of Greek that lasted two terms at most, when Malahide's great books formed part of the curriculum. Over against this, then, the drag and smother of solid worldly business, the sordid weight of modern ugliness, the bitterness of an ambitious, over-striving life. And abruptly\u2014beyond both pictures\u2014a shining, marvellous Beauty that scattered stars beneath my feet and scarved the universe with gold. All this flashed before me with the utterance of that old family name. An alternative sprang up. There seemed some radical, elemental choice presented to me\u2014to what I used to call my soul. My soul could take or leave it as it pleased. ...\n\nI looked at Arthur moving beside me like a shaft of light. What had come over me? How had our walk and talk and mood, our quite recent everyday and ordinary view, our normal relationship with the things of the world\u2014how had it all slipped into this? So insensibly, so easily, so naturally!\n\n\"Was it worth while?\"\n\nThe question\u2014I didn't ask it\u2014jumped up in me of its own accord. Was \"what\" worth while? Why, my present life of commonplace and grubbing toil, of course; my city existence, with its meagre, unremunerative ambitions. Ah, it was this new Beauty calling me, this shining dream that lay beyond the two pictures I have mentioned. ... I did not argue it, even to myself. But I understood. There was a radical change in me. The buried poet, too long hidden, rushed into the air like some great singing bird.\n\nI glanced again at Arthur moving along lightly by my side, half dancing almost in his brimming happiness. \"Wait till you see Them,\" I heard him singing. \"Wait till you hear the call of Artemis and the footsteps of her flying nymphs. Wait till Orion thunders overhead and Selene, crowned with the crescent moon, drives up the zenith in her white-horsed chariot. The choice will be beyond all question then ...!\"\n\nA great silent bird, with soft brown plumage, whirred across our path, pausing an instant as though to peep, then disappearing with a muted sound into an eddy of the wind it made. The big trees hid it. It was an owl. The same moment I heard a rush of liquid song come pouring through the forest with a gush of almost human notes, and a pair of glossy wings flashed past us, swerving upwards to find the open sky\u2014blue-black, pointed wings.\n\n\"His favourites!\" exclaimed my companion with clear joy in his voice. \"They all are here! Athene's bird, Procne and Philomela too! The owl\u2014the swallow\u2014and the nightingale! Tereus and Itys are not far away.\" And the entire forest, as he said it, stirred with movement, as though that great bird's quiet wings had waked the sea of ancient shadows. There were voices too\u2014ringing, laughing voices, as though his words woke echoes that had been listening for it. For I heard sweet singing in the distance. The names he had used perplexed me. Yet even I, stranger as I was to such refined delights, could not mistake the passion of the nightingale and the dart of the eager swallow. That wild burst of music, that curve of swift escape, were unmistakable.\n\nAnd I struck a stalwart tree-stem with my open hand, feeling the need of hearing, touching, sensing it. My link with known, remembered things was breaking. I craved the satisfaction of the commonplace. I got that satisfaction; but I got something more as well. For the trunk was round and smooth and comely. It was no dead thing I struck. Somehow it brushed me into intercourse with inanimate Nature. And next the desire came to hear my voice\u2014my own familiar, high-pitched voice with the twang and accent the New World climate brings, so-called American:\n\n\"Exchange Place, Noo York City. I'm in that business, buying and selling of exchange between the banks of two civilised countries, one of them stoopid and old-fashioned, the other leading all creation ...!\"\n\nIt was an effort; but I made it firmly. It sounded odd, remote, unreal.\n\n\"Sunlit woods and a wind among the branches\", followed close and sweet upon my words. But who, in the name of Wall Street, said it?\n\n\"England's buying gold,\" I tried again. \"We've had a private wire. Cut in quick. First National is selling!\"\n\nGreat-faced Heph\u00e6stus, how ridiculous! It was like saying, \"I'll take your scalp unless you give me meat.\" It was barbaric, savage, centuries ago. Again there came another voice that caught up my own and turned it into common syntax. Some heady beauty of the Earth rose about me like a cloud.\n\n\"Hark! Night comes, with the dusk upon her eyelids. She brings those dreams that every dew-drop holds at dawn. Daughter of Thanatos and Hypnos ...!\"\n\nBut again\u2014who said the words? It surely was not Arthur, my nephew Arthur, of To-day, learning French in a Swiss mountain village! I felt\u2014well, what did I feel? In the name of the Stock Exchange and Wall Street, what was the cash surrender of amazing feelings?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 524", + "text": "And, turning to look at him, I made a discovery. I don't know how to tell it quite; such shadowy marvels have never been my line of goods. He looked several things at once\u2014taller, slighter, sweeter, but chiefly\u2014it sounds so crazy when I write it down\u2014grander is the word, I think. And all spread out with some power that flowed like Spring when it pours upon a landscape. Eternally young and glorious\u2014young, I mean, in the sense of a field of flowers in the Spring looks young; and glorious in the sense the sky looks glorious at dawn or sunset. Something big shone through him like a storm, something that would go on for ever just as the Earth goes on, always renewing itself, something of gigantic life that in the human sense could never age at all\u2014something the old gods had. But the figure, so far as there was any figure at all, was that old family picture come to life. Our great ancestor and Arthur were one being, and that one being was vaster than a million people. Yet it was Malahide I saw. ...\n\n\"They laid me in the earth I loved,\" he said in a strange, thrilling voice like running wind and water, \"and I found eternal life. I live now for ever in Their divine existence. I share the life that changes yet can never pass away.\"\n\nI felt myself rising like a cloud as he said it. A roaring beauty captured me completely. If I could tell it in honest newspaper language\u2014the common language used in flats and offices\u2014why, I guess I could patent a new meaning in ordinary words, a new power of expression, the thing that all the churches and poets and thinkers have been trying to say since the world began. I caught on to a fact so fine and simple that it knocked me silly to think I'd never realised it before. I had read it, yes; but now I knew it. The Earth, the whole bustling universe, was nothing after all but a visible production of eternal, living Powers\u2014spiritual powers, mind you\u2014that just happened to include the particular little type of strutting creature we called mankind. And these Powers, as seen in Nature, were the gods. It was our refusal of their grand appeal, so wild and sweet and beautiful, that caused \"evil.\" It was this barrier between ourselves and the rest of...\n\nMy thoughts and feelings swept away upon the rising flood as the \"figure\" came upon me like a shaft of moonlight, melting the last remnant of opposition that was in me. I took my brain, my reason, chucking them aside for the futile little mechanism I suddenly saw them to be. In place of them came\u2014oh, God, I hate to say it, for only nursery talk can get within a mile of it, and yet what I need is something simpler even than the words that children use. Under one arm I carried a whole forest breathing in the wind, and beneath the other a hundred meadows full of singing streams with golden marigolds and blue forget-me-nots along their banks. Upon my back and shoulders lay the clouded hills with dew and moonlight in their brimmed, capacious hollows. Thick in my hair hung the unaging powers that are stars and sunlight; though the sun was far away, it sweetened the currents of my blood with liquid gold. Breast and throat and face, as I advanced, met all the rivers of the world and all the winds of heaven, their strength and swiftness melting into me as light melts into everything it touches. And into my eyes passed all the radiant colours that weave the cloth of Nature as she takes the sun.\n\nAnd this \"figure,\" pouring upon me like a burst of moonlight, spoke:\n\n\"They all are in you\u2014air, and fire, and water. ...\"\n\n\"And I\u2014my feet stand\u2014on the Earth,\" my own voice interrupted, deep power lifting through the sound of it.\n\n\"The Earth!\" He laughed gigantically. He spread. He seemed everywhere about me. He seemed a race of men. My life swam forth in waves of some immense sensation that issued from the mountain and the forest, then returned to them again. I reeled. I clutched at something in me that was slipping beyond control, slipping down a bank towards a deep, dark river flowing at my feet. A shadowy boat appeared, a still more shadowy outline at the helm. I was in the act of stepping into it. For the tree I caught at was only air. I couldn't stop myself. I tried to scream.\n\n\"You have plucked asphodel,\" sang the voice beside me, \"and you shall pluck more. ...\"\n\nI slipped and slipped, the speed increasing horribly. Then something caught, as though a cog held fast and stopped me. I remembered my business in New York City.\n\n\"Arthur!\" I yelled. \"Arthur!\" I shouted again as hard as I could shout. There was frantic terror in me. I felt as though I should never get back to myself again. Death!\n\nThe answer came in his normal voice: \"Keep close to me. I know the way. ...\"\n\nThe scenery dwindled suddenly; the trees came back. I was walking in the forest beside my nephew, and the moonlight lay in patches and little shafts of silver. The crests of the pines just murmured in a wind that scarcely stirred, and through an opening on our right I saw the deep valley clasped about the twinkling village lights. Towering in splendour the spectral snowfields hung upon the sky, huge summits guarding them. And Arthur took my arm\u2014oh, solidly enough this time. Thank heaven, he asked no questions of me.\n\n\"There's a smell of myrrh,\" he whispered, \"and we are very near the undying, ancient things.\"\n\nI said something about the resin from the trees, but he took no notice.\n\n\"It enclosed its body in an egg of myrrh,\" he went on, smiling down at me; \"then, setting it on fire, rose from the ashes with its life renewed. Once every five hundred years, you see\u2014\"\n\n\"What did?\" I cried, feeling that loss of self stealing over me again. And his answer came like a blow between the eyes:\n\n\"The Ph\u0153nix. They called it a bird, but, of course, the true...\"\n\n\"But my life's insured in that,\" I cried, for he had named the company that took large yearly premiums from me; \"and I pay...\"\n\n\"Your life's insured in this,\" he said quietly, waving his arms to indicate the Earth. \"Your love of Nature and your sympathy with it make you safe.\" He gazed at me. There was a marvellous expression in his eyes. I understood why poets talked of stars and flowers in a human face. But behind the face crept back another look as well. There grew about his figure an indeterminate extension. The outline of Malahide again stirred through his own. A pale, delicate hand reached out to take my own. And something broke in me.\n\nI was conscious of two things\u2014a burst of joy that meant losing myself entirely, and a rush of terror that meant staying as I was, a small, painful, struggling item of individual life. Another spray of that awful asphodel fell fluttering through the air in front of my face. It rested on the earth against my feet. And Arthur\u2014this weirdly changing Arthur\u2014stooped to pick it for me. I kicked it with my foot beyond his reach... then turned and ran as though the Furies of that ancient world were after me. I ran for my very life. How I escaped from that thick wood without banging my body to bits against the trees I can't explain. I ran from something I desired and yet feared. I leaped along in a succession of flying bounds. Each tree I passed turned of its own accord and flung after me until the entire forest followed. But I got out. I reached the open. Upon the sloping field in the full, clear light of the moon I collapsed in a panting heap. The Earth drew back with a great shuddering sigh behind me. There was this strange, tumultuous sound upon the night. I lay beneath the open heavens that were full of moonlight. I was myself\u2014but there were tears in me. Beauty too high for understanding had slipped between my fingers. I had lost Malahide. I had lost the gods of Earth. ... Yet I had seen... and felt. I had not lost all. Something remained that I could never lose again. ...\n\nI don't know how it happened exactly, but presently I heard Arthur saying: \"You'll catch your death of cold if you lie on that soaking grass,\" and felt his hand seize mine to pull me to my feet.\n\n\"I feel safer on earth,\" I believe I answered. And then he said: \"Yes, but it's such a stupid way to die\u2014a chill!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 525", + "text": "I got up then, and we went downhill together towards the village lights. I danced\u2014oh, I admit it\u2014I sang as well. There was a flood of joy and power about me that beat anything I'd ever felt before. I didn't think or hesitate; there was no self-consciousness; I just let it rip for all there was, and if there had been ten thousand people there in front of me, I could have made them feel it too. That was the kind of feeling\u2014power and confidence and a sort of raging happiness. I think I know what it was too. I say this soberly, with reverence... all wool and no fading. There was a bit of God in me, God's power that drives the Earth and pours through Nature\u2014the imperishable Beauty expressed in those old-world nature-deities!\n\nAnd the fear I'd felt was nothing but the little tickling point of losing my ordinary two-cent self, the dread of letting go, the shrinking before the plunge\u2014what a fellow feels when he's falling in love, and hesitates, and tries to think it out and hold back, and is afraid to let the enormous tide flow in and drown him.\n\nOh, yes, I began to think it over a bit as we raced down the mountain-side that glorious night. I've read some in my day; my brain's all right; I've heard of dual personality and subliminal uprush and conversion\u2014no new line of goods, all that. But somehow these stunts of the psychologists and philosophers didn't cut any ice with me just then, because I'd experienced what they merely explained. And explanation was just a bargain sale. The best things can't be explained at all. There's no real value in a bargain sale.\n\nArthur had trouble to keep up with me. We were running due east, and the Earth was turning, therefore, with us. We all three ran together at her pace\u2014terrific! The moonlight danced along the summits, and the snow-fields flew like spreading robes, and the forests everywhere, far and near, hung watching us and booming like a thousand organs. There were uncaged winds about; you could hear them whistling among the precipices. But the great thing that I knew was\u2014Beauty, a beauty of the common old familiar Earth, and a beauty that's stayed with me ever since, and given me joy and strength and a source of power and delight I'd never guessed existed before." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 526", + "text": "As we dropped lower into the thicker air of the valley I sobered down. Gradually the ecstasy passed from me. We slowed up a bit. The lights and the houses and the sight of the hotel where people were dancing in a stuffy ballroom, all this put blotting-paper on something that had been flowing.\n\nNow you'll think this an odd thing too\u2014but when we reached the village street, I just took Arthur's hand and shook it and said good-night and went up to bed and slept like a two-year-old till morning. And from that day to this I've never set eyes on the boy again.\n\nPerhaps it's difficult to explain, and perhaps it isn't. I can explain it to myself in two lines\u2014I was afraid to see him. I was afraid he might \"explain.\" I was afraid he might explain \"away.\" I just left a note\u2014he never replied to it\u2014and went off by a morning train. Can you understand that? Because if you can't you haven't understood this account I've tried to give of the experience Arthur gave me. Well\u2014anyway\u2014I'll just let it go at that.\n\nArthur's a director now in his father's wholesale chemical business, and I\u2014well, I'm doing better than ever in the buying and selling of exchange between banks in New York City as before.\n\nBut when I said I was still drawing dividends on my Swiss investment, I meant it. And it's not \"scenery.\" Everybody gets a thrill from \"scenery.\" It's a darned sight more than that. It's those little wayward patches of blue on a cloudy day; those blue pools in the sky just above Trinity Church steeple when I pass out of Wall Street into Lower Broadway; it's the rustle of the sea-wind among the Battery trees; the wash of the waves when the Ferry's starting for Staten Island, and the glint of the sun far down the Bay, or dropping a bit of pearl into the old East River. And sometimes it's the strip of cloud in the west above the Jersey shore of the Hudson, the first star, the sickle of the new moon behind the masts and shipping. But usually it's something nearer, bigger, simpler than all or any of these. It's just the certainty that, when I hurry along the hard stone pavements from bank to bank, I'm walking on the\u2014Earth. It's just that\u2014the Earth!" + }, + { + "title": "A Desert Episode by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "\"Better put wraps on now. The sun's getting low,\" a girl said.\n\nIt was the end of a day's expedition in the Arabian Desert, and they were having tea. A few yards away the donkeys munched their barsim; beside them in the sand the boys lay finishing bread and jam. Immense, with gliding tread, the sun's rays slid from crest to crest of the limestone ridges that broke the huge expanse towards the Red Sea. By the time the tea-things were packed the sun hovered, a giant ball of red, above the Pyramids. It stood in the western sky a moment, looking out of its majestic hood across the sand. With a movement almost visible it leaped, paused, then leaped again. It seemed to bound towards the horizon; then, suddenly, was gone.\n\n\"It is cold, yes,\" said the painter, Rivers. And all who heard looked up at him because of the way he said it. A hurried movement ran through the merry party, and the girls were on their donkeys quickly, not wishing to be left to bring up the rear. They clattered off. The boys cried; the thud of sticks was heard; hoofs shuffled through the sand and stones. In single file the picnickers headed for Helouan, some five miles distant. And the desert closed up behind them as they went, following in a shadowy wave that never broke, noiseless, foamless, unstreaked, driven by no wind, and of a volume undiscoverable. Against the orange sunset the Pyramids turned deep purple. The strip of silvery Nile among its palm trees looked like rising mist. In the incredible Egyptian afterglow the enormous horizons burned a little longer, then went out. The ball of the earth\u2014a huge round globe that bulged\u2014curved visibly as at sea. It was no longer a flat expanse; it turned. Its splendid curves were realised.\n\n\"Better put wraps on; it's cold and the sun is low\"\u2014and then the curious hurry to get back among the houses and the haunts of men. No more was said, perhaps, than this, yet, the time and place being what they were, the mind became suddenly aware of that quality which ever brings a certain shrinking with it\u2014vastness; and more than vastness: that which is endless because it is also beginningless\u2014eternity. A colossal splendour stole upon the heart, and the senses, unaccustomed to the unusual stretch, reeled a little, as though the wonder was more than could be faced with comfort. Not all, doubtless, realised it, though to two, at least, it came with a staggering impact there was no withstanding. For, while the luminous greys and purples crept round them from the sandy wastes, the hearts of these two became aware of certain common things whose simple majesty is usually dulled by mere familiarity. Neither the man nor the girl knew for certain that the other felt it, as they brought up the rear together; yet the fact that each did feel it set them side by side in the same strange circle\u2014and made them silent. They realised the immensity of a moment: the dizzy stretch of time that led up to the casual pinning of a veil; to the tightening of a stirrup strap; to the little speech with a companion; the roar of the vanished centuries that have ground mountains into sand and spread them over the floor of Africa; above all, to the little truth that they themselves existed amid the whirl of stupendous systems all delicately balanced as a spider's web\u2014that they were alive.\n\nFor a moment this vast scale of reality revealed itself, then hid swiftly again behind the d\u00e9bris of the obvious. The universe, containing their two tiny yet important selves, stood still for an instant before their eyes. They looked at it\u2014realised that they belonged to it. Everything moved and had its being, lived\u2014here in this silent, empty desert even more actively than in a city of crowded houses. The quiet Nile, sighing with age, passed down towards the sea; there loomed the menacing Pyramids across the twilight; beneath them, in monstrous dignity, crouched that Shadow from whose eyes of battered stone proceeds the nameless thing that contracts the heart, then opens it again to terror; and everywhere, from towering monoliths as from secret tombs, rose that strange, long whisper which, defying time and distance, laughs at death. The spell of Egypt, which is the spell of immortality, touched their hearts.\n\nAlready, as the group of picnickers rode homewards now, the first stars twinkled overhead, and the peerless Egyptian night was on the way. There was hurry in the passing of the dusk. And the cold sensibly increased.\n\n\"So you did no painting after all,\" said Rivers to the girl who rode a little in front of him, \"for I never saw you touch your sketch-book once.\"\n\nThey were some distance now behind the others; the line straggled; and when no answer came he quickened his pace, drew up alongside and saw that her eyes, in the reflection of the sunset, shone with moisture. But she turned her head a little, smiling into his face, so that the human and the non-human beauty came over him with an onset that was almost shock. Neither one nor other, he knew, were long for him, and the realisation fell upon him with a pang of actual physical pain. The acuteness, the hopelessness of the realisation, for a moment, were more than he could bear, stern of temper though he was, and he tried to pass in front of her, urging his donkey with resounding strokes. Her own animal, however, following the lead, at once came up with him.\n\n\"You felt it, perhaps, as I did,\" he said some moments later, his voice quite steady again. \"The stupendous, everlasting thing\u2014the\u2014life behind it all.\" He hesitated a little in his speech, unable to find the substantive that could compass even a fragment of his thought. She paused, too, similarly inarticulate before the surge of incomprehensible feelings.\n\n\"It's\u2014awful,\" she said, half laughing, yet the tone hushed and a little quaver in it somewhere. And her voice to his was like the first sound he had ever heard in the world, for the first sound a full-grown man heard in the world would be beyond all telling\u2014magical. \"I shall not try again,\" she continued, leaving out the laughter this time; \"my sketch-book is a farce. For, to tell the truth\"\u2014and the next three words she said below her breath\u2014\"I dare not.\"\n\nHe turned and looked at her for a second. It seemed to him that the following wave had caught them up, and was about to break above her, too. But the big-brimmed hat and the streaming veil shrouded her features. He saw, instead, the Universe. He felt as though he and she had always, always been together, and always, always would be. Separation was inconceivable.\n\n\"It came so close,\" she whispered. \"It\u2014shook me!\"\n\nThey were cut off from their companions, whose voices sounded far ahead. Her words might have been spoken by the darkness, or by some one who peered at them from within that following wave. Yet the fanciful phrase was better than any he could find. From the immeasurable space of time and distance men's hearts vainly seek to plumb, it drew into closer perspective a certain meaning that words may hardly compass, a formidable truth that belongs to that deep place where hope and doubt fight their incessant battle. The awe she spoke of was the awe of immortality, of belonging to something that is endless and beginningless.\n\nAnd he understood that the tears and laughter were one\u2014caused by that spell which takes a little human life and shakes it, as an animal shakes its prey that later shall feed its blood and increase its power of growth. His other thoughts\u2014really but a single thought\u2014he had not the right to utter. Pain this time easily routed hope as the wave came nearer. For it was the wave of death that would shortly break, he knew, over him, but not over her. Him it would sweep with its huge withdrawal into the desert whence it came: her it would leave high upon the shores of life\u2014alone. And yet the separation would somehow not be real. They were together in eternity even now. They were endless as this desert, beginningless as this sky... immortal. The realisation overwhelmed. ...\n\nThe lights of Helouan seemed to come no nearer as they rode on in silence for the rest of the way. Against the dark background of the Mokattam Hills these fairy lights twinkled brightly, hanging in mid-air, but after an hour they were no closer than before. It was like riding towards the stars. It would take centuries to reach them. There were centuries in which to do so. Hurry has no place in the desert; it is born in streets. The desert stands still; to go fast in it is to go backwards. Now, in particular, its enormous, uncanny leisure was everywhere\u2014in keeping with that mighty scale the sunset had made visible. His thoughts, like the steps of the weary animal that bore him, had no progress in them. The serpent of eternity, holding its tail in its own mouth, rose from the sand, enclosing himself, the stars\u2014and her. Behind him, in the hollows of that shadowy wave, the procession of dynasties and conquests, the great series of gorgeous civilisations the mind calls Past, stood still, crowded with shining eyes and beckoning faces, still waiting to arrive. There is no death in Egypt. His own death stood so close that he could touch it by stretching out his hand, yet it seemed as much behind as in front of him. What man called a beginning was a trick. There was no such thing. He was with this girl\u2014now, when Death waited so close for him\u2014yet he had never really begun. Their lives ran always parallel. The hand he stretched to clasp approaching death caught instead in this girl's shadowy hair, drawing her in with him to the centre where he breathed the eternity of the desert. Yet expression of any sort was as futile as it was unnecessary. To paint, to speak, to sing, even the slightest gesture of the soul, became a crude and foolish thing. Silence was here the truth. And they rode in silence towards the fairy lights.\n\nThen suddenly the rocky ground rose up close before them; boulders stood out vividly with black shadows and shining heads; a flat-roofed house slid by; three palm trees rattled in the evening wind; beyond, a mosque and minaret sailed upwards, like the spars and rigging of some phantom craft; and the colonnades of the great modern hotel, standing upon its dome of limestone ridge, loomed over them. Helouan was about them before they knew it. The desert lay behind with its huge, arrested billow. Slowly, owing to its prodigious volume, yet with a speed that merged it instantly with the far horizon behind the night, this wave now withdrew a little. There was no hurry. It came, for the moment, no farther. Rivers knew. For he was in it to the throat. Only his head was above the surface. He still could breathe\u2014and speak\u2014and see. Deepening with every hour into an incalculable splendour, it waited." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 528", + "text": "In the street the foremost riders drew rein, and, two and two abreast, the long line clattered past the shops and caf\u00e9s, the railway station and hotels, stared at by the natives from the busy pavements. The donkeys stumbled, blinded by the electric light. Girls in white dresses flitted here and there, arab\u00eeyehs rattled past with people hurrying home to dress for dinner, and the evening train, just in from Cairo, disgorged its stream of passengers. There were dances in several of the hotels that night. Voices rose on all sides. Questions and answers, engagements and appointments were made, little plans and plots and intrigues for seizing happiness on the wing\u2014before the wave rolled in and caught the lot. They chattered gaily:\n\n\"You are going, aren't you? You promised\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course I am.\"\n\n\"Then I'll drive you over. May I call for you?\"\n\n\"All right. Come at ten.\"\n\n\"We shan't have finished our bridge by then. Say ten-thirty.\"\n\nAnd eyes exchanged their meaning signals. The group dismounted and dispersed. Arabs standing under the lebbekh trees, or squatting on the pavements before their dim-lit booths, watched them with faces of gleaming bronze. Rivers gave his bridle to a donkey-boy, and moved across stiffly after the long ride to help the girl dismount. \"You feel tired?\" he asked gently. \"It's been a long day.\" For her face was white as chalk, though the eyes shone brilliantly.\n\n\"Tired, perhaps,\" she answered, \"but exhilarated too. I should like to be there now. I should like to go back this minute\u2014if some one would take me.\" And, though she said it lightly, there was a meaning in her voice he apparently chose to disregard. It was as if she knew his secret. \"Will you take me\u2014some day soon?\"\n\nThe direct question, spoken by those determined little lips, was impossible to ignore. He looked close into her face as he helped her from the saddle with a spring that brought her a moment half into his arms. \"Some day\u2014soon. I will,\" he said with emphasis, \"when you are\u2014ready.\" The pallor in her face, and a certain expression in it he had not known before, startled him. \"I think you have been overdoing it,\" he added, with a tone in which authority and love were oddly mingled, neither of them disguised.\n\n\"Like yourself,\" she smiled, shaking her skirts out and looking down at her dusty shoes. \"I've only a few days more\u2014before I sail. We're both in such a hurry, but you are the worst of the two.\"\n\n\"Because my time is even shorter,\" ran his horrified thought\u2014for he said no word.\n\nShe raised her eyes suddenly to his, with an expression that for an instant almost convinced him she had guessed\u2014and the soul in him stood rigidly at attention, urging back the rising fires. The hair had dropped loosely round the sun-burned neck. Her face was level with his shoulder. Even the glare of the street lights could not make her undesirable. But behind the gaze of the deep brown eyes another thing looked forth imperatively into his own. And he recognised it with a rush of terror, yet of singular exultation.\n\n\"It followed us all the way,\" she whispered. \"It came after us from the desert\u2014where it lives.\"\n\n\"At the houses,\" he said equally low, \"it stopped.\" He gladly adopted her syncopated speech, for it helped him in his struggle to subdue those rising fires.\n\nFor a second she hesitated. \"You mean, if we had not left so soon\u2014when it turned cold. If we had not hurried\u2014if we had remained a little longer\u2014\"\n\nHe caught at her hand, unable to control himself, but dropped it again the same second, while she made as though she had not noticed, forgiving him with her eyes. \"Or a great deal longer,\" she added slowly\u2014\"for ever?\"\n\nAnd then he was certain that she had guessed\u2014not that he loved her above all else in the world, for that was so obvious that a child might know it, but that his silence was due to his other, lesser secret; that the great Executioner stood waiting to drop the hood about his eyes. He was already pinioned. Something in her gaze and in her manner persuaded him suddenly that she understood.\n\nHis exhilaration increased extraordinarily. \"I mean,\" he said very quietly, \"that the spell weakens here among the houses and among the\u2014so-called living.\" There was masterfulness, triumph, in his voice. Very wonderfully he saw her smile change; she drew slightly closer to his side, as though unable to resist. \"Mingled with lesser things we should not understand completely,\" he added softly.\n\n\"And that might be a mistake, you mean?\" she asked quickly, her face grave again.\n\nIt was his turn to hesitate a moment. The breeze stirred the hair about her neck, bringing its faint perfume\u2014perfume of young life\u2014to his nostrils. He drew his breath in deeply, smothering back the torrent of rising words he knew were unpermissible. \"Misunderstanding,\" he said briefly. \"If the eye be single\u2014\" He broke off, shaken by a paroxysm of coughing. \"You know my meaning,\" he continued, as soon as the attack had passed; \"you feel the difference here,\" pointing round him to the hotels, the shops, the busy stream of people; \"the hurry, the excitement, the feverish, blinding child's play which pretends to be alive, but does not know it\u2014\" And again the coughing stopped him. This time she took his hand in her own, pressed it very slightly, then released it. He felt it as the touch of that desert wave upon his soul. \"The reception must be in complete and utter resignation. Tainted by lesser things, the disharmony might be\u2014\" he began stammeringly.\n\nAgain there came interruption, as the rest of the party called impatiently to know if they were coming up to the hotel. He had not time to find the completing adjective. Perhaps he could not find it ever. Perhaps it does not exist in any modern language. Eternity is not realised to-day; men have no time to know they are alive for ever; they are too busy. ...\n\nThey all moved in a clattering, merry group towards the big hotel. Rivers and the girl were separated." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 529", + "text": "There was a dance that evening, but neither of these took part in it. In the great dining-room their tables were far apart. He could not even see her across the sea of intervening heads and shoulders. The long meal over, he went to his room, feeling it imperative to be alone. He did not read, he did not write; but, leaving the light unlit, he wrapped himself up and leaned out upon the broad window-sill into the great Egyptian night. His deep-sunken thoughts, like to the crowding stars, stood still, yet for ever took new shapes. He tried to see behind them, as, when a boy, he had tried to see behind the constellations\u2014out into space\u2014where there is nothing.\n\nBelow him the lights of Helouan twinkled like the Pleiades reflected in a pool of water; a hum of queer soft noises rose to his ears; but just beyond the houses the desert stood at attention, the vastest thing he had ever known, very stern, yet very comforting, with its peace beyond all comprehension, its delicate, wild terror, and its awful message of immortality. And the attitude of his mind, though he did not know it, was one of prayer. ... From time to time he went to lie on the bed with paroxysms of coughing. He had overtaxed his strength\u2014his swiftly fading strength. The wave had risen to his lips.\n\nNearer forty than thirty-five, Paul Rivers had come out to Egypt, plainly understanding that with the greatest care he might last a few weeks longer than if he stayed in England. A few more times to see the sunset and the sunrise, to watch the stars, feel the soft airs of earth upon his cheeks; a few more days of intercourse with his kind, asking and answering questions, wearing the old familiar clothes he loved, reading his favourite pages, and then\u2014out into the big spaces\u2014where there is nothing.\n\nYet no one, from his stalwart, energetic figure, would have guessed\u2014no one but the expert mind, not to be deceived, to whom in the first attack of overwhelming despair and desolation he went for final advice. He left that house, as many had left it before, knowing that soon he would need no earthly protection of roof and walls, and that his soul, if it existed, would be shelterless in the space behind all manifested life. He had looked forward to fame and position in this world; had, indeed, already achieved the first step towards this end; and now, with the vanity of all earthly aims so mercilessly clear before him, he had turned, in somewhat of a nervous, concentrated hurry, to make terms with the Infinite while still the brain was there. And had, of course, found nothing. For it takes a lifetime crowded with experiment and effort to learn even the alphabet of genuine faith; and what could come of a few weeks' wild questioning but confusion and bewilderment of mind? It was inevitable. He came out to Egypt wondering, thinking, questioning, but chiefly wondering. He had grown, that is, more childlike, abandoning the futile tool of Reason, which hitherto had seemed to him the perfect instrument. Its foolishness stood naked before him in the pitiless light of the specialist's decision. For\u2014\"Who can by searching find out God?\"\n\nTo be exceedingly careful of over-exertion was the final warning he brought with him, and, within a few hours of his arrival, three weeks ago, he had met this girl and utterly disregarded it. He took it somewhat thus: \"Instead of lingering I'll enjoy myself and go out\u2014a little sooner. I'll live. The time is very short.\" His was not a nature, anyhow, that could heed a warning. He could not kneel. Upright and unflinching, he went to meet things as they came, reckless, unwise, but certainly not afraid. And this characteristic operated now. He ran to meet Death full tilt in the uncharted spaces that lay behind the stars. With love for a companion now, he raced, his speed increasing from day to day, she, as he thought, knowing merely that he sought her, but had not guessed his darker secret that was now his lesser secret.\n\nAnd in the desert, this afternoon of the picnic, the great thing he sped to meet had shown itself with its familiar touch of appalling cold and shadow, familiar, because all minds know of and accept it; appalling because, until realised close, and with the mental power at the full, it remains but a name the heart refuses to believe in. And he had discovered that its name was\u2014Life.\n\nRivers had seen the Wave that sweeps incessant, tireless, but as a rule invisible, round the great curve of the bulging earth, brushing the nations into the deeps behind. It had followed him home to the streets and houses of Helouan. He saw it now, as he leaned from his window, dim and immense, too huge to break. Its beauty was nameless, undecipherable. His coughing echoed back from the wall of its great sides. ... And the music floated up at the same time from the ball-room in the opposite wing. The two sounds mingled. Life, which is love, and Death, which is their unchanging partner, held hands beneath the stars.\n\nHe leaned out farther to drink in the cool, sweet air. Soon, on this air, his body would be dust, driven, perhaps, against her very cheek, trodden on possibly by her little foot\u2014until, in turn, she joined him too, blown by the same wind loose about the desert. True. Yet at the same time they would always be together, always somewhere side by side, continuing in the vast universe, alive. This new, absolute conviction was in him now. He remembered the curious, sweet perfume in the desert, as of flowers, where yet no flowers are. It was the perfume of life. But in the desert there is no life. Living things that grow and move and utter, are but a protest against death. In the desert they are unnecessary, because death there is not. Its overwhelming vitality needs no insolent, visible proof, no protest, no challenge, no little signs of life. The message of the desert is immortality. ...\n\nHe went finally to bed, just before midnight. Hovering magnificently just outside his window, Death watched him while he slept. The wave crept to the level of his eyes. He called her name. ..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 530", + "text": "And downstairs, meanwhile, the girl, knowing nothing, wondered where he was, wondered unhappily and restlessly; more\u2014though this she did not understand\u2014wondered motheringly. Until to-day, on the ride home, and from their singular conversation together, she had guessed nothing of his reason for being at Helouan, where so many come in order to find life. She only knew her own. And she was but twenty-five. ...\n\nThen, in the desert, when that touch of unearthly chill had stolen out of the sand towards sunset, she had realised clearly, astonished she had not seen it long ago, that this man loved her, yet that something prevented his obeying the great impulse. In the life of Paul Rivers, whose presence had profoundly stirred her heart the first time she saw him, there was some obstacle that held him back, a barrier his honour must respect. He could never tell her of his love. It could lead to nothing. Knowing that he was not married, her intuition failed her utterly at first. Then, in their silence on the homeward ride, the truth had somehow pressed up and touched her with its hand of ice. In that disjointed conversation at the end, which reads as it sounded, as though no coherent meaning lay behind the words, and as though both sought to conceal by speech what yet both burned to utter, she had divined his darker secret, and knew that it was the same as her own. She understood then it was Death that had tracked them from the desert, following with its gigantic shadow from the sandy wastes. The cold, the darkness, the silence which cannot answer, the stupendous mystery which is the spell of its inscrutable Presence, had risen about them in the dusk, and kept them company at a little distance, until the lights of Helouan had bade it halt. Life which may not, cannot end, had frightened her.\n\nHis time, perhaps, was even shorter than her own. None knew his secret, since he was alone in Egypt and was caring for himself. Similarly, since she bravely kept her terror to herself, her mother had no inkling of her own, aware merely that the disease was in her system and that her orders were to be extremely cautious. This couple, therefore, shared secretly together the two clearest glimpses of eternity life has to offer to the soul. Side by side they looked into the splendid eyes of Love and Death. Life, moreover, with its instinct for simple and terrific drama, had produced this majestic climax, breaking with pathos, at the very moment when it could not be developed\u2014this side of the stars. They stood together upon the stage, a stage emptied of other human players; the audience had gone home and the lights were being lowered; no music sounded; the critics were a-bed. In this great game of Consequences it was known where he met her, what he said and what she answered, possibly what they did and even what the world thought. But \"what the consequence was\" would remain unknown, untold. That would happen in the big spaces of which the desert in its silence, its motionless serenity, its shelterless, intolerable vastness, is the perfect symbol. And the desert gives no answer. It sounds no challenge, for it is complete. Life in the desert makes no sign. It is." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 531", + "text": "In the hotel that night there arrived by chance a famous International dancer, whose dahab\u00eeyeh lay anchored at San Giovanni, in the Nile below Helouan; and this woman, with her party, had come to dine and take part in the festivities. The news spread. After twelve the lights were lowered, and while the moonlight flooded the terraces, streaming past pillar and colonnade, she rendered in the shadowed halls the music of the Masters, interpreting with an instinctive genius messages which are eternal and divine.\n\nAmong the crowd of enthralled and delighted guests, the girl sat on the steps and watched her. The rhythmical interpretation held a power that seemed, in a sense, inspired; there lay in it a certain unconscious something that was pure, unearthly; something that the stars, wheeling in stately movements over the sea and desert know; something the great winds bring to mountains where they play together; something the forests capture and fix magically into their gathering of big and little branches. It was both passionate and spiritual, wild and tender, intensely human and seductively non-human. For it was original, taught of Nature, a revelation of naked, unhampered life. It comforted, as the desert comforts. It brought the desert awe into the stuffy corridors of the hotel, with the moonlight and the whispering of stars, yet behind it ever the silence of those grey, mysterious, interminable spaces which utter to themselves the wordless song of life. For it was the same dim thing, she felt, that had followed her from the desert several hours before, halting just outside the streets and houses as though blocked from further advance; the thing that had stopped her foolish painting, skilled though she was, because it hides behind colour and not in it; the thing that veiled the meaning in the cryptic sentences she and he had stammered out together; the thing, in a word, as near as she could approach it by any means of interior expression, that the realisation of death for the first time makes comprehensible\u2014Immortality. It was unutterable, but it was. He and she were indissolubly together. Death was no separation. There was no death. ... It was terrible. It was\u2014she had already used the word\u2014awful, full of awe.\n\n\"In the desert,\" thought whispered, as she watched spellbound, \"it is impossible even to conceive of death. The idea is meaningless. It simply is not.\"\n\nThe music and the movement filled the air with life which, being there, must continue always, and continuing always can have never had a beginning. Death, therefore, was the great revealer of life. Without it none could realise that they are alive. Others had discovered this before her, but she did not know it. In the desert no one can realise death: it is hope and life that are the only certainty. The entire conception of the Egyptian system was based on this\u2014the conviction, sure and glorious, of life's endless continuation. Their tombs and temples, their pyramids and sphinxes surviving after thousands of years, defy the passage of time and laugh at death; the very bodies of their priests and kings, of their animals even, their fish, their insects, stand to-day as symbols of their stalwart knowledge.\n\nAnd this girl, as she listened to the music and watched the inspired dancing, remembered it. The message poured into her from many sides, though the desert brought it clearest. With death peering into her face a few short weeks ahead, she thought instead of\u2014life. The desert, as it were, became for her a little fragment of eternity, focused into an intelligible point for her mind to rest upon with comfort and comprehension. Her steady, thoughtful nature stirred towards an objective far beyond the small enclosure of one narrow lifetime. The scale of the desert stretched her to the grandeur of its own imperial meaning, its divine repose, its unassailable and everlasting majesty. She looked beyond the wall.\n\nEternity! That which is endless; without pause, without beginning, without divisions or boundaries. The fluttering of her brave yet frightened spirit ceased, aware with awe of its own everlastingness. The swiftest motion produces the effect of immobility; excessive light is darkness; size, run loose into enormity, is the same as the minutely tiny. Similarly, in the desert, life, too overwhelming and terrific to know limit or confinement, lies undetailed and stupendous, still as deity, a revelation of nothingness because it is all. Turned golden beneath its spell that the music and the rhythm made even more comprehensible, the soul in her, already lying beneath the shadow of the great wave, sank into rest and peace, too certain of itself to fear. And panic fled away. \"I am immortal... because I am. And what I love is not apart from me. It is myself. We are together endlessly because we are.\"\n\nYet in reality, though the big desert brought this, it was Love, which, being of similar parentage, interpreted its vast meaning to her little heart\u2014that sudden love which, without a word of preface or explanation, had come to her a short three weeks before. ... She went up to her room soon after midnight, abruptly, unexpectedly stricken. Some one, it seemed, had called her name. She passed his door.\n\nThe lights had been turned up. The clamour of praise was loud round the figure of the weary dancer as she left in a carriage for her dahab\u00eeyeh on the Nile. A low wind whistled round the walls of the great hotel, blowing chill and bitter between the pillars of the colonnades. The girl heard the voices float up to her through the night, and once more, behind the confused sound of the many, she heard her own name called, but more faintly than before, and from very far away. It came through the spaces beyond her open window; it died away again; then\u2014but for the sighing of that bitter wind\u2014silence, the deep silence of the desert.\n\nAnd these two, Paul Rivers and the girl, between them merely a floor of that stone that built the Pyramids, lay a few moments before the Wave of Sleep engulfed them. And, while they slept, two shadowy forms hovered above the roof of the quiet hotel, melting presently into one, as dreams stole down from the desert and the stars. Immortality whispered to them. On either side rose Life and Death, towering in splendour. Love, joining their spreading wings, fused the gigantic outlines into one. The figures grew smaller, comprehensible. They entered the little windows. Above the beds they paused a moment, watching, waiting, and then, like a wave that is just about to break, they stooped. ...\n\nAnd in the brilliant Egyptian sunlight of the morning, as she went downstairs, she passed his door again. She had awakened, but he slept on. He had preceded her. It was next day she learned his room was vacant. ... Within the month she joined him, and within the year the cool north wind that sweetens Lower Egypt from the sea blew the dust across the desert as before. It is the dust of kings, of queens, of priests, princesses, lovers. It is the dust no earthly power can annihilate. It, too, lasts for ever. There was a little more of it... the desert's message slightly added to: Immortality." + }, + { + "title": "The Other Wing by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "It used to puzzle him that, after dark, some one would look in round the edge of the bedroom door, and withdraw again too rapidly for him to see the face. When the nurse had gone away with the candle this happened: \"Good night, Master Tim,\" she said usually, shading the light with one hand to protect his eyes; \"dream of me and I'll dream of you.\" She went out slowly. The sharp-edged shadow of the door ran across the ceiling like a train. There came a whispered colloquy in the corridor outside, about himself, of course, and\u2014he was alone. He heard her steps going deeper and deeper into the bosom of the old country house; they were audible for a moment on the stone flooring of the hall; and sometimes the dull thump of the baize door into the servants' quarters just reached him, too\u2014then silence. But it was only when the last sound, as well as the last sign of her had vanished, that the face emerged from its hiding-place and flashed in upon him round the corner. As a rule, too, it came just as he was saying, \"Now I'll go to sleep. I won't think any longer. Good night, Master Tim, and happy dreams.\" He loved to say this to himself; it brought a sense of companionship, as though there were two persons speaking.\n\nThe room was on the top of the old house, a big, high-ceilinged room, and his bed against the wall had an iron railing round it; he felt very safe and protected in it. The curtains at the other end of the room were drawn. He lay watching the firelight dancing on the heavy folds, and their pattern, showing a spaniel chasing a long-tailed bird towards a bushy tree, interested and amused him. It was repeated over and over again. He counted the number of dogs, and the number of birds, and the number of trees, but could never make them agree. There was a plan somewhere in that pattern; if only he could discover it, the dogs and birds and trees would \"come out right.\" Hundreds and hundreds of times he had played this game, for the plan in the pattern made it possible to take sides, and the bird and dog were against him. They always won, however; Tim usually fell asleep just when the advantage was on his own side. The curtains hung steadily enough most of the time, but it seemed to him once or twice that they stirred\u2014hiding a dog or bird on purpose to prevent his winning. For instance, he had eleven birds and eleven trees, and, fixing them in his mind by saying, \"that's eleven birds and eleven trees, but only ten dogs,\" his eyes darted back to find the eleventh dog, when\u2014the curtain moved and threw all his calculations into confusion again. The eleventh dog was hidden. He did not quite like the movement; it gave him questionable feelings, rather, for the curtain did not move of itself. Yet, usually, he was too intent upon counting the dogs to feel positive alarm.\n\nOpposite to him was the fireplace, full of red and yellow coals; and, lying with his head sideways on the pillow, he could see directly in between the bars. When the coals settled with a soft and powdery crash, he turned his eyes from the curtains to the grate, trying to discover exactly which bits had fallen. So long as the glow was there the sound seemed pleasant enough, but sometimes he awoke later in the night, the room huge with darkness, the fire almost out\u2014and the sound was not so pleasant then. It startled him. The coals did not fall of themselves. It seemed that some one poked them cautiously. The shadows were very thick before the bars. As with the curtains, moreover, the morning aspect of the extinguished fire, the ice-cold cinders that made a clinking sound like tin, caused no emotion whatever in his soul.\n\nAnd it was usually while he lay waiting for sleep, tired both of the curtain and the coal games, on the point, indeed, of saying, \"I'll go to sleep now,\" that the puzzling thing took place. He would be staring drowsily at the dying fire, perhaps counting the stockings and flannel garments that hung along the high fender-rail when, suddenly, a person looked in with lightning swiftness through the door and vanished again before he could possibly turn his head to see. The appearance and disappearance were accomplished with amazing rapidity always.\n\nIt was a head and shoulders that looked in, and the movement combined the speed, the lightness and the silence of a shadow. Only it was not a shadow. A hand held the edge of the door. The face shot round, saw him, and withdrew like lightning. It was utterly beyond him to imagine anything more quick and clever. It darted. He heard no sound. It went. But\u2014it had seen him, looked him all over, examined him, noted what he was doing with that lightning glance. It wanted to know if he were awake still, or asleep. And though it went off, it still watched him from a distance; it waited somewhere; it knew all about him. Where it waited no one could ever guess. It came probably, he felt, from beyond the house, possibly from the roof, but most likely from the garden or the sky. Yet, though strange, it was not terrible. It was a kindly and protective figure, he felt. And when it happened he never called for help, because the occurrence simply took his voice away.\n\n\"It comes from the Nightmare Passage,\" he decided; \"but it's not a nightmare.\" It puzzled him.\n\nSometimes, moreover, it came more than once in a single night. He was pretty sure\u2014not quite positive\u2014that it occupied his room as soon as he was properly asleep. It took possession, sitting perhaps before the dying fire, standing upright behind the heavy curtains, or even lying down in the empty bed his brother used when he was home from school. Perhaps it played the curtain game, perhaps it poked the coals; it knew, at any rate, where the eleventh dog had lain concealed. It certainly came in and out; certainly, too, it did not wish to be seen. For, more than once, on waking suddenly in the midnight blackness, Tim knew it was standing close beside his bed and bending over him. He felt, rather than heard, its presence. It glided quietly away. It moved with marvellous softness, yet he was positive it moved. He felt the difference, so to speak. It had been near him, now it was gone. It came back, too\u2014just as he was falling into sleep again. Its midnight coming and going, however, stood out sharply different from its first shy, tentative approach. For in the firelight it came alone; whereas in the black and silent hours, it had with it\u2014others.\n\nAnd it was then he made up his mind that its swift and quiet movements were due to the fact that it had wings. It flew. And the others that came with it in the darkness were \"its little ones.\" He also made up his mind that all were friendly, comforting, protective, and that while positively not a Nightmare, it yet came somehow along the Nightmare Passage before it reached him. \"You see, it's like this,\" he explained to the nurse: \"The big one comes to visit me alone, but it only brings its little ones when I'm quite asleep.\"\n\n\"Then the quicker you get to sleep the better, isn't it, Master Tim?\"\n\nHe replied: \"Rather! I always do. Only I wonder where they come from!\" He spoke, however, as though he had an inkling.\n\nBut the nurse was so dull about it that he gave her up and tried his father. \"Of course,\" replied this busy but affectionate parent; \"it's either nobody at all, or else it's Sleep coming to carry you away to the land of dreams.\" He made the statement kindly but somewhat briskly, for he was worried just then about the extra taxes on his land, and the effort to fix his mind on Tim's fanciful world was beyond him at the moment. He lifted the boy on to his knee, kissed and patted him as though he were a favourite dog, and planted him on the rug again with a flying sweep. \"Run and ask your mother,\" he added; \"she knows all that kind of thing. Then come back and tell me all about it\u2014another time.\"\n\nTim found his mother in an arm-chair before the fire of another room; she was knitting and reading at the same time\u2014a wonderful thing the boy could never understand. She raised her head as he came in, pushed her glasses on to her forehead, and held her arms out. He told her everything, ending up with what his father said.\n\n\"You see, it's not Jackman, or Thompson, or any one like that,\" he exclaimed. \"It's some one real.\"\n\n\"But nice,\" she assured him, \"some one who comes to take care of you and see that you're all safe and cosy.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I know that. But\u2014\"\n\n\"I think your father's right,\" she added quickly. \"It's Sleep, I'm sure, who pops in round the door like that. Sleep has got wings, I've always heard.\"\n\n\"Then the other thing\u2014the little ones?\" he asked. \"Are they just sorts of dozes, you think?\"\n\nMother did not answer for a moment. She turned down the page of her book, closed it slowly, put it on the table beside her. More slowly still she put her knitting away, arranging the wool and needles with some deliberation.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" she said, drawing the boy closer to her and looking into his big eyes of wonder, \"they're dreams!\"\n\nTim felt a thrill run through him as she said it. He stepped back a foot or so and clapped his hands softly. \"Dreams!\" he whispered with enthusiasm and belief; \"of course! I never thought of that.\"\n\nHis mother, having proved her sagacity, then made a mistake. She noted her success, but instead of leaving it there, she elaborated and explained. As Tim expressed it she \"went on about it.\" Therefore he did not listen. He followed his train of thought alone. And presently, he interrupted her long sentences with a conclusion of his own:\n\n\"Then I know where She hides,\" he announced with a touch of awe. \"Where She lives, I mean.\" And without waiting to be asked, he imparted the information: \"It's in the Other Wing.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said his mother, taken by surprise. \"How clever of you, Tim!\"\u2014and thus confirmed it.\n\nThenceforward this was established in his life\u2014that Sleep and her attendant Dreams hid during the daytime in that unused portion of the great Elizabethan mansion called the Other Wing. This other wing was unoccupied, its corridors untrodden, its windows shuttered and its rooms all closed. At various places green baize doors led into it, but no one ever opened them. For many years this part had been shut up; and for the children, properly speaking, it was out of bounds. They never mentioned it as a possible place, at any rate; in hide-and-seek it was not considered, even; there was a hint of the inaccessible about the Other Wing. Shadows, dust, and silence had it to themselves.\n\nBut Tim, having ideas of his own about everything, possessed special information about the Other Wing. He believed it was inhabited. Who occupied the immense series of empty rooms, who trod the spacious corridors, who passed to and fro behind the shuttered windows, he had not known exactly. He had called these occupants \"they,\" and the most important among them was \"The Ruler.\" The Ruler of the Other Wing was a kind of deity, powerful, far away, ever present yet never seen.\n\nAnd about this Ruler he had a wonderful conception for a little boy; he connected her, somehow, with deep thoughts of his own, the deepest of all. When he made up adventures to the moon, to the stars, or to the bottom of the sea, adventures that he lived inside himself, as it were\u2014to reach them he must invariably pass through the chambers of the Other Wing. Those corridors and halls, the Nightmare Passage among them, lay along the route; they were the first stage of the journey. Once the green baize doors swung to behind him and the long dim passage stretched ahead, he was well on his way into the adventure of the moment; the Nightmare Passage once passed, he was safe from capture; but once the shutters of a window had been flung open, he was free of the gigantic world that lay beyond. For then light poured in and he could see his way.\n\nThe conception, for a child, was curious. It established a correspondence between the mysterious chambers of the Other Wing and the occupied, but unguessed chambers of his Inner Being. Through these chambers, through these darkened corridors, along a passage, sometimes dangerous, or at least of questionable repute, he must pass to find all adventures that were real. The light\u2014when he pierced far enough to take the shutters down\u2014was discovery. Tim did not actually think, much less say, all this. He was aware of it, however. He felt it. The Other Wing was inside himself as well as through the green baize doors. His inner map of wonder included both of them.\n\nBut now, for the first time in his life, he knew who lived there and who the Ruler was. A shutter had fallen of its own accord; light poured in; he made a guess, and Mother had confirmed it. Sleep and her Little Ones, the host of dreams, were the daylight occupants. They stole out when the darkness fell. All adventures in life began and ended by a dream\u2014discoverable by first passing through the Other Wing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 533", + "text": "And, having settled this, his one desire now was to travel over the map upon journeys of exploration and discovery. The map inside himself he knew already, but the map of the Other Wing he had not seen. His mind knew it, he had a clear mental picture of rooms and halls and passages, but his feet had never trod the silent floors where dust and shadows hid the flock of dreams by day. The mighty chambers where Sleep ruled he longed to stand in, to see the Ruler face to face. He made up his mind to get into the Other Wing.\n\nTo accomplish this was difficult; but Tim was a determined youngster, and he meant to try; he meant, also, to succeed. He deliberated. At night he could not possibly manage it; in any case, the Ruler and her host all left it after dark, to fly about the world; the Wing would be empty, and the emptiness would frighten him. Therefore he must make a daylight visit; and it was a daylight visit he decided on. He deliberated more. There were rules and risks involved: it meant going out of bounds, the danger of being seen, the certainty of being questioned by some idle and inquisitive grown-up: \"Where in the world have you been all this time\"\u2014and so forth. These things he thought out carefully, and though he arrived at no solution, he felt satisfied that it would be all right. That is, he recognised the risks. To be prepared was half the battle, for nothing then could take him by surprise.\n\nThe notion that he might slip in from the garden was soon abandoned; the red bricks showed no openings; there was no door; from the courtyard, also, entrance was impracticable; even on tiptoe he could barely reach the broad window-sills of stone. When playing alone, or walking with the French governess, he examined every outside possibility. None offered. The shutters, supposing he could reach them, were thick and solid.\n\nMeanwhile, when opportunity offered, he stood against the outside walls and listened, his ear pressed against the tight red bricks; the towers and gables of the Wing rose overhead; he heard the wind go whispering along the eaves; he imagined tiptoe movements and a sound of wings inside. Sleep and her Little Ones were busily preparing for their journeys after dark; they hid, but they did not sleep; in this unused Wing, vaster alone than any other country house he had ever seen, Sleep taught and trained her flock of feathered Dreams. It was very wonderful. They probably supplied the entire county. But more wonderful still was the thought that the Ruler herself should take the trouble to come to his particular room and personally watch over him all night long. That was amazing. And it flashed across his imaginative, inquiring mind: \"Perhaps they take me with them! The moment I'm asleep! That's why she comes to see me!\"\n\nYet his chief preoccupation was, how Sleep got out. Through the green baize doors, of course! By a process of elimination he arrived at a conclusion: he, too, must enter through a green baize door and risk detection.\n\nOf late, the lightning visits had ceased. The silent, darting figure had not peeped in and vanished as it used to do. He fell asleep too quickly now, almost before Jackman reached the hall, and long before the fire began to die. Also, the dogs and birds upon the curtains always matched the trees exactly, and he won the curtain game quite easily; there was never a dog or bird too many; the curtain never stirred. It had been thus ever since his talk with Mother and Father. And so he came to make a second discovery: His parents did not really believe in his Figure. She kept away on that account. They doubted her; she hid. Here was still another incentive to go and find her out. He ached for her, she was so kind, she gave herself so much trouble\u2014just for his little self in the big and lonely bedroom. Yet his parents spoke of her as though she were of no account. He longed to see her, face to face, and tell her that he believed in her and loved her. For he was positive she would like to hear it. She cared. Though he had fallen asleep of late too quickly for him to see her flash in at the door, he had known nicer dreams than ever in his life before\u2014travelling dreams. And it was she who sent them. More\u2014he was sure she took him out with her.\n\nOne evening, in the dusk of a March day, his opportunity came; and only just in time, for his brother Jack was expected home from school on the morrow, and with Jack in the other bed, no Figure would ever care to show itself. Also it was Easter, and after Easter, though Tim was not aware of it at the time, he was to say good-bye finally to governesses and become a day-boarder at a preparatory school for Wellington. The opportunity offered itself so naturally, moreover, that Tim took it without hesitation. It never occurred to him to question, much less to refuse it. The thing was obviously meant to be. For he found himself unexpectedly in front of a green baize door; and the green baize door was\u2014swinging! Somebody, therefore, had just passed through it.\n\nIt had come about in this wise. Father, away in Scotland, at Inglemuir, the shooting place, was expected back next morning; Mother had driven over to the church upon some Easter business or other; and the governess had been allowed her holiday at home in France. Tim, therefore, had the run of the house, and in the hour between tea and bed-time he made good use of it. Fully able to defy such second-rate obstacles as nurses and butlers, he explored all manner of forbidden places with ardent thoroughness, arriving finally in the sacred precincts of his father's study. This wonderful room was the very heart and centre of the whole big house; he had been birched here long ago; here, too, his father had told him with a grave yet smiling face: \"You've got a new companion, Tim, a little sister; you must be very kind to her.\" Also, it was the place where all the money was kept. What he called \"father's jolly smell\" was strong in it\u2014papers, tobacco, books, flavoured by hunting crops and gunpowder.\n\nAt first he felt awed, standing motionless just inside the door; but presently, recovering equilibrium, he moved cautiously on tiptoe towards the gigantic desk where important papers were piled in untidy patches. These he did not touch; but beside them his quick eye noted the jagged piece of iron shell his father brought home from his Crimean campaign and now used as a letter-weight. It was difficult to lift, however. He climbed into the comfortable chair and swung round and round. It was a swivel-chair, and he sank down among the cushions in it, staring at the strange things on the great desk before him, as if fascinated. Next he turned away and saw the stick-rack in the corner\u2014this, he knew, he was allowed to touch. He had played with these sticks before. There were twenty, perhaps, all told, with curious carved handles, brought from every corner of the world; many of them cut by his father's own hand in queer and distant places. And, among them, Tim fixed his eye upon a cane with an ivory handle, a slender, polished cane that he had always coveted tremendously. It was the kind he meant to use when he was a man. It bent, it quivered, and when he swished it through the air it trembled like a riding-whip, and made a whistling noise. Yet it was very strong in spite of its elastic qualities. A family treasure, it was also an old-fashioned relic; it had been his grandfather's walking stick. Something of another century clung visibly about it still. It had dignity and grace and leisure in its very aspect. And it suddenly occurred to him: \"How grandpapa must miss it! Wouldn't he just love to have it back again!\"\n\nHow it happened exactly, Tim did not know, but a few minutes later he found himself walking about the deserted halls and passages of the house with the air of an elderly gentleman of a hundred years ago, proud as a courtier, flourishing the stick like an Eighteenth Century dandy in the Mall. That the cane reached to his shoulder made no difference; he held it accordingly, swaggering on his way. He was off upon an adventure. He dived down through the byways of the Other Wing, inside himself, as though the stick transported him to the days of the old gentleman who had used it in another century.\n\nIt may seem strange to those who dwell in smaller houses, but in this rambling Elizabethan mansion there were whole sections that, even to Tim, were strange and unfamiliar. In his mind the map of the Other Wing was clearer by far than the geography of the part he travelled daily. He came to passages and dim-lit halls, long corridors of stone beyond the Picture Gallery; narrow, wainscoted connecting-channels with four steps down and a little later two steps up; deserted chambers with arches guarding them\u2014all hung with the soft March twilight and all bewilderingly unrecognised. With a sense of adventure born of naughtiness he went carelessly along, farther and farther into the heart of this unfamiliar country, swinging the cane, one thumb stuck into the arm-pit of his blue serge suit, whistling softly to himself, excited yet keenly on the alert\u2014and suddenly found himself opposite a door that checked all further advance. It was a green baize door. And it was swinging.\n\nHe stopped abruptly, facing it. He stared, he gripped his cane more tightly, he held his breath. \"The Other Wing!\" he gasped in a swallowed whisper. It was an entrance, but an entrance he had never seen before. He thought he knew every door by heart; but this one was new. He stood motionless for several minutes, watching it; the door had two halves, but one half only was swinging, each swing shorter than the one before; he heard the little puffs of air it made; it settled finally, the last movements very short and rapid; it stopped. And the boy's heart, after similar rapid strokes, stopped also\u2014for a moment.\n\n\"Some one's just gone through,\" he gulped. And even as he said it he knew who the some one was. The conviction just dropped into him. \"It's Grandfather; he knows I've got his stick. He wants it!\" On the heels of this flashed instantly another amazing certainty. \"He sleeps in there. He's having dreams. That's what being dead means.\"\n\nHis first impulse, then, took the form of, \"I must let Father know; it'll make him burst for joy\"; but his second was for himself\u2014to finish his adventure. And it was this, naturally enough, that gained the day. He could tell his father later. His first duty was plainly to go through the door into the Other Wing. He must give the stick back to its owner. He must hand it back.\n\nThe test of will and character came now. Tim had imagination, and so knew the meaning of fear; but there was nothing craven in him. He could howl and scream and stamp like any other person of his age when the occasion called for such behaviour, but such occasions were due to temper roused by a thwarted will, and the histrionics were half \"pretended\" to produce a calculated effect. There was no one to thwart his will at present. He also knew how to be afraid of Nothing, to be afraid without ostensible cause, that is\u2014which was merely \"nerves.\" He could have \"the shudders\" with the best of them.\n\nBut, when a real thing faced him, Tim's character emerged to meet it. He would clench his hands, brace his muscles, set his teeth\u2014and wish to heaven he was bigger. But he would not flinch. Being imaginative, he lived the worst a dozen times before it happened, yet in the final crash he stood up like a man. He had that highest pluck\u2014the courage of a sensitive temperament. And at this particular juncture, somewhat ticklish for a boy of eight or nine, it did not fail him. He lifted the cane and pushed the swinging door wide open. Then he walked through it\u2014into the Other Wing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 534", + "text": "The green baize door swung to behind him; he was even sufficiently master of himself to turn and close it with a steady hand, because he did not care to hear the series of muffled thuds its lessening swings would cause. But he realised clearly his position, knew he was doing a tremendous thing.\n\nHolding the cane between fingers very tightly clenched, he advanced bravely along the corridor that stretched before him. And all fear left him from that moment, replaced, it seemed, by a mild and exquisite surprise. His footsteps made no sound, he walked on air; instead of darkness, or the twilight he expected, a diffused and gentle light that seemed like the silver on the lawn when a half-moon sails a cloudless sky, lay everywhere. He knew his way, moreover, knew exactly where he was and whither he was going. The corridor was as familiar to him as the floor of his own bedroom; he recognised the shape and length of it; it agreed exactly with the map he had constructed long ago. Though he had never, to the best of his knowledge, entered it before, he knew with intimacy its every detail.\n\nAnd thus the surprise he felt was mild and far from disconcerting. \"I'm here again!\" was the kind of thought he had. It was how he got here that caused the faint surprise, apparently. He no longer swaggered, however, but walked carefully, and half on tiptoe, holding the ivory handle of the cane with a kind of affectionate respect. And as he advanced, the light closed softly up behind him, obliterating the way by which he had come. But this he did not know, because he did not look behind him. He only looked in front, where the corridor stretched its silvery length towards the great chamber where he knew the cane must be surrendered. The person who had preceded him down this ancient corridor, passing through the green baize door just before he reached it, this person, his father's father, now stood in that great chamber, waiting to receive his own. Tim knew it as surely as he knew he breathed. At the far end he even made out the larger patch of silvery light which marked its gaping doorway.\n\nThere was another thing he knew as well\u2014that this corridor he moved along between rooms with fast-closed doors, was the Nightmare Corridor; often and often he had traversed it; each room was occupied. \"This is the Nightmare Passage,\" he whispered to himself, \"but I know the Ruler\u2014it doesn't matter. None of them can get out or do anything.\" He heard them, none the less, inside, as he passed by; he heard them scratching to get out. The feeling of security made him reckless; he took unnecessary risks; he brushed the panels as he passed. And the love of keen sensation for its own sake, the desire to feel \"an awful thrill,\" tempted him once so sharply that he raised his stick and poked a fast-shut door with it!\n\nHe was not prepared for the result, but he gained the sensation and the thrill. For the door opened with instant swiftness half an inch, a hand emerged, caught the stick and tried to draw it in. Tim sprang back as if he had been struck. He pulled at the ivory handle with all his strength, but his strength was less than nothing. He tried to shout, but his voice had gone. A terror of the moon came over him, for he was unable to loosen his hold of the handle; his fingers had become a part of it. An appalling weakness turned him helpless. He was dragged inch by inch towards the fearful door. The end of the stick was already through the narrow, crack. He could not see the hand that pulled, but he knew it was terrific. He understood now why the world was strange, why horses galloped furiously, and why trains whistled as they raced through stations. All the comedy and terror of nightmare gripped his heart with pincers made of ice. The disproportion was abominable. The final collapse rushed over him when, without a sign of warning, the door slammed silently, and between the jamb and the wall the cane was crushed as flat as if it were a bulrush. So irresistible was the force behind the door that the solid stick just went flat as a stalk of a bulrush.\n\nHe looked at it. It was a bulrush.\n\nHe did not laugh; the absurdity was so distressingly unnatural. The horror of finding a bulrush where he had expected a polished cane\u2014this hideous and appalling detail held the nameless horror of the nightmare. It betrayed him utterly. Why had he not always known really that the stick was not a stick, but a thin and hollow reed ...?\n\nThen the cane was safely in his hand, unbroken. He stood looking at it. The Nightmare was in full swing. He heard another door opening behind his back, a door he had not touched. There was just time to see a hand thrusting and waving dreadfully, familiarly, at him through the narrow crack\u2014just time to realise that this was another Nightmare acting in atrocious concert with the first, when he saw closely beside him, towering to the ceiling, the protective, kindly Figure that visited his bedroom. In the turning movement he made to meet the attack, he became aware of her. And his terror passed. It was a nightmare terror merely. The infinite horror vanished. Only the comedy remained. He smiled.\n\nHe saw her dimly only, she was so vast, but he saw her, the Ruler of the Other Wing at last, and knew that he was safe again. He gazed with a tremendous love and wonder, trying to see her clearly; but the face was hidden far aloft and seemed to melt into the sky beyond the roof. He discerned that she was larger than the Night, only far, far softer, with wings that folded above him more tenderly even than his mother's arms; that there were points of light like stars among the feathers, and that she was vast enough to cover millions and millions of people all at once. Moreover, she did not fade or go, so far as he could see, but spread herself in such a way that he lost sight of her. She spread over the entire Wing. ...\n\nAnd Tim remembered that this was all quite natural really. He had often and often been down this corridor before; the Nightmare Corridor was no new experience; it had to be faced as usual. Once knowing what hid inside the rooms, he was bound to tempt them out. They drew, enticed, attracted him; this was their power. It was their special strength that they could suck him helplessly towards them, and that he was obliged to go. He understood exactly why he was tempted to tap with the cane upon their awful doors, but, having done so, he had accepted the challenge and could now continue his journey quietly and safely. The Ruler of the Other Wing had taken him in charge.\n\nA delicious sense of carelessness came on him. There was softness as of water in the solid things about him, nothing that could hurt or bruise. Holding the cane firmly by its ivory handle, he went forward along the corridor, walking as on air.\n\nThe end was quickly reached: He stood upon the threshold of the mighty chamber where he knew the owner of the cane was waiting; the long corridor lay behind him, in front he saw the spacious dimensions of a lofty hall that gave him the feeling of being in the Crystal Palace, Euston Station, or St. Paul's. High, narrow windows, cut deeply into the wall, stood in a row upon the other side; an enormous open fireplace of burning logs was on his right; thick tapestries hung from the ceiling to the floor of stone; and in the centre of the chamber was a massive table of dark, shining wood, great chairs with carved stiff backs set here and there beside it. And in the biggest of these throne-like chairs there sat a figure looking at him gravely\u2014the figure of an old, old man.\n\nYet there was no surprise in the boy's fast-beating heart; there was a thrill of pleasure and excitement only, a feeling of satisfaction. He had known quite well the figure would be there, known also it would look like this exactly. He stepped forward on to the floor of stone without a trace of fear or trembling, holding the precious cane in two hands now before him, as though to present it to its owner. He felt proud and pleased. He had run risks for this.\n\nAnd the figure rose quietly to meet him, advancing in a stately manner over the hard stone floor. The eyes looked gravely, sweetly down at him, the aquiline nose stood out. Tim knew him perfectly: the knee-breeches of shining satin, the gleaming buckles on the shoes, the neat dark stockings, the lace and ruffles about neck and wrists, the coloured waistcoat opening so widely\u2014all the details of the picture over father's mantelpiece, where it hung between two Crimean bayonets, were reproduced in life before his eyes at last. Only the polished cane with the ivory handle was not there.\n\nTim went three steps nearer to the advancing figure and held out both his hands with the cane laid crosswise on them.\n\n\"I've brought it, Grandfather,\" he said, in a faint but clear and steady tone; \"here it is.\"\n\nAnd the other stooped a little, put out three fingers half concealed by falling lace, and took it by the ivory handle. He made a courtly bow to Tim. He smiled, but though there was pleasure, it was a grave, sad smile. He spoke then: the voice was slow and very deep. There was a delicate softness in it, the suave politeness of an older day.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said; \"I value it. It was given to me by my grandfather. I forgot it when I\u2014\" His voice grew indistinct a little.\n\n\"Yes?\" said Tim.\n\n\"When I\u2014left,\" the old gentleman repeated.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Tim, thinking how beautiful and kind the gracious figure was.\n\nThe old man ran his slender fingers carefully along the cane, feeling the polished surface with satisfaction. He lingered specially over the smoothness of the ivory handle. He was evidently very pleased.\n\n\"I was not quite myself\u2014er\u2014at the moment,\" he went on gently; \"my memory failed me somewhat.\" He sighed, as though an immense relief was in him.\n\n\"I forget things, too\u2014sometimes,\" Tim mentioned sympathetically. He simply loved his grandfather. He hoped\u2014for a moment\u2014he would be lifted up and kissed. \"I'm awfully glad I brought it,\" he faltered\u2014\"that you've got it again.\"\n\nThe other turned his kind grey eyes upon him; the smile on his face was full of gratitude as he looked down.\n\n\"Thank you, my boy. I am truly and deeply indebted to you. You courted danger for my sake. Others have tried before, but the Nightmare Passage\u2014er\u2014\" He broke off. He tapped the stick firmly on the stone flooring, as though to test it. Bending a trifle, he put his weight upon it. \"Ah!\" he exclaimed with a short sigh of relief, \"I can now\u2014\"\n\nHis voice again grew indistinct; Tim did not catch the words.\n\n\"Yes?\" he asked again, aware for the first time that a touch of awe was in his heart.\n\n\"\u2014get about again,\" the other continued very low. \"Without my cane,\" he added, the voice failing with each word the old lips uttered, \"I could not... possibly... allow myself... to be seen. It was indeed... deplorable... unpardonable of me... to forget in such a way. Zounds, sir ...! I\u2014I...\"\n\nHis voice sank away suddenly into a sound of wind. He straightened up, tapping the iron ferrule of his cane on the stones in a series of loud knocks. Tim felt a strange sensation creep into his legs. The queer words frightened him a little.\n\nThe old man took a step towards him. He still smiled, but there was a new meaning in the smile. A sudden earnestness had replaced the courtly, leisurely manner. The next words seemed to blow down upon the boy from above, as though a cold wind brought them from the sky outside.\n\nYet the words, he knew, were kindly meant, and very sensible. It was only the abrupt change that startled him. Grandfather, after all, was but a man! The distant sound recalled something in him to that outside world from which the cold wind blew.\n\n\"My eternal thanks to you,\" he heard, while the voice and face and figure seemed to withdraw deeper and deeper into the heart of the mighty chamber. \"I shall not forget your kindness and your courage. It is a debt I can, fortunately, one day repay. ... But now you had best return and with dispatch. For your head and arm lie heavily on the table, the documents are scattered, there is a cushion fallen... and my son is in the house. ... Farewell! You had best leave me quickly. See! She stands behind you, waiting. Go with her! Go now ...!\"\n\nThe entire scene had vanished even before the final words were uttered. Tim felt empty space about him. A vast, shadowy Figure bore him through it as with mighty wings. He flew, he rushed, he remembered nothing more\u2014until he heard another voice and felt a heavy hand upon his shoulder.\n\n\"Tim, you rascal! What are you doing in my study? And in the dark, like this!\"\n\nHe looked up into his father's face without a word. He felt dazed. The next minute his father had caught him up and kissed him.\n\n\"Ragamuffin! How did you guess I was coming back to-night?\" He shook him playfully and kissed his tumbling hair. \"And you've been asleep, too, into the bargain. Well\u2014how's everything at home\u2014eh? Jack's coming back from school to-morrow, you know, and...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 535", + "text": "Jack came home, indeed, the following day, and when the Easter holidays were over, the governess stayed abroad and Tim went off to adventures of another kind in the preparatory school for Wellington. Life slipped rapidly along with him; he grew into a man; his mother and his father died; Jack followed them within a little space; Tim inherited, married, settled down into his great possessions\u2014and opened up the Other Wing. The dreams of imaginative boyhood all had faded; perhaps he had merely put them away, or perhaps he had forgotten them. At any rate, he never spoke of such things now, and when his Irish wife mentioned her belief that the old country house possessed a family ghost, even declaring that she had met an Eighteenth Century figure of a man in the corridors, \"an old, old man who bends down upon a stick\"\u2014Tim only laughed and said:\n\n\"That's as it ought to be! And if these awful land-taxes force us to sell some day, a respectable ghost will increase the market value.\"\n\nBut one night he woke and heard a tapping on the floor. He sat up in bed and listened. There was a chilly feeling down his back. Belief had long since gone out of him; he felt uncannily afraid. The sound came nearer and nearer; there were light footsteps with it. The door opened\u2014it opened a little wider, that is, for it already stood ajar\u2014and there upon the threshold stood a figure that it seemed he knew. He saw the face as with all the vivid sharpness of reality. There was a smile upon it, but a smile of warning and alarm. The arm was raised. Tim saw the slender hand, lace falling down upon the long, thin fingers, and in them, tightly gripped, a polished cane. Shaking the cane twice to and fro in the air, the face thrust forward, spoke certain words, and\u2014vanished. But the words were inaudible; for, though the lips distinctly moved, no sound, apparently, came from them.\n\nAnd Tim sprang out of bed. The room was full of darkness. He turned the light on. The door, he saw, was shut as usual. He had, of course, been dreaming. But he noticed a curious odour in the air. He sniffed it once or twice\u2014then grasped the truth. It was a smell of burning!\n\nFortunately, he awoke just in time. ...\n\nHe was acclaimed a hero for his promptitude. After many days, when the damage was repaired, and nerves had settled down once more into the calm routine of country life, he told the story to his wife\u2014the entire story. He told the adventure of his imaginative boyhood with it. She asked to see the old family cane. And it was this request of hers that brought back to memory a detail Tim had entirely forgotten all these years. He remembered it suddenly again\u2014the loss of the cane, the hubbub his father kicked up about it, the endless, futile search. For the stick had never been found, and Tim, who was questioned very closely concerning it, swore with all his might that he had not the smallest notion where it was. Which was, of course, the truth." + }, + { + "title": "The Occupant Of The Room by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "He arrived late at night by the yellow diligence, stiff and cramped after the toilsome ascent of three slow hours. The village, a single mass of shadow, was already asleep. Only in front of the little hotel was there noise and light and bustle\u2014for a moment. The horses, with tired, slouching gait, crossed the road and disappeared into the stable of their own accord, their harness trailing in the dust; and the lumbering diligence stood for the night where they had dragged it\u2014the body of a great yellow-sided beetle with broken legs.\n\nIn spite of his physical weariness the schoolmaster, revelling in the first hours of his ten-guinea holiday, felt exhilarated. For the high Alpine valley was marvellously still; stars twinkled over the torn ridges of the Dent du Midi where spectral snows gleamed against rocks that looked like solid ink; and the keen air smelt of pine forests, dew-soaked pastures, and freshly sawn wood. He took it all in with a kind of bewildered delight for a few minutes, while the other three passengers gave directions about their luggage and went to their rooms. Then he turned and walked over the coarse matting into the glare of the hall, only just able to resist stopping to examine the big mountain map that hung upon the wall by the door.\n\nAnd, with a sudden disagreeable shock, he came down from the ideal to the actual. For at the inn\u2014the only inn\u2014there was no vacant room. Even the available sofas were occupied. ...\n\nHow stupid he had been not to write! Yet it had been impossible, he remembered, for he had come to the decision suddenly that morning in Geneva, enticed by the brilliance of the weather after a week of rain.\n\nThey talked endlessly, this gold-braided porter and the hard-faced old woman\u2014her face was hard, he noticed\u2014gesticulating all the time, and pointing all about the village with suggestions that he ill understood, for his French was limited and their patois was fearful.\n\n\"There!\"\u2014he might find a room, \"or there! But we are, h\u00e9las full\u2014more full than we care about. To-morrow, perhaps\u2014if So-and-So give up their rooms\u2014!\" And then, with much shrugging of shoulders, the hard-faced old woman stared at the gold-braided porter, and the porter stared sleepily at the schoolmaster.\n\nAt length, however, by some process of hope he did not himself understand, and following directions given by the old woman that were utterly unintelligible, he went out into the street and walked towards a dark group of houses she had pointed out to him. He only knew that he meant to thunder at a door and ask for a room. He was too weary to think out details. The porter half made to go with him, but turned back at the last moment to speak with the old woman. The houses sketched themselves dimly in the general blackness. The air was cold. The whole valley was filled with the rush and thunder of falling water. He was thinking vaguely that the dawn could not be very far away, and that he might even spend the night wandering in the woods, when there was a sharp noise behind him and he turned to see a figure hurrying after him. It was the porter\u2014running.\n\nAnd in the little hall of the inn there began again a confused three-cornered conversation, with frequent muttered colloquy and whispered asides in patois between the woman and the porter\u2014the net result of which was that, \"If Monsieur did not object\u2014there was a room, after all, on the first floor\u2014only it was in a sense 'engaged.' That is to say\u2014\"\n\nBut the schoolmaster took the room without inquiring too closely into the puzzle that had somehow provided it so suddenly. The ethics of hotel-keeping had nothing to do with him. If the woman offered him quarters it was not for him to argue with her whether the said quarters were legitimately hers to offer.\n\nBut the porter, evidently a little thrilled, accompanied the guest up to the room and supplied in a mixture of French and English details omitted by the landlady\u2014and Minturn, the schoolmaster, soon shared the thrill with him, and found himself in the atmosphere of a possible tragedy.\n\nAll who know the peculiar excitement that belongs to high mountain valleys where dangerous climbing is a chief feature of the attractions, will understand a certain faint element of high alarm that goes with the picture. One looks up at the desolate, soaring ridges and thinks involuntarily of the men who find their pleasure for days and nights together scaling perilous summits among the clouds, and conquering inch by inch the icy peaks that for ever shake their dark terror in the sky. The atmosphere of adventure, spiced with the possible horror of a very grim order of tragedy, is inseparable from any imaginative contemplation of the scene; and the idea Minturn gleaned from the half-frightened porter lost nothing by his ignorance of the language. This Englishwoman, the real occupant of the room, had insisted on going without a guide. She had left just before daybreak two days before\u2014the porter had seen her start\u2014and... she had not returned! The route was difficult and dangerous, yet not impossible for a skilled climber, even a solitary one. And the Englishwoman was an experienced mountaineer. Also, she was self-willed, careless of advice, bored by warnings, self-confident to a degree. Queer, moreover; for she kept entirely to herself, and sometimes remained in her room with locked doors, admitting no one, for days together: a \"crank,\" evidently, of the first water.\n\nThis much Minturn gathered clearly enough from the porter's talk while his luggage was brought in and the room set to rights; further, too, that the search party had gone out and might, of course, return at any moment. In which case\u2014 Thus the room was empty, yet still hers. \"If Monsieur did not object\u2014if the risk he ran of having to turn out suddenly in the night\u2014\" It was the loquacious porter who furnished the details that made the transaction questionable; and Minturn dismissed the loquacious porter as soon as possible, and prepared to get into the hastily arranged bed and snatch all the hours of sleep he could before he was turned out.\n\nAt first, it must be admitted, he felt uncomfortable\u2014distinctly uncomfortable. He was in some one else's room. He had really no right to be there. It was in the nature of an unwarrantable intrusion; and while he unpacked he kept looking over his shoulder as though some one were watching him from the corners. Any moment, it seemed, he would hear a step in the passage, a knock would come at the door, the door would open, and there he would see this vigorous Englishwoman looking him up and down with anger. Worse still\u2014he would hear her voice asking him what he was doing in her room\u2014her bedroom. Of course, he had an adequate explanation, but still\u2014!\n\nThen, reflecting that he was already half undressed, the humour of it flashed for a second across his mind, and he laughed\u2014quietly. And at once, after that laughter, under his breath, came the sudden sense of tragedy he had felt before. Perhaps, even while he smiled, her body lay broken and cold upon those awful heights, the wind of snow playing over her hair, her glazed eyes staring sightless up to the stars. ... It made him shudder. The sense of this woman whom he had never seen, whose name even he did not know, became extraordinarily real. Almost he could imagine that she was somewhere in the room with him, hidden, observing all he did.\n\nHe opened the door softly to put his boots outside, and when he closed it again he turned the key. Then he finished unpacking and distributed his few things about the room. It was soon done; for, in the first place, he had only a small Gladstone and a knapsack, and secondly, the only place where he could spread his clothes was the sofa. There was no chest of drawers, and the cupboard, an unusually large and solid one, was locked. The Englishwoman's things had evidently been hastily put away in it. The only sign of her recent presence was a bunch of faded Alpenrosen standing in a glass jar upon the washhand stand. This, and a certain faint perfume, were all that remained. In spite, however, of these very slight evidences, the whole room was pervaded with a curious sense of occupancy that he found exceedingly distasteful. One moment the atmosphere seemed subtly charged with a \"just left\" feeling; the next it was a queer awareness of \"still here\" that made him turn cold and look hurriedly behind him.\n\nAltogether, the room inspired him with a singular aversion, and the strength of this aversion seemed the only excuse for his tossing the faded flowers out of the window, and then hanging his mackintosh upon the cupboard door in such a way as to screen it as much as possible from view. For the sight of that big, ugly cupboard, filled with the clothing of a woman who might then be beyond any further need of covering\u2014thus his imagination insisted on picturing it\u2014touched in him a startled sense of the Incongruous that did not stop there, but crept through his mind gradually till it merged somehow into a sense of a rather grotesque horror. At any rate, the sight of that cupboard was offensive, and he covered it almost instinctively. Then, turning out the electric light, he got into bed.\n\nBut the instant the room was dark he realised that it was more than he could stand; for, with the blackness, there came a sudden rush of cold that he found it hard to explain. And the odd thing was that, when he lit the candle beside his bed, he noticed that his hand trembled.\n\nThis, of course, was too much. His imagination was taking liberties and must be called to heel. Yet the way he called it to order was significant, and its very deliberateness betrayed a mind that has already admitted fear. And fear, once in, is difficult to dislodge. He lay there upon his elbow in bed and carefully took note of all the objects in the room\u2014with the intention, as it were, of taking an inventory of everything his senses perceived, then drawing a line, adding them up finally, and saying with decision, \"That's all the room contains! I've counted every single thing. There is nothing more. Now\u2014I may sleep in peace!\"\n\nAnd it was during this absurd process of enumerating the furniture of the room that the dreadful sense of distressing lassitude came over him that made it difficult even to finish counting. It came swiftly, yet with an amazing kind of violence that overwhelmed him softly and easily with a sensation of enervating weariness hard to describe. And its first effect was to banish fear. He no longer possessed enough energy to feel really afraid or nervous. The cold remained, but the alarm vanished. And into every corner of his usually vigorous personality crept the insidious poison of a muscular fatigue\u2014at first\u2014that in a few seconds, it seemed, translated itself into spiritual inertia. A sudden consciousness of the foolishness, the crass futility, of life, of effort, of fighting\u2014of all that makes life worth living, shot into every fibre of his being, and left him utterly weak. A spirit of black pessimism that was not even vigorous enough to assert itself, invaded the secret chambers of his heart. ...\n\nEvery picture that presented itself to his mind came dressed in grey shadows: those bored and sweating horses toiling up the ascent to\u2014nothing! that hard-faced landlady taking so much trouble to let her desire for gain conquer her sense of morality\u2014for a few francs! That gold-braided porter, so talkative, fussy, energetic, and so anxious to tell all he knew! What was the use of them all? And for himself, what in the world was the good of all the labour and drudgery he went through in that preparatory school where he was junior master? What could it lead to? Wherein lay the value of so much uncertain toil, when the ultimate secrets of life were hidden and no one knew the final goal? How foolish was effort, discipline, work! How vain was pleasure! How trivial the noblest life! ...\n\nWith a fearful jump that nearly upset the candle Minturn pulled himself together. Such vicious thoughts were usually so remote from his normal character that the sudden vile invasion produced a swift reaction. Yet, only for a moment. Instantly, again, the black depression descended upon him like a wave. His work\u2014it could lead to nothing but the dreary labour of a small headmastership after all\u2014seemed as vain and foolish as his holiday in the Alps. What an idiot he had been, to be sure, to come out with a knapsack merely to work himself into a state of exhaustion climbing over toilsome mountains that led to nowhere\u2014resulted in nothing. A dreariness of the grave possessed him. Life was a ghastly fraud! Religion childish humbug! Everything was merely a trap\u2014a trap of death; a coloured toy that Nature used as a decoy! But a decoy for what? For nothing! There was no meaning in anything. The only real thing was\u2014DEATH. And the happiest people were those who found it soonest.\n\nThen why wait for it to come?\n\nHe sprang out of bed, thoroughly frightened. This was horrible. Surely mere physical fatigue could not produce a world so black, an outlook so dismal, a cowardice that struck with such sudden hopelessness at the very roots of life? For, normally, he was cheerful and strong, full of the tides of healthy living; and this appalling lassitude swept the very basis of his personality into Nothingness and the desire for death. It was like the development of a Secondary Personality. He had read, of course, how certain persons who suffered shocks developed thereafter entirely different characteristics, memory, tastes, and so forth. It had all rather frightened him. Though scientific men vouched for it, it was hardly to be believed. Yet here was a similar thing taking place in his own consciousness. He was, beyond question, experiencing all the mental variations of\u2014some one else! It was un-moral. It was awful. It was\u2014well, after all, at the same time, it was uncommonly interesting.\n\nAnd this interest he began to feel was the first sign of his returning normal Self. For to feel interest is to live, and to love life.\n\nHe sprang into the middle of the room\u2014then switched on the electric light. And the first thing that struck his eye was\u2014the big cupboard.\n\n\"Hallo! There's that\u2014beastly cupboard!\" he exclaimed to himself, involuntarily, yet aloud. It held all the clothes, the swinging skirts and coats and summer blouses of the dead woman. For he knew now\u2014somehow or other\u2014that she was dead. ...\n\nAt that moment, through the open windows, rushed the sound of falling water, bringing with it a vivid realisation of the desolate, snow-swept heights. He saw her\u2014positively saw her!\u2014lying where she had fallen, the frost upon her cheeks, the snow-dust eddying about her hair and eyes, her broken limbs pushing against the lumps of ice. For a moment the sense of spiritual lassitude\u2014of the emptiness of life\u2014vanished before this picture of broken effort\u2014of a small human force battling pluckily, yet in vain, against the impersonal and pitiless Potencies of Inanimate Nature\u2014and he found himself again, his normal self. Then, instantly, returned again that terrible sense of cold, nothingness, emptiness. ...\n\nAnd he found himself standing opposite the big cupboard where her clothes were. He wanted to see those clothes\u2014things she had used and worn. Quite close he stood, almost touching it. The next second he had touched it. His knuckles struck upon the wood.\n\nWhy he knocked is hard to say. It was an instinctive movement probably. Something in his deepest self dictated it\u2014ordered it. He knocked at the door. And the dull sound upon the wood into the stillness of that room brought\u2014horror. Why it should have done so he found it as hard to explain to himself as why he should have felt impelled to knock. The fact remains that when he heard the faint reverberation inside the cupboard, it brought with it so vivid a realisation of the woman's presence that he stood there shivering upon the floor with a dreadful sense of anticipation: he almost expected to hear an answering knock from within\u2014the rustling of the hanging skirts perhaps\u2014or, worse still, to see the locked door slowly open towards him.\n\nAnd from that moment, he declares that in some way or other he must have partially lost control of himself, or at least of his better judgment; for he became possessed by such an overmastering desire to tear open that cupboard door and see the clothes within, that he tried every key in the room in the vain effort to unlock it, and then, finally, before he quite realised what he was doing\u2014rang the bell!\n\nBut, having rung the bell for no obvious or intelligent reason at two o'clock in the morning, he then stood waiting in the middle of the floor for the servant to come, conscious for the first time that something outside his ordinary self had pushed him towards the act. It was almost like an internal voice that directed him... and thus, when at last steps came down the passage and he faced the cross and sleepy chambermaid, amazed at being summoned at such an hour, he found no difficulty in the matter of what he should say. For the same power that insisted he should open the cupboard door also impelled him to utter words over which he apparently had no control.\n\n\"It's not you I rang for!\" he said with decision and impatience, \"I want a man. Wake the porter and send him up to me at once\u2014hurry! I tell you, hurry\u2014!\"\n\nAnd when the girl had gone, frightened at his earnestness, Minturn realised that the words surprised himself as much as they surprised her. Until they were out of his mouth he had not known what exactly he was saying. But now he understood that some force foreign to his own personality was using his mind and organs. The black depression that had possessed him a few moments before was also part of it. The powerful mood of this vanished woman had somehow momentarily taken possession of him\u2014communicated, possibly, by the atmosphere of things in the room still belonging to her. But even now, when the porter, without coat or collar, stood beside him in the room, he did not understand why he insisted, with a positive fury admitting no denial, that the key of that cupboard must be found and the door instantly opened.\n\nThe scene was a curious one. After some perplexed whispering with the chambermaid at the end of the passage, the porter managed to find and produce the key in question. Neither he nor the girl knew clearly what this excited Englishman was up to, or why he was so passionately intent upon opening the cupboard at two o'clock in the morning. They watched him with an air of wondering what was going to happen next. But something of his curious earnestness, even of his late fear, communicated itself to them, and the sound of the key grating in the lock made them both jump.\n\nThey held their breath as the creaking door swung slowly open. All heard the clatter of that other key as it fell against the wooden floor\u2014within. The cupboard had been locked from the inside. But it was the scared housemaid, from her position in the corridor, who first saw\u2014and with a wild scream fell crashing against the bannisters.\n\nThe porter made no attempt to save her. The schoolmaster and himself made a simultaneous rush towards the door, now wide open. They, too, had seen.\n\nThere were no clothes, skirts or blouses on the pegs, but, all by itself, from an iron hook in the centre, they saw the body of the Englishwoman hanging by the neck, the head bent horribly forwards, the tongue protruding. Jarred by the movement of unlocking, the body swung slowly round to face them. ... Pinned upon the inside of the door was a hotel envelope with the following words pencilled in straggling writing:\n\n\"Tired\u2014unhappy\u2014hopelessly depressed. ... I cannot face life any longer. ... All is black. I must put an end to it. ... I meant to do it on the mountains, but was afraid. I slipped back to my room unobserved. This way is easiest and best. ...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Cain's Atonement by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "So many thousands to-day have deliberately put Self aside, and are ready to yield their lives for an ideal, that it is not surprising a few of them should have registered experiences of a novel order. For to step aside from Self is to enter a larger world, to be open to new impressions. If Powers of Good exist in the universe at all, they can hardly be inactive at the present time. ...\n\nThe case of two men, who may be called Jones and Smith, occurs to the mind in this connection. Whether a veil actually was lifted for a moment, or whether the tension of long and terrible months resulted in an exaltation of emotion, the experience claims significance. Smith, to whom the experience came, holds the firm belief that it was real. Jones, though it involved him too, remained unaware.\n\nIt is a somewhat personal story, their peculiar relationship dating from early youth: a kind of unwilling antipathy was born between them, yet an antipathy that had no touch of hate or even of dislike. It was rather in the nature of an instinctive rivalry. Some tie operated that flung them ever into the same arena with strange persistence, and ever as opponents. An inevitable fate delighted to throw them together in a sense that made them rivals; small as well as large affairs betrayed this malicious tendency of the gods. It showed itself in earliest days, at school, at Cambridge, in travel, even in house-parties and the lighter social intercourse. Though distant cousins, their families were not intimate, and there was no obvious reason why their paths should fall so persistently together. Yet their paths did so, crossing and recrossing in the way described. Sooner or later, in all his undertakings, Smith would note the shadow of Jones darkening the ground in front of him; and later, when called to the Bar in his chosen profession, he found most frequently that the learned counsel in opposition to him was the owner of this shadow, Jones. In another matter, too, they became rivals, for the same girl, oddly enough, attracted both, and though she accepted neither offer of marriage (during Smith's lifetime!), the attitude between them was that of unwilling rivals. For they were friends as well.\n\nJones, it appears, was hardly aware that any rivalry existed; he did not think of Smith as an opponent, and as an adversary, never. He did notice, however, the constantly recurring meetings, for more than once he commented on them with good-humoured amusement. Smith, on the other hand, was conscious of a depth and strength in the tie that certainly intrigued him; being of a thoughtful, introspective nature, he was keenly sensible of the strange competition in their lives, and sought in various ways for its explanation, though without success. The desire to find out was very strong in him. And this was natural enough, owing to the singular fact that in all their battles he was the one to lose. Invariably Jones got the best of every conflict. Smith always paid; sometimes he paid with interest.\n\nOccasionally, too, he seemed forced to injure himself while contributing to his cousin's success. It was very curious. He reflected much upon it; he wondered what the origin of their tie and rivalry might be, but especially why it was that he invariably lost, and why he was so often obliged to help his rival to the point even of his own detriment. Tempted to bitterness sometimes, he did not yield to it, however; the relationship remained frank and pleasant; if anything, it deepened.\n\nHe remembered once, for instance, giving his cousin a chance introduction which yet led, a little later, to the third party offering certain evidence which lost him an important case\u2014Jones, of course, winning it. The third party, too, angry at being dragged into the case, turned hostile to him, thwarting various subsequent projects. In no other way could Jones have procured this particular evidence; he did not know of its existence even. That chance introduction did it all. There was nothing the least dishonourable on the part of Jones\u2014it was just the chance of the dice. The dice were always loaded against Smith\u2014and there were other instances of similar kind.\n\nAbout this time, moreover, a singular feeling that had lain vaguely in his mind for some years past, took more definite form. It suddenly assumed the character of a conviction, that yet had no evidence to support it. A voice, long whispering in the depths of him, became much louder, grew into a statement that he accepted without further ado: \"I'm paying off a debt,\" he phrased it, \"an old, old debt is being discharged. I owe him this\u2014my help and so forth.\" He accepted it, that is, as just; and this certainty of justice kept sweet his heart and mind, shutting the door on bitterness or envy. The thought, however, though it recurred persistently with each encounter, brought no explanation.\n\nWhen the war broke out both offered their services; as members of the O.T.C., they got commissions quickly; but it was a chance remark of Smith's that made his friend join the very regiment he himself was in. They trained together, were in the same retreats and the same advances together. Their friendship deepened. Under the stress of circumstances the tie did not dissolve, but strengthened. It was indubitably real, therefore. Then, oddly enough, they were both wounded in the same engagement.\n\nAnd it was here the remarkable fate that jointly haunted them betrayed itself more clearly than in any previous incident of their long relationship\u2014Smith was wounded in the act of protecting his cousin. How it happened is confusing to a layman, but each apparently was leading a bombing-party, and the two parties came together. They found themselves shoulder to shoulder, both brimmed with that pluck which is complete indifference to Self; they exchanged a word of excited greeting; and the same second one of those rare opportunities of advantage presented itself which only the highest courage could make use of. Neither, certainly, was thinking of personal reward; it was merely that each saw the chance by which instant heroism might gain a surprise advantage for their side. The risk was heavy, but there was a chance; and success would mean a decisive result, to say nothing of high distinction for the man who obtained it\u2014if he survived. Smith, being a few yards ahead of his cousin, had the moment in his grasp. He was in the act of dashing forward when something made him pause. A bomb in mid-air, flung from the opposing trench, was falling; it seemed immediately above him; he saw that it would just miss himself, but land full upon his cousin\u2014whose head was turned the other way. By stretching out his hand, Smith knew he could field it like a cricket ball. There was an interval of a second and a half, he judged. He hesitated\u2014perhaps a quarter of a second\u2014then he acted. He caught it. It was the obvious thing to do. He flung it back into the opposing trench.\n\nThe rapidity of thought is hard to realise. In that second and a half Smith was aware of many things: He saved his cousin's life unquestionably; unquestionably also Jones seized the opportunity that otherwise was his cousin's. But it was neither of these reflections that filled Smith's mind. The dominant impression was another. It flashed into actual words inside his excited brain: \"I must risk it. I owe it to him\u2014and more besides!\" He was, further, aware of another impulse than the obvious one. In the first fraction of a second it was overwhelmingly established. And it was this: that the entire episode was familiar to him. A subtle familiarity was present. All this had happened before. He had already\u2014somewhere, somehow\u2014seen death descending upon his cousin from the air. Yet with a difference. The \"difference\" escaped him; the familiarity was vivid. That he missed the deadly detonators in making the catch, or that the fuse delayed, he called good luck. He only remembers that he flung the gruesome weapon back whence it had come, and that its explosion in the opposite trench materially helped his cousin to find glory in the place of death. The slight delay, however, resulted in his receiving a bullet through the chest\u2014a bullet he would not otherwise have received, presumably.\n\nIt was some days later, gravely wounded, that he discovered his cousin in another bed across the darkened floor. They exchanged remarks. Jones was already \"decorated,\" it seemed, having snatched success from his cousin's hands, while little aware whose help had made it easier. ... And once again there stole across the inmost mind of Smith that strange, insistent whisper: \"I owed it to him... but, by God, I owe more than that... I mean to pay it too ...!\"\n\nThere was not a trace of bitterness or envy now; only this profound conviction, of obscurest origin, that it was right and absolutely just\u2014full, honest repayment of a debt incurred. Some ancient balance of account was being settled; there was no \"chance\"; injustice and caprice played no role at all. ... And a deeper understanding of life's ironies crept into him; for if everything was just, there was no room for whimpering.\n\nAnd the voice persisted above the sound of busy footsteps in the ward: \"I owe it... I'll pay it gladly ...!\"\n\nThrough the pain and weakness the whisper died away. He was exhausted. There were periods of unconsciousness, but there were periods of half-consciousness as well; then flashes of another kind of consciousness altogether, when, bathed in high, soft light, he was aware of things he could not quite account for. He saw. It was absolutely real. Only, the critical faculty was gone. He did not question what he saw, as he stared across at his cousin's bed. He knew. Perhaps the beaten, worn-out body let something through at last. The nerves, over-strained to numbness, lay very still. The physical system, battered and depleted, made no cry. The clamour of the flesh was hushed. He was aware, however, of an undeniable exaltation of the spirit in him, as he lay and gazed towards his cousin's bed. ...\n\nAcross the night of time, it seemed to him, the picture stole before his inner eye with a certainty that left no room for doubt. It was not the cells of memory in his brain of To-day that gave up their dead, it was the eternal Self in him that remembered and understood\u2014the soul. ...\n\nWith that satisfaction which is born of full comprehension, he watched the light glow and spread about the little bed. Thick matting deadened the footsteps of nurses, orderlies, doctors. New cases were brought in, \"old\" cases were carried out; he ignored them; he saw only the light above his cousin's bed grow stronger. He lay still and stared. It came neither from the ceiling nor the floor; it unfolded like a cloud of shining smoke. And the little lamp, the sheets, the figure framed between them\u2014all these slid cleverly away and vanished utterly. He stood in another place that had lain behind all these appearances\u2014a landscape with wooded hills, a foaming river, the sun just sinking below the forest, and dusk creeping from a gorge along the lonely banks. In the warm air there was a perfume of great flowers and heavy-scented trees; there were fire-flies, and the taste of spray from the tumbling river was on his lips. Across the water a large bird, flapped its heavy wings, as it moved down-stream to find another fishing place. For he and his companion had disturbed it as they broke out of the thick foliage and reached the river-bank. The companion, moreover, was his brother; they ever hunted together; there was a passionate link between them born of blood and of affection\u2014they were twins. ...\n\nIt all was as clear as though of Yesterday. In his heart was the lust of the hunt; in his blood was the lust of woman; and thick behind these lurked the jealousy and fierce desire of a primitive day. But, though clear as of Yesterday, he knew that it was of long, long ago. ... And his brother came up close beside him, resting his bloody spear with a clattering sound against the boulders on the shore. He saw the gleaming of the metal in the sunset, he saw the shining glitter of the spray upon the boulders, he saw his brother's eyes look straight into his own. And in them shone a light that was neither the reflection of the sunset, nor the excitement of the hunt just over.\n\n\"It escaped us,\" said his brother. \"Yet I know my first spear struck.\"\n\n\"It followed the fawn that crossed,\" was the reply. \"Besides, we came down wind, thus giving it warning. Our flocks, at any rate, are safer\u2014\"\n\nThe other laughed significantly.\n\n\"It is not the safety of our flocks that troubles me just now, brother,\" he interrupted eagerly, while the light burned more deeply in his eyes. \"It is, rather, that she waits for me by the fire across the river, and that I would get to her. With your help added to my love,\" he went on in a trusting voice, \"the gods have shown me the favour of true happiness!\" He pointed with his spear to a camp-fire on the farther bank, turning his head as he strode to plunge into the stream and swim across.\n\nFor an instant, then, the other felt his natural love turn into bitter hate. His own fierce passion, unconfessed, concealed, burst into instant flame. That the girl should become his brother's wife sent the blood surging through his veins in fury. He felt his life and all that he desired go down in ashes. ... He watched his brother stride towards the water, the deer-skin cast across one naked shoulder\u2014when another object caught his practised eye. In mid-air it passed suddenly, like a shining gleam; it seemed to hang a second; then it swept swiftly forward past his head\u2014and downward. It had leaped with a blazing fury from the overhanging bank behind; he saw the blood still streaming from its wounded flank. It must land\u2014he saw it with a secret, awful pleasure\u2014full upon the striding figure, whose head was turned away!\n\nThe swiftness of that leap, however, was not so swift but that he could easily have used his spear. Indeed, he gripped it strongly. His skill, his strength, his aim\u2014he knew them well enough. But hate and love, fastening upon his heart, held all his muscles still. He hesitated. He was no murderer, yet he paused. He heard the roar, the ugly thud, the crash, the cry for help\u2014too late... and when, an instant afterwards, his steel plunged into the great beast's heart, the human heart and life he might have saved lay still for ever. ... He heard the water rushing past, an icy wind came down the gorge against his naked back, he saw the fire shine upon the farther bank... and the figure of a girl in skins was wading across, seeking out the shallow places in the dusk, and calling wildly as she came. ... Then darkness hid the entire landscape, yet a darkness that was deeper, bluer than the velvet of the night alone. ...\n\nAnd he shrieked aloud in his remorseful anguish: \"May the gods forgive me, for I did not mean it! Oh, that I might undo... that I might repay ...!\"\n\nThat his cries disturbed the weary occupants in more than one bed is certain, but he remembers chiefly that a nurse was quickly by his side, and that something she gave him soothed his violent pain and helped him into deeper sleep again. There was, he noticed, anyhow, no longer the soft, clear, blazing light about his cousin's bed. He saw only the faint glitter of the oil-lamps down the length of the great room. ...\n\nAnd some weeks later he went back to fight. The picture, however, never left his memory. It stayed with him as an actual reality that was neither delusion nor hallucination. He believed that he understood at last the meaning of the tie that had fettered him and puzzled him so long. The memory of those far-off days of shepherding beneath the stars of long ago remained vividly beside him. He kept his secret, however. In many a talk with his cousin beneath the nearer stars of Flanders no word of it ever passed his lips.\n\nThe friendship between them, meanwhile, experienced a curious deepening, though unacknowledged in any spoken words. Smith, at any rate, on his side, put into it an affection that was a brave man's love. He watched over his cousin. In the fighting especially, when possible, he sought to protect and shield him, regardless of his own personal safety. He delighted secretly in the honours his cousin had already won. He himself was not yet even mentioned in dispatches, and no public distinction of any kind had come his way.\n\nHis V.C. eventually\u2014well, he was no longer occupying his body when it was bestowed. He had already \"left.\"... He was now conscious, possibly, of other experiences besides that one of ancient, primitive days when he and his brother were shepherding beneath other stars. But the reckless heroism which saved his cousin under fire may later enshrine another memory which, at some far future time, shall reawaken as a \"hallucination\" from a Past that to-day is called the Present. ... The notion, at any rate, flashed across his mind before he \"left.\"" + }, + { + "title": "An Egyptian Hornet by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The word has an angry, malignant sound that brings the idea of attack vividly into the mind. There is a vicious sting about it somewhere\u2014even a foreigner, ignorant of the meaning, must feel it. A hornet is wicked; it darts and stabs; it pierces, aiming without provocation for the face and eyes. The name suggests a metallic droning of evil wings, fierce flight, and poisonous assault. Though black and yellow, it sounds scarlet. There is blood in it. A striped tiger of the air in concentrated form! There is no escape\u2014if it attacks.\n\nIn Egypt an ordinary bee is the size of an English hornet, but the Egyptian hornet is enormous. It is truly monstrous\u2014an ominous, dying terror. It shares that universal quality of the land of the Sphinx and Pyramids\u2014great size. It is a formidable insect, worse than scorpion or tarantula. The Rev. James Milligan, meeting one for the first time, realised the meaning of another word as well, a word he used prolifically in his eloquent sermons\u2014devil.\n\nOne morning in April, when the heat began to bring the insects out, he rose as usual betimes and went across the wide stone corridor to his bath. The desert already glared in through the open windows. The heat would be afflicting later in the day, but at this early hour the cool north wind blew pleasantly down the hotel passages. It was Sunday, and at half-past eight o'clock he would appear to conduct the morning service for the English visitors. The floor of the passage-way was cold beneath his feet in their thin native slippers of bright yellow. He was neither young nor old; his salary was comfortable; he had a competency of his own, without wife or children to absorb it; the dry climate had been recommended to him; and\u2014the big hotel took him in for next to nothing. And he was thoroughly pleased with himself, for he was a sleek, vain, pompous, well-advertised personality, but mean as a rat. No worries of any kind were on his mind as, carrying sponge and towel, scented soap and a bottle of Scrubb's ammonia, he travelled amiably across the deserted, shining corridor to the bathroom. And nothing went wrong with the Rev. James Milligan until he opened the door, and his eye fell upon a dark, suspicious-looking object clinging to the window-pane in front of him.\n\nAnd even then, at first, he felt no anxiety or alarm, but merely a natural curiosity to know exactly what it was\u2014this little clot of an odd-shaped, elongated thing that stuck there on the wooden framework six feet before his aquiline nose. He went straight up to it to see\u2014then stopped dead. His heart gave a distinct, unclerical leap. His lips formed themselves into unregenerate shape. He gasped: \"Good God! What is it?\" For something unholy, something wicked as a secret sin, stuck there before his eyes in the patch of blazing sunshine. He caught his breath.\n\nFor a moment he was unable to move, as though the sight half fascinated him. Then, cautiously and very slowly\u2014stealthily, in fact\u2014he withdrew towards the door he had just entered. Fearful of making the smallest sound, he retraced his steps on tiptoe. His yellow slippers shuffled. His dry sponge fell, and bounded till it settled, rolling close beneath the horribly attractive object facing him. From the safety of the open door, with ample space for retreat behind him, he paused and stared. His entire being focused itself in his eyes. It was a hornet that he saw. It hung there, motionless and threatening, between him and the bathroom door. And at first he merely exclaimed\u2014below his breath\u2014\"Good God! It's an Egyptian hornet!\"\n\nBeing a man with a reputation for decided action, however, he soon recovered himself. He was well schooled in self-control. When people left his church at the beginning of the sermon, no muscle of his face betrayed the wounded vanity and annoyance that burned deep in his heart. But a hornet sitting directly in his path was a very different matter. He realised in a flash that he was poorly clothed\u2014in a word, that he was practically half naked.\n\nFrom a distance he examined this intrusion of the devil. It was calm and very still. It was wonderfully made, both before and behind. Its wings were folded upon its terrible body. Long, sinuous things, pointed like temptation, barbed as well, stuck out of it. There was poison, and yet grace, in its exquisite presentment. Its shiny black was beautiful, and the yellow stripes upon its sleek, curved abdomen were like the gleaming ornaments upon some feminine body of the seductive world he preached against. Almost, he saw an abandoned dancer on the stage. And then, swiftly in his impressionable soul, the simile changed, and he saw instead more blunt and aggressive forms of destruction. The well-filled body, tapering to a horrid point, reminded him of those perfect engines of death that reduce hundreds to annihilation unawares\u2014torpedoes, shells, projectiles, crammed with secret, desolating powers. Its wings, its awful, quiet head, its delicate, slim waist, its stripes of brilliant saffron\u2014all these seemed the concentrated prototype of abominations made cleverly by the brain of man, and beautifully painted to disguise their invisible freight of cruel death.\n\n\"Bah!\" he exclaimed, ashamed of his prolific imagination. \"It's only a hornet after all\u2014an insect!\" And he contrived a hurried, careful plan. He aimed a towel at it, rolled up into a ball\u2014but did not throw it. He might miss. He remembered that his ankles were unprotected. Instead, he paused again, examining the black and yellow object in safe retirement near the door, as one day he hoped to watch the world in leisurely retirement in the country. It did not move. It was fixed and terrible. It made no sound. Its wings were folded. Not even the black antennae, blunt at the tips like clubs, showed the least stir or tremble. It breathed, however. He watched the rise and fall of the evil body; it breathed air in and out as he himself did. The creature, he realised, had lungs and heart and organs. It had a brain! Its mind was active all this time. It knew it was being watched. It merely waited. Any second, with a whiz of fury, and with perfect accuracy of aim, it might dart at him and strike. If he threw the towel and missed\u2014it certainly would.\n\nThere were other occupants of the corridor, however, and a sound of steps approaching gave him the decision to act. He would lose his bath if he hesitated much longer. He felt ashamed of his timidity, though \"pusillanimity\" was the word thought selected owing to the pulpit vocabulary it was his habit to prefer. He went with extreme caution towards the bathroom door, passing the point of danger so close that his skin turned hot and cold. With one foot gingerly extended, he recovered his sponge. The hornet did not move a muscle. But\u2014it had seen him pass. It merely waited. All dangerous insects had that trick. It knew quite well he was inside; it knew quite well he must come out a few minutes later; it also knew quite well that he was\u2014naked.\n\nOnce inside the little room, he closed the door with exceeding gentleness, lest the vibration might stir the fearful insect to attack. The bath was already filled, and he plunged to his neck with a feeling of comparative security. A window into the outside passage he also closed, so that nothing could possibly come in. And steam soon charged the air and left its blurred deposit on the glass. For ten minutes he could enjoy himself and pretend that he was safe. For ten minutes he did so. He behaved carelessly, as though nothing mattered, and as though all the courage in the world were his. He splashed and soaped and sponged, making a lot of reckless noise. He got out and dried himself. Slowly the steam subsided, the air grew clearer, he put on dressing-gown and slippers. It was time to go out.\n\nUnable to devise any further reason for delay, he opened the door softly half an inch\u2014peeped out\u2014and instantly closed it again with a resounding bang. He had heard a drone of wings. The insect had left its perch and now buzzed upon the floor directly in his path. The air seemed full of stings; he felt stabs all over him; his unprotected portions winced with the expectancy of pain. The beast knew he was coming out, and was waiting for him. In that brief instant he had felt its sting all over him, on his unprotected ankles, on his back, his neck, his cheeks, in his eyes, and on the bald clearing that adorned his Anglican head. Through the closed door he heard the ominous, dull murmur of his striped adversary as it beat its angry wings. Its oiled and wicked sting shot in and out with fury. Its deft legs worked. He saw its tiny waist already writhing with the lust of battle. Ugh! That tiny waist! A moment's steady nerve and he could have severed that cunning body from the directing brain with one swift, well-directed thrust. But his nerve had utterly deserted him.\n\nHuman motives, even in the professedly holy, are an involved affair at any time. Just now, in the Rev. James Milligan, they were quite inextricably mixed. He claims this explanation, at any rate, in excuse of his abominable subsequent behaviour. For, exactly at this moment, when he had decided to admit cowardice by ringing for the Arab servant, a step was audible in the corridor outside, and courage came with it into his disreputable heart. It was the step of the man he cordially \"disapproved of,\" using the pulpit version of \"hated and despised.\" He had overstayed his time, and the bath was in demand by Mr. Mullins. Mr. Mullins invariably followed him at seven-thirty; it was now a quarter to eight. And Mr. Mullins was a wretched drinking man\u2014\"a sot.\"\n\nIn a flash the plan was conceived and put into execution. The temptation, of course, was of the devil. Mr. Milligan hid the motive from himself, pretending he hardly recognised it. The plan was what men call a dirty trick; it was also irresistibly seductive. He opened the door, stepped boldly, nose in the air, right over the hideous insect on the floor, and fairly pranced into the outer passage. The brief transit brought a hundred horrible sensations\u2014that the hornet would rise and sting his leg, that it would cling to his dressing-gown and stab his spine, that he would step upon it and die, like Achilles, of a heel exposed. But with these, and conquering them, was one other stronger emotion that robbed the lesser terrors of their potency\u2014that Mr. Mullins would run precisely the same risks five seconds later, unprepared. He heard the gloating insect buzz and scratch the oil-cloth. But it was behind him. He was safe!\n\n\"Good morning to you, Mr. Mullins,\" he observed with a gracious smile. \"I trust I have not kept you waiting.\"\n\n\"Mornin'!\" grunted Mullins sourly in reply, as he passed him with a distinctly hostile and contemptuous air. For Mullins, though depraved, perhaps, was an honest man, abhorring parsons and making no secret of his opinions\u2014whence the bitter feeling.\n\nAll men, except those very big ones who are supermen, have something astonishingly despicable in them. The despicable thing in Milligan came uppermost now. He fairly chuckled. He met the snub with a calm, forgiving smile, and continued his shambling gait with what dignity he could towards his bedroom opposite. Then he turned his head to see. His enemy would meet an infuriated hornet\u2014an Egyptian hornet!\u2014and might not notice it. He might step on it. He might not. But he was bound to disturb it, and rouse it to attack. The chances were enormously on the clerical side. And its sting meant death.\n\n\"May God forgive me!\" ran subconsciously through his mind. And side by side with the repentant prayer ran also a recognition of the tempter's eternal skill: \"I hope the devil it will sting him!\"\n\nIt happened very quickly. The Rev. James Milligan lingered a moment by his door to watch. He saw Mullins, the disgusting Mullins, step blithely into the bathroom passage; he saw him pause, shrink back, and raise his arm to protect his face. He heard him swear out aloud: \"What's the d\u2014d thing doing here? Have I really got 'em again\u2014?\" And then he heard him laugh\u2014a hearty, guffawing laugh of genuine relief\u2014 \"It's real!\"\n\nThe moment of revulsion was overwhelming. It filled the churchly heart with anguish and bitter disappointment. For a space he hated the whole race of men.\n\nFor the instant Mr. Mullins realised that the insect was not a fiery illusion of his disordered nerves, he went forward without the smallest hesitation. With his towel he knocked down the flying terror. Then he stooped. He gathered up the venomous thing his well-aimed blow had stricken so easily to the floor. He advanced with it, held at arm's length, to the window. He tossed it out carelessly. The Egyptian hornet flew away uninjured, and Mr. Mullins\u2014the Mr. Mullins who drank, gave nothing to the church, attended no services, hated parsons, and proclaimed the fact with enthusiasm\u2014this same detestable Mr. Mullins went to his unearned bath without a scratch. But first he saw his enemy standing in the doorway across the passage, watching him\u2014and understood. That was the awful part of it. Mullins would make a story of it, and the story would go the round of the hotel.\n\nThe Rev. James Milligan, however, proved that his reputation for self-control was not undeserved. He conducted morning service half an hour later with an expression of peace upon his handsome face. He conquered all outward sign of inward spiritual vexation; the wicked, he consoled himself, ever flourish like green bay trees. It was notorious that the righteous never have any luck at all! That was bad enough. But what was worse\u2014and the Rev. James Milligan remembered for very long\u2014was the superior ease with which Mullins had relegated both himself and hornet to the same level of comparative insignificance. Mullins ignored them both\u2014which proved that he felt himself superior. Infinitely worse than the sting of any hornet in the world: he really was superior." + }, + { + "title": "By Water by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The night before young Larsen left to take up his new appointment in Egypt he went to the clairvoyante. He neither believed nor disbelieved. He felt no interest, for he already knew his past and did not wish to know his future. \"Just to please me, Jim,\" the girl pleaded. \"The woman is wonderful. Before I had been five minutes with her she told me your initials, so there must be something in it.\" \"She read your thought,\" he smiled indulgently. \"Even I can do that!\" But the girl was in earnest. He yielded; and that night at his farewell dinner he came to give his report of the interview.\n\nThe result was meagre and unconvincing: money was coming to him, he was soon to make a voyage, and\u2014he would never marry. \"So you see how silly it all is,\" he laughed, for they were to be married when his first promotion came. He gave the details, however, making a little story of it in the way he knew she loved.\n\n\"But was that all, Jim?\" The girl asked it, looking rather hard into his face. \"Aren't you hiding something from me?\" He hesitated a moment, then burst out laughing at her clever discernment. \"There was a little more,\" he confessed, \"but you take it all so seriously; I\u2014\"\n\nHe had to tell it then, of course. The woman had told him a lot of gibberish about friendly and unfriendly elements. \"She said water was unfriendly to me; I was to be careful of water, or else I should come to harm by it. Fresh water only,\" he hastened to add, seeing that the idea of shipwreck was in her mind.\n\n\"Drowning?\" the girl asked quickly.\n\n\"Yes,\" he admitted with reluctance, but still laughing; \"she did say drowning, though drowning in no ordinary way.\"\n\nThe girl's face showed uneasiness a moment. \"What does that mean\u2014drowning in no ordinary way?\" she asked, a catch in her breath.\n\nBut that he could not tell her, because he did not know himself. He gave, therefore, the exact words: \"You will drown, but will not know you drown.\"\n\nIt was unwise of him. He wished afterwards he had invented a happier report, or had kept this detail back. \"I'm safe in Egypt, anyhow,\" he laughed. \"I shall be a clever man if I can find enough water in the desert to do me harm!\" And all the way from Trieste to Alexandria he remembered the promise she had extracted\u2014that he would never once go on the Nile unless duty made it imperative for him to do so. He kept that promise like the literal, faithful soul he was. His love was equal to the somewhat quixotic sacrifice it occasionally involved. Fresh water in Egypt there was practically none other, and in any case the natrum works where his duty lay had their headquarters some distance out into the desert. The river, with its banks of welcome, refreshing verdure, was not even visible.\n\nMonths passed quickly, and the time for leave came within measurable distance. In the long interval luck had played the cards kindly for him, vacancies had occurred, early promotion seemed likely, and his letters were full of plans to bring her out to share a little house of their own. His health, however, had not improved; the dryness did not suit him; even in this short period his blood had thinned, his nervous system deteriorated, and, contrary to the doctor's prophecy, the waterless air had told upon his sleep. A damp climate liked him best, and once the sun had touched him with its fiery finger.\n\nHis letters made no mention of this. He described the life to her, the work, the sport, the pleasant people, and his chances of increased pay and early marriage. And a week before he sailed he rode out upon a final act of duty to inspect the latest diggings his company were making. His course lay some twenty miles into the desert behind El-Chobak and towards the limestone hills of Guebel Haidi, and he went alone, carrying lunch and tea, for it was the weekly holiday of Friday, and the men were not at work.\n\nThe accident was ordinary enough. On his way back in the heat of early afternoon his pony stumbled against a boulder on the treacherous desert film, threw him heavily, broke the girth, bolted before he could seize the reins again, and left him stranded some ten or twelve miles from home. There was a pain in his knee that made walking difficult, a buzzing in his head that troubled sight and made the landscape swim, while, worse than either, his provisions, fastened to the saddle, had vanished with the frightened pony into those blazing leagues of sand. He was alone in the Desert, beneath the pitiless afternoon sun, twelve miles of utterly exhausting country between him and safety.\n\nUnder normal conditions he could have covered the distance in four hours, reaching home by dark; but his knee pained him so that a mile an hour proved the best he could possibly do. He reflected a few minutes. The wisest course was to sit down and wait till the pony told its obvious story to the stable, and help should come. And this was what he did, for the scorching heat and glare were dangerous; they were terrible; he was shaken and bewildered by his fall, hungry and weak into the bargain; and an hour's painful scrambling over the baked and burning little gorges must have speedily caused complete prostration. He sat down and rubbed his aching knee. It was quite a little adventure. Yet, though he knew the Desert might not be lightly trifled with, he felt at the moment nothing more than this\u2014and the amusing description of it he would give in his letter, or\u2014intoxicating thought\u2014by word of mouth. In the heat of the sun he began to feel drowsy. A soft torpor crept over him. He dozed. He fell asleep.\n\nIt was a long, a dreamless sleep... for when he woke at length the sun had just gone down, the dusk lay awfully upon the enormous desert, and the air was chilly. The cold had waked him. Quickly, as though on purpose, the red glow faded from the sky; the first stars shone; it was dark; the heavens were deep violet. He looked round and realised that his sense of direction had gone entirely. Great hunger was in him. The cold already was bitter as the wind rose, but the pain in his knee having eased, he got up and walked a little\u2014and in a moment lost sight of the spot where he had been lying. The shadowy desert swallowed it. \"Ah,\" he realised, \"this is not an English field or moor. I'm in the Desert!\" The safe thing to do was to remain exactly where he was; only thus could the rescuers find him; once he wandered he was done for. It was strange the search-party had not yet arrived. To keep warm, however, he was compelled to move, so he made a little pile of stones to mark the place, and walked round and round it in a circle of some dozen yards' diameter. He limped badly, and the hunger gnawed dreadfully; but, after all, the adventure was not so terrible. The amusing side of it kept uppermost still. Though fragile in body, his spirit was not unduly timid or imaginative; he could last out the night, or, if the worst came to the worst, the next day as well. But when he watched the little group of stones, he saw that there were dozens of them, scores, hundreds, thousands of these little groups of stones. The desert's face, of course, is thickly strewn with them. The original one was lost in the first five minutes. So he sat down again. But the biting cold, and the wind that licked his very skin beneath the light clothing, soon forced him up again. It was ominous; and the night huge and shelterless. The shaft of green zodiacal light that hung so strangely in the western sky for hours had faded away; the stars were out in their bright thousands; no guide was anywhere; the wind moaned and puffed among the sandy mounds; the vast sheet of desert stretched appallingly upon the world; he heard the jackals cry. ...\n\nAnd with the jackals' cry came suddenly the unwelcome realisation that no play was in this adventure any more, but that a bleak reality stared at him through the surrounding darkness. He faced it\u2014at bay. He was genuinely lost. Thought blocked in him. \"I must be calm and think,\" he said aloud. His voice woke no echo; it was small and dead; something gigantic ate it instantly. He got up and walked again. Why did no one come? Hours had passed. The pony had long ago found its stable, or\u2014had it run madly in another direction altogether? He worked out possibilities, tightening his belt. The cold was searching; he never had been, never could be warm again; the hot sunshine of a few hours ago seemed the merest dream. Unfamiliar with hardship, he knew not what to do, but he took his coat and shirt off, vigorously rubbed his skin where the dried perspiration of the afternoon still caused clammy shivers, swung his arms furiously like a London cabman, and quickly dressed again. Though the wind upon his bare back was fearful, he felt warmer a little. He lay down exhausted, sheltered by an overhanging limestone crag, and took snatches of fitful dog's-sleep, while the wind drove overhead and the dry sand pricked his skin. One face continually was near him; one pair of tender eyes; two dear hands smoothed him; he smelt the perfume of light brown hair. It was all natural enough. His whole thought, in his misery, ran to her in England\u2014England where there were soft fresh grass, big sheltering trees, hemlock and honeysuckle in the hedges\u2014while the hard black Desert guarded him, and consciousness dipped away at little intervals under this dry and pitiless Egyptian sky. ...\n\nIt was perhaps five in the morning when a voice spoke and he started up with a horrid jerk\u2014the voice of that clairvoyante woman. The sentence died away into the darkness, but one word remained: Water! At first he wondered, but at once explanation came. Cause and effect were obvious. The clue was physical. His body needed water, and so the thought came up into his mind. He was thirsty.\n\nThis was the moment when fear first really touched him. Hunger was manageable, more or less\u2014for a day or two, certainly. But thirst! Thirst and the Desert were an evil pair that, by cumulative suggestion gathering since childhood days, brought terror in. Once in the mind it could not be dislodged. In spite of his best efforts, the ghastly thing grew passionately\u2014because his thirst grew too. He had smoked much; had eaten spiced things at lunch; had breathed in alkali with the dry, scorched air. He searched for a cool flint pebble to put into his burning mouth, but found only angular scraps of dusty limestone. There were no pebbles here. The cold helped a little to counteract, but already he knew in himself subconsciously the dread of something that was coming. What was it? He tried to hide the thought and bury it out of sight. The utter futility of his tiny strength against the power of the universe appalled him. And then he knew. The merciless sun was on the way, already rising. Its return was like the presage of execution to him. ...\n\nIt came. With true horror he watched the marvellous swift dawn break over the sandy sea. The eastern sky glowed hurriedly as from crimson fires. Ridges, not noticeable in the starlight, turned black in endless series, like flat-topped billows of a frozen ocean. Wide streaks of blue and yellow followed, as the sky dropped sheets of faint light upon the wind-eaten cliffs and showed their under sides. They did not advance; they waited till the sun was up\u2014and then they moved; they rose and sank; they shifted as the sunshine lifted them and the shadows crept away. But in an hour there would be no shadows any more. There would be no shade! ...\n\nThe little groups of stones began to dance. It was horrible. The unbroken, huge expanse lay round him, warming up, twelve hours of blazing hell to come. Already the monstrous Desert glared, each bit familiar, since each bit was a repetition of the bit before, behind, on either side. It laughed at guidance and direction. He rose and walked; for miles he walked, though how many, north, south, or west, he knew not. The frantic thing was in him now, the fury of the Desert; he took its pace, its endless, tireless stride, the stride of the burning, murderous Desert that is\u2014waterless. He felt it alive\u2014a blindly heaving desire in it to reduce him to its conditionless, awful dryness. He felt\u2014yet knowing this was feverish and not to be believed\u2014that his own small life lay on its mighty surface, a mere dot in space, a mere heap of little stones. His emotions, his fears, his hopes, his ambition, his love\u2014mere bundled group of little unimportant stones that danced with apparent activity for a moment, then were merged in the undifferentiated surface underneath. He was included in a purpose greater than his own.\n\nThe will made a plucky effort then. \"A night and a day,\" he laughed, while his lips cracked smartingly with the stretching of the skin, \"what is it? Many a chap has lasted days and days ...!\" Yes, only he was not of that rare company. He was ordinary, unaccustomed to privation, weak, untrained of spirit, unacquainted with stern resistance. He knew not how to spare himself. The Desert struck him where it pleased\u2014all over. It played with him. His tongue was swollen; the parched throat could not swallow. He sank. ... An hour he lay there, just wit enough in him to choose the top of a mound where he could be most easily seen. He lay two hours, three, four hours. ... The heat blazed down upon him like a furnace. ... The sky, when he opened his eyes once, was empty... then a speck became visible in the blue expanse; and presently another speck. They came from nowhere. They hovered very high, almost out of sight. They appeared, they disappeared, they\u2014reappeared. Nearer and nearer they swung down, in sweeping stealthy circles... little dancing groups of them, miles away but ever drawing closer\u2014the vultures. ...\n\nHe had strained his ears so long for sounds of feet and voices that it seemed he could no longer hear at all. Hearing had ceased within him. Then came the water-dreams, with their agonising torture. He heard that... heard it running in silvery streams and rivulets across green English meadows. It rippled with silvery music. He heard it splash. He dipped hands and feet and head in it\u2014in deep, clear pools of generous depth. He drank; with his skin he drank, not with mouth and throat alone. Ice clinked in effervescent, sparkling water against a glass. He swam and plunged. Water gushed freely over back and shoulders, gallons and gallons of it, bathfuls and to spare, a flood of gushing, crystal, cool, life-giving liquid. ... And then he stood in a beech wood and felt the streaming deluge of delicious summer rain upon his face; heard it drip luxuriantly upon a million thirsty leaves. The wet trunks shone, the damp moss spread its perfume, ferns waved heavily in the moist atmosphere. He was soaked to the skin in it. A mountain torrent, fresh from fields of snow, foamed boiling past, and the spray fell in a shower upon his cheeks and hair. He dived\u2014head foremost. ... Ah, he was up to the neck... and she was with him; they were under water together; he saw her eyes gleaming into his own beneath the copious flood.\n\nThe voice, however, was not hers. ... \"You will drown, yet you will not know you drown ...!\" His swollen tongue called out a name. But no sound was audible. He closed his eyes. There came sweet unconsciousness. ...\n\nA sound in that instant was audible, though. It was a voice\u2014voices\u2014and the thud of animal hoofs upon the sand. The specks had vanished from the sky as mysteriously as they came. And, as though in answer to the sound, he made a movement\u2014an automatic, unconscious movement. He did not know he moved. And the body, uncontrolled, lost its precarious balance. He rolled; but he did not know he rolled. Slowly, over the edge of the sloping mound of sand, he turned sideways. Like a log of wood he slid gradually, turning over and over, nothing to stop him\u2014to the bottom. A few feet only, and not even steep; just steep enough to keep rolling slowly. There was a\u2014splash. But he did not know there was a splash.\n\nThey found him in a pool of water\u2014one of these rare pools the Desert Bedouin mark preciously for their own. He had lain within three yards of it for hours. He was drowned... but he did not know he drowned. ..." + }, + { + "title": "H. S. H.", + "text": "In the mountain Club Hut, to which he had escaped after weeks of gaiety in the capital, Delane, young travelling Englishman, sat alone, and listened to the wind that beat the pines with violence. The firelight danced over the bare stone floor and raftered ceiling, giving the room an air of movement, and though the solid walls held steady against the wild spring hurricane, the cannonading of the wind seemed to threaten the foundations. For the mountain shook, the forest roared, and the shadows had a way of running everywhere as though the little building trembled. Delane watched and listened. He piled the logs on. From time to time he glanced nervously over his shoulder, restless, half uneasy, as a burst of spray from the branches dashed against the window, or a gust of unusual vehemence shook the door. Over-wearied with his long day's climb among impossible conditions, he now realised, in this mountain refuge, his utter loneliness; for his mind gave birth to that unwelcome symptom of true loneliness\u2014that he was not, after all, alone. Continually he heard steps and voices in the storm. Another wanderer, another climber out of season like himself, would presently arrive, and sleep was out of the question until first he heard that knocking on the door. Almost\u2014he expected some one.\n\nHe went for the tenth time to the little window. He peered forth into the thick darkness of the dropping night, shading his eyes against the streaming pane to screen the firelight in an attempt to see if another climber\u2014perhaps a climber in distress\u2014were visible. The surroundings were desolate and savage, well named the Devil's Saddle. Black-faced precipices, streaked with melting snow, rose towering to the north, where the heights were hidden in seas of vapour; waterfalls poured into abysses on two sides; a wall of impenetrable forest pressed up from the south; and the dangerous ridge he had climbed all day slid off wickedly into a sky of surging cloud. But no human figure was, of course, distinguishable, for both the lateness of the hour and the elemental fury of the night rendered it most unlikely. He turned away with a start, as the tempest delivered a blow with massive impact against his very face. Then, clearing the remnants of his frugal supper from the table, he hung his soaking clothes at a new angle before the fire, made sure the door was fastened on the inside, climbed into the bunk where white pillows and thick Austrian blankets looked so inviting, and prepared finally for sleep.\n\n\"I must be over-tired,\" he sighed, after half an hour's weary tossing, and went back to make up the sinking fire. Wood is plentiful in these climbers' huts; he heaped it on. But this time he lit the little oil lamp as well, realising\u2014though unwilling to acknowledge it\u2014that it was not over-fatigue that banished sleep, but this unwelcome sense of expecting some one, of being not quite alone. For the feeling persisted and increased. He drew the wooden bench close up to the fire, turned the lamp as high as it would go, and wished unaccountably for the morning. Light was a very pleasant thing; and darkness now, for the first time since childhood, troubled him. It was outside; but it might so easily come in and swamp, obliterate, extinguish. The darkness seemed a positive thing. Already, somehow, it was established in his mind\u2014this sense of enormous, aggressive darkness that veiled an undesirable hint of personality. Some shadow from the peaks or from the forest, immense and threatening, pervaded all his thought. \"This can't be entirely nerves,\" he whispered to himself. \"I'm not so tired as all that!\" And he made the fire roar. He shivered and drew closer to the blaze. \"I'm out of condition; that's part of it,\" he realised, and remembered with loathing the weeks of luxurious indulgence just behind him.\n\nFor Delane had rather wasted his year of educational travel. Straight from Oxford, and well supplied with money, he had first saturated his mind in the latest Continental thought\u2014the science of France, the metaphysics and philosophy of Germany\u2014and had then been caught aside by the gaiety of capitals where the lights are not turned out at midnight by a Sunday School police. He had been surfeited, physically, emotionally, and intellectually, till his mind and body longed hungrily for simple living again and simple teaching\u2014above all, the latter. The Road of Excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom\u2014for certain temperaments (as Blake forgot to add), of which Delane was one. For there was stuff in the youth, and the reaction had set in with violent abruptness. His system rebelled. He cut loose energetically from all soft delights, and craved for severity, pure air, solitude and hardship. Clean and simple conditions he must have without delay, and the tonic of physical battling. It was too early in the year to climb seriously, for the snow was still dangerous and the weather wild, but he had chosen this most isolated of all the mountain huts in order to make sure of solitude, and had come, without guide or companion, for a week's strenuous life in wild surroundings, and to take stock of himself with a view to full recovery.\n\nAnd all day long as he climbed the desolate, unsafe ridge, his mind\u2014good, wholesome, natural symptom\u2014had reverted to his childhood days, to the solid worldly wisdom of his church-going father, and to the early teaching (oh, how sweet and refreshing in its literal spirit!) at his mother's knee. Now, as he watched the blazing logs, it came back to him again with redoubled force; the simple, precious, old-world stories of heaven and hell, of a paternal Deity, and of a daring, subtle, personal devil\u2014\n\nThe interruption to his thoughts came with startling suddenness, as the roaring night descended against the windows with a thundering violence that shook the walls and sucked the flame half-way up the wide stone chimney. The oil lamp flickered and went out. Darkness invaded the room for a second, and Delane sprang from his bench, thinking the wet snow had loosened far above and was about to sweep the hut into the depths. And he was still standing, trembling and uncertain, in the middle of the room, when a deep and sighing hush followed sharp upon the elemental outburst, and in the hush, like a whisper after thunder, he heard a curious steady sound that, at first, he thought must be a footstep by the door. It was then instantly repeated. But it was not a step. It was some one knocking on the heavy oaken panels\u2014a firm, authoritative sound, as though the new arrival had the right to enter and was already impatient at the delay.\n\nThe Englishman recovered himself instantly, realising with keen relief the new arrival\u2014at last.\n\n\"Another climber like myself, of course,\" he said, \"or perhaps the man who comes to prepare the hut for others. The season has begun.\" And he went over quickly, without a further qualm, to unbolt the door.\n\n\"Forgive!\" he exclaimed in German, as he threw it wide, \"I was half asleep before the fire. It is a terrible night. Come in to food and shelter, for both are here, and you shall share such supper as I possess.\"\n\nAnd a tall, cloaked figure passed him swiftly with a gust of angry wind from the impenetrable blackness of the world beyond. On the threshold, for a second, his outline stood full in the blaze of firelight with the sheet of darkness behind it, stately, erect, commanding, his cloak torn fiercely by the wind, but the face hidden by a low-brimmed hat; and an instant later the door shut with resounding clamour upon the hurricane, and the two men turned to confront one another in the little room.\n\nDelane then realised two things sharply, both of them fleeting impressions, but acutely vivid: First, that the outside darkness seemed to have entered and established itself between him and the new arrival; and, secondly, that the stranger's face was difficult to focus for clear sight, although the covering hat was now removed. There was a blur upon it somewhere. And this the Englishman ascribed partly to the flickering effect of firelight, and partly to the lightning glare of the man's masterful and terrific eyes, which made his own sight waver in some curious fashion as he gazed upon him. These impressions, however, were but momentary and passing, due doubtless to the condition of his nerves and to the semi-shock of the dramatic, even theatrical entrance. Delane's senses, in this wild setting, were guilty of exaggeration. For now, while helping the man remove his cloak, speaking naturally of shelter, food, and the savage weather, he lost this first distortion and his mind recovered sane proportion. The stranger, after all, though striking, was not of appearance so uncommon as to cause alarm; the light and the low doorway had touched his stature with illusion. He dwindled. And the great eyes, upon calmer subsequent inspection, lost their original fierce lightning. The entering darkness, moreover, was but an effect of the upheaving night behind him as he strode across the threshold. The closed door proved it.\n\nAnd yet, as Delane continued his quieter examination, there remained, he saw, the startling quality which had caused that first magnifying in his mind. His senses, while reporting accurately, insisted upon this arresting and uncommon touch: there was, about this late wanderer of the night, some evasive, lofty strangeness that set him utterly apart from ordinary men.\n\nThe Englishman examined him searchingly, surreptitiously, but with a touch of passionate curiosity he could not in the least account for nor explain. There were contradictions of perplexing character about him. For the first presentment had been of splendid youth, while on the face, though vigorous and gloriously handsome, he now discerned the stamp of tremendous age. It was worn and tired. While radiant with strength and health and power, it wore as well this certain signature of deep exhaustion that great experience rather than physical experience brings. Moreover, he discovered in it, in some way he could not hope to describe, man, woman, and child. There was a big, sad earnestness about it, yet a touch of humour too; patience, tenderness, and sweetness held the mouth; and behind the high pale forehead intellect sat enthroned and watchful. In it were both love and hatred, longing and despair; an expression of being ever on the defensive, yet hugely mutinous; an air both hunted and beseeching; great knowledge and great woe.\n\nDelane gave up the search, aware that something unalterably splendid stood before him. Solemnity and beauty swept him too. His was never the grotesque assumption that man must be the highest being in the universe, nor that a thing is a miracle merely because it has never happened before. He groped, while explanation and analysis both halted. \"A great teacher,\" thought fluttered through him, \"or a mighty rebel! A distinguished personality beyond all question! Who can he be?\" There was something regal that put respect upon his imagination instantly. And he remembered the legend of the country-side that Ludwig of Bavaria was said to be about when nights were very wild. He wondered. Into his speech and manner crept unawares an attitude of deference that was almost reverence, and with it\u2014whence came this other quality?\u2014a searching pity.\n\n\"You must be wearied out,\" he said respectfully, busying himself about the room, \"as well as cold and wet. This fire will dry you, sir, and meanwhile I will prepare quickly such food as there is, if you will eat it.\" For the other carried no knapsack, nor was he clothed for the severity of mountain travel.\n\n\"I have already eaten,\" said the stranger courteously, \"and, with my thanks to you, I am neither wet nor tired. The afflictions that I bear are of another kind, though ones that you shall more easily, I am sure, relieve.\"\n\nHe spoke as a man whose words set troops in action, and Delane glanced at him, deeply moved by the surprising phrase, yet hardly marvelling that it should be so. He found no ready answer. But there was evidently question in his look, for the other continued, and this time with a smile that betrayed sheer winning beauty as of a tender woman:\n\n\"I saw the light and came to it. It is unusual\u2014at this time.\"\n\nHis voice was resonant, yet not deep. There was a ringing quality about it that the bare room emphasised. It charmed the young Englishman inexplicably. Also, it woke in him a sense of infinite pathos.\n\n\"You are a climber, sir, like myself,\" Delane resumed, lifting his eyes a moment uneasily from the coffee he brewed over a corner of the fire. \"You know this neighbourhood, perhaps? Better, at any rate, than I can know it?\" His German halted rather. He chose his words with difficulty. There was uncommon trouble in his mind.\n\n\"I know all wild and desolate places,\" replied the other, in perfect English, but with a wintry mournfulness in his voice and eyes, \"for I feel at home in them, and their stern companionship my nature craves as solace. But, unlike yourself, I am no climber.\"\n\n\"The heights have no attraction for you?\" asked Delane, as he mingled steaming milk and coffee in the wooden bowl, marvelling what brought him then so high above the valleys. \"It is their difficulty and danger that fascinate me always. I find the loneliness of the summits intoxicating in a sense.\"\n\nAnd, regardless of refusal, he set the bread and meat before him, the apple and the tiny packet of salt, then turned away to place the coffee pot beside the fire again. But as he did so a singular gesture of the other caught his eyes. Before touching bowl or plate, the stranger took the fruit and brushed his lips with it. He kissed it, then set it on the ground and crushed it into pulp beneath his heel. And, seeing this, the young Englishman knew something dreadfully arrested in his mind, for, as he looked away, pretending the act was unobserved, a thing of ice and darkness moved past him through the room, so that the pot trembled in his hand, rattling sharply against the hearthstone where he stooped. He could only interpret it as an act of madness, and the myth of the sad, drowned monarch wandering through this enchanted region, pressed into him again unsought and urgent. It was a full minute before he had control of his heart and hand again.\n\nThe bowl was half emptied, and the man was smiling\u2014this time the smile of a child who implores the comfort of enveloping and understanding arms.\n\n\"I am a wanderer rather than a climber,\" he was saying, as though there had been no interval, \"for, though the lonely summits suit me well, I now find in them only\u2014terror. My feet lose their sureness, and my head its steady balance. I prefer the hidden gorges of these mountains, and the shadows of the covering forests. My days\"\u2014his voice drew the loneliness of uttermost space into its piteous accents\u2014\"are passed in darkness. I can never climb again.\"\n\nHe spoke this time, indeed, as a man whose nerve was gone for ever. It was pitiable almost to tears. And Delane, unable to explain the amazing contradictions, felt recklessly, furiously drawn to this trapped wanderer with the mien of a king yet the air and speech sometimes of a woman and sometimes of an outcast child.\n\n\"Ah, then you have known accidents,\" Delane replied with outer calmness, as he lit his pipe, trying in vain to keep his hand as steady as his voice. \"You have been in one perhaps. The effect, I have been told, is\u2014\"\n\nThe power and sweetness in that resonant voice took his breath away as he heard it break in upon his own uncertain accents:\n\n\"I have\u2014fallen,\" the stranger replied impressively, as the rain and wind wailed past the building mournfully, \"yet a fall that was no part of any accident. For it was no common fall,\" the man added with a magnificent gesture of disdain, \"while yet it broke my heart in two.\" He stooped a little as he uttered the next words with a crying pathos that an outcast woman might have used. \"I am,\" he said, \"engulfed in intolerable loneliness. I can never climb again.\"\n\nWith a shiver impossible to control, half of terror, half of pity, Delane moved a step nearer to the marvellous stranger. The spirit of Ludwig, exiled and distraught, had gripped his soul with a weakening terror; but now sheer beauty lifted him above all personal shrinking. There seemed some echo of lost divinity, worn, wild yet grandiose, through which this significant language strained towards a personal message\u2014for himself.\n\n\"In loneliness?\" he faltered, sympathy rising in a flood.\n\n\"For my Kingdom that is lost to me for ever,\" met him in deep, throbbing tones that set the air on fire. \"For my imperial ancient heights that jealousy took from me\u2014\"\n\nThe stranger paused, with an indescribable air of broken dignity and pain.\n\nOutside the tempest paused a moment before the awful elemental crash that followed. A bellowing of many winds descended like artillery upon the world. A burst of smoke rushed from the fireplace about them both, shrouding the stranger momentarily in a flying veil. And Delane stood up, uncomfortable in his very bones. \"What can it be?\" he asked himself sharply. \"Who is this being that he should use such language?\" He watched alarm chase pity, aware that the conversation held something beyond experience. But the pity returned in greater and ever greater flood. And love surged through him too. It was significant, he remembered afterwards, that he felt it incumbent upon himself to stand. Curious, too, how the thought of that mad, drowned monarch haunted memory with such persistence. Some vast emotion that he could not name drove out his subsequent words. The smoke had cleared, and a strange, high stillness held the world. The rain streamed down in torrents, isolating these two somehow from the haunts of men. And the Englishman stared then into a countenance grown mighty with woe and loneliness. There stood darkly in it this incommunicable magnificence of pain that mingled awe with the pity he had felt. The kingly eyes looked clear into his own, completing his subjugation out of time. \"I would follow you,\" ran his thought upon its knees, \"follow you with obedience for ever and ever, even into a last damnation. For you are sublime. You shall come again into your Kingdom, if my own small worship\u2014\"\n\nThen blackness sponged the reckless thought away. He spoke in its place a more guarded, careful thing:\n\n\"I am aware,\" he faltered, yet conscious that he bowed, \"of standing before a Great One of some world unknown to me. Who he may be I have but the privilege of wondering. He has spoken darkly of a Kingdom that is lost. Yet he is still, I see, a Monarch.\" And he lowered his head and shoulders involuntarily.\n\nFor an instant, then, as he said it, the eyes before him flashed their original terrific lightnings. The darkness of the common world faded before the entrance of an Outer Darkness. From gulfs of terror at his feet rose shadows out of the night of time, and a passionate anguish as of sudden madness seized his heart and shook it.\n\nHe listened breathlessly for the words that followed. It seemed some wind of unutterable despair passed in the breath from those non-human lips:\n\n\"I am still a Monarch, yes; but my Kingdom is taken from me, for I have no single subject. Lost in a loneliness that lies out of space and time, I am become a throneless Ruler, and my hopelessness is more than I can bear.\" The beseeching pathos of the voice tore him in two. The Deity himself, it seemed, stood there accused of jealousy, of sin and cruelty. The stranger rose. The power about him brought the picture of a planet, throned in mid-heaven and poised beyond assault. \"Not otherwise,\" boomed the startling words as though an avalanche found syllables, \"could I now show myself to\u2014you.\"\n\nDelane was trembling horribly. He felt the next words slip off his tongue unconsciously. The shattering truth had dawned upon his soul at last.\n\n\"Then the light you saw, and came to\u2014?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Was the light in your heart that guided me,\" came the answer, sweet, beguiling as the music in a woman's tones, \"the light of your instant, brief desire that held love in it.\" He made an opening movement with his arms as he continued, smiling like stars in summer. \"For you summoned me; summoned me by your dear and precious belief: how dear, how precious, none can know but I who stand before you.\"\n\nHis figure drew up with an imperial air of proud dominion. His feet were set among the constellations. The opening movement of his arms continued slowly. And the music in his tones seemed merged in distant thunder.\n\n\"For your single, brief belief,\" he smiled with the grandeur of a condescending Emperor, \"shall give my vanished Kingdom back to me.\"\n\nAnd with an air of native majesty he held his hand out\u2014to be kissed.\n\nThe black hurricane of night, the terror of frozen peaks, the yawning horror of the great abyss outside\u2014all three crowded into the Englishman's mind with a slashing impact that blocked delivery of any word or action. It was not that he refused, it was not that he withdrew, but that Life stood paralysed and rigid. The flow stopped dead for the first time since he had left his mother's womb. The God in him was turned to stone and rendered ineffective. For an appalling instant God was not.\n\nHe realised the stupendous moment. Before him, drinking his little soul out merely by his Presence, stood one whose habit of mind, not alone his external accidents, was imperial with black prerogative before the first man drew the breath of life. August procedure was native to his inner process of existence. The stars and confines of the universe owned his sway before he fell, to trifle away the dreary little centuries by haunting the minds of feeble men and women, by hiding himself in nursery cupboards, and by grinning with stained gargoyles from the roofs of city churches. ...\n\nAnd the lad's life stammered, flickered, threatened to go out before the enveloping terror of the revelation.\n\n\"I called to you... but called to you in play,\" thought whispered somewhere deep below the level of any speech, yet not so low that the audacious sound of it did not crash above the elements outside; \"for... till now... you have been to me but a... coated bogy... that my brain disowned with laughter... and my heart thought picturesque. If you are here... alive! May God forgive me for my...\"\n\nIt seemed as though tears\u2014the tears of love and profound commiseration\u2014drowned the very seed of thought itself.\n\nA sound stopped him that was like a collapse in heaven. Some crashing, as of a ruined world, passed splintering through his little timid heart. He did not yield, but he understood\u2014with an understanding which seemed the delicate first sign of yielding\u2014the seductiveness of evil, the sweet delight of surrendering the Will with utter recklessness to those swelling forces which disintegrate the heroic soul in man. He remembered. It was true. In the reaction from excess he had definitely called upon his childhood's teaching with a passing moment of genuine belief. And now that yearning of a fraction of a second bore its awful fruit. The luscious Capitals where he had rioted passed in a coloured stream before his eyes; the Wine, the Woman, and the Song stood there before him, clothed in that Power which lies insinuatingly disguised behind their little passing show of innocence. Their glamour donned this domino of regal and virile grandeur. He felt entangled beyond recovery. The idea of God seemed sterile and without reality. The one real thing, the one desirable thing, the one possible, strong and beautiful thing\u2014was to bend his head and kiss those imperial fingers. He moved noiselessly towards the Hand. He raised his own to take it and lift it towards his mouth\u2014\n\nWhen there rose in his mind with startling vividness a small, soft picture of a child's nursery, a picture of a little boy, kneeling in scanty night-gown with pink upturned soles, and asking ridiculous, audacious things of a shining Figure seated on a summer cloud above the kitchen-garden walnut tree.\n\nThe tiny symbol flashed and went its way, yet not before it had lit the entire world with glory. For there came an absolutely routing power with it. In that half-forgotten instant's craving for the simple teaching of his childhood days, Belief had conjured with two immense traditions. This was the second of them. The appearance of the one had inevitably produced the passage of its opposite. ...\n\nAnd the Hand that floated in the air before him to be kissed sank slowly down below the possible level of his lips. He shrank away. Though laughter tempted something in his brain, there still clung about his heart the first aching, pitying terror. But size retreated, dwindling somehow as it went. The wind and rain obliterated every other sound; yet in that bare, unfurnished room of a climber's mountain hut, there was a silence, above the roar, that drank in everything and broke the back of speech. In opposition to this masquerading splendour Delane had set up a personal, paternal Deity.\n\n\"I thought of you, perhaps,\" cried the voice of self-defence, \"but I did not call to you with real belief. And, by the name of God, I did not summon you. For your sweetness, as your power, sickens me; and your hand is black with the curses of all the mothers in the world, whose prayers and tears\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped dead, overwhelmed by the cruelty of his reckless utterance.\n\nAnd the Other moved towards him slowly. It was like the summit of some peaked and terrible height that moved. He spoke. He changed appallingly.\n\n\"But I claim,\" he roared, \"your heart. I claim you by that instant of belief you felt. For by that alone you shall restore to me my vanished Kingdom. You shall worship me.\"\n\nIn the countenance was a sudden awful power; but behind the stupefying roar there was weakness in the voice as of an imploring and beseeching child. Again, deep love and searching pity seared the Englishman's heart as he replied in the gentlest accents he could find to master:\n\n\"And I claim you,\" he said, \"by my understanding sympathy, and by my sorrow for your God-forsaken loneliness, and by my love. For no Kingdom built on hate can stand against the love you would deny\u2014\"\n\nWords failed him then, as he saw the majesty fade slowly from the face, grown small and shadowy. One last expression of desperate energy in the eyes struck lightnings from the smoky air, as with an abandoned movement of the entire figure, he drew back, it seemed, towards the door behind him.\n\nDelane moved slowly after him, opening his arms. Tenderness and big compassion flung wide the gates of love within him. He found strange language, too, although actual, spoken words did not produce them further than his entrails where they had their birth.\n\n\"Toys in the world are plentiful, Sire, and you may have them for your masterpiece of play. But you must seek them where they still survive; in the churches, and in isolated lands where thought lies unawakened. For they are the children's blocks of make-believe whose palaces, like your once tremendous kingdom, have no true existence for the thinking mind.\"\n\nAnd he stretched his hands towards him with the gesture of one who sought to help and save, then paused as he realised that his arms enclosed sheer blackness, with the emptiness of wind and driving rain.\n\nFor the door of the hut stood open, and Delane balanced on the threshold, facing the sheet of night above the abyss. He heard the waterfalls in the valley far below. The forest flapped and tossed its myriad branches. Cold draughts swept down from spectral fields of melting snow above; and the blackness turned momentarily into the semblance of towers and bastions of thick beaten gloom. Above one soaring turret, then, a space of sky appeared, swept naked by a violent, lost wind\u2014an opening of purple into limitless distance. For one second, amid the vapours, it was visible, empty and untenanted. The next, there sailed across its small diameter a falling Star. With an air of slow and endless leisure, yet at the same time with terrific speed, it dived behind the ragged curtain of the clouds, and the space closed up again. Blackness returned upon the heavens.\n\nAnd through this blackness, plunging into that abyss of woe whence he had momentarily risen, the figure of the marvellous stranger melted utterly away. Delane, for a fleeting second, was aware of the earnestness in the sad, imploring countenance; of its sweetness and its power so strangely mingled; of it mysterious grandeur; and of its pathetic childishness. But, already, it was sunk into interminable distance. A star that would be baleful, yet was merely glorious, passed on its endless wandering among the teeming systems of the universe. Behind the fixed and steady stars, secure in their appointed places, it set. It vanished into the pit of unknown emptiness. It was gone.\n\n\"God help you!\" sighed across the sea of wailing branches, echoing down the dark abyss below. \"God give you rest at last!\"\n\nFor he saw a princely, nay, an imperial Being, homeless for ever, and for ever wandering, hunted as by keen remorseless winds about a universe that held no corner for his feet, his majesty unworshipped, his reign a mockery, his Court unfurnished, and his courtiers mere shadows of deep space. ...\n\nAnd a thin, grey dawn, stealing up behind clearing summits in the east, crept then against the windows of the mountain hut. It brought with it a treacherous, sharp air that made the sleeper draw another blanket near to shelter him from the sudden cold. For the fire had died out, and an icy draught sucked steadily beneath the doorway." + }, + { + "title": "A Bit Of Wood by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "He found himself in Meran with some cousins who had various slight ailments, but, being rich and imaginative, had gone to a sanatorium to be cured. But for its sanatoria, Meran might be a cheerful place; their ubiquity reminds a healthy man too often that the air is really good. Being well enough himself, except for a few mental worries, he went to a Gasthaus in the neighbourhood. In the sanatorium his cousins complained bitterly of the food, the ignorant \"sisters,\" the inattentive doctors, and the idiotic regulations generally\u2014which proves that people should not go to a sanatorium unless they are really ill. However, they paid heavily for being there, so felt that something was being accomplished, and were annoyed when he called each day for tea, and told them cheerfully how much better they looked\u2014which proved, again, that their ailments were slight and quite curable by the local doctor at home. With one of the ailing cousins, a rich and pretty girl, he believed himself in love.\n\nIt was a three weeks' business, and he spent his mornings walking in the surrounding hills, his mind reflective, analytical, and ambitious, as with a man in love. He thought of thousands of things. He mooned. Once, for instance, he paused beside a rivulet to watch the buttercups dip, and asked himself, \"Will she be like this when we're married\u2014so anxious to be well that she thinks fearfully all the time of getting ill?\" For if so, he felt he would be bored. He knew himself accurately enough to realise that he never could stand that. Yet money was a wonderful thing to have, and he, already thirty-five, had little enough! \"Am I influenced by her money, then?\" he asked himself... and so went on to ask and wonder about many things besides, for he was of a reflective temperament and his father had been a minor poet. And Doubt crept in. He felt a chill. He was not much of a man, perhaps, thin-blooded and unsuccessful, rather a dreamer, too, into the bargain. He had \u00a3100 a year of his own and a position in a Philanthropic Institution (due to influence) with a nominal salary attached. He meant to keep the latter after marriage. He would work just the same. Nobody should ever say that of him\u2014!\n\nAnd as he sat on the fallen tree beside the rivulet, idly knocking stones into the rushing water with his stick, he reflected upon those banal truisms that epitomise two-thirds of life. The way little unimportant things can change a person's whole existence was the one his thought just now had fastened on. His cousin's chill and headache, for instance, caught at a gloomy picnic on the Campagna three weeks before, had led to her going into a sanatorium and being advised that her heart was weak, that she had a tendency to asthma, that gout was in her system, and that a treatment of X-rays, radium, sun-baths and light baths, violet rays, no meat, complete rest, with big daily fees to experts with European reputations, were imperative. \"From that chill, sitting a moment too long in the shadow of a forgotten Patrician's tomb,\" he reflected, \"has come all this\"\u2014\"all this\" including his doubt as to whether it was herself or her money that he loved, whether he could stand living with her always, whether he need really keep his work on after marriage, in a word, his entire life and future, and her own as well\u2014\"all from that tiny chill three weeks ago!\" And he knocked with his stick a little piece of sawn-off board that lay beside the rushing water.\n\nUpon that bit of wood his mind, his mood, then fastened itself. It was triangular, a piece of sawn-off wood, brown with age and ragged. Once it had been part of a triumphant, hopeful sapling on the mountains; then, when thirty years of age, the men had cut it down; the rest of it stood somewhere now, at this very moment, in the walls of the house. This extra bit was cast away as useless; it served no purpose anywhere; it was slowly rotting in the sun. But each tap of the stick, he noticed, turned it sideways without sending it over the edge into the rushing water. It was obstinate. \"It doesn't want to go in,\" he laughed, his father's little talent cropping out in him, \"but, by Jove, it shall!\" And he pushed it with his foot. But again it stopped, stuck end-ways against a stone. He then stooped, picked it up, and threw it in. It plopped and splashed, and went scurrying away downhill with the bubbling water. \"Even that scrap of useless wood,\" he reflected, rising to continue his aimless walk, and still idly dreaming, \"even that bit of rubbish may have a purpose, and may change the life of someone\u2014somewhere!\"\u2014and then went strolling through the fragrant pine woods, crossing a dozen similar streams, and hitting scores of stones and scraps and fir cones as he went\u2014till he finally reached his Gasthaus an hour later, and found a note from her: \"We shall expect you about three o'clock. We thought of going for a drive. The others feel so much better.\"\n\nIt was a revealing touch\u2014the way she put it on \"the others.\" He made his mind up then and there\u2014thus tiny things divide the course of life\u2014that he could never be happy with such an \"affected creature.\" He went for that drive, sat next to her consuming beauty, proposed to her passionately on the way back, was accepted before he could change his mind, and is now the father of several healthy children\u2014and just as much afraid of getting ill, or of their getting ill, as she was fifteen years before. The female, of course, matures long, long before the male, he reflected, thinking the matter over in his study once. ...\n\nAnd that scrap of wood he idly set in motion out of impulse also went its destined way upon the hurrying water that never dared to stop. Proud of its new-found motion, it bobbed down merrily, spinning and turning for a mile or so, dancing gaily over sunny meadows, brushing the dipping buttercups as it passed, through vineyards, woods, and under dusty roads in neat, cool gutters, and tumbling headlong over little waterfalls, until it neared the plain. And so, finally, it came to a wooden trough that led off some of the precious water to a sawmill where bare-armed men did practical and necessary things. At the parting of the ways its angles delayed it for a moment, undecided which way to take. It wobbled. And upon that moment's wobbling hung tragic issues\u2014issues of life and death.\n\nUnknowing (yet assuredly not unknown), it chose the trough. It swung light-heartedly into the tearing sluice. It whirled with the gush of water towards the wheel, banged, spun, trembled, caught fast in the side where the cogs just chanced to be\u2014and abruptly stopped the wheel. At any other spot the pressure of the water must have smashed it into pulp, and the wheel have continued as before; but it was caught in the one place where the various tensions held it fast immovably. It stopped the wheel, and so the machinery of the entire mill. It jammed like iron. The particular angle at which the double-handed saw, held by two weary and perspiring men, had cut it off a year before just enabled it to fit and wedge itself with irresistible exactitude. The pressure of the tearing water combined with the weight of the massive wheel to fix it tight and rigid. And in due course a workman\u2014it was the foreman of the mill\u2014came from his post inside to make investigations. He discovered the irritating item that caused the trouble. He put his weight in a certain way; he strained his hefty muscles; he swore\u2014and the scrap of wood was easily dislodged. He fished the morsel out, and tossed it on the bank, and spat on it. The great wheel started with a mighty groan. But it started a fraction of a second before he expected it would start. He overbalanced, clutching the revolving framework with a frantic effort, shouted, swore, leaped at nothing, and fell into the pouring flood. In an instant he was turned upside down, sucked under, drowned. He was engaged to be married, and had put by a thousand kronen in the Tiroler Sparbank. He was a sober and hard-working man. ...\n\nThere was a paragraph in the local paper two days later. The Englishman, asking the porter of his Gasthaus for something to wrap up a present he was taking to his cousin in the sanatorium, used that very issue. As he folded its crumpled and recalcitrant sheets with sentimental care about the precious object his eye fell carelessly upon the paragraph. Being of an idle and reflective temperament, he stopped to read it\u2014it was headed \"Ungl\u00fccksfall,\" and his poetic eye, inherited from his foolish, rhyming father, caught the pretty expression \"fliessandes Wasser.\" He read the first few lines. Some fellow, with a picturesque Tyrolese name, had been drowned beneath a mill-wheel; he was popular in the neighbourhood, it seemed; he had saved some money, and was just going to be married. It was very sad. \"Our readers' sympathy\" was with him. ... And, being of a reflective temperament, the Englishman thought for a moment, while he went on wrapping up the parcel. He wondered if the man had really loved the girl, whether she, too, had money, and whether they would have had lots of children and been happy ever afterwards. And then he hurried out towards the sanatorium. \"I shall be late,\" he reflected. \"Such little, unimportant things delay one ...!\"" + }, + { + "title": "A Victim Of Higher Space by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "\"There's a hextraordinary gentleman to see you, sir,\" said the new man.\n\n\"Why 'extraordinary'?\" asked Dr. Silence, drawing the tips of his thin fingers through his brown beard. His eyes twinkled pleasantly. \"Why 'extraordinary,' Barker?\" he repeated encouragingly, noticing the perplexed expression in the man's eyes.\n\n\"He's so\u2014so thin, sir. I could hardly see 'im at all\u2014at first. He was inside the house before I could ask the name,\" he added, remembering strict orders.\n\n\"And who brought him here?\"\n\n\"He come alone, sir, in a closed cab. He pushed by me before I could say a word\u2014making no noise not what I could hear. He seemed to move so soft like\u2014\"\n\nThe man stopped short with obvious embarrassment, as though he had already said enough to jeopardise his new situation, but trying hard to show that he remembered the instructions and warnings he had received with regard to the admission of strangers not properly accredited.\n\n\"And where is the gentleman now?\" asked Dr. Silence, turning away to conceal his amusement.\n\n\"I really couldn't exactly say, sir. I left him standing in the 'all\u2014\"\n\nThe doctor looked up sharply. \"But why in the hall, Barker? Why not in the waiting-room?\" He fixed his piercing though kindly eyes on the man's face. \"Did he frighten you?\" he asked quickly.\n\n\"I think he did, sir, if I may say so. I seemed to lose sight of him, as it were\u2014\" The man stammered, evidently convinced by now that he had earned his dismissal. \"He come in so funny, just like a cold wind,\" he added boldly, setting his heels at attention and looking his master full in the face.\n\nThe doctor made an internal note of the man's halting description; he was pleased that the slight signs of psychic intuition which had induced him to engage Barker had not entirely failed at the first trial. Dr. Silence sought for this qualification in all his assistants, from secretary to serving man, and if it surrounded him with a somewhat singular crew, the drawbacks were more than compensated for on the whole by their occasional flashes of insight.\n\n\"So the gentleman made you feel queer, did he?\"\n\n\"That was it, I think, sir,\" repeated the man stolidly.\n\n\"And he brings no kind of introduction to me\u2014no letter or anything?\" asked the doctor, with feigned surprise, as though he knew what was coming.\n\nThe man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced an envelope.\n\n\"I beg pardon, sir,\" he said, greatly flustered; \"the gentleman handed me this for you.\"\n\nIt was a note from a discerning friend, who had never yet sent him a case that was not vitally interesting from one point or another.\n\n\"Please see the bearer of this note,\" the brief message ran, \"though I doubt if even you can do much to help him.\"\n\nJohn Silence paused a moment, so as to gather from the mind of the writer all that lay behind the brief words of the letter. Then he looked up at his servant with a graver expression than he had yet worn.\n\n\"Go back and find this gentleman,\" he said, \"and show him into the green study. Do not reply to his question, or speak more than actually necessary; but think kind, helpful, sympathetic thoughts as strongly as you can, Barker. You remember what I told you about the importance of thinking, when I engaged you. Put curiosity out of your mind, and think gently, sympathetically, affectionately, if you can.\"\n\nHe smiled, and Barker, who had recovered his composure in the doctor's presence, bowed silently and went out.\n\nThere were two different reception-rooms in Dr. Silence's house. One (intended for persons who imagined they needed spiritual assistance when really they were only candidates for the asylum) had padded walls, and was well supplied with various concealed contrivances by means of which sudden violence could be instantly met and overcome. It was, however, rarely used. The other, intended for the reception of genuine cases of spiritual distress and out-of-the-way afflictions of a psychic nature, was entirely draped and furnished in a soothing deep green, calculated to induce calmness and repose of mind. And this room was the one in which Dr. Silence interviewed the majority of his \"queer\" cases, and the one into which he had directed Barker to show his present caller.\n\nTo begin with, the arm-chair in which the patient was always directed to sit, was nailed to the floor, since its immovability tended to impart this same excellent characteristic to the occupant. Patients invariably grew excited when talking about themselves, and their excitement tended to confuse their thoughts and to exaggerate their language. The inflexibility of the chair helped to counteract this. After repeated endeavours to drag it forward, or push it back, they ended by resigning themselves to sitting quietly. And with the futility of fidgeting there followed a calmer state of mind.\n\nUpon the floor, and at intervals in the wall immediately behind, were certain tiny green buttons, practically unnoticeable, which on being pressed permitted a soothing and persuasive narcotic to rise invisibly about the occupant of the chair. The effect upon the excitable patient was rapid, admirable, and harmless. The green study was further provided with a secret spy-hole; for John Silence liked when possible to observe his patient's face before it had assumed that mask the features of the human countenance invariably wear in the presence of another person. A man sitting alone wears a psychic expression; and this expression is the man himself. It disappears the moment another person joins him. And Dr. Silence often learned more from a few moments' secret observation of a face than from hours of conversation with its owner afterwards.\n\nA very light, almost a dancing, step followed Barker's heavy tread towards the green room, and a moment afterwards the man came in and announced that the gentleman was waiting. He was still pale and his manner nervous.\n\n\"Never mind, Barker,\" the doctor said kindly; \"if you were not psychic the man would have had no effect upon you at all. You only need training and development. And when you have learned to interpret these feelings and sensations better, you will feel no fear, but only a great sympathy.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; thank you, sir!\" And Barker bowed and made his escape, while Dr. Silence, an amused smile lurking about the corners of his mouth, made his way noiselessly down the passage and put his eye to the spy-hole in the door of the green study.\n\nThis spy-hole was so placed that it commanded a view of almost the entire room, and, looking through it, the doctor saw a hat, gloves, and umbrella lying on a chair by the table, but searched at first in vain for their owner.\n\nThe windows were both closed and a brisk fire burned in the grate. There were various signs\u2014signs intelligible at least to a keenly intuitive soul\u2014that the room was occupied, yet so far as human beings were concerned, it was empty, utterly empty. No one sat in the chairs; no one stood on the mat before the fire; there was no sign even that a patient was anywhere close against the wall, examining the B\u00f6cklin reproductions\u2014as patients so often did when they thought they were alone\u2014and therefore rather difficult to see from the spy-hole. Ordinarily speaking, there was no one in the room. It was undeniable.\n\nYet Dr. Silence was quite well aware that a human being was in the room. His psychic apparatus never failed in letting him know the proximity of an incarnate or discarnate being. Even in the dark he could tell that. And he now knew positively that his patient\u2014the patient who had alarmed Barker, and had then tripped down the corridor with that dancing footstep\u2014was somewhere concealed within the four walls commanded by his spy-hole. He also realised\u2014and this was most unusual\u2014that this individual whom he desired to watch knew that he was being watched. And, further, that the stranger himself was also watching! In fact, that it was he, the doctor, who was being observed\u2014and by an observer as keen and trained as himself.\n\nAn inkling of the true state of the case began to dawn upon him, and he was on the verge of entering\u2014indeed, his hand already touched the door-knob\u2014when his eye, still glued to the spy-hole, detected a slight movement. Directly opposite, between him and the fireplace, something stirred. He watched very attentively and made certain that he was not mistaken. An object on the mantelpiece\u2014it was a blue vase\u2014disappeared from view. It passed out of sight together with the portion of the marble mantelpiece on which it rested. Next, that part of the fire and grate and brass fender immediately below it vanished entirely, as though a slice had been taken clean out of them.\n\nDr. Silence then understood that something between him and these objects was slowly coming into being, something that concealed them and obstructed his vision by inserting itself in the line of sight between them and himself.\n\nHe quietly awaited further results before going in.\n\nFirst he saw a thin perpendicular line tracing itself from just above the height of the clock and continuing downwards till it reached the woolly fire-mat. This line grew wider, broadened, grew solid. It was no shadow; it was something substantial. It defined itself more and more. Then suddenly, at the top of the line, and about on a level with the face of the clock, he saw a round luminous disc gazing steadily at him. It was a human eye, looking straight into his own, pressed there against the spy-hole. And it was bright with intelligence. Dr. Silence held his breath for a moment\u2014and stared back at it.\n\nThen, like some one moving out of deep shadow into light, he saw the figure of a man come sliding sideways into view, a whitish face following the eye, and the perpendicular line he had first observed broadening out and developing into the complete figure of a human being. It was the patient. He had apparently been standing there in front of the fire all the time. A second eye had followed the first, and both of them stared steadily at the spy-hole, sharply concentrated, yet with a sly twinkle of humour and amusement that made it impossible for the doctor to maintain his position any longer.\n\nHe opened the door and went in quickly. As he did so he noticed for the first time the sound of a German band coming in gaily through the open ventilators. In some intuitive, unaccountable fashion the music connected itself with the patient he was about to interview. This sort of prevision was not unfamiliar to him. It always explained itself later.\n\nThe man, he saw, was of middle age and of very ordinary appearance; so ordinary, in fact, that he was difficult to describe\u2014his only peculiarity being his extreme thinness. Pleasant\u2014that is, good\u2014vibrations issued from his atmosphere and met Dr. Silence as he advanced to greet him, yet vibrations alive with currents and discharges betraying the perturbed and disordered condition of his mind and brain. There was evidently something wholly out of the usual in the state of his thoughts. Yet, though strange, it was not altogether distressing; it was not the impression that the broken and violent atmosphere of the insane produces upon the mind. Dr. Silence realised in a flash that here was a case of absorbing interest that might require all his powers to handle properly.\n\n\"I was watching you through my little peep-hole\u2014as you saw,\" he began, with a pleasant smile, advancing to shake hands. \"I find it of the greatest assistance sometimes\u2014\"\n\nBut the patient interrupted him at once. His voice was hurried and had odd, shrill changes in it, breaking from high to low in unexpected fashion. One moment it thundered, the next it almost squeaked.\n\n\"I understand without explanation,\" he broke in rapidly. \"You get the true note of a man in this way\u2014when he thinks himself unobserved. I quite agree. Only, in my case, I fear, you saw very little. My case, as you of course grasp, Dr. Silence, is extremely peculiar, uncomfortably peculiar. Indeed, unless Sir William had positively assured me\u2014\"\n\n\"My friend has sent you to me,\" the doctor interrupted gravely, with a gentle note of authority, \"and that is quite sufficient. Pray, be seated, Mr.\u2014\"\n\n\"Mudge\u2014Racine Mudge,\" returned the other.\n\n\"Take this comfortable one, Mr. Mudge,\" leading him to the fixed chair, \"and tell me your condition in your own way and at your own pace. My whole day is at your service if you require it.\"\n\nMr. Mudge moved towards the chair in question and then hesitated.\n\n\"You will promise me not to use the narcotic buttons,\" he said, before sitting down. \"I do not need them. Also I ought to mention that anything you think of vividly will reach my mind. That is apparently part of my peculiar case.\" He sat down with a sigh and arranged his thin legs and body into a position of comfort. Evidently he was very sensitive to the thoughts of others, for the picture of the green buttons had only entered the doctor's mind for a second, yet the other had instantly snapped it up. Dr. Silence noticed, too, that Mr. Mudge held on tightly with both hands to the arms of the chair.\n\n\"I'm rather glad the chair is nailed to the floor,\" he remarked, as he settled himself more comfortably. \"It suits me admirably. The fact is\u2014and this is my case in a nutshell\u2014which is all that a doctor of your marvellous development requires\u2014the fact is, Dr. Silence, I am a victim of Higher Space. That's what's the matter with me\u2014Higher Space!\"\n\nThe two looked at each other for a space in silence, the little patient holding tightly to the arms of the chair which \"suited him admirably,\" and looking up with staring eyes, his atmosphere positively trembling with the waves of some unknown activity; while the doctor smiled kindly and sympathetically, and put his whole person as far as possible into the mental condition of the other.\n\n\"Higher Space,\" repeated Mr. Mudge, \"that's what it is. Now, do you think you can help me with that?\"\n\nThere was a pause during which the men's eyes steadily searched down below the surface of their respective personalities. Then Dr. Silence spoke.\n\n\"I am quite sure I can help,\" he answered quietly; \"sympathy must always help, and suffering always owns my sympathy. I see you have suffered cruelly. You must tell me all about your case, and when I hear the gradual steps by which you reached this strange condition, I have no doubt I can be of assistance to you.\"\n\nHe drew a chair up beside his interlocutor and laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment. His whole being radiated kindness, intelligence, desire to help.\n\n\"For instance,\" he went on, \"I feel sure it was the result of no mere chance that you became familiar with the terrors of what you term Higher Space; for Higher Space is no mere external measurement. It is, of course, a spiritual state, a spiritual condition, an inner development, and one that we must recognise as abnormal, since it is beyond the reach of the world at the present stage of evolution. Higher Space is a mythical state.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" cried the other, rubbing his birdlike hands with pleasure, \"the relief it is to be to talk to some one who can understand! Of course what you say is the utter truth. And you are right that no mere chance led me to my present condition, but, on the other hand, prolonged and deliberate study. Yet chance in a sense now governs it. I mean, my entering the condition of Higher Space seems to depend upon the chance of this and that circumstance. For instance, the mere sound of that German band sent me off. Not that all music will do so, but certain sounds, certain vibrations, at once key me up to the requisite pitch, and off I go. Wagner's music always does it, and that band must have been playing a stray bit of Wagner. But I'll come to all that later. Only, first, I must ask you to send away your man from the spy-hole.\"\n\nJohn Silence looked up with a start, for Mr. Mudge's back was to the door, and there was no mirror. He saw the brown eye of Barker glued to the little circle of glass, and he crossed the room without a word and snapped down the black shutter provided for the purpose, and then heard Barker shuffle away along the passage.\n\n\"Now,\" continued the little man in the chair, \"I can begin. You have managed to put me completely at my ease, and I feel I may tell you my whole case without shame or reserve. You will understand. But you must be patient with me if I go into details that are already familiar to you\u2014details of Higher Space, I mean\u2014and if I seem stupid when I have to describe things that transcend the power of language and are really therefore indescribable.\"\n\n\"My dear friend,\" put in the other calmly, \"that goes without saying. To know Higher Space is an experience that defies description, and one is obliged to make use of more or less intelligible symbols. But, pray, proceed. Your vivid thoughts will tell me more than your halting words.\"\n\nAn immense sigh of relief proceeded from the little figure half lost in the depths of the chair. Such intelligent sympathy meeting him half-way was a new experience to him, and it touched his heart at once. He leaned back, relaxing his tight hold of the arms, and began in his thin, scale-like voice.\n\n\"My mother was a Frenchwoman, and my father an Essex bargeman,\" he said abruptly. \"Hence my name\u2014Racine and Mudge. My father died before I ever saw him. My mother inherited money from her Bordeaux relations, and when she died soon after, I was left alone with wealth and a strange freedom. I had no guardian, trustees, sisters, brothers, or any connection in the world to look after me. I grew up, therefore, utterly without education. This much was to my advantage; I learned none of that deceitful rubbish taught in schools, and so had nothing to unlearn when I awakened to my true love\u2014mathematics, higher mathematics and higher geometry. These, however, I seemed to know instinctively. It was like the memory of what I had deeply studied before; the principles were in my blood, and I simply raced through the ordinary stages, and beyond, and then did the same with geometry. Afterwards, when I read the books on these subjects, I understood how swift and undeviating the knowledge had come back to me. It was simply memory. It was simply re-collecting the memories of what I had known before in a previous existence and required no books to teach me.\"\n\nIn his growing excitement, Mr. Mudge attempted to drag the chair forward a little nearer to his listener, and then smiled faintly as he resigned himself instantly again to its immovability, and plunged anew into the recital of his singular \"disease.\"\n\n\"The audacious speculations of Bolyai, the amazing theories of Gauss\u2014that through a point more than one line could be drawn parallel to a given line; the possibility that the angles of a triangle are together greater than two right angles, if drawn upon immense curvatures-the breathless intuitions of Beltrami and Lobatchewsky\u2014all these I hurried through, and emerged, panting but unsatisfied, upon the verge of my\u2014my new world, my Higher Space possibilities\u2014in a word, my disease!\n\n\"How I got there,\" he resumed after a brief pause, during which he appeared to be listening intently for an approaching sound, \"is more than I can put intelligibly into words. I can only hope to leave your mind with an intuitive comprehension of the possibility of what I say.\n\n\"Here, however, came a change. At this point I was no longer absorbing the fruits of studies I had made before; it was the beginning of new efforts to learn for the first time, and I had to go slowly and laboriously through terrible work. Here I sought for the theories and speculations of others. But books were few and far between, and with the exception of one man\u2014a 'dreamer,' the world called him\u2014whose audacity and piercing intuition amazed and delighted me beyond description, I found no one to guide or help.\n\n\"You, of course, Dr. Silence, understand something of what I am driving at with these stammering words, though you cannot perhaps yet guess what depths of pain my new knowledge brought me to, nor why an acquaintance with a new development of space should prove a source of misery and terror.\"\n\nMr. Racine Mudge, remembering that the chair would not move, did the next best thing he could in his desire to draw nearer to the attentive man facing him, and sat forward upon the very edge of the cushions, crossing his legs and gesticulating with both hands as though he saw into this region of new space he was attempting to describe, and might any moment tumble into it bodily from the edge of the chair and disappear from view. John Silence, separated from him by three paces, sat with his eyes fixed upon the thin white face opposite, noting every word and every gesture with deep attention.\n\n\"This room we now sit in, Dr. Silence, has one side open to space\u2014to Higher Space. A closed box only seems closed. There is a way in and out of a soap bubble without breaking the skin.\"\n\n\"You tell me no new thing,\" the doctor interposed gently.\n\n\"Hence, if Higher Space exists and our world borders upon it and lies partially in it, it follows necessarily that we see only portions of all objects. We never see their true and complete shape. We see their three measurements, but not their fourth. The new direction is concealed from us, and when I hold this book and move my hand all round it I have not really made a complete circuit. We only perceive those portions of any object which exist in our three dimensions; the rest escapes us. But, once we learn to see in Higher Space, and objects will appear as they actually are. Only they will thus be hardly recognisable!\n\n\"Now, you may begin to grasp something of what I am coming to.\"\n\n\"I am beginning to understand something of what you must have suffered,\" observed the doctor soothingly, \"for I have made similar experiments myself, and only stopped just in time\u2014\"\n\n\"You are the one man in all the world who can hear and understand, and sympathise,\" exclaimed Mr. Mudge, grasping his hand and holding it tightly while he spoke. The nailed chair prevented further excitability.\n\n\"Well,\" he resumed, after a moment's pause, \"I procured the implements and the coloured blocks for practical experiment, and I followed the instructions carefully till I had arrived at a working conception of four-dimensional space. The tessaract, the figure whose boundaries are cubes, I knew by heart. That is to say, I knew it and saw it mentally, for my eye, of course, could never take in a new measurement, or my hands and feet handle it.\n\n\"So, at least, I thought,\" he added, making a wry face. \"I had reached the stage, you see, when I could imagine in a new dimension. I was able to conceive the shape of that new figure which is intrinsically different to all we know\u2014the shape of the tessaract. I could perceive in four dimensions. When, therefore, I looked at a cube I could see all its sides at once. Its top was not foreshortened, nor its farther side and base invisible. I saw the whole thing out flat, so to speak. And this tessaract was bounded by cubes! Moreover, I also saw its content\u2014its insides.\"\n\n\"You were not yourself able to enter this new world,\" interrupted Dr. Silence.\n\n\"Not then. I was only able to conceive intuitively what it was like and how exactly it must look. Later, when I slipped in there and saw objects in their entirety, unlimited by the paucity of our poor three measurements, I very nearly lost my life. For, you see, space does not stop at a single new dimension, a fourth. It extends in all possible new ones, and we must conceive it as containing any number of new dimensions. In other words, there is no space at all, but only a spiritual condition. But, meanwhile, I had come to grasp the strange fact that the objects in our normal world appear to us only partially.\"\n\nMr. Mudge moved farther forward till he was balanced dangerously on the very edge of the chair. \"From this starting point,\" he resumed, \"I began my studies and experiments, and continued them for years. I had money, and I was without friends. I lived in solitude and experimented. My intellect, of course, had little part in the work, for intellectually it was all unthinkable. Never was the limitation of mere reason more plainly demonstrated. It was mystically, intuitively, spiritually that I began to advance. And what I learnt, and knew, and did is all impossible to put into language, since it all describes experiences transcending the experiences of men. It is only some of the results\u2014what you would call the symptoms of my disease\u2014that I can give you, and even these must often appear absurd contradictions and impossible paradoxes.\n\n\"I can only tell you, Dr. Silence\"\u2014his manner became exceedingly impressive\u2014\"that I reached sometimes a point of view whence all the great puzzle of the world became plain to me, and I understood what they call in the Yoga books 'The Great Heresy of Separateness'; why all great teachers have urged the necessity of man loving his neighbour as himself; how men are all really one; and why the utter loss of self is necessary to salvation and the discovery of the true life of the soul.\"\n\nHe paused a moment and drew breath.\n\n\"Your speculations have been my own long ago,\" the doctor said quietly. \"I fully realise the force of your words. Men are doubtless not separate at all\u2014in the sense they imagine\u2014\"\n\n\"All this about the very much Higher Space I only dimly, very dimly, conceived, of course,\" the other went on, raising his voice again by jerks; \"but what did happen to me was the humbler accident of\u2014the simpler disaster\u2014oh, dear, how shall I put it\u2014?\"\n\nHe stammered and showed visible signs of distress.\n\n\"It was simply this,\" he resumed with a sudden rush of words, \"that, accidentally, as the result of my years of experiment, I one day slipped bodily into the next world, the world of four dimensions, yet without knowing precisely how I got there, or how I could get back again. I discovered, that is, that my ordinary three-dimensional body was but an expression\u2014a projection\u2014of my higher four-dimensional body!\n\n\"Now you understand what I meant much earlier in our talk when I spoke of chance. I cannot control my entrance or exit. Certain people, certain human atmospheres, certain wandering forces, thoughts, desires even\u2014the radiations of certain combinations of colour, and above all, the vibrations of certain kinds of music, will suddenly throw me into a state of what I can only describe as an intense and terrific inner vibration\u2014and behold I am off! Off in the direction at right angles to all our known directions! Off in the direction the cube takes when it begins to trace the outlines of the new figure! Off into my breathless and semi-divine Higher Space! Off, inside myself, into the world of four dimensions!\"\n\nHe gasped and dropped back into the depths of the immovable chair.\n\n\"And there,\" he whispered, his voice issuing from among the cushions, \"there I have to stay until these vibrations subside, or until they do something which I cannot find words to describe properly or intelligibly to you\u2014and then, behold, I am back again. First, that is, I disappear. Then I reappear.\"\n\n\"Just so,\" exclaimed Dr. Silence, \"and that is why a few\u2014\"\n\n\"Why a few moments ago,\" interrupted Mr. Mudge, taking the words out of his mouth, \"you found me gone, and then saw me return. The music of that wretched German band sent me off. Your intense thinking about me brought me back\u2014when the band had stopped its Wagner. I saw you approach the peep-hole and I saw Barker's intention of doing so later. For me no interiors are hidden. I see inside. When in that state the content of your mind, as of your body, is open to me as the day. Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear!\"\n\nMr. Mudge stopped and again mopped his brow. A light trembling ran over the surface of his small body like wind over grass. He still held tightly to the arms of the chair.\n\n\"At first,\" he presently resumed, \"my new experiences were so vividly interesting that I felt no alarm. There was no room for it. The alarm came a little later.\"\n\n\"Then you actually penetrated far enough into that state to experience yourself as a normal portion of it?\" asked the doctor, leaning forward, deeply interested.\n\nMr. Mudge nodded a perspiring face in reply.\n\n\"I did,\" he whispered, \"undoubtedly I did. I am coming to all that. It began first at night, when I realised that sleep brought no loss of consciousness\u2014\"\n\n\"The spirit, of course, can never sleep. Only the body becomes unconscious,\" interposed John Silence.\n\n\"Yes, we know that\u2014theoretically. At night, of course, the spirit is active elsewhere, and we have no memory of where and how, simply because the brain stays behind and receives no record. But I found that, while remaining conscious, I also retained memory. I had attained to the state of continuous consciousness, for at night I regularly, with the first approaches of drowsiness, entered nolens volens the four-dimensional world.\n\n\"For a time this happened regularly, and I could not control it; though later I found a way to regulate it better. Apparently sleep is unnecessary in the higher\u2014the four-dimensional\u2014body. Yes, perhaps. But I should infinitely have preferred dull sleep to the knowledge. For, unable to control my movements, I wandered to and fro, attracted, owing to my partial development and premature arrival, to parts of this new world that alarmed me more and more. It was the awful waste and drift of a monstrous world, so utterly different to all we know and see that I cannot even hint at the nature of the sights and objects and beings in it. More than that, I cannot even remember them. I cannot now picture them to myself even, but can recall only the memory of the impression they made upon me, the horror and devastating terror of it all. To be in several places at once, for instance\u2014\"\n\n\"Perfectly,\" interrupted John Silence, noticing the increase of the other's excitement, \"I understand exactly. But now, please, tell me a little more of this alarm you experienced, and how it affected you.\"\n\n\"It's not the disappearing and reappearing per se that I mind,\" continued Mr. Mudge, \"so much as certain other things. It's seeing people and objects in their weird entirety, in their true and complete shapes, that is so distressing. It introduces me to a world of monsters. Horses, dogs, cats, all of which I loved; people, trees, children; all that I have considered beautiful in life\u2014everything, from a human face to a cathedral\u2014appear to me in a different shape and aspect to all I have known before. I cannot perhaps convince you why this should be terrible, but I assure you that it is so. To hear the human voice proceeding from this novel appearance which I scarcely recognise as a human body is ghastly, simply ghastly. To see inside everything and everybody is a form of insight peculiarly distressing. To be so confused in geography as to find myself one moment at the North Pole, and the next at Clapham Junction\u2014or possibly at both places simultaneously\u2014is absurdly terrifying. Your imagination will readily furnish other details without my multiplying my experiences now. But you have no idea what it all means, and how I suffer.\"\n\nMr. Mudge paused in his panting account and lay back in his chair. He still held tightly to the arms as though they could keep him in the world of sanity and three measurements, and only now and again released his left hand in order to mop his face. He looked very thin and white and oddly unsubstantial, and he stared about him as though he saw into this other space he had been talking about.\n\nJohn Silence, too, felt warm. He had listened to every word and had made many notes. The presence of this man had an exhilarating effect upon him. It seemed as if Mr. Racine Mudge still carried about with him something of that breathless Higher-Space condition he had been describing. At any rate, Dr. Silence had himself advanced sufficiently far along the legitimate paths of spiritual and psychic transformations to realise that the visions of this extraordinary little person had a basis of truth for their origin.\n\nAfter a pause that prolonged itself into minutes, he crossed the room and unlocked a drawer in a bookcase, taking out a small book with a red cover. It had a lock to it, and he produced a key out of his pocket and proceeded to open the covers. The bright eyes of Mr. Mudge never left him for a single second.\n\n\"It almost seems a pity,\" he said at length, \"to cure you, Mr. Mudge. You are on the way to discovery of great things. Though you may lose your life in the process\u2014that is, your life here in the world of three dimensions\u2014you would lose thereby nothing of great value\u2014you will pardon my apparent rudeness, I know\u2014and you might gain what is infinitely greater. Your suffering, of course, lies in the fact that you alternate between the two worlds and are never wholly in one or the other. Also, I rather imagine, though I cannot be certain of this from any personal experiments, that you have here and there penetrated even into space of more than four dimensions, and have hence experienced the terror you speak of.\"\n\nThe perspiring son of the Essex bargeman and the woman of Normandy bent his head several times in assent, but uttered no word in reply.\n\n\"Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your 'disease'; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner experience. None of the knowledge you have foreshadowed has come to you through the senses, of course.\"\n\nMr. Mudge, sitting in his immovable chair, began to tremble slightly. A wind again seemed to pass over his surface and again to set it curiously in motion like a field of grass.\n\n\"You are merely talking to gain time,\" he said hurriedly, in a shaking voice. \"This thinking aloud delays us. I see ahead what you are coming to, only please be quick, for something is going to happen. A band is again coming down the street, and if it plays\u2014if it plays Wagner\u2014I shall be off in a twinkling.\"\n\n\"Precisely. I will be quick. I was leading up to the point of how to effect your cure. The way is this: You must simply learn to block the entrances.\"\n\n\"True, true, utterly true!\" exclaimed the little man, dodging about nervously in the depths of the chair. \"But how, in the name of space, is that to be done?\"\n\n\"By concentration. They are all within you, these entrances, although outer cases such as colour, music and other things lead you towards them. These external things you cannot hope to destroy, but once the entrances are blocked, they will lead you only to bricked walls and closed channels. You will no longer be able to find the way.\"\n\n\"Quick, quick!\" cried the bobbing figure in the chair. \"How is this concentration to be effected?\"\n\n\"This little book,\" continued Dr. Silence calmly, \"will explain to you the way.\" He tapped the cover. \"Let me now read out to you certain simple instructions, composed, as I see you divine, entirely from my own personal experiences in the same direction. Follow these instructions and you will no longer enter the state of Higher Space. The entrances will be blocked effectively.\"\n\nMr. Mudge sat bolt upright in his chair to listen, and John Silence cleared his throat and began to read slowly in a very distinct voice.\n\nBut before he had uttered a dozen words, something happened. A sound of street music entered the room through the open ventilators, for a band had begun to play in the stable mews at the back of the house\u2014the March from Tannh\u00e4user. Odd as it may seem that a German band should twice within the space of an hour enter the same mews and play Wagner, it was nevertheless the fact.\n\nMr. Racine Mudge heard it. He uttered a sharp, squeaking cry and twisted his arms with nervous energy round the chair. A piteous look that was not far from tears spread over his white face. Grey shadows followed it\u2014the grey of fear. He began to struggle convulsively.\n\n\"Hold me fast! Catch me! For God's sake, keep me here! I'm on the rush already. Oh, it's frightful!\" he cried in tones of anguish, his voice as thin as a reed.\n\nDr. Silence made a plunge forward to seize him, but in a flash, before he could cover the space between them, Mr. Racine Mudge, screaming and struggling, seemed to shoot past him into invisibility. He disappeared like an arrow from a bow propelled at infinite speed, and his voice no longer sounded in the external air, but seemed in some curious way to make itself heard somewhere within the depths of the doctor's own being. It was almost like a faint singing cry in his head, like a voice of dream, a voice of vision and unreality.\n\n\"Alcohol, alcohol!\" it cried, \"give me alcohol! It's the quickest way. Alcohol, before I'm out of reach!\"\n\nThe doctor, accustomed to rapid decisions and even more rapid action, remembered that a brandy flask stood upon the mantelpiece, and in less than a second he had seized it and was holding it out towards the space above the chair recently occupied by the visible Mudge. Then, before his very eyes, and long ere he could unscrew the metal stopper, he saw the contents of the closed glass phial sink and lessen as though some one were drinking violently and greedily of the liquor within.\n\n\"Thanks! Enough! It deadens the vibrations!\" cried the faint voice in his interior, as he withdrew the flask and set it back upon the mantelpiece. He understood that in Mudge's present condition one side of the flask was open to space and he could drink without removing the stopper. He could hardly have had a more interesting proof of what he had been hearing described at such length.\n\nBut the next moment\u2014the very same moment it almost seemed\u2014the German band stopped midway in its tune\u2014and there was Mr. Mudge back in his chair again, gasping and panting!\n\n\"Quick!\" he shrieked, \"stop that band! Send it away! Catch hold of me! Block the entrances! Block the entrances! Give me the red book! Oh, oh, oh-h-h-h!!!\"\n\nThe music had begun again. It was merely a temporary interruption. The Tannh\u00e4user March started again, this time at a tremendous pace that made it sound like a rapid two-step as though the instruments played against time.\n\nBut the brief interruption gave Dr. Silence a moment in which to collect his scattering thoughts, and before the band had got through half a bar, he had flung forward upon the chair and held Mr. Racine Mudge, the struggling little victim of Higher Space, in a grip of iron. His arms went all round his diminutive person, taking in a good part of the chair at the same time. He was not a big man, yet he seemed to smother Mudge completely.\n\nYet, even as he did so, and felt the wriggling form underneath him, it began to melt and slip away like air or water. The wood of the arm-chair somehow disentangled itself from between his own arms and those of Mudge. The phenomenon known as the passage of matter through matter took place. The little man seemed actually to get mixed up in his own being. Dr. Silence could just see his face beneath him. It puckered and grew dark as though from some great internal effort. He heard the thin, reedy voice cry in his ear to \"Block the entrances, block the entrances!\" and then\u2014but how in the world describe what is indescribable?\n\nJohn Silence half rose up to watch. Racine Mudge, his face distorted beyond all recognition, was making a marvellous inward movement, as though doubling back upon himself. He turned funnel-wise like water in a whirling vortex, and then appeared to break up somewhat as a reflection breaks up and divides in a distorting convex mirror. He went neither forward nor backwards, neither to the right nor the left, neither up nor down. But he went. He went utterly. He simply flashed away out of sight like a vanishing projectile.\n\nAll but one leg! Dr. Silence just had the time and the presence of mind to seize upon the left ankle and boot as it disappeared, and to this he held on for several seconds like grim death. Yet all the time he knew it was a foolish and useless thing to do.\n\nThe foot was in his grasp one moment, and the next it seemed\u2014this was the only way he could describe it\u2014inside his own skin and bones, and at the same time outside his hand and all round it. It seemed mixed up in some amazing way with his own flesh and blood. Then it was gone, and he was tightly grasping a draught of heated air.\n\n\"Gone! gone! gone!\" cried a thick, whispering voice, somewhere deep within his own consciousness. \"Lost! lost! lost!\" it repeated, growing fainter and fainter till at length it vanished into nothing and the last signs of Mr. Racine Mudge vanished with it.\n\nJohn Silence locked his red book and replaced it in the cabinet, which he fastened with a click, and when Barker answered the bell he inquired if Mr. Mudge had left a card upon the table. It appeared that he had, and when the servant returned with it, Dr. Silence read the address and made a note of it. It was in North London.\n\n\"Mr. Mudge has gone,\" he said quietly to Barker, noticing his expression of alarm.\n\n\"He's not taken his 'at with him, sir.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mudge requires no hat where he is now,\" continued the doctor, stooping to poke the fire. \"But he may return for it\u2014\"\n\n\"And the humbrella, sir.\"\n\n\"And the umbrella.\"\n\n\"He didn't go out my way, sir, if you please,\" stuttered the amazed servant, his curiosity overcoming his nervousness.\n\n\"Mr. Mudge has his own way of coming and going, and prefers it. If he returns by the door at any time remember to bring him instantly to me, and be kind and gentle with him and ask no questions. Also, remember, Barker, to think pleasantly, sympathetically, affectionately of him while he is away. Mr. Mudge is a very suffering gentleman.\"\n\nBarker bowed and went out of the room backwards, gasping and feeling round the inside of his collar with three very hot fingers of one hand.\n\nIt was two days later when he brought in a telegram to the study. Dr. Silence opened it, and read as follows:\n\n\"Bombay. Just slipped out again. All safe. Have blocked entrances. Thousand thanks. Address Cooks, London.\u2014Mudge.\"\n\nDr. Silence looked up and saw Barker staring at him bewilderingly. It occurred to him that somehow he knew the contents of the telegram.\n\n\"Make a parcel of Mr. Mudge's things,\" he said briefly, \"and address them Thomas Cook & Sons, Ludgate Circus. And send them there exactly a month from to-day and marked 'To be called for.'\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said Barker, leaving the room with a deep sigh and a hurried glance at the waste-paper basket where his master had dropped the pink paper." + }, + { + "title": "Transition by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "John Mudbury was on his way home from the shops, his arms full of Christmas presents. It was after six o'clock and the streets were very crowded. He was an ordinary man, lived in an ordinary suburban flat, with an ordinary wife and four ordinary children. He did not think them ordinary, but everybody else did. He had ordinary presents for each one, a cheap blotter for his wife, a cheap air-gun for the eldest boy, and so forth. He was over fifty, bald, in an office, decent in mind and habits, of uncertain opinions, uncertain politics, and uncertain religion. Yet he considered himself a decided, positive gentleman, quite unaware that the morning newspaper determined his opinions for the day. He just lived\u2014from day to day. Physically, he was fit enough, except for a weak heart (which never troubled him); and his summer holiday was bad golf, while the children bathed and his wife read \"Garvice\" on the sands. Like the majority of men, he dreamed idly of the past, muddled away the present, and guessed vaguely\u2014after imaginative reading on occasions\u2014at the future.\n\n\"I'd like to survive all right,\" he said, \"provided it's better than this,\" surveying his wife and children, and thinking of his daily toil. \"Otherwise\u2014!\" and he shrugged his shoulders as a brave man should.\n\nHe went to church regularly. But nothing in church convinced him that he did survive, just as nothing in church enticed him into hoping that he would. On the other hand, nothing in life persuaded him that he didn't, wouldn't, couldn't. \"I'm an Evolutionist,\" he loved to say to thoughtful cronies (over a glass), having never heard that Darwinism had been questioned. ...\n\nAnd so he came home gaily, happily, with his bunch of Christmas presents \"for the wife and little ones,\" stroking himself upon their keen enjoyment and excitement. The night before he had taken \"the wife\" to see Magic at a select London theatre where the Intellectuals went\u2014and had been extraordinarily stirred. He had gone questioningly, yet expecting something out of the common. \"It's not musical,\" he warned her, \"nor farce, nor comedy, so to speak\"; and in answer to her question as to what the Critics had said, he had wriggled, sighed, and put his gaudy necktie straight four times in quick succession. For no \"Man in the Street,\" with any claim to self-respect, could be expected to understand what the Critics had said, even if he understood the Play. And John had answered truthfully: \"Oh, they just said things. But the theatre's always full\u2014and that's the only test.\"\n\nAnd just now, as he crossed the crowded Circus to catch his 'bus, it chanced that his mind (having glimpsed an advertisement) was full of this particular Play, or, rather, of the effect it had produced upon him at the time. For it had thrilled him\u2014inexplicably: with its marvellous speculative hint, its big audacity, its alert and spiritual beauty. ... Thought plunged to find something\u2014plunged after this bizarre suggestion of a bigger universe, after this quasi-jocular suggestion that man is not the only\u2014then dashed full-tilt against a sentence that memory thrust beneath his nose: \"Science does not exhaust the Universe\"\u2014and at the same time dashed full-tilt against destruction of another kind as well ...!\n\nHow it happened, he never exactly knew. He saw a Monster glaring at him with eyes of blazing fire. It was horrible! It rushed upon him. He dodged. ... Another Monster met him round the corner. Both came at him simultaneously. ... He dodged again\u2014a leap that might have cleared a hurdle easily, but was too late. Between the pair of them\u2014his heart literally in his gullet\u2014he was mercilessly caught. ... Bones crunched. ... There was a soft sensation, icy cold and hot as fire. Horns and voices roared. Battering-rams he saw, and a carapace of iron. ... Then dazzling light. ... \"Always face the traffic!\" he remembered with a frantic yell\u2014and, by some extraordinary luck, escaped miraculously on to the opposite pavement. ...\n\nThere was no doubt about it. By the skin of his teeth he had dodged a rather ugly death. First... he felt for his presents\u2014all were safe. And then, instead of congratulating himself and taking breath, he hurried homewards\u2014on foot, which proved that his mind had lost control a bit!\u2014thinking only how disappointed the wife and children would have been if\u2014if anything had happened. ... Another thing he realised, oddly enough, was that he no longer really loved his wife, but had only great affection for her. What made him think of that, Heaven only knows, but he did think of it. He was an honest man without pretence. This came as a discovery somehow. He turned a moment, and saw the crowd gathered about the entangled taxicabs, policemen's helmets gleaming in the lights of the shop windows... then hurried on again, his thoughts full of the joy his presents would give... of the scampering children... and of his wife\u2014bless her silly heart!\u2014eyeing the mysterious parcels. ...\n\nAnd, though he never could explain how, he presently stood at the door of the jail-like building that contained his flat, having walked the whole three miles! His thoughts had been so busy and absorbed that he had hardly noticed the length of weary trudge. ... \"Besides,\" he reflected, thinking of the narrow escape, \"I've had a nasty shock. It was a d\u2014d near thing, now I come to think of it. ...\" He did feel a bit shaky and bewildered. ... Yet, at the same time, he felt extraordinarily jolly and light-hearted. ...\n\nHe counted his Christmas parcels... hugged himself in anticipatory joy... and let himself in swiftly with his latchkey. \"I'm late,\" he realised, \"but when she sees the brown-paper parcels, she'll forget to say a word. God bless the old faithful soul.\" And he softly used the key a second time and entered his flat on tiptoe. ... In his mind was the master impulse of that afternoon\u2014the pleasure these Christmas presents would give his wife and children. ...\n\nHe heard a noise. He hung up hat and coat in the pokey vestibule (they never called it \"hall\") and moved softly towards the parlour door, holding the packages behind him. Only of them he thought, not of himself\u2014of his family, that is, not of the packages. Pushing the door cunningly ajar, he peeped in slyly. To his amazement, the room was full of people! He withdrew quickly, wondering what it meant. A party? And without his knowing about it! Extraordinary! ... Keen disappointment came over him. But, as he stepped back, the vestibule, he saw, was full of people too.\n\nHe was uncommonly surprised, yet somehow not surprised at all. People were congratulating him. There was a perfect mob of them. Moreover, he knew them all\u2014vaguely remembered them, at least. And they all knew him.\n\n\"Isn't it a game?\" laughed some one, patting him on the back. \"They haven't the least idea ...!\"\n\nAnd the speaker\u2014it was old John Palmer, the bookkeeper at the office\u2014emphasised the \"they.\"\n\n\"Not the least idea,\" he answered with a smile, saying something he didn't understand, yet knew was right.\n\nHis face, apparently, showed the utter bewilderment he felt. The shock of the collision had been greater than he realised evidently. His mind was wandering. ... Possibly! Only the odd thing was\u2014he had never felt so clear-headed in his life. Ten thousand things grew simple suddenly. But, how thickly these people pressed about him, and how\u2014familiarly!\n\n\"My parcels,\" he said, joyously pushing his way across the throng. \"These are Christmas presents I've bought for them.\" He nodded toward the room. \"I've saved for weeks\u2014stopped cigars and billiards and\u2014and several other good things\u2014to buy them.\"\n\n\"Good man!\" said Palmer with a happy laugh. \"It's the heart that counts.\"\n\nMudbury looked at him. Palmer had said an amazing truth, only\u2014people would hardly understand and believe him. ... Would they?\n\n\"Eh?\" he asked, feeling stuffed and stupid, muddled somewhere between two meanings, one of which was gorgeous and the other stupid beyond belief.\n\n\"If you please, Mr. Mudbury, step inside. They are expecting you,\" said a kindly, pompous voice. And, turning sharply, he met the gentle, foolish eyes of Sir James Epiphany, a director of the Bank where he worked.\n\nThe effect of the voice was instantaneous from long habit.\n\n\"They are?\" he smiled from his heart, and advanced as from the custom of many years. Oh, how happy and gay he felt! His affection for his wife was real. Romance, indeed, had gone, but he needed her\u2014and she needed him. And the children\u2014Milly, Bill, and Jean\u2014he deeply loved them. Life was worth living indeed!\n\nIn the room was a crowd, but\u2014an astounding silence. John Mudbury looked round him. He advanced towards his wife, who sat in the corner arm-chair with Milly on her knee. A lot of people talked and moved about. Momentarily the crowd increased. He stood in front of them\u2014in front of Milly and his wife. And he spoke\u2014holding out his packages. \"It's Christmas Eve,\" he whispered shyly, \"and I've\u2014brought you something\u2014something for everybody. Look!\" He held the packages before their eyes.\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" said a voice behind him, \"but you may hold them out like that for a century. They'll never see them!\"\n\n\"Of course they won't. But I love to do the old, sweet thing,\" replied John Mudbury\u2014then wondered with a gasp of stark amazement why he said it.\n\n\"I think\u2014\" whispered Milly, staring round her.\n\n\"Well, what do you think?\" her mother asked sharply. \"You're always thinking something queer.\"\n\n\"I think,\" the child continued dreamily, \"that Daddy's already here.\" She paused, then added with a child's impossible conviction, \"I'm sure he is. I feel him.\"\n\nThere was an extraordinary laugh. Sir James Epiphany laughed. The others\u2014the whole crowd of them\u2014also turned their heads and smiled. But the mother, thrusting the child away from her, rose up suddenly with a violent start. Her face had turned to chalk. She stretched her arms out\u2014into the air before her. She gasped and shivered. There was an awful anguish in her eyes.\n\n\"Look!\" repeated John, \"these are the presents that I brought.\"\n\nBut his voice apparently was soundless. And, with a spasm of icy pain, he remembered that Palmer and Sir James\u2014some years ago\u2014had died.\n\n\"It's magic,\" he cried, \"but\u2014I love you, Jinny\u2014I love you\u2014and\u2014and I have always been true to you\u2014as true as steel. We need each other\u2014oh, can't you see\u2014we go on together\u2014you and I\u2014for ever and ever\u2014\"\n\n\"Think,\" interrupted an exquisitely tender voice, \"don't shout! They can't hear you\u2014now.\" And, turning, John Mudbury met the eyes of Everard Minturn, their President of the year before. Minturn had gone down with the Titanic.\n\nHe dropped his parcels then. His heart gave an enormous leap of joy.\n\nHe saw her face\u2014the face of his wife\u2014look through him.\n\nBut the child gazed straight into his eyes. She saw him.\n\nThe next thing he knew was that he heard something tinkling... far, far away. It sounded miles below him\u2014inside him\u2014he was sounding himself\u2014all utterly bewildering\u2014like a bell. It was a bell.\n\nMilly stooped down and picked the parcels up. Her face shone with happiness and laughter. ...\n\nBut a man came in soon after, a man with a ridiculous, solemn face, a pencil, and a notebook. He wore a dark blue helmet. Behind him came a string of other men. They carried something... something... he could not see exactly what it was. But when he pressed forward through the laughing throng to gaze upon it, he dimly made out two eyes, a nose, a chin, a deep red smear, and a pair of folded hands upon an overcoat. A woman's form fell down upon them then, and... he heard... soft sounds of children weeping strangely... and other sounds... sounds as of familiar voices... laughing... laughing gaily.\n\n\"They'll join us presently. It goes like a flash. ...\"\n\nAnd, turning with great happiness in his heart, he saw that Sir James had said it, holding Palmer by the arm as with some natural yet unexpected love of sympathetic friendship.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Palmer, smiling like a man who accepts a gift in universal fellowship, \"let's help 'em. They'll never understand. ... Still, we can always try.\"\n\nThe entire throng moved up with laughter and amusement. It was a moment of hearty, genuine life at last. Delight and Joy and Peace were everywhere.\n\nThen John Mudbury realised the truth\u2014that he was dead." + }, + { + "title": "The Tradition by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The noises outside the little flat at first were very disconcerting after living in the country. They made sleep difficult. At the cottage in Sussex where the family had lived, night brought deep, comfortable silence, unless the wind was high, when the pine trees round the duck-pond made a sound like surf, or if the gale was from the south-west, the orchard roared a bit unpleasantly.\n\nBut in London it was very different; sleep was easier in the daytime than at night. For after nightfall the rumble of the traffic became spasmodic instead of continuous; the motor-horns startled like warnings of alarm; after comparative silence the furious rushing of a taxi-cab touched the nerves. From dinner till eleven o'clock the streets subsided gradually; then came the army from theatres, parties, and late dinners, hurrying home to bed. The motor-horns during this hour were lively and incessant, like bugles of a regiment moving into battle. The parents rarely retired until this attack was over. If quick about it, sleep was possible then before the flying of the night-birds\u2014an uncertain squadron\u2014screamed half the street awake again. But, these finally disposed of, a delightful hush settled down upon the neighbourhood, profounder far than any peace of the countryside. The deep rumble of the produce wagons, coming in to the big London markets from the farms\u2014generally about three A.M.\u2014held no disturbing quality.\n\nBut sometimes in the stillness of very early morning, when streets were empty and pavements all deserted, there was a sound of another kind that was startling and unwelcome. For it was ominous. It came with a clattering violence that made nerves quiver and forced the heart to pause and listen. A strange resonance was in it, a volume of sound, moreover, that was hardly justified by its cause. For it was hoofs. A horse swept hurrying up the deserted street, and was close upon the building in a moment. It was audible suddenly, no gradual approach from a distance, but as though it turned a corner from soft ground that muffled the hoofs, on to the echoing, hard paving that emphasised the dreadful clatter. Nor did it die away again when once the house was reached. It ceased as abruptly as it came. The hoofs did not go away.\n\nIt was the mother who heard them first, and drew her husband's attention to their disagreeable quality.\n\n\"It is the mail-vans, dear,\" he answered. \"They go at four A. M. to catch the early trains into the country.\"\n\nShe looked up sharply, as though something in his tone surprised her.\n\n\"But there's no sound of wheels,\" she said. And then, as he did not reply, she added gravely, \"You have heard it too, John. I can tell.\"\n\n\"I have,\" he said. \"I have heard it\u2014twice.\"\n\nAnd they looked at one another searchingly, each trying to read the other's mind. She did not question him; he did not propose writing to complain in a newspaper; both understood something that neither of them understood.\n\n\"I heard it first,\" she then said softly, \"the night before Jack got the fever. And as I listened, I heard him crying. But when I went in to see he was asleep. The noise stopped just outside the building.\" There was a shadow in her eyes as she said this, and a hush crept in between her words. \"I did not hear it go.\" She said this almost beneath her breath.\n\nHe looked a moment at the ground; then, coming towards her, he took her in his arms and kissed her. And she clung very tightly to him.\n\n\"Sometimes,\" he said in a quiet voice, \"a mounted policeman passes down the street, I think.\"\n\n\"It is a horse,\" she answered. But whether it was a question or mere corroboration he did not ask, for at that moment the doctor arrived, and the question of little Jack's health became the paramount matter of immediate interest. The great man's verdict was uncommonly disquieting.\n\nAll that night they sat up in the sick room. It was strangely still, as though by one accord the traffic avoided the house where a little boy hung between life and death. The motor-horns even had a muffled sound, and heavy drays and wagons used the wide streets; there were fewer taxicabs about, or else they flew by noiselessly. Yet no straw was down; the expense prohibited that. And towards morning, very early, the mother decided to watch alone. She had been a trained nurse before her marriage, accustomed when she was younger to long vigils. \"You go down, dear, and get a little sleep,\" she urged in a whisper. \"He's quiet now. At five o'clock I'll come for you to take my place.\"\n\n\"You'll fetch me at once,\" he whispered, \"if\u2014\" then hesitated as though breath failed him. A moment he stood there staring from her face to the bed. \"If you hear anything,\" he finished. She nodded, and he went downstairs to his study, not to his bedroom. He left the door ajar. He sat in darkness, listening. Mother, he knew, was listening, too, beside the bed. His heart was very full, for he did not believe the boy could live till morning. The picture of the room was all the time before his eyes\u2014the shaded lamp, the table with the medicines, the little wasted figure beneath the blankets, and mother close beside it, listening. He sat alert, ready to fly upstairs at the smallest cry.\n\nBut no sound broke the stillness; the entire neighbourhood was silent; all London slept. He heard the clock strike three in the dining-room at the end of the corridor. It was still enough for that. There was not even the heavy rumble of a single produce wagon, though usually they passed about this time on their way to Smithfield and Covent Garden markets. He waited, far too anxious to close his eyes. ... At four o'clock he would go up and relieve her vigil. Four, he knew, was the time when life sinks to its lowest ebb. ... Then, in the middle of his reflections, thought stopped dead, and it seemed his heart stopped too.\n\nFar away, but coming nearer with extraordinary rapidity, a sharp, clear sound broke out of the surrounding stillness\u2014a horse's hoofs. At first it was so distant that it might have been almost on the high roads of the country, but the amazing speed with which it came closer, and the sudden increase of the beating sound, was such, that by the time he turned his head it seemed to have entered the street outside. It was within a hundred yards of the building. The next second it was before the very door. And something in him blenched. He knew a moment's complete paralysis. The abrupt cessation of the heavy clatter was strangest of all. It came like lightning, it struck, it paused. It did not go away again. Yet the sound of it was still beating in his ears as he dashed upstairs three steps at a time. It seemed in the house as well, on the stairs behind him, in the little passage-way, inside the very bedroom. It was an appalling sound. Yet he entered a room that was quiet, orderly, and calm. It was silent. Beside the bed his wife sat, holding Jack's hand and stroking it. She was soothing him; her face was very peaceful. No sound but her gentle whisper was audible.\n\nHe controlled himself by a tremendous effort, but his face betrayed his consternation and distress. \"Hush,\" she said beneath her breath; \"he's sleeping much more calmly now. The crisis, bless God, is over, I do believe. I dared not leave him.\"\n\nHe saw in a moment that she was right, and an untenable relief passed over him. He sat down beside her, very cold, yet perspiring with heat.\n\n\"You heard\u2014?\" he asked after a pause.\n\n\"Nothing,\" she replied quickly, \"except his pitiful, wild words when the delirium was on him. It's passed. It lasted but a moment, or I'd have called you.\"\n\nHe stared closely into her tired eyes. \"And his words?\" he asked in a whisper. Whereupon she told him quietly that the little chap had sat up with wide-opened eyes and talked excitedly about a \"great, great horse\" he heard, but that was not \"coming for him.\" \"He laughed and said he would not go with it because he 'was not ready yet.' Some scrap of talk he had overheard from us,\" she added, \"when we discussed the traffic once. ...\"\n\n\"But you heard nothing?\" he repeated almost impatiently.\n\nNo, she had heard nothing. After all, then, he had dozed a moment in his chair. ...\n\nFour weeks later Jack, entirely convalescent, was playing a restricted game of hide-and-seek with his sister in the flat. It was really a forbidden joy, owing to noise and risk of breakages, but he had unusual privileges after his grave illness. It was dusk. The lamps in the street were being lit. \"Quietly, remember; your mother's resting in her room,\" were the father's orders. She had just returned from a week by the sea, recuperating from the strain of nursing for so many nights. The traffic rolled and boomed along the streets below.\n\n\"Jack! Do come on and hide. It's your turn. I hid last.\"\n\nBut the boy was standing spellbound by the window, staring hard at something on the pavement. Sybil called and tugged in vain. Tears threatened. Jack would not budge. He declared he saw something.\n\n\"Oh, you're always seeing something. I wish you'd go and hide. It's only because you can't think of a good place, really.\"\n\n\"Look!\" he cried in a voice of wonder. And as he said it his father rose quickly from his chair before the fire.\n\n\"Look!\" the child repeated with delight and excitement. \"It's a great big horse. And it's perfectly white all over.\" His sister joined him at the window. \"Where? Where? I can't see it. Oh, do show me!\"\n\nTheir father was standing close behind them now. \"I heard it,\" he was whispering, but so low the children did not notice him. His face was the colour of chalk.\n\n\"Straight in front of our door, stupid! Can't you see it? Oh, I do wish it had come for me. It's such a beauty!\" And he clapped his hands with pleasure and excitement. \"Quick, quick! It's going away again!\"\n\nBut while the children stood half-squabbling by the window, their father leaned over a sofa in the adjoining room above a figure whose heart in sleep had quietly stopped its beating. The great white horse had come. But this time he had not only heard its wonderful arrival. He had also heard it go. It seemed he heard the awful hoofs beat down the sky, far, far away, and very swiftly, dying into silence, finally up among the stars.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Wolves of God, and Other Fey Stories by Algernon Blackwood ]\n\nAs the little steamer entered the bay of Kettletoft in the Orkneys the beach at Sanday appeared so low that the houses almost seemed to be standing in the water; and to the big, dark man leaning over the rail of the upper deck the sight of them came with a pang of mingled pain and pleasure. The scene, to his eyes, had not changed. The houses, the low shore, the flat treeless country beyond, the vast open sky, all looked exactly the same as when he left the island thirty years ago to work for the Hudson Bay Company in distant N. W. Canada. A lad of eighteen then, he was now a man of forty-eight, old for his years, and this was the home-coming he had so often dreamed about in the lonely wilderness of trees where he had spent his life. Yet his grim face wore an anxious rather than a tender expression. The return was perhaps not quite as he had pictured it.\n\nJim Peace had not done too badly, however, in the Company's service. For an islander, he would be a rich man now; he had not married, he had saved the greater part of his salary, and even in the far-away Post where he had spent so many years there had been occasional opportunities of the kind common to new, wild countries where life and law are in the making. He had not hesitated to take them. None of the big Company Posts, it was true, had come his way, nor had he risen very high in the service; in another two years his turn would have come, yet he had left of his own accord before those two years were up. His decision, judging by the strength in the features, was not due to impulse; the move had been deliberately weighed and calculated; he had renounced his opportunity after full reflection. A man with those steady eyes, with that square jaw and determined mouth, certainly did not act without good reason.\n\nA curious expression now flickered over his weather-hardened face as he saw again his childhood's home, and the return, so often dreamed about, actually took place at last. An uneasy light flashed for a moment in the deep-set grey eyes, but was quickly gone again, and the tanned visage recovered its accustomed look of stern composure. His keen sight took in a dark knot of figures on the landing-pier\u2014his brother, he knew, among them. A wave of home-sickness swept over him. He longed to see his brother again, the old farm, the sweep of open country, the sand-dunes, and the breaking seas. The smell of long-forgotten days came to his nostrils with its sweet, painful pang of youthful memories.\n\nHow fine, he thought, to be back there in the old familiar fields of childhood, with sea and sand about him instead of the smother of endless woods that ran a thousand miles without a break. He was glad in particular that no trees were visible, and that rabbits scampering among the dunes were the only wild animals he need ever meet...\n\nThose thirty years in the woods, it seemed, oppressed his mind; the forests, the countless multitudes of trees, had wearied him. His nerves, perhaps, had suffered finally. Snow, frost and sun, stars, and the wind had been his companions during the long days and endless nights in his lonely Post, but chiefly\u2014trees. Trees, trees, trees! On the whole, he had preferred them in stormy weather, though, in another way, their rigid hosts, 'mid the deep silence of still days, had been equally oppressive. In the clear sunlight of a windless day they assumed a waiting, listening, watching aspect that had something spectral in it, but when in motion\u2014well, he preferred a moving animal to one that stood stock-still and stared. Wind, moreover, in a million trees, even the lightest breeze, drowned all other sounds\u2014the howling of the wolves, for instance, in winter, or the ceaseless harsh barking of the husky dogs he so disliked.\n\nEven on this warm September afternoon a slight shiver ran over him as the background of dead years loomed up behind the present scene. He thrust the picture back, deep down inside himself. The self-control, the strong, even violent will that the face betrayed, came into operation instantly. The background was background; it belonged to what was past, and the past was over and done with. It was dead. Jim meant it to stay dead.\n\nThe figure waving to him from the pier was his brother. He knew Tom instantly; the years had dealt easily with him in this quiet island; there was no startling, no unkindly change, and a deep emotion, though unexpressed, rose in his heart. It was good to be home again, he realized, as he sat presently in the cart, Tom holding the reins, driving slowly back to the farm at the north end of the island. Everything he found familiar, yet at the same time strange. They passed the school where he used to go as a little bare-legged boy; other boys were now learning their lessons exactly as he used to do. Through the open window he could hear the droning voice of the schoolmaster, who, though invisible, wore the face of Mr. Lovibond, his own teacher.\n\n\"Lovibond?\" said Tom, in reply to his question. \"Oh, he's been dead these twenty years. He went south, you know\u2014Glasgow, I think it was, or Edinburgh. He got typhoid.\"\n\nStands of golden plover were to be seen as of old in the fields, or flashing overhead in swift flight with a whir of wings, wheeling and turning together like one huge bird. Down on the empty shore a curlew cried. Its piercing note rose clear above the noisy clamour of the gulls. The sun played softly on the quiet sea, the air was keen but pleasant, the tang of salt mixed sweetly with the clean smells of open country that he knew so well. Nothing of essentials had changed, even the low clouds beyond the heaving uplands were the clouds of childhood.\n\nThey came presently to the sand-dunes, where rabbits sat at their burrow-mouths, or ran helter-skelter across the road in front of the slow cart.\n\n\"They're safe till the colder weather comes and trapping begins,\" he mentioned. It all came back to him in detail.\n\n\"And they know it, too\u2014the canny little beggars,\" replied Tom. \"Any rabbits out where you've been?\" he asked casually.\n\n\"Not to hurt you,\" returned his brother shortly.\n\nNothing seemed changed, although everything seemed different. He looked upon the old, familiar things, but with other eyes. There were, of course, changes, alterations, yet so slight, in a way so odd and curious, that they evaded him; not being of the physical order, they reported to his soul, not to his mind. But his soul, being troubled, sought to deny the changes; to admit them meant to admit a change in himself he had determined to conceal even if he could not entirely deny it.\n\n\"Same old place, Tom,\" came one of his rare remarks. \"The years ain't done much to it.\" He looked into his brother's face a moment squarely. \"Nor to you, either, Tom,\" he added, affection and tenderness just touching his voice and breaking through a natural reserve that was almost taciturnity.\n\nHis brother returned the look; and something in that instant passed between the two men, something of understanding that no words had hinted at, much less expressed. The tie was real, they loved each other, they were loyal, true, steadfast fellows. In youth they had known no secrets. The shadow that now passed and vanished left a vague trouble in both hearts.\n\n\"The forests,\" said Tom slowly, \"have made a silent man of you, Jim. You'll miss them here, I'm thinking.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" was the curt reply, \"but I guess not.\"\n\nHis lips snapped to as though they were of steel and could never open again, while the tone he used made Tom realize that the subject was not one his brother cared to talk about particularly. He was surprised, therefore, when, after a pause, Jim returned to it of his own accord. He was sitting a little sideways as he spoke, taking in the scene with hungry eyes. \"It's a queer thing,\" he observed, \"to look round and see nothing but clean empty land, and not a single tree in sight. You see, it don't look natural quite.\"\n\nAgain his brother was struck by the tone of voice, but this time by something else as well he could not name. Jim was excusing himself, explaining. The manner, too, arrested him. And thirty years disappeared as though they had not been, for it was thus Jim acted as a boy when there was something unpleasant he had to say and wished to get it over. The tone, the gesture, the manner, all were there. He was edging up to something he wished to say, yet dared not utter.\n\n\"You've had enough of trees then?\" Tom said sympathetically, trying to help, \"and things?\"\n\nThe instant the last two words were out he realized that they had been drawn from him instinctively, and that it was the anxiety of deep affection which had prompted them. He had guessed without knowing he had guessed, or rather, without intention or attempt to guess. Jim had a secret. Love's clairvoyance had discovered it, though not yet its hidden terms.\n\n\"I have\u2014\" began the other, then paused, evidently to choose his words with care. \"I've had enough of trees.\" He was about to speak of something that his brother had unwittingly touched upon in his chance phrase, but instead of finding the words he sought, he gave a sudden start, his breath caught sharply. \"What's that?\" he exclaimed, jerking his body round so abruptly that Tom automatically pulled the reins. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"A dog barking,\" Tom answered, much surprised. \"A farm dog barking. Why? What did you think it was?\" he asked, as he flicked the horse to go on again. \"You made me jump,\" he added, with a laugh. \"You're used to huskies, ain't you?\"\n\n\"It sounded so\u2014not like a dog, I mean,\" came the slow explanation. \"It's long since I heard a sheep-dog bark, I suppose it startled me.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's a dog all right,\" Tom assured him comfortingly, for his heart told him infallibly the kind of tone to use. And presently, too, he changed the subject in his blunt, honest fashion, knowing that, also, was the right and kindly thing to do. He pointed out the old farms as they drove along, his brother silent again, sitting stiff and rigid at his side. \"And it's good to have you back, Jim, from those outlandish places. There are not too many of the family left now\u2014just you and I, as a matter of fact.\"\n\n\"Just you and I,\" the other repeated gruffly, but in a sweetened tone that proved he appreciated the ready sympathy and tact. \"We'll stick together, Tom, eh? Blood's thicker than water, ain't it? I've learnt that much, anyhow.\"\n\nThe voice had something gentle and appealing in it, something his brother heard now for the first time. An elbow nudged into his side, and Tom knew the gesture was not solely a sign of affection, but grew partly also from the comfort born of physical contact when the heart is anxious. The touch, like the last words, conveyed an appeal for help. Tom was so surprised he couldn't believe it quite.\n\nScared! Jim scared! The thought puzzled and afflicted him who knew his brother's character inside out, his courage, his presence of mind in danger, his resolution. Jim frightened seemed an impossibility, a contradiction in terms; he was the kind of man who did not know the meaning of fear, who shrank from nothing, whose spirits rose highest when things appeared most hopeless. It must, indeed, be an uncommon, even a terrible danger that could shake such nerves; yet Tom saw the signs and read them clearly. Explain them he could not, nor did he try. All he knew with certainty was that his brother, sitting now beside him in the cart, hid a secret terror in his heart. Sooner or later, in his own good time, he would share it with him.\n\nHe ascribed it, this simple Orkney farmer, to those thirty years of loneliness and exile in wild desolate places, without companionship, without the society of women, with only Indians, husky dogs, a few trappers or fur-dealers like himself, but none of the wholesome, natural influences that sweeten life within reach. Thirty years was a long, long time. He began planning schemes to help. Jim must see people as much as possible, and his mind ran quickly over the men and women available. In women the neighbourhood was not rich, but there were several men of the right sort who might be useful, good fellows all. There was John Rossiter, another old Hudson Bay man, who had been factor at Cartwright, Labrador, for many years, and had returned long ago to spend his last days in civilization. There was Sandy McKay, also back from a long spell of rubber-planting in Malay... Tom was still busy making plans when they reached the old farm and presently sat down to their first meal together since that early breakfast thirty years ago before Jim caught the steamer that bore him off to exile\u2014an exile that now returned him with nerves unstrung and a secret terror hidden in his heart.\n\n\"I'll ask no questions,\" he decided. \"Jim will tell me in his own good time. And meanwhile, I'll get him to see as many folks as possible.\" He meant it too; yet not only for his brother's sake. Jim's terror was so vivid it had touched his own heart too.\n\n\"Ah, a man can open his lungs here and breathe!\" exclaimed Jim, as the two came out after supper and stood before the house, gazing across the open country. He drew a deep breath as though to prove his assertion, exhaling with slow satisfaction again. \"It's good to see a clear horizon and to know there's all that water between\u2014between me and where I've been.\" He turned his face to watch the plover in the sky, then looked towards the distant shore-line where the sea was just visible in the long evening light. \"There can't be too much water for me,\" he added, half to himself. \"I guess they can't cross water\u2014not that much water at any rate.\"\n\nTom stared, wondering uneasily what to make of it.\n\n\"At the trees again, Jim?\" he said laughingly. He had overheard the last words, though spoken low, and thought it best not to ignore them altogether. To be natural was the right way, he believed, natural and cheery. To make a joke of anything unpleasant, he felt, was to make it less serious. \"I've never seen a tree come across the Atlantic yet, except as a mast\u2014dead,\" he added.\n\n\"I wasn't thinking of the trees just then,\" was the blunt reply, \"but of\u2014something else. The damned trees are nothing, though I hate the sight of 'em. Not of much account, anyway\"\u2014as though he compared them mentally with another thing. He puffed at his pipe, a moment.\n\n\"They certainly can't move,\" put in his brother, \"nor swim either.\"\n\n\"Nor another thing,\" said Jim, his voice thick suddenly, but not with smoke, and his speech confused, though the idea in his mind was certainly clear as daylight. \"Things can't hide behind 'em\u2014can they?\"\n\n\"Not much cover hereabouts, I admit,\" laughed Tom, though the look in his brother's eyes made his laughter as short as it sounded unnatural.\n\n\"That's so,\" agreed the other. \"But what I meant was\"\u2014he threw out his chest, looked about him with an air of intense relief, drew in another deep breath, and again exhaled with satisfaction\u2014\"if there are no trees, there's no hiding.\"\n\nIt was the expression on the rugged, weathered face that sent the blood in a sudden gulping rush from his brother's heart. He had seen men frightened, seen men afraid before they were actually frightened; he had also seen men stiff with terror in the face both of natural and so-called supernatural things; but never in his life before had he seen the look of unearthly dread that now turned his brother's face as white as chalk and yet put the glow of fire in two haunted burning eyes.\n\nAcross the darkening landscape the sound of distant barking had floated to them on the evening wind.\n\n\"It's only a farm-dog barking.\" Yet it was Jim's deep, quiet voice that said it, one hand upon his brother's arm.\n\n\"That's all,\" replied Tom, ashamed that he had betrayed himself, and realizing with a shock of surprise that it was Jim who now played the r\u00f4le of comforter\u2014a startling change in their relations. \"Why, what did you think it was?\"\n\nHe tried hard to speak naturally and easily, but his voice shook. So deep was the brothers' love and intimacy that they could not help but share.\n\nJim lowered his great head. \"I thought,\" he whispered, his grey beard touching the other's cheek, \"maybe it was the wolves\"\u2014an agony of terror made both voice and body tremble\u2014\"the Wolves of God!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 545", + "text": "The interval of thirty years had been bridged easily enough; it was the secret that left the open gap neither of them cared or dared to cross. Jim's reason for hesitation lay within reach of guesswork, but Tom's silence was more complicated.\n\nWith strong, simple men, strangers to affectation or pretence, reserve is a real, almost a sacred thing. Jim offered nothing more; Tom asked no single question. In the latter's mind lay, for one thing, a singular intuitive certainty: that if he knew the truth he would lose his brother. How, why, wherefore, he had no notion; whether by death, or because, having told an awful thing, Jim would hide\u2014physically or mentally\u2014he knew not, nor even asked himself. No subtlety lay in Tom, the Orkney farmer. He merely felt that a knowledge of the truth involved separation which was death.\n\nDay and night, however, that extraordinary phrase which, at its first hearing, had frozen his blood, ran on beating in his mind. With it came always the original, nameless horror that had held him motionless where he stood, his brother's bearded lips against his ear: The Wolves of God. In some dim way, he sometimes felt\u2014tried to persuade himself, rather\u2014the horror did not belong to the phrase alone, but was a sympathetic echo of what Jim felt himself. It had entered his own mind and heart. They had always shared in this same strange, intimate way. The deep brotherly tie accounted for it. Of the possible transference of thought and emotion he knew nothing, but this was what he meant perhaps.\n\nAt the same time he fought and strove to keep it out, not because it brought uneasy and distressing feelings to him, but because he did not wish to pry, to ascertain, to discover his brother's secret as by some kind of subterfuge that seemed too near to eavesdropping almost. Also, he wished most earnestly to protect him. Meanwhile, in spite of himself, or perhaps because of himself, he watched his brother as a wild animal watches its young. Jim was the only tie he had on earth. He loved him with a brother's love, and Jim, similarly, he knew, loved him. His job was difficult. Love alone could guide him.\n\nHe gave openings, but he never questioned:\n\n\"Your letter did surprise me, Jim. I was never so delighted in my life. You had still two years to run.\"\n\n\"I'd had enough,\" was the short reply. \"God, man, it was good to get home again!\"\n\nThis, and the blunt talk that followed their first meeting, was all Tom had to go upon, while those eyes that refused to shut watched ceaselessly always. There was improvement, unless, which never occurred to Tom, it was self-control; there was no more talk of trees and water, the barking of the dogs passed unnoticed, no reference to the loneliness of the backwoods life passed his lips; he spent his days fishing, shooting, helping with the work of the farm, his evenings smoking over a glass\u2014he was more than temperate\u2014and talking over the days of long ago.\n\nThe signs of uneasiness still were there, but they were negative, far more suggestive, therefore, than if open and direct. He desired no company, for instance\u2014an unnatural thing, thought Tom, after so many years of loneliness.\n\nIt was this and the awkward fact that he had given up two years before his time was finished, renouncing, therefore, a comfortable pension\u2014it was these two big details that stuck with such unkind persistence in his brother's thoughts. Behind both, moreover, ran ever the strange whispered phrase. What the words meant, or whence they were derived, Tom had no possible inkling. Like the wicked refrain of some forbidden song, they haunted him day and night, even his sleep not free from them entirely. All of which, to the simple Orkney farmer, was so new an experience that he knew not how to deal with it at all. Too strong to be flustered, he was at any rate bewildered. And it was for Jim, his brother, he suffered most.\n\nWhat perplexed him chiefly, however, was the attitude his brother showed towards old John Rossiter. He could almost have imagined that the two men had met and known each other out in Canada, though Rossiter showed him how impossible that was, both in point of time and of geography as well. He had brought them together within the first few days, and Jim, silent, gloomy, morose, even surly, had eyed him like an enemy. Old Rossiter, the milk of human kindness as thick in his veins as cream, had taken no offence. Grizzled veteran of the wilds, he had served his full term with the Company and now enjoyed his well-earned pension. He was full of stories, reminiscences, adventures of every sort and kind; he knew men and values, had seen strange things that only the true wilderness delivers, and he loved nothing better than to tell them over a glass. He talked with Jim so genially and affably that little response was called for luckily, for Jim was glum and unresponsive almost to rudeness. Old Rossiter noticed nothing. What Tom noticed was, chiefly perhaps, his brother's acute uneasiness. Between his desire to help, his attachment to Rossiter, and his keen personal distress, he knew not what to do or say. The situation was becoming too much for him.\n\nThe two families, besides\u2014Peace and Rossiter\u2014had been neighbours for generations, had intermarried freely, and were related in various degrees. He was too fond of his brother to feel ashamed, but he was glad when the visit was over and they were out of their host's house. Jim had even declined to drink with him.\n\n\"They're good fellows on the island,\" said Tom on their way home, \"but not specially entertaining, perhaps. We all stick together though. You can trust 'em mostly.\"\n\n\"I never was a talker, Tom,\" came the gruff reply. \"You know that.\" And Tom, understanding more than he understood, accepted the apology and made generous allowances.\n\n\"John likes to talk,\" he helped him. \"He appreciates a good listener.\"\n\n\"It's the kind of talk I'm finished with,\" was the rejoinder. \"The Company and their goings-on don't interest me any more. I've had enough.\"\n\nTom noticed other things as well with those affectionate eyes of his that did not want to see yet would not close. As the days drew in, for instance, Jim seemed reluctant to leave the house towards evening. Once the full light of day had passed, he kept indoors. He was eager and ready enough to shoot in the early morning, no matter at what hour he had to get up, but he refused point blank to go with his brother to the lake for an evening flight. No excuse was offered; he simply declined to go.\n\nThe gap between them thus widened and deepened, while yet in another sense it grew less formidable. Both knew, that is, that a secret lay between them for the first time in their lives, yet both knew also that at the right and proper moment it would be revealed. Jim only waited till the proper moment came. And Tom understood. His deep, simple love was equal to all emergencies. He respected his brother's reserve. The obvious desire of John Rossiter to talk and ask questions, for instance, he resisted staunchly as far as he was able. Only when he could help and protect his brother did he yield a little. The talk was brief, even monosyllabic; neither the old Hudson Bay fellow nor the Orkney farmer ran to many words:\n\n\"He ain't right with himself,\" offered John, taking his pipe out of his mouth and leaning forward. \"That's what I don't like to see.\" He put a skinny hand on Tom's knee, and looked earnestly into his face as he said it.\n\n\"Jim!\" replied the other. \"Jim ill, you mean!\" It sounded ridiculous.\n\n\"His mind is sick.\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Tom said, though the truth bit like rough-edged steel into the brother's heart.\n\n\"His soul, then, if you like that better.\"\n\nTom fought with himself a moment, then asked him to be more explicit.\n\n\"More'n I can say,\" rejoined the laconic old backwoodsman. \"I don't know myself. The woods heal some men and make others sick.\"\n\n\"Maybe, John, maybe.\" Tom fought back his resentment. \"You've lived, like him, in lonely places. You ought to know.\" His mouth shut with a snap, as though he had said too much. Loyalty to his suffering brother caught him strongly. Already his heart ached for Jim. He felt angry with Rossiter for his divination, but perceived, too, that the old fellow meant well and was trying to help him. If he lost Jim, he lost the world\u2014his all.\n\nA considerable pause followed, during which both men puffed their pipes with reckless energy. Both, that is, were a bit excited. Yet both had their code, a code they would not exceed for worlds.\n\n\"Jim,\" added Tom presently, making an effort to meet the sympathy half way, \"ain't quite up to the mark, I'll admit that.\"\n\nThere was another long pause, while Rossiter kept his eyes on his companion steadily, though without a trace of expression in them\u2014a habit that the woods had taught him.\n\n\"Jim,\" he said at length, with an obvious effort, \"is skeered. And it's the soul in him that's skeered.\"\n\nTom wavered dreadfully then. He saw that old Rossiter, experienced backwoodsman and taught by the Company as he was, knew where the secret lay, if he did not yet know its exact terms. It was easy enough to put the question, yet he hesitated, because loyalty forbade.\n\n\"It's a dirty outfit somewheres,\" the old man mumbled to himself.\n\nTom sprang to his feet, \"If you talk that way,\" he exclaimed angrily, \"you're no friend of mine\u2014or his.\" His anger gained upon him as he said it. \"Say that again,\" he cried, \"and I'll knock your teeth\u2014\"\n\nHe sat back, stunned a moment.\n\n\"Forgive me, John,\" he faltered, shamed yet still angry. \"It's pain to me, it's pain. Jim,\" he went on, after a long breath and a pull at his glass, \"Jim is scared, I know it.\" He waited a moment, hunting for the words that he could use without disloyalty. \"But it's nothing he's done himself,\" he said, \"nothing to his discredit. I know that.\"\n\nOld Rossiter looked up, a strange light in his eyes.\n\n\"No offence,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"Tell me what you know,\" cried Tom suddenly, standing up again.\n\nThe old factor met his eye squarely, steadfastly. He laid his pipe aside.\n\n\"D'ye really want to hear?\" he asked in a lowered voice. \"Because, if you don't\u2014why, say so right now. I'm all for justice,\" he added, \"and always was.\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" said Tom, his heart in his mouth. \"Maybe, if I knew\u2014I might help him.\" The old man's words woke fear in him. He well knew his passionate, remorseless sense of justice.\n\n\"Help him,\" repeated the other. \"For a man skeered in his soul there ain't no help. But\u2014if you want to hear\u2014I'll tell you.\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" cried Tom. \"I will help him,\" while rising anger fought back rising fear.\n\nJohn took another pull at his glass.\n\n\"Jest between you and me like.\"\n\n\"Between you and me,\" said Tom. \"Get on with it.\"\n\nThere was a deep silence in the little room. Only the sound of the sea came in, the wind behind it.\n\n\"The Wolves,\" whispered old Rossiter. \"The Wolves of God.\"\n\nTom sat still in his chair, as though struck in the face. He shivered. He kept silent and the silence seemed to him long and curious. His heart was throbbing, the blood in his veins played strange tricks. All he remembered was that old Rossiter had gone on talking. The voice, however, sounded far away and distant. It was all unreal, he felt, as he went homewards across the bleak, wind-swept upland, the sound of the sea for ever in his ears...\n\nYes, old John Rossiter, damned be his soul, had gone on talking. He had said wild, incredible things. Damned be his soul! His teeth should be smashed for that. It was outrageous, it was cowardly, it was not true.\n\n\"Jim,\" he thought, \"my brother, Jim!\" as he ploughed his way wearily against the wind. \"I'll teach him. I'll teach him to spread such wicked tales!\" He referred to Rossiter. \"God blast these fellows! They come home from their outlandish places and think they can say anything! I'll knock his yellow dog's teeth...!\"\n\nWhile, inside, his heart went quailing, crying for help, afraid.\n\nHe tried hard to remember exactly what old John had said. Round Garden Lake\u2014that's where Jim was located in his lonely Post\u2014there was a tribe of Redskins. They were of unusual type. Malefactors among them\u2014thieves, criminals, murderers\u2014were not punished. They were merely turned out by the Tribe to die.\n\nBut how?\n\nThe Wolves of God took care of them. What were the Wolves of God?\n\nA pack of wolves the Redskins held in awe, a sacred pack, a spirit pack\u2014God curse the man! Absurd, outlandish nonsense! Superstitious humbug! A pack of wolves that punished malefactors, killing but never eating them. \"Torn but not eaten,\" the words came back to him, \"white men as well as red. They could even cross the sea...\"\n\n\"He ought to be strung up for telling such wild yarns. By God\u2014I'll teach him!\"\n\n\"Jim! My brother, Jim! It's monstrous.\"\n\nBut the old man, in his passionate cold justice, had said a yet more terrible thing, a thing that Tom would never forget, as he never could forgive it: \"You mustn't keep him here; you must send him away. We cannot have him on the island.\" And for that, though he could scarcely believe his ears, wondering afterwards whether he heard aright, for that, the proper answer to which was a blow in the mouth, Tom knew that his old friendship and affection had turned to bitter hatred.\n\n\"If I don't kill him, for that cursed lie, may God\u2014and Jim\u2014forgive me!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 546", + "text": "It was a few days later that the storm caught the islands, making them tremble in their sea-born bed. The wind tearing over the treeless expanse was terrible, the lightning lit the skies. No such rain had ever been known. The building shook and trembled. It almost seemed the sea had burst her limits, and the waves poured in. Its fury and the noises that the wind made affected both the brothers, but Jim disliked the uproar most. It made him gloomy, silent, morose. It made him\u2014Tom perceived it at once\u2014uneasy. \"Scared in his soul\"\u2014the ugly phrase came back to him.\n\n\"God save anyone who's out to-night,\" said Jim anxiously, as the old farm rattled about his head. Whereupon the door opened as of itself. There was no knock. It flew wide, as if the wind had burst it. Two drenched and beaten figures showed in the gap against the lurid sky\u2014old John Rossiter and Sandy. They laid their fowling pieces down and took off their capes; they had been up at the lake for the evening flight and six birds were in the game bag. So suddenly had the storm come up that they had been caught before they could get home.\n\nAnd, while Tom welcomed them, looked after their creature wants, and made them feel at home as in duty bound, no visit, he felt at the same time, could have been less opportune. Sandy did not matter\u2014Sandy never did matter anywhere, his personality being negligible\u2014but John Rossiter was the last man Tom wished to see just then. He hated the man; hated that sense of implacable justice that he knew was in him; with the slightest excuse he would have turned him out and sent him on to his own home, storm or no storm. But Rossiter provided no excuse; he was all gratitude and easy politeness, more pleasant and friendly to Jim even than to his brother. Tom set out the whisky and sugar, sliced the lemon, put the kettle on, and furnished dry coats while the soaked garments hung up before the roaring fire that Orkney makes customary even when days are warm.\n\n\"It might be the equinoctials,\" observed Sandy, \"if it wasn't late October.\" He shivered, for the tropics had thinned his blood.\n\n\"This ain't no ordinary storm,\" put in Rossiter, drying his drenched boots. \"It reminds me a bit\"\u2014he jerked his head to the window that gave seawards, the rush of rain against the panes half drowning his voice\u2014\"reminds me a bit of yonder.\" He looked up, as though to find someone to agree with him, only one such person being in the room.\n\n\"Sure, it ain't,\" agreed Jim at once, but speaking slowly, \"no ordinary storm.\" His voice was quiet as a child's. Tom, stooping over the kettle, felt something cold go trickling down his back. \"It's from acrost the Atlantic too.\"\n\n\"All our big storms come from the sea,\" offered Sandy, saying just what Sandy was expected to say. His lank red hair lay matted on his forehead, making him look like an unhappy collie dog.\n\n\"There's no hospitality,\" Rossiter changed the talk, \"like an islander's,\" as Tom mixed and filled the glasses. \"He don't even ask 'Say when?'\" He chuckled in his beard and turned to Sandy, well pleased with the compliment to his host. \"Now, in Malay,\" he added dryly, \"it's probably different, I guess.\" And the two men, one from Labrador, the other from the tropics, fell to bantering one another with heavy humour, while Tom made things comfortable and Jim stood silent with his back to the fire. At each blow of the wind that shook the building, a suitable remark was made, generally by Sandy: \"Did you hear that now?\" \"Ninety miles an hour at least.\" \"Good thing you build solid in this country!\" while Rossiter occasionally repeated that it was an \"uncommon storm\" and that \"it reminded\" him of the northern tempests he had known \"out yonder.\"\n\nTom said little, one thought and one thought only in his heart\u2014the wish that the storm would abate and his guests depart. He felt uneasy about Jim. He hated Rossiter. In the kitchen he had steadied himself already with a good stiff drink, and was now half-way through a second; the feeling was in him that he would need their help before the evening was out. Jim, he noticed, had left his glass untouched. His attention, clearly, went to the wind and the outer night; he added little to the conversation.\n\n\"Hark!\" cried Sandy's shrill voice. \"Did you hear that? That wasn't wind, I'll swear.\" He sat up, looking for all the world like a dog pricking its ears to something no one else could hear.\n\n\"The sea coming over the dunes,\" said Rossiter. \"There'll be an awful tide to-night and a terrible sea off the Swarf. Moon at the full, too.\" He cocked his head sideways to listen. The roaring was tremendous, waves and wind combining with a result that almost shook the ground. Rain hit the glass with incessant volleys like duck shot.\n\nIt was then that Jim spoke, having said no word for a long time.\n\n\"It's good there's no trees,\" he mentioned quietly. \"I'm glad of that.\"\n\n\"There'd be fearful damage, wouldn't there?\" remarked Sandy. \"They might fall on the house too.\"\n\nBut it was the tone Jim used that made Rossiter turn stiffly in his chair, looking first at the speaker, then at his brother. Tom caught both glances and saw the hard keen glitter in the eyes. This kind of talk, he decided, had got to stop, yet how to stop it he hardly knew, for his were not subtle methods, and rudeness to his guests ran too strong against the island customs. He refilled the glasses, thinking in his blunt fashion how best to achieve his object, when Sandy helped the situation without knowing it.\n\n\"That's my first,\" he observed, and all burst out laughing. For Sandy's tenth glass was equally his \"first,\" and he absorbed his liquor like a sponge, yet showed no effects of it until the moment when he would suddenly collapse and sink helpless to the ground. The glass in question, however, was only his third, the final moment still far away.\n\n\"Three in one and one in three,\" said Rossiter, amid the general laughter, while Sandy, grave as a judge, half emptied it at a single gulp. Good-natured, obtuse as a cart-horse, the tropics, it seemed, had first worn out his nerves, then removed them entirely from his body. \"That's Malay theology, I guess,\" finished Rossiter. And the laugh broke out again. Whereupon, setting his glass down, Sandy offered his usual explanation that the hot lands had thinned his blood, that he felt the cold in these \"arctic islands,\" and that alcohol was a necessity of life with him. Tom, grateful for the unexpected help, encouraged him to talk, and Sandy, accustomed to neglect as a rule, responded readily. Having saved the situation, however, he now unwittingly led it back into the danger zone.\n\n\"A night for tales, eh?\" he remarked, as the wind came howling with a burst of strangest noises against the house. \"Down there in the States,\" he went on, \"they'd say the evil spirits were out. They're a superstitious crowd, the natives. I remember once\u2014\" And he told a tale, half foolish, half interesting, of a mysterious track he had seen when following buffalo in the jungle. It ran close to the spoor of a wounded buffalo for miles, a track unlike that of any known animal, and the natives, though unable to name it, regarded it with awe. It was a good sign, a kill was certain. They said it was a spirit track.\n\n\"You got your buffalo?\" asked Tom.\n\n\"Found him two miles away, lying dead. The mysterious spoor came to an end close beside the carcass. It didn't continue.\"\n\n\"And that reminds me\u2014\" began old Rossiter, ignoring Tom's attempt to introduce another subject. He told them of the haunted island at Eagle River, and a tale of the man who would not stay buried on another island off the coast. From that he went on to describe the strange man-beast that hides in the deep forests of Labrador, manifesting but rarely, and dangerous to men who stray too far from camp, men with a passion for wild life over-strong in their blood\u2014the great mythical Wendigo. And while he talked, Tom noticed that Sandy used each pause as a good moment for a drink, but that Jim's glass still remained untouched.\n\nThe atmosphere of incredible things, thus, grew in the little room, much as it gathers among the shadows round a forest camp-fire when men who have seen strange places of the world give tongue about them, knowing they will not be laughed at\u2014an atmosphere, once established, it is vain to fight against. The ingrained superstition that hides in every mother's son comes up at such times to breathe. It came up now. Sandy, closer by several glasses to the moment, Tom saw, when he would be suddenly drunk, gave birth again, a tale this time of a Scottish planter who had brutally dismissed a native servant for no other reason than that he disliked him. The man disappeared completely, but the villagers hinted that he would\u2014soon indeed that he had\u2014come back, though \"not quite as he went.\" The planter armed, knowing that vengeance might be violent. A black panther, meanwhile, was seen prowling about the bungalow. One night a noise outside his door on the veranda roused him. Just in time to see the black brute leaping over the railings into the compound, he fired, and the beast fell with a savage growl of pain. Help arrived and more shots were fired into the animal, as it lay, mortally wounded already, lashing its tail upon the grass. The lanterns, however, showed that instead of a panther, it was the servant they had shot to shreds.\n\nSandy told the story well, a certain odd conviction in his tone and manner, neither of them at all to the liking of his host. Uneasiness and annoyance had been growing in Tom for some time already, his inability to control the situation adding to his anger. Emotion was accumulating in him dangerously; it was directed chiefly against Rossiter, who, though saying nothing definite, somehow deliberately encouraged both talk and atmosphere. Given the conditions, it was natural enough the talk should take the turn it did take, but what made Tom more and more angry was that, if Rossiter had not been present, he could have stopped it easily enough. It was the presence of the old Hudson Bay man that prevented his taking decided action. He was afraid of Rossiter, afraid of putting his back up. That was the truth. His recognition of it made him furious.\n\n\"Tell us another, Sandy McKay,\" said the veteran. \"There's a lot in such tales. They're found the world over\u2014men turning into animals and the like.\"\n\nAnd Sandy, yet nearer to his moment of collapse, but still showing no effects, obeyed willingly. He noticed nothing; the whisky was good, his tales were appreciated, and that sufficed him. He thanked Tom, who just then refilled his glass, and went on with his tale. But Tom, hatred and fury in his heart, had reached the point where he could no longer contain himself, and Rossiter's last words inflamed him. He went over, under cover of a tremendous clap of wind, to fill the old man's glass. The latter refused, covering the tumbler with his big, lean hand. Tom stood over him a moment, lowering his face. \"You keep still,\" he whispered ferociously, but so that no one else heard it. He glared into his eyes with an intensity that held danger, and Rossiter, without answering, flung back that glare with equal, but with a calmer, anger.\n\nThe wind, meanwhile, had a trick of veering, and each time it shifted, Jim shifted his seat too. Apparently, he preferred to face the sound, rather than have his back to it.\n\n\"Your turn now for a tale,\" said Rossiter with purpose, when Sandy finished. He looked across at him, just as Jim, hearing the burst of wind at the walls behind him, was in the act of moving his chair again. The same moment the attack rattled the door and windows facing him. Jim, without answering, stood for a moment still as death, not knowing which way to turn.\n\n\"It's beatin' up from all sides,\" remarked Rossiter, \"like it was goin' round the building.\"\n\nThere was a moment's pause, the four men listening with awe to the roar and power of the terrific wind. Tom listened too, but at the same time watched, wondering vaguely why he didn't cross the room and crash his fist into the old man's chattering mouth. Jim put out his hand and took his glass, but did not raise it to his lips. And a lull came abruptly in the storm, the wind sinking into a moment's dreadful silence. Tom and Rossiter turned their heads in the same instant and stared into each other's eyes. For Tom the instant seemed enormously prolonged. He realized the challenge in the other and that his rudeness had roused it into action. It had become a contest of wills\u2014Justice battling against Love.\n\nJim's glass had now reached his lips, and the chattering of his teeth against its rim was audible.\n\nBut the lull passed quickly and the wind began again, though so gently at first, it had the sound of innumerable swift footsteps treading lightly, of countless hands fingering the doors and windows, but then suddenly with a mighty shout as it swept against the walls, rushed across the roof and descended like a battering-ram against the farther side.\n\n\"God, did you hear that?\" cried Sandy. \"It's trying to get in!\" and having said it, he sank in a heap beside his chair, all of a sudden completely drunk. \"It's wolves or panthersh,\" he mumbled in his stupor on the floor, \"but whatsh's happened to Malay?\" It was the last thing he said before unconsciousness took him, and apparently he was insensible to the kick on the head from a heavy farmer's boot. For Jim's glass had fallen with a crash and the second kick was stopped midway. Tom stood spell-bound, unable to move or speak, as he watched his brother suddenly cross the room and open a window into the very teeth of the gale.\n\n\"Let be! Let be!\" came the voice of Rossiter, an authority in it, a curious gentleness too, both of them new. He had risen, his lips were still moving, but the words that issued from them were inaudible, as the wind and rain leaped with a galloping violence into the room, smashing the glass to atoms and dashing a dozen loose objects helter-skelter on to the floor.\n\n\"I saw it!\" cried Jim, in a voice that rose above the din and clamour of the elements. He turned and faced the others, but it was at Rossiter he looked. \"I saw the leader.\" He shouted to make himself heard, although the tone was quiet. \"A splash of white on his great chest. I saw them all!\"\n\nAt the words, and at the expression in Jim's eyes, old Rossiter, white to the lips, dropped back into his chair as if a blow had struck him. Tom, petrified, felt his own heart stop. For through the broken window, above yet within the wind, came the sound of a wolf-pack running, howling in deep, full-throated chorus, mad for blood. It passed like a whirlwind and was gone. And, of the three men so close together, one sitting and two standing, Jim alone was in that terrible moment wholly master of himself.\n\nBefore the others could move or speak, he turned and looked full into the eyes of each in succession. His speech went back to his wilderness days:\n\n\"I done it,\" he said calmly. \"I killed him\u2014and I got ter go.\"\n\nWith a look of mystical horror on his face, he took one stride, flung the door wide, and vanished into the darkness.\n\nSo quick were both words and action, that Tom's paralysis passed only as the draught from the broken window banged the door behind him. He seemed to leap across the room, old Rossiter, tears on his cheeks and his lips mumbling foolish words, so close upon his heels that the backward blow of fury Tom aimed at his face caught him only in the neck and sent him reeling sideways to the floor instead of flat upon his back.\n\n\"Murderer! My brother's death upon you!\" he shouted as he tore the door open again and plunged out into the night.\n\nAnd the odd thing that happened then, the thing that touched old John Rossiter's reason, leaving him from that moment till his death a foolish man of uncertain mind and memory, happened when he and the unconscious, drink-sodden Sandy lay alone together on the stone floor of that farm-house room.\n\nRossiter, dazed by the blow and his fall, but in full possession of his senses, and the anger gone out of him owing to what he had brought about, this same John Rossiter sat up and saw Sandy also sitting up and staring at him hard. And Sandy was sober as a judge, his eyes and speech both clear, even his face unflushed.\n\n\"John Rossiter,\" he said, \"it was not God who appointed you executioner. It was the devil.\" And his eyes, thought Rossiter, were like the eyes of an angel.\n\n\"Sandy McKay,\" he stammered, his teeth chattering and breath failing him. \"Sandy McKay!\" It was all the words that he could find. But Sandy, already sunk back into his stupor again, was stretched drunk and incapable upon the farm-house floor, and remained in that condition till the dawn.\n\nJim's body lay hidden among the dunes for many months and in spite of the most careful and prolonged searching. It was another storm that laid it bare. The sand had covered it. The clothes were gone, and the flesh, torn but not eaten, was naked to the December sun and wind." + }, + { + "title": "Chinese Magic by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "Dr. Owen Francis felt a sudden wave of pleasure and admiration sweep over him as he saw her enter the room. He was in the act of going out; in fact, he had already said good-bye to his hostess, glad to make his escape from the chattering throng, when the tall and graceful young woman glided past him. Her carriage was superb; she had black eyes with a twinkling happiness in them; her mouth was exquisite. Round her neck, in spite of the warm afternoon, she wore a soft thing of fur or feathers; and as she brushed by to shake the hand he had just shaken himself, the tail of this touched his very cheek. Their eyes met fair and square. He felt as though her eyes also touched him.\n\nChanging his mind, he lingered another ten minutes, chatting with various ladies he did not in the least remember, but who remembered him. He did not, of course, desire to exchange banalities with these other ladies, yet did so gallantly enough. If they found him absent-minded they excused him since he was the famous mental specialist whom everybody was proud to know. And all the time his eyes never left the tall graceful figure that allured him almost to the point of casting a spell upon him.\n\nHis first impression deepened as he watched. He was aware of excitement, curiosity, longing; there was a touch even of exaltation in him; yet he took no steps to seek the introduction which was easily enough procurable. He checked himself, if with an effort. Several times their eyes met across the crowded room; he dared to believe\u2014he felt instinctively\u2014that his interest was returned. Indeed, it was more than instinct, for she was certainly aware of his presence, and he even caught her indicating him to a woman she spoke with, and evidently asking who he was. Once he half bowed, and once, in spite of himself, he went so far as to smile, and there came, he was sure, a faint, delicious brightening of the eyes in answer. There was, he fancied, a look of yearning in the face. The young woman charmed him inexpressibly; the very way she moved delighted him. Yet at last he slipped out of the room without a word, without an introduction, without even knowing her name. He chose his moment when her back was turned. It was characteristic of him.\n\nFor Owen Francis had ever regarded marriage, for himself at least, as a disaster that could be avoided. He was in love with his work, and his work was necessary to humanity. Others might perpetuate the race, but he must heal it. He had come to regard love as the bait wherewith Nature lays her trap to fulfill her own ends. A man in love was a man enjoying a delusion, a deluded man. In his case, and he was nearing forty-five, the theory had worked admirably, and the dangerous exception that proved it had as yet not troubled him.\n\n\"It's come at last\u2014I do believe,\" he thought to himself, as he walked home, a new tumultuous emotion in his blood; \"the exception, quite possibly, has come at last. I wonder...\"\n\nAnd it seemed he said it to the tall graceful figure by his side, who turned up dark eyes smilingly to meet his own, and whose lips repeated softly his last two words \"I wonder...\"\n\nThe experience, being new to him, was baffling. A part of his nature, long dormant, received the authentic thrill that pertains actually to youth. He was a man of chaste, abstemious custom. The reaction was vehement. That dormant part of him became obstreperous. He thought of his age, his appearance, his prospects; he looked thirty-eight, he was not unhandsome, his position was secure, even remarkable. That gorgeous young woman\u2014he called her gorgeous\u2014haunted him. Never could he forget that face, those eyes. It was extraordinary\u2014he had left her there unspoken to, unknown, when an introduction would have been the simplest thing in the world.\n\n\"But it still is,\" he replied. And the reflection filled his being with a flood of joy.\n\nHe checked himself again. Not so easily is established habit routed. He felt instinctively that, at last, he had met his mate; if he followed it up he was a man in love, a lost man enjoying a delusion, a deluded man. But the way she had looked at him! That air of intuitive invitation which not even the sweetest modesty could conceal! He felt an immense confidence in himself; also he felt oddly sure of her.\n\nThe presence of that following figure, already precious, came with him into his house, even into his study at the back where he sat over a number of letters by the open window. The pathetic little London garden showed its pitiful patch. The lilac had faded, but a smell of roses entered. The sun was just behind the buildings opposite, and the garden lay soft and warm in summer shadows.\n\nHe read and tossed aside the letters; one only interested him, from Edward Farque, whose journey to China had interrupted a friendship of long standing. Edward Farque's work on eastern art and philosophy, on Chinese painting and Chinese thought in particular, had made its mark. He was an authority. He was to be back about this time, and his friend smiled with pleasure. \"Dear old unpractical dreamer, as I used to call him,\" he mused. \"He's a success, anyhow!\" And as he mused, the presence that sat beside him came a little closer, yet at the same time faded. Not that he forgot her\u2014that was impossible\u2014but that just before opening the letter from his friend, he had come to a decision. He had definitely made up his mind to seek acquaintance. The reality replaced the remembered substitute.\n\n\"As the newspapers may have warned you,\" ran the familiar and kinky writing, \"I am back in England after what the scribes term my ten years of exile in Cathay. I have taken a little house in Hampstead for six months, and am just settling in. Come to us to-morrow night and let me prove it to you. Come to dinner. We shall have much to say; we both are ten years wiser. You know how glad I shall be to see my old-time critic and disparager, but let me add frankly that I want to ask you a few professional, or, rather, technical, questions. So prepare yourself to come as doctor and as friend. I am writing, as the papers said truthfully, a treatise on Chinese thought. But\u2014don't shy!\u2014it is about Chinese Magic that I want your technical advice [the last two words were substituted for \"professional wisdom,\" which had been crossed out] and the benefit of your vast experience. So come, old friend, come quickly, and come hungry! I'll feed your body as you shall feed my mind.\u2014Yours,\n\n\"Edward Farque.\"\n\n\"P.S.\u2014'The coming of a friend from a far-off land\u2014is not this true joy?'\"\n\nDr. Francis laid down the letter with a pleased anticipatory chuckle, and it was the touch in the final sentence that amused him. In spite of being an authority, Farque was clearly the same fanciful, poetic dreamer as of old. He quoted Confucius as in other days. The firm but kinky writing had not altered either. The only sign of novelty he noticed was the use of scented paper, for a faint and pungent aroma clung to the big quarto sheet.\n\n\"A Chinese habit, doubtless,\" he decided, sniffing it with a puzzled air of disapproval. Yet it had nothing in common with the scented sachets some ladies use too lavishly, so that even the air of the street is polluted by their passing for a dozen yards. He was familiar with every kind of perfumed note-paper used in London, Paris, and Constantinople. This one was difficult. It was delicate and penetrating for all its faintness, pleasurable too. He rather liked it, and while annoyed that he could not name it, he sniffed at the letter several times, as though it were a flower.\n\n\"I'll go,\" he decided at once, and wrote an acceptance then and there. He went out and posted it. He meant to prolong his walk into the Park, taking his chief preoccupation, the face, the eyes, the figure, with him. Already he was composing the note of inquiry to Mrs. Malleson, his hostess of the tea-party, the note whose willing answer should give him the name, the address, the means of introduction he had now determined to secure. He visualized that note of inquiry, seeing it in his mind's eye; only, for some odd reason, he saw the kinky writing of Farque instead of his own more elegant script. Association of ideas and emotions readily explained this. Two new and unexpected interests had entered his life on the same day, and within half an hour of each other. What he could not so readily explain, however, was that two words in his friend's ridiculous letter, and in that kinky writing, stood out sharply from the rest. As he slipped his envelope into the mouth of the red pillar-box they shone vividly in his mind. These two words were \"Chinese Magic.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 548", + "text": "It was the warmth of his friend's invitation as much as his own state of inward excitement that decided him suddenly to anticipate his visit by twenty-four hours. It would clear his judgment and help his mind, if he spent the evening at Hampstead rather than alone with his own thoughts. \"A dose of China,\" he thought, with a smile, \"will do me good. Edward won't mind. I'll telephone.\"\n\nHe left the Park soon after six o'clock and acted upon his impulse. The connexion was bad, the wire buzzed and popped and crackled; talk was difficult; he did not hear properly. The Professor had not yet come in, apparently. Francis said he would come up anyhow on the chance.\n\n\"Velly pleased,\" said the voice in his ear, as he rang off.\n\nGoing into his study, he drafted the note that should result in the introduction that was now, it appeared, the chief object of his life. The way this woman with the black, twinkling eyes obsessed him was\u2014he admitted it with joy\u2014extraordinary. The draft he put in his pocket, intending to re-write it next morning, and all the way up to Hampstead Heath the gracious figure glided silently beside him, the eyes were ever present, his cheek still glowed where the feather boa had touched his skin. Edward Farque remained in the background. In fact, it was on the very door-step, having rung the bell, that Francis realized he must pull himself together. \"I've come to see old Farque,\" he reminded himself, with a smile. \"I've got to be interested in him and his, and, probably, for an hour or two, to talk Chinese\u2014\" when the door opened noiselessly, and he saw facing him, with a grin of celestial welcome on his yellow face, a China-man.\n\n\"Oh!\" he said, with a start. He had not expected a Chinese servant.\n\n\"Velly pleased,\" the man bowed him in.\n\nDr. Francis stared round him with astonishment he could not conceal. A great golden idol faced him in the hall, its gleaming visage blazing out of a sort of miniature golden palanquin, with a grin, half dignified, half cruel. Fully double human size, it blocked the way, looking so life-like that it might have moved to meet him without too great a shock to what seemed possible. It rested on a throne with four massive legs, carved, the doctor saw, with serpents, dragons, and mythical monsters generally. Round it on every side were other things in keeping. Name them he could not, describe them he did not try. He summed them up in one word\u2014China: pictures, weapons, cloths and tapestries, bells, gongs, and figures of every sort and kind imaginable.\n\nBeing ignorant of Chinese matters, Dr. Francis stood and looked about him in a mental state of some confusion. He had the feeling that he had entered a Chinese temple, for there was a faint smell of incense hanging about the house that was, to say the least, un-English. Nothing English, in fact, was visible at all. The matting on the floor, the swinging curtains of bamboo beads that replaced the customary doors, the silk draperies and pictured cushions, the bronze and ivory, the screens hung with fantastic embroideries, everything was Chinese. Hampstead vanished from his thoughts. The very lamps were in keeping, the ancient lacquered furniture as well. The value of what he saw, an expert could have told him, was considerable.\n\n\"You likee?\" queried the voice at his side.\n\nHe had forgotten the servant. He turned sharply.\n\n\"Very much; it's wonderfully done,\" he said. \"Makes you feel at home, John, eh?\" he added tactfully, with a smile, and was going to ask how long all this preparation had taken, when a voice sounded on the stairs beyond. It was a voice he knew, a note of hearty welcome in its deep notes.\n\n\"The coming of a friend from a far-off land, even from Harley Street\u2014is not this true joy?\" he heard, and the next minute was shaking the hand of his old and valued friend. The intimacy between them had always been of the truest.\n\n\"I almost expected a pigtail,\" observed Francis, looking him affectionately up and down, \"but, really\u2014why, you've hardly changed at all!\"\n\n\"Outwardly, not as much, perhaps, as Time expects,\" was the happy reply, \"but inwardly\u2014!\" He scanned appreciatively the burly figure of the doctor in his turn. \"And I can say the same of you,\" he declared, still holding his hand tight. \"This is a real pleasure, Owen,\" he went on in his deep voice, \"to see you again is a joy to me. Old friends meeting again\u2014there's nothing like it in life, I believe, nothing.\" He gave the hand another squeeze before he let it go. \"And we,\" he added, leading the way into a room across the hall, \"neither of us is a fugitive from life. We take what we can, I mean.\"\n\nThe doctor smiled as he noted the un-English turn of language, and together they entered a sitting-room that was, again, more like some inner chamber of a Chinese temple than a back room in a rented Hampstead house.\n\n\"I only knew ten minutes ago that you were coming, my dear fellow,\" the scholar was saying, as his friend gazed round him with increased astonishment, \"or I would have prepared more suitably for your reception. I was out till late. All this\"\u2014he waved his hand\u2014\"surprises you, of course, but the fact is I have been home some days already, and most of what you see was arranged for me in advance of my arrival. Hence its apparent completion. I say 'apparent,' because, actually, it is far from faithfully carried out. Yet to exceed,\" he added, \"is as bad as to fall short.\"\n\nThe doctor watched him while he listened to a somewhat lengthy explanation of the various articles surrounding them. The speaker\u2014he confirmed his first impression\u2014had changed little during the long interval; the same enthusiasm was in him as before, the same fire and dreaminess alternately in the fine grey eyes, the same humour and passion about the mouth, the same free gestures, and the same big voice. Only the lines had deepened on the forehead, and on the fine face the air of thoughtfulness was also deeper. It was Edward Farque as of old, scholar, poet, dreamer and enthusiast, despiser of western civilization, contemptuous of money, generous and upright, a type of value, an individual.\n\n\"You've done well, done splendidly, Edward, old man,\" said his friend presently, after hearing of Chinese wonders that took him somewhat beyond his depth perhaps. \"No one is more pleased than I. I've watched your books. You haven't regretted England, I'll be bound?\" he asked.\n\n\"The philosopher has no country, in any case,\" was the reply, steadily given. \"But out there, I confess, I've found my home.\" He leaned forward, a deeper earnestness in his tone and expression. And into his face, as he spoke, came a glow of happiness. \"My heart,\" he said, \"is in China.\"\n\n\"I see it is, I see it is,\" put in the other, conscious that he could not honestly share his friend's enthusiasm. \"And you're fortunate to be free to live where your treasure is,\" he added after a moment's pause. \"You must be a happy man. Your passion amounts to nostalgia, I suspect. Already yearning to get back there, probably?\"\n\nFarque gazed at him for some seconds with shining eyes. \"You remember the Persian saying, I'm sure,\" he said. \"'You see a man drink, but you do not see his thirst.' Well,\" he added, laughing happily, \"you may see me off in six months' time, but you will not see my happiness.\"\n\nWhile he went on talking, the doctor glanced round the room, marvelling still at the exquisite taste of everything, the neat arrangement, the perfect matching of form and colour. A woman might have done this thing, occurred to him, as the haunting figure shifted deliciously into the foreground of his mind again. The thought of her had been momentarily replaced by all he heard and saw. She now returned, filling him with joy, anticipation and enthusiasm. Presently, when it was his turn to talk, he would tell his friend about this new, unimagined happiness that had burst upon him like a sunrise. Presently, but not just yet. He remembered, too, with a passing twinge of possible boredom to come, that there must be some delay before his own heart could unburden itself in its turn. Farque wanted to ask some professional questions, of course. He had for the moment forgotten that part of the letter in his general interest and astonishment.\n\n\"Happiness, yes...\" he murmured, aware that his thoughts had wandered, and catching at the last word he remembered hearing. \"As you said just now in your own queer way\u2014you haven't changed a bit, let me tell you, in your picturesqueness of quotation, Edward\u2014one must not be fugitive from life; one must seize happiness when and where it offers.\"\n\nHe said it lightly enough, hugging internally his own sweet secret; but he was a little surprised at the earnestness of his friend's rejoinder: \"Both of us, I see,\" came the deep voice, backed by the flash of the far-seeing grey eyes, \"have made some progress in the doctrine of life and death.\" He paused, gazing at the other with sight that was obviously turned inwards upon his own thoughts. \"Beauty,\" he went on presently, his tone even more serious, \"has been my lure; yours, Reality...\"\n\n\"You don't flatter either of us, Edward. That's too exclusive a statement,\" put in the doctor. He was becoming every minute more and more interested in the workings of his friend's mind. Something about the signs offered eluded his understanding. \"Explain yourself, old scholar-poet. I'm a dull, practical mind, remember, and can't keep pace with Chinese subtleties.\"\n\n\"You've left out Beauty,\" was the quiet rejoinder, \"while I left out Reality. That's neither Chinese nor subtle. It is simply true.\"\n\n\"A bit wholesale, isn't it?\" laughed Francis. \"A big generalization, rather.\"\n\nA bright light seemed to illuminate the scholar's face. It was as though an inner lamp was suddenly lit. At the same moment the sound of a soft gong floated in from the hall outside, so soft that the actual strokes were not distinguishable in the wave of musical vibration that reached the ear.\n\nFarque rose to lead the way in to dinner.\n\n\"What if I\u2014\" he whispered, \"have combined the two?\" And upon his face was a look of joy that reached down into the other's own full heart with its unexpectedness and wonder. It was the last remark in the world he had looked for. He wondered for a moment whether he interpreted it correctly.\n\n\"By Jove...!\" he exclaimed. \"Edward, what d'you mean?\"\n\n\"You shall hear\u2014after dinner,\" said Farque, his voice mysterious, his eyes still shining with his inner joy. \"I told you I have some questions to ask you\u2014professionally.\" And they took their seats round an ancient, marvellous table, lit by two swinging lamps of soft green jade, while the Chinese servant waited on them with the silent movements and deft neatness of his imperturbable celestial race." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 549", + "text": "To say that he was bored during the meal were an over-statement of Dr. Francis's mental condition, but to say that he was half-bored seemed the literal truth; for one-half of him, while he ate his steak and savoury and watched Farque manipulating chou chop suey and chou om dong most cleverly with chop-sticks, was too pre-occupied with his own romance to allow the other half to give its full attention to the conversation.\n\nHe had entered the room, however, with a distinct quickening of what may be termed his instinctive and infallible sense of diagnosis. That last remark of his friend's had stimulated him. He was aware of surprise, curiosity, and impatience. Willy-nilly, he began automatically to study him with a profounder interest. Something, he gathered, was not quite as it should be in Edward Farque's mental composition. There was what might be called an elusive emotional disturbance. He began to wonder and to watch.\n\nThey talked, naturally, of China and of things Chinese, for the scholar responded to little else, and Francis listened with what sympathy and patience he could muster. Of art and beauty he had hitherto known little, his mind was practical and utilitarian. He now learned that all art was derived from China, where a high, fine, subtle culture had reigned since time immemorial. Older than Egypt was their wisdom. When the western races were eating one another, before Greece was even heard of, the Chinese had reached a level of knowledge and achievement that few realized. Never had they, even in earliest times, been deluded by anthropomorphic conceptions of the Deity, but perceived in everything the expressions of a single whole whose giant activities they reverently worshipped. Their contempt for the western scurry after knowledge, wealth, machinery, was justified, if Farque was worthy of belief. He seemed saturated with Chinese thought, art, philosophy, and his natural bias towards the celestial race had hardened into an attitude to life that had now become ineradicable.\n\n\"They deal, as it were, in essences,\" he declared; \"they discern the essence of everything, leaving out the superfluous, the unessential, the trivial. Their pictures alone prove it. Come with me,\" he concluded, \"and see the 'Earthly Paradise,' now in the British Museum. It is like Botticelli, but better than anything Botticelli ever did. It was painted\"\u2014he paused for emphasis\u2014\"600 years B.C.\"\n\nThe wonder of this quiet, ancient civilization, a sense of its depth, its wisdom, grew upon his listener as the enthusiastic poet described its charm and influence upon himself. He willingly allowed the enchantment of the other's Paradise to steal upon his own awakened heart. There was a good deal Francis might have offered by way of criticism and objection, but he preferred on the whole to keep his own views to himself, and to let his friend wander unhindered through the mazes of his passionate evocation. All men, he well knew, needed a dream to carry them through life's disappointments, a dream that they could enter at will and find peace, contentment, happiness. Farque's dream was China. Why not? It was as good as another, and a man like Farque was entitled to what dream he pleased.\n\n\"And their women?\" he inquired at last, letting both halves of his mind speak together for the first time.\n\nBut he was not prepared for the expression that leaped upon his friend's face at the simple question. Nor for his method of reply. It was no reply, in point of fact. It was simply an attack upon all other types of woman, and upon the white, the English, in particular\u2014their emptiness, their triviality, their want of intuitive imagination, of spiritual grace, of everything, in a word, that should constitute woman a meet companion for man, and a little higher than the angels into the bargain. The doctor listened spellbound. Too humorous to be shocked, he was, at any rate, disturbed by what he heard, displeased a little, too. It threatened too directly his own new tender dream.\n\nOnly with the utmost self-restraint did he keep his temper under, and prevent hot words he would have regretted later from tearing his friend's absurd claim into ragged shreds. He was wounded personally as well. Never now could he bring himself to tell his own secret to him. The outburst chilled and disappointed him. But it had another effect\u2014it cooled his judgment. His sense of diagnosis quickened. He divined an id\u00e9e fixe, a mania possibly. His interest deepened abruptly. He watched. He began to look about him with more wary eyes, and a sense of uneasiness, once the anger passed, stirred in his friendly and affectionate heart.\n\nThey had been sitting alone over their port for some considerable time, the servant having long since left the room. The doctor had sought to change the subject many times without much success, when suddenly Farque changed it for him.\n\n\"Now,\" he announced, \"I'll tell you something,\" and Francis guessed that the professional questions were on the way at last. \"We must pity the living, remember, and part with the dead. Have you forgotten old Shan-Yu?\"\n\nThe forgotten name came back to him, the picturesque East End dealer of many years ago. \"The old merchant who taught you your first Chinese? I do recall him dimly; now you mention it. You made quite a friend of him, didn't you? He thought very highly of you\u2014ah, it comes back to me now\u2014he offered something or other very wonderful in his gratitude, unless my memory fails me?\"\n\n\"His most valuable possession,\" Farque went on, a strange look deepening on his face, an expression of mysterious rapture, as it were, and one that Francis recognized and swiftly pigeon-holed in his now attentive mind.\n\n\"Which was?\" he asked sympathetically. \"You told me once, but so long ago that really it's slipped my mind. Something magical, wasn't it?\" He watched closely for his friend's reply.\n\nFarque lowered his voice to a whisper almost devotional:\n\n\"The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness,\" he murmured, with an expression in his eyes as though the mere recollection gave him joy. \"'Burn it,' he told me, 'in a brazier; then inhale. You will enter the Valley of a Thousand Temples wherein lies the Garden of Happiness, and there you will meet your Love. You will have seven years of happiness with your Love before the Waters of Separation flow between you. I give this to you who alone of men here have appreciated the wisdom of my land. Follow my body towards the Sunrise. You, an eastern soul in a barbarian body, will meet your Destiny.'\"\n\nThe doctor's attention, such is the power of self-interest, quickened amazingly as he heard. His own romance flamed up with power. His friend\u2014it dawned upon him suddenly\u2014loved a woman.\n\n\"Come,\" said Farque, rising quietly, \"we will go into the other room, and I will show you what I have shown to but one other in the world before. You are a doctor,\" he continued, as he led the way to the silk-covered divan where golden dragons swallowed crimson suns, and wonderful jade horses hovered near. \"You understand the mind and nerves. States of consciousness you also can explain, and the effect of drugs is, doubtless, known to you.\" He swung to the heavy curtains that took the place of door, handed a lacquered box of cigarettes to his friend, and lit one himself. \"Perfumes, too,\" he added, \"you probably have studied, with their extraordinary evocative power.\" He stood in the middle of the room, the green light falling on his interesting and thoughtful face, and for a passing second Francis, watching keenly, observed a change flit over it and vanish. The eyes grew narrow and slid tilted upwards, the skin wore a shade of yellow underneath the green from the lamp of jade, the nose slipped back a little, the cheek-bones forward.\n\n\"Perfumes,\" said the doctor, \"no. Of perfumes I know nothing, beyond their interesting effect upon the memory. I cannot help you there. But, you, I suspect,\" and he looked up with an inviting sympathy that concealed the close observation underneath, \"you yourself, I feel sure, can tell me something of value about them?\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" was the calm reply, \"perhaps, for I have smelt the perfume of the Garden of Happiness, and I have been in the Valley of a Thousand Temples.\" He spoke with a glow of joy and reverence almost devotional.\n\nThe doctor waited in some suspense, while his friend moved towards an inlaid cabinet across the room. More than broad-minded, he was that much rarer thing, an open-minded man, ready at a moment's notice to discard all preconceived ideas, provided new knowledge that necessitated the holocaust were shown to him. At present, none the less, he held very definite views of his own. \"Please ask me any questions you like,\" he added. \"All I know is entirely yours, as always.\" He was aware of suppressed excitement in his friend that betrayed itself in every word and look and gesture, an excitement intense, and not as yet explained by anything he had seen or heard.\n\nThe scholar, meanwhile, had opened a drawer in the cabinet and taken from it a neat little packet tied up with purple silk. He held it with tender, almost loving care, as he came and sat down on the divan beside his friend.\n\n\"This,\" he said, in a tone, again, of something between reverence and worship, \"contains what I have to show you first.\" He slowly unrolled it, disclosing a yet smaller silken bag within, coloured a deep rich orange. There were two vertical columns of writing on it, painted in Chinese characters. The doctor leaned forward to examine them. His friend translated:\n\n\"The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness,\" he read aloud, tracing the letters of the first column with his finger. \"The Destroyer of Honourable Homes,\" he finished, passing to the second, and then proceeded to unwrap the little silken bag. Before it was actually open, however, and the pale shredded material resembling coloured chaff visible to the eyes, the doctor's nostrils had recognized the strange aroma he had first noticed about his friend's letter received earlier in the day. The same soft, penetrating odour, sharply piercing, sweet and delicate, rose to his brain. It stirred at once a deep emotional pleasure in him. Having come to him first when he was aglow with his own unexpected romance, his mind and heart full of the woman he had just left, that delicious, torturing state revived in him quite naturally. The evocative power of perfume with regard to memory is compelling. A livelier sympathy towards his friend, and towards what he was about to hear, awoke in him spontaneously.\n\nHe did not mention the letter, however. He merely leaned over to smell the fragrant perfume more easily.\n\nFarque drew back the open packet instantly, at the same time holding out a warning hand. \"Careful,\" he said gravely, \"be careful, my old friend\u2014unless you desire to share the rapture and the risk that have been mine. To enjoy its full effect, true, this dust must be burned in a brazier and its smoke inhaled; but even sniffed, as you now would sniff it, and you are in danger\u2014\"\n\n\"Of what?\" asked Francis, impressed by the other's extraordinary intensity of voice and manner.\n\n\"Of Heaven; but, possibly, of Heaven before your time.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 550", + "text": "The tale that Farque unfolded then had certainly a strange celestial flavour, a glory not of this dull world; and as his friend listened, his interest deepened with every minute, while his bewilderment increased. He watched closely, expert that he was, for clues that might guide his deductions aright, but for all his keen observation and experience he could detect no inconsistency, no weakness, nothing that betrayed the smallest mental aberration. The origin and nature of what he already decided was an id\u00e9e fixe, a mania, evaded him entirely. This evasion piqued and vexed him; he had heard a thousand tales of similar type before; that this one in particular should baffle his unusual skill touched his pride. Yet he faced the position honestly, he confessed himself baffled until the end of the evening. When he went away, however, he went away satisfied, even forgetful\u2014because a new problem of yet more poignant interest had replaced the first.\n\n\"It was after three years out there,\" said Farque, \"that a sense of my loneliness first came upon me. It came upon me bitterly. My work had not then been recognized; obstacles and difficulties had increased; I felt a failure; I had accomplished nothing. And it seemed to me I had misjudged my capacities, taken a wrong direction, and wasted my life accordingly. For my move to China, remember, was a radical move, and my boats were burnt behind me. This sense of loneliness was really devastating.\"\n\nFrancis, already fidgeting, put up his hand.\n\n\"One question, if I may,\" he said, \"and I'll not interrupt again.\"\n\n\"By all means,\" said the other patiently, \"what is it?\"\n\n\"Were you\u2014we are such old friends\"\u2014he apologized\u2014\"were you still celibate as ever?\"\n\nFarque looked surprised, then smiled. \"My habits had not changed,\" he replied, \"I was, as always, celibate.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" murmured the doctor, and settled down to listen.\n\n\"And I think now,\" his friend went on, \"that it was the lack of companionship that first turned my thoughts towards conscious disappointment. However that may be, it was one evening, as I walked homewards to my little house, that I caught my imagination lingering upon English memories, though chiefly, I admit, upon my old Chinese tutor, the dead Shan-Yu.\n\n\"It was dusk, the stars were coming out in the pale evening air, and the orchards, as I passed them, stood like wavering ghosts of unbelievable beauty. The effect of thousands upon thousands of these trees, flooding the twilight of a spring evening with their sea of blossom, is almost unearthly. They seem transparencies, their colour hangs sheets upon the very sky. I crossed a small wooden bridge that joined two of these orchards above a stream, and in the dark water I watched a moment the mingled reflection of stars and flowering branches on the quiet surface. It seemed too exquisite to belong to earth, this fairy garden of stars and blossoms, shining faintly in the crystal depths, and my thought, as I gazed, dived suddenly down the little avenue that memory opened into former days. I remembered Shan-Yu's present, given to me when he died. His very words came back to me: The Garden of Happiness in the Valley of the Thousand Temples, with its promise of love, of seven years of happiness, and the prophecy that I should follow his body towards the Sunrise and meet my destiny.\n\n\"This memory I took home with me into my lonely little one-storey house upon the hill. My servants did not sleep there. There was no one near. I sat by the open window with my thoughts, and you may easily guess that before very long I had unearthed the long-forgotten packet from among my things, spread a portion of its contents on a metal tray above a lighted brazier, and was comfortably seated before it, inhaling the light blue smoke with its exquisite and fragrant perfume.\n\n\"A light air entered through the window, the distant orchards below me trembled, rose and floated through the dusk, and I found myself, almost at once, in a pavilion of flowers; a blue river lay shining in the sun before me, as it wandered through a lovely valley where I saw groves of flowering trees among a thousand scattered temples. Drenched in light and colour, the Valley lay dreaming amid a peaceful loveliness that woke what seemed impossible, unrealizable, longings in my heart. I yearned towards its groves and temples, I would bathe my soul in that flood of tender light, and my body in the blue coolness of that winding river. In a thousand temples must I worship. Yet these impossible yearnings instantly were satisfied. I found myself there at once... and the time that passed over my head you may reckon in centuries, if not in ages. I was in the Garden of Happiness and its marvellous perfume banished time and sorrow, there was no end to chill the soul, nor any beginning, which is its foolish counterpart.\n\n\"Nor was there loneliness.\" The speaker clasped his thin hands, and closed his eyes a moment in what was evidently an ecstasy of the sweetest memory man may ever know. A slight trembling ran through his frame, communicating itself to his friend upon the divan beside him\u2014this understanding, listening, sympathetic friend, whose eyes had never once yet withdrawn their attentive gaze from the narrator's face.\n\n\"I was not alone,\" the scholar resumed, opening his eyes again, and smiling out of some deep inner joy. \"Shan-Yu came down the steps of the first temple and took my hand, while the great golden figures in the dim interior turned their splendid shining heads to watch. Then, breathing the soul of his ancient wisdom in my ear, he led me through all the perfumed ways of that enchanted garden, worshipping with me at a hundred deathless shrines, led me, I tell you, to the sound of soft gongs and gentle bells, by fragrant groves and sparkling streams, mid a million gorgeous flowers, until, beneath that unsetting sun, we reached the heart of the Valley, where the source of the river gushed forth beneath the lighted mountains. He stopped and pointed across the narrow waters. I saw the woman\u2014\"\n\n\"The woman,\" his listener murmured beneath his breath, though Farque seemed unaware of interruption.\n\n\"She smiled at me and held her hands out, and while she did so, even before I could express my joy and wonder in response, Shan-Yu, I saw, had crossed the narrow stream and stood beside her. I made to follow then, my heart burning with inexpressible delight. But Shan-Yu held up his hand, as they began to move down the flowered bank together, making a sign that I should keep pace with them, though on my own side.\n\n\"Thus, side by side, yet with the blue sparkling stream between us, we followed back along its winding course, through the heart of that enchanted valley, my hands stretched out towards the radiant figure of my Love, and hers stretched out towards me. They did not touch, but our eyes, our smiles, our thoughts, these met and mingled in a sweet union of unimagined bliss, so that the absence of physical contact was unnoticed and laid no injury on our marvellous joy. It was a spirit union, and our kiss a spirit kiss. Therein lay the subtlety and glory of the Chinese wonder, for it was our essences that met, and for such union there is no satiety and, equally, no possible end. The Perfume of the Garden of Happiness is an essence. We were in Eternity.\n\n\"The stream, meanwhile, widened between us, and as it widened, my Love grew farther from me in space, smaller, less visibly defined, yet ever essentially more perfect, and never once with a sense of distance that made our union less divinely close. Across the widening reaches of blue, sunlit water I still knew her smile, her eyes, the gestures of her radiant being; I saw her exquisite reflection in the stream; and, mid the music of those soft gongs and gentle bells, the voice of Shan-Yu came like a melody to my ears:\n\n\"'You have followed me into the sunrise, and have found your destiny. Behold now your Love. In this Valley of a Thousand Temples you have known the Garden of Happiness, and its Perfume your soul now inhales.'\n\n\"'I am bathed,' I answered, 'in a happiness divine. It is forever.'\n\n\"'The Waters of Separation,' his answer floated like a bell, 'lie widening between you.'\n\n\"I moved nearer to the bank, impelled by the pain in his words to take my Love and hold her to my breast.\n\n\"'But I would cross to her,' I cried, and saw that, as I moved, Shan-Yu and my Love came likewise closer to the water's edge across the widening river. They both obeyed, I was aware, my slightest wish.\n\n\"'Seven years of Happiness you may know,' sang his gentle tones across the brimming flood, 'if you would cross to her. Yet the Destroyer of Honourable Homes lies in the shadows that you must cast outside.'\n\n\"I heard his words, I noticed for the first time that in the blaze of this radiant sunshine we cast no shadows on the sea of flowers at our feet, and\u2014I stretched out my arms towards my Love across the river.\n\n\"'I accept my destiny,' I cried, 'I will have my seven years of bliss,' and stepped forward into the running flood. As the cool water took my feet, my Love's hands stretched out both to hold me and to bid me stay. There was acceptance in her gesture, but there was warning too.\n\n\"I did not falter. I advanced until the water bathed my knees, and my Love, too, came to meet me, the stream already to her waist, while our arms stretched forth above the running flood towards each other.\n\n\"The change came suddenly. Shan-Yu first faded behind her advancing figure into air; there stole a chill upon the sunlight; a cool mist rose from the water, hiding the Garden and the hills beyond; our fingers touched, I gazed into her eyes, our lips lay level with the water\u2014and the room was dark and cold about me. The brazier stood extinguished at my side. The dust had burnt out, and no smoke rose. I slowly left my chair and closed the window, for the air was chill.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 551", + "text": "It was difficult at first to return to Hampstead and the details of ordinary life about him. Francis looked round him slowly, freeing himself gradually from the spell his friend's words had laid even upon his analytical temperament. The transition was helped, however, by the details that everywhere met his eye. The Chinese atmosphere remained. More, its effect had gained, if anything. The embroideries of yellow gold, the pictures, the lacquered stools and inlaid cabinets, above all, the exquisite figures in green jade upon the shelf beside him, all this, in the shimmering pale olive light the lamps shed everywhere, helped his puzzled mind to bridge the gulf from the Garden of Happiness into the decorated villa upon Hampstead Heath.\n\nThere was silence between the two men for several minutes. Far was it from the doctor's desire to injure his old friend's delightful fantasy. For he called it fantasy, although something in him trembled. He remained, therefore, silent. Truth to tell, perhaps, he knew not exactly what to say.\n\nFarque broke the silence himself. He had not moved since the story ended; he sat motionless, his hands tightly clasped, his eyes alight with the memory of his strange imagined joy, his face rapt and almost luminous, as though he still wandered through the groves of the Enchanted Garden and inhaled the perfume of its perfect happiness in the Valley of the Thousand Temples.\n\n\"It was two days later,\" he went on suddenly in his quiet voice, \"only two days afterwards, that I met her.\"\n\n\"You met her? You met the woman of your dream?\" Francis's eyes opened very wide.\n\n\"In that little harbour town,\" repeated Farque calmly, \"I met her in the flesh. She had just landed in a steamer from up the coast. The details are of no particular interest. She knew me, of course, at once. And, naturally, I knew her.\"\n\nThe doctor's tongue refused to act as he heard. It dawned upon him suddenly that his friend was married. He remembered the woman's touch about the house; he recalled, too, for the first time that the letter of invitation to dinner had said \"come to us.\" He was full of a bewildered astonishment.\n\nThe reaction upon himself was odd, perhaps, yet wholly natural. His heart warmed towards his imaginative friend. He could now tell him his own new strange romance. The woman who haunted him crept back into the room and sat between them. He found his tongue.\n\n\"You married her, Edward?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"She is my wife,\" was the reply, in a gentle, happy voice.\n\n\"A Ch\u2014\" he could not bring himself to say the word. \"A foreigner?\"\n\n\"My wife is a Chinese woman,\" Farque helped him easily, with a delighted smile.\n\nSo great was the other's absorption in the actual moment, that he had not heard the step in the passage that his host had heard. The latter stood up suddenly.\n\n\"I hear her now,\" he said. \"I'm glad she's come back before you left.\" He stepped towards the door.\n\nBut before he reached it, the door was opened and in came the woman herself. Francis tried to rise, but something had happened to him. His heart missed a beat. Something, it seemed, broke in him. He faced a tall, graceful young English woman with black eyes of sparkling happiness, the woman of his own romance. She still wore the feather boa round her neck. She was no more Chinese than he was.\n\n\"My wife,\" he heard Farque introducing them, as he struggled to his feet, searching feverishly for words of congratulation, normal, everyday words he ought to use, \"I'm so pleased, oh, so pleased,\" Farque was saying\u2014he heard the sound from a distance, his sight was blurred as well\u2014\"my two best friends in the world, my English comrade and my Chinese wife.\" His voice was absolutely sincere with conviction and belief.\n\n\"But we have already met,\" came the woman's delightful voice, her eyes full upon his face with smiling pleasure, \"I saw you at Mrs. Malleson's tea only this afternoon.\"\n\nAnd Francis remembered suddenly that the Mallesons were old acquaintances of Farque's as well as of himself. \"And I even dared to ask who you were,\" the voice went on, floating from some other space, it seemed, to his ears, \"I had you pointed out to me. I had heard of you from Edward, of course. But you vanished before I could be introduced.\"\n\nThe doctor mumbled something or other polite and, he hoped, adequate. But the truth had flashed upon him with remorseless suddenness. She had \"heard of\" him\u2014the famous mental specialist. Her interest in him was cruelly explained, cruelly both for himself and for his friend. Farque's delusion lay clear before his eyes. An awakening to reality might involve dislocation of the mind. She, too, moreover, knew the truth. She was involved as well. And her interest in himself was\u2014consultation.\n\n\"Seven years we've been married, just seven years to-day,\" Farque was saying thoughtfully, as he looked at them. \"Curious, rather, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Very,\" said Francis, turning his regard from the black eyes to the grey.\n\nThus it was that Owen Francis left the house a little later with a mind in a measure satisfied, yet in a measure forgetful too\u2014forgetful of his own deep problem, because another of even greater interest had replaced it.\n\n\"Why undeceive him?\" ran his thought. \"He need never know. It's harmless anyhow\u2014I can tell her that.\"\n\nBut, side by side with this reflection, ran another that was oddly haunting, considering his type of mind: \"Destroyer of Honourable Homes,\" was the form of words it took. And with a sigh he added \"Chinese Magic.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Running Wolf by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The man who enjoys an adventure outside the general experience of the race, and imparts it to others, must not be surprised if he is taken for either a liar or a fool, as Malcolm Hyde, hotel clerk on a holiday, discovered in due course. Nor is \"enjoy\" the right word to use in describing his emotions; the word he chose was probably \"survive.\"\n\nWhen he first set eyes on Medicine Lake he was struck by its still, sparkling beauty, lying there in the vast Canadian backwoods; next, by its extreme loneliness; and, lastly\u2014a good deal later, this\u2014by its combination of beauty, loneliness, and singular atmosphere, due to the fact that it was the scene of his adventure.\n\n\"It's fairly stiff with big fish,\" said Morton of the Montreal Sporting Club. \"Spend your holiday there\u2014up Mattawa way, some fifteen miles west of Stony Creek. You'll have it all to yourself except for an old Indian who's got a shack there. Camp on the east side\u2014if you'll take a tip from me.\" He then talked for half an hour about the wonderful sport; yet he was not otherwise very communicative, and did not suffer questions gladly, Hyde noticed. Nor had he stayed there very long himself. If it was such a paradise as Morton, its discoverer and the most experienced rod in the province, claimed, why had he himself spent only three days there?\n\n\"Ran short of grub,\" was the explanation offered; but to another friend he had mentioned briefly, \"flies,\" and to a third, so Hyde learned later, he gave the excuse that his half-breed \"took sick,\" necessitating a quick return to civilization.\n\nHyde, however, cared little for the explanations; his interest in these came later. \"Stiff with fish\" was the phrase he liked. He took the Canadian Pacific train to Mattawa, laid in his outfit at Stony Creek, and set off thence for the fifteen-mile canoe-trip without a care in the world.\n\nTravelling light, the portages did not trouble him; the water was swift and easy, the rapids negotiable; everything came his way, as the saying is. Occasionally he saw big fish making for the deeper pools, and was sorely tempted to stop; but he resisted. He pushed on between the immense world of forests that stretched for hundreds of miles, known to deer, bear, moose, and wolf, but strange to any echo of human tread, a deserted and primeval wilderness. The autumn day was calm, the water sang and sparkled, the blue sky hung cloudless over all, ablaze with light. Toward evening he passed an old beaver-dam, rounded a little point, and had his first sight of Medicine Lake. He lifted his dripping paddle; the canoe shot with silent glide into calm water. He gave an exclamation of delight, for the loveliness caught his breath away.\n\nThough primarily a sportsman, he was not insensible to beauty. The lake formed a crescent, perhaps four miles long, its width between a mile and half a mile. The slanting gold of sunset flooded it. No wind stirred its crystal surface. Here it had lain since the redskin's god first made it; here it would lie until he dried it up again. Towering spruce and hemlock trooped to its very edge, majestic cedars leaned down as if to drink, crimson sumachs shone in fiery patches, and maples gleamed orange and red beyond belief. The air was like wine, with the silence of a dream.\n\nIt was here the red men formerly \"made medicine,\" with all the wild ritual and tribal ceremony of an ancient day. But it was of Morton, rather than of Indians, that Hyde thought. If this lonely, hidden paradise was really stiff with big fish, he owed a lot to Morton for the information. Peace invaded him, but the excitement of the hunter lay below.\n\nHe looked about him with quick, practised eye for a camping-place before the sun sank below the forests and the half-lights came. The Indian's shack, lying in full sunshine on the eastern shore, he found at once; but the trees lay too thick about it for comfort, nor did he wish to be so close to its inhabitant. Upon the opposite side, however, an ideal clearing offered. This lay already in shadow, the huge forest darkening it toward evening; but the open space attracted. He paddled over quickly and examined it. The ground was hard and dry, he found, and a little brook ran tinkling down one side of it into the lake. This outfall, too, would be a good fishing spot. Also it was sheltered. A few low willows marked the mouth.\n\nAn experienced camper soon makes up his mind. It was a perfect site, and some charred logs, with traces of former fires, proved that he was not the first to think so. Hyde was delighted. Then, suddenly, disappointment came to tinge his pleasure. His kit was landed, and preparations for putting up the tent were begun, when he recalled a detail that excitement had so far kept in the background of his mind\u2014Morton's advice. But not Morton's only, for the storekeeper at Stony Creek had reinforced it. The big fellow with straggling moustache and stooping shoulders, dressed in shirt and trousers, had handed him out a final sentence with the bacon, flour, condensed milk, and sugar. He had repeated Morton's half-forgotten words:\n\n\"Put yer tent on the east shore. I should,\" he had said at parting.\n\nHe remembered Morton, too, apparently. \"A shortish fellow, brown as an Indian and fairly smelling of the woods. Travelling with Jake, the half-breed.\" That assuredly was Morton. \"Didn't stay long, now, did he?\" he added in a reflective tone.\n\n\"Going Windy Lake way, are yer? Or Ten Mile Water, maybe?\" he had first inquired of Hyde.\n\n\"Medicine Lake.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" the man said, as though he doubted it for some obscure reason. He pulled at his ragged moustache a moment. \"Is that so, now?\" he repeated. And the final words followed him down-stream after a considerable pause\u2014the advice about the best shore on which to put his tent.\n\nAll this now suddenly flashed back upon Hyde's mind with a tinge of disappointment and annoyance, for when two experienced men agreed, their opinion was not to be lightly disregarded. He wished he had asked the storekeeper for more details. He looked about him, he reflected, he hesitated. His ideal camping-ground lay certainly on the forbidden shore. What in the world, he pondered, could be the objection to it?\n\nBut the light was fading; he must decide quickly one way or the other. After staring at his unpacked dunnage and the tent, already half erected, he made up his mind with a muttered expression that consigned both Morton and the storekeeper to less pleasant places. \"They must have some reason,\" he growled to himself; \"fellows like that usually know what they're talking about. I guess I'd better shift over to the other side\u2014for to-night, at any rate.\"\n\nHe glanced across the water before actually reloading. No smoke rose from the Indian's shack. He had seen no sign of a canoe. The man, he decided, was away. Reluctantly, then, he left the good camping-ground and paddled across the lake, and half an hour later his tent was up, firewood collected, and two small trout were already caught for supper. But the bigger fish, he knew, lay waiting for him on the other side by the little outfall, and he fell asleep at length on his bed of balsam boughs, annoyed and disappointed, yet wondering how a mere sentence could have persuaded him so easily against his own better judgment. He slept like the dead; the sun was well up before he stirred.\n\nBut his morning mood was a very different one. The brilliant light, the peace, the intoxicating air, all this was too exhilarating for the mind to harbour foolish fancies, and he marvelled that he could have been so weak the night before. No hesitation lay in him anywhere. He struck camp immediately after breakfast, paddled back across the strip of shining water, and quickly settled in upon the forbidden shore, as he now called it, with a contemptuous grin. And the more he saw of the spot, the better he liked it. There was plenty of wood, running water to drink, an open space about the tent, and there were no flies. The fishing, moreover, was magnificent. Morton's description was fully justified, and \"stiff with big fish\" for once was not an exaggeration.\n\nThe useless hours of the early afternoon he passed dozing in the sun, or wandering through the underbrush beyond the camp. He found no sign of anything unusual. He bathed in a cool, deep pool; he revelled in the lonely little paradise. Lonely it certainly was, but the loneliness was part of its charm; the stillness, the peace, the isolation of this beautiful backwoods lake delighted him. The silence was divine. He was entirely satisfied.\n\nAfter a brew of tea, he strolled toward evening along the shore, looking for the first sign of a rising fish. A faint ripple on the water, with the lengthening shadows, made good conditions. Plop followed plop, as the big fellows rose, snatched at their food, and vanished into the depths. He hurried back. Ten minutes later he had taken his rods and was gliding cautiously in the canoe through the quiet water.\n\nSo good was the sport, indeed, and so quickly did the big trout pile up in the bottom of the canoe that, despite the growing lateness, he found it hard to tear himself away. \"One more,\" he said, \"and then I really will go.\" He landed that \"one more,\" and was in act of taking it off the hook, when the deep silence of the evening was curiously disturbed. He became abruptly aware that someone watched him. A pair of eyes, it seemed, were fixed upon him from some point in the surrounding shadows.\n\nThus, at least, he interpreted the odd disturbance in his happy mood; for thus he felt it. The feeling stole over him without the slightest warning. He was not alone. The slippery big trout dropped from his fingers. He sat motionless, and stared about him.\n\nNothing stirred; the ripple on the lake had died away; there was no wind; the forest lay a single purple mass of shadow; the yellow sky, fast fading, threw reflections that troubled the eye and made distances uncertain. But there was no sound, no movement; he saw no figure anywhere. Yet he knew that someone watched him, and a wave of quite unreasoning terror gripped him. The nose of the canoe was against the bank. In a moment, and instinctively, he shoved it off and paddled into deeper water. The watcher, it came to him also instinctively, was quite close to him upon that bank. But where? And who? Was it the Indian?\n\nHere, in deeper water, and some twenty yards from the shore, he paused and strained both sight and hearing to find some possible clue. He felt half ashamed, now that the first strange feeling passed a little. But the certainty remained. Absurd as it was, he felt positive that someone watched him with concentrated and intent regard. Every fibre in his being told him so; and though he could discover no figure, no new outline on the shore, he could even have sworn in which clump of willow bushes the hidden person crouched and stared. His attention seemed drawn to that particular clump.\n\nThe water dripped slowly from his paddle, now lying across the thwarts. There was no other sound. The canvas of his tent gleamed dimly. A star or two were out. He waited. Nothing happened.\n\nThen, as suddenly as it had come, the feeling passed, and he knew that the person who had been watching him intently had gone. It was as if a current had been turned off; the normal world flowed back; the landscape emptied as if someone had left a room. The disagreeable feeling left him at the same time, so that he instantly turned the canoe in to the shore again, landed, and, paddle in hand, went over to examine the clump of willows he had singled out as the place of concealment. There was no one there, of course, nor any trace of recent human occupancy. No leaves, no branches stirred, nor was a single twig displaced; his keen and practised sight detected no sign of tracks upon the ground. Yet, for all that, he felt positive that a little time ago someone had crouched among these very leaves and watched him. He remained absolutely convinced of it. The watcher, whether Indian, hunter, stray lumberman, or wandering half-breed, had now withdrawn, a search was useless, and dusk was falling. He returned to his little camp, more disturbed perhaps than he cared to acknowledge. He cooked his supper, hung up his catch on a string, so that no prowling animal could get at it during the night, and prepared to make himself comfortable until bedtime. Unconsciously, he built a bigger fire than usual, and found himself peering over his pipe into the deep shadows beyond the firelight, straining his ears to catch the slightest sound. He remained generally on the alert in a way that was new to him.\n\nA man under such conditions and in such a place need not know discomfort until the sense of loneliness strikes him as too vivid a reality. Loneliness in a backwoods camp brings charm, pleasure, and a happy sense of calm until, and unless, it comes too near. It should remain an ingredient only among other conditions; it should not be directly, vividly noticed. Once it has crept within short range, however, it may easily cross the narrow line between comfort and discomfort, and darkness is an undesirable time for the transition. A curious dread may easily follow\u2014the dread lest the loneliness suddenly be disturbed, and the solitary human feel himself open to attack.\n\nFor Hyde, now, this transition had been already accomplished; the too intimate sense of his loneliness had shifted abruptly into the worse condition of no longer being quite alone. It was an awkward moment, and the hotel clerk realized his position exactly. He did not quite like it. He sat there, with his back to the blazing logs, a very visible object in the light, while all about him the darkness of the forest lay like an impenetrable wall. He could not see a foot beyond the small circle of his camp-fire; the silence about him was like the silence of the dead. No leaf rustled, no wave lapped; he himself sat motionless as a log.\n\nThen again he became suddenly aware that the person who watched him had returned, and that same intent and concentrated gaze as before was fixed upon him where he lay. There was no warning; he heard no stealthy tread or snapping of dry twigs, yet the owner of those steady eyes was very close to him, probably not a dozen feet away. This sense of proximity was overwhelming.\n\nIt is unquestionable that a shiver ran down his spine. This time, moreover, he felt positive that the man crouched just beyond the firelight, the distance he himself could see being nicely calculated, and straight in front of him. For some minutes he sat without stirring a single muscle, yet with each muscle ready and alert, straining his eyes in vain to pierce the darkness, but only succeeding in dazzling his sight with the reflected light. Then, as he shifted his position slowly, cautiously, to obtain another angle of vision, his heart gave two big thumps against his ribs and the hair seemed to rise on his scalp with the sense of cold that shot horribly up his spine. In the darkness facing him he saw two small and greenish circles that were certainly a pair of eyes, yet not the eyes of Indian, hunter, or of any human being. It was a pair of animal eyes that stared so fixedly at him out of the night. And this certainly had an immediate and natural effect upon him.\n\nFor, at the menace of those eyes, the fears of millions of long dead hunters since the dawn of time woke in him. Hotel clerk though he was, heredity surged through him in an automatic wave of instinct. His hand groped for a weapon. His fingers fell on the iron head of his small camp axe, and at once he was himself again. Confidence returned; the vague, superstitious dread was gone. This was a bear or wolf that smelt his catch and came to steal it. With beings of that sort he knew instinctively how to deal, yet admitting, by this very instinct, that his original dread had been of quite another kind.\n\n\"I'll damned quick find out what it is,\" he exclaimed aloud, and snatching a burning brand from the fire, he hurled it with good aim straight at the eyes of the beast before him.\n\nThe bit of pitch-pine fell in a shower of sparks that lit the dry grass this side of the animal, flared up a moment, then died quickly down again. But in that instant of bright illumination he saw clearly what his unwelcome visitor was. A big timber wolf sat on its hindquarters, staring steadily at him through the firelight. He saw its legs and shoulders, he saw its hair, he saw also the big hemlock trunks lit up behind it, and the willow scrub on each side. It formed a vivid, clear-cut picture shown in clear detail by the momentary blaze. To his amazement, however, the wolf did not turn and bolt away from the burning log, but withdrew a few yards only, and sat there again on its haunches, staring, staring as before. Heavens, how it stared! He \"shoo-ed\" it, but without effect; it did not budge. He did not waste another good log on it, for his fear was dissipated now; a timber wolf was a timber wolf, and it might sit there as long as it pleased, provided it did not try to steal his catch. No alarm was in him any more. He knew that wolves were harmless in the summer and autumn, and even when \"packed\" in the winter, they would attack a man only when suffering desperate hunger. So he lay and watched the beast, threw bits of stick in its direction, even talked to it, wondering only that it never moved. \"You can stay there for ever, if you like,\" he remarked to it aloud, \"for you cannot get at my fish, and the rest of the grub I shall take into the tent with me!\"\n\nThe creature blinked its bright green eyes, but made no move.\n\nWhy, then, if his fear was gone, did he think of certain things as he rolled himself in the Hudson Bay blankets before going to sleep? The immobility of the animal was strange, its refusal to turn and bolt was still stranger. Never before had he known a wild creature that was not afraid of fire. Why did it sit and watch him, as with purpose in its dreadful eyes? How had he felt its presence earlier and instantly? A timber wolf, especially a solitary timber wolf, was a timid thing, yet this one feared neither man nor fire. Now, as he lay there wrapped in his blankets inside the cosy tent, it sat outside beneath the stars, beside the fading embers, the wind chilly in its fur, the ground cooling beneath its planted paws, watching him, steadily watching him, perhaps until the dawn.\n\nIt was unusual, it was strange. Having neither imagination nor tradition, he called upon no store of racial visions. Matter of fact, a hotel clerk on a fishing holiday, he lay there in his blankets, merely wondering and puzzled. A timber wolf was a timber wolf and nothing more. Yet this timber wolf\u2014the idea haunted him\u2014was different. In a word, the deeper part of his original uneasiness remained. He tossed about, he shivered sometimes in his broken sleep; he did not go out to see, but he woke early and unrefreshed.\n\nAgain, with the sunshine and the morning wind, however, the incident of the night before was forgotten, almost unreal. His hunting zeal was uppermost. The tea and fish were delicious, his pipe had never tasted so good, the glory of this lonely lake amid primeval forests went to his head a little; he was a hunter before the Lord, and nothing else. He tried the edge of the lake, and in the excitement of playing a big fish, knew suddenly that it, the wolf, was there. He paused with the rod, exactly as if struck. He looked about him, he looked in a definite direction. The brilliant sunshine made every smallest detail clear and sharp\u2014boulders of granite, burned stems, crimson sumach, pebbles along the shore in neat, separate detail\u2014without revealing where the watcher hid. Then, his sight wandering farther inshore among the tangled undergrowth, he suddenly picked up the familiar, half-expected outline. The wolf was lying behind a granite boulder, so that only the head, the muzzle, and the eyes were visible. It merged in its background. Had he not known it was a wolf, he could never have separated it from the landscape. The eyes shone in the sunlight.\n\nThere it lay. He looked straight at it. Their eyes, in fact, actually met full and square. \"Great Scott!\" he exclaimed aloud, \"why, it's like looking at a human being!\" From that moment, unwittingly, he established a singular personal relation with the beast. And what followed confirmed this undesirable impression, for the animal rose instantly and came down in leisurely fashion to the shore, where it stood looking back at him. It stood and stared into his eyes like some great wild dog, so that he was aware of a new and almost incredible sensation\u2014that it courted recognition.\n\n\"Well! well!\" he exclaimed again, relieving his feelings by addressing it aloud, \"if this doesn't beat everything I ever saw! What d'you want, anyway?\"\n\nHe examined it now more carefully. He had never seen a wolf so big before; it was a tremendous beast, a nasty customer to tackle, he reflected, if it ever came to that. It stood there absolutely fearless and full of confidence. In the clear sunlight he took in every detail of it\u2014a huge, shaggy, lean-flanked timber wolf, its wicked eyes staring straight into his own, almost with a kind of purpose in them. He saw its great jaws, its teeth, and its tongue, hung out, dropping saliva a little. And yet the idea of its savagery, its fierceness, was very little in him.\n\nHe was amazed and puzzled beyond belief. He wished the Indian would come back. He did not understand this strange behaviour in an animal. Its eyes, the odd expression in them, gave him a queer, unusual, difficult feeling. Had his nerves gone wrong, he almost wondered.\n\nThe beast stood on the shore and looked at him. He wished for the first time that he had brought a rifle. With a resounding smack he brought his paddle down flat upon the water, using all his strength, till the echoes rang as from a pistol-shot that was audible from one end of the lake to the other. The wolf never stirred. He shouted, but the beast remained unmoved. He blinked his eyes, speaking as to a dog, a domestic animal, a creature accustomed to human ways. It blinked its eyes in return.\n\nAt length, increasing his distance from the shore, he continued fishing, and the excitement of the marvellous sport held his attention\u2014his surface attention, at any rate. At times he almost forgot the attendant beast; yet whenever he looked up, he saw it there. And worse; when he slowly paddled home again, he observed it trotting along the shore as though to keep him company. Crossing a little bay, he spurted, hoping to reach the other point before his undesired and undesirable attendant. Instantly the brute broke into that rapid, tireless lope that, except on ice, can run down anything on four legs in the woods. When he reached the distant point, the wolf was waiting for him. He raised his paddle from the water, pausing a moment for reflection; for this very close attention\u2014there were dusk and night yet to come\u2014he certainly did not relish. His camp was near; he had to land; he felt uncomfortable even in the sunshine of broad day, when, to his keen relief, about half a mile from the tent, he saw the creature suddenly stop and sit down in the open. He waited a moment, then paddled on. It did not follow. There was no attempt to move; it merely sat and watched him. After a few hundred yards, he looked back. It was still sitting where he left it. And the absurd, yet significant, feeling came to him that the beast divined his thought, his anxiety, his dread, and was now showing him, as well as it could, that it entertained no hostile feeling and did not meditate attack.\n\nHe turned the canoe toward the shore; he landed; he cooked his supper in the dusk; the animal made no sign. Not far away it certainly lay and watched, but it did not advance. And to Hyde, observant now in a new way, came one sharp, vivid reminder of the strange atmosphere into which his commonplace personality had strayed: he suddenly recalled that his relations with the beast, already established, had progressed distinctly a stage further. This startled him, yet without the accompanying alarm he must certainly have felt twenty-four hours before. He had an understanding with the wolf. He was aware of friendly thoughts toward it. He even went so far as to set out a few big fish on the spot where he had first seen it sitting the previous night. \"If he comes,\" he thought, \"he is welcome to them. I've got plenty, anyway.\" He thought of it now as \"he.\"\n\nYet the wolf made no appearance until he was in the act of entering his tent a good deal later. It was close on ten o'clock, whereas nine was his hour, and late at that, for turning in. He had, therefore, unconsciously been waiting for him. Then, as he was closing the flap, he saw the eyes close to where he had placed the fish. He waited, hiding himself, and expecting to hear sounds of munching jaws; but all was silence. Only the eyes glowed steadily out of the background of pitch darkness. He closed the flap. He had no slightest fear. In ten minutes he was sound asleep.\n\nHe could not have slept very long, for when he woke up he could see the shine of a faint red light through the canvas, and the fire had not died down completely. He rose and cautiously peeped out. The air was very cold; he saw his breath. But he also saw the wolf, for it had come in, and was sitting by the dying embers, not two yards away from where he crouched behind the flap. And this time, at these very close quarters, there was something in the attitude of the big wild thing that caught his attention with a vivid thrill of startled surprise and a sudden shock of cold that held him spellbound. He stared, unable to believe his eyes; for the wolf's attitude conveyed to him something familiar that at first he was unable to explain. Its pose reached him in the terms of another thing with which he was entirely at home. What was it? Did his senses betray him? Was he still asleep and dreaming?\n\nThen, suddenly, with a start of uncanny recognition, he knew. Its attitude was that of a dog. Having found the clue, his mind then made an awful leap. For it was, after all, no dog its appearance aped, but something nearer to himself, and more familiar still. Good heavens! It sat there with the pose, the attitude, the gesture in repose of something almost human. And then, with a second shock of biting wonder, it came to him like a revelation. The wolf sat beside that camp-fire as a man might sit.\n\nBefore he could weigh his extraordinary discovery, before he could examine it in detail or with care, the animal, sitting in this ghastly fashion, seemed to feel his eyes fixed on it. It slowly turned and looked him in the face, and for the first time Hyde felt a full-blooded, superstitious fear flood through his entire being. He seemed transfixed with that nameless terror that is said to attack human beings who suddenly face the dead, finding themselves bereft of speech and movement. This moment of paralysis certainly occurred. Its passing, however, was as singular as its advent. For almost at once he was aware of something beyond and above this mockery of human attitude and pose, something that ran along unaccustomed nerves and reached his feeling, even perhaps his heart. The revulsion was extraordinary, its result still more extraordinary and unexpected. Yet the fact remains. He was aware of another thing that had the effect of stilling his terror as soon as it was born. He was aware of appeal, silent, half expressed, yet vastly pathetic. He saw in the savage eyes a beseeching, even a yearning, expression that changed his mood as by magic from dread to natural sympathy. The great grey brute, symbol of cruel ferocity, sat there beside his dying fire and appealed for help.\n\nThis gulf betwixt animal and human seemed in that instant bridged. It was, of course, incredible. Hyde, sleep still possibly clinging to his inner being with the shades and half shapes of dream yet about his soul, acknowledged, how he knew not, the amazing fact. He found himself nodding to the brute in half consent, and instantly, without more ado, the lean grey shape rose like a wraith and trotted off swiftly, but with stealthy tread, into the background of the night.\n\nWhen Hyde woke in the morning his first impression was that he must have dreamed the entire incident. His practical nature asserted itself. There was a bite in the fresh autumn air; the bright sun allowed no half lights anywhere; he felt brisk in mind and body. Reviewing what had happened, he came to the conclusion that it was utterly vain to speculate; no possible explanation of the animal's behaviour occurred to him; he was dealing with something entirely outside his experience. His fear, however, had completely left him. The odd sense of friendliness remained. The beast had a definite purpose, and he himself was included in that purpose. His sympathy held good.\n\nBut with the sympathy there was also an intense curiosity. \"If it shows itself again,\" he told himself, \"I'll go up close and find out what it wants.\" The fish laid out the night before had not been touched.\n\nIt must have been a full hour after breakfast when he next saw the brute; it was standing on the edge of the clearing, looking at him in the way now become familiar. Hyde immediately picked up his axe and advanced toward it boldly, keeping his eyes fixed straight upon its own. There was nervousness in him, but kept well under; nothing betrayed it; step by step he drew nearer until some ten yards separated them. The wolf had not stirred a muscle as yet. Its jaws hung open, its eyes observed him intently; it allowed him to approach without a sign of what its mood might be. Then, with these ten yards between them, it turned abruptly and moved slowly off, looking back first over one shoulder and then over the other, exactly as a dog might do, to see if he was following.\n\nA singular journey it was they then made together, animal and man. The trees surrounded them at once, for they left the lake behind them, entering the tangled bush beyond. The beast, Hyde noticed, obviously picked the easiest track for him to follow; for obstacles that meant nothing to the four-legged expert, yet were difficult for a man, were carefully avoided with an almost uncanny skill, while yet the general direction was accurately kept. Occasionally there were windfalls to be surmounted; but though the wolf bounded over these with ease, it was always waiting for the man on the other side after he had laboriously climbed over. Deeper and deeper into the heart of the lonely forest they penetrated in this singular fashion, cutting across the arc of the lake's crescent, it seemed to Hyde; for after two miles or so, he recognized the big rocky bluff that overhung the water at its northern end. This outstanding bluff he had seen from his camp, one side of it falling sheer into the water; it was probably the spot, he imagined, where the Indians held their medicine-making ceremonies, for it stood out in isolated fashion, and its top formed a private plateau not easy of access. And it was here, close to a big spruce at the foot of the bluff upon the forest side, that the wolf stopped suddenly and for the first time since its appearance gave audible expression to its feelings. It sat down on its haunches, lifted its muzzle with open jaws, and gave vent to a subdued and long-drawn howl that was more like the wail of a dog than the fierce barking cry associated with a wolf.\n\nBy this time Hyde had lost not only fear, but caution too; nor, oddly enough, did this warning howl revive a sign of unwelcome emotion in him. In that curious sound he detected the same message that the eyes conveyed\u2014appeal for help. He paused, nevertheless, a little startled, and while the wolf sat waiting for him, he looked about him quickly. There was young timber here; it had once been a small clearing, evidently. Axe and fire had done their work, but there was evidence to an experienced eye that it was Indians and not white men who had once been busy here. Some part of the medicine ritual, doubtless, took place in the little clearing, thought the man, as he advanced again towards his patient leader. The end of their queer journey, he felt, was close at hand.\n\nHe had not taken two steps before the animal got up and moved very slowly in the direction of some low bushes that formed a clump just beyond. It entered these, first looking back to make sure that its companion watched. The bushes hid it; a moment later it emerged again. Twice it performed this pantomime, each time, as it reappeared, standing still and staring at the man with as distinct an expression of appeal in the eyes as an animal may compass, probably. Its excitement, meanwhile, certainly increased, and this excitement was, with equal certainty, communicated to the man. Hyde made up his mind quickly. Gripping his axe tightly, and ready to use it at the first hint of malice, he moved slowly nearer to the bushes, wondering with something of a tremor what would happen.\n\nIf he expected to be startled, his expectation was at once fulfilled; but it was the behaviour of the beast that made him jump. It positively frisked about him like a happy dog. It frisked for joy. Its excitement was intense, yet from its open mouth no sound was audible. With a sudden leap, then, it bounded past him into the clump of bushes, against whose very edge he stood, and began scraping vigorously at the ground. Hyde stood and stared, amazement and interest now banishing all his nervousness, even when the beast, in its violent scraping, actually touched his body with its own. He had, perhaps, the feeling that he was in a dream, one of those fantastic dreams in which things may happen without involving an adequate surprise; for otherwise the manner of scraping and scratching at the ground must have seemed an impossible phenomenon. No wolf, no dog certainly, used its paws in the way those paws were working. Hyde had the odd, distressing sensation that it was hands, not paws, he watched. And yet, somehow, the natural, adequate surprise he should have felt was absent. The strange action seemed not entirely unnatural. In his heart some deep hidden spring of sympathy and pity stirred instead. He was aware of pathos.\n\nThe wolf stopped in its task and looked up into his face. Hyde acted without hesitation then. Afterwards he was wholly at a loss to explain his own conduct. It seemed he knew what to do, divined what was asked, expected of him. Between his mind and the dumb desire yearning through the savage animal there was intelligent and intelligible communication. He cut a stake and sharpened it, for the stones would blunt his axe-edge. He entered the clump of bushes to complete the digging his four-legged companion had begun. And while he worked, though he did not forget the close proximity of the wolf, he paid no attention to it; often his back was turned as he stooped over the laborious clearing away of the hard earth; no uneasiness or sense of danger was in him any more. The wolf sat outside the clump and watched the operations. Its concentrated attention, its patience, its intense eagerness, the gentleness and docility of the grey, fierce, and probably hungry brute, its obvious pleasure and satisfaction, too, at having won the human to its mysterious purpose\u2014these were colours in the strange picture that Hyde thought of later when dealing with the human herd in his hotel again. At the moment he was aware chiefly of pathos and affection. The whole business was, of course, not to be believed, but that discovery came later, too, when telling it to others.\n\nThe digging continued for fully half an hour before his labour was rewarded by the discovery of a small whitish object. He picked it up and examined it\u2014the finger-bone of a man. Other discoveries then followed quickly and in quantity. The cache was laid bare. He collected nearly the complete skeleton. The skull, however, he found last, and might not have found at all but for the guidance of his strangely alert companion. It lay some few yards away from the central hole now dug, and the wolf stood nuzzling the ground with its nose before Hyde understood that he was meant to dig exactly in that spot for it. Between the beast's very paws his stake struck hard upon it. He scraped the earth from the bone and examined it carefully. It was perfect, save for the fact that some wild animal had gnawed it, the teeth-marks being still plainly visible. Close beside it lay the rusty iron head of a tomahawk. This and the smallness of the bones confirmed him in his judgment that it was the skeleton not of a white man, but of an Indian.\n\nDuring the excitement of the discovery of the bones one by one, and finally of the skull, but, more especially, during the period of intense interest while Hyde was examining them, he had paid little, if any, attention to the wolf. He was aware that it sat and watched him, never moving its keen eyes for a single moment from the actual operations, but of sign or movement it made none at all. He knew that it was pleased and satisfied, he knew also that he had now fulfilled its purpose in a great measure. The further intuition that now came to him, derived, he felt positive, from his companion's dumb desire, was perhaps the cream of the entire experience to him. Gathering the bones together in his coat, he carried them, together with the tomahawk, to the foot of the big spruce where the animal had first stopped. His leg actually touched the creature's muzzle as he passed. It turned its head to watch, but did not follow, nor did it move a muscle while he prepared the platform of boughs upon which he then laid the poor worn bones of an Indian who had been killed, doubtless, in sudden attack or ambush, and to whose remains had been denied the last grace of proper tribal burial. He wrapped the bones in bark; he laid the tomahawk beside the skull; he lit the circular fire round the pyre, and the blue smoke rose upward into the clear bright sunshine of the Canadian autumn morning till it was lost among the mighty trees far overhead.\n\nIn the moment before actually lighting the little fire he had turned to note what his companion did. It sat five yards away, he saw, gazing intently, and one of its front paws was raised a little from the ground. It made no sign of any kind. He finished the work, becoming so absorbed in it that he had eyes for nothing but the tending and guarding of his careful ceremonial fire. It was only when the platform of boughs collapsed, laying their charred burden gently on the fragrant earth among the soft wood ashes, that he turned again, as though to show the wolf what he had done, and seek, perhaps, some look of satisfaction in its curiously expressive eyes. But the place he searched was empty. The wolf had gone.\n\nHe did not see it again; it gave no sign of its presence anywhere; he was not watched. He fished as before, wandered through the bush about his camp, sat smoking round his fire after dark, and slept peacefully in his cosy little tent. He was not disturbed. No howl was ever audible in the distant forest, no twig snapped beneath a stealthy tread, he saw no eyes. The wolf that behaved like a man had gone for ever.\n\nIt was the day before he left that Hyde, noticing smoke rising from the shack across the lake, paddled over to exchange a word or two with the Indian, who had evidently now returned. The Redskin came down to meet him as he landed, but it was soon plain that he spoke very little English. He emitted the familiar grunts at first; then bit by bit Hyde stirred his limited vocabulary into action. The net result, however, was slight enough, though it was certainly direct:\n\n\"You camp there?\" the man asked, pointing to the other side.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Wolf come?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You see wolf?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe Indian stared at him fixedly a moment, a keen, wondering look upon his coppery, creased face.\n\n\"You 'fraid wolf?\" he asked after a moment's pause.\n\n\"No,\" replied Hyde, truthfully. He knew it was useless to ask questions of his own, though he was eager for information. The other would have told him nothing. It was sheer luck that the man had touched on the subject at all, and Hyde realized that his own best r\u00f4le was merely to answer, but to ask no questions. Then, suddenly, the Indian became comparatively voluble. There was awe in his voice and manner.\n\n\"Him no wolf. Him big medicine wolf. Him spirit wolf.\"\n\nWhereupon he drank the tea the other had brewed for him, closed his lips tightly, and said no more. His outline was discernible on the shore, rigid and motionless, an hour later, when Hyde's canoe turned the corner of the lake three miles away, and landed to make the portages up the first rapid of his homeward stream.\n\nIt was Morton who, after some persuasion, supplied further details of what he called the legend. Some hundred years before, the tribe that lived in the territory beyond the lake began their annual medicine-making ceremonies on the big rocky bluff at the northern end; but no medicine could be made. The spirits, declared the chief medicine man, would not answer. They were offended. An investigation followed. It was discovered that a young brave had recently killed a wolf, a thing strictly forbidden, since the wolf was the totem animal of the tribe. To make matters worse, the name of the guilty man was Running Wolf. The offence being unpardonable, the man was cursed and driven from the tribe:\n\n\"Go out. Wander alone among the woods, and if we see you we slay you. Your bones shall be scattered in the forest, and your spirit shall not enter the Happy Hunting Grounds till one of another race shall find and bury them.\"\n\n\"Which meant,\" explained Morton laconically, his only comment on the story, \"probably for ever.\"" + }, + { + "title": "First Hate by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "They had been shooting all day; the weather had been perfect and the powder straight, so that when they assembled in the smoking-room after dinner they were well pleased with themselves. From discussing the day's sport and the weather outlook, the conversation drifted to other, though still cognate, fields. Lawson, the crack shot of the party, mentioned the instinctive recognition all animals feel for their natural enemies, and gave several instances in which he had tested it\u2014tame rats with a ferret, birds with a snake, and so forth.\n\n\"Even after being domesticated for generations,\" he said, \"they recognize their natural enemy at once by instinct, an enemy they can never even have seen before. It's infallible. They know instantly.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly,\" said a voice from the corner chair; \"and so do we.\"\n\nThe speaker was Ericssen, their host, a great hunter before the Lord, generally uncommunicative but a good listener, leaving the talk to others. For this latter reason, as well as for a certain note of challenge in his voice, his abrupt statement gained attention.\n\n\"What do you mean exactly by 'so do we'?\" asked three men together, after waiting some seconds to see whether he meant to elaborate, which he evidently did not.\n\n\"We belong to the animal kingdom, of course,\" put in a fourth, for behind the challenge there obviously lay a story, though a story that might be difficult to drag out of him. It was.\n\nEricssen, who had leaned forward a moment so that his strong, humorous face was in clear light, now sank back again into his chair, his expression concealed by the red lampshade at his side. The light played tricks, obliterating the humorous, almost tender lines, while emphasizing the strength of the jaw and nose. The red glare lent to the whole a rather grim expression.\n\nLawson, man of authority among them, broke the little pause.\n\n\"You're dead right,\" he observed, \"but how do you know it?\"\u2014for John Ericssen never made a positive statement without a good reason for it. That good reason, he felt sure, involved a personal proof, but a story Ericssen would never tell before a general audience. He would tell it later, however, when the others had left. \"There's such a thing as instinctive antipathy, of course,\" he added, with a laugh, looking around him. \"That's what you mean probably.\"\n\n\"I meant exactly what I said,\" replied the host bluntly. \"There's first love. There's first hate, too.\"\n\n\"Hate's a strong word,\" remarked Lawson.\n\n\"So is love,\" put in another.\n\n\"Hate's strongest,\" said Ericssen grimly. \"In the animal kingdom, at least,\" he added suggestively, and then kept his lips closed, except to sip his liquor, for the rest of the evening\u2014until the party at length broke up, leaving Lawson and one other man, both old trusted friends of many years' standing.\n\n\"It's not a tale I'd tell to everybody,\" he began, when they were alone. \"It's true, for one thing; for another, you see, some of those good fellows\"\u2014he indicated the empty chairs with an expressive nod of his great head\u2014\"some of 'em knew him. You both knew him too, probably.\"\n\n\"The man you hated,\" said the understanding Lawson.\n\n\"And who hated me,\" came the quiet confirmation. \"My other reason,\" he went on, \"for keeping quiet was that the tale involves my wife.\"\n\nThe two listeners said nothing, but each remembered the curiously long courtship that had been the prelude to his marriage. No engagement had been announced, the pair were devoted to one another, there was no known rival on either side; yet the courtship continued without coming to its expected conclusion. Many stories were afloat in consequence. It was a social mystery that intrigued the gossips.\n\n\"I may tell you two,\" Ericssen continued, \"the reason my wife refused for so long to marry me. It is hard to believe, perhaps, but it is true. Another man wished to make her his wife, and she would not consent to marry me until that other man was dead. Quixotic, absurd, unreasonable? If you like. I'll tell you what she said.\" He looked up with a significant expression in his face which proved that he, at least, did not now judge her reason foolish. \"'Because it would be murder,' she told me. 'Another man who wants to marry me would kill you.'\"\n\n\"She had some proof for the assertion, no doubt?\" suggested Lawson.\n\n\"None whatever,\" was the reply. \"Merely her woman's instinct. Moreover, I did not know who the other man was, nor would she ever tell me.\"\n\n\"Otherwise you might have murdered him instead?\" said Baynes, the second listener.\n\n\"I did,\" said Ericssen grimly. \"But without knowing he was the man.\" He sipped his whisky and relit his pipe. The others waited.\n\n\"Our marriage took place two months later\u2014just after Hazel's disappearance.\"\n\n\"Hazel?\" exclaimed Lawson and Baynes in a single breath. \"Hazel! Member of the Hunters!\" His mysterious disappearance had been a nine days' wonder some ten years ago. It had never been explained. They had all been members of the Hunters' Club together.\n\n\"That's the chap,\" Ericssen said. \"Now I'll tell you the tale, if you care to hear it.\" They settled back in their chairs to listen, and Ericssen, who had evidently never told the affair to another living soul except his own wife, doubtless, seemed glad this time to tell it to two men.\n\n\"It began some dozen years ago when my brother Jack and I came home from a shooting trip in China. I've often told you about our adventures there, and you see the heads hanging up here in the smoking-room\u2014some of 'em.\" He glanced round proudly at the walls. \"We were glad to be in town again after two years' roughing it, and we looked forward to our first good dinner at the club, to make up for the rotten cooking we had endured so long. We had ordered that dinner in anticipatory detail many a time together. Well, we had it and enjoyed it up to a point\u2014the point of the entr\u00e9e, to be exact.\n\n\"Up to that point it was delicious, and we let ourselves go, I can tell you. We had ordered the very wine we had planned months before when we were snow-bound and half starving in the mountains.\" He smacked his lips as he mentioned it. \"I was just starting on a beautifully cooked grouse,\" he went on, \"when a figure went by our table, and Jack looked up and nodded. The two exchanged a brief word of greeting and explanation, and the other man passed on. Evidently they knew each other just enough to make a word or two necessary, but enough.\n\n\"'Who's that?' I asked.\n\n\"'A new member, named Hazel,' Jack told me. 'A great shot.' He knew him slightly, he explained; he had once been a client of his\u2014Jack was a barrister, you remember\u2014and had defended him in some financial case or other. Rather an unpleasant case, he added. Jack did not 'care about' the fellow, he told me, as he went on with his tender wing of grouse.\"\n\nEricssen paused to relight his pipe a moment.\n\n\"Not care about him!\" he continued. \"It didn't surprise me, for my own feeling, the instant I set eyes on the fellow, was one of violent, instinctive dislike that amounted to loathing. Loathing! No. I'll give it the right word\u2014hatred. I simply couldn't help myself; I hated the man from the very first go off. A wave of repulsion swept over me as I followed him down the room a moment with my eyes, till he took his seat at a distant table and was out of sight. Ugh! He was a big, fat-faced man, with an eyeglass glued into one of his pale-blue cod-like eyes\u2014out of condition, ugly as a toad, with a smug expression of intense self-satisfaction on his jowl that made me long to\u2014\n\n\"I leave it to you to guess what I would have liked to do to him. But the instinctive loathing he inspired in me had another aspect, too. Jack had not introduced us during the momentary pause beside our table, but as I looked up I caught the fellow's eye on mine\u2014he was glaring at me instead of at Jack, to whom he was talking\u2014with an expression of malignant dislike, as keen evidently as my own. That's the other aspect I meant. He hated me as violently as I hated him. We were instinctive enemies, just as the rat and ferret are instinctive enemies. Each recognized a mortal foe. It was a case\u2014I swear it\u2014of whoever got first chance.\"\n\n\"Bad as that!\" exclaimed Baynes. \"I knew him by sight. He wasn't pretty, I'll admit.\"\n\n\"I knew him to nod to,\" Lawson mentioned. \"I never heard anything particular against him.\" He shrugged his shoulders.\n\nEricssen went on. \"It was not his character or qualities I hated,\" he said. \"I didn't even know them. That's the whole point. There's no reason you fellows should have disliked him. My hatred\u2014our mutual hatred\u2014was instinctive, as instinctive as first love. A man knows his natural mate; also he knows his natural enemy. I did, at any rate, both with him and with my wife. Given the chance, Hazel would have done me in; just as surely, given the chance, I would have done him in. No blame to either of us, what's more, in my opinion.\"\n\n\"I've felt dislike, but never hatred like that,\" Baynes mentioned. \"I came across it in a book once, though. The writer did not mention the instinctive fear of the human animal for its natural enemy, or anything of that sort. He thought it was a continuance of a bitter feud begun in an earlier existence. He called it memory.\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" said Ericssen briefly. \"My mind is not speculative. But I'm glad you spoke of fear. I left that out. The truth is, I feared the fellow, too, in a way; and had we ever met face to face in some wild country without witnesses I should have felt justified in drawing on him at sight, and he would have felt the same. Murder? If you like. I should call it self-defence. Anyhow, the fellow polluted the room for me. He spoilt the enjoyment of that dinner we had ordered months before in China.\"\n\n\"But you saw him again, of course, later?\"\n\n\"Lots of times. Not that night, because we went on to a theatre. But in the club we were always running across one another\u2014in the houses of friends at lunch or dinner; at race meetings; all over the place; in fact, I even had some trouble to avoid being introduced to him. And every time we met our eyes betrayed us. He felt in his heart what I felt in mine. Ugh! He was as loathsome to me as leprosy, and as dangerous. Odd, isn't it? The most intense feeling, except love, I've ever known. I remember\"\u2014he laughed gruffly\u2014\"I used to feel quite sorry for him. If he felt what I felt, and I'm convinced he did, he must have suffered. His one object\u2014to get me out of the way for good\u2014was so impossible. Then Fate played a hand in the game. I'll tell you how.\n\n\"My brother died a year or two later, and I went abroad to try and forget it. I went salmon fishing in Canada. But, though the sport was good, it was not like the old times with Jack. The camp never felt the same without him. I missed him badly. But I forgot Hazel for the time; hating did not seem worth while, somehow.\n\n\"When the best of the fishing was over on the Atlantic side, I took a run back to Vancouver and fished there for a bit. I went up the Campbell River, which was not so crowded then as it is now, and had some rattling sport. Then I grew tired of the rod and decided to go after wapiti for a change. I came back to Victoria and learned what I could about the best places, and decided finally to go up the west coast of the island. By luck I happened to pick up a good guide, who was in the town at the moment on business, and we started off together in one of the little Canadian Pacific Railway boats that ply along that coast.\n\n\"Outfitting two days later at a small place the steamer stopped at, the guide said we needed another man to help pack our kit over portages, and so forth, but the only fellow available was a Siwash of whom he disapproved. My guide would not have him at any price; he was lazy, a drunkard, a liar, and even worse, for on one occasion he came back without the sportsman he had taken up country on a shooting trip, and his story was not convincing, to say the least. These disappearances are always awkward, of course, as you both know. We preferred, anyhow, to go without the Siwash, and off we started.\n\n\"At first our luck was bad. I saw many wapiti, but no good heads; only after a fortnight's hunting did I manage to get a decent head, though even that was not so good as I should have liked.\n\n\"We were then near the head waters of a little river that ran down into the Inlet; heavy rains had made the river rise; running downstream was a risky job, what with old log-jams shifting and new ones forming; and, after many narrow escapes, we upset one afternoon and had the misfortune to lose a lot of our kit, amongst it most of our cartridges. We could only muster a few between us. The guide had a dozen; I had two\u2014just enough, we considered, to take us out all right. Still, it was an infernal nuisance. We camped at once to dry out our soaked things in front of a big fire, and while this laundry work was going on, the guide suggested my filling in the time by taking a look at the next little valley, which ran parallel to ours. He had seen some good heads over there a few weeks ago. Possibly I might come upon the herd. I started at once, taking my two cartridges with me.\n\n\"It was the devil of a job getting over the divide, for it was a badly bushed-up place, and where there were no bushes there were boulders and fallen trees, and the going was slow and tiring. But I got across at last and came out upon another stream at the bottom of the new valley. Signs of wapiti were plentiful, though I never came up with a single beast all the afternoon. Blacktail deer were everywhere, but the wapiti remained invisible. Providence, or whatever you like to call that which there is no escaping in our lives, made me save my two cartridges.\"\n\nEricssen stopped a minute then. It was not to light his pipe or sip his whisky. Nor was it because the remainder of his story failed in the recollection of any vivid detail. He paused a moment to think.\n\n\"Tell us the lot,\" pleaded Lawson. \"Don't leave out anything.\"\n\nEricssen looked up. His friend's remark had helped him to make up his mind apparently. He had hesitated about something or other, but the hesitation passed. He glanced at both his listeners.\n\n\"Right,\" he said. \"I'll tell you everything. I'm not imaginative, as you know, and my amount of superstition, I should judge, is microscopic.\" He took a longer breath, then lowered his voice a trifle. \"Anyhow,\" he went on, \"it's true, so I don't see why I should feel shy about admitting it\u2014but as I stood there in that lonely valley, where only the noises of wind and water were audible, and no human being, except my guide, some miles away, was within reach, a curious feeling came over me I find difficult to describe. I felt\"\u2014obviously he made an effort to get the word out\u2014\"I felt creepy.\"\n\n\"You,\" murmured Lawson, with an incredulous smile\u2014\"you creepy?\" he repeated under his breath.\n\n\"I felt creepy and afraid,\" continued the other, with conviction. \"I had the sensation of being seen by someone\u2014as if someone, I mean, was watching me. It was so unlikely that anyone was near me in that God-forsaken bit of wilderness, that I simply couldn't believe it at first. But the feeling persisted. I felt absolutely positive somebody was not far away among the red maples, behind a boulder, across the little stream, perhaps, somewhere, at any rate, so near that I was plainly visible to him. It was not an animal. It was human. Also, it was hostile.\n\n\"I was in danger.\n\n\"You may laugh, both of you, but I assure you the feeling was so positive that I crouched down instinctively to hide myself behind a rock. My first thought, that the guide had followed me for some reason or other, I at once discarded. It was not the guide. It was an enemy.\n\n\"No, no, I thought of no one in particular. No name, no face occurred to me. Merely that an enemy was on my trail, that he saw me, and I did not see him, and that he was near enough to me to\u2014well, to take instant action. This deep instinctive feeling of danger, of fear, of anything you like to call it, was simply overwhelming.\n\n\"Another curious detail I must also mention. About half an hour before, having given up all hope of seeing wapiti, I had decided to kill a blacktail deer for meat. A good shot offered itself, not thirty yards away. I aimed. But just as I was going to pull the trigger a queer emotion touched me, and I lowered the rifle. It was exactly as though a voice said, 'Don't!' I heard no voice, mind you; it was an emotion only, a feeling, a sudden inexplicable change of mind\u2014a warning, if you like. I didn't fire, anyhow.\n\n\"But now, as I crouched behind that rock, I remembered this curious little incident, and was glad I had not used up my last two cartridges. More than that I cannot tell you. Things of that kind are new to me. They're difficult enough to tell, let alone to explain. But they were real.\n\n\"I crouched there, wondering what on earth was happening to me, and, feeling a bit of a fool, if you want to know, when suddenly, over the top of the boulder, I saw something moving. It was a man's hat. I peered cautiously. Some sixty yards away the bushes parted, and two men came out on to the river's bank, and I knew them both. One was the Siwash I had seen at the store. The other was Hazel. Before I had time to think I cocked my rifle.\"\n\n\"Hazel. Good Lord!\" exclaimed the listeners.\n\n\"For a moment I was too surprised to do anything but cock that rifle. I waited, for what puzzled me was that, after all, Hazel had not seen me. It was only the feeling of his beastly proximity that had made me feel I was seen and watched by him. There was something else, too, that made me pause before\u2014er\u2014doing anything. Two other things, in fact. One was that I was so intensely interested in watching the fellow's actions. Obviously he had the same uneasy sensation that I had. He shared with me the nasty feeling that danger was about. His rifle, I saw, was cocked and ready; he kept looking behind him, over his shoulder, peering this way and that, and sometimes addressing a remark to the Siwash at his side. I caught the laughter of the latter. The Siwash evidently did not think there was danger anywhere. It was, of course, unlikely enough\u2014\"\n\n\"And the other thing that stopped you?\" urged Lawson, impatiently interrupting.\n\nEricssen turned with a look of grim humour on his face.\n\n\"Some confounded or perverted sense of chivalry in me, I suppose,\" he said, \"that made it impossible to shoot him down in cold blood, or, rather, without letting him have a chance. For my blood, as a matter of fact, was far from cold at the moment. Perhaps, too, I wanted the added satisfaction of letting him know who fired the shot that was to end his vile existence.\"\n\nHe laughed again. \"It was rat and ferret in the human kingdom,\" he went on, \"but I wanted my rat to have a chance, I suppose. Anyhow, though I had a perfect shot in front of me at easy distance, I did not fire. Instead I got up, holding my cocked rifle ready, finger on trigger, and came out of my hiding place. I called to him. 'Hazel, you beast! So there you are\u2014at last!'\n\n\"He turned, but turned away from me, offering his horrid back. The direction of the voice he misjudged. He pointed down stream, and the Siwash turned to look. Neither of them had seen me yet. There was a big log-jam below them. The roar of the water in their ears concealed my footsteps. I was, perhaps, twenty paces from them when Hazel, with a jerk of his whole body, abruptly turned clean round and faced me. We stared into each other's eyes.\n\n\"The amazement on his face changed instantly to hatred and resolve. He acted with incredible rapidity. I think the unexpected suddenness of his turn made me lose a precious second or two. Anyhow he was ahead of me. He flung his rifle to his shoulder. 'You devil!' I heard his voice. 'I've got you at last!' His rifle cracked, for he let drive the same instant. The hair stirred just above my ear.\n\n\"He had missed!\n\n\"Before he could draw back his bolt for another shot I had acted.\n\n\"'You're not fit to live!' I shouted, as my bullet crashed into his temple. I had the satisfaction, too, of knowing that he heard my words. I saw the swift expression of frustrated loathing in his eyes.\n\n\"He fell like an ox, his face splashing in the stream. I shoved the body out. I saw it sucked beneath the log-jam instantly. It disappeared. There could be no inquest on him, I reflected comfortably. Hazel was gone\u2014gone from this earth, from my life, our mutual hatred over at last.\"\n\nThe speaker paused a moment. \"Odd,\" he continued presently\u2014\"very odd indeed.\" He turned to the others. \"I felt quite sorry for him suddenly. I suppose,\" he added, \"the philosophers are right when they gas about hate being very close to love.\"\n\nHis friends contributed no remark.\n\n\"Then I came away,\" he resumed shortly. \"My wife\u2014well, you know the rest, don't you? I told her the whole thing. She\u2014she said nothing. But she married me, you see.\"\n\nThere was a moment's silence. Baynes was the first to break it. \"But\u2014the Siwash?\" he asked. \"The witness?\"\n\nLawson turned upon him with something of contemptuous impatience.\n\n\"He told you he had two cartridges.\"\n\nEricssen, smiling grimly, said nothing at all." + }, + { + "title": "The Tarn Of Sacrifice by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "John Holt, a vague excitement in him, stood at the door of the little inn, listening to the landlord's directions as to the best way of reaching Scarsdale. He was on a walking tour through the Lake District, exploring the smaller dales that lie away from the beaten track and are accessible only on foot.\n\nThe landlord, a hard-featured north countryman, half innkeeper, half sheep farmer, pointed up the valley. His deep voice had a friendly burr in it.\n\n\"You go straight on till you reach the head,\" he said, \"then take to the fell. Follow the 'sheep-trod' past the Crag. Directly you're over the top you'll strike the road.\"\n\n\"A road up there!\" exclaimed his customer incredulously.\n\n\"Aye,\" was the steady reply. \"The old Roman road. The same road,\" he added, \"the savages came down when they burst through the Wall and burnt everything right up to Lancaster\u2014\"\n\n\"They were held\u2014weren't they\u2014at Lancaster?\" asked the other, yet not knowing quite why he asked it.\n\n\"I don't rightly know,\" came the answer slowly. \"Some say they were. But the old town has been that built over since, it's hard to tell.\" He paused a moment. \"At Ambleside,\" he went on presently, \"you can still see the marks of the burning, and at the little fort on the way to Ravenglass.\"\n\nHolt strained his eyes into the sunlit distance, for he would soon have to walk that road and he was anxious to be off. But the landlord was communicative and interesting. \"You can't miss it,\" he told him. \"It runs straight as a spear along the fell top till it meets the Wall. You must hold to it for about eight miles. Then you'll come to the Standing Stone on the left of the track\u2014\"\n\n\"The Standing Stone, yes?\" broke in the other a little eagerly.\n\n\"You'll see the Stone right enough. It was where the Romans came. Then bear to the left down another 'trod' that comes into the road there. They say it was the war-trail of the folk that set up the Stone.\"\n\n\"And what did they use the Stone for?\" Holt inquired, more as though he asked it of himself than of his companion.\n\nThe old man paused to reflect. He spoke at length.\n\n\"I mind an old fellow who seemed to know about such things called it a Sighting Stone. He reckoned the sun shone over it at dawn on the longest day right on to the little holm in Blood Tarn. He said they held sacrifices in a stone circle there.\" He stopped a moment to puff at his black pipe. \"Maybe he was right. I have seen stones lying about that may well be that.\"\n\nThe man was pleased and willing to talk to so good a listener. Either he had not noticed the curious gesture the other made, or he read it as a sign of eagerness to start. The sun was warm, but a sharp wind from the bare hills went between them with a sighing sound. Holt buttoned his coat about him. \"An odd name for a mountain lake\u2014Blood Tarn,\" he remarked, watching the landlord's face expectantly.\n\n\"Aye, but a good one,\" was the measured reply. \"When I was a boy the old folk had a tale that the savages flung three Roman captives from that crag into the water. There's a book been written about it; they say it was a sacrifice, but most likely they were tired of dragging them along, I say. Anyway, that's what the writer said. One, I mind, now you ask me, was a priest of some heathen temple that stood near the Wall, and the other two were his daughter and her lover.\" He guffawed. At least he made a strange noise in his throat. Evidently, thought Holt, he was sceptical yet superstitious. \"It's just an old tale handed down, whatever the learned folk may say,\" the old man added.\n\n\"A lonely place,\" began Holt, aware that a fleeting touch of awe was added suddenly to his interest.\n\n\"Aye,\" said the other, \"and a bad spot too. Every year the Crag takes its toll of sheep, and sometimes a man goes over in the mist. It's right beside the track and very slippery. Ninety foot of a drop before you hit the water. Best keep round the tarn and leave the Crag alone if there's any mist about. Fishing? Yes, there's some quite fair trout in the tarn, but it's not much fished. Happen one of the shepherd lads from Tyson's farm may give it a turn with an 'otter,'\" he went on, \"once in a while, but he won't stay for the evening. He'll clear out before sunset.\"\n\n\"Ah! Superstitious, I suppose?\"\n\n\"It's a gloomy, chancy spot\u2014and with the dusk falling,\" agreed the innkeeper eventually. \"None of our folk care to be caught up there with night coming on. Most handy for a shepherd, too\u2014but Tyson can't get a man to bide there.\" He paused again, then added significantly: \"Strangers don't seem to mind it though. It's only our own folk\u2014\"\n\n\"Strangers!\" repeated the other sharply, as though he had been waiting all along for this special bit of information. \"You don't mean to say there are people living up there?\" A curious thrill ran over him.\n\n\"Aye,\" replied the landlord, \"but they're daft folk\u2014a man and his daughter. They come every spring. It's early in the year yet, but I mind Jim Backhouse, one of Tyson's men, talking about them last week.\" He stopped to think. \"So they've come back,\" he went on decidedly. \"They get milk from the farm.\"\n\n\"And what on earth are they doing up there?\" Holt asked.\n\nHe asked many other questions as well, but the answers were poor, the information not forthcoming. The landlord would talk for hours about the Crag, the tarn, the legends and the Romans, but concerning the two strangers he was uncommunicative. Either he knew little, or he did not want to discuss them; Holt felt it was probably the former. They were educated town-folk, he gathered with difficulty, rich apparently, and they spent their time wandering about the fell, or fishing. The man was often seen upon the Crag, his girl beside him, bare-legged, dressed as a peasant. \"Happen they come for their health, happen the father is a learned man studying the Wall\"\u2014exact information was not forthcoming.\n\nThe landlord \"minded his own business,\" and inhabitants were too few and far between for gossip. All Holt could extract amounted to this: the couple had been in a motor accident some years before, and as a result they came every spring to spend a month or two in absolute solitude, away from cities and the excitement of modern life. They troubled no one and no one troubled them.\n\n\"Perhaps I may see them as I go by the tarn,\" remarked the walker finally, making ready to go. He gave up questioning in despair. The morning hours were passing.\n\n\"Happen you may,\" was the reply, \"for your track goes past their door and leads straight down to Scarsdale. The other way over the Crag saves half a mile, but it's rough going along the scree.\" He stopped dead. Then he added, in reply to Holt's good-bye: \"In my opinion it's not worth it,\" yet what he meant exactly by \"it\" was not quite clear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 555", + "text": "The walker shouldered his knapsack. Instinctively he gave the little hitch to settle it on his shoulders\u2014much as he used to give to his pack in France. The pain that shot through him as he did so was another reminder of France. The bullet he had stopped on the Somme still made its presence felt at times... Yet he knew, as he walked off briskly, that he was one of the lucky ones. How many of his old pals would never walk again, condemned to hobble on crutches for the rest of their lives! How many, again, would never even hobble! More terrible still, he remembered, were the blind... The dead, it seemed to him, had been more fortunate...\n\nHe swung up the narrowing valley at a good pace and was soon climbing the fell. It proved far steeper than it had appeared from the door of the inn, and he was glad enough to reach the top and fling himself down on the coarse springy turf to admire the view below.\n\nThe spring day was delicious. It stirred his blood. The world beneath looked young and stainless. Emotion rose through him in a wave of optimistic happiness. The bare hills were half hidden by a soft blue haze that made them look bigger, vaster, less earthly than they really were. He saw silver streaks in the valleys that he knew were distant streams and lakes. Birds soared between. The dazzling air seemed painted with exhilarating light and colour. The very clouds were floating gossamer that he could touch. There were bees and dragon-flies and fluttering thistle-down. Heat vibrated. His body, his physical sensations, so-called, retired into almost nothing. He felt himself, like his surroundings, made of air and sunlight. A delicious sense of resignation poured upon him. He, too, like his surroundings, was composed of air and sunshine, of insect wings, of soft, fluttering vibrations that the gorgeous spring day produced... It seemed that he renounced the heavy dues of bodily life, and enjoyed the delights, momentarily at any rate, of a more ethereal consciousness.\n\nNear at hand, the hills were covered with the faded gold of last year's bracken, which ran down in a brimming flood till it was lost in the fresh green of the familiar woods below. Far in the hazy distance swam the sea of ash and hazel. The silver birch sprinkled that lower world with fairy light.\n\nYes, it was all natural enough. He could see the road quite clearly now, only a hundred yards away from where he lay. How straight it ran along the top of the hill! The landlord's expression recurred to him: \"Straight as a spear.\" Somehow, the phrase seemed to describe exactly the Romans and all their works... The Romans, yes, and all their works...\n\nHe became aware of a sudden sympathy with these long dead conquerors of the world. With them, he felt sure, there had been no useless, foolish talk. They had known no empty words, no bandying of foolish phrases. \"War to end war,\" and \"Regeneration of the race\"\u2014no hypocritical nonsense of that sort had troubled their minds and purposes. They had not attempted to cover up the horrible in words. With them had been no childish, vain pretence. They had gone straight to their ends.\n\nOther thoughts, too, stole over him, as he sat gazing down upon the track of that ancient road; strange thoughts, not wholly welcome. New, yet old, emotions rose in a tide upon him. He began to wonder... Had he, after all, become brutalized by the War? He knew quite well that the little \"Christianity\" he inherited had soon fallen from him like a garment in France. In his attitude to Life and Death he had become, frankly, pagan. He now realized, abruptly, another thing as well: in reality he had never been a \"Christian\" at any time. Given to him with his mother's milk, he had never accepted, felt at home with Christian dogmas. To him they had always been an alien creed. Christianity met none of his requirements...\n\nBut what were his \"requirements\"? He found it difficult to answer.\n\nSomething, at any rate, different and more primitive, he thought...\n\nEven up here, alone on the mountain-top, it was hard to be absolutely frank with himself. With a kind of savage, honest determination, he bent himself to the task. It became suddenly important for him. He must know exactly where he stood. It seemed he had reached a turning point in his life. The War, in the objective world, had been one such turning point; now he had reached another, in the subjective life, and it was more important than the first.\n\nAs he lay there in the pleasant sunshine, his thoughts went back to the fighting. A friend, he recalled, had divided people into those who enjoyed the War and those who didn't. He was obliged to admit that he had been one of the former\u2014he had thoroughly enjoyed it. Brought up from a youth as an engineer, he had taken to a soldier's life as a duck takes to water. There had been plenty of misery, discomfort, wretchedness; but there had been compensations that, for him, outweighed them. The fierce excitement, the primitive, naked passions, the wild fury, the reckless indifference to pain and death, with the loss of the normal, cautious, pettifogging little daily self all these involved, had satisfied him. Even the actual killing...\n\nHe started. A slight shudder ran down his back as the cool wind from the open moorlands came sighing across the soft spring sunshine. Sitting up straight, he looked behind him a moment, as with an effort to turn away from something he disliked and dreaded because it was, he knew, too strong for him. But the same instant he turned round again. He faced the vile and dreadful thing in himself he had hitherto sought to deny, evade. Pretence fell away. He could not disguise from himself, that he had thoroughly enjoyed the killing; or, at any rate, had not been shocked by it as by an unnatural and ghastly duty. The shooting and bombing he performed with an effort always, but the rarer moments when he had been able to use the bayonet... the joy of feeling the steel go home...\n\nHe started again, hiding his face a moment in his hands, but he did not try to evade the hideous memories that surged. At times, he knew, he had gone quite mad with the lust of slaughter; he had gone on long after he should have stopped. Once an officer had pulled him up sharply for it, but the next instant had been killed by a bullet. He thought he had gone on killing, but he did not know. It was all a red mist before his eyes and he could only remember the sticky feeling of the blood on his hands when he gripped his rifle...\n\nAnd now, at this moment of painful honesty with himself, he realized that his creed, whatever it was, must cover all that; it must provide some sort of a philosophy for it; must neither apologize nor ignore it. The heaven that it promised must be a man's heaven. The Christian heaven made no appeal to him, he could not believe in it. The ritual must be simple and direct. He felt that in some dim way he understood why those old people had thrown their captives from the Crag. The sacrifice of an animal victim that could be eaten afterwards with due ceremonial did not shock him. Such methods seemed simple, natural, effective. Yet would it not have been better\u2014the horrid thought rose unbidden in his inmost mind\u2014better to have cut their throats with a flint knife... slowly?\n\nHorror-stricken, he sprang to his feet. These terrible thoughts he could not recognize as his own. Had he slept a moment in the sunlight, dreaming them? Was it some hideous nightmare flash that touched him as he dozed a second? Something of fear and awe stole over him. He stared round for some minutes into the emptiness of the desolate landscape, then hurriedly ran down to the road, hoping to exorcize the strange sudden horror by vigorous movement. Yet when he reached the track he knew that he had not succeeded. The awful pictures were gone perhaps, but the mood remained. It was as though some new attitude began to take definite form and harden within him.\n\nHe walked on, trying to pretend to himself that he was some forgotten legionary marching up with his fellows to defend the Wall. Half unconsciously he fell into the steady tramping pace of his old regiment: the words of the ribald songs they had sung going to the front came pouring into his mind. Steadily and almost mechanically he swung along till he saw the Stone as a black speck on the left of the track, and the instant he saw it there rose in him the feeling that he stood upon the edge of an adventure that he feared yet longed for. He approached the great granite monolith with a curious thrill of anticipatory excitement, born he knew not whence.\n\nBut, of course, there was nothing. Common sense, still operating strongly, had warned him there would be, could be, nothing. In the waste the great Stone stood upright, solitary, forbidding, as it had stood for thousands of years. It dominated the landscape somewhat ominously. The sheep and cattle had used it as a rubbing-stone, and bits of hair and wool clung to its rough, weather-eaten edges; the feet of generations had worn a cup-shaped hollow at its base. The wind sighed round it plaintively. Its bulk glistened as it took the sun.\n\nA short mile away the Blood Tarn was now plainly visible; he could see the little holm lying in a direct line with the Stone, while, overhanging the water as a dark shadow on one side, rose the cliff-like rock they called \"the Crag.\" Of the house the landlord had mentioned, however, he could see no trace, as he relieved his shoulders of the knapsack and sat down to enjoy his lunch. The tarn, he reflected, was certainly a gloomy place; he could understand that the simple superstitious shepherds did not dare to live there, for even on this bright spring day it wore a dismal and forbidding look. With failing light, when the Crag sprawled its big lengthening shadow across the water, he could well imagine they would give it the widest possible berth. He strolled down to the shore after lunch, smoking his pipe lazily\u2014then suddenly stood still. At the far end, hidden hitherto by a fold in the ground, he saw the little house, a faint column of blue smoke rising from the chimney, and at the same moment a woman came out of the low door and began to walk towards the tarn. She had seen him, she was moving evidently in his direction; a few minutes later she stopped and stood waiting on the path\u2014waiting, he well knew, for him.\n\nAnd his earlier mood, the mood he dreaded yet had forced himself to recognize, came back upon him with sudden redoubled power. As in some vivid dream that dominates and paralyses the will, or as in the first stages of an imposed hypnotic spell, all question, hesitation, refusal sank away. He felt a pleasurable resignation steal upon him with soft, numbing effect. Denial and criticism ceased to operate, and common sense died with them. He yielded his being automatically to the deeps of an adventure he did not understand. He began to walk towards the woman.\n\nIt was, he saw as he drew nearer, the figure of a young girl, nineteen or twenty years of age, who stood there motionless with her eyes fixed steadily on his own. She looked as wild and picturesque as the scene that framed her. Thick black hair hung loose over her back and shoulders; about her head was bound a green ribbon; her clothes consisted of a jersey and a very short skirt which showed her bare legs browned by exposure to the sun and wind. A pair of rough sandals covered her feet. Whether the face was beautiful or not he could not tell; he only knew that it attracted him immensely and with a strength of appeal that he at once felt curiously irresistible. She remained motionless against the boulder, staring fixedly at him till he was close before her. Then she spoke:\n\n\"I am glad that you have come at last,\" she said in a clear, strong voice that yet was soft and even tender. \"We have been expecting you.\"\n\n\"You have been expecting me!\" he repeated, astonished beyond words, yet finding the language natural, right and true. A stream of sweet feeling invaded him, his heart beat faster, he felt happy and at home in some extraordinary way he could not understand yet did not question.\n\n\"Of course,\" she answered, looking straight into his eyes with welcome unashamed. Her next words thrilled him to the core of his being. \"I have made the room ready for you.\"\n\nQuick upon her own, however, flashed back the landlord's words, while common sense made a last faint effort in his thought. He was the victim of some absurd mistake evidently. The lonely life, the forbidding surroundings, the associations of the desolate hills had affected her mind. He remembered the accident.\n\n\"I am afraid,\" he offered, lamely enough, \"there is some mistake. I am not the friend you were expecting. I\u2014\" He stopped. A thin slight sound as of distant laughter seemed to echo behind the unconvincing words.\n\n\"There is no mistake,\" the girl answered firmly, with a quiet smile, moving a step nearer to him, so that he caught the subtle perfume of her vigorous youth. \"I saw you clearly in the Mystery Stone. I recognized you at once.\"\n\n\"The Mystery Stone,\" he heard himself saying, bewilderment increasing, a sense of wild happiness growing with it.\n\nLaughing, she took his hand in hers. \"Come,\" she said, drawing him along with her, \"come home with me. My father will be waiting for us; he will tell you everything, and better far than I can.\"\n\nHe went with her, feeling that he was made of sunlight and that he walked on air, for at her touch his own hand responded as with a sudden fierceness of pleasure that he failed utterly to understand, yet did not question for an instant. Wildly, absurdly, madly it flashed across his mind: \"This is the woman I shall marry\u2014my woman. I am her man.\"\n\nThey walked in silence for a little, for no words of any sort offered themselves to his mind, nor did the girl attempt to speak. The total absence of embarrassment between them occurred to him once or twice as curious, though the very idea of embarrassment then disappeared entirely. It all seemed natural and unforced, the sudden intercourse as familiar and effortless as though they had known one another always.\n\n\"The Mystery Stone,\" he heard himself saying presently, as the idea rose again to the surface of his mind. \"I should like to know more about it. Tell me, dear.\"\n\n\"I bought it with the other things,\" she replied softly.\n\n\"What other things?\"\n\nShe turned and looked up into his face with a slight expression of surprise; their shoulders touched as they swung along; her hair blew in the wind across his coat. \"The bronze collar,\" she answered in the low voice that pleased him so, \"and this ornament that I wear in my hair.\"\n\nHe glanced down to examine it. Instead of a ribbon, as he had first supposed, he saw that it was a circlet of bronze, covered with a beautiful green patina and evidently very old. In front, above the forehead, was a small disk bearing an inscription he could not decipher at the moment. He bent down and kissed her hair, the girl smiling with happy contentment, but offering no sign of resistance or annoyance.\n\n\"And,\" she added suddenly, \"the dagger.\"\n\nHolt started visibly. This time there was a thrill in her voice that seemed to pierce down straight into his heart. He said nothing, however. The unexpectedness of the word she used, together with the note in her voice that moved him so strangely, had a disconcerting effect that kept him silent for a time. He did not ask about the dagger. Something prevented his curiosity finding expression in speech, though the word, with the marked accent she placed upon it, had struck into him like the shock of sudden steel itself, causing him an indecipherable emotion of both joy and pain. He asked instead, presently, another question, and a very commonplace one: he asked where she and her father had lived before they came to these lonely hills. And the form of his question\u2014his voice shook a little as he said it\u2014was, again, an effort of his normal self to maintain its already precarious balance.\n\nThe effect of his simple query, the girl's reply above all, increased in him the mingled sensations of sweetness and menace, of joy and dread, that half alarmed, half satisfied him. For a moment she wore a puzzled expression, as though making an effort to remember.\n\n\"Down by the sea,\" she answered slowly, thoughtfully, her voice very low. \"Somewhere by a big harbour with great ships coming in and out. It was there we had the break\u2014the shock\u2014an accident that broke us, shattering the dream we share To-day.\" Her face cleared a little. \"We were in a chariot,\" she went on more easily and rapidly, \"and father\u2014my father was injured, so that I went with him to a palace beyond the Wall till he grew well.\"\n\n\"You were in a chariot?\" Holt repeated. \"Surely not.\"\n\n\"Did I say chariot?\" the girl replied. \"How foolish of me!\" She shook her hair back as though the gesture helped to clear her mind and memory. \"That belongs, of course, to the other dream. No, not a chariot; it was a car. But it had wheels like a chariot\u2014the old war-chariots. You know.\"\n\n\"Disk-wheels,\" thought Holt to himself. He did not ask about the palace. He asked instead where she had bought the Mystery Stone, as she called it, and the other things. Her reply bemused and enticed him farther, for he could not unravel it. His whole inner attitude was shifting with uncanny rapidity and completeness. They walked together, he now realized, with linked arms, moving slowly in step, their bodies touching. He felt the blood run hot and almost savage in his veins. He was aware how amazingly precious she was to him, how deeply, absolutely necessary to his life and happiness. Her words went past him in the mountain wind like flying birds.\n\n\"My father was fishing,\" she went on, \"and I was on my way to join him, when the old woman called me into her dwelling and showed me the things. She wished to give them to me, but I refused the present and paid for them in gold. I put the fillet on my head to see if it would fit, and took the Mystery Stone in my hand. Then, as I looked deep into the stone, this present dream died all away. It faded out. I saw the older dreams again\u2014our dreams.\"\n\n\"The older dreams!\" interrupted Holt. \"Ours!\" But instead of saying the words aloud, they issued from his lips in a quiet whisper, as though control of his voice had passed a little from him. The sweetness in him became more wonderful, unmanageable; his astonishment had vanished; he walked and talked with his old familiar happy Love, the woman he had sought so long and waited for, the woman who was his mate, as he was hers, she who alone could satisfy his inmost soul.\n\n\"The old dream,\" she replied, \"the very old\u2014the oldest of all perhaps\u2014when we committed the terrible sacrilege. I saw the High Priest lying dead\u2014whom my father slew\u2014and the other whom you destroyed. I saw you prise out the jewel from the image of the god\u2014with your short bloody spear. I saw, too, our flight to the galley through the hot, awful night beneath the stars\u2014and our escape...\"\n\nHer voice died away and she fell silent.\n\n\"Tell me more,\" he whispered, drawing her closer against his side. \"What had you done?\" His heart was racing now. Some fighting blood surged uppermost. He felt that he could kill, and the joy of violence and slaughter rose in him.\n\n\"Have you forgotten so completely?\" she asked very low, as he pressed her more tightly still against his heart. And almost beneath her breath she whispered into his ear, which he bent to catch the little sound: \"I had broken my vows with you.\"\n\n\"What else, my lovely one\u2014my best beloved\u2014what more did you see?\" he whispered in return, yet wondering why the fierce pain and anger that he felt behind still lay hidden from betrayal.\n\n\"Dream after dream, and always we were punished. But the last time was the clearest, for it was here\u2014here where we now walk together in the sunlight and the wind\u2014it was here the savages hurled us from the rock.\"\n\nA shiver ran through him, making him tremble with an unaccountable touch of cold that communicated itself to her as well. Her arm went instantly about his shoulder, as he stooped and kissed her passionately. \"Fasten your coat about you,\" she said tenderly, but with troubled breath, when he released her, \"for this wind is chill although the sun shines brightly. We were glad, you remember, when they stopped to kill us, for we were tired and our feet were cut to pieces by the long, rough journey from the Wall.\" Then suddenly her voice grew louder again and the smile of happy confidence came back into her eyes. There was the deep earnestness of love in it, of love that cannot end or die. She looked up into his face. \"But soon now,\" she said, \"we shall be free. For you have come, and it is nearly finished\u2014this weary little present dream.\"\n\n\"How,\" he asked, \"shall we get free?\" A red mist swam momentarily before his eyes.\n\n\"My father,\" she replied at once, \"will tell you all. It is quite easy.\"\n\n\"Your father, too, remembers?\"\n\n\"The moment the collar touches him,\" she said, \"he is a priest again. See! Here he comes forth already to meet us, and to bid you welcome.\"\n\nHolt looked up, startled. He had hardly noticed, so absorbed had he been in the words that half intoxicated him, the distance they had covered. The cottage was now close at hand, and a tall, powerfully built man, wearing a shepherd's rough clothing, stood a few feet in front of him. His stature, breadth of shoulder and thick black beard made up a striking figure. The dark eyes, with fire in them, gazed straight into his own, and a kindly smile played round the stern and vigorous mouth.\n\n\"Greeting, my son,\" said a deep, booming voice, \"for I shall call you my son as I did of old. The bond of the spirit is stronger than that of the flesh, and with us three the tie is indeed of triple strength. You come, too, at an auspicious hour, for the omens are favourable and the time of our liberation is at hand.\" He took the other's hand in a grip that might have killed an ox and yet was warm with gentle kindliness, while Holt, now caught wholly into the spirit of some deep reality he could not master yet accepted, saw that the wrist was small, the fingers shapely, the gesture itself one of dignity and refinement.\n\n\"Greeting, my father,\" he replied, as naturally as though he said more modern words.\n\n\"Come in with me, I pray,\" pursued the other, leading the way, \"and let me show you the poor accommodation we have provided, yet the best that we can offer.\"\n\nHe stooped to pass the threshold, and as Holt stooped likewise the girl took his hand and he knew that his bewitchment was complete. Entering the low doorway, he passed through a kitchen, where only the roughest, scantiest furniture was visible, into another room that was completely bare. A heap of dried bracken had been spread on the floor in one corner to form a bed. Beside it lay two cheap, coloured blankets. There was nothing else.\n\n\"Our place is poor,\" said the man, smiling courteously, but with that dignity and air of welcome which made the hovel seem a palace. \"Yet it may serve, perhaps, for the short time that you will need it. Our little dream here is wellnigh over, now that you have come. The long weary pilgrimage at last draws to a close.\" The girl had left them alone a moment, and the man stepped closer to his guest. His face grew solemn, his voice deeper and more earnest suddenly, the light in his eyes seemed actually to flame with the enthusiasm of a great belief. \"Why have you tarried thus so long, and where?\" he asked in a lowered tone that vibrated in the little space. \"We have sought you with prayer and fasting, and she has spent her nights for you in tears. You lost the way, it must be. The lesser dreams entangled your feet, I see.\" A touch of sadness entered the voice, the eyes held pity in them. \"It is, alas, too easy, I well know,\" he murmured. \"It is too easy.\"\n\n\"I lost the way,\" the other replied. It seemed suddenly that his heart was filled with fire. \"But now,\" he cried aloud, \"now that I have found her, I will never, never let her go again. My feet are steady and my way is sure.\"\n\n\"For ever and ever, my son,\" boomed the happy, yet almost solemn answer, \"she is yours. Our freedom is at hand.\"\n\nHe turned and crossed the little kitchen again, making a sign that his guest should follow him. They stood together by the door, looking out across the tarn in silence. The afternoon sunshine fell in a golden blaze across the bare hills that seemed to smoke with the glory of the fiery light. But the Crag loomed dark in shadow overhead, and the little lake lay deep and black beneath it.\n\n\"Acella, Acella!\" called the man, the name breaking upon his companion as with a shock of sweet delicious fire that filled his entire being, as the girl came the same instant from behind the cottage. \"The Gods call me,\" said her father. \"I go now to the hill. Protect our guest and comfort him in my absence.\"\n\nWithout another word, he strode away up the hillside and presently was visible standing on the summit of the Crag, his arms stretched out above his head to heaven, his great head thrown back, his bearded face turned upwards. An impressive, even a majestic figure he looked, as his bulk and stature rose in dark silhouette against the brilliant evening sky. Holt stood motionless, watching him for several minutes, his heart swelling in his breast, his pulses thumping before some great nameless pressure that rose from the depths of his being. That inner attitude which seemed a new and yet more satisfying attitude to life than he had known hitherto, had crystallized. Define it he could not, he only knew that he accepted it as natural. It satisfied him. The sight of that dignified, gaunt figure worshipping upon the hill-top enflamed him...\n\n\"I have brought the stone,\" a voice interrupted his reflections, and turning, he saw the girl beside him. She held out for his inspection a dark square object that looked to him at first like a black stone lying against the brown skin of her hand. \"The Mystery Stone,\" the girl added, as their faces bent down together to examine it. \"It is there I see the dreams I told you of.\"\n\nHe took it from her and found that it was heavy, composed apparently of something like black quartz, with a brilliant polished surface that revealed clear depths within. Once, evidently, it had been set in a stand or frame, for the marks where it had been attached still showed, and it was obviously of great age. He felt confused, the mind in him troubled yet excited, as he gazed. The effect upon him was as though a wind rose suddenly and passed across his inmost subjective life, setting its entire contents in rushing motion.\n\n\"And here,\" the girl said, \"is the dagger.\"\n\nHe took from her the short bronze weapon, feeling at once instinctively its ragged edge, its keen point, sharp and effective still. The handle had long since rotted away, but the bronze tongue, and the holes where the rivets had been, remained, and, as he touched it, the confusion and trouble in his mind increased to a kind of turmoil, in which violence, linked to something tameless, wild and almost savage, was the dominating emotion. He turned to seize the girl and crush her to him in a passionate embrace, but she held away, throwing back her lovely head, her eyes shining, her lips parted, yet one hand stretched out to stop him.\n\n\"First look into it with me,\" she said quietly. \"Let us see together.\"\n\nShe sat down on the turf beside the cottage door, and Holt, obeying, took his place beside her. She remained very still for some minutes, covering the stone with both hands as though to warm it. Her lips moved. She seemed to be repeating some kind of invocation beneath her breath, though no actual words were audible. Presently her hands parted. They sat together gazing at the polished surface. They looked within.\n\n\"There comes a white mist in the heart of the stone,\" the girl whispered. \"It will soon open. The pictures will then grow. Look!\" she exclaimed after a brief pause, \"they are forming now.\"\n\n\"I see only mist,\" her companion murmured, gazing intently. \"Only mist I see.\"\n\nShe took his hand and instantly the mist parted. He found himself peering into another landscape which opened before his eyes as though it were a photograph. Hills covered with heather stretched away on every side.\n\n\"Hills, I see,\" he whispered. \"The ancient hills\u2014\"\n\n\"Watch closely,\" she replied, holding his hand firmly.\n\nAt first the landscape was devoid of any sign of life; then suddenly it surged and swarmed with moving figures. Torrents of men poured over the hill-crests and down their heathery sides in columns. He could see them clearly\u2014great hairy men, clad in skins, with thick shields on their left arms or slung over their backs, and short stabbing spears in their hands. Thousands upon thousands poured over in an endless stream. In the distance he could see other columns sweeping in a turning movement. A few of the men rode rough ponies and seemed to be directing the march, and these, he knew, were the chiefs...\n\nThe scene grew dimmer, faded, died away completely. Another took its place:\n\nBy the faint light he knew that it was dawn. The undulating country, less hilly than before, was still wild and uncultivated. A great wall, with towers at intervals, stretched away till it was lost in shadowy distance. On the nearest of these towers he saw a sentinel clad in armour, gazing out across the rolling country. The armour gleamed faintly in the pale glimmering light, as the man suddenly snatched up a bugle and blew upon it. From a brazier burning beside him he next seized a brand and fired a great heap of brushwood. The smoke rose in a dense column into the air almost immediately, and from all directions, with incredible rapidity, figures came pouring up to man the wall. Hurriedly they strung their bows, and laid spare arrows close beside them on the coping. The light grew brighter. The whole country was alive with savages; like the waves of the sea they came rolling in enormous numbers. For several minutes the wall held. Then, in an impetuous, fearful torrent, they poured over...\n\nIt faded, died away, was gone again, and a moment later yet another took its place:\n\nBut this time the landscape was familiar, and he recognized the tarn. He saw the savages upon the ledge that flanked the dominating Crag; they had three captives with them. He saw two men. The other was a woman. But the woman had fallen exhausted to the ground, and a chief on a rough pony rode back to see what had delayed the march. Glancing at the captives, he made a fierce gesture with his arm towards the water far below. Instantly the woman was jerked cruelly to her feet and forced onwards till the summit of the Crag was reached. A man snatched something from her hand. A second later she was hurled over the brink.\n\nThe two men were next dragged on to the dizzy spot where she had stood. Dead with fatigue, bleeding from numerous wounds, yet at this awful moment they straightened themselves, casting contemptuous glances at the fierce savages surrounding them. They were Romans and would die like Romans. Holt saw their faces clearly for the first time.\n\nHe sprang up with a cry of anguished fury.\n\n\"The second man!\" he exclaimed. \"You saw the second man!\"\n\nThe girl, releasing his hand, turned her eyes slowly up to his, so that he met the flame of her ancient and undying love shining like stars upon him out of the night of time.\n\n\"Ever since that moment,\" she said in a low voice that trembled, \"I have been looking, waiting for you\u2014\"\n\nHe took her in his arms and smothered her words with kisses, holding her fiercely to him as though he would never let her go. \"I, too,\" he said, his whole being burning with his love, \"I have been looking, waiting for you. Now I have found you. We have found each other...!\"\n\nThe dusk fell slowly, imperceptibly. As twilight slowly draped the gaunt hills, blotting out familiar details, so the strong dream, veil upon veil, drew closer over the soul of the wanderer, obliterating finally the last reminder of To-day. The little wind had dropped and the desolate moors lay silent, but for the hum of distant water falling to its valley bed. His life, too, and the life of the girl, he knew, were similarly falling, falling into some deep shadowed bed where rest would come at last. No details troubled him, he asked himself no questions. A profound sense of happy peace numbed every nerve and stilled his beating heart.\n\nHe felt no fear, no anxiety, no hint of alarm or uneasiness vexed his singular contentment. He realized one thing only\u2014that the girl lay in his arms, he held her fast, her breath mingled with his own. They had found each other. What else mattered?\n\nFrom time to time, as the daylight faded and the sun went down behind the moors, she spoke. She uttered words he vaguely heard, listening, though with a certain curious effort, before he closed the thing she said with kisses. Even the fierceness of his blood was gone. The world lay still, life almost ceased to flow. Lapped in the deeps of his great love, he was redeemed, perhaps, of violence and savagery...\n\n\"Three dark birds,\" she whispered, \"pass across the sky... they fall beyond the ridge. The omens are favourable. A hawk now follows them, cleaving the sky with pointed wings.\"\n\n\"A hawk,\" he murmured. \"The badge of my old Legion.\"\n\n\"My father will perform the sacrifice,\" he heard again, though it seemed a long interval had passed, and the man's figure was now invisible on the Crag amid the gathering darkness. \"Already he prepares the fire. Look, the sacred island is alight. He has the black cock ready for the knife.\"\n\nHolt roused himself with difficulty, lifting his face from the garden of her hair. A faint light, he saw, gleamed fitfully on the holm within the tarn. Her father, then, had descended from the Crag, and had lit the sacrificial fire upon the stones. But what did the doings of the father matter now to him?\n\n\"The dark bird,\" he repeated dully, \"the black victim the Gods of the Underworld alone accept. It is good, Acella, it is good!\" He was about to sink back again, taking her against his breast as before, when she resisted and sat up suddenly.\n\n\"It is time,\" she said aloud. \"The hour has come. My father climbs, and we must join him on the summit. Come!\"\n\nShe took his hand and raised him to his feet, and together they began the rough ascent towards the Crag. As they passed along the shore of the Tarn of Blood, he saw the fire reflected in the ink-black waters; he made out, too, though dimly, a rough circle of big stones, with a larger flag-stone lying in the centre. Three small fires of bracken and wood, placed in a triangle with its apex towards the Standing Stone on the distant hill, burned briskly, the crackling material sending out sparks that pierced the columns of thick smoke. And in this smoke, peering, shifting, appearing and disappearing, it seemed he saw great faces moving. The flickering light and twirling smoke made clear sight difficult. His bliss, his lethargy were very deep. They left the tarn below them and hand in hand began to climb the final slope.\n\nWhether the physical effort of climbing disturbed the deep pressure of the mood that numbed his senses, or whether the cold draught of wind they met upon the ridge restored some vital detail of To-day, Holt does not know. Something, at any rate, in him wavered suddenly, as though a centre of gravity had shifted slightly. There was a perceptible alteration in the balance of thought and feeling that had held invariable now for many hours. It seemed to him that something heavy lifted, or rather, began to lift\u2014a weight, a shadow, something oppressive that obstructed light. A ray of light, as it were, struggled through the thick darkness that enveloped him. To him, as he paused on the ridge to recover his breath, came this vague suggestion of faint light breaking across the blackness. It was objective.\n\n\"See,\" said the girl in a low voice, \"the moon is rising. It lights the sacred island. The blood-red waters turn to silver.\"\n\nHe saw, indeed, that a huge three-quarter moon now drove with almost visible movement above the distant line of hills; the little tarn gleamed as with silvery armour; the glow of the sacrificial fires showed red across it. He looked down with a shudder into the sheer depth that opened at his feet, then turned to look at his companion. He started and shrank back. Her face, lit by the moon and by the fire, shone pale as death; her black hair framed it with a terrible suggestiveness; the eyes, though brilliant as ever, had a film upon them. She stood in an attitude of both ecstasy and resignation, and one outstretched arm pointed towards the summit where her father stood.\n\nHer lips parted, a marvellous smile broke over her features, her voice was suddenly unfamiliar: \"He wears the collar,\" she uttered. \"Come. Our time is here at last, and we are ready. See, he waits for us!\"\n\nThere rose for the first time struggle and opposition in him; he resisted the pressure of her hand that had seized his own and drew him forcibly along. Whence came the resistance and the opposition he could not tell, but though he followed her, he was aware that the refusal in him strengthened. The weight of darkness that oppressed him shifted a little more, an inner light increased; The same moment they reached the summit and stood beside\u2014the priest. There was a curious sound of fluttering. The figure, he saw, was naked, save for a rough blanket tied loosely about the waist.\n\n\"The hour has come at last,\" cried his deep booming voice that woke echoes from the dark hills about them. \"We are alone now with our Gods.\" And he broke then into a monotonous rhythmic chanting that rose and fell upon the wind, yet in a tongue that sounded strange; his erect figure swayed slightly with its cadences; his black beard swept his naked chest; and his face, turned skywards, shone in the mingled light of moon above and fire below, yet with an added light as well that burned within him rather than without. He was a weird, magnificent figure, a priest of ancient rites invoking his deathless deities upon the unchanging hills.\n\nBut upon Holt, too, as he stared in awed amazement, an inner light had broken suddenly. It came as with a dazzling blaze that at first paralysed thought and action. His mind cleared, but too abruptly for movement, either of tongue or hand, to be possible. Then, abruptly, the inner darkness rolled away completely. The light in the wild eyes of the great chanting, swaying figure, he now knew was the light of mania.\n\nThe faint fluttering sound increased, and the voice of the girl was oddly mingled with it. The priest had ceased his invocation. Holt, aware that he stood alone, saw the girl go past him carrying a big black bird that struggled with vainly beating wings.\n\n\"Behold the sacrifice,\" she said, as she knelt before her father and held up the victim. \"May the Gods accept it as presently They shall accept us too!\"\n\nThe great figure stooped and took the offering, and with one blow of the knife he held, its head was severed from its body. The blood spattered on the white face of the kneeling girl. Holt was aware for the first time that she, too, was now unclothed; but for a loose blanket, her white body gleamed against the dark heather in the moonlight. At the same moment she rose to her feet, stood upright, turned towards him so that he saw the dark hair streaming across her naked shoulders, and, with a face of ecstasy, yet ever that strange film upon her eyes, her voice came to him on the wind:\n\n\"Farewell, yet not farewell! We shall meet, all three, in the underworld. The Gods accept us!\"\n\nTurning her face away, she stepped towards the ominous figure behind, and bared her ivory neck and breast to the knife. The eyes of the maniac were upon her own; she was as helpless and obedient as a lamb before his spell.\n\nThen Holt's horrible paralysis, if only just in time, was lifted. The priest had raised his arm, the bronze knife with its ragged edge gleamed in the air, with the other hand he had already gathered up the thick dark hair, so that the neck lay bare and open to the final blow. But it was two other details, Holt thinks, that set his muscles suddenly free, enabling him to act with the swift judgment which, being wholly unexpected, disconcerted both maniac and victim and frustrated the awful culmination. The dark spots of blood upon the face he loved, and the sudden final fluttering of the dead bird's wings upon the ground\u2014these two things, life actually touching death, released the held-back springs.\n\nHe leaped forward. He received the blow upon his left arm and hand. It was his right fist that sent the High Priest to earth with a blow that, luckily, felled him in the direction away from the dreadful brink, and it was his right arm and hand, he became aware some time afterwards only, that were chiefly of use in carrying the fainting girl and her unconscious father back to the shelter of the cottage, and to the best help and comfort he could provide...\n\nIt was several years afterwards, in a very different setting, that he found himself spelling out slowly to a little boy the lettering cut into a circlet of bronze the child found on his study table. To the child he told a fairy tale, then dismissed him to play with his mother in the garden. But, when alone, he rubbed away the verdigris with great care, for the circlet was thin and frail with age, as he examined again the little picture of a tripod from which smoke issued, incised neatly in the metal. Below it, almost as sharp as when the Roman craftsman cut it first, was the name Acella. He touched the letters tenderly with his left hand, from which two fingers were missing, then placed it in a drawer of his desk and turned the key.\n\n\"That curious name,\" said a low voice behind his chair. His wife had come in and was looking over his shoulder. \"You love it, and I dread it.\" She sat on the desk beside him, her eyes troubled. \"It was the name father used to call me in his illness.\"\n\nHer husband looked at her with passionate tenderness, but said no word.\n\n\"And this,\" she went on, taking the broken hand in both her own, \"is the price you paid to me for his life. I often wonder what strange good deity brought you upon the lonely moor that night, and just in the very nick of time. You remember...?\"\n\n\"The deity who helps true lovers, of course,\" he said with a smile, evading the question. The deeper memory, he knew, had closed absolutely in her since the moment of the attempted double crime. He kissed her, murmuring to himself as he did so, but too low for her to hear, \"Acella! My Acella...!\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Valley Of The Beasts by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "As they emerged suddenly from the dense forest the Indian halted, and Grimwood, his employer, stood beside him, gazing into the beautiful wooded valley that lay spread below them in the blaze of a golden sunset. Both men leaned upon their rifles, caught by the enchantment of the unexpected scene.\n\n\"We camp here,\" said Tooshalli abruptly, after a careful survey. \"To-morrow we make a plan.\"\n\nHe spoke excellent English. The note of decision, almost of authority, in his voice was noticeable, but Grimwood set it down to the natural excitement of the moment. Every track they had followed during the last two days, but one track in particular as well, had headed straight for this remote and hidden valley, and the sport promised to be unusual.\n\n\"That's so,\" he replied, in the tone of one giving an order. \"You can make camp ready at once.\" And he sat down on a fallen hemlock to take off his moccasin boots and grease his feet that ached from the arduous day now drawing to a close. Though under ordinary circumstances he would have pushed on for another hour or two, he was not averse to a night here, for exhaustion had come upon him during the last bit of rough going, his eye and muscles were no longer steady, and it was doubtful if he could have shot straight enough to kill. He did not mean to miss a second time.\n\nWith his Canadian friend, Iredale, the latter's half-breed, and his own Indian, Tooshalli, the party had set out three weeks ago to find the \"wonderful big moose\" the Indians reported were travelling in the Snow River country. They soon found that the tale was true; tracks were abundant; they saw fine animals nearly every day, but though carrying good heads, the hunters expected better still and left them alone. Pushing up the river to a chain of small lakes near its source, they then separated into two parties, each with its nine-foot bark canoe, and packed in for three days after the yet bigger animals the Indians agreed would be found in the deeper woods beyond. Excitement was keen, expectation keener still. The day before they separated, Iredale shot the biggest moose of his life, and its head, bigger even than the grand Alaskan heads, hangs in his house to-day. Grimwood's hunting blood was fairly up. His blood was of the fiery, not to say ferocious, quality. It almost seemed he liked killing for its own sake.\n\nFour days after the party broke into two he came upon a gigantic track, whose measurements and length of stride keyed every nerve he possessed to its highest tension.\n\nTooshalli examined the tracks for some minutes with care. \"It is the biggest moose in the world,\" he said at length, a new expression on his inscrutable red visage.\n\nFollowing it all that day, they yet got no sight of the big fellow that seemed to be frequenting a little marshy dip of country, too small to be called valley, where willow and undergrowth abounded. He had not yet scented his pursuers. They were after him again at dawn. Towards the evening of the second day Grimwood caught a sudden glimpse of the monster among a thick clump of willows, and the sight of the magnificent head that easily beat all records set his heart beating like a hammer with excitement. He aimed and fired. But the moose, instead of crashing, went thundering away through the further scrub and disappeared, the sound of his plunging canter presently dying away. Grimwood had missed, even if he had wounded.\n\nThey camped, and all next day, leaving the canoe behind, they followed the huge track, but though finding signs of blood, these were not plentiful, and the shot had evidently only grazed the animal. The travelling was of the hardest. Towards evening, utterly exhausted, the spoor led them to the ridge they now stood upon, gazing down into the enchanting valley that opened at their feet. The giant moose had gone down into this valley. He would consider himself safe there. Grimwood agreed with the Indian's judgment. They would camp for the night and continue at dawn the wild hunt after \"the biggest moose in the world.\"\n\nSupper was over, the small fire used for cooking dying down, with Grimwood became first aware that the Indian was not behaving quite as usual. What particular detail drew his attention is hard to say. He was a slow-witted, heavy man, full-blooded, unobservant; a fact had to hurt him through his comfort, through his pleasure, before he noticed it. Yet anyone else must have observed the changed mood of the Redskin long ago. Tooshalli had made the fire, fried the bacon, served the tea, and was arranging the blankets, his own and his employer's, before the latter remarked upon his\u2014silence. Tooshalli had not uttered a word for over an hour and a half, since he had first set eyes upon the new valley, to be exact. And his employer now noticed the unaccustomed silence, because after food he liked to listen to wood talk and hunting lore.\n\n\"Tired out, aren't you?\" said big Grimwood, looking into the dark face across the firelight. He resented the absence of conversation, now that he noticed it. He was over-weary himself, he felt more irritable than usual, though his temper was always vile.\n\n\"Lost your tongue, eh?\" he went on with a growl, as the Indian returned his stare with solemn, expressionless face. That dark inscrutable look got on his nerves a bit. \"Speak up, man!\" he exclaimed sharply. \"What's it all about?\"\n\nThe Englishman had at last realized that there was something to \"speak up\" about. The discovery, in his present state, annoyed him further. Tooshalli stared gravely, but made no reply. The silence was prolonged almost into minutes. Presently the head turned sideways, as though the man listened. The other watched him very closely, anger growing in him.\n\nBut it was the way the Redskin turned his head, keeping his body rigid, that gave the jerk to Grimwood's nerves, providing him with a sensation he had never known in his life before\u2014it gave him what is generally called \"the goose-flesh.\" It seemed to jangle his entire system, yet at the same time made him cautious. He did not like it, this combination of emotions puzzled him.\n\n\"Say something, I tell you,\" he repeated in a harsher tone, raising his voice. He sat up, drawing his great body closer to the fire. \"Say something, damn it!\"\n\nHis voice fell dead against the surrounding trees, making the silence of the forest unpleasantly noticeable. Very still the great woods stood about them; there was no wind, no stir of branches; only the crackle of a snapping twig was audible from time to time, as the night-life moved unwarily sometimes watching the humans round their little fire. The October air had a frosty touch that nipped.\n\nThe Redskin did not answer. No muscle of his neck nor of his stiffened body moved. He seemed all ears.\n\n\"Well?\" repeated the Englishman, lowering his voice this time instinctively. \"What d'you hear, God damn it!\" The touch of odd nervousness that made his anger grow betrayed itself in his language.\n\nTooshalli slowly turned his head back again to its normal position, the body rigid as before.\n\n\"I hear nothing, Mr. Grimwood,\" he said, gazing with quiet dignity into his employer's eyes.\n\nThis was too much for the other, a man of savage temper at the best of times. He was the type of Englishman who held strong views as to the right way of treating \"inferior\" races.\n\n\"That's a lie, Tooshalli, and I won't have you lie to me. Now what was it? Tell me at once!\"\n\n\"I hear nothing,\" repeated the other. \"I only think.\"\n\n\"And what is it you're pleased to think?\" Impatience made a nasty expression round the mouth.\n\n\"I go not,\" was the abrupt reply, unalterable decision in the voice.\n\nThe man's rejoinder was so unexpected that Grimwood found nothing to say at first. For a moment he did not take its meaning; his mind, always slow, was confused by impatience, also by what he considered the foolishness of the little scene. Then in a flash he understood; but he also understood the immovable obstinacy of the race he had to deal with. Tooshalli was informing him that he refused to go into the valley where the big moose had vanished. And his astonishment was so great at first that he merely sat and stared. No words came to him.\n\n\"It is\u2014\" said the Indian, but used a native term.\n\n\"What's that mean?\" Grimwood found his tongue, but his quiet tone was ominous.\n\n\"Mr. Grimwood, it mean the 'Valley of the Beasts,'\" was the reply in a tone quieter still.\n\nThe Englishman made a great, a genuine effort at self-control. He was dealing, he forced himself to remember, with a superstitious Redskin. He knew the stubbornness of the type. If the man left him his sport was irretrievably spoilt, for he could not hunt in this wilderness alone, and even if he got the coveted head, he could never, never get it out alone. His native selfishness seconded his effort. Persuasion, if only he could keep back his rising anger, was his r\u00f4le to play.\n\n\"The Valley of the Beasts,\" he said, a smile on his lips rather than in his darkening eyes; \"but that's just what we want. It's beasts we're after, isn't it?\" His voice had a false cheery ring that could not have deceived a child. \"But what d'you mean, anyhow\u2014the Valley of the Beasts?\" He asked it with a dull attempt at sympathy.\n\n\"It belong to Ishtot, Mr. Grimwood.\" The man looked him full in the face, no flinching in the eyes.\n\n\"My\u2014our\u2014big moose is there,\" said the other, who recognized the name of the Indian Hunting God, and understanding better, felt confident he would soon persuade his man. Tooshalli, he remembered, too, was nominally a Christian. \"We'll follow him at dawn and get the biggest head the world has ever seen. You will be famous,\" he added, his temper better in hand again. \"Your tribe will honour you. And the white hunters will pay you much money.\"\n\n\"He go there to save himself. I go not.\"\n\nThe other's anger revived with a leap at this stupid obstinacy. But, in spite of it, he noticed the odd choice of words. He began to realize that nothing now would move the man. At the same time he also realized that violence on his part must prove worse than useless. Yet violence was natural to his \"dominant\" type. \"That brute Grimwood\" was the way most men spoke of him.\n\n\"Back at the settlement you're a Christian, remember,\" he tried, in his clumsy way, another line. \"And disobedience means hell-fire. You know that!\"\n\n\"I a Christian\u2014at the post,\" was the reply, \"but out here the Red God rule. Ishtot keep that valley for himself. No Indian hunt there.\" It was as though a granite boulder spoke.\n\nThe savage temper of the Englishman, enforced by the long difficult suppression, rose wickedly into sudden flame. He stood up, kicking his blankets aside. He strode across the dying fire to the Indian's side. Tooshalli also rose. They faced each other, two humans alone in the wilderness, watched by countless invisible forest eyes.\n\nTooshalli stood motionless, yet as though he expected violence from the foolish, ignorant white-face. \"You go alone, Mr. Grimwood.\" There was no fear in him.\n\nGrimwood choked with rage. His words came forth with difficulty, though he roared them into the silence of the forest:\n\n\"I pay you, don't I? You'll do what I say, not what you say!\" His voice woke the echoes.\n\nThe Indian, arms hanging by his side, gave the old reply.\n\n\"I go not,\" he repeated firmly.\n\nIt stung the other into uncontrollable fury.\n\nThe beast then came uppermost; it came out. \"You've said that once too often, Tooshalli!\" and he struck him brutally in the face. The Indian fell, rose to his knees again, collapsed sideways beside the fire, then struggled back into a sitting position. He never once took his eyes from the white man's face.\n\nBeside himself with anger, Grimwood stood over him. \"Is that enough? Will you obey me now?\" he shouted.\n\n\"I go not,\" came the thick reply, blood streaming from his mouth. The eyes had no flinching in them. \"That valley Ishtot keep. Ishtot see us now. He see you.\" The last words he uttered with strange, almost uncanny emphasis.\n\nGrimwood, arm raised, fist clenched, about to repeat his terrible assault, paused suddenly. His arm sank to his side. What exactly stopped him he could never say. For one thing, he feared his own anger, feared that if he let himself go he would not stop till he had killed\u2014committed murder. He knew his own fearful temper and stood afraid of it. Yet it was not only that. The calm firmness of the Redskin, his courage under pain, and something in the fixed and burning eyes arrested him. Was it also something in the words he had used\u2014\"Ishtot see you\"\u2014that stung him into a queer caution midway in his violence?\n\nHe could not say. He only knew that a momentary sense of awe came over him. He became unpleasantly aware of the enveloping forest, so still, listening in a kind of impenetrable, remorseless silence. This lonely wilderness, looking silently upon what might easily prove murder, laid a faint, inexplicable chill upon his raging blood. The hand dropped slowly to his side again, the fist unclenched itself, his breath came more evenly.\n\n\"Look you here,\" he said, adopting without knowing it the local way of speech. \"I ain't a bad man, though your going-on do make a man damned tired. I'll give you another chance.\" His voice was sullen, but a new note in it surprised even himself. \"I'll do that. You can have the night to think it over, Tooshalli\u2014see? Talk it over with your\u2014\"\n\nHe did not finish the sentence. Somehow the name of the Redskin God refused to pass his lips. He turned away, flung himself into his blankets, and in less than ten minutes, exhausted as much by his anger as by the day's hard going, he was sound asleep.\n\nThe Indian, crouching beside the dying fire, had said nothing.\n\nNight held the woods, the sky was thick with stars, the life of the forest went about its business quietly, with that wondrous skill which millions of years have perfected. The Redskin, so close to this skill that he instinctively used and borrowed from it, was silent, alert and wise, his outline as inconspicuous as though he merged, like his four-footed teachers, into the mass of the surrounding bush.\n\nHe moved perhaps, yet nothing knew he moved. His wisdom, derived from that eternal, ancient mother who from infinite experience makes no mistakes, did not fail him. His soft tread made no sound; his breathing, as his weight, was calculated. The stars observed him, but they did not tell; the light air knew his whereabouts, yet without betrayal...\n\nThe chill dawn gleamed at length between the trees, lighting the pale ashes of an extinguished fire, also of a bulky, obvious form beneath a blanket. The form moved clumsily. The cold was penetrating.\n\nAnd that bulky form now moved because a dream had come to trouble it. A dark figure stole across its confused field of vision. The form started, but it did not wake. The figure spoke: \"Take this,\" it whispered, handing a little stick, curiously carved. \"It is the totem of great Ishtot. In the valley all memory of the White Gods will leave you. Call upon Ishtot... Call on Him if you dare\"; and the dark figure glided away out of the dream and out of all remembrance..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 557", + "text": "The first thing Grimwood noticed when he woke was that Tooshalli was not there. No fire burned, no tea was ready. He felt exceedingly annoyed. He glared about him, then got up with a curse to make the fire. His mind seemed confused and troubled. At first he only realized one thing clearly\u2014his guide had left him in the night.\n\nIt was very cold. He lit the wood with difficulty and made his tea, and the actual world came gradually back to him. The Red Indian had gone; perhaps the blow, perhaps the superstitious terror, perhaps both, had driven him away. He was alone, that was the outstanding fact. For anything beyond outstanding facts, Grimwood felt little interest. Imaginative speculation was beyond his compass. Close to the brute creation, it seemed, his nature lay.\n\nIt was while packing his blankets\u2014he did it automatically, a dull, vicious resentment in him\u2014that his fingers struck a bit of wood that he was about to throw away when its unusual shape caught his attention suddenly. His odd dream came back then. But was it a dream? The bit of wood was undoubtedly a totem stick. He examined it. He paid it more attention than he meant to, wished to. Yes, it was unquestionably a totem stick. The dream, then, was not a dream. Tooshalli had quit, but, following with Redskin faithfulness some code of his own, had left him the means of safety. He chuckled sourly, but thrust the stick inside his belt. \"One never knows,\" he mumbled to himself.\n\nHe faced the situation squarely. He was alone in the wilderness. His capable, experienced woodsman had deserted him. The situation was serious. What should he do? A weakling would certainly retrace his steps, following the track they had made, afraid to be left alone in this vast hinterland of pathless forest. But Grimwood was of another build. Alarmed he might be, but he would not give in. He had the defects of his own qualities. The brutality of his nature argued force. He was determined and a sportsman. He would go on. And ten minutes after breakfast, having first made a cache of what provisions were left over, he was on his way\u2014down across the ridge and into the mysterious valley, the Valley of the Beasts.\n\nIt looked, in the morning sunlight, entrancing. The trees closed in behind him, but he did not notice. It led him on...\n\nHe followed the track of the gigantic moose he meant to kill, and the sweet, delicious sunshine helped him. The air was like wine, the seductive spoor of the great beast, with here and there a faint splash of blood on leaves or ground, lay forever just before his eyes. He found the valley, though the actual word did not occur to him, enticing; more and more he noticed the beauty, the desolate grandeur of the mighty spruce and hemlock, the splendour of the granite bluffs which in places rose above the forest and caught the sun... The valley was deeper, vaster than he had imagined. He felt safe, at home in it, though, again these actual terms did not occur to him... Here he could hide for ever and find peace... He became aware of a new quality in the deep loneliness. The scenery for the first time in his life appealed to him, and the form of the appeal was curious\u2014he felt the comfort of it.\n\nFor a man of his habit, this was odd, yet the new sensations stole over him so gently, their approach so gradual, that they were first recognized by his consciousness indirectly. They had already established themselves in him before he noticed them; and the indirectness took this form\u2014that the passion of the chase gave place to an interest in the valley itself. The lust of the hunt, the fierce desire to find and kill, the keen wish, in a word, to see his quarry within range, to aim, to fire, to witness the natural consummation of the long expedition\u2014these had all become measurably less, while the effect of the valley upon him had increased in strength. There was a welcome about it that he did not understand.\n\nThe change was singular, yet, oddly enough, it did not occur to him as singular; it was unnatural, yet it did not strike him so. To a dull mind of his unobservant, unanalytical type, a change had to be marked and dramatic before he noticed it; something in the nature of a shock must accompany it for him to recognize it had happened. And there had been no shock. The spoor of the great moose was much cleaner, now that he caught up with the animal that made it; the blood more frequent; he had noticed the spot where it had rested, its huge body leaving a marked imprint on the soft ground; where it had reached up to eat the leaves of saplings here and there was also visible; he had come undoubtedly very near to it, and any minute now might see its great bulk within range of an easy shot. Yet his ardour had somehow lessened.\n\nHe first realized this change in himself when it suddenly occurred to him that the animal itself had grown less cautious. It must scent him easily now, since a moose, its sight being indifferent, depends chiefly for its safety upon its unusually keen sense of smell, and the wind came from behind him. This now struck him as decidedly uncommon: the moose itself was obviously careless of his close approach. It felt no fear.\n\nIt was this inexplicable alteration in the animal's behaviour that made him recognize, at last, the alteration in his own. He had followed it now for a couple of hours and had descended some eight hundred to a thousand feet; the trees were thinner and more sparsely placed; there were open, park-like places where silver birch, sumach and maple splashed their blazing colours; and a crystal stream, broken by many waterfalls, foamed past towards the bed of the great valley, yet another thousand feet below. By a quiet pool against some over-arching rocks, the moose had evidently paused to drink, paused at its leisure, moreover. Grimwood, rising from a close examination of the direction the creature had taken after drinking\u2014the hoof-marks were fresh and very distinct in the marshy ground about the pool\u2014looked suddenly straight into the great creature's eyes. It was not twenty yards from where he stood, yet he had been standing on that spot for at least ten minutes, caught by the wonder and loneliness of the scene. The moose, therefore, had been close beside him all this time. It had been calmly drinking, undisturbed by his presence, unafraid.\n\nThe shock came now, the shock that woke his heavy nature into realization. For some seconds, probably for minutes, he stood rooted to the ground, motionless, hardly breathing. He stared as though he saw a vision. The animal's head was lowered, but turned obliquely somewhat, so that the eyes, placed sideways in its great head, could see him properly; its immense proboscis hung as though stuffed upon an English wall; he saw the fore-feet planted wide apart, the slope of the enormous shoulders dropping back towards the fine hind-quarters and lean flanks. It was a magnificent bull. The horns and head justified his wildest expectations, they were superb, a record specimen, and a phrase\u2014where had he heard it?\u2014ran vaguely, as from far distance, through his mind: \"the biggest moose in the world.\"\n\nThere was the extraordinary fact, however, that he did not shoot; nor feel the wish to shoot. The familiar instinct, so strong hitherto in his blood, made no sign; the desire to kill apparently had left him. To raise his rifle, aim and fire had become suddenly an absolute impossibility.\n\nHe did not move. The animal and the human stared into each other's eyes for a length of time whose interval he could not measure. Then came a soft noise close beside him: the rifle had slipped from his grasp and fallen with a thud into the mossy earth at his feet. And the moose, for the first time now, was moving. With slow, easy stride, its great weight causing a squelching sound as the feet drew out of the moist ground, it came towards him, the bulk of the shoulders giving it an appearance of swaying like a ship at sea. It reached his side, it almost touched him, the magnificent head bent low, the spread of the gigantic horns lay beneath his very eyes. He could have patted, stroked it. He saw, with a touch of pity, that blood trickled from a sore in its left shoulder, matting the thick hair. It sniffed the fallen rifle.\n\nThen, lifting its head and shoulders again, it sniffed the air, this time with an audible sound that shook from Grimwood's mind the last possibility that he witnessed a vision or dreamed a dream. One moment it gazed into his face, its big brown eyes shining and unafraid, then turned abruptly, and swung away at a speed ever rapidly increasing across the park-like spaces till it was lost finally among the dark tangle of undergrowth beyond. And the Englishman's muscles turned to paper, his paralysis passed, his legs refused to support his weight, and he sank heavily to the ground..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 558", + "text": "It seems he slept, slept long and heavily; he sat up, stretched himself, yawned and rubbed his eyes. The sun had moved across the sky, for the shadows, he saw, now ran from west to east, and they were long shadows. He had slept evidently for hours, and evening was drawing in. He was aware that he felt hungry. In his pouchlike pockets, he had dried meat, sugar, matches, tea, and the little billy that never left him. He would make a fire, boil some tea and eat.\n\nBut he took no steps to carry out his purpose, he felt disinclined to move, he sat thinking, thinking... What was he thinking about? He did not know, he could not say exactly; it was more like fugitive pictures that passed across his mind. Who, and where, was he? This was the Valley of the Beasts, that he knew; he felt sure of nothing else. How long had he been here, and where had he come from, and why? The questions did not linger for their answers, almost as though his interest in them was merely automatic. He felt happy, peaceful, unafraid.\n\nHe looked about him, and the spell of this virgin forest came upon him like a charm; only the sound of falling water, the murmur of wind sighing among innumerable branches, broke the enveloping silence. Overhead, beyond the crests of the towering trees, a cloudless evening sky was paling into transparent orange, opal, mother of pearl. He saw buzzards soaring lazily. A scarlet tanager flashed by. Soon would the owls begin to call and the darkness fall like a sweet black veil and hide all detail, while the stars sparkled in their countless thousands...\n\nA glint of something that shone upon the ground caught his eye\u2014a smooth, polished strip of rounded metal: his rifle. And he started to his feet impulsively, yet not knowing exactly what he meant to do. At the sight of the weapon, something had leaped to life in him, then faded out, died down, and was gone again.\n\n\"I'm\u2014I'm\u2014\" he began muttering to himself, but could not finish what he was about to say. His name had disappeared completely. \"I'm in the Valley of the Beasts,\" he repeated in place of what he sought but could not find.\n\nThis fact, that he was in the Valley of the Beasts, seemed the only positive item of knowledge that he had. About the name something known and familiar clung, though the sequence that led up to it he could not trace. Presently, nevertheless, he rose to his feet, advanced a few steps, stooped and picked up the shining metal thing, his rifle. He examined it a moment, a feeling of dread and loathing rising in him, a sensation of almost horror that made him tremble, then, with a convulsive movement that betrayed an intense reaction of some sort he could not comprehend, he flung the thing far from him into the foaming torrent. He saw the splash it made, he also saw that same instant a large grizzly bear swing heavily along the bank not a dozen yards from where he stood. It, too, heard the splash, for it started, turned, paused a second, then changed its direction and came towards him. It came up close. Its fur brushed his body. It examined him leisurely, as the moose had done, sniffed, half rose upon its terrible hind legs, opened its mouth so that red tongue and gleaming teeth were plainly visible, then flopped back upon all fours again with a deep growling that yet had no anger in it, and swung off at a quick trot back to the bank of the torrent. He had felt its hot breath upon his face, but he had felt no fear. The monster was puzzled but not hostile. It disappeared.\n\n\"They know not\u2014\" he sought for the word \"man,\" but could not find it. \"They have never been hunted.\"\n\nThe words ran through his mind, if perhaps he was not entirely certain of their meaning; they rose, as it were, automatically; a familiar sound lay in them somewhere. At the same time there rose feelings in him that were equally, though in another way, familiar and quite natural, feelings he had once known intimately but long since laid aside.\n\nWhat were they? What was their origin? They seemed distant as the stars, yet were actually in his body, in his blood and nerves, part and parcel of his flesh. Long, long ago... Oh, how long, how long?\n\nThinking was difficult; feeling was what he most easily and naturally managed. He could not think for long; feeling rose up and drowned the effort quickly.\n\nThat huge and awful bear\u2014not a nerve, not a muscle quivered in him as its acrid smell rose to his nostrils, its fur brushed down his legs. Yet he was aware that somewhere there was danger, though not here. Somewhere there was attack, hostility, wicked and calculated plans against him\u2014as against that splendid, roaming animal that had sniffed, examined, then gone its own way, satisfied. Yes, active attack, hostility and careful, cruel plans against his safety, but\u2014not here. Here he was safe, secure, at peace; here he was happy; here he could roam at will, no eye cast sideways into forest depths, no ear pricked high to catch sounds not explained, no nostrils quivering to scent alarm. He felt this, but he did not think it. He felt hungry, thirsty too.\n\nSomething prompted him now at last to act. His billy lay at his feet, and he picked it up; the matches\u2014he carried them in a metal case whose screw top kept out all moisture\u2014were in his hand. Gathering a few dry twigs, he stooped to light them, then suddenly drew back with the first touch of fear he had yet known.\n\nFire! What was fire? The idea was repugnant to him, it was impossible, he was afraid of fire. He flung the metal case after the rifle and saw it gleam in the last rays of sunset, then sink with a little splash beneath the water. Glancing down at his billy, he realized next that he could not make use of it either, nor of the dark dry dusty stuff he had meant to boil in water. He felt no repugnance, certainly no fear, in connexion with these things, only he could not handle them, he did not need them, he had forgotten, yes, \"forgotten,\" what they meant exactly. This strange forgetfulness was increasing in him rapidly, becoming more and more complete with every minute. Yet his thirst must be quenched.\n\nThe next moment he found himself at the water's edge; he stooped to fill his billy; paused, hesitated, examined the rushing water, then abruptly moved a few feet higher up the stream, leaving the metal can behind him. His handling of it had been oddly clumsy, his gestures awkward, even unnatural. He now flung himself down with an easy, simple motion of his entire body, lowered his face to a quiet pool he had found, and drank his fill of the cool, refreshing liquid. But, though unaware of the fact, he did not drink. He lapped.\n\nThen, crouching where he was, he ate the meat and sugar from his pockets, lapped more water, moved back a short distance again into the dry ground beneath the trees, but moved this time without rising to his feet, curled his body into a comfortable position and closed his eyes again to sleep... No single question now raised its head in him. He felt contentment, satisfaction only...\n\nHe stirred, shook himself, opened half an eye and saw, as he had felt already in slumber, that he was not alone. In the park-like spaces in front of him, as in the shadowed fringe of the trees at his back, there was sound and movement, the sound of stealthy feet, the movement of innumerable dark bodies. There was the pad and tread of animals, the stir of backs, of smooth and shaggy beasts, in countless numbers. Upon this host fell the light of a half moon sailing high in a cloudless sky; the gleam of stars, sparkling in the clear night air like diamonds, shone reflected in hundreds of ever-shifting eyes, most of them but a few feet above the ground. The whole valley was alive.\n\nHe sat upon his haunches, staring, staring, but staring in wonder, not in fear, though the foremost of the great host were so near that he could have stretched an arm and touched them. It was an ever-moving, ever-shifting throng he gazed at, spell-bound, in the pale light of moon and stars, now fading slowly towards the approaching dawn. And the smell of the forest itself was not sweeter to him in that moment than the mingled perfume, raw, pungent, acrid, of this furry host of beautiful wild animals that moved like a sea, with a strange murmuring, too, like sea, as the myriad feet and bodies passed to and fro together. Nor was the gleam of the starry, phosphorescent eyes less pleasantly friendly than those happy lamps that light home-lost wanderers to cosy rooms and safety. Through the wild army, in a word, poured to him the deep comfort of the entire valley, a comfort which held both the sweetness of invitation and the welcome of some magical home-coming.\n\nNo thoughts came to him, but feeling rose in a tide of wonder and acceptance. He was in his rightful place. His nature had come home. There was this dim, vague consciousness in him that after long, futile straying in another place where uncongenial conditions had forced him to be unnatural and therefore terrible, he had returned at last where he belonged. Here, in the Valley of the Beasts, he had found peace, security and happiness. He would be\u2014he was at last\u2014himself.\n\nIt was a marvellous, even a magical, scene he watched, his nerves at highest tension yet quite steady, his senses exquisitely alert, yet no uneasiness in the full, accurate reports they furnished. Strong as some deep flood-tide, yet dim, as with untold time and distance, rose over him the spell of long-forgotten memory of a state where he was content and happy, where he was natural. The outlines, as it were, of mighty, primitive pictures, flashed before him, yet were gone again before the detail was filled in.\n\nHe watched the great army of the animals, they were all about him now; he crouched upon his haunches in the centre of an ever-moving circle of wild forest life. Great timber wolves he saw pass to and fro, loping past him with long stride and graceful swing; their red tongues lolling out; they swarmed in hundreds. Behind, yet mingling freely with them, rolled the huge grizzlies, not clumsy as their uncouth bodies promised, but swiftly, lightly, easily, their half tumbling gait masking agility and speed. They gambolled, sometimes they rose and stood half upright, they were comely in their mass and power, they rolled past him so close that he could touch them. And the black bear and the brown went with them, bears beyond counting, monsters and little ones, a splendid multitude. Beyond them, yet only a little further back, where the park-like spaces made free movement easier, rose a sea of horns and antlers like a miniature forest in the silvery moonlight. The immense tribe of deer gathered in vast throngs beneath the starlit sky. Moose and caribou, he saw, the mighty wapiti, and the smaller deer in their crowding thousands. He heard the sound of meeting horns, the tread of innumerable hoofs, the occasional pawing of the ground as the bigger creatures man\u0153uvred for more space about them. A wolf, he saw, was licking gently at the shoulder of a great bull-moose that had been injured. And the tide receded, advanced again, once more receded, rising and falling like a living sea whose waves were animal shapes, the inhabitants of the Valley of the Beasts.\n\nBeneath the quiet moonlight they swayed to and fro before him. They watched him, knew him, recognized him. They made him welcome.\n\nHe was aware, moreover, of a world of smaller life that formed an under-sea, as it were, numerous under-currents rather, running in and out between the great upright legs of the larger creatures. These, though he could not see them clearly, covered the earth, he was aware, in enormous numbers, darting hither and thither, now hiding, now reappearing, too intent upon their busy purposes to pay him attention like their huger comrades, yet ever and anon tumbling against his back, cannoning from his sides, scampering across his legs even, then gone again with a scuttering sound of rapid little feet, and rushing back into the general host beyond. And with this smaller world also he felt at home.\n\nHow long he sat gazing, happy in himself, secure, satisfied, contented, natural, he could not say, but it was long enough for the desire to mingle with what he saw, to know closer contact, to become one with them all\u2014long enough for this deep blind desire to assert itself, so that at length he began to move from his mossy seat towards them, to move, moreover, as they moved, and not upright on two feet.\n\nThe moon was lower now, just sinking behind a towering cedar whose ragged crest broke its light into silvery spray. The stars were a little paler too. A line of faint red was visible beyond the heights at the valley's eastern end.\n\nHe paused and looked about him, as he advanced slowly, aware that the host already made an opening in their ranks and that the bear even nosed the earth in front, as though to show the way that was easiest for him to follow. Then, suddenly, a lynx leaped past him into the low branches of a hemlock, and he lifted his head to admire its perfect poise. He saw in the same instant the arrival of the birds, the army of the eagles, hawks and buzzards, birds of prey\u2014the awakening flight that just precedes the dawn. He saw the flocks and streaming lines, hiding the whitening stars a moment as they passed with a prodigious whirr of wings. There came the hooting of an owl from the tree immediately overhead where the lynx now crouched, but not maliciously, along its branch.\n\nHe started. He half rose to an upright position. He knew not why he did so, knew not exactly why he started. But in the attempt to find his new, and, as it now seemed, his unaccustomed balance, one hand fell against his side and came in contact with a hard straight thing that projected awkwardly from his clothing. He pulled it out, feeling it all over with his fingers. It was a little stick. He raised it nearer to his eyes, examined it in the light of dawn now growing swiftly, remembered, or half remembered what it was\u2014and stood stock still.\n\n\"The totem stick,\" he mumbled to himself, yet audibly, finding his speech, and finding another thing\u2014a glint of peering memory\u2014for the first time since entering the valley.\n\nA shock like fire ran through his body; he straightened himself, aware that a moment before he had been crawling upon his hands and knees; it seemed that something broke in his brain, lifting a veil, flinging a shutter free. And Memory peered dreadfully through the widening gap.\n\n\"I'm\u2014I'm Grimwood,\" his voice uttered, though below his breath. \"Tooshalli's left me. I'm alone...!\"\n\nHe was aware of a sudden change in the animals surrounding him. A big, grey wolf sat three feet away, glaring into his face; at its side an enormous grizzly swayed itself from one foot to the other; behind it, as if looking over its shoulder, loomed a gigantic wapiti, its horns merged in the shadows of the drooping cedar boughs. But the northern dawn was nearer, the sun already close to the horizon. He saw details with sharp distinctness now. The great bear rose, balancing a moment on its massive hind-quarters, then took a step towards him, its front paws spread like arms. Its wicked head lolled horribly, as a huge bull-moose, lowering its horns as if about to charge, came up with a couple of long strides and joined it. A sudden excitement ran quivering over the entire host; the distant ranks moved in a new, unpleasant way; a thousand heads were lifted, ears were pricked, a forest of ugly muzzles pointed up to the wind.\n\nAnd the Englishman, beside himself suddenly with a sense of ultimate terror that saw no possible escape, stiffened and stood rigid. The horror of his position petrified him. Motionless and silent he faced the awful army of his enemies, while the white light of breaking day added fresh ghastliness to the scene which was the setting for his cruel death in the Valley of the Beasts.\n\nAbove him crouched the hideous lynx, ready to spring the instant he sought safety in the tree; above it again, he was aware of a thousand talons of steel, fierce hooked beaks of iron, and the angry beating of prodigious wings.\n\nHe reeled, for the grizzly touched his body with its outstretched paw; the wolf crouched just before its deadly spring; in another second he would have been torn to pieces, crushed, devoured, when terror, operating naturally as ever, released the muscles of his throat and tongue. He shouted with what he believed was his last breath on earth. He called aloud in his frenzy. It was a prayer to whatever gods there be, it was an anguished cry for help to heaven.\n\n\"Ishtot! Great Ishtot, help me!\" his voice rang out, while his hand still clutched the forgotten totem stick.\n\nAnd the Red Heaven heard him.\n\nGrimwood that same instant was aware of a presence that, but for his terror of the beasts, must have frightened him into sheer unconsciousness. A gigantic Red Indian stood before him. Yet, while the figure rose close in front of him, causing the birds to settle and the wild animals to crouch quietly where they stood, it rose also from a great distance, for it seemed to fill the entire valley with its influence, its power, its amazing majesty. In some way, moreover, that he could not understand, its vast appearance included the actual valley itself with all its trees, its running streams, its open spaces and its rocky bluffs. These marked its outline, as it were, the outline of a superhuman shape. There was a mighty bow, there was a quiver of enormous arrows, there was this Redskin figure to whom they belonged.\n\nYet the appearance, the outline, the face and figure too\u2014these were the valley; and when the voice became audible, it was the valley itself that uttered the appalling words. It was the voice of trees and wind, and of running, falling water that woke the echoes in the Valley of the Beasts, as, in that same moment, the sun topped the ridge and filled the scene, the outline of the majestic figure too, with a flood of dazzling light:\n\n\"You have shed blood in this my valley... I will not save...!\"\n\nThe figure melted away into the sunlit forest, merging with the new-born day. But Grimwood saw close against his face the shining teeth, hot fetid breath passed over his cheeks, a power enveloped his whole body as though a mountain crushed him. He closed his eyes. He fell. A sharp, crackling sound passed through his brain, but already unconscious, he did not hear it.\n\nHis eyes opened again, and the first thing they took in was\u2014fire. He shrank back instinctively.\n\n\"It's all right, old man. We'll bring you round. Nothing to be frightened about.\" He saw the face of Iredale looking down into his own. Behind Iredale stood Tooshalli. His face was swollen. Grimwood remembered the blow. The big man began to cry.\n\n\"Painful still, is it?\" Iredale said sympathetically. \"Here, swallow a little more of this. It'll set you right in no time.\"\n\nGrimwood gulped down the spirit. He made a violent effort to control himself, but was unable to keep the tears back. He felt no pain. It was his heart that ached, though why or wherefore, he had no idea.\n\n\"I'm all to pieces,\" he mumbled, ashamed yet somehow not ashamed. \"My nerves are rotten. What's happened?\" There was as yet no memory in him.\n\n\"You've been hugged by a bear, old man. But no bones broken. Tooshalli saved you. He fired in the nick of time\u2014a brave shot, for he might easily have hit you instead of the brute.\"\n\n\"The other brute,\" whispered Grimwood, as the whisky worked in him and memory came slowly back.\n\n\"Where are we?\" he asked presently, looking about him.\n\nHe saw a lake, canoes drawn up on the shore, two tents, and figures moving. Iredale explained matters briefly, then left him to sleep a bit. Tooshalli, it appeared, travelling without rest, had reached Iredale's camping ground twenty-four hours after leaving his employer. He found it deserted, Iredale and his Indian being on the hunt. When they returned at nightfall, he had explained his presence in his brief native fashion: \"He struck me and I quit. He hunt now alone in Ishtot's Valley of the Beasts. He is dead, I think. I come to tell you.\"\n\nIredale and his guide, with Tooshalli as leader, started off then and there, but Grimwood had covered a considerable distance, though leaving an easy track to follow. It was the moose tracks and the blood that chiefly guided them. They came up with him suddenly enough\u2014in the grip of an enormous bear.\n\nIt was Tooshalli that fired.\n\nThe Indian lives now in easy circumstances, all his needs cared for, while Grimwood, his benefactor but no longer his employer, has given up hunting. He is a quiet, easy-tempered, almost gentle sort of fellow, and people wonder rather why he hasn't married. \"Just the fellow to make a good father,\" is what they say; \"so kind, good-natured and affectionate.\" Among his pipes, in a glass case over the mantlepiece, hangs a totem stick. He declares it saved his soul, but what he means by the expression he has never quite explained." + }, + { + "title": "The Call by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The incident\u2014story it never was, perhaps\u2014began tamely, almost meanly; it ended upon a note of strange, unearthly wonder that has haunted him ever since. In Headley's memory, at any rate, it stands out as the loveliest, the most amazing thing he ever witnessed. Other emotions, too, contributed to the vividness of the picture. That he had felt jealousy towards his old pal, Arthur Deane, shocked him in the first place; it seemed impossible until it actually happened. But that the jealousy was proved afterwards to have been without a cause shocked him still more. He felt ashamed and miserable.\n\nFor him, the actual incident began when he received a note from Mrs. Blondin asking him to the Priory for a week-end, or for longer, if he could manage it.\n\nCaptain Arthur Deane, she mentioned, was staying with her at the moment, and a warm welcome awaited him. Iris she did not mention\u2014Iris Manning, the interesting and beautiful girl for whom it was well known he had a considerable weakness. He found a good-sized house party; there was fishing in the little Sussex river, tennis, golf not far away, while two motor cars brought the remoter country across the downs into easy reach. Also there was a bit of duck shooting for those who cared to wake at 3 a.m. and paddle up-stream to the marshes where the birds were feeding.\n\n\"Have you brought your gun?\" was the first thing Arthur said to him when he arrived. \"Like a fool, I left mine in town.\"\n\n\"I hope you haven't,\" put in Miss Manning; \"because if you have I must get up one fine morning at three o'clock.\" She laughed merrily, and there was an undernote of excitement in the laugh.\n\nCaptain Headley showed his surprise. \"That you were a Diana had escaped my notice, I'm ashamed to say,\" he replied lightly. \"Yet I've known you some years, haven't I?\" He looked straight at her, and the soft yet searching eye, turning from his friend, met his own securely. She was appraising him, for the hundreth time, and he, for the hundreth time, was thinking how pretty she was, and wondering how long the prettiness would last after marriage.\n\n\"I'm not,\" he heard her answer. \"That's just it. But I've promised.\"\n\n\"Rather!\" said Arthur gallantly. \"And I shall hold you to it,\" he added still more gallantly\u2014too gallantly, Headley thought. \"I couldn't possibly get up at cockcrow without a very special inducement, could I, now? You know me, Dick!\"\n\n\"Well, anyhow, I've brought my gun,\" Headley replied evasively, \"so you've no excuse, either of you. You'll have to go.\" And while they were laughing and chattering about it, Mrs. Blondin clinched the matter for them. Provisions were hard to come by; the larder really needed a brace or two of birds; it was the least they could do in return for what she called amusingly her \"Armistice hospitality.\"\n\n\"So I expect you to get up at three,\" she chaffed them, \"and return with your Victory birds.\"\n\nIt was from this preliminary skirmish over the tea-table on the law five minutes after his arrival that Dick Headley realized easily enough the little game in progress. As a man of experience, just on the wrong side of forty, it was not difficult to see the cards each held. He sighed. Had he guessed an intrigue was on foot he would not have come, yet he might have known that wherever his hostess was, there were the vultures gathered together. Matchmaker by choice and instinct, Mrs. Blondin could not help herself. True to her name, she was always balancing on matrimonial tightropes\u2014for others.\n\nHer cards, at any rate, were obvious enough; she had laid them on the table for him. He easily read her hand. The next twenty-four hours confirmed this reading. Having made up her mind that Iris and Arthur were destined for each other, she had grown impatient; they had been ten days together, yet Iris was still free. They were good friends only. With calculation, she, therefore, took a step that must bring things further. She invited Dick Headley, whose weakness for the girl was common knowledge. The card was indicated; she played it. Arthur must come to the point or see another man carry her off. This, at least, she planned, little dreaming that the dark King of Spades would interfere.\n\nMiss Manning's hand also was fairly obvious, for both men were extremely eligible partis. She was getting on; one or other was to become her husband before the party broke up. This, in crude language, was certainly in her cards, though, being a nice and charming girl, she might camouflage it cleverly to herself and others. Her eyes, on each man in turn when the shooting expedition was being discussed, revealed her part in the little intrigue clearly enough. It was all, thus far, as commonplace as could be.\n\nBut there were two more hands Headley had to read\u2014his own and his friend's; and these, he admitted honestly, were not so easy. To take his own first. It was true he was fond of the girl and had often tried to make up his mind to ask her. Without being conceited, he had good reason to believe his affection was returned and that she would accept him. There was no ecstatic love on either side, for he was no longer a boy of twenty, nor was she unscathed by tempestuous love affairs that had scorched the first bloom from her face and heart. But they understood one another; they were an honest couple; she was tired of flirting; both wanted to marry and settle down. Unless a better man turned up she probably would say \"Yes\" without humbug or delay. It was this last reflection that brought him to the final hand he had to read.\n\nHere he was puzzled. Arthur Deane's r\u00f4le in the teacup strategy, for the first time since they had known one another, seemed strange, uncertain. Why? Because, though paying no attention to the girl openly, he met her clandestinely, unknown to the rest of the house-party, and above all without telling his intimate pal\u2014at three o'clock in the morning.\n\nThe house-party was in full swing, with a touch of that wild, reckless gaiety which followed the end of the war: \"Let us be happy before a worse thing comes upon us,\" was in many hearts. After a crowded day they danced till early in the morning, while doubtful weather prevented the early shooting expedition after duck. The third night Headley contrived to disappear early to bed. He lay there thinking. He was puzzled over his friend's r\u00f4le, over the clandestine meeting in particular. It was the morning before, waking very early, he had been drawn to the window by an unusual sound\u2014the cry of a bird. Was it a bird? In all his experience he had never heard such a curious, half-singing call before. He listened a moment, thinking it must have been a dream, yet with the odd cry still ringing in his ears. It was repeated close beneath his open window, a long, low-pitched cry with three distinct following notes in it.\n\nHe sat up in bed and listened hard. No bird that he knew could make such sounds. But it was not repeated a third time, and out of sheer curiosity he went to the window and looked out. Dawn was creeping over the distant downs; he saw their outline in the grey pearly light; he saw the lawn below, stretching down to the little river at the bottom, where a curtain of faint mist hung in the air. And on this lawn he also saw Arthur Deane\u2014with Iris Manning.\n\nOf course, he reflected, they were going after the duck. He turned to look at his watch; it was three o'clock. The same glance, however, showed him his gun standing in the corner. So they were going without a gun. A sharp pang of unexpected jealousy shot through him. He was just going to shout out something or other, wishing them good luck, or asking if they had found another gun, perhaps, when a cold touch crept down his spine. The same instant his heart contracted. Deane had followed the girl into the summer-house, which stood on the right. It was not the shooting expedition at all. Arthur was meeting her for another purpose. The blood flowed back, filling his head. He felt an eavesdropper, a sneak, a detective; but, for all that, he felt also jealous. And his jealousy seemed chiefly because Arthur had not told him.\n\nOf this, then, he lay thinking in bed on the third night. The following day he had said nothing, but had crossed the corridor and put the gun in his friend's room. Arthur, for his part, had said nothing either. For the first time in their long, long friendship, there lay a secret between them. To Headley the unexpected revelation came with pain.\n\nFor something like a quarter of a century these two had been bosom friends; they had camped together, been in the army together, taken their pleasure together, each the full confidant of the other in all the things that go to make up men's lives. Above all, Headley had been the one and only recipient of Arthur's unhappy love story. He knew the girl, knew his friend's deep passion, and also knew his terrible pain when she was lost at sea. Arthur was burnt out, finished, out of the running, so far as marriage was concerned. He was not a man to love a second time. It was a great and poignant tragedy. Headley, as confidant, knew all. But more than that\u2014Arthur, on his side, knew his friend's weakness for Iris Manning, knew that a marriage was still possible and likely between them. They were true as steel to one another, and each man, oddly enough, had once saved the other's life, thus adding to the strength of a great natural tie.\n\nYet now one of them, feigning innocence by day, even indifference, secretly met his friend's girl by night, and kept the matter to himself. It seemed incredible. With his own eyes Headley had seen him on the lawn, passing in the faint grey light through the mist into the summer-house, where the girl had just preceded him. He had not seen her face, but he had seen the skirt sweep round the corner of the wooden pillar. He had not waited to see them come out again.\n\nSo he now lay wondering what r\u00f4le his old friend was playing in this little intrigue that their hostess, Mrs. Blondin, helped to stage. And, oddly enough, one minor detail stayed in his mind with a curious vividness. As naturalist, hunter, nature-lover, the cry of that strange bird, with its three mournful notes, perplexed him exceedingly.\n\nA knock came at his door, and the door pushed open before he had time to answer. Deane himself came in.\n\n\"Wise man,\" he exclaimed in an easy tone, \"got off to bed. Iris was asking where you were.\" He sat down on the edge of the mattress, where Headley was lying with a cigarette and an open book he had not read. The old sense of intimacy and comradeship rose in the latter's heart. Doubt and suspicion faded. He prized his great friendship. He met the familiar eyes. \"Impossible,\" he said to himself, \"absolutely impossible! He's not playing a game; he's not a rotter!\" He pushed over his cigarette case, and Arthur lighted one.\n\n\"Done in,\" he remarked shortly, with the first puff. \"Can't stand it any more. I'm off to town to-morrow.\"\n\nHeadley stared in amazement. \"Fed up already?\" he asked. \"Why, I rather like it. It's quite amusing. What's wrong, old man?\"\n\n\"This match-making,\" said Deane bluntly. \"Always throwing that girl at my head. If it's not the duck-shooting stunt at 3 a.m., it's something else. She doesn't care for me and I don't care for her. Besides\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped, and the expression of his face changed suddenly. A sad, quiet look of tender yearning came into his clear brown eyes.\n\n\"You know, Dick,\" he went on in a low, half-reverent tone. \"I don't want to marry. I never can.\"\n\nDick's heart stirred within him. \"Mary,\" he said, understandingly.\n\nThe other nodded, as though the memories were still too much for him. \"I'm still miserably lonely for her,\" he said. \"Can't help it simply. I feel utterly lost without her. Her memory to me is everything.\" He looked deep into his pal's eyes. \"I'm married to that,\" he added very firmly.\n\nThey pulled their cigarettes a moment in silence. They belonged to the male type that conceals emotion behind schoolboy language.\n\n\"It's hard luck,\" said Headley gently, \"rotten luck, old man, I understand.\" Arthur's head nodded several times in succession as he smoked. He made no remark for some minutes. Then presently he said, as though it had no particular importance\u2014for thus old friends show frankness to each other\u2014\"Besides, anyhow, it's you the girl's dying for, not me. She's blind as a bat, old Blondin. Even when I'm with her\u2014thrust with her by that old matchmaker for my sins\u2014it's you she talks about. All the talk leads up to you and yours. She's devilish fond of you.\" He paused a moment and looked searchingly into his friend's face. \"I say, old man\u2014are you\u2014I mean, do you mean business there? Because\u2014excuse me interfering\u2014but you'd better be careful. She's a good sort, you know, after all.\"\n\n\"Yes, Arthur, I do like her a bit,\" Dick told him frankly. \"But I can't make up my mind quite. You see, it's like this\u2014\"\n\nAnd they talked the matter over as old friends will, until finally Arthur chucked his cigarette into the grate and got up to go. \"Dead to the world,\" he said, with a yawn. \"I'm off to bed. Give you a chance, too,\" he added with a laugh. It was after midnight.\n\nThe other turned, as though something had suddenly occurred to him.\n\n\"By the bye, Arthur,\" he said abruptly, \"what bird makes this sound? I heard it the other morning. Most extraordinary cry. You know everything that flies. What is it?\" And, to the best of his ability, he imitated the strange three-note cry he had heard in the dawn two mornings before.\n\nTo his amazement and keen distress, his friend, with a sound like a stifled groan, sat down upon the bed without a word. He seemed startled. His face was white. He stared. He passed a hand, as in pain, across his forehead.\n\n\"Do it again,\" he whispered, in a hushed, nervous voice. \"Once again\u2014for me.\"\n\nAnd Headley, looking at him, repeated the queer notes, a sudden revulsion of feeling rising through him. \"He's fooling me after all,\" ran in his heart, \"my old, old pal\u2014\"\n\nThere was silence for a full minute. Then Arthur, stammering a bit, said lamely, a certain hush in his voice still: \"Where in the world did you hear that\u2014and when?\"\n\nDick Headley sat up in bed. He was not going to lose this friendship, which, to him, was more than the love of woman. He must help. His pal was in distress and difficulty. There were circumstances, he realized, that might be too strong for the best man in the world\u2014sometimes. No, by God, he would play the game and help him out!\n\n\"Arthur, old chap,\" he said affectionately, almost tenderly. \"I heard it two mornings ago\u2014on the lawn below my window here. It woke me up. I\u2014I went to look. Three in the morning, about.\"\n\nArthur amazed him then. He first took another cigarette and lit it steadily. He looked round the room vaguely, avoiding, it seemed, the other's eyes. Then he turned, pain in his face, and gazed straight at him.\n\n\"You saw\u2014nothing?\" he asked in a louder voice, but a voice that had something very real and true in it. It reminded Headley of the voice he heard when he was fainting from exhaustion, and Arthur had said, \"Take it, I tell you. I'm all right,\" and had passed over the flask, though his own throat and sight and heart were black with thirst. It was a voice that had command in it, a voice that did not lie because it could not\u2014yet did lie and could lie\u2014when occasion warranted.\n\nHeadley knew a second's awful struggle.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he answered quietly, after his little pause. \"Why?\"\n\nFor perhaps two minutes his friend hid his face. Then he looked up.\n\n\"Only,\" he whispered, \"because that was our secret lover's cry. It seems so strange you heard it and not I. I've felt her so close of late\u2014Mary!\"\n\nThe white face held very steady, the firm lips did not tremble, but it was evident that the heart knew anguish that was deep and poignant. \"We used it to call each other\u2014in the old days. It was our private call. No one else in the world knew it but Mary and myself.\"\n\nDick Headley was flabbergasted. He had no time to think, however.\n\n\"It's odd you should hear it and not I,\" his friend repeated. He looked hurt, bewildered, wounded. Then suddenly his face brightened. \"I know,\" he cried suddenly. \"You and I are pretty good pals. There's a tie between us and all that. Why, it's tel\u2014telepathy, or whatever they call it. That's what it is.\"\n\nHe got up abruptly. Dick could think of nothing to say but to repeat the other's words. \"Of course, of course. That's it,\" he said, \"telepathy.\" He stared\u2014anywhere but at his pal.\n\n\"Night, night!\" he heard from the door, and before he could do more than reply in similar vein Arthur was gone.\n\nHe lay for a long time, thinking, thinking. He found it all very strange. Arthur in this emotional state was new to him. He turned it over and over. Well, he had known good men behave queerly when wrought up. That recognition of the bird's cry was strange, of course, but\u2014he knew the cry of a bird when he heard it, though he might not know the actual bird. That was no human whistle. Arthur was\u2014inventing. No, that was not possible. He was worked up, then, over something, a bit hysterical perhaps. It had happened before, though in a milder way, when his heart attacks came on. They affected his nerves and head a little, it seemed. He was a deep sort, Dick remembered. Thought turned and twisted in him, offering various solutions, some absurd, some likely. He was a nervous, high-strung fellow underneath, Arthur was. He remembered that. Also he remembered, anxiously again, that his heart was not quite sound, though what that had to do with the present tangle he did not see.\n\nYet it was hardly likely that he would bring in Mary as an invention, an excuse\u2014Mary, the most sacred memory in his life, the deepest, truest, best. He had sworn, anyhow, that Iris Manning meant nothing to him.\n\nThrough all his speculations, behind every thought, ran this horrid working jealousy. It poisoned him. It twisted truth. It moved like a wicked snake through mind and heart. Arthur, gripped by his new, absorbing love for Iris Manning, lied. He couldn't believe it, he didn't believe it, he wouldn't believe it\u2014yet jealousy persisted in keeping the idea alive in him. It was a dreadful thought. He fell asleep on it.\n\nBut his sleep was uneasy with feverish, unpleasant dreams that rambled on in fragments without coming to conclusion. Then, suddenly, the cry of the strange bird came into his dream. He started, turned over, woke up. The cry still continued. It was not a dream. He jumped out of bed.\n\nThe room was grey with early morning, the air fresh and a little chill. The cry came floating over the lawn as before. He looked out, pain clutching at his heart. Two figures stood below, a man and a girl, and the man was Arthur Deane. Yet the light was so dim, the morning being overcast, that had he not expected to see his friend, he would scarcely have recognized the familiar form in that shadowy outline that stood close beside the girl. Nor could he, perhaps, have recognized Iris Manning. Their backs were to him. They moved away, disappearing again into the little summer-house, and this time\u2014he saw it beyond question\u2014the two were hand in hand. Vague and uncertain as the figures were in the early twilight, he was sure of that.\n\nThe first disagreeable sensation of surprise, disgust, anger that sickened him turned quickly, however, into one of another kind altogether. A curious feeling of superstitious dread crept over him, and a shiver ran again along his nerves.\n\n\"Hallo, Arthur!\" he called from the window. There was no answer. His voice was certainly audible in the summer-house. But no one came. He repeated the call a little louder, waited in vain for thirty seconds, then came, the same moment, to a decision that even surprised himself, for the truth we he could no longer bear the suspense of waiting. He must see his friend at once and have it out with him. He turned and went deliberately down the corridor to Deane's bedroom. He would wait there for his return and know the truth from his own lips. But also another thought had come\u2014the gun. He had quite forgotten it\u2014the safety-catch was out of order. He had not warned him.\n\nHe found the door closed but not locked; opening it cautiously, he went in.\n\nBut the unexpectedness of what he saw gave him a genuine shock. He could hardly suppress a cry. Everything in the room was neat and orderly, no sign of disturbance anywhere, and it was not empty. There, in bed, before his very eyes, was Arthur. The clothes were turned back a little; he saw the pyjamas open at the throat; he lay sound asleep, deeply, peacefully asleep.\n\nSo surprised, indeed, was Headley that, after staring a moment, almost unable to believe his sight, he then put out a hand and touched him gently, cautiously on the forehead. But Arthur did not stir or wake; his breathing remained deep and regular. He lay sleeping like a baby.\n\nHeadley glanced round the room, noticed the gun in the corner where he himself had put it the day before, and then went out, closing the door behind him softly.\n\nArthur Deane, however, did not leave for London as he had intended, because he felt unwell and kept to his room upstairs. It was only a slight attack, apparently, but he must lie quiet. There was no need to send for a doctor; he knew just what to do; these passing attacks were common enough. He would be up and about again very shortly. Headley kept him company, saying no single word of what had happened. He read aloud to him, chatted and cheered him up. He had no other visitors. Within twenty-four hours he was himself once more. He and his friend had planned to leave the following day.\n\nBut Headley, that last night in the house, felt an odd uneasiness and could not sleep. All night long he sat up reading, looking out of the window, smoking in a chair where he could see the stars and hear the wind and watch the huge shadow of the downs. The house lay very still as the hours passed. He dozed once or twice. Why did he sit up in this unnecessary way? Why did he leave his door ajar so that the slightest sound of another door opening, or of steps passing along the corridor, must reach him? Was he anxious for his friend? Was he suspicious? What was his motive, what his secret purpose?\n\nHeadley did not know, and could not even explain it to himself. He felt uneasy, that was all he knew. Not for worlds would he have let himself go to sleep or lose full consciousness that night. It was very odd; he could not understand himself. He merely obeyed a strange, deep instinct that bade him wait and watch. His nerves were jumpy; in his heart lay some unexplicable anxiety that was pain.\n\nThe dawn came slowly; the stars faded one by one; the line of the downs showed their grand bare curves against the sky; cool and cloudless the September morning broke above the little Sussex pleasure house. He sat and watched the east grow bright. The early wind brought a scent of marshes and the sea into his room. Then suddenly it brought a sound as well\u2014the haunting cry of the bird with its three following notes. And this time there came an answer.\n\nHeadley knew then why he had sat up. A wave of emotion swept him as he heard\u2014an emotion he could not attempt to explain. Dread, wonder, longing seized him. For some seconds he could not leave his chair because he did not dare to. The low-pitched cries of call and answer rang in his ears like some unearthly music. With an effort he started up, went to the window and looked out.\n\nThis time the light was sharp and clear. No mist hung in the air. He saw the crimsoning sky reflected like a band of shining metal in the reach of river beyond the lawn. He saw dew on the grass, a sheet of pallid silver. He saw the summer-house, empty of any passing figures. For this time the two figures stood plainly in view before his eyes upon the lawn. They stood there, hand in hand, sharply defined, unmistakable in form and outline, their faces, moreover, turned upwards to the window where he stood, staring down in pain and amazement at them\u2014at Arthur Deane and Mary.\n\nThey looked into his eyes. He tried to call, but no sound left his throat. They began to move across the dew-soaked lawn. They went, he saw, with a floating, undulating motion towards the river shining in the dawn. Their feet left no marks upon the grass. They reached the bank, but did not pause in their going. They rose a little, floating like silent birds across the river. Turning in mid-stream, they smiled towards him, waved their hands with a gesture of farewell, then, rising still higher into the opal dawn, their figures passed into the distance slowly, melting away against the sunlit marshes and the shadowing downs beyond. They disappeared.\n\nHeadley never quite remembers actually leaving the window, crossing the room, or going down the passage. Perhaps he went at once, perhaps he stood gazing into the air above the downs for a considerable time, unable to tear himself away. He was in some marvellous dream, it seemed. The next thing he remembers, at any rate, was that he was standing beside his friend's bed, trying, in his distraught anguish of heart, to call him from that sleep which, on earth, knows no awakening." + }, + { + "title": "Egyptian Sorcery by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "Sanfield paused as he was about to leave the Underground station at Victoria, and cursed the weather. When he left the City it was fine; now it was pouring with rain, and he had neither overcoat nor umbrella. Not a taxi was discoverable in the dripping gloom. He would get soaked before he reached his rooms in Sloane Street.\n\nHe stood for some minutes, thinking how vile London was in February, and how depressing life was in general. He stood also, in that moment, though he knew it not, upon the edge of a singular adventure. Looking back upon it in later years, he often remembered this particularly wretched moment of a pouring wet February evening, when everything seemed wrong, and Fate had loaded the dice against him, even in the matter of weather and umbrellas.\n\nFate, however, without betraying her presence, was watching him through the rain and murk; and Fate, that night, had strange, mysterious eyes. Fantastic cards lay up her sleeve. The rain, his weariness and depression, his physical fatigue especially, seemed the conditions she required before she played these curious cards. Something new and wonderful fluttered close. Romance flashed by him across the driving rain and touched his cheek. He was too exasperated to be aware of it.\n\nThings had gone badly that day at the office, where he was junior partner in a small firm of engineers. Threatened trouble at the works had come to a head. A strike seemed imminent. To add to his annoyance, a new client, whose custom was of supreme importance, had just complained bitterly of the delay in the delivery of his machinery. The senior partners had left the matter in Sanfield's hands; he had not succeeded. The angry customer swore he would hold the firm to its contract. They could deliver or pay up\u2014whichever suited them. The junior partner had made a mess of things.\n\nThe final words on the telephone still rang in his ears as he stood sheltering under the arcade, watching the downpour, and wondering whether he should make a dash for it or wait on the chance of its clearing up\u2014when a further blow was dealt him as the rain-soaked poster of an evening paper caught his eye: \"Riots in Egypt. Heavy Fall in Egyptian Securities,\" he read with blank dismay. Buying a paper he turned feverishly to the City article\u2014to find his worst fears confirmed. Delta Lands, in which nearly all his small capital was invested, had declined a quarter on the news, and would evidently decline further still. The riots were going on in the towns nearest to their property. Banks had been looted, crops destroyed; the trouble was deep-seated.\n\nSo grave was the situation that mere weather seemed suddenly of no account at all. He walked home doggedly in the drenching rain, paying less attention to it than if it had been Scotch mist. The water streamed from his hat, dripped down his back and neck, splashed him with mud and grime from head to foot. He was soaked to the skin. He hardly noticed it. His capital had depreciated by half, at least, and possibly was altogether lost; his position at the office was insecure. How could mere weather matter?\n\nSitting, eventually, before his fire in dry clothes, after an apology for a dinner he had no heart to eat, he reviewed the situation. He faced a possible total loss of his private capital. Next, the position of his firm caused him grave uneasiness, since, apart from his own mishandling of the new customer, the threatened strike might ruin it completely; a long strain on its limited finances was out of the question. George Sanfield certainly saw things at their worst. He was now thirty-five. A fresh start\u2014the mere idea of it made him shudder\u2014occurred as a possibility in the near future. Vitality, indeed, was at a low ebb, it seemed. Mental depression, great physical fatigue, weariness of life in general made his spirits droop alarmingly, so that almost he felt tired of living. His tie with existence, at any rate, just then was dangerously weak.\n\nThought turned next to the man on whose advice he had staked his all in Delta Lands. Morris had important Egyptian interests in various big companies and enterprises along the Nile. He had first come to the firm with a letter of introduction upon some business matter, which the junior partner had handled so successfully that acquaintance thus formed had ripened into a more personal tie. The two men had much in common; their temperaments were suited; understanding grew between them; they felt at home and comfortable with one another. They became friends; they felt a mutual confidence. When Morris paid his rare visits to England, they spent much time together; and it was on one of these occasions that the matter of the Egyptian shares was mentioned, Morris urgently advising their purchase.\n\nSanfield explained his own position clearly enough, but his friend was so confident and optimistic that the purchase eventually had been made. There had been, moreover, Sanfield now remembered, the flavour of a peculiarly intimate and personal kind about the deal. He had remarked it, with a touch of surprise, at the moment, though really it seemed natural enough. Morris was very earnest, holding his friend's interest at heart; he was affectionate almost.\n\n\"I'd like to do you this good turn, old man,\" he said. \"I have the strong feeling, somehow, that I owe you this, though heaven alone knows why!\" After a pause he added, half shyly: \"It may be one of those old memories we hear about nowadays cropping up out of some previous life together.\" Before the other could reply, he went on to explain that only three men were in the parent syndicate, the shares being unobtainable. \"I'll set some of my own aside for you\u2014four thousand or so, if you like.\"\n\nThey laughed together; Sanfield thanked him warmly; the deal was carried out. But the recipient of the favour had wondered a little at the sudden increase of intimacy even while he liked it and responded.\n\nHad he been a fool, he now asked himself, to swallow the advice, putting all his eggs into a single basket? He knew very little about Morris after all... Yet, while reflection showed him that the advice was honest, and the present riots no fault of the adviser's, he found his thoughts turning in a steady stream towards the man. The affairs of the firm took second place. It was Morris, with his deep-set eyes, his curious ways, his dark skin burnt brick-red by a fierce Eastern sun; it was Morris, looking almost like an Egyptian, who stood before him as he sat thinking gloomily over his dying fire.\n\nHe longed to talk with him, to ask him questions, to seek advice. He saw him very vividly against the screen of thought; Morris stood beside him now, gazing out across the limitless expanse of tawny sand. He had in his eyes the \"distance\" that sailors share with men whose life has been spent amid great trackless wastes. Morris, moreover, now he came to think of it, seemed always a little out of place in England. He had few relatives and, apparently, no friends; he was always intensely pleased when the time came to return to his beloved Nile. He had once mentioned casually a sister who kept house for him when duty detained him in Cairo, but, even here, he was something of an Oriental, rarely speaking of his women folk. Egypt, however, plainly drew him like a magnet. Resistance involved disturbance in his being, even ill-health. Egypt was \"home\" to him, and his friend, though he had never been there, felt himself its potent spell.\n\nAnother curious trait Sanfield remembered, too\u2014his friend's childish superstition; his belief, or half-belief, in magic and the supernatural. Sanfield, amused, had ascribed it to the long sojourn in a land where anything unusual is at once ascribed to spiritual agencies. Morris owed his entire fortune, if his tale could be believed, to the magical apparition of an unearthly kind in some lonely wadi among the Bedouins. A sand-diviner had influenced another successful speculation... He was a picturesque figure, whichever way one took him: yet a successful business man into the bargain.\n\nThese reflections and memories, on the other hand, brought small comfort to the man who had tempted Fate by following his advice. It was only a little strange how Morris now dominated his thoughts, directing them towards himself. Morris was in Egypt at the moment.\n\nHe went to bed at length, filled with uneasy misgivings, but for a long time he could not sleep. He tossed restlessly, his mind still running on the subject of his long reflections. He ached with tiredness. He dropped off at last. Then came a nightmare dream, in which the firm's works were sold for nearly nothing to an old Arab sheikh who wished to pay for them\u2014in goats. He woke up in a cold perspiration. He had uneasy thoughts. His fancy was travelling. He could not rest.\n\nTo distract his mind, he turned on the light and tried to read, and, eventually, towards morning, fell into a sleep of sheer exhaustion. And his final thought\u2014he knew not exactly why\u2014was a sentence Morris had made use of long ago: \"I feel I owe you a good turn; I'd like to do something for you...\"\n\nThis was the memory in his mind as he slipped off into unconsciousness.\n\nBut what happens when the mind is unconscious and the tired body lies submerged in deep sleep, no man, they say, can really tell." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 561", + "text": "The next thing he knew he was walking along a sun-baked street in some foreign town that was familiar, although, at first, its name escaped him. Colour, softness, and warmth pervaded it; there was sparkle and lightness in the exhilarating air; it was an Eastern town.\n\nThough early morning, a number of people were already stirring; strings of camels passed him, loaded with clover, bales of merchandise, and firewood. Gracefully-draped women went by silently, carrying water jars of burnt clay upon their heads. Rude wooden shutters were being taken down in the bazaars; the smoke of cooking-fires rose in the blue spirals through the quiet air. He felt strangely at home and happy. The light, the radiance stirred him. He passed a mosque from which the worshippers came pouring in a stream of colour.\n\nYet, though an Eastern town, it was not wholly Oriental, for he saw that many of the buildings were of semi-European design, and that the natives sometimes wore European dress, except for the fez upon the head. Among them were Europeans, too. Staring into the faces of the passers-by he found, to his vexation, that he could not focus sight as usual, and that the nearer he approached, the less clearly he discerned the features. The faces, upon close attention, at once grew shadowy, merged into each other, or, in some odd fashion, melted into the dazzling sunshine that was their background. All his attempts in this direction failed; impatience seized him; of surprise, however, he was not conscious. Yet this mingled vagueness and intensity seemed perfectly natural.\n\nFilled with a stirring curiosity, he made a strong effort to concentrate his attention, only to discover that this vagueness, this difficulty of focus, lay in his own being, too. He wandered on, unaware exactly where he was going, yet not much perturbed, since there was an objective in view, he knew, and this objective must eventually be reached. Its nature, however, for the moment entirely eluded him.\n\nThe sense of familiarity, meanwhile, increased; he had been in this town before, although not quite within recoverable memory. It seemed, perhaps, the general atmosphere, rather than the actual streets, he knew; a certain perfume in the air, a tang of indefinable sweetness, a vitality in the radiant sunshine. The dark faces that he could not focus, he yet knew; the flowing garments of blue and red and yellow, the softly-slippered feet, the slouching camels, the burning human eyes that faded ere he fully caught them\u2014the entire picture in this blazing sunlight lay half-hidden, half-revealed. And an extraordinary sense of happiness and well-being flooded him as he walked; he felt at home; comfort and bliss stole over him. Almost he knew his way about. This was a place he loved and knew.\n\nThe complete silence, moreover, did not strike him as peculiar until, suddenly, it was broken in a startling fashion. He heard his own name spoken. It sounded close beside his ear.\n\n\"George Sanfield!\" The voice was familiar. Morris called him. He realized then the truth. He was, of course, in Cairo.\n\nYet, instead of turning to discover the speaker at his side, he hurried forward, as though he knew that the voice had come through distance. His consciousness cleared and lightened; he felt more alive; his eyes now focused the passers-by without difficulty. He was there to find Morris, and Morris was directing him. All was explained and natural again. He hastened. But, even while he hastened, he knew that his personal desire to speak with his friend about Egyptian shares and Delta Lands was not his single object. Behind it, further in among as yet unstirring shadows, lay another deeper purpose. Yet he did not trouble about it, nor make a conscious effort at discovery. Morris was doing him that \"good turn I feel I owe you.\" This conviction filled him overwhelmingly. The question of how and why did not once occur to him. A strange, great happiness rose in him.\n\nUpon the outskirts of the town now, he found himself approaching a large building in the European style, with wide verandas and a cultivated garden filled with palm trees. A well-kept drive of yellow sand led to its chief entrance, and the man in khaki drill and riding-breeches walking along this drive, not ten yards in front of him, was\u2014Morris. He overtook him, but his cry of welcome recognition was not answered. Morris, walking with bowed head and stooping shoulders, seemed intensely preoccupied; he had not heard the call.\n\n\"Here I am, old fellow!\" exclaimed his friend, holding out a hand. \"I've come, you see...!\" then paused aghast before the altered face. Morris paid no attention. He walked straight on as though he had not heard. It was the distraught and anguished expression on the drawn and haggard features that impressed the other most. The silence he took without surprise.\n\nIt was the pain and suffering in his friend that occupied him. The dark rims beneath heavy eyes, the evidence of sleepless nights, of long anxiety and ceaseless dread, afflicted him with their too-plain story. The man was overwhelmed with some great sorrow. Sanfield forgot his personal trouble; this larger, deeper grief usurped its place entirely.\n\n\"Morris! Morris!\" he cried yet more eagerly than before. \"I've come, you see. Tell me what's the matter. I believe\u2014that I can\u2014help you...!\"\n\nThe other turned, looking past him through the air. He made no answer. The eyes went through him. He walked straight on, and Sanfield walked at his side in silence. Through the large door they passed together, Morris paying as little attention to him as though he were not there, and in the small chamber they now entered, evidently a waiting-room, an Egyptian servant approached, uttered some inaudible words, and then withdrew, leaving them alone together.\n\nIt seemed that time leaped forward, yet stood still; the passage of minutes, that is to say, was irregular, almost fanciful. Whether the interval was long or short, however, Morris spent it pacing up and down the little room, his hands thrust deep into his pockets, his mind oblivious of all else but his absorbing anxiety and grief. To his friend, who watched him by the wall with intense desire to help, he paid no attention. The latter's spoken words went by him, entirely unnoticed; he gave no sign of seeing him; his eyes, as he paced up and down, muttering inaudibly to himself, were fixed every few seconds on an inner door. Beyond that door, Sanfield now divined, lay someone who hesitated on the narrow frontier between life and death.\n\nIt opened suddenly and a man, in overall and rubber gloves, came out, his face grave yet with faint signs of hope about it\u2014a doctor, clearly, straight from the operating table. Morris, standing rigid in his tracks, listened to something spoken, for the lips were in movement, though no words were audible. The operation, Sanfield divined, had been successful, though danger was still present. The two men passed out, then, into the hall and climbed a wide staircase to the floor above, Sanfield following noiselessly, though so close that he could touch them. Entering a large, airy room where French windows, carefully shaded with green blinds opened on to a veranda, they approached a bed. Two nurses bent over it. The occupant was at first invisible.\n\nEvents had moved with curious rapidity. All this had happened, it seemed, in a single moment, yet with the irregular effect already mentioned which made Sanfield feel it might, equally, have lasted hours. But, as he stood behind Morris and the surgeon at the bed, the deeps in him opened suddenly, and he trembled under a shock of intense emotion that he could not understand. As with a stroke of lightning some heavenly fire set his heart aflame with yearning. The very soul in him broke loose with passionate longing that must find satisfaction. It came to him in a single instant with the certain knowledge of an unconquerable conviction. Hidden, yet ever waiting, among the broken centuries, there now leaped upon him this flash of memory\u2014the memory of some sweet and ancient love Time might veil yet could not kill.\n\nHe ran forward, past the surgeon and the nurses, past Morris who bent above the bed with a face ghastly from anxiety. He gazed down upon the fair girl lying there, her unbound hair streaming over the pillow. He saw, and he remembered. And an uncontrollable cry of recognition left his lips...\n\nThe irregularity of the passing minutes became so marked then, that he might well have passed outside their measure altogether, beyond what men call Time; duration, interval, both escaped. Alone and free with his eternal love, he was safe from all confinement, free, it seemed, either of time or space. His friend, however, was vaguely with him during the amazing instant. He felt acutely aware of the need each had, respectively, for the other, born of a heritage the Past had hidden over-long. Each, it was clear, could do the other a good turn... Sanfield, though unable to describe or disentangle later, knew, while it lasted, this joy of full, delicious understanding...\n\nThe strange, swift instant of recognition passed and disappeared. The cry, Sanfield realized, on coming back to the Present, had been soundless and inaudible as before. No one observed him; no one stirred. The girl, on that bed beside the opened windows, lay evidently dying. Her breath came in gasps, her chest heaved convulsively, each attempt at recovery was slower and more painful than the one before. She was unconscious. Sometimes her breathing seemed to stop. It grew weaker, as the pulse grew fainter. And Sanfield, transfixed as with paralysis, stood watching, waiting, an intolerable yearning in his heart to help. It seemed to him that he waited with a purpose.\n\nThis purpose suddenly became clear. He knew why he waited. There was help to be given. He was the one to give it.\n\nThe girl's vitality and ebbing nerves, her entire physical organism now fading so quickly towards that final extinction which meant death\u2014could these but be stimulated by a new tide of life, the danger-point now fast approaching might be passed, and recovery must follow. This impetus, he knew suddenly, he could supply. How, he could not tell. It flashed upon him from beyond the stars, as from ancient store of long-forgotten, long-neglected knowledge. It was enough that he felt confident and sure. His soul burned within him; the strength of an ancient and unconquerable love rose through his being. He would try.\n\nThe doctor, he saw, was in the act of giving his last aid in the form of a hypodermic injection, Morris and the nurses looking on. Sanfield observed the sharp quick rally, only too faint, too slight; he saw the collapse that followed. The doctor, shrugging his shoulders, turned with a look that could not express itself in words, and Morris, burying his face in his hands, knelt by the bed, shaken with convulsive sobbing. It was the end.\n\nIn which moment, precisely, the strange paralysis that had bound Sanfield momentarily, was lifted from his being, and an impelling force, obeying his immense desire, invaded him. He knew how to act. His will, taught long ago, yet long-forgotten, was set free.\n\n\"You have come back to me at last,\" he cried in his anguish and his power, though the voice was, as ever, inaudible and soundless, \"I shall not let you go!...\"\n\nDrawn forward nearer and nearer to the bed, he leaned down, as if to kiss the pale lips and streaming hair. But his knowledge operated better than he knew. In the tremendous grip of that power which spins the stars and suns, while drawing souls into manifestation upon a dozen planets, he raced, he dived, he plunged, helpless, yet driven by the creative stress of love and sacrifice towards some eternal purpose. Caught in what seemed a vortex of amazing force, he sank away, as a straw is caught and sunk within the suction of a mighty whirlpool. His memory of Morris, of the doctor, of the girl herself, passed utterly. His entire personality became merged, lost, obliterated. He was aware of nothing; not even aware of nothingness. He lost consciousness..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 562", + "text": "The reappearance was as sudden as the obliteration. He emerged. There had been interval, duration, time. He was not aware of them. A spasm of blinding pain shot through him. He opened his eyes. His whole body was a single devouring pain. He felt cramped, confined, uncomfortable. He must escape. He thrashed about. Someone seized his arm and held it. With a snarl he easily wrenched it free.\n\nHe was in bed. How had he come to this? An accident? He saw the faces of nurse and doctor bending over him, eager, amazed, surprised, a trifle frightened. Vague memories floated to him. Who was he? Where had he come from? And where was... where was... someone... who was dearer to him than life itself? He looked about him: the room, the faces, the French windows, the veranda, all seemed only half familiar. He looked, he searched for... someone... but in vain...\n\nA spasm of violent pain burned through his body like a fire, and he shut his eyes. He groaned. A voice sounded just above him: \"Take this, dear. Try and swallow a little. It will relieve you. Your brother will be back in a moment. You are much better already.\"\n\nHe looked up at the nurse; he drank what she gave him.\n\n\"My brother!\" he murmured. \"I don't understand. I have no brother.\" Thirst came over him; he drained the glass. The nurse, wearing a startled look, moved away. He watched her go. He pointed at her with his hand, meaning to say something that he instantly forgot\u2014as he saw his own bare arm. Its dreadful thinness shocked him. He must have been ill for months. The arm, wasted almost to nothing, showed the bone. He sank back exhausted, the sleeping draught began to take effect. The nurse returned quietly to a chair beside the bed, from which she watched him without ceasing as the long minutes passed...\n\nHe found it difficult to collect his thoughts, to keep them in his mind when caught. There floated before him a series of odd scenes like coloured pictures in an endless flow. He was unable to catch them. Morris was with him always. They were doing quite absurd, impossible things. They rode together across the desert in the dawn, they wandered through old massive temples, they saw the sun set behind mud villages mid wavering palms, they drifted down a river in a sailing boat of quaint design. It had an enormous single sail. Together they visited tombs cut in the solid rock, hot airless corridors, and huge, dim, vaulted chambers underground. There was an icy wind by night, fierce burning sun by day. They watched vast troops of stars pass down a stupendous sky... They knew delight and tasted wonder. Strange memories touched them...\n\n\"Nurse!\" he called aloud, returning to himself again, and remembering that he must speak with his friend about something\u2014he failed to recall exactly what. \"Please ask Mr. Morris to come to me.\"\n\n\"At once, dear. He's only in the next room waiting for you to wake.\" She went out quickly, and he heard her voice in the passage. It sank to a whisper as she came back with Morris, yet every syllable reached him distinctly:\n\n\"...and pay no attention if she wanders a little; just ignore it. She's turned the corner, thank God, and that's the chief thing.\" Each word he heard with wonder and perplexity, with increasing irritability too.\n\n\"I'm a hell of a wreck,\" he said, as Morris came, beaming, to the bedside. \"Have I been ill long? It's frightfully decent of you to come, old man.\"\n\nBut Morris, staggered at this greeting, stopped abruptly, half turning to the nurse for guidance. He seemed unable to find words. Sanfield was extremely annoyed; he showed his feeling. \"I'm not balmy, you old ass!\" he shouted. \"I'm all right again, though very weak. But I wanted to ask you\u2014oh, I remember now\u2014I wanted to ask you about my\u2014er\u2014Deltas.\"\n\n\"My poor dear Maggie,\" stammered Morris, fumbling with his voice. \"Don't worry about your few shares, darling. Deltas are all right\u2014it's you we\u2014\"\n\n\"Why, the devil, do you call me Maggie?\" snapped the other viciously. \"And 'darling'!\" He felt furious, exasperated. \"Have you gone balmy, or have I? What in the world are you two up to?\" His fury tired him. He lay back upon his pillows, fuming. Morris took a chair beside the bed; he put a hand gently on his wasted arm.\n\n\"My darling girl,\" he said, in what was intended to be a soothing voice, though it stirred the sick man again to fury beyond expression, \"you must really keep quiet for a bit. You've had a very severe operation\"\u2014his voice shook a little\u2014\"but, thank God, you've pulled through and are now on the way to recovery. You are my sister Maggie. It will all come back to you when you're rested\u2014\"\n\n\"Maggie, indeed!\" interrupted the other, trying to sit up again, but too weak to compass it. \"Your sister! You bally idiot! Don't you know me? I wish to God the nurse wouldn't 'dear' me in that senseless way. And you, with your atrocious 'darling,' I'm not your precious sister Maggie. I'm\u2014I'm George San\u2014\"\n\nBut even as he said it, there passed over him some dim lost fragment of a wild, delicious memory he could not seize. Intense pleasure lay in it, could he but recover it. He knew a sweet, forgotten joy. His broken, troubled mind lay searching frantically but without success. It dazzled him. It shook him with an indescribable emotion\u2014of joy, of wonder, of deep sweet confusion. A rapt happiness rose in him, yet pain, like a black awful shutter, closed in upon the happiness at once. He remembered a girl. But he remembered, too, that he had seen her die. Who was she? Had he lost her... again...!\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" he faltered in a weaker voice to Morris, \"my brain's in a whirl. I'm sorry. I suppose I've had some blasted concussion\u2014haven't I?\"\n\nBut the man beside his bed, he saw, was startled. An extraordinary look came into his face, though he tried to hide it with a smile.\n\n\"My shares!\" cried Sanfield, with a half scream. \"Four thousand of them!\"\n\nWhereupon Morris blanched. \"George Sanfield!\" he muttered, half to himself, half to the nurse who hurried up. \"That voice! The very number too!\" He looked white and terrified, as if he had seen a ghost. A whispered colloquy ensued between him and the nurse. It was inaudible.\n\n\"Now, dearest Maggie,\" he said at length, making evidently a tremendous effort, \"do try and lie quiet for a bit. Don't bother about George Sanfield, my London friend. His shares are quite safe. You've heard me speak of him. It's all right, my darling, quite all right. Oh, believe me! I'm your brother.\"\n\n\"Maggie...!\" whispered the man to himself upon the bed, whereupon Morris stooped, and, to his intense horror, kissed him on the cheek. But his horror seemed merged at once in another personality that surged through and over his entire being, drowning memory and recognition hopelessly. \"Darling,\" he murmured. He realized that he was mad, of course. It seemed he fainted...\n\nThe momentary unconsciousness soon passed, at any rate. He opened his eyes again. He saw a palm tree out of the window. He knew positively he was not mad, whatever else he might be. Dead perhaps? He felt the sheets, the mattress, the skin upon his face. No, he was alive all right. The dull pains where the tight bandages oppressed him were also real. He was among substantial, earthly things. The nurse, he noticed, regarded him anxiously. She was a pleasant-looking young woman. He smiled; and, with an expression of affectionate, even tender pleasure, she smiled back at him.\n\n\"You feel better now, a little stronger,\" she said softly. \"You've had a sleep, Miss Margaret.\" She said \"Miss Margaret\" with a conscious effort. It was better, perhaps, than \"dear\"; but his anger rose at once. He was too tired, however, to express his feelings. There stole over him, besides, the afflicting consciousness of an alien personality that was familiar, and yet not his. It strove to dominate him. Only by a great effort could he continue to think his own thoughts. This other being kept trying to intrude, to oust him, to take full possession. It resented his presence with a kind of violence.\n\nHe sighed. So strong was the feeling of another personality trying to foist itself upon his own, upon his mind, his body, even upon his very face, that he turned instinctively to the nurse, though unaware exactly what he meant to ask her for.\n\n\"My hand-glass, please,\" he heard himself saying\u2014with horror. The phrase was not his own. Glass or mirror were the words he would have used.\n\nA moment later he was staring with acute and ghastly terror at a reflection that was not his own. It was the face of the dead girl he saw within the silver-handled, woman's hand-glass he held up." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 563", + "text": "The dream with its amazing, vivid detail haunted him for days, even coming between him and his work. It seemed far more real, more vivid than the commonplace events of life that followed. The occurrences of the day were pale compared to its overpowering intensity. And a cable, received the very next afternoon, increased this sense of actual truth\u2014of something that had really happened.\n\n\"Hold shares writing Morris.\"\n\nIts brevity added a convincing touch. He was aware of Egypt even in Throgmorton Street. Yet it was the face of the dead, or dying, girl that chiefly haunted him. She remained in his thoughts, alive and sweet and exquisite. Without her he felt incomplete, his life a failure. He thought of nothing else.\n\nThe affairs at the office, meanwhile, went well; unexpected success attended them; there was no strike; the angry customer was pacified. And when the promised letter came from Morris, Sanfield's hands trembled so violently that he could hardly tear it open. Nor could he read it calmly. The assurance about his precious shares scarcely interested him. It was the final paragraph that set his heart beating against his ribs as though a hammer lay inside him:\n\n\"...I've had great trouble and anxiety, though, thank God, the danger is over now. I forget if I ever mentioned my sister, Margaret, to you. She keeps house for me in Cairo, when I'm there. She is my only tie in life. Well, a severe operation she had to undergo, all but finished her. To tell you the truth, she very nearly died, for the doctor gave her up. You'll smile when I tell you that odd things happened\u2014at the very last moment. I can't explain it, nor can the doctor. It rather terrified me. But at the very moment when we thought her gone, something revived in her. She became full of unexpected life and vigor. She was even violent\u2014whereas, a moment before, she had not the strength to speak, much less to move. It was rather wonderful, but it was terrible too.\n\n\"You don't believe in these things, I know, but I must tell you, because, when she recovered consciousness, she began to babble about yourself, using your name, though she has rarely, if ever, heard it, and even speaking\u2014you won't believe this, of course!\u2014of your shares in Deltas, giving the exact number that you hold. When you write, please tell me if you were very anxious about these? Also, whether your thoughts were directed particularly to me? I thought a good deal about you, knowing you might be uneasy, but my mind was pretty full, as you will understand, of her operation at the time. The climax, when all this happened, was about 11 a.m. on February 13th.\n\n\"Don't fail to tell me this, as I'm particularly interested in what you may have to say.\"\n\n\"And, now, I want to ask a great favor of you. The doctor forbids Margaret to stay here during the hot weather, so I'm sending her home to some cousins in Yorkshire, as soon as she is fit to travel. It would be most awfully kind\u2014I know how women bore you\u2014if you could manage to meet the boat and help her on her way through London. I'll let you know dates and particulars later, when I hear that you will do this for me...\"\n\nSanfield hardly read the remainder of the letter, which dealt with shares and business matters. But a month later he stood on the dock-pier at Tilbury, watching the approach of the tender from the Egyptian Mail.\n\nHe saw it make fast; he saw the stream of passengers pour down the gangway; and he saw among them the tall, fair woman of his dream. With a beating heart he went to meet her..." + }, + { + "title": "The Decoy by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "It belonged to the category of unlovely houses about which an ugly superstition clings, one reason being, perhaps, its inability to inspire interest in itself without assistance. It seemed too ordinary to possess individuality, much less to exert an influence. Solid and ungainly, its huge bulk dwarfing the park timber, its best claim to notice was a negative one\u2014it was unpretentious.\n\nFrom the little hill its expressionless windows stared across the Kentish Weald, indifferent to weather, dreary in winter, bleak in spring, unblessed in summer. Some colossal hand had tossed it down, then let it starve to death, a country mansion that might well strain the adjectives of advertisers and find inheritors with difficulty. Its soul had fled, said some; it had committed suicide, thought others; and it was an inheritor, before he killed himself in the library, who thought this latter, yielding, apparently, to an hereditary taint in the family. For two other inheritors followed suit, with an interval of twenty years between them, and there was no clear reason to explain the three disasters. Only the first owner, indeed, lived permanently in the house, the others using it in the summer months and then deserting it with relief. Hence, when John Burley, present inheritor, assumed possession, he entered a house about which clung an ugly superstition, based, nevertheless, upon a series of undeniably ugly facts.\n\nThis century deals harshly with superstitious folk, deeming them fools or charlatans; but John Burley, robust, contemptuous of half lights, did not deal harshly with them, because he did not deal with them at all. He was hardly aware of their existence. He ignored them as he ignored, say, the Esquimaux, poets, and other human aspects that did not touch his scheme of life. A successful business man, he concentrated on what was real; he dealt with business people. His philanthropy, on a big scale, was also real; yet, though he would have denied it vehemently, he had his superstition as well. No man exists without some taint of superstition in his blood; the racial heritage is too rich to be escaped entirely. Burley's took this form\u2014that unless he gave his tithe to the poor he would not prosper. This ugly mansion, he decided, would make an ideal Convalescent Home.\n\n\"Only cowards or lunatics kill themselves,\" he declared flatly, when his use of the house was criticized. \"I'm neither one nor t'other.\" He let out his gusty, boisterous laugh. In his invigorating atmosphere such weakness seemed contemptible, just as superstition in his presence seemed feeblest ignorance. Even its picturesqueness faded. \"I can't conceive,\" he boomed, \"can't even imagine to myself,\" he added emphatically, \"the state of mind in which a man can think of suicide, much less do it.\" He threw his chest out with a challenging air. \"I tell you, Nancy, it's either cowardice or mania. And I've no use for either.\"\n\nYet he was easy-going and good-humoured in his denunciation. He admitted his limitations with a hearty laugh his wife called noisy. Thus he made allowances for the fairy fears of sailorfolk, and had even been known to mention haunted ships his companies owned. But he did so in the terms of tonnage and \u00a3 s. d. His scope was big; details were made for clerks.\n\nHis consent to pass a night in the mansion was the consent of a practical business man and philanthropist who dealt condescendingly with foolish human nature. It was based on the common-sense of tonnage and \u00a3 s. d. The local newspapers had revived the silly story of the suicides, calling attention to the effect of the superstition upon the fortunes of the house, and so, possibly, upon the fortunes of its present owner. But the mansion, otherwise a white elephant, was precisely ideal for his purpose, and so trivial a matter as spending a night in it should not stand in the way. \"We must take people as we find them, Nancy.\"\n\nHis young wife had her motive, of course, in making the proposal, and, if she was amused by what she called \"spook-hunting,\" he saw no reason to refuse her the indulgence. He loved her, and took her as he found her\u2014late in life. To allay the superstitions of prospective staff and patients and supporters, all, in fact, whose goodwill was necessary to success, he faced this boredom of a night in the building before its opening was announced. \"You see, John, if you, the owner, do this, it will nip damaging talk in the bud. If anything went wrong later it would only be put down to this suicide idea, this haunting influence. The Home will have a bad name from the start. There'll be endless trouble. It will be a failure.\"\n\n\"You think my spending a night there will stop the nonsense?\" he inquired.\n\n\"According to the old legend it breaks the spell,\" she replied. \"That's the condition, anyhow.\"\n\n\"But somebody's sure to die there sooner or later,\" he objected. \"We can't prevent that.\"\n\n\"We can prevent people whispering that they died unnaturally.\" She explained the working of the public mind.\n\n\"I see,\" he replied, his lip curling, yet quick to gauge the truth of what she told him about collective instinct.\n\n\"Unless you take poison in the hall,\" she added laughingly, \"or elect to hang yourself with your braces from the hat peg.\"\n\n\"I'll do it,\" he agreed, after a moment's thought. \"I'll sit up with you. It will be like a honeymoon over again, you and I on the spree\u2014eh?\" He was even interested now; the boyish side of him was touched perhaps; but his enthusiasm was less when she explained that three was a better number than two on such an expedition.\n\n\"I've often done it before, John. We were always three.\"\n\n\"Who?\" he asked bluntly. He looked wonderingly at her, but she answered that if anything went wrong a party of three provided a better margin for help. It was sufficiently obvious. He listened and agreed. \"I'll get young Mortimer,\" he suggested. \"Will he do?\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"Well\u2014he's cheery; he'll be interested, too. Yes, he's as good as another.\" She seemed indifferent.\n\n\"And he'll make the time pass with his stories,\" added her husband.\n\nSo Captain Mortimer, late officer on a T.B.D., a \"cheery lad,\" afraid of nothing, cousin of Mrs. Burley, and now filling a good post in the company's London offices, was engaged as third hand in the expedition. But Captain Mortimer was young and ardent, and Mrs. Burley was young and pretty and ill-mated, and John Burley was a neglectful, and self-satisfied husband.\n\nFate laid the trap with cunning, and John Burley, blind-eyed, careless of detail, floundered into it. He also floundered out again, though in a fashion none could have expected of him.\n\nThe night agreed upon eventually was as near to the shortest in the year as John Burley could contrive\u2014June 18th\u2014when the sun set at 8:18 and rose about a quarter to four. There would be barely three hours of true darkness. \"You're the expert,\" he admitted, as she explained that sitting through the actual darkness only was required, not necessarily from sunset to sunrise. \"We'll do the thing properly. Mortimer's not very keen, he had a dance or something,\" he added, noticing the look of annoyance that flashed swiftly in her eyes; \"but he got out of it. He's coming.\" The pouting expression of the spoilt woman amused him. \"Oh, no, he didn't need much persuading really,\" he assured her. \"Some girl or other, of course. He's young, remember.\" To which no comment was forthcoming, though the implied comparison made her flush.\n\nThey motored from South Audley Street after an early tea, in due course passing Sevenoaks and entering the Kentish Weald; and, in order that the necessary advertisement should be given, the chauffeur, warned strictly to keep their purpose quiet, was to put up at the country inn and fetch them an hour after sunrise; they would breakfast in London. \"He'll tell everybody,\" said his practical and cynical master; \"the local newspaper will have it all next day. A few hours' discomfort is worth while if it ends the nonsense. We'll read and smoke, and Mortimer shall tell us yarns about the sea.\" He went with the driver into the house to superintend the arrangement of the room, the lights, the hampers of food, and so forth, leaving the pair upon the lawn.\n\n\"Four hours isn't much, but it's something,\" whispered Mortimer, alone with her for the first time since they started. \"It's simply ripping of you to have got me in. You look divine to-night. You're the most wonderful woman in the world.\" His blue eyes shone with the hungry desire he mistook for love. He looked as if he had blown in from the sea, for his skin was tanned and his light hair bleached a little by the sun. He took her hand, drawing her out of the slanting sunlight towards the rhododendrons.\n\n\"I didn't, you silly boy. It was John suggested your coming.\" She released her hand with an affected effort. \"Besides, you overdid it\u2014pretending you had a dance.\"\n\n\"You could have objected,\" he said eagerly, \"and didn't. Oh, you're too lovely, you're delicious!\" He kissed her suddenly with passion. There was a tiny struggle, in which she yielded too easily, he thought.\n\n\"Harry, you're an idiot!\" she cried breathlessly, when he let her go. \"I really don't know how you dare! And John's your friend. Besides, you know\"\u2014she glanced round quickly\u2014\"it isn't safe here.\" Her eyes shone happily, her cheeks were flaming. She looked what she was, a pretty, young, lustful animal, false to ideals, true to selfish passion only. \"Luckily,\" she added, \"he trusts me too fully to think anything.\"\n\nThe young man, worship in his eyes, laughed gaily. \"There's no harm in a kiss,\" he said. \"You're a child to him, he never thinks of you as a woman. Anyhow, his head's full of ships and kings and sealing-wax,\" he comforted her, while respecting her sudden instinct which warned him not to touch her again, \"and he never sees anything. Why, even at ten yards\u2014\"\n\nFrom twenty yards away a big voice interrupted him, as John Burley came round a corner of the house and across the lawn towards them. The chauffeur, he announced, had left the hampers in the room on the first floor and gone back to the inn. \"Let's take a walk round,\" he added, joining them, \"and see the garden. Five minutes before sunset we'll go in and feed.\" He laughed. \"We must do the thing faithfully, you know, mustn't we, Nancy? Dark to dark, remember. Come on, Mortimer\"\u2014he took the young man's arm\u2014\"a last look round before we go in and hang ourselves from adjoining hooks in the matron's room!\" He reached out his free hand towards his wife.\n\n\"Oh, hush, John!\" she said quickly. \"I don't like\u2014especially now the dusk is coming.\" She shivered, as though it were a genuine little shiver, pursing her lips deliciously as she did so; whereupon he drew her forcibly to him, saying he was sorry, and kissed her exactly where she had been kissed two minutes before, while young Mortimer looked on. \"We'll take care of you between us,\" he said. Behind a broad back the pair exchanged a swift but meaning glance, for there was that in his tone which enjoined wariness, and perhaps after all he was not so blind as he appeared. They had their code, these two. \"All's well,\" was signalled; \"but another time be more careful!\"\n\nThere still remained some minutes' sunlight before the huge red ball of fire would sink behind the wooded hills, and the trio, talking idly, a flutter of excitement in two hearts certainly, walked among the roses. It was a perfect evening, windless, perfumed, warm. Headless shadows preceded them gigantically across the lawn as they moved, and one side of the great building lay already dark; bats were flitting, moths darted to and fro above the azalea and rhododendron clumps. The talk turned chiefly on the uses of the mansion as a Convalescent Home, its probable running cost, suitable staff, and so forth.\n\n\"Come along,\" John Burley said presently, breaking off and turning abruptly, \"we must be inside, actually inside, before the sun's gone. We must fulfil the conditions faithfully,\" he repeated, as though fond of the phrase. He was in earnest over everything in life, big or little, once he set his hand to it.\n\nThey entered, this incongruous trio of ghost-hunters, no one of them really intent upon the business in hand, and went slowly upstairs to the great room where the hampers lay. Already in the hall it was dark enough for three electric torches to flash usefully and help their steps as they moved with caution, lighting one corner after another. The air inside was chill and damp. \"Like an unused museum,\" said Mortimer. \"I can smell the specimens.\" They looked about them, sniffing. \"That's humanity,\" declared his host, employer, friend, \"with cement and whitewash to flavour it\"; and all three laughed as Mrs. Burley said she wished they had picked some roses and brought them in. Her husband was again in front on the broad staircase, Mortimer just behind him, when she called out. \"I don't like being last,\" she exclaimed. It's so black behind me in the hall. I'll come between you two,\" and the sailor took her outstretched hand, squeezing it, as he passed her up. \"There's a figure, remember,\" she said hurriedly, turning to gain her husband's attention, as when she touched wood at home. \"A figure is seen; that's part of the story. The figure of a man.\" She gave a tiny shiver of pleasurable, half-imagined alarm as she took his arm.\n\n\"I hope we shall see it,\" he mentioned prosaically.\n\n\"I hope we shan't,\" she replied with emphasis. \"It's only seen before\u2014something happens.\" Her husband said nothing, while Mortimer remarked facetiously that it would be a pity if they had their trouble for nothing. \"Something can hardly happen to all three of us,\" he said lightly, as they entered a large room where the paper-hangers had conveniently left a rough table of bare planks. Mrs. Burley, busy with her own thoughts, began to unpack the sandwiches and wine. Her husband strolled over to the window. He seemed restless.\n\n\"So this,\" his deep voice startled her, \"is where one of us\"\u2014he looked round him\u2014\"is to\u2014\"\n\n\"John!\" She stopped him sharply, with impatience. \"Several times already I've begged you.\" Her voice rang rather shrill and querulous in the empty room, a new note in it. She was beginning to feel the atmosphere of the place, perhaps. On the sunny lawn it had not touched her, but now, with the fall of night, she was aware of it, as shadow called to shadow and the kingdom of darkness gathered power. Like a great whispering gallery, the whole house listened.\n\n\"Upon my word, Nancy,\" he said with contrition, as he came and sat down beside her, \"I quite forgot again. Only I cannot take it seriously. It's so utterly unthinkable to me that a man\u2014\"\n\n\"But why evoke the idea at all?\" she insisted in a lowered voice, that snapped despite its faintness. \"Men, after all, don't do such things for nothing.\"\n\n\"We don't know everything in the universe, do we?\" Mortimer put in, trying clumsily to support her. \"All I know just now is that I'm famished and this veal and ham pie is delicious.\" He was very busy with his knife and fork. His foot rested lightly on her own beneath the table; he could not keep his eyes off her face; he was continually passing new edibles to her.\n\n\"No,\" agreed John Burley, \"not everything. You're right there.\"\n\nShe kicked the younger man gently, flashing a warning with her eyes as well, while her husband, emptying his glass, his head thrown back, looked straight at them over the rim, apparently seeing nothing. They smoked their cigarettes round the table, Burley lighting a big cigar. \"Tell us about the figure, Nancy?\" he inquired. \"At least there's no harm in that. It's new to me. I hadn't heard about a figure.\" And she did so willingly, turning her chair sideways from the dangerous, reckless feet. Mortimer could now no longer touch her. \"I know very little,\" she confessed; \"only what the paper said. It's a man... And he changes.\"\n\n\"How changes?\" asked her husband. \"Clothes, you mean, or what?\"\n\nMrs. Burley laughed, as though she was glad to laugh. Then she answered: \"According to the story, he shows himself each time to the man\u2014\"\n\n\"The man who\u2014?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, of course. He appears to the man who dies\u2014as himself.\"\n\n\"H'm,\" grunted her husband, naturally puzzled. He stared at her.\n\n\"Each time the chap saw his own double\"\u2014Mortimer came this time usefully to the rescue\u2014\"before he did it.\"\n\nConsiderable explanation followed, involving much psychic jargon from Mrs. Burley, which fascinated and impressed the sailor, who thought her as wonderful as she was lovely, showing it in his eyes for all to see. John Burley's attention wandered. He moved over to the window, leaving them to finish the discussion between them; he took no part in it, made no comment even, merely listening idly and watching them with an air of absent-mindedness through the cloud of cigar smoke round his head. He moved from window to window, ensconcing himself in turn in each deep embrasure, examining the fastenings, measuring the thickness of the stonework with his handkerchief. He seemed restless, bored, obviously out of place in this ridiculous expedition. On his big massive face lay a quiet, resigned expression his wife had never seen before. She noticed it now as, the discussion ended, the pair tidied away the d\u00e9bris of dinner, lit the spirit lamp for coffee and laid out a supper which would be very welcome with the dawn. A draught passed through the room, making the papers flutter on the table. Mortimer turned down the smoking lamps with care.\n\n\"Wind's getting up a bit\u2014from the south,\" observed Burley from his niche, closing one-half of the casement window as he said it. To do this, he turned his back a moment, fumbling for several seconds with the latch, while Mortimer, noting it, seized his sudden opportunity with the foolish abandon of his age and temperament. Neither he nor his victim perceived that, against the outside darkness, the interior of the room was plainly reflected in the window-pane. One reckless, the other terrified, they snatched the fearful joy, which might, after all, have been lengthened by another full half-minute, for the head they feared, followed by the shoulders, pushed through the side of the casement still open, and remained outside, taking in the night.\n\n\"A grand air,\" said his deep voice, as the head drew in again, \"I'd like to be at sea a night like this.\" He left the casement open and came across the room towards them. \"Now,\" he said cheerfully, arranging a seat for himself, \"let's get comfortable for the night. Mortimer, we expect stories from you without ceasing, until dawn or the ghost arrives. Horrible stories of chains and headless men, remember. Make it a night we shan't forget in a hurry.\" He produced his gust of laughter.\n\nThey arranged their chairs, with other chairs to put their feet on, and Mortimer contrived a footstool by means of a hamper for the smallest feet; the air grew thick with tobacco smoke; eyes flashed and answered, watched perhaps as well; ears listened and perhaps grew wise; occasionally, as a window shook, they started and looked round; there were sounds about the house from time to time, when the entering wind, using broken or open windows, set loose objects rattling.\n\nBut Mrs. Burley vetoed horrible stories with decision. A big, empty mansion, lonely in the country, and even with the comfort of John Burley and a lover in it, has its atmosphere. Furnished rooms are far less ghostly. This atmosphere now came creeping everywhere, through spacious halls and sighing corridors, silent, invisible, but all-pervading, John Burley alone impervious to it, unaware of its soft attack upon the nerves. It entered possibly with the summer night wind, but possibly it was always there... And Mrs. Burley looked often at her husband, sitting near her at an angle; the light fell on his fine strong face; she felt that, though apparently so calm and quiet, he was really very restless; something about him was a little different; she could not define it; his mouth seemed set as with an effort; he looked, she thought curiously to herself, patient and very dignified; he was rather a dear after all. Why did she think the face inscrutable? Her thoughts wandered vaguely, unease, discomfort among them somewhere, while the heated blood\u2014she had taken her share of wine\u2014seethed in her.\n\nBurley turned to the sailor for more stories. \"Sea and wind in them,\" he asked. \"No horrors, remember!\" and Mortimer told a tale about the shortage of rooms at a Welsh seaside place where spare rooms fetched fabulous prices, and one man alone refused to let\u2014a retired captain of a South Seas trader, very poor, a bit crazy apparently. He had two furnished rooms in his house worth twenty guineas a week. The rooms faced south; he kept them full of flowers; but he would not let. An explanation of his unworldly obstinacy was not forthcoming until Mortimer\u2014they fished together\u2014gained his confidence. \"The South Wind lives in them,\" the old fellow told him. \"I keep them free for her.\"\n\n\"For her?\"\n\n\"It was on the South Wind my love came to me,\" said the other softly; \"and it was on the South Wind that she left\u2014\"\n\nIt was an odd tale to tell in such company, but he told it well.\n\n\"Beautiful,\" thought Mrs. Burley. Aloud she said a quiet, \"Thank you. By 'left,' I suppose he meant she died or ran away?\"\n\nJohn Burley looked up with a certain surprise. \"We ask for a story,\" he said, \"and you give us a poem.\" He laughed. \"You're in love, Mortimer,\" he informed him, \"and with my wife probably.\"\n\n\"Of course I am, sir,\" replied the young man gallantly. \"A sailor's heart, you know,\" while the face of the woman turned pink, then white. She knew her husband more intimately than Mortimer did, and there was something in his tone, his eyes, his words, she did not like. Harry was an idiot to choose such a tale. An irritated annoyance stirred in her, close upon dislike. \"Anyhow, it's better than horrors,\" she said hurriedly.\n\n\"Well,\" put in her husband, letting forth a minor gust of laughter, \"it's possible, at any rate. Though one's as crazy as the other.\" His meaning was not wholly clear. \"If a man really loved,\" he added in his blunt fashion, \"and was tricked by her, I could almost conceive his\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, don't preach, John, for Heaven's sake. You're so dull in the pulpit.\" But the interruption only served to emphasize the sentence which, otherwise, might have been passed over.\n\n\"Could conceive his finding life so worthless,\" persisted the other, \"that\u2014\" He hesitated. \"But there, now, I promised I wouldn't,\" he went on, laughing good-humouredly. Then, suddenly, as though in spite of himself, driven it seemed: \"Still, under such conditions, he might show his contempt for human nature and for life by\u2014\"\n\nIt was a tiny stifled scream that stopped him this time.\n\n\"John, I hate, I loathe you, when you talk like that. And you've broken your word again.\" She was more than petulant; a nervous anger sounded in her voice. It was the way he had said it, looking from them towards the window, that made her quiver. She felt him suddenly as a man; she felt afraid of him.\n\nHer husband made no reply; he rose and looked at his watch, leaning sideways towards the lamp, so that the expression of his face was shaded. \"Two o'clock,\" he remarked. \"I think I'll take a turn through the house. I may find a workman asleep or something. Anyhow, the light will soon come now.\" He laughed; the expression of his face, his tone of voice, relieved her momentarily. He went out. They heard his heavy tread echoing down the carpetless long corridor.\n\nMortimer began at once. \"Did he mean anything?\" he asked breathlessly. \"He doesn't love you the least little bit, anyhow. He never did. I do. You're wasted on him. You belong to me.\" The words poured out. He covered her face with kisses. \"Oh, I didn't mean that,\" he caught between the kisses.\n\nThe sailor released her, staring. \"What then?\" he whispered. \"Do you think he saw us on the lawn?\" He paused a moment, as she made no reply. The steps were audible in the distance still. \"I know!\" he exclaimed suddenly. \"It's the blessed house he feels. That's what it is. He doesn't like it.\"\n\nA wind sighed through the room, making the papers flutter; something rattled; and Mrs. Burley started. A loose end of rope swinging from the paperhanger's ladder caught her eye. She shivered slightly.\n\n\"He's different,\" she replied in a low voice, nestling very close again, \"and so restless. Didn't you notice what he said just now\u2014that under certain conditions he could understand a man\"\u2014she hesitated\u2014\"doing it,\" she concluded, a sudden drop in her voice. \"Harry,\" she looked full into his eyes, \"that's not like him. He didn't say that for nothing.\"\n\n\"Nonsense! He's bored to tears, that's all. And the house is getting on your nerves, too.\" He kissed her tenderly. Then, as she responded, he drew her nearer still and held her passionately, mumbling incoherent words, among which \"nothing to be afraid of\" was distinguishable. Meanwhile, the steps were coming nearer. She pushed him away. \"You must behave yourself. I insist. You shall, Harry,\" then buried herself in his arms, her face hidden against his neck\u2014only to disentangle herself the next instant and stand clear of him. \"I hate you, Harry,\" she exclaimed sharply, a look of angry annoyance flashing across her face. \"And I hate myself. Why do you treat me\u2014?\" She broke off as the steps came closer, patted her hair straight, and stalked over to the open window.\n\n\"I believe after all you're only playing with me,\" he said viciously. He stared in surprised disappointment, watching her. \"It's him you really love,\" he added jealously. He looked and spoke like a petulant spoilt boy.\n\nShe did not turn her head. \"He's always been fair to me, kind and generous. He never blames me for anything. Give me a cigarette and don't play the stage hero. My nerves are on edge, to tell you the truth.\" Her voice jarred harshly, and as he lit her cigarette he noticed that her lips were trembling; his own hand trembled too. He was still holding the match, standing beside her at the window-sill, when the steps crossed the threshold and John Burley came into the room. He went straight up to the table and turned the lamp down. \"It was smoking,\" he remarked. \"Didn't you see?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir,\" and Mortimer sprang forward, too late to help him. \"It was the draught as you pushed the door open.\" The big man said, \"Ah!\" and drew a chair over, facing them. \"It's just the very house,\" he told them. \"I've been through every room on this floor. It will make a splendid Home, with very little alteration, too.\" He turned round in his creaking wicker chair and looked up at his wife, who sat swinging her legs and smoking in the window embrasure. \"Lives will be saved inside these old walls. It's a good investment,\" he went on, talking rather to himself it seemed. \"People will die here, too\u2014\"\n\n\"Hark!\" Mrs. Burley interrupted him. \"That noise\u2014what is it?\" A faint thudding sound in the corridor or in the adjoining room was audible, making all three look round quickly, listening for a repetition, which did not come. The papers fluttered on the table, the lamps smoked an instant.\n\n\"Wind,\" observed Burley calmly, \"our little friend, the South Wind. Something blown over again, that's all.\" But, curiously, the three of them stood up. \"I'll go and see,\" he continued. \"Doors and windows are all open to let the paint dry.\" Yet he did not move; he stood there watching a white moth that dashed round and round the lamp, flopping heavily now and again upon the bare deal table.\n\n\"Let me go, sir,\" put in Mortimer eagerly. He was glad of the chance; for the first time he, too, felt uncomfortable. But there was another who, apparently, suffered a discomfort greater than his own and was accordingly even more glad to get away. \"I'll go,\" Mrs. Burley announced, with decision. \"I'd like to. I haven't been out of this room since we came. I'm not an atom afraid.\"\n\nIt was strange that for a moment she did not make a move either; it seemed as if she waited for something. For perhaps fifteen seconds no one stirred or spoke. She knew by the look in her lover's eyes that he had now become aware of the slight, indefinite change in her husband's manner, and was alarmed by it. The fear in him woke her contempt; she suddenly despised the youth, and was conscious of a new, strange yearning towards her husband; against her worked nameless pressures, troubling her being. There was an alteration in the room, she thought; something had come in. The trio stood listening to the gentle wind outside, waiting for the sound to be repeated; two careless, passionate young lovers and a man stood waiting, listening, watching in that room; yet it seemed there were five persons altogether and not three, for two guilty consciences stood apart and separate from their owners. John Burley broke the silence.\n\n\"Yes, you go, Nancy. Nothing to be afraid of\u2014there. It's only wind.\" He spoke as though he meant it.\n\nMortimer bit his lips. \"I'll come with you,\" he said instantly. He was confused. \"Let's all three go. I don't think we ought to be separated.\" But Mrs. Burley was already at the door. \"I insist,\" she said, with a forced laugh. \"I'll call if I'm frightened,\" while her husband, saying nothing, watched her from the table.\n\n\"Take this,\" said the sailor, flashing his electric torch as he went over to her. \"Two are better than one.\" He saw her figure exquisitely silhouetted against the black corridor beyond; it was clear she wanted to go; any nervousness in her was mastered by a stronger emotion still; she was glad to be out of their presence for a bit. He had hoped to snatch a word of explanation in the corridor, but her manner stopped him. Something else stopped him, too.\n\n\"First door on the left,\" he called out, his voice echoing down the empty length. \"That's the room where the noise came from. Shout if you want us.\"\n\nHe watched her moving away, the light held steadily in front of her, but she made no answer, and he turned back to see John Burley lighting his cigar at the lamp chimney, his face thrust forward as he did so. He stood a second, watching him, as the lips sucked hard at the cigar to make it draw; the strength of the features was emphasized to sternness. He had meant to stand by the door and listen for the least sound from the adjoining room, but now found his whole attention focused on the face above the lamp. In that minute he realized that Burley had wished\u2014had meant\u2014his wife to go. In that minute also he forgot his love, his shameless, selfish little mistress, his worthless, caddish little self. For John Burley looked up. He straightened slowly, puffing hard and quickly to make sure his cigar was lit, and faced him. Mortimer moved forward into the room, self-conscious, embarrassed, cold.\n\n\"Of course it was only wind,\" he said lightly, his one desire being to fill the interval while they were alone with commonplaces. He did not wish the other to speak, \"Dawn wind, probably.\" He glanced at his wrist-watch. \"It's half-past two already, and the sun gets up at a quarter to four. It's light by now, I expect. The shortest night is never quite dark.\" He rambled on confusedly, for the other's steady, silent stare embarrassed him. A faint sound of Mrs. Burley moving in the next room made him stop a moment. He turned instinctively to the door, eager for an excuse to go.\n\n\"That's nothing,\" said Burley, speaking at last and in a firm quiet voice. \"Only my wife, glad to be alone\u2014my young and pretty wife. She's all right. I know her better than you do. Come in and shut the door.\"\n\nMortimer obeyed. He closed the door and came close to the table, facing the other, who at once continued.\n\n\"If I thought,\" he said, in that quiet deep voice, \"that you two were serious\"\u2014he uttered his words very slowly, with emphasis, with intense severity\u2014\"do you know what I should do? I will tell you, Mortimer. I should like one of us two\u2014you or myself\u2014to remain in this house, dead.\"\n\nHis teeth gripped his cigar tightly; his hands were clenched; he went on through a half-closed mouth. His eyes blazed steadily.\n\n\"I trust her so absolutely\u2014understand me?\u2014that my belief in women, in human beings, would go. And with it the desire to live. Understand me?\"\n\nEach word to the young careless fool was a blow in the face, yet it was the softest blow, the flash of a big deep heart, that hurt the most. A dozen answers\u2014denial, explanation, confession, taking all guilt upon himself\u2014crowded his mind, only to be dismissed. He stood motionless and silent, staring hard into the other's eyes. No word passed his lips; there was no time in any case. It was in this position that Mrs. Burley, entering at that moment, found them. She saw her husband's face; the other man stood with his back to her. She came in with a little nervous laugh. \"A bell-rope swinging in the wind and hitting a sheet of metal before the fireplace,\" she informed them. And all three laughed together then, though each laugh had a different sound. \"But I hate this house,\" she added. \"I wish we had never come.\"\n\n\"The moment there's light in the sky,\" remarked her husband quietly, \"we can leave. That's the contract; let's see it through. Another half-hour will do it. Sit down, Nancy, and have a bite of something.\" He got up and placed a chair for her. \"I think I'll take another look round.\" He moved slowly to the door. \"I may go out on to the lawn a bit and see what the sky is doing.\"\n\nIt did not take half a minute to say the words, yet to Mortimer it seemed as though the voice would never end. His mind was confused and troubled. He loathed himself, he loathed the woman through whom he had got into this awkward mess.\n\nThe situation had suddenly become extremely painful; he had never imagined such a thing; the man he had thought blind had after all seen everything\u2014known it all along, watched them, waited. And the woman, he was now certain, loved her husband; she had fooled him, Mortimer, all along, amusing herself.\n\n\"I'll come with you, sir. Do let me,\" he said suddenly. Mrs. Burley stood pale and uncertain between them. She looked scared. What has happened, she was clearly wondering.\n\n\"No, no, Harry\"\u2014he called him \"Harry\" for the first time\u2014\"I'll be back in five minutes at most. My wife mustn't be alone either.\" And he went out.\n\nThe young man waited till the footsteps sounded some distance down the corridor, then turned, but he did not move forward; for the first time he let pass unused what he called \"an opportunity.\" His passion had left him; his love, as he once thought it, was gone. He looked at the pretty woman near him, wondering blankly what he had ever seen there to attract him so wildly. He wished to Heaven he was out of it all. He wished he were dead. John Burley's words suddenly appalled him.\n\nOne thing he saw plainly\u2014she was frightened. This opened his lips.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" he asked, and his hushed voice shirked the familiar Christian name. \"Did you see anything?\" He nodded his head in the direction of the adjoining room. It was the sound of his own voice addressing her coldly that made him abruptly see himself as he really was, but it was her reply, honestly given, in a faint even voice, that told him she saw her own self too with similar clarity. God, he thought, how revealing a tone, a single word can be!\n\n\"I saw\u2014nothing. Only I feel uneasy\u2014dear.\" That \"dear\" was a call for help.\n\n\"Look here,\" he cried, so loud that she held up a warning finger, \"I'm\u2014I've been a damned fool, a cad! I'm most frightfully ashamed. I'll do anything\u2014anything to get it right.\" He felt cold, naked, his worthlessness laid bare; she felt, he knew, the same. Each revolted suddenly from the other. Yet he knew not quite how or wherefore this great change had thus abruptly come about, especially on her side. He felt that a bigger, deeper emotion than he could understand was working on them, making mere physical relationships seem empty, trivial, cheap and vulgar. His cold increased in face of this utter ignorance.\n\n\"Uneasy?\" he repeated, perhaps hardly knowing exactly why he said it. \"Good Lord, but he can take care of himself\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, he is a man,\" she interrupted; \"yes.\"\n\nSteps were heard, firm, heavy steps, coming back along the corridor. It seemed to Mortimer that he had listened to this sound of steps all night, and would listen to them till he died. He crossed to the lamp and lit a cigarette, carefully this time, turning the wick down afterwards. Mrs. Burley also rose, moving over towards the door, away from him. They listened a moment to these firm and heavy steps, the tread of a man, John Burley. A man... and a philanderer, flashed across Mortimer's brain like fire, contrasting the two with fierce contempt for himself. The tread became less audible. There was distance in it. It had turned in somewhere.\n\n\"There!\" she exclaimed in a hushed tone. \"He's gone in.\"\n\n\"Nonsense! It passed us. He's going out on to the lawn.\"\n\nThe pair listened breathlessly for a moment, when the sound of steps came distinctly from the adjoining room, walking across the boards, apparently towards the window.\n\n\"There!\" she repeated. \"He did go in.\" Silence of perhaps a minute followed, in which they heard each other's breathing. \"I don't like his being alone\u2014in there,\" Mrs. Burley said in a thin faltering voice, and moved as though to go out. Her hand was already on the knob of the door, when Mortimer stopped her with a violent gesture.\n\n\"Don't! For God's sake, don't!\" he cried, before she could turn it. He darted forward. As he laid a hand upon her arm a thud was audible through the wall. It was a heavy sound, and this time there was no wind to cause it.\n\n\"It's only that loose swinging thing,\" he whispered thickly, a dreadful confusion blotting out clear thought and speech.\n\n\"There was no loose swaying thing at all,\" she said in a failing voice, then reeled and swayed against him. \"I invented that. There was nothing.\" As he caught her, staring helplessly, it seemed to him that a face with lifted lids rushed up at him. He saw two terrified eyes in a patch of ghastly white. Her whisper followed, as she sank into his arms. \"It's John. He's\u2014\"\n\nAt which instant, with terror at its climax, the sound of steps suddenly became audible once more\u2014the firm and heavy tread of John Burley coming out again into the corridor. Such was their amazement and relief that they neither moved nor spoke. The steps drew nearer. The pair seemed petrified; Mortimer did not remove his arms, nor did Mrs. Burley attempt to release herself. They stared at the door and waited. It was pushed wider the next second, and John Burley stood beside them. He was so close he almost touched them\u2014there in each other's arms.\n\n\"Jack, dear!\" cried his wife, with a searching tenderness that made her voice seem strange.\n\nHe gazed a second at each in turn. \"I'm going out on to the lawn for a moment,\" he said quietly. There was no expression on his face; he did not smile, he did not frown; he showed no feeling, no emotion\u2014just looked into their eyes, and then withdrew round the edge of the door before either could utter a word in answer. The door swung to behind him. He was gone.\n\n\"He's going to the lawn. He said so.\" It was Mortimer speaking, but his voice shook and stammered. Mrs. Burley had released herself. She stood now by the table, silent, gazing with fixed eyes at nothing, her lips parted, her expression vacant. Again she was aware of an alteration in the room; something had gone out... He watched her a second, uncertain what to say or do. It was the face of a drowned person, occurred to him. Something intangible, yet almost visible stood between them in that narrow space. Something had ended, there before his eyes, definitely ended. The barrier between them rose higher, denser. Through this barrier her words came to him with an odd whispering remoteness.\n\n\"Harry... You saw? You noticed?\"\n\n\"What d'you mean?\" he said gruffly. He tried to feel angry, contemptuous, but his breath caught absurdly.\n\n\"Harry\u2014he was different. The eyes, the hair, the\"\u2014her face grew like death\u2014\"the twist in his face\u2014\"\n\n\"What on earth are you saying? Pull yourself together.\" He saw that she was trembling down the whole length of her body, as she leaned against the table for support. His own legs shook. He stared hard at her.\n\n\"Altered, Harry... altered.\" Her horrified whisper came at him like a knife. For it was true. He, too, had noticed something about the husband's appearance that was not quite normal. Yet, even while they talked, they heard him going down the carpetless stairs; the sounds ceased as he crossed the hall; then came the noise of the front door banging, the reverberation even shaking the room a little where they stood.\n\nMortimer went over to her side. He walked unevenly.\n\n\"My dear! For God's sake\u2014this is sheer nonsense. Don't let yourself go like this. I'll put it straight with him\u2014it's all my fault.\" He saw by her face that she did not understand his words; he was saying the wrong thing altogether; her mind was utterly elsewhere. \"He's all right,\" he went on hurriedly. \"He's out on the lawn now\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off at the sight of her. The horror that fastened on her brain plastered her face with deathly whiteness.\n\n\"That was not John at all!\" she cried, a wail of misery and terror in her voice. She rushed to the window and he followed. To his immense relief a figure moving below was plainly visible. It was John Burley. They saw him in the faint grey of the dawn, as he crossed the lawn, going away from the house. He disappeared.\n\n\"There you are! See?\" whispered Mortimer reassuringly. \"He'll be back in\u2014\" when a sound in the adjoining room, heavier, louder than before, cut appallingly across his words, and Mrs. Burley, with that wailing scream, fell back into his arms. He caught her only just in time, for she stiffened into ice, daft with the uncomprehended terror of it all, and helpless as a child.\n\n\"Darling, my darling\u2014oh, God!\" He bent, kissing her face wildly. He was utterly distraught.\n\n\"Harry! Jack\u2014oh, oh!\" she wailed in her anguish. \"It took on his likeness. It deceived us... to give him time. He's done it.\"\n\nShe sat up suddenly. \"Go,\" she said, pointing to the room beyond, then sank fainting, a dead weight in his arms.\n\nHe carried her unconscious body to a chair, then entering the adjoining room he flashed his torch upon the body of her husband hanging from a bracket in the wall. He cut it down five minutes too late." + }, + { + "title": "The Man Who Found Out (A Nightmare) by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "Professor Mark Ebor, the scientist, led a double life, and the only persons who knew it were his assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, and his publishers. But a double life need not always be a bad one, and, as Dr. Laidlaw and the gratified publishers well knew, the parallel lives of this particular man were equally good, and indefinitely produced would certainly have ended in a heaven somewhere that can suitably contain such strangely opposite characteristics as his remarkable personality combined.\n\nFor Mark Ebor, F.R.S., etc., etc., was that unique combination hardly ever met with in actual life, a man of science and a mystic.\n\nAs the first, his name stood in the gallery of the great, and as the second\u2014but there came the mystery! For under the pseudonym of \"Pilgrim\" (the author of that brilliant series of books that appealed to so many), his identity was as well concealed as that of the anonymous writer of the weather reports in a daily newspaper. Thousands read the sanguine, optimistic, stimulating little books that issued annually from the pen of \"Pilgrim,\" and thousands bore their daily burdens better for having read; while the Press generally agreed that the author, besides being an incorrigible enthusiast and optimist, was also\u2014a woman; but no one ever succeeded in penetrating the veil of anonymity and discovering that \"Pilgrim\" and the biologist were one and the same person.\n\nMark Ebor, as Dr. Laidlaw knew him in his laboratory, was one man; but Mark Ebor, as he sometimes saw him after work was over, with rapt eyes and ecstatic face, discussing the possibilities of \"union with God\" and the future of the human race, was quite another.\n\n\"I have always held, as you know,\" he was saying one evening as he sat in the little study beyond the laboratory with his assistant and intimate, \"that Vision should play a large part in the life of the awakened man\u2014not to be regarded as infallible, of course, but to be observed and made use of as a guide-post to possibilities\u2014\"\n\n\"I am aware of your peculiar views, sir,\" the young doctor put in deferentially, yet with a certain impatience.\n\n\"For Visions come from a region of the consciousness where observation and experiment are out of the question,\" pursued the other with enthusiasm, not noticing the interruption, \"and, while they should be checked by reason afterwards, they should not be laughed at or ignored. All inspiration, I hold, is of the nature of interior Vision, and all our best knowledge has come\u2014such is my confirmed belief\u2014as a sudden revelation to the brain prepared to receive it\u2014\"\n\n\"Prepared by hard work first, by concentration, by the closest possible study of ordinary phenomena,\" Dr. Laidlaw allowed himself to observe.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" sighed the other; \"but by a process, none the less, of spiritual illumination. The best match in the world will not light a candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared.\"\n\nIt was Laidlaw's turn to sigh. He knew so well the impossibility of arguing with his chief when he was in the regions of the mystic, but at the same time the respect he felt for his tremendous attainments was so sincere that he always listened with attention and deference, wondering how far the great man would go and to what end this curious combination of logic and \"illumination\" would eventually lead him.\n\n\"Only last night,\" continued the elder man, a sort of light coming into his rugged features, \"the vision came to me again\u2014the one that has haunted me at intervals ever since my youth, and that will not be denied.\"\n\nDr. Laidlaw fidgeted in his chair.\n\n\"About the Tablets of the Gods, you mean\u2014and that they lie somewhere hidden in the sands,\" he said patiently. A sudden gleam of interest came into his face as he turned to catch the professor's reply.\n\n\"And that I am to be the one to find them, to decipher them, and to give the great knowledge to the world\u2014\"\n\n\"Who will not believe,\" laughed Laidlaw shortly, yet interested in spite of his thinly-veiled contempt.\n\n\"Because even the keenest minds, in the right sense of the word, are hopelessly\u2014unscientific,\" replied the other gently, his face positively aglow with the memory of his vision. \"Yet what is more likely,\" he continued after a moment's pause, peering into space with rapt eyes that saw things too wonderful for exact language to describe, \"than that there should have been given to man in the first ages of the world some record of the purpose and problem that had been set him to solve? In a word,\" he cried, fixing his shining eyes upon the face of his perplexed assistant, \"that God's messengers in the far-off ages should have given to His creatures some full statement of the secret of the world, of the secret of the soul, of the meaning of life and death\u2014the explanation of our being here, and to what great end we are destined in the ultimate fullness of things?\"\n\nDr. Laidlaw sat speechless. These outbursts of mystical enthusiasm he had witnessed before. With any other man he would not have listened to a single sentence, but to Professor Ebor, man of knowledge and profound investigator, he listened with respect, because he regarded this condition as temporary and pathological, and in some sense a reaction from the intense strain of the prolonged mental concentration of many days.\n\nHe smiled, with something between sympathy and resignation as he met the other's rapt gaze.\n\n\"But you have said, sir, at other times, that you consider the ultimate secrets to be screened from all possible\u2014\"\n\n\"The ultimate secrets, yes,\" came the unperturbed reply; \"but that there lies buried somewhere an indestructible record of the secret meaning of life, originally known to men in the days of their pristine innocence, I am convinced. And, by this strange vision so often vouchsafed to me, I am equally sure that one day it shall be given to me to announce to a weary world this glorious and terrific message.\"\n\nAnd he continued at great length and in glowing language to describe the species of vivid dream that had come to him at intervals since earliest childhood, showing in detail how he discovered these very Tablets of the Gods, and proclaimed their splendid contents\u2014whose precise nature was always, however, withheld from him in the vision\u2014to a patient and suffering humanity.\n\n\"The Scrutator, sir, well described 'Pilgrim' as the Apostle of Hope,\" said the young doctor gently, when he had finished; \"and now, if that reviewer could hear you speak and realize from what strange depths comes your simple faith\u2014\"\n\nThe professor held up his hand, and the smile of a little child broke over his face like sunshine in the morning.\n\n\"Half the good my books do would be instantly destroyed,\" he said sadly; \"they would say that I wrote with my tongue in my cheek. But wait,\" he added significantly; \"wait till I find these Tablets of the Gods! Wait till I hold the solutions of the old world-problems in my hands! Wait till the light of this new revelation breaks upon confused humanity, and it wakes to find its bravest hopes justified! Ah, then, my dear Laidlaw\u2014\"\n\nHe broke off suddenly; but the doctor, cleverly guessing the thought in his mind, caught him up immediately.\n\n\"Perhaps this very summer,\" he said, trying hard to make the suggestion keep pace with honesty; \"in your explorations in Assyria\u2014your digging in the remote civilization of what was once Chaldea, you may find\u2014what you dream of\u2014\"\n\nThe professor held up his hand, and the smile of a fine old face.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" he murmured softly, \"perhaps!\"\n\nAnd the young doctor, thanking the gods of science that his leader's aberrations were of so harmless a character, went home strong in the certitude of his knowledge of externals, proud that he was able to refer his visions to self-suggestion, and wondering complaisantly whether in his old age he might not after all suffer himself from visitations of the very kind that afflicted his respected chief.\n\nAnd as he got into bed and thought again of his master's rugged face, and finely shaped head, and the deep lines traced by years of work and self-discipline, he turned over on his pillow and fell asleep with a sigh that was half of wonder, half of regret." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 566", + "text": "It was in February, nine months later, when Dr. Laidlaw made his way to Charing Cross to meet his chief after his long absence of travel and exploration. The vision about the so-called Tablets of the Gods had meanwhile passed almost entirely from his memory.\n\nThere were few people in the train, for the stream of traffic was now running the other way, and he had no difficulty in finding the man he had come to meet. The shock of white hair beneath the low-crowned felt hat was alone enough to distinguish him by easily.\n\n\"Here I am at last!\" exclaimed the professor, somewhat wearily, clasping his friend's hand as he listened to the young doctor's warm greetings and questions. \"Here I am\u2014a little older, and much dirtier than when you last saw me!\" He glanced down laughingly at his travel-stained garments.\n\n\"And much wiser,\" said Laidlaw, with a smile, as he bustled about the platform for porters and gave his chief the latest scientific news.\n\nAt last they came down to practical considerations.\n\n\"And your luggage\u2014where is that? You must have tons of it, I suppose?\" said Laidlaw.\n\n\"Hardly anything,\" Professor Ebor answered. \"Nothing, in fact, but what you see.\"\n\n\"Nothing but this hand-bag?\" laughed the other, thinking he was joking.\n\n\"And a small portmanteau in the van,\" was the quiet reply. \"I have no other luggage.\"\n\n\"You have no other luggage?\" repeated Laidlaw, turning sharply to see if he were in earnest.\n\n\"Why should I need more?\" the professor added simply.\n\nSomething in the man's face, or voice, or manner\u2014the doctor hardly knew which\u2014suddenly struck him as strange. There was a change in him, a change so profound\u2014so little on the surface, that is\u2014that at first he had not become aware of it. For a moment it was as though an utterly alien personality stood before him in that noisy, bustling throng. Here, in all the homely, friendly turmoil of a Charing Cross crowd, a curious feeling of cold passed over his heart, touching his life with icy finger, so that he actually trembled and felt afraid.\n\nHe looked up quickly at his friend, his mind working with startled and unwelcome thoughts.\n\n\"Only this?\" he repeated, indicating the bag. \"But where's all the stuff you went away with? And\u2014have you brought nothing home\u2014no treasures?\"\n\n\"This is all I have,\" the other said briefly. The pale smile that went with the words caused the doctor a second indescribable sensation of uneasiness. Something was very wrong, something was very queer; he wondered now that he had not noticed it sooner.\n\n\"The rest follows, of course, by slow freight,\" he added tactfully, and as naturally as possible. \"But come, sir, you must be tired and in want of food after your long journey. I'll get a taxi at once, and we can see about the other luggage afterwards.\"\n\nIt seemed to him he hardly knew quite what he was saying; the change in his friend had come upon him so suddenly and now grew upon him more and more distressingly. Yet he could not make out exactly in what it consisted. A terrible suspicion began to take shape in his mind, troubling him dreadfully.\n\n\"I am neither very tired, nor in need of food, thank you,\" the professor said quietly. \"And this is all I have. There is no luggage to follow. I have brought home nothing\u2014nothing but what you see.\"\n\nHis words conveyed finality. They got into a taxi, tipped the porter, who had been staring in amazement at the venerable figure of the scientist, and were conveyed slowly and noisily to the house in the north of London where the laboratory was, the scene of their labours of years.\n\nAnd the whole way Professor Ebor uttered no word, nor did Dr. Laidlaw find the courage to ask a single question.\n\nIt was only late that night, before he took his departure, as the two men were standing before the fire in the study\u2014that study where they had discussed so many problems of vital and absorbing interest\u2014that Dr. Laidlaw at last found strength to come to the point with direct questions. The professor had been giving him a superficial and desultory account of his travels, of his journeys by camel, of his encampments among the mountains and in the desert, and of his explorations among the buried temples, and, deeper, into the waste of the pre-historic sands, when suddenly the doctor came to the desired point with a kind of nervous rush, almost like a frightened boy.\n\n\"And you found\u2014\" he began stammering, looking hard at the other's dreadfully altered face, from which every line of hope and cheerfulness seemed to have been obliterated as a sponge wipes markings from a slate\u2014\"you found\u2014\"\n\n\"I found,\" replied the other, in a solemn voice, and it was the voice of the mystic rather than the man of science\u2014\"I found what I went to seek. The vision never once failed me. It led me straight to the place like a star in the heavens. I found\u2014the Tablets of the Gods.\"\n\nDr. Laidlaw caught his breath, and steadied himself on the back of a chair. The words fell like particles of ice upon his heart. For the first time the professor had uttered the well-known phrase without the glow of light and wonder in his face that always accompanied it.\n\n\"You have\u2014brought them?\" he faltered.\n\n\"I have brought them home,\" said the other, in a voice with a ring like iron; \"and I have\u2014deciphered them.\"\n\nProfound despair, the bloom of outer darkness, the dead sound of a hopeless soul freezing in the utter cold of space seemed to fill in the pauses between the brief sentences. A silence followed, during which Dr. Laidlaw saw nothing but the white face before him alternately fade and return. And it was like the face of a dead man.\n\n\"They are, alas, indestructible,\" he heard the voice continue, with its even, metallic ring.\n\n\"Indestructible,\" Laidlaw repeated mechanically, hardly knowing what he was saying.\n\nAgain a silence of several minutes passed, during which, with a creeping cold about his heart, he stood and stared into the eyes of the man he had known and loved so long\u2014aye, and worshipped, too; the man who had first opened his own eyes when they were blind, and had led him to the gates of knowledge, and no little distance along the difficult path beyond; the man who, in another direction, had passed on the strength of his faith into the hearts of thousands by his books.\n\n\"I may see them?\" he asked at last, in a low voice he hardly recognized as his own. \"You will let me know\u2014their message?\"\n\nProfessor Ebor kept his eyes fixedly upon his assistant's face as he answered, with a smile that was more like the grin of death than a living human smile.\n\n\"When I am gone,\" he whispered; \"when I have passed away. Then you shall find them and read the translation I have made. And then, too, in your turn, you must try, with the latest resources of science at your disposal to aid you, to compass their utter destruction.\" He paused a moment, and his face grew pale as the face of a corpse. \"Until that time,\" he added presently, without looking up, \"I must ask you not to refer to the subject again\u2014and to keep my confidence meanwhile\u2014ab\u2014so\u2014lute\u2014ly.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 567", + "text": "A year passed slowly by, and at the end of it Dr. Laidlaw had found it necessary to sever his working connexion with his friend and one-time leader. Professor Ebor was no longer the same man. The light had gone out of his life; the laboratory was closed; he no longer put pen to paper or applied his mind to a single problem. In the short space of a few months he had passed from a hale and hearty man of late middle life to the condition of old age\u2014a man collapsed and on the edge of dissolution. Death, it was plain, lay waiting for him in the shadows of any day\u2014and he knew it.\n\nTo describe faithfully the nature of this profound alteration in his character and temperament is not easy, but Dr. Laidlaw summed it up to himself in three words: Loss of Hope. The splendid mental powers remained indeed undimmed, but the incentive to use them\u2014to use them for the help of others\u2014had gone. The character still held to its fine and unselfish habits of years, but the far goal to which they had been the leading strings had faded away. The desire for knowledge\u2014knowledge for its own sake\u2014had died, and the passionate hope which hitherto had animated with tireless energy the heart and brain of this splendidly equipped intellect had suffered total eclipse. The central fires had gone out. Nothing was worth doing, thinking, working for. There was nothing to work for any longer!\n\nThe professor's first step was to recall as many of his books as possible; his second to close his laboratory and stop all research. He gave no explanation, he invited no questions. His whole personality crumbled away, so to speak, till his daily life became a mere mechanical process of clothing the body, feeding the body, keeping it in good health so as to avoid physical discomfort, and, above all, doing nothing that could interfere with sleep. The professor did everything he could to lengthen the hours of sleep, and therefore of forgetfulness.\n\nIt was all clear enough to Dr. Laidlaw. A weaker man, he knew, would have sought to lose himself in one form or another of sensual indulgence\u2014sleeping-draughts, drink, the first pleasures that came to hand. Self-destruction would have been the method of a little bolder type; and deliberate evil-doing, poisoning with his awful knowledge all he could, the means of still another kind of man. Mark Ebor was none of these. He held himself under fine control, facing silently and without complaint the terrible facts he honestly believed himself to have been unfortunate enough to discover. Even to his intimate friend and assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, he vouchsafed no word of true explanation or lament. He went straight forward to the end, knowing well that the end was not very far away.\n\nAnd death came very quietly one day to him, as he was sitting in the arm-chair of the study, directly facing the doors of the laboratory\u2014the doors that no longer opened. Dr. Laidlaw, by happy chance, was with him at the time, and just able to reach his side in response to the sudden painful efforts for breath; just in time, too, to catch the murmured words that fell from the pallid lips like a message from the other side of the grave.\n\n\"Read them, if you must; and, if you can\u2014destroy. But\"\u2014his voice sank so low that Dr. Laidlaw only just caught the dying syllables\u2014\"but\u2014never, never\u2014give them to the world.\"\n\nAnd like a grey bundle of dust loosely gathered up in an old garment the professor sank back into his chair and expired.\n\nBut this was only the death of the body. His spirit had died two years before." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 568", + "text": "The estate of the dead man was small and uncomplicated, and Dr. Laidlaw, as sole executor and residuary legatee, had no difficulty in settling it up. A month after the funeral he was sitting alone in his upstairs library, the last sad duties completed, and his mind full of poignant memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered and loved, and to whom his debt was so incalculably great. The last two years, indeed, had been for him terrible. To watch the swift decay of the greatest combination of heart and brain he had ever known, and to realize he was powerless to help, was a source of profound grief to him that would remain to the end of his days.\n\nAt the same time an insatiable curiosity possessed him. The study of dementia was, of course, outside his special province as a specialist, but he knew enough of it to understand how small a matter might be the actual cause of how great an illusion, and he had been devoured from the very beginning by a ceaseless and increasing anxiety to know what the professor had found in the sands of \"Chaldea,\" what these precious Tablets of the Gods might be, and particularly\u2014for this was the real cause that had sapped the man's sanity and hope\u2014what the inscription was that he had believed to have deciphered thereon.\n\nThe curious feature of it all to his own mind was, that whereas his friend had dreamed of finding a message of glorious hope and comfort, he had apparently found (so far as he had found anything intelligible at all, and not invented the whole thing in his dementia) that the secret of the world, and the meaning of life and death, was of so terrible a nature that it robbed the heart of courage and the soul of hope. What, then, could be the contents of the little brown parcel the professor had bequeathed to him with his pregnant dying sentences?\n\nActually his hand was trembling as he turned to the writing-table and began slowly to unfasten a small old-fashioned desk on which the small gilt initials \"M.E.\" stood forth as a melancholy memento. He put the key into the lock and half turned it. Then, suddenly, he stopped and looked about him. Was that a sound at the back of the room? It was just as though someone had laughed and then tried to smother the laugh with a cough. A slight shiver ran over him as he stood listening.\n\n\"This is absurd,\" he said aloud; \"too absurd for belief\u2014that I should be so nervous! It's the effect of curiosity unduly prolonged.\" He smiled a little sadly and his eyes wandered to the blue summer sky and the plane trees swaying in the wind below his window. \"It's the reaction,\" he continued. \"The curiosity of two years to be quenched in a single moment! The nervous tension, of course, must be considerable.\"\n\nHe turned back to the brown desk and opened it without further delay. His hand was firm now, and he took out the paper parcel that lay inside without a tremor. It was heavy. A moment later there lay on the table before him a couple of weather-worn plaques of grey stone\u2014they looked like stone, although they felt like metal\u2014on which he saw markings of a curious character that might have been the mere tracings of natural forces through the ages, or, equally well, the half-obliterated hieroglyphics cut upon their surface in past centuries by the more or less untutored hand of a common scribe.\n\nHe lifted each stone in turn and examined it carefully. It seemed to him that a faint glow of heat passed from the substance into his skin, and he put them down again suddenly, as with a gesture of uneasiness.\n\n\"A very clever, or a very imaginative man,\" he said to himself, \"who could squeeze the secrets of life and death from such broken lines as those!\"\n\nThen he turned to a yellow envelope lying beside them in the desk, with the single word on the outside in the writing of the professor\u2014the word Translation.\n\n\"Now,\" he thought, taking it up with a sudden violence to conceal his nervousness, \"now for the great solution. Now to learn the meaning of the worlds, and why mankind was made, and why discipline is worth while, and sacrifice and pain the true law of advancement.\"\n\nThere was the shadow of a sneer in his voice, and yet something in him shivered at the same time. He held the envelope as though weighing it in his hand, his mind pondering many things. Then curiosity won the day, and he suddenly tore it open with the gesture of an actor who tears open a letter on the stage, knowing there is no real writing inside at all.\n\nA page of finely written script in the late scientist's handwriting lay before him. He read it through from beginning to end, missing no word, uttering each syllable distinctly under his breath as he read.\n\nThe pallor of his face grew ghastly as he neared the end. He began to shake all over as with ague. His breath came heavily in gasps. He still gripped the sheet of paper, however, and deliberately, as by an intense effort of will, read it through a second time from beginning to end. And this time, as the last syllable dropped from his lips, the whole face of the man flamed with a sudden and terrible anger. His skin became deep, deep red, and he clenched his teeth. With all the strength of his vigorous soul he was struggling to keep control of himself.\n\nFor perhaps five minutes he stood there beside the table without stirring a muscle. He might have been carved out of stone. His eyes were shut, and only the heaving of the chest betrayed the fact that he was a living being. Then, with a strange quietness, he lit a match and applied it to the sheet of paper he held in his hand. The ashes fell slowly about him, piece by piece, and he blew them from the window-sill into the air, his eyes following them as they floated away on the summer wind that breathed so warmly over the world.\n\nHe turned back slowly into the room. Although his actions and movements were absolutely steady and controlled, it was clear that he was on the edge of violent action. A hurricane might burst upon the still room any moment. His muscles were tense and rigid. Then, suddenly, he whitened, collapsed, and sank backwards into a chair, like a tumbled bundle of inert matter. He had fainted.\n\nIn less than half an hour he recovered consciousness and sat up. As before, he made no sound. Not a syllable passed his lips. He rose quietly and looked about the room.\n\nThen he did a curious thing.\n\nTaking a heavy stick from the rack in the corner he approached the mantlepiece, and with a heavy shattering blow he smashed the clock to pieces. The glass fell in shivering atoms.\n\n\"Cease your lying voice for ever,\" he said, in a curiously still, even tone. \"There is no such thing as time!\"\n\nHe took the watch from his pocket, swung it round several times by the long gold chain, smashed it into smithereens against the wall with a single blow, and then walked into his laboratory next door, and hung its broken body on the bones of the skeleton in the corner of the room.\n\n\"Let one damned mockery hang upon another,\" he said smiling oddly. \"Delusions, both of you, and cruel as false!\"\n\nHe slowly moved back to the front room. He stopped opposite the bookcase where stood in a row the \"Scriptures of the World,\" choicely bound and exquisitely printed, the late professor's most treasured possession, and next to them several books signed \"Pilgrim.\"\n\nOne by one he took them from the shelf and hurled them through the open window.\n\n\"A devil's dreams! A devil's foolish dreams!\" he cried, with a vicious laugh.\n\nPresently he stopped from sheer exhaustion. He turned his eyes slowly to the wall opposite, where hung a weird array of Eastern swords and daggers, scimitars and spears, the collections of many journeys. He crossed the room and ran his finger along the edge. His mind seemed to waver.\n\n\"No,\" he muttered presently; \"not that way. There are easier and better ways than that.\"\n\nHe took his hat and passed downstairs into the street." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 569", + "text": "It was five o'clock, and the June sun lay hot upon the pavement. He felt the metal door-knob burn the palm of his hand.\n\n\"Ah, Laidlaw, this is well met,\" cried a voice at his elbow; \"I was in the act of coming to see you. I've a case that will interest you, and besides, I remembered that you flavoured your tea with orange leaves!\u2014and I admit\u2014\"\n\nIt was Alexis Stephen, the great hypnotic doctor.\n\n\"I've had no tea to-day,\" Laidlaw said, in a dazed manner, after staring for a moment as though the other had struck him in the face. A new idea had entered his mind.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" asked Dr. Stephen quickly. \"Something's wrong with you. It's this sudden heat, or overwork. Come, man, let's go inside.\"\n\nA sudden light broke upon the face of the younger man, the light of a heaven-sent inspiration. He looked into his friend's face, and told a direct lie.\n\n\"Odd,\" he said, \"I myself was just coming to see you. I have something of great importance to test your confidence with. But in your house, please,\" as Stephen urged him towards his own door\u2014\"in your house. It's only round the corner, and I\u2014I cannot go back there\u2014to my rooms\u2014till I have told you.\"\n\n\"I'm your patient\u2014for the moment,\" he added stammeringly as soon as they were seated in the privacy of the hypnotist's sanctum, \"and I want\u2014er\u2014\"\n\n\"My dear Laidlaw,\" interrupted the other, in that soothing voice of command which had suggested to many a suffering soul that the cure for its pain lay in the powers of its own reawakened will, \"I am always at your service, as you know. You have only to tell me what I can do for you, and I will do it.\" He showed every desire to help him out. His manner was indescribably tactful and direct.\n\nDr. Laidlaw looked up into his face.\n\n\"I surrender my will to you,\" he said, already calmed by the other's healing presence, \"and I want you to treat me hypnotically\u2014and at once. I want you to suggest to me\"\u2014his voice became very tense\u2014\"that I shall forget\u2014forget till I die\u2014everything that has occurred to me during the last two hours; till I die, mind,\" he added, with solemn emphasis, \"till I die.\"\n\nHe floundered and stammered like a frightened boy. Alexis Stephen looked at him fixedly without speaking.\n\n\"And further,\" Laidlaw continued, \"I want you to ask me no questions. I wish to forget for ever something I have recently discovered\u2014something so terrible and yet so obvious that I can hardly understand why it is not patent to every mind in the world\u2014for I have had a moment of absolute clear vision\u2014of merciless clairvoyance. But I want no one else in the whole world to know what it is\u2014least of all, old friend, yourself.\"\n\nHe talked in utter confusion, and hardly knew what he was saying. But the pain on his face and the anguish in his voice were an instant passport to the other's heart.\n\n\"Nothing is easier,\" replied Dr. Stephen, after a hesitation so slight that the other probably did not even notice it. \"Come into my other room where we shall not be disturbed. I can heal you. Your memory of the last two hours shall be wiped out as though it had never been. You can trust me absolutely.\"\n\n\"I know I can,\" Laidlaw said simply, as he followed him in." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 570", + "text": "An hour later they passed back into the front room again. The sun was already behind the houses opposite, and the shadows began to gather.\n\n\"I went off easily?\" Laidlaw asked.\n\n\"You were a little obstinate at first. But though you came in like a lion, you went out like a lamb. I let you sleep a bit afterwards.\"\n\nDr. Stephen kept his eyes rather steadily upon his friend's face.\n\n\"What were you doing by the fire before you came here?\" he asked, pausing, in a casual tone, as he lit a cigarette and handed the case to his patient.\n\n\"I? Let me see. Oh, I know; I was worrying my way through poor old Ebor's papers and things. I'm his executor, you know. Then I got weary and came out for a whiff of air.\" He spoke lightly and with perfect naturalness. Obviously he was telling the truth. \"I prefer specimens to papers,\" he laughed cheerily.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" said Dr. Stephen, holding a lighted match for the cigarette. His face wore an expression of content. The experiment had been a complete success. The memory of the last two hours was wiped out utterly. Laidlaw was already chatting gaily and easily about a dozen other things that interested him. Together they went out into the street, and at his door Dr. Stephen left him with a joke and a wry face that made his friend laugh heartily.\n\n\"Don't dine on the professor's old papers by mistake,\" he cried, as he vanished down the street.\n\nDr. Laidlaw went up to his study at the top of the house. Half way down he met his housekeeper, Mrs. Fewings. She was flustered and excited, and her face was very red and perspiring.\n\n\"There've been burglars here,\" she cried excitedly, \"or something funny! All your things is just anyhow, sir. I found everything all about everywhere!\" She was very confused. In this orderly and very precise establishment it was unusual to find a thing out of place.\n\n\"Oh, my specimens!\" cried the doctor, dashing up the rest of the stairs at top speed. \"Have they been touched or\u2014\"\n\nHe flew to the door of the laboratory. Mrs. Fewings panted up heavily behind him.\n\n\"The labatry ain't been touched,\" she explained, breathlessly, \"but they smashed the libry clock and they've 'ung your gold watch, sir, on the skelinton's hands. And the books that weren't no value they flung out er the window just like so much rubbish. They must have been wild drunk, Dr. Laidlaw, sir!\"\n\nThe young scientist made a hurried examination of the rooms. Nothing of value was missing. He began to wonder what kind of burglars they were. He looked up sharply at Mrs. Fewings standing in the doorway. For a moment he seemed to cast about in his mind for something.\n\n\"Odd,\" he said at length. \"I only left here an hour ago and everything was all right then.\"\n\n\"Was it, sir? Yes, sir.\" She glanced sharply at him. Her room looked out upon the courtyard, and she must have seen the books come crashing down, and also have heard her master leave the house a few minutes later.\n\n\"And what's this rubbish the brutes have left?\" he cried, taking up two slabs of worn gray stone, on the writing-table. \"Bath brick, or something, I do declare.\"\n\nHe looked very sharply again at the confused and troubled housekeeper.\n\n\"Throw them on the dust heap, Mrs. Fewings, and\u2014and let me know if anything is missing in the house, and I will notify the police this evening.\"\n\nWhen she left the room he went into the laboratory and took his watch off the skeleton's fingers. His face wore a troubled expression, but after a moment's thought it cleared again. His memory was a complete blank.\n\n\"I suppose I left it on the writing-table when I went out to take the air,\" he said. And there was no one present to contradict him.\n\nHe crossed to the window and blew carelessly some ashes of burned paper from the sill, and stood watching them as they floated away lazily over the tops of the trees." + }, + { + "title": "The Empty Sleeve by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The Gilmer brothers were a couple of fussy and pernickety old bachelors of a rather retiring, not to say timid, disposition. There was grey in the pointed beard of John, the elder, and if any hair had remained to William it would also certainly have been of the same shade. They had private means. Their main interest in life was the collection of violins, for which they had the instinctive flair of true connoisseurs. Neither John nor William, however, could play a single note. They could only pluck the open strings. The production of tone, so necessary before purchase, was done vicariously for them by another.\n\nThe only objection they had to the big building in which they occupied the roomy top floor was that Morgan, liftman and caretaker, insisted on wearing a billycock with his uniform after six o'clock in the evening, with a result disastrous to the beauty of the universe. For \"Mr. Morgan,\" as they called him between themselves, had a round and pasty face on the top of a round and conical body. In view, however, of the man's other rare qualities\u2014including his devotion to themselves\u2014this objection was not serious.\n\nHe had another peculiarity that amused them. On being found fault with, he explained nothing, but merely repeated the words of the complaint.\n\n\"Water in the bath wasn't really hot this morning, Morgan!\"\n\n\"Water in the bath not reely 'ot, wasn't it, sir?\"\n\nOr, from William, who was something of a faddist:\n\n\"My jar of sour milk came up late yesterday, Morgan.\"\n\n\"Your jar sour milk come up late, sir, yesterday?\"\n\nSince, however, the statement of a complaint invariably resulted in its remedy, the brothers had learned to look for no further explanation. Next morning the bath was hot, the sour milk was \"brortup\" punctually. The uniform and billycock hat, though, remained an eyesore and source of oppression.\n\nOn this particular night John Gilmer, the elder, returning from a Masonic rehearsal, stepped into the lift and found Mr. Morgan with his hand ready on the iron rope.\n\n\"Fog's very thick outside,\" said Mr. John pleasantly; and the lift was a third of the way up before Morgan had completed his customary repetition: \"Fog very thick outside, yes, sir.\" And Gilmer then asked casually if his brother were alone, and received the reply that Mr. Hyman had called and had not yet gone away.\n\nNow this Mr. Hyman was a Hebrew, and, like themselves, a connoisseur in violins, but, unlike themselves, who only kept their specimens to look at, he was a skilful and exquisite player. He was the only person they ever permitted to handle their pedigree instruments, to take them from the glass cases where they reposed in silent splendour, and to draw the sound out of their wondrous painted hearts of golden varnish. The brothers loathed to see his fingers touch them, yet loved to hear their singing voices in the room, for the latter confirmed their sound judgment as collectors, and made them certain their money had been well spent. Hyman, however, made no attempt to conceal his contempt and hatred for the mere collector. The atmosphere of the room fairly pulsed with these opposing forces of silent emotion when Hyman played and the Gilmers, alternately writhing and admiring, listened. The occasions, however, were not frequent. The Hebrew only came by invitation, and both brothers made a point of being in. It was a very formal proceeding\u2014something of a sacred rite almost.\n\nJohn Gilmer, therefore, was considerably surprised by the information Morgan had supplied. For one thing, Hyman, he had understood, was away on the Continent.\n\n\"Still in there, you say?\" he repeated, after a moment's reflection.\n\n\"Still in there, Mr. John, sir.\" Then, concealing his surprise from the liftman, he fell back upon his usual mild habit of complaining about the billycock hat and the uniform.\n\n\"You really should try and remember, Morgan,\" he said, though kindly. \"That hat does not go well with that uniform!\"\n\nMorgan's pasty countenance betrayed no vestige of expression. \"'At don't go well with the yewniform, sir,\" he repeated, hanging up the disreputable bowler and replacing it with a gold-braided cap from the peg. \"No, sir, it don't, do it?\" he added cryptically, smiling at the transformation thus effected.\n\nAnd the lift then halted with an abrupt jerk at the top floor. By somebody's carelessness the landing was in darkness, and, to make things worse, Morgan, clumsily pulling the iron rope, happened to knock the billycock from its peg so that his sleeve, as he stooped to catch it, struck the switch and plunged the scene in a moment's complete obscurity.\n\nAnd it was then, in the act of stepping out before the light was turned on again, that John Gilmer stumbled against something that shot along the landing past the open door. First he thought it must be a child, then a man, then\u2014an animal. Its movement was rapid yet stealthy. Starting backwards instinctively to allow it room to pass, Gilmer collided in the darkness with Morgan, and Morgan incontinently screamed. There was a moment of stupid confusion. The heavy framework of the lift shook a little, as though something had stepped into it and then as quickly jumped out again. A rushing sound followed that resembled footsteps, yet at the same time was more like gliding\u2014someone in soft slippers or stockinged feet, greatly hurrying. Then came silence again. Morgan sprang to the landing and turned up the electric light. Mr. Gilmer, at the same moment, did likewise to the switch in the lift. Light flooded the scene. Nothing was visible.\n\n\"Dog or cat, or something, I suppose, wasn't it?\" exclaimed Gilmer, following the man out and looking round with bewildered amazement upon a deserted landing. He knew quite well, even while he spoke, that the words were foolish.\n\n\"Dog or cat, yes, sir, or\u2014something,\" echoed Morgan, his eyes narrowed to pin-points, then growing large, but his face stolid.\n\n\"The light should have been on.\" Mr. Gilmer spoke with a touch of severity. The little occurrence had curiously disturbed his equanimity. He felt annoyed, upset, uneasy.\n\nFor a perceptible pause the liftman made no reply, and his employer, looking up, saw that, besides being flustered, he was white about the jaws. His voice, when he spoke, was without its normal assurance. This time he did not merely repeat. He explained.\n\n\"The light was on, sir, when last I come up!\" he said, with emphasis, obviously speaking the truth. \"Only a moment ago,\" he added.\n\nMr. Gilmer, for some reason, felt disinclined to press for explanations. He decided to ignore the matter.\n\nThen the lift plunged down again into the depths like a diving-bell into water; and John Gilmer, pausing a moment first to reflect, let himself in softly with his latch-key, and, after hanging up hat and coat in the hall, entered the big sitting-room he and his brother shared in common.\n\nThe December fog that covered London like a dirty blanket had penetrated, he saw, into the room. The objects in it were half shrouded in the familiar yellowish haze." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 572", + "text": "In dressing-gown and slippers, William Gilmer, almost invisible in his armchair by the gas-stove across the room, spoke at once. Through the thick atmosphere his face gleamed, showing an extinguished pipe hanging from his lips. His tone of voice conveyed emotion, an emotion he sought to suppress, of a quality, however, not easy to define.\n\n\"Hyman's been here,\" he announced abruptly. \"You must have met him. He's this very instant gone out.\"\n\nIt was quite easy to see that something had happened, for \"scenes\" leave disturbance behind them in the atmosphere. But John made no immediate reference to this. He replied that he had seen no one\u2014which was strictly true\u2014and his brother thereupon, sitting bolt upright in the chair, turned quickly and faced him. His skin, in the foggy air, seemed paler than before.\n\n\"That's odd,\" he said nervously.\n\n\"What's odd?\" asked John.\n\n\"That you didn't see\u2014anything. You ought to have run into one another on the doorstep.\" His eyes went peering about the room. He was distinctly ill at ease. \"You're positive you saw no one? Did Morgan take him down before you came? Did Morgan see him?\" He asked several questions at once.\n\n\"On the contrary, Morgan told me he was still here with you. Hyman probably walked down, and didn't take the lift at all,\" he replied. \"That accounts for neither of us seeing him.\" He decided to say nothing about the occurrence in the lift, for his brother's nerves, he saw plainly, were on edge.\n\nWilliam then stood up out of his chair, and the skin of his face changed its hue, for whereas a moment ago it was merely pale, it had now altered to a tint that lay somewhere between white and a livid grey. The man was fighting internal terror. For a moment these two brothers of middle age looked each other straight in the eye. Then John spoke:\n\n\"What's wrong, Billy?\" he asked quietly. \"Something's upset you. What brought Hyman in this way\u2014unexpectedly? I thought he was still in Germany.\"\n\nThe brothers, affectionate and sympathetic, understood one another perfectly. They had no secrets. Yet for several minutes the younger one made no reply. It seemed difficult to choose his words apparently.\n\n\"Hyman played, I suppose\u2014on the fiddles?\" John helped him, wondering uneasily what was coming. He did not care much for the individual in question, though his talent was of such great use to them.\n\nThe other nodded in the affirmative, then plunged into rapid speech, talking under his breath as though he feared someone might overhear. Glancing over his shoulder down the foggy room, he drew his brother close.\n\n\"Hyman came,\" he began, \"unexpectedly. He hadn't written, and I hadn't asked him. You hadn't either, I suppose?\"\n\nJohn shook his head.\n\n\"When I came in from the dining-room I found him in the passage. The servant was taking away the dishes, and he had let himself in while the front door was ajar. Pretty cool, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"He's an original,\" said John, shrugging his shoulders. \"And you welcomed him?\" he asked.\n\n\"I asked him in, of course. He explained he had something glorious for me to hear. Silenski had played it in the afternoon, and he had bought the music since. But Silenski's 'Strad' hadn't the power\u2014it's thin on the upper strings, you remember, unequal, patchy\u2014and he said no instrument in the world could do it justice but our 'Joseph'-the small Guarnerius, you know, which he swears is the most perfect in the world.\"\n\n\"And what was it? Did he play it?\" asked John, growing more uneasy as he grew more interested. With relief he glanced round and saw the matchless little instrument lying there safe and sound in its glass case near the door.\n\n\"He played it\u2014divinely: a Zigeuner Lullaby, a fine, passionate, rushing bit of inspiration, oddly misnamed 'lullaby.' And, fancy, the fellow had memorized it already! He walked about the room on tiptoe while he played it, complaining of the light\u2014\"\n\n\"Complaining of the light?\"\n\n\"Said the thing was crepuscular, and needed dusk for its full effect. I turned the lights out one by one, till finally there was only the glow of the gas logs. He insisted. You know that way he has with him? And then he got over me in another matter: insisted on using some special strings he had brought with him, and put them on, too, himself\u2014thicker than the A and E we use.\"\n\nFor though neither Gilmer could produce a note, it was their pride that they kept their precious instruments in perfect condition for playing, choosing the exact thickness and quality of strings that suited the temperament of each violin; and the little Guarnerius in question always \"sang\" best, they held, with thin strings.\n\n\"Infernal insolence,\" exclaimed the listening brother, wondering what was coming next. \"Played it well, though, didn't he, this Lullaby thing?\" he added, seeing that William hesitated. As he spoke he went nearer, sitting down close beside him in a leather chair.\n\n\"Magnificent! Pure fire of genius!\" was the reply with enthusiasm, the voice at the same time dropping lower. \"Staccato like a silver hammer; harmonics like flutes, clear, soft, ringing; and the tone\u2014well, the G string was a baritone, and the upper registers creamy and mellow as a boy's voice. John,\" he added, \"that Guarnerius is the very pick of the period and\"\u2014again he hesitated\u2014\"Hyman loves it. He'd give his soul to have it.\"\n\nThe more John heard, the more uncomfortable it made him. He had always disliked this gifted Hebrew, for in his secret heart he knew that he had always feared and distrusted him. Sometimes he had felt half afraid of him; the man's very forcible personality was too insistent to be pleasant. His type was of the dark and sinister kind, and he possessed a violent will that rarely failed of accomplishing its desire.\n\n\"Wish I'd heard the fellow play,\" he said at length, ignoring his brother's last remark, and going on to speak of the most matter-of-fact details he could think of. \"Did he use the Dodd bow, or the Tourte? That Dodd I picked up last month, you know, is the most perfectly balanced I have ever\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped abruptly, for William had suddenly got upon his feet and was standing there, searching the room with his eyes. A chill ran down John's spine as he watched him.\n\n\"What is it, Billy?\" he asked sharply. \"Hear anything?\"\n\nWilliam continued to peer about him through the thick air.\n\n\"Oh, nothing, probably,\" he said, an odd catch in his voice; \"only\u2014 I keep feeling as if there was somebody listening. Do you think, perhaps\"\u2014he glanced over his shoulder\u2014\"there is someone at the door? I wish\u2014I wish you'd have a look, John.\"\n\nJohn obeyed, though without great eagerness. Crossing the room slowly, he opened the door, then switched on the light. The passage leading past the bathroom towards the bedrooms beyond was empty. The coats hung motionless from their pegs.\n\n\"No one, of course,\" he said, as he closed the door and came back to the stove. He left the light burning in the passage. It was curious the way both brothers had this impression that they were not alone, though only one of them spoke of it.\n\n\"Used the Dodd or the Tourte, Billy\u2014which?\" continued John in the most natural voice he could assume.\n\nBut at that very same instant the water started to his eyes. His brother, he saw, was close upon the thing he really had to tell. But he had stuck fast." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 573", + "text": "By a great effort John Gilmer composed himself and remained in his chair. With detailed elaboration he lit a cigarette, staring hard at his brother over the flaring match while he did so. There he sat in his dressing-gown and slippers by the fireplace, eyes downcast, fingers playing idly with the red tassel. The electric light cast heavy shadows across the face. In a flash then, since emotion may sometimes express itself in attitude even better than in speech, the elder brother understood that Billy was about to tell him an unutterable thing.\n\nBy instinct he moved over to his side so that the same view of the room confronted him.\n\n\"Out with it, old man,\" he said, with an effort to be natural. \"Tell me what you saw.\"\n\nBilly shuffled slowly round and the two sat side by side, facing the fog-draped chamber.\n\n\"It was like this,\" he began softly, \"only I was standing instead of sitting, looking over to that door as you and I do now. Hyman moved to and fro in the faint glow of the gas logs against the far wall, playing that 'crepuscular' thing in his most inspired sort of way, so that the music seemed to issue from himself rather than from the shining bit of wood under his chin, when\u2014I noticed something coming over me that was\"\u2014he hesitated, searching for words\u2014\"that wasn't all due to the music,\" he finished abruptly.\n\n\"His personality put a bit of hypnotism on you, eh?\"\n\nWilliam shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"The air was thickish with fog and the light was dim, cast upwards upon him from the stove,\" he continued. \"I admit all that. But there wasn't light enough to throw shadows, you see, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Hyman looked queer?\" the other helped him quickly.\n\nBilly nodded his head without turning.\n\n\"Changed there before my very eyes\"\u2014he whispered it\u2014\"turned animal\u2014\"\n\n\"Animal?\" John felt his hair rising.\n\n\"That's the only way I can put it. His face and hands and body turned otherwise than usual. I lost the sound of his feet. When the bow-hand or the fingers on the strings passed into the light, they were\"\u2014he uttered a soft, shuddering little laugh\u2014\"furry, oddly divided, the fingers massed together. And he paced stealthily. I thought every instant the fiddle would drop with a crash and he would spring at me across the room.\"\n\n\"My dear chap\u2014\"\n\n\"He moved with those big, lithe, striding steps one sees\"\u2014John held his breath in the little pause, listening keenly\u2014\"one sees those big brutes make in the cages when their desire is aflame for food or escape, or\u2014or fierce, passionate desire for anything they want with their whole nature\u2014\"\n\n\"The big felines!\" John whistled softly.\n\n\"And every minute getting nearer and nearer to the door, as though he meant to make a sudden rush for it and get out.\"\n\n\"With the violin! Of course you stopped him?\"\n\n\"In the end. But for a long time, I swear to you, I found it difficult to know what to do, even to move. I couldn't get my voice for words of any kind; it was like a spell.\"\n\n\"It was a spell,\" suggested John firmly.\n\n\"Then, as he moved, still playing,\" continued the other, \"he seemed to grow smaller; to shrink down below the line of the gas. I thought I should lose sight of him altogether. I turned the light up suddenly. There he was over by the door\u2014crouching.\"\n\n\"Playing on his knees, you mean?\"\n\nWilliam closed his eyes in an effort to visualize it again.\n\n\"Crouching,\" he repeated, at length, \"close to the floor. At least, I think so. It all happened so quickly, and I felt so bewildered, it was hard to see straight. But at first I could have sworn he was half his natural size. I called to him, I think I swore at him\u2014I forget exactly, but I know he straightened up at once and stood before me down there in the light\"\u2014he pointed across the room to the door\u2014\"eyes gleaming, face white as chalk, perspiring like midsummer, and gradually filling out, straightening up, whatever you like to call it, to his natural size and appearance again. It was the most horrid thing I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"As an\u2014animal, you saw him still?\"\n\n\"No; human again. Only much smaller.\"\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\nBilly reflected a moment.\n\n\"Nothing that I can remember,\" he replied. \"You see, it was all over in a few seconds. In the full light, I felt so foolish, and nonplussed at first. To see him normal again baffled me. And, before I could collect myself, he had let himself out into the passage, and I heard the front door slam. A minute later\u2014the same second almost, it seemed\u2014you came in. I only remember grabbing the violin and getting it back safely under the glass case. The strings were still vibrating.\"\n\nThe account was over. John asked no further questions. Nor did he say a single word about the lift, Morgan, or the extinguished light on the landing. There fell a longish silence between the two men; and then, while they helped themselves to a generous supply of whisky-and-soda before going to bed, John looked up and spoke:\n\n\"If you agree, Billy,\" he said quietly, \"I think I might write and suggest to Hyman that we shall no longer have need for his services.\"\n\nAnd Billy, acquiescing, added a sentence that expressed something of the singular dread lying but half concealed in the atmosphere of the room, if not in their minds as well:\n\n\"Putting it, however, in a way that need not offend him.\"\n\n\"Of course. There's no need to be rude, is there?\"\n\nAccordingly, next morning the letter was written; and John, saying nothing to his brother, took it round himself by hand to the Hebrew's rooms near Euston. The answer he dreaded was forthcoming:\n\n\"Mr. Hyman's still away abroad,\" he was told. \"But we're forwarding letters; yes. Or I can give you 'is address if you'll prefer it.\" The letter went, therefore, to the number in K\u00f6nigstrasse, Munich, thus obtained.\n\nThen, on his way back from the insurance company where he went to increase the sum that protected the small Guarnerius from loss by fire, accident, or theft, John Gilmer called at the offices of certain musical agents and ascertained that Silenski, the violinist, was performing at the time in Munich. It was only some days later, though, by diligent inquiry, he made certain that at a concert on a certain date the famous virtuoso had played a Zigeuner Lullaby of his own composition\u2014the very date, it turned out, on which he himself had been to the Masonic rehearsal at Mark Masons' Hall.\n\nJohn, however, said nothing of these discoveries to his brother William." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 574", + "text": "It was about a week later when a reply to the letter came from Munich\u2014a letter couched in somewhat offensive terms, though it contained neither words nor phrases that could actually be found fault with. Isidore Hyman was hurt and angry. On his return to London a month or so later, he proposed to call and talk the matter over. The offensive part of the letter lay, perhaps, in his definite assumption that he could persuade the brothers to resume the old relations. John, however, wrote a brief reply to the effect that they had decided to buy no new fiddles; their collection being complete, there would be no occasion for them to invite his services as a performer. This was final. No answer came, and the matter seemed to drop. Never for one moment, though, did it leave the consciousness of John Gilmer. Hyman had said that he would come, and come assuredly he would. He secretly gave Morgan instructions that he and his brother for the future were always \"out\" when the Hebrew presented himself.\n\n\"He must have gone back to Germany, you see, almost at once after his visit here that night,\" observed William\u2014John, however, making no reply.\n\nOne night towards the middle of January the two brothers came home together from a concert in Queen's Hall, and sat up later than usual in their sitting-room discussing over their whisky and tobacco the merits of the pieces and performers. It must have been past one o'clock when they turned out the lights in the passage and retired to bed. The air was still and frosty; moonlight over the roofs\u2014one of those sharp and dry winter nights that now seem to visit London rarely.\n\n\"Like the old-fashioned days when we were boys,\" remarked William, pausing a moment by the passage window and looking out across the miles of silvery, sparkling roofs.\n\n\"Yes,\" added John; \"the ponds freezing hard in the fields, rime on the nursery windows, and the sound of a horse's hoofs coming down the road in the distance, eh?\" They smiled at the memory, then said good night, and separated. Their rooms were at opposite ends of the corridor; in between were the bathroom, dining-room, and sitting-room. It was a long, straggling flat. Half an hour later both brothers were sound asleep, the flat silent, only a dull murmur rising from the great city outside, and the moon sinking slowly to the level of the chimneys.\n\nPerhaps two hours passed, perhaps three, when John Gilmer, sitting up in bed with a start, wide-awake and frightened, knew that someone was moving about in one of the three rooms that lay between him and his brother. He had absolutely no idea why he should have been frightened, for there was no dream or nightmare-memory that he brought over from unconsciousness, and yet he realized plainly that the fear he felt was by no means a foolish and unreasoning fear. It had a cause and a reason. Also\u2014which made it worse\u2014it was fully warranted. Something in his sleep, forgotten in the instant of waking, had happened that set every nerve in his body on the watch. He was positive only of two things\u2014first, that it was the entrance of this person, moving so quietly there in the flat, that sent the chills down his spine; and, secondly, that this person was not his brother William.\n\nJohn Gilmer was a timid man. The sight of a burglar, his eyes black-masked, suddenly confronting him in the passage, would most likely have deprived him of all power of decision\u2014until the burglar had either shot him or escaped. But on this occasion some instinct told him that it was no burglar, and that the acute distress he experienced was not due to any message of ordinary physical fear. The thing that had gained access to his flat while he slept had first come\u2014he felt sure of it\u2014into his room, and had passed very close to his own bed, before going on. It had then doubtless gone to his brother's room, visiting them both stealthily to make sure they slept. And its mere passage through his room had been enough to wake him and set these drops of cold perspiration upon his skin. For it was\u2014he felt it in every fibre of his body\u2014something hostile.\n\nThe thought that it might at that very moment be in the room of his brother, however, brought him to his feet on the cold floor, and set him moving with all the determination he could summon towards the door. He looked cautiously down an utterly dark passage; then crept on tiptoe along it. On the wall were old-fashioned weapons that had belonged to his father; and feeling a curved, sheathless sword that had come from some Turkish campaign of years gone by, his fingers closed tightly round it, and lifted it silently from the three hooks whereon it lay. He passed the doors of the bathroom and dining-room, making instinctively for the big sitting-room where the violins were kept in their glass cases. The cold nipped him. His eyes smarted with the effort to see in the darkness. Outside the closed door he hesitated.\n\nPutting his ear to the crack, he listened. From within came a faint sound of someone moving. The same instant there rose the sharp, delicate \"ping\" of a violin-string being plucked; and John Gilmer, with nerves that shook like the vibrations of that very string, opened the door wide with a fling and turned on the light at the same moment. The plucked string still echoed faintly in the air.\n\nThe sensation that met him on the threshold was the well-known one that things had been going on in the room which his unexpected arrival had that instant put a stop to. A second earlier and he would have discovered it all in the act. The atmosphere still held the feeling of rushing, silent movement with which the things had raced back to their normal, motionless positions. The immobility of the furniture was a mere attitude hurriedly assumed, and the moment his back was turned the whole business, whatever it might be, would begin again. With this presentment of the room, however\u2014a purely imaginative one\u2014came another, swiftly on its heels.\n\nFor one of the objects, less swift than the rest, had not quite regained its \"attitude\" of repose. It still moved. Below the window curtains on the right, not far from the shelf that bore the violins in their glass cases, he made it out, slowly gliding along the floor. Then, even as his eye caught it, it came to rest.\n\nAnd, while the cold perspiration broke out all over him afresh, he knew that this still moving item was the cause both of his waking and of his terror. This was the disturbance whose presence he had divined in the flat without actual hearing, and whose passage through his room, while he yet slept, had touched every nerve in his body as with ice. Clutching his Turkish sword tightly, he drew back with the utmost caution against the wall and watched, for the singular impression came to him that the movement was not that of a human being crouching, but rather of something that pertained to the animal world. He remembered, flash-like, the movements of reptiles, the stealth of the larger felines, the undulating glide of great snakes. For the moment, however, it did not move, and they faced one another.\n\nThe other side of the room was but dimly lighted, and the noise he made clicking up another electric lamp brought the thing flying forward again\u2014towards himself. At such a moment it seemed absurd to think of so small a detail, but he remembered his bare feet, and, genuinely frightened, he leaped upon a chair and swished with his sword through the air about him. From this better point of view, with the increased light to aid him, he then saw two things\u2014first, that the glass case usually covering the Guarnerius violin had been shifted; and, secondly, that the moving object was slowly elongating itself into an upright position. Semi-erect, yet most oddly, too, like a creature on its hind legs, it was coming swiftly towards him. It was making for the door\u2014and escape.\n\nThe confusion of ghostly fear was somehow upon him so that he was too bewildered to see clearly, but he had sufficient self-control, it seemed, to recover a certain power of action; for the moment the advancing figure was near enough for him to strike, that curved scimitar flashed and whirred about him, with such misdirected violence, however, that he not only failed to strike it even once, but at the same time lost his balance and fell forward from the chair whereon he perched\u2014straight into it.\n\nAnd then came the most curious thing of all, for as he dropped, the figure also dropped, stooped low down, crouched, dwindled amazingly in size, and rushed past him close to the ground like an animal on all fours. John Gilmer screamed, for he could no longer contain himself. Stumbling over the chair as he turned to follow, cutting and slashing wildly with his sword, he saw halfway down the darkened corridor beyond the scuttling outline of, apparently, an enormous\u2014cat!\n\nThe door into the outer landing was somehow ajar, and the next second the beast was out, but not before the steel had fallen with a crashing blow upon the front disappearing leg, almost severing it from the body.\n\nIt was dreadful. Turning up the lights as he went, he ran after it to the outer landing. But the thing he followed was already well away, and he heard, on the floor below him, the same oddly gliding, slithering, stealthy sound, yet hurrying, that he had heard weeks before when something had passed him in the lift and Morgan, in his terror, had likewise cried aloud.\n\nFor a time he stood there on that dark landing, listening, thinking, trembling; then turned into the flat and shut the door. In the sitting-room he carefully replaced the glass case over the treasured violin, puzzled to the point of foolishness, and strangely routed in his mind. For the violin itself, he saw, had been dragged several inches from its cushioned bed of plush.\n\nNext morning, however, he made no allusion to the occurrence of the night. His brother apparently had not been disturbed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 575", + "text": "The only thing that called for explanation\u2014an explanation not fully forthcoming\u2014was the curious aspect of Mr. Morgan's countenance. The fact that this individual gave notice to the owners of the building, and at the end of the month left for a new post, was, of course, known to both brothers; whereas the story he told in explanation of his face was known only to the one who questioned him about it\u2014John. And John, for reasons best known to himself, did not pass it on to the other. Also, for reasons best known to himself, he did not cross-question the liftman about those singular marks, or report the matter to the police.\n\nMr. Morgan's pasty visage was badly scratched, and there were red lines running from the cheek into the neck that had the appearance of having been produced by sharp points viciously applied\u2014claws. He had been disturbed by a noise in the hall, he said, about three in the morning, a scuffle had ensued in the darkness, but the intruder had got clear away...\n\n\"A cat or something of the kind, no doubt,\" suggested John Gilmer at the end of the brief recital. And Morgan replied in his usual way: \"A cat, or something of the kind, Mr. John, no doubt.\"\n\nAll the same, he had not cared to risk a second encounter, but had departed to wear his billycock and uniform in a building less haunted.\n\nHyman, meanwhile, made no attempt to call and talk over his dismissal. The reason for this was only apparent, however, several months later when, quite by chance, coming along Piccadilly in an omnibus, the brothers found themselves seated opposite to a man with a thick black beard and blue glasses. William Gilmer hastily rang the bell and got out, saying something half intelligible about feeling faint. John followed him.\n\n\"Did you see who it was?\" he whispered to his brother the moment they were safely on the pavement.\n\nJohn nodded.\n\n\"Hyman, in spectacles. He's grown a beard, too.\"\n\n\"Yes, but did you also notice\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"He had an empty sleeve.\"\n\n\"An empty sleeve?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said William; \"he's lost an arm.\"\n\nThere was a long pause before John spoke. At the door of their club the elder brother added:\n\n\"Poor devil! He'll never again play on\"\u2014then, suddenly changing the preposition\u2014\"with a pedigree violin!\"\n\nAnd that night in the flat, after William had gone to bed, he looked up a curious old volume he had once picked up on a second-hand bookstall, and read therein quaint descriptions of how the \"desire-body of a violent man\" may assume animal shape, operate on concrete matter even at a distance; and, further, how a wound inflicted thereon can reproduce itself upon its physical counterpart by means of the mysterious so-called phenomenon of \"re-percussion.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Wireless Confusion by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "\"Good night, Uncle,\" whispered the child, as she climbed on to his knee and gave him a resounding kiss. \"It's time for me to disappop into bed\u2014at least, so mother says.\"\n\n\"Disappop, then,\" he replied, returning her kiss, \"although I doubt...\"\n\nHe hesitated. He remembered the word was her father's invention, descriptive of the way rabbits pop into their holes and disappear, and the way good children should leave the room the instant bed-time was announced. The father\u2014his twin brother\u2014seemed to enter the room and stand beside them. \"Then give me another kiss, and disappop!\" he said quickly. The child obeyed the first part of his injunction, but had not obeyed the second when the queer thing happened. She had not left his knee; he was still holding her at the full stretch of both arms; he was staring into her laughing eyes, when she suddenly went far away into an extraordinary distance. She retired. Minute, tiny, but still in perfect proportion and clear as before, she was withdrawn in space till she was small as a doll. He saw his own hands holding her, and they too were minute. Down this long corridor of space, as it were, he saw her diminutive figure.\n\n\"Uncle!\" she cried, yet her voice was loud as before, \"but what a funny face! You're pretending you've seen a ghost\"\u2014and she was gone from his knee and from the room, the door closing quietly behind her. He saw her cross the floor, a tiny figure. Then, just as she reached the door, she became of normal size again, as if she crossed a line.\n\nHe felt dizzy. The loud voice close to his ear issuing from a diminutive figure half a mile away had a distressing effect upon him. He knew a curious qualm as he sat there in the dark. He heard the wind walking round the house, trying the doors and windows. He was troubled by a memory he could not seize.\n\nYet the emotion instantly resolved itself into one of personal anxiety: something had gone wrong with his eyes. Sight, his most precious possession as an artist, was of course affected. He was conscious of a little trembling in him, as he at once began trying his sight at various objects\u2014his hands, the high ceiling, the trees dim in the twilight on the lawn outside. He opened a book and read half a dozen lines, at changing distances; finally he stared carefully at the second hand of his watch. \"Right as a trivet!\" he exclaimed aloud. He emitted a long sigh; he was immensely relieved. \"Nothing wrong with my eyes.\"\n\nHe thought about the actual occurrence a great deal\u2014he felt as puzzled as any other normal person must have felt. While he held the child actually in his arms, gripping her with both hands, he had seen her suddenly half a mile away. \"Half a mile!\" he repeated under his breath, \"why it was even more, it was easily a mile.\" It had been exactly as though he suddenly looked at her down the wrong end of a powerful telescope. It had really happened; he could not explain it; there was no more to be said.\n\nThis was the first time it happened to him.\n\nAt the theatre, a week later, when the phenomenon was repeated, the stage he was watching fixedly at the moment went far away, as though he saw it from a long way off. The distance, so far as he could judge, was the same as before, about a mile. It was an Eastern scene, realistically costumed and produced, that without an instant's warning withdrew. The entire stage went with it, although he did not actually see it go. He did not see movement, that is. It was suddenly remote, while yet the actors' voices, the orchestra, the general hubbub retained their normal volume. He experienced again the distressing dizziness; he closed his eyes, covering them with his hand, then rubbing the eyeballs slightly; and when he looked up the next minute, the world was as it should be, as it had been, at any rate. Unwilling to experience a repetition of the thing in a public place, however, and fortunately being alone, he left the theatre at the end of the act.\n\nTwice this happened to him, once with an individual, his brother's child, and once with a landscape, an Eastern stage scene. Both occurrences were within the week, during which time he had been considering a visit to the oculist, though without putting his decision into execution. He was the kind of man that dreaded doctors, dentists, oculists, always postponing, always finding reasons for delay. He found reasons now, the chief among them being an unwelcome one\u2014that it was perhaps a brain specialist, rather than an oculist, he ought to consult. This particular notion hung unpleasantly about his mind, when, the day after the theatre visit, the thing recurred, but with a startling difference.\n\nWhile idly watching a blue-bottle fly that climbed the window-pane with remorseless industry, only to slip down again at the very instant when escape into the open air was within its reach, the fly grew abruptly into gigantic proportions, became blurred and indistinct as it did so, covered the entire pane with its furry, dark, ugly mass, and frightened him so that he stepped back with a cry and nearly lost his balance altogether. He collapsed into a chair. He listened with closed eyes. The metallic buzzing was audible, a small, exasperating sound, ordinarily unable to stir any emotion beyond a mild annoyance. Yet it was terrible; that so huge an insect should make so faint a sound seemed to him terrible.\n\nAt length he cautiously opened his eyes. The fly was of normal size once more. He hastily flicked it out of the window.\n\nAn hour later he was talking with the famous oculist in Harley Street... about the advisability of starting reading-glasses. He found it difficult to relate the rest. A curious shyness restrained him.\n\n\"Your optic nerves might belong to a man of twenty,\" was the verdict. \"Both are perfect. But at your age it is wise to save the sight as much as possible. There is a slight astigmatism...\" And a prescription for the glasses was written out. It was only when paying the fee, and as a means of drawing attention from the awkward moment, that his story found expression. It seemed to come out in spite of himself. He made light of it even then, telling it without conviction. It seemed foolish suddenly as he told it. \"How very odd,\" observed the oculist vaguely, \"dear me, yes, curious indeed. But that's nothing. H'm, h'm!\" Either it was no concern of his, or he deemed it negligible... His only other confidant was a friend of psychological tendencies who was interested and eager to explain. It is on the instant plausible explanation of anything and everything that the reputation of such folk depends; this one was true to type: \"A spontaneous invention, my dear fellow\u2014a pictorial rendering of your thought. You are a painter, aren't you? Well, this is merely a rendering in picture-form of\"\u2014he paused for effect, the other hung upon his words\u2014\"of the odd expression 'disappop.'\"\n\n\"Ah!\" exclaimed the painter.\n\n\"You see everything pictorially, of course, don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014as a rule.\"\n\n\"There you have it. Your painter's psychology saw the child 'disappopping.' That's all.\"\n\n\"And the fly?\" but the fly was easily explained, since it was merely the process reversed. \"Once a process has established itself in your mind, you see, it may act in either direction. When a madman says 'I'm afraid Smith will do me an injury,' it means, 'I will do an injury to Smith,'\" And he repeated with finality, \"That's it.\"\n\nThe explanations were not very satisfactory, the illustration even tactless, but then the problem had not been stated quite fully. Neither to the oculist nor to the other had all the facts been given. The same shyness had been a restraining influence in both cases; a detail had been omitted, and this detail was that he connected the occurrences somehow with his brother whom the war had taken.\n\nThe phenomenon made one more appearance\u2014the last\u2014before its character, its field of action rather, altered. He was reading a book when the print became now large, now small; it blurred, grew remote and tiny, then so huge that a single word, a letter even, filled the whole page. He felt as if someone were playing optical tricks with the mechanism of his eyes, trying first one, then another focus.\n\nMore curious still, the meaning of the words themselves became uncertain; he did not understand them any more; the sentences lost their meaning, as though he read a strange language, or a language little known. The flash came then\u2014someone was using his eyes\u2014someone else was looking through them.\n\nNo, it was not his brother. The idea was preposterous in any case. Yet he shivered again, as when he heard the walking wind, for an uncanny conviction came over him that it was someone who did not understand eyes but was manipulating their mechanism experimentally. With the conviction came also this: that, while not his brother, it was someone connected with his brother.\n\nHere, moreover, was an explanation of sorts, for if the supernatural existed\u2014he had never troubled his head about it\u2014he could accept this odd business as a manifestation, and leave it at that. He did so, and his mind was eased. This was his attitude: \"The supernatural may exist. Why not? We cannot know. But we can watch.\" His eyes and brain, at any rate, were proved in good condition.\n\nHe watched. No change of focus, no magnifying or diminishing, came again. For some weeks he noticed nothing unusual of any kind, except that his mind often filled now with Eastern pictures. Their sudden irruption caught his attention, but no more than that; they were sometimes blurred and sometimes vivid; he had never been in the East; he attributed them to his constant thinking of his brother, missing in Mesopotamia these six months. Photographs in magazines and newspapers explained the rest. Yet the persistence of the pictures puzzled him: tents beneath hot cloudless skies, palms, a stretch of desert, dry watercourses, camels, a mosque, a minaret\u2014typical snatches of this kind flashed into his mind with a sense of faint familiarity often. He knew, again, the return of a fugitive memory he could not seize... He kept a note of the dates, all of them subsequent to the day he read his brother's fate in the official Roll of Honour: \"Believed missing; now killed.\" Only when the original phenomenon returned, but in its altered form, did he stop the practice. The change then affected his life too fundamentally to trouble about mere dates and pictures.\n\nFor the phenomenon, shifting its field of action, abruptly became mental, and the singular change of focus took place now in his mind. Events magnified or contracted themselves out of all relation with their intrinsic values, sense of proportion went hopelessly astray. Love, hate and fear experienced sudden intensification, or abrupt dwindling into nothing; the familiar everyday emotions, commonplace daily acts, suffered exaggerated enlargement, or reduction into insignificance, that threatened the stability of his personality. Fortunately, as stated, they were of brief duration; to examine them in detail were to touch the painful absurdities of incipient mania almost; that a lost collar stud could block his exasperated mind for hours, filling an entire day with emotion, while a deep affection of long standing could ebb towards complete collapse suddenly without apparent cause...!\n\nIt was the unexpected suddenness of Turkey's spectacular defeat that closed the painful symptoms. The Armistice saw them go. He knew a quick relief he was unable to explain. The telegram that his brother was alive and safe came after his recovery of mental balance. It was a shock. But the phenomena had ceased before the shock.\n\nIt was in the light of his brother's story that he reviewed the puzzling phenomena described. The story was not more curious than many another, perhaps, yet the details were queer enough. That a wounded Turk to whom he gave water should have remembered gratitude was likely enough, for all travellers know that these men are kindly gentlemen at times; but that this Mohammedan peasant should have been later a member of a prisoner's escort and have provided the means of escape and concealment\u2014weeks in a dry watercourse and months in a hut outside the town\u2014seemed an incredible stroke of good fortune. \"He brought me food and water three times a week. I had no money to give him, so I gave him my Zeiss glasses. I taught him a bit of English too. But he liked the glasses best. He was never tired of playing with 'em\u2014making big and little, as he called it. He learned precious little English...\"\n\n\"My pair, weren't they?\" interrupted his brother. \"My old climbing glasses.\"\n\n\"Your present to me when I went out, yes. So really you helped me to save my life. I told the old Turk that. I was always thinking about you.\"\n\n\"And the Turk?\"\n\n\"No doubt... Through my mind, that is. At any rate, he asked a lot of questions about you. I showed him your photo. He died, poor chap\u2014at least they told me so. Probably they shot him.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Confession by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The fog swirled slowly round him, driven by a heavy movement of its own, for of course there was no wind. It hung in poisonous thick coils and loops; it rose and sank; no light penetrated it directly from street lamp or motor-car, though here and there some big shop-window shed a glimmering patch upon its ever-shifting curtain.\n\nO'Reilly's eyes ached and smarted with the incessant effort to see a foot beyond his face. The optic nerve grew tired, and sight, accordingly, less accurate. He coughed as he shuffled forward cautiously through the choking gloom. Only the stifled rumble of crawling traffic persuaded him he was in a crowded city at all\u2014this, and the vague outlines of groping figures, hugely magnified, emerging suddenly and disappearing again, as they fumbled along inch by inch towards uncertain destinations.\n\nThe figures, however were human beings; they were real. That much he knew. He heard their muffled voices, now close, now distant, strangely smothered always. He also heard the tapping of innumerable sticks, feeling for iron railings or the kerb. These phantom outlines represented living people. He was not alone.\n\nIt was the dread of finding himself quite alone that haunted him, for he was still unable to cross an open space without assistance. He had the physical strength, it was the mind that failed him. Midway the panic terror might descend upon him, he would shake all over, his will dissolve, he would shriek for help, run wildly\u2014into the traffic probably\u2014or, as they called it in his North Ontario home, \"throw a fit\" in the street before advancing wheels. He was not yet entirely cured, although under ordinary conditions he was safe enough, as Dr. Henry had assured him.\n\nWhen he left Regent's Park by Tube an hour ago the air was clear, the November sun shone brightly, the pale blue sky was cloudless, and the assumption that he could manage the journey across London Town alone was justified. The following day he was to leave for Brighton for the week of final convalescence: this little preliminary test of his powers on a bright November afternoon was all to the good. Doctor Henry furnished minute instructions: \"You change at Piccadilly Circus\u2014without leaving the underground station, mind\u2014and get out at South Kensington. You know the address of your V.A.D. friend. Have your cup of tea with her, then come back the same way to Regent's Park. Come back before dark\u2014say six o'clock at latest. It's better.\" He had described exactly what turns to take after leaving the station, so many to the right, so many to the left; it was a little confusing, but the distance was short. \"You can always ask. You can't possibly go wrong.\"\n\nThe unexpected fog, however, now blurred these instructions in a confused jumble in his mind. The failure of outer sight reacted upon memory. The V.A.D. besides had warned him her address was \"not easy to find the first time. The house lies in a backwater. But with your 'backwoods' instincts you'll probably manage it better than any Londoner!\" She, too, had not calculated upon the fog.\n\nWhen O'Reilly came up the stairs at South Kensington Station, he emerged into such murky darkness that he thought he was still underground. An impenetrable world lay round him. Only a raw bite in the damp atmosphere told him he stood beneath an open sky. For some little time he stood and stared\u2014a Canadian soldier, his home among clear brilliant spaces, now face to face for the first time in his life with that thing he had so often read about\u2014a bad London fog. With keenest interest and surprise he \"enjoyed\" the novel spectacle for perhaps ten minutes, watching the people arrive and vanish, and wondering why the station lights stopped dead the instant they touched the street\u2014then, with a sense of adventure\u2014it cost an effort\u2014he left the covered building and plunged into the opaque sea beyond.\n\nRepeating to himself the directions he had received\u2014first to the right, second to the left, once more to the left, and so forth\u2014he checked each turn, assuring himself it was impossible to go wrong. He made correct if slow progress, until someone blundered into him with an abrupt and startling question: \"Is this right, do you know, for South Kensington Station?\"\n\nIt was the suddenness that startled him; one moment there was no one, the next they were face to face, another, and the stranger had vanished into the gloom with a courteous word of grateful thanks. But the little shock of interruption had put memory out of gear. Had he already turned twice to the right, or had he not? O'Reilly realized sharply he had forgotten his memorized instructions. He stood still, making strenuous efforts at recovery, but each effort left him more uncertain than before. Five minutes later he was lost as hopelessly as any townsman who leaves his tent in the backwoods without blazing the trees to ensure finding his way back again. Even the sense of direction, so strong in him among his native forests, was completely gone. There were no stars, there was no wind, no smell, no sound of running water. There was nothing anywhere to guide him, nothing but occasional dim outlines, groping, shuffling, emerging and disappearing in the eddying fog, but rarely coming within actual speaking, much less touching, distance. He was lost utterly; more, he was alone.\n\nYet not quite alone\u2014the thing he dreaded most. There were figures still in his immediate neighborhood. They emerged, vanished, reappeared, dissolved. No, he was not quite alone. He saw these thickenings of the fog, he heard their voices, the tapping of their cautious sticks, their shuffling feet as well. They were real. They moved, it seemed, about him in a circle, never coming very close.\n\n\"But they're real,\" he said to himself aloud, betraying the weak point in his armour. \"They're human beings right enough. I'm positive of that.\"\n\nHe had never argued with Dr. Henry\u2014he wanted to get well; he had obeyed implicitly, believing everything the doctor told him\u2014up to a point. But he had always had his own idea about these \"figures,\" because, among them, were often enough his own pals from the Somme, Gallipoli, the Mespot horror, too. And he ought to know his own pals when he saw them! At the same time he knew quite well he had been \"shocked,\" his being dislocated; half dissolved as it were, his system pushed into some lopsided condition that meant inaccurate registration. True. He grasped that perfectly. But, in that shock and dislocation, had he not possibly picked up another gear? Were there not gaps and broken edges, pieces that no longer dovetailed, fitted as usual, interstices, in a word? Yes, that was the word\u2014interstices. Cracks, so to speak, between his perception of the outside world and his inner interpretation of these? Between memory and recognition? Between the various states of consciousness that usually dovetailed so neatly that the joints were normally imperceptible?\n\nHis state, he well knew, was abnormal, but were his symptoms on that account unreal? Could not these \"interstices\" be used by\u2014others? When he saw his \"figures,\" he used to ask himself: \"Are not these the real ones, and the others\u2014the human beings\u2014unreal?\"\n\nThis question now revived in him with a new intensity. Were these figures in the fog real or unreal? The man who had asked the way to the station, was he not, after all, a shadow merely?\n\nBy the use of his cane and foot and what of sight was left to him he knew that he was on an island. A lamppost stood up solid and straight beside him, shedding its faint patch of glimmering light. Yet there were railings, however, that puzzled him, for his stick hit the metal rods distinctly in a series. And there should be no railings round an island. Yet he had most certainly crossed a dreadful open space to get where he was. His confusion and bewilderment increased with dangerous rapidity. Panic was not far away.\n\nHe was no longer on an omnibus route. A rare taxi crawled past occasionally, a whitish patch at the window indicating an anxious human face; now and again came a van or cart, the driver holding a lantern as he led the stumbling horse. These comforted him, rare though they were. But it was the figures that drew his attention most. He was quite sure they were real. They were human beings like himself.\n\nFor all that, he decided he might as well be positive on the point. He tried one accordingly\u2014a big man who rose suddenly before him out of the very earth.\n\n\"Can you give me the trail to Morley Place?\" he asked.\n\nBut his question was drowned by the other's simultaneous inquiry in a voice much louder than his own.\n\n\"I say, is this right for the Tube station, d'you know? I'm utterly lost. I want South Ken.\"\n\nAnd by the time O'Reilly had pointed the direction whence he himself had just come, the man was gone again, obliterated, swallowed up, not so much as his footsteps audible, almost as if\u2014it seemed again\u2014he never had been there at all.\n\nThis left an acute unpleasantness in him, a sense of bewilderment greater than before. He waited five minutes, not daring to move a step, then tried another figure, a woman this time who, luckily, knew the immediate neighbourhood intimately. She gave him elaborate instructions in the kindest possible way, then vanished with incredible swiftness and ease into the sea of gloom beyond. The instantaneous way she vanished was disheartening, upsetting; it was so uncannily abrupt and sudden. Yet she comforted him. Morley Place, according to her version, was not two hundred yards from where he stood. He felt his way forward, step by step, using his cane, crossing a giddy open space kicking the kerb with each boot alternately, coughing and choking all the time as he did so.\n\n\"They were real, I guess, anyway,\" he said aloud. \"They were both real enough all right. And it may lift a bit soon!\" He was making a great effort to hold himself in hand. He was already fighting, that is. He realized this perfectly. The only point was\u2014the reality of the figures. \"It may lift now any minute,\" he repeated louder. In spite of the cold, his skin was sweating profusely.\n\nBut, of course, it did not lift. The figures, too, became fewer. No carts were audible. He had followed the woman's directions carefully, but now found himself in some by-way, evidently, where pedestrians at the best of times were rare. There was dull silence all about him. His foot lost the kerb, his cane swept the empty air, striking nothing solid, and panic rose upon him with its shuddering, icy grip. He was alone, he knew himself alone, worse still\u2014he was in another open space.\n\nIt took him fifteen minutes to cross that open space, most of the way upon his hands and knees, oblivious of the icy slime that stained his trousers, froze his fingers, intent only upon feeling solid support against his back and spine again. It was an endless period. The moment of collapse was close, the shriek already rising in his throat, the shaking of the whole body uncontrollable, when\u2014his outstretched fingers struck a friendly kerb, and he saw a glimmering patch of diffused radiance overhead. With a great, quick effort he stood upright, and an instant later his stick rattled along an area railing. He leaned against it, breathless, panting, his heart beating painfully while the street lamp gave him the further comfort of its feeble gleam, the actual flame, however, invisible. He looked this way and that; the pavement was deserted. He was engulfed in the dark silence of the fog.\n\nBut Morley Place, he knew, must be very close by now. He thought of the friendly little V.A.D. he had known in France, of a warm bright fire, a cup of tea and a cigarette. One more effort, he reflected, and all these would be his. He pluckily groped his way forward again, crawling slowly by the area railings. If things got really bad again, he would ring a bell and ask for help, much as he shrank from the idea. Provided he had no more open spaces to cross, provided he saw no more figures emerging and vanishing like creatures born of the fog and dwelling within it as within their native element\u2014it was the figures he now dreaded more than anything else, more even than the loneliness\u2014provided the panic sense\u2014\n\nA faint darkening of the fog beneath the next lamp caught his eye and made him start. He stopped. It was not a figure this time, it was the shadow of the pole grotesquely magnified. No, it moved. It moved towards him. A flame of fire followed by ice flowed through him. It was a figure\u2014close against his face. It was a woman.\n\nThe doctor's advice came suddenly back to him, the counsel that had cured him of a hundred phantoms:\n\n\"Do not ignore them. Treat them as real. Speak and go with them. You will soon prove their unreality then. And they will leave you...\"\n\nHe made a brave, tremendous effort. He was shaking. One hand clutched the damp and icy area railing.\n\n\"Lost your way like myself, haven't you, ma'am?\" he said in a voice that trembled. \"Do you know where we are at all? Morley Place I'm looking for\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped dead. The woman moved nearer and for the first time he saw her face clearly. Its ghastly pallor, the bright, frightened eyes that stared with a kind of dazed bewilderment into his own, the beauty above all, arrested his speech midway. The woman was young, her tall figure wrapped in a dark fur coat.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" he asked impulsively, forgetting his own terror for the moment. He was more than startled. Her air of distress and pain stirred a peculiar anguish in him. For a moment she made no answer, thrusting her white face closer as if examining him, so close, indeed, that he controlled with difficulty his instinct to shrink back a little.\n\n\"Where am I?\" she asked at length, searching his eyes intently. \"I'm lost\u2014I've lost myself. I can't find my way back.\" Her voice was low, a curious wailing in it that touched his pity oddly. He felt his own distress merging in one that was greater.\n\n\"Same here,\" he replied more confidently. \"I'm terrified of being alone, too. I've had shell-shock, you know. Let's go together. We'll find a way together\u2014\"\n\n\"Who are you!\" the woman murmured, still staring at him with her big bright eyes, their distress, however, no whit lessened. She gazed at him as though aware suddenly of his presence.\n\nHe told her briefly. \"And I'm going to tea with a V.A.D. friend in Morley Place. What's your address? Do you know the name of the street?\"\n\nShe appeared not to hear him, or not to understand exactly; it was as if she was not listening again.\n\n\"I came out so suddenly, so unexpectedly,\" he heard the low voice with pain in every syllable; \"I can't find my home again. Just when I was expecting him too\u2014\" She looked about her with a distraught expression that made O'Reilly long to carry her in his arms to safety then and there. \"He may be there now\u2014waiting for me at this very moment\u2014and I can't get back.\" And so sad was her voice that only by an effort did O'Reilly prevent himself putting out his hand to touch her. More and more he forgot himself in his desire to help her. Her beauty, the wonder of her strange bright eyes in the pallid face, made an immense appeal. He became calmer. This woman was real enough. He asked again the address, the street and number, the distance she thought it was. \"Have you any idea of the direction, ma'am, any idea at all? We'll go together and\u2014\"\n\nShe suddenly cut him short. She turned her head as if to listen, so that he saw her profile a moment, the outline of the slender neck, a glimpse of jewels just below the fur.\n\n\"Hark! I hear him calling! I remember...!\" And she was gone from his side into the swirling fog.\n\nWithout an instant's hesitation O'Reilly followed her, not only because he wished to help, but because he dared not be left alone. The presence of this strange, lost woman comforted him; he must not lose sight of her, whatever happened. He had to run, she went so rapidly, ever just in front, moving with confidence and certainty, turning right and left, crossing the street, but never stopping, never hesitating, her companion always at her heels in breathless haste, and with a growing terror that he might lose her any minute. The way she found her direction through the dense fog was marvellous enough, but O'Reilly's only thought was to keep her in sight, lest his own panic redescend upon him with its inevitable collapse in the dark and lonely street. It was a wild and panting pursuit, and he kept her in view with difficulty, a dim fleeting outline always a few yards ahead of him. She did not once turn her head, she uttered no sound, no cry; she hurried forward with unfaltering instinct. Nor did the chase occur to him once as singular; she was his safety, and that was all he realized.\n\nOne thing, however, he remembered afterwards, though at the actual time he no more than registered the detail, paying no attention to it\u2014a definite perfume she left upon the atmosphere, one, moreover, that he knew, although he could not find its name as he ran. It was associated vaguely, for him, with something unpleasant, something disagreeable. He connected it with misery and pain. It gave him a feeling of uneasiness. More than that he did not notice at the moment, nor could he remember\u2014he certainly did not try\u2014where he had known this particular scent before.\n\nThen suddenly the woman stopped, opened a gate and passed into a small private garden\u2014so suddenly that O'Reilly, close upon her heels, only just avoided tumbling into her. \"You've found it?\" he cried. \"May I come in a moment with you? Perhaps you'll let me telephone to the doctor.\"\n\nShe turned instantly. Her face close against his own, was livid.\n\n\"Doctor!\" she repeated in an awful whisper. The word meant terror to her. O'Reilly stood amazed. For a second or two neither of them moved. The woman seemed petrified.\n\n\"Dr. Henry, you know,\" he stammered, finding his tongue again. \"I'm in his care. He's in Harley Street.\"\n\nHer face cleared as suddenly as it had darkened, though the original expression of bewilderment and pain still hung in her great eyes. But the terror left them, as though she suddenly forgot some association that had revived it.\n\n\"My home,\" she murmured. \"My home is somewhere here. I'm near it. I must get back\u2014in time\u2014for him. I must. He's coming to me.\" And with these extraordinary words she turned, walked up the narrow path, and stood upon the porch of a two-storey house before her companion had recovered from his astonishment sufficiently to move or utter a syllable in reply. The front door, he saw, was ajar. It had been left open.\n\nFor five seconds, perhaps for ten, he hesitated; it was the fear that the door would close and shut him out that brought the decision to his will and muscles. He ran up the steps and followed the woman into a dark hall where she had already preceded him, and amid whose blackness she now had finally vanished. He closed the door, not knowing exactly why he did so, and knew at once by an instinctive feeling that the house he now found himself in with this unknown woman was empty and unoccupied. In a house, however, he felt safe. It was the open streets that were his danger. He stood waiting, listening a moment before he spoke; and he heard the woman moving down the passage from door to door, repeating to herself in her low voice of unhappy wailing some words he could not understand:\n\n\"Where is it? Oh, where is it? I must get back...\"\n\nO'Reilly then found himself abruptly stricken with dumbness, as though, with these strange words, a haunting terror came up and breathed against him in the darkness.\n\n\"Is she after all a figure?\" ran in letters of fire across his numbed brain. \"Is she unreal\u2014or real?\"\n\nSeeking relief in action of some kind, he put out a hand automatically, feeling along the wall for an electric switch, and though he found it by some miraculous chance, no answering glow responded to the click.\n\nAnd the woman's voice from the darkness: \"Ah! Ah! At last I've found it. I'm home again\u2014at last...!\" He heard a door open and close upstairs. He was on the ground-floor now\u2014alone. Complete silence followed.\n\nIn the conflict of various emotions\u2014fear for himself lest his panic should return, fear for the woman who had led him into this empty house and now deserted him upon some mysterious errand of her own that made him think of madness\u2014in this conflict that held him a moment spell-bound, there was a yet bigger ingredient demanding instant explanation, but an explanation that he could not find. Was the woman real or was she unreal? Was she a human being or a \"figure\"? The horror of doubt obsessed him with an acute uneasiness that betrayed itself in a return of that unwelcome inner trembling he knew was dangerous.\n\nWhat saved him from a crise that must have had most dangerous results for his mind and nervous system generally, seems to have been the outstanding fact that he felt more for the woman than for himself. His sympathy and pity had been deeply moved; her voice, her beauty, her anguish and bewilderment, all uncommon, inexplicable, mysterious, formed together a claim that drove self into the background. Added to this was the detail that she had left him, gone to another floor without a word, and now, behind a closed door in a room upstairs, found herself face to face at last with the unknown object of her frantic search\u2014with \"it,\" whatever \"it\" might be. Real or unreal, figure or human being, the overmastering impulse of his being was that he must go to her.\n\nIt was this clear impulse that gave him decision and energy to do what he then did. He struck a match, he found a stump of candle, he made his way by means of this flickering light along the passage and up the carpetless stairs. He moved cautiously, stealthily, though not knowing why he did so. The house, he now saw, was indeed untenanted; dust-sheets covered the piled-up furniture; he glimpsed through doors ajar, pictures were screened upon the walls, brackets draped to look like hooded heads. He went on slowly, steadily, moving on tiptoe as though conscious of being watched, noting the well of darkness in the hall below, the grotesque shadows that his movements cast on walls and ceiling. The silence was unpleasant, yet, remembering that the woman was \"expecting\" someone, he did not wish it broken. He reached the landing and stood still. Closed doors on both sides of a corridor met his sight, as he shaded the candle to examine the scene. Behind which of these doors, he asked himself, was the woman, figure or human being, now alone with \"it\"?\n\nThere was nothing to guide him, but an instinct that he must not delay sent him forward again upon his search. He tried a door on the right\u2014an empty room, with the furniture hidden by dust-sheets, and the mattress rolled up on the bed. He tried a second door, leaving the first one open behind him, and it was, similarly, an empty bedroom. Coming out into the corridor again he stood a moment waiting, then called aloud in a low voice that yet woke echoes unpleasantly in the hall below: \"Where are you? I want to help\u2014which room are you in?\"\n\nThere was no answer; he was almost glad he heard no sound, for he knew quite well that he was waiting really for another sound\u2014the steps of him who was \"expected.\" And the idea of meeting with this unknown third sent a shudder through him, as though related to an interview he dreaded with his whole heart, and must at all costs avoid. Waiting another moment or two, he noted that his candle-stump was burning low, then crossed the landing with a feeling, at once of hesitation and determination, towards a door opposite to him. He opened it; he did not halt on the threshold. Holding the candle at arm's length, he went boldly in.\n\nAnd instantly his nostrils told him he was right at last, for a whiff of the strange perfume, though this time much stronger than before, greeted him, sending a new quiver along his nerves. He knew now why it was associated with unpleasantness, with pain, with misery, for he recognized it\u2014the odour of a hospital. In this room a powerful an\u00e6sthetic had been used\u2014and recently.\n\nSimultaneously with smell, sight brought its message too. On the large double bed behind the door on his right lay, to his amazement, the woman in the dark fur coat. He saw the jewels on the slender neck; but the eyes he did not see, for they were closed\u2014closed, too, he grasped at once, in death. The body lay stretched at full length, quite motionless. He approached. A dark thin streak that came from the parted lips and passed downwards over the chin, losing itself then in the fur collar, was a trickle of blood. It was hardly dry. It glistened.\n\nStrange it was perhaps that, while imaginary fears had the power to paralyse him, mind and body, this sight of something real had the effect of restoring confidence. The sight of blood and death, amid conditions often ghastly and even monstrous, was no new thing to him. He went up quietly, and with steady hand he felt the woman's cheek, the warmth of recent life still in its softness. The final cold had not yet mastered this empty form whose beauty, in its perfect stillness, had taken on the new strange sweetness of an unearthly bloom. Pallid, silent, untenanted, it lay before him, lit by the flicker of his guttering candle. He lifted the fur coat to feel for the unbeating heart. A couple of hours ago at most, he judged, this heart was working busily, the breath came through those parted lips, the eyes were shining in full beauty. His hand encountered a hard knob\u2014the head of a long steel hat-pin driven through the heart up to its hilt.\n\nHe knew then which was the figure\u2014which was the real and which the unreal. He knew also what had been meant by \"it.\"\n\nBut before he could think or reflect what action he must take, before he could straighten himself even from his bent position over the body on the bed, there sounded through the empty house below the loud clang of the front door being closed. And instantly rushed over him that other fear he had so long forgotten\u2014fear for himself. The panic of his own shaken nerves descended with irresistible onslaught. He turned, extinguishing the candle in the violent trembling of his hand, and tore headlong from the room.\n\nThe following ten minutes seemed a nightmare in which he was not master of himself and knew not exactly what he did. All he realized was that steps already sounded on the stairs, coming quickly nearer. The flicker of an electric torch played on the banisters, whose shadows ran swiftly sideways along the wall as the hand that held the light ascended. He thought in a frenzied second of police, of his presence in the house, of the murdered woman. It was a sinister combination. Whatever happened, he must escape without being so much as even seen. His heart raced madly. He darted across the landing into the room opposite, whose door he had luckily left open. And by some incredible chance, apparently, he was neither seen nor heard by the man who, a moment later, reached the landing, entered the room where the body of the woman lay, and closed the door carefully behind him.\n\nShaking, scarcely daring to breathe lest his breath be audible, O'Reilly, in the grip of his own personal terror, remnant of his uncured shock of war, had no thought of what duty might demand or not demand of him. He thought only of himself. He realized one clear issue\u2014that he must get out of the house without being heard or seen. Who the new-comer was he did not know, beyond an uncanny assurance that it was not him whom the woman had \"expected,\" but the murderer himself, and that it was the murderer, in his turn, who was expecting this third person. In that room with death at his elbow, a death he had himself brought about but an hour or two ago, the murderer now hid in waiting for his second victim. And the door was closed.\n\nYet any minute it might open again, cutting off retreat.\n\nO'Reilly crept out, stole across the landing, reached the head of the stairs, and began, with the utmost caution, the perilous descent. Each time the bare boards creaked beneath his weight, no matter how stealthily this weight was adjusted, his heart missed a beat. He tested each step before he pressed upon it, distributing as much of his weight as he dared upon the banisters. It was a little more than half-way down that, to his horror, his foot caught in a projecting carpet tack; he slipped on the polished wood, and only saved himself from falling headlong by a wild clutch at the railing, making an uproar that seemed to him like the explosion of a hand-grenade in the forgotten trenches. His nerves gave way then, and panic seized him. In the silence that followed the resounding echoes he heard the bedroom door opening on the floor above.\n\nConcealment was now useless. It was impossible, too. He took the last flight of stairs in a series of leaps, four steps at a time, reached the hall, flew across it, and opened the front door, just as his pursuer, electric torch in hand, covered half the stairs behind him. Slamming the door, he plunged headlong into the welcome, all-obscuring fog outside.\n\nThe fog had now no terrors for him, he welcomed its concealing mantle; nor did it matter in which direction he ran so long as he put distance between him and the house of death. The pursuer had, of course, not followed him into the street. He crossed open spaces without a tremor. He ran in a circle nevertheless, though without being aware he did so. No people were about, no single groping shadow passed him; no boom of traffic reached his ears, when he paused for breath at length against an area railing. Then for the first time he made the discovery that he had no hat. He remembered now. In examining the body, partly out of respect, partly perhaps unconsciously, he had taken it off and laid it\u2014on the very bed.\n\nIt was there, a tell-tale bit of damning evidence, in the house of death. And a series of probable consequences flashed through his mind like lightning. It was a new hat fortunately; more fortunate still, he had not yet written name or initials in it; but the maker's mark was there for all to read, and the police would go immediately to the shop where he had bought it only two days before. Would the shop-people remember his appearance? Would his visit, the date, the conversation be recalled? He thought it was unlikely; he resembled dozens of men; he had no outstanding peculiarity. He tried to think, but his mind was confused and troubled, his heart was beating dreadfully, he felt desperately ill. He sought vainly for some story to account for his being out in the fog and far from home without a hat. No single idea presented itself. He clung to the icy railings, hardly able to keep upright, collapse very near\u2014when suddenly a figure emerged from the fog, paused a moment to stare at him, put out a hand and caught him, and then spoke:\n\n\"You're ill, my dear sir,\" said a man's kindly voice. \"Can I be of any assistance? Come, let me help you.\" He had seen at once that it was not a case of drunkenness. \"Come, take my arm, won't you? I'm a physician. Luckily, too, you are just outside my very house. Come in.\" And he half dragged, half pushed O'Reilly, now bordering on collapse, up the steps and opened the door with his latch-key.\n\n\"Felt ill suddenly\u2014lost in the fog... terrified, but be all right soon, thanks awfully\u2014\" the Canadian stammered his gratitude, but already feeling better. He sank into a chair in the hall, while the other put down a paper parcel he had been carrying, and led him presently into a comfortable room; a fire burned brightly; the electric lamps were pleasantly shaded; a decanter of whisky and a siphon stood on a small table beside a big arm-chair; and before O'Reilly could find another word to say the other had poured him out a glass and bade him sip it slowly, without troubling to talk till he felt better.\n\n\"That will revive you. Better drink it slowly. You should never have been out a night like this. If you've far to go, better let me put you up\u2014\"\n\n\"Very kind, very kind, indeed,\" mumbled O'Reilly, recovering rapidly in the comfort of a presence he already liked and felt even drawn to.\n\n\"No trouble at all,\" returned the doctor. \"I've been at the front, you know. I can see what your trouble is\u2014shell-shock, I'll be bound.\"\n\nThe Canadian, much impressed by the other's quick diagnosis, noted also his tact and kindness. He had made no reference to the absence of a hat, for instance.\n\n\"Quite true,\" he said. \"I'm with Dr. Henry, in Harley Street,\" and he added a few words about his case. The whisky worked its effect, he revived more and more, feeling better every minute. The other handed him a cigarette; they began to talk about his symptoms and recovery; confidence returned in a measure, though he still felt badly frightened. The doctor's manner and personality did much to help, for there was strength and gentleness in the face, though the features showed unusual determination, softened occasionally by a sudden hint as of suffering in the bright, compelling eyes. It was the face, thought O'Reilly, of a man who had seen much and probably been through hell, but of a man who was simple, good, sincere. Yet not a man to trifle with; behind his gentleness lay something very stern. This effect of character and personality woke the other's respect in addition to his gratitude. His sympathy was stirred.\n\n\"You encourage me to make another guess,\" the man was saying, after a successful reading of the impromptu patient's state, \"that you have had, namely, a severe shock quite recently, and\"\u2014he hesitated for the merest fraction of a second\u2014\"that it would be a relief to you,\" he went on, the skilful suggestion in the voice unnoticed by his companion, \"it would be wise as well, if you could unburden yourself to\u2014someone\u2014who would understand.\" He looked at O'Reilly with a kindly and very pleasant smile. \"Am I not right, perhaps?\" he asked in his gentle tone.\n\n\"Someone who would understand,\" repeated the Canadian. \"That's my trouble exactly. You've hit it. It's all so incredible.\"\n\nThe other smiled. \"The more incredible,\" he suggested, \"the greater your need for expression. Suppression, as you may know, is dangerous in cases like this. You think you have hidden it, but it bides its time and comes up later, causing a lot of trouble. Confession, you know\"\u2014he emphasized the word\u2014\"confession is good for the soul!\"\n\n\"You're dead right,\" agreed the other.\n\n\"Now if you can, bring yourself to tell it to someone who will listen and believe\u2014to myself, for instance. I am a doctor, familiar with such things. I shall regard all you say as a professional confidence, of course; and, as we are strangers, my belief or disbelief is of no particular consequence. I may tell you in advance of your story, however\u2014I think I can promise it\u2014that I shall believe all you have to say.\"\n\nO'Reilly told his story without more ado, for the suggestion of the skilled physician had found easy soil to work in. During the recital his host's eyes never once left his own. He moved no single muscle of his body. His interest seemed intense.\n\n\"A bit tall, isn't it?\" said the Canadian, when his tale was finished. \"And the question is\u2014\" he continued with a threat of volubility which the other checked instantly.\n\n\"Strange, yes, but incredible, no,\" the doctor interrupted. \"I see no reason to disbelieve a single detail of what you have just told me. Things equally remarkable, equally incredible, happen in all large towns, as I know from personal experience. I could give you instances.\" He paused a moment, but his companion, staring into his eyes with interest and curiosity, made no comment. \"Some years ago, in fact,\" continued the other, \"I knew of a very similar case\u2014strangely similar.\"\n\n\"Really! I should be immensely interested\u2014\"\n\n\"So similar that it seems almost a coincidence. You may find it hard, in your turn, to credit it.\" He paused again, while O'Reilly sat forward in his chair to listen. \"Yes,\" pursued the doctor slowly, \"I think everyone connected with it is now dead. There is no reason why I should not tell it, for one confidence deserves another, you know. It happened during the Boer War\u2014as long ago as that,\" he added with emphasis. \"It is really a very commonplace story in one way, though very dreadful in another, but a man who has served at the front will understand and\u2014I'm sure\u2014will sympathize.\"\n\n\"I'm sure of that,\" offered the other readily.\n\n\"A colleague of mine, now dead, as I mentioned\u2014a surgeon, with a big practice, married a young and charming girl. They lived happily together for several years. His wealth made her very comfortable. His consulting-room, I must tell you, was some distance from his house\u2014just as this might be\u2014so that she was never bothered with any of his cases. Then came the war. Like many others, though much over age, he volunteered. He gave up his lucrative practice and went to South Africa. His income, of course, stopped; the big house was closed; his wife found her life of enjoyment considerably curtailed. This she considered a great hardship, it seems. She felt a bitter grievance against him. Devoid of imagination, without any power of sacrifice, a selfish type, she was yet a beautiful, attractive woman\u2014and young. The inevitable lover came upon the scene to console her. They planned to run away together. He was rich. Japan they thought would suit them. Only, by some ill luck, the husband got wind of it and arrived in London just in the nick of time.\"\n\n\"Well rid of her,\" put in O'Reilly, \"I think.\"\n\nThe doctor waited a moment. He sipped his glass. Then his eyes fixed upon his companion's face somewhat sternly.\n\n\"Well rid of her, yes,\" he continued, \"only he determined to make that riddance final. He decided to kill her\u2014and her lover. You see, he loved her.\"\n\nO'Reilly made no comment. In his own country this method with a faithless woman was not unknown. His interest was very concentrated. But he was thinking, too, as he listened, thinking hard.\n\n\"He planned the time and place with care,\" resumed the other in a lower voice, as though he might possibly be overheard. \"They met, he knew, in the big house, now closed, the house where he and his young wife had passed such happy years during their prosperity. The plan failed, however, in an important detail\u2014the woman came at the appointed hour, but without her lover. She found death waiting for her\u2014it was a painless death. Then her lover, who was to arrive half an hour later, did not come at all. The door had been left open for him purposely. The house was dark, its rooms shut up, deserted; there was no caretaker even. It was a foggy night, just like this.\"\n\n\"And the other?\" asked O'Reilly in a failing voice. \"The lover\u2014\"\n\n\"A man did come in,\" the doctor went on calmly, \"but it was not the lover. It was a stranger.\"\n\n\"A stranger?\" the other whispered. \"And the surgeon\u2014where was he all this time?\"\n\n\"Waiting outside to see him enter\u2014concealed in the fog. He saw the man go in. Five minutes later he followed, meaning to complete his vengeance, his act of justice, whatever you like to call it. But the man who had come in was a stranger\u2014he came in by chance\u2014just as you might have done\u2014to shelter from the fog\u2014or\u2014\"\n\nO'Reilly, though with a great effort, rose abruptly to his feet. He had an appalling feeling that the man facing him was mad. He had a keen desire to get outside, fog or no fog, to leave this room, to escape from the calm accents of this insistent voice. The effect of the whisky was still in his blood. He felt no lack of confidence. But words came to him with difficulty.\n\n\"I think I'd better be pushing off now, doctor,\" he said clumsily. \"But I feel I must thank you very much for all your kindness and help.\" He turned and looked hard into the keen eyes facing him. \"Your friend,\" he asked in a whisper, \"the surgeon\u2014I hope\u2014I mean, was he ever caught?\"\n\n\"No,\" was the grave reply, the doctor standing up in front of him, \"he was never caught.\"\n\nO'Reilly waited a moment before he made another remark. \"Well,\" he said at length, but in a louder tone than before, \"I think\u2014I'm glad.\" He went to the door without shaking hands.\n\n\"You have no hat,\" mentioned the voice behind him. \"If you'll wait a moment I'll get you one of mine. You need not trouble to return it.\" And the doctor passed him, going into the hall. There was a sound of tearing paper, O'Reilly left the house a moment later with a hat upon his head, but it was not till he reached the Tube station half an hour afterwards that he realized it was his own." + }, + { + "title": "The Lane That Ran East And West by Algernon Blackwood", + "text": "The curving strip of lane, fading into invisibility east and west, had always symbolized life to her. In some minds life pictures itself a straight line, uphill, downhill, flat, as the case may be; in hers it had been, since childhood, this sweep of country lane that ran past her cottage door. In thick white summer dust, she invariably visualized it, blue and yellow flowers along its untidy banks of green. It flowed, it glided, sometimes it rushed. Without a sound it ran along past the nut trees and the branches where honeysuckle and wild roses shone. With every year now its silent speed increased.\n\nFrom either end she imagined, as a child, that she looked over into outer space\u2014from the eastern end into the infinity before birth, from the western into the infinity that follows death. It was to her of real importance.\n\nFrom the veranda the entire stretch was visible, not more than five hundred yards at most; from the platform in her mind, whence she viewed existence, she saw her own life, similarly, as a white curve of flowering lane, arising she knew not whence, gliding whither she could not tell. At eighteen she had paraphrased the quatrain with a smile upon her red lips, her chin tilted, her strong grey eyes rather wistful with yearning\u2014\n\nInto this little lane, and why not knowing,\n\nNor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing,\n\nAnd out again\u2014like dust along the waste,\n\nI know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.\n\nAt thirty she now repeated it, the smile still there, but the lips not quite so red, the chin a trifle firmer, the grey eyes stronger, clearer, but charged with a more wistful and a deeper yearning.\n\nIt was her turn of mind, imaginative, introspective, querulous perhaps, that made the bit of running lane significant. Food with the butcher's and baker's carts came to her from its eastern, its arriving end, as she called it; news with the postman, adventure with rare callers. Youth, hope, excitement, all these came from the sunrise. Thence came likewise spring and summer, flowers, butterflies, the swallows. The fairies, in her childhood, had come that way too, their silver feet and gossamer wings brightening the summer dawns; and it was but a year ago that Dick Messenger, his car stirring a cloud of thick white dust, had also come into her life from the space beyond the sunrise.\n\nShe sat thinking about him now\u2014how he had suddenly appeared out of nothing that warm June morning, asked her permission about some engineering business on the neighbouring big estate over the hill, given her a dog-rose and a bit of fern-leaf, and eventually gone away with her promise when he left. Out of the eastern end he appeared; into the western end he vanished.\n\nFor there was this departing end as well, where the lane curved out of sight into the space behind the yellow sunset. In this direction went all that left her life. Her parents, each in turn, had taken that way to the churchyard. Spring, summer, the fading butterflies, the restless swallows, all left her round that western curve. Later the fairies followed them, her dreams one by one, the vanishing years as well\u2014and now her youth, swifter, ever swifter, into the region where the sun dipped nightly among pale rising stars, leaving her brief strip of life colder, more and more unlit.\n\nJust beyond this end she imagined shadows.\n\nShe saw Dick's car whirling towards her, whirling away again, making for distant Mexico, where his treasure lay. In the interval he had found that treasure and realized it. He was now coming back again. He had landed in England yesterday.\n\nSeated in her deck-chair on the veranda, she watched the sun sink to the level of the hazel trees. The last swallows already flashed their dark wings against the fading gold. Over that western end to-morrow or the next day, amid a cloud of whirling white dust, would emerge, again out of nothingness, the noisy car that brought Dick Messenger back to her, back from the Mexican expedition that ensured his great new riches, back into her heart and life. In the other direction she would depart a week or so later, her life in his keeping, and his in hers... and the feet of their children, in due course, would run up and down the mysterious lane in search of flowers, butterflies, excitement, in search of life.\n\nShe wondered... and as the light faded her wondering grew deeper. Questions that had lain dormant for twelve months became audible suddenly. Would Dick be satisfied with this humble cottage which meant so much to her that she felt she could never, never leave it? Would not his money, his new position, demand palaces elsewhere? He was ambitious. Could his ambitions set an altar of sacrifice to his love? And she\u2014could she, on the other hand, walk happy and satisfied along the western curve, leaving her lane finally behind her, lost, untravelled, forgotten? Could she face this sacrifice for him? Was he, in a word, the man whose appearance out of the sunrise she had been watching and waiting for all these hurrying, swift years?\n\nShe wondered. Now that the decisive moment was so near, unhappy doubts assailed her. Her wondering grew deeper, spread, enveloped, penetrated her being like a gathering darkness. And the sun sank lower, dusk crept along the hedgerows, the flowers closed their little burning eyes. Shadows passed hand in hand along the familiar bend that was so short, so soon travelled over and left behind that a mistake must ruin all its sweetest joy. To wander down it with a companion to whom its flowers, its butterflies, its shadows brought no full message, must turn it chill, dark, lonely, colourless... Her thoughts slipped on thus into a soft inner reverie born of that scented twilight hour of honeysuckle and wild roses, born too of her deep self-questioning, of wonder, of yearning unsatisfied.\n\nThe lane, meanwhile, produced its customary few figures, moving homewards through the dusk. She knew them well, these familiar figures of the countryside, had known them from childhood onwards\u2014labourers, hedgers, ditchers and the like, with whom now, even in her reverie, she exchanged the usual friendly greetings across the wicket-gate. This time, however, she gave but her mind to them, her heart absorbed with its own personal and immediate problem.\n\nMelancey had come and gone; old Averill, carrying his hedger's sickle-knife, had followed; and she was vaguely looking for Hezekiah Purdy, bent with years and rheumatism, his tea-pail always rattling, his shuffling feet making a sorry dust, when the figure she did not quite recognize came into view, emerging unexpectedly from the sunrise end. Was it Purdy? Yes\u2014no\u2014yet, if not, who was it? Of course it must be Purdy. Yet while the others, being homeward bound, came naturally from west to east, with this new figure it was otherwise, so that he was half-way down the curve before she fully realized him. Out of the eastern end the man drew nearer, a stranger therefore; out of the unknown regions where the sun rose, and where no shadows were, he moved towards her down the deserted lane, perhaps a trespasser, an intruder possibly, but certainly an unfamiliar figure.\n\nWithout particular attention or interest, she watched him drift nearer down her little semi-private lane of dream, passing leisurely from east to west, the mere fact that he was there establishing an intimacy that remained at first unsuspected. It was her eye that watched him, not her mind. What was he doing here, where going, whither come, she wondered vaguely, the lane both his background and his starting-point? A little by-way, after all, this haunted lane. The real world, she knew, swept down the big high-road beyond, unconscious of the humble folk its unimportant tributary served. Suddenly the burden of the years assailed her. Had she, then, missed life by living here?\n\nThen, with a little shock, her heart contracted as she became aware of two eyes fixed upon her in the dusk. The stranger had already reached the wicket-gate and now stood leaning against it, staring at her over its spiked wooden top. It was certainly not old Purdy. The blood rushed back into her heart again as she returned the gaze. He was watching her with a curious intentness, with an odd sense of authority almost, with something that persuaded her instantly of a definite purpose in his being there. He was waiting for her\u2014expecting her to come down and speak with him, as she had spoken with the others. Of this, her little habit, he made use, she felt. Shyly, half-nervously, she left her deck-chair and went slowly down the short gravel path between the flowers, noticing meanwhile that his clothes were ragged, his hair unkempt, his face worn and ravaged as by want and suffering, yet that his eyes were curiously young. His eyes, indeed, were full brown smiling eyes, and it was the surprise of his youth that impressed her chiefly. That he could be tramp or trespasser left her. She felt no fear.\n\nShe wished him \"Good evening\" in her calm, quiet voice, adding with sympathy, \"And who are you, I wonder? You want to ask me something?\" It flashed across her that his shabby clothing was somehow a disguise. Over his shoulder hung a faded sack. \"I can do something for you?\" she pursued inquiringly, as was her kindly custom. \"If you are hungry, thirsty, or\u2014\"\n\nIt was the expression of vigour leaping into the deep eyes that stopped her. \"If you need clothes,\" she had been going to add. She was not frightened, but suddenly she paused, gripped by a wonder she could not understand.\n\nAnd his first words justified her wonder. \"I have something for you,\" he said, his voice faint, a kind of stillness in it as though it came through distance. Also, though this she did not notice, it was an educated voice, and it was the absence of surprise that made this detail too natural to claim attention. She had expected it. \"Something to give you. I have brought it for you,\" the man concluded.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied, aware, again without comprehension, that her courage and her patience were both summoned to support her. \"Yes,\" she repeated more faintly, as though this was all natural, inevitable, expected. She saw that the sack was now lifted from his shoulder and that his hand plunged into it, as it hung apparently loose and empty against the gate. His eyes, however, never for one instant left her own. Alarm, she was able to remind herself, she did not feel. She only recognized that this ragged figure laid something upon her spirit she could not fathom, yet was compelled to face.\n\nHis next words startled her. She drew, if unconsciously, upon her courage:\n\n\"A dream.\"\n\nThe voice was deep, yet still with the faintness as of distance in it. His hand, she saw, was moving slowly from the empty sack. A strange attraction, mingled with pity, with yearning too, stirred deeply in her. The face, it seemed, turned soft, the eyes glowed with some inner fire of feeling. Her heart now beat unevenly.\n\n\"Something\u2014to\u2014sell to me,\" she faltered, aware that his glowing eyes upon her made her tremble. The same instant she was ashamed of the words, knowing they were uttered by a portion of her that resisted, and this was not the language he deserved.\n\nHe smiled, and she knew her resistance a vain make-believe he pierced too easily, though he let it pass in silence.\n\n\"There is, I mean, a price\u2014for every dream,\" she tried to save herself, conscious delightfully that her heart was smiling in return.\n\nThe dusk enveloped them, the corncrakes were calling from the fields, the scent of honeysuckle and wild roses lay round her in a warm wave of air, yet at the same time she felt as if her naked soul stood side by side with this figure in the infinitude of space beyond the sunrise end. The golden stars hung calm and motionless above them. \"That price\"\u2014his answer fell like a summons she had actually expected\u2014\"you pay to another, not to me.\" The voice grew fainter, farther away, dropping through empty space behind her. \"All dreams are but a single dream. You pay that price to\u2014\"\n\nHer interruption slipped spontaneously from her lips, its inevitable truth a prophecy:\n\n\"To myself!\"\n\nHe smiled again, but this time he did not answer. His hand, instead, now moved across the gate towards her.\n\nAnd before she quite realized what had happened, she was holding a little object he had passed across to her. She had taken it, obeying, it seemed, an inner compulsion and authority which were inevitable, fore-ordained. Lowering her face she examined it in the dusk\u2014a small green leaf of fern\u2014fingered it with tender caution as it lay in her palm, gazed for some seconds closely at the tiny thing... When she looked up again the stranger, the seller of dreams, as she now imagined him, had moved some yards away from the gate, and was moving still, a leisurely quiet tread that stirred no dust, a shadowy outline soft with dusk and starlight, moving towards the sunrise end, whence he had first appeared.\n\nHer heart gave a sudden leap, as once again the burden of the years assailed her. Her words seemed driven out:\n\n\"Who are you? Before you go\u2014your name! What is your name?\"\n\nHis voice, now faint with distance as he melted from sight against the dark fringe of hazel trees, reached her but indistinctly, though its meaning was somehow clear:\n\n\"The dream,\" she heard like a breath of wind against her ear, \"shall bring its own name with it. I wait...\" Both sound and figure trailed off into the unknown space beyond the eastern end, and, leaning against the wicket-gate as usual, the white dust settling about his heavy boots, the tea-pail but just ceased from rattling, was\u2014old Purdy.\n\nUnless the mind can fix the reality of an event in the actual instant of its happening, judgment soon dwindles into a confusion between memory and argument. Five minutes later, when old Purdy had gone his way again, she found herself already wondering, reflecting, questioning. Yearning had perhaps conjured with emotion to fashion both voice and figure out of imagination, out of this perfumed dusk, out of the troubled heart's desire. Confusion in time had further helped to metamorphose old Purdy into some legendary shape that had stolen upon her mood of reverie from the shadows of her beloved lane... Yet the dream she had accepted from a stranger hand, a little fern leaf, remained at any rate to shape a delightful certainty her brain might criticize while her heart believed. The fern leaf assuredly was real. A fairy gift! Those who eat of this fern-seed, she remembered as she sank into sleep that night, shall see the fairies! And, indeed, a few hours later she walked in dream along the familiar curve between the hedges, her own childhood taking her by the hand as she played with the flowers, the butterflies, the glad swallows beckoning while they flashed. Without the smallest sense of surprise or unexpectedness, too, she met at the eastern end\u2014two figures. They stood, as she with her childhood stood, hand in hand, the seller of dreams and her lover, waiting since time began, she realized, waiting with some great unuttered question on their lips. Neither addressed her, neither spoke a word. Dick looked at her, ambition, hard and restless, shining in his eyes; in the eyes of the other\u2014dark, gentle, piercing, but extraordinarily young for all the ragged hair about the face the shabby clothes, the ravaged and unkempt appearance\u2014a brightness as of the coming dawn.\n\nA choice, she understood, was offered to her; there was a decision she must make. She realized, as though some great wind blew it into her from outer space, another, a new standard to which her judgment must inevitably conform, or admit the purpose of her life evaded finally. The same moment she knew what her decision was. No hesitation touched her. Calm, yet trembling, her courage and her patience faced the decision and accepted it. The hands then instantly fell apart, unclasped. One figure turned and vanished down the lane towards the departing end, but with the other, now hand in hand, she rose floating, gliding without effort, a strange bliss in her heart, to meet the sunrise.\n\n\"He has awakened... so he cannot stay,\" she heard, like a breath of wind that whispered into her ear. \"I, who bring you this dream\u2014I wait.\"\n\nShe did not wake at once when the dream was ended, but slept on long beyond her accustomed hour, missing thereby Melancey, Averill, old Purdy as they passed the wicket-gate in the early hours. She woke, however, with a new clear knowledge of herself, of her mind and heart, to all of which in simple truth to her own soul she must conform. The fern-seed she placed in a locket attached to a fine gold chain about her neck. During the long, lonely, expectant yet unsatisfied years that followed she wore it day and night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 579", + "text": "She had the curious feeling that she remained young. Others grew older, but not she. She watched her contemporaries slowly give the signs, while she herself held stationary. Even those younger than herself went past her, growing older in the ordinary way, whereas her heart, her mind, even her appearance, she felt certain, hardly aged at all. In a room full of people she felt pity often as she read the signs in their faces knowing her own unchanged. Their eyes were burning out, but hers burned on. It was neither vanity nor delusion, but an inner conviction she could not alter.\n\nThe age she held to was the year she had received the fern-seed from old Purdy, or rather, from an imaginary figure her reverie had set momentarily in old Purdy's place. That figure of her reverie, the dream that followed, the subsequent confession to Dick Messenger, meeting his own half-way\u2014these marked the year when she stopped growing older. To that year she seemed chained, gazing into the sunrise end\u2014waiting, ever waiting.\n\nWhether in her absent-minded reverie she had actually plucked the bit of fern herself, or whether, after all, old Purdy had handed it to her, was not a point that troubled her. It was in her locket about her neck still, day and night. The seller of dreams was an established imaginative reality in her life. Her heart assured her she would meet him again one day. She waited. It was very curious, it was rather pathetic. Men came and went, she saw her chances pass; her answer was invariably \"No.\"\n\nThe break came suddenly, and with devastating effect. As she was dressing carefully for the party, full of excited anticipation like some young girl still, she saw looking out upon her from the long mirror a face of plain middle-age. A blackness rose about her. It seemed the mirror shattered. The long, long dream, at any rate, fell in a thousand broken pieces at her feet. It was perhaps the ball dress, perhaps the flowers in her hair; it may have been the low-cut gown that betrayed the neck and throat, or the one brilliant jewel that proved her eyes now dimmed beside it\u2014but most probably it was the tell-tale hands, whose ageing no artifice ever can conceal. The middle-aged woman, at any rate, rushed from the glass and claimed her.\n\nIt was a long time, too, before the signs of tears had been carefully obliterated again, and the battle with herself\u2014to go or not to go\u2014was decided by clear courage. She would not send a hurried excuse of illness, but would take the place where she now belonged. She saw herself, a fading figure, more than half-way now towards the sunset end, within sight even of the shadowed emptiness that lay beyond the sun's dipping edge. She had lingered over-long, expecting a dream to confirm a dream; she had been oblivious of the truth that the lane went rushing just the same. It was now too late. The speed increased. She had waited, waited for nothing. The seller of dreams was a myth. No man could need her as she now was.\n\nYet the chief ingredient in her decision was, oddly enough, itself a sign of youth. A party, a ball, is ever an adventure. Fate, with her destined eyes aglow, may be bidden too, waiting among the throng, waiting for that very one who hesitates whether to go or not to go. Who knows what the evening may bring forth? It was this anticipation, faintly beckoning, its voice the merest echo of her shadowy youth, that tipped the scales between an evening of sleepless regrets at home and hours of neglected loneliness, watching the young fulfil the happy night. This and her courage weighed the balance down against the afflicting weariness of her sudden disillusion.\n\nTherefore she went, her aunt, in whose house she was a visitor, accompanying her. They arrived late, walking under the awning alone into the great mansion. Music, flowers, lovely dresses, and bright happy faces filled the air about them. The dancing feet, the flashing eyes, the swing of the music, the throng of graceful figures expressed one word\u2014pleasure. Pleasure, of course, meant youth. Beneath the calm summer stars youth realized itself prodigally, reckless of years to follow. Under the same calm stars, some fifty miles away in Kent, her stretch of deserted lane flowed peacefully, never pausing, passing relentlessly out into unknown space beyond the edge of the world. A girl and a middle-aged woman bravely watched both scenes.\n\n\"Dreadfully overcrowded,\" remarked her prosaic aunt. \"When I was a young thing there was more taste\u2014always room to dance, at any rate.\"\n\n\"It is a rabble rather,\" replied the middle-aged woman, while the girl added, \"but I enjoy it.\" She had enjoyed one duty-dance with an elderly man to whom her aunt had introduced her. She now sat watching the rabble whirl and laugh. Her friend, behind unabashed lorgnettes, made occasional comments.\n\n\"There's Mabel. Look at her frock, will you\u2014the naked back. The way he holds her, too!\"\n\nShe looked at Mabel Messenger, exactly her own age, wife of the successful engineer, yet bearing herself almost like a girl.\n\n\"He's away in Mexico, as usual,\" went on her aunt, \"with somebody else, also as usual.\"\n\n\"I don't envy her,\" mentioned the middle-aged woman, while the girl added, \"but she did well for herself, anyhow.\"\n\n\"It's a mistake to wait too long,\" was a suggestion she did not comment on.\n\nThe host's brother came up and carried off her aunt. She was left alone. An old gentleman dropped into the vacated chair. Only in the centre of the brilliantly lit room was there dancing now; people stood and talked in animated throngs, every seat along the walls, every chair and sofa in alcove corners occupied. The landing outside the great flung doors was packed; some, going on elsewhere, were already leaving, but others arriving late still poured up the staircase. Her loneliness remained unnoticed; with many other women, similarly stationed behind the whirling, moving dancers, she sat looking on, an artificial smile of enjoyment upon her face, but the eyes empty and unlit.\n\nTwo pictures she watched simultaneously\u2014the gay ballroom and the lane that ran east and west.\n\nMidnight was past and supper over, though she had not noticed it. Her aunt had disappeared finally, it seemed. The two pictures filled her mind, absorbed her. What she was feeling was not clear, for there was confusion in her between the two scenes somewhere\u2014as though the brilliant ballroom lay set against the dark background of the lane beneath the quiet stars. The contrast struck her. How calm and lovely the night lane seemed against this feverish gaiety, this heat, this artificial perfume, these exaggerated clothes. Like a small, rapid cinema-picture the dazzling ballroom passed along the dark throat of the deserted lane. A patch of light, alive with whirling animalcul\u00e6, it shone a moment against the velvet background of the midnight country-side. It grew smaller and smaller. It vanished over the edge of the departing end. It was gone.\n\nNight and the stars enveloped her, and her eyes became accustomed to the change, so that she saw the sandy strip of lane, the hazel bushes, the dim outline of the cottage. Her naked soul, it seemed again, stood facing an infinitude. Yet the scent of roses, of dew-soaked grass came to her. A blackbird was whistling in the hedge. The eastern end showed itself now more plainly. The tops of the trees defined themselves. There came a glimmer in the sky, an early swallow flashed past against a streak of pale sweet gold. Old Purdy, his tea-pail faintly rattling, a stir of thick white dust about his feet, came slowly round the curve. It was the sunrise.\n\nA deep, passionate thrill ran through her body from head to feet. There was a clap beside her\u2014in the air it seemed\u2014as though the wings of the early swallow had flashed past her very ear, or the approaching sunrise called aloud. She turned her head\u2014along the brightening lane, but also across the gay ballroom. Old Purdy, straightening up his bent shoulders, was gazing over the wicket-gate into her eyes.\n\nSomething quivered. A shimmer ran fluttering before her sight. She trembled. Over the crowd of intervening heads, as over the spiked top of the little gate, a man was gazing at her.\n\nOld Purdy, however, did not fade, nor did his outline wholly pass. There was this confusion between two pictures. Yet this man who gazed at her was in the London ballroom. He was so tall and straight. The same moment her aunt's face appeared below his shoulder, only just visible, and he turned his head, but did not turn his eyes, to listen to her. Both looked her way; they moved, threading their way towards her. It meant an introduction coming. He had asked for it.\n\nShe did not catch his name, so quickly, yet so easily and naturally the little formalities were managed, and she was dancing. The same sweet, dim confusion was about her. His touch, his voice, his eyes combined extraordinarily in a sense of complete possession to which she yielded utterly. The two pictures, moreover, still held their place. Behind the glaring lights ran the pale sweet gold of a country dawn; woven like a silver thread among the strings she heard the blackbirds whistling; in the stale, heated air lay the subtle freshness of a summer sunrise. Their dancing feet bore them along in a flowing motion that curved from east to west.\n\nThey danced without speaking; one rhythm took them; like a single person they glided over the smooth, perfect floor, and, more and more to her, it was as if the floor flowed with them, bearing them along. Such dancing she had never known. The strange sweetness of the confusion that half-entranced her increased\u2014almost as though she lay upon her partner's arms and that he bore her through the air. Both the sense of weight and the touch of her feet on solid ground were gone delightfully. The London room grew hazy, too; the other figures faded; the ceiling, half transparent, let through a filtering glimmer of the dawn. Her thoughts\u2014surely he shared them with her\u2014went out floating beneath this brightening sky. There was a sound of wakening birds, a smell of flowers.\n\nThey had danced perhaps five minutes when both stopped abruptly as with one accord.\n\n\"Shall we sit it out\u2014if you've no objection?\" he suggested in the very instant that the same thought occurred to her. \"The conservatory, among the flowers,\" he added, leading her to the corner among scented blooms and plants, exactly as she herself desired. There were leaves and ferns about them in the warm air. The light was dim. A streak of gold in the sky showed through the glass. But for one other couple they were alone.\n\n\"I have something to say to you,\" he began. \"You must have thought it curious\u2014I've been staring at you so. The whole evening I've been watching you.\"\n\n\"I\u2014hadn't noticed,\" she said truthfully, her voice, as it were, not quite her own. \"I've not been dancing\u2014only once, that is.\"\n\nBut her heart was dancing as she said it. For the first time she became aware of her partner more distinctly\u2014of his deep, resonant voice, his soldierly tall figure, his deferential, almost protective manner. She turned suddenly and looked into his face. The clear, rather penetrating eyes reminded her of someone she had known.\n\nAt the same instant he used her thought, turning it in his own direction. \"I can't remember, for the life of me,\" he said quietly, \"where I have seen you before. Your face is familiar to me, oddly familiar\u2014years ago\u2014in my first youth somewhere.\"\n\nIt was as though he broke something to her gently\u2014something he was sure of and knew positively, that yet might shock and startle her.\n\nThe blood rushed from her heart as she quickly turned her gaze away. The wave of deep feeling that rose with a sensation of glowing warmth troubled her voice. \"I find in you, too, a faint resemblance to\u2014someone I have met,\" she murmured. Without meaning it she let slip the added words, \"when I was a girl.\"\n\nShe felt him start, but he saved the situation, making it ordinary again by obtaining her permission to smoke, then slowly lighting his cigarette before he spoke.\n\n\"You must forgive me,\" he put in with a smile, \"but your name, when you were kind enough to let me be introduced, escaped me. I did not catch it.\"\n\nShe told him her surname, but he asked in his persuasive yet somehow masterful way for the Christian name as well. He turned round instantly as she gave it, staring hard at her with meaning, with an examining intentness, with open curiosity. There was a question on his lips, but she interrupted, delaying it by a question of her own. Without looking at him she knew and feared his question. Her voice just concealed a trembling that was in her throat.\n\n\"My aunt,\" she agreed lightly, \"is incorrigible. Do you know I didn't catch yours either? Oh\u2014I meant your surname,\" she added, confusion gaining upon her when he mentioned his first name only.\n\nHe became suddenly more earnest, his voice deepened, his whole manner took on the guise of deliberate intention backed by some profound emotion that he could no longer hide. The music, which had momentarily ceased, began again, and a couple, who had been sitting out diagonally across from them, rose and went out. They were now quite alone. The sky was brighter.\n\n\"I must tell you,\" he went on in a way that compelled her to look up and meet his intent gaze. \"You really must allow me. I feel sure somehow you'll understand. At any rate,\" he added like a boy, \"you won't laugh.\"\n\nShe believes she gave the permission and assurance. Memory fails her a little here, for as she returned his gaze, it seemed a curious change came stealing over him, yet at first so imperceptibly, so vaguely, that she could not say when it began, nor how it happened.\n\n\"Yes,\" she murmured, \"please\u2014\" The change defined itself. She stopped dead.\n\n\"I know now where I've seen you before. I remember.\" His voice vibrated like a wind in big trees. It enveloped her.\n\n\"Yes,\" she repeated in a whisper, for the hammering of her heart made both a louder tone or further words impossible. She knew not what he was going to say, yet at the same time she knew with accuracy. Her eyes gazed helplessly into his. The change absorbed her. Within his outline she watched another outline grow. Behind the immaculate evening clothes a ragged, unkempt figure rose. A worn, ravaged face with young burning eyes peered through his own. \"Please, please,\" she whispered again very faintly. He took her hand in his.\n\nHis voice came from very far away, yet drawing nearer, and the scene about them faded, vanished. The lane that curved east and west now stretched behind him, and she sat gazing towards the sunrise end, as years ago when the girl passed into the woman first.\n\n\"I knew\u2014a friend of yours\u2014Dick Messenger,\" he was saying in this distant voice that yet was close beside her, \"knew him at school, at Cambridge, and later in Mexico. We worked in the same mines together, only he was contractor and I was\u2014in difficulties. That made no difference. He\u2014he told me about a girl\u2014of his love and admiration, an admiration that remained, but a love that had already faded.\"\n\nShe saw only the ragged outline within the well-groomed figure of the man who spoke. The young eyes that gazed so piercingly into hers belonged to him, the seller of her dream of years before. It was to this ragged stranger in her lane she made her answer:\n\n\"I, too, now remember,\" she said softly. \"Please go on.\"\n\n\"He gave me his confidence, asking me where his duty lay, and I told him that the real love comes once only; it knows no doubt, no fading. I told him this\u2014\"\n\n\"We both discovered it in time,\" she said to herself, so low it was scarcely audible, yet not resisting as he laid his other hand upon the one he already held.\n\n\"I also told him there was only one true dream,\" the voice continued, the inner face drawing nearer to the outer that contained it. \"I asked him, and he told me\u2014everything. I knew all about this girl. Her picture, too, he showed me.\"\n\nThe voice broke off. The flood of love and pity, of sympathy and understanding that rose in her like a power long suppressed, threatened tears, yet happy, yearning tears like those of a girl, which only the quick, strong pressure of his hands prevented.\n\n\"The\u2014little painting\u2014yes, I know it,\" she faltered.\n\n\"It saved me,\" he said simply. \"It changed my life. From that moment I began\u2014living decently again\u2014living for an ideal.\" Without knowing that she did so, the pressure of her hand upon his own came instantly. \"He\u2014he gave it to me,\" the voice went on, \"to keep. He said he could neither keep it himself nor destroy it. It was the day before he sailed. I remember it as yesterday. I said I must give him something in return, or it would cut friendship. But I had nothing in the world to give. We were in the hills. I picked a leaf of fern instead. 'Fern-seed,' I told him, 'it will make you see the fairies and find your true dream.' I remember his laugh to this day\u2014a sad, uneasy laugh. 'I shall give it to her,' he told me, 'when I give her my difficult explanation.' But I said, 'Give it with my love, and tell her that I wait.' He looked at me with surprise, incredulous. Then he said slowly, 'Why not? If\u2014if only you hadn't let yourself go to pieces like this!'\"\n\nAn immensity of clear emotion she could not understand passed over her in a wave. Involuntarily she moved closer against him. With her eyes unflinchingly upon his own, she whispered: \"You were hungry, thirsty, you had no clothes... You waited!\"\n\n\"You're reading my thoughts, as I knew one day you would.\" It seemed as if their minds, their bodies too, were one, as he said the words. \"You, too\u2014you waited.\" His voice was low.\n\nThere came a glow between them as of hidden fire; their faces shone; there was a brightening as of dawn upon their skins, within their eyes, lighting their very hair. Out of this happy sky his voice floated to her with the blackbird's song:\n\n\"And that night I dreamed of you. I dreamed I met you in an English country lane.\"\n\n\"We did,\" she murmured, as though it were quite natural.\n\n\"I dreamed I gave you the fern leaf\u2014across a wicket-gate\u2014and in front of a little house that was our home. In my dream\u2014I handed to you\u2014a dream\u2014\"\n\n\"You did.\" And as she whispered it the two figures merged into one before her very eyes. \"See,\" she added softly, \"I have it still. It is in my locket at this moment, for I have worn it day and night through all these years of waiting.\" She began fumbling at her chain.\n\nHe smiled. \"Such things,\" he said gently, \"are beyond me rather. I have found you. That's all that matters. That\"\u2014he smiled again\u2014\"is real at any rate.\"\n\n\"A vision,\" she murmured, half to herself and half to him, \"I can understand. A dream, though wonderful, is a dream. But the little fern you gave me,\" drawing the fine gold chain from her bosom, \"the actual leaf I have worn all these years in my locket!\"\n\nHe smiled as she held the locket out to him, her fingers feeling for the little spring. He shook his head, but so slightly she did not notice it.\n\n\"I will prove it to you,\" she said. \"I must. Look!\" she cried, as with trembling hand she pressed the hidden catch. \"There! There!\"\n\nWith heads close together they bent over. The tiny lid flew open. And as he took her for one quick instant in his arms the sun flashed his first golden shaft upon them, covering them with light. But her exclamation of incredulous surprise he smothered with a kiss. For inside the little locket there lay\u2014nothing. It was quite empty." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 580", + "text": "\"VENGEANCE IS MINE\"\n\nAn active, vigorous man in Holy orders, yet compelled by heart trouble to resign a living in Kent before full middle age, he had found suitable work with the Red Cross in France; and it rather pleased a strain of innocent vanity in him that Rouen, whence he derived his Norman blood, should be the scene of his activities.\n\nHe was a gentle-minded soul, a man deeply read and thoughtful, but goodness perhaps his out-standing quality, believing no evil of others. He had been slow, for instance, at first to credit the German atrocities, until the evidence had compelled him to face the appalling facts. With acceptance, then, he had experienced a revulsion which other gentle minds have probably also experienced\u2014a burning desire, namely, that the perpetrators should be fitly punished.\n\nThis primitive instinct of revenge\u2014he called it a lust\u2014he sternly repressed; it involved a descent to lower levels of conduct irreconcilable with the progress of the race he so passionately believed in. Revenge pertained to savage days. But, though he hid away the instinct in his heart, afraid of its clamour and persistency, it revived from time to time, as fresh horrors made it bleed anew. It remained alive, unsatisfied; while, with its analysis, his mind strove unconsciously. That an intellectual nation should deliberately include frightfulness as a chief item in its creed perplexed him horribly; it seemed to him conscious spiritual evil openly affirmed. Some genuine worship of Odin, Wotan, Moloch lay still embedded in the German outlook, and beneath the veneer of their pretentious culture. He often wondered, too, what effect the recognition of these horrors must have upon gentle minds in other men, and especially upon imaginative minds. How did they deal with the fact that this appalling thing existed in human nature in the twentieth century? Its survival, indeed, caused his belief in civilization as a whole to waver. Was progress, his pet ideal and cherished faith, after all a mockery? Had human nature not advanced...?\n\nHis work in the great hospitals and convalescent camps beyond the town was tiring; he found little time for recreation, much less for rest; a light dinner and bed by ten o'clock was the usual way of spending his evenings. He had no social intercourse, for everyone else was as busy as himself. The enforced solitude, not quite wholesome, was unavoidable. He found no outlet for his thoughts. First-hand acquaintance with suffering, physical and mental, was no new thing to him, but this close familiarity, day by day, with maimed and broken humanity preyed considerably on his mind, while the fortitude and cheerfulness shown by the victims deepened the impression of respectful, yearning wonder made upon him. They were so young, so fine and careless, these lads whom the German lust for power had robbed of limbs, and eyes, of mind, of life itself. The sense of horror grew in him with cumulative but unrelieved effect.\n\nWith the lengthening of the days in February, and especially when March saw the welcome change to summer time, the natural desire for open air asserted itself. Instead of retiring early to his dingy bedroom, he would stroll out after dinner through the ancient streets. When the air was not too chilly, he would prolong these outings, starting at sunset and coming home beneath the bright mysterious stars. He knew at length every turn and winding of the old-world alleys, every gable, every tower and spire, from the Vieux March\u00e9, where Joan of Arc was burnt, to the busy quays, thronged now with soldiers from half a dozen countries. He wandered on past grey gateways of crumbling stone that marked the former banks of the old tidal river. An English army, five centuries ago, had camped here among reeds and swamps, besieging the Norman capital, where now they brought in supplies of men and material upon modern docks, a mighty invasion of a very different kind. Imaginative reflection was his constant mood.\n\nBut it was the haunted streets that touched him most, stirring some chord his ancestry had planted in him. The forest of spires thronged the air with strange stone flowers, silvered by moonlight as though white fire streamed from branch and petal; the old church towers soared; the cathedral touched the stars. After dark the modern note, paramount in the daylight, seemed hushed; with sunset it underwent a definite night-change. Although the darkened streets kept alive in him the menace of fire and death, the crowding soldiers, dipped to the face in shadow, seemed somehow negligible; the leaning roofs and gables hid them in a purple sea of mist that blurred their modern garb, steel weapons, and the like. Shadows themselves, they entered the being of the town; their feet moved silently; there was a hush and murmur; the brooding buildings absorbed them easily.\n\nAncient and modern, that is, unable successfully to mingle, let fall grotesque, incongruous shadows on his thoughts. The spirit of medi\u00e6val days stole over him, exercising its inevitable sway upon a temperament already predisposed to welcome it. Witchcraft and wonder, pagan superstition and speculation, combined with an ancestral tendency to weave a spell, half of acceptance, half of shrinking, about his imaginative soul in which poetry and logic seemed otherwise fairly balanced. Too weary for critical judgment to discern clear outlines, his mind, during these magical twilight walks, became the playground of opposing forces, some power of dreaming, it seems, too easily in the ascendant. The soul of ancient Rouen, stealing beside his footsteps in the dusk, put forth a shadowy hand and touched him.\n\nThis shadowy spell he denied as far as in him lay, though the resistance offered by reason to instinct lacked true driving power. The dice were loaded otherwise in such a soul. His own blood harked back unconsciously to the days when men were tortured, broken on the wheel, walled up alive, and burnt for small offences. This shadowy hand stirred faint ancestral memories in him, part instinct, part desire. The next step, by which he saw a similar attitude flowering full blown in the German frightfulness, was too easily made to be rejected. The German horrors made him believe that this ignorant cruelty of olden days threatened the world now in a modern, organized shape that proved its survival in the human heart. Shuddering, he fought against the natural desire for adequate punishment, but forgot that repressed emotions sooner or later must assert themselves. Essentially irrepressible, they may force an outlet in distorted fashion. He hardly recognized, perhaps, their actual claim, yet it was audible occasionally. For, owing to his loneliness, the natural outlet, in talk and intercourse, was denied.\n\nThen, with the softer winds, he yearned for country air. The sweet spring days had come; morning and evening were divine; above the town the orchards were in bloom. Birds blew their tiny bugles on the hills. The midday sun began to burn.\n\nIt was the time of the final violence, when the German hordes flung like driven cattle against the Western line where free men fought for liberty. Fate hovered dreadfully in the balance that spring of 1918; Amiens was threatened, and if Amiens fell, Rouen must be evacuated. The town, already full, became now over-full. On his way home one evening he passed the station, crowded with homeless new arrivals. \"Got the wind up, it seems, in Amiens!\" cried a cheery voice, as an officer he knew went by him hurriedly. And as he heard it the mood of the spring became of a sudden uppermost. He reached a decision. The German horror came abruptly closer. This further overcrowding of the narrow streets was more than he could face.\n\nIt was a small, personal decision merely, but he must get out among woods and fields, among flowers and wholesome, growing things, taste simple, innocent life again. The following evening he would pack his haversack with food and tramp the four miles to the great For\u00eat Verte\u2014delicious name!\u2014and spend the night with trees and stars, breathing his full of sweetness, calm and peace. He was too accustomed to the thunder of the guns to be disturbed by it. The song of a thrush, the whistle of a blackbird, would easily drown that. He made his plan accordingly.\n\nThe next two nights, however, a warm soft rain was falling; only on the third evening could he put his little plan into execution. Anticipatory enjoyment, meanwhile, lightened his heart; he did his daily work more competently, the spell of the ancient city weakened somewhat. The shadowy hand withdrew." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 581", + "text": "Meanwhile, a curious adventure intervened.\n\nHis good and simple heart, disciplined these many years in the way a man should walk, received upon its imaginative side, a stimulus that, in his case, amounted to a shock. That a strange and comely woman should make eyes at him disturbed his equilibrium considerably; that he should enjoy the attack, though without at first responding openly\u2014even without full comprehension of its meaning\u2014disturbed it even more. It was, moreover, no ordinary attack.\n\nHe saw her first the night after his decision when, in a mood of disappointment due to the rain, he came down to his lonely dinner. The room, he saw, was crowded with new arrivals, from Amiens, doubtless, where they had \"the wind up.\" The wealthier civilians had fled for safety to Rouen. These interested and, in a measure, stimulated him. He looked at them sympathetically, wondering what dear home-life they had so hurriedly relinquished at the near thunder of the enemy guns, and, in so doing, he noticed, sitting alone at a small table just in front of his own\u2014yet with her back to him\u2014a woman.\n\nShe drew his attention instantly. The first glance told him that she was young and well-to-do; the second, that she was unusual. What precisely made her unusual he could not say, although he at once began to study her intently. Dignity, atmosphere, personality, he perceived beyond all question. She sat there with an air. The becoming little hat with its challenging feather slightly tilted, the set of the shoulders, the neat waist and slender outline; possibly, too, the hair about the neck, and the faint perfume that was wafted towards him as the serving girl swept past, combined in the persuasion. Yet he felt it as more than a persuasion. She attracted him with a subtle vehemence he had never felt before. The instant he set eyes upon her his blood ran faster. The thought rose passionately in him, almost the words that phrased it: \"I wish I knew her.\"\n\nThis sudden flash of response his whole being certainly gave\u2014to the back of an unknown woman. It was both vehement and instinctive. He lay stress upon its instinctive character; he was aware of it before reason told him why. That it was \"in response\" he also noted, for although he had not seen her face and she assuredly had made no sign, he felt that attraction which involves also invitation. So vehement, moreover, was this response in him that he felt shy and ashamed the same instant, for it almost seemed he had expressed his thought in audible words. He flushed, and the flush ran through his body; he was conscious of heated blood as in a youth of twenty-five, and when a man past forty knows this touch of fever he may also know, though he may not recognize it, that the danger signal which means possible abandon has been lit. Moreover, as though to prove his instinct justified, it was at this very instant that the woman turned and stared at him deliberately. She looked into his eyes, and he looked into hers. He knew a moment's keen distress, a sharpest possible discomfort, that after all he had expressed his desire audibly. Yet, though he blushed, he did not lower his eyes. The embarrassment passed instantly, replaced by a thrill of strangest pleasure and satisfaction. He knew a tinge of inexplicable dismay as well. He felt for a second helpless before what seemed a challenge in her eyes. The eyes were too compelling. They mastered him.\n\nIn order to meet his gaze she had to make a full turn in her chair, for her table was placed directly in front of his own. She did so without concealment. It was no mere attempt to see what lay behind by making a half-turn and pretending to look elsewhere; no corner of the eye business; but a full, straight, direct, significant stare. She looked into his soul as though she called him, he looked into hers as though he answered. Sitting there like a statue, motionless, without a bow, without a smile, he returned her intense regard unflinchingly and yet unwillingly. He made no sign. He shivered again... It was perhaps ten seconds before she turned away with an air as if she had delivered her message and received his answer, but in those ten seconds a series of singular ideas crowded his mind, leaving an impression that ten years could never efface. The face and eyes produced a kind of intoxication in him. There was almost recognition, as though she said: \"Ah, there you are! I was waiting; you'll have to come, of course. You must!\" And just before she turned away she smiled.\n\nHe felt confused and helpless.\n\nThe face he described as unusual; familiar, too, as with the atmosphere of some long forgotten dream, and if beauty perhaps was absent, character and individuality were supreme. Implacable resolution was stamped upon the features, which yet were sweet and womanly, stirring an emotion in him that he could not name and certainly did not recognize. The eyes, slanting a little upwards, were full of fire, the mouth voluptuous but very firm, the chin and jaw most delicately modelled, yet with a masculine strength that told of inflexible resolve. The resolution, as a whole, was the most relentless he had ever seen upon a human countenance. It dominated him. \"How vain to resist the will,\" he thought, \"that lies behind!\" He was conscious of enslavement; she conveyed a message that he must obey, admitting compliance with her unknown purpose.\n\nThat some extraordinary wordless exchange was registered thus between them seemed very clear; and it was just at this moment, as if to signify her satisfaction, that she smiled. At his feeling of willing compliance with some purpose in her mind, the smile appeared. It was faint, so faint indeed that the eyes betrayed it rather than the mouth and lips; but it was there; he saw it and he thrilled again to this added touch of wonder and enchantment. Yet, strangest of all, he maintains that with the smile there fluttered over the resolute face a sudden arresting tenderness, as though some wild flower lit a granite surface with its melting loveliness. He was aware in the clear strong eyes of unshed tears, of sympathy, of self-sacrifice he called maternal, of clinging love. It was this tenderness, as of a soft and gracious mother, and this implacable resolution, as of a stern, relentless man, that left upon his receptive soul the strange impression of sweetness yet of domination.\n\nThe brief ten seconds were over. She turned away as deliberately as she had turned to look. He found himself trembling with confused emotions he could not disentangle, could not even name; for, with the subtle intoxication of compliance in his soul lay also a vigorous protest that included refusal, even a violent refusal given with horror. This unknown woman, without actual speech or definite gesture, had lit a flame in him that linked on far away and out of sight with the magic of the ancient city's medi\u00e6val spell. Both, he decided, were undesirable, both to be resisted.\n\nHe was quite decided about this. She pertained to forgotten yet unburied things, her modern aspect a mere disguise, a disguise that some deep unsatisfied instinct in him pierced with ease.\n\nHe found himself equally decided, too, upon another thing which, in spite of his momentary confusion, stood out clearly: the magic of the city, the enchantment of the woman, both attacked a constitutional weakness in his blood, a line of least resistance. It wore no physical aspect, breathed no hint of ordinary romance; the mere male and female, moral or immoral touch was wholly absent; yet passion lurked there, tumultuous if hidden, and a tract of consciousness, long untravelled, was lit by sudden ominous flares. His character, his temperament, his calling in life as a former clergyman and now a Red Cross worker, being what they were, he stood on the brink of an adventure not dangerous alone but containing a challenge of fundamental kind that involved his very soul.\n\nNo further thrill, however, awaited him immediately. He left his table before she did, having intercepted no slightest hint of desired acquaintanceship or intercourse. He, naturally, made no advances; she, equally, made no smallest sign. Her face remained hidden, he caught no flash of eyes, no gesture, no hint of possible invitation. He went upstairs to his dingy room, and in due course fell asleep. The next day he saw her not, her place in the dining-room was empty; but in the late evening of the following day, as the soft spring sunshine found him prepared for his postponed expedition, he met her suddenly on the stairs. He was going down with haversack and in walking kit to an early dinner, when he saw her coming up; she was perhaps a dozen steps below him; they must meet. A wave of confused, embarrassed pleasure swept him. He realized that this was no chance meeting. She meant to speak to him.\n\nViolent attraction and an equally violent repulsion seized him. There was no escape, nor, had escape been possible, would he have attempted it. He went down four steps, she mounted four towards him; then he took one and she took one. They met. For a moment they stood level, while he shrank against the wall to let her pass. He had the feeling that but for the support of that wall he must have lost his balance and fallen into her, for the sunlight from the landing window caught her face and lit it, and she was younger, he saw, than he had thought, and far more comely. Her atmosphere enveloped him, the sense of attraction and repulsion became intense. She moved past him with the slightest possible bow of recognition; then, having passed, she turned.\n\nShe stood a little higher than himself, a step at most, and she thus looked down at him. Her eyes blazed into his. She smiled, and he was aware again of the domination and the sweetness. The perfume of her near presence drowned him; his head swam. \"We count upon you,\" she said in a low firm voice, as though giving a command; \"I know... we may. We do.\" And, before he knew what he was saying, trembling a little between deep pleasure and a contrary impulse that sought to choke the utterance, he heard his own voice answering. \"You can count upon me...\" And she was already half-way up the next flight of stairs ere he could move a muscle, or attempt to thread a meaning into the singular exchange.\n\nYet meaning, he well knew, there was.\n\nShe was gone; her footsteps overhead had died away. He stood there trembling like a boy of twenty, yet also like a man of forty in whom fires, long dreaded, now blazed sullenly. She had opened the furnace door, the draught rushed through. He felt again the old unwelcome spell; he saw the twisted streets 'mid leaning gables and shadowy towers of a day forgotten; he heard the ominous murmurs of a crowd that thirsted for wheel and scaffold and fire; and, aware of vengeance, sweet and terrible, aware, too, that he welcomed it, his heart was troubled and afraid.\n\nIn a brief second the impression came and went; following it swiftly, the sweetness of the woman swept him: he forgot his shrinking in a rush of wild delicious pleasure. The intoxication in him deepened. She had recognized him! She had bowed and even smiled; she had spoken, assuming familiarity, intimacy, including him in her secret purposes! It was this sweet intimacy cleverly injected, that overcame the repulsion he acknowledged, winning complete obedience to the unknown meaning of her words. This meaning, for the moment, lay in darkness; yet it was a portion of his own self, he felt, that concealed it of set purpose. He kept it hid, he looked deliberately another way; for, if he faced it with full recognition, he knew that he must resist it to the death. He allowed himself to ask vague questions\u2014then let her dominating spell confuse the answers so that he did not hear them. The challenge to his soul, that is, he evaded.\n\nWhat is commonly called sex lay only slightly in his troubled emotions; her purpose had nothing that kept step with chance acquaintanceship. There lay meaning, indeed, in her smile and voice, but these were no hand-maids to a vulgar intrigue in a foreign hotel. Her will breathed cleaner air; her purpose aimed at some graver, mightier climax than the mere subjection of an elderly victim like himself. That will, that purpose, he felt certain, were implacable as death, the resolve in those bold eyes was not a common one. For, in some strange way, he divined the strong maternity in her; the maternal instinct was deeply, even predominantly, involved; he felt positive that a divine tenderness, deeply outraged, was a chief ingredient too. In some way, then, she needed him, yet not she alone, for the pronoun \"we\" was used, and there were others with her; in some way, equally, a part of him was already her and their accomplice, an unresisting slave, a willing co-conspirator.\n\nHe knew one other thing, and it was this that he kept concealed so carefully from himself. His recognition of it was sub-conscious possibly, but for that very reason true: her purpose was consistent with the satisfaction at last of a deep instinct in him that clamoured to know gratification. It was for these odd, mingled reasons that he stood trembling when she left him on the stairs, and finally went down to his hurried meal with a heart that knew wonder, anticipation, and delight, but also dread." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 582", + "text": "The table in front of him remained unoccupied; his dinner finished, he went out hastily.\n\nAs he passed through the crowded streets, his chief desire was to be quickly free of the old muffled buildings and airless alleys with their clinging atmosphere of other days. He longed for the sweet taste of the heights, the smells of the forest whither he was bound. This For\u00eat Verte, he knew, rolled for leagues towards the north, empty of houses as of human beings; it was the home of deer and birds and rabbits, of wild boar too. There would be spring flowers among the brushwood, anemones, celandine, oxslip, daffodils. The vapours of the town oppressed him, the warm and heavy moisture stifled; he wanted space and the sight of clean simple things that would stimulate his mind with lighter thoughts.\n\nHe soon passed the Rampe, skirted the ugly villas of modern Bihorel and, rising now with every step, entered the Route Neuve. He went unduly fast; he was already above the Cathedral spire; below him the Seine meandered round the chalky hills, laden with war-barges, and across a dip, still pink in the afterglow, rose the blunt Down of Bonsecours with its anti-aircraft batteries. Poetry and violent fact crashed everywhere; he longed to top the hill and leave these unhappy reminders of death behind him. In front the sweet woods already beckoned through the twilight. He hastened. Yet while he deliberately fixed his imagination on promised peace and beauty, an undercurrent ran sullenly in his mind, busy with quite other thoughts. The unknown woman and her singular words, the following mystery of the ancient city, the soft beating wonder of the two together, these worked their incalculable magic persistently about him. Repression merely added to their power. His mind was a prey to some shadowy, remote anxiety that, intangible, invisible, yet knocked with ghostly fingers upon some door of ancient memory... He watched the moon rise above the eastern ridge, in the west the afterglow of sunset still hung red. But these did not hold his attention as they normally must have done. Attention seemed elsewhere. The undercurrent bore him down a siding, into a backwater, as it were, that clamoured for discharge.\n\nHe thought suddenly, then, of weather, what he called \"German weather\"\u2014that combination of natural conditions which so oddly favoured the enemy always. It had often occurred to him as strange; on sea and land, mist, rain and wind, the fog and drying sun worked ever on their side. The coincidence was odd, to say the least. And now this glimpse of rising moon and sunset sky reminded him unpleasantly of the subject. Legends of pagan weather-gods passed through his mind like hurrying shadows. These shadows multiplied, changed form, vanished and returned. They came and went with incoherence, a straggling stream, rushing from one point to another, man\u0153uvring for position, but all unled, unguided by his will. The physical exercise filled his brain with blood, and thought danced undirected, picture upon picture driving by, so that soon he slipped from German weather and pagan gods to the witchcraft of past centuries, of its alleged association with the natural powers of the elements, and thus, eventually, to his cherished beliefs that humanity had advanced.\n\nSuch remnants of primitive days were grotesque superstition, of course. But had humanity advanced? Had the individual progressed after all? Civilization, was it not the merest artificial growth? And the old perplexity rushed through his mind again\u2014the German barbarity and blood-lust, the savagery, the undoubted sadic impulses, the frightfulness taught with cool calculation by their highest minds, approved by their professors, endorsed by their clergy, applauded by their women even\u2014all the unwelcome, undesired thoughts came flocking back upon him, escorted by the trooping shadows. They lay, these questions, still unsolved within him; it was the undercurrent, flowing more swiftly now, that bore them to the surface. It had acquired momentum; it was leading somewhere.\n\nThey were a thoughtful, intellectual race, these Germans; their music, literature, philosophy, their science\u2014how reconcile the opposing qualities? He had read that their herd-instinct was unusually developed, though betraying the characteristics of a low wild savage type\u2014the lupine. It might be true. Fear and danger wakened this collective instinct into terrific activity, making them blind and humourless; they fought best, like wolves, in contact; they howled and whined and boasted loudly all together to inspire terror; their Hymn of Hate was but an elaboration of the wolf's fierce bark, giving them herd-courage; and a savage discipline was necessary to their lupine type.\n\nThese reflections thronged his mind as the blood coursed in his veins with the rapid climbing; yet one and all, the beauty of the evening, the magic of the hidden town, the thoughts of German horror, German weather, German gods, all these, even the odd detail that they revived a pagan practice by hammering nails into effigies and idols\u2014all led finally to one blazing centre that nothing could dislodge nor anything conceal; a woman's voice and eyes. To these he knew quite well, was due the undesired intensification of the very mood, the very emotions, the very thoughts he had come out on purpose to escape.\n\n\"It is the night of the vernal equinox,\" occurred to him suddenly, sharp as a whispered voice beside him. He had no notion whence the idea was born. It had no particular meaning, so far as he remembered.\n\n\"It had then...\" said the voice imperiously, rising, it seemed, directly out of the under-current in his soul.\n\nIt startled him. He increased his pace. He walked very quickly, whistling softly as he went.\n\nThe dusk had fallen when at length he topped the long, slow hill, and left the last of the atrocious straggling villas well behind him. The ancient city lay far below in murky haze and smoke, but tinged now with the silver of the growing moon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 583", + "text": "He stood now on the open plateau. He was on the heights at last.\n\nThe night air met him freshly in the face, so that he forgot the fatigue of the long climb uphill, taken too fast somewhat for his years. He drew a deep draught into his lungs and stepped out briskly.\n\nFar in the upper sky light flaky clouds raced through the reddened air, but the wind kept to these higher strata, and the world about him lay very still. Few lights showed in the farms and cottages, for this was the direct route of the Gothas, and nothing that could help the German hawks to find the river was visible.\n\nHis mind cleared pleasantly; this keen sweet air held no mystery; he put his best foot foremost, whistling still, but a little more loudly than before. Among the orchards he saw the daisies glimmer. Also, he heard the guns, a thudding concussion in the direction of the coveted Amiens, where, some sixty miles as the crow flies, they roared their terror into the calm evening skies. He cursed the sound, in the town below it was not audible. Thought jumped then to the men who fired them, and so to the prisoners who worked on the roads outside the hospitals and camps he visited daily. He passed them every morning and night, and the N.C.O. invariably saluted his Red Cross uniform, a salute he returned, when he could not avoid it, with embarrassment.\n\nOne man in particular stood out clearly in this memory; he had exchanged glances with him, noted the expression of his face, the number of his gang printed on coat and trousers\u2014\"82.\" The fellow had somehow managed to establish a relationship; he would look up and smile or frown; if the news, from his point of view, was good, he smiled; if it was bad, he scowled; once, insolently enough\u2014when the Germans had taken Albert, P\u00e9ronne, Bapaume\u2014he grinned.\n\nSomething about the sullen, close-cropped face, typically Prussian, made the other shudder. It was the visage of an animal, neither evil nor malignant, even good-natured sometimes when it smiled, yet of an animal that could be fierce with the lust of happiness, ferocious with delight. The sullen savagery of a human wolf lay in it somewhere. He pictured its owner impervious to shame, to normal human instinct as civilized people know these. Doubtless he read his own feelings into it. He could imagine the man doing anything and everything, regarding chivalry and sporting instinct as proof of fear or weakness. He could picture this member of the wolf-pack killing a woman or a child, mutilating, cutting off little hands even, with the conscientious conviction that it was right and sensible to destroy any individual of an enemy tribe. It was, to him, an atrocious and inhuman face.\n\nIt now cropped up with unpleasant vividness, as he listened to the distant guns and thought of Amiens with its back against the wall, its inhabitants flying\u2014\n\nAh! Amiens...! He again saw the woman staring into his obedient eyes across the narrow space between the tables. He smelt the delicious perfume of her dress and person on the stairs. He heard her commanding voice, her very words: \"We count on you... I know we can... we do.\" And her background was of twisted streets, dark alley-ways and leaning gables...\n\nHe hurried, whistling loudly an air that he invented suddenly, using his stick like a golf club at every loose stone his feet encountered, making as much noise as possible. He told himself he was a parson and a Red Cross worker. He looked up and saw that the stars were out. The pace made him warm, and he shifted his haversack to the other shoulder. The moon, he observed, now cast his shadow for a long distance on the sandy road.\n\nAfter another mile, while the air grew sharper and twilight surrendered finally to the moon, the road began to curve and dip, the cottages lay farther out in the dim fields, the farms and barns occurred at longer intervals. A dog barked now and again; he saw cows lying down for the night beneath shadowy fruit-trees. And then the scent in the air changed slightly, and a darkening of the near horizon warned him that the forest had come close.\n\nThis was an event. Its influence breathed already a new perfume; the shadows from its myriad trees stole out and touched him. Ten minutes later he reached its actual frontier cutting across the plateau like a line of sentries at attention. He slowed down a little. Here, within sight and touch of his long-desired objective, he hesitated. It stretched, he knew from the map, for many leagues to the north, uninhabited, lonely, the home of peace and silence; there were flowers there, and cool sweet spaces where the moonlight fell. Yet here, within scent and touch of it, he slowed down a moment to draw breath. A forest on the map is one thing; visible before the eyes when night has fallen, it is another. It is real.\n\nThe wind, not noticeable hitherto, now murmured towards him from the serried trees that seemed to manufacture darkness out of nothing. This murmur hummed about him. It enveloped him. Piercing it, another sound that was not the guns just reached him, but so distant that he hardly noticed it. He looked back. Dusk suddenly merged in night. He stopped.\n\n\"How practical the French are,\" he said to himself\u2014aloud\u2014as he looked at the road running straight as a ruled line into the heart of the trees. \"They waste no energy, no space, no time. Admirable!\"\n\nIt pierced the forest like a lance, tapering to a faint point in the misty distance. The trees ate its undeviating straightness as though they would smother it from sight, as though its rigid outline marred their mystery. He admired the practical makers of the road, yet sided, too, with the poetry of the trees. He stood there staring, waiting, dawdling... About him, save for this murmur of the wind, was silence. Nothing living stirred. The world lay extraordinarily still. That other distant sound had died away.\n\nHe lit his pipe, glad that the match blew out and the damp tobacco needed several matches before the pipe drew properly. His puttees hurt him a little, he stooped to loosen them. His haversack swung round in front as he straightened up again, he shifted it laboriously to the other shoulder. A tiny stone in his right boot caused irritation. Its removal took a considerable time, for he had to sit down, and a log was not at once forthcoming. Moreover, the laces gave him trouble, and his fingers had grown thick with heat and the knots were difficult to tie...\n\n\"There!\" He said it aloud, standing up again. \"Now at last, I'm ready!\" Then added a mild imprecation, for his pipe had gone out while he stooped over the recalcitrant boot, and it had to be lighted once again. \"Ah!\" he gasped finally with a sigh as, facing the forest for the third time, he shuffled his tunic straight, altered his haversack once more, changed his stick from the right hand to the left\u2014and faced the foolish truth without further pretence.\n\nHe mopped his forehead carefully, as though at the same time trying to mop away from his mind a faint anxiety, a very faint uneasiness, that gathered there. Was someone standing near him? Had somebody come close? He listened intently. It was the blood singing in his ears, of course, that curious distant noise. For, truth to tell, the loneliness bit just below the surface of what he found enjoyable. It seemed to him that somebody was coming, someone he could not see, so that he looked back over his shoulder once again, glanced quickly right and left, then peered down the long opening cut through the woods in front\u2014when there came suddenly a roar and a blaze of dazzling light from behind, so instantaneously that he barely had time to obey the instinct of self-preservation and step aside. He actually leapt. Pressed against the hedge, he saw a motor-car rush past him like a whirlwind, flooding the sandy road with fire; a second followed it; and, to his complete amazement, then, a third.\n\nThey were powerful, private cars, so-called. This struck him instantly. Two other things he noticed, as they dived down the throat of the long white road\u2014they showed no tail-lights. This made him wonder. And, secondly, the drivers, clearly seen, were women. They were not even in uniform\u2014which made him wonder even more. The occupants, too, were women. He caught the outline of toque and feather\u2014or was it flowers?\u2014against the closed windows in the moonlight as the procession rushed past him.\n\nHe felt bewildered and astonished. Private motors were rare, and military regulations exceedingly strict; the danger of spies dressed in French uniform was constant; cars armed with machine guns, he knew, patrolled the countryside in all directions. Shaken and alarmed, he thought of favoured persons fleeing stealthily by night, of treachery, disguise and swift surprise; he thought of various things as he stood peering down the road for ten minutes after all sight and sound of the cars had died away. But no solution of the mystery occurred to him. Down the white throat the motors vanished. His pipe had gone out; he lit it, and puffed furiously.\n\nHis thoughts, at any rate, took temporarily a new direction now. The road was not as lonely as he had imagined. A natural reaction set in at once, and this proof of practical, modern life banished the shadows from his mind effectually. He started off once more, oblivious of his former hesitation. He even felt a trifle shamed and foolish, pretending that the vanished mood had not existed. The tobacco had been damp. His boot had really hurt him.\n\nYet bewilderment and surprise stayed with him. The swiftness of the incident was disconcerting; the cars arrived and vanished with such extraordinary rapidity; their noisy irruption into this peaceful spot seemed incongruous; they roared, blazed, rushed and disappeared; silence resumed its former sway.\n\nBut the silence persisted, whereas the noise was gone.\n\nThis touch of the incongruous remained with him as he now went ever deeper into the heart of the quiet forest. This odd incongruity of dreams remained." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 584", + "text": "The keen air stole from the woods, cooling his body and his mind; anemones gleamed faintly among the brushwood, lit by the pallid moonlight. There were beauty, calm and silence, the slow breathing of the earth beneath the comforting sweet stars. War, in this haunt of ancient peace, seemed an incredible anachronism. His thoughts turned to gentle happy hopes of a day when the lion and the lamb would yet lie down together, and a little child would lead them without fear. His soul dwelt with peaceful longings and calm desires.\n\nHe walked on steadily, until the inflexible straightness of the endless road began to afflict him, and he longed for a turning to the right or left. He looked eagerly about him for a woodland path. Time mattered little; he could wait for the sunrise and walk home \"beneath the young grey dawn\"; he had food and matches, he could light a fire, and sleep\u2014 No!\u2014after all, he would not light a fire, perhaps; he might be accused of signalling to hostile aircraft, or a garde foresti\u00e8re might catch him. He would not bother with a fire. The night was warm, he could enjoy himself and pass the time quite happily without artificial heat; probably he would need no sleep at all... And just then he noticed an opening on his right, where a seductive pathway led in among the trees. The moon, now higher in the sky, lit this woodland trail enticingly; it seemed the very opening he had looked for, and with a thrill of pleasure he at once turned down it, leaving the ugly road behind him with relief.\n\nThe sound of his footsteps hushed instantly on the leaves and moss; the silence became noticeable; an unusual stillness followed; it seemed that something in his mind was also hushed. His feet moved stealthily, as though anxious to conceal his presence from surprise. His steps dragged purposely; their rustling through the thick dead leaves, perhaps, was pleasant to him. He was not sure.\n\nThe path opened presently into a clearing where the moonlight made a pool of silver, the surrounding brushwood fell away; and in the centre a gigantic outline rose. It was, he saw, a beech tree that dwarfed the surrounding forest by its grandeur. Its bulk loomed very splendid against the sky, a faint rustle just audible in its myriad tiny leaves. Dipped in the moonlight, it had such majesty of proportion, such symmetry, that he stopped in admiration. It was, he saw, a multiple tree, five stems springing with attempted spirals out of an enormous trunk; it was immense; it had a presence, the space framed it to perfection. The clearing, evidently, was a favourite resting place for summer picknickers, a playground, probably, for city children on holiday afternoons; woodcutters, too, had been here recently, for he noticed piled brushwood ready to be carted. It indicated admirably, he felt, the limits of his night expedition. Here he would rest awhile, eat his late supper, sleep perhaps round a small\u2014 No! again\u2014a fire he need not make; a spark might easily set the woods ablaze, it was against both forest and military regulations. This idea of a fire, otherwise so natural, was distasteful, even repugnant, to him. He wondered a little why it recurred. He noticed this time, moreover, something unpleasant connected with the suggestion of a fire, something that made him shrink; almost a ghostly dread lay hidden in it.\n\nThis startled him. A dozen excellent reasons, supplied by his brain, warned him that a fire was unwise; but the true reason, supplied by another part of him, concealed itself with care, as though afraid that reason might detect its nature and fix the label on. Disliking this reminder of his earlier mood, he moved forward into the clearing, swinging his stick aggressively and whistling. He approached the tree, where a dozen thick roots dipped into the earth. Admiring, looking up and down, he paced slowly round its prodigious girth, then stood absolutely still. His heart stopped abruptly, his blood became congealed. He saw something that filled him with a sudden emptiness of terror. On this western side the shadow lay very black; it was between the thick limbs, half stem, half root, where the dark hollows gave easy hiding-places, that he was positive he detected movement. A portion of the trunk had moved.\n\nHe stood stock still and stared\u2014not three feet from the trunk\u2014when there came a second movement. Concealed in the shadows there crouched a living form. The movement defined itself immediately. Half reclining, half standing, a living being pressed itself close against the tree, yet fitting so neatly into the wide scooped hollows, that it was scarcely distinguishable from its ebony background. But for the chance movement he must have passed it undetected. Equally, his outstretched fingers might have touched it. The blood rushed from his heart, as he saw this second movement.\n\nDetaching itself from the obscure background, the figure rose and stood before him. It swayed a little, then stepped out into the patch of moonlight on his left. Three feet lay between them. The figure then bent over. A pallid face with burning eyes thrust forward and peered straight into his own.\n\nThe human being was a woman. The same instant he recognized the eyes that had stared him out of countenance in the dining-room two nights ago. He was petrified. She stared him out of countenance now.\n\nAnd, as she did so, the under-current he had tried to ignore so long swept to the surface in a tumultuous flood, obliterating his normal self. Something elaborately built up in his soul by years of artificial training collapsed like a house of cards, and he knew himself undone.\n\n\"They've got me...!\" flashed dreadfully through his mind. It was, again, like a message delivered in a dream where the significance of acts performed and language uttered, concealed at the moment, is revealed much later only.\n\n\"After all\u2014they've got me...!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 585", + "text": "The dialogue that followed seemed strange to him only when looking back upon it. The element of surprise again was negligible if not wholly absent, but the incongruity of dreams, almost of nightmare, became more marked. Though the affair was unlikely, it was far from incredible. So completely were this man and woman involved in some purpose common to them both that their talk, their meeting, their instinctive sympathy at the time seemed natural. The same stream bore them irresistibly towards the same far sea. Only, as yet, this common purpose remained concealed. Nor could he define the violent emotions that troubled him. Their exact description was in him, but so deep that he could not draw it up. Moonlight lay upon his thought, merging clear outlines.\n\nDivided against himself, the cleavage left no authoritative self in control; his desire to take an immediate decision resulted in a confused struggle, where shame and pleasure, attraction and revulsion mingled painfully. Incongruous details tumbled helter-skelter about his mind: for no obvious reason, he remembered again his Red Cross uniform, his former holy calling, his nationality too; he was a servant of mercy, a teacher of the love of God; he was an English gentleman. Against which rose other details, as in opposition, holding just beyond the reach of words, yet rising, he recognized well enough, from the bed-rock of the human animal, whereon a few centuries have imposed the thin crust of refinement men call civilization. He was aware of joy and loathing.\n\nIn the first few seconds he knew the clash of a dreadful fundamental struggle, while the spell of this woman's strange enchantment poured over him, seeking the reconciliation he himself could not achieve. Yet the reconciliation she sought meant victory or defeat; no compromise lay in it. Something imperious emanating from her already dominated the warring elements towards a coherent whole. He stood before her, quivering with emotions he dared not name. Her great womanhood he recognized, acknowledging obedience to her undisclosed intentions. And this idea of coming surrender terrified him. Whence came, too, that queenly touch about her that made him feel he should have sunk upon his knees?\n\nThe conflict resulted in a curious compromise. He raised his hand; he saluted; he found very ordinary words.\n\n\"You passed me only a short time ago,\" he stammered, \"in the motors. There were others with you\u2014\"\n\n\"Knowing that you would find us and come after. We count on your presence and your willing help.\" Her voice was firm as with unalterable conviction. It was persuasive too. He nodded, as though acquiescence seemed the only course.\n\n\"We need your sympathy; we must have your power too.\"\n\nHe bowed again. \"My power!\" Something exulted in him. But he murmured only. It was natural, he felt; he gave consent without a question.\n\nStrange words he both understood and did not understand. Her voice, low and silvery, was that of a gentle, cultured woman, but command rang through it with a clang of metal, terrible behind the sweetness. She moved a little closer, standing erect before him in the moonlight, her figure borrowing something of the great tree's majesty behind her. It was incongruous, this gentle and yet sinister air she wore. Whence came, in this calm peaceful spot, the suggestion of a wild and savage background to her? Why were there tumult and oppression in his heart, pain, horror, tenderness and mercy, mixed beyond disentanglement? Why did he think already, but helplessly, of escape, yet at the same time burn to stay? Whence came again, too, a certain queenly touch he felt in her?\n\n\"The gods have brought you,\" broke across his turmoil in a half whisper whose breath almost touched his face. \"You belong to us.\"\n\nThe deeps rose in him. Seduced by the sweetness and the power, the warring divisions in his being drew together. His under-self more and more obtained the mastery she willed. Then something in the French she used flickered across his mind with a faint reminder of normal things again.\n\n\"Belgian\u2014\" he began, and then stopped short, as her instant rejoinder broke in upon his halting speech and petrified him. In her voice sang that triumphant tenderness that only the feminine powers of the Universe may compass: it seemed the sky sang with her, the mating birds, wild flowers, the south wind and the running streams. All these, even the silver birches, lent their fluid, feminine undertones to the two pregnant words with which she interrupted him and completed his own unfinished sentence:\n\n\"\u2014 and mother.\"\n\nWith the dreadful calm of an absolute assurance, she stood and watched him.\n\nHis understanding already showed signs of clearing. She stretched her hands out with a passionate appeal, a yearning gesture, the eloquence of which should explain all that remained unspoken. He saw their grace and symmetry, exquisite in the moonlight, then watched them fold together in an attitude of prayer. Beautiful mother hands they were; hands made to smooth the pillows of the world, to comfort, bless, caress, hands that little children everywhere must lean upon and love-perfect symbol of protective, self-forgetful motherhood.\n\nThis tenderness he noted; he noted next\u2014the strength. In the folded hands he divined the expression of another great world-power, fulfilling the implacable resolution of the mouth and eyes. He was aware of relentless purpose, more\u2014of merciless revenge, as by a protective motherhood outraged beyond endurance. Moreover, the gesture held appeal; these hands, so close that their actual perfume reached him, sought his own in help. The power in himself as man, as male, as father\u2014this was required of him in the fulfillment of the unknown purpose to which this woman summoned him. His understanding cleared still more.\n\nThe couple faced one another, staring fixedly beneath the giant beech that overarched them. In the dark of his eyes, he knew, lay growing terror. He shivered, and the shiver passed down his spine, making his whole body tremble. There stirred in him an excitement he loathed, yet welcomed, as the primitive male in him, answering the summons, reared up with instinctive, dreadful glee to shatter the bars that civilization had so confidently set upon its freedom. A primal emotion of his under-being, ancient lust that had too long gone hungry and unfed, leaped towards some possible satisfaction. It was incredible; it was, of course, a dream. But judgment wavered; increasing terror ate his will away. Violence and sweetness, relief and degradation, fought in his soul, as he trembled before a power that now slowly mastered him. This glee and loathing formed their ghastly partnership. He could have strangled the woman where she stood. Equally, he could have knelt and kissed her feet.\n\nThe vehemence of the conflict paralysed him.\n\n\"A mother's hands...\" he murmured at length, the words escaping like bubbles that rose to the surface of a seething cauldron and then burst.\n\nAnd the woman smiled as though she read his mind and saw his little trembling. The smile crept down from the eyes towards the mouth; he saw her lips part slightly; he saw her teeth.\n\nBut her reply once more transfixed him. Two syllables she uttered in a voice of iron:\n\n\"Louvain.\"\n\nThe sound acted upon him like a Word of Power in some Eastern fairy tale. It knit the present to a past that he now recognized could never die. Humanity had not advanced. The hidden source of his secret joy began to glow. For this woman focused in him passions that life had hitherto denied, pretending they were atrophied, and the primitive male, the naked savage rose up, with glee in its lustful eyes and blood upon its lips. Acquired civilization, a pitiful mockery, split through its thin veneer and fled.\n\n\"Belgian... Louvain... Mother...\" he whispered, yet astonished at the volume of sound that now left his mouth. His voice had a sudden fullness. It seemed a cave-man roared the words.\n\nShe touched his hand, and he knew a sudden intensification of life within him; immense energy poured through his veins; a medi\u00e6val spirit used his eyes; great pagan instincts strained and urged against his heart, against his very muscles. He longed for action.\n\nAnd he cried aloud: \"I am with you, with you to the end!\"\n\nHer spell had vivified beyond all possible resistance that primitive consciousness which is ever the bed-rock of the human animal.\n\nA racial memory, inset against the forest scenery, flashed suddenly through the depths laid bare. Below a sinking moon dark figures flew in streaming lines and groups; tormented cries went down the wind; he saw torn, blasted trees that swayed and rocked; there was a leaping fire, a gleaming knife, an altar. He saw a sacrifice.\n\nIt flashed away and vanished. In its place the woman stood, with shining eyes fixed on his face, one arm outstretched, one hand upon his flesh. She shifted slightly, and her cloak swung open. He saw clinging skins wound closely about her figure; leaves, flowers and trailing green hung from her shoulders, fluttering down the lines of her triumphant physical beauty. There was a perfume of wild roses, incense, ivy bloom, whose subtle intoxication drowned his senses. He saw a sparkling girdle round the waist, a knife thrust through it tight against the hip. And his secret joy, the glee, the pleasure of some unlawful and unholy lust leaped through his blood towards the abandonment of satisfaction.\n\nThe moon revealed a glimpse, no more. An instant he saw her thus, half savage and half sweet, symbol of primitive justice entering the present through the door of vanished centuries.\n\nThe cloak swung back again, the outstretched hand withdrew, but from a world he knew had altered.\n\nTo-day sank out of sight. The moon shone pale with terror and delight on Yesterday." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 586", + "text": "Across this altered world a faint new sound now reached his ears, as though a human wail of anguished terror trembled and changed into the cry of some captured helpless animal. He thought of a wolf apart from the comfort of its pack, savage yet abject. The despair of a last appeal was in the sound. It floated past, it died away. The woman moved closer suddenly.\n\n\"All is prepared,\" she said, in the same low, silvery voice; \"we must not tarry. The equinox is come, the tide of power flows. The sacrifice is here; we hold him fast. We only awaited you.\" Her shining eyes were raised to his. \"Your soul is with us now?\" she whispered.\n\n\"My soul is with you.\"\n\n\"And midnight,\" she continued, \"is at hand. We use, of course, their methods. Henceforth the gods\u2014their old-world gods\u2014shall work on our side. They demand a sacrifice, and justice has provided one.\"\n\nHis understanding cleared still more then; the last veil of confusion was drawing from his mind. The old, old names went thundering through his consciousness\u2014Odin, Wotan, Moloch\u2014accessible ever to invocation and worship of the rightful kind. It seemed as natural as though he read in his pulpit the prayer for rain, or gave out the hymn for those at sea. That was merely an empty form, whereas this was real. Sea, storm and earthquake, all natural activities, lay under the direction of those elemental powers called the gods. Names changed, the principle remained.\n\n\"Their weather shall be ours,\" he cried, with sudden passion, as a memory of unhallowed usages he had thought erased from life burned in him; while, stranger still, resentment stirred\u2014revolt\u2014against the system, against the very deity he had worshipped hitherto. For these had never once interfered to help the cause of right; their feebleness was now laid bare before his eyes. And a two-fold lust rose in him. \"Vengeance is ours!\" he cried in a louder voice, through which this sudden loathing of the cross poured hatred. \"Vengeance and justice! Now bind the victim! Bring on the sacrifice!\"\n\n\"He is already bound.\" And as the woman moved a little, the curious erection behind her caught his eye\u2014the piled brushwood he had imagined was the work of woodmen, picnickers, or playing children. He realized its true meaning.\n\nIt now delighted and appalled him. Awe deepened in him, a wind of ice passed over him. Civilization made one more fluttering effort. He gasped, he shivered; he tried to speak. But no words came. A thin cry, as of a frightened child, escaped him.\n\n\"It is the only way,\" the woman whispered softly. \"We steal from them the power of their own deities.\" Her head flung back with a marvellous gesture of grace and power; she stood before him a figure of perfect womanhood, gentle and tender, yet at the same time alive and cruel with the passions of an ignorant and savage past. Her folded hands were clasped, her face turned heavenwards. \"I am a mother,\" she added, with amazing passion, her eyes glistening in the moonlight with unshed tears. \"We all\"\u2014she glanced towards the forest, her voice rising to a wild and poignant cry\u2014\"all, all of us are mothers!\"\n\nIt was then the final clearing of his understanding happened, and he realized his own part in what would follow. Yet before the realization he felt himself not merely ineffective, but powerless. The struggling forces in him were so evenly matched that paralysis of the will resulted. His dry lips contrived merely a few words of confused and feeble protest.\n\n\"Me!\" he faltered. \"My help\u2014?\"\n\n\"Justice,\" she answered; and though softly uttered, it was as though the medi\u00e6val towers clanged their bells. That secret, ghastly joy again rose in him; admiration, wonder, desire followed instantly. A fugitive memory of Joan of Arc flashed by, as with armoured wings, upon the moonlight. Some power similarly heroic, some purpose similarly inflexible, emanated from this woman, the savour of whose physical enchantment, whose very breath, rose to his brain like incense. Again he shuddered. The spasm of secret pleasure shocked him. He sighed. He felt alert, yet stunned.\n\nHer words went down the wind between them:\n\n\"You are so weak, you English,\" he heard her terrible whisper, \"so nobly forgiving, so fine, yet so forgetful. You refuse the weapon they place within your hands.\" Her face thrust closer, the great eyes blazed upon him. \"If we would save the children\"\u2014the voice rose and fell like wind\u2014\"we must worship where they worship, we must sacrifice to their savage deities...\"\n\nThe stream of her words flowed over him with this nightmare magic that seemed natural, without surprise. He listened, he trembled, and again he sighed. Yet in his blood there was sudden roaring.\n\n\"...Louvain... the hands of little children... we have the proof,\" he heard, oddly intermingled with another set of words that clamoured vainly in his brain for utterance; \"the diary in his own handwriting, his gloating pleasure... the little, innocent hands...\"\n\n\"Justice is mine!\" rang through some fading region of his now fainting soul, but found no audible utterance.\n\n\"...Mist, rain and wind... the gods of German Weather... We all... are mothers...\"\n\n\"I will repay,\" came forth in actual words, yet so low he hardly heard the sound. But the woman heard.\n\n\"We!\" she cried fiercely, \"we will repay!\"...\n\n\"God!\" The voice seemed torn from his throat. \"Oh God\u2014my God!\"\n\n\"Our gods,\" she said steadily in that tone of iron, \"are near. The sacrifice is ready. And you\u2014servant of mercy, priest of a younger deity, and English\u2014you bring the power that makes it effectual. The circuit is complete.\"\n\nIt was perhaps the tears in her appealing eyes, perhaps it was her words, her voice, the wonder of her presence; all combined possibly in the spell that finally then struck down his will as with a single blow that paralysed his last resistance. The monstrous, half-legendary spirit of a primitive day recaptured him completely; he yielded to the spell of this tender, cruel woman, mother and avenging angel, whom horror and suffering had flung back upon the practices of uncivilized centuries. A common desire, a common lust and purpose, degraded both of them. They understood one another. Dropping back into a gulf of savage worship that set up idols in the place of God, they prayed to Odin and his awful crew...\n\nIt was again the touch of her hand that galvanized him. She raised him; he had been kneeling in slavish wonder and admiration at her feet. He leaped to do the bidding, however terrible, of this woman who was priestess, queen indeed, of a long-forgotten orgy.\n\n\"Vengeance at last!\" he cried, in an exultant voice that no longer frightened him. \"Now light the fire! Bring on the sacrifice!\"\n\nThere was a rustling among the nearer branches, the forest stirred; the leaves of last year brushed against advancing feet. Yet before he could turn to see, before even the last words had wholly left his lips, the woman, whose hand still touched his fingers, suddenly tossed her cloak aside, and flinging her bare arms about his neck, drew him with impetuous passion towards her face and kissed him, as with delighted fury of exultant passion, full upon the mouth. Her body, in its clinging skins, pressed close against his own; her heat poured into him. She held him fiercely, savagely, and her burning kiss consumed his modern soul away with the fire of a primal day.\n\n\"The gods have given you to us,\" she cried, releasing him. \"Your soul is ours!\"\n\nShe turned\u2014they turned together\u2014to look for one upon whose last hour the moon now shed her horrid silver." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 587", + "text": "This silvery moonlight fell upon the scene.\n\nIncongruously he remembered the flowers that soon would know the cuckoo's call; the soft mysterious stars shone down; the woods lay silent underneath the sky.\n\nAn amazing fantasy of dream shot here and there. \"I am a man, an Englishman, a padre!\" ran twisting through his mind, as though she whispered them to emphasize the ghastly contrast of reality. A memory of his own Kentish village with its Sunday school fled past, his dream of the Lion and the Lamb close after it. He saw children playing on the green... He saw their happy little hands...\n\nJustice, punishment, revenge\u2014he could not disentangle them. No longer did he wish to. The tide of violence was at his lips, quenching an ancient thirst. He drank. It seemed he could drink forever. These tender pictures only sweetened horror. That kiss had burned his modern soul away.\n\nThe woman waved her hand; there swept from the underbrush a score of figures dressed like herself in skins, with leaves and flowers entwined among their flying hair. He was surrounded in a moment. Upon each face he noted the same tenderness and terrible resolve that their commander wore. They pressed about him, dancing with enchanting grace, yet with full-blooded abandon, across the chequered light and shadow. It was the brimming energy of their movements that swept him off his feet, waking the desire for fierce rhythmical expression. His own muscles leaped and ached; for this energy, it seemed, poured into him from the tossing arms and legs, the shimmering bodies whence hair and skins flung loose, setting the very air awhirl. It flowed over into inanimate objects even, so that the trees waved their branches although no wind stirred\u2014hair, skins and hands, rushing leaves and flying fingers touched his face, his neck, his arms and shoulders, catching him away into this orgy of an ancient, sacrificial ritual. Faces with shining eyes peered into his, then sped away; grew in a cloud upon the moonlight; sank back in shadow; reappeared, touched him, whispered, vanished. Silvery limbs gleamed everywhere. Chanting rose in a wave, to fall away again into forest rustlings; there were smiles that flashed, then fainted into moonlight, red lips and gleaming teeth that shone, then faded out. The secret glade, picked from the heart of the forest by the moon, became a torrent of tumultuous life, a whirlpool of passionate emotions Time had not killed.\n\nBut it was the eyes that mastered him, for in their yearning, mating so incongruously with the savage grace\u2014in the eyes shone ever tears. He was aware of gentle women, of womanhood, of accumulated feminine power that nothing could withstand, but of feminine power in majesty, its essential protective tenderness roused, as by tribal instinct, into a collective fury of implacable revenge. He was, above all, aware of motherhood\u2014of mothers. And the man, the male, the father in him rose like a storm to meet it.\n\nFrom the torrent of voices certain sentences emerged; sometimes chanted, sometimes driven into his whirling mind as though big whispers thrust them down his ears. \"You are with us to the end,\" he caught. \"We have the proof. And punishment is ours!\"\n\nIt merged in wind, others took its place:\n\n\"We hold him fast. The old gods wait and listen.\"\n\nThe body of rushing whispers flowed like a storm-wind past.\n\nA lovely face, fluttering close against his own, paused an instant, and starry eyes gazed into his with a passion of gratitude, dimming a moment their stern fury with a mother's tenderness: \"For the little ones... it is necessary, it is the only way... Our own children...\" The face went out in a gust of blackness, as the chorus rose with a new note of awe and reverence, and a score of throats uttered in unison a single cry: \"The raven! The White Horses! His signs! Great Odin hears!\"\n\nHe saw the great dark bird flap slowly across the clearing, and melt against the shadow of the giant beech; he heard its hoarse, croaking note; the crowds of heads bowed low before its passage. The White Horses he did not see; only a sound as of considerable masses of air regularly displaced was audible far overhead. But the veiled light, as though great thunder-clouds had risen, he saw distinctly. The sky above the clearing where he stood, panting and dishevelled, was blocked by a mass that owned unusual outline. These clouds now topped the forest, hiding the moon and stars. The flowers went out like nightlights blown. The wind rose slowly, then with sudden violence. There was a roaring in the tree-tops. The branches tossed and shook.\n\n\"The White Horses!\" cried the voices, in a frenzy of adoration. \"He is here!\"\n\nIt came swiftly, this collective mass; it was both apt and terrible. There was an immense footstep. It was there.\n\nThen panic seized him, he felt an answering tumult in himself, the Past surged through him like a sea at flood. Some inner sight, peering across the wreckage of To-day, perceived an outline that in its size dwarfed mountains, a pair of monstrous shoulders, a face that rolled through a full quarter of the heavens. Above the ruin of civilization, now fulfilled in the microcosm of his own being, the menacing shadow of a forgotten deity peered down upon the earth, yet upon one detail of it chiefly\u2014the human group that had been wildly dancing, but that now chanted in solemn conclave about a forest altar.\n\nFor some minutes a dead silence reigned; the pouring winds left emptiness in which no leaf stirred; there was a hush, a stillness that could be felt. The kneeling figures stretched forth a level sea of arms towards the altar; from the lowered heads the hair hung down in torrents, against which the naked flesh shone white; the skins upon the rows of backs gleamed yellow. The obscurity deepened overhead. It was the time of adoration. He knelt as well, arms similarly outstretched, while the lust of vengeance burned within him.\n\nThen came, across the stillness, the stirring of big wings, a rustling as the great bird settled in the higher branches of the beech. The ominous note broke through the silence; and with one accord the shining backs were straightened. The company rose, swayed, parting into groups and lines. Two score voices resumed the solemn chant. The throng of pallid faces passed to and fro like great fire-flies that shone and vanished. He, too, heard his own voice in unison, while his feet, as with instinctive knowledge, trod the same measure that the others trod.\n\nOut of this tumult and clearly audible above the chorus and the rustling feet rang out suddenly, in a sweetly fluting tone, the leader's voice:\n\n\"The Fire! But first the hands!\"\n\nA rush of figures set instantly towards a thicket where the underbrush stood densest. Skins, trailing flowers, bare waving arms and tossing hair swept past on a burst of perfume. It was as though the trees themselves sped by. And the torrent of voices shook the very air in answer:\n\n\"The Fire! But first\u2014the hands!\"\n\nAcross this roaring volume pierced then, once again, that wailing sound which seemed both human and non-human\u2014the anguished cry as of some lonely wolf in metamorphosis, apart from the collective safety of the pack, abjectly terrified, feeling the teeth of the final trap, and knowing the helpless feet within the steel. There was a crash of rending boughs and tearing branches. There was a tumult in the thicket, though of brief duration\u2014then silence.\n\nHe stood watching, listening, overmastered by a diabolical sensation of expectancy he knew to be atrocious. Turning in the direction of the cry, his straining eyes seemed filled with blood; in his temples the pulses throbbed and hammered audibly. The next second he stiffened into a stone-like rigidity, as a figure, struggling violently yet half collapsed, was borne hurriedly past by a score of eager arms that swept it towards the beech tree, and then proceeded to fasten it in an upright position against the trunk. It was a man bound tight with thongs, adorned with leaves and flowers and trailing green. The face was hidden, for the head sagged forward on the breast, but he saw the arms forced flat against the giant trunk, held helpless beyond all possible escape; he saw the knife, poised and aimed by slender, graceful fingers above the victim's wrists laid bare; he saw the\u2014hands.\n\n\"An eye for an eye,\" he heard, \"a tooth for a tooth!\" It rose in awful chorus. Yet this time, although the words roared close about him, they seemed farther away, as if wind brought them through the crowding trees from far off.\n\n\"Light the fire! Prepare the sacrifice!\" came on a following wind; and, while strange distance held the voices as before, a new faint sound now audible was very close. There was a crackling. Some ten feet beyond the tree a column of thick smoke rose in the air; he was aware of heat not meant for modern purposes; of yellow light that was not the light of stars.\n\nThe figure writhed, and the face swung suddenly sideways. Glaring with panic hopelessness past the judge and past the hanging knife, the eyes found his own. There was a pause of perhaps five seconds, but in these five seconds centuries rolled by. The priest of To-day looked down into the well of time. For five hundred years he gazed into those twin eyeballs, glazed with the abject terror of a last appeal. They recognized one another.\n\nThe centuries dragged appallingly. The drama of civilization, in a sluggish stream, went slowly by, halting, meandering, losing itself, then reappearing. Sharpest pains, as of a thousand knives, accompanied its dreadful, endless lethargy. Its million hesitations made him suffer a million deaths of agony. Terror, despair and anger, all futile and without effect upon its progress, destroyed a thousand times his soul, which yet some hope\u2014a towering, indestructible hope\u2014a thousand times renewed. This despair and hope alternately broke his being, ever to fashion it anew. His torture seemed not of this world. Yet hope survived. The sluggish stream moved onward, forward...\n\nThere came an instant of sharpest, dislocating torture. The yellow light grew slightly brighter. He saw the eyelids flicker.\n\nIt was at this moment he realized abruptly that he stood alone, apart from the others, unnoticed apparently, perhaps forgotten; his feet held steady; his voice no longer sang. And at this discovery a quivering shock ran through his being, as though the will were suddenly loosened into a new activity, yet an activity that halted between two terrifying alternatives.\n\nIt was as though the flicker of those eyelids loosed a spring.\n\nTwo instincts, clashing in his being, fought furiously for the mastery. One, ancient as this sacrifice, savage as the legendary figure brooding in the heavens above him, battled fiercely with another, acquired more recently in human evolution, that had not yet crystallized into permanence. He saw a child, playing in a Kentish orchard with toys and flowers the little innocent hands made living... he saw a lowly manger, figures kneeling round it, and one star shining overhead in piercing and prophetic beauty.\n\nThought was impossible; he saw these symbols only, as the two contrary instincts, alternately hidden and revealed, fought for permanent possession of his soul. Each strove to dominate him; it seemed that violent blows were struck that wounded physically; he was bruised, he ached, he gasped for breath; his body swayed, held upright only, it seemed, by the awful appeal in the fixed and staring eyes.\n\nThe challenge had come at last to final action; the conqueror, he well knew, would remain an integral portion of his character, his soul.\n\nIt was the old, old battle, waged eternally in every human heart, in every tribe, in every race, in every period, the essential principle indeed, behind the great world-war. In the stress and confusion of the fight, as the eyes of the victim, savage in victory, abject in defeat\u2014the appealing eyes of that animal face against the tree stared with their awful blaze into his own, this flashed clearly over him. It was the battle between might and right, between love and hate, forgiveness and vengeance, Christ and the Devil. He heard the menacing thunder of \"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,\" then above its angry volume rose suddenly another small silvery voice that pierced with sweetness:\u2014\"Vengeance is mine, I will repay...\" sang through him as with unimaginable hope.\n\nSomething became incandescent in him then. He realized a singular merging of powers in absolute opposition to each other. It was as though they harmonized. Yet it was through this small, silvery voice the apparent magic came. The words, of course, were his own in memory, but they rose from his modern soul, now reawakening... He started painfully. He noted again that he stood apart, alone, perhaps forgotten of the others. The woman, leading a dancing throng about the blazing brushwood, was far from him. Her mind, too sure of his compliance, had momentarily left him. The chain was weakened. The circuit knew a break.\n\nBut this sudden realization was not of spontaneous origin. His heart had not produced it of its own accord. The unholy tumult of the orgy held him too slavishly in its awful sway for the tiny point of his modern soul to have pierced it thus unaided. The light flashed to him from an outside, natural source of simple loveliness\u2014the singing of a bird. From the distance, faint and exquisite, there had reached him the silvery notes of a happy thrush, awake in the night, and telling its joy over and over again to itself. The innocent beauty of its song came through the forest and fell into his soul...\n\nThe eyes, he became aware, had shifted, focusing now upon an object nearer to them. The knife was moving. There was a convulsive wriggle of the body, the head dropped loosely forward, no cry was audible. But, at the same moment, the inner battle ceased and an unexpected climax came. Did the soul of the bully faint with fear? Did the spirit leave him at the actual touch of earthly vengeance? The watcher never knew. In that appalling moment when the knife was about to begin the mission that the fire would complete, the roar of inner battle ended abruptly, and that small silvery voice drew the words of invincible power from his reawakening soul. \"Ye do it also unto me...\" pealed o'er the forest.\n\nHe reeled. He acted instantaneously. Yet before he had dashed the knife from the hand of the executioner, scattered the pile of blazing wood, plunged through the astonished worshippers with a violence of strength that amazed even himself; before he had torn the thongs apart and loosened the fainting victim from the tree; before he had uttered a single word or cry, though it seemed to him he roared with a voice of thousands\u2014he witnessed a sight that came surely from the Heaven of his earliest childhood days, from that Heaven whose God is love and whose forgiveness was taught him at his mother's knee.\n\nWith superhuman rapidity it passed before him and was gone. Yet it was no earthly figure that emerged from the forest, ran with this incredible swiftness past the startled throng, and reached the tree. He saw the shape; the same instant it was there; wrapped in light, as though a flame from the sacrificial fire flashed past him over the ground. It was of an incandescent brightness, yet brightest of all were the little outstretched hands. These were of purest gold, of a brilliance incredibly shining.\n\nIt was no earthly child that stretched forth these arms of generous forgiveness and took the bewildered prisoner by the hand just as the knife descended and touched the helpless wrists. The thongs were already loosened, and the victim, fallen to his knees, looked wildly this way and that for a way of possible escape, when the shining hands were laid upon his own. The murderer rose. Another instant and the throng must have been upon him, tearing him limb from limb. But the radiant little face looked down into his own; she raised him to his feet; with superhuman swiftness she led him through the infuriated concourse as though he had become invisible, guiding him safely past the furies into the cover of the trees. Close before his eyes, this happened; he saw the waft of golden brilliance, he heard the final gulp of it, as wind took the dazzling of its fiery appearance into space. They were gone..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 588", + "text": "He stood watching the disappearing motor-cars, wondering uneasily who the occupants were and what their business, whither and why did they hurry so swiftly through the night? He was still trying to light his pipe, but the damp tobacco would not burn.\n\nThe air stole out of the forest, cooling his body and his mind; he saw the anemones gleam; there was only peace and calm about him, the earth lay waiting for the sweet, mysterious stars. The moon was higher; he looked up; a late bird sang. Three strips of cloud, spaced far apart, were the footsteps of the South Wind, as she flew to bring more birds from Africa. His thoughts turned to gentle, happy hopes of a day when the lion and the lamb should lie down together, and a little child should lead them. War, in this haunt of ancient peace, seemed an incredible anachronism.\n\nHe did not go farther; he did not enter the forest; he turned back along the quiet road he had come, ate his food on a farmer's gate, and over a pipe sat dreaming of his sure belief that humanity had advanced. He went home to his hotel soon after midnight. He slept well, and next day walked back the four miles from the hospitals, instead of using the car. Another hospital searcher walked with him. They discussed the news.\n\n\"The weather's better anyhow,\" said his companion. \"In our favour at last!\"\n\n\"That's something,\" he agreed, as they passed a gang of prisoners and crossed the road to avoid saluting.\n\n\"Been another escape, I hear,\" the other mentioned. \"He won't get far. How on earth do they manage it? The M.O. had a yarn that he was helped by a motor-car. I wonder what they'll do to him.\"\n\n\"Oh, nothing much. Bread and water and extra work, I suppose?\"\n\nThe other laughed. \"I'm not so sure,\" he said lightly. \"Humanity hasn't advanced very much in that kind of thing.\"\n\nA fugitive memory flashed for an instant through the other's brain as he listened. He had an odd feeling for a second that he had heard this conversation before somewhere. A ghostly sense of familiarity brushed his mind, then vanished. At dinner that night the table in front of him was unoccupied. He did not, however, notice that it was unoccupied." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Ancient China.json b/Ancient China.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..39a5f121c0130fc88186362e286045fc0805d856 --- /dev/null +++ b/Ancient China.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:36ccf28d233a90e922dc1ac1eab1a986f5a858e3554cd54d21913392af4dc180 +size 31929283 diff --git a/Ancient Greece.json b/Ancient Greece.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..f394bd2d0dd6ec9ecd5c893cec6fdbd59dd2c469 --- /dev/null +++ b/Ancient Greece.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:4fe7c084cabe8f8d62a1b806e65c43eafc1df34d972a464183d7d99d64782f50 +size 19138849 diff --git a/Animal Fiction.json b/Animal Fiction.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..2fc515f1f0f9ea8f6e11fa89494a4387e60d395e --- /dev/null +++ b/Animal Fiction.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:f68e5036944cb646211956f361571317c3f7b34ecaac08adb4fa1f7955cf09c7 +size 47515593 diff --git a/Anthropomorphic Animals.json b/Anthropomorphic Animals.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..711d3d6df6442f4234e906205c13a41270531f67 --- /dev/null +++ b/Anthropomorphic Animals.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:42842b69985916964a3a156acf5070ad09b943813e368aab6935d0606e054843 +size 50400617 diff --git a/Arthur Conan Doyle.json b/Arthur Conan Doyle.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..a60a32e47823a26d82362fbdb5d16afc939f65f7 --- /dev/null +++ b/Arthur Conan Doyle.json @@ -0,0 +1,1035 @@ +[ + { + "title": "Sir Nigel", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "adventure", + "historical fiction" + ], + "tags": [ + "" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "THE HOUSE OF LORING", + "text": "In the month of July of the year 1348, between the feasts of St. Benedict and of St. Swithin, a strange thing came upon England, for out of the east there drifted a monstrous cloud, purple and piled, heavy with evil, climbing slowly up the hushed heaven. In the shadow of that strange cloud the leaves drooped in the trees, the birds ceased their calling, and the cattle and the sheep gathered cowering under the hedges. A gloom fell upon all the land, and men stood with their eyes upon the strange cloud and a heaviness upon their hearts. They crept into the churches where the trembling people were blessed and shriven by the trembling priests. Outside no bird flew, and there came no rustling from the woods, nor any of the homely sounds of Nature. All was still, and nothing moved, save only the great cloud which rolled up and onward, with fold on fold from the black horizon. To the west was the light summer sky, to the east this brooding cloud-bank, creeping ever slowly across, until the last thin blue gleam faded away and the whole vast sweep of the heavens was one great leaden arch.\n\nThen the rain began to fall. All day it rained, and all the night and all the week and all the month, until folk had forgotten the blue heavens and the gleam of the sunshine. It was not heavy, but it was steady and cold and unceasing, so that the people were weary of its hissing and its splashing, with the slow drip from the eaves. Always the same thick evil cloud flowed from east to west with the rain beneath it. None could see for more than a bowshot from their dwellings for the drifting veil of the rain-storms. Every morning the folk looked upward for a break, but their eyes rested always upon the same endless cloud, until at last they ceased to look up, and their hearts despaired of ever seeing the change. It was raining at Lammastide and raining at the Feast of the Assumption and still raining at Michaelmas. The crops and the hay, sodden and black, had rotted in the fields, for they were not worth the garnering. The sheep had died, and the calves also, so there was little to kill when Martinmas came and it was time to salt the meat for the winter. They feared a famine, but it was worse than famine which was in store for them.\n\nFor the rain had ceased at last, and a sickly autumn sun shone upon a land which was soaked and sodden with water. Wet and rotten leaves reeked and festered under the foul haze which rose from the woods. The fields were spotted with monstrous fungi of a size and color never matched before\u2014scarlet and mauve and liver and black. It was as though the sick earth had burst into foul pustules; mildew and lichen mottled the walls, and with that filthy crop Death sprang also from the water-soaked earth. Men died, and women and children, the baron of the castle, the franklin on the farm, the monk in the abbey and the villein in his wattle-and-daub cottage. All breathed the same polluted reek and all died the same death of corruption. Of those who were stricken none recovered, and the illness was ever the same\u2014gross boils, raving, and the black blotches which gave its name to the disease. All through the winter the dead rotted by the wayside for want of some one to bury them. In many a village no single man was left alive. Then at last the spring came with sunshine and health and lightness and laughter\u2014the greenest, sweetest, tenderest spring that England had ever known\u2014but only half of England could know it. The other half had passed away with the great purple cloud.\n\nYet it was there in that stream of death, in that reek of corruption, that the brighter and freer England was born. There in that dark hour the first streak of the new dawn was seen. For in no way save by a great upheaval and change could the nation break away from that iron feudal system which held her limbs. But now it was a new country which came out from that year of death. The barons were dead in swaths. No high turret nor cunning moat could keep out that black commoner who struck them down.\n\nOppressive laws slackened for want of those who could enforce them, and once slackened could never be enforced again. The laborer would be a slave no longer. The bondsman snapped his shackles. There was much to do and few left to do it. Therefore the few should be freemen, name their own price, and work where and for whom they would. It was the black death which cleared the way for that great rising thirty years later which left the English peasant the freest of his class in Europe.\n\nBut there were few so far-sighted that they could see that here, as ever, good was coming out of evil. At the moment misery and ruin were brought into every family. The dead cattle, the ungarnered crops, the untilled lands\u2014every spring of wealth had dried up at the same moment. Those who were rich became poor; but those who were poor already, and especially those who were poor with the burden of gentility upon their shoulders, found themselves in a perilous state. All through England the smaller gentry were ruined, for they had no trade save war, and they drew their living from the work of others. On many a manor-house there came evil times, and on none more than on the Manor of Tilford, where for many generations the noble family of the Lorings had held their home.\n\nThere was a time when the Lorings had held the country from the North Downs to the Lakes of Frensham, and when their grim castle-keep rising above the green meadows which border the River Wey had been the strongest fortalice betwixt Guildford Castle in the east and Winchester in the west. But there came that Barons' War, in which the King used his Saxon subjects as a whip with which to scourge his Norman barons, and Castle Loring, like so many other great strongholds, was swept from the face of the land. From that time the Lorings, with estates sadly curtailed, lived in what had been the dower-house, with enough for splendor.\n\nAnd then came their lawsuit with Waverley Abbey, and the Cistercians laid claim to their richest land, with peccary, turbary and feudal rights over the remainder. It lingered on for years, this great lawsuit, and when it was finished the men of the Church and the men of the Law had divided all that was richest of the estate between them. There was still left the old manor-house from which with each generation there came a soldier to uphold the credit of the name and to show the five scarlet roses on the silver shield where it had always been shown\u2014in the van. There were twelve bronzes in the little chapel where Matthew the priest said mass every morning, all of men of the house of Loring. Two lay with their legs crossed, as being from the Crusades. Six others rested their feet upon lions, as having died in war. Four only lay with the effigy of their hounds to show that they had passed in peace.\n\nOf this famous but impoverished family, doubly impoverished by law and by pestilence, two members were living in the year of grace 1349\u2014Lady Ermyntrude Loring and her grandson Nigel. Lady Ermyntrude's husband had fallen before the Scottish spearsmen at Stirling, and her son Eustace, Nigel's father, had found a glorious death nine years before this chronicle opens upon the poop of a Norman galley at the sea-fight of Sluys. The lonely old woman, fierce and brooding like the falcon mewed in her chamber, was soft only toward the lad whom she had brought up. All the tenderness and love of her nature, so hidden from others that they could not imagine their existence, were lavished upon him. She could not bear him away from her, and he, with that respect for authority which the age demanded, would not go without her blessing and consent.\n\nSo it came about that Nigel, with his lion heart and with the blood of a hundred soldiers thrilling in his veins, still at the age of two and twenty, wasted the weary days reclaiming his hawks with leash and lure or training the alans and spaniels who shared with the family the big earthen-floored hall of the manor-house.\n\nDay by day the aged Lady Ermyntrude had seen him wax in strength and in manhood, small of stature, it is true, but with muscles of steel\u2014and a soul of fire. From all parts, from the warden of Guildford Castle, from the tiltyard of Farnham, tales of his prowess were brought back to her, of his daring as a rider, of his debonair courage, of his skill with all weapons; but still she, who had both husband and son torn from her by a bloody death, could not bear that this, the last of the Lorings, the final bud of so famous an old tree, should share the same fate. With a weary heart, but with a smiling face, he bore with his uneventful days, while she would ever put off the evil time until the harvest was better, until the monks of Waverley should give up what they had taken, until his uncle should die and leave money for his outfit, or any other excuse with which she could hold him to her side.\n\nAnd indeed, there was need for a man at Tilford, for the strife betwixt the Abbey and the manor-house had never been appeased, and still on one pretext or another the monks would clip off yet one more slice of their neighbor's land. Over the winding river, across the green meadows, rose the short square tower and the high gray walls of the grim Abbey, with its bell tolling by day and night, a voice of menace and of dread to the little household.\n\nIt is in the heart of the great Cistercian monastery that this chronicle of old days must take its start, as we trace the feud betwixt the monks and the house of Loring, with those events to which it gave birth, ending with the coming of Chandos, the strange spear-running of Tilford Bridge and the deeds with which Nigel won fame in the wars. Elsewhere, in the chronicle of the White Company, it has been set forth what manner of man was Nigel Loring. Those who love him may read herein those things which went to his making. Let us go back together and gaze upon this green stage of England, the scenery, hill, plain and river even as now, the actors in much our very selves, in much also so changed in thought and act that they might be dwellers in another world to ours." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE DEVIL CAME TO WAVERLEY", + "text": "The day was the first of May, which was the Festival of the Blessed Apostles Philip and James. The year was the 1,349th from man's salvation.\n\nFrom tierce to sext, and then again from sext to nones, Abbot John of the House of Waverley had been seated in his study while he conducted the many high duties of his office. All around for many a mile on every side stretched the fertile and flourishing estate of which he was the master. In the center lay the broad Abbey buildings, with church and cloisters, hospitium, chapter-house and frater-house, all buzzing with a busy life. Through the open window came the low hum of the voices of the brethren as they walked in pious converse in the ambulatory below. From across the cloister there rolled the distant rise and fall of a Gregorian chant, where the precentor was hard at work upon the choir, while down in the chapter-house sounded the strident voice of Brother Peter, expounding the rule of Saint Bernard to the novices.\n\nAbbot John rose to stretch his cramped limbs. He looked out at the greensward of the cloister, and at the graceful line of open Gothic arches which skirted a covered walk for the brethren within. Two and two in their black-and-white garb with slow step and heads inclined, they paced round and round. Several of the more studious had brought their illuminating work from the scriptorium, and sat in the warm sunshine with their little platters of pigments and packets of gold-leaf before them, their shoulders rounded and their faces sunk low over the white sheets of vellum. There too was the copper-worker with his burin and graver. Learning and art were not traditions with the Cistercians as with the parent Order of the Benedictines, and yet the library of Waverley was well filled both with precious books and with pious students.\n\nBut the true glory of the Cistercian lay in his outdoor work, and so ever and anon there passed through the cloister some sunburned monk, soiled mattock or shovel in hand, with his gown looped to his knee, fresh from the fields or the garden. The lush green water-meadows speckled with the heavy-fleeced sheep, the acres of corn-land reclaimed from heather and bracken, the vineyards on the southern slope of Crooksbury Hill, the rows of Hankley fish-ponds, the Frensham marshes drained and sown with vegetables, the spacious pigeon-cotes, all circled the great Abbey round with the visible labors of the Order.\n\nThe Abbot's full and florid face shone with a quiet content as he looked out at his huge but well-ordered household. Like every head of a prosperous Abbey, Abbot John, the fourth of the name, was a man of various accomplishments. Through his own chosen instruments he had to minister a great estate and to keep order and decorum among a large body of men living a celibate life. He was a rigid disciplinarian toward all beneath him, a supple diplomatist to all above. He held high debate with neighboring abbots and lords, with bishops, with papal legates, and even on occasion with the King's majesty himself. Many were the subjects with which he must be conversant. Questions of doctrine, questions of building, points of forestry, of agriculture, of drainage, of feudal law, all came to the Abbot for settlement. He held the scales of justice in all the Abbey banlieue which stretched over many a mile of Hampshire and of Surrey. To the monks his displeasure might mean fasting, exile to some sterner community, or even imprisonment in chains. Over the layman also he could hold any punishment save only corporeal death, instead of which he had in hand the far more dreadful weapon of spiritual excommunication.\n\nSuch were the powers of the Abbot, and it is no wonder that there were masterful lines in the ruddy features of Abbot John, or that the brethren, glancing up, should put on an even meeker carriage and more demure expression as they saw the watchful face in the window above them.\n\nA knock at the door of his studio recalled the Abbot to his immediate duties, and he returned to his desk. Already he had spoken with his cellarer and prior, almoner, chaplain and lector, but now in the tall and gaunt monk who obeyed his summons to enter he recognized the most important and also the most importunate of his agents, Brother Samuel the sacrist, whose office, corresponding to that of the layman's bailiff, placed the material interests of the monastery and its dealings with the outer world entirely under his control, subject only to the check of the Abbot. Brother Samuel was a gnarled and stringy old monk whose stern and sharp-featured face reflected no light from above but only that sordid workaday world toward which it was forever turned. A huge book of accounts was tucked under one of his arms, while a great bunch of keys hung from the other hand, a badge of his office, and also on occasion of impatience a weapon of offense, as many a scarred head among rustics and lay brothers could testify.\n\nThe Abbot sighed wearily, for he suffered much at the hands of his strenuous agent. \"Well, Brother Samuel, what is your will?\" he asked.\n\n\"Holy father, I have to report that I have sold the wool to Master Baldwin of Winchester at two shillings a bale more than it fetched last year, for the murrain among the sheep has raised the price.\"\n\n\"You have done well, brother.\"\n\n\"I have also to tell you that I have distrained Wat the warrener from his cottage, for his Christmas rent is still unpaid, nor the hen-rents of last year.\"\n\n\"He has a wife and four children, brother.\" He was a good, easy man, the Abbot, though liable to be overborne by his sterner subordinate.\n\n\"It is true, holy father; but if I should pass him, then how am I to ask the rent of the foresters of Puttenham, or the hinds in the village? Such a thing spreads from house to house, and where then is the wealth of Waverley?\"\n\n\"What else, Brother Samuel?\"\n\n\"There is the matter of the fish-ponds.\"\n\nThe Abbot's face brightened. It was a subject upon which he was an authority. If the rule of his Order had robbed him of the softer joys of life, he had the keener zest for those which remained.\n\n\"How have the char prospered, brother?\"\n\n\"They have done well, holy father, but the carp have died in the Abbot's pond.\"\n\n\"Carp prosper only upon a gravel bottom. They must be put in also in their due proportion, three milters to one spawner, brother sacrist, and the spot must be free from wind, stony and sandy, an ell deep, with willows and grass upon the banks. Mud for tench, brother, gravel for carp.\"\n\nThe sacrist leaned forward with the face of one who bears tidings of woe. \"There are pike in the Abbot's pond,\" said he.\n\n\"Pike!\" cried the Abbot in horror. \"As well shut up a wolf in our sheepfold. How came a pike in the pond? There were no pike last year, and a pike does not fall with the rain nor rise in the springs. The pond must be drained, or we shall spend next Lent upon stockfish, and have the brethren down with the great sickness ere Easter Sunday has come to absolve us from our abstinence.\"\n\n\"The pond shall be drained, holy father; I have already ordered it. Then we shall plant pot-herbs on the mud bottom, and after we have gathered them in, return the fish and water once more from the lower pond, so that they may fatten among the rich stubble.\"\n\n\"Good!\" cried the Abbot. \"I would have three fish-stews in every well-ordered house\u2014one dry for herbs, one shallow for the fry and the yearlings, and one deep for the breeders and the tablefish. But still, I have not heard you say how the pike came in the Abbot's pond.\"\n\nA spasm of anger passed over the fierce face of the sacrist, and his keys rattled as his bony hand clasped them more tightly. \"Young Nigel Loring!\" said he. \"He swore that he would do us scathe, and in this way he has done it.\"\n\n\"How know you this?\"\n\n\"Six weeks ago he was seen day by day fishing for pike at the great Lake of Frensham. Twice at night he has been met with a bundle of straw under his arm on the Hankley Down. Well, I wot that the straw was wet and that a live pike lay within it.\"\n\nThe Abbot shook his head. \"I have heard much of this youth's wild ways; but now indeed he has passed all bounds if what you say be truth. It was bad enough when it was said that he slew the King's deer in Woolmer Chase, or broke the head of Hobbs the chapman, so that he lay for seven days betwixt life and death in our infirmary, saved only by Brother Peter's skill in the pharmacies of herbs; but to put pike in the Abbot's pond\u2014why should he play such a devil's prank?\"\n\n\"Because he hates the House of Waverley, holy father; because he swears that we hold his father's land.\"\n\n\"In which there is surely some truth.\"\n\n\"But, holy father, we hold no more than the law has allowed.\"\n\n\"True, brother, and yet between ourselves, we may admit that the heavier purse may weigh down the scales of Justice. When I have passed the old house and have seen that aged woman with her ruddled cheeks and her baleful eyes look the curses she dare not speak, I have many a time wished that we had other neighbors.\"\n\n\"That we can soon bring about, holy father. Indeed, it is of it that I wished to speak to you. Surely it is not hard for us to drive them from the countryside. There are thirty years' claims of escuage unsettled, and there is Sergeant Wilkins, the lawyer of Guildford, whom I will warrant to draw up such arrears of dues and rents and issues of hidage and fodder-corn that these folk, who are as beggarly as they are proud, will have to sell the roof-tree over them ere they can meet them. Within three days I will have them at our mercy.\"\n\n\"They are an ancient family and of good repute. I would not treat them too harshly, brother.\"\n\n\"Bethink you of the pike in the carp pond!\"\n\nThe Abbot hardened his heart at the thought. \"It was indeed a devil's deed\u2014when we had but newly stocked it with char and with carp. Well, well, the law is the law, and if you can use it to hurt, it is still lawful to do so. Have these claims been advanced?\"\n\n\"Deacon the bailiff with his two varlets went down to the Hall yesternight on the matter of the escuage, and came screaming back with this young hothead raging at their heels. He is small and slight, yet he has the strength of many men in the hour of his wrath. The bailiff swears that he will go no more, save with half a score of archers to uphold him.\"\n\nThe Abbot was red with anger at this new offense. \"I will teach him that the servants of Holy Church, even though we of the rule of Saint Bernard be the lowliest and humblest of her children, can still defend their own against the froward and the violent! Go, cite this man before the Abbey court. Let him appear in the chapter-house after tierce to-morrow.\"\n\nBut the wary sacrist shook his head: \"Nay, holy father, the times are not yet ripe. Give me three days, I pray you, that my case against him may be complete. Bear in mind that the father and the grandfather of this unruly squire were both famous men of their day and the foremost knights in the King's own service, living in high honor and dying in their knightly duty. The Lady Ermyntrude Loring was first lady to the King's mother. Roger FitzAlan of Farnham and Sir Hugh Walcott of Guildford Castle were each old comrades-in-arms of Nigel's father, and sib to him on the distaff side. Already there has been talk that we have dealt harshly with them. Therefore, my rede is that we be wise and wary and wait until his cup be indeed full.\"\n\nThe Abbot had opened his mouth to reply, when the consultation was interrupted by a most unwonted buzz of excitement from among the monks in the cloister below. Questions and answers in excited voices sounded from one side of the ambulatory to the other. Sacrist and Abbot were gazing at each other in amazement at such a breach of the discipline and decorum of their well-trained flock, when there came a swift step upon the stair, and a white-faced brother flung open the door and rushed into the room.\n\n\"Father Abbot!\" he cried. \"Alas, alas! Brother John is dead, and the holy subprior is dead, and the Devil is loose in the five-virgate field!\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE YELLOW HORSE OF CROOKSBURY", + "text": "In those simple times there was a great wonder and mystery in life. Man walked in fear and solemnity, with Heaven very close above his head, and Hell below his very feet. God's visible hand was everywhere, in the rainbow and the comet, in the thunder and the wind. The Devil too raged openly upon the earth; he skulked behind the hedge-rows in the gloaming; he laughed loudly in the night-time; he clawed the dying sinner, pounced on the unbaptized babe, and twisted the limbs of the epileptic. A foul fiend slunk ever by a man's side and whispered villainies in his ear, while above him there hovered an angel of grace who pointed to the steep and narrow track. How could one doubt these things, when Pope and priest and scholar and King were all united in believing them, with no single voice of question in the whole wide world?\n\nEvery book read, every picture seen, every tale heard from nurse or mother, all taught the same lesson. And as a man traveled through the world his faith would grow the firmer, for go where he would there were the endless shrines of the saints, each with its holy relic in the center, and around it the tradition of incessant miracles, with stacks of deserted crutches and silver votive hearts to prove them. At every turn he was made to feel how thin was the veil, and how easily rent, which screened him from the awful denizens of the unseen world.\n\nHence the wild announcement of the frightened monk seemed terrible rather than incredible to those whom he addressed. The Abbot's ruddy face paled for a moment, it is true, but he plucked the crucifix from his desk and rose valiantly to his feet.\n\n\"Lead me to him!\" said he. \"Show me the foul fiend who dares to lay his grip upon brethren of the holy house of Saint Bernard! Run down to my chaplain, brother! Bid him bring the exorcist with him, and also the blessed box of relics, and the bones of Saint James from under the altar! With these and a contrite and humble heart we may show front to all the powers of darkness.\"\n\nBut the sacrist was of a more critical turn of mind. He clutched the monk's arm with a grip which left its five purple spots for many a day to come.\n\n\"Is this the way to enter the Abbot's own chamber, without knock or reverence, or so much as a 'Pax vobiscum'?\" said he sternly. \"You were wont to be our gentlest novice, of lowly carriage in chapter, devout in psalmody and strict in the cloister. Pull your wits together and answer me straightly. In what form has the foul fiend appeared, and how has he done this grievous scathe to our brethren? Have you seen him with your own eyes, or do you repeat from hearsay? Speak, man, or you stand on the penance-stool in the chapter-house this very hour!\"\n\nThus adjured, the frightened monk grew calmer in his bearing, though his white lips and his startled eyes, with the gasping of his breath, told of his inward tremors.\n\n\"If it please you, holy father, and you, reverend sacrist, it came about in this way. James the subprior, and Brother John and I had spent our day from sext onward on Hankley, cutting bracken for the cow-houses. We were coming back over the five-virgate field, and the holy subprior was telling us a saintly tale from the life of Saint Gregory, when there came a sudden sound like a rushing torrent, and the foul fiend sprang over the high wall which skirts the water-meadow and rushed upon us with the speed of the wind. The lay brother he struck to the ground and trampled into the mire. Then, seizing the good subprior in his teeth, he rushed round the field, swinging him as though he were a fardel of old clothes.\n\n\"Amazed at such a sight, I stood without movement and had said a credo and three aves, when the Devil dropped the subprior and sprang upon me. With the help of Saint Bernard I clambered over the wall, but not before his teeth had found my leg, and he had torn away the whole back skirt of my gown.\" As he spoke he turned and gave corroboration to his story by the hanging ruins of his long trailing garment.\n\n\"In what shape then did Satan appear?\" the Abbot demanded.\n\n\"As a great yellow horse, holy father\u2014a monster horse, with eyes of fire and the teeth of a griffin.\"\n\n\"A yellow horse!\" The sacrist glared at the scared monk. \"You foolish brother! How will you behave when you have indeed to face the King of Terrors himself if you can be so frightened by the sight of a yellow horse? It is the horse of Franklin Aylward, my father, which has been distrained by us because he owes the Abbey fifty good shillings and can never hope to pay it. Such a horse, they say, is not to be found betwixt this and the King's stables at Windsor, for his sire was a Spanish destrier, and his dam an Arab mare of the very breed which Saladin, whose soul now reeks in Hell, kept for his own use, and even it has been said under the shelter of his own tent. I took him in discharge of the debt, and I ordered the varlets who had haltered him to leave him alone in the water-meadow, for I have heard that the beast has indeed a most evil spirit, and has killed more men than one.\"\n\n\"It was an ill day for Waverley that you brought such a monster within its bounds,\" said the Abbot. \"If the subprior and Brother John be indeed dead, then it would seem that if the horse be not the Devil he is at least the Devil's instrument.\"\n\n\"Horse or Devil, holy father, I heard him shout with joy as he trampled upon Brother John, and had you seen him tossing the subprior as a dog shakes a rat you would perchance have felt even as I did.\"\n\n\"Come then,\" cried the Abbot, \"let us see with our own eyes what evil has been done.\"\n\nAnd the three monks hurried down the stair which led to the cloisters.\n\nThey had no sooner descended than their more pressing fears were set at rest, for at that very moment, limping, disheveled and mud-stained, the two sufferers were being led in amid a crowd of sympathizing brethren. Shouts and cries from outside showed, however, that some further drama was in progress, and both Abbot and sacrist hastened onward as fast as the dignity of their office would permit, until they had passed the gates and gained the wall of the meadow. Looking over it, a remarkable sight presented itself to their eyes.\n\nFetlock deep in the lush grass there stood a magnificent horse, such a horse as a sculptor or a soldier might thrill to see. His color was a light chestnut, with mane and tail of a more tawny tint. Seventeen hands high, with a barrel and haunches which bespoke tremendous strength, he fined down to the most delicate lines of dainty breed in neck and crest and shoulder. He was indeed a glorious sight as he stood there, his beautiful body leaning back from his widespread and propped fore legs, his head craned high, his ears erect, his mane bristling, his red nostrils opening and shutting with wrath, and his flashing eyes turning from side to side in haughty menace and defiance.\n\nScattered round in a respectful circle, six of the Abbey lay servants and foresters, each holding a halter, were creeping toward him. Every now and then, with a beautiful toss and swerve and plunge, the great creature would turn upon one of his would-be captors, and with outstretched head, flying mane and flashing teeth, would chase him screaming to the safety of the wall, while the others would close swiftly in behind and cast their ropes in the hope of catching neck or leg, but only in their turn to be chased to the nearest refuge.\n\nHad two of these ropes settled upon the horse, and had their throwers found some purchase of stump or boulder by which they could hold them, then the man's brain might have won its wonted victory over swiftness and strength. But the brains were themselves at fault which imagined that one such rope would serve any purpose save to endanger the thrower.\n\nYet so it was, and what might have been foreseen occurred at the very moment of the arrival of the monks. The horse, having chased one of his enemies to the wall, remained so long snorting his contempt over the coping that the others were able to creep upon him from behind. Several ropes were flung, and one noose settled over the proud crest and lost itself in the waving mane. In an instant the creature had turned and the men were flying for their lives; but he who had cast the rope lingered, uncertain what use to make of his own success. That moment of doubt was fatal. With a yell of dismay, the man saw the great creature rear above him. Then with a crash the fore feet fell upon him and dashed him to the ground. He rose screaming, was hurled over once more, and lay a quivering, bleeding heap, while the savage horse, the most cruel and terrible in its anger of all creatures on earth, bit and shook and trampled the writhing body.\n\nA loud wail of horror rose from the lines of tonsured heads which skirted the high wall\u2014a wail which suddenly died away into a long hushed silence, broken at last by a rapturous cry of thanksgiving and of joy.\n\nOn the road which led to the old dark manor-house upon the side of the hill a youth had been riding. His mount was a sorry one, a weedy, shambling, long-haired colt, and his patched tunic of faded purple with stained leather belt presented no very smart appearance; yet in the bearing of the man, in the poise of his head, in his easy graceful carriage, and in the bold glance of his large blue eyes, there was that stamp of distinction and of breed which would have given him a place of his own in any assembly. He was of small stature, but his frame was singularly elegant and graceful. His face, though tanned with the weather, was delicate in features and most eager and alert in expression. A thick fringe of crisp yellow curls broke from under the dark flat cap which he was wearing, and a short golden beard hid the outline of his strong square chin. One white osprey feather thrust through a gold brooch in the front of his cap gave a touch of grace to his somber garb. This and other points of his attire, the short hanging mantle, the leather-sheathed hunting-knife, the cross belt which sustained a brazen horn, the soft doeskin boots and the prick spurs, would all disclose themselves to an observer; but at the first glance the brown face set in gold and the dancing light of the quick, reckless, laughing eyes, were the one strong memory left behind.\n\nSuch was the youth who, cracking his whip joyously, and followed by half a score of dogs, cantered on his rude pony down the Tilford Lane, and thence it was that with a smile of amused contempt upon his face he observed the comedy in the field and the impotent efforts of the servants of Waverley.\n\nSuddenly, however, as the comedy turned swiftly to black tragedy, this passive spectator leaped into quick strenuous life. With a spring he was off his pony, and with another he was over the stone wall and flying swiftly across the field. Looking up from his victim, the great yellow horse saw this other enemy approach, and spurning the prostrate, but still writhing body with its heels, dashed at the newcomer.\n\nBut this time there was no hasty flight, no rapturous pursuit to the wall. The little man braced himself straight, flung up his metal-headed whip, and met the horse with a crashing blow upon the head, repeated again and again with every attack. In vain the horse reared and tried to overthrow its enemy with swooping shoulders and pawing hoofs. Cool, swift and alert, the man sprang swiftly aside from under the very shadow of death, and then again came the swish and thud of the unerring blow from the heavy handle.\n\nThe horse drew off, glared with wonder and fury at this masterful man, and then trotted round in a circle, with mane bristling, tail streaming and ears on end, snorting in its rage and pain. The man, hardly deigning to glance at his fell neighbor, passed on to the wounded forester, raised him in his arms with a strength which could not have been expected in so slight a body, and carried him, groaning, to the wall, where a dozen hands were outstretched to help him over. Then, at his leisure, the young man also climbed the wall, smiling back with cool contempt at the yellow horse, which had come raging after him once more.\n\nAs he sprang down, a dozen monks surrounded him to thank him or to praise him; but he would have turned sullenly away without a word had he not been stopped by Abbot John in person.\n\n\"Nay, Squire Loring,\" said he, \"if you be a bad friend to our Abbey, yet we must needs own that you have played the part of a good Christian this day, for if there is breath left in our servant's body it is to you next to our blessed patron Saint Bernard that we owe it.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! I owe you no good-will, Abbot John,\" said the young man. \"The shadow of your Abbey has ever fallen across the house of Loring. As to any small deed that I may have done this day, I ask no thanks for it. It is not for you nor for your house that I have done it, but only because it was my pleasure so to do.\"\n\nThe Abbot flushed at the bold words, and bit his lip with vexation.\n\nIt was the sacrist, however, who answered: \"It would be more fitting and more gracious,\" said he, \"if you were to speak to the holy Father Abbot in a manner suited to his high rank and to the respect which is due to a Prince of the Church.\"\n\nThe youth turned his bold blue eyes upon the monk, and his sunburned face darkened with anger. \"Were it not for the gown upon your back, and for your silvering hair, I would answer you in another fashion,\" said he. \"You are the lean wolf which growls ever at our door, greedy for the little which hath been left to us. Say and do what you will with me, but by Saint Paul! if I find that Dame Ermyntrude is baited by your ravenous pack I will beat them off with this whip from the little patch which still remains of all the acres of my fathers.\"\n\n\"Have a care, Nigel Loring, have a care!\" cried the Abbot, with finger upraised. \"Have you no fears of the law of England?\"\n\n\"A just law I fear and obey.\"\n\n\"Have you no respect for Holy Church?\"\n\n\"I respect all that is holy in her. I do not respect those who grind the poor or steal their neighbor's land.\"\n\n\"Rash man, many a one has been blighted by her ban for less than you have now said! And yet it is not for us to judge you harshly this day. You are young and hot words come easily to your lips. How fares the forester?\"\n\n\"His hurt is grievous, Father Abbot, but he will live,\" said a brother, looking up from the prostrate form. \"With a blood-letting and an electuary, I will warrant him sound within a month.\"\n\n\"Then bear him to the hospital. And now, brother, about this terrible beast who still gazes and snorts at us over the top of the wall as though his thoughts of Holy Church were as uncouth as those of Squire Nigel himself, what are we to do with him?\"\n\n\"Here is Franklin Aylward,\" said one of the brethren. \"The horse was his, and doubtless he will take it back to his farm.\"\n\nBut the stout red-faced farmer shook his head at the proposal. \"Not I, in faith!\" said he. \"The beast hath chased me twice round the paddock; it has nigh slain my boy Samkin. He would never be happy till he had ridden it, nor has he ever been happy since. There is not a hind in my employ who will enter his stall. Ill fare the day that ever I took the beast from the Castle stud at Guildford, where they could do nothing with it and no rider could be found bold enough to mount it! When the sacrist here took it for a fifty-shilling debt he made his own bargain and must abide by it. He comes no more to the Crooksbury farm.\"\n\n\"And he stays no more here,\" said the Abbot. \"Brother sacrist, you have raised the Devil, and it is for you to lay it again.\"\n\n\"That I will most readily,\" cried the sacrist. \"The pittance-master can stop the fifty shillings from my very own weekly dole, and so the Abbey be none the poorer. In the meantime here is Wat with his arbalist and a bolt in his girdle. Let him drive it to the head through this cursed creature, for his hide and his hoofs are of more value than his wicked self.\"\n\nA hard brown old woodman who had been shooting vermin in the Abbey groves stepped forward with a grin of pleasure. After a lifetime of stoats and foxes, this was indeed a noble quarry which was to fall before him. Fitting a bolt on the nut of his taut crossbow, he had raised it to his shoulder and leveled it at the fierce, proud, disheveled head which tossed in savage freedom at the other side of the wall. His finger was crooked on the spring, when a blow from a whip struck the bow upward and the bolt flew harmless over the Abbey orchard, while the woodman shrank abashed from Nigel Loring's angry eyes.\n\n\"Keep your bolts for your weasels!\" said he. \"Would you take life from a creature whose only fault is that its spirit is so high that it has met none yet who dare control it? You would slay such a horse as a king might be proud to mount, and all because a country franklin, or a monk, or a monk's varlet, has not the wit nor the hands to master him?\"\n\nThe sacrist turned swiftly on the Squire. \"The Abbey owes you an offering for this day's work, however rude your words may be,\" said he. \"If you think so much of the horse, you may desire to own it. If I am to pay for it, then with the holy Abbot's permission it is in my gift and I bestow it freely upon you.\"\n\nThe Abbot plucked at his subordinate's sleeve. \"Bethink you, brother sacrist,\" he whispered, \"shall we not have this man's blood upon our heads?\"\n\n\"His pride is as stubborn as the horse's, holy father,\" the sacrist answered, his gaunt fact breaking into a malicious smile. \"Man or beast, one will break the other and the world will be the better for it. If you forbid me\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, brother, you have bought the horse, and you may have the bestowal of it.\"\n\n\"Then I give it\u2014hide and hoofs, tail and temper\u2014to Nigel Loring, and may it be as sweet and as gentle to him as he hath been to the Abbot of Waverley!\"\n\nThe sacrist spoke aloud amid the tittering of the monks, for the man concerned was out of earshot. At the first words which had shown him the turn which affairs had taken he had run swiftly to the spot where he had left his pony. From its mouth he removed the bit and the stout bridle which held it. Then leaving the creature to nibble the grass by the wayside he sped back whence he came.\n\n\"I take your gift, monk,\" said he, \"though I know well why it is that you give it. Yet I thank you, for there are two things upon earth for which I have ever yearned, and which my thin purse could never buy. The one is a noble horse, such a horse as my father's son should have betwixt his thighs, and here is the one of all others which I would have chosen, since some small deed is to be done in the winning of him, and some honorable advancement to be gained. How is the horse called?\"\n\n\"Its name,\" said the franklin, \"is Pommers. I warn you, young sir, that none may ride him, for many have tried, and the luckiest is he who has only a staved rib to show for it.\"\n\n\"I thank you for your rede,\" said Nigel, \"and now I see that this is indeed a horse which I would journey far to meet. I am your man, Pommers, and you are my horse, and this night you shall own it or I will never need horse again. My spirit against thine, and God hold thy spirit high, Pommers, so that the greater be the adventure, and the more hope of honor gained!\"\n\nWhile he spoke the young Squire had climbed on to the top of the wall and stood there balanced, the very image of grace and spirit and gallantry, his bridle hanging from one hand and his whip grasped in the other. With a fierce snort, the horse made for him instantly, and his white teeth flashed as he snapped; but again a heavy blow from the loaded whip caused him to swerve, and even at the instant of the swerve, measuring the distance with steady eyes, and bending his supple body for the spring, Nigel bounded into the air and fell with his legs astride the broad back of the yellow horse. For a minute, with neither saddle nor stirrups to help him, and the beast ramping and rearing like a mad thing beneath him, he was hard pressed to hold his own. His legs were like two bands of steel welded on to the swelling arches of the great horse's ribs, and his left hand was buried deep in the tawny mane.\n\nNever had the dull round of the lives of the gentle brethren of Waverley been broken by so fiery a scene. Springing to right and swooping to left, now with its tangled wicked head betwixt its forefeet, and now pawing eight feet high in the air, with scarlet, furious nostrils and maddened eyes, the yellow horse was a thing of terror and of beauty. But the lithe figure on his back, bending like a reed in the wind to every movement, firm below, pliant above, with calm inexorable face, and eyes which danced and gleamed with the joy of contest, still held its masterful place for all that the fiery heart and the iron muscles of the great beast could do.\n\nOnce a long drone of dismay rose from the monks, as rearing higher and higher yet a last mad effort sent the creature toppling over backward upon its rider. But, swift and cool, he had writhed from under it ere it fell, spurned it with his foot as it rolled upon the earth, and then seizing its mane as it rose swung himself lightly on to its back once more. Even the grim sacrist could not but join the cheer, as Pommers, amazed to find the rider still upon his back, plunged and curveted down the field.\n\nBut the wild horse only swelled into a greater fury. In the sullen gloom of its untamed heart there rose the furious resolve to dash the life from this clinging rider, even if it meant destruction to beast and man. With red, blazing eyes it looked round for death. On three sides the five-virgate field was bounded by a high wall, broken only at one spot by a heavy four-foot wooden gate. But on the fourth side was a low gray building, one of the granges of the Abbey, presenting a long flank unbroken by door or window. The horse stretched itself into a gallop, and headed straight for that craggy thirty-foot wall. He would break in red ruin at the base of it if he could but dash forever the life of this man, who claimed mastery over that which had never found its master yet.\n\nThe great haunches gathered under it, the eager hoofs drummed the grass, as faster and still more fast the frantic horse bore himself and his rider toward the wall. Would Nigel spring off? To do so would be to bend his will to that of the beast beneath him. There was a better way than that. Cool, quick and decided, the man swiftly passed both whip and bridle into the left hand which still held the mane. Then with the right he slipped his short mantle from his shoulders and lying forward along the creature's strenuous, rippling back he cast the flapping cloth over the horse's eyes.\n\nThe result was but too successful, for it nearly brought about the downfall of the rider. When those red eyes straining for death were suddenly shrouded in unexpected darkness the amazed horse propped on its forefeet and came to so dead a stop that Nigel was shot forward on to its neck and hardly held himself by his hair-entwined hand. Ere he had slid back into position the moment of danger had passed, for the horse, its purpose all blurred in its mind by this strange thing which had befallen, wheeled round once more, trembling in every fiber, and tossing its petulant head until at last the mantle had been slipped from its eyes and the chilling darkness had melted into the homely circle of sunlit grass once more.\n\nBut what was this new outrage which had been inflicted upon it? What was this defiling bar of iron which was locked hard against its mouth? What were these straps which galled the tossing neck, this band which spanned its chest? In those instants of stillness ere the mantle had been plucked away Nigel had lain forward, had slipped the snaffle between the champing teeth, and had deftly secured it.\n\nBlind, frantic fury surged in the yellow horse's heart once more at this new degradation, this badge of serfdom and infamy. His spirit rose high and menacing at the touch. He loathed this place, these people, all and everything which threatened his freedom. He would have done with them forever; he would see them no more. Let him away to the uttermost parts of the earth, to the great plains where freedom is. Anywhere over the far horizon where he could get away from the defiling bit and the insufferable mastery of man.\n\nHe turned with a rush, and one magnificent deer-like bound carried him over the four-foot gate. Nigel's hat had flown off, and his yellow curls streamed behind him as he rose and fell in the leap. They were in the water-meadow now, and the rippling stream twenty feet wide gleamed in front of them running down to the main current of the Wey. The yellow horse gathered his haunches under him and flew over like an arrow. He took off from behind a boulder and cleared a furzebush on the farther side. Two stones still mark the leap from hoof-mark to hoof-mark, and they are eleven good paces apart. Under the hanging branch of the great oak-tree on the farther side (that Quercus Tilfordiensis ordiensis is still shown as the bound of the Abby's immediate precincts) the great horse passed. He had hoped to sweep off his rider, but Nigel sank low on the heaving back with his face buried in the flying mane. The rough bough rasped him rudely, but never shook his spirit nor his grip. Rearing, plunging and struggling, Pommers broke through the sapling grove and was out on the broad stretch of Hankley Down.\n\nAnd now came such a ride as still lingers in the gossip of the lowly country folk and forms the rude jingle of that old Surrey ballad, now nearly forgotten, save for the refrain:\n\n\u2003The Doe that sped on Hinde Head,\n\n\u2003The Kestril on the winde,\n\n\u2003And Nigel on the Yellow Horse\n\n\u2003Can leave the world behinde.\n\nBefore them lay a rolling ocean of dark heather, knee-deep, swelling in billow on billow up to the clear-cut hill before them. Above stretched one unbroken arch of peaceful blue, with a sun which was sinking down toward the Hampshire hills. Through the deep heather, down the gullies, over the watercourses, up the broken slopes, Pommers flew, his great heart bursting with rage, and every fiber quivering at the indignities which he had endured.\n\nAnd still, do what he would, the man clung fast to his heaving sides and to his flying mane, silent, motionless, inexorable, letting him do what he would, but fixed as Fate upon his purpose. Over Hankley Down, through Thursley Marsh, with the reeds up to his mud-splashed withers, onward up the long slope of the Headland of the Hinds, down by the Nutcombe Gorge, slipping, blundering, bounding, but never slackening his fearful speed, on went the great yellow horse. The villagers of Shottermill heard the wild clatter of hoofs, but ere they could swing the ox-hide curtains of their cottage doors horse and rider were lost amid the high bracken of the Haslemere Valley. On he went, and on, tossing the miles behind his flying hoofs. No marshland could clog him, no hill could hold him back. Up the slope of Linchmere and the long ascent of Fernhurst he thundered as on the level, and it was not until he had flown down the incline of Henley Hill, and the gray castle tower of Midhurst rose over the coppice in front, that at last the eager outstretched neck sank a little on the breast, and the breath came quick and fast. Look where he would in woodland and on down, his straining eyes could catch no sign of those plains of freedom which he sought.\n\nAnd yet another outrage! It was bad that this creature should still cling so tight upon his back, but now he would even go to the intolerable length of checking him and guiding him on the way that he would have him go. There was a sharp pluck at his mouth, and his head was turned north once more. As well go that way as another, but the man was mad indeed if he thought that such a horse as Pommers was at the end of his spirit or his strength. He would soon show him that he was unconquered, if it strained his sinews or broke his heart to do so. Back then he flew up the long, long ascent. Would he ever get to the end of it? Yet he would not own that he could go no farther while the man still kept his grip. He was white with foam and caked with mud. His eyes were gorged with blood, his mouth open and gasping, his nostrils expanded, his coat stark and reeking. On he flew down the long Sunday Hill until he reached the deep Kingsley Marsh at the bottom. No, it was too much! Flesh and blood could go no farther. As he struggled out from the reedy slime with the heavy black mud still clinging to his fetlocks, he at last eased down with sobbing breath and slowed the tumultuous gallop to a canter.\n\nOh, crowning infamy! Was there no limit to these degradations? He was no longer even to choose his own pace. Since he had chosen to gallop so far at his own will he must now gallop farther still at the will of another. A spur struck home on either flank. A stinging whip-lash fell across his shoulder. He bounded his own height in the air at the pain and the shame of it. Then, forgetting his weary limbs, forgetting his panting, reeking sides, forgetting everything save this intolerable insult and the burning spirit within, he plunged off once more upon his furious gallop. He was out on the heather slopes again and heading for Weydown Common. On he flew and on. But again his brain failed him and again his limbs trembled beneath him, and yet again he strove to ease his pace, only to be driven onward by the cruel spur and the falling lash. He was blind and giddy with fatigue.\n\nHe saw no longer where he placed his feet, he cared no longer whither he went, but his one mad longing was to get away from this dreadful thing, this torture which clung to him and would not let him go. Through Thursley village he passed, his eyes straining in his agony, his heart bursting within him, and he had won his way to the crest of Thursley Down, still stung forward by stab and blow, when his spirit weakened, his giant strength ebbed out of him, and with one deep sob of agony the yellow horse sank among the heather. So sudden was the fall that Nigel flew forward over his shoulder, and beast and man lay prostrate and gasping while the last red rim of the sun sank behind Butser and the first stars gleamed in a violet sky.\n\nThe young Squire was the first to recover, and kneeling by the panting, overwrought horse he passed his hand gently over the tangled mane and down the foam-flecked face. The red eye rolled up at him; but it was wonder not hatred, a prayer and not a threat, which he could read in it. As he stroked the reeking muzzle, the horse whinnied gently and thrust his nose into the hollow of his hand. It was enough. It was the end of the contest, the acceptance of new conditions by a chivalrous foe from a chivalrous victor.\n\n\"You are my horse, Pommers,\" Nigel whispered, and he laid his cheek against the craning head. \"I know you, Pommers, and you know me, and with the help of Saint Paul we shall teach some other folk to know us both. Now let us walk together as far as this moorland pond, for indeed I wot not whether it is you or I who need the water most.\"\n\nAnd so it was that some belated monks of Waverley passing homeward from the outer farms saw a strange sight which they carried on with them so that it reached that very night the ears both of sacrist and of Abbot. For, as they passed through Tilford they had seen horse and man walking side by side and head by head up the manor-house lane. And when they had raised their lanterns on the pair it was none other than the young Squire himself who was leading home, as a shepherd leads a lamb, the fearsome yellow horse of Crooksbury." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE SUMMONER CAME TO THE MANOR HOUSE OF TILFORD", + "text": "By the date of this chronicle the ascetic sternness of the old Norman castles had been humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for war. He who compares the savage bareness of Pevensey or Guildford with the piled grandeur of Bodmin or Windsor cannot fail to understand the change in manners which they represent.\n\nThe earlier castles had a set purpose, for they were built that the invaders might hold down the country; but when the Conquest was once firmly established a castle had lost its meaning save as a refuge from justice or as a center for civil strife. On the marches of Wales and of Scotland the castle might continue to be a bulwark to the kingdom, and there still grew and flourished; but in all other places they were rather a menace to the King's majesty, and as such were discouraged and destroyed. By the reign of the third Edward the greater part of the old fighting castles had been converted into dwelling-houses or had been ruined in the civil wars, and left where their grim gray bones are still littered upon the brows of our hills. The new buildings were either great country-houses, capable of defense, but mainly residential, or they were manor-houses with no military significance at all.\n\nSuch was the Tilford Manor-house where the last survivors of the old and magnificent house of Loring still struggled hard to keep a footing and to hold off the monks and the lawyers from the few acres which were left to them. The mansion was a two-storied one, framed in heavy beams of wood, the interstices filled with rude blocks of stone. An outside staircase led up to several sleeping-rooms above. Below there were only two apartments, the smaller of which was the bower of the aged Lady Ermyntrude. The other was the hall, a very large room, which served as the living room of the family and as the common dining-room of themselves and of their little group of servants and retainers. The dwellings of these servants, the kitchens, the offices and the stables were all represented by a row of penthouses and sheds behind the main building. Here lived Charles the page, Peter the old falconer, Red Swire who had followed Nigel's grandfather to the Scottish wars, Weathercote the broken minstrel, John the cook, and other survivors of more prosperous days, who still clung to the old house as the barnacles to some wrecked and stranded vessel.\n\nOne evening about a week after the breaking of the yellow horse, Nigel and his grandmother sat on either side of the large empty fireplace in this spacious apartment. The supper had been removed, and so had the trestle tables upon which it had been served, so that the room seemed bare and empty. The stone floor was strewed with a thick layer of green rushes, which was swept out every Saturday and carried with it all the dirt and debris of the week. Several dogs were now crouched among these rushes, gnawing and cracking the bones which had been thrown from the table. A long wooden buffet loaded with plates and dishes filled one end of the room, but there was little other furniture save some benches against the walls, two dorseret chairs, one small table littered with chessmen, and a great iron coffer. In one corner was a high wickerwork stand, and on it two stately falcons were perched, silent and motionless, save for an occasional twinkle of their fierce yellow eyes.\n\nBut if the actual fittings of the room would have appeared scanty to one who had lived in a more luxurious age, he would have been surprised on looking up to see the multitude of objects which were suspended above his head. Over the fireplace were the coats-of-arms of a number of houses allied by blood or by marriage to the Lorings. The two cresset-lights which flared upon each side gleamed upon the blue lion of the Percies, the red birds of de Valence, the black engrailed cross of de Mohun, the silver star of de Vere, and the ruddy bars of FitzAlan, all grouped round the famous red roses on the silver shield which the Lorings had borne to glory upon many a bloody field. Then from side to side the room was spanned by heavy oaken beams from which a great number of objects were hanging. There were mail-shirts of obsolete pattern, several shields, one or two rusted and battered helmets, bowstaves, lances, otter-spears, harness, fishing-rods, and other implements of war or of the chase, while higher still amid the black shadows of the peaked roof could be seen rows of hams, flitches of bacon, salted geese, and those other forms of preserved meat which played so great a part in the housekeeping of the Middle Ages.\n\nDame Ermyntrude Loring, daughter, wife, and mother of warriors, was herself a formidable figure. Tall and gaunt, with hard craggy features and intolerant dark eyes, even her snow-white hair and stooping back could not entirely remove the sense of fear which she inspired in those around her. Her thoughts and memories went back to harsher times, and she looked upon the England around her as a degenerate and effeminate land which had fallen away from the old standard of knightly courtesy and valor.\n\nThe rising power of the people, the growing wealth of the Church, the increasing luxury in life and manners, and the gentler tone of the age were all equally abhorrent to her, so that the dread of her fierce face, and even of the heavy oak staff with which she supported her failing limbs, was widespread through all the country round.\n\nYet if she was feared she was also respected, for in days when books were few and readers scarce, a long memory and a ready tongue were of the more value; and where, save from Dame Ermyntrude, could the young unlettered Squires of Surrey and Hampshire hear of their grandfathers and their battles, or learn that lore of heraldry and chivalry which she handed down from a ruder but a more martial age? Poor as she was, there was no one in Surrey whose guidance would be more readily sought upon a question of precedence or of conduct than the Dame Ermyntrude Loring.\n\nShe sat now with bowed back by the empty fireplace, and looked across at Nigel with all the harsh lines of her old ruddled face softening into love and pride. The young Squire was busy cutting bird-bolts for his crossbow, and whistling softly as he worked. Suddenly he looked up and caught the dark eyes which were fixed upon him. He leaned forward and patted the bony hand.\n\n\"What hath pleased you, dear dame? I read pleasure in your eyes.\"\n\n\"I have heard to-day, Nigel, how you came to win that great warhorse which stamps in our stable.\"\n\n\"Nay, dame; I had told you that the monks had given it to me.\"\n\n\"You said so, fair son, but never a word more. Yet the horse which you brought home was a very different horse I wot, to that which was given you. Why did you not tell me?\"\n\n\"I should think it shame to talk of such a thing.\"\n\n\"So would your father before you, and his father no less. They would sit silent among the knights when the wine went round and listen to every man's deeds; but if perchance there was anyone who spoke louder than the rest and seemed to be eager for honor, then afterwards your father would pluck him softly by the sleeve and whisper in his ear to learn if there was any small vow of which he could relieve him, or if he would deign to perform some noble deed of arms upon his person. And if the man were a braggart and would go no further, your father would be silent and none would know it. But if he bore himself well, your father would spread his fame far and wide, but never make mention of himself.\"\n\nNigel looked at the old woman with shining eyes. \"I love to hear you speak of him,\" said he. \"I pray you to tell me once more of the manner of his death.\"\n\n\"He died as he had lived, a very courtly gentleman. It was at the great sea-battle upon the Norman coast, and your father was in command of the afterguard in the King's own ship. Now the French had taken a great English ship the year before when they came over and held the narrow seas and burned the town of Southampton.\n\n\"This ship was the Christopher, and they placed it in the front of their battle; but the English closed upon it and stormed over its side, and slew all who were upon it.\n\n\"But your father and Sir Lorredan of Genoa, who commanded the Christopher, fought upon the high poop, so that all the fleet stopped to watch it, and the King himself cried aloud at the sight, for Sir Lorredan was a famous man-at-arms and bore himself very stoutly that day, and many a knight envied your father that he should have chanced upon so excellent a person. But your father bore him back and struck him such a blow with a mace that he turned the helmet half round on his head, so that he could no longer see through the eye holes, and Sir Lorredan threw down his sword and gave himself to ransom. But your father took him by the helmet and twisted it until he had it straight upon his head. Then, when he could see once again, he handed him his sword, and prayed him that he would rest himself and then continue, for it was great profit and joy to see any gentleman carry himself so well. So they sat together and rested by the rail of the poop; but even as they raised their hands again your father was struck by a stone from a mangonel and so died.\"\n\n\"And this Sir Lorredan,\" cried Nigel, \"he died also, as I understand?\"\n\n\"I fear that he was slain by the archers, for they loved your father, and they do not see these things with our eyes.\"\n\n\"It was a pity,\" said Nigel; \"for it is clear that he was a good knight and bore himself very bravely.\"\n\n\"Time was, when I was young, when commoners dared not have laid their grimy hands upon such a man. Men of gentle blood and coat-armor made war upon each other, and the others, spearmen or archers, could scramble amongst themselves. But now all are of a level, and only here and there one like yourself, fair son, who reminds me of the men who are gone.\"\n\nNigel leaned forward and took her hands in his. \"What I am you have made me,\" said he.\n\n\"It is true, Nigel. I have indeed watched over you as the gardener watches his most precious blossom, for in you alone are all the hopes of our ancient house, and soon\u2014very soon\u2014you will be alone.\"\n\n\"Nay, dear lady, say not that.\"\n\n\"I am very old, Nigel, and I feel the shadow closing in upon me. My heart yearns to go, for all whom I have known and loved have gone before me. And you\u2014it will be a blessed day for you, since I have held you back from that world into which your brave spirit longs to plunge.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, I have been happy here with you at Tilford.\"\n\n\"We are very poor, Nigel. I do not know where we may find the money to fit you for the wars. Yet we have good friends. There is Sir John Chandos, who has won such credit in the French wars and who rides ever by the King's bridle-arm. He was your father's friend and they were Squires together. If I sent you to court with a message to him he would do what he could.\"\n\nNigel's fair face flushed. \"Nay, Dame Ermyntrude, I must find my own gear, even as I have found my own horse, for I had rather ride into battle in this tunic than owe my suit to another.\"\n\n\"I feared that you would say so, Nigel; but indeed I know not how else we may get the money,\" said the old woman sadly. \"It was different in the days of my father. I can remember that a suit of mail was but a small matter in those days, for in every English town such things could be made. But year by year since men have come to take more care of their bodies, there have been added a plate of proof here and a cunning joint there, and all must be from Toledo or Milan, so that a knight must have much metal in his purse ere he puts any on his limbs.\"\n\nNigel looked up wistfully at the old armor which was slung on the beams above him. \"The ash spear is good,\" said he, \"and so is the oaken shield with facings of steel. Sir Roger FitzAlan handled them and said that he had never seen better. But the armor\u2014\"\n\nLady Ermyntrude shook her old head and laughed. \"You have your father's great soul, Nigel, but you have not his mighty breadth of shoulder and length of limb. There was not in all the King's great host a taller or a stronger man. His harness would be little use to you. No, fair son, I rede you that when the time comes you sell this crumbling house and the few acres which are still left, and so go forth to the wars in the hope that with your own right hand you will plant the fortunes of a new house of Loring.\"\n\nA shadow of anger passed over Nigel's fresh young face. \"I know not if we may hold off these monks and their lawyers much longer. This very day there came a man from Guildford with claims from the Abbey extending back before my father's death.\"\n\n\"Where are they, fair son?\"\n\n\"They are flapping on the furzebushes of Hankley, for I sent his papers and parchments down wind as fast as ever falcon flew.\"\n\n\"Nay! you were mad to do that, Nigel. And the man, where is he?\"\n\n\"Red Swire and old George the archer threw him into the Thursley bog.\"\n\n\"Alas! I fear me such things cannot be done in these days, though my father or my husband would have sent the rascal back to Guildford without his ears. But the Church and the Law are too strong now for us who are of gentler blood. Trouble will come of it, Nigel, for the Abbot of Waverley is not one who will hold back the shield of the Church from those who are her servants.\"\n\n\"The Abbot would not hurt us. It is that gray lean wolf of a sacrist who hungers for our land. Let him do his worst. I fear him not.\"\n\n\"He has such an engine at his back, Nigel, that even the bravest must fear him. The ban which blasts a man's soul is in the keeping of his church, and what have we to place against it? I pray you to speak him fair, Nigel.\"\n\n\"Nay, dear lady, it is both my duty and my pleasure to do what you bid me; but I would die ere I ask as a favor that which we can claim as a right. Never can I cast my eyes from yonder window that I do not see the swelling downlands and the rich meadows, glade and dingle, copse and wood, which have been ours since Norman-William gave them to that Loring who bore his shield at Senlac. Now, by trick and fraud, they have passed away from us, and many a franklin is a richer man than I; but never shall it be said that I saved the rest by bending my neck to their yoke. Let them do their worst, and let me endure it or fight it as best I may.\"\n\nThe old lady sighed and shook her head. \"You speak as a Loring should, and yet I fear that some great trouble will befall us. But let us talk no more of such matters, since we cannot mend them. Where is your citole, Nigel? Will you not play and sing to me?\"\n\nThe gentleman of those days could scarce read and write; but he spoke in two languages, played at least one musical instrument as a matter of course, and possessed a number of other accomplishments, from the imping of hawk's feathers, to the mystery of venery, with knowledge of every beast and bird, its time of grace and when it was seasonable. As far as physical feats went, to vault barebacked upon a horse, to hit a running hare with a crossbow-bolt, or to climb the angle of a castle courtyard, were feats which had come by nature to the young Squire; but it was very different with music, which had called for many a weary hour of irksome work. Now at last he could master the strings, but both his ear and his voice were not of the best, so that it was well perhaps that there was so small and so unprejudiced an audience to the Norman-French chanson, which he sang in a high reedy voice with great earnestness of feeling, but with many a slip and quaver, waving his yellow head in cadence to the music:\n\n\u2003A sword! A sword! Ah, give me a sword!\n\n\u2003For the world is all to win.\n\n\u2003Though the way be hard and the door be barred,\n\n\u2003The strong man enters in.\n\n\u2003If Chance and Fate still hold the gate,\n\n\u2003Give me the iron key,\n\n\u2003And turret high my plume shall fly,\n\n\u2003Or you may weep for me!\n\n\u2003A horse! A horse! Ah, give me a horse!\n\n\u2003To bear me out afar,\n\n\u2003Where blackest need and grimmest deed\n\n\u2003And sweetest perils are.\n\n\u2003Hold thou my ways from glutted days\n\n\u2003Where poisoned leisure lies,\n\n\u2003And point the path of tears and wrath\n\n\u2003Which mounts to high emprise!\n\n\u2003A heart! A heart! Ah, give me a heart\n\n\u2003To rise to circumstance!\n\n\u2003Serene and high and bold to try\n\n\u2003The hazard of the chance,\n\n\u2003With strength to wait, but fixed as fate\n\n\u2003To plan and dare and do,\n\n\u2003The peer of all, and only thrall,\n\n\u2003Sweet lady mine, to you!\n\nIt may have been that the sentiment went for more than the music, or it may have been the nicety of her own ears had been dulled by age, but old Dame Ermyntrude clapped her lean hands together and cried out in shrill applause.\n\n\"Weathercote has indeed had an apt pupil!\" she said. \"I pray you that you will sing again.\"\n\n\"Nay, dear dame, it is turn and turn betwixt you and me. I beg that you will recite a romance, you who know them all. For all the years that I have listened I have never yet come to the end of them, and I dare swear that there are more in your head than in all the great books which they showed me at Guildford Castle. I would fain hear 'Doon of Mayence,' or 'The Song of Roland,' or 'Sir Isumbras.'\"\n\nSo the old dame broke into a long poem, slow and dull in the inception, but quickening as the interest grew, until with darting hands and glowing face she poured forth the verses which told of the emptiness of sordid life, the beauty of heroic death, the high sacredness of love and the bondage of honor. Nigel, with set, still features and brooding eyes, drank in the fiery words, until at last they died upon the old woman's lips and she sank back weary in her chair.\n\nNigel stooped over her and kissed her brow. \"Your words will ever be as a star upon my path,\" said he. Then, carrying over the small table and the chessmen, he proposed that they should play their usual game before they sought their rooms for the night.\n\nBut a sudden and rude interruption broke in upon their gentle contest. A dog pricked its ears and barked. The others ran growling to the door. And then there came a sharp clash of arms, a dull heavy blow as from a club or sword-pommel, and a deep voice from without summoned them to open in the King's name. The old dame and Nigel had both sprung to their feet, their table overturned and their chessmen scattered among the rushes. Nigel's hand had sought his crossbow, but the Lady Ermyntrude grasped his arm.\n\n\"Nay, fair son! Have you not heard that it is in the King's name?\" said she. \"Down, Talbot! Down, Bayard! Open the door and let his messenger in!\"\n\nNigel undid the bolt, and the heavy wooden door swung outward upon its hinges. The light from the flaring cressets beat upon steel caps and fierce bearded faces, with the glimmer of drawn swords and the yellow gleam of bowstaves. A dozen armed archers forced their way into the room. At their head were the gaunt sacrist of Waverley and a stout elderly man clad in a red velvet doublet and breeches much stained and mottled with mud and clay. He bore a great sheet of parchment with a fringe of dangling seals, which he held aloft as he entered.\n\n\"I call on Nigel Loring!\" he cried. \"I, the officer of the King's law and the lay summoner of Waverley, call upon the man named Nigel Loring!\"\n\n\"I am he.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is he!\" cried the sacrist. \"Archers, do as you were ordered!\"\n\nIn an instant the band threw themselves upon him like the hounds on a stag. Desperately Nigel strove to gain his sword which lay upon the iron coffer. With the convulsive strength which comes from the spirit rather than from the body, he bore them all in that direction, but the sacrist snatched the weapon from its place, and the rest dragged the writhing Squire to the ground and swathed him in a cord.\n\n\"Hold him fast, good archers! Keep a stout grip on him!\" cried the summoner. \"I pray you, one of you, prick off these great dogs which snarl at my heels. Stand off, I say, in the name of the King! Watkin, come betwixt me and these creatures who have as little regard for the law as their master.\"\n\nOne of the archers kicked off the faithful dogs. But there were others of the household who were equally ready to show their teeth in defense of the old house of Loring. From the door which led to their quarters there emerged the pitiful muster of Nigel's threadbare retainers. There was a time when ten knights, forty men-at-arms and two hundred archers would march behind the scarlet roses. Now at this last rally when the young head of the house lay bound in his own hall, there mustered at his call the page Charles with a cudgel, John the cook with his longest spit, Red Swire the aged man-at-arms with a formidable ax swung over his snowy head, and Weathercote the minstrel with a boar-spear. Yet this motley array was fired with the spirit of the house, and under the lead of the fierce old soldier they would certainly have flung themselves upon the ready swords of the archers, had the Lady Ermyntrude not swept between them:\n\n\"Stand back, Swire!\" she cried. \"Back, Weathercote Charles, put a leash on Talbot, and hold Bayard back!\" Her black eyes blazed upon the invaders until they shrank from that baleful gaze. \"Who are you, you rascal robbers, who dare to misuse the King's name and to lay hands upon one whose smallest drop of blood has more worth than all your thrall and caitiff bodies?\"\n\n\"Nay, not so fast, dame, not so fast, I pray you!\" cried the stout summoner, whose face had resumed its natural color, now that he had a woman to deal with. \"There is a law of England, mark you, and there are those who serve and uphold it, who are the true men and the King's own lieges. Such a one am I. Then again, there are those who take such as me and transfer, carry or convey us into a bog or morass. Such a one is this graceless old man with the ax, whom I have seen already this day. There are also those who tear, destroy or scatter the papers of the law, of which this young man is the chief. Therefore, I would rede you, dame, not to rail against us, but to understand that we are the King's men on the King's own service.\"\n\n\"What then is your errand in this house at this hour of the night?\"\n\nThe summoner cleared his throat pompously, and turning his parchment to the light of the cressets he read out a long document in Norman-French, couched in such a style and such a language that the most involved and foolish of our forms were simplicity itself compared to those by which the men of the long gown made a mystery of that which of all things on earth should be the plainest and the most simple. Despair fell cold upon Nigel's heart and blanched the face of the old dame as they listened to the dread catalogue of claims and suits and issues, questions of peccary and turbary, of house-bote and fire-bote, which ended by a demand for all the lands, hereditaments, tenements, messuages and curtilages, which made up their worldly all.\n\nNigel, still bound, had been placed with his back against the iron coffer, whence he heard with dry lips and moist brow this doom of his house. Now he broke in on the recital with a vehemence which made the summoner jump:\n\n\"You shall rue what you have done this night!\" he cried. \"Poor as we are, we have our friends who will not see us wronged, and I will plead my cause before the King's own majesty at Windsor, that he, who saw the father die, may know what things are done in his royal name against the son. But these matters are to be settled in course of law in the King's courts, and how will you excuse yourself for this assault upon my house and person?\"\n\n\"Nay, that is another matter,\" said the sacrist. \"The question of debt may indeed be an affair of a civil court. But it is a crime against the law and an act of the Devil, which comes within the jurisdiction of the Abbey Court of Waverley when you dare to lay hands upon the summoner or his papers.\"\n\n\"Indeed, he speaks truth,\" cried the official. \"I know no blacker sin.\"\n\n\"Therefore,\" said the stern monk, \"it is the order of the holy father Abbot that you sleep this night in the Abbey cell, and that to-morrow you be brought before him at the court held in the chapter-house so that you receive the fit punishment for this and the many other violent and froward deeds which you have wrought upon the servants of Holy Church. Enough is now said, worthy master summoner. Archers, remove your prisoner!\"\n\nAs Nigel was lifted up by four stout archers, the Dame Ermyntrude would have rushed to his aid, but the sacrist thrust her back.\n\n\"Stand off, proud woman! Let the law take its course, and learn to humble your heart before the power of Holy Church. Has your life not taught its lesson, you, whose horn was exalted among the highest and will soon not have a roof above your gray hairs? Stand back, I say, lest I lay a curse upon you!\"\n\nThe old dame flamed suddenly into white wrath as she stood before the angry monk: \"Listen to me while I lay a curse upon you and yours!\" she cried as she raised her shriveled arms and blighted him with her flashing eyes\u2014\n\n\"As you have done to the house of Loring, so may God do to you, until your power is swept from the land of England, and of your great Abbey of Waverley there is nothing left but a pile of gray stones in a green meadow! I see it! I see it! With my old eyes I see it! From scullion to Abbot and from cellar to tower, may Waverley and all within it droop and wither from this night on!\"\n\nThe monk, hard as he was, quailed before the frantic figure and the bitter, burning words. Already the summoner and the archers with their prisoner were clear of the house. He turned and with a clang he shut the heavy door behind him." + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL WAS TRIED BY THE ABBOT OF WAVERLEY", + "text": "The law of the Middle Ages, shrouded as it was in old Norman-French dialect, and abounding in uncouth and incomprehensible terms, in deodands and heriots, in infang and outfang, was a fearsome weapon in the hands of those who knew how to use it. It was not for nothing that the first act of the rebel commoners was to hew off the head of the Lord Chancellor. In an age when few knew how to read or to write, these mystic phrases and intricate forms, with the parchments and seals which were their outward expression, struck cold terror into hearts which were steeled against mere physical danger.\n\nEven young Nigel Loring's blithe and elastic spirit was chilled as he lay that night in the penal cell of Waverley and pondered over the absolute ruin which threatened his house from a source against which all his courage was of no avail. As well take up sword and shield to defend himself against the black death, as against this blight of Holy Church. He was powerless in the grip of the Abbey. Already they had shorn off a field here and a grove there, and now in one sweep they would take in the rest, and where then was the home of the Lorings, and where should Lady Ermyntrude lay her aged head, or his old retainers, broken and spent, eke out the balance of their days? He shivered as he thought of it.\n\nIt was very well for him to threaten to carry the matter before the King, but it was years since royal Edward had heard the name of Loring, and Nigel knew that the memory of princes was a short one. Besides, the Church was the ruling power in the palace as well as in the cottage, and it was only for very good cause that a King could be expected to cross the purposes of so high a prelate as the Abbot of Waverley, as long as they came within the scope of the law. Where then was he to look for help? With the simple and practical piety of the age, he prayed for the aid of his own particular saints: of Saint Paul, whose adventures by land and sea had always endeared him; of Saint George, who had gained much honorable advancement from the Dragon; and of Saint Thomas, who was a gentleman of coat-armor, who would understand and help a person of gentle blood. Then, much comforted by his naive orisons he enjoyed the sleep of youth and health until the entrance of the lay brother with the bread and small beer, which served as breakfast, in the morning.\n\nThe Abbey court sat in the chapter-house at the canonical hour of tierce, which was nine in the forenoon. At all times the function was a solemn one, even when the culprit might be a villain who was taken poaching on the Abbey estate, or a chapman who had given false measure from his biased scales. But now, when a man of noble birth was to be tried, the whole legal and ecclesiastical ceremony was carried out with every detail, grotesque or impressive, which the full ritual prescribed. The distant roll of church music and the slow tolling of the Abbey bell; the white-robed brethren, two and two, walked thrice round the hall singing the \"Benedicite\" and the \"Veni, Creator\" before they settled in their places at the desks on either side. Then in turn each high officer of the Abbey from below upward, the almoner, the lector, the chaplain, the subprior and the prior, swept to their wonted places.\n\nFinally there came the grim sacrist, with demure triumph upon his downcast features, and at his heels Abbot John himself, slow and dignified, with pompous walk and solemn, composed face, his iron-beaded rosary swinging from his waist, his breviary in his hand, and his lips muttering as he hurried through his office for the day. He knelt at his high prie-dieu; the brethren, at a signal from the prior, prostrated themselves upon the floor, and the low deep voices rolled in prayer, echoed back from the arched and vaulted roof like the wash of waves from an ocean cavern. Finally the monks resumed their seats; there entered clerks in seemly black with pens and parchment; the red-velveted summoner appeared to tell his tale; Nigel was led in with archers pressing close around him; and then, with much calling of old French and much legal incantation and mystery, the court of the Abbey was open for business.\n\nIt was the sacrist who first advanced to the oaken desk reserved for the witnesses and expounded in hard, dry, mechanical fashion the many claims which the House, of Waverley had against the family of Loring. Some generations back in return for money advanced or for spiritual favor received the Loring of the day had admitted that his estate had certain feudal duties toward the Abbey. The sacrist held up the crackling yellow parchment with swinging leaden seals on which the claim was based. Amid the obligations was that of escuage, by which the price of a knight's fee should be paid every year. No such price had been paid, nor had any service been done. The accumulated years came now to a greater sum than the fee simple of the estate. There were other claims also. The sacrist called for his books, and with thin, eager forefinger he tracked them down: dues for this, and tailage for that, so many shillings this year, and so many marks that one. Some of it occurred before Nigel was born; some of it when he was but a child. The accounts had been checked and certified by the sergeant of the law.\n\nNigel listened to the dread recital, and felt like some young stag who stands at bay with brave pose and heart of fire, but who sees himself compassed round and knows clearly that there is no escape. With his bold young face, his steady blue eyes, and the proud poise of his head, he was a worthy scion of the old house, and the sun, shining through the high oriel window, and showing up the stained and threadbare condition of his once rich doublet, seemed to illuminate the fallen fortunes of his family.\n\nThe sacrist had finished his exposition, and the sergeant-at-law was about to conclude a case which Nigel could in no way controvert, when help came to him from an unexpected quarter. It may have been a certain malignity with which the sacrist urged his suit, it may have been a diplomatic dislike to driving matters to extremes, or it may have been some genuine impulse of kindliness, for Abbot John was choleric but easily appeased. Whatever the cause, the result was that a white plump hand, raised in the air with a gesture of authority, showed that the case was at an end.\n\n\"Our brother sacrist hath done his duty in urging this suit,\" said he, \"for the worldly wealth of this Abbey is placed in his pious keeping, and it is to him that we should look if we suffered in such ways, for we are but the trustees of those who come after us. But to my keeping has been consigned that which is more precious still, the inner spirit and high repute of those who follow the rule of Saint Bernard. Now it has ever been our endeavor, since first our saintly founder went down into the valley of Clairvaux and built himself a cell there, that we should set an example to all men in gentleness and humility. For this reason it is that we built our houses in lowly places, that we have no tower to our Abbey churches, and that no finery and no metal, save only iron or lead, come within our walls. A brother shall eat from a wooden platter, drink from an iron cup, and light himself from a leaden sconce. Surely it is not for such an order who await the exaltation which is promised to the humble, to judge their own case and so acquire the lands of their neighbor! If our cause be just, as indeed I believe that it is, then it were better that it be judged at the King's assizes at Guildford, and so I decree that the case be now dismissed from the Abbey court so that it can be heard elsewhere.\"\n\nNigel breathed a prayer to the three sturdy saints who had stood by him so manfully and well in the hour of his need. \"Abbot John,\" said he, \"I never thought that any man of my name would utter thanks to a Cistercian of Waverley; but by Saint Paul! you have spoken like a man this day, for it would indeed be to play with cogged dice if the Abbey's case is to be tried in the Abbey court.\"\n\nThe eighty white-clad brethren looked with half resentful, half amused eyes as they listened to this frank address to one who, in their small lives, seemed to be the direct vice-regent of Heaven. The archers had stood back from Nigel, as though he was at liberty to go, when the loud voice of the summoner broke in upon the silence\u2014\n\n\"If it please you, holy father Abbot,\" cried the voice, \"this decision of yours is indeed secundum legem and intra vires so far as the civil suit is concerned which lies between this person and the Abbey. That is your affair; but it is I, Joseph the summoner, who have been grievously and criminally mishandled, my writs, papers and indentures destroyed, my authority flouted, and my person dragged through a bog, quagmire or morass, so that my velvet gabardine and silver badge of office were lost and are, as I verily believe, in the morass, quagmire or bog aforementioned, which is the same bog, morass\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough!\" cried the Abbot sternly. \"Lay aside this foolish fashion of speech and say straitly what you desire.\"\n\n\"Holy father, I have been the officer of the King's law no less than the servant of Holy Church, and I have been let, hindered and assaulted in the performance of my lawful and proper duties, whilst my papers, drawn in the King's name, have been shended and rended and cast to the wind. Therefore, I demand justice upon this man in the Abbey court, the said assault having been committed within the banlieue of the Abbey's jurisdiction.\"\n\n\"What have you to say to this, brother sacrist?\" asked the Abbot in some perplexity.\n\n\"I would say, father, that it is within our power to deal gently and charitably with all that concerns ourselves, but that where a the King's officer is concerned we are wanting in our duty if we give him less than the protection that he demands. I would remind you also, holy father, that this is not the first of this man's violence, but that he has before now beaten our servants, defied our authority, and put pike in the Abbot's own fish-pond.\"\n\nThe prelate's heavy cheeks flushed with anger as this old grievance came fresh into his mind. His eyes hardened as he looked at the prisoner. \"Tell me, Squire Nigel, did you indeed put pike in the pond?\"\n\nThe young man drew himself proudly up. \"Ere I answer such a question, father Abbot, do you answer one from me, and tell me what the monks of Waverley have ever done for me that I should hold my hand when I could injure them?\"\n\nA low murmur ran round the room, partly wonder at his frankness, and partly anger at his boldness.\n\nThe Abbot settled down in his seat as one who has made up his mind. \"Let the case of the summoner be laid before me,\" said he. \"Justice shall be done, and the offender shall be punished, be he noble or simple. Let the plaint be brought before the court.\"\n\nThe tale of the summoner, though rambling and filled with endless legal reiteration, was only too clear in its essence. Red Swire, with his angry face framed in white bristles, was led in, and confessed to his ill treatment of the official. A second culprit, a little wiry nut-brown archer from Churt, had aided and abetted in the deed. Both of them were ready to declare that young Squire Nigel Loring knew nothing of the matter. But then there was the awkward incident of the tearing of the writs. Nigel, to whom a lie was an impossibility, had to admit that with his own hands he had shredded those august documents. As to an excuse or an explanation, he was too proud to advance any. A cloud gathered over the brow of the Abbot, and the sacrist gazed with an ironical smile at the prisoner, while a solemn hush fell over the chapter-house as the case ended and only, judgment remained.\n\n\"Squire Nigel,\" said the Abbot, \"it was for you, who are, as all men know, of ancient lineage in this land, to give a fair example by which others should set their conduct. Instead of this, your manor house has ever been a center for the stirring up of strife, and now not content with your harsh showing toward us, the Cistercian monks of Waverley, you have even marked your contempt for the King's law, and through your servants have mishandled the person of his messenger. For such offenses it is in my power to call the spiritual terrors of the Church upon your head, and yet I would not be harsh with you, seeing that you are young, and that even last week you saved the life of a servant of the Abbey when in peril. Therefore, it is by temporal and carnal means that I will use my power to tame your overbold spirit, and to chasten that headstrong and violent humor which has caused such scandal in your dealings with our Abbey. Bread and water for six weeks from now to the Feast of Saint Benedict, with a daily exhortation from our chaplain, the pious Father Ambrose, may still avail to bend the stiff neck and to soften the hard heart.\"\n\nAt this ignominious sentence by which the proud heir of the house of Loring would share the fate of the meanest village poacher, the hot blood of Nigel rushed to his face, and his eye glanced round him with a gleam which said more plainly than words that there could be no tame acceptance of such a doom. Twice he tried to speak, and twice his anger and his shame held the words in his throat.\n\n\"I am no subject of yours, proud Abbot!\" he cried at last. \"My house has ever been vavasor to the King. I deny the power of you and your court to lay sentence upon me. Punish these your own monks, who whimper at your frown, but do not dare to lay your hand upon him who fears you not, for he is a free man, and the peer of any save only the King himself.\"\n\nThe Abbot seemed for an instant taken aback by these bold words, and by the high and strenuous voice in which they were uttered. But the sterner sacrist came as ever to stiffen his will. He held up the old parchment in his hand.\n\n\"The Lorings were indeed vavasors to the King,\" said he; \"but here is the very seal of Eustace Loring which shows that he made himself vassal to the Abbey and held his land from it.\"\n\n\"Because he was gentle,\" cried Nigel, \"because he had no thought of trick or guile.\"\n\n\"Nay!\" said the summoner. \"If my voice may be heard, father Abbot, upon a point of the law, it is of no weight what the causes may have been why a deed is subscribed, signed or confirmed, but a court is concerned only with the terms, articles, covenants and contracts of the said deed.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" said the sacrist, \"sentence is passed by the Abbey court, and there is an end of its honor and good name if it be not upheld.\"\n\n\"Brother sacrist,\" said the Abbot angrily, \"methinks you show overmuch zeal in this case, and certes, we are well able to uphold the dignity and honor of the Abbey court without any rede of thine. As to you, worthy summoner, you will give your opinion when we crave for it, and not before, or you may yourself get some touch of the power of our tribunal. But your case hath been tried, Squire Loring, and judgment given. I have no more to say.\"\n\nHe motioned with his hand, and an archer laid his grip upon the shoulder of the prisoner. But that rough plebeian touch woke every passion of revolt in Nigel's spirit. Of all his high line of ancestors, was there one who had been subjected to such ignominy as this? Would they not have preferred death? And should he be the first to lower their spirit or their traditions? With a quick, lithe movement, he slipped under the arm of the archer, and plucked the short, straight sword from the soldier's side as he did so. The next instant he had wedged himself into the recess of one of the narrow windows, and there were his pale set face, his burning eyes, and his ready blade turned upon the assembly.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said he, \"I never thought to find honorable advancement under the roof of an abbey, but perchance there may, be some room for it ere you hale me to your prison.\"\n\nThe chapter-house was in an uproar. Never in the long and decorous history of the Abbey had such a scene been witnessed within its walls. The monks themselves seemed for an instant to be infected by this spirit of daring revolt. Their own lifelong fetters hung more loosely as they viewed this unheard-of defiance of authority. They broke from their seats on either side and huddled half-scared, half-fascinated, in a large half-circle round the defiant captive, chattering, pointing, grimacing, a scandal for all time. Scourges should fall and penance be done for many a long week before the shadow of that day should pass from Waverley. But meanwhile there was no effort to bring them back to their rule. Everything was chaos and disorder. The Abbot had left his seat of justice and hurried angrily forward, to be engulfed and hustled in the crowd of his own monks like a sheep-dog who finds himself entangled amid a flock.\n\nOnly the sacrist stood clear. He had taken shelter behind the half-dozen archers, who looked with some approval and a good deal of indecision at this bold fugitive from justice.\n\n\"On him!\" cried the sacrist. \"Shall he defy the authority of the court, or shall one man hold six of you at bay? Close in upon him and seize him. You, Baddlesmere, why do you hold back?\"\n\nThe man in question, a tall bushy-bearded fellow, clad like the others in green jerkin and breeches with high brown boots, advanced slowly, sword in hand, against Nigel. His heart was not in the business, for these clerical courts were not popular, and everyone had a tender heart for the fallen fortunes of the house of Loring and wished well to its young heir.\n\n\"Come, young sir, you have caused scathe enough,\" said he. \"Stand forth and give yourself up!\"\n\n\"Come and fetch me, good fellow,\" said Nigel, with a dangerous smile.\n\nThe archer ran in. There was a rasp of steel, a blade flickered like a swift dart of flame, and the man staggered back, with blood running down his forearm and dripping from his fingers. He wrung them and growled a Saxon oath.\n\n\"By the black rood of Bromeholm!\" he cried, \"I had as soon put my hand down a fox's earth to drag up a vixen from her cubs.\"\n\n\"Standoff!\" said Nigel curtly. \"I would not hurt you; but by Saint Paul! I will not be handled, or some one will be hurt in the handling.\"\n\nSo fierce was his eye and so menacing his blade as he crouched in the narrow bay of the window that the little knot of archers were at a loss what to do. The Abbot had forced his way through the crowd and stood, purple with outraged dignity, at their side.\n\n\"He is outside the law,\" said he. \"He hath shed blood in a court of justice, and for such a sin there is no forgiveness. I will not have my court so flouted and set at naught. He who draws the sword, by the sword also let him perish. Forester Hugh lay a shaft to your bow!\"\n\nThe man, who was one of the Abbey's lay servants, put his weight upon his long bow and slipped the loose end of the string into the upper notch. Then, drawing one of the terrible three-foot arrows, steel-tipped and gaudily winged, from his waist, he laid it to the string.\n\n\"Now draw your bow and hold it ready!\" cried the furious Abbot. \"Squire Nigel, it is not for Holy Church to shed blood, but there is naught but violence which will prevail against the violent, and on your head be the sin. Cast down the sword which you hold in your hand!\"\n\n\"Will you give me freedom to leave your Abbey?\"\n\n\"When you have abided your sentence and purged your sin.\"\n\n\"Then I had rather die where I stand than give up my sword.\"\n\nA dangerous flame lit in the Abbot's eyes. He came of a fighting Norman stock, like so many of those fierce prelates who, bearing a mace lest they should be guilty of effusion of blood, led their troops into battle, ever remembering that it was one of their own cloth and dignity who, crosier in hand, had turned the long-drawn bloody day of Hastings. The soft accent of the churchman was gone and it was the hard voice of a soldier which said\u2014\n\n\"One minute I give you, and no more. Then when I cry 'Loose!' drive me an arrow through his body.\"\n\nThe shaft was fitted, the bow was bent, and the stern eyes of the woodman were fixed on his mark. Slowly the minute passed, while Nigel breathed a prayer to his three soldier saints, not that they should save his body in this life, but that they should have a kindly care for his soul in the next. Some thought of a fierce wildcat sally crossed his mind, but once out of his corner he was lost indeed. Yet at the last he would have rushed among his enemies, and his body was bent for the spring, when with a deep sonorous hum, like a breaking harp-string, the cord of the bow was cloven in twain, and the arrow tinkled upon the tiled floor. At the same moment a young curly-headed bowman, whose broad shoulders and deep chest told of immense strength, as clearly as his frank, laughing face and honest hazel eyes did of good humor and courage, sprang forward sword in hand and took his place by Nigel's side.\n\n\"Nay, comrades!\" said he. \"Samkin Aylward cannot stand by and see a gallant man shot down like a bull at the end of a baiting. Five against one is long odds; but two against four is better, and by my finger-bones! Squire Nigel and I leave this room together, be it on our feet or no.\"\n\nThe formidable appearance of this ally and his high reputation among his fellows gave a further chill to the lukewarm ardor of the attack. Aylward's left arm was passed through his strung bow, and he was known from Woolmer Forest to the Weald as the quickest, surest archer that ever dropped a running deer at tenscore paces.\n\n\"Nay, Baddlesmere, hold your fingers from your string-case, or I may chance to give your drawing hand a two months' rest,\" said Aylward. \"Swords, if you will, comrades, but no man strings his bow till I have loosed mine.\"\n\nYet the angry hearts of both Abbot and sacrist rose higher with a fresh obstacle.\n\n\"This is an ill day for your father, Franklin Aylward, who holds the tenancy of Crooksbury,\" said the sacrist. \"He will rue it that ever he begot a son who will lose him his acres and his steading.\"\n\n\"My father is a bold yeoman, and would rue it evermore that ever his son should stand by while foul work was afoot,\" said Aylward stoutly. \"Fall on, comrades! We are waiting.\"\n\nEncouraged by promises of reward if they should fall in the service of the Abbey, and by threats of penalties if they should hold back, the four archers were about to close, when a singular interruption gave an entirely new turn to the proceedings.\n\nAt the door of the chapter-house, while these fiery doings had been afoot, there had assembled a mixed crowd of lay brothers, servants and varlets who had watched the development of the drama with the interest and delight with which men hail a sudden break in a dull routine. Suddenly there was an agitation at the back of this group, then a swirl in the center, and finally the front rank was violently thrust aside, and through the gap there emerged a strange and whimsical figure, who from the instant of his appearance dominated both chapter-house and Abbey, monks, prelates and archers, as if he were their owner and their master.\n\nHe was a man somewhat above middle age, with thin lemon-colored hair, a curling mustache, a tufted chin of the same hue, and a high craggy face, all running to a great hook of the nose, like the beak of an eagle. His skin was tanned a brown-red by much exposure to the wind and sun. In height he was tall, and his figure was thin and loose-jointed, but stringy and hard-bitten. One eye was entirely covered by its lid, which lay flat over an empty socket, but the other danced and sparkled with a most roguish light, darting here and there with a twinkle of humor and criticism and intelligence, the whole fire of his soul bursting through that one narrow cranny.\n\nHis dress was as noteworthy as his person. A rich purple doublet and cloak was marked on the lapels with a strange scarlet device shaped like a wedge. Costly lace hung round his shoulders, and amid its soft folds there smoldered the dull red of a heavy golden chain. A knight's belt at his waist and a knight's golden spurs twinkling from his doeskin riding-boots proclaimed his rank, and on the wrist of his left gauntlet there sat a demure little hooded falcon of a breed which in itself was a mark of the dignity of the owner. Of weapons he had none, but a mandolin was slung by a black silken band over his back, and the high brown end projected above his shoulder. Such was the man, quaint, critical, masterful, with a touch of what is formidable behind it, who now surveyed the opposing groups of armed men and angry monks with an eye which commanded their attention.\n\n\"Excusez!\" said he, in a lisping French. \"Excusez, mes amis! I had thought to arouse from prayer or meditation, but never have I seen such a holy exercise as this under an abbey's roof, with swords for breviaries and archers for acolytes. I fear that I have come amiss, and yet I ride on an errand from one who permits no delay.\"\n\nThe Abbot, and possibly the sacrist also, had begun to realize that events had gone a great deal farther than they had intended, and that without an extreme scandal it was no easy matter for them to save their dignity and the good name of Waverley. Therefore, in spite of the debonair, not to say disrespectful, bearing of the newcomer, they rejoiced at his appearance and intervention.\n\n\"I am the Abbot of Waverley, fair son,\" said the prelate. \"If your message deal with a public matter it may be fitly repeated in the chapter-house; if not I will give you audience in my own chamber; for it is clear to me that you are a gentle man of blood and coat-armor who would not lightly break in upon the business of our court\u2014a business which, as you have remarked, is little welcome to men of peace like myself and the brethren of the rule of Saint Bernard.\"\n\n\"Pardieu! Father Abbot,\" said the stranger. \"One had but to glance at you and your men to see that the business was indeed little to your taste, and it may be even less so when I say that rather than see this young person in the window, who hath a noble bearing, further molested by these archers, I will myself adventure my person on his behalf.\"\n\nThe Abbot's smile turned to a frown at these frank words. \"It would become you better, sir, to deliver the message of which you say that you are the bearer, than to uphold a prisoner against the rightful judgment of a court.\"\n\nThe stranger swept the court with his questioning eye. \"The message is not for you, good father Abbot. It is for one whom I know not. I have been to his house, and they have sent me hither. The name is Nigel Loring.\"\n\n\"It is for me, fair sir.\"\n\n\"I had thought as much. I knew your father, Eustace Loring, and though he would have made two of you, yet he has left his stamp plain enough upon your face.\"\n\n\"You know not the truth of this matter,\" said the Abbot. \"If you are a loyal man, you will stand aside, for this young man hath grievously offended against the law, and it is for the King's lieges to give us their support.\"\n\n\"And you have haled him up for judgment,\" cried the stranger with much amusement. \"It is as though a rookery sat in judgment upon a falcon. I warrant that you have found it easier to judge than to punish. Let me tell you, father Abbot, that this standeth not aright. When powers such as these were given to the like of you, they were given that you might check a brawling underling or correct a drunken woodman, and not that you might drag the best blood in England to your bar and set your archers on him if he questioned your findings.\"\n\nThe Abbot was little used to hear such words of reproof uttered in so stern a voice under his own abbey roof and before his listening monks. \"You may perchance find that an Abbey court has more powers than you wot of, Sir Knight,\" said he, \"if knight indeed you be who are so uncourteous and short in your speech. Ere we go further, I would ask your name and style?\"\n\nThe stranger laughed. \"It is easy to see that you are indeed men of peace,\" said he proudly. \"Had I shown this sign,\" and he touched the token upon his lapels, \"whether on shield or pennon, in the marches of France or Scotland, there is not a cavalier but would have known the red pile of Chandos.\"\n\nChandos, John Chandos, the flower of English chivalry, the pink of knight-errantry, the hero already of fifty desperate enterprises, a man known and honored from end to end of Europe! Nigel gazed at him as one who sees a vision. The archers stood back abashed, while the monks crowded closer to stare at the famous soldier of the French wars. The Abbot abated his tone, and a smile came to his angry face.\n\n\"We are indeed men of peace, Sir John, and little skilled in warlike blazonry,\" said he; \"yet stout as are our Abbey walls, they are not so thick that the fame of your exploits has not passed through them and reached our ears. If it be your pleasure to take an interest in this young and misguided Squire, it is not for us to thwart your kind intention or to withhold such grace as you request. I am glad indeed that he hath one who can set him so fair an example for a friend.\"\n\n\"I thank you for your courtesy, good father Abbot,\" said Chandos carelessly. \"This young Squire has, however, a better friend than myself, one who is kinder to those he loves and more terrible to those he hates. It is from him I bear a message.\"\n\n\"I pray you, fair and honored sir,\" said Nigel, \"that you will tell me what is the message that you bear.\"\n\n\"The message, mon ami, is that your friend comes into these parts and would have a night's lodging at the manor house of Tilford for the love and respect that he bears your family.\"\n\n\"Nay, he is most welcome,\" said Nigel, \"and yet I hope that he is one who can relish a soldier's fare and sleep under a humble roof, for indeed we can but give our best, poor as it is.\"\n\n\"He is indeed a soldier and a good one,\" Chandos answered, laughing, \"and I warrant he has slept in rougher quarters than Tilford Manor-house.\"\n\n\"I have few friends, fair sir,\" said Nigel, with a puzzled face. \"I pray you give me this gentleman's name.\"\n\n\"His name is Edward.\"\n\n\"Sir Edward Mortimer of Kent, perchance, or is it Sir Edward Brocas of whom the Lady Ermyntrude talks?\"\n\n\"Nay, he is known as Edward only, and if you ask a second name it is Plantagenet, for he who comes to seek the shelter of your roof is your liege lord and mine, the King's high majesty, Edward of England.\"" + }, + { + "title": "IN WHICH LADY ERMYNTRUDE OPENS THE IRON COFFER", + "text": "AS in a dream Nigel heard these stupendous and incredible words. As in a dream also he had a vision of a smiling and conciliatory Abbot, of an obsequious sacrist, and of a band of archers who cleared a path for him and for the King's messenger through the motley crowd who had choked the entrance of the Abbey court. A minute later he was walking by the side of Chandos through the peaceful cloister, and in front in the open archway of the great gate was the broad yellow road between its borders of green meadowland. The spring air was the sweeter and the more fragrant for that chill dread of dishonor and captivity which had so recently frozen his ardent heart. He had already passed the portal when a hand plucked at his sleeve and he turned to find himself confronted by the brown honest face and hazel eyes of the archer who had interfered in his behalf.\n\n\"Well,\" said Aylward, \"what have you to say to me, young sir?\"\n\n\"What can I say, my good fellow, save that I thank you with all my heart? By Saint Paul! if you had been my blood brother you could not have stood by me more stoutly.\"\n\n\"Nay! but this is not enough.\"\n\nNigel colored with vexation, and the more so as Chandos was listening with his critical smile to their conversation. \"If you had heard what was said in the court,\" said he, \"you would understand that I am not blessed at this moment with much of this world's gear. The black death and the monks have between them been heavy upon our estate. Willingly would I give you a handful of gold for your assistance, since that is what you seem to crave; but indeed I have it not, and so once more I say that you must be satisfied with my thanks.\"\n\n\"Your gold is nothing to me,\" said Aylward shortly, \"nor would you buy my loyalty if you filled my wallet with rose nobles, so long as you were not a man after my own heart. But I have seen you back the yellow horse, and I have seen you face the Abbot of Waverley, and you are such a master as I would very gladly serve if you have by chance a place for such a man. I have seen your following, and I doubt not that they were stout fellows in your grandfather's time; but which of them now would draw a bowstring to his ear? Through you I have left the service of the Abbey of Waverley, and where can I look now for a post? If I stay here I am all undone like a fretted bowstring.\"\n\n\"Nay, there can be no difficulty there,\" said Chandos. \"Pardieu! a roistering, swaggering dare-devil archer is worth his price on the French border. There are two hundred such who march behind my own person, and I would ask nothing better than to see you among them.\"\n\n\"I thank you, noble sir, for your offer,\" said Aylward, \"and I had rather follow your banner than many another one, for it is well known that it goes ever forward, and I have heard enough of the wars to know that there are small pickings for the man who lags behind. Yet, if the Squire will have me, I would choose to fight under the five roses of Loring, for though I was born in the hundred of Easebourne and the rape of Chichester, yet I have grown up and learned to use the longbow in these parts, and as the free son of a free franklin I had rather serve my own neighbor than a stranger.\"\n\n\"My good fellow,\" said Nigel, \"I have told you that I could in no wise reward you for such service.\"\n\n\"If you will but take me to the wars I will see to my own reward,\" said Aylward. \"Till then I ask for none, save a corner of your table and six feet of your floor, for it is certain that the only reward I would get from the Abbey for this day's work would be the scourge for my back and the stocks for my ankles. Samkin Aylward is your man, Squire Nigel, from this hour on, and by these ten finger-bones he trusts the Devil will fly away with him if ever he gives you cause to regret it!\" So saying he raised his hand to his steel cap in salute, slung his great yellow bow over his back, and followed on some paces in the rear of his new master.\n\n\"Pardieu! I have arrived a la bonne heure,\" said Chandos. \"I rode from Windsor and came to your manor house, to find it empty save for a fine old dame, who told me of your troubles. From her I walked across to the Abbey, and none too soon, for what with cloth-yard shafts for your body, and bell, book and candle for your soul, it was no very cheerful outlook. But here is the very dame herself, if I mistake not.\"\n\nIt was indeed the formidable figure of the Lady Ermyntrude, gaunt, bowed and leaning on her staff, which had emerged from the door of the manor-house and advanced to greet them. She croaked with laughter, and shook her stick at the great building as she heard of the discomfiture of the Abbey court. Then she led the way into the hall where the best which she could provide had been laid out for their illustrious guest. There was Chandos blood in her own veins, traceable back through the de Greys, de Multons, de Valences, de Montagues and other high and noble strains, so that the meal had been eaten and cleared before she had done tracing the network of intermarriages and connections, with quarterings, impalements, lozenges and augmentations by which the blazonry of the two families might be made to show a common origin. Back to the Conquest and before it there was not a noble family-tree every twig and bud of which was not familiar to the Dame Ermyntrude.\n\nAnd now when the trestles were cleared and the three were left alone in the hall, Chandos broke his message to the lady. \"King Edward hath ever borne in mind that noble knight your son Sir Eustace,\" said he. \"He will journey to Southampton next week, and I am his harbinger. He bade me say, noble and honored lady, that he would come from Guildford in any easy stage so that he might spend one night under your roof.\"\n\nThe old dame flushed with pleasure, and then turned white with vexation at the words. \"It is in truth great honor to the house of Loring,\" said she, \"yet our roof is now humble and, as you have seen, our fare is plain. The King knows not that we are so poor. I fear lest we seem churlish and niggard in his eyes.\"\n\nBut Chandos reasoned away her fears. The King's retinue would journey on to Farnham Castle. There were no ladies in his party. Though he was King, still he was a hardy soldier, and cared little for his ease. In any case, since he had declared his coming, they must make the best of it. Finally, with all delicacy, Chandos offered his own purse if it would help in the matter. But already the Lady Ermyntrude had recovered her composure.\n\n\"Nay, fair kinsman, that may not be,\" said she. \"I will make such preparation as I may for the King. He will bear in mind that if the house of Loring can give nothing else, they have always held their blood and their lives at his disposal.\"\n\nChandos was to ride on to Farnham Castle and beyond, but he expressed his desire to have a warm bath ere he left Tilford, for like most of his fellow-knights, he was much addicted to simmering in the hottest water that he could possibly endure. The bath therefore, a high hooped arrangement like a broader but shorter churn, was carried into the privacy of the guest-chamber, and thither it was that Nigel was summoned to hold him company while he stewed and sweltered in his tub.\n\nNigel perched himself upon the side of the high bed, swinging his legs over the edge and gazing with wonder and amusement at the quaint face, the ruffled yellow hair, and the sinewy shoulders of the famous warrior, dimly seen amid a pillar of steam. He was in a mood for talk; so Nigel with eager lips plied him with a thousand questions about the wars, hanging upon every word which came back to him, like those of the ancient oracles, out of the mist and the cloud. To Chandos himself, the old soldier for whom war had lost its freshness, it was a renewal of his own ardent youth to listen to Nigel's rapid questions and to mark the rapt attention with which he listened.\n\n\"Tell me of the Welsh, honored sir,\" asked the Squire. \"What manner of soldiers are the Welsh?\"\n\n\"They are very valiant men of war,\" said Chandos, splashing about in his tub. \"There is good skirmishing to be had in their valleys if you ride with a small following. They flare up like a furzebush in the flames, but if for a short space you may abide the heat of it, then there is a chance that it may be cooler.\"\n\n\"And the Scotch?\" asked Nigel. \"You have made war upon them also, as I understand.\"\n\n\"The Scotch knights have no masters in the world, and he who can hold his own with the best of them, be it a Douglas, a Murray or a Seaton, has nothing more to learn. Though you be a hard man, you will always meet as hard a one if you ride northward. If the Welsh be like the furze fire, then, pardieu! the Scotch are the peat, for they will smolder and you will never come to the end of them. I have had many happy hours on the marches of Scotland, for even if there be no war the Percies of Alnwick or the Governor of Carlisle can still raise a little bickering with the border clans.\"\n\n\"I bear in mind that my father was wont to say that they were very stout spearmen.\"\n\n\"No better in the world, for the spears are twelve foot long and they hold them in very thick array; but their archers are weak, save only the men of Ettrick and Selkirk who come from the forest. I pray you to open the lattice, Nigel, for the steam is overthick. Now in Wales it is the spearmen who are weak, and there are no archers in these islands like the men of Gwent with their bows of elm, which shoot with such power that I have known a cavalier to have his horse killed when the shaft had passed through his mail breeches, his thigh and his saddle. And yet, what is the most strongly shot arrow to these new balls of iron driven by the fire-powder which will crush a man's armor as an egg is crushed by a stone? Our fathers knew them not.\"\n\n\"Then the better for us,\" cried Nigel, \"since there is at least one honorable venture which is all our own.\"\n\nChandos chuckled and turned upon the flushed youth a twinkling and sympathetic eye. \"You have a fashion of speech which carries me back to the old men whom I met in my boyhood,\" said he. \"There were some of the real old knight-errants left in those days, and they spoke as you do. Young as you are, you belong to another age. Where got you that trick of thought and word?\"\n\n\"I have had only one to teach me, the Lady Ermyntrude.\"\n\n\"Pardieu! she has trained a proper young hawk ready to stoop at a lordly quarry,\" said Chandos. \"I would that I had the first unhooding of you. Will you not ride with me to the wars?\"\n\nThe tears brimmed over from Nigel's eyes, and he wrung the gaunt hand extended from the bath. \"By Saint Paul! what could I ask better in the world? I fear to leave her, for she has none other to care for her. But if it can in any way be arranged\u2014\"\n\n\"The King's hand may smooth it out. Say no more until he is here. But if you wish to ride with me\u2014\"\n\n\"What could man wish for more? Is there a Squire in England who would not serve under the banner of Chandos! Whither do you go, fair sir? And when do you go? Is it to Scotland? Is it to Ireland? Is it to France? But alas, alas!\"\n\nThe eager face had clouded. For the instant he had forgotten that a suit of armor was as much beyond his means as a service of gold plate. Down in a twinkling came all his high hopes to the ground. Oh, these sordid material things, which come between our dreams and their fulfilment! The Squire of such a knight must dress with the best. Yet all the fee simple of Tilford would scarce suffice for one suit of plate.\n\nChandos, with his quick wit and knowledge of the world, had guessed the cause of this sudden change. \"If you fight under my banner it is for me to find the weapons,\" said he. \"Nay, I will not be denied.\"\n\nBut Nigel shook his head sadly. \"It may not be. The Lady Ermyntrude would sell this old house and every acre round it, ere she would permit me to accept this gracious bounty which you offer. Yet I do not despair, for only last week I won for myself a noble warhorse for which I paid not a penny, so perchance a suit of armor may also come my way.\"\n\n\"And how won you the horse?\"\n\n\"It was given me by the monks of Waverley.\"\n\n\"This is wonderful. Pardieu! I should have expected, from what I had seen, that they would have given you little save their malediction.\"\n\n\"They had no use for the horse, and they gave it to me.\"\n\n\"Then we have only to find some one who has no use for a suit of armor and will give it to you. Yet I trust that you will think better of it and let me, since that good lady proves that I am your kinsman, fit you for the wars.\"\n\n\"I thank you, noble sir, and if I should turn to anyone it would indeed be to you; but there are other ways which I would try first. But I pray you, good Sir John, to tell me of some of your noble spear-runnings against the French, for the whole land rings with the tale of your deeds and I have heard that in one morning three champions have fallen before your lance. Was it not so?\"\n\n\"That it was indeed so these scars upon my body will prove; but these were the follies of my youth.\"\n\n\"How can you call them follies? Are they not the means by which honorable advancement may be gained and one's lady exalted?\"\n\n\"It is right that you should think so, Nigel. At your age a man should have a hot head and a high heart. I also had both and fought for my lady's glove or for my vow or for the love of fighting. But as one grows older and commands men one has other things to think of. One thinks less of one's own honor and more of the safety of the army. It is not your own spear, your own sword, your own arm, which will turn the tide of fight; but a cool head may save a stricken field. He who knows when his horsemen should charge and when they should fight on foot, he who can mix his archers with his men-at-arms in such a fashion that each can support the other, he who can hold up his reserve and pour it into the battle when it may turn the tide, he who has a quick eye for boggy land and broken ground\u2014that is the man who is of more worth to an army than Roland, Oliver and all the paladins.\"\n\n\"Yet if his knights fail him, honored sir, all his head-work will not prevail.\"\n\n\"True enough, Nigel; so may every Squire ride to the wars with his soul on fire, as yours is now. But I must linger no longer, for the King's service must be done. I will dress, and when I have bid farewell to the noble Dame Ermyntrude I will on to Farnham; but you will see me here again on the day that the King comes.\"\n\nSo Chandos went his way that evening, walking his horse through the peaceful lanes and twanging his citole as he went, for he loved music and was famous for his merry songs. The cottagers came from their huts and laughed and clapped as the rich full voice swelled and sank to the cheery tinkling of the strings. There were few who saw him pass that would have guessed that the quaint one-eyed man with the yellow hair was the toughest fighter and craftiest man of war in Europe. Once only, as he entered Farnham, an old broken man-at-arms ran out in his rags and clutched at his horse as a dog gambols round his master. Chandos threw him a kind word and a gold coin as he passed on to the castle.\n\nIn the meanwhile young Nigel and the Lady Ermyntrude, left alone with their difficulties, looked blankly in each other's faces.\n\n\"The cellar is well nigh empty,\" said Nigel. \"There are two firkins of small beer and a tun of canary. How can we set such drink before the King and his court?\"\n\n\"We must have some wine of Bordeaux. With that and the mottled cow's calf and the fowls and a goose, we can set forth a sufficient repast if he stays only for the one night. How many will be with him?\"\n\n\"A dozen, at the least.\"\n\nThe old dame wrung her hands in despair. \"Nay, take it not to heart, dear lady!\" said Nigel. \"We have but to say the word and the King would stop at Waverley, where he and his court would find all that they could wish.\"\n\n\"Never!\" cried the Lady Ermyntrude. \"It would be shame and disgrace to us forever if the King were to pass our door when he has graciously said that he was fain to enter in. Nay, I will do it. Never did I think that I would be forced to this, but I know that he would wish it, and I will do it.\"\n\nShe went to the old iron coffer, and taking a small key from her girdle she unlocked it. The rusty hinges, screaming shrilly as she threw back the lid, proclaimed how seldom it was that she had penetrated into the sacred recesses of her treasure-chest. At the top were some relics of old finery: a silken cloak spangled with golden stars, a coif of silver filigree, a roll of Venetian lace. Beneath were little packets tied in silk which the old lady handled with tender care: a man's hunting-glove, a child's shoe, a love-knot done in faded green ribbon, some letters in rude rough script, and a vernicle of Saint Thomas. Then from the very bottom of the box she drew three objects, swathed in silken cloth, which she uncovered and laid upon the table. The one was a bracelet of rough gold studded with uncut rubies, the second was a gold salver, and the third was a high goblet of the same metal.\n\n\"You have heard me speak of these, Nigel, but never before have you seen them, for indeed I have not opened the hutch for fear that we might be tempted in our great need to turn them into money. I have kept them out of my sight and even out of my thoughts. But now it is the honor of the house which calls, and even these must go. This goblet was that which my husband, Sir Nele Loring, won after the intaking of Belgrade when he and his comrades held the lists from matins to vespers against the flower of the French chivalry. The salver was given him by the Earl of Pembroke in memory of his valor upon the field of Falkirk.\"\n\n\"And the bracelet, dear lady?\"\n\n\"You will not laugh, Nigel?\"\n\n\"Nay, why should I laugh?\"\n\n\"The bracelet was the prize for the Queen of Beauty which was given to me before all the high-born ladies of England by Sir Nele Loring a month before our marriage\u2014the Queen of Beauty, Nigel\u2014I, old and twisted, as you see me. Five strong men went down before his lance ere he won that trinket for me. And now in my last years\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, dear and honored lady, we will not part with it.\"\n\n\"Yes, Nigel, he would have it so. I can hear his whisper in my ear. Honor to him was everything\u2014the rest nothing. Take it from me, Nigel, ere my heart weakens. To-morrow you will ride with it to Guildford; you will see Thorold the goldsmith; and you will raise enough money to pay for all that we shall need for the King's coming.\" She turned her face away to hide the quivering of her wrinkled features, and the crash of the iron lid covered the sob which burst from her overwrought soul." + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL WENT MARKETING TO GUILDFORD", + "text": "It was on a bright June morning that young Nigel, with youth and springtime to make his heart light, rode upon his errand from Tilford to Guildford town. Beneath him was his great yellow warhorse, caracoling and curveting as he went, as blithe and free of spirit as his master. In all England one would scarce have found upon that morning so high-mettled and so debonair a pair. The sandy road wound through groves of fir, where the breeze came soft and fragrant with resinous gums, or over heathery downs, which rolled away to north and to south, vast and untenanted, for on the uplands the soil was poor and water scarce. Over Crooksbury Common he passed, and then across the great Heath of Puttenham, following a sandy path which wound amid the bracken and the heather, for he meant to strike the Pilgrims' Way where it turned eastward from Farnham and from Seale. As he rode he continually felt his saddle-bag with his hand, for in it, securely strapped, he had placed the precious treasures of the Lady Ermyntrude. As he saw the grand tawny neck tossing before him, and felt the easy heave of the great horse and heard the muffled drumming of his hoofs, he could have sung and shouted with the joy of living.\n\nBehind him, upon the little brown pony which had been Nigel's former mount, rode Samkin Aylward the bowman, who had taken upon himself the duties of personal attendant and body-guard. His great shoulders and breadth of frame seemed dangerously top-heavy upon the tiny steed, but he ambled along, whistling a merry lilt and as lighthearted as his master. There was no countryman who had not a nod and no woman who had not a smile for the jovial bowman, who rode for the most part with his face over his shoulder, staring at the last petticoat which had passed him. Once only he met with a harsher greeting. It was from a tall, white-headed, red-faced man whom they met upon the moor.\n\n\"Good-morrow, dear father!\" cried Aylward. \"How is it with you at Crooksbury? And how are the new black cow and the ewes from Alton and Mary the dairymaid and all your gear?\"\n\n\"It ill becomes you to ask, you ne'er-do-weel,\" said the old man. \"You have angered the monks of Waverley, whose tenant I am, and they would drive me out of my farm. Yet there are three more years to run, and do what they may I will bide till then. But little did I think that I should lose my homestead through you, Samkin, and big as you are I would knock the dust out of that green jerkin with a good hazel switch if I had you at Crooksbury.\"\n\n\"Then you shall do it to-morrow morning, good father, for I will come and see you then. But indeed I did not do more at Waverley than you would have done yourself. Look me in the eye, old hothead, and tell me if you would have stood by while the last Loring\u2014look at him as he rides with his head in the air and his soul in the clouds\u2014was shot down before your very eyes at the bidding of that fat monk! If you would, then I disown you as my father.\"\n\n\"Nay, Samkin, if it was like that, then perhaps what you did was not so far amiss. But it is hard to lose the old farm when my heart is buried deep in the good brown soil.\"\n\n\"Tut, man! there are three years to run, and what may not happen in three years? Before that time I shall have gone to the wars, and when I have opened a French strong box or two you can buy the good brown soil and snap your fingers at Abbot John and his bailiffs. Am I not as proper a man as Tom Withstaff of Churt? And yet he came back after six months with his pockets full of rose nobles and a French wench on either arm.\"\n\n\"God preserve us from the wenches, Samkin! But indeed I think that if there is money to be gathered you are as likely to get your fist full as any man who goes to the war. But hasten, lad, hasten! Already your young master is over the brow.\"\n\nThus admonished, the archer waved his gauntleted hand to his father, and digging his heels into the sides of his little pony soon drew up with the Squire. Nigel glanced over his shoulder and slackened speed until the pony's head was up to his saddle.\n\n\"Have I not heard, archer,\" said he, \"that an outlaw has been loose in these parts?\"\n\n\"It is true, fair sir. He was villain to Sir Peter Mandeville, but he broke his bonds and fled into the forests. Men call him the 'Wild Man of Puttenham.'\"\n\n\"How comes it that he has not been hunted down? If the man be a draw-latch and a robber it would be an honorable deed to clear the country of such an evil.\"\n\n\"Twice the sergeants-at-arms from Guildford have come out against him, but the fox has many earths, and it would puzzle you to get him out of them.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! were my errand not a pressing one I would be tempted to turn aside and seek him. Where lives he, then?\"\n\n\"There is a great morass beyond Puttenham, and across it there are caves in which he and his people lurk.\"\n\n\"His people? He hath a band?\"\n\n\"There are several with him.\"\n\n\"It sounds a most honorable enterprise,\" said Nigel. \"When the King hath come and gone we will spare a day for the outlaws of Puttenham. I fear there is little chance for us to see them on this journey.\"\n\n\"They prey upon the pilgrims who pass along the Winchester Road, and they are well loved by the folk in these parts, for they rob none of them and have an open hand for all who will help them.\"\n\n\"It is right easy to have an open hand with the money that you have stolen,\" said Nigel; \"but I fear that they will not try to rob two men with swords at their girdles like you and me, so we shall have no profit from them.\"\n\nThey had passed over the wild moors and had come down now into the main road by which the pilgrims from the west of England made their way to the national shrine at Canterbury. It passed from Winchester, and up the beautiful valley of the Itchen until it reached Farnham, where it forked into two branches, one of which ran along the Hog's Back, while the second wound to the south and came out at Saint Catherine's Hill where stands the Pilgrim shrine, a gray old ruin now, but once so august, so crowded and so affluent. It was this second branch upon which Nigel and Aylward found themselves as they rode to Guildford.\n\nNo one, as it chanced, was going the same way as themselves, but they met one large drove of pilgrims returning from their journey with pictures of Saint Thomas and snails' shells or little leaden ampullae in their hats and bundles of purchases over their shoulders. They were a grimy, ragged, travel-stained crew, the men walking, the women borne on asses. Man and beast, they limped along as if it would be a glad day when they saw their homes once more. These and a few beggars or minstrels, who crouched among the heather on either side of the track in the hope of receiving an occasional farthing from the passer-by, were the only folk they met until they had reached the village of Puttenham. Already there, was a hot sun and just breeze enough to send the dust flying down the road, so they were glad to clear their throats with a glass of beer at the alestake in the village, where the fair alewife gave Nigel a cold farewell because he had no attentions for her, and Aylward a box on the ear because he had too many.\n\nOn the farther side of Puttenham the road runs through thick woods of oak and beech, with a tangled undergrowth of fern and bramble. Here they met a patrol of sergeants-at-arms, tall fellows, well-mounted, clad in studded-leather caps and tunics, with lances and swords. They walked their horses slowly on the shady side of the road, and stopped as the travelers came up, to ask if they had been molested on the way.\n\n\"Have a care,\" they added, \"for the 'Wild Man' and his wife are out. Only yesterday they slew a merchant from the west and took a hundred crowns.\"\n\n\"His wife, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes, she is ever at his side, and has saved him many a time, for if he has the strength it is she who has the wit. I hope to see their heads together upon the green grass one of these mornings.\"\n\nThe patrol passed downward toward Farnham, and so, as it proved, away from the robbers, who had doubtless watched them closely from the dense brushwood which skirted the road. Coming round a curve, Nigel and Aylward were aware of a tall and graceful woman who sat, wringing her hands and weeping bitterly, upon the bank by the side of the track. At such a sight of beauty in distress Nigel pricked Pommers with the spur and in three bounds was at the side of the unhappy lady.\n\n\"What ails you, fair dame?\" he asked. \"Is there any small matter in which I may stand your friend, or is it possible that anyone hath so hard a heart as to do you an injury.\"\n\nShe rose and turned upon him a face full of hope and entreaty. \"Oh, save my poor, poor father!\" she cried. \"Have you perchance seen the way-wardens? They passed us, and I fear they are beyond reach.\"\n\n\"Yes, they have ridden onward, but we may serve as well.\"\n\n\"Then hasten, hasten, I pray you! Even now they may be doing him to death. They have dragged him into yonder grove and I have heard his voice growing ever weaker in the distance. Hasten, I implore you!\"\n\nNigel sprang from his horse and tossed the rein to Aylward.\n\n\"Nay, let us go together. How many robbers were there, lady?\"\n\n\"Two stout fellows.\"\n\n\"Then I come also.\"\n\n\"Nay, it is not possible,\" said Nigel. \"The wood is too thick for horses, and we cannot leave them in the road.\"\n\n\"I will guard them,\" cried the lady.\n\n\"Pommers is not so easily held. Do you bide here, Aylward, until you hear from me. Stir not, I command you!\" So saying, Nigel, with the light, of adventure gleaming in his joyous eyes, drew his sword and plunged swiftly into the forest.\n\nFar and fast he ran, from glade to glade, breaking through the bushes, springing over the brambles, light as a young deer, peering this way and that, straining his ears for a sound, and catching only the cry of the wood-pigeons. Still on he went, with the constant thought of the weeping woman behind and of the captured man in front. It was not until he was footsore and out of breath that he stopped with his hand to his side, and considered that his own business had still to be done, and that it was time once more that he should seek the road to Guildford.\n\nMeantime Aylward had found his own rough means of consoling the woman in the road, who stood sobbing with her face against the side of Pommers' saddle.\n\n\"Nay, weep not, my pretty one,\" said he. \"It brings the tears to my own eyes to see them stream from thine.\"\n\n\"Alas! good archer, he was the best of fathers, so gentle and so kind! Had you but known him, you must have loved him.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut! he will suffer no scathe. Squire Nigel will bring him back to you anon.\"\n\n\"No, no, I shall never see him more. Hold me, archer, or I fall!\"\n\nAylward pressed his ready arm round the supple waist. The fainting woman leaned with her hand upon his shoulder. Her pale face looked past him, and it was some new light in her eyes, a flash of expectancy, of triumph, of wicked joy, which gave him sudden warning of his danger.\n\nHe shook her off and sprang to one side, but only just in time to avoid a crashing blow from a great club in the hands of a man even taller and stronger than himself. He had one quick vision of great white teeth clenched in grim ferocity, a wild flying beard and blazing wild-beast eyes. The next instant he had closed, ducking his head beneath another swing of that murderous cudgel.\n\nWith his arms round the robber's burly body and his face buried in his bushy beard, Aylward gasped and strained and heaved. Back and forward in the dusty road the two men stamped and staggered, a grim wrestling-match, with life for the prize. Twice the great strength of the outlaw had Aylward nearly down, and twice with his greater youth and skill the archer restored his grip and his balance. Then at last his turn came. He slipped his leg behind the other's knee, and, giving a mighty wrench, tore him across it. With a hoarse shout the outlaw toppled backward and had hardly reached the ground before Aylward had his knee upon his chest and his short sword deep in his beard and pointed to his throat.\n\n\"By these ten finger-bones!\" he gasped, \"one more struggle and it is your last!\"\n\nThe man lay still enough, for he was half-stunned by the crashing fall. Aylward looked round him, but the woman had disappeared. At the first blow struck she had vanished into the forest. He began to have fears for his master, thinking that he perhaps had been lured into some deathtrap; but his forebodings were soon at rest, for Nigel himself came hastening down the road, which he had struck some distance from the spot where he left it.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" he cried, \"who is this man on whom you are perched, and where is the lady who has honored us so far as to crave our help? Alas, that I have been unable to find her father!\"\n\n\"As well for you, fair sir,\" said Aylward, \"for I am of opinion that her father was the Devil. This woman is, as I believe, the wife of the 'Wild Man of Puttenham,' and this is the 'Wild Man' himself who set upon me and tried to brain me with his club.\"\n\nThe outlaw, who had opened his eyes, looked with a scowl from his captor to the newcomer. \"You are in luck, archer,\" said he, \"for I have come to grips with many a man, but I cannot call to mind any who have had the better of me.\"\n\n\"You have indeed the grip of a bear,\" said Aylward; \"but it was a coward deed that your wife should hold me while you dashed out my brains with a stick. It is also a most villainous thing to lay a snare for wayfarers by asking for their pity and assistance, so that it was our own soft hearts which brought us into such danger. The next who hath real need of our help may suffer for your sins.\"\n\n\"When the hand of the whole world is against you,\" said the outlaw in a surly voice, \"you must fight as best you can.\"\n\n\"You well deserve to be hanged, if only because you have brought this woman, who is fair and gentle-spoken, to such a life,\" said Nigel. \"Let us tie him by the wrist to my stirrup leather, Aylward, and we will lead him into Guildford.\"\n\nThe archer drew a spare bowstring from his case and had bound the prisoner as directed, when Nigel gave a sudden start and cry of alarm.\n\n\"Holy Mary!\" he cried. \"Where is the saddle-bag?\"\n\nIt had been cut away by a sharp knife. Only the two ends of strap remained. Aylward and Nigel stared at each other in blank dismay. Then the young Squire shook his clenched hands and pulled at his yellow curls in his despair.\n\n\"The Lady Ermyntrude's bracelet! My grandfather's cup!\" he cried. \"I would have died ere I lost them! What can I say to her? I dare not return until I have found them. Oh, Aylward, Aylward! how came you to let them be taken?\"\n\nThe honest archer had pushed back his steel cap and was scratching his tangled head. \"Nay, I know nothing of it. You never said that there was aught of price in the bag, else had I kept a better eye upon it. Certes! it was not this fellow who took it, since I have never had my hands from him. It can only be the woman who fled with it while we fought.\"\n\nNigel stamped about the road in his perplexity. \"I would follow her to the world's end if I knew where I could find her, but to search these woods for her is to look for a mouse in a wheat-field. Good Saint George, thou who didst overcome the Dragon, I pray you by that most honorable and knightly achievement that you will be with me now! And you also, great Saint Julian, patron of all wayfarers in distress! Two candles shall burn before your shrine at Godalming, if you will but bring me back my saddle-bag. What would I not give to have it back?\"\n\n\"Will you give me my life?\" asked the outlaw. \"Promise that I go free, and you shall have it back, if it be indeed true that my wife has taken it.\"\n\n\"Nay, I cannot do that,\" said Nigel. \"My honor would surely be concerned, since my loss is a private one; but it would be to the public scathe that you should go free. By Saint Paul! it would be an ungentle deed if in order to save my own I let you loose upon the gear of a hundred others.\"\n\n\"I will not ask you to let me loose,\" said the \"Wild Man.\" \"If you will promise that my life be spared I will restore your bag.\"\n\n\"I cannot give such a promise, for it will lie with the Sheriff and reeves of Guildford.\"\n\n\"Shall I have your word in my favor?\"\n\n\"That I could promise you, if you will give back the bag, though I know not how far my word may avail. But your words are vain, for you cannot think that we will be so fond as to let you go in the hope that you return?\"\n\n\"I would not ask it,\" said the \"Wild Man,\" \"for I can get your bag and yet never stir from the spot where I stand. Have I your promise upon your honor and all that you hold dear that you will ask for grace?\"\n\n\"You have.\"\n\n\"And that my wife shall be unharmed?\"\n\n\"I promise it.\"\n\nThe outlaw laid back his head and uttered a long shrill cry like the howl of a wolf. There was a silent pause, and then, clear and shrill, there rose the same cry no great distance away in the forest. Again the \"Wild Man\" called, and again his mate replied. A third time he summoned, as the deer bells to the doe in the greenwood. Then with a rustle of brushwood and snapping of twigs the woman was before them once more, tall, pale, graceful, wonderful. She glanced neither at Aylward nor Nigel, but ran to the side of her husband.\n\n\"Dear and sweet lord,\" she cried, \"I trust they have done you no hurt. I waited by the old ash, and my heart sank when you came not.\"\n\n\"I have been taken at last, wife.\"\n\n\"Oh, cursed, cursed day! Let him go, kind, gentle sirs; do not take him from me!\"\n\n\"They will speak for me at Guildford,\" said the \"Wild Man.\" \"They have sworn it. But hand them first the bag that you have taken.\"\n\nShe drew it out from under her loose cloak. \"Here it is, gentle sir. Indeed it went to my heart to take it, for you had mercy upon me in my trouble. But now I am, as you see, in real and very sore distress. Will you not have mercy now? Take ruth on us, fair sir! On my knees I beg it of you, most gentle and kindly Squire!\"\n\nNigel had clutched his bag, and right glad he was to feel that the treasures were all safe within it. \"My proffer is given,\" said he. \"I will say what I can; but the issue rests with others. I pray you to stand up, for indeed I cannot promise more.\"\n\n\"Then I must be content,\" said she, rising, with a composed face. \"I have prayed you to take ruth, and indeed I can do no more; but ere I go back to the forest I would rede you to be on your guard lest you lose your bag once more. Wot you how I took it, archer? Nay, it was simple enough, and may happen again, so I make it clear to you. I had this knife in my sleeve, and though it is small it is very sharp. I slipped it down like this. Then when I seemed to weep with my face against the saddle, I cut down like this\u2014\"\n\nIn an instant she had shorn through the stirrup leather which bound her man, and he, diving under the belly of the horse, had slipped like a snake into the brushwood. In passing he had struck Pommers from beneath, and the great horse, enraged and insulted, was rearing high, with two men hanging to his bridle. When at last he had calmed there was no sign left of the \"Wild Man\" or of his wife. In vain did Aylward, an arrow on his string, run here and there among the great trees and peer down the shadowy glades. When he returned he and his master cast a shamefaced glance at each other.\n\n\"I trust that we are better soldiers than jailers,\" said Aylward, as he climbed on his pony.\n\nBut Nigel's frown relaxed into a smile. \"At least we have gained back what we lost,\" said he. \"Here I place it on the pommel of my saddle, and I shall not take my eyes from it until we are safe in Guildford town.\"\n\nSo they jogged on together until passing Saint Catherine's shrine they crossed the winding Wey once more, and so found themselves in the steep high street with its heavy-caved gabled houses, its monkish hospitium upon the left, where good ale may still be quaffed, and its great square-keeped castle upon the right, no gray and grim skeleton of ruin, but very quick and alert, with blazoned banner flying free, and steel caps twinkling from the battlement. A row of booths extended from the castle gate to the high street, and two doors from the Church of the Trinity was that of Thorold the goldsmith, a rich burgess and Mayor of the town.\n\nHe looked long and lovingly at the rich rubies and at the fine work upon the goblet. Then he stroked his flowing gray beard as he pondered whether he should offer fifty nobles or sixty, for he knew well that he could sell them again for two hundred. If he offered too much his profit would be reduced. If he offered too little the youth might go as far as London with them, for they were rare and of great worth. The young man was ill-clad, and his eyes were anxious. Perchance he was hard pressed and was ignorant of the value of what he bore. He would sound him.\n\n\"These things are old and out of fashion, fair sir,\" said he. \"Of the stones I can scarce say if they are of good quality or not, but they are dull and rough. Yet, if your price be low I may add them to my stock, though indeed this booth was made to sell and not to buy. What do you ask?\"\n\nNigel bent his brows in perplexity. Here was a game in which neither his bold heart nor his active limbs could help him. It was the new force mastering the old: the man of commerce conquering the man of war\u2014wearing him down and weakening him through the centuries until he had him as his bond-servant and his thrall.\n\n\"I know not what to ask, good sir,\" said Nigel. \"It is not for me, nor for any man who bears my name, to chaffer and to haggle. You know the worth of these things, for it is your trade to do so. The Lady Ermyntrude lacks money, and we must have it against the King's coming, so give me that which is right and just, and we will say no more.\"\n\nThe goldsmith smiled. The business was growing more simple and more profitable. He had intended to offer fifty, but surely it would be sinful waste to give more than twenty-five.\n\n\"I shall scarce know what to do with them when I have them,\" said he. \"Yet I should not grudge twenty nobles if it is a matter in which the King is concerned.\"\n\nNigel's heart turned to lead. This sum would not buy one-half what was needful. It was clear that the Lady Ermyntrude had overvalued her treasures. Yet he could not return empty-handed, so if twenty nobles was the real worth, as this good old man assured him, then he must be thankful and take it.\n\n\"I am concerned by what you say,\" said he. \"You know more of these things than I can do. However, I will take\u2014\"\n\n\"A hundred and fifty,\" whispered Aylward's voice in his ear.\n\n\"A hundred and fifty,\" said Nigel, only too relieved to have found the humblest guide upon these unwonted paths.\n\nThe goldsmith started. This youth was not the simple soldier that he had seemed. That frank face, those blue eyes, were traps for the unwary. Never had he been more taken aback in a bargain.\n\n\"This is fond talk and can lead to nothing, fair sir,\" said he, turning away and fiddling with the keys of his strong boxes. \"Yet I have no wish to be hard on you. Take my outside price, which is fifty nobles.\"\n\n\"And a hundred,\" whispered Aylward.\n\n\"And a hundred,\" said Nigel, blushing at his own greed.\n\n\"Well, well, take a hundred!\" cried the merchant. \"Fleece me, skin me, leave me a loser, and take for your wares the full hundred!\"\n\n\"I should be shamed forever if I were to treat you so badly,\" said Nigel. \"You have spoken me fair, and I would not grind you down. Therefore, I will gladly take one hundred\u2014\"\n\n\"And fifty,\" whispered Aylward.\n\n\"And fifty,\" said Nigel.\n\n\"By Saint John of Beverley!\" cried the merchant. \"I came hither from the North Country, and they are said to be shrewd at a deal in those parts; but I had rather bargain with a synagogue full of Jews than with you, for all your gentle ways. Will you indeed take no less than a hundred and fifty? Alas! you pluck from me my profits of a month. It is a fell morning's work for me. I would I had never seen you!\" With groans and lamentations he paid the gold pieces across the counter, and Nigel, hardly able to credit his own good fortune, gathered them into the leather saddle-bag.\n\nA moment later with flushed face he was in the street and pouring out his thanks to Aylward.\n\n\"Alas, my fair lord! the man has robbed us now,\" said the archer. \"We could have had another twenty had we stood fast.\"\n\n\"How know you that, good Aylward?\"\n\n\"By his eyes, Squire Loring. I wot I have little store of reading where the parchment of a book or the pinching of a blazon is concerned, but I can read men's eyes, and I never doubted that he would give what he has given.\"\n\nThe two travelers had dinner at the monk's hospitium, Nigel at the high table and Aylward among the commonalty. Then again they roamed the high street on business intent. Nigel bought taffeta for hangings, wine, preserves, fruit, damask table linen and many other articles of need. At last he halted before the armorer's shop at the castle-yard, staring at the fine suits of plate, the engraved pectorals, the plumed helmets, the cunningly jointed gorgets, as a child at a sweet-shop.\n\n\"Well, Squire Loring,\" said Wat the armorer, looking sidewise from the furnace where he was tempering a sword blade, \"what can I sell you this morning? I swear to you by Tubal Cain, the father of all workers in metal, that you might go from end to end of Cheapside and never see a better suit than that which hangs from yonder hook!\"\n\n\"And the price, armorer?\"\n\n\"To anyone else, two hundred and fifty rose nobles. To you two hundred.\"\n\n\"And why cheaper to me, good fellow?\"\n\n\"Because I fitted your father also for the wars, and a finer suit never went out of my shop. I warrant that it turned many an edge before he laid it aside. We worked in mail in those days, and I had as soon have a well-made thick-meshed mail as any plates; but a young knight will be in the fashion like any dame of the court, and so it must be plate now, even though the price be trebled.\"\n\n\"Your rede is that the mail is as good?\"\n\n\"I am well sure of it.\"\n\n\"Hearken then, armorer! I cannot at this moment buy a suit of plate, and yet I sorely need steel harness on account of a small deed which it is in my mind to do. Now I have at my home at Tilford that very suit of mail of which you speak, with which my father first rode to the wars. Could you not so alter it that it should guard my limbs also?\"\n\nThe armorer looked at Nigel's small upright figure and burst out laughing. \"You jest, Squire Loring! The suit was made for one who was far above the common stature of man.\"\n\n\"Nay, I jest not. If it will but carry me through one spear-running it will have served its purpose.\"\n\nThe armorer leaned back on his anvil and pondered while Nigel stared anxiously at his sooty face.\n\n\"Right gladly would I lend you a suit of plate for this one venture, Squire Loring, but I know well that if you should be overthrown your harness becomes prize to the victor. I am a poor man with many children, and I dare not risk the loss of it. But as to what you say of the old suit of mail, is it indeed in good condition?\"\n\n\"Most excellent, save only at the neck, which is much frayed.\"\n\n\"To shorten the limbs is easy. It is but to cut out a length of the mail and then loop up the links. But to shorten the body\u2014nay, that is beyond the armorer's art.\"\n\n\"It was my last hope. Nay, good armorer, if you have indeed served and loved my gallant father, then I beg you by his memory that you will help me now.\"\n\nThe armorer threw down his heavy hammer with a crash upon the floor. \"It is not only that I loved your father, Squire Loring, but it is that I have seen you, half armed as you were, ride against the best of them at the Castle tiltyard. Last Martinmas my heart bled for you when I saw how sorry was your harness, and yet you held your own against the stout Sir Oliver with his Milan suit: When go you to Tilford?\"\n\n\"Even now.\"\n\n\"Heh, Jenkin, fetch out the cob!\" cried the worthy Wat. \"May my right hand lose its cunning if I do not send you into battle in your father's suit! To-morrow I must be back in my booth, but to-day I give to you without fee and for the sake of the good-will which I bear to your house. I will ride with you to Tilford, and before night you shall see what Wat can do.\"\n\nSo it came about that there was a busy evening at the old Tilford Manor-house, where the Lady Ermyntrude planned and cut and hung the curtains for the hall, and stocked her cupboards with the good things which Nigel had brought from Guildford.\n\nMeanwhile the Squire and the armorer sat with their heads touching and the old suit of mail with its gorget of overlapping plates laid out across their knees. Again and again old Wat shrugged his shoulders, as one who has been asked to do more than can be demanded from mortal man. At last, at a suggestion from the Squire, he leaned back in his chair and laughed long and loudly in his bushy beard, while the Lady Ermyntrude glared her black displeasure at such plebeian merriment. Then taking his fine chisel and his hammer from his pouch of tools, the armorer, still chuckling at his own thoughts, began to drive a hole through the center of the steel tunic." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE KING HAWKED ON CROOKSBURY HEATH", + "text": "The King and his attendants had shaken off the crowd who had followed them from Guildford along the Pilgrims' Way and now, the mounted archers having beaten off the more persistent of the spectators, they rode at their ease in a long, straggling, glittering train over the dark undulating plain of heather.\n\nIn the van was the King himself, for his hawks were with him and he had some hope of sport. Edward at that time was a well-grown, vigorous man in the very prime of his years, a keen sportsman, an ardent gallant and a chivalrous soldier. He was a scholar too, speaking Latin, French, German, Spanish, and even a little English.\n\nSo much had long been patent to the world, but only of recent years had he shown other and more formidable characteristics: a restless ambition which coveted his neighbor's throne, and a wise foresight in matters of commerce, which engaged him now in transplanting Flemish weavers and sowing the seeds of what for many years was the staple trade of England. Each of these varied qualities might have been read upon his face. The brow, shaded by a crimson cap of maintenance, was broad and lofty. The large brown eyes were ardent and bold. His chin was clean-shaven, and the close-cropped dark mustache did not conceal the strong mouth, firm, proud and kindly, but capable of setting tight in merciless ferocity. His complexion was tanned to copper by a life spent in field sports or in war, and he rode his magnificent black horse carelessly and easily, as one who has grown up in the saddle. His own color was black also, for his active; sinewy figure was set off by close-fitting velvet of that hue, broken only by a belt of gold, and by a golden border of open pods of the broom-plant.\n\nWith his high and noble bearing, his simple yet rich attire and his splendid mount, he looked every inch a King.\n\nThe picture of gallant man on gallant horse was completed by the noble Falcon of the Isles which fluttered along some twelve feet above his head, \"waiting on,\" as it was termed, for any quarry which might arise. The second bird of the cast was borne upon the gauntleted wrist of Raoul the chief falconer in the rear.\n\nAt the right side of the monarch and a little behind him rode a youth some twenty years of age, tall, slim and dark, with noble aquiline features and keen penetrating eyes which sparkled with vivacity and affection as he answered the remarks of the King. He was clad in deep crimson diapered with gold, and the trappings of his white palfrey were of a magnificence which proclaimed the rank of its rider. On his face, still free from mustache or beard, there sat a certain gravity and majesty of expression which showed that young as he was great affairs had been in his keeping and that his thoughts and interests were those of the statesman and the warrior. That great day when, little more than a schoolboy, he had led the van of the victorious army which had crushed the power of France and Crecy, had left this stamp upon his features; but stern as they were they had not assumed that tinge of fierceness which in after years was to make \"The Black Prince\" a name of terror on the marches of France. Not yet had the first shadow of fell disease come to poison his nature ere it struck at his life, as he rode that spring day, light and debonair, upon the heath of Crooksbury.\n\nOn the left of the King, and so near to him that great intimacy was implied, rode a man about his own age, with the broad face, the projecting jaw and the flattish nose which are often the outward indications of a pugnacious nature.\n\nHis complexion was crimson, his large blue eyes somewhat prominent, and his whole appearance full-blooded and choleric. He was short, but massively built, and evidently possessed of immense strength. His voice, however, when he spoke was gentle and lisping, while his manner was quiet and courteous. Unlike the King or the Prince, he was clad in light armor and carried a sword by his side and a mace at his saddlebow, for he was acting as Captain of the King's Guard, and a dozen other knights in steel followed in the escort. No hardier soldier could Edward have at his side, if, as was always possible in those lawless times, sudden danger was to threaten, for this was the famous knight of Hainault, now naturalized as an Englishman, Sir Walter Manny, who bore as high a reputation for chivalrous valor and for gallant temerity as Chandos himself.\n\nBehind the knights, who were forbidden to scatter and must always follow the King's person, there was a body of twenty or thirty hobblers or mounted bowmen, together with several squires, unarmed themselves but leading spare horses upon which the heavier part of their knights' equipment was carried. A straggling tail of falconers, harbingers, varlets, body-servants and huntsmen holding hounds in leash completed the long and many-colored train which rose and dipped on the low undulations of the moor.\n\nMany weighty things were on the mind of Edward the King. There was truce for the moment with France, but it was a truce broken by many small deeds of arms, raids, surprises and ambushes upon either side, and it was certain that it would soon dissolve again into open war. Money must be raised, and it was no light matter to raise it, now that the Commons had once already voted the tenth lamb and the tenth sheaf. Besides, the Black Death had ruined the country, the arable land was all turned to pasture, the laborer, laughing at statutes, would not work under fourpence a day, and all society was chaos. In addition, the Scotch were growling over the border, there was the perennial trouble in half-conquered Ireland, and his allies abroad in Flanders and in Brabant were clamoring for the arrears of their subsidies.\n\nAll this was enough to make even a victorious monarch full of care; but now Edward had thrown it all to the winds and was as lighthearted as a boy upon a holiday. No thought had he for the dunning of Florentine bankers or the vexatious conditions of those busybodies at Westminster. He was out with his hawks, and his thoughts and his talk should be of nothing else. The varlets beat the heather and bushes as they passed, and whooped loudly as the birds flew out.\n\n\"A magpie! A magpie!\" cried the falconer.\n\n\"Nay, nay, it is not worthy of your talons, my brown-eyed queen,\" said the King, looking up at the great bird which flapped from side to side above his head, waiting for the whistle which should give her the signal. \"The tercels, falconer\u2014a cast of tercels! Quick, man, quick! Ha! the rascal makes for wood! He puts in! Well flown, brave peregrine! He makes his point. Drive him out to thy comrade. Serve him, varlets! Beat the bushes! He breaks! He breaks! Nay, come away then! You will see Master Magpie no more.\"\n\nThe bird had indeed, with the cunning of its race, flapped its way through brushwood and bushes to the thicker woods beyond, so that neither the hawk amid the cover nor its partner above nor the clamorous beaters could harm it. The King laughed at the mischance and rode on. Continually birds of various sorts were flushed, and each was pursued by the appropriate hawk, the snipe by the tercel, the partridge by the goshawk, even the lark by the little merlin. But the King soon tired of this petty sport and went slowly on his way, still with the magnificent silent attendant flapping above his head.\n\n\"Is she not a noble bird, fair son?\" he asked, glancing up as her shadow fell upon him.\n\n\"She is indeed, sire. Surely no finer ever came from the isles of the north.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not, and yet I have had a hawk from Barbary as good a footer and a swifter flyer. An Eastern bird in yarak has no peer.\"\n\n\"I had one once from the Holy Land,\" said de Manny. \"It was fierce and keen and swift as the Saracens themselves. They say of old Saladin that in his day his breed of birds, of hounds and of horses had no equal on earth.\"\n\n\"I trust, dear father, that the day may come when we shall lay our hands on all three,\" said the Prince, looking with shining eyes upon the King. \"Is the Holy Land to lie forever in the grasp of these unbelieving savages, or the Holy Temple to be defiled by their foul presence? Ah! my dear and most sweet lord, give to me a thousand lances with ten thousand bowmen like those I led at Crecy, and I swear to you by God's soul that within a year I will have done homage to you for the Kingdom of Jerusalem!\"\n\nThe King laughed as he turned to Walter Manny. \"Boys will still be boys,\" said he.\n\n\"The French do not count me such!\" cried the young Prince, flushing with anger.\n\n\"Nay, fair son, there is no one sets you at a higher rate than your father. But you have the nimble mind and quick fancy of youth, turning over from the thing that is half done to a further task beyond. How would we fare in Brittany and Normandy while my young paladin with his lances and his bowmen was besieging Ascalon or battering at Jerusalem?\"\n\n\"Heaven would help in Heaven's work.\"\n\n\"From what I have heard of the past,\" said the King dryly, \"I cannot see that Heaven has counted for much as an ally in these wars of the East. I speak with reverence, and yet it is but sooth to say that Richard of the Lion Heart or Louis of France might have found the smallest earthly principality of greater service to him than all the celestial hosts. How say you to that, my Lord Bishop?\"\n\nA stout churchman who had ridden behind the King on a solid bay cob, well-suited to his weight and dignity, jogged up to the monarch's elbow. \"How say you, sire? I was watching the goshawk on the partridge and heard you not.\"\n\n\"Had I said that I would add two manors to the See of Chichester, I warrant that you would have heard me, my Lord Bishop.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair lord, test the matter by saying so,\" cried the jovial Bishop.\n\nThe King laughed aloud. \"A fair counter, your reverence. By the rood! you broke your lance that passage. But the question I debated was this: How is it that since the Crusades have manifestly been fought in God's quarrel, we Christians have had so little comfort or support in fighting them. After all our efforts and the loss of more men than could be counted, we are at last driven from the country, and even the military orders which were formed only for that one purpose can scarce hold a footing in the islands of the Greek sea. There is not one seaport nor one fortress in Palestine over which the flag of the Cross still waves. Where then was our ally?\"\n\n\"Nay, sire, you open a great debate which extends far beyond this question of the Holy Land, though that may indeed be chosen as a fair example. It is the question of all sin, of all suffering, of all injustice\u2014why it should pass without the rain of fire and the lightnings of Sinai. The wisdom of God is beyond our understanding.\"\n\nThe King shrugged his shoulders. \"This is an easy answer, my Lord Bishop. You are a prince of the Church. It would fare ill with an earthly prince who could give no better answer to the affairs which concerned his realm.\"\n\n\"There are other considerations which might be urged, most gracious sire. It is true that the Crusades were a holy enterprise which might well expect the immediate blessing of God; but the Crusaders\u2014is it certain that they deserved such a blessing? Have I not heard that their camp was the most dissolute ever seen?\"\n\n\"Camps are camps all the world over, and you cannot in a moment change a bowman into a saint. But the holy Louis was a crusader after your own heart. Yet his men perished at Mansurah and he himself at Tunis.\"\n\n\"Bethink you also that this world is but the antechamber of the next,\" said the prelate. \"By suffering and tribulation the soul is cleansed, and the true victor may be he who by the patient endurance of misfortune merits the happiness to come.\"\n\n\"If that be the true meaning of the Church's blessing, then I hope that it will be long before it rests upon our banners in France,\" said the King. \"But methinks that when one is out with a brave horse and a good hawk one might find some other subject than theology. Back to the birds, Bishop, or Raoul the falconer will come to interrupt thee in thy cathedral.\"\n\nStraightway the conversation came back to the mystery of the woods and the mystery of the rivers, to the dark-eyed hawks and the yellow-eyed, to hawks of the lure and hawks of the fist. The Bishop was as steeped in the lore of falconry as the King, and the others smiled as the two wrangled hard over disputed and technical questions: if an eyas trained in the mews can ever emulate the passage hawk taken wild, or how long the young hawks should be placed at hack, and how long weathered before they are fully reclaimed.\n\nMonarch and prelate were still deep in this learned discussion, the Bishop speaking with a freedom and assurance which he would never have dared to use in affairs of Church and State, for in all ages there is no such leveler as sport. Suddenly, however, the Prince, whose keen eyes had swept from time to time over the great blue heaven, uttered a peculiar call and reined up his palfrey, pointing at the same time into the air.\n\n\"A heron!\" he cried. \"A heron on passage!\"\n\nTo gain the full sport of hawking a heron must not be put up from its feeding-ground, where it is heavy with its meal, and has no time to get its pace on before it is pounced upon by the more active hawk, but it must be aloft, traveling from point to point, probably from the fish-stream to the heronry. Thus to catch the bird on passage was the prelude of all good sport. The object to which the Prince had pointed was but a black dot in the southern sky, but his strained eyes had not deceived him, and both Bishop and King agreed that it was indeed a heron, which grew larger every instant as it flew in their direction.\n\n\"Whistle him off, sire! Whistle off the gerfalcon!\" cried the Bishop.\n\n\"Nay, nay, he is overfar. She would fly at check.\"\n\n\"Now, sire, now!\" cried the Prince, as the great bird with the breeze behind him came sweeping down the sky.\n\nThe King gave the shrill whistle, and the well-trained hawk raked out to the right and to the left to make sure which quarry she was to follow. Then, spying the heron, she shot up in a swift ascending curve to meet him.\n\n\"Well flown, Margot! Good bird!\" cried the King, clapping his hands to encourage the hawk, while the falconers broke into the shrill whoop peculiar to the sport.\n\nGoing on her curve, the hawk would soon have crossed the path of the heron; but the latter, seeing the danger in his front and confident in his own great strength of wing and lightness of body, proceeded to mount higher in the air, flying in such small rings that to the spectators it almost seemed as if the bird was going perpendicularly upward.\n\n\"He takes the air!\" cried the King. \"But strong as he flies, he cannot out fly Margot. Bishop, I lay you ten gold pieces to one that the heron is mine.\"\n\n\"I cover your wager, sire,\" said the Bishop. \"I may not take gold so won, and yet I warrant that there is an altar-cloth somewhere in need of repairs.\"\n\n\"You have good store of altar-cloths, Bishop, if all the gold I have seen you win at tables goes to the mending of them,\" said the King. \"Ah! by the rood, rascal, rascal! See how she flies at check!\"\n\nThe quick eyes of the Bishop had perceived a drift of rooks when on their evening flight to the rookery were passing along the very line which divided the hawk from the heron. A rook is a hard temptation for a hawk to resist. In an instant the inconstant bird had forgotten all about the great heron above her and was circling over the rooks, flying westward with them as she singled out the plumpest for her stoop.\n\n\"There is yet time, sire! Shall I cast off her mate?\" cried the falconer.\n\n\"Or shall I show you, sire, how a peregrine may win where a gerfalcon fails?\" said the Bishop. \"Ten golden pieces to one upon my bird.\"\n\n\"Done with you, Bishop!\" cried the King, his brow dark with vexation. \"By the rood! if you were as learned in the fathers as you are in hawks you would win to the throne of Saint Peter! Cast off your peregrine and make your boasting good.\"\n\nSmaller than the royal gerfalcon, the Bishop's bird was none the less a swift and beautiful creature. From her perch upon his wrist she had watched with fierce, keen eyes the birds in the heaven, mantling herself from time to time in her eagerness. Now when the button was undone and the leash uncast the peregrine dashed off with a whir of her sharp-pointed wings, whizzing round in a great ascending circle which mounted swiftly upward, growing ever smaller as she approached that lofty point where, a mere speck in the sky, the heron sought escape from its enemies. Still higher and higher the two birds mounted, while the horsemen, their faces upturned, strained their eyes in their efforts to follow them.\n\n\"She rings! She still rings!\" cried the Bishop. \"She is above him! She has gained her pitch.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, she is far below,\" said the King.\n\n\"By my soul, my Lord Bishop is right!\" cried the Prince. \"I believe she is above. See! See! She swoops!\"\n\n\"She binds! She binds!\" cried a dozen voices as the two dots blended suddenly into one.\n\nThere could be no doubt that they were falling rapidly. Already they grew larger to the eye. Presently the heron disengaged himself and flapped heavily away, the worse for that deadly embrace, while the peregrine, shaking her plumage, ringed once more so as to get high above the quarry and deal it a second and more fatal blow. The Bishop smiled, for nothing, as it seemed, could hinder his victory.\n\n\"Thy gold pieces shall be well spent, sire,\" said he. \"What is lost to the Church is gained by the loser.\"\n\nBut a most unlooked-for chance deprived the Bishop's altar cloth of its costly mending. The King's gerfalcon having struck down a rook, and finding the sport but tame, bethought herself suddenly of that noble heron, which she still perceived fluttering over Crooksbury Heath. How could she have been so weak as to allow these silly, chattering rooks to entice her away from that lordly bird? Even now it was not too late to atone for her mistake. In a great spiral she shot upward until she was over the heron. But what was this? Every fiber of her, from her crest to her deck feathers, quivered with jealousy and rage at the sight of this creature, a mere peregrine, who had dared to come between a royal gerfalcon and her quarry. With one sweep of her great wings she shot up until she was above her rival. The next instant\u2014\n\n\"They crab! They crab!\" cried the King, with a roar of laughter, following them with his eyes as they bustled down through the air. \"Mend thy own altar-cloths, Bishop. Not a groat shall you have from me this journey. Pull them apart, falconer, lest they do each other an injury. And now, masters, let us on, for the sun sinks toward the west.\"\n\nThe two hawks, which had come to the ground interlocked with clutching talons and ruffled plumes, were torn apart and brought back bleeding and panting to their perches, while the heron after its perilous adventure flapped its way heavily onward to settle safely in the heronry of Waverley. The cortege, who had scattered in the excitement of the chase, came together again, and the journey was once more resumed.\n\nA horseman who had been riding toward them across the moor now quickened his pace and closed swiftly upon them. As he came nearer, the King and the Prince cried out joyously and waved their hands in greeting.\n\n\"It is good John Chandos!!\" cried the King. \"By the rood, John, I have missed your merry songs this week or more! Glad I am to see that you have your citole slung to your back. Whence come you then?\"\n\n\"I come from Tilford, sire, in the hope that I should meet your majesty.\"\n\n\"It was well thought of. Come, ride here between the Prince and me, and we will believe that we are back in France with our war harness on our backs once more. What is your news, Master John?\"\n\nChandos' quaint face quivered with suppressed amusement and his one eye twinkled like a star. \"Have you had sport, my liege?\"\n\n\"Poor sport, John. We flew two hawks on the same heron. They crabbed, and the bird got free. But why do you smile so?\"\n\n\"Because I hope to show you better sport ere you come to Tilford.\"\n\n\"For the hawk? For the hound?\"\n\n\"A nobler sport than either.\"\n\n\"Is this a riddle, John? What mean you?\"\n\n\"Nay, to tell all would be to spoil all. I say again that there is rare sport betwixt here and Tilford, and I beg you, dear lord, to mend your pace that we make the most of the daylight.\"\n\nThus adjured, the King set spurs to his horse, and the whole cavalcade cantered over the heath in the direction which Chandos showed. Presently as they came over a slope they saw beneath them a winding river with an old high-backed bridge across it. On the farther side was a village green with a fringe of cottages and one dark manor house upon the side of the hill.\n\n\"This is Tilford,\" said Chandos. \"Yonder is the house of the Lorings.\"\n\nThe King's expectations had been aroused and his face showed his disappointment.\n\n\"Is this the sport that you have promised us, Sir John? How can you make good your words?\"\n\n\"I will make them good, my liege.\"\n\n\"Where then is the sport?\"\n\nOn the high crown of the bridge a rider in armor was seated, lance in hand, upon a great yellow steed. Chandos touched the King's arm and pointed. \"That is the sport,\" said he." + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL HELD THE BRIDGE AT TILFORD", + "text": "The King looked at the motionless figure, at the little crowd of hushed expectant rustics beyond the bridge, and finally at the face of Chandos, which shone with amusement.\n\n\"What is this, John?\" he asked.\n\n\"You remember Sir Eustace Loring, sire?\"\n\n\"Indeed I could never forget him nor the manner of his death.\"\n\n\"He was a knight errant in his day.\"\n\n\"That indeed he was\u2014none better have I known.\"\n\n\"So is his son Nigel, as fierce a young war-hawk as ever yearned to use beak and claws; but held fast in the mews up to now. This is his trial fight. There he stands at the bridge-head, as was the wont in our fathers' time, ready to measure himself against all comers.\"\n\nOf all Englishmen there was no greater knight errant than the King himself, and none so steeped in every quaint usage of chivalry; so that the situation was after his own heart.\n\n\"He is not yet a knight?\"\n\n\"No, sire, only a Squire.\"\n\n\"Then he must bear himself bravely this day if he is to make good what he has done. Is it fitting that a young untried Squire should venture to couch his lance against the best in England?\"\n\n\"He hath given me his cartel and challenge,\" said Chandos, drawing a paper from his tunic. \"Have I your permission, sire, to issue it?\"\n\n\"Surely, John, we have no cavalier more versed in the laws of chivalry than yourself. You know this young man, and you are aware how far he is worthy of the high honor which he asks. Let us hear his defiance.\"\n\nThe knights and squires of the escort, most of whom were veterans of the French war, had been gazing with interest and some surprise at the steel-clad figure in front of them. Now at a call from Sir Walter Manny they assembled round the spot where the King and Chandos had halted. Chandos cleared his throat and read from his paper\u2014\n\n\"'A tous seigneurs, chevaliers et escuyers,' so it is headed, gentlemen. It is a message from the good Squire Nigel Loring of Tilford, son of Sir Eustace Loring, of honorable memory. Squire Loring awaits you in arms, gentlemen, yonder upon the crown of the old bridge. Thus says he: 'For the great desire that I, a most humble and unworthy Squire, entertain, that I may come to the knowledge of the noble gentlemen who ride with my royal master, I now wait on the Bridge of the Way in the hope that some of them may condescend to do some small deed of arms upon me, or that I may deliver them from any vow which they may have taken. This I say out of no esteem for myself, but solely that I may witness the noble bearing of these famous cavaliers and admire their skill in the handling of arms. Therefore, with the help of Saint George, I will hold the bridge with sharpened lances against any or all who may deign to present themselves while daylight lasts.\"\n\n\"What say you to this, gentlemen?\" asked the King, looking round with laughing eyes.\n\n\"Truly it is issued in very good form,\" said the Prince. \"Neither Claricieux nor Red Dragon nor any herald that ever wore tabard could better it. Did he draw it of his own hand?\"\n\n\"He hath a grim old grandmother who is one of the ancient breed,\" said Chandos. \"I doubt not that the Dame Ermyntrude hath drawn a challenge or two before now. But hark ye, sire, I would have a word in your ear\u2014and yours too, most noble Prince.\"\n\nLeading them aside, Chandos whispered some explanations, which ended by them all three bursting into a shout of laughter.\n\n\"By the rood! no honorable gentleman should be reduced to such straits,\" said the King. \"It behooves me to look to it. But how now, gentlemen? This worthy cavalier still waits his answer.\"\n\nThe soldiers had all been buzzing together; but now Walter Manny turned to the King with the result of their counsel.\n\n\"If it please your majesty,\" said he, \"we are of opinion that this Squire hath exceeded all bounds in desiring to break a spear with a belted knight ere he has given his proofs. We do him sufficient honor if a Squire ride against him, and with your consent I have chosen my own body-squire, John Widdicombe, to clear the path for us across the bridge.\"\n\n\"What you say, Walter, is right and fair,\" said the King. \"Master Chandos, you will tell our champion yonder what hath been arranged. You will advise him also that it is our royal will that this contest be not fought upon the bridge, since it is very clear that it must end in one or both going over into the river, but that he advance to the end of the bridge and fight upon the plain. You will tell him also that a blunted lance is sufficient for such an encounter, but that a handstroke or two with sword or mace may well be exchanged, if both riders should keep their saddles. A blast upon Raoul's horn shall be the signal to close.\"\n\nSuch ventures as these where an aspirant for fame would wait for days at a cross-road, a ford, or a bridge, until some worthy antagonist should ride that way, were very common in the old days of adventurous knight erranty, and were still familiar to the minds of all men because the stories of the romancers and the songs of the trouveres were full of such incidents. Their actual occurrence however had become rare. There was the more curiosity, not unmixed with amusement, in the thoughts of the courtiers as they watched Chandos ride down to the bridge and commented upon the somewhat singular figure of the challenger. His build was strange, and so also was his figure, for the limbs were short for so tall a man. His head also was sunk forward as if he were lost in thought or overcome with deep dejection.\n\n\"This is surely the Cavalier of the Heavy Heart,\" said Manny. \"What trouble has he, that he should hang his head?\"\n\n\"Perchance he hath a weak neck,\" said the King.\n\n\"At least he hath no weak voice,\" the Prince remarked, as Nigel's answer to Chandos came to their ears. \"By our lady, he booms like a bittern.\"\n\nAs Chandos rode back again to the King, Nigel exchanged the old ash spear which had been his father's for one of the blunted tournament lances which he took from the hands of a stout archer in attendance. He then rode down to the end of the bridge where a hundred-yard stretch of greensward lay in front of him. At the same moment the Squire of Sir Walter Manny, who had been hastily armed by his comrades, spurred forward and took up his position.\n\nThe King raised his hand; there was a clang from the falconer's horn, and the two riders, with a thrust of their heels and a shake of their bridles, dashed furiously at each other. In the center the green strip of marshy meadowland, with the water squirting from the galloping hoofs, and the two crouching men, gleaming bright in the evening sun, on one side the half circle of motionless horsemen, some in steel, some in velvet, silent and attentive, dogs, hawks, and horses all turned to stone; on the other the old peaked bridge, the blue lazy river, the group of openmouthed rustics, and the dark old manor-house with one grim face which peered from the upper window.\n\nA good man was John Widdicombe, but he had met a better that day. Before that yellow whirlwind of a horse and that rider who was welded and riveted to his saddle his knees could not hold their grip. Nigel and Pommers were one flying missile, with all their weight and strength and energy centered on the steady end of the lance. Had Widdicombe been struck by a thunderbolt he could not have flown faster or farther from his saddle. Two full somersaults did he make, his plates clanging like cymbals, ere he lay prone upon his back.\n\nFor a moment the King looked grave at that prodigious fall. Then smiling once more as Widdicombe staggered to his feet, he clapped his hands loudly in applause. \"A fair course and fairly run!\" he cried. \"The five scarlet roses bear themselves in peace even as I have seen them in war. How now, my good Walter? Have you another Squire or will you clear a path for us yourself?\"\n\nManny's choleric face had turned darker as he observed the mischance of his representative. He beckoned now to a tall knight, whose gaunt and savage face looked out from his open bassinet as an eagle might from a cage of steel.\n\n\"Sir Hubert,\" said he, \"I bear in mind the day when you overbore the Frenchman at Caen. Will you not be our champion now?\"\n\n\"When I fought the Frenchman, Walter, it was with naked weapons,\" said the knight sternly. \"I am a soldier and I love a soldier's work, but I care not for these tiltyard tricks which were invented for nothing but to tickle the fancies of foolish women.\"\n\n\"Oh, most ungallant speech!\" cried the King. \"Had my good-consort heard you she would have arraigned you to appear at a Court of Love with a jury of virgins to answer for your sins. But I pray you to take a tilting spear, good Sir Hubert!\"\n\n\"I had as soon take a peacock's feather, my fair lord; but I will do it, if you ask me. Here, page, hand me one of those sticks, and let me see what I can do.\"\n\nBut Sir Hubert de Burgh was not destined to test either his skill or his luck. The great bay horse which he rode was as unused to this warlike play as was its master, and had none of its master's stoutness of heart; so that when it saw the leveled lance, the gleaming figure and the frenzied yellow horse rushing down upon it, it swerved, turned and galloped furiously down the river-bank. Amid roars of laughter from the rustics on the one side and from the courtiers on the other, Sir Hubert was seen, tugging vainly at his bridle, and bounding onward, clearing gorse-bushes and heather-clumps, until he was but a shimmering, quivering gleam upon the dark hillside. Nigel, who had pulled Pommers on to his very haunches at the instant that his opponent turned, saluted with his lance and trotted back to the bridge-head, where he awaited his next assailant.\n\n\"The ladies would say that a judgment hath fallen upon our good Sir Hubert for his impious words,\" said the King.\n\n\"Let us hope that his charger may be broken in ere they venture to ride out between two armies,\" remarked the Prince. \"They might mistake the hardness of his horse's mouth for a softness of the rider's heart. See where he rides, still clearing every bush upon his path.\"\n\n\"By the rood!\" said the King, \"if the bold Hubert has not increased his repute as a jouster he has gained great honor as a horseman. But the bridge is still closed, Walter. How say you now? Is this young Squire never to be unhorsed, or is your King himself to lay lance in rest ere his way can be cleared? By the head of Saint Thomas! I am in the very mood to run a course with this gentle youth.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, sire, too much honor hath already been done him!\" said Manny, looking angrily at the motionless horseman. \"That this untried boy should be able to say that in one evening he has unhorsed my Squire, and seen the back of one of the bravest knights in England is surely enough to turn his foolish head. Fetch me a spear, Robert! I will see what I can make of him.\"\n\nThe famous knight took the spear when it was brought to him as a master-workman takes a tool. He balanced it, shook it once or twice in the air, ran his eyes down it for a flaw in the wood, and then finally having made sure of its poise and weight laid it carefully in rest under his arm. Then gathering up his bridle so as to have his horse under perfect command, and covering himself with the shield, which was slung round his neck, he rode out to do battle.\n\nNow, Nigel, young and inexperienced, all Nature's aid will not help you against the mixed craft and strength of such a warrior. The day will come when neither Manny nor even Chandos could sweep you from your saddle; but now, even had you some less cumbrous armor, your chance were small. Your downfall is near; but as you see the famous black chevrons on a golden ground your gallant heart which never knew fear is only filled with joy and amazement at the honor done you. Your downfall is near, and yet in your wildest dreams you would never guess how strange your downfall is to be.\n\nAgain with a dull thunder of hoofs the horses gallop over the soft water-meadow. Again with a clash of metal the two riders meet. It is Nigel now, taken clean in the face of his helmet with the blunted spear, who flies backward off his horse and falls clanging on the grass.\n\nBut good heavens! what is this? Manny has thrown up his hands in horror and the lance has dropped from his nerveless fingers. From all sides, with cries of dismay, with oaths and shouts and ejaculations to the saints, the horsemen ride wildly in. Was ever so dreadful, so sudden, so complete, an end to a gentle passage at arms? Surely their eyes must be at fault? Some wizard's trick has been played upon them to deceive their senses. But no, it was only too clear. There on the greensward lay the trunk of the stricken cavalier, and there, a good dozen yards beyond, lay his helmeted head.\n\n\"By the Virgin!\" cried Manny wildly, as he jumped from his horse, \"I would give my last gold piece that the work of this evening should be undone! How came it? What does it mean? Hither, my Lord Bishop, for surely it smacks of witchcraft and the Devil.\"\n\nWith a white face the Bishop had sprung down beside the prostrate body, pushing through the knot of horrified knights and squires.\n\n\"I fear that the last offices of the Holy Church come too late,\" said he in a quivering voice. \"Most unfortunate young man! How sudden an end! In medio vitae, as the Holy Book has it\u2014one moment in the pride of his youth, the next his head torn from his body. Now God and his saints have mercy upon me and guard me from evil!\"\n\nThe last prayer was shot out of the Bishop with an energy and earnestness unusual in his orisons. It was caused by the sudden outcry of one of the Squires who, having lifted the helmet from the ground, cast it down again with a scream of horror.\n\n\"It is empty!\" he cried. \"It weighs as light as a feather.\"\n\n\"'Fore God, it is true!\" cried Manny, laying his hand on it. \"There is no one in it. With what have I fought, father Bishop? Is it of this world or of the next?\"\n\nThe Bishop had clambered on his horse the better to consider the point. \"If the foul fiend is abroad,\" said he, \"my place is over yonder by the King's side. Certes that sulphur-colored horse hath a very devilish look. I could have sworn that I saw both smoke and flame from its nostrils. The beast is fit to bear a suit of armor which rides and fights and yet hath no man within it.\"\n\n\"Nay, not too fast, father Bishop,\" said one of the knights. \"It may be all that you say and yet come from a human workshop. When I made a campaign in South Germany I have seen at Nuremberg a cunning figure, devised by an armorer, which could both ride and wield a sword. If this be such a one\u2014\"\n\n\"I thank you all for your very gentle courtesy,\" said a booming voice from the figure upon the ground.\n\nAt the words even the valiant Manny sprang into his saddle. Some rode madly away from the horrid trunk. A few of the boldest lingered.\n\n\"Most of all,\" said the voice, \"would I thank the most noble knight, Sir Walter Manny, that he should deign to lay aside his greatness and condescend to do a deed of arms upon so humble a Squire.\"\n\n\"'Fore God!\" said Manny, \"if this be the Devil, then the Devil hath a very courtly tongue. I will have him out of his armor, if he blast me!\"\n\nSo saying he sprang once more from his horse and plunging his hand down the slit in the collapsed gorget he closed it tightly upon a fistful of Nigel's yellow curls. The groan that came forth was enough to convince him that it was indeed a man who lurked within. At the same time his eyes fell upon the hole in the mail corselet which had served the Squire as a visor, and he burst into deep-chested mirth. The King, the Prince and Chandos, who had watched the scene from a distance, too much amused by it to explain or interfere, rode up weary with laughter, now that all was discovered.\n\n\"Let him out!\" said the King, with his hand to his side. \"I pray you to unlace him and let him out! I have shared in many a spear-running, but never have I been nearer falling from my horse than as I watched this one. I feared the fall had struck him senseless, since he lay so still.\"\n\nNigel had indeed lain with all the breath shaken from his body, and as he was unaware that his helmet had been carried off, he had not understood either the alarm or the amusement that he had caused. Now freed from the great hauberk in which he had been shut like a pea in a pod, he stood blinking in the light, blushing deeply with shame that the shifts to which his poverty had reduced him should be exposed to all these laughing courtiers. It was the King who brought him comfort.\n\n\"You have shown that you can use your father's weapons,\" said he, \"and you have proved also that you are the worthy bearer of his name and his arms, for you have within you that spirit for which he was famous. But I wot that neither he nor you would suffer a train of hungry men to starve before your door; so lead on, I pray you, and if the meat be as good as this grace before it, then it will be a feast indeed.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE KING GREETED HIS SENESCHAL OF CALAIS", + "text": "It would have fared ill with the good name of Tilford Manor house and with the housekeeping of the aged Dame Ermyntrude had the King's whole retinue, with his outer and inner marshal, his justiciar, his chamberlain and his guard, all gathered under the one roof. But by the foresight and the gentle management of Chandos this calamity was avoided, so that some were quartered at the great Abbey and others passed on to enjoy the hospitality of Sir Roger FitzAlan at Farnham Castle. Only the King himself, the Prince, Manny, Chandos, Sir Hubert de Burgh, the Bishop and two or three more remained behind as the guests of the Lorings.\n\nBut small as was the party and humble the surroundings, the King in no way relaxed that love of ceremony, of elaborate form and of brilliant coloring which was one of his characteristics. The sumpter-mules were unpacked, squires ran hither and thither, baths smoked in the bed-chambers, silks and satins were unfolded, gold chains gleamed and clinked, so that when at last, to the long blast of two court trumpeters, the company took their seats at the board, it was the brightest, fairest scene which those old black rafters had ever spanned.\n\nThe great influx of foreign knights who had come in their splendor from all parts of Christendom to take part in the opening of the Round Tower of Windsor six years before, and to try their luck and their skill at the tournament connected with it, had deeply modified the English fashions of dress. The old tunic, over-tunic and cyclas were too sad and simple for the new fashions, so now strange and brilliant cote-hardies, pourpoints, courtepies, paltocks, hanselines and many other wondrous garments, parti-colored or diapered, with looped, embroidered or escalloped edges, flamed and glittered round the King. He himself, in black velvet and gold, formed a dark rich center to the finery around him. On his right sat the Prince, on his left the Bishop, while Dame Ermyntrude marshaled the forces of the household outside, alert and watchful, pouring in her dishes and her flagons at the right moment, rallying her tired servants, encouraging the van, hurrying the rear, hastening up her reserves, the tapping of her oak stick heard everywhere the pressure was the greatest.\n\nBehind the King, clad in his best, but looking drab and sorry amid the brilliant costumes round him, Nigel himself, regardless of an aching body and a twisted knee, waited upon his royal guests, who threw many a merry jest at him over their shoulders as they still chuckled at the adventure of the bridge.\n\n\"By the rood!\" said King Edward, leaning back, with a chicken bone held daintily between the courtesy fingers of his left hand, \"the play is too good for this country stage. You must to Windsor with me, Nigel, and bring with you this great suit of harness in which you lurk. There you shall hold the lists with your eyes in your midriff, and unless some one cleave you to the waist I see not how any harm can befall you. Never have I seen so small a nut in so great a shell.\"\n\nThe Prince, looking back with laughing eyes, saw by Nigel's flushed and embarrassed face that his poverty hung heavily upon him. \"Nay,\" said he kindly, \"such a workman is surely worthy of better tools.\"\n\n\"And it is for his master to see that he has them,\" added the King. \"The court armorer will look to it that the next time your helmet is carried away, Nigel, your head shall be inside it.\"\n\nNigel, red to the roots of his flaxen hair, stammered out some words of thanks.\n\nJohn Chandos, however, had a fresh suggestion, and he cocked a roguish eye as he made it: \"Surely, my liege, your bounty is little needed in this case. It is the ancient law of arms that if two cavaliers start to joust, and one either by maladdress or misadventure fail to meet the shock, then his arms become the property of him who still holds the lists. This being so, methinks, Sir Hubert de Burgh, that the fine hauberk of Milan and the helmet of Bordeaux steel in which you rode to Tilford should remain with our young host as some small remembrance of your visit.\"\n\nThe suggestion raised a general chorus of approval and laughter, in which all joined, save only Sir Hubert himself, who, flushed with anger, fixed his baleful eyes upon Chandos' mischievous and smiling face.\n\n\"I said that I did not play that foolish game, and I know nothing of its laws,\" said he; \"but you know well, John, that if you would have a bout with sharpened spear or sword, where two ride to the ground, and only one away from it, you have not far to go to find it.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, would you ride to the ground? Surely you had best walk, Hubert,\" said Chandos. \"On your feet I know well that I should not see your back as we have seen it to-day. Say what you will, your horse has played you false, and I claim your suit of harness for Nigel Loring.\"\n\n\"Your tongue is overlong, John, and I am weary of its endless clack!\" said Sir Hubert, his yellow mustache bristling from a scarlet face. \"If you claim my harness, do you yourself come and take it. If there is a moon in the sky you may try this very night when the board is cleared.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sirs,\" cried the King, smiling from one to the other, \"this matter must be followed no further. Do you fill a bumper of Gascony, John, and you also, Hubert. Now pledge each other, I pray you, as good and loyal comrades who would scorn to fight save in your King's quarrel. We can spare neither of you while there is so much work for brave hearts over the sea. As to this matter of the harness, John Chandos speaks truly where it concerns a joust in the lists, but we hold that such a law is scarce binding in this, which was but a wayside passage and a gentle trial of arms. On the other hand, in the case of your Squire, Master Manny, there can be no doubt that his suit is forfeit.\"\n\n\"It is a grievous hearing for him, my liege,\" said Walter Manny; \"for he is a poor man and hath been at sore pains to fit himself for the wars. Yet what you say shall be done, fair sire. So, if you will come to me in the morning, Squire Loring, John Widdicombe's suit will be handed over to you.\"\n\n\"Then with the King's leave, I will hand it back to him,\" said Nigel, troubled and stammering; \"for indeed I had rather never ride to the wars than take from a brave man his only suit of plate.\"\n\n\"There spoke your father's spirit!\" cried the King. \"By the rood! Nigel, I like you full well. Let the matter bide in my hands. But I marvel much that Sir Aymery the Lombard hath not come to us yet from Windsor.\"\n\nFrom the moment of his arrival at Tilford, again and again King Edward had asked most eagerly whether Sir Aymery had come, and whether there was any news of him, so that the courtiers glanced at each other in wonder. For Aymery was known to all of them as a famous mercenary of Italy, lately appointed Governor of Calais, and this sudden and urgent summons from the King might well mean some renewal of the war with France, which was the dearest wish of every soldier. Twice the King had stopped his meal and sat with sidelong head; his wine-cup in his hand, listening attentively when some sound like the clatter of hoofs was heard from outside; but the third time there could be no mistake. The tramp and jingle of the horses broke loud upon the ear, and ended in hoarse voices calling out of the darkness, which were answered by the archers posted as sentries without the door.\n\n\"Some traveler has indeed arrived, my liege,\" said Nigel. \"What is your royal will?\"\n\n\"It can be but Aymery,\" the King answered, \"for it was only to him that I left the message that he should follow me hither. Bid him come in, I pray you, and make him very welcome at your board.\"\n\nNigel cast open the door, plucking a torch from its bracket as he did so. Half a dozen men-at-arms sat on their horses outside, but one had dismounted, a short, squat, swarthy man with a rat face and quick, restless brown eyes which peered eagerly past Nigel into the red glare of the well-lit hall.\n\n\"I am Sir Aymery of Pavia,\" he whispered. \"For God's sake, tell me! is the King within?\"\n\n\"He is at table, fair sir, and he bids you to enter.\"\n\n\"One moment, young man, one moment, and a secret word in your ear. Wot you why it is that the King has sent for me?\"\n\nNigel read terror in the dark cunning eyes which glanced in sidelong fashion into his. \"Nay, I know not.\"\n\n\"I would I knew\u2014I would I was sure ere I sought his presence.\"\n\n\"You have but to cross the threshold, fair sir, and doubtless you will learn from the King's own lips.\"\n\nSir Aymery seemed to gather himself as one who braces for a spring into ice-cold water. Then he crossed with a quick stride from the darkness into the light. The King stood up and held out his hand with a smile upon his long handsome face, and yet it seemed to the Italian that it was the lips which smiled but not the eyes.\n\n\"Welcome!\" cried Edward. \"Welcome to our worthy and faithful Seneschal of Calais! Come, sit here before me at the board, for I have sent for you that I may hear your news from over the sea, and thank you for the care that you have taken of that which is as dear to me as wife or child. Set a place for Sir Aymery there, and give him food and drink, for he has ridden fast and far in our service to-day.\"\n\nThroughout the long feast which the skill of the Lady Ermyntrude had arranged, Edward chatted lightly with the Italian as well as with the barons near him. Finally, when the last dish was removed and the gravy-soaked rounds of coarse bread which served as plates had been cast to the dogs, the wine-flagons were passed round; and old Weathercote the minstrel entered timidly with his harp in the hope that he might be allowed to play before the King's majesty. But Edward had other sport afoot.\n\n\"I pray you, Nigel, to send out the servants, so that we may be alone. I would have two men-at-arms at every door lest we be disturbed in our debate, for it is a matter of privacy. And now, Sir Aymery, these noble lords as well as I, your master, would fain hear from your own lips how all goes forward in France.\"\n\nThe Italian's face was calm; but he looked restlessly from one to another along the line of his listeners.\n\n\"So far as I know, my liege, all is quiet on the French marches,\" said he.\n\n\"You have not heard then that they have mustered or gathered to a head with the intention of breaking the truce and making some attempt upon our dominions?\"\n\n\"Nay, sire, I have heard nothing of it.\"\n\n\"You set my mind much at ease, Aymery,\" said the King; \"for if nothing has come to your ears, then surely it cannot be. It was said that the wild Knight de Chargny had come down to St. Omer with his eyes upon my precious jewel and his mailed hands ready to grasp it.\"\n\n\"Nay, sire, let him come. He will find the jewel safe in its strong box, with a goodly guard over it.\"\n\n\"You are the guard over my jewel, Aymery.\"\n\n\"Yes, sire, I am the guard.\"\n\n\"And you are a faithful guard and one whom I can trust, are you not? You would not barter away that which is so dear to me when I have chosen you out of all my army to hold it for me?\"\n\n\"Nay, sire, what reasons can there be for such questions? They touch my honor very nearly. You know that I would part with Calais only when I parted with my soul.\"\n\n\"Then you know nothing of de Chargny's attempt?\"\n\n\"Nothing sire.\"\n\n\"Liar and villain!\" yelled the King, springing to his feet and dashing his fist upon the table until the glasses rattled again. \"Seize him, archers! Seize him this instant! Stand close by either elbow, lest he do himself a mischief! Now do you dare to tell me to my face, you perjured Lombard, that you know nothing of de Chargny and his plans?\"\n\n\"As God is my witness I know nothing of him!\" The man's lips were white, and he spoke in a thin, sighing, reedy voice, his eyes wincing away from the fell gaze of the angry King.\n\nEdward laughed bitterly, and drew a paper from his breast. \"You are the judges in this case, you, my fair son, and you, Chandos, and you, Manny, and you, Sir Hubert, and you also, my Lord Bishop. By my sovereign power I make you a court that you may deal justice upon this man, for by God's eyes I will not stir from this room until I have sifted the matter to the bottom. And first I would read you this letter. It is superscribed to Sir Aymery of Pavia, nomme Le Lombard, Chateau de Calais. Is not that your name and style, you rogue?\"\n\n\"It is my name, sire; but no such letter has come to me.\"\n\n\"Else had your villainy never been disclosed. It is signed 'Isidore de Chargny'. What says my enemy de Chargny to my trusted servant? Listen! 'We could not come with the last moon, for we have not gathered sufficient strength, nor have we been able to collect the twenty thousand crowns which are your price. But with the next turn of the moon in the darkest hour we will come and you will be paid your money at the small postern gate with the rowan-bush beside it.' Well, rogue, what say you now?\"\n\n\"It is a forgery!\" gasped the Italian.\n\n\"I pray you that you will let me see it, sire,\" said Chandos. \"De Chargny was my prisoner, and so many letters passed ere his ransom was paid that his script is well-known to me. Yes, yes, I will swear that this is indeed his. If my salvation were at stake I could swear it.\"\n\n\"If it were indeed written by de Chargny it was to dishonor me,\" cried Sir Aymery.\n\n\"Nay, nay!\" said the young Prince. \"We all know de Chargny and have fought against him. Many faults he has, a boaster and a brawler, but a braver man and one of greater heart and higher of enterprise does not ride beneath the lilies of France. Such a man would never stoop to write a letter for the sake of putting dishonor upon one of knightly rank. I, for one, will never believe it.\"\n\nA gruff murmur from the others showed that they were of one mind with the Prince. The light of the torches from the walls beat upon the line of stern faces at the high table. They had sat like flint, and the Italian shrank from their inexorable eyes. He looked swiftly round, but armed men choked every entrance. The shadow of death had fallen athwart his soul.\n\n\"This letter,\" said the King, \"was given by de Chargny to one Dom Beauvais, a priest of St. Omer, to carry into Calais. The said priest, smelling a reward, brought it to one who is my faithful servant, and so it came to me. Straightway I sent for this man that he should come to me. Meanwhile the priest has returned so that de Chargny may think that his message is indeed delivered.\"\n\n\"I know nothing of it,\" said the Italian doggedly, licking his dry lips.\n\nA dark flush mounted to the King's forehead, and his eyes were gorged with his wrath. \"No more of this, for God's dignity!\" he cried. \"Had we this fellow at the Tower, a few turns of the rack would tear a confession from his craven soul. But why should we need his word for his own guilt? You have seen, my lords, you have heard! How say you, fair son? Is the man guilty?\"\n\n\"Sire, he is guilty.\"\n\n\"And you, John? And you, Walter? And you, Hubert? And you, my Lord Bishop? You are all of one mind, then. He is guilty of the betrayal of his trust. And the punishment?\"\n\n\"It can only be death,\" said the Prince, and each in turn the others nodded their agreement.\n\n\"Aymery of Pavia, you have heard your doom,\" said Edward, leaning his chin upon his hand and glooming at the cowering Italian. \"Step forward, you archer at the door, you with the black beard. Draw your sword! Nay, you white-faced rogue, I would not dishonor this roof-tree by your blood. It is your heels, not your head, that we want. Hack off these golden spurs of knighthood with your sword, archer! 'Twas I who gave them, and I who take them back. Ha! they fly across the hall, and with them every bond betwixt you and the worshipful order whose sign and badge they are! Now lead him out on the heath afar from the house where his carrion can best lie, and hew his scheming head from his body as a warning to all such traitors!\"\n\nThe Italian, who had slipped from his chair to his knees, uttered a cry of despair, as an archer seized him by either shoulder. Writhing out of their grip, he threw himself upon the floor and clutched at the King's feet.\n\n\"Spare me, my most dread lord, spare me, I beseech you! In the name of Christ's passion, I implore your grace and pardon! Bethink you, my good and dear lord, how many years I have served under your banners and how many services I have rendered. Was it not I who found the ford upon the Seine two days before the great battle? Was it not I also who marshaled the attack at the intaking of Calais? I have a wife and four children in Italy, great King; and it was the thought of them which led me to fall from my duty, for this money would have allowed me to leave the wars and to see them once again. Mercy, my liege, mercy, I implore!\"\n\nThe English are a rough race, but not a cruel one. The King sat with a face of doom; but the others looked askance and fidgeted in their seats.\n\n\"Indeed, my fair liege,\" said Chandos, \"I pray you that you will abate somewhat of your anger.\"\n\nEdward shook his head curtly. \"Be silent, John. It shall be as I have said.\"\n\n\"I pray you, my dear and honored liege, not to act with overmuch haste in the matter,\" said Manny. \"Bind him and hold him until the morning, for other counsels may prevail.\"\n\n\"Nay, I have spoken. Lead him out!\"\n\nBut the trembling man clung to the King's knees in such a fashion that the archers could not disengage his convulsive grip. \"Listen to me a moment, I implore you! Give me but one minute to plead with you, and then do what you will.\"\n\nThe King leaned back in his chair. \"Speak and have done,\" said he.\n\n\"You must spare me, my noble liege. For your own sake I say that you must spare me, for I can set you in the way of such a knightly adventure as will gladden your heart. Bethink you, sire, that this de Chargny and his comrades know nothing of their plans having gone awry. If I do but send them a message they will surely come to the postern gate. Then, if we have placed our bushment with skill we shall have such a capture and such a ransom as will fill your coffers. He and his comrades should be worth a good hundred thousand crowns.\"\n\nEdward spurned the Italian away from him with his foot until he sprawled among the rushes, but even as he lay there like a wounded snake his dark eyes never left the King's face.\n\n\"You double traitor! You would sell Calais to de Chargny, and then in turn you would sell de Chargny to me. How dare you suppose that I or any noble knight had such a huckster's soul as to think only of ransoms where honor is to be won? Could I or any true man be so caitiff and so thrall? You have sealed your own doom. Lead him out!\"\n\n\"One instant, I pray you, my fair and most sweet lord,\" cried the Prince. \"Assuage your wrath yet a little while, for this man's rede deserves perhaps more thought than we have given it. He has turned your noble soul sick with his talk of ransoms; but look at it, I pray you, from the side of honor, and where could we find such hope of worshipfully winning worship? I pray you to let me put my body in this adventure, for it is one from which, if rightly handled, much advancement is to be gained.\"\n\nEdward looked with sparkling eyes at the noble youth at his side. \"Never was hound more keen on the track of a stricken hart than you on the hope of honor, fair son,\" said he. \"How do you conceive the matter in your mind?\"\n\n\"De Chargny and his men will be such as are worth going far to meet, for he will have the pick of France under his banner that night. If we did as this man says and awaited him with the same number of lances, then I cannot think that there is any spot in Christendom where one would rather be than in Calais that night.\"\n\n\"By the rood, fair son, you are right!\" cried the King, his face shining with the thought. \"Now which of you, John Chandos or Walter Manny, will take the thing in charge?\" He looked mischievously from one to the other like a master who dangles a bone betwixt two fierce old hounds. All they had to say was in their burning, longing eyes. \"Nay, John, you must not take it amiss; but it is Walter's turn, and he shall have it.\"\n\n\"Shall we not all go under your banner, sire, or that of the Prince?\"\n\n\"Nay, it is not fitting that the royal banners of England should be advanced in so small an adventure. And yet, if you have space in your ranks for two more cavaliers, both the Prince and I would ride with you that night.\"\n\nThe young man stooped and kissed his father's hand.\n\n\"Take this man in your charge, Walter, and do with him as you will. Guard well lest he betray us once again. Take him from my sight, for his breath poisons the room. And now, Nigel, if that worthy graybeard of thine would fain twang his harp or sing to us\u2014but what in God's name would you have?\"\n\nHe had turned, to find his young host upon his knee and his flaxen head bent in entreaty.\n\n\"What is it, man? What do you crave?\"\n\n\"A boon, fair liege!\"\n\n\"Well, well, am I to have no peace to-night, with a traitor kneeling to me in front, and a true man on his knees behind? Out with it, Nigel. What would you have?\"\n\n\"To come with you to Calais.\"\n\n\"By the rood! your request is fair enough, seeing that our plot is hatched beneath your very roof. How say you, Walter? Will you take him, armor and all?\" asked King Edward.\n\n\"Say rather will you take me?\" said Chandos. \"We two are rivals in honor, Walter, but I am very sure that you would not hold me back.\"\n\n\"Nay, John, I will be proud to have the best lance in Christendom beneath my banner.\"\n\n\"And I to follow so knightly a leader. But Nigel Loring is my Squire, and so he comes with us also.\"\n\n\"Then that is settled,\" said the King, \"and now there is no need for hurry, since there can be no move until the moon has changed. So I pray you to pass the flagon once again, and to drink with me to the good knights of France. May they be of great heart and high of enterprise when we all meet once more within the castle wall of Calais!\"" + }, + { + "title": "IN THE HALL OF THE KNIGHT OF DUPLIN", + "text": "The King had come and had gone. Tilford Manor house stood once more dark and silent, but joy and contentment reigned within its walls. In one night every trouble had fallen away like some dark curtain which had shut out the sun. A princely sum of money had come from the King's treasurer, given in such fashion that there could be no refusal. With a bag of gold pieces at his saddlebow Nigel rode once more into Guildford, and not a beggar on the way who had not cause to bless his name.\n\nThere he had gone first to the goldsmith and had bought back cup and salver and bracelet, mourning with the merchant over the evil chance that gold and gold-work had for certain reasons which only those in the trade could fully understand gone up in value during the last week, so that already fifty gold pieces had to be paid more than the price which Nigel had received. In vain the faithful Aylward fretted and fumed and muttered a prayer that the day would come when he might feather a shaft in the merchant's portly paunch. The money had to be paid.\n\nThence Nigel hurried to Wat the armorer's and there he bought that very suit for which he had yearned so short a time before. Then and there he tried it on in the booth, Wat and his boy walking round him with spanner and wrench, fixing bolts and twisting rivets.\n\n\"How is that, my fair sir?\" cried the armorer as he drew the bassinet over the head and fastened it to the camail which extended to the shoulders. \"I swear by Tubal Cain that it fits you as the shell fits the crab! A finer suit never came from Italy or Spain.\"\n\nNigel stood in front of a burnished shield which served as a mirror, and he turned this way and that, preening himself like a little shining bird. His smooth breastplate, his wondrous joints with their deft protection by the disks at knee and elbow and shoulder, the beautifully flexible gauntlets and sollerets, the shirt of mail and the close-fitting greave-plates were all things of joy and of beauty in his eyes. He sprang about the shop to show his lightness, and then running out he placed his hand on the pommel and vaulted into Pommers' saddle, while Wat and his boy applauded in the doorway.\n\nThen springing off and running into the shop again he clanked down upon his knees before the image of the Virgin upon the smithy wall. There from his heart he prayed that no shadow or stain should come upon his soul or his honor whilst these arms incased his body, and that he might be strengthened to use them for noble and godly ends. A strange turn this to a religion of peace, and yet for many a century the sword and the faith had upheld each other and in a darkened world the best ideal of the soldier had turned in some dim groping fashion toward the light. \"Benedictus dominus deus meus qui docet manus meas ad Praelium et digitos meos ad bellum!\" There spoke the soul of the knightly soldier.\n\nSo the armor was trussed upon the armorer's mule and went back with them to Tilford, where Nigel put it on once more for the pleasure of the Lady Ermyntrude, who clapped her skinny hands and shed tears of mingled pain and joy\u2014pain that she should lose him, joy that he should go so bravely to the wars. As to her own future, it had been made easy for her, since it was arranged that a steward should look to the Tilford estate whilst she had at her disposal a suite of rooms in royal Windsor, where with other venerable dames of her own age and standing she could spend the twilight of her days discussing long-forgotten scandals and whispering sad things about the grandfathers and the grandmothers of the young courtiers all around them. There Nigel might leave her with an easy mind when he turned his face to France.\n\nBut there was one more visit to be paid and one more farewell to be spoken ere Nigel could leave the moorlands where he had dwelled so long. That evening he donned his brightest tunic, dark purple velvet of Genoa, with trimming of miniver, his hat with the snow-white feather curling round the front, and his belt of embossed silver round his loins. Mounted on lordly Pommers, with his hawk upon wrist and his sword by his side, never did fairer young gallant or one more modest in mind set forth upon such an errand. It was but the old Knight of Duplin to whom he would say farewell; but the Knight of Duplin had two daughters, Edith and Mary, and Edith was the fairest maid in all the heather-country.\n\nSir John Buttesthorn, the Knight of Duplin, was so called because he had been present at that strange battle, some eighteen years before, when the full power of Scotland had been for a moment beaten to the ground by a handful of adventurers and mercenaries, marching under the banner of no nation, but fighting in their own private quarrel. Their exploit fills no pages of history, for it is to the interest of no nation to record it, and yet the rumor and fame of the great fight bulked large in those times, for it was on that day when the flower of Scotland was left dead upon the field, that the world first understood that a new force had arisen in war, and that the English archer, with his robust courage and his skill with the weapon which he had wielded from his boyhood, was a power with which even the mailed chivalry of Europe had seriously to reckon.\n\nSir John after his return from Scotland had become the King's own head huntsman, famous through all England for his knowledge of venery, until at last, getting overheavy for his horses, he had settled in modest comfort into the old house of Cosford upon the eastern slope of the Hindhead hill. Here, as his face grew redder and his beard more white, he spent the evening of his days, amid hawks and hounds, a flagon of spiced wine ever at his elbow, and his swollen foot perched upon a stool before him. There it was that many an old comrade broke his journey as he passed down the rude road which led from London to Portsmouth, and thither also came the young gallants of the country to hear the stout knight's tales of old wars, or to learn, from him that lore of the forest and the chase which none could teach so well as he.\n\nBut sooth to say, whatever the old knight might think, it was not merely his old tales and older wine which drew the young men to Cosford, but rather the fair face of his younger daughter, or the strong soul and wise counsel of the elder. Never had two more different branches sprung from the same trunk. Both were tall and of a queenly graceful figure. But there all resemblance began and ended.\n\nEdith was yellow as the ripe corn, blue-eyed, winning, mischievous, with a chattering tongue, a merry laugh, and a smile which a dozen of young gallants, Nigel of Tilford at their head, could share equally amongst them. Like a young kitten she played with all things that she found in life, and some there were who thought that already the claws could be felt amid the patting of her velvet touch.\n\nMary was dark as night, grave-featured, plain-visaged, with steady brown eyes looking bravely at the world from under a strong black arch of brows. None could call her beautiful, and when her fair sister cast her arm round her and placed her cheek against hers, as was her habit when company was there, the fairness of the one and the plainness of the other leaped visibly to the eyes of all, each the clearer for that hard contrast. And yet, here and there, there was one who, looking at her strange, strong face, and at the passing gleams far down in her dark eyes, felt that this silent woman with her proud bearing and her queenly grace had in her something of strength, of reserve and of mystery which was more to them than all the dainty glitter of her sister.\n\nSuch were the ladies of Cosford toward whom Nigel Loring rode that night with doublet of Genoan velvet and the new white feather in his cap.\n\nHe had ridden over Thursley Ridge past that old stone where in days gone by at the place of Thor the wild Saxons worshiped their war-god. Nigel looked at it with a wary eye and spurred Pommers onward as he passed it, for still it was said that wild fires danced round it on the moonless nights, and they who had ears for such things could hear the scream and sob of those whose lives had been ripped from them that the fiend might be honored. Thor's stone, Thor's jumps, Thor's punch-bowl\u2014the whole countryside was one grim monument to the God of Battles, though the pious monks had changed his uncouth name for that of the Devil his father, so that it was the Devil's jumps and the Devil's punch-bowl of which they spoke. Nigel glanced back at the old gray boulder, and he felt for an instant a shudder pass through his stout heart. Was it the chill of the evening air, or was it that some inner voice had whispered to him of the day when he also might lie bound on such a rock and have such a blood-stained pagan crew howling around him.\n\nAn instant later the rock and his vague fear and all things else had passed from his mind, for there, down the yellow sandy path, the setting sun gleaming on her golden hair, her lithe figure bending and swaying with every heave of the cantering horse, was none other than the same fair Edith, whose face had come so often betwixt him and his sleep. His blood rushed hot to his face at the sight, for fearless of all else, his spirit was attracted and yet daunted by the delicate mystery of woman. To his pure and knightly soul not Edith alone, but every woman, sat high and aloof, enthroned and exalted, with a thousand mystic excellencies and virtues which raised her far above the rude world of man. There was joy in contact with them; and yet there was fear, fear lest his own unworthiness, his untrained tongue or rougher ways should in some way break rudely upon this delicate and tender thing. Such was his thought as the white horse cantered toward him; but a moment later his vague doubts were set at rest by the frank voice of the young girl, who waved her whip in merry greeting.\n\n\"Hail and well met, Nigel!\" she cried. \"Whither away this evening? Sure I am that it is not to see your friends of Cosford, for when did you ever don so brave a doublet for us? Come, Nigel, her name, that I may hate her for ever.\"\n\n\"Nay, Edith,\" said the young Squire, laughing back at the laughing girl. \"I was indeed coming to Cosford.\"\n\n\"Then we shall ride back together, for I will go no farther. How think you that I am looking?\"\n\nNigel's answer was in his eyes as he glanced at the fair flushed face, the golden hair, the sparkling eyes and the daintily graceful figure set off in a scarlet-and-black riding-dress. \"You are as fair as ever, Edith.\"\n\n\"Oh, cold of speech! Surely you were bred for the cloisters, and not for a lady's bower, Nigel. Had I asked such a question from young Sir George Brocas or the Squire of Fernhurst, he would have raved from here to Cosford. They are both more to my taste than you are, Nigel.\"\n\n\"It is the worse for me, Edith,\" said Nigel ruefully.\n\n\"Nay, but you must not lose heart.\"\n\n\"Have I not already lost it?\" said he.\n\n\"That is better,\" she cried, laughing. \"You can be quick enough when you choose, Master Malapert. But you are more fit to speak of high and weary matters with my sister Mary. She will have none of the prattle and courtesy of Sir George, and yet I love them well. But tell me, Nigel, why do you come to Cosford to-night?\"\n\n\"To bid you farewell.\"\n\n\"Me alone?\"\n\n\"Nay, Edith, you and your sister Mary and the good knight your father.\"\n\n\"Sir George would have said that he had come for me alone. Indeed you are but a poor courtier beside him. But is it true, Nigel, that you go to France?\"\n\n\"Yes, Edith.\"\n\n\"It was so rumored after the King had been to Tilford. The story goes that the King goes to France and you in his train. Is that true?\"\n\n\"Yes, Edith, it is true.\"\n\n\"Tell me, then, to what part you go, and when?\"\n\n\"That, alas! I may not say.\"\n\n\"Oh, in sooth!\" She tossed her fair head and rode onward in silence, with compressed lips and angry eyes.\n\nNigel glanced at her in surprise and dismay. \"Surely, Edith,\" said he at last, \"you have overmuch regard for my honor that you should wish me to break the word that I have given?\"\n\n\"Your honor belongs to you, and my likings belong to me,\" said she. \"You hold fast to the one, and I will do the same by the other.\"\n\nThey rode in silence through Thursley village. Then a thought came to her mind and in an instant her anger was forgotten and she was hot on a new scent.\n\n\"What would you do if I were injured, Nigel? I have heard my father say that small as you are there is no man in these parts could stand against you. Would you be my champion if I suffered wrong?\"\n\n\"Surely I or any man of gentle blood would be the champion of any woman who had suffered wrong.\"\n\n\"You or any and I or any\u2014what sort of speech is that? Is it a compliment, think you, to be mixed with a drove in that fashion? My question was of you and me. If I were wronged would you be my man?\"\n\n\"Try me and see, Edith!\"\n\n\"Then I will do so, Nigel. Either Sir George Brocas or the Squire of Fernhurst would gladly do what I ask, and yet I am of a mind, Nigel, to turn to you.\"\n\n\"I pray you to tell me what it is.\"\n\n\"You know Paul de la Fosse of Shalford?\"\n\n\"You mean the small man with the twisted back?\"\n\n\"He is no smaller than yourself, Nigel, and as to his back there are many folk that I know who would be glad to have his face.\"\n\n\"Nay, I am no judge of that, and I spoke out of no discourtesy. What of the man?\"\n\n\"He has flouted me, Nigel, and I would have revenge.\"\n\n\"What\u2014on that poor twisted creature?\"\n\n\"I tell you that he has flouted me!\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"I should have thought that a true cavalier would have flown to my aid, withouten all these questions. But I will tell you, since I needs must. Know then that he was one of those who came around me and professed to be my own. Then, merely because he thought that there were others who were as dear to me as himself he left me, and now he pays court to Maude Twynham, the little freckle-faced hussy in his village.\"\n\n\"But how has this hurt you, since he was no man of thine?\"\n\n\"He was one of my men, was he not? And he has made game of me to his wench. He has told her things about me. He has made me foolish in her eyes. Yes, yes, I can read it in her saffron face and in her watery eyes when we meet at the church door on Sundays. She smiles\u2014yes, smiles at me! Nigel, go to him! Do not slay him, nor even wound him, but lay his face open with thy riding-whip, and then come back to me and tell me how I can serve you.\"\n\nNigel's face was haggard with the strife within, for desire ran hot in every vein, and yet reason shrank with horror. \"By Saint Paul! Edith,\" he cried, \"I see no honor nor advancement of any sort in this thing which you have asked me to do. Is it for me to strike one who is no better than a cripple? For my manhood I could not do such a deed, and I pray you, dear lady, that you will set me some other task.\"\n\nHer eyes flashed at him in contempt. \"And you are a man-at-arms!\" she cried, laughing in bitter scorn. \"You are afraid of a little man who can scarce walk. Yes, yes, say what you will, I shall ever believe that you have heard of his skill at fence and of his great spirit, and that your heart has failed you! You are right, Nigel. He is indeed a perilous man. Had you done what I asked he would have slain you, and so you have shown your wisdom.\"\n\nNigel flushed and winced under the words, but he said no more, for his mind was fighting hard within him, striving to keep that high image of woman which seemed for a moment to totter on the edge of a fall. Together in silence, side by side, the little man and the stately woman, the yellow charger and the white jennet, passed up the sandy winding track with the gorse and the bracken head-high on either side. Soon a path branched off through a gateway marked with the boar-heads of the Buttesthorns, and there was the low widespread house heavily timbered, loud with the barking of dogs. The ruddy Knight limped forth with outstretched hand and roaring voice\u2014\n\n\"What how, Nigel! Good welcome and all hail! I had thought that you had given over poor friends like us, now that the King had made so much of you. The horses, varlets, or my crutch will be across you! Hush, Lydiard! Down, Pelamon! I can scarce hear my voice for your yelping. Mary, a cup of wine for young Squire Loring!\"\n\nShe stood framed in the doorway, tall, mystic, silent, with strange, wistful face and deep soul shining in her dark, questioning eyes. Nigel kissed the hand that she held out, and all his faith in woman and his reverence came back to him as he looked at her. Her sister had slipped behind her and her fair elfish face smiled her forgiveness of Nigel over Mary's shoulder.\n\nThe Knight of Duplin leaned his weight upon the young man's arm and limped his way across the great high-roofed hall to his capacious oaken chair. \"Come, come, the stool, Edith!\" he cried. \"As God is my help, that girl's mind swarms with gallants as a granary with rats. Well, Nigel, I hear strange tales of your spear-running at Tilford and of the visit of the King. How seemed he? And my old friend Chandos\u2014many happy hours in the woodlands have we had together\u2014and Manny too, he was ever a bold and a hard rider\u2014what news of them all?\"\n\nNigel told to the old Knight all that had occurred, saying little of his own success and much of his own failure, yet the eyes of the dark woman burned the brighter as she sat at her tapestry and listened.\n\nSir John followed the story with a running fire of oaths, prayers, thumps with his great fist and flourishes of his crutch. \"Well, well, lad, you could scarce expect to hold your saddle against Manny, and you have carried yourself well. We are proud of you, Nigel, for you are our own man, reared in the heather country. But indeed I take shame that you are not more skilled in the mystery of the woods, seeing that I have had the teaching of you, and that no one in broad England is my master at the craft. I pray you to fill your cup again whilst I make use of the little time that is left to us.\"\n\nAnd straightway the old Knight began a long and weary lecture upon the times of grace and when each beast and bird was seasonable, with many anecdotes, illustrations, warnings and exceptions, drawn from his own great experience. He spoke also of the several ranks and grades of the chase: how the hare, hart and boar must ever take precedence over the buck, the doe, the fox, the marten and the roe, even as a knight banneret does over a knight, while these in turn are of a higher class to the badger, the wildcat or the otter, who are but the common populace of the world of beasts. Of blood-stains also he spoke\u2014how the skilled hunter may see at a glance if blood be dark and frothy, which means a mortal hurt, or thin and clear, which means that the arrow has struck a bone.\n\n\"By such signs,\" said he, \"you will surely know whether to lay on the hounds and cast down the blinks which hinder the stricken deer in its flight. But above all I pray you, Nigel, to have a care in the use of the terms of the craft, lest you should make some blunder at table, so that those who are wiser may have the laugh of you, and we who love you may be shamed.\"\n\n\"Nay, Sir John,\" said Nigel. \"I think that after your teaching I can hold my place with the others.\"\n\nThe old Knight shook his white head doubtfully. \"There is so much to be learned that there is no one who can be said to know all,\" said he. \"For example, Nigel, it is sooth that for every collection of beasts of the forest, and for every gathering of birds of the air, there is their own private name so that none may be confused with another.\"\n\n\"I know it, fair sir.\"\n\n\"You know it, Nigel, but you do not know each separate name, else are you a wiser man than I had thought you. In truth\u2014none can say that they know all, though I have myself picked off eighty, and six for a wager at court, and it is said that the chief huntsman of the Duke of Burgundy has counted over a hundred\u2014but it is in my mind that he may have found them as he went, for there was none to say him nay. Answer me now, lad, how would you say if you saw ten badgers together in the forest?\"\n\n\"A cete of badgers, fair sir.\"\n\n\"Good, Nigel\u2014good, by my faith! And if you walk in Woolmer Forest and see a swarm of foxes, how would you call it?\"\n\n\"A skulk of foxes.\"\n\n\"And if they be lions?\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, I am not like to meet several lions in Woolmer Forest.\"\n\n\"Aye, lad, but there are other forests besides Woolmer, and other lands besides England, and who can tell how far afield such a knight errant as Nigel of Tilford may go, when he sees worship to be won? We will say that you were in the deserts of Nubia, and that afterward at the court of the great Sultan you wished to say that you had seen several lions, which is the first beast of the chase, being the king of all animals. How then would you say it?\"\n\nNigel scratched his head. \"Surely, fair sir, I would be content to say that I had seen a number of lions, if indeed I could say aught after so wondrous an adventure.\"\n\n\"Nay, Nigel, a huntsman would have said that he had seen a pride of lions, and so proved that he knew the language of the chase. Now had it been boars instead of lions?\"\n\n\"One says a singular of boars.\"\n\n\"And if they be swine?\"\n\n\"Surely it is a herd of swine.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, lad, it is indeed sad to see how little you know. Your hands, Nigel, were always better than your head. No man of gentle birth would speak of a herd of swine; that is the peasant speech. If you drive them it is a herd. If you hunt them it is other. What call you them, then, Edith?\"\n\n\"Nay, I know not,\" said the girl listlessly. A crumpled note brought in by a varlet was clinched in her right hand and her blue eyes looked afar into the deep shadows of the roof.\n\n\"But you can tell us, Mary?\"\n\n\"Surely, sweet sir, one talks of a sounder of swine.\"\n\nThe old Knight laughed exultantly. \"Here is a pupil who never brings me shame!\" he cried. \"Be it lore\u2014of chivalry or heraldry or woodcraft or what you will, I can always turn to Mary. Many a man can she put to the blush.\"\n\n\"Myself among them,\" said Nigel.\n\n\"Ah, lad, you are a Solomon to some of them. Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young Squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?\"\n\n\"Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants.\"\n\n\"Good, Nigel\u2014a nye of pheasants, even as it is a gaggle of geese or a badling of ducks, a fall of woodcock or a wisp of snipe. But a covey of pheasants! What sort of talk is that? I made him sit even where you are sitting, Nigel, and I saw the bottom of two pots of Rhenish ere I let him up. Even then I fear that he had no great profit from his lesson, for he was casting his foolish eyes at Edith when he should have been turning his ears to her father. But where is the wench?\"\n\n\"She hath gone forth, father.\"\n\n\"She ever doth go forth when there is a chance of learning aught that is useful indoors. But supper will soon be ready, and there is a boar's ham fresh from the forest with which I would ask your help, Nigel, and a side of venison from the King's own chase. The tinemen and verderers have not forgotten me yet, and my larder is ever full. Blow three moots on the horn, Mary, that the varlets may set the table, for the growing shadow and my loosening belt warn me that it is time.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL FOUGHT THE TWISTED MAN OF SHALFORD", + "text": "In the days of which you read all classes, save perhaps the very poor, fared better in meat and in drink than they have ever done since. The country was covered with woodlands\u2014there were seventy separate forests in England alone, some of them covering half a shire. Within these forests the great beasts of the chase were strictly preserved, but the smaller game, the hares, the rabbits, the birds, which swarmed round the coverts, found their way readily into the poor man's pot. Ale was very cheap, and cheaper still was the mead which every peasant could make for himself out of the wild honey in the tree-trunks. There were many tea-like drinks also, which were brewed by the poor at no expense: mallow tea, tansy tea, and others the secret of which has passed.\n\nAmid the richer classes there was rude profusion, great joints ever on the sideboard, huge pies, beasts of the field and beasts of the chase, with ale and rough French or Rhenish wines to wash them down. But the very rich had attained to a high pitch of luxury in their food, and cookery was a science in which the ornamentation of the dish was almost as important as the dressing of the food. It was gilded, it was silvered, it was painted, it was surrounded with flame. From the boar and the peacock down to such strange food as the porpoise and the hedgehog, every dish had its own setting and its own sauce, very strange and very complex, with flavorings of dates, currants, cloves, vinegar, sugar and honey, of cinnamon, ground ginger, sandalwood, saffron, brawn and pines. It was the Norman tradition to eat in moderation, but to have a great profusion of the best and of the most delicate from which to choose. From them came this complex cookery, so unlike the rude and often gluttonous simplicity of the old Teutonic stock.\n\nSir John Buttesthorn was of that middle class who fared in the old fashion, and his great oak supper-table groaned beneath the generous pastries, the mighty joints and the great flagons. Below were the household, above on a raised dais the family table, with places ever ready for those frequent guests who dropped in from the high road outside. Such a one had just come, an old priest, journeying from the Abbey of Chertsey to the Priory of Saint John at Midhurst. He passed often that way, and never without breaking his journey at the hospitable board of Cosford.\n\n\"Welcome again, good Father Athanasius!\" cried the burly Knight. \"Come sit here on my right and give me the news of the countryside, for there is never a scandal but the priests are the first to know it.\"\n\nThe priest, a kindly, quiet man, glanced at an empty place upon the farther side of his host. \"Mistress Edith?\" said he.\n\n\"Aye, aye, where is the hussy?\" cried her father impatiently. \"Mary, I beg you to have the horn blown again, that she may know that the supper is on the table. What can the little owlet do abroad at this hour of the night?\"\n\nThere was trouble in the priest's gentle eyes as he touched the Knight upon the sleeve. \"I have seen Mistress Edith within this hour,\" said he. \"I fear that she will hear no horn that you may blow, for she must be at Milford ere now.\"\n\n\"At Milford? What does she there?\"\n\n\"I pray you, good Sir John, to abate your voice somewhat, for indeed this matter is for our private discourse, since it touches the honor of a lady.\"\n\n\"Her honor?\" Sir John's ruddy face had turned redder still, as he stared at the troubled features of the priest. \"Her honor, say you\u2014the honor of my daughter? Make good those words, or never set your foot over the threshold of Cosford again!\"\n\n\"I trust that I have done no wrong, Sir John, but indeed I must say what I have seen, else would I be a false friend and an unworthy priest.\"\n\n\"Haste man, haste! What in the Devil's name have you seen?\"\n\n\"Know you a little man, partly misshapen, named Paul de la Fosse?\"\n\n\"I know him well. He is a man of noble family and coat-armor, being the younger brother of Sir Eustace de la Fosse of Shalford. Time was when I had thought that I might call him son, for there was never a day that he did not pass with my girls, but I fear that his crooked back sped him ill in his wooing.\"\n\n\"Alas, Sir John! It is his mind that is more crooked than his back. He is a perilous man with women, for the Devil hath given him such a tongue and such an eye that he charms them even as the basilisk. Marriage may be in their mind, but never in his, so that I could count a dozen and more whom he has led to their undoing. It is his pride and his boast over the whole countryside.\"\n\n\"Well, well, and what is this to me or mine?\"\n\n\"Even now, Sir John, as I rode my mule up the road I met this man speeding toward his home. A woman rode by his side, and though her face was hooded I heard her laugh as she passed me. That laugh I have heard before, and it was under this very roof, from the lips of Mistress Edith.\"\n\nThe Knight's knife dropped from his hand. But the debate had been such that neither Mary nor Nigel could fail to have heard it. Mid the rough laughter and clatter of voices from below the little group at the high table had a privacy of their own.\n\n\"Fear not, father,\" said the girl\u2014\"indeed, the good Father Athanasius hath fallen into error, and Edith will be with us anon. I have heard her speak of this man many times of late, and always with bitter words.\"\n\n\"It is true, sir,\" cried Nigel eagerly. \"It was only this very evening as we rode over Thursley Moor that Mistress Edith told me that she counted him not a fly, and that she would be glad if he were beaten for his evil deeds.\"\n\nBut the wise priest shook his silvery locks. \"Nay, there is ever danger when a woman speaks like that. Hot hate is twin brother to hot love. Why should she speak so if there were not some bond between them?\"\n\n\"And yet,\" said Nigel, \"what can have changed her thoughts in three short hours? She was here in the hall with us since I came. By Saint Paul, I will not believe it!\"\n\nMary's face darkened. \"I call to mind,\" said she, \"that a note was brought her by Hannekin the stable varlet when you were talking to us, fair sir, of the terms of the chase. She read it and went forth.\"\n\nSir John sprang to his feet, but sank into his chair again with a groan. \"Would that I were dead,\" he cried, \"ere I saw dishonor come upon my house, and am so tied with this accursed foot that I can neither examine if it be true, nor yet avenge it! If my son Oliver were here, then all would be well. Send me this stable varlet that I may question him.\"\n\n\"I pray you, fair and honored sir,\" said Nigel, \"that you will take me for your son this night, that I may handle this matter in the way which seems best. On jeopardy of my honor I will do all that a man may.\"\n\n\"Nigel, I thank you. There is no man in Christendom to whom I would sooner turn.\"\n\n\"But I would lean your mind in one matter, fair sir. This man, Paul de la Fosse, owns broad acres, as I understand, and comes of noble blood. There is no reason if things be as we fear that he should not marry your daughter?\"\n\n\"Nay, she could not wish for better.\"\n\n\"It is well. And first I would question this Hannekin; but it shall be done in such a fashion that none shall know, for indeed it is not a matter for the gossip of servants. But if you will show me the man, Mistress Mary, I will take him out to tend my own horse, and so I shall learn all that he has to tell.\"\n\nNigel was absent for some time, and when he returned the shadow upon his face brought little hope to the anxious hearts at the high table. \"I have locked him in the stable loft, lest he talk too much,\" said he, \"for my questions must have shown him whence the wind blew. It was indeed from this man that the note came, and he had brought with him a spare horse for the lady.\"\n\nThe old Knight groaned, and his face sank upon his hands.\n\n\"Nay, father, they watch you!\" whispered Mary. \"For the honor of our house let us keep a bold face to all.\" Then, raising her young clear voice, so that it sounded through the room: \"If you ride eastward, Nigel, I would fain go with you, that my sister may not come back alone.\"\n\n\"We will ride together, Mary,\" said Nigel, rising; then in a lower voice: \"But we cannot go alone, and if we take a servant all is known. I pray you to stay at home and leave the matter with me.\"\n\n\"Nay, Nigel, she may sorely need a woman's aid, and what woman should it be save her own sister? I can take my tire-woman with us.\"\n\n\"Nay, I shall ride with you myself if your impatience can keep within the powers of my mule,\" said the old priest.\n\n\"But it is not your road, father?\"\n\n\"The only road of a true priest is that which leads to the good of others. Come, my children, and we will go together.\"\n\nAnd so it was that stout Sir John Buttesthorn, the aged Knight of Duplin, was left alone at his own high table, pretending to eat, pretending to drink, fidgeting in his seat, trying hard to seem unconcerned with his mind and body in a fever, while below him his varlets and handmaids laughed and jested, clattering their cups and clearing their trenchers, all unconscious of the dark shadow which threw its gloom over the lonely man upon the dais above.\n\nMeantime the Lady Mary upon the white jennet which her sister had ridden on the same evening, Nigel on his warhorse, and the priest on the mule, clattered down the rude winding road which led to London. The country on either side was a wilderness of heather moors and of morasses from which came the strange crying of night-fowl. A half-moon shone in the sky between the rifts of hurrying clouds. The lady rode in silence, absorbed in the thought of the task before them, the danger and the shame.\n\nNigel chatted in a low tone with the priest. From him he learned more of the evil name of this man whom they followed. His house at Shalford was a den of profligacy and vice. No woman could cross that threshold and depart unstained. In some strange fashion, inexplicable and yet common, the man, with all his evil soul and his twisted body, had yet some strange fascination for women, some mastery over them which compelled them to his will. Again and again he had brought ruin to a household, again and again his adroit tongue and his cunning wit had in some fashion saved him from the punishment of his deeds. His family was great in the county, and his kinsmen held favor with the King, so that his neighbors feared to push things too far against him. Such was the man, malignant and ravenous, who had stooped like some foul night-hawk and borne away to his evil nest the golden beauty of Cosford. Nigel said little as he listened, but he raised his hunting-dagger to his tightened lips, and thrice he kissed the cross of its handle.\n\nThey had passed over the moors and through the village of Milford and the little township of Godalming, until their path turned southward over the Pease marsh and crossed the meadows of Shalford. There on the dark hillside glowed the red points of light which marked the windows of the house which they sought. A somber arched avenue of oak-trees led up to it, and then they were in the moon-silvered clearing in front.\n\nFrom the shadow of the arched door there sprang two rough serving-men, bearded and gruff, great cudgels in their hands, to ask them who they were and what their errand. The Lady Mary had slipped from her horse and was advancing to the door, but they rudely barred her way.\n\n\"Nay, nay, our master needs no more!\" cried one, with a hoarse laugh. \"Stand back, mistress, whoever you be! The house is shut, and our lord sees no guests to-night.\"\n\n\"Fellow,\" said Nigel, speaking low and clear, \"stand back from us! Our errand is with your master.\"\n\n\"Bethink you, my children,\" cried the old priest, \"would it not be best perchance, that I go in to him and see whether the voice of the Church may not soften this hard heart? I fear bloodshed if you enter.\"\n\n\"Nay, father, I pray you to stay here for the nonce,\" said Nigel. \"And you, Mary, do you bide with the good priest, for we know not what may be within.\"\n\nAgain he turned to the door, and again the two men barred his passage.\n\n\"Stand back, I say, back for your lives!\" said Nigel. \"By Saint Paul! I should think it shame to soil my sword with such as you, but my soul is set, and no man shall bar my path this night.\"\n\nThe men shrank from the deadly menace of that gentle voice.\n\n\"Hold!\" said one of them, peering through the darkness, \"is it not Squire Loring of Tilford?\"\n\n\"That is indeed my name.\"\n\n\"Had you spoken it I for one would not have stopped your way. Put down your staff, Wat, for this is no stranger, but the Squire of Tilford.\"\n\n\"As well for him,\" grumbled the other, lowering his cudgel with an inward prayer of thanksgiving. \"Had it been otherwise I should have had blood upon my soul to-night. But our master said nothing of neighbors when he ordered us to hold the door. I will enter and ask him what is his will.\"\n\nBut already Nigel was past them and had pushed open the outer door. Swift as he was, the Lady Mary was at his very heels, and the two passed together into the hall beyond.\n\nIt was a great room, draped and curtained with black shadows, with one vivid circle of light in the center, where two oil lamps shone upon a small table. A meal was laid upon the table, but only two were seated at it, and there were no servants in the room. At the near end was Edith, her golden hair loose and streaming down over the scarlet and black of her riding-dress.\n\nAt the farther end the light beat strongly upon the harsh face and the high-drawn misshapen shoulders of the lord of the house. A tangle of black hair surmounted a high rounded forehead, the forehead of a thinker, with two deep-set cold gray eyes twinkling sharply from under tufted brows. His nose was curved and sharp, like the beak of some cruel bird, but below the whole of his clean-shaven powerful face was marred by the loose slabbing mouth and the round folds of the heavy chin. His knife in one hand and a half-gnawed bone in the other, he looked fiercely up, like some beast disturbed in his den, as the two intruders broke in upon his hall.\n\nNigel stopped midway between the door and the table. His eyes and those of Paul de la Fosse were riveted upon each other. But Mary, with her woman's soul flooded over with love and pity, had rushed forward and cast her arms round her younger sister. Edith had sprung up from her chair, and with averted face tried to push the other away from her.\n\n\"Edith, Edith! By the Virgin, I implore you to come back with us, and to leave this wicked man!\" cried Mary. \"Dear sister, you would not break our father's heart, nor bring his gray head in dishonor to the grave! Come back Edith, come back and all is well.\"\n\nBut Edith pushed her away, and her fair cheeks were flushed with her anger. \"What right have you over me, Mary, you who are but two years older, that you should follow me over the countryside as though I were a runagate villain and you my mistress? Do you yourself go back, and leave me to do that which seems best in my own eyes.\"\n\nBut Mary still held her in her arms, and still strove to soften the hard and angry heart. \"Our mother is dead, Edith. I thank God that she died ere she saw you under this roof! But I stand for her, as I have done all my life, since I am indeed your elder. It is with her voice that I beg and pray you that you will not trust this man further, and that you will come back ere it be too late!\"\n\nEdith writhed from her grasp, and stood flushed and defiant, with gleaming, angry eyes fixed upon her sister. \"You may speak evil of him now,\" said she, \"but there was a time when Paul de la Fosse came to Cosford, and who so gentle and soft-spoken to him then as wise, grave, sister Mary? But he has learned to love another; so now he is the wicked man, and it is shame to be seen under his roof! From what I see of my good pious sister and her cavalier it is sin for another to ride at night with a man at your side, but it comes easy enough to you. Look at your own eye, good sister, ere you would take the speck from that of another.\"\n\nMary stood irresolute and greatly troubled, holding down her pride and her anger, but uncertain how best to deal with this strong wayward spirit.\n\n\"It is not a time for bitter words, dear sister,\" said she, and again she laid her hand upon her sister's sleeve. \"All that you say may be true. There was indeed a time when this man was friend to us both, and I know even as you do the power which he may have to win a woman's heart. But I know him now, and you do not. I know the evil that he has wrought, the dishonor that he has brought, the perjury that lies upon his soul, the confidence betrayed, the promise unfulfilled\u2014all this I know. Am I to see my own sister caught in the same well-used trap? Has it shut upon you, child? Am I indeed already too late? For God's sake, tell me, Edith, that it is not so?\"\n\nEdith plucked her sleeve from her sister and made two swift steps to the head of the table. Paul de la Fosse still sat silent with his eyes upon Nigel. Edith laid her hand upon his shoulder: \"This is the man I love, and the only man that I have ever loved. This is my husband,\" said she.\n\nAt the word Mary gave a cry of joy.\n\n\"And is it so?\" she cried. \"Nay, then all is in honor, and God will see to the rest. If you are man and wife before the altar, then indeed why should I, or any other, stand between you? Tell me that it is indeed so, and I return this moment to make your father a happy man.\"\n\nEdith pouted like a naughty child. \"We are man and wife in the eyes of God. Soon also we shall be wedded before all the world. We do but wait until next Monday when Paul's brother, who is a priest at St. Albans, will come to wed us. Already a messenger has sped for him, and he will come, will he not, dear love?\"\n\n\"He will come,\" said the master of Shalford, still with his eyes fixed upon the silent Nigel.\n\n\"It is a lie; he will not come,\" said a voice from the door.\n\nIt was the old priest, who had followed the others as far as the threshold.\n\n\"He will not come,\" he repeated as he advanced into the room. \"Daughter, my daughter, hearken to the words of one who is indeed old enough to be your earthly father. This lie has served before. He has ruined others before you with it. The man has no brother at Saint Albans. I know his brothers well, and there is no priest among them. Before Monday, when it is all too late, you will have found the truth as others have done before you. Trust him not, but come with us!\"\n\nPaul de la Fosse looked up at her with a quick smile and patted the hand upon his shoulder.\n\n\"Do you speak to them, Edith,\" said he.\n\nHer eyes flashed with scorn as she surveyed them each in turn, the woman, the youth and the priest.\n\n\"I have but one word to say to them,\" said she. \"It is that they go hence and trouble us no more. Am I not a free woman? Have I not said that this is the only man I ever loved? I have loved him long. He did not know it, and in despair he turned to another. Now he knows all and never again can doubt come between us. Therefore I will stay here at Shalford and come to Cosford no more save upon the arm of my husband. Am I so weak that I would believe the tales you tell against him? Is it hard for a jealous woman and a wandering priest to agree upon a lie? No, no, Mary, you can go hence and take your cavalier and your priest with you, for here I stay, true to my love and safe in my trust upon his honor!\"\n\n\"Well spoken, on my faith, my golden bird!\" said the little master of Shalford. \"Let me add my own word to that which has been said. You would not grant me any virtue in your unkindly speech, good Lady Mary, and yet you must needs confess that at least I have good store of patience, since I have not set my dogs upon your friends who have come between me and my ease. But even to the most virtuous there comes at last a time when poor human frailty may prevail, and so I pray you to remove both yourself, your priest and your valiant knight errant, lest perhaps there be more haste and less dignity when at last you do take your leave. Sit down, my fair love, and let us turn once more to our supper.\" He motioned her to her chair, and he filled her wine-cup as well as his own.\n\nNigel had said no word since he had entered the room, but his look had never lost its set purpose, nor had his brooding eyes ever wandered from the sneering face of the deformed master of Shalford. Now he turned with swift decision to Mary and to the priest.\n\n\"That is over,\" said he in a low voice. \"You have done all that you could, and now it is for me to play my part as well as I am able. I pray you, Mary, and you, good father, that you will await me outside.\"\n\n\"Nay, Nigel, if there is danger\u2014\"\n\n\"It is easier for me, Mary, if you are not there. I pray you to go. I can speak to this man more at my ease.\"\n\nShe looked at him with questioning eyes and then obeyed.\n\nNigel plucked at the priest's gown.\n\n\"I pray you, father, have you your book of offices with you?\"\n\n\"Surely, Nigel, it is ever in my breast.\"\n\n\"Have it ready, father!\"\n\n\"For what, my son?\"\n\n\"There are two places you may mark; there is the service of marriage and there is the prayer for the dying. Go with her, father, and be ready at my call.\"\n\nHe closed the door behind them and was alone with this ill-matched couple. They both turned in their chairs to look at him, Edith with a defiant face, the man with a bitter smile upon his lips and malignant hatred in his eyes.\n\n\"What,\" said he, \"the knight errant still lingers? Have we not heard of his thirst for glory? What new venture does he see that he should tarry here?\"\n\nNigel walked to the table.\n\n\"There is no glory and little venture,\" said he; \"but I have come for a purpose and I must do it. I learn from your own lips, Edith, that you will not leave this man.\"\n\n\"If you have ears you have heard it.\"\n\n\"You are, as you have said, a free woman, and who can gainsay you? But I have known you, Edith, since we played as boy and girl on the heather-hills together. I will save you from this man's cunning and from your own foolish weakness.\"\n\n\"What would you do?\"\n\n\"There is a priest without. He will marry you now. I will see you married ere I leave this hall.\"\n\n\"Or else?\" sneered the man.\n\n\"Or else you never leave this hall alive. Nay, call not for your servants or your dogs! By Saint Paul! I swear to you that this matter lies between us three, and that if any fourth comes at your call you, at least, shall never live to see what comes of it! Speak then, Paul of Shalford! Will you wed this woman now, or will you not?\"\n\nEdith was on her feet with outstretched arms between them. \"Stand back, Nigel! He is small and weak. You would not do him a hurt! Did you not say so this very day? For God's sake, Nigel, do not look at him so! There is death in your eyes.\"\n\n\"A snake may be small and weak, Edith, yet every honest man would place his heel upon it. Do you stand back yourself, for my purpose is set.\"\n\n\"Paul!\" she turned her eyes to the pale sneering face. \"Bethink you, Paul! Why should you not do what he asks? What matter to you whether it be now or on Monday? I pray you, dear Paul, for my sake let him have his way! Your brother can read the service again if it so please him. Let us wed now, Paul, and then all is well.\"\n\nHe had risen from his chair, and he dashed aside her appealing hands. \"You foolish woman,\" he snarled, \"and you, my savior of fair damsels, who are so bold against a cripple, you have both to learn that if my body be weak there is the soul of my breed within it! To marry because a boasting, ranting, country Squire would have me do so\u2014no, by the soul of God, I will die first! On Monday I will marry, and no day sooner, so let that be your answer.\"\n\n\"It is the answer that I wished,\" said Nigel, \"for indeed I see no happiness in this marriage, and the other may well be the better way. Stand aside, Edith!\" He gently forced her to one side and drew his sword.\n\nDe la Fosse cried aloud at the sight. \"I have no sword. You would not murder me?\" said he, leaning back with haggard-face and burning eyes against his chair. The bright steel shone in the lamp-light. Edith shrank back, her hand over her face.\n\n\"Take this sword!\" said Nigel, and he turned the hilt to the cripple. \"Now!\" he added, as he drew his hunting knife. \"Kill me if you can, Paul de la Fosse, for as God is my help I will do as much for you!\"\n\nThe woman, half swooning and yet spellbound and fascinated, looked on at that strange combat. For a moment the cripple stood with an air of doubt, the sword grasped in his nerveless fingers. Then as he saw the tiny blade in Nigel's hand the greatness of the advantage came home to him, and a cruel smile tightened his loose lips. Slowly, step by step he advanced, his chin sunk upon his chest, his eyes glaring from under the thick tangle of his brows like fires through the brushwood. Nigel waited for him, his left hand forward, his knife down by his hip, his face grave, still and watchful.\n\nNearer and nearer yet, with stealthy step, and then with a bound and a cry of hatred and rage Paul de la Fosse had sped his blow. It was well judged and well swung, but point would have been wiser than edge against that supple body and those active feet. Quick as a flash, Nigel had sprung inside the sweep of the blade, taking a flesh wound on his left forearm, as he pressed it under the hilt. The next instant the cripple was on the ground and Nigel's dagger was at his throat.\n\n\"You dog!\" he whispered. \"I have you at my mercy! Quick ere I strike, and for the last time! Will you marry or no?\"\n\nThe crash of the fall and the sharp point upon his throat had cowed the man's spirit. He looked up with a white face and the sweat gleamed upon his forehead. There was terror in his eyes.\n\n\"Nay, take your knife from me!\" he cried. \"I cannot die like a calf in the shambles.\"\n\n\"Will you marry?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I will wed her! After all she is a good wench and I might do worse. Let me up! I tell you I will marry her! What more would you have?\"\n\nNigel stood above him with his foot upon his misshapen body. He had picked up his sword, and the point rested upon the cripple's breast.\n\n\"Nay, you will bide where you are! If you are to live\u2014and my conscience cries loud against it\u2014at least your wedding will be such as your sins have deserved. Lie there, like the crushed worm that you are!\" Then he raised his voice. \"Father Athanasius!\" he cried. \"What ho! Father Athanasius!\"\n\nThe old priest ran to the cry, and so did the Lady Mary. A strange sight it was that met them now in the circle of light, the frightened girl, half-unconscious against the table, the prostrate cripple, and Nigel with foot and sword upon his body.\n\n\"Your book, father!\" cried Nigel. \"I know not if what we do is good or ill; but we must wed them, for there is no way out.\"\n\nBut the girl by the table had given a great cry, and she was clinging and sobbing with her arms round her sister's neck.\n\n\"Oh, Mary, I thank the Virgin that you have come! I thank the Virgin that it is not too late! What did he say? He said that he was a de la Fosse and that he would not be married at the sword-point. My heart went out to him when he said it. But I, am I not a Buttesthorn, and shall it be said that I would marry a man who could be led to the altar with a knife at his throat? No, no, I see him as he is! I know him now, the mean spirit, the lying tongue! Can I not read in his eyes that he has indeed deceived me, that he would have left me as you say that he has left others? Take me home, Mary, my sister, for you have plucked me back this night from the very mouth of Hell!\"\n\nAnd so it was that the master of Shalford, livid and brooding, was left with his wine at his lonely table, while the golden beauty of Cosford, hot with shame and anger, her fair face wet with tears, passed out safe from the house of infamy into the great calm and peace of the starry night." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE COMRADES JOURNEYED DOWN THE OLD, OLD ROAD", + "text": "And now the season of the moonless nights was drawing nigh and the King's design was ripe. Very secretly his preparations were made. Already the garrison of Calais, which consisted of five hundred archers and two hundred men-at-arms, could, if forewarned, resist any attack made upon it. But it was the King's design not merely to resist the attack, but to capture the attackers. Above all it was his wish to find the occasion for one of those adventurous passages of arms which had made his name famous throughout Christendom as the very pattern and leader of knight-errant chivalry.\n\nBut the affair wanted careful handling. The arrival of any, reinforcements, or even the crossing of any famous soldier, would have alarmed the French and warned them that their plot had been discovered. Therefore it was in twos and threes in the creyers and provision ships which were continually passing from shore to shore that the chosen warriors and their squires were brought to Calais. There they were passed at night through the water-gate into the castle where they could lie hidden, unknown to the townsfolk, until the hour for action had come.\n\nNigel had received word from Chandos to join him at \"The Sign of the Broom-Pod\" in Winchelsea. Three days beforehand he and Aylward rode from Tilford all armed and ready for the wars. Nigel was in hunting-costume, blithe and gay, with his precious armor and his small baggage trussed upon the back of a spare horse which Aylward led by the bridle. The archer had himself a good black mare, heavy and slow, but strong enough to be fit to carry his powerful frame. In his brigandine of chain mail and his steel cap, with straight strong sword by his side, his yellow longbow jutting over his shoulder, and his quiver of arrows supported by a scarlet baldric, he was such a warrior as any knight might well be proud to have in his train. All Tilford trailed behind them, as they rode slowly over the long slope of heath land which skirts the flank of Crooksbury Hill.\n\nAt the summit of the rise Nigel reined in Pommers and looked back at the little village behind him. There was the old dark manor house, with one bent figure leaning upon a stick and gazing dimly after him from beside the door. He looked at the high-pitched roof, the timbered walls, the long trail of swirling blue smoke which rose from the single chimney, and the group of downcast old servants who lingered at the gate, John the cook, Weathercote the minstrel, and Red Swire the broken soldier. Over the river amid the trees he could see the grim, gray tower of Waverley, and even as he looked, the iron bell, which had so often seemed to be the hoarse threatening cry of an enemy, clanged out its call to prayer. Nigel doffed his velvet cap and prayed also\u2014prayed that peace might remain at home, and good warfare, in which honor and fame should await him, might still be found abroad. Then, waving his hand to the people, he turned his horse's head and rode slowly eastward. A moment later Aylward broke from the group of archers and laughing girls who clung to his bridle and his stirrup straps, and rode on, blowing kisses over his shoulder. So at last the two comrades, gentle and simple, were fairly started on their venture.\n\nThere are two seasons of color in those parts: the yellow, when the countryside is flaming with the gorse-blossoms, and the crimson, when all the long slopes are smoldering with the heather. So it was now. Nigel looked back from time to time, as he rode along the narrow track where the ferns and the ling brushed his feet on either side, and as he looked it seemed to him that wander where he might he would never see a fairer scene than that of his own home. Far to the westward, glowing in the morning light, rolled billow after billow of ruddy heather land, until they merged into the dark shadows of Woolmer Forest and the pale clear green of the Butser chalk downs. Never in his life had Nigel wandered far beyond these limits, and the woodlands, the down and the heather were dear to his soul. It gave him a pang in his heart now as he turned his face away from them; but if home lay to the westward, out there to the eastward was the great world of adventure, the noble stage where each of his kinsmen in turn had played his manly part and left a proud name behind.\n\nHow often he had longed for this day! And now it had come with no shadow cast behind it. Dame Ermyntrude was under the King's protection. The old servants had their future assured. The strife with the monks of Waverley had been assuaged. He had a noble horse under him, the best of weapons, and a stout follower at his back. Above all he was bound on a gallant errand with the bravest knight in England as his leader. All these thoughts surged together in his mind, and he whistled and sang, as he rode, out of the joy of his heart, while Pommers sidled and curveted in sympathy with the mood of his master. Presently, glancing back, he saw from Aylward's downcast eyes and Puckered brow that the archer was clouded with trouble. He reined his horse to let him come abreast of him.\n\n\"How now, Aylward?\" said he. \"Surely of all men in England you and I should be the most blithe this morning, since we ride forward with all hopes of honorable advancement. By Saint Paul! ere we see these heather hills once more we shall either worshipfully win worship, or we shall venture our persons in the attempt. These be glad thoughts, and why should you be downcast?\"\n\nAylward shrugged his broad shoulders, and a wry smile dawned upon his rugged face. \"I am indeed as limp as a wetted bowstring,\" said he. \"It is the nature of a man that he should be sad when he leaves the woman he loves.\"\n\n\"In truth, yes!\" cried Nigel, and in a flash the dark eyes of Mary Buttesthorn rose before him, and he heard her low, sweet, earnest voice as he had heard it that night when they brought her frailer sister back from Shalford Manor, a voice which made all that was best and noblest in a man thrill within his soul. \"Yet, bethink you, archer, that what a woman loves in man is not his gross body, but rather his soul, his honor, his fame, the deeds with which he has made his life beautiful. Therefore you are winning love as well as glory when you turn to the wars.\"\n\n\"It may be so,\" said Aylward; \"but indeed it goes to my heart to see the pretty dears weep, and I would fain weep as well to keep them company. When Mary\u2014or was it Dolly?\u2014nay, it was Martha, the red-headed girl from the mill\u2014when she held tight to my baldric it was like snapping my heart-string to pluck myself loose.\"\n\n\"You speak of one name and then of another,\" said Nigel. \"How is she called then, this maid whom you love?\"\n\nAylward pushed back his steel cap and scratched his bristling head with some embarrassment. \"Her name,\" said he, \"is Mary Dolly Martha Susan Jane Cicely Theodosia Agnes Johanna Kate.\"\n\nNigel laughed as Aylward rolled out this prodigious title. \"I had no right to take you to the wars,\" said he; \"for by Saint Paul! it is very clear that I have widowed half the parish. But I saw your aged father the franklin. Bethink you of the joy that will fill his heart when he hears that you have done some small deed in France, and so won honor in the eyes of all.\"\n\n\"I fear that honor will not help him to pay his arrears of rent to the sacrist of Waverley,\" said Aylward. \"Out he will go on the roadside, honor and all, if he does not find ten nobles by next Epiphany. But if I could win a ransom or be at the storming of a rich city, then indeed the old man would be proud of me. 'Thy sword must help my spade, Samkin,' said he as he kissed me goodby. Ah! it would indeed be a happy day for him and for all if I could ride back with a saddle-bag full of gold pieces, and please God, I shall dip my hand in somebody's pocket before I see Crooksbury Hill once more!\"\n\nNigel shook his head, for indeed it seemed hopeless to try to bridge the gulf between them. Already they had made such good progress along the bridle-path through the heather that the little hill of Saint Catharine and the ancient shrine upon its summit loomed up before them. Here they crossed the road from the south to London, and at the crossing two wayfarers were waiting who waved their hands in greeting, the one a tall, slender, dark woman upon a white jennet, the other a very thick and red-faced old man, whose weight seemed to curve the back of the stout gray cob which he bestrode.\n\n\"What how, Nigel!\" he cried. \"Mary has told me that you make a start this morning, and we have waited here this hour and more on the chance of seeing you pass. Come, lad, and have a last stoup of English ale, for many a time amid the sour French wines you will long for the white foam under your nose, and the good homely twang of it.\"\n\nNigel had to decline the draft, for it meant riding into Guildford town, a mile out of his course, but very gladly he agreed with Mary that they should climb the path to the old shrine and offer a last orison together. The knight and Aylward waited below with the horses; and so it came about that Nigel and Mary found themselves alone under the solemn old Gothic arches, in front of the dark shadowed recess in which gleamed the golden reliquary of the saint. In silence they knelt side by side in prayer, and then came forth once more out of the gloom and the shadow into the fresh sunlit summer morning. They stopped ere they descended the path, and looked to right and left at the fair meadows and the blue Wey curling down the valley.\n\n\"What have you prayed for, Nigel?\" said she.\n\n\"I have prayed that God and His saints will hold my spirit high and will send me back from France in such a fashion that I may dare to come to you and to claim you for my own.\"\n\n\"Bethink you well what it is that you say, Nigel,\" said she. \"What you are to me only my own heart can tell; but I would never set eyes upon your face again rather than abate by one inch that height of honor and worshipful achievement to which you may attain.\"\n\n\"Nay, my dear and most sweet lady, how should you abate it, since it is the thought of you which will nerve my arm and uphold my heart?\"\n\n\"Think once more, my fair lord, and hold yourself bound by no word which you have said. Let it be as the breeze which blows past our faces and is heard of no more. Your soul yearns for honor. To that has it ever turned. Is there room in it for love also? or is it possible that both shall live at their highest in one mind? Do you not call to mind that Galahad and other great knights of old have put women out of their lives that they might ever give their whole soul and strength to the winning of honor? May it not be that I shall be a drag upon you, that your heart may shrink from some honorable task, lest it should bring risk and pain to me? Think well before you answer, my fair lord, for indeed my very heart would break if it should ever happen that through love of me your high hopes and great promise should miss fulfilment.\"\n\nNigel looked at her with sparkling eyes. The soul which shone through her dark face had transformed it for the moment into a beauty more lofty and more rare than that of her shallow sister. He bowed before the majesty of the woman, and pressed his lips to her hand. \"You are like a star upon my path which guides me on the upward way,\" said he. \"Our souls are set together upon the finding of honor, and how shall we hold each other back when our purpose is the same?\"\n\nShe shook her proud head. \"So it seems to you now, fair lord, but it may be otherwise as the years pass. How shall you prove that I am indeed a help and not a hindrance?\"\n\n\"I will prove it by my deeds, fair and dear lady,\" said Nigel. \"Here at the shrine of the holy Catharine, on this, the Feast of Saint Margaret, I take my oath that I will do three deeds in your honor as a proof of my high love before I set eyes upon your face again, and these three deeds shall stand as a proof to you that if I love you dearly, still I will not let the thought of you stand betwixt me and honorable achievement!\"\n\nHer face shone with her love and her pride. \"I also make my oath,\" said she, \"and I do it in the name of the holy Catharine whose shrine is hard by. I swear that I will hold myself for you until these three deeds be done and we meet once more; also that if\u2014which may dear Christ forfend! you fall in doing them then I shall take the veil in Shalford nunnery and look upon no man's face again! Give me your hand, Nigel.\"\n\nShe had taken a little bangle of gold filigree work from her arm and fastened it upon his sunburnt wrist, reading aloud to him the engraved motto in old French: \"Fais ce que dois, adviegne que pourra\u2014c'est commande au chevalier.\" Then for one moment they fell into each other's arms and with kiss upon kiss, a loving man and a tender woman, they swore their troth to each other. But the old knight was calling impatiently from below and together they hurried down the winding path to where the horses waited under the sandy bluff.\n\nAs far as the Shalford crossing Sir John rode by Nigel's arm, and many were the last injunctions which he gave him concerning woodcraft, and great his anxiety lest he confuse a spay with a brocket, or either with a hind. At last when they came to the reedy edge of the Wey the old knight and his daughter reined up their horses. Nigel looked back at them ere he entered the dark Chantry woods, and saw them still gazing after him and waving their hands. Then the path wound amongst the trees and they were lost to sight; but long afterwards when a clearing exposed once more the Shalford meadows Nigel saw that the old man upon the gray cob was riding slowly toward Saint Catharine's Hill, but that the girl was still where he had seen her last, leaning forward in her saddle and straining her eyes to pierce the dark forest which screened her lover from her view. It was but a fleeting glance through a break in the foliage, and yet in after days of stress and toil in far distant lands it was that one little picture\u2014the green meadow, the reeds, the slow blue-winding river, and the eager bending graceful figure upon the white horse\u2014which was the clearest and the dearest image of that England which he had left behind him.\n\nBut if Nigel's friends had learned that this was the morning of his leaving, his enemies too were on the alert. The two comrades had just emerged from the Chantry woods and were beginning the ascent of that curving path which leads upward to the old Chapel of the Martyr when with a hiss like an angry snake a long white arrow streaked under Pommers and struck quivering in the grassy turf. A second whizzed past Nigel's ear, as he tried to turn; but Aylward struck the great warhorse a sharp blow over the haunches, and it had galloped some hundreds of yards before its rider could pull it up. Aylward followed as hard as he could ride, bending low over his horse's neck, while arrows whizzed all around him.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said Nigel, tugging at his bridle and white with anger, \"they shall not chase me across the country as though I was a frighted doe. Archer, how dare you to lash my horse when I would have turned and ridden in upon them?\"\n\n\"It is well that I did so,\" said Aylward, \"or by these ten finger-bones! our journey would have begun and ended on the same day. As I glanced round I saw a dozen of them at the least amongst the brushwood. See now how the light glimmers upon their steel caps yonder in the bracken under the great beech-tree. Nay, I pray you, my fair lord, do not ride forward. What chance has a man in the open against all these who lie at their ease in the underwood? If you will not think of yourself, then consider your horse, which would have a cloth-yard shaft feathered in its hide ere it could reach the wood.\"\n\nNigel chafed in impotent anger. \"Am I to be shot at like a popinjay at a fair, by any reaver or outlaw that seeks a mark for his bow?\" he cried. \"By Saint Paul! Aylward, I will put on my harness and go further into the matter. Help me to untruss, I pray you!\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord, I will not help you to your own downfall. It is a match with cogged dice betwixt a horseman on the moor and archers amid the forest. But these men are no outlaws, or they would not dare to draw their bows within a league of the sheriff of Guildford.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Aylward, I think that you speak truth,\" said Nigel. \"It may be that these are the men of Paul de la Fosse of Shalford, whom I have given little cause to love me. Ah! there is indeed the very man himself.\"\n\nThey sat their horses with their backs to the long slope which leads up to the old chapel on the hill. In front of them was the dark ragged edge of the wood, with a sharp twinkle of steel here and there in its shadows which spoke of these lurking foes. But now there was a long moot upon a horn, and at once a score of russet-clad bowmen ran forward from amid the trees, spreading out into a scattered line and closing swiftly in upon the travelers. In the midst of them, upon a great gray horse, sat a small misshapen man, waving and cheering as one sets hounds on a badger, turning his head this way and that as he whooped and pointed, urging his bowmen onward up the slope.\n\n\"Draw them on, my fair lord! Draw them on until we have them out on the down!\" cried Aylward, his eyes shining with joy. \"Five hundred paces more, and then we may be on terms with them. Nay, linger not, but keep them always just clear of arrowshot until our turn has come.\"\n\nNigel shook and trembled with eagerness, as with his hand on his sword-hilt he looked at the line of eager hurrying men. But it flashed through his mind what Chandos had said of the cool head which is better for the warrior than the hot heart. Aylward's words were true and wise. He turned Pommers' head therefore, and amid a cry of derision from behind them the comrades trotted over the down. The bowmen broke into a run, while their leader screamed and waved more madly than before. Aylward cast many a glance at them over his shoulder.\n\n\"Yet a little farther! Yet a little farther still!\" he muttered. \"The wind is towards them and the fools have forgot that I can overshoot them by fifty paces. Now, my good lord, I pray you for one instant to hold the horses, for my weapon is of more avail this day, than thine can be. They may make sorry cheer ere they gain the shelter of the wood once more.\"\n\nHe had sprung from his horse, and with a downward wrench of his arm and a push with his knee he slipped the string into the upper nock of his mighty war-bow. Then in a flash he notched his shaft and drew it to the pile, his keen blue eyes glowing fiercely behind it from under his knotted brows. With thick legs planted sturdily apart, his body laid to the bow, his left arm motionless as wood, his right bunched into a double curve of swelling muscles as he stretched the white well-waxed string, he looked so keen and fierce a fighter that the advancing line stopped for an instant at the sight of him. Two or three loosed off their arrows, but the shafts flew heavily against the head wind, and snaked along the hard turf some score of paces short of the mark. One only, a short bandy-legged man, whose squat figure spoke of enormous muscular strength, ran swiftly in and then drew so strong a bow that the arrow quivered in the ground at Aylward's very feet.\n\n\"It is Black Will of Lynchmere,\" said the bowman. \"Many a match have I shot with him, and I know well that no other man on the Surrey marches could have sped such a shaft. I trust that you are houseled and shriven, Will, for I have known you so long that I would not have your damnation upon my soul.\"\n\nHe raised his bow as he spoke, and the string twanged with a rich deep musical note. Aylward leaned upon his bowstave as he keenly watched the long swift flight of his shaft, skimming smoothly down the wind.\n\n\"On him, on him! No, over him, by my hilt!\" he cried. \"There is more wind than I had thought. Nay, nay, friend, now that I have the length of you, you can scarce hope to loose again.\"\n\nBlack Will had notched an arrow and was raising his bow when Aylward's second shaft passed through the shoulder of his drawing arm. With a shout of anger and pain he dropped his weapon, and dancing in his fury he shook his fist and roared curses at his rival.\n\n\"I could slay him; but I will not, for good bowmen are not so common,\" said Aylward. \"And now, fair sir, we must on, for they are spreading round on either side, and if once they get behind us, then indeed our journey has come to a sudden end. But ere we go I would send a shaft through yonder horseman who leads them on.\"\n\n\"Nay, Aylward, I pray you to leave him,\" said Nigel. \"Villain as he is, he is none the less a gentleman of coat-armor, and should die by some other weapon than thine.\"\n\n\"As you will,\" said Aylward, with a clouded brow. \"I have been told that in the late wars many a French prince and baron has not been too proud to take his death wound from an English yeoman's shaft, and that nobles of England have been glad enough to stand by and see it done.\"\n\nNigel shook his head sadly. \"It is sooth you say, archer, and indeed it is no new thing, for that good knight Richard of the Lion Heart met his end in such a lowly fashion, and so also did Harold the Saxon. But this is a private matter, and I would not have you draw your bow against him. Neither can I ride at him myself, for he is weak in body, though dangerous in spirit. Therefore, we will go upon our way, since there is neither profit nor honor to be gained, nor any hope of advancement.\"\n\nAylward, having unstrung his bow, had remounted his horse during this conversation, and the two rode swiftly past the little squat Chapel of the Martyr and over the brow of the hill. From the summit they looked back. The injured archer lay upon the ground, with several of his comrades gathered in a knot around him. Others ran aimlessly up the hill, but were already far behind. The leader sat motionless upon his horse, and as he saw them look back he raised his hand and shrieked his curses at them. An instant later the curve of the ground had hid them from view. So, amid love and hate, Nigel bade adieu to the home of his youth.\n\nAnd now the comrades were journeying upon that old, old road which runs across the south of England and yet never turns toward London, for the good reason that the place was a poor hamlet when first the road was laid. From Winchester, the Saxon capital, to Canterbury, the holy city of Kent, ran that ancient highway, and on from Canterbury to the narrow straits where, on a clear day, the farther shore can be seen. Along this track as far back as history can trace the metals of the west have been carried and passed the pack-horses which bore the goods which Gaul sent in exchange. Older than the Christian faith and older than the Romans, is the old road. North and south are the woods and the marshes, so that only on the high dry turf of the chalk land could a clear track be found. The Pilgrim's Way, it still is called; but the pilgrims were the last who ever trod it, for it was already of immemorial age before the death of Thomas a Becket gave a new reason why folk should journey to the scene of his murder.\n\nFrom the hill of Weston Wood the travelers could see the long white band which dipped and curved and rose over the green downland, its course marked even in the hollows by the line of the old yew-trees which flanked it. Neither Nigel nor Aylward had wandered far from their own country, and now they rode with light hearts and eager eyes taking note of all the varied pictures of nature and of man which passed before them. To their left was a hilly country, a land of rolling heaths and woods, broken here and there into open spaces round the occasional farm-house of a franklin. Hackhurst Down, Dunley Hill, and Ranmore Common swelled and sank, each merging into the other. But on the right, after passing the village of Shere and the old church of Gomshall, the whole south country lay like a map at their feet. There was the huge wood of the Weald, one unbroken forest of oak-trees stretching away to the South Downs, which rose olive-green against the deep blue sky. Under this great canopy of trees strange folk lived and evil deeds were done. In its recesses were wild tribes, little changed from their heathen ancestors, who danced round the altar of Thor, and well was it for the peaceful traveler that he could tread the high open road of the chalk land with no need to wander into so dangerous a tract, where soft clay, tangled forest and wild men all barred his progress.\n\nBut apart from the rolling country upon the left and the great forest-hidden plain upon the right, there was much upon the road itself to engage the attention of the wayfarers. It was crowded with people. As far as their eyes could carry they could see the black dots scattered thickly upon the thin white band, sometimes single, sometimes several abreast, sometimes in moving crowds, where a drove of pilgrims held together for mutual protection, or a nobleman showed his greatness by the number of retainers who trailed at his heels. At that time the main roads were very crowded, for there were many wandering people in the land. Of all sorts and kinds, they passed in an unbroken stream before the eyes of Nigel and of Aylward, alike only in the fact that one and all were powdered from their hair to their shoes with the gray dust of the chalk.\n\nThere were monks journeying from one cell to another, Benedictines with their black gowns looped up to show their white skirts, Carthusians in white, and pied Cistercians. Friars also of the three wandering orders\u2014Dominicans in black, Carmelites in white and Franciscans in gray. There was no love lost between the cloistered monks and the free friars, each looking on the other as a rival who took from him the oblations of the faithful; so they passed on the high road as cat passes dog, with eyes askance and angry faces.\n\nThen besides the men of the church there were the men of trade, the merchant in dusty broadcloth and Flanders hat riding at the head of his line of pack-horses. He carried Cornish tin, Welt-country wool, or Sussex iron if he traded eastward, or if his head should be turned westward then he bore with him the velvets of Genoa, the ware of Venice, the wine of France, or the armor of Italy and Spain. Pilgrims were everywhere, poor people for the most part, plodding wearily along with trailing feet and bowed heads, thick staves in their hands and bundles over their shoulders. Here and there on a gaily caparisoned palfrey, or in the greater luxury of a horse-litter, some West-country lady might be seen making her easy way to the shrine of Saint Thomas.\n\nBesides all these a constant stream of strange vagabonds drifted along the road: minstrels who wandered from fair to fair, a foul and pestilent crew; jugglers and acrobats, quack doctors and tooth-drawers, students and beggars, free workmen in search of better wages, and escaped bondsmen who would welcome any wages at all. Such was the throng which set the old road smoking in a haze of white dust from Winchester to the narrow sea.\n\nBut of all the wayfarers those which interested Nigel most were the soldiers. Several times they passed little knots of archers or men-at-arms, veterans from France, who had received their discharge and were now making their way to their southland homes. They were half drunk all of them, for the wayfarers treated them to beer at the frequent inns and alestakes which lined the road, so that they cheered and sang lustily as they passed. They roared rude pleasantries at Aylward, who turned in his saddle and shouted his opinion of them until they were out of hearing.\n\nOnce, late in the afternoon, they overtook a body of a hundred archers all marching together with two knights riding at their head. They were passing from Guildford Castle to Reigate Castle, where they were in garrison. Nigel rode with the knights for some distance, and hinted that if either was in search of honorable advancement, or wished to do some small deed, or to relieve himself of any vow, it might be possible to find some means of achieving it. They were both, however, grave and elderly men, intent upon their business and with no mind for fond wayside adventures, so Nigel quickened his pace and left them behind.\n\nThey had left Boxhill and Headley Heath upon the left, and the towers of Reigate were rising amid the trees in front of them, when they overtook a large, cheery, red-faced man, with a forked beard, riding upon a good horse and exchanging a nod or a merry word with all who passed him. With him they rode nearly as far as Bletchingley, and Nigel laughed much to hear him talk; but always under the raillery there was much earnestness and much wisdom in all his words. He rode at his ease about the country, he said, having sufficient money to keep him from want and to furnish him for the road. He could speak all the three languages of England, the north, the middle and the south, so that he was at home with the people of every shire and could hear their troubles and their joys. In all parts in town and in country there was unrest, he said; for the poor folk were weary of their masters both of the Church and State, and soon there would be such doings in England as had never been seen before.\n\nBut above all this man was earnest against the Church its enormous wealth, its possession of nearly one-third of the whole land of the country, its insatiable greed for more at the very time when it claimed to be poor and lowly. The monks and friars, too, he lashed with his tongue: their roguish ways, their laziness and their cunning. He showed how their wealth and that of the haughty lord must always be founded upon the toil of poor humble Peter the Plowman, who worked and strove in rain and cold out in the fields, the butt and laughing-stock of everyone, and still bearing up the whole world upon his weary shoulders. He had set it all out in a fair parable; so now as he rode he repeated some of the verses, chanting them and marking time with his forefinger, while Nigel and Aylward on either side of him with their heads inclined inward listened with the same attention, but with very different feelings\u2014Nigel shocked at such an attack upon authority, and Aylward chuckling as he heard the sentiments of his class so shrewdly expressed. At last the stranger halted his horse outside the \"Five Angels\" at Gatton.\n\n\"It is a good inn, and I know the ale of old,\" said he. \"When I had finished that 'Dream of Piers the Plowman' from which I have recited to you, the last verses were thus:\n\n\u2003\"'Now have I brought my little booke to an ende\n\n\u2003God's blessing be on him who a drinke will me sende'\u2014\n\n\"I pray you come in with me and share it.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Nigel, \"we must on our way, for we have far to go. But give me your name, my friend, for indeed we have passed a merry hour listening to your words.\"\n\n\"Have a care!\" the stranger answered, shaking his head. \"You and your class will not spend a merry hour when these words are turned into deeds and Peter the Plowman grows weary of swinking in the fields and takes up his bow and his staff in order to set this land in order.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! I expect that we shall bring Peter to reason and also those who have put such evil thoughts into his head,\" said Nigel. \"So once more I ask your name, that I may know it if ever I chance to hear that you have been hanged?\"\n\nThe stranger laughed good-humoredly. \"You can call me Thomas Lackland,\" said he. \"I should be Thomas Lack-brain if I were indeed to give my true name, since a good many robbers, some in black gowns and some in steel, would be glad to help me upwards in the way you speak of. So good-day to you, Squire, and to you also, archer, and may you find your way back with whole bones from the wars!\"\n\nThat night the comrades slept in Godstone Priory, and early next morning they were well upon their road down the Pilgrim's Way. At Titsey it was said that a band of villeins were out in Westerham Wood and had murdered three men the day before; so that Nigel had high hopes of an encounter; but the brigands showed no sign, though the travelers went out of their way to ride their horses along the edges of the forest. Farther on they found traces of their work, for the path ran along the hillside at the base of a chalk quarry, and there in the cutting a man was lying dead. From his twisted limbs and shattered frame it was easy to see that he had been thrown over from above, while his pockets turned outward showed the reason for his murder. The comrades rode past without too close a survey, for dead men were no very uncommon objects on the King's highway, and if sheriff or bailiff should chance upon you near the body you might find yourself caught in the meshes of the law.\n\nNear Sevenoaks their road turned out of the old Canterbury way and pointed south toward the coast, leaving the chalk lands and coming down into the clay of the Weald. It was a wretched, rutted mule-track running through thick forests with occasional clearings in which lay the small Kentish villages, where rude shock-headed peasants with smocks and galligaskins stared with bold, greedy eyes at the travelers. Once on the right they caught a distant view of the Towers of Penshurst, and once they heard the deep tolling of the bells of Bayham Abbey, but for the rest of their day's journey savage peasants and squalid cottages were all that met their eyes, with endless droves of pigs who fed upon the litter of acorns. The throng of travelers who crowded the old road were all gone, and only here and there did they meet or overtake some occasional merchant or messenger bound for Battle Abbey, Pevensey Castle or the towns of the south.\n\nThat night they slept in a sordid inn, overrun with rats and with fleas, one mile south of the hamlet of Mayfield. Aylward scratched vigorously and cursed with fervor. Nigel lay without movement or sound. To the man who had learned the old rule of chivalry there were no small ills in life. It was beneath the dignity of his soul to stoop to observe them. Cold and heat, hunger and thirst, such things did not exist for the gentleman. The armor of his soul was so complete that it was proof not only against the great ills of life but even against the small ones; so the flea-bitten Nigel lay grimly still while Aylward writhed upon his couch.\n\nThey were now but a short distance from their destination; but they had hardly started on their journey through the forest next morning, when an adventure befell them which filled Nigel with the wildest hopes.\n\nAlong the narrow winding path between the great oak trees there rode a dark sallow man in a scarlet tabard who blew so loudly upon a silver trumpet that they heard the clanging call long before they set eyes on him. Slowly he advanced, pulling up every fifty paces to make the forest ring with another warlike blast. The comrades rode forward to meet him.\n\n\"I pray you,\" said Nigel, \"to tell me who you are and why you blow upon this trumpet.\"\n\nThe fellow shook his head, so Nigel repeated the question in French, the common language of chivalry, spoken at that age by every gentleman in Western Europe.\n\nThe man put his lips to the trumpet and blew another long note before he answered. \"I am Gaston de Castrier,\" said he, \"the humble Squire of the most worthy and valiant knight Raoul de Tubiers, de Pestels, de Grimsard, de Mersac, de Leoy, de Bastanac, who also writes himself Lord of Pons. It is his order that I ride always a mile in front of him to prepare all to receive him, and he desires me to blow upon a trumpet not out of vainglory, but out of greatness of spirit, so that none may be ignorant of his coming should they desire to encounter him.\"\n\nNigel sprang from his horse with a cry of joy, and began to unbutton his doublet. \"Quick, Aylward, quick!\" he said. \"He comes, a knight errant comes! Was there ever such a chance of worshipfully winning worship? Untruss the harness whilst I loose my clothes! Good sir, I beg you to warn your noble and valiant master that a poor Squire of England would implore him to take notice of him and to do some small deed upon him as he passes.\"\n\nBut already the Lord of Pons had come in sight. He was a huge man upon an enormous horse, so that together they seemed to fill up the whole long dark archway under the oaks. He was clad in full armor of a brazen hue with only his face exposed, and of this face there was little visible save a pair of arrogant eyes and a great black beard, which flowed through the open visor and down over his breastplate. To the crest of his helmet was tied a small brown glove, nodding and swinging above him. He bore a long lance with a red square banner at the end, charged with a black boar's head, and the same symbol was engraved upon his shield. Slowly he rode through the forest, ponderous, menacing, with dull thudding of his charger's hoofs and constant clank of metal, while always in front of him came the distant peal of the silver trumpet calling all men to admit his majesty and to clear his path ere they be cleared from it.\n\nNever in his dreams had so perfect a vision come to cheer Nigel's heart, and as he struggled with his clothes, glancing up continually at this wondrous traveler, he pattered forth prayers of thanksgiving to the good Saint Paul who had shown such loving-kindness to his unworthy servant and thrown him in the path of so excellent and debonair a gentleman.\n\nBut alas! how often at the last instant the cup is dashed from the lips! This joyful chance was destined to change suddenly to unexpected and grotesque disaster\u2014disaster so strange and so complete that through all his life Nigel flushed crimson when he thought of it. He was busily stripping his hunting-costume, and with feverish haste he had doffed boots, hat, hose, doublet and cloak, so that nothing remained save a pink jupon and pair of silken drawers. At the same time Aylward was hastily unbuckling the load with the intention of handing his master his armor piece by piece, when the Squire gave one last challenging peal from his silver trumpet into the very ear of the spare horse.\n\nIn an instant it had taken to its heels, the precious armor upon its back, and thundered away down the road which they had traversed. Aylward jumped upon his mare, drove his prick spurs into her sides and galloped after the runaway as hard as he could ride. Thus it came about that in an instant Nigel was shorn of all his little dignity, had lost his two horses, his attendant and his outfit, and found himself a lonely and unarmed man standing in his shirt and drawers upon the pathway down which the burly figure of the Lord of Pons was slowly advancing.\n\nThe knight errant, whose mind had been filled by the thought of the maiden whom he had left behind at St. Jean\u2014the same whose glove dangled from his helmet\u2014had observed nothing that had occurred. Hence, all that met his eyes was a noble yellow horse, which was tethered by the track, and a small young man, who appeared to be a lunatic since he had undressed hastily in the heart of the forest, and stood now with an eager anxious face clad in his underlinen amid the scattered debris of his garments. Of such a person the high Lord of Pons could take no notice, and so he pursued his inexorable way, his arrogant eyes looking out into the distance and his thoughts set intently upon the maiden of St. Jean. He was dimly aware that the little crazy man in the undershirt ran a long way beside him in his stockings, begging, imploring and arguing.\n\n\"Just one hour, most fair sir, just one hour at the longest, and a poor Squire of England shall ever hold himself your debtor! Do but condescend to rein your horse until my harness comes back to me! Will you not stoop to show me some small deed of arms? I implore you, fair sir, to spare me a little of your time and a handstroke or two ere you go upon your way!\"\n\nLord de Pons motioned impatiently with his gauntleted hand, as one might brush away an importunate fly, but when at last Nigel became desperate in his clamor he thrust his spurs into his great warhorse, and clashing like a pair of cymbals he thundered off through the forest. So he rode upon his majestic way, until two days later he was slain by Lord Reginald Cobham in a field near Weybridge.\n\nWhen after a long chase Aylward secured the spare horse and brought it back, he found his master seated upon a fallen tree, his face buried in his hands and his mind clouded with humiliation and grief. Nothing was said, for the matter was beyond words, and so in moody silence they rode upon their way.\n\nBut soon they came upon a scene which drew Nigel's thoughts away from his bitter trouble, for in front of them there rose the towers of a great building with a small gray sloping village around it, and they learned from a passing hind that this was the hamlet and Abbey of Battle. Together they drew rein upon the low ridge and looked down into that valley of death from which even now the reek of blood seems to rise. Down beside that sinister lake and amid those scattered bushes sprinkled over the naked flank of the long ridge was fought that long-drawn struggle betwixt two most noble foes with broad England as the prize of victory. Here, up and down the low hill, hour by hour the grim struggle had waxed and waned, until the Saxon army had died where it stood, King, court, house-carl and fyrdsman, each in their ranks even as they had fought. And now, after all the stress and toil, the tyranny, the savage revolt, the fierce suppression, God had made His purpose complete, for here were Nigel the Norman and Aylward the Saxon with good-fellowship in their hearts and a common respect in their minds, with the same banner and the same cause, riding forth to do battle for their old mother England.\n\nAnd now the long ride drew to an end. In front of them was the blue sea, flecked with the white sails of ships. Once more the road passed upward from the heavy-wooded plain to the springy turf of the chalk downs. Far to the right rose the grim fortalice of Pevensey, squat and powerful, like one great block of rugged stone, the parapet twinkling with steel caps and crowned by the royal banner of England. A flat expanse of reeded marshland lay before them, out of which rose a single wooded hill, crowned with towers, with a bristle of masts rising out of the green plain some distance to the south of it. Nigel looked at it with his hand shading his eyes, and then urged Pommers to a trot. The town was Winchelsea, and there amid that cluster of houses on the hill the gallant Chandos must be awaiting him." + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL CHASED THE RED FERRET", + "text": "They passed a ferry, wound upward by a curving path, and then, having satisfied a guard of men-at-arms, were admitted through the frowning arch of the Pipewell Gate. There waiting for them, in the middle of the east street, the sun gleaming upon his lemon-colored beard, and puckering his single eye, stood Chandos himself, his legs apart, his hands behind his back, and a welcoming smile upon his quaint high-nosed face. Behind him a crowd of little boys were gazing with reverent eyes at the famous soldier.\n\n\"Welcome, Nigel!\" said he, \"and you also, good archer! I chanced to be walking on the city wall, and I thought from the color of your horse that it was indeed you upon the Udimore Road. How have you fared, young squire errant? Have you held bridges or rescued damsels or slain oppressors on your way from Tilford?\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord, I have accomplished nothing; but I once had hopes\u2014\" Nigel flushed at the remembrance.\n\n\"I will give you more than hopes, Nigel. I will put you where you can dip both arms to the elbow into danger and honor, where peril will sleep with you at night and rise with you in the morning and the very air you breathe be laden with it. Are you ready for that, young sir?\"\n\n\"I can but pray, fair lord, that my spirit will rise to it.\"\n\nChandos smiled his approval and laid his thin brown hand on the youth's shoulder. \"Good!\" said he. \"It is the mute hound which bites the hardest. The babbler is ever the hang-back. Bide with me here, Nigel, and walk upon the ramparts. Archer, do you lead the horses to the 'Sign of the Broom Pod' in the high street, and tell my varlets to see them aboard the cog Thomas before nightfall. We sail at the second hour after curfew. Come hither, Nigel, to the crest of the corner turret, for from it I will show you what you have never seen.\"\n\nIt was but a dim and distant white cloud upon the blue water seen far off over the Dungeness Point, and yet the sight of it flushed the young Squire's cheeks and sent the blood hot through his veins. It was the fringe of France, that land of chivalry and glory, the stage where name and fame were to be won. With burning eyes he gazed across at it, his heart rejoicing to think that the hour was at hand when he might tread that sacred soil. Then his gaze crossed the immense stretch of the blue sea, dotted over with the sails of fishing-boats, until it rested upon the double harbor beneath packed with vessels of every size and shape, from the pessoners and creyers which plied up and down the coast to the great cogs and galleys which were used either as war-ships or merchantmen as the occasion served. One of them was at that instant passing out to sea, a huge galleass, with trumpets blowing and nakers banging, the flag of Saint George flaunting over the broad purple sail, and the decks sparkling from end to end with steel. Nigel gave a cry of pleasure at the splendor of the sight.\n\n\"Aye, lad,\" said Chandos, \"it is the Trinity of Rye, the very ship on which I fought at Sluys. Her deck ran blood from stem to stern that day. But turn your eyes this way, I beg you, and tell me if you see aught strange about this town.\"\n\nNigel looked down at the noble straight street, at the Roundel Tower, at the fine church of Saint Thomas, and the other fair buildings of Winchelsea. \"It is all new,\" said he\u2014\"church, castle, houses, all are new.\"\n\n\"You are right, fair son. My grandfather can call to mind the time when only the conies lived upon this rock. The town was down yonder by the sea, until one night the waves rose upon it and not a house was left. See, yonder is Rye, huddling also on a hill, the two towns like poor sheep when the waters are out. But down there under the blue water and below the Camber Sand lies the true Winchelsea\u2014tower, cathedral, walls and all, even as my grandfather knew it, when the first Edward was young upon the throne.\"\n\nFor an hour or more Chandos paced upon the ramparts with his young Squire at his elbow and talked to him of his duties and of the secrets and craft of warfare, Nigel drinking in and storing in his memory every word from so revered a teacher. Many a time in after life, in stress and in danger, he strengthened himself by the memory of that slow walk with the blue sea on one side and the fair town on the other, when the wise soldier and noble-hearted knight poured forth his precept and advice as the master workman to the apprentice.\n\n\"Perhaps, fair son,\" said he, \"you are like so many other lads who ride to the wars, and know so much already that it is waste of breath to advise them?\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord, I know nothing save that I would fain do my duty and either win honorable advancement or die worshipful on the field.\"\n\n\"You are wise to be humble,\" said Chandos; \"for indeed he who knows most of war knows best that there is much to learn. As there is a mystery of the rivers and a mystery of woodcraft, even so there is a mystery of warfare by which battles may be lost and gained; for all nations are brave, and where the brave meets the brave it is he who is crafty and war-wise who will win the day. The best hound will run at fault if he be ill laid on, and the best hawk will fly at check if he be badly loosed, and even so the bravest army may go awry if it be ill handled. There are not in Christendom better knights and squires than those of the French, and yet we have had the better of them, for in our Scottish Wars and elsewhere we have learned more of this same mystery of which I speak.\"\n\n\"And wherein lies our wisdom, honored sir?\" asked Nigel. \"I also would fain be war-wise and learn to fight with my wits as well as with my sword.\"\n\nChandos shook his head and smiled. \"It is in the forest and on the down that you learn to fly the hawk and loose the hound,\" said he. \"So also it is in camp and on the field that the mystery of war can be learned. There only has every great captain come to be its master. To start he must have a cool head, quick to think, soft as wax before his purpose is formed, hard as steel when once he sees it before him. Ever alert he must be, and cautious also, but with judgment to turn his caution into rashness where a large gain may be put against a small stake. An eye for country also, for the trend of the rivers, the slope of the hills, the cover of the woods, and the light green of the bog-land.\"\n\nPoor Nigel, who had trusted to his lance and to Pommers to break his path to glory, stood aghast at this list of needs. \"Alas!\" he cried. \"How am I to gain all this?\u2014I, who could scarce learn to read or write though the good Father Matthew broke a hazel stick a day across my shoulders?\"\n\n\"You will gain it, fair son, where others have gained it before you. You have that which is the first thing of all, a heart of fire from which other colder hearts may catch a spark. But you must have knowledge also of that which warfare has taught us in olden times. We know, par exemple, that horsemen alone cannot hope to win against good foot-soldiers. Has it not been tried at Courtrai, at Stirling, and again under my own eyes at Crecy, where the chivalry of France went down before our bowmen?\"\n\nNigel stared at him, with a perplexed brow. \"Fair sir, my heart grows heavy as I hear you. Do you then say that our chivalry can make no head against archers, billmen and the like?\"\n\n\"Nay, Nigel, for it has also been very clearly shown that the best foot-soldiers unsupported cannot hold their own against the mailed horsemen.\"\n\n\"To whom then is the victory?\" asked Nigel.\n\n\"To him who can mix his horse and foot, using each to strengthen the other. Apart they are weak. Together they are strong. The archer who can weaken the enemy's line, the horseman who can break it when it is weakened, as was done at Falkirk and Duplin, there is the secret of our strength. Now touching this same battle of Falkirk, I pray you for one instant to give it your attention.\"\n\nWith his whip he began to trace a plan of the Scottish battle upon the dust, and Nigel with knitted brows was trying hard to muster his small stock of brains and to profit by the lecture, when their conversation was interrupted by a strange new arrival.\n\nIt was a very stout little man, wheezy and purple with haste, who scudded down the rampart as if he were blown by the wind, his grizzled hair flying and his long black gown floating behind him. He was clad in the dress of a respectable citizen, a black jerkin trimmed with sable, a black-velvet beaver hat and a white feather. At the sight of Chandos he gave a cry of joy and quickened his pace so that when he did at last reach him he could only stand gasping and waving his hands.\n\n\"Give yourself time, good Master Wintersole, give yourself time!\" said Chandos in a soothing voice.\n\n\"The papers!\" gasped the little man. \"Oh, my Lord Chandos, the papers\u2014\"\n\n\"What of the papers, my worthy sir?\"\n\n\"I swear by our good patron Saint Leonard, it is no fault of mine! I had locked them in my coffer. But the lock was forced and the coffer rifled.\"\n\nA shadow of anger passed over the soldier's keen face.\n\n\"How now, Master Mayor? Pull your wits together and do not stand there babbling like a three-year child. Do you say that some one hath taken the papers?\"\n\n\"It is sooth, fair sir! Thrice I have been Mayor of the town, and fifteen years burgess and jurat, but never once has any public matter gone awry through me. Only last month there came an order from Windsor on a Tuesday for a Friday banquet, a thousand soles, four thousand plaice, two thousand mackerel, five hundred crabs, a thousand lobsters, five thousand whiting\u2014\"\n\n\"I doubt not, Master Mayor, that you are an excellent fishmonger; but the matter concerns the papers I gave into your keeping. Where are they?\"\n\n\"Taken, fair sir\u2014gone!\"\n\n\"And who hath dared to take them?\"\n\n\"Alas! I know not. It was but for as long as you would say an angelus that I left the chamber, and when I came back there was the coffer, broken and empty, upon my table.\"\n\n\"Do you suspect no one?\"\n\n\"There was a varlet who hath come with the last few days into my employ. He is not to be found, and I have sent horsemen along both the Udimore road and that to Rye, that they may seize him. By the help of Saint Leonard they can scarce miss him, for one can tell him a bowshot off by his hair.\"\n\n\"Is it red?\" asked Chandos eagerly. \"Is it fox-red, and the man a small man pocked with sun-spots, and very quick in his movements?\"\n\n\"It is the man himself.\"\n\nChandos shook his clenched hand with annoyance, and then set off swiftly down the street.\n\n\"It is Peter the Red Ferret once more!\" said he. \"I knew him of old in France, where he has done us more harm than a company of men-at-arms. He speaks English as he speaks French, and he is of such daring and cunning that nothing is secret from him. In all France there is no more dangerous man, for though he is a gentleman of blood and coat-armor he takes the part of a spy, because it hath the more danger and therefore the more honor.\"\n\n\"But, my fair lord,\" cried the Mayor, as he hurried along, keeping pace with the long strides of the soldier, \"I knew that you warned me to take all care of the papers; but surely there was no matter of great import in it? It was but to say what stores were to be sent after you to Calais?\"\n\n\"Is that not everything?\" cried Chandos impatiently. \"Can you not see, oh foolish Master Wintersole, that the French suspect we are about to make some attempt and that they have sent Peter the Red Ferret, as they have sent him many times before, to get tidings of whither we are bound? Now that he knows that the stores are for Calais, then the French near Calais will take his warning, and so the King's whole plan come to nothing.\"\n\n\"Then he will fly by water. We can stop him yet. He has not an hour's start.\"\n\n\"It may be that a boat awaits him at Rye or Hythe; but it is more like that he has all ready to depart from here. Ah, see yonder! I'll warrant that the Red Ferret is on board!\"\n\nChandos had halted in front of his inn, and now he pointed down to the outer harbor, which lay two miles off across the green plain. It was connected by a long winding canal with the inner dock at the base of the hill, upon which the town was built. Between the two horns formed by the short curving piers a small schooner was running out to sea, dipping and rising before a sharp southerly breeze.\n\n\"It is no Winchelsea boat,\" said the Mayor. \"She is longer and broader in the beam than ours.\"\n\n\"Horses! bring horses!\" cried Chandos. \"Come, Nigel, let us go further into the matter.\"\n\nA busy crowd of varlets, archers, and men-at-arms swarmed round the gateway of the \"Sign of the Broom Pod,\" singing, shouting, and jostling in rough good-fellowship. The sight of the tall thin figure of Chandos brought order amongst them, and a few minutes later the horses were ready and saddled. A breakneck ride down a steep declivity, and then a gallop of two miles over the sedgy plain carried them to the outer harbor. A dozen vessels were lying there, ready to start for Bordeaux or Rochelle, and the quay was thick with sailors, laborers and townsmen and heaped with wine-barrels and wool-packs.\n\n\"Who is warden here?\" asked Chandos, springing from his horse.\n\n\"Badding! Where is Cock Badding? Badding is warden!\" shouted the crowd.\n\nA moment later a short swarthy man, bull-necked and deep-chested, pushed through the people. He was clad in rough russet wool with a scarlet cloth tied round his black curly head. His sleeves were rolled up to his shoulders, and his brown arms, all stained with grease and tar, were like two thick gnarled branches from an oaken stump. His savage brown face was fierce and frowning, and was split from chin to temple with the long white wale of an ill-healed wound.\n\n\"How now, gentles, will you never wait your turn?\" he rumbled in a deep angry voice. \"Can you not see that we are warping the Rose of Guienne into midstream for the ebb-tide? Is this a time to break in upon us? Your goods will go aboard in due season, I promise you; so ride back into the town and find such pleasure as you may, while I and my mates do our work without let or hindrance.\"\n\n\"It is the gentle Chandos!\" cried some one in the crowd. \"It is the good Sir John.\"\n\nThe rough harbor-master changed his gruffness to smiles in an instant. \"Nay, Sir John, what would you? I pray you to hold me excused if I was short of speech, but we port-wardens are sore plagued with foolish young lordlings, who get betwixt us and our work and blame us because we do not turn an ebb-tide into a flood, or a south wind into a north. I pray you to tell me how I can serve you.\"\n\n\"That boat!\" said Chandos, pointing to the already distant sail rising and falling on the waves. \"What is it?\"\n\nCock Badding shaded his keen eyes with his strong brows hand. \"She has but just gone out,\" said he. \"She is La Pucelle, a small wine-sloop from Gascony, home-bound and laden with barrel-staves.\"\n\n\"I pray you did any man join her at the very last?\"\n\n\"Nay, I know not. I saw no one.\"\n\n\"But I know,\" cried a seaman in the crowd. \"I was standing at the wharf-side and was nigh knocked into the water by a little red-headed fellow, who breathed as though he had run from the town. Ere I had time to give him a cuff he had jumped aboard, the ropes were cast off, and her nose was seaward.\"\n\nIn a few words Chandos made all clear to Badding, the crowd pressing eagerly round.\n\n\"Aye, aye!\" cried a seaman, \"the good Sir John is right. See how she points. It is Picardy and not Gascony that she will fetch this journey in spite of her wine-staves.\"\n\n\"Then we must lay her aboard!\" cried Cock Badding. \"Come, lads, here is my own Marie Rose ready to cast off. Who's for a trip with a fight at the end of it?\"\n\nThere was a rush for the boat; but the stout little seaman picked his men. \"Go back, Jerry! Your heart is good, but you are overfat for the work. You, Luke, and you, Thomas, and the two Deedes, and William of Sandgate. You will work the boat. And now we need a few men of their hands. Do you come, little sir?\"\n\n\"I pray you, my dear lord, to let me go!\" cried Nigel.\n\n\"Yes, Nigel, you can go, and I will bring your gear over to Calais this night.\"\n\n\"I will join you there, fair sir, and with the help of Saint Paul I will bring this Red Ferret with me.\"\n\n\"Aboard, aboard! Time passes!\" cried Badding impatiently, while already his seamen were hauling on the line and raising the mainsail. \"Now then, sirrah! who are you?\" It was Aylward, who had followed Nigel and was pushing his way aboard.\n\n\"Where my master goes I go also,\" cried Aylward, \"so stand clear, master-shipman, or you may come by a hurt.\"\n\n\"By Saint Leonard! archer,\" said Cock Badding, \"had I more time I would give you a lesson ere I leave land. Stand back and give place to others!\"\n\n\"Nay, stand back and give place to me!\" cried Aylward, and seizing Badding round the waist he slung him into the dock.\n\nThere was a cry of anger from the crowd, for Badding was the hero of all the Cinque Ports and had never yet met his match in manhood. The epitaph still lingers in which it was said that he \"could never rest until he had foughten his fill.\" When, therefore, swimming like a duck, he reached a rope and pulled himself hand over hand up to the quay, all stood aghast to see what fell fate would befall this bold stranger. But Badding laughed loudly, dashing the saltwater from his eyes and hair.\n\n\"You have fairly won your place, archer,\" said he. \"You are the very man for our work. Where is Black Simon of Norwich?\"\n\nA tall dark young man with a long, stern, lean face came forward. \"I am with you, Cock,\" said he, \"and I thank you for my place.\"\n\n\"You can come, Hugh Baddlesmere, and you, Hal Masters, and you, Dicon of Rye. That is enough. Now off, in God's name, or it will be night ere we can come up with them!\"\n\nAlready the headsails and the mainsail had been raised, while a hundred willing hands poled her off from the wharf. Now the wind caught her; heeling over, and quivering with eagerness like an unleashed hound she flew through the opening and out into the Channel. She was a famous little schooner, the Marie Rose of Winchelsea, and under her daring owner Cock Badding, half trader and half pirate, had brought back into port many a rich cargo taken in mid-Channel, and paid for in blood rather than money. Small as she was, her great speed and the fierce character of her master had made her a name of terror along the French coast, and many a bulky Eastlander or Fleming as he passed the narrow seas had scanned the distant Kentish shore, fearing lest that ill-omened purple sail with a gold Christopher upon it should shoot out suddenly from the dim gray cliffs. Now she was clear of the land, with the wind on her larboard quarter, every inch of canvas set, and her high sharp bows smothered in foam, as she dug through the waves.\n\nCock Badding trod the deck with head erect and jaunty bearing, glancing up at the swelling sails and then ahead at the little tilted white triangle, which stood out clear and hard against the bright blue sky. Behind was the lowland of the Camber marshes, with the bluffs of Rye and Winchelsea, and the line of cliffs behind them. On the larboard bow rose the great white walls of Folkestone and of Dover, and far on the distant sky-line the gray shimmer of those French cliffs for which the fugitives were making.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" cried Nigel, looking with eager eyes over the tossing waters, \"it seems to me, Master Badding, that already we draw in upon them.\"\n\nThe master measured the distance with his keen steady gaze, and then looked up at the sinking sun. \"We have still four hours of daylight,\" said he; \"but if we do not lay her aboard ere darkness falls she will save herself, for the nights are as black as a wolf's mouth, and if she alter her course I know not how we may follow her.\"\n\n\"Unless, indeed, you might guess to which port she was bound and reach it before her.\"\n\n\"Well thought of, little master!\" cried Badding. \"If the news be for the French outside Calais, then Ambleteuse would be nearest to Saint Omer. But my sweeting sails three paces to that lubber's two, and if the wind holds we shall have time and to spare. How now, archer? You do not seem so eager as when you made your way aboard this boat by slinging me into the sea.\"\n\nAylward sat on the upturned keel of a skiff which lay upon the deck. He groaned sadly and held his green face between his two hands. \"I would gladly sling you into the sea once more, master-shipman,\" said he, \"if by so doing I could get off this most accursed vessel of thine. Or if you would wish to have your turn, then I would thank you if you would lend me a hand over the side, for indeed I am but a useless weight upon your deck. Little did I think that Samkin Aylward could be turned into a weakling by an hour of salt water. Alas the day that ever my foot wandered from the good red heather of Crooksbury!\"\n\nCock Badding laughed loud and long. \"Nay, take it not to heart, archer,\" he cried; \"for better men than you or I have groaned upon this deck. The Prince himself with ten of his chosen knights crossed with me once, and eleven sadder faces I never saw. Yet within a month they had shown at Crecy that they were no weaklings, as you will do also, I dare swear, when the time comes. Keep that thick head of thine down upon the planks, and all will be well anon. But we raise her, we raise her with every blast of the wind!\"\n\nIt was indeed evident, even to the inexperienced eyes of Nigel, that the Marie Rose was closing in swiftly upon the stranger. She was a heavy, bluff-bowed, broad-sterned vessel which labored clumsily through the seas. The swift, fierce little Winchelsea boat swooping and hissing through the waters behind her was like some keen hawk whizzing down wind at the back of a flapping heavy-bodied duck. Half an hour before La Pucelle had been a distant patch of canvas. Now they could see the black hull, and soon the cut of her sails and the lines of her bulwarks. There were at least a dozen men upon her deck, and the twinkle of weapons from amongst them showed that they were preparing to resist. Cock Badding began to muster his own forces.\n\nHe had a crew of seven rough, hardy mariners, who had been at his back in many a skirmish. They were armed with short swords, but Cock Badding carried a weapon peculiar to himself, a twenty-pound blacksmith's hammer, the memory of which, as \"Badding's cracker,\" still lingers in the Cinque Ports. Then there were the eager Nigel, the melancholy Aylward, Black Simon who was a tried swordsman, and three archers, Baddlesmere, Masters and Dicon of Rye, all veterans of the French War. The numbers in the two vessels might be about equal; but Badding as he glanced at the bold harsh faces which looked to him for orders had little fear for the result.\n\nGlancing round, however, he saw something which was more dangerous to his plans than the resistance of the enemy. The wind, which had become more fitful and feebler, now fell suddenly away, until the sails hung limp and straight above them. A belt of calm lay along the horizon, and the waves around had smoothed down into a long oily swell on which the two little vessels rose and fell. The great boom of the Marie Rose rattled and jarred with every lurch, and the high thin prow pointed skyward one instant and seaward the next in a way that drew fresh groans from the unhappy Aylward. In vain Cock Badding pulled on his sheets and tried hard to husband every little wandering gust which ruffled for an instant the sleek rollers. The French master was as adroit a sailor, and his boom swung round also as each breath of wind came up from astern.\n\nAt last even these fitful puffs died finally away, and a cloudless sky overhung a glassy sea. The sun was almost upon the horizon behind Dungeness Point, and the whole western heaven was bright with the glory of the sunset, which blended sea and sky in one blaze of ruddy light. Like rollers of molten gold, the long swell heaved up Channel from the great ocean beyond. In the midst of the immense beauty and peace of nature the two little dark specks with the white sail and the purple rose and fell, so small upon the vast shining bosom of the waters, and yet so charged with all the unrest and the passion of life.\n\nThe experienced eye of the seaman told him that it was hopeless to expect a breeze before nightfall. He looked across at the Frenchman, which lay less than a quarter of a mile ahead, and shook his gnarled fist at the line of heads which could be seen looking back over her stern. One of them waved a white kerchief in derision, and Cock Badding swore a bitter oath at the sight.\n\n\"By Saint Leonard of Winchelsea,\" he cried, \"I will rub my side up against her yet! Out with the skiff, lads, and two of you to the oars. Make fast the line to the mast, Will. Do you go in the boat, Hugh, and I'll make the second. Now if we bend our backs to it we may have them yet ere night cover them.\"\n\nThe little skiff was swiftly lowered over the side and the slack end of the cable fastened to the after thwart. Cock Badding and his comrades pulled as if they would snap their oars, and the little vessel began slowly to lurch forward over the rollers. But the next moment a larger skiff had splashed over the side of the Frenchman, and no less than four seamen were hard at work under her bows. If the Marie Rose advanced a yard the Frenchman was going two. Again Cock Badding raved and shook his fist. He clambered aboard, his face wet with sweat and dark with anger.\n\n\"Curse them! they have had the best of us!\" he cried. \"I can do no more. Sir John has lost his papers, for indeed now that night is at hand I can see no way in which we can gain them.\"\n\nNigel had leaned against the bulwark during these events, watching with keen attention the doings of the sailors, and praying alternately to Saint Paul, Saint George, and Saint Thomas for a slant of wind which would put them along side their enemy. He was silent; but his hot heart was simmering within him. His spirit had risen even above the discomfort of the sea, and his mind was too absorbed in his mission to have a thought for that which had laid Aylward flat upon the deck. He had never doubted that Cock Badding in one way or another would accomplish his end, but when he heard his speech of despair he bounded off the bulwark and stood before the seaman with his face flushed and all his soul afire.\n\n\"By Saint Paul! master-shipman,\" he cried, \"we should never hold up our heads in honor if we did not go further into the matter! Let us do some small deed this night upon the water, or let us never see land again, for indeed we could not wish fairer prospect of winning honorable advancement.\"\n\n\"With your leave, little master, you speak like a fool,\" said the gruff seaman. \"You and all your kind are as children when once the blue water is beneath you. Can you not see that there is no wind, and that the Frenchman can warp her as swiftly as we? What then would you do?\"\n\nNigel pointed to the boat which towed astern. \"Let us venture forth in her,\" said he, \"and let us take this ship or die worshipful in the attempt.\"\n\nHis bold and fiery words found their echo in the brave rough hearts around him. There was a deep-chested shout from both archers and seamen. Even Aylward sat up, with a wan smile upon his green face.\n\nBut Cock Badding shook his head. \"I have never met the man who could lead where I would not follow,\" said he; \"but by Saint Leonard! this is a mad business, and I should be a fool if I were to risk my men and my ship. Bethink you, little master, that the skiff can hold only five, though you load her to the water's edge. If there is a man yonder, there are fourteen, and you have to climb their side from the boat. What chance would you have? Your boat stove and you in the water\u2014there is the end of it. No man of mine goes on such a fool's errand, and so I swear!\"\n\n\"Then, Master Badding, I must crave the loan of your skiff, for by Saint Paul! the good Lord Chandos' papers are not to be so lightly lost. If no one else will come, then I will go alone.\"\n\nThe shipman smiled at the words; but the smile died away from his lips when Nigel, with features set like ivory and eyes as hard as steel, pulled on the rope so as to bring the skiff under the counter. It was very clear that he would do even as he said. At the same time Aylward raised his bulky form from the deck, leaned for a moment against the bulwarks, and then tottered aft to his master's side.\n\n\"Here is one that will go with you,\" said he, \"or he would never dare show his face to the girls of Tilford again. Come, archers, let us leave these salt herrings in their pickle tub and try our luck out on the water.\"\n\nThe three archers at once ranged themselves on the same side as their comrade. They were bronzed, bearded men, short in stature, as were most Englishmen of that day, but hardy, strong and skilled with their weapons. Each drew his string from its waterproof case and bent the huge arc of his war-bow as he fitted it into the nocks.\n\n\"Now, master, we are at your back,\" said they as they pulled and tightened their sword-belts.\n\nBut already Cock Badding had been carried away by the hot lust of battle and had thrown aside every fear and doubt which had clouded him. To see a fight and not to be in it was more than he could bear.\n\n\"Nay, have it your own way!\" he cried, \"and may Saint Leonard help us, for a madder venture I have never seen! And yet it may be worth the trial. But if it be done let me have the handling of it, little master, for you know no more of a boat than I do of a warhorse. The skiff can bear five and not a man more. Now, who will come?\"\n\nThey had all caught fire, and there was not one who would be left out.\n\nBadding picked up his hammer. \"I will come myself,\" said he, \"and you also, little master, since it is your hot head that has planned it. Then there is Black Simon, the best sword of the Cinque Ports. Two archers can pull on the oars, and it may be that they can pick off two or three of these Frenchmen before we close with them. Hugh Baddlesmere, and you, Dicon of Rye\u2014into the boat with you!\"\n\n\"What?\" cried Aylward. \"Am I to be left behind? I, who am the Squire's own man? Ill fare the bowman who comes betwixt me and yonder boat!\"\n\n\"Nay, Aylward,\" said his master, \"I order that you stay, for indeed you are a sick man.\"\n\n\"But now that the waves have sunk I am myself again. Nay, fair sir, I pray that you will not leave me behind.\"\n\n\"You must needs take the space of a better man; for what do you know of the handling of a boat?\" said Badding shortly. \"No more fool's talk, I pray you, for the night will soon fall. Stand aside!\"\n\nAylward looked hard at the French boat. \"I could swim ten times up and down Frensham pond,\" said he, \"and it will be strange if I cannot go as far as that. By these finger-bones, Samkin Aylward may be there as soon as you!\"\n\nThe little boat with its five occupants pushed off from the side of the schooner, and dipping and rising, made its slow way toward the Frenchman. Badding and one archer had single oars, the second archer was in the prow, while Black Simon and Nigel huddled into the stern with the water lapping and hissing at their very elbows. A shout of defiance rose from the Frenchmen, and they stood in a line along the side of their vessel shaking their fists and waving their weapons. Already the sun was level with Dungeness, and the gray of evening was blurring sky and water into one dim haze. A great silence hung over the broad expanse of nature, and no sound broke it save the dip and splash of the oars and the slow deep surge of the boat upon the swell. Behind them their comrades of the Marie Rose stood motionless and silent, watching their progress with eager eyes.\n\nThey were near enough now to have a good look at the Frenchmen. One was a big swarthy man with a long black beard. He had a red cap and an ax over his shoulder. There were ten other hardy-looking fellows, all of them well armed, and there were three who seemed to be boys.\n\n\"Shall we try a shaft upon them?\" asked Hugh Baddlesmere. \"They are well within our bowshot.\"\n\n\"Only one of you can shoot at a time, for you have no footing,\" said Badding. \"With one foot in the prow and one over the thwart you will get your stance. Do what you may, and then we will close in upon them.\"\n\nThe archer balanced himself in the rolling boat with the deftness of a man who has been trained upon the sea, for he was born and bred in the Cinque Ports. Carefully he nocked his arrow, strongly he drew it, steadily he loosed it, but the boat swooped at the instant, and it buried itself in the waves. The second passed over the little ship, and the third struck in her black side. Then in quick succession so quick that two shafts were often in the air at the same instant\u2014he discharged a dozen arrows, most of which just cleared the bulwarks and dropped upon the deck. There was a cry on the Frenchman, and the heads vanished from the side.\n\n\"Enough!\" cried Badding. \"One is down, and it may be two. Close in, close in, in God's name, before they rally!\"\n\nHe and the other bent to their oars; but at the same instant there was a sharp zip in the air and a hard clear sound like a stone striking a wall. Baddlesmere clapped his hand to his head, groaned and fell forward out of the boat, leaving a swirl of blood upon the surface. A moment later the same fierce hiss ended in a loud wooden crash, and a short, thick crossbow-bolt was buried deep in the side of their boat.\n\n\"Close in, close in!\" roared Badding, tugging at his oar. \"Saint George for England! Saint Leonard for Winchelsea! Close in!\"\n\nBut again that fatal crossbow twanged. Dicon of Rye fell back with a shaft through his shoulder. \"God help me, I can no more!\" said he.\n\nBadding seized the oar from his hand; but it was only to sweep the boat's head round and pull her back to the Marie Rose. The attack had failed.\n\n\"What now, master-shipman?\" cried Nigel. \"What has befallen to stop us? Surely the matter does not end here?\"\n\n\"Two down out of five,\" said Badding, \"and twelve at the least against us. The odds are too long, little master. Let us at least go back, fill up once more, and raise a mantelet against the bolts, for they have an arbalist which shoots both straight and hard. But what we do we must do quickly, for the darkness falls apace.\"\n\nTheir repulse had been hailed by wild yells of delight from the Frenchmen, who danced with joy and waved their weapons madly over their heads. But before their rejoicings had finished they saw the little boat creeping out once more from the shadow of the Marie Rose, a great wooden screen in her bows to protect her from the arrows. Without a pause she came straight and fast for her enemy. The wounded archer had been put on board, and Aylward would have had his place had Nigel been able to see him upon the deck. The third archer, Hal Masters, had sprung in, and one of the seamen, Wat Finnis of Hythe. With their hearts hardened to conquer or to die, the five ran alongside the Frenchman and sprang upon her deck. At the same instant a great iron weight crashed through the bottom of their skiff, and their feet had hardly left her before she was gone. There was no hope and no escape save victory.\n\nThe crossbowman stood under the mast, his terrible weapon at his shoulder, the steel string stretched taut, the heavy bolt shining upon the nut. One life at least he would claim out of this little band. Just for one instant too long did he dwell upon his aim, shifting from the seaman to Cock Badding, whose formidable appearance showed him to be the better prize. In that second of time Hal Masters' string twanged and his long arrow sped through the arbalister's throat. He dropped on the deck, with blood and curses pouring from his mouth.\n\nA moment later Nigel's sword and Badding's hammer had each claimed a victim and driven back the rush of assailants. The five were safe upon the deck, but it was hard for them to keep a footing there. The French seamen, Bretons and Normans, were stout, powerful fellows, armed with axes and swords, fierce fighters and brave men. They swarmed round the little band, attacking them from all sides. Black Simon felled the black-bearded French Captain, and at the same instant was cut over the head and lay with his scalp open upon the deck. The seaman Wat of Hythe was killed by a crashing blow from an ax. Nigel was struck down, but was up again like a flash, and drove his sword through the man who had felled him.\n\nBut Badding, Masters the archer and he had been hustled back to the bulwark and were barely holding their own from minute to minute against the fierce crowd who assailed them, when an arrow coming apparently from the sea struck the foremost Frenchman to the heart. A moment later a boat dashed up alongside and four more men from the Marie Rose scrambled on to the blood-stained deck. With one fierce rush the remaining Frenchmen were struck down or were seized by their assailants. Nine prostrate men upon the deck showed how fierce had been the attack, how desperate the resistance.\n\nBadding leaned panting upon his blood-clotted hammer. \"By Saint Leonard!\" he cried, \"I thought that this little master had been the death of us all. God wot you were but just in time, and how you came I know not. This archer has had a hand in it, by the look of him.\"\n\nAylward, still pale from his seasickness and dripping from head to foot with water, had been the first man in the rescue party.\n\nNigel looked at him in amazement. \"I sought you aboard the ship, Aylward, but I could not lay eyes on you,\" said he.\n\n\"It was because I was in the water, fair sir, and by my hilt! it suits my stomach better than being on it,\" he answered. \"When you first set forth I swam behind you, for I saw that the Frenchman's boat hung by a rope, and I thought that while you kept him in play I might gain it. I had reached it when you were driven back, so I hid behind it in the water and said my prayers as I have not said them for many a day. Then you came again, and no one had an eye for me, so I clambered into it, cut the rope, took the oars which I found there and brought her back for more men.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! you have acted very wisely and well,\" said Nigel, \"and I think that of all of us it is you who have won most honor this day. But of all these men dead and alive I see none who resembles that Red Ferret whom my Lord Chandos has described and who has worked such despite upon us in the past: It would indeed be an evil chance if he has in spite of all our pains made his way to France in some other boat.\"\n\n\"That we shall soon find out,\" said Badding. \"Come with me and we will search the ship from truck to keel ere he escapes us.\"\n\nThere was a scuttle at the base of the mast which led down into the body of the vessel, and the Englishmen were approaching this when a strange sight brought them to a stand. A round brazen head had appeared in the square dark opening. An instant afterward a pair of shining shoulders followed. Then slowly the whole figure of a man in complete plate-armor emerged on the deck. In his gauntleted hand he carried a heavy steel mace. With this uplifted he moved toward his enemies, silent save for the ponderous clank of his footfall. It was an inhuman, machine-like figure, menacing and terrible, devoid of all expression, slow-moving, inexorable and awesome.\n\nA sudden wave of terror passed over the English seamen. One of them tried to pass and get behind the brazen man, but he was pinned against the side by a quick movement and his brains dashed out by a smashing blow from the heavy mace. Wild panic seized the others, and they rushed back to the boat. Aylward strung an arrow, but his bowstring was damp and the shaft rang loudly upon the shining breastplate and glanced off into the sea. Masters struck the brazen head with a sword, but the blade snapped without injuring the helmet, and an instant later the bowman was stretched senseless on the deck. The seamen shrank from this terrible silent creature and huddled in the stern, all the fight gone out of them.\n\nAgain he raised his mace and was advancing on the helpless crowd where the brave were encumbered and hampered by the weaklings, when Nigel shook himself clear and bounded forward into the open, his sword in his hand and a smile of welcome upon his lips.\n\nThe sun had set, and one long mauve gash across the western Channel was closing swiftly into the dull grays of early night. Above, a few stars began to faintly twinkle; yet the twilight was still bright enough for an observer to see every detail of the scene: the Marie Rose, dipping and rising on the long rollers astern; the broad French boat with its white deck blotched with blood and littered with bodies; the group of men in the stern, some trying to advance and some seeking to escape\u2014all a confused, disorderly, struggling rabble.\n\nThen betwixt them and the mast the two figures: the armed shining man of metal, with hand upraised, watchful, silent, motionless, and Nigel, bareheaded and crouching, with quick foot, eager eyes and fearless happy face, moving this way and that, in and out, his sword flashing like a gleam of light as he sought at all points for some opening in the brazen shell before him.\n\nIt was clear to the man in armor that if he could but pen his antagonist in a corner he would beat him down without fail. But it was not to be done. The unhampered man had the advantage of speed. With a few quick steps he could always glide to either side and escape the clumsy rush. Aylward and Badding had sprung out to Nigel's assistance; but he shouted to them to stand back, with such authority and anger in his voice that their weapons dropped to their sides. With staring eyes and set features they stood watching that unequal fight.\n\nOnce it seemed that all was over with the Squire, for in springing back from his enemy he tripped over one of the bodies which strewed the deck and fell flat upon his back, but with a swift wriggle he escaped the heavy blow which thundered down upon him, and springing to his feet he bit deeply into the Frenchman's helmet with a sweeping cut in return. Again the mace fell, and this time Nigel had not quite cleared himself. His sword was beaten down and the blow fell partly upon his left shoulder. He staggered, and once more the iron club whirled upward to dash him to the ground.\n\nQuick as a flash it passed through his mind that he could not leap beyond its reach. But he might get within it. In an instant he had dropped his sword, and springing in he had seized the brazen man round the waist. The mace was shortened and the handle jobbed down once upon the bare flaxen head. Then, with a sonorous clang, and a yell of delight from the spectators, Nigel with one mighty wrench tore his enemy from the deck and hurled him down upon his back. His own head was whirling and he felt that his senses were slipping away, but already his hunting-knife was out and pointing through the slit in the brazen helmet.\n\n\"Give yourself up, fair sir!\" said he.\n\n\"Never to fishermen and to archers! I am a gentleman of coat-armor. Kill me!\"\n\n\"I also am a gentleman of coat-armor. I promise you quarter.\"\n\n\"Then, sir, I surrender myself to you.\"\n\nThe dagger tinkled down upon the deck. Seamen and archers ran forward, to find Nigel half senseless upon his face. They drew him off, and a few deft blows struck off the helmet of his enemy. A head, sharp-featured, freckled and foxy-red, disclosed itself beneath it. Nigel raised himself on his elbow for an instant.\n\n\"You are the Red Ferret?\" said he.\n\n\"So my enemies call me,\" said the Frenchman, with a smile. \"I rejoice, sir, that I have fallen to so valiant and honorable a gentleman.\"\n\n\"I thank you, fair sir,\" said Nigel feebly. \"I also rejoice that I have encountered so debonair a person, and I shall ever bear in mind the pleasure which I have had from our meeting.\"\n\nSo saying, he laid his bleeding head upon his enemy's brazen front and sank into a dead faint." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE RED FERRET CAME TO COSFORD", + "text": "The old chronicler in his \"Gestes du Sieur Nigel\" has bewailed his broken narrative, which rose from the fact that out of thirty-one years of warfare no less than seven were spent by his hero at one time or another in the recovery from his wounds or from those illnesses which arose from privation and fatigue. Here at the very threshold of his career, on the eve of a great enterprise, this very fate befell him.\n\nStretched upon a couch in a low-roofed and ill-furnished chamber, which looks down from under the machicolated corner turret upon the inner court of the Castle of Calais, he lay half-unconscious and impotent, while great deeds were doing under his window. Wounded in three places, and with his head splintered by the sharp pommel of the Ferret's mace, he hovered betwixt life and death, his shattered body drawing him downward, his youthful spirit plucking him up.\n\nAs in some strange dream he was aware of that deed of arms within the courtyard below. Dimly it came back to his memory afterwards the sudden startled shout, the crash of metal, the slamming of great gates, the roar of many voices, the clang, clang, clang, as of fifty lusty smiths upon their anvils, and then at last the dwindling of the hubbub, the low groans and sudden shrill cries to the saints, the measured murmur of many voices, the heavy clanking of armored feet.\n\nSometime in that fell struggle he must have drawn his weakened body as far as the narrow window, and hanging to the iron bars have looked down on the wild scene beneath him. In the red glare of torches held from windows and from roof he saw the rush and swirl of men below, the ruddy light shining back from glowing brass and gleaming steel. As a wild vision it came to him afterward, the beauty and the splendor, the flying lambrequins, the jeweled crests, the blazonry and richness of surcoat and of shield, where sable and gules, argent and vair, in every pattern of saltire, bend or chevron, glowed beneath him like a drift of many-colored blossoms, tossing, sinking, stooping into shadow, springing into light. There glared the blood-red gules of Chandos, and he saw the tall figure of his master, a thunderbolt of war, raging in the van. There too were the three black chevrons on the golden shield which marked the noble Manny. That strong swordsman must surely be the royal Edward himself, since only he and the black-armored swift-footed youth at his side were marked by no symbol of heraldry. \"Manny! Manny! George for England!\" rose the deep-throated bay, and ever the gallant counter-cry: \"A Chargny! A Chargny! Saint Denis for France!\" thundered amid the clash and thudding of the battle.\n\nSuch was the vague whirling memory still lingering in Nigel's mind when at last the mists cleared away from it and he found himself weak but clear on the low couch in the corner turret. Beside him, crushing lavender betwixt his rough fingers and strewing it over floor and sheets, was Aylward the archer. His longbow leaned at the foot of the bed, and his steel cap was balanced on the top of it, while he himself, sitting in his shirt sleeves, fanned off the flies and scattered the fragrant herbs over his helpless master.\n\n\"By my hilt!\" he cried with a sudden shout, every tooth in his head gleaming with joy, \"I thank the Virgin and all the saints for this blessed sight! I had not dared to go back to Tilford had I lost you. Three weeks have you lain there and babbled like a babe, but now I see in your eyes that you are your own man again.\"\n\n\"I have indeed had some small hurt,\" said Nigel feebly; \"but it is shame and sorrow that I should lie here if there is work for my hands. Whither go you, archer?\"\n\n\"To tell the good Sir John that you are mending.\"\n\n\"Nay, bide with me a little longer, Aylward. I can call to mind all that has passed. There was a bickering of small boats, was there not, and I chanced upon a most worthy person and exchanged handstrokes with him? He was my prisoner, was he not?\"\n\n\"He was, fair sir.\"\n\n\"And where is he now?\"\n\n\"Below in the castle.\"\n\nA smile stole over Nigel's pale face. \"I know what I will do with him,\" said he.\n\n\"I pray you to rest, fair sir,\" said Aylward anxiously. \"The King's own leech saw you this morning, and he said that if the bandage was torn from your head you would surely die.\"\n\n\"Nay, good archer, I will not move. But tell me what befell upon the boat?\"\n\n\"There is little to tell, fair sir. Had this Ferret not been his own squire and taken so long a time to don his harness it is likely that they would have had the better of us. He did not reach the battle till his comrades were on their backs. Him we took to the Marie Rose, because he was your man. The others were of no worth, so we threw them into the sea.\"\n\n\"The quick and the dead?\"\n\n\"Every man of them.\"\n\n\"It was an evil deed.\"\n\nAylward shrugged his shoulders. \"I tried to save one boy,\" said he; \"but Cock Badding would not have it, and he had Black Simon and the others at his back. 'It is the custom of the Narrow Seas,' said they: 'To-day for them; to-morrow for us.'\u2014Then they tore him from his hold and cast him screaming over the side. By my hilt! I have no love for the sea and its customs, so I care not if I never set foot on it again when it has once borne me back to England.\"\n\n\"Nay, there are great happenings upon the sea, and many worthy people to be found upon ships,\" said Nigel. \"In all parts, if one goes far enough upon the water, one would find those whom it would be joy to meet. If one crosses over the Narrow Sea, as we have done, we come on the French who are so needful to us; for how else would we win worship? Or if you go south, then in time one may hope to come to the land of the unbelievers, where there is fine skirmishing and much honor for him who will venture his person. Bethink you, archer, how fair a life it must be when one can ride forth in search of advancement with some hope of finding many debonair cavaliers upon the same quest, and then if one be overborne one has died for the faith, and the gates of Heaven are open before you. So also the sea to the north is a help to him who seeks honor, for it leads to the country of the Eastlanders and to those parts where the heathen still dwell who turn their faces from the blessed Gospel. There also a man might find some small deeds to do, and by Saint Paul! Aylward, if the French hold the truce and the good Sir John permits us, I would fain go down into those parts. The sea is a good friend to the cavalier, for it takes him where he may fulfil his vows.\"\n\nAylward shook his head, for his memories were too recent; but he said nothing, because at this instant the door opened and Chandos entered. With joy in his face he stepped forward to the couch and took Nigel's hand in his. Then he whispered a word in Aylward's ear, who hurried from the room.\n\n\"Pardieu! this is a good sight,\" said the knight. \"I trust that you will soon be on your feet again.\"\n\n\"I crave your pardon, my honored lord, that I have been absent from your side,\" said Nigel.\n\n\"In truth my heart was sore for you, Nigel; for you have missed such a night as comes seldom in any man's life. All went even as we had planned. The postern gate was opened, and a party made their way in; but we awaited them, and all were taken or slain. But the greater part of the French had remained without upon the plain of Nieullet, so we took horse and went out against them. When we drew near them they were surprised, but they made good cheer among themselves, calling out to each other: 'If we fly we lose all. It is better to fight on, in the hopes that the day may be ours.' This was heard by our people in the van, who cried out to them: 'By Saint George! you speak truth. Evil befall him who thinks of flying!' So they held their ground like worthy people for the space of an hour, and there were many there whom it is always good to meet: Sir Geoffrey himself, and Sir Pepin de Werre, with Sir John de Landas, old Ballieul of the Yellow Tooth, and his brother Hector the Leopard. But above all Sir Eustace de Ribeaumont was at great pains to meet us worthily, and he was at handstrokes with the King for a long time. Then, when we had slain or taken them, all the prisoners were brought to a feast which was ready for them, and the knights of England waited upon them at the table and made good cheer with them. And all this, Nigel, we owe to you.\"\n\nThe Squire flushed with pleasure at the words. \"Nay, most honored lord, it was but a small thing which I have been able to do. But I thank God and our Lady that I have done some service, since it has pleased you to take me with you to the wars. Should it chance\u2014\"\n\nBut the words were cut short upon Nigel's lips, and he lay back with amazed eyes staring from his pallid face. The door of his little chamber had opened, and who was this, the tall stately man with the noble presence, the high forehead, the long handsome face, the dark, brooding eyes\u2014who but the noble Edward of England?\n\n\"Ha, my little cock of Tilford Bridge, I still bear you in mind,\" said he. \"Right glad I was to hear that you had found your wits again, and I trust that I have not helped to make you take leave of them once more.\"\n\nNigel's stare of astonishment had brought a smile to the King's lips. Now the Squire stammered forth some halting words of gratitude at the honor done to him.\n\n\"Nay, not a word,\" said the King. \"But in sooth it is a joy to my heart to see the son of my old comrade Eustace Loring carry himself so bravely. Had this boat got before us with news of our coming, then all our labor had been in vain, and no Frenchman ventured to Calais that night. But above all I thank you for that you have delivered into my hands one whom I had vowed to punish in that he has caused us more scathe by fouler means than any living man. Twice have I sworn that Peter the Red Ferret shall hang, for all his noble blood and coat-armor, if ever he should fall into my hands. Now at last his time has come; but I would not put him to death until you, who had taken him, could be there to see it done. Nay, thank me not, for I could do no less, seeing that it is to you that I owe him.\"\n\nBut it was not thanks which Nigel was trying to utter. It was hard to frame his words, and yet they must be said. \"Sire,\" he murmured, \"it ill becomes me to cross your royal will\u2014\"\n\nThe dark Plantagenet wrath gathered upon the King's high brow and gloomed in his fierce deep-set eyes. \"By God's dignity! no man has ever crossed it yet and lived unscathed. How now, young sir, what mean such words, to which we are little wont? Have a care, for this is no light thing which you venture.\"\n\n\"Sire,\" said Nigel, \"in all matters in which I am a free man I am ever your faithful liege, but some things there are which may not be done.\"\n\n\"How?\" cried the King. \"In spite of my will?\"\n\n\"In spite of your will, sire,\" said Nigel, sitting up on his couch, with white face and blazing eyes.\n\n\"By the Virgin!\" the angry King thundered, \"we are come to a pretty pass! You have been held too long at home, young man. The overstabled horse will kick. The unweathered hawk will fly at check. See to it, Master Chandos! He is thine to break, and I hold you to it that you break him. And what is it that Edward of England may not do, Master Loring?\"\n\nNigel faced the King with a face as grim as his own. \"You may not put to death the Red Ferret.\"\n\n\"Pardieu! And why?\"\n\n\"Because he is not thine to slay, sire. Because he is mine. Because I promised him his life, and it is not for you, King though you be, to constrain a man of gentle blood to break his plighted word and lose his honor.\"\n\nChandos laid his soothing hand upon his Squire's shoulder. \"Excuse him, sire; he is weak from his wounds,\" said he. \"Perhaps we have stayed overlong, for the leech has ordered repose.\"\n\nBut the angry King was not easily to be appeased. \"I am not wont to be so browbeat,\" said he hotly. \"This is your Squire, Master John. How comes it that you can stand there and listen to his pert talk, and say no word to chide him? Is this how you guide your household? Have you not taught him that every promise given is subject to the King's consent, and that with him only lie the springs of life and death? If he is sick, you at least are hale. Why stand you there in silence?\"\n\n\"My liege,\" said Chandos gravely, \"I have served you for over a score of years, and have shed my blood through as many wounds in your cause, so that you should not take my words amiss. But indeed I should feel myself to be no true man if I did not tell you that my Squire Nigel, though perchance he has spoken more bluntly than becomes him, is none the less right in this matter, and that you are wrong. For bethink you, sire\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough!\" cried the King, more furious than ever. \"Like master, like man, and I might have known why it is that this saucy Squire dares to bandy words with his sovereign lord. He does but give out what he hath taken in. John, John, you grow overbold. But this I tell you, and you also, young man, that as God is my help, ere the sun has set this night the Red Ferret will hang as a warning to all spies and traitors from the highest tower of Calais, that every ship upon the Narrow Seas, and every man for ten miles round may see him as he swings and know how heavy is the hand of the English King. Do you bear it in mind, lest you also may feel its weight!\" With a glare like an angry lion he walked from the room, and the iron-clamped door clanged loudly behind him.\n\nChandos and Nigel looked ruefully at each other. Then the knight patted his Squire upon his bandaged head.\n\n\"You have carried yourself right well, Nigel. I could not wish for better. Fear not. All will be well.\"\n\n\"My fair and honored lord,\" cried Nigel, \"I am heavy at heart, for indeed I could do no other, and yet I have brought trouble upon you.\"\n\n\"Nay, the clouds will soon pass. If he does indeed slay this Frenchman, you have done all that lay within your power, and your mind may rest easy.\"\n\n\"I pray that it will rest easy in Paradise,\" said Nigel; \"for at the hour that I hear that I am dishonored and my prisoner slain I tear this bandage from my head and so end all things. I will not live when once my word is broken.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair son, you take this thing too heavily,\" said Chandos, with a grave face. \"When a man has done all he may there remains no dishonor; but the King hath a kind heart for all his hot head, and it may be that if I see him I will prevail upon him. Bethink you how he swore to hang the six burghers of this very town, and yet he pardoned them. So keep a high heart, fair son, and I will come with good news ere evening.\"\n\nFor three hours, as the sinking sun traced the shadow higher and ever higher upon the chamber wall, Nigel tossed feverishly upon his couch, his ears straining for the footfall of Aylward or of Chandos, bringing news of the fate of the prisoner. At last the door flew open, and there before him stood the one man whom he least expected, and yet would most gladly have seen. It was the Red Ferret himself, free and joyous.\n\nWith swift furtive steps he was across the room and on his knees beside the couch, kissing the pendent hand. \"You have saved me, most noble sir!\" he cried. \"The gallows was fixed and the rope slung, when the good Lord Chandos told the King that you would die by your own hand if I were slain. 'Curse this mule-headed Squire!' he cried. 'In God's name let him have his prisoner, and let him do what he will with him so long as he troubles me no more!' So here I have come, fair sir, to ask you what I shall do.\"\n\n\"I pray you to sit beside me and be at your ease,\" said Nigel. \"In a few words I will tell you what I would have you do. Your armor I will keep, that I may have some remembrance of my good fortune in meeting so valiant a gentleman. We are of a size, and I make little doubt that I can wear it. Of ransom I would ask a thousand crowns.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay!\" cried the Ferret. \"It would be a sad thing if a man of my position was worth less than five thousand.\"\n\n\"A thousand will suffice, fair sir, to pay my charges for the war. You will not again play the spy, nor do us harm until the truce is broken.\"\n\n\"That I will swear.\"\n\n\"And lastly there is a journey that you shall make.\"\n\nThe Frenchman's face lengthened. \"Where you order I must go,\" said he; \"but I pray you that it is not to the Holy Land.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Nigel; \"but it is to a land which is holy to me. You will make your way back to Southampton.\"\n\n\"I know it well. I helped to burn it down some years ago.\"\n\n\"I rede you to say nothing of that matter when you get there. You will then journey as though to London until you come to a fair town named Guildford.\"\n\n\"I have heard of it. The King hath a hunt there.\"\n\n\"The same. You will then ask for a house named Cosford, two leagues from the town on the side of a long hill.\"\n\n\"I will bear it in mind.\"\n\n\"At Cosford you will see a good knight named Sir John Buttesthorn, and you will ask to have speech with his daughter, the Lady Mary.\"\n\n\"I will do so; and what shall I say to the Lady Mary, who lives at Cosford on the slope of a long hill two leagues from the fair town of Guildford?\"\n\n\"Say only that I sent my greeting, and that Saint Catharine has been my friend\u2014only that and nothing more. And now leave me, I pray you, for my head is weary and I would fain have sleep.\"\n\nThus it came about that a month later on the eve of the Feast of Saint Matthew, the Lady Mary, as she walked front Cosford gates, met with a strange horseman, richly clad, a serving-man behind him, looking shrewdly about him with quick blue eyes, which twinkled from a red and freckled face. At sight of her he doffed his hat and reined his horse.\n\n\"This house should be Cosford,\" said he. \"Are you by chance the Lady Mary who dwells there?\"\n\nThe lady bowed her proud dark head.\n\n\"Then,\" said he, \"Squire Nigel Loring sends you greeting and tells you that Saint Catharine has been his friend.\" Then turning to his servant he cried: \"Heh, Raoul, our task is done! Your master is a free man once more. Come, lad, come, the nearest port to France! Hola! Hola! Hola!\" And so without a word more the two, master and man, set spurs to their horses and galloped like madmen down the long slope of Hindhead, until as she looked after them they were but two dark dots in the distance, waist-high in the ling and the bracken.\n\nShe turned back to the house, a smile upon her face. Nigel had sent her greeting. A Frenchman had brought it. His bringing it had made him a freeman. And Saint Catherine had been Nigel's friend. It was at her shrine that he had sworn that three deeds should be done ere he should set eyes upon her again. In the privacy of her room the Lady Mary sank upon her prie-dieu and poured forth the thanks of her heart to the Virgin that one deed was accomplished; but even as she did so her joy was overcast by the thought of those two others which lay before him." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE KING'S COURT FEASTED IN CALAIS CASTLE", + "text": "It was a bright sunshiny morning when Nigel found himself at last able to leave his turret chamber and to walk upon the rampart of the castle. There was a brisk northern wind, heavy and wet with the salt of the sea, and he felt, as he turned his face to it, fresh life and strength surging in his blood and bracing his limbs. He took his hand from Aylward's supporting arm and stood with his cap off, leaning on the rampart and breathing in the cool strong air. Far off upon the distant sky-line, half hidden by the heave of the waves, was the low white fringe of cliffs which skirted England. Between him and them lay the broad blue Channel, seamed and flecked with flashing foam, for a sharp sea was running and the few ships in sight were laboring heavily. Nigel's eyes traversed the widespread view, rejoicing in the change from the gray wall of his cramped chamber. Finally they settled upon a strange object at his very feet.\n\nIt was a long trumpet-shaped engine of leather and iron bolted into a rude wooden stand and fitted with wheels. Beside it lay a heap of metal slugs and lumps of stone. The end of the machine was raised and pointed over the battlement. Behind it stood an iron box which Nigel opened. It was filled with a black coarse powder, like gritty charcoal.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said he, passing his hands over the engine, \"I have heard men talk of these things, but never before have I seen one. It is none other than one of those wondrous new-made bombards.\"\n\n\"In sooth, it is even as you say,\" Aylward answered, looking at it with contempt and dislike in his face. \"I have seen them here upon the ramparts, and have also exchanged a buffet or two with him who had charge of them. He was jack-fool enough to think that with this leather pipe he could outshoot the best archer in Christendom. I lent him a cuff on the ear that laid him across his foolish engine.\"\n\n\"It is a fearsome thing,\" said Nigel, who had stooped to examine it. \"We live in strange times when such things can be made. It is loosed by fire, is it not, which springs from the black dust?\"\n\n\"By my hilt! fair sir, I know not. And yet I call to mind that ere we fell out this foolish bombardman did say something of the matter. The fire-dust is within and so also is the ball. Then you take more dust from this iron box and place it in the hole at the farther end\u2014so. It is now ready. I have never seen one fired, but I wot that this one could be fired now.\"\n\n\"It makes a strange sound, archer, does it not?\" said Nigel wistfully.\n\n\"So I have heard, fair sir\u2014even as the bow twangs, so it also has a sound when you loose it.\"\n\n\"There is no one to hear, since we are alone upon the rampart, nor can it do scathe, since it points to sea. I pray you to loose it and I will listen to the sound.\" He bent over the bombard with an attentive ear, while Aylward, stooping his earnest brown face over the touch-hole, scraped away diligently with a flint and steel. A moment later both he and Nigel were seated some distance off upon the ground while amid the roar of the discharge and the thick cloud of smoke they had a vision of the long black snakelike engine shooting back upon the recoil. For a minute or more they were struck motionless with astonishment while the reverberations died away and the smoke wreaths curled slowly up to the blue heavens.\n\n\"Good lack!\" cried Nigel at last, picking himself up and looking round him. \"Good lack, and Heaven be my aid! I thank the Virgin that all stands as it did before. I thought that the castle had fallen.\"\n\n\"Such a bull's bellow I have never heard,\" cried Aylward, rubbing his injured limbs. \"One could hear it from Frensham Pond to Guildford Castle. I would not touch one again\u2014not for a hide of the best land in Puttenham!\"\n\n\"It may fare ill with your own hide, archer, if you do,\" said an angry voice behind them. Chandos had stepped from the open door of the corner turret and stood looking at them with a harsh gaze. Presently, as the matter was made clear to him his face relaxed into a smile.\n\n\"Hasten to the warden, archer, and tell him how it befell. You will have the castle and the town in arms. I know not what the King may think of so sudden an alarm. And you, Nigel, how in the name of the saints came you to play the child like this?\"\n\n\"I knew not its power, fair lord.\"\n\n\"By my soul, Nigel, I think that none of us know its power. I can see the day when all that we delight in, the splendor and glory of war, may all go down before that which beats through the plate of steel as easily as the leathern jacket. I have bestrode my warhorse in my armor and have looked down at the sooty, smoky bombardman beside me, and I have thought that perhaps I was the last of the old and he the first of the new; that there would come a time when he and his engines would sweep you and me and the rest of us from the field.\"\n\n\"But not yet, I trust, honored sir?\"\n\n\"No, not yet, Nigel. You are still in time to win your spurs even as your fathers did. How is your strength?\"\n\n\"I am ready for any task, my good and honored lord.\"\n\n\"It is well, for work awaits us\u2014good work, pressing work, work of peril and of honor. Your eyes shine and your face flushes, Nigel. I live my own youth over again as I look at you. Know then that though there is truce with the French here, there is not truce in Brittany where the houses of Blois and of Montfort still struggle for the dukedom. Half Brittany fights for one, and half for the other. The French have taken up the cause of Blois, and we of Montfort, and it is such a war that many a great leader, such as Sir Walter Manny, has first earned his name there. Of late the war has gone against us, and the bloody hands of the Rohans, of Gaptooth Beaumanoir, of Oliver the Flesher and others have been heavy upon our people. The last tidings have been of disaster, and the King's soul is dark with wrath for that his friend and comrade Gilles de St. Pol has been done to death in the Castle of La Brohiniere. He will send succors to the country, and we go at their head. How like you that, Nigel?\"\n\n\"My honored lord, what could I ask for better?\"\n\n\"Then have your harness ready, for we start within the week. Our path by land is blocked by the French, and we go by sea. This night the King gives a banquet ere he returns to England, and your place is behind my chair. Be in my chamber that you may help me to dress, and so we will to the hall together.\"\n\nWith satin and with samite, with velvet and with fur, the noble Chandos was dressed for the King's feast, and Nigel too had donned his best silk jupon, faced with the five scarlet roses, that he might wait upon him. In the great hall of Calais Castle the tables were set, a high table for the lords, a second one for the less distinguished knights, and a third at which the squires might feast when their masters were seated.\n\nNever had Nigel in his simple life at Tilford pictured a scene of such pomp and wondrous luxury. The grim gray walls were covered from ceiling to floor with priceless tapestry of Arras, where hart, hounds and huntsmen circled the great hall with one long living image of the chase. Over the principal table drooped a line of banners, and beneath them rows of emblazoned shields upon the wall carried the arms of the high noblemen who sat beneath. The red light of cressets and of torches burned upon the badges of the great captains of England. The lions and lilies shone over the high dorseret chair in the center, and the same august device marked with the cadency label indicated the seat of the Prince, while glowing to right and to left were the long lines of noble insignia, honored in peace and terrible in war. There shone the gold and sable of Manny, the engrailed cross of Suffolk, the red chevron of Stafford, the scarlet and gold of Audley, the blue lion rampant of the Percies, the silver swallows of Arundel, the red roebuck of the Montacutes, the star of the de Veres, the silver scallops of Russell, the purple lion of de Lacy, and the black crosses of Clinton.\n\nA friendly Squire at Nigel's elbow whispered the names of the famous warriors beneath. \"You are young Loring of Tilford, the Squire of Chandos, are you not?\" said he. \"My name is Delves, and I come from Doddington in Cheshire. I am the Squire of Sir James Audley, yonder round-backed man with the dark face and close-cropped beard, who hath the Saracen head as a crest above him.\"\n\n\"I have heard of him as a man of great valor,\" said Nigel, gazing at him with interest.\n\n\"Indeed, you may well say so, Master Loring. He is the bravest knight in England, and in Christendom also, as I believe. No man hath done such deeds of valor.\"\n\nNigel looked at his new acquaintance with hope in his eyes. \"You speak as it becomes you to speak when you uphold your own master,\" said he. \"For the same reason, Master Delves, and in no spirit of ill-will to you, it behooves me to tell you that he is not to be compared in name or fame with the noble knight on whom I wait. Should you hold otherwise, then surely we can debate the matter in whatever way or time may please you best.\"\n\nDelves smiled good-humoredly. \"Nay, be not so hot,\" said he. \"Had you upheld any other knight, save perhaps Sir Walter Manny, I had taken you at your word, and your master or mine would have had place for a new Squire. But indeed it is only truth that no knight is second to Chandos, nor would I draw my sword to lower his pride of place. Ha, Sir James' cup is low! I must see to it!\" He darted off, a flagon of Gascony in his hand. \"The King hath had good news to-night,\" he continued when he returned. \"I have not seen him in so merry a mind since the night when we took the Frenchmen and he laid his pearl chaplet upon the head of de Ribeaumont. See how he laughs, and the Prince also. That laugh bodes some one little good, or I am the more mistaken. Have a care! Sir John's plate is empty.\"\n\nIt was Nigel's turn to dart away; but ever in the intervals he returned to the corner whence he could look down the hall and listen to the words of the older Squire. Delves was a short, thick-set man past middle age, weather-beaten and scarred, with a rough manner and bearing which showed that he was more at his ease in a tent than a hall. But ten years of service had taught him much, and Nigel listened eagerly to his talk.\n\n\"Indeed the King hath some good tidings,\" he continued. \"See now, he has whispered it to Chandos and to Manny. Manny spreads it on to Sir Reginald Cobham, and he to Robert Knolles, each smiling like the Devil over a friar.\"\n\n\"Which is Sir Robert Knolles?\" asked Nigel with interest. \"I have heard much of him and his deeds.\"\n\n\"He is the tall hard-faced man in yellow silk, he with the hairless cheeks and the split lip. He is little older than yourself, and his father was a cobbler in Chester, yet he has already won the golden spurs. See how he dabs his great hand in the dish and hands forth the gobbets. He is more used to a camp-kettle than a silver plate. The big man with the black beard is Sir Bartholomew Berghersh, whose brother is the Abbot of Beaulieu. Haste, haste! for the boar's head is come and the plate's to be cleaned.\"\n\nThe table manners of our ancestors at this period would have furnished to the modern eye the strangest mixture of luxury and of barbarism. Forks were still unknown, and the courtesy fingers, the index and the middle of the left hand, took their place. To use any others was accounted the worst of manners. A crowd of dogs lay among the rushes growling at each other and quarreling over the gnawed bones which were thrown to them by the feasters. A slice of coarse bread served usually as a plate, but the King's own high table was provided with silver platters, which were wiped by the Squire or page after each course. On the other hand the table-linen was costly, and the courses, served with a pomp and dignity now unknown, comprised such a variety of dishes and such complex marvels of cookery as no modern banquet could show. Besides all our domestic animals and every kind of game, such strange delicacies as hedgehogs, bustards, porpoises, squirrels, bitterns and cranes lent variety to the feast.\n\nEach new course, heralded by a flourish of silver trumpets, was borne in by liveried servants walking two and two, with rubicund marshals strutting in front and behind, bearing white wands in their hands, not only as badges of their office, but also as weapons with which to repel any impertinent inroad upon the dishes in the journey from the kitchen to the hall. Boar's heads, enarmed and endored with gilt tusks and flaming mouths, were followed by wondrous pasties molded to the shape of ships, castles and other devices with sugar seamen or soldiers who lost their own bodies in their fruitless defense against the hungry attack. Finally came the great nef, a silver vessel upon wheels laden with fruit and sweetmeats which rolled with its luscious cargo down the line of guests. Flagons of Gascony, of Rhine wine, of Canary and of Rochelle were held in readiness by the attendants; but the age, though luxurious, was not drunken, and the sober habits of the Norman had happily prevailed over the license of those Saxon banquets where no guest might walk from the table without a slur upon his host. Honor and hardihood go ill with a shaking hand or a blurred eye.\n\nWhilst wine, fruit and spices were handed round the high tables the squires had been served in turn at the farther end of the hall. Meanwhile round the King there had gathered a group of statesmen and soldiers, talking eagerly among themselves. The Earl of Stafford, the Earl of Warwick, the Earl of Arundel, Lord Beauchamp and Lord Neville were assembled at the back of his chair, with Lord Percy and Lord Mowbray at either side. The little group blazed with golden chains and jeweled chaplets, flame colored paltocks and purple tunics.\n\nOf a sudden the King said something over his shoulder to Sir William de Pakyngton the herald, who advanced and stood by the royal chair. He was a tall and noble-featured man, with long grizzled beard which rippled down to the gold-linked belt girdling his many-colored tabard. On his head he had placed the heraldic barret-cap which bespoke his dignity, and he slowly raised his white wand high in the air, while a great hush fell upon the hall.\n\n\"My lords of England,\" said he, \"knight bannerets, knights, squires, and all others here present of gentle birth and coat-armor, know that your dread and sovereign lord, Edward, King of England and of France, bids me give you greeting and commands you to come hither that he may have speech with you.\"\n\nIn an instant the tables were deserted and the whole company had clustered in front of the King's chair. Those who had sat on either side of him crowded inward so that his tall dark figure upreared itself amid the dense circle of his guests.\n\nWith a flush upon his olive cheeks and with pride smoldering in his dark eyes, he looked round him at the eager faces of the men who had been his comrades from Sluys and Cadsand to Crecy and Calais. They caught fire from that warlike gleam in his masterful gaze, and a sudden wild, fierce shout pealed up to the vaulted ceiling, a soldierly thanks for what was passed and a promise for what was to come. The King's teeth gleamed in a quick smile, and his large white hand played with the jeweled dagger in his belt.\n\n\"By the splendor of God!\" said he in a loud clear voice, \"I have little doubt that you will rejoice with me this night, for such tidings have come to my ears as may well bring joy to everyone of you. You know well that our ships have suffered great scathe from the Spaniards, who for many years have slain without grace or ruth all of my people who have fallen into their cruel hands. Of late they have sent their ships into Flanders, and thirty great cogs and galleys lie now at Sluys well-filled with archers and men-at-arms and ready in all ways for battle. I have it to-day from a sure hand that, having taken their merchandise aboard, these ships will sail upon the next Sunday and will make their way through our Narrow Sea. We have for a great time been long-suffering to these people, for which they have done us many contraries and despites, growing ever more arrogant as we grow more patient. It is in my mind therefore that we hie us to-morrow to Winchelsea, where we have twenty ships, and make ready to sally out upon them as they pass. May God and Saint George defend the right!\"\n\nA second shout, far louder and fiercer than the first, came like a thunderclap after the King's words. It was the bay of a fierce pack to their trusted huntsman.\n\nEdward laughed again as he looked round at the gleaming eyes, the waving arms and the flushed joyful faces of his liegemen. \"Who hath fought against these Spaniards?\" he asked. \"Is there anyone here who can tell us what manner of men they be?\"\n\nA dozen hands went up into the air; but the King turned to the Earl of Suffolk at his elbow.\n\n\"You have fought them, Thomas?\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, sire, I was in the great sea-fight eight years ago at the Island of Guernsey, when Lord Lewis of Spain held the sea against the Earl of Pembroke.\"\n\n\"How found you them, Thomas?\"\n\n\"Very excellent people, sire, and no man could ask for better. On every ship they have a hundred crossbowmen of Genoa, the best in the world, and their spearmen also are very hardy men. They would throw great cantles of iron from the tops of the masts, and many of our people met their death through it. If we can bar their way in the Narrow Sea, then there will be much hope of honor for all of us.\"\n\n\"Your words are very welcome, Thomas,\" said the King, \"and I make no doubt that they will show themselves to be very worthy of what we prepare for them. To you I give a ship, that you may have the handling of it. You also, my dear son, shall have a ship, that evermore honor may be thine.\"\n\n\"I thank you, my fair and sweet father,\" said the Prince, with joy flushing his handsome boyish face.\n\n\"The leading ship shall be mine. But you shall have one, Walter Manny, and you, Stafford, and you, Arundel, and you, Audley, and you, Sir Thomas Holland, and you, Brocas, and you, Berkeley, and you, Reginald. The rest shall be awarded at Winchelsea, whither we sail to-morrow. Nay, John, why do you pluck so at my sleeve?\"\n\nChandos was leaning forward, with an anxious face. \"Surely, my honored lord, I have not served you so long and so faithfully that you should forget me now. Is there then no ship for me?\"\n\nThe King smiled, but shook his head. \"Nay, John, have I not given you two hundred archers and a hundred men-at-arms to take with you into Brittany? I trust that your ships will be lying in Saint Malo Bay ere the Spaniards are abreast of Winchelsea. What more would you have, old war-dog? Wouldst be in two battles at once?\"\n\n\"I would be at your side, my liege, when the lion banner is in the wind once more. I have ever been there. Why should you cast me now? I ask little, dear lord\u2014a galley, a balinger, even a pinnace, so that I may only be there.\"\n\n\"Nay, John, you shall come. I cannot find it in my heart to say you nay. I will find you place in my own ship, that you may indeed be by my side.\"\n\nChandos stooped and kissed the King's hand. \"My Squire?\" he asked.\n\nThe King's brows knotted into a frown. \"Nay, let him go to Brittany with the others,\" said he harshly. \"I wonder, John, that you should bring back to my memory this youth whose pertness is too fresh that I should forget it. But some one must go to Brittany in your stead, for the matter presses and our people are hard put to it to hold their own.\" He cast his eyes over the assembly, and they rested upon the stern features of Sir Robert Knolles.\n\n\"Sir Robert,\" he said, \"though you are young in years you are already old in war, and I have heard that you are as prudent in council as you are valiant in the field. To you I commit the charge of this venture to Brittany in place of Sir John Chandos, who will follow thither when our work has been done upon the waters. Three ships lie in Calais port and three hundred men are ready to your hand. Sir John will tell you what our mind is in the matter. And now, my friends and good comrades, you will haste you each to his own quarters, and you will make swiftly such preparations as are needful, for, as God is my aid, I will sail with you to Winchelsea to-morrow!\"\n\nBeckoning to Chandos, Manny and a few of his chosen leaders, the King led them away to an inner chamber, where they might discuss the plans for the future. At the same time the assembly broke up, the knights in silence and dignity, the squires in mirth and noise, but all joyful at heart for the thought of the great days which lay before them." + }, + { + "title": "THE SPANIARDS ON THE SEA", + "text": "Day had not yet dawned when Nigel was in the chamber of Chandos preparing him for his departure and listening to the last cheery words of advice and direction from his noble master. That same morning, before the sun was half-way up the heaven, the King's great nef Philippa, bearing within it the most of those present at his banquet the night before, set its huge sail, adorned with the lions and the lilies, and turned its brazen beak for England. Behind it went five smaller cogs crammed with squires, archers and men-at-arms.\n\nNigel and his companions lined the ramparts of the castle and waved their caps as the bluff, burly vessels, with drums beating and trumpets clanging, a hundred knightly pennons streaming from their decks and the red cross of England over all, rolled slowly out to the open sea. Then when they had watched them until they were hull down they turned, with hearts heavy at being left behind, to make ready for their own more distant venture.\n\nIt took them four days of hard work ere their preparations were complete, for many were the needs of a small force sailing to a strange country. Three ships had been left to them, the cog Thomas of Romney, the Grace Dieu of Hythe, and the Basilisk of Southampton, into each of which one hundred men were stowed, besides the thirty seamen who formed the crew. In the hold were forty horses, amongst them Pommers, much wearied by his long idleness, and homesick for the slopes of Surrey where his great limbs might find the work he craved. Then the food and the water, the bowstaves and the sheaves of arrows, the horseshoes, the nails, the hammers, the knives, the axes, the ropes, the vats of hay, the green fodder and a score of other things were packed aboard. Always by the side of the ships stood the stern young knight Sir Robert, checking, testing, watching and controlling, saying little, for he was a man of few words, but with his eyes, his hands, and if need be his heavy dog-whip, wherever they were wanted.\n\nThe seamen of the Basilisk, being from a free port, had the old feud against the men of the Cinque Ports, who were looked upon by the other mariners of England as being unduly favored by the King. A ship of the West Country could scarce meet with one from the Narrow Seas without blood flowing. Hence sprang sudden broils on the quay side, when with yell and blow the Thomases and Grace Dieus, Saint Leonard on their lips and murder in their hearts, would fall upon the Basilisks. Then amid the whirl of cudgels and the clash of knives would spring the tiger figure of the young leader, lashing mercilessly to right and left like a tamer among his wolves, until he had beaten them howling back to their work. Upon the morning of the fourth day all was ready, and the ropes being cast off the three little ships were warped down the harbor by their own pinnaces until they were swallowed up in the swirling folds of a Channel mist.\n\nThough small in numbers, it was no mean force which Edward had dispatched to succor the hard-pressed English garrisons in Brittany. There was scarce a man among them who was not an old soldier, and their leaders were men of note in council and in war. Knolles flew his flag of the black raven aboard the Basilisk. With him were Nigel and his own Squire John Hawthorn. Of his hundred men, forty were Yorkshire Dalesmen and forty were men of Lincoln, all noted archers, with old Wat of Carlisle, a grizzled veteran of border warfare, to lead them.\n\nAlready Aylward by his skill and strength had won his way to an under-officership amongst them, and shared with Long Ned Widdington, a huge North Countryman, the reputation of coming next to famous Wat Carlisle in all that makes an archer. The men-at-arms too were war-hardened soldiers, with Black Simon of Norwich, the same who had sailed from Winchelsea, to lead them. With his heart filled with hatred for the French who had slain all who were dear to him, he followed like a bloodhound over land and sea to any spot where he might glut his vengeance. Such also were the men who sailed in the other ships, Cheshire men from the Welsh borders in the cog Thomas, and Cumberland men, used to Scottish warfare, in the Grace Dieu.\n\nSir James Astley hung his shield of cinquefoil ermine over the quarter of the Thomas. Lord Thomas Percy, a cadet of Alnwick, famous already for the high spirit of that house which for ages was the bar upon the landward gate of England, showed his blue lion rampant as leader of the Grace Dieu. Such was the goodly company Saint-Malo bound, who warped from Calais Harbor to plunge into the thick reek of a Channel mist.\n\nA slight breeze blew from the eastward, and the highended, round-bodied craft rolled slowly down the Channel. The mist rose a little at times, so that they had sight of each other dipping and rising upon a sleek, oily sea, but again it would sink down, settling over the top, shrouding the great yard, and finally frothing over the deck until even the water alongside had vanished from their view and they were afloat on a little raft in an ocean of vapor. A thin cold rain was falling, and the archers were crowded under the shelter of the overhanging poop and forecastle, where some spent the hours at dice, some in sleep, and many in trimming their arrows or polishing their weapons.\n\nAt the farther end, seated on a barrel as a throne of honor, with trays and boxes of feathers around him, was Bartholomew the bowyer and Fletcher, a fat, bald-headed man, whose task it was to see that every man's tackle was as it should be, and who had the privilege of selling such extras as they might need. A group of archers with their staves and quivers filed before him with complaints or requests, while half a dozen of the seniors gathered at his back and listened with grinning faces to his comments and rebukes.\n\n\"Canst not string it?\" he was saying to a young bowman. \"Then surely the string is overshort or the stave overlong. It could not by chance be the fault of thy own baby arms more fit to draw on thy hosen than to dress a warbow. Thou lazy lurdan, thus is it strung!\" He seized the stave by the center in his right hand, leaned the end on the inside of his right foot, and then, pulling the upper nock down with the left hand, slid the eye of the string easily into place. \"Now I pray thee to unstring it again,\" handing it to the bowman.\n\nThe youth with an effort did so, but he was too slow in disengaging his fingers, and the string sliding down with a snap from the upper nock caught and pinched them sorely against the stave. A roar of laughter, like the clap of a wave, swept down the deck as the luckless bowman danced and wrung his hand.\n\n\"Serve thee well right, thou redeless fool!\" growled the old bowyer. \"So fine a bow is wasted in such hands. How now, Samkin? I can teach you little of your trade, I trow. Here is a bow dressed as it should be; but it would, as you say, be the better for a white band to mark the true nocking point in the center of this red wrapping of silk. Leave it and I will tend to it anon. And you, Wat? A fresh head on yonder stele? Lord, that a man should carry four trades under one hat, and be bowyer, fletcher, stringer and headmaker! Four men's work for old Bartholomew and one man's pay!\"\n\n\"Nay, say no more about that,\" growled an old wizened bowman, with a brown-parchment skin and little beady eyes. \"It is better in these days to mend a bow than to bend one. You who never looked a Frenchman in the face are pricked off for ninepence a day, and I, who have fought five stricken fields, can earn but fourpence.\"\n\n\"It is in my mind, John of Tuxford, that you have looked in the face more pots of mead than Frenchmen,\" said the old bowyer. \"I am swinking from dawn to night, while you are guzzling in an alestake. How now, youngster? Overbowed? Put your bow in the tiller. It draws at sixty pounds\u2014not a pennyweight too much for a man of your inches. Lay more body to it, lad, and it will come to you. If your bow be not stiff, how can you hope for a twenty-score flight. Feathers? Aye, plenty and of the best. Here, peacock at a groat each. Surely a dandy archer like you, Tom Beverley, with gold earrings in your ears, would have no feathering but peacocks?\"\n\n\"So the shaft fly straight, I care not of the feather,\" said the bowman, a tall young Yorkshireman, counting out pennies on the palm of his horny hand.\n\n\"Gray goose-feathers are but a farthing. These on the left are a halfpenny, for they are of the wild goose, and the second feather of a fenny goose is worth more than the pinion of a tame one. These in the brass tray are dropped feathers, and a dropped feather is better than a plucked one. Buy a score of these, lad, and cut them saddle-backed or swine-backed, the one for a dead shaft and the other for a smooth flyer, and no man in the company will swing a better-fletched quiver over his shoulder.\"\n\nIt chanced that the opinion of the bowyer on this and other points differed from that of Long Ned of Widdington, a surly straw-bearded Yorkshireman, who had listened with a sneering face to his counsel. Now he broke in suddenly upon the bowyer's talk. \"You would do better to sell bows than to try to teach others how to use them,\" said he; \"for indeed, Bartholomew, that head of thine has no more sense within it than it has hairs without. If you had drawn string for as many months as I have years you would know that a straight-cut feather flies smoother than a swine-backed, and pity it is that these young bowmen have none to teach them better!\"\n\nThis attack upon his professional knowledge touched the old bowyer on the raw. His fat face became suffused with blood and his eyes glared with fury as he turned upon the archer. \"You seven-foot barrel of lies!\" he cried. \"All-hallows be my aid, and I will teach you to open your slabbing mouth against me! Pluck forth your sword and stand out on yonder deck, that we may see who is the man of us twain. May I never twirl a shaft over my thumb nail if I do not put Bartholomew's mark upon your thick head!\"\n\nA score of rough voices joined at once in the quarrel, some upholding the bowyer and others taking the part of the North Countryman. A red-headed Dalesman snatched up a sword, but was felled by a blow from the fist of his neighbor. Instantly, with a buzz like a swarm of angry hornets, the bowmen were out on the deck; but ere a blow was struck Knolles was amongst them with granite face and eyes of fire.\n\n\"Stand apart, I say! I will warrant you enough fighting to cool your blood ere you see England once more. Loring, Hawthorn, cut any man down who raises his hand. Have you aught to say, you fox-haired rascal?\" He thrust his face within two inches of that of the red man who had first seized his sword. The fellow shrank back, cowed, from his fierce eyes. \"Now stint your noise, all of you, and stretch your long ears. Trumpeter, blow once more!\"\n\nA bugle call had been sounded every quarter of an hour so as to keep in touch with the other two vessels who were invisible in the fog. Now the high clear note rang out once more, the call of a fierce sea-creature to its mates, but no answer came back from the thick wall which pent them in. Again and again they called, and again and again with bated breath they waited for an answer.\n\n\"Where is the Shipman?\" asked Knolles. \"What is your name, fellow? Do you dare call yourself master-mariner?\"\n\n\"My name is Nat Dennis, fair sir,\" said the graybearded old seaman. \"It is thirty years since first I showed my cartel and blew trumpet for a crew at the water-gate of Southampton. If any man may call himself master-mariner, it is surely I.\"\n\n\"Where are our two ships?\"\n\n\"Nay, sir, who can say in this fog?\"\n\n\"Fellow, it was your place to hold them together.\"\n\n\"I have but the eyes God gave me, fair sir, and they cannot see through a cloud.\"\n\n\"Had it been fair, I, who am a soldier, could have kept them in company. Since it was foul, we looked to you, who are called a mariner, to do so. You have not done it. You have lost two of my ships ere the venture is begun.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, I pray you to consider\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough words!\" said Knolles sternly. \"Words will not give me back my two hundred men. Unless I find them before I come to Saint-Malo, I swear by Saint Wilfrid of Ripon that it will be an evil day for you! Enough! Go forth and do what you may!\"\n\nFor five hours with a light breeze behind them they lurched through the heavy fog, the cold rain still matting their beards and shining on their faces. Sometimes they could see a circle of tossing water for a bowshot or so in each direction, and then the wreaths would crawl in upon them once more and bank them thickly round. They had long ceased to blow the trumpet for their missing comrades, but had hopes when clear weather came to find them still in sight. By the shipman's reckoning they were now about midway between the two shores.\n\nNigel was leaning against the bulwarks, his thoughts away in the dingle at Cosford and out on the heather-clad slopes of Hindhead, when something struck his ear. It was a thin clear clang of metal, pealing out high above the dull murmur of the sea, the creak of the boom and the flap of the sail. He listened, and again it was borne to his ear.\n\n\"Hark, my lord!\" said he to Sir Robert. \"Is there not a sound in the fog?\"\n\nThey both listened together with sidelong heads. Then it rang clearly forth once more, but this time in another direction. It had been on the bow; now it was on the quarter. Again it sounded, and again. Now it had moved to the other bow; now back to the quarter again; now it was near; and now so far that it was but a faint tinkle on the ear. By this time every man on board, seamen, archers and men-at-arms, were crowding the sides of the vessel. All round them there were noises in the darkness, and yet the wall of fog lay wet against their very faces. And the noises were such as were strange to their ears, always the same high musical clashing.\n\nThe old shipman shook his head and crossed himself.\n\n\"In thirty years upon the waters I have never heard the like,\" said he. \"The Devil is ever loose in a fog. Well is he named the Prince of Darkness.\"\n\nA wave of panic passed over the vessel, and these rough and hardy men who feared no mortal foe shook with terror at the shadows of their own minds. They stared into the cloud with blanched faces and fixed eyes, as though each instant some fearsome shape might break in upon them. And as they stared there came a gust of wind. For a moment the fog-bank rose and a circle of ocean lay before them.\n\nIt was covered with vessels. On all sides they lay thick upon its surface. They were huge caracks, highended and portly, with red sides and bulwarks carved and crusted with gold. Each had one great sail set and was driving down channel on the same course at the Basilisk. Their decks were thick with men, and from their high poops came the weird clashing which filled the air. For one moment they lay there, this wondrous fleet, surging slowly forward, framed in gray vapor. The next the clouds closed in and they had vanished from view. There was a long hush, and then a buzz of excited voices.\n\n\"The Spaniards!\" cried a dozen bowmen and sailors.\n\n\"I should have known it,\" said the shipman. \"I call to mind on the Biscay Coast how they would clash their cymbals after the fashion of the heathen Moor with whom they fight; but what would you have me do, fair sir? If the fog rises we are all dead men.\"\n\n\"There were thirty ships at the least,\" said Knolles, with a moody brow. \"If we have seen them I trow that they have also seen us. They will lay us aboard.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, it is in my mind that our ship is lighter and faster than theirs. If the fog hold another hour we should be through them.\"\n\n\"Stand to your arms!\" yelled Knolles. \"Stand to your arms\u2014! They are on us!\"\n\nThe Basilisk had indeed been spied from the Spanish Admiral's ship before the fog closed down. With so light a breeze, and such a fog, he could not hope to find her under sail. But by an evil chance not a bowshot from the great Spanish carack was a low galley, thin and swift, with oars which could speed her against wind or tide. She also had seen the Basilisk and it was to her that the Spanish leader shouted his orders. For a few minutes she hunted through the fog, and then sprang out of it like a lean and stealthy beast upon its prey. It was the sight of the long dark shadow gliding after them which had brought that wild shout of alarm from the lips of the English knight. In another instant the starboard oars of the galley had been shipped, the sides of the two vessels grated together, and a stream of swarthy, red-capped Spaniards were swarming up the sides of the Basilisk and dropped with yells of triumph upon her deck.\n\nFor a moment it seemed as if the vessel was captured without a blow being struck, for the men of the English ship had run wildly in all directions to look for their arms. Scores of archers might be seen under the shadow of the forecastle and the poop bending their bowstaves to string them with the cords from their waterproof cases. Others were scrambling over saddles, barrels and cases in wild search of their quivers. Each as he came upon his arrows pulled out a few to lend to his less fortunate comrades. In mad haste the men-at-arms also were feeling and grasping in the dark corners, picking up steel caps which would not fit them, hurling them down on the deck, and snatching eagerly at any swords or spears that came their way.\n\nThe center of the ship was held by the Spaniards; and having slain all who stood before them, they were pressing up to either end before they were made to understand that it was no fat sheep but a most fierce old wolf which they had taken by the ears.\n\nIf the lesson was late, it was the more thorough. Attacked on both sides and hopelessly outnumbered, the Spaniards, who had never doubted that this little craft was a merchant-ship, were cut off to the last man. It was no fight, but a butchery. In vain the survivors ran screaming prayers to the saints and threw themselves down into the galley alongside. It also had been riddled with arrows from the poop of the Basilisk, and both the crew on the deck and the galley-slaves in the outriggers at either side lay dead in rows under the overwhelming shower from above. From stem to rudder every foot of her was furred with arrows. It was but a floating coffin piled with dead and dying men, which wallowed in the waves behind them as the Basilisk lurched onward and left her in the fog.\n\nIn their first rush on to the Basilisk, the Spaniards had seized six of the crew and four unarmed archers. Their throats had been cut and their bodies tossed overboard. Now the Spaniards who littered the deck, wounded and dead, were thrust over the side in the same fashion. One ran down into the hold and had to be hunted and killed squealing under the blows like a rat in the darkness. Within half an hour no sign was left of this grim meeting in the fog save for the crimson splashes upon bulwarks and deck. The archers, flushed and merry, were unstringing their bows once more, for in spite of the water glue the damp air took the strength from the cords. Some were hunting about for arrows which might have stuck inboard, and some tying up small injuries received in the scuffle. But an anxious shadow still lingered upon the face of Sir Robert, and he peered fixedly about him through the fog.\n\n\"Go among the archers, Hawthorne,\" said he to his Squire. \"Charge them on their lives to make no sound! You also, Loring. Go to the afterguard and say the same to them. We are lost if one of these great ships should spy us.\"\n\nFor an hour with bated breath they stole through the fleet, still hearing the cymbals clashing all round them, for in this way the Spaniards held themselves together. Once the wild music came from above their very prow, and so warned them to change their course. Once also a huge vessel loomed for an instant upon their quarter, but they turned two points away from her, and she blurred and vanished. Soon the cymbals were but a distant tinkling, and at last they died gradually away.\n\n\"It is none too soon,\" said the old shipman, pointing to a yellowish tint in the haze above them. \"See yonder! It is the sun which wins through. It will be here anon. Ah! said I not so?\"\n\nA sickly sun, no larger and far dimmer than the moon, had indeed shown its face, with cloud-wreaths smoking across it. As they looked up it waxed larger and brighter before their eyes\u2014a yellow halo spread round it, one ray broke through, and then a funnel of golden light poured down upon them, widening swiftly at the base. A minute later they were sailing on a clear blue sea with an azure cloud-flecked sky above their heads, and such a scene beneath it as each of them would carry in his memory while memory remained.\n\nThey were in mid-channel. The white and green coasts of Picardy and of Kent lay clear upon either side of them. The wide channel stretched in front, deepening from the light blue beneath their prow to purple on the far sky-line. Behind them was that thick bank of cloud from which they had just burst. It lay like a gray wall from east to west, and through it were breaking the high shadowy forms of the ships of Spain. Four of them had already emerged, their red bodies, gilded sides and painted sails shining gloriously in the evening sun. Every instant a fresh golden spot grew out of the fog, which blazed like a star for an instant, and then surged forward to show itself as the brazen beak of the great red vessel which bore it. Looking back, the whole bank of cloud was broken by the widespread line of noble ships which were bursting through it. The Basilisk lay a mile or more in front of them and two miles clear of their wing. Five miles farther off, in the direction of the French coast, two other small ships were running down Channel. A cry of joy from Robert Knolles and a hearty prayer of gratitude to the saints from the old shipman hailed them as their missing comrades, the cog Thomas and the Grace Dieu.\n\nBut fair as was the view of their lost friends, and wondrous the appearance of the Spanish ships, it was not on those that the eyes of the men of the Basilisk were chiefly bent. A greater sight lay before them\u2014a sight which brought them clustering to the forecastle with eager eyes and pointing fingers. The English fleet was coming forth from the Winchelsea Coast. Already before the fog lifted a fast galleass had brought the news down Channel that the Spanish were on the sea, and the King's fleet was under way. Now their long array of sails, gay with the coats and colors of the towns which had furnished them, lay bright against the Kentish coast from Dungeness Point to Rye. Nine and twenty ships were there from Southampton, Shoreham, Winchelsea, Hastings, Rye, Hythe, Romney, Folkestone, Deal, Dover and Sandwich. With their great sails slued round to catch the wind they ran out, whilst the Spanish, like the gallant foes that they have ever been, turned their heads landward to meet them. With flaunting banners and painted sails, blaring trumpets and clashing cymbals, the two glittering fleets, dipping and rising on the long Channel swell, drew slowly together.\n\nKing Edward had been lying all day in his great ship the Philippa, a mile out from the Camber Sands, waiting for the coming of the Spaniards. Above the huge sail which bore the royal arms flew the red cross of England. Along the bulwarks were shown the shields of forty knights, the flower of English chivalry, and as many pennons floated from the deck. The high ends of the ship glittered with the weapons of the men-at-arms, and the waist was crammed with the archers. From time to time a crash of nakers and blare of trumpets burst from the royal ship, and was answered by her great neighbors, the Lion on which the Black Prince flew his flag, the Christopher with the Earl of Suffolk, the Salle du Roi of Robert of Namur, and the Grace Marie of Sir Thomas Holland. Farther off lay the White Swan, bearing the arms of Mowbray, the Palmer of Deal, flying the Black Head of Audley, and the Kentish man under the Lord Beauchamp. The rest lay, anchored but ready, at the mouth of Winchelsea Creek.\n\nThe King sat upon a keg in the fore part of his ship, with little John of Richmond, who was no more than a schoolboy, perched upon his knee. Edward was clad in the black velvet jacket which was his favorite garb, and wore a small brown-beaver hat with a white plume at the side. A rich cloak of fur turned up with miniver drooped from his shoulders. Behind him were a score of his knights, brilliant in silks and sarcenets, some seated on an upturned boat and some swinging their legs from the bulwark.\n\nIn front stood John Chandos in a party-colored jupon, one foot raised upon the anchor-stock, picking at the strings of his guitar and singing a song which he had learned at Marienburg when last he helped the Teutonic knights against the heathen. The King, his knights, and even the archers in the waist below them, laughed at the merry lilt and joined lustily in the chorus, while the men of the neighboring ships leaned over the side to hearken to the deep chant rolling over the waters.\n\nBut there came a sudden interruption to the song. A sharp, harsh shout came down from the lookout stationed in the circular top at the end of the mast. \"I spy a sail\u2014two sails!\" he cried.\n\nJohn Bunce the King's shipman shaded his eyes and stared at the long fog-bank which shrouded the northern channel. Chandos, with his fingers over the strings of his guitar, the King, the knights, all gazed in the same direction. Two small dark shapes had burst forth, and then after some minutes a third.\n\n\"Surely they are the Spaniards?\" said the King.\n\n\"Nay, sire,\" the seaman answered, \"the Spaniards are greater ships and are painted red. I know not what these may be.\"\n\n\"But I could hazard a guess!\" cried Chandos. \"Surely they are the three ships with my own men on their way to Brittany.\"\n\n\"You have hit it, John,\" said the King. \"But look, I pray you! What in the name of the Virgin is that?\"\n\nFour brilliant stars of flashing light had shone out from different points of the cloud-bank. The next instant as many tall ships had swooped forth into the sunshine. A fierce shout rang from the King's ship, and was taken up all down the line, until the whole coast from Dungeness to Winchelsea echoed the warlike greeting. The King sprang up with a joyous face.\n\n\"The game is afoot, my friends!\" said he. \"Dress, John! Dress, Walter! Quick all of you! Squires, bring the harness! Let each tend to himself, for the time is short.\"\n\nA strange sight it was to see these forty nobles tearing off their clothes and littering the deck with velvets and satins, whilst the squire of each, as busy as an ostler before a race, stooped and pulled and strained and riveted, fastening the bassinets, the legpieces, the front and the back plates, until the silken courtier had become the man of steel. When their work was finished, there stood a stern group of warriors where the light dandies had sung and jested round Sir John's guitar. Below in orderly silence the archers were mustering under their officers and taking their allotted stations. A dozen had swarmed up to their hazardous post in the little tower in the tops.\n\n\"Bring wine, Nicholas!\" cried the King. \"Gentlemen, ere you close your visors I pray you to take a last rouse with me. You will be dry enough, I promise you, before your lips are free once more. To what shall we drink, John?\"\n\n\"To the men of Spain,\" said Chandos, his sharp face peering like a gaunt bird through the gap in his helmet. \"May their hearts be stout and their spirits high this day!\"\n\n\"Well said, John!\" cried the King, and the knights laughed joyously as they drank. \"Now, fair sirs, let each to his post! I am warden here on the forecastle. Do you, John, take charge of the afterguard. Walter, James, William, Fitzallan, Goldesborough, Reginald\u2014you will stay with me! John, you may pick whom you will and the others will bide with the archers. Now bear straight at the center, master-shipman. Ere yonder sun sets we will bring a red ship back as a gift to our ladies, or never look upon a lady's face again.\"\n\nThe art of sailing into a wind had not yet been invented, nor was there any fore-and-aft canvas, save for small headsails with which a vessel could be turned. Hence the English fleet had to take a long slant down channel to meet their enemies; but as the Spaniards coming before the wind were equally anxious to engage there was the less delay. With stately pomp and dignity, the two great fleets approached.\n\nIt chanced that one fine carack had outstripped its consorts and came sweeping along, all red and gold, with a fringe of twinkling steel, a good half-mile before the fleet. Edward looked at her with a kindling eye, for indeed she was a noble sight with the blue water creaming under her gilded prow.\n\n\"This is a most worthy and debonair vessel, Master Bunce,\" said he to the shipman beside him. \"I would fain have a tilt with her. I pray you to hold us straight that we may bear her down.\"\n\n\"If I hold her straight, then one or other must sink, and it may be both,\" the seaman answered.\n\n\"I doubt not that with the help of our Lady we shall do our part,\" said the King. \"Hold her straight, master-shipman, as I have told you.\"\n\nNow the two vessels were within arrow flight, and the bolts from the crossbowmen pattered upon the English ship. These short thick devil's darts were everywhere humming like great wasps through the air, crashing against the bulwarks, beating upon the deck, ringing loudly on the armor of the knights, or with a soft muffled thud sinking to the socket in a victim.\n\nThe bowmen along either side of the Philippa had stood motionless waiting for their orders, but now there was a sharp shout from their leader, and every string twanged together. The air was full of their harping, together with the swish of the arrows, the long-drawn keening of the bowmen and the short deep bark of the under-officers. \"Steady, steady! Loose steady! Shoot wholly together! Twelve score paces! Ten score! Now eight! Shoot wholly together!\" Their gruff shouts broke through the high shrill cry like the deep roar of a wave through the howl of the wind.\n\nAs the two great ships hurtled together the Spaniard turned away a few points so that the blow should be a glancing one. None the less it was terrific. A dozen men in the tops of the carack were balancing a huge stone with the intention of dropping it over on the English deck. With a scream of horror they saw the mast cracking beneath them. Over it went, slowly at first, then faster, until with a crash it came down on its side, sending them flying like stones from a sling far out into the sea. A swath of crushed bodies lay across the deck where the mast had fallen. But the English ship had not escaped unscathed. Her mast held, it is true, but the mighty shock not only stretched every man flat upon the deck, but had shaken a score of those who lined her sides into the sea. One bowman was hurled from the top, and his body fell with a dreadful crash at the very side of the prostrate King upon the forecastle. Many were thrown down with broken arms and legs from the high castles at either end into the waist of the ship. Worst of all, the seams had been opened by the crash and the water was gushing in at a dozen places.\n\nBut these were men of experience and of discipline, men who had already fought together by sea and by land, so that each knew his place and his duty. Those who could staggered to their feet and helped up a score or more of knights who were rolling and clashing in the scuppers unable to rise for the weight of their armor. The bowmen formed up as before. The seamen ran to the gaping seams with oakum and with tar. In ten minutes order had been restored and the Philippa, though shaken and weakened, was ready for battle once more. The King was glaring round him like a wounded boar.\n\n\"Grapple my ship with that,\" he cried, pointing to the crippled Spaniard, \"for I would have possession of her!\"\n\nBut already the breeze had carried them past it, and a dozen Spanish ships were bearing down full upon them.\n\n\"We cannot win back to her, lest we show our flank to these others,\" said the shipman.\n\n\"Let her go her way!\" cried the knights. \"You shall have better than her.\"\n\n\"By Saint George! you speak the truth,\" said the King, \"for she is ours when we have time to take her. These also seem very worthy ships which are drawing up to us, and I pray you, master-shipman, that you will have a tilt with the nearest.\"\n\nA great carack was within a bowshot of them and crossing their bows. Bunce looked up at his mast, and he saw that already it was shaken and drooping. Another blow and it would be over the side and his ship a helpless log upon the water. He jammed his helm round therefore, and ran his ship alongside the Spaniard, throwing out his hooks and iron chains as he did so.\n\nThey, no less eager, grappled the Philippa both fore and aft, and the two vessels, linked tightly together, surged slowly over the long blue rollers. Over their bulwarks hung a cloud of men locked together in a desperate struggle, sometimes surging forward on to the deck of the Spaniard, sometimes recoiling back on to the King's ship, reeling this way and that, with the swords flickering like silver flames above them, while the long-drawn cry of rage and agony swelled up like a wolf's howl to the calm blue heaven above them.\n\nBut now ship after ship of the English had come up, each throwing its iron over the nearest Spaniard and striving to board her high red sides. Twenty ships were drifting in furious single combat after the manner of the Philippa, until the whole surface of the sea was covered with a succession of these desperate duels. The dismasted carack, which the King's ship had left behind it, had been carried by the Earl of Suffolk's Christopher, and the water was dotted with the heads of her crew. An English ship had been sunk by a huge stone discharged from an engine, and her men also were struggling in the waves, none having leisure to lend them a hand. A second English ship was caught between two of the Spanish vessels and overwhelmed by a rush of boarders so that not a man of her was left alive. On the other hand, Mowbray and Audley had each taken the caracks which were opposed to them, and the battle in the center, after swaying this way and that, was turning now in favor of the Islanders.\n\nThe Black Prince, with the Lion, the Grace Marie and four other ships had swept round to turn the Spanish flank; but the movement was seen, and the Spaniards had ten ships with which to meet it, one of them their great carack the St. Iago di Compostella. To this ship the Prince had attached his little cog and strove desperately to board her, but her side was so high and the defense so desperate that his men could never get beyond her bulwarks but were hurled down again and again with a clang and clash to the deck beneath. Her side bristled with crossbowmen, who shot straight down on to the packed waist of the Lion, so that the dead lay there in heaps. But the most dangerous of all was a swarthy black-bearded giant in the tops, who crouched so that none could see him, but rising every now and then with a huge lump of iron between his hands, hurled it down with such force that nothing would stop it. Again and again these ponderous bolts crashed through the deck and hurtled down into the bottom of the ship, starting the planks and shattering all that came in their way.\n\nThe Prince, clad in that dark armor which gave him his name, was directing the attack from the poop when the shipman rushed wildly up to him with fear on his face.\n\n\"Sire!\" he cried. \"The ship may not stand against these blows. A few more will sink her! Already the water floods inboard.\"\n\nThe Prince looked up, and as he did so the shaggy beard showed once more and two brawny arms swept downward. A great slug, whizzing down, beat a gaping hole in the deck, and fell rending and riving into the hold below. The master-mariner tore his grizzled hair.\n\n\"Another leak!\" he cried. \"I pray to Saint Leonard to bear us up this day! Twenty of my shipmen are bailing with buckets, but the water rises on them fast. The vessel may not float another hour.\"\n\nThe Prince had snatched a crossbow from one of his attendants and leveled it at the Spaniard's tops. At the very instant when the seaman stood erect with a fresh bar in his hands, the bolt took him full in the face, and his body fell forward over the parapet, hanging there head downward. A howl of exultation burst from the English at the sight, answered by a wild roar of anger from the Spaniards. A seaman had run from the Lion's hold and whispered in the ear of the shipman. He turned an ashen face upon the Prince.\n\n\"It is even as I say, sire. The ship is sinking beneath our feet!\" he cried.\n\n\"The more need that we should gain another,\" said he. \"Sir Henry Stokes, Sir Thomas Stourton, William, John of Clifton, here lies our road! Advance my banner, Thomas de Mohun! On, and the day is ours!\"\n\nBy a desperate scramble a dozen men, the Prince at their head, gained a footing on the edge of the Spaniard's deck. Some slashed furiously to clear a space, others hung over, clutching the rail with one hand and pulling up their comrades from below. Every instant that they could hold their own their strength increased, till twenty had become thirty and thirty forty, when of a sudden the newcomers, still reaching forth to their comrades below, saw the deck beneath them reel and vanish in a swirling sheet of foam. The Prince's ship had foundered.\n\nA yell went up from the Spaniards as they turned furiously upon the small band who had reached their deck. Already the Prince and his men had carried the poop, and from that high station they beat back their swarming enemies. But crossbow darts pelted and thudded among their ranks till a third of their number were stretched upon the planks. Lined across the deck they could hardly keep an unbroken front to the leaping, surging crowd who pressed upon them. Another rush, or another after that, must assuredly break them, for these dark men of Spain, hardened by an endless struggle with the Moors, were fierce and stubborn fighters. But hark to this sudden roar upon the farther side of them\u2014\n\n\"Saint George! Saint George! A Knolles to the rescue!\" A small craft had run alongside and sixty men had swarmed on the deck of the St. Iago. Caught between two fires, the Spaniards wavered and broke. The fight became a massacre. Down from the poop sprang the Prince's men. Up from the waist rushed the new-corners. There were five dreadful minutes of blows and screams and prayers with struggling figures clinging to the bulwarks and sullen splashes into the water below. Then it was over, and a crowd of weary, overstrained men leaned panting upon their weapons, or lay breathless and exhausted upon the deck of the captured carack.\n\nThe Prince had pulled up his visor and lowered his beaver. He smiled proudly as he gazed around him and wiped his streaming face. \"Where is the shipman?\" he asked. \"Let him lead us against another ship.\"\n\n\"Nay, sire, the shipman and all his men have sunk in the Lion,\" said Thomas de Mohun, a young knight of the West Country, who carried the standard. \"We have lost our ship and the half of our following. I fear that we can fight no more.\"\n\n\"It matters the less since the day is already ours,\" said the Prince, looking over the sea. \"My noble father's royal banner flies upon yonder Spaniard. Mowbray, Audley, Suffolk, Beauchamp, Namur, Tracey, Stafford, Arundel, each has his flag over a scarlet carack, even as mine floats over this. See, yonder squadron is already far beyond our reach. But surely we owe thanks to you who came at so perilous a moment to our aid. Your face I have seen, and your coat-armor also, young sir, though I cannot lay my tongue to your name. Let me know that I may thank you.\"\n\nHe had turned to Nigel, who stood flushed and joyous at the head of the boarders from the Basilisk.\n\n\"I am but a Squire, sire, and can claim no thanks, for there is nothing that I have done. Here is our leader.\"\n\nThe Prince's eyes fell upon the shield charged with the Black Raven and the stern young face of him who bore it. \"Sir Robert Knolles,\" said he, \"I had thought you were on your way to Brittany.\"\n\n\"I was so, sire, when I had the fortune to see this battle as I passed.\"\n\nThe Prince laughed. \"It would indeed be to ask too much, Robert, that you should keep on your course when much honor was to be gathered so close to you. But now I pray you that you will come back with us to Winchelsea, for well I know that my father would fain thank you for what you have done this day.\"\n\nBut Robert Knolles shook his head. \"I have your father's command, sire, and without his order I may not go against it. Our people are hard-pressed in Brittany, and it is not for me to linger on the way. I pray you, sire, if you must needs mention me to the King, to crave his pardon that I should have broken my journey thus.\"\n\n\"You are right, Robert. God-speed you on your way! And I would that I were sailing under your banner, for I see clearly that you will take your people where they may worshipfully win worship. Perchance I also maybe in Brittany before the year is past.\"\n\nThe Prince turned to the task of gathering his weary people together, and the Basilisks passed over the side once more and dropped down on to their own little ship. They poled her off from the captured Spaniard and set their sail with their prow for the south. Far ahead of them were their two consorts, beating towards them in the hope of giving help, while down Channel were a score of Spanish ships with a few of the English vessels hanging upon their skirts. The sun lay low on the water, and its level beams glowed upon the scarlet and gold of fourteen great caracks, each flying the cross of Saint George, and towering high above the cluster of English ships which, with brave waving of flags and blaring of music, were moving slowly towards the Kentish coast." + }, + { + "title": "HOW BLACK SIMON CLAIMED FORFEIT FROM THE KING OF SARK", + "text": "For a day and a half the small fleet made good progress, but on the second morning, after sighting Cape de la Hague, there came a brisk land wind which blew them out to sea. It grew into a squall with rain and fog so that they were two more days beating back. Next morning they found themselves in a dangerous rock studded sea with a small island upon their starboard quarter. It was girdled with high granite cliffs of a reddish hue, and slopes of bright green grassland lay above them. A second smaller island lay beside it. Dennis the shipman shook his head as he looked.\n\n\"That is Brechou,\" said he, \"and the larger one is the Island of Sark. If ever I be cast away, I pray the saints that I may not be upon yonder coast!\"\n\nKnolles gazed across at it. \"You say well, master-shipman,\" said he. \"It does appear to be a rocky and perilous spot.\"\n\n\"Nay, it is the rocky hearts of those who dwell upon it that I had in my mind,\" the old sailor answered. \"We are well safe in three goodly vessels, but had we been here in a small craft I make no doubt that they would have already had their boats out against us.\"\n\n\"Who then are these people, and how do they live upon so small and windswept an island?\" asked the soldier.\n\n\"They do not live from the island, fair sir, but from what they can gather upon the sea around it. They are broken folk from all countries, justice-fliers, prison-breakers, reavers, escaped bondsmen, murderers and staff-strikers who have made their way to this outland place and hold it against all comers. There is one here who could tell you of them and of their ways, for he was long time prisoner amongst them.\" The seaman pointed to Black Simon, the dark man from Norwich, who was leaning against the side lost in moody thought and staring with a brooding eye at the distant shore.\n\n\"How now, fellow?\" asked Knolles. \"What is this I hear? Is it indeed sooth that you have been a captive upon this island?\"\n\n\"It is true, fair sir. For eight months I have been servant to the man whom they call their King. His name is La Muette, and he comes from Jersey nor is there under God's sky a man whom I have more desire to see.\"\n\n\"Has he then mishandled you?\"\n\nBlack Simon gave a wry smile and pulled off his jerkin. His lean sinewy back was waled and puckered with white scars. \"He has left his sign of hand upon me,\" said he. \"He swore that he would break me to his will, and thus he tried to do it. But most I desire to see him because he hath lost a wager to me and I would fain be paid.\"\n\n\"This is a strange saying,\" said Knolles. \"What is this wager, and why should he pay you?\"\n\n\"It is but a small matter,\" Simon answered; \"but I am a poor man and the payment would be welcome. Should it have chanced that we stopped at this island I should have craved your leave that I go ashore and ask for that which I have fairly won.\"\n\nSir Robert Knolles laughed. \"This business tickleth my fancy,\" said he. \"As to stopping at the island, this shipman tells me that we must needs wait a day and a night, for that we have strained our planks. But if you should go ashore, how will you be sure that you will be free to depart, or that you will see this King of whom you speak?\"\n\nBlack Simon's dark face was shining with a fierce joy. \"Fair sir, I will ever be your debtor if you will let me go. Concerning what you ask, I know this island even as I know the streets of Norwich, as you may well believe seeing that it is but a small place and I upon it for near a year. Should I land after dark, I could win my way to the King's house, and if he be not dead or distraught with drink I could have speech with him alone, for I know his ways and his hours and how he may be found. I would ask only that Aylward the archer may go with me, that I may have one friend at my side if things should chance to go awry.\"\n\nKnolles thought awhile. \"It is much that you ask,\" said he, \"for by God's truth I reckon that you and this friend of yours are two of my men whom I would be least ready to lose. I have seen you both at grips with the Spaniards and I know you. But I trust you, and if we must indeed stop at this accursed place, then you may do as you will. If you have deceived me, or if this is a trick by which you design to leave me, then God be your friend when next we meet, for man will be of small avail!\"\n\nIt proved that not only the seams had to be calked but that the cog Thomas was out of fresh water. The ships moored therefore near the Isle of Brechou, where springs were to be found. There were no people upon this little patch, but over on the farther island many figures could be seen watching them, and the twinkle of steel from among them showed that they were armed men. One boat had ventured forth and taken a good look at them, but had hurried back with the warning that they were too strong to be touched.\n\nBlack Simon found Aylward seated under the poop with his back, against Bartholomew the bowyer. He was whistling merrily as he carved a girl's face upon the horn of his bow.\n\n\"My friend,\" said Simon, \"will you come ashore to-night\u2014for I have need of your help?\"\n\nAylward crowed lustily. \"Will I come, Simon? By my hilt, I shall be right glad to put my foot on the good brown earth once more. All my life I have trod it, and yet I would never have learned its worth had I not journeyed in these cursed ships. We will go on shore together, Simon, and we will seek out the women, if there be any there, for it seems a long year since I heard their gentle voices, and my eyes are weary of such faces as Bartholomew's or thine.\"\n\nSimon's grim features relaxed into a smile. \"The only face that you will see ashore, Samkin, will bring you small comfort,\" said he, \"and I warn you that this is no easy errand, but one which may be neither sweet nor fair, for if these people take us our end will be a cruel one.\"\n\n\"By my hilt,\" said Aylward, \"I am with you, gossip, wherever you may go! Say no more, therefore, for I am weary of living like a cony in a hole, and I shall be right glad to stand by you in your venture.\"\n\nThat night, two hours after dark, a small boat put forth from the Basilisk. It contained Simon, Aylward and two seamen. The soldiers carried their swords, and Black Simon bore a brown biscuit-bag over his shoulder. Under his direction the rowers skirted the dangerous surf which beat against the cliffs until they came to a spot where an outlying reef formed a breakwater. Within was a belt of calm water and a shallow cover with a sloping beach. Here the boat was dragged up and the seamen were ordered to wait, while Simon and Aylward started on their errand.\n\nWith the assured air of a man who knows exactly where he is and whither he is going, the man-at-arms began to clamber up a narrow fern-lined cleft among the rocks. It was no easy ascent in the darkness, but Simon climbed on like an old dog hot upon a scent, and the panting Aylward struggled after as best he might. At last they were at the summit and the archer threw himself down upon the grass.\n\n\"Nay, Simon, I have not enough breath to blow out a candle,\" said he. \"Stint your haste for a minute, since we have a long night before us. Surely this man is a friend indeed, if you hasten so to see him.\"\n\n\"Such a friend,\" Simon answered, \"that I have often dreamed of our next meeting. Now before that moon has set it will have come.\"\n\n\"Had it been a wench I could have understood it,\" said Aylward. \"By these ten finger-bones, if Mary of the mill or little Kate of Compton had waited me on the brow of this cliff, I should have come up it and never known it was there. But surely I see houses and hear voices over yonder in the shadow?\"\n\n\"It is their town,\" whispered Simon. \"There are a hundred as bloody-minded cutthroats as are to be found in Christendom beneath those roofs. Hark to that!\"\n\nA fierce burst of laughter came out of the darkness, followed by a long cry of pain.\n\n\"All-hallows be with us!\" cried Aylward. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"As like as not some poor devil has fallen into their clutches, even as I did. Come this way, Samkin, for there is a peat-cutting where we may hide. Aye, here it is, but deeper and broader than of old. Now follow me close, for if we keep within it we shall find ourselves a stone cast off the King's house.\"\n\nTogether they crept along the dark cutting. Suddenly Simon seized Aylward by the shoulder and pushed him into the shadow of the bank. Crouching in the darkness, they heard footsteps and voices upon the farther side of the trench. Two men sauntered along it and stopped almost at the very spot where the comrades were lying. Aylward could see their dark figures outlined against the starry sky.\n\n\"Why should you scold, Jacques,\" said one of them, speaking a strange half-French, half-English lingo. \"Le diable t'emporte for a grumbling rascal. You won a woman and I got nothing. What more would you have?\"\n\n\"You will have your chance off the next ship, mon garcon, but mine is passed. A woman, it is true\u2014an old peasant out of the fields, with a face as yellow as a kite's claw. But Gaston, who threw a nine against my eight, got as fair a little Normandy lass as ever your eyes have seen. Curse the dice, I say! And as to my woman, I will sell her to you for a firkin of Gascony.\"\n\n\"I have no wine to spare, but I will give you a keg of apples,\" said the other. \"I had it out of the Peter and Paul, the Falmouth boat that struck in Creux Bay.\"\n\n\"Well, well your apples may be the worse for keeping, but so is old Marie, and we can cry quits on that. Come round and drink a cup over the bargain.\"\n\nThey shuffled onward in the darkness.\n\n\"Heard you ever such villainy?\" cried Aylward, breathing fierce and hard. \"Did you hear them, Simon? A woman for a keg of apples! And my heart's root is sad for the other one, the girl of Normandy. Surely we can land to-morrow and burn all these water-rats out of their nest.\"\n\n\"Nay, Sir Robert will not waste time or strength ere he reach Brittany.\"\n\n\"Sure I am that if my little master Squire Loring had the handling of it, every woman on this island would be free ere another day had passed.\"\n\n\"I doubt it not,\" said Simon. \"He is one who makes an idol of woman, after the manner of those crazy knight errants. But Sir Robert is a true soldier and hath only his purpose in view.\"\n\n\"Simon,\" said Aylward, \"the light is not overgood and the place is cramped for sword-play, but if you will step out into the open I will teach you whether my master is a true soldier or not.\"\n\n\"Tut, man! you are as foolish yourself,\" said Simon. \"Here we are with our work in hand, and yet you must needs fall out with me on our way to it. I say nothing against your master save that he hath the way of his fellows who follow dreams and fancies. But Knolles looks neither to right nor left and walks forward to his mark. Now, let us on, for the time passes.\"\n\n\"Simon, your words are neither good nor fair. When we are back on shipboard we will speak further of this matter. Now lead on, I pray you, and let us see some more of this ten-devil island.\"\n\nFor half a mile Simon led the way until they came to a large house which stood by itself. Peering at it from the edge of the cutting, Aylward could see that it was made from the wreckage of many vessels, for at each corner a prow was thrust out. Lights blazed within, and there came the sound of a strong voice singing a gay song which was taken up by a dozen others in the chorus.\n\n\"All is well, lad!\" whispered Simon in great delight. \"That is the voice of the King. It is the very song he used to sing. 'Les deux filles de Pierre.' 'Fore God, my back tingles at the very sound of it. Here we will wait until his company take their leave.\"\n\nHour after hour they crouched in the peat-cutting, listening to the noisy songs of the revelers within, some French, some English, and all growing fouler and less articulate as the night wore on. Once a quarrel broke out and the clamor was like a cageful of wild beasts at feeding-time. Then a health was drunk and there was much stamping and cheering.\n\nOnly once was the long vigil broken. A woman came forth from the house and walked up and down, with her face sunk upon her breast. She was tall and slender, but her features could not be seen for a wimple over her head. Weary sadness could be read in her bowed back and dragging steps. Once only they saw her throw her two hands up to Heaven as one who is beyond human aid. Then she passed slowly into the house again. A moment later the door of the hall was flung open, and a shouting stumbling throng came crowding forth, with whoop and yell, into the silent night. Linking arms and striking up a chorus, they marched past the peat-cutting, their voices dwindling slowly away as they made for their homes.\n\n\"Now, Samkin, now!\" cried Simon, and jumping out from the hiding-place he made for the door. It had not yet been fastened. The two comrades sprang inside. Then Simon drew the bolts so that none might interrupt them.\n\nA long table littered with flagons and beakers lay before them. It was lit up by a line of torches, which flickered and smoked in their iron sconces. At the farther end a solitary man was seated. His head rested upon his two hands, as if he were befuddled with wine, but at the harsh sound of the snapping bolts he raised his face and looked angrily around him. It was a strange powerful head, tawny and shaggy like a lion's, with a tangled beard and a large harsh face, bloated and blotched with vice. He laughed as the newcomers entered, thinking that two of his boon companions had returned to finish a flagon. Then he stared hard and he passed his hand over his eyes like one who thinks he may be dreaming.\n\n\"Mon Dieu!\" he cried. \"Who are you and whence come you at this hour of the night? Is this the way to break into our royal presence?\"\n\nSimon approached up one side of the table and Aylward up the other. When they were close to the King, the man-at-arms plucked a torch from its socket and held it to his own face. The King staggered back with a cry, as he gazed at that grim visage.\n\n\"Le diable noir!\" he cried. \"Simon, the Englishman! What make you here?\"\n\nSimon put his hand upon his shoulder. \"Sit here!\" said he, and he forced the King into his seat. \"Do you sit on the farther side of him, Aylward. We make a merry group, do we not? Often have I served at this table, but never did I hope to drink at it. Fill your cup, Samkin, and pass the flagon.\"\n\nThe King looked from one to the other with terror in his bloodshot eyes. \"What would you do?\" he asked. \"Are you mad, that you should come here. One shout and you are at my mercy.\"\n\n\"Nay, my friend, I have lived too long in your house not to know the ways of it. No man-servant ever slept beneath your roof, for you feared lest your throat would be cut in the night-time. You may shout and shout, if it so please you. It chanced that I was passing on my way from England in those ships which lie off La Brechou, and I thought I would come in and have speech with you.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Simon, I am right glad to see you,\" said the King, cringing away from the fierce eyes of the soldier. \"We were good friends in the past, were we not, and I cannot call to mind that I have ever done you injury. When you made your way to England by swimming to the Levantine there was none more glad in heart than I!\"\n\n\"If I cared to doff my doublet I could show you the marks of what your friendship has done for me in the past,\" said Simon. \"It is printed on my back as clearly as on my memory. Why, you foul dog, there are the very rings upon the wall to which my hands were fastened, and there the stains upon the boards on which my blood has dripped! Is it not so, you king of butchers?\"\n\nThe pirate chief turned whiter still. \"It may be that life here was somewhat rough, Simon, but if I have wronged you in anyway, I will surely make amends. What do you ask?\"\n\n\"I ask only one thing, and I have come hither that I may get it. It is that you pay me forfeit for that you have lost your wager.\"\n\n\"My wager, Simon! I call to mind no wager.\"\n\n\"But I will call it to your mind, and then I will take my payment. Often have you sworn that you would break my courage. 'By my head!' you have cried to me. 'You will crawl at my feet!' and again: 'I will wager my head that I will tame you!' Yes, yes, a score of times you have said so. In my heart, as I listened, I have taken up your gage. And now, dog, you have lost and I am here to claim the forfeit.\"\n\nHis long heavy sword flew from its sheath. The King, with a howl of despair, flung his arms round him, and they rolled together under the table. Aylward sat with a ghastly face, and his toes curled with horror at the sight, for he was still new to scenes of strife and his blood was too cold for such a deed. When Simon rose he tossed something into his bag and sheathed his bloody sword.\n\n\"Come, Samkin, our work is well done,\" said he.\n\n\"By my hilt, if I had known what it was I would have been less ready to come with you,\" said the archer. \"Could you not have clapped a sword in his fist and let him take his chance in the hall?\"\n\n\"Nay, Samkin, if you had such memories as I, you would have wished that he should die like a sheep and not like a man. What chance did he give me when he had the power? And why should I treat him better? But, Holy Virgin, what have we here?\"\n\nAt the farther end of the table a woman was standing. An open door behind her showed that she had come from the inner room of the house. By her tall figure the comrades knew that she was the same that they had already seen. Her face had once been fair, but now was white and haggard with wild dark eyes full of a hopeless terror and despair. Slowly she paced up the room, her gaze fixed not upon the comrades, but upon the dreadful thing beneath the table. Then as she stooped and was sure she burst into loud laughter and clapped her hands.\n\n\"Who shall say there is no God?\" she cried. \"Who shall say that prayer is unavailing? Great sir, brave sir, let me kiss that conquering hand!\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, dame, stand back! Well, if you must needs have one of them, take this which is the clean one.\"\n\n\"It is the other I crave\u2014that which is red with his blood! Oh! joyful night when my lips have been wet with it! Now I can die in peace!\"\n\n\"We must go, Aylward,\" said Simon. \"In another hour the dawn will have broken. In daytime a rat could not cross this island and pass unseen. Come, man, and at once!\"\n\nBut Aylward was at the woman's side. \"Come with us, fair dame,\" said he. \"Surely we can, at least, take you from this island, and no such change can be for the worse.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said she, \"the saints in Heaven cannot help me now until they take me to my rest. There is no place for me in the world beyond, and all my friends were slain on the day I was taken. Leave me, brave men, and let me care for myself. Already it lightens in the east, and black will be your fate if you are taken. Go, and may the blessing of one who was once a holy nun go with you and guard you from danger!\"\n\nSir Robert Knolles was pacing the deck in the early morning, when he heard the sound of oars, and there were his two night-birds climbing up the side.\n\n\"So, fellow,\" said he, \"have you had speech with the King of Sark?\"\n\n\"Fair sir, I have seen him.\"\n\n\"And he has paid his forfeit?\"\n\n\"He has paid it, sir!\"\n\nKnolles looked with curiosity at the bag which Simon bore. \"What carry you there?\" he asked.\n\n\"The stake that he has lost.\"\n\n\"What was it then? A goblet? A silver plate?\"\n\nFor answer Simon opened his bag and shook it on the deck.\n\nSir Robert turned away with a whistle. \"'Fore God!\" said he, \"it is in my mind that I carry some hard men with me to Brittany.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW A SQUIRE OF ENGLAND MET A SQUIRE OF FRANCE", + "text": "Sir Robert Knolles with his little fleet had sighted the Breton coast near Cancale; they had rounded the Point du Grouin, and finally had sailed past the port of St. Malo and down the long narrow estuary of the Rance until they were close to the old walled city of Dinan, which was held by that Montfort faction whose cause the English had espoused. Here the horses had been disembarked, the stores were unloaded, and the whole force encamped outside the city, whilst the leaders waited for news as to the present state of affairs, and where there was most hope of honor and profit.\n\nThe whole of France was feeling the effects of that war with England which had already lasted some ten years, but no Province was in so dreadful a condition as this unhappy land of Brittany. In Normandy or Picardy the inroads of the English were periodical with intervals of rest between; but Brittany was torn asunder by constant civil war apart from the grapple of the two great combatants, so that there was no surcease of her sufferings. The struggle had begun in 1341 through the rival claims of Montfort and of Blois to the vacant dukedom. England had taken the part of Montfort, France that of Blois. Neither faction was strong enough to destroy the other, and so after ten years of continual fighting, history recorded a long ineffectual list of surprises and ambushes, of raids and skirmishes, of towns taken and retaken, of alternate victory and defeat, in which neither party could claim a supremacy. It mattered nothing that Montfort and Blois had both disappeared from the scene, the one dead and the other taken by the English. Their wives caught up the swords which had dropped from the hands of their lords, and the long struggle went on even more savagely than before.\n\nIn the south and east the Blois faction held the country, and Nantes the capital was garrisoned and occupied by a strong French army. In the north and west the Montfort party prevailed, for the island kingdom was at their back and always fresh sails broke the northern sky-line bearing adventurers from over the channel.\n\nBetween these two there lay a broad zone comprising all the center of the country which was a land of blood and violence, where no law prevailed save that of the sword. From end to end it was dotted with castles, some held for one side, some for the other, and many mere robber strongholds, the scenes of gross and monstrous deeds, whose brute owners, knowing that they could never be called to account, made war upon all mankind, and wrung with rack and with flame the last shilling from all who fell into their savage hands. The fields had long been untilled. Commerce was dead. From Rennes in the east to Hennebon in the west, and from Dinan in the north to Nantes in the south, there was no spot where a man's life or a woman's honor was safe. Such was the land, full of darkness and blood, the saddest, blackest spot in Christendom, into which Knolles and his men were now advancing.\n\nBut there was no sadness in the young heart of Nigel, as he rode by the side of Knolles at the head of a clump of spears, nor did it seem to him that Fate had led him into an unduly arduous path. On the contrary, he blessed the good fortune which had sent him into so delightful a country, and it seemed to him as he listened to dreadful stories of robber barons, and looked round at the black scars of war which lay branded upon the fair faces of the hills, that no hero of romances or trouveur had ever journeyed through such a land of promise, with so fair a chance of knightly venture and honorable advancement.\n\nThe Red Ferret was one deed toward his vow. Surely a second, and perhaps a better, was to be found somewhere upon this glorious countryside. He had borne himself as the others had in the sea-fight, and could not count it to his credit where he had done no more than mere duty. Something beyond this was needed for such a deed as could be laid at the feet of the Lady Mary. But surely it was to be found here in fermenting war-distracted Brittany. Then with two done it would be strange if he could not find occasion for that third one, which would complete his service and set him free to look her in the face once more. With the great yellow horse curveting beneath him, his Guildford armor gleaming in the sun, his sword clanking against his stirrup-iron, and his father's tough ash-spear in his hand, he rode with a light heart and a smiling face, looking eagerly to right and to left for any chance which his good Fate might send.\n\nThe road from Dinan to Caulnes, along which the small army was moving, rose and dipped over undulating ground, with a bare marshy plain upon the left where the river Rance ran down to the sea, while upon the right lay a wooded country with a few wretched villages, so poor and sordid that they had nothing with which to tempt the spoiler. The peasants had left them at the first twinkle of a steel cap, and lurked at the edges of the woods, ready in an instant to dive into those secret recesses known only to themselves. These creatures suffered sorely at the hands of both parties, but when the chance came they revenged their wrongs on either in a savage way which brought fresh brutalities upon their heads.\n\nThe newcomers soon had a chance of seeing to what lengths they would go, for in the roadway near to Caulnes they came upon an English man-at-arms who had been waylaid and slain by them. How they had overcome him could not be told, but how they had slain him within his armor was horribly apparent, for they had carried such a rock as eight men could lift, and had dropped it upon him as he lay, so that he was spread out in his shattered case like a crab beneath a stone. Many a fist was shaken at the distant woods and many a curse hurled at those who haunted them, as the column of scowling soldiers passed the murdered man, whose badge of the Molene cross showed him to have been a follower of that House of Bentley, whose head, Sir Walter, was at that time leader of the British forces in the country.\n\nSir Robert Knolles had served in Brittany before, and he marshaled his men on the march with the skill and caution of the veteran soldier, the man who leaves as little as possible to chance, having too steadfast a mind to heed the fool who may think him overcautious. He had recruited a number of bowmen and men-at-arms at Dinan; so that his following was now close upon five hundred men. In front under his own leadership were fifty mounted lancers, fully armed and ready for any sudden attack. Behind them on foot came the archers, and a second body of mounted men closed up the rear. Out upon either flank moved small bodies of cavalry, and a dozen scouts, spread fanwise, probed every gorge and dingle in front of the column. So for three days he moved slowly down the Southern Road.\n\nSir Thomas Percy and Sir James Astley had ridden to the head of the column, and Knolles conferred with them as they marched concerning the plan of their campaign. Percy and Astley were young and hotheaded with wild visions of dashing deeds and knight errantry, but Knolles with cold, clear brain and purpose of iron held ever his object in view.\n\n\"By the holy Dunstan and all the saints of Lindisfarne!\" cried the fiery Borderer, \"it goes to my heart to ride forward when there are such honorable chances on either side of us. Have I not heard that the French are at Evran beyond the river, and is it not sooth that yonder castle, the towers of which I see above the woods, is in the hands of a traitor, who is false to his liege lord of Montford? There is little profit to be gained upon this road, for the folk seem to have no heart for war. Had we ventured as far over the marches of Scotland as we now are in Brittany, we should not have lacked some honorable venture or chance of winning worship.\"\n\n\"You say truth, Thomas,\" cried Astley, a red-faced and choleric young man. \"It is well certain that the French will not come to us, and surely it is the more needful that we go to them. In sooth, any soldier who sees us would smile that we should creep for three days along this road as though a thousand dangers lay before us, when we have but poor broken peasants to deal with.\"\n\nBut Robert Knolles shook his head. \"We know not what are in these woods, or behind these hills,\" said he, \"and when I know nothing it is my wont to prepare for the worst which may befall. It is but prudence so to do.\"\n\n\"Your enemies might find some harsher name for it,\" said Astley with a sneer. \"Nay, you need not think to scare me by glaring at me, Sir Robert, nor will your ill-pleasure change my thoughts. I have faced fiercer eyes than thine, and I have not feared.\"\n\n\"Your speech, Sir James, is neither courteous nor good,\" said Knolles, \"and if I were a free man I would cram your words down your throat with the point of my dagger. But I am here to lead these men in profit and honor, not to quarrel with every fool who has not the wit to understand how soldiers should be led. Can you not see that if I make attempts here and there, as you would have me do, I shall have weakened my strength before I come to that part where it can best be spent?\"\n\n\"And where is that?\" asked Percy. \"'Fore God, Astley, it is in my mind that we ride with one who knows more of war than you or I, and that we would be wise to be guided by his rede. Tell us then what is in your mind.\"\n\n\"Thirty miles from here,\" said Knolles, \"there is, as I am told, a fortalice named Ploermel, and within it is one Bambro', an Englishman, with a good garrison. No great distance from him is the Castle of Josselin where dwells Robert of Beaumanoir with a great following of Bretons. It is my intention that we should join Bambro', and so be in such strength that we may throw ourselves upon Josselin, and by taking it become the masters of all mid-Brittany, and able to make head against the Frenchmen in the south.\"\n\n\"Indeed I think that you can do no better,\" said Percy heartily, \"and I swear to you on jeopardy of my soul that I will stand by you in the matter! I doubt not that when we come deep into their land they will draw together and do what they may to make head against us; but up to now I swear by all the saints of Lindisfarne that I should have seen more war in a summer's day in Liddesdale or at the Forest of Jedburgh than any that Brittany has shown us. But see, yonder horsemen are riding in. They are our own hobblers, are they not? And who are these who are lashed to their stirrups?\"\n\nA small troop of mounted bowmen had ridden out of an oak grove upon the left of the road. They trotted up to where the three knights had halted. Two wretched peasants whose wrists had been tied to their leathers came leaping and straining beside the horses in their effort not to be dragged off their feet. One was a tall, gaunt, yellow-haired man, the other short and swarthy, but both so crusted with dirt, so matted and tangled and ragged, that they were more like beasts of the wood than human beings.\n\n\"What is this?\" asked Knolles. \"Have I not ordered you to leave the countryfolk at peace?\"\n\nThe leader of the archers, old Wat of Carlisle, held up a sword, a girdle and a dagger. \"If it please you, fair sir,\" said he, \"I saw the glint of these, and I thought them no fit tools for hands which were made for the spade and the plow. But when we had ridden them down and taken them, there was the Bentley cross upon each, and we knew that they had belonged to yonder dead Englishman upon the road. Surely then, these are two of the villains who have slain him, and it is right that we do justice upon them.\"\n\nSure enough, upon sword, girdle and dagger shone the silver Molene cross which had gleamed on the dead man's armor. Knolles looked at them and then at the prisoners with a face of stone. At the sight of those fell eyes they had dropped with inarticulate howls upon their knees, screaming out their protests in a tongue which none could understand.\n\n\"We must have the roads safe for wandering Englishmen,\" said Knolles. \"These men must surely die. Hang them to yonder tree.\"\n\nHe pointed to a live-oak by the roadside, and rode onward upon his way in converse with his fellow-knights. But the old bowman had ridden after him.\n\n\"If it please you, Sir Robert, the bowmen would fain put these men to death in their own fashion,\" said he.\n\n\"So that they die, I care not how,\" Knolles answered carelessly, and looked back no more.\n\nHuman life was cheap in those stern days when the footmen of a stricken army or the crew of a captured ship were slain without any question or thought of mercy by the victors. War was a rude game with death for the stake, and the forfeit was always claimed on the one side and paid on the other without doubt or hesitation. Only the knight might be spared, since his ransom made him worth more alive than dead. To men trained in such a school, with death forever hanging over their own heads, it may be well believed that the slaying of two peasant murderers was a small matter.\n\nAnd yet there was special reason why upon this occasion the bowmen wished to keep the deed in their own hands. Ever since their dispute aboard the Basilisk, there had been ill-feeling betwixt Bartholomew the old bald-headed bowyer, and long Ned Widdington the Dalesman, which had ended in a conflict at Dinan, in which not only they, but a dozen of their friends had been laid upon the cobblestones. The dispute raged round their respective knowledge and skill with the bow, and now some quick wit amongst the soldiers had suggested a grim fashion in which it should be put to the proof, once for all, which could draw the surer shaft.\n\nA thick wood lay two hundred paces from the road upon which the archers stood. A stretch of smooth grassy sward lay between. The two peasants were led out fifty yards from the road, with their faces toward the wood. There they stood, held on a leash, and casting many a wondering frightened glance over their shoulders at the preparations which were being made behind them.\n\nOld Bartholomew and the big Yorkshireman had stepped out of the ranks and stood side by side each with his strung bow in his left hand and a single arrow in his right. With care they had drawn on and greased their shooting-gloves and fastened their bracers. They plucked and cast up a few blades of grass to measure the wind, examined every small point of their tackle, turned their sides to the mark, and Widened their feet in a firmer stance. From all sides came chaff and counsel from their comrades.\n\n\"A three-quarter wind, bowyer!\" cried one. \"Aim a body's breadth to the right!\"\n\n\"But not thy body's breadth, bowyer,\" laughed another. \"Else may you be overwide.\"\n\n\"Nay, this wind will scarce turn a well-drawn shaft,\" said a third. \"Shoot dead upon him and you will be clap in the clout.\"\n\n\"Steady, Ned, for the good name of the Dales,\" cried a Yorkshireman. \"Loose easy and pluck not, or I am five crowns the poorer man.\"\n\n\"A week's pay on Bartholomew!\" shouted another. \"Now, old fat-pate, fail me not!\"\n\n\"Enough, enough! Stint your talk!\" cried the old bowman, Wat of Carlisle. \"Were your shafts as quick as your tongues there would be no facing you. Do you shoot upon the little one, Bartholomew, and you, Ned, upon the other. Give them law until I cry the word, then loose in your own fashion and at your own time. Are you ready! Hola, there, Hayward, Beddington, let them run!\"\n\nThe leashes were torn away, and the two men, stooping their heads, ran madly for the shelter of the wood amid such a howl from the archers as beaters may give when the hare starts from its form. The two bowmen, each with his arrow drawn to the pile, stood like russet statues, menacing, motionless, their eager eyes fixed upon the fugitives, their bowstaves rising slowly as the distance between them lengthened. The Bretons were half-way to the wood, and still Old Wat was silent. It may have been mercy or it may have been mischief, but at least the chase should have a fair chance of life. At six score paces he turned his grizzled head at last.\n\n\"Loose!\" he cried.\n\nAt the word the Yorkshireman's bowstring twanged. It was not for nothing that he had earned the name of being one of the deadliest archers of the North and had twice borne away the silver arrow of Selby. Swift and true flew the fatal shaft and buried itself to the feather in the curved back of the long yellow-haired peasant. Without a sound he fell upon his face and lay stone-dead upon the grass, the one short white plume between his dark shoulders to mark where Death had smote him.\n\nThe Yorkshireman threw his bowstave into the air and danced in triumph, whilst his comrades roared their fierce delight in a shout of applause, which changed suddenly into a tempest of hooting and of laughter.\n\nThe smaller peasant, more cunning, than his comrade, had run more slowly, but with many a backward glance. He had marked his companion's fate and had waited with keen eyes until he saw the bowyer loose his string. At the moment he had thrown himself flat upon the grass and had heard the arrow scream above him,\u2014and seen it quiver in the turf beyond. Instantly he had sprung to his feet again and amid wild whoops and halloos from the bowmen had made for the shelter of the wood. Now he had reached it, and ten score good paces separated him from the nearest of his persecutors. Surely they could not reach him here. With the tangled brushwood behind him he was as safe as a rabbit at the mouth of his burrow. In the joy of his heart he must needs dance in derision and snap his fingers at the foolish men who had let him slip. He threw back his head, howling at them like a dog, and at the instant an arrow struck him full in the throat and laid him dead among the bracken. There was a hush of surprised silence and then a loud cheer burst from the archers.\n\n\"By the rood of Beverley!\" cried old Wat, \"I have not seen a finer roving shaft this many a year. In my own best day I could not have bettered it. Which of you loosed it?\"\n\n\"It was Aylward of Tilford\u2014Samkin Aylward,\" cried a score of voices, and the bowman, flushed at his own fame, was pushed to the front.\n\n\"Indeed I would that it had been at a nobler mark,\" said he. \"He might have gone free for me, but I could not keep my fingers from the string when he turned to jeer at us.\"\n\n\"I see well that you are indeed a master-bowman,\" said old Wat, \"and it is comfort to my soul to think that if I fall I leave such a man behind me to hold high the credit of our craft. Now gather your shafts and on, for Sir Robert awaits us on the brow of the hill.\"\n\nAll day Knolles and his men marched through the same wild and deserted country, inhabited only by these furtive creatures, hares to the strong and wolves to the weak, who hovered in the shadows of the wood. Ever and anon upon the tops of the hills they caught a glimpse of horsemen who watched them from a distance and vanished when approached. Sometimes bells rang an alarm from villages amongst the hills, and twice they passed castles which drew up their drawbridges at their approach and lined their walls with hooting soldiers as they passed. The Englishmen gathered a few oxen and sheep from the pastures of each, but Knolles had no mind to break his strength upon stone walls, and so he went upon his way.\n\nOnce at St. Meen they passed a great nunnery, girt with a high gray lichened wall, an oasis of peace in this desert of war, the black-robed nuns basking in the sun or working in the gardens, with the strong gentle hand of Holy Church shielding them ever from evil. The archers doffed caps to them as they passed, for the boldest and roughest dared not cross that line guarded by the dire ban and blight which was the one only force in the whole steel-ridden earth which could stand betwixt the weakling and the spoiler.\n\nThe little army halted at St. Meen and cooked its midday meal. It had gathered into its ranks again and was about to start, when Knolles drew Nigel to one side.\n\n\"Nigel,\" said he, \"it seems to me that I have seldom set eyes upon a horse which hath more power and promise of speed than this great beast of thine.\"\n\n\"It is indeed a noble steed, fair sir,\" said Nigel. Betwixt him and his young leader there had sprung up great affection and respect since the day that they set foot in the Basilisk.\n\n\"It will be the better if you stretch his limbs, for he grows overheavy,\" said the knight. \"Now mark me, Nigel! Yonder betwixt the ash-tree and the red rock what do you see on the side of the far hill?\"\n\n\"There is a white dot upon it. Surely it is a horse.\"\n\n\"I have marked it all morning, Nigel. This horseman has kept ever upon our flank, spying upon us or waiting to make some attempt upon us. Now I should be right glad to have a prisoner, for it is my wish to know something of this countryside, and these peasants can speak neither French nor English. I would have you linger here in hiding when we go forward. This man will still follow us. When he does so, yonder wood will lie betwixt you and him. Do you ride round it and come upon him from behind. There is broad plain upon his left, and we will cut him off upon the right. If your horse be indeed the swifter, then you cannot fail to take him.\"\n\nNigel had already sprung down and was tightening Pommers' girth.\n\n\"Nay, there is no need of haste, for you cannot start until we are two miles upon our way. And above all I pray you, Nigel, none of your knight-errant ways. It is this roan that I want, him and the news that he can bring me. Think little of your own advancement and much of the needs of the army. When you get him, ride westwards upon the sun, and you cannot fail to find the road.\"\n\nNigel waited with Pommers under the shadow of the nunnery wall, horse and man chafing with impatience, whilst above them six round-eyed innocent nun-faces looked down on this strange and disturbing vision from the outer world. At last the long column wound itself out of sight round a curve of the road, and the white dot was gone from the bare green flank of the hill. Nigel bowed his steel head to the nuns, gave his bridle a shake, and bounded off upon his welcome mission. The round-eyed sisters saw yellow horse and twinkling man sweep round the skirt of the wood, caught a last glimmer of him through the tree-trunks, and paced slowly back to their pruning and their planting, their minds filled with the beauty and the terror of that outer world beyond the high gray lichen-mottled wall.\n\nEverything fell out even as Knolles had planned. As Nigel rounded the oak forest, there upon the farther side of it, with only good greensward between, was the rider upon the white horse. Already he was so near that Nigel could see him clearly, a young cavalier, proud in his bearing, clad in purple silk tunic with a red curling feather in his low black cap. He wore no armor, but his sword gleamed at his side. He rode easily and carelessly, as one who cares for no man, and his eyes were forever fixed upon the English soldiers on the road. So intent was he upon them that he gave no thought to his own safety, and it was only when the low thunder of the great horse's hoofs broke upon his ears that he turned in his saddle, looked very coolly and steadily at Nigel, then gave his own bridle a shake and darted off, swift as a hawk, toward the hills upon the left.\n\nPommers had met his match that day. The white horse, two parts Arab, bore the lighter weight, since Nigel was clad in full armor. For five miles over the open neither gained a hundred yards upon the other. They had topped the hill and flew down the farther side, the stranger continually turning in his saddle to have a look at his pursuer. There was no panic in his flight, but rather the amused rivalry with which a good horseman who is proud of his mount contends with one who has challenged him. Below the hill was a marshy plain, studded with great Druidic stones, some prostrate, some erect, some bearing others across their tops like the huge doors of some vanished building. A path ran through the marsh with green rushes as a danger signal on either side of it. Across this path many of the huge stones were lying, but the white horse cleared them in its stride and Pommers followed close upon his heels. Then came a mile of soft ground where the lighter weight again drew to the front, but it ended in a dry upland and once again Nigel gained. A sunken road crossed it, but the white cleared it with a mighty spring, and again the yellow followed. Two small hills lay before them with a narrow gorge of deep bushes between. Nigel saw the white horse bounding chest-deep amid the underwood.\n\nNext instant its hind legs were high in the air, and the rider had been shot from its back. A howl of triumph rose from amidst the bushes, and a dozen wild figures armed with club and with spear, rushed upon the prostrate man.\n\n\"A moi, Anglais, a moi!\" cried a voice, and Nigel saw the young rider stagger to his feet, strike round him with his sword, and then fall once more before the rush of his assailants.\n\nThere was a comradeship among men of gentle blood and bearing which banded them together against all ruffianly or unchivalrous attack. These rude fellows were no soldiers. Their dress and arms, their uncouth cries and wild assault, marked them as banditti\u2014such men as had slain the Englishman upon the road. Waiting in narrow gorges with a hidden rope across the path, they watched for the lonely horseman as a fowler waits by his bird-trap, trusting that they could overthrow the steed and then slay the rider ere he had recovered from his fall.\n\nSuch would have been the fate of the stranger, as of so many cavaliers before him, had Nigel not chanced to be close upon his heels. In an instant Pommers had burst through the group who struck at the prostrate man, and in another two of the robbers had fallen before Nigel's sword. A spear rang on his breastplate, but one blow shore off its head, and a second that of him who held it. In vain they thrust at the steel-girt man. His sword played round them like lightning, and the fierce horse ramped and swooped above them with pawing iron-shod hoofs and eyes of fire. With cries and shrieks they flew off to right and left amidst the bushes, springing over boulders and darting under branches where no horseman could follow them. The foul crew had gone as swiftly and suddenly as it had come, and save for four ragged figures littered amongst the trampled bushes, no sign remaining of their passing.\n\nNigel tethered Pommers to a thorn-bush and then turned his attention to the injured man. The white horse had regained his feet and stood whinnying gently as he looked down on his prostrate master. A heavy blow, half broken by his sword, had beaten him down and left a great raw bruise upon his forehead. But a stream gurgled through the gorge, and a capful of water dashed over his face brought the senses back to the injured man. He was a mere stripling, with the delicate features of a woman, and a pair of great violet-blue eyes which looked up presently with a puzzled stare into Nigel's face.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked. \"Ah yes! I call you to mind. You are the young Englishman who chased me on the great yellow horse. By our Lady of Rocamadour whose vernicle is round my neck! I could not have believed that any horse could have kept at the heels of Charlemagne so long. But I will wager you a hundred crowns, Englishman, that I lead you over a five-mile course.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Nigel, \"we will wait till you can back a horse ere we talk of racing it. I am Nigel of Tilford, of the family of Loring, a squire by rank and the son of a knight. How are you called, young sir?\"\n\n\"I also am a squire by rank and the son of a knight. I am Raoul de la Roche Pierre de Bras, whose father writes himself Lord of Grosbois, a free vavasor of the noble Count of Toulouse, with the right of fossa and of furca, the high justice, the middle and the low.\" He sat up and rubbed his eyes. \"Englishman, you have saved my life as I would have saved yours, had I seen such yelping dogs set upon a man of blood and of coat-armor. But now I am yours, and what is your sweet will?\"\n\n\"When you are fit to ride, you will come back with me to my people.\"\n\n\"Alas! I feared that you would say so. Had I taken you, Nigel\u2014that is your name, is it not?\u2014had I taken you, I would not have acted thus.\"\n\n\"How then would you have ordered things?\" asked Nigel, much taken with the frank and debonair manner of his captive.\n\n\"I would not have taken advantage of such a mischance as has befallen me which has put me in your power. I would give you a sword and beat you in fair fight, so that I might send you to give greeting to my dear lady and show her the deeds which I do for her fair sake.\"\n\n\"Indeed, your words are both good and fair,\" said Nigel. \"By Saint Paul! I cannot call to mind that I have ever met a man who bore himself better. But since I am in my armor and you without, I see not how we can debate the matter.\"\n\n\"Surely, gentle Nigel, you could doff your armor.\"\n\n\"Then have I only my underclothes.\"\n\n\"Nay, there shall be no unfairness there, for I also will very gladly strip to my underclothes.\"\n\nNigel looked wistfully at the Frenchman; but he shook his head. \"Alas! it may not be,\" said he. \"The last words that Sir Robert said to me were that I was to bring you to his side, for he would have speech with you. Would that I could do what you ask, for I also have a fair lady to whom I would fain send you. What use are you to me, Raoul, since I have gained no honor in the taking of you? How is it with you now?\"\n\nThe young Frenchman had risen to his feet. \"Do not take my sword,\" he said. \"I am yours, rescue or no rescue. I think now that I could mount my horse, though indeed my head still rings like a cracked bell.\"\n\nNigel had lost all traces of his comrades; but he remembered Sir Robert's words that he should ride upon the sun with the certainty that sooner or later he would strike upon the road. As they jogged slowly along over undulating hills, the Frenchman shook off his hurt and the two chatted merrily together.\n\n\"I had but just come from France,\" said he, \"and I had hoped to win honor in this country, for I have ever heard that the English are very hardy men and excellent people to fight with. My mules and my baggage are at Evran; but I rode forth to see what I could see, and I chanced upon your army moving down the road, so I coasted it in the hopes of some profit or adventure. Then you came after me and I would have given all the gold goblets upon my father's table if I had my harness so that I could have turned upon you. I have promised the Countess Beatrice that I will send her an Englishman or two to kiss her hands.\"\n\n\"One might perchance have a worse fate,\" said Nigel. \"Is this fair dame your betrothed?\"\n\n\"She is my love,\" answered the Frenchman. \"We are but waiting for the Count to be slain in the wars, and then we mean to marry. And this lady of thine, Nigel? I would that I could see her.\"\n\n\"Perchance you shall, fair sir,\" said Nigel, \"for all that I have seen of you fills me with desire to go further with you. It is in my mind that we might turn this thing to profit and to honor, for when Sir Robert has spoken with you, I am free to do with you as I will.\"\n\n\"And what will you do, Nigel?\"\n\n\"We shall surely try some small deed upon each other, so that either I shall see the Lady Beatrice, or you the Lady Mary. Nay, thank me not, for like yourself, I have come to this country in search of honor, and I know not where I may better find it than at the end of your sword-point. My good lord and master, Sir John Chandos, has told me many times that never yet did he meet French knight nor squire that he did not find great pleasure and profit from their company, and now I very clearly see that he has spoken the truth.\"\n\nFor an hour these two friends rode together, the Frenchman pouring forth the praises of his lady, whose glove he produced from one pocket, her garter from his vest, and her shoe from his saddle-bag. She was blond, and when he heard that Mary was dark, he would fain stop then and there to fight the question of color. He talked too of his great chateau at Lauta, by the head waters of the pleasant Garonne; of the hundred horses in the stables, the seventy hounds in the kennels, the fifty hawks in the mews. His English friend should come there when the wars were over, and what golden days would be theirs! Nigel too, with his English coldness thawing before this young sunbeam of the South, found himself talking of the heather slopes of Surrey, of the forest of Woolmer, even of the sacred chambers of Cosford.\n\nBut as they rode onward towards the sinking sun, their thoughts far away in their distant homes, their horses striding together, there came that which brought their minds back in an instant to the perilous hillsides of Brittany.\n\nIt was the long blast of a trumpet blown from somewhere on the farther side of a ridge toward which they were riding. A second long-drawn note from a distance answered it.\n\n\"It is your camp,\" said the Frenchman.\n\n\"Nay,\" said Nigel; \"we have pipes with us and a naker or two, but I have heard no trumpet-call from our ranks. It behooves us to take heed, for we know not what may be before us. Ride this way, I pray you, that we may look over and yet be ourselves unseen.\"\n\nSome scattered boulders crowned the height, and from behind them the two young Squires could see the long rocky valley beyond. Upon a knoll was a small square building with a battlement round it. Some distance from it towered a great dark castle, as massive as the rocks on which it stood, with one strong keep at the corner, and four long lines of machicolated walls. Above, a great banner flew proudly in the wind, with some device which glowed red in the setting sun. Nigel shaded his eyes and stared with wrinkled brow.\n\n\"It is not the arms of England, nor yet the lilies of France, nor is it the ermine of Brittany,\" said he. \"He who holds this castle fights for his own hand, since his own device flies above it. Surely it is a head gules on an argent field.\"\n\n\"The bloody head on a silver tray!\" cried the Frenchman. \"Was I not warned against him? This is not a man, friend Nigel. It is a monster who wars upon English, French and all Christendom. Have you not heard of the Butcher of La Brohiniere?\"\n\n\"Nay, I have not heard of him.\"\n\n\"His name is accursed in France. Have I not been told also that he put to death this very year Gilles de St. Pol, a friend of the English King?\"\n\n\"Yes, in very truth it comes back to my mind now that I heard something of this matter in Calais before we started.\"\n\n\"Then there he dwells, and God guard you if ever you pass under yonder portal, for no prisoner has ever come forth alive! Since these wars began he hath been a king to himself, and the plunder of eleven years lies in yonder cellars. How can justice come to him, when no man knows who owns the land? But when we have packed you all back to your island, by the Blessed Mother of God, we have a heavy debt to pay to the man who dwells in yonder pile!\"\n\nBut even as they watched, the trumpet-call burst forth once more. It came not from the castle but from the farther end of the valley. It was answered by a second call from the walls. Then in a long, straggling line there came a wild troop of marauders streaming homeward from some foray. In the van, at the head of a body of spearmen, rode a tall and burly man, clad in brazen armor, so that he shone like a golden image in the slanting rays of the sun. His helmet had been loosened from his gorget and was held before him on his horse's neck. A great tangled beard flowed over his breastplate, and his hair hung down as far behind. A squire at his elbow bore high the banner of the bleeding head. Behind the spearmen were a line of heavily laden mules, and on either side of them a drove of poor country folk, who were being herded into the castle. Lastly came a second strong troop of mounted spearmen, who conducted a score or more of prisoners who marched together in a solid body.\n\nNigel stared at them and then, springing on his horse, he urged it along the shelter of the ridge so as to reach unseen a spot which was close to the castle gate. He had scarce taken up his new position when the cavalcade reached the drawbridge, and amid yells of welcome from those upon the wall, filed in a thin line across it. Nigel stared hard once more at the prisoners in the rear, and so absorbed was he by the sight that he had passed the rocks and was standing sheer upon the summit.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" he cried, \"it must indeed be so. I see their russet jackets. They are English archers!\"\n\nAs he spoke, the hindmost one, a strongly built, broad-shouldered man, looked round and saw the gleaming figure above him upon the hill, with open helmet, and the five roses glowing upon his breast. With a sweep of his hands he had thrust his guardians aside and for a moment was clear of the throng.\n\n\"Squire Loring! Squire Loring!\" he cried. \"It is I, Aylward the archer! It is I, Samkin Aylward!\" The next minute a dozen hands had seized him, his cries were muffled with a gag, and he was hurled, the last of the band, through the black and threatening archway of the gate. Then with a clang the two iron wings came together, the portcullis swung upward, and captives and captors, robbers and booty, were all swallowed up within the grim and silent fortress." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE ENGLISH ATTEMPTED THE CASTLE OF LA BROHINIERE", + "text": "For some minutes Nigel remained motionless upon the crest of the hill, his heart, like lead within him, and his eyes fixed upon the huge gray walls which contained his unhappy henchman. He was roused by a sympathetic hand upon his shoulder and the voice of his young prisoner in his ear.\n\n\"Peste!\" said he. \"They have some of your birds in their cage, have they not? What then, my friend? Keep your heart high! Is it not the chance of war, to-day to them, to-morrow to thee, and death at last for us all? And yet I had rather they were in any hands than those of Oliver the Butcher.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul, we cannot suffer it!\" cried Nigel distractedly. \"This man has come with me from my own home. He has stood between me and death before now. It goes to my very heart that he should call upon me in vain. I pray you, Raoul, to use your wits, for mine are all curdled in my head. Tell me what I should do and how I may bring him help.\"\n\nThe Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. \"As easy to get a lamb unscathed out of a wolves' lair as a prisoner safe from La Brohiniere. Nay, Nigel, whither do you go? Have you indeed taken leave of your wits?\"\n\nThe Squire had spurred his horse down the hillside and never halted until he was within a bowshot of the gate. The French prisoner followed hard behind him, with a buzz of reproaches and expostulations.\n\n\"You are mad, Nigel!\" he cried. \"What do you hope to do then? Would you carry the castle with your own hands? Halt, man, halt, in the name of the Virgin!\"\n\nBut Nigel had no plan in his head and only obeyed the fevered impulse to do something to ease his thoughts. He paced his horse up and down, waving his spear, and shouting insults and challenges to the garrison. Over the high wall a hundred jeering faces looked down upon him. So rash and wild was his action that it seemed to those within to mean some trap, so the drawbridge was still held high and none ventured forth to seize him. A few long-range arrows pattered on the rocks, and then with a deep booming sound a huge stone, hurled from a mangonel, sang over the head of the two Squires and crushed into splinters amongst the boulders behind them. The Frenchman seized Nigel's bridle and forced him farther from the gateway.\n\n\"By the dear Virgin!\" he cried, \"I care not to have those pebbles about my ears, yet I cannot go back alone, so it is very clear, my crazy comrade, that you must come also. Now we are beyond their reach! But see, my friend Nigel, who are those who crown the height?\"\n\nThe sun had sunk behind the western ridge, but the glowing sky was fringed at its lower edge by a score of ruddy twinkling points. A body of horsemen showed hard and black upon the bare hill. Then they dipped down the slope into the valley, whilst a band of footmen followed behind.\n\n\"They are my people,\" cried Nigel joyously. \"Come, my friend, hasten, that we may take counsel what we shall do.\"\n\nSir Robert Knolles rode a bowshot in front of his men, and his brow was as black as night. Beside him, with crestfallen face, his horse bleeding, his armor dinted and soiled, was the hotheaded knight, Sir James Astley. A fierce discussion raged between them.\n\n\"I have done my devoir as best I might,\" said Astley. \"Alone I had ten of them at my sword-point. I know not how I have lived to tell it.\"\n\n\"What is your devoir to me? Where are my thirty bowmen?\" cried Knolles in bitter wrath. \"Ten lie dead upon the ground and twenty are worse than dead in yonder castle. And all because you must needs show all men how bold you are, and ride into a bushment such as a child could see. Alas for my own folly that ever I should have trusted such a one as you with the handling of men!\"\n\n\"By God, Sir Robert, you shall answer to me for those words!\" cried Astley with a choking voice. \"Never has a man dared to speak to me as you have done this day.\"\n\n\"As long as I hold the King's order I shall be master, and by the Lord I will hang you, James, on a near tree if I have further cause of offense! How now, Nigel? I see by yonder white horse that you at least have not failed me. I will speak with you anon. Percy, bring up your men, and let us gather round this castle, for, as I hope for my soul's salvation, I win not leave it until I have my archers, or the head of him who holds them.\"\n\nThat night the English lay thick round the fortress of La Brohiniere so that none might come forth from it. But if none could come forth it was hard to see how any could win their way in, for it was full of men, the walls were high and strong, and a deep dry ditch girt it round. But the hatred and fear which its master had raised over the whole countryside could now be plainly seen, for during the night the brushwood men and the villagers came in from all parts with offers of such help as they could give for the intaking of the castle. Knolles set them cutting bushes and tying them into fagots. When morning came he rode out before the wall and he held counsel with his knights and squires as to how he should enter in.\n\n\"By noon,\" said he, \"we shall have so many fagots that we may make our way over the ditch. Then we will beat in the gates and so win a footing.\"\n\nThe young Frenchman had come with Nigel to the conference, and now, amid the silence which followed the leader's proposal, he asked if he might be heard. He was clad in the brazen armor which Nigel had taken from the Red Ferret.\n\n\"It may be that it is not for me to join in your counsel,\" said he, \"seeing that I am a prisoner and a Frenchman. But this man is the enemy of all, and we of France owe him a debt even as you do, since many a good Frenchman has died in his cellars. For this reason I crave to be heard.\"\n\n\"We will hear you,\" said Knolles.\n\n\"I have come from Evran yesterday,\" said he. \"Sir Henry Spinnefort, Sir Peter La Roye and many other brave knights and squires lie there, with a good company of men, all of whom would very gladly join with you to destroy this butcher and his castle, for it is well known amongst us that his deeds are neither good nor fair. There are also bombards which we could drag over the hills, and so beat down this iron gate. If you so order it I will ride to Evran and bring my companions back with me.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Robert,\" said Percy, \"it is in my mind that this Frenchman speaks very wisely and well.\"\n\n\"And when we have taken the castle\u2014what then?\" asked Knolles.\n\n\"Then you could go upon your way, fair sir, and we upon ours. Or if it please you better you could draw together on yonder hill and we on this one, so that the valley lies between us. Then if any cavalier wished to advance himself or to shed a vow and exalt his lady, an opening might be found for him. Surely it would be shame if so many brave men drew together and no small deed were to come of it.\"\n\nNigel clasped his captive's hand to show his admiration and esteem, but Knolles shook his head.\n\n\"Things are not ordered thus, save in the tales of the minstrels,\" said he. \"I have no wish that your people at Evran should know our numbers or our plans. I am not in this land for knight errantry, but I am here to make head against the King's enemies. Has no one aught else to say?\"\n\nPercy pointed to the small outlying fortalice upon the knoll, on which also flew the flag of the bloody head. \"This smaller castle, Robert, is of no great strength and cannot hold more than fifty men. It is built, as I conceive it, that no one should seize the high ground and shoot down into the other. Why should we not turn all our strength upon it, since it is the weaker of the twain?\"\n\nBut again the young leader shook his head. \"If I should take it,\" said he, \"I am still no nearer to my desire, nor will it avail me in getting back my bowmen. It may cost a score of men, and what profit shall I have from it? Had I bombards, I might place them on yonder hill, but having none it is of little use to me.\"\n\n\"It may be,\" said Nigel, \"that they have scant food or water, and so must come forth to fight us.\"\n\n\"I have made inquiry of the peasants,\" Knolles answered, \"and they are of one mind that there is a well within the castle, and good store of food. Nay, gentlemen, there is no way before us save to take it by arms, and no spot where we can attempt it save through the great gate. Soon we will have so many fagots that we can cast them down into the ditch, and so win our way across. I have ordered them to cut a pine-tree on the hill and shear the branches so that we may beat down the gate with it. But what is now amiss, and why do they run forward to the castle?\"\n\nA buzz had risen from the soldiers in the camp, and they all crowded in one direction, rushing toward the castle wall. The knights and squires rode after them, and when in view of the main gate, the cause of the disturbance lay before them. On the tower above the portal three men were standing in the garb of English archers, ropes round their necks and their hands bound behind them. Their comrades surged below them with cries of recognition and of pity.\n\n\"It is Ambrose!\" cried one. \"Surely it is Ambrose of Ingleton.\"\n\n\"Yes, in truth, I see his yellow hair. And the other, him with the beard, it is Lockwood of Skipton. Alas for his wife who keeps the booth by the bridge-head of Ribble! I wot not who the third may be.\"\n\n\"It is little Johnny Alspaye, the youngest man in the company,\" cried old Wat, with the tears running down his cheeks, \"'Twas I who brought him from his home. Alas! Alas! Foul fare the day that ever I coaxed him from his mother's side that he might perish in a far land.\"\n\nThere was a sudden flourish of a trumpet and the drawbridge fell. Across it strode a portly man with a faded herald's coat. He halted warily upon the farther side and his voice boomed like a drum. \"I would speak with your leader.\" he cried.\n\nKnolles rode forward.\n\n\"Have I your knightly word that I may advance unscathed with all courteous entreaty as befits a herald?\"\n\nKnolles nodded his head.\n\nThe man came slowly and pompously forward. \"I am the messenger and liege servant,\" said he, \"of the high baron, Oliver de St. Yvon, Lord of La Brohiniere. He bids me to say that if you continue your journey and molest him no further he will engage upon his part to make no further attack upon you. As to the men whom he holds, he will enroll them in his own honorable service, for he has need of longbowmen, and has heard much of their skill. But if you constrain him or cause him further displeasure by remaining before his castle he hereby gives you warning that he will hang these three men over his gateway and every morning another three until all have been slain. This he has sworn upon the rood of Calvary, and as he has said so he will do upon jeopardy of his soul.\"\n\nRobert Knolles looked grimly at the messenger. \"You may thank the saints that you have had my promise,\" said he, \"else would I have stripped that lying tabard from thy back and the skin beneath it from thy bones, that thy master might have a fitting answer to his message. Tell him that I hold him and all that are within his castle as hostage for the lives of my men, and that should he dare to do them scathe he and every man that is with him shall hang upon his battlements. Go, and go quickly, lest my patience fail.\"\n\nThere was that in Knolles' cold gray eyes and in his manner of speaking those last words which sent the portly envoy back at a quicker gait than he had come. As he vanished into the gloomy arch of the gateway the drawbridge swung up with creak and rattle behind him.\n\nA few minutes later a rough-bearded fellow stepped out over the portal where the condemned archers stood and seizing the first by the shoulders he thrust him over the wall. A cry burst from the man's lips and a deep groan from those of his comrades below as he fell with a jerk which sent him half-way up to the parapet again, and then after dancing like a child's toy swung slowly backward and forward with limp limbs and twisted neck.\n\nThe hangman turned and bowed in mock reverence to the spectators beneath him. He had not yet learned in a land of puny archers how sure and how strong is the English bow. Half a dozen men, old Wat amongst them, had run forward toward the wall. They were too late to save their comrades, but at least their deaths were speedily avenged.\n\nThe man was in the act of pushing off the second prisoner when an arrow crashed through his head, and he fell stone dead upon the parapet. But even in falling he had given the fatal thrust and a second russet figure swung beside the first against the dark background of the castle wall.\n\nThere only remained the young lad, Johnny Alspaye, who stood shaking with fear, an abyss below him, and the voices of those who would hurl him over it behind. There was a long pause before anyone would come forth to dare those deadly arrows. Then a fellow, crouching double, ran forward from the shelter, keeping the young archer's body as a shield between him and danger.\n\n\"Aside, John! Aside!\" cried his comrades from below.\n\nThe youth sprang as far as the rope would allow him, and slipped it half over his face in the effort. Three arrows flashed past his side, and two of them buried themselves in the body of the man behind. A howl of delight burst from the spectators as he dropped first upon his knees and then upon his face. A life for a life was no bad bargain.\n\nBut it was only a short respite which the skill of his comrades had given to the young archer. Over the parapet there appeared a ball of brass, then a pair of great brazen shoulders, and lastly the full figure of an armored man. He walked to the edge and they heard his hoarse guffaw of laughter as the arrows clanged and clattered against his impenetrable mail. He slapped his breastplate, as he jeered at them. Well he knew that at the distance no dart ever sped by mortal hands could cleave through his plates of metal. So he stood, the great burly Butcher of La Brohiniere, with head uptossed, laughing insolently at his foes. Then with slow and ponderous tread he walked toward his boy victim, seized him by the ear, and dragged him across so that the rope might be straight. Seeing that the noose had slipped across the face, he tried to push it down, but the mail glove hampering him he pulled it off, and grasped the rope above the lad's head with his naked hand.\n\nQuick as a flash old Wat's arrow had sped, and the Butcher sprang back with a howl of pain, his hand skewered by a cloth-yard shaft. As he shook it furiously at his enemies a second grazed his knuckles. With a brutal kick of his metal-shod feet he hurled young Alspaye over the edge, looked down for a few moments at his death agonies, and then walked slowly from the parapet, nursing his dripping hand, the arrows still ringing loudly upon his back-piece as he went.\n\nThe archers below, enraged at the death of their comrades, leaped and howled like a pack of ravening wolves.\n\n\"By Saint Dunstan,\" said Percy, looking round at their flushed faces, \"if ever we are to carry it now is the moment, for these men will not be stopped if hate can take them forward.\"\n\n\"You are right, Thomas!\" cried Knolles. \"Gather together twenty men-at-arms each with his shield to cover him. Astley, do you place the bowmen so that no head may show at window or parapet. Nigel, I pray you to order the countryfolk forward with their fardels of fagots. Let the others bring up the lopped pine-tree which lies yonder behind the horse lines. Ten men-at-arms can bear it on the right, and ten on the left, having shields over their heads. The gate once down, let every man rush in. And God help the better cause!\"\n\nSwiftly and yet quietly the dispositions were made, for these were old soldiers whose daily trade was war. In little groups the archers formed in front of each slit or crevice in the walls, whilst others scanned the battlements with wary eyes, and sped an arrow at every face which gleamed for an instant above them. The garrison shot forth a shower of crossbow bolts and an occasional stone from their engine, but so deadly was the hail which rained upon them that they had no time to dwell upon their aim, and their discharges were wild and harmless. Under cover of the shafts of the bowmen a line of peasants ran unscathed to the edge of the ditch, each hurling in the bundle which he bore in his arms, and then hurrying back for another one. In twenty minutes a broad pathway of fagots lay level with the ground upon one side and the gate upon the other. With the loss of two peasants slain by bolts and one archer crushed by a stone, the ditch had been filled up. All was ready for the battering-ram.\n\nWith a shout, twenty picked men rushed forward with the pine-tree under their arms, the heavy end turned toward the gate. The arbalesters on the tower leaned over and shot into the midst of them, but could not stop their advance. Two dropped, but the others raising their shields ran onward still shouting, crossed the bridge of fagots, and came with a thundering crash against the door. It splintered from base to arch, but kept its place.\n\nSwinging their mighty weapon, the storming party thudded and crashed upon the gate, every blow loosening and widening the cracks which rent it from end to end. The three knights, with Nigel, the Frenchman Raoul and the other squires, stood beside the ram, cheering on the men, and chanting to the rhythm of the swing with a loud \"Ha!\" at every blow. A great stone loosened from the parapet roared through the air and struck Sir James Astley and another of the attackers, but Nigel and the Frenchman had taken their places in an instant, and the ram thudded and smashed with greater energy than ever. Another blow and another! the lower part was staving inward, but the great central bar still held firm. Surely another minute would beat it from its sockets.\n\nBut suddenly from above there came a great deluge of liquid. A hogshead of it had been tilted from the battlement until soldiers, bridge, and ram were equally drenched in yellow slime. Knolles rubbed his gauntlet in it, held it to his visor, and smelled it.\n\n\"Back, back!\" he cried. \"Back before it is too late!\"\n\nThere was a small barred window above their heads at the side of the gate. A ruddy glare shone through it, and then a blazing torch was tossed down upon them. In a moment the oil had caught and the whole place was a sheet of flame. The fir-tree that they carried, the fagots beneath them, their very weapons, were all in a blaze.\n\nTo right and left the men sprang down into the dry ditch, rolling with screams upon the ground in their endeavor to extinguish the flames. The knights and squires protected by their armor strove hard, stamping and slapping, to help those who had but leather jacks to shield their bodies. From above a ceaseless shower of darts and of stones were poured down upon them, while on the other hand the archers, seeing the greatness of the danger, ran up to the edge of the ditch, and shot fast and true at every face which showed above the wall.\n\nScorched, wearied and bedraggled, the remains of the storming party clambered out of the ditch as best they could, clutching at the friendly hands held down to them, and so limped their way back amid the taunts and howls of their enemies. A long pile of smoldering cinders was all that remained of their bridge, and on it lay Astley and six other red-hot men glowing in their armor.\n\nKnolles clinched his hands as he looked back at the ruin that was wrought, and then surveyed the group of men who stood or lay around him nursing their burned limbs and scowling up at the exultant figures who waved on the castle wall. Badly scorched himself, the young leader had no thought for his own injuries in the rage and grief which racked his soul. \"We will build another bridge,\" he cried. \"Set the peasants binding fagots once more.\"\n\nBut a thought had flashed through Nigel's mind. \"See, fair sir,\" said he. \"The nails of yonder door are red-hot and the wood as white as ashes. Surely we can break our way through it.\"\n\n\"By the Virgin, you speak truly!\" cried the French Squire. \"If we can cross the ditch the gate will not stop us. Come, Nigel, for our fair ladies' sakes, I will race you who will reach it first, England or France.\"\n\nAlas for all the wise words of the good Chandos! Alas for all the lessons in order and discipline learned from the wary Knolles. In an instant, forgetful of all things but this noble challenge, Nigel was running at the top of his speed for the burning gate. Close at his heels was the Frenchman, blowing and gasping, as he rushed along in his brazen armor. Behind came a stream of howling archers and men-at-arms, like a flood which has broken its dam. Down they slipped into the ditch, rushed across it, and clambered on each other's backs up the opposite side. Nigel, Raoul and two archers gained a foothold in front of the burning gate at the same moment. With blows and kicks they burst it to pieces, and dashed with a yell of triumph through the dark archway beyond. For a moment they thought with mad rapture that the castle was carried. A dark tunnel lay before them, down which they rushed. But alas! at the farther end it was blocked by a second gateway as strong as that which had been burned. In vain they beat upon it with their swords and axes. On each side the tunnel was pierced with slits, and the crossbow bolts discharged at only a few yards' distance crashed through armor as if it were cloth and laid man after man upon the stones. They raged and leaped before the great iron-clamped barrier, but the wall itself was as easy to tear down.\n\nIt was bitter to draw back; but it was madness to remain. Nigel looked round and saw that half his men were down. At the same moment Raoul sank with a gasp at his feet, a bolt driven to its socket through the links of the camail which guarded his neck. Some of the archers, seeing that certain death awaited them, were already running back to escape from the fatal passage.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" cried Nigel hotly. \"Would you leave our wounded where this butcher may lay his hands upon them? Let the archers shoot inwards and hold them back from the slits. Now let each man raise one of our comrades, lest we leave our honor in the gate of this castle.\"\n\nWith a mighty effort he had raised Raoul upon his shoulders and staggered with him to the edge of the ditch. Several men were waiting below where the steep bank shield them from the arrows, and to them Nigel handed down his wounded friend, and each archer in turn did the same. Again and again Nigel went back until no one lay in the tunnel save seven who had died there. Thirteen wounded were laid in the shelter of the ditch, and there they must remain until night came to cover them. Meanwhile the bowmen on the farther side protected them from attack, and also prevented the enemy from all attempts to build up the outer gate. The gaping smoke-blackened arch was all that they could show for a loss of thirty men, but that at least Knolles was determined to keep.\n\nBurned and bruised, but unconscious of either pain or fatigue for the turmoil of his spirit within him, Nigel knelt by the Frenchman and loosened his helmet. The girlish face of the young Squire was white as chalk, and the haze of death was gathering over his violet eyes, but a faint smile played round his lips as he looked up at his English comrade.\n\n\"I shall never see Beatrice again,\" he whispered. \"I pray you, Nigel, that when there is a truce you will journey as far as my father's chateau and tell him how his son died. Young Gaston will rejoice, for to him come the land and the coat, the war-cry and the profit. See them, Nigel, and tell them that I was as forward as the others.\"\n\n\"Indeed Raoul, no man could have carried himself with more honor or won more worship than you have done this day. I will do your behest when the time comes.\"\n\n\"Surely you are happy, Nigel,\" the dying Squire murmured, \"for this day has given you one more deed which you may lay at the feet of your lady-love.\"\n\n\"It might have been so had we carried the gate,\" Nigel answered sadly; \"but by Saint Paul! I cannot count it a deed where I have come back with my purpose unfulfilled. But this is no time, Raoul, to talk of my small affairs. If we take the castle and I bear a good part in it, then perchance all this may indeed avail.\"\n\nThe Frenchman sat up with that strange energy which comes often as the harbinger of death. \"You will win your Lady Mary, Nigel, and your great deeds will be not three but a score, so that in all Christendom there shall be no man of blood and coat-armor who has not heard your name and your fame. This I tell you\u2014I, Raoul de la Roche Pierre de Bras, dying upon the field of honor. And now kiss me, sweet friend, and lay me back, for the mists close round me and I am gone!\"\n\nWith tender hands the Squire lowered his comrade's head, but even as he did so there came a choking rush of blood, and the soul had passed. So died a gallant cavalier of France, and Nigel as he knelt in the ditch beside him prayed that his own end might be as noble and as debonair." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE SECOND MESSENGER WENT TO COSFORD", + "text": "Under cover of night the wounded men were lifted from the ditch and carried back, whilst pickets of archers were advanced to the very gate so that none should rebuild it. Nigel, sick at heart over his own failure, the death of his prisoner and his fears for Aylward, crept back into the camp, but his cup was not yet full, for Knolles was waiting for him with a tongue which cut like a whip-lash. Who was he, a raw squire, that he should lead an attack without orders? See what his crazy knight errantry had brought about. Twenty men had been destroyed by it and nothing gained. Their blood was on his head. Chandos should hear of his conduct. He should be sent back to England when the castle had fallen.\n\nSuch were the bitter words of Knolles, the more bitter because Nigel felt in his heart that he had indeed done wrong, and that Chandos would have said the same though, perchance, in kinder words. He listened in silent respect, as his duty was, and then having saluted his leader he withdrew apart, threw himself down amongst the bushes, and wept the hottest tears of his life, sobbing bitterly with his face between his hands. He had striven hard, and yet everything had gone wrong with him. He was bruised, burned and aching from head to foot. Yet so high is the spirit above the body that all was nothing compared to the sorrow and shame which racked his soul.\n\nBut a little thing changed the current of his thoughts and brought some peace to his mind. He had slipped off his mail gauntlets, and as he did so his fingers lighted upon the tiny bangle which Mary had fastened there when they stood together upon St. Catharine's Hill on the Guildford Road. He remembered the motto curiously worked in filigree of gold. It ran: \"Fais ce que dois, adviegne que pourra\u2014c'est commande au chevalier.\"\n\nThe words rang in his weary brain. He had done what seemed right, come what might. It had gone awry, it is true; but all things human may do that. If he had carried the castle, he felt that Knolles would have forgiven and forgotten all else. If he had not carried it, it was no fault of his. No man could have done more. If Mary could see she would surely have approved. Dropping into sleep, he saw her dark face, shining with pride and with pity, stooping over him as he lay. She stretched out her hand in his dream and touched him on the shoulder. He sprang up and rubbed his eyes, for fact had woven itself into dream in the strange way that it does, and some one was indeed leaning over him in the gloom, and shaking him from his slumbers. But the gentle voice and soft touch of the Lady Mary had changed suddenly to the harsh accents and rough grip of Black Simon, the fierce Norfolk man-at-arms.\n\n\"Surely you are the Squire Loring,\" he said, peering close to his face in the darkness.\n\n\"I am he. What then?\"\n\n\"I have searched through the camp for you, but when I saw the great horse tethered near these bushes, I thought you would be found hard by. I would have a word with you.\"\n\n\"Speak on.\"\n\n\"This man Aylward the bowman was my friend, and it is the nature that God has given me to love my friends even as I hate my foes. He is also thy servant, and it has seemed to me that you love him also.\"\n\n\"I have good cause so to do.\"\n\n\"Then you and I, Squire Loring, have more reason to strive on his behalf than any of these others, who think more of taking the castle than of saving those who are captives within. Do you not see that such a man as this robber lord would, when all else had failed him, most surely cut the throats of his prisoners at the last instant before the castle fell, knowing well that come what might he would have short shrift himself? Is that not certain?\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! I had not thought of it.\"\n\n\"I was with you, hammering at the inner gate,\" said Simon, \"and yet once when I thought that it was giving way I said in my heart: 'Good-by, Samkin! I shall never see you more.' This Baron has gall in his soul, even as I have myself, and do you think that I would give up my prisoners alive, if I were constrained so to do? No, no; had we won our way this day it would have been the death-stroke for them all.\"\n\n\"It may be that you are right, Simon,\" said Nigel, \"and the thought of it should assuage our grief. But if we cannot save them by taking the castle, then surely they are lost indeed.\"\n\n\"It may be so, or it may not,\" Simon answered slowly. \"It is in my mind that if the castle were taken very suddenly, and in such a fashion that they could not foresee it, then perchance we might get the prisoners before they could do them scathe.\"\n\nNigel bent forward eagerly, his hand on the soldier's arm.\n\n\"You have some plan in your mind, Simon. Tell me what it is.\"\n\n\"I had wished to tell Sir Robert, but he is preparing the assault for to-morrow and will not be turned from his purpose. I have indeed a plan, but whether it be good or not I cannot say until I have tried it. But first I will tell you what put it into my thoughts. Know then that this morning when I was in yonder ditch I marked one of their men upon the wall. He was a big man with a white face, red hair and a touch of Saint Anthony's fire upon the cheek.\"\n\n\"But what has this to do with Aylward?\"\n\n\"I will show you. This evening after the assault I chanced to walk with some of my fellows, round yonder small fort upon the knoll to see if we could spy a weak spot in it. Some of them came to the wall to curse us, and among them whom should I see but a big man with a white face, red hair and a touch of Anthony's fire upon his cheek? What make you of that, Squire Nigel?\"\n\n\"That this man had crossed from the castle to the fort.\"\n\n\"In good sooth, it must indeed be so. There are not two such ken-speckled men in the world. But if he crossed from the castle to the fort, it was not above the ground, for our own people were between.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! I see your meaning!\" cried Nigel. \"It is in your mind that there is a passage under the earth from one to the other.\"\n\n\"I am well sure of it.\"\n\n\"Then if we should take the small fort we may pass down this tunnel, and so carry the great castle also.\"\n\n\"Such a thing might happen,\" said Simon, \"and yet it is dangerous also, for surely those in the castle would hear our assault upon the fort and so be warned to bar the passage against us, and to slay the prisoners before we could come.\"\n\n\"What then is your rede?\"\n\n\"Could we find where the tunnel lay, Squire Nigel, I know not what is to prevent us from digging down upon it and breaking into it so that both fort and castle are at our mercy before either knows that we are there.\"\n\nNigel clapped his hands with joy. \"'Fore God!\" he cried. \"It is a most noble plan! But alas! Simon, I see not how we can tell the course of this passage or where we should dig.\"\n\n\"I have peasants yonder with spades,\" said Simon. \"There are two of my friends, Harding of Barnstable and West-country John who are waiting for us with their gear. If you will come to lead us, Squire Nigel, we are ready to venture our bodies in the attempt.\"\n\nWhat would Knolles say in case they failed? The thought flashed through Nigel's mind, but another came swiftly behind it. He would not venture further unless he found hopes of success. And if he did venture further he would put his life upon it. Giving that, he made amends for all errors. And if on the other hand success crowned their efforts, then Knolles would forgive his failure at the gateway. A minute later, every doubt banished from his mind, he was making his way through the darkness under the guidance of Black Simon.\n\nOutside the camp the two other men-at-arms were waiting for them, and the four advanced together. Presently a little group of figures loomed up in the darkness. It was a cloudy night, and a thin rain was falling which obscured both the castle and the fort; but a stone had been placed by Simon in the daytime which assured that they were between the two.\n\n\"Is blind Andreas there?\" asked Simon.\n\n\"Yes, kind sir, I am here,\" said a voice.\n\n\"This man,\" said Simon, \"was once rich and of good repute, but he was beggared by this robber lord, who afterwards put out his eyes so that he has lived for many years in darkness at the charity of others.\"\n\n\"How can he help us in our enterprise if he be indeed blind?\" asked Nigel.\n\n\"It is for that very reason, fair lord, that he can be of greater service than any other man,\" Simon answered; \"for it often happens that when a man has lost a sense the good God will strengthen those that remain. Hence it is that Andreas has such ears that he can hear the sap in the trees or the cheep of the mouse in its burrow. He has come to help us to find the tunnel.\"\n\n\"And I have found it,\" said the blind man proudly. \"Here I have placed my staff upon the line of it. Twice as I lay there with my ear to the ground I have heard footsteps pass beneath me.\"\n\n\"I trust you make no mistake, old man,\" said Nigel.\n\nFor answer the blind man raised his staff and smote twice upon the ground, once to the right and once to the left. The one gave a dull thud, the other a hollow boom.\n\n\"Can you not hear that?\" he asked. \"Will you ask me now if I make a mistake?\"\n\n\"Indeed, we are much beholden to you!\" cried Nigel. \"Let the peasants dig then, and as silently as they may. Do you keep your ear upon the ground, Andreas, so that if anyone pass beneath us we shall be warned.\"\n\nSo, amid the driving rain, the little group toiled in the darkness. The blind man lay silent, flat upon his face, and twice they heard his warning hiss and stopped their work, whilst some one passed beneath. In an hour they had dug down to a stone arch which was clearly the outer side of the tunnel roof. Here was a sad obstacle, for it might take long to loosen a stone, and if their work was not done by the break of day then their enterprise was indeed hopeless. They loosened the mortar with a dagger, and at last dislodged one small stone which enabled them to get at the others. Presently a dark hole blacker than the night around them yawned at their feet, and their swords could touch no bottom to it. They had opened the tunnel.\n\n\"I would fain enter it first,\" said Nigel. \"I pray you to lower me down.\" They held him to the full length of their arms and then letting him drop they heard him land safely beneath them. An instant later the blind man started up with a low cry of alarm.\n\n\"I hear steps coming,\" said he. \"They are far off, but they draw nearer.\"\n\nSimon thrust his head and neck down the hole. \"Squire Nigel,\" he whispered, \"can you hear me?\"\n\n\"I can hear you, Simon.\"\n\n\"Andreas says that some one comes.\"\n\n\"Then cover over the hole,\" came the answer. \"Quick, I pray you, cover it over!\"\n\nA mantle was stretched across it, so that no glimmer of light should warn the newcomer. The fear was that he might have heard, the sound of Nigel's descent. But soon it was clear that he had not done so, for Andreas announced that he was still advancing. Presently Nigel could hear the distant thud of his feet. If he bore a lantern all was lost. But no gleam of light appeared in the black tunnel, and still the footsteps drew nearer.\n\nNigel breathed a prayer of thanks to all his guardian saints as he crouched close to the slimy wall and waited breathless, his dagger in his hand. Nearer yet and nearer came the steps. He could hear the stranger's coarse breathing in the darkness. Then as he brushed past Nigel bounded upon him with a tiger spring. There was one gasp of astonishment, and not a sound more, for the Squire's grip was on the man's throat and his body was pinned motionless against the wall.\n\n\"Simon! Simon!\" cried Nigel loudly.\n\nThe mantle was moved from the hole.\n\n\"Have you a cord? Or your belts linked together may serve.\"\n\nOne of the peasants had a rope, and Nigel soon felt it dangling against his hand. He listened and there was no sound in the passage. For an instant he released his captive's throat. A torrent of prayers and entreaties came forth. The man was shaking like a leaf in the wind. Nigel pressed the point of his dagger against his face and dared him to open his lips. Then he slipped the rope beneath his arms and tied it.\n\n\"Pull him up!\" he whispered, and for an instant the gray glimmer above him was obscured.\n\n\"We have him, fair sir,\" said Simon.\n\n\"Then drop me the rope and hold it fast.\"\n\nA moment later Nigel stood among the group of men who had gathered round their captive. It was too dark to see him, and they dare not strike flint and steel.\n\nSimon passed his hand roughly over him and felt a fat clean-shaven face, and a cloth gabardine which hung to the ankles. \"Who are you?\" he whispered. \"Speak the truth and speak it low, if you would ever speak again.\"\n\nThe man's teeth chattered in his head with cold and fright. \"I speak no English,\" he murmured.\n\n\"French, then,\" said Nigel.\n\n\"I am a holy priest of God. You court the ban of holy Church when you lay hands upon me. I pray you let me go upon my way, for there are those whom I would shrive and housel. If they should die in sin, their damnation is upon you.\"\n\n\"How are you called then?\"\n\n\"I am Dom Peter de Cervolles.\"\n\n\"De Cervolles, the arch-priest, he who heated the brazier when they burned out my eyes,\" cried old Andreas. \"Of all the devils in hell there is none fouler than this one. Friends, friends, if I have done aught for you this night, I ask but one reward, that ye let me have my will of this man.\"\n\nBut Nigel pushed the old man back. \"There is no time for this,\" he said. \"Now hark you, priest\u2014if priest indeed you be\u2014your gown and tonsure will not save you if you play us false, for we are here of a set purpose and we will go forward with it, come what may. Answer me and answer me truly or it will be an ill night for you. In what part of the Castle does this tunnel enter?\"\n\n\"In the lower cellar.\"\n\n\"What is at the end?\"\n\n\"An oaken door.\"\n\n\"Is it barred?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is barred.\"\n\n\"How would you have entered?\"\n\n\"I would have given the password.\"\n\n\"Who then would have opened?\"\n\n\"There is a guard within.\"\n\n\"And beyond him?\"\n\n\"Beyond him are the prison cells and the jailers.\"\n\n\"Who else would be afoot?\"\n\n\"No one save a guard at the gate and another on the battlement.\"\n\n\"What then is the password?\"\n\nThe man was silent.\n\n\"The password, fellow!\"\n\nThe cold points of two daggers pricked his throat; but still he would not speak.\n\n\"Where is the blind man?\" asked Nigel. \"Here, Andreas, you can have him and do what you will with him.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay,\" the priest whimpered. \"Keep him off me. Save me from blind Andreas! I will tell you everything.\"\n\n\"The password then, this instant?\"\n\n\"It is 'Benedicite!'\"\n\n\"We have the password, Simon,\" cried Nigel. \"Come then, let us on to the farther end. These peasants will guard the priest, and they will remain here lest we wish to send a message.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, it is in my mind that we can do better,\" said Simon. \"Let us take the priest with us, so that he who is within may know his voice.\"\n\n\"It is well thought of,\" said Nigel, \"and first let us pray together, for indeed this night may well be our last.\"\n\nHe and the three men-at-arms knelt in the rain and sent up their simple orisons, Simon still clutching tight to his prisoner's wrist.\n\nThe priest fumbled in his breast and drew something forth. \"It is the heart of the blessed confessor Saint Enogat,\" said he. \"It may be that it will ease and assoil your souls if you would wish to handle it.\"\n\nThe four Englishmen passed the flat silver case from hand to hand, each pressing his lips devoutly upon it. Then they rose to their feet. Nigel was the first to lower himself down the hole; then Simon; then the priest, who was instantly seized by the other two. The men-at-arms followed them. They had scarcely moved away from the hole when Nigel stopped.\n\n\"Surely some one else came after us,\" said he.\n\nThey listened, but no whisper or rustle came from behind them. For a minute they paused and then resumed their journey through the dark. It seemed a long, long way, though in truth it was but a few hundred yards before they came to a door with a glimmer of yellow light around it, which barred their passage. Nigel struck upon it with his hand.\n\nThere was the rasping of a bolt and then a loud voice \"Is that you, priest?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is I,\" said the prisoner in a quavering voice. \"Open, Arnold!\"\n\nThe voice was enough. There was no question of passwords. The door swung inward, and in an instant the janitor was cut down by Nigel and Simon. So sudden and so fierce was the attack that save for the thud of his body no sound was heard. A flood of light burst outward into the passage, and the Englishmen stood with blinking eyes in its glare.\n\nIn front of them lay a stone-flagged corridor, across which lay the dead body of the janitor. It had doors on either side of it, and another grated door at the farther end. A strange hubbub, a kind of low droning and whining filled the air. The four men were standing listening, full of wonder as to what this might mean, when a sharp cry came from behind them. The priest lay in a shapeless heap upon the ground, and the blood was rushing from his gaping throat. Down the passage, a black shadow in the yellow light, there fled a crouching man, who clattered with a stick as he went.\n\n\"It is Andreas,\" cried West-country Will. \"He has slain him.\"\n\n\"Then it was he that I heard behind us,\" said Nigel. \"Doubtless he was at our very heels in the darkness. I fear that the priest's cry has been heard.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Simon, \"there are so many cries that one more may well pass. Let us take this lamp from the wall and see what sort of devil's den we have around us.\"\n\nThey opened the door upon the right, and so horrible a smell issued from it that they were driven back from it. The lamp which Simon held forward showed a monkeylike creature mowing and grimacing in the corner, man or woman none could tell, but driven crazy by loneliness and horror. In the other cell was a graybearded man fettered to the wall, looking blankly before him, a body without a soul, yet with life still in him, for his dull eyes turned slowly in their direction. But it was from behind the central door at the end of the passage that the chorus of sad cries came which filled the air.\n\n\"Simon,\" said Nigel, \"before we go farther we will take this outer door from its hinges. With it we will block this passage so that at the worst we may hold our ground here until help comes. Do you back to the camp as fast as your feet can bear you. The peasants will draw you upward through the hole. Give my greetings to Sir Robert and tell him that the castle is taken without fail if he comes this way with fifty men. Say that we have made a lodgment within the walls. And tell him also, Simon, that I would counsel him to make a stir before the gateway so that the guard may be held there whilst we make good our footing behind them. Go, good Simon, and lose not a moment!\"\n\nBut the man-at-arms shook his head. \"It is I who have brought you here, fair sir, and here I bide through fair and foul. But you speak wisely and well, for Sir Robert should indeed be told what is going forward now that we have gone so far. Harding, do you go with all speed and bear the gentle Nigel's message.\"\n\nReluctantly the man-at-arms sped upon his errand. They could hear the racing of his feet and the low jingle of his harness until they died away in the tunnel. Then the three companions approached the door at the end. It was their intention to wait where they were until help should come, but suddenly amid the babel of cries within there broke forth an English voice, shouting in torment.\n\n\"My God!\" it cried, \"I pray you, comrades, for a cup of water, as you hope for Christ's mercy!\"\n\nA shout of laughter and the thud of a heavy blow followed the appeal.\n\nAll the hot blood rushed to Nigel's head at the sound, buzzing in his ears and throbbing in his temples. There are times when the fiery heart of a man must overbear the cold brain of a soldier. With one bound he was at the door, with another he was through it, the men-at-arms at his heels. So strange was the scene before them that for an instant all three stood motionless with horror and surprise.\n\nIt was a great vaulted chamber, brightly lit by many torches. At the farther end roared a great fire. In front of it three naked men were chained to posts in such a way that flinch as they might they could never get beyond the range of its scorching heat. Yet they were so far from it that no actual burn would be inflicted if they could but keep turning and shifting so as continually to present some fresh portion of their flesh to the flames. Hence they danced and whirled in front of the fire, tossing ceaselessly this way and that within the compass of their chains, wearied to death, their protruding tongues cracked and blackened with thirst, but unable for one instant to rest from their writhings and contortions.\n\nEven stranger was the sight at each side of the room, whence came that chorus of groans which had first struck upon the ears of Nigel and his companions. A line of great hogsheads were placed alongside the walls, and within each sat a man, his head protruding from the top. As they moved within there was a constant splashing and washing of water. The white wan faces all turned together as the door flew open, and a cry of amazement and of hope took the place of those long-drawn moans of despair.\n\nAt the same instant two fellows clad in black, who had been seated with a flagon of wine between them at a table near the fire, sprang wildly to their feet, staring with blank amazement at this sudden inrush. That instant of delay deprived them of their last chance of safety. Midway down the room was a flight of stone steps which led to the main door.\n\nSwift as a wildcat Nigel bounded toward it and gained the steps a stride or two before the jailers. They turned and made for the other which led to the passage, but Simon and his comrades were nearer to it than they. Two sweeping blows, two dagger thrusts into writhing figures, and the ruffians who worked the will of the Butcher lay dead upon the floor of their slaughter-house.\n\nOh, the buzz of joy and of prayer from all those white lips! Oh, the light of returning hope in all those sunken weary eyes! One wild shout would have gone up had not Nigel's outstretched hands and warning voice hushed them to silence.\n\nHe opened the door behind him. A curving newel staircase wound upward into the darkness. He listened, but no sound came down. There was a key in the outer lock of the iron door. He whipped it out and turned it on the inner side. The ground that they had gained was safe. Now they could turn to the relief of these poor fellows beside them. A few strong blows struck off the irons and freed the three dancers before the fire. With a husky croak of joy, they rushed across to their comrades' water-barrels, plunged their heads in like horses, and drank and drank and drank. Then in turn the poor shivering wretches were taken out of the barrels, their skins bleached and wrinkled with long soaking. Their bonds were torn from them; but, cramped and fixed, their limbs refused to act, and they tumbled and twisted upon the floor in their efforts to reach Nigel and to kiss his hand.\n\nIn a corner lay Aylward, dripping from his barrel and exhausted with cold and hunger. Nigel ran to his side and raised his head. The jug of wine from which the two jailers had drunk still stood upon their table. The Squire placed it to the archer's lips and he took a hearty pull at it.\n\n\"How is it with you now, Aylward?\"\n\n\"Better, Squire, better, but may I never touch water again as long as I live! Alas! poor Dicon has gone, and Stephen also\u2014the life chilled out of them. The cold is in the very marrow of my bones. I pray you, let me lean upon your arm as far as the fire, that I may warm the frozen blood and set it running in my veins once more.\"\n\nA strange sight it was to see these twenty naked men crouching in a half-circle round the fire with their trembling hands extended to the blaze. Soon their tongues at least were thawed, and they poured out the story of their troubles with many a prayer and ejaculation to the saints for their safe delivery. No food had crossed their lips since they had been taken. The Butcher had commanded them to join his garrison and to shoot upon their comrades from the wall. When they refused he had set aside three of them for execution.\n\nThe others had been dragged to the cellar, whither the leering tyrant had followed them. Only one question he had asked them, whether they were of a hot-blooded nature or of a cold. Blows were showered upon them until they answered. Three had said cold, and had been condemned to the torment of the fire. The rest who had said hot were delivered up to the torture of the water-cask. Every few hours this man or fiend had come down to exult over their sufferings and to ask them whether they were ready yet to enter his service. Three had consented and were gone. But the others had all of them stood firm, two of them even to their death.\n\nSuch was the tale to which Nigel and his comrades listened whilst they waited impatiently for the coming of Knolles and his men. Many an anxious look did they cast down the black tunnel, but no glimmer of light and no clash of steel came from its depths. Suddenly, however, a loud and measured sound broke upon their ears. It was a dull metallic clang, ponderous and slow, growing louder and ever louder\u2014the tread of an armored man. The poor wretches round the fire, all unnerved by hunger and suffering, huddled together with wan, scared faces, their eyes fixed in terror on the door.\n\n\"It is he!\" they whispered. \"It is the Butcher himself!\"\n\nNigel had darted to the door and listened intently. There were no footfalls save those of one man. Once sure of that, he softly turned the key in the lock. At the same instant there came a bull's bellow from without.\n\n\"Ives! Bertrand!\" cried the voice. \"Can you not hear me coming, you drunken varlets? You shall cool your own heads in the water-casks, you lazy rascals! What, not even now! Open, you dogs. Open, I say!\"\n\nHe had thrust down the latch, and with a kick he flung the door wide and rushed inward. For an instant he stood motionless, a statue of dull yellow metal, his eyes fixed upon the empty casks and the huddle of naked men. Then with the roar of a trapped lion, he turned, but the door had slammed behind him, and Black Simon, with grim figure and sardonic face, stood between.\n\nThe Butcher looked round him helplessly, for he was unarmed save for his dagger. Then his eyes fell upon Nigel's roses.\n\n\"You are a gentleman of coat-armor,\" he cried. \"I surrender myself to you.\"\n\n\"I will not take your surrender, you black villain,\" said Nigel. \"Draw and defend yourself. Simon, give him your sword.\"\n\n\"Nay, this is madness,\" said the blunt man-at-arms. \"Why should I give the wasp a sting?\"\n\n\"Give it him, I say. I cannot kill him in cold blood.\"\n\n\"But I can!\" yelled Aylward, who had crept up from the fire. \"Come, comrades! By these ten finger-bones! has he not taught us how cold blood should be warmed?\"\n\nLike a pack of wolves they were on him, and he clanged upon the floor with a dozen frenzied naked figures clutching and clinging above him. In vain Nigel tried to pull them off. They were mad with rage, these tortured starving men, their eyes fixed and glaring, their hair on end, their teeth gnashing with fury, while they tore at the howling, writhing man. Then with a rattle and clatter they pulled him across the room by his two ankles and dragged him into the fire.\n\nNigel shuddered and turned away his eyes as he saw the brazen figure roll out and stagger to his knees, only to be hurled once more into the heart of the blaze. His prisoners screamed with joy and clapped their hands as they pushed him back with their feet until the armor was too hot for them to touch. Then at last he lay still and glowed darkly red, whilst the naked men danced in a wild half-circle round the fire.\n\nBut now at last the supports had come. Lights flashed and armor gleamed down the tunnel. The cellar filled with armed men, while from above came the cries and turmoil of the feigned assault upon the gate. Led by Knolles and Nigel, the storming party rushed upward and seized the courtyard. The guard of the gate taken in the rear threw down their weapons and cried for mercy. The gate was thrown open and the assailants rushed in, with hundreds of furious peasants at their heels. Some of the robbers died in hot blood, many in cold; but all died, for Knolles had vowed to give no quarter. Day was just breaking when the last fugitive had been hunted out and slain. From all sides came the yells and whoops of the soldiers with the rending and riving of doors as they burst into the store-rooms and treasure-chambers. There was a joyous scramble amongst them, for the plunder of eleven years, gold and jewels, satins and velvets, rich plate and noble hangings were all to be had for the taking.\n\nThe rescued prisoners, their hunger appeased and their clothes restored, led the search for booty. Nigel, leaning on his sword by the gateway, saw Aylward totter past, a huge bundle under each arm, another slung over his back and a smaller packet hanging from his mouth. He dropped it for a moment as he passed his young master.\n\n\"By these ten finger-bones! I am right glad that I came to the war, and no man could ask for a more goodly life,\" said he. \"I have a present here for every girl in Tilford, and my father need never fear the frown of the sacrist of Waverley again. But how of you, Squire Loring? It standeth not aright that we should gather the harvest whilst you, who sowed it, go forth empty-handed. Come, gentle sir, take these things that I have gathered, and I will go back and find more.\"\n\nBut Nigel smiled and shook his head. \"You have gained what your heart desired, and perchance I have done so also,\" said he.\n\nAn instant later Knolles strode up to him with outstretched hand. \"I ask your pardon, Nigel,\" said he. \"I have spoken too hotly in my wrath.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, I was at fault.\"\n\n\"If we stand here now within this castle, it is to you that I owe it. The King shall know of it, and Chandos also. Can I do aught else, Nigel, to prove to you the high esteem in which I hold you?\"\n\nThe Squire flushed with pleasure. \"Do you send a messenger home to England, fair sir, with news of these doings?\"\n\n\"Surely, I must do so. But do not tell me, Nigel, that you would be that messenger. Ask me some other favor, for indeed I cannot let you go.\"\n\n\"Now God forbid!\" cried Nigel. \"By Saint Paul! I would not be so caitiff and so thrall as to leave you, when some small deed might still be done. But I would fain send a message by your messenger.\"\n\n\"To whom?\"\n\n\"It is to the Lady Mary, daughter of old Sir John Buttesthorn who dwells near Guildford.\"\n\n\"But you will write the message, Nigel. Such greetings as a cavalier sends to his lady-love should be under seal.\"\n\n\"Nay, he can carry my message by word of mouth.\"\n\n\"Then I shall tell him for he goes this morning. What message, then, shall he say to the lady?\"\n\n\"He will give her my very humble greeting, and he will say to her that for the second time Saint Catharine has been our friend.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW ROBERT OF BEAUMANOIR CAME TO PLOERMEL", + "text": "Sir Robert Knolles and his men passed onward that day, looking back many a time to see the two dark columns of smoke, one thicker and one more slender, which arose from the castle and from the fort of La Brohiniere. There was not an archer nor a man-at-arms who did not bear a great bundle of spoil upon his back, and Knolles frowned darkly as he looked upon them. Gladly would he have thrown it all down by the roadside, but he had tried such matters before, and he knew that it was as safe to tear a half-gnawed bone from a bear as their blood-won plunder from such men as these. In any case it was but two days' march to Ploermel, where he hoped to bring his journey to an end.\n\nThat night they camped at Mauron, where a small English and Breton garrison held the castle. Right glad were the bowmen to see some of their own countrymen once more, and they spent the night over wine and dice, a crowd of Breton girls assisting, so that next morning their bundles were much lighter, and most of the plunder of La Brohiniere was left with the men and women of Mauron. Next day their march lay with a fair sluggish river upon their right, and a great rolling forest upon their left which covered the whole country. At last toward evening the towers of Ploermel rose before them and they saw against a darkening sky the Red Cross of England waving in the wind. So blue was the river Duc which skirted the road, and so green its banks, that they might indeed have been back beside their own homely streams, the Oxford Thames or the Midland Trent, but ever as the darkness deepened there came in wild gusts the howling of wolves from the forest to remind them that they were in a land of war. So busy had men been for many years in hunting one another that the beasts of the chase had grown to a monstrous degree, until the streets of the towns were no longer safe from the wild inroads of the fierce creatures, the wolves and the bears, who swarmed around them.\n\nIt was nightfall when the little army entered the outer gate of the Castle of Ploermel and encamped in the broad Bailey yard. Ploermel was at that time the center of British power in Mid-Brittany, as Hennebon was in the West, and it was held by a garrison of five hundred men under an old soldier, Richard of Bambro', a rugged Northumbrian, trained in that great school of warriors, the border wars. He who had ridden the marches of the most troubled frontier in Europe, and served his time against the Liddlesdale and Nithsdale raiders was hardened for a life in the field.\n\nOf late, however, Bambro' had been unable to undertake any enterprise, for his reinforcements had failed him, and amid his following he had but three English knights and seventy men. The rest were a mixed crew of Bretons, Hainaulters and a few German mercenary soldiers, brave men individually, as those of that stock have ever been, but lacking interest in the cause, and bound together by no common tie of blood or tradition.\n\nOn the other hand, the surrounding castles, and especially that of Josselin, were held by strong forces of enthusiastic Bretons, inflamed by a common patriotism, and full of warlike ardor. Robert of Beaumanoir, the fierce seneschal of the house of Rohan, pushed constant forays and excursions against Ploermel so that town and castle were both in daily dread of being surrounded and besieged. Several small parties of the English faction had been cut off and slain to a man, and so straitened were the others that it was difficult for them to gather provisions from the country round.\n\nSuch was the state of Bambro's garrison when on that March evening Knolles and his men streamed into the bailey-yard of his Castle.\n\nIn the glare of the torches at the inner gate Bambro' was waiting to receive them, a dry, hard, wizened man, small and fierce, with beady black eyes and quick furtive ways.\n\nBeside him, a strange contrast, stood his Squire, Croquart, a German, whose name and fame as a man-at-arms were widespread, though like Robert Knolles himself he had begun as a humble page. He was a very tall man, with an enormous spread of shoulders, and a pair of huge hands with which he could crack a horseshoe. He was slow and lethargic, save in moments of excitement, and his calm blond face, his dreamy blue eyes and his long fair hair gave him so gentle an appearance that none save those who had seen him in his berserk mood, raging, an iron giant, in the forefront of the battle, could ever guess how terrible a warrior he might be. Little knight and huge squire stood together under the arch of the donjon and gave welcome to the newcomers, whilst a swarm of soldiers crowded round to embrace their comrades and to lead them off where they might feed and make merry together.\n\nSupper had been set in the hall of Ploermel wherein the knights and squires assembled. Bambro' and Croquart were there with Sir Hugh Calverly, an old friend of Knolles and a fellow-townsman, for both were men of Chester. Sir Hugh was a middle-sized flaxen man, with hard gray eyes and fierce large-nosed face sliced across with the scar of a sword-cut. There too were Geoffrey D'Ardaine, a young Breton seigneur, Sir Thomas Belford, a burly thick-set Midland Englishman, Sir Thomas Walton, whose surcoat of scarlet martlets showed that he was of the Surrey Waltons, James Marshall and John Russell, young English squires, and the two brothers, Richard and Hugh Le Galliard, who were of Gascon blood. Besides these were several squires, unknown to fame, and of the newcomers, Sir Robert Knolles, Sir Thomas Percy, Nigel Loring and two other squires, Allington and Parsons. These were the company who gathered in the torchlight round the table of the Seneschal of Ploermel, and kept high revel with joyous hearts because they thought that much honor and noble deeds lay before them.\n\nBut one sad face there was at the board, and that belonged to him at the head of it. Sir Robert Bambro' sat with his chin leaning upon his hand and his eyes downcast upon the cloth, whilst all round him rose the merry clatter of voices, everyone planning some fresh enterprise which might now be attempted. Sir Robert Knolles was for an immediate advance upon Josselin. Calverly thought that a raid might be made into the South where the main French power lay. Others spoke of an attack upon Vannes.\n\nTo all these eager opinions Bambro' listened in a moody silence, which he broke at last by a fierce execration which drew a hushed attention from the company. \"Say no more, fair sirs,\" he cried; \"for indeed your words are like so many stabs in my heart. All this and more we might indeed have done. But of a truth you are too late.\"\n\n\"Too late?'\" cried Knolles. \"What mean you, Richard?\"\n\n\"Alas; that I should have to say it, but you and all these fair soldiers might be back in England once more for all the profit that I am like to have from your coming. Saw you a rider on a white horse ere you reached the Castle?\"\n\n\"Nay, I saw him not?\"\n\n\"He came by the western road from Hennebon. Would that he had broken his neck ere he came here. Not an hour ago he left his message and now hath ridden on to warn the garrison of Malestroit. A truce has been proclaimed for a year betwixt the French King and the English, and he who breaks it forfeits life and estate.\"\n\n\"A truce!\" Here was an end to all their fine dreams. They looked blankly at each other all round the table, whilst Croquart brought his great fist down upon the board until the glasses rattled again. Knolles sat with clenched hands as if he were a figure of stone, while Nigel's heart turned cold and heavy within him. A truce! Where then was his third deed, and how might he return without it?\n\nEven as they sat in moody silence there was the call of a bugle from somewhere out in the darkness.\n\nSir Richard looked up with surprise. \"We are not wont to be summoned after once the portcullis is up,\" said he. \"Truce or no truce, we must let no man within our walls until we have proved him. Croquart, see to it!\"\n\nThe huge German left the room. The company were still seated in despondent silence when he returned.\n\n\"Sir Richard,\" said he, \"the brave knight Robert of Beaumanoir and his Squire William de Montaubon are without the gate, and would fain have speech with you.\"\n\nBambro' started in his chair. What could the fierce leader of the Bretons, a man who was red to the elbow with English blood, have to say to them? On what errand had he left his castle of Josselin to pay this visit to his deadly enemies?\n\n\"Are they armed?\" he asked.\n\n\"They are unarmed.\"\n\n\"Then admit them and bring them hither, but double the guards and take all heed against surprise.\"\n\nPlaces were set at the farther end of the table for these most unexpected guests. Presently the door was swung open, and Croquart with all form and courtesy announced the two Bretons, who entered with the proud and lofty air of gallant warriors and high-bred gentlemen.\n\nBeaumanoir was a tall dark man with raven hair and long swarthy beard. He was strong and straight as a young oak, with fiery black eyes, and no flaw in his comely features save that his front teeth had been dashed from their sockets. His Squire, William of Montaubon, was also tall, with a thin hatchet face, and two small gray eyes set very close upon either side of a long fierce nose. In Beaumanoir's expression one read only gallantry and frankness; in Montaubon's there was gallantry also, but it was mixed with the cruelty and cunning of the wolf. They bowed as they entered, and the little English seneschal advanced with outstretched hand to meet them.\n\n\"Welcome, Robert, so long as you are beneath this roof,\" said he. \"Perhaps the time may come in another place when we may speak to each other in another fashion.\"\n\n\"So I hope, Richard,\" said Beaumanoir; \"but indeed we of Josselin bear you in high esteem and are much beholden to you and to your men for all that you have done for us. We could not wish better neighbors nor any from whom more honor is to be gained. I learn that Sir Robert Knolles and others have joined you, and we are heavy-hearted to think that the orders of our Kings should debar us from attempting a venture.\" He and his squire sat down at the places set for them, and filling their glasses drank to the company.\n\n\"What you say is true, Robert,\" said Bambro', \"and before you came we were discussing the matter among ourselves and grieving that it should be so. When heard you of the truce?\"\n\n\"Yester-evening a messenger rode from Nantes.\"\n\n\"Our news came to-night from Hennebon. The King's own seal was on the order. So I fear that for a year at least you will bide at Josselin and we at Ploermel, and kill time as we may. Perchance we may hunt the wolf together in the great forest, or fly our hawks on the banks of the Duc.\"\n\n\"Doubtless we shall do all this, Richard,\" said Beaumanoir; \"but by Saint Cadoc it is in my mind that with good-will upon both sides we may please ourselves and yet stand excused before our Kings.\"\n\nKnights and squires leaned forward in their chairs, their eager eyes, fixed upon him. He broke into a gap-toothed smile as he looked round at the circle, the wizened seneschal, the blond giant, Nigel's fresh young face, the grim features of Knolles, and the yellow hawk-like Calverly, all burning with the same desire.\n\n\"I see that I need not doubt the good-will,\" said he, \"and of that I was very certain before I came upon this errand. Bethink you then that this order applies to war but not to challenges, spear-runnings, knightly exchanges or the like. King Edward is too good a knight, and so is King John, that either of them should stand in the way of a gentleman who desires to advance himself or to venture his body for the exaltation of his lady. Is this not so?\"\n\nA murmur of eager assent rose from the table.\n\n\"If you as the garrison of Ploermel march upon the garrison of Josselin, then it is very plain that we have broken the truce and upon our heads be it. But if there be a private bickering betwixt me, for example, and this young squire whose eyes show that he is very eager for honor, and if thereafter others on each side join in and fight upon the quarrel, it is in no sense war, but rather our own private business which no king can alter.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Robert,\" said Bambro', \"all that you say is very good and fair.\"\n\nBeaumanoir leaned forward toward Nigel, his brimming glass in his hand. \"Your name, squire?\" said he.\n\n\"My name is Nigel Loring.\"\n\n\"I see that you are young and eager, so I choose you as I would fain have been chosen when I was of your age.\"\n\n\"I thank you, fair sir,\" said Nigel. \"It is great honor that one so famous as yourself should condescend to do some small deed upon me.\"\n\n\"But we must have cause for quarrel, Nigel. Now here I drink to the ladies of Brittany, who of all ladies upon this earth are the most fair and the most virtuous, so that the least worthy-amongst them is far above the best of England. What say you to that, young sir?\"\n\nNigel dipped his finger in his glass and leaning over he placed its wet impress on the Breton's hand. \"This in your face!\" said he.\n\nBeaumanoir swept off the red drop of moisture and smiled his approval. \"It could not have been better done,\" said he. \"Why spoil my velvet paltock as many a hotheaded fool would have done. It is in my mind, young sir, that you will go far. And now, who follows up this quarrel?\"\n\nA growl ran round the table.\n\nBeaumanoir ran his eye round and shook his head. \"Alas!\" said he, \"there are but twenty of you here, and I have thirty at Josselin who are so eager to advance themselves that if I return without hope for all of them there will be sore hearts amongst them. I pray you, Richard, since we have been at these pains to arrange matters, that you in turn will do what you may. Can you not find ten more men?\"\n\n\"But not of gentle blood.\"\n\n\"Nay, it matters not, if they will only fight.\"\n\n\"Of that there can be no doubt, for the castle is full of archers and men-at-arms who would gladly play a part in the matter.\"\n\n\"Then choose ten,\" said Beaumanoir.\n\nBut for the first time the wolf-like squire opened his thin lips. \"Surely, my lord, you will not allow archers,\" said he.\n\n\"I fear not any man.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, consider that this is a trial of weapons betwixt us where man faces man. You have seen these English archers, and you know how fast and how strong are their shafts. Bethink you that if ten of them were against us it is likely that half of us would be down before ever we came to handstrokes.\"\n\n\"By Saint Cadoc, William, I think that you are right,\" cried the Breton. \"If we are to have such a fight as will remain in the memories of men, you will bring no archers and we no crossbows. Let it be steel upon steel. How say you then?\"\n\n\"Surely we can bring ten men-at-arms to make up the thirty that you desire, Robert. It is agreed then that we fight on no quarrel of England and France, but over this matter of the ladies in which you and Squire Loring have fallen out. And now the time?\"\n\n\"At once.\"\n\n\"Surely at once, or perchance a second messenger may come and this also be forbidden. We will be ready with to-morrow's sunrise.\"\n\n\"Nay, a day later,\" cried the Breton Squire. \"Bethink you, my lord, that the three lances of Radenac would take time to come over.\"\n\n\"They are not of our garrison, and they shall not have a place.\"\n\n\"But, fair sir, of all the lances of Brittany\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, William, I will not have it an hour later. To-morrow it shall be, Richard.\"\n\n\"And where?\"\n\n\"I marked a fitting place even as I rode here this evening. If you cross the river and take the bridle-path through the fields which leads to Josselin you come midway upon a mighty oak standing at the corner of a fair and level meadow. There let us meet at midday to-morrow.\"\n\n\"Agreed!\" cried Bambro'. \"But I pray you not to rise, Robert! The night is still young and the spices and hippocras will soon be served. Bide with us, I pray you, for if you would fain hear the latest songs from England, these gentlemen have doubtless brought them. To some of us perchance it is the last night, so we would make it a full one.\"\n\nBut the gallant Breton shook his head. \"It may indeed be the last night for many,\" said he, \"and it is but right that my comrades should know it. I have no need of monk or friar, for I cannot think that harm will ever come beyond the grave to one who has borne himself as a knight should, but others have other thoughts upon these matters and would fain have time for prayer and penitence. Adieu, fair sirs, and I drink a last glass to a happy meeting at the midway oak.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THIRTY OF JOSSELIN ENCOUNTERED THIRTY OF PLOERMEL", + "text": "All night the Castle of Ploermel rang with warlike preparations, for the smiths were hammering and filing and riveting, preparing the armor for the champions. In the stable yard hostlers were testing and grooming the great warhorses, whilst in the chapel knights and squires were easing their souls at the knees of old Father Benedict.\n\nDown in the courtyard, meanwhile, the men-at-arms had been assembled, and the volunteers weeded out until the best men had been selected. Black Simon had obtained a place, and great was the joy which shone upon his grim visage. With him were chosen young Nicholas Dagsworth, a gentleman adventurer who was nephew to the famous Sir Thomas, Walter the German, Hulbitee\u2014a huge peasant whose massive frame gave promise which his sluggish spirit failed to fulfil\u2014John Alcock, Robin Adey and Raoul Provost. These with three others made up the required thirty. Great was the grumbling and evil the talk amongst the archers when it was learned that none of them were to be included, but the bow had been forbidden on either side. It is true that many of them were expert fighters both with ax and with sword, but they were unused to carry heavy armor, and a half-armed man would have short shrift in such a hand-to-hand struggle as lay before them.\n\nIt was two hours after tierce, or one hour before noon, on the fourth Wednesday of Lent in the year of Christ 1351 that the men of Ploermel rode forth from their castle-gate and crossed the bridge of the Due. In front was Bambro' with his Squire Croquart, the latter on a great roan horse bearing the banner of Ploermel, which was a black rampant lion holding a blue flag upon a field of ermine. Behind him came Robert Knolles and Nigel Loring, with an attendant at their side, who carried the pennon of the black raven. Then rode Sir Thomas Percy with his blue lion flaunting above him, and Sir Hugh Calverly, whose banner bore a silver owl, followed by the massive Belford who carried a huge iron club, weighing sixty pounds, upon his saddlebow, and Sir Thomas Walton the knight of Surrey. Behind them were four brave Anglo-Bretons, Perrot de Commelain, Le Gaillart, d'Aspremont and d'Ardaine, who fought against their own countrymen because they were partisans of the Countess of Montfort. Her engrailed silver cross upon a blue field was carried at their head. In the rear were five German or Hainault mercenaries, the tall Hulbitee, and the men-at-arms. Altogether of these combatants twenty were of English birth, four were Breton and six were of German blood.\n\nSo, with glitter of armor and flaunting of pennons, their warhorses tossing and pawing, the champions rode down to the midway oak. Behind them streamed hundreds of archers and men-at-arms whose weapons had been wisely taken from them lest a general battle should ensue. With them also went the townsfolk, men and women, together with wine-sellers, provisions merchants, armorers, grooms and heralds, with surgeons to tend the wounded and priests to shrive the dying. The path was blocked by this throng, but all over the face of the country horsemen and footmen, gentle and simple, men and women, could be seen speeding their way to the scene of the encounter.\n\nThe journey was not a long one, for presently, as they threaded their way through the fields, there appeared before them a great gray oak which spread its gnarled leafless branches over the corner of a green and level meadow. The tree was black with the peasants who had climbed into it, and all round it was a huge throng, chattering and calling like a rookery at sunset. A storm of hooting broke out from them at the approach of the English, for Bambro' was hated in the country where he raised money for the Montfort cause by putting every parish to ransom and maltreating those who refused to pay. There was little amenity in the warlike ways which had been learned upon the Scottish border. The champions rode onward without deigning to take notice of the taunts of the rabble, but the archers turned that way and soon beat the mob to silence. Then they resolved themselves into the keepers of the ground, and pressed the people back until they formed a dense line along the edge of the field, leaving the whole space clear for the warriors.\n\nThe Breton champions had not yet arrived, so the English tethered their horses at one side of the ground, and then gathered round their leader. Every man had his shield slung round his neck, and had cut his spear to the length of five feet so that it might be more manageable for fighting on foot. Besides the spear a sword or a battle-ax hung at the side of each. They were clad from head to foot in armor, with devices upon the crests and surcoats to distinguish them from their antagonists. At present their visors were still up and they chatted gayly with each other.\n\n\"By Saint Dunstan!\" cried Percy, slapping his gauntleted hands together and stamping his steel feet. \"I shall be right glad to get to work, for my blood is chilled.\"\n\n\"I warrant you will be warm enough ere you get through,\" said Calverly.\n\n\"Or cold forever. Candle shall burn and bell toll at Alnwick Chapel if I leave this ground alive, but come what may, fair sirs, it should be a famous joust and one which will help us forward. Surely each of us will have worshipfully won worship, if we chance to come through.\"\n\n\"You say truth, Thomas,\" said Knolles, bracing his girdle. \"For my own part I have no joy in such encounters when there is warfare to be carried out, for it standeth not aright that a man should think of his own pleasure and advancement rather than of the King's cause and the weal of the army. But in times of truce I can think of no better way in which a day may be profitably spent. Why so silent, Nigel?\"\n\n\"Indeed, fair sir, I was looking toward Josselin, which lies as I understand beyond those woods. I see no sign of this debonair gentleman and of his following. It would be indeed grievous pity if any cause came to hold them back.\"\n\nHugh Calverly laughed at the words. \"You need have no fear, young sir,\" said he. \"Such a spirit lies in Robert de Beaumanoir that if he must come alone he would ride against us none the less. I warrant that if he were on a bed of death he would be borne here and die on the green field.\"\n\n\"You say truly, Hugh,\" said Bambro'. \"I know him and those who ride behind him. Thirty stouter men or more skilled in arms are not to be found in Christendom. It is in my mind that come what may there will be much honor for all of us this day. Ever in my head I have a rhyme which the wife of a Welsh archer gave me when I crossed her hand with a golden bracelet after the intaking of Bergerac. She was of the old blood of Merlin with the power of sight. Thus she said\u2014\n\n\u2003\"'Twixt the oak-tree and the river\n\n\u2003Knightly fame aid brave endeavor\n\n\u2003Make an honored name forever.'\n\n\"Methinks I see the oak-tree, and yonder is the river. Surely this should betide some good to us.\"\n\nThe huge German Squire betrayed some impatience during this speech of his leader. Though his rank was subordinate, no man present had more experience of warfare or was more famous as a fighter than he. He new broke brusquely into the talk. \"We should be better employed in ordering our line and making our plans than in talking of the rhymes of Merlin or such old wives' tales,\" said he. \"It is to our own strong arms and good weapons that we must trust this day. And first I would ask you, Sir Richard, what is your will if perchance you should fall in the midst of the fight?\"\n\nBambro' turned to the others. \"If such should be the case, fair sirs, I desire that my Squire Croquart should command.\"\n\nThere was a pause while the knights looked with some chagrin at each other. The silence was broken by Knolles.\n\n\"I will do what you say, Richard,\" said he, \"though indeed it is bitter that we who are knights should serve beneath a squire. Yet it is not for us to fall out among ourselves now at this last moment, and I have ever heard that Croquart is a very worthy and valiant man. Therefore, I will pledge you on jeopardy of my soul that I will accept him as leader if you fall.\"\n\n\"So will I also, Richard,\" said Calverly.\n\n\"And I too!\" cried Belford. \"But surely I hear music, and yonder are their pennons amid the trees.\"\n\nThey all turned, leaning upon their short spears, and watched the advance of the men of Josselin, as their troop wound its way out from the woodlands. In front rode three heralds with tabards of the ermine of Brittany, blowing loudly upon silver trumpets. Behind them a great man upon a white horse bore the banner of Josselin which carries nine golden torteaus upon a scarlet field. Then came the champions riding two and two, fifteen knights and fifteen squires, each with his pennon displayed. Behind them on a litter was borne an aged priest, the Bishop of Rennes, carrying in his hands the viaticum and the holy oils that he might give the last aid and comfort of the Church to those who were dying. The procession was terminated by hundreds of men and women from Josselin, Guegon, and Helleon, and by the entire garrison of the fortress, who came, as the English had done, without their arms. The head of this long column had reached the field before the rear were clear of the wood, but as they arrived the champions picketed their horses on the farther side, behind which their banner was planted and the people lined up until they had inclosed the whole lists with a dense wall of spectators.\n\nWith keen eyes the English party had watched the armorial blazonry of their antagonists, for those fluttering pennons and brilliant surcoats carried a language which all men could read. In front was the banner of Beaumanoir, blue with silver frets. His motto \"J'ayme qui m'ayme\" was carried on a second flag by a little page.\n\n\"Whose is the shield behind him\u2014silver with scarlet drops?\" asked Knolles.\n\n\"It is his Squire, William of Montaubon,\" Calverly answered. \"And there are the golden lion of Rochefort and the silver cross of Du Bois the Strong. I would not wish to meet a better company than are before us this day. See, there are the blue rings of young Tintiniac, who slew my Squire Hubert last Lammastide. With the aid of Saint George I will avenge him ere nightfall.\"\n\n\"By the three kings of Almain,\" growled Croquart, \"we will need to fight hard this day, for never have I seen so many good soldiers gathered together. Yonder is Yves Cheruel, whom they call the man of iron, Caro de Bodegat also with whom I have had more than one bickering\u2014that is he with the three ermine circles on the scarlet shield. There too is left-handed Alain de Karanais; bear in mind that his stroke comes on the side where there is no shield.\"\n\n\"Who is the small stout man\"\u2014asked Nigel\u2014\"he with the black and silver shield? By Saint Paul! he seems a very worthy person and one from whom much might be gained, for he is nigh as broad as he is long.\"\n\n\"It is Sir Robert Raguenel,\" said Calverly, whose long spell of service in Brittany had made him familiar with the people. \"It is said that he can lift a horse upon his back. Beware a full stroke of that steel mace, for the armor is not made that can abide it. But here is the good Beaumanoir, and surely it is time that we came to grips.\"\n\nThe Breton leader had marshaled his men in a line opposite to the English, and now he strode forward and shook Bambro' by the hand. \"By Saint Cadoc! this is a very joyous meeting, Richard,\" said he, \"and we have certainly hit upon a very excellent way of keeping a truce.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Robert,\" said Bambro', \"we owe you much thanks, for I can see that you have been at great pains to bring a worthy company against us this day. Surely if all should chance to perish there will be few noble houses in Brittany who will not mourn.\"\n\n\"Nay, we have none of the highest of Brittany,\" Beaumanoir answered. \"Neither a Blois, nor a Leon, nor a Rohan, nor a Conan, fights in our ranks this day. And yet we are all men of blood and coat-armor, who are ready to venture our persons for the desire of our ladies and the love of the high order of knighthood. And now, Richard, what is your sweet will concerning this fight?\"\n\n\"That we continue until one or other can endure no longer, for since it is seldom that so many brave men draw together it is fitting that we see as much as is possible of each other.\"\n\n\"Richard, your words are fair and good. It shall be even as you say. For the rest, each shall fight as pleases him best from the time that the herald calls the word. If any man from without shall break in upon us he shall be hanged on yonder oak.\"\n\nWith a salute he drew down his visor and returned to his own men, who were kneeling in a twinkling, many colored group whilst the old bishop gave them his blessing.\n\nThe heralds rode round with a warning to the spectators. Then they halted at the side of the two bands of men who now stood in a long line facing each other with fifty yards of grass between. The visors had been closed, and every man was now cased in metal from head to foot, some few glowing in brass, the greater number shining in steel. Only their fierce eyes could be seen smoldering in the dark shadow of their helmets. So for an instant they stood glaring and crouching.\n\nThen with a loud cry of \"Allez!\" the herald dropped his upraised hand, and the two lines of men shuffled as fast as their heavy armor would permit until they met with a sharp clang of metal in the middle of the field. There was a sound as of sixty smiths working upon their anvils. Then the babel of yells and shouts from the spectators, cheering on this party or that, rose and swelled until even the uproar of the combat was drowned in that mighty surge.\n\nSo eager were the combatants to engage that in a few moments all order had been lost and the two bands were mixed up in one furious scrambling, clattering throng, each man tossed hither and thither, thrown against one adversary and then against another, beaten and hustled and buffeted, with only the one thought in his mind to thrust with his spear or to beat with his ax against anyone who came within the narrow slit of vision left by his visor.\n\nBut alas for Nigel and his hopes of some great deed! His was at least the fate of the brave, for he was the first to fall. With a high heart he had placed himself in the line as nearly opposite to Beaumanoir as he could, and had made straight for the Breton leader, remembering that in the out set the quarrel had been so ordered that it lay between them. But ere he could reach his goal he was caught in the swirl of his own comrades, and being the lighter man was swept aside and dashed into the arms of Alain de Karanais, the left-handed swordsman, with such a crash that the two rolled upon the ground together. Light footed as a cat, Nigel had sprung up first, and was stooping over the Breton Squire when the powerful dwarf Raguenel brought his mace thudding down upon the exposed back of his helmet. With a groan Nigel fell upon his face, blood gushing from his mouth, nose, and ears. There he lay, trampled over by either party, while that great fight for which his fiery soul had panted was swaying back and forward above his unconscious form.\n\nBut Nigel was not long unavenged. The huge iron club of Belford struck the dwarf Raguenel to the ground, while Belford in turn was felled by a sweeping blow from Beaumanoir. Sometimes a dozen were on the ground at one time, but so strong was the armor, and so deftly was the force of a blow broken by guard and shield, that the stricken men were often pulled to their feet once more by their comrades, and were able to continue the fight.\n\nSome, however, were beyond all aid. Croquart had cut at a Breton knight named Jean Rousselot and had shorn away his shoulder-piece, exposing his neck and the upper part of his arm. Vainly he tried to cover this vulnerable surface with his shield. It was his right side, and he could not stretch it far enough across, nor could he get away on account of the press of men around him. For a time he held his foemen at bay, but that bare patch of white shoulder was a mark for every weapon, until at last a hatchet sank up to the socket in the knight's chest. Almost at the same moment a second Breton, a young Squire named Geoffrey Mellon, was slain by a thrust from Black Simon which found the weak spot beneath the armpit. Three other Bretons, Evan Cheruel, Caro de Bodegat, and Tristan de Pestivien, the first two knights and the latter a squire, became separated from their comrades, and were beaten to the ground with English all around them, so that they had to choose between instant death and surrender. They handed their swords to Bambro' and stood apart, each of them sorely wounded, watching with hot and bitter hearts the melee which still surged up and down the field.\n\nBut now the combat had lasted half an hour without stint or rest, until the warriors were so exhausted with the burden of their armor, the loss of blood, the shock of blows, and their own furious exertions, that they could scarce totter or raise their weapons. There must be a pause if the combat was to have any decisive end. \"Cessez! Cessez! Retirez!\" cried the heralds, as they spurred their horses between the exhausted men.\n\nSlowly the gallant Beaumanoir led the twenty-five men who were left to their original station, where they opened their visors and threw themselves down upon the grass, panting like weary dogs, and wiping the sweat from their bloodshot eyes. A pitcher of wine of Anjou was carried round by a page, and each in turn drained a cup, save only Beaumanoir who kept his Lent with such strictness that neither food nor drink might pass his lips before sunset. He paced slowly amongst his men, croaking forth encouragement from his parched lips and pointing out to them that among the English there was scarce a man who was not wounded, and some so sorely that they could hardly stand. If the fight so far had gone against them, there were still five hours of daylight, and much might happen before the last of them was laid upon his back.\n\nVarlets had rushed forth to draw away the two dead Bretons, and a brace of English archers had carried Nigel from the field. With his own hands Aylward had unlaced the crushed helmet and had wept to see the bloodless and unconscious face of his young master. He still breathed, however, and stretched upon the grass by the riverside the bowman tended him with rude surgery, until the water upon his brow and the wind upon his face had coaxed back the life into his battered frame. He breathed with heavy gasps, and some tinge of blood crept hack into his cheeks, but still he lay unconscious of the roar of the crowd and of that great struggle which his comrades were now waging once again.\n\nThe English had lain for a space bleeding and breathless, in no better case than their rivals, save that they were still twenty-nine in number. But of this muster there were not nine who were hale men, and some were so weak from loss of blood that they could scarce keep standing. Yet, when the signal was at last given to reengage there was not a man upon either side who did not totter to his feet and stagger forward toward his enemies.\n\nBut the opening of this second phase of the combat brought one great misfortune and discouragement to the English. Bambro' like the others, had undone his visor, but with his mind full of many cares he had neglected to make it fast again. There was an opening an inch broad betwixt it and the beaver. As the two lines met the left-handed Breton squire, Alain de Karanais, caught sight of Bambro's face, and in an instant thrust his short spear through the opening. The English leader gave a cry of pain and fell on his knees, but staggered to his feet again, too weak to raise his shield. As he stood exposed the Breton knight, Geoffrey Dubois the Strong, struck him such a blow with his ax that he beat in the whole breastplate with the breast behind it. Bambro' fell dead upon the ground and for a few minutes a fierce fight raged round his body.\n\nThen the English drew back, sullen and dogged, bearing Bambro' with them, and the Bretons, breathing hard, gathered again in their own quarter. At the same instant the three prisoners picked up such weapons as were scattered upon the grass and ran over to join their own party.\n\n\"Nay, nay!\" cried Knolles, raising his visor and advancing. \"This may not be. You have been held to mercy when we might have slain you, and by the Virgin I will hold you dishonored, all three, if you stand not back.\"\n\n\"Say not so, Robert Knolles,\" Evan Cheruel answered. \"Never yet has the word dishonor been breathed with my name, but I should count myself faineant if I did not fight beside my comrades when chance has made it right and proper that I should do so.\"\n\n\"By Saint Cadoc! he speaks truly,\" croaked Beaumanoir, advancing in front of his men. \"You are well aware, Robert, that it is the law of war and the usage of chivalry that if the knight to whom you have surrendered is himself slain the prisoners thereby become released.\"\n\nThere was no answer to this and Knolles, weary and spent, returned to his comrades. \"I would that we had slain them,\" said he. \"We have lost our leader and they have gained three men by the same stroke.\"\n\n\"If any more lay down their arms it is my order that you slay them forthwith,\" said Croquart, whose bent sword and bloody armor showed how manfully he had borne himself in the fray. \"And now, comrades, do not be heavy-hearted because we have lost our leader. Indeed, his rhymes of Merlin have availed him little. By the three kings of Almain! I can teach you what is better than an old woman's prophecies, and that is that you should keep your shoulders together and your shields so close that none can break between them. Then you will know what is on either side of you, and you can fix your eyes upon the front. Also, if any be so weak or wounded that he must sink his hands his comrades on right and left can bear him up. Now advance all together in God's name, for the battle is still ours if we bear ourselves like men.\"\n\nIn a solid line the English advanced, while the Bretons ran forward as before to meet them. The swiftest of these was a certain Squire, Geoffrey Poulart, who bore a helmet which was fashioned as a cock's head, with high comb above, and long pointed beak in front pierced with the breathing-holes. He thrust with his sword at Calverly, but Belford who was the next in the line raised his giant club and struck him a crushing blow from the side. He staggered, and then pushing forth from the crowd, he ran round and round in circles as one whose brain is stricken, the blood dripping from the holes of his brazen beak. So for a long time he ran, the crowd laughing and cock-crowing at the sight, until at last he stumbled and fell stone-dead upon his face. But the fighters had seen nothing of his fate, for desperate and unceasing was the rush of the Bretons and the steady advance of the English line.\n\nFor a time it seemed as if nothing would break it, but gap-toothed Beaumanoir was a general as well as a warrior. Whilst his weary, bleeding, hard-breathing men still flung themselves upon the front of the line, he himself with Raguenel, Tentiniac, Alain de Karanais, and Dubois rushed round the flank and attacked the English with fury from behind. There was a long and desperate melee until once more the heralds, seeing the combatants stand gasping and unable to strike a blow, rode in and called yet another interval of truce.\n\nBut in those few minutes whilst they had been assaulted upon both sides, the losses of the English party had been heavy. The Anglo-Breton D'Ardaine had fallen before Beaumanoir's sword, but not before he had cut deeply into his enemy's shoulder. Sir Thomas Walton, Richard of Ireland one of the Squires, and Hulbitee the big peasant had all fallen before the mace of the dwarf Raguenel or the swords of his companions. Some twenty men were still left standing upon either side, but all were in the last state of exhaustion, gasping, reeling, hardly capable of striking a blow.\n\nIt was strange to see them as they staggered with many a lurch and stumble toward each other once again, for they moved like drunken men, and the scales of their neck-armor and joints were as red as fishes' gills when they raised them They left foul wet footprints behind them on the green grass as they moved forward once more to their endless contest.\n\nBeaumanoir, faint with the drain of his blood and with a tongue of leather, paused as he advanced. \"I am fainting, comrades,\" he cried. \"I must drink.\"\n\n\"Drink your own blood, Beaumanoir!\" cried Dubois, and the weary men all croaked together in dreadful laughter.\n\nBut now the English had learned from experience, and under the guidance of Croquart they fought no longer in a straight line, but in one so bent that at last it became a circle. As the Bretons still pushed and staggered against it they thrust it back on every side, until they had turned it into the most dangerous formation of all, a solid block of men, their faces turned outward, their weapons bristling forth to meet every attack. Thus the English stood, and no assault could move them. They could lean against each other back to back while they waited and allowed their foemen to tire themselves out. Again and again the gallant Bretons tried to make a way through. Again and again they were beaten back by a shower of blows.\n\nBeaumanoir, his head giddy with fatigue, opened his helmet and gazed in despair at this terrible, unbreakable circle. Only too clearly he could see the inevitable result. His men were wearing themselves out. Already many of them could scarce stir hand or foot, and might be dead for any aid which they could give him in winning the fight. Soon all would be in the same plight. Then these cursed English would break their circle to swarm over his helpless men and to strike them down. Do what he might, he could see no way by which such an end might be prevented. He cast his eyes round in his agony, and there was one of his Bretons slinking away to the side of the lists. He could scarce credit his senses when he saw by the scarlet and silver that the deserter was his own well-tried squire, William of Montaubon.\n\n\"William! William!\" he cried. \"Surely you would not leave me?\"\n\nBut the other's helmet was closed and he could hear nothing. Beaumanoir saw that he was staggering away as swiftly as he could. With a cry of bitter despair, he drew into a knot as many of his braves as could still move, and together they made a last rush upon the English spears. This time he was firmly resolved, deep in his gallant soul, that he would come no foot back, but would find his death there amongst his foemen or carve a path into the heart of their ranks. The fire in his breast spread from man to man of his followers, and amid the crashing of blows they still locked themselves against the English shields and drove hard for an opening in their ranks.\n\nBut all was vain! Beaumanoir's head reeled. His senses were leaving him. In another minute he and his men would have been stretched senseless before this terrible circle of steel, when suddenly the whole array fell in pieces before his eyes, his enemies Croquart, Knolles, Calverly, Belford, all were stretched upon the ground together, their weapons dashed from their hands and their bodies too exhausted to rise. The surviving Bretons had but strength to fall upon them dagger in hands, and to wring from them their surrender with the sharp point stabbing through their visors. Then victors and vanquished lay groaning and panting in one helpless and blood-smeared heap.\n\nTo Beaumanoir's simple mind it had seemed that at the supreme moment the Saints of Brittany had risen at their country's call. Already, as he lay gasping, his heart was pouring forth its thanks to his patron Saint Cadoc. But the spectators had seen clearly enough the earthly cause of this sudden victory, and a hurricane of applause from one side, with a storm of hooting from the other showed how different was the emotion which it raised in minds which sympathized with the victors or the vanquished.\n\nWilliam of Montaubon, the cunning squire, had made his way across to the spot where the steeds were tethered, and had mounted his own great roussin. At first it was thought that he was about to ride from the field, but the howl of execration from the Breton peasants changed suddenly to a yell of applause and delight as he turned the beast's head for the English circle and thrust his long prick spurs into its side. Those who faced him saw this sudden and unexpected appearance. Time was when both horse and rider must have winced away from the shower of their blows. But now they were in no state to meet such a rush. They could scarce raise their arms. Their blows were too feeble to hurt this mighty creature. In a moment it had plunged through the ranks, and seven of them were on the grass. It turned and rushed through them again, leaving five others helpless beneath its hoofs. No need to do more! Already Beaumanoir and his companions were inside the circle, the prostrate men were helpless, and Josselin had won.\n\nThat night a train of crestfallen archers, bearing many a prostrate figure, marched sadly into Ploermel Castle. Behind them rode ten men, all weary, all wounded, and all with burning hearts against William of Montaubon for the foul trick that he had served them.\n\nBut over at Josselin, yellow gorse-blossoms in their helmets, the victors were borne in on the shoulders of a shouting mob, amid the fanfare of trumpets and the beating of drums. Such was the combat of the Midway Oak, where brave men met brave men, and such honor was gained that from that day he who had fought in the Battle of the Thirty was ever given the highest place and the post of honor, nor was it easy for any man to pretend to have been there, for it has been said by that great chronicler who knew them all, that not one on either side failed to carry to his grave the marks of that stern encounter." + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL WAS CALLED TO HIS MASTER", + "text": "\"My sweet ladye,\" wrote Nigel in a script which it would take the eyes of love to read, \"there hath been a most noble meeting in the fourth sennight of Lent betwixt some of our own people and sundry most worthy persons of this country, which ended, by the grace of our Lady, in so fine a joust that no man living can call to mind so fair an occasion. Much honor was gained by the Sieurde Beaumanoir and also by an Almain named Croquart, with whom I hope to have some speech when I am hale again, for he is a most excellent person and very ready to advance himself or to relieve another from a vow. For myself I had hoped, with Godde's help, to venture that third small deed which might set me free to haste to your sweet side, but things have gone awry with me, and I early met with such scathe and was of so small comfort to my friends that my heart is heavy within me, and in sooth I feel that I have lost honor rather than gained it. Here I have lain since the Feast of the Virgin, and here I am like still to be, for I can move no limb, save only my hand; but grieve not, sweet lady, for Saint Catharine hath been our friend since in so short a time I had two such ventures as the Red Ferret and the intaking of the Reaver's fortalice. It needs but one more deed, and sickerly when I am hale once more it will not be long ere I seek it out. Till then, if my eyes may not rest upon you, my heart at least is ever at thy feet.\"\n\nSo he wrote from his sick-room in the Castle of Ploermel late in the summer, but yet another summer had come before his crushed head had mended and his wasted limbs had gained their strength once more. With despair he heard of the breaking of the truce, and of the fight at Mauron in which Sir Robert Knolles and Sir Walter Bentley crushed the rising power of Brittany\u2014a fight in which many of the thirty champions of Josselin met their end. Then, when with renewed strength and high hopes in his heart he went forth to search for the famous Croquart who proclaimed himself ever ready night or day to meet any man with any weapon, it was only to find that in trying the paces of his new horse the German had been cast into a ditch and had broken his neck. In the same ditch perished Nigel's last chance of soon accomplishing that deed which should free him from his vow.\n\nThere was truce once more over all Christendom, and mankind was sated with war, so that only in far-off Prussia, where the Teutonic knights waged ceaseless battle with the Lithuanian heathen, could he hope to find his heart's desire. But money and high knightly fame were needed ere a man could go upon the northern crusade, and ten years were yet to pass ere Nigel should look from the battlements of Marienberg on the waters of the Frische Haff, or should endure the torture of the hot plate when bound to the Holy Woden stone of Memel. Meanwhile, he chafed his burning soul out through the long seasons of garrison life in Brittany, broken only by one visit to the chateau of the father of Raoul, when he carried to the Lord of Grosbois the news of how his son had fallen like a gallant gentleman under the gateway of La Brohiniere.\n\nAnd then, then at last, when all hope was well-nigh dead in his heart, there came one glorious July morning which brought a horseman bearing a letter to the Castle of Vannes, of which Nigel now was seneschal. It contained but few words, short and clear as the call of a war-trumpet. It was Chandos who wrote. He needed his Squire at his side, for his pennon was in the breeze once more. He was at Bordeaux. The Prince was starting at once for Bergerac, whence he would make a great raid into France. It would not end without a battle. They had sent word of their coming, and the good French King had promised to be at great pains to receive them. Let Nigel hasten at once. If the army had left, then let him follow after with all speed. Chandos had three other squires, but would very gladly see his fourth once again, for he had heard much of him since he parted, and nothing which he might not have expected to hear of his father's son. Such was the letter which made the summer sun shine brighter and the blue sky seem of a still fairer blue upon that happy morning in Vannes.\n\nIt is a weary way from Vannes to Bordeaux. Coastwise ships are hard to find, and winds blow north when all brave hearts would fain be speeding south. A full month has passed from the day when Nigel received his letter before he stood upon the quay-side of the Garonne amid the stacked barrels of Gascon wine and helped to lead Pommers down the gang-planks. Not Aylward himself had a worse opinion of the sea than the great yellow horse, and he whinnied with joy as he thrust his muzzle into his master's outstretched hand, and stamped his ringing hoofs upon the good firm cobblestones. Beside him, slapping his tawny shoulder in encouragement, was the lean spare form of Back Simon who had remained ever under Nigel's pennon.\n\nBut Aylward, where was he? Alas! two years before he and the whole of Knolles' company of archers had been drafted away on the King's service to Guienne, and since he could not write the Squire knew not whether he was alive or dead. Simon, indeed, had thrice heard of him from wandering archers, each time that he was alive and well and newly married, but as the wife in one case was a fair maid, and in another a dark, while in the third she was a French widow, it was hard to know the truth.\n\nAlready the army had been gone a month, but news of it came daily to the town, and such news as all men could read, for through the landward gates there rolled one constant stream of wagons, pouring down the Libourne Road, and bearing the booty of Southern France. The town was full of foot-soldiers, for none but mounted men had been taken by the Prince. With sad faces and longing eyes they watched the passing of the train of plunder-laden carts, piled high with rich furniture, silks, velvets, tapestries, carvings, and precious metals, which had been the pride of many a lordly home in fair Auvergne or the wealthy Bourbonnais.\n\nLet no man think that in these wars England alone was face to face with France alone. There is glory and to spare without trifling with the truth. Two Provinces in France, both rich and warlike, had become English through a royal marriage, and these, Guienne and Gascony, furnished many of the most valiant soldiers under the island flag. So poor a country as England could not afford to keep a great force overseas, and so must needs have lost the war with France through want of power to uphold the struggle. The feudal system enabled an army to be drawn rapidly together with small expense, but at the end of a few weeks it dispersed again as swiftly, and only by a well-filled money-chest could it be held together. There was no such chest in England, and the King was forever at his wits' end how to keep his men in the field.\n\nBut Guienne and Gascony were full of knights and squires who were always ready to assemble from their isolated castles for a raid into France, and these with the addition of those English cavaliers who fought for honor, and a few thousand of the formidable archers, hired for fourpence a day, made an army with which a short campaign could be carried on. Such were the materials of the Prince's force, some eight thousand strong, who were now riding in a great circle through Southern France, leaving a broad wale of blackened and ruined country behind them.\n\nBut France, even with her southwestern corner in English hands, was still a very warlike power, far richer and more populous than her rival. Single Provinces were so great that they were stronger than many a kingdom. Normandy in the north, Burgundy in the east, Brittany in the west and Languedoc in the south were each capable of fitting out a great army of their own. Therefore the brave and spirited John, watching from Paris this insolent raid into his dominions, sent messengers in hot haste to all these great feudatories as well as to Lorraine, Picardy, Auvergne, Hainault, Vermandois, Champagne, and to the German mercenaries over his eastern border, bidding all of them to ride hard, with bloody spur, day and night, until they should gather to a head at Chartres.\n\nThere a great army had assembled early in September, whilst the Prince, all unconscious of its presence sacked towns and besieged castles from Bourges to Issodun, passing Romorautin, and so onward to Vierzon and to Tours. From week to week there were merry skirmishes at barriers, brisk assaults of fortresses in which much honor was won, knightly meetings with detached parties of Frenchmen and occasional spear-runnings where noble champions deigned to venture their persons. Houses, too, were to be plundered, while wine and women were in plenty. Never had either knights or archers had so pleasant and profitable an excursion, so that it was with high heart and much hope of pleasant days at Bordeaux with their pockets full of money that the army turned south from the Loire and began to retrace its steps to the seaboard city.\n\nBut now its pleasant and martial promenade changed suddenly to very serious work of war. As the Prince moved south he found that all, supplies had been cleared away from in front of him and that there was neither fodder for the horses nor food for the men. Two hundred wagons laden with spoil rolled at the head of the army, but the starving soldiers would soon have gladly changed it all for as many loads of bread and of meat. The light troops of the French had preceded then and burned or destroyed everything that could be of use. Now also for the first time the Prince and his men became aware that a great army was moving upon the eastern side of them, streaming southward in the hope of cutting off their retreat to the sea. The sky glowed with their fires at night, and the autumn sun twinkled and gleamed from one end of the horizon to the other upon the steel caps and flashing weapons of a mighty host.\n\nAnxious to secure his plunder, and conscious that the levies of France were far superior in number to his own force, the Prince redoubled his attempts to escape; but his horses were exhausted and his starving men were hardly to be kept in order. A few more days would unfit them for battle. Therefore, when he found near the village of Maupertuis a position in which a small force might have a chance to hold its own, he gave up the attempt to outmarch his pursuers, and he turned at bay, like a hunted boar, all tusks and eyes of flame.\n\nWhilst these high events had been in progress, Nigel with Black Simon and four other men-at-arms from Bordeaux, was hastening northward to join the army. As far as Bergerac they were in a friendly land, but thence onward they rode over a blackened landscape with many a roofless house, its two bare gable-ends sticking upward\u2014a \"Knolles' miter\" as it was afterward called when Sir Robert worked his stern will upon the country. For three days they rode northward, seeing many small parties of French in all directions, but too eager to reach the army to ease their march in the search of adventures.\n\nThen at last after passing Lusignan they began to come in touch with English foragers, mounted bowmen for the most part, who were endeavoring to collect supplies either for the army or for themselves. From them Nigel learned that the Prince, with Chandos ever at his side, was hastening south and might be met within a short day's march. As he still advanced these English stragglers became more and more numerous, until at last he overtook a considerable column of archers moving in the same direction as his own party. These were men whose horses had failed them and who had therefore been left behind on the advance, but were now hastening to be in time for the impending battle. A crowd of peasant girls accompanied them upon their march, and a whole train of laden mules were led beside them.\n\nNigel and his little troop of men-at-arms were riding past the archers when Black Simon with a sudden exclamation touched his leader upon the arm.\n\n\"See yonder, fair sir,\" he cried, with gleaming eyes, \"there where the wastrel walks with the great fardel upon his back! Who is he who marches behind him?\"\n\nNigel looked, and was aware of a stunted peasant who bore upon his rounded back an enormous bundle very much larger than himself. Behind him walked a burly broad-shouldered archer, whose stained jerkin and battered headpiece gave token of long and hard service. His bow was slung over his shoulder, and his arms were round the waists of two buxom Frenchwomen, who tripped along beside him with much laughter and many saucy answers flung back over their shoulders to a score of admirers behind them.\n\n\"Aylward!\" cried Nigel, spurring forward.\n\nThe archer turned his bronzed face, stared for an instant with wild eyes, and then, dropping his two ladies, who were instantly carried off by his comrades, he rushed to seize the hand which his young master held down to him. \"Now, by my hilt, Squire Nigel, this is the fairest sight of my lifetime!\" he cried. \"And you, old leather-face! Nay, Simon, I would put my arms round your dried herring of a body, if I could but reach you. Here is Pommers too, and I read in his eye that he knows me well and is as ready to put his teeth into me as when he stood in my father's stall.\"\n\nIt was like a whiff of the heather-perfumed breezes of Hankley to see his homely face once more. Nigel laughed with sheer joy as he looked at him.\n\n\"It was an ill day when the King's service called you from my side,\" said he, \"and by Saint Paul! I am right glad to set eyes upon you once more! I see well that you are in no wise altered, but the same Aylward that I have ever known. But who is this varlet with the great bundle who waits upon your movements?\"\n\n\"It is no less than a feather-bed, fair sir, which he bears upon his back, for I would fain bring it to Tilford, and yet it is overlarge for me when I take my place with my fellows in the ranks. But indeed this war has been a most excellent one, and I have already sent half a wagonload of my gear back to Bordeaux to await my homecoming. Yet I have my fears when I think of all the rascal foot-archers who are waiting there, for some folk have no grace or honesty in their souls, and cannot keep their hands from that which belongs to another. But if I may throw my leg over yonder spare horse I will come on with you, fair sir, for indeed it would be joy to my heart to know that I was riding under your banner once again.\"\n\nSo Aylward, having given instructions to the bearer of his feather-bed, rode away in spite of shrill protests from his French companions, who speedily consoled themselves with those of his comrades who seemed to have most to give. Nigel's party was soon clear of the column of archers and riding hard in the direction of the Prince's army. They passed by a narrow and winding track, through the great wood of Nouaille, and found before them a marshy valley down which ran a sluggish stream. Along its farther bank hundreds of horses were being watered, and beyond was a dense block of wagons. Through these the comrades passed, and then topped a small mound from which the whole strange scene lay spread before them.\n\nDown the valley the slow stream meandered with marshy meadows on either side. A mile or two lower a huge drove of horses were to be seen assembled upon the bank. They were the steeds of the French cavalry, and the blue haze of a hundred fires showed where King John's men were camping. In front of the mound upon which they stood the English line was drawn, but there were few fires, for indeed, save their horses, there was little for them to cook. Their right rested upon the river, and their array stretched across a mile of ground until the left was in touch with a tangled forest which guarded it from flank attack. In front was a long thick hedge and much broken ground, with a single deeply rutted country road cutting through it in the middle. Under the hedge and along the Whole front of the position lay swarms of archers upon the grass, the greater number slumbering peacefully with sprawling limbs in the warm rays of the September sun. Behind were the quarters of the various knights, and from end to end flew the banners and pennons marked with the devices of the chivalry of England and Guienne.\n\nWith a glow in his heart Nigel saw those badges of famous captains and leaders and knew that now at last he also might show his coat-armor in such noble company. There was the flag of Jean Grailly, the Captal de Buch, five silver shells on a black cross, which marked the presence of the most famous soldier of Gascony, while beside it waved the red lion of the noble Knight of Hainault, Sir Eustace d'Ambreticourt. These two coats Nigel knew, as did every warrior in Europe, but a dense grove of pennoned lances surrounded them, bearing charges which were strange to him, from which he understood that these belonged to the Guienne division of the army. Farther down the line the famous English ensigns floated on the wind, the scarlet and gold of Warwick, the silver star of Oxford, the golden cross of Suffolk, the blue and gold of Willoughby, and the gold-fretted scarlet of Audley. In the very center of them, all was one which caused all others to pass from his mind, for close to the royal banner of England, crossed with the label of the Prince, there waved the war-worn flag with the red wedge upon the golden field which marked the quarters of the noble Chandos.\n\nAt the sight Nigel set spurs to his horse, and a few minutes later had reached the spot. Chandos, gaunt from hunger and want of sleep, but with the old fire lurking in his eye, was standing by the Prince's tent, gazing down at what could be seen of the French array, and heavy with thought. Nigel sprang from his horse and was within touch of his master when the silken hanging of the royal tent was torn violently aside and Edward rushed out.\n\nHe was without his armor and clad in a sober suit of black, but the high dignity of his bearing and the imperious anger which flushed his face proclaimed the leader and the Prince. At his heels was a little white-haired ecclesiastic in a flowing gown of scarlet sendal, expostulating and arguing in a torrent of words.\n\n\"Not another word, my Lord Cardinal,\" cried the angry prince. \"I have listened to you overlong, and by God's dignity! that which you say is neither good nor fair in my ears. Hark you, John, I would have your counsel. What think you is the message which my Lord Cardinal of Perigord has carried from the King of France? He says that of his clemency he will let my army pass back to Bordeaux if we will restore to him all that we have taken, remit all ransoms, and surrender my own person with that of a hundred nobles of England and Guienne to be held as prisoners. What think you, John?\"\n\nChandos smiled. \"Things are not done in that fashion,\" said he.\n\n\"But my Lord Chandos,\" cried the Cardinal, \"I have made it clear to the Prince that indeed it is a scandal to all Christendom and a cause of mocking to the heathen, that two great sons of the Church should turn their swords thus upon each other.\"\n\n\"Then bid the King of France keep clear of us,\" said the Prince.\n\n\"Fair son, you are aware that you are in the heart of his country and that it standeth not aright that he should suffer you to go forth as you came. You have but a small army, three thousand bowmen and five thousand men-at-arms at the most, who seem in evil case for want of food and rest. The King has thirty thousand men at his back, of which twenty thousand are expert men-at-arms. It is fitting therefore that you make such terms as you may, lest worse befall.\"\n\n\"Give my greetings to the King of France and tell him that England will never pay ransom for me. But it seems to me, my Lord Cardinal, that you have our numbers and condition very ready upon your tongue, and I would fain know how the eye of a Churchman can read a line of battle so easily. I have seen that these knights of your household have walked freely to and fro within our camp, and I much fear that when I welcomed you as envoys I have in truth given my protection to spies. How say you, my Lord Cardinal?\"\n\n\"Fair Prince, I know not how you can find it in your heart or conscience to say such evil words.\"\n\n\"There is this red-bearded nephew of thine, Robert de Duras. See where he stands yonder, counting and prying. Hark hither, young sir! I have been saying to your uncle the Cardinal that it is in my mind that you and your comrades have carried news of our dispositions to the French King. How say you?\"\n\nThe knight turned pale and sank his eyes. \"My lord,\" he murmured, \"it may be that I have answered some questions.\"\n\n\"And how will such answers accord with your honor, seeing that we have trusted you since you came in the train of the Cardinal?\"\n\n\"My lord, it is true that I am in the train of the Cardinal, and yet I am liege man of King John and a knight of France, so I pray you to assuage your wrath against me.\"\n\nThe Prince ground his teeth and his piercing eyes blazed upon the youth. \"By my father's soul! I can scarce forbear to strike you to the earth! But this I promise you, that if you show that sign of the Red Griffin in the field and if you be taken alive in to-morrow's battle, your head shall most assuredly be shorn from your shoulders.\"\n\n\"Fair son, indeed you speak wildly,\" cried the Cardinal. \"I pledge you my word that neither my nephew Robert nor any of my train will take part in the battle. And now I leave you, sire, and may God assoil your soul, for indeed in all this world no men stand in greater peril than you and those who are around you, and I rede you that you spend the night in such ghostly exercises as may best prepare you for that which may befall.\" So saying the Cardinal bowed, and with his household walking behind him set off for the spot where they had left their' horses, whence they rode to the neighboring Abbey.\n\nThe angry Prince turned upon his heel and entered his tent once more, whilst Chandos, glancing round, held out a warm welcoming hand to Nigel.\n\n\"I have heard much of your noble deeds,\" said he. \"Already your name rises as a squire errant. I stood no higher, nor so high, at your age.\"\n\nNigel flushed with pride and pleasure. \"Indeed, my dear lord, it is very little that I have done. But now that I am back at your side I hope that in truth I shall learn to bear myself in worthy fashion, for where else should I win honor if it be not under your banner.\"\n\n\"Truly, Nigel, you have come at a very good time for advancement. I cannot see how we can leave this spot without a great battle which will live in men's minds forever. In all our fights in France I cannot call to mind any in which they have been so strong or we so weak as now, so that there will be the more honor to be gained. I would that we had two thousand more archers. But I doubt not that we shall give them much trouble ere they drive us out from amidst these hedges. Have you seen the French?\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir, I have but this moment arrived.\"\n\n\"I was about to ride forth myself to coast their army and observe their countenance, so come with me ere the night fall, and we shall see what we can of their order and dispositions.\"\n\nThere was a truce betwixt the two forces for the day, on account of the ill-advised and useless interposition of the Cardinal of Perigord, Hence when Chandos and Nigel had pushed their horses through the long hedge which fronted the position they found that many small parties of the knights of either army were riding up and down on the plain outside. The greater number of these groups were French, since it was very necessary for them to know as much as possible of the English defenses; and many of their scouts had ridden up to within a hundred yards of the hedge, where they were sternly ordered back by the pickets of archers on guard.\n\nThrough these scattered knots of horsemen Chandos rode, and as many of them were old antagonists it was \"Ha, John!\" on the one side, and \"Ha, Raoul!\" \"Ha, Nicholas!\" \"Ha, Guichard!\" upon the other, as they brushed past them. Only one cavalier greeted them amiss, a large, red-faced man, the Lord Clermont, who by some strange chance bore upon his surcoat a blue virgin standing amid golden sunbeams, which was the very device which Chandos had donned for the day. The fiery Frenchman dashed across their path and drew his steed back on to its haunches.\n\n\"How long is it, my Lord Chandos,\" said he hotly, \"since you have taken it upon yourself to wear my arms?\"\n\nChandos smiled. \"It is surely you who have mine,\" said he, \"since this surcoat was worked for thee by the good nuns of Windsor a long year ago.\"\n\n\"If it were not for the truce,\" said Clermont, \"I would soon show you that you have no right to wear it.\"\n\n\"Look for it then in the battle to-morrow, and I also will look for yours,\" Chandos answered. \"There we can very honorably settle the matter.\"\n\nBut the Frenchman was choleric and hard to appease. \"You English can invent nothing,\" said he, \"and you take for your own whatever you see handsome belonging to others.\" So, grumbling and fuming, he rode upon his way, while Chandos, laughing gayly, spurred onward across the plain.\n\nThe immediate front of the English line was shrouded with scattered trees and bushes which hid the enemy; but when they had cleared these a fair view of the great French army lay before them. In the center of the huge camp was a long and high pavilion of red silk, with the silver lilies of the King at one end of it, and the golden oriflamme, the battle-flag of old France, at the other. Like the reeds of a pool from side to side of the broad array, and dwindling away as far as their eyes could see, were the banners and pennons of high barons and famous knights, but above them all flew the ducal standards which showed that the feudal muster of all the warlike provinces of France was in the field before them.\n\nWith a kindling eye Chandos looked across at the proud ensigns of Normandy, or Burgundy, of Auvergne, of Champagne, of Vermandois, and of Berry, flaunting and gleaming in the rays of the sinking sun. Riding slowly down the line he marked with attentive gaze the camp of the crossbowmen, the muster of the German mercenaries, the numbers of the foot-soldiers, the arms of every proud vassal or vavasor which might give some guide as to the power of each division. From wing to wing and round the flanks he went, keeping ever within crossbow-shot of the army, and then at last having noted all things in his mind he turned his horse's head and rode slowly back, heavy with thought, to the English lines." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE KING OF FRANCE HELD COUNSEL AT MAUPERTUIS", + "text": "The morning of Sunday, the nineteenth of September, in the year of our Lord 1356, was cold and fine. A haze which rose from the marshy valley of Muisson covered both camps and set the starving Englishmen shivering, but it cleared slowly away as the sun rose. In the red silken pavilion of the French King\u2014the same which had been viewed by Nigel and Chandos the evening before\u2014a solemn mass was held by the Bishop of Chalons, who prayed for those who were about to die, with little thought in his mind that his own last hour was so near at hand. Then, when communion had been taken by the King and his four young sons the altar was cleared away, and a great red-covered table placed lengthwise down the tent, round which John might assemble his council and determine how best he should proceed. With the silken roof, rich tapestries of Arras round the walls and Eastern rugs beneath the feet, his palace could furnish no fairer chamber.\n\nKing John, who sat upon the canopied dais at the upper end, was now in the sixth year of his reign and the thirty-sixth of his life. He was a short burly man, ruddy-faced and deep-chested, with dark kindly eyes and a most noble bearing. It did not need the blue cloak sewed with silver lilies to mark him as the King. Though his reign had been short, his fame was already widespread over all Europe as a kindly gentleman and a fearless soldier\u2014a fit leader for a chivalrous nation. His elder son, the Duke of Normandy, still hardly more than a boy, stood beside him, his hand upon the King's shoulder, and John half turned from time to time to fondle him. On the right, at the same high dais, was the King's younger brother, the Duke of Orleans, a pale heavy-featured man, with a languid manner and intolerant eyes. On the left was the Duke of Bourbon, sad-faced and absorbed, with that gentle melancholy in his eyes and bearing which comes often with the premonition of death. All these were in their armor, save only for their helmets, which lay upon the board before them.\n\nBelow, grouped around the long red table, was an assembly of the most famous warriors in Europe. At the end nearest the King was the veteran soldier the Duke of Athens, son of a banished father, and now High Constable of France. On one side of him sat the red-faced and choleric Lord Clermont, with the same blue Virgin in golden rays upon his surcoat which had caused his quarrel with Chandos the night before. On the other was a noble-featured grizzly-haired soldier, Arnold d'Andreghen, who shared with Clermont the honor of being Marshal of France. Next to them sat Lord James of Bourbon, a brave warrior who was afterwards slain by the White Company at Brignais, and beside him a little group of German noblemen, including the Earl of Salzburg and the Earl of Nassau, who had ridden over the frontier with their formidable mercenaries at the bidding of the French King. The ridged armor and the hanging nasals of their bassinets were enough in themselves to tell every soldier that they were from beyond the Rhine. At the other side of the table were a line of proud and warlike Lords, Fiennes, Chatillon, Nesle, de Landas, de Beaujeu, with the fierce knight errant de Chargny, he who had planned the surprise of Calais, and Eustace de Ribeaumont, who had upon the same occasion won the prize of valor from the hands of Edward of England. Such were the chiefs to whom the King now turned for assistance and advice.\n\n\"You have already heard, my friends,\" said he, \"that the Prince of Wales has made no answer to the proposal which we sent by the Lord Cardinal of Perigord. Certes this is as it should be, and though I have obeyed the call of Holy Church I had no fears that so excellent a Prince as Edward of England would refuse to meet us in battle. I am now of opinion that we should fall upon them at once, lest perchance the Cardinal's cross should again come betwixt our swords and our enemies.\"\n\nA buzz of joyful assent arose from the meeting, and even from the attendant men-at-arms who guarded the door. When it had died away the Duke of Orleans rose in his place beside the King.\n\n\"Sire,\" said he, \"you speak as we would have you do, and I for one am of opinion that the Cardinal of Perigord has been an ill friend of France, for why should we bargain for a part when we have but to hold out our hand in order to grasp the whole? What need is there for words? Let us spring to horse forthwith and ride over this handful of marauders who have dared to lay waste your fair dominions. If one of them go hence save as our prisoner we are the more to blame.\"\n\n\"By Saint Denis, brother!\" said the King, smiling, \"if words could slay you would have had them all upon their backs ere ever we left Chartres. You are new to war, but when you have had experience of a stricken field or two you would know that things must be done with forethought and in order or they may go awry. In our father's time we sprang to horse and spurred upon these English at Crecy and elsewhere as you advise, but we had little profit from it, and now we are grown wiser. How say you, Sieur de Ribeaumont? You have coasted their lines and observed their countenance. Would you ride down upon them, as my brother has advised, or how would you order the matter?\"\n\nDe Ribeaumont, a tall dark-eyed handsome man, paused ere he answered. \"Sire,\" he said at last, \"I have indeed ridden along their front and down their flanks, in company with Lord Landas and Lord de Beaujeu, who are here at your council to witness to what I say. Indeed, sire, it is in my mind that though the English are few in number yet they are in such a position amongst these hedges and vines that you would be well-advised if you were to leave them alone, for they have no food and must retreat, so that you will be able to follow them and to fight them to better advantage.\"\n\nA murmur of disapproval rose from the company, and the Lord Clermont, Marshal of the army, sprang to his feet, his face red with anger.\n\n\"Eustace; Eustace,\" said he, \"I bear in mind the days when you were of great heart and high enterprise, but since King Edward gave you yonder chaplet of pearls you have ever been backward against the English!\"\n\n\"My Lord Clermont,\" said de Ribeaumont sternly, \"it is not for me to brawl at the King's council and in the face of the enemy, but we will go further into this matter at some other time. Meanwhile, the King has asked me for my advice and I have given it as best I might.\"\n\n\"It had been better for your honor, Sir Eustace, had you held your peace,\" said the Duke of Orleans. \"Shall we let them slip from our fingers when we have them here and are fourfold their number? I know not where we should dwell afterwards, for I am very sure that we should be ashamed to ride back to Paris, or to look our ladies in the eyes again.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Eustace, you have done well to say what is in your mind,\" said the King; \"but I have already said that we shall join battle this morning, so that there is no room here for further talk. But I would fain have heard from you how it would be wisest and best that we attack them?\"\n\n\"I will advise you, sire, to the best of my power. Upon their right is a river with marshes around it, and upon their left a great wood, so that we can advance only upon the center. Along their front is a thick hedge, and behind it I saw the green jerkins of their archers, as thick as the sedges by the river. It is broken by one road where only four horsemen could ride abreast, which leads through the position. It is clear then that if we are to drive them back we must cross the great hedge, and I am very sure that the horses will not face it with such a storm of arrows beating from behind it. Therefore, it is my council that we fight upon foot, as the English did at Crecy, for indeed we may find that our horses will be more hindrance than help to us this day.\"\n\n\"The same thought was in my own mind, sire,\" said Arnold d'Andreghen the veteran Marshal. \"At Crecy the bravest had to turn their backs, for what can a man do with a horse which is mad with pain and fear? If we advance upon foot we are our own masters, and if we stop the shame is ours.\"\n\n\"The counsel is good,\" said the Duke of Athens, turning his shrewd wizened face to the King; \"but one thing only I would add to it. The strength of these people lies in their archers, and if we could throw them into disorder, were it only for a short time, we should win the hedge; else they will shoot so strongly that we must lose many men before we reach it, for indeed we have learned that no armor will keep out their shafts when they are close.\"\n\n\"Your words, fair sir, are both good and wise,\" said the King, \"but I pray you to tell us how you would throw these archers into disorder?\"\n\n\"I would choose three hundred horsemen, sire, the best and most forward in the army. With these I would ride up the narrow road, and so turn to right and left, falling upon the archers behind the hedge. It may be that the three hundred would suffer sorely, but what are they among so great a host, if a road may be cleared for their companions?\"\n\n\"I would say a word to that, sire,\" cried the German Count of Nassau, \"I have come here with my comrades to venture our persons in your quarrel; but we claim the right to fight in our own fashion, and we would count it dishonor to dismount from our steeds out of fear of the arrows of the English. Therefore, with your permission, we will ride to the front, as the Duke of Athens has advised, and so clear a path for the rest of you.\"\n\n\"This may not be!\" cried the Lord Clermont angrily. \"It would be strange indeed if Frenchmen could not be found to clear a path for the army of the King of France. One would think to hear you talk, my Lord Count, that your hardihood was greater than our own, but by our Lady of Rocamadour you will learn before nightfall that it is not so. It is for me, who am a Marshal of France; to lead these three hundred, since it is an honorable venture.\"\n\n\"And I claim the same right for the same reason,\" said Arnold of Andreghen.\n\nThe German Count struck the table with his mailed fist. \"Do what you like!\" said he. \"But this only I can promise you, that neither I nor any of my German riders will descend from our horses so long as they are able to carry us, for in our country it is only people of no consequence who fight upon their feet.\"\n\nThe Lord Clermont was leaning angrily forward with some hot reply when King John intervened. \"Enough, enough!\" he said. \"It is for you to give your opinions, and for me to tell you what you will do. Lord Clermont, and you, Arnold, you will choose three hundred of the bravest cavaliers in the army and you will endeavor to break these archers. As to you and your Germans, my Lord Nassau, you will remain upon horseback, since you desire it, and you will follow the Marshals and support them as best you may. The rest of the army will advance upon foot, in three other divisions as arranged: yours, Charles,\" and he patted his son, the Duke of Normandy, affectionately upon the hand; \"yours, Philip,\" he glanced at the Duke of Orleans; \"and the main battle which is my own. To you, Geoffrey de Chargny, I intrust the oriflamme this day. But who is this knight and what does he desire?\"\n\nA young knight, ruddy-bearded and tall, a red griffin upon his surcoat, had appeared in the opening of the tent. His flushed face and disheveled dress showed that he had come in haste. \"Sire,\" said he, \"I am Robert de Duras, of the household of the Cardinal de Perigord. I have told you yesterday all that I have learned of the English camp. This morning I was again admitted to it, and I have seen their wagons moving to the rear. Sire, they are in flight for Bordeaux.\"\n\n\"'Fore God, I knew it!\" cried the Duke of Orleans in a voice of fury. \"Whilst we have been talking they have slipped through our fingers. Did I not warn you?\"\n\n\"Be silent, Philip!\" said the King angrily. \"But you, sir, have you seen this with your own eyes?\"\n\n\"With my own eyes, sire, and I have ridden straight from their camp.\"\n\nKing John looked at him with a stern gaze. \"I know not how it accords with your honor to carry such tidings in such a fashion,\" said he; \"but we cannot choose but take advantage of it. Fear not, brother Philip, it is in my mind that you will see all that you would wish of the Englishmen before nightfall. Should we fall upon them whilst they cross the ford it will be to our advantage. Now, fair sirs, I pray you to hasten to your posts and to carry out all that we have agreed. Advance the oriflamme, Geoffrey, and do you marshal the divisions, Arnold. So may God and Saint Denis have us in their holy keeping this day!\"\n\nThe Prince of Wales stood upon that little knoll where Nigel had halted the day before. Beside him were Chandos, and a tall sunburned warrior of middle age, the Gascon Captal de Buch. The three men were all attentively watching the distant French lines, while behind them a column of wagons wound down to the ford of the Muisson.\n\nClose in the rear four knights in full armor with open visors sat their horses and conversed in undertones with each other. A glance at their shields would have given their names to any soldier, for they were all men of fame who had seen much warfare. At present they were awaiting their orders, for each of them commanded the whole or part of a division of the army. The youth upon the left, dark, slim and earnest, was William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, only twenty-eight years of age and yet a veteran of Crecy. How high he stood in reputation is shown by the fact that the command of the rear, the post of honor in a retreating army, had been given to him by the Prince. He was talking to a grizzled harsh-faced man, somewhat over middle age, with lion features and fierce light-blue eyes which gleamed as they watched the distant enemy. It was the famous Robert de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, who had fought without a break from Cadsand onward through the whole Continental War. The other tall silent soldier, with the silver star gleaming upon his surcoat, was John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, and he listened to the talk of Thomas Beauchamp, a burly, jovial, ruddy nobleman and a tried soldier, who leaned forward and tapped his mailed hand upon the other's steel-clad thigh. They were old battle-companions, of the same age and in the very prime of life, with equal fame and equal experience of the wars. Such was the group of famous English soldiers who sat their horses behind the Prince and waited for their orders.\n\n\"I would that you had laid hands upon him,\" said the Prince angrily, continuing his conversation with Chandos, \"and yet, perchance, it was wiser to play this trick and make them think that we were retreating.\"\n\n\"He has certainly carried the tidings,\" said Chandos, with a smile. \"No sooner had the wagons started than I saw him gallop down the edge of the wood.\"\n\n\"It was well thought of, John,\" the Prince remarked, \"for it would indeed be great comfort if we could turn their own spy against them. Unless they advance upon us, I know not how we can hold out another day, for there is not a loaf left in the army; and yet if we leave this position where shall we hope to find such another?\"\n\n\"They will stoop, fair sir, they will stoop to our lure. Even now Robert de Duras will be telling them that the wagons are on the move, and they will hasten to overtake us lest we pass the ford. But who is this, who rides so fast? Here perchance may be tidings.\"\n\nA horseman had spurred up to the knoll. He sprang from the saddle, and sank on one knee before the Prince.\n\n\"How now, my Lord Audley,\" said Edward. \"What would you have?\"\n\n\"Sir,\" said the knight, still kneeling with bowed head before his leader, \"I have a boon to ask of you.\"\n\n\"Nay, James, rise! Let me hear what I can do.\"\n\nThe famous knight errant, pattern of chivalry for all time; rose and turned his swarthy face and dark earnest eyes upon his master. \"Sir,\" said he, \"I have ever served most loyally my lord your father and yourself, and shall continue so to do so long as I have life. Dear sir, I must now acquaint you that formerly I made a vow if ever I should be in any battle under your command that I would be foremost or die in the attempt. I beg therefore that you will graciously permit me to honorably quit my place among the others, that I may post myself in such wise as to accomplish my vow.\"\n\nThe Prince smiled, for it was very sure that vow or no vow, permission or no permission, Lord James Audley would still be in the van. \"Go, James,\" said he, shaking his hand, \"and God grant that this day you may shine in valor above all knights. But hark, John, what is that?\"\n\nChandos cast up his fierce nose like the eagle which smells slaughter afar. \"Surely, sir, all is forming even as we had planned it.\"\n\nFrom far away there came a thunderous shout. Then another and yet another.\n\n\"See, they are moving!\" cried the Captal de Buch.\n\nAll morning they had watched the gleam of the armed squadrons who were drawn up in front of the French camp. Now whilst a great blare of trumpets was borne to their ears, the distant masses flickered and twinkled in the sunlight.\n\n\"Yes, yes, they are moving!\" cried the Prince.\n\n\"They are moving! They are moving!\" Down the line the murmur ran. And then with a sudden impulse the archers at the hedge sprang to their feet and the knights behind them waved their weapons in the air, while one tremendous shout of warlike joy carried their defiance to the approaching enemy. Then there fell such a silence that the pawing of the horses or the jingle of their harness struck loud upon the ear, until amid the hush there rose a low deep roar like the sound of the tide upon the beach, ever growing and deepening as the host of France drew near." + }, + { + "title": "HOW NIGEL FOUND HIS THIRD DEED", + "text": "Four archers lay behind a clump of bushes ten yards in front of the thick hedge which shielded their companions. Amid the long line of bowmen those behind them were their own company, and in the main the same who were with Knolles in Brittany. The four in front were their leaders: old Wat of Carlisle, Ned Widdington the red-headed Dalesman, the bald bowyer Bartholomew, and Samkin Alyward, newly rejoined after a week's absence. All four were munching bread and apples, for Aylward had brought in a full haversack and divided them freely amongst his starving comrades. The old Borderer and the Yorkshireman were gaunt and hollow-eyed with privation, while the bowyer's round face had fallen in so that the skin hung in loose pouches under his eyes and beneath his jaws.\n\nBehind them lines of haggard, wolfish men glared through the underwood, silent and watchful save that they burst into a fierce yelp of welcome when Chandos and Nigel galloped up, sprang from their horses and took their station beneath them. All along the green fringe of bowmen might be seen the steel-clad figures of knights and squires who had pushed their way into the front line to share the fortune of the archers.\n\n\"I call to mind that I once shot six ends with a Kentish woldsman at Ashford\u2014\" began the Bowyer.\n\n\"Nay, nay, we have heard that story!\" said old Wat impatiently. \"Shut thy clap, Bartholomew, for it is no time for redeless gossip! Walk down the line, I pray you, and see if there be no frayed string, nor broken nock nor loosened whipping to be mended.\"\n\nThe stout bowyer passed down the fringe of bowmen, amidst a running fire of rough wit. Here and there a bow was thrust out at him through the hedge for his professional advice.\n\n\"Wax your heads!\" he kept crying. \"Pass down the wax-pot and wax your heads. A waxed arrow will pass where a dry will be held. Tom Beverley, you jack-fool! where is your bracer-guard? Your string will flay your arm ere you reach your up-shot this day. And you, Watkin, draw not to your mouth, as is your wont, but to your shoulder. You are so used to the wine-pot that the string must needs follow it. Nay, stand loose, and give space for your drawing arms, for they will be on us anon.\"\n\nHe ran back and joined his comrades in the front, who had now risen to their feet. Behind them a half-mile of archers stood behind the hedge, each with his great warbow strung, half a dozen shafts loose behind him, and eighteen more in the quiver slung across his front. With arrow on string, their feet firm-planted, their fierce eager faces peering through the branches, they awaited the coming storm.\n\nThe broad flood of steel, after oozing slowly forward, had stopped about a mile from the English front. The greater part of the army had then descended from their horses, while a crowd of varlets and hostlers led them to the rear. The French formed themselves now into three great divisions, which shimmered in the sun like silvery pools, reed-capped with many a thousand of banners and pennons. A space of several hundred yards divided each. At the same time two bodies of horsemen formed themselves in front. The first consisted of three hundred men in one thick column, the second of a thousand, riding in a more extended line.\n\nThe Prince had ridden up to the line of archers. He was in dark armor, his visor open, and his handsome aquiline face all glowing with spirit and martial fire. The bowmen yelled at him, and he waved his hands to them as a huntsman cheers his hounds.\n\n\"Well, John, what think you now?\" he asked. \"What would my noble father not give to be by our side this day? Have you seen that they have left their horses?\"\n\n\"Yes, my fair lord, they have learned their lesson,\" said Chandos. \"Because we have had good fortune upon our feet at Crecy and elsewhere they think that they have found the trick of it. But it is in my mind that it is very different to stand when you are assailed, as we have done, and to assail others when you must drag your harness for a mile and come weary to the fray.\"\n\n\"You speak wisely, John. But these horsemen who form in front and ride slowly towards us, what make you of them?\"\n\n\"Doubtless they hope to cut the strings of our bowmen and so clear a way for the others. But they are indeed a chosen band, for mark you, fair sir, are not those the colors of Clermont upon the left, and of d'Andreghen upon the right, so that both marshals ride with the vanguard?\"\n\n\"By God's soul, John!\" cried the Prince, \"it is very sure that you can see more with one eye than any man in this army with two. But it is even as you say. And this larger band behind?\"\n\n\"They should be Germans, fair sir, by the fashion of their harness.\"\n\nThe two bodies of horsemen had moved slowly over the plain, with a space of nearly a quarter of a mile between them. Now, having come two bowshots from the hostile line, they halted. All that they could see of the English was the long hedge, with an occasional twinkle of steel through its leafy branches, and behind that the spear-heads of the men-at-arms rising from amidst the brushwood and the vines. A lovely autumn countryside with changing many-tinted foliage lay stretched before them, all bathed in peaceful sunshine, and nothing save those flickering fitful gleams to tell of the silent and lurking enemy who barred their way. But the bold spirit of the French cavaliers rose the higher to the danger. The clamor of their warcries filled the air, and they tossed their pennoned spears over their heads in menace and defiance. From the English line it was a noble sight, the gallant, pawing, curveting horses, the many-colored twinkling riders, the swoop and wave and toss of plume and banner.\n\nThen a bugle rang forth. With a sudden yell every spur struck deep, every lance was laid in rest, and the whole gallant squadron flew like a glittering thunderbolt for the center of the English line.\n\nA hundred yards they had crossed, and yet another hundred, but there was no movement in front of them, and no sound save their own hoarse battle-cries and the thunder of their horses. Ever swifter and swifter they flew. From behind the hedge it was a vision of horses, white, bay and black, their necks stretched, their nostrils distended, their bellies to the ground, whilst of the rider one could but see a shield with a plume-tufted visor above it, and a spear-head twinkling in front.\n\nThen of a sudden the Prince raised his hand and gave a cry. Chandos echoed it, it swelled down the line, and with one mighty chorus of twanging strings and hissing shafts the long-pent storm broke at last.\n\nAlas for the noble steeds! Alas for the gallant men. When the lust of battle is over who would not grieve to see that noble squadron break into red ruin before the rain of arrows beating upon the faces and breasts of the horses? The front rank crashed down, and the others piled themselves upon the top of them, unable to check their speed, or to swerve aside from the terrible wall of their shattered comrades which had so suddenly sprung up before them. Fifteen feet high was that blood-spurting mound of screaming, kicking horses and writhing, struggling men. Here and there on the flanks a horseman cleared himself and dashed for the hedge, only to have his steed slain under him and to be hurled from his saddle. Of all the three hundred gallant riders, not one ever reached that fatal hedge.\n\nBut now in a long rolling wave of steel the German battalion roared swiftly onward. They opened in the center to pass that terrible mound of death, and then spurred swiftly in upon the archers. They were brave men, well led, and in their open lines they could avoid the clubbing together which had been the ruin of the vanguard; yet they perished singly even as the others had perished together. A few were slain by the arrows. The greater number had their horses killed under them, and were so shaken and shattered by the fall that they could not raise their limbs, over-weighted with iron, from the spot where they lay.\n\nThree men riding together broke through the bushes which sheltered the leaders of the archers, cut down Widdington the Dalesman, spurred onward through the hedge, dashed over the bowmen behind it, and made for the Prince. One fell with an arrow through his head, a second was beaten from his saddle by Chandos, and the third was slain by the Prince's own hand. A second band broke through near the river, but were cut off by Lord Audley and his squires, so that all were slain. A single horseman whose steed was mad with pain, an arrow in its eye and a second in its nostril, sprang over the hedge and clattered through the whole army, disappearing amid whoops and laughter into the woods behind. But none others won as far as the hedge. The whole front of the position was fringed with a litter of German wounded or dead, while one great heap in the center marked the downfall of the gallant French three hundred.\n\nWhilst these two waves of the attack had broken in front of the English position, leaving this blood-stained wreckage behind them, the main divisions had halted and made their last preparations for their own assault. They had not yet begun their advance, and the nearest was still half a mile distant, when the few survivors from the forlorn hope, their maddened horses bristling with arrows, flew past them on either flank.\n\nAt the same moment the English archers and men-at-arms dashed through the hedge, and dragged all who were living out of that tangled heap of shattered horses and men. It was a mad wild rush, for in a few minutes the fight must be renewed, and yet there was a rich harvest of wealth for the lucky man who could pick a wealthy prisoner from amid the crowd. The nobler spirits disdained to think of ransoms whilst the fight was still unsettled; but a swarm of needy soldiers, Gascons and English, dragged the wounded out by the leg or the arm, and with daggers at their throats demanded their names, title and means. He who had made a good prize hurried him to the rear where his own servants could guard him, while he who was disappointed too often drove the dagger home and then rushed once more into the tangle in the hope of better luck. Clermont, with an arrow through the sky-blue Virgin on his surcoat, lay dead within ten paces of the hedge; d'Andreghen was dragged by a penniless squire from under a horse and became his prisoner. The Earl of Salzburg and of Nassau were both found helpless on the ground and taken to the rear. Aylward cast his thick arms round Count Otto von Langenbeck, and laid him, helpless from a broken leg, behind his bush. Black Simon had made prize of Bernard, Count of Ventadour, and hurried him through the hedge. Everywhere there was rushing and shouting, brawling and buffeting, while amidst it all a swarm of archers were seeking their shafts, plucking them from the dead, and sometimes even from the wounded. Then there was a sudden cry of warning. In a moment every man was back in his place once more, and the line of the hedge was clear.\n\nIt was high time; for already the first division of the French was close upon them. If the charge of the horsemen had been terrible from its rush and its fire, this steady advance of a huge phalanx of armored footmen was even more fearsome to the spectator. They moved very slowly, on account of the weight of their armor, but their progress was the more regular and inexorable. With elbows touching\u2014their shields slung in front, their short five-foot spears carried in their right hands, and their maces or swords ready at their belts, the deep column of men-at-arms moved onward. Again the storm of arrows beat upon them clinking and thudding on the armor. They crouched double behind their shields as they met it. Many fell, but still the slow tide lapped onward. Yelling, they surged up to the hedge, and lined it for half a mile, struggling hard to pierce it.\n\nFor five minutes the long straining ranks faced each other with fierce stab of spear on one side and heavy beat of ax or mace upon the other. In many parts the hedge was pierced or leveled to the ground, and the French men-at-arms were raging amongst the archers, hacking and hewing among the lightly armed men. For a moment it seemed as if the battle was on the turn.\n\nBut John de Vere, Earl of Oxford, cool, wise and crafty in war, saw and seized his chance. On the right flank a marshy meadow skirted the river. So soft was it that a heavily-armed man would sink to his knees. At his order a spray of light bowmen was thrown out from the battle line and forming upon the flank of the French poured their arrows into them. At the same moment Chandos, with Audley, Nigel, Bartholomew Burghersh, the Captal de Buch, and a score of other knights sprang upon their horses, and charging down the narrow lane rode over the French line in front of them. Once through it they spurred to left and right, trampling down the dismounted men-at-arms.\n\nA fearsome sight was Pommers that day, his red eyes rolling, his nostrils gaping, his tawny mane tossing, and his savage teeth gnashing in fury, as he tore and smashed and ground beneath his ramping hoofs all that came before him. Fearsome too was the rider, ice-cool; alert, concentrated of purpose, with, heart of fire and muscles of steel. A very angel of battle he seemed as he drove his maddened horse through the thickest of the press, but strive as he would: the tall figure of his master upon his coal-black steed was ever half a length before him.\n\nAlready the moment of danger was passed. The French line had given back. Those who had pierced the hedge had fallen like brave men amid the ranks of their foemen. The division of Warwick had hurried up from the vineyards to fill the gaps of Salisbury's battle-line. Back rolled the shining tide, slowly at first, even as it had advanced, but quicker now as the bolder fell and the weaker shredded out and shuffled with ungainly speed for a place of safety. Again there was a rush from behind the hedge. Again there was a reaping of that strange crop of bearded arrows which grew so thick upon the ground, and again the wounded prisoners were seized and dragged in brutal haste to the rear. Then the line was restored, and the English, weary, panting and shaken, awaited the next attack.\n\nBut a great good fortune had come to them\u2014so great that as they looked down the valley they could scarce credit their own senses. Behind the division of the Dauphin, which had pressed them so hard, stood a second division hardly less numerous, led by the Duke of Orleans. The fugitives from in front, blood-smeared and bedraggled, blinded with sweat and with fear, rushed amidst its ranks in their flight, and in a moment, without a blow being struck, had carried them off in their wild rout. This vast array, so solid and so martial, thawed suddenly away like a snow-wreath in the sun. It was gone, and in its place thousands of shining dots scattered over the whole plain as each man made his own way to the spot where he could find his horse and bear himself from the field. For a moment it seemed that the battle was won, and a thundershout of joy pealed up from the English line.\n\nBut as the curtain of the Duke's division was drawn away it was only to disclose stretching far behind it, and spanning the valley from side to side, the magnificent array of the French King, solid, unshaken, and preparing its ranks for the attack. Its numbers were as great as those of the English army; it was unscathed by all that was past, and it had a valiant monarch to lead it to the charge. With the slow deliberation of the man who means to do or to die, its leader marshaled its ranks for the supreme effort of the day.\n\nMeanwhile during that brief moment of exultation when the battle appeared to be won, a crowd of hotheaded young knights and squires swarmed and clamored round the Prince, beseeching that he would allow them to ride forth.\n\n\"See this insolent fellow who bears three martlets upon a field gales!\" cried Sir Maurice Berkeley. \"He stands betwixt the two armies as though he had no dread of us.\"\n\n\"I pray you, sir, that I may ride out to him, since he seems ready to attempt some small deed,\" pleaded Nigel.\n\n\"Nay, fair sirs, it is an evil thing that we should break our line, seeing that we still have much to do,\" said the Prince. \"See! he rides away, and so the matter is settled.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair prince,\" said the young knight who had spoken first. \"My gray horse, Lebryte, could run him down ere he could reach shelter. Never since I left Severn side have I seen steed so fleet as mine. Shall I not show you?\" In an instant he had spurred the charger and was speeding across the plain.\n\nThe Frenchman, John de Helennes, a squire of Picardy, had waited with a burning heart, his soul sick at the flight of the division in which he had ridden. In the hope of doing some redeeming exploit, or of meeting his own death, he had loitered betwixt the armies, but no movement had come from the English lines. Now he had turned his horse's head to join the King's array, when the low drumming of hoofs sounded behind him, and he turned to find a horseman hard upon his heels. Each had drawn his sword, and the two armies paused to view the fight. In the first bout Sir Maurice Berkeley's lance was struck from his hand, and as he sprang down to recover it the Frenchman ran him through the thigh, dismounted from his horse, and received his surrender. As the unfortunate Englishman hobbled away at the side of his captor a roar of laughter burst from both armies at the spectacle.\n\n\"By my ten finger-bones!\" cried Aylward, chuckling behind the remains of his bush, \"he found more on his distaff that time than he knew how to spin. Who was the knight?\"\n\n\"By his arms,\" said old Wat, \"he should either be a Berkeley of the West or a Popham of Kent.\"\n\n\"I call to mind that I shot a match of six ends once with a Kentish woldsman\u2014\" began the fat Bowyer.\n\n\"Nay, nay, stint thy talk, Bartholomew!\" cried old Wat. \"Here is poor Ned with his head cloven, and it would be more fitting if you were saying aves for his soul, instead of all this bobance and boasting. Now, now, Tom of Beverley?\"\n\n\"We have suffered sorely in this last bout, Wat. There are forty of our men upon their backs, and the Dean Foresters on the right are in worse case still.\"\n\n\"Talking will not mend it, Tom, and if all but one were on their backs he must still hold his ground.\"\n\nWhilst the archers were chatting, the leaders of the army were in solemn conclave just behind them. Two divisions of the French had been repulsed, and yet there was many an anxious face as the older knights looked across the plain at the unbroken array of the French King moving slowly toward them. The line of the archers was much thinned and shredded. Many knights and squires had been disabled in the long and fierce combat at the hedge. Others, exhausted by want of food, had no strength left and were stretched panting upon the ground. Some were engaged in carrying the wounded to the rear and laying them under the shelter of the trees, whilst others were replacing their broken swords or lances from the weapons of the slain. The Captal de Buch, brave and experienced as he was, frowned darkly and whispered his misgivings to Chandos.\n\nBut the Prince's courage flamed the higher as the shadow fell, while his dark eyes gleamed with a soldier's pride as he glanced round him at his weary comrades, and then at the dense masses of the King's battle which now, with a hundred trumpets blaring and a thousand pennons waving, rolled slowly over the plain. \"Come what may, John, this has been a most noble meeting,\" said he. \"They will not be ashamed of us in England. Take heart, my friends, for if we conquer we shall carry the glory ever with us; but if we be slain then we die most worshipfully and in high honor, as we have ever prayed that we might die, and we leave behind us our brothers and kinsmen who will assuredly avenge us. It is but one more effort, and all will be well. Warwick, Oxford, Salisbury, Suffolk, every man to the front! My banner to the front also! Your horses, fair sirs! The archers are spent, and our own good lances must win the field this day. Advance, Walter, and may God and Saint George be with England!\"\n\nSir Walter Woodland, riding a high black horse, took station by the Prince, with the royal banner resting in a socket by his saddle. From all sides the knights and squires crowded in upon it, until they formed a great squadron containing the survivors of the battalions of Warwick and Salisbury as well as those of the Prince. Four hundred men-at-arms who had been held in reserve were brought up and thickened the array, but even so Chandos' face was grave as he scanned it and then turned his eyes upon the masses of the Frenchmen.\n\n\"I like it not, fair sir. The weight is overgreat,\" he whispered to the Prince.\n\n\"How would you order it, John? Speak what is in your mind.\"\n\n\"We should attempt something upon their flank whilst we hold them in front. How say you, Jean?\" He turned to the Captal de Buch, whose dark, resolute face reflected the same misgivings.\n\n\"Indeed, John, I think as you do,\" said he. \"The French King is a very valiant man, and so are those who are about him, and I know not how we may drive them back unless we can do as you advise. If you will give me only a hundred men I will attempt it.\"\n\n\"Surely the task is mine, fair sir, since the thought has come from me,\" said Chandos.\n\n\"Nay, John, I would keep you at my side. But you speak well, Jean, and you shall do even as you have said. Go ask the Earl of Oxford for a hundred men-at-arms and as many hobblers, that you may ride round the mound yonder, and so fall upon them unseen. Let all that are left of the archers gather on each side, shoot away their arrows, and then fight as best they may. Wait till they are past yonder thorn-bush and then, Walter, bear my banner straight against that of the King of France. Fair sirs, may God and the thought of your ladies hold high your hearts!\"\n\nThe French monarch, seeing that his footmen had made no impression upon the English, and also that the hedge had been well-nigh leveled to the ground in the course of the combat, so that it no longer presented an obstacle, had ordered his followers to remount their horses, and it was as a solid mass of cavalry that the chivalry of France advanced to their last supreme effort. The King was in the center of the front line, Geoffrey de Chargny with the golden oriflamme upon his right, and Eustace de Ribeaumont with the royal lilies upon the left. At his elbow was the Duke of Athens, High Constable of France, and round him were the nobles of the court, fiery and furious, yelling their warcries as they waved their weapons over their heads. Six thousand gallant men of the bravest race in Europe, men whose very names are like blasts of a battle-trumpet\u2014Beaujeus and Chatillons, Tancarvilles and Ventadours\u2014pressed hard behind the silver lilies.\n\nSlowly they moved at first, walking their horses that they might be the fresher for the shock. Then they broke into a trot which was quickening into a gallop when the remains of the hedge in front of them was beaten in an instant to the ground and the broad line of the steel-clad chivalry of England swept grandly forth to the final shock. With loose rein and busy spur the two lines of horsemen galloped at the top of their speed straight and hard for each other. An instant later they met with a thunder-crash which was heard by the burghers on the wall of Poitiers, seven good miles away.\n\nUnder that frightful impact horses fell dead with broken necks, and many a rider, held in his saddle by the high pommel, fractured his thighs with the shock. Here and there a pair met breast to breast, the horses rearing straight upward and falling back upon their masters. But for the most part the line had opened in the gallop, and the cavaliers, flying through the gaps, buried themselves in the enemy's ranks. Then the flanks shredded out, and the thick press in the center loosened until there was space to swing a sword and to guide a steed. For ten acres there was one wild tumultuous swirl of tossing heads, of gleaming weapons which rose and fell, of upthrown hands, of tossing plumes and of lifted shields, whilst the din of a thousand warcries and the clash-clash of metal upon metal rose and swelled like the roar and beat of an ocean surge upon a rock-bound coast. Backward and forward swayed the mighty throng, now down the valley and now up, as each side in turn put forth its strength for a fresh rally. Locked in one long deadly grapple, great England and gallant France with iron hearts and souls of fire strove and strove for mastery.\n\nSir Walter Woodland, riding hard upon his high black horse, had plunged into the swelter and headed for the blue and silver banner of King John. Close at his heels in a solid wedge rode the Prince, Chandos, Nigel, Lord Reginald Cobham, Audley with his four famous squires, and a score of the flower of the English and Gascon knighthood. Holding together and bearing down opposition by a shower of blows and by the weight of their powerful horses, their progress was still very slow, for ever fresh waves of French cavaliers surged up against them and broke in front only to close in again upon their rear. Sometimes they were swept backward by the rush, sometimes they gained a few paces, sometimes they could but keep their foothold, and yet from minute to minute that blue and silver flag which waved above the press grew ever a little closer. A dozen furious hard-breathing French knights had broken into their ranks, and clutched at Sir Walter Woodland's banner, but Chandos and Nigel guarded it on one side, Audley with his squires on the other, so that no man laid his hand upon it and lived.\n\nBut now there was a distant crash and a roar of \"Saint George for Guienne!\" from behind. The Captal de Buch had charged home. \"Saint George for England!\" yelled the main attack, and ever the counter-cry came back to them from afar. The ranks opened in front of them. The French were giving way. A small knight with golden scroll-work upon his armor threw himself upon the Prince and was struck dead by his mace. It was the Duke of Athens, Constable of France, but none had time to note it, and the fight rolled on over his body. Looser still were the French ranks. Many were turning their horses, for that ominous roar from the rear had shaken their resolution. The little English wedge poured onward, the Prince, Chandos, Audley and Nigel ever in the van.\n\nA huge warrior in black, bearing a golden banner, appeared suddenly in a gap of the shredding ranks. He tossed his precious burden to a squire, who bore it away. Like a pack of hounds on the very haunch of a deer the English rushed yelling for the oriflamme. But the black warrior flung himself across their path. \"Chargny! Chargny a la recousse!\" he roared with a voice of thunder. Sir Reginald Cobham dropped before his battle-ax, so did the Gascon de Clisson. Nigel was beaten down on to the crupper of his horse by a sweeping blow; but at the same instant Chandos' quick blade passed through the Frenchman's camail and pierced his throat. So died Geoffrey de Chargny; but the oriflamme was saved.\n\nDazed with the shock, Nigel still kept his saddle, and Pommers, his yellow hide mottled with blood, bore him onward with the others. The French horsemen were now in full flight; but one stern group of knights stood firm, like a rock in a rushing torrent, beating off all, whether friend or foe, who tried to break their ranks. The oriflamme had gone, and so had the blue and silver banner, but here were desperate men ready to fight to the death. In their ranks honor was to be reaped. The Prince and his following hurled themselves upon them, while the rest of the English horsemen swept onward to secure the fugitives and to win their ransoms. But the nobler spirits\u2014Audley, Chandos and the others\u2014would have thought it shame to gain money whilst there was work to be done or honor to be won. Furious was the wild attack, desperate the prolonged defense. Men fell from their saddles for very exhaustion.\n\nNigel, still at his place near Chandos' elbow, was hotly attacked by a short broad-shouldered warrior upon a stout white cob, but Pommers reared with pawing fore feet and dashed the smaller horse to the ground. The falling rider clutched Nigel's arm and tore him from the saddle, so that the two rolled upon the grass under the stamping hoofs, the English squire on the top, and his shortened sword glimmered before the visor of the gasping, breathless Frenchman.\n\n\"Je me rends! je axe rends!\" he panted.\n\nFor a moment a vision of rich ransoms passed through Nigel's brain. That noble palfrey, that gold-flecked armor, meant fortune to the captor. Let others have it! There was work still to be done. How could he desert the Prince and his noble master for the sake of a private gain? Could he lead a prisoner to the rear when honor beckoned him to the van? He staggered to his feet, seized Pommers by the mane, and swung himself into the saddle.\n\nAn instant later he was by Chandos' side once more and they were bursting together through the last ranks of the gallant group who had fought so bravely to the end. Behind them was one long swath of the dead and the wounded. In front the whole wide plain was covered with the flying French and their pursuers.\n\nThe Prince reined up his steed and opened his visor, whilst his followers crowded round him with waving weapons and frenzied shouts of victory. \"What now, John!\" cried the smiling Prince, wiping his streaming face with his ungauntleted hand. \"How fares it then?\"\n\n\"I am little hurt, fair lord, save for a crushed hand and a spear-prick in the shoulder. But you, sir? I trust you have no scathe?\"\n\n\"In truth, John, with you at one elbow and Lord Audley at the other, I know not how I could come to harm. But alas! I fear that Sir James is sorely stricken.\"\n\nThe gallant Lord Audley had dropped upon the ground and the blood oozed from every crevice of his battered armor. His four brave Squires\u2014Dutton of Dutton, Delves of Doddington, Fowlhurst of Crewe and Hawkstone of Wainhill\u2014wounded and weary themselves, but with no thought save for their master, unlaced his helmet and bathed his pallid blood-stained face.\n\nHe looked up at the Prince with burning eyes. \"I thank you, sir, for deigning to consider so poor a knight as myself,\" said he in a feeble voice.\n\nThe Prince dismounted and bent over him. \"I am bound to honor you very much, James,\" said he, \"for by your valor this day you have won glory and renown above us all, and your prowess has proved you to be the bravest knight.\"\n\n\"My Lord,\" murmured the wounded man, \"you have a right to say what you please; but I wish it were as you say.\"\n\n\"James,\" said the Prince, \"from this time onward I make you a knight of my own household, and I settle upon you five hundred marks of yearly income from my own estates in England.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" the knight answered, \"God make me worthy of the good fortune you bestow upon me. Your knight I will ever be, and the money I will divide with your leave amongst these four squires who have brought me whatever glory I have won this day.\" So saying his head fell back, and he lay white and silent upon the grass.\n\n\"Bring water!\" said the Prince. \"Let the royal leech see to him; for I had rather lose many men than the good Sir James. Ha, Chandos, what have we here?\"\n\nA knight lay across the path with his helmet beaten down upon his shoulders. On his surcoat and shield were the arms of a red griffin.\n\n\"It is Robert de Duras the spy,\" said Chandos.\n\n\"Well for him that he has met his end,\" said the angry Prince. \"Put him on his shield, Hubert, and let four archers bear him to the monastery. Lay him at the feet of the Cardinal and say that by this sign I greet him. Place my flag on yonder high bush, Walter, and let my tent be raised there, that my friends may know where to seek me.\"\n\nThe flight and pursuit had thundered far away, and the field was deserted save for the numerous groups of weary horsemen who were making their way back, driving their prisoners before them. The archers were scattered over the whole plain, rifling the saddle-bags and gathering the armor of those who had fallen, or searching for their own scattered arrows.\n\nSuddenly, however, as the Prince was turning toward the bush which he had chosen for his headquarters, there broke out from behind him an extraordinary uproar and a group of knights and squires came pouring toward him, all arguing, swearing and abusing each other in French and English at the tops of their voices. In the midst of them limped a stout little man in gold-spangled armor, who appeared to be the object of the contention, for one would drag him one way and one another, as though they would pull him limb from limb. \"Nay, fair sirs, gently, gently, I pray you!\" he pleaded. \"There is enough for all, and no need to treat me so rudely.\" But ever the hubbub broke out again, and swords gleamed as the angry disputants glared furiously at each other. The Prince's eyes fell upon the small prisoner, and he staggered back with a gasp of astonishment.\n\n\"King John!\" he cried.\n\nA shout of joy rose from the warriors around him. \"The King of France! The King of France a prisoner!\" they cried in an ecstasy.\n\n\"Nay, nay, fair sirs, let him not hear that we rejoice! Let no word bring pain to his soul!\" Running forward the Prince clasped the French King by the two hands.\n\n\"Most welcome, sire!\" he cried. \"Indeed it is good for us that so gallant a knight should stay with us for some short time, since the chance of war has so ordered it. Wine there! Bring wine for the King!\"\n\nBut John was flushed and angry. His helmet had been roughly torn off, and blood was smeared upon his cheek. His noisy captors stood around him in a circle, eying him hungrily like dogs who have been beaten from their quarry. There were Gascons and English, knights, squires and archers, all pushing and straining.\n\n\"I pray you, fair Prince, to get rid of these rude fellows,\" said King John, \"for indeed they have plagued me sorely. By Saint Denis! my arm has been well-nigh pulled from its socket.\"\n\n\"What wish you then?\" asked the Prince, turning angrily upon the noisy swarm of his followers.\n\n\"We took him, fair lord. He is ours!\" cried a score of voices. They closed in, all yelping together like a pack of wolves. \"It was I, fair lord!\"\u2014\"Nay, it was I!\"\u2014\"You lie, you rascal, it was I!\" Again their fierce eyes glared and their blood-stained hands sought the hilts of their weapons.\n\n\"Nay, this must be settled here and now!\" said the Prince. \"I crave your patience, fair and honored sir, for a few brief minutes, since indeed much ill-will may spring from this if it be not set at rest. Who is this tall knight who can scarce keep his hands from the King's shoulder?\"\n\n\"It is Denis de Morbecque, my lord, a knight of St. Omer, who is in our service, being an outlaw from France.\"\n\n\"I call him to mind. How then, Sir Denis? What say you in this matter?\"\n\n\"He gave himself to me, fair lord. He had fallen in the press, and I came upon him and seized him. I told him that I was a knight from Artois, and he gave me his glove. See here, I bear it in my hand.\"\n\n\"It is true, fair lord! It is true!\" cried a dozen French voices.\n\n\"Nay, sir, judge not too soon!\" shouted an English squire, pushing his way to the front. \"It was I who had him at my mercy, and he is my prisoner, for he spoke to this man only because he could tell by his tongue that he was his own countryman. I took him, and here are a score to prove it.\"\n\n\"It is true, fair lord. We saw it and it was even so,\" cried a chorus of Englishmen.\n\nAt all times there was growling and snapping betwixt the English and their allies of France. The Prince saw how easily this might set a light to such a flame as could not readily be quenched. It must be stamped out now ere it had time to mount.\n\n\"Fair and honored lord,\" he said to the King, \"again I pray you for a moment of patience. It is your word and only yours which can tell us what is just and right. To whom were you graciously pleased to commit your royal person?\"\n\nKing John looked up from the flagon which had been brought to him and wiped his lips with the dawnings of a smile upon his ruddy face.\n\n\"It was not this Englishman,\" he said, and a cheer burst from the Gascons, \"nor was it this bastard Frenchman,\" he added. \"To neither of them did I surrender.\"\n\nThere was a hush of surprise.\n\n\"To whom then, sir?\" asked the Prince.\n\nThe King looked slowly round. \"There was a devil of a yellow horse,\" said he. \"My poor palfrey went over like a skittle-pin before a ball. Of the rider I know nothing save that he bore red roses on a silver shield. Ah! by Saint Denis, there is the man himself, and there his thrice-accursed horse!\"\n\nHis head swimming, and moving as if in a dream, Nigel found himself the center of the circle of armed and angry men.\n\nThe Prince laid his hand upon his shoulder. \"It is the little cock of Tilford Bridge,\" said he. \"On my father's soul, I have ever said that you would win your way. Did you receive the King's surrender?\"\n\n\"Nay, fair lord, I did not receive it.\"\n\n\"Did you hear him give it?\"\n\n\"I heard, sir, but I did not know that it was the King. My master Lord Chandos had gone on, and I followed after.\"\n\n\"And left him lying. Then the surrender was not complete, and by the laws of war the ransom goes to Denis de Morbecque, if his story be true.\"\n\n\"It is true,\" said the King. \"He was the second.\"\n\n\"Then the ransom is yours, Denis. But for my part I swear by my father's soul that I had rather have the honor this Squire has gathered than all the richest ransoms of France.\"\n\nAt these words spoken before that circle of noble warriors Nigel's heart gave one great throb, and he dropped upon his knee before the Prince. \"Fair lord, how can I thank you?\" he murmured. \"These words at least are more than any ransom.\"\n\n\"Rise up!\" said the smiling Prince, and he smote with his sword upon his shoulder. \"England has lost a brave Squire, and has gained a gallant knight. Nay, linger not, I pray! Rise up, Sir Nigel!\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE THIRD MESSENGER CAME TO COSFORD", + "text": "Two months have passed, and the long slopes of Hindhead are russet with the faded ferns\u2014the fuzzy brown pelt which wraps the chilling earth. With whoop and scream the wild November wind sweeps over the great rolling downs, tossing the branches of the Cosford beeches, and rattling at the rude latticed windows. The stout old knight of Duplin, grown even a little stouter, with whiter beard to fringe an ever redder face, sits as of yore at the head of his own board. A well-heaped platter flanked by a foaming tankard stands before him. At his right sits the Lady Mary, her dark, plain, queenly face marked deep with those years of weary waiting, but bearing the gentle grace and dignity which only sorrow and restraint can give. On his left is Matthew, the old priest. Long ago the golden-haired beauty had passed from Cosford to Fernhurst, where the young and beautiful Lady Edith Brocas is the belle of all Sussex, a sunbeam of smiles and merriment, save perhaps when her thoughts for an instant fly back to that dread night when she was plucked from under the very talons of the foul hawk of Shalford.\n\nThe old knight looked up as a fresh gust of wind with a dash of rain beat against the window behind him. \"By Saint Hubert, it is a wild night!\" said he. \"I had hoped to-morrow to have a flight at a heron of the pool or a mallard in the brook. How fares it with little Katherine the peregrine, Mary?\"\n\n\"I have joined the wing, father, and I have imped the feathers; but I fear it will be Christmas ere she can fly again.\"\n\n\"This is a hard saying,\" said Sir John; \"for indeed I have seen no bolder better bird. Her wing was broken by a heron's beak last Sabbath sennight, holy father, and Mary has the mending of it.\"\n\n\"I trust, my son, that you had heard mass ere you turned to worldly pleasure upon God's holy day,\" Father Matthew answered.\n\n\"Tut, tut!\" said the old knight, laughing. \"Shall I make confession at the head of my own table? I can worship the good God amongst his own works, the woods and the fields, better than in yon pile of stone and wood. But I call to mind a charm for a wounded hawk which was taught me by the fowler of Gaston de Foix. How did it run? 'The lion of the Tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered.' Yes, those were the words to be said three times as you walk round the perch where the bird is mewed.\"\n\nThe old priest shook his head. \"Nay, these charms are tricks of the Devil,\" said he. \"Holy Church lends them no countenance, for they are neither good nor fair. But how is it now with your tapestry, Lady Mary? When last I was beneath this roof you had half done in five fair colors the story of Theseus and Ariadne.\"\n\n\"It is half done still, holy father.\"\n\n\"How is this, my daughter? Have you then so many calls?\"\n\n\"Nay, holy father, her thoughts are otherwhere,\" Sir John answered. \"She will sit an hour at a time, the needle in her hand and her soul a hundred leagues from Cosford House. Ever since the Prince's battle\u2014\"\n\n\"Good father, I beg you\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, Mary, none can hear me, save your own confessor, Father Matthew. Ever since the Prince's battle, I say, when we heard that young Nigel had won such honor she is brain-wode, and sits ever\u2014well, even as you see her now.\"\n\nAn intent look had come into Mary's eyes; her gaze was fixed upon the dark rain-splashed window. It was a face carved from ivory, white-lipped and rigid, on which the old priest looked.\n\n\"What is it, my daughter? What do you see?\"\n\n\"I see nothing, father.\"\n\n\"What is it then that disturbs you?\"\n\n\"I hear, father.\"\n\n\"What do you hear?\"\n\n\"There are horsemen on the road.\"\n\nThe old knight laughed. \"So it goes on, father. What day is there that a hundred horsemen do not pass our gate, and yet every clink of hoofs sets her poor heart a-trembling. So strong and steadfast she has ever been, my Mary, and now no sound too slight to shake her to the soul! Nay, daughter, nay, I pray you!\"\n\nShe had half-risen from her chair, her hands clenched and her dark, startled eyes still fixed upon the window. \"I hear them, father! I hear them amid the wind and the rain! Yes, yes, they are turning\u2014they have turned! My God, they are at our very door!\"\n\n\"By Saint Hubert, the girl is right!\" cried old Sir John, beating his fist upon the board. \"Ho, varlets, out with you to the yard! Set the mulled wine on the blaze once more! There are travelers at the gate, and it is no night to keep a dog waiting at our door. Hurry, Hannekin! Hurry, I say, or I will haste you with my cudgel!\"\n\nPlainly to the ears of all men could be heard the stamping of the horses. Mary had stood up, quivering in every limb. An eager step at the threshold, the door was flung wide, and there in the opening stood Nigel, the rain gleaming upon his smiling face, his cheeks flushed with the beating of the wind, his blue eyes shining with tenderness and love. Something held her by the throat, the light of the torches danced up and down; but her strong spirit rose at the thought that others should see that inner holy of holies of her soul. There is a heroism of women to which no valor of man can attain. Her eyes only carried him her message as she held out her hand.\n\n\"Welcome, Nigel!\" said she.\n\nHe stooped and kissed it.\n\n\"Saint Catharine has brought me home,\" said he.\n\nA merry supper it was at Cosford Manor that night, with Nigel at the head betwixt the jovial old knight and the Lady Mary, whilst at the farther end Samkin Aylward, wedged between two servant maids, kept his neighbors in alternate laughter and terror as he told his tales of the French Wars. Nigel had to turn his doeskin heels and show his little golden spurs. As he spoke of what was passed Sir John clapped him on the shoulder, while Mary took his strong right hand in hers, and the good old priest smiling blessed them both. Nigel had drawn a little golden ring from his pocket, and it twinkled in the torchlight.\n\n\"Did you say that you must go on your way to-morrow, father?\" he asked the priest.\n\n\"Indeed, fair son, the matter presses.\"\n\n\"But you may bide the morning?\"\n\n\"It will suffice if I start at noon.\"\n\n\"Much may be done in a morning.\" He looked at Mary, who blushed and smiled. \"By Saint Paul! I have waited long enough.\"\n\n\"Good, good!\" chuckled the old knight, with wheezy laughter. \"Even so I wooed your mother, Mary. Wooers were brisk in the olden time. To-morrow is Tuesday, and Tuesday is ever a lucky day. Alas! that the good Dame Ermyntrude is no longer with us to see it done! The old hound must run us down, Nigel, and I hear its bay upon my own heels; but my heart will rejoice that before the end I may call you son. Give me your hand, Mary, and yours, Nigel. Now, take an old man's blessing, and may God keep and guard you both, and give you your desert, for I believe on my soul that in all this broad land there dwells no nobler man nor any woman more fitted to be his mate!\"\n\nThere let us leave them, their hearts full of gentle joy, the golden future of hope and promise stretching out before their youthful eyes. Alas for those green spring dreaming! How often do they fade and wither until they fall and rot, a dreary sight, by the wayside of life! But here, by God's blessing, it was not so, for they burgeoned and they grew, ever fairer and more noble, until the whole wide world might marvel at the beauty of it.\n\nIt has been told elsewhere how as the years passed Nigel's name rose higher in honor; but still Mary's would keep pace with it, each helping and sustaining the other upon an ever higher path. In many lands did Nigel carve his fame, and ever as he returned spent and weary from his work he drank fresh strength and fire and craving for honor from her who glorified his home. At Twynham Castle they dwelled for many years, beloved and honored by all. Then in the fullness of time they came back to the Tilford Manor-house and spent their happy, healthy age amid those heather downs where Nigel had passed his first lusty youth, ere ever he turned his face to the wars. Thither also came Aylward when he had left the \"Pied Merlin\" where for many a year he sold ale to the men of the forest.\n\nBut the years pass; the old wheel turns and ever the thread runs out. The wise and the good, the noble and the brave, they come from the darkness, and into the darkness they go, whence, whither and why, who may say? Here is the slope of Hindhead. The fern still glows russet in November, the heather still burns red in July; but where now is the Manor of Cosford? Where is the old house of Tilford? Where, but for a few scattered gray stones, is the mighty pile of Waverley? And yet even gnawing Time has not eaten all things away. Walk with me toward Guildford, reader, upon the busy highway. Here, where the high green mound rises before us, mark yonder roofless shrine which still stands foursquare to the winds. It is St. Catharine's, where Nigel and Mary plighted their faith. Below lies the winding river, and over yonder you still see the dark Chantry woods which mount up to the bare summit, on which, roofed and whole, stands that Chapel of the Martyr where the comrades beat off the archers of the crooked Lord of Shalford. Down yonder on the flanks of the long chalk hills one traces the road by which they made their journey to the wars. And now turn hither to the north, down this sunken winding path! It is all unchanged since Nigel's day. Here is the Church of Compton. Pass under the aged and crumbling arch. Before the steps of that ancient altar, unrecorded and unbrassed, lies the dust of Nigel and of Mary. Near them is that of Maude their daughter, and of Alleyne Edricson, whose spouse she was; their children and children's children are lying by their side. Here too, near the old yew in the churchyard, is the little mound which marks where Samkin Aylward went back to that good soil from which he sprang.\n\nSo lie the dead leaves; but they and such as they nourish forever that great old trunk of England, which still sheds forth another crop and another, each as strong and as fair as the last. The body may lie in moldering chancel, or in crumbling vault, but the rumor of noble lives, the record of valor and truth, can never die, but lives on in the soul of the people. Our own work lies ready to our hands; and yet our strength may be the greater and our faith the firmer if we spare an hour from present toils to look back upon the women who were gentle and strong, or the men who loved honor more than life, on this green stage of England where for a few short years we play our little part." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "mystery" + ], + "tags": [ + "short stories" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "A STUDY IN SCARLET", + "text": "[ Part I BEING A REPRINT FROM THE REMINISCENCES OF JOHN H. WATSON, M. D., LATE OF THE ARMY MEDICAL DEPARTMENT ]\n\n[ Mr. Sherlock Holmes ]\n\nIn the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army. Having completed my studies there, I was duly attached to the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers as assistant surgeon. The regiment was stationed in India at the time, and before I could join it, the second Afghan war had broken out. On landing at Bombay, I learned that my corps had advanced through the passes, and was already deep in the enemy's country. I followed, however, with many other officers who were in the same situation as myself, and succeeded in reaching Candahar in safety, where I found my regiment, and at once entered upon my new duties.\n\nThe campaign brought honours and promotion to many, but for me it had nothing but misfortune and disaster. I was removed from my brigade and attached to the Berkshires, with whom I served at the fatal battle of Maiwand. There I was struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery. I should have fallen into the hands of the murderous Ghazis had it not been for the devotion and courage shown by Murray, my orderly, who threw me across a pack-horse, and succeeded in bringing me safely to the British lines.\n\nWorn with pain, and weak from the prolonged hardships which I had undergone, I was removed, with a great train of wounded sufferers, to the base hospital at Peshawar. Here I rallied, and had already improved so far as to be able to walk about the wards, and even to bask a little upon the veranda, when I was struck down by enteric fever, that curse of our Indian possessions. For months my life was despaired of, and when at last I came to myself and became convalescent, I was so weak and emaciated that a medical board determined that not a day should be lost in sending me back to England. I was despatched, accordingly, in the troopship Orontes, and landed a month later on Portsmouth jetty, with my health irretrievably ruined, but with permission from a paternal government to spend the next nine months in attempting to improve it.\n\nI had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air\u2014or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. There I stayed for some time at a private hotel in the Strand, leading a comfortless, meaningless existence, and spending such money as I had, considerably more freely than I ought. So alarming did the state of my finances become, that I soon realized that I must either leave the metropolis and rusticate somewhere in the country, or that I must make a complete alteration in my style of living. Choosing the latter alternative, I began by making up my mind to leave the hotel, and take up my quarters in some less pretentious and less expensive domicile.\n\nOn the very day that I had come to this conclusion, I was standing at the Criterion Bar, when someone tapped me on the shoulder, and turning round I recognized young Stamford, who had been a dresser under me at Bart's. The sight of a friendly face in the great wilderness of London is a pleasant thing indeed to a lonely man. In old days Stamford had never been a particular crony of mine, but now I hailed him with enthusiasm, and he, in his turn, appeared to be delighted to see me. In the exuberance of my joy, I asked him to lunch with me at the Holborn, and we started off together in a hansom.\n\n\"Whatever have you been doing with yourself, Watson?\" he asked in undisguised wonder, as we rattled through the crowded London streets. \"You are as thin as a lath and as brown as a nut.\"\n\nI gave him a short sketch of my adventures, and had hardly concluded it by the time that we reached our destination.\n\n\"Poor devil!\" he said, commiseratingly, after he had listened to my misfortunes. \"What are you up to now?\"\n\n\"Looking for lodgings,\" I answered. \"Trying to solve the problem as to whether it is possible to get comfortable rooms at a reasonable price.\"\n\n\"That's a strange thing,\" remarked my companion; \"you are the second man today that has used that expression to me.\"\n\n\"And who was the first?\" I asked.\n\n\"A fellow who is working at the chemical laboratory up at the hospital. He was bemoaning himself this morning because he could not get someone to go halves with him in some nice rooms which he had found, and which were too much for his purse.\"\n\n\"By Jove!\" I cried; \"if he really wants someone to share the rooms and the expense, I am the very man for him. I should prefer having a partner to being alone.\"\n\nYoung Stamford looked rather strangely at me over his wineglass. \"You don't know Sherlock Holmes yet,\" he said; \"perhaps you would not care for him as a constant companion.\"\n\n\"Why, what is there against him?\"\n\n\"Oh, I didn't say there was anything against him. He is a little queer in his ideas\u2014an enthusiast in some branches of science. As far as I know he is a decent fellow enough.\"\n\n\"A medical student, I suppose?\" said I.\n\n\"No\u2014I have no idea what he intends to go in for. I believe he is well up in anatomy, and he is a first-class chemist; but, as far as I know, he has never taken out any systematic medical classes. His studies are very desultory and eccentric, but he has amassed a lot of out-of-the-way knowledge which would astonish his professors.\"\n\n\"Did you never ask him what he was going in for?\" I asked.\n\n\"No; he is not a man that it is easy to draw out, though he can be communicative enough when the fancy seizes him.\"\n\n\"I should like to meet him,\" I said. \"If I am to lodge with anyone, I should prefer a man of studious and quiet habits. I am not strong enough yet to stand much noise or excitement. I had enough of both in Afghanistan to last me for the remainder of my natural existence. How could I meet this friend of yours?\"\n\n\"He is sure to be at the laboratory,\" returned my companion. \"He either avoids the place for weeks, or else he works there from morning till night. If you like, we will drive round together after luncheon.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" I answered, and the conversation drifted away into other channels.\n\nAs we made our way to the hospital after leaving the Holborn, Stamford gave me a few more particulars about the gentleman whom I proposed to take as a fellow-lodger.\n\n\"You mustn't blame me if you don't get on with him,\" he said; \"I know nothing more of him than I have learned from meeting him occasionally in the laboratory. You proposed this arrangement, so you must not hold me responsible.\"\n\n\"If we don't get on it will be easy to part company,\" I answered. \"It seems to me, Stamford,\" I added, looking hard at my companion, \"that you have some reason for washing your hands of the matter. Is this fellow's temper so formidable, or what is it? Don't be mealymouthed about it.\"\n\n\"It is not easy to express the inexpressible,\" he answered with a laugh. \"Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes\u2014it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.\"\n\n\"Very right too.\"\n\n\"Yes, but it may be pushed to excess. When it comes to beating the subjects in the dissecting-rooms with a stick, it is certainly taking rather a bizarre shape.\"\n\n\"Beating the subjects!\"\n\n\"Yes, to verify how far bruises may be produced after death. I saw him at it with my own eyes.\"\n\n\"And yet you say he is not a medical student?\"\n\n\"No. Heaven knows what the objects of his studies are. But here we are, and you must form your own impressions about him.\" As he spoke, we turned down a narrow lane and passed through a small side-door, which opened into a wing of the great hospital. It was familiar ground to me, and I needed no guiding as we ascended the bleak stone staircase and made our way down the long corridor with its vista of whitewashed wall and dun-coloured doors. Near the farther end a low arched passage branched away from it and led to the chemical laboratory.\n\nThis was a lofty chamber, lined and littered with countless bottles. Broad, low tables were scattered about, which bristled with retorts, test-tubes, and little Bunsen lamps, with their blue flickering flames. There was only one student in the room, who was bending over a distant table absorbed in his work. At the sound of our steps he glanced round and sprang to his feet with a cry of pleasure. \"I've found it! I've found it,\" he shouted to my companion, running towards us with a test-tube in his hand. \"I have found a re-agent which is precipitated by h\u00e6moglobin, and by nothing else.\" Had he discovered a gold mine, greater delight could not have shone upon his features.\n\n\"Dr. Watson, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said Stamford, introducing us.\n\n\"How are you?\" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. \"You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.\"\n\n\"How on earth did you know that?\" I asked in astonishment.\n\n\"Never mind,\" said he, chuckling to himself. \"The question now is about h\u00e6moglobin. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?\"\n\n\"It is interesting, chemically, no doubt,\" I answered, \"but practically\u2014\"\n\n\"Why, man, it is the most practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don't you see that it gives us an infallible test for blood stains? Come over here now!\" He seized me by the coat-sleeve in his eagerness, and drew me over to the table at which he had been working. \"Let us have some fresh blood,\" he said, digging a long bodkin into his finger, and drawing off the resulting drop of blood in a chemical pipette. \"Now, I add this small quantity of blood to a litre of water. You perceive that the resulting mixture has the appearance of pure water. The proportion of blood cannot be more than one in a million. I have no doubt, however, that we shall be able to obtain the characteristic reaction.\" As he spoke, he threw into the vessel a few white crystals, and then added some drops of a transparent fluid. In an instant the contents assumed a dull mahogany colour, and a brownish dust was precipitated to the bottom of the glass jar.\n\n\"Ha! ha!\" he cried, clapping his hands, and looking as delighted as a child with a new toy. \"What do you think of that?\"\n\n\"It seems to be a very delicate test,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Beautiful! beautiful! The old guaiacum test was very clumsy and uncertain. So is the microscopic examination for blood corpuscles. The latter is valueless if the stains are a few hours old. Now, this appears to act as well whether the blood is old or new. Had this test been invented, there are hundreds of men now walking the earth who would long ago have paid the penalty of their crimes.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" I murmured.\n\n\"Criminal cases are continually hinging upon that one point. A man is suspected of a crime months perhaps after it has been committed. His linen or clothes are examined and brownish stains discovered upon them. Are they blood stains, or mud stains, or rust stains, or fruit stains, or what are they? That is a question which has puzzled many an expert, and why? Because there was no reliable test. Now we have the Sherlock Holmes's test, and there will no longer be any difficulty.\"\n\nHis eyes fairly glittered as he spoke, and he put his hand over his heart and bowed as if to some applauding crowd conjured up by his imagination.\n\n\"You are to be congratulated,\" I remarked, considerably surprised at his enthusiasm.\n\n\"There was the case of Von Bischoff at Frankfort last year. He would certainly have been hung had this test been in existence. Then there was Mason of Bradford, and the notorious Muller, and Lefevre of Montpellier, and Samson of New Orleans. I could name a score of cases in which it would have been decisive.\"\n\n\"You seem to be a walking calendar of crime,\" said Stamford with a laugh. \"You might start a paper on those lines. Call it the 'Police News of the Past.'\"\n\n\"Very interesting reading it might be made, too,\" remarked Sherlock Holmes, sticking a small piece of plaster over the prick on his finger. \"I have to be careful,\" he continued, turning to me with a smile, \"for I dabble with poisons a good deal.\" He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and discoloured with strong acids.\n\n\"We came here on business,\" said Stamford, sitting down on a high three-legged stool, and pushing another one in my direction with his foot. \"My friend here wants to take diggings; and as you were complaining that you could get no one to go halves with you, I thought that I had better bring you together.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes seemed delighted at the idea of sharing his rooms with me. \"I have my eye on a suite in Baker Street,\" he said, \"which would suit us down to the ground. You don't mind the smell of strong tobacco, I hope?\"\n\n\"I always smoke 'ship's' myself,\" I answered.\n\n\"That's good enough. I generally have chemicals about, and occasionally do experiments. Would that annoy you?\"\n\n\"By no means.\"\n\n\"Let me see\u2014what are my other shortcomings? I get in the dumps at times, and don't open my mouth for days on end. You must not think I am sulky when I do that. Just let me alone, and I'll soon be right. What have you to confess now? It's just as well for two fellows to know the worst of one another before they begin to live together.\"\n\nI laughed at this cross-examination. \"I keep a bull pup,\" I said, \"and I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I'm well, but those are the principal ones at present.\"\n\n\"Do you include violin playing in your category of rows?\" he asked, anxiously.\n\n\"It depends on the player,\" I answered. \"A well-played violin is a treat for the gods\u2014a badly played one\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, that's all right,\" he cried, with a merry laugh. \"I think we may consider the thing as settled\u2014that is, if the rooms are agreeable to you.\"\n\n\"When shall we see them?\"\n\n\"Call for me here at noon to-morrow, and we'll go together and settle everything,\" he answered.\n\n\"All right\u2014noon exactly,\" said I, shaking his hand.\n\nWe left him working among his chemicals, and we walked together towards my hotel.\n\n\"By the way,\" I asked suddenly, stopping and turning upon Stamford, \"how the deuce did he know that I had come from Afghanistan?\"\n\nMy companion smiled an enigmatical smile. \"That's just his little peculiarity,\" he said. \"A good many people have wanted to know how he finds things out.\"\n\n\"Oh! a mystery is it?\" I cried, rubbing my hands. \"This is very piquant. I am much obliged to you for bringing us together. 'The proper study of mankind is man,' you know.\"\n\n\"You must study him, then,\" Stamford said, as he bade me good-bye. \"You'll find him a knotty problem, though. I'll wager he learns more about you than you about him. Good-bye.\"\n\n\"Good-bye,\" I answered, and strolled on to my hotel, considerably interested in my new acquaintance." + }, + { + "title": "The Science of Deduction", + "text": "We met next day as he had arranged, and inspected the rooms at No. 221B, Baker Street, of which he had spoken at our meeting. They consisted of a couple of comfortable bedrooms and a single large airy sitting-room, cheerfully furnished, and illuminated by two broad windows. So desirable in every way were the apartments, and so moderate did the terms seem when divided between us, that the bargain was concluded upon the spot, and we at once entered into possession. That very evening I moved my things round from the hotel, and on the following morning Sherlock Holmes followed me with several boxes and portmanteaus. For a day or two we were busily employed in unpacking and laying out our property to the best advantage. That done, we gradually began to settle down and to accommodate ourselves to our new surroundings.\n\nHolmes was certainly not a difficult man to live with. He was quiet in his ways, and his habits were regular. It was rare for him to be up after ten at night, and he had invariably breakfasted and gone out before I rose in the morning. Sometimes he spent his day at the chemical laboratory, sometimes in the dissecting-rooms, and occasionally in long walks, which appeared to take him into the lowest portions of the city. Nothing could exceed his energy when the working fit was upon him; but now and again a reaction would seize him, and for days on end he would lie upon the sofa in the sitting-room, hardly uttering a word or moving a muscle from morning to night. On these occasions I have noticed such a dreamy, vacant expression in his eyes, that I might have suspected him of being addicted to the use of some narcotic, had not the temperance and cleanliness of his whole life forbidden such a notion.\n\nAs the weeks went by, my interest in him and my curiosity as to his aims in life gradually deepened and increased. His very person and appearance were such as to strike the attention of the most casual observer. In height he was rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller. His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded; and his thin, hawk-like nose gave his whole expression an air of alertness and decision. His chin, too, had the prominence and squareness which mark the man of determination. His hands were invariably blotted with ink and stained with chemicals, yet he was possessed of extraordinary delicacy of touch, as I frequently had occasion to observe when I watched him manipulating his fragile philosophical instruments.\n\nThe reader may set me down as a hopeless busybody, when I confess how much this man stimulated my curiosity, and how often I endeavoured to break through the reticence which he showed on all that concerned himself. Before pronouncing judgment, however, be it remembered how objectless was my life, and how little there was to engage my attention. My health forbade me from venturing out unless the weather was exceptionally genial, and I had no friends who would call upon me and break the monotony of my daily existence. Under these circumstances, I eagerly hailed the little mystery which hung around my companion, and spent much of my time in endeavouring to unravel it.\n\nHe was not studying medicine. He had himself, in reply to a question, confirmed Stamford's opinion upon that point. Neither did he appear to have pursued any course of reading which might fit him for a degree in science or any other recognized portal which would give him an entrance into the learned world. Yet his zeal for certain studies was remarkable, and within eccentric limits his knowledge was so extraordinarily ample and minute that his observations have fairly astounded me. Surely no man would work so hard or attain such precise information unless he had some definite end in view. Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning. No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.\n\nHis ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing. Upon my quoting Thomas Carlyle, he inquired in the na\u00efvest way who he might be and what he had done. My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System. That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to me to be such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.\n\n\"You appear to be astonished,\" he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. \"Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.\"\n\n\"To forget it!\"\n\n\"You see,\" he explained. \"I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.\"\n\n\"But the Solar System!\" I protested.\n\n\"What the deuce is it to me?\" he interrupted impatiently: \"you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.\"\n\n[ I was on the point of asking him what that work might be, but something in his manner showed me that the question would be an unwelcome one. I pondered over our short conversation, however, and endeavoured to draw my deductions from it. He said that he would acquire no knowledge which did not bear upon his object. Therefore all the knowledge which he possessed was such as would be useful to him. I enumerated in my own mind all the various points upon which he had shown me that he was exceptionally well informed. I even took a pencil and jotted them down. I could not help smiling at the document when I had completed it. It ran in this way: Sherlock Holmes\u2014his limits ]\n\n1. Knowledge of Literature.\u2014Nil.\n\n2. \" \" Philosophy.\u2014Nil.\n\n3. \" \" Astronomy.\u2014Nil.\n\n4. \" \" Politics.\u2014Feeble.\n\n5. \" \" Botany.\u2014Variable. Well up in belladonna, opium, and poisons generally.\n\nKnows nothing of practical gardening.\n\n6. Knowledge of Geology.\u2014Practical, but limited. Tells at a glance different soils from each other. After walks has shown me splashes upon his trousers, and told me by their colour and consistence in what part of London he had received them.\n\n7. Knowledge of Chemistry.\u2014Profound.\n\n8. \" \" Anatomy.\u2014Accurate, but unsystematic.\n\n9. \" \" Sensational Literature.\u2014Immense. He appears to know every detail of every horror perpetrated in the century.\n\n10. Plays the violin well.\n\n11. Is an expert singlestick player, boxer, and swordsman.\n\n12. Has a good practical knowledge of British law.\n\nWhen I had got so far in my list I threw it into the fire in despair. \"If I can only find what the fellow is driving at by reconciling all these accomplishments, and discovering a calling which needs them all,\" I said to myself, \"I may as well give up the attempt at once.\"\n\nI see that I have alluded above to his powers upon the violin. These were very remarkable, but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments. That he could play pieces, and difficult pieces, I knew well, because at my request he has played me some of Mendelssohn's Lieder, and other favourites. When left to himself, however, he would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his armchair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy, was more than I could determine. I might have rebelled against these exasperating solos had it not been that he usually terminated them by playing in quick succession a whole series of my favourite airs as a slight compensation for the trial upon my patience.\n\nDuring the first week or so we had no callers, and I had begun to think that my companion was as friendless a man as I was myself. Presently, however, I found that he had many acquaintances, and those in the most different classes of society. There was one little sallow, rat-faced, dark-eyed fellow, who was introduced to me as Mr. Lestrade, and who came three or four times in a single week. One morning a young girl called, fashionably dressed, and stayed for half an hour or more. The same afternoon brought a gray-headed, seedy visitor, looking like a Jew peddler, who appeared to me to be much excited, and who was closely followed by a slip-shod elderly woman. On another occasion an old white-haired gentleman had an interview with my companion; and on another, a railway porter in his velveteen uniform. When any of these nondescript individuals put in an appearance, Sherlock Holmes used to beg for the use of the sitting-room, and I would retire to my bedroom. He always apologized to me for putting me to this inconvenience. \"I have to use this room as a place of business,\" he said, \"and these people are my clients.\" Again I had an opportunity of asking him a point-blank question, and again my delicacy prevented me from forcing another man to confide in me. I imagined at the time that he had some strong reason for not alluding to it, but he soon dispelled the idea by coming round to the subject of his own accord.\n\nIt was upon the 4th of March, as I have good reason to remember, that I rose somewhat earlier than usual, and found that Sherlock Holmes had not yet finished his breakfast. The landlady had become so accustomed to my late habits that my place had not been laid nor my coffee prepared. With the unreasonable petulance of mankind I rang the bell and gave a curt intimation that I was ready. Then I picked up a magazine from the table and attempted to while away the time with it, while my companion munched silently at his toast. One of the articles had a pencil mark at the heading, and I naturally began to run my eye through it.\n\nIts somewhat ambitious title was \"The Book of Life,\" and it attempted to show how much an observant man might learn by an accurate and systematicexamination of all that came in his way. It struck me as being a remarkable mixture of shrewdness and of absurdity. The reasoning was close and intense, but the deductions appeared to me to be far fetched and exaggerated. The writer claimed by a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or a glance of an eye, to fathom a man's inmost thoughts. Deceit, according to him, was an impossibility in the case of one trained to observation and analysis. His conclusions were as infallible as so many propositions of Euclid. So startling would his results appear to the uninitiated that until they learned the processes by which he had arrived at them they might well consider him as a necromancer.\n\n\"From a drop of water,\" said the writer, \"a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other. So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a single link of it. Like all other arts, the Science of Deduction and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the greatest difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elementary problems. Let him, on meeting a fellow-mortal, learn at a glance to distinguish the history of the man, and the trade or profession to which he belongs. Puerile as such an exercise may seem, it sharpens the faculties of observation, and teaches one where to look and what to look for. By a man's finger-nails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boots, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs\u2014by each of these things a man's calling is plainly revealed. That all united should fail to enlighten the competent inquirer in any case is almost inconceivable.\"\n\n\"What ineffable twaddle!\" I cried, slapping the magazine down on the table; \"I never read such rubbish in my life.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"Why, this article,\" I said, pointing at it with my eggspoon as I sat down to my breakfast. \"I see that you have read it since you have marked it. I don't deny that it is smartly written. It irritates me, though. It is evidently the theory of some armchair lounger who evolves all these neat little paradoxes in the seclusion of his own study. It is not practical. I should like to see him clapped down in a third-class carriage on the Underground, and asked to give the trades of all his fellow-travellers. I would lay a thousand to one against him.\"\n\n\"You would lose your money,\" Holmes remarked calmly. \"As for the article, I wrote it myself.\"\n\n\"You!\"\n\n\"Yes; I have a turn both for observation and for deduction. The theories which I have expressed there, and which appear to you to be so chimerical, are really extremely practical\u2014so practical that I depend upon them for my bread and cheese.\"\n\n\"And how?\" I asked involuntarily.\n\n\"Well, I have a trade of my own. I suppose I am the only one in the world. I'm a consulting detective, if you can understand what that is. Here in London we have lots of government detectives and lots of private ones. When these fellows are at fault, they come to me, and I manage to put them on the right scent. They lay all the evidence before me, and I am generally able, by the help of my knowledge of the history of crime, to set them straight. There is a strong family resemblance about misdeeds, and if you have all the details of a thousand at your finger ends, it is odd if you can't unravel the thousand and first. Lestrade is a well-known detective. He got himself into a fog recently over a forgery case, and that was what brought him here.\"\n\n\"And these other people?\"\n\n\"They are mostly sent on by private inquiry agencies. They are all people who are in trouble about something and want a little enlightening. I listen to their story, they listen to my comments, and then I pocket my fee.\"\n\n\"But do you mean to say,\" I said, \"that without leaving your room you can unravel some knot which other men can make nothing of, although they have seen every detail for themselves?\"\n\n\"Quite so. I have a kind of intuition that way. Now and again a case turns up which is a little more complex. Then I have to bustle about and see things with my own eyes. You see I have a lot of special knowledge which I apply to the problem, and which facilitates matters wonderfully. Those rules of deduction laid down in that article which aroused your scorn are invaluable to me in practical work. Observation with me is second nature. You appeared to be surprised when I told you, on our first meeting, that you had come from Afghanistan.\"\n\n\"You were told, no doubt.\"\n\n\"Nothing of the sort. I knew you came from Afghanistan. From long habit the train of thoughts ran so swiftly through my mind that I arrived at the conclusion without being conscious of intermediate steps. There were such steps, however. The train of reasoning ran, 'Here is a gentleman of a medical type, but with the air of a military man. Clearly an army doctor, then. He has just come from the tropics, for his face is dark, and that is not the natural tint of his skin, for his wrists are fair. He has undergone hardship and sickness, as his haggard face says clearly. His left arm has been injured. He holds it in a stiff and unnatural manner. Where in the tropics could an English army doctor have seen much hardship and got his arm wounded? Clearly in Afghanistan.' The whole train of thought did not occupy a second. I then remarked that you came from Afghanistan, and you were astonished.\"\n\n\"It is simple enough as you explain it,\" I said, smiling. \"You remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. \"No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin,\" he observed. \"Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.\"\n\n\"Have you read Gaboriau's works?\" I asked. \"Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. \"Lecoq was a miserable bungler,\" he said, in an angry voice; \"he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a textbook for detectives to teach them what to avoid.\"\n\nI felt rather indignant at having two characters whom I had admired treated in this cavalier style. I walked over to the window and stood looking out into the busy street. \"This fellow may be very clever,\" I said to myself, \"but he is certainly very conceited.\"\n\n\"There are no crimes and no criminals in these days,\" he said, querulously. \"What is the use of having brains in our profession? I know well that I have it in me to make my name famous. No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done. And what is the result? There is no crime to detect; or, at most, some bungling villainy with a motive so transparent that even a Scotland Yard official can see through it.\"\n\nI was still annoyed at his bumptious style of conversation. I thought it best to change the topic.\n\n\"I wonder what that fellow is looking for?\" I asked, pointing to a stalwart, plainly dressed individual who was walking slowly down the other side of the street, looking anxiously at the numbers. He had a large blue envelope in his hand, and was evidently the bearer of a message.\n\n\"You mean the retired sergeant of Marines,\" said Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"Brag and bounce!\" thought I to myself. \"He knows that I cannot verify his guess.\"\n\nThe thought had hardly passed through my mind when the man whom we were watching caught sight of the number on our door, and ran rapidly across the roadway. We heard a loud knock, a deep voice below, and heavy steps ascending the stair.\n\n\"For Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" he said, stepping into the room and handing my friend the letter.\n\nHere was an opportunity of taking the conceit out of him. He little thought of this when he made that random shot. \"May I ask, my lad,\" I said, in the blandest voice, \"what your trade may be?\"\n\n\"Commissionaire, sir,\" he said, gruffly. \"Uniform away for repairs.\"\n\n\"And you were?\" I asked, with a slightly malicious glance at my companion.\n\n\"A sergeant, sir, Royal Marine Light Infantry, sir. No answer? Right, sir.\"\n\nHe clicked his heels together, raised his hand in salute, and was gone." + }, + { + "title": "The Lauriston Garden Mystery", + "text": "I confess that I was considerably startled by this fresh proof of the practical nature of my companion's theories. My respect for his powers of analysis increased wondrously. There still remained some lurking suspicion in my mind, however, that the whole thing was a prearranged episode, intended to dazzle me, though what earthly object he could have in taking me in was past my comprehension. When I looked at him, he had finished reading the note, and his eyes had assumed the vacant, lack-lustre expression which showed mental abstraction.\n\n\"How in the world did you deduce that?\" I asked.\n\n\"Deduce what?\" said he, petulantly.\n\n\"Why, that he was a retired sergeant of Marines.\"\n\n\"I have no time for trifles,\" he answered, brusquely; then with a smile, \"Excuse my rudeness. You broke the thread of my thoughts; but perhaps it is as well. So you actually were not able to see that that man was a sergeant of Marines?\"\n\n\"No, indeed.\"\n\n\"It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact. Even across the street I could see a great blue anchor tattooed on the back of the fellow's hand. That smacked of the sea. He had a military carriage, however, and regulation side whiskers. There we have the marine. He was a man with some amount of self-importance and a certain air of command. You must have observed the way in which he held his head and swung his cane. A steady, respectable, middle-aged man, too, on the face of him all facts which led me to believe that he had been a sergeant.\"\n\n\"Wonderful!\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"Commonplace,\" said Holmes, though I thought from his expression that he was pleased at my evident surprise and admiration. \"I said just now that there were no criminals. It appears that I am wrong\u2014look at this!\" He threw me over the note which the commissionaire had brought.\n\n\"Why,\" I cried, as I cast my eye over it, \"this is terrible!\"\n\n\"It does seem to be a little out of the common,\" he remarked, calmly. \"Would you mind reading it to me aloud?\"\n\nThis is the letter which I read to him,\u2014\n\n\u2002\"My dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes:\n\n\u2002\"There has been a bad business during the night at 3, Lauriston Gardens, off the Brixton Road. Our man on the beat saw a light there about two in the morning, and as the house was an empty one, suspected that something was amiss. He found the door open, and in the front room, which is bare of furniture, discovered the body of a gentleman, well dressed, and having cards in his pocket bearing the name of 'Enoch J. Drebber, Cleveland, Ohio, U. S. A.' There had been no robbery, nor is there any evidence as to how the man met his death. There are marks of blood in the room, but there is no wound upon his person. We are at a loss as to how he came into the empty house; indeed, the whole affair is a puzzler. If you can come round to the house any time before twelve, you will find me there. I have left everything in statu quo until I hear from you. If you are unable to come, I shall give you fuller details, and would esteem it a great kindness if you would favour me with your opinions.\n\n\u2002\"Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002\"TOBIAS GREGSON.\"\n\n\"Gregson is the smartest of the Scotland Yarders,\" my friend remarked; \"he and Lestrade are the pick of a bad lot. They are both quick and energetic, but conventional\u2014shockingly so. They have their knives into one another, too. They are as jealous as a pair of professional beauties. There will be some fun over this case if they are both put upon the scent.\"\n\nI was amazed at the calm way in which he rippled on. \"Surely there is not a moment to be lost,\" I cried; \"shall I go and order you a cab?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure about whether I shall go. I am the most incurably lazy devil that ever stood in shoe leather\u2014that is, when the fit is on me, for I can be spry enough at times.\"\n\n\"Why, it is just such a chance as you have been longing for.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, what does it matter to me? Supposing I unravel the whole matter, you may be sure that Gregson, Lestrade, and Co. will pocket all the credit. That comes of being an unofficial personage.\"\n\n\"But he begs you to help him.\"\n\n\"Yes. He knows that I am his superior, and acknowledges it to me; but he would cut his tongue out before he would own it to any third person. However, we may as well go and have a look. I shall work it out on my own hook. I may have a laugh at them, if I have nothing else. Come on!\"\n\nHe hustled on his overcoat, and bustled about in a way that showed that an energetic fit had superseded the apathetic one.\n\n\"Get your hat,\" he said.\n\n\"You wish me to come?\"\n\n\"Yes, if you have nothing better to do.\" A minute later we were both in a hansom, driving furiously for the Brixton Road.\n\nIt was a foggy, cloudy morning, and a dun-coloured veil hung over the housetops, looking like the reflection of the mud-coloured streets beneath. My companion was in the best of spirits, and prattled away about Cremona fiddles and the difference between a Stradivarius and an Amati. As for myself, I was silent, for the dull weather and the melancholy business upon which we were engaged depressed my spirits.\n\n\"You don't seem to give much thought to the matter in hand,\" I said at last, interrupting Holmes's musical disquisition.\n\n\"No data yet,\" he answered. \"It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.\"\n\n\"You will have your data soon,\" I remarked, pointing with my finger; \"this is the Brixton Road, and that is the house, if I am not very much mistaken.\"\n\n\"So it is. Stop, driver, stop!\" We were still a hundred yards or so from it, but he insisted upon our alighting, and we finished our journey upon foot.\n\nNumber 3, Lauriston Gardens wore an ill-omened and minatory look. It was one of four which stood back some little way from the street, two being occupied and two empty. The latter looked out with three tiers of vacant melancholy windows, which were blank and dreary, save that here and there a \"To Let\" card had developed like a cataract upon the bleared panes. A small garden sprinkled over with a scattered eruption of sickly plants separated each of these houses from the street, and was traversed by a narrow pathway, yellowish in colour, and consisting apparently of a mixture of clay and of gravel. The whole place was very sloppy from the rain which had fallen through the night. The garden was bounded by a three-foot brick wall with a fringe of wood rails upon the top, and against this wall was leaning a stalwart police constable, surrounded by a small knot of loafers, who craned their necks and strained their eyes in the vain hope of catching some glimpse of the proceedings within.\n\nI had imagined that Sherlock Holmes would at once have hurried into the house and plunged into a study of the mystery. Nothing appeared to be further from his intention. With an air of nonchalance which, under the circumstances, seemed to me to border upon affectation, he lounged up and down the pavement, and gazed vacantly at the ground, the sky, the opposite houses and the line of railings. Having finished his scrutiny, he proceeded slowly down the path, or rather down the fringe of grass which flanked the path, keeping his eyes riveted upon the ground. Twice he stopped, and once I saw him smile, and heard him utter an exclamation of satisfaction. There were many marks of footsteps upon the wet clayey soil; but since the police had been coming and going over it, I was unable to see how my companion could hope to learn anything from it. Still I had had such extraordinary evidence of the quickness of his perceptive faculties, that I had no doubt that he could see a great deal which was hidden from me.\n\nAt the door of the house we were met by a tall, white-faced, flaxen-haired man, with a notebook in his hand, who rushed forward and wrung my companion's hand with effusion. \"It is indeed kind of you to come,\" he said, \"I have had everything left untouched.\"\n\n\"Except that!\" my friend answered, pointing at the pathway. \"If a herd of buffaloes had passed along, there could not be a greater mess. No doubt, however, you had drawn your own conclusions, Gregson, before you permitted this.\"\n\n\"I have had so much to do inside the house,\" the detective said evasively. \"My colleague, Mr. Lestrade, is here. I had relied upon him to look after this.\"\n\nHolmes glanced at me and raised his eyebrows sardonically. \"With two such men as yourself and Lestrade upon the ground, there will not be much for a third party to find out,\" he said.\n\nGregson rubbed his hands in a self-satisfied way. \"I think we have done all that can be done,\" he answered; \"it's a queer case, though, and I knew your taste for such things.\"\n\n\"You did not come here in a cab?\" asked Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Nor Lestrade?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Then let us go and look at the room.\" With which inconsequent remark he strode on into the house followed by Gregson, whose features expressed his astonishment.\n\nA short passage, bare-planked and dusty, led to the kitchen and offices. Two doors opened out of it to the left and to the right. One of these had obviously been closed for many weeks. The other belonged to the dining-room, which was the apartment in which the mysterious affair had occurred. Holmes walked in, and I followed him with that subdued feeling at my heart which the presence of death inspires.\n\nIt was a large square room, looking all the larger from the absence of all furniture. A vulgar flaring paper adorned the walls, but it was blotched in places with mildew, and here and there great strips had become detached and hung down, exposing the yellow plaster beneath. Opposite the door was a showy fireplace, surmounted by a mantelpiece of imitation white marble. On one corner of this was stuck the stump of a red wax candle. The solitary window was so dirty that the light was hazy and uncertain, giving a dull gray tinge to everything, which was intensified by the thick layer of dust which coated the whole apartment.\n\nAll these details I observed afterwards. At present my attention was centred upon the single, grim, motionless figure which lay stretched upon the boards, with vacant, sightless eyes staring up at the discoloured ceiling. It was that of a man about forty-three or forty-four years of age, middle-sized, broad-shouldered, with crisp curling black hair, and a short, stubbly beard. He was dressed in a heavy broadcloth frock coat and waistcoat, with light-coloured trousers, and immaculate collar and cuffs. A top hat, well brushed and trim, was placed upon the floor beside him. His hands were clenched and his arms thrown abroad, while his lower limbs were interlocked, as though his death struggle had been a grievous one. On his rigid face there stood an expression of horror, and, as it seemed to me, of hatred, such as I have never seen upon human features. This malignant and terrible contortion, combined with the low forehead, blunt nose, and prognathous jaw, gave the dead man a singularly simious and ape-like appearance, which was increased by his writhing, unnatural posture. I have seen death in many forms, but never has it appeared to me in a more fearsome aspect than in that dark, grimy apartment, which looked out upon one of the main arteries of suburban London.\n\nLestrade, lean and ferret-like as ever, was standing by the doorway, and greeted my companion and myself.\n\n\"This case will make a stir, sir,\" he remarked. \"It beats anything I have seen, and I am no chicken.\"\n\n\"There is no clue?\" said Gregson.\n\n\"None at all,\" chimed in Lestrade.\n\nSherlock Holmes approached the body, and, kneeling down, examined it intently. \"You are sure that there is no wound?\" he asked, pointing to numerous gouts and splashes of blood which lay all round.\n\n\"Positive!\" cried both detectives.\n\n\"Then, of course, this blood belongs to a second individual\u2014presumably the murderer, if murder has been committed. It reminds me of the circumstances attendant on the death of Van Jansen, in Utrecht, in the year '34. Do you remember the case, Gregson?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Read it up\u2014you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before.\"\n\nAs he spoke, his nimble fingers were flying here, there, and everywhere, feeling, pressing, unbuttoning, examining, while his eyes wore the same far-away expression which I have already remarked upon. So swiftly was the examination made, that one would hardly have guessed the minuteness with which it was conducted. Finally, he sniffed the dead man's lips, and then glanced at the soles of his patent leather boots.\n\n\"He has not been moved at all?\" he asked.\n\n\"No more than was necessary for the purpose of our examination.\"\n\n\"You can take him to the mortuary now,\" he said. \"There is nothing more to be learned.\"\n\nGregson had a stretcher and four men at hand. At his call they entered the room, and the stranger was lifted and carried out. As they raised him, a ring tinkled down and rolled across the floor. Lestrade grabbed it up and stared at it with mystified eyes.\n\n\"There's been a woman here,\" he cried. \"It's a woman's wedding ring.\"\n\nHe held it out, as he spoke, upon the palm of his hand. We all gathered round him and gazed at it. There could be no doubt that that circlet of plain gold had once adorned the finger of a bride.\n\n\"This complicates matters,\" said Gregson. \"Heaven knows, they were complicated enough before.\"\n\n\"You're sure it doesn't simplify them?\" observed Holmes. \"There's nothing to be learned by staring at it. What did you find in his pockets?\"\n\n\"We have it all here,\" said Gregson, pointing to a litter of objects upon one of the bottom steps of the stairs. \"A gold watch, No. 97163, by Barraud, of London. Gold Albert chain, very heavy and solid. Gold ring, with masonic device. Gold pin\u2014bull-dog's head, with rubies as eyes. Russian leather cardcase, with cards of Enoch J. Drebber of Cleveland, corresponding with the E. J. D. upon the linen. No purse, but loose money to the extent of seven pounds thirteen. Pocket edition of Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' with name of Joseph Stangerson upon the flyleaf. Two letters\u2014one addressed to E. J. Drebber and one to Joseph Stangerson.\n\n\"At what address?\"\n\n\"American Exchange, Strand\u2014to be left till called for. They are both from the Guion Steamship Company, and refer to the sailing of their boats from Liverpool. It is clear that this unfortunate man was about to return to New York.\"\n\n\"Have you made any inquiries as to this man Stangerson?\"\n\n\"I did it at once, sir,\" said Gregson. \"I have had advertisements sent to all the newspapers, and one of my men has gone to the American Exchange, but he has not returned yet.\"\n\n\"Have you sent to Cleveland?\"\n\n\"We telegraphed this morning.\"\n\n\"How did you word your inquiries?\"\n\n\"We simply detailed the circumstances, and said that we should be glad of any information which could help us.\"\n\n\"You did not ask for particulars on any point which appeared to you to be crucial?\"\n\n\"I asked about Stangerson.\"\n\n\"Nothing else? Is there no circumstance on which this whole case appears to hinge? Will you not telegraph again?\"\n\n\"I have said all I have to say,\" said Gregson, in an offended voice.\n\nSherlock Holmes chuckled to himself, and appeared to be about to make some remark, when Lestrade, who had been in the front room while we were holding this conversation in the hall, reappeared upon the scene, rubbing his hands in a pompous and self-satisfied manner.\n\n\"Mr. Gregson,\" he said, \"I have just made a discovery of the highest importance, and one which would have been overlooked had I not made a careful examination of the walls.\"\n\nThe little man's eyes sparkled as he spoke, and he was evidently in a state of suppressed exultation at having scored a point against his colleague.\n\n\"Come here,\" he said, bustling back into the room, the atmosphere of which felt clearer since the removal of its ghastly inmate. \"Now, stand there!\"\n\nHe struck a match on his boot and held it up against the wall.\n\n\"Look at that!\" he said, triumphantly.\n\nI have remarked that the paper had fallen away in parts. In this particular corner of the room a large piece had peeled off, leaving a yellow square of coarse plastering. Across this bare space there was scrawled in blood-red letters a single word\u2014" + }, + { + "title": "RACHE", + "text": "\"What do you think of that?\" cried the detective, with the air of a showman exhibiting his show. \"This was overlooked because it was in the darkest corner of the room, and no one thought of looking there. The murderer has written it with his or her own blood. See this smear where it has trickled down the wall! That disposes of the idea of suicide anyhow. Why was that corner chosen to write it on? I will tell you. See that candle on the mantelpiece. It was lit at the time, and if it was lit this corner would be the brightest instead of the darkest portion of the wall.\"\n\n\"And what does it mean now that you have found it?\" asked Gregson in a depreciatory voice.\n\n\"Mean? Why, it means that the writer was going to put the female name Rachel, but was disturbed before he or she had time to finish. You mark my words, when this case comes to be cleared up, you will find that a woman named Rachel has something to do with it. It's all very well for you to laugh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You may be very smart and clever, but the old hound is the best, when all is said and done.\"\n\n\"I really beg your pardon!\" said my companion, who had ruffled the little man's temper by bursting into an explosion of laughter. \"You certainly have the credit of being the first of us to find this out and, as you say, it bears every mark of having been written by the other participant in last night's mystery. I have not had time to examine this room yet, but with your permission I shall do so now.\"\n\nAs he spoke, he whipped a tape measure and a large round magnifying glass from his pocket. With these two implements he trotted noiselessly about the room, sometimes stopping, occasionally kneeling, and once lying flat upon his face. So engrossed was he with his occupation that he appeared to have forgotten our presence, for he chattered away to himself under his breath the whole time, keeping up a running fire of exclamations, groans, whistles, and little cries suggestive of encouragement and of hope. As I watched him I was irresistibly reminded of a pure-blooded, well-trained foxhound, as it dashes backward and forward through the covert, whining in its eagerness, until it comes across the lost scent. For twenty minutes or more he continued his researches, measuring with the most exact care the distance between marks which were entirely invisible to me, and occasionally applying his tape to the walls in an equally incomprehensible manner. In one place he gathered up very carefully a little pile of gray dust from the floor, and packed it away in an envelope. Finally he examined with his glass the word upon the wall, going over every letter of it with the most minute exactness. This done, he appeared to be satisfied, for he replaced his tape and his glass in his pocket.\n\n\"They say that genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains,\" he remarked with a smile. \"It's a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.\"\n\nGregson and Lestrade had watched the man\u0153uvres of their amateur companion with considerable curiosity and some contempt. They evidently failed to appreciate the fact, which I had begun to realize, that Sherlock Holmes's smallest actions were all directed towards some definite and practical end.\n\n\"What do you think of it, sir?\" they both asked.\n\n\"It would be robbing you of the credit of the case if I were to presume to help you,\" remarked my friend. \"You are doing so well now that it would be a pity for anyone to interfere.\" There was a world of sarcasm in his voice as he spoke. \"If you will let me know how your investigations go,\" he continued, \"I shall be happy to give you any help I can. In the meantime I should like to speak to the constable who found the body. Can you give me his name and address?\"\n\nLestrade glanced at his notebook. \"John Rance,\" he said. \"He is off duty now. You will find him at 46, Audley Court, Kennington Park Gate.\"\n\nHolmes took a note of the address.\n\n\"Come along, Doctor,\" he said: \"we shall go and look him up. I'll tell you one thing which may help you in the case,\" he continued, turning to the two detectives. \"There has been murder done, and the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse, square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg. In all probability the murderer had a florid face, and the finger-nails of his right hand were remarkably long. These are only a few indications, but they may assist you.\"\n\nLestrade and Gregson glanced at each other with an incredulous smile.\n\n\"If this man was murdered, how was it done?\" asked the former.\n\n\"Poison,\" said Sherlock Holmes curtly, and strode off. \"One other thing, Lestrade,\" he added, turning round at the door: \" 'Rache,' is the German for 'revenge'; so don't lose your time looking for Miss Rachel.\"\n\nWith which Parthian shot he walked away, leaving the two rivals open mouthed behind him." + }, + { + "title": "What John Rance Had to Tell", + "text": "It was one o'clock when we left No. 3, Lauriston Gardens. Sherlock Holmes led me to the nearest telegraph office, whence he dispatched a long telegram. He then hailed a cab, and ordered the driver to take us to the address given us by Lestrade.\n\n\"There is nothing like first-hand evidence,\" he remarked; \"as a matter of fact, my mind is entirely made up upon the case, but still we may as well learn all that is to be learned.\"\n\n\"You amaze me, Holmes,\" said I. \"Surely you are not as sure as you pretend to be of all those particulars which you gave.\"\n\n\"There's no room for a mistake,\" he answered. \"The very first thing which I observed on arriving there was that a cab had made two ruts with its wheels close to the curb. Now, up to last night, we have had no rain for a week, so that those wheels which left such a deep impression must have been there during the night. There were the marks of the horse's hoofs, too, the outline of one of which was far more clearly cut than that of the other three, showing that that was a new shoe. Since the cab was there after the rain began, and was not there at any time during the morning\u2014I have Gregson's word for that\u2014it follows that it must have been there during the night, and therefore, that it brought those two individuals to the house.\"\n\n\"That seems simple enough,\" said I; \"but how about the other man's height?\"\n\n\"Why, the height of a man, in nine cases out of ten, can be told from the length of his stride. It is a simple calculation enough, though there is no use my boring you with figures. I had this fellow's stride both on the clay outside and on the dust within. Then I had a way of checking my calculation. When a man writes on a wall, his instinct leads him to write above the level of his own eyes. Now that writing was just over six feet from the ground. It was child's play.\"\n\n\"And his age?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, if a man can stride four and a half feet without the smallest effort, he can't be quite in the sere and yellow. That was the breadth of a puddle on the garden walk which he had evidently walked across. Patent-leather boots had gone round, and Square-toes had hopped over. There is no mystery about it at all. I am simply applying to ordinary life a few of those precepts of observation and deduction which I advocated in that article. Is there anything else that puzzles you?\"\n\n\"The finger-nails and the Trichinopoly,\" I suggested.\n\n\"The writing on the wall was done with a man's forefinger dipped in blood. My glass allowed me to observe that the plaster was slightly scratched in doing it, which would not have been the case if the man's nail had been trimmed. I gathered up some scattered ash from the floor. It was dark in colour and flaky\u2014such an ash is only made by a Trichinopoly. I have made a special study of cigar ashes\u2014in fact, I have written a monograph upon the subject. I flatter myself that I can distinguish at a glance the ash of any known brand either of cigar or of tobacco. It is just in such details that the skilled detective differs from the Gregson and Lestrade type.\"\n\n\"And the florid face?\" I asked.\n\n\"Ah, that was a more daring shot, though I have no doubt that I was right. You must not ask me that at the present state of the affair.\"\n\nI passed my hand over my brow. \"My head is in a whirl,\" I remarked; \"the more one thinks of it the more mysterious it grows. How came these two men\u2014if there were two men\u2014into an empty house? What has become of the cabman who drove them? How could one man compel another to take poison? Where did the blood come from? What was the object of the murderer, since robbery had no part in it? How came the woman's ring there? Above all, why should the second man write up the German word RACHE before decamping? I confess that I cannot see any possible way of reconciling all these facts.\"\n\nMy companion smiled approvingly.\n\n\"You sum up the difficulties of the situation succinctly and well,\" he said. \"There is much that is still obscure, though I have quite made up my mind on the main facts. As to poor Lestrade's discovery, it was simply a blind intended to put the police upon a wrong track, by suggesting Socialism and secret societies. It was not done by a German. The A, if you noticed, was printed somewhat after the German fashion. Now, a real German invariably prints in the Latin character, so that we may safely say that this was not written by one, but by a clumsy imitator who overdid his part. It was simply a ruse to divert inquiry into a wrong channel. I'm not going to tell you much more of the case, Doctor. You know a conjurer gets no credit when once he has explained his trick; and if I show you too much of my method of working, you will come to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary individual after all.\"\n\n\"I shall never do that,\" I answered; \"you have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.\"\n\nMy companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.\n\n\"I'll tell you one other thing,\" he said. \"Patent-leathers and Square-toes came in the same cab, and they walked down the pathway together as friendly as possible\u2014arm-in-arm, in all probability. When they got inside, they walked up and down the room\u2014or rather, Patent-leathers stood still while Square-toes walked up and down. I could read all that in the dust; and I could read that as he walked he grew more and more excited. That is shown by the increased length of his strides. He was talking all the while, and working himself up, no doubt, into a fury. Then the tragedy occurred. I've told you all I know myself now, for the rest is mere surmise and conjecture. We have a good working basis, however, on which to start. We must hurry up, for I want to go to Halle's concert to hear Norman Neruda this afternoon.\"\n\nThis conversation had occurred while our cab had been threading its way through a long succession of dingy streets and dreary byways. In the dingiest and dreariest of them our driver suddenly came to a stand. \"That's Audley Court in there,\" he said, pointing to a narrow slit in the line of dead-coloured brick. \"You'll find me here when you come back.\"\n\nAudley Court was not an attractive locality. The narrow passage led us into a quadrangle paved with flags and lined by sordid dwellings. We picked our way among groups of dirty children, and through lines of discoloured linen, until we came to Number 46, the door of which was decorated with a small slip of brass on which the name Rance was engraved. On inquiry we found that the constable was in bed, and we were shown into a little front parlour to await his coming.\n\nHe appeared presently, looking a little irritable at being disturbed in his slumbers. \"I made my report at the office,\" he said.\n\nHolmes took a half-sovereign from his pocket and played with it pensively. \"We thought that we should like to hear it all from your own lips,\" he said.\n\n\"I shall be most happy to tell you anything I can,\" the constable answered, with his eyes upon the little golden disc.\n\n\"Just let us hear it all in your own way as it occurred.\"\n\nRance sat down on the horsehair sofa, and knitted his brows, as though determined not to omit anything in his narrative.\n\n\"I'll tell it ye from the beginning,\" he said. \"My time is from ten at night to six in the morning. At eleven there was a fight at the White Hart; but bar that all was quiet enough on the beat. At one o'clock it began to rain, and I met Harry Murcher\u2014him who has the Holland Grove beat\u2014and we stood together at the corner of Henrietta Street a-talkin'. Presently\u2014maybe about two or a little after\u2014I thought I would take a look round and see that all was right down the Brixton Road. It was precious dirty and lonely. Not a soul did I meet all the way down, though a cab or two went past me. I was a-strollin' down, thinkin' between ourselves how uncommon handy a four of gin hot would be, when suddenly the glint of a light caught my eye in the window of that same house. Now, I knew that them two houses in Lauriston Gardens was empty on account of him that owns them who won't have the drains seed to, though the very last tenant what lived in one of them died o' typhoid fever. I was knocked all in a heap, therefore, at seeing a light in the window, and I suspected as something was wrong. When I got to the door\u2014\"\n\n\"You stopped, and then walked back to the garden gate,\" my companion interrupted. \"What did you do that for?\"\n\nRance gave a violent jump, and stared at Sherlock Holmes with the utmost amazement upon his features.\n\n\"Why, that's true, sir,\" he said; \"though how you come to know it. Heaven only knows. Ye see when I got up to the door, it was so still and so lonesome, that I thought I'd be none the worse for someone with me. I ain't afeared of anything on this side o' the grave; but I thought that maybe it was him that died o' the typhoid inspecting the drains what killed him. The thought gave me a kind o' turn, and I walked back to the gate to see if I could see Murcher's lantern, but there wasn't no sign of him nor of anyone else.\"\n\n\"There was no one in the street?\"\n\n\"Not a livin' soul, sir, nor as much as a dog. Then I pulled myself together and went back and pushed the door open. All was quiet inside, so I went into the room where the light was a-burnin'. There was a candle flickerin' on the mantelpiece\u2014a red wax one\u2014and by its light I saw\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I know all that you saw. You walked round the room several times, and you knelt down by the body, and then you walked through and tried the kitchen door, and then\u2014\"\n\nJohn Rance sprang to his feet with a frightened face and suspicion in his eyes. \"Where was you hid to see all that?\" he cried. \"It seems to me that you knows a deal more than you should.\"\n\nHolmes laughed and threw his card across the table to the constable. \"Don't go arresting me for the murder,\" he said. \"I am one of the hounds and not the wolf; Mr. Gregson or Mr. Lestrade will answer for that. Go on, though. What did you do next?\"\n\nRance resumed, his seat, without, however, losing his mystified expression. \"I went back to the gate and sounded my whistle. That brought Murcher and two more to the spot.\"\n\n\"Was the street empty then?\"\n\n\"Well, it was, as far as anybody that could be of any good goes.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nThe constable's features broadened into a grin. \"I've seen many a drunk chap in my time,\" he said, \"but never anyone so cryin' drunk as that cove. He was at the gate when I came out, a-leanin' up ag'in the railings, and a-singin' at the pitch o' his lungs about Columbine's New-fangled Banner, or some such stuff. He couldn't stand, far less help.\"\n\n\"What sort of a man was he?\" asked Sherlock Holmes.\n\nJohn Rance appeared to be somewhat irritated at this digression. \"He was an uncommon drunk sort o' man,\" he said. \"He'd ha' found hisself in the station if we hadn't been so took up.\"\n\n\"His face\u2014his dress\u2014didn't you notice them?\" Holmes broke in impatiently.\n\n\"I should think I did notice them, seeing that I had to prop him up\u2014me and Murcher between us. He was a long chap, with a red face, the lower part muffled round\u2014\"\n\n\"That will do,\" cried Holmes. \"What became of him?\"\n\n\"We'd enough to do without lookin' after him,\" the policeman said, in an aggrieved voice. \"I'll wager he found his way home all right.\"\n\n\"How was he dressed?\"\n\n\"A brown overcoat.\"\n\n\"Had he a whip in his hand?\"\n\n\"A whip\u2014no.\"\n\n\"He must have left it behind,\" muttered my companion. \"You didn't happen to see or hear a cab after that?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"There's a half-sovereign for you,\" my companion said, standing up and taking his hat. \"I am afraid, Rance, that you will never rise in the force. That head of yours should be for use as well as ornament. You might have gained your sergeant's stripes last night. The man whom you held in your hands is the man who holds the clue of this mystery, and whom we are seeking. There is no use of arguing about it now; I tell you that it is so. Come along, Doctor.\"\n\nWe started off for the cab together, leaving our informant incredulous, but obviously uncomfortable.\n\n\"The blundering fool!\" Holmes said, bitterly, as we drove back to our lodgings. \"Just to think of his having such an incomparable bit of good luck, and not taking advantage of it.\"\n\n\"I am rather in the dark still. It is true that the description of this man tallies with your idea of the second party in this mystery. But why should he come back to the house after leaving it? That is not the way of criminals.\"\n\n\"The ring, man, the ring: that was what he came back for. If we have no other way of catching him, we can always bait our line with the ring. I shall have him, Doctor\u2014I'll lay you two to one that I have him. I must thank you for it all. I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon. There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it. And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What's that little thing of Chopin's she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay.\"\n\nLeaning back in the cab, this amateur bloodhound carolled away like a lark while I meditated upon the many-sidedness of the human mind." + }, + { + "title": "Our Advertisement Brings a Visitor", + "text": "Our morning's exertions had been too much for my weak health, and I was tired out in the afternoon. After Holmes's departure for the concert, I lay down upon the sofa and endeavoured to get a couple of hours' sleep. It was a useless attempt. My mind had been too much excited by all that had occurred, and the strangest fancies and surmises crowded into it. Every time that I closed my eyes I saw before me the distorted, baboon-like countenance of the murdered man. So sinister was the impression which that face had produced upon me that I found it difficult to feel anything but gratitude for him who had removed its owner from the world. If ever human features bespoke vice of the most malignant type, they were certainly those of Enoch J. Drebber, of Cleveland. Still I recognized that justice must be done, and that the depravity of the victim was no condonement in the eyes of the law.\n\nThe more I thought of it the more extraordinary did my companion's hypothesis, that the man had been poisoned, appear. I remembered how he had sniffed his lips, and had no doubt that he had detected something which had given rise to the idea. Then, again, if not poison, what had caused the man's death, since there was neither wound nor marks of strangulation? But, on the other hand, whose blood was that which lay so thickly upon the floor? There were no signs of a struggle, nor had the victim any weapon with which he might have wounded an antagonist. As long as all these questions were unsolved, I felt that sleep would be no easy matter, either for Holmes or myself. His quiet, self-confident manner convinced me that he had already formed a theory which explained all the facts, though what it was I could not for an instant conjecture.\n\nHe was very late in returning\u2014so late that I knew that the concert could not have detained him all the time. Dinner was on the table before he appeared.\n\n\"It was magnificent,\" he said, as he took his seat. \"Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.\"\n\n\"That's rather a broad idea,\" I remarked.\n\n\"One's ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature,\" he answered. \"What's the matter? You're not looking quite yourself. This Brixton Road affair has upset you.\"\n\n\"To tell the truth, it has,\" I said. \"I ought to be more case-hardened after my Afghan experiences. I saw my own comrades hacked to pieces at Maiwand without losing my nerve.\"\n\n\"I can understand. There is a mystery about this which stimulates the imagination; where there is no imagination there is no horror. Have you seen the evening paper?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"It gives a fairly good account of the affair. It does not mention the fact that when the man was raised up a woman's wedding ring fell upon the floor. It is just as well it does not.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Look at this advertisement,\" he answered. \"I had one sent to every paper this morning immediately after the affair.\"\n\nHe threw the paper across to me and I glanced at the place indicated. It was the first announcement in the \"Found\" column. \"In Brixton Road, this morning,\" it ran, \"a plain gold wedding ring, found in the roadway between the White Hart Tavern and Holland Grove. Apply Dr. Watson, 221B, Baker Street, between eight and nine this evening.\"\n\n\"Excuse my using your name,\" he said. \"If I used my own, some of these dunderheads would recognize it, and want to meddle in the affair.\"\n\n\"That is all right,\" I answered. \"But supposing anyone applies, I have no ring.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, you have,\" said he, handing me one. \"This will do very well. It is almost a facsimile.\"\n\n\"And who do you expect will answer this advertisement?\"\n\n\"Why, the man in the brown coat\u2014our florid friend with the square toes. If he does not come himself, he will send an accomplice.\"\n\n\"Would he not consider it as too dangerous?\"\n\n\"Not at all. If my view of the case is correct, and I have every reason to believe that it is, this man would rather risk anything than lose the ring. According to my notion he dropped it while stooping over Drebber's body, and did not miss it at the time. After leaving the house he discovered his loss and hurried back, but found the police already in possession, owing to his own folly in leaving the candle burning. He had to pretend to be drunk in order to allay the suspicions which might have been aroused by his appearance at the gate. Now put yourself in that man's place. On thinking the matter over, it must have occurred to him that it was possible that he had lost the ring in the road after leaving the house. What would he do then? He would eagerly look out for the evening papers in the hope of seeing it among the articles found. His eye, of course, would light upon this. He would be overjoyed. Why should he fear a trap? There would be no reason in his eyes why the finding of the ring should be connected with the murder. He would come. He will come. You shall see him within an hour.\"\n\n\"And then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, you can leave me to deal with him then. Have you any arms?\"\n\n\"I have my old service revolver and a few cartridges.\"\n\n\"You had better clean it and load it. He will be a desperate man; and though I shall take him unawares, it is as well to be ready for anything.\"\n\nI went to my bedroom and followed his advice. When I returned with the pistol, the table had been cleared, and Holmes was engaged in his favourite occupation of scraping upon his violin.\n\n\"The plot thickens,\" he said, as I entered; \"I have just had an answer to my American telegram. My view of the case is the correct one.\"\n\n\"And that is\u2014?\" I asked eagerly.\n\n\"My fiddle would be the better for new strings,\" he remarked. \"Put your pistol in your pocket. When the fellow comes, speak to him in an ordinary way. Leave the rest to me. Don't frighten him by looking at him too hard.\"\n\n\"It is eight o'clock now,\" I said, glancing at my watch.\n\n\"Yes. He will probably be here in a few minutes. Open the door slightly. That will do. Now put the key on the inside. Thank you! This is a queer old book I picked up at a stall yesterday\u2014De Jure inter Gentes\u2014published in Latin at Li\u00e9ge in the Lowlands, in 1642. Charles's head was still firm on his shoulders when this little brown-backed volume was struck off.\"\n\n\"Who is the printer?\"\n\n\"Philippe de Croy, whoever he may have been. On the fly-leaf, in very faded ink, is written 'Ex libris Guliolmi Whyte.' I wonder who William Whyte was. Some pragmatical seventeenth-century lawyer, I suppose. His writing has a legal twist about it. Here comes our man, I think.\"\n\nAs he spoke there was a sharp ring at the bell. Sherlock Holmes rose softly and moved his chair in the direction of the door. We heard the servant pass along the hall, and the sharp click of the latch as she opened it.\n\n\"Does Dr. Watson live here?\" asked a clear but rather harsh voice. We could not hear the servant's reply, but the door closed, and someone began to ascend the stairs. The footfall was an uncertain and shuffling one. A look of surprise passed over the face of my companion as he listened to it. It came slowly along the passage, and there was a feeble tap at the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" I cried.\n\nAt my summons, instead of the man of violence whom we expected, a very old and wrinkled woman hobbled into the apartment. She appeared to be dazzled by the sudden blaze of light, and after dropping a curtsey, she stood blinking at us with her bleared eyes and fumbling in her pocket with nervous, shaky fingers. I glanced at my companion, and his face had assumed such a disconsolate expression that it was all I could do to keep my countenance.\n\nThe old crone drew out an evening paper, and pointed at our advertisement. \"It's this as has brought me, good gentlemen,\" she said, dropping another curtsey; \"a gold wedding ring in the Brixton Road. It belongs to my girl Sally, as was married only this time twelvemonth, which her husband is steward aboard a Union boat, and what he'd say if he comes 'ome and found her without her ring is more than I can think, he being short enough at the best o' times, but more especially when he has the drink. If it please you, she went to the circus last night along with\u2014\"\n\n\"Is that her ring?\" I asked.\n\n\"The Lord be thanked!\" cried the old woman; \"Sally will be a glad woman this night. That's the ring.\"\n\n\"And what may your address be?\" I inquired, taking up a pencil.\n\n\"13, Duncan Street, Houndsditch. A weary way from here.\"\n\n\"The Brixton Road does not lie between any circus and Houndsditch,\" said Sherlock Holmes sharply.\n\nThe old woman faced round and looked keenly at him from her little red-rimmed eyes. \"The gentleman asked me for my address,\" she said. \"Sally lives in lodgings at 3, Mayfield Place, Peckham.\"\n\n\"And your name is\u2014?\"\n\n\"My name is Sawyer\u2014hers is Dennis, which Tom Dennis married her\u2014and a smart, clean lad, too, as long as he's at sea, and no steward in the company more thought of; but when on shore, what with the women and what with liquor shops\u2014\"\n\n\"Here is your ring, Mrs. Sawyer,\" I interrupted, in obedience to a sign from my companion; \"it clearly belongs to your daughter, and I am glad to be able to restore it to the rightful owner.\"\n\nWith many mumbled blessings and protestations of gratitude the old crone packed it away in her pocket, and shuffled off down the stairs. Sherlock Holmes sprang to his feet the moment that she was gone and rushed into his room. He returned in a few seconds enveloped in an ulster and a cravat. \"I'll follow her,\" he said, hurriedly; \"she must be an accomplice, and will lead me to him. Wait up for me.\" The hall door had hardly slammed behind our visitor before Holmes had descended the stair. Looking through the window I could see her walking feebly along the other side, while her pursuer dogged her some little distance behind. \"Either his whole theory is incorrect,\" I thought to myself, \"or else he will be led now to the heart of the mystery.\" There was no need for him to ask me to wait up for him, for I felt that sleep was impossible until I heard the result of his adventure.\n\nIt was close upon nine when he set out. I had no idea how long he might be, but I sat stolidly puffing at my pipe and skipping over the pages of Henri Murger's Vie de Boh\u00e8me. Ten o'clock passed, and I heard the footsteps of the maid as she pattered off to bed. Eleven, and the more stately tread of the landlady passed my door, bound for the same destination. It was close upon twelve before I heard the sharp sound of his latchkey. The instant he entered I saw by his face that he had not been successful. Amusement and chagrin seemed to be struggling for the mastery, until the former suddenly carried the day, and he burst into a hearty laugh.\n\n\"I wouldn't have the Scotland Yarders know it for the world,\" he cried, dropping into his chair; \"I have chaffed them so much that they would never have let me hear the end of it. I can afford to laugh, because I know that I will be even with them in the long run.\"\n\n\"What is it then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, I don't mind telling a story against myself. That creature had gone a little way when she began to limp and show every sign of being footsore. Presently she came to a halt, and hailed a four-wheeler which was passing. I managed to be close to her so as to hear the address, but I need not have been so anxious, for she sang it out loud enough to be heard at the other side of the Street, 'Drive to 13, Duncan Street, Houndsditch,' she cried. This begins to look genuine, I thought, and having seen her safely inside, I perched myself behind. That's an art which every detective should be an expert at. Well, away we rattled, and never drew rein until we reached the street in question. I hopped off before we came to the door, and strolled down the street in an easy, lounging way. I saw the cab pull up. The driver jumped down, and I saw him open the door and stand expectantly. Nothing came out though. When I reached him, he was groping about frantically in the empty cab, and giving vent to the finest assorted collection of oaths that ever I listened to. There was no sign or trace of his passenger, and I fear it will be some time before he gets his fare. On inquiring at Number 13 we found that the house belonged to a respectable paperhanger, named Keswick, and that no one of the name either of Sawyer or Dennis had ever been heard of there.\"\n\n\"You don't mean to say,\" I cried, in amazement, \"that that tottering, feeble old woman was able to get out of the cab while it was in motion, without either you or the driver seeing her?\"\n\n\"Old woman be damned!\" said Sherlock Holmes, sharply. \"We were the old women to be so taken in. It must have been a young man, and an active one, too, besides being an incomparable actor. The get-up was inimitable. He saw that he was followed, no doubt, and used this means of giving me the slip. It shows that the man we are after is not as lonely as I imagined he was, but has friends who are ready to risk something for him. Now, Doctor, you are looking done-up. Take my advice and turn in.\"\n\nI was certainly feeling very weary, so I obeyed his injunction. I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low melancholy wailings of his violin, and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel." + }, + { + "title": "Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do", + "text": "The papers next day were full of the \"Brixton Mystery,\" as they termed it. Each had a long account of the affair, and some had leaders upon it in addition. There was some information in them which was new to me. I still retain in my scrapbook numerous clippings and extracts bearing upon the case. Here is a condensation of a few of them:\n\nThe Daily Telegraph remarked that in the history of crime there had seldom been a tragedy which presented stranger features. The German name of the victim, the absence of all other motive, and the sinister inscription on the wall, all pointed to its perpetration by political refugees and revolutionists. The Socialists had many branches in America, and the deceased had, no doubt, infringed their unwritten laws, and been tracked down by them. After alluding airily to the Vehmgericht, aqua tofana, Carbonari, the Marchioness de Brinvilliers, the Darwinian theory, the principles of Malthus, and the Ratcliff Highway murders, the article concluded by admonishing the government and advocating a closer watch over foreigners in England.\n\nThe Standard commented upon the fact that lawless outrages of the sort usually occurred under a Liberal administration. They arose from the unsettling of the minds of the masses, and the consequent weakening of all authority. The deceased was an American gentleman who had been residing for some weeks in the metropolis. He had stayed at the boarding-house of Madame Charpentier, in Torquay Terrace, Camberwell. He was accompanied in his travels by his private secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson. The two bade adieu to their landlady upon Tuesday, the 4th inst., and departed to Euston Station with the avowed intention of catching the Liverpool express. They were afterwards seen together upon the platform. Nothing more is known of them until Mr. Drebber's body was, as recorded, discovered in an empty house in the Brixton Road, many miles from Euston. How he came there, or how he met his fate, are questions which are still involved in mystery. Nothing is known of the whereabouts of Stangerson. We are glad to learn that Mr. Lestrade and Mr. Gregson, of Scotland Yard, are both engaged upon the case, and it is confidently anticipated that these well-known officers will speedily throw light upon the matter.\n\nThe Daily News observed that there was no doubt as to the crime being a political one. The despotism and hatred of Liberalism which animated the Continental governments had had the effect of driving to our shores a number of men who might have made excellent citizens were they not soured by the recollection of all that they had undergone. Among these men there was a stringent code of honour, any infringement of which was punished by death. Every effort should be made to find the secretary, Stangerson, and to ascertain some particulars of the habits of the deceased. A great step had been gained by the discovery of the address of the house at which he had boarded\u2014a result which was entirely due to the acuteness and energy of Mr. Gregson of Scotland Yard.\n\nSherlock Holmes and I read these notices over together at breakfast, and they appeared to afford him considerable amusement.\n\n\"I told you that, whatever happened, Lestrade and Gregson would be sure to score.\"\n\n\"That depends on how it turns out.\"\n\n\"Oh, bless you, it doesn't matter in the least. If the man is caught, it will be on account of their exertions; if he escapes, it will be in spite of their exertions. It's heads I win and tails you lose. Whatever they do, they will have followers. 'Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l'admire.'\"\n\n\"What on earth is this?\" I cried, for at this moment there came the pattering of many steps in the hall and on the stairs, accompanied by audible expressions of disgust upon the part of our landlady.\n\n\"It's the Baker Street division of the detective police force,\" said my companion gravely; and as he spoke there rushed into the room half a dozen of the dirtiest and most ragged street Arabs that ever I clapped eyes on.\n\n\"'Tention!\" cried Holmes, in a sharp tone, and the six dirty little scoundrels stood in a line like so many disreputable statuettes. \"In future you shall send up Wiggins alone to report, and the rest of you must wait in the street. Have you found it, Wiggins?\"\n\n\"No, sir, we hain't,\" said one of the youths.\n\n\"I hardly expected you would. You must keep on until you do. Here are your wages.\" He handed each of them a shilling. \"Now, off you go, and come back with a better report next time.\"\n\nHe waved his hand, and they scampered away downstairs like so many rats, and we heard their shrill voices next moment in the street.\n\n\"There's more work to be got out of one of those little beggars than out of a dozen of the force,\" Holmes remarked. \"The mere sight of an official-looking person seals men's lips. These youngsters, however, go everywhere and hear everything. They are as sharp as needles, too; all they want is organization.\"\n\n\"Is it on this Brixton case that you are employing them?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes; there is a point which I wish to ascertain. It is merely a matter of time. Hullo! we are going to hear some news now with a vengeance! Here is Gregson coming down the road with beatitude written upon every feature of his face. Bound for us, I know. Yes, he is stopping. There he is!\"\n\nThere was a violent peal at the bell, and in a few seconds the fair-haired detective came up the stairs, three steps at a time, and burst into our sitting-room.\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" he cried, wringing Holmes's unresponsive hand, \"congratulate me! I have made the whole thing as clear as day.\"\n\nA shade of anxiety seemed to me to cross my companion's expressive face.\n\n\"Do you mean that you are on the right track?\" he asked.\n\n\"The right track! Why, sir, we have the man under lock and key.\"\n\n\"And his name is?\"\n\n\"Arthur Charpentier, sub-lieutenant in Her Majesty's navy,\" cried Gregson pompously rubbing his fat hands and inflating his chest.\n\nSherlock Holmes gave a sigh of relief and relaxed into a smile.\n\n\"Take a seat, and try one of these cigars,\" he said. \"We are anxious to know how you managed it. Will you have some whisky and water?\"\n\n\"I don't mind if I do,\" the detective answered. \"The tremendous exertions which I have gone through during the last day or two have worn me out. Not so much bodily exertion, you understand, as the strain upon the mind. You will appreciate that, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for we are both brain-workers.\"\n\n\"You do me too much honour,\" said Holmes, gravely. \"Let us hear how you arrived at this most gratifying result.\"\n\nThe detective seated himself in the armchair, and puffed complacently at his cigar. Then suddenly he slapped his thigh in a paroxysm of amusement.\n\n\"The fun of it is,\" he cried, \"that that fool Lestrade, who thinks himself so smart, has gone off upon the wrong track altogether. He is after the secretary Stangerson, who had no more to do with the crime than the babe unborn. I have no doubt that he has caught him by this time.\"\n\nThe idea tickled Gregson so much that he laughed until he choked.\n\n\"And how did you get your clue?\"\n\n\"Ah, I'll tell you all about it. Of course, Dr. Watson, this is strictly between ourselves. The first difficulty which we had to contend with was the finding of this American's antecedents. Some people would have waited until their advertisements were answered, or until parties came forward and volunteered information. That is not Tobias Gregson's way of going to work. You remember the hat beside the dead man?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Holmes; \"by John Underwood and Sons, 129, Camberwell Road.\"\n\nGregson looked quite crestfallen.\n\n\"I had no idea that you noticed that,\" he said. \"Have you been there?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" cried Gregson, in a relieved voice; \"you should never neglect a chance, however small it may seem.\"\n\n\"To a great mind, nothing is little,\" remarked Holmes, sententiously.\n\n\"Well, I went to Underwood, and asked him if he had sold a hat of that size and description. He looked over his books, and came on it at once. He had sent the hat to a Mr. Drebber, residing at Charpentier's Boarding Establishment, Torquay Terrace. Thus I got at his address.\"\n\n\"Smart\u2014very smart!\" murmured Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"I next called upon Madame Charpentier,\" continued the detective. \"I found her very pale and distressed. Her daughter was in the room, too\u2014an uncommonly fine girl she is, too; she was looking red about the eyes and her lips trembled as I spoke to her. That didn't escape my notice. I began to smell a rat. You know the feeling, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, when you come upon the right scent\u2014a kind of thrill in your nerves. 'Have you heard of the mysterious death of your late boarder Mr. Enoch J. Drebber, of Cleveland?' I asked.\n\n\"The mother nodded. She didn't seem able to get out a word. The daughter burst into tears. I felt more than ever that these people knew something of the matter.\n\n\"'At what o'clock did Mr. Drebber leave your house for the train?' I asked.\n\n\"'At eight o'clock,' she said, gulping in her throat to keep down her agitation. 'His secretary, Mr. Stangerson, said that there were two trains\u2014one at 9:15 and one at 11. He was to catch the first.'\n\n\"'And was that the last which you saw of him?'\n\n\"A terrible change came over the woman's face as I asked the question. Her features turned perfectly livid. It was some seconds before she could get out the single word 'Yes'\u2014and when it did come it was in a husky, unnatural tone.\n\n\"There was silence for a moment, and then the daughter spoke in a calm, clear voice.\n\n\"'No good can ever come of falsehood, mother,' she said. 'Let us be frank with this gentleman. We did see Mr. Drebber again.'\n\n\"'God forgive you!' cried Madame Charpentier, throwing up her hands and sinking back in her chair. 'You have murdered your brother.'\n\n\"'Arthur would rather that we spoke the truth,' the girl answered firmly.\n\n\"'You had best tell me all about it now,' I said. 'Half confidences are worse than none. Besides, you do not know how much we know of it.'\n\n\"'On your head be it, Alice!' cried her mother; and then, turning to me, 'I will tell you all, sir. Do not imagine that my agitation on behalf of my son arises from any fear lest he should have had a hand in this terrible affair. He is utterly innocent of it. My dread is, however, that in your eyes and in the eyes of others he may appear to be compromised. That, however, is surely impossible. His high character, his profession, his antecedents would all forbid it.'\n\n\"'Your best way is to make a clean breast of the facts,' I answered. 'Depend upon it, if your son is innocent he will be none the worse.'\n\n\"'Perhaps, Alice, you had better leave us together,' she said, and her daughter withdrew. 'Now, sir,' she continued, 'I had no intention of telling you all this, but since my poor daughter has disclosed it I have no alternative. Having once decided to speak, I will tell you all without omitting any particular.'\n\n\"'It is your wisest course,' said I.\n\n\"'Mr. Drebber has been with us nearly three weeks. He and his secretary, Mr. Stangerson, had been travelling on the Continent. I noticed a Copenhagen label upon each of their trunks, showing that that had been their last stopping place. Stangerson was a quiet, reserved man, but his employer, I am sorry to say, was far otherwise. He was coarse in his habits and brutish in his ways. The very night of his arrival he became very much the worse for drink, and, indeed, after twelve o'clock in the day he could hardly ever be said to be sober. His manners towards the maid-servants were disgustingly free and familiar. Worst of all, he speedily assumed the same attitude towards my daughter, Alice, and spoke to her more than once in a way which, fortunately, she is too innocent to understand. On one occasion he actually seized her in his arms and embraced her\u2014an outrage which caused his own secretary to reproach him for his unmanly conduct.'\n\n\"'But why did you stand all this?' I asked. 'I suppose that you can get rid of your boarders when you wish.'\n\n\"Mrs. Charpentier blushed at my pertinent question. 'Would to God that I had given him notice on the very day that he came,' she said. 'But it was a sore temptation. They were paying a pound a day each\u2014fourteen pounds a week, and this is the slack season. I am a widow, and my boy in the Navy has cost me much. I grudged to lose the money. I acted for the best. This last was too much, however, and I gave him notice to leave on account of it. That was the reason of his going.'\n\n\"'Well?'\n\n\"'My heart grew light when I saw him drive away. My son is on leave just now, but I did not tell him anything of all this, for his temper is violent, and he is passionately fond of his sister. When I closed the door behind them a load seemed to be lifted from my mind. Alas, in less than an hour there was a ring at the bell, and I learned that Mr. Drebber had returned. He was much excited, and evidently the worse for drink. He forced his way into the room, where I was sitting with my daughter, and made some incoherent remark about having missed his train. He then turned to Alice, and before my very face, proposed to her that she should fly with him. \"You are of age,\" he said, \"and there is no law to stop you. I have money enough and to spare. Never mind the old girl here, but come along with me now straight away. You shall live like a princess.\" Poor Alice was so frightened that she shrunk away from him, but he caught her by the wrist and endeavoured to draw her towards the door. I screamed, and at that moment my son Arthur came into the room. What happened then I do not know. I heard oaths and the confused sounds of a scuffle. I was too terrified to raise my head. When I did look up I saw Arthur standing in the doorway laughing, with a stick in his hand. \"I don't think that fine fellow will trouble us again,\" he said. \"I will just go after him and see what he does with himself.\" With those words he took his hat and started off down the street. The next morning we heard of Mr. Drebber's mysterious death.'\n\n\"This statement came from Mrs. Charpentier's lips with many gasps and pauses. At times she spoke so low that I could hardly catch the words. I made shorthand notes of all that she said, however, so that there should be no possibility of a mistake.\"\n\n\"It's quite exciting,\" said Sherlock Holmes, with a yawn. \"What happened next?\"\n\n\"When Mrs. Charpentier paused,\" the detective continued, \"I saw that the whole case hung upon one point. Fixing her with my eye in a way which I always found effective with women, I asked her at what hour her son returned.\n\n\"'I do not know,' she answered.\n\n\"'Not know?'\n\n\"'No; he has a latchkey, and he let himself in.'\n\n\"'After you went to bed?'\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'When did you go to bed?'\n\n\"'About eleven.'\n\n\"'So your son was gone at least two hours?'\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'Possibly four or five?'\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'What was he doing during that time?'\n\n\"'I do not know,' she answered, turning white to her very lips.\n\n\"Of course after that there was nothing more to be done. I found out where Lieutenant Charpentier was, took two officers with me, and arrested him. When I touched him on the shoulder and warned him to come quietly with us, he answered us as bold as brass, 'I suppose you are arresting me for being concerned in the death of that scoundrel Drebber,' he said. We had said nothing to him about it, so that his alluding to it had a most suspicious aspect.\"\n\n\"Very,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"He still carried the heavy stick which the mother described him as having with him when he followed Drebber. It was a stout oak cudgel.\"\n\n\"What is your theory, then?\"\n\n\"Well, my theory is that he followed Drebber as far as the Brixton Road. When there, a fresh altercation arose between them, in the course of which Drebber received a blow from the stick, in the pit of the stomach perhaps, which killed him without leaving any mark. The night was so wet that no one was about, so Charpentier dragged the body of his victim into the empty house. As to the candle, and the blood, and the writing on the wall, and the ring, they may all be so many tricks to throw the police on to the wrong scent.\"\n\n\"Well done!\" said Holmes in an encouraging voice. \"Really, Gregson, you are getting along. We shall make something of you yet.\"\n\n\"I flatter myself that I have managed it rather neatly,\" the detective answered, proudly. \"The young man volunteered a statement, in which he said that after following Drebber some time, the latter perceived him, and took a cab in order to get away from him. On his way home he met an old shipmate, and took a long walk with him. On being asked where this old shipmate lived, he was unable to give any satisfactory reply. I think the whole case fits together uncommonly well. What amuses me is to think of Lestrade, who had started off upon the wrong scent. I am afraid he won't make much of it. Why, by Jove, here's the very man himself!\"\n\nIt was indeed Lestrade, who had ascended the stairs while we were talking, and who now entered the room. The assurance and jauntiness which generally marked his demeanour and dress were, however, wanting. His face was disturbed and troubled, while his clothes were disarranged and untidy. He had evidently come with the intention of consulting with Sherlock Holmes, for on perceiving his colleague he appeared to be embarrassed and put out. He stood in the centre of the room, fumbling nervously with his hat and uncertain what to do. \"This is a most extraordinary case,\" he said at last\u2014\"a most incomprehensible affair.\"\n\n\"Ah, you find it so, Mr. Lestrade!\" cried Gregson, triumphantly. \"I thought you would come to that conclusion. Have you managed to find the secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson?\"\n\n\"The secretary, Mr. Joseph Stangerson,\" said Lestrade, gravely, \"was murdered at Halliday's Private Hotel about six o'clock this morning.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Light in the Darkness", + "text": "The intelligence with which Lestrade greeted us was so momentous and so unexpected that we were all three fairly dumfounded. Gregson sprang out of his chair and upset the remainder of his whisky and water. I stared in silence at Sherlock Holmes, whose lips were compressed and his brows drawn down over his eyes.\n\n\"Stangerson too!\" he muttered. \"The plot thickens.\"\n\n\"It was quite thick enough before,\" grumbled Lestrade, taking a chair, \"I seem to have dropped into a sort of council of war.\"\n\n\"Are you\u2014are you sure of this piece of intelligence?\" stammered Gregson.\n\n\"I have just come from his room,\" said Lestrade. \"I was the first to discover what had occurred.\"\n\n\"We have been hearing Gregson's view of the matter,\" Holmes observed. \"Would you mind letting us know what you have seen and done?\"\n\n\"I have no objection,\" Lestrade answered, seating himself. \"I freely confess that I was of the opinion that Stangerson was concerned in the death of Drebber. This fresh development has shown me that I was completely mistaken. Full of the one idea, I set myself to find out what had become of the secretary. They had been seen together at Euston Station about half-past eight on the evening of the 3rd. At two in the morning Drebber had been found in the Brixton Road. The question which confronted me was to find out how Stangerson had been employed between 8:30 and the time of the crime, and what had become of him afterwards. I telegraphed to Liverpool, giving a description of the man, and warning them to keep a watch upon the American boats. I then set to work calling upon all the hotels and lodging-houses in the vicinity of Euston. You see, I argued that if Drebber and his companion had become separated, the natural course for the latter would be to put up somewhere in the vicinity for the night, and then to hang about the station again next morning.\"\n\n\"They would be likely to agree on some meeting-place beforehand,\" remarked Holmes.\n\n\"So it proved. I spent the whole of yesterday evening in making inquiries entirely without avail. This morning I began very early, and at eight o'clock I reached Halliday's Private Hotel, in Little George Street. On my inquiry as to whether a Mr. Stangerson was living there, they at once answered me in the affirmative.\n\n\"'No doubt you are the gentleman whom he was expecting,' they said. 'He has been waiting for a gentleman for two days.'\n\n\"'Where is he now?' I asked.\n\n\"'He is upstairs in bed. He wished to be called at nine.'\n\n\"'I will go up and see him at once,' I said.\n\n\"It seemed to me that my sudden appearance might shake his nerves and lead him to say something unguarded. The boots volunteered to show me the room: it was on the second floor, and there was a small corridor leading up to it. The boots pointed out the door to me, and was about to go downstairs again when I saw something that made me feel sickish, in spite of my twenty years' experience. From under the door there curled a little red ribbon of blood, which had meandered across the passage and formed a little pool along the skirting at the other side. I gave a cry, which brought the boots back. He nearly fainted when he saw it. The door was locked on the inside, but we put our shoulders to it, and knocked it in. The window of the room was open, and beside the window, all huddled up, lay the body of a man in his nightdress. He was quite dead, and had been for some time, for his limbs were rigid and cold. When we turned him over, the boots recognized him at once as being the same gentleman who had engaged the room under the name of Joseph Stangerson. The cause of death was a deep stab in the left side, which must have penetrated the heart. And now comes the strangest part of the affair. What do you suppose was above the murdered man?\"\n\nI felt a creeping of the flesh, and a presentiment of coming horror, even before Sherlock Holmes answered.\n\n\"The word RACHE, written in letters of blood,\" he said.\n\n\"That was it,\" said Lestrade, in an awestruck voice; and we were all silent for a while.\n\nThere was something so methodical and so incomprehensible about the deeds of this unknown assassin, that it imparted a fresh ghastliness to his crimes. My nerves, which were steady enough on the field of battle, tingled as I thought of it.\n\n\"The man was seen,\" continued Lestrade. \"A milk boy, passing on his way to the dairy, happened to walk down the lane which leads from the mews at the back of the hotel. He noticed that a ladder, which usually lay there, was raised against one of the windows of the second floor, which was wide open. After passing, he looked back and saw a man descend the ladder. He came down so quietly and openly that the boy imagined him to be some carpenter or joiner at work in the hotel. He took no particular notice of him, beyond thinking in his own mind that it was early for him to be at work. He has an impression that the man was tall, had a reddish face, and was dressed in a long, brownish coat. He must have stayed in the room some little time after the murder, for we found blood-stained water in the basin, where he had washed his hands, and marks on the sheets where he had deliberately wiped his knife.\"\n\nI glanced at Holmes on hearing the description of the murderer which tallied so exactly with his own. There was, however, no trace of exultation or satisfaction upon his face.\n\n\"Did you find nothing in the room which could furnish a clue to the murderer?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nothing. Stangerson had Drebber's purse in his pocket, but it seems that this was usual, as he did all the paying. There was eighty-odd pounds in it, but nothing had been taken. Whatever the motives of these extraordinary crimes, robbery is certainly not one of them. There were no papers or memoranda in the murdered man's pocket, except a single telegram, dated from Cleveland about a month ago, and containing the words, 'J. H. is in Europe.' There was no name appended to this message.\"\n\n\"And there was nothing else?\" Holmes asked.\n\n\"Nothing of any importance. The man's novel, with which he had read himself to sleep, was lying upon the bed, and his pipe was on a chair beside him. There was a glass of water on the table, and on the window-sill a small chip ointment box containing a couple of pills.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes sprang from his chair with an exclamation of delight. \"The last link,\" he cried, exultantly. \"My case is complete.\"\n\nThe two detectives stared at him in amazement.\n\n\"I have now in my hands,\" my companion said, confidently, \"all the threads which have formed such a tangle. There are, of course, details to be filled in, but I am as certain of all the main facts, from the time that Drebber parted from Stangerson at the station, up to the discovery of the body of the latter, as if I had seen them with my own eyes. I will give you a proof of my knowledge. Could you lay your hand upon those pills?\"\n\n\"I have them,\" said Lestrade, producing a small white box; \"I took them and the purse and the telegram, intending to have them put in a place of safety at the police station. It was the merest chance my taking these pills, for I am bound to say that I do not attach any importance to them.\"\n\n\"Give them here,\" said Holmes. \"Now, Doctor,\" turning to me, \"are those ordinary pills?\"\n\nThey certainly were not. They were of a pearly gray colour, small, round, and almost transparent against the light. \"From their lightness and transparency, I should imagine that they are soluble in water,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Precisely so,\" answered Holmes. \"Now would you mind going down and fetching that poor little devil of a terrier which has been bad so long, and which the landlady wanted you to put out of its pain yesterday?\"\n\nI went downstairs and carried the dog upstairs in my arms. Its laboured breathing and glazing eye showed that it was not far from its end. Indeed, its snow-white muzzle proclaimed that it had already exceeded the usual term of canine existence. I placed it upon a cushion on the rug.\n\n\"I will now cut one of these pills in two,\" said Holmes, and drawing his penknife he suited the action to the word. \"One half we return into the box for future purposes. The other half I will place in this wineglass, in which is a teaspoonful of water. You perceive that our friend, the doctor, is right, and that it readily dissolves.\"\n\n\"This may be very interesting,\" said Lestrade, in the injured tone of one who suspects that he is being laughed at; \"I cannot see, however, what it has to do with the death of Mr. Joseph Stangerson.\"\n\n\"Patience, my friend, patience! You will find in time that it has everything to do with it. I shall now add a little milk to make the mixture palatable, and on presenting it to the dog we find that he laps it up readily enough.\"\n\nAs he spoke he turned the contents of the wineglass into a saucer and placed it in front of the terrier, who speedily licked it dry. Sherlock Holmes's earnest demeanour had so far convinced us that we all sat in silence, watching the animal intently, and expecting some startling effect. None such appeared, however. The dog continued to lie stretched upon the cushion, breathing in a laboured way, but apparently neither the better nor the worse for its draught.\n\nHolmes had taken out his watch, and as minute followed minute without result, an expression of the utmost chagrin and disappointment appeared upon his features. He gnawed his lip, drummed his fingers upon the table, and showed every other symptom of acute impatience. So great was his emotion that I felt sincerely sorry for him, while the two detectives smiled derisively, by no means displeased at this check which he had met.\n\n\"It can't be a coincidence,\" he cried, at last springing from his chair and pacing wildly up and down the room; \"it is impossible that it should be a mere coincidence. The very pills which I suspected in the case of Drebber are actually found after the death of Stangerson. And yet they are inert. What can it mean? Surely my whole chain of reasoning cannot have been false. It is impossible! And yet this wretched dog is none the worse. Ah, I have it! I have it!\" With a perfect shriek of delight he rushed to the box, cut the other pill in two, dissolved it, added milk, and presented it to the terrier. The unfortunate creature's tongue seemed hardly to have been moistened in it before it gave a convulsive shiver in every limb, and lay as rigid and lifeless as if it had been struck by lightning.\n\nSherlock Holmes drew a long breath, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead. \"I should have more faith,\" he said; \"I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears to be opposed to a long train of deductions, it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation. Of the two pills in that box, one was of the most deadly poison, and the other was entirely harmless. I ought to have known that before ever I saw the box at all.\"\n\nThis last statement appeared to me to be so startling that I could hardly believe that he was in his sober senses. There was the dead dog, however, to prove that his conjecture had been correct. It seemed to me that the mists in my own mind were gradually clearing away, and I began to have a dim, vague perception of the truth.\n\n\"All this seems strange to you,\" continued Holmes, \"because you failed at the beginning of the inquiry to grasp the importance of the single real clue which was presented to you. I had the good fortune to seize upon that, and everything which has occurred since then has served to confirm my original supposition, and, indeed, was the logical sequence of it. Hence things which have perplexed you and made the case more obscure have served to enlighten me and to strengthen my conclusions. It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious, because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outr\u00e9 and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.\"\n\nMr. Gregson, who had listened to this address with considerable impatience, could contain himself no longer. \"Look here, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" he said, \"we are all ready to acknowledge that you are a smart man, and that you have your own methods of working. We want something more than mere theory and preaching now, though. It is a case of taking the man. I have made my case out, and it seems I was wrong. Young Charpentier could not have been engaged in this second affair. Lestrade went after his man, Stangerson, and it appears that he was wrong too. You have thrown out hints here, and hints there, and seem to know more than we do, but the time has come when we feel that we have a right to ask you straight how much you do know of the business. Can you name the man who did it?\"\n\n\"I cannot help feeling that Gregson is right, sir,\" remarked Lestrade. \"We have both tried, and we have both failed. You have remarked more than once since I have been in the room that you had all the evidence which you require. Surely you will not withhold it any longer.\"\n\n\"Any delay in arresting the assassin,\" I observed, \"might give him time to perpetrate some fresh atrocity.\"\n\nThus pressed by us all, Holmes showed signs of irresolution. He continued to walk up and down the room with his head sunk on his chest and his brows drawn down, as was his habit when lost in thought.\n\n\"There will be no more murders,\" he said at last, stopping abruptly and facing us. \"You can put that consideration out of the question. You have asked me if I know the name of the assassin. I do. The mere knowing of his name is a small thing, however, compared with the power of laying our hands upon him. This I expect very shortly to do. I have good hopes of managing it through my own arrangements; but it is a thing which needs delicate handling, for we have a shrewd and desperate man to deal with, who is supported, as I have had occasion to prove, by another who is as clever as himself. As long as this man has no idea that anyonecan have a clue there is some chance of securing him; but if he had the slightest suspicion, he would change his name, and vanish in an instant among the four million inhabitants of this great city. Without meaning to hurt either of your feelings, I am bound to say that I consider these men to be more than a match for the official force, and that is why I have not asked your assistance. If I fail, I shall, of course, incur all the blame due to this omission; but that I am prepared for. At present I am ready to promise that the instant that I can communicate with you without endangering my own combinations, I shall do so.\"\n\nGregson and Lestrade seemed to be far from satisfied by this assurance, or by the depreciating allusion to the detective police. The former had flushed up to the roots of his flaxen hair, while the other's beady eyes glistened with curiosity and resentment. Neither of them had time to speak, however, before there was a tap at the door, and the spokesman of the street Arabs, young Wiggins, introduced his insignificant and unsavoury person.\n\n\"Please, sir,\" he said, touching his forelock, \"I have the cab downstairs.\"\n\n\"Good boy,\" said Holmes, blandly. \"Why don't you introduce this pattern at Scotland Yard?\" he continued, taking a pair of steel handcuffs from a drawer. \"See how beautifully the spring works. They fasten in an instant.\"\n\n\"The old pattern is good enough,\" remarked Lestrade, \"if we can only find the man to put them on.\"\n\n\"Very good, very good,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"The cabman may as well help me with my boxes. Just ask him to step up, Wiggins.\"\n\nI was surprised to find my companion speaking as though he were about to set out on a journey, since he had not said anything to me about it. There was a small portmanteau in the room, and this he pulled out and began to strap. He was busily engaged at it when the cabman entered the room.\n\n\"Just give me a help with this buckle, cabman,\" he said, kneeling over his task, and never turning his head.\n\nThe fellow came forward with a somewhat sullen, defiant air, and put down his hands to assist. At that instant there was a sharp click, the jangling of metal, and Sherlock Holmes sprang to his feet again.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he cried, with flashing eyes, \"let me introduce you to Mr. Jefferson Hope, the murderer of Enoch Drebber and of Joseph Stangerson.\"\n\nThe whole thing occurred in a moment\u2014so quickly that I had no time to realize it. I have a vivid recollection of that instant, of Holmes's triumphant expression and the ring of his voice, of the cabman's dazed, savage face, as he glared at the glittering handcuffs, which had appeared as if by magic upon his wrists. For a second or two we might have been a group of statues. Then with an inarticulate roar of fury, the prisoner wrenched himself free from Holmes's grasp, and hurled himself through the window. Woodwork and glass gave way before him; but before he got quite through, Gregson, Lestrade, and Holmes sprang upon him like so many staghounds. He was dragged back into the room, and then commenced a terrific conflict. So powerful and so fierce was he that the four of us were shaken off again and again. He appeared to have the convulsive strength of a man in an epileptic fit. His face and hands were terribly mangled by his passage through the glass, but loss of blood had no effect in diminishing his resistance. It was not until Lestrade succeeded in getting his hand inside his neckcloth and half-strangling him that we made him realize that his struggles were of no avail; and even then we felt no security until we had pinioned his feet as well as his hands. That done, we rose to our feet breathless and panting.\n\n\"We have his cab,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"It will serve to take him to Scotland Yard. And now, gentlemen,\" he continued, with a pleasant smile, \"we have reached the end of our little mystery. You are very welcome to put any questions that you like to me now, and there is no danger that I will refuse to answer them.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE COUNTRY OF THE SAINTS", + "text": "[ On the Great Alkali Plain ]\n\nIn the central portion of the great North American Continent there lies an arid and repulsive desert, which for many a long year served as a barrier against the advance of civilization. From the Sierra Nevada to Nebraska, and from the Yellowstone River in the north to the Colorado upon the south, is a region of desolation and silence. Nor is Nature always in one mood throughout this grim district. It comprises snow-capped and lofty mountains, and dark and gloomy valleys. There are swift-flowing rivers which dash through jagged canons; and there are enormous plains, which in winter are white with snow, and in summer are gray with the saline alkali dust. They all preserve, however, the common characteristics of barrenness, inhospitality, and misery.\n\nThere are no inhabitants of this land of despair. A band of Pawnees or of Blackfeet may occasionally traverse it in order to reach other hunting-grounds, but the hardiest of the braves are glad to lose sight of those awe-some plains, and to find themselves once more upon their prairies. The coyote skulks among the scrub, the buzzard flaps heavily through the air, and the clumsy grizzly bear lumbers through the dark ravines, and picks up such sustenance as it can amongst the rocks. These are the sole dwellers in the wilderness.\n\nIn the whole world there can be no more dreary view than that from the northern slope of the Sierra Blanco. As far as the eye can reach stretches the great flat plain-land, all dusted over with patches of alkali, and intersected by clumps of the dwarfish chaparral bushes. On the extreme verge of the horizon lie a long chain of mountain peaks, with their rugged summits flecked with snow. In this great stretch of country there is no sign of life, nor of anything appertaining to life. There is no bird in the steel-blue heaven, no movement upon the dull, gray earth\u2014above all, there is absolute silence. Listen as one may, there is no shadow of a sound in all that mighty wilderness; nothing but silence\u2014complete and heart-subduing silence.\n\nIt has been said there is nothing appertaining to life upon the broad plain. That is hardly true. Looking down from the Sierra Blanco, one sees a pathway traced out across the desert, which winds away and is lost in the extreme distance. It is rutted with wheels and trodden down by the feet of many adventurers. Here and there there are scattered white objects which glisten in the sun, and stand out against the dull deposit of alkali. Approach, and examine, them! They are bones: some large and coarse, others smaller and more delicate. The former have belonged to oxen, and the latter to men. For fifteen hundred miles one may trace this ghastly caravan route by these scattered remains of those who had fallen by the wayside.\n\nLooking down on this very scene, there stood upon the fourth of May, eighteen hundred and forty-seven, a solitary traveller. His appearance was such that he might have been the very gemus or demon of the region. An observer would have found it difficult to say whether he was nearer to forty or to sixty. His face was lean and haggard, and the brown parchment-like skin was drawn tightly over the projecting bones; his long, brown hair and beard were all flecked and dashed with white; his eyes were sunken in his head, and burned with an unnatural lustre; while the hand which grasped his rifle was hardly more fleshy than that of a skeleton. As he stood, he leaned upon his weapon for support, and yet his tall figure and the massive framework of his bones suggested a wiry and vigorous constitution. His gaunt face, however, and his clothes, which hung so baggily over his shrivelled limbs, proclaimed what it was that gave him that senile and decrepit appearance. The man was dying\u2014dying from hunger and from thirst.\n\nHe had toiled painfully down the ravine, and on to this little elevation, in the vain hope of seeing some signs of water. Now the great salt plain stretched before his eyes, and the distant belt of savage mountains, without a sign anywhere of plant or tree, which might indicate the presence of moisture. In all that broad landscape there was no gleam of hope. North, and east, and west he looked with wild, questioning eyes, and then he realized that his wanderings had come to an end, and that there, on that barren crag, he was about to die. \"Why not here, as well as in a feather bed, twenty years hence?\" he muttered, as he seated himself in the shelter of a boulder.\n\nBefore sitting down, he had deposited upon the ground his useless rifle, and also a large bundle tied up in a gray shawl, which he had carried slung over his right shoulder. It appeared to be somewhat too heavy for his strength, for in lowering it, it came down on the ground with some little violence. Instantly there broke from the gray parcel a little moaning cry, and from it there protruded a small, scared face, with very bright brown eyes, and two little speckled dimpled fists.\n\n\"You've hurt me!\" said a childish voice, reproachfully.\n\n\"Have I, though?\" the man answered penitently; \"I didn't go for to do it.\" As he spoke he unwrapped the gray shawl and extricated a pretty little girl of about five years of age, whose dainty shoes and smart pink frock with its little linen apron, all bespoke a mother's care. The child was pale and wan, but her healthy arms and legs showed that she had suffered less than her companion.\n\n\"How is it now?\" he answered anxiously, for she was still rubbing the tousy golden curls which covered the back of her head.\n\n\"Kiss it and make it well,\" she said, with perfect gravity, showing the injured part up to him. \"That's what mother used to do. Where's mother?\"\n\n\"Mother's gone. I guess you'll see her before long.\"\n\n\"Gone, eh!\" said the little girl. \"Funny, she didn't say good-bye; she 'most always did if she was just goin' over to auntie's for tea, and now she's been away three days. Say, it's awful dry, ain't it? Ain't there no water nor nothing to eat?\"\n\n\"No, there ain't nothing, dearie. You'll just need to be patient awhile, and then you'll be all right. Put your head up ag'in me like that, and then you'll feel bullier. It ain't easy to talk when your lips is like leather, but I guess I'd best let you know how the cards lie. What's that you've got?\"\n\n\"Pretty things! fine things!\" cried the little girl enthusiastically, holding up two glittering fragments of mica. \"When we goes back to home I'll give them to brother Bob.\"\n\n\"You'll see prettier things than them soon,\" said the man confidently. \"You just wait a bit. I was going to tell you though\u2014you remember when we left the river?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\"Well, we reckoned we'd strike another river soon, d'ye see. But there was somethin' wrong; compasses, or map, or somethin', and it didn't turn up. Water ran out. Just except a little drop for the likes of you, and\u2014and\u2014\"\n\n\"And you couldn't wash yourself,\" interrupted his companion gravely, staring up at his grimy visage.\n\n\"No, nor drink. And Mr. Bender, he was the fust to go, and then Indian Pete, and then Mrs. McGregor, and then Johnny Hones, and then, dearie, your mother.\"\n\n\"Then mother's a deader too,\" cried the little girl, dropping her face in her pinafore and sobbing bitterly.\n\n\"Yes, they all went except you and me. Then I thought there was some chance of water in this direction, so I heaved you over my shoulder and we tramped it together. It don't seem as though we've improved matters. There's an almighty small chance for us now!\"\n\n\"Do you mean that we are going to die too?\" asked the child, checking her sobs, and raising her tear-stained face.\n\n\"I guess that's about the size of it.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you say so before?\" she said, laughing gleefully. \"You gave me such a fright. Why, of course, now as long as we die we'll be with mother again.\"\n\n\"Yes, you will, dearie.\"\n\n\"And you too. I'll tell her how awful good you've been. I'll bet she meets us at the door of heaven with a big pitcher of water, and a lot of buckwheat cakes, hot, and toasted on both sides, like Bob and me was fond of. How long will it be first?\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2014not very long.\" The man's eyes were fixed upon the northern horizon. In the blue vault of the heaven there had appeared three little specks which increased in size every moment, so rapidly did they approach. They speedily resolved themselves into three large brown birds, which circled over the heads of the two wanderers, and then settled upon some rocks which overlooked them. They were buzzards, the vultures of the West, whose coming is the forerunner of death.\n\n\"Cocks and hens,\" cried the little girl gleefully, pointing at their ill-omened forms, and clapping her hands to make them rise. \"Say, did God make this country?\"\n\n\"Of course He did,\" said her companion, rather startled by this unexpected question.\n\n\"He made the country down in Illinois, and He made the Missouri,\" the little girl continued. \"I guess somebody else made the country in these parts. It's not nearly so well done. They forgot the water and the trees.\"\n\n\"What would ye think of offering up prayer?\" the man asked diffidently.\n\n\"It ain't night yet,\" she answered.\n\n\"It don't matter. It ain't quite regular, but He won't mind that, you bet. You say over them ones that you used to say every night in the wagon when we was on the plains.\"\n\n\"Why don't you say some yourself?\" the child asked, with wondering eyes.\n\n\"I disremember them,\" he answered. \"I hain't said none since I was half the height o' that gun. I guess it's never too late. You say them out, and I'll stand by and come in on the choruses.\"\n\n\"Then you'll need to kneel down, and me too,\" she said, laying the shawl out for that purpose. \"You've got to put your hands up like this. It makes you feel kind of good.\"\n\nIt was a strange sight, had there been anything but the buzzards to see it. Side by side on the narrow shawl knelt the two wanderers, the little prattling child and the reckless, hardened adventurer. Her chubby face and his haggard, angular visage were both turned up to the cloudless heaven in heartfelt entreaty to that dread Being with whom they were face to face, while the two voices\u2014the one thin and clear, the other deep and harsh\u2014united in the entreaty for mercy and forgiveness. The prayer finished, they resumed their seat in the shadow of the boulder until the child fell asleep, nestling upon the broad breast of her protector. He watched over her slumber for some time, but Nature proved to be too strong for him. For three days and three nights he had allowed himself neither rest nor repose. Slowly the eyelids drooped over the tired eyes, and the head sunk lower and lower upon the breast, until the man's grizzled beard was mixed with the gold tresses of his companion, and both slept the same deep and dreamless slumber.\n\nHad the wanderer remained awake for another half-hour a strange sight would have met his eyes. Far away on the extreme verge of the alkali plain there rose up a little spray of dust; very slight at first, and hardly to be distinguished from the mists of the distance, but gradually growing higher and broader until it formed a solid, well-defined cloud. This cloud continued to increase in size until it became evident that it could only be raised by a great multitude of moving creatures. In more fertile spots the observer would have come to the conclusion that one of those great herds of bisons which graze upon the prairie land was approaching him. This was obviously impossible in these arid wilds. As the whirl of dust drew nearer to the solitary bluff upon which the two castaways were reposing, the canvas-covered tilts of wagons and the figures of armed horsemen began to show up through the haze, and the apparition revealed itself as being a great caravan upon its journey for the West. But what a caravan! When the head of it had reached the base of the mountains, the rear was not yet visible on the horizon. Right across the enormous plain stretched the straggling array, wagons and carts, men on horseback, and men on foot. Innumerable women who staggered along under burdens, and children who toddled beside the wagons or peeped out from under the white coverings. This was evidently no ordinary party of immigrants, but rather some nomad people who had been compelled from stress of circumstances to seek themselves a new country. There rose through the clear air a confused clattering and rumbling from this great mass of humanity, with the creaking of wheels and the neighing of horses. Loud as it was, it was not sufficient to rouse the two tired wayfarers above them.\n\nAt the head of the column there rode a score or more of grave, iron-faced men, clad in sombre homespun garments and armed with rifles. On reaching the base of the bluff they halted, and held a short council among themselves.\n\n\"The wells are to the right, my brothers,\" said one, a hard-lipped, clean-shaven man with grizzly hair.\n\n\"To the right of the Sierra Blanco\u2014so we shall reach the Rio Grande,\" said another.\n\n\"Fear not for water,\" cried a third. \"He who could draw it from the rocks will not now abandon His own chosen people.\"\n\n\"Amen! amen!\" responded the whole party.\n\nThey were about to resume their journey when one of the youngest and keenest-eyed uttered an exclamation and pointed up at the rugged crag above them. From its summit there fluttered a little wisp of pink, showing up hard and bright against the gray rocks behind. At the sight there was a general reining up of horses and unslinging of guns, while fresh horsemen came galloping up to reinforce the vanguard. The word \"Redskins\" was on every lip.\n\n\"There can't be any number of Injuns here,\" said the elderly man who appeared to be in command. \"We have passed the Pawnees, and there are no other tribes until we cross the great mountains.\"\n\n\"Shall I go forward and see, Brother Stangerson?\" asked one of the band.\n\n\"And I,\" \"And I,\" cried a dozen voices.\n\n\"Leave your horses below and we will await you here,\" the elder answered. In a moment the young fellows had dismounted, fastened their horses, and were ascending the precipitous slope which led up to the object which had excited their curiosity. They advanced rapidly and noiselessly, with the confidence and dexterity of practised scouts. The watchers from the plain below could see them flit from rock to rock until their figures stood out against the sky-line. The young man who had first given the alarm was leading them. Suddenly his followers saw him throw up his hands, as though overcome with astonishment, and on joining him they were affected in the same way by the sight which met their eyes.\n\nOn the little plateau which crowned the barren hill there stood a single giant boulder, and against this boulder there lay a tall man, long-bearded and hard-featured, but of an excessive thinness. His placid face and regular breathing showed that he was fast asleep. Beside him lay a child, with her round white arms encircling his brown sinewy neck, and her golden-haired head resting upon the breast of his velveteen tunic. Her rosy lips were parted, showing the regular line of snow-white teeth within, and a playful smile played over her infantile features. Her plump little white legs, terminating in white socks and neat shoes with shining buckles, offered a strange contrast to the long shrivelled members of her companion. On the ledge of rock above this strange couple there stood three solemn buzzards, who, at the sight of the newcomers, uttered raucous screams of disappointment and flapped sullenly away.\n\nThe cries of the foul birds awoke the two sleepers, who stared about them in bewilderment. The man staggered to his feet and looked down upon the plain which had been so desolate when sleep had overtaken him, and which was now traversed by this enormous body of men and of beasts. His face assumed an expression of incredulity as he gazed, and he passed his bony hand over his eyes. \"This is what they call delirium, I guess,\" he muttered. The child stood beside him, holding on to the skirt of his coat, and said nothing, but looked all round her with the wondering, questioning gaze of childhood.\n\nThe rescuing party were speedily able to convince the two castaways that their appearance was no delusion. One of them seized the little girl and hoisted her upon his shoulder, while two others supported her gaunt companion, and assisted him towards the wagons.\n\n\"My name is John Ferrier,\" the wanderer explained; \"me and that little un are all that's left o' twenty-one people. The rest is all dead o' thirst and hunger away down in the south.\"\n\n\"Is she your child?\" asked someone.\n\n\"I guess she is now,\" the other cried, defiantly; \"she's mine 'cause I saved her. No man will take her from me. She's Lucy Ferrier from this day on. Who are you, though?\" he continued, glancing with curiosity at his stalwart, sunburned rescuers; \"there seems to be a powerful lot of ye.\"\n\n\"Nigh unto ten thousand,\" said one of the young men; \"we are the persecuted children of God\u2014the chosen of the Angel Moroni.\"\n\n\"I never heard tell on him,\" said the wanderer. \"He appears to have chosen a fair crowd of ye.\"\n\n\"Do not jest at that which is sacred,\" said the other, sternly. \"We are of those who believe in those sacred writings, drawn in Egyptian letters on plates of beaten gold, which were handed unto the holy Joseph Smith at Palmyra. We have come from Nauvoo, in the state of Illinois, where we had founded our temple. We have come to seek a refuge from the violent man and from the godless, even though it be the heart of the desert.\"\n\nThe name of Nauvoo evidently recalled recollections to John Ferrier. \"I see,\" he said; \"you are the Mormons.\"\n\n\"We are the Mormons,\" answered his companions with one voice.\n\n\"And where are you going?\"\n\n\"We do not know. The hand of God is leading us under the person of our Prophet. You must come before him. He shall say what is to be done with you.\"\n\nThey had reached the base of the hill by this time, and were surrounded by crowds of the pilgrims\u2014pale-faced, meek-looking women; strong, laughing children; and anxious, earnest-eyed men. Many were the cries of astonishment and of commiseration which arose from them when they perceived the youth of one of the strangers and the destitution of the other. Their escort did not halt, however, but pushed on, followed by a great crowd of Mormons, until they reached a wagon, which was conspicuous for its great size and for the gaudiness and smartness of its appearance. Six horses were yoked to it, whereas the others were furnished with two, or, at most, four apiece. Beside the driver there sat a man who could not have been more than thirty years of age, but whose massive head and resolute expression marked him as a leader. He was reading a brown-backed volume, but as the crowd approached he laid it aside, and listened attentively to an account of the episode. Then he turned to the two castaways.\n\n\"If we take you with us,\" he said, in solemn words, \"it can only be as believers in our own creed. We shall have no wolves in our fold. Better far that your bones should bleach in this wilderness than that you should prove to be that little speck of decay which in time corrupts the whole fruit. Will you come with us on these terms?\"\n\n\"Guess I'll come with you on any terms,\" said Ferrier, with such emphasis that the grave Elders could not restrain a smile. The leader alone retained his stern, impressive expression.\n\n\"Take him, Brother Stangerson,\" he said, \"give him food and drink, and the child likewise. Let it be your task also to teach him our holy creed. We have delayed long enough. Forward! On, on to Zion!\"\n\n\"On, on to Zion!\" cried the crowd of Mormons, and the words rippled down the long caravan, passing from mouth to mouth until they died away in a dull murmur in the far distance. With a cracking of whips and a creaking of wheels the great wagons got into motion, and soon the whole caravan was winding along once more. The Elder to whose care the two waifs had been committed led them to his wagon, where a meal was already awaiting them.\n\n\"You shall remain here,\" he said. \"In a few days you will have recovered from your fatigues. In the meantime, remember that now and forever you are of our religion. Brigham Young has said it, and he has spoken with the voice of Joseph Smith, which is the voice of God.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Flower of Utah", + "text": "This is not the place to commemorate the trials and privations endured by the immigrant Mormons before they came to their final haven. From the shores of the Mississippi to the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains they had struggled on with a constancy almost unparalleled in history. The savage man, and the savage beast, hunger, thirst, fatigue, and disease\u2014every impediment which Nature could place in the way\u2014had all been overcome with Anglo-Saxon tenacity. Yet the long journey and the accumulated terrors had shaken the hearts of the stoutest among them. There was not one who did not sink upon his knees in heartfelt prayer when they saw the broad valley of Utah bathed in the sunlight beneath them, and learned from the lips of their leader that this was the promised land, and that these virgin acres were to be theirs for evermore.\n\nYoung speedily proved himself to be a skilful administrator as well as a resolute chief. Maps were drawn and charts prepared, in which the future city was sketched out. All around farms were apportioned and allotted in proportion to the standing of each individual. The tradesman was put to his trade and the artisan to his calling. In the town streets and squares sprang up as if by magic. In the country there was draining and hedging, planting and clearing, until the next summer saw the whole country golden with the wheat crop. Everything prospered in the strange settlement. Above all, the great temple which they had erected in the centre of the city grew ever taller and larger. From the first blush of dawn until the closing of the twilight, the clatter of the hammer and the rasp of the saw were never absent from the monument which the immigrants erected to Him who had led them safe through many dangers.\n\nThe two castaways, John Ferrier and the little girl, who had shared his fortunes and had been adopted as his daughter, accompanied the Mormons to the end of their great pilgrimage. Little Lucy Ferrier was borne along pleasantly enough in Elder Stangerson's wagon, a retreat which she shared with the Mormon's three wives and with his son, a headstrong, forward boy of twelve. Having rallied, with the elasticity of childhood, from the shock caused by her mother's death, she soon became a pet with the women, and reconciled herself to this new life in her moving canvas-covered home. In the meantime Ferrier having recovered from his privations, distinguished himself as a useful guide and an indefatigable hunter. So rapidly did he gain the esteem of his new companions, that when they reached the end of their wanderings, it was unanimously agreed that he should be provided with as large and as fertile a tract of land as any of the settlers, with the exception of Young himself, and of Stangerson, Kemball, Johnston, and Drebber, who were the four principal Elders.\n\nOn the farm thus acquired John Ferrier built himself a substantial log-house, which received so many additions in succeeding years that it grew into a roomy villa. He was a man of a practical turn of mind, keen in his dealings and skilful with his hands. His iron constitution enabled him to work morning and evening at improving and tilling his lands. Hence it came about that his farm and all that belonged to him prospered exceedingly. In three years he was better off than his neighbours, in six he was well-to-do, in nine he was rich, and in twelve there were not half a dozen men in the whole of Salt Lake City who could compare with him. From the great inland sea to the distant Wasatch Mountains there was no name better known than that of John Ferrier.\n\nThere was one way and only one in which he offended the susceptibilities of his co-religionists. No argument or persuasion could ever induce him to set up a female establishment after the manner of his companions. He never gave reasons for this persistent refusal, but contented himself by resolutely and inflexibly adhering to his determination. There were some who accused him of lukewarmness in his adopted religion, and others who put it down to greed of wealth and reluctance to incur expense. Others, again, spoke of some early love affair, and of a fair-haired girl who had pined away on the shores of the Atlantic. Whatever the reason, Ferrier remained strictly celibate. In every other respect he conformed to the religion of the young settlement, and gained the name of being an orthodox and straight-walking man.\n\nLucy Ferrier grew up within the log-house, and assisted her adopted father in all his undertakings. The keen air of the mountains and the balsamic odour of the pine trees took the place of nurse and mother to the young girl. As year succeeded to year she grew taller and stronger, her cheek more ruddy and her step more elastic. Many a wayfarer upon the high road which ran by Ferrier's farm felt long-forgotten thoughts revive in his mind as he watched her lithe, girlish figure tripping through the wheatfields, or met her mounted upon her father's mustang, and managing it with all the ease and grace of a true child of the West. So the bud blossomed into a flower, and the year which saw her father the richest of the farmers left her as fair a specimen of American girlhood as could be found in the whole Pacific slope.\n\nIt was not the father, however, who first discovered that the child had developed into the woman. It seldom is in such cases. That mysterious change is too subtle and too gradual to be measured by dates. Least of all does the maiden herself know it until the tone of a voice or the touch of a hand sets her heart thrilling within her, and she learns, with a mixture of pride and of fear, that a new and a larger nature has awakened within her. There are few who cannot recall that day and remember the one little incident which heralded the dawn of a new life. In the case of Lucy Ferrier the occasion was serious enough in itself, apart from its future influence on her destiny and that of many besides.\n\nIt was a warm June morning, and the Latter Day Saints were as busy as the bees whose hive they have chosen for their emblem. In the fields and in the streets rose the same hum of human industry. Down the dusty high roads defiled long streams of heavily laden mules, all heading to the west, for the gold fever had broken out in California, and the overland route lay through the city of the Elect. There, too, were droves of sheep and bullocks coming in from the outlying pasture lands, and trains of tired immigrants, men and horses equally weary of their interminable journey. Through all this motley assemblage, threading her way with the skill of an accomplished rider, there galloped Lucy Ferrier, her fair face flushed with the exercise and her long chestnut hair floating out behind her. She had a commission from her father in the city, and was dashing in as she had done many a time before, with all the fearlessness of youth, thinking only of her task and how it was to be performed. The travel-stained adventurers gazed after her in astonishment, and even the unemotional Indians, journeying in with their peltries, relaxed their accustomed stoicism as they marvelled at the beauty of the pale-faced maiden.\n\nShe had reached the outskirts of the city when she found the road blocked by a great drove of cattle, driven by a half-dozen wild-looking herdsmen from the plains. In her impatience she endeavoured to pass this obstacle by pushing her horse into what appeared to be a gap. Scarcely had she got fairly into it, however, before the beasts closed in behind her, and she found herself completely embedded in the moving stream of fierce-eyed, long-horned bullocks. Accustomed as she was to deal with cattle, she was not alarmed at her situation, but took advantage of every opportunity to urge her horse on, in the hopes of pushing her way through the cavalcade. Unfortunately the horns of one of the creatures, either by accident or design, came in violent contact with the flank of the mustang, and excited it to madness. In an instant it reared up upon its hind legs with a snort of rage, and pranced and tossed in a way that would have unseated any but a skilful rider. The situation was full of peril. Every plunge of the excited horse brought it against the horns again, and goaded it to fresh madness. It was all that the girl could do to keep herself in the saddle, yet a slip would mean a terrible death under the hoofs of the unwieldy and terrified animals. Unaccustomed to sudden emergencies, her head began to swim, and her grip upon the bridle to relax. Choked by the rising cloud of dust and by the steam from the struggling creatures, she might have abandoned her efforts in despair, but for a kindly voice at her elbow which assured her of assistance. At the same moment a sinewy brown hand caught the frightened horse by the curb, and forcing a way through the drove, soon brought her to the outskirts.\n\n\"You're not hurt, I hope, miss,\" said her preserver, respectfully.\n\nShe looked up at his dark, fierce face, and laughed saucily. \"I'm awful frightened,\" she said, na\u00efvely; \"whoever would have thought that Poncho would have been so scared by a lot of cows?\"\n\n\"Thank God, you kept your seat,\" the other said, earnestly. He was a tall, savage-looking young fellow, mounted on a powerful roan horse, and clad in the rough dress of a hunter, with a long rifle slung over his shoulders. \"I guess you are the daughter of John Ferrier,\" he remarked; \"I saw you ride down from his house. When you see him, ask him if he remembers the Jefferson Hopes of St. Louis. If he's the same Ferrier, my father and he were pretty thick.\"\n\n\"Hadn't you better come and ask yourself?\" she asked, demurely.\n\nThe young fellow seemed pleased at the suggestion, and his dark eyes sparkled with pleasure. \"I'll do so,\" he said; \"we've been in the mountains for two months, and are not over and above in visiting condition. He must take us as he finds us.\"\n\n\"He has a good deal to thank you for, and so have I,\" she answered; \"he's awful fond of me. If those cows had jumped on me he'd have never got over it.\"\n\n\"Neither would I,\" said her companion.\n\n\"You! Well, I don't see that it would make much matter to you, anyhow. You ain't even a friend of ours.\"\n\nThe young hunter's dark face grew so gloomy over this remark that Lucy Ferrier laughed aloud.\n\n\"There, I didn't mean that,\" she said; \"of course, you are a friend now. You must come and see us. Now I must push along, or father won't trust me with his business any more. Good-bye!\"\n\n\"Good-bye,\" he answered, raising his broad sombrero, and bending over her little hand. She wheeled her mustang round, gave it a cut with her riding-whip, and darted away down the broad road in a rolling cloud of dust.\n\nYoung Jefferson Hope rode on with his companions, gloomy and taciturn. He and they had been among the Nevada Mountains prospecting for silver, and were returning to Salt Lake City in the hope of raising capital enough to work some lodes which they had discovered. He had been as keen as any of them upon the business until this sudden incident had drawn his thoughts into another channel. The sight of the fair young girl, as frank and wholesome as the Sierra breezes, had stirred his volcanic, untamed heart to its very depths. When she had vanished from his sight, he realized that a crisis had come in his life, and that neither silver speculations nor any other questions could ever be of such importance to him as this new and all-absorbing one. The love which had sprung up in his heart was not the sudden, changeable fancy of a boy, but rather the wild, fierce passion of a man of strong will and imperious temper. He had been accustomed to succeed in all that he undertook. He swore in his heart that he would not fail in this if human effort and human perseverance could render him successful.\n\nHe called on John Ferrier that night, and many times again, until his face was a familiar one at the farmhouse. John, cooped up in the valley, and absorbed in his work, had had little chance of learning the news of the outside world during the last twelve years. All this Jefferson Hope was able to tell him, and in a style which interested Lucy as well as her father. He had been a pioneer in California, and could narrate many a strange tale of fortunes made and fortunes lost in those wild, halcyon days. He had been a scout too, and a trapper, a silver explorer, and a ranchman. Wherever stirring adventures were to be had, Jefferson Hope had been there in search of them. He soon became a favourite with the old farmer, who spoke eloquently of his virtues. On such occasions, Lucy was silent, but her blushing cheek and her bright, happy eyes showed only too clearly that her young heart was no longer her own. Her honest father may not have observed these symptoms, but they were assuredly not thrown away upon the man who had won her affections.\n\nOne summer evening he came galloping down the road and pulled up at the gate. She was at the doorway, and came down to meet him. He threw the bridle over the fence and strode up the pathway.\n\n\"I am off, Lucy,\" he said, taking her two hands in his, and gazing tenderly down into her face: \"I won't ask you to come with me now, but will you be ready to come when I am here again?\"\n\n\"And when will that be?\" she asked, blushing and laughing.\n\n\"A couple of months at the outside. I will come and claim you then, my darling. There's no one who can stand between us.\"\n\n\"And how about father?\" she asked.\n\n\"He has given his consent, provided we get these mines working all right. I have no fear on that head.\"\n\n\"Oh, well; of course, if you and father have arranged it all, there's no more to be said,\" she whispered, with her cheek against his broad breast.\n\n\"Thank God!\" he said, hoarsely, stooping and kissing her. \"It is settled, then. The longer I stay, the harder it will be to go. They are waiting for me at the ca\u00f1on. Good-bye, my own darling\u2014good-bye. In two months you shall see me.\"\n\nHe tore himself from her as he spoke, and, flinging himself upon his horse, galloped furiously away, never even looking round, as though afraid that his resolution might fail him if he took one glance at what he was leaving. She stood at the gate, gazing after him until he vanished from her sight. Then she walked back into the house, the happiest girl in all Utah." + }, + { + "title": "John Ferrier Talks with the Prophet", + "text": "Three weeks had passed since Jefferson Hope and his comrades had departed from Salt Lake City. John Ferrier's heart was sore within him when he thought of the young man's return, and of the impending loss of his adopted child. Yet her bright and happy face reconciled him to the arrangement more than any argument could have done. He had always determined, deep down in his resolute heart, that nothing would ever induce him to allow his daughter to wed a Mormon. Such marriage he regarded as no marriage at all, but as a shame and a disgrace. Whatever he might think of the Mormon doctrines, upon that one point he was inflexible. He had to seal his mouth on the subject, however, for to express an unorthodox opinion was a dangerous matter in those days in the Land of the Saints.\n\nYes, a dangerous matter\u2014so dangerous that even the most saintly dared only whisper their religious opinions with bated breath, lest something which fell from their lips might be misconstrued, and bring down a swift retribution upon them. The victims of persecution had now turned persecutors on their own account, and persecutors of the most terrible description. Not the Inquisition of Seville, nor the German Vehmgericht, nor the secret societies of Italy, were ever able to put a more formidable machinery in motion than that which cast a cloud over the state of Utah.\n\nIts invisibility, and the mystery which was attached to it, made this organization doubly terrible. It appeared to be omniscient and omnipotent, and yet was neither seen nor heard. The man who held out against the Church vanished away, and none knew whither he had gone or what had befallen him. His wife and his children awaited him at home, but no father ever returned to tell them how he had fared at the hands of his secret judges. A rash word or a hasty act was followed by annihilation, and yet none knew what the nature might be of this terrible power which was suspended over them. No wonder that men went about in fear and trembling, and that even in the heart of the wilderness they dared not whisper the doubts which oppressed them.\n\nAt first this vague and terrible power was exercised only upon the recalcitrants who, having embraced the Mormon faith, wished afterwards to pervert or to abandon it. Soon, however, it took a wider range. The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about\u2014rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders\u2014women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror. Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took substance and shape, and were corroborated and recorroborated, until they resolved themselves into a definite name. To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one.\n\nFuller knowledge of the organization which produced such terrible results served to increase rather than to lessen the horror which it inspired in the minds of men. None knew who belonged to this ruthless society. The names of the participators in the deeds of blood and violence done under the name of religion were kept profoundly secret. The very friend to whom you communicated your misgivings as to the Prophet and his mission might be one of those who would come forth at night with fire and sword to exact a terrible reparation. Hence every man feared his neighbour, and none spoke of the things which were nearest his heart.\n\nOne fine morning John Ferrier was about to set out to his wheatfields, when he heard the click of the latch, and, looking through the window, saw a stout, sandy-haired, middle-aged man coming up the pathway. His heart leapt to his mouth, for this was none other than the great Brigham Young himself. Full of trepidation\u2014for he knew that such a visit boded him little good\u2014Ferrier ran to the door to greet the Mormon chief. The latter, however, received his salutations coldly, and followed him with a stern face into the sitting-room.\n\n\"Brother Ferrier,\" he said, taking a seat, and eyeing the farmer keenly from under his light-coloured eyelashes, \"the true believers have been good friends to you. We picked you up when you were starving in the desert, we shared our food with you, led you safe to the Chosen Valley, gave you a goodly share of land, and allowed you to wax rich under our protection. Is not this so?\"\n\n\"It is so,\" answered John Ferrier.\n\n\"In return for all this we asked but one condition: that was, that you should embrace the true faith, and conform in every way to its usages. This you promised to do, and this, if common report says truly, you have neglected.\"\n\n\"And how have I neglected it?\" asked Ferrier, throwing out his hands in expostulation. \"Have I not given to the common fund? Have I not attended at the Temple? Have I not\u2014?\"\n\n\"Where are your wives?\" asked Young, looking round him. \"Call them in, that I may greet them.\"\n\n\"It is true that I have not married,\" Ferrier answered. \"But women were few, and there were many who had better claims than I. I was not a lonely man: I had my daughter to attend to my wants.\"\n\n\"It is of that daughter that I would speak to you,\" said the leader of the Mormons. \"She has grown to be the flower of Utah, and has found favour in the eyes of many who are high in the land.\"\n\nJohn Ferrier groaned internally.\n\n\"There are stories of her which I would fain disbelieve\u2014stories that she is sealed to some Gentile. This must be the gossip of idle tongues. What is the thirteenth rule in the code of the sainted Joseph Smith? 'Let every maiden of the true faith marry one of the elect; for if she wed a Gentile, she commits a grievous sin.' This being so, it is impossible that you, who profess the holy creed, should suffer your daughter to violate it.\"\n\nJohn Ferrier made no answer, but he played nervously with his riding-whip.\n\n\"Upon this one point your whole faith shall be tested\u2014so it has been decided in the Sacred Council of Four. The girl is young, and we would not have her wed gray hairs, neither would we deprive her of all choice. We Elders have many heifers, but our children must also be provided. Stangerson has a son, and Drebber has a son, and either of them would gladly welcome your daughter to his house. Let her choose between them. They are young and rich, and of the true faith. What say you to that?\"\n\nFerrier remained silent for some little time with his brows knitted.\n\n\"You will give us time,\" he said at last. \"My daughter is very young\u2014she is scarce of an age to marry.\"\n\n\"She shall have a month to choose,\" said Young, rising from his seat. \"At the end of that time she shall give her answer.\"\n\nHe was passing through the door, when he turned with flushed face and flashing eyes. \"It were better for you, John Ferrier,\" he thundered, \"that you and she were now lying blanched skeletons upon the Sierra Blanco, than that you should put your weak wills against the orders of the Holy Four!\"\n\nWith a threatening gesture of his hand, he turned from the door, and Ferrier heard his heavy steps scrunching along the shingly path.\n\nHe was still sitting with his elbow upon his knee, considering how he should broach the matter to his daughter, when a soft hand was laid upon his, and looking up, he saw her standing beside him. One glance at her pale, frightened face showed him that she had heard what had passed.\n\n\"I could not help it,\" she said, in answer to his look. \"His voice rang through the house. Oh, father, father, what shall we do?\"\n\n\"Don't you scare yourself,\" he answered, drawing her to him, and passing his broad, rough hand caressingly over her chestnut hair. \"We'll fix it up somehow or another. You don't find your fancy kind o' lessening for this chap, do you?\"\n\nA sob and a squeeze of his hand were her only answer.\n\n\"No; of course not. I shouldn't care to hear you say you did. He's a likely lad, and he's a Christian, which is more than these folks here, in spite o' all their praying and preaching. There's a party starting for Nevada to-morrow, and I'll manage to send him a message letting him know the hole we are in. If I know anything o' that young man, he'll be back with a speed that would whip electro-telegraphs.\"\n\nLucy laughed through her tears at her father's description.\n\n\"When he comes, he will advise us for the best. But it is for you that I am frightened, dear. One hears\u2014one hears such dreadful stories about those who oppose the Prophet; something terrible always happens to them.\"\n\n\"But we haven't opposed him yet,\" her father answered. \"It will be time to look out for squalls when we do. We have a clear month before us; at the end of that, I guess we had best shin out of Utah.\"\n\n\"Leave Utah!\"\n\n\"That's about the size of it.\"\n\n\"But the farm?\"\n\n\"We will raise as much as we can in money, and let the rest go. To tell the truth, Lucy, it isn't the first time I have thought of doing it. I don't care about knuckling under to any man, as these folk do to their darned Prophet. I'm a freeborn American, and it's all new to me. Guess I'm too old to learn. If he comes browsing about this farm, he might chance to run up against a charge of buckshot travelling in the opposite direction.\"\n\n\"But they won't let us leave,\" his daughter objected.\n\n\"Wait till Jefferson comes, and we'll soon manage that. In the mean-time, don't you fret yourself, my dearie, and don't get your eyes swelled up, else he'll be walking into me when he sees you. There's nothing to be afeared about, and there's no danger at all.\"\n\nJohn Ferrier uttered these consoling remarks in a very confident tone, but she could not help observing that he paid unusual care to the fastening of the doors that night, and that he carefully cleaned and loaded the rusty old shot-gun which hung upon the wall of his bedroom." + }, + { + "title": "A Flight for Life", + "text": "On the morning which followed his interview with the Mormon Prophet, John Ferrier went in to Salt Lake City, and having found his acquaintance, who was bound for the Nevada Mountains, he entrusted him with his message to Jefferson Hope. In it he told the young man of the imminent danger which threatened them, and how necessary it was that he should return. Having done thus he felt easier in his mind, and returned home with a lighter heart.\n\nAs he approached his farm, he was surprised to see a horse hitched to each of the posts of the gate. Still more surprised was he on the entering to find two young men in possession of his sitting-room. One, with a long pale face, was leaning back in the rocking-chair, with his feet cocked up upon the stove. The other, a bull-necked youth with coarse, bloated features, was standing in front of the window with his hands in his pockets whistling a popular hymn. Both of them nodded to Ferrier as he entered, and the one in the rocking-chair commenced the conversation.\n\n\"Maybe you don't know us,\" he said. \"This here is the son of Elder Drebber, and I'm Joseph Stangerson, who travelled with you in the desert when the Lord stretched out His hand and gathered you into the true fold.\"\n\n\"As He will all the nations in His own good time,\" said the other in a nasal voice; \"He grindeth slowly but exceeding small.\"\n\nJohn Ferrier bowed coldly. He had guessed who his visitors were.\n\n\"We have come,\" continued Stangerson, \"at the advice of our fathers to solicit the hand of your daughter for whichever of us may seem good to you and to her. As I have but four wives and Brother Drebber here has seven, it appears to me that my claim is the stronger one.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, Brother Stangerson,\" cried the other; \"the question is not how many wives we have, but how many we can keep. My father has now given over his mills to me, and I am the richer man.\"\n\n\"But my prospects are better,\" said the other, warmly. \"When the Lord removes my father, I shall have his tanning yard and his leather factory. Then I am your elder, and am higher in the Church.\"\n\n\"It will be for the maiden to decide,\" rejoined young Drebber, smirking at his own reflection in the glass. \"We will leave it all to her decision.\"\n\nDuring this dialogue John Ferrier had stood fuming in the doorway, hardly able to keep his riding-whip from the backs of his two visitors.\n\n\"Look here,\" he said at last, striding up to them, \"when my daughter summons you, you can come, but until then I don't want to see your faces again.\"\n\nThe two young Mormons stared at him in amazement. In their eyes this competition between them for the maiden's hand was the highest of honours both to her and her father.\n\n\"There are two ways out of the room,\" cried Ferrier; \"there is the door, and there is the window. Which do you care to use?\"\n\nHis brown face looked so savage, and his gaunt hands so threatening, that his visitors sprang to their feet and beat a hurried retreat. The old farmer followed them to the door.\n\n\"Let me know when you have settled which it is to be,\" he said, sardonically.\n\n\"You shall smart for this!\" Stangerson cried, white with rage. \"You have defied the Prophet and the Council of Four. You shall rue it to the end of your days.\"\n\n\"The hand of the Lord shall be heavy upon you,\" cried young Drebber; \"He will arise and smite you!\"\n\n\"Then I'll start the smiting,\" exclaimed Ferrier, furiously, and would have rushed upstairs for his gun had not Lucy seized him by the arm and restrained him. Before he could escape from her, the clatter of horses' hoofs told him that they were beyond his reach.\n\n\"The young canting rascals!\" he exclaimed, wiping the perspiration from his forehead; \"I would sooner see you in your grave, my girl, than the wife of either of them.\"\n\n\"And so should I, father.\" she answered, with spirit; \"but Jefferson will soon be here.\"\n\n\"Yes. It will not be long before he comes. The sooner the better, for we do not know what their next move may be.\"\n\nIt was, indeed, high time that someone capable of giving advice and help should come to the aid of the sturdy old farmer and his adopted daughter. In the whole history of the settlement there had never been such a case of rank disobedience to the authority of the Elders. If minor errors were punished so sternly, what would be the fate of this arch rebel? Ferrier knew that his wealth and position would be of no avail to him. Others as well known and as rich as himself had been spirited away before now, and their goods given over to the Church. He was a brave man, but he trembled at the vague, shadowy terrors which hung over him. Any known danger he could face with a firm lip, but this suspense was unnerving. He concealed his fears from his daughter, however, and affected to make light of the whole matter, though she, with the keen eye of love, saw plainly that he was ill at ease.\n\nHe expected that he would receive some message or remonstrance from Young as to his conduct, and he was not mistaken, though it came in an unlooked-for manner. Upon rising next morning he found, to his surprise, a small square of paper pinned on to the coverlet of his bed just over his chest. On it was printed, in bold, straggling letters:\u2014\n\n\"Twenty-nine days are given you for amendment, and then\u2014\"\n\nThe dash was more fear-inspiring than any threat could have been. How this warning came into his room puzzled John Ferrier sorely, for his servants slept in an outhouse, and the doors and windows had all been secured. He crumpled the paper up and said nothing to his daughter, but the incident struck a chill into his heart. The twenty-nine days were evidently the balance of the month which Young had promised. What strength or courage could avail against an enemy armed with such mysterious powers? The hand which fastened that pin might have struck him to the heart, and he could never have known who had slain him.\n\nStill more shaken was he next morning. They had sat down to their breakfast, when Lucy with a cry of surprise pointed upwards. In the centre of the ceiling was scrawled, with a burned stick apparently, the number 28. To his daughter it was unintelligible, and he did not enlighten her. That night he sat up with his gun and kept watch and ward. He saw and he heard nothing, and yet in the morning a great 27 had been painted upon the outside of his door.\n\nThus day followed day; and as sure as morning came he found that his unseen enemies had kept their register, and had marked up in some conspicuous position how many days were still left to him out of the month of grace. Sometimes the fatal numbers appeared upon the walls, sometimes upon the floors, occasionally they were on small placards stuck upon the garden gate or the railings. With all his vigilance John Ferrier could not discover whence these daily warnings proceeded. A horror which was almost superstitious came upon him at the sight of them. He became haggard and restless, and his eyes had the troubled look of some hunted creature. He had but one hope in life now, and that was for the arrival of the young hunter from Nevada.\n\nTwenty had changed to fifteen, and fifteen to ten, but there was no news of the absentee. One by one the numbers dwindled down, and still there came no sign of him. Whenever a horseman clattered down the road, or a driver shouted at his team, the old farmer hurried to the gate, thinking that help had arrived at last. At last, when he saw five give way to four and that again to three, he lost heart, and abandoned all hope of escape. Single-handed, and with his limited knowledge of the mountains which surrounded the settlement, he knew that he was powerless. The more frequented roads were strictly watched and guarded, and none could pass along them without an order from the Council. Turn which way he would, there appeared to be no avoiding the blow which hung over him. Yet the old man never wavered in his resolution to part with life itself before he consented to what he regarded as his daughter's dishonour.\n\nHe was sitting alone one evening pondering deeply over his troubles, and searching vainly for some way out of them. That morning had shown the figure 2 upon the wall of his house, and the next day would be the last of the allotted time. What was to happen then? All manner of vague and terrible fancies filled his imagination. And his daughter\u2014what was to become of her after he was gone? Was there no escape from the invisible network which was drawn all round them? He sank his head upon the table and sobbed at the thought of his own impotence.\n\nWhat was that? In the silence he heard a gentle scratching sound\u2014low, but very distinct in the quiet of the night. It came from the door of the house. Ferrier crept into the hall and listened intently. There was a pause for a few moments, and then the low, insidious sound was repeated. Someone was evidently tapping very gently upon one of the panels of the door. Was it some midnight assassin who had come to carry out the murderous orders of the secret tribunal? Or was it some agent who was marking up that the last day of grace had arrived? John Ferrier felt that instant death would be better than the suspense which shook his nerves and chilled his heart. Springing forward, he drew the bolt and threw the door open.\n\nOutside all was calm and quiet. The night was fine, and the stars were twinkling brightly overhead. The little front garden lay before the farmer's eyes bounded by the fence and gate; but neither there nor on the road was any human being to be seen. With a sigh of relief, Ferrier looked to right and to left, until, happening to glance straight down at his own feet, he saw to his astonishment a man lying flat upon his face upon the ground, with arms and legs all asprawl.\n\nSo unnerved was he at the sight that he leaned up against the wall with his hand to his throat to stifle his inclination to call out. His first thought was that the prostrate figure was that of some wounded or dying man, but as he watched it he saw it writhe along the ground and into the hall with the rapidity and noiselessness of a serpent. Once within the house the man sprang to his feet, closed the door, and revealed to the astonished farmer the fierce face and resolute expression of Jefferson Hope.\n\n\"Good God!\" gasped John Ferrier. \"How you scared me! Whatever made you come in like that?\"\n\n\"Give me food,\" the other said, hoarsely. \"I have had no time for bite or sup for eight-and-forty hours.\" He flung himself upon the cold meat and bread which were still lying upon the table from his host's supper, and devoured it voraciously. \"Does Lucy bear up well?\" he asked, when he had satisfied his hunger.\n\n\"Yes. She does not know the danger,\" her father answered.\n\n\"That is well. The house is watched on every side. That is why I crawled my way up to it. They may be darned sharp, but they're not quite sharp enough to catch a Washoe hunter.\"\n\nJohn Ferrier felt a different man now that he realized that he had a devoted ally. He seized the young man's leathery hand and wrung it cordially. \"You're a man to be proud of,\" he said. \"There are not many who would come to share our danger and our troubles.\"\n\n\"You've hit it there, pard,\" the young hunter answered. \"I have a respect for you, but if you were alone in this business I'd think twice before I put my head into such a hornet's nest. It's Lucy that brings me here, and before harm comes on her I guess there will be one less o' the Hope family in Utah.\"\n\n\"What are we to do?\"\n\n\"To-morrow is your last day, and unless you act to-night you are lost. I have a mule and two horses waiting in the Eagle Ravine. How much money have you?\"\n\n\"Two thousand dollars in gold, and five in notes.\"\n\n\"That will do. I have as much more to add to it. We must push for Carson City through the mountains. You had best wake Lucy. It is as well that the servants do not sleep in the house.\"\n\nWhile Ferrier was absent, preparing his daughter for the approaching journey, Jefferson Hope packed all the eatables that he could find into a small parcel, and filled a stoneware jar with water, for he knew by experience that the mountain wells were few and far between. He had hardly completed his arrangements before the farmer returned with his daughter all dressed and ready for a start. The greeting between the lovers was warm, but brief, for minutes were precious, and there was much to be done.\n\n\"We must make our start at once,\" said Jefferson Hope, speaking in a low but resolute voice, like one who realizes the greatness of the peril, but has steeled his heart to meet it. \"The front and back entrances are watched, but with caution we may get away through the side window and across the fields. Once on the road we are only two miles from the Ravine where the horses are waiting. By daybreak we should be halfway through the mountains.\"\n\n\"What if we are stopped?\" asked Ferrier.\n\nHope slapped the revolver butt which protruded from the front of his tunic. \"If they are too many for us, we shall take two or three of them with us,\" he said with a sinister smile.\n\nThe lights inside the house had all been extinguished, and from the darkened window Ferrier peered over the fields which had been his own, and which he was now about to abandon forever. He had long nerved himself to the sacrifice, however, and the thought of the honour and happiness of his daughter outweighed any regret at his ruined fortunes. All looked so peaceful and happy, the rustling trees and the broad silent stretch of grainland, that it was difficult to realize that the spirit of murder lurked through it all. Yet the white face and set expression of the young hunter showed that in his approach to the house he had seen enough to satisfy him upon that head.\n\nFerrier carried the bag of gold and notes, Jefferson Hope had the scanty provisions and water, while Lucy had a small bundle containing a few of her more valued possessions. Opening the window very slowly and carefully, they waited until a dark cloud had somewhat obscured the night, and then one by one passed through into the little garden. With bated breath and crouching figures they stumbled across it, and gained the shelter of the hedge, which they skirted until they came to the gap which opened into the cornfield. They had just reached this point when the young man seized his two companions and dragged them down into the shadow, where they lay silent and trembling.\n\nIt was as well that his prairie training had given Jefferson Hope the ears of a lynx. He and his friends had hardly crouched down before the melancholy hooting of a mountain owl was heard within a few yards of them, which was immediately answered by another hoot at a small distance. At the same moment a vague, shadowy figure emerged from the gap for which they had been making, and uttered the plaintive signal cry again, on which a second man appeared out of the obscurity.\n\n\"To-morrow at midnight,\" said the first, who appeared to be in authority. \"When the whippoorwill calls three times.\"\n\n\"It is well,\" returned the other. \"Shall I tell Brother Drebber?\"\n\n\"Pass it on to him, and from him to the others. Nine to seven!\"\n\n\"Seven to five!\" repeated the other; and the two figures flitted away in different directions. Their concluding words had evidently been some form of sign and countersign. The instant that their footsteps had died away in the distance, Jefferson Hope sprang to his feet, and helping his companions through the gap, led the way across the fields at the top of his speed, supporting and half-carrying the girl when her strength appeared to fail her.\n\n\"Hurry on! hurry on!\" he gasped from time to time. \"We are through the line of sentinels. Everything depends on speed. Hurry on!\"\n\nOnce on the high road, they made rapid progress. Only once did they meet anyone, and then they managed to slip into a field, and so avoid recognition. Before reaching the town the hunter branched away into a rugged and narrow footpath which led to the mountains. Two dark, jagged peaks loomed above them through the darkness, and the defile which led between them was the Eagle Ca\u00f1on in which the horses were awaiting them. With unerring instinct Jefferson Hope picked his way among the great boulders and along the bed of a dried-up water-course, until he came to the retired corner screened with rocks, where the faithful animals had been picketed. The girl was placed upon the mule, and old Ferrier upon one of the horses, with his money-bag, while Jefferson Hope led the other along the precipitous and dangerous path.\n\nIt was a bewildering route for anyone who was not accustomed to face Nature in her wildest moods. On the one side a great crag towered up a thousand feet or more, black, stern, and menacing, with long basaltic columns upon its rugged surface like the ribs of some petrified monster. On the other hand a wild chaos of boulders and debris made all advance impossible. Between the two ran the irregular tracks, so narrow in places that they had to travel in Indian file, and so rough that only practised riders could have traversed it at all. Yet, in spite of all dangers and difficulties, the hearts of the fugitives were light within them, for every step increased the distance between them and the terrible despotism from which they were flying.\n\nThey soon had a proof, however, that they were still within the jurisdiction of the Saints. They had reached the very wildest and most desolate portion of the pass when the girl gave a startled cry, and pointed upwards. On a rock which overlooked the track, showing out dark and plain against the sky, there stood a solitary sentinel. He saw them as soon as they perceived him, and his military challenge of \"Who goes there?\" rang through the silent ravine.\n\n\"Travellers for Nevada,\" said Jefferson Hope, with his hand upon the rifle which hung by his saddle.\n\nThey could see the lonely watcher fingering his gun, and peering down at them as if dissatisfied at their reply.\n\n\"By whose permission?\" he asked.\n\n\"The Holy Four,\" answered Ferrier. His Mormon experiences had taught him that that was the highest authority to which he could refer.\n\n\"Nine to seven,\" cried the sentinel.\n\n\"Seven to five,\" returned Jefferson Hope promptly, remembering the countersign which he had heard in the garden.\n\n\"Pass, and the Lord go with you,\" said the voice from above. Beyond his post the path broadened out, and the horses were able to break into a trot. Looking back, they could see the solitary watcher leaning upon his gun, and knew that they had passed the outlying post of the chosen people, and that freedom lay before them." + }, + { + "title": "The Avenging Angels", + "text": "All night their course lay through intricate defiles and over irregular and rockstrewn paths. More than once they lost their way, but Hope's intimate knowledge of the mountains enabled them to regain the track once more. When morning broke, a scene of marvellous though savage beauty lay before them. In every direction the great snow-capped peaks hemmed them in, peeping over each other's shoulders to the far horizon. So steep were the rocky banks on either side of them that the larch and the pine seemed to be suspended over their heads, and to need only a gust of wind to come hurtling down upon them. Nor was the fear entirely an illusion, for the barren valley was thickly strewn with trees and boulders which had fallen in a similar manner. Even as they passed, a great rock came thundering down with a hoarse rattle which woke the echoes in the silent gorges, and startled the weary horses into a gallop.\n\nAs the sun rose slowly above the eastern horizon, the caps of the great mountains lit up one after the other, like lamps at a festival, until they were all ruddy and glowing. The magnificent spectacle cheered the hearts of the three fugitives and gave them fresh energy. At a wild torrent which swept out of a ravine they called a halt and watered their horses, while they partook of a hasty breakfast. Lucy and her father would fain have rested longer, but Jefferson Hope was inexorable. \"They will be upon our track by this time,\" he said. \"Everything depends upon our speed. Once safe in Carson, we may rest for the remainder of our lives.\"\n\nDuring the whole of that day they struggled on through the defiles, and by evening they calculated that they were more than thirty miles from their enemies. At night-time they chose the base of a beetling crag, where the rocks offered some protection from the chill wind, and there, huddled together for warmth, they enjoyed a few hours' sleep. Before daybreak, however, they were up and on their way once more. They had seen no signs of any pursuers, and Jefferson Hope began to think that they were fairly out of the reach of the terrible organization whose enmity they had incurred. He little knew how far that iron grasp could reach, or how soon it was to close upon them and crush them.\n\nAbout the middle of the second day of their flight their scanty store of provisions began to run out. This gave the hunter little uneasiness, however, for there was game to be had among the mountains, and he had frequently before had to depend upon his rifle for the needs of life. Choosing a sheltered nook, he piled together a few dried branches and made a blazing fire, at which his companions might warm themselves, for they were now nearly five thousand feet above the sea level, and the air was bitter and keen. Having tethered the horses, and bid Lucy adieu, he threw his gun over his shoulder, and set out in search of whatever chance might throw in his way. Looking back, he saw the old man and the young girl crouching over the blazing fire, while the three animals stood motionless in the background. Then the intervening rocks hid them from his view.\n\nHe walked for a couple of miles through one ravine after another without success, though, from the marks upon the bark of the trees, and other indications, he judged that there were numerous bears in the vicinity. At last, after two or three hours' fruitless search, he was thinking of turning back in despair, when casting his eyes upwards he saw a sight which sent a thrill of pleasure through his heart. On the edge of a jutting pinnacle, three or four hundred feet above him, there stood a creature somewhat resembling a sheep in appearance, but armed with a pair of gigantic horns. The big-horn\u2014for so it is called\u2014was acting, probably, as a guardian over a flock which were invisible to the hunter; but fortunately it was heading in the opposite direction, and had not perceived him. Lying on his face, he rested his rifle upon a rock, and took a long and steady aim before drawing the trigger. The animal sprang into the air, tottered for a moment upon the edge of the precipice, and then came crashing down into the valley beneath.\n\nThe creature was too unwieldy to lift, so the hunter contented himself with cutting away one haunch and part of the flank. With this trophy over his shoulder, he hastened to retrace his steps, for the evening was already drawing in. He had hardly started, however, before he realized the difficulty which faced him. In his eagerness he had wandered far past the ravines which were known to him, and it was no easy matter to pick out the path which he had taken. The valley in which he found himself divided and sub-divided into many gorges, which were so like each other that it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. He followed one for a mile or more until he came to a mountain torrent which he was sure that he had never seen before. Convinced that he had taken the wrong turn, he tried another, but with the same result. Night was coming on rapidly, and it was almost dark before he at last found himself in a defile which was familiar to him. Even then it was no easy matter to keep to the right track, for the moon had not yet risen, and the high cliffs on either side made the obscurity more profound. Weighed down with his burden, and weary from his exertions, he stumbled along, keeping up his heart by the reflection that every step brought him nearer to Lucy, and that he carried with him enough to ensure them food for the remainder of their journey.\n\nHe had now come to the mouth of the very defile in which he had left them. Even in the darkness he could recognize the outline of the cliffs which bounded it. They must, he reflected, be awaiting him anxiously, for he had been absent nearly five hours. In the gladness of his heart he put his hands to his mouth and made the glen re\u00ebcho to a loud halloo as a signal that he was coming. He paused and listened for an answer. None came save his own cry, which clattered up the dreary, silent ravines, and was borne back to his ears in countless repetitions. Again he shouted, even louder than before, and again no whisper came back from the friends whom he had left such a short time ago. A vague, nameless dread came over him, and he hurried onward frantically, dropping the precious food in his agitation.\n\nWhen he turned the corner, he came full in sight of the spot where the fire had been lit. There was still a glowing pile of wood ashes there, but it had evidently not been tended since his departure. The same dead silence still reigned all round. With his fears all changed to convictions, he hurried on. There was no living creature near the remains of the fire: animals, man, maiden, all were gone. It was only too clear that some sudden and terrible disaster had occurred during his absence\u2014a disaster which had embraced them all, and yet had left no traces behind it.\n\nBewildered and stunned by this blow, Jefferson Hope felt his head spin round, and had to lean upon his rifle to save himself from falling. He was essentially a man of action, however, and speedily recovered from his temporary impotence. Seizing a half-consumed piece of wood from the smouldering fire, he blew it into a flame, and proceeded with its help to examine the little camp. The ground was all stamped down by the feet of horses, showing that a large party of mounted men had overtaken the fugitives, and the direction of their tracks proved that they had afterwards turned back to Salt Lake City. Had they carried back both of his companions with them? Jefferson Hope had almost persuaded himself that they must have done so, when his eye fell upon an object which made every nerve of his body tingle within him. A little way on one side of the camp was a lowlying heap of reddish soil, which had assuredly not been there before. There was no mistaking it for anything but a newly dug grave. As the young hunter approached it, he perceived that a stick had been planted on it, with a sheet of paper stuck in the cleft fork of it. The inscription upon the paper was brief, but to the point:\n\n\u2002JOHN FERRIER,\n\n\u2002FORMERLY OF SALT LAKE CITY.\n\n\u2002Died August 4th, 1860.\n\nThe sturdy old man, whom he had left so short a time before, was gone, then, and this was all his epitaph. Jefferson Hope looked wildly round to see if there was a second grave, but there was no sign of one. Lucy had been carried back by their terrible pursuers to fulfil her original destiny, by becoming one of the harem of an Elder's son. As the young fellow realized the certainty of her fate, and his own powerlessness to prevent it, he wished that he, too, was lying with the old farmer in his last silent resting-place.\n\nAgain, however, his active spirit shook off the lethargy which springs from despair. If there was nothing else left to him, he could at least devote his life to revenge. With indomitable patience and perseverance, Jefferson Hope possessed also a power of sustained vindictiveness, which he may have learned from the Indians amongst whom he had lived. As he stood by the desolate fire, he felt that the only one thing which could assuage his grief would be thorough and complete retribution, brought by his own hand upon his enemies. His strong will and untiring energy should, he determined, be devoted to that one end. With a grim, white face, he retraced his steps to where he had dropped the food, and having stirred up the smouldering fire, he cooked enough to last him for a few days. This he made up into a bundle, and, tired as he was, he set himself to walk back through the mountains upon the track of the Avenging Angels.\n\nFor five days he toiled footsore and weary through the defiles which he had already traversed on horseback. At night he flung himself down among the rocks, and snatched a few hours of sleep; but before daybreak he was always well on his way. On the sixth day, he reached the Eagle Ca\u00f1on, from which they had commenced their ill-fated flight. Thence he could look down upon the home of the Saints. Worn and exhausted, he leaned upon his rifle and shook his gaunt hand fiercely at the silent widespread city beneath him. As he looked at it, he observed that there were flags in some of the principal streets, and other signs of festivity. He was still speculating as to what this might mean when he heard the clatter of horse's hoofs, and saw a mounted man riding towards him. As he approached, he recognized him as a Mormon named Cowper, to whom he had rendered services at different times. He therefore accosted him when he got up to him, with the object of finding out what Lucy Ferrier's fate had been.\n\n\"I am Jefferson Hope,\" he said. \"You remember me.\"\n\nThe Mormon looked at him with undisguised astonishment\u2014indeed, it was difficult to recognize in this tattered, unkempt wanderer, with ghastly white face and fierce, wild eyes, the spruce young hunter of former days. Having, however, at last satisfied himself as to his identity, the man's surprise changed to consternation.\n\n\"You are mad to come here,\" he cried. \"It is as much as my own life is worth to be seen talking with you. There is a warrant against you from the Holy Four for assisting the Ferriers away.\"\n\n\"I don't fear them, or their warrant,\" Hope said, earnestly. \"You must know something of this matter, Cowper. I conjure you by everything you hold dear to answer a few questions. We have always been friends. For God's sake, don't refuse to answer me.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" the Mormon asked, uneasily. \"Be quick. The very rocks have ears and the trees eyes.\"\n\n\"What has become of Lucy Ferrier?\"\n\n\"She was married yesterday to young Drebber. Hold up, man, hold up; you have no life left in you.\"\n\n\"Don't mind me,\" said Hope faintly. He was white to the very lips, and had sunk down on the stone against which he had been leaning. \"Married, you say?\"\n\n\"Married yesterday\u2014that's what those flags are for on the Endowment House. There was some words between young Drebber and young Stangerson as to which was to have her. They'd both been in the party that followed them, and Stangerson had shot her father, which, seemed to give him the best claim; but when they argued it out in council, Drebber's party was the stronger, so the Prophet gave her over to him. No one won't have her very long though, for I saw death in her face yesterday. She is more like a ghost than a woman. Are you off, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, I am off,\" said Jefferson Hope, who had risen from his seat. His face might have been chiselled out of marble, so hard and set was its expression, while its eyes glowed with a baleful light.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" he answered; and, slinging his weapon over his shoulder, strode off down the gorge and so away into the heart of the mountains to the haunts of the wild beasts. Amongst them all there was none so fierce and so dangerous as himself.\n\nThe prediction of the Mormon was only too well fulfilled. Whether it was the terrible death of her father or the effects of the hateful marriage into which she had been forced, poor Lucy never held up her head again, but pined away and died within a month. Her sottish husband, who had married her principally for the sake of John Ferrier's property, did not affect any great grief at his bereavement; but his other wives mourned over her, and sat up with her the night before the burial, as is the Mormon custom. They were grouped round the bier in the early hours of the morning, when, to their inexpressible fear and astonishment, the door was flung open, and a savage-looking, weather-beaten man in tattered garments strode into the room. Without a glance or a word to the cowering women, he walked up to the white silent figure which had once contained the pure soul of Lucy Ferner. Stooping over her, he pressed his lips reverently to her cold forehead, and then, snatching up her hand, he took the wedding ring from her finger. \"She shall not be buried in that,\" he cried with a fierce snarl, and before an alarm could be raised sprang down the stairs and was gone. So strange and so brief was the episode that the watchers might have found it hard to believe it themselves or persuade other people of it, had it not been for the undeniable fact that the circlet of gold which marked her as having been a bride had disappeared.\n\nFor some months Jefferson Hope lingered among the mountains, leading a strange, wild life, and nursing in his heart the fierce desire for vengeance which possessed him. Tales were told in the city of the weird figure which was seen prowling about the suburbs, and which haunted the lonely mountain gorges. Once a bullet whistled through Stangerson's window and flattened itself upon the wall within a foot of him. On another occasion, as Drebber passed under a cliff a great boulder crashed down on him, and he only escaped a terrible death by throwing himself upon his face. The two young Mormons were not long in discovering the reason of these attempts upon their lives, and led repeated expeditions into the mountains in the hope of capturing or killing their enemy, but always without success. Then they adopted the precaution of never going out alone or after nightfall, and of having their houses guarded. After a time they were able to relax these measures, for nothing was either heard or seen of their opponent, and they hoped that time had cooled his vindictiveness.\n\nFar from doing so, it had, if anything, augmented it. The hunter's mind was of a hard, unyielding nature, and the predominant idea of revenge had taken such complete possession of it that there was no room for any other emotion. He was, however, above all things, practical. He soon realized that even his iron constitution could not stand the incessant strain which he was putting upon it. Exposure and want of wholesome food were wearing him out. If he died like a dog among the mountains, what was to become of his revenge then? And yet such a death was sure to overtake him if he persisted. He felt that that was to play his enemy's game, so he reluctantly returned to the old Nevada mines, there to recruit his health and to amass money enough to allow him to pursue his object without privation.\n\nHis intention had been to be absent a year at the most, but a combination of unforeseen circumstances prevented his leaving the mines for nearly five. At the end of that time, however, his memory of his wrongs and his craving for revenge were quite as keen as on that memorable night when he had stood by John Ferrier's grave. Disguised, and under an assumed name, he returned to Salt Lake City, careless what became of his own life, as long as he obtained what he knew to be justice. There he found evil tidings awaiting him. There had been a schism among the Chosen People a few months before, some of the younger members of the Church having rebelled against the authority of the Elders, and the result had been the secession of a certain number of the malcontents, who had left Utah and become Gentiles. Among these had been Drebber and Stangerson; and no one knew whither they had gone. Rumour reported that Drebber had managed to convert a large part of his property into money, and that he had departed a wealthy man, while his companion, Stangerson, was comparatively poor. There was no clue at all, however, as to their whereabouts.\n\nMany a man, however vindictive, would have abandoned all thought of revenge in the face of such a difficulty, but Jefferson Hope never faltered for a moment. With the small competence he possessed, eked out by such employment as he could pick up, he travelled from town to town through the United States in quest of his enemies. Year passed into year, his black hair turned grizzled, but still he wandered on, a human bloodhound, with his mind wholly set upon the one object to which he had devoted his life. At last his perseverance was rewarded. It was but a glance of a face in a window, but that one glance told him that Cleveland in Ohio possessed the men whom he was in pursuit of. He returned to his miserable lodgings with his plan of vengeance all arranged. It chanced, however, that Drebber, looking from his window, had recognized the vagrant in the street, and had read murder in his eyes. He hurried before a justice of the peace accompanied by Stangerson, who had become his private secretary, and represented to him that they were in danger of their lives from the jealousy and hatred of an old rival. That evening Jefferson Hope was taken into custody, and not being able to find sureties, was detained for some weeks. When at last he was liberated it was only to find that Drebber's house was deserted, and that he and his secretary had departed for Europe.\n\nAgain the avenger had been foiled, and again his concentrated hatred urged him to continue the pursuit. Funds were wanting, however, and for some time he had to return to work, saving every dollar for his approaching journey. At last, having collected enough to keep life in him, he departed for Europe, and tracked his enemies from city to city, working his way in any menial capacity, but never overtaking the fugitives. When he reached St. Petersburg, they had departed for Paris; and when he followed them there, he learned that they had just set off for Copenhagen. At the Danish capital he was again a few days late, for they had journeyed on to London, where he at last succeeded in running them to earth. As to what occurred there, we cannot do better than quote the old hunter's own account, as duly recorded in Dr. Watson's Journal, to which we are already under such obligations." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "A Continuation of the Reminiscences of John Watson, M.D.\n\nOur prisoner's furious resistance did not apparently indicate any ferocity in his disposition towards ourselves, for on finding himself powerless, he smiled in an affable manner, and expressed his hopes that he had not hurt any of us in the scuffle. \"I guess you're going to take me to the police-station,\" he remarked to Sherlock Holmes. \"My cab's at the door. If you'll loose my legs I'll walk down to it. I'm not so light to lift as I used to be.\"\n\nGregson and Lestrade exchanged glances, as if they thought this proposition rather a bold one; but Holmes at once took the prisoner at his word, and loosened the towel which we had bound round his ankles. He rose and stretched his legs, as though to assure himself that they were free once more. I remember that I thought to myself, as I eyed him, that I had seldom seen a more powerfully built man; and his dark, sunburned face bore an expression of determination and energy which was as formidable as his personal strength.\n\n\"If there's a vacant place for a chief of the police, I reckon you are the man for it,\" he said, gazing with undisguised admiration at my fellow-lodger. \"The way you kept on my trail was a caution.\"\n\n\"You had better come with me,\" said Holmes to the two detectives.\n\n\"I can drive you,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"Good! and Gregson can come inside with me. You too, Doctor. You have taken an interest in the case, and may as well stick to us.\"\n\nI assented gladly, and we all descended together. Our prisoner made no attempt at escape, but stepped calmly into the cab which had been his, and we followed him. Lestrade mounted the box, whipped up the horse, and brought us in a very short time to our destination. We were ushered into a small chamber, where a police inspector noted down our prisoner's name and the names of the men with whose murder he had been charged. The official was a white-faced, unemotional man, who went through his duties in a dull, mechanical way. \"The prisoner will be put before the magistrates in the course of the week,\" he said; \"in the meantime, Mr. Jefferson Hope, have you anything that you wish to say? I must warn you that your words will be taken down, and may be used against you.\"\n\n\"I've got a good deal to say,\" our prisoner said slowly. \"I want to tell you gentlemen all about it.\"\n\n\"Hadn't you better reserve that for your trial?\" asked the inspector.\n\n\"I may never be tried,\" he answered. \"You needn't look startled. It isn't suicide I am thinking of. Are you a doctor?\" He turned his fierce dark eyes upon me as he asked this last question.\n\n\"Yes, I am,\" I answered.\n\n\"Then put your hand here,\" he said, with a smile, motioning with his manacled wrists towards his chest.\n\nI did so; and became at once conscious of an extraordinary throbbing and commotion which was going on inside. The walls of his chest seemed to thrill and quiver as a frail building would do inside when some powerful engine was at work. In the silence of the room I could hear a dull humming and buzzing noise which proceeded from the same source.\n\n\"Why,\" I cried, \"you have an aortic aneurism!\"\n\n\"That's what they call it,\" he said, placidly. \"I went to a doctor last week about it, and he told me that it is bound to burst before many days passed. It has been getting worse for years. I got it from overexposure and under-feeding among the Salt Lake Mountains. I've done my work now, and I don't care how soon I go, but I should like to leave some account of the business behind me. I don't want to be remembered as a common cut-throat.\"\n\nThe inspector and the two detectives had a hurried discussion as to the advisability of allowing him to tell his story.\n\n\"Do you consider, Doctor, that there is immediate danger?\" the former asked.\n\n\"Most certainly there is,\" I answered.\n\n\"In that case it is clearly our duty, in the interests of justice, to take his statement,\" said the inspector. \"You are at liberty, sir, to give your account, which I again warn you will be taken down.\"\n\n\"I'll sit down, with your leave,\" the prisoner said, suiting the action to the word. \"This aneurism of mine makes me easily tired, and the tussle we had half an hour ago has not mended matters. I'm on the brink of the grave, and I am not likely to lie to you. Every word I say is the absolute truth, and how you use it is a matter of no consequence to me.\"\n\nWith these words, Jefferson Hope leaned back in his chair and began the following remarkable statement. He spoke in a calm and methodical manner, as though the events which he narrated were commonplace enough. I can vouch for the accuracy of the subjoined account, for I have had access to Lestrade's notebook, in which the prisoner's words were taken down exactly as they were uttered.\n\n\"It don't much matter to you why I hated these men,\" he said; \"it's enough that they were guilty of the death of two human beings\u2014a father and daughter\u2014and that they had, therefore, forfeited their own lives. After the lapse of time that has passed since their crime, it was impossible for me to secure a conviction against them in any court. I knew of their guilt though, and I determined that I should be judge, jury, and executioner all rolled into one. You'd have done the same, if you have any manhood in you, if you had been in my place.\n\n\"That girl that I spoke of was to have married me twenty years ago. She was forced into marrying that same Drebber, and broke her heart over it. I took the marriage ring from her dead finger, and I vowed that his dying eyes should rest upon that very ring, and that his last thoughts should be of the crime for which he was punished. I have carried it about with me, and have followed him and his accomplice over two continents until I caught them. They thought to tire me out, but they could not do it. If I die to-morrow, as is likely enough, I die knowing that my work in this world is done, and well done. They have perished, and by my hand. There is nothing left for me to hope for, or to desire.\n\n\"They were rich and I was poor, so that it was no easy matter for me to follow them. When I got to London my pocket was about empty, and I found that I must turn my hand to something for my living. Driving and riding are as natural to me as walking, so I applied at a cab-owner's office, and soon got employment. I was to bring a certain sum a week to the owner, and whatever was over that I might keep for myself. There was seldom much over, but I managed to scrape along somehow. The hardest job was to learn my way about, for I reckon that of all the mazes that ever were contrived, this city is the most confusing. I had a map beside me, though, and when once I had spotted the principal hotels and stations, I got on pretty well.\n\n\"It was some time before I found out where my two gentlemen were living; but I inquired and inquired until at last I dropped across them. They were at a boarding-house at Camberwell, over on the other side of the river. When once I found them out, I knew that I had them at my mercy. I had grown my beard, and there was no chance of their recognizing me. I would dog them and follow them until I saw my opportunity. I was determined that they should not escape me again.\n\n\"They were very near doing it for all that. Go where they would about London, I was always at their heels. Sometimes I followed them on my cab, and sometimes on foot, but the former was the best, for then they could not get away from me. It was only early in the morning or late at night that I could earn anything, so that I began to get behindhand with my employer. I did not mind that, however, as long as I could lay my hand upon the men I wanted.\n\n\"They were very cunning, though. They must have thought that there was some chance of their being followed, for they would never go out alone, and never after nightfall. During two weeks I drove behind them every day, and never once saw them separate. Drebber himself was drunk half the time, but Stangerson was not to be caught napping. I watched them late and early, but never saw the ghost of a chance; but I was not discouraged, for something told me that the hour had almost come. My only fear was that this thing in my chest might burst a little too soon and leave my work undone.\n\n\"At last, one evening I was driving up and down Torquay Terrace, as the street was called in which they boarded, when I saw a cab drive up to their door. Presently some luggage was brought out and after a time Drebber and Stangerson followed it, and drove off. I whipped up my horse and kept within sight of them, feeling very ill at ease, for I feared that they were going to shift their quarters. At Euston Station they got out, and I left a boy to hold my horse and followed them on to the platform. I heard them ask for the Liverpool train, and the guard answer that one had just gone, and there would not be another for some hours. Stangerson seemed to be put out at that, but Drebber was rather pleased than otherwise. I got so close to them in the bustle that I could hear every word that passed between them. Drebber said that he had a little business of his own to do, and that if the other would wait for him he would soon rejoin him. His companion remonstrated with him, and reminded him that they had resolved to stick together. Drebber answered that the matter was a delicate one, and that he must go alone. I could not catch what Stangerson said to that, but the other burst out swearing, and reminded him that he was nothing more than his paid servant, and that he must not presume to dictate to him. On that the secretary gave it up as a bad job, and simply bargained with him that if he missed the last train he should rejoin him at Halliday's Private Hotel; to which Drebber answered that he would be back on the platform before eleven, and made his way out of the station.\n\n\"The moment for which I had waited so long had at last come. I had my enemies within my power. Together they could protect each other, but singly they were at my mercy. I did not act, however, with undue precipitation. My plans were already formed. There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him. I had my plans arranged by which I should have the opportunity of making the man who had wronged me understand that his old sin had found him out. It chanced that some days before a gentleman who had been engaged in looking over some houses in the Brixton Road had dropped the key of one of them in my carriage. It was claimed that same evening, and returned; but in the interval I had taken a moulding of it, and had a duplicate constructed. By means of this I had access to at least one spot in this great city where I could rely upon being free from interruption. How to get Drebber to that house was the difficult problem which I had now to solve.\n\n\"He walked down the road and went into one or two liquor shops, staying for nearly half an hour in the last of them. When he came out, he staggered in his walk, and was evidently pretty well on. There was a hansom just in front of me, and he hailed it. I followed it so close that the nose of my horse was within a yard of his driver the whole way. We rattled across Waterloo Bridge and through miles of streets, until, to my astonishment, we found ourselves back in the terrace in which he had boarded. I could not imagine what his intention was in returning there; but I went on and pulled up my cab a hundred yards or so from the house. He entered it, and his hansom drove away. Give me a glass of water, if you please. My mouth gets dry with the talking.\"\n\nI handed him the glass, and he drank it down.\n\n\"That's better,\" he said. \"Well, I waited for a quarter of an hour, or more, when suddenly there came a noise like people struggling inside the house. Next moment the door was flung open and two men appeared, one of whom was Drebber, and the other was a young chap whom I had never seen before. This fellow had Drebber by the collar, and when they came to the head of the steps he gave him a shove and a kick which sent him half across the road. 'You hound!' he cried, shaking his stick at him; 'I'll teach you to insult an honest girl!' He was so hot that I think he would have thrashed Drebber with his cudgel, only that the cur staggered away down the road as fast as his legs would carry him. He ran as far as the corner, and then seeing my cab, he hailed me and jumped in. 'Drive me to Halliday's Private Hotel,' said he.\n\n\"When I had him fairly inside my cab, my heart jumped so with joy that I feared lest at this last moment my aneurism might go wrong. I drove along slowly, weighing in my own mind what it was best to do. I might take him right out into the country, and there in some deserted lane have my last interview with him. I had almost decided upon this, when he solved the problem for me. The craze for drink had seized him again, and he ordered me to pull up outside a gin palace. He went in, leaving word that I should wait for him. There he remained until closing time, and when he came out he was so far gone that I knew the game was in my own hands.\n\n\"Don't imagine that I intended to kill him in cold blood. It would only have been rigid justice if I had done so, but I could not bring myself to do it. I had long determined that he should have a show for his life if he chose to take advantage of it. Among the many billets which I have filled in America during my wandering life, I was once janitor and sweeper-out of the laboratory at York College. One day the professor was lecturing on poisons, and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which was so powerful that the least grain meant instant death. I spotted the bottle in which this preparation was kept, and when they were all gone. I helped myself to a little of it. I was a fairly good dispenser, so I worked this alkaloid into small, soluble pills, and each pill I put in a box with a similar pill made without the poison. I determined at the time that when I had my chance my gentlemen should each have a draw out of one of these boxes, while I ate the pill that remained. It would be quite as deadly and a good deal less noisy than firing across a handkerchief. From that day I had always my pill boxes about with me, and the time had now come when I was to use them.\n\n\"It was nearer one than twelve, and a wild, bleak night, blowing hard and raining in torrents. Dismal as it was outside, I was glad within\u2014so glad that I could have shouted out from pure exultation. If any of you gentlemen have ever pined for a thing, and longed for it during twenty long years, and then suddenly found it within your reach, you would understand my feelings. I lit a cigar, and puffed at it to steady my nerves, but my hands were trembling and my temples throbbing with excitement. As I drove, I could see old John Ferrier and sweet Lucy looking at me out of the darkness and smiling at me, just as plain as I see you all in this room. All the way they were ahead of me, one on each side of the horse until I pulled up at the house in the Brixton Road.\n\n\"There was not a soul to be seen, nor a sound to be heard, except the dripping of the rain. When I looked in at the window, I found Drebber all huddled together in a drunken sleep. I shook him by the arm. 'It's time to get out,' I said.\n\n\"'All right, cabby.' said he.\n\n\"I suppose he thought we had come to the hotel that he had mentioned, for he got out without another word, and followed me down the garden. I had to walk beside him to keep him steady, for he was still a little top-heavy. When we came to the door, I opened it and led him into the front room. I give you my word that all the way, the father and the daughter were walking in front of us.\n\n\"'It's infernally dark,' said he, stamping about.\n\n\"'We'll soon have a light,' I said, striking a match and putting it to a wax candle which I had brought with me. 'Now, Enoch Drebber,' I continued, turning to him, and holding the light to my own face, 'who am I?'\n\n\"He gazed at me with bleared, drunken eyes for a moment, and then I saw a horror spring up in them, and convulse his whole features, which showed me that he knew me. He staggered back with a livid face, and I saw the perspiration break out upon his brow, while his teeth chattered in his head. At the sight I leaned my back against the door and laughed loud and long. I had always known that vengeance would be sweet, but I had never hoped for the contentment of soul which now possessed me.\n\n\"'You dog!' I said; 'I have hunted you from Salt Lake City to St. Petersburg, and you have always escaped me. Now, at last your wanderings have come to an end, for either you or I shall never see to-morrow's sun rise.' He shrunk still farther away as I spoke, and I could see on his face that he thought I was mad. So I was for the time. The pulses in my temples beat like sledgehammers, and I believe I would have had a fit of some sort if the blood had not gushed from my nose and relieved me.\n\n\"'What do you think of Lucy Ferrier now?' I cried, locking the door, and shaking the key in his face. 'Punishment has been slow in coming, but it has overtaken you at last.' I saw his coward lips tremble as I spoke. He would have begged for his life, but he knew well that it was useless.\n\n\"'Would you murder me?' he stammered.\n\n\"'There is no murder,' I answered. 'Who talks of murdering a mad dog? What mercy had you upon my poor darling, when you dragged her from her slaughtered father, and bore her away to your accursed and shameless harem?\n\n\"'It was not I who killed her father,' he cried.\n\n\"'But it was you who broke her innocent heart,' I shrieked, thrusting the box before him. 'Let the high God judge between us. Choose and eat. There is death in one and life in the other. I shall take what you leave. Let us see if there is justice upon the earth, or if we are ruled by chance.'\n\n\"He cowered away with wild cries and prayers for mercy, but I drew my knife and held it to his throat until he had obeyed me. Then I swallowed the other, and we stood facing one another in silence for a minute or more, waiting to see which was to live and which was to die. Shall I ever forget the look which came over his face when the first warning pangs told him that the poison was in his system? I laughed as I saw it, and held Lucy's marriage ring in front of his eyes. It was but for a moment, for the action of the alkaloid is rapid. A spasm of pain contorted his features; he threw his hands out in front of him, staggered, and then, with a hoarse cry, fell heavily upon the floor. I turned him over with my foot, and placed my hand upon his heart. There was no movement. He was dead!\n\n\"The blood had been streaming from my nose, but I had taken no notice of it. I don't know what it was that put it into my head to write upon the wall with it. Perhaps it was some mischievous idea of setting the police upon a wrong track, for I felt light-hearted and cheerful. I remember a German being found in New York with RACHE written up above him, and it was argued at the time in the newspapers that the secret societies must have done it. I guessed that what puzzled the New Yorkers would puzzle the Londoners, so I dipped my finger in my own blood and printed it on a convenient place on the wall. Then I walked down to my cab and found that there was nobody about, and that the night was still very wild. I had driven some distance, when I put my hand into the pocket in which I usually kept Lucy's ring, and found that it was not there. I was thunderstruck at this, for it was the only memento that I had of her. Thinking that I might have dropped it when I stooped over Drebber's body, I drove back, and leaving my cab in a side street, I went boldly up to the house\u2014for I was ready to dare anything rather than lose the ring. When I arrived there, I walked right into the arms of a police-officer who was coming out, and only managed to disarm his suspicions by pretending to be hopelessly drunk.\n\n\"That was how Enoch Drebber came to his end. All I had to do then was to do as much for Stangerson, and so pay off John Ferrier's debt. I knew that he was staying at Halliday's Private Hotel, and I hung about all day, but he never came out. I fancy that he suspected something when Drebber failed to put in an appearance. He was cunning, was Stangerson, and always on his guard. If he thought he could keep me off by staying indoors he was very much mistaken. I soon found out which was the window of his bedroom, and early next morning I took advantage of some ladders which were lying in the lane behind the hotel, and so made my way into his room in the gray of the dawn. I woke him up and told him that the hour had come when he was to answer for the life he had taken so long before. I described Drebber's death to him, and I gave him the same choice of the poisoned pills. Instead of grasping at the chance of safety which that offered him, he sprang from his bed and flew at my throat. In self-defence I stabbed him to the heart. It would have been the same in any case, for Providence would never have allowed his guilty hand to pick out anything but the poison.\n\n\"I have little more to say, and it's as well, for I am about done up. I went on cabbing it for a day or so, intending to keep at it until I could save enough to take me back to America. I was standing in the yard when a ragged youngster asked if there was a cabby there called Jefferson Hope, and said that his cab was wanted by a gentleman at 221B Baker Street. I went round suspecting no harm, and the next thing I knew, this young man here had the bracelets on my wrists, and as neatly shackled as ever I saw in my life. That's the whole of my story, gentlemen. You may consider me to be a murderer; but I hold that I am just as much an officer of justice as you are.\"\n\nSo thrilling had the man's narrative been and his manner was so impressive that we had sat silent and absorbed. Even the professional detectives, blas\u00e9 as they were in every detail of crime, appeared to be keenly interested in the man's story. When he finished, we sat for some minutes in a stillness which was only broken by the scratching of Lestrade's pencil as he gave the finishing touches to his shorthand account.\n\n\"There is only one point on which I should like a little more information,\" Sherlock Holmes said at last. \"Who was your accomplice who came for the ring which I advertised?\"\n\nThe prisoner winked at my friend jocosely. \"I can tell my own secrets,\" he said, \"but I don't get other people into trouble. I saw your advertisement, and I thought it might be a plant, or it might be the ring which I wanted. My friend volunteered to go and see. I think you'll own he did it smartly.\"\n\n\"Not a doubt of that,\" said Holmes, heartily.\n\n\"Now, gentlemen,\" the inspector remarked gravely, \"the forms of the law must be complied with. On Thursday the prisoner will be brought before the magistrates, and your attendance will be required. Until then I will be responsible for him.\" He rang the bell as he spoke, and Jefferson Hope was led off by a couple of warders, while my friend and I made our way out of the station and took a cab back to Baker Street." + }, + { + "title": "The Conclusion", + "text": "We had all been warned to appear before the magistrates upon the Thursday; but when the Thursday came there was no occasion for our testimony. A higher Judge had taken the matter in hand, and Jefferson Hope had been summoned before a tribunal where strict justice would be meted out to him. On the very night after his capture the aneurism burst, and he was found in the morning stretched upon the floor of the cell, with a placid smile upon his face, as though he had been able in his dying moments to look back upon a useful life, and on work well done.\n\n\"Gregson and Lestrade will be wild about his death,\" Holmes remarked, as we chatted it over next evening. \"Where will their grand advertisement be now?\"\n\n\"I don't see that they had very much to do with his capture,\" I answered.\n\n\"What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,\" returned my companion, bitterly. \"The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done? Never mind,\" he continued, more brightly, after a pause. \"I would not have missed the investigation for anything. There has been no better case within my recollection. Simple as it was, there were several most instructive points about it.\"\n\n\"Simple!\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"Well, really, it can hardly be described as otherwise,\" said Sherlock Holmes, smiling at my surprise. \"The proof of its intrinsic simplicity is, that without any help save a few very ordinary deductions I was able to lay my hand upon the criminal within three days.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" said I.\n\n\"I have already explained to you that what is out of the common is usually a guide rather than a hindrance. In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backward. That is a very useful accomplishment, and a very easy one, but people do not practise it much. In the everyday affairs of life it is more useful to reason forward, and so the other comes to be neglected. There are fifty who can reason synthetically for one who can reason analytically.\"\n\n\"I confess,\" said I, \"that I do not quite follow you.\"\n\n\"I hardly expected that you would. Let me see if I can make it clearer. Most people, if you describe a train of events to them, will tell you what the result would be. They can put those events together in their minds, and argue from them that something will come to pass. There are few people, however, who, if you told them a result, would be able to evolve from their own inner consciousness what the steps were which led up to that result. This power is what I mean when I talk of reasoning backward, or analytically.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" said I.\n\n\"Now this was a case in which you were given the result and had to find everything else for yourself. Now let me endeavour to show you the different steps in my reasoning. To begin at the beginning. I approached the house, as you know, on foot, and with my mind entirely free from all impressions. I naturally began by examining the roadway, and there, as I have already explained to you, I saw clearly the marks of a cab, which, I ascertained by inquiry, must have been there during the night. I satisfied myself that it was a cab and not a private carriage by the narrow gauge of the wheels. The ordinary London growler is considerably less wide than a gentleman's brougham.\n\n\"This was the first point gained. I then walked slowly down the garden path, which happened to be composed of a clay soil, peculiarly suitable for taking impressions. No doubt it appeared to you to be a mere trampled line of slush, but to my trained eyes every mark upon its surface had a meaning. There is no branch of detective science which is so important and so much neglected as the art of tracing footsteps. Happily, I have always laid great stress upon it, and much practice has made it second nature to me. I saw the heavy footmarks of the constables, but I saw also the track of the two men who had first passed through the garden. It was easy to tell that they had been before the others, because in places their marks had been entirely obliterated by the others coming upon the top of them. In this way my second link was formed, which told me that the nocturnal visitors were two in number, one remarkable for his height (as I calculated from the length of his stride), and the other fashionably dressed, to judge from the small and elegant impression left by his boots.\n\n\"On entering the house this last inference was confirmed. My well-booted man lay before me. The tall one, then, had done the murder, if murder there was. There was no wound upon the dead man's person, but the agitated expression upon his face assured me that he had foreseen his fate before it came upon him. Men who die from heart disease, or any sudden natural cause, never by any chance exhibit agitation upon their features. Having sniffed the dead man's lips, I detected a slightly sour smell, and I came to the conclusion that he had had poison forced upon him. Again, I argued that it had been forced upon him from the hatred and fear expressed upon his face. By the method of exclusion, I had arrived at this result, for no other hypothesis would meet the facts. Do not imagine that it was a very unheard-of idea. The forcible administration of poison is by no means a new thing in criminal annals. The cases of Dolsky in Odessa, and of Leturier in Montpellier, will occur at once to any toxicologist.\n\n\"And now came the great question as to the reason why. Robbery had not been the object of the murder, for nothing was taken. Was it politics, then, or was it a woman? That was the question which confronted me. I was inclined from the first to the latter supposition. Political assassins are only too glad to do their work and to fly. This murder had, on the contrary, been done most deliberately, and the perpetrator had left his tracks all over the room, showing that he had been there all the time. It must have been a private wrong, and not a political one, which called for such a methodical revenge. When the inscription was discovered upon the wall, I was more inclined than ever to my opinion. The thing was too evidently a blind. When the ring was found, however, it settled the question. Clearly the murderer had used it to remind his victim of some dead or absent woman. It was at this point that I asked Gregson whether he had inquired in his telegram to Cleveland as to any particular point in Mr. Drebber's former career. He answered, you remember, in the negative.\n\n\"I then proceeded to make a careful examination of the room, which confirmed me in my opinion as to the murderer's height, and furnished me with the additional details as to the Trichinopoly cigar and the length of his nails. I had already come to the conclusion, since there were no signs of a struggle, that the blood which covered the floor had burst from the murderer's nose in his excitement. I could perceive that the track of blood coincided with the track of his feet. It is seldom that any man, unless he is very full-blooded, breaks out in this way through emotion, so I hazarded the opinion that the criminal was probably a robust and ruddy-faced man. Events proved that I had judged correctly.\n\n\"Having left the house, I proceeded to do what Gregson had neglected. I telegraphed to the head of the police at Cleveland, limiting my inquiry to the circumstances connected with the marriage of Enoch Drebber. The answer was conclusive. It told me that Drebber had already applied for the protection of the law against an old rival in love, named Jefferson Hope, and that this same Hope was at present in Europe. I knew now that I held the clue to the mystery in my hand, and all that remained was to secure the murderer.\n\n\"I had already determined in my own mind that the man who had walked into the house with Drebber was none other than the man who had driven the cab. The marks in the road showed me that the horse had wandered on in a way which would have been impossible had there been anyone in charge of it. Where, then, could the driver be, unless he were inside the house? Again, it is absurd to suppose that any sane man would carry out a deliberate crime under the very eyes, as it were, of a third person who was sure to betray him. Lastly, supposing one man wished to dog another through London, what better means could he adopt than to turn cabdriver? All these considerations led me to the irresistible conclusion that Jefferson Hope was to be found among the jarveys of the Metropolis.\n\n\"If he had been one, there was no reason to believe that he had ceased to be. On the contrary, from his point of view, any sudden change would be likely to draw attention to himself. He would probably, for a time at least, continue to perform his duties. There was no reason to suppose that he was going under an assumed name. Why should he change his name in a country where no one knew his original one? I therefore organized my street Arab detective corps, and sent them systematically to every cab proprietor in London until they ferreted out the man that I wanted. How well they succeeded, and how quickly I took advantage of it, are still fresh in your recollection. The murder of Stangerson was an incident which was entirely unexpected, but which could hardly in any case have been prevented. Through it, as you know, I came into possession of the pills, the existence of which I had already surmised. You see, the whole thing is a chain of logical sequences without a break or flaw.\"\n\n\"It is wonderful!\" I cried. \"Your merits should be publicly recognized. You should publish an account of the case. If you won't, I will for you.\"\n\n\"You may do what you like, Doctor,\" he answered. \"See here!\" he continued, handing a paper over to me, \"look at this!\"\n\nIt was the Echo for the day, and the paragraph to which he pointed was devoted to the case in question.\n\n\"The public,\" it said, \"have lost a sensational treat through the sudden death of the man Hope, who was suspected of the murder of Mr. Enoch Drebber and of Mr. Joseph Stangerson. The details of the case will probably be never known now, though we are informed upon good authority that the crime was the result of an old-standing and romantic feud, in which love and Mormonism bore a part. It seems that both the victims belonged, in their younger days, to the Latter Day Saints, and Hope, the deceased prisoner, hails also from Salt Lake City. If the case has had no other effect, it, at least, brings out in the most striking manner the efficiency of our detective police force, and will serve as a lesson to all foreigners that they will do wisely to settle their feuds at home, and not to carry them on to British soil. It is an open secret that the credit of this smart capture belongs entirely to the well-known Scotland Yard officials, Messrs. Lestrade and Gregson. The man was apprehended, it appears, in the rooms of a certain Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who has himself, as an amateur, shown some talent in the detective line and who, with such instructors, may hope in time to attain to some degree of their skill. It is expected that a testimonial of some sort will be presented to the two officers as a fitting recognition of their services.\"\n\n\"Didn't I tell you so when we started?\" cried Sherlock Holmes with a laugh. \"That's the result of all our Study in Scarlet: to get them a testimonial!\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" I answered; \"I have all the facts in my journal, and the public shall know them. In the meantime you must make yourself contented by the consciousness of success, like the Roman miser\u2014\n\n\u2003\"Populus me sibilat, at mihi plaudo\n\n\u2003Ipse domi simul ac nummos contemplar in arca.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE SIGN OF FOUR", + "text": "[ The Science of Deduction ]\n\nSherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle and rolled back his left shirtcuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined armchair with a long sigh of satisfaction.\n\nThree times a day for many months I had witnessed this performance, but custom had not reconciled my mind to it. On the contrary, from day to day I had become more irritable at the sight, and my conscience swelled nightly within me at the thought that I had lacked the courage to protest. Again and again I had registered a vow that I should deliver my soul upon the subject; but there was that in the cool, nonchalant air of my companion which made him the last man with whom one would care to take anything approaching to a liberty. His great powers, his masterly manner, and the experience which I had had of his many extraordinary qualities, all made me diffident and backward in crossing him.\n\nYet upon that afternoon, whether it was the Beaune which I had taken with my lunch or the additional exasperation produced by the extreme deliberation of his manner, I suddenly felt that I could hold out no longer.\n\n\"Which is it to-day,\" I asked, \"morphine or cocaine?\"\n\nHe raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.\n\n\"It is cocaine,\" he said, \"a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?\"\n\n\"No, indeed,\" I answered brusquely. \"My constitution has not got over the Afghan campaign yet. I cannot afford to throw any extra strain upon it.\"\n\nHe smiled at my vehemence. \"Perhaps you are right, Watson,\" he said. \"I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.\"\n\n\"But consider!\" I said earnestly. \"Count the cost! Your brain may, as you say, be roused and excited, but it is a pathological and morbid process which involves increased tissue-change and may at least leave a permanent weakness. You know, too, what a black reaction comes upon you. Surely the game is hardly worth the candle. Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed? Remember that I speak not only as one comrade to another but as a medical man to one for whose constitution he is to some extent answerable.\"\n\nHe did not seem offended. On the contrary, he put his fingertips together, and leaned his elbows on the arms of his chair, like one who has a relish for conversation.\n\n\"My mind,\" he said, \"rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.\"\n\n\"The only unofficial detective?\" I said, raising my eyebrows.\n\n\"The only unofficial consulting detective,\" he answered. \"I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection. When Gregson, or Lestrade, or Athelney Jones are out of their depths\u2014which, by the way, is their normal state\u2014the matter is laid before me. I examine the data, as an expert, and pronounce a specialist's opinion. I claim no credit in such cases. My name figures in no newspaper. The work itself, the pleasure of finding a field for my peculiar powers, is my highest reward. But you have yourself had some experience of my methods of work in the Jefferson Hope case.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed,\" said I cordially. \"I was never so struck by anything in my life. I even embodied it in a small brochure, with the somewhat fantastic title of 'A Study in Scarlet.'\n\nHe shook his head sadly.\n\n\"I glanced over it,\" said he. \"Honestly, I cannot congratulate you upon it. Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.\"\n\n\"But the romance was there,\" I remonstrated. \"I could not tamper with the facts.\"\n\n\"Some facts should be suppressed, or, at least, a just sense of proportion should be observed in treating them. The only point in the case which deserved mention was the curious analytical reasoning from effects to causes, by which I succeeded in unravelling it.\"\n\nI was annoyed at this criticism of a work which had been specially designed to please him. I confess, too, that I was irritated by the egotism which seemed to demand that every line of my pamphlet should be devoted to his own special doings. More than once during the years that I had lived with him in Baker Street I had observed that a small vanity underlay my companion's quiet and didactic manner. I made no remark, however, but sat nursing my wounded leg. I had had a Jezail bullet through it some time before, and though it did not prevent me from walking it ached wearily at every change of the weather.\n\n\"My practice has extended recently to the Continent,\" said Holmes after a while, filling up his old brier-root pipe. \"I was consulted last week by Fran\u00e7ois le Villard, who, as you probably know, has come rather to the front lately in the French detective service. He has all the Celtic power of quick intuition, but he is deficient in the wide range of exact knowledge which is essential to the higher developments of his art. The case was concerned with a will and possessed some features of interest. I was able to refer him to two parallel cases, the one at Riga in 1857, and the other at St. Louis in 1871, which have suggested to him the true solution. Here is the letter which I had this morning acknowledging my assistance.\"\n\nHe tossed over, as he spoke, a crumpled sheet of foreign notepaper. I glanced my eyes down it, catching a profusion of notes of admiration, with stray magnifiques, coup-de-ma\u00eetres and tours-de-force, all testifying to the ardent admiration of the Frenchman.\n\n\"He speaks as a pupil to his master,\" said I.\n\n\"Oh, he rates my assistance too highly,\" said Sherlock Holmes lightly. \"He has considerable gifts himself. He possesses two out of the three qualities necessary for the ideal detective. He has the power of observation and that of deduction. He is only wanting in knowledge, and that may come in time. He is now translating my small works into French.\"\n\n\"Your works?\"\n\n\"Oh, didn't you know?\" he cried, laughing. \"Yes, I have been guilty of several monographs. They are all upon technical subjects. Here, for example, is one 'Upon the Distinction between the Ashes of the Various Tobaccos. ' In it I enumerate a hundred and forty forms of cigar, cigarette, and pipe tobacco, with coloured plates illustrating the difference in the ash. It is a point which is continually turning up in criminal trials, and which is sometimes of supreme importance as a clue. If you can say definitely, for example, that some murder had been done by a man who was smoking an Indian lunkah, it obviously narrows your field of search. To the trained eye there is as much difference between the black ash of a Trichinopoly and the white fluff of bird's-eye as there is between a cabbage and a potato.\"\n\n\"You have an extraordinary genius for minuti\u00e6,\" I remarked.\n\n\"I appreciate their importance. Here is my monograph upon the tracing of footsteps, with some remarks upon the uses of plaster of Paris as a preserver of impresses. Here, too, is a curious little work upon the influence of a trade upon the form of the hand, with lithotypes of the hands of slaters, sailors, cork-cutters, compositors, weavers, and diamond-polishers. That is a matter of great practical interest to the scientific detective\u2014especially in cases of unclaimed bodies, or in discovering the antecedents of criminals. But I weary you with my hobby.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" I answered earnestly. \"It is of the greatest interest to me, especially since I have had the opportunity of observing your practical application of it. But you spoke just now of observation and deduction. Surely the one to some extent implies the other.\"\n\n\"Why, hardly,\" he answered, leaning back luxuriously in his armchair and sending up thick blue wreaths from his pipe. \"For example, observation shows me that you have been to the Wigmore Street Post-Office this morning, but deduction lets me know that when there you dispatched a telegram.\"\n\n\"Right!\" said I. \"Right on both points! But I confess that I don't see how you arrived at it. It was a sudden impulse upon my part, and I have mentioned it to no one.\"\n\n\"It is simplicity itself,\" he remarked, chuckling at my surprise\u2014\"so absurdly simple that an explanation is superfluous; and yet it may serve to define the limits of observation and of deduction. Observation tells me that you have a little reddish mould adhering to your instep. Just opposite the Wigmore Street Office they have taken up the pavement and thrown up some earth, which lies in such a way that it is difficult to avoid treading in it in entering. The earth is of this peculiar reddish tint which is found, as far as I know, nowhere else in the neighbourhood. So much is observation. The rest is deduction.\"\n\n\"How, then, did you deduce the telegram?\"\n\n\"Why, of course I knew that you had not written a letter, since I sat opposite to you all morning. I see also in your open desk there that you have a sheet of stamps and a thick bundle of postcards. What could you go into the post-office for, then, but to send a wire? Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.\"\n\n\"In this case it certainly is so,\" I replied after a little thought. The thing, however, is, as you say, of the simplest. Would you think me impertinent if I were to put your theories to a more severe test?\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" he answered, \"it would prevent me from taking a second dose of cocaine. I should be delighted to look into any problem which you might submit to me.\"\n\n\"I have heard you say it is difficult for a man to have any object in daily use without leaving the impress of his individuality upon it in such a way that a trained observer might read it. Now, I have here a watch which has recently come into my possession. Would you have the kindness to let me have an opinion upon the character or habits of the late owner?\"\n\nI handed him over the watch with some slight feeling of amusement in my heart, for the test was, as I thought, an impossible one, and I intended it as a lesson against the somewhat dogmatic tone which he occasionally assumed. He balanced the watch in his hand, gazed hard at the dial, opened the back, and examined the works, first with his naked eyes and then with a powerful convex lens. I could hardly keep from smiling at his crestfallen face when he finally snapped the case to and handed it back.\n\n\"There are hardly any data,\" he remarked. \"The watch has been recently cleaned, which robs me of my most suggestive facts.\"\n\n\"You are right,\" I answered. \"It was cleaned before being sent to me.\"\n\nIn my heart I accused my companion of putting forward a most lame and impotent excuse to cover his failure. What data could he expect from an uncleaned watch?\n\n\"Though unsatisfactory, my research has not been entirely barren,\" he observed, staring up at the ceiling with dreamy, lack-lustre eyes. \"Subject to your correction, I should judge that the watch belonged to your elder brother, who inherited it from your father.\"\n\n\"That you gather, no doubt, from the H. W. upon the back?\"\n\n\"Quite so. The W. suggests your own name. The date of the watch is nearly fifty years back, and the initials are as old as the watch: so it was made for the last generation. Jewellery usually descends to the eldest son, and he is most likely to have the same name as the father. Your father has, if I remember right, been dead many years. It has, therefore, been in the hands of your eldest brother.\"\n\n\"Right, so far,\" said I. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"He was a man of untidy habits\u2014very untidy and careless. He was left with good prospects, but he threw away his chances, lived for some time in poverty with occasional short intervals of prosperity, and finally, taking to drink, he died. That is all I can gather.\"\n\nI sprang from my chair and limped impatiently about the room with considerable bitterness in my heart.\n\n\"This is unworthy of you, Holmes,\" I said. \"I could not have believed that you would have descended to this. You have made inquiries into the history of my unhappy brother, and you now pretend to deduce this knowledge in some fanciful way. You cannot expect me to believe that you have read all this from his old watch! It is unkind and, to speak plainly, has a touch of charlatanism in it.\"\n\n\"My dear doctor,\" said he kindly, \"pray accept my apologies. Viewing the matter as an abstract problem, I had forgotten how personal and painful a thing it might be to you. I assure you, however, that I never even knew that you had a brother until you handed me the watch.\"\n\n\"Then how in the name of all that is wonderful did you get these facts? They are absolutely correct in every particular.\"\n\n\"Ah, that is good luck. I could only say what was the balance of probability. I did not at all expect to be so accurate.\"\n\n\"But it was not mere guesswork?\"\n\n\"No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit\u2014destructive to the logical faculty. What seems strange to you is only so because you do not follow my train of thought or observe the small facts upon which large inferences may depend. For example. I began by stating that your brother was careless. When you observe the lower part of that watch-case you notice that it is not only dinted in two places but it is cut and marked all over from the habit of keeping other hard objects, such as coins or keys, in the same pocket. Surely it is no great feat to assume that a man who treats a fifty-guinea watch so cavalierly must be a careless man. Neither is it a very far-fetched inference that a man who inherits one article of such value is pretty well provided for in other respects.\"\n\nI nodded to show that I followed his reasoning.\n\n\"It is very customary for pawnbrokers in England, when they take a watch, to scratch the numbers of the ticket with a pin-point upon the inside of the case. It is more handy than a label as there is no risk of the number being lost or transposed. There are no less than four such numbers visible to my lens on the inside of this case. Inference\u2014that your brother was often at low water. Secondary inference\u2014that he had occasional bursts of prosperity, or he could not have redeemed the pledge. Finally, I ask you to look at the inner plate, which contains the keyhole. Look at the thousands of scratches all round the hole\u2014marks where the key has slipped. What sober man's key could have scored those grooves? But you will never see a drunkard's watch without them. He winds it at night, and he leaves these traces of his unsteady hand. Where is the mystery in all this?\"\n\n\"It is as clear as daylight,\" I answered. \"I regret the injustice which I did you. I should have had more faith in your marvellous faculty. May I ask whether you have any professional inquiry on foot at present?\"\n\n\"None. Hence the cocaine. I cannot live without brainwork. What else is there to live for? Stand at the window here. Was ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world? See how the yellow fog swirls down the Street and drifts across the dun-coloured houses. What could be more hopelessly prosaic and material? What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth.\"\n\nI had opened my mouth to reply to this tirade when, with a crisp knock, our landlady entered, bearing a card upon the brass salver.\n\n\"A young lady for you, sir,\" she said, addressing my companion.\n\n\"Miss Mary Morstan,\" he read. \"Hum! I have no recollection of the name. Ask the young lady to step up, Mrs. Hudson. Don't go, Doctor. I should prefer that you remain.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Statement of the Case", + "text": "Miss Morstan entered the room with a firm step and an outward composure of manner. She was a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste. There was, however, a plainness and simplicity about her costume which bore with it a suggestion of limited means. The dress was a sombre grayish beige, untrimmed and unbraided, and she wore a small turban of the same dull hue, relieved only by a suspicion of white feather in the side. Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, but her expression was sweet and amiable, and her large blue eyes were singularly spiritual and sympathetic. In an experience of women which extends over many nations and three separate continents, I have never looked upon a face which gave a clearer promise of a refined and sensitive nature. I could not but observe that as she took the seat which Sherlock Holmes placed for her, her lip trembled, her hand quivered, and she showed every sign of intense inward agitation.\n\n\"I have come to you, Mr. Holmes,\" she said, \"because you once enabled my employer, Mrs. Cecil Forrester, to unravel a little domestic complication. She was much impressed by your kindness and skill.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Cecil Forrester,\" he repeated thoughtfully. \"I believe that I was of some slight service to her. The case, however, as I remember it, was a very simple one.\"\n\n\"She did not think so. But at least you cannot say the same of mine. I can hardly imagine anything more strange, more utterly inexplicable, than the situation in which I find myself.\"\n\nHolmes rubbed his hands, and his eyes glistened. He leaned forward in his chair with an expression of extraordinary concentration upon his clear-cut, hawklike features.\n\n\"State your case,\" said he in brisk business tones.\n\nI felt that my position was an embarrassing one.\n\n\"You will, I am sure, excuse me,\" I said, rising from my chair.\n\nTo my surprise, the young lady held up her gloved hand to detain me.\n\n\"If your friend,\" she said, \"would be good enough to stop, he might be of inestimable service to me.\"\n\nI relapsed into my chair.\n\n\"Briefly,\" she continued, \"the facts are these. My father was an officer in an Indian regiment, who sent me home when I was quite a child. My mother was dead, and I had no relative in England. I was placed, however, in a comfortable boarding establishment at Edinburgh, and there I remained until I was seventeen years of age. In the year 1878 my father, who was senior captain of his regiment, obtained twelve months' leave and came home. He telegraphed to me from London that he had arrived all safe and directed me to come down at once, giving the Langham Hotel as his address. His message, as I remember, was full of kindness and love. On reaching London I drove to the Langham and was informed that Captain Morstan was staying there, but that he had gone out the night before and had not returned. I waited all day without news of him. That night, on the advice of the manager of the hotel, I communicated with the police, and next morning we advertised in all the papers. Our inquiries led to no result; and from that day to this no word has ever been heard of my unfortunate father. He came home with his heart full of hope to find some peace, some comfort, and instead\u2014\"\n\nShe put her hand to her throat, and a choking sob cut short the sentence.\n\n\"The date?\" asked Holmes, opening his notebook.\n\n\"He disappeared upon the third of December, 1878\u2014nearly ten years ago.\"\n\n\"His luggage?\"\n\n\"Remained at the hotel. There was nothing in it to suggest a clue\u2014some clothes, some books, and a considerable number of curiosities from the Andaman Islands. He had been one of the officers in charge of the convict-guard there.\"\n\n\"Had he any friends in town?\"\n\n\"Only one that we know of\u2014Major Sholto, of his own regiment, the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry. The major had retired some little time before and lived at Upper Norwood. We communicated with him, of course, but he did not even know that his brother officer was in England.\"\n\n\"A singular case,\" remarked Holmes.\n\n\"I have not yet described to you the most singular part. About six years ago\u2014to be exact, upon the fourth of May, 1882\u2014an advertisement appeared in the Times asking for the address of Miss Mary Morstan, and stating that it would be to her advantage to come forward. There was no name or address appended. I had at that time just entered the family of Mrs. Cecil Forrester in the capacity of governess. By her advice I published my address in the advertisement column. The same day there arrived through the post a small cardboard box addressed to me, which I found to contain a very large and lustrous pearl. No word of writing was enclosed. Since then every year upon the same date there has always appeared a similar box, containing a similar pearl, without any clue as to the sender. They have been pronounced by an expert to be of a rare variety and of considerable value. You can see for yourself that they are very handsome.\"\n\nShe opened a flat box as she spoke and showed me six of the finest pearls that I had ever seen.\n\n\"Your statement is most interesting,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"Has anything else occurred to you?\"\n\n\"Yes, and no later than to-day. That is why I have come to you. This morning I received this letter, which you will perhaps read for yourself.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Holmes. \"The envelope, too, please. Post-mark, London, S. W. Date, July 7. Hum! Man's thumbmark on corner\u2014probably postman. Best quality paper. Envelopes at sixpence a packet. Particular man in his stationery. No address.\n\n\"Be at the third pillar from the left outside the Lyceum Theatre tonight at seven o'clock. If you are distrustful bring two friends. You are a wronged woman and shall have justice. Do not bring police. If you do, all will be in vain. Your unknown friend.\"\n\nWell, really, this is a very pretty little mystery! What do you intend to do, Miss Morstan?\"\n\n\"That is exactly what I want to ask you.\"\n\n\"Then we shall most certainly go\u2014you and I and\u2014yes, why Dr. Watson is the very man. Your correspondent says two friends. He and I have worked together before.\"\n\n\"But would he come?\" she asked with something appealing in her voice and expression.\n\n\"I shall be proud and happy,\" said I fervently. \"if I can be of any service.\"\n\n\"You are both very kind,\" she answered. \"I have led a retired life and have no friends whom I could appeal to. If I am here at six it will do, I suppose?\"\n\n\"You must not be later,\" said Holmes. \"There is one other point, however. Is this handwriting the same as that upon the pearl-box addresses?\"\n\n\"I have them here,\" she answered, producing half a dozen pieces of paper.\n\n\"You are certainly a model client. You have the correct intuition. Let us see, now.\" He spread out the papers upon the table and gave little darting glances from one to the other. \"They are disguised hands, except the letter,\" he said presently; \"but there can be no question as to the authorship. See how the irrepressible Greek e will break out, and see the twirl of the final s. They are undoubtedly by the same person. I should not like to suggest false hopes, Miss Morstan, but is there any resemblance between this hand and that of your father?\"\n\n\"Nothing could be more unlike.\"\n\n\"I expected to hear you say so. We shall look out for you, then, at six. Pray allow me to keep the papers. I may look into the matter before then. It is only half-past three. Au revoir, then.\"\n\n\"Au revoir,\" said our visitor; and with a bright, kindly glance from one to the other of us, she replaced her pearl-box in her bosom and hurried away.\n\nStanding at the window, I watched her walking briskly down the street until the gray turban and white feather were but a speck in the sombre crowd.\n\n\"What a very attractive woman!\" I exclaimed, turning to my companion.\n\nHe had lit his pipe again and was leaning back with drooping eyelids. \"Is she?\" he said languidly; \"I did not observe.\"\n\n\"You really are an automaton\u2014a calculating machine,\" I cried. \"There is something positively inhuman in you at times.\"\n\nHe smiled gently.\n\n\"It is of the first importance,\" he cried, \"not to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.\"\n\n\"In this case, however\u2014\"\n\n\"I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule. Have you ever had occasion to study character in handwriting? What do you make of this fellow's scribble?\"\n\n\"It is legible and regular,\" I answered. \"A man of business habits and some force of character.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head.\n\n\"Look at his long letters,\" he said. \"They hardly rise above the common herd. That d might be an a, and that l an e. Men of character always differentiate their long letters, however illegibly they may write. There is vacillation in his k's and self-esteem in his capitals. I am going out now. I have some few references to make. Let me recommend this book\u2014one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade's Martyrdom of Man. I shall be back in an hour.\"\n\nI sat in the window with the volume in my hand, but my thoughts were far from the daring speculations of the writer. My mind ran upon our late visitor\u2014her smiles, the deep rich tones of her voice, the strange mystery which overhung her life. If she were seventeen at the time of her father's disappearance she must be seven-and-twenty now\u2014a sweet age, when youth has lost its self-consciousness and become a little sobered by experience. So I sat and mused until such dangerous thoughts came into my head that I hurried away to my desk and plunged furiously into the latest treatise upon pathology. What was I, an army surgeon with a weak leg and a weaker banking account, that I should dare to think of such things? She was a unit, a factor\u2014nothing more. If my future were black, it was better surely to face it like a man than to attempt to brighten it by mere will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination." + }, + { + "title": "In Quest of a Solution", + "text": "It was half-past five before Holmes returned. He was bright, eager, and inexcell entspirits, a mood which in his case alternated with fits of the blackest depression.\n\n\"There is no great mystery in this matter,\" he said, taking the cup of tea which I had poured out for him; \"the facts appear to admit of only one explanation.\"\n\n\"What! you have solved it already?\"\n\n\"Well, that would be too much to say. I have discovered a suggestive fact, that is all. It is, however, very suggestive: The details are still to be added. I have just found, on consulting the back files of the Times, that Major Sholto, of Upper Norwood, late of the Thirty-fourth Bombay Infantry, died upon the twenty-eighth of April, 1882.\"\n\n\"I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.\"\n\n\"No? You surprise me. Look at it in this way, then. Captain Morstan disappears. The only person in London whom he could have visited is Major Sholto. Major Sholto denies having heard that he was in London. Four years later Sholto dies. Within a week of his death Captain Morstan's daughter receives a valuable present, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in a letter which describes her as a wronged woman. What wrong can it refer to except this deprivation of her father? And why should the presents begin immediately after Sholto's death unless it is that Sholto's heir knows something of the mystery and desires to make compensation? Have you any alternative theory which will meet the facts?\"\n\n\"But what a strange compensation! And how strangely made! Why, too, should he write a letter now, rather than six years ago? Again, the letter speaks of giving her justice. What justice can she have? It is too much to suppose that her father is still alive. There is no other injustice in her case that you know of.\"\n\n\"There are difficulties; there are certainly difficulties,\" said Sherlock Holmes pensively; \"but our expedition of to-night will solve them all. Ah, here is a four-wheeler, and Miss Morstan is inside. Are you all ready? Then we had better go down, for it is a little past the hour.\"\n\nI picked up my hat and my heaviest stick, but I observed that Holmes took his revolver from his drawer and slipped it into his pocket. It was clear that he thought that our night's work might be a serious one.\n\nMiss Morstan was muffled in a dark cloak, and her sensitive face was composed but pale. She must have been more than woman if she did not feel some uneasiness at the strange enterprise upon which we were embarking, yet her self-control was perfect, and she readily answered the few additional questions which Sherlock Holmes put to her.\n\n\"Major Sholto was a very particular friend of Papa's,\" she said. \"His letters were full of allusions to the major. He and Papa were in command of the troops at the Andaman Islands, so they were thrown a great deal together. By the way, a curious paper was found in Papa's desk which no one could understand. I don't suppose that it is of the slightest importance, but I thought you might care to see it, so I brought it with me. It is here.\"\n\nHolmes unfolded the paper carefully and smoothed it out upon his knee. He then very methodically examined it all over with his double lens.\n\n\"It is paper of native Indian manufacture,\" he remarked. \"It has at some time been pinned to a board. The diagram upon it appears to be a plan of part of a large building with numerous halls, corridors, and passages. At one point is a small cross done in red ink, and above it is '3.37 from left,' in faded pencil-writing. In the left-hand corner is a curious hieroglyphic like four crosses in a line with their arms touching. Beside it is written, in very rough and coarse characters, 'The sign of the four\u2014Jonathan Small, Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, Dost Akbar.' No, I confess that I do not see how this bears upon the matter. Yet it is evidently a document of importance. It has been kept carefully in a pocketbook, for the one side is as clean as the other.\"\n\n\"It was in his pocketbook that we found it.\"\n\n\"Preserve it carefully, then, Miss Morstan, for it may prove to be of use to us. I begin to suspect that this matter may turn out to be much deeper and more subtle than I at first supposed. I must reconsider my ideas.\"\n\nHe leaned back in the cab, and I could see by his drawn brow and his vacant eye that he was thinking intently. Miss Morstan and I chatted in an undertone about our present expedition and its possible outcome, but our companion maintained his impenetrable reserve until the end of our journey.\n\nIt was a September evening and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-coloured clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghostlike in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light\u2014sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all humankind, they flitted from the gloom into the light and so back into the gloom once more. I am not subject to impressions, but the dull, heavy evening, with the strange business upon which we were engaged, combined to make me nervous and depressed. I could see from Miss Morstan's manner that she was suffering from the same feeling. Holmes alone could rise superior to petty influences. He held his open notebook upon his knee, and from time to time he jotted down figures and memoranda in the light of his pocket-lantern.\n\nAt the Lyceum Theatre the crowds were already thick at the side-entrances. In front a continuous stream of hansoms and four-wheelers were rattling up, discharging their cargoes of shirt-fronted men and be-shawled, bediamonded women. We had hardly reached the third pillar, which was our rendezvous, before a small, dark, brisk man in the dress of a coachman accosted us.\n\n\"Are you the parties who come with Miss Morstan?\" he asked.\n\n\"I am Miss Morstan, and these two gentlemen are my friends,\" said she.\n\nHe bent a pair of wonderfully penetrating and questioning eyes upon us.\n\n\"You will excuse me, miss,\" he said with a certain dogged manner, \"but I was to ask you to give me your word that neither of your companions is a police-officer.\"\n\n\"I give you my word on that,\" she answered.\n\nHe gave a shrill whistle, on which a street Arab led across a four-wheeler and opened the door. The man who had addressed us mounted to the box, while we took our places inside. We had hardly done so before the driver whipped up his horse, and we plunged away at a furious pace through the foggy streets.\n\nThe situation was a curious one. We were driving to an unknown place, on an unknown errand. Yet our invitation was either a complete hoax\u2014which was an inconceivable hypothesis\u2014or else we had good reason to think that important issues might hang upon our journey. Miss Morstan's demeanour was as resolute and collected as ever. I endeavoured to cheer and amuse her by reminiscences of my adventures in Afghanistan; but, to tell the truth, I was myself so excited at our situation and so curious as to our destination that my stories were slightly involved. To this day she declares that I told her one moving anecdote as to how a musket looked into my tent at the dead of night, and how I fired a double-barrelled tiger cub at it. At first I had some idea as to the direction in which we were driving; but soon, what with our pace, the fog, and my own limited knowledge of London, I lost my bearings and knew nothing save that we seemed to be going a very long way. Sherlock Holmes was never at fault, however, and he muttered the names as the cab rattled through squares and in and out by tortuous by-streets.\n\n\"Rochester Row,\" said he. \"Now Vincent Square. Now we come out on the Vauxhall Bridge Road. We are making for the Surrey side apparently. Yes, I thought so. Now we are on the bridge. You can catch glimpses of the river.\"\n\nWe did indeed get a fleeting view of a stretch of the Thames, with the lamps shining upon the broad, silent water; but our cab dashed on and was soon involved in a labyrinth of streets upon the other side.\n\n\"Wordsworth Road,\" said my companion. \"Priory Road. Lark Hall Lane. Stockwell Place. Robert Street. Cold Harbour Lane. Our quest does not appear to take us to very fashionable regions.\"\n\nWe had indeed reached a questionable and forbidding neighbourhood. Long lines of dull brick houses were only relieved by the coarse glare and tawdry brilliancy of public-houses at the corner. Then came rows of two-storied villas, each with a fronting of miniature garden, and then again interminable lines of new, staring brick buildings\u2014the monster tentacles which the giant city was throwing out into the country. At last the cab drew up at the third house in a new terrace. None of the other houses were inhabited, and that at which we stopped was as dark as its neighbours, save for a single glimmer in the kitchen-window. On our knocking, however, the door was instantly thrown open by a Hindoo servant, clad in a yellow turban, white loose-fitting clothes, and a yellow sash. There was something strangely incongruous in this Oriental figure framed in the commonplace doorway of a third-rate suburban dwelling-house.\n\n\"The sahib awaits you,\" said he, and even as he spoke, there came a high, piping voice from some inner room.\n\n\"Show them in to me, khitmutgar,\" it said. \"Show them straight in to me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Story of the Bald-Headed Man", + "text": "We followed the Indian down a sordid and common passage, ill-lit and worse furnished, until he came to a door upon the right, which he threw open. A blaze of yellow light streamed out upon us, and in the centre of the glare there stood a small man with a very high head, a bristle of red hair all round the fringe of it, and a bald, shining scalp which shot out from among it like a mountain-peak from fir-trees. He writhed his hands together as he stood, and his features were in a perpetual jerk\u2014now smiling, now scowling, but never for an instant in repose. Nature had given him a pendulous lip, and a too visible line of yellow and irregular teeth, which he strove feebly to conceal by constantly passing his hand over the lower part of his face. In spite of his obtrusive baldness he gave the impression of youth. In point of fact, he had just turned his thirtieth year.\n\n\"Your servant, Miss Morstan,\" he kept repeating in a thin, high voice. \"Your servant, gentlemen. Pray step into my little sanctum. A small place, miss, but furnished to my own liking. An oasis of art in the howling desert of South London.\"\n\nWe were all astonished by the appearance of the apartment into which he invited us. In that sorry house it looked as out of place as a diamond of the first water in a setting of brass. The richest and glossiest of curtains and tapestries draped the walls, looped back here and there to expose some richly mounted painting or Oriental vase. The carpet was of amber and black, so soft and so thick that the foot sank pleasantly into it, as into a bed of moss. Two great tiger-skins thrown athwart it increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury, as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the corner. A lamp in the fashion of a silver dove was hung from an almost invisible golden wire in the centre of the room. As it burned it filled the air with a subtle and aromatic odour.\n\n\"Mr. Thaddeus Sholto,\" said the little man, still jerking and smiling. \"That is my name. You are Miss Morstan, of course. And these gentlemen\u2014\"\n\n\"This is Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and this Dr. Watson.\"\n\n\"A doctor, eh?\" cried he, much excited. \"Have you your stethoscope? Might I ask you\u2014would you have the kindness? I have grave doubts as to my mitral valve, if you would be so very good. The aortic I may rely upon, but I should value your opinion upon the mitral.\"\n\nI listened to his heart, as requested, but was unable to find anything amiss, save, indeed, that he was in an ecstasy of fear, for he shivered from head to foot.\n\n\"It appears to be normal,\" I said. \"You have no cause for uneasiness.\"\n\n\"You will excuse my anxiety, Miss Morstan,\" he remarked airily. \"I am a great sufferer, and I have long had suspicions as to that valve. I am delighted to hear that they are unwarranted. Had your father, Miss Morstan, refrained from throwing a strain upon his heart, he might have been alive now.\"\n\nI could have struck the man across the face, so hot was I at this callous and offhand reference to so delicate a matter. Miss Morstan sat down, and her face grew white to the lips.\n\n\"I knew in my heart that he was dead,\" said she.\n\n\"I can give you every information,\" said he; \"and, what is more, I can do you justice; and I will, too, whatever Brother Bartholomew may say. I am so glad to have your friends here not only as an escort to you but also as witnesses to what I am about to do and say. The three of us can show a bold front to Brother Bartholomew. But let us have no outsiders\u2014no police or officials. We can settle everything satisfactorily among ourselves without any interference. Nothing would annoy Brother Bartholomew more than any publicity.\"\n\nHe sat down upon a low settee and blinked at us inquiringly with his weak, watery blue eyes.\n\n\"For my part,\" said Holmes, \"whatever you may choose to say will go no further.\"\n\nI nodded to show, my agreement.\n\n\"That is well! That is well!\" said he. \"May I offer you a glass of Chianti, Miss Morstan? Or of Tokay? I keep no other wines. Shall I open a flask? No? Well, then, I trust that you have no objection to tobacco-smoke, to the balsamic odour of the Eastern tobacco. I am a little nervous, and I find my hookah an invaluable sedative.\"\n\nHe applied a taper to the great bowl, and the smoke bubbled merrily through the rose-water. We sat all three in a semicircle, with our heads advanced and our chins upon our hands, while the strange, jerky little fellow, with his high, shining head, puffed uneasily in the centre.\n\n\"When I first determined to make this communication to you,\" said he, \"I might have given you my address; but I feared that you might disregard my request and bring unpleasant people with you. I took the liberty, therefore, of making an appointment in such a way that my man Williams might be able to see you first. I have complete confidence in his discretion, and he had orders, if he were dissatisfied, to proceed no further in the matter. You will excuse these precautions, but I am a man of somewhat retiring, and I might even say refined, tastes, and there is nothing more unesthetic than a policeman. I have a natural shrinking from all forms of rough materialism. I seldom come in contact with the rough crowd. I live, as you see, with some little atmosphere of elegance around me. I may call myself a patron of the arts. It is my weakness. The landscape is genuine Corot, and though a connoisseur might perhaps throw doubt upon that Salvator Rosa, there cannot be the least question about the Bouguereau. I am partial to the modern French school.\"\n\n\"You will excuse me, Mr. Sholto,\" said Miss Morstan, \"but I am here at your request to learn something which you desire to tell me. It is very late, and I should desire the interview to be as short as possible.\"\n\n\"At the best it must take some time,\" he answered; \"for we shall certainly have to go to Norwood and see Brother Bartholomew. We shall all go and try if we can get the better of Brother Bartholomew. He is very angry with me for taking the course which has seemed right to me. I had quite high words with him last night. You cannot imagine what a terrible fellow he is when he is angry.\"\n\n\"If we are to go to Norwood, it would perhaps be as well to start at once,\" I ventured to remark.\n\nHe laughed until his ears were quite red.\n\n\"That would hardly do,\" he cried. \"I don't know what he would say if I brought you in that sudden way. No, I must prepare you by showing you how we all stand to each other. In the first place, I must tell you that there are several points in the story of which I am myself ignorant. I can only lay the facts before you as far as I know them myself.\n\n\"My father was, as you may have guessed, Major John Sholto, once of the Indian Army. He retired some eleven years ago and came to live at Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood. He had prospered in India and brought back with him a considerable sum of money, a large collection of valuable curiosities, and a staff of native servants. With these advantages he bought himself a house, and lived in great luxury. My twin-brother Bartholomew and I were the only children.\n\n\"I very well remember the sensation which was caused by the disappearance of Captain Morstan. We read the details in the papers, and knowing that he had been a friend of our father's we discussed the case freely in his presence. He used to join in our speculations as to what could have happened. Never for an instant did we suspect that he had the whole secret hidden in his own breast, that of all men he alone knew the fate of Arthur Morstan.\n\n\"We did know, however, that some mystery, some positive danger, overhung our father. He was very fearful of going out alone, and he always employed two prize-fighters to act as porters at Pondicherry Lodge. Williams, who drove you tonight, was one of them. He was once lightweight champion of England. Our father would never tell us what it was he feared, but he had a most marked aversion to men with wooden legs. On one occasion he actually fired his revolver at a wooden-legged man, who proved to be a harmless tradesman canvassing for orders. We had to pay a large sum to hush the matter up. My brother and I used to think this a mere whim of my father's, but events have since led us to change our opinion.\n\n\"Early in 1882 my father received a letter from India which was a great shock to him. He nearly fainted at the breakfast-table when he opened it, and from that day he sickened to his death. What was in the letter we could never discover, but I could see as he held it that it was short and written in a scrawling hand. He had suffered for years from an enlarged spleen, but he now became rapidly worse, and towards the end of April we were informed that he was beyond all hope, and that he wished to make a last communication to us.\n\n\"When we entered his room he was propped up with pillows and breathing heavily. He besought us to lock the door and to come upon either side of the bed. Then grasping our hands he made a remarkable statement to us in a voice which was broken as much by emotion as by pain. I shall try and give it to you in his own very words.\n\n\"'I have only one thing,' he said, 'which weighs upon my mind at this supreme moment. It is my treatment of poor Morstan's orphan. The cursed greed which has been my besetting sin through life has withheld from her the treasure, half at least of which should have been hers. And yet I have made no use of it myself, so blind and foolish a thing is avarice. The mere feeling of possession has been so dear to me that I could not bear to share it with another. See that chaplet tipped with pearls beside the quinine-bottle. Even that I could not bear to part with, although I had got it out with the design of sending it to her. You, my sons, will give her a fair share of the Agra treasure. But send her nothing\u2014not even the chaplet\u2014until I am gone. After all, men have been as bad as this and have recovered.\n\n\"'I will tell you how Morstan died,' he continued. 'He had suffered for years from a weak heart, but he concealed it from every one. I alone knew it. When in India, he and I, through a remarkable chain of circumstances, came into possession of a considerable treasure. I brought it over to England, and on the night of Morstan's arrival he came straight over here to claim his share. He walked over from the station and was admitted by my faithful old Lal Chowdar, who is now dead. Morstan and I had a difference of opinion as to the division of the treasure, and we came to heated words. Morstan had sprung out of his chair in a paroxysm of anger, when he suddenly pressed his hand to his side, his face turned a dusky hue, and he fell backward, cutting his head against the corner of the treasure-chest. When I stooped over him I found, to my horror, that he was dead.\n\n\"'For a long time I sat half distracted, wondering what I should do. My first impulse was, of course, to call for assistance; but I could not but recognize that there was every chance that I would be accused of his murder. His death at the moment of a quarrel, and the gash in his head, would be black against me. Again, an official inquiry could not be made without bringing out some facts about the treasure, which I was particularly anxious to keep secret. He had told me that no soul upon earth knew where he had gone. There seemed to be no necessity why any soul ever should know.\n\n\"'I was still pondering over the matter, when, looking up, I saw my servant, Lal Chowdar, in the doorway. He stole in and bolted the door behind him. \"Do not fear, sahib,\" he said; \"no one need know that you have killed him. Let us hide him away, and who is the wiser?\" \"I did not kill him,\" said I. Lal Chowdar shook his head and smiled. \"I heard it all, sahib,\" said he; \"I heard you quarrel, and I heard the blow. But my lips are sealed. All are asleep in the house. Let us put him away together.\" That was enough to decide me. If my own servant could not believe my innocence, how could I hope to make it good before twelve foolish tradesmen in a jury-box? Lal Chowdar and I disposed of the body that night, and within a few days the London papers were full of the mysterious disappearance of Captain Morstan. You will see from what I say that I can hardly be blamed in the matter. My fault lies in the fact that we concealed not only the body but also the treasure and that I have clung to Morstan's share as well as to my own. I wish you, therefore, to make restitution. Put your ears down to my mouth. The treasure is hidden in\u2014'\n\n\"At this instant a horrible change came over his expression; his eyes stared wildly, his jaw dropped, and he yelled in a voice which I can never forget, 'Keep him out! For Christ's sake keep him out!' We both stared round at the window behind us upon which his gaze was fixed. A face was looking in at us out of the darkness. We could see the whitening of the nose where it was pressed against the glass. It was a bearded, hairy face, with wild cruel eyes and an expression of concentrated malevolence. My brother and I rushed towards the window, but the man was gone. When we returned to my father his head had dropped and his pulse had ceased to beat.\n\n\"We searched the garden that night but found no sign of the intruder save that just under the window a single footmark was visible in the flower-bed. But for that one trace, we might have thought that our imaginations had conjured up that wild, fierce face. We soon, however, had another and a more striking proof that there were secret agencies at work all round us. The window of my father's room was found open in the morning, his cupboards and boxes had been rifled, and upon his chest was fixed a torn piece of paper with the words 'The sign of the four' scrawled across it. What the phrase meant or who our secret visitor may have been, we never knew. As far as we can judge, none of my father's property had been actually stolen, though everything had been turned out. My brother and I naturally associated this peculiar incident with the fear which haunted my father during his life, but it is still a complete mystery to us.\"\n\nThe little man stopped to relight his hookah and puffed thoughtfully for a few moments. We had all sat absorbed, listening to his extraordinary narrative. At the short account of her father's death Miss Morstan had turned deadly white, and for a moment I feared that she was about to faint. She rallied, however, on drinking a glass of water which I quietly poured out for her from a Venetian carafe upon the side-table. Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair with an abstracted expression and the lids drawn low over his glittering eyes. As I glanced at him I could not but think how on that very day he had complained bitterly of the common-placeness of life. Here at least was a problem which would tax his sagacity to the utmost. Mr. Thaddeus Sholto looked from one to the other of us with an obvious pride at the effect which his story had produced and then continued between the puffs of his overgrown pipe.\n\n\"My brother and I,\" said he, \"were, as you may imagine, much excited as to the treasure which my father had spoken of. For weeks and for months we dug and delved in every part of the garden without discovering its whereabouts. It was maddening to think that the hiding-place was on his very lips at the moment that he died. We could judge the splendour of the missing riches by the chaplet which he had taken out. Over this chaplet my brother Bartholomew and I had some little discussion. The pearls were evidently of great value, and he was averse to part with them, for, between friends, my brother was himself a little inclined to my father's fault. He thought, too, that if we parted with the chaplet it might give rise to gossip and finally bring us into trouble. It was all that I could do to persuade him to let me find out Miss Morstan's address and send her a detached pearl at fixed intervals so that at least she might never feel destitute.\"\n\n\"It was a kindly thought,\" said our companion earnestly; \"it was extremely good of you.\"\n\nThe little man waved his hand deprecatingly.\n\n\"We were your trustees,\" he said; \"that was the view which I took of it, though Brother Bartholomew could not altogether see it in that light. We had plenty of money ourselves. I desired no more. Besides, it would have been such bad taste to have treated a young lady in so scurvy a fashion. 'Le mauvais go\u00fbt m\u00e8ne au crime.' The French have a very neat way of putting these things. Our difference of opinion on this subject went so far that I thought it best to set up rooms for myself; so I left Pondicherry Lodge, taking the old khitmutgar and Williams with me. Yesterday, however, I learned that an event of extreme importance has occurred. The treasure has been discovered. I instantly communicated with Miss Morstan, and it only remains for us to drive out to Norwood and demand our share. I explained my views last night to Brother Bartholomew, so we shall be expected, if not welcome, visitors.\"\n\nMr. Thaddeus Sholto ceased and sat twitching on his luxurious settee. We all remained silent, with our thoughts upon the new development which the mysterious business had taken. Holmes was the first to spring to his feet.\n\n\"You have done well, sir, from first to last,\" said he. \"It is possible that we may be able to make you some small return by throwing some light upon that which is still dark to you. But, as Miss Morstan remarked just now, it is late, and we had best put the matter through without delay.\"\n\nOur new acquaintance very deliberately coiled up the tube of his hookah and produced from behind a curtain a very long befrogged topcoat with astrakhan collar and cuffs. This he buttoned tightly up in spite of the extreme closeness of the night and finished his attire by putting on a rabbit-skin cap with hanging lappets which covered the ears, so that no part of him was visible save his mobile and peaky face.\n\n\"My health is somewhat fragile,\" he remarked as he led the way down the passage. \"I am compelled to be a valetudinarian.\"\n\nOur cab was awaiting us outside, and our programme was evidently prearranged, for the driver started off at once at a rapid pace. Thaddeus Sholto talked incessantly in a voice which rose high above the rattle of the wheels.\n\n\"Bartholomew is a clever fellow,\" said he. \"How do you think he found out where the treasure was? He had come to the conclusion that it was somewhere indoors, so he worked out all the cubic space of the house and made measurements everywhere so that not one inch should be unaccounted for. Among other things, he found that the height of the building was seventy-four feet, but on adding together the heights of all the separate rooms and making every allowance for the space between, which he ascertained by borings, he could not bring the total to more than seventy feet. There were four feet unaccounted for. These could only be at the top of the building. He knocked a hole, therefore, in the lath and plaster ceiling of the highest room, and there, sure enough, he came upon another little garret above it, which had been sealed up and was known to no one. In the centre stood the treasure-chest resting upon two rafters. He lowered it through the hole, and there it lies. He computes the value of the jewels at not less than half a million sterling.\"\n\nAt the mention of this gigantic sum we all stared at one another open-eyed. Miss Morstan, could we secure her rights, would change from a needy governess to the richest heiress in England. Surely it was the place of a loyal friend to rejoice at such news, yet I am ashamed to say that selfishness took me by the soul and that my heart turned as heavy as lead within me. I stammered out some few halting words of congratulation and then sat downcast, with my head drooped, deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, some of which he bore about in a leather ease in his pocket. I trust that he may not remember any of the answers which I gave him that night. Holmes declares that he overheard me caution him against the great danger of taking more than two drops of castor-oil, while I recommended strychnine in large doses as a sedative. However that may be, I was certainly relieved when our cab pulled up with a jerk and the coachman sprang down to open the door.\n\n\"This, Miss Morstan, is Pondicherry Lodge,\" said Mr. Thaddeus Sholto as he handed her out." + }, + { + "title": "Tragedy of Pondicherry Lodge", + "text": "It was nearly eleven o'clock when we reached this final stage of our night's adventures. We had left the damp fog of the great city behind us, and the night was fairly fine. A warm wind blew from the westward, and heavy clouds moved slowly across the sky, with half a moon peeping occasionally through the rifts. It was clear enough to see for some distance, but Thaddeus Sholto took down one of the sidelamps from the carriage to give us a better light upon our way.\n\nPondicherry Lodge stood in its own grounds and was girt round with a very high stone wall topped with broken glass. A single narrow iron-clamped door formed the only means of entrance. On this our guide knocked with a peculiar postman-like rat-tat.\n\n\"Who is there?\" cried a gruff voice from within.\n\n\"It is I, McMurdo. You surely know my knock by this time.\"\n\nThere was a grumbling sound and a clanking and jarring of keys. The door swung heavily back, and a short, deep-chested man stood in the opening, with the yellow light of the lantern shining upon his protruded face and twinkling, distrustful eyes.\n\n\"That you, Mr. Thaddeus? But who are the others? I had no orders about them from the master.\"\n\n\"No, McMurdo? You surprise me! I told my brother last night that I should bring some friends.\"\n\n\"He hain't been out o' his rooms to-day, Mr. Thaddeus, and I have no orders. You know very well that I must stick to regulations. I can let you in, but your friends they must just stop where they are.\"\n\nThis was an unexpected obstacle. Thaddeus Sholto looked about him in a perplexed and helpless manner.\n\n\"This is too bad of you, McMurdo!\" he said. \"If I guarantee them, that is enough for you. There is the young lady, too. She cannot wait on the public road at this hour.\"\n\n\"Very sorry, Mr. Thaddeus,\" said the porter inexorably. \"Folk may be friends o' yours, and yet no friend o' the master's. He pays me well to do my duty; and my duty I'll do. I don't know none o' your friends.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes you do, McMurdo,\" cried Sherlock Holmes genially. \"I don't think you can have forgotten me. Don't you remember that amateur who fought three rounds with you at Alison's rooms on the night of your benefit four years back?\"\n\n\"Not Mr. Sherlock Holmes!\" roared the prize-fighter. \"God's truth! how could I have mistook you? If instead o' standin' there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I'd ha' known you without a question. Ah, you're one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.\"\n\n\"You see, Watson, if all else fails me, I have still one of the scientific professions open to me,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"Our friend won't keep us out in the cold now, I am sure.\"\n\n\"In you come, sir, in you come\u2014you and your friends,\" he answered. \"Very sorry, Mr. Thaddeus, but orders are very strict. Had to be certain of your friends before I let them in.\"\n\nInside, a gravel path wound through desolate grounds to a huge clump of a house, square and prosaic, all plunged in shadow save where a moon-beam struck one corner and glimmered in a garret window. The vast size of the building, with its gloom and its deathly silence, struck a chill to the heart. Even Thaddeus Sholto seemed ill at ease, and the lantern quivered and rattled in his hand.\n\n\"I cannot understand it,\" he said. \"There must be some mistake. I distinctly told Bartholomew that we should be here, and yet there is no light in his window. I do not know what to make of it.\"\n\n\"Does he always guard the premises in this way?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Yes; he has followed my father's custom. He was the favourite son you know, and I sometimes think that my father may have told him more than he ever told me. That is Bartholomew's window up there where the moonshine strikes. It is quite bright, but there is no light from within, I think.\"\n\n\"None,\" said Holmes. \"But I see the glint of a light in that little window beside the door.\"\n\n\"Ah, that is the housekeeper's room. That is where old Mrs. Bernstone sits. She can tell us all about it. But perhaps you would not mind waiting here for a minute or two, for if we all go in together, and she has had no word of our coming, she may be alarmed. But, hush! what is that?\"\n\nHe held up the lantern, and his hand shook until the circles of light flickered and wavered all round us. Miss Morstan seized my wrist, and we all stood, with thumping hearts, straining our ears. From the great black house there sounded through the silent night the saddest and most pitiful of sounds\u2014the shrill, broken whimpering of a frightened woman.\n\n\"It is Mrs. Bernstone,\" said Sholto. \"She is the only woman in the house. Wait here. I shall be back in a moment.\"\n\nHe hurried for the door and knocked in his peculiar way. We could see a tall old woman admit him and sway with pleasure at the very sight of him.\n\n\"Oh, Mr. Thaddeus, sir, I am so glad you have come! I am so glad you have come, Mr. Thaddeus, sir!\"\n\nWe heard her reiterated rejoicings until the door was closed and her voice died away into a muffled monotone.\n\nOur guide had left us the lantern. Holmes swung it slowly round and peered keenly at the house and at the great rubbish-heaps which cumbered the grounds. Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marvelled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I should go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.\n\n\"What a strange place!\" she said, looking round.\n\n\"It looks as though all the moles in England had been let loose in it. I have seen something of the sort on the side of a hill near Ballarat, where the prospectors had been at work.\"\n\n\"And from the same cause,\" said Holmes. \"These are the traces of the treasure-seekers. You must remember that they were six years looking for it. No wonder that the grounds look like a gravel-pit.\"\n\nAt that moment the door of the house burst open, and Thaddeus Sholto came running out, with his hands thrown forward and terror in his eyes.\n\n\"There is something amiss with Bartholomew!\" he cried. \"I am frightened! My nerves cannot stand it.\"\n\nHe was, indeed, half blubbering with fear, and his twitching, feeble face peeping out from the great astrakhan collar had the helpless, appealing expression of a terrified child.\n\n\"Come into the house,\" said Holmes in his crisp, firm way.\n\n\"Yes, do!\" pleaded Thaddeus Sholto. \"I really do not feel equal to giving directions.\"\n\nWe all followed him into the housekeeper's room, which stood upon the lefthand side of the passage. The old woman was pacing up and down with a scared look and restless, picking fingers, but the sight of Miss Morstan appeared to have a soothing effect upon her.\n\n\"God bless your sweet, calm face!\" she cried with a hysterical sob. \"It does me good to see you. Oh, but I have been sorely tried this day!\"\n\nOur companion patted her thin, work-worn hand and murmured some few words of kindly, womanly comfort which brought the colour back into the other's bloodless cheeks.\n\n\"Master has locked himself in and will not answer me,\" she explained. \"All day I have waited to hear from him, for he often likes to be alone; but an hour ago I feared that something was amiss, so I went up and peeped through the keyhole. You must go up, Mr. Thaddeus\u2014you must go up and look for yourself. I have seen Mr. Bartholomew Sholto in joy and in sorrow for ten long years, but I never saw him with such a face on him as that.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes took the lamp and led the way, for Thaddeus Sholto's teeth were chattering in his head. So shaken was he that I had to pass my hand under his arm as we went up the stairs, for his knees were trembling under him. Twice as we ascended, Holmes whipped his lens out of his pocket and carefully examined marks which appeared to me to be mere shapeless smudges of dust upon the cocoanut-matting which served as a stair-carpet. He walked slowly from step to step, holding the lamp low, and shooting keen glances to right and left. Miss Morstan had remained behind with the frightened housekeeper.\n\nThe third flight of stairs ended in a straight passage of some length, with a great picture in Indian tapestry upon the right of it and three doors upon the left. Holmes advanced along it in the same slow and methodical way, while we kept close at his heels, with our long black shadows streaming backward down the corridor. The third door was that which we were seeking. Holmes knocked without receiving any answer, and then tried to turn the handle and force it open. It was locked on the inside, however, and by a broad and powerful bolt, as we could see when we set our lamp up against it. The key being turned, however, the hole was not entirely closed. Sherlock Holmes bent down to it and instantly rose again with a sharp intaking of the breath.\n\n\"There is something devilish in this, Watson,\" said he, more moved than I had ever before seen him. \"What do you make of it?\"\n\nI stooped to the hole and recoiled in horror. Moonlight was streaming into the room, and it was bright with a vague and shifty radiance. Looking straight at me and suspended, as it were, in the air, for all beneath was in shadow, there hung a face\u2014the very face of our companion Thaddeus. There was the same high, shining head, the same circular bristle of red hair, the same bloodless countenance. The features were set, however, in a horrible smile, a fixed and unnatural grin, which in that still and moon-lit room was more jarring to the nerves than any scowl or contortion. So like was the face to that of our little friend that I looked round at him to make sure that he was indeed with us. Then I recalled to mind that he had mentioned to us that his brother and he were twins.\n\n\"This is terrible!\" I said to Holmes. \"What is to be done?\"\n\n\"The door must come down,\" he answered, and springing against it, he put all his weight upon the lock.\n\nIt creaked and groaned but did not yield. Together we flung ourselves upon it once more, and this time it gave way with a sudden snap, and we found ourselves within Bartholomew Sholto's chamber.\n\nIt appeared to have been fitted up as a chemical laboratory. A double line of glass-stoppered bottles was drawn up upon the wall opposite the door, and the table was littered over with Bunsen burners, test-tubes, and retorts. In the corners stood carboys of acid in wicker baskets. One of these appeared to leak or to have been broken, for a stream of dark-coloured liquid had trickled out from it, and the air was heavy with a peculiarly pungent, tarlike odour. A set of steps stood at one side of the room in the midst of a litter of lath and plaster, and above them there was an opening in the ceiling large enough for a man to pass through. At the foot of the steps a long coil of rope was thrown carelessly together.\n\nBy the table in a wooden armchair the master of the house was seated all in a heap, with his head sunk upon his left shoulder and that ghastly, inscrutable smile upon his face. He was stiff and cold and had clearly been dead many hours. It seemed to me that not only his features but all his limbs were twisted and turned in the most fantastic fashion. By his hand upon the table there lay a peculiar instrument\u2014a brown, close-grained stick, with a stone head like a hammer, rudely lashed on with coarse twine. Beside it was a torn sheet of note-paper with some words scrawled upon it. Holmes glanced at it and then handed it to me.\n\n\"You see,\" he said with a significant raising of the eyebrows.\n\nIn the light of the lantern I read with a thrill of horror, \"The sign of the four.\"\n\n\"In God's name, what does it all mean?\" I asked.\n\n\"It means murder,\" said he, stooping over the dead man. \"Ah! I expected it. Look here!\"\n\nHe pointed to what looked like a long dark thorn stuck in the skin just above the ear.\n\n\"It looks like a thorn,\" said I.\n\n\"It is a thorn. You may pick it out. But be careful, for it is poisoned.\"\n\nI took it up between my finger and thumb. It came away from the skin so readily that hardly any mark was left behind. One tiny speck of blood showed where the puncture had been.\n\n\"This is all an insoluble mystery to me,\" said I. \"It grows darker instead of clearer.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" he answered, \"it clears every instant. I only require a few missing links to have an entirely connected case.\"\n\nWe had almost forgotten our companion's presence since we entered the chamber. He was still standing in the doorway, the very picture of terror, wringing his hands and moaning to himself. Suddenly, however, he broke out into a sharp, querulous cry.\n\n\"The treasure is gone!\" he said. \"They have robbed him of the treasure! There is the hole through which we lowered it. I helped him to do it! I was the last person who saw him! I left him here last night, and I heard him lock the door as I came downstairs.\"\n\n\"What time was that?\"\n\n\"It was ten o'clock. And now he is dead, and the police will be called in, and I shall be suspected of having had a hand in it. Oh, yes, I am sure I shall. But you don't think so, gentlemen? Surely you don't think that it was I? Is it likely that I would have brought you here if it were I? Oh, dear! oh, dear! I know that I shall go mad!\"\n\nHe jerked his arms and stamped his feet in a kind of convulsive frenzy.\n\n\"You have no reason for fear, Mr. Sholto,\" said Holmes kindly, putting his hand upon his shoulder; \"take my advice and drive down to the station to report the matter to the police. Offer to assist them in every way. We shall wait here until your return.\"\n\nThe little man obeyed in a half-stupefied fashion, and we heard him stumbling down the stairs in the dark." + }, + { + "title": "Sherlock Holmes Gives a Demonstration", + "text": "\"Now, Watson,\" said Holmes, rubbing his hands, \"we have half an hour to ourselves. Let us make good use of it. My case is, as I have told you, almost complete; but we must not err on the side of overconfidence. Simple as the case seems now, there may be something deeper underlying it.\"\n\n\"Simple!\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"Surely,\" said he with something of the air of a clinical professor expounding to his class. \"Just sit in the corner there, that your footprints may not complicate matters. Now to work! In the first place, how did these folk come and how did they go? The door has not been opened since last night. How of the window?\" He carried the lamp across to it, muttering his observations aloud the while but addressing them to himself rather than to me. \"Window is snibbed on the inner side. Framework is solid. No hinges at the side. Let us open it. No water-pipe near. Roof quite out of reach. Yet a man has mounted by the window. It rained a little last night. Here is the print of a foot in mould upon the sill. And here is a circular muddy mark, and here again upon the floor, and here again by the table. See here, Watson! This is really a very pretty demonstration.\"\n\nI looked at the round, well-defined muddy discs.\n\n\"That is not a footmark,\" said I.\n\n\"It is something much more valuable to us. It is the impression of a wooden stump. You see here on the sill is the boot-mark, a heavy boot with a broad metal heel, and beside it is the mark of the timber-toe.\"\n\n\"It is the wooden-legged man.\"\n\n\"Quite so. But there has been someone else\u2014a very able and efficient ally. Could you scale that wall, Doctor?\"\n\nI looked out of the open window. The moon still shone brightly on that angle of the house. We were a good sixty feet from the ground, and, look where I would, I could see no foothold, nor as much as a crevice in the brickwork.\n\n\"It is absolutely impossible,\" I answered.\n\n\"Without aid it is so. But suppose you had a friend up here who lowered you this good stout rope which I see in the corner, securing one end of it to this great hook in the wall. Then, I think, if you were an active man, you might swarm up, wooden leg and all. You would depart, of course, in the same fashion, and your ally would draw up the rope, untie it from the hook, shut the window, snib it on the inside, and get away in the way that he originally came. As a minor point, it may be noted,\" he continued, fingering the rope, \"that our wooden-legged friend, though a fair climber, was not a professional sailor. His hands were far from horny. My lens discloses more than one blood-mark, especially towards the end of the rope, from which I gather that he slipped down with such velocity that he took the skin off his hands.\"\n\n\"This is all very well,\" said I; \"but the thing becomes more unintelligible than ever. How about this mysterious ally? How came he into the room?\"\n\n\"Yes, the ally!\" repeated Holmes pensively. \"There are features of interest about this ally. He lifts the case from the regions of the commonplace. I fancy that this ally breaks fresh ground in the annals of crime in this country\u2014though parallel cases suggest themselves from India and, if my memory serves me, from Senegambia.\n\n\"How came he, then?\" I reiterated. \"The door is locked; the window is inaccessible. Was it through the chimney?\"\n\n\"The grate is much too small,\" he answered. \"I had already considered that possibility.\"\n\n\"How, then?\" I persisted.\n\n\"You will not apply my precept,\" he said, shaking his head. \"How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?\"\n\n\"He came through the hole in the roof!\" I cried.\n\n\"Of course he did. He must have done so. If you will have the kindness to hold the lamp for me, we shall now extend our researches to the room above\u2014the secret room in which the treasure was found.\"\n\nHe mounted the steps, and, seizing a rafter with either hand, he swung himself up into the garret. Then, lying on his face, he reached down for the lamp and held it while I followed him.\n\nThe chamber in which we found ourselves was about ten feet one way and six the other. The floor was formed by the rafters, with thin lath and plaster between, so that in walking one had to step from beam to beam. The roof ran up to an apex and was the evidently inner shell of the true roof of the house. There was no furniture of any sort, and the accumulated dust of years lay thick upon the floor.\n\n\"Here you are, you see,\" said Sherlock Holmes, putting his hand against the sloping wall. \"This is a trapdoor which leads out on to the roof. I can press it back, and here is the roof itself, sloping at a gentle angle. This, then, is the way by which Number One entered. Let us see if we can find some other traces of his individuality?\"\n\nHe held down the lamp to the floor, and as he did so I saw for the second time that night a startled, surprised look come over his face. For myself, as I followed his gaze, my skin was cold under my clothes. The floor was covered thickly with the prints of a naked foot\u2014clear, well-defined, perfectly formed, but scarce half the size of those of an ordinary man.\n\n\"Holmes,\" I said in a whisper, \"a child has done this horrid thing.\"\n\nHe had recovered his self-possession in an instant.\n\n\"I was staggered for the moment,\" he said, \"but the thing is quite natural. My memory failed me, or I should have been able to foretell it. There is nothing more to be learned here. Let us go down.\"\n\n\"What is your theory, then, as to those footmarks?\" I asked eagerly when we had regained the lower room once more.\n\n\"My dear Watson, try a little analysis yourself,\" said he with a touch of impatience. \"You know my methods. Apply them, and it will be instructive to compare results.\"\n\n\"I cannot conceive anything which will cover the facts,\" I answered.\n\n\"It will be clear enough to you soon,\" he said, in an offhand way. \"I think that there is nothing else of importance here, but I will look.\"\n\nHe whipped out his lens and a tape measure and hurried about the room on his knees, measuring, comparing, examining, with his long thin nose only a few inches from the planks and his beady eyes gleaming and deep-set like those of a bird. So swift, silent, and furtive were his movements, like those of a trained bloodhound picking out a scent, that I could not but think what a terrible criminal he would have made had he turned his energy and sagacity against the law instead of exerting them in its defence. As he hunted about, he kept muttering to himself, and finally he broke out into a loud crow of delight.\n\n\"We are certainly in luck,\" said he. \"We ought to have very little trouble now. Number One has had the misfortune to tread in the creosote. You can see the outline of the edge of his small foot here at the side of this evil-smelling mess. The carboy has been cracked, you see, and the stuff has leaked out.\"\n\n\"What then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Why, we have got him, that's all,\" said he.\n\n\"I know a dog that would follow that scent to the world's end. If a pack can track a trailed herring across a shire, how far can a specially trained hound follow so pungent a smell as this? It sounds like a sum in the rule of three. The answer should give us the\u2014But hallo! here are the accredited representatives of the law.\"\n\nHeavy steps and the clamour of loud voices were audible from below, and the hall door shut with a loud crash.\n\n\"Before they come,\" said Holmes, \"just put your hand here on this poor fellow's arm, and here on his leg. What do you feel?\"\n\n\"The muscles are as hard as a board,\" I answered.\n\n\"Quite so. They are in a state of extreme contraction, far exceeding the usual rigor mortis. Coupled with this distortion of the face, this Hippocratic smile, or '...risus sardonicus,' as the old writers called it, what conclusion would it suggest to your mind?\"\n\n\"Death from some powerful vegetable alkaloid,\" I answered, \"some strychnine-like substance which would produce tetanus.\"\n\n\"That was the idea which occurred to me the instant I saw the drawn muscles of the face. On getting into the room I at once looked for the means by which the poison had entered the system. As you saw, I discovered a thorn which had been driven or shot with no great force into the scalp. You observe that the part struck was that which would be turned towards the hole in the ceiling if the man were erect in his chair. Now examine this thorn.\"\n\nI took it up gingerly and held it in the light of the lantern. It was long, sharp, and black, with a glazed look near the point as though some gummy substance had dried upon it. The blunt end had been trimmed and rounded off with a knife.\n\n\"Is that an English thorn?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, it certainly is not.\"\n\n\"With all these data you should be able to draw some just inference. But here are the regulars, so the auxiliary forces may beat a retreat.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the steps which had been coming nearer sounded loudly on the passage, and a very stout, portly man in a gray suit strode heavily into the room. He was red-faced, burly, and plethoric, with a pair of very small twinkling eyes which looked keenly out from between swollen and puffy pouches. He was closely followed by an inspector in uniform and by the still palpitating Thaddeus Sholto.\n\n\"Here's a business!\" he cried in a muffled, husky voice. \"Here's a pretty business! But who are all these? Why, the house seems to be as full as a rabbit-warren!\"\n\n\"I think you must recollect me, Mr. Athelney Jones,\" said Holmes quietly.\n\n\"Why, of course I do!\" he wheezed. \"It's Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the theorist. Remember you! I'll never forget how you lectured us all on causes and inferences and effects in the Bishopgate jewel case. It's true you set us on the right track; but you'll own now that it was more by good luck than good guidance.\"\n\n\"It was a piece of very simple reasoning.\"\n\n\"Oh, come, now, come! Never be ashamed to own up. But what is all this? Bad business! Bad business! Stern facts here\u2014no room for theories. How lucky that I happened to be out at Norwood over another case! I was at the station when the message arrived. What d'you think the man died of?\"\n\n\"Oh, this is hardly a case for me to theorize over,\" said Holmes dryly.\n\n\"No, no. Still, we can't deny that you hit the nail on the head sometimes. Dear me! Door locked, I understand. Jewels worth half a million missing. How was the window?\"\n\n\"Fastened; but there are steps on the sill.\"\n\n\"Well, well, if it was fastened the steps could have nothing to do with the matter. That's common sense. Man might have died in a fit; but then the jewels are missing. Ha! I have a theory. These flashes come upon me at times.\u2014Just step outside, Sergeant, and you, Mr. Sholto. Your friend can remain.\u2014What do you think of this, Holmes? Sholto was, on his own confession, with his brother last night. The brother died in a fit, on which Sholto walked off with the treasure? How's that?\"\n\n\"On which the dead man very considerately got up and locked the door on the inside.\"\n\n\"Hum! There's a flaw there. Let us apply common sense to the matter. This Thaddeus Sholto was with his brother; there was a quarrel: so much we know. The brother is dead and the jewels are gone. So much also we know. No one saw the brother from the time Thaddeus left him. His bed had not been slept in. Thaddeus is evidently in a most disturbed state of mind. His appearance is\u2014well, not attractive. You see that I am weaving my web round Thaddeus. The net begins to close upon him.\"\n\n\"You are not quite in possession of the facts yet,\" said Holmes. \"This splinter of wood, which I have every reason to believe to be poisoned, was in the man's scalp where you still see the mark; this card, inscribed as you see it, was on the table, and beside it lay this rather curious stone-headed instrument. How does all that fit into your theory?\"\n\n\"Confirms it in every respect,\" said the fat detective pompously. \"House is full of Indian curiosities. Thaddeus brought this up, and if this splinter be poisonous Thaddeus may as well have made murderous use of it as any other man. The card is some hocus-pocus\u2014a blind, as like as not. The only question is, how did he depart? Ah, of course, here is a hole in the roof.\"\n\nWith great activity, considering his bulk, he sprang up the steps and squeezed through into the garret, and immediately afterwards we heard his exulting voice proclaiming that he had found the trapdoor.\n\n\"He can find something,\" remarked Holmes, shrugging his shoulders; \"he has occasional glimmerings of reason. I! n'y a pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l'esprit!\"\n\n\"You see!\" said Athelney Jones, reappearing down the steps again; \"facts are better than theories, after all. My view of the case is confirmed. There is a trapdoor communicating with the roof, and it is partly open.\"\n\n\"It was I who opened it.\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed! You did notice it, then?\" He seemed a little crestfallen at the discovery. \"Well, whoever noticed it, it shows how our gentleman got away. Inspector!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" from the passage.\n\n\"Ask Mr. Sholto to step this way.\u2014Mr. Sholto, it is my duty to inform you that anything which you may say will be used against you. I arrest you in the Queen's name as being concerned in the death of your brother.\"\n\n\"There, now! Didn't I tell you!\" cried the poor little man, throwing out his hands and looking from one to the other of us.\n\n\"Don't trouble yourself about it, Mr. Sholto,\" said Holmes; \"I think that I can engage to clear you of the charge.\"\n\n\"Don't promise too much, Mr. Theorist, don't promise too much!\" snapped the detective. \"You may find it a harder matter than you think.\"\n\n\"Not only will I clear him, Mr. Jones, but I will make you a free present of the name and description of one of the two people who were in this room last night. His name, I have every reason to believe, is Jonathan Small. He is a poorly educated man, small, active, with his right leg off, and wearing a wooden stump which is worn away upon the inner side. His left boot has a coarse, square-toed sole, with an iron band round the heel. He is a middle-aged man, much sunburned, and has been a convict. These few indications may be of some assistance to you, coupled with the fact that there is a good deal of skin missing from the palm of his hand. The other man\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah! the other man?\" asked Athelney Jones in a sneering voice, but impressed none the less, as I could easily see, by the precision of the other's manner.\n\n\"Is a rather curious person,\" said Sherlock Holmes, turning upon his heel. \"I hope before very long to be able to introduce you to the pair of them. A word with you, Watson.\"\n\nHe led me out to the head of the stair.\n\n\"This unexpected occurrence,\" he said, \"has caused us rather to lose sight of the original purpose of our journey.\"\n\n\"I have just been thinking so,\" I answered; \"it is not right that Miss Morstan should remain in this stricken house.\"\n\n\"No. You must escort her home. She lives with Mrs. Cecil Forrester in Lower Camberwell, so it is not very far. I will wait for you here if you will drive out again. Or perhaps you are too tired?\"\n\n\"By no means. I don't think I could rest until I know more of this fantastic business. I have seen something of the rough side of life, but I give you my word that this quick succession of strange surprises to-night has shaken my nerve completely. I should like, however, to see the matter through with you, now that I have got so far.\"\n\n\"Your presence will be of great service to me,\" he answered. \"We shall work the case out independently and leave this fellow Jones to exult, over any mare's-nest which he may choose to construct. When you have dropped Miss Morstan, I wish you to go on to No. 3 Pinchin Lane, down near the water's edge at Lambeth. The third house on the right-hand side is a bird-stuffer's; Sherman is the name. You will see a weasel holding a young rabbit in the window. Knock old Sherman up and tell him, with my compliments, that I want Toby at once. You will bring Toby back in the cab with you.\"\n\n\"A dog, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Yes, a queer mongrel with a most amazing power of scent. I would rather have Toby's help than that of the whole detective force of London.\"\n\n\"I shall bring him then,\" said I. \"It is one now. I ought to be back before three if I can get a fresh horse.\"\n\n\"And I,\" said Holmes, \"shall see what I can learn from Mrs. Bernstone and from the Indian servant, who, Mr. Thaddeus tells me, sleeps in the next garret. Then I shall study the great Jones's methods and listen to his not too delicate sarcasms.\n\n\"'Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verh\u00f6hnen was sie nicht verstehen.'\n\n\"Goethe is always pithy.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Episode of the Barrel", + "text": "The police had brought a cab with them, and in this I escorted Miss Morstan back to her home. After the angelic fashion of women, she had borne trouble with a calm face as long as there was someone weaker than herself to support, and I had found her bright and placid by the side of the frightened housekeeper. In the cab, however, she first turned faint and then burst into a passion of weeping\u2014so sorely had she been tried by the adventures of the night. She has told me since that she thought me cold and distant upon that journey. She little guessed the struggle within my breast, or the effort of self-restraint which held me back. My sympathies and my love went out to her, even as my hand had in the garden. I felt that years of the conventionalities of life could not teach me to know her sweet, brave nature as had this one day of strange experiences. Yet there were two thoughts which sealed the words of affection upon my lips. She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time. Worse still, she was rich. If Holmes's researches were successful, she would be an heiress. Was it fair, was it honourable, that a half-pay surgeon should take such advantage of an intimacy which chance had brought about? Might she not look upon me as a mere vulgar fortune-seeker? I could not bear to risk that such a thought should cross her mind. This Agra treasure intervened like an impassable barrier between us.\n\nIt was nearly two o'clock when we reached Mrs. Cecil Forrester's. The servants had retired hours ago, but Mrs. Forrester had been so interested by the strange message which Miss Morstan had received that she had sat up in the hope of her return. She opened the door herself, a middle-aged, graceful woman, and it gave me joy to see how tenderly her arm stole round the other's waist and how motherly was the voice in which she greeted her. She was clearly no mere paid dependant but an honoured friend. I was introduced, and Mrs. Forrester earnestly begged me to step in and tell her our adventures. I explained, however, the importance of my errand and promised faithfully to call and report any progress which we might make with the case. As we drove away I stole a glance back, and I still seem to see that little group on the step\u2014the two graceful, clinging figures, the half-opened door, the hall-light shining through stained glass, the barometer, and the bright stair-rods. It was soothing to catch even that passing glimpse of a tranquil English home in the midst of the wild, dark business which had absorbed us.\n\nAnd the more I thought of what had happened, the wilder and darker it grew. I reviewed the whole extraordinary sequence of events as I rattled on through the silent, gas-lit streets. There was the original problem: that at least was pretty clear now. The death of Captain Morstan, the sending of the pearls, the advertisement, the letter\u2014we had had light upon all those events. They had only led us, however, to a deeper and far more tragic mystery. The Indian treasure, the curious plan found among Morstan's baggage, the strange scene at Major Sholto's death, the rediscovery of the treasure immediately followed by the murder of the discoverer, the very singular accompaniments to the crime, the footsteps, the remarkable weapons, the words upon the card, corresponding with those upon Captain Morstan's chart\u2014here was indeed a labyrinth in which a man less singularly endowed than my fellow-lodger might well despair of ever finding the clue.\n\nPinchin Lane was a row of shabby, two-storied brick houses in the lower quarter of Lambeth. I had to knock for some time at No. 3 before I could make any impression. At last, however, there was the glint of a candle behind the blind, and a face looked out at the upper window.\n\n\"Go on, you drunken vagabond,\" said the face. \"If you kick up any more row, I'll open the kennels and let out forty-three dogs upon you.\"\n\n\"If you'll let one out, it's just what I have come for,\" said I.\n\n\"Go on!\" yelled the voice. \"So help me gracious, I have a wiper in this bag, and I'll drop it on your 'ead if you don't hook it!\"\n\n\"But I want a dog,\" I cried.\n\n\"I won't be argued with!\" shouted Mr. Sherman. \"Now stand clear; for when I say 'three,' down goes the wiper.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sherlock Holmes\u2014\" I began; but the words had a most magical effect, for the window instantly slammed down, and within a minute the door was unbarred and open. Mr. Sherman was a lanky, lean old man, with stooping shoulders, a stringy neck, and blue-tinted glasses.\n\n\"A friend of Mr. Sherlock is always welcome,\" said he. \"Step in, sir. Keep clear of the badger, for he bites. Ah, naughty, naughty; would you take a nip at the gentleman?\" This to a stoat which thrust its wicked head and red eyes between the bars of its cage. \"Don't mind that, sir; it's only a slowworm. It hain't got no fangs, so I gives it the run o' the room, for it keeps the beetles down. You must not mind my bein' just a little short wi' you at first, for I'm guyed at by the children, and there's many a one just comes down this lane to knock me up. What was it that Mr. Sherlock Holmes wanted, sir?\"\n\n\"He wanted a dog of yours.\"\n\n\"Ah! that would be Toby.\"\n\n\"Yes, Toby was the name.\"\n\n\"Toby lives at No. 7 on the left here.\"\n\nHe moved slowly forward with his candle among the queer animal family which he had gathered round him. In the uncertain, shadowy light I could see dimly that there were glancing, glimmering eyes peeping down at us from every cranny and corner. Even the rafters above our heads were lined by solemn fowls, who lazily shifted their weight from one leg to the other as our voices disturbed their slumbers.\n\nToby proved to be an ugly, long-haired, lop-eared creature, half spaniel and half lurcher, brown and white in colour, with a very clumsy, waddling gait. It accepted, after some hesitation, a lump of sugar which the old naturalist handed to me, and, having thus sealed an alliance, it followed me to the cab and made no difficulties about accompanying me. It had just struck three on the Palace clock when I found myself back once more at Pondicherry Lodge. The ex-prize-fighter McMurdo had, I found, been arrested as an accessory, and both he and Mr. Sholto had been marched off to the station. Two constables guarded the narrow gate, but they allowed me to pass with the dog on my mentioning the detective's name.\n\nHolmes was standing on the doorstep with his hands in his pockets, smoking his pipe.\n\n\"Ah, you have him there!\" said he. \"Good dog, then! Athelney Jones has gone. We have had an immense display of energy since you left. He has arrested not only friend Thaddeus but the gatekeeper, the housekeeper, and the Indian servant. We have the place to ourselves but for a sergeant upstairs. Leave the dog here and come up.\"\n\nWe tied Toby to the hall table and reascended the stairs. The room was as we had left it, save that a sheet had been draped over the central figure. A weary-looking police-sergeant reclined in the corner.\n\n\"Lend me your bull's eye, Sergeant,\" said my companion. \"Now tie this bit of cord round my neck, so as to hang it in front of me. Thank you. Now I must kick off my boots and stockings. Just you carry them down with you, Watson. I am going to do a little climbing. And dip my handkerchief into the creosote. That will do. Now come up into the garret with me for a moment.\"\n\nWe clambered up through the hole. Holmes turned his light once more upon the footsteps in the dust.\n\n\"I wish you particularly to notice these footmarks,\" he said. \"Do you observe anything noteworthy about them?\"\n\n\"They belong,\" I said, \"to a child or a small woman.\"\n\n\"Apart from their size, though. Is there nothing else?\"\n\n\"They appear to be much as other footmarks.\"\n\n\"Not at all. Look here! This is the print of a right foot in the dust. Now I make one with my naked foot beside it. What is the chief difference?\"\n\n\"Your toes are all cramped together. The other print has each toe distinctly divided.\"\n\n\"Quite so. That is the point. Bear that in mind. Now, would you kindly step over to that flap-window and smell the edge of the woodwork? I shall stay over here, as I have this handkerchief in my hand.\"\n\nI did as he directed and was instantly conscious of a strong tarry smell.\n\n\"That is where he put his foot in getting out. If you can trace him, I should think that Toby will have no difficulty. Now run downstairs, loose the dog, and look out for Blondin.\"\n\nBy the time that I got out into the grounds Sherlock Holmes was on the roof, and I could see him like an enormous glow-worm crawling very slowly along the ridge. I lost sight of him behind a stack of chimneys, but he presently reappeared and then vanished once more upon the opposite side. When I made my way round there I found him seated at one of the corner eaves.\n\n\"That you, Watson?\" he cried.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"This is the place. What is that black thing down there?\"\n\n\"A water-barrel.\"\n\n\"Top on it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"No sign of a ladder?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Confound the fellow! It's a most breakneck place. I ought to be able to come down where he could climb up. The water-pipe feels pretty firm. Here goes, anyhow.\"\n\nThere was a scuffling of feet, and the lantern began to come steadily down the side of the wall. Then with a light spring he came on to the barrel, and from there to the earth.\n\n\"It was easy to follow him,\" he said, drawing on his stockings and boots. \"Tiles were loosened the whole way along, and in his hurry he had dropped this. It confirms my diagnosis, as you doctors express it.\"\n\nThe object which he held up to me was a small pocket or pouch woven out of coloured grasses and with a few tawdry beads strung round it. In shape and size it was not unlike a cigarette-case. Inside were half a dozen spines of dark wood, sharp at one end and rounded at the other, like that which had struck Bartholomew Sholto.\n\n\"They are hellish things,\" said he. \"Look out that you don't prick yourself. I'm delighted to have them, for the chances are that they are all he has. There is the less fear of you or me finding one in our skin before long. I would sooner face a Martini bullet, myself. Are you game for a six-mile trudge, Watson?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" I answered.\n\n\"Your leg will stand it?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\"Here you are, doggy! Good old Toby! Smell it, Toby, smell it!\" He pushed the creosote handkerchief under the dog's nose, while the creature stood with its fluffy legs separated, and with a most comical cock to its head, like a connoisseur sniffing the bouquet of a famous vintage. Holmes then threw the handkerchief to a distance, fastened a stout cord to the mongrel's collar, and led him to the foot of the water-barrel. The creature instantly broke into a succession of high, tremulous yelps and, with his nose on the ground and his tail in the air, pattered off upon the trail at a pace which strained his leash and kept us at the top of our speed.\n\nThe east had been gradually whitening, and we could now see some distance in the cold gray light. The square, massive house, with its black, empty windows and high, bare walls, towered up, sad and forlorn, behind us. Our course led right across the grounds, in and out among the trenches and pits with which they were scarred and intersected. The whole place, with its scattered dirt-heaps and ill-grown shrubs, had a blighted, ill-omened look which harmonized with the black tragedy which hung over it.\n\nOn reaching the boundary wall Toby ran along, whining eagerly, underneath its shadow, and stopped finally in a corner screened by a young beech. Where the two walls joined, several bricks had been loosened, and the crevices left were worn down and rounded upon the lower side, as though they had frequently been used as a ladder. Holmes clambered up, and taking the dog from me he dropped it over upon the other side.\n\n\"There's the print of Wooden-leg's hand,\" he remarked as I mounted up beside him. \"You see the slight smudge of blood upon the white plaster. What a lucky thing it is that we have had no very heavy rain since yesterday! The scent will lie upon the road in spite of their eight-and-twenty hours' start.\"\n\nI confess that I had my doubts myself when I reflected upon the great traffic which had passed along the London road in the interval. My fears were soon appeased, however. Toby never hesitated or swerved but waddled on in his peculiar rolling fashion. Clearly the pungent smell of the creosote rose high above all other contending scents.\n\n\"Do not imagine,\" said Holmes, \"that I depend for my success in this case upon the mere chance of one of these fellows having put his foot in the chemical. I have knowledge now which would enable me to trace them in many different ways. This, however, is the readiest, and, since fortune has put it into our hands, I should be culpable if I neglected it. It has, however, prevented the case from becoming the pretty little intellectual problem which it at one time promised to be. There might have been some credit to be gained out of it but for this too palpable clue.\"\n\n\"There is credit, and to spare,\" said I. \"I assure you, Holmes, that I marvel at the means by which you obtain your results in this case even more than I did in the Jefferson Hope murder. The thing seems to me to be deeper and more inexplicable. How, for example, could you describe with such confidence the wooden-legged man?\"\n\n\"Pshaw, my dear boy! it was simplicity itself. I don't wish to be theatrical. It is all patent and above-board. Two officers who are in command of a convict-guard learn an important secret as to buried treasure. A map is drawn for them by an Englishman named Jonathan Small. You remember that we saw the name upon the chart in Captain Morstan's possession. He had signed it in behalf of himself and his associates\u2014the sign of the four, as he somewhat dramatically called it. Aided by this chart, the officers\u2014or one of them\u2014gets the treasure and brings it to England, leaving, we will suppose, some condition under which he received it unfulfilled. Now, then, why did not Jonathan Small get the treasure himself? The answer is obvious. The chart is dated at a time when Morstan was brought into close association with convicts. Jonathan Small did not get the treasure because he and his associates were themselves convicts and could not get away.\"\n\n\"But this is mere speculation,\" said I.\n\n\"It is more than that. It is the only hypothesis which covers the facts. Let us see how it fits in with the sequel. Major Sholto remains at peace for some years, happy in the possession of his treasure. Then he receives a letter from India which gives him a great fright. What was that?\"\n\n\"A letter to say that the men whom he had wronged had been set free.\"\n\n\"Or had escaped. That is much more likely, for he would have known what their term of imprisonment was. It would not have been a surprise to him. What does he do then? He guards himself against a wooden-legged man\u2014a white man, mark you, for he mistakes a white tradesman for him and actually fires a pistol at him. Now, only one white man's name is on the chart. The others are Hindoos or Mohammedans. There is no other white man. Therefore we may say with confidence that the wooden-legged man is identical with Jonathan Small. Does the reasoning strike you as being faulty?\"\n\n\"No: it is clear and concise.\"\n\n\"Well, now, let us put ourselves in the place of Jonathan Small. Let us look at it from his point of view. He comes to England with the double idea of regaining what he would consider to be his rights and of having his revenge upon the man who had wronged him. He found out where Sholto lived, and very possibly he established communications with someone inside the house. There is this butler, Lal Rao, whom we have not seen. Mrs. Bernstone gives him far from a good character. Small could not find out, however, where the treasure was hid, for no one ever knew save the major and one faithful servant who had died. Suddenly Small learns that the major is on his deathbed. In a frenzy lest the secret of the treasure die with him, he runs the gauntlet of the guards, makes his way to the dying man's window, and is only deterred from entering by the presence of his two sons. Mad with hate, however, against the dead man, he enters the room that night, searches his private papers in the hope of discovering some memorandum relating to the treasure, and finally leaves a memento of his visit in the short inscription upon the card. He had doubtless planned beforehand that, should he slay the major, he would leave some such record upon the body as a sign that it was not a common murder but, from the point of view of the four associates, something in the nature of an act of justice. Whimsical and bizarre conceits of this kind are common enough in the annals of crime and usually afford valuable indications as to the criminal. Do you follow all this?\"\n\n\"Very clearly.\"\n\n\"Now what could Jonathan Small do? He could only continue to keep a secret watch upon the efforts made to find the treasure. Possibly he leaves England and only comes back at intervals. Then comes the discovery of the garret, and he is instantly informed of it. We again trace the presence of some confederate in the household. Jonathan, with his wooden leg, is utterly unable to reach the lofty room of Bartholomew Sholto. He takes with him, however, a rather curious associate, who gets over this difficulty but dips his naked foot into creosote, whence come Toby, and a six-mile limp for a half-pay officer with a damaged tendo Achillis.\"\n\n\"But it was the associate and not Jonathan who committed the crime.\n\n\"Quite so. And rather to Jonathan's disgust, to judge by the way he stamped about when he got into the room. He bore no grudge against Bartholomew Sholto and would have preferred if he could have been simply bound and gagged. He did not wish to put his head in a halter. There was no help for it, however: the savage instincts of his companion had broken out, and the poison had done its work: so Jonathan Small left his record, lowered the treasure-box to the ground, and followed it himself. That was the train of events as far as I can decipher them. Of course, as to his personal appearance, he must be middle-aged and must be sunburned after serving his time in such an oven as the Andamans. His height is readily calculated from the length of his stride, and we know that he was bearded. His hairiness was the one point which impressed itself upon Thaddeus Sholto when he saw him at the window. I don't know that there is anything else.\"\n\n\"The associate?\"\n\n\"Ah, well, there is no great mystery in that. But you will know all about it soon enough. How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature! Are you well up in your Jean Paul?\"\n\n\"Fairly so. I worked back to him through Carlyle.\"\n\n\"That was like following the brook to the parent lake. He makes one curious but profound remark. It is that the chief proof of man's real greatness lies in his perception of his own smallness. It argues, you see, a power of comparison and of appreciation which is in itself a proof of nobility. There is much food for thought in Richter. You have not a pistol, have you?\"\n\n\"I have my stick.\"\n\n\"It is just possible that we may need something of the sort if we get to their lair. Jonathan I shall leave to you, but if the other turns nasty I shall shoot him dead.\"\n\nHe took out his revolver as he spoke, and, having loaded two of the chambers, he put it back into the right-hand pocket of his jacket.\n\nWe had during this time been following the guidance of Toby down the half-rural villa-lined roads which lead to the metropolis. Now, however, we were beginning to come among continuous streets, where labourers and dockmen were already astir, and slatternly women were taking down shutters and brushing doorsteps. At the square-topped corner public-houses business was just beginning, and rough-looking men were emerging, rubbing their sleeves across their beards after their morning wet. Strange dogs sauntered up and stared wonderingly at us as we passed, but our inimitable Toby looked neither to the right nor to the left but trotted onward with his nose to the ground and an occasional eager whine which spoke of a hot scent.\n\nWe had traversed Streatham, Brixton, Camberwell, and now found ourselves in Kennington Lane, having borne away through the side streets to the east of the Oval. The men whom we pursued seemed to have taken a curiously zigzag road, with the idea probably of escaping observation. They had never kept to the main road if a parallel side street would serve their turn. At the foot of Kennington Lane they had edged away to the left through Bond Street and Miles Street. Where the latter street turns into Knight's Place, Toby ceased to advance but began to run backward and forward with one ear cocked and the other drooping, the very picture of canine indecision. Then he waddled round in circles, looking up to us from time to time, as if to ask for sympathy in his embarrassment.\n\n\"What the deuce is the matter with the dog?\" growled Holmes. \"They surely would not take a cab or go off in a balloon.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they stood here for some time,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Ah! it's all right. He's off again,\" said my companion in a tone of relief.\n\nHe was indeed off, for after sniffing round again he suddenly made up his mind and darted away with an energy and determination such as he had not yet shown. The scent appeared to be much hotter than before, for he had not even to put his nose on the ground but tugged at his leash and tried to break into a run. I could see by the gleam in Holmes's eyes that he thought we were nearing the end of our journey.\n\nOur course now ran down Nine Elms until we came to Broderick and Nelson's large timber-yard just past the White Eagle tavern. Here the dog, frantic with excitement, turned down through the side gate into the enclosure, where the sawyers were already at work. On the dog raced through sawdust and shavings, down an alley, round a passage, between two wood-piles, and finally, with a triumphant yelp, sprang upon a large barrel which still stood upon the hand-trolley on which it had been brought. With lolling tongue and blinking eyes Toby stood upon the cask, looking from one to the other of us for some sign of appreciation. The staves of the barrel and the wheels of the trolley were smeared with a dark liquid, and the whole air was heavy with the smell of creosote.\n\nSherlock Holmes and I looked blankly at each other and then burst simultaneously into an uncontrollable fit of laughter." + }, + { + "title": "The Baker Street Irregulars", + "text": "\"What now?\" I asked. \"Toby has lost his character for infallibility.\"\n\n\"He acted according to his lights,\" said Holmes, lifting him down from the barrel and walking him out of the timber-yard. \"If you consider how much creosote is carted about London in one day, it is no great wonder that our trail should have been crossed. It is much used now, especially for the seasoning of wood. Poor Toby is not to blame.\"\n\n\"We must get on the main scent again, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Yes. And, fortunately, we have no distance to go. Evidently what puzzled the dog at the corner of Knight's Place was that there were two different trails running in opposite directions. We took the wrong one. It only remains to follow the other.\"\n\nThere was no difficulty about this. On leading Toby to the place where he had committed his fault, he cast about in a wide circle and finally dashed off in a fresh direction.\n\n\"We must take care that he does not now bring us to the place where the creosote-barrel came from,\" I observed.\n\n\"I had thought of that. But you notice that he keeps on the pavement, whereas the barrel passed down the roadway. No, we are on the true scent now.\"\n\nIt tended down towards the riverside, running through Belmont Place and Prince's Street. At the end of Broad Street it ran right down to the water's edge, where there was a small wooden wharf. Toby led us to the very edge of this and there stood whining, looking out on the dark current beyond.\n\n\"We are out of luck,\" said Holmes. \"They have taken to a boat here.\"\n\nSeveral small punts and skiffs were lying about in the water and on the edge of the wharf. We took Toby round to each in turn, but though he sniffed earnestly he made no sign.\n\nClose to the rude landing-stage was a small brick house, with a wooden placard slung out through the second window. \"Mordecai Smith\" was printed across it in large letters, and, underneath, \"Boats to hire by the hour or day.\" A second inscription above the door informed us that a steam launch was kept\u2014a statement which was confirmed by a great pile of coke upon the jetty. Sherlock Holmes looked slowly round, and his face assumed an ominous expression.\n\n\"This looks bad,\" said he. \"These fellows are sharper than I expected. They seem to have covered their tracks. There has, I fear, been preconcerted management here.\"\n\nHe was approaching the door of the house, when it opened, and a little curly-headed lad of six came running out, followed by a stoutish, red-faced woman with a large sponge in her hand.\n\n\"You come back and be washed, Jack,\" she shouted. \"Come back, you young imp; for if your father comes home and finds you like that he'll let us hear of it.\"\n\n\"Dear little chap!\" said Holmes strategically. \"What a rosy-cheeked young rascal! Now, Jack, is there anything you would like?\"\n\nThe youth pondered for a moment.\n\n\"I'd like a shillin',\" said he.\n\n\"Nothing you would like better?\"\n\n\"I'd like two shillin' better,\" the prodigy answered after some thought.\n\n\"Here you are, then! Catch!\u2014A fine child, Mrs. Smith!\"\n\n\"Lor' bless you, sir, he is that, and forward. He gets a'most too much for me to manage, 'specially when my man is away days at a time.\"\n\n\"Away, is he?\" said Holmes in a disappointed voice. \"I am sorry for that, for I wanted to speak to Mr. Smith.\"\n\n\"He's been away since yesterday mornin', sir, and, truth to tell, I am beginnin' to feel frightened about him. But if it was about a boat, sir, maybe I could serve as well.\"\n\n\"I wanted to hire his steam launch.\"\n\n\"Why, bless you, sir, it is in the steam launch that he has gone. That's what puzzles me; for I know there ain't more coals in her than would take her to about Woolwich and back. If he's been away in the barge I'd ha' thought nothin'; for many a time a job has taken him as far as Gravesend, and then if there was much doin' there he might ha' stayed over. But what good is a steam launch without coals?\"\n\n\"He might have bought some at a wharf down the river.\"\n\n\"He might, sir, but it weren't his way. Many a time I've heard him call out at the prices they charge for a few odd bags. Besides, I don't like that wooden-legged man, wi' his ugly face and outlandish talk. What did he want always knockin' about here for?\"\n\n\"A wooden-legged man?\" said Holmes with bland surprise.\n\n\"Yes, sir, a brown, monkey-faced chap that's called more'n once for my old man. It was him that roused him up yesternight, and, what's more, my man knew he was comin', for he had steam up in the launch. I tell you straight, sir. I don't feel easy in my mind about it.\"\n\n\"But, my dear Mrs. Smith,\" said Holmes, shrugging his shoulders, \"you are frightening yourself about nothing. How could you possibly tell that it was the wooden-legged man who came in the night? I don't quite understand how you can be so sure.\"\n\n\"His voice, sir. I knew his voice, which is kind o' thick and foggy. He tapped at the winder\u2014about three it would be. 'Show a leg, matey,' says he: 'time to turn out guard.' My old man woke up Jim\u2014that's my eldest\u2014and away they went without so much as a word to me. I could hear the wooden leg clackin' on the stones.\"\n\n\"And was this wooden-legged man alone?\"\n\n\"Couldn't say, I am sure, sir. I didn't hear no one else.\"\n\n\"I am sorry, Mrs. Smith, for I wanted a steam launch, and I have heard good reports of the\u2014Let me see, what is her name?\"\n\n\"The Aurora, sir.\"\n\n\"Ah! She's not that old green launch with a yellow line, very broad in the beam?\"\n\n\"No, indeed. She's as trim a little thing as any on the river. She's been fresh painted, black with two red streaks.\"\n\n\"Thanks. I hope that you will hear soon from Mr. Smith. I am going down the river, and if I should see anything of the Aurora I shall let him know that you are uneasy. A black funnel, you say?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Black with a white band.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course. It was the sides which were black. Good morning, Mrs. Smith. There is a boatman here with a wherry, Watson. We shall take it and cross the river.\"\n\n\"The main thing with people of that sort,\" said Holmes as we sat in the sheets of the wherry, \"is never to let them think that their information can be of the slightest importance to you. If you do they will instantly shut up like an oyster. If you listen to them under protest, as it were, you are very likely to get what you want.\"\n\n\"Our course now seems pretty clear,\" said I.\n\n\"What would you do, then?\"\n\n\"I would engage a launch and go down the river on the track of the Aurora .\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, it would be a colossal task. She may have touched at any wharf on either side of the stream between here and Greenwich. Below the bridge there is a perfect labyrinth of landing-places for miles. It would take you days and days to exhaust them if you set about it alone.\"\n\n\"Employ the police, then.\"\n\n\"No. I shall probably call Athelney Jones in at the last moment. He is not a bad fellow, and I should not like to do anything which would injure him professionally. But I have a fancy for working it out myself, now that we have gone so far.\"\n\n\"Could we advertise, then, asking for information from wharfingers?\"\n\n\"Worse and worse! Our men would know that the chase was hot at their heels, and they would be off out of the country. As it is, they are likely enough to leave, but as long as they think they are perfectly safe they will be in no hurry. Jones's energy will be of use to us there, for his view of the case is sure to push itself into the daily press, and the runaways will think that everyone is off on the wrong scent.\"\n\n\"What are we to do, then?\" I asked as we landed near Millbank Penitentiary.\n\n\"Take this hansom, drive home, have some breakfast, and get an hour's sleep. It is quite on the cards that we may be afoot to-night again. Stop at a telegraph office, cabby! We will keep Toby, for he may be of use to us yet.\"\n\nWe pulled up at the Great Peter Street Post-Office, and Holmes dispatched his wire.\n\n\"Whom do you think that is to?\" he asked as we resumed our journey.\n\n\"I am sure I don't know.\"\n\n\"You remember the Baker Street division of the detective police force whom I employed in the Jefferson Hope case?\"\n\n\"Well,\" said I, laughing.\n\n\"This is just the case where they might be invaluable. If they fail I have other resources, but I shall try them first. That wire was to my dirty little lieutenant, Wiggins, and I expect that he and his gang will be with us before we have finished our breakfast.\n\nIt was between eight and nine o'clock now, and I was conscious of a strong reaction after the successive excitements of the night. I was limp and weary, befogged in mind and fatigued in body. I had not the professional enthusiasm which carried my companion on, nor could I look at the matter as a mere abstract intellectual problem. As far as the death of Bartholomew Sholto went, I had heard little good of him and could feel no intense antipathy to his murderers. The treasure, however, was a different matter. That, or part of it, belonged rightfully to Miss Morstan. While there was a chance of recovering it I was ready to devote my life to the one object. True, if I found it, it would probably put her forever beyond my reach. Yet it would be a petty and selfish love which would be influenced by such a thought as that. If Holmes could work to find the criminals, I had a tenfold stronger reason to urge me on to find the treasure.\n\nA bath at Baker Street and a complete change freshened me up wonderfully. When I came down to our room I found the breakfast laid and Holmes pouring out the coffee.\n\n\"Here it is,\" said he, laughing and pointing to an open newspaper. \"The energetic Jones and the ubiquitous reporter have fixed it up between them. But you have had enough of the case. Better have your ham and eggs first.\"\n\nI took the paper from him and read the short notice, Which was headed \"Mysterious Business at Upper Norwood.\"\n\nAbout twelve o'clock last night [said the Standard] Mr. Bartholomew Sholto, of Pondicherry Lodge, Upper Norwood, was found dead in his room under circumstances which point to foul play. As far as we can learn, no actual traces of violence were found upon Mr. Sholto's person, but a valuable collection of Indian gems which the deceased gentleman had inherited from his father has been carried off. The discovery was first made by Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, who had called at the house with Mr. Thaddeus Sholto, brother of the deceased. By a singular piece of good fortune, Mr. Athelney Jones, the well-known member of the detective police force, happened to be at the Norwood police station and was on the ground within half an hour of the first alarm. His trained and experienced faculties were at once directed towards the detection of the criminals, with the gratifying result that the brother, Thaddeus Sholto, has already been arrested, together with the housekeeper, Mrs. Bernstone, an Indian butler named Lal Rao, and a porter, or gatekeeper, named McMurdo. It is quite certain that the thief or thieves were well acquainted with the house, for Mr. Jones's well-known technical knowledge and his powers of minute observation have enabled him to prove conclusively that the miscreants could not have entered by the door or by the window but must have made their way across the roof of the building, and so through a trapdoor into a room which communicated with that in which the body was found. This fact, which has been very clearly made out, proves conclusively that it was no mere haphazard burglary. The prompt and energetic action of the officers of the law shows the great advantage of the presence on such occasions of a single vigorous and masterful mind. We cannot but think that it supplies an argument to those who would wish to see our detectives more decentralized, and so brought into closer and more effective touch with the cases which it is their duty to investigate.\n\n\"Isn't it gorgeous!\" said Holmes, grinning over his coffee cup. \"What do you think of it?\"\n\n\"I think that we have had a close shave ourselves of being arrested for the crime.\"\n\n\"So do I. I wouldn't answer for our safety now if he should happen to have another of his attacks of energy.\"\n\nAt this moment there was a loud ring at the bell, and I could hear Mrs. Hudson, our landlady, raising her voice in a wail of expostulation and dismay.\n\n\"By heavens, Holmes,\" I said, half rising, \"I believe that they are really after us.\"\n\n\"No, it's not quite so bad as that. It is the unofficial force\u2014the Baker Street irregulars.\"\n\nAs he spoke, there came a swift pattering of naked feet upon the stairs, a clatter of high voices, and in rushed a dozen dirty and ragged little street Arabs. There was some show of discipline among them, despite their tumultuous entry, for they instantly drew up in line and stood facing us with expectant faces. One of their number, taller and older than the others, stood forward with an air of lounging superiority which was very funny in such a disreputable little scarecrow.\n\n\"Got your message, sir,\" said he, \"and brought 'em on sharp. Three bob and a tanner for tickets.\"\n\n\"Here you are,\" said Holmes, producing some silver. \"In future they can report to you, Wiggins, and you to me. I cannot have the house invaded in this way. However, it is just as well that you should all hear the instructions. I want to find the whereabouts of a steam launch called the Aurora, owner Mordecai Smith, black with two red streaks, funnel black with a white band. She is down the river somewhere. I want one boy to be at Mordecai Smith's landing-stage opposite Millbank to say if the boat comes back. You must divide it out among yourselves and do both banks thoroughly. Let me know the moment you have news. Is that all clear?\"\n\n\"Yes, guv'nor,\" said Wiggins.\n\n\"The old scale of pay, and a guinea to the boy who finds the boat. Here's a day in advance. Now off you go!\"\n\nHe handed them a shilling each, and away they buzzed down the stairs, and I saw them a moment later streaming down the street.\n\n\"If the launch is above water they will find her,\" said Holmes as he rose from the table and lit his pipe. \"They can go every-where, see everything, overhear everyone. I expect to hear before evening that they have spotted her. In the meanwhile, we can do nothing but await results. We cannot pick up the broken trail until we find either the Aurora or Mr. Mordecai Smith.\"\n\n\"Toby could eat these scraps, I dare say. Are you going to bed, Holmes?\"\n\n\"No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely. I am going to smoke and to think over this queer business to which my fair client has introduced us. If ever man had an easy task, this of ours ought to be. Wooden-legged men are not so common, but the other man must, I should think, be absolutely unique.\"\n\n\"That other man again!\"\n\n\"I have no wish to make a mystery of him to you, anyway. But you must have formed your own opinion. Now, do consider the data. Diminutive footmarks, toes never fettered by boots, naked feet, stone-headed wooden mace, great agility, small poisoned darts. What do you make of all this?\"\n\n\"A savage!\" I exclaimed. \"Perhaps one of those Indians who were the associates of Jonathan Small.\"\n\n\"Hardly that,\" said he. \"When first I saw signs of strange weapons I was inclined to think so, but the remarkable character of the footmarks caused me to reconsider my views. Some of the inhabitants of the Indian Peninsula are small men, but none could have left such marks as that. The Hindoo proper has long and thin feet. The sandal-wearing Mohammedan has the great toe well separated from the others because the thong is commonly passed between. These little darts, too, could only be shot in one way. They are from a blow-pipe. Now, then, where are we to find our savage?\"\n\n\"South America,\" I hazarded.\n\nHe stretched his hand up and took down a bulky volume from the shelf.\n\n\"This is the first volume of a gazetteer which is now being published. It may be looked upon as the very latest authority. What have we here?\n\n\"Andaman Islands, situated 340 miles to the north of Sumatra, in the Bay of Bengal.\n\nHum! hum! What's all this? Moist climate, coral reefs, sharks, Port Blair, convict barracks. Rutland Island, cottonwoods\u2014Ah, here we are!\n\n\"The aborigines of the Andaman Islands may perhaps claim the distinction of being the smallest race upon this earth, though some anthropologists prefer the Bushmen of Africa, the Digger Indians of America, and the Terra del Fuegians. The average height is rather below four feet, although many full-grown adults may be found who are very much smaller than this. They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained.\n\nMark that, Watson. Now, then listen to this.\n\n\"They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they, that all the efforts of the British officials have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast.\n\nNice, amiable people, Watson! If this fellow had been left to his own unaided devices, this affair might have taken an even more ghastly turn. I fancy that, even as it is, Jonathan Small would give a good deal not to have employed him.\"\n\n\"But how came he to have so singular a companion?\"\n\n\"Ah, that is more than I can tell. Since, however, we had already determined that Small had come from the Andamans, it is not so very wonderful that this islander should be with him. No doubt we shall know all about it in time. Look here, Watson; you look regularly done. Lie down there on the sofa and see if I can put you to sleep.\"\n\nHe took up his violin from the corner, and as I stretched myself out he began to play some low, dreamy, melodious air\u2014his own, no doubt, for he had a remarkable gift for improvisation. I have a vague remembrance of his gaunt limbs, his earnest face and the rise and fall of his bow. Then I seemed to be floated peacefully away upon a soft sea of sound until I found myself in dreamland, with the sweet face of Mary Morstan looking down upon me." + }, + { + "title": "A Break in the Chain", + "text": "It was late in the afternoon before I woke, strengthened and refreshed. Sherlock Holmes still sat exactly as I had left him, save that he had laid aside his violin and was deep in a book. He looked across at me as I stirred, and I noticed that his face was dark and troubled.\n\n\"You have slept soundly,\" he said. \"I feared that our talk would wake you.\"\n\n\"I heard nothing,\" I answered. \"Have you had fresh news, then?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, no. I confess that I am surprised and disappointed. I expected something definite by this time. Wiggins has just been up to report. He says that no trace can be found of the launch. It is a provoking check, for every hour is of importance.\"\n\n\"Can I do anything? I am perfectly fresh now, and quite ready for another night's outing.\"\n\n\"No; we can do nothing. We can only wait. If we go ourselves the message might come in our absence and delay be caused. You can do what you will, but I must remain on guard.\"\n\n\"Then I shall run over to Camberwell and call upon Mrs. Cecil Forrester. She asked me to, yesterday.\"\n\n\"On Mrs. Cecil Forrester?\" asked Holmes with the twinkle of a smile in his eyes.\n\n\"Well, of course on Miss Morstan, too. They were anxious to hear what happened.\"\n\n\"I would not tell them too much,\" said Holmes. \"Women are never to be entirely trusted\u2014not the best of them.\"\n\nI did not pause to argue over this atrocious sentiment.\n\n\"I shall be back in an hour or two,\" I remarked.\n\n\"All right! Good luck! But, I say, if you are crossing the river you may as well return Toby, for I don't think it is at all likely that we shall have any use for him now.\"\n\nI took our mongrel accordingly and left him, together with a half-sovereign at the old naturalist's in Pinchin Lane. At Camberwell I found Miss Morstan a little weary after her night's adventures but very eager to hear the news. Mrs. Forrester, too, was full of curiosity. I told them all that we had done, suppressing, however, the more dreadful parts of the tragedy. Thus, although I spoke of Mr. Sholto's death, I said nothing of the exact manner and method of it. With all my omissions, however, there was enough to startle and amaze them.\n\n\"It is a romance!\" cried Mrs. Forrester. \"An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl.\"\n\n\"And two knight-errants to the rescue,\" added Miss Morstan with a bright glance at me.\n\n\"Why, Mary, your fortune depends upon the issue of this search. I don't think that you are nearly excited enough. Just imagine what it must be to be so rich and to have the world at your feet!\"\n\nIt sent a little thrill of joy to my heart to notice that she showed no sign of elation at the prospect. On the contrary, she gave a toss of her proud head, as though the matter were one in which she took small interest.\n\n\"It is for Mr. Thaddeus Sholto that I am anxious,\" she said. \"Nothing else is of any consequence; but I think that he has behaved most kindly and honourably throughout. It is our duty to clear him of this dreadful and unfounded charge.\"\n\nIt was evening before I left Camberwell, and quite dark by the time I reached home. My companion's book and pipe lay by his chair, but he had disappeared. I looked about in the hope of seeing a note, but there was none.\n\n\"I suppose that Mr. Sherlock Holmes has gone out,\" I said to Mrs. Hudson as she came up to lower the blinds.\n\n\"No, sir. He has gone to his room, sir. Do you know, sir,\" sinking her voice into an impressive whisper, \"I am afraid for his health.\"\n\n\"Why so, Mrs. Hudson?\"\n\n\"Well, he's that strange, sir. After you was gone he walked and he walked, up and down, and up and down, until I was weary of the sound of his footstep. Then I heard him talking to himself and muttering, and every time the bell rang out he came on the stairhead, with 'What is that, Mrs. Hudson?' And now he has slammed off to his room, but I can hear him walking away the same as ever. I hope he's not going to be ill, sir. I ventured to say something to him about cooling medicine, but he turned on me, sir, with such a look that I don't know how ever I got out of the room.\"\n\n\"I don't think that you have any cause to be uneasy, Mrs. Hudson,\" I answered. \"I have seen him like this before. He has some small matter upon his mind which makes him restless.\"\n\nI tried to speak lightly to our worthy landlady, but I was myself somewhat uneasy when through the long night I still from time to time heard the dull sound of his tread, and knew how his keen spirit was chafing against this involuntary inaction.\n\nAt breakfast-time he looked worn and haggard, with a little fleck of feverish colour upon either cheek.\n\n\"You are knocking yourself up, old man,\" I remarked. \"I heard you marching about in the night.\"\n\n\"No, I could not sleep,\" he answered. \"This infernal problem is consuming me. It is too much to be balked by so petty an obstacle, when all else had been overcome. I know the men, the launch, everything; and yet I can get no news. I have set other agencies at work and used every means at my disposal. The whole river has been searched on either side, but there is no news, nor has Mrs. Smith heard of her husband. I shall come to the conclusion soon that they have scuttled the craft. But there are objections to that.\"\n\n\"Or that Mrs. Smith has put us on a wrong scent.\"\n\n\"No, I think that may be dismissed. I had inquiries made, and there is a launch of that description.\"\n\n\"Could it have gone up the river?\"\n\n\"I have considered that possibility, too, and there is a search-party who will work up as far as Richmond. If no news comes to-day I shall start off myself tomorrow and go for the men rather than the boat. But surely, surely, we shall hear something.\"\n\nWe did not, however. Not a word came to us either from Wiggins or from the other agencies. There were articles in most of the papers upon the Norwood tragedy. They all appeared to be rather hostile to the unfortunate Thaddeus Sholto. No fresh details were to be found, however, in any of them, save that an inquest was to be held upon the following day. I walked over to Camberwell in the evening to report our ill-success to the ladies, and on my return I found Holmes dejected and somewhat morose. He would hardly reply to my questions and busied himself all the evening in an abstruse chemical analysis which involved much heating of retorts and distilling of vapours, ending at last in a smell which fairly drove me out of the apartment. Up to the small hours of the morning I could hear the clinking of his test-tubes which told me that he was still engaged in his malodorous experiment.\n\nIn the early dawn I woke with a start and was surprised to find him standing by my bedside, clad in a rude sailor dress with a pea-jacket and a coarse red scarf round his neck.\n\n\"I am off down the river, Watson,\" said he. \"I have been turning it over in my mind, and I can see only one way out of it. It is worth trying, at all events.\"\n\n\"Surely I can come with you, then?\" said I.\n\n\"No; you can be much more useful if you will remain here as my representative. I am loath to go, for it is quite on the cards that some message may come during the day, though Wiggins was despondent about it last night. I want you to open all notes and telegrams; and to act on your own judgment if any news should come. Can I rely upon you?\"\n\n\"Most certainly.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that you will not be able to wire to me, for I can hardly tell yet where I may find myself. If I am in luck, however, I may not be gone so very long. I shall have news of some sort or other before I get back.\"\n\nI had heard nothing of him by breakfast time. On opening the Standard, however, I found that there was a fresh allusion to the business.\n\nWith reference to the Upper Norwood tragedy [it remarked] we have reason to believe that the matter promises to be even more complex and mysterious than was originally supposed. Fresh evidence has shown that it is quite impossible that Mr. Thaddeus Sholto could have been in any way concerned in the matter. He and the housekeeper, Mrs. Bernstone, were both released yesterday evening. It is believed, however, that the police have a clue as to the real culprits, and that it is being prosecuted by Mr. Athelney Jones, of Scotland Yard, with all his well-known energy and sagacity. Further arrests may be expected at any moment.\n\n\"That is satisfactory so far as it goes,\" thought I. \"Friend Sholto is safe, at any rate. I wonder what the fresh clue may be, though it seems to be a stereotyped form whenever the police have made a blunder.\"\n\nI tossed the paper down upon the table, but at that moment my eye caught an advertisement in the agony column. It ran in this way:\n\nLOST\u2014Whereas Mordecai Smith, boatman, and his son Jim, left Smith's Wharf at or about three o'clock last Tuesday morning in the steam launch Aurora, black with two red stripes, funnel black with a white band, the sum of five pounds will be paid to anyone who can give information to Mrs. Smith, at Smith's Wharf, or at 221B, Baker Street, as to the whereabouts of the said Mordecai Smith and the launch Aurora.\n\nThis was clearly Holmes's doing. The Baker Street address was enough to prove that. It struck me as rather ingenious because it might be read by the fugitives without their seeing in it more than the natural anxiety of a wife for her missing husband.\n\nIt was a long day. Every time that a knock came to the door or a sharp step passed in the street, I imagined that it was either Holmes returning or an answer to his advertisement. I tried to read, but my thoughts would wander off to our strange quest and to the ill-assorted and villainous pair whom we were pursuing. Could there be, I wondered, some radical flaw in my companion's reasoning? Might he not be suffering from some huge self-deception? Was it not possible that his nimble and speculative mind had built up this wild theory upon faulty premises? I had never known him to be wrong, and yet the keenest reasoner may occasionally be deceived. He was likely, I thought, to fall into error through the over-refinement of his logic\u2014his preference for a subtle and bizarre explanation when a plainer and more commonplace one lay ready to his hand. Yet, on the other hand, I had myself seen the evidence, and I had heard the reasons for his deductions. When I looked back on the long chain of curious circumstances, many of them trivial in themselves but all tending in the same direction, I could not disguise from myself that even if Holmes's explanation were incorrect the true theory must be equally outr\u00e9 and startling.\n\nAt three o'clock on the afternoon there was a loud peal at the bell, an authoritative voice in the hall, and, to my surprise, no less a person than Mr. Athelney Jones was shown up to me. Very different was he, however, from the brusque and masterful professor of common sense who had taken over the case so confidently at Upper Norwood. His expression was downcast, and his bearing meek and even apologetic.\n\n\"Good-day, sir; good-day,\" said he. \"Mr. Sherlock Holmes is out, I understand.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I cannot be sure when he will be back. But perhaps you would care to wait. Take that chair and try one of these cigars.\"\n\n\"Thank you; I don't mind if I do,\" said he, mopping his face with a red bandanna handkerchief.\n\n\"And a whisky and soda?\"\n\n\"Well, half a glass. It is very hot for the time of year, and I have had a good deal to worry and try me. You know my theory about this Norwood case?\"\n\n\"I remember that you expressed one.\"\n\n\"Well, I have been obliged to reconsider it. I had my net drawn tightly round Mr. Sholto, sir, when pop he went through a hole in the middle of it. He was able to prove an alibi which could not be shaken. From the time that he left his brother's room he was never out of sight of someone or other. So it could not be he who climbed over roofs and through trap-doors. It's a very dark case, and my professional credit is at stake. I should be very glad of a little assistance.\"\n\n\"We all need help sometimes,\" said I.\n\n\"Your friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, is a wonderful man, sir,\" said he in a husky and confidential voice. \"He's a man who is not to be beat. I have known that young man go into a good many cases, but I never saw the case yet that he could not throw a light upon. He is irregular in his methods and a little quick perhaps in jumping at theories, but, on the whole, I think he would have made a most promising officer, and I don't care who knows it. I have had a wire from him this morning, by which I understand that he has got some clue to this Sholto business. Here is his message.\"\n\nHe took the telegram out of his pocket and handed it to me. It was dated from Poplar at twelve o'clock.\n\nGo to Baker Street at once [it said]. If I have not returned, wait for me. I am close on the track of the Sholto gang. You can come with us to-night if you want to be in at the finish.\n\n\"This sounds well. He has evidently picked up the scent again,\" said I.\n\n\"Ah, then he has been at fault too,\" exclaimed Jones with evident satisfaction. \"Even the best of us are thrown off sometimes. Of course this may prove to be a false alarm but it is my duty as an officer of the law to allow no chance to slip. But there is someone at the door. Perhaps this is he.\"\n\nA heavy step was heard ascending the stair, with a great wheezing and rattling as from a man who was sorely put to it for breath. Once or twice he stopped, as though the climb were too much for him, but at last he made his way to our door and entered. His appearance corresponded to the sounds which we had heard. He was an aged man, clad in seafaring garb, with an old pea-jacket buttoned up to his throat. His back was bowed, his knees were shaky, and his breathing was painfully asthmatic. As he leaned upon a thick oaken cudgel his shoulders heaved in the effort to draw the air into his lungs. He had a coloured scarf round his chin, and I could see little of his face save a pair of keen dark eyes, overhung by bushy white brows and long gray side-whiskers. Altogether he gave me the impression of a respectable master mariner who had fallen into years and poverty.\n\n\"What is it, my man?\" I asked.\n\nHe looked about him in the slow methodical fashion of old age.\n\n\"Is Mr. Sherlock Holmes here?\" said he.\n\n\"No; but I am acting for him. You can tell me any message you have for him.\"\n\n\"It was to him himself I was to tell it,\" said he.\n\n\"But I tell you that I am acting for him. Was it about Mordecai Smith's boat?\"\n\n\"Yes. I knows well where it is. An' I knows where the men he is after are. An' I knows where the treasure is. I knows all about it.\"\n\n\"Then tell me, and I shall let him know.\"\n\n\"It was to him I was to tell it,\" he repeated with the petulant obstinacy of a very old man.\n\n\"Well, you must wait for him.\"\n\n\"No, no; I ain't goin' to lose a whole day to please no one. If Mr. Holmes ain't here, then Mr. Holmes must find it all out for himself. I don't care about the look of either of you, and I won't tell a word.\"\n\nHe shuffled towards the door, but Athelney Jones got in front of him.\n\n\"Wait a bit, my friend,\" said he. \"You have important information, and you must not walk off. We shall keep you, whether you like or not, until our friend returns.\"\n\nThe old man made a little run towards the door, but, as Athelney Jones put his broad back up against it, he recognized the uselessness of resistance.\n\n\"Pretty sort o' treatment this!\" he cried, stamping his stick. \"I come here to see a gentleman, and you two, who I never saw in my life, seize me and treat me in this fashion!\"\n\n\"You will be none the worse,\" I said. \"We shall recompense you for the loss of your time. Sit over here on the sofa, and you will not have long to wait.\"\n\nHe came across sullenly enough and seated himself with his face restingon his hands. Jones and I resumed our cigars and our talk. Suddenly, however, Holmes's voice broke in upon us.\n\n\"I think that you might offer me a cigar too,\" he said.\n\nWe both started in our chairs. There was Holmes sitting close to us with an air of quiet amusement.\n\n\"Holmes!\" I exclaimed. \"You here! But where is the old man?\"\n\n\"Here is the old man,\" said he, holding out a heap of white hair. \"Here he is\u2014wig, whiskers, eyebrows, and all. I thought my disguise was pretty good, but I hardly expected that it would stand that test.\"\n\n\"Ah, you rogue!\" cried Jones, highly delighted. \"You would have made an actor and a rare one. You had the proper work-house cough, and those weak legs of yours are worth ten pound a week. I thought I knew the glint of your eye, though. You didn't get away from us so easily, you see.\"\n\n\"I have been working in that get-up all day,\" said he, lighting his cigar. \"You see, a good many of the criminal classes begin to know me\u2014especially since our friend here took to publishing some of my cases: so I can only go on the war-path under some simple disguise like this. You got my wire?\"\n\n\"Yes; that was what brought me here.\"\n\n\"How has your case prospered?\"\n\n\"It has all come to nothing. I have had to release two of my prisoners, and there is no evidence against the other two.\"\n\n\"Never mind. We shall give you two others in the place of them. But you must put yourself under my orders. You are welcome to all the official credit, but you must act on the lines that I point out. Is that agreed?\"\n\n\"Entirely, if you will help me to the men.\"\n\n\"Well, then, in the first place I shall want a fast police-boat\u2014a steam launch\u2014to be at the Westminster Stairs at seven o'clock.\"\n\n\"That is easily managed. There is always one about there, but I can step across the road and telephone to make sure.\"\n\n\"Then I shall want two staunch men in case of resistance.\"\n\n\"There will be two or three in the boat. What else?\"\n\n\"When we secure the men we shall get the treasure. I think that it would be a pleasure to my friend here to take the box round to the young lady to whom half of it rightfully belongs. Let her be the first to open it. Eh, Watson?\"\n\n\"It would be a great pleasure to me.\"\n\n\"Rather an irregular proceeding,\" said Jones, shaking his head. \"However, the whole thing is irregular, and I suppose we must wink at it. The treasure must afterwards be handed over to the authorities until after the official investigation.\"\n\n\"Certainly. That is easily managed. One other point. I should much like to have a few details about this matter from the lips of Jonathan Small himself. You know I like to work the details of my cases out. There is no objection to my having an unofficial interview with him, either here in my rooms or elsewhere, as long as he is efficiently guarded?\"\n\n\"Well, you are master of the situation. I have had no proof yet of the existence of this Jonathan Small. However, if you can catch him, I don't see how I can refuse you an interview with him.\"\n\n\"That is understood, then?\"\n\n\"Perfectly. Is there anything else?\"\n\n\"Only that I insist upon your dining with us. It will be ready in half an hour. I have oysters and a brace of grouse, with something a little choice in white wines.\u2014Watson, you have never yet recognized my merits as a housekeeper.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The End of the Islander", + "text": "Our meal was a merry one. Holmes could talk exceedingly well when he chose, and that night he did choose. He appeared to be in a state of nervous exaltation. I have never known him so brilliant. He spoke on a quick succession of subjects\u2014on miracle plays, on medi\u00e6val pottery, on Stradivarius violins, on the Buddhism of Ceylon, and on the warships of the future\u2014handling each as though he had made a special study of it. His bright humour marked the reaction from his black depression of the preceding days. Athelney Jones proved to be a sociable soul in his hours of relaxation and faced his dinner with the air of a bon vivant. For myself, I felt elated at the thought that we were nearing the end of our task, and I caught something of Holmes's gaiety. None of us alluded during dinner to the cause which had brought us together.\n\nWhen the cloth was cleared Holmes glanced at his watch and filled up three glasses with port.\n\n\"One bumper,\" said he, \"to the success of our little expedition. And now it is high time we were off. Have you a pistol, Watson?\"\n\n\"I have my old service-revolver in my desk.\"\n\n\"You had best take it, then. It is well to be prepared. I see that the cab is at the door. I ordered it for half-past six.\"\n\nIt was a little past seven before we reached the Westminster wharf and found our launch awaiting us. Holmes eyed it critically.\n\n\"Is there anything to mark it as a police-boat?\"\n\n\"Yes, that green lamp at the side.\"\n\n\"Then take it off.\"\n\nThe small change was made, we stepped on board, and the ropes were cast off. Jones, Holmes, and I sat in the stern. There was one man at the rudder, one to tend the engines, and two burly police-inspectors forward.\n\n\"Where to?\" asked Jones.\n\n\"To the Tower. Tell them to stop opposite to Jacobson's Yard.\"\n\nOur craft was evidently a very fast one. We shot past the long lines of loaded barges as though they were stationary. Holmes smiled with satisfaction as we overhauled a river steamer and left her behind us.\n\n\"We ought to be able to catch anything on the river,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, hardly that. But there are not many launches to beat us.\"\n\n\"We shall have to catch the Aurora, and she has a name for being a clipper. I will tell you how the land lies, Watson. You recollect how annoyed I was at being baulked by so small a thing?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, I gave my mind a thorough rest by plunging into a chemical analysis. One of our greatest statesmen has said that a change of work is the best rest. So it is. When I had succeeded in dissolving the hydrocarbon which I was at work at, I came back to our problem of the Sholtos, and thought the whole matter out again. My boys had been up the river and down the river without result. The launch was not at any landing-stage or wharf, nor had it returned. Yet it could hardly have been scuttled to hide their traces, though that always remained as a possible hypothesis if all else failed. I knew that this man Small had a certain degree of low cunning, but I did not think him capable of anything in the nature of delicate finesse. That is usually a product of higher education. I then reflected that since he had certainly been in London some time\u2014as we had evidence that he maintained a continual watch over Pondicherry Lodge\u2014he could hardly leave at a moment's notice, but would need some little time, if it were only a day, to arrange his affairs. That was the balance of probability, at any rate.\"\n\n\"It seems to me to be a little weak,\" said I; \"it is more probable that he had arranged his affairs before ever he set out upon his expedition.\"\n\n\"No, I hardly think so. This lair of his would be too valuable a retreat in case of need for him to give it up until he was sure that he could do without it. But a second consideration struck me. Jonathan Small must have felt that the peculiar appearance of his companion, however much he may have top-coated him, would give rise to gossip, and possibly be associated with this Norwood tragedy. He was quite sharp enough to see that. They had started from their headquarters under cover of darkness, and he would wish to get back before it was broad light. Now, it was past three o'clock, according to Mrs. Smith, when they got the boat. It would be quite bright, and people would be about in an hour or so. Therefore, I argued, they did not go very far. They paid Smith well to hold his tongue, reserved his launch for the final escape, and hurried to their lodgings with the treasure-box. In a couple of nights, when they had time to see what view the papers took, and whether there was any suspicion, they would make their way under cover of darkness to some ship at Gravesend or in the Downs, where no doubt they had already arranged for passages to America or the Colonies.\"\n\n\"But the launch? They could not have taken that to their lodgings.\"\n\n\"Quite so. I argued that the launch must be no great way off, in spite of its invisibility. I then put myself in the place of Small and looked at it as a man of his capacity would. He would probably consider that to send back the launch or to keep it at a wharf would make pursuit easy if the police did happen to get on his track. How, then, could he conceal the launch and yet have her at hand when wanted? I wondered what I should do myself if I were in his shoes. I could only think of one way of doing it. I might hand the launch over to some boat-builder or repairer, with directionsto make a trifling change in her. She would then be removed to his shed or yard, and so be effectually concealed, while at the same time I could have her at a few hours' notice.\"\n\n\"That seems simple enough.\"\n\n\"It is just these very simple things which are extremely liable to be overlooked. However, I determined to act on the idea. I started at once in this harmless seaman's rig and inquired at all the yards down the river. I drew blank at fifteen, but at the sixteenth\u2014Jacobson's\u2014I learned that the Aurora had been handed over to them two days ago by a wooden-legged man, with some trivial directions as to her rudder. 'There ain't naught amiss with her rudder,' said the foreman. 'There she lies, with the red streaks.' At that moment who should come down but Mordecai Smith, the missing owner. He was rather the worse for liquor. I should not, of course, have known him, but he bellowed out his name and the name of his launch. 'I want her to-night at eight o'clock,' said he\u2014'eight o'clock sharp, mind, for I have two gentlemen who won't be kept waiting.' They had evidently paid him well, for he was very flush of money, chucking shillings about to the men. I followed him some distance, but he subsided into an alehouse; so I went back to the yard, and, happening to pick up one of my boys on the way, I stationed him as a sentry over the launch. He is to stand at the water's edge and wave his handkerchief to us when they start. We shall be lying off in the stream, and it will be a strange thing if we do not take men, treasure, and all.\"\n\n\"You have planned it all very neatly, whether they are the right men or not,\" said Jones; \"but if the affair were in my hands I should have had a body of police in Jacobson's Yard and arrested them when they came down.\"\n\n\"Which would have been never. This man Small is a pretty shrewd fellow. He would send a scout on ahead, and if anything made him suspicious he would lie snug for another week.\"\n\n\"But you might have stuck to Mordecai Smith, and so been led to their hiding-place,\" said I.\n\n\"In that case I should have wasted my day. I think that it is a hundred to one against Smith knowing where they live. As long as he has liquor and good pay, why should he ask questions? They send him messages what to do. No, I thought over every possible course, and this is the best.\"\n\nWhile this conversation had been proceeding, we had been shooting the long series of bridges which span the Thames. As we passed the City the last rays of the sun were gilding the cross upon the summit of St. Paul's. It was twilight before we reached the Tower.\n\n\"That is Jacobson's Yard,\" said Holmes, pointing to a bristle of masts and rigging on the Surrey side. \"Cruise gently up and down here under cover of this string of lighters.\" He took a pair of night-glasses from his pocket and gazed some time at the shore. \"I see my sentry at his post,\" he remarked, \"but no sign of a handkerchief.\"\n\n\"Suppose we go downstream a short way and lie in wait for them,\" said Jones eagerly.\n\nWe were all eager by this time, even the policemen and stokers, who had a very vague idea of what was going forward.\n\n\"We have no right to take anything for granted,\" Holmes answered. \"It is certainly ten to one that they go downstream, but we cannot be certain. From this point we can see the entrance of the yard, and they can hardly see us. It will be a clear night and plenty of light. We must stay where we are. See how the folk swarm over yonder in the gaslight.\"\n\n\"They are coming from work in the yard.\"\n\n\"Dirty-looking rascals, but I suppose every one has some little immortal spark concealed about him. You would not think it, to look at them. There is no a priori probability about it. A strange enigma is man!\"\n\n\"Someone calls him a soul concealed in an animal,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Winwood Reade is good upon the subject,\" said Holmes. \"He remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician. But do I see a handkerchief? Surely there is a white flutter over yonder.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is your boy,\" I cried. \"I can see him plainly.\"\n\n\"And there is the Aurora,\" exclaimed Holmes, \"and going like the devil! Full speed ahead, engineer. Make after that launch with the yellow light. By heaven, I shall never forgive myself if she proves to have the heels of us!\"\n\nShe had slipped unseen through the yard-entrance and passed between two or three small craft, so that she had fairly got her speed up before we saw her. Now she was flying down the stream, near in to the shore, going at a tremendous rate. Jones looked gravely at her and shook his head.\n\n\"She is very fast,\" he said. \"I doubt if we shall catch her.\"\n\n\"We must catch her!\" cried Holmes between his teeth. \"Heap it on, stokers! Make her do all she can! If we burn the boat we must have them!\"\n\nWe were fairly after her now. The furnaces roared, and the powerful engines whizzed and clanked like a great metallic heart. Her sharp, steep prow cut through the still river-water and sent two rolling waves to right and to left of us. With every throb of the engines we sprang and quivered like a living thing. One great yellow lantern in our bows threw a long, flickering funnel of light in front of us. Right ahead a dark blur upon the water showed where the Aurora lay, and the swirl of white foam behind her spoke of the pace at which she was going. We flashed past barges, steamers, merchant-vessels, in and out, behind this one and round the other. Voices hailed us out of the darkness, but still the Aurora thundered on, and still we followed close upon her track.\n\n\"Pile it on, men, pile it on!\" cried Holmes, looking down into the engine-room, while the fierce glow from below beat upon his eager, aquiline face. \"Get every pound of steam you can.\"\n\n\"I think we gain a little,\" said Jones with his eyes on the Aurora.\n\n\"I am sure of it,\" said I. \"We shall be up with her in a very few minutes.\"\n\nAt that moment, however, as our evil fate would have it, a tug with three barges in tow blundered in between us. It was only by putting our helm hard down that we avoided a collision, and before we could round them and recover our way the Aurora had gained a good two hundred yards. She was still, however, well in view, and the murky, uncertain twilight was settling into a clear, starlit night. Our boilers were strained to their utmost, and the frail shell vibrated and creaked with the fierce energy which was driving us along. We had shot through the pool, past the West India Docks, down the long Deptford Reach, and up again after rounding the Isle of Dogs. The dull blur in front of us resolved itself now clearly into the dainty Aurora. Jones turned our searchlight upon her, so that we could plainly see the figures upon her deck. One man sat by the stern, with something black between his knees, over which he stooped. Beside him lay a dark mass, which looked like a Newfoundland dog. The boy held the tiller, while against the red glare of the furnace I could see old Smith, stripped to the waist, and shovelling coals for dear life. They may have had some doubt at first as to whether we were really pursuing them, but now as we followed every winding and turning which they took there could no longer be any question about it. At Greenwich we were about three hundred paces behind them. At Blackwall we could not have been more than two hundred and fifty. I have coursed many creatures in many countries during my checkered career, but never did sport give me such a wild thrill as this mad, flying man-hunt down the Thames. Steadily we drew in upon them, yard by yard. In the silence of the night we could hear the panting and clanking of their machinery. The man in the stern still crouched upon the deck, and his arms were moving as though he were busy, while every now and then he would look up and measure with a glance the distance which still separated us. Nearer we came and nearer. Jones yelled to them to stop. We were not more than four boat's-lengths behind them, both boats flying at a tremendous pace. It was a clear reach of the river, with Barking Level upon one side and the melancholy Plum-stead Marshes upon the other. At our hail the man in the stern sprang up from the deck and shook his two clenched fists at us, cursing the while in a high, cracked voice. He was a good-sized, powerful man, and as he stood poising himself with legs astride I could see that from the thigh downward there was but a wooden stump upon the right side. At the sound of his strident, angry cries, there was movement in the huddled bundle upon the deck. It straightened itself into a little black man\u2014the smallest I have ever seen\u2014with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature. He was wrapped in some sort of dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed, but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury.\n\n\"Fire if he raises his hand,\" said Holmes quietly.\n\nWe were within a boat's-length by this time, and almost within touch of our quarry. I can see the two of them now as they stood, the white man with his legs far apart, shrieking out curses, and the unhallowed dwarf with his hideous face, and his strong yellow teeth gnashing at us in the light of our lantern.\n\nIt was well that we had so clear a view of him. Even as we looked he plucked out from under his covering a short, round piece of wood, like a school-ruler, and clapped it to his lips. Our pistols rang out together. He whirled round, threw up his arms, and, with a kind of choking cough, fell sideways into the stream. I caught one glimpse of his venomous, menacing eyes amid the white swirl of the Waters. At the same moment the wooden-legged man threw himself upon the rudder and put it hard down, so that his boat made straight in for the southern bank, while we shot past her stern, only clearing her by a few feet. We were round after her in an instant, but she was already nearly at the bank. It was a wild and desolate place, where the moon glimmered upon a wide expanse of marsh-land, with pools of stagnant water and beds of decaying vegetation. The launch, with a dull thud, ran up upon the mud-bank, with her bow in the air and her stern flush with the water. The fugitive sprang out; but his stump instantly sank its whole length into the sodden soil. In vain he struggled and writhed. Not one step could he possibly take either forward or backward. He yelled in impotent rage and kicked frantically into the mud with his other foot, but his struggles only bored his wooden pin the deeper into the sticky bank. When we brought our launch alongside he was so firmly anchored that it was only by throwing the end of a rope over his shoulders that we were able to haul him out and to drag him, like some evil fish, over our side. The two Smiths, father and son, sat sullenly in their launch but came aboard meekly enough when commanded. The Aurora herself we hauled off and made fast to our stern. A solid iron chest of Indian workmanship stood upon the deck. This, there could be no question, was the same that had contained the ill-omened treasure of the Sholtos. There was no key, but it was of considerable weight, so we transferred it carefully to our own little cabin. As we steamed slowly upstream again, we flashed our searchlight in every direction, but there was no sign of the Islander. Somewhere in the dark ooze at the bottom of the Thames lie the bones of that strange visitor to our shores.\n\n\"See here,\" said Holmes, pointing to the wooden hatchway. \"We were hardly quick enough with our pistols.\" There, sure enough, just behind where we had been standing, stuck one of those murderous darts which we knew so well. It must have whizzed between us at the instant we fired. Holmes smiled at it and shrugged his shoulders in his easy fashion, but I confess that it turned me sick to think of the horrible death which had passed so close to us that night." + }, + { + "title": "The Great Agra Treasure", + "text": "Our captive sat in the cabin opposite to the iron box which he had done so much and waited so long to gain. He was a sunburned reckless-eyed fellow, with a network of lines and wrinkles all over his mahogany features, which told of a hard, open-air life. There was a singular prominence about his bearded chin which marked a man who was not to be easily turned from his purpose. His age may have been fifty or thereabouts, for his black, curly hair was thickly shot with gray. His face in repose was not an unpleasing one, though his heavy brows and aggressive chin gave him, as I had lately seen, a terrible expression when moved to anger. He sat now with his handcuffed hands upon his lap, and his head sunk upon his breast, while he looked with his keen, twinkling eyes at the box which had been the cause of his ill-doings. It seemed to me that there was more sorrow than anger in his rigid and contained countenance. Once he looked up at me with a gleam of something like humour in his eyes.\n\n\"Well, Jonathan Small,\" said Holmes, lighting a cigar, \"I am sorry that it has come to this.\"\n\n\"And so am I, sir,\" he answered frankly. \"I don't believe that I can swing over the job. I give you my word on the book that I never raised hand against Mr. Sholto. It was that little hell-hound, Tonga, who shot one of his cursed darts into him. I had no part in it, sir. I was as grieved as if it had been my blood-relation. I welted the little devil with the slack end of the rope for it, but it was done, and I could not undo it again.\"\n\n\"Have a cigar,\" said Holmes; \"and you had best take a pull out of my flask, for you are very wet. How could you expect so small and weak a man as this black fellow to overpower Mr. Sholto and hold him while you were climbing the rope?\"\n\n\"You seem to know as much about it as if you were there, sir. The truth is that I hoped to find the room clear. I knew the habits of the house pretty well, and it was the time when Mr. Sholto usually went down to his supper. I shall make no secret of the business. The best defence that I can make is just the simple truth. Now, if it had been the old major I would have swung for him with a light heart. I would have thought no more of knifing him than of smoking this cigar. But it's cursed hard that I should be lagged over this young Sholto, with whom I had no quarrel whatever.\"\n\n\"You are under the charge of Mr. Athelney Jones, of Scotland Yard. He is going to bring you up to my rooms, and I shall ask you for a true account of the matter. You must make a clean breast of it, for if you do I hope that I may be of use to you. I think I can prove that the poison acts so quickly that the man was dead before ever you reached the room.\"\n\n\"That he was, sir. I never got such a turn in my life as when I saw him grinning at me with his head on his shoulder as I climbed through the window. It fairly shook me, sir. I'd have half-killed Tonga for it if he had not scrambled off. That was how he came to leave his club, and some of his darts too, as he tells me, which I dare say helped to put you on our track; though how you kept on it is more than I can tell. I don't feel no malice against you for it. But it does seem a queer thing,\" he added with a bitter smile, \"that I, who have a fair claim to half a million of money, should spend the first half of my life building a breakwater in the Andamans, and am like to spend the other half digging drains at Dartmoor. It was an evil day for me when first I clapped eyes upon the merchant Achmet and had to do with the Agra treasure, which never brought anything but a curse yet upon the man who owned it. To him it brought murder, to Major Sholto it brought fear and guilt, to me it has meant slavery for life.\"\n\nAt this moment Athelney Jones thrust his broad face and heavy shoulders into the tiny cabin.\n\n\"Quite a family party,\" he remarked. \"I think I shall have a pull at that flask, Holmes. Well, I think we may all congratulate each other. Pity we didn't take the other alive, but there was no choice. I say, Holmes, you must confess that you cut it rather fine. It was all we could do to overhaul her.\"\n\n\"All is well that ends well,\" said Holmes. \"But I certainly did not know that the Aurora was such a clipper.\"\n\n\"Smith says she is one of the fastest launches on the river, and that if he had had another man to help him with the engines we should never have caught her. He swears he knew nothing of this Norwood business.\"\n\n\"Neither he did,\" cried our prisoner\u2014\"not a word. I chose his launch because I heard that she was a flier. We told him nothing; but we paid him well, and he was to get something handsome if we reached our vessel, the Esmeralda, at Gravesend, outward bound for the Brazils.\"\n\n\"Well, if he has done no wrong we shall see that no wrong comes to him. If we are pretty quick in catching our men, we are not so quick in condemning them.\" It was amusing to notice how the consequential Jones was already beginning to give himself airs on the strength of the capture. From the slight smile which played over Sherlock Holmes's face, I could see that the speech had not been lost upon him.\n\n\"We will be at Vauxhall Bridge presently,\" said Jones, \"and shall land you, Dr. Watson, with the treasure-box. I need hardly tell you that I am taking a very grave responsibility upon myself in doing this. It is most irregular, but of course an agreement is an agreement. I must, however, as a matter of duty, send an inspector with you, since you have so valuable a charge. You will drive, no doubt?\"\n\n\"Yes, I shall drive.\"\n\n\"It is a pity there is no key, that we may make an inventory first. You will have to break it open. Where is the key, my man?\"\n\n\"At the bottom of the river,\" said Small shortly.\n\n\"Hum! There was no use your giving this unnecessary trouble. We have had work enough already through you. However, Doctor, I need not warn you to be careful. Bring the box back with you to the Baker Street rooms. You will find us there, on our way to the station.\"\n\nThey landed me at Vauxhall, with my heavy iron box, and with a bluff, genial inspector as my companion. A quarter of an hour's drive brought us to Mrs. Cecil Forrester's. The servant seemed surprised at so late a visitor. Mrs. Cecil Forrester was out for the evening, she explained, and likely to be very late. Miss Morstan, however, was in the drawing-room; so to the drawing-room I went, box in hand, leaving the obliging inspector in the cab.\n\nShe was seated by the open window, dressed in some sort of white diaphanous material, with a little touch of scarlet at the neck and waist. The soft light of a shaded lamp fell upon her as she leaned back in the basket chair, playing over her sweet grave face, and tinting with a dull, metallic sparkle the rich coils of her luxuriant hair. One white arm and hand drooped over the side of the chair, and her whole pose and figure spoke of an absorbing melancholy. At the sound of my footfall she sprang to her feet, however, and a bright flush of surprise and of pleasure coloured her pale cheeks.\n\n\"I heard a cab drive up,\" she said. \"I thought that Mrs. Forrester had come back very early, but I never dreamed that it might-be you. What news have you brought me?\"\n\n\"I have brought something better than news,\" said I, putting down the box upon the table and speaking jovially and boisterously, though my heart was heavy within me. \"I have brought you something which is worth all the news in the world. I have brought you a fortune.\"\n\nShe glanced at the iron box.\n\n\"Is that the treasure then?\" she asked, coolly enough.\n\n\"Yes, this is the great Agra treasure. Half of it is yours and half is Thaddeus Sholto's. You will have a couple of hundred thousand each. Think of that! An annuity of ten thousand pounds. There will be few richer young ladies in England. Is it not glorious?\"\n\nI think I must have been rather over-acting my delight, and that she detected a hollow ring in my congratulations, for I saw her eyebrows rise a little, and she glanced at me curiously.\n\n\"If I have it,\" said she, \"I owe it to you.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" I answered, \"not to me but to my friend Sherlock Holmes. With all the will in the world, I could never have followed up a clue which has taxed even his analytical genius. As it was, we very nearly lost it at the last moment.\"\n\n\"Pray sit down and tell me all about it, Dr. Watson,\" said she.\n\nI narrated briefly what had occurred since I had seen her last. Holmes's new method of search, the discovery of the Aurora, the appearance of Athelney Jones, our expedition in the evening, and the wild chase down the Thames. She listened with parted lips and shining eyes to my recital of our adventures. When I spoke of the dart which had so narrowly missed us, she turned so white that I feared that she was about to faint.\n\n\"It is nothing,\" she said as I hastened to pour her out some water. \"I am all right again. It was a shock to me to hear that I had placed my friends in such horrible peril.\"\n\n\"That is all over,\" I answered. \"It was nothing. I will tell you no more gloomy details. Let us turn to something brighter. There is the treasure. What could be brighter than that? I got leave to bring it with me, thinking that it would interest you to be the first to see it.\"\n\n\"It would be of the greatest interest to me,\" she said. There was no eagerness in her voice, however. It had struck her, doubtless, that it might seem ungracious upon her part to be indifferent to a prize which had cost so much to win.\n\n\"What a pretty box!\" she said, stooping over it. \"This is Indian work, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Yes; it is Benares metal-work.\"\n\n\"And so heavy!\" she exclaimed, trying to raise it. \"The box alone must be of some value. Where is the key?\"\n\n\"Small threw it into the Thames,\" I answered. \"I must borrow Mrs. Forrester's poker.\"\n\nThere was in the front a thick and broad hasp, wrought in the image of a sitting Buddha. Under this I thrust the end of the poker and twisted it outward as a lever. The hasp sprang open with a loud snap. With trembling fingers I flung back the lid. We both stood gazing in astonishment. The box was empty!\n\nNo wonder that it was heavy. The ironwork was two-thirds of an inch thick all round. It was massive, well made, and solid, like a chest constructed to carry things of great price, but not one shred or crumb of metal or jewellery lay within it. It was absolutely and completely empty.\n\n\"The treasure is lost,\" said Miss Morstan calmly.\n\nAs I listened to the words and realized what they meant, a great shadow seemed to pass from my soul. I did not know how this Agra treasure had weighed me down until now that it was finally removed. It was selfish, no doubt, disloyal, wrong, but I could realize nothing save that the golden barrier was gone from between us.\n\n\"Thank God!\" I ejaculated from my very heart.\n\nShe looked at me with a quick, questioning smile.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because you are within my reach again,\" I said, taking her hand. She did not withdraw it. \"Because I love you, Mary, as truly as ever a man loved a woman. Because this treasure, these riches, sealed my lips. Now that they are gone I can tell you how I love you. That is why I said, 'Thank God.'\"\n\n\"Then I say 'Thank God,' too,\" she whispered as I drew her to my side.\n\nWhoever had lost a treasure, I knew that night that I had gained one." + }, + { + "title": "The Strange Story of Jonathan Small", + "text": "A very patient man was that inspector in the cab, for it was a weary time before I rejoined him. His face clouded over when I showed him the empty box.\n\n\"There goes the reward!\" said he gloomily. \"Where there is no money there is no pay. This night's work would have been worth a tenner each to Sam Brown and me if the treasure had been there.\"\n\n\"Mr. Thaddeus Sholto is a rich man,\" I said; \"he will see that you are rewarded, treasure or no.\"\n\nThe inspector shook his head despondently, however.\n\n\"It's a bad job,\" he repeated; \"and so Mr. Athelney Jones will think.\"\n\nHis forecast proved to be correct, for the detective looked blank enough when I got to Baker Street and showed him the empty box. They had only just arrived, Holmes, the prisoner, and he, for they had changed their plans so far as to report themselves at a station upon the way. My companion lounged in his armchair with his usual listless expression, while Small sat stolidly opposite to him with his wooden leg cocked over his sound one. As I exhibited the empty box he leaned back in his chair and laughed aloud.\n\n\"This is your doing, Small,\" said Athelney Jones angrily.\n\n\"Yes, I have put it away where you shall never lay hand upon it,\" he cried exultantly. \"It is my treasure, and if I can't have the loot I'll take darned good care that no one else does. I tell you that no living man has any right to it, unless it is three men who are in the Andaman convict-barracks and myself. I know now that I cannot have the use of it, and I know that they cannot. I have acted all through for them as much as for myself. It's been the sign of four with us always. Well, I know that they would have had me do just what I have done, and throw the treasure into the Thames rather than let it go to kith or kin of Sholto or Morstan. It was not to make them rich that we did for Achmet. You'll find the treasure where the key is and where little Tonga is. When I saw that your launch must catch us, I put the loot away in a safe place. There are no rupees for you this journey.\"\n\n\"You are deceiving us, Small,\" said Athelney Jones sternly; \"if you had wished to throw the treasure into the Thames, it would have been easier for you to have thrown box and all.\"\n\n\"Easier for me to throw and easier for you to recover,\" he answered with a shrewd, side-long look. \"The man that was clever enough to hunt me down is clever enough to pick an iron box from the bottom of a river. Now that they are scattered over five miles or so, it may be a harder job. It went to my heart to do it though. I was half mad when you came up with us. However, there's no good grieving over it. I've had ups in my life, and I've had downs, but I've learned not to cry over spilled milk.\"\n\n\"This is a very serious matter, Small,\" said the detective. \"If you had helped justice, instead of thwarting it in this way, you would have had a better chance at your trial.\"\n\n\"Justice!\" snarled the ex-convict. \"A pretty justice! Whose loot is this, if it is not ours? Where is the justice that I should give it up to those who have never earned it? Look how I have earned it! Twenty long years in that fever-ridden swamp, all day at work under the mangrove-tree, all night chained up in the filthy convict-huts, bitten by mosquitoes, racked with ague, bullied by every cursed black-faced policeman who loved to take it out of a white man. That was how I earned the Agra treasure, and you talk to me of justice because I cannot bear to feel that I have paid this price only that another may enjoy it! I would rather swing a score of times, or have one of Tonga's darts in my hide, than live in a convict's cell and feel that another man is at his ease in a palace with the money that should be mine.\"\n\nSmall had dropped his mask of stoicism, and all this came out in a wild whirl of words, while his eyes blazed, and the handcuffs clanked together with the impassioned movement of his hands. I could understand, as I saw the fury and the passion of the man, that it was no groundless or unnatural terror which had possessed Major Sholto when he first learned that the injured convict was upon his track.\n\n\"You forget that we know nothing of all this,\" said Holmes quietly. \"We have not heard your story, and we cannot tell how far justice may originally have been on your side.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, you have been very fair-spoken to me, though I can see that I have you to thank that I have these bracelets upon my wrists. Still, I bear no grudge for that. It is all fair and above-board. If you want to hear my story, I have no wish to hold it back. What I say to you is God's truth, every word of it. Thank you, you can put the glass beside me here, and I'll put my lips to it if I am dry.\n\n\"I am a Worcestershire man myself, born near Pershore. I dare say you would find a heap of Smalls living there now if you were to look. I have often thought of taking a look round there, but the truth is that I was never much of a credit to the family, and I doubt if they would be so very glad to see me. They were all steady, chapel-going folk, small farmers, well known and respected over the countryside, while I was always a bit of a rover. At last, however, when I was about eighteen, I gave them no more trouble, for I got into a mess over a girl and could only get out of it again by taking the Queen's shilling and joining the Third Buffs, which was just starting for India.\n\n\"I wasn't destined to do much soldiering, however. I had just got past the goose-step and learned to handle my musket, when I was fool enough to go swimming in the Ganges. Luckily for me, my company sergeant, John Holder, was in the water at the same time, and he was one of the finest swimmers in the service. A crocodile took me just as I was halfway across and nipped off my right leg as clean as a surgeon could have done it, just above the knee. What with the shock and the loss of blood, I fainted, and should have been drowned if Holder had not caught hold of me and paddled for the bank. I was five months in hospital over it, and when at last I was able to limp out of it with this timber toe strapped to my stump, I found myself invalided out of the Army and unfitted for any active occupation.\n\n\"I was, as you can imagine, pretty down on my luck at this time, for I was a useless cripple, though not yet in my twentieth year. However, my misfortune soon proved to be a blessing in disguise. A man named Abel White, who had come out there as an indigo-planter, wanted an overseer to look after his coolies and keep them up to their work. He happened to be a friend of our colonel's, who had taken an interest in me since the accident. To make a long story short, the colonel recommended me strongly for the post, and, as the work was mostly to be done on horseback, my leg was no great obstacle, for I had enough thigh left to keep a good grip on the saddle. What I had to do was to ride over the plantation, to keep an eye on the men as they worked, and to report the idlers. The pay was fair, I had comfortable quarters, and altogether I was content to spend the remainder of my life in indigo-planting. Mr. Abel White was a kind man, and he would often drop into my little shanty and smoke a pipe with me, for white folk out there feel their hearts warm to each other as they never do here at home.\n\n\"Well, I was never in luck's way long. Suddenly, without a note of warning, the great mutiny broke upon us. One month India lay as still and peaceful, to all appearance, as Surrey or Kent; the next there were two hundred thousand black devils let loose, and the country was a perfect hell. Of course you know all about it, gentlemen\u2014a deal more than I do, very like, since reading is not in my line. I only know what I saw with my own eyes. Our plantation was at a place called Muttra, near the border of the Northwest Provinces. Night after night the whole sky was alight with the burning bungalows, and day after day we had small companies of Europeans passing through our estate with their wives and children, on their way to Agra, where were the nearest troops. Mr. Abel White was an obstinate man. He had it in his head that the affair had been exaggerated, and that it would blow over as suddenly as it had sprung up. There he sat on his veranda, drinking whisky-pegs and smoking cheroots, while the country was in a blaze about him. Of course we stuck by him, I and Dawson, who, with his wife, used to do the book-work and the managing. Well, one fine day the crash came. I had been away on a distant plantation and was riding slowly home in the evening, when my eye fell upon something all huddled together at the bottom of a steep nullah. I rode down to see what it was, and the cold struck through my heart when I found it was Dawson's wife, all cut into ribbons, and half eaten by jackals and native dogs. A little further up the road Dawson himself was lying on his face, quite dead, with an empty revolver in his hand, and four sepoys lying across each other in front of him. I reined up my horse, wondering which way I should turn; but at that moment I saw thick smoke curling up from Abel White's bungalow and the flames beginning to burst through the roof. I knew then that I could do my employer no good, but would only throw my own life away if I meddled in the matter. From where I stood I could see hundreds of the black fiends, with their red coats still on their backs, dancing and howling round the burning house. Some of them pointed at me, and a couple of bullets sang past my head: so I broke away across the paddy-fields, and found myself late at night safe within the walls at Agra.\n\n\"As it proved, however, there was no great safety there, either. The whole country was up like a swarm of bees. Wherever the English could collect in little bands they held just the ground that their guns commanded. Everywhere else they were helpless fugitives. It was a fight of the millions against the hundreds; and the cruellest part of it was that these men that we fought against, foot, horse, and gunners, were our own picked troops, whom we had taught and trained, handling our own weapons and blowing our own bugle-calls. At Agra there were the Third Bengal Fusiliers, some Sikhs, two troops of horse, and a battery of artillery. A volunteer corps of clerks and merchants had been formed, and this I joined, wooden leg and all. We went out to meet the rebels at Shah-gunge early in July, and we beat them back for a time, but our powder gave out, and we had to fall back upon the city.\n\n\"Nothing but the worst news came to us from every side\u2014which is not to be wondered at, for if you look at the map you will see that we were right in the heart of it. Lucknow is rather better than a hundred miles to the east, and Cawnpore about as far to the south. From every point on the compass there was nothing but torture and murder and outrage.\n\n\"The city of Agra is a great place, swarming with fanatics and fierce devil-worshippers of all sorts. Our handful of men were lost among the narrow, winding streets. Our leader moved across the river, therefore, and took up his position in the old fort of Agra. I don't know if any of you gentlemen have ever read or heard anything of that old fort. It is a very queer place\u2014the queerest that ever I was in, and I have been in some rum corners, too. First of all it is enormous in size. I should think that the enclosure must be acres and acres. There is a modern part, which took all our garrison, women, children, stores, and everything else, with plenty of room over. But the modern part is nothing like the size of the old quarter, where nobody goes, and which is given over to the scorpions and the centipedes. It is all full of great deserted halls, and winding passages, and long corridors twisting in and out, so that it is easy enough for folk to get lost in it. For this reason it was seldom that anyone went into it, though now and again a party with torches might go exploring.\n\n\"The river washes along the front of the old fort, and so protects it, but on the sides and behind there are many doors, and these had to be guarded, of course, in the old quarter as well as in that which was actually held by our troops. We were short-handed, with hardly men enough to man the angles of the building and to serve the guns. It was impossible for us, therefore, to station a strong guard at every one of the innumerable gates. What we did was to organize a central guardhouse in the middle of the fort, and to leave each gate under the charge of one white man and two or three natives. I was selected to take charge during certain hours of the night of a small isolated door upon the south-west side of the building. Two Sikh troopers were placed under my command, and I was instructed if anything went wrong to fire my musket, when I might rely upon help coming at once from the central guard. As the guard was a good two hundred paces away, however, and as the space between was cut up into a labyrinth of passages and corridors, I had great doubts as to whether they could arrive in time to be of any use in case of an actual attack.\n\n\"Well, I was pretty proud at having this small command given me, since I was a raw recruit, and a game-legged one at that. For two nights I kept the watch with my Punjabees. They were tall, fierce-looking chaps, Mahomet Singh and Abdullah Khan by name, both old fighting men, who had borne arms against us at Chilian Wallah. They could talk English pretty well, but I could get little out of them. They preferred to stand together, and jabber all night in their queer Sikh lingo. For myself, I used to stand outside the gateway, looking down on the broad, winding river and on the twinkling lights of the great city. The beating of drums, the rattle of tomtoms, and the yells and howls of the rebels, drunk with opium and with bhang, were enough to remind us all night of our dangerous neighbours across the stream. Every two hours the officer of the night used to come round to all the posts to make sure that all was well.\n\n\"The third night of my watch was dark and dirty, with a small driving rain. It was dreary work standing in the gateway hour after hour in such weather. I tried again and again to make my Sikhs talk, but without much success. At two in the morning the rounds passed and broke for a moment the weariness of the night. Finding that my companions would not be led into conversation, I took out my pipe and laid down my musket to strike the match. In an instant the two Sikhs were upon me. One of them snatched my firelock up and levelled it at my head, while the other held a great knife to my throat and swore between his teeth that he would plunge it into me if I moved a step.\n\n\"My first thought was that these fellows were in league with the rebels, and that this was the beginning of an assault. If our door were in the hands of the sepoys the place must fall, and the women and children be treated as they were in Cawnpore. Maybe you gentlemen think that I am just making out a case for myself, but I give you my word that when I thought of that, though I felt the point of the knife at my throat, I opened my mouth with the intention of giving a scream, if it was my last one, which might alarm the main guard. The man who held me seemed to know my thoughts; for, even as I braced myself to it, he whispered: 'Don't make a noise. The fort is safe enough. There are no rebel dogs on this side of the river.' There was the ring of truth in what he said, and I knew that if I raised my voice I was a dead man. I could read it in the fellow's brown eyes. I waited, therefore, in silence, to see what it was that they wanted from me.\n\n\"'Listen to me, sahib,' said the taller and fiercer of the pair, the one whom they called Abdullah Khan. 'You must either be with us now, or you must be silenced forever. The thing is too great a one for us to hesitate. Either you are heart and soul with us on your oath on the cross of the Christians, or your body this night shall be thrown into the ditch, and we shall pass over to our brothers in the rebel army. There is no middle way. Which is it to be\u2014death or life? We can only give you three minutes to decide, for the time is passing, and all must be done before the rounds come again.'\n\n\"'How can I decide?' said I. 'You have not told me what you want of me. But I tell you now that if it is anything against the safety of the fort I will have no truck with it, so you can drive home your knife and welcome.'\n\n\"'It is nothing against the fort,' said he. 'We only ask you to do that which your countrymen come to this land for. We ask you to be rich. If you will be one of us this night, we will swear to you upon the naked knife, and by the threefold oath which no Sikh was ever known to break, that you shall have your fair share of the loot. A quarter of the treasure shall be yours. We can say no fairer.'\n\n\"'But what is the treasure then?' I asked. 'I am as ready to be rich as you can be if you will but show me how it can be done.'\n\n'You will swear, then,' said he, 'by the bones of your father, by the honour of your mother, by the cross of your faith, to raise no hand and speak no word against us, either now or afterwards?'\n\n\"'I will swear it,' I answered, 'provided that the fort is not endangered.'\n\n\"'Then my comrade and I will swear that you shall have a quarter of the treasure which shall be equally divided among the four of us.'\n\n\"'There are but three,' said I.\n\n\"'No; Dost Akbar must have his share. We can tell the tale to you while we wait them. Do you stand at the gate, Mahomet Singh, and give notice of their coming. The thing stands thus, sahib, and I tell it to you because I know that an oath is binding upon a Feringhec, and that we may trust you. Had you been a lying Hindoo, though you had sworn by all the gods in their false temples, your blood would have been upon the knife and your body in the water. But the Sikh knows the Englishman, and the Englishman knows the Sikh. Hearken, then, to what I have to say.\n\n\"'There is a rajah in the northern provinces who has much wealth, though his lands are small. Much has come to him from his father, and more still he has set by himself, for he is of a low nature and hoards his gold rather than spend it. When the troubles broke out he would be friends both with the lion and the tiger\u2014with the sepoy and with the Company's raj. Soon, however, it seemed to him that the white men's day was come, for through all the land he could hear of nothing but of their death and their overthrow. Yet, being a careful man, he made such plans that, come what might, half at least of his treasure should be left to him. That which was in gold and silver he kept by him in the vaults of his palace, but the most precious stones and the choicest pearls that he had he put in an iron box and sent it by a trusty servant, who, under the guise of a merchant, should take it to the fort at Agra, there to lie until the land is at peace. Thus, if the rebels won he would have his money, but if the Company conquered, his jewels would be saved to him. Having thus divided his hoard, he threw himself into the cause of the sepoys, since they were strong upon his borders. By his doing this, mark you, sahib, his property becomes the due of those who have been true to their salt.\n\n\"'This pretended merchant, who travels under the name of Achmet, is now in the city of Agra and desires to gain his way into the fort. He has with him as travelling-companion my foster-brother Dost Akbar, who knows his secret. Dost Akbar has promised this night to lead him to a side-postern of the fort, and has chosen this one for his purpose. Here he will come presently, and here he will find Mahomet Singh and myself awaiting him. The place is lonely, and none shall know of his coming. The world shall know the merchant Achmet no more, but the great treasure of the rajah shall be divided among us. What say you to it, sahib?'\n\n\"In Worcestershire the life of a man seems a great and a sacred thing; but it is very different when there is fire and blood all round you, and you have been used to meeting death at every turn. Whether Achmet the merchant lived or died was a thing as light as air to me, but at the talk about the treasure my heart turned to it, and I thought of what I might do in the old country with it, and how my folk would stare when they saw their ne'er-do-well coming back with his pockets full of gold moidores. I had, therefore, already made up my mind. Abdullah Khan, however, thinking that I hesitated, pressed the matter more closely.\n\n\"'Consider, sahib,' said he, 'that if this man is taken by the commandant he will be hung or shot, and his jewels taken by the government, so that no man will be a rupee the better for them. Now, since we do the taking of him, why should we not do the rest as well? The jewels will be as well with us as in the Company's coffers. There will be enough to make every one of us rich men and great chiefs. No one can know about the matter, for here we are cut off from all men. What could be better for the purpose? Say again, then, sahib, whether you are with us, or if we must look upon you as an enemy.'\n\n\"'I am with you heart and soul,' said I.\n\n\"'It is well,' he answered, handing me back my firelock. 'You see that we trust you, for your word, like ours, is not to be broken. We have now only to wait for my brother and the merchant.'\n\n\"'Does your brother know, then, of what you will do?' I asked.\n\n\"'The plan is his. He has devised it. We will go to the gate and share the watch with Mahomet Singh.'\n\n\"The rain was still falling steadily, for it was just the beginning of the wet season. Brown, heavy clouds were drifting across the sky, and it was hard to see more than a stonecast. A deep moat lay in front of our door, but the water was in places nearly dried up, and it could easily be crossed. It was strange to me to be standing there with those two wild Punjabees waiting for the man who was coming to his death.\n\n\"Suddenly my eye caught the glint of a shaded lantern at the other side of the moat. It vanished among the mound-heaps, and then appeared again coming slowly in our direction.\n\n\"'Here they are!' I exclaimed.\n\n\"'You will challenge him, sahib, as usual,' whispered Abdullah. 'Give him no cause for fear. Send us in with him, and we shall do the rest while you stay here on guard. Have the lantern ready to uncover, that we may be sure that it is indeed the man.'\n\n\"The light had flickered onward, now stopping and now advancing, until I could see two dark figures upon the other side of the moat. I let them scramble down the sloping bank, splash through the mire, and climb halfway up to the gate before I challenged them.\n\n\"'Who goes there?' said I in a subdued voice.\n\n\"'Friends,' came the answer. I uncovered my lantern and threw a flood of light upon them. The first was an enormous Sikh with a black beard which swept nearly down to his cumberbund. Outside of a show I have never seen so tall a man. The other was a little fat, round fellow with a great yellow turban and a bundle in his hand, done up in a shawl. He seemed to be all in a quiver with fear, for his hands twitched as if he had the ague, and his head kept turning to left and right with two bright little twinkling eyes, like a mouse when he ventures out from his hole. It gave me the chills to think of killing him, but I thought of the treasure, and my heart set as hard as a flint within me. When he saw my white face he gave a little chirrup of joy and came running up towards me.\n\n\"'Your protection, sahib,' he panted, 'your protection for the unhappy merchant Achmet. I have travelled across Rajpootana, that I might seek the shelter of the fort at Agra. I have been robbed and beaten and abused because I have been the friend of the Company. It is a blessed night this when I am once more in safety\u2014I and my poor possessions.'\n\n\"'What have you in the bundle?' I asked.\n\n\"'An iron box,' he answered, 'which contains one or two little family matters which are of no value to others but which I should be sorry to lose. Yet I am not a beggar; and I shall reward you, young sahib, and your governor also if he will give me the shelter I ask.'\n\n\"I could not trust myself to speak longer with the man. The more I looked at his fat, frightened face, the harder did it seem that we should slay him in cold blood. It was best to get it over.\n\n\"'Take him to the main guard,' said I. The two Sikhs closed in upon him on each side, and the giant walked behind, while they marched in through the dark gateway. Never was a man so compassed round with death. I remained at the gateway with the lantern.\n\n\"I could hear the measured tramp of their footsteps sounding through the lonely corridors. Suddenly it ceased, and I heard voices and a scuffle, with the sound of blows. A moment later there came, to my horror, a rush of footsteps coming in my direction, with a loud breathing of a running man. I turned my lantern down the long straight passage, and there was the fat man, running like the wind, with a smear of blood across his face, and close at his heels, bounding like a tiger, the great black-bearded Sikh, with a knife flashing in his hand. I have never seen a man run so fast as that little merchant. He was gaining on the Sikh, and I could see that if he once passed me and got to the open air he would save himself yet. My heart softened to him, but again the thought of his treasure turned me hard and bitter. I cast my firelock between his legs as he raced past, and he rolled twice over like a shot rabbit. Ere he could stagger to his feet the Sikh was upon him and buried his knife twice in his side. The man never uttered moan nor moved muscle but lay where he had fallen. I think myself that he may have broken his neck with the fall. You see, gentlemen, that I am keeping my promise. I am telling you every word of the business just exactly as it happened, whether it is in my favour or not.\"\n\nHe stopped and held out his manacled hands for the whisky and water which Holmes had brewed for him. For myself, I confess that I had now conceived the utmost horror of the man not only for this cold-blooded business in which he had been concerned but even more for the somewhat flippant and careless way in which he narrated it. Whatever punishment was in store for him, I felt that he might expect no sympathy from me. Sherlock Holmes and Jones sat with their hands upon their knees, deeply interested in the story but with the same disgust written upon their faces. He may have observed it, for there was a touch of defiance in his voice and manner as he proceeded.\n\n\"It was all very bad, no doubt.\" said he. \"I should like to know how many fellows in my shoes would have refused a share of this loot when they knew that they would have their throats cut for their pains. Besides, it was my life or his when once he was in the fort. If he had got out, the whole business would come to light, and I should have been court-martialled and shot as likely as not; for people were not very lenient at a time like that.\"\n\n\"Go on with your story,\" said Holmes shortly.\n\n\"Well, we carried him in, Abdullah, Akbar, and I. A fine weight he was, too, for all that he was so short. Mahomet Singh was left to guard the door. We took him to a place which the Sikhs had already prepared. It was some distance off, where a winding passage leads to a great empty hall, the brick walls of which were all crumbling to pieces. The earth floor had sunk in at one place, making a natural grave, so we left Achmet the merchant there, having first covered him over with loose bricks. This done, we all went back to the treasure.\n\n\"It lay where he had dropped it when he was first attacked. The box was the same which now lies open upon your table. A key was hung by a silken cord to that carved handle upon the top. We opened it, and the light of the lantern gleamed upon a collection of gems such as I have read of and thought about when I was a little lad at Pershore. It was blinding to look upon them. When we had feasted our eyes we took them all out and made a list of them. There were one hundred and forty-three diamonds of the first water, including one which has been called, I believe, 'the Great Mogul,' and is said to be the second largest stone in existence. Then there were ninety-seven very fine emeralds, and one hundred and seventy rubies, some of which, however, were small. There were forty carbuncles, two hundred and ten sapphires, sixty-one agates, and a great quantity of beryls, onyxes, cats'-eyes, turquoises, and other stones, the very names of which I did not know at the time, though I have become more familiar with them since. Besides this, there were nearly three hundred very fine pearls, twelve of which were set in a gold coronet. By the way, these last had been taken out of the chest, and were not there when I recovered it.\n\n\"After we had counted our treasures we put them back into the chest and carried them to the gateway to show them to Mahomet Singh. Then we solemnly renewed our oath to stand by each other and be true to our secret. We agreed to conceal our loot in a safe place until the country should be at peace again, and then to divide it equally among ourselves. There was no use dividing it at present, for if gems of such value were found upon us it would cause suspicion, and there was no privacy in the fort nor any place where we could keep them. We carried the box, therefore, into the same hall where we had buried the body, and there, under certain bricks in the best-preserved wall, we made a hollow and put our treasure. We made careful note of the place, and next day I drew four plans, one for each of us, and put the sign of the four of us at the bottom, for we had sworn that we should each always act for all, so that none might take advantage. That is an oath that I can put my hand to my heart and swear that I have never broken.\n\n\"Well, there's no use my telling you gentlemen what came of the Indian mutiny. After Wilson took Delhi and Sir Cohn relieved Lucknow the back of the business was broken. Fresh troops came pouring in, and Nana Sahib made himself scarce over the frontier. A flying column under Colonel Greathed came round to Agra and cleared the Pandies away from it. Peace seemed to be settling upon the country, and we four were beginning to hope that the time was at hand when we might safely go off with our shares of the plunder. In a moment, however, our hopes were shattered by our being arrested as the murderers of Achmet.\n\n\"It came about in this way. When the rajah put his jewels into the hands of Achmet he did it because he knew that he was a trusty man. They are suspicious folk in the East, however: so what does this rajah do but take a second even more trusty servant and set him to play the spy upon the first. This second man was ordered never to let Achmet out of his sight, and he followed him like his shadow. He went after him that night and saw him pass through the doorway. Of course he thought he had taken refuge in the fort and applied for admission there himself next day, but could find no trace of Achmet. This seemed to him so strange that he spoke about it to a sergeant of guides, who brought it to the ears of the commandant. A thorough search was quickly made, and the body was discovered. Thus at the very moment that we thought that all was safe we were all four seized and brought to trial on a charge of murder\u2014three of us because we had held the gate that night, and the fourth because he was known to have been in the company of the murdered man. Not a word about the jewels came out at the trial, for the rajah had been deposed and driven out of India: so no one had any particular interest in them. The murder, however, was clearly made out, and it was certain that we must all have been concerned in it. The three Sikhs got penal servitude for life, and I was condemned to death, though my sentence was afterwards commuted to the same as the others.\n\n\"It was rather a queer position that we found ourselves in then. There we were all four tied by the leg and with precious little chance of ever getting out again, while we each held a secret which might have put each of us in a palace if we could only have made use of it. It was enough to make a man eat his heart out to have to stand the kick and the cuff of every petty jack-in-office, to have rice to eat and water to drink, when that gorgeous fortune was ready for him outside, just waiting to be picked up. It might have driven me mad; but I was always a pretty stubborn one, so I just held on and bided my time.\n\n\"At last it seemed to me to have come. I was changed from Agra to Madras, and from there to Blair Island in the Andamans. There are very few white convicts at this settlement, and, as I had behaved well from the first, I soon found myself a sort of privileged person. I was given a hut in Hope Town, which is a small place on the slopes of Mount Harriet, and I was left pretty much to myself. It is a dreary, fever-stricken place, and all beyond our little clearings was infested with wild cannibal natives, who were ready enough to blow a poisoned dart at us if they saw a chance. There was digging and ditching and yam-planting, and a dozen other things to be done, so we were busy enough all day; though in the evening we had a little time to ourselves. Among other things, I learned to dispense drugs for the surgeon, and picked up a smattering of his knowledge. All the time I was on the lookout for a chance to escape; but it is hundreds of miles from any other land, and there is little or no wind in those seas: so it was a terribly difficult job to get away.\n\n\"The surgeon, Dr. Somerton, was a fast, sporting young chap, and the other young officers would meet in his rooms of an evening and play cards. The surgery, where I used to make up my drugs, was next to his sitting-room, with a small window between us. Often, if I felt lonesome, I used to turn out the lamp in the surgery, and then, standing there, I could hear their talk and watch their play. I am fond of a hand at cards myself, and it was almost as good as having one to watch the others. There was Major Sholto, Captain Morstan, and Lieutenant Bromley Brown, who were in command of the native troops, and there was the surgeon himself, and two or three prison-officials, crafty old hands who played a nice sly safe game. A very snug little party they used to make.\n\n\"Well, there was one thing which very soon struck me, and that was that the soldiers used always to lose and the civilians to win. Mind, I don't say there was anything unfair, but so it was. These prison-chaps had done little else than play cards ever since they had been at the Andamans, and they knew each other's game to a point, while the others just played to pass the time and threw their cards down anyhow. Night after night the soldiers got up poorer men, and the poorer they got the more keen they were to play. Major Sholto was the hardest hit. He used to pay in notes and gold at first, but soon it came to notes of hand and for big sums. He sometimes would win for a few deals just to give him heart, and then the luck would set in against him worse than ever. All day he would wander about as black as thunder, and he took to drinking a deal more than was good for him.\n\n\"One night he lost even more heavily than usual. I was sitting in my hut when he and Captain Morstan came stumbling along on the way to their quarters. They were bosom friends, those two, and never far apart. The major was raving about his losses.\n\n\"'It's all up, Morstan,' he was saying as they passed my hut. 'I shall have to send in my papers. I am a ruined man.'\n\n\"'Nonsense, old chap!' said the other, slapping him upon the shoulder. 'I've had a nasty facer myself, but\u2014' That was all I could hear, but it was enough to set me thinking.\n\n\"A couple of days later Major Sholto was strolling on the beach: so I took the chance of speaking to him.\n\n\"'I wish to have your advice, Major,' said I.\n\n\"'Well, Small, what is it?' he asked, taking his cheroot from his lips.\n\n\"'I wanted to ask you, sir,' said I, 'who is the proper person to whom hidden treasure should be handed over. I know where half a million worth lies, and, as I cannot use it myself, I thought perhaps the best thing that I could do would be to hand it over to the proper authorities, and then perhaps they would get my sentence shortened for me.'\n\n\"'Half a million, Small?' he gasped, looking hard at me to see if I was in earnest.\n\n\"'Quite that, sir\u2014in jewels and pearls. It lies there ready for anyone. And the queer thing about it is that the real owner is outlawed and cannot hold property, so that it belongs to the first comer.'\n\n\"'To government, Small,' he stammered, 'to government.' But he said it in a halting fashion, and I knew in my heart that I had got him.\n\n\"'You think, then, sir, that I should give the information to the governor-general? ' said I quietly.\n\n\"'Well, well, you must not do anything rash, or that you might repent. Let me hear all about it, Small. Give me the facts.'\n\n\"I told him the whole story, with small changes, so that he could not identify the places. When I had finished he stood stock still and full of thought. I could see by the twitch of his lip that there was a struggle going on within him.\n\n\"'This is a very important matter, Small,' he said at last. 'You must not say a word to anyone about it, and I shall see you again soon.'\n\n\"Two nights later he and his friend, Captain Morstan, came to my hut in the dead of the night with a lantern.\n\n\"'I want you just to let Captain Morstan hear that story from your own lips, Small,' said he.\n\n\"I repeated it as I had told it before.\n\n\"'It rings true, eh?' said he. 'It's good enough to act upon?'\n\n\"Captain Morstan nodded.\n\n\"'Look here, Small,' said the major. 'We have been talking it over, my friend here and I, and we have come to the conclusion that this secret of yours is hardly a government matter, after all, but is a private concern of your own, which of course you have the power of disposing of as you think best. Now the question is, What price would you ask for it? We might be inclined to take it up, and at least look into it, if we could agree as to terms.' He tried to speak in a cool, careless way, but his eyes were shining with excitement and greed.\n\n\"'Why, as to that, gentlemen,' I answered, trying also to be cool but feeling as excited as he did, 'there is only one bargain which a man in my position can make. I shall want you to help me to my freedom, and to help my three companions to theirs. We shall then take you into partnership and give you a fifth share to divide between you.'\n\n\"'Hum!' said he. 'A fifth share! That is not very tempting.'\n\n\"'It would come to fifty thousand apiece,' said I.\n\n\"'But how can we gain your freedom? You know very well that you ask an impossibility.'\n\n\"'Nothing of the sort,' I answered. 'I have thought it all out to the last detail. The only bar to our escape is that we can get no boat fit for the voyage, and no provisions to last us for so long a time. There are plenty of little yachts and yawls at Calcutta or Madras which would serve our turn well. Do you bring one over. We shall engage to get aboard her by night, and if you will drop us on any part of the Indian coast you will have done your part of the bargain.'\n\n\"'If there were only one,' he said.\n\n\"'None or all,' I answered. 'We have sworn it. The four of us must always act together.'\n\n\"'You see, Morstan,' said he, 'Small is a man of his word. He does not flinch from his friends. I think we may very well trust him.'\n\n\"'It's a dirty business,' the other answered. 'Yet, as you say, the money will save our commissions handsomely.'\n\n\"'Well, Small,' said the major, 'we must, I suppose, try and meet you. We must first, of course, test the truth of your story. Tell me where the box is hid, and I shall get leave of absence and go back to India in the monthly relief-boat to inquire into the affair.'\n\n\"'Not so fast,' said I, growing colder as he got hot. 'I must have the consent of my three comrades. I tell you that it is four or none with us.'\n\n\"'Nonsense!' he broke in. 'What have three black fellows to do with our agreement?'\n\n\"'Black or blue,' said I, 'they are in with me, and we all go together.'\n\n\"Well, the matter ended by a second meeting, at which Mahomet Singh, Abdullah Khan, and Dost Akbar were all present. We talked the matter over again, and at last we came to an arrangement. We were to provide both the officers with charts of the part of the Agra fort, and mark the place in the wall where the treasure was hid. Major Sholto was to go to India to test our story. If he found the box he was to leave it there, to send out a small yacht provisioned for a voyage, which was to lie off Rutland Island, and to which we were to make our way, and finally to return to his duties. Captain Morstan was then to apply for leave of absence, to meet us at Agra, and there we were to have a final division of the treasure, he taking the major's share as well as his own. All this we sealed by the most solemn oaths that the mind could think or the lips utter. I sat up all night with paper and ink, and by the morning I had the two charts all ready, signed with the sign of four\u2014that is, of Abdullah, Akbar, Mahomet, and myself.\n\n\"Well, gentlemen, I weary you with my long story, and I know that my friend Mr. Jones is impatient to get me safely stowed in chokey. I'll make it as short as I can. The villain Sholto went off to India, but he never came back again. Captain Morstan showed me his name among a list of passengers in one of the mail-boats very shortly afterwards. His uncle had died, leaving him a fortune, and he had left the Army; yet he could stoop to treat five men as he had treated us. Morstan went over to Agra shortly afterwards and found, as we expected, that the treasure was indeed gone. The scoundrel had stolen it all without carrying out one of the conditions on which we had sold him the secret. From that I lived only for vengeance. I thought of it by day and I nursed it by night. It became an overpowering, absorbing passion with me. I cared nothing for the law\u2014nothing for the gallows. To escape, to track down Sholto, to have my hand upon his throat\u2014that was my one thought. Even the Agra treasure had come to be a smaller thing in my mind than the slaying of Sholto.\n\n\"Well, I have set my mind on many things in this life, and never one which I did not carry out. But it was weary years before my time came. I have told you that I had picked up something of medicine. One day when Dr. Somerton was down with a fever a little Andaman Islander was picked up by a convict-gang in the woods. He was sick to death and had gone to a lonely place to die. I took him in hand, though he was as venomous as a young snake, and after a couple of months I got him all right and able to walk. He took a kind of fancy to me then, and would hardly go back to his woods, but was always hanging about my hut. I learned a little of his lingo from him, and this made him all the fonder of me.\n\n\"Tonga\u2014for that was his name\u2014was a fine boatman and owned a big, roomy canoe of his own. When I found that he was devoted to me and would do anything to serve me, I saw my chance of escape. I talked it over with him. He was to bring his boat round on a certain night to an old wharf which was never guarded, and there he was to pick me up. I gave him directions to have several gourds of water and a lot of yas, cocoanuts, and sweet potatoes.\n\n\"He was staunch and true, was little Tonga. No man ever had a more faithful mate. At the night named he had his boat at the wharf. As it chanced, however, there was one of the convict-guard down there\u2014a vile Pathan who had never missed a chance of insulting and injuring me. I had always vowed vengeance, and now I had my chance. It was as if fate had placed him in my way that I might pay my debt before I left the island. He stood on the bank with his back to me, and his carbine on his shoulder. I looked about for a stone to beat out his brains with, but none could I see.\n\n\"Then a queer thought came into my head and showed me where I could lay my hand on a weapon. I sat down in the darkness and unstrapped my wooden leg. With three long hops I was on him. He put his carbine to his shoulder, but I struck him full, and knocked the whole front of his skull in. You can see the split in the wood now where I hit him. We both went down together, for I could not keep my balance; but when I got up I found him still lying quiet enough. I made for the boat, and in an hour we were well out at sea. Tonga had brought all his earthly possessions with him, his arms and his gods. Among other things, he had a long bamboo spear, and some Andaman cocoanut matting, with which I made a sort of a sail. For ten days we were beating about, trusting to luck, and on the eleventh we were picked up by a trader which was going from Singapore to Jiddah with a cargo of Malay pilgrims. They were a rum crowd, and Tonga and I soon managed to settle down among them. They had one very good quality: they let you alone and asked no questions.\n\n\"Well, if I were to tell you all the adventures that my little chum and I went through, you would not thank me, for I would have you here until the sun was shining. Here and there we drifted about the world, something always turning up to keep us from London. All the time, however, I never lost sight of my purpose. I would dream of Sholto at night. A hundred times I have killed him in my sleep. At last, however, some three or four years ago, we found ourselves in England. I had no great difficulty in finding where Sholto lived, and I set to work to discover whether he had realized on the treasure, or if he still had it. I made friends with someone who could help me\u2014I name no names, for I don't want to get anyone else in a hole\u2014and I soon found that he still had the jewels. Then I tried to get at him in many ways; but he was pretty sly and had always two prize-fighters, besides his sons and his khitmutgar, on guard over him.\n\n\"One day, however, I got word that he was dying. I hurried at once to the garden, mad that he should slip out of my clutches like that, and, looking through the window, I saw him lying in his bed, with his sons on each side of him. I'd have come through and taken my chance with the three of them, only even as I looked at him his jaw dropped, and I knew that he was gone. I got into his room that same night though, and I searched his papers to see if there was any record of where he had hidden our jewels. There was not a line, however, so I came away, bitter and savage as a man could be. Before I left I bethought me that if I ever met my Sikh friends again it would be a satisfaction to know that I had left some mark of our hatred; so I scrawled down the sign of the four of us, as it had been on the chart, and I pinned it on his bosom. It was too much that he should be taken to the grave without some token from the men whom he had robbed and befooled.\n\n\"We earned a living at this time by my exhibiting poor Tonga at fairs and other such places as the black cannibal. He would eat raw meat and dance his wardance: so we always had a hatful of pennies after a day's work. I still heard all the news from Pondicherry Lodge, and for some years there was no news to hear, except that they were hunting for the treasure. At last, however, came what we had waited for so long. The treasure had been found. It was up at the top of the house in Mr. Bartholomew Sholto's chemical laboratory. I came at once and had a look at the place, but I could not see how, with my wooden leg, I was to make my way up to it. I learned, however, about a trapdoor in the roof, and also about Mr. Sholto's supper-hour. It seemed to me that I could manage the thing easily through Tonga. I brought him out with me with a long rope wound round his waist. He could climb like a cat, and he soon made his way through the roof, but, as ill luck would have it, Bartholomew Sholto was still in the room, to his cost. Tonga thought he had done something very clever in killing him, for when I came up by the rope I found him strutting about as proud as a peacock. Very much surprised was he when I made at him with the rope's end and cursed him for a little bloodthirsty imp. I took the treasure box and let it down, and then slid down myself, having first left the sign of the four upon the table to show that the jewels had come back at last to those who had most right to them. Tonga then pulled up the rope, closed the window, and made off the way that he had come.\n\n\"I don't know that I have anything else to tell you. I had heard a waterman speak of the speed of Smith's launch, the Aurora, so I thought she would be a handy craft for our escape with old Smith, and was to give him a big sum if he got us safe to our ship. He knew, no doubt, that there was some screw loose, but he was not in our secrets. All this is the truth, and if I tell it to you, gentlemen, it is not to amuse you\u2014for you have not done me a very good turn\u2014but it is because I believe the best defence I can make is just to hold back nothing, but let all the world know how badly I have myself been served by Major Sholto, and how innocent I am of the death of his son.\"\n\n\"A very remarkable account,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"A fitting windup to an extremely interesting case. There is nothing at all new to me in the latter part of your narrative except that you brought your own rope. That I did not know. By the way, I had hoped that Tonga had lost all his darts; yet he managed to shoot one at us in the boat.\"\n\n\"He had lost them all, sir, except the one which was in his blow-pipe at the time.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course,\" said Holmes. \"I had not thought of that.\"\n\n\"Is there any other point which you would like to ask about?\" asked the convict affably.\n\n\"I think not, thank you,\" my companion answered.\n\n\"Well, Holmes,\" said Athelney Jones, \"you are a man to be humoured, and we all know that you are a connoisseur of crime; but duty is duty, and I have gone rather far in doing what you and your friend asked me. I shall feel more at ease when we have our story-teller here safe under lock and key. The cab still waits, and there are two inspectors downstairs. I am much obliged to you both for your assistance. Of course you will be wanted at the trial. Good-night to you.\"\n\n\"Good-night, gentlemen both,\" said Jonathan Small.\n\n\"You first, Small,\" remarked the wary Jones as they left the room. \"I'll take particular care that you don't club me with your wooden leg, whatever you may have done to the gentleman at the Andaman Isles.\"\n\n\"Well, and there is the end of our little drama,\" I remarked, after we had sat some time smoking in silence. \"I fear that it may be the last investigation in which I shall have the chance of studying your methods. Miss Morstan has done me the honour to accept me as a husband in prospective.\"\n\nHe gave a most dismal groan.\n\n\"I feared as much,\" said he. \"I really cannot congratulate you.\"\n\nI was a little hurt.\n\n\"Have you any reason to be dissatisfied with my choice?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not at all. I think she is one of the most charming young ladies I ever met and might have been most useful in such work as we have been doing. She had a decided genius that way; witness the way in which she preserved that Agra plan from all the other papers of her father. But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment.\"\n\n\"I trust,\" said I, laughing, \"that my judgment may survive the ordeal. But you look weary.\"\n\n\"Yes, the reaction is already upon me. I shall be as limp as a rag for a week.\"\n\n\"Strange,\" said I, \"how terms of what in another man I should call laziness alternate with your fits of splendid energy and vigour.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he answered, \"there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer, and also of a pretty spry sort of a fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe:\n\n\u2003Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf,\n\n\u2003Denn zum w\u00fcrdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.\n\nBy the way, apropos of this Norwood business, you see that they had, as I surmised, a confederate in the house, who could be none other than Lal Rao, the butler: so Jones actually has the undivided honour of having caught one fish in his great haul.\"\n\n\"The division seems rather unfair,\" I remarked. \"You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?\"\n\n\"For me,\" said Sherlock Holmes, \"there still remains the cocaine-bottle.\" And he stretched his long white hand up for it." + }, + { + "title": "ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES", + "text": "[ A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA ]\n\nTo Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer\u2014excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.\n\nI had seen little of Holmes lately. My marriage had drifted us away from each other. My own complete happiness, and the home-centred interests which rise up around the man who first finds himself master of his own establishment, were sufficient to absorb all my attention, while Holmes, who loathed every form of society with his whole Bohemian soul, remained in our lodgings in Baker Street, buried among his old books, and alternating from week to week between cocaine and ambition, the drowsiness of the drug, and the fierce energy of his own keen nature. He was still, as ever, deeply attracted by the study of crime, and occupied his immense faculties and extraordinary powers of observation in following out those clues, and clearing up those mysteries which had been abandoned as hopeless by the official police. From time to time I heard some vague account of his doings: of his summons to Odessa in the case of the Trepoff murder, of his clearing up of the singular tragedy of the Atkinson brothers at Trincomalee, and finally of the mission which he had accomplished so delicately and successfully for the reigning family of Holland. Beyond these signs of his activity, however, which I merely shared with all the readers of the daily press, I knew little of my former friend and companion.\n\nOne night\u2014it was on the twentieth of March, 1888\u2014I was returning from a journey to a patient (for I had now returned to civil practice), when my way led me through Baker Street. As I passed the well-remembered door, which must always be associated in my mind with my wooing, and with the dark incidents of the Study in Scarlet, I was seized with a keen desire to see Holmes again, and to know how he was employing his extraordinary powers. His rooms were brilliantly lit, and, even as I looked up, I saw his tall, spare figure pass twice in a dark silhouette against the blind. He was pacing the room swiftly, eagerly, with his head sunk upon his chest and his hands clasped behind him. To me, who knew his every mood and habit, his attitude and manner told their own story. He was at work again. He had risen out of his drug-created dreams and was hot upon the scent of some new problem. I rang the bell and was shown up to the chamber which had formerly been in part my own.\n\nHis manner was not effusive. It seldom was; but he was glad, I think, to see me. With hardly a word spoken, but with a kindly eye, he waved me to an armchair, threw across his case of cigars, and indicated a spirit case and a gasogene in the corner. Then he stood before the fire and looked me over in his singular introspective fashion.\n\n\"Wedlock suits you,\" he remarked. \"I think, Watson, that you have put on seven and a half pounds since I saw you.\"\n\n\"Seven!\" I answered.\n\n\"Indeed, I should have thought a little more. Just a trifle more, I fancy, Watson. And in practice again, I observe. You did not tell me that you intended to go into harness.\"\n\n\"Then, how do you know?\"\n\n\"I see it, I deduce it. How do I know that you have been getting yourself very wet lately, and that you have a most clumsy and careless servant girl?\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes,\" said I, \"this is too much. You would certainly have been burned, had you lived a few centuries ago. It is true that I had a country walk on Thursday and came home in a dreadful mess, but as I have changed my clothes I can't imagine how you deduce it. As to Mary Jane, she is incorrigible, and my wife has given her notice; but there, again, I fail to see how you work it out.\"\n\nHe chuckled to himself and rubbed his long, nervous hands together.\n\n\"It is simplicity itself,\" said he; \"my eyes tell me that on the inside of your left shoe, just where the firelight strikes it, the leather is scored by six almost parallel cuts. Obviously they have been caused by someone who has very carelessly scraped round the edges of the sole in order to remove crusted mud from it. Hence, you see, my double deduction that you had been out in vile weather, and that you had a particularly malignant boot-slitting specimen of the London slavey. As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.\"\n\nI could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. \"When I hear you give your reasons,\" I remarked, \"the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" he answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. \"You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.\"\n\n\"Frequently.\"\n\n\"How often?\"\n\n\"Well, some hundreds of times.\"\n\n\"Then how many are there?\"\n\n\"How many? I don't know.\"\n\n\"Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed. By the way, since you are interested in these little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this.\" He threw over a sheet of thick, pink-tinted note-paper which had been lying open upon the table. \"It came by the last post,\" said he. \"Read it aloud.\"\n\nThe note was undated, and without either signature or address.\n\n\"There will call upon you to-night, at a quarter to eight o'clock [it said], a gentleman who desires to consult you upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask.\n\n\"This is indeed a mystery,\" I remarked. \"What do you imagine that it means?\"\n\n\"I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. But the note itself. What do you deduce from it?\"\n\nI carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was written.\n\n\"The man who wrote it was presumably well to do,\" I remarked, endeavouring to imitate my companion's processes. \"Such paper could not be bought under half a crown a packet. It is peculiarly strong and stiff.\"\n\n\"Peculiar\u2014that is the very word,\" said Holmes. \"It is not an English paper at all. Hold it up to the light.\"\n\nI did so, and saw a large \"E\" with a small \"g,\" a \"P,\" and a large \"G\" with a small \"t\" woven into the texture of the paper.\n\n\"What do you make of that?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"The name of the maker, no doubt; or his monogram, rather.\"\n\n\"Not at all. The 'G' with the small 't' stands for 'Gesellschaft,' which is the German for 'Company.' It is a customary contraction like our 'Co.' 'P,' of course, stands for 'Papier.' Now for the 'Eg.' Let us glance at our Continental Gazetteer.\" He took down a heavy brown volume from his shelves. \"Eglow. Eglonitz\u2014here we are, Egria. It is in a German-speaking country\u2014in Bohemia, not far from Carlsbad. 'Remarkable as being the scene of the death of Wallenstein, and for its numerous glass-factories and paper-mills.' Ha, ha, my boy, what do you make of that?\" His eyes sparkled, and he sent up a great blue triumphant cloud from his cigarette.\n\n\"The paper was made in Bohemia,\" I said.\n\n\"Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence\u2014'This account of you we have from all quarters received.' A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts.\"\n\nAs he spoke there was the sharp sound of horses' hoofs and grating wheels against the curb, followed by a sharp pull at the bell. Holmes whistled.\n\n\"A pair, by the sound,\" said he. \"Yes,\" he continued, glancing out of the window. \"A nice little brougham and a pair of beauties. A hundred and fifty guineas apiece. There's money in this case, Watson, if there is nothing else.\"\n\n\"I think that I had better go, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell. And this promises to be interesting. It would be a pity to miss it.\"\n\n\"But your client\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind him. I may want your help, and so may he. Here he comes. Sit down in that armchair, Doctor, and give us your best attention.\"\n\nA slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative tap.\n\n\"Come in!\" said Holmes.\n\nA man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. His dress was rich with a richness which would, in England, be looked upon as akin to bad taste. Heavy bands of astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his double-breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his shoulders was lined with flame-coloured silk and secured at the neck with a brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended halfway up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur, completed the impression of barbaric opulence which was suggested by his whole appearance. He carried a broad-brimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black vizard mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment, for his hand was still raised to it as he entered. From the lower part of the face he appeared to be a man of strong character, with a thick, hanging lip, and a long, straight chin suggestive of resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy.\n\n\"You had my note?\" he asked with a deep harsh voice and a strongly marked German accent. \"I told you that I would call.\" He looked from one to the other of us, as if uncertain which to address.\n\n\"Pray take a seat,\" said Holmes. \"This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson, who is occasionally good enough to help me in my cases. Whom have I the honour to address?\"\n\n\"You may address me as the Count Von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman. I understand that this gentleman, your friend, is a man of honour and discretion, whom I may trust with a matter of the most extreme importance. If not, I should much prefer to communicate with you alone.\"\n\nI rose to go, but Holmes caught me by the wrist and pushed me back into my chair. \"It is both, or none,\" said he. \"You may say before this gentleman anything which you may say to me.\"\n\nThe Count shrugged his broad shoulders. \"Then I must begin,\" said he, \"by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years; at the end of that time the matter will be of no importance. At present it is not too much to say that it is of such weight it may have an influence upon European history.\"\n\n\"I promise,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"And I.\"\n\n\"You will excuse this mask,\" continued our strange visitor. \"The august person who employs me wishes his agent to be unknown to you, and I may confess at once that the title by which I have just called myself is not exactly my own.\"\n\n\"I was aware of it,\" said Holmes drily.\n\n\"The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution has to be taken to quench what might grow to be an immense scandal and seriously compromise one of the reigning families of Europe. To speak plainly, the matter implicates the great House of Ormstein, hereditary kings of Bohemia.\"\n\n\"I was also aware of that,\" murmured Holmes, settling himself down in his armchair and closing his eyes.\n\nOur visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid, lounging figure of the man who had been no doubt depicted to him as the most incisive reasoner and most energetic agent in Europe. Holmes slowly reopened his eyes and looked impatiently at his gigantic client.\n\n\"If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,\" he remarked, \"I should be better able to advise you.\"\n\nThe man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face and hurled it upon the ground. \"You are right,\" he cried; \"I am the King. Why should I attempt to conceal it?\"\n\n\"Why, indeed?\" murmured Holmes. \"Your Majesty had not spoken before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia.\"\n\n\"But you can understand,\" said our strange visitor, sitting down once more and passing his hand over his high white forehead, \"you can understand that I am not accustomed to doing such business in my own person. Yet the matter was so delicate that I could not confide it to an agent without putting myself in his power. I have come incognito from Prague for the purpose of consulting you.\"\n\n\"Then, pray consult,\" said Holmes, shutting his eyes once more.\n\n\"The facts are briefly these: Some five years ago, during a lengthy visit to Warsaw, I made the acquaintance of the well-known adventuress, Irene Adler. The name is no doubt familiar to you.\"\n\n\"Kindly look her up in my index, Doctor,\" murmured Holmes without opening his eyes. For many years he had adopted a system of docketing all paragraphs concerning men and things, so that it was difficult to name a subject or a person on which he could not at once furnish information. In this case I found her biography sandwiched in between that of a Hebrew rabbi and that of a staff-commander who had written a monograph upon the deep-sea fishes.\n\n\"Let me see!\" said Holmes. \"Hum! Born in New Jersey in the year 1858. Contralto\u2014hum! La Scala, hum! Prima donna Imperial Opera of Warsaw\u2014yes! Retired from operatic stage\u2014ha! Living in London\u2014quite so! Your Majesty, as I understand, became entangled with this young person, wrote her some compromising letters, and is now desirous of getting those letters back.\"\n\n\"Precisely so. But how\u2014\"\n\n\"Was there a secret marriage?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"No legal papers or certificates?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Then I fail to follow your Majesty. If this young person should produce her letters for blackmailing or other purposes, how is she to prove their authenticity?\"\n\n\"There is the writing.\"\n\n\"Pooh, pooh! Forgery.\"\n\n\"My private note-paper.\"\n\n\"Stolen.\"\n\n\"My own seal.\"\n\n\"Imitated.\"\n\n\"My photograph.\"\n\n\"Bought.\"\n\n\"We were both in the photograph.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear! That is very bad! Your Majesty has indeed committed an indiscretion.\"\n\n\"I was mad\u2014insane.\"\n\n\"You have compromised yourself seriously.\"\n\n\"I was only Crown Prince then. I was young. I am but thirty now.\"\n\n\"It must be recovered.\"\n\n\"We have tried and failed.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty must pay. It must be bought.\"\n\n\"She will not sell.\"\n\n\"Stolen, then.\"\n\n\"Five attempts have been made. Twice burglars in my pay ransacked her house. Once we diverted her luggage when she travelled. Twice she has been waylaid. There has been no result.\"\n\n\"No sign of it?\"\n\n\"Absolutely none.\"\n\nHolmes laughed. \"It is quite a pretty little problem,\" said he.\n\n\"But a very serious one to me,\" returned the King reproachfully.\n\n\"Very, indeed. And what does she propose to do with the photograph?\"\n\n\"To ruin me.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"I am about to be married.\"\n\n\"So I have heard.\"\n\n\"To Clotilde Lothman von Saxe-Meningen, second daughter of the King of Scandinavia. You may know the strict principles of her family. She is herself the very soul of delicacy. A shadow of a doubt as to my conduct would bring the matter to an end.\"\n\n\"And Irene Adler?\"\n\n\"Threatens to send them the photograph. And she will do it. I know that she will do it. You do not know her, but she has a soul of steel. She has the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men. Rather than I should marry another woman, there are no lengths to which she would not go\u2014none.\"\n\n\"You are sure that she has not sent it yet?\"\n\n\"I am sure.\"\n\n\"And why?\"\n\n\"Because she has said that she would send it on the day when the betrothal was publicly proclaimed. That will be next Monday.\"\n\n\"Oh, then we have three days yet,\" said Holmes with a yawn. \"That is very fortunate, as I have one or two matters of importance to look into just at present. Your Majesty will, of course, stay in London for the present?\"\n\n\"Certainly. You will find me at the Langham under the name of the Count Von Kramm.\"\n\n\"Then I shall drop you a line to let you know how we progress.\"\n\n\"Pray do so. I shall be all anxiety.\"\n\n\"Then, as to money?\"\n\n\"You have carte blanche.\"\n\n\"Absolutely?\"\n\n\"I tell you that I would give one of the provinces of my kingdom to have that photograph.\"\n\n\"And for present expenses?\"\n\nThe King took a heavy chamois leather bag from under his cloak and laid it on the table.\n\n\"There are three hundred pounds in gold and seven hundred in notes,\" he said.\n\nHolmes scribbled a receipt upon a sheet of his note-book and handed it to him.\n\n\"And Mademoiselle's address?\" he asked.\n\n\"Is Briony Lodge, Serpentine Avenue, St. John's Wood.\"\n\nHolmes took a note of it. \"One other question,\" said he. \"Was the photograph a cabinet?\"\n\n\"It was.\"\n\n\"Then, good-night, your Majesty, and I trust that we shall soon have some good news for you. And good-night, Watson,\" he added, as the wheels of the royal brougham rolled down the street. \"If you will be good enough to call to-morrow afternoon at three o'clock I should like to chat this little matter over with you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "At three o'clock precisely I was at Baker Street, but Holmes had not yet returned. The landlady informed me that he had left the house shortly after eight o'clock in the morning. I sat down beside the fire, however, with the intention of awaiting him, however long he might be. I was already deeply interested in his inquiry, for, though it was surrounded by none of the grim and strange features which were associated with the two crimes which I have already recorded, still, the nature of the case and the exalted station of his client gave it a character of its own. Indeed, apart from the nature of the investigation which my friend had on hand, there was something in his masterly grasp of a situation, and his keen, incisive reasoning, which made it a pleasure to me to study his system of work, and to follow the quick, subtle methods by which he disentangled the most inextricable mysteries. So accustomed was I to his invariable success that the very possibility of his failing had ceased to enter into my head.\n\nIt was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken-looking groom, ill-kempt and side-whiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes, walked into the room. Accustomed as I was to my friend's amazing powers in the use of disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain that it was indeed he. With a nod he vanished into the bedroom, whence he emerged in five minutes tweed-suited and respectable, as of old. Putting his hands into his pockets, he stretched out his legs in front of the fire and laughed heartily for some minutes.\n\n\"Well, really!\" he cried, and then he choked and laughed again until he was obliged to lie back, limp and helpless, in the chair.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"It's quite too funny. I am sure you could never guess how I employed my morning, or what I ended by doing.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine. I suppose that you have been watching the habits, and perhaps the house, of Miss Irene Adler.\"\n\n\"Quite so; but the sequel was rather unusual. I will tell you, however. I left the house a little after eight o'clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsy men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. I soon found Briony Lodge. It is a bijou villa, with a garden at the back, but built out in front right to the road, two stones. Chubb lock to the door. Large sitting-room on the right side, well furnished, with long windows almost to the floor, and those preposterous English window fasteners which a child could open. Behind there was nothing remarkable, save that the passage window could be reached from the top of the coach-house. I walked round it and examined it closely from every point of view, but without noting anything else of interest.\n\n\"I then lounged down the Street and found, as I expected, that there was a mews in a lane which runs down by one wall of the garden. I lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange twopence, a glass of half and half, two fills of shag tobacco, and as much information as I could desire about Miss Adler, to say nothing of half a dozen other people in the neighbourhood in whom I was not in the least interested, but whose biographies I was compelled to listen to.\"\n\n\"And what of Irene Adler?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, she has turned all the men's heads down in that part. She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet. So say the Serpentine-mews, to a man. She lives quietly, sings at concerts, drives out at five every day, and returns at seven sharp for dinner. Seldom goes out at other times, except when she sings. Has only one male visitor, but a good deal of him. He is dark, handsome, and dashing, never calls less than once a day, and often twice. He is a Mr. Godfrey Norton, of the Inner Temple. See the advantages of a cabman as a confidant. They had driven him home a dozen times from Serpentine-mews, and knew all about him. When I had listened to all they had to tell, I began to walk up and down near Briony Lodge once more, and to think over my plan of campaign.\n\n\"This Godfrey Norton was evidently an important factor in the matter: He was a lawyer. That sounded ominous. What was the relation between them, and what the object of his repeated visits? Was she his client, his friend, or his mistress? If the former, she had probably transferred the photograph to his keeping. If the latter, it was less likely. On the issue of this question depended whether I should continue my work at Briony Lodge, or turn my attention to the gentleman's chambers in the Temple. It was a delicate point, and it widened the field of my inquiry. I fear that I bore you with these details, but I have to let you see my little difficulties, if you are to understand the situation.\"\n\n\"I am following you closely,\" I answered.\n\n\"I was still balancing the matter in my mind when a hansom cab drove up to Briony Lodge, and a gentleman sprang out. He was a remarkably handsome man, dark, aquiline, and moustached\u2014evidently the man of whom I had heard. He appeared to be in a great hurry, shouted to the cabman to wait, and brushed past the maid who opened the door with the air of a man who was thoroughly at home.\n\n\"He was in the house about half an hour, and I could catch glimpses of him in the windows of the sitting-room, pacing up and down, talking excitedly, and waving his arms. Of her I could see nothing. Presently he emerged, looking even more flurried than before. As he stepped up to the cab, he pulled a gold watch from his pocket and looked at it earnestly, 'Drive like the devil,' he shouted, 'first to Gross & Hankey's in Regent Street, and then to the Church of St. Monica in the Edgeware Road. Half a guinea if you do it in twenty minutes!'\n\n\"Away they went, and I was just wondering whether I should not do well to follow them when up the lane came a neat little landau, the coachman with his coat only half-buttoned, and his tie under his ear, while all the tags of his harness were sticking out of the buckles. It hadn't pulled up before she shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for.\n\n\"'The Church of St. Monica, John,' she cried, 'and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.'\n\n\"This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came through the street. The driver looked twice at such a shabby fare, but I jumped in before he could object. 'The Church of St. Monica,' said I, 'and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.' It was twenty-five minutes to twelve, and of course it was clear enough what was in the wind.\n\n\"My cabby drove fast. I don't think I ever drove faster, but the others were there before us. The cab and the landau with their steaming horses were in front of the door when I arrived. I paid the man and hurried into the church. There was not a soul there save the two whom I had followed and a surpliced clergyman, who seemed to be expostulating with them. They were all three standing in a knot in front of the altar. I lounged up the side aisle like any other idler who has dropped into a church. Suddenly, to my surprise, the three at the altar faced round to me, and Godfrey Norton came running as hard as he could towards me.\n\n\"'Thank God,' he cried. 'You'll do. Come! Come!'\n\n\"'What then?' I asked.\n\n\"'Come, man, come, only three minutes, or it won't be legal.'\n\n\"I was half-dragged up to the altar, and before I knew where I was I found myself mumbling responses which were whispered in my ear, and vouching for things of which I knew nothing, and generally assisting in the secure tying up of Irene Adler, spinster, to Godfrey Norton, bachelor. It was all done in an instant, and there was the gentleman thanking me on the one side and the lady on the other, while the clergyman beamed on me in front. It was the most preposterous position in which I ever found myself in my life, and it was the thought of it that started me laughing just now. It seems that there had been some informality about their license, that the clergyman absolutely refused to marry them without a witness of some sort, and that my lucky appearance saved the bridegroom from having to sally out into the streets in search of a best man. The bride gave me a sovereign, and I mean to wear it on my watch-chain in memory of the occasion.\n\n\"This is a very unexpected turn of affairs,\" said I; \"and what then?\"\n\n\"Well, I found my plans very seriously menaced. It looked as if the pair might take an immediate departure, and so necessitate very prompt and energetic measures on my part. At the church door, however, they separated, he driving back to the Temple, and she to her own house. 'I shall drive out in the park at five as usual,' she said as she left him. I heard no more. They drove away in different directions, and I went off to make my own arrangements.\"\n\n\"Which are?\"\n\n\"Some cold beef and a glass of beer,\" he answered, ringing the bell. \"I have been too busy to think of food, and I am likely to be busier still this evening. By the way, Doctor. I shall want your co\u00f6peration.\"\n\n\"I shall be delighted.\"\n\n\"You don't mind breaking the law?\"\n\n\"Not in the least.\"\n\n\"Nor running a chance of arrest?\"\n\n\"Not in a good cause.\"\n\n\"Oh, the cause is excellent!\"\n\n\"Then I am your man.\"\n\n\"I was sure that I might rely on you.\"\n\n\"But what is it you wish?\"\n\n\"When Mrs. Turner has brought in the tray I will make it clear to you. Now,\" he said as he turned hungrily on the simple fare that our landlady had provided, \"I must discuss it while I eat, for I have not much time. It is nearly five now. In two hours we must be on the scene of action. Miss Irene, or Madame, rather, returns from her drive at seven. We must be at Briony Lodge to meet her.\"\n\n\"And what then?\"\n\n\"You must leave that to me. I have already arranged what is to occur. There is only one point on which I must insist. You must not interfere, come what may. You understand?\"\n\n\"I am to be neutral?\"\n\n\"To do nothing whatever. There will probably be some small unpleasantness. Do not join in it. It will end in my being conveyed into the house. Four or five minutes afterwards the sitting-room window will open. You are to station yourself close to that open window.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You are to watch me, for I will be visible to you.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And when I raise my hand\u2014so\u2014you will throw into the room what I give you to throw, and will, at the same time, raise the cry of fire. You quite follow me?\"\n\n\"Entirely.\"\n\n\"It is nothing very formidable,\" he said, taking a long cigar-shaped roll from his pocket. \"It is an ordinary plumber's smoke-rocket, fitted with a cap at either end to make it self-lighting. Your task is confined to that. When you raise your cry of fire, it will be taken up by quite a number of people. You may then walk to the end of the street, and I will rejoin you in ten minutes. I hope that I have made myself clear?\"\n\n\"I am to remain neutral, to get near the window, to watch you, and at the signal to throw in this object, then to raise the cry of fire, and to wait you at the corner of the street.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"Then you may entirely rely on me.\"\n\n\"That is excellent. I think, perhaps, it is almost time that I prepare for the new role I have to play.\"\n\nHe disappeared into his bedroom and returned in a few minutes in the character of an amiable and simple-minded Nonconformist clergyman. His broad black hat, his baggy trousers, his white tie, his sympathetic smile, and general look of peering and benevolent curiosity were such as Mr. John Hare alone could have equalled. It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed. The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when he became a specialist in crime.\n\nIt was a quarter past six when we left Baker Street, and it still wanted ten minutes to the hour when we found ourselves in Serpentine Avenue. It was already dusk, and the lamps were just being lighted as we paced up and down in front of Briony Lodge, waiting for the coming of its occupant. The house was just such as I had pictured it from Sherlock Holmes's succinct description, but the locality appeared to be less private than I expected. On the contrary, for a small street in a quiet neighbourhood, it was remarkably animated. There was a group of shabbily dressed men smoking and laughing in a corner, a scissors-grinder with his wheel, two guardsmen who were flirting with a nurse-girl, and several well-dressed young men who were lounging up and down with cigars in their mouths.\n\n\"You see,\" remarked Holmes, as we paced to and fro in front of the house, \"this marriage rather simplifies matters. The photograph becomes a double-edged weapon now. The chances are that she would be as averse to its being seen by Mr. Godfrey Norton, as our client is to its coming to the eyes of his princess. Now the question is, Where are we to find the photograph?\"\n\n\"Where, indeed?\"\n\n\"It is most unlikely that she carries it about with her. It is cabinet size. Too large for easy concealment about a woman's dress. She knows that the King is capable of having her waylaid and searched. Two attempts of the sort have already been made. We may take it, then, that she does not carry it about with her.\"\n\n\"Where, then?\"\n\n\"Her banker or her lawyer. There is that double possibility. But I am inclined to think neither. Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting. Why should she hand it over to anyone else? She could trust her own guardianship, but she could not tell what indirect or political influence might be brought to bear upon a business man. Besides, remember that she had resolved to use it within a few days. It must be where she can lay her hands upon it. It must be in her own house.\"\n\n\"But it has twice been burgled.\"\n\n\"Pshaw! They did not know how to look.\"\n\n\"But how will you look?\"\n\n\"I will not look.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"I will get her to show me.\"\n\n\"But she will refuse.\"\n\n\"She will not be able to. But I hear the rumble of wheels. It is her carriage. Now carry out my orders to the letter.\"\n\nAs he spoke the gleam of the side-lights of a carriage came round the curve of the avenue. It was a smart little landau which rattled up to the door of Briony Lodge. As it pulled up, one of the loafing men at the corner dashed forward to open the door in the hope of earning a copper, but was elbowed away by another loafer, who had rushed up with the same intention. A fierce quarrel broke out, which was increased by the two guardsmen, who took sides with one of the loungers, and by the scissors-grinder, who was equally hot upon the other side. A blow was struck, and in an instant the lady, who had stepped from her carriage, was the centre of a little knot of flushed and struggling men, who struck savagely at each other with their fists and sticks. Holmes dashed into the crowd to protect the lady; but just as he reached her he gave a cry and dropped to the ground, with the blood running freely down his face. At his fall the guardsmen took to their heels in one direction and the loungers in the other, while a number of better-dressed people, who had watched the scuffle without taking part in it, crowded in to help the lady and to attend to the injured man. Irene Adler, as I will still call her, had hurried up the steps; but she stood at the top with her superb figure outlined against the lights of the hail, looking back into the street.\n\n\"Is the poor gentleman much hurt?\" she asked.\n\n\"He is dead,\" cried several voices.\n\n\"No, no, there's life in him!\" shouted another. \"But he'll be gone before you can get him to hospital.\"\n\n\"He's a brave fellow,\" said a woman. \"They would have had the lady's purse and watch if it hadn't been for him. They were a gang, and a rough one, too. Ah, he's breathing now.\"\n\n\"He can't lie in the street. May we bring him in, marm?\"\n\n\"Surely. Bring him into the sitting room. There is a comfortable sofa. This way, please!\"\n\nSlowly and solemnly he was borne into Briony Lodge and laid out in the principal room, while I still observed the proceedings from my post by the window. The lamps had been lit, but the blinds had not been drawn, so that I could see Holmes as he lay upon the couch. I do not know whether he was seized with compunction at that moment for the part he was playing, but I know that I never felt more heartily ashamed of myself in my life than when I saw the beautiful creature against whom I was conspiring, or the grace and kindliness with which she waited upon the injured man. And yet it would be the blackest treachery to Holmes to draw back now from the part which he had intrusted to me. I hardened my heart, and took the smoke-rocket from under my ulster. After all, I thought, we are not injuring her. We are but preventing her from injuring another.\n\nHolmes had sat up upon the couch, and I saw him motion like a man who is in need of air. A maid rushed across and threw open the window. At the same instant I saw him raise his hand, and at the signal I tossed my rocket into the room with a cry of \"Fire!\" The word was no sooner out of my mouth than the whole crowd of spectators, well dressed and ill\u2014gentlemen, ostlers, and servant-maids\u2014joined in a general shriek of \"Fire!\" Thick clouds of smoke curled through the room and out at the open window. I caught a glimpse of rushing figures, and a moment later the voice of Holmes from within assuring them that it was a false alarm. Slipping through the shouting crowd I made my way to the corner of the street, and in ten minutes was rejoiced to find my friend's arm in mine, and to get away from the scene of uproar. He walked swiftly and in silence for some few minutes until we had turned down one of the quiet streets which lead towards the Edgeware Road.\n\n\"You did it very nicely, Doctor,\" he remarked. \"Nothing could have been better. It is all right.\"\n\n\"You have the photograph?\"\n\n\"I know where it is.\"\n\n\"And how did you find out?\"\n\n\"She showed me, as I told you she would.\"\n\n\"I am still in the dark.\"\n\n\"I do not wish to make a mystery,\" said he, laughing. \"The matter was perfectly simple. You, of course, saw that everyone in the street was an accomplice. They were all engaged for the evening.\"\n\n\"I guessed as much.\"\n\n\"Then, when the row broke out, I had a little moist red paint in the palm of my hand. I rushed forward, fell down, clapped my hand to my face, and became a piteous spectacle. It is an old trick.\"\n\n\"That also I could fathom.\"\n\n\"Then they carried me in. She was bound to have me in. What else could she do? And into her sitting-room, which was the very room which I suspected. It lay between that and her bedroom, and I was determined to see which. They laid me on a couch, I motioned for air, they were compelled to open the window, and you had your chance.\"\n\n\"How did that help you?\"\n\n\"It was all-important. When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. In the case of the Darlington substitution scandal it was of use to me, and also in the Arnsworth Castle business. A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box. Now it was clear to me that our lady of to-day had nothing in the house more precious to her than what we are in quest of. She would rush to secure it. The alarm of fire was admirably done. The smoke and shouting were enough to shake nerves of steel. She responded beautifully. The photograph is in a recess behind a sliding panel just above the right bell-pull. She was there in an instant, and I caught a glimpse of it as she half-drew it out. When I cried out that it was a false alarm, she replaced it, glanced at the rocket, rushed from the room, and I have not seen her since. I rose, and, making my excuses, escaped from the house. I hesitated whether to attempt to secure the photograph at once; but the coachman had come in, and as he was watching me narrowly it seemed safer to wait. A little over-precipitance may ruin all.\"\n\n\"And now?\" I asked.\n\n\"Our quest is practically finished. I shall call with the King to-morrow, and with you, if you care to come with us. We will be shown into the sitting-room to wait for the lady; but it is probable that when she comes she may find neither us nor the photograph. It might be a satisfaction to his Majesty to regain it with his own hands.\"\n\n\"And when will you call?\"\n\n\"At eight-in the morning. She will not be up, so that we shall have a clear field. Besides, we must be prompt, for this marriage may mean a complete change in her life and habits. I must wire to the King without delay.\"\n\nWe had reached Baker Street and had stopped at the door. He was searching his pockets for the key when someone passing said:\n\n\"Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\nThere were several people on the pavement at the time, but the greeting appeared to come from a slim youth in an ulster who had hurried by.\n\n\"I've heard that voice before,\" said Holmes, staring down the dimly lit street. \"Now, I wonder who the deuce that could have been.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "I slept at Baker Street that night, and we were engaged upon our toast and coffee in the morning when the King of Bohemia rushed into the room.\n\n\"You have really got it!\" he cried, grasping Sherlock Holmes by either shoulder and looking eagerly into his face.\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"But you have hopes?\"\n\n\"I have hopes.\"\n\n\"Then, come. I am all impatience to be gone.\"\n\n\"We must have a cab.\"\n\n\"No, my brougham is waiting.\"\n\n\"Then that will simplify matters.\" We descended and started off once more for Briony Lodge.\n\n\"Irene Adler is married,\" remarked Holmes.\n\n\"Married! When?\"\n\n\"Yesterday.\"\n\n\"But to whom?\"\n\n\"To an English lawyer named Norton.\"\n\n\"But she could not love him.\"\n\n\"I am in hopes that she does.\"\n\n\"And why in hopes?\"\n\n\"Because it would spare your Majesty all fear of future annoyance. If the lady loves her husband, she does not love your Majesty. If she does not love your Majesty, there is no reason why she should interfere with your Majesty's plan.\"\n\n\"It is true. And yet\u2014Well! I wish she had been of my own station! What a queen she would have made!\" He relapsed into a moody silence, which was not broken until we drew up in Serpentine Avenue.\n\nThe door of Briony Lodge was open and an elderly woman stood upon the steps. She watched us with a sardonic eye as we stepped from the brougham.\n\n\"Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I believe?\" said she.\n\n\"I am Mr. Holmes,\" answered my companion, looking at her with a questioning and rather startled gaze.\n\n\"Indeed! My mistress told me that you were likely to call. She left this morning with her husband by the 5:15 train from Charing Cross for the Continent.\"\n\n\"What!\" Sherlock Holmes staggered back, white with chagrin and surprise. \"Do you mean that she has left England?\"\n\n\"Never to return.\"\n\n\"And the papers?\" asked the King hoarsely. \"All is lost.\"\n\n\"We shall see.\" He pushed past the servant and rushed into the drawing-room, followed by the King and myself. The furniture was scattered about in every direction, with dismantled shelves and open drawers, as if the lady had hurriedly ransacked them before her flight. Holmes rushed at the bell-pull, tore back a small sliding shutter, and, plunging in his hand, pulled out a photograph and a letter. The photograph was of Irene Adler herself in evening dress, the letter was superscribed to \"Sherlock Holmes, Esq. To be left till called for.\" My friend tore it open, and we all three read it together. It was dated at midnight of the preceding night and ran in this way:\n\n\u2002MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES:\n\n\u2002You really did it very well. You took me in completely. Until after the alarm of fire, I had not a suspicion. But then, when I found how I had betrayed myself, I began to think. I had been warned against you months ago. I had been told that if the King employed an agent it would certainly be you. And your address had been given me. Yet, with all this, you made me reveal what you wanted to know. Even after I became suspicious, I found it hard to think evil of such a dear, kind old clergyman. But, you know, I have been trained as an actress, myself. Male costume is nothing new to me. I often take advantage of the freedom which it gives. I sent John, the coachman, to watch you, ran upstairs, got into my walking-clothes, as I call them, and came down just as you departed.\n\n\u2002Well, I followed you to your door, and so made sure that I was really an object of interest to the celebrated Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Then I, rather imprudently, wished you good-night, and started for the Temple to see my husband.\n\n\u2002We both thought the best resource was flight, when pursued by so formidable an antagonist; so you will find the nest empty when you call to-morrow. As to the photograph, your client may rest in peace. I love and am loved by a better man than he. The King may do what he will without hindrance from one whom he has cruelly wronged. I keep it only to safeguard myself, and to preserve a weapon which will always secure me from any steps which he might take in the future. I leave a photograph which he might care to possess; and I remain, dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\n\n\u2002Very truly yours,\n\n\u2002IRENE NORTON, n\u00e9e ADLER.\n\n\"What a woman\u2014oh, what a woman!\" cried the King of Bohemia, when we had all three read this epistle. \"Did I not tell you how quick and resolute she was? Would she not have made an admirable queen? Is it not a pity that she was not on my level?\"\n\n\"From what I have seen of the lady she seems indeed to be on a very different level to your Majesty,\" said Holmes coldly. \"I am sorry that I have not been able to bring your Majesty's business to a more successful conclusion.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, my dear sir,\" cried the King; \"nothing could be more successful. I know that her word is inviolate. The photograph is now as safe as if it were in the fire.\"\n\n\"I am glad to hear your Majesty say so.\"\n\n\"I am immensely indebted to you. Pray tell me in what way I can reward you. This ring\u2014\" He slipped an emerald snake ring from his finger and held it out upon the palm of his hand.\n\n\"Your Majesty has something which I should value even more highly,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"You have but to name it.\"\n\n\"This photograph!\"\n\nThe King stared at him in amazement.\n\n\"Irene's photograph!\" he cried. \"Certainly, if you wish it.\"\n\n\"I thank your Majesty. Then there is no more to be done in the matter. I have the honour to wish you a very good-morning.\" He bowed, and, turning away without observing the hand which the King had stretched out to him, he set off in my company for his chambers.\n\nAnd that was how a great scandal threatened to affect the kingdom of Bohemia, and how the best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman's wit. He used to make merry over the cleverness of women, but I have not heard him do it of late. And when he speaks of Irene Adler, or when he refers to her photograph, it is always under the honourable title of the woman." + }, + { + "title": "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE", + "text": "I had called upon my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, one day in the autumn of last year and found him in deep conversation with a very stout, florid-faced, elderly gentleman with fiery red hair. With an apology for my intrusion, I was about to withdraw when Holmes pulled me abruptly into the room and closed the door behind me.\n\n\"You could not possibly have come at a better time, my dear Watson,\" he said cordially.\n\n\"I was afraid that you were engaged.\"\n\n\"So I am. Very much so.\"\n\n\"Then I can wait in the next room.\"\n\n\"Not at all. This gentleman, Mr. Wilson, has been my partner and helper in many of my most successful cases, and I have no doubt that he will be of the utmost use to me in yours also.\"\n\nThe stout gentleman half rose from his chair and gave a bob of greeting, with a quick little questioning glance from his small fat-encircled eyes.\n\n\"Try the settee,\" said Holmes, relapsing into his armchair and putting his fingertips together, as was his custom when in judicial moods. \"I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own little adventures.\"\n\n\"Your cases have indeed been of the greatest interest to me,\" I observed.\n\n\"You will remember that I remarked the other day, just before we went into the very simple problem presented by Miss Mary Sutherland, that for strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.\"\n\n\"A proposition which I took the liberty of doubting.\"\n\n\"You did, Doctor, but none the less you must come round to my view, for otherwise I shall keep on piling fact upon fact on you until your reason breaks down under them and acknowledges me to be right. Now, Mr. Jabez Wilson here has been good enough to call upon me this morning, and to begin a narrative which promises to be one of the most singular which I have listened to for some time. You have heard me remark that the strangest and most unique things are very often connected not with the larger but with the smaller crimes, and occasionally, indeed, where there is room for doubt whether any positive crime has been committed. As far as I have heard it is impossible for me to say whether the present case is an instance of crime or not, but the course of events is certainly among the most singular that I have ever listened to. Perhaps, Mr. Wilson, you would have the great kindness to recommence your narrative. I ask you not merely because my friend Dr. Watson has not heard the opening part but also because the peculiar nature of the story makes me anxious to have every possible detail from your lips. As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique.\"\n\nThe portly client puffed out his chest with an appearance of some little pride and pulled a dirty and wrinkled newspaper from the inside pocket of his greatcoat. As he glanced down the advertisement column, with his head thrust forward and the paper flattened out upon his knee, I took a good look at the man and endeavoured, after the fashion of my companion, to read the indications which might be presented by his dress or appearance.\n\nI did not gain very much, however, by my inspection. Our visitor bore every mark of being an average commonplace British tradesman, obese, pompous, and slow. He wore rather baggy gray shepherd's check trousers, a not over-clean black frock-coat, unbuttoned in the front, and a drab waistcoat with a heavy brassy Albert chain, and a square pierced bit of metal dangling down as an ornament. A frayed top-hat and a faded brown overcoat with a wrinkled velvet collar lay upon a chair beside him. Altogether, look as I would, there was nothing remarkable about the man save his blazing red head, and the expression of extreme chagrin and discontent upon his features.\n\nSherlock Holmes's quick eye took in my occupation, and he shook his head with a smile as he noticed my questioning glances. \"Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.\"\n\nMr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion.\n\n\"How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?\" he asked. \"How did you know, for example, that I did manual labour? It's as true as gospel, for I began as a ship's carpenter.\"\n\n\"Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.\"\n\n\"Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?\"\n\n\"I won't insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?\"\n\n\"What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?\"\n\n\"Well, but China?\"\n\n\"The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes' scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter becomes even more simple.\"\n\nMr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. \"Well, I never!\" said he. \"I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it, after all.\"\n\n\"I begin to think, Watson,\" said Holmes, \"that I make a mistake in explaining. 'Omne ignotum pro magnifico, you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid. Can you not find the advertisement, Mr. Wilson?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have got it now,\" he answered with his thick red finger planted halfway down the column. \"Here it is. This is what began it all. You just read it for yourself, sir.\"\n\nI took the paper from him and read as follows.\n\nTO THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE:\n\nOn account of the bequest of the late Ezekiah Hopkins, of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, U. S. A., there is now another vacancy open which entitles a member of the League to a salary of \u00a34 a week for purely nominal services. All red-headed men who are sound in body and mind, and above the age of twenty-one years, are eligible. Apply in person on Monday, at eleven o'clock, to Duncan Ross, at the offices of the League, 7 Pope's Court, Fleet Street.\n\n\"What on earth does this mean?\" I ejaculated after I had twice read over the extraordinary announcement.\n\nHolmes chuckled and wriggled in his chair, as was his habit when in high spirits. \"It is a little off the beaten track, isn't it?\" said he. \"And now, Mr. Wilson, off you go at scratch and tell us all about yourself, your household, and the effect which this advertisement had upon your fortunes. You will first make a note, Doctor, of the paper and the date.\"\n\n\"It is The Morning Chronicle of April 27, 1890. Just two months ago.\"\n\n\"Very good. Now, Mr. Wilson?\"\n\n\"Well, it is just as I have been telling you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said Jabez Wilson, mopping his forehead; \"I have a small pawnbroker's businessat Coburg Square, near the City. It's not a very large affair, and of late years it has not done more than just give me a living. I used to be able to keep two assistants, but now I only keep one; and I would have a job to pay him but that he is willing to come for half wages so as to learn the business.\"\n\n\"What is the name of this obliging youth?\" asked Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"His name is Vincent Spaulding, and he's not such a youth, either. It's hard to say his age. I should not wish a smarter assistant, Mr. Holmes; and I know very well that he could better himself and earn twice what I am able to give him. But, after all, if he is satisfied, why should I put ideas in his head?\"\n\n\"Why, indeed? You seem most fortunate in having an employee who comes under the full market price. It is not a common experience among employers in this age. I don't know that your assistant is not as remarkable as your advertisement.\"\n\n\"Oh, he has his faults, too,\" said Mr. Wilson. \"Never was such a fellow for photography. Snapping away with a camera when he ought to be improving his mind, and then diving down into the cellar like a rabbit into its hole to develop his pictures. That is his main fault, but on the whole he's a good worker. There's no vice in him.\"\n\n\"He is still with you, I presume?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. He and a girl of fourteen, who does a bit of simple cooking and keeps the place clean\u2014that's all I have in the house, for I am a widower and never had any family. We live very quietly, sir, the three of us; and we keep a roof over our heads and pay our debts, if we do nothing more.\n\n\"The first thing that put us out was that advertisement. Spaulding, he came down into the office just this day eight weeks, with this very paper in his hand, and he says:\n\n\"'I wish to the Lord, Mr. Wilson, that I was a red-headed man.'\n\n\"'Why that?' I asks.\n\n\"'Why,' says he, 'here's another vacancy on the League of the Red-headed Men. It's worth quite a little fortune to any man who gets it, and I understand that there are more vacancies than there are men, so that the trustees are at their wits' end what to do with the money. If my hair would only change colour, here's a nice little crib all ready for me to step into.'\n\n\"'Why, what is it then?' I asked. You see, Mr. Holmes. I am a very stay-at-home man, and as my business came to me instead of my having to go to it, I was often weeks on end without putting my foot over the door-mat. In that way I didn't know much of what was going on outside, and I was always glad of a bit of news.\n\n\"'Have you never heard of the League of the Red-headed Men?' he asked with his eyes open.\n\n\"'Never.'\n\n\"'Why, I wonder at that, for you are eligible yourself for one of the vacancies.'\n\n\"'And what are they worth?' I asked.\n\n\"'Oh, merely a couple of hundred a year, but the work is slight, and it need not interfere very much with one's other occupations.'\n\n\"Well, you can easily think that that made me prick up my ears, for the business has not been over-good for some years, and an extra couple of hundred would have been very handy.\n\n\"'Tell me all about it,' said I.\n\n\"'Well,' said he, showing me the advertisement, 'you can see for yourself that the League has a vacancy, and there is the address where you should apply for particulars. As far as I can make out, the League was founded by an American millionaire, Ezekiah Hopkins, who was very peculiar in his ways. He was himself red-headed, and he had a great sympathy for all red-headed men; so when he died it was found that he had left his enormous fortune in the hands of trustees, with instructions to apply the interest to the providing of easy berths to men whose hair is of that colour. From all I hear it is splendid pay and very little to do.'\n\n\"'But,' said I, 'there would be millions of red-headed men who would apply.'\n\n\"'Not so many as you might think,' he answered. 'You see it is really confined to Londoners, and to grown men. This American had started from London when he was young, and he wanted to do the old town a good turn. Then, again, I have heard it is no use your applying if your hair is light red, or dark red, or anything but real bright, blazing, fiery red. Now, if you cared to apply, Mr. Wilson, you would just walk in; but perhaps it would hardly be worth your while to put yourself out of the way for the sake of a few hundred pounds.'\n\n\"Now, it is a fact, gentlemen, as you may see for yourselves, that my hair is of a very full and rich tint, so that it seemed to me that if there was to be any competition in the matter I stood as good a chance as any man that I had ever met. Vincent Spaulding seemed to know so much about it that I thought he might prove useful, so I just ordered him to put up the shutters for the day and to come right away with me. He was very willing to have a holiday, so we shut the business up and started off for the address that was given us in the advertisement.\n\n\"I never hope to see such a sight as that again, Mr. Holmes. From north, south, east, and west every man who had a shade of red in his hair had tramped into the city to answer the advertisement. Fleet Street was choked with red-headed folk, and Pope's Court looked like a coster's orange barrow. I should not have thought there were so many in the whole country as were brought together by that single advertisement. Every shade of colour they were\u2014straw, lemon, orange, brick, Irish-setter, liver, clay; but, as Spaulding said, there were not many who had the real vivid flame-coloured tint. When I saw how many were waiting, I would have given it up in despair; but Spaulding would not hear of it. How he did it I could not imagine, but he pushed and pulled and butted until he got me through the crowd, and right up to the steps which led to the office. There was a double stream upon the stair, some going up in hope, and some coming back dejected; but we wedged in as well as we could and soon found ourselves in the office.\"\n\n\"Your experience has been a most entertaining one,\" remarked Holmes as his client paused and refreshed his memory with a huge pinch of snuff. \"Pray continue your very interesting statement.\"\n\n\"There was nothing in the office but a couple of wooden chairs and a deal table, behind which sat a small man with a head that was even redder than mine. He said a few words to each candidate as he came up, and then he always managed to find some fault in them which would disqualify them. Getting a vacancy did not seem to be such a very easy mailer, after all. However, when our turn came the little man was much more favourable to me than to any of the others, and he closed the door as we entered, so that he might have a private word with us.\n\n\"'This is Mr. Jabez Wilson,' said my assistant, 'and he is willing to fill a vacancy in the League.'\n\n\"'And he is admirably suited for it,' the other answered. 'He has every requirement. I cannot recall when I have seen anything so fine.' He took a step backward, cocked his head on one side, and gazed at my hair until I felt quite bashful. Then suddenly he plunged forward, wrung my hand, and congratulated me warmly on my success.\n\n\"'It would be injustice to hesitate,' said he. 'You will, however, I am sure, excuse me for taking an obvious precaution.' With that he seized my hair in both his hands, and tugged until I yelled with the pain. 'There is water in your eyes,' said he as he released me. 'I perceive that all is as it should be. But we have to be careful, for we have twice been deceived by wigs and once by paint. I could tell you tales of cobbler's wax which would disgust you with human nature.' He stepped over to the window and shouted through it at the top of his voice that the vacancy was filled. A groan of disappointment came up from below, and the folk all trooped away in different directions until there was not a red-head to be seen except my own and that of the manager.\n\n\"'My name,' said he, 'is Mr. Duncan Ross, and I am myself one of the pensioners upon the fund left by our noble benefactor. Are you a married man, Mr. Wilson? Have you a family?'\n\n\"I answered that I had not.\n\n\"His face fell immediately.\n\n\"'Dear me!' he said gravely, 'that is very serious indeed! I am sorry to hear you say that. The fund was, of course, for the propagation and spread of the red-heads as well as for their maintenance. It is exceedingly unfortunate that you should be a bachelor.'\n\n\"My face lengthened at this, Mr. Holmes, for I thought that I was not to have the vacancy after all; but after thinking it over for a few minutes he said that it would be all right.\n\n\"'In the case of another,' said he, 'the objection might be fatal, but we must stretch a point in favour of a man with such a head of hair as yours. When shall you be able to enter upon your new duties?'\n\n\"'Well, it is a little awkward, for I have a business already,' said I.\n\n\"'Oh, never mind about that, Mr. Wilson!' said Vincent Spaulding. 'I should be able to look after that for you.'\n\n\"'What would be the hours?' I asked.\n\n\"'Ten to two.'\n\n\"Now a pawnbroker's business is mostly done of an evening, Mr. Holmes, especially Thursday and Friday evening, which is just before pay-day; so it would suit me very well to earn a little in the mornings. Besides, I knew that my assistant was a good man, and that he would see to anything that turned up.\n\n\"'That would suit me very well,' said I. 'And the pay?'\n\n\"'Is \u00a34 a week.'\n\n\"'And the work?'\n\n\"'Is purely nominal.'\n\n\"'What do you call purely nominal?'\n\n\"'Well, you have to be in the office, or at least in the building, the whole time. If you leave, you forfeit your whole position forever. The will is very clear upon that point. You don't comply with the conditions if you budge from the office during that time.'\n\n\"'It's only four hours a day, and I should not think of leaving,' said I.\n\n\"'No excuse will avail,' said Mr. Duncan Ross; 'neither sickness nor business nor anything else. There you must stay, or you lose your billet.'\n\n\"'And the work?'\n\n\"'Is to copy out the Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica. There is the first volume of it in that press. You must find your own ink, pens, and blotting-paper, but we provide this table and chair. Will you be ready to-morrow?'\n\n\"'Certainly,' I answered.\n\n\"'Then, good-bye, Mr. Jabez Wilson, and let me congratulate you once more on the important position which you have been fortunate enough to gain.' He bowed me out of the room, and I went home with my assistant, hardly knowing what to say or do, I was so pleased at my own good fortune.\n\n\"Well, I thought over the matter all day, and by evening I was in low spirits again; for I had quite persuaded myself that the whole affair must be some great hoax or fraud, though what its object might be I could not imagine. It seemed altogether past belief that anyone could make such a will, or that they would pay such a sum for doing anything so simple as copying out the Encyclop\u00e6dia Britannica. Vincent Spaulding did what he could to cheer me up, but by bedtime I had reasoned myself out of the whole thing. However, in the morning I determined to have a look at it anyhow, so I bought a penny bottle of ink, and with a quill-pen, and seven sheets of foolscap paper, I started off for Pope's Court.\n\n\"Well, to my surprise and delight, everything was as right as possible. The table was set out ready for me, and Mr. Duncan Ross was there to see that I got fairly to work. He started me off upon the letter A, and then he left me; but he would drop in from time to time to see that all was right with me. At two o'clock he bade me good-day, complimented me upon the amount that I had written, and locked the door of the office after me.\n\n\"This went on day after day, Mr. Holmes, and on Saturday the manager came in and planked down four golden sovereigns for my week's work. It was the same next week, and the same the week after. Every morning I was there at ten, and every afternoon I left at two. By degrees Mr. Duncan Ross took to coming in only once of a morning, and then, after a time, he did not come in at all. Still, of course, I never dared to leave the room for an instant, for I was not sure when he might come, and the billet was such a good one, and suited me so well, that I would not risk the loss of it.\n\n\"Eight weeks passed away like this, and I had written about Abbots and Archery and Armour and Architecture and Attica, and hoped with diligence that I might get on to the B's before very long. It cost me something in foolscap, and I had pretty nearly filled a shelf with my writings. And then suddenly the whole business came to an end.\"\n\n\"To an end?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. And no later than this morning. I went to my work as usual at ten o'clock, but the door was shut and locked, with a little square of card-board hammered on to the middle of the panel with a tack. Here it is, and you can read for yourself.\"\n\nHe held up a piece of white card-board about the size of a sheet of note-paper. It read in this fashion:" + }, + { + "title": "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE", + "text": "DISSOLVED.\n\nOctober 9, 1890.\n\nSherlock Holmes and I surveyed this curt announcement and the rueful face behind it, until the comical side of the affair so completely over-topped every other consideration that we both burst out into a roar of laughter.\n\n\"I cannot see that there is anything very funny,\" cried our client, flushing up to the roots of his flaming head. \"If you can do nothing better than laugh at me, I can go elsewhere.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" cried Holmes, shoving him back into the chair from which he had half risen. \"I really wouldn't miss your case for the world. It is most refreshingly unusual. But there is, if you will excuse my saying so, something just a little funny about it. Pray what steps did you take when you found the card upon the door?\"\n\n\"I was staggered, sir. I did not know what to do. Then I called at the offices round, but none of them seemed to know anything about it. Finally, I went to the landlord, who is an accountant living on the ground-floor, and I asked him if he could tell me what had become of the Red-headed League. He said that he had never heard of any such body. Then I asked him who Mr. Duncan Ross was. He answered that the name was new to him.\n\n\"'Well,' said I, 'the gentleman at No. 4.'\n\n\"'What, the red-headed man?'\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'Oh,' said he, 'his name was William Morris. He was a solicitor and was using my room as a temporary convenience until his new premises were ready. He moved out yesterday.'\n\n\"'Where could I find him?'\n\n\"'Oh, at his new offices. He did tell me the address. Yes, 17 King Edward Street, near St. Paul's.'\n\n\"I started off, Mr. Holmes, but when I got to that address it was a manufactory of artificial knee-caps, and no one in it had ever heard of either Mr. William Morris or Mr. Duncan Ross.\"\n\n\"And what did you do then?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"I went home to Saxe-Coburg Square, and I took the advice of my assistant. But he could not help me in any way. He could only say that if I waited I should hear by post. But that was not quite good enough, Mr. Holmes. I did not wish to lose such a place without a struggle, so, as I had heard that you were good enough to give advice to poor folk who were in need of it, I came right away to you.\"\n\n\"And you did very wisely,\" said Holmes. \"Your case is an exceedingly remarkable one, and I shall be happy to look into it. From what you have told me I think that it is possible that graver issues hang from it than might at first sight appear.\"\n\n\"Grave enough!\" said Mr. Jabez Wilson. \"Why, I have lost four pound a week.\"\n\n\"As far as you are personally concerned,\" remarked Holmes, \"I do not see that you have any grievance against this extraordinary league. On the contrary, you are, as I understand, richer by some \u00a330, to say nothing of the minute knowledge which you have gained on every subject which comes under the letter A. You have lost nothing by them.\"\n\n\"No, sir. But I want to find out about them, and who they are, and what their object was in playing this prank\u2014if it was a prank\u2014upon me. It was a pretty expensive joke for them, for it cost them two and thirty pounds.\"\n\n\"We shall endeavour to clear up these points for you. And, first, one or two questions, Mr. Wilson. This assistant of yours who first called your attention to the advertisement\u2014how long had he been with you?\"\n\n\"About a month then.\"\n\n\"How did he come?\"\n\n\"In answer to an advertisement.\"\n\n\"Was he the only applicant?\"\n\n\"No, I had a dozen.\"\n\n\"Why did you pick him?\"\n\n\"Because he was handy and would come cheap.\"\n\n\"At half-wages, in fact.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What is he like, this Vincent Spaulding?\"\n\n\"Small, stout-built, very quick in his ways, no hair on his face, though he's not short of thirty. Has a white splash of acid upon his forehead.\"\n\nHolmes sat up in his chair in considerable excitement. \"I thought as much,\" said he. \"Have you ever observed that his ears are pierced for earrings?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. He told me that a gypsy had done it for him when he was a lad.\"\n\n\"Hum!\" said Holmes, sinking back in deep thought. \"He is still with you?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, sir; I have only just left him.\"\n\n\"And has your business been attended to in your absence?\"\n\n\"Nothing to complain of, sir. There's never very much to do of a morning.\"\n\n\"That will do, Mr. Wilson. I shall be happy to give you an opinion upon the subject in the course of a day or two. To-day is Saturday, and I hope that by Monday we may come to a conclusion.\"\n\n\"Well, Watson,\" said Holmes when our visitor had left us, \"what do you make of it all?\"\n\n\"I make nothing of it,\" I answered frankly. \"It is a most mysterious business.\"\n\n\"As a rule,\" said Holmes. \"the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify. But I must be prompt over this matter.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"To smoke,\" he answered. \"It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won't speak to me for fifty minutes.\" He curled himself up in his chair, with his thin knees drawn up to his hawk-like nose, and there he sat with his eyes closed and his black clay pipe thrusting out like the bill of some strange bird. I had come to the conclusion that he had dropped asleep, and indeed was nodding myself, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with the gesture of a man who had made up his mind and put his pipe down upon the mantelpiece.\n\n\"Sarasate plays at the St. James's Hall this afternoon,\" he remarked. \"What do you think, Watson? Could your patients spare you for a few hours?\"\n\n\"I have nothing to do to-day. My practice is never very absorbing.\"\n\n\"Then put on your hat and come. I am going through the City first, and we can have some lunch on the way. I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the programme, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective, and I want to introspect. Come along!\"\n\nWe travelled by the Underground as far as Aldersgate; and a short walk took us to Saxe-Coburg Square, the scene of the singular story which we had listened to in the morning. It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel-bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere. Three gilt balls and a brown board with \"JABEZ WILSON\" in white letters, upon a corner house, announced the place where our red-headed client carried on his business. Sherlock Holmes stopped in front of it with his head on one side and looked it all over, with his eyes shining brightly between puckered lids. Then he walked slowly up the Street, and then down again to the corner, still looking keenly at the houses. Finally he returned to the pawnbroker's, and, having thumped vigorously upon the pavement with his stick two or three times, he went up to the door and knocked. It was instantly opened by a bright-looking, clean-shaven young fellow, who asked him to step in.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Holmes, \"I only wished to ask you how you would go from here to the Strand.\"\n\n\"Third right, fourth left,\" answered the assistant promptly, closing the door.\n\n\"Smart fellow, that,\" observed Holmes as we walked away. \"He is, in my judgment, the fourth smartest man in London, and for daring I am not sure that he has not a claim to be third. I have known something of him before.\"\n\n\"Evidently,\" said I, \"Mr. Wilson's assistant counts for a good deal in this mystery of the Red-headed League. I am sure that you inquired your way merely in order that you might see him.\"\n\n\"Not him.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"The knees of his trousers.\"\n\n\"And what did you see?\"\n\n\"What I expected to see.\"\n\n\"Why did you beat the pavement?\"\n\n\"My dear doctor, this is a time for observation, not for talk. We are spies in an enemy's country. We know something of Saxe-Coburg Square. Let us now explore the parts which lie behind it.\"\n\nThe road in which we found ourselves as we turned round the corner from the retired Saxe-Coburg Square presented as great a contrast to it as the front of a picture does to the back. It was one of the main arteries which conveyed the traffic of the City to the north and west. The roadway was blocked with the immense stream of commerce flowing in a double tide inward and outward, while the footpaths were black with the hurrying swarm of pedestrians. It was difficult to realize as we looked at the line of fine shops and stately business premises that they really abutted on the other side upon the faded and stagnant square which we had just quitted.\n\n\"Let me see,\" said Holmes, standing at the corner and glancing along the line, \"I should like just to remember the order of the houses here. It is a hobby of mine to have an exact knowledge of London. There is Mortimer's, the tobacconist, the little newspaper shop, the Coburg branch of the City and Suburban Bank, the Vegetarian Restaurant, and McFarlane's carriage-building depot. That carries us right on to the other block. And now, Doctor, we've done our work, so it's time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums.\"\n\nMy friend was an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable performer but a composer of no ordinary merit. All the afternoon he sat in the stalls wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music, while his gently smiling face and his languid, dreamy eyes were as unlike those of Holmes, the sleuth-hound, Holmes the relentless, keen-witted, ready-handed criminal agent, as it was possible to conceive. In his singular character the dual nature alternately asserted itself, and his extreme exactness and astuteness represented, as I have often thought, the reaction against the poetic and contemplative mood which occasionally predominated in him. The swing of his nature took him from extreme languor to devouring energy; and, as I knew well, he was never so truly formidable as when, for days on end, he had been lounging in his armchair amid his improvisations and his black-letter editions. Then it was that the lust of the chase would suddenly come upon him, and that his brilliant reasoning power would rise to the level of intuition, until those who were unacquainted with his methods would look askance at him as on a man whose knowledge was not that of other mortals. When I saw him that afternoon so enwrapped in the music at St. James's Hall I felt that an evil time might be coming upon those whom he had set himself to hunt down.\n\n\"You want to go home, no doubt, Doctor,\" he remarked as we emerged.\n\n\"Yes, it would be as well.\"\n\n\"And I have some business to do which will take some hours. This business at Coburg Square is serious.\"\n\n\"Why serious?\"\n\n\"A considerable crime is in contemplation. I have every reason to believe that we shall be in time to stop it. But to-day being Saturday rather complicates matters. I shall want your help tonight.\"\n\n\"At what time?\"\n\n\"Ten will be early enough.\"\n\n\"I shall be at Baker Street at ten.\"\n\n\"Very well. And, I say, Doctor, there may be some little danger, so kindly put your army revolver in your pocket.\" He waved his hand, turned on his heel, and disappeared in an instant among the crowd.\n\nI trust that I am not more dense than my neighbours, but I was always oppressed with a sense of my own stupidity in my dealings with Sherlock Holmes. Here I had heard what he had heard, I had seen what he had seen, and yet from his words it was evident that he saw clearly not only what had happened but what was about to happen, while to me the whole business was still confused, and grotesque. As I drove home to my house in Kensington I thought over it all, from the extraordinary story of the red-headed copier of the Encyclop\u00e6dia down to the visit to Saxe-Coburg Square, and the ominous words with which he had parted from me. What was this nocturnal expedition, and why should I go armed? Where were we going, and what were we to do? I had the hint from Holmes that this smooth-faced pawnbroker's assistant was a formidable man\u2014a man who might play a deep game. I tried to puzzle it out, but gave it up in despair and set the matter aside until night should bring an explanation.\n\nIt was a quarter-past nine when I started from home and made my way across the Park, and so through Oxford Street to Baker Street. Two hansoms were standing at the door, and as I entered the passage I heard the sound of voices from above. On entering his room I found Holmes in animated conversation with two men, one of whom I recognized as Peter Jones, the official police agent, while the other was a long, thin, sad-faced man, with a very shiny hat and oppressively respectable frock-coat.\n\n\"Ha! Our party is complete,\" said Holmes, buttoning up his pea-jacket and taking his heavy hunting crop from the rack. \"Watson, I think you know Mr. Jones, of Scotland Yard? Let me introduce you to Mr. Merryweather, who is to be our companion in tonight's adventure.\"\n\n\"We're hunting in couples again, Doctor, you see,\" said Jones in his consequential way. \"Our friend here is a wonderful man for starting a chase. All he wants is an old dog to help him to do the running down.\"\n\n\"I hope a wild goose may not prove to be the end of our chase,\" observed Mr. Merryweather gloomily.\n\n\"You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir,\" said the police agent loftily. \"He has his own little methods, which are, if he won't mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic, but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to say that once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure, he has been more nearly correct than the official force.\"\n\n\"Oh, if you say so, Mr. Jones, it is all right,\" said the stranger with deference. \"Still, I confess that I miss my rubber. It is the first Saturday night for seven-and-twenty years that I have not had my rubber.\"\n\n\"I think you will find,\" said Sherlock Holmes, \"that you will play for a higher stake tonight than you have ever done yet, and that the play will be more exciting. For you, Mr. Merryweather, the stake will be some \u00a330,000; and for you, Jones, it will be the man upon whom you wish to lay your hands.\"\n\n\"John Clay, the murderer, thief, smasher, and forger. He's a young man, Mr. Merryweather, but he is at the head of his profession, and I would rather have my bracelets on him than on any criminal in London. He's a remarkable man, is young John Clay. His grandfather was a royal duke, and he himself has been to Eton and Oxford. His brain is as cunning as his fingers, and though we meet signs of him at every turn, we never know where to find the man himself. He'll crack a crib in Scotland one week, and be raising money to build an orphanage in Cornwall the next. I've been on his track for years and have never set eyes on him yet.\"\n\n\"I hope that I may have the pleasure of introducing you tonight. I've had one or two little turns also with Mr. John Clay, and I agree with you that he is at the head of his profession. It is past ten, however, and quite time that we started. If you two will take the first hansom, Watson and I will follow in the second.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes was not very communicative during the long drive and lay back in the cab humming the tunes which he had heard in the afternoon. We rattled through an endless labyrinth of gas-lit streets until we emerged into Farrington Street.\n\n\"We are close there now,\" my friend remarked. \"This fellow Merryweather is a bank director, and personally interested in the matter. I thought it as well to have Jones with us also. He is not a bad fellow, though an absolute imbecile in his profession. He has one positive virtue. He is as brave as a bulldog and as tenacious as a lobster if he gets his claws upon anyone. Here we are, and they are waiting for us.\"\n\nWe had reached the same crowded thoroughfare in which we had found ourselves in the morning. Our cabs were dismissed, and, following the guidance of Mr. Merryweather, we passed down a narrow passage and through a side door, which he opened for us. Within there was a small corridor, which ended in a very massive iron gate. This also was opened, and led down a flight of winding stone steps, which terminated at another formidable gate. Mr. Merryweather stopped to light a lantern, and then conducted us down a dark, earth-smelling passage, and so, after opening a third door, into a huge vault or cellar, which was piled all round with crates and massive boxes.\n\n\"You are not very vulnerable from above,\" Holmes remarked as he held up the lantern and gazed about him.\n\n\"Nor from below,\" said Mr. Merryweather, striking his stick upon the flags which lined the floor. \"Why, dear me, it sounds quite hollow!\" he remarked, looking up in surprise.\n\n\"I must really ask you to be a little more quiet!\" said Holmes severely. \"You have already imperilled the whole success of our expedition. Might I beg that you would have the goodness to sit down upon one of those boxes, and not to interfere?\"\n\nThe solemn Mr. Merryweather perched himself upon a crate, with a very injured expression upon his face, while Holmes fell upon his knees upon the floor and, with the lantern and a magnifying lens, began to examine minutely the cracks between the stones. A few seconds sufficed to satisfy him, for he sprang to his feet again and put his glass in his pocket.\n\n\"We have at least an hour before us,\" he remarked, \"for they can hardly take any steps until the good pawnbroker is safely in bed. Then they will not lose a minute, for the sooner they do their work the longer time they will have for their escape. We are at present, Doctor\u2014as no doubt you have divined\u2014in the cellar of the City branch of one of the principal London banks. Mr. Merryweather is the chairman of directors, and he will explain to you that there are reasons why the more daring criminals of London should take a considerable interest in this cellar at present.\"\n\n\"It is our French gold,\" whispered the director. \"We have had several warnings that an attempt might be made upon it.\"\n\n\"Your French gold?\"\n\n\"Yes. We had occasion some months ago to strengthen our resources and borrowed for that purpose 30,000 napoleons from the Bank of France. It has become known that we have never had occasion to unpack the money, and that it is still lying in our cellar. The crate upon which I sit contains 2,000 napoleons packed between layers of lead foil. Our reserve of bullion is much larger at present than is usually kept in a single branch office, and the directors have had misgivings upon the subject.\"\n\n\"Which were very well justified,\" observed Holmes. \"And now it is time that we arranged our little plans. I expect that within an hour matters will come to a head. In the meantime, Mr. Merryweather, we must put the screen over that dark lantern.\"\n\n\"And sit in the dark?\"\n\n\"I am afraid so. I had brought a pack of cards in my pocket, and I thought that, as we were a partie carr\u00e9e, you might have your rubber after all. But I see that the enemy's preparations have gone so far that we cannot risk the presence of a light. And, first of all, we must choose our positions. These are daring men, and though we shall take them at a disadvantage, they may do us some harm unless we are careful. I shall stand behind this crate, and do you conceal yourselves behind those. Then, when I flash a light upon them, close in swiftly. If they fire, Watson, have no compunction about shooting them down.\"\n\nI placed my revolver, cocked, upon the top of the wooden case behind which I crouched. Holmes shot the slide across the front of his lantern and left us in pitch darkness\u2014such an absolute darkness as I have never before experienced. The smell of hot metal remained to assure us that the light was still there, ready to flash out at a moment's notice. To me, with my nerves worked up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold dank air of the vault.\n\n\"They have but one retreat,\" whispered Holmes. \"That is back through the house into Saxe-Coburg Square. I hope that you have done what I asked you, Jones?\"\n\n\"I have an inspector and two officers waiting at the front door.\"\n\n\"Then we have stopped all the holes. And now we must be silent and wait.\"\n\nWhat a time it seemed! From comparing notes afterwards it was but an hour and a quarter, yet it appeared to me that the night must have almost gone, and the dawn be breaking above us. My limbs were weary and stiff, for I feared to change my position; yet my nerves were worked up to the highest pitch of tension, and my hearing was so acute that I could not only hear the gentle breathing of my companions, but I could distinguish the deeper, heavier in-breath of the bulky Jones from the thin, sighing note of the bank director. From my position I could look over the case in the direction of the floor. Suddenly my eyes caught the glint of a light.\n\nAt first it was but a lurid spark upon the stone pavement. Then it lengthened out until it became a yellow line, and then, without any warning or sound, a gash seemed to open and a hand appeared; a white, almost womanly hand, which felt about in the centre of the little area of light. For a minute or more the hand, with its writhing fingers, protruded out of the floor. Then it was withdrawn as suddenly as it appeared, and all was dark again save the single lurid spark which marked a chink between the stones.\n\nIts disappearance, however, was but momentary. With a rending, tearing sound, one of the broad, white stones turned over upon its side and left a square, gaping hole, through which streamed the light of a lantern. Over the edge there peeped a clean-cut, boyish face, which looked keenly about it, and then, with a hand on either side of the aperture, drew itself shoulder-high and waist-high, until one knee rested upon the edge. In another instant he stood at the side of the hole and was hauling after him a companion, lithe and small like himself, with a pale face and a shock of very red hair.\n\n\"It's all clear,\" he whispered. \"Have you the chisel and the bags? Great Scott! Jump, Archie, jump, and I'll swing for it!\"\n\nSherlock Holmes had sprung out and seized the intruder by the collar. The other dived down the hole, and I heard the sound of rending cloth as Jones clutched at his skirts. The light flashed upon the barrel of a revolver, but Holmes's hunting crop came down on the man's wrist, and the pistol clinked upon the stone floor.\n\n\"It's no use, John Clay,\" said Holmes blandly. \"You have no chance at all.\"\n\n\"So I see,\" the other answered with the utmost coolness. \"I fancy that my pal is all right, though I see you have got his coat-tails.\"\n\n\"There are three men waiting for him at the door,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Oh, indeed! You seem to have done the thing very completely. I must compliment you.\"\n\n\"And I you,\" Holmes answered. \"Your red-headed idea was very new and effective.\"\n\n\"You'll see your pal again presently,\" said Jones. \"He's quicker at climbing down holes than I am. Just hold out while I fix the derbies.\"\n\n\"I beg that you will not touch me with your filthy hands,\" remarked our prisoner as the handcuffs clattered upon his wrists. \"You may not be aware that I have royal blood in my veins. Have the goodness, also, when you address me always to say 'sir' and 'please.'\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Jones with a stare and a snigger. \"Well, would you please, sir, march upstairs, where we can get a cab to carry your Highness to the police-station?\"\n\n\"That is better,\" said John Clay serenely. He made a sweeping bow to the three of us and walked quietly off in the custody of the detective.\n\n\"Really, Mr. Holmes,\" said Mr. Merryweather as we followed them from the cellar, \"I do not know how the bank can thank you or repay you. There is no doubt that you have detected and defeated in the most complete manner one of the most determined attempts at bank robbery that have ever come within my experience.\"\n\n\"I have had one or two little scores of my own to settle with Mr. John Clay,\" said Holmes. \"I have been at some small expense over this matter, which I shall expect the bank to refund, but beyond that I am amply repaid by having had an experience which is in many ways unique, and by hearing the very remarkable narrative of the Red-headed League.\"\n\n\"You see, Watson,\" he explained in the early hours of the morning as we sat over a glass of whisky and soda in Baker Street, \"it was perfectly obvious from the first that the only possible object of this rather fantastic business of the advertisement of the League, and the copying of the Encyclop\u00e6dia, must be to get this not over-bright pawnbroker out of the way for a number of hours every day. It was a curious way of managing it but, really, it would be difficult to suggest a better. The method was no doubt suggested to Clay's ingenious mind by the colour of his accomplice's hair. The \u00a34 a week was a lure which must draw him, and what was it to them, who were playing for thousands? They put in the advertisement, one rogue has the temporary office, the other rogue incites the man to apply for it, and together they manage to secure his absence every morning in the week. From the time that I heard of the assistant having come for half wages, it was obvious to me that he had some strong motive for securing the situation.\"\n\n\"But how could you guess what the motive was?\"\n\n\"Had there been women in the house, I should have suspected a mere vulgar intrigue. That, however, was out of the question. The man's business was a small one, and there was nothing in his house which could account for such elaborate preparations, and such an expenditure as they were at. It must, then, be something out of the house. What could it be? I thought of the assistant's fondness for photography, and his trick of vanishing into the cellar. The cellar! There was the end of this tangled clue. Then I made inquiries as to this mysterious assistant and found that I had to deal with one of the coolest and most daring criminals in London. He was doing something in the cellar\u2014something which took many hours a day for months on end. What could it be, once more? I could think of nothing save that he was running a tunnel to some other building.\n\n\"So far I had got when we went to visit the scene of action. I surprised you by beating upon the pavement with my stick. I was ascertaining whether the cellar stretched out in front or behind. It was not in front. Then I rang the bell, and, as I hoped, the assistant answered it. We have had some skirmishes, but we had never set eyes upon each other before. I hardly looked at his face. His knees were what I wished to see. You must yourself have remarked how worn, wrinkled, and stained they were. They spoke of those hours of burrowing. The only remaining point was what they were burrowing for. I walked round the corner, saw the City and Suburban Bank abutted on our friend's premises, and felt that I had solved my problem. When you drove home after the concert I called upon Scotland Yard and upon the chairman of the bank directors, with the result that you have seen.\"\n\n\"And how could you tell that they would make their attempt tonight?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, when they closed their League offices that was a sign that they cared no longer about Mr. Jabez Wilson's presence\u2014in other words, that they had completed their tunnel. But it was essential that they should use it soon, as it might be discovered, or the bullion might be removed. Saturday would suit them better than any other day, as it would give them two days for their escape. For all these reasons I expected them to come tonight.\"\n\n\"You reasoned it out beautifully,\" I exclaimed in unfeigned admiration. \"It is so long a chain, and yet every link rings true.\"\n\n\"It saved me from ennui,\" he answered, yawning. \"Alas! I already feel it closing in upon me. My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.\"\n\n\"And you are a benefactor of the race,\" said I.\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders. \"Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some little use,\" he remarked. \" 'L'homme c'est rien\u2014l' \u0153uvre c'est tout,' as Gustave Flaubert wrote to George Sand.\"" + }, + { + "title": "A CASE OF IDENTITY", + "text": "\"My dear fellow,\" said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, \"life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generation, and leading to the most outr\u00e9 results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.\"\n\n\"And yet I am not convinced of it,\" I answered. \"The cases which come to light in the papers are, as a rule, bald enough, and vulgar enough. We have in our police reports realism pushed to its extreme limits, and yet the result is, it must be confessed, neither fascinating nor artistic.\"\n\n\"A certain selection and discretion must be used in producing a realistic effect,\" remarked Holmes. \"This is wanting in the police report, where more stress is laid, perhaps, upon the platitudes of the magistrate than upon the details, which to an observer contain the vital essence of the whole matter. Depend upon it, there is nothing so unnatural as the commonplace.\"\n\nI smiled and shook my head. \"I can quite understand your thinking so,\" I said. \"Of course, in your position of unofficial adviser and helper to everybody who is absolutely puzzled, throughout three continents, you are brought in contact with all that is strange and bizarre. But here\"\u2014I picked up the morning paper from the ground\u2014\"let us put it to a practical test. Here is the first heading upon which I come. 'A husband's cruelty to his wife.' There is half a column of print, but I know without reading it that it is all perfectly familiar to me. There is, of course, the other woman, the drink, the push, the blow, the bruise, the sympathetic sister or landlady. The crudest of writers could invent nothing more crude.\"\n\n\"Indeed, your example is an unfortunate one for your argument,\" said Holmes, taking the paper and glancing his eye down it. \"This is the Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing up some small points in connection with it. The husband was a teetotaler, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife, which, you will allow, is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of the average story-teller. Take a pinch of snuff, Doctor, and acknowledge that I have scored over you in your example.\"\n\nHe held out his snuffbox of old gold, with a great amethyst in the centre of the lid. Its splendour was in such contrast to his homely ways and simple life that I could not help commenting upon it.\n\n\"Ah,\" said he, \"I forgot that I had not seen you for some weeks. It is a little souvenir from the King of Bohemia in return for my assistance in the case of the Irene Adler papers.\"\n\n\"And the ring?\" I asked, glancing at a remarkable brilliant which sparkled upon his finger.\n\n\"It was from the reigning family of Holland, though the matter in which I served them was of such delicacy that I cannot confide it even to you, who have been good enough to chronicle one or two of my little problems.\"\n\n\"And have you any on hand just now?\" I asked with interest.\n\n\"Some ten or twelve, but none which present any feature of interest. They are important, you understand, without being interesting. Indeed, I have found that it is usually in unimportant matters that there is a field for the observation, and for the quick analysis of cause and effect which gives the charm to an investigation. The larger crimes are apt to be the simpler, for the bigger the crime the more obvious, as a rule, is the motive. In these cases, save for one rather intricate matter which has been referred to me from Marseilles, there is nothing which presents any features of interest. It is possible, however, that I may have something better before very many minutes are over, for this is one of my clients, or I am much mistaken.\"\n\nHe had risen from his chair and was standing between the parted blinds gazing down into the dull neutral-tinted London street. Looking over his shoulder, I saw that on the pavement opposite there stood a large woman with a heavy fur boa round her neck, and a large curling red feather in a broad-brimmed hat, which was tilted in a coquettish Duchess of Devonshire fashion over her ear. From under this great panoply she peeped up in a nervous, hesitating fashion at our windows, while her body oscillated backward and forward, and her fingers fidgeted with her glove buttons. Suddenly, with a plunge, as of the swimmer who leaves the bank, she hurried across the road, and we heard the sharp clang of the bell.\n\n\"I have seen those symptoms before,\" said Holmes, throwing his cigarette into the fire. \"Oscillation upon the pavement always means an af-faire de c\u0153ur. She would like advice, but is not sure that the matter is not too delicate for communication. And yet even here we may discriminate. When a woman has been seriously wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and the usual symptom is a broken bell wire. Here we may take it that there is a love matter, but that the maiden is not so much angry as perplexed, or grieved. But here she comes in person to resolve our doubts.\"\n\nAs he spoke there was a tap at the door, and the boy in buttons entered to announce Miss Mary Sutherland, while the lady herself loomed behind his small black figure like a full-sailed merchant-man behind a tiny pilot boat. Sherlock Holmes welcomed her with the easy courtesy for which he was remarkable, and, having closed the door and bowed her into an armchair, he looked her over in the minute and yet abstracted fashion which was peculiar to him.\n\n\"Do you not find,\" he said, \"that with your short sight it is a little trying to do so much typewriting?\"\n\n\"I did at first,\" she answered, \"but now I know where the letters are without looking.\" Then, suddenly realizing the full purport of his words, she gave a violent start and looked up, with fear and astonishment upon her broad, good-humoured face. \"You've heard about me, Mr. Holmes,\" she cried, \"else how could you know all that?\"\n\n\"Never mind,\" said Holmes, laughing; \"it is my business to know things. Perhaps I have trained myself to see what others overlook. If not, why should you come to consult me?\"\n\n\"I came to you, sir, because I heard of you from Mrs. Etherege, whose husband you found so easy when the police and everyone had given him up for dead. Oh, Mr. Holmes, I wish you would do as much for me. I'm not rich, but still I have a hundred a year in my own right, besides the little that I make by the machine, and I would give it all to know what has become of Mr. Hosmer Angel.\"\n\n\"Why did you come away to consult me in such a hurry?\" asked Sherlock Holmes, with his fingertips together and his eyes to the ceiling.\n\nAgain a startled look came over the somewhat vacuous face of Miss Mary Sutherland. \"Yes, I did bang out of the house,\" she said, \"for it made me angry to see the easy way in which Mr. Windibank\u2014that is, my father\u2014took it all. He would not go to the police, and he would not go to you, and so at last, as he would do nothing and kept on saying that there was no harm done, it made me mad, and I just on with my things and came right away to you.\"\n\n\"Your father,\" said Holmes, \"your stepfather, surely, since the name is different.\"\n\n\"Yes, my stepfather. I call him father, though it sounds funny, too, for he is only five years and two months older than myself.\"\n\n\"And your mother is alive?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, mother is alive and well. I wasn't best pleased, Mr. Holmes, when she married again so soon after father's death, and a man who was nearly fifteen years younger than herself. Father was a plumber in the Tottenham Court Road, and he left a tidy business behind him, which mother carried on with Mr. Hardy, the foreman; but when Mr. Windibank came he made her sell the business, for he was very superior, being a traveller in wines. They got \u00a34700 for the goodwill and interest, which wasn't near as much as father could have got if he had been alive.\"\n\nI had expected to see Sherlock Holmes impatient under this rambling and inconsequential narrative, but, on the contrary he had listened with the greatest concentration of attention.\n\n\"Your own little income,\" he asked, \"does it come out of the business?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, sir. It is quite separate and was left me by my uncle Ned in Auckland. It is in New Zealand stock, paying 41/2 per cent. Two thousand five hundred pounds was the amount, but I can only touch the interest.\"\n\n\"You interest me extremely,\" said Holmes. \"And since you draw so large a sum as a hundred a year, with what you earn into the bargain, you no doubt travel a little and indulge yourself in every way. I believe that a single lady can get on very nicely upon an income of about \u00a360.\"\n\n\"I could do with much less than that, Mr. Holmes, but you understand that as long as I live at home I don't wish to be a burden to them, and so they have the use of the money just while I am staying with them. Of course, that is only just for the time. Mr. Windibank draws my interest every quarter and pays it over to mother, and I find that I can do pretty well with what I earn at typewriting. It brings me twopence a sheet, and I can often do from fifteen to twenty sheets in a day.\"\n\n\"You have made your position very clear to me,\" said Holmes. \"This is my friend, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Kindly tell us now all about your connection with Mr. Hosmer Angel.\"\n\nA flush stole over Miss Sutherland's face, and she picked nervously at the fringe of her jacket. \"I met him first at the gasfitters' ball,\" she said. \"They used to send father tickets when he was alive, and then afterwards they remembered us, and sent them to mother. Mr. Windibank did not wish us to go. He never did wish us to go anywhere. He would get quite mad if I wanted so much as to join a Sunday-school treat. But this time I was set on going, and I would go; for what right had he to prevent? He said the folk were not fit for us to know, when all father's friends were to be there. And he said that I had nothing fit to wear, when I had my purple plush that I had never so much as taken out of the drawer. At last, when nothing else would do, he went off to France upon the business of the firm, but we went, mother and I, with Mr. Hardy, who used to be our foreman, and it was there I met Mr. Hosmer Angel.\n\n\"I suppose,\" said Holmes, \"that when Mr. Windibank came back from France he was very annoyed at your having gone to the ball.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, he was very good about it. He laughed, I remember, and shrugged his shoulders, and said there was no use denying anything to a woman, for she would have her way.\"\n\n\"I see. Then at the gasfitters' ball you met, as I understand, a gentleman called Mr. Hosmer Angel.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I met him that night, and he called next day to ask if we had got home all safe, and after that we met him\u2014that is to say, Mr. Holmes, I met him twice for walks, but after that father came back again, and Mr. Hosmer Angel could not come to the house any more.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"Well, you know, father didn't like anything of the sort. He wouldn't have any visitors if he could help it, and he used to say that a woman should be happy in her own family circle. But then, as I used to say to mother, a woman wants her own circle to begin with, and I had not got mine yet.\"\n\n\"But how about Mr. Hosmer Angel? Did he make no attempt to see you?\"\n\n\"Well, father was going off to France again in a week, and Hosmer wrote and said that it would be safer and better not to see each other until he had gone. We could write in the mean-time, and he used to write every day. I took the letters in in the morning, so there was no need for father to know.\"\n\n\"Were you engaged to the gentleman at this time?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, Mr. Holmes. We were engaged after the first walk that we took. Hosmer\u2014Mr. Angel\u2014was a cashier in an office in Leadenhall Street\u2014and\u2014\"\n\n\"What office?\"\n\n\"That's the worst of it, Mr. Holmes, I don't know.\"\n\n\"Where did he live, then?\"\n\n\"He slept on the premises.\"\n\n\"And you don't know his address?\"\n\n\"No\u2014except that it was Leadenhall Street.\"\n\n\"Where did you address your letters, then?\"\n\n\"To the Leadenhall Street Post-Office, to be left till called for. He said that if they were sent to the office he would be chaffed by all the other clerks about having letters from a lady, so I offered to typewrite them, like he did his, but he wouldn't have that, for he said that when I wrote them they seemed to come from me, but when they were typewritten he always felt that the machine had come between us. That will just show you how fond he was of me, Mr. Holmes, and the little things that he would think of.\"\n\n\"It was most suggestive,\" said Holmes. \"It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important. Can you remember any other little things about Mr. Hosmer Angel?\"\n\n\"He was a very shy man, Mr. Holmes. He would rather walk with me in the evening than in the daylight, for he said that he hated to be conspicuous. Very retiring and gentlemanly he was. Even his voice was gentle. He'd had the quinsy and swollen glands when he was young, he told me, and it had left him with a weak throat, and a hesitating, whispering fashion of speech. He was always well dressed, very neat and plain, but his eyes were weak, just as mine are, and he wore tinted glasses against the glare.\"\n\n\"Well, and what happened when Mr. Windibank, your stepfather, returned to France?\"\n\n\"Mr. Hosmer Angel came to the house again and proposed that we should marry before father came back. He was in dreadful earnest and made me swear, with my hands on the Testament, that whatever happened I would always be true to him. Mother said he was quite right to make me swear, and that it was a sign of his passion. Mother was all in his favour from the first and was even fonder of him than I was. Then, when they talked of marrying within the week, I began to ask about father; but they both said never to mind about father, but just to tell him afterwards, and mother said she would make it all right with him. I didn't quite like that, Mr. Holmes. It seemed funny that I should ask his leave, as he was only a few years older than me; but I didn't want to do anything on the sly, so I wrote to father at Bordeaux, where the company has its French offices, but the letter came back to me on the very morning of the wedding.\"\n\n\"It missed him, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; for he had started to England just before it arrived.\"\n\n\"Ha! that was unfortunate. Your wedding was arranged, then, for the Friday. Was it to be in church?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, but very quietly. It was to be at St. Saviour's, near King's Cross, and we were to have breakfast afterwards at the St. Pancras Hotel. Hosmer came for us in a hansom, but as there were two of us he put us both into it and stepped himself into a four-wheeler, which happened to be the only other cab in the street. We got to the church first, and when the four-wheeler drove up we waited for him to step out, but he never did, and when the cabman got down from the box and looked there was no one there! The cabman said that he could not imagine what had become of him, for he had seen him get in with his own eyes. That was last Friday, Mr. Holmes, and I have never seen or heard anything since then to throw any light upon what became of him.\"\n\n\"It seems to me that you have been very shamefully treated,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Oh, no, sir! He was too good and kind to leave me so. Why, all the morning he was saying to me that, whatever happened, I was to be true; and that even if something quite unforeseen occurred to separate us, I was always to remember that I was pledged to him, and that he would claim his pledge sooner or later. It seemed strange talk for a wedding-morning, but what has happened since gives a meaning to it.\"\n\n\"Most certainly it does. Your own opinion is, then, that some unforeseen catastrophe has occurred to him?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I believe that he foresaw some danger, or else he would not have talked so. And then I think that what he foresaw happened.\"\n\n\"But you have no notion as to what it could have been?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"One more question. How did your mother take the matter?\"\n\n\"She was angry, and said that I was never to speak of the matter again.\"\n\n\"And your father? Did you tell him?\"\n\n\"Yes; and he seemed to think, with me, that something had happened, and that I should hear of Hosmer again. As he said, what interest could anyone have in bringing me to the doors of the church, and then leaving me? Now, if he had borrowed my money, or if he had married me and got my money settled on him, there might be some reason, but Hosmer was very independent about money and never would look at a shilling of mine. And yet, what could have happened? And why could he not write? Oh, it drives me half-mad to think of it, and I can't sleep a wink at night.\" She pulled a little handkerchief out of her muff and began to sob heavily into it.\n\n\"I shall glance into the case for you,\" said Holmes, rising, \"and I have no doubt that we shall reach some definite result. Let the weight of the matter rest upon me now, and do not let your mind dwell upon it further. Above all, try to let Mr. Hosmer Angel vanish from your memory, as he has done from your life.\"\n\n\"Then you don't think I'll see him again?\"\n\n\"I fear not.\"\n\n\"Then what has happened to him?\"\n\n\"You will leave that question in my hands. I should like an accurate description of him and any letters of his which you can spare.\"\n\n\"I advertised for him in last Saturday's Chronicle,\" said she. \"Here is the slip and here are four letters from him.\"\n\n\"Thank you. And your address?\"\n\n\"No. 31 Lyon Place, Camberwell.\"\n\n\"Mr. Angel's address you never had, I understand. Where is your father's place of business?\"\n\n\"He travels for Westhouse & Marbank, the great claret importers of Fenchurch Street.\"\n\n\"Thank you. You have made your statement very clearly. You will leave the papers here, and remember the advice which I have given you. Let the whole incident be a sealed book, and do not allow it to affect your life.\"\n\n\"You are very kind, Mr. Holmes, but I cannot do that. I shall be true to Hosmer. He shall find me ready when he comes back.\"\n\nFor all the preposterous hat and the vacuous face, there was something noble in the simple faith of our visitor which compelled our respect. She laid her little bundle of papers upon the table and went her way, with a promise to come again whenever she might be summoned.\n\nSherlock Holmes sat silent for a few minutes with his fingertips still pressed together, his legs stretched out in front of him, and his gaze directed upward to the ceiling. Then he took down from the rack the old and oily clay pipe, which was to him as a counsellor, and, having lit it, he leaned back in his chair, with the thick blue cloud-wreaths spinning up from him, and a look of infinite languor in his face.\n\n\"Quite an interesting study, that maiden,\" he observed. \"I found her more interesting than her little problem, which, by the way, is rather a trite one. You will find parallel cases, if you consult my index, in Andover in '77, and there was something of the sort at The Hague last year. Old as is the idea, however, there were one or two details which were new to me. But the maiden herself was most instructive.\"\n\n\"You appeared to read a good deal upon her which was quite invisible to me,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Not invisible but unnoticed, Watson. You did not know where to look, and so you missed all that was important. I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace. Now, what did you gather from that woman's appearance? Describe it.\"\n\n\"Well, she had a slate-coloured, broad-brimmed straw hat, with a feather of a brickish red. Her jacket was black, with black beads sewn upon it, and a fringe of little black jet ornaments. Her dress was brown, rather darker than coffee colour, with a little purple plush at the neck and sleeves. Her gloves were grayish and were worn through at the right forefinger. Her boots I didn't observe. She had small round, hanging gold earrings, and a general air of being fairly well-to-do in a vulgar, comfortable, easy-going way.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes clapped his hands softly together and chuckled.\n\n\"'Pon my word, Watson, you are coming along wonderfully. You have really done very well indeed. It is true that you have missed everything of importance, but you have hit upon the method, and you have a quick eye for colour. Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details. My first glance is always at a woman's sleeve. In a man it is perhaps better first to take the knee of the trouser. As you observe, this woman had plush upon her sleeves, which is a most useful material for showing traces. The double line a little above the wrist, where the typewritist presses against the table, was beautifully defined. The sewing-machine, of the hand type, leaves a similar mark, but only on the left arm, and on the side of it farthest from the thumb, instead of being right across the broadest part, as this was. I then glanced at her face, and, observing the dint of a pince-nez at either side of her nose, I ventured a remark upon short sight and typewriting, which seemed to surprise her.\"\n\n\"It surprised me.\"\n\n\"But, surely, it was obvious. I was then much surprised and interested on glancing down to observe that, though the boots which she was wearing were not unlike each other, they were really odd ones; the one having a slightly decorated toe-cape and the other a plain one. One was buttoned only in the two lower buttons out of five, and the other at the first, third, and fifth. Now, when you see that a young lady, otherwise neatly dressed, has come away from home with odd boots, half-buttoned, it is no great deduction to say that she came away in a hurry.\"\n\n\"And what else?\" I asked, keenly interested, as I always was, by my friend's incisive reasoning.\n\n\"I noted, in passing, that she had written a note before leaving home but after being fully dressed. You observed that her right glove was torn at the forefinger, but you did not apparently see that both glove and finger were stained with violet ink. She had written in a hurry and dipped her pen too deep. It must have been this morning, or the mark would not remain clear upon the finger. All this is amusing, though rather elementary, but I must go back to business, Watson. Would you mind reading me the advertised description of Mr. Hosmer Angel?\"\n\nI held the little printed slip to the light.\n\n\"Missing [it said] on the morning of the fourteenth, a gentleman named Hosmer Angel. About five feet seven inches in height; strongly built, sallow complexion, black hair, a little bald in the centre, bushy, black side-whiskers and moustache; tinted glasses, slight infirmity of speech. Was dressed, when last seen, in black frock-coat faced with silk, black waistcoat, gold Albert chain, and gray Harris tweed trousers, with brown gaiters over elastic-sided boots. Known to have been employed in an office in Leadenhall Street. Anybody bringing\u2014\"\n\n\"That will do,\" said Holmes. \"As to the letters,\" he continued, glancing over them, \"they are very commonplace. Absolutely no clue in them to Mr. Angel, save that he quotes Balzac once. There is one remarkable point, however, which will no doubt strike you.\"\n\n\"They are typewritten,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Not only that, but the signature is typewritten. Look at the neat little 'Hosmer Angel' at the bottom. There is a date, you see, but no superscription except Leadenhall Street, which is rather vague. The point about the signature is very suggestive\u2014in fact, we may call it conclusive.\"\n\n\"Of what?\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, is it possible you do not see how strongly it bears upon the case?\"\n\n\"I cannot say that I do unless it were that he wished to be able to deny his signature if an action for breach of promise were instituted.\"\n\n\"No, that was not the point. However, I shall write two letters, which should settle the matter. One is to a firm in the City, the other is to the young lady's stepfather, Mr. Windibank, asking him whether he could meet us here at six o'clock to-morrow evening. It is just as well that we should do business with the male relatives. And now, Doctor, we can do nothing until the answers to those letters come, so we may put our little problem upon the shelf for the interim.\"\n\nI had had so many reasons to believe in my friend's subtle powers of reasoning and extraordinary energy in action that I felt that he must have some solid grounds for the assured and easy demeanour with which he treated the singular mystery which he had been called upon to fathom. Once only had I known him to fail, in the case of the King of Bohemia and of the Irene Adler photograph; but when I looked back to the weird business of 'The Sign of Four', and the extraordinary circumstances connected with 'A Study in Scarlet', I felt that it would be a strange tangle indeed which he could not unravel.\n\nI left him then, still puffing at his black clay pipe, with the conviction that when I came again on the next evening I would find that he held in his hands all the clues which would lead up to the identity of the disappearing bridegroom of Miss Mary Sutherland.\n\nA professional case of great gravity was engaging my own attention at the time, and the whole of next day I was busy at the bedside of the sufferer. It was not until close upon six o'clock that I found myself free and was able to spring into a hansom and drive to Baker Street, half afraid that I might be too late to assist at the denouement of the little mystery. I found Sherlock Holmes alone, however, half asleep, with his long, thin form curled up in the recesses of his armchair. A formidable array of bottles and test-tubes, with the pungent cleanly smell of hydrochloric acid, told me that he had spent his day in the chemical work which was so dear to him.\n\n\"Well, have you solved it?\" I asked as I entered.\n\n\"Yes. It was the bisulphate of baryta.\"\n\n\"No, no, the mystery!\" I cried.\n\n\"Oh, that! I thought of the salt that I have been working upon. There was never any mystery in the matter, though, as I said yesterday, some of the details are of interest. The only drawback is that there is no law, I fear, that can touch the scoundrel.\"\n\n\"Who was he, then, and what was his object in deserting Miss Sutherland?\"\n\nThe question was hardly out of my mouth, and Holmes had not yet opened his lips to reply, when we heard a heavy footfall in the passage and a tap at the door.\n\n\"This is the girl's stepfather, Mr. James Windibank,\" said Holmes. \"He has written to me to say that he would be here at six. Come in!\"\n\nThe man who entered was a sturdy, middle-sized fellow, some thirty years of age, clean-shaven, and sallow-skinned, with a bland, insinuating manner, and a pair of wonderfully sharp and penetrating gray eyes. He shot a questioning glance at each of us, placed his shiny top-hat upon the sideboard, and with a slight bow sidled down into the nearest chair.\n\n\"Good-evening, Mr. James Windibank,\" said Holmes. \"I think that this typewritten letter is from you, in which you made an appointment with me for six o'clock?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I am afraid that I am a little late, but I am not quite my own master, you know. I am sorry that Miss Sutherland has troubled you about this little matter, for I think it is far better not to wash linen of the sort in public. It was quite against my wishes that she came, but she is a very excitable, impulsive girl, as you may have noticed, and she is not easily controlled when she has made up her mind on a point. Of course, I did not mind you so much, as you are not connected with the official police, but it is not pleasant to have a family misfortune like this noised abroad. Besides, it is a useless expense, for how could you possibly find this Hosmer Angel?\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" said Holmes quietly; \"I have every reason to believe that I will succeed in discovering Mr. Hosmer Angel.\"\n\nMr. Windibank gave a violent start and dropped his gloves. \"I am delighted to hear it,\" he said.\n\n\"It is a curious thing,\" remarked Holmes, \"that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over of the 'e,' and a slight defect in the tail of the 'r.' There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious.\"\n\n\"We do all our correspondence with this machine at the office, and no doubt it is a little worn,\" our visitor answered, glancing keenly at Holmes with his bright little eyes.\n\n\"And now I will show you what is really a very interesting study, Mr. Windibank,\" Holmes continued. \"I think of writing another little monograph some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten. In each case, not only are the 'e's' slurred and the 'r's' tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have alluded are there as well.\"\n\nMr. Windibank sprang out of his chair and picked up his hat. \"I cannot waste time over this sort of fantastic talk, Mr. Holmes,\" he said. \"If you can catch the man, catch him, and let me know when you have done it.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" said Holmes, stepping over and turning the key in the door. \"I let you know, then, that I have caught him!\"\n\n\"What! where?\" shouted Mr. Windibank, turning white to his lips and glancing about him like a rat, in a trap.\n\n\"Oh, it won't do\u2014really it won't,\" said Holmes suavely. \"There is no possible getting out of it, Mr. Windibank. It is quite too transparent, and it was a very bad compliment when you said that it was impossible for me to solve so simple a question. That's right! Sit down and let us talk it over.\"\n\nOur visitor collapsed into a chair, with a ghastly face and a glitter of moisture on his brow. \"It\u2014it's not actionable,\" he stammered.\n\n\"I am very much afraid that it is not. But between ourselves, Windibank, it was as cruel and selfish and heartless a trick in a petty way as ever came before me. Now, let me just run over the course of events, and you will contradict me if I go wrong.\"\n\nThe man sat huddled up in his chair, with his head sunk upon his breast, like one who is utterly crushed. Holmes stuck his feet up on the corner of the mantelpiece and, leaning back with his hands in his pockets, began talking, rather to himself, as it seemed, than to us.\n\n\"The man married a woman very much older than himself for her money,\" said he, \"and he enjoyed the use of the money of the daughter as long as she lived with them. It was a considerable sum, for people in their position, and the loss of it would have made a serious difference. It was worth an effort to preserve it. The daughter was of a good, amiable disposition, but affectionate and warm-hearted in her ways, so that it was evident that with her fair personal advantages, and her little income, she would not be allowed to remain single long. Now her marriage would mean, of course, the loss of a hundred a year, so what does her stepfather do to prevent it? He takes the obvious course of keeping her at home and forbidding her to seek the company of people of her own age. But soon he found that that would not answer forever. She became restive, insisted upon her rights, and finally announced her positive intention of going to a certain ball. What does her clever stepfather do then? He conceives an idea more creditable to his head than to his heart. With the connivance and assistance of his wife he disguised himself, covered those keen eyes with tinted glasses, masked the face with a moustache and a pair of bushy whiskers, sunk that clear voice into an insinuating whisper, and doubly secure on account of the girl's short sight, he appears as Mr. Hosmer Angel, and keeps off other lovers by making love himself.\"\n\n\"It was only a joke at first,\" groaned our visitor. \"We never thought that she would have been so carried away.\"\n\n\"Very likely not. However that may be, the young lady was very decidedly carried away, and, having quite made up her mind that her stepfather was in France, the suspicion of treachery never for an instant entered her mind. She was flattered by the gentleman's attentions, and the effect was increased by the loudly expressed admiration of her mother. Then Mr. Angel began to call, for it was obvious that the matter should be pushed as far as it would go if a real effect were to be produced. There were meetings, and an engagement, which would finally secure the girl's affections from turning towards anyone else. But the deception could not be kept up forever. These pretended journeys to France were rather cumbrous. The thing to do was clearly to bring the business to an end in such a dramatic manner that it would leave a permanent impression upon the young lady's mind and prevent her from looking upon any other suitor for some time to come. Hence those vows of fidelity exacted upon a Testament, and hence also the allusions to a possibility of something happening on the very morning of the wedding. James Windibank wished Miss Sutherland to be so bound to Hosmer Angel, and so uncertain as to his fate, that for ten years to come, at any rate, she would not listen to another man. As far as the church door he brought her, and then, as he could go no farther, he conveniently vanished away by the old trick of stepping in at one door of a four-wheeler and out at the other. I think that was the chain of events, Mr. Windibank!\"\n\nOur visitor had recovered something of his assurance while Holmes had been talking, and he rose from his chair now with a cold sneer upon his pale face.\n\n\"It may be so, or it may not, Mr. Holmes,\" said he, \"but if you are so very sharp you ought to be sharp enough to know that it is you who are breaking the law now, and not me. I have done nothing actionable from the first, but as long as you keep that door locked you lay yourself open to an action for assault and illegal constraint.\"\n\n\"The law cannot, as you say, touch you,\" said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, \"yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!\" he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man's face, \"it is not part of my duties to my client, but here's a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to\u2014\" He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.\n\n\"There's a cold-blooded scoundrel!\" said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. \"That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.\"\n\n\"I cannot now entirely see all the steps of your reasoning,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Well, of course it was obvious from the first that this Mr. Hosmer Angel must have some strong object for his curious conduct, and it was equally clear that the only man who really profited by the incident, as far as we could see, was the stepfather. Then the fact that the two men were never together, but that the one always appeared when the other was away, was suggestive. So were the tinted spectacles and the curious voice, which both hinted at a disguise, as did the bushy whiskers. My suspicions were all confirmed by his peculiar action in typewriting his signature, which, of course, inferred that his handwriting was so familiar to her that she would recognize even the smallest sample of it. You see all these isolated facts, together with many minor ones, all pointed in the same direction.\"\n\n\"And how did you verify them?\"\n\n\"Having once spotted my man, it was easy to get corroboration. I knew the firm for which this man worked. Having taken the printed description, I eliminated everything from it which could be the result of a disguise\u2014the whiskers, the glasses, the voice, and I sent it to the firm, with a request that they would inform me whether it answered to the description of any of their travellers. I had already noticed the peculiarities of the typewriter, and I wrote to the man himself at his business address, asking him if he would come here. As I expected, his reply was typewritten and revealed the same trivial but characteristic defects. The same post brought me a letter from Westhouse & Marbank, of Fenchurch Street, to say that the description tallied in every respect with that of their employee, James Windibank. Voil\u00e0 tout!\"\n\n\"And Miss Sutherland?\"\n\n\"If I tell her she will not believe me. You may remember the old Persian saying, 'There is danger for him who taketh the tiger cub, and danger also for whoso snatches a delusion from a woman.' There is as much sense in Hafiz as in Horace, and as much knowledge of the world.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE BOSCOMBE VALLEY MYSTERY", + "text": "We were seated at breakfast one morning, my wife and I, when the maid brought in a telegram. It was from Sherlock Holmes and ran in this way:\n\nHave you a couple of days to spare? Have just been wired for from the west of England in connection with Boscombe Valley tragedy. Shall be glad if you will come with me. Air and scenery perfect. Leave Paddington by the 11:15.\n\n\"What do you say, dear?\" said my wife, looking across at me. \"Will you go?\"\n\n\"I really don't know what to say. I have a fairly long list at present.\"\n\n\"Oh, Anstruther would do your work for you. You have been looking a little pale lately. I think that the change would do you good, and you are always so interested in Mr. Sherlock Holmes's cases.\"\n\n\"I should be ungrateful if I were not, seeing what I gained through one of them,\" I answered. \"But if I am to go, I must pack at once, for I have only half an hour.\"\n\nMy experience of camp life in Afghanistan had at least had the effect of making me a prompt and ready traveller. My wants were few and simple, so that in less than the time stated I was in a cab with my valise, rattling away to Paddington Station. Sherlock Holmes was pacing up and down the platform, his tall, gaunt figure made even gaunter and taller by his long gray travelling-cloak and close-fitting cloth cap.\n\n\"It is really very good of you to come, Watson,\" said he. \"It makes a considerable difference to me, having someone with me on whom I can thoroughly rely. Local aid is always either worthless or else biassed. If you will keep the two corner seats I shall get the tickets.\"\n\nWe had the carriage to ourselves save for an immense litter of papers which Holmes had brought with him. Among these he rummaged and read, with intervals of note-taking and of meditation, until we were past Reading. Then he suddenly rolled them all into a gigantic ball and tossed them up onto the rack.\n\n\"Have you heard anything of the case?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not a word. I have not seen a paper for some days.\"\n\n\"The London press has not had very full accounts. I have just been looking through all the recent papers in order to master the particulars. It seems, from what I gather, to be one of those simple cases which are so extremely difficult.\"\n\n\"That sounds a little paradoxical.\"\n\n\"But it is profoundly true. Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult it is to bring it home. In this case, however, they have established a very serious case against the son of the murdered man.\"\n\n\"It is a murder, then?\"\n\n\"Well, it is conjectured to be so. I shall take nothing for granted until I have the opportunity of looking personally into it. I will explain the state of things to you, as far as I have been able to understand it, in a very few words.\n\n\"Boscombe Valley is a country district not very far from Ross, in Herefordshire. The largest landed proprietor in that part is a Mr. John Turner, who made his money in Australia and returned some years ago to the old country. One of the farms which he held, that of Hatherley, was let to Mr. Charles McCarthy, who was also an ex-Australian. The men had known each other in the colonies, so that it was not unnatural that when they came to settle down they should do so as near each other as possible. Turner was apparently the richer man, so McCarthy became his tenant but still remained, it seems, upon terms of perfect equality, as they were frequently together. McCarthy had one son, a lad of eighteen, and Turner had an only daughter of the same age, but neither of them had wives living. They appear to have avoided the society of the neighbouring English families and to have led retired lives, though both the McCarthys were fond of sport and were frequently seen at the race-meetings of the neighbourhood. McCarthy kept two servants\u2014a man and a girl. Turner had a considerable household, some half-dozen at the least. That is as much as I have been able to gather about the families. Now for the facts.\n\n\"On June 3rd, that is, on Monday last, McCarthy left his house at Hatherley about three in the afternoon and walked down to the Boscombe Pool, which is a small lake formed by the spreading out of the stream which runs down the Boscombe Valley. He had been out with his serving-man in the morning at Ross, and he had told the man that he must hurry, as he had an appointment of importance to keep at three. From that appointment he never came back alive.\n\n\"From Hatherley Farmhouse to the Boscombe Pool is a quarter of a mile, and two people saw him as he passed over this ground. One was an old woman, whose name is not mentioned, and the other was William Crowder, a game-keeper in the employ of Mr. Turner. Both these witnesses depose that Mr. McCarthy was walking alone. The game-keeper adds that within a few minutes of his seeing Mr. McCarthy pass he had seen his son, Mr. James McCarthy, going the same way with a gun under his arm. To the best of his belief, the father was actually in sight at the time, and the son was following him. He thought no more of the matter until he heard in the evening of the tragedy that had occurred.\n\n\"The two McCarthys were seen after the time when William Crowder, the game-keeper, lost sight of them. The Boscombe Pool is thickly wooded round, with just a fringe of grass and of reeds round the edge. A girl of fourteen, Patience Moran, who is the daughter of the lodge-keeper of the Boscombe Valley estate, was in one of the woods picking flowers. She states that while she was there she saw, at the border of the wood and close by the lake, Mr. McCarthy and his son, and that they appeared to be having a violent quarrel. She heard Mr. McCarthy the elder using very strong language to his son, and she saw the latter raise up his hand as if to strike his father. She was so frightened by their violence that she ran away and told her mother when she reached home that she had left the two McCarthys quarrelling near Boscombe Pool, and that she was afraid that they were going to fight. She had hardly said the words when young Mr. McCarthy came running up to the lodge to say that he had found his father dead in the wood, and to ask for the help of the lodge-keeper. He was much excited, without either his gun or his hat, and his right hand and sleeve were observed to be stained with fresh blood. On following him they found the dead body stretched out upon the grass beside the pool. The head had been beaten in by repeated blows of some heavy and blunt weapon. The injuries were such as might very well have been inflicted by the butt-end of his son's gun, which was found lying on the grass within a few paces of the body. Under these circumstances the young man was instantly arrested, and a verdict of 'wilful murder' having been returned at the inquest on Tuesday, he was on Wednesday brought before the magistrates at Ross, who have referred the case to the next Assizes. Those are the main facts of the case as they came out before the coroner and the police-court.\"\n\n\"I could hardly imagine a more damning case,\" I remarked. \"If ever circumstantial evidence pointed to a criminal it does so here.\"\n\n\"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing,\" answered Holmes thoughtfully. \"It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different. It must be confessed, however, that the case looks exceedingly grave against the young man, and it is very possible that he is indeed the culprit. There are several people in the neighbourhood, however, and among them Miss Turner, the daughter of the neighbouring landowner, who believe in his innocence, and who have retained Lestrade, whom you may recollect in connection with 'A Study in Scarlet', to work out the case in his interest. Lestrade, being rather puzzled, has referred the case to me, and hence it is that two middle-aged gentlemen are flying westward at fifty miles an hour instead of quietly digesting their breakfasts at home.\"\n\n\"I am afraid,\" said I, \"that the facts are so obvious that you will find little credit to be gained out of this case.\"\n\n\"There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact,\" he answered, laughing. \"Besides, we may chance to hit upon some other obvious facts which may have been by no means obvious to Mr. Lestrade. You know me too well to think that I am boasting when I say that I shall either confirm or destroy his theory by means which he is quite incapable of employing, or even of understanding. To take the first example to hand, I very clearly perceive that in your bedroom the window is upon the right-hand side, and yet I question whether Mr. Lestrade would have noted even so self-evident a thing as that.\"\n\n\"How on earth\u2014\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, I know you well. I know the military neatness which characterizes you. You shave every morning, and in this season you shave by the sunlight; but since your shaving is less and less complete as we get farther back on the left side, until it becomes positively slovenly as we get round the angle of the jaw, it is surely very clear that that side is less illuminated than the other. I could not imagine a man of your habits looking at himself in an equal light and being satisfied with such a result. I only quote this as a trivial example of observation and inference. Therein lies my m\u00e9tier, and it is just possible that it may be of some service in the investigation which lies before us. There are one or two minor points which were brought out in the inquest, and which are worth considering.\"\n\n\"What are they?\"\n\n\"It appears that his arrest did not take place at once, but after the return to Hatherley Farm. On the inspector of constabulary informing him that he was a prisoner, he remarked that he was not surprised to hear it, and that it was no more than his deserts. This observation of his had the natural effect of removing any traces of doubt which might have remained in the minds of the coroner's jury.\"\n\n\"It was a confession,\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"No, for it was followed by a protestation of innocence.\"\n\n\"Coming on the top of such a damning series of events, it was at least a most suspicious remark.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" said Holmes, \"it is the brightest rift which I can at present see in the clouds. However innocent he might be, he could not be such an absolute imbecile as not to see that the circumstances were very black against him. Had he appeared surprised at his own arrest, or feigned indignation at it, I should have looked upon it as highly suspicious, because such surprise or anger would not be natural under the circumstances, and yet might appear to be the best policy to a scheming man. His frank acceptance of the situation marks him as either an innocent man, or else as a man of considerable self-restraint and firmness. As to his remark about his deserts, it was also not unnatural if you consider that he stood beside the dead body of his father, and that there is no doubt that he had that very day so far forgotten his filial duty as to bandy words with him, and even, according to the little girl whose evidence is so important, to raise his hand as if to strike him. The self-reproach and contritionwhich are displayed in his remark appear to me to be the signs of a healthy mind rather than of a guilty one.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Many men have been hanged on far slighter evidence,\" I remarked.\n\n\"So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged.\"\n\n\"What is the young man's own account of the matter?\"\n\n\"It is, I am afraid, not very encouraging to his supporters, though there are one or two points in it which are suggestive. You will find it here, and may read it for yourself.\"\n\nHe picked out from his bundle a copy of the local Herefordshire paper, and having turned down the sheet he pointed out the paragraph in which the unfortunate young man had given his own statement of what had occurred. I settled myself down in the corner of the carriage and read it very carefully. It ran in this way:\n\nMr. James McCarthy, the only son of the deceased, was then called and gave evidence as follows: \"I had been away from home for three days at Bristol, and had only just returned upon the morning of last Monday, the 3d. My father was absent from home at the time of my arrival, and I was informed by the maid that he had driven over to Ross with John Cobb, the groom. Shortly after my return I heard the wheels of his trap in the yard, and, looking out of my window, I saw him get out and walk rapidly out of the yard, though I was not aware in which direction he was going. I then took my gun and strolled out in the direction of the Boscombe Pool, with the intention of visiting the rabbit-warren which is upon the other side. On my way I saw William Crowder, the game-keeper, as he had stated in his evidence; but he is mistaken in thinking that I was following my father. I had no idea that he was in front of me. When about a hundred yards from the pool I heard a cry of 'Cooee!' which was a usual signal between my father and myself. I then hurried forward, and found him standing by the pool. He appeared to be much surprised at seeing me and asked me rather roughly what I was doing there. A conversation ensued which led to high words and almost to blows, for my father was a man of a very violent temper. Seeing that his passion was becoming ungovernable, I left him and returned towards Hatherley Farm. I had not gone more than 150 yards, however, when I heard a hideous outcry behind me, which caused me to run back again. I found my father expiring upon the ground, with his head terribly injured. I dropped my gun and held him in my arms, but he almost instantly expired. I knelt beside him for some minutes, and then made my way to Mr. Turner's lodge-keeper, his house being the nearest, to ask for assistance. I saw no one near my father when I returned, and I have no idea how he came by his injuries. He was not a popular man, being somewhat cold and forbidding in his manners; but he had, as far as I know, no active enemies. I know nothing further of the matter.\"\n\nThe Coroner: Did your father make any statement to you before he died?\n\nWitness: He mumbled a few words, but I could only catch some allusion to a rat.\n\nThe Coroner: What did you understand by that?\n\nWitness: It conveyed no meaning to me. I thought that he was delirious.\n\nThe Coroner: What was the point upon which you and your father had this final quarrel?\n\nWitness: I should prefer not to answer.\n\nThe Coroner: I am afraid that I must press it.\n\nWitness: It is really impossible for me to tell you. I can assure you that it has nothing to do with the sad tragedy which followed.\n\nThe Coroner: That is for the court to decide. I need not point out to you that your refusal to answer will prejudice your case considerably in any future proceedings which may arise.\n\nWitness: I must still refuse.\n\nThe Coroner: I understand that the cry of \"Cooee\" was a common signal between you and your father?\n\nWitness: It was.\n\nThe Coroner: How was it, then, that he uttered it before he saw you, and before he even knew that you had returned from Bristol?\n\nWitness (with considerable confusion): I do not know.\n\nA Juryman: Did you see nothing which aroused your suspicions when you returned on hearing the cry and found your father fatally injured?\n\nWitness: Nothing definite.\n\nThe Coroner: What do you mean?\n\nWitness: I was so disturbed and excited as I rushed out into the open, that I could think of nothing except of my father. Yet I have a vague impression that as I ran forward something lay upon the ground to the left of me. It seemed to me to be something gray in colour, a coat of some sort, or a plaid perhaps. When I rose from my father I looked round for it, but it was gone.\n\n\"Do you mean that it disappeared before you went for help?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was gone.\"\n\n\"You cannot say what it was?\"\n\n\"No, I had a feeling something was there.\"\n\n\"How far from the body?\"\n\n\"A dozen yards or so.\"\n\n\"And how far from the edge of the wood?\"\n\n\"About the same.\"\n\n\"Then if it was removed it was while you were within a dozen yards of it?\"\n\n\"Yes, but with my back towards it.\"\n\nThis concluded the examination of the witness.\n\n\"I see,\" said I as I glanced down the column, \"that the coroner in his concluding remarks was rather severe upon young McCarthy. He calls attention, and with reason, to the discrepancy about his father having signalled to him before seeing him, also to his refusal to give details of his conversation with his father, and his singular account of his father's dying words. They are all, as he remarks, very much against the son.\"\n\nHolmes laughed softly to himself and stretched himself out upon the cushioned seat. \"Both you and the coroner have been at some pains,\" said he, \"to single out the very strongest points in the young man's favour. Don't you see that you alternately give him credit for having too much imagination and too little? Too little, if he could not invent a cause of quarrel which would give him the sympathy of the jury; too much, if he evolved from his own inner consciousness anything so outr\u00e9 as a dying reference to a rat, and the incident of the vanishing cloth. No, sir, I shall approach this case from the point of view that what this young man says is true, and we shall see whither that hypothesis will lead us. And now here is my pocket Petrarch, and not another word shall I say of this case until we are on the scene of action. We lunch at Swindon, and I see that we shall be there in twenty minutes.\"\n\nIt was nearly four o'clock when we at last, after passing through the beautiful Stroud Valley, and over the broad gleaming Severn, found ourselves at the pretty little country-town of Ross. A lean, ferret-like man, furtive and sly-looking, was waiting for us upon the platform. In spite of the light brown dustcoat and leather-leggings which he wore in deference to his rustic surroundings, I had no difficulty in recognizing Lestrade, of Scotland Yard. With him we drove to the Hereford Arms where a room had already been engaged for us.\n\n\"I have ordered a carriage,\" said Lestrade as we sat over a cup of tea. \"I knew your energetic nature, and that you would not be happy until you had been on the scene of the crime.\"\n\n\"It was very nice and complimentary of you,\" Holmes answered. \"It is entirely a question of barometric pressure.\"\n\nLestrade looked startled. \"I do not quite follow,\" he said.\n\n\"How is the glass? Twenty-nine, I see. No wind, and not a cloud in the sky. I have a caseful of cigarettes here which need smoking, and the sofa is very much superior to the usual country hotel abomination. I do not think that it is probable that I shall use the carriage to-night.\"\n\nLestrade laughed indulgently. \"You have, no doubt, already formed your conclusions from the newspapers,\" he said. \"The case is as plain as a pikestaff, and the more one goes into it the plainer it becomes. Still, of course, one can't refuse a lady, and such a very positive one, too. She had heard of you, and would have your opinion, though I repeatedly told her that there was nothing which you could do which I had not already done. Why, bless my soul! here is her carriage at the door.\"\n\nHe had hardly spoken before there rushed into the room one of the most lovely young women that I have ever seen in my life. Her violet eyes shining, her lips parted, a pink flush upon her cheeks, all thought of her natural reserve lost in her overpowering excitement and concern.\n\n\"Oh, Mr. Sherlock Holmes!\" she cried, glancing from one to the other of us, and finally, with a woman's quick intuition, fastening upon my companion, \"I am so glad that you have come. I have driven down to tell you so. I know that James didn't do it. I know it, and I want you to start upon your work knowing it, too. Never let yourself doubt upon that point. We have known each other since we were little children, and I know his faults as no one else does; but he is too tenderhearted to hurt a fly. Such a charge is absurd to anyone who really knows him.\"\n\n\"I hope we may clear him, Miss Turner,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"You may rely upon my doing all that I can.\"\n\n\"But you have read the evidence. You have formed some conclusion? Do you not see some loophole, some flaw? Do you not yourself think that he is innocent?\"\n\n\"I think that it is very probable.\"\n\n\"There, now!\" she cried, throwing back her head and looking defiantly at Lestrade. \"You hear! He gives me hopes.\"\n\nLestrade shrugged his shoulders. \"I am afraid that my colleague has been a little quick in forming his conclusions,\" he said.\n\n\"But he is right. Oh! I know that he is right. James never did it. And about his quarrel with his father, I am sure that the reason why he would not speak about it to the coroner was because I was concerned in it.\"\n\n\"In what way?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"It is no time for me to hide anything. James and his father had many disagreements about me. Mr. McCarthy was very anxious that there should be a marriage between us. James and I have always loved each other as brother and sister; but of course he is young and has seen very little of life yet, and\u2014and\u2014well, he naturally did not wish to do anything like that yet. So there were quarrels, and this, I am sure, was one of them.\"\n\n\"And your father?\" asked Holmes. \"Was he in favour of such a union?\"\n\n\"No, he was averse to it also. No one but Mr. McCarthy was in favour of it.\" A quick blush passed over her fresh young face as Holmes shot one of his keen, questioning glances at her.\n\n\"Thank you for this information,\" said he. \"May I see your father if I call to-morrow?\"\n\n\"I am afraid the doctor won't allow it.\"\n\n\"The doctor?\"\n\n\"Yes, have you not heard? Poor father has never been strong for years back, but this has broken him down completely. He has taken to his bed, and Dr. Willows says that he is a wreck and that his nervous system is shattered. Mr. McCarthy was the only man alive who had known dad in the old days in Victoria.\"\n\n\"Ha! In Victoria! That is important.\"\n\n\"Yes, at the mines.\"\n\n\"Quite so; at the gold-mines, where, as I understand, Mr. Turner made his money.\"\n\n\"Yes, certainly.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Miss Turner. You have been of material assistance to me.\"\n\n\"You will tell me if you have any news to-morrow. No doubt you will go to the prison to see James. Oh, if you do, Mr. Holmes, do tell him that I know him to be innocent.\"\n\n\"I will, Miss Turner.\"\n\n\"I must go home now, for dad is very ill, and he misses me so if I leave him. Good-bye, and God help you in your undertaking.\" She hurried from the room as impulsively as she had entered, and we heard the wheels of her carriage rattle off down the street.\n\n\"I am ashamed of you, Holmes,\" said Lestrade with dignity after a few minutes' silence. \"Why should you raise up hopes which you are bound to disappoint? I am not over-tender of heart, but I call it cruel.\"\n\n\"I think that I see my way to clearing James McCarthy,\" said Holmes. \"Have you an order to see him in prison?\"\n\n\"Yes, but only for you and me.\"\n\n\"Then I shall reconsider my resolution about going out. We have still time to take a train to Hereford and see him to-night?\"\n\n\"Ample.\"\n\n\"Then let us do so. Watson, I fear that you will find it very slow, but I shall only be away a couple of hours.\"\n\nI walked down to the station with them, and then wandered through the streets of the little town, finally returning to the hotel, where I lay upon the sofa and tried to interest myself in a yellow-backed novel. The puny plot of the story was so thin, however, when compared to the deep mystery through which we were groping, and I found my attention wander so continually from the fiction to the fact, that I at last flung it across the room and gave myself up entirely to a consideration of the events of the day. Supposing that this unhappy young man's story were absolutely true, then what hellish thing, what absolutely unforeseen and extraordinary calamity could have occurred between the time when he parted from his father, and the moment when, drawn back by his screams, he rushed into the glade? It was something terrible and deadly. What could it be? Might not the nature of the injuries reveal something to my medical instincts? I rang the bell and called for the weekly county paper, which contained a verbatim account of the inquest. In the surgeon's deposition it was stated that the posterior third of the left parietal bone and the left half of the occipital bone had been shattered by a heavy blow from a blunt weapon. I marked the spot upon my own head. Clearly such a blow must have been struck from behind. That was to some extent in favour of the accused, as when seen quarrelling he was face to face with his father. Still, it did not go for very much, for the older man might have turned his back before the blow fell. Still, it might be worth while to call Holmes's attention to it. Then there was the peculiar dying reference to a rat. What could that mean? It could not be delirium. A man dying from a sudden blow does not commonly become delirious. No, it was more likely to be an attempt to explain how he met his fate. But what could it indicate? I cudgelled my brains to find some possible explanation. And then the incident of the gray cloth seen by young McCarthy. If that were true the murderer must have dropped some part of his dress, presumably his overcoat, in his flight, and must have had the hardihood to return and to carry it away at the instant when the son was kneeling with his back turned not a dozen paces off. What a tissue of mysteries and improbabilities the whole thing was! I did not wonder at Lestrade's opinion, and yet I had so much faith in Sherlock Holmes's insight that I could not lose hope as long as every fresh fact seemed to strengthen his conviction of young McCarthy's innocence.\n\nIt was late before Sherlock Holmes returned. He came back alone, for Lestrade was staying in lodgings in the town.\n\n\"The glass still keeps very high,\" he remarked as he sat down. \"It is of importance that it should not rain before we are able to go over the ground. On the other hand, a man should be at his very best and keenest for such nice work as that, and I did not wish to do it when fagged by a long journey. I have seen young McCarthy.\"\n\n\"And what did you learn from him?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Could he throw no light?\"\n\n\"None at all. I was inclined to think at one time that he knew who had done it and was screening him or her, but I am convinced now that he is as puzzled as everyone else. He is not a very quick-witted youth, though comely to look at and, I should think, sound at heart.\"\n\n\"I cannot admire his taste,\" I remarked, \"if it is indeed a fact that he was averse to a marriage with so charming a young lady as this Miss Turner.\"\n\n\"Ah, thereby hangs a rather painful tale. This fellow is madly, insanely, in love with her, but some two years ago, when he was only a lad, and before he really knew her, for she had been away five years at a boarding-school, what does the idiot do but get into the clutches of a barmaid in Bristol and marry her at a registry office? No one knows a word of the matter, but you can imagine how maddening it must be to him to be upbraided for not doing what he would give his very eyes to do, but what he knows to be absolutely impossible. It was sheer frenzy of this sort which made him throw his hands up into the air when his father, at their last interview, was goading him on to propose to Miss Turner. On the other hand, he had no means of supporting himself, and his father, who was by all accounts a very hard man, would have thrown him over utterly had he known the truth. It was with his barmaid wife that he had spent the last three days in Bristol, and his father did not know where he was. Mark that point. It is of importance. Good has come out of evil, however, for the barmaid, finding from the papers that he is in serious trouble and likely to be hanged, has thrown him over utterly and has written to him to say that she has a husband already in the Bermuda Dockyard, so that there is really no tie between them. I think that that bit of news has consoled young McCarthy for all that he has suffered.\"\n\n\"But if he is innocent, who has done it?\"\n\n\"Ah! who? I would call your attention very particularly to two points. One is that the murdered man had an appointment with someone at the pool, and that the someone could not have been his son, for his son was away, and he did not know when he would return. The second is that the murdered man was heard to cry 'Cooee!' before he knew that his son had returned. Those are the crucial points upon which the case depends. And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow.\"\n\nThere was no rain, as Holmes had foretold, and the morning broke bright and cloudless. At nine o'clock Lestrade called for us with the carriage, and we set off for Hatherley Farm and the Boscombe Pool.\n\n\"There is serious news this morning,\" Lestrade observed. \"It is said that Mr. Turner, of the Hall, is so ill that his life is despaired of.\"\n\n\"An elderly man, I presume?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"About sixty; but his constitution has been shattered by his life abroad, and he has been in failing health for some time. This business has had a very bad effect upon him. He was an old friend of McCarthy's, and, I may add, a great benefactor to him, for I have learned that he gave him Hatherley Farm rent free.\"\n\n\"Indeed! That is interesting,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Oh, yes! In a hundred other ways he has helped him. Everybody about here speaks of his kindness to him.\"\n\n\"Really! Does it not strike you as a little singular that this McCarthy, who appears to have had little of his own, and to have been under such obligations to Turner, should still talk of marrying his son to Turner's daughter, who is, presumably, heiress to the estate, and that in such a very cocksure manner, as if it were merely a case of a proposal and all else would follow? It is the more strange, since we know that Turner himself was averse to the idea. The daughter told us as much. Do you not deduce something from that?\"\n\n\"We have got to the deductions and the inferences,\" said Lestrade, winking at me. \"I find it hard enough to tackle facts, Holmes, without flying away after theories and fancies.\"\n\n\"You are right,\" said Holmes demurely; \"you do find it very hard to tackle the facts.\"\n\n\"Anyhow, I have grasped one fact which you seem to find it difficult to get hold of,\" replied Lestrade with some warmth.\n\n\"And that is\u2014\"\n\n\"That McCarthy senior met his death from McCarthy junior and that all theories to the contrary are the merest moonshine.\"\n\n\"Well, moonshine is a brighter thing than fog,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"But I am very much mistaken if this is not Hatherley Farm upon the left.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is it.\" It was a widespread, comfortable-looking building, two-storied, slate-roofed, with great yellow blotches of lichen upon the gray walls. The drawn blinds and the smokeless chimneys, however, gave it a stricken look, as though the weight of this horror still lay heavy upon it. We called at the door when the maid, at Holmes's request, showed us the boots which her master wore at the time of his death, and also a pair of the son's, though not the pair which he had then had. Having measured these very carefully from seven or eight different points, Holmes desired to be led to the court-yard, from which we all followed the winding track which led to Boscombe Pool.\n\nSherlock Holmes was transformed when he was hot upon such a scent as this. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two hard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long, sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply. Swiftly and silently he made his way along the track which ran through the meadows, and so by way of the woods to the Boscombe Pool. It was damp, marshy ground, as is all that district, and there were marks of many feet, both upon the path and amid the short grass which bounded it on either side. Sometimes Holmes would hurry on, sometimes stop dead, and once he made quite a little detour into the meadow. Lestrade and I walked behind him, the detective indifferent and contemptuous, while I watched my friend with the interest which sprang from the conviction that every one of his actions was directed towards a definite end.\n\nThe Boscombe Pool, which is a little reed-girt sheet of water some fifty yards across, is situated at the boundary between the Hatherley Farm and the private park of the wealthy Mr. Turner. Above the woods which lined it upon the farther side we could see the red, jutting pinnacles which marked the site of the rich landowner's dwelling. On the Hatherley side of the pool the woods grew very thick, and there was a narrow belt of sodden grass twenty paces across between the edge of the trees and the reeds which lined the lake. Lestrade showed us the exact spot at which the body had been found, and, indeed, so moist was the ground, that I could plainly see the traces which had been left by the fall of the stricken man. To Holmes, as I could see by his eager face and peering eyes, very many other things were to be read upon the trampled grass. He ran round, like a dog who is picking up a scent, and then turned upon my companion.\n\n\"What did you go into the pool for?\" he asked.\n\n\"I fished about with a rake. I thought there might be some weapon or other trace. But how on earth\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, tut, tut! I have no time! That left foot of yours with its inward twist is all over the place. A mole could trace it, and there it vanishes among the reeds. Oh, how simple it would all have been had I been here before they came like a herd of buffalo and wallowed all over it. Here is where the party with the lodge-keeper came, and they have covered all tracks for six or eight feet round the body. But here are three separate tracks of the same feet.\" He drew out a lens and lay down upon his waterproof to have a better view, talking all the time rather to himself than to us. \"These are young McCarthy's feet. Twice he was walking, and once he ran swiftly, so that the soles are deeply marked and the heels hardly visible. That bears out his story. He ran when he saw his father on the ground. Then here are the father's feet as he paced up and down. What is this, then? It is the butt-end of the gun as the son stood listening. And this? Ha, ha! What have we here? Tiptoes! tiptoes! Square, too, quite unusual boots! They come, they go, they come again\u2014of course that was for the cloak. Now where did they come from?\" He ran up and down, sometimes losing, sometimes finding the track until we were well within the edge of the wood and under the shadow of a great beech, the largest tree in the neighbourhood. Holmes traced his way to the farther side of this and lay down once more upon his face with a little cry of satisfaction. For a long time he remained there, turning over the leaves and dried sticks, gathering up what seemed to me to be dust into an envelope and examining with his lens not only the ground but even the bark of the tree as far as he could reach. A jagged stone was lying among the moss, and this also he carefully examined and retained. Then he followed a pathway through the wood until he came to the highroad, where all traces were lost.\n\n\"It has been a case of considerable interest,\" he remarked, returning to his natural manner. \"I fancy that this gray house on the right must be the lodge. I think that I will go in and have a word with Moran, and perhaps write a little note. Having done that, we may drive back to our luncheon. You may walk to the cab, and I shall be with you presently.\"\n\nIt was about ten minutes before we regained our cab and drove back into Ross, Holmes still carrying with him the stone which he had picked up in the wood.\n\n\"This may interest you, Lestrade,\" he remarked, holding it out. \"The murder was done with it.\"\n\n\"I see no marks.\"\n\n\"There are none.\"\n\n\"How do you know, then?\"\n\n\"The grass was growing under it. It had only lain there a few days. There was no sign of a place whence it had been taken. It corresponds with the injuries. There is no sign of any other weapon.\"\n\n\"And the murderer?\"\n\n\"Is a tall man, left-handed, limps with the right leg, wears thick-soled shooting-boots and a gray cloak, smokes Indian cigars, uses a cigar-holder, and carries a blunt pen-knife in his pocket. There are several other indications, but these may be enough to aid us in our search.\"\n\nLestrade laughed. \"I am afraid that I am still a sceptic,\" he said. \"Theories are all very well, but we have to deal with a hard-headed British jury.\"\n\n\"Nous verrons,\" answered Holmes calmly; \"You work your own method, and I shall work mine. I shall be busy this afternoon, and shall probably return to London by the evening train.\"\n\n\"And leave your case unfinished?\"\n\n\"No, finished.\"\n\n\"But the mystery?\"\n\n\"It is solved.\"\n\n\"Who was the criminal, then?\"\n\n\"The gentleman I describe.\"\n\n\"But who is he?\"\n\n\"Surely it would not be difficult to find out. This is not such a populous neighbourhood.\"\n\nLestrade shrugged his shoulders. \"I am a practical man,\" he said, \"and I really cannot undertake to go about the country looking for a left-handed gentleman with a game-leg. I should become the laughing-stock of Scotland Yard.\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Holmes quietly. \"I have given you the chance. Here are your lodgings. Good-bye. I shall drop you a line before I leave.\"\n\nHaving left Lestrade at his rooms, we drove to our hotel, where we found lunch upon the table. Holmes was silent and buried in thought with a pained expression upon his face, as one who finds himself in a perplexing position.\n\n\"Look here, Watson,\" he said when the cloth was cleared; \"just sit down in this chair and let me preach to you for a little. I don't know quite what to do, and I should value your advice. Light a cigar and let me expound.\"\n\n\"Pray do so.\"\n\n\"Well, now, in considering this case there are two points about young McCarthy's narrative which struck us both instantly, although they impressed me in his favour and you against him. One was the fact that his father should, according to his account, cry 'Cooee!' before seeing him. The other was his singular dying reference to a rat. He mumbled several words, you understand, but that was all that caught the son's ear. Now from this double point our research must commence, and we will begin it by presuming that what the lad says is absolutely true.\"\n\n\"What of this 'Cooee!' then?\"\n\n\"Well, obviously it could not have been meant for the son. The son, as far as he knew, was in Bristol. It was mere chance that he was within earshot. The 'Cooee!' was meant to attract the attention of whoever it was that he had the appointment with. But 'Cooee' is a distinctly Australian cry, and one which is used between Australians. There is a strong presumption that the person whom McCarthy expected to meet him at Boscombe Pool was someone who had been in Australia.\"\n\n\"What of the rat, then?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes took a folded paper from his pocket and flattened it out on the table. \"This is a map of the Colony of Victoria,\" he said. \"I wired to Bristol for it last night.\" He put his hand over part of the map. \"What do you read?\"\n\n\"ARAT,\" I read.\n\n\"And now?\" He raised his hand.\n\n\"BALLARAT.\"\n\n\"Quite so. That was the word the man uttered, and of which his son only caught the last two syllables. He was trying to utter the name of his murderer. So and so, of Ballarat.\"\n\n\"It is wonderful!\" I exclaimed.\n\n\"It is obvious. And now, you see, I had narrowed the field down considerably. The possession of a gray garment was a point which, granting the son's statement to be correct was a certainty. We have come now out of mere vagueness to definite conception of an Australian from Ballarat with a cloak.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"And one who was at home in the district, for the pool can only be approached by the farm or by the estate, where strangers could hardly wander.\"\n\n\"Quite so.\"\n\n\"Then comes our expedition of to-day. By an examination of the ground I gained the trifling details which I gave to that imbecile Lestrade, as to the personality of the criminal.\"\n\n\"But how did you gain them?\"\n\n\"You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles.\"\n\n\"His height I know that you might roughly judge from the length of his stride. His boots, too, might be told from their traces.\"\n\n\"Yes, they were peculiar boots.\"\n\n\"But his lameness?\"\n\n\"The impression of his right foot was always less distinct than his left. He put less weight upon it. Why? Because he limped\u2014he was lame.\"\n\n\"But his left-handedness.\"\n\n\"You were yourself struck by the nature of the injury as recorded by the surgeon at the inquest. The blow was struck from immediately behind, and yet was upon the left side. Now, how can that be unless it were by a left-handed man? He had stood behind that tree during the interview between the father and son. He had even smoked there. I found the ash of a cigar, which my special knowledge of tobacco ashes enables me to pronounce as an Indian cigar. I have, as you know, devoted some attention to this, and written a little monograph on the ashes of 140 different varieties of pipe, cigar, and cigarette tobacco. Having found the ash, I then looked round and discovered the stump among the moss where he had tossed it. It was an Indian cigar, of the variety which are rolled in Rotterdam.\"\n\n\"And the cigar-holder?\"\n\n\"I could see that the end had not been in his mouth. Therefore he used a holder. The tip had been cut off, not bitten off, but the cut was not a clean one, so I deduced a blunt pen-knife.\"\n\n\"Holmes,\" I said, \"you have drawn a net round this man from which he cannot escape, and you have saved an innocent human life as truly as if you had cut the cord which was hanging him. I see the direction in which all this points. The culprit is\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. John Turner,\" cried the hotel waiter, opening the door of our sitting-room, and ushering in a visitor.\n\nThe man who entered was a strange and impressive figure. His slow, limping step and bowed shoulders gave the appearance of decrepitude, and yet his hard, deep-lined, craggy features, and his enormous limbs showed that he was possessed of unusual strength of body and of character. His tangled beard, grizzled hair, and outstanding, drooping eyebrows combined to give an air of dignity and power to his appearance, but his face was of an ashen white, while his lips and the corners of his nostrils were tinged with a shade of blue. It was clear to me at a glance that he was in the grip of some deadly and chronic disease.\n\n\"Pray sit down on the sofa,\" said Holmes gently. \"You had my note?\"\n\n\"Yes, the lodge-keeper brought it up. You said that you wished to see me here to avoid scandal.\"\n\n\"I thought people would talk if I went to the Hall.\"\n\n\"And why did you wish to see me?\" He looked across at my companion with despair in his weary eyes, as though his question was already answered.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Holmes, answering the look rather than the words. \"It is so. I know all about McCarthy.\"\n\nThe old man sank his face in his hands. \"God help me!\" he cried. \"But I would not have let the young man come to harm. I give you my word that I would have spoken out if it went against him at the Assizes.\"\n\n\"I am glad to hear you say so,\" said Holmes gravely.\n\n\"I would have spoken now had it not been for my dear girl. It would break her heart\u2014it will break her heart when she hears that I am arrested.\"\n\n\"It may not come to that,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I am no official agent. I understand that it was your daughter who required my presence here, and I am acting in her interests. Young McCarthy must be got off, however.\"\n\n\"I am a dying man,\" said old Turner. \"I have had diabetes for years. My doctor says it is a question whether I shall live a month. Yet I would rather die under my own roof than in a jail.\"\n\nHolmes rose and sat down at the table with his pen in his hand and a bundle of paper before him. \"Just tell us the truth,\" he said. \"I shall jot down the facts. You will sign it, and Watson here can witness it. Then I could produce your confession at the last extremity to save young McCarthy. I promise you that I shall not use it unless it is absolutely needed.\"\n\n\"It's as well,\" said the old man; \"it's a question whether I shall live to the Assizes, so it matters little to me, but I should wish to spare Alice the shock. And now I will make the thing clear to you; it has been a long time in the acting, but will not take me long to tell.\n\n\"You didn't know this dead man, McCarthy. He was a devil incarnate. I tell you that. God keep you out of the clutches of such a man as he. His grip has been upon me these twenty years, and he has blasted my life. I'll tell you first how I came to be in his power.\n\n\"It was in the early '60's at the diggings. I was a young chap then, hot-blooded and reckless, ready to turn my hand at anything; I got among bad companions, took to drink, had no luck with my claim, took to the bush, and in a word became what you would call over here a highway robber. There were six of us, and we had a wild, free life of it, sticking up a station from time to time, or stopping the wagons on the road to the diggings. Black Jack of Ballarat was the name I went under, and our party is still remembered in the colony as the Ballarat Gang.\n\n\"One day a gold convoy came down from Ballarat to Melbourne, and we lay in wait for it and attacked it. There were six troopers and six of us, so it was a close thing, but we emptied four of their saddles at the first volley. Three of our boys were killed, however, before we got the swag. I put my pistol to the head of the wagon-driver, who was this very man McCarthy. I wish to the Lord that I had shot him then, but I spared him, though I saw his wicked little eyes fixed on my face, as though to remember every feature. We got away with the gold, became wealthy men, and made our way over to England without being suspected. There I parted from my old pals and determined to settle down to a quiet and respectable life. I bought this estate, which chanced to be in the market, and I set myself to do a little good with my money, to make up for the way in which I had earned it. I married, too, and though my wife died young she left me my dear little Alice. Even when she was just a baby her wee hand seemed to lead me down the right path as nothing else had ever done. In a word, I turned over a new leaf and did my best to make up for the past. All was going well when McCarthy laid his grip upon me.\n\n\"I had gone up to town about an investment, and I met him in Regent Street with hardly a coat to his back or a boot to his foot.\n\n\"'Here we are, Jack,' says he, touching me on the arm; 'we'll be as good as a family to you. There's two of us, me and my son, and you can have the keeping of us. If you don't\u2014it's a fine, law-abiding country is England, and there's always a policeman within hail.'\n\n\"Well, down they came to the west country, there was no shaking them off, and there they have lived rent free on my best land ever since. There was no rest for me, no peace, no forgetfulness; turn where I would, there was his cunning, grinning face at my elbow. It grew worse as Alice grew up, for he soon saw I was more afraid of her knowing my past than of the police. Whatever he wanted he must have, and whatever it was I gave him without question, land, money, houses, until at last he asked a thing which I could not give. He asked for Alice.\n\n\"His son, you see, had grown up, and so had my girl, and as I was known to be in weak health, it seemed a fine stroke to him that his lad should step into the whole property. But there I was firm. I would not have his cursed stock mixed with mine; not that I had any dislike to the lad, but his blood was in him, and that was enough. I stood firm. McCarthy threatened. I braved him to do his worst. We were to meet at the pool midway between our houses to talk it over.\n\n\"When we went down there I found him talking with his son, so I smoked a cigar and waited behind a tree until he should be alone. But as I listened to his talk all that was black and bitter in me seemed to come uppermost. He was urging his son to marry my daughter with as little regard for what she might think as if she were a slut from off the streets. It drove me mad to think that I and all that I held most dear should be in the power of such a man as this. Could I not snap the bond? I was already a dying and a desperate man. Though clear of mind and fairly strong of limb, I knew that my own fate was sealed. But my memory and my girl! Both could be saved if I could but silence that foul tongue. I did it, Mr. Holmes. I would do it again. Deeply as I have sinned, I have led a life of martyrdom to atone for it. But that my girl should be entangled in the same meshes which held me was more than I could suffer. I struck him down with no more compunction than if he had been some foul and venomous beast. His cry brought back his son; but I had gained the cover of the wood, though I was forced to go back to fetch the cloak which I had dropped in my flight. That is the true story, gentlemen, of all that occurred.\"\n\n\"Well, it is not for me to judge you,\" said Holmes as the old man signed the statement which had been drawn out. \"I pray that we may never be exposed to such a temptation.\"\n\n\"I pray not, sir. And what do you intend to do?\"\n\n\"In view of your health, nothing. You are yourself aware that you will soon have to answer for your deed at a higher court than the Assizes. I will keep your confession, and if McCarthy is condemned I shall be forced to use it. If not, it shall never be seen by mortal eye; and your secret, whether you be alive or dead, shall be safe with us.\"\n\n\"Farewell, then,\" said the old man solemnly. \"Your own deathbeds, when they come, will be the easier for the thought of the peace which you have given to mine.\" Tottering and shaking in all his giant frame, he stumbled slowly from the room.\n\n\"God help us!\" said Holmes after a long silence. \"Why does fate play such tricks with poor, helpless worms? I never hear of such a case as this that I do not think of Baxter's words, and say, 'There, but for the grace of God, goes Sherlock Holmes.'\"\n\nJames McCarthy was acquitted at the Assizes on the strength of a number of objections which had been drawn out by Holmes and submitted to the defending counsel. Old Turner lived for seven months after our interview, but he is now dead; and there is every prospect that the son and daughter may come to live happily together in ignorance of the black cloud which rests upon their past." + }, + { + "title": "THE FIVE ORANGE PIPS", + "text": "When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years '82 and '90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave. Some, however, have already gained publicity through the papers, and others have not offered a field for those peculiar qualities which my friend possessed in so high a degree, and which it is the object of these papers to illustrate. Some, too, have baffled his analytical skill, and would be as narratives, beginnings without an ending, while others have been but partially cleared up, and have their explanations founded rather upon conjecture and surmise than on that absolute logical proof which was so dear to him. There is, however, one of these last which was so remarkable in its details and so startling in its results that I am tempted to give some account of it in spite of the fact that there are points in connection with it which never have been, and probably never will be, entirely cleared up.\n\nThe year '87 furnished us with a long series of cases of greater or less interest, of which I retain the records. Among my headings under this one twelve months I find an account of the adventure of the Paradol Chamber, of the Amateur Mendicant Society, who held a luxurious club in the lower vault of a furniture warehouse, of the facts connected with the loss of the British bark Sophy Anderson, of the singular adventures of the Grice Patersons in the island of Uffa, and finally of the Camberwell poisoning case. In the latter, as may be remembered, Sherlock Holmes was able, by winding up the dead man's watch, to prove that it had been wound up two hours before, and that therefore the deceased had gone to bed within that time\u2014a deduction which was of the greatest importance in clearing up the case. All these I may sketch out at some future date, but none of them present such singular features as the strange train of circumstances which I have now taken up my pen to describe.\n\nIt was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life, and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell's fine sea-stories until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves. My wife was on a visit to her mother's, and for a few days I was a dweller once more in my old quarters at Baker Street.\n\n\"Why,\" said I, glancing up at my companion, \"that was surely the bell. Who could come to-night? Some friend of yours, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Except yourself I have none,\" he answered. \"I do not encourage visitors.\"\n\n\"A client, then?\"\n\n\"If so, it is a serious case. Nothing less would bring a man out on such a day and at such an hour. But I take it that it is more likely to be some crony of the landlady's.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes was wrong in his conjecture, however, for there came a step in the passage and a tapping at the door. He stretched out his long arm to turn the lamp away from himself and towards the vacant chair upon which a newcomer must sit. \"Come in!\" said he.\n\nThe man who entered was young, some two-and-twenty at the outside, well-groomed and trimly clad, with something of refinement and delicacy in his bearing. The streaming umbrella which he held in his hand, and his long shining waterproof told of the fierce weather through which he had come. He looked about him anxiously in the glare of the lamp, and I could see that his face was pale and his eyes heavy, like those of a man who is weighed down with some great anxiety.\n\n\"I owe you an apology,\" he said, raising his golden pince-nez to his eyes. \"I trust that I am not intruding. I fear that I have brought some traces of the storm and rain into your snug chamber.\"\n\n\"Give me your coat and umbrella,\" said Holmes. \"They may rest here on the hook and will be dry presently. You have come up from the south-west, I see.\"\n\n\"Yes, from Horsham.\"\n\n\"That clay and chalk mixture which I see upon your toe caps is quite distinctive.\"\n\n\"I have come for advice.\"\n\n\"That is easily got.\"\n\n\"And help.\"\n\n\"That is not always so easy.\"\n\n\"I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes. I heard from Major Prendergast how you saved him in the Tankerville Club scandal.\"\n\n\"Ah, of course. He was wrongfully accused of cheating at cards.\"\n\n\"He said that you could solve anything.\"\n\n\"He said too much.\"\n\n\"That you are never beaten.\"\n\n\"I have been beaten four times\u2014three times by men, and once by a woman.\"\n\n\"But what is that compared with the number of your successes?\"\n\n\"It is true that I have been generally successful.\"\n\n\"Then you may be so with me.\"\n\n\"I beg that you will draw your chair up to the fire and favour me with some details as to your case.\"\n\n\"It is no ordinary one.\"\n\n\"None of those which come to me are. I am the last court of appeal.\"\n\n\"And yet I question, sir, whether, in all your experience, you have ever listened to a more mysterious and inexplicable chain of events than those which have happened in my own family.\"\n\n\"You fill me with interest,\" said Holmes. \"Pray give us the essential facts from the commencement, and I can afterwards question you as to those details which seem to me to be most important.\"\n\nThe young man pulled his chair up and pushed his wet feet out towards the blaze.\n\n\"My name,\" said he, \"is John Openshaw, but my own affairs have, as far as I can understand, little to do with this awful business. It is a hereditary matter; so in order to give you an idea of the facts, I must go back to the commencement of the affair.\n\n\"You must know that my grandfather had two sons\u2014my uncle Elias and my father Joseph. My father had a small factory at Coventry, which he enlarged at the time of the invention of bicycling. He was a patentee of the Openshaw unbreakable tire, and his business met with such success that he was able to sell it and to retire upon a handsome competence.\n\n\"My uncle Elias emigrated to America when he was a young man and became a planter in Florida, where he was reported to have done very well. At the time of the war he fought in Jackson's army, and afterwards under Hood, where he rose to be a colonel. When Lee laid down his arms my uncle returned to his plantation, where he remained for three or four years. About 1869 or 1870 he came back to Europe and took a small estate in Sussex, near Horsham. He had made a very considerable fortune in the States, and his reason for leaving them was his aversion to the negroes, and his dislike of the Republican policy in extending the franchise to them. He was a singular man, fierce and quick-tempered, very foul-mouthed when he was angry, and of a most retiring disposition. During all the years that he lived at Horsham, I doubt if ever he set foot in the town. He had a garden and two or three fields round his house, and there he would take his exercise, though very often for weeks on end he would never leave his room. He drank a great deal of brandy and smoked very heavily, but he would see no society and did not want any friends, not even his own brother.\n\n\"He didn't mind me; in fact he took a fancy to me, for at the time when he saw me first I was a youngster of twelve or so. This would be in the year 1878, after he had been eight or nine years in England. He begged my father to let me live with him, and he was very kind to me in his way. When he was sober he used to be fond of playing backgammon and draughts with me and he would make me his representative both with the servants and with the tradespeople, so that by the time that I was sixteen I was quite master of the house. I kept all the keys and could go where I liked and do what I liked, so long as I did not disturb him in his privacy. There was one singular exception, however, for he had a single room, a lumber-room up among the attics, which was invariably locked, and which he would never permit either me or anyone else to enter. With a boy's curiosity I have peeped through the keyhole, but I was never able to see more than such a collection of old trunks and bundles as would be expected in such a room.\n\n\"One day\u2014it was in March, 1883\u2014a letter with a foreign stamp lay upon the table in front of the colonel's plate. It was not a common thing for him to receive letters, for his bills were all paid in ready money, and he had no friends of any sort. 'From India!' said he as he took it up, 'Pondicherry postmark! What can this be?' Opening it hurriedly, out there jumped five little dried orange pips, which pattered down upon his plate. I began to laugh at this, but the laugh was struck from my lips at the sight of his face. His lip had fallen, his eyes were protruding, his skin the colour of putty, and he glared at the envelope which he still held in his trembling hand, 'K. K. K.!' he shrieked, and then, 'My God, my God, my sins have overtaken me!'\n\n\"'What is it, uncle?' I cried.\n\n\"'Death,' said he, and rising from the table he retired to his room, leaving me palpitating with horror. I took up the envelope and saw scrawled in red ink upon the inner flap, just above the gum, the letter K three times repeated. There was nothing else save the five dried pips. What could be the reason of his overpowering terror? I left the breakfast-table, and as I ascended the stair I met him coming down with an old rusty key, which must have belonged to the attic, in one hand, and a small brass box, like a cashbox, in the other.\n\n\"'They may do what they like, but I'll checkmate them still,' said he with an oath. 'Tell Mary that I shall want a fire in my room to-day, and send down to Fordham, the Horsham lawyer.'\n\n\"I did as he ordered, and when the lawyer arrived I was asked to step up to the room. The fire was burning brightly, and in the grate there was a mass of black, fluffy ashes, as of burned paper, while the brass box stood open and empty beside it. As I glanced at the box I noticed, with a start, that upon the lid was printed the treble K which I had read in the morning upon the envelope.\n\n\"'I wish you, John,' said my uncle, 'to witness my will. I leave my estate, with all its advantages and all its disadvantages, to my brother, your father, whence it will, no doubt, descend to you. If you can enjoy it in peace, well and good! If you find you cannot, take my advice, my boy, and leave it to your deadliest enemy. I am sorry to give you such a two-edged thing, but I can't say what turn things are going to take. Kindly sign the paper where Mr. Fordham shows you.'\n\n\"I signed the paper as directed, and the lawyer took it away with him. The singular incident made, as you may think, the deepest impression upon me, and I pondered over it and turned it every way in my mind without being able to make anything of it. Yet I could not shake off the vague feeling of dread which it left behind, though the sensation grew less keen as the weeks passed, and nothing happened to disturb the usual routine of our lives. I could see a change in my uncle, however. He drank more than ever, and he was less inclined for any sort of society. Most of his time he would spend in his room, with the door locked upon the inside, but sometimes he would emerge in a sort of drunken frenzy and would burst out of the house and tear about the garden with a revolver in his hand, screaming out that he was afraid of no man, and that he was not to be cooped up, like a sheep in a pen, by man or devil. When these hot fits were over, however, he would rush tumultuously in at the door and lock and bar it behind him, like a man who can brazen it out no longer against the terror which lies at the roots of his soul. At such times I have seen his face, even on a cold day, glisten with moisture, as though it were new raised from a basin.\n\n\"Well, to come to an end of the matter, Mr. Holmes, and not to abuse your patience, there came a night when he made one of those drunken sallies from which he never came back. We found him, when we went to search for him, face downward in a little green-scummed pool, which lay at the foot of the garden. There was no sign of any violence, and the water was but two feet deep, so that the jury, having regard to his known eccentricity, brought in a verdict of 'suicide.' But I, who knew how he winced from the very thought of death, had much ado to persuade myself that he had gone out of his way to meet it. The matter passed, however, and my father entered into possession of the estate, and of some \u00a314,000, which lay to his credit at the bank.\"\n\n\"One moment,\" Holmes interposed, \"your statement is, I foresee, one of the most remarkable to which I have ever listened. Let me have the date of the reception by your uncle of the letter, and the date of his supposed suicide.\"\n\n\"The letter arrived on March 10, 1883. His death was seven weeks later, upon the night of May 2d.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Pray proceed.\"\n\n\"When my father took over the Horsham property, he, at my request, made a careful examination of the attic, which had been always locked up. We found the brass box there, although its contents had been destroyed. On the inside of the cover was a paper label, with the initials of K. K. K. repeated upon it, and 'Letters, memoranda, receipts, and a register' written beneath. These, we presume, indicated the nature of the papers which had been destroyed by Colonel Openshaw. For the rest, there was nothing of much importance in the attic save a great many scattered papers and note-books bearing upon my uncle's life in America. Some of them were of the war time and showed that he had done his duty well and had borne the repute of a brave soldier. Others were of a date during the reconstruction of the Southern states, and were mostly concerned with politics, for he had evidently taken a strong part in opposing the carpet-bag politicians who had been sent down from the North.\n\n\"Well, it was the beginning of '84 when my father came to live at Horsham, and all went as well as possible with us until the January of '85. On the fourth day after the new year I heard my father give a sharp cry of surprise as we sat together at the breakfast-table. There he was, sitting with a newly opened envelope in one hand and five dried orange pips in the outstretched palm of the other one. He had always laughed at what he called my cock-and-bull story about the colonel, but he looked very scared and puzzled now that the same thing had come upon himself.\n\n\"'Why, what on earth does this mean, John?' he stammered.\n\n\"My heart had turned to lead. 'It is K. K. K.,' said I.\n\n\"He looked inside the envelope. 'So it is,' he cried. 'Here are the very letters. But what is this written above them?'\n\n\"'Put the papers on the sundial,' I read, peeping over his shoulder.\n\n\"'What papers? What sundial?' he asked.\n\n\"'The sundial in the garden. There is no other,' said I; 'but the papers must be those that are destroyed.'\n\n\"'Pooh!' said he, gripping hard at his courage. 'We are in a civilized land here, and we can't have tomfoolery of this. Where does the thing come from?'\n\n\"'From Dundee,' I answered, glancing at the postmark.\n\n\"'Some preposterous practical joke,' said he. 'What have I to do with sundials and papers? I shall take no notice of such nonsense.'\n\n\"'I should certainly speak to the police,' I said.\n\n\"'And be laughed at for my pains. Nothing of the sort.'\n\n\"'Then let me do so?'\n\n\"'No, I forbid you. I won't have a fuss made about such nonsense.'\n\n\"It was in vain to argue with him, for he was a very obstinate man. I went about, however, with a heart which was full of forebodings.\n\n\"On the third day after the coming of the letter my father went from home to visit an old friend of his, Major Freebody, who is in command of one of the forts upon Portsdown Hill. I was glad that he should go, for it seemed to me that he was farther from danger when he was away from home. In that, however, I was in error. Upon the second day of his absence I received a telegram from the major, imploring me to come at once. My father had fallen over one of the deep chalk-pits which abound in the neighbourhood, and was lying senseless, with a shattered skull. I hurried to him, but he passed away without having ever recovered his consciousness. He had, as it appears, been returning from Fareham in the twilight, and as the country was unknown to him, and the chalk-pit un-fenced, the jury had no hesitation in bringing in a verdict of 'death from accidental causes.' Carefully as I examined every fact connected with his death, I was unable to find anything which could suggest the idea of murder. There were no signs of violence, no footmarks, no robbery, no record of strangers having been seen upon the roads. And yet I need not tell you that my mind was far from at ease, and that I was well-nigh certain that some foul plot had been woven round him.\n\n\"In this sinister way I came into my inheritance. You will ask me why I did not dispose of it? I answer, because I was well convinced that our troubles were in some way dependent upon an incident in my uncle's life, and that the danger would be as pressing in one house as in another.\n\n\"It was in January, '85, that my poor father met his end, and two years and eight months have elapsed since then. During that time I have lived happily at Horsham, and I had begun to hope that this curse had passed way from the family, and that it had ended with the last generation. I had begun to take comfort too soon, however; yesterday morning the blow fell in the very shape in which it had come upon my father.\"\n\nThe young man took from his waistcoat a crumpled envelope, and turning to the table he shook out upon it five little dried orange pips.\n\n\"This is the envelope,\" he continued. \"The postmark is London\u2014eastern division. Within are the very words which were upon my father's last message: 'K. K. K.'; and then 'Put the papers on the sundial.'\"\n\n\"What have you done?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Nothing?\"\n\n\"To tell the truth\"\u2014he sank his face into his thin, white hands\u2014\"I have felt helpless. I have felt like one of those poor rabbits when the snake is writhing towards it. I seem to be in the grasp of some resistless, inexorable evil, which no foresight and no precautions can guard against.\"\n\n\"Tut! tut!\" cried Sherlock Holmes. \"You must act, man, or you are lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for despair.\"\n\n\"I have seen the police.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"But they listened to my story with a smile. I am convinced that the inspector has formed the opinion that the letters are all practical jokes, and that the deaths of my relations were really accidents, as the jury stated, and were not to be connected with the warnings.\"\n\nHolmes shook his clenched hands in the air. \"Incredible imbecility!\" he cried.\n\n\"They have, however, allowed me a policeman, who may remain in the house with me.\"\n\n\"Has he come with you to-night?\"\n\n\"No. His orders were to stay in the house.\"\n\nAgain Holmes raved in the air.\n\n\"Why did you come to me,\" he cried. \"and, above all, why did you not come at once?\"\n\n\"I did not know. It was only to-day that I spoke to Major Prendergast about my troubles and was advised by him to come to you.\"\n\n\"It is really two days since you had the letter. We should have acted before this. You have no further evidence, I suppose, than that which you have placed before us\u2014no suggestive detail which might help us?\"\n\n\"There is one thing,\" said John Openshaw. He rummaged in his coat pocket, and, drawing out a piece of discoloured, blue-tinted paper, he laid it out upon the table. \"I have some remembrance,\" said he, \"that on the day when my uncle burned the papers I observed that the small, unburned margins which lay amid the ashes were of this particular colour. I found this single sheet upon the floor of his room, and I am inclined to think that it may be one of the papers which has, perhaps, fluttered out from among the others, and in that way has escaped destruction. Beyond the mention of pips, I do not see that it helps us much. I think myself that it is a page from some private diary. The writing is undoubtedly my uncle's.\"\n\nHolmes moved the lamp, and we both bent over the sheet of paper, which showed by its ragged edge that it had indeed been torn from a book. It was headed, \"March, 1869,\" and beneath were the following enigmatical notices:\n\n4th. Hudson came. Same old platform.\n\n7th. Set the pips on McCauley, Paramore, and John Swain, of St. Augustine.\n\n9th. McCauley cleared.\n\n10th. John Swain cleared.\n\n12th. Visited Paramore. All well.\n\n\"Thank you!\" said Holmes, folding up the paper and returning it to our visitor. \"And now you must on no account lose another instant. We cannot spare time even to discuss what you have told me. You must get home instantly and act.\"\n\n\"What shall I do?\"\n\n\"There is but one thing to do. It must be done at once. You must put this piece of paper which you have shown us into the brass box which you have described. You must also put in a note to say that all the other papers were burned by your uncle, and that this is the only one which remains. You must assert that in such words as will carry conviction with them. Having done this, you must at once put the box out upon the sundial, as directed. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Entirely.\"\n\n\"Do not think of revenge, or anything of the sort, at present. I think that we may gain that by means of the law; but we have our web to weave, while theirs is already woven. The first consideration is to remove the pressing danger which threatens you. The second is to clear up the mystery and to punish the guilty parties.\"\n\n\"I thank you,\" said the young man, rising and pulling on his overcoat. \"You have given me fresh life and hope. I shall certainly do as you advise.\"\n\n\"Do not lose an instant. And, above all, take care of yourself in the meanwhile, for I do not think that there can be a doubt that you are threatened by a very real and imminent danger. How do you go back?\"\n\n\"By train from Waterloo.\"\n\n\"It is not yet nine. The streets will be crowded, so I trust that you may be in safety. And yet you cannot guard yourself too closely.\"\n\n\"I am armed.\"\n\n\"That is well. To-morrow I shall set to work upon your case.\"\n\n\"I shall see you at Horsham, then?\"\n\n\"No, your secret lies in London. It is there that I shall seek it.\"\n\n\"Then I shall call upon you in a day, or in two days, with news as to the box and the papers. I shall take your advice in every particular.\" He shook hands with us and took his leave. Outside the wind still screamed and the rain splashed and pattered against the windows. This strange, wild story seemed to have come to us from amid the mad elements\u2014blown in upon us like a sheet of sea-weed in a gale\u2014and now to have been reabsorbed by them once more.\n\nSherlock Holmes sat for some time in silence, with his head sunk forward and his eyes bent upon the red glow of the fire. Then he lit his pipe, and leaning back in his chair he watched the blue smoke-rings as they chased each other up to the ceiling.\n\n\"I think, Watson,\" he remarked at last, \"that of all our cases we have had none more fantastic than this.\"\n\n\"Save, perhaps, the Sign of Four.\"\n\n\"Well, yes. Save, perhaps, that. And yet this John Openshaw seems to me to be walking amid even greater perils than did the Sholtos.\"\n\n\"But have you,\" I asked, \"formed any definite conception as to what these perils are?\"\n\n\"There can be no question as to their nature,\" he answered.\n\n\"Then what are they? Who is this K. K. K., and why does he pursue this unhappy family?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. \"The ideal reasoner,\" he remarked, \"would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilize all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclop\u00e6dias, is a somewhatrare accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do. If I remember rightly, you on one occasion, in the early days of our friendship, defined my limits in a very precise fashion.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered, laughing. \"it was a singular document. Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the main points of my analysis.\"\n\nHolmes grinned at the last item. \"Well,\" he said, \"I say now, as I said then, that a man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. Now, for such a case as the one which has been submitted to us to-night, we need certainly to muster all our resources. Kindly hand me down the letter K of the American Encyclop\u00e6dia which stands upon the shelf beside you. Thank you. Now let us consider the situation and see what may be deduced from it. In the first place, we may start with a strong presumption that Colonel Openshaw had some very strong reason for leaving America. Men at his time of life do not change all their habits and exchange willingly the charming climate of Florida for the lonely life of an English provincial town. His extreme love of solitude in England suggests the idea that he was in fear of someone or something, so we may assume as a working hypothesis that it was fear of someone or something which drove him from America. As to what it was he feared, we can only deduce that by considering the formidable letters which were received by himself and his successors. Did you remark the postmarks of those letters?\"\n\n\"The first was from Pondicherry, the second from Dundee, and the third from London.\"\n\n\"From East London. What do you deduce from that?\"\n\n\"They are all seaports. That the writer was on board of a ship.\"\n\n\"Excellent. We have already a clue. There can be no doubt that the probability\u2014the strong probability\u2014is that the writer was on board of a ship. And now let us consider another point. In the case of Pondicherry, seven weeks elapsed between the threat and its fulfillment, in Dundee it was only some three or four days. Does that suggest anything?\"\n\n\"A greater distance to travel.\"\n\n\"But the letter had also a greater distance to come.\"\n\n\"Then I do not see the point.\"\n\n\"There is at least a presumption that the vessel in which the man or men are is a sailing-ship. It looks as if they always sent their singular warning or token before them when starting upon their mission. You see how quickly the deed followed the sign when it came from Dundee. If they had come from Pondicherry in a steamer they would have arrived almost as soon as their letter. But, as a matter of fact, seven weeks elapsed. I think that those seven weeks represented the difference between the mail-boat which brought the letter and the sailing vessel which brought the writer.\"\n\n\"It is possible.\"\n\n\"More than that. It is probable. And now you see the deadly urgency of this new case, and why I urged young Openshaw to caution. The blow has always fallen at the end of the time which it would take the senders to travel the distance. But this one comes from London, and therefore we cannot count upon delay.\"\n\n\"Good God!\" I cried. \"What can it mean, this relentless persecution?\"\n\n\"The papers which Openshaw carried are obviously of vital importance to the person or persons in the sailing-ship. I think that it is quite clear that there must be more than one of them. A single man could not have carried out two deaths in such a way as to deceive a coroner's jury. There must have been several in it, and they must have been men of resource and determination. Their papers they mean to have, be the holder of them who it may. In this way you see K. K. K. ceases to be the initials of an individual and becomes the badge of a society.\"\n\n\"But of what society?\"\n\n\"Have you never\u2014\" said Sherlock Holmes, bending forward and sinking his voice\u2014\"have you never heard of the Ku Klux Klan?\"\n\n\"I never have.\"\n\nHolmes turned over the leaves of the book upon his knee. \"Here it is,\" said he presently:\n\n\"Ku Klux Klan. A name derived from the fanciful resemblance to the sound produced by cocking a rifle. This terrible secret society was formed by some ex-Confederate soldiers in the Southern states after the Civil War, and it rapidly formed local branches in different parts of the country, notably in Tennessee, Louisiana, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Its power was used for political purposes, principally for the terrorizing of the negro voters and the murdering and driving from the country of those who were opposed to its views. Its outrages were usually preceded by a warning sent to the marked man in some fantastic but generally recognized shape\u2014a sprig of oak-leaves in some parts, melon seeds or orange pips in others. On receiving this the victim might either openly abjure his former ways, or might fly from the country. If he braved the matter out, death would unfailingly come upon him, and usually in some strange and unforeseen manner. So perfect was the organization of the society, and so systematic its methods, that there is hardly a case upon record where any man succeeded in braving it with impunity, or in which any of its outrages were traced home to the perpetrators. For some years the organization flourished in spite of the efforts of the United States government and of the better classes of the community in the South. Eventually, in the year 1869, the movement rather suddenly collapsed, although there have been sporadic outbreaks of the same sort since that date.\n\n\"You will observe,\" said Holmes, laying down the volume, \"that the sudden breaking up of the society was coincident with the disappearance of Openshaw from America with their papers. It may well have been cause and effect. It is no wonder that he and his family have some of the more implacable spirits upon their track. You can understand that this register and diary may implicate some of the first men in the South, and that there may be many who will not sleep easy at night until it is recovered.\"\n\n\"Then the page we have seen\u2014\"\n\n\"Is such as we might expect. It ran, if I remember right, 'sent the pips to A, B, and C'\u2014that is, sent the society's warning to them. Then there are successive entries that A and B cleared, or left the country, and finally that C was visited, with, I fear, a sinister result for C. Well, I think, Doctor, that we may let some light into this dark place, and I believe that the only chance young Openshaw has in the meantime is to do what I have told him. There is nothing more to be said or to be done to-night, so hand me over my violin and let us try to forget for half an hour the miserable weather and the still more miserable ways of our fellowmen.\"\n\nIt had cleared in the morning, and the sun was shining with a subdued brightness through the dim veil which hangs over the great city. Sherlock Holmes was already at breakfast when I came down.\n\n\"You will excuse me for not waiting for you,\" said he; \"I have, I foresee, a very busy day before me in looking into this case of young Openshaw's.\"\n\n\"What steps will you take?\" I asked.\n\n\"It will very much depend upon the results of my first inquiries. I may have to go down to Horsham, after all.\"\n\n\"You will not go there first?\"\n\n\"No, I shall commence with the City. Just ring the bell and the maid will bring up your coffee.\"\n\nAs I waited, I lifted the unopened newspaper from the table and glanced my eye over it. It rested upon a heading which sent a chill to my heart.\n\n\"Holmes,\" I cried, \"you are too late.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said he, laying down his cup, \"I feared as much. How was it done?\" He spoke calmly, but I could see that he was deeply moved.\n\n\"My eye caught the name of Openshaw, and the heading 'Tragedy Near Waterloo Bridge.' Here is the account:\n\n\"Between nine and ten last night Police-Constable Cook, of the H Division, on duty near Waterloo Bridge, heard a cry for help and a splash in the water. The night, however, was extremely dark and stormy, so that, in spite of the help of several passers-by, it was quite impossible to effect a rescue. The alarm, however, was given, and, by the aid of the water-police, the body was eventually recovered. It proved to be that of a young gentleman whose name, as it appears from an envelope which was found in his pocket, was John Openshaw, and whose residence is near Horsham. It is conjectured that he may have been hurrying down to catch the last train from Waterloo Station, and that in his haste and the extreme darkness he missed his path and walked over the edge of one of the small landing-places for river steamboats. The body exhibited no traces of violence, and there can be no doubt that the deceased had been the victim of an unfortunate accident, which should have the effect of calling the attention of the authorities to the condition of the riverside landing-stages.\"\n\nWe sat in silence for some minutes, Holmes more depressed and shaken than I had ever seen him.\n\n\"That hurts my pride, Watson,\" he said at last. \"It is a petty feeling, no doubt, but it hurts my pride. It becomes a personal matter with me now, and, if God sends me health, I shall set my hand upon this gang. That he should come to me for help, and that I should send him away to his death\u2014!\" He sprang from his chair and paced about the room in uncontrollable agitation, with a flush upon his sallow cheeks and a nervous clasping and unclasping of his long thin hands.\n\n\"They must be cunning devils,\" he exclaimed at last. \"How could they have decoyed him down there? The Embankment is not on the direct line to the station. The bridge, no doubt, was too crowded, even on such a night, for their purpose. Well, Watson, we shall see who will win in the long run. I am going out now!\"\n\n\"To the police?\"\n\n\"No; I shall be my own police. When I have spun the web they may take the flies, but not before.\"\n\nAll day I was engaged in my professional work, and it was late in the evening before I returned to Baker Street. Sherlock Holmes had not come back yet. It was nearly ten o'clock before he entered, looking pale and worn. He walked up to the sideboard, and tearing a piece from the loaf he devoured it voraciously, washing it down with a long draught of water.\n\n\"You are hungry,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Starving. It had escaped my memory. I have had nothing since breakfast.\"\n\n\"Nothing?\"\n\n\"Not a bite. I had no time to think of it.\"\n\n\"And how have you succeeded?\"\n\n\"Well.\"\n\n\"You have a clue?\"\n\n\"I have them in the hollow of my hand. Young Openshaw shall not long remain unavenged. Why, Watson, let us put their own devilish trademark upon them. It is well thought of!\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe took an orange from the cupboard, and tearing it to pieces he squeezed out the pips upon the table. Of these he took five and thrust them into an envelope. On the inside of the flap he wrote \"S. H. for J. O.\" Then he sealed it and addressed it to \"Captain James Calhoun, Bark Lone Star, Savannah, Georgia.\"\n\n\"That will await him when he enters port,\" said he, chuckling. \"It may give him a sleepless night. He will find it as sure a precursor of his fate as Openshaw did before him.\"\n\n\"And who is this Captain Calhoun?\"\n\n\"The leader of the gang. I shall have the others, but he first.\"\n\n\"How did you trace it, then?\"\n\nHe took a large sheet of paper from his pocket, all covered with dates and names.\n\n\"I have spent the whole day,\" said he, \"over Lloyd's registers and files of the old papers, following the future career of every vessel which touched at Pondicherry in January and February in '83. There were thirty-six ships of fair tonnage which were reported there during those months. Of these, one, the Lone Star, instantly attracted my attention, since, although it was reported as having cleared from London, the name is that which is given to one of the states of the Union.\"\n\n\"Texas, I think.\"\n\n\"I was not and am not sure which; but I knew that the ship must have an American origin.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"I searched the Dundee records, and when I found that the bark Lone Star was there in January, '85, my suspicion became a certainty. I then inquired as to the vessels which lay at present in the port of London.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"The Lone Star had arrived here last week. I went down to the Albert Dock and found that she had been taken down the river by the early tide this morning, homeward bound to Savannah. I wired to Gravesend and learned that she had passed some time ago, and as the wind is easterly I have no doubt that she is now past the Goodwins and not very far from the Isle of Wight.\"\n\n\"What will you do, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, I have my hand upon him. He and the two mates, are, as I learn, the only native-born Americans in the ship. The others are Finns and Germans. I know, also, that they were all three away from the ship last night. I had it from the stevedore who has been loading their cargo. By the time that their sailing-ship reaches Savannah the mail-boat will have carried this letter, and the cable will have informed the police of Savannah that these three gentlemen are badly wanted here upon a charge of murder.\"\n\nThere is ever a flaw, however, in the best laid of human plans, and the murderers of John Openshaw were never to receive the orange pips which would show them that another, as cunning and as resolute as themselves, was upon their track. Very long and very severe were the equinoctial gales that year. We waited long for news of the Lone Star of Savannah, but none ever reached us. We did at last hear that somewhere far out in the Atlantic a shattered stern-post of the boat was seen swinging in the trough of a wave, with the letters \"L. S.\" carved upon it, and that is all which we shall ever know of the fate of the Lone Star." + }, + { + "title": "THE MAN WITH THE TWISTED LIP", + "text": "Isa Whitney, brother of the late Elias Whitney, D.D., Principal of the Theological College of St. George's, was much addicted to opium. The habit grew upon him, as I understand, from some foolish freak when he was at college; for having read De Quincey's description of his dreams and sensations, he had drenched his tobacco with laudanum in an attempt to produce the same effects. He found, as so many more have done, that the practice is easier to attain than to get rid of, and for many years he continued to be a slave to the drug, an object of mingled horror and pity to his friends and relatives. I can see him now, with yellow, pasty face, drooping lids, and pin-point pupils, all huddled in a chair, the wreck and ruin of a noble man.\n\nOne night\u2014it was in June, '89\u2014there came a ring to my bell, about the hour when a man gives his first yawn and glances at the clock. I sat up in my chair, and my wife laid her needle-work down in her lap and made a little face of disappointment.\n\n\"A patient!\" said she. \"You'll have to go out.\"\n\nI groaned, for I was newly come back from a weary day.\n\nWe heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps upon the linoleum. Our own door flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff, with a black veil, entered the room.\n\n\"You will excuse my calling so late,\" she began, and then, suddenly losing her self-control, she ran forward, threw her arms about my wife's neck, and sobbed upon her shoulder. \"Oh, I'm in such trouble!\" she cried; \"I do so want a little help.\"\n\n\"Why,\" said my wife, pulling up her veil, \"it is Kate Whitney. How you startled me, Kate! I had not an idea who you were when you came in.\"\n\n\"I didn't know what to do, so I came straight to you.\" That was always the way. Folk who were in grief came to my wife like birds to a lighthouse.\n\n\"It was very sweet of you to come. Now, you must have some wine and water, and sit here comfortably and tell us all about it. Or should you rather that I sent James off to bed?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, no! I want the doctor's advice and help too. It's about Isa. He has not been home for two days. I am so frightened about him!\"\n\nIt was not the first time that she had spoken to us of her husband's trouble, to me as a doctor, to my wife as an old friend and school companion. We soothed and comforted her by such words as we could find. Did she know where her husband was? Was it possible that we could bring him back to her?\n\nIt seems that it was. She had the surest information that of late he had, when the fit was on him, made use of an opium den in the farthest east of the City. Hitherto his orgies had always been confined to one day, and he had come back, twitching and shattered, in the evening. But now the spell had been upon him eight-and-forty hours, and he lay there, doubtless among the dregs of the docks, breathing in the poison or sleeping off the effects. There he was to be found, she was sure of it, at the Bar of Gold, in Upper Swandam Lane. But what was she to do? How could she, a young and timid woman, make her way into such a place and pluck her husband out from among the ruffians who surrounded him?\n\nThere was the case, and of course there was but one way out of it. Might I not escort her to this place? And then, as a second thought, why should she come at all? I was Isa Whitney's medical adviser, and as such I had influence over him. I could manage it better if I were alone. I promised her on my word that I would send him home in a cab within two hours if he were indeed at the address which she had given me. And so in ten minutes I had left my armchair and cheery sitting-room behind me, and was speeding eastward in a hansom on a strange errand, as it seemed to me at the time, though the future only could show how strange it was to be.\n\nBut there was no great difficulty in the first stage of my adventure. Upper Swandam Lane is a vile alley lurking behind the high wharves which line the north side of the river, to the east of London Bridge. Between a slop-shop and a gin-shop, approached by a steep flight of steps leading down to a black gap like the mouth of a cave, I found the den of which I was in search. Ordering my cab to wait, I passed down the steps, worn hollow in the centre by the ceaseless tread of drunken feet; and by the light of a flickering oil-lamp above the door I found the latch and made my way into a long, low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the forecastle of an emigrant ship.\n\nThrough the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies lying in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the newcomer. Out of the black shadows there glimmered little red circles of light, now bright, now faint, as the burning poison waxed or waned in the bowls of the metal pipes. The most lay silent, but some muttered to themselves, and others talked together in a strange, low, monotonous voice, their conversation coming in gushes, and then suddenly tailing off into silence, each mumbling out his own thoughts and paying little heed to the words of his neighbour. At the farther end was a small brazier of burning charcoal, beside which on a three-legged wooden stool there sat a tall, thin old man, with his jaw resting upon his two fists, and his elbows upon his knees, staring into the fire.\n\nAs I entered, a sallow Malay attendant had hurried up with a pipe for me and a supply of the drug, beckoning me to an empty berth.\n\n\"Thank you. I have not come to stay,\" said I. \"There is a friend of mine here, Mr. Isa Whitney, and I wish to speak with him.\"\n\nThere was a movement and an exclamation from my right, and peering through the gloom I saw Whitney, pale, haggard, and unkempt, staring out at me.\n\n\"My God! It's Watson,\" said he. He was in a pitiable state of reaction, with every nerve in a twitter. \"I say, Watson, what o'clock is it?\"\n\n\"Nearly eleven.\"\n\n\"Of what day?\"\n\n\"Of Friday, June 19th.\"\n\n\"Good heavens! I thought it was Wednesday. It is Wednesday. What d'you want to frighten the chap for?\" He sank his face onto his arms and began to sob in a high treble key.\n\n\"I tell you that it is Friday, man. Your wife has been waiting this two days for you. You should be ashamed of yourself!\"\n\n\"So I am. But you've got mixed, Watson, for I have only been here a few hours, three pipes, four pipes\u2014I forget how many. But I'll go home with you. I wouldn't frighten Kate\u2014poor little Kate. Give me your hand! Have you a cab?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have one waiting.\"\n\n\"Then I shall go in it. But I must owe something. Find what I owe, Watson. I am all off colour. I can do nothing for myself.\"\n\nI walked down the narrow passage between the double row of sleepers, holding my breath to keep out the vile, stupefying fumes of the drug, and looking about for the manager. As I passed the tall man who sat by the brazier I felt a sudden pluck at my skirt, and a low voice whispered, \"Walk past me, and then look back at me.\" The words fell quite distinctly upon my ear. I glanced down. They could only have come from the old man at my side, and yet he sat now as absorbed as ever, very thin, very wrinkled, bent with age, an opium pipe dangling down from between his knees, as though it had dropped in sheer lassitude from his fingers. I took two steps forward and looked back. It took all my self-control to prevent me from breaking out into a cry of astonishment. He had turned his back so that none could see him but I. His form had filled out, his wrinkles were gone, the dull eyes had regained their fire, and there, sitting by the fire and grinning at my surprise, was none other than Sherlock Holmes. He made a slight motion to me to approach him, and instantly, as he turned his face half round to the company once more, subsided into a doddering, loose-lipped senility.\n\n\"Holmes!\" I whispered, \"what on earth are you doing in this den?\"\n\n\"As low as you can,\" he answered; \"I have excellent ears. If you would have the great kindness to get rid of that sottish friend of yours I should be exceedingly glad to have a little talk with you.\"\n\n\"I have a cab outside.\"\n\n\"Then pray send him home in it. You may safely trust him, for he appears to be too limp to get into any mischief. I should recommend you also to send a note by the cabman to your wife to say that you have thrown in your lot with me. If you will wait outside, I shall be with you in five minutes.\"\n\nIt was difficult to refuse any of Sherlock Holmes's requests, for they were always so exceedingly definite, and put forward with such a quiet air of mastery. I felt, however, that when Whitney was once confined in the cab my mission was practically accomplished; and for the rest, I could not wish anything better than to be associated with my friend in one of those singular adventures which were the normal condition of his existence. In a few minutes I had written my note, paid Whitney's bill, led him out to the cab, and seen him driven through the darkness. In a very short time a decrepit figure had emerged from the opium den, and I was walking down the street with Sherlock Holmes. For two streets he shuffled along with a bent back and an uncertain foot. Then, glancing quickly round, he straightened himself out and burst into a hearty fit of laughter.\n\n\"I suppose, Watson,\" said he, \"that you imagine that I have added opium-smoking to cocaine injections, and all the other little weaknesses on which you have favoured me with your medical views.\"\n\n\"I was certainly surprised to find you there.\"\n\n\"But not more so than I to find you.\"\n\n\"I came to find a friend.\"\n\n\"And I to find an enemy.\"\n\n\"An enemy?\"\n\n\"Yes; one of my natural enemies, or, shall I say, my natural prey. Briefly, Watson, I am in the midst of a very remarkable inquiry, and I have hoped to find a clue in the incoherent ramblings of these sots, as I have done before now. Had I been recognized in that den my life would not have been worth an hour's purchase; for I have used it before now for my own purposes, and the rascally lascar who runs it has sworn to have vengeance upon me. There is a trap-door at the back of that building, near the corner of Paul's Wharf, which could tell some strange tales of what has passed through it upon the moonless nights.\"\n\n\"What! You do not mean bodies?\"\n\n\"Ay, bodies, Watson. We should be rich men if we had \u00a31000 for every poor devil who has been done to death in that den. It is the vilest murder-trap on the whole riverside, and I fear that Neville St. Clair has entered it never to leave it more. But our trap should be here.\" He put his two forefingers between his teeth and whistled shrilly\u2014a signal which was answered by a similar whistle from the distance, followed shortly by the rattle of wheels and the clink of horses' hoofs.\n\n\"Now, Watson,\" said Holmes, as a tall dog-cart dashed up through the gloom, throwing out two golden tunnels of yellow light from its side lanterns. \"You'll come with me, won't you?\"\n\n\"If I can be of use.\"\n\n\"Oh, a trusty comrade is always of use; and a chronicler still more so. My room at The Cedars is a double-bedded one.\"\n\n\"The Cedars?\"\n\n\"Yes; that is Mr. St. Clair's house. I am staying there while I conduct the inquiry.\"\n\n\"Where is it, then?\"\n\n\"Near Lee, in Kent. We have a seven-mile drive before us.\"\n\n\"But I am all in the dark.\"\n\n\"Of course you are. You'll know all about it presently. Jump up here. All right, John; we shall not need you. Here's half a crown. Look out for me to-morrow, about eleven. Give her her head. So long, then!\"\n\nHe flicked the horse with his whip, and we dashed away through the endless succession of sombre and deserted streets, which widened gradually, until we were flying across a broad balustraded bridge, with the murky river flowing sluggishly beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him, curious to learn what this new quest might be which seemed to tax his powers so sorely, and yet afraid to break in upon the current of his thoughts. We had driven several miles, and were beginning to get to the fringe of the belt of suburban villas, when he shook himself, shrugged his shoulders, and lit up his pipe with the air of a man who has satisfied himself that he is acting for the best.\n\n\"You have a grand gift of silence, Watson,\" said he. \"It makes you quite invaluable as a companion. 'Pon my word, it is a great thing for me to have someone to talk to, for my own thoughts are not over-pleasant. I was wondering what I should say to this dear little woman to-night when she meets me at the door.\"\n\n\"You forget that I know nothing about it.\"\n\n\"I shall just have time to tell you the facts of the case before we get to Lee. It seems absurdly simple, and yet, somehow, I can get nothing to go upon. There's plenty of thread, no doubt, but I can't get the end of it into my hand. Now, I'll state the case clearly and concisely to you, Watson, and maybe you can see a spark where all is dark to me.\"\n\n\"Proceed, then.\"\n\n\"Some years ago\u2014to be definite, in May, 1884\u2014there came to Lee a gentleman, Neville St. Clair by name, who appeared to have plenty of money. He took a large villa, laid out the grounds very nicely, and lived generally in good style. By degrees he made friends in the neighbourhood, and in 1887 he married the daughter of a local brewer, by whom he now has two children. He had no occupation, but was interested in several companies and went into town as a rule in the morning, returning by the 5:14 from Cannon Street every night. Mr. St. Clair is now thirty-seven years of age, is a man of temperate habits, a good husband, a very affectionate father, and a man who is popular with all who know him. I may add that his whole debts at the present moment, as far as we have been able to ascertain, amount to \u00a388 l0s., while he has \u00a3220 standing to his credit in the Capital and Counties Bank. There is no reason, therefore, to think that money troubles have been weighing upon his mind.\n\n\"Last Monday Mr. Neville St. Clair went into town rather earlier than usual, remarking before he started that he had two important commissions to perform, and that he would bring his little boy home a box of bricks. Now, by the merest chance, his wife received a telegram upon this same Monday, very shortly after his departure, to the effect that a small parcel of considerable value which she had been expecting was waiting for her at the offices of the Aberdeen Shipping Company. Now, if you are well up in your London, you will know that the office of the company is in Fresno Street, which branches out of Upper Swandam Lane, where you found me to-night. Mrs. St. Clair had her lunch, started for the City, did some shopping, proceeded to the company's office, got her packet, and found herself at exactly 4:35 walking through Swandam Lane on her way back to the station. Have you followed me so far?\"\n\n\"It is very clear.\"\n\n\"If you remember, Monday was an exceedingly hot day, and Mrs. St. Clair walked slowly, glancing about in the hope of seeing a cab, as she did not like the neighbourhood in which she found herself. While she was walking in this way down Swandam Lane, she suddenly heard an ejaculation or cry, and was struck cold to see her husband looking down at her and, as it seemed to her, beckoning to her from a second-floor window. The window was open, and she distinctly saw his face, which she describes as being terribly agitated. He waved his hands frantically to her, and then vanished from the window so suddenly that it seemed to her that he had been plucked back by some irresistible force from behind. One singular point which struck her quick feminine eye was that although he wore some dark coat, such as he had started to town in, he had on neither collar nor necktie.\n\n\"Convinced that something was amiss with him, she rushed down the steps\u2014for the house was none other than the opium den in which you found me to-night\u2014and running through the front room she attempted to ascend the stairs which led to the first floor. At the foot of the stairs, however, she met this lascar scoundrel of whom I have spoken, who thrust her back and, aided by a Dane, who acts as assistant there, pushed her out into the street. Filled with the most maddening doubts and fears, she rushed down the lane and, by rare good-fortune, met in Fresno Street a number of constables with an inspector, all on their way to their beat. The inspector and two men accompanied her back, and in spite of the continued resistance of the proprietor, they made their way to the room in which Mr. St. Clair had last been seen. There was no sign of him there. In fact, in the whole of that floor there was no one to be found save a crippled wretch of hideous aspect, who, it seems, made his home there. Both he and the lascar stoutly swore that no one else had been in the front room during the afternoon. So determined was their denial that the inspector was staggered, and had almost come to believe that Mrs. St. Clair had been deluded when, with a cry, she sprang at a small deal box which lay upon the table and tore the lid from it. Out there fell a cascade of children's bricks. It was the toy which he had promised to bring home.\n\n\"This discovery, and the evident confusion which the cripple showed, made the inspector realize that the matter was serious. The rooms were carefully examined, and results all pointed to an abominable crime. The front room was plainly furnished as a sitting-room and led into a small bedroom, which looked out upon the back of one of the wharves. Between the wharf and the bedroom window is a narrow strip, which is dry at low tide but is covered at high tide with at least four and a half feet of water. The bedroom window was a broad one and opened from below. On examination traces of blood were to be seen upon the window-sill, and several scattered drops were visible upon the wooden floor of the bedroom. Thrust away behind a curtain in the front room were all the clothes of Mr. Neville St. Clair, with the exception of his coat. His boots, his socks, his hat, and his watch\u2014all were there. There were no signs of violence upon any of these garments, and there were no other traces of Mr. Neville St. Clair. Out of the window he must apparently have gone, for no other exit could be discovered, and the ominous bloodstains upon the sill gave little promise that he could save himself by swimming, for the tide was at its very highest at the moment of the tragedy.\n\n\"And now as to the villains who seemed to be immediately implicated in the matter. The lascar was known to be a man of the vilest antecedents, but as, by Mrs. St. Clair's story, he was known to have been at the foot of the stair within a very few seconds of her husband's appearance at the window, he could hardly have been more than an accessory to the crime. His defense was one of absolute ignorance, and he protested that he had no knowledge as to the doings of Hugh Boone, his lodger, and that he could not account in any way for the presence of the missing gentleman's clothes.\n\n\"So much for the lascar manager. Now for the sinister cripple who lives upon the second floor of the opium den, and who was certainly the last human being whose eyes rested upon Neville St. Clair. His name is Hugh Boone, and his hideous face is one which is familiar to every man who goes much to the City. He is a professional beggar, though in order to avoid the police regulations he pretends to a small trade in wax vestas. Some little distance down Threadneedle Street, upon the left-hand side, there is, as you may have remarked, a small angle in the wall. Here it is that this creature takes his daily seat, cross-legged, with his tiny stock of matches on his lap, and as he is a piteous spectacle a small rain of charity descends into the greasy leather cap which lies upon the pavement beside him. I have watched the fellow more than once before ever I thought of making his professional acquaintance, and I have been surprised at the harvest which he has reaped in a short time. His appearance, you see, is so remarkable that no one can pass him without observing him. A shock of orange hair, a pale face disfigured by a horrible scar, which, by its contraction, has turned up the outer edge of his upper lip, a bulldog chin, and a pair of very penetrating dark eyes, which present a singular contrast to the colour of his hair, all mark him out from amid the common crowd of mendicants, and so, too, does his wit, for he is ever ready with a reply to any piece of chaff which may be thrown at him by the passers-by. This is the man whom we now learn to have been the lodger at the opium den, and to have been the last man to see the gentleman of whom we are in quest.\"\n\n\"But a cripple!\" said I. \"What could he have done single-handed against a man in the prime of life?\"\n\n\"He is a cripple in the sense that he walks with a limp; but in other respects he appears to be a powerful and well-nurtured man. Surely your medical experience would tell you, Watson, that weakness in one limb is often compensated for by exceptional strength in the others.\"\n\n\"Pray continue your narrative.\"\n\n\"Mrs. St. Clair had fainted at the sight of the blood upon the window, and she was escorted home in a cab by the police, as her presence could be of no help to them in their investigations. Inspector Barton, who had charge of the case, made a very careful examination of the premises, but without finding anything which threw any light upon the matter. One mistake had been made in not arresting Boone instantly, as he was allowed some few minutes during which he might have communicated with his friend the lascar, but this fault was soon remedied, and he was seized and searched, without anything being found which could incriminate him. There were, it is true, some bloodstains upon his right shirt-sleeve, but he pointed to his ring-finger, which had been cut near the nail, and explained that the bleeding came from there, adding that he had been to the window not long before, and that the stains which had been observed there came doubtless from the same source. He denied strenuously having ever seen Mr. Neville St. Clair and swore that the presence of the clothes in his room was as much a mystery to him as to the police. As to Mrs. St. Clair's assertion that she had actually seen her husband at the window, he declared that she must have been either mad or dreaming. He was removed, loudly protesting, to the police-station, while the inspector remained upon the premises in the hope that the ebbing tide might afford some fresh clue.\n\n\"And it did, though they hardly found upon the mud-bank what they had feared to find. It was Neville St. Clair's coat, and not Neville St. Clair, which lay uncovered as the tide receded. And what do you think they found in the pockets?\"\n\n\"I cannot imagine.\"\n\n\"No, I don't think you would guess. Every pocket stuffed with pennies and half-pennies\u2014421 pennies and 270 half-pennies. It was no wonder that it had not been swept away by the tide. But a human body is a different matter. There is a fierce eddy between the wharf and the house. It seemed likely enough that the weighted coat had remained when the stripped body had been sucked away into the river.\"\n\n\"But I understand that all the other clothes were found in the room. Would the body be dressed in a coat alone?\"\n\n\"No, sir, but the facts might be met speciously enough. Suppose that this man Boone had thrust Neville St. Clair through the window, there is no human eye which could have seen the deed. What would he do then? It would of course instantly strike him that he must get rid of the tell-tale garments. He would seize the coat, then, and be in the act of throwing it out, when it would occur to him that it would swim and not sink. He has little time, for he has heard the scuffle downstairs when the wife tried to force her way up, and perhaps he has already heard from his lascar confederate that the police are hurrying up the street. There is not an instant to be lost. He rushes to some secret hoard, where he has accumulated the fruits of his beggary, and he stuffs all the coins upon which he can lay his hands into the pockets to make sure of the coat's sinking. He throws it out, and would have done the same with the other garments had not he heard the rush of steps below, and only just had time to close the window when the police appeared.\"\n\n\"It certainly sounds feasible.\"\n\n\"Well, we will take it as a working hypothesis for want of a better. Boone, as I have told you, was arrested and taken to the station, but it could not be shown that there had ever before been anything against him. He had for years been known as a professional beggar, but his life appeared to have been a very quiet and innocent one. There the matter stands at present, and the questions which have to be solved\u2014what Neville St. Clair was doing in the opium den, what happened to him when there, where is he now, and what Hugh Boone had to do with his disappearance\u2014are all as far from a solution as ever. I confess that I cannot recall any case within my experience which looked at the first glance so simple and yet which presented such difficulties.\"\n\nWhile Sherlock Holmes had been detailing this singular series of events, we had been whirling through the outskirts of the great town until the last straggling houses had been left behind, and we rattled along with a country hedge upon either side of us. Just as he finished, however, we drove through two scattered villages, where a few lights still glimmered in the windows.\n\n\"We are on the outskirts of Lee,\" said my companion. \"We have touched on three English counties in our short drive, starting in Middlesex, passing over an angle of Surrey, and ending in Kent. See that light among the trees? That is The Cedars, and beside that lamp sits a woman whose anxious ears have already, I have little doubt, caught the clink of our horse's feet.\"\n\n\"But why are you not conducting the case from Baker Street?\" I asked.\n\n\"Because there are many inquiries which must be made out here. Mrs. St. Clair has most kindly put two rooms at my disposal, and you may rest assured that she will have nothing but a welcome for my friend and colleague. I hate to meet her, Watson, when I have no news of her husband. Here we are. Whoa, there, whoa!\"\n\nWe had pulled up in front of a large villa which stood within its own grounds. A stable-boy had run out to the horse's head, and springing, down I followed Holmes up the small, winding gravel-drive which led to the house. As we approached, the door flew open, and a little blonde woman stood in the opening, clad in some sort of light mousseline de soie, with a touch of fluffy pink chiffon at her neck and wrists. She stood with her figure outlined against the flood of light, one hand upon the door, one half-raised in her eagerness, her body slightly bent, her head and face protruded, with eager eyes and parted lips, a standing question.\n\n\"Well?\" she cried, \"well?\" And then, seeing that there were two of us, she gave a cry of hope which sank into a groan as she saw that my companion shook his head and shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"No good news?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"No bad?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Thank God for that. But come in. You must be weary, for you have had a long day.\"\n\n\"This is my friend, Dr. Watson. He has been of most vital use to me in several of my cases, and a lucky chance has made it possible for me to bring him out and associate him with this investigation.\"\n\n\"I am delighted to see you,\" said she, pressing my hand warmly. \"You will, I am sure, forgive anything that may be wanting in our arrangements, when you consider the blow which has come so suddenly upon us.\"\n\n\"My dear madam,\" said I, \"I am an old campaigner, and if I were not I can very well see that no apology is needed. If I can be of any assistance, either to you or to my friend here, I shall be indeed happy.\"\n\n\"Now, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said the lady as we entered a well-lit dining-room, upon the table of which a cold supper had been laid out, \"I should very much like to ask you one or two plain questions, to which I beg that you will give a plain answer.\"\n\n\"Certainly, madam.\"\n\n\"Do not trouble about my feelings. I am not hysterical, not given to fainting. I simply wish to hear your real, real opinion.\"\n\n\"Upon what point?\"\n\n\"In your heart of hearts, do you think that Neville is alive?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes seemed to be embarrassed by the question. \"Frankly, now!\" she repeated, standing upon the rug and looking keenly down at him as he leaned back in a basket-chair.\n\n\"Frankly, then, madam, I do not.\"\n\n\"You think that he is dead?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Murdered?\"\n\n\"I don't say that. Perhaps.\"\n\n\"And on what day did he meet his death?\"\n\n\"On Monday.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps, Mr. Holmes, you will be good enough to explain how it is that I have received a letter from him to-day.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes sprang out of his chair as if he had been galvanized. \"What!\" he roared.\n\n\"Yes, to-day.\" She stood smiling, holding up a little slip of paper in the air.\n\n\"May I see it?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\nHe snatched it from her in his eagerness, and smoothing it out upon the table he drew over the lamp and examined it intently. I had left my chair and was gazing at it over his shoulder. The envelope was a very coarse one and was stamped with the Gravesend postmark and with the date of that very day, or rather of the day before, for it was considerably after midnight.\n\n\"Coarse writing,\" murmured Holmes. \"Surely this is not your husband's writing, madam.\"\n\n\"No, but the enclosure is.\"\n\n\"I perceive also that whoever addressed the envelope had to go and inquire as to the address.\"\n\n\"How can you tell that?\"\n\n\"The name, you see, is in perfectly black ink, which has dried itself. The rest is of the grayish colour, which shows that blotting-paper has been used. If it had been written straight off, and then blotted, none would be of a deep black shade. This man has written the name, and there has then been a pause before he wrote the address, which can only mean that he was not familiar with it. It is, of course, a trifle, but there is nothing so important as trifles. Let us now see the letter. Ha! there has been an enclosure here!\"\n\n\"Yes, there was a ring. His signet-ring.\"\n\n\"And you are sure that this is your husband's hand?\"\n\n\"One of his hands.\"\n\n\"One?\"\n\n\"His hand when he wrote hurriedly. It is very unlike his usual writing, and yet I know it well.\"\n\n\"Dearest do not be frightened. All will come well. There is a huge error which it may take some little time to rectify. Wait in patience.\n\n\"NEVILLE.\n\nWritten in pencil upon the fly-leaf of a book, octavo size, no water-mark. Hum! Posted to-day in Gravesend by a man with a dirty thumb. Ha! And the flap has been gummed, if I am not very much in error, by a person who had been chewing tobacco. And you have no doubt that it is your husband's hand, madam?\"\n\n\"None. Neville wrote those words.\"\n\n\"And they were posted to-day at Gravesend. Well, Mrs. St. Clair, the clouds lighten, though I should not venture to say that the danger is over.\"\n\n\"But he must be alive, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Unless this is a clever forgery to put us on the wrong scent. The ring, after all, proves nothing. It may have been taken from him.\"\n\n\"No, no; it is, it is his very own writing!\"\n\n\"Very well. It may, however, have been written on Monday and only posted to-day.\"\n\n\"That is possible.\"\n\n\"If so, much may have happened between.\"\n\n\"Oh, you must not discourage me, Mr. Holmes. I know that all is well with him. There is so keen a sympathy between us that I should know if evil came upon him. On the very day that I saw him last he cut himself in the bedroom, and yet I in the dining-room rushed upstairs instantly with the utmost certainty that something had happened. Do you think that I would respond to such a trifle and yet be ignorant of his death?\"\n\n\"I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner. And in this letter you certainly have a very strong piece of evidence to corroborate your view. But if your husband is alive and able to write letters, why should he remain away from you?\"\n\n\"I cannot imagine. It is unthinkable.\"\n\n\"And on Monday he made no remarks before leaving you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"And you were surprised to see him in Swandam Lane?\"\n\n\"Very much so.\"\n\n\"Was the window open?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then he might have called to you?\"\n\n\"He might.\"\n\n\"He only, as I understand, gave an inarticulate cry?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"A call for help, you thought?\"\n\n\"Yes. He waved his hands.\"\n\n\"But it might have been a cry of surprise. Astonishment at the unexpected sight of you might cause him to throw up his hands?\"\n\n\"It is possible.\"\n\n\"And you thought he was pulled back?\"\n\n\"He disappeared so suddenly.\"\n\n\"He might have leaped back. You did not see anyone else in the room?\"\n\n\"No, but this horrible man confessed to having been there, and the lascar was at the foot of the stairs.\"\n\n\"Quite so. Your husband, as far as you could see, had his ordinary clothes on?\"\n\n\"But without his collar or tie. I distinctly saw his bare throat.\"\n\n\"Had he ever spoken of Swandam Lane?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Had he ever showed any signs of having taken opium?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mrs. St. Clair. Those are the principal points about which I wished to be absolutely clear. We shall now have a little supper and then retire, for we may have a very busy day to-morrow.\"\n\nA large and comfortable double-bedded room had been placed at our disposal, and I was quickly between the sheets, for I was weary after my night of adventure. Sherlock Holmes was a man, however, who, when he had an unsolved problem upon his mind, would go for days, and even for a week, without rest, turning it over, rearranging his facts, looking at it from every point of view until he had either fathomed it or convinced himself that his data were insufficient. It was soon evident to me that he was now preparing for an all-night sitting. He took off his coat and waistcoat, put on a large blue dressing-gown, and then wandered about the room collecting pillows from his bed and cushions from the sofa and armchairs. With these he constructed a sort of Eastern divan, upon which he perched himself cross-legged, with an ounce of shag tobacco and a box of matches laid out in front of him. In the dim light of the lamp I saw him sitting there, an old briar pipe between his lips, his eyes fixed vacantly upon the corner of the ceiling, the blue smoke curling up from him, silent, motionless, with the light shining upon his strong-set aquiline features. So he sat as I dropped off to sleep, and so he sat when a sudden ejaculation caused me to wake up, and I found the summer sun shining into the apartment. The pipe was still between his lips, the smoke still curled upward, and the room was full of a dense tobacco haze, but nothing remained of the heap of shag which I had seen upon the previous night.\n\n\"Awake, Watson?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Game for a morning drive?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"Then dress. No one is stirring yet, but I know where the stable-boy sleeps, and we shall soon have the trap out.\" He chuckled to himself as he spoke, his eyes twinkled, and he seemed a different man to the sombre thinker of the previous night.\n\nAs I dressed I glanced at my watch. It was no wonder that no one was stirring. It was twenty-five minutes past four. I had hardly finished when Holmes returned with the news that the boy was putting in the horse.\n\n\"I want to test a little theory of mine,\" said he, pulling on his boots. \"I think, Watson, that you are now standing in the presence of one of the most absolute fools in Europe. I deserve to be kicked from here to Charing Cross. But I think I have the key of the affair now.\"\n\n\"And where is it?\" I asked, smiling.\n\n\"In the bathroom,\" he answered. \"Oh, yes, I am not joking,\" he continued, seeing my look of incredulity. \"I have just been there, and I have taken it out, and I have got it in this Gladstone bag. Come on, my boy; and we shall see whether it will not fit the lock.\"\n\nWe made our way downstairs as quietly as possible, and out into the bright morning sunshine. In the road stood our horse and trap, with the half-clad stable-boy waiting at the head. We both sprang in, and away we dashed down the London Road. A few country carts were stirring, bearing in vegetables to the metropolis, but the lines of villas on either side were as silent and lifeless as some city in a dream.\n\n\"It has been in some points a singular case,\" said Holmes, flicking the horse on into a gallop. \"I confess that I have been as blind as a mole, but it is better to learn wisdom late than never to learn it at all.\"\n\nIn town the earliest risers were just beginning to look sleepily from their windows as we drove through the streets of the Surrey side. Passing down the Waterloo Bridge Road we crossed over the river, and dashing up Wellington Street wheeled sharply to the right and found ourselves in Bow Street. Sherlock Holmes was well known to the force, and the two constables at the door saluted him. One of them held the horse's head while the other led us in.\n\n\"Who is on duty?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Inspector Bradstreet, sir.\"\n\n\"Ah, Bradstreet, how are you?\" A tall, stout official had come down the stone-flagged passage, in a peaked cap and frogged jacket. \"I wish to have a quiet word with you, Bradstreet.\"\n\n\"Certainly, Mr. Holmes. Step into my room here.\"\n\nIt was a small, office-like room, with a huge ledger upon the table, and a telephone projecting from the wall. The inspector sat down at his desk.\n\n\"What can I do for you, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I called about that beggarman, Boone\u2014the one who was charged with being concerned in the disappearance of Mr. Neville St. Clair, of Lee.\"\n\n\"Yes. He was brought up and remanded for further inquiries.\"\n\n\"So I heard. You have him here?\"\n\n\"In the cells.\"\n\n\"Is he quiet?\"\n\n\"Oh, he gives no trouble. But he is a dirty scoundrel.\"\n\n\"Dirty?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is all we can do to make him wash his hands, and his face is as black as a tinker's. Well, when once his case has been settled, he will have a regular prison bath; and I think, if you saw him, you would agree with me that he needed it.\"\n\n\"I should like to see him very much.\"\n\n\"Would you? That is easily done. Come this way. You can leave your bag.\"\n\n\"No, I think that I'll take it.\"\n\n\"Very good. Come this way, if you please.\" He led us down a passage, opened a barred door, passed down a winding stair, and brought us to a whitewashed corridor with a line of doors on each side.\n\n\"The third on the right is his,\" said the inspector. \"Here it is!\" He quietly shot back a panel in the upper part of the door and glanced through.\n\n\"He is asleep,\" said he. \"You can see him very well.\"\n\nWe both put our eyes to the grating. The prisoner lay with his face towards us, in a very deep sleep, breathing slowly and heavily. He was a middle-sized man, coarsely clad as became his calling, with a coloured shirt protruding through the rent in his tattered coat. He was, as the inspector had said, extremely dirty, but the grime which covered his face could not conceal its repulsive ugliness. A broad wheal from an old scar ran right across it from eye to chin, and by its contraction had turned up one side of the upper lip, so that three teeth were exposed in a perpetual snarl. A shock of very bright red hair grew low over his eyes and forehead.\n\n\"He's a beauty, isn't he?\" said the inspector.\n\n\"He certainly needs a wash,\" remarked Holmes. \"I had an idea that he might, and I took the liberty of bringing the tools with me.\" He opened the Gladstone bag as he spoke, and took out, to my astonishment, a very large bath-sponge.\n\n\"He! he! You are a funny one,\" chuckled the inspector.\n\n\"Now, if you will have the great goodness to open that door very quietly, we will soon make him cut a much more respectable figure.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know why not,\" said the inspector. \"He doesn't look a credit to the Bow Street cells, does he?\" He slipped his key into the lock, and we all very quietly entered the cell. The sleeper half turned, and then settled down once more into a deep slumber. Holmes stooped to the water-jug, moistened his sponge, and then rubbed it twice vigorously across and down the prisoner's face.\n\n\"Let me introduce you,\" he shouted, \"to Mr. Neville St. Clair, of Lee, in the county of Kent.\"\n\nNever in my life have I seen such a sight. The man's face peeled off under the sponge like the bark from a tree. Gone was the coarse brown tint! Gone, too, was the horrid scar which had seamed it across, and the twisted lip which had given the repulsive sneer to the face! A twitch brought away the tangled red hair, and there, sitting up in his bed, was a pale, sad-faced, refined-looking man, black-haired and smooth-skinned, rubbing his eyes and staring about him with sleepy bewilderment. Then suddenly realizing the exposure, he broke into a scream and threw himself down with his face to the pillow.\n\n\"Great heavens!\" cried the inspector, \"it is, indeed, the missing man. I know him from the photograph.\"\n\nThe prisoner turned with the reckless air of a man who abandons himself to his destiny. \"Be it so,\" said he. \"And pray, what am I charged with?\"\n\n\"With making away with Mr. Neville St.\u2014Oh, come, you can't be charged with that unless they make a case of attempted suicide of it,\" said the inspector with a grin. \"Well, I have been twenty-seven years in the force, but this really takes the cake.\"\n\n\"If I am Mr. Neville St. Clair, then it is obvious that no crime has been committed, and that, therefore, I am illegally detained.\"\n\n\"No crime, but a very great error has been committed,\" said Holmes. \"You would have done better to have trusted your wife.\"\n\n\"It was not the wife; it was the children,\" groaned the prisoner. \"God help me, I would not have them ashamed of their father. My God! What an exposure! What can I do?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes sat down beside him on the couch and patted him kindly on the shoulder.\n\n\"If you leave it to a court of law to clear the matter up,\" said he, \"of course you can hardly avoid publicity. On the other hand, if you convince the police authorities that there is no possible case against you, I do not know that there is any reason that the details should find their way into the papers. Inspector Bradstreet would, I am sure, make notes upon anything which you might tell us and submit it to the proper authorities. The case would then never go into court at all.\"\n\n\"God bless you!\" cried the prisoner passionately. \"I would have endured imprisonment, ay, even execution, rather than have left my miserable secret as a family blot to my children.\n\n\"You are the first who have ever heard my story. My father was a school-master in Chesterfield, where I received an excellent education. I travelled in my youth, took to the stage, and finally became a reporter on an evening paper in London. One day my editor wished to have a series of articles upon begging in the metropolis, and I volunteered to supply them. There was the point from which all my adventures started. It was only by trying begging as an amateur that I could get the facts upon which to base my articles. When an actor I had, of course, learned all the secrets of making up, and had been famous in the green-room for my skill. I took advantage now of my attainments. I painted my face, and to make myself as pitiable as possible I made a good scar and fixed one side of my lip in a twist by the aid of a small slip of flesh-coloured plaster. Then with a red head of hair, and an appropriate dress, I took my station in the business part of the city, ostensibly as a match-seller but really as a beggar. For seven hours I plied my trade, and when I returned home in the evening I found to my surprise that I had received no less than 26s. 4d.\n\n\"I wrote my articles and thought little more of the matter until, some time later, I backed a bill for a friend and had a writ served upon me for \u00a325. I was at my wit's end where to get the money, but a sudden idea came to me. I begged a fortnight's grace from the creditor, asked for a holiday from my employers, and spent the time in begging in the City under my disguise. In ten days I had the money and had paid the debt.\n\n\"Well, you can imagine how hard it was to settle down to arduous work at \u00a32 a week when I knew that I could earn as much in a day by smearing my face with a little paint, laying my cap on the ground, and sitting still. It was a long fight between my pride and the money, but the dollars won at last, and I threw up reporting and sat day after day in the corner which I had first chosen, inspiring pity by my ghastly face and filling my pockets with coppers. Only one man knew my secret. He was the keeper of a low den in which I used to lodge in Swandam Lane, where I could every morning emerge as a squalid beggar and in the evenings transform myself into a well-dressed man about town. This fellow, a lascar, was well paid by me for his rooms, so that I knew that my secret was safe in his possession.\n\n\"Well, very soon I found that I was saving considerable sums of money. I do not mean that any beggar in the streets of London could earn \u00a3700 a year\u2014which is less than my average takings\u2014but I had exceptional advantages in my power of making up, and also in a facility of repartee, which improved by practice and made me quite a recognized character in the City. All day a stream of pennies, varied by silver, poured in upon me, and it was a very bad day in which I failed to take \u00a32.\n\n\"As I grew richer I grew more ambitious, took a house in the country, and eventually married, without anyone having a suspicion as to my real occupation. My dear wife knew that I had business in the City. She little knew what.\n\n\"Last Monday I had finished for the day and was dressing in my room above the opium den when I looked out of my window and saw, to my horror and astonishment, that my wife was standing in the street, with her eyes fixed full upon me. I gave a cry of surprise, threw up my arms to cover my face, and, rushing to my confidant, the lascar, entreated him to prevent anyone from coming up to me. I heard her voice downstairs, but I knew that she could not ascend. Swiftly I threw off my clothes, pulled on those of a beggar, and put on my pigments and wig. Even a wife's eyes could not pierce so complete a disguise. But then it occurred to me that there might be a search in the room, and that the clothes might betray me. I threw open the window, reopening by my violence a small cut which I had inflicted upon myself in the bedroom that morning. Then I seized my coat, which was weighted by the coppers which I had just transferred to it from the leather bag in which I carried my takings. I hurled it out of the window, and it disappeared into the Thames. The other clothes would have followed, but at that moment there was a rush of constables up the stair, and a few minutes after I found, rather, I confess, to my relief, that instead of being identified as Mr. Neville St. Clair, I was arrested as his murderer.\n\n\"I do not know that there is anything else for me to explain. I was determined to preserve my disguise as long as possible, and hence my preference for a dirty face. Knowing that my wife would be terribly anxious, I slipped off my ring and confided it to the lascar at a moment when no constable was watching me, together with a hurried scrawl, telling her that she had no cause to fear.\"\n\n\"That note only reached her yesterday,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Good God! What a week she must have spent!\"\n\n\"The police have watched this lascar,\" said Inspector Bradstreet, \"and I can quite understand that he might find it difficult to post a letter unobserved. Probably he handed it to some sailor customer of his, who forgot all about it for some days.\"\n\n\"That was it,\" said Holmes, nodding approvingly; \"I have no doubt of it. But have you never been prosecuted for begging?\"\n\n\"Many times; but what was a fine to me?\"\n\n\"It must stop here, however,\" said Bradstreet. \"If the police are to hush this thing up, there must be no more of Hugh Boone.\"\n\n\"I have sworn it by the most solemn oaths which a man can take.\"\n\n\"In that case I think that it is probable that no further steps may be taken. But if you are found again, then all must come out. I am sure, Mr. Holmes, that we are very much indebted to you for having cleared the matter up. I wish I knew how you reach your results.\"\n\n\"I reached this one,\" said my friend, \"by sitting upon five pillows and consuming an ounce of shag. I think, Watson, that if we drive to Baker Street we shall just be in time for breakfast.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLUE CARBUNCLE", + "text": "I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season. He was lounging upon the sofa in a purple dressing-gown, a pipe-rack within his reach upon the right, and a pile of crumpled morning papers, evidently newly studied, near at hand. Beside the couch was a wooden chair, and on the angle of the back hung a very seedy and disreputable hard-felt hat, much the worse for wear, and cracked in several places. A lens and a forceps lying upon the seat of the chair suggested that the hat had been suspended in this manner for the purpose of examination.\n\n\"You are engaged,\" said I; \"perhaps I interrupt you.\"\n\n\"Not at all. I am glad to have a friend with whom I can discuss my results. The matter is a perfectly trivial one\"\u2014he jerked his thumb in the direction of the old hat\u2014\"but there are points in connection with it which are not entirely devoid of interest and even of instruction.\"\n\nI seated myself in his armchair and warmed my hands before his crackling fire, for a sharp frost had set in, and the windows were thick with the ice crystals. \"I suppose,\" I remarked, \"that, homely as it looks, this thing has some deadly story linked on to it\u2014that it is the clue which will guide you in the solution of some mystery and the punishment of some crime.\"\n\n\"No, no. No crime,\" said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. \"Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such.\"\n\n\"So much so,\" I remarked, \"that of the last six cases which I have added to my notes, three have been entirely free of any legal crime.\"\n\n\"Precisely. You allude to my attempt to recover the Irene Adler papers, to the singular case of Miss Mary Sutherland, and to the adventure of the man with the twisted lip. Well, I have no doubt that this small matter will fall into the same innocent category. You know Peterson, the commissionaire?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It is to him that this trophy belongs.\"\n\n\"It is his hat.\"\n\n\"No, no; he found it. Its owner is unknown. I beg that you will look upon it not as a battered billycock but as an intellectual problem. And, first, as to how it came here. It arrived upon Christmas morning, in company with a good fat goose, which is, I have no doubt, roasting at this moment in front of Peterson's fire. The facts are these: about four o'clock on Christmas morning, Peterson, who, as you know, is a very honest fellow, was returning from some small jollification and was making his way homeward down Tottenham Court Road. In front of him he saw, in the gaslight, a tallish man, walking with a slight stagger, and carrying a white goose slung over his shoulder. As he reached the corner of Goodge Street, a row broke out between this stranger and a little knot of roughs. One of the latter knocked off the man's hat, on which he raised his stick to defend himself and, swinging it over his head, smashed the shop window behind him. Peterson had rushed forward to protect the stranger from his assailants; but the man, shocked at having broken the window, and seeing an official-looking person in uniform rushing towards him, dropped his goose, took to his heels, and vanished amid the labyrinth of small streets which lie at the back of Tottenham Court Road. The roughs had also fled at the appearance of Peterson, so that he was left in possession of the field of battle, and also of the spoils of victory in the shape of this battered hat and a most unimpeachable Christmas goose.\"\n\n\"Which surely he restored to their owner?\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, there lies the problem. It is true that 'For Mrs. Henry Baker' was printed upon a small card which was tied to the bird's-left leg, and it is also true that the initials 'H. B.' are legible upon the lining of this hat; but as there are some thousands of Bakers, and some hundreds of Henry Bakers in this city of ours, it is not easy to restore lost property to any one of them.\"\n\n\"What, then, did Peterson do?\"\n\n\"He brought round both hat and goose to me on Christmas morning, knowing that even the smallest problems are of interest to me. The goose we retained until this morning, when there were signs that, in spite of the slight frost, it would be well that it should be eaten without unnecessary delay. Its finder has carried it off, therefore, to fulfil the ultimate destiny of a goose, while I continue to retain the hat of the unknown gentleman who lost his Christmas dinner.\"\n\n\"Did he not advertise?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then, what clue could you have as to his identity?\"\n\n\"Only as much as we can deduce.\"\n\n\"From his hat?\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"But you are joking. What can you gather from this old battered felt?\"\n\n\"Here is my lens. You know my methods. What can you gather yourself as to the individuality of the man who has worn this article?\"\n\nI took the tattered object in my hands and turned it over rather ruefully. It was a very ordinary black hat of the usual round shape, hard and much the worse for wear. The lining had been of red silk, but was a good deal discoloured. There was no maker's name; but, as Holmes had remarked, the initials \"H. B.\" were scrawled upon one side. It was pierced in the brim for a hat-securer, but the elastic was missing. For the rest, it was cracked, exceedingly dusty, and spotted in several places, although there seemed to have been some attempt to hide the discoloured patches by smearing them with ink.\n\n\"I can see nothing,\" said I, handing it back to my friend.\n\n\"On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see. You are too timid in drawing your inferences.\"\n\n\"Then, pray tell me what it is that you can infer from this hat?\"\n\nHe picked it up and gazed at it in the peculiar introspective fashion which was characteristic of him. \"It is perhaps less suggestive than it might have been,\" he remarked, \"and yet there are a few inferences which are very distinct; and a few others which represent at least a strong balance of probability. That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\"\n\n\"He has, however, retained some degree of self-respect,\" he continued, disregarding my remonstrance. \"He is a man who leads a sedentary life, goes out little, is out of training entirely, is middle-aged, has grizzled hair which he has had cut within the last few days, and which he anoints with lime-cream. These are the more patent facts which are to be deduced from his hat. Also, by the way, that it is extremely improbable that he has gas laid on in his house.\"\n\n\"You are certainly joking, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Not in the least. Is it possible that even now, when I give you these results, you are unable to see how they are attained?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt that I am very stupid, but I must confess that I am unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was intellectual?\"\n\nFor answer Holmes clapped the hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. \"It is a question of cubic capacity,\" said he; \"a man with so large a brain must have something in it.\"\n\n\"The decline of his fortunes, then?\"\n\n\"This hat is three years old. These flat brims curled at the edge came in then. It is a hat of the very best quality. Look at the band of ribbed silk and the excellent lining. If this man could afford to buy so expensive a hat three years ago, and has had no hat since, then he has assuredly gone down in the world.\"\n\n\"Well, that is clear enough, certainly. But how about the foresight and the moral retrogression?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes laughed. \"Here is the foresight,\" said he, putting his finger upon the little disc and loop of the hat-securer. \"They are never sold upon hats. If this man ordered one, it is a sign of a certain amount of foresight, since he went out of his way to take this precaution against the wind. But since we see that he has broken the elastic and has not troubled to replace it, it is obvious that he has less foresight now than formerly, which is a distinct proof of a weakening nature. On the other hand, he has endeavoured to conceal some of these stains upon the felt by daubing them with ink, which is a sign that he has not entirely lost his self-respect.\"\n\n\"Your reasoning is certainly plausible.\"\n\n\"The further points, that he is middle-aged, that his hair is grizzled, that it has been recently cut, and that he uses lime-cream, are all to be gathered from a close examination of the lower part of the lining. The lens discloses a large number of hair-ends, clean cut by the scissors of the barber. They all appear to be adhesive, and there is a distinct odour of lime-cream. This dust, you will observe, is not the gritty, gray dust of the street but the fluffy brown dust of the house, showing that it has been hung up indoors most of the time; while the marks of moisture upon the inside are proof positive that the wearer perspired very freely, and could therefore, hardly be in the best of training.\"\n\n\"But his wife\u2014you said that she had ceased to love him.\"\n\n\"This hat has not been brushed for weeks. When I see you, my dear Watson, with a week's accumulation of dust upon your hat, and when your wife allows you to go out in such a state, I shall fear that you also have been unfortunate enough to lose your wife's affection.\"\n\n\"But he might be a bachelor.\"\n\n\"Nay, he was bringing home the goose as a peace-offering to his wife. Remember the card upon the bird's leg.\"\n\n\"You have an answer to everything. But how on earth do you deduce that the gas is not laid on in his house?\"\n\n\"One tallow stain, or even two, might come by chance; but when I see no less than five, I think that there can be little doubt that the individual must be brought into frequent contact with burning tallow\u2014walks upstairs at night probably with his hat in one hand and a guttering candle in the other. Anyhow, he never got tallow-stains from a gas-jet. Are you satisfied?\"\n\n\"Well, it is very ingenious,\" said I, laughing; \"but since, as you said just now, there has been no crime committed, and no harm done save the loss of a goose, all this seems to be rather a waste of energy.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes had opened his mouth to reply, when the door flew open, and Peterson, the commissionaire, rushed into the apartment with flushed cheeks and the face of a man who is dazed with astonishment.\n\n\"The goose, Mr. Holmes! The goose, sir!\" he gasped.\n\n\"Eh? What of it, then? Has it returned to life and flapped off through the kitchen window?\" Holmes twisted himself round upon the sofa to get a fairer view of the man's excited face.\n\n\"See here, sir! See what my wife found in its crop!\" He held out his hand and displayed upon the centre of the palm a brilliantly scintillating blue stone, rather smaller than a bean in size, but of such purity and radiance that it twinkled like an electric point in the dark hollow of his hand.\n\nSherlock Holmes sat up with a whistle. \"By Jove, Peterson!\" said he, \"this is treasure trove indeed. I suppose you know what you have got?\"\n\n\"A diamond, sir? A precious stone. It cuts into glass as though it were putty.\"\n\n\"It's more than a precious stone. It is the precious stone.\"\n\n\"Not the Countess of Morcar's blue carbuncle!\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"Precisely so. I ought to know its size and shape, seeing that I have read the advertisement about it in The Times every day lately. It is absolutely unique, and its value can only be conjectured, but the reward offered of \u00a31000 is certainly not within a twentieth part of the market price.\"\n\n\"A thousand pounds! Great Lord of mercy!\" The commissionaire plumped down into a chair and stared from one to the other of us.\n\n\"That is the reward, and I have reason to know that there are sentimental considerations in the background which would induce the Countess to part with half her fortune if she could but recover the gem.\"\n\n\"It was lost, if I remember aright, at the Hotel Cosmopolitan,\" I remarked.\n\n\"Precisely so, on December 22d, just five days ago. John Homer, a plumber, was accused of having abstracted it from the lady's jewel-case. The evidence against him was so strong that the case has been referred to the Assizes. I have some account of the matter here, I believe.\" He rummaged amid his newspapers, glancing over the dates, until at last he smoothed one out, doubled it over, and read the following paragraph:\n\n\"Hotel Cosmopolitan Jewel Robbery. John Horner, 26, plumber, was brought up upon the charge of having upon the 22d inst., abstracted from the jewel-case of the Countess of Morcar the valuable gem known as the blue carbuncle. James Ryder, upper-attendant at the hotel, gave his evidence to the effect that he had shown Horner up to the dressing-room of the Countess of Morcar upon the day of the robbery in order that he might solder the second bar of the grate, which was loose. He had remained with Horner some little time, but had finally been called away. On returning, he found that Horner had disappeared, that the bureau had been forced open, and that the small morocco casket in which, as it afterwards transpired, the Countess was accustomed to keep her jewel, was lying empty upon the dressing-table. Ryder instantly gave the alarm, and Horner was arrested the same evening; but the stone could not be found either upon his person or in his rooms. Catherine Cusack, maid to the Countess, deposed to having heard Ryder's cry of dismay on discovering the robbery, and to having rushed into the room, where she found matters as described by the last witness. Inspector Bradstreet, B division, gave evidence as to the arrest of Horner, who struggled frantically, and protested his innocence in the strongest terms. Evidence of a previous conviction for robbery having been given against the prisoner, the magistrate refused to deal summarily with the offence, but referred it to the Assizes. Horner, who had shown signs of intense emotion during the proceedings, fainted away at the conclusion and was carried out of court.\n\n\"Hum! So much for the police-court,\" said Holmes thoughtfully, tossing aside the paper. \"The question for us now to solve is the sequence of events leading from a rifled jewel-case at one end to the crop of a goose in Tottenham Court Road at the other. You see, Watson, our little deductions have suddenly assumed a much more important and less innocent aspect. Here is the stone; the stone came from the goose, and the goose came from Mr. Henry Baker, the gentleman with the bad hat and all the other characteristics with which I have bored you. So now we must set ourselves very seriously to finding this gentleman and ascertaining what part he has played in this little mystery. To do this, we must try the simplest means first, and these lie undoubtedly in an advertisement in all the evening papers. If this fail, I shall have recourse to other methods.\"\n\n\"What will you say?\"\n\n\"Give me a pencil and that slip of paper. Now, then:\n\n\"Found at the corner of Goodge Street, a goose and a black felt hat. Mr. Henry Baker can have the same by applying at 6:30 this evening at 22lB Baker Street.\n\nThat is clear and concise.\"\n\n\"Very. But will he see it?\"\n\n\"Well, he is sure to keep an eye on the papers, since, to a poor man, the loss was a heavy one. He was clearly so scared by his mischance in breaking the window and by the approach of Peterson that he thought of nothing but flight, but since then he must have bitterly regretted the impulse which caused him to drop his bird. Then, again, the introduction of his name will cause him to see it, for everyone who knows him will direct his attention to it. Here you are, Peterson, run down to the advertising agency and have this put in the evening papers.\"\n\n\"In which, sir?\"\n\n\"Oh, in the Globe, Star, Pall Mall, St. James's, Evening News Standard, Echo, and any others that occur to you.\"\n\n\"Very well, sir. And this stone?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, I shall keep the stone. Thank you. And, I say, Peterson, just buy a goose on your way back and leave it here with me, for we must have one to give to this gentleman in place of the one which your family is now devouring.\"\n\nWhen the commissionaire had gone, Holmes took up the stone and held it against the light. \"It's a bonny thing,\" said he. \"Just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil's pet baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed. This stone is not yet twenty years old. It was found in the banks of the Amoy River in southern China and is remarkable in having every characteristic of the carbuncle, save that it is blue in shade instead of ruby red. In spite of its youth, it has already a sinister history. There have been two murders, a vitriol-throwing, a suicide, and several robberies brought about for the sake of this forty-grain weight of crystallized charcoal. Who would think that so pretty a toy would be a purveyor to the gallows and the prison? I'll lock it up in my strong box now and drop a line to the Countess to say that we have it.\"\n\n\"Do you think that this man Horner is innocent?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell.\"\n\n\"Well, then, do you imagine that this other one, Henry Baker, had anything to do with the matter?\"\n\n\"It is, I think, much more likely that Henry Baker is an absolutely innocent man, who had no idea that the bird which he was carrying was of considerably more value than if it were made of solid gold. That, however, I shall determine by a very simple test if we have an answer to our advertisement.\"\n\n\"And you can do nothing until then?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"In that case I shall continue my professional round. But I shall come back in the evening at the hour you have mentioned, for I should like to see the solution of so tangled a business.\"\n\n\"Very glad to see you. I dine at seven. There is a woodcock, I believe. By the way, in view of recent occurrences, perhaps I ought to ask Mrs. Hudson to examine its crop.\"\n\nI had been delayed at a case, and it was a little after half-past six when I found myself in Baker Street once more. As I approached the house I saw a tall man in a Scotch bonnet with a coat which was buttoned up to his chin waiting in the bright semicircle which was thrown from the fan-light. Just as I arrived the door was opened, and we were shown up together to Holmes's room.\n\n\"Mr. Henry Baker, I believe,\" said he, rising from his armchair and greeting his visitor with the easy air of geniality which he could so readilyassume. \"Pray take this chair by the fire, Mr. Baker. It is a cold night, and I observe that your circulation is more adapted for summer than for winter. Ah, Watson, you have just come at the right time. Is that your hat, Mr. Baker?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, that is undoubtedly my hat.\"\n\nHe was a large man with rounded shoulders, a massive head, and a broad, intelligent face, sloping down to a pointed beard of grizzled brown. A touch of red in nose and cheeks, with a slight tremor of his extended hand, recalled Holmes's surmise as to his habits. His rusty black frock-coat was buttoned right up in front, with the collar turned up; and his lank wrists protruded from his sleeves without a sign of cuff or shirt. He spoke in a slow staccato fashion, choosing his words with care, and gave the impression generally of a man of learning and letters who had had ill-usage at the hands of fortune.\n\n\"We have retained these things for some days,\" said Holmes, \"because we expected to see an advertisement from you giving your address. I am at a loss to know now why you did not advertise.\"\n\nOur visitor gave a rather shamefaced laugh. \"Shillings have not been so plentiful with me as they once were,\" he remarked. \"I had no doubt that the gang of roughs who assaulted me had carried off both my hat and the bird. I did not care to spend more money in a hopeless attempt at recovering them.\"\n\n\"Very naturally. By the way, about the bird, we were compelled to eat it.\"\n\n\"To eat it!\" Our visitor half rose from his chair in his excitement.\n\n\"Yes, it would have been of no use to anyone had we not done so. But I presume that this other goose upon the sideboard, which is about the same weight and perfectly fresh, will answer your purpose equally well?\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly, certainly,\" answered Mr. Baker with a sigh of relief.\n\n\"Of course, we still have the feathers, legs, crop, and so on of your own bird, so if you wish\u2014\"\n\nThe man burst into a hearty laugh. \"They might be useful to me as relics of my adventure,\" said he \"but beyond that I can hardly see what use the disjecta membra of my late acquaintance are going to be to me. No, sir, I think that, with your permission, I will confine my attentions to the excellent bird which I perceive upon the sideboard.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes glanced sharply across at me with a slight shrug of his shoulders.\n\n\"There is your hat, then, and there your bird,\" said he. \"By the way, would it bore you to tell me where you got the other one from? I am somewhat of a fowl fancier, and I have seldom seen a better grown goose.\"\n\n\"Certainly, sir,\" said Baker, who had risen and tucked his newly gained property under his arm. \"There are a few of us who frequent the Alpha Inn, near the Museum\u2014we are to be found in the Museum itself during the day, you understand. This year our good host, Windigate by name, instituted a goose club, by which, on consideration of some few pence every week, we were each to receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the rest is familiar to you. I am much indebted to you, sir, for a Scotch bonnet is fitted neither to my years nor my gravity.\" With a comical pomposity of manner he bowed solemnly to both of us and strode off upon his way.\n\n\"So much for Mr. Henry Baker,\" said Holmes when he had closed the door behind him. \"It is quite certain that he knows nothing whatever about the matter. Are you hungry, Watson?\"\n\n\"Not particularly.\"\n\n\"Then I suggest that we turn our dinner into a supper and follow up this clue while it is still hot.\"\n\n\"By all means.\"\n\nIt was a bitter night, so we drew on our ulsters and wrapped cravats about our throats. Outside, the stars were shining coldly in a cloudless sky, and the breath of the passers-by blew out into smoke like so many pistol shots. Our footfalls rang out crisply and loudly as we swung through the doctors' quarter, Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and so through Wigmore Street into Oxford Street. In a quarter of an hour we were in Bloomsbury at the Alpha Inn, which is a small public-house at the corner of one of the streets which runs down into Holborn. Holmes pushed open the door of the private bar and ordered two glasses of beer from the ruddy-faced, white-aproned landlord.\n\n\"Your beer should be excellent if it is as good as your geese,\" said he.\n\n\"My geese!\" The man seemed surprised.\n\n\"Yes. I was speaking only half an hour ago to Mr. Henry Baker, who was a member of your goose club.\"\n\n\"Ah! yes, I see. But you see, sir, them's not our geese.\"\n\n\"Indeed! Whose, then?\"\n\n\"Well, I got the two dozen from a salesman in Covent Garden.\"\n\n\"Indeed? I know some of them. Which was it?\"\n\n\"Breckinridge is his name.\"\n\n\"Ah! I don't know him. Well, here's your good health, landlord, and prosperity to your house. Good-night.\n\n\"Now for Mr. Breckinridge,\" he continued, buttoning up his coat as we came out into the frosty air. \"Remember, Watson, that though we have so homely a thing as a goose at one end of this chain, we have at the other a man who will certainly get seven years' penal servitude unless we can establish his innocence. It is possible that our inquiry may but confirm his guilt; but, in any case, we have a line of investigation which has been missed by the police, and which a singular chance has placed in our hands. Let us follow it out to the bitter end. Faces to the south, then, and quick march!\"\n\nWe passed across Holborn, down Endell Street, and so through a zigzag of slums to Covent Garden Market. One of the largest stalls bore the name of Breckinridge upon it, and the proprietor, a horsy-looking man, with a sharp face and trim side-whiskers, was helping a boy to put up the shutters.\n\n\"Good-evening. It's a cold night,\" said Holmes.\n\nThe salesman nodded and shot a questioning glance at my companion. \"Sold out of geese, I see,\" continued Holmes, pointing at the bare slabs of marble.\n\n\"Let you have five hundred to-morrow morning.\"\n\n\"That's no good.\"\n\n\"Well, there are some on the stall with the gas-flare.\"\n\n\"Ah, but I was recommended to you.\"\n\n\"Who by?\"\n\n\"The landlord of the Alpha.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes; I sent him a couple of dozen.\"\n\n\"Fine birds they were, too. Now where did you get them from?\"\n\nTo my surprise the question provoked a burst of anger from the salesman.\n\n\"Now, then, mister,\" said he, with his head cocked and his arms akimbo, \"what are you driving at? Let's have it straight, now.\"\n\n\"It is straight enough. I should like to know who sold you the geese which you supplied to the Alpha.\"\n\n\"Well, then, I shan't tell you. So now!\"\n\n\"Oh, it is a matter of no importance; but I don't know why you should be so warm over such a trifle.\"\n\n\"Warm! You'd be as warm, maybe, if you were as pestered as I am. When I pay good money for a good article there should be an end of the business; but it's 'Where are the geese?' and 'Who did you sell the geese to?' and 'What will you take for the geese?' One would think they were the only geese in the world, to hear the fuss that is made over them.\"\n\n\"Well, I have no connection with any other people who have been making inquiries,\" said Holmes carelessly. \"If you won't tell us the bet is off, that is all. But I'm always ready to back my opinion on a matter of fowls, and I have a fiver on it that the bird I ate is country bred.\"\n\n\"Well, then, you've lost your fiver, for it's town bred,\" snapped the salesman.\n\n\"It's nothing of the kind.\"\n\n\"I say it is.\"\n\n\"I don't believe it.\"\n\n\"D'you think you know more about fowls than I, who have handled them ever since I was a nipper? I tell you, all those birds that went to the Alpha were town bred.\"\n\n\"You'll never persuade me to believe that.\"\n\n\"Will you bet, then?\"\n\n\"It's merely taking your money, for I know that I am right. But I'll have a sovereign on with you, just to teach you not to be obstinate.\"\n\nThe salesman chuckled grimly. \"Bring me the books, Bill,\" said he.\n\nThe small boy brought round a small thin volume and a great greasy-backed one, laying them out together beneath the hanging lamp.\n\n\"Now then, Mr. Cocksure,\" said the salesman, \"I thought that I was out of geese, but before I finish you'll find that there is still one left in my shop. You see this little book?\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"That's the list of the folk from whom I buy. D'you see? Well, then, here on this page are the country folk, and the numbers after their names are where their accounts are in the big ledger. Now, then! You see this other page in red ink? Well, that is a list of my town suppliers. Now, look at that third name. Just read it out to me.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Oakshott, 117, Brixton Road\u2014249,\" read Holmes.\n\n\"Quite so. Now turn that up in the ledger.\"\n\nHolmes turned to the page indicated. \"Here you are, 'Mrs. Oakshott, 117, Brixton Road, egg and poultry supplier.'\"\n\n\"Now, then, what's the last entry?\"\n\n\"'December 22d. Twenty-four geese at 7s. 6d.'\"\n\n\"Quite so. There you are. And underneath?\"\n\n\"'Sold to Mr. Windigate of the Alpha at 12s.'\"\n\n\"What have you to say now?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes looked deeply chagrined. He drew a sovereign from his pocket and threw it down upon the slab, turning away with the air of a man whose disgust is too deep for words. A few yards off he stopped under a lamp-post and laughed in the hearty, noiseless fashion which was peculiar to him.\n\n\"When you see a man with whiskers of that cut and the 'Pink 'un' protruding out of his pocket, you can always draw him by a bet,\" said he. \"I daresay that if I had put \u00a3100 down in front of him, that man would not have given me such complete information as was drawn from him by the idea that he was doing me on a wager. Well, Watson, we are, I fancy, nearing the end of our quest, and the only point which remains to be determined is whether we should go on to this Mrs. Oakshott to-night, or whether we should reserve it for to-morrow. It is clear from what that surly fellow said that there are others besides ourselves who are anxious about the matter, and I should\u2014\"\n\nHis remarks were suddenly cut short by a loud hubbub which broke out from the stall which we had just left. Turning round we saw a little rat-faced fellow standing in the centre of the circle of yellow light which was thrown by the swinging lamp, while Breckinridge, the salesman, framed in the door of his stall, was shaking his fists fiercely at the cringing figure.\n\n\"I've had enough of you and your geese,\" he shouted. \"I wish you were all at the devil together. If you come pestering me any more with your silly talk I'll set the dog at you. You bring Mrs. Oakshott here and I'll answer her, but what have you to do with it? Did I buy the geese off you?\"\n\n\"No; but one of them was mine all the same,\" whined the little man.\n\n\"Well, then, ask Mrs. Oakshott for it.\"\n\n\"She told me to ask you.\"\n\n\"Well, you can ask the King of Proosia, for all I care. I've had enough of it. Get out of this!\" He rushed fiercely forward, and the inquirer flitted away into the darkness.\n\n\"Ha! this may save us a visit to Brixton Road,\" whispered Holmes. \"Come with me, and we will see what is to be made of this fellow.\" Striding through the scattered knots of people who lounged round the flaring stalls, my companion speedily overtook the little man and touched him upon the shoulder. He sprang round, and I could see in the gaslight that every vestige of colour had been driven from his face.\n\n\"Who are you, then? What do you want?\" he asked in a quavering voice.\n\n\"You will excuse me,\" said Holmes blandly, \"but I could not help overhearing the questions which you put to the salesman just now. I think that I could be of assistance to you.\"\n\n\"You? Who are you? How could you know anything of the matter?\"\n\n\"My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people don't know.\"\n\n\"But you can know nothing of this?\"\n\n\"Excuse me, I know everything of it. You are endeavouring to trace some geese which were sold by Mrs. Oakshott, of Brixton Road, to a salesman named Breckinridge, by him in turn to Mr. Windigate, of the Alpha, and by him to his club, of which Mr. Henry Baker is a member.\"\n\n\"Oh, sir, you are the very man whom I have longed to meet,\" cried the little fellow with outstretched hands and quivering fingers. \"I can hardly explain to you how interested I am in this matter.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes hailed a four-wheeler which was passing. \"In that case we had better discuss it in a cosy room rather than in this wind-swept market-place,\" said he. \"But pray tell me, before we go farther, who it is that I have the pleasure of assisting.\"\n\nThe man hesitated for an instant. \"My name is John Robinson,\" he answered with a sidelong glance.\n\n\"No, no; the real name,\" said Holmes sweetly. \"It is always awkward doing business with an alias.\"\n\nA flush sprang to the white cheeks of the stranger. \"Well, then,\" said he, \"my real name is James Ryder.\"\n\n\"Precisely so. Head attendant at the Hotel Cosmopolitan. Pray step into the cab, and I shall soon be able to tell you everything which you would wish to know.\"\n\nThe little man stood glancing from one to the other of us with half-frightened, half-hopeful eyes, as one who is not sure whether he is on the verge of a windfall or of a catastrophe. Then he stepped into the cab, and in half an hour we were back in the sitting-room at Baker Street. Nothing had been said during our drive, but the high, thin breathing of our new companion, and the claspings and unclaspings of his hands, spoke of the nervous tension within him.\n\n\"Here we are!\" said Holmes cheerily as we filed into the room. \"The fire looks very seasonable in this weather. You look cold, Mr. Ryder. Pray take the basket-chair. I will just put on my slippers before we settle this little matter of yours. Now, then! You want to know what became of those geese?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Or rather, I fancy, of that goose. It was one bird, I imagine, in which you were interested\u2014white, with a black bar across the tail.\"\n\nRyder quivered with emotion. \"Oh, sir,\" he cried, \"can you tell me where it went to?\"\n\n\"It came here.\"\n\n\"Here?\"\n\n\"Yes, and a most remarkable bird it proved. I don't wonder that you should take an interest in it. It laid an egg after it was dead\u2014the bonniest, brightest little blue egg that ever was seen. I have it here in my museum.\"\n\nOur visitor staggered to his feet and clutched the mantelpiece with his right hand. Holmes unlocked his strong-box and held up the blue carbuncle, which shone out like a star, with a cold, brilliant, many-pointed radiance. Ryder stood glaring with a drawn face, uncertain whether to claim or to disown it.\n\n\"The game's up, Ryder,\" said Holmes quietly. \"Hold up, man, or you'll be into the fire! Give him an arm back into his chair, Watson. He's not got blood enough to go in for felony with impunity. Give him a dash of brandy. So! Now he looks a little more human. What a shrimp it is, to be sure!\"\n\nFor a moment he had staggered and nearly fallen, but the brandy brought a tinge of colour into his cheeks, and he sat staring with frightened eyes at his accuser.\n\n\"I have almost every link in my hands, and all the proofs which I could possibly need, so there is little which you need tell me. Still, that little may as well be cleared up to make the case complete. You had heard, Ryder, of this blue stone of the Countess of Morcar's?\"\n\n\"It was Catherine Cusack who told me of it,\" said he in a crackling voice.\n\n\"I see\u2014her ladyship's waiting-maid. Well, the temptation of sudden wealth so easily acquired was too much for you, as it has been for better men before you; but you were not very scrupulous in the means you used. It seems to me, Ryder, that there is the making of a very pretty villain in you. You knew that this man Horner, the plumber, had been concerned in some such matter before, and that suspicion would rest the more readily upon him. What did you do, then? You made some small job in my lady's room\u2014you and your confederate Cusack\u2014and you managed that he should be the man sent for. Then, when he had left, you rifled the jewel-case, raised the alarm, and had this unfortunate man arrested. You then\u2014\"\n\nRyder threw himself down suddenly upon the rug and clutched at my companion's knees. \"For God's sake, have mercy!\" he shrieked. \"Think of my father! of my mother! It would break their hearts. I never went wrong before! I never will again. I swear it. I'll swear it on a Bible. Oh, don't bring it into court! For Christ's sake, don't!\"\n\n\"Get back into your chair!\" said Holmes sternly. \"It is very well to cringe and crawl now, but you thought little enough of this poor Horner in the dock for a crime of which he knew nothing.\"\n\n\"I will fly, Mr. Holmes. I will leave the country, sir. Then the charge against him will break down.\"\n\n\"Hum! We will talk about that. And now let us hear a true account of the next act. How came the stone into the goose, and how came the goose into the open market? Tell us the truth, for there lies your only hope of safety.\"\n\nRyder passed his tongue over his parched lips. \"I will tell you it just as it happened, sir,\" said he. \"When Horner had been arrested, it seemed to me that it would be best for me to get away with the stone at once, for I did not know at what moment the police might not take it into their heads to search me and my room. There was no place about the hotel where it would be safe. I went out, as if on some commission, and I made for my sister's house. She had married a man named Oakshott, and lived in Brixton Road, where she fattened fowls for the market. All the way there every man I met seemed to me to be a policeman or a detective; and, for all that it was a cold night, the sweat was pouring down my face before I came to the Brixton Road. My sister asked me what was the matter, and why I was so pale; but I told her that I had been upset by the jewel robbery at the hotel. Then I went into the back yard and smoked a pipe, and wondered what it would be best to do.\n\n\"I had a friend once called Maudsley, who went to the bad, and has just been serving his time in Pentonville. One day he had met me, and fell into talk about the ways of thieves, and how they could get rid of what they stole. I knew that he would be true to me, for I knew one or two things about him; so I made up my mind to go right on to Kilburn, where he lived, and take him into my confidence. He would show me how to turn the stone into money. But how to get to him in safety? I thought of the agonies I had gone through in coming from the hotel. I might at any moment be seized and searched, and there would be the stone in my waistcoat pocket. I was leaning against the wall at the time and looking at the geese which were waddling about round my feet, and suddenly an idea came into my head which showed me how I could beat the best detective that ever lived.\n\n\"My sister had told me some weeks before that I might have the pick of her geese for a Christmas present, and I knew that she was always as good as her word. I would take my goose now, and in it I would carry my stone to Kilburn. There was a little shed in the yard, and behind this I drove one of the birds\u2014a fine big one, white, with a barred tail. I caught it, and, prying its bill open, I thrust the stone down its throat as far as my finger could reach. The bird gave a gulp, and I felt the stone pass along its gullet and down into its crop. But the creature flapped and struggled, and out came my sister to know what was the matter. As I turned to speak to her the brute broke loose and fluttered off among the others.\n\n\"'Whatever were you doing with that bird, Jem?' says she.\n\n\"'Well,' said I, 'you said you'd give me one for Christmas, and I was feeling which was the fattest.'\n\n\"'Oh,' says she, 'we've set yours aside for you\u2014Jem's bird, we call it. It's the big white one over yonder. There's twenty-six of them, which makes one for you, and one for us, and two dozen for the market.'\n\n\"'Thank you, Maggie,' says I; 'but if it is all the same to you, I'd rather have that one I was handling just now.'\n\n\"'The other is a good three pound heavier,' said she, 'and we fattened it expressly for you.'\n\n\"'Never mind. I'll have the other, and I'll take it now,' said I.\n\n\"'Oh, just as you like,' said she, a little huffed. 'Which is it you want, then?'\n\n\"'That white one with the barred tail, right in the middle of the flock.'\n\n\"'Oh, very well. Kill it and take it with you.'\n\n\"Well, I did what she said, Mr. Holmes, and I carried the bird all the way to Kilburn. I told my pal what I had done, for he was a man that it was easy to tell a thing like that to. He laughed until he choked, and we got a knife and opened the goose. My heart turned to water, for there was no sign of the stone, and I knew that some terrible mistake had occurred. I left the bird, rushed back to my sister's, and hurried into the back yard. There was not a bird to be seen there.\n\n\"'Where are they all, Maggie?' I cried.\n\n\"'Gone to the dealer's, Jem.'\n\n\"'Which dealer's?'\n\n\"'Breckinridge, of Covent Garden.'\n\n\"'But was there another with a barred tail?' I asked, 'the same as the one I chose?'\n\n\"'Yes, Jem; there were two barred-tailed ones, and I could never tell them apart.'\n\n\"Well, then, of course I saw it all, and I ran off as hard as my feet would carry me to this man Breckinridge; but he had sold the lot at once, and not one word would he tell me as to where they had gone. You heard him yourselves to-night. Well, he has always answered me like that. My sister thinks that I am going mad. Sometimes I think that I am myself. And now\u2014and now I am myself a branded thief, without ever having touched the wealth for which I sold my character. God help me! God help me!\" He burst into convulsive sobbing, with his face buried in his hands.\n\nThere was a long silence, broken only by his heavy breathing, and by the measured tapping of Sherlock Holmes's finger-tips upon the edge of the table. Then my friend rose and threw open the door.\n\n\"Get out!\" said he.\n\n\"What, sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!\"\n\n\"No more words. Get out!\"\n\nAnd no more words were needed. There was a rush, a clatter upon the stairs, the bang of a door, and the crisp rattle of running footfalls from the street.\n\n\"After all, Watson,\" said Holmes, reaching up his hand for his clay pipe, \"I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies. If Horner were in danger it would be another thing; but this fellow will not appear against him, and the case must collapse. I suppose that I am commiting a felony, but it is just possible that I am saving a soul. This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness. Chance has put in our way a most singular and whimsical problem, and its solution is its own reward. If you will have the goodness to touch the bell, Doctor, we will begin another investigation, in which, also a bird will be the chief feature.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE SPECKLED BAND", + "text": "On glancing over my notes of the seventy odd cases in which I have during the last eight years studied the methods of my friend Sherlock Holmes, I find many tragic, some comic, a large number merely strange, but none commonplace; for, working as he did rather for the love of his art than for the acquirement of wealth, he refused to associate himself with any investigation which did not tend towards the unusual, and even the fantastic. Of all these varied cases, however, I cannot recall any which presented more singular features than that which was associated with the well-known Surrey family of the Roylotts of Stoke Moran. The events in question occurred in the early days of my association with Holmes, when we were sharing rooms as bachelors in Baker Street. It is possible that I might have placed them upon record before, but a promise of secrecy was made at the time, from which I have only been freed during the last month by the untimely death of the lady to whom the pledge was given. It is perhaps as well that the facts should now come to light, for I have reasons to know that there are widespread rumours as to the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott which tend to make the matter even more terrible than the truth.\n\nIt was early in April in the year '83 that I woke one morning to find Sherlock Holmes standing, fully dressed, by the side of my bed. He was a late riser, as a rule, and as the clock on the mantelpiece showed me that it was only a quarter-past seven, I blinked up at him in some surprise, and perhaps just a little resentment, for I was myself regular in my habits.\n\n\"Very sorry to knock you up, Watson,\" said he, \"but it's the common lot this morning. Mrs. Hudson has been knocked up, she retorted upon me, and I on you.\"\n\n\"What is it, then\u2014a fire?\"\n\n\"No; a client. It seems that a young lady has arrived in a considerable state of excitement, who insists upon seeing me. She is waiting now in the sitting-room. Now, when young ladies wander about the metropolis at this hour of the morning, and knock sleepy people up out of their beds, I presume that it is something very pressing which they have to communicate. Should it prove to be an interesting case, you would, I am sure, wish to follow it from the outset. I thought, at any rate, that I should call you and give you the chance.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, I would not miss it for anything.\"\n\nI had no keener pleasure than in following Holmes in his professional investigations, and in admiring the rapid deductions, as swift as intuitions, and yet always founded on a logical basis, with which he unravelled the problems which were submitted to him. I rapidly threw on my clothes and was ready in a few minutes to accompany my friend down to the sitting-room. A lady dressed in black and heavily veiled, who had been sitting in the window, rose as we entered.\n\n\"Good-morning, madam,\" said Holmes cheerily. \"My name is Sherlock Holmes. This is my intimate friend and associate, Dr. Watson, before whom you can speak as freely as before myself. Ha! I am glad to see that Mrs. Hudson has had the good sense to light the fire. Pray draw up to it, and I shall order you a cup of hot coffee, for I observe that you are shivering.\"\n\n\"It is not cold which makes me shiver,\" said the woman in a low voice, changing her seat as requested.\n\n\"What, then?\"\n\n\"It is fear, Mr. Holmes. It is terror.\" She raised her veil as she spoke, and we could see that she was indeed in a pitiable state of agitation, her face all drawn and gray, with restless, frightened eyes, like those of some hunted animal. Her features and figure were those of a woman of thirty, but her hair was shot with premature gray, and her expression was weary and haggard. Sherlock Holmes ran her over with one of his quick, all comprehensive glances.\n\n\"You must not fear,\" said he soothingly, bending forward and patting her forearm. \"We shall soon set matters right, I have no doubt. You have come in by train this morning, I see.\"\n\n\"You know me, then?\"\n\n\"No, but I observe the second half of a return ticket in the palm of your left glove. You must have started early, and yet you had a good drive in a dog-cart, along heavy roads, before you reached the station.\"\n\nThe lady gave a violent start and stared in bewilderment at my companion.\n\n\"There is no mystery, my dear madam,\" said he, smiling. \"The left arm of your jacket is spattered with mud in no less than seven places. The marks are perfectly fresh. There is no vehicle save a dog-cart which throws up mud in that way, and then only when you sit on the left-hand side of the driver.\"\n\n\"Whatever your reasons may be, you are perfectly correct,\" said she. \"I started from home before six, reached Leatherhead at twenty past, and came in by the first train to Waterloo. Sir, I can stand this strain no longer; I shall go mad if it continues. I have no one to turn to\u2014none, save only one, who cares for me, and he, poor fellow, can be of little aid. I have heard of you, Mr. Holmes; I have heard of you from Mrs. Farintosh, whom you helped in the hour of her sore need. It was from her that I had your address. Oh, sir, do you not think that you could help me, too, and at least throw a little light through the dense darkness which surrounds me? At present it is out of my power to reward you for your services, but in a month or six weeks I shall be married, with the control of my own income, and then at least you shall not find me ungrateful.\"\n\nHolmes turned to his desk and, unlocking it, drew out a small case-book, which he consulted.\n\n\"Farintosh,\" said he. \"Ah yes, I recall the case; it was concerned with an opal tiara. I think it was before your time, Watson. I can only say, madam, that I shall be happy to devote the same care to your case as I did to that of your friend. As to reward my profession is its own reward; but you are at liberty to defray whatever expenses I may be put to, at the time which suits you best. And now I beg that you will lay before us everything that may help us in forming an opinion upon the matter.\"\n\n\"Alas!\" replied our visitor, \"the very horror of my situation lies in the fact that my fears are so vague, and my suspicions depend so entirely upon small points, which might seem trivial to another, that even he to whom of all others I have a right to look for help and advice looks upon all that I tell him about it as the fancies of a nervous woman. He does not say so, but I can read it from his soothing answers and averted eyes. But I have heard, Mr. Holmes, that you can see deeply into the manifold wickedness of the human heart. You may advise me how to walk amid the dangers which encompass me.\"\n\n\"I am all attention, madam.\"\n\n\"My name is Helen Stoner, and I am living with my stepfather, who is the last survivor of one of the oldest Saxon families in England, the Roylotts of Stoke Moran, on the western border of Surrey.\"\n\nHolmes nodded his head. \"The name is familiar to me,\" said he.\n\n\"The family was at one time among the richest in England, and the estates extended over the borders into Berkshire in the north, and Hampshire in the west. In the last century, however, four successive heirs were of a dissolute and wasteful disposition, and the family ruin was eventually completed by a gambler in the days of the Regency. Nothing was left save a few acres of ground, and the two-hundred-year-old house, which is itself crushed under a heavy mortgage. The last squire dragged out his existence there, living the horrible life of an aristocratic pauper; but his only son, my stepfather, seeing that he must adapt himself to the new conditions, obtained an advance from a relative, which enabled him to take a medical degree and went out to Calcutta, where, by his professional skill and his force of character, he established a large practice. In a fit of anger, however, caused by some robberies which had been perpetrated in the house, he beat his native butler to death and narrowly escaped a capital sentence. As it was, he suffered a long term of imprisonment and afterwards returned to England a morose and disappointed man.\n\n\"When Dr. Roylott was in India he married my mother, Mrs. Stoner, the young widow of Major-General Stoner, of the Bengal Artillery. My sister Julia and I were twins, and we were only two years old at the time of my mother's re-marriage. She had a considerable sum of money\u2014not less than \u00a31000 a year\u2014and this she bequeathed to Dr. Roylott entirely while we resided with him, with a provision that a certain annual sum should be allowed to each of us in the event of our marriage. Shortly after our return to England my mother died\u2014she was killed eight years ago in a railway accident near Crewe. Dr. Roylott then abandoned his attempts to establish himself in practice in London and took us to live with him in the old ancestral house at Stoke Moran. The money which my mother had left was enough for all our wants, and there seemed to be no obstacle to our happiness.\n\n\"But a terrible change came over our stepfather about this time. Instead of making friends and exchanging visits with our neighbours, who had at first been overjoyed to see a Roylott of Stoke Moran back in the old family seat, he shut himself up in his house and seldom came out save to indulge in ferocious quarrels with whoever might cross his path. Violence of temper approaching to mania has been hereditary in the men of the family, and in my stepfather's case it had, I believe, been intensified by his long residence in the tropics. A series of disgraceful brawls took place, two of which ended in the police-court, until at last he became the terror of the village, and the folks would fly at his approach, for he is a man of immense strength, and absolutely uncontrollable in his anger.\n\n\"Last week he hurled the local blacksmith over a parapet into a stream, and it was only by paying over all the money which I could gather together that I was able to avert another public exposure. He had no friends at all save the wandering gypsies, and he would give these vagabonds leave to encamp upon the few acres of bramble-covered land which represent the family estate, and would accept in return the hospitality of their tents, wandering away with them sometimes for weeks on end. He has a passion also for Indian animals, which are sent over to him by a correspondent, and he has at this moment a cheetah and a baboon, which wander freely over his grounds and are feared by the villagers almost as much as their master.\n\n\"You can imagine from what I say that my poor sister Julia and I had no great pleasure in our lives. No servant would stay with us, and for a long time we did all the work of the house. She was but thirty at the time of her death, and yet her hair had already begun to whiten, even as mine has.\"\n\n\"Your sister is dead, then?\"\n\n\"She died just two years ago, and it is of her death that I wish to speak to you. You can understand that, living the life which I have described, we were little likely to see anyone of our own age and position. We had, however, an aunt, my mother's maiden sister, Miss Honoria Westphail, who lives near Harrow, and we were occasionally allowed to pay short visits at this lady's house. Julia went there at Christmas two years ago, and met there a half-pay major of marines, to whom she became engaged. My stepfather learned of the engagement when my sister returned and offeredno objection to the marriage; but within a fortnight of the day which had been fixed for the wedding, the terrible event occurred which has deprived me of my only companion.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes had been leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed and his head sunk in a cushion, but he half opened his lids now and glanced across at his visitor.\n\n\"Pray be precise as to details,\" said he.\n\n\"It is easy for me to be so, for every event of that dreadful time is seared into my memory. The manor-house is, as I have already said, very old, and only one wing is now inhabited. The bedrooms in this wing are on the ground floor, the sitting-rooms being in the central block of the buildings. Of these bedrooms the first is Dr. Roylott's, the second my sister's, and the third my own. There is no communication between them, but they all open out into the same corridor. Do I make myself plain?\"\n\n\"Perfectly so.\"\n\n\"The windows of the three rooms open out upon the lawn. That fatal night Dr. Roylott had gone to his room early, though we knew that he had not retired to rest, for my sister was troubled by the smell of the strong Indian cigars which it was his custom to smoke. She left her room, therefore, and came into mine, where she sat for some time, chatting about her approaching wedding. At eleven o'clock she rose to leave me, but she paused at the door and looked back.\n\n\"'Tell me, Helen,' said she, 'have you ever heard anyone whistle in the dead of the night?'\n\n\"'Never,' said I.\n\n\"'I suppose that you could not possibly whistle, yourself, in your sleep?'\n\n\"'Certainly not. But why?'\n\n\"'Because during the last few nights I have always, about three in the morning, heard a low, clear whistle. I am a light sleeper, and it has awakened me. I cannot tell where it came from\u2014perhaps from the next room, perhaps from the lawn. I thought that I would just ask you whether you had heard it.'\n\n\"'No, I have not. It must be those wretched gypsies in the plantation.'\n\n\"'Very likely. And yet if it were on the lawn, I wonder that you did not hear it also.'\n\n\"'Ah, but I sleep more heavily than you.'\n\n\"'Well, it is of no great consequence, at any rate.' She smiled back at me, closed my door, and a few moments later I heard her key turn in the lock.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" said Holmes. \"Was it your custom always to lock yourselves in at night?\"\n\n\"Always.\"\n\n\"And why?\"\n\n\"I think that I mentioned to you that the doctor kept a cheetah and a baboon. We had no feeling of security unless our doors were locked.\"\n\n\"Quite so. Pray proceed with your statement.\"\n\n\"I could not sleep that night. A vague feeling of impending misfortune impressed me. My sister and I, you will recollect, were twins, and you know how subtle are the links which bind two souls which are so closely allied. It was a wild night. The wind was howling outside, and the rain was beating and splashing against the windows. Suddenly, amid all the hubbub of the gale, there burst forth the wild scream of a terrified woman. I knew that it was my sister's voice. I sprang from my bed, wrapped a shawl round me, and rushed into the corridor. As I opened my door I seemed to hear a low whistle, such as my sister described, and a few moments later a clanging sound, as if a mass of metal had fallen. As I ran down the passage, my sister's door was unlocked, and revolved slowly upon its hinges. I stared at it horror-stricken, not knowing what was about to issue from it. By the light of the corridor-lamp I saw my sister appear at the opening, her face blanched with terror, her hands groping for help, her whole figure swaying to and fro like that of a drunkard. I ran to her and threw my arms round her, but at that moment her knees seemed to give way and she fell to the ground. She writhed as one who is in terrible pain, and her limbs were dreadfully convulsed. At first I thought that she had not recognized me, but as I bent over her she suddenly shrieked out in a voice which I shall never forget, 'Oh, my God! Helen! It was the band! The speckled band!' There was something else which she would fain have said, and she stabbed with her finger into the air in the direction of the doctor's room, but a fresh convulsion seized her and choked her words. I rushed out, calling loudly for my stepfather, and I met him hastening from his room in his dressing-gown. When he reached my sister's side she was unconscious, and though he poured brandy down her throat and sent for medical aid from the village, all efforts were in vain, for she slowly sank and died without having recovered her consciousness. Such was the dreadful end of my beloved sister.\"\n\n\"One moment,\" said Holmes; \"are you sure about this whistle and metallic sound? Could you swear to it?\"\n\n\"That was what the county coroner asked me at the inquiry. It is my strong impression that I heard it, and yet, among the crash of the gale and the creaking of an old house, I may possibly have been deceived.\"\n\n\"Was your sister dressed?\"\n\n\"No, she was in her night-dress. In her right hand was found the charred stump of a match, and in her left a match-box.\"\n\n\"Showing that she had struck a light and looked about her when the alarm took place. That is important. And what conclusions did the coroner come to?\"\n\n\"He investigated the case with great care, for Dr. Roylott's conduct had long been notorious in the county, but he was unable to find any satisfactory cause of death. My evidence showed that the door had been fastened upon the inner side, and the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters with broad iron bars, which were secured every night. The walls were carefully sounded, and were shown to be quite solid all round, and the flooring was also thoroughly examined, with the same result. The chimney is wide, but is barred up by four large staples. It is certain, therefore, that my sister was quite alone when she met her end. Besides, there were no marks of any violence upon her.\"\n\n\"How about poison?\"\n\n\"The doctors examined her for it, but without success.\"\n\n\"What do you think that this unfortunate lady died of, then?\"\n\n\"It is my belief that she died of pure fear and nervous shock, though what it was that frightened her I cannot imagine.\"\n\n\"Were there gypsies in the plantation at the time?\"\n\n\"Yes, there are nearly always some there.\"\n\n\"Ah, and what did you gather from this allusion to a band\u2014a speckled band?\"\n\n\"Sometimes I have thought that it was merely the wild talk of delirium, sometimes that it may have referred to some band of people, perhaps to these very gypsies in the plantation. I do not know whether the spotted handkerchiefs which so many of them wear over their heads might have suggested the strange adjective which she used.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head like a man who is far from being satisfied.\n\n\"These are very deep waters,\" said he; \"pray go on with your narrative.\"\n\n\"Two years have passed since then, and my life has been until lately lonelier than ever. A month ago, however, a dear friend, whom I have known for many years, has done me the honour to ask my hand in marriage. His name is Armitage\u2014Percy Armitage\u2014the second son of Mr. Armitage, of Crane Water, near Reading. My stepfather has offered no opposition to the match, and we are to be married in the course of the spring. Two days ago some repairs were started in the west wing of the building, and my bedroom wall has been pierced, so that I have had to move into the chamber in which my sister died, and to sleep in the very bed in which she slept. Imagine, then, my thrill of terror when last night, as I lay awake, thinking over her terrible fate, I suddenly heard in the silence of the night the low whistle which had been the herald of her own death. I sprang up and lit the lamp, but nothing was to be seen in the room. I was too shaken to go to bed again, however, so I dressed, and as soon as it was daylight I slipped down, got a dog-cart at the Crown Inn, which is opposite, and drove to Leatherhead, from whence I have come on this morning with the one object of seeing you and asking your advice.\"\n\n\"You have done wisely,\" said my friend. \"But have you told me all?\"\n\n\"Yes, all.\"\n\n\"Miss Roylott, you have not. You are screening your stepfather.\"\n\n\"Why, what do you mean?\"\n\nFor answer Holmes pushed back the frill of black lace which fringed the hand that lay upon our visitor's knee. Five little livid spots, the marks of four fingers and a thumb, were printed upon the white wrist.\n\n\"You have been cruelly used,\" said Holmes.\n\nThe lady coloured deeply and covered over her injured wrist. \"He is a hard man,\" she said, \"and perhaps he hardly knows his own strength.\"\n\nThere was a long silence, during which Holmes leaned his chin upon his hands and stared into the crackling fire.\n\n\"This is a very deep business,\" he said at last. \"There are a thousand details which I should desire to know before I decide upon our course of action. Yet we have not a moment to lose. If we were to come to Stoke Moran to-day, would it be possible for us to see over these rooms without the knowledge of your stepfather?\"\n\n\"As it happens, he spoke of coming into town to-day upon some most important business. It is probable that he will be away all day, and that there would be nothing to disturb you. We have a housekeeper now, but she is old and foolish, and I could easily get her out of the way.\"\n\n\"Excellent. You are not averse to this trip, Watson?\"\n\n\"By no means.\"\n\n\"Then we shall both come. What are you going to do yourself?\"\n\n\"I have one or two things which I would wish to do now that I am in town. But I shall return by the twelve o'clock train, so as to be there in time for your coming.\"\n\n\"And you may expect us early in the afternoon. I have myself some small business matters to attend to. Will you not wait and breakfast?\"\n\n\"No, I must go. My heart is lightened already since I have confided my trouble to you. I shall look forward to seeing you again this afternoon.\" She dropped her thick black veil over her face and glided from the room.\n\n\"And what do you think of it all, Watson?\" asked Sherlock Holmes, leaning back in his chair.\n\n\"It seems to me to be a most dark and sinister business.\"\n\n\"Dark enough and sinister enough.\"\n\n\"Yet if the lady is correct in saying that the flooring and walls are sound, and that the door, window, and chimney are impassable, then her sister must have been undoubtedly alone when she met her mysterious end.\"\n\n\"What becomes, then, of these nocturnal whistles, and what of the very peculiar words of the dying woman?\"\n\n\"I cannot think.\"\n\n\"When you combine the ideas of whistles at night, the presence of a band of gypsies who are on intimate terms with this old doctor, the fact that we have every reason to believe that the doctor has an interest in preventing his stepdaughter's marriage, the dying allusion to a band, and, finally, the fact that Miss Helen Stoner heard a metallic clang, which might have been caused by one of those metal bars that secured the shutters falling back into its place, I think that there is good ground to think that the mystery may be cleared along those lines.\"\n\n\"But what, then, did the gypsies do?\"\n\n\"I cannot imagine.\"\n\n\"I see many objections to any such theory.\"\n\n\"And so do I. It is precisely for that reason that we are going to Stoke Moran this day. I want to see whether the objections are fatal, or if they may be explained away. But what in the name of the devil!\"\n\nThe ejaculation had been drawn from my companion by the fact that our door had been suddenly dashed open, and that a huge man had framed himself in the aperture. His costume was a peculiar mixture of the professional and of the agricultural, having a black top-hat, a long frock-coat, and a pair of high gaiters, with a hunting-crop swinging in his hand. So tall was he that his hat actually brushed the cross bar of the doorway, and his breadth seemed to span it across from side to side. A large face, seared with a thousand wrinkles, burned yellow with the sun, and marked with every evil passion, was turned from one to the other of us, while his deep-set, bile-shot eyes and his high, thin, fleshless nose, gave him somewhat the resemblance to a fierce old bird of prey.\n\n\"Which of you is Holmes?\" asked this apparition.\n\n\"My name, sir; but you have the advantage of me,\" said my companion quietly.\n\n\"I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Doctor,\" said Holmes blandly. \"Pray take a seat.\"\n\n\"I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?\"\n\n\"It is a little cold for the time of the year,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"What has she been saying to you?\" screamed the old man furiously.\n\n\"But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,\" continued my companion imperturbably.\n\n\"Ha! You put me off, do you?\" said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. \"I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.\"\n\nMy friend smiled.\n\n\"Holmes, the busybody!\"\n\nHis smile broadened.\n\n\"Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!\"\n\nHolmes chuckled heartily. \"Your conversation is most entertaining,\" said he. \"When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.\"\n\n\"I will go when I have said my say. Don't you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here.\" He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.\n\n\"See that you keep yourself out of my grip,\" he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.\n\n\"He seems a very amiable person,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.\" As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again.\n\n\"Fancy his having the insolence to confound me with the official detective force! This incident gives zest to our investigation, however, and I only trust that our little friend will not suffer from her imprudence in allowing this brute to trace her. And now, Watson, we shall order breakfast, and afterwards I shall walk down to Doctors' Commons, where I hope to get some data which may help us in this matter.\"\n\nIt was nearly one o'clock when Sherlock Holmes returned from his excursion. He held in his hand a sheet of blue paper, scrawled over with notes and figures.\n\n\"I have seen the will of the deceased wife,\" said he. \"To determine its exact meaning I have been obliged to work out the present prices of the investments with which it is concerned. The total income, which at the time of the wife's death was little short of \u00a31100, is now, through the fall in agricultural prices, not more than \u00a3750. Each daughter can claim an income of \u00a3250, in case of marriage. It is evident, therefore, that if both girls had married, this beauty would have had a mere pittance, while even one of them would cripple him to a very serious extent. My morning's work has not been wasted, since it has proved that he has the very strongest motives for standing in the way of anything of the sort. And now, Watson, this is too serious for dawdling, especially as the old man is aware that we are interesting ourselves in his affairs; so if you are ready, we shall call a cab and drive to Waterloo. I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley's No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need.\"\n\nAt Waterloo we were fortunate in catching a train for Leatherhead, where we hired a trap at the station inn and drove for four or five miles through the lovely Surrey lanes. It was a perfect day, with a bright sun and a few fleecy clouds in the heavens. The trees and wayside hedges were just throwing out their first green shoots, and the air was full of the pleasant smell of the moist earth. To me at least there was a strange contrast between the sweet promise of the spring and this sinister quest upon which we were engaged. My companion sat in the front of the trap, his arms folded, his hat pulled down over his eyes, and his chin sunk upon his breast, buried in the deepest thought. Suddenly, however, he started, tapped me on the shoulder, and pointed over the meadows.\n\n\"Look there!\" said he.\n\nA heavily timbered park stretched up in a gentle slope, thickening into a grove at the highest point. From amid the branches there jutted out the gray gables and high roof-tree of a very old mansion.\n\n\"Stoke Moran?\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, sir, that be the house of Dr. Grimesby Roylott,\" remarked the driver.\n\n\"There is some building going on there,\" said Holmes; \"that is where we are going.\"\n\n\"There's the village,\" said the driver, pointing to a cluster of roofs some distance to the left; \"but if you want to get to the house, you'll find it shorter to get over this stile, and so by the foot-path over the fields. There it is, where the lady is walking.\"\n\n\"And the lady, I fancy, is Miss Stoner,\" observed Holmes, shading his eyes. \"Yes, I think we had better do as you suggest.\"\n\nWe got off, paid our fare, and the trap rattled back on its way to Leatherhead.\n\n\"I thought it as well,\" said Holmes as we climbed the stile, \"that this fellow should think we had come here as architects, or on some definite business. It may stop his gossip. Good-afternoon, Miss Stoner. You see that we have been as good as our word.\"\n\nOur client of the morning had hurried forward to meet us with a face which spoke her joy. \"I have been waiting so eagerly for you,\" she cried, shaking hands with us warmly. \"All has turned out splendidly. Dr. Roylott has gone to town, and it is unlikely that he will be back before evening.\"\n\n\"We have had the pleasure of making the doctor's acquaintance,\" said Holmes, and in a few words he sketched out what had occurred. Miss Stoner turned white to the lips as she listened.\n\n\"Good heavens!\" she cried, \"he has followed me, then.\"\n\n\"So it appears.\"\n\n\"He is so cunning that I never know when I am safe from him. What will he say when he returns?\"\n\n\"He must guard himself, for he may find that there is some-one more cunning than himself upon his track. You must lock yourself up from him to-night. If he is violent, we shall take you away to your aunt's at Harrow. Now, we must make the best use of our time, so kindly take us at once to the rooms which we are to examine.\"\n\nThe building was of gray, lichen-blotched stone, with a high central portion and two curving wings, like the claws of a crab, thrown out on each side. In one of these wings the windows were broken and blocked with wooden boards, while the roof was partly caved in, a picture of ruin. The central portion was in little better repair, but the right-hand block was comparatively modern, and the blinds in the windows, with the blue smoke curling up from the chimneys, showed that this was where the family resided. Some scaffolding had been erected against the end wall, and the stone-work had been broken into, but there were no signs of any workmen at the moment of our visit. Holmes walked slowly up and down the ill-trimmed lawn and examined with deep attention the outsides of the windows.\n\n\"This, I take it, belongs to the room in which you used to sleep, the centre one to your sister's, and the one next to the main building to Dr. Roylott's chamber?\"\n\n\"Exactly so. But I am now sleeping in the middle one.\"\n\n\"Pending the alterations, as I understand. By the way, there does not seem to be any very pressing need for repairs at that end wall.\"\n\n\"There were none. I believe that it was an excuse to move me from my room.\"\n\n\"Ah! that is suggestive. Now, on the other side of this narrow wing runs the corridor from which these three rooms open. There are windows in it, of course?\"\n\n\"Yes, but very small ones. Too narrow for anyone to pass through.\"\n\n\"As you both locked your doors at night, your rooms were unapproachable from that side. Now, would you have the kindness to go into your room and bar your shutters?\"\n\nMiss Stoner did so, and Holmes, after a careful examination through the open window, endeavoured in every way to force the shutter open, but without success. There was no slit through which a knife could be passed to raise the bar. Then with his lens he tested the hinges, but they were of solid iron, built firmly into the massive masonry. \"Hum!\" said he, scratching his chin in some perplexity, \"my theory certainly presents some difficulties. No one could pass these shutters if they were bolted. Well, we shall see if the inside throws any light upon the matter.\"\n\nA small side door led into the whitewashed corridor from which the three bedrooms opened. Holmes refused to examine the third chamber, so we passed at once to the second, that in which Miss Stoner was now sleeping, and in which her sister had met with her fate. It was a homely little room, with a low ceiling and a gaping fireplace, after the fashion of old country-houses. A brown chest of drawers stood in one corner, a narrow white-counterpaned bed in another, and a dressing-table on the left-hand side of the window. These articles, with two small wicker-work chairs, made up all the furniture in the room save for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. The boards round and the panelling of the walls were of brown, worm-eaten oak, so old and discoloured that it may have dated from the original building of the house. Holmes drew one of the chairs into a corner and sat silent, while his eyes travelled round and round and up and down, taking in every detail of the apartment.\n\n\"Where does that bell communicate with?\" he asked at last, pointing to a thick bell-rope which hung down beside the bed, the tassel actually lying upon the pillow.\n\n\"It goes to the housekeeper's room.\"\n\n\"It looks newer than the other things?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was only put there a couple of years ago.\"\n\n\"Your sister asked for it, I suppose?\"\n\n\"No, I never heard of her using it. We used always to get what we wanted for ourselves.\"\n\n\"Indeed, it seemed unnecessary to put so nice a bell-pull there. You will excuse me for a few minutes while I satisfy myself as to this floor.\" He threw himself down upon his face with his lens in his hand and crawled swiftly backward and forward, examining minutely the cracks between the boards. Then he did the same with the wood-work with which the chamber was panelled. Finally he walked over to the bed and spent some time in staring at it and in running his eye up and down the wall. Finally he took the bell-rope in his hand and gave it a brisk tug.\n\n\"Why, it's a dummy,\" said he.\n\n\"Won't it ring?\"\n\n\"No, it is not even attached to a wire. This is very interesting. You can see now that it is fastened to a hook just above where the little opening for the ventilator is.\"\n\n\"How very absurd! I never noticed that before.\"\n\n\"Very strange!\" muttered Holmes, pulling at the rope. \"There are one or two very singular points about this room. For example, what a fool a builder must be to open a ventilator into another room, when, with the same trouble, he might have communicated with the outside air!\"\n\n\"That is also quite modern,\" said the lady.\n\n\"Done about the same time as the bell-rope?\" remarked Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, there were several little changes carried out about that time.\"\n\n\"They seem to have been of a most interesting character\u2014dummy bell-ropes, and ventilators which do not ventilate. With your permission, Miss Stoner, we shall now carry our researches into the inner apartment.\"\n\nDr. Grimesby Roylott's chamber was larger than that of his stepdaughter, but was as plainly furnished. A camp-bed, a small wooden shelf full of books, mostly of a technical character, an armchair beside the bed, a plain wooden chair against the wall, a round table, and a large iron safe were the principal things which met the eye. Holmes walked slowly round and examined each and all of them with the keenest interest.\n\n\"What's in here?\" he asked, tapping the safe.\n\n\"My stepfather's business papers.\"\n\n\"Oh! you have seen inside, then?\"\n\n\"Only once, some years ago. I remember that it was full of papers.\"\n\n\"There isn't a cat in it, for example?\"\n\n\"No. What a strange idea!\"\n\n\"Well, look at this!\" He took up a small saucer of milk which stood on the top of it.\n\n\"No; we don't keep a cat. But there is a cheetah and a baboon.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, of course! Well, a cheetah is just a big cat, and yet a saucer of milk does not go very far in satisfying its wants, I daresay. There is one point which I should wish to determine.\" He squatted down in front of the wooden chair and examined the seat of it with the greatest attention.\n\n\"Thank you. That is quite settled,\" said he, rising and putting his lens in his pocket. \"Hello! Here is something interesting!\"\n\nThe object which had caught his eye was a small dog lash hung on one corner of the bed. The lash, however, was curled upon itself and tied so as to make a loop of whipcord.\n\n\"What do you make of that, Watson?\"\n\n\"It's a common enough lash. But I don't know why it should be tied.\"\n\n\"That is not quite so common, is it? Ah, me! it's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brains to crime it is the worst of all. I think that I have seen enough now, Miss Stoner, and with your permission we shall walk out upon the lawn.\"\n\nI had never seen my friend's face so grim or his brow so dark as it was when we turned from the scene of this investigation. We had walked several times up and down the lawn, neither Miss Stoner nor myself liking to break in upon his thoughts before he roused himself from his reverie.\n\n\"It is very essential, Miss Stoner,\" said he, \"that you should absolutely follow my advice in every respect.\"\n\n\"I shall most certainly do so.\"\n\n\"The matter is too serious for any hesitation. Your life may depend upon your compliance.\"\n\n\"I assure you that I am in your hands.\"\n\n\"In the first place, both my friend and I must spend the night in your room.\"\n\nBoth Miss Stoner and I gazed at him in astonishment.\n\n\"Yes, it must be so. Let me explain. I believe that that is the village inn over there?\"\n\n\"Yes, that is the Crown.\"\n\n\"Very good. Your windows would be visible from there?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"You must confine yourself to your room, on pretence of a headache, when your stepfather comes back. Then when you hear him retire for the night, you must open the shutters of your window, undo the hasp, put your lamp there as a signal to us, and then withdraw quietly with everything which you are likely to want into the room which you used to occupy. I have no doubt that, in spite of the repairs, you could manage there for one night.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, easily.\"\n\n\"The rest you will leave in our hands.\"\n\n\"But what will you do?\"\n\n\"We shall spend the night in your room, and we shall investigate the cause of this noise which has disturbed you.\"\n\n\"I believe, Mr. Holmes, that you have already made up your mind,\" said Miss Stoner, laying her hand upon my companion's sleeve.\n\n\"Perhaps I have.\"\n\n\"Then, for pity's sake, tell me what was the cause of my sister's death.\"\n\n\"I should prefer to have clearer proofs before I speak.\"\n\n\"You can at least tell me whether my own thought is correct, and if she died from some sudden fright.\"\n\n\"No, I do not think so. I think that there was probably some more tangible cause. And now, Miss Stoner, we must leave you, for if Dr. Roylott returned and saw us our journey would be in vain. Good-bye, and be brave, for if you will do what I have told you you may rest assured that we shall soon drive away the dangers that threaten you.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes and I had no difficulty in engaging a bedroom and sitting-room at the Crown Inn. They were on the upper floor, and from our window we could command a view of the avenue gate; and of the inhabited wing of Stoke Moran Manor House. At dusk we saw Dr. Grimesby Roylott drive past, his huge form looming up beside the little figure of the lad who drove him. The boy had some slight difficulty in undoing the heavy iron gates, and we heard the hoarse roar of the doctor's voice and saw the fury with which he shook his clinched fists at him. The trap drove on, and a few minutes later we saw a sudden light spring up among the trees as the lamp was lit in one of the sitting-rooms.\n\n\"Do you know, Watson,\" said Holmes as we sat together in the gathering darkness, \"I have really some scruples as to taking you to-night. There is a distinct element of danger.\"\n\n\"Can I be of assistance?\"\n\n\"Your presence might be invaluable.\"\n\n\"Then I shall certainly come.\"\n\n\"It is very kind of you.\"\n\n\"You speak of danger. You have evidently seen more in these rooms than was visible to me.\"\n\n\"No, but I fancy that I may have deduced a little more. I imagine that you saw all that I did.\"\n\n\"I saw nothing remarkable save the bell-rope, and what purpose that could answer I confess is more than I can imagine.\"\n\n\"You saw the ventilator, too?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I do not think that it is such a very unusual thing to have a small opening between two rooms. It was so small that a rat could hardly pass through.\"\n\n\"I knew that we should find a ventilator before ever we came to Stoke Moran.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I did. You remember in her statement she said that her sister could smell Dr. Roylott's cigar. Now, of course that suggested at once that there must be a communication between the two rooms. It could only be a small one, or it would have been remarked upon at the coroner's inquiry. I deduced a ventilator.\"\n\n\"But what harm can there be in that?\"\n\n\"Well, there is at least a curious coincidence of dates. A ventilator is made, a cord is hung, and a lady who sleeps in the bed dies. Does not that strike you?\"\n\n\"I cannot as yet see any connection.\"\n\n\"Did you observe anything very peculiar about that bed?\"\n\n\"It was clamped to the floor. Did you ever see a bed fastened like that before?\"\n\n\"I cannot say that I have.\"\n\n\"The lady could not move her bed. It must always be in the same relative position to the ventilator and to the rope\u2014or so we may call it, since it was clearly never meant for a bell-pull.\"\n\n\"Holmes,\" I cried, \"I seem to see dimly what you are hinting at. We are only just in time to prevent some subtle and horrible crime.\"\n\n\"Subtle enough and horrible enough. When a doctor does go wrong he is the first of criminals. He has nerve and he has knowledge. Palmer and Pritchard were among the heads of their profession. This man strikes even deeper, but I think, Watson, that we shall be able to strike deeper still. But we shall have horrors enough before the night is over; for goodness' sake let us have a quiet pipe and turn our minds for a few hours to something more cheerful.\"\n\nAbout nine o'clock the light among the trees was extinguished, and all was dark in the direction of the Manor House. Two hours passed slowly away, and then, suddenly, just at the stroke of eleven, a single bright light shone out right in front of us.\n\n\"That is our signal,\" said Holmes, springing to his feet; \"it comes from the middle window.\"\n\nAs we passed out he exchanged a few words with the landlord, explaining that we were going on a late visit to an acquaintance, and that it was possible that we might spend the night there. A moment later we were out on the dark road, a chill wind blowing in our faces, and one yellow light twinkling in front of us through the gloom to guide us on our sombre errand.\n\nThere was little difficulty in entering the grounds, for unrepaired breaches gaped in the old park wall. Making our way among the trees, we reached the lawn, crossed it, and were about to enter through the window when out from a clump of laurel bushes there darted what seemed to be a hideous and distorted child, who threw itself upon the grass with writhing limbs and then ran swiftly across the lawn into the darkness.\n\n\"My God!\" I whispered; \"did you see it?\"\n\nHolmes was for the moment as startled as I. His hand closed like a vise upon my wrist in his agitation. Then he broke into a low laugh and put his lips to my ear.\n\n\"It is a nice household,\" he murmured. \"That is the baboon.\"\n\nI had forgotten the strange pets which the doctor affected. There was a cheetah, too; perhaps we might find it upon our shoulders at any moment. I confess that I felt easier in my mind when, after following Holmes's example and slipping off my shoes, I found myself inside the bedroom. My companion noiselessly closed the shutters, moved the lamp onto the table, and cast his eyes round the room. All was as we had seen it in the daytime. Then creeping up to me and making a trumpet of his hand, he whispered into my ear again so gently that it was all that I could do to distinguish the words:\n\n\"The least sound would be fatal to our plans.\"\n\nI nodded to show that I had heard.\n\n\"We must sit without light. He would see it through the ventilator.\"\n\nI nodded again.\n\n\"Do not go asleep; your very life may depend upon it. Have your pistol ready in case we should need it. I will sit on the side of the bed, and you in that chair.\"\n\nI took out my revolver and laid it on the corner of the table.\n\nHolmes had brought up a long thin cane, and this he placed upon the bed beside him. By it he laid the box of matches and the stump of a candle. Then he turned down the lamp, and we were left in darkness.\n\nHow shall I ever forget that dreadful vigil? I could not hear a sound, not even the drawing of a breath, and yet I knew that my companion sat open-eyed, within a few feet of me, in the same state of nervous tension in which I was myself. The shutters cut off the least ray of light, and we waited in absolute darkness. From outside came the occasional cry of a night-bird, and once at our very window a long drawn catlike whine, which told us that the cheetah was indeed at liberty. Far away we could hear the deep tones of the parish clock, which boomed out every quarter of an hour. How long they seemed, those quarters! Twelve struck; and one and two and three, and still we sat waiting silently for whatever might befall.\n\nSuddenly there was the momentary gleam of a light up in the direction of the ventilator, which vanished immediately, but was succeeded by a strong smell of burning oil and heated metal. Someone in the next room had lit a dark-lantern. I heard a gentle sound of movement, and then all was silent once more, though the smell grew stronger. For half an hour I sat with straining ears. Then suddenly another sound became audible\u2014a very gentle, soothing sound, like that of a small jet of steam escaping continually from a kettle. The instant that we heard it, Holmes sprang from the bed, struck a match, and lashed furiously with his cane at the bell-pull.\n\n\"You see it, Watson?\" he yelled. \"You see it?\"\n\nBut I saw nothing. At the moment when Holmes struck the light I heard a low, clear whistle, but the sudden glare flashing into my weary eyes made it impossible for me to tell what it was at which my friend lashed so savagely. I could, however, see that his face was deadly pale and filled with horror and loathing.\n\nHe had ceased to strike and was gazing up at the ventilator when suddenly there broke from the silence of the night the most horrible cry to which I have ever listened. It swelled up louder and louder, a hoarse yell of pain and fear and anger all mingled in the one dreadful shriek. They say that away down in the village, and even in the distant parsonage, that cry raised the sleepers from their beds. It struck cold to our hearts, and I stood gazing at Holmes, and he at me, until the last echoes of it had died away into the silence from which it rose.\n\n\"What can it mean?\" I gasped.\n\n\"It means that it is all over,\" Holmes answered. \"And perhaps, after all, it is for the best. Take your pistol, and we will enter Dr. Roylott's room.\"\n\nWith a grave face he lit the lamp and led the way down the corridor. Twice he struck at the chamber door without any reply from within. Then he turned the handle and entered, I at his heels, with the cocked pistol in my hand.\n\nIt was a singular sight which met our eyes. On the table stood a dark-lantern with the shutter half open, throwing a brilliant beam of light upon the iron safe, the door of which was ajar. Beside this table, on the wooden chair, sat Dr. Grimesby Roylott, clad in a long gray dressing-gown, his bare ankles protruding beneath, and his feet thrust into red heelless Turkish slippers. Across his lap lay the short stock with the long lash which we had noticed during the day. His chin was cocked upward and his eyes were fixed in a dreadful, rigid stare at the corner of the ceiling. Round his brow he had a peculiar yellow band, with brownish speckles, which seemed to be bound tightly round his head. As we entered he made neither sound nor motion.\n\n\"The band! the speckled band!\" whispered Holmes.\n\nI took a step forward. In an instant his strange headgear began to move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat diamond-shaped head and puffed neck of a loathsome serpent.\n\n\"It is a swamp adder!\" cried Holmes; \"the deadliest snake in India. He has died within ten seconds of being bitten. Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another. Let us thrust this creature back into its den, and we can then remove Miss Stoner to some place of shelter and let the county police know what has happened.\"\n\nAs he spoke he drew the dog-whip swiftly from the dead man's lap, and throwing the noose round the reptile's neck he drew it from its horrid perch and, carrying it at arm's length, threw it into the iron safe, which he closed upon it.\n\nSuch are the true facts of the death of Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran. It is not necessary that I should prolong a narrative which has already run to too great a length by telling how we broke the sad news to the terrified girl, how we conveyed her by the morning train to the care of her good aunt at Harrow, of how the slow process of official inquiry came to the conclusion that the doctor met his fate while indiscreetly playing with a dangerous pet. The little which I had yet to learn of the case was told me by Sherlock Holmes as we travelled back next day.\n\n\"I had,\" said he, \"come to an entirely erroneous conclusion which shows, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data. The presence of the gypsies, and the use of the word 'band,' which was used by the poor girl, no doubt to explain the appearance which she had caught a hurried glimpse of by the light of her match, were sufficient to put me upon an entirely wrong scent. I can only claim the merit that I instantly reconsidered my position when, however, it became clear to me that whatever danger threatened the occupant of the room could not come either from the window or the door. My attention was speedily drawn, as I have already remarked to you, to this ventilator, and to the bell-rope which hung down to the bed. The discovery that this was a dummy, and that the bed was clamped to the floor, instantly gave rise to the suspicion that the rope was there as a bridge for something passing through the hole and coming to the bed. The idea of a snake instantly occurredto me, and when I coupled it with my knowledge that the doctor was furnished with a supply of creatures from India, I felt that I was probably on the right track. The idea of using a form of poison which could not possibly be discovered by any chemical test was just such a one as would occur to a clever and ruthless man who had had an Eastern training. The rapidity with which such a poison would take effect would also, from his point of view, be an advantage. It would be a sharp-eyed coroner, indeed, who could distinguish the two little dark punctures which would show where the poison fangs had done their work. Then I thought of the whistle. Of course he must recall the snake before the morning light revealed it to the victim. He had trained it, probably by the use of the milk which we saw, to return to him when summoned. He would put it through this ventilator at the hour that he thought best, with the certainty that it would crawl down the rope and land on the bed. It might or might not bite the occupant, perhaps she might escape every night for a week, but sooner or later she must fall a victim.\n\n\"I had come to these conclusions before ever I had entered his room. An inspection of his chair showed me that he had been in the habit of standing on it, which of course would be necessary in order that he should reach the ventilator. The sight of the safe, the saucer of milk, and the loop of whipcord were enough to finally dispel any doubts which may have remained. The metallic clang heard by Miss Stoner was obviously caused by her stepfather hastily closing the door of his safe upon its terrible occupant. Having once made up my mind, you know the steps which I took in order to put the matter to the proof. I heard the creature hiss as I have no doubt that you did also, and I instantly lit the light and attacked it.\"\n\n\"With the result of driving it through the ventilator.\"\n\n\"And also with the result of causing it to turn upon its master at the other side. Some of the blows of my cane came home and roused its snakish temper, so that it flew upon the first person it saw. In this way I am no doubt indirectly responsible for Dr. Grimesby Roylott's death, and I cannot say that it is likely to weigh very heavily upon my conscience.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE ENGINEER'S THUMB", + "text": "Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy, there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his notice\u2014that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of Colonel Warburton's madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a finer field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so strange in its inception and so dramatic in its details that it may be the more worthy of being placed upon record, even if it gave my friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of reasoning by which he achieved such remarkable results. The story has, I believe, been told more than once in the newspapers, but, like all such narratives, its effect is much less striking when set forth en bloc in a single half-column of print than when the facts slowly evolve before your own eyes, and the mystery clears gradually away as each new discovery furnishes a step which leads on to the complete truth. At the time the circumstances made a deep impression upon me, and the lapse of two years has hardly served to weaken the effect.\n\nIt was in the summer of '89, not long after my marriage, that the events occurred which I am now about to summarize. I had returned to civil practice and had finally abandoned Holmes in his Baker Street rooms, although I continually visited him and occasionally even persuaded him to forgo his Bohemian habits so far as to come and visit us. My practice had steadily increased, and as I happened to live at no very great distance from Paddington Station, I got a few patients from among the officials. One of these, whom I had cured of a painful and lingering disease, was never weary of advertising my virtues and of endeavouring to send me on every sufferer over whom he might have any influence.\n\nOne morning, at a little before seven o'clock, I was awakened by the maid tapping at the door to announce that two men had come from Paddington and were waiting in the consulting-room. I dressed hurriedly, for I knew by experience that railway cases were seldom trivial, and hastened downstairs. As I descended, my old ally, the guard, came out of the room and closed the door tightly behind him.\n\n\"I've got him here,\" he whispered, jerking his thumb over his shoulder; \"he's all right.\"\n\n\"What is it, then?\" I asked, for his manner suggested that it was some strange creature which he had caged up in my room.\n\n\"It's a new patient,\" he whispered. \"I thought I'd bring him round myself; then he couldn't slip away. There he is, all safe and sound. I must go now, Doctor; I have my dooties, just the same as you.\" And off he went, this trusty tout, without even giving me time to thank him.\n\nI entered my consulting-room and found a gentleman seated by the table. He was quietly dressed in a suit of heather tweed, with a soft cloth cap which he had laid down upon my books. Round one of his hands he had a handkerchief wrapped, which was mottled all over with bloodstains. He was young, not more than five-and-twenty, I should say, with a strong, masculine face; but he was exceedingly pale and gave me the impression of a man who was suffering from some strong agitation, which it took all his strength of mind to control.\n\n\"I am sorry to knock you up so early, Doctor,\" said he, \"but I have had a very serious accident during the night. I came in by train this morning, and on inquiring at Paddington as to where I might find a doctor, a worthy fellow very kindly escorted me here. I gave the maid a card, but I see that she has left it upon the side-table.\"\n\nI took it up and glanced at it. \"Mr. Victor Hatherley, hydraulic engineer, 16A, Victoria Street (3d floor).\" That was the name, style, and abode of my morning visitor. \"I regret that I have kept you waiting,\" said I, sitting down in my library-chair. \"You are fresh from a night journey, I understand, which is in itself a monotonous occupation.\"\n\n\"Oh, my night could not be called monotonous,\" said he, and laughed. He laughed very heartily, with a high, ringing note, leaning back in his chair and shaking his sides. All my medical instincts rose up against that laugh.\n\n\"Stop it!\" I cried; \"pull yourself together!\" and I poured out some water from a carafe.\n\nIt was useless, however. He was off in one of those hysterical outbursts which come upon a strong nature when some great crisis is over and gone. Presently he came to himself once more, very weary and pale-looking.\n\n\"I have been making a fool of myself,\" he gasped.\n\n\"Not at all. Drink this.\" I dashed some brandy into the water, and the colour began to come back to his bloodless cheeks.\n\n\"That's better!\" said he. \"And now, Doctor, perhaps you would kindly attend to my thumb, or rather to the place where my thumb used to be.\"\n\nHe unwound the handkerchief and held out his hand. It gave even my hardened nerves a shudder to look at it. There were four protruding fingers and a horrid red, spongy surface where the thumb should have been. It had been hacked or torn right out from the roots.\n\n\"Good heavens!\" I cried, \"this is a terrible injury. It must have bled considerably.\"\n\n\"Yes, it did. I fainted, when it was done, and I think that I must have been senseless for a long time. When I came to I found that it was still bleeding, so I tied one end of my handkerchief very tightly round the wrist and braced it up with a twig.\"\n\n\"Excellent! You should have been a surgeon.\"\n\n\"It is a question of hydraulics, you see, and came within my own province.\"\n\n\"This has been done,\" said I, examining the wound, \"by a very heavy and sharp instrument.\"\n\n\"A thing like a cleaver,\" said he.\n\n\"An accident, I presume?\"\n\n\"By no means.\"\n\n\"What! a murderous attack?\"\n\n\"Very murderous indeed.\"\n\n\"You horrify me.\"\n\nI sponged the wound, cleaned it, dressed it, and finally covered it over with cotton wadding and carbolized bandages. He lay back without wincing, though he bit his lip from time to time.\n\n\"How is that?\" I asked when I had finished.\n\n\"Capital! Between your brandy and your bandage, I feel a new man. I was very weak, but I have had a good deal to go through.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you had better not speak of the matter. It is evidently trying to your nerves.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, not now. I shall have to tell my tale to the police; but, between ourselves, if it were not for the convincing evidence of this wound of mine, I should be surprised if they believed my statement; for it is a very extraordinary one, and I have not much in the way of proof with which to back it up; and, even if they believe me, the clues which I can give them are so vague that it is a question whether justice will be done.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" cried I, \"if it is anything in the nature of a problem which you desire to see solved, I should strongly recommend you to come to my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, before you go to the official police.\"\n\n\"Oh, I have heard of that fellow,\" answered my visitor, \"and I should be very glad if he would take the matter up, though of course I must use the official police as well. Would you give me an introduction to him?\"\n\n\"I'll do better. I'll take you round to him myself.\"\n\n\"I should be immensely obliged to you.\"\n\n\"We'll call a cab and go together. We shall just be in time to have a little breakfast with him. Do you feel equal to it?\"\n\n\"Yes; I shall not feel easy until I have told my story.\"\n\n\"Then my servant will call a cab, and I shall be with you in an instant.\" I rushed upstairs, explained the matter shortly to my wife, and in five minutes was inside a hansom, driving with my new acquaintance to Baker Street.\n\nSherlock Holmes was, as I expected, lounging about his sitting-room in his dressing-gown, reading the agony column of The Times and smoking his before-breakfast pipe, which was composed of all the plugs and dottles left from his smokes of the day before, all carefully dried and collected on the corner of the mantelpiece. He received us in his quietly genial fashion, ordered fresh rashers and eggs, and joined us in a hearty meal. When it was concluded he settled our new acquaintance upon the sofa, placed a pillow beneath his head, and laid a glass of brandy and water within his reach.\n\n\"It is easy to see that your experience has been no common one, Mr. Hatherley,\" said he. \"Pray, lie down there and make yourself absolutely at home. Tell us what you can, but stop when you are tired and keep up your strength with a little stimulant.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said my patient, \"but I have felt another man since the doctor bandaged me, and I think that your breakfast has completed the cure. I shall take up as little of your valuable time as possible, so I shall start at once upon my peculiar experiences.\"\n\nHolmes sat in his big armchair with the weary, heavy-lidded expression which veiled his keen and eager nature, while I sat opposite to him, and we listened in silence to the strange story which our visitor detailed to us.\n\n\"You must know,\" said he, \"that I am an orphan and a bachelor, residing alone in lodgings in London. By profession I am a hydraulic engineer, and I have had considerable experience of my work during the seven years that I was apprenticed to Venner & Matheson, the well-known firm, of Greenwich. Two years ago, having served my time, and having also come into a fair sum of money through my poor father's death, I determined to start in business for myself and took professional chambers in Victoria Street.\n\n\"I suppose that everyone finds his first independent start in business a dreary experience. To me it has been exceptionally so. During two years I have had three consultations and one small job, and that is absolutely all that my profession has brought me. My gross takings amount to \u00a327 l0s. Every day, from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, I waited in my little den, until at last my heart began to sink, and I came to believe that I should never have any practice at all.\n\n\"Yesterday, however, just as I was thinking of leaving the office, my clerk entered to say there was a gentleman waiting who wished to see me upon business. He brought up a card, too, with the name of 'Colonel Lysander Stark' engraved upon it. Close at his heels came the colonel himself, a man rather over the middle size, but of an exceeding thinness. I do not think that I have ever seen so thin a man. His whole face sharpened away into nose and chin, and the skin of his cheeks was drawn quite tense over his outstanding bones. Yet this emaciation seemed to be his natural habit, and due to no disease, for his eye was bright, his step brisk, and his bearing assured. He was plainly but neatly dressed, and his age, I should judge, would be nearer forty than thirty.\n\n\"'Mr. Hatherley?' said he, with something of a German accent. 'You have been recommended to me, Mr. Hatherley, as being a man who is not only proficient in his profession but is also discreet and capable of preserving a secret.'\n\n\"I bowed, feeling as flattered as any young man would at such an address. 'May I ask who it was who gave me so good a character?'\n\n\"'Well, perhaps it is better that I should not tell you that just at this moment. I have it from the same source that you are both an orphan and a bachelor and are residing alone in London.'\n\n\"'That is quite correct,' I answered; 'but you will excuse me if I say that I cannot see how all this bears upon my professional qualifications. I understand that it was on a professional matter that you wished to speak to me?'\n\n\"'Undoubtedly so. But you will find that all I say is really to the point. I have a professional commission for you, but absolute secrecy is quite essential\u2014absolute secrecy, you understand, and of course we may expect that more from a man who is alone than from one who lives in the bosom of his family.'\n\n\"'If I promise to keep a secret,' said I, 'you may absolutely depend upon my doing so.'\n\n\"He looked very hard at me as I spoke, and it seemed to me that I had never seen so suspicious and questioning an eye.\n\n\"'Do you promise, then?' said he at last.\n\n\"'Yes, I promise.'\n\n\"'Absolute and complete silence before, during, and after? No reference to the matter at all, either in word or writing?'\n\n\"'I have already given you my word.'\n\n\"'Very good.' He suddenly sprang up, and darting like lightning across the room he flung open the door. The passage outside was empty.\n\n\"'That's all right,' said he, coming back. 'I know the clerks are sometimes curious as to their master's affairs. Now we can talk in safety.' He drew up his chair very close to mine and began to stare at me again with the same questioning and thoughtful look.\n\n\"A feeling of repulsion, and of something akin to fear had begun to rise within me at the strange antics of this fleshless man. Even my dread of losing a client could not restrain me from showing my impatience.\n\n\"'I beg that you will state your business, sir,' said I; 'my time is of value.' Heaven forgive me for that last sentence, but the words came to my lips.\n\n\"'How would fifty guineas for a night's work suit you?' he asked.\n\n\"'Most admirably.'\n\n\"'I say a night's work, but an hour's would be nearer the mark. I simply want your opinion about a hydraulic stamping machine which has got out of gear. If you show us what is wrong we shall soon set it right ourselves. What do you think of such a commission as that?'\n\n\"'The work appears to be light and the pay munificent.'\n\n\"'Precisely so. We shall want you to come to-night by the last train.'\n\n\"'Where to?'\n\n\"'To Eyford, in Berkshire. It is a little place near the borders of Oxfordshire, and within seven miles of Reading. There is a train from Paddington which would bring you there at about 11:15.'\n\n\"'Very good.'\n\n\"'I shall come down in a carriage to meet you.'\n\n\"'There is a drive, then?'\n\n\"'Yes, our little place is quite out in the country. It is a good seven miles from Eyford Station.'\n\n\"'Then we can hardly get there before midnight. I suppose there would be no chance of a train back. I should be compelled to stop the night.'\n\n\"'Yes, we could easily give you a shake-down.'\n\n\"'That is very awkward. Could I not come at some more convenient hour?'\n\n\"'We have judged it best that you should come late. It is to recompense you for any inconvenience that we are paying to you, a young and unknown man, a fee which would buy an opinion from the very heads of your profession. Still, of course, if you would like to draw out of the business, there is plenty of time to do so.'\n\n\"I thought of the fifty guineas, and of how very useful they would be to me. 'Not at all,' said I, 'I shall be very happy to accommodate myself to your wishes. I should like, however, to understand a little more clearly what it is that you wish me to do.'\n\n\"'Quite so. It is very natural that the pledge of secrecy which we have exacted from you should have aroused your curiosity. I have no wish to commit you to anything without your having it all laid before you. I suppose that we are absolutely safe from eavesdroppers?'\n\n\"'Entirely.'\n\n\"'Then the matter stands thus. You are probably aware that fuller's-earth is a valuable product, and that it is only found in one or two places in England?'\n\n\"'I have heard so.'\n\n\"'Some little time ago I bought a small place\u2014a very small place\u2014within ten miles of Reading. I was fortunate enough to discover that there was a deposit of fuller's-earth in one of my fields. On examining it, however, I found that this deposit was a comparatively small one, and that it formed a link between two very much larger ones upon the right and left\u2014both of them, however, in the grounds of my neighbours. These good people were absolutely ignorant that their land contained that which was quite as valuable as a gold-mine. Naturally, it was to my interest to buy their land before they discovered its true value, but unfortunately I had no capital by which I could do this. I took a few of my friends into the secret, however, and they suggested that we should quietly and secretly work our own little deposit, and that in this way we should earn the money which would enable us to buy the neighbouring fields. This we have now been doing for some time, and in order to help us in our operations we erected a hydraulic press. This press, as I have already explained, has got out of order, and we wish your advice upon the subject. We guard our secret very jealously, however, and if it once became known that we had hydraulic engineers coming to our little house, it would soon rouse inquiry, and then, if the facts came out, it would be good-bye to any chance of getting these fields and carrying out our plans. That is why I have made you promise me that you will not tell a human being that you are going to Eyford to-night. I hope that I make it all plain?'\n\n\"'I quite follow you,' said I. 'The only point which I could not quite understand was what use you could make of a hydraulic press in excavating fuller's-earth, which, as I understand, is dug out like gravel from a pit.'\n\n\"'Ah!' said he carelessly, 'we have our own process. We compress the earth into bricks, so as to remove them without revealing what they are. But that is a mere detail. I have taken you fully into my confidence now, Mr. Hatherley, and I have shown you how I trust you.' He rose as he spoke. 'I shall expect you, then, at Eyford at 11:15.'\n\n\"'I shall certainly be there.'\n\n\"'And not a word to a soul.' He looked at me with a last, long, questioning gaze, and then, pressing my hand in a cold, dank grasp, he hurried from the room.\n\n\"Well, when I came to think it all over in cool blood I was very much astonished, as you may both think, at this sudden commission which had been intrusted to me. On the one hand, of course, I was glad, for the fee was at least tenfold what I should have asked had I set a price upon my own services, and it was possible that this order might lead to other ones. On the other hand, the face and manner of my patron had made an unpleasant impression upon me, and I could not think that his explanation of the fuller's-earth was sufficient to explain the necessity for my coming at midnight, and his extreme anxiety lest I should tell anyone of my errand. However, I threw all fears to the winds, ate a hearty supper, drove to Paddington, and started off, having obeyed to the letter the injunction as to holding my tongue.\n\n\"At Reading I had to change not only my carriage but my station. However, I was in time for the last train to Eyford, and I reached the little dim-lit station after eleven o'clock. I was the only passenger who got out there, and there was no one upon the platform save a single sleepy porter with a lantern. As I passed out through the wicket gate, however. I found my acquaintance of the morning waiting in the shadow upon the other side. Without a word he grasped my arm and hurried me into a carriage, the door of which was standing open. He drew up the windows on either side, tapped on the wood-work, and away we went as fast as the horse could go.\"\n\n\"One horse?\" interjected Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, only one.\"\n\n\"Did you observe the colour?\"\n\n\"Yes, I saw it by the side-lights when I was stepping into the carriage. It was a chestnut.\"\n\n\"Tired-looking or fresh?\"\n\n\"Oh, fresh and glossy.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I am sorry to have interrupted you. Pray continue your most interesting statement.\"\n\n\"Away we went then, and we drove for at least an hour. Colonel Lysander Stark had said that it was only seven miles, but I should think, from the rate that we seemed to go, and from the time that we took, that it must have been nearer twelve. He sat at my side in silence all the time, and I was aware, more than once when I glanced in his direction, that he was looking at me with great intensity. The country roads seem to be not very good in that part of the world, for we lurched and jolted terribly. I tried to look out of the windows to see something of where we were, but they were made of frosted glass, and I could make out nothing save the occasional bright blur of a passing light. Now and then I hazarded some remark to break the monotony of the journey, but the colonel answered only in monosyllables, and the conversation soon flagged. At last, however, the bumping of the road was exchanged for the crisp smoothness of a gravel-drive, and the carriage came to a stand. Colonel Lysander Stark sprang out, and, as I followed after him, pulled me swiftly into a porch which gaped in front of us. We stepped, as it were, right out of the carriage and into the hall, so that I failed to catch the most fleeting glance of the front of the house. The instant that I had crossed the threshold the door slammed heavily behind us, and I heard faintly the rattle of the wheels as the carriage drove away.\n\n\"It was pitch dark inside the house, and the colonel fumbled about looking for matches and muttering under his breath. Suddenly a door opened at the other end of the passage, and a long, golden bar of light shot out in our direction. It grew broader, and a woman appeared with a lamp in her hand, which she held above her head, pushing her face forward and peering at us. I could see that she was pretty, and from the gloss with which the light shone upon her dark dress I knew that it was a rich material. She spoke a few words in a foreign tongue in a tone as though asking a question, and when my companion answered in a gruff monosyllable she gave such a start that the lamp nearly fell from her hand. Colonel Stark went up to her, whispered something in her ear, and then, pushing her back into the room from whence she had come, he walked towards me again with the lamp in his hand.\n\n\"'Perhaps you will have the kindness to wait in this room for a few minutes,' said he, throwing open another door. It was a quiet, little, plainly furnished room, with a round table in the centre, on which several German books were scattered. Colonel Stark laid down the lamp on the top of a harmonium beside the door. 'I shall not keep you waiting an instant, ' said he, and vanished into the darkness.\n\n\"I glanced at the books upon the table, and in spite of my ignorance of German I could see that two of them were treatises on science, the others being volumes of poetry. Then I walked across to the window, hoping that I might catch some glimpse of the country-side, but an oak shutter, heavily barred, was folded across it. It was a wonderfully silent house. There was an old clock ticking loudly somewhere in the passage, but otherwise everything was deadly still. A vague feeling of uneasiness began to steal over me. Who were these German people, and what were they doing living in this strange, out-of-the-way place? And where was the place? I was ten miles or so from Eyford, that was all I knew, but whether north, south, east, or west I had no idea. For that matter, Reading, and possibly other large towns, were within that radius, so the place might not be so secluded, after all. Yet it was quite certain, from the absolute stillness, that we were in the country. I paced up and down the room, humming a tune under my breath to keep up my spirits and feeling that I was thoroughly earning my fifty-guinea fee.\n\n\"Suddenly, without any preliminary sound in the midst of the utter stillness, the door of my room swung slowly open. The woman was standing in the aperture, the darkness of the hall behind her, the yellow light from my lamp beating upon her eager and beautiful face. I could see at a glance that she was sick with fear, and the sight sent a chill to my own heart. She held up one shaking finger to warn me to be silent, and she shot a few whispered words of broken English at me, her eyes glancing back, like those of a frightened horse, into the gloom behind her.\n\n\"'I would go,' said she, trying hard, as it seemed to me, to speak calmly; 'I would go. I should not stay here. There is no good for you to do.'\n\n\"'But, madam,' said I, 'I have not yet done what I came for. I cannot possibly leave until I have seen the machine.'\n\n\"'It is not worth your while to wait,' she went on. 'You can pass through the door; no one hinders.' And then, seeing that I smiled and shook my head, she suddenly threw aside her constraint and made a step forward, with her hands wrung together. 'For the love of Heaven!' she whispered, 'get away from here before it is too late!'\n\n\"But I am somewhat headstrong by nature, and the more ready to engage in an affair when there is some obstacle in the way. I thought of my fifty-guinea fee, of my wearisome journey, and of the unpleasant night which seemed to be before me. Was it all to go for nothing? Why should I slink away without having carried out my commission, and without the payment which was my due? This woman might, for all I knew, be a monomaniac. With a stout bearing, therefore, though her manner had shaken me more than I cared to confess, I still shook my head and declared my intention of remaining where I was. She was about to renew her entreaties when a door slammed overhead, and the sound of several footsteps was heard upon the stairs. She listened for an instant, threw up her hands with a despairing gesture, and vanished as suddenly and as noiselessly as she had come.\n\n\"The newcomers were Colonel Lysander Stark and a short thick man with a chinchilla beard growing out of the creases of his double chin, who was introduced to me as Mr. Ferguson.\n\n\"'This is my secretary and manager,' said the colonel. 'By the way, I was under the impression that I left this door shut just now. I fear that you have felt the draught.'\n\n\"'On the contrary,' said I, 'I opened the door myself because I felt the room to be a little close.'\n\n\"He shot one of his suspicious looks at me. 'Perhaps we had better proceed to business, then,' said he. 'Mr. Ferguson and I will take you up to see the machine.'\n\n\"'I had better put my hat on, I suppose.'\n\n\"'Oh, no, it is in the house.'\n\n\"'What, you dig fuller's-earth in the house?'\n\n\"'No, no. This is only where we compress it. But never mind that. All we wish you to do is to examine the machine and to let us know what is wrong with it.'\n\n\"We went upstairs together, the colonel first with the lamp, the fat manager and I behind him. It was a labyrinth of an old house, with corridors, passages, narrow winding staircases, and little low doors, the thresholds of which were hollowed out by the generations who had crossed them. There were no carpets and no signs of any furniture above the ground floor, while the plaster was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green, unhealthy blotches. I tried to put on as unconcerned an air as possible, but I had not forgotten the warnings of the lady, even though I disregarded them, and I kept a keen eye upon my two companions. Ferguson appeared to be a morose and silent man, but I could see from the little that he said that he was at least a fellow-countryman.\n\n\"Colonel Lysander Stark stopped at last before a low door, which he unlocked. Within was a small, square room, in which the three of us could hardly get at one time. Ferguson remained outside, and the colonel ushered me in.\n\n\"'We are now,' said he, 'actually within the hydraulic press, and it would be a particularly unpleasant thing for us if anyone were to turn it on. The ceiling of this small chamber is really the end of the descending piston, and it comes down with the force of many tons upon this metal floor. There are small lateral columns of water outside which receive the force, and which transmit and multiply it in the manner which is familiar to you. The machine goes readily enough, but there is some stiffness in the working of it, and it has lost a little of its force. Perhaps you will have the goodness to look it over and, to show us how we can set it right.'\n\n\"I took the lamp from him, and I examined the machine very thoroughly. It was indeed a gigantic one, and capable of exercising enormous pressure. When I passed outside, however, and pressed down the levers which controlled it, I knew at once by the whishing sound that there was a slight leakage, which allowed a regurgitation of water through one of the side cylinders. An examination showed that one of the india-rubber bands which was round the head of a driving-rod had shrunk so as not quite to fill the socket along which it worked. This was clearly the cause of the loss of power, and I pointed it out to my companions, who followed my remarks very carefully and asked several practical questions as to how they should proceed to set it right. When I had made it clear to them, I returned to the main chamber of the machine and took a good look at it to satisfy my own curiosity. It was obvious at a glance that the story of the fuller's-earth was the merest fabrication, for it would be absurd to suppose that so powerful an engine could be designed for so inadequate a purpose. The walls were of wood, but the floor consisted of a large iron trough, and when I came to examine it I could see a crust of metallic deposit all over it. I had stooped and was scraping at this to see exactly what it was when I heard a muttered exclamation in German and saw the cadaverous face of the colonel looking down at me.\n\n\"'What are you doing there?' he asked.\n\n\"I felt angry at having been tricked by so elaborate a story as that which he had told me. 'I was admiring your fuller's-earth,' said I; 'I think that I should be better able to advise you as to your machine if I knew what the exact purpose was for which it was used.'\n\n\"The instant that I uttered the words I regretted the rashness of my speech. His face set hard, and a baleful light sprang up in his gray eyes.\n\n\"'Very well,' said he, 'you shall know all about the machine.' He took a step backward, slammed the little door, and turned the key in the lock. I rushed towards it and pulled at the handle, but it was quite secure, and did not give in the least to my kicks and shoves. 'Hello!' I yelled. 'Hello! Colonel! Let me out!'\n\n\"And then suddenly in the silence I heard a sound which sent my heart into my mouth. It was the clank of the levers and the swish of the leaking cylinder. He had set the engine at work. The lamp still stood upon the floor where I had placed it when examining the trough. By its light I saw that the black ceiling was coming down upon me, slowly, jerkily, but, as none knew better than myself, with a force which must within a minute grind me to a shapeless pulp. I threw myself, screaming, against the door, and dragged with my nails at the lock. I implored the colonel to let me out, but the remorseless clanking of the levers drowned my cries. The ceiling was only a foot or two above my head, and with my hand upraised I could feel its hard, rough surface. Then it flashed through my mind that the pain of my death would depend very much upon the position in which I met it. If I lay on my face the weight would come upon my spine, and I shuddered to think of that dreadful snap. Easier the other way, perhaps; and yet, had I the nerve to lie and look up at that deadly black shadow wavering down upon me? Already I was unable to stand erect, when my eye caught something which brought a gush of hope back to my heart.\n\n\"I have said that though the floor and ceiling were of iron, the walls were of wood. As I gave a last hurried glance around, I saw a thin line of yellow light between two of the boards, which broadened and broadened as a small panel was pushed backward. For an instant I could hardly believe that here was indeed a door which led away from death. The next instant I threw myself through, and lay half-fainting upon the other side. The panel had closed again behind me, but the crash of the lamp, and a few moments afterwards the clang of the two slabs of metal, told me how narrow had been my escape.\n\n\"I was recalled to myself by a frantic plucking at my wrist, and I found myself lying upon the stone floor of a narrow corridor, while a woman bent over me and tugged at me with her left hand, while she held a candle in her right. It was the same good friend whose warning I had so foolishly rejected.\n\n\"'Come! come!' she cried breathlessly. 'They will be here in a moment. They will see that you are not there. Oh, do not waste the so-precious time, but come!'\n\n\"This time, at least, I did not scorn her advice. I staggered to my feet and ran with her along the corridor and down a winding stair. The latter led to another broad passage, and just as we reached it we heard the sound of running feet and the shouting of two voices, one answering the other from the floor on which we were and from the one beneath. My guide stopped and looked about her like one who is at her wit's end. Then she threw open a door which led into a bedroom, through the window of which the moon was shining brightly.\n\n\"'It is your only chance,' said she. 'It is high, but it may be that you can jump it.'\n\n\"As she spoke a light sprang into view at the further end of the passage, and I saw the lean figure of Colonel Lysander Stark rushing forward with a lantern in one hand and a weapon like a butcher's cleaver in the other. I rushed across the bedroom, flung open the window, and looked out. How quiet and sweet and wholesome the garden looked in the moonlight, and it could not be more than thirty feet down. I clambered out upon the sill, but I hesitated to jump until I should have heard what passed between my saviour and the ruffian who pursued me. If she were ill-used, then at any risks I was determined to go back to her assistance. The thought had hardly flashed through my mind before he was at the door, pushing his way past her; but she threw her arms round him and tried to hold him back.\n\n\"'Fritz! Fritz!' she cried in English, 'remember your promise after the last time. You said it should not be again. He will be silent! Oh, he will be silent!'\n\n\"'You are mad, Elise!' he shouted, struggling to break away from her. 'You will be the ruin of us. He has seen too much. Let me pass, I say!' He dashed her to one side, and, rushing to the window, cut at me with his heavy weapon. I had let myself go, and was hanging by the hands to the sill, when his blow fell. I was conscious of a dull pain, my grip loosened, and I fell into the garden below.\n\n\"I was shaken but not hurt by the fall; so I picked myself up and rushed off among the bushes as hard as I could run, for I understood that I was far from being out of danger yet. Suddenly, however, as I ran, a deadly dizziness and sickness came over me. I glanced down at my hand, which was throbbing painfully, and then, for the first time, saw that my thumb had been cut off and that the blood was pouring from my wound. I endeavoured to tie my handkerchief round it, but there came a sudden buzzing in my ears, and next moment I fell in a dead faint among the rose-bushes.\n\n\"How long I remained unconscious I cannot tell. It must have been a very long time, for the moon had sunk, and a bright morning was breaking when I came to myself. My clothes were all sodden with dew, and my coat-sleeve was drenched with blood from my wounded thumb. The smarting of it recalled in an instant all the particulars of my night's adventure, and I sprang to my feet with the feeling that I might hardly yet be safe from my pursuers. But to my astonishment, when I came to look round me, neither house nor garden were to be seen. I had been lying in an angle of the hedge close by the highroad, and just a little lower down was a long building, which proved, upon my approaching it, to be the very station at which I had arrived upon the previous night. Were it not for the ugly wound upon my hand, all that had passed during those dreadful hours might have been an evil dream.\n\n\"Half dazed, I went into the station and asked about the morning train. There would be one to Reading in less than an hour. The same porter was on duty, I found, as had been there when I arrived. I inquired of him whether he had ever heard of Colonel Lysander Stark. The name was strange to him. Had he observed a carriage the night before waiting for me? No, he had not. Was there a police-station anywhere near? There was one about three miles off.\n\n\"It was too far for me to go, weak and ill as I was. I determined to wait until I got back to town before telling my story to the police. It was a little past six when I arrived, so I went first to have my wound dressed, and then the doctor was kind enough to bring me along here. I put the case into your hands and shall do exactly what you advise.\"\n\nWe both sat in silence for some little time after listening to this extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock Holmes pulled down from the shelf one of the ponderous commonplace books in which he placed his cuttings.\n\n\"Here is an advertisement which will interest you,\" said he. \"It appeared in all the papers about a year ago. Listen to this: etc., etc. Ha! That represents the last time that the colonel needed to have his machine overhauled, I fancy.\"\n\n\"Lost, on the 9th inst., Mr. Jeremiah Hayling, aged twenty-six, a hydraulic engineer. Left his lodgings at ten o'clock at night, and has not been heard of since. Was dressed in\u2014\n\n\"Good heavens!\" cried my patient. \"Then that explains what the girl said.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly. It is quite clear that the colonel was a cool and desperate man, who was absolutely determined that nothing should stand in the way of his little game, like those out-and-out pirates who will leave no survivor from a captured ship. Well, every moment now is precious, so if you feel equal to it we shall go down to Scotland Yard at once as a preliminary to starting for Eyford.\"\n\nSome three hours or so afterwards we were all in the train together, bound from Reading to the little Berkshire village. There were Sherlock Holmes, the hydraulic engineer, Inspector Bradstreet, of Scotland Yard, a plain-clothes man, and myself. Bradstreet had spread an ordnance map of the county out upon the seat and was busy with his compasses drawing a circle with Eyford for its centre.\n\n\"There you are,\" said he. \"That circle is drawn at a radius of ten miles from the village. The place we want must be somewhere near that line. You said ten miles, I think, sir.\"\n\n\"It was an hour's good drive.\"\n\n\"And you think that they brought you back all that way when you were unconscious?\"\n\n\"They must have done so. I have a confused memory, too, of having been lifted and conveyed somewhere.\"\n\n\"What I cannot understand,\" said I, \"is why they should have spared you when they found you lying fainting in the garden. Perhaps the villain was softened by the woman's entreaties.\"\n\n\"I hardly think that likely. I never saw a more inexorable face in my life.\"\n\n\"Oh, we shall soon clear up all that,\" said Bradstreet. \"Well, I have drawn my circle, and I only wish I knew at what point upon it the folk that we are in search of are to be found.\"\n\n\"I think I could lay my finger on it,\" said Holmes quietly.\n\n\"Really, now!\" cried the inspector, \"you have formed your opinion! Come, now, we shall see who agrees with you. I say it is south, for the country is more deserted there.\"\n\n\"And I say east,\" said my patient.\n\n\"I am for west,\" remarked the plain-clothes man. \"There are several quiet little villages up there.\"\n\n\"And I am for north,\" said I, \"because there are no hills there, and our friend says that he did not notice the carriage go up any.\"\n\n\"Come,\" cried the inspector, laughing; \"it's a very pretty diversity of opinion. We have boxed the compass among us. Who do you give your casting vote to?\"\n\n\"You are all wrong.\"\n\n\"But we can't all be.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, you can. This is my point.\" He placed his finger in the centre of the circle. \"This is where we shall find them.\"\n\n\"But the twelve-mile drive?\" gasped Hatherley.\n\n\"Six out and six back. Nothing simpler. You say yourself that the horse was fresh and glossy when you got in. How could it be that if it had gone twelve miles over heavy roads?\"\n\n\"Indeed, it is a likely ruse enough,\" observed Bradstreet thoughtfully. \"Of course there can be no doubt as to the nature of this gang.\"\n\n\"None at all,\" said Holmes. \"They are coiners on a large scale, and have used the machine to form the amalgam which has taken the place of silver.\"\n\n\"We have known for some time that a clever gang was at work,\" said the inspector. \"They have been turning out half-crowns by the thousand. We even traced them as far as Reading, but could get no farther, for they had covered their traces in a way that showed that they were very old hands. But now, thanks to this lucky chance, I think that we have got them right enough.\"\n\nBut the inspector was mistaken, for those criminals were not destined to fall into the hands of justice. As we rolled into Eyford Station we saw a gigantic column of smoke which streamed up from behind a small clump of trees in the neighbourhood and hung like an immense ostrich feather over the landscape.\n\n\"A house on fire?\" asked Bradstreet as the train steamed off again on its way.\n\n\"Yes, sir!\" said the station-master.\n\n\"When did it break out?\"\n\n\"I hear that it was during the night, sir, but it has got worse, and the whole place is in a blaze.\"\n\n\"Whose house is it?\"\n\n\"Dr. Becher's.\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" broke in the engineer, \"is Dr. Becher a German, very thin, with a long, sharp nose?\"\n\nThe station-master laughed heartily. \"No, sir, Dr. Becher is an Englishman, and there isn't a man in the parish who has a better-lined waistcoat. But he has a gentleman staying with him, a patient, as I understand, who is a foreigner, and he looks as if a little good Berkshire beef would do him no harm.\"\n\nThe station-master had not finished his speech before we were all hastening in the direction of the fire. The road topped a low hill, and there was a great widespread whitewashed building in front of us, spouting fire at every chink and window, while in the garden in front three fire-engines were vainly striving to keep the flames under.\n\n\"That's it!\" cried Hatherley, in intense excitement. \"There is the gravel-drive, and there are the rose-bushes where I lay. That second window is the one that I jumped from.\"\n\n\"Well, at least,\" said Holmes, \"you have had your revenge upon them. There can be no question that it was your oil-lamp which, when it was crushed in the press, set fire to the wooden walls, though no doubt they were too excited in the chase after you to observe it at the time. Now keep your eyes open in this crowd for your friends of last night, though I very much fear that they are a good hundred miles off by now.\"\n\nAnd Holmes's fears came to be realized, for from that day to this no word has ever been heard either of the beautiful woman, the sinister German, or the morose Englishman. Early that morning a peasant had met a cart containing several people and some very bulky boxes driving rapidly in the direction of Reading, but there all traces of the fugitives disappeared, and even Holmes's ingenuity failed ever to discover the least clue as to their whereabouts.\n\nThe firemen had been much perturbed at the strange arrangements which they had found within, and still more so by discovering a newly severed human thumb upon a window-sill of the second floor. About sunset, however, their efforts were at last successful, and they subdued the flames, but not before the roof had fallen in, and the whole place been reduced to such absolute ruin that, save some twisted cylinders and iron piping, not a trace remained of the machinery which had cost our unfortunate acquaintance so dearly. Large masses of nickel and of tin were discovered stored in an out-house, but no coins were to be found, which may have explained the presence of those bulky boxes which have been already referred to.\n\nHow our hydraulic engineer had been conveyed from the garden to the spot where he recovered his senses might have remained forever a mystery were it not for the soft mould, which told us a very plain tale. He had evidently been carried down by two persons, one of whom had remarkably small feet and the other unusually large ones. On the whole, it was most probable that the silent Englishman, being less bold or less murderous than his companion, had assisted the woman to bear the unconscious man out of the way of danger.\n\n\"Well,\" said our engineer ruefully as we took our seats to return once more to London, \"it has been a pretty business for me! I have lost my thumb and I have lost a fifty-guinea fee, and what have I gained?\"\n\n\"Experience,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"Indirectly it may be of value, you know; you have only to put it into words to gain the reputation of being excellent company for the remainder of your existence.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE NOBLE BACHELOR", + "text": "The Lord St. Simon marriage, and its curious termination, have long ceased to be a subject of interest in those exalted circles in which the unfortunate bridegroom moves. Fresh scandals have eclipsed it, and their more piquant details have drawn the gossips away from this four-year-old drama. As I have reason to believe, however, that the full facts have never been revealed to the general public, and as my friend Sherlock Holmes had a considerable share in clearing the matter up, I feel that no memoir of him would be complete without some little sketch of this remarkable episode.\n\nIt was a few weeks before my own marriage, during the days when I was still sharing rooms with Holmes in Baker Street, that he came home from an afternoon stroll to find a letter on the table waiting for him. I had remained indoors all day, for the weather had taken a sudden turn to rain, with high autumnal winds, and the Jezail bullet which I had brought back in one of my limbs as a relic of my Afghan campaign throbbed with dull persistence. With my body in one easy-chair and my legs upon another, I had surrounded myself with a cloud of newspapers until at last, saturated with the news of the day, I tossed them all aside and lay listless, watching the huge crest and monogram upon the envelope upon the table and wondering lazily who my friend's noble correspondent could be.\n\n\"Here is a very fashionable epistle,\" I remarked as he entered. \"Your morning letters, if I remember right, were from a fish-monger and a tide-waiter.\"\n\n\"Yes, my correspondence has certainly the charm of variety,\" he answered, smiling, \"and the humbler are usually the more interesting. This looks like one of those unwelcome social summonses which call upon a man either to be bored or to lie.\"\n\nHe broke the seal and glanced over the contents.\n\n\"Oh, come, it may prove to be something of interest, after all.\"\n\n\"Not social, then?\"\n\n\"No, distinctly professional.\"\n\n\"And from a noble client?\"\n\n\"One of the highest in England.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, I congratulate you.\"\n\n\"I assure you, Watson, without affectation, that the status of my client is a matter of less moment to me than the interest of his case. It is just possible, however, that that also may not be wanting in this new investigation. You have been reading the papers diligently of late, have you not?\"\n\n\"It looks like it,\" said I ruefully, pointing to a huge bundle in the corner. \"I have had nothing else to do.\"\n\n\"It is fortunate, for you will perhaps be able to post me up. I read nothing except the criminal news and the agony column. The latter is always instructive. But if you have followed recent events so closely you must have read about Lord St. Simon and his wedding?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, with the deepest interest.\"\n\n\"That is well. The letter which I hold in my hand is from Lord St. Simon. I will read it to you, and in return you must turn over these papers and let me have whatever bears upon the matter. This is what he says:\n\n\u2002\"MY DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES:\n\n\u2002\"Lord Backwater tells me that I may place implicit reliance upon your judgment and discretion. I have determined, therefore, to call upon you and to consult you in reference to the very painful event which has occurred in connection with my wedding. Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, is acting already in the matter, but he assures me that he sees no objection to your cooperation, and that he even thinks that it might be of some assistance. I will call at four o'clock in the afternoon, and, should you have any other engagement at that time, I hope that you will postpone it, as this matter is of paramount importance.\n\n\u2002\"Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002\"ST. SIMON.\n\n\"It is dated from Grosvenor Mansions, written with a quill pen, and the noble lord has had the misfortune to get a smear of ink upon the outer side of his right little finger,\" remarked Holmes as he folded up the epistle.\n\n\"He says four o'clock. It is three now. He will be here in an hour.\"\n\n\"Then I have just time, with your assistance, to get clear upon the subject. Turn over those papers and arrange the extracts in their order of time, while I take a glance as to who our client is.\" He picked a red-covered volume from a line of books of reference beside the mantelpiece. \"Here he is,\" said he, sitting down and flattening it out upon his knee. \"Lord Robert Walsingham de Vere St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral. Hum! Arms: Azure, three caltrops in chief over a fess sable. Born in 1846. He's forty-one years of age, which is mature for marriage. Was Under-Secretary for the colonies in a late administration. The Duke, his father, was at one time Secretary for Foreign Affairs. They inherit Plantagenet blood by direct descent, and Tudor on the distaff side. Ha! Well, there is nothing very instructive in all this. I think that I must turn to you, Watson, for something more solid.\"\n\n\"I have very little difficulty in finding what I want,\" said I, \"for the facts are quite recent, and the matter struck me as remarkable. I feared to refer them to you, however, as I knew that you had an inquiry on hand and that you disliked the intrusion of other matters.\"\n\n\"Oh, you mean the little problem of the Grosvenor Square furniture van. That is quite cleared up now\u2014though, indeed, it was obvious from the first. Pray give me the results of your newspaper selections.\"\n\n\"Here is the first notice which I can find. It is in the personal column of the Morning Post, and dates, as you see, some weeks back:\n\n\"A marriage has been arranged [it says] and will, if rumour is correct, very shortly take place, between Lord Robert St. Simon, second son of the Duke of Balmoral, and Miss Hatty Doran, the only daughter of Aloysius Doran. Esq., of San Francisco. Cal., U. S. A.\n\nThat is all.\"\n\n\"Terse and to the point,\" remarked Holmes, stretching his long, thin legs towards the fire.\n\n\"There was a paragraph amplifying this in one of the society papers of the same week. Ah, here it is:\n\n\"There will soon be a call for protection in the marriage market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the Atlantic. An important addition has been made during the last week to the list of the prizes which have been borne away by these charming invaders. Lord St. Simon, who has shown himself for over twenty years proof against the little god's arrows, has now definitely announced his approaching marriage with Miss Hatty Doran, the fascinating daughter of a California millionaire. Miss Doran, whose graceful figure and striking face attracted much attention at the West-bury House festivities, is an only child, and it is currently reported that her dowry will run to considerably over the six figures, with expectancies for the future. As it is an open secret that the Duke of Balmoral has been compelled to sell his pictures within the last few years, and as Lord St. Simon has no property of his own save the small estate of Birchmoor, it is obvious that the Californian heiress is not the only gainer by an alliance which will enable her to make the easy and common transition from a Republican lady to a British peeress.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\" asked Holmes, yawning.\n\n\"Oh, yes; plenty. Then there is another note in the Morning Post to say that the marriage would be an absolutely quiet one, that it would be at St. George's, Hanover Square, that only half a dozen intimate friends would be invited, and that the party would return to the furnished house at Lancaster Gate which has been taken by Mr. Aloysius Doran. Two days later\u2014that is, on Wednesday last\u2014there is a curt announcement that the wedding had taken place, and that the honeymoon would be passed at Lord Backwater's place, near Petersfield. Those are all the notices which appeared before the disappearance of the bride.\"\n\n\"Before the what?\" asked Holmes with a start.\n\n\"The vanishing of the lady.\"\n\n\"When did she vanish, then?\"\n\n\"At the wedding breakfast.\"\n\n\"Indeed. This is more interesting than it promised to be; quite dramatic, in fact.\"\n\n\"Yes; it struck me as being a little out of the common.\"\n\n\"They often vanish before the ceremony, and occasionally during the honeymoon; but I cannot call to mind anything quite so prompt as this. Pray let me have the details.\"\n\n\"I warn you that they are very incomplete.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we may make them less so.\"\n\n\"Such as they are, they are set forth in a single article of a morning paper of yesterday, which I will read to you. It is headed, 'Singular Occurrence at a Fashionable Wedding':\n\n\"The family of Lord Robert St. Simon has been thrown into the greatest consternation by the strange and painful episodes which have taken place in connection with his wedding. The ceremony, as shortly announced in the papers of yesterday, occurred on the previous morning; but it is only now that it has been possible to confirm the strange rumours which have been so persistently floating about. In spite of the attempts of the friends to hush the matter up, so much public attention has now been drawn to it that no good purpose can be served by affecting to disregard what is a common subject for conversation.\n\n\"The ceremony, which was performed at St. George's, Hanover Square, was a very quiet one, no one being present save the father of the bride, Mr. Aloysius Doran, the Duchess of Balmoral, Lord Backwater, Lord Eustace, and Lady Clara St. Simon (the younger brother and sister of the bridegroom), and Lady Alicia Whittington. The whole party proceeded afterwards to the house of Mr. Aloysius Doran, at Lancaster Gate, where breakfast had been prepared. It appears that some little trouble was caused by a woman, whose name has not been ascertained, who endeavoured to force her way into the house after the bridal party, alleging that she had some claim upon Lord St. Simon. It was only after a painful and prolonged scene that she was ejected by the butler and the footman. The bride, who had fortunately entered the house before this unpleasant interruption, had sat down to breakfast with the rest, when she complained of a sudden indisposition and retired to her room. Her prolonged absence having caused some comment, her father followed her, but learned from her maid that she had only come up to her chamber for an instant, caught up an ulster and bonnet, and hurried down to the passage. One of the footmen declared that he had seen a lady leave the house thus apparelled, but had refused to credit that it was his mistress, believing her to be with the company. On ascertaining that his daughter had disappeared, Mr. Aloysius Doran, in conjunction with the bridegroom, instantly put themselves in communication with the police, and very energetic inquiries are being made, which will probably result in a speedy clearing up of this very singular business. Up to a late hour last night, however, nothing had transpired as to the whereabouts of the missing lady. There are rumours of foul play in the matter, and it is said that the police have caused the arrest of the woman who had caused the original disturbance, in the belief that, from jealousy or some other motive, she may have been concerned in the strange disappearance of the bride.\"\n\n\"And is that all?\"\n\n\"Only one little item in another of the morning papers, but it is a suggestive one.\"\n\n\"And it is\u2014\"\n\n\"That Miss Flora Millar, the lady who had caused the disturbance, has actually been arrested. It appears that she was formerly a danseuse at the Allegro, and that she has known the bridegroom for some years. There are no further particulars, and the whole case is in your hands now\u2014so far as it has been set forth in the public press.\"\n\n\"And an exceedingly interesting case it appears to be. I would not have missed it for worlds. But there is a ring at the bell, Watson, and as the clock makes it a few minutes after four, I have no doubt that this will prove to be our noble client. Do not dream of going, Watson, for I very much prefer having a witness, if only as a check to my own memory.\"\n\n\"Lord Robert St. Simon,\" announced our page-boy, throwing open the door. A gentleman entered, with a pleasant, cultured face, high-nosed and pale, with something perhaps of petulance about the mouth, and with the steady, well-opened eye of a man whose pleasant lot it had ever been to command and to be obeyed. His manner was brisk, and yet his general appearance gave an undue impression of age, for he had a slight forward stoop and a little bend of the knees as he walked. His hair, too, as he swept off his very curly-brimmed hat, was grizzled round the edges and thin upon the top. As to his dress, it was careful to the verge of foppish-ness, with high collar, black frock-coat, white waistcoat, yellow gloves, patent-leather shoes, and light-coloured gaiters. He advanced slowly into the room, turning his head from left to right, and swinging in his right hand the cord which held his golden eyeglasses.\n\n\"Goodday, Lord St. Simon,\" said Holmes, rising and bowing. \"Pray take the basket-chair. This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson. Draw up a little to the fire, and we will talk this matter over.\"\n\n\"A most painful matter to me, as you can most readily imagine, Mr. Holmes. I have been cut to the quick. I understand that you have already managed several delicate cases of this sort, sir, though I presume that they were hardly from the same class of society.\"\n\n\"No, I am descending.\"\n\n\"I beg pardon.\"\n\n\"My last client of the sort was a king.\"\n\n\"Oh, really! I had no idea. And which king?\"\n\n\"The King of Scandinavia.\"\n\n\"What! Had he lost his wife?\"\n\n\"You can understand,\" said Holmes suavely, \"that I extend to the affairs of my other clients the same secrecy which I promise to you in yours.\"\n\n\"Of course! Very right! very right! I'm sure I beg pardon. As to my own case, I am ready to give you any information which may assist you in forming an opinion.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I have already learned all that is in the public prints, nothing more. I presume that I may take it as correct\u2014this article, for example, as to the disappearance of the bride.\"\n\nLord St. Simon glanced over it. \"Yes, it is correct, as far as it goes.\"\n\n\"But it needs a great deal of supplementing before anyone could offer an opinion. I think that I may arrive at my facts most directly by questioning you.\"\n\n\"Pray do so.\"\n\n\"When did you first meet Miss Hatty Doran?\"\n\n\"In San Francisco, a year ago.\"\n\n\"You were travelling in the States?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Did you become engaged then?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But you were on a friendly footing?\"\n\n\"I was amused by her society, and she could see that I was amused.\"\n\n\"Her father is very rich?\"\n\n\"He is said to be the richest man on the Pacific slope.\"\n\n\"And how did he make his money?\"\n\n\"In mining. He had nothing a few years ago. Then he struck gold, invested it, and came up by leaps and bounds.\"\n\n\"Now, what is your own impression as to the young lady's\u2014your wife's character?\"\n\nThe nobleman swung his glasses a little faster and stared down into the fire. \"You see, Mr. Holmes,\" said he, \"my wife was twenty before her father became a rich man. During that time she ran free in a mining camp and wandered through woods or mountains, so that her education has come from Nature rather than from the schoolmaster. She is what we call in England a tomboy, with a strong nature, wild and free, unfettered by any sort of traditions. She is impetuous\u2014volcanic, I was about to say. She is swift in making up her mind and fearless in carrying out her resolutions. On the other hand, I would not have given her the name which I have the honour to bear\"\u2014he gave a little stately cough\u2014\"had not I thought her to be at bottom a noble woman. I believe that she is capable of heroic self-sacrifice and that anything dishonourable would be repugnant to her.\"\n\n\"Have you her photograph?\"\n\n\"I brought this with me.\" He opened a locket and showed us the full face of a very lovely woman. It was not a photograph but an ivory miniature, and the artist had brought out the full effect of the lustrous black hair, the large dark eyes, and the exquisite mouth. Holmes gazed long and earnestly at it. Then he closed the locket and handed it back to Lord St. Simon.\n\n\"The young lady came to London, then, and you renewed your acquaintance?\"\n\n\"Yes, her father brought her over for this last London season. I met her several times, became engaged to her, and have now married her.\"\n\n\"She brought, I understand, a considerable dowry?\"\n\n\"A fair dowry. Not more than is usual in my family.\"\n\n\"And this, of course, remains to you, since the marriage is a fait accompli?\"\n\n\"I really have made no inquiries on the subject.\"\n\n\"Very naturally not. Did you see Miss Doran on the day before the wedding?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Was she in good spirits?\"\n\n\"Never better. She kept talking of what we should do in our future lives.\"\n\n\"Indeed! That is very interesting. And on the morning of the wedding?\"\n\n\"She was as bright as possible\u2014at least until after the ceremony.\"\n\n\"And did you observe any change in her then?\"\n\n\"Well, to tell the truth, I saw then the first signs that I had ever seen that her temper was just a little sharp. The incident, however, was too trivial to relate and can have no possible bearing upon the case.\"\n\n\"Pray let us have it, for all that.\"\n\n\"Oh, it is childish. She dropped her bouquet as we went towards the vestry. She was passing the front pew at the time, and it fell over into the pew. There was a moment's delay, but the gentleman in the pew handed it up to her again, and it did not appear to be the worse for the fall. Yet when I spoke to her of the matter, she answered me abruptly; and in the carriage, on our way home, she seemed absurdly agitated over this trifling cause.\"\n\n\"Indeed! You say that there was a gentleman in the pew. Some of the general public were present, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. It is impossible to exclude them when the church is open.\"\n\n\"This gentleman was not one of your wife's friends?\"\n\n\"No, no; I call him a gentleman by courtesy, but he was quite a common-looking person. I hardly noticed his appearance. But really I think that we are wandering rather far from the point.\"\n\n\"Lady St. Simon, then, returned from the wedding in a less cheerful frame of mind than she had gone to it. What did she do on reentering her father's house?\"\n\n\"I saw her in conversation with her maid.\"\n\n\"And who is her maid?\"\n\n\"Alice is her name. She is an American and came from California with her.\"\n\n\"A confidential servant?\"\n\n\"A little too much so. It seemed to me that her mistress allowed her to take great liberties. Still, of course, in America they look upon these things in a different way.\"\n\n\"How long did she speak to this Alice?\"\n\n\"Oh, a few minutes. I had something else to think of.\"\n\n\"You did not overhear what they said?\"\n\n\"Lady St. Simon said something about 'jumping a claim.' She was accustomed to use slang of the kind. I have no idea what she meant.\"\n\n\"American slang is very expressive sometimes. And what did your wife do when she finished speaking to her maid?\"\n\n\"She walked into the breakfast-room.\"\n\n\"On your arm?\"\n\n\"No, alone. She was very independent in little matters like that. Then, after we had sat down for ten minutes or so, she rose hurriedly, muttered some words of apology, and left the room. She never came back.\"\n\n\"But this maid, Alice, as I understand, deposes that she went to her room, covered her bride's dress with a long ulster, put on a bonnet, and went out.\"\n\n\"Quite so. And she was afterwards seen walking into Hyde Park in company with Flora Millar, a woman who is now in custody, and who had already made a disturbance at Mr. Doran's house that morning.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. I should like a few particulars as to this young lady, and your relations to her.\"\n\nLord St. Simon shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. \"We have been on a friendly footing for some years\u2014I may say on a very friendly footing. She used to be at the Allegro. I have not treated her un-generously, and she had no just cause of complaint against me, but you know what women are, Mr. Holmes. Flora was a dear little thing, but exceedingly hot-headed and devotedly attached to me. She wrote me dreadful letters when she heard that I was about to be married, and, to tell the truth, the reason why I had the marriage celebrated so quietly was that I feared lest there might be a scandal in the church. She came to Mr. Doran's door just after we returned, and she endeavoured to push her way in, uttering very abusive expressions towards my wife, and even threatening her, but I had foreseen the possibility of something of the sort, and I had two police fellows there in private clothes, who soon pushed her out again. She was quiet when she saw that there was no good in making a row.\"\n\n\"Did your wife hear all this?\"\n\n\"No, thank goodness, she did not.\"\n\n\"And she was seen walking with this very woman afterwards?\"\n\n\"Yes. That is what Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, looks upon as so serious. It is thought that Flora decoyed my wife out and laid some terrible trap for her.\"\n\n\"Well, it is a possible supposition.\"\n\n\"You think so, too?\"\n\n\"I did not say a probable one. But you do not yourself look upon this as likely?\"\n\n\"I do not think Flora would hurt a fly.\"\n\n\"Still, jealousy is a strange transformer of characters. Pray what is your own theory as to what took place?\"\n\n\"Well, really, I came to seek a theory, not to propound one. I have given you all the facts. Since you ask me, however, I may say that it has occurred to me as possible that the excitement of this affair, the consciousness that she had made so immense a social stride, had the effect of causing some little nervous disturbance in my wife.\"\n\n\"In short, that she had become suddenly deranged?\"\n\n\"Well, really, when I consider that she has turned her back\u2014I will not say upon me, but upon so much that many have aspired to without success\u2014I can hardly explain it in any other fashion.\"\n\n\"Well, certainly that is also a conceivable hypothesis,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"And now, Lord St. Simon, I think that I have nearly all my data. May I ask whether you were seated at the breakfast-table so that you could see out of the window?\"\n\n\"We could see the other side of the road and the Park.\"\n\n\"Quite so. Then I do not think that I need to detain you longer. I shall communicate with you.\"\n\n\"Should you be fortunate enough to solve this problem,\" said our client, rising.\n\n\"I have solved it.\"\n\n\"Eh? What was that?\"\n\n\"I say that I have solved it.\"\n\n\"Where, then, is my wife?\"\n\n\"That is a detail which I shall speedily supply.\"\n\nLord St. Simon shook his head. \"I am afraid that it will take wiser heads than yours or mine,\" he remarked, and bowing in a stately, old-fashioned manner he departed.\n\n\"It is very good of Lord St. Simon to honour my head by putting it on a level with his own,\" said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. \"I think that I shall have a whisky and soda and a cigar after all this cross-questioning. I had formed my conclusions as to the case before our client came into the room.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\"\n\n\"I have notes of several similar cases, though none, as I remarked before, which were quite as prompt. My whole examination served to turn my conjecture into a certainty. Circumstantial evidence is occasionally very convincing, as when you find a trout in the milk, to quote Thoreau's example.\"\n\n\"But I have heard all that you have heard.\"\n\n\"Without, however, the knowledge of pre\u00ebxisting cases which serves me so well. There was a parallel instance in Aberdeen some years back, and something on very much the same lines at Munich the year after the Franco-Prussian War. It is one of these cases\u2014but, hello, here is Lestrade! Good-afternoon, Lestrade! You will find an extra tumbler upon the sideboard, and there are cigars in the box.\"\n\nThe official detective was attired in a pea-jacket and cravat, which gave him a decidedly nautical appearance, and he carried a black canvas bag in his hand. With a short greeting he seated himself and lit the cigar which had been offered to him.\n\n\"What's up, then?\" asked Holmes with a twinkle in his eye. \"You look dissatisfied.\"\n\n\"And I feel dissatisfied. It is this infernal St. Simon marriage case. I can make neither head nor tail of the business.\"\n\n\"Really! You surprise me.\"\n\n\"Who ever heard of such a mixed affair? Every clue seems to slip through my fingers. I have been at work upon it all day.\"\n\n\"And very wet it seems to have made you,\" said Holmes, laying his hand upon the arm of the pea-jacket.\n\n\"Yes, I have been dragging the Serpentine.\"\n\n\"In heaven's name, what for?\"\n\n\"In search of the body of Lady St. Simon.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes leaned back in his chair and laughed heartily.\n\n\"Have you dragged the basin of Trafalgar Square fountain?\" he asked.\n\n\"Why? What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Because you have just as good a chance of finding this lady in the one as in the other.\"\n\nLestrade shot an angry glance at my companion. \"I suppose you know all about it,\" he snarled.\n\n\"Well, I have only just heard the facts, but my mind is made up.\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed! Then you think that the Serpentine plays no part in the matter?\"\n\n\"I think it very unlikely.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps you will kindly explain how it is that we found this in it?\" He opened his bag as he spoke, and tumbled onto the floor a wedding-dress of watered silk, a pair of white satin shoes, and a bride's wreath and veil, all discoloured and soaked in water. \"There,\" said he, putting a new wedding-ring upon the top of the pile. \"There is a little nut for you to crack, Master Holmes.\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed!\" said my friend, blowing blue rings into the air. \"You dragged them from the Serpentine?\"\n\n\"No. They were found floating near the margin by a park-keeper. They have been identified as her clothes, and it seemed to me that if the clothes were there the body would not be far off.\"\n\n\"By the same brilliant reasoning, every man's body is to be found in the neighbourhood of his wardrobe. And pray what did you hope to arrive at through this?\"\n\n\"At some evidence implicating Flora Millar in the disappearance.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that you will find it difficult.\"\n\n\"Are you, indeed, now?\" cried Lestrade with some bitterness. \"I am afraid, Holmes, that you are not very practical with your deductions and your inferences. You have made two blunders in as many minutes. This dress does implicate Miss Flora Millar.\"\n\n\"And how?\"\n\n\"In the dress is a pocket. In the pocket is a card-case. In the card-case is a note. And here is the very note.\" He slapped it down upon the table in front of him. \"Listen to this:\n\n\"You will see me when all is ready. Come at once.\n\n\"F. H. M.\n\nNow my theory all along has been that Lady St. Simon was decoyed away by Flora Millar, and that she, with confederates, no doubt, was responsible for her disappearance. Here, signed with her initials, is the very note which was no doubt quietly slipped into her hand at the door and which lured her within their reach.\"\n\n\"Very good, Lestrade,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"You really are very fine indeed. Let me see it.\" He took up the paper in a listless way, but his attention instantly became riveted, and he gave a little cry of satisfaction. \"This is indeed important,\" said he.\n\n\"Ha! you find it so?\"\n\n\"Extremely so. I congratulate you warmly.\"\n\nLestrade rose in his triumph and bent his head to look. \"Why,\" he shrieked, \"you're looking at the wrong side!\"\n\n\"On the contrary, this is the right side.\"\n\n\"The right side? You're mad! Here is the note written in pencil over here.\"\n\n\"And over here is what appears to be the fragment of a hotel bill, which interests me deeply.\"\n\n\"There's nothing in it. I looked at it before,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"Oct. 4th, rooms 8s., breakfast 2s. 6d., cocktail ls., lunch 2s. 6d., glass sherry, 8d.\n\nI see nothing in that.\"\n\n\"Very likely not. It is most important, all the same. As to the note, it is important also, or at least the initials are, so I congratulate you again.\"\n\n\"I've wasted time enough,\" said Lestrade, rising. \"I believe in hard work and not in sitting by the fire spinning fine theories. Goodday, Mr. Holmes, and we shall see which gets to the bottom of the matter first.\" He gathered up the garments, thrust them into the bag, and made for the door.\n\n\"Just one hint to you, Lestrade,\" drawled Holmes before his rival vanished; \"I will tell you the true solution of the matter. Lady St. Simon is a myth. There is not, and there never has been, any such person.\"\n\nLestrade looked sadly at my companion. Then he turned to me, tapped his forehead three times, shook his head solemnly, and hurried away.\n\nHe had hardly shut the door behind him when Holmes rose to put on his overcoat. \"There is something in what the fellow says about outdoor work,\" he remarked, \"so I think, Watson, that I must leave you to your papers for a little.\"\n\nIt was after five o'clock when Sherlock Holmes left me, but I had no time to be lonely, for within an hour there arrived a confectioner's man with a very large flat box. This he unpacked with the help of a youth whom he had brought with him, and presently, to my very great astonishment, a quite epicurean little cold supper began to be laid out upon our humble lodging-house mahogany. There were a couple of brace of cold woodcock, a pheasant, a p\u00e2t\u00e9 de foie gras pie with a group of ancient and cobwebby bottles. Having laid out all these luxuries, my two visitors vanished away, like the genii of the Arabian Nights, with no explanation save that the things had been paid for and were ordered to this address.\n\nJust before nine o'clock Sherlock Holmes stepped briskly into the room. His features were gravely set, but there was a light in his eye which made me think that he had not been disappointed in his conclusions.\n\n\"They have laid the supper, then,\" he said, rubbing his hands.\n\n\"You seem to expect company. They have laid for five.\"\n\n\"Yes, I fancy we may have some company dropping in,\" said he. \"I am surprised that Lord St. Simon has not already arrived. Ha! I fancy that I hear his step now upon the stairs.\"\n\nIt was indeed our visitor of the afternoon who came bustling in, dangling his glasses more vigorously than ever, and with a very perturbed expression upon his aristocratic features.\n\n\"My messenger reached you, then?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, and I confess that the contents startled me beyond measure. Have you good authority for what you say?\"\n\n\"The best possible.\"\n\nLord St. Simon sank into a chair and passed his hand over his forehead.\n\n\"What will the Duke say,\" he murmured, \"when he hears that one of the family has been subjected to such humiliation?\"\n\n\"It is the purest accident. I cannot allow that there is any humiliation.\"\n\n\"Ah, you look on these things from another standpoint.\"\n\n\"I fail to see that anyone is to blame. I can hardly see how the lady could have acted otherwise, though her abrupt method of doing it was undoubtedly to be regretted. Having no mother, she had no one to advise her at such a crisis.\"\n\n\"It was a slight, sir, a public slight,\" said Lord St. Simon, tapping his fingers upon the table.\n\n\"You must make allowance for this poor girl, placed in so unprecedented a position.\"\n\n\"I will make no allowance. I am very angry indeed, and I have been shamefully used.\"\n\n\"I think that I heard a ring,\" said Holmes. \"Yes, there are steps on the landing. If I cannot persuade you to take a lenient view of the matter, Lord St. Simon, I have brought an advocate here who may be more successful.\" He opened the door and ushered in a lady and gentleman. \"Lord St. Simon,\" said he, \"allow me to introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Francis Hay Moulton. The lady, I think, you have already met.\"\n\nAt the sight of these newcomers our client had sprung from his seat and stood very erect, with his eyes cast down and his hand thrust into the breast of his frock-coat, a picture of offended dignity. The lady had taken a quick step forward and had held out her hand to him, but he still refused to raise his eyes. It was as well for his resolution, perhaps, for her pleading face was one which it was hard to resist.\n\n\"You're angry, Robert,\" said she. \"Well, I guess you have every cause to be.\"\n\n\"Pray make no apology to me,\" said Lord St. Simon bitterly.\n\n\"Oh, yes, I know that I have treated you real bad and that I should have spoken to you before I went; but I was kind of rattled, and from the time when I saw Frank here again I just didn't know what I was doing or saying. I only wonder I didn't fall down and do a faint right there before the altar.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, Mrs. Moulton, you would like my friend and me to leave the room while you explain this matter?\"\n\n\"If I may give an opinion,\" remarked the strange gentleman, \"we've had just a little too much secrecy over this business already. For my part, I should like all Europe and America to hear the rights of it.\" He was a small, wiry, sunburnt man, clean-shaven, with a sharp face and alert manner.\n\n\"Then I'll tell our story right away,\" said the lady. \"Frank here and I met in '84, in McQuire's camp, near the Rockies, where pa was working a claim. We were engaged to each other, Frank and I; but then one day father struck a rich pocket and made a pile; while poor Frank here had a claim that petered out and came to nothing. The richer pa grew the poorer was Frank; so at last pa wouldn't hear of our engagement lasting any longer, and he took me away to 'Frisco. Frank wouldn't throw up his hand, though; so he followed me there, and he saw me without pa knowing anything about it. It would only have made him mad to know, so we just fixed it all up for ourselves. Frank said that he would go and make his pile, too, and never come back to claim me until he had as much as pa. So then I promised to wait for him to the end of time and pledged myself not to marry anyone else while he lived. 'Why shouldn't we be married right away, then,' said he, 'and then I will feel sure of you; and I won't claim to be your husband until I come back?' Well, we talked it over, and he had fixed it all up so nicely, with a clergyman all ready in waiting, that we just did it right there; and then Frank went off to seek his fortune, and I went back to pa.\n\n\"The next I heard of Frank was that he was in Montana, and then he went prospecting in Arizona, and then I heard of him from New Mexico. After that came a long newspaper story about how a miners' camp had been attacked by Apache Indians, and there was my Frank's name among the killed. I fainted dead away, and I was very sick for months after. Pa thought I had a decline and took me to half the doctors in 'Frisco. Not a word of news came for a year and more, so that I never doubted that Frank was really dead. Then Lord St. Simon came to 'Frisco, and we came to London, and a marriage was arranged, and pa was very pleased, but I felt all the time that no man on this earth would ever take the place in my heart that had been given to my poor Frank.\n\n\"Still, if I had married Lord St. Simon, of course I'd have done my duty by him. We can't command our love, but we can our actions. I went to the altar with him with the intention to make him just as good a wife as it was in me to be. But you may imagine what I felt when, just as I came to the altar rails, I glanced back and saw Frank standing and looking at me out of the first pew. I thought it was his ghost at first; but when I looked again there he was still, with a kind of question in his eyes; as if to ask me whether I were glad or sorry to see him. I wonder I didn't drop. I know that everything was turning round, and the words of the clergyman were just like the buzz of a bee in my ear. I didn't know what to do. Should I stop the service and make a scene in the church? I glanced at him again, and he seemed to know what I was thinking, for he raised his finger to his lips to tell me to be still. Then I saw him scribble on a piece of paper, and I knew that he was writing me a note. As I passed his pew on the way out I dropped my bouquet over to him, and he slipped the note into my hand when he returned me the flowers. It was only a line asking me to join him when he made the sign to me to do so. Of course I never doubted for a moment that my first duty was now to him, and I determined to do just whatever he might direct.\n\n\"When I got back I told my maid, who had known him in California, and had always been his friend. I ordered her to say nothing, but to get a few things packed and my ulster ready. I know I ought to have spoken to Lord St. Simon, but it was dreadful hard before his mother and all those great people. I just made up my mind to run away and explain afterwards. I hadn't been at the table ten minutes before I saw Frank out of the window at the other side of the road. He beckoned to me and then began walking into the Park. I slipped out, put on my things, and followed him. Some woman came talking something or other about Lord St. Simon to me\u2014seemed to me from the little I heard as if he had a little secret of his own before marriage also\u2014but I managed to get away from her and soon overtook Frank. We got into a cab together, and away we drove to some lodgings he had taken in Gordon Square, and that was my true wedding after all those years of waiting. Frank had been a prisoner among the Apaches, had escaped, came on to 'Frisco, found that I had given him up for dead and had gone to England, followed me there, and had come upon me at last on the very morning of my second wedding.\"\n\n\"I saw it in a paper,\" explained the American. \"It gave the name and the church but not where the lady lived.\"\n\n\"Then we had a talk as to what we should do, and Frank was all for openness, but I was so ashamed of it all that I felt as if I should like to vanish away and never see any of them again\u2014just sending a line to pa, perhaps, to show him that I was alive. It was awful to me to think of all those lords and ladies sitting round that breakfast-table and waiting for me to come back. So Frank took my wedding-clothes and things and made a bundle of them, so that I should not be traced, and dropped them away somewhere where no one could find them. It is likely that we should have gone on to Paris to-morrow, only that this good gentleman, Mr. Holmes, came round to us this evening, though how he found us is more than I can think, and he showed us very clearly and kindly that I was wrong and that Frank was right, and that we should be putting ourselves in the wrong if we were so secret. Then he offered to give us a chance of talking to Lord St. Simon alone, and so we came right away round to his rooms at once. Now, Robert, you have heard it all, and I am very sorry if I have given you pain, and I hope that you do not think very meanly of me.\"\n\nLord St. Simon had by no means relaxed his rigid attitude, but had listened with a frowning brow and a compressed lip to this long narrative.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" he said, \"but it is not my custom to discuss my most intimate personal affairs in this public manner.\"\n\n\"Then you won't forgive me? You won't shake hands before I go?\"\n\n\"Oh, certainly, if it would give you any pleasure.\" He put out his hand and coldly grasped that which she extended to him.\n\n\"I had hoped,\" suggested Holmes, \"that you would have joined us in a friendly supper.\"\n\n\"I think that there you ask a little too much,\" responded his Lordship. \"I may be forced to acquiesce in these recent developments, but I can hardly be expected to make merry over them. I think that with your permission I will now wish you all a very good-night.\" He included us all in a sweeping bow and stalked out of the room.\n\n\"Then I trust that you at least will honour me with your company,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"It is always a joy to meet an American, Mr. Moulton, for I am one of those who believe that the folly of a monarch and the blundering of a minister in far-gone years will not prevent our children from being some day citizens of the same world-wide country under a flag which shall be a quartering of the Union Jack with the Stars and Stripes.\"\n\n\"The case has been an interesting one,\" remarked Holmes when our visitors had left us, \"because it serves to show very clearly how simple the explanation may be of an affair which at first sight seems to be almost inexplicable. Nothing could be more natural than the sequence of events as narrated by this lady, and nothing stranger than the result when viewed, for instance, by Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard.\"\n\n\"You were not yourself at fault at all, then?\"\n\n\"From the first, two facts were very obvious to me, the one that the lady had been quite willing to undergo the wedding ceremony, the other that she had repented of it within a few minutes of returning home. Obviously something had occurred during the morning, then, to cause her to change her mind. What could that something be? She could not have spoken to anyone when she was out, for she had been in the company of the bridegroom. Had she seen someone, then? If she had, it must be someone from America because she had spent so short a time in this country that she could hardly have allowed anyone to acquire so deep an influence over her that the mere sight of him would induce her to change her plans so completely. You see we have already arrived, by a process of exclusion, at the idea that she might have seen an American. Then who could this American be, and why should he possess so much influence over her? It might be a lover; it might be a husband. Her young womanhood had, I knew, been spent in rough scenes and under strange conditions. So far I had got before I ever heard Lord St. Simon's narrative. When he told us of a man in a pew, of the change in the bride's manner, of so transparent a device for obtaining a note as the dropping of a bouquet, of her resort to her confidential maid, and of her very significant allusion to claim-jumping\u2014which in miners' parlance means taking possession of that which another person has a prior claim to\u2014the whole situation became absolutely clear. She had gone off with a man, and the man was either a lover or was a previous husband\u2014the chances being in favour of the latter.\"\n\n\"And how in the world did you find them?\"\n\n\"It might have been difficult, but friend Lestrade held information in his hands the value of which he did not himself know. The initials were, of course, of the highest importance, but more valuable still was it to know that within a week he had settled his bill at one of the most select London hotels.\"\n\n\"How did you deduce the select?\"\n\n\"By the select prices. Eight shillings for a bed and eightpence for a glass of sherry pointed to one of the most expensive hotels. There are not many in London which charge at that rate. In the second one which I visited in Northumberland Avenue, I learned by an inspection of the book that Francis H. Moulton, an American gentleman, had left only the day before; and on looking over the entries against him, I came upon the very items which I had seen in the duplicate bill. His letters were to be forwarded to 226 Gordon Square; so thither I travelled, and being fortunate enough to find the loving couple at home, I ventured to give them some paternal advice and to point out to them that it would be better in every way that they should make their position a little clearer both to the general public and to Lord St. Simon in particular. I invited them to meet him here, and, as you see, I made him keep the appointment.\"\n\n\"But with no very good result,\" I remarked. \"His conduct was certainly not very gracious.\"\n\n\"Ah, Watson,\" said Holmes, smiling, \"perhaps you would not be very gracious either, if, after all the trouble of wooing and wedding, you found yourself deprived in an instant of wife and of fortune. I think that we may judge Lord St. Simon very mercifully and thank our stars that we are never likely to find ourselves in the same position. Draw your chair up and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE BERYL CORONET", + "text": "\"Holmes,\" said I as I stood one morning in our bow-window look-Hing down the street, \"here is a madman coming along. It seems rather sad that his relatives should allow him to come out alone.\"\n\nMy friend rose lazily from his armchair and stood with his hands in the pockets of his dressing-gown, looking over my shoulder. It was a bright, crisp February morning, and the snow of the day before still lay deep upon the ground, shimmering brightly in the wintry sun. Down the centre of Baker Street it had been ploughed into a brown crumbly band by the traffic, but at either side and on the heaped-up edges of the foot-paths it still lay as white as when it fell. The gray pavement had been cleaned and scraped, but was still dangerously slippery, so that there were fewer passengers than usual. Indeed, from the direction of the Metropolitan Station no one was coming save the single gentleman whose eccentric conduct had drawn my attention.\n\nHe was a man of about fifty, tall, portly, and imposing, with a massive, strongly marked face and a commanding figure. He was dressed in a sombre yet rich style, in black frock-coat, shining hat, neat brown gaiters, and well-cut pearl-gray trousers. Yet his actions were in absurd contrast to the dignity of his dress and features, for he was running hard, with occasional little springs, such as a weary man gives who is little accustomed to set any tax upon his legs. As he ran he jerked his hands up and down, waggled his head, and writhed his face into the most extraordinary contortions.\n\n\"What on earth can be the matter with him?\" I asked. \"He is looking up at the numbers of the houses.\"\n\n\"I believe that he is coming here,\" said Holmes, rubbing his hands.\n\n\"Here?\"\n\n\"Yes; I rather think he is coming to consult me professionally. I think that I recognize the symptoms. Ha! did I not tell you?\" As he spoke, the man, puffing and blowing, rushed at our door and pulled at our bell until the whole house resounded with the clanging.\n\nA few moments later he was in our room, still puffing, still gesticulating, but with so fixed a look of grief and despair in his eyes that our smiles were turned in an instant to horror and pity. For a while he could not get his words out, but swayed his body and plucked at his hair like one who has been driven to the extreme limits of his reason. Then, suddenly springing to his feet, he beat his head against the wall with such force that we both rushed upon him and tore him away to the centre of the room. Sherlock Holmes pushed him down into the easy-chair and, sitting beside him, patted his hand and chatted with him in the easy, soothing tones which he knew so well how to employ.\n\n\"You have come to me to tell your story, have you not?\" said he. \"You are fatigued with your haste. Pray wait until you have recovered yourself, and then I shall be most happy to look into any little problem which you may submit to me.\"\n\nThe man sat for a minute or more with a heaving chest, fighting against his emotion. Then he passed his handkerchief over his brow, set his lips tight, and turned his face towards us.\n\n\"No doubt you think me mad?\" said he.\n\n\"I see that you have had some great trouble,\" responded Holmes.\n\n\"God knows I have!\u2014a trouble which is enough to unseat my reason, so sudden and so terrible is it. Public disgrace I might have faced, although I am a man whose character has never yet borne a stain. Private affliction also is the lot of every man; but the two coming together, and in so frightful a form, have been enough to shake my very soul. Besides, it is not I alone. The very noblest in the land may suffer unless some way be found out of this horrible affair.\"\n\n\"Pray compose yourself, sir,\" said Holmes, \"and let me have a clear account of who you are and what it is that has befallen you.\"\n\n\"My name,\" answered our visitor, \"is probably familiar to your ears. I am Alexander Holder, of the banking firm of Holder & Stevenson, of Threadneedle Street.\"\n\nThe name was indeed well known to us as belonging to the senior partner in the second largest private banking concern in the City of London. What could have happened, then, to bring one of the foremost citizens of London to this most pitiable pass? We waited, all curiosity, until with another effort he braced himself to tell his story.\n\n\"I feel that time is of value,\" said he; \"that is why I hastened here when the police inspector suggested that I should secure your cooperation. I came to Baker Street by the Underground and hurried from there on foot, for the cabs go slowly through this snow. That is why I was so out of breath, for I am a man who takes very little exercise. I feel better now, and I will put the facts before you as shortly and yet as clearly as I can.\n\n\"It is, of course, well known to you that in a successful banking business as much depends upon our being able to find remunerative investments for our funds as upon our increasing our connection and the number of our depositors. One of our most lucrative means of laying out money is in the shape of loans, where the security is unimpeachable. We have done a good deal in this direction during the last few years, and there are many noble families to whom we have advanced large sums upon the security of their pictures, libraries, or plate.\n\n\"Yesterday morning I was seated in my office at the bank when a card was brought in to me by one of the clerks. I started when I saw the name, for it was that of none other than\u2014well, perhaps even to you I had better say no more than that it was a name which is a household word all over the earth\u2014one of the highest, noblest, most exalted names in England. I was overwhelmed by the honour and attempted, when he entered, to say so, but he plunged at once into business with the air of a man who wishes to hurry quickly through a disagreeable task.\n\n\"'Mr. Holder,' said he, 'I have been informed that you are in the habit of advancing money.'\n\n\"'The firm does so when the security is good,' I answered.\n\n\"'It is absolutely essential to me,' said he, 'that I should have \u00a350,000 at once. I could, of course, borrow so trifling a sum ten times over from my friends, but I much prefer to make it a matter of business and to carry out that business myself. In my position you can readily understand that it is unwise to place one's self under obligations.'\n\n\"'For how long, may I ask, do you want this sum?' I asked.\n\n\"'Next Monday I have a large sum due to me, and I shall then most certainly repay what you advance, with whatever interest you think it right to charge. But it is very essential to me that the money should be paid at once.'\n\n\"'I should be happy to advance it without further parley from my own private purse,' said I, 'were it not that the strain would be rather more than it could bear. If, on the other hand, I am to do it in the name of the firm, then in justice to my partner I must insist that, even in your case, every businesslike precaution should be taken.'\n\n\"'I should much prefer to have it so,' said he, raising up a square, black morocco case which he had laid beside his chair. 'You have doubtless heard of the Beryl Coronet?'\n\n\"'One of the most precious public possessions of the empire,' said I.\n\n\"'Precisely.' He opened the case, and there, imbedded in soft, flesh-coloured velvet, lay the magnificent piece of jewellery which he had named. 'There are thirty-nine enormous beryls,' said he, 'and the price of the gold chasing is incalculable. The lowest estimate would put the worth of the coronet at double the sum which I have asked. I am prepared to leave it with you as my security.'\n\n\"I took the precious case into my hands and looked in some perplexity from it to my illustrious client.\n\n\"'You doubt its value?' he asked.\n\n\"'Not at all. I only doubt\u2014'\n\n\"'The propriety of my leaving it. You may set your mind at rest about that. I should not dream of doing so were it not absolutely certain that I should be able in four days to reclaim it. It is a pure matter of form. Is the security sufficient?'\n\n\"'Ample.'\n\n\"'You understand, Mr. Holder, that I am giving you a strong proof of the confidence which I have in you, founded upon all that I have heard of you. I rely upon you not only to be discreet and to refrain from all gossip upon the matter but, above all, to preserve this coronet with every possible precaution because I need not say that a great public scandal would be caused if any harm were to befall it. Any injury to it would be almost as serious as its complete loss, for there are no beryls in the world to match these, and it would be impossible to replace them. I leave it with you, however, with every confidence, and I shall call for it in person on Monday morning.'\n\n\"Seeing that my client was anxious to leave, I said no more; but, calling for my cashier, I ordered him to pay over fifty \u00a31000 notes. When I was alone once more, however, with the precious case lying upon the table in front of me, I could not but think with some misgivings of the immense responsibility which it entailed upon me. There could be no doubt that, as it was a national possession, a horrible scandal would ensue if any misfortune should occur to it. I already regretted having ever consented to take charge of it. However, it was too late to alter the matter now, so I locked it up in my private safe and turned once more to my work.\n\n\"When evening came I felt that it would be an imprudence to leave so precious a thing in the office behind me. Bankers' safes had been forced before now, and why should not mine be? If so, how terrible would be the position in which I should find myself! I determined, therefore, that for the next few days I would always carry the case backward and forward with me, so that it might never be really out of my reach. With this intention, I called a cab and drove out to my house at Streatham, carrying the jewel with me. I did not breathe freely until I had taken it upstairs and locked it in the bureau of my dressing-room.\n\n\"And now a word as to my household, Mr. Holmes, for I wish you to thoroughly understand the situation. My groom and my page sleep out of the house, and may be set aside altogether. I have three maid-servants who have been with me a number of years and whose absolute reliability is quite above suspicion. Another, Lucy Parr, the second waiting-maid, has only been in my service a few months. She came with an excellent character, however, and has always given me satisfaction. She is a very pretty girl and has attracted admirers who have occasionally hung about the place. That is the only drawback which we have found to her, but we believe her to be a thoroughly good girl in every way.\n\n\"So much for the servants. My family itself is so small that it will not take me long to describe it. I am a widower and have an only son, Arthur. He has been a disappointment to me, Mr. Holmes\u2014a grievous disappointment. I have no doubt that I am myself to blame. People tell me that I have spoiled him. Very likely I have. When my dear wife died I felt that he was all I had to love. I could not bear to see the smile fade even for a moment from his face. I have never denied him a wish. Perhaps it would have been better for both of us had I been sterner, but I meant it for the best.\n\n\"It was naturally my intention that he should succeed me in my business, but he was not of a business turn. He was wild, wayward, and, to speak the truth, I could not trust him in the handling of large sums of money. When he was young he became a member of an aristocratic club, and there, having charming manners, he was soon the intimate of a number of men with long purses and expensive habits. He learned to play heavily at cards and to squander money on the turf, until he had again and again to come to me and implore me to give him an advance upon his allowance, that he might settle his debts of honour. He tried more than once to break away from the dangerous company which he was keeping, but each time the influence of his friend, Sir George Burnwell, was enough to draw him back again.\n\n\"And, indeed, I could not wonder that such a man as Sir George Burnwell should gain an influence over him, for he has frequently brought him to my house, and I have found myself that I could hardly resist the fascination of his manner. He is older than Arthur, a man of the world to his finger-tips, one who had been everywhere, seen everything, a brilliant talker, and a man of great personal beauty. Yet when I think of him in cold blood, far away from the glamour of his presence, I am convinced from his cynical speech and the look which I have caught in his eyes that he is one who should be deeply distrusted. So I think, and so, too, thinks my little Mary, who has a woman's quick insight into character.\n\n\"And now there is only she to be described. She is my niece; but when my brother died five years ago and left her alone in the world I adopted her, and have looked upon her ever since as my daughter. She is a sun-beam in my house\u2014sweet, loving, beautiful, a wonderful manager and housekeeper, yet as tender and quiet and gentle as a woman could be. She is my right hand. I do not know what I could do without her. In only one matter has she ever gone against my wishes. Twice my boy has asked her to marry him, for he loves her devotedly, but each time she has refused him. I think that if anyone could have drawn him into the right path it would have been she, and that his marriage might have changed his whole life; but now, alas! it is too late\u2014forever too late!\n\n\"Now, Mr. Holmes, you know the people who live under my roof, and I shall continue with my miserable story.\n\n\"When we were taking coffee in the drawing-room that night after dinner, I told Arthur and Mary my experience, and of the precious treasure which we had under our roof, suppressing only the name of my client. Lucy Parr, who had brought in the coffee, had, I am sure, left the room; but I cannot swear that the door was closed. Mary and Arthur were much interested and wished to see the famous coronet, but I thought it better not to disturb it.\n\n\"'Where have you put it?' asked Arthur.\n\n\"'In my own bureau.'\n\n\"'Well, I hope to goodness the house won't be burgled during the night,' said he.\n\n\"'It is locked up,' I answered.\n\n\"'Oh, any old key will fit that bureau. When I was a youngster I have opened it myself with the key of the box-room cupboard.'\n\n\"He often had a wild way of talking, so that I thought little of what he said. He followed me to my room, however, that night with a very grave face.\n\n\"'Look here, dad,' said he with his eyes cast down, 'can you let me have \u00a3200?'\n\n\"'No, I cannot!' I answered sharply. 'I have been far too generous with you in money matters.'\n\n\"'You have been very kind,' said he, 'but I must have this money, or else I can never show my face inside the club again.'\n\n\"'And a very good thing, too!' I cried.\n\n\"'Yes, but you would not have me leave it a dishonoured man,' said he. 'I could not bear the disgrace. I must raise the money in some way, and if you will not let me have it, then I must try other means.'\n\n\"I was very angry, for this was the third demand during the month. 'You shall not have a farthing from me,' I cried, on which he bowed and left the room without another word.\n\n\"When he was gone I unlocked my bureau, made sure that my treasure was safe, and locked it again. Then I started to go round the house to see that all was secure\u2014a duty which I usually leave to Mary but which I thought it well to perform myself that night. As I came down the stairs I saw Mary herself at the side window of the hall, which she closed and fastened as I approached.\n\n\"'Tell me, dad,' said she, looking, I thought, a little disturbed, 'did you give Lucy, the maid, leave to go out to-night?'\n\n\"'Certainly not.'\n\n\"'She came in just now by the back door. I have no doubt that she has only been to the side gate to see someone, but I think that it is hardly safe and should be stopped.'\n\n\"'You must speak to her in the morning, or I will if you prefer it. Are you sure that everything is fastened?'\n\n\"'Quite sure, dad.'\n\n\"'Then, good-night.' I kissed her and went up to my bedroom again, where I was soon asleep.\n\n\"I am endeavouring to tell you everything, Mr. Holmes, which may have any bearing upon the case, but I beg that you will question me upon any point which I do not make clear.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, your statement is singularly lucid.\"\n\n\"I come to a part of my story now in which I should wish to be particularly so. I am not a very heavy sleeper, and the anxiety in my mind tended, no doubt, to make me even less so than usual. About two in the morning, then, I was awakened by some sound in the house. It had ceased ere I was wide awake, but it had left an impression behind it as though a window had gently closed somewhere. I lay listening with all my ears. Suddenly, to my horror, there was a distinct sound of footsteps moving softly in the next room. I slipped out of bed, all palpitating with fear, and peeped round the corner of my dressing-room door.\n\n\"'Arthur!' I screamed, 'you villain! you thief! How dare you touch that coronet?'\n\n\"The gas was half up, as I had left it, and my unhappy boy, dressed only in his shirt and trousers, was standing beside the light, holding, the coronet in his hands. He appeared to be wrenching at it, or bending it with all his strength. At my cry he dropped it from his grasp and turned as pale as death. I snatched it up and examined it. One of the gold corners, with three of the beryls in it, was missing.\n\n\"'You blackguard!' I shouted, beside myself with rage. 'You have destroyed it! You have dishonoured me forever! Where are the jewels which you have stolen?'\n\n\"'Stolen!' he cried.\n\n\"'Yes, thief!' I roared, shaking him by the shoulder.\n\n\"'There are none missing. There cannot be any missing,' said he.\n\n\"'There are three missing. And you know where they are. Must I call you a liar as well as a thief? Did I not see you trying to tear off another piece?'\n\n\"'You have called me names enough,' said he; 'I will not stand it any longer. I shall not say another word about this business, since you have chosen to insult me. I will leave your house in the morning and make my own way in the world.'\n\n\"'You shall leave it in the hands of the police!' I cried, half-mad with grief and rage. 'I shall have this matter probed to the bottom.'\n\n\"'You shall learn nothing from me,' said he with a passion such as I should not have thought was in his nature. 'If you choose to call the police, let the police find what they can.'\n\n\"By this time the whole house was astir, for I had raised my voice in my anger. Mary was the first to rush into my room, and, at the sight of the coronet and of Arthur's face, she read the whole story and, with a scream, fell down senseless on the ground. I sent the house-maid for the police and put the investigation into their hands at once. When the inspector and a constable entered the house, Arthur, who had stood sullenly with his arms folded, asked me whether it was my intention to charge him with theft. I answered that it had ceased to be a private matter, but had become a public one, since the ruined coronet was national property. I was determined that the law should have its way in everything.\n\n\"'At least,' said he, 'you will not have me arrested at once. It would be to your advantage as well as mine if I might leave the house for five minutes.'\n\n\"'That you may get away, or perhaps that you may conceal what you have stolen,' said I. And then, realizing the dreadful position in which I was placed, I implored him to remember that not only my honour but that of one who was far greater than I was at stake; and that he threatened to raise a scandal which would convulse the nation. He might avert it all if he would but tell me what he had done with the three missing stones.\n\n\"'You may as well face the matter,' said I; 'you have been caught in the act, and no confession could make your guilt more heinous. If you but make such reparation as is in your power, by telling us where the beryls are, all shall be forgiven and forgotten.'\n\n\"'Keep your forgiveness for those who ask for it,' he answered, turning away from me with a sneer. I saw that he was too hardened for any words of mine to influence him. There was but one way for it. I called in the inspector and gave him into custody. A search was made at once not only of his person but of his room and of every portion of the house where he could possibly have concealed the gems; but no trace of them could be found, nor would the wretched boy open his mouth for all our persuasions and our threats. This morning he was removed to a cell, and I, after going through all the police formalities, have hurried round to you to implore you to use your skill in unravelling the matter. The police have openly confessed that they can at present make nothing of it. You may go to any expense which you think necessary. I have already offered a reward of \u00a31000. My God, what shall I do! I have lost my honour, my gems, and my son in one night. Oh, what shall I do!\"\n\nHe put a hand on either side of his head and rocked himself to and fro, droning to himself like a child whose grief has got beyond words.\n\nSherlock Holmes sat silent for some few minutes, with his brows knitted and his eyes fixed upon the fire.\n\n\"Do you receive much company?\" he asked.\n\n\"None save my partner with his family and an occasional friend of Arthur's. Sir George Burnwell has been several times lately. No one else, I think.\"\n\n\"Do you go out much in society?\"\n\n\"Arthur does. Mary and I stay at home. We neither of us care for it.\"\n\n\"That is unusual in a young girl.\"\n\n\"She is of a quiet nature. Besides, she is not so very young. She is four-and-twenty.\"\n\n\"This matter, from what you say, seems to have been a shock to her also.\"\n\n\"Terrible! She is even more affected than I.\"\n\n\"You have neither of you any doubt as to your son's guilt?\"\n\n\"How can we have when I saw him with my own eyes with the coronet in his hands.\"\n\n\"I hardly consider that a conclusive proof. Was the remainder of the coronet at all injured?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was twisted.\"\n\n\"Do you not think, then, that he might have been trying to straighten it?\"\n\n\"God bless you! You are doing what you can for him and for me. But it is too heavy a task. What was he doing there at all? If his purpose were innocent, why did he not say so?\"\n\n\"Precisely. And if it were guilty, why did he not invent a lie? His silence appears to me to cut both ways. There are several singular points about the case. What did the police think of the noise which awoke you from your sleep?\"\n\n\"They considered that it might be caused by Arthur's closing his bedroom door.\"\n\n\"A likely story! As if a man bent on felony would slam his door so as to wake a household. What did they say, then, of the disappearance of these gems?\"\n\n\"They are still sounding the planking and probing the furniture in the hope of finding them.\"\n\n\"Have they thought of looking outside the house?\"\n\n\"Yes, they have shown extraordinary energy. The whole garden has already been minutely examined.\"\n\n\"Now, my dear sir,\" said Holmes, \"is it not obvious to you now that this matter really strikes very much deeper than either you or the police were at first inclined to think? It appeared to you to be a simple case; to me it seems exceedingly complex. Consider what is involved by your theory. You suppose that your son came down from his bed, went, at great risk, to your dressing-room, opened your bureau, took out your coronet, broke off by main force a small portion of it, went off to some other place, concealed three gems out of the thirty-nine, with such skill that nobody can find them, and then returned with the other thirty-six into the room in which he exposed himself to the greatest danger of being discovered. I ask you now, is such a theory tenable?\"\n\n\"But what other is there?\" cried the banker with a gesture of despair. \"If his motives were innocent, why does he not explain them?\"\n\n\"It is our task to find that out,\" replied Holmes; \"so now, if you please, Mr. Holder, we will set off for Streatham together, and devote an hour to glancing a little more closely into details.\"\n\nMy friend insisted upon my accompanying them in their expedition, which I was eager enough to do, for my curiosity and sympathy were deeply stirred by the story to which we had listened. I confess that the guilt of the banker's son appeared to me to be as obvious as it did to his unhappy father, but still I had such faith in Holmes's judgment that I felt that there must be some grounds for hope as long as he was dissatisfied with the accepted explanation. He hardly spoke a word the whole way out to the southern suburb, but sat with his chin upon his breast and his hat drawn over his eyes, sunk in the deepest thought. Our client appeared to have taken fresh heart at the little glimpse of hope which had been presented to him, and he even broke into a desultory chat with me over his business affairs. A short railway journey and a shorter walk brought us to Fairbank, the modest residence of the great financier.\n\nFairbank was a good-sized square house of white stone, standing back a little from the road. A double carriage-sweep, with a snow-clad lawn, stretched down in front to two large iron gates which closed the entrance. On the right side was a small wooden thicket, which led into a narrow path between two neat hedges stretching from the road to the kitchen door, and forming the tradesmen's entrance. On the left ran a lane which led to the stables, and was not itself within the grounds at all, being a public, though little used, thoroughfare. Holmes left us standing at the door and walked slowly all round the house, across the front, down the tradesmen's path, and so round by the garden behind into the stable lane. So long was he that Mr. Holder and I went into the dining-room and waited by the fire until he should return. We were sitting there in silence when the door opened and a young lady came in. She was rather above the middle height, slim, with dark hair and eyes, which seemed the darker against the absolute pallor of her skin. I do not think that I have ever seen such deadly paleness in a woman's face. Her lips, too, were bloodless, but her eyes were flushed with crying. As she swept silently into the room she impressed me with a greater sense of grief than the banker had done in the morning, and it was the more striking in her as she was evidently a woman of strong character, with immense capacity for self-restraint. Disregarding my presence, she went straight to her uncle and passed her hand over his head with a sweet womanly caress.\n\n\"You have given orders that Arthur should be liberated, have you not, dad?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, no, my girl, the matter must be probed to the bottom.\"\n\n\"But I am so sure that he is innocent. You know what woman's instincts are. I know that he has done no harm and that you will be sorry for having acted so harshly.\"\n\n\"Why is he silent, then, if he is innocent?\"\n\n\"Who knows? Perhaps because he was so angry that you should suspect him.\"\n\n\"How could I help suspecting him, when I actually saw him with the coronet in his hand?\"\n\n\"Oh, but he had only picked it up to look at it. Oh, do, do take my word for it that he is innocent. Let the matter drop and say no more. It is so dreadful to think of our dear Arthur in prison!\"\n\n\"I shall never let it drop until the gems are found\u2014never, Mary! Your affection for Arthur blinds you as to the awful consequences to me. Far from hushing the thing up, I have brought a gentleman down from London to inquire more deeply into it.\"\n\n\"This gentleman?\" she asked, facing round to me.\n\n\"No, his friend. He wished us to leave him alone. He is round in the stable lane now.\"\n\n\"The stable lane?\" She raised her dark eyebrows. \"What can he hope to find there? Ah! this, I suppose, is he. I trust, sir, that you will succeed in proving, what I feel sure is the truth, that my cousin Arthur is innocent of this crime.\"\n\n\"I fully share your opinion, and I trust, with you, that we may prove it,\" returned Holmes, going back to the mat to knock the snow from his shoes. \"I believe I have the honour of addressing Miss Mary Holder. Might I ask you a question or two?\"\n\n\"Pray do, sir, if it may help to clear this horrible affair up.\"\n\n\"You heard nothing yourself last night?\"\n\n\"Nothing, until my uncle here began to speak loudly. I heard that, and I came down.\"\n\n\"You shut up the windows and doors the night before. Did you fasten all the windows?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Were they all fastened this morning?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You have a maid who has a sweetheart? I think that you remarked to your uncle last night that she had been out to see him?\"\n\n\"Yes, and she was the girl who waited in the drawing-room, and who may have heard uncle's remarks about the coronet.\"\n\n\"I see. You infer that she may have gone out to tell her sweetheart, and that the two may have planned the robbery.\"\n\n\"But what is the good of all these vague theories,\" cried the banker impatiently, \"when I have told you that I saw Arthur with the coronet in his hands?\"\n\n\"Wait a little, Mr. Holder. We must come back to that. About this girl, Miss Holder. You saw her return by the kitchen door, I presume?\"\n\n\"Yes; when I went to see if the door was fastened for the night I met her slipping in. I saw the man, too, in the gloom.\"\n\n\"Do you know him?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes! he is the green-grocer who brings our vegetables round. His name is Francis Prosper.\"\n\n\"He stood,\" said Holmes, \"to the left of the door\u2014that is to say, farther up the path than is necessary to reach the door?\"\n\n\"Yes, he did.\"\n\n\"And he is a man with a wooden leg?\"\n\nSomething like fear sprang up in the young lady's expressive black eyes. \"Why, you are like a magician,\" said she. \"How do you know that?\" She smiled, but there was no answering smile in Holmes's thin, eager face.\n\n\"I should be very glad now to go upstairs,\" said he. \"I shall probably wish to go over the outside of the house again. Perhaps I had better take a look at the lower windows before I go up.\"\n\nHe walked swiftly round from one to the other, pausing only at the large one which looked from the hall onto the stable lane. This he opened and made a very careful examination of the sill with his powerful magnifying lens. \"Now we shall go upstairs,\" said he at last.\n\nThe banker's dressing-room was a plainly furnished little chamber, with a gray carpet, a large bureau, and a long mirror. Holmes went to the bureau first and looked hard at the lock.\n\n\"Which key was used to open it?\" he asked.\n\n\"That which my son himself indicated\u2014that of the cupboard of the lumber-room.\"\n\n\"Have you it here?\"\n\n\"That is it on the dressing-table.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes took it up and opened the bureau.\n\n\"It is a noiseless lock,\" said he. \"It is no wonder that it did not wake you. This case, I presume, contains the coronet. We must have a look at it.\" He opened the case, and taking out the diadem he laid it upon the table. It was a magnificent specimen of the jeweller's art, and the thirty-six stones were the finest that I have ever seen. At one side of the coronet was a cracked edge, where a corner holding three gems had been torn away.\n\n\"Now, Mr. Holder,\" said Holmes, \"here is the corner which corresponds to that which has been so unfortunately lost. Might I beg that you will break it off.\"\n\nThe banker recoiled in horror. \"I should not dream of trying,\" said he.\n\n\"Then I will.\" Holmes suddenly bent his strength upon it, but without result. \"I feel it give a little,\" said he; \"but, though I am exceptionally strong in the fingers, it would take me all my time to break it. An ordinary man could not do it. Now, what do you think would happen if I did break it, Mr. Holder? There would be a noise like a pistol shot. Do you tell me that all this happened within a few yards of your bed and that you heard nothing of it?\"\n\n\"I do not know what to think. It is all dark to me.\"\n\n\"But perhaps it may grow lighter as we go. What do you think, Miss Holder?\"\n\n\"I confess that I still share my uncle's perplexity.\"\n\n\"Your son had no shoes or slippers on when you saw him?\"\n\n\"He had nothing on save only his trousers and shirt.\"\n\n\"Thank you. We have certainly been favoured with extraordinary luck during this inquiry, and it will be entirely our own fault if we do not succeed in clearing the matter up. With your permission, Mr. Holder, I shall now continue my investigations outside.\"\n\nHe went alone, at his own request, for he explained that any unnecessary footmarks might make his task more difficult. For an hour or more he was at work, returning at last with his feet heavy with snow and his features as inscrutable as ever.\n\n\"I think that I have seen now all that there is to see, Mr. Holder,\" said he; \"I can serve you best by returning to my rooms.\"\n\n\"But the gems, Mr. Holmes. Where are they?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell.\"\n\nThe banker wrung his hands. \"I shall never see them again!\" he cried. \"And my son? You give me hopes?\"\n\n\"My opinion is in no way altered.\"\n\n\"Then, for God's sake, what was this dark business which was acted in my house last night?\"\n\n\"If you can call upon me at my Baker Street rooms to-morrow morning between nine and ten I shall be happy to do what I can to make it clearer. I understand that you give me carte blanche to act for you, provided only that I get back the gems, and that you place no limit on the sum I may draw.\"\n\n\"I would give my fortune to have them back.\"\n\n\"Very good. I shall look into the matter between this and then. Good-bye; it is just possible that I may have to come over here again before evening.\"\n\nIt was obvious to me that my companion's mind was now made up about the case, although what his conclusions were was more than I could even dimly imagine. Several times during our homeward journey I endeavoured to sound him upon the point, but he always glided away to some other topic, until at last I gave it over in despair. It was not yet three when we found ourselves in our rooms once more. He hurried to his chamber, and was down again in a few minutes dressed as a common loafer. With his collar turned up, his shiny, seedy coat, his red cravat, and his worn boots, he was a perfect sample of the class.\n\n\"I think that this should do,\" said he, glancing into the glass above the fireplace. \"I only wish that you could come with me, Watson, but I fear that it won't do. I may be on the trail in this matter, or I may be following a will-o'-the-wisp, but I shall soon know which it is. I hope that I may be back in a few hours.\" He cut a slice of beef from the joint upon the sideboard, sandwiched it between two rounds of bread, and thrusting this rude meal into his pocket he started off upon his expedition.\n\nI had just finished my tea when he returned, evidently in excellent spirits, swinging an old elastic-sided boot in his hand. He chucked it down into a corner and helped himself to a cup of tea.\n\n\"I only looked in as I passed,\" said he. \"I am going right on.\"\n\n\"Where to?\"\n\n\"Oh, to the other side of the West End. It may be some time before I get back. Don't wait up for me in case I should be late.\"\n\n\"How are you getting on?\"\n\n\"Oh, so so. Nothing to complain of. I have been out to Streatham since I saw you last, but I did not call at the house. It is a very sweet little problem, and I would not have missed it for a good deal. However, I must not sit gossiping here, but must get these disreputable clothes off and return to my highly respectable self.\"\n\nI could see by his manner that he had stronger reasons for satisfaction than his words alone would imply. His eyes twinkled, and there was even a touch of colour upon his sallow cheeks. He hastened upstairs, and a few minutes later I heard the slam of the hall door, which told me that he was off once more upon his congenial hunt.\n\nI waited until midnight, but there was no sign of his return, so I retired to my room. It was no uncommon thing for him to be away for days and nights on end when he was hot upon a scent, so that his lateness caused me no surprise. I do not know at what hour he came in, but when I came down to breakfast in the morning there he was with a cup of coffee in one hand and the paper in the other, as fresh and trim as possible.\n\n\"You will excuse my beginning without you, Watson,\" said he, \"but you remember that our client has rather an early appointment this morning.\"\n\n\"Why, it is after nine now,\" I answered. \"I should not be surprised if that were he. I thought I heard a ring.\"\n\nIt was, indeed, our friend the financier. I was shocked by the change which had come over him, for his face which was naturally of a broad and massive mould, was now pinched and fallen in, while his hair seemed to me at least a shade whiter. He entered with a weariness and lethargy which was even more painful than his violence of the morning before, and he dropped heavily into the armchair which I pushed forward for him.\n\n\"I do not know what I have done to be so severely tried,\" said he. \"Only two days ago I was a happy and prosperous man, without a care in the world. Now I am left to a lonely and dishonoured age. One sorrow comes close upon the heels of another. My niece, Mary, has deserted me.\"\n\n\"Deserted you?\"\n\n\"Yes. Her bed this morning had not been slept in, her room was empty, and a note for me lay upon the hall table. I had said to her last night, in sorrow and not in anger, that if she had married my boy all might have been well with him. Perhaps it was thoughtless of me to say so. It is to that remark that she refers in this note:\n\n\u2002\"MY DEAREST UNCLE:\n\n\u2002\"I feel that I have brought trouble upon you, and that if I had acted differently this terrible misfortune might never have occurred. I cannot, with this thought in my mind, ever again be happy under your roof, and I feel that I must leave you forever. Do not worry about my future, for that is provided for; and, above all, do not search for me, for it will be fruitless labour and an ill-service to me. In life or in death, I am ever\n\n\u2002\"Your loving\n\n\u2002\"MARY.\n\n\"What could she mean by that note, Mr. Holmes? Do you think it points to suicide?\"\n\n\"No, no, nothing of the kind. It is perhaps the best possible solution. I trust, Mr. Holder, that you are nearing the end of your troubles.\"\n\n\"Ha! You say so! You have heard something, Mr. Holmes; you have learned something! Where are the gems?\"\n\n\"You would not think \u00a31000 apiece an excessive sum for them?\"\n\n\"I would pay ten.\"\n\n\"That would be unnecessary. Three thousand will cover the matter. And there is a little reward, I fancy. Have you your check-book? Here is a pen. Better make it out for \u00a34000.\"\n\nWith a dazed face the banker made out the required check. Holmes walked over to his desk, took out a little triangular piece of gold with three gems in it, and threw it down upon the table.\n\nWith a shriek of joy our client clutched it up.\n\n\"You have it!\" he gasped. \"I am saved! I am saved!\"\n\nThe reaction of joy was as passionate as his grief had been, and he hugged his recovered gems to his bosom.\n\n\"There is one other thing you owe, Mr. Holder,\" said Sherlock Holmes rather sternly.\n\n\"Owe!\" He caught up a pen. \"Name the sum, and I will pay it.\"\n\n\"No, the debt is not to me. You owe a very humble apology to that noble lad, your son, who has carried himself in this matter as I should be proud to see my own son do, should I ever chance to have one.\"\n\n\"Then it was not Arthur who took them?\"\n\n\"I told you yesterday, and I repeat to-day, that it was not.\"\n\n\"You are sure of it! Then let us hurry to him at once to let him know that the truth is known.\"\n\n\"He knows it already. When I had cleared it all up I had an interview with him, and finding that he would not tell me the story, I told it to him, on which he had to confess that I was right and to add the very few details which were not yet quite clear to me. Your news of this morning, however, may open his lips.\"\n\n\"For heaven's sake, tell me, then, what is this extraordinary mystery!\"\n\n\"I will do so, and I will show you the steps by which I reached it. And let me say to you, first, that which it is hardest for me to say and for you to hear: there has been an understanding between Sir George Burnwell and your niece Mary. They have now fled together.\"\n\n\"My Mary? Impossible!\"\n\n\"It is unfortunately more than possible; it is certain. Neither you nor your son knew the true character of this man when you admitted him into your family circle. He is one of the most dangerous men in England\u2014a ruined gambler, an absolutely desperate villain, a man without heart or conscience. Your niece knew nothing of such men. When he breathed his vows to her, as he had done to a hundred before her, she flattered herself that she alone had touched his heart. The devil knows best what he said, but at least she became his tool and was in the habit of seeing him nearly every evening.\"\n\n\"I cannot, and I will not, believe it!\" cried the banker with an ashen face.\n\n\"I will tell you, then, what occurred in your house last night. Your niece, when you had, as she thought, gone to your room, slipped down and talked to her lover through the window which leads into the stable lane. His footmarks had pressed right through the snow, so long had he stood there. She told him of the coronet. His wicked lust for gold kindled at the news, and he bent her to his will. I have no doubt that she loved you, but there are women in whom the love of a lover extinguishes all other loves, and I think that she must have been one. She had hardly listened to his instructions when she saw you coming downstairs, on which she closed the window rapidly and told you about one of the servants' escapade with her wooden-legged lover, which was all perfectly true.\n\n\"Your boy, Arthur, went to bed after his interview with you, but he slept badly on account of his uneasiness about his club debts. In the middle of the night he heard a soft tread pass his door, so he rose and, looking out, was surprised to see his cousin walking very stealthily along the passage until she disappeared into your dressing-room. Petrified with astonishment, the lad slipped on some clothes and waited there in the dark to see what would come of this strange affair. Presently she emerged from the room again, and in the light of the passage-lamp your son saw that she carried the precious coronet in her hands. She passed down the stairs, and he, thrilling with horror, ran along and slipped behind the curtain near your door, whence he could see what passed in the hall beneath. He saw her stealthily open the window, hand out the coronet to someone in the gloom, and then closing it once more hurry back to her room, passing quite close to where he stood hid behind the curtain.\n\n\"As long as she was on the scene he could not take any action without a horrible exposure of the woman whom he loved. But the instant that she was gone he realized how crushing a misfortune this would be for you, and how all-important it was to set it right. He rushed down, just as he was, in his bare feet, opened the window, sprang out into the snow, and ran down the lane, where he could see a dark figure in the moonlight. Sir George Burnwell tried to get away, but Arthur caught him, and there was a struggle between them, your lad tugging at one side of the coronet, and his opponent at the other. In the scuffle, your son struck Sir George and cut him over the eye. Then something suddenly snapped, and your son, finding that he had the coronet in his hands, rushed back, closed the window, ascended to your room, and had just observed that the coronet had been twisted in the struggle and was endeavouring to straighten it when you appeared upon the scene.\"\n\n\"Is it possible?\" gasped the banker.\n\n\"You then roused his anger by calling him names at a moment when he felt that he had deserved your warmest thanks. He could not explain the true state of affairs without betraying one who certainly deserved little enough consideration at his hands. He took the more chivalrous view, however, and preserved her secret.\"\n\n\"And that was why she shrieked and fainted when she saw the coronet,\" cried Mr. Holder. \"Oh, my God! what a blind fool I have been! And his asking to be allowed to go out for five minutes! The dear fellow wanted to see if the missing piece were at the scene of the struggle. How cruelly I have misjudged him!\"\n\n\"When I arrived at the house,\" continued Holmes, \"I at once went very carefully round it to observe if there were any traces in the snow which might help me. I knew that none had fallen since the evening before, and also that there had been a strong frost to preserve impressions. I passed along the tradesmen's path, but found it all trampled down and indistinguishable. Just beyond it, however, at the far side of the kitchen door, a woman had stood and talked with a man, whose round impressions on one side showed that he had a wooden leg. I could even tell that they had been disturbed, for the woman had run back swiftly to the door, as was shown by the deep toe and light heel marks, while Wooden-leg had waited a little, and then had gone away. I thought at the time that this might be the maid and her sweetheart, of whom you had already spoken to me, and inquiry showed it was so. I passed round the garden without seeing anything more than random tracks, which I took to be the police; but when I got into the stable lane a very long and complex story was written in the snow in front of me.\n\n\"There was a double line of tracks of a booted man, and a second double line which I saw with delight belonged to a man with naked feet. I was at once convinced from what you had told me that the latter was your son. The first had walked both ways, but, the other had run swiftly, and as his tread was marked in places over the depression of the boot, it was obvious that he had passed after the other. I followed them up and found they led to the hall window, where Boots had worn all the snow away while waiting. Then I walked to the other end, which was a hundred yards or more down the lane. I saw where Boots had faced round, where the snow was cut up as though there had been a struggle, and, finally, where a few drops of blood had fallen, to show me that I was not mistaken. Boots had then run down the lane, and another little smudge of blood showed that it was he who had been hurt. When he came to the highroad at the other end, I found that the pavement had been cleared, so there was an end to that clue.\n\n\"On entering the house, however, I examined, as you remember, the sill and framework of the hall window with my lens, and I could at once see that someone had passed out. I could distinguish the outline of an instep where the wet foot had been placed in coming in. I was then beginning to be able to form an opinion as to what had occurred. A man had waited outside the window; someone had brought the gems; the deed had been overseen by your son; he had pursued the thief; had struggled with him; they had each tugged at the coronet, their united strength causing injuries which neither alone could have effected. He had returned with the prize, but had left a fragment in the grasp of his opponent. So far I was clear. The question now was, who was the man and who was it brought him the coronet?\n\n\"It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Now, I knew that it was not you who had brought it down, so there only remained your niece and the maids. But if it were the maids, why should your son allow himself to be accused in their place? There could be no possible reason. As he loved his cousin, however, there was an excellent explanation why he should retain her secret\u2014the more so as the secret was a disgraceful one. When I remembered that you had seen her at that window, and how she had fainted on seeing the coronet again, my conjecture became a certainty.\n\n\"And who could it be who was her confederate? A lover evidently, for who else could outweigh the love and gratitude which she must feel to you? I knew that you went out little, and that your circle of friends was a very limited one. But among them was Sir George Burnwell. I had heard of him before as being a man of evil reputation among women. It must have been he who wore those boots and retained the missing gems. Even though he knew that Arthur had discovered him, he might still flatter himself that he was safe, for the lad could not say a word without compromising his own family.\n\n\"Well, your own good sense will suggest what measures I took next. I went in the shape of a loafer to Sir George's house, managed to pick up an acquaintance with his valet, learned that his master had cut his head the night before, and, finally, at the expense of six shillings, made all sure by buying a pair of his cast-off shoes. With these I journeyed down to Streatham and saw that they exactly fitted the tracks.\"\n\n\"I saw an ill-dressed vagabond in the lane yesterday evening,\" said Mr. Holder.\n\n\"Precisely. It was I. I found that I had my man, so I came home and changed my clothes. It was a delicate part which I had to play then, for I saw that a prosecution must be avoided to avert scandal, and I knew that so astute a villain would see that our hands were tied in the matter. I went and saw him. At first, of course, he denied everything. But when I gave him every particular that occurred, he tried to bluster and took down a life-preserver from the wall. I knew my man, however, and I clapped a pistol to his head before he could strike. Then he became a little more reasonable. I told him that we would give him a price for the stones he held\u2014\u00a31000 apiece. That brought out the first signs of grief that he had shown. 'Why, dash it all!' said he, 'I've let them go at six hundred for the three!' I soon managed to get the address of the receiver who had them, on promising him that there would be no prosecution. Off I set to him, and after much chaffering I got our stones at \u00a31000 apiece. Then I looked in upon your son, told him that all was right, and eventually got to my bed about two o'clock, after what I may call a really hard day's work.\"\n\n\"A day which has saved England from a great public scandal,\" said the banker, rising. \"Sir, I cannot find words to thank you, but you shall not find me ungrateful for what you have done. Your skill has indeed exceeded all that I have heard of it. And now I must fly to my dear boy to apologize to him for the wrong which I have done him. As to what you tell me of poor Mary, it goes to my very heart. Not even your skill can inform me where she is now.\"\n\n\"I think that we may safely say,\" returned Holmes, \"that she is wherever Sir George Burnwell is. It is equally certain, too, that whatever her sins are, they will soon receive a more than sufficient punishment.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE COPPER BEECHES", + "text": "\"To the man who loves art for its own sake,\" remarked Sherlock Holmes, tossing aside the advertisement sheet of the Daily Telegraph, \"it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived. It is pleasant to me to observe, Watson, that you have so far grasped this truth that in these little records of our cases which you have been good enough to draw up, and, I am bound to say, occasionally to embellish, you have given prominence not so much to the many causes c\u00e9l\u00e8bres and sensational trials in which I have figured but rather to those incidents which may have been trivial in themselves, but which have given room for those faculties of deduction and of logical synthesis which I have made my special province.\"\n\n\"And yet,\" said I, smiling, \"I cannot quite hold myself absolved from the charge of sensationalism which has been urged against my records.\"\n\n\"You have erred, perhaps,\" he observed, taking up a glowing cinder with the tongs and lighting with it the long cherry-wood pipe which was wont to replace his clay when he was in a disputatious rather than a meditative mood\u2014\"you have erred perhaps in attempting to put colour and life into each of your statements instead of confining yourself to the task of placing upon record that severe reasoning from cause to effect which is really the only notable feature about the thing.\"\n\n\"It seems to me that I have done you full justice in the matter,\" I remarked with some coldness, for I was repelled by the egotism which I had more than once observed to be a strong factor in my friend's singular character.\n\n\"No, it is not selfishness or conceit,\" said he, answering, as was his wont, my thoughts rather than my words. \"If I claim full justice for my art, it is because it is an impersonal thing\u2014a thing beyond myself. Crime is common. Logic is rare. Therefore it is upon the logic rather than upon the crime that you should dwell. You have degraded what should have been a course of lectures into a series of tales.\"\n\nIt was a cold morning of the early spring, and we sat after breakfast on either side of a cheery fire in the old room at Baker Street. A thick fog rolled down between the lines of dun-coloured houses, and the opposing windows loomed like dark, shapeless blurs through the heavy yellow wreaths. Our gas was lit and shone on the white cloth and glimmer of china and metal, for the table had not been cleared yet. Sherlock Holmes had been silent all the morning, dipping continuously into the advertisement columns of a succession of papers until at last, having apparently given up his search, he had emerged in no very sweet temper to lecture me upon my literary shortcomings.\n\n\"At the same time,\" he remarked after a pause, during which he had sat puffing at his long pipe and gazing down into the fire, \"you can hardly be open to a charge of sensationalism, for out of these cases which you have been so kind as to interest yourself in, a fair proportion do not treat of crime, in its legal sense, at all. The small matter in which I endeavoured to help the King of Bohemia, the singular experience of Miss Mary Sutherland, the problem connected with the man with the twisted lip, and the incident of the noble bachelor, were all matters which are outside the pale of the law. But in avoiding the sensational, I fear that you may have bordered on the trivial.\"\n\n\"The end may have been so,\" I answered, \"but the methods I hold to have been novel and of interest.\"\n\n\"Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!\" He tossed a crumpled letter across to me.\n\nIt was dated from Montague Place upon the preceding evening, and ran thus:\n\n\u2002DEAR MR. HOLMES:\n\n\u2002I am very anxious to consult you as to whether I should or should not accept a situation which has been offered to me as governess. I shall call at half-past ten tomorrow if I do not inconvenience you.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002VIOLET HUNTER.\n\n\"Do you know the young lady?\" I asked.\n\n\"Not I.\"\n\n\"It is half-past ten now.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I have no doubt that is her ring.\"\n\n\"It may turn out to be of more interest than you think. You remember that the affair of the blue carbuncle, which appeared to be a mere whim at first, developed into a serious investigation. It may be so in this case, also.\"\n\n\"Well, let us hope so. But our doubts will very soon be solved, for here, unless I am much mistaken, is the person in question.\"\n\nAs he spoke the door opened and a young lady entered the room. She was plainly but neatly dressed, with a bright, quick face, freckled like a plover's egg, and with the brisk manner of a woman who has had her own way to make in the world.\n\n\"You will excuse my troubling you, I am sure,\" said she, as my companion rose to greet her, \"but I have had a very strange experience, and as I have no parents or relations of any sort from whom I could ask advice, I thought that perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me what I should do.\"\n\n\"Pray take a seat, Miss Hunter. I shall be happy to do anything that I can to serve you.\"\n\nI could see that Holmes was favourably impressed by the manner and speech of his new client. He looked her over in his searching fashion, and then composed himself, with his lids drooping and his finger-tips together, to listen to her story.\n\n\"I have been a governess for five years,\" said she, \"in the family of Colonel Spence Munro, but two months ago the colonel received an appointment at Halifax, in Nova Scotia, and took his children over to America with him, so that I found myself without a situation. I advertised, and I answered advertisements, but without success. At last the little money which I had saved began to run short, and I was at my wit's end as to what I should do.\n\n\"There is a well-known agency for governesses in the West End called Westaway's, and there I used to call about once a week in order to see whether anything had turned up which might suit me. Westaway was the name of the founder of the business, but it is really managed by Miss Stoper. She sits in her own little office, and the ladies who are seeking employment wait in an anteroom, and are then shown in one by one, when she consults her ledgers and sees whether she has anything which would suit them.\n\n\"Well, when I called last week I was shown into the little office as usual, but I found that Miss Stoper was not alone. A prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon fold over his throat sat at her elbow with a pair of glasses on his nose, looking very earnestly at the ladies who entered. As I came in he gave quite a jump in his chair and turned quickly to Miss Stoper.\n\n\"'That will do,' said he; 'I could not ask for anything better. Capital! capital!' He seemed quite enthusiastic and rubbed his hands together in the most genial fashion. He was such a comfortable-looking man that it was quite a pleasure to look at him.\n\n\"'You are looking for a situation, miss?' he asked.\n\n\"'Yes, sir.'\n\n\"'As governess?'\n\n\"'Yes, sir.'\n\n\"'And what salary do you ask?'\n\n\"'I had \u00a34 a month in my last place with Colonel Spence Munro.'\n\n\"'Oh, tut, tut! sweating\u2014rank sweating!' he cried, throwing his fat hands out into the air like a man who is in a boiling passion. 'How could anyone offer so pitiful a sum to a lady with such attractions and accomplishments?'\n\n\"'My accomplishments, sir, may be less than you imagine,' said I. 'A little French, a little German, music, and drawing\u2014'\n\n\"'Tut, tut!' he cried. 'This is all quite beside the question. The point is, have you or have you not the bearing and deportment of a lady? There it is in a nutshell. If you have not, you are not fitted for the rearing of a child who may some day play a considerable part in the history of the country. But if you have, why, then, how could any gentleman ask you to condescend to accept anything under the three figures? Your salary with me, madam, would commence at \u00a3100 a year.'\n\n\"You may imagine, Mr. Holmes, that to me, destitute as I was, such an offer seemed almost too good to be true. The gentleman, however, seeing perhaps the look of incredulity upon my face, opened a pocket-book and took out a note.\n\n\"'It is also my custom,' said he, smiling in the most pleasant fashion until his eyes were just two little shining slits amid the white creases of his face, 'to advance to my young ladies half their salary beforehand, so that they may meet any little expenses of their journey and their wardrobe.'\n\n\"It seemed to me that I had never met so fascinating and so thoughtful a man. As I was already in debt to my tradesmen, the advance was a great convenience, and yet there was something unnatural about the whole transaction which made me wish to know a little more before I quite committed myself.\n\n\"'May I ask where you live, sir?' said I.\n\n\"'Hampshire. Charming rural place. The Copper Beeches, five miles on the far side of Winchester. It is the most lovely country, my dear young lady, and the dearest old country-house.'\n\n\"'And my duties, sir? I should be glad to know what they would be.'\n\n\"'One child\u2014one dear little romper just six years old. Oh, if you could see him killing cockroaches with a slipper! Smack! smack! smack! Three gone before you could wink!' He leaned back in his chair and laughed his eyes into his head again.\n\n\"I was a little startled at the nature of the child's amusement, but the father's laughter made me think that perhaps he was joking.\n\n\"'My sole duties, then,' I asked, 'are to take charge of a single child?'\n\n\"'No, no, not the sole, not the sole, my dear young lady,' he cried. 'Your duty would be, as I am sure your good sense would suggest, to obey any little commands my wife might give, provided always that they were such commands as a lady might with propriety obey. You see no difficulty, heh?'\n\n\"'I should be happy to make myself useful.'\n\n\"'Quite so. In dress now, for example. We are faddy people, you know\u2014faddy but kind-hearted. If you were asked to wear any dress which we might give you, you would not object to our little whim. Heh?'\n\n\"'No,' said I, considerably astonished at his words.\n\n\"'Or to sit here, or sit there, that would not be offensive to you?'\n\n\"'Oh, no.'\n\n\"'Or to cut your hair quite short before you come to us?'\n\n\"I could hardly believe my ears. As you may observe, Mr. Holmes, my hair is somewhat luxuriant, and of a rather peculiar tint of chestnut. It has been considered artistic. I could not dream of sacrificing it in this offhand fashion.\n\n\"'I am afraid that that is quite impossible.' said I. He had been watching me eagerly out of his small eyes, and I could see a shadow pass over his face as I spoke.\n\n\"'I am afraid that it is quite essential,' said he. 'It is a little fancy of my wife's, and ladies' fancies, you know, madam, ladies' fancies must be consulted. And so you won't cut your hair?'\n\n\"'No, sir, I really could not,' I answered firmly.\n\n'Ah, very well; then that quite settles the matter. It is a pity, because in other respects you would really have done very nicely. In that case. Miss Stoper, I had best inspect a few more of your young ladies.'\n\n\"The manageress had sat all this while busy with her papers without a word to either of us, but she glanced at me now with so much annoyance upon her face that I could not help suspecting that she had lost a handsome commission through my refusal.\n\n\"'Do you desire your name to be kept upon the books?' she asked.\n\n\"'If you please, Miss Stoper.'\n\n\"'Well, really, it seems rather useless, since you refuse the most excellent offers in this fashion,' said she sharply. 'You can hardly expect us to exert ourselves to find another such opening for you. Good-day to you, Miss Hunter.' She struck a gong upon the table, and I was shown out by the page.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, when I got back to my lodgings and found little enough in the cupboard, and two or three bills upon the table, I began to ask myself whether I had not done a very foolish thing. After all, if these people had strange fads and expected obedience on the most extraordinary matters, they were at least ready to pay for their eccentricity. Very few governesses in England are getting \u00a3100 a year. Besides, what use was my hair to me? Many people are improved by wearing it short, and perhaps I should be among the number. Next day I was inclined to think that I had made a mistake, and by the day after I was sure of it. I had almost overcome my pride so far as to go back to the agency and inquire whether the place was still open when I received this letter from the gentleman himself. I have it here, and I will read it to you:\n\n\"The Copper Beeches, near Winchester.\n\n\u2002\"DEAR MISS HUNTER:\n\n\u2002\"Miss Stoper has very kindly given me your address, and I write from here to ask you whether you have reconsidered your decision. My wife is very anxious that you should come, for she has been much attracted by my description of you. We are willing to give \u00a330 a quarter, or \u00a3120 a year, so as to recompense you for any little inconvenience which our fads may cause you. They are not very exacting, after all. My wife is fond of a particular shade of electric blue, and would like you to wear such a dress indoors in the morning. You need not, however, go to the expense of purchasing one, as we have one belonging to my dear daughter Alice (now in Philadelphia), which would, I should think, fit you very well. Then, as to sitting here or there, or amusing yourself in any manner indicated, that need cause you no inconvenience. As regards your hair, it is no doubt a pity, especially as I could not help remarking its beauty during our short interview, but I am afraid that I must remain firm upon this point, and I only hope that the increased salary may recompense you for the loss. Your duties, as far as the child is concerned, are very light. Now do try to come, and I shall meet you with the dog-cart at Winchester. Let me know your train.\n\n\u2002\"Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002\"JEPHRO RUCASTLE.\n\n\"That is the letter which I have just received, Mr. Holmes, and my mind is made up that I will accept it. I thought, however, that before taking the final step I should like to submit the whole matter to your consideration.\"\n\n\"Well, Miss Hunter, if your mind is made up, that settles the question,\" said Holmes, smiling.\n\n\"But you would not advise me to refuse?\"\n\n\"I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for.\"\n\n\"What is the meaning of it all, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Ah, I have no data. I cannot tell. Perhaps you have yourself formed some opinion?\"\n\n\"Well, there seems to me to be only one possible solution. Mr. Rucastle seemed to be a very kind, good-natured man. Is it not possible that his wife is a lunatic, that he desires to keep the matter quiet for fear she should be taken to an asylum, and that he humours her fancies, in every way in order to prevent an outbreak?\"\n\n\"That is a possible solution\u2014in fact, as matters stand, it is the most probable one. But in any case it does not seem to be a nice household for a young lady.\"\n\n\"But the money, Mr. Holmes, the money!\"\n\n\"Well, yes, of course the pay is good\u2014too good. That is what makes me uneasy. Why should they give you \u00a3120 a year, when they could have their pick for \u00a340? There must be some strong reason behind.\"\n\n\"I thought that if I told you the circumstances you would understand afterwards if I wanted your help. I should feel so much stronger if I felt that you were at the back of me.\"\n\n\"Oh, you may carry that feeling away with you. I assure you that your little problem promises to be the most interesting which has come my way for some months. There is something distinctly novel about some of the features. If you should find yourself in doubt or in danger\u2014\"\n\n\"Danger! What danger do you foresee?\"\n\nHolmes shook his head gravely. \"It would cease to be a danger if we could define it,\" said he. \"But at any time, day or night, a telegram would bring me down to your help.\"\n\n\"That is enough.\" She rose briskly from her chair with the anxiety all swept from her face. \"I shall go down to Hampshire quite easy in my mind now. I shall write to Mr. Rucastle at once, sacrifice my poor hair tonight, and start for Winchester tomorrow.\" With a few grateful words to Holmes she bade us both good-night and bustled off upon her way.\n\n\"At least,\" said I as we heard her quick, firm steps descending the stairs, \"she seems to be a young lady who is very well able to take care of herself.\"\n\n\"And she would need to be,\" said Holmes gravely. \"I am much mistaken if we do not hear from her before many days are past.\"\n\nIt was not very long before my friend's prediction was fulfilled. A fortnight went by, during which I frequently found my thoughts turning in her direction and wondering, what strange side-alley of human experience this lonely woman had strayed into. The unusual salary, the curious conditions, the light duties, all pointed to something abnormal, though whether a fad or a plot, or whether the man were a philanthropist or a villain, it was quite beyond my powers to determine. As to Holmes, I observed that he sat frequently for half an hour on end, with knitted brows and an abstracted air, but he swept the matter away with a wave of his hand when I mentioned it. \"Data! data! data!\" he cried impatiently. \"I can't make bricks without clay.\" And yet he would always wind up by muttering that no sister of his should ever have accepted such a situation.\n\nThe telegram which we eventually received came late one night just as I was thinking of turning in and Holmes was settling down to one of those all-night chemical researches which he frequently indulged in, when I would leave him stooping over a retort and a test-tube at night and find him in the same position when I came down to breakfast in the morning. He opened the yellow envelope, and then, glancing at the message, threw it across to me.\n\n\"Just look up the trains in Bradshaw,\" said he, and turned back to his chemical studies.\n\nThe summons was a brief and urgent one.\n\nPlease be at the Black Swan Hotel at Winchester at midday tomorrow [it said]. Do come! I am at my wit's end.\n\nHUNTER.\n\n\"Will you come with me?\" asked Holmes, glancing up.\n\n\"I should wish to.\"\n\n\"Just look it up, then.\"\n\n\"There is a train at half-past nine,\" said I, glancing over my Bradshaw. \"It is due at Winchester at 11:30.\"\n\n\"That will do very nicely. Then perhaps I had better postpone my analysis of the acetones, as we may need to be at our best in the morning.\"\n\nBy eleven o'clock the next day we were well upon our way to the old English capital. Holmes had been buried in the morning papers all the way down, but after we had passed the Hampshire border he threw them down and began to admire the scenery. It was an ideal spring day, a light blue sky, flecked with little fleecy white clouds drifting across from west to east. The sun was shining very brightly, and yet there was an exhilarating nip in the air, which set an edge to a man's energy. All over the countryside, away to the rolling hills around Aldershot, the little red and gray roofs of the farm-steadings peeped out from amid the light green of the new foliage.\n\n\"Are they not fresh and beautiful?\" I cried with all the enthusiasm of a man fresh from the fogs of Baker Street.\n\nBut Holmes shook his head gravely.\n\n\"Do you know, Watson,\" said he, \"that it is one of the curses of a mind with a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is a feeling of their isolation and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" I cried. \"Who would associate crime with these dear old homesteads?\"\n\n\"They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.\"\n\n\"You horrify me!\"\n\n\"But the reason is very obvious. The pressure of public opinion can do in the town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no lane so vile that the scream of a tortured child, or the thud of a drunkard's blow, does not beget sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole machinery of justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser. Had this lady who appeals to us for help gone to live in Winchester, I should never have had a fear for her. It is the five miles of country which makes the danger. Still, it is clear that she is not personally threatened.\"\n\n\"No. If she can come to Winchester to meet us she can get away.\"\n\n\"Quite so. She has her freedom.\"\n\n\"What can be the matter, then? Can you suggest no explanation?\"\n\n\"I have devised seven separate explanations, each of which would cover the facts as far as we know them. But which of these is correct can only be determined by the fresh information which we, shall no doubt find waiting for us. Well, there is the tower of the cathedral, and we shall soon learn all that Miss Hunter has to tell.\"\n\nThe Black Swan is an inn of repute in the High Street, at no distance from the station, and there we found the young lady waiting for us. She had engaged a sitting-room, and our lunch awaited us upon the table.\n\n\"I am so delighted that you have come,\" she said earnestly. \"It is so very kind of you both; but indeed I do not know what I should do. Your advice will be altogether invaluable to me.\"\n\n\"Pray tell us what has happened to you.\"\n\n\"I will do so, and I must be quick, for I have promised Mr. Rucastle to be back before three. I got his leave to come into town this morning, though he little knew for what purpose.\"\n\n\"Let us have everything in its due order.\" Holmes thrust his long thin legs out towards the fire and composed himself to listen.\n\n\"In the first place, I may say that I have met, on the whole, with no actual ill-treatment from Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle. It is only fair to them to say that. But I cannot understand them, and I am not easy in my mind about them.\"\n\n\"What can you not understand?\"\n\n\"Their reasons for their conduct. But you shall have it all just as it occurred. When I came down, Mr. Rucastle met me here and drove me in his dog-cart to the Copper Beeches. It is, as he said, beautifully situated, but it is not beautiful in itself, for it is a large square block of a house, whitewashed, but all stained and streaked with damp and bad weather. There are grounds round it, woods on three sides, and on the fourth a field which slopes down to the Southampton highroad, which curves past about a hundred yards from the front door. This ground in front belongs to the house, but the woods all round are part of Lord Southerton's preserves. A clump of copper beeches immediately in front of the hall door has given its name to the place.\n\n\"I was driven over by my employer, who was as amiable as ever, and was introduced by him that evening to his wife and the child. There was no truth, Mr. Holmes, in the conjecture which seemed to us to be probable in your rooms at Baker Street. Mrs. Rucastle is not mad. I found her to be a silent, pale-faced woman, much younger than her husband, not more than thirty, I should think, while he can hardly be less than forty-five. From their conversation I have gathered that they have been married about seven years, that he was a widower, and that his only child by the first wife was the daughter who has gone to Philadelphia. Mr. Rucastle told me in private that the reason why she had left them was that she had an unreasoning aversion to her stepmother. As the daughter could not have been less than twenty, I can quite imagine that her position must have been uncomfortable with her father's young wife.\n\n\"Mrs. Rucastle seemed to me to be colourless in mind as well as in feature. She impressed me neither favourably nor the reverse. She was a nonentity. It was easy to see that she was passionately devoted both to her husband and to her little son. Her light gray eyes wandered continually from one to the other, noting every little want and forestalling it if possible. He was kind to her also in his bluff, boisterous fashion, and on the whole they seemed to be a happy couple. And yet she had sonic secret sorrow, this woman. She would often be lost in deep thought, with the saddest look upon her face. More than once I have surprised her in tears. I have thought sometimes that it was the disposition of her child which weighed upon her mind, for I have never met so utterly spoiled and so ill-natured a little creature. He is small for his age, with a head which is quite disproportionately large. His whole life appears to be spent in an alternation between savage fits of passion and gloomy intervals of sulking. Giving pain to any creature weaker than himself seems to be his one idea of amusement, and he shows quite remarkable talent in planning the capture of mice, little birds, and insects. But I would rather not talk about the creature, Mr. Holmes, and, indeed, he has little to do with my story.\"\n\n\"I am glad of all details,\" remarked my friend, \"whether they seem to you to be relevant or not.\"\n\n\"I shall try not to miss anything of importance. The one unpleasant thing about the house, which struck me at once, was the appearance and conduct of the servants. There are only two, a man and his wife. Toller, for that is his name, is a rough, uncouth man, with grizzled hair and whiskers, and a perpetual smell of drink. Twice since I have been with them he has been quite drunk, and yet Mr. Rucastle seemed to take no notice of it. His wife is a very tall and strong woman with a sour face, as silent as Mrs. Rucastle and much less amiable. They are a most unpleasant couple, but fortunately I spend most of my time in the nursery and my own room, which are next to each other in one corner of the building.\n\n\"For two days after my arrival at the Copper Beeches my life was very quiet; on the third, Mrs. Rucastle came down just after breakfast and whispered something to her husband.\n\n\"'Oh, yes,' said he, turning to me, 'we are very much obliged to you, Miss Hunter, for falling in with our whims so far as to cut your hair. I assure you that it has not detracted in the tiniest iota from your appearance. We shall now see how the electric-blue dress will become you. You will find it laid out upon the bed in your room, and if you would be so good as to put it on we should both be extremely obliged.'\n\n\"The dress which I found waiting for me was of a peculiar shade of blue. It was of excellent material, a sort of beige, but it bore unmistakable signs of having been worn before. It could not have been a better fit if I had been measured for it. Both Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle expressed a delight at the look of it, which seemed quite exaggerated in its vehemence. They were waiting for me in the drawing-room, which is a very large room, stretching along the entire front of the house, with three long windows reaching down to the floor. A chair had been placed close to the central window, with its back turned towards it. In this I was asked to sit, and then Mr. Rucastle, walking up and down on the other side of the room, began to tell me a series of the funniest stories that I have ever listened to. You cannot imagine how comical he was, and I laughed until I was quite weary. Mrs. Rucastle, however, who has evidently no sense of humour, never so much as smiled, but sat with her hands in her lap, and a sad, anxious look upon her face. After an hour or so, Mr. Rucastle suddenly remarked that it was time to commence the duties of the day, and that I might change my dress and go to little Edward in the nursery.\n\n\"Two days later this same performance was gone through under exactly similar circumstances. Again I changed my dress, again I sat in the window, and again I laughed very heartily at the funny stories of which my employer had an immense repertoire, and which he told inimitably. Then he handed me a yellow-backed novel, and moving my chair a little sideways, that my own shadow might not fail upon the page, he begged me to read aloud to him. I read for about ten minutes, beginning in the heart of a chapter, and then suddenly, in the middle of a sentence, he ordered me to cease and to change my dress.\n\n\"You can easily imagine, Mr. Holmes, how curious I became as to what the meaning of this extraordinary performance could possibly be. They were always very careful, I observed, to turn my face away from the window, so that I became consumed with the desire to see what was going on behind my back. At first it seemed to be impossible, but I soon devised a means. My hand-mirror had been broken, so a happy thought seized me, and I concealed a piece of the glass in my handkerchief. On the next occasion, in the midst of my laughter, I put my handkerchief up to my eyes, and was able with a little management to see all that there was behind me. I confess that I was disappointed. There was nothing. At least that was my first impression. At the second glance, however, I perceived that there was a man standing in the Southampton Road, a small bearded man in a gray suit, who seemed to be looking in my direction. The road is an important highway, and there are usually people there. This man, however, was leaning against the railings which bordered our field and was looking earnestly up. I lowered my handkerchief and glanced at Mrs. Rucastle to find her eyes fixed upon me with a most searching gaze. She said nothing, but I am convinced that she had divined that I had a mirror in my hand and had seen what was behind me. She rose at once.\n\n\"'Jephro,' said she, 'there is an impertinent fellow upon the road there who stares up at Miss Hunter.'\n\n\"'No friend of yours, Miss Hunter?' he asked.\n\n\"'No, I know no one in these parts.'\n\n\"'Dear me! How very impertinent! Kindly turn round and motion to him to go away.'\n\n\"'Surely it would be better to take no notice.'\n\n\"'No, no, we should have him loitering here always. Kindly turn round and wave him away like that.'\n\n\"I did as I was told, and at the same instant Mrs. Rucastle drew down the blind. That was a week ago, and from that time I have not sat again in the window, nor have I worn the blue dress, nor seen the man in the road.\"\n\n\"Pray continue,\" said Holmes. \"Your narrative promises to be a most interesting one.\"\n\n\"You will find it rather disconnected, I fear, and there may prove to be little relation between the different incidents of which I speak. On the very first day that I was at the Copper Beeches, Mr. Rucastle took me to a small outhouse which stands near the kitchen door. As we approached it I heard the sharp rattling of a chain, and the sound as of a large animal moving about.\n\n\"'Look in here!' said Mr. Rucastle, showing me a slit between two planks. 'Is he not a beauty?'\n\n\"I looked through and was conscious of two glowing eyes, and of a vague figure huddled up in the darkness.\n\n\"'Don't be frightened,' said my employer, laughing at the start which I had given. 'It's only Carlo, my mastiff. I call him mine, but really old Toller, my groom, is the only man who can do anything with him. We feed him once a day, and not too much then, so that he is always as keen as mustard. Toller lets him loose every night, and God help the trespasser whom he lays his fangs upon. For goodness' sake don't you ever on any pretext set your foot over the threshold at night, for it's as much as your life is worth.'\n\n\"The warning was no idle one, for two nights later I happened to look out of my bedroom window about two o'clock in the morning. It was a beautiful moonlight night, and the lawn in front of the house was silvered over and almost as bright as day. I was standing, rapt in the peaceful beauty of the scene, when I was aware that something was moving under the shadow of the copper beeches. As it emerged into the moonshine I saw what it was. It was a giant dog, as large as a calf, tawny tinted, with hanging jowl, black muzzle, and huge projecting bones. It walked slowly across the lawn and vanished into the shadow upon the other side. That dreadful sentinel sent a chill to my heart which I do not think that any burglar could have done.\n\n\"And now I have a very strange experience to tell you. I had, as you know, cut off my hair in London, and I had placed it in a great coil at the bottom of my trunk. One evening, after the child was in bed, I began to amuse myself by examining the furniture of my room and by rearranging my own little things. There was an old chest of drawers in the room, the two upper ones empty and open, the lower one locked. I had filled the first two with my linen, and as I had still much to pack away I was naturally annoyed at not having the use of the third drawer. It struck me that it might have been fastened by a mere oversight, so I took out my bunch of keys and tried to open it. The very first key fitted to perfection, and I drew the drawer open. There was only one thing in it, but I am sure that you would never guess what it was. It was my coil of hair.\n\n\"I took it up and examined it. It was of the same peculiar tint, and the same thickness. But then the impossibility of the thing obtruded itself upon me. How could my hair have been locked in the drawer? With trembling hands I undid my trunk, turned out the contents, and drew from the bottom my own hair. I laid the two tresses together, and I assure you that they were identical. Was it not extraordinary? Puzzle as I would, I could make nothing at all of what it meant. I returned the strange hair to the drawer, and I said nothing of the matter to the Rucastles as I felt that I had put myself in the wrong by opening a drawer which they had locked.\n\n\"I am naturally observant, as you may have remarked, Mr. Holmes, and I soon had a pretty good plan of the whole house in my head. There was one wing, however, which appeared not to be inhabited at all. A door which faced that which led into the quarters of the Tollers opened into this suite, but it was invariably locked. One day, however, as I ascended the stair, I met Mr. Rucastle coming out through this door, his keys in his hand, and a look on his face which made him a very different person to the round, jovial man to whom I was accustomed. His cheeks were red, his brow was all crinkled with anger, and the veins stood out at his temples with passion. He locked the door and hurried past me without a word or a look.\n\n\"This aroused my curiosity; so when I went out for a walk in the grounds with my charge, I strolled round to the side from which I could see the windows of this part of the house. There were four of them in a row, three of which were simply dirty, while the fourth was shuttered up. They were evidently all deserted. As I strolled up and down, glancing at them occasionally, Mr. Rucastle came out to me, looking as merry and jovial as ever.\n\n\"'Ah!' said he, 'you must not think me rude if I passed you without a word, my dear young lady. I was preoccupied with business matters.'\n\n\"I assured him that I was not offended. 'By the way,' said I, 'you seem to have quite a suite of spare rooms up there, and one of them has the shutters up.'\n\n\"He looked surprised and, as it seemed to me, a little startled at my remark.\n\n\"'Photography is one of my hobbies,' said he. 'I have made my dark room up there. But, dear me! what an observant young lady we have come upon. Who would have believed it? Who would have ever believed it?' He spoke in a jesting tone, but there was no jest in his eyes as he looked at me. I read suspicion there and annoyance, but no jest.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, from the moment that I understood that there was something about that suite of rooms which I was not to know, I was all on fire to go over them. It was not mere curiosity, though I have my share of that. It was more a feeling of duty\u2014a feeling that some good might come from my penetrating to this place. They talk of woman's instinct; perhaps it was woman's instinct which gave me that feeling. At any rate, it was there, and I was keenly on the lookout for any chance to pass the forbidden door.\n\n\"It was only yesterday that the chance came. I may tell you that, besides Mr. Rucastle, both Toller and his wife find something to do in these deserted rooms, and I once saw him carrying a large black linen bag with him through the door. Recently he has been drinking hard, and yesterday evening he was very drunk; and when I came upstairs there was the key in the door. I have no doubt at all that he had left it there. Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle were both downstairs, and the child was with them, so that I had an admirable opportunity. I turned the key gently in the lock, opened the door, and slipped through.\n\n\"There was a little passage in front of me, unpapered and uncarpeted, which turned at a right angle at the farther end. Round this corner were three doors in a line, the first and third of which were open. They each led into an empty room, dusty and cheerless, with two windows in the one and one in the other, so thick with dirt that the evening light glimmered dimly through them. The centre door was closed, and across the outside of it had been fastened one of the broad bars of an iron bed, padlocked at one end to a ring in the wall, and fastened at the other with stout cord. The door itself was locked as well, and the key was not there. This barricaded door corresponded clearly with the shuttered window outside, and yet I could see by the glimmer from beneath it that the room was not in darkness. Evidently there was a skylight which let in light from above. As I stood in the passage gazing at the sinister door and wondering what secret it might veil, I suddenly heard the sound of steps within the room and saw a shadow pass backward and forward against the little slit of dim light which shone out from under the door. A mad, unreasoning terror rose up in me at the sight, Mr. Holmes. My overstrung nerves failed me suddenly, and I turned and ran\u2014ran as though some dreadful hand were behind me clutching at the skirt of my dress. I rushed down the passage, through the door, and straight into the arms of Mr. Rucastle, who was waiting outside.\n\n\"'So,' said he, smiling, 'it was you, then. I thought that it must be when I saw the door open.'\n\n\"'Oh, I am so frightened!' I panted.\n\n\"'My dear young lady! my dear young lady!'\u2014you cannot think how caressing and soothing his manner was\u2014'and what has frightened you, my dear young lady?'\n\n\"But his voice was just a little too coaxing. He overdid it. I was keenly on my guard against him.\n\n\"'I was foolish enough to go into the empty wing,' I answered. 'But it is so lonely and eerie in this dim light that I was frightened and ran out again. Oh, it is so dreadfully still in there!'\n\n\"'Only that?' said he, looking at me keenly.\n\n\"'Why, what did you think?' I asked.\n\n\"'Why do you think that I lock this door?'\n\n\"'I am sure that I do not know.'\n\n\"'It is to keep people out who have no business there. Do you see?' He was still smiling in the most amiable manner.\n\n\"'I am sure if I had known\u2014'\n\n\"'Well, then, you know now. And if you ever put your foot over that threshold again'\u2014here in an instant the smile hardened into a grin of rage, and he glared down at me with the face of a demon\u2014'I'Il throw you to the mastiff.'\n\n\"I was so terrified that I do not know what I did. I suppose that I must have rushed past him into my room. I remember nothing until I found myself lying on my bed trembling all over. Then I thought of you, Mr. Holmes. I could not live there longer without some advice. I was frightened of the house, of the man, of the woman, of the servants, even of the child. They were all horrible to me. If I could only bring you down all would be well. Of course I might have fled from the house, but my curiosity was almost as strong as my fears. My mind was soon made up. I would send you a wire. I put on my hat and cloak, went down to the office, which is about half a mile from the house, and then returned, feeling very much easier. A horrible doubt came into my mind as I approached the door lest the dog might be loose, but I remembered that Toller had drunk himself into a state of insensibility that evening and I knew that he was the only one in the household who had any influence with the savage creature, or who would venture to set him free. I slipped in in safety and lay awake half the night in my joy at the thought of seeing you. I had no difficulty in getting leave to come into Winchester this morning, but I must be back before three o'clock, for Mr. and Mrs. Rucastle are going on a visit, and will be away all the evening, so that I must look after the child. Now I have told you all my adventures, Mr. Holmes, and I should be very glad if you could tell me what it all means, and, above all, what I should do.\"\n\nHolmes and I had listened spellbound to this extraordinary story. My friend rose now and paced up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, and an expression of the most profound gravity upon his face.\n\n\"Is Toller still drunk?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes. I heard his wife tell Mrs. Rucastle that she could do nothing with him.\"\n\n\"That is well. And the Rucastles go out tonight?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Is there a cellar with a good strong lock?\"\n\n\"Yes, the wine-cellar.\"\n\n\"You seem to me to have acted all through this matter like a very brave and sensible girl, Miss Hunter. Do you think that you could perform one more feat? I should not ask it of you if I did not think you a quite exceptional woman.\"\n\n\"I will try. What is it?\"\n\n\"We shall be at the Copper Beeches by seven o'clock, my friend and I. The Rucastles will be gone by that time, and Toller will, we hope, be incapable. There only remains Mrs. Toller, who might give the alarm. If you could send her into the cellar on some errand, and then turn the key upon her, you would facilitate matters immensely.\"\n\n\"I will do it.\"\n\n\"Excellent! We shall then look thoroughly into the affair. Of course there is only one feasible explanation. You have been brought there to personate someone, and the real person is imprisoned in this chamber. That is obvious. As to who this prisoner is, I have no doubt that it is the daughter, Miss Alice Rucastle, if I remember right, who was said to have gone to America. You were chosen, doubtless, as resembling her in height, figure, and the colour of your hair. Hers had been cut off, very possibly in some illness through which she has passed, and so, of course, yours had to be sacrificed also. By a curious chance you came upon her tresses. The man in the road was undoubtedly some friend of hers\u2014possibly her fianc\u00e9\u2014and no doubt, as you wore the girl's dress and were so like her, he was convinced from your laughter, whenever he saw you, and afterwards from your gesture, that Miss Rucastle was perfectly happy, and that she no longer desired his attentions. The dog is let loose at night to prevent him from endeavouring to communicate with her. So much is fairly clear. The most serious point in the case is the disposition of the child.\"\n\n\"What on earth has that to do with it?\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"My dear Watson, you as a medical man are continually gaining light as to the tendencies of a child by the study of the parents. Don't you see that the converse is equally valid. I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children. This child's disposition is abnormally cruel, merely for cruelty's sake, and whether he derives this from his smiling father, as I should suspect, or from his mother, it bodes evil for the poor girl who is in their power.\"\n\n\"I am sure that you are right, Mr. Holmes,\" cried our client. \"A thousand things come back to me which make me certain that you have hit it. Oh, let us lose not an instant in bringing help to this poor creature.\"\n\n\"We must be circumspect, for we are dealing with a very cunning man. We can do nothing until seven o'clock. At that hour we shall be with you, and it will not be long before we solve the mystery.\"\n\nWe were as good as our word, for it was just seven when we reached the Copper Beeches, having put up our trap at a wayside public-house. The group of trees, with their dark leaves shining like burnished metal in the light of the setting sun, were sufficient to mark the house even had Miss Hunter not been standing smiling on the door-step.\n\n\"Have you managed it?\" asked Holmes.\n\nA loud thudding noise came from somewhere downstairs. \"That is Mrs. Toller in the cellar,\" said she. \"Her husband lies snoring on the kitchen rug. Here are his keys, which are the duplicates of Mr. Rucastle's.\"\n\n\"You have done well indeed!\" cried Holmes with enthusiasm. \"Now lead the way, and we shall soon see the end of this black business.\"\n\nWe passed up the stair, unlocked the door, followed on down a passage, and found ourselves in front of the barricade which Miss Hunter had described. Holmes cut the cord and removed the transverse bar. Then he tried the various keys in the lock, but without success. No sound came from within, and at the silence Holmes's face clouded over.\n\n\"I trust that we are not too late,\" said he. \"I think, Miss Hunter, that we had better go in without you. Now, Watson, put your shoulder to it, and we shall see whether we cannot make our way in.\"\n\nIt was an old rickety door and gave at once before our united strength. Together we rushed into the room. It was empty. There was no furniture save a little pallet bed, a small table, and a basketful of linen. The skylight above was open and the prisoner gone.\n\n\"There has been some villainy here,\" said Holmes; \"this beauty has guessed Miss Hunter's intentions and has carried his victim off.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"Through the skylight. We shall soon see how he managed it.\" He swung himself up onto the roof. \"Ah, yes,\" he cried, \"here's the end of a long light ladder against the eaves. That is how he did it.\"\n\n\"But it is impossible,\" said Miss Hunter; \"the ladder was not there when the Rucastles went away.\"\n\n\"He has come back and done it. I tell you that he is a clever and dangerous man. I should not be very much surprised if this were he whose step I hear now upon the stair. I think, Watson, that it would be as well for you to have your pistol ready.\"\n\nThe words were hardly out of his mouth before a man appeared at the door of the room, a very fat and burly man, with a heavy stick in his hand. Miss Hunter screamed and shrunk against the wall at the sight of him, but Sherlock Holmes sprang forward and confronted him.\n\n\"You villain!\" said he, \"where's your daughter?\"\n\nThe fat man cast his eyes round, and then up at the open skylight.\n\n\"It is for me to ask you that,\" he shrieked, \"you thieves! Spies and thieves! I have caught you, have I? You are in my power. I'll serve you!\" He turned and clattered down the stairs as hard as he could go.\n\n\"He's gone for the dog!\" cried Miss Hunter.\n\n\"I have my revolver,\" said I.\n\n\"Better close the front door,\" cried Holmes, and we all rushed down the stairs together. We had hardly reached the hall when we heard the baying of a hound, and then a scream of agony, with a horrible worrying sound which it was dreadful to listen to. An elderly man with a red face and shaking limbs came staggering out at a side door.\n\n\"My God!\" he cried. \"Someone has loosed the dog. It's not been fed for two days. Quick, quick, or it'll be too late!\"\n\nHolmes and I rushed out and round the angle of the house, with Toller hurrying behind us. There was the huge famished brute, its black muzzle buried in Rucastle's throat, while he writhed and screamed upon the ground. Running up, I blew its brains out, and it fell over with its keen white teeth still meeting in the great creases of his neck. With much labour we separated them and carried him, living but horribly mangled, into the house. We laid him upon the drawing-room sofa, and having dispatched the sobered Toller to bear the news to his wife, I did what I could to relieve his pain. We were all assembled round him when the door opened, and a tall, gaunt woman entered the room.\n\n\"Mrs. Toller!\" cried Miss Hunter.\n\n\"Yes, miss. Mr. Rucastle let me out when he came back before he went up to you. Ah, miss, it is a pity you didn't let me know what you were planning, for I would have told you that your pains were wasted.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" said Holmes, looking keenly at her. \"It is clear that Mrs. Toller knows more about this matter than anyone else.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I do, and I am ready enough to tell what I know.\"\n\n\"Then, pray, sit down, and let us hear it, for there are several points on which I must confess that I am still in the dark.\"\n\n\"I will soon make it clear to you,\" said she; \"and I'd have done so before now if I could ha' got out from the cellar. If there's police-court business over this, you'll remember that I was the one that stood your friend, and that I was Miss Alice's friend too.\n\n\"She was never happy at home, Miss Alice wasn't, from the time that her father married again. She was slighted like and had no say in anything, but it never really became bad for her until after she met Mr. Fowler at a friend's house. As well as I could learn, Miss Alice had rights of her own by will, but she was so quiet and patient, she was, that she never said a word about them, but just left everything in Mr. Rucastle's hands. He knew he was safe with her; but when there was a chance of a husband coming forward, who would ask for all that the law would give him, then her father thought it time to put a stop on it. He wanted her to sign a paper, so that whether she married or not, he could use her money. When she wouldn't do it, he kept on worrying her until she got brain-fever, and for six weeks was at death's door. Then she got better at last, all worn to a shadow, and with her beautiful hair cut off; but that didn't make no change in her young man, and he stuck to her as true as man could be.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Holmes, \"I think that what you have been good enough to tell us makes the matter fairly clear, and that I can deduce all that remains. Mr. Rucastle then, I presume, took to this system of imprisonment?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"And brought Miss Hunter down from London in order to get rid of the disagreeable persistence of Mr. Fowler.\"\n\n\"That was it, sir.\"\n\n\"But Mr. Fowler being a persevering man, as a good seaman should be, blockaded the house, and having met you succeeded by certain arguments, metallic or otherwise, in convincing you that your interests were the same as his.\"\n\n\"Mr. Fowler was a very kind-spoken, free-handed gentleman,\" said Mrs. Toller serenely.\n\n\"And in this way he managed that your good man should have no want of drink, and that a ladder should be ready at the moment when your master had gone out.\"\n\n\"You have it, sir, just as it happened.\"\n\n\"I am sure we owe you an apology, Mrs. Toller,\" said Holmes, \"for you have certainly cleared up everything which puzzled us. And here comes the country surgeon and Mrs. Rucastle, so I think, Watson, that we had best escort Miss Hunter back to Winchester, as it seems to me that our locus standi now is rather a questionable one.\"\n\nAnd thus was solved the mystery of the sinister house with the copper beeches in front of the door. Mr. Rucastle survived, but was always a broken man, kept alive solely through the care of his devoted wife. They still live with their old servants, who probably know so much of Rucastle's past life that he finds it difficult to part from them. Mr. Fowler and Miss Rucastle were married, by special license, in Southampton the day after their flight, and he is now the holder of a government appointment in the island of Mauritius. As to Miss Violet Hunter, my friend Holmes, rather to my disappointment, manifested no further interest in her when once she had ceased to be the centre of one of his problems, and she is now the head of a private school at Walsall, where I believe that she has met with considerable success." + }, + { + "title": "MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES", + "text": "[ SILVER BLAZE ]\n\n\"I am afraid, Watson, that I shall have to go,\" said Holmes as we sat down together to our breakfast one morning.\n\n\"Go! Where to?\"\n\n\"To Dartmoor; to King's Pyland.\"\n\nI was not surprised. Indeed, my only wonder was that he had not already been mixed up in this extraordinary case, which was the one topic of conversation through the length and breadth of England. For a whole day my companion had rambled about the room with his chin upon his chest and his brows knitted, charging and recharging his pipe with the strongest black tobacco, and absolutely deaf to any of my questions or remarks. Fresh editions of every paper had been sent up by our news agent, only to be glanced over and tossed down into a corner. Yet, silent as he was, I knew perfectly well what it was over which he was brooding. There was but one problem before the public which could challenge his powers of analysis, and that was the singular disappearance of the favourite for the Wessex Cup, and the tragic murder of its trainer. When, therefore, he suddenly announced his intention of setting out for the scene of the drama, it was only what I had both expected and hoped for.\n\n\"I should be most happy to go down with you if I should not be in the way,\" said I.\n\n\"My dear Watson, you would confer a great favour upon me by coming. And I think that your time will not be misspent, for there are points about the case which promise to make it an absolutely unique one. We have, I think, just time to catch our train at Paddington, and I will go further into the matter upon our journey. You would oblige me by bringing with you your very excellent field-glass.\"\n\nAnd so it happened that an hour or so later I found myself in the corner of a first-class carriage flying along en route for Exeter, while Sherlock Holmes, with his sharp, eager face framed in his ear-flapped travelling-cap, dipped rapidly into the bundle of fresh papers which he had procured at Paddington. We had left Reading far behind us before he thrust the last one of them under the seat and offered me his cigar-case.\n\n\"We are going well,\" said he, looking out of the window and glancing at his watch. \"Our rate at present is fifty-three and a half miles an hour.\"\n\n\"I have not observed the quarter-mile posts,\" said I.\n\n\"Nor have I. But the telegraph posts upon this line are sixty yards apart, and the calculation is a simple one. I presume that you have looked into this matter of the murder of John Straker and the disappearance of Silver Blaze?\"\n\n\"I have seen what the Telegraph and the Chronicle have to say.\"\n\n\"It is one of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete, and of such personal importance to so many people that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact\u2014of absolute undeniable fact\u2014from the embellishments of theorists and reporters. Then, having established ourselves upon this sound basis, it is our duty to see what inferences may be drawn and what are the special points upon which the whole mystery turns. On Tuesday evening I received telegrams from both Colonel Ross, the owner of the horse, and from Inspector Gregory, who is looking after the case, inviting my co\u00f6peration.\"\n\n\"Tuesday evening!\" I exclaimed. \"And this is Thursday morning. Why didn't you go down yesterday?\"\n\n\"Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson\u2014which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. The fact is that I could not believe it possible that the most remarkable horse in England could long remain concealed, especially in so sparsely inhabited a place as the north of Dartmoor. From hour to hour yesterday I expected to hear that he had been found, and that his abductor was the murderer of John Straker. When, however, another morning had come and I found that beyond the arrest of young Fitzroy Simpson nothing had been done, I felt that it was time for me to take action. Yet in some ways I feel that yesterday has not been wasted.\"\n\n\"You have formed a theory, then?\"\n\n\"At least I have got a grip of the essential facts of the case. I shall enumerate them to you, for nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person, and I can hardly expect your cooperation if I do not show you the position from which we start.\"\n\nI lay back against the cushions, puffing at my cigar, while Holmes, leaning forward, with his long, thin forefinger checking off the points upon the palm of his left hand, gave me a sketch of the events which had led to our journey.\n\n\"Silver Blaze,\" said he, \"is from the Isonomy stock and holds as brilliant a record as his famous ancestor. He is now in his fifth year and has brought in turn each of the prizes of the turf to Colonel Ross, his fortunate owner. Up to the time of the catastrophe he was the first favourite for the Wessex Cup, the betting being three to one on him. He has always, however, been a prime favourite with the racing public and has never yet disappointed them, so that even at those odds enormous sums of money have been laid upon him. It is obvious, therefore, that there were many people who had the strongest interest in preventing Silver Blaze from being there at the fall of the flag next Tuesday.\n\n\"The fact was, of course, appreciated at King's Pyland, where the colonel's training-stable is situated. Every precaution was taken to guard the favourite. The trainer, John Straker, is a retired jockey who rode in Colonel Ross's colours before he became too heavy for the weighing-chair. He has served the colonel for five years as jockey and for seven as trainer, and has always shown himself to be a zealous and honest servant. Under him were three lads, for the establishment was a small one containing only four horses in all. One of these lads sat up each night in the stable, while the others slept in the loft. All three bore excellent characters. John Straker, who is a married man, lived in a small villa about two hundred yards from the stables. He has no children, keeps one maidservant, and is comfortably off. The country round is very lonely, but about half a mile to the north there is a small cluster of villas which have been built by a Tavistock contractor for the use of invalids and others who may wish to enjoy the pure Dartmoor air. Tavistock itself lies two miles to the west, while across the moor, also about two miles distant, is the larger training establishment of Mapleton, which belongs to Lord Backwater and is managed by Silas Brown. In every other direction the moor is a complete wilderness, inhabited only by a few roaming gypsies. Such was the general situation last Monday night when the catastrophe occurred.\n\n\"On that evening the horses had been exercised and watered as usual, and the stables were locked up at nine o'clock. Two of the lads walked up to the trainer's house, where they had supper in the kitchen, while the third, Ned Hunter, remained on guard. At a few minutes after nine the maid, Edith Baxter, carried down to the stables his supper, which consisted of a dish of curried mutton. She took no liquid, as there was a water-tap in the stables, and it was the rule that the lad on duty should drink nothing else. The maid carried a lantern with her, as it was very dark and the path ran across the open moor.\n\n\"Edith Baxter was within thirty yards of the stables when a man appeared out of the darkness and called to her to stop. As she stepped into the circle of yellow light thrown by the lantern she saw that he was a person of gentlemanly bearing, dressed in a gray suit of tweeds, with a cloth cap. He wore gaiters and carried a heavy stick with a knob to it. She was most impressed, however, by the extreme pallor of his face and by the nervousness of his manner. His age, she thought, would be rather over thirty than under it.\n\n\"'Can you tell me where I am?' he asked. 'I had almost made up my mind to sleep on the moor when I saw the light of your lantern.'\n\n\"'You are close to the King's Pyland training stables,' said she.\n\n\"'Oh, indeed! What a stroke of luck!' he cried. 'I understand that a stable-boy sleeps there alone every night. Perhaps that is his supper which you are carrying to him. Now I am sure that you would not be too proud to earn the price of a new dress, would you?' He took a piece of white paper folded up out of his waistcoat pocket. 'See that the boy has this to-night, and you shall have the prettiest frock that money can buy.'\n\n\"She was frightened by the earnestness of his manner and ran past him to the window through which she was accustomed to hand the meals. It was already opened, and Hunter was seated at the small table inside. She had begun to tell him of what had happened when the stranger came up again.\n\n\"'Good-evening,' said he, looking through the window. 'I wanted to have a word with you.' The girl has sworn that as he spoke she noticed the corner of the little paper packet protruding from his closed hand.\n\n\"'What business have you here?' asked the lad.\n\n\"'It's business that may put something into your pocket,' said the other. 'You've two horses in for the Wessex Cup\u2014Silver Blaze and Bayard. Let me have the straight tip and you won't be a loser. Is it a fact that at the weights Bayard could give the other a hundred yards in five furlongs, and that the stable have put their money on him?'\n\n\"'So, you're one of those damned touts!' cried the lad. 'I'll show you how we serve them in King's Pyland.' He sprang up and rushed across the stable to unloose the dog. The girl fled away to the house, but as she ran she looked back and saw that the stranger was leaning through the window. A minute later, however, when Hunter rushed out with the hound he was gone, and though he ran all round the buildings he failed to find any trace of him.\"\n\n\"One moment,\" I asked. \"Did the stable-boy, when he ran out with the dog, leave the door unlocked behind him?\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson, excellent!\" murmured my companion. \"The importance of the point struck me so forcibly that I sent a special wire to Dartmoor yesterday to clear the matter up. The boy locked the door before he left it. The window, I may add, was not large enough for a man to get through.\n\n\"Hunter waited until his fellow-grooms had returned, when he sent a message to the trainer and told him what had occurred. Straker was excited at hearing the account, although he does not seem to have quite realized its true significance. It left him, however, vaguely uneasy, and Mrs. Straker, waking at one in the morning, found that he was dressing. In reply to her inquiries, he said that he could not sleep on account of his anxiety about the horses, and that he intended to walk down to the stables to see that all was well. She begged him to remain at home, as she could hear the rain pattering against the window, but in spite of her entreaties he pulled on his large mackintosh and left the house.\n\n\"Mrs. Straker awoke at seven in the morning to find that her husband had not yet returned. She dressed herself hastily, called the maid, and set off for the stables. The door was open; inside, huddled together upon a chair, Hunter was sunk in a state of absolute stupor, the favourite's stall was empty, and there were no signs of his trainer.\n\n\"The two lads who slept in the chaff-cutting loft above the harness-room were quickly aroused. They had heard nothing during the night, for they are both sound sleepers. Hunter was obviously under the influence of some powerful drug, and as no sense could be got out of him, he was left to sleep it off while the two lads and the two women ran out in search of the absentees. They still had hopes that the trainer had for some reason taken out the horse for early exercise, but on ascending the knoll near the house, from which all the neighbouring moors were visible, they not only could see no signs of the missing favourite, but they perceived something which warned them that they were in the presence of a tragedy.\n\n\"About a quarter of a mile from the stables John Straker's overcoat was flapping from a furze-bush. Immediately beyond there was a bowl-shaped depression in the moor, and at the bottom of this was found the dead body of the unfortunate trainer. His head had been shattered by a savage blow from some heavy weapon, and he was wounded on the thigh, where there was a long, clean cut, inflicted evidently by some very sharp instrument. It was clear, however, that Straker had defended himself vigorously against his assailants, for in his right hand he held a small knife, which was clotted with blood up to the handle, while in his left he clasped a red and black silk cravat, which was recognized by the maid as having been worn on the preceding evening by the stranger who had visited the stables. Hunter, on recovering from his stupor, was also quite positive as to the ownership of the cravat. He was equally certain that the same stranger had, while standing at the window, drugged his curried mutton, and so deprived the stables of their watchman. As to the missing horse, there were abundant proofs in the mud which lay at the bottom of the fatal hollow that he had been there at the time of the struggle. But from that morning he has disappeared, and although a large reward has been offered, and all the gypsies of Dartmoor are on the alert, no news has come of him. Finally, an analysis has shown that the remains of his supper left by the stable-lad contained an appreciable quantity of powdered opium, while the people at the house partook of the same dish on the same night without any ill effect.\n\n\"Those are the main facts of the case, stripped of all surmise, and stated as baldly as possible. I shall now recapitulate what the police have done in the matter.\n\n\"Inspector Gregory, to whom the case has been committed, is an extremely competent officer. Were he but gifted with imagination he might rise to great heights in his profession. On his arrival he promptly found and arrested the man upon whom suspicion naturally rested. There was little difficulty in finding him, for he inhabited one of those villas which I have mentioned. His name, it appears, was Fitzroy Simpson. He was a man of excellent birth and education, who had squandered a fortune upon the turf, and who lived now by doing a little quiet and genteel book-making in the sporting clubs of London. An examination of his betting-book shows that bets to the amount of five thousand pounds had been registered by him against the favourite. On being arrested he volunteered the statement that he had come down to Dartmoor in the hope of getting some information about the King's Pyland horses, and also about Desborough, the second favourite, which was in charge of Silas Brown at the Mapleton stables. He did not attempt to deny that he had acted as described upon the evening before, but declared that he had no sinister designs and had simply wished to obtain first-hand information. When confronted with his cravat he turned very pale and was utterly unable to account for its presence in the hand of the murdered man. His wet clothing showed that he had been out in the storm of the night before, and his stick, which was a penang-lawyer weighted with lead, was just such a weapon as might, by repeated blows, have inflicted the terrible injuries to which the trainer had succumbed. On the other hand, there was no wound upon his person, while the state of Straker's knife would show that one at least of his assailants must bear his mark upon him. There you have it all in a nutshell, Watson, and if you can give me any light I shall be infinitely obliged to you.\"\n\nI had listened with the greatest interest to the statement which Holmes, with characteristic clearness, had laid before me. Though most of the facts were familiar to me, I had not sufficiently appreciated their relative importance, nor their connection to each other.\n\n\"Is it not possible,\" I suggested; \"that the incised wound upon Straker may have been caused by his own knife in the convulsive struggles which follow any brain injury?\"\n\n\"It is more than possible; it is probable,\" said Holmes. \"In that case one of the main points in favour of the accused disappears.\"\n\n\"And yet,\" said I, \"even now I fail to understand what the theory of the police can be.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that whatever theory we state has very grave objections to it,\" returned my companion. \"The police imagine, I take it, that this Fitzroy Simpson, having drugged the lad, and having in some way obtained a duplicate key, opened the stable door and took out the horse, with the intention, apparently, of kidnapping him altogether. His bridle is missing, so that Simpson must have put this on. Then, having left the door open behind him, he was leading the horse away over the moor when he was either met or overtaken by the trainer. A row naturally ensued. Simpson beat out the trainer's brains with his heavy stick without receiving any injury from the small knife which Straker used in self-defence, and then the thief either led the horse on to some secret hiding-place, or else it may have bolted during the struggle, and be now wandering out on the moors. That is the case as it appears to the police, and improbable as it is, all other explanations are more improbable still. However, I shall very quickly test the matter when I am once upon the spot, and until then I cannot really see how we can get much further than our present position.\"\n\nIt was evening before we reached the little town of Tavistock, which lies, like the boss of a shield, in the middle of the huge circle of Dartmoor. Two gentlemen were awaiting us in the station\u2014the one a tall, fair man with lion-like-hair and beard and curiously penetrating light blue eyes; the other a small, alert person, very neat and dapper, in a frock-coat and gaiters, with trim little side-whiskers and an eyeglass. The latterwas Colonel Ross, the well-known sportsman; the other, Inspector Gregory; a man who was rapidly making his name in the English detective service.\n\n\"I am delighted that you have come down, Mr. Holmes,\" said the colonel. \"The inspector here has done all that could possibly be suggested, but I wish to leave no stone unturned in trying to avenge poor Straker and in recovering my horse.\"\n\n\"Have there been any fresh developments?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"I am sorry to say that we have made very little progress,\" said the inspector. \"We have an open carriage outside, and as you would no doubt like to see the place before the light fails, we might talk it over as we drive.\"\n\nA minute later we were all seated in a comfortable landau and were rattling through the quaint old Devonshire city. Inspector Gregory was full of his case and poured out a stream of remarks, while Holmes threw in an occasional question or interjection. Colonel Ross leaned back with his arms folded and his hat tilted over his eyes, while I listened with interest to the dialogue of the two detectives. Gregory was formulating his theory, which was almost exactly what Holmes had foretold in the train.\n\n\"The net is drawn pretty close round Fitzroy Simpson,\" he remarked, \"and I believe myself that he is our man. At the same time I recognize that the evidence is purely circumstantial, and that some new development may upset it.\"\n\n\"How about Straker's knife?\"\n\n\"We have quite come to the conclusion that he wounded himself in his fall.\"\n\n\"My friend Dr. Watson made that suggestion to me as we came down. If so, it would tell against this man Simpson.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly. He has neither a knife nor any sign of a wound. The evidence against him is certainly very strong. He had a great interest in the disappearance of the favourite. He lies under suspicion of having poisoned the stable-boy; he was undoubtedly out in the storm; he was armed with a heavy stick, and his cravat was found in the dead man's hand. I really think we have enough to go before a jury.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head. \"A clever counsel would tear it all to rags,\" said he, \"Why should he take the horse out of the stable? If he wished to injure it, why could he not do it there? Has a duplicate key been found in his possession? What chemist sold him the powdered opium? Above all, where could he, a stranger to the district, hide a horse, and such a horse as this? What is his own explanation as to the paper which he wished the maid to give to the stable-boy?\"\n\n\"He says that it was a ten-pound note. One was found in his purse. But your other difficulties are not so formidable as they seem. He is not a stranger to the district. He has twice lodged at Tavistock in the summer. The opium was probably brought from London. The key, having served its purpose, would be hurled away. The horse may be at the bottom of one of the pits or old mines upon the moor.\"\n\n\"What does he say about the cravat?\"\n\n\"He acknowledges that it is his and declares that he had lost it. But a new element has been introduced into the case which may account for his leading the horse from the stable.\"\n\nHolmes pricked up his ears.\n\n\"We have found traces which show that a party of gypsies encamped on Monday night within a mile of the spot where the murder took place. On Tuesday they were gone. Now, presuming that there was some understanding between Simpson and these gypsies, might he not have been leading the horse to them when he was overtaken, and may they not have him now?\"\n\n\"It is certainly possible.\"\n\n\"The moor is being scoured for these gypsies. I have also examined every stable and outhouse in Tavistock, and for a radius of ten miles.\"\n\n\"There is another training-stable quite close, I understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, and that is a factor which we must certainly not neglect. As Desborough, their horse, was second in the betting, they had an interest in the disappearance of the favourite. Silas Brown, the trainer, is known to have had large bets upon the event, and he was no friend to poor Straker. We have, however, examined the stables, and there is nothing to connect him with the affair.\"\n\n\"And nothing to connect this man Simpson with the interests of the Mapleton stables?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all.\"\n\nHolmes leaned back in the carriage, and the conversation ceased. A few minutes later our driver pulled up at a neat little red-brick villa with overhanging eaves which stood by the road. Some distance off, across a paddock, lay a long gray-tiled outbuilding. In every other direction the low curves of the moor, bronze-coloured from the fading ferns, stretched away to the sky-line, broken only by the steeples of Tavistock, and by a cluster of houses away to the westward which marked the Mapleton stables. We all sprang out with the exception of Holmes, who continued to lean back with his eyes fixed upon the sky in front of him, entirely absorbed in his own thoughts. It was only when I touched his arm that he roused himself with a violent start and stepped out of the carriage.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" said he, turning to Colonel Ross, who had looked at him in some surprise. \"I was day-dreaming.\" There was a gleam in his eyes and a suppressed excitement in his manner which convinced me, used as I was to his ways, that his hand was upon a clue, though I could not imagine where he had found it.\n\n\"Perhaps you would prefer at once to go on to the scene of the crime, Mr. Holmes?\" said Gregory.\n\n\"I think that I should prefer to stay here a little and go into one or two questions of detail. Straker was brought back here, I presume?\"\n\n\"Yes, he lies upstairs. The inquest is to-morrow.\"\n\n\"He has been in your service some years, Colonel Ross?\"\n\n\"I have always found him an excellent servant.\"\n\n\"I presume that you made an inventory of what he had in his pockets at the time of his death, Inspector?\"\n\n\"I have the things themselves in the sitting-room if you would care to see them.\"\n\n\"I should be very glad.\" We all filed into the front room and sat round the central table while the inspector unlocked a square tin box and laid a small heap of things before us. There was a box of vestas, two inches of tallow candle, an A D Pbrier-root pipe, a pouch of sealskin with half an ounce of long-cut Cavendish, a silver watch with a gold chain, five sovereigns in gold, an aluminum pencil-case, a few papers, and an ivory-handled knife with a very delicate, inflexible blade marked Weiss & Co., London.\n\n\"This is a very singular knife,\" said Holmes, lifting it up and examining it minutely. \"I presume, as I see blood-stains upon it, that it is the one which was found in the dead man's grasp. Watson, this knife is surely in your line?\"\n\n\"It is what we call a cataract knife,\" said I.\n\n\"I thought so. A very delicate blade devised for very delicate work. A strange thing for a man to carry with him upon a rough expedition, especially as it would not shut in his pocket.\"\n\n\"The tip was guarded by a disc of cork which we found beside his body,\" said the inspector. \"His wife tells us that the knife had lain upon the dressing-table, and that he had picked it up as he left the room. It was a poor weapon, but perhaps the best that he could lay his hands on at the moment.\"\n\n\"Very possibly. How about these papers?\"\n\n\"Three of them are receipted hay-dealers' accounts. One of them is a letter of instructions from Colonel Ross. This other is a milliner's account for thirty-seven pounds fifteen made out by Madame Lesurier, of Bond Street, to William Derbyshire. Mrs. Straker tells us that Derbyshire was a friend of her husband's, and that occasionally his letters were addressed here.\"\n\n\"Madame Derbyshire had somewhat expensive tastes,\" remarked Holmes, glancing down the account. \"Twenty-two guineas is rather heavy for a single costume. However, there appears to be nothing more to learn, and we may now go down to the scene of the crime.\"\n\nAs we emerged from the sitting-room a woman, who had been waiting in the passage, took a step forward and laid her hand upon the inspector's sleeve. Her face was haggard and thin and eager, stamped with the print of a recent horror.\n\n\"Have you got them? Have you found them?\" she panted.\n\n\"No, Mrs. Straker. But Mr. Holmes here has come from London to help us, and we shall do all that is possible.\"\n\n\"Surely I met you in Plymouth at a garden-party some little time ago, Mrs. Straker?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"No, sir; you are mistaken.\"\n\n\"Dear me! Why, I could have sworn to it. You wore a costume of dove-coloured silk with ostrich-feather trimming.\"\n\n\"I never had such a dress, sir,\" answered the lady.\n\n\"Ah, that quite settles it,\" said Holmes. And with an apology he followed the inspector outside. A short walk across the moor took us to the hollow in which the body had been found. At the brink of it was the furze-bush upon which the coat had been hung.\n\n\"There was no wind that night, I understand,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"None, but very heavy rain.\"\n\n\"In that case the overcoat was not blown against the furze-bush, but placed there.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was laid across the bush.\"\n\n\"You fill me with interest. I perceive that the ground has been trampled up a good deal. No doubt many feet have been here since Monday night.\"\n\n\"A piece of matting has been laid here at the side, and we have all stood upon that.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\"\n\n\"In this bag I have one of the boots which Straker wore, one of Fitzroy Simpson's shoes, and a cast horseshoe of Silver Blaze.\"\n\n\"My dear Inspector, you surpass yourself!\" Holmes took the bag, and, descending into the hollow, he pushed the matting into a more central position. Then stretching himself upon his face and leaning his chin upon his hands, he made a careful study of the trampled mud in front of him. \"Hullo!\" said he suddenly. \"What's this?\" It was a wax vesta, half burned, which was so coated with mud that it looked at first like a little chip of wood.\n\n\"I cannot think how I came to overlook it,\" said the inspector with an expression of annoyance.\n\n\"It was invisible, buried in the mud. I only saw it because I was looking for it.\"\n\n\"What! you expected to find it?\"\n\n\"I thought it not unlikely.\"\n\nHe took the boots from the bag and compared the impressions of each of them with marks upon the ground. Then he clambered up to the rim of the hollow and crawled about among the ferns and bushes.\n\n\"I am afraid that there are no more tracks,\" said the inspector. \"I have examined the ground very carefully for a hundred yards in each direction.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" said Holmes, rising. \"I should not have the impertinence to do it again after what you say. But I should like to take a little walk over the moor before it grows dark that I may know my ground to-morrow, and I think that I shall put this horseshoe into my pocket for luck.\"\n\nColonel Ross, who had shown some signs of impatience at my companion's quiet and systematic method of work, glanced at his watch. \"I wish you would come back with me, Inspector,\" said he. \"There are several points on which I should like your advice, and especially as to whether we do not owe it to the public to remove our horse's name from the entries for the cup.\"\n\n\"Certainly not,\" cried Holmes with decision. \"I should let the name stand.\"\n\nThe colonel bowed. \"I am very glad to have had your opinion, sir,\" said he. \"You will find us at poor Straker's house when you have finished your walk, and we can drive together into Tavistock.\"\n\nHe turned back with the inspector, while Holmes and I walked slowly across the moor. The sun was beginning to sink behind the stable of Mapleton, and the long sloping plain in front of us was tinged with gold, deepening into rich, ruddy browns where the faded ferns and brambles caught the evening light. But the glories of the landscape were all wasted upon my companion, who was sunk in the deepest thought.\n\n\"It's this way, Watson,\" said he at last. \"We may leave the question of who killed John Straker for the instant and confine ourselves to finding out what has become of the horse. Now, supposing that he broke away during or after the tragedy, where could he have gone to? The horse is a very gregarious creature. If left to himself his instincts would have been either to return to King's Pyland or go over to Mapleton. Why should he run wild upon the moor? He would surely have been seen by now. And why should gypsies kidnap him? These people always clear out when they hear of trouble, for they do not wish to be pestered by the police. They could not hope to sell such a horse. They would run a great risk and gain nothing by taking him. Surely that is clear.\"\n\n\"Where is he, then?\"\n\n\"I have already said that he must have gone to King's Pyland or to Mapleton. He is not at King's Pyland. Therefore he is at Mapleton. Let us take that as a working hypothesis and see what it leads us to. This part of the moor, as the inspector remarked, is very hard and dry. But it falls away towards Mapleton, and you can see from here that there is a long hollow over yonder, which must have been very wet on Monday night. If our supposition is correct, then the horse must have crossed that, and there is the point where we should look for his tracks.\"\n\nWe had been walking briskly during this conversation, and a few more minutes brought us to the hollow in question. At Holmes's request I walked down the bank to the right, and he to the left, but I had not taken fifty paces before I heard him give a shout and saw him waving his hand to me. The track of a horse was plainly outlined in the soft earth in front of him, and the shoe which he took from his pocket exactly fitted the impression.\n\n\"See the value of imagination,\" said Holmes. \"It is the one quality which Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.\"\n\nWe crossed the marshy bottom and passed over a quarter of a mile of dry, hard turf. Again the ground sloped, and again we came on the tracks. Then we lost them for half a mile, but only to pick them up once more quite close to Mapleton. It was Holmes who saw them first, and he stood pointing, with a look of triumph upon his face. A man's track was visible beside the horse's.\n\n\"The horse was alone before,\" I cried.\n\n\"Quite so. It was alone before. Hullo, what is this?\"\n\nThe double track turned sharp off and took the direction of King's Pyland. Holmes whistled, and we both followed along after it. His eyes were on the trail, but I happened to look a little to one side and saw to my surprise the same tracks coming back again in the opposite direction.\n\n\"One for you, Watson,\" said Holmes when I pointed it out. \"You have saved us a long walk, which would have brought us back on our own traces. Let us follow the return track.\"\n\nWe had not to go far. It ended at the paving of asphalt which led up to the gates of the Mapleton stables. As we approached, a groom ran out from them.\n\n\"We don't want any loiterers about here,\" said he.\n\n\"I only wished to ask a question,\" said Holmes, with his finger and thumb in his waistcoat pocket. \"Should I be too early to see your master, Mr. Silas Brown, if I were to call at five o'clock to-morrow morning?\"\n\n\"Bless you, sir, if anyone is about he will be, for he is always the first stirring. But here he is, sir, to answer your questions for himself. No, sir, no, it is as much as my place is worth to let him see me touch your money. Afterwards, if you like.\"\n\nAs Sherlock Holmes replaced the half-crown which he had drawn from his pocket, a fierce-looking elderly man strode out from the gate with a hunting-crop swinging in his hand.\n\n\"What's this, Dawson!\" he cried. \"No gossiping! Go about your business! And you, what the devil do you want here?\"\n\n\"Ten minutes' talk with you, my good sir,\" said Holmes in the sweetest of voices.\n\n\"I've no time to talk to every gadabout. We want no strangers here. Be off, or you may find a dog at your heels.\"\n\nHolmes leaned forward and whispered something in the trainer's ear. He started violently and flushed to the temples.\n\n\"It's a lie!\" he shouted. \"An infernal lie!\"\n\n\"Very good. Shall we argue about it here in public or talk it over in your parlour?\"\n\n\"Oh, come in if you wish to.\"\n\nHolmes smiled. \"I shall not keep you more than a few minutes, Watson,\" said he. \"Now, Mr. Brown, I am quite at your disposal.\"\n\nIt was twenty minutes, and the reds had all faded into grays before Holmes and the trainer reappeared. Never have I seen such a change as had been brought about in Silas Brown in that short time. His face was ashy pale, beads of perspiration shone upon his brow, and his hands shook until the hunting-crop wagged like a branch in the wind. His bullying, overbearing manner was all gone too, and he cringed along at my companion's side like a dog with its master.\n\n\"Your instructions will be done. It shall all be done,\" said he.\n\n\"There must be no mistake,\" said Holmes, looking round at him. The other winced as he read the menace in his eyes.\n\n\"Oh, no, there shall be no mistake. It shall be there. Should I change it first or not?\"\n\nHolmes thought a little and then burst out laughing. \"No, don't,\" said he, \"I shall write to you about it. No tricks, now, or\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, you can trust me, you can trust me!\"\n\n\"Yes, I think I can. Well, you shall hear from me to-morrow.\" He turned upon his heel, disregarding the trembling hand which the other held out to him, and we set off for King's Pyland.\n\n\"A more perfect compound of the bully, coward, and sneak than Master Silas Brown I have seldom met with,\" remarked Holmes as we trudged along together.\n\n\"He has the horse, then?\"\n\n\"He tried to bluster out of it, but I described to him so exactly what his actions had been upon that morning that he is convinced that I was watching him. Of course you observed the peculiarly square toes in the impressions, and that his own boots exactly corresponded to them. Again, of course no subordinate would have dared to do such a thing. I described to him how, when according to his custom he was the first down, he perceived a strange horse wandering over the moor. How he went out to it, and his astonishment at recognizing, from the white forehead which has given the favourite its name, that chance had put in his power the only horse which could beat the one upon which he had put his money. Then I described how his first impulse had been to lead him back to King's Pyland, and how the devil had shown him how he could hide the horse until the race was over, and how he had led it back and concealed it at Mapleton. When I told him every detail he gave it up and thought only of saving his own skin.\"\n\n\"But his stables had been searched?\"\n\n\"Oh, an old horse-faker like him has many a dodge.\"\n\n\"But are you not afraid to leave the horse in his power now, since he has every interest in injuring it?\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, he will guard it as the apple of his eye. He knows that his only hope of mercy is to produce it safe.\"\n\n\"Colonel Ross did not impress me as a man who would be likely to show much mercy in any case.\"\n\n\"The matter does not rest with Colonel Ross. I follow my own methods and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial. I don't know whether you observed it, Watson, but the colonel's manner has been just a trifle cavalier to me. I am inclined now to have a little amusement at his expense. Say nothing to him about the horse.\"\n\n\"Certainly not without your permission.\"\n\n\"And of course this is all quite a minor point compared to the question of who killed John Straker.\"\n\n\"And you will devote yourself to that?\"\n\n\"On the contrary, we both go back to London by the night train.\"\n\nI was thunderstruck by my friend's words. We had only been a few hours in Devonshire, and that he should give up an investigation which he had begun so brilliantly was quite incomprehensible to me. Not a word more could I draw from him until we were back at the trainer's house. The colonel and the inspector were awaiting us in the parlour.\n\n\"My friend and I return to town by the night-express,\" said Holmes. \"We have had a charming little breath of your beautiful Dartmoor air.\"\n\nThe inspector opened his eyes, and the colonel's lip curled in a sneer.\n\n\"So you despair of arresting the murderer of poor Straker,\" said he.\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders. \"There are certainly grave difficulties in the way,\" said he. \"I have every hope, however, that your horse will start upon Tuesday, and I beg that you will have your jockey in readiness. Might I ask for a photograph of Mr. John Straker?\"\n\nThe inspector took one from an envelope and handed it to him.\n\n\"My dear Gregory, you anticipate all my wants. If I might ask you to wait here for an instant, I have a question which I should like to put to the maid.\"\n\n\"I must say that I am rather disappointed in our London consultant,\" said Colonel Ross bluntly as my friend left the room. \"I do not see that we are any further than when he came.\"\n\n\"At least you have his assurance that your horse will run,\" said I.\n\n\"Yes, I have his assurance,\" said the colonel with a shrug of his shoulders. \"I should prefer to have the horse.\"\n\nI was about to make some reply in defence of my friend when he entered the room again.\n\n\"Now, gentlemen,\" said he, \"I am quite ready for Tavistock.\"\n\nAs we stepped into the carriage one of the stable-lads held the door open for us. A sudden idea seemed to occur to Holmes, for he leaned forward and touched the lad upon the sleeve.\n\n\"You have a few sheep in the paddock,\" he said. \"Who attends to them?\"\n\n\"I do, sir.\"\n\n\"Have you noticed anything amiss with them of late?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, not of much account, but three of them have gone lame, sir.\"\n\nI could see that Holmes was extremely pleased, for he chuckled and rubbed his hands together.\n\n\"A long shot, Watson, a very long shot,\" said he, pinching my arm. \"Gregory, let me recommend to your attention this singular epidemic among the sheep. Drive on, coachman!\"\n\nColonel Ross still wore an expression which showed the poor opinion which he had formed of my companion's ability, but I saw by the inspector's face that his attention had been keenly aroused.\n\n\"You consider that to be important?\" he asked.\n\n\"Exceedingly so.\"\n\n\"Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?\"\n\n\"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.\"\n\n\"The dog did nothing in the night-time.\"\n\n\"That was the curious incident,\" remarked Sherlock Holmes.\n\nFour days later Holmes and I were again in the train, bound for Winchester to see the race for the Wessex Cup. Colonel Ross met us by appointment outside the station, and we drove in his drag to the course beyond the town. His face was grave, and his manner was cold in the extreme.\n\n\"I have seen nothing of my horse,\" said he.\n\n\"I suppose that you would know him when you saw him?\" asked Holmes.\n\nThe colonel was very angry. \"I have been on the turf for twenty years and never was asked such a question as that before,\" said he. \"A child would know Silver Blaze with his white forehead and his mottled off-foreleg.\"\n\n\"How is the betting?\"\n\n\"Well, that is the curious part of it. You could have got fifteen to one yesterday, but the price has become shorter and shorter, until you can hardly get three to one now.\"\n\n\"Hum!\" said Holmes. \"Somebody knows something, that is clear.\"\n\nAs the drag drew up in the enclosure near the grandstand I glanced at the card to see the entries.\n\nWessex Plate [it ran] 50 sovs. each h ft with 1000 sovs. added, for four and five year olds. Second, \u00a3300. Third, \u00a3200. New course (one mile and five furlongs).\n\n1. Mr. Heath Newton's The Negro. Red cap. Cinnamon jacket.\n\n2. Colonel Wardlaw's Pugilist. Pink cap. Blue and black jacket.\n\n3. Lord Backwater's Desborough. Yellow cap and sleeves.\n\n4. Colonel Ross's Silver Blaze. Black cap. Red jacket.\n\n5. Duke of Balmoral's Iris. Yellow and black stripes.\n\n6. Lord Singleford's Rasper. Purple cap. Black sleeves.\n\n\"We scratched our other one and put all hopes on your word,\" said the colonel. \"Why, what is that? Silver Blaze favourite?\"\n\n\"Five to four against Silver Blaze!\" roared the ring. \"Five to four against Silver Blaze! Five to fifteen against Desborough! Five to four on the field!\"\n\n\"There are the numbers up,\" I cried. \"They are all six there.\"\n\n\"All six there? Then my horse is running,\" cried the colonel in great agitation. \"But I don't see him. My colours have not passed.\"\n\n\"Only five have passed. This must be he.\"\n\nAs I spoke a powerful bay horse-swept out from the weighing enclosure and cantered past us, bearing on its back the well-known black and red of the colonel.\n\n\"That's not my horse,\" cried the owner. \"That beast has not a white hair upon its body. What is this that you have done, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Well, well, let us see how he gets on,\" said my friend imperturbably. For a few minutes he gazed through my field-glass. \"Capital! An excellent start!\" he cried suddenly. \"There they are, coming round the curve!\"\n\nFrom our drag we had a superb view as they came up the straight. The six horses were so close together that a carpet could have covered them, but halfway up the yellow of the Mapleton stable showed to the front. Before they reached us, however, Desborough's bolt was shot, and the colonel's horse, coming away with a rush, passed the post a good six lengths before its rival, the Duke of Balmoral's Iris making a bad third.\n\n\"It's my race, anyhow,\" gasped the colonel, passing his hand over his eyes. \"I confess that I can make neither head nor tail of it. Don't you think that you have kept up your mystery long enough, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Certainly, Colonel, you shall know everything. Let us all go round and have a look at the horse together. Here he is,\" he continued as we made our way into the weighing enclosure, where only owners and their friends find admittance. \"You have only to wash his face and his leg in spirits of wine, and you will find that he is the same old Silver Blaze as ever.\"\n\n\"You take my breath away!\"\n\n\"I found him in the hands of a faker and took the liberty of running him just as he was sent over.\"\n\n\"My dear sir, you have done wonders. The horse looks very fit and well. It never went better in its life. I owe you a thousand apologies for having doubted your ability. You have done me a great service by recovering my horse. You would do me a greater still if you could lay your hands on the murderer of John Straker.\"\n\n\"I have done so,\" said Holmes quietly.\n\nThe colonel and I stared at him in amazement. \"You have got him! Where is he, then?\"\n\n\"He is here.\"\n\n\"Here! Where?\"\n\n\"In my company at the present moment.\"\n\nThe colonel flushed angrily. \"I quite recognize that I am under obligations to you, Mr. Holmes,\" said he, \"but I must regard what you have just said as either a very bad joke or an insult.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes laughed. \"I assure you that I have not associated you with the crime, Colonel,\" said he. \"The real murderer is standing immediately behind you.\" He stepped past and laid his hand upon the glossy neck of the thoroughbred.\n\n\"The horse!\" cried both the colonel and myself.\n\n\"Yes, the horse. And it may lessen his guilt if I say that it was done in self-defence, and that John Straker was a man who was entirely unworthy of your confidence. But there goes the bell, and as I stand to win a little on this next race, I shall defer a lengthy explanation until a more fitting time.\"\n\nWe had the corner of a Pullman car to ourselves that evening as we whirled back to London, and I fancy that the journey was a short one to Colonel Ross as well as to myself as we listened to our companion's narrative of the events which had occurred at the Dartmoor training-stables upon that Monday night, and the means by which he had unravelled them.\n\n\"I confess,\" said he, \"that any theories which I had formed from the newspaper reports were entirely erroneous. And yet there were indications there, had they not been overlaid by other details which concealed their true import. I went to Devonshire with the conviction that Fitzroy Simpson was the true culprit, although, of course, I saw that the evidence against him was by no means complete. It was while I was in the carriage, just as we reached the trainer's house, that the immense significance of the curried mutton occurred to me. You may remember that I was distrait and remained sitting after you had all alighted. I was marvelling in my own mind how I could possibly have overlooked so obvious a clue.\"\n\n\"I confess,\" said the colonel. \"that even now I cannot see how it helps us.\"\n\n\"It was the first link in my chain of reasoning. Powdered opium is by no means tasteless. The flavour is not disagreeable, but it is perceptible. Were it mixed with any ordinary dish the eater would undoubtedly detect it and would probably eat no more. A curry was exactly the medium which would disguise this taste. By no possible supposition could this stranger, Fitzroy Simpson, have caused curry to be served in the trainer's family that night, and it is surely too monstrous a coincidence to suppose that he happened to come along with powdered opium upon the very night when a dish happened to be served which would disguise the flavour. That is unthinkable. Therefore Simpson becomes eliminated from the case, and our attention centres upon Straker and his wife, the only two people who could have chosen curried mutton for supper that night. The opium was added after the dish was set aside for the stable-boy, for the others had the same for supper with no ill effects. Which of them, then, had access to that dish without the maid seeing them?\n\n\"Before deciding that question I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others. The Simpson incident had shown me that a dog was kept in the stables, and yet, though someone had been in and had fetched out a horse, he had not barked enough to arouse the two lads in the loft. Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.\n\n\"I was already convinced, or almost convinced, that John Straker went down to the stables in the dead of the night and took out Silver Blaze. For what purpose? For a dishonest one, obviously, or why should he drug his own stable-boy? And yet I was at a loss to know why. There have been cases before now where trainers have made sure of great sums of money by laying against their own horses through agents and then preventing them from winning by fraud. Sometimes it is a pulling jockey. Sometimes it is some surer and subtler means. What was it here? I hoped that the contents of his pockets might help me to form a conclusion.\n\n\"And they did so. You cannot have forgotten the singular knife which was found in the dead man's hand, a knife which certainly no sane man would choose for a weapon. It was, as Dr. Watson told us, a form of knife which is used for the most delicate operations known in surgery. And it was to be used for a delicate operation that night. You must know, with your wide experience of turf matters, Colonel Ross, that it is possible to make a slight nick upon the tendons of a horse's ham, and to do it subcutaneously, so as to leave absolutely no trace. A horse so treated would develop a slight lameness, which would be put down to a strain in exercise or a touch of rheumatism, but never to foul play.\"\n\n\"Villain! Scoundrel!\" cried the colonel.\n\n\"We have here the explanation of why John Straker wished to take the horse out on to the moor. So spirited a creature would have certainly roused the soundest of sleepers when it felt the prick of the knife. It was absolutely necessary to do it in the open air.\"\n\n\"I have been blind!\" cried the colonel. \"Of course that was why he needed the candle and struck the match.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly. But in examining his belongings I was fortunate enough to discover not only the method of the crime but even its motives. As a man of the world, Colonel, you know that men do not carry other people's bills about in their pockets. We have most of us quite enough to do to settle our own. I at once concluded that Straker was leading a double life and keeping a second establishment. The nature of the bill showed that there was a lady in the case, and one who had expensive tastes. Liberal as you are with your servants, one can hardly expect that they can buy twenty-guinea walking dresses for their ladies. I questioned Mrs. Straker as to the dress without her knowing it, and, having satisfied myself that it had never reached her, I made a note of the milliner's address and felt that by calling there with Straker's photograph I could easily dispose of the mythical Derbyshire.\n\n\"From that time on all was plain. Straker had led out the horse to a hollow where his light would be invisible. Simpson in his flight had dropped his cravat, and Straker had picked it up\u2014with some idea, perhaps, that he might use it in securing the horse's leg. Once in the hollow, he had got behind the horse and had struck a light; but the creature, frightened at the sudden glare, and with the strange instinct of animals feeling that some mischief was intended, had lashed out, and the steel shoe had struck Straker full on the forehead. He had already, in spite of the rain, taken off his overcoat in order to do his delicate task, and so, as he fell, his knife gashed his thigh. Do I make it clear?\"\n\n\"Wonderful!\" cried the colonel. \"Wonderful! You might have been there!\"\n\n\"My final shot was, I confess, a very long one. It struck me that so astute a man as Straker would not undertake this delicate tendon-nicking without a little practise. What could he practise on? My eyes fell upon the sheep, and I asked a question which, rather to my surprise, showed that my surmise was correct.\n\n\"When I returned to London I called upon the milliner, who had recognized Straker as an excellent customer of the name of Derbyshire, who had a very dashing wife, with a strong partiality for expensive dresses. I have no doubt that this woman had plunged him over head and ears in debt, and so led him into this miserable plot.\"\n\n\"You have explained all but one thing,\" cried the colonel. \"Where was the horse?\"\n\n\"Ah, it bolted, and was cared for by one of your neighbours. We must have an amnesty in that direction. I think. This is Clapham Junction, if I am not mistaken, and we shall be in Victoria in less than ten minutes. If you care to smoke a cigar in our rooms, Colonel, I shall be happy to give you any other details which might interest you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE YELLOW FACE", + "text": "[In publishing these short sketches based upon the numerous cases in which my companion's singular gifts have made us the listeners to, and eventually the actors in, some strange drama, it is only natural that I should dwell rather upon his successes than upon his failures. And this not so much for the sake of his reputation\u2014for, indeed, it was when he was at his wit's end that his energy and his versatility were most admirable\u2014but because where he failed it happened too often that no one else succeeded, and that the tale was left forever without a conclusion. Now and again, however, it chanced that even when he erred the truth was still discovered. I have notes of some half-dozen cases of the kind: the adventure of the Musgrave Ritual and that which I am about to recount are the two which present the strongest features of interest.]\n\nSherlock Holmes was a man who seldom took exercise for exercise's sake. Few men were capable of greater muscular effort, and he was undoubtedly one of the finest boxers of his weight that I have ever seen; but he looked upon aimless bodily exertion as a waste of energy, and he seldom bestirred himself save where there was some professional object to be served. Then he was absolutely untiring and indefatigable. That he should have kept himself in training under such circumstances is remarkable, but his diet was usually of the sparest, and his habits were simple to the verge of austerity. Save for the occasional use of cocaine, he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.\n\nOne day in early spring he had so far relaxed as to go for a walk with me in the Park, where the first faint shoots of green were breaking out upon the elms, and the sticky spear-heads of the chestnuts were just beginning to burst into their five-fold leaves. For two hours we rambled about together, in silence for the most part, as befits two men who know each other intimately. It was nearly five before we were back in Baker Street once more.\n\n\"Beg pardon, sir,\" said our page-boy as he opened the door. \"There's been a gentleman here asking for you, sir.\"\n\nHolmes glanced reproachfully at me. \"So much for afternoon walks!\" said he. \"Has this gentleman gone, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Didn't you ask him in?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he came in.\"\n\n\"How long did he wait?\"\n\n\"Half an hour, sir. He was a very restless gentleman, sir, a-walkin' and a-stampin' all the time he was here. I was waitin' outside the door, sir, and I could hear him. At last he outs into the passage, and he cries, 'Is that man never goin' to come?' Those were his very words, sir. 'You'll only need to wait a little longer,' says I. 'Then I'll wait in the open air, for I feel half choked,' says he. 'I'll be back before long.' And with that he ups and he outs, and all I could say wouldn't hold him back.\"\n\n\"Well, well, you did your best,\" said Holmes as we walked into our room. \"It's very annoying, though, Watson. I was badly in need of a case, and this looks, from the man's impatience, as if it were of importance. Hullo! that's not your pipe on the table. He must have left his behind him. A nice old brier with a good long stem of what the tobacconists call amber. I wonder how many real amber mouthpieces there are in London? Some people think that a fly in it is a sign. Well, he must have been disturbed in his mind to leave a pipe behind him which he evidently values highly.\"\n\n\"How do you know that he values it highly?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, I should put the original cost of the pipe at seven and sixpence. Now it has, you see, been twice mended, once in the wooden stem and once in the amber. Each of these mends, done, as you observe, with silver bands, must have cost more than the pipe did originally. The man must value the pipe highly when he prefers to patch it up rather than buy a new one with the same money.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\" I asked, for Holmes was turning the pipe about in his hand and staring at it in his peculiar pensive way. He held it up and tapped on it with his long, thin forefinger, as a professor might who was lecturing on a bone.\n\n\"Pipes are occasionally of extraordinary interest,\" said he. \"Nothing has more individuality, save perhaps watches and bootlaces. The indications here, however, are neither very marked nor very important. The owner is obviously a muscular man, left-handed, with an excellent set of teeth, careless in his habits, and with no need to practise economy.\"\n\nMy friend threw out the information in a very offhand way, but I saw that he cocked his eye at me to see if I had followed his reasoning.\n\n\"You think a man must be well-to-do if he smokes a seven-shilling pipe?\" said I.\n\n\"This is Grosvenor mixture at eightpence an ounce,\" Holmes answered, knocking a little out on his palm. \"As he might get an excellent smoke for half the price, he has no need to practise economy.\"\n\n\"And the other points?\"\n\n\"He has been in the habit of lighting his pipe at lamps and gas-jets. You can see that it is quite charred all down one side. Of course a match could not have done that. Why should a man hold a match to the side of his pipe? But you cannot light it at a lamp without getting the bowl charred. And it is all on the right side of the pipe. From that I gather that he is a left-handed man. You hold your own pipe to the lamp and see how naturally you, being right-handed, hold the left side to the flame. You might do it once the other way, but not as a constancy. This has always been held so. Then he has bitten through his amber. It takes a muscular, energetic fellow, and one with a good set of teeth, to do that. But if I am not mistaken I hear him upon the stair, so we shall have something more interesting than his pipe to study.\"\n\nAn instant later our door opened, and a tall young man entered the room. He was well but quietly dressed in a dark gray suit and carried a brown wideawake in his hand. I should have put him at about thirty, though he was really some years older.\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" said he with some embarrassment, \"I suppose I should have knocked. Yes, of course I should have knocked. The fact is that I am a little upset, and you must put it all down to that.\" He passed his hand over his forehead like a man who is half dazed, and then fell rather than sat down upon a chair.\n\n\"I can see that you have not slept for a night or two,\" said Holmes in his easy, genial way. \"That tries a man's nerves more than work, and more even than pleasure. May I ask how I can help you?\"\n\n\"I wanted your advice, sir. I don't know what to do, and my whole life seems to have gone to pieces.\"\n\n\"You wish to employ me as a consulting detective?\"\n\n\"Not that only. I want your opinion as a judicious man\u2014as a man of the world. I want to know what I ought to do next. I hope to God you'll be able to tell me.\"\n\nHe spoke in little, sharp, jerky outbursts, and it seemed to me that to speak at all was very painful to him, and that his will all through was overriding his inclinations.\n\n\"It's a very delicate thing,\" said he. \"One does not like to speak of one's domestic affairs to strangers. It seems dreadful to discuss the conduct of one's wife with two men whom I have never seen before. It's horrible to have to do it. But I've got to the end of my tether, and I must have advice.\"\n\n\"My dear Mr. Grant Munro\u2014\" began Holmes.\n\nOur visitor sprang from his chair. \"What!\" he cried, \"you know my name?\"\n\n\"If you wish to preserve your incognito,\" said Holmes, smiling, \"I would suggest that you cease to write your name upon the lining of your hat, or else that you turn the crown towards the person whom you are addressing. I was about to say that my friend and I have listened to a good many strange secrets in this room, and that we have had the good fortune to bring peace to many troubled souls. I trust that we may do as much for you. Might I beg you, as time may prove to be of importance, to furnish me with the facts of your case without further delay?\"\n\nOur visitor again passed his hand over his forehead, as if he found it bitterly hard. From every gesture and expression I could see that he was a reserved, self-contained man, with a dash of pride in his nature, more likely to hide his wounds than to expose them. Then suddenly, with a fierce gesture of his closed hand, like one who throws reserve to the winds, he began:\n\n\"The facts are these, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"I am a married man and have been so for three years. During that time my wife and I have loved each other as fondly and lived as happily as any two that ever were joined. We have not had a difference, not one, in thought or word or deed. And now, since last Monday, there has suddenly sprung up a barrier between us, and I find that there is something in her life and in her thoughts of which I know as little as if she were the woman who brushes by me in the street. We are estranged, and I want to know why.\n\n\"Now there is one thing that I want to impress upon you before I go any further, Mr. Holmes. Effie loves me. Don't let there be any mistake about that. She loves me with her whole heart and soul, and never more than now. I know it. I feel it. I don't want to argue about that. A man can tell easily enough when a woman loves him. But there's this secret between us, and we can never be the same until it is cleared.\"\n\n\"Kindly let me have the facts, Mr. Munro,\" said Holmes with some impatience.\n\n\"I'll tell you what I know about Effie's history. She was a widow when I met her first, though quite young\u2014only twenty-five. Her name then was Mrs. Hebron. She went out to America when she was young and lived in the town of Atlanta, where she married this Hebron, who was a lawyer with a good practice. They had one child, but the yellow fever broke out badly in the place, and both husband and child died of it. I have seen his death certificate. This sickened her of America, and she came back to live with a maiden aunt at Pinner, in Middlesex. I may mention that her husband had left her comfortably off, and that she had a capital of about four thousand five hundred pounds, which had been so well invested by him that it returned an average of seven per cent. She had only been six months at Pinner when I met her; we fell in love with each other, and we married a few weeks afterwards.\n\n\"I am a hop merchant myself, and as I have an income of seven or eight hundred, we found ourselves comfortably off and took a nice eighty-pound-a-year villa at Norbury. Our little place was very countrified, considering that it is so close to town. We had an inn, and two houses a little above us, and a single cottage at the other side of the field which faces us, and except those there were no houses until you got halfway to the station. My business took me into town at certain seasons, but in summer I had less to do, and then in our country home my wife and I were just as happy as could be wished. I tell you that there never was a shadow between us until this accursed affair began.\n\n\"There's one thing I ought to tell you before I go further. When we married, my wife made over all her property to me\u2014rather against my will, for I saw how awkward it would be if my business affairs went wrong. However, she would have it so, and it was done. Well, about six weeks ago she came to me.\n\n\"'Jack,' said she, 'when you took my money you said that if ever I wanted any I was to ask you for it.'\n\n\"'Certainly,' said I. 'It's all your own.'\n\n\"'Well,' said she, 'I want a hundred pounds.'\n\n\"I was a bit staggered at this, for I had imagined it was simply a new dress or something of the kind that she was after.\n\n\"'What on earth for?' I asked.\n\n\"'Oh,' said she in her playful way, 'you said that you were only my banker, and bankers never ask questions, you know.'\n\n\"'If you really mean it, of course you shall have the money,' said I.\n\n\"'Oh, yes, I really mean it.'\n\n\"'And you won't tell me what you want it for?'\n\n\"'Some day, perhaps, but not just at present, Jack.'\n\n\"So I had to be content with that, though it was the first time that there had ever been any secret between us. I gave her a check, and I never thought any more of the matter. It may have nothing to do with what came afterwards, but I thought it only right to mention it.\n\n\"Well, I told you just now that there is a cottage not far from our house. There is just a field between us, but to reach it you have to go along the road and then turn down a lane. Just beyond it is a nice little grove of Scotch firs, and I used to be very fond of strolling down there, for trees are always a neighbourly kind of thing. The cottage had been standing empty this eight months, and it was a pity, for it was a pretty two-storied place, with an old-fashioned porch and a honeysuckle about it. I have stood many a time and thought what a neat little homestead it would make.\n\n\"Well, last Monday evening I was taking a stroll down that way when I met an empty van coming up the lane and saw a pile of carpets and things lying about on the grass-plot beside the porch. It was clear that the cottage had at last been let. I walked past it, and then stopping, as an idle man might, I ran my eye over it and wondered what sort of folk they were who had come to live so near us. And as I looked I suddenly became aware that a face was watching me out of one of the upper windows.\n\n\"I don't know what there was about that face, Mr. Holmes, but it seemed to send a chill right down my back. I was some little way off, so that I could not make out the features, but there was something unnatural and inhuman about the face. That was the impression that I had, and I moved quickly forward to get a nearer view of the person who was watching me. But as I did so the face suddenly disappeared, so suddenly that it seemed to have been plucked away into the darkness of the room. I stood for five minutes thinking the business over and trying to analyze my impressions. I could not tell if the face was that of a man or a woman. It had been too far from me for that. But its colour was what had impressed me most. It was of a livid chalky white, and with something set and rigid about it which was shockingly unnatural. So disturbed was I that I determined to see a little more of the new inmates of the cottage. I approached and knocked at the door, which was instantly opened by a tall, gaunt woman with a harsh, forbidding face.\n\n\"'What may you be wantin'?' she asked in a Northern accent.\n\n\"'I am your neighbour over yonder,' said I, nodding towards my house. 'I see that you have only just moved in, so I thought that if I could be of any help to you in any\u2014'\n\n\"'Ay, We'll just ask ye when we want ye,' said she, and shut the door in my face. Annoyed at the churlish rebuff, I turned my back and walked home. All evening, though I tried to think of other things, my mind would still turn to the apparition at the window and the rudeness of the woman. I determined to say nothing about the former to my wife, for she is a nervous, highly strung woman, and I had no wish that she should share the unpleasant impression which had been produced upon myself. I remarked to her, however, before I fell asleep, that the cottage was now occupied, to which she returned no reply.\n\n\"I am usually an extremely sound sleeper. It has been a standing jest in the family that nothing could ever wake me during the night. And yet somehow on that particular night, whether it may have been the slight excitement produced by my little adventure or not I know not, but I slept much more lightly than usual. Half in my dreams I was dimly conscious that something was going on in the room, and gradually became aware that my wife had dressed herself and was slipping on her mantle and her bonnet. My lips were parted to murmur out some sleepy words of surprise or remonstrance at this untimely preparation, when suddenly my half-opened eyes fell upon her face, illuminated by the candle-light, and astonishment held me dumb. She wore an expression such as I had never seen before\u2014such as I should have thought her incapable of assuming. She was deadly pale and breathing fast, glancing furtively towards the bed as she fastened her mantle to see if she had disturbed me. Then, thinking that I was still asleep, she slipped noiselessly from the room, and an instant later I heard a sharp creaking which could only come from the hinges of the front door. I sat up in bed and rapped my knuckles against the rail to make certain that I was truly awake. Then I took my watch from under the pillow. It was three in the morning. What on this earth could my wife be doing out on the country road at three in the morning?\n\n\"I had sat for about twenty minutes turning the thing over in my mind and trying to find some possible explanation. The more I thought, the more extraordinary and inexplicable did it appear. I was still puzzling over it when I heard the door gently close again, and her footsteps coming up the stairs.\n\n\"'Where in the world have you been, Effie?' I asked as she entered.\n\n\"She gave a violent start and a kind of gasping cry when I spoke, and that cry and start troubled me more than all the rest, for there was something indescribably guilty about them. My wife had always been a woman of a frank, open nature, and it gave me a chill to see her slinking into her own room and crying out and wincing when her own husband spoke to her.\n\n\"'You awake, Jack!' she cried with a nervous laugh. 'Why, I thought that nothing could awake you.'\n\n\"'Where have you been?' I asked, more sternly.\n\n\"'I don't wonder that you are surprised,' said she, and I could see that her fingers were trembling as she undid the fastenings of her mantle. 'Why, I never remember having done such a thing in my life before. The fact is that I felt as though I were choking and had a perfect longing for a breath of fresh air. I really think that I should have fainted if I had not gone out. I stood at the door for a few minutes, and now I am quite myself again.'\n\n\"All the time that she was telling me this story she never once looked in my direction, and her voice was quite unlike her usual tones. It was evident to me that she was saying what was false. I said nothing in reply, but turned my face to the wall, sick at heart, with my mind filled with a thousand venomous doubts and suspicions. What was it that my wife was concealing from me? Where had she been during that strange expedition? I felt that I should have no peace until I knew, and yet I shrank from asking her again after once she had told me what was false. All the rest of the night I tossed and tumbled, framing theory after theory, each more unlikely than the last.\n\n\"I should have gone to the City that day, but I was too disturbed in my mind to be able to pay attention to business matters. My wife seemed to be as upset as myself, and I could see from the little questioning glances which she kept shooting at me that she understood that I disbelieved her statement, and that she was at her wit's end what to do. We hardly exchanged a word during breakfast, and immediately afterwards I went out for a walk that I might think the matter out in the fresh morning air.\n\n\"I went as far as the Crystal Palace, spent an hour in the grounds, and was back in Norbury by one o'clock. It happened that my way took me past the cottage, and I stopped for an instant to look at the windows and to see if I could catch a glimpse of the strange face which had looked out at me on the day before. As I stood there, imagine my surprise, Mr. Holmes, when the door suddenly opened and my wife walked out.\n\n\"I was struck dumb with astonishment at the sight of her, but my emotionswere nothing to those which showed themselves upon her face when our eyes met. She seemed for an instant to wish to shrink back inside the house again; and then, seeing how useless all concealment must be, she came forward, with a very white face and frightened eyes which be-lied the smile upon her lips.\n\n\"'Ah, Jack,' she said, 'I have just been in to see if I can be of any assistance to our new neighbours. Why do you look at me like that, Jack? You are not angry with me?'\n\n\"'So,' said I, 'this is where you went during the night.'\n\n\"'What do you mean?' she cried.\n\n\"'You came here. I am sure of it. Who are these people that you should visit them at such an hour?'\n\n\"'I have not been here before.'\n\n\"'How can you tell me what you know is false?' I cried. 'Your very voice changes as you speak. When have I ever had a secret from you? I shall enter that cottage, and I shall probe the matter to the bottom.'\n\n\"'No, no, Jack, for God's sake!' she gasped in uncontrollable emotion. Then, as I approached the door, she seized my sleeve and pulled me back with convulsive strength.\n\n\"'I implore you not to do this, Jack,' she cried. 'I swear that I will tell you everything some day, but nothing but misery can come of it if you enter that cottage.' Then, as I tried to shake her off, she clung to me in a frenzy of entreaty.\n\n\"'Trust me, Jack!' she cried. 'Trust me only this once. You will never have cause to regret it. You know that I would not have a secret from you if it were not for your own sake. Our whole lives are at stake in this. If you come home with me all will be well. If you force your way into that cottage all is over between us.'\n\n\"There was such earnestness, such despair, in her manner that her words arrested me, and I stood irresolute before the door.\n\n\"'I will trust you on one condition, and on one condition only,' said I at last. 'It is that this mystery comes to an end from now. You are at liberty to preserve your secret, but you must promise me that there shall be no more nightly visits, no more doings which are kept from my knowledge. I am willing to forget those which are past if you will promise that there shall be no more in the future.'\n\n\"'I was sure that you would trust me,' she cried with a great sigh of relief. 'It shall be just as you wish. Come away\u2014oh, come away up to the house.'\n\n\"Still pulling at my sleeve, she led me away from the cottage. As we went I glanced back, and there was that yellow livid face watching us out of the upper window. What link could there be between that creature and my wife? Or how could the coarse, rough woman whom I had seen the day before be connected with her? It was a strange puzzle, and yet I knew that my mind could never know ease again until I had solved it.\n\n\"For two days after this I stayed at home, and my wife appeared to abide loyally by our engagement, for, as far as I know, she never stirred out of the house. On the third day, however, I had ample evidence that her solemn promise was not enough to hold her back from this secret influence which drew her away from her husband and her duty.\n\n\"I had gone into town on that day, but I returned by the 2:40 instead of the 3:36, which is my usual train. As I entered the house the maid ran into the hall with a startled face.\n\n\"'Where is your mistress?' I asked.\n\n\"'I think that she has gone out for a walk,' she answered.\n\n\"My mind was instantly filled with suspicion. I rushed upstairs to make sure that she was not in the house. As I did so I happened to glance out of one of the upper windows and saw the maid with whom I had just been speaking running across the field in the direction of the cottage. Then of course I saw exactly what it all meant. My wife had gone over there and had asked the servant to call her if I should return. Tingling with anger, I rushed down and hurried across, determined to end the matter once and forever. I saw my wife and the maid hurrying back along the lane, but I did not stop to speak with them. In the cottage lay the secret which was casting a shadow over my life. I vowed that, come what might, it should be a secret no longer. I did not even knock when I reached it, but turned the handle and rushed into the passage.\n\n\"It was all still and quiet upon the ground floor. In the kitchen a kettle was singing on the fire, and a large black cat lay coiled up in the basket; but there was no sign of the woman whom I had seen before. I ran into the other room, but it was equally deserted. Then I rushed up the stairs only to find two other rooms empty and deserted at the top. There was no one at all in the whole house. The furniture and pictures were of the most common and vulgar description, save in the one chamber at the window of which I had seen the strange face. That was comfortable and elegant, and all my suspicions rose into a fierce, bitter flame when I saw that on the mantelpiece stood a copy of a full-length photograph of my wife, which had been taken at my request only three months ago.\n\n\"I stayed long enough to make certain that the house was absolutely empty. Then I left it, feeling a weight at my heart such as I had never had before. My wife came out into the hall as I entered my house; but I was too hurt and angry to speak with her, and, pushing past her, I made my way into my study. She followed me, however, before I could close the door.\n\n\"'I am sorry that I broke my promise, Jack,' said she, 'but if you knew all the circumstances I am sure that you would forgive me.'\n\n\"'Tell me everything, then,' said I.\n\n\"'I cannot, Jack, I cannot,' she cried.\n\n\"'Until you tell me who it is that has been living in that cottage, and who it is to whom you have given that photograph, there can never be any confidence between us,' said I, and breaking away from her I left the house. That was yesterday, Mr. Holmes, and I have not seen her since, nor do I know anything more about this strange business. It is the first shadow that has come between us, and it has so shaken me that I do not know what I should do for the best. Suddenly this morning it occurred to me that you were the man to advise me, so I have hurried to you now, and I place myself unreservedly in your hands. If there is any point which I have not made clear, pray question me about it. But, above all, tell me quickly what I am to do, for this misery is more than I can bear.\"\n\nHolmes and I had listened with the utmost interest to this extraordinary statement, which had been delivered in the jerky, broken fashion of a man who is under the influence of extreme emotion. My companion sat silent now for some time, with his chin upon his hand, lost in thought.\n\n\"Tell me,\" said he at last, \"could you swear that this was a man's face which you saw at the window?\"\n\n\"Each time that I saw it I was some distance away from it, so that it is impossible for me to say.\"\n\n\"You appear, however, to have been disagreeably impressed by it.\"\n\n\"It seemed to be of an unusual colour and to have a strange rigidity about the features. When I approached it vanished with a jerk.\"\n\n\"How long is it since your wife asked you for a hundred pounds?\"\n\n\"Nearly two months.\"\n\n\"Have you ever seen a photograph of her first husband?\"\n\n\"No, there was a great fire at Atlanta very shortly after his death, and all her papers were destroyed.\"\n\n\"And yet she had a certificate of death. You say that you saw it.\"\n\n\"Yes, she got a duplicate after the fire.\"\n\n\"Did you ever meet anyone who knew her in America?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did she ever talk of revisiting the place?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Or get letters from it?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I should like to think over the matter a little now. If the cottage is now permanently deserted we may have some difficulty. If, on the other hand, as I fancy is more likely, the inmates were warned of your coming and left before you entered yesterday, then they may be back now, and we should clear it all up easily. Let me advise you, then, to return to Norbury and to examine the windows of the cottage again. If you have reason to believe that it is inhabited, do not force your way in, but send a wire to my friend and me. We shall be with you within an hour of receiving it, and we shall then very soon get to the bottom of the business.\"\n\n\"And if it is still empty?\"\n\n\"In that case I shall come out to-morrow and talk it over with you. Good-by, and, above all, do not fret until you know that you really have a cause for it.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that this is a bad business, Watson,\" said my companion as he returned after accompanying Mr. Grant Munro to the door. \"What do you make of it?\"\n\n\"It had an ugly sound,\" I answered.\n\n\"Yes. There's blackmail in it, or I am much mistaken.\"\n\n\"And who is the blackmailer?\"\n\n\"Well, it must be the creature who lives in the only comfortable room in the place and has her photograph above his fireplace. Upon my word, Watson, there is something very attractive about that livid face at the window, and I would not have missed the case for worlds.\"\n\n\"You have a theory?\"\n\n\"Yes, a provisional one. But I shall be surprised if it does not turn out to be correct. This woman's first husband is in that cottage.\"\n\n\"Why do you think so?\"\n\n\"How else can we explain her frenzied anxiety that her second one should not enter it? The facts, as I read them, are something like this: This woman was married in America. Her husband developed some hateful qualities, or shall we say he contracted some loathsome disease and became a leper or an imbecile? She flies from him at last, returns to England, changes her name, and starts her life, as she thinks, afresh. She has been married three years and believes that her position is quite secure, having shown her husband the death certificate of some man whose name she has assumed, when suddenly her whereabouts is discovered by her first husband, or, we may suppose, by some unscrupulous woman who has attached herself to the invalid. They write to the wife and threaten to come and expose her. She asks for a hundred pounds and endeavours to buy them off. They come in spite of it, and when the husband mentions casually to the wife that there are newcomers in the cottage, she knows in some way that they are her pursuers. She waits until her husband is asleep and then she rushes down to endeavour to persuade them to leave her in peace. Having no success, she goes again next morning, and her husband meets her, as he has told us, as she comes out. She promises him then not to go there again, but two days afterwards the hope of getting rid of those dreadful neighbours was too strong for her, and she made another attempt, taking down with her the photograph which had probably been demanded from her. In the midst of this interview the maid rushed in to say that the master had come home, on which the wife, knowing that he would come straight down to the cottage, hurried the inmates out at the back door, into the grove of fir-trees, probably, which was mentioned as standing near. In this way he found the place deserted. I shall be very much surprised, however, if it is still so when he reconnoitres it this evening. What do you think of my theory?\"\n\n\"It is all surmise.\"\n\n\"But at least it covers all the facts. When new facts come to our knowledge which cannot be covered by it, it will be time enough to reconsider it. We can do nothing more until we have a message from our friend at Norbury.\"\n\nBut we had not a very long time to wait for that. It came just as we had finished our tea.\n\nThe cottage is still tenanted [it said]. Have seen the face again at the window. Will meet the seven-o'clock train and will take no steps until you arrive.\n\nHe was waiting on the platform when we stepped out, and we could see in the light of the station lamps that he was very pale, and quivering with agitation.\n\n\"They are still there, Mr. Holmes,\" said he, laying his hand hard upon my friend's sleeve. \"I saw lights in the cottage as I came down. We shall settle it now once and for all.\"\n\n\"What is your plan, then?\" asked Holmes as he walked down the dark tree-lined road.\n\n\"I am going to force my way in and see for myself who is in the house. I wish you both to be there as witnesses.\"\n\n\"You are quite determined to do this in spite of your wife's warning that it is better that you should not solve the mystery?\"\n\n\"Yes, I am determined.\"\n\n\"Well, I think that you are in the right. Any truth is better than indefinite doubt. We had better go up at once. Of course, legally, we are putting ourselves hopelessly in the wrong; but I think that it is worth it.\"\n\nIt was a very dark night, and a thin rain began to fall as we turned from the highroad into a narrow lane, deeply rutted, with hedges on either side. Mr. Grant Munro pushed impatiently forward, however, and we stumbled after him as best we could.\n\n\"There are the lights of my house,\" he murmured, pointing to a glimmer among the trees. \"And here is the cottage which I am going to enter.\"\n\nWe turned a corner in the lane as he spoke, and there was the building close beside us. A yellow bar falling across the black foreground showed that the door was not quite closed, and one window in the upper story was brightly illuminated. As we looked, we saw a dark blur moving across the blind.\n\n\"There is that creature!\" cried Grant Munro. \"You can see for yourselves that someone is there. Now follow me, and we shall soon know all.\"\n\nWe approached the door, but suddenly a woman appeared out of the shadow and stood in the golden track of the lamplight. I could not see her face in the darkness, but her arms were thrown out in an attitude of entreaty.\n\n\"For God's sake, don't, Jack!\" she cried. \"I had a presentiment that you would come this evening. Think better of it, dear! Trust me again, and you will never have cause to regret it.\"\n\n\"I have trusted you too long, Effie,\" he cried sternly. \"Leave go of me! I must pass you. My friends and I are going to settle this matter once and forever!\" He pushed her to one side, and we followed closely after him. As he threw the door open an old woman ran out in front of him and tried to bar his passage, but he thrust her back, and an instant afterwards we were all upon the stairs. Grant Munro rushed into the lighted room at the top, and we entered at his heels.\n\nIt was a cosy, well-furnished apartment, with two candles burning upon the table and two upon the mantelpiece. In the corner, stooping over a desk, there sat what appeared to be a little girl. Her face was turned away as we entered, but we could see that she was dressed in a red frock, and that she had long white gloves on. As she whisked round to us. I gave a cry of surprise and horror. The face which she turned towards us was of the strangest livid tint, and the features were absolutely devoid of any expression. An instant later the mystery was explained. Holmes, with a laugh, passed his hand behind the child's ear, a mask peeled off from her countenance, and there was a little coal-black negress, with all her white teeth flashing in amusement at our amazed faces. I burst out laughing, out of sympathy with her merriment; but Grant Munro stood staring, with his hand clutching his throat.\n\n\"My God!\" he cried. \"What can be the meaning of this?\"\n\n\"I will tell you the meaning of it,\" cried the lady, sweeping into the room with a proud, set face. \"You have forced me, against my own judgment, to tell you, and, now we must both make the best of it. My husband died at Atlanta. My child survived.\"\n\n\"Your child?\"\n\nShe drew a large silver locket from her bosom. \"You have never seen this open.\"\n\n\"I understood that it did not open.\"\n\nShe touched a spring; and the front hinged back. There was a portrait within of a man strikingly handsome and intelligent-looking, but bearing unmistakable signs upon his features of his African descent.\n\n\"That is John Hebron, of Atlanta,\" said the lady, \"and a nobler man never walked the earth. I cut myself off from my race in order to wed him, but never once while he lived did I for an instant regret it. It was our misfortune that our only child took after his people rather than mine. It is often so in such matches, and little Lucy is darker far than ever her father was. But dark or fair, she is my own dear little girlie, and her mother's pet.\" The little creature ran across at the words and nestled up against the lady's dress. \"When I left her in America,\" she continued, \"it was only because her health was weak, and the change might have done her harm. She was given to the care of a faithful Scotch woman who had once been our servant. Never for an instant did I dream of disowning her as my child. But when chance threw you in my way, Jack, and I learned to love you, I feared to tell you about my child. God forgive me, I feared that I should lose you, and I had not the courage to tell you. I had to choose between you, and in my weakness I turned away from my own little girl. For three years I have kept her existence a secret from you, but I heard from the nurse, and I knew that all was well with her. At last, however, there came an overwhelming desire to see the child once more. I struggled against it, but in vain. Though I knew the danger, I determined to have the child over, if it were but for a few weeks. I sent a hundred pounds to the nurse, and I gave her instructions about this cottage, so that she might come as a neighbour, without my appearing to be in any way connected with her. I pushed my precautions so far as to order her to keep the child in the house during the daytime, and to cover up her little face and hands so that even those who might see her at the window should not gossip about there being a black child in the neighbourhood. If I had been less cautious I might have been more wise, but I was half crazy with fear that you should learn the truth.\n\n\"It was you who told me first that the cottage was occupied. I should have waited for the morning, but I could not sleep for excitement, and so at last I slipped out, knowing how difficult it is to awake you. But you saw me go, and that was the beginning of my troubles. Next day you had my secret at your mercy, but you nobly refrained from pursuing your advantage. Three days later, however, the nurse and child only just escaped from the back door as you rushed in at the front one. And now to-night you at last know all, and I ask you what is to become of us, my child and me?\" She clasped her hands and waited for an answer.\n\nIt was a long ten minutes before Grant Munro broke the silence, and when his answer came it was one of which I love to think. He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held his other hand out to his wife and turned towards the door.\n\n\"We can talk it over more comfortably at home,\" said he. \"I am not a very good man, Effie, but I think that I am a better one than you have given me credit for being.\"\n\nHolmes and I followed them down the lane, and my friend plucked at my sleeve as we came out.\n\n\"I think,\" said he, \"that we shall be of more use in London than in Norbury.\"\n\nNot another word did he say of the case until late that night, when he was turning away, with his lighted candle, for his bedroom.\n\n\"Watson,\" said he, \"if it should ever strike you that I am getting a little overconfident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely obliged to you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE STOCKBROKER'S CLERK", + "text": "Shortly after my marriage I had bought a connection in the Paddington district. Old Mr. Farquhar, from whom I purchased it, had at one time an excellent general practice; but his age, and an affliction of the nature of St. Vitus's dance from which he suffered, had very much thinned it. The public not unnaturally goes on the principle that he who would heal others must himself be whole, and looks askance at the curative powers of the man whose own case is beyond the reach of his drugs. Thus as my predecessor weakened his practice declined, until when I purchased it from him it had sunk from twelve hundred to little more than three hundred a year. I had confidence, however, in my own youth and energy and was convinced that in a very few years the concern would be as flourishing as ever.\n\nFor three months after taking over the practice I was kept very closely at work and saw little of my friend Sherlock Holmes, for I was too busy to visit Baker Street, and he seldom went anywhere himself save upon professional business. I was surprised, therefore, when, one morning in June, as I sat reading the British Medical Journal after breakfast, I heard a ring at the bell, followed by the high, somewhat strident tones of my old companion's voice.\n\n\"Ah, my dear Watson,\" said he, striding into the room, \"I am very delighted to see you! I trust that Mrs. Watson has entirely recovered from all the little excitements connected with our adventure of the Sign of Four.\"\n\n\"Thank you, we are both very well,\" said I, shaking him warmly by the hand.\n\n\"And I hope, also,\" he continued, sitting down in the rocking-chair, \"that the cares of medical practice have not entirely obliterated the interest which you used to take in our little deductive problems.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" I answered, \"it was only last night that I was looking over my old notes, and classifying some of our past results.\"\n\n\"I trust that you don't consider your collection closed.\"\n\n\"Not at all. I should wish nothing better than to have some more of such experiences.\"\n\n\"To-day, for example?\"\n\n\"Yes, to-day, if you like.\"\n\n\"And as far off as Birmingham?\"\n\n\"Certainly, if you wish it.\"\n\n\"And the practice?\"\n\n\"I do my neighbour's when he goes. He is always ready to work off the debt.\"\n\n\"Ha! nothing could be better,\" said Holmes, leaning back in his chair and looking keenly at me from under his half-closed lids. \"I perceive that you have been unwell lately. Summer colds are always a little trying.\"\n\n\"I was confined to the house by a severe chill for three days last week. I thought, however, that I had cast off every trace of it.\"\n\n\"So you have. You look remarkably robust.\"\n\n\"How, then, did you know of it?\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, you know my methods.\"\n\n\"You deduced it, then?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"And from what?\"\n\n\"From your slippers.\"\n\nI glanced down at the new patent-leathers which I was wearing. \"How on earth\u2014\" I began, but Holmes answered my question before it was asked.\n\n\"Your slippers are new,\" he said. \"You could not have had them more than a few weeks. The soles which you are at this moment presenting to me are slightly scorched. For a moment I thought they might have got wet and been burned in the drying. But near the instep there is a small circular wafer of paper with the shopman's hieroglyphics upon it. Damp would of course have removed this. You had, then, been sitting with your feet outstretched to the fire, which a man would hardly do even in so wet a June as this if he were in his full health.\"\n\nLike all Holmes's reasoning the thing seemed simplicity itself when it was once explained. He read the thought upon my features, and his smile had a tinge of bitterness.\n\n\"I am afraid that I rather give myself away when I explain,\" said he. \"Results without causes are much more impressive. You are ready to come to Birmingham, then?\"\n\n\"Certainly. What is the case?\"\n\n\"You shall hear it all in the train. My client is outside in a four-wheeler. Can you come at once?\"\n\n\"In an instant.\" I scribbled a note to my neighbour, rushed upstairs to explain the matter to my wife, and joined Holmes upon the doorstep.\n\n\"Your neighbour is a doctor,\" said he, nodding at the brass plate.\n\n\"Yes, he bought a practice as I did.\"\n\n\"An old-established one?\"\n\n\"Just the same as mine. Both have been ever since the houses were built.\"\n\n\"Ah! then you got hold of the best of the two.\"\n\n\"I think I did. But how do you know?\"\n\n\"By the steps, my boy. Yours are worn three inches deeper than his. But this gentleman in the cab is my client, Mr. Hall Pycroft. Allow me to introduce you to him. Whip your horse up, cabby, for we have only just time to catch our train.\"\n\nThe man whom I found myself facing was a well-built, fresh-complexioned young fellow, with a frank, honest face and a slight, crisp, yellow moustache. He wore a very shiny top-hat and a neat suit of sober black, which made him look what he was\u2014a smart young City man, of the class who have been labelled cockneys, but who give us our crack volunteer regiments, and who turn out more fine athletes and sportsmen than any body of men in these islands. His round, ruddy face was naturally full of cheeriness, but the corners of his mouth seemed to me to be pulled down in a half-comical distress. It was not, however, until we were in a first-class carriage and well started upon our journey to Birmingham that I was able to learn what the trouble was which had driven him to Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"We have a clear run here of seventy minutes,\" Holmes remarked. \"I want you, Mr. Hall Pycroft, to tell my friend your very interesting experience exactly as you have told it to me, or with more detail if possible. It will be of use to me to hear the succession of events again. It is a case, Watson, which may prove to have something in it, or may prove to have nothing, but which, at least, presents those unusual and outr\u00e9 features which are as dear to you as they are to me. Now, Mr. Pycroft, I shall not interrupt you again.\"\n\nOur young companion looked at me with a twinkle in his eye.\n\n\"The worst of the story is,\" said he, \"that I show myself up as such a confounded fool. Of course it may work out all right, and I don't see that I could have done otherwise; but if I have lost my crib and get nothing in exchange I shall feel what a soft Johnny I have been. I'm not very good at telling a story, Dr. Watson, but it is like this with me:\n\n\"I used to have a billet at Coxon & Woodhouse's, of Draper Gardens, but they were let in early in the spring through the Venezuelan loan, as no doubt you remember, and came a nasty cropper. I have been with them five years, and old Coxon gave me a ripping good testimonial when the smash came, but of course we clerks were all turned adrift, the twenty-seven of us. I tried here and tried there, but there were lots of other chaps on the same lay as myself, and it was a perfect frost for a long time. I had been taking three pounds a week at Coxon's, and I had saved about seventy of them, but I soon worked my way through that and out at the other end. I was fairly at the end of my tether at last, and could hardly find the stamps to answer the advertisements or the envelopes to stick them to. I had worn out my boots paddling up office stairs, and I seemed just as far from getting a billet as ever.\n\n\"At last I saw a vacancy at Mawson & Williams's, the great stockbroking firm in Lombard Street. I dare say E. C. is not much in your line, but I can tell you that this is about the richest house in London. The advertisement was to be answered by letter only: I sent in my testimonial and application, but without the least hope of getting it. Back came an answer by return, saying that if I would appear next Monday I might take over my new duties at once, provided that my appearance was satisfactory. No one knows how these things are worked. Some people say that the manager just plunges his hand into the heap and takes the first that comes. Anyhow it was my innings that time, and I don't ever wish to feel better pleased. The screw was a pound a week rise, and the duties just about the same as at Coxon's.\n\n\"And now I come to the queer part of the business. I was in diggings out Hampstead way, 17 Potter's Terrace. Well, I was sitting doing a smoke that very evening after I had been promised the appointment, when up came my landlady with a card which had 'Arthur Pinner, Financial Agent,' printed upon it. I had never heard the name before and could not imagine what he wanted with me, but of course I asked her to show him up. In he walked, a middle-sized, dark-haired, dark-eyed, black-bearded man, with a touch of the sheeny about his nose. He had a brisk kind of way with him and spoke sharply, like a man who knew the value of time.\n\n\"'Mr. Hall Pycroft, I believe?' said he.\n\n\"'Yes, sir,' I answered, pushing a chair towards him.\n\n\"'Lately engaged at Coxon & Woodhouse's?'\n\n\"'Yes, sir.'\n\n\"'And now on the staff of Mawson's.'\n\n\"'Quite so.'\n\n\"'Well,' said he, 'the fact is that I have heard some really extraordinary stories about your financial ability. You remember Parker, who used to be Coxon's manager. He can never say enough about it.'\n\n\"Of course I was pleased to hear this. I had always been pretty sharp in the office, but I had never dreamed that I was talked about in the City in this fashion.\n\n\"'You have a good memory?' said he.\n\n\"'Pretty fair,' I answered modestly.\n\n\"'Have you kept in touch with the market while you have been out of work?' he asked.\n\n\"'Yes. I read the stock-exchange list every morning.'\n\n\"'Now that shows real application!' he cried. 'That is the way to prosper! You won't mind my testing you, will you? Let me see. How are Ayrshires?'\n\n\"'A hundred and six and a quarter to a hundred and five and seven-eighths.'\n\n\"'And New Zealand consolidated?'\n\n\"'A hundred and four.'\n\n\"'And British Broken Hills?'\n\n\"'Seven to seven-and-six.'\n\n\"'Wonderful!' he cried with his hands up. 'This quite fits in with all that I had heard. My boy, my boy, you are very much too good to be a clerk at Mawson's!'\n\n\"This outburst rather astonished me, as you can think. 'Well,' said I, 'other people don't think quite so much of me as you seem to do, Mr. Pinner. I had a hard enough fight to get this berth, and I am very glad to have it.'\n\n\"'Pooh, man; you should soar above it. You are not in your true sphere. Now, I'll tell you how it stands with me. What I have to offer is little enough when measured by your ability, but when compared with Mawson's it's light to dark. Let me see. When do you go to Mawson's?'\n\n\"'On Monday.'\n\n\"'Ha, ha! I think I would risk a little sporting flutter that you don't go there at all.'\n\n\"'Not go to Mawson's?'\n\n\"'No, sir. By that day you will be the business manager of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company, Limited, with a hundred and thirty-four branches in the towns and villages of France, not counting one in Brussels and one in San Remo.'\n\n\"This took my breath away. 'I never heard of it,' said I.\n\n\"'Very likely not. It has been kept very quiet, for the capital was all privately subscribed, and it's too good a thing to let the public into. My brother, Harry Pinner, is promoter, and joins the board after allotment as managing director. He knew I was in the swim down here and asked me to pick up a good man cheap. A young, pushing man with plenty of snap about him. Parker spoke of you, and that brought me here to-night. We can only offer you a beggarly five hundred to start with.'\n\n\"'Five hundred a year!' I shouted.\n\n\"'Only that at the beginning; but you are to have an overriding commission of one per cent on all business done by your agents, and you may take my word for it that this will come to more than your salary.'\n\n\"'But I know nothing about hardware.'\n\n\"'Tut, my boy, you know about figures.'\n\n\"My head buzzed, and I could hardly sit still in my chair. But suddenly a little chill of doubt came upon me.\n\n\"'I must be frank with you,' said I. 'Mawson only gives me two hundred, but Mawson is safe. Now, really, I know so little about your company that\u2014'\n\n\"'Ah, smart, smart!' he cried in a kind of ecstasy of delight. 'You are the very man for us. You are not to be talked over, and quite right, too. Now, here's a note for a hundred pounds, and if you think that we can do business you may just slip it into your pocket as an advance upon your salary.'\n\n\"'That is very handsome,' said I. 'When should I take over my new duties?'\n\n\"'Be in Birmingham to-morrow at one,' said he. 'I have a note in my pocket here which you will take to my brother. You will find him at l26B Corporation Street, where the temporary offices of the company are situated. Of course he must confirm your engagement, but between ourselves it will be all right.'\n\n\"'Really, I hardly know how to express my gratitude, Mr. Pinner,' said I.\n\n\"'Not at all, my boy. You have only got your deserts. There are one or two small things\u2014mere formalities\u2014which I must arrange with you. You have a bit of paper beside you there. Kindly write upon it \"I am perfectly willing to act as business manager to the Franco-Midland Hardware Company, Limited, at a minimum salary of \u00a3500.'\"\n\n\"I did as he asked, and he put the paper in his pocket.\n\n\"'There is one other detail,' said he. 'What do you intend to do about Mawson's?'\n\n\"I had forgotten all about Mawson's in my joy. 'I'll write and resign,' said I.\n\n\"'Precisely what I don't want you to do. I had a row over you with Mawson's manager. I had gone up to ask him about you, and he was very offensive; accused me of coaxing you away from the service of the firm, and that sort of thing. At last I fairly lost my temper. \"If you want good men you should pay them a good price,\" said I.\n\n\"' \"He would rather have our small price than your big one,\" said he.\n\n\"' \"I'll lay you a fiver,\" said I, \"that when he has my offer you'll never so much as hear from him again.\"\n\n\"' \"Done!\" said he. \"We picked him out of the gutter, and he won't leave us so easily.\" Those were his very words.'\n\n\"'The impudent scoundrel!' I cried. 'I've never so much as seen him in my life. Why should I consider him in any way? I shall certainly not write if you would rather I didn't.'\n\n\"'Good! That's a promise,' said he, rising from his chair. 'Well, I'm delighted to have got so good a man for my brother. Here's your advance of a hundred pounds, and here is the letter. Make a note of the address, 126B Corporation Street, and remember that one o'clock to-morrow is your appointment. Good-night, and may you have all the fortune that you deserve!'\n\n\"That's just about all that passed between us, as near as I can remember. You can imagine, Dr. Watson, how pleased I was at such an extraordinary bit of good fortune. I sat up half the night hugging myself over it, and next day I was off to Birmingham in a train that would take me in plenty time for my appointment. I took my things to a hotel in New Street, and then I made my way to the address which had been given me.\n\n\"It was a quarter of an hour before my time, but I thought that would make no difference. 126B was a passage between two large shops, which led to a winding stone stair, from which there were many flats, let as offices to companies or professional men. The names of the occupants were painted at the bottom on the wall, but there was no such name as the Franco-Midland Hardware Company, Limited. I stood for a few minutes with my heart in my boots, wondering whether the whole thing was an elaborate hoax or not, when up came a man and addressed me. He was very like the chap I had seen the night before, the same figure and voice, but he was clean-shaven and his hair was lighter.\n\n\"'Are you Mr. Hall Pycroft?' he asked.\n\n\"'Yes,' said I.\n\n\"'Oh! I was expecting you, but you are a trifle before your time. I had a note from my brother this morning in which he sang your praises very loudly.'\n\n\"'I was just looking for the offices when you came.'\n\n\"'We have not got our name up yet, for we only secured these temporary premises last week. Come up with me, and we will talk the matter over.'\n\n\"I followed him to the top of a very lofty stair, and there, right under the slates, were a couple of empty, dusty little rooms, uncarpeted and uncurtained, into which he led me. I had thought of a great office with shining tables and rows of clerks, such as I was used to, and I daresay I stared rather straight at the two deal chairs and one little table, which with a ledger and a waste-paper basket, made up the whole furniture.\n\n\"'Don't be disheartened, Mr. Pycroft,' said my new acquaintance, seeing the length of my face. 'Rome was not built in a day, and we have lots of money at our backs, though we don't cut much dash yet in offices. Pray sit down, and let me have your letter.'\n\n\"I gave it to him, and he read it over very carefully.\n\n\"'You seem to have made a vast impression upon my brother Arthur,' said he, 'and I know that he is a pretty shrewd judge. He swears by London, you know; and I by Birmingham; but this time I shall follow his advice. Pray consider yourself definitely engaged.'\n\n\"'What are my duties?' I asked.\n\n\"'You will eventually manage the great depot in Paris, which will pour a flood of English crockery into the shops of a hundred and thirty-four agents in France. The purchase will be completed in a week, and meanwhile you will remain in Birmingham and make yourself useful.'\n\n\"'How?'\n\n\"For answer, he took a big red book out of a drawer.\n\n\"'This is a directory of Paris,' said he, 'with the trades after the names of the people. I want you to take it home with you, and to mark off all the hardware-sellers, with their addresses. It would be of the greatest use to me to have them.'\n\n\"'Surely, there are classified lists?' I suggested.\n\n\"'Not reliable ones. Their system is different from ours. Stick at it, and let me have the lists by Monday, at twelve. Good-day, Mr. Pycroft. If you continue to show zeal and intelligence you will find the company a good master.'\n\n\"I went back to the hotel with the big book under my arm, and with very conflicting feelings in my breast. On the one hand, I was definitely engaged and had a hundred pounds in my pocket; on the other, the look of the offices, the absence of name on the wall, and other of the points which would strike a business man had left a bad impression as to the position of my employers. However, come what might, I had my money, so I settled down to my task. All Sunday I was kept hard at work, and yet by Monday I had only got as far as H. I went round to my employer, found him in the same dismantled kind of room, and was told to keep at it until Wednesday, and then come again. On Wednesday it was still unfinished, so I hammered away until Friday\u2014that is, yesterday. Then I brought it round to Mr. Harry Pinner.\n\n\"'Thank you very much,' said he, 'I fear that I underrated the difficulty of the task. This list will be of very material assistance to me.'\n\n\"'It took some time,' said I.\n\n\"'And now,' said he, 'I want you to make a list of the furniture shops, for they all sell crockery.'\n\n\"'Very good.'\n\n\"'And you can come up to-morrow evening at seven and let me know how you are getting on. Don't overwork yourself. A couple of hours at Day's Music Hall in the evening would do you no harm after your labours.' He laughed as he spoke, and I saw with a thrill that his second tooth upon the left-hand side had been very badly stuffed with gold.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes rubbed his hands with delight, and I stared with astonishment at our client.\n\n\"You may well look surprised, Dr. Watson, but it is this way,\" said he: \"When I was speaking to the other chap in London, at the time that he laughed at my not going to Mawson's, I happened to notice that his tooth was stuffed in this very identical fashion. The glint of the gold in each case caught my eye, you see. When I put that with the voice and figure being the same, and only those things altered which might be changed by a razor or a wig, I could not doubt that it was the same man. Of course you expect two brothers to be alike, but not that they should have the same tooth stuffed in the same way. He bowed me out, and I found myself in the street, hardly knowing whether I was on my head or my heels. Back I went to my hotel, put my head in a basin of cold water, and tried to think it out. Why had he sent me from London to Birmingham? Why had he got there before me? And why had he written a letter from himself to himself? It was altogether too much for me, and I could make no sense of it. And then suddenly it struck me that what was dark to me might be very light to Mr. Sherlock Holmes. I had just time to get up to town by the night train to see him this morning, and to bring you both back with me to Birmingham.\"\n\nThere was a pause after the stockbroker's clerk had concluded his surprising experience. Then Sherlock Holmes cocked his eye at me, leaning back on the cushions with a pleased and yet critical face, like a connoisseur who has just taken his first sip of a comet vintage.\n\n\"Rather fine, Watson, is it not?\" said he. \"There are points in it which please me. I think that you will agree with me that an interview with Mr. Arthur Harry Pinner in the temporary offices of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company, Limited, would be a rather interesting experience for both of us.\"\n\n\"But how can we do it?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, easily enough,\" said Hall Pycroft cheerily. \"You are two friends of mine who are in want of a billet, and what could be more natural than that I should bring you both round to the managing director?\"\n\n\"Quite so, of course,\" said Holmes. \"I should like to have a look at the gentleman and see if I can make anything of his little game. What qualities have you, my friend, which would make your services so valuable? Or is it possible that\u2014\" He began biting his nails and staring blankly out of the window, and we hardly drew another word from him until we were in New Street.\n\nAt seven o'clock that evening we were walking, the three of us, down Corporation Street to the company's offices.\n\n\"It is no use our being at all before our time,\" said our client. \"He only comes there to see me, apparently, for the place is deserted up to the very hour he names.\"\n\n\"That is suggestive,\" remarked Holmes.\n\n\"By Jove, I told you so!\" cried the clerk. \"That's he walking ahead of us there.\"\n\nHe pointed to a smallish, dark, well-dressed man who was bustling along the other side of the road. As we watched him he looked across at a boy who was bawling out the latest edition of the evening paper, and, running over among the cabs and buses, he bought one from him. Then, clutching it in his hand, he vanished through a doorway.\n\n\"There he goes!\" cried Hall Pycroft. \"These are the company's offices into which he has gone. Come with me, and I'll fix it up as easily as possible.\"\n\nFollowing his lead, we ascended five stones, until we found ourselves outside a half-opened door, at which our client tapped. A voice within bade us enter, and we entered a bare, unfurnished room such as Hall Pycroft had described. At the single table sat the man whom we had seen in the street, with his evening paper spread out in front of him, and as he looked up at us it seemed to me that I had never looked upon a face which bore such marks of grief, and of something beyond grief\u2014of a horror such as comes to few men in a lifetime. His brow glistened with perspiration, his cheeks were of the dull, dead white of a fish's belly, and his eyes were wild and staring. He looked at his clerk as though he failed to recognize him, and I could see by the astonishment depicted upon our conductor's face that this was by no means the usual appearance of his employer.\n\n\"You look ill, Mr. Pinner!\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"Yes, I am not very well,\" answered the other, making obvious efforts to pull himself together and licking his dry lips before he spoke. \"Who are these gentlemen whom you have brought with you?\"\n\n\"One is Mr. Harris, of Bermondsey, and the other is Mr. Price, of this town,\" said our clerk glibly. \"They are friends of mine and gentlemen of experience, but they have been out of a place for some little time, and they hoped that perhaps you might find an opening for them in the company's employment.\"\n\n\"Very possibly! very possibly!\" cried Mr. Pinner with a ghastly smile. \"Yes, I have no doubt that we shall be able to do something for you. What is your particular line, Mr. Harris?\"\n\n\"I am an accountant,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Ah, yes, we shall want something of the sort. And you, Mr. Price?\"\n\n\"A clerk,\" said I.\n\n\"I have every hope that the company may accommodate you. I will let you know about it as soon as we come to any conclusion. And now I beg that you will go. For God's sake leave me to myself!\"\n\nThese last words were shot out of him, as though the constraint which he was evidently setting upon himself had suddenly and utterly burst asunder. Holmes and I glanced at each other, and Hall Pycroft took a step towards the table.\n\n\"You forget, Mr. Pinner, that I am here by appointment to receive some directions from you,\" said he.\n\n\"Certainly, Mr. Pycroft, certainly,\" the other resumed in a calmer tone. \"You may wait here a moment and there is no reason why your friends should not wait with you. I will be entirely at your service in three minutes, if I might trespass upon your patience so far.\" He rose with a very courteous air, and, bowing to us, he passed out through a door at the farther end of the room, which he closed behind him.\n\n\"What now?\" whispered Holmes. \"Is he giving us the slip?\"\n\n\"Impossible,\" answered Pycroft.\n\n\"Why so?\"\n\n\"That door leads into an inner room.\"\n\n\"There is no exit?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Is it furnished?\"\n\n\"It was empty yesterday.\"\n\n\"Then what on earth can he be doing? There is something which I don't understand in this matter. If ever a man was three parts mad with terror, that man's name is Pinner. What can have put the shivers on him?\"\n\n\"He suspects that we are detectives,\" I suggested.\n\n\"That's it,\" cried Pycroft.\n\nHolmes shook his head. \"He did not turn pale. He was pale when we entered the room,\" said he. \"It is just possible that\u2014\"\n\nHis words were interrupted by a sharp rat-tat from the direction of the inner door.\n\n\"What the deuce is he knocking at his own door for?\" cried the clerk.\n\nAgain and much louder came the rat-tat-tat. We all gazed expectantly at the closed door. Glancing at Holmes, I saw his face turn rigid, and he leaned forward in intense excitement. Then suddenly came a low guggling, gargling sound, and a brisk drumming upon woodwork. Holmes sprang frantically across the room and pushed at the door. It was fastened on the inner side. Following his example, we threw ourselves upon it with all our weight. One hinge snapped, then the other, and down came the door with a crash. Rushing over it, we found ourselves in the inner room. It was empty.\n\nBut it was only for a moment that we were at fault. At one corner, the corner nearest the room which we had left, there was a second door. Holmes sprang to it and pulled it open. A coat and waistcoat were lying on the floor, and from a hook behind the door, with his own braces round his neck, was hanging the managing director of the Franco-Midland Hardware Company. His knees were drawn up, his head hung at a dreadful angle to his body, and the clatter of his heels against the door made the noise which had broken in upon our conversation. In an instant I had caught him round the waist, and held him up while Holmes and Pycroft untied the elastic bands which had disappeared between the livid creases of skin. Then we carried him into the other room, where he lay with a clay-coloured face, puffing his purple lips in and out with every breath\u2014a dreadful wreck of all that he had been but five minutes before.\n\n\"What do you think of him, Watson?\" asked Holmes.\n\nI stooped over him and examined him. His pulse was feeble and intermittent, but his breathing grew longer, and there was a little shivering of his eyelids, which showed a thin white slit of ball beneath.\n\n\"It has been touch and go with him,\" said I, \"but he'll live now. Just open that window, and hand me the water carafe.\" I undid his collar, poured the cold water over his face, and raised and sank his arms until he drew a long, natural breath. \"It's only a question of time now,\" said I as I turned away from him.\n\nHolmes stood by the table, with his hands deep in his trousers' pockets and his chin upon his breast.\n\n\"I suppose we ought to call the police in now,\" said he. \"And yet I confess that I'd like to give them a complete case when they come.\"\n\n\"It's a blessed mystery to me,\" cried Pycroft, scratching his head. \"Whatever they wanted to bring me all the way up here for, and then\u2014\"\n\n\"Pooh! All that is clear enough,\" said Holmes impatiently. \"It is this last sudden move.\"\n\n\"You understand the rest, then?\"\n\n\"I think that it is fairly obvious. What do you say, Watson?\"\n\nI shrugged my shoulders. \"I must confess that I am out of my depths,\" said I.\n\n\"Oh, surely if you consider the events at first they can only point to one conclusion.\"\n\n\"What do you make of them?\"\n\n\"Well, the whole thing hinges upon two points. The first is the making of Pycroft write a declaration by which he entered the service of this preposterous company. Do you not see how very suggestive that is?\"\n\n\"I am afraid I miss the point.\"\n\n\"Well, why did they want him to do it? Not as a business matter, for these arrangements are usually verbal, and there was no earthly business reason why this should be an exception. Don't you see, my young friend, that they were very anxious to obtain a specimen of your handwriting, and had no other way of doing it?\"\n\n\"And why?\"\n\n\"Quite so. Why? When we answer that we have made some progress with our little problem. Why? There can be only one adequate reason. Someone wanted to learn to imitate your writing and had to procure a specimen of it first. And now if we pass on to the second point we find that each throws light upon the other. That point is the request made by Pinner that you should not resign your place, but should leave the manager of this important business in the full expectation that a Mr. Hall Pycroft, whom he had never seen, was about to enter the office upon the Monday morning.\"\n\n\"My God!\" cried our client, \"what a blind beetle I have been!\"\n\n\"Now you see the point about the handwriting. Suppose that someone turned up in your place who wrote a completely different hand from that in which you had applied for the vacancy, of course the game would have been up. But in the interval the rogue had learned to imitate you, and his position was therefore secure, as I presume that nobody in the office had ever set eyes upon you.\"\n\n\"Not a soul,\" groaned Hall Pycroft.\n\n\"Very good. Of course it was of the utmost importance to prevent you from thinking better of it, and also to keep you from coming into contact with anyone who might tell you that your double was at work in Mawson's office. Therefore they gave you a handsome advance on your salary, and ran you off to the Midlands, where they gave you enough work to do to prevent your going to London, where you might have burst their little game up. That is all plain enough.\"\n\n\"But why should this man pretend to be his own brother?\"\n\n\"Well, that is pretty clear also. There are evidently only two of them in it. The other is impersonating you at the office. This one acted as your engager, and then found that he could not find you an employer without admitting a third person into his plot. That he was most unwilling to do. He changed his appearance as far as he could, and trusted that the likeness, which you could not fail to observe, would be put down to a family resemblance. But for the happy chance of the gold stuffing, your suspicions would probably never have been aroused.\"\n\nHall Pycroft shook his clenched hands in the air. \"Good Lord!\" he cried, \"while I have been fooled in this way, what has this other Hall Pycroft been doing at Mawson's? What should we do, Mr. Holmes? Tell me what to do.\"\n\n\"We must wire to Mawson's.\"\n\n\"They shut at twelve on Saturdays.\"\n\n\"Never mind. There may be some door-keeper or attendant\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, they keep a permanent guard there on account of the value of the securities that they hold. I remember hearing it talked of in the City.\"\n\n\"Very good, we shall wire to him and see if all is well, and if a clerk of your name is working there. That is clear enough, but what is not so clear is why at sight of us one of the rogues should instantly walk out of the room and hang himself.\"\n\n\"The paper!\" croaked a voice behind us. The man was sitting up, blanched and ghastly, with returning reason in his eyes, and hands which rubbed nervously at the broad red band which still encircled his throat.\n\n\"The paper! Of course!\" yelled Holmes in a paroxysm of excitement. \"Idiot that I was! I thought so much of our visit that the paper never entered my head for an instant. To be sure, the secret must lie there.\" He flattened it out upon the table, and a cry of triumph burst from his lips. \"Look at this, Watson,\" he cried. \"It is a London paper, an early edition of the Evening Standard. Here is what we want. Look at the headlines: 'Crime in the City. Murder at Mawson & Williams's. Gigantic Attempted Robbery. Capture of the Criminal.' Here, Watson, we are all equally anxious to hear it, so kindly read it aloud to us.\"\n\nIt appeared from its position in the paper to have been the one event of importance in town, and the account of it ran in this way:\n\n\"A desperate attempt at robbery, culminating in the death of one man and the capture of the criminal, occurred this afternoon in the City. For some time back Mawson & Williams, the famous financial house, have been the guardians of securities which amount in the aggregate to a sum of considerably over a million sterling. So conscious was the manager of the responsibility which devolved upon him in consequence of the great interests at stake that safes of the very latest construction have been employed, and an armed watchman has been left day and night in the building. It appears that last week a new clerk named Hall Pycroft was engaged by the firm. This person appears to have been none other than Beddington, the famous forger and cracks-man, who, with his brother, has only recently emerged from a five years' spell of penal servitude. By some means, which are not yet clear, he succeeded in winning, under a false name, this official position in the office, which he utilized in order to obtain mouldings of various locks, and a thorough knowledge of the position of the strongroom and the safes.\n\n\"It is customary at Mawson's for the clerks to leave at midday on Saturday. Sergeant Tuson, of the City police, was somewhat surprised, therefore, to see a gentleman with a carpet-bag come down the steps at twenty minutes past one. His suspicions being aroused, the sergeant followed the man, and with the aid of Constable Pollock succeeded, after a most desperate resistance, in arresting him. It was at once clear that a daring and gigantic robbery had been committed. Nearly a hundred thousand pounds' worth of American railway bonds, with a large amount of scrip in mines and other companies, was discovered in the bag. On examining the premises the body of the unfortunate watchman was found doubled up and thrust into the largest of the safes, where it would not have been discovered until Monday morning had it not been for the prompt action of Sergeant Tuson. The man's skull had been shattered by a blow from a poker delivered from behind. There could be no doubt that Beddington had obtained entrance by pretending that he had left something behind him, and having murdered the watchman, rapidly rifled the large safe, and then made off with his booty. His brother, who usually works with him, has not appeared in this job as far as can at present be ascertained, although the police are making energetic inquiries as to his whereabouts.\"\n\n\"Well, we may save the police some little trouble in that direction,\" said Holmes, glancing at the haggard figure huddled up by the window. \"Human nature is a strange mixture, Watson. You see that even a villain and murderer can inspire such affection that his brother turns to suicide when he learns that his neck is forfeited. However, we have no choice as to our action. The doctor and I will remain on guard, Mr. Pycroft, if you will have the kindness to step out for the police.\"\n\n[ THE \"GLORIA SCOTT\" ]\n\n\"I have some papers here,\" said my friend Sherlock Holmes as we sat one winter's night on either side of the fire, \"which I really think, Watson, that it would be worth your while to glance over. These are the documents in the extraordinary case of the Gloria Scott, and this is the message which struck Justice of the Peace Trevor dead with horror when he read it.\"\n\nHe had picked from a drawer a little tarnished cylinder, and undoing the tape, he handed me a short note scrawled upon a half-sheet of slate-gray paper.\n\nThe supply of game for London is going steadily up [it ran]. Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your hen-pheasant's life.\n\nAs I glanced up from reading this enigmatical message, I saw Holmes chuckling at the expression upon my face.\n\n\"You look a little bewildered,\" said he.\n\n\"I cannot see how such a message as this could inspire horror. It seems to me to be rather grotesque than otherwise.\"\n\n\"Very likely. Yet the fact remains that the reader, who was a fine, robust old man, was knocked clean down by it as if it had been the butt end of a pistol.\"\n\n\"You arouse my curiosity,\" said I. \"But why did you say just now that there were very particular reasons why I should study this case?\"\n\n\"Because it was the first in which I was ever engaged.\"\n\nI had often endeavoured to elicit from my companion what had first turned his mind in the direction of criminal research, but had never caught him before in a communicative humour. Now he sat forward in his armchair and spread out the documents upon his knees. Then he lit his pipe and sat for some time smoking and turning them over.\n\n\"You never heard me talk of Victor Trevor?\" he asked. \"He was the only friend I made during the two years I was at college. I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed much with the men of my year. Bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic tastes, and then my line of study was quite distinct from that of the other fellows, so that we had no points of contact at all. Trevor was the only man I knew, and that only through the accident of his bull terrier freezing on to my ankle one morning as I went down to chapel.\n\n\"It was a prosaic way of forming a friendship, but it was effective. I was laid by the heels for ten days, and Trevor used to come in to inquire after me. At first it was only a minute's chat, but soon his visits lengthened, and before the end of the term we were close friends. He was a hearty, full-blooded fellow, full of spirits and energy, the very opposite to me in most respects, but we had some subjects in common, and it was a bond of union when I found that he was as friendless as I. Finally he invited me down to his father's place at Donnithorpe, in Norfolk, and I accepted his hospitality for a month of the long vacation.\n\n\"Old Trevor was evidently a man of some wealth and consideration, a J. P., and a landed proprietor. Donnithorpe is a little hamlet just to the north of Langmere, in the country of the Broads. The house was an old-fashioned, widespread, oak-beamed brick building, with a fine lime-lined avenue leading up to it. There was excellent wild-duck shooting in the fens, remarkably good fishing, a small but select library, taken over, as I understood, from a former occupant, and a tolerable cook, so that he would be a fastidious man who could not put in a pleasant month there.\n\n\"Trevor senior was a widower, and my friend his only son.\n\n\"There had been a daughter, I heard, but she had died of diphtheria while on a visit to Birmingham. The father interested me extremely. He was a man of little culture, but with a considerable amount of rude strength, both physically and mentally. He knew hardly any books, but he had travelled far, had seen much of the world, and had remembered all that he had learned. In person he was a thick-set, burly man with a shock of grizzled hair, a brown, weather-beaten face, and blue eyes which were keen to the verge of fierceness. Yet he had a reputation for kindness and charity on the countryside, and was noted for the leniency of his sentences from the bench.\n\n\"One evening, shortly after my arrival, we were sitting over a glass of port after dinner, when young Trevor began to talk about those habits of observation and inference which I had already formed into a system, although I had not yet appreciated the part which they were to play in my life. The old man evidently thought that his son was exaggerating in his description of one or two trivial feats which I had performed.\n\n\"'Come, now, Mr. Holmes,' said he, laughing good-humouredly. 'I'm an excellent subject, if you can deduce anything from me.'\n\n\"'I fear there is not very much,' I answered. 'I might suggest that you have gone about in fear of some personal attack within the last twelvemonth.'\n\n\"The laugh faded from his lips, and he stared at me in great surprise.\n\n\"'Well, that's true enough,' said he. 'You know, Victor,' turning to his son, 'when we broke up that poaching gang they swore 'to knife us, and Sir Edward Holly has actually been attacked. I've always been on my guard since then, though I have no idea how you know it.'\n\n\"'You have a very handsome stick,' I answered. 'By the inscription I observed that you had not had it more than a year. But you have taken some pains to bore the head of it and pour melted lead into the hole so as to make it a formidable weapon. I argued that you would not take such precautions unless you had some danger to fear.'\n\n\"'Anything else?' he asked, smiling.\n\n\"'You have boxed a good deal in your youth.'\n\n\"'Right again. How did you know it? Is my nose knocked a little out of the straight?'\n\n\"'No,' said I. 'It is your ears. They have the peculiar flattening and thickening which marks the boxing man.'\n\n\"'Anything else?'\n\n\"'You have done a good deal of digging by your callosities.'\n\n\"'Made all my money at the gold fields.'\n\n\"'You have been in New Zealand.'\n\n\"'Right again.'\n\n\"'You have visited Japan.'\n\n\"'Quite true.'\n\n\"'And you have been most intimately associated with someone whose initials were J. A., and whom you afterwards were eager to entirely forget.'\n\n\"Mr. Trevor stood slowly up, fixed his large blue eyes upon me with a strange wild stare, and then pitched forward, with his face among the nutshells which strewed the cloth, in a dead faint.\n\n\"You can imagine, Watson, how shocked both his son and I were. His attack did not last long, however, for when we undid his collar and sprinkled the water from one of the finger-glasses over his face, he gave a gasp or two and sat up.\n\n\"'Ah, boys,' said he, forcing a smile, 'I hope I haven't frightened you. Strong as I look, there is a weak place in my heart, and it does not take much to knock me over. I don't know how you manage this, Mr. Holmes, but it seems to me that all the detectives of fact and of fancy would be children in your hands. That's your line of life, sir, and you may take the word of a man who has seen something of the world.'\n\n\"And that recommendation, with the exaggerated estimate of my ability with which he prefaced it, was, if you will believe me, Watson, the very first thing which ever made me feel that a profession might be made out of what had up to that time been the merest hobby. At the moment, however, I was too much concerned at the sudden illness of my host to think of anything else.\n\n\"'I hope that I have said nothing to pain you?' said I.\n\n\"'Well, you certainly touched upon rather a tender point. Might I ask how you know, and how much you know?' He spoke now in a half-jesting fashion, but a look of terror still lurked at the back of his eyes.\n\n\"'It is simplicity itself,' said I. 'When you bared your arm to draw that fish into the boat I saw that J. A. had been tattooed in the bend of the elbow. The letters were still legible, but it was perfectly clear from their blurred appearance, and from the staining of the skin round them, that efforts had been made to obliterate them. It was obvious, then, that those initials had once been very familiar to you, and that you had afterwards wished to forget them.'\n\n\"'What an eye you have!' he cried with a sigh of relief. 'It is just as you say. But we won't talk of it. Of all ghosts the ghosts of our old loves are the worst. Come into the billiard-room and have a quiet cigar.'\n\n\"From that day, amid all his cordiality, there was always a touch of suspicion in Mr. Trevor's manner towards me. Even his son remarked it. 'You've given the governor such a turn,' said he, 'that he'll never be sure again of what you know and what you don't know.' He did not mean to show it, I am sure, but it was so strongly in his mind that it peeped out at every action. At last I became so convinced that I was causing him uneasiness that I drew my visit to a close. On the very day, however, before I left, an incident occurred which proved in the sequel to be of importance.\n\n\"We were sitting out upon the lawn on garden chairs, the three of us, basking in the sun and admiring the view across the Broads, when a maid came out to say that there was a man at the door who wanted to see Mr. Trevor.\n\n\"'What is his name?' asked my host.\n\n\"'He would not give any.'\n\n\"'What does he want, then?'\n\n\"'He says that you know him, and that he only wants a moment's conversation.'\n\n\"'Show him round here.' An instant afterwards there appeared a little wizened fellow with a cringing manner and a shambling style of walking. He wore an open jacket, with a splotch of tar on the sleeve, a red-and-black check shirt, dungaree trousers, and heavy boots badly worn. His face was thin and brown and crafty, with a perpetual smile upon it, which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth, and his crinkled hands were half closed in a way that is distinctive of sailors. As he came slouching across the lawn I heard Mr. Trevor make a sort of hiccoughing noise in his throat, and, jumping out of his chair, he ran into the house. He was back in a moment, and I smelt a strong reek of brandy as he passed me.\n\n\"'Well, my man,' said he. 'What can I do for you?'\n\n\"The sailor stood looking at him with puckered eyes, and with the same loose-lipped smile upon his face.\n\n\"'You don't know me?' he asked.\n\n\"'Why, dear me, it is surely Hudson,' said Mr. Trevor in a tone of surprise.\n\n\"'Hudson it is, sir,' said the seaman. 'Why, it's thirty year and more since I saw you last. Here you are in your house, and me still picking my salt meat out of the harness cask.'\n\n\"'Tut, you will find that I have not forgotten old times,' cried Mr. Trevor, and, walking towards the sailor, he said something in a low voice. 'Go into the kitchen,' he continued out loud, 'and you will get food and drink. I have no doubt that I shall find you a situation.'\n\n\"'Thank you, sir,' said the seaman, touching his forelock. 'I'm just off a two-yearer in an eight-knot tramp, short-handed at that, and I wants a rest. I thought I'd get it either with Mr. Beddoes or with you.'\n\n\"'Ah!' cried Mr. Trevor. 'You know where Mr. Beddoes is?'\n\n\"'Bless you, sir, I know where all my old friends are,' said the fellow with a sinister smile, and he slouched off after the maid to the kitchen. Mr. Trevor mumbled something to us about having been shipmate with the man when he was going back to the diggings, and then, leaving us on the lawn, he went indoors. An hour later, when we entered the house, we found him stretched dead drunk upon the dining-room sofa. The whole incident left a most ugly impression upon my mind, and I was not sorry next day to leave Donnithorpe behind me, for I felt that my presence must be a source of embarrassment to my friend.\n\n\"All this occurred during the first month of the long vacation. I went up to my London rooms, where I spent seven weeks working out a few experiments in organic chemistry. One day, however, when the autumn was far advanced and the vacation drawing to a close, I received a telegram from my friend imploring me to return to Donnithorpe, and saying that he was in great need of my advice and assistance. Of course I dropped everything and set out for the North once more.\n\n\"He met me with the dog-cart at the station, and I saw at a glance that the last two months had been very trying ones for him. He had grown thin and careworn, and had lost the loud, cheery manner for which he had been remarkable.\n\n\"'The governor is dying,' were the first words he said.\n\n\"'Impossible!' I cried. 'What is the matter?'\n\n\"'Apoplexy. Nervous shock. He's been on the verge all day. I doubt if we shall find him alive.'\n\n\"I was, as you may think, Watson, horrified at this unexpected news.\n\n\"'What has caused it?' I asked.\n\n\"'Ah, that is the point. Jump in and we can talk it over while we drive. You remember that fellow who came upon the evening before you left us?'\n\n\"'Perfectly.'\n\n\"'Do you know who it was that we let into the house that day?'\n\n\"'I have no idea.'\n\n\"'It was the devil, Holmes,' he cried.\n\n\"I stared at him in astonishment.\n\n\"'Yes, it was the devil himself. We have not had a peaceful hour since\u2014not one. The governor has never held up his head from that evening, and now the life has been crushed out of him and his heart broken, all through this accursed Hudson.'\n\n\"'What power had he, then?'\n\n\"'Ah, that is what I would give so much to know. The kindly, charitable good old governor\u2014how could he have fallen into the clutches of such a ruffian! But I am so glad that you have come, Holmes. I trust very much to your judgment and discretion, and I know that you will advise me for the best.'\n\n\"We were dashing along the smooth white country road, with the long stretch of the Broads in front of us glimmering in the red light of the setting sun. From a grove upon our left I could already see the high chimneys and the flagstaff which marked the squire's dwelling.\n\n\"'My father made the fellow gardener,' said my companion, 'and then, as that did not satisfy him, he was promoted to be butler. The house seemed to be at his mercy, and he wandered about and did what he chose in it. The maids complained of his drunken habits and his vile language. The dad raised their wages all round to recompense them for the annoyance. The fellow would take the boat and my father's best gun and treat himself to little shooting trips. And all this with such a sneering, leering, insolent face that I would have knocked him down twenty times over if he had been a man of my own age. I tell you, Holmes, I have had to keep a tight hold upon myself all this time; and now I am asking myself whether, if I had let myself go a little more, I might not have been a wiser man.\n\n\"'Well, matters went from bad to worse with us, and this animal Hudson became more and more intrusive, until at last, on his making some insolent reply to my father in my presence one day, I took him by the shoulders and turned him out of the room. He slunk away with a livid face and two venomous eyes which uttered more threats than his tongue could do. I don't know what passed between the poor dad and him after that, but the dad came to me next day and asked me whether I would mind apologizing to Hudson. I refused, as you can imagine, and asked my father how he could allow such a wretch to take such liberties with himself and his household.\n\n\"' \"Ah, my boy,\" said he, \"it is all very well to talk, but you don't know how I am placed. But you shall know, Victor. I'll see that you shall know, come what may. You wouldn't believe harm of your poor old father, would you, lad?\" He was very much moved and shut himself up in the study all day, where I could see through the window that he was writing busily.\n\n\"'That evening there came what seemed to me to be a grand release, for Hudson told us that he was going to leave us. He walked into the dining-room as we sat after dinner and announced his intention in the thick voice of a half-drunken man.\n\n\"' \"I've had enough of Norfolk,\" said he. \"I'll run down to Mr. Beddoes in Hampshire. He'll be as glad to see me as you were, I daresay.\"\n\n\"' \"You're not going away in an unkind spirit, Hudson, I hope,\" said my father with a tameness which made my blood boil.\n\n\"' \"I've not had my 'pology,\" said he sulkily, glancing in my direction.\n\n\"' \"Victor, you will acknowledge that you have used this worthy fellow rather roughly,\" said the dad, turning to me.\n\n\"' \"On the contrary, I think that we have both shown extraordinary patience towards him,\" I answered.\n\n\"' \"Oh, you do, do you?\" he snarled. \"Very good, mate. We'll see about that!\"\n\n\"'He slouched out of the room and half an hour afterwards left the house, leaving my father in a state of pitiable nervousness. Night after night I heard him pacing his room, and it was just as he was recovering his confidence that the blow did at last fall.'\n\n\"'And how?' I asked eagerly.\n\n\"'In a most extraordinary fashion. A letter arrived for my father yesterday evening, bearing the Fordingham postmark. My father read it, clapped both his hands to his head, and began running round the room in little circles like a man who has been driven out of his senses. When I at last drew him down on to the sofa, his mouth and eyelids were all puckered on one side, and I saw that he had a stroke. Dr. Fordham came over at once. We put him to bed, but the paralysis has spread, he has shown no sign of returning consciousness, and I think that we shall hardly find him alive.'\n\n\"'You horrify me, Trevor!' I cried. 'What then could have been in this letter to cause so dreadful a result?'\n\n\"'Nothing. There lies the inexplicable part of it. The message was absurd and trivial. Ah, my God, it is as I feared!'\n\n\"As he spoke we came round the curve of the avenue and saw in the fading light that every blind in the house had been drawn down. As we dashed up to the door, my friend's face convulsed with grief, a gentleman in black emerged from it.\n\n\"'When did it happen, doctor?' asked Trevor.\n\n\"'Almost immediately after you left.'\n\n\"'Did he recover consciousness?'\n\n\"'For an instant before the end.'\n\n\"'Any message for me?'\n\n\"'Only that the papers were in the back drawer of the Japanese cabinet.'\n\n\"My friend ascended with the doctor to the chamber of death, while I remained in the study, turning the whole matter over and over in my head, and feeling as sombre as ever I had done in my life. What was the past of this Trevor, pugilist, traveller, and gold-digger, and how had he placed himself in the power of this acid-faced seaman? Why, too, should he faint at an allusion to the half-effaced initials upon his arm and die of fright when he had a letter from Fordingham? Then I remembered that Fordingham was in Hampshire, and that this Mr. Beddoes, whom the seaman had gone to visit and presumably to blackmail, had also been mentioned as living in Hampshire. The letter, then, might either come from Hudson, the seaman, saying that he had betrayed the guilty secret which appeared to exist, or it might come from Beddoes, warning an old confederate that such a betrayal was imminent. So far it seemed clear enough. But then how could this letter be trivial and grotesque, as described by the son? He must have misread it. If so, it must have been one of those ingenious secret codes which mean one thing while they seem to mean another. I must see this letter. If there was a hidden meaning in it, I was confident that I could pluck it forth. For an hour I sat pondering over it in the gloom, until at last a weeping maid brought in a lamp, and close at her heels came my friend Trevor, pale but composed, with these very papers which lie upon my knee held in his grasp. He sat down opposite to me, drew the lamp to the edge of the table, and handed me a short note scribbled, as you see, upon a single sheet of gray paper. 'The supply of game for London is going steadily up,' it ran. 'Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your hen-pheasant's life.'\n\n\"I daresay my face looked as bewildered as yours did just now when first I read this message. Then I reread it very carefully. It was evidently as I had thought, and some secret meaning must lie buried in this strange combination of words. Or could it be that there was a prearranged significance to such phrases as 'fly-paper' and 'hen-pheasant'? Such a meaning would be arbitrary and could not be deduced in any way. And yet I was loath to believe that this was the case, and the presence of the word Hudson seemed to show that the subject of the message was as I had guessed, and that it was from Beddoes rather than the sailor. I tried it backward, but the combination 'life pheasant's hen' was not encouraging. Then I tried alternate words, but neither 'the of for' nor 'supply game London' promised to throw any light upon it.\n\n\"And then in an instant the key of the riddle was in my hands, and I saw that every third word, beginning with the first, would give a message which might well drive old Trevor to despair.\n\n\"It was short and terse, the warning, as I now read it to my companion:\n\n\"'The game is up. Hudson has told all. Fly for your life.'\n\n\"Victor Trevor sank his face into his shaking hands. 'It must be that, I suppose,' said he. 'This is worse than death, for it means disgrace as well. But what is the meaning of these \"head-keepers\" and \"hen-pheasants\"?'\n\n\"'It means nothing to the message, but it might mean a good deal to us if we had no other means of discovering the sender. You see that he has begun by writing \"The... game... is,\" and so on. Afterwards he had, to fulfil the prearranged cipher, to fill in any two words in each space. He would naturally use the first words which came to his mind, and if there were so many which referred to sport among them, you may be tolerably sure that he is either an ardent shot or interested in breeding. Do you know anything of this Beddoes?'\n\n\"'Why, now that you mention it,' said he, 'I remember that my poor father used to have an invitation from him to shoot over his preserves every autumn.'\n\n\"'Then it is undoubtedly from him that the note comes,' said I. 'It only remains for us to find out what this secret was which the sailor Hudson seems to have held over the heads of these two wealthy and respected men.'\n\n\"'Alas, Holmes, I fear that it is one of sin and shame!' cried my friend. 'But from you I shall have no secrets. Here is the statement which was drawn up by my father when he knew that the danger from Hudson had become imminent. I found it in the Japanese cabinet, as he told the doctor. Take it and read it to me, for I have neither the strength nor the courage to do it myself.'\n\n\"These are the very papers, Watson, which he handed to me, and I will read them to you, as I read them in the old study that night to him. They are endorsed outside, as you see, 'Some particulars of the voyage of the bark Gloria Scott, from her leaving Falmouth on the 8th October, 1855, to her destruction in N. Lat. 15\u00b0 20', W. Long. 25\u00b0 14', on. Nov. 6th.' It is in the form of a letter, and runs in this way.\n\n\"'My dear, dear son, now that approaching disgrace begins to darken the closing years of my life, I can write with all truth and honesty that it is not the terror of the law, it is not the loss of my position in the county, nor is it my fall in the eyes of all who have known me, which cuts me to the heart; but it is the thought that you should come to blush for me\u2014you who love me and who have seldom, I hope, had reason to do other than respect me. But if the blow falls which is forever hanging over me, then I should wish you to read this, that you may know straight from me how far I have been to blame. On the other hand, if all should go well (which may kind God Almighty grant!), then, if by any chance this paper should be still undestroyed and should fall into your hands, I conjure you, by all you hold sacred, by the memory of your dear mother, and by the love which has been between us, to hurl it into the fire and to never give one thought to it again.\n\n\"'If then your eye goes on to read this line, I know that I shall already have been exposed and dragged from my home, or, as is more likely, for you know that my heart is weak, be lying with my tongue sealed forever in death. In either case the time for suppression is past, and every word which I tell you is the naked truth, and this I swear as I hope for mercy.\n\n\"'My name, dear lad, is not Trevor. I was James Armitage in my younger days, and you can understand now the shock that it was to me a few weeks ago when your college friend addressed me in words which seemed to imply that he had surprised my secret. As Armitage it was that I entered a London banking-house, and as Armitage I was convicted of breaking my country's laws, and was sentenced to transportation. Do not think very harshly of me, laddie. It was a debt of honour, so called, which I had to pay, and I used money which was not my own to do it, in the certainty that I could replace it before there could be any possibility of its being missed. But the most dreadful ill-luck pursued me. The money which I had reckoned upon never came to hand, and a premature examination of accounts exposed my deficit. The case might have been dealt leniently with, but the laws were more harshly administered thirty years ago than now, and on my twenty-third birthday I found myself chained as a felon with thirty-seven other convicts in the 'tween-decks of the bark Gloria Scott, bound for Australia.\n\n\"'It was the year '55, when the Crimean War was at its height, and the old convict ships had been largely used as transports in the Black Sea. The government was compelled, therefore, to use smaller and less suitable vessels for sending out their prisoners. The Gloria Scott had been in the Chinese tea-trade, but she was an old-fashioned, heavy-bowed, broad-beamed craft, and the new clippers had cut her out. She was a five-hundred-ton boat; and besides her thirty-eight jail-birds, she carried twenty-six of a crew, eighteen soldiers, a captain, three mates, a doctor, a chaplain, and four warders. Nearly a hundred souls were in her, all told, when we set sail from Falmouth.\n\n\"'The partitions between the cells of the convicts instead of being of thick oak, as is usual in convict-ships, were quite thin and frail. The man next to me, upon the aft side, was one whom I had particularly noticed when we were led down the quay. He was a young man with a clear, hairless face, a long, thin nose, and rather nut-cracker jaws. He carried his head very jauntily in the air, had a swaggering style of walking, and was, above all else, remarkable for his extraordinary height. I don't think any of our heads would have come up to his shoulder, and I am sure that he could not have measured less than six and a half feet. It was strange among so many sad and weary faces to see one which was full of energy and resolution. The sight of it was to me like a fire in a snowstorm. I was glad, then, to find that he was my neighbour, and gladder still when, in the dead of the night, I heard a whisper close to my ear and found that he had managed to cut an opening in the board which separated us.\n\n\"' \"Hullo, chummy!\" said he, \"what's your name, and what are you here for?\"\n\n\"'I answered him, and asked in turn who I was talking with.\n\n\"' \"I'm Jack Prendergast,\" said he, \"and by God! you'll learn to bless my name before you've done with me.\"\n\n\"'I remembered hearing of his case, for it was one which had made an immense sensation throughout the country some time before my own arrest. He was a man of good family and of great ability, but of incurably vicious habits, who had by an ingenious system of fraud obtained huge sums of money from the leading London merchants.\n\n\"' \"Ha, ha! You remember my case!\" said he proudly.\n\n\"' \"Very well, indeed.\"\n\n\"' \"Then maybe you remember something queer about it?\"\n\n\"' \"What was that, then?\"\n\n\"' \"I'd had nearly a quarter of a million, hadn't I?\"\n\n\"' \"So it was said.\"\n\n\"' \"But none was recovered, eh?\"\n\n\"' \"No.\"\n\n\"' \"Well, where d'ye suppose the balance is?\" he asked.\n\n\"' \"I have no idea,\" said I.\n\n\"' \"Right between my finger and thumb,\" he cried. \"By God! I've got more pounds to my name than you've hairs on your head. And if you've money, my son, and know how to handle it and spread it, you can do anything . Now, you don't think it likely that a man who could do anything is going to wear his breeches out sitting in the stinking hold of a rat-gutted, beetle-ridden, mouldy old coffin of a Chin China coaster. No, sir, such a man will look after himself and will look after his chums. You may lay to that! You hold on to him, and you may kiss the Book that he'll haul you through.\"\n\n\"'That was his style of talk, and at first I thought it meant nothing; but after a while, when he had tested me and sworn me in with all possible solemnity, he let me understand that there really was a plot to gain command of the vessel. A dozen of the prisoners had hatched it before they came aboard, Prendergast was the leader, and his money was the motive power.\n\n\"' \"I'd a partner,\" said he, \"a rare good man, as true as a stock to a barrel. He's got the dibbs, he has, and where do you think he is at this moment? Why, he's the chaplain of this ship\u2014the chaplain, no less! He came aboard with a black coat, and his papers right, and money enough in his box to buy the thing right up from keel to main-truck. The crew are his, body and soul. He could buy 'em at so much a gross with a cash discount, and he did it before ever they signed on. He's got two of the warders and Mereer, the second mate, and he'd get the captain himself, if he thought him worth it.\"\n\n\"' \"What are we to do, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"' \"What do you think?\" said he. \"We'll make the coats of some of these soldiers redder than ever the tailor did.\"\n\n\"' \"But they are armed,\" said I.\n\n\"' \"And so shall we be, my boy. There's a brace of pistols for every mother's son of us; and if we can't carry this ship, with the crew at our back, it's time we were all sent to a young misses' boarding-school. You speak to your mate upon the left to-night, and see if he is to be trusted.\"\n\n\"'I did so and found my other neighbour to be a young fellow in much the same position as myself, whose crime had been forgery. His name was Evans, but he afterwards changed it, like myself, and he is now a rich and prosperous man in the south of England. He was ready enough to join the conspiracy, as the only means of saving ourselves, and before we had crossed the bay there were only two of the prisoners who were not in the secret. One of these was of weak mind, and we did not dare to trust him, and the other was suffering from jaundice and could not be of any use to us.\n\n\"'From the beginning there was really nothing to prevent us from taking possession of the ship. The crew were a set of ruffians, specially picked for the job. The sham chaplain came into our cells to exhort us, carrying a black bag, supposed to be full of tracts, and so often did he come that by the third day we had each stowed away at the foot of our beds a file, a brace of pistols, a pound of powder, and twenty slugs. Two of the warders were agents of Prendergast, and the second mate was his right-hand man. The captain, the two mates, two warders, Lieutenant Martin, his eighteen soldiers, and the doctor were all that we had against us. Yet, safe as it was, we determined to neglect no precaution, and to make our attack suddenly by night. It came, however, more quickly than we expected, and in this way.\n\n\"'One evening, about the third week after our start, the doctor had come down to see one of the prisoners who was ill, and, putting his hand down on the bottom of his bunk, he felt the outline of the pistols. If he had been silent he might have blown the whole thing, but he was a nervous little chap, so he gave a cry of surprise and turned so pale that the man knew what was up in an instant and seized him. He was gagged before he could give the alarm and tied down upon the bed. He had unlocked the door that led to the deck, and we were through it in a rush. The two sentries were shot down, and so was a corporal who came running to see what was the matter. There were two more soldiers at the door of the stateroom, and their muskets seemed not to be loaded, for they never fired upon us, and they were shot while trying to fix their bayonets. Then we rushed on into the captain's cabin, but as we pushed open the door there was an explosion from within, and there he lay with his brains smeared over the chart of the Atlantic which was pinned upon the table, while the chaplain stood with a smoking pistol in his hand at his elbow. The two mates had both been seized by the crew, and the whole business seemed to be settled.\n\n\"'The stateroom was next the cabin, and we flocked in there and flopped down on the settees, all speaking together, for we were just mad with the feeling that we were free once more. There were lockers all round, and Wilson, the sham chaplain, knocked one of them in, and pulled out a dozen of brown sherry. We cracked off the necks of the bottles, poured the stuff out into tumblers, and were just tossing them off when in an instant without warning there came the roar of muskets in our ears, and the saloon was so full of smoke that we could not see across the table. When it cleared again the place was a shambles. Wilson and eight others were wriggling on the top of each other on the floor, and the blood and the brown sherry on that table turn me sick now when I think of it. We were so cowed by the sight that I think we should have given the job up if it had not been for Prendergast. He bellowed like a bull and rushed for the door with all that were left alive at his heels. Out we ran, and there on the poop were the lieutenant and ten of his men. The swing skylights above the saloon table had been a bit open, and they had fired on us through the slit. We got on them before they could load, and they stood to it like men; but we had the upper hand of them, and in five minutes it was all over. My God! was there ever a slaughter-house like that ship! Prendergast was like a raging devil, and he picked the soldiers up as if they had been children and threw them overboard alive or dead. There was one sergeant that was horribly wounded and yet kept on swimming for a surprising time until someone in mercy blew out his brains. When the fighting was over there was no one left of our enemies except just the warders, the mates, and the doctor.\n\n\"'It was over them that the great quarrel arose. There were many of us who were glad enough to win back our freedom, and yet who had no wish to have murder on our souls. It was one thing to knock the soldiers over with their muskets in their hands, and it was another to stand by while men were being killed in cold blood. Eight of us, five convicts and three sailors, said that we would not see it done. But there was no moving Prendergast and those who were with him. Our only chance of safety lay in making a clean job of it, said he, and he would not leave a tongue with power to wag in a witness-box. It nearly came to our sharing the fate of the prisoners, but at last he said that if we wished we might take a boat and go. We jumped at the offer, for we were already sick of these bloodthirsty doings, and we saw that there would be worse before it was done. We were given a suit of sailor togs each, a barrel of water, two casks, one of junk and one of biscuits, and a compass. Prendergast threw us over a chart, told us that we were shipwrecked mariners whose ship had foundered in Lat. 15\u00b0 and Long. 25\u00b0 west, and then cut the painter and let us go.\n\n\"'And now I come to the most surprising part of my story, my dear son. The seamen had hauled the fore-yard aback during the rising, but now as we left them they brought it square again, and as there was a light wind from the north and east the bark began to draw slowly away from us. Our boat lay, rising and falling, upon the long, smooth rollers, and Evans and I, who were the most educated of the party, were sitting in the sheets working out our position and planning what coast we should make for. It was a nice question, for the Cape Verdes were about five hundred miles to the north of us, and the African coast about seven hundred to the east. On the whole, as the wind was coming round to the north, we thought that Sierra Leone might be best and turned our head in that direction, the bark being at that time nearly hull down on our starboard quarter. Suddenly as we looked at her we saw a dense black cloud of smoke shoot up from her, which hung like a monstrous tree upon the sky-line. A few seconds later a roar like thunder burst upon our ears, and as the smoke thinned away there was no sign left of the Gloria Scott. In an instant we swept the boat's head round again and pulled with all our strength for the place where the haze still trailing over the water marked the scene of this catastrophe.\n\n\"'It was a long hour before we reached it, and at first we feared that we had come too late to save anyone. A splintered boat and a number of crates and fragments of spars rising and falling on the waves showed us where the vessel had foundered; but there was no sign of life, and we had turned away in despair, when we heard a cry for help and saw at some distance a piece of wreckage with a man lying stretched across it. When we pulled him aboard the boat he proved to be a young seaman of the name of Hudson, who was so burned and exhausted that he could give us no account of what had happened until the following morning.\n\n\"'It seemed that after we had left, Prendergast and his gang had proceeded to put to death the five remaining prisoners. The two warders had been shot and thrown overboard, and so also had the third mate. Prendergast then descended into the 'tween-decks and with his own hands cut the throat of the unfortunate surgeon. There only remained the first mate, who was a bold and active man. When he saw the convict approaching him with the bloody knife in his hand he kicked off his bonds, which he had somehow contrived to loosen, and rushing down the deck he plunged into the after-hold. A dozen convicts, who descended with their pistols in search of him, found him with a match-box in his hand seated beside an open powder-barrel, which was one of the hundred carried on board, and swearing that he would blow all hands up if he were in any way molested. An instant later the explosion occurred, though Hudson thought it was caused by the misdirected bullet of one of the convicts rather than the mate's match. Be the cause what it may, it was the end of the Gloria Scott and of the rabble who held command of her.\n\n\"'Such, in a few words, my dear boy, is the history of this terrible business in which I was involved. Next day we were picked up by the brig Hotspur, bound for Australia, whose captain found no difficulty in believing that we were the survivors of a passenger ship which had foundered. The transport ship Gloria Scott was set down by the Admiralty as being lost at sea, and no word has ever leaked out as to her true fate. After an excellent voyage the Hotspur landed us at Sydney, where Evans and I changed our names and made our way to the diggings, where, among the crowds who were gathered from all nations, we had no difficulty in losing our former identities. The rest I need not relate. We prospered, we travelled, we came back as rich colonials to England, and we bought country estates. For more than twenty years we have led peaceful and useful lives, and we hoped that our past was forever buried. Imagine, then, my feelings when in the seaman who came to us I recognized instantly the man who had been picked off the wreck. He had tracked us down somehow and had set himself to live upon our fears. You will understand now how it was that I strove to keep the peace with him, and you will in some measure sympathize with me in the fears which fill me, now that he has gone from me to his other victim with threats upon his tongue.'\n\n\"Underneath is written in a hand so shaky as to be hardly legible, 'Beddoes writes in cipher to say H. has told all. Sweet Lord, have mercy on our souls!'\n\n\"That was the narrative which I read that night to young Trevor, and I think, Watson, that under the circumstances it was a dramatic one. The good fellow was heart-broken at it, and went out to the Terai tea planting, where I hear that he is doing well. As to the sailor and Beddoes, neither of them was ever heard of again after that day on which the letter of warning was written. They both disappeared utterly and completely. No complaint had been lodged with the police, so that Beddoes had mistaken a threat for a deed. Hudson had been seen lurking about, and it was believed by the police that he had done away with Beddoes and had fled. For myself I believe that the truth was exactly the opposite. I think that it is most probable that Beddoes, pushed to desperation and believing himself to have been already betrayed, had revenged himself upon Hudson, and had fled from the country with as much money as he could lay his hands on. Those are the facts of the case, Doctor, and if they are of any use to your collection, I am sure that they are very heartily at your service.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE MUSGRAVE RITUAL", + "text": "An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an armchair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.\n\nOur chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter's night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts into his commonplace book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor, and, squatting down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into separate packages.\n\n\"There are cases enough here, Watson,\" said he, looking at me with mischievous eyes. \"I think that if you knew all that I had in this box you would ask me to pull some out instead of putting others in.\"\n\n\"These are the records of your early work, then?\" I asked. \"I have often wished that I had notes of those cases.\"\n\n\"Yes, my boy, these were all done prematurely before my biographer had come to glorify me.\" He lifted bundle after bundle in a tender, caressing sort of way. \"They are not all successes, Watson,\" said he. \"But there are some pretty little problems among them. Here's the record of the Tarleton murders, and the case of Vamberry, the wine merchant, and the adventure of the old Russian woman, and the singular affair of the aluminum crutch, as well as a full account of Ricoletti of the club-foot, and his abominable wife. And here\u2014ah, now, this really is something a little recherch\u00e9.\"\n\nHe dived his arm down to the bottom of the chest and brought up a small wooden box with a sliding lid such as children's toys are kept in. From within he produced a crumpled piece of paper, an old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old discs of metal.\n\n\"Well, my boy, what do you make of this lot?\" he asked, smiling at my expression.\n\n\"It is a curious collection.\"\n\n\"Very curious; and the story that hangs round it will strike you as being more curious still.\"\n\n\"These relics have a history, then?\"\n\n\"So much so that they are history.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes picked them up one by one and laid them along the edge of the table. Then he reseated himself in his chair and looked them over with a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes.\n\n\"These,\" said he, \"are all that I have left to remind me of the adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.\"\n\nI had heard him mention the case more than once, though I had never been able to gather the details. \"I should be so glad,\" said I, \"if you would give me an account of it.\"\n\n\"And leave the litter as it is?\" he cried mischievously. \"Your tidiness won't bear much strain, after all, Watson. But I should be glad that you should add this case to your annals, for there are points in it which make it quite unique in the criminal records of this or, I believe, of any other country. A collection of my trifling achievements would certainly be incomplete which contained no account of this very singular business.\n\n\"You may remember how the affair of the Gloria Scott, and my conversation with the unhappy man whose fate I told you of, first turned my attention in the direction of the profession which has become my life's work. You see me now when my name has become known far and wide, and when I am generally recognized both by the public and by the official force as being a final court of appeal in doubtful cases. Even when you knew me first, at the time of the affair which you have commemorated in 'A Study in Scarlet,' I had already established a considerable, though not a very lucrative, connection. You can hardly realize, then, how difficult I found it at first, and how long I had to wait before I succeeded in making any headway.\n\n\"When I first came up to London I had rooms in Montague Street, just round the corner from the British Museum, and there I waited, filling in my too abundant leisure time by studying all those branches of science which might make me more efficient. Now and again cases came in my way, principally through the introduction of old fellow-students, for during my last years at the university there was a good deal of talk there about myself and my methods. The third of these cases was that of the Musgrave Ritual, and it is to the interest which was aroused by that singular chain of events, and the large issues which proved to be at stake, that I trace my first stride towards the position which I now hold.\n\n\"Reginald Musgrave had been in the same college as myself, and I had some slight acquaintance with him. He was not generally popular among the undergraduates, though it always seemed to me that what was set down as pride was really an attempt to cover extreme natural diffidence. In appearance he was a man of an exceedingly aristocratic type, thin, high-nosed, and large-eyed, with languid and yet courtly manners. He was indeed a scion of one of the very oldest families in the kingdom, though his branch was a cadet one which had separated from the northern Musgraves some time in the sixteenth century and had established itself in western Sussex, where the Manor House of Hurlstone is perhaps the oldest inhabited building in the county. Something of his birth-place seemed to cling to the man, and I never looked at his pale, keen face or the poise of his head without associating him with gray archways and mullioned windows and all the venerable wreckage of a feudal keep. Once or twice we drifted into talk, and I can remember that more than once he expressed a keen interest in my methods of observation and inference.\n\n\"For four years I had seen nothing of him until one morning he walked into my room in Montague Street. He had changed little, was dressed like a young man of fashion\u2014he was always a bit of a dandy\u2014and preserved the same quiet, suave manner which had formerly distinguished him.\n\n\"'How has all gone with you, Musgrave?' I asked after we had cordially shaken hands.\n\n\"'You probably heard of my poor father's death,' said he; 'he was carried off about two years ago. Since then I have of course had the Hurlstone estate to manage, and as I am member for my district as well, my life has been a busy one. But I understand, Holmes, that you are turning to practical ends those powers with which you used to amaze us?'\n\n\"'Yes,' said I, 'I have taken to living by my wits.'\n\n\"'I am delighted to hear it, for your advice at present would be exceedingly valuable to me. We have had some very strange doings at Hurlstone, and the police have been able to throw no light upon the matter. It is really the most extraordinary and inexplicable business.\n\n\"You can imagine with what eagerness I listened to him, Watson, for the very chance for which I had been panting during all those months of inaction seemed to have come within my reach. In my inmost heart I believed that I could succeed where others failed, and now I had the opportunity to test myself.\n\n\"'Pray let me have the details,' I cried.\n\n\"Reginald Musgrave sat down opposite to me and lit the cigarette which I had pushed towards him.\n\n\"'You must know,' said he, 'that though I am a bachelor, I have to keep up a considerable staff of servants at Hurlstone, for it is a rambling old place and takes a good deal of looking after. I preserve, too, and in the pheasant months I usually have a house-party, so that it would not do to be short-handed. Altogether there are eight maids, the cook, the butler, two footmen, and a boy. The garden and the stables of course have a separate staff.\n\n\"'Of these servants the one who had been longest in our service was Brunton, the butler. He was a young schoolmaster out of place when he was first taken up by my father, but he was a man of great energy and character, and he soon became quite invaluable in the household. He was a well-grown, handsome man, with a splendid forehead, and though he has been with us for twenty years he cannot be more than forty now. With his personal advantages and his extraordinary gifts\u2014for he can speak several languages and play nearly every musical instrument\u2014it is wonderful that he should have been satisfied so long in such a position, but I suppose that he was comfortable and lacked energy to make any change. The butler of Hurlstone is always a thing that is remembered by all who visit us.\n\n\"'But this paragon has one fault. He is a bit of a Don Juan, and you can imagine that for a man like him it is not a very difficult part to play in a quiet country district. When he was married it was all right, but since he has been a widower we have had no end of trouble with him. A few months ago we were in hopes that he was about to settle down again, for he became engaged to Rachel Howells, our second housemaid; but he has thrown her over since then and taken up with Janet Tregellis, the daughter of the head game-keeper. Rachel\u2014who is a very good girl, but of an excitable Welsh temperament\u2014had a sharp touch of brain-fever and goes about the house now\u2014or did until yesterday\u2014like a black-eyed shadow of her former self. That was our first drama at Hurlstone; but a second one came to drive it from our minds, and it was prefaced by the disgrace and dismissal of butler Brunton.\n\n\"'This was how it came about. I have said that the man was intelligent, and this very intelligence has caused his ruin, for it seems to have led to an insatiable curiosity about things which did not in the least concern him. I had no idea of the lengths to which this would carry him until the merest accident opened my eyes to it.\n\n\"'I have said that the house is a rambling one. One day last week\u2014on Thursday night, to be more exact\u2014I found that I could not sleep, having foolishly taken a cup of strong caf\u00e9 noir after my dinner. After struggling against it until two in the morning, I felt that it was quite hopeless, so I rose and lit the candle with the intention of continuing a novel which I was reading. The book, however, had been left in the billiard-room, so I pulled on my dressing-gown and started off to get it.\n\n\"'In order to reach the billiard-room I had to descend a flight of stairs and then to cross the head of a passage which led to the library and the gun-room. You can imagine my surprise when, as I looked down this corridor, I saw a glimmer of light coming from the open door of the library. I had myself extinguished the lamp and closed the door before coming to bed. Naturally my first thought was of burglars. The corridors at Hurlstone have their walls largely decorated with trophies of old weapons. From one of these I picked a battle-axe, and then, leaving my candle behind me, I crept on tiptoe down the passage and peeped in at the open door.\n\n\"'Brunton, the butler, was in the library. He was sitting, fully dressed, in an easy-chair, with a slip of paper which looked like a map upon his knee, and his forehead sunk forward upon his hand in deep thought. I stood dumb with astonishment, watching him from the darkness. A small taper on the edge of the table shed a feeble light which sufficed to show me that he was fully dressed. Suddenly, as I looked, he rose from his chair, and, walking over to a bureau at the side, he unlocked it and drew out one of the drawers. From this he took a paper, and, returning to his seat, he flattened it out beside the taper on the edge of the table and began to study it with minute attention. My indignation at this calm examination of our family documents overcame me so far that I took a step forward, and Brunton, looking up, saw me standing in the doorway. He sprang to his feet, his face turned livid with fear, and he thrust into his breast the chart-like paper which he had been originally studying.\n\n\"' \"So!\" said I. \"This is how you repay the trust which we have reposed in you. You will leave my service to-morrow.\"\n\n\"'He bowed with the look of a man who is utterly crushed and slunk past me without a word. The taper was still on the table, and by its light I glanced to see what the paper was which Brunton had taken from the bureau. To my surprise it was nothing of any importance at all, but simply a copy of the questions and answers in the singular old observance called the Musgrave Ritual. It is a sort of ceremony peculiar to our family, which each Musgrave for centuries past has gone through on his coming of age\u2014a thing of private interest, and perhaps of some little importance to the arch\u00e6ologist, like our own blazonings and charges, but of no practical use whatever.'\n\n\"'We had better come back to the paper afterwards,' said I.\n\n\"'If you think it really necessary,' he answered with some hesitation. 'To continue my statement, however: I relocked the bureau, using the key which Brunton had left, and I had turned to go when I was surprised to find that the butler had returned, and was standing before me.\n\n\"' \"Mr. Musgrave, sir,\" he cried in a voice which was hoarse with emotion, \"I can't bear disgrace, sir. I've always been proud above my station in life, and disgrace would kill me. My blood will be on your head, sir\u2014it will, indeed\u2014if you drive me to despair. If you cannot keep me after what has passed, then for God's sake let me give you notice and leave in a month, as if of my own free will. I could stand that, Mr. Musgrave, but not to be cast out before all the folk that I know so well.\"\n\n\"' \"You don't deserve much consideration, Brunton,\" I answered. \"Your conduct has been most infamous. However, as you have been a long time in the family, I have no wish to bring public disgrace upon you. A month, however, is too long. Take yourself away in a week, and give what reason you like for going.\"\n\n\"' \"Only a week, sir?\" he cried in a despairing voice. \"A fortnight\u2014say at least a fortnight!\"\n\n\"' \"A week,\" I repeated, \"and you may consider yourself to have been very leniently dealt with.\"\n\n\"'He crept away, his face sunk upon his breast, like a broken man, while I put out the light and returned to my room.\n\n\"'For two days after this Brunton was most assiduous in his attention to his duties. I made no allusion to what had passed and waited with some curiosity to see how he would cover his disgrace. On the third morning, however, he did not appear, as was his custom, after breakfast to receive my instructions for the day. As I left the dining-room I happened to meet Rachel Howells, the maid. I have told you that she had only recently recovered from an illness and was looking so wretchedly pale and wan that I remonstrated with her for being at work.\n\n\"' \"You should be in bed,\" I said. \"Come back to your duties when you are stronger.\"\n\n\"'She looked at me with so strange an expression that I began to suspect that her brain was affected.\n\n\"' \"I am strong enough, Mr. Musgrave,\" said she.\n\n\"' \"We will see what the doctor says,\" I answered. \"You must stop work now, and when you go downstairs just say that I wish to see Brunton.\"\n\n\"' \"The butler is gone,\" said she.\n\n\"' \"Gone! Gone where?\"\n\n\"' \"He is gone. No one has seen him. He is not in his room. Oh, yes, he is gone, he is gone!\" She fell back against the wall with shriek after shriek of laughter, while I, horrified at this sudden hysterical attack, rushed to the bell to summon help. The girl was taken to her room, still screaming and sobbing, while I made inquiries about Brunton. There was no doubt about it that he had disappeared. His bed had not been slept in, he had been seen by no one since he had retired to his room the night before, and yet it was difficult to see how he could have left the house, as both windows and doors were found to be fastened in the morning. His clothes, his watch, and even his money were in his room, but the black suit which he usually wore was missing. His slippers, too, were gone, but his boots were left behind. Where then could butler Brunton have gone in the night, and what could have become of him now?\n\n\"'Of course we searched the house from cellar to garret, but there was no trace of him. It is, as I have said, a labyrinth of an old house, especially the original wing, which is now practically uninhabited; but we ransacked every room and cellar without discovering the least sign of the missing man. It was incredible to me that he could have gone away leaving all his property behind him, and yet where could he be? I called in the local police, but without success. Rain had fallen on the night before, and we examined the lawn and the paths all round the house, but in vain. Matters were in this state, when a new development quite drew our attention away from the original mystery.\n\n\"'For two days Rachel Howells had been so ill, sometimes delirious, sometimes hysterical, that a nurse had been employed to sit up with her at night. On the third night after Brunton's disappearance, the nurse, finding her patient sleeping nicely, had dropped into a nap in the armchair, when she woke in the early morning to find the bed empty, the window open, and no signs of the invalid. I was instantly aroused, and, with the two footmen, started off at once in search of the missing girl. It was not difficult to tell the direction which she had taken, for, starting from under her window, we could follow her footmarks easily across the lawn to the edge of the mere, where they vanished close to the gravel path which leads out of the grounds. The lake there is eight feet deep, and you can imagine our feelings when we saw that the trail of the poor demented girl came to an end at the edge of it.\n\n\"'Of course, we had the drags at once and set to work to recover the remains, but no trace of the body could we find. On the other hand, we brought to the surface an object of a most unexpected kind. It was a linen bag which contained within it a mass of old rusted and discoloured metal and several dull-coloured pieces of pebble or glass. This strange find was all that we could get from the mere, and, although we made every possible search and inquiry yesterday, we know nothing of the fate either of Rachel Howells or of Richard Brunton. The county police are at their wit's end, and I have come up to you as a last resource.\n\n\"You can imagine, Watson, with what eagerness I listened to this extraordinary sequence of events, and endeavoured to piece them together, and to devise some common thread upon which they might all hang. The butler was gone. The maid was gone. The maid had loved the butler, but had afterwards had cause to hate him. She was of Welsh blood, fiery and passionate. She had been terribly excited immediately after his disappearance. She had flung into the lake a bag containing some curious contents. These were all factors which had to be taken into consideration, and yet none of them got quite to the heart of the matter. What was the starting-point of this chain of events? There lay the end of this tangled line.\n\n\"'I must see that paper, Musgrave,' said I, 'which this butler of yours thought it worth his while to consult, even at the risk of the loss of his place.'\n\n\"'It is rather an absurd business, this ritual of ours,' he answered. 'But it has at least the saving grace of antiquity to excuse it. I have a copy of the questions and answers here if you care to run your eye over them.'\n\n\"He handed me the very paper which I have here, Watson, and this is the strange catechism to which each Musgrave had to submit when he came to man's estate. I will read you the questions and answers as they stand.\n\n\"'Whose was it?'\n\n\"'His who is gone.'\n\n\"'Who shall have it?'\n\n\"'He who will come.'\n\n\"'Where was the sun?'\n\n\"'Over the oak.'\n\n\"'Where was the shadow?'\n\n\"'Under the elm.'\n\n\"'How was it stepped?'\n\n\"'North by ten and by ten, east by five and by five, south by two and by two, west by one and by one, and so under.'\n\n\"'What shall we give for it?'\n\n\"'All that is ours.'\n\n\"'Why should we give it?'\n\n\"'For the sake of the trust.'\n\n\"'The original has no date, but is in the spelling of the middle of the seventeenth century,' remarked Musgrave. 'I am afraid, however, that it can be of little help to you in solving this mystery.'\n\n\"'At least,' said I, 'it gives us another mystery, and one which is even more interesting than the first. It may be that the solution of the one may prove to be the solution of the other. You will excuse me, Musgrave, if I say that your butler appears to me to have been a very clever man, and to have had a clearer insight than ten generations of his masters.'\n\n\"'I hardly follow you,' said Musgrave. 'The paper seems to me to be of no practical importance.'\n\n\"'But to me it seems immensely practical, and I fancy that Brunton took the same view. He had probably seen it before that night on which you caught him.'\n\n\"'It is very possible. We took no pains to hide it.'\n\n\"'He simply wished, I should imagine, to refresh his memory upon that last occasion. He had, as I understand, some sort of map or chart which he was comparing with the manuscript, and which he thrust into his pocket when you appeared.'\n\n\"'That is true. But what could he have to do with this old family custom of ours, and what does this rigmarole mean?'\n\n\"'I don't think that we should have much difficulty in determining that,' said I; 'with your permission we will take the first train down to Sussex and go a little more deeply into the matter upon the spot.'\n\n\"The same afternoon saw us both at Hurlstone. Possibly you have seen pictures and read descriptions of the famous old building, so I will confine my account of it to saying that it is built in the shape of an L, the long arm being the more modern portion, and the shorter the ancient nucleus from which the other has developed. Over the low, heavy-lintelled door, in the centre of this old part, is chiselled the date, 1607, but experts are agreed that the beams and stonework are really much older than this. The enormously thick walls and tiny windows of this part had in the last century driven the family into building the new wing, and the old one was used now as a storehouse and a cellar, when it was used at all. A splendid park with fine old timber surrounds the house, and the lake, to which my client had referred, lay close to the avenue, about two hundred yards from the building.\n\n\"I was already firmly convinced, Watson, that there were not three separate mysteries here, but one only, and that if I could read the Musgrave Ritual aright I should hold in my hand the clue which would lead me to the truth concerning both the butler Brunton and the maid Howells. To that then I turned all my energies. Why should this servant be so anxious to master this old formula? Evidently because he saw something in it which had escaped all those generations of country squires, and from which he expected some personal advantage. What was it then, and how had it affected his fate?\n\n\"It was perfectly obvious to me, on reading the Ritual, that the measurements must refer to some spot to which the rest of the document alluded, and that if we could find that spot we should be in a fair way towards finding what the secret was which the old Musgraves had thought it necessary to embalm in so curious a fashion. There were two guides given us to start with, an oak and an elm. As to the oak there could be no question at all. Right in front of the house, upon the left-hand side of the drive, there stood a patriarch among oaks, one of the most magnificent trees that I have ever seen.\n\n\"'That was there when your Ritual was drawn up,' said I as we drove past it.\n\n\"'It was there at the Norman Conquest in all probability,' he answered. 'It has a girth of twenty-three feet.'\n\n\"Here was one of my fixed points secured.\n\n\"'Have you any old elms?' I asked.\n\n\"'There used to be a very old one over yonder, but it was struck by lightning ten years ago, and we cut down the stump.'\n\n\"'You can see where it used to be?'\n\n\"'Oh, yes.'\n\n\"'There are no other elms?'\n\n\"'No old ones, but plenty of beeches.'\n\n\"'I should like to see where it grew.'\n\n\"We had driven up in a dog-cart, and my client led me away at once, without our entering the house, to the scar on the lawn where the elm had stood. It was nearly midway between the oak and the house. My investigation seemed to be progressing.\n\n\"'I suppose it is impossible to find out how high the elm was?' I asked.\n\n\"'I can give you it at once. It was sixty-four feet.'\n\n\"'How do you come to know it?' I asked in surprise.\n\n\"'When my old tutor used to give me an exercise in trigonometry, it always took the shape of measuring heights. When I was a lad I worked out every tree and building in the estate.'\n\n\"This was an unexpected piece of luck. My data were coming more quickly than I could have reasonably hoped.\n\n\"'Tell me,' I asked, 'did your butler ever ask you such a question?'\n\n\"Reginald Musgrave looked at me in astonishment. 'Now that you call it to my mind,' he answered, 'Brunton did ask me about the height of the tree some months ago in connection with some little argument with the groom.'\n\n\"This was excellent news, Watson, for it showed me that I was on the right road. I looked up at the sun. It was low in the heavens, and I calculated that in less than an hour it would lie just above the topmost branches of the old oak. One condition mentioned in the Ritual would then be fulfilled. And the shadow of the elm must mean the farther end of the shadow, otherwise the trunk would have been chosen as the guide. I had, then, to find where the far end of the shadow would fall when the sun was just clear of the oak.\"\n\n\"That must have been difficult, Holmes, when the elm was no longer there.\"\n\n\"Well, at least I knew that if Brunton could do it, I could also. Besides, there was no real difficulty. I went with Musgrave to his study and whittled myself this peg, to which I tied this long string with a knot at each yard. Then I took two lengths of a fishing-rod, which came to just six feet, and I went back with my client to where the elm had been. The sun was just grazing the top of the oak. I fastened the rod on end, marked out the direction of the shadow, and measured it. It was nine feet in length.\n\n\"Of course the calculation now was a simple one. If a rod of six feet threw a shadow of nine, a tree of sixty-four feet would throw one of ninety-six, and the line of the one would of course be the line of the other. I measured out the distance, which brought me almost to the wall of the house, and I thrust a peg into the spot. You can imagine my exultation, Watson, when within two inches of my peg I saw a conical depression in the ground. I knew that it was the mark made by Brunton in his measurements, and that I was still upon his trail.\n\n\"From this starting-point I proceeded to step, having first taken the cardinal points by my pocket-compass. Ten steps with each foot took me along parallel with the wall of the house, and again I marked my spot with a peg. Then I carefully paced off five to the east and two to the south. It brought me to the very threshold of the old door. Two steps to the west meant now that I was to go two paces down the stone-flagged passage, and this was the place indicated by the Ritual.\n\n\"Never have I felt such a cold chill of disappointment, Watson. For a moment it seemed to me that there must be some radical mistake in my calculations. The setting sun shone full upon the passage floor, and I could see that the old, foot-worn gray stones with which it was paved were firmly cemented together, and had certainly not been moved for many a long year. Brunton had not been at work here. I tapped upon the floor, but it sounded the same all over, and there was no sign of any crack or crevice. But, fortunately, Musgrave, who had begun to appreciate the meaning of my proceedings, and who was now as excited as myself, took out his manuscript to check my calculations.\n\n\"'And under,' he cried. 'You have omitted the \"and under.\"'\n\n\"I had thought that it meant that we were to dig, but now, of course, I saw at once that I was wrong. 'There is a cellar under this then?' I cried.\n\n\"'Yes, and as old as the house. Down here, through this door.'\n\n\"We went down a winding stone stair, and my companion, striking a match, lit a large lantern which stood on a barrel in the corner. In an instant it was obvious that we had at last come upon the true place, and that we had not been the only people to visit the spot recently.\n\n\"It had been used for the storage of wood, but the billets, which had evidently been littered over the floor, were now piled at the sides, so as to leave a clear space in the middle. In this space lay a large and heavy flag-stone with a rusted iron ring in the centre to which a thick shepherd's-check muffler was attached.\n\n\"'By Jove!' cried my client. 'That's Brunton's muffler. I have seen it on him and could swear to it. What has the villain been doing here?'\n\n\"At my suggestion a couple of the county police were summoned to be present, and I then endeavoured to raise the stone by pulling on the cravat. I could only move it slightly, and it was with the aid of one of the constables that I succeeded at last in carrying it to one side. A black hole yawned beneath into which we all peered, while Musgrave, kneeling at the side, pushed down the lantern.\n\n\"A small chamber about seven feet deep and four feet square lay open to us. At one side of this was a squat, brassbound wooden box, the lid of which was hinged upward, with this curious old-fashioned key projecting from the lock. It was furred outside by a thick layer of dust, and damp and worms had eaten through the wood, so that a crop of livid fungi was growing on the inside of it. Several discs of metal, old coins apparently, such as I hold here, were scattered over the bottom of the box, but it contained nothing else.\n\n\"At the moment, however, we had no thought for the old chest, for our eyes were riveted upon that which crouched beside it. It was the figure of a man, clad in a suit of black, who squatted down upon his hams with his forehead sunk upon the edge of the box and his two arms thrown out on each side of it. The attitude had drawn all the stagnant blood to the face, and no man could have recognized that distorted liver-coloured countenance; but his height, his dress, and his hair were all sufficient to show my client, when we had drawn the body up, that it was indeed his missing butler. He had been dead some days, but there was no wound or bruise upon his person to show how he had met his dreadful end. When his body had been carried from the cellar we found ourselves still confronted with a problem which was almost as formidable as that with which we had started.\n\n\"I confess that so far, Watson, I had been disappointed in my investigation. I had reckoned upon solving the matter when once I had found the place referred to in the Ritual; but now I was there, and was apparently as far as ever from knowing what it was which the family had concealed with such elaborate precautions. It is true that I had thrown a light upon the fate of Brunton, but now I had to ascertain how that fate had come upon him, and what part had been played in the matter by the woman who had disappeared. I sat down upon a keg in the corner and thought the whole matter carefully over.\n\n\"You know my methods in such cases, Watson. I put myself in the man's place, and, having first gauged his intelligence, I try to imagine how I should myself have proceeded under the same circumstances. In this case the matter was simplified by Brunton's intelligence being quite first-rate, so that it was unnecessary to make any allowance for the personal equation, as the astronomers have dubbed it. He knew that something valuable was concealed. He had spotted the place. He found that the stone which covered it was just too heavy for a man to move unaided. What would he do next? He could not get help from outside, even if he had someone whom he could trust, without the unbarring of doors and considerable risk of detection. It was better, if he could, to have his help-mate inside the house. But whom could he ask? This girl had been devoted to him. A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her. He would try by a few attentions to make his peace with the girl Howells, and then would engage her as his accomplice. Together they would come at night to the cellar, and their united force would suffice to raise the stone. So far I could follow their actions as if I had actually seen them.\n\n\"But for two of them, and one a woman, it must have been heavy work, the raising of that stone. A burly Sussex policeman and I had found it no light job. What would they do to assist them? Probably what I should have done myself. I rose and examined carefully the different billets of wood which were scattered round the floor. Almost at once I came upon what I expected. One piece, about three feet in length, had a very marked indentation at one end, while several were flattened at the sides as if they had been compressed by some considerable weight. Evidently, as they had dragged the stone up, they had thrust the chunks of wood into the chink until at last when the opening was large enough to crawl through, they would hold it open by a billet placed lengthwise, which might very well become indented at the lower end, since the whole weight of the stone would press it down on to the edge of this other slab. So far I was still on safe ground.\n\n\"And now how was I to proceed to reconstruct this midnight drama? Clearly, only one could fit into the hole, and that one was Brunton. The girl must have waited above. Brunton then unlocked the box, handed up the contents presumably\u2014since they were not to be found\u2014and then\u2014and then what happened?\n\n\"What smouldering fire of vengeance had suddenly sprung into flame in this passionate Celtic woman's soul when she saw the man who had wronged her\u2014wronged her, perhaps, far more than we suspected\u2014in her power? Was it a chance that the wood had slipped and that the stone had shut Brunton into what had become his sepulchre? Had she only been guilty of silence as to his fate? Or had some sudden blow from her hand dashed the support away and sent the slab crashing down into its place? Be that as it might, I seemed to see that woman's figure still clutching at her treasure trove and flying wildly up the winding stair, with her ears ringing perhaps with the muffled screams from behind her and with the drumming of frenzied hands against the slab of stone which was choking her faithless lover's life out.\n\n\"Here was the secret of her blanched face, her shaken nerves, her peals of hysterical laughter on the next morning. But what had been in the box? What had she done with that? Of course, it must have been the old metal and pebbles which my client had dragged from the mere. She had thrown them in there at the first opportunity to remove the last trace of her crime.\n\n\"For twenty minutes I had sat motionless, thinking the matter out. Musgrave still stood with a very pale face, swinging his lantern and peering, down into the hole.\n\n\"'These are coins of Charles the First,' said he, holding out the few which had been in the box; 'you see we were right in fixing our date for the Ritual.'\n\n\"'We may find something else of Charles the First,' I cried, as the probable meaning of the first two questions of the Ritual broke suddenly upon me. 'Let me see the contents of the bag which you fished from the mere.'\n\n\"We ascended to his study, and he laid the d\u00e9bris before me. I could understand his regarding it as of small importance when I looked at it, for the metal was almost black and the stones lustreless and dull. I rubbed one of them on my sleeve, however, and it glowed afterwards like a spark in the dark hollow of my hand. The metal work was in the form of a double ring, but it had been bent and twisted out of its original shape.\n\n\"'You must bear in mind,' said I, 'that the royal party made head in England even after the death of the king, and that when they at last fled they probably left many of their most precious possessions buried behind them, with the intention of returning for them in more peaceful times.'\n\n\"'My ancestor, Sir Ralph Musgrave, was a prominent Cavalier and the right-hand man of Charles the Second in his wanderings,' said my friend.\n\n\"'Ah, indeed!' I answered. 'Well now, I think that really should give us the last link that we wanted. I must congratulate you on coming into the possession, though in rather a tragic manner, of a relic which is of great intrinsic value, but of even greater importance as a historical curiosity.'\n\n\"'What is it, then?' he gasped in astonishment.\n\n\"'It is nothing less than the ancient crown of the kings of England.'\n\n\"'The crown!'\n\n\"'Precisely. Consider what the Ritual says. How does it run? \"Whose was it?\" \"His who is gone.\" That was after the execution of Charles. Then, \"Who shall have it?\" \"He who will come.\" That was Charles the Second, whose advent was already foreseen. There can, I think, be no doubt that this battered and shapeless diadem once encircled the brows of the royal Stuarts.'\n\n\"'And how came it in the pond?'\n\n\"'Ah, that is a question that will take some time to answer.' And with that I sketched out to him the whole long chain of surmise and of proof which I had constructed. The twilight had closed in and the moon was shining brightly in the sky before my narrative was finished.\n\n\"'And how was it then that Charles did not get his crown when he returned? ' asked Musgrave, pushing back the relic into its linen bag.\n\n\"'Ah, there you lay your finger upon the one point which we shall probably never be able to clear up. It is likely that the Musgrave who held the secret died in the interval, and by some oversight left this guide to his descendant without explaining the meaning of it. From that day to this it has been handed down from father to son, until at last it came within reach of a man who tore its secret out of it and lost his life in the venture.'\n\n\"And that's the story of the Musgrave Ritual, Watson. They have the crown down at Hurlstone\u2014though they had some legal bother and a considerablesum to pay before they were allowed to retain it. I am sure that if you mentioned my name they would be happy to show it to you. Of the woman nothing was ever heard, and the probability is that she got away out of England and carried herself and the memory of her crime to some land beyond the seas.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE REIGATE PUZZLE", + "text": "It was some time before the health of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes recovered from the strain caused by his immense exertions in the spring of '87. The whole question of the Netherland-Sumatra Company and of the colossal schemes of Baron Maupertuis are too recent in the minds of the public, and are too intimately concerned with politics and finance to be fitting subjects for this series of sketches. They led, however, in an indirect fashion to a singular and complex problem which gave my friend an opportunity of demonstrating the value of a fresh weapon among the many with which he waged his lifelong battle against crime.\n\nOn referring to my notes I see that it was upon the fourteenth of April that I received a telegram from Lyons which informed me that Holmes was lying ill in the Hotel Dulong. Within twenty-four hours I was in his sick-room and was relieved to find that there was nothing formidable in his symptoms. Even his iron constitution, however, had broken down under the strain of an investigation which had extended over two months, during which period he had never worked less than fifteen hours a day and had more than once, as he assured me, kept to his task for five days at a stretch. Even the triumphant issue of his labours could not save him from reaction after so terrible an exertion, and at a time when Europe was ringing with his name and when his room was literally ankle-deep with congratulatory telegrams I found him a prey to the blackest depression. Even the knowledge that he had succeeded where the police of three countries had failed, and that he had outman\u0153uvred at every point the most accomplished swindler in Europe, was insufficient to rouse him from his nervous prostration.\n\nThree days later we were back in Baker Street together; but it was evident that my friend would be much the better for a change, and the thought of a week of springtime in the country was full of attractions to me also. My old friend, Colonel Hayter, who had come under my professional care in Afghanistan, had now taken a house near Reigate in Surrey and had frequently asked me to come down to him upon a visit. On the last occasion he had remarked that if my friend would only come with me he would be glad to extend his hospitality to him also. A little diplomacy was needed, but when Holmes understood that the establishment was a bachelor one, and that he would be allowed the fullest freedom, he fell in with my plans and a week after our return from Lyons we were under the colonel's roof. Hayter was a fine old soldier who had seen much of the world, and he soon found, as I had expected, that Holmes and he had much in common.\n\nOn the evening of our arrival we were sitting in the colonel's gun-room after dinner, Holmes stretched upon the sofa, while Hayter and I looked over his little armory of Eastern weapons.\n\n\"By the way,\" said he suddenly, \"I think I'll take one of these pistols upstairs with me in case we have an alarm.\"\n\n\"An alarm!\" said I.\n\n\"Yes, we've had a scare in this part lately. Old Acton, who is one of our county magnates, had his house broken into last Monday. No great damage done, but the fellows are still at large.\"\n\n\"No clue?\" asked Holmes, cocking his eye at the colonel.\n\n\"None as yet. But the affair is a petty one, one of our little country crimes, which must seem too small for your attention, Mr. Holmes, after this great international affair.\"\n\nHolmes waved away the compliment, though his smile showed that it had pleased him.\n\n\"Was there any feature of interest?\"\n\n\"I fancy not. The thieves ransacked the library and got very little for their pains. The whole place was turned upside down, drawers burst open, and presses ransacked, with the result that an odd volume of Pope's Homer, two plated candlesticks, an ivory letter-weight, a small oak barometer, and a ball of twine are all that have vanished.\"\n\n\"What an extraordinary assortment!\" I exclaimed.\n\n\"Oh, the fellows evidently grabbed hold of everything they could get.\"\n\nHolmes grunted from the sofa.\n\n\"The county police ought to make something of that,\" said he; \"why, it is surely obvious that\u2014\"\n\nBut I held up a warning finger.\n\n\"You are here for a rest, my dear fellow. For heaven's sake don't get started on a new problem when your nerves are all in shreds.\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders with a glance of comic resignation towards the colonel, and the talk drifted away into less dangerous channels.\n\nIt was destined, however, that all my professional caution should be wasted; for next morning the problem obtruded itself upon us in such a way that it was impossible to ignore it, and our country visit took a turn which neither of us could have anticipated. We were at breakfast when the colonel's butler rushed in, with all his propriety shaken out of him.\n\n\"Have you heard the news, sir?\" he gasped. \"At the Cunningham's, sir!\"\n\n\"Burglary!\" cried the colonel, with his coffee-cup in mid-air.\n\n\"Murder!\"\n\nThe colonel whistled. \"By Jove!\" said he. \"Who's killed, then? The J. P. or his son?\"\n\n\"Neither, sir. It was William the coachman. Shot through the heart, sir, and never spoke again.\"\n\n\"Who shot him, then?\"\n\n\"The burglar, sir. He was off like a shot and got clean away. He'd just broke in at the pantry window when William came on him and met his end in saving his master's property.\"\n\n\"What time?\"\n\n\"It was last night, sir, somewhere about twelve.\"\n\n\"Ah, then, we'll step over afterwards,\" said the colonel, coolly settling down to his breakfast again. \"It's a baddish business,\" he added when the butler had gone; \"he's our leading man about here, is old Cunningham, and a very decent fellow too. He'll be cut up over this, for the man has been in his service for years and was a good servant. It's evidently the same villains who broke into Acton's.\"\n\n\"And stole that very singular collection,\" said Holmes thoughtfully.\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"Hum! It may prove the simplest matter in the world, but all the same at first glance this is just a little curious, is it not? A gang of burglars acting in the country might be expected to vary the scene of their operations, and not to crack two cribs in the same district within a few days. When you spoke last night of taking precautions I remember that it passed through my mind that this was probably the last parish in England to which the thief or thieves would be likely to turn their attention\u2014which shows that I have still much to learn.\"\n\n\"I fancy it's some local practitioner,\" said the colonel. \"In that case, of course, Acton's and Cunningham's are just the places he would go for, since they are far the largest about here.\"\n\n\"And richest?\"\n\n\"Well, they ought to be, but they've had a lawsuit for some years which has sucked the blood out of both of them, I fancy. Old Acton has some claim on half Cunningham's estate, and the lawyers have been at it with both hands.\"\n\n\"If it's a local villain there should not be much difficulty in running him down,\" said Holmes with a yawn. \"All right, Watson, I don't intend to meddle.\"\n\n\"Inspector Forrester, sir,\" said the butler, throwing open the door.\n\nThe official, a smart, keen-faced young fellow, stepped into the room. \"Good-morning, Colonel,\" said he. \"I hope I don't intrude, but we hear that Mr. Holmes of Baker Street is here.\"\n\nThe colonel waved his hand towards my friend, and the inspector bowed.\n\n\"We thought that perhaps you would care to step across, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"The fates are against you, Watson,\" said he, laughing. \"We were chatting about the matter when you came in, Inspector. Perhaps you can let us have a few details.\" As he leaned back in his chair in the familiar attitude I knew that the case was hopeless.\n\n\"We had no clue in the Acton affair. But here we have plenty to go on, and there's no doubt it is the same party in each case. The man was seen.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But he was off like a deer after the shot that killed poor William Kirwan was fired. Mr. Cunningham saw him from the bedroom window, and Mr. Alec Cunningham saw him from the back passage. It was quarter to twelve when the alarm broke out. Mr. Cunningham had just got into bed, and Mr. Alec was smoking a pipe in his dressing-gown. They both heard William, the coachman, calling for help, and Mr. Alec ran down to see what was the matter. The back door was open, and as he came to the foot of the stairs he saw two men wrestling together outside. One of them fired a shot, the other dropped, and the murderer rushed across the garden and over the hedge. Mr. Cunningham, looking out of his bedroom, saw the fellow as he gained the road, but lost sight of him at once. Mr. Alec stopped to see if he could help the dying man, and so the villain got clean away. Beyond the fact that he was a middle-sized man and dressed in some dark stuff, we have no personal clue; but we are making energetic inquiries, and if he is a stranger we shall soon find him out.\"\n\n\"What was this William doing there? Did he say anything before he died?\"\n\n\"Not a word. He lives at the lodge with his mother, and as he was a very faithful fellow we imagine that he walked up to the house with the intention of seeing that all was right there. Of course this Acton business has put everyone on their guard. The robber must have just burst open the door\u2014the lock has been forced\u2014when William came upon him.\"\n\n\"Did William say anything to his mother before going out?\"\n\n\"She is very old and deaf, and we can get no information from her. The shock has made her half-witted, but I understand that she was never very bright. There is one very important circumstance, however. Look at this!\"\n\nHe took a small piece of torn paper from a notebook and spread it out upon his knee.\n\n\"This was found between the finger and thumb of the dead man. It appears to be a fragment torn from a larger sheet. You will observe that the hour mentioned upon it is the very time at which the poor fellow met his fate. You see that his murderer might have torn the rest of the sheet from him or he might have taken this fragment from the murderer. It reads almost as though it were an appointment.\"\n\nHolmes took up the scrap of paper, a facsimile of which is here reproduced.\n\n\"Presuming that it is an appointment,\" continued the inspector, \"it is of course a conceivable theory that this William Kirwan, though he had the reputation of being an honest man, may have been in league with the thief. He may have met him there, may even have helped him to break in the door, and then they may have fallen out between themselves.\"\n\n\"This writing is of extraordinary interest,\" said Holmes, who had been examining it with intense concentration. \"These are much deeper waters than I had thought.\" He sank his head upon his hands, while the inspector smiled at the effect which his case had had upon the famous London specialist.\n\n\"Your last remark,\" said Holmes presently, \"as to the possibility of there being an understanding between the burglar and the servant, and this being a note of appointment from one to the other, is an ingenious and not entirely impossible supposition. But this writing opens up\u2014\" He sank his head into his hands again and remained for some minutes in the deepest thought. When he raised his face again I was surprised to see that his cheek was tinged with colour, and his eyes as bright as before his illness. He sprang to his feet with all his old energy.\n\n\"I'll tell you what,\" said he, \"I should like to have a quiet little glance into the details of this case. There is something in it which fascinates me extremely. If you will permit me, Colonel, I will leave my friend Watson and you, and I will step round with the inspector to test the truth of one or two little fancies of mine. I will be with you again in half an hour.\"\n\nAn hour and a half had elapsed before the inspector returned alone.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes is walking up and down in the field outside,\" said he. \"He wants us all four to go up to the house together.\"\n\n\"To Mr. Cunningham's?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\nThe inspector shrugged his shoulders. \"I don't quite know, sir. Between ourselves, I think Mr. Holmes has not quite got over his illness yet. He's been behaving very queerly, and he is very much excited.\"\n\n\"I don't think you need alarm yourself,\" said I. \"I have usually found that there was method in his madness.\"\n\n\"Some folk might say there was madness in his method,\" muttered the inspector. \"But he's all on fire to start, Colonel, so we had best go out if you are ready.\"\n\nWe found Holmes pacing up and down in the field, his chin sunk upon his breast, and his hands thrust into his trousers pockets.\n\n\"The matter grows in interest,\" said he. \"Watson, your country trip has been a distinct success. I have had a charming morning.\"\n\n\"You have been up to the scene of the crime, I understand,\" said the colonel.\n\n\"Yes, the inspector and I have made quite a little reconnaissance together.\"\n\n\"Any success?\"\n\n\"Well, we have seen some very interesting things. I'll tell you what we did as we walk. First of all, we saw the body of this unfortunate man. He certainly died from a revolver wound as reported.\"\n\n\"Had you doubted it, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, it is as well to test everything. Our inspection was not wasted. We then had an interview with Mr. Cunningham and his son, who were able to point out the exact spot where the murderer had broken through the garden-hedge in his flight. That was of great interest.\"\n\n\"Naturally.\"\n\n\"Then we had a look at this poor fellow's mother. We could get no information from her, however, as she is very old and feeble.\"\n\n\"And what is the result of your investigations?\"\n\n\"The conviction that the crime is a very peculiar one. Perhaps our visit now may do something to make it less obscure. I think that we are both agreed, Inspector, that the fragment of paper in the dead man's hand, bearing, as it does, the very hour of his death written upon it, is of extreme importance.\"\n\n\"It should give a clue, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"It does give a clue. Whoever wrote that note was the man who brought William Kirwan out of his bed at that hour. But where is the rest of that sheet of paper?\"\n\n\"I examined the ground carefully in the hope of finding it,\" said the inspector.\n\n\"It was torn out of the dead man's hand. Why was someone so anxious to get possession of it? Because it incriminated him. And what would he do with it? Thrust it into his pocket, most likely, never noticing that a corner of it had been left in the grip of the corpse. If we could get the rest of that sheet it is obvious that we should have gone a long way towards solving the mystery.\"\n\n\"Yes, but how can we get at the criminal's pocket before we catch the criminal?\"\n\n\"Well, well, it was worth thinking over. Then there is another obvious point. The note was sent to William. The man who wrote it could not have taken it; otherwise, of course, he might have delivered his own message by word of mouth. Who brought the note, then? Or did it come through the post?\"\n\n\"I have made inquiries,\" said the inspector. \"William received a letter by the afternoon post yesterday. The envelope was destroyed by him.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" cried Holmes, clapping the inspector on the back. \"You've seen the postman. It is a pleasure to work with you. Well, here is the lodge, and if you will come up, Colonel, I will show you the scene of the crime.\"\n\nWe passed the pretty cottage where the murdered man had lived and walked up an oak-lined avenue to the fine old Queen Anne house, which bears the date of Malplaquet upon the lintel of the door. Holmes and the inspector led us round it until we came to the side gate, which is separated by a stretch of garden from the hedge which lines the road. A constable was standing at the kitchen door.\n\n\"Throw the door open, officer,\" said Holmes. \"Now, it was on those stairs that young Mr. Cunningham stood and saw the two men struggling just where we are. Old Mr. Cunningham was at that window\u2014the second on the left\u2014and he saw the fellow get away just to the left of that bush. So did the son. They are both sure of it on account of the bush. Then Mr. Alec ran out and knelt beside the wounded man. The ground is very hard, you see, and there are no marks to guide us.\" As he spoke two men came down the garden path, from round the angle of the house. The one was an elderly man, with a strong, deep-lined, heavy-eyed face; the other a dashing young fellow, whose bright, smiling expression and showy dress were in strange contrast with the business which had brought us there.\n\n\"Still at it, then?\" said he to Holmes. \"I thought you Londoners were never at fault. You don't seem to be so very quick, after all.\"\n\n\"Ah, you must give us a little time,\" said Holmes good-humouredly.\n\n\"You'll want it,\" said young Alec Cunningham. \"Why, I don't see that we have any clue at all.\"\n\n\"There's only one,\" answered the inspector. \"We thought that if we could only find\u2014Good heavens, Mr. Holmes! what is the matter?\"\n\nMy poor friend's face had suddenly assumed the most dreadful expression. His eyes rolled upward, his features writhed in agony, and with a suppressed groan he dropped on his face upon the ground. Horrified at the suddenness and severity of the attack, we carried him into the kitchen, where he lay back in a large chair and breathed heavily for some minutes. Finally, with a shamefaced apology for his weakness, he rose once more.\n\n\"Watson would tell you that I have only just recovered from a severe illness,\" he explained. \"I am liable to these sudden nervous attacks.\"\n\n\"Shall I send you home in my trap?\" asked old Cunningham.\n\n\"Well, since I am here, there is one point on which I should like to feel sure. We can very easily verify it.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Well, it seems to me that it is just possible that the arrival of this poor fellow William was not before, but after, the entrance of the burglar into the house. You appear to take it for granted that although the door was forced the robber never got in.\"\n\n\"I fancy that is quite obvious,\" said Mr. Cunningham gravely. \"Why, my son Alec had not yet gone to bed, and he would certainly have heard anyone moving about.\"\n\n\"Where was he sitting?\"\n\n\"I was smoking in my dressing-room.\"\n\n\"Which window is that?\"\n\n\"The last on the left, next my father's.\"\n\n\"Both of your lamps were lit, of course?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly.\"\n\n\"There are some very singular points here,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"Is it not extraordinary that a burglar\u2014and a burglar who had some previous experience\u2014should deliberately break into a house at a time when he could see from the lights that two of the family were still afoot?\"\n\n\"He must have been a cool hand.\"\n\n\"Well, of course, if the case were not an odd one we should not have been driven to ask you for an explanation,\" said young Mr. Alec. \"But as to your ideas that the man had robbed the house before William tackled him, I think it a most absurd notion. Wouldn't we have found the place disarranged and missed the things which he had taken?\"\n\n\"It depends on what the things were,\" said Holmes. \"You must remember that we are dealing with a burglar who is a very peculiar fellow, and who appears to work on lines of his own. Look, for example, at the queer lot of things which he took from Acton's\u2014what was it?\u2014a ball of string, a letter-weight, and I don't know what other odds and ends.\"\n\n\"Well, we are quite in your hands, Mr. Holmes,\" said old Cunningham. \"Anything which you or the inspector may suggest will most certainly be done.\"\n\n\"In the first place,\" said Holmes, \"I should like you to offer a reward\u2014coming from yourself, for the officials may take a little time before they would agree upon the sum, and these things cannot be done too promptly. I have jotted down the form here, if you would not mind signing it. Fifty pounds was quite enough, I thought.\"\n\n\"I would willingly give five hundred,\" said the J. P., taking the slip of paper and the pencil which Holmes handed to him. \"This is not quite correct, however,\" he added, glancing over the document.\n\n\"I wrote it rather hurriedly.\"\n\n\"You see you begin, 'Whereas, at about a quarter to one on Tuesday morning an attempt was made,' and so on. It was at a quarter to twelve, as a matter of fact.\"\n\nI was pained at the mistake, for I knew how keenly Holmes would feel any slip of the kind. It was his specialty to be accurate as to fact, but his recent illness had shaken him, and this one little incident was enough to show me that he was still far from being himself. He was obviously embarrassed for an instant, while the inspector raised his eyebrows, and Alec Cunningham burst into a laugh. The old gentleman corrected the mistake, however, and handed the paper back to Holmes.\n\n\"Get it printed as soon as possible,\" he said; \"I think your idea is an excellent one.\"\n\nHolmes put the slip of paper carefully away into his pocketbook.\n\n\"And now,\" said he. \"it really would be a good thing that we should all go over the house together and make certain that this rather erratic burglar did not, after all, carry anything away with him.\"\n\nBefore entering, Holmes made an examination of the door which had been forced. It was evident that a chisel or strong knife had been thrust in, and the lock forced back with it. We could see the marks in the wood where it had been pushed in.\n\n\"You don't use bars, then?\" he asked.\n\n\"We have never found it necessary.\"\n\n\"You don't keep a dog?\"\n\n\"Yes, but he is chained on the other side of the house.\"\n\n\"When do the servants go to bed?\"\n\n\"About ten.\"\n\n\"I understand that William was usually in bed also at that hour?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It is singular that on this particular night he should have been up. Now, I should be very glad if you would have the kindness to show us over the house, Mr. Cunningham.\"\n\nA stone-flagged passage, with the kitchens branching away from it, led by a wooden staircase directly to the first floor of the house. It came out upon the landing opposite to a second more ornamental stair which came up from the front hall. Out of this landing opened the drawing-room and several bedrooms, including those of Mr. Cunningham and his son. Holmes walked slowly, taking keen note of the architecture of the house. I could tell from his expression that he was on a hot scent, and yet I could not in the least imagine in what direction his inferences were leading him.\n\n\"My good sir,\" said Mr. Cunningham, with some impatience, \"this is surely very unnecessary. That is my room at the end of the stairs, and my son's is the one beyond it. I leave it to your judgment whether it was possible for the thief to have come up here without disturbing us.\"\n\n\"You must try round and get on a fresh scent, I fancy,\" said the son with a rather malicious smile.\n\n\"Still, I must ask you to humour me a little further. I should like, for example, to see how far the windows of the bedrooms command the front. This, I understand, is your son's room\"\u2014he pushed open the door\u2014\"and that, I presume is the dressing-room in which he sat smoking when the alarm was given. Where does the window of that look out to?\" He stepped across the bedroom, pushed open the door, and glanced round the other chamber.\n\n\"I hope that you are satisfied now?\" said Mr. Cunningham tartly.\n\n\"Thank you, I think I have seen all that I wished.\"\n\n\"Then if it is really necessary we can go into my room.\"\n\n\"If it is not too much trouble.\"\n\nThe J. P. shrugged his shoulders and led the way into his own chamber, which was a plainly furnished and commonplace room. As we moved across it in the direction of the window, Holmes fell back until he and I were the last of the group. Near the foot of the bed stood a dish of oranges and a carafe of water. As we passed it Holmes, to my unutterable astonishment, leaned over in front of me and deliberately knocked the whole thing over. The glass smashed into a thousand pieces and the fruit rolled about into every corner of the room.\n\n\"You've done it now, Watson,\" said he coolly. \"A pretty mess you've made of the carpet.\"\n\nI stooped in some confusion and began to pick up the fruit, understanding for some reason my companion desired me to take the blame upon myself. The others did the same and set the table on its legs again.\n\n\"Hullo!\" cried the inspector, \"where's he got to?\"\n\nHolmes had disappeared.\n\n\"Wait here an instant,\" said young Alec Cunningham. \"The fellow is off his head, in my opinion. Come with me, father, and see where he has got to!\"\n\nThey rushed out of the room, leaving the inspector, the colonel, and me staring at each other.\n\n\"'Pon my word, I am inclined to agree with Master Alec,\" said the official. \"It may be the effect of this illness, but it seems to me that\u2014\"\n\nHis words were cut short by a sudden scream of \"Help! Help! Murder!\" With a thrill I recognized the voice as that of my friend. I rushed madly from the room on to the landing. The cries, which had sunk down into a hoarse, inarticulate shouting, came from the room which we had first visited. I dashed in, and on into the dressing-room beyond. The two Cunninghams were bending over the prostrate figure of Sherlock Holmes, the younger clutching his throat with both hands, while the elder seemed to be twisting one of his wrists. In an instant the three of us had torn them away from him, and Holmes staggered to his feet, very pale and evidently greatly exhausted.\n\n\"Arrest these men, Inspector,\" he gasped.\n\n\"On what charge?\"\n\n\"That of murdering their coachman, William Kirwan.\"\n\nThe inspector stared about him in bewilderment. \"Oh, come now, Mr. Holmes,\" said he at last, \"I'm sure you don't really mean to\u2014\"\n\n\"Tut, man, look at their faces!\" cried Holmes curtly.\n\nNever certainly have I seen a plainer confession of guilt upon human countenances. The older man seemed numbed and dazed, with a heavy, sullen expression upon his strongly marked face. The son, on the other hand, had dropped all that jaunty, dashing style which had characterized him, and the ferocity of a dangerous wild beast gleamed in his dark eyes and distorted his handsome features. The inspector said nothing, but, stepping to the door, he blew his whistle. Two of his constables came at the call.\n\n\"I have no alternative, Mr. Cunningham,\" said he. \"I trust that this may all prove to be an absurd mistake, but you can see that\u2014Ah, would you? Drop it!\" He struck out with his hand, and a revolver which the younger man was in the act of cocking clattered down upon the floor.\n\n\"Keep that,\" said Holmes, quietly putting his foot upon it; \"you will find it useful at the trial. But this is what we really wanted.\" He held up a little crumpled piece of paper.\n\n\"The remainder of the sheet!\" cried the inspector.\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"And where was it?\"\n\n\"Where I was sure it must be. I'll make the whole matter clear to you presently. I think, Colonel, that you and Watson might return now, and I will be with you again in an hour at the furthest. The inspector and I must have a word with the prisoners, but you will certainly see me back at luncheon time.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes was as good as his word, for about one o'clock he rejoined us in the colonel's smoking-room. He was accompanied by a little elderly gentleman, who was introduced to me as the Mr. Acton whose house had been the scene of the original burglary.\n\n\"I wished Mr. Acton to be present while I demonstrated this small matter to you,\" said Holmes, \"for it is natural that he should take a keen interest in the details. I am afraid, my dear Colonel, that you must regret the hour that you took in such a stormy petrel as I am.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" answered the colonel warmly, \"I consider it the greatest privilege to have been permitted to study your methods of working: I confess that they quite surpass my expectations, and that I am utterly unable to account for your result. I have not yet seen the vestige of a clue.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that my explanation may disillusion you, but it has always been my habit to hide none of my methods, either from my friend Watson or from anyone who might take an intelligent interest in them. But, first, as I am rather shaken by the knocking about which I had in the dressing-room, I think that I shall help myself to a dash of your brandy, Colonel. My strength has been rather tried of late.\"\n\n\"I trust you had no more of those nervous attacks.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes laughed heartily. \"We will come to that in its turn,\" said he. \"I will lay an account of the case before you in its due order, showing you the various points which guided me in my decision. Pray interrupt me if there is any inference which is not perfectly clear to you.\n\n\"It is of the highest importance in the art of detection to be able to recognize, out of a number of facts, which are incidental and which vital. Otherwise your energy and attention must be dissipated instead of being concentrated. Now, in this case there was not the slightest doubt in my mind from the first that the key of the whole matter must be looked for in the scrap of paper in the dead man's hand.\n\n\"Before going into this, I would draw your attention to the fact that, if Alec Cunningham's narrative was correct, and if the assailant, after shooting William Kirwan, had instantly fled, then it obviously could not be he who tore the paper from the dead man's hand. But if it was not he, it must have been Alec Cunningham himself, for by the time that the old man had descended several servants were upon the scene. The point is a simple one, but the inspector had overlooked it because he had started with the supposition that these county magnates had had nothing to do with the matter. Now, I make a point of never having any prejudices, and of following docilely wherever fact may lead me, and so, in the very first stage of the investigation, I found myself looking a little askance at the part which had been played by Mr. Alec Cunningham.\n\n\"And now I made a very careful examination of the corner of paper which the inspector had submitted to us. It was at once clear to me that it formed part of a very remarkable document. Here it is. Do you not now observe something very suggestive about it?\"\n\n\"It has a very irregular look,\" said the colonel.\n\n\"My dear sir,\" cried Holmes, \"there cannot be the least doubt in the world that it has been written by two persons doing alternate words. When I draw your attention to the strong t's of 'at' and 'to,' and ask you to compare them with the weak ones of 'quarter' and 'twelve,' you will instantly recognize the fact. A very brief analysis of these four words would enable you to say with the utmost confidence that the 'learn' and the 'maybe' are written in the stronger hand, and the 'what' in the weaker.\"\n\n\"By Jove, it's as clear as day!\" cried the colonel. \"Why on earth should two men write a letter in such a fashion?\"\n\n\"Obviously the business was a bad one, and one of the men who distrusted the other was determined that, whatever was done, each should have an equal hand in it. Now, of the two men, it is clear that the one who wrote the 'at' and 'to' was the ringleader.\"\n\n\"How do you get at that?\"\n\n\"We might deduce it from the mere character of the one hand compared with the other. But we have more assured reasons than that for supposing it. If you examine this scrap with attention you will come to the conclusion that the man with the stronger hand wrote all his words first, leaving blanks for the other to fill up. These blanks were not always sufficient, and you can see that the second man had a squeeze to fit his 'quarter' in between the 'at' and the 'to,' showing that the latter were already written. The man who wrote all his words first is undoubtedly the man who planned the affair.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" cried Mr. Acton.\n\n\"But very superficial,\" said Holmes. \"We come now, however, to a point which is of importance. You may not be aware that the deduction of a man's age from his writing is one which has been brought to considerable accuracy by experts. In normal cases one can place a man in his true decade with tolerable confidence. I say normal cases, because ill-health and physical weakness reproduce the signs of old age, even when the invalid is a youth. In this case, looking at the bold, strong hand of the one, and the rather broken-backed appearance of the other, which still retains its legibility although the t's have begun to lose their crossing, we can say that the one was a young man and the other was advanced in years without being positively decrepit.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" cried Mr. Acton again.\n\n\"There is a further point, however, which is subtler and of greater interest. There is something in common between these hands. They belong to men who are blood-relatives. It may be most obvious to you in the Greek e's, but to me there are many small points which indicate the same thing. I have no doubt at all that a family mannerism can be traced in these two specimens of writing. I am only, of course, giving you the leading results now of my examination of the paper. There were twenty-three other deductions which would be of more interest to experts than to you. They all tend to deepen the impression upon my mind that the Cunninghams, father and son, had written this letter.\n\n\"Having got so far, my next step was, of course, to examine into the details of the crime, and to see how far they would help us. I went up to the house with the inspector and saw all that was to be seen. The wound upon the dead man was, as I was able to determine with absolute confidence, fired from a revolver at the distance of something over four yards. There was no powder-blackening on the clothes. Evidently, therefore, Alec Cunningham had lied when he said that the two men were struggling when the shot was fired. Again, both father and son agreed as to the place where the man escaped into the road. At that point, however, as it happens, there is a broadish ditch, moist at the bottom. As there were no indications of boot-marks about this ditch, I was absolutely sure not only that the Cunninghams had again lied but that there had never been any unknown man upon the scene at all.\n\n\"And now I have to consider the motive of this singular crime. To get at this, I endeavoured first of all to solve the reason of the original burglary at Mr. Acton's. I understood, from something which the colonel told us, that a lawsuit had been going on between you, Mr. Acton, and the Cunninghams. Of course, it instantly occurred to me that they had broken into your library with the intention of getting at some document which might be of importance in the case.\"\n\n\"Precisely so,\" said Mr. Acton. \"There can be no possible doubt as to their intentions. I have the clearest claim upon half of their present estate, and if they could have found a single paper\u2014which, fortunately, was in the strong-box of my solicitors\u2014they would undoubtedly have crippled our case.\"\n\n\"There you are,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"It was a dangerous, reckless attempt in which I seem to trace the influence of young Alec. Having found nothing, they tried to divert suspicion by making it appear to be an ordinary burglary, to which end they carried off whatever they could lay their hands upon. That is all clear enough, but there was much that was still obscure. What I wanted, above all, was to get the missing part of that note. I was certain that Alec had torn it out of the dead man's hand, and almost certain that he must have thrust it into the pocket of his dressing-gown. Where else could he have put it? The only question was whether it was still there. It was worth an effort to find out, and for that object we all went up to the house.\n\n\"The Cunninghams joined us, as you doubtless remember, outside the kitchen door. It was, of course, of the very first importance that they should not be reminded of the existence of this paper, otherwise they would naturally destroy it without delay. The inspector was about to tell them the importance which we attached to it when, by the luckiest chance in the world, I tumbled down in a sort of fit and so changed the conversation.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" cried the colonel, laughing, \"do you mean to say all our sympathy was wasted and your fit an imposture?\"\n\n\"Speaking professionally, it was admirably done,\" cried I, looking in amazement at this man who was forever confounding me with some new phase of his astuteness.\n\n\"It is an art which is often useful,\" said he. \"When I recovered I managed, by a device which had perhaps some little merit of ingenuity, to get old Cunningham to write the word 'twelve,' so that I might compare it with the 'twelve' upon the paper.\"\n\n\"Oh, what an ass I have been!\" I exclaimed.\n\n\"I could see that you were commiserating me over my weakness,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"I was sorry to cause you the sympathetic pain which I know that you felt. We then went upstairs together, and, having entered the room and seen the dressing-gown hanging up behind the door, I contrived, by upsetting a table, to engage their attention for the moment and slipped back to examine the pockets. I had hardly got the paper, however\u2014which was, as I had expected, in one of them\u2014when the two Cunninghams were on me, and would, I verily believe, have murdered me then and there but for your prompt and friendly aid. As it is, I feel that young man's grip on my throat now, and the father has twisted my wrist round in the effort to get the paper out of my hand. They saw that I must know all about it, you see, and the sudden change from absolute security to complete despair made them perfectly desperate.\n\n\"I had a little talk with old Cunningham afterwards as to the motive of the crime. He was tractable enough, though his son was a perfect demon, ready to blow out his own or anybody else's brains if he could have got to his revolver. When Cunningham saw that the case against him was so strong he lost all heart and made a clean breast of everything. It seems that William had secretly followed his two masters on the night when they made their raid upon Mr. Acton's and, having thus got them into his power, proceeded, under threats of exposure, to levy blackmail upon them. Mr. Alec, however, was a dangerous man to play games of that sort with. It was a stroke of positive genius on his part to see in the burglary scare which was convulsing the countryside an opportunity of plausibly getting rid of the man whom he feared. William was decoyed up and shot, and had they only got the whole of the note and paid a little more attention to detail in their accessories, it is very possible that suspicion might never have been aroused.\"\n\n\"And the note?\" I asked.\n\nSherlock Holmes placed the subjoined paper before us.\n\n\"It is very much the sort of thing that I expected,\" said he. \"Of course, we do not yet know what the relations may have been between Alec Cunningham, William Kirwan, and Annie Morrison. The result shows that the trap was skilfully baited. I am sure that you cannot fail to be delighted with the traces of heredity shown in the p's and in the tails of the g's. The absence of the i-dots in the old man's writing is also most characteristic. Watson, I think our quiet rest in the country has been a distinct success, and I shall certainly return much invigorated to Baker Street to-morrow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE CROOKED MAN", + "text": "One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day's work had been an exhausting one. My wife had already gone upstairs, and the sound of the locking of the hall door some time before told me that the servants had also retired. I had risen from my seat and was knocking out the ashes of my pipe when I suddenly heard the clang of the bell.\n\nI looked at the clock. It was a quarter to twelve. This could not be a visitor at so late an hour. A patient evidently, and possibly an all-night sitting. With a wry face I went out into the hall and opened the door. To my astonishment it was Sherlock Holmes who stood upon my step.\n\n\"Ah, Watson,\" said he, \"I hoped that I might not be too late to catch you.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, pray come in.\"\n\n\"You look surprised, and no wonder! Relieved, too, I fancy! Hum! You still smoke the Arcadia mixture of your bachelor days, then! There's no mistaking that fluffy ash upon your coat. It's easy to tell that you have been accustomed to wear a uniform, Watson. You'll never pass as a pure-bred civilian as long as you keep that habit of carrying your handkerchief in your sleeve. Could you put me up to-night?\"\n\n\"With pleasure.\"\n\n\"You told me that you had bachelor quarters for one, and I see that you have no gentleman visitor at present. Your hat-stand proclaims as much.\"\n\n\"I shall be delighted if you will stay.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'll fill the vacant peg then. Sorry to see that you've had the British workman in the house. He's a token of evil. Not the drains, I hope?\"\n\n\"No, the gas.\"\n\n\"Ah! He has left two nail-marks from his boot upon your linoleum just where the light strikes it. No, thank you, I had some supper at Waterloo, but I'll smoke a pipe with you with pleasure.\"\n\nI handed him my pouch, and he seated himself opposite to me and smoked for some time in silence. I was well aware that nothing but business of importance would have brought him to me at such an hour, so I waited patiently until he should come round to it.\n\n\"I see that you are professionally rather busy just now,\" said he, glancing very keenly across at me.\n\n\"Yes, I've had a busy day,\" I answered. \"It may seem very foolish in your eyes,\" I added, \"but really I don't know how you deduced it.\"\n\nHolmes chuckled to himself.\n\n\"I have the advantage of knowing your habits, my dear Watson,\" said he. \"When your round is a short one you walk, and when it is a long one you use a hansom. As I perceive that your boots, although used, are by no means dirty, I cannot doubt that you are at present busy enough to justify the hansom.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" I cried.\n\n\"Elementary,\" said he. \"It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. The same may be said, my dear fellow, for the effect of some of these little sketches of yours, which is entirely meretricious, depending as it does upon your retaining in your own hands some factors in the problem which are never imparted to the reader. Now, at present I am in the position of these same readers, for I hold in this hand several threads of one of the strangest cases which ever perplexed a man's brain, and yet I lack the one or two which are needful to complete my theory. But I'll have them, Watson, I'll have them!\" His eyes kindled and a slight flush sprang into his thin cheeks. For an instant the veil had lifted upon his keen, intense nature, but for an instant only. When I glanced again his face had resumed that red-Indian composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man.\n\n\"The problem presents features of interest,\" said he. \"I may even say exceptional features of interest. I have already looked into the matter, and have come, as I think, within sight of my solution. If you could accompany me in that last step you might be of considerable service to me.\"\n\n\"I should be delighted.\"\n\n\"Could you go as far as Aldershot to-morrow?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt Jackson would take my practice.\"\n\n\"Very good. I want to start by the 11:10 from Waterloo.\"\n\n\"That would give me time.\"\n\n\"Then, if you are not too sleepy, I will give you a sketch of what has happened, and of what remains to be done.\"\n\n\"I was sleepy before you came. I am quite wakeful now.\"\n\n\"I will compress the story as far as may be done without omitting anything vital to the case. It is conceivable that you may even have read some account of the matter. It is the supposed murder of Colonel Barclay, of the Royal Munsters, at Aldershot, which I am investigating.\"\n\n\"I have heard nothing of it.\"\n\n\"It has not excited much attention yet, except locally. The facts are only two days old. Briefly they are these:\n\n\"The Royal Munsters is, as you know, one of the most famous Irish regiments in the British Army. It did wonders both in the Crimea and the Mutiny, and has since that time distinguished itself upon every possible occasion. It was commanded up to Monday night by James Barclay, a gallant veteran, who started as a full private, was raised to commissioned rank for his bravery at the time of the Mutiny, and so lived to command the regiment in which he had once carried a musket.\n\n\"Colonel Barclay had married at the time when he was a sergeant, and his wife, whose maiden name was Miss Nancy Devoy, was the daughter of a former colour-sergeant in the same corps. There was, therefore, as can be imagined, some little social friction when the young couple (for they were still young) found themselves in their new surroundings. They appear, however, to have quickly adapted themselves, and Mrs. Barclay has always, I understand, been as popular with the ladies of the regiment as her husband was with his brother officers. I may add that she was a woman of great beauty, and that even now, when she has been married for upward of thirty years, she is still of a striking and queenly appearance.\n\n\"Colonel Barclay's family life appears to have been a uniformly happy one. Major Murphy, to whom I owe most of my facts, assures me that he has never heard of any misunderstanding between the pair. On the whole, he thinks that Barclay's devotion to his wife was greater than his wife's to Barclay. He was acutely uneasy if he were absent from her for a day. She, on the other hand, though devoted and faithful, was less obtrusively affectionate. But they were regarded in the regiment as the very model of a middle-aged couple. There was absolutely nothing in their mutual relations to prepare people for the tragedy which was to follow.\n\n\"Colonel Barclay himself seems to have had some singular traits in his character. He was a dashing, jovial old soldier in his usual mood, but there were occasions on which he seemed to show himself capable of considerable violence and vindictiveness. This side of his nature, however, appears never to have been turned towards his wife. Another fact which had struck Major Murphy and three out of five of the other officers with whom I conversed was the singular sort of depression which came upon him at times. As the major expressed it, the smile has often been struck from his mouth, as if by some invisible hand, when he has been joining in the gaieties and chaff of the mess-table. For days on end, when the mood was on him, he has been sunk in the deepest gloom. This and a certain tinge of superstition were the only unusual traits in his character which his brother officers had observed. The latter peculiarity took the form of a dislike to being left alone, especially after dark. This puerile feature in a nature which was conspicuously manly had often given rise to comment and conjecture.\n\n\"The first battalion of the Royal Munsters (which is the old One Hundred and Seventeenth) has been stationed at Aldershot for some years. The married officers live out of barracks, and the colonel has during all this time occupied a villa called 'Lachine,' about half a mile from the north camp. The house stands in its own grounds, but the west side of it is not more than thirty yards from the highroad. A coachman and two maids form the staff of servants. These with their master and mistress were the sole occupants of Lachine, for the Barclays had no children, nor was it usual for them to have resident visitors.\n\n\"Now for the events at Lachine between nine and ten on the evening of last Monday.\n\n\"Mrs. Barclay was, it appears, a member of the Roman Catholic Church and had interested herself very much in the establishment of the Guild of St. George, which was formed in connection with the Watt Street Chapel for the purpose of supplying the poor with cast-off clothing. A meeting of the Guild had been held that evening at eight, and Mrs. Barclay had hurried over her dinner in order to be present at it. When leaving the house she was heard by the coachman to make some commonplace remark to her husband, and to assure him that she would be back before very long. She then called for Miss Morrison, a young lady who lives in the next villa, and the two went off together to their meeting. It lasted forty minutes, and at a quarter-past nine Mrs. Barclay returned home, having left Miss Morrison at her door as she passed.\n\n\"There is a room which is used as a morning-room at Lachine. This faces the road and opens by a large glass folding-door on to the lawn. The lawn is thirty yards across and is only divided from the highway by a low wall with an iron rail above it. It was into this room that Mrs. Barclay went upon her return. The blinds were not down, for the room was seldom used in the evening, but Mrs. Barclay herself lit the lamp and then rang the bell, asking Jane Stewart, the housemaid, to bring her a cup of tea, which was quite contrary to her usual habits. The colonel had been sitting in the dining-room, but, hearing that his wife had returned, he joined her in the morning-room. The coachman saw him cross the hall and enter it. He was never seen again alive.\n\n\"The tea which had been ordered was brought up at the end of ten minutes; but the maid, as she approached the door, was surprised to hear the voices of her master and mistress in furious altercation. She knocked without receiving any answer, and even turned the handle, but only to find that the door was locked upon the inside. Naturally enough she ran down to tell the cook, and the two women with the coachman came up into the hall and listened to the dispute which was still raging. They all agreed that only two voices were to be heard, those of Barclay and of his wife. Barclay's remarks were subdued and abrupt so that none of them were audible to the listeners. The lady's, on the other hand, were most bitter, and when she raised her voice could be plainly heard. 'You coward!' she repeated over and over again. 'What can be done now? What can be done now? Give me back my life. I will never so much as breathe the same air with you again! You coward! You coward!' Those were scraps of her conversation, ending in a sudden dreadful cry in the man's voice, with a crash, and a piercing scream from the woman. Convinced that some tragedy had occurred, the coachman rushed to the door and strove to force it, while scream after scream issued from within. He was unable, however, to make his way in, and the maids were too distracted with fear to be of any assistance to him. A sudden thought struck him, however, and he ran through the hall door and round to the lawn upon which the long French windows open. One side of the window was open, which I understand was quite usual in the summertime, and he passed without difficulty into the room. His mistress had ceased to scream and was stretched insensible upon a couch. While with his feet tilted over the side of an armchair, and his head upon the ground near the corner of the fender, was lying the unfortunate soldier stone dead in a pool of his own blood.\n\n\"Naturally, the coachman's first thought, on finding that he could do nothing for his master, was to open the door. But here an unexpected and singular difficulty presented itself. The key was not in the inner side of the door, nor could he find it anywhere in the room. He went out again, therefore, through the window, and, having obtained the help of a policeman and of a medical man, he returned. The lady, against whom naturally the strongest suspicion rested, was removed to her room, still in a state of insensibility. The colonel's body was then placed upon the sofa and a careful examination made of the scene of the tragedy.\n\n\"The injury from which the unfortunate veteran was suffering was found to be a jagged cut some two inches long at the back part of his head, which had evidently been caused by a violent blow from a blunt weapon. Nor was it difficult to guess what that weapon may have been. Upon the floor, close to the body, was lying a singular club of hard carved wood with a bone handle. The colonel possessed a varied collection of weapons brought from the different countries in which he had fought, and it is conjectured by the police that this club was among his trophies. The servants deny having seen it before, but among the numerous curiosities in the house it is possible that it may have been overlooked. Nothing else of importance was discovered in the room by the police, save the inexplicable fact that neither upon Mrs. Barclay's person nor upon that of the victim nor in any part of the room was the missing key to be found. The door had eventually to be opened by a locksmith from Aldershot.\n\n\"That was the state of things, Watson, when upon the Tuesday morning I, at the request of Major Murphy, went down to Aldershot to supplement the efforts of the police. I think that you will acknowledge that the problem was already one of interest, but my observations soon made me realize that it was in truth much more extraordinary than would at first sight appear.\n\n\"Before examining the room I cross-questioned the servants, but only succeeded in eliciting the facts which I have already stated. One other detail of interest was remembered by Jane Stewart, the housemaid. You will remember that on hearing the sound of the quarrel she descended and returned with the other servants. On that first occasion, when she was alone, she says that the voices of her master and mistress were sunk so low that she could hardly hear anything, and judged by their tones rather than their words that they had fallen out. On my pressing her, however, she remembered that she heard the word David uttered twice by the lady. The point is of the utmost importance as guiding us towards the reason of the sudden quarrel. The colonel's name, you remember, was James.\n\n\"There was one thing in the case which had made the deepest impression both upon the servants and the police. This was the contortion of the colonel's face. It had set, according to their account, into the most dreadful expression of fear and horror which a human countenance is capable of assuming. More than one person fainted at the mere sight of him, so terrible was the effect. It was quite certain that he had foreseen his fate, and that it had caused him the utmost horror. This, of course, fitted in well enough with the police theory, if the colonel could have seen his wife making a murderous attack upon him. Nor was the fact of the wound being on the back of his head a fatal objection to this, as he might have turned to avoid the blow. No information could be got from the lady herself, who was temporarily insane from an acute attack of brain-fever.\n\n\"From the police I learned that Miss Morrison, who you remember went out that evening with Mrs. Barclay, denied having any knowledge of what it was which had caused the ill-humour in which her companion had returned.\n\n\"Having gathered these facts, Watson, I smoked several pipes over them, trying to separate those which were crucial from others which were merely incidental. There could be no question that the most distinctive and suggestive point in the case was the singular disappearance of the door-key. A most careful search had failed to discover it in the room. Therefore it must have been taken from it. But neither the colonel nor the colonel's wife could have taken it. That was perfectly clear. Therefore a third person must have entered the room. And that third person could only have come in through the window. It seemed to me that a careful examination of the room and the lawn might possibly reveal some traces of this mysterious individual. You know my methods, Watson. There was not one of them which I did not apply to the inquiry. And it ended by my discovering traces, but very different ones from those which I had expected. There had been a man in the room, and he had crossed the lawn coming from the road. I was able to obtain five very clear impressions of his footmarks: one in the roadway itself, at the point where he had climbed the low wall, two on the lawn, and two very faint ones upon the stained boards near the window where he had entered. He had apparently rushed across the lawn, for his toe-marks were much deeper than his heels. But it was not the man who surprised me. It was his companion.\"\n\n\"His companion!\"\n\nHolmes pulled a large sheet of tissue-paper out of his pocket and carefully unfolded it upon his knee.\n\n\"What do you make of that?\" he asked.\n\nThe paper was covered with the tracings of the footmarks of some small animal. It had five well-marked footpads, an indication of long nails, and the whole print might be nearly as large as a dessert-spoon.\n\n\"It's a dog,\" said I.\n\n\"Did you ever hear of a dog running up a curtain? I found distinct traces that this creature had done so.\"\n\n\"A monkey, then?\"\n\n\"But it is not the print of a monkey.\"\n\n\"What can it be, then?\"\n\n\"Neither dog nor cat nor monkey nor any creature that we are familiar with. I have tried to reconstruct it from the measurements. Here are four prints where the beast has been standing motionless. You see that it is no less than fifteen inches from fore-foot to hind. Add to that the length of neck and head, and you get a creature not much less than two feet long\u2014probably more if there is any tail. But now observe this other measurement. The animal has been moving, and we have the length of its stride. In each case it is only about three inches. You have an indication, you see, of a long body with very short legs attached to it. It has not been considerate enough to leave any of its hair behind it. But its general shape must be what I have indicated, and it can run up a curtain, and it is carnivorous.\n\n\"How do you deduce that?\"\n\n\"Because it ran up the curtain. A canary's cage was hanging in the window, and its aim seems to have been to get at the bird.\"\n\n\"Then what was the beast?\"\n\n\"Ah, if I could give it a name it might go a long way towards solving the case. On the whole, it was probably some creature of the weasel and stoat tribe\u2014and yet it is larger than any of these that I have seen.\"\n\n\"But what had it to do with the crime?\"\n\n\"That, also, is still obscure. But we have learned a good deal, you perceive. We know that a man stood in the road looking at the quarrel between the Barclays\u2014the blinds were up and the room lighted. We know, also, that he ran across the lawn, entered the room, accompanied by a strange animal, and that he either struck the colonel or, as is equally possible, that the colonel fell down from sheer fright at the sight of him, and cut his head on the corner of the fender. Finally we have the curious fact that the intruder carried away the key with him when he left.\"\n\n\"Your discoveries seem to have left the business more obscure than it was before,\" said I.\n\n\"Quite so. They undoubtedly showed that the affair was much deeper than was at first conjectured. I thought the matter over, and I came to the conclusion that I must approach the case from another aspect. But really, Watson, I am keeping you up, and I might just as well tell you all this on our way to Aldershot to-morrow.\"\n\n\"Thank you, you have gone rather too far to stop.\"\n\n\"It is quite certain that when Mrs. Barclay left the house at half-past seven she was on good terms with her husband. She was never, as I think I have said, ostentatiously affectionate, but she was heard by the coachman chatting with the colonel in a friendly fashion. Now, it was equally certain that, immediately on her return, she had gone to the room in which she was least likely to see her husband, had flown to tea as an agitated woman will, and finally, on his coming in to her, had broken into violent recriminations. Therefore something had occurred between seven-thirty and nine o'clock which had completely altered her feelings towards him. But Miss Morrison had been with her during the whole of that hour and a half. It was absolutely certain, therefore, in spite of her denial, that she must know something of the matter.\n\n\"My first conjecture was that possibly there had been some passages between this young lady and the old soldier, which the former had now confessed to the wife. That would account for the angry return, and also for the girl's denial that anything had occurred. Nor would it be entirely incompatible with most of the words overheard. But there was the reference to David, and there was the known affection of the colonel for his wife to weigh against it, to say nothing of the tragic intrusion of this other man, which might, of course, be entirely disconnected with what had gone before. It was not easy to pick one's steps, but, on the whole, I was inclined to dismiss the idea that there had been anything between the colonel and Miss Morrison, but more than ever convinced that the young lady held the clue as to what it was which had turned Mrs. Barclay to hatred of her husband. I took the obvious course, therefore, of calling upon Miss M., of explaining to her that I was perfectly certain that she held the facts in her possession, and of assuring her that her friend, Mrs. Barclay, might find herself in the dock upon a capital charge unless the matter were cleared up.\n\n\"Miss Morrison is a little ethereal slip of a girl, with timid eyes and blond hair, but I found her by no means wanting in shrewdness and common sense. She sat thinking for some time after I had spoken, and then, turning to me with a brisk air of resolution, she broke into a remarkable statement which I will condense for your benefit.\n\n\"'I promised my friend that I would say nothing of the matter, and a promise is a promise,' said she; 'but if I can really help her when so serious a charge is laid against her, and when her own mouth, poor darling, is closed by illness, then I think I am absolved from my promise. I will tell you exactly what happened upon Monday evening.\n\n\"'We were returning from the Watt Street Mission about a quarter to nine o'clock. On our way we had to pass through Hudson Street, which is a very quiet thoroughfare. There is only one lamp in it, upon the left-hand side, and as we approached this lamp I saw a man coming towards us with his back very bent, and something like a box slung over one of his shoulders. He appeared to be deformed, for he carried his head low and walked with his knees bent. We were passing him when he raised his face to look at us in the circle of light thrown by the lamp, and as he did so he stopped and screamed out in a dreadful voice, \"My God, it's Nancy!\" Mrs. Barclay turned as white as death and would have fallen down had the dreadful-looking creature not caught hold of her. I was going to call for the police, but she, to my surprise, spoke quite civilly to the fellow.\n\n\"' \"I thought you had been dead this thirty years, Henry,\" said she in a shaking voice.\n\n\"' \"So I have,\" said he, and it was awful to hear the tones that he said it in. He had a very dark, fearsome face, and a gleam in his eyes that comes back to me in my dreams. His hair and whiskers were shot with gray, and his face was all crinkled and puckered like a withered apple.\n\n\"' \"Just walk on a little way, dear,\" said Mrs. Barclay; \"I want to have a word with this man. There is nothing to be afraid of.\" She tried to speak boldly, but she was still deadly pale and could hardly get her words out for the trembling of her lips.\n\n\"'I did as she asked me, and they talked together for a few minutes. Then she came down the street with her eyes blazing, and I saw the crippled wretch standing by the lamp-post and shaking his clenched fists in the air as if he were mad with rage. She never said a word until we were at the door here, when she took me by the hand and begged me to tell no one what had happened.\n\n\"' \"It's an old acquaintance of mine who has come down in the world,\" said she. When I promised her I would say nothing she kissed me, and I have never seen her since. I have told you now the whole truth, and if I withheld it from the police it is because I did not realize then the danger in which my dear friend stood. I know that it can only be to her advantage that everything should be known.'\n\n\"There was her statement, Watson, and to me, as you can imagine, it was like a light on a dark night. Everything which had been disconnected before began at once to assume its true place, and I had a shadowy presentiment of the whole sequence of events. My next step obviously was to find the man who had produced such a remarkable impression upon Mrs. Barclay. If he were still in Aldershot it should not be a very difficult matter. There are not such a very great number of civilians, and a deformed man was sure to have attracted attention. I spent a day in the search, and by evening\u2014this very evening, Watson\u2014I had run him down. The man's name is Henry Wood, and he lives in lodgings in this same street in which the ladies met him. He has only been five days in the place. In the character of a registration-agent I had a most interesting gossip with his landlady. The man is by trade a conjurer and performer, going round the canteens after nightfall, and giving a little entertainment at each. He carries some creature about with him in that box, about which the landlady seemed to be in considerable trepidation, for she had never seen an animal like it. He uses it in some of his tricks according to her account. So much the woman was able to tell me, and also that it was a wonder the man lived, seeing how twisted he was, and that he spoke in a strange tongue sometimes, and that for the last two nights she had heard him groaning and weeping in his bedroom. He was all right, as far as money went, but in his deposit he had given her what looked like a bad florin. She showed it to me, Watson, and it was an Indian rupee.\n\n\"So now, my dear fellow, you see exactly how we stand and why it is I want you. It is perfectly plain that after the ladies parted from this man he followed them at a distance, that he saw the quarrel between husband and wife through the window, that he rushed in, and that the creature which he carried in his box got loose. That is all very certain. But he is the only person in this world who can tell us exactly what happened in that room.\"\n\n\"And you intend to ask him?\"\n\n\"Most certainly\u2014but in the presence of a witness.\"\n\n\"And I am the witness?\"\n\n\"If you will be so good. If he can clear the matter up, well and good. If he refuses, we have no alternative but to apply for a warrant.\"\n\n\"But how do you know he'll be there when we return?\"\n\n\"You may be sure that I took some precautions. I have one of my Baker Street boys mounting guard over him who would stick to him like a burr, go where he might. We shall find him in Hudson Street to-morrow, Watson, and meanwhile I should be the criminal myself if I kept you out of bed any longer.\"\n\nIt was midday when we found ourselves at the scene of the tragedy, and, under my companion's guidance, we made our way at once to Hudson Street. In spite of his capacity for concealing his emotions I could easily see that Holmes was in a state of suppressed excitement, while I was myself tingling with that half-sporting, half-intellectual pleasure which I invariably experienced when I associated myself with him in his investigations.\n\n\"This is the street,\" said he as we turned into a short thoroughfare lined with plain two-storied brick houses. \"Ah, here is Simpson to report.\"\n\n\"He's in all right, Mr. Holmes,\" cried a small street Arab, running up to us.\n\n\"Good, Simpson!\" said Holmes, patting him on the head. \"Come along, Watson. This is the house.\" He sent in his card with a message that he had come on important business, and a moment later we were face to face with the man whom we had come to see. In spite of the warm weather he was crouching over a fire, and the little room was like an oven. The man sat all twisted and huddled in his chair in a way which gave an indescribable impression of deformity; but the face which he turned towards us, though worn and swarthy, must at some time have been remarkable for its beauty. He looked suspiciously at us now out of yellow-shot, bilious eyes, and, without speaking or rising, he waved towards two chairs.\n\n\"Mr. Henry Wood, late of India, I believe,\" said Holmes affably. \"I've come over this little matter of Colonel Barclay's death.\"\n\n\"What should I know about that?\"\n\n\"That's what I want to ascertain. You know, I suppose, that unless the matter is cleared up, Mrs. Barclay, who is an old friend of yours, will in all probability be tried for murder.\"\n\nThe man gave a violent start.\n\n\"I don't know who you are,\" he cried, \"nor how you come to know what you do know, but will you swear that this is true that you tell me?\"\n\n\"Why, they are only waiting for her to come to her senses to arrest her.\"\n\n\"My God! Are you in the police yourself?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What business is it of yours, then?\"\n\n\"It's every man's business to see justice done.\"\n\n\"You can take my word that she is innocent.\"\n\n\"Then you are guilty.\"\n\n\"No, I am not.\"\n\n\"Who killed Colonel James Barclay, then?\"\n\n\"It was a just Providence that killed him. But, mind you this, that if I had knocked his brains out, as it was in my heart to do, he would have had no more than his due from my hands. If his own guilty conscience had not struck him down it is likely enough that I might have had his blood upon my soul. You want me to tell the story. Well, I don't know why I shouldn't, for there's no cause for me to be ashamed of it.\n\n\"It was in this way, sir. You see me now with my back like a camel and my ribs all awry, but there was a time when Corporal Henry Wood was the smartest man in the One Hundred and Seventeenth foot. We were in India, then, in cantonments, at a place we'll call Bhurtee. Barclay, who died the other day, was sergeant in the same company as myself, and the belle of the regiment, ay, and the finest girl that ever had the breath of life between her lips, was Nancy Devoy, the daughter of the colour-sergeant. There were two men that loved her, and one that she loved, and you'll smile when you look at this poor thing huddled before the fire and hear me say that it was for my good looks that she loved me.\n\n\"Well, though I had her heart, her father was set upon her marrying Barclay. I was a harum-scarum, reckless lad, and he had had an education and was already marked for the sword-belt. But the girl held true to me, and it seemed that I would have had her when the Mutiny broke out, and all hell was loose in the country.\n\n\"We were shut up in Bhurtee, the regiment of us with half a battery of artillery, a company of Sikhs, and a lot of civilians and women-folk. There were ten thousand rebels round us, and they were as keen as a set of terriers round a rat-cage. About the second week of it our water gave out, and it was a question whether we could communicate with General Neill's column, which was moving up-country. It was our only chance, for we could not hope to fight our way out with all the women and children, so I volunteered to go out and to warn General Neill of our danger. My offer was accepted, and I talked it over with Sergeant Barclay, who was supposed to know the ground better than any other man, and who drew up a route by which I might get through the rebel lines. At ten o'clock the same night I started off upon my journey. There were a thousand lives to save, but it was of only one that I was thinking when I dropped over the wall that night.\n\n\"My way ran down a dried-up watercourse, which we hoped would screen me from the enemy's sentries; but as I crept round the corner of it I walked right into six of them, who were crouching down in the dark waiting for me. In an instant I was stunned with a blow and bound hand and foot. But the real blow was to my heart and not to my head, for as I came to and listened to as much as I could understand of their talk, I heard enough to tell me that my comrade, the very man who had arranged the way I was to take, had betrayed me by means of a native servant into the hands of the enemy.\n\n\"Well, there's no need for me to dwell on that part of it. You know now what James Barclay was capable of. Bhurtee was relieved by Neill next day, but the rebels took me away with them in their retreat, and it was many a long year before ever I saw a white face again. I was tortured and tried to get away, and was captured and tortured again. You can see for yourselves the state in which I was left. Some of them that fled into Nepal took me with them, and then afterwards I was up past Darjeeling. The hill-folk up there murdered the rebels who had me, and I became their slave for a time until I escaped; but instead of going south I had to go north, until I found myself among the Afghans. There I wandered about for many a year, and at last came back to the Punjab, where I lived mostly among the natives and picked up a living by the conjuring tricks that I had learned. What use was it for me, a wretched cripple, to go back to England or to make myself known to my old comrades? Even my wish for revenge would not make me do that. I had rather that Nancy and my old pals should think of Harry Wood as having died with a straight back, than see him living and crawling with a stick like a chimpanzee. They never doubted that I was dead, and I meant that they never should. I heard that Barclay had married Nancy, and that he was rising rapidly in the regiment, but even that did not make me speak.\n\n\"But when one gets old one has a longing for home. For years I've been dreaming of the bright green fields and the hedges of England. At last I determined to see them before I died. I saved enough to bring me across, and then I came here where the soldiers are, for I know their ways and how to amuse them and so earn enough to keep me.\"\n\n\"Your narrative is most interesting,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"I have already heard of your meeting with Mrs. Barclay, and your mutual recognition. You then, as I understand, followed her home and saw through the window an altercation between her husband and her, in which she doubtless cast his conduct to you in his teeth. Your own feelings overcame you, and you ran across the lawn and broke in upon them.\"\n\n\"I did, sir, and at the sight of me he looked as I have never seen a man look before, and over he went with his head on the fender. But he was dead before he fell. I read death on his face as plain as I can read that text over the fire. The bare sight of me was like a bullet through his guilty heart.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"Then Nancy fainted, and I caught up the key of the door from her hand, intending to unlock it and get help. But as I was doing it it seemed to me better to leave it alone and get away, for the thing might look black against me, and anyway my secret would be out if I were taken. In my haste I thrust the key into my pocket, and dropped my stick while I was chasing Teddy, who had run up the curtain. When I got him into his box, from which he had slipped, I was off as fast as I could run.\"\n\n\"Who's Teddy?\" asked Holmes.\n\nThe man leaned over and pulled up the front of a kind of hutch in the corner. In an instant out there slipped a beautiful reddish-brown creature, thin and lithe, with the legs of a stoat, a long, thin nose, and a pair of the finest red eyes that ever I saw in an animal's head.\n\n\"It's a mongoose,\" I cried.\n\n\"Well, some call them that, and some call them ichneumon,\" said the man. \"Snake-catcher is what I call them, and Teddy is amazing quick on cobras. I have one here without the fangs, and Teddy catches it every night to please the folk in the canteen.\n\n\"Any other point, sir?\"\n\n\"Well, we may have to apply to you again if Mrs. Barclay should prove to be in serious trouble.\"\n\n\"In that case, of course, I'd come forward.\"\n\n\"But if not, there is no object in raking up this scandal against a dead man, foully as he has acted. You have at least the satisfaction of knowing that for thirty years of his life his conscience bitterly reproached him for his wicked deed. Ah, there goes Major Murphy on the other side of the street. Good-bye, Wood. I want to learn if anything has happened since yesterday.\"\n\nWe were in time to overtake the major before he reached the corner.\n\n\"Ah, Holmes,\" he said, \"I suppose you have heard that all this fuss has come to nothing?\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"The inquest is just over. The medical evidence showed conclusively that death was due to apoplexy. You see it was quite a simple case, after all.\"\n\n\"Oh, remarkably superficial,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"Come, Watson, I don't think we shall be wanted in Aldershot any more.\"\n\n\"There's one thing,\" said I as we walked down to the station. \"If the husband's name was James, and the other was Henry, what was this talk about David?\"\n\n\"That one word, my dear Watson, should have told me the whole story had I been the ideal reasoner which you are so fond of depicting. It was evidently a term of reproach.\"\n\n\"Of reproach?\"\n\n\"Yes; David strayed a little occasionally, you know, and on one occasion in the same direction as Sergeant James Barclay. You remember the small affair of Uriah and Bathsheba? My Biblical knowledge is a trifle rusty, I fear, but you will find the story in the first or second of Samuel.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE RESIDENT PATIENT", + "text": "In glancing over the somewhat incoherent series of Memoirs with which I have endeavoured to illustrate a few of the mental peculiarities of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have been struck by the difficulty which I have experienced in picking out examples which shall in every way answer my purpose. For in those cases in which Holmes has performed some tour de force of analytical reasoning, and has demonstrated the value of his peculiar methods of investigation, the facts themselves have often been so slight or so commonplace that I could not feel justified in laying them before the public. On the other hand, it has frequently happened that he has been concerned in some research where the facts have been of the most remarkable and dramatic character, but where the share which he has himself taken in determining their causes has been less pronounced than I, as his biographer, could wish. The small matter which I have chronicled under the heading of \"A Study in Scarlet,\" and that other later one connected with the loss of the Gloria Scott, may serve as examples of this Scylla and Charybdis which are forever threatening the historian. It may be that in the business of which I am now about to write the part which my friend played is not sufficiently accentuated; and yet the whole train of circumstances is so remarkable that I cannot bring myself to omit it entirely from this series.\n\nIt had been a close, rainy day in October. \"Unhealthy weather, Watson,\" said my friend. \"But the evening has brought a breeze with it. What do you say to a ramble through London?\"\n\nI was weary of our little sitting-room and gladly acquiesced. For three hours we strolled about together, watching the ever-changing kaleidoscope of life as it ebbs and flows through Fleet Street and the Strand. His characteristic talk, with its keen observance of detail and subtle power of inference, held me amused and enthralled. It was ten o'clock before we reached Baker Street again. A brougham was waiting at our door.\n\n\"Hum! A doctor's\u2014general practitioner, I perceive,\" said Holmes. \"Not been long in practice, but has a good deal to do. Come to consult us, I fancy! Lucky we came back!\"\n\nI was sufficiently conversant with Holmes's methods to be able to follow his reasoning, and to see that the nature and state of the various medical instruments in the wicker basket which hung in the lamp-light inside the brougham had given him the data for his swift deduction. The light in our window above showed that this late visit was indeed intended for us. With some curiosity as to what could have sent a brother medico to us at such an hour, I followed Holmes into our sanctum.\n\nA pale, taper-faced man with sandy whiskers rose up from a chair by the fire as we entered. His age may not have been more than three or four and thirty, but his haggard expression and unhealthy hue told of a life which had sapped his strength and robbed him of his youth. His manner was nervous and shy, like that of a sensitive gentleman, and the thin white hand which he laid on the mantelpiece as he rose was that of an artist rather than of a surgeon. His dress was quiet and sombre\u2014a black frock-coat, dark trousers, and a touch of colour about his necktie.\n\n\"Good-evening, Doctor,\" said Holmes cheerily. \"I am glad to see that you have only been waiting a very few minutes.\"\n\n\"You spoke to my coachman, then?\"\n\n\"No, it was the candle on the side-table that told me. Pray resume your seat and let me know how I can serve you.\"\n\n\"My name is Dr. Percy Trevelyan,\" said our visitor, \"and I live at 403 Brook Street.\"\n\n\"Are you not the author of a monograph upon obscure nervous lesions?\" I asked.\n\nHis pale cheeks flushed with pleasure at hearing that his work was known to me.\n\n\"I so seldom hear of the work that I thought it was quite dead,\" said he. \"My publishers gave me a most discouraging account of its sale. You are yourself, I presume, a medical man.\"\n\n\"A retired army surgeon.\"\n\n\"My own hobby has always been nervous disease. I should wish to make it an absolute specialty, but of course a man must take what he can get at first. This, however, is beside the question, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and I quite appreciate how valuable your time is. The fact is that a very singular train of events has occurred recently at my house in Brook Street, and tonight they came to such a head that I felt it was quite impossible for me to wait another hour before asking for your advice and assistance.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes sat down and lit his pipe. \"You are very welcome to both,\" said he. \"Pray let me have a detailed account of what the circumstances are which have disturbed you.\"\n\n\"One or two of them are so trivial,\" said Dr. Trevelyan, \"that really I am almost ashamed to mention them. But the matter is so inexplicable, and the recent turn which it has taken is so elaborate, that I shall lay it all before you, and you shall judge what is essential and what is not.\n\n\"I am compelled, to begin with, to say something of my own college career. I am a London University man, you know, and I am sure that you will not think that I am unduly singing my own praises if I say that my student career was considered by my professors to be a very promising one. After I had graduated I continued to devote myself to research, occupying a minor position in King's College Hospital, and I was fortunate enough to excite considerable interest by my research into the pathology of catalepsy, and finally to win the Bruce Pinkerton prize and medal by the monograph on nervous lesions to which your friend has just alluded. I should not go too far if I were to say that there was a general impression at that time that a distinguished career lay before me.\n\n\"But the one great stumbling-block lay in my want of capital. As you will readily understand, a specialist who aims high is compelled to start in one of a dozen streets in the Cavendish Square quarter, all of which entail enormous rents and furnishing expenses. Besides this preliminary outlay, he must be prepared to keep himself for some years, and to hire a presentable carriage and horse. To do this was quite beyond my power, and I could only hope that by economy I might in ten years' time save enough to enable me to put up my plate. Suddenly, however, an unexpected incident opened up quite a new prospect to me.\n\n\"This was a visit from a gentleman of the name of Blessington, who was a complete stranger to me. He came up into my room one morning, and plunged into business in an instant.\n\n\"'You are the same Percy Trevelyan who has had so distinguished a career and won a great prize lately?' said he.\n\n\"I bowed.\n\n\"'Answer me frankly,' he continued, 'for you will find it to your interest to do so. You have all the cleverness which makes a successful man. Have you the tact?'\n\n\"I could not help smiling at the abruptness of the question.\n\n\"'I trust that I have my share,' I said.\n\n\"'Any bad habits? Not drawn towards drink, eh?'\n\n\"'Really, sir!' I cried.\n\n\"'Quite right! That's all right! But I was bound to ask. With all these qualities, why are you not in practice?'\n\n\"I shrugged my shoulders.\n\n\"'Come, come!' said he in his bustling way. 'It's the old story. More in your brains than in your pocket, eh? What would you say if I were to start you in Brook Street?'\n\n\"I stared at him in astonishment.\n\n\"'Oh, it's for my sake, not for yours,' he cried. 'I'll be perfectly frank with you, and if it suits you it will suit me very well. I have a few thousands to invest, d'ye see, and I think I'll sink them in you.'\n\n\"'But why?' I gasped.\n\n\"'Well, it's just like any other speculation, and safer than most.'\n\n\"'What am I to do, then?'\n\n\"'I'll tell you. I'll take the house, furnish it, pay the maids, and run the whole place. All you have to do is just to wear out your chair in the consulting-room. I'll let you have pocket-money and everything. Then you hand over to me three quarters of what you earn, and you keep the other quarter for yourself.'\n\n\"This was the strange proposal, Mr. Holmes, with which the man Blessington approached me. I won't weary you with the account of how we bargained and negotiated. It ended in my moving into the house next Lady Day. and starting in practice on very much the same conditions as he had suggested. He came himself to live with me in the character of a resident patient. His heart was weak, it appears, and he needed constant medical supervision. He turned the two best rooms of the first floor into a sitting-room and bedroom for himself. He was a man of singular habits, shunning company and very seldom going out. His life was irregular, but in one respect he was regularity itself. Every evening, at the same hour, he walked into the consulting-room, examined the books, put down five and three-pence for every guinea that I had earned, and carried the rest off to the strong-box in his own room.\n\n\"I may say with confidence that he never had occasion to regret his speculation. From the first it was a success. A few good cases and the reputation which I had won in the hospital brought me rapidly to the front, and during the last few years I have made him a rich man.\n\n\"So much, Mr. Holmes, for my past history and my relations with Mr. Blessington. It only remains for me now to tell you what has occurred to bring me here tonight.\n\n\"Some weeks ago Mr. Blessington came down to me in, as it seemed to me, a state of considerable agitation. He spoke of some burglary which, he said, had been committed in the West End, and he appeared, I remember, to be quite unnecessarily excited about it, declaring that a day should not pass before we should add stronger bolts to our windows and doors. For a week he continued to be in a peculiar state of restlessness, peering continually out of the windows, and ceasing to take the short walk which had usually been the prelude to his dinner. From his manner it struck me that he was in mortal dread of something or somebody, but when I questioned him upon the point he became so offensive that I was compelled to drop the subject. Gradually, as time passed, his fears appeared to die away, and he renewed his former habits, when a fresh event reduced him to the pitiable state of prostration in which he now lies.\n\n\"What happened was this. Two days ago I received the letter which I now read to you. Neither address nor date is attached to it.\n\n\"A Russian nobleman who is now resident in England [it runs], would be glad to avail himself of the professional assistance of Dr. Percy Trevelyan. He has been for some years a victim to cataleptic attacks, on which, as is well known, Dr. Trevelyan is an authority. He proposes to call at about a quarter-past six to-morrow evening, if Dr. Trevelyan will make it convenient to be at home.\n\n\"This letter interested me deeply, because the chief difficulty in the study of catalepsy is the rareness of the disease. You may believe, then, that I was in my consulting-room when, at the appointed hour, the page showed in the patient.\n\n\"He was an elderly man, thin, demure, and commonplace\u2014by no means the conception one forms of a Russian nobleman. I was much more struck by the appearance of his companion. This was a tall young man, surprisingly handsome, with a dark, fierce face, and the limbs and chest of a Hercules. He had his hand under the other's arm as they entered, and helped him to a chair with a tenderness which one would hardly have expected from his appearance.\n\n\"'You will excuse my coming in, Doctor,' said he to me, speaking English with a slight lisp. 'This is my father, and his health is a matter of the most overwhelming importance to me.'\n\n\"I was touched by this filial anxiety. 'You would, perhaps, care to remain during the consultation?' said I.\n\n\"'Not for the world,' he cried with a gesture of horror. 'It is more painful to me than I can express. If I were to see my father in one of these dreadful seizures I am convinced that I should never survive it. My own nervous system is an exceptionally sensitive one. With your permission, I will remain in the waiting-room while you go into my father's case.'\n\n\"To this, of course, I assented, and the young man withdrew. The patient and I then plunged into a discussion of his case, of which I took exhaustive notes. He was not remarkable for intelligence, and his answers were frequently obscure, which I attributed to his limited acquaintance with our language. Suddenly, however, as I sat writing, he ceased to give any answer at all to my inquiries, and on my turning towards him I was shocked to see that he was sitting bolt upright in his chair, staring at me with a perfectly blank and rigid face. He was again in the grip of his mysterious malady.\n\n\"My first feeling, as I have just said, was one of pity and horror. My second, I fear, was rather one of professional satisfaction. I made notes of my patient's pulse and temperature, tested the rigidity of his muscles, and examined his reflexes. There was nothing markedly abnormal in any of these conditions, which harmonized with my former experiences. I had obtained good results in such cases by the inhalation of nitrite of amyl, and the present seemed an admirable opportunity of testing its virtues. The bottle was downstairs in my laboratory, so, leaving my patient seated in his chair, I ran down to get it. There was some little delay in finding it\u2014five minutes, let us say\u2014and then I returned. Imagine my amazement to find the room empty and the patient gone.\n\n\"Of course, my first act was to run into the waiting-room. The son had gone also. The hall door had been closed, but not shut. My page who admits patients is a new boy and by no means quick. He waits downstairs and runs up to show patients out when I ring the consulting-room bell. He had heard nothing, and the affair remained a complete mystery. Mr. Blessington came in from his walk shortly afterwards, but I did not say anything to him upon the subject, for, to tell the truth, I have got in the way of late of holding as little communication with him as possible.\n\n\"Well, I never thought that I should see anything more of the Russian and his son, so you can imagine my amazement when, at the very same hour this evening, they both came marching into my consulting-room, just as they had done before.\n\n\"'I feel that I owe you a great many apologies for my abrupt departure yesterday, Doctor,' said my patient.\n\n\"'I confess that I was very much surprised at it,' said I.\n\n\"'Well, the fact is,' he remarked, 'that when I recover from these attacks my mind is always very clouded as to all that has gone before. I woke up in a strange room, as it seemed to me, and made my way out into the street in a sort of dazed way when you were absent.'\n\n\"'And I,' said the son, 'seeing my father pass the door of the waiting-room, naturally thought that the consultation had come to an end. It was not until we had reached home that I began to realize the true state of affairs.'\n\n\"'Well,' said I, laughing, 'there is no harm done except that you puzzled me terribly; so if you, sir, would kindly step into the waiting-room I shall be happy to continue our consultation which was brought to so abrupt an ending.'\n\n\"For half an hour or so I discussed the old gentleman's symptoms with him, and then, having prescribed for him, I saw him go off upon the arm of his son.\n\n\"I have told you that Mr. Blessington generally chose this hour of the day for his exercise. He came in shortly afterwards and passed upstairs. An instant later I heard him running down, and he burst into my consulting-room like a man who is mad with panic:\n\n\"'Who has been in my room?' he cried.\n\n\"'No one,' said I.\n\n\"'It's a lie!' he yelled. 'Come up and look!'\n\n\"I passed over the grossness of his language, as he seemed half out of his mind with fear. When I went upstairs with him he pointed to several footprints upon the light carpet.\n\n\"'Do you mean to say those are mine?' he cried.\n\n\"They were certainly very much larger than any which he could have made, and were evidently quite fresh. It rained hard this afternoon, as you know, and my patients were the only people who called. It must have been the case, then, that the man in the waiting-room had, for some unknown reason, while I was busy with the other, ascended to the room of my resident patient. Nothing had been touched or taken, but there were the footprints to prove that the intrusion was an undoubted fact.\n\n\"Mr. Blessington seemed more excited over the matter than I should have thought possible, though of course it was enough to disturb anybody's peace of mind. He actually sat crying in an armchair, and I could hardly get him to speak coherently. It was his suggestion that I should come round to you, and of course I at once saw the propriety of it, for certainly the incident is a very singular one, though he appears to completely overrate its importance. If you would only come back with me in my brougham, you would at least be able to soothe him, though I can hardly hope that you will be able to explain this remarkable occurrence.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes had listened to this long narrative with an intentness which showed me that his interest was keenly aroused. His face was as impassive as ever, but his lids had drooped more heavily over his eyes, and his smoke had curled up more thickly from his pipe to emphasize each curious episode in the doctor's tale. As our visitor concluded, Holmes sprang up without a word, handed me my hat, picked his own from the table, and followed Dr. Trevelyan to the door. Within a quarter of an hour we had been dropped at the door of the physician's residence in Brook Street, one of those sombre, flat-faced houses which one associates with a West End practice. A small page admitted us, and we began at once to ascend the broad, well-carpeted stair.\n\nBut a singular interruption brought us to a standstill. The light at the top was suddenly whisked out, and from the darkness came a reedy, quavering voice.\n\n\"I have a pistol,\" it cried. \"I give you my word that I'll fire if you come any nearer.\"\n\n\"This really grows outrageous, Mr. Blessington,\" cried Dr. Trevelyan.\n\n\"Oh, then it is you, Doctor,\" said the voice with a great heave of relief. \"But those other gentlemen, are they what they pretend to be?\"\n\nWe were conscious of a long scrutiny out of the darkness.\n\n\"Yes, yes, it's all right,\" said the voice at last. \"You can come up, and I am sorry if my precautions have annoyed you.\"\n\nHe relit the stair gas as he spoke, and we saw before us a singular-looking man, whose appearance, as well as his voice, testified to his jangled nerves. He was very fat, but had apparently at some time been much fatter, so that the skin hung about his face in loose pouches, like the cheeks of a bloodhound. He was of a sickly colour, and his thin, sandy hair seemed to bristle up with the intensity of his emotion. In his hand he held a pistol, but he thrust it into his pocket as we advanced.\n\n\"Good-evening, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"I am sure I am very much obliged to you for coming round. No one ever needed your advice more than I do. I suppose that Dr. Trevelyan has told you of this most unwarrantable intrusion into my rooms.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" said Holmes. \"Who are these two men, Mr. Blessington, and why do they wish to molest you?\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said the resident patient in a nervous fashion, \"of course it is hard to say that. You can hardly expect me to answer that, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Do you mean that you don't know?\"\n\n\"Come in here, if you please. Just have the kindness to step in here.\"\n\nHe led the way into his bedroom, which was large and comfortably furnished.\n\n\"You see that,\" said he, pointing to a big black box at the end of his bed. \"I have never been a very rich man, Mr. Holmes\u2014never made but one investment in my life, as Dr. Trevelyan would tell you. But I don't believe in bankers. I would never trust a banker, Mr. Holmes. Between ourselves, what little I have is in that box, so you can understand what it means to me when unknown people force themselves into my rooms.\"\n\nHolmes looked at Blessington in his questioning way and shook his head.\n\n\"I cannot possibly advise you if you try to deceive me,\" said he.\n\n\"But I have told you everything.\"\n\nHolmes turned on his heel with a gesture of disgust. \"Good-night, Dr. Trevelyan,\" said he.\n\n\"And no advice for me?\" cried Blessington in a breaking voice.\n\n\"My advice to you, sir, is to speak the truth.\"\n\nA minute later we were in the street and walking for home. We had crossed Oxford Street and were halfway down Harley Street before I could get a word from my companion.\n\n\"Sorry to bring you out on such a fool's errand, Watson,\" he said at last. \"It is an interesting case, too, at the bottom of it.\"\n\n\"I can make little of it,\" I confessed.\n\n\"Well, it is quite evident that there are two men\u2014more, perhaps, but at least two\u2014who are determined for some reason to get at this fellow Blessington. I have no doubt in my mind that both on the first and on the second occasion that young man penetrated to Blessington's room, while his confederate, by an ingenious device, kept the doctor from interfering.\"\n\n\"And the catalepsy?\"\n\n\"A fraudulent imitation, Watson, though I should hardly dare to hint as much to our specialist. It is a very easy complaint to imitate. I have done it myself.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"By the purest chance Blessington was out on each occasion. Their reason for choosing so unusual an hour for a consultation was obviously to insure that there should be no other patient in the waiting-room. It just happened, however, that this hour coincided with Blessington's constitutional, which seems to show that they were not very well acquainted with his daily routine. Of course, if they had been merely after plunder they would at least have made some attempt to search for it. Besides, I can read in a man's eye when it is his own skin that he is frightened for. It is inconceivable that this fellow could have made two such vindictive enemies as these appear to be without knowing of it. I hold it, therefore, to be certain that he does know who these men are, and that for reasons of his own he suppresses it. It is just possible that to-morrow may find him in a more communicative mood.\"\n\n\"Is there not one alternative,\" I suggested, \"grotesquely improbable, no doubt, but still just conceivable? Might the whole story of the cataleptic Russian and his son be a concoction of Dr. Trevelyan's, who has, for his own purposes, been in Blessington's rooms?\"\n\nI saw in the gas-light that Holmes wore an amused smile at this brilliant departure of mine.\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" said he, \"it was one of the first solutions which occurred to me, but I was soon able to corroborate the doctor's tale. This young man has left prints upon the stair-carpet which made it quite superfluous for me to ask to see those which he had made in the room. When I tell you that his shoes were square-toed instead of being pointed like Blessington's, and were quite an inch and a third longer than the doctor's, you will acknowledge that there can be no doubt as to his individuality. But we may sleep on it now, for I shall be surprised if we do not hear something further from Brook Street in the morning.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes's prophecy was soon fulfilled, and in a dramatic fashion. At half-past seven next morning, in the first dim glimmer of daylight, I found him standing by my bedside in his dressing-gown.\n\n\"There's a brougham waiting for us, Watson,\" said he.\n\n\"What's the matter, then?\"\n\n\"The Brook Street business.\"\n\n\"Any fresh news?\"\n\n\"Tragic, but ambiguous,\" said he, pulling up the blind. \"Look at this\u2014a sheet from a notebook, with 'For God's sake come at once. P. T.,' scrawled upon it in pencil. Our friend, the doctor, was hard put to it when he wrote this. Come along, my dear fellow, for it's an urgent call.\"\n\nIn a quarter of an hour or so we were back at the physician's house. He came running out to meet us with a face of horror.\n\n\"Oh, such a business!\" he cried with his hands to his temples.\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"Blessington has committed suicide!\"\n\nHolmes whistled.\n\n\"Yes, he hanged himself during the night.\"\n\nWe had entered, and the doctor had preceded us into what was evidently his waiting-room.\n\n\"I really hardly know what I am doing,\" he cried. \"The police are already upstairs. It has shaken me most dreadfully.\"\n\n\"When did you find it out?\"\n\n\"He has a cup of tea taken in to him early every morning. When the maid entered, about seven, there the unfortunate fellow was hanging in the middle of the room. He had tied his cord to the hook on which the heavy lamp used to hang, and he had jumped off from the top of the very box that he showed us yesterday.\"\n\nHolmes stood for a moment in deep thought.\n\n\"With your permission,\" said he at last, \"I should like to go upstairs and look into the matter.\"\n\nWe both ascended, followed by the doctor.\n\nIt was a dreadful sight which met us as we entered the bedroom door. I have spoken of the impression of flabbiness which this man Blessington conveyed. As he dangled from the hook it was exaggerated and intensified until he was scarce human in his appearance. The neck was drawn out like a plucked chicken's, making the rest of him seem the more obese and unnatural by the contrast. He was clad only in his long night-dress, and his swollen ankles and ungainly feet protruded starkly from beneath it. Beside him stood a smart-looking police-inspector, who was taking notes in a pocketbook.\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Holmes,\" said he heartily as my friend entered, \"I am delighted to see you.\"\n\n\"Good-morning, Lanner,\" answered Holmes; \"you won't think me an intruder, I am sure. Have you heard of the events which led up to this affair?\"\n\n\"Yes, I heard something of them.\"\n\n\"Have you formed any opinion?\"\n\n\"As far as I can see, the man has been driven out of his senses by fright. The bed has been well slept in, you see. There's his impression, deep enough. It's about five in the morning, you know, that suicides are most common. That would be about his time for hanging himself. It seems to have been a very deliberate affair.\"\n\n\"I should say that he has been dead about three hours, judging by the rigidity of the muscles,\" said I.\n\n\"Noticed anything peculiar about the room?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Found a screw-driver and some screws on the wash-hand stand. Seems to have smoked heavily during the night, too. Here are four cigar-ends that I picked out of the fireplace.\"\n\n\"Hum!\" said Holmes, \"have you got his cigar-holder?\"\n\n\"No, I have seen none.\"\n\n\"His cigar-case, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was in his coat-pocket.\"\n\nHolmes opened it and smelled the single cigar which it contained.\n\n\"Oh, this is a Havana, and these others are cigars of the peculiar sort which are imported by the Dutch from their East Indian colonies. They are usually wrapped in straw, you know, and are thinner for their length than any other brand.\" He picked up the four ends and examined them with his pocket-lens.\n\n\"Two of these have been smoked from a holder and two without,\" said he. \"Two have been cut by a not very sharp knife, and two have had the ends bitten off by a set of excellent teeth. This is no suicide, Mr. Lanner. It is a very deeply planned and cold-blooded murder.\"\n\n\"Impossible!\" cried the inspector.\n\n\"And why?\"\n\n\"Why should anyone murder a man in so clumsy a fashion as by hanging him?\"\n\n\"That is what we have to find out.\"\n\n\"How could they get in?\"\n\n\"Through the front door.\"\n\n\"It was barred in the morning.\"\n\n\"Then it was barred after them.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"I saw their traces. Excuse me a moment, and I may be able to give you some further information about it.\"\n\nHe went over to the door, and turning the lock he examined it in his methodical way. Then he took out the key, which was on the inside, and inspected that also. The bed, the carpet, the chairs, the mantelpiece, the dead body, and the rope were each in turn examined, until at last he professed himself satisfied, and with my aid and that of the inspector cut down the wretched object and laid it reverently under a sheet.\n\n\"How about this rope?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is cut off this,\" said Dr. Trevelyan, drawing a large coil from under the bed. \"He was morbidly nervous of fire, and always kept this beside him, so that he might escape by the window in case the stairs were burning.\"\n\n\"That must have saved them trouble,\" said Holmes thoughtfully. \"Yes, the actual facts are very plain, and I shall be surprised if by the afternoon I cannot give you the reasons for them as well. I will take this photograph of Blessington, which I see upon the mantelpiece, as it may help me in my inquiries.\"\n\n\"But you have told us nothing!\" cried the doctor.\n\n\"Oh, there can be no doubt as to the sequence of events,\" said Holmes. \"There were three of them in it: the young man, the old man, and a third, to whose identity I have no clue. The first two, I need hardly remark, are the same who masqueraded as the Russian count and his son, so we can give a very full description of them. They were admitted by a confederate inside the house. If I might offer you a word of advice, Inspector, it would be to arrest the page, who, as I understand, has only recently come into your service, Doctor.\"\n\n\"The young imp cannot be found,\" said Dr. Trevelyan; \"the maid and the cook have just been searching for him.\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"He has played a not unimportant part in this drama,\" said he. \"The three men having ascended the stairs, which they did on tiptoe, the elder man first, the younger man second, and the unknown man in the rear\u2014\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"Oh, there could be no question as to the superimposing of the footmarks. I had the advantage of learning which was which last night. They ascended, then, to Mr. Blessington's room, the door of which they found to be locked. With the help of a wire, however, they forced round the key. Even without the lens you will perceive, by the scratches on this ward, where the pressure was applied.\n\n\"On entering the room their first proceeding must have been to gag Mr. Blessington. He may have been asleep, or he may have been so paralyzed with terror as to have been unable to cry out. These walls are thick, and it is conceivable that his shriek, if he had time to utter one, was unheard.\n\n\"Having secured him, it is evident to me that a consultation of some sort was held. Probably it was something in the nature of a judicial proceeding. It must have lasted for some time, for it was then that these cigars were smoked. The older man sat in that wicker chair; it was he who used the cigar-holder. The younger man sat over yonder; he knocked his ash off against the chest of drawers. The third fellow paced up and down. Blessington, I think, sat upright in the bed, but of that I cannot be absolutely certain.\n\n\"Well, it ended by their taking Blessington and hanging him. The matter was so prearranged that it is my belief that they brought with them some sort of block or pulley which might serve as a gallows. That screw-driver and those screws were, as I conceive, for fixing it up. Seeing the hook, however, they naturally saved themselves the trouble. Having finished their work they made off, and the door was barred behind them by their confederate.\"\n\nWe had all listened, with the deepest interest to this sketch of the night's doings, which Holmes had deduced from signs so subtle and minute that, even when he had pointed them out to us, we could scarcely follow him in his reasonings. The inspector hurried away on the instant to make inquiries about the page, while Holmes and I returned to Baker Street for breakfast.\n\n\"I'll be back by three,\" said he when we had finished our meal. \"Both the inspector and the doctor will meet me here at that hour, and I hope by that time to have cleared up any little obscurity which the case may still present.\"\n\nOur visitors arrived at the appointed time; but it was a quarter to four before my friend put in an appearance. From his expression as he entered, however, I could see that all had gone well with him.\n\n\"Any news, Inspector?\"\n\n\"We have got the boy, sir.\"\n\n\"Excellent, and I have got the men.\"\n\n\"You have got them!\" we cried, all three.\n\n\"Well, at least I have got their identity. This so-called Blessington is, as I expected, well known at headquarters, and so are his assailants. Their names are Biddle, Hayward, and Moffat.\"\n\n\"The Worthingdon bank gang,\" cried the inspector.\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Then Blessington must have been Sutton.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Why, that makes it as clear as crystal,\" said the inspector.\n\nBut Trevelyan and I looked at each other in bewilderment.\n\n\"You must surely remember the great Worthingdon bank business,\" said Holmes. \"Five men were in it\u2014these four and a fifth called Cartwright. Tobin, the caretaker, was murdered, and the thieves got away with seven thousand pounds. This was in 1875. They were all five arrested, but the evidence against them was by no means conclusive. This Blessington or Sutton, who was the worst of the gang, turned informer. On his evidence Cartwright was hanged and the other three got fifteen years apiece. When they got out the other day, which was some years before their full term, they set themselves, as you perceive, to hunt down the traitor and to avenge the death of their comrade upon him. Twice they tried to get at him and failed; a third time, you see, it came off. Is there anything further which I can explain, Dr. Trevelyan?\"\n\n\"I think you have made it all remarkably clear,\" said the doctor. \"No doubt the day on which he was so perturbed was the day when he had seen of their release in the newspapers.\"\n\n\"Quite so. His talk about a burglary was the merest blind.\"\n\n\"But why could he not tell you this?\"\n\n\"Well, my dear sir, knowing the vindictive character of his old associates, he was trying to hide his own identity from everybody as long as he could. His secret was a shameful one, and he could not bring himself to divulge it. However, wretch as he was, he was still living under the shield of British law, and I have no doubt, Inspector, that you will see that, though that shield may fail to guard, the sword of justice is still there to avenge.\"\n\nSuch were the singular circumstances in connection with the Resident Patient and the Brook Street Doctor. From that night nothing has been seen of the three murderers by the police, and it is surmised at Scotland Yard that they were among the passengers of the ill-fated steamer Norah Creina, which was lost some years ago with all hands upon the Portuguese coast, some leagues to the north of Oporto. The proceedings against the page broke down for want of evidence, and the Brook Street Mystery, as it was called, has never until now been fully dealt with in any public print." + }, + { + "title": "THE GREEK INTERPRETER", + "text": "During my long and intimate acquaintance with Mr. Sherlock Holmes I had never heard him refer to his relations, and hardly ever to his own early life. This reticence upon his part had increased the somewhat inhuman effect which he produced upon me, until sometimes I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre\u00ebminent in intelligence. His aversion to women and his disinclination to form new friendships were both typical of his unemotional character, but not more so than his complete suppression of every reference to his own people. I had come to believe that he was an orphan with no relatives living; but one day, to my very great surprise, he began to talk to me about his brother.\n\nIt was after tea on a summer evening, and the conversation, which had roamed in a desultory, spasmodic fashion from golf clubs to the causes of the change in the obliquity of the ecliptic, came round at last to the question of atavism and hereditary aptitudes. The point under discussion was, how far any singular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to his own early training.\n\n\"In your own case,\" said I, \"from all that you have told me, it seems obvious that your faculty of observation and your peculiar facility for deduction are due to your own systematic training.\"\n\n\"To some extent,\" he answered thoughtfully. \"My ancestors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural to their class. But, none the less, my turn that way is in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.\"\n\n\"But how do you know that it is hereditary?\"\n\n\"Because my brother Mycroft possesses it in a larger degree than I do.\"\n\nThis was news to me indeed. If there were another man with such singular powers in England, how was it that neither police nor public had heard of him? I put the question, with a hint that it was my companion's modesty which made him acknowledge his brother as his superior. Holmes laughed at my suggestion.\n\n\"My dear Watson,\" said he, \"I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers. When I say, therefore, that Mycroft has better powers of observation than I, you may take it that I am speaking the exact and literal truth.\"\n\n\"Is he your junior?\"\n\n\"Seven years my senior.\"\n\n\"How comes it that he is unknown?\"\n\n\"Oh, he is very well known in his own circle.\"\n\n\"Where, then?\"\n\n\"Well, in the Diogenes Club, for example.\"\n\nI had never heard of the institution, and my face must have proclaimed as much, for Sherlock Homes pulled out his watch.\n\n\"The Diogenes Club is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft one of the queerest men. He's always there from quarter to five to twenty to eight. It's six now, so if you care for a stroll this beautiful evening I shall be very happy to introduce you to two curiosities.\"\n\nFive minutes later we were in the street, walking towards Regent's Circus.\n\n\"You wonder,\" said my companion, \"why it is that Mycroft does not use his powers for detective work. He is incapable of it.\"\n\n\"But I thought you said\u2014\"\n\n\"I said that he was my superior in observation and deduction. If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from an armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived. But he has no ambition and no energy. He will not even go out of his way to verify his own solutions, and would rather be considered wrong than take the trouble to prove himself right. Again and again I have taken a problem to him, and have received an explanation which has afterwards proved to be the correct one. And yet he was absolutely incapable of working out the practical points which must be gone into before a case could be laid before a judge or jury.\"\n\n\"It is not his profession, then?\"\n\n\"By no means. What is to me a means of livelihood is to him the merest hobby of a dilettante. He has an extraordinary faculty for figures, and audits the books in some of the government departments. Mycroft lodges in Pall Mall, and he walks round the corner into Whitehall every morning and back every evening. From year's end to year's end he takes no other exercise, and is seen nowhere else, except only in the Diogenes Club, which is just opposite his rooms.\"\n\n\"I cannot recall the name.\"\n\n\"Very likely not. There are many men in London, you know, who, some from shyness, some from misanthropy, have no wish for the company of their fellows. Yet they are not averse to comfortable chairs and the latest periodicals. It is for the convenience of these that the Diogenes Club was started, and it now contains the most unsociable and unclubable men in town. No member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one. Save in the Stranger's Room, no talking is, under any circumstances, allowed, and three offences, if brought to the notice of the committee, render the talker liable to expulsion. My brother was one of the founders, and I have myself found it a very soothing atmosphere.\"\n\nWe had reached Pall Mall as we talked, and were walking down it from the St. James's end. Sherlock Holmes stopped at a door some little distance from the Carlton, and, cautioning me not to speak, he led the way into the hall. Through the glass panelling I caught a glimpse of a large and luxurious room, in which a considerable number of men were sitting about and reading papers, each in his own little nook. Holmes showed me into a small chamber which looked out into Pall Mall, and then, leaving me for a minute, he came back with a companion whom I knew could only be his brother.\n\nMycroft Holmes was a much larger and stouter man than Sherlock. His body was absolutely corpulent, but his face, though massive, had preserved something of the sharpness of expression which was so remarkable in that of his brother. His eyes, which were of a peculiarly light, watery gray, seemed to always retain that far-away, introspective look which I had only observed in Sherlock's when he was exerting his full powers.\n\n\"I am glad to meet you, sir,\" said he, putting out a broad, fat hand like the flipper of a seal. \"I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler. By the way, Sherlock, I expected to see you round last week to consult me over that Manor House case. I thought you might be a little out of your depth.\"\n\n\"No, I solved it,\" said my friend, smiling.\n\n\"It was Adams, of course.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was Adams.\"\n\n\"I was sure of it from the first.\" The two sat down together in the bow-window of the club. \"To anyone who wishes to study mankind this is the spot,\" said Mycroft. \"Look at the magnificent types! Look at these two men who are coming towards us, for example.\"\n\n\"The billiard-marker and the other?\"\n\n\"Precisely. What do you make of the other?\"\n\nThe two men had stopped opposite the window. Some chalk marks over the waistcoat pocket were the only signs of billiards which I could see in one of them. The other was a very small, dark fellow, with his hat pushed back and several packages under his arm.\n\n\"An old soldier, I perceive,\" said Sherlock.\n\n\"And very recently discharged,\" remarked the brother.\n\n\"Served in India, I see.\"\n\n\"And a non-commissioned officer.\"\n\n\"Royal Artillery, I fancy,\" said Sherlock.\n\n\"And a widower.\"\n\n\"But with a child.\"\n\n\"Children, my dear boy, children.\"\n\n\"Come,\" said I, laughing, \"this is a little too much.\"\n\n\"Surely,\" answered Holmes, \"it is not hard to say that a man with that bearing, expression of authority, and sun-baked skin, is a soldier, is more than a private, and is not long from India.\"\n\n\"That he has not left the service long is shown by his still wearing his ammunition boots, as they are called,\" observed Mycroft.\n\n\"He had not the cavalry stride, yet he wore his hat on one side, as is shown by the lighter skin on that side of his brow. His weight is against his being a sapper. He is in the artillery.\"\n\n\"Then, of course, his complete mourning shows that he has lost someone very dear. The fact that he is doing his own shopping looks as though it were his wife. He has been buying things for children, you perceive. There is a rattle, which shows that one of them is very young. The wife probably died in childbed. The fact that he has a picture-book under his arm shows that there is another child to be thought of.\"\n\nI began to understand what my friend meant when he said that his brother possessed even keener faculties than he did himself. He glanced across at me and smiled. Mycroft took snuff from a tortoise-shell box and brushed away the wandering grains from his coat front with a large, red silk handkerchief.\n\n\"By the way, Sherlock,\" said he, \"I have had something quite after your own heart\u2014a most singular problem\u2014submitted to my judgment. I really had not the energy to follow it up save in a very incomplete fashion, but it gave me a basis for some pleasing speculations. If you would care to hear the facts\u2014\"\n\n\"My dear Mycroft, I should be delighted.\"\n\nThe brother scribbled a note upon a leaf of his pocket-book, and, ringing the bell, he handed it to the waiter.\n\n\"I have asked Mr. Melas to step across,\" said he. \"He lodges on the floor above me, and I have some slight acquaintance with him, which led him to come to me in his perplexity. Mr. Melas is a Greek by extraction, as I understand, and he is a remarkable linguist. He earns his living partly as interpreter in the law courts and partly by acting as guide to any wealthy Orientals who may visit the Northumberland Avenue hotels. I think I will leave him to tell his very remarkable experience in his own fashion.\"\n\nA few minutes later we were joined by a short, stout man whose olive face and coal black hair proclaimed his Southern origin, though his speech was that of an educated Englishman. He shook hands eagerly with Sherlock Holmes, and his dark eyes sparkled with pleasure when he understood that the specialist was anxious to hear his story.\n\n\"I do not believe that the police credit me\u2014on my word, I do not,\" said he in a wailing voice. \"Just because they have never heard of it before, they think that such a thing cannot be. But I know that I shall never be easy in my mind until I know what has become of my poor man with the sticking-plaster upon his face.\"\n\n\"I am all attention,\" said Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"This is Wednesday evening,\" said Mr. Melas. \"Well, then, it was Monday night\u2014only two days ago, you understand\u2014that all this happened. I am an interpreter, as perhaps my neighbour there has told you. I interpret all languages\u2014or nearly all\u2014but as I am a Greek by birth and with a Grecian name, it is with that particular tongue that I am principally associated. For many years I have been the chief Greek interpreter in London, and my name is very well known in the hotels.\n\n\"It happens not unfrequently that I am sent for at strange hours by foreigners who get into difficulties, or by travellers who arrive late and wish my services. I was not surprised, therefore, on Monday night when a Mr. Latimer, a very fashionably dressed young man, came up to my rooms and asked me to accompany him in a cab which was waiting at the door. A Greek friend had come to see him upon business, he said, and as he could speak nothing but his own tongue, the services of an interpreter were indispensable. He gave me to understand that his house was some little distance off, in Kensington, and he seemed to be in a great hurry, bustling me rapidly into the cab when we had descended to the street.\n\n\"I say into the cab, but I soon became doubtful as to whether it was not a carriage in which I found myself. It was certainly more roomy than the ordinary four-wheeled disgrace to London, and the fittings, though frayed, were of rich quality. Mr. Latimer seated himself opposite to me and we started off through Charing Cross and up the Shaftesbury Avenue. We had come out upon Oxford Street and I had ventured some remark as to this being a roundabout way to Kensington, when my words were arrested by the extraordinary conduct of my companion.\n\n\"He began by drawing a most formidable-looking bludgeon loaded with lead from his pocket, and switching it backward and forward several times, as if to test its weight and strength. Then he placed it without a word upon the seat beside him. Having done this, he drew up the windows on each side, and I found to my astonishment that they were covered with paper so as to prevent my seeing through them.\n\n\"'I am sorry to cut off your view, Mr. Melas,' said he. 'The fact is that I have no intention that you should see what the place is to which we are driving. It might possibly be inconvenient to me if you could find your way there again.'\n\n\"As you can imagine, I was utterly taken aback by such an address. My companion was a powerful, broad-shouldered young fellow, and, apart from the weapon, I should not have had the slightest chance in a struggle with him.\n\n\"'This is very extraordinary conduct, Mr. Latimer,' I stammered. 'You must be aware that what you are doing is quite illegal.'\n\n\"'It is somewhat of a liberty, no doubt,' said he, 'but we'll make it up to you. I must warn you, however, Mr. Melas, that if at any time to-night you attempt to raise an alarm or do anything which is against my interest, you will find it a very serious thing. I beg you to remember that no one knows where you are, and that, whether you are in this carriage or in my house, you are equally in my power.'\n\n\"His words were quiet, but he had a rasping way of saying them, which was very menacing. I sat in silence wondering what on earth could be his reason for kidnapping me in this extraordinary fashion. Whatever it might be, it was perfectly clear that there was no possible use in my resisting, and that I could only wait to see what might befall.\n\n\"For nearly two hours we drove without my having the least clue as to where we were going. Sometimes the rattle of the stones told of a paved causeway, and at others our smooth, silent course suggested asphalt; but, save by this variation in sound, there was nothing at all which could in the remotest way help me to form a guess as to where we were. The paper over each window was impenetrable to light, and a blue curtain was drawn across the glasswork in front. It was a quarter-past seven when we left Pall Mall, and my watch showed me that it was ten minutes to nine when we at last came to a standstill. My companion let down the window, and I caught a glimpse of a low, arched doorway with a lamp burning above it. As I was hurried from the carriage it swung open, and I found myself inside the house, with a vague impression of a lawn and trees on each side of me as I entered. Whether these were private grounds, however, or bona-fide country was more than I could possibly venture to say.\n\n\"There was a coloured gas-lamp inside which was turned so low that I could see little save that the hall was of some size and hung with pictures. In the dim light I could make out that the person who had opened the door was a small, mean-looking, middle-aged man with rounded shoulders. As he turned towards us the glint of the light showed me that he was wearing glasses.\n\n\"'Is this Mr. Melas, Harold?' said he.\n\n\"'Yes.'\n\n\"'Well done, well done! No ill-will, Mr. Melas, I hope, but we could not get on without you. If you deal fair with us you'll not regret it, but if you try any tricks, God help you!' He spoke in a nervous, jerky fashion, and with little giggling laughs in between, but somehow he impressed me with fear more than the other.\n\n\"'What do you want with me?' I asked.\n\n\"'Only to ask a few questions of a Greek gentleman who is visiting us, and to let us have the answers. But say no more than you are told to say, or\u2014' here came the nervous giggle again\u2014'you had better never have been born.'\n\n\"As he spoke he opened a door and showed the way into a room which appeared to be very richly furnished, but again the only light was afforded by a single lamp half-turned down. The chamber was certainly large, and the way in which my feet sank into the carpet as I stepped across it told me of its richness. I caught glimpses of velvet chairs, a high white marble mantel-piece, and what seemed to be a suit of Japanese armour at one side of it. There was a chair just under the lamp, and the elderly man motioned that I should sit in it. The younger had left us, but he suddenly returned through another door, leading with him a gentleman clad in some sort of loose dressing-gown who moved slowly towards us. As he came into the circle of dim light which enabled me to see him more clearly I was thrilled with horror at his appearance. He was deadly pale and terribly emaciated, with the protruding, brilliant eyes of a man whose spirit was greater than his strength. But what shocked me more than any signs of physical weakness was that his face was grotesquely criss-crossed with sticking-plaster, and that one large pad of it was fastened over his mouth.\n\n\"'Have you the slate, Harold?' cried the older man, as this strange being fell rather than sat down into a chair. 'Are his hands loose? Now, then, give him the pencil. You are to ask the questions, Mr. Melas, and he will write the answers. Ask him first of all whether he is prepared to sign the papers?\"\n\n\"The man's eyes flashed fire.\n\n\"'Never!' he wrote in Greek upon the slate.\n\n\"'On no conditions?' I asked at the bidding of our tyrant.\n\n\"'Only if I see her married in my presence by a Greek priest whom I know.'\n\n\"The man giggled in his venomous way.\n\n\"'You know what awaits you, then?'\n\n\"'I care nothing for myself.'\n\n\"These are samples of the questions and answers which made up our strange half-spoken, half-written conversation. Again and again I had to ask him whether he would give in and sign the documents. Again and again I had the same indignant reply. But soon a happy thought came to me. I took to adding on little sentences of my own to each question, innocent ones at first, to test whether either of our companions knew anything of the matter, and then, as I found that they showed no sign I played a more dangerous game. Our conversation ran something like this:\n\n\"'You can do no good by this obstinacy. Who are you?'\n\n\"'I care not. I am a stranger in London.'\n\n\"'Your fate will be on your own head. How long have you been here?'\n\n\"'Let it be so. Three weeks.'\n\n\"'The property can never be yours. What ails you?'\n\n\"'It shall not go to villains. They are starving me.'\n\n\"'You shall go free if you sign. What house is this?'\n\n\"'I will never sign. I do not know.'\n\n\"'You are not doing her any service. What is your name?'\n\n\"'Let me hear her say so. Kratides.'\n\n\"'You shall see her if you sign. Where are you from?'\n\n\"'Then I shall never see her. Athens.'\n\n\"Another five minutes, Mr. Holmes, and I should have wormed out the whole story under their very noses. My very next question might have cleared the matter up, but at that instant the door opened and a woman stepped into the room. I could not see her clearly enough to know more than that she was tall and graceful, with black hair, and clad in some sort of loose white gown.\n\n\"'Harold,' said she, speaking English with a broken accent. 'I could not stay away longer. It is so lonely up there with only\u2014Oh, my God, it is Paul!'\n\n\"These last words were in Greek, and at the same instant the man with a convulsive effort tore the plaster from his lips, and screaming out 'Sophy! Sophy!' rushed into the woman's arms. Their embrace was but for an instant, however, for the younger man seized the woman and pushed her out of the room, while the elder easily overpowered his emaciated victim and dragged him away through the other door. For a moment I was left alone in the room, and I sprang to my feet with some vague idea that I might in some way get a clue to what this house was in which I found myself. Fortunately, however, I took no steps, for looking up I saw that the older man was standing in the doorway, with his eyes fixed upon me.\n\n\"'That will do, Mr. Melas,' said he. 'You perceive that we have taken you into our confidence over some very private business. We should not have troubled you, only that our friend who speaks Greek and who began these negotiations has been forced to return to the East. It was quite necessary for us to find someone to take his place, and we were fortunate in hearing of your powers.'\n\n\"I bowed.\n\n\"'There are five sovereigns here,' said he, walking up to me, 'which will, I hope, be a sufficient fee. But remember,' he added, tapping me lightly on the chest and giggling, 'if you speak to a human soul about this\u2014one human soul, mind\u2014well, may God have mercy upon your soul!'\n\n\"I cannot tell you the loathing and horror with which this insignificant-looking man inspired me. I could see him better now as the lamp-light shone upon him. His features were peaky and sallow, and his little pointed beard was thready and ill-nourished. He pushed his face forward as he spoke and his lips and eyelids were continually twitching like a man with St. Vitus's dance. I could not help thinking that his strange, catchy little laugh was also a symptom of some nervous malady. The terror of his face lay in his eyes, however, steel gray, and glistening coldly with a malignant, inexorable cruelty in their depths.\n\n\"'We shall know if you speak of this,' said he. 'We have our own means of information. Now you will find the carriage waiting, and my friend will see you on your way.'\n\n\"I was hurried through the hall and into the vehicle, again obtaining that momentary glimpse of trees and a garden. Mr. Latimer followed closely at my heels and took his place opposite to me without a word. In silence we again drove for an interminable distance with the windows raised, until at last, just after midnight, the carriage pulled up.\n\n\"'You will get down here, Mr. Melas,' said my companion. 'I am sorry to leave you so far from your house, but there is no alternative. Any attempt upon your part to follow the carriage can only end in injury to yourself.'\n\n\"He opened the door as he spoke, and I had hardly time to spring out when the coachman lashed the horse and the carriage rattled away. I looked around me in astonishment. I was on some sort of a heathy common mottled over with dark clumps of furze-bushes. Far away stretched a line of houses, with a light here and there in the upper windows. On the other side I saw the red signal-lamps of a railway.\n\n\"The carriage which had brought me was already out of sight. I stood gazing round and wondering where on earth I might be, when I saw someone coming towards me in the darkness. As he came up to me I made out that he was a railway porter.\n\n\"'Can you tell me what place this is?' I asked.\n\n\"'Wandsworth Common,' said he.\n\n\"'Can I get a train into town?'\n\n\"'If you walk on a mile or so to Clapham Junction,' said he, 'you'll just be in time for the last to Victoria.'\n\n\"So that was the end of my adventure, Mr. Holmes. I do not know where I was, nor whom I spoke with, nor anything save what I have told you. But I know that there is foul play going on, and I want to help that unhappy man if I can. I told the whole story to Mr. Mycroft Holmes next morning, and subsequently to the police.\"\n\nWe all sat in silence for some little time after listening to this extraordinary narrative. Then Sherlock looked across at his brother.\n\n\"Any steps?\" he asked.\n\nMycroft picked up the Daily News, which was lying on the side-table.\n\n\"Anybody supplying any information as to the whereabouts of a Greek gentleman named Paul Kratides, from Athens, who is unable to speak English, will be rewarded. A similar reward paid to anyone giving information about a Greek lady whose first name is Sophy. X 2473.\n\n\"That was in all the dailies. No answer.\"\n\n\"How about the Greek legation?\"\n\n\"I have inquired. They know nothing.\"\n\n\"A wire to the head of the Athens police, then?\"\n\n\"Sherlock has all the energy of the family,\" said Mycroft, turning to me. \"Well, you take the case up by all means and let me know if you do any good.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" answered my friend, rising from his chair. \"I'll let you know, and Mr. Melas also. In the meantime, Mr. Melas, I should certainly be on my guard if I were you, for of course they must know through these advertisements that you have betrayed them.\"\n\nAs we walked home together, Holmes stopped at a telegraph office and sent off several wires.\n\n\"You see, Watson,\" he remarked, \"our evening has been by no means wasted. Some of my most interesting cases have come to me in this way through Mycroft. The problem which we have just listened to, although it can admit of but one explanation, has still some distinguishing features.\"\n\n\"You have hopes of solving it?\"\n\n\"Well, knowing as much as we do, it will be singular indeed if we fail to discover the rest. You must yourself have formed some theory which will explain the facts to which we have listened.\"\n\n\"In a vague way, yes.\"\n\n\"What was your idea, then?\"\n\n\"It seemed to me to be obvious that this Greek girl had been carried off by the young Englishman named Harold Latimer.\"\n\n\"Carried off from where?\"\n\n\"Athens, perhaps.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes shook his head. \"This young man could not talk a word of Greek. The lady could talk English fairly well. Inference\u2014that she had been in England some little time, but he had not been in Greece.\"\n\n\"Well, then, we will presume that she had once come on a visit to England, and that this Harold had persuaded her to fly with him.\"\n\n\"That is more probable.\"\n\n\"Then the brother\u2014for that, I fancy, must be the relationship\u2014comes over from Greece to interfere. He imprudently puts himself into the power of the young man and his older associate. They seize him and use violence towards him in order to make him sign some papers to make over the girl's fortune\u2014of which he may be trustee\u2014to them. This he refuses to do. In order to negotiate with him they have to get an interpreter, and they pitch upon this Mr. Melas, having used some other one before. The girl is not told of the arrival of her brother and finds it out by the merest accident.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson!\" cried Holmes. \"I really fancy that you are not far from the truth. You see that we hold all the cards, and we have only to fear some sudden act of violence on their part. If they give us time we must have them.\"\n\n\"But how can we find where this house lies?\"\n\n\"Well, if our conjecture is correct and the girl's name is or was Sophy Kratides, we should have no difficulty in tracing her. That must be our main hope, for the brother is, of course, a complete stranger. It is clear that some time has elapsed since this Harold established these relations with the girl\u2014some weeks, at any rate\u2014since the brother in Greece has had time to hear of it and come across. If they have been living in the same place during this time, it is probable that we shall have some answer to Mycroft's advertisement.\"\n\nWe had reached our house in Baker Street while we had been talking. Holmes ascended the stair first, and as he opened the door of our room he gave a start of surprise. Looking over his shoulder, I was equally astonished. His brother Mycroft was sitting smoking in the armchair.\n\n\"Come in, Sherlock! Come in, sir,\" said he blandly, smiling at our surprised faces. \"You don't expect such energy from me, do you, Sherlock? But somehow this case attracts me.\"\n\n\"How did you get here?\"\n\n\"I passed you in a hansom.\"\n\n\"There has been some new development?\"\n\n\"I had an answer to my advertisement.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"Yes, it came within a few minutes of your leaving.\"\n\n\"And to what effect?\"\n\nMycroft Holmes took out a sheet of paper.\n\n\"Here it is,\" said he, \"written with a J pen on royal cream paper by a middle-aged man with a weak constitution.\n\n\u2002\"SIR [he says]:\n\n\u2002\"In answer to your advertisement of to-day's date. I beg to inform you that I know the young lady in question very well. If you should care to call upon me I could give you some particulars as to her painful history. She is living at present at The Myrtles, Beckenham.\n\n\u2002\"Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002\"J. DAVENPORT.\n\n\"He writes from Lower Brixton\" said Mycroft Holmes. \"Do you not think that we might drive to him now, Sherlock, and learn these particulars?\"\n\n\"My dear Mycroft, the brother's life is more valuable than the sister's story. I think we should call at Scotland Yard for Inspector Gregson and go straight out to Beckenham. We know that a man is being done to death, and every hour may be vital.\"\n\n\"Better pick up Mr. Melas on our way,\" I suggested. \"We may need an interpreter.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"Send the boy for a four-wheeler, and we shall be off at once.\" He opened the table-drawer as he spoke, and I noticed that he slipped his revolver into his pocket. \"Yes,\" said he in answer to my glance, \"I should say, from what we have heard, that we are dealing with a particularly dangerous gang.\"\n\nIt was almost dark before we found ourselves in Pall Mall, at the rooms of Mr. Melas. A gentleman had just called for him, and he was gone.\n\n\"Can you tell me where?\" asked Mycroft Holmes.\n\n\"I don't know, sir,\" answered the woman who had opened the door; \"I only know that he drove away, with the gentleman in a carriage.\"\n\n\"Did the gentleman give a name?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"He wasn't a tall, handsome, dark young man?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, sir. He was a little gentleman, with glasses, thin in the face, but very pleasant in his ways, for he was laughing all the time that he was talking.\"\n\n\"Come along!\" cried Sherlock Holmes abruptly. \"This grows serious,\" he observed as we drove to Scotland Yard. \"These men have got hold of Melas again. He is a man of no physical courage, as they are well aware from their experience the other night. This villain was able to terrorize him the instant that he got into his presence. No doubt they want his professional services, but, having used him, they may be inclined to punish him for what they will regard as his treachery.\"\n\nOur hope was that, by taking train, we might get to Beckenham as soon as or sooner than the carriage. On reaching Scotland Yard, however, it was more than an hour before we could get Inspector Gregson and comply with the legal formalities which would enable us to enter the house. It was a quarter to ten before we reached London Bridge, and half past before the four of us alighted on the Beckenham platform. A drive of half a mile brought us to The Myrtles\u2014a large, dark house standing back from the road in its own grounds. Here we dismissed our cab and made our way up the drive together.\n\n\"The windows are all dark,\" remarked the inspector. \"The house seems deserted.\"\n\n\"Our birds are flown and the nest empty,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Why do you say so?\"\n\n\"A carriage heavily loaded with luggage has passed out during the last hour.\"\n\nThe inspector laughed. \"I saw the wheel-tracks in the light of the gate-lamp, but where does the luggage come in?\"\n\n\"You may have observed the same wheel-tracks going the other way. But the outward-bound ones were very much deeper\u2014so much so that we can say for a certainty that there was a very considerable weight on the carriage.\"\n\n\"You get a trifle beyond me there,\" said the inspector, shrugging his shoulders. \"It will not be an easy door to force, but we will try if we cannot make someone hear us.\"\n\nHe hammered loudly at the knocker and pulled at the bell, but without any success. Holmes had slipped away, but he came back in a few minutes.\n\n\"I have a window open,\" said he.\n\n\"It is a mercy that you are on the side of the force, and not against it, Mr. Holmes,\" remarked the inspector as he noted the clever way in which my friend had forced back the catch. \"Well, I think that under the circumstances we may enter without an invitation.\"\n\nOne after the other we made our way into a large apartment, which was evidently that in which Mr. Melas had found himself. The inspector had lit his lantern, and by its light we could see the two doors, the curtain, the lamp, and the suit of Japanese mail as he had described them. On the table lay two glasses, an empty brandy-bottle, and the remains of a meal.\n\n\"What is that?\" asked Holmes suddenly.\n\nWe all stood still and listened. A low moaning sound was coming from somewhere over our heads. Holmes rushed to the door and out into the hall. The dismal noise came from upstairs. He dashed up, the inspector and I at his heels, while his brother Mycroft followed as quickly as his great bulk would permit.\n\nThree doors faced us upon the second floor, and it was from the central of these that the sinister sounds were issuing, sinking sometimes into a dull mumble and rising again into a shrill whine. It was locked, but the key had been left on the outside. Holmes flung open the door and rushed in, but he was out again in an instant, with his hand to his throat.\n\n\"It's charcoal,\" he cried. \"Give it time. It will clear.\"\n\nPeering in, we could see that the only light in the room came from a dull blue flame which flickered from a small brass tripod in the centre. It threw a livid, unnatural circle upon the floor, while in the shadows beyond we saw the vague loom of two figures which crouched against the wall. From the open door there reeked a horrible poisonous exhalation which set us gasping and coughing. Holmes rushed to the top of the stairs to draw in the fresh air, and then, dashing into the room, he threw up the window and hurled the brazen tripod out into the garden.\n\n\"We can enter in a minute,\" he gasped, darting out again. \"Where is a candle? I doubt if we could strike a match in that atmosphere. Hold the light at the door and we shall get them out, Mycroft, now!\"\n\nWith a rush we got to the poisoned men and dragged them out into the well-lit hall. Both of them were blue-lipped and insensible, with swollen, congested faces and protruding eyes. Indeed, so distorted were their features that, save for his black beard and stout figure, we might have failed to recognize in one of them the Greek interpreter who had parted from us only a few hours before at the Diogenes Club. His hands and feet were securely strapped together, and he bore over one eye the marks of a violent blow. The other, who was secured in a similar fashion, was a tall man in the last stage of emaciation, with several strips of sticking-plaster arranged in a grotesque pattern over his face. He had ceased to moan as we laid him down, and a glance showed me that for him at least our aid had come too late. Mr. Melas, however, still lived, and in less than an hour, with the aid of ammonia and brandy, I had the satisfaction of seeing him open his eyes, and of knowing that my hand had drawn him back from that dark valley in which all paths meet.\n\nIt was a simple story which he had to tell, and one which did but confirm our own deductions. His visitor, on entering his rooms, had drawn a life-preserver from his sleeve, and had so impressed him with the fear of instant and inevitable death that he had kidnapped him for the second time. Indeed, it was almost mesmeric, the effect which this giggling ruffian had produced upon the unfortunate linguist, for he could not speak of him save with trembling hands and a blanched cheek. He had been taken swiftly to Beckenham, and had acted as interpreter in a second interview, even more dramatic than the first, in which the two Englishmen had menaced their prisoner with instant death if he did not comply with their demands. Finally, finding him proof against every threat, they had hurled him back into his prison, and after reproaching Melas with his treachery, which appeared from the newspaper advertisement, they had stunned him with a blow from a stick, and he remembered nothing more until he found us bending over him.\n\nAnd this was the singular case of the Grecian Interpreter, the explanation of which is still involved in some mystery. We were able to find out, by communicating with the gentleman who had answered the advertisement, that the unfortunate young lady came of a wealthy Grecian family, and that she had been on a visit to some friends in England. While there she had met a young man named Harold Latimer, who had acquired an ascendency over her and had eventually persuaded her to fly with him. Her friends, shocked at the event, had contented themselves with informing her brother at Athens, and had then washed their hands of the matter. The brother, on his arrival in England, had imprudently placed himself in the power of Latimer and of his associate, whose name was Wilson Kemp\u2014a man of the foulest antecedents. These two, finding that through his ignorance of the language he was helpless in their hands, had kept him a prisoner, and had endeavoured by cruelty and starvation to make him sign away his own and his sister's property. They had kept him in the house without the girl's knowledge, and the plaster over the face had been for the purpose of making recognition difficult in case she should ever catch a glimpse of him. Her feminine perceptions, however, had instantly seen through the disguise when, on the occasion of the interpreter's visit, she had seen him for the first time. The poor girl, however, was herself a prisoner, for there was no one about the house except the man who acted as coachman, and his wife, both of whom were tools of the conspirators. Finding that their secret was out, and that their prisoner was not to be coerced, the two villains with the girl had fled away at a few hours' notice from the furnished house which they had hired, having first, as they thought, taken vengeance both upon the man who had defied and the one who had betrayed them.\n\nMonths afterwards a curious newspaper cutting reached us from Buda-Pesth. It told how two Englishmen who had been travelling with a woman had met with a tragic end. They had each been stabbed, it seems, and the Hungarian police were of opinion that they had quarrelled and had inflicted mortal injuries upon each other. Holmes, however, is, I fancy, of a different way of thinking, and he holds to this day that, if one could find the Grecian girl, one might learn how the wrongs of herself and her brother came to be avenged." + }, + { + "title": "THE NAVAL TREATY", + "text": "The July which immediately succeeded my marriage was made memorable by three cases of interest, in which I had the privilege of being associated with Sherlock Holmes and of studying his methods. I find them recorded in my notes under the headings of \"The Adventure of the Second Stain,\" \"The Adventure of the Naval Treaty,\" and \"The Adventure of the Tired Captain.\" The first of these, however, deals with interests of such importance and implicates so many of the first families in the kingdom that for many years it will be impossible to make it public. No case, however, in which Holmes was engaged has ever illustrated the value of his analytical methods so clearly or has impressed those who were associated with him so deeply. I still retain an almost verbatim report of the interview in which he demonstrated the true facts of the case to Monsieur Dubugue of the Paris police, and Fritz von Waldbaum, the well-known specialist of Dantzig, both of whom had wasted their energies upon what proved to be side-issues. The new century will have come, however, before the story can be safely told. Meanwhile I pass on to the second on my list, which promised also at one time to be of national importance and was marked by several incidents which give it a quite unique character.\n\nDuring my school-days I had been intimately associated with a lad named Percy Phelps, who was of much the same age as myself, though he was two classes ahead of me. He was a very brilliant boy and carried away every prize which the school had to offer, finishing his exploits by winning a scholarship which sent him on to continue his triumphant career at Cambridge. He was, I remember, extremely well connected, and even when we were all little boys together we knew that his mother's brother was Lord Holdhurst, the great conservative politician. This gaudy relationship did him little good at school. On the contrary, it seemed rather a piquant thing to us to chevy him about the playground and hit him over the shins with a wicket. But it was another thing when he came out into the world. I heard vaguely that his abilities and the influences which he commanded had won him a good position at the Foreign Office, and then he passed completely out of my mind until the following letter recalled his existence:\n\nBriarbrae, Woking.\n\n\u2002MY DEAR WATSON:\n\n\u2002I have no doubt that you can remember \"Tadpole\" Phelps, who was in the fifth form when you were in the third. It is possible even that you may have heard that through my uncle's influence I obtained a good appointment at the Foreign Office, and that I was in a situation of trust and honour until a horrible misfortune came suddenly to blast my career.\n\n\u2002There is no use writing the details of that dreadful event. In the event of your acceding to my request it is probable that I shall have to narrate them to you. I have only just recovered from nine weeks of brain-fever and am still exceedingly weak. Do you think that you could bring your friend Mr. Holmes down to see me? I should like to have his opinion of the case, though the authorities assure me that nothing more can be done. Do try to bring him down, and as soon as possible. Every minute seems an hour while I live in this state of horrible suspense. Assure him that if I have not asked his advice sooner it was not because I did not appreciate his talents, but because I have been off my head ever since the blow fell. Now I am clear again, though I dare not think of it too much for fear of a relapse. I am still so weak that I have to write, as you see, by dictating. Do try to bring him.\n\n\u2002Your old school-fellow,\n\n\u2002PERCY PHELPS.\n\nThere was something that touched me as I read this letter, something pitiable in the reiterated appeals to bring Holmes. So moved was I that even had it been a difficult matter I should have tried it, but of course I knew well that Holmes loved his art, so that he was ever as ready to bring his aid as his client could be to receive it. My wife agreed with me that not a moment should be lost in laying the matter before him, and so within an hour of breakfast-time I found myself back once more in the old rooms in Baker Street.\n\nHolmes was seated at his side-table clad in his dressing-gown and working hard over a chemical investigation. A large curved retort was boiling furiously in the bluish flame of a Bunsen burner, and the distilled drops were condensing into a two-litre measure. My friend hardly glanced up as I entered, and I, seeing that his investigation must be of importance, seated myself in an armchair and waited. He dipped into this bottle or that, drawing out a few drops of each with his glass pipette, and finally brought a test-tube containing a solution over to the table. In his right hand he held a slip of litmus-paper.\n\n\"You come at a crisis, Watson,\" said he. \"If this paper remains blue, all is well. If it turns red, it means a man's life.\" He dipped it into the test-tube and it flushed at once into a dull, dirty crimson. \"Hum! I thought as much!\" he cried. \"I will be at your service in an instant, Watson. You will find tobacco in the Persian slipper.\" He turned to his desk and scribbled off several telegrams, which were handed over to the page-boy. Then he threw himself down into the chair opposite and drew up his knees until his fingers clasped round his long, thin shins.\n\n\"A very commonplace little murder,\" said he. \"You've got something better, I fancy. You are the stormy petrel of crime, Watson. What is it?\"\n\nI handed him the letter, which he read with the most concentrated attention.\n\n\"It does not tell us very much, does it?\" he remarked as he handed it back to me.\n\n\"Hardly anything.\"\n\n\"And yet the writing is of interest.\"\n\n\"But the writing is not his own.\"\n\n\"Precisely. It is a woman's.\"\n\n\"A man's surely,\" I cried.\n\n\"No, a woman's, and a woman of rare character. You see, at the commencement of an investigation it is something to know that your client is in close contact with someone who, for good or evil, has an exceptional nature. My interest is already awakened in the case. If you are ready we will start at once for Woking and see this diplomatist who is in such evil case and the lady to whom he dictates his letters.\"\n\nWe were fortunate enough to catch an early train at Waterloo, and in a little under an hour we found ourselves among the fir-woods and the heather of Woking. Briarbrae proved to be a large detached house standing in extensive grounds within a few minutes' walk of the station. On sending in our cards we were shown into an elegantly appointed drawing-room, where we were joined in a few minutes by a rather stout man who received us with much hospitality. His age may have been nearer forty than thirty, but his cheeks were so ruddy and his eyes so merry that he still conveyed the impression of a plump and mischievous boy.\n\n\"I am so glad that you have come,\" said he, shaking our hands with effusion. \"Percy has been inquiring for you all morning. Ah, poor old chap, he clings to any straw! His father and his mother asked me to see you, for the mere mention of the subject is very painful to them.\"\n\n\"We have had no details yet,\" observed Holmes. \"I perceive that you are not yourself a member of the family.\"\n\nOur acquaintance looked surprised, and then, glancing down, he began to laugh.\n\n\"Of course you saw theJHmonogram on my locket,\" said he. \"For a moment I thought you had done something clever. Joseph Harrison is my name, and as Percy is to marry my sister Annie I shall at least be a relation by marriage. You will find my sister in his room, for she has nursed him hand and foot this two months back. Perhaps we'd better go in at once, for I know how impatient he is.\"\n\nThe chamber into which we were shown was on the same floor as the drawing-room. It was furnished partly as a sitting and partly as a bedroom, with flowers arranged daintily in every nook and corner. A young man, very pale and worn, was lying upon a sofa near the open window, through which came the rich scent of the garden and the balmy summer air. A woman was sitting beside him, who rose as we entered.\n\n\"Shall I leave, Percy?\" she asked.\n\nHe clutched her hand to detain her. \"How are you, Watson?\" said he cordially. \"I should never have known you under that moustache, and I daresay you would not be prepared to swear to me. This I presume is your celebrated friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\"\n\nI introduced him in a few words, and we both sat down. The stout young man had left us, but his sister still remained with her hand in that of the invalid. She was a striking-looking woman, a little short and thick for symmetry, but with a beautiful olive complexion, large, dark, Italian eyes, and a wealth of deep black hair. Her rich tints made the white face of her companion, the more worn and haggard by the contrast.\n\n\"I won't waste your time,\" said he, raising himself upon the sofa. \"I'll plunge into the matter without further preamble. I was a happy and successful man, Mr. Holmes, and on the eve of being married, when a sudden and dreadful misfortune wrecked all my prospects in life.\n\n\"I was, as Watson may have told you, in the Foreign Office, and through the influence of my uncle, Lord Holdhurst, I rose rapidly to a responsible position. When my uncle became foreign minister in this administration he gave me several missions of trust, and as I always brought them to a successful conclusion, he came at last to have the utmost confidence in my ability and tact.\n\n\"Nearly ten weeks ago\u2014to be more accurate, on the twenty-third of May\u2014he called me into his private room, and, after complimenting me on the good work which I had done, he informed me that he had a new commission of trust for me to execute.\n\n\"'This,' said he, taking a gray roll of paper from his bureau, 'is the original of that secret treaty between England and Italy of which, I regret to say, some rumours have already got into the public press. It is of enormous importance that nothing further should leak out. The French or the Russian embassy would pay an immense sum to learn the contents of these papers. They should not leave my bureau were it not that it is absolutely necessary to have them copied. You have a desk in your office?'\n\n\"'Yes, sir.'\n\n\"'Then take the treaty and lock it up there. I shall give directions that you may remain behind when the others go, so that you may copy it at your leisure without fear of being overlooked. When you have finished, relock both the original and the draft in the desk, and hand them over to me personally tomorrow morning.'\n\n\"I took the papers and\u2014\"\n\n\"Excuse me an instant,\" said Holmes. \"Were you alone during this conversation?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"In a large room?\"\n\n\"Thirty feet each way.\"\n\n\"In the centre?\"\n\n\"Yes, about it.\"\n\n\"And speaking low?\"\n\n\"My uncle's voice is always remarkably low. I hardly spoke at all.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Holmes, shutting his eyes; \"pray go on.\"\n\n\"I did exactly what he indicated and waited until the other clerks had departed. One of them in my room, Charles Gorot, had some arrears of work to make up, so I left him there and went out to dine. When I returned he was gone. I was anxious to hurry my work, for I knew that Joseph\u2014the Mr. Harrison whom you saw just now\u2014was in town, and that he would travel down to Woking by the eleven-o'clock train, and I wanted if possible to catch it.\n\n\"When I came to examine the treaty I saw at once that it was of such importance that my uncle had been guilty of no exaggeration in what he said. Without going into details, I may say that it defined the position of Great Britain towards the Triple Alliance, and foreshadowed the policy which this country would pursue in the event of the French fleet gaining a complete ascendency over that of Italy in the Mediterranean. The questions treated in it were purely naval. At the end were the signatures of the high dignitaries who had signed it. I glanced my eyes over it, and then settled down to my task of copying.\n\n\"It was a long document, written in the French language, and containing twenty-six separate articles. I copied as quickly as I could, but at nine o'clock I had only done nine articles, and it seemed hopeless for me to attempt to catch my train. I was feeling drowsy and stupid, partly from my dinner and also from the effects of a long day's work. A cup of coffee would clear my brain. A commissionaire remains all night in a little lodge at the foot of the stairs and is in the habit of making coffee at his spirit-lamp for any of the officials who may be working over-time. I rang the bell, therefore, to summon him.\n\n\"To my surprise, it was a woman who answered the summons, a large, coarse-faced, elderly woman, in an apron. She explained that she was the commissionaire's wife, who did the charing, and I gave her the order for the coffee.\n\n\"I wrote two more articles, and then, feeling more drowsy than ever, I rose and walked up and down the room to stretch my legs. My coffee had not yet come, and I wondered what the cause of the delay could be. Opening the door, I started down the corridor to find out. There was a straight passage, dimly lighted, which led from the room in which I had been working, and was the only exit from it. It ended in a curving staircase, with the commissionaire's lodge in the passage at the bottom. Halfway down this staircase is a small landing, with another passage run-ning into it at right angles. This second one leads by means of a second small stair to a side door, used by servants, and also as a short cut by clerks when coming from Charles Street. Here is a rough chart of the place.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I think that I quite follow you,\" said Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"It is of the utmost importance that you should notice this point. I went down the stairs and into the hall, where I found the commissionaire fast asleep in his box, with the kettle boiling furiously upon the spirit-lamp. I took off the kettle and blew out the lamp, for the water was spurting over the floor. Then I put out my hand and was about to shake the man, who was still sleeping soundly, when a bell over his head rang loudly, and he woke with a start.\n\n\"'Mr. Phelps, sir!' said he, looking at me in bewilderment.\n\n\"'I came down to see if my coffee was ready.'\n\n\"'I was boiling the kettle when I fell asleep, sir.' He looked at me and then up at the still quivering bell with an ever-growing astonishment upon his face.\n\n\"'If you was here, sir, then who rang the bell?' he asked.\n\n\"'The bell!' I cried. 'What bell is it?'\n\n\"'It's the bell of the room you were working in.'\n\n\"A cold hand seemed to close round my heart. Someone, then, was in that room where my precious treaty lay upon the table. I ran frantically up the stairs and along the passage. There was no one in the corridors, Mr. Holmes. There was no one in the room. All was exactly as I left it, save only that the papers which had been committed to my care had been taken from the desk on which they lay. The copy was there, and the original was gone.\"\n\nHolmes sat up in his chair and rubbed his hands. I could see that the problem was entirely to his heart. \"Pray what did you do then?\" he murmured.\n\n\"I recognized in an instant that the thief must have come up the stairs from the side door. Of course I must have met him if he had come the other way.\"\n\n\"You were satisfied that he could not have been concealed in the room all the time, or in the corridor which you have just described as dimly lighted?\"\n\n\"It is absolutely impossible. A rat could not conceal himself either in the room or the corridor. There is no cover at all.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Pray proceed.\"\n\n\"The commissionaire, seeing by my pale face that something was to be feared, had followed me upstairs. Now we both rushed along the corridor and down the steep steps which led to Charles Street. The door at the bottom was closed but unlocked. We flung it open and rushed out. I can distinctly remember that as we did so there came three chimes from a neighbouring clock. It was a quarter to ten.\"\n\n\"That is of enormous importance,\" said Holmes, making a note upon his shirtcuff.\n\n\"The night was very dark, and a thin, warm rain was falling. There was no one in Charles Street, but a great traffic was going on, as usual, in Whitehall, at the extremity. We rushed along the pavement, bare-headed as we were, and at the far corner we found a policeman standing.\n\n\"'A robbery has been committed,' I gasped. 'A document of immense value has been stolen from the Foreign Office. Has anyone passed this way?'\n\n\"'I have been standing here for a quarter of an hour, sir,' said he, 'only one person has passed during that time\u2014a woman, tall and elderly, with a Paisley shawl.'\n\n\"'Ah, that is only my wife,' cried the commissionaire; 'has no one else passed?'\n\n\"'No one.'\n\n\"'Then it must be the other way that the thief took,' cried the fellow, tugging at my sleeve.\n\n\"But I was not satisfied, and the attempts which he made to draw me away increased my suspicions.\n\n\"'Which way did the woman go?' I cried.\n\n\"'I don't know, sir. I noticed her pass, but I had no special reason for watching her. She seemed to be in a hurry.'\n\n\"'How long ago was it?'\n\n\"'Oh, not very many minutes.'\n\n\"'Within the last five?'\n\n\"'Well, it could not be more than five.'\n\n\"'You're only wasting your time, sir, and every minute now is of importance, ' cried the commissionaire; 'take my word for it that my old woman has nothing to do with it and come down to the other end of the street. Well, if you won't, I will.' And with that he rushed off in the other direction.\n\n\"But I was after him in an instant and caught him by the sleeve.\n\n\"'Where do you live?' said I.\n\n\"'16 Ivy Lane, Brixton,' he answered. 'But don't let yourself be drawn away upon a false scent, Mr. Phelps. Come to the other end of the street and let us see if we can hear of anything.'\n\n\"Nothing was to be lost by following his advice. With the policeman we both hurried down, but only to find the street full of traffic, many people coming and going, but all only too eager to get to a place of safety upon so wet a night. There was no lounger who could tell us who had passed.\n\n\"Then we returned to the office and searched the stairs and the passage without result. The corridor which led to the room was laid down with a kind of creamy linoleum which shows an impression very easily. We examined it very carefully, but found no outline of any footmark.\"\n\n\"Had it been raining all evening?\"\n\n\"Since about seven.\"\n\n\"How is it, then, that the woman who came into the room about nine left no traces with her muddy boots?\"\n\n\"I am glad you raised the point. It occurred to me at the time. The charwomen are in the habit of taking off their boots at the commissionaire's office, and putting on list slippers.\"\n\n\"That is very clear. There were no marks, then, though the night was a wet one? The chain of events is certainly one of extraordinary interest. What did you do next?\"\n\n\"We examined the room also. There is no possibility of a secret door, and the windows are quite thirty feet from the ground. Both of them were fastened on the inside. The carpet prevents any possibility of a trapdoor, and the ceiling is of the ordinary whitewashed kind. I will pledge my life that whoever stole my papers could only have come through the door.\"\n\n\"How about the fireplace?\"\n\n\"They use none. There is a stove. The bell-rope hangs from the wire just to the right of my desk. Whoever rang it must have come right up to the desk to do it. But why should any criminal wish to ring the bell? It is a most insoluble mystery.\"\n\n\"Certainly the incident was unusual. What were your next steps? You examined the room, I presume, to see if the intruder had left any traces\u2014any cigar-end or dropped glove or hairpin or other trifle?\"\n\n\"There was nothing of the sort.\"\n\n\"No smell?\"\n\n\"Well, we never thought of that.\"\n\n\"Ah, a scent of tobacco would have been worth a great deal to us in such an investigation.\"\n\n\"I never smoke myself, so I think I should have observed it if there had been any smell of tobacco. There was absolutely no clue of any kind: The only tangible fact was that the commissionaire's wife\u2014Mrs. Tangey was the name\u2014had hurried out of the place. He could give no explanation save that it was about the time when the woman always went home. The policeman and I agreed that our best plan would be to seize the woman before she could get rid of the papers, presuming that she had them.\n\n\"The alarm had reached Scotland Yard by this time, and Mr. Forbes, the detective, came round at once and took up the case with a great deal of energy. We hired a hansom, and in half an hour we were at the address which had been given to us. A young woman opened the door, who proved to be Mrs. Tangey's eldest daughter. Her mother had not come back yet, and we were shown into the front room to wait.\n\n\"About ten minutes later a knock came at the door, and here we made the one serious mistake for which I blame myself. Instead of opening the door ourselves, we allowed the girl to do so. We heard her say, 'Mother, there are two men in the house waiting to see you,' and an instant afterwards we heard the patter of feet rushing down the passage. Forbes flung open the door, and we both ran into the back room or kitchen, but the woman had got there before us. She stared at us with defiant eyes, and then, suddenly recognizing me, an expression of absolute astonishment came over her face.\n\n\"'Why, if it isn't Mr. Phelps, of the office!' she cried.\n\n\"'Come, come, who did you think we were when you ran away from us?' asked my companion.\n\n\"'I thought you were the brokers,' said she, 'we have had some trouble with a tradesman.'\n\n\"'That's not quite good enough,' answered Forbes. 'We have reason to believe that you have taken a paper of importance from the Foreign Office, and that you ran in here to dispose of it. You must come back with us to Scotland Yard to be searched.'\n\n\"It was in vain that she protested and resisted. A four-wheeler was brought, and we all three drove back in it. We had first made an examination of the kitchen, and especially of the kitchen fire, to see whether she might have made away with the papers during the instant that she was alone. There were no signs, however, of any ashes or scraps. When we reached Scotland Yard she was handed over at once to the female searcher. I waited in an agony of suspense until she came back with her report. There were no signs of the papers.\n\n\"Then for the first time the horror of my situation came in its full force. Hitherto I had been acting, and action had numbed thought. I had been so confident of regaining the treaty at once that I had not dared to think of what would be the consequence if I failed to do so. But now there was nothing more to be done, and I had leisure to realize my position. It was horrible. Watson there would tell you that I was a nervous, sensitive boy at school. It is my nature. I thought of my uncle and of his colleagues in the Cabinet, of the shame which I had brought upon him, upon myself, upon everyone connected with me. What though I was the victim of an extraordinary accident? No allowance is made for accidents where diplomatic interests are at stake. I was ruined, shamefully, hopelessly ruined. I don't know what I did. I fancy I must have made a scene. I have a dim recollection of a group of officials who crowded round me, endeavouring to soothe me. One of them drove down with me to Waterloo, and saw me into the Woking train. I believe that he would have come all the way had it not been that Dr. Ferrier, who lives near me, was going down by that very train. The doctor most kindly took charge of me, and it was well he did so, for I had a fit in the station, and before we reached home I was practically a raving maniac.\n\n\"You can imagine the state of things here when they were roused from their beds by the doctor's ringing and found me in this condition. Poor Annie here and my mother were broken-hearted. Dr. Ferrier had just heard enough from the detective at the station to be able to give an idea of what had happened, and his story did not mend matters. It was evident to all that I was in for a long illness, so Joseph was bundled out of this cheery bedroom, and it was turned into a sickroom for me. Here I have lain, Mr. Holmes, for over nine weeks, unconscious, and raving with brain-fever. If it had not been for Miss Harrison here and for the doctor's care, I should not be speaking to you now. She has nursed me by day and a hired nurse has looked after me by night, for in my mad fits I was capable of anything. Slowly my reason has cleared, but it is only during the last three days that my memory has quite returned. Sometimes I wish that it never had. The first thing that I did was to wire to Mr. Forbes, who had the case in hand. He came out, and assures me that, though everything has been done, no trace of a clue has been discovered. The commissionaire and his wife have been examined in every way without any light being thrown upon the matter. The suspicions of the police then rested upon young Gorot, who, as you may remember, stayed over-time in the office that night. His remaining behind and his French name were really the only two points which could suggest suspicion; but, as a matter of fact, I did not begin work until he had gone, and his people are of Huguenot extraction, but as English in sympathy and tradition as you and I are. Nothing was found to implicate him in any way, and there the matter dropped. I turn to you, Mr. Holmes, as absolutely my last hope. If you fail me, then my honour as well as my position are forever forfeited.\"\n\nThe invalid sank back upon his cushions, tired out by this long recital, while his nurse poured him out a glass of some stimulating medicine. Holmes sat silently, with his head thrown back and his eyes closed, in an attitude which might seem listless to a stranger, but which I knew betokened the most intense self-absorption.\n\n\"Your statement has been so explicit,\" said he at last, \"that you have really left me very few questions to ask. There is one of the very utmost importance, however. Did you tell anyone that you had this special task to perform?\"\n\n\"No one.\"\n\n\"Not Miss Harrison here, for example?\"\n\n\"No. I had not been back to Woking between getting the order and executing the commission.\"\n\n\"And none of your people had by chance been to see you?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Did any of them know their way about in the office?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, all of them had been shown over it.\"\n\n\"Still, of course, if you said nothing to anyone about the treaty these inquiries are irrelevant.\"\n\n\"I said nothing.\"\n\n\"Do you know anything of the commissionaire?\"\n\n\"Nothing except that he is an old soldier.\"\n\n\"What regiment?\"\n\n\"Oh, I have heard\u2014Coldstream Guards.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I have no doubt I can get details from Forbes. The authorities are excellent at amassing facts, though they do not always use them to advantage. What a lovely thing a rose is!\"\n\nHe walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects.\n\n\"There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion,\" said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. \"It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.\"\n\nPercy Phelps and his nurse looked at Holmes during this demonstration with surprise and a good deal of disappointment written upon their faces. He had fallen into a reverie, with the moss-rose between his fingers. It had lasted some minutes before the young lady broke in upon it.\n\n\"Do you see any prospect of solving this mystery, Mr. Holmes?\" she asked with a touch of asperity in her voice.\n\n\"Oh, the mystery!\" he answered, coming back with a start to the realities of life. \"Well, it would be absurd to deny that the case is a very abstruseand complicated one, but I can promise you that I will look into the matter and let you know any points which may strike me.\"\n\n\"Do you see any clue?\"\n\n\"You have furnished me with seven, but of course I must test them before I can pronounce upon their value.\"\n\n\"You suspect someone?\"\n\n\"I suspect myself.\"\n\n\"What!\"\n\n\"Of coming to conclusions too rapidly.\"\n\n\"Then go to London and test your conclusions.\"\n\n\"Your advice is very excellent, Miss Harrison,\" said Holmes, rising. \"I think, Watson, we cannot do better. Do not allow yourself to indulge in false hopes, Mr. Phelps. The affair is a very tangled one.\"\n\n\"I shall be in a fever until I see you again,\" cried the diplomatist.\n\n\"Well, I'll come out by the same train tomorrow, though it's more than likely that my report will be a negative one.\"\n\n\"God bless you for promising to come,\" cried our client. \"It gives me fresh life to know that something is being done. By the way, I have had a letter from Lord Holdhurst.\"\n\n\"Ha! what did he say?\"\n\n\"He was cold, but not harsh, I dare say my severe illness prevented him from being that. He repeated that the matter was of the utmost importance, and added that no steps would be taken about my future\u2014by which he means, of course, my dismissal\u2014until my health was restored and I had an opportunity of repairing my misfortune.\"\n\n\"Well, that was reasonable and considerate,\" said Holmes. \"Come, Watson, for we have a good day's work before us in town.\"\n\nMr. Joseph Harrison drove us down to the station, and we were soon whirling up in a Portsmouth train. Holmes was sunk in profound thought and hardly opened his mouth until we had passed Clapham Junction.\n\n\"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high and allow you to look down upon the houses like this.\"\n\nI thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.\n\n\"Look at those big, isolated clumps of buildings rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-coloured sea.\"\n\n\"The board-schools.\"\n\n\"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future. I suppose that man Phelps does not drink?\"\n\n\"I should not think so.\"\n\n\"Nor should I, but we are bound to take every possibility into account. The poor devil has certainly got himself into very deep water, and it's a question whether we shall ever be able to get him ashore. What do you think of Miss Harrison?\"\n\n\"A girl of strong character.\"\n\n\"Yes, but she is a good sort, or I am mistaken. She and her brother are the only children of an iron-master somewhere up Northumberland way. He got engaged to her when travelling last winter, and she came down to be introduced to his people, with her brother as escort. Then came the smash, and she stayed on to nurse her lover, while brother Joseph, finding himself pretty snug, stayed on, too. I've been making a few independent inquiries, you see. But to-day must be a day of inquiries.\"\n\n\"My practice\u2014\" I began.\n\n\"Oh, if you find your own cases more interesting than mine\u2014\" said Holmes with some asperity.\n\n\"I was going to say that my practice could get along very well for a day or two, since it is the slackest time in the year.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" said he, recovering his good-humour. \"Then we'll look into this matter together. I think that we should begin by seeing Forbes. He can probably tell us all the details we want until we know from what side the case is to be approached.\"\n\n\"You said you had a clue?\"\n\n\"Well, we have several, but we can only test their value by further inquiry. The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless. Now this is not purposeless. Who is it who profits by it? There is the French ambassador, there is the Russian, there is whoever might sell it to either of these, and there is Lord Holdhurst.\"\n\n\"Lord Holdhurst!\"\n\n\"Well, it is just conceivable that a statesman might find himself in a position where he was not sorry to have such a document accidentally destroyed.\"\n\n\"Not a statesman with the honourable record of Lord Holdhurst?\"\n\n\"It is a possibility and we cannot afford to disregard it. We shall see the noble lord to-day and find out if he can tell us anything. Meanwhile I have already set inquiries on foot.\"\n\n\"Already?\"\n\n\"Yes, I sent wires from Woking station to every evening paper in London. This advertisement will appear in each of them.\"\n\nHe handed over a sheet torn from a notebook. On it was scribbled in pencil:\n\n\u00a310 reward. The number of the cab which dropped a fare at or about the door of the Foreign Office in Charles Street at quarter to ten in the evening of May 23d. Apply 221B, Baker Street.\n\n\"You are confident that the thief came in a cab?\"\n\n\"If not, there is no harm done. But if Mr. Phelps is correct in stating that there is no hiding-place either in the room or the corridors, then the person must have come from outside. If he came from outside on so wet a night, and yet left no trace of damp upon the linoleum, which was examined within a few minutes of his passing, then it is exceedingly probable that he came in a cab. Yes, I think that we may safely deduce a cab.\"\n\n\"It sounds plausible.\"\n\n\"That is one of the clues of which I spoke. It may lead us to something. And then, of course, there is the bell\u2014which is the most distinctive feature of the case. Why should the bell ring? Was it the thief who did it out of bravado? Or was it someone who was with the thief who did it in order to prevent the crime? Or was it an accident? Or was it\u2014?\" He sank back into the state of intense and silent thought from which he had emerged; but it seemed to me, accustomed as I was to his every mood, that some new possibility had dawned suddenly upon him.\n\nIt was twenty past three when we reached our terminus, and after a hasty luncheon at the buffet we pushed on at once to Scotland Yard. Holmes had already wired to Forbes, and we found him waiting to receive us\u2014a small, foxy man with a sharp but by no means amiable expression. He was decidedly frigid in his manner to us, especially when he heard the errand upon which we had come.\n\n\"I've heard of your methods before now, Mr. Holmes,\" said he tartly. \"You are ready enough to use all the information that the police can lay at your disposal, and then you try to finish the case yourself and bring discredit on them.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" said Holmes, \"out of my last fifty-three cases my name has only appeared in four, and the police have had all the credit in forty-nine. I don't blame you for not knowing this, for you are young and inexperienced, but if you wish to get on in your new duties you will work with me and not against me.\"\n\n\"I'd be very glad of a hint or two,\" said the detective, changing his manner. \"I've certainly had no credit from the case so far.\"\n\n\"What steps have you taken?\"\n\n\"Tangey, the commissionaire, has been shadowed. He left the Guards with a good character, and we can find nothing against him. His wife is a bad lot, though. I fancy she knows more about this than appears.\"\n\n\"Have you shadowed her?\"\n\n\"We have set one of our women on to her. Mrs. Tangey drinks, and our woman has been with her twice when she was well on, but she could get nothing out of her.\"\n\n\"I understand that they have had brokers in the house?\"\n\n\"Yes, but they were paid off.\"\n\n\"Where did the money come from?\"\n\n\"That was all right. His pension was due. They have not shown any sign of being in funds.\"\n\n\"What explanation did she give of having answered the bell when Mr. Phelps rang for the coffee?\"\n\n\"She said that her husband was very tired and she wished to relieve him.\"\n\n\"Well, certainly that would agree with his being found a little later asleep in his chair. There is nothing against them then but the woman's character. Did you ask her why she hurried away that night? Her haste attracted the attention of the police constable.\"\n\n\"She was later than usual and wanted to get home.\"\n\n\"Did you point out to her that you and Mr. Phelps, who started at least twenty minutes after her, got home before her?\"\n\n\"She explains that by the difference between a 'bus and a hansom.\"\n\n\"Did she make it clear why, on reaching her house, she ran into the back kitchen?\"\n\n\"Because she had the money there with which to pay off the brokers.\"\n\n\"She has at least an answer for everything. Did you ask her whether in leaving she met anyone or saw anyone loitering about Charles Street?\"\n\n\"She saw no one but the constable.\"\n\n\"Well, you seem to have cross-examined her pretty thoroughly. What else have you done?\"\n\n\"The clerk Gorot has been shadowed all these nine weeks, but without result. We can show nothing against him.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Well, we have nothing else to go upon\u2014no evidence of any kind.\"\n\n\"Have you formed any theory about how that bell rang?\"\n\n\"Well, I must confess that it beats me. It was a cool hand, whoever it was, to go and give the alarm like that.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was a queer thing to do. Many thanks to you for what you have told me. If I can put the man into your hands you shall hear from me. Come along, Watson.\"\n\n\"Where are we going to now?\" I asked as we left the office.\n\n\"We are now going to interview Lord Holdhurst, the cabinet minister and future premier of England.\"\n\nWe were fortunate in finding that Lord Holdhurst was still in his chambers in Downing Street, and on Holmes sending in his card we were instantly shown up. The statesman received us with that old-fashioned courtesy for which he is remarkable and seated us on the two luxuriant lounges on either side of the fireplace. Standing on the rug between us, with his slight, tall figure, his sharp features, thoughtful face, and curling hair prematurely tinged with gray, he seemed to represent that not too common type, a nobleman who is in truth noble.\n\n\"Your name is very familiar to me, Mr. Holmes,\" said he, smiling. \"And of course I cannot pretend to be ignorant of the object of your visit. There has only been one occurrence in these offices which could call for your attention. In whose interest are you acting, may I ask?\"\n\n\"In that of Mr. Percy Phelps,\" answered Holmes.\n\n\"Ah, my unfortunate nephew! You can understand that our kinship makes it the more impossible for me to screen him in any way. I fear that the incident must have a very prejudicial effect upon his career.\"\n\n\"But if the document is found?\"\n\n\"Ah, that, of course, would be different.\"\n\n\"I had one or two questions which I wished to ask you, Lord Holdhurst.\"\n\n\"I shall be happy to give you any information in my power.\"\n\n\"Was it in this room that you gave your instructions as to the copying of the document?\"\n\n\"It was.\"\n\n\"Then you could hardly have been overheard?\"\n\n\"It is out of the question.\"\n\n\"Did you ever mention to anyone that it was your intention to give anyone the treaty to be copied?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"You are certain of that?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Well, since you never said so, and Mr. Phelps never said so, and nobody else knew anything of the matter, then the thief's presence in the room was purely accidental. He saw his chance and he took it.\"\n\nThe statesman smiled. \"You take me out of my province there,\" said he.\n\nHolmes considered for a moment. \"There is another very important point which I wish to discuss with you,\" said he. \"You feared, as I understand, that very grave results might follow from the details of this treaty becoming known.\"\n\nA shadow passed over the expressive face of the statesman. \"Very grave results indeed.\"\n\n\"And have they occurred?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"If the treaty had reached, let us say, the French or Russian Foreign Office, you would expect to hear of it?\"\n\n\"I should,\" said Lord Holdhurst with a wry face.\n\n\"Since nearly ten weeks have elapsed, then, and nothing has been heard, it is not unfair to suppose that for some reason the treaty has not reached them.\"\n\nLord Holdhurst shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"We can hardly suppose, Mr. Holmes, that the thief took the treaty in order to frame it and hang it up.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he is waiting for a better price.\"\n\n\"If he waits a little longer he will get no price at all. The treaty will cease to be secret in a few months.\"\n\n\"That is most important,\" said Holmes. \"Of course, it is a possible supposition that the thief has had a sudden illness\u2014\"\n\n\"An attack of brain-fever, for example?\" asked the statesman, flashing a swift glance at him.\n\n\"I did not say so,\" said Holmes imperturbably. \"And now, Lord Holdhurst, we have already taken up too much of your valuable time, and we shall wish you good-day.\"\n\n\"Every success to your investigation, be the criminal who it may,\" answered the nobleman as he bowed us out at the door.\n\n\"He's a fine fellow,\" said Holmes as we came out into Whitehall. \"But he has a struggle to keep up his position. He is far from rich and has many calls. You noticed, of course, that his boots had been resoled. Now, Watson, I won't detain you from your legitimate work any longer. I shall do nothing more to-day unless I have an answer to my cab advertisement. But I should be extremely obliged to you if you would come down with me to Woking tomorrow by the same train which we took yesterday.\"\n\nI met him accordingly next morning and we travelled down to Woking together. He had had no answer to his advertisement, he said, and no fresh light had been thrown upon the case. He had, when he so willed it, the utter immobility of countenance of a red Indian, and I could not gather from his appearance whether he was satisfied or not with the position of the case. His conversation, I remember, was about the Bertillon system of measurements, and he expressed his enthusiastic admiration of the French savant.\n\nWe found our client still under the charge of his devoted nurse, but looking considerably better than before. He rose from the sofa and greeted us without difficulty when we entered.\n\n\"Any news?\" he asked eagerly.\n\n\"My report, as I expected, is a negative one,\" said Holmes. \"I have seen Forbes, and I have seen your uncle, and I have set one or two trains of inquiry upon foot which may lead to something.\"\n\n\"You have not lost heart, then?\"\n\n\"By no means.\"\n\n\"God bless you for saying that!\" cried Miss Harrison. \"If we keep our courage and our patience the truth must come out.\"\n\n\"We have more to tell you than you have for us,\" said Phelps, reseating himself upon the couch.\n\n\"I hoped you might have something.\"\n\n\"Yes, we have had an adventure during the night, and one which might have proved to be a serious one.\" His expression grew very grave as he spoke, and a look of something akin to fear sprang up in his eyes. \"Do you know,\" said he, \"that I begin to believe that I am the unconscious centre of some monstrous conspiracy, and that my life is aimed at as well as my honour?\"\n\n\"Ah!\" cried Holmes.\n\n\"It sounds incredible, for I have not, as far as I know, an enemy in the world. Yet from last night's experience I can come to no other conclusion.\"\n\n\"Pray let me hear it.\"\n\n\"You must know that last night was the very first night that I have ever slept without a nurse in the room. I was so much better that I thought I could dispense with one. I had a night-light burning, however. Well, about two in the morning I had sunk into a light sleep when I was suddenly aroused by a slight noise. It was like the sound which a mouse makes when it is gnawing a plank, and I lay listening to it for some time under the impression that it must come from that cause. Then it grew louder, and suddenly there came from the window a sharp metallic snick. I sat up in amazement. There could be no doubt what the sounds were now. The first ones had been caused by someone forcing an instrument through the slit between the sashes, and the second by the catch being pressed back.\n\n\"There was a pause then for about ten minutes, as if the person were waiting to see whether the noise had awakened me. Then I heard a gentle creaking as the window was very slowly opened. I could stand it no longer, for my nerves are not what they used to be. I sprang out of bed and flung open the shutters. A man was crouching at the window. I could see little of him, for he was gone like a flash. He was wrapped in some sort of cloak which came across the lower part of his face. One thing only I am sure of, and that is that he had some weapon in his hand. It looked to me like a long knife. I distinctly saw the gleam of it as he turned to run.\"\n\n\"This is most interesting,\" said Holmes. \"Pray what did you do then?\"\n\n\"I should have followed him through the open window if I had been stronger. As it was, I rang the bell and roused the house. It took some little time, for the bell rings in the kitchen and the servants all sleep upstairs. I shouted, however, and that brought Joseph down, and he roused the others. Joseph and the groom found marks on the bed outside the window, but the weather has been so dry lately that they found it hopeless to follow the trail across the grass. There's a place, however, on the wooden fence which skirts the road which shows signs, they tell me, as if someone had got over, and had snapped the top of the rail in doing so. I have said nothing to the local police yet, for I thought I had best have your opinion first.\"\n\nThis tale of our client's appeared to have an extraordinary effect upon Sherlock Holmes. He rose from his chair and paced about the room in uncontrollable excitement.\n\n\"Misfortunes never come single,\" said Phelps, smiling, though it was evident that his adventure had somewhat shaken him.\n\n\"You have certainly had your share,\" said Holmes. \"Do you think you could walk round the house with me?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I should like a little sunshine. Joseph will come, too.\"\n\n\"And I also,\" said Miss Harrison.\n\n\"I am afraid not,\" said Holmes, shaking his head. \"I think I must ask you to remain sitting exactly where you are.\"\n\nThe young lady resumed her seat with an air of displeasure. Her brother, however, had joined us and we set off all four together. We passed round the lawn to the outside of the young diplomatist's window. There were, as he had said, marks upon the bed, but they were hopelessly blurred and vague. Holmes stooped over them for an instant, and then rose shrugging his shoulders.\n\n\"I don't think anyone could make much of this,\" said he. \"Let us go round the house and see why this particular room was chosen by the burglar. I should have thought those larger windows of the drawing-room and dining-room would have had more attractions for him.\"\n\n\"They are more visible from the road,\" suggested Mr. Joseph Harrison.\n\n\"Ah, yes, of course. There is a door here which he might have attempted. What is it for?\"\n\n\"It is the side entrance for trades-people. Of course it is locked at night.\"\n\n\"Have you ever had an alarm like this before?\"\n\n\"Never,\" said our client.\n\n\"Do you keep plate in the house, or anything to attract burglars?\"\n\n\"Nothing of value.\"\n\nHolmes strolled round the house with his hands in his pockets and a negligent air which was unusual with him.\n\n\"By the way,\" said he to Joseph Harrison, \"you found some place, I understand, where the fellow scaled the fence. Let us have a look at that!\"\n\nThe plump young man led us to a spot where the top of one of the wooden rails had been cracked. A small fragment of the wood was hanging down. Holmes pulled it off and examined it critically.\n\n\"Do you think that was done last night? It looks rather old, does it not?\"\n\n\"Well, possibly so.\"\n\n\"There are no marks of anyone jumping down upon the other side. No, I fancy we shall get no help here. Let us go back to the bedroom and talk the matter over.\"\n\nPercy Phelps was walking very slowly, leaning upon the arm of his future brother-in-law. Holmes walked swiftly across the lawn, and we were at the open window of the bedroom long before the others came up.\n\n\"Miss Harrison,\" said Holmes, speaking with the utmost intensity of manner, \"you must stay where you are all day. Let nothing prevent you from staying where you are all day. It is of the utmost importance.\"\n\n\"Certainly, if you wish it, Mr. Holmes,\" said the girl in astonishment.\n\n\"When you go to bed lock the door of this room on the outside and keep the key. Promise to do this.\"\n\n\"But Percy?\"\n\n\"He will come to London with us.\"\n\n\"And am I to remain here?\"\n\n\"It is for his sake. You can serve him. Quick! Promise!\"\n\nShe gave a quick nod of assent just as the other two came up.\n\n\"Why do you sit moping there, Annie?\" cried her brother. \"Come out into the sunshine!\"\n\n\"No, thank you, Joseph. I have a slight headache and this room is deliciously cool and soothing.\"\n\n\"What do you propose now, Mr. Holmes?\" asked our client.\n\n\"Well, in investigating this minor affair we must not lose sight of our main inquiry. It would be a very great help to me if you would come up to London with us.\"\n\n\"At once?\"\n\n\"Well, as soon as you conveniently can. Say in an hour.\"\n\n\"I feel quite strong enough, if I can really be of any help.\"\n\n\"The greatest possible.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would like me to stay there tonight?\"\n\n\"I was just going to propose it.\"\n\n\"Then, if my friend of the night comes to revisit me, he will find the bird flown. We are all in your hands, Mr. Holmes, and you must tell us exactly what you would like done. Perhaps you would prefer that Joseph came with us so as to look after me?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, my friend Watson is a medical man, you know, and he'll look after you. We'll have our lunch here, if you will permit us, and then we shall all three set off for town together.\"\n\nIt was arranged as he suggested, though Miss Harrison excused herself from leaving the bedroom, in accordance with Holmes's suggestion. What the object of my friends man\u0153uvres was I could not conceive, unless it were to keep the lady away from Phelps, who, rejoiced by his returning health and by the prospect of action, lunched with us in the dining-room. Holmes had a still more startling surprise for us, however, for, after accompanying us down to the station and seeing us into our carriage, he calmly announced that he had no intention of leaving Woking.\n\n\"There are one or two small points which I should desire to clear up before I go,\" said he. \"Your absence, Mr. Phelps, will in some ways rather assist me. Watson, when you reach London you would oblige me by driving at once to Baker Street with our friend here, and remaining with him until I see you again. It is fortunate that you are old school-fellows, as you must have much to talk over. Mr. Phelps can have the spare bedroom tonight, and I will be with you in time for breakfast, for there is a train which will take me into Waterloo at eight.\"\n\n\"But how about our investigation in London?\" asked Phelps ruefully.\n\n\"We can do that tomorrow. I think that just at present I can be of more immediate use here.\"\n\n\"You might tell them at Briarbrae that I hope to be back tomorrow night,\" cried Phelps, as we began to move from the platform.\n\n\"I hardly expect to go back to Briarbrae,\" answered Holmes, and waved his hand to us cheerily as we shot out from the station.\n\nPhelps and I talked it over on our journey, but neither of us could devise a satisfactory reason for this new development.\n\n\"I suppose he wants to find out some clues as to the burglary last night, if a burglar it was. For myself, I don't believe it was an ordinary thief.\"\n\n\"What is your own idea, then?\"\n\n\"Upon my word, you may put it down to my weak nerves or not, but I believe there is some deep political intrigue going on around me, and that for some reason that passes my understanding my life is aimed at by the conspirators. It sounds high-flown and absurd, but consider the facts! Why should a thief try to break in at a bedroom window where there could be no hope of any plunder, and why should he come with a long knife in his hand?\"\n\n\"You are sure it was not a house-breaker's jimmy?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, it was a knife. I saw the flash of the blade quite distinctly.\"\n\n\"But why on earth should you be pursued with such animosity?\"\n\n\"Ah, that is the question.\"\n\n\"Well, if Holmes takes the same view, that would account for his action, would it not? Presuming that your theory is correct, if he can lay his hands upon the man who threatened you last night he will have gone a long way towards finding who took the naval treaty. It is absurd to suppose that you have two enemies, one of whom robs you, while the other threatens your life.\"\n\n\"But Holmes said that he was not going to Briarbrae.\"\n\n\"I have known him for some time,\" said I, \"but I never knew him do anything yet without a very good reason,\" and with that our conversation drifted off on to other topics.\n\nBut it was a weary day for me. Phelps was still weak after his long illness, and his misfortunes made him querulous and nervous. In vain I endeavoured to interest him in Afghanistan, in India, in social questions, in anything which might take his mind out of the groove. He would always come back to his lost treaty, wondering, guessing, speculating as to what Holmes was doing, what steps Lord Holdhurst was taking, what news we should have in the morning. As the evening wore on his excitement became quite painful.\n\n\"You have implicit faith in Holmes?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have seen him do some remarkable things.\"\n\n\"But he never brought light into anything quite so dark as this?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I have known him solve questions which presented fewer clues than yours.\"\n\n\"But not where such large interests are at stake?\"\n\n\"I don't know that. To my certain knowledge he has acted on behalf of three of the reigning houses of Europe in very vital matters.\"\n\n\"But you know him well, Watson. He is such an inscrutable fellow that I never quite know what to make of him. Do you think he is hopeful? Do you think he expects to make a success of it?\"\n\n\"He has said nothing.\"\n\n\"That is a bad sign.\"\n\n\"On the contrary. I have noticed that when he is off the trail he generally says so. It is when he is on a scent and is not quite absolutely sure yet that it is the right one that he is most taciturn. Now, my dear fellow, we can't help matters by making ourselves nervous about them, so let me implore you to go to bed and so be fresh for whatever may await us tomorrow.\"\n\nI was able at last to persuade my companion to take my advice, though I knew from his excited manner that there was not much hope of sleep for him. Indeed, his mood was infectious, for I lay tossing half the night myself, brooding over this strange problem and inventing a hundred theories, each of which was more impossible than the last. Why had Holmes remained at Woking? Why had he asked Miss Harrison to remain in the sickroom all day? Why had he been so careful not to inform the people at Briarbrae that he intended to remain near them? I cudgelled my brains until I fell asleep in the endeavour to find some explanation which would cover all these facts.\n\nIt was seven o'clock when I awoke, and I set off at once for Phelps's room to find him haggard and spent after a sleepless night. His first question was whether Holmes had arrived yet.\n\n\"He'll be here when he promised,\" said I, \"and not an instant sooner or later.\"\n\nAnd my words were true, for shortly after eight a hansom dashed up to the door and our friend got out of it. Standing in the window we saw that his left hand was swathed in a bandage and that his face was very grim and pale. He entered the house, but it was some little time before he came upstairs.\n\n\"He looks like a beaten man,\" cried Phelps.\n\nI was forced to confess that he was right. \"After all,\" said I, \"the clue of the matter lies probably here in town.\"\n\nPhelps gave a groan.\n\n\"I don't know how it is,\" said he, \"but I had hoped for so much from his return. But surely his hand was not tied up like that yesterday. What can be the matter?\"\n\n\"You are not wounded, Holmes?\" I asked as my friend entered the room.\n\n\"Tut, it is only a scratch through my own clumsiness,\" he answered, nodding his good-morning to us. \"This case of yours, Mr. Phelps, is certainly one of the darkest which I have ever investigated.\"\n\n\"I feared that you would find it beyond you.\"\n\n\"It has been a most remarkable experience.\"\n\n\"That bandage tells of adventures,\" said I. \"Won't you tell us what has happened?\"\n\n\"After breakfast, my dear Watson. Remember that I have breathed thirty miles of Surrey air this morning. I suppose that there has been no answer from my cabman advertisement? Well, well, we cannot expect to score every time.\"\n\nThe table was all laid, and just as I was about to ring Mrs. Hudson entered with the tea and coffee. A few minutes later she brought in three covers, and we all drew up to the table, Holmes ravenous, I curious, and Phelps in the gloomiest state of depression.\n\n\"Mrs. Hudson has risen to the occasion,\" said Holmes, uncovering a dish of curried chicken. \"Her cuisine is a little limited, but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman. What have you there, Watson?\"\n\n\"Ham and eggs,\" I answered.\n\n\"Good! What are you going to take, Mr. Phelps\u2014curried fowl or eggs, or will you help yourself?\"\n\n\"Thank you. I can eat nothing,\" said Phelps.\n\n\"Oh, come! Try the dish before you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, I would really rather not.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" said Holmes with a mischievous twinkle, \"I suppose that you have no objection to helping me?\"\n\nPhelps raised the cover, and as he did so he uttered a scream and sat there staring with a face as white as the plate upon which he looked. Across the centre of it was lying a little cylinder of blue-gray paper. He caught it up, devoured it with his eyes, and then danced madly about the room, pressing it to his bosom and shrieking out in his delight. Then he fell back into an armchair, so limp and exhausted with his own emotions that we had to pour brandy down his throat to keep him from fainting.\n\n\"There! there!\" said Holmes soothingly, patting him upon the shoulder. \"It was too bad to spring it on you like this, but Watson here will tell you that I never can resist a touch of the dramatic.\"\n\nPhelps seized his hand and kissed it. \"God bless you!\" he cried. \"You have saved my honour.\"\n\n\"Well, my own was at stake, you know,\" said Holmes. \"I assure you it is just as hateful to me to fail in a case as it can be to you to blunder over a commission.\"\n\nPhelps thrust away the precious document into the innermost pocket of his coat.\n\n\"I have not the heart to interrupt your breakfast any further, and yet I am dying to know how you got it and where it was.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes swallowed a cup of coffee and turned his attention to the ham and eggs. Then he rose, lit his pipe, and settled himself down into his chair.\n\n\"I'll tell you what I did first, and how I came to do it afterwards,\" said he. \"After leaving you at the station I went for a charming walk through some admirable Surrey scenery to a pretty little village called Ripley, where I had my tea at an inn and took the precaution of filling my flask and of putting a paper of sandwiches in my pocket. There I remained until evening, when I set off for Woking again and found myself in the highroad outside Briarbrae just after sunset.\n\n\"Well, I waited until the road was clear\u2014it is never a very frequented one at any time, I fancy\u2014and then I clambered over the fence into the grounds.\"\n\n\"Surely the gate was open!\" ejaculated Phelps.\n\n\"Yes, but I have a peculiar taste in these matters. I chose the place where the three fir-trees stand, and behind their screen I got over without the least chance of anyone in the house being able to see me. I crouched down among the bushes on the other side and crawled from one to the other\u2014witness the disreputable state of my trouser knees\u2014until I had reached the clump of rhododendrons just opposite to your bedroom window. There I squatted down and awaited developments.\n\n\"The blind was not down in your room, and I could see Miss Harrison sitting there reading by the table. It was quarter-past ten when she closed her book, fastened the shutters, and retired.\n\n\"I heard her shut the door and felt quite sure that she had turned the key in the lock.\"\n\n\"The key!\" ejaculated Phelps.\n\n\"Yes, I had given Miss Harrison instructions to lock the door on the outside and take the key with her when she went to bed. She carried out every one of my injunctions to the letter, and certainly without her co\u00f6peration you would not have that paper in your coat-pocket. She departed then and the lights went out, and I was left squatting in the rhododendron-bush.\n\n\"The night was fine, but still it was a very weary vigil. Of course it has the sort of excitement about it that the sportsman feels when he lies beside the watercourse and waits for the big game. It was very long, though\u2014almost as long, Watson, as when you and I waited in that deadly room when we looked into the little problem of the Speckled Band. There was a church-clock down at Woking which struck the quarters, and I thought more than once that it had stopped. At last, however, about two in the morning, I suddenly heard the gentle sound of a bolt being pushed back and the creaking of a key. A moment later the servants' door was opened, and Mr. Joseph Harrison stepped out into the moonlight.\"\n\n\"Joseph!\" ejaculated Phelps.\n\n\"He was bare-headed, but he had a black cloak thrown over his shoulder, so that he could conceal his face in an instant if there were any alarm. He walked on tiptoe under the shadow of the wall, and when he reached the window he worked a long-bladed knife through the sash and pushed back the catch. Then he flung open the window, and putting his knife through the crack in the shutters, he thrust the bar up and swung them open.\n\n\"From where I lay I had a perfect view of the inside of the room and of every one of his movements. He lit the two candles which stood upon the mantelpiece, and then he proceeded to turn back the corner of the carpet in the neighbourhood of the door. Presently he stooped and picked out a square piece of board, such as is usually left to enable plumbers to get at the joints of the gas-pipes. This one covered, as a matter of fact, the T joint which gives off the pipe which supplies the kitchen underneath. Out of this hiding-place he drew that little cylinder of paper, pushed down the board, rearranged the carpet, blew out the candles, and walked straight into my arms as I stood waiting for him outside the window.\n\n\"Well, he has rather more viciousness than I gave him credit for, has Master Joseph. He flew at me with his knife, and I had to grass him twice, and got a cut over the knuckles, before I had the upper hand of him. He looked murder out of the only eye he could see with when we had finished, but he listened to reason and gave up the papers. Having got them I let my man go, but I wired full particulars to Forbes this morning. If he is quick enough to catch his bird, well and good. But if, as I shrewdly suspect, he finds the nest empty before he gets there, why, all the better for the government. I fancy that Lord Holdhurst, for one, and Mr. Percy Phelps for another, would very much rather that the affair never got as far as a police-court.\"\n\n\"My God!\" gasped our client. \"Do you tell me that during these long ten weeks of agony the stolen papers were within the very room with me all the time?\"\n\n\"So it was.\"\n\n\"And Joseph! Joseph a villain and a thief!\"\n\n\"Hum! I am afraid Joseph's character is a rather deeper and more dangerous one than one might judge from his appearance. From what I have heard from him this morning, I gather that he has lost heavily in dabbling with stocks, and that he is ready to do anything on earth to better his fortunes. Being an absolutely selfish man, when a chance presents itself he did not allow either his sister's happiness or your reputation to hold his hand.\"\n\nPercy Phelps sank back in his chair. \"My head whirls,\" said he. \"Your words have dazed me.\"\n\n\"The principal difficulty in your case,\" remarked Holmes in his didactic fashion, \"lay in the fact of there being too much evidence. What was vital was overlaid and hidden by what was irrelevant. Of all the facts which were presented to us we had to pick just those which we deemed to be essential, and then piece them together in their order, so as to reconstruct this very remarkable chain of events. I had already begun to suspect Joseph from the fact that you had intended to travel home with him that night, and that therefore it was a likely enough thing that he should call for you, knowing the Foreign Office well, upon his way. When I heard that someone had been so anxious to get into the bedroom, in which no one but Joseph could have concealed anything\u2014you told us in your narrative how you had turned Joseph out when you arrived with the doctor\u2014my suspicions all changed to certainties, especially as the attempt was made on the first night upon which the nurse was absent, showing that the intruder was well acquainted with the ways of the house.\"\n\n\"How blind I have been!\"\n\n\"The facts of the case, as far as I have worked them out, are these: This Joseph Harrison entered the office through the Charles Street door, and knowing his way he walked straight into your room the instant after you left it. Finding no one there he promptly rang the bell, and at the instant that he did so his eyes caught the paper upon the table. A glance showed him that chance had put in his way a State document of immense value, and in an instant he had thrust it into his pocket and was gone. A few minutes elapsed, as you remember, before the sleepy commissionaire drew your attention to the bell, and those were just enough to give the thief time to make his escape.\n\n\"He made his way to Woking by the first train, and, having examined his booty and assured himself that it really was of immense value, he had concealed it in what he thought was a very safe place, with the intention of taking it out again in a day or two, and carrying it to the French embassy, or wherever he thought that a long price was to be had. Then came your sudden return. He, without a moment's warning, was bundled out of his room, and from that time onward there were always at least two of you there to prevent him from regaining his treasure. The situation to him must have been a maddening one. But at last he thought he saw his chance. He tried to steal in, but was baffled by your wakefulness. You may remember that you did not take your usual draught that night.\"\n\n\"I remember.\"\n\n\"I fancy that he had taken steps to make that draught efficacious, and that he quite relied upon your being unconscious. Of course, I understood that he would repeat the attempt whenever it could be done with safety. Your leaving the room gave him the chance he wanted. I kept Miss Harrison in it all day so that he might not anticipate us. Then, having given him the idea that the coast was clear, I kept guard as I have described. I already knew that the papers were probably in the room, but I had no desire to rip up all the planking and skirting in search of them. I let him take them, therefore, from the hiding-place, and so saved myself an infinity of trouble. Is there any other point which I can make clear?\"\n\n\"Why did he try the window on the first occasion,\" I asked, \"when he might have entered by the door?\"\n\n\"In reaching the door he would have to pass seven bedrooms. On the other hand, he could get out on to the lawn with ease. Anything else?\"\n\n\"You do not think,\" asked Phelps, \"that he had any murderous intention? The knife was only meant as a tool.\"\n\n\"It may be so,\" answered Holmes, shrugging his shoulders. \"I can only say for certain that Mr. Joseph Harrison is a gentleman to whose mercy I should be extremely unwilling to trust.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE FINAL PROBLEM", + "text": "It is with a heavy heart that I take up my pen to write these the last words in which I shall ever record the singular gifts by which my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes was distinguished. In an incoherent and, as I deeply feel, an entirely inadequate fashion, I have endeavoured to give some account of my strange experiences in his company from the chance which first brought us together at the period of the \"Study in Scarlet,\" up to the time of his interference in the matter of the \"Naval Treaty\"\u2014an interference which had the unquestionable effect of preventing a serious international complication. It was my intention to have stopped there, and to have said nothing of that event which has created a void in my life which the lapse of two years has done little to fill. My hand has been forced, however, by the recent letters in which Colonel James Moriarty defends the memory of his brother, and I have no choice but to lay the facts before the public exactly as they occurred. I alone know the absolute truth of the matter, and I am satisfied that the time has come when no good purpose is to be served by its suppression. As far as I know, there have been only three accounts in the public press: that in the Journal de Gen\u00e8ve on May 6th, 1891, the Reuter's dispatch in the English papers on May 7th, and finally the recent letters to which I have alluded. Of these the first and second were extremely condensed, while the last is, as I shall now show, an absolute perversion of the facts. It lies with me to tell for the first time what really took place between Professor Moriarty and Mr. Sherlock Holmes.\n\nIt may be remembered that after my marriage, and my subsequent start in private practice, the very intimate relations which had existed between Holmes and myself became to some extent modified. He still came to me from time to time when he desired a companion in his investigations, but these occasions grew more and more seldom, until I find that in the year 1890 there were only three cases of which I retain any record. During the winter of that year and the early spring of 1891, I saw in the papers that he had been engaged by the French government upon a matter of supreme importance, and I received two notes from Holmes, dated from Narbonne and from N\u00eemes, from which I gathered that his stay in France was likely to be a long one. It was with some surprise, therefore, that I saw him walk into my consulting-room upon the evening of April 24th. It struck me that he was looking even paler and thinner than usual.\n\n\"Yes, I have been using myself up rather too freely,\" he remarked, in answer to my look rather than to my words; \"I have been a little pressed of late. Have you any objection to my closing your shutters?\"\n\nThe only light in the room came from the lamp upon the table at which I had been reading. Holmes edged his way round the wall, and, flinging the shutters together, he bolted them securely.\n\n\"You are afraid of something?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, I am.\"\n\n\"Of what?\"\n\n\"Of air-guns.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes, what do you mean?\"\n\n\"I think that you know me well enough, Watson, to understand that I am by no means a nervous man. At the same time, it is stupidity rather than courage to refuse to recognize danger when it is close upon you. Might I trouble you for a match?\" He drew in the smoke of his cigarette as if the soothing influence was grateful to him.\n\n\"I must apologize for calling so late,\" said he, \"and I must further beg you to be so unconventional as to allow me to leave your house presently by scrambling over your back garden wall.\"\n\n\"But what does it all mean?\" I asked.\n\nHe held out his hand, and I saw in the light of the lamp that two of his knuckles were burst and bleeding.\n\n\"It's not an airy nothing, you see,\" said he, smiling. \"On the contrary, it is solid enough for a man to break his hand over. Is Mrs. Watson in?\"\n\n\"She is away upon a visit.\"\n\n\"Indeed! You are alone?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\n\"Then it makes it the easier for me to propose that you should come away with me for a week to the Continent.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Oh, anywhere. It's all the same to me.\"\n\nThere was something very strange in all this. It was not Holmes's nature to take an aimless holiday, and something about his pale, worn face told me that his nerves were at their highest tension. He saw the question in my eyes, and, putting his finger-tips together and his elbows upon his knees, he explained the situation.\n\n\"You have probably never heard of Professor Moriarty?\" said he.\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Ay, there's the genius and the wonder of the thing!\" he cried. \"The man pervades London, and no one has heard of him. That's what puts him on a pinnacle in the records of crime. I tell you Watson, in all seriousness, that if I could beat that man, if I could free society of him, I should feel that my own career had reached its summit, and I should be prepared to turn to some more placid line in life. Between ourselves, the recent cases in which I have been of assistance to the royal family of Scandinavia, and to the French republic, have left me in such a position that I could continue to live in the quiet fashion which is most congenial to me, and to concentrate my attention upon my chemical researches. But I could not rest, Watson, I could not sit quiet in my chair, if I thought that such a man as Professor Moriarty were walking the streets of London unchallenged.\"\n\n\"What has he done, then?\"\n\n\"His career has been an extraordinary one. He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. At the age of twenty-one he wrote a treatise upon the binomial theorem, which has had a European vogue. On the strength of it he won the mathematical chair at one of our smaller universities, and had, to all appearances, a most brilliant career before him. But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. Dark rumours gathered round him in the university town, and eventually he was compelled to resign his chair and to come down to London, where he set up as an army coach. So much is known to the world, but what I am telling you now is what I have myself discovered.\n\n\"As you are aware, Watson, there is no one who knows the higher criminal world of London so well as I do. For years past I have continually been conscious of some power behind the malefactor, some deep organizing power which forever stands in the way of the law, and throws its shield over the wrong-doer. Again and again in cases of the most varying sorts\u2014forgery cases, robberies, murders\u2014I have felt the presence of this force, and I have deduced its action in many of those undiscovered crimes in which I have not been personally consulted. For years I have endeavoured to break through the veil which shrouded it, and at last the time came when I seized my thread and followed it, until it led me, after a thousand cunning windings, to ex-Professor Moriarty, of mathematical celebrity.\n\n\"He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organizer of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. He is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order. He sits motionless, like a spider in the centre of its web, but that web has a thousand radiations, and he knows well every quiver of each of them. He does little himself. He only plans. But his agents are numerous and splendidly organized. Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed\u2014the word is passed to the professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught\u2014never so much as suspected. This was the organization which I deduced, Watson, and which I devoted my whole energy to exposing and breaking up.\n\n\"But the professor was fenced round with safeguards so cunningly devised that, do what I would, it seemed impossible to get evidence which would convict in a court of law. You know my powers, my dear Watson, and yet at the end of three months I was forced to confess that I had at last met an antagonist who was my intellectual equal. My horror at his crimes was lost in my admiration at his skill. But at last he made a trip\u2014only a little, little trip\u2014but it was more than he could afford, when I was so close upon him. I had my chance, and, starting from that point, I have woven my net round him until now it is all ready to close. In three days\u2014that is to say, on Monday next\u2014matters will be ripe, and the professor, with all the principal members of his gang, will be in the hands of the police. Then will come the greatest criminal trial of the century, the clearing up of over forty mysteries, and the rope for all of them; but if we move at all prematurely, you understand, they may slip out of our hands even at the last moment.\n\n\"Now, if I could have done this without the knowledge of Professor Moriarty, all would have been well. But he was too wily for that. He saw every step which I took to draw my toils round him. Again and again he strove to break away, but I as often headed him off. I tell you, my friend, that if a detailed account of that silent contest could be written, it would take its place as the most brilliant bit of thrust-and-parry work in the history of detection. Never have I risen to such a height, and never have I been so hard pressed by an opponent. He cut deep, and yet I just undercut him. This morning the last steps were taken, and three days only were wanted to complete the business. I was sitting in my room thinking the matter over when the door opened and Professor Moriarty stood before me.\n\n\"My nerves are fairly proof, Watson, but I must confess to a start when I saw the very man who had been so much in my thoughts standing there on my threshold. His appearance was quite familiar to me. He is extremely tall and thin, his forehead domes out in a white curve, and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his puckered eyes.\n\n\"'You have less frontal development than I should have expected,' said he at last. 'It is a dangerous habit to finger loaded firearms in the pocket of one's dressing-gown.'\n\n\"The fact is that upon his entrance I had instantly recognized the extreme personal danger in which I lay. The only conceivable escape for him lay in silencing my tongue. In an instant I had slipped the revolver from the drawer into my pocket and was covering him through the cloth. At his remark I drew the weapon out and laid it cocked upon the table. He still smiled and blinked, but there was something about his eyes which made me feel very glad that I had it there.\n\n\"'You evidently don't know me,' said he.\n\n\"'On the contrary,' I answered, 'I think it is fairly evident that I do. Pray take a chair. I can spare you five minutes if you have anything to say.'\n\n\"'All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,' said he.\n\n\"'Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,' I replied.\n\n\"'You stand fast?'\n\n\"'Absolutely.'\n\n\"He clapped his hand into his pocket, and I raised the pistol from the table. But he merely drew out a memorandum-book in which he had scribbled some dates.\n\n\"'You crossed my path on the fourth of January,' said he. 'On the twenty-third you incommoded me; by the middle of February I was seriously inconvenienced by you; at the end of March I was absolutely hampered in my plans; and now, at the close of April, I find myself placed in such a position through your continual persecution that I am in positive danger of losing my liberty. The situation is becoming an impossible one.'\n\n\"'Have you any suggestion to make?' I asked.\n\n\"'You must drop it, Mr. Holmes,' said he, swaying his face about. 'You really must, you know.'\n\n\"'After Monday,' said I.\n\n\"'Tut, tut!' said he. 'I am quite sure that a man of your intelligence will see that there can be but one outcome to this affair. It is necessary that you should withdraw. You have worked things in such a fashion that we have only one resource left. It has been an intellectual treat to me to see the way in which you have grappled with this affair, and I say, unaffectedly, that it would be a grief to me to be forced to take any extreme measure. You smile, sir, but I assure you that it really would.'\n\n\"'Danger is part of my trade,' I remarked.\n\n\"'This is not danger,' said he. 'It is inevitable destruction. You stand in the way not merely of an individual but of a mighty organization, the full extent of which you, with all your cleverness, have been unable to realize. You must stand clear, Mr. Holmes, or be trodden under foot.'\n\n\"'I am afraid,' said I, rising, 'that in the pleasure of this conversation I am neglecting business of importance which awaits me elsewhere.'\n\n\"He rose also and looked at me in silence, shaking his head sadly.\n\n\"'Well, well,' said he at last. 'It seems a pity, but I have done what I could. I know every move of your game. You can do nothing before Monday. It has been a duel between you and me, Mr. Holmes. You hope to place me in the dock. I tell you that I will never stand in the dock. You hope to beat me. I tell you that you will never beat me. If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.'\n\n\"'You have paid me several compliments, Mr. Moriarty,' said I. 'Let me pay you one in return when I say that if I were assured of the former eventuality I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept the latter.'\n\n\"'I can promise you the one, but not the other,' he snarled, and so turned his rounded back upon me and went peering and blinking out of the room.\n\n\"That was my singular interview with Professor Moriarty. I confess that it left an unpleasant effect upon my mind. His soft, precise fashion of speech leaves a conviction of sincerity which a mere bully could not produce. Of course, you will say: 'Why not take police precautions against him?' The reason is that I am well convinced that it is from his agents the blow would fall. I have the best of proofs that it would be so.\"\n\n\"You have already been assaulted?\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, Professor Moriarty is not a man who lets the grass grow under his feet. I went out about midday to transact some business in Oxford Street. As I passed the corner which leads from Bentinck Street on to the Welbeck Street crossing a two-horse van furiously driven whizzed round and was on me like a flash. I sprang for the foot-path and saved myself by the fraction of a second. The van dashed round by Marylebone Lane and was gone in an instant. I kept to the pavement after that, Watson, but as I walked down Vere Street a brick came down from the roof of one of the houses and was shattered to fragments at my feet. I called the police and had the place examined. There were slates and bricks piled up on the roof preparatory to some repairs, and they would have me believe that the wind had toppled over one of these. Of course I knew better, but I could prove nothing. I took a cab after that and reached my brother's rooms in Pall Mall, where I spent the day. Now I have come round to you, and on my way I was attacked by a rough with a bludgeon. I knocked him down, and the police have him in custody; but I can tell you with the most absolute confidence that no possible connection will ever be traced between the gentleman upon whose front teeth I have barked my knuckles and the retiring mathematical coach, who is, I daresay, working out problems upon a black-board ten miles away. You will not wonder, Watson, that my first act on entering your rooms was to close your shutters, and that I have been compelled to ask your permission to leave the house by some less conspicuous exit than the front door.\"\n\nI had often admired my friend's courage, but never more than now, as he sat quietly checking off a series of incidents which must have combined to make up a day of horror.\n\n\"You will spend the night here?\" I said.\n\n\"No, my friend, you might find me a dangerous guest. I have my plans laid, and all will be well. Matters have gone so far now that they can move without my help as far as the arrest goes, though my presence is necessary for a conviction. It is obvious, therefore, that I cannot do better than get away for the few days which remain before the police are at liberty to act. It would be a great pleasure to me, therefore, if you could come on to the Continent with me.\"\n\n\"The practice is quiet,\" said I, \"and I have an accommodating neighbour. I should be glad to come.\"\n\n\"And to start to-morrow morning?\"\n\n\"If necessary.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, it is most necessary. Then these are your instructions, and I beg, my dear Watson, that you will obey them to the letter, for you are now playing a double-handed game with me against the cleverest rogue and the most powerful syndicate of criminals in Europe. Now listen! You will dispatch whatever luggage you intend to take by a trusty messenger unaddressed to Victoria to-night. In the morning you will send for a hansom, desiring your man to take neither the first nor the second which may present itself. Into this hansom you will jump, and you will drive to the Strand end of the Lowther Arcade, handing the address to the cabman upon a slip of paper, with a request that he will not throw it away. Have your fare ready, and the instant that your cab stops, dash through the Arcade, timing yourself to reach the other side at a quarter-past nine. You will find a small brougham waiting close to the curb, driven by a fellow with a heavy black cloak tipped at the collar with red. Into this you will step, and you will reach Victoria in time for the Continental express.\"\n\n\"Where shall I meet you?\"\n\n\"At the station. The second first-class carriage from the front will be reserved for us.\"\n\n\"The carriage is our rendezvous, then?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nIt was in vain that I asked Holmes to remain for the evening. It was evident to me that he thought he might bring trouble to the roof he was under, and that that was the motive which impelled him to go. With a few hurried words as to our plans for the morrow he rose and came out with me into the garden, clambering over the wall which leads into Mortimer Street, and immediately whistling for a hansom, in which I heard him drive away.\n\nIn the morning I obeyed Holmes's injunctions to the letter. A hansom was procured with such precautions as would prevent its being one which was placed ready for us, and I drove immediately after breakfast to the Lowther Arcade, through which I hurried at the top of my speed. A brougham was waiting with a very massive driver wrapped in a dark cloak, who, the instant that I had stepped in, whipped up the horse and rattled off to Victoria Station. On my alighting there he turned the carriage, and dashed away again without so much as a look in my direction.\n\nSo far all had gone admirably. My luggage was waiting for me, and I had no difficulty in finding the carriage which Holmes had indicated, the less so as it was the only one in the train which was marked \"Engaged.\" My only source of anxiety now was the non-appearance of Holmes. The station clock marked only seven minutes from the time when we were due to start. In vain I searched among the groups of travellers and leave-takers for the lithe figure of my friend. There was no sign of him. I spent a few minutes in assisting a venerable Italian priest, who was endeavouring to make a porter understand, in his broken English, that his luggage was to be booked through to Paris. Then, having taken another look round, I returned to my carriage, where I found that the porter, in spite of the ticket, had given me my decrepit Italian friend as a travelling companion. It was useless for me to explain to him that his presence was an intrusion, for my Italian was even more limited than his English, so I shrugged my shoulders resignedly, and continued to look out anxiously for my friend. A chill of fear had come over me, as I thought that his absence might mean that some blow had fallen during the night. Already the doors had all been shut and the whistle blown, when\u2014\n\n\"My dear Watson,\" said a voice, \"you have not even condescended to say good-morning.\"\n\nI turned in uncontrollable astonishment. The aged ecclesiastic had turned his face towards me. For an instant the wrinkles were smoothed away, the nose drew away from the chin, the lower lip ceased to protrude and the mouth to mumble, the dull eyes regained their fire, the drooping figure expanded. The next the whole frame collapsed again, and Holmes had gone as quickly as he had come.\n\n\"Good heavens!\" I cried, \"how you startled me!\"\n\n\"Every precaution is still necessary,\" he whispered. \"I have reason to think that they are hot upon our trail. Ah, there is Moriarty himself.\"\n\nThe train had already begun to move as Holmes spoke. Glancing back, I saw a tall man pushing his way furiously through the crowd, and waving his hand as if he desired to have the train stopped. It was too late, however, for we were rapidly gathering momentum, and an instant later had shot clear of the station.\n\n\"With all our precautions, you see that we have cut it rather fine,\" said Holmes, laughing. He rose, and throwing off the black cassock and hat which had formed his disguise, he packed them away in a hand-bag.\n\n\"Have you seen the morning paper, Watson?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You haven't seen about Baker Street, then?\"\n\n\"Baker Street?\"\n\n\"They set fire to our rooms last night. No great harm was done.\"\n\n\"Good heavens, Holmes, this is intolerable!\"\n\n\"They must have lost my track completely after their bludgeonman was arrested. Otherwise they could not have imagined that I had returned to my rooms. They have evidently taken the precaution of watching you, however, and that is what has brought Moriarty to Victoria. You could not have made any slip in coming?\"\n\n\"I did exactly what you advised.\"\n\n\"Did you find your brougham?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was waiting.\"\n\n\"Did you recognize your coachman?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"It was my brother Mycroft. It is an advantage to get about in such a case without taking a mercenary into your confidence. But we must plan what we are to do about Moriarty now.\"\n\n\"As this is an express, and as the boat runs in connection with it, I should think we have shaken him off very effectively.\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, you evidently did not realize my meaning when I said that this man may be taken as being quite on the same intellectual plane as myself. You do not imagine that if I were the pursuer I should allow myself to be baffled by so slight an obstacle. Why, then, should you think so meanly of him?\"\n\n\"What will he do?\"\n\n\"What I should do.\"\n\n\"What would you do, then?\"\n\n\"Engage a special.\"\n\n\"But it must be late.\"\n\n\"By no means. This train stops at Canterbury; and there is always at least a quarter of an hour's delay at the boat. He will catch us there.\"\n\n\"One would think that we were the criminals. Let us have him arrested on his arrival.\"\n\n\"It would be to ruin the work of three months. We should get the big fish, but the smaller would dart right and left out of the net. On Monday we should have them all. No, an arrest is inadmissible.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"We shall get out at Canterbury.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"Well, then we must make a cross-country journey to Newhaven, and so over to Dieppe. Moriarty will again do what I should do. He will get on to Paris, mark down our luggage, and wait for two days at the depot. In the meantime we shall treat ourselves to a couple of carpet-bags, encourage the manufactures of the countries through which we travel, and make our way at our leisure into Switzerland, via Luxembourg and Basle.\"\n\nAt Canterbury, therefore, we alighted, only to find that we should have to wait an hour before we could get a train to Newhaven.\n\nI was still looking rather ruefully after the rapidly disappearing luggage-van which contained my wardrobe, when Holmes pulled my sleeve and pointed up the line.\n\n\"Already, you see,\" said he.\n\nFar away, from among the Kentish woods there rose a thin spray of smoke. A minute later a carriage and engine could be seen flying along the open curve which leads to the station. We had hardly time to take our place behind a pile of luggage when it passed with a rattle and a roar, beating a blast of hot air into our faces.\n\n\"There he goes,\" said Holmes, as we watched the carriage swing and rock over the points. \"There are limits, you see, to our friend's intelligence. It would have been a coup-de-ma\u00eetre had he deduced what I would deduce and acted accordingly.\"\n\n\"And what would he have done had he overtaken us?\"\n\n\"There cannot be the least doubt that he would have made a murderous attack upon me. It is, however, a game at which two may play. The question now is whether we should take a premature lunch here, or run our chance of starving before we reach the buffet at Newhaven.\"\n\nWe made our way to Brussels that night and spent two days there, moving on upon the third day as far as Strasbourg. On the Monday morning Holmes had telegraphed to the London police, and in the evening we found a reply waiting for us at our hotel. Holmes tore it open, and then with a bitter curse hurled it into the grate.\n\n\"I might have known it!\" he groaned. \"He has escaped!\"\n\n\"Moriarty?\"\n\n\"They have secured the whole gang with the exception of him. He has given them the slip. Of course, when I had left the country there was no one to cope with him. But I did think that I had put the game in their hands. I think that you had better return to England, Watson.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because you will find me a dangerous companion now. This man's occupation is gone. He is lost if he returns to London. If I read his character right he will devote his whole energies to revenging himself upon me. He said as much in our short interview, and I fancy that he meant it. I should certainly recommend you to return to your practice.\"\n\nIt was hardly an appeal to be successful with one who was an old campaigner as well as an old friend. We sat in the Strasbourg salle-\u00e0-manger arguing the question for half an hour, but the same night we had resumed our journey and were well on our way to Geneva.\n\nFor a charming week we wandered up the valley of the Rhone, and then, branching off at Leuk, we made our way over the Gemini Pass, still deep in snow, and so, by way of Interlaken, to Meiringen. It was a lovely trip, the dainty green of the spring below, the virgin white of the winter above; but it was clear to me that never for one instant did Holmes forget the shadow which lay across him. In the homely Alpine villages or in the lonely mountain passes, I could still tell by his quick glancing eyes and his sharp scrutiny of every face that passed us, that he was well convinced that, walk where we would, we could not walk ourselves clear of the danger which was dogging our footsteps.\n\nOnce, I remember, as we passed over the Gemini, and walked along the border of the melancholy Daubensee, a large rock which had been dislodged from the ridge upon our right clattered down and roared into the lake behind us. In an instant Holmes had raced up on to the ridge, and, standing upon a lofty pinnacle, craned his neck in every direction. It was in vain that our guide assured him that a fall of stones was a common chance in the springtime at that spot. He said nothing, but he smiled at me with the air of a man who sees the fulfilment of that which he had expected.\n\nAnd yet for all his watchfulness he was never depressed. On the contrary, I can never recollect having seen him in such exuberant spirits. Again and again he recurred to the fact that if he could be assured that society was freed from Professor Moriarty he would cheerfully bring his own career to a conclusion.\n\n\"I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived wholly in vain,\" he remarked. \"If my record were closed to-night I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence. In over a thousand cases I am not aware that I have ever used my powers upon the wrong side. Of late I have been tempted to look into the problems furnished by nature rather than those more superficial ones for which our artificial state of society is responsible. Your memoirs will draw to an end, Watson, upon the day that I crown my career by the capture or extinction of the most dangerous and capable criminal in Europe.\"\n\nI shall be brief, and yet exact, in the little which remains for me to tell. It is not a subject on which I would willingly dwell, and yet I am conscious that a duty devolves upon me to omit no detail.\n\nIt was on the third of May that we reached the little village of Meiringen, where we put up at the Englischer Hof, then kept by Peter Steiler the elder. Our landlord was an intelligent man and spoke excellent English, having served for three years as waiter at the Grosvenor Hotel in London. At his advice, on the afternoon of the fourth we set off together, with the intention of crossing the hills and spending the night at the hamlet of Rosenlaui. We had strict injunctions, however, on no account to pass the falls of Reichenbach, which are about halfway up the hills, without making a small detour to see them.\n\nIt is, indeed, a fearful place. The torrent, swollen by the melting snow, plunges into a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house. The shaft into which the river hurls itself is an immense chasm, lined by glistening coal-black rock, and narrowing into a creaming, boiling pit of incalculable depth, which brims over and shoots the stream onward over its jagged lip. The long sweep of green water roaring forever down, and the thick flickering curtain of spray hissing forever upward, turn a man giddy with their constant whirl and clamour. We stood near the edge peering down at the gleam of the breaking water far below us against the black rocks, and listening to the half-human shout which came booming up with the spray out of the abyss.\n\nThe path has been cut halfway round the fall to afford a complete view, but it ends abruptly, and the traveller has to return as he came. We had turned to do so, when we saw a Swiss lad come running along it with a letter in his hand. It bore the mark of the hotel which we had just left and was addressed to me by the landlord. It appeared that within a very few minutes of our leaving, an English lady had arrived who was in the last stage of consumption. She had wintered at Davos Platz and was journeying now to join her friends at Lucerne, when a sudden hemorrhage had overtaken her. It was thought that she could hardly live a few hours, but it would be a great consolation to her to see an English doctor, and, if I would only return, etc. The good Steiler assured me in a postscript that he would himself look upon my compliance as a very great favour, since the lady absolutely refused to see a Swiss physician, and he could not but feel that he was incurring a great responsibility.\n\nThe appeal was one which could not be ignored. It was impossible to refuse the request of a fellow-countrywoman dying in a strange land. Yet I had my scruples about leaving Holmes. It was finally agreed, however, that he should retain the young Swiss messenger with him as guide and companion while I returned to Meiringen. My friend would stay some little time at the fall, he said, and would then walk slowly over the hill to Rosenlaui, where I was to rejoin him in the evening. As I turned away I saw Holmes, with his back against a rock and his arms folded, gazing down at the rush of the waters. It was the last that I was ever destined to see of him in this world.\n\nWhen I was near the bottom of the descent I looked back. It was impossible, from that position, to see the fall, but I could see the curving path which winds over the shoulder of the hills and leads to it. Along this a man was, I remember, walking very rapidly.\n\nI could see his black figure clearly outlined against the green behind him. I noted him, and the energy with which he walked, but he passed from my mind again as I hurried on upon my errand.\n\nIt may have been a little over an hour before I reached Meiringen. Old Steiler was standing at the porch of his hotel.\n\n\"Well,\" said I, as I came hurrying up. \"I trust that she is no worse?\"\n\nA look of surprise passed over his face, and at the first quiver of his eyebrows my heart turned to lead in my breast.\n\n\"You did not write this?\" I said, pulling the letter from my pocket. \"There is no sick Englishwoman in the hotel?\"\n\n\"Certainly not!\" he cried. \"But it has the hotel mark upon it! Ha, it must have been written by that tall Englishman who came in after you had gone. He said\u2014\"\n\nBut I waited for none of the landlord's explanation. In a tingle of fear I was already running down the village street, and making for the path which I had so lately descended. It had taken me an hour to come down. For all my efforts two more had passed before I found myself at the fall of Reichenbach once more. There was Holmes's Alpine-stock still leaning against the rock by which I had left him. But there was no sign of him, and it was in vain that I shouted. My only answer was my own voice reverberating in a rolling echo from the cliffs around me.\n\nIt was the sight of that Alpine-stock which turned me cold and sick. He had not gone to Rosenlaui, then. He had remained on that three-foot path, with sheer wall on one side and sheer drop on the other, until his enemy had overtaken him. The young Swiss had gone too. He had probably been in the pay of Moriarty and had left the two men together. And then what had happened? Who was to tell us what had happened then?\n\nI stood for a minute or two to collect myself, for I was dazed with the horror of the thing. Then I began to think of Holmes's own methods and to try to practise them in reading this tragedy. It was, alas, only too easy to do. During our conversation we had not gone to the end of the path, and the Alpine-stock marked the place where we had stood. The blackish soil is kept forever soft by the incessant drift of spray, and a bird would leave its tread upon it. Two lines of footmarks were clearly marked along the farther end of the path, both leading away from me. There were none returning. A few yards from the end the soil was all ploughed up into a patch of mud, and the brambles and ferns which fringed the chasm were torn and bedraggled. I lay upon my face and peered over with the spray spouting up all around me. It had darkened since I left, and now I could only see here and there the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far away down at the end of the shaft the gleam of the broken water. I shouted; but only that same half-human cry of the fall was borne back to my ears.\n\nBut it was destined that I should, after all, have a last word of greeting from my friend and comrade. I have said that his Alpine-stock had been left leaning against a rock which jutted on to the path. From the top of this boulder the gleam of something bright caught my eye, and raising my hand I found that it came from the silver cigarette-case which he used to carry. As I took it up a small square of paper upon which it had lain fluttered down on to the ground. Unfolding it, I found that it consisted of three pages torn from his notebook and addressed to me. It was characteristic of the man that the direction was as precise, and the writing as firm and clear, as though it had been written in his study.\n\n\u2002MY DEAR WATSON [it said]:\n\n\u2002I write these few lines through the courtesy of Mr. Moriarty, who awaits my convenience for the final discussion of those questions which lie between us. He has been giving me a sketch of the methods by which he avoided the English police and kept himself informed of our movements. They certainly confirm the very high opinion which I had formed of his abilities. I am pleased to think that I shall be able to free society from any further effects of his presence, though I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you. I have already explained to you, however, that my career had in any case reached its crisis, and that no possible conclusion to it could be more congenial to me than this. Indeed, if I may make a full confession to you, I was quite convinced that the letter from Meiringen was a hoax, and I allowed you to depart on that errand under the persuasion that some development of this sort would follow. Tell Inspector Patterson that the papers which he needs to convict the gang are in pigeonhole M., done up in a blue envelope and inscribed \"Moriarty.\" I made every disposition of my property before leaving England and handed it to my brother Mycroft. Pray give my greetings to Mrs. Watson, and believe me to be, my dear fellow,\n\n\u2002Very sincerely yours,\n\n\u2002SHERLOCK HOLMES.\n\nA few words may suffice to tell the little that remains. An examination by experts leaves little doubt that a personal contest between the two men ended, as it could hardly fail to end in such a situation, in their reeling over, locked in each other's arms. Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful cauldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation. The Swiss youth was never found again, and there can be no doubt that he was one of the numerous agents whom Moriarty kept in his employ. As to the gang, it will be within the memory of the public how completely the evidence which Holmes had accumulated exposed their organization, and how heavily the hand of the dead man weighed upon them. Of their terrible chief few details came out during the proceedings, and if I have now been compelled to make a clear statement of his career, it is due to those injudicious champions who have endeavoured to clear his memory by attacks upon him whom I shall ever regard as the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES ]\n\n[ Mr. Sherlock Holmes ]\n\nMr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a \"Penang lawyer.\" Just under the head was a broad silver band, nearly an inch across. \"To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.,\" was engraved upon it, with the date \"1884.\" It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry\u2014dignified, solid, and reassuring.\n\n\"Well, Watson, what do you make of it?\"\n\nHolmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.\n\n\"How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.\"\n\n\"I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,\" said he. \"But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor's stick? Since we have been so unfortunate as to miss him and have no notion of his errand, this accidental souvenir becomes of importance. Let me hear you reconstruct the man by an examination of it.\"\n\n\"I think,\" said I, following as far as I could the methods of my companion, \"that Dr. Mortimer is a successful, elderly medical man, well-esteemed, since those who know him give him this mark of their appreciation.\"\n\n\"Good!\" said Holmes. \"Excellent!\"\n\n\"I think also that the probability is in favour of his being a country practitioner who does a great deal of his visiting on foot.\"\n\n\"Why so?\"\n\n\"Because this stick, though originally a very handsome one, has been so knocked about that I can hardly imagine a town practitioner carrying it. The thick iron ferrule is worn down, so it is evident that he has done a great amount of walking with it.\"\n\n\"Perfectly sound!\" said Holmes.\n\n\"And then again, there is the 'friends of the C.C.H.' I should guess that to be the Something Hunt, the local hunt to whose members he has possiblygiven some surgical assistance, and which has made him a small presentation in return.\"\n\n\"Really, Watson, you excel yourself,\" said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. \"I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt.\"\n\nHe had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and, carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.\n\n\"Interesting, though elementary,\" said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. \"There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions.\"\n\n\"Has anything escaped me?\" I asked with some self-importance. \"I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?\"\n\n\"I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal.\"\n\n\"Then I was right.\"\n\n\"To that extent.\"\n\n\"But that was all.\"\n\n\"No, no, my dear Watson, not all\u2014by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the initials 'C.C.' are placed before that hospital the words 'Charing Cross' very naturally suggest themselves.\"\n\n\"You may be right.\"\n\n\"The probability lies in that direction. And if we take this as a working hypothesis we have a fresh basis from which to start our construction of this unknown visitor.\"\n\n\"Well, then, supposing that 'C.C.H.' does stand for 'Charing Cross Hospital,' what further inferences may we draw?\"\n\n\"Do none suggest themselves? You know my methods. Apply them!\"\n\n\"I can only think of the obvious conclusion that the man has practiced in town before going to the country.\"\n\n\"I think that we might venture a little farther than this. Look at it in this light. On what occasion would it be most probable that such a presentation would be made? When would his friends unite to give him a pledge of their good will? Obviously at the moment when Dr. Mortimer withdrew from the service of the hospital in order to start in practice for himself. We know there has been a presentation. We believe there has been a change from a town hospital to a country practice. Is it, then, stretching our inference too far to say that the presentation was on the occasion of the change?\"\n\n\"It certainly seems probable.\"\n\n\"Now, you will observe that he could not have been on the staff of the hospital, since only a man well-established in a London practice could hold such a position, and such a one would not drift into the country. What was he, then? If he was in the hospital and yet not on the staff he could only have been a house-surgeon or a house-physician\u2014little more than a senior student. And he left five years ago\u2014the date is on the stick. So your grave, middle-aged family practitioner vanishes into thin air, my dear Watson, and there emerges a young fellow under thirty, amiable, unambitious, absent-minded, and the possessor of a favourite dog, which I should describe roughly as being larger than a terrier and smaller than a mastiff.\"\n\nI laughed incredulously as Sherlock Holmes leaned back in his settee and blew little wavering rings of smoke up to the ceiling.\n\n\"As to the latter part, I have no means of checking you,\" said I, \"but at least it is not difficult to find out a few particulars about the man's age and professional career.\" From my small medical shelf I took down the Medical Directory and turned up the name. There were several Mortimers, but only one who could be our visitor. I read his record aloud.\n\n\"Mortimer, James, M.R.C.S., 1882, Grimpen, Dartmoor, Devon. House-surgeon, from 1882 to 1884, at Charing Cross Hospital. Winner of the Jackson prize for Comparative Pathology, with essay entitled 'Is Disease a Reversion?' Corresponding member of the Swedish Pathological Society. Author of 'Some Freaks of Atavism' (Lancet 1882). 'Do We Progress?' (Journal of Psychology, March, 1883). Medical Officer for the parishes of Grimpen, Thorsley, and High Barrow.\"\n\n\"No mention of that local hunt, Watson,\" said Holmes with a mischievous smile, \"but a country doctor, as you very astutely observed. I think that I am fairly justified in my inferences. As to the adjectives, I said, if I remember right, amiable, unambitious, and absent-minded. It is my experience that it is only an amiable man in this world who receives testimonials, only an unambitious one who abandons a London career for the country, and only an absent-minded one who leaves his stick and not his visiting-card after waiting an hour in your room.\"\n\n\"And the dog?\"\n\n\"Has been in the habit of carrying this stick behind his master. Being a heavy stick the dog has held it tightly by the middle, and the marks of his teeth are very plainly visible. The dog's jaw, as shown in the space between these marks, is too broad in my opinion for a terrier and not broad enough for a mastiff. It may have been\u2014yes, by Jove, it is a curly-haired spaniel.\"\n\nHe had risen and paced the room as he spoke. Now he halted in the recess of the window. There was such a ring of conviction in his voice that I glanced up in surprise.\n\n\"My dear fellow, how can you possibly be so sure of that?\"\n\n\"For the very simple reason that I see the dog himself on our very door-step, and there is the ring of its owner. Don't move, I beg you, Watson. He is a professional brother of yours, and your presence may be of assistance to me. Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill. What does Dr. James Mortimer, the man of science, ask of Sherlock Holmes, the specialist in crime? Come in!\"\n\nThe appearance of our visitor was a surprise to me, since I had expected a typical country practitioner. He was a very tall, thin man, with a long nose like a beak, which jutted out between two keen, gray eyes, set closely together and sparkling brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was clad in a professional but rather slovenly fashion, for his frock-coat was dingy and his trousers frayed. Though young, his long back was already bowed, and he walked with a forward thrust of his head and a general air of peering benevolence. As he entered his eyes fell upon the stick in Holmes's hand, and he ran towards it with an exclamation of joy. \"I am so very glad,\" said he. \"I was not sure whether I had left it here or in the Shipping Office. I would not lose that stick for the world.\"\n\n\"A presentation, I see,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"From Charing Cross Hospital?\"\n\n\"From one or two friends there on the occasion of my marriage.\"\n\n\"Dear, dear, that's bad!\" said Holmes, shaking his head.\n\nDr. Mortimer blinked through his glasses in mild astonishment.\n\n\"Why was it bad?\"\n\n\"Only that you have disarranged our little deductions. Your marriage, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I married, and so left the hospital, and with it all hopes of a consulting practice. It was necessary to make a home of my own.\"\n\n\"Come, come, we are not so far wrong, after all,\" said Holmes. \"And now, Dr. James Mortimer\u2014\"\n\n\"Mister, sir, Mister\u2014a humble M.R.C.S.\"\n\n\"And a man of precise mind, evidently.\"\n\n\"A dabbler in science, Mr. Holmes, a picker up of shells on the shores of the great unknown ocean. I presume that it is Mr. Sherlock Holmes whom I am addressing and not\u2014\"\n\n\"No, this is my friend Dr. Watson.\"\n\n\"Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes waved our strange visitor into a chair. \"You are an enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive, sir, as I am in mine,\" said he. \"I observe from your forefinger that you make your own cigarettes. Have no hesitation in lighting one.\"\n\nThe man drew out paper and tobacco and twirled the one up in the other with surprising dexterity. He had long, quivering fingers as agile and restless as the antennae of an insect.\n\nHolmes was silent, but his little darting glances showed me the interest which he took in our curious companion.\n\n\"I presume, sir,\" said he at last, \"that it was not merely for the purpose of examining my skull that you have done me the honour to call here last night and again to-day?\"\n\n\"No, sir, no; though I am happy to have had the opportunity of doing that as well. I came to you, Mr. Holmes, because I recognized that I am myself an unpractical man and because I am suddenly confronted with a most serious and extraordinary problem. Recognizing, as I do, that you are the second highest expert in Europe\u2014\"\n\n\"Indeed, sir! May I inquire who has the honour to be the first?\" asked Holmes with some asperity.\n\n\"To the man of precisely scientific mind the work of Monsieur Bertillon must always appeal strongly.\"\n\n\"Then had you not better consult him?\"\n\n\"I said, sir, to the precisely scientific mind. But as a practical man of affairs it is acknowledged that you stand alone. I trust, sir, that I have not inadvertently\u2014\"\n\n\"Just a little,\" said Holmes. \"I think, Dr. Mortimer, you would do wisely if without more ado you would kindly tell me plainly what the exact nature of the problem is in which you demand my assistance.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Curse of the Baskervilles", + "text": "\"I have in my pocket a manuscript,\" said Dr. James Mortimer.\n\n\"I observed it as you entered the room,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"It is an old manuscript.\"\n\n\"Early eighteenth century, unless it is a forgery.\"\n\n\"How can you say that, sir?\"\n\n\"You have presented an inch or two of it to my examination all the time that you have been talking. It would be a poor expert who could not give the date of a document within a decade or so. You may possibly have read my little monograph upon the subject. I put that at 1730.\"\n\n\"The exact date is 1742.\" Dr. Mortimer drew it from his breast-pocket. \"This family paper was committed to my care by Sir Charles Baskerville, whose sudden and tragic death some three months ago created so much excitement in Devonshire. I may say that I was his personal friend as well as his medical attendant. He was a strong-minded man, sir, shrewd, practical, and as unimaginative as I am myself. Yet he took this document very seriously, and his mind was prepared for just such an end as did eventually overtake him.\"\n\nHolmes stretched out his hand for the manuscript and flattened it upon his knee.\n\n\"You will observe, Watson, the alternative use of the long s and the short. It is one of several indications which enabled me to fix the date.\"\n\nI looked over his shoulder at the yellow paper and the faded script. At the head was written: \"Baskerville Hall,\" and below, in large, scrawling figures: \"1742.\"\n\n\"It appears to be a statement of some sort.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is a statement of a certain legend which runs in the Baskerville family.\"\n\n\"But I understand that it is something more modern and practical upon which you wish to consult me?\"\n\n\"Most modern. A most practical, pressing matter, which must be decided within twenty-four hours. But the manuscript is short and is intimately connected with the affair. With your permission I will read it to you.\"\n\nHolmes leaned back in his chair, placed his finger-tips together, and closed his eyes, with an air of resignation. Dr. Mortimer turned the manuscript to the light and read in a high, cracking voice the following curious, old-world narrative:\n\n\"Of the origin of the Hound of the Baskervilles there have been many statements, yet as I come in a direct line from Hugo Baskerville, and as I had the story from my father, who also had it from his, I have set it down with all belief that it occurred even as is here set forth. And I would have you believe, my sons, that the same Justice which punishes sin may also most graciously forgive it, and that no ban is so heavy but that by prayer and repentance it may be removed. Learn then from this story not to fear the fruits of the past, but rather to be circumspect in the future, that those foul passions whereby our family has suffered so grievously may not again be loosed to our undoing.\n\n\"Know then that in the time of the Great Rebellion (the history of which by the learned Lord Clarendon I most earnestly commend to your attention) this Manor of Baskerville was held by Hugo of that name, nor can it be gainsaid that he was a most wild, profane, and godless man. This, in truth, his neighbours might have pardoned, seeing that saints have never flourished in those parts, but there was in him a certain wanton and cruel humour which made his name a by-word through the West. It chanced that this Hugo came to love (if, indeed, so dark a passion may be known under so bright a name) the daughter of a yeoman who held lands near the Baskerville estate. But the young maiden, being discreet and of good repute, would ever avoid him, for she feared his evil name. So it came to pass that one Michaelmas this Hugo, with five or six of his idle and wicked companions, stole down upon the farm and carried off the maiden, her father and brothers being from home, as he well knew. When they had brought her to the Hall the maiden was placed in an upper chamber, while Hugo and his friends sat down to a long carouse, as was their nightly custom. Now, the poor lass upstairs was like to have her wits turned at the singing and shouting and terrible oaths which came up to her from below, for they say that the words used by Hugo Baskerville, when he was in wine, were such as might blast the man who said them. At last in the stress of her fear she did that which might have daunted the bravest or most active man, for by the aid of the growth of ivy which covered (and still covers) the south wall she came down from under the eaves, and so homeward across the moor, there being three leagues betwixt the Hall and her father's farm.\n\n\"It chanced that some little time later Hugo left his guests to carry food and drink\u2014with other worse things, perchance\u2014to his captive, and so found the cage empty and the bird escaped. Then, as it would seem, he became as one that hath a devil, for, rushing down the stairs into the dining-hall, he sprang upon the great table, flagons and trenchers flying before him, and he cried aloud before all the company that he would that very night render his body and soul to the Powers of Evil if he might but overtake the wench. And while the revellers stood aghast at the fury of the man, one more wicked or, it may be, more drunken than the rest, cried out that they should put the hounds upon her. Whereat Hugo ran from the house, crying to his grooms that they should saddle his mare and unkennel the pack, and giving the hounds a kerchief of the maid's, he swung them to the line, and so off full cry in the moonlight over the moor.\n\n\"Now, for some space the revellers stood agape, unable to understand all that had been done in such haste. But anon their bemused wits awoke to the nature of the deed which was like to be done upon the moorlands. Everything was now in an uproar, some calling for their pistols, some for their horses, and some for another flask of wine. But at length some sense came back to their crazed minds, and the whole of them, thirteen in number, took horse and started in pursuit. The moon shone clear above them, and they rode swiftly abreast, taking that course which the maid must needs have taken if she were to reach her own home.\n\n\"They had gone a mile or two when they passed one of the night shepherds upon the moorlands, and they cried to him to know if he had seen the hunt. And the man, as the story goes, was so crazed with fear that he could scarce speak, but at last he said that he had indeed seen the unhappy maiden, with the hounds upon her track. 'But I have seen more than that,' said he, 'for Hugo Baskerville passed me upon his black mare, and there ran mute behind him such a hound of hell as God forbid should ever be at my heels.' So the drunken squires cursed the shepherd and rode onward. But soon their skins turned cold, for there came a galloping across the moor, and the black mare, dabbled with white froth, went past with trailing bridle and empty saddle. Then the revellers rode close together, for a great fear was on them, but they still followed over the moor, though each, had he been alone, would have been right glad to have turned his horse's head. Riding slowly in this fashion they came at last upon the hounds. These, though known for their valour and their breed, were whimpering in a cluster at the head of a deep dip or goyal, as we call it, upon the moor, some slinking away and some, with starting hackles and staring eyes, gazing down the narrow valley before them.\n\n\"The company had come to a halt, more sober men, as you may guess, than when they started. The most of them would by no means advance, but three of them, the boldest, or it may be the most drunken, rode forward down the goyal. Now, it opened into a broad space in which stood two of those great stones, still to be seen there, which were set by certain forgotten peoples in the days of old. The moon was shining bright upon the clearing, and there in the centre lay the unhappy maid where she had fallen, dead of fear and of fatigue. But it was not the sight of her body, nor yet was it that of the body of Hugo Baskerville lying near her, which raised the hair upon the heads of these three dare-devil roysterers, but it was that, standing over Hugo, and plucking at his throat, there stood a foul thing, a great, black-beast, shaped like a hound, yet larger than any hound that ever mortal eye has rested upon. And even as they looked the thing tore the throat out of Hugo Baskerville, on which, as it turned its blazing eyes and dripping jaws upon them, the three shrieked with fear and rode for dear life, still screaming, across the moor. One, it is said, died that very night of what he had seen, and the other twain were but broken men for the rest of their days.\n\n\"Such is the tale, my sons, of the coming of the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever since. If I have set it down it is because that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed. Nor can it be denied that many of the family have been unhappy in their deaths, which have been sudden, bloody, and mysterious. Yet may we shelter ourselves in the infinite goodness of Providence, which would not forever punish the innocent beyond that third or fourth generation which is threatened in Holy Writ. To that Providence, my sons, I hereby commend you, and I counsel you by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted.\n\n\"[This from Hugo Baskerville to his sons Rodger and John, with instructions that they say nothing thereof to their sister Elizabeth.]\"\n\nWhen Dr. Mortimer had finished reading this singular narrative he pushed his spectacles up on his forehead and stared across at Mr. Sherlock Holmes. The latter yawned and tossed the end of his cigarette into the fire.\n\n\"Well?\" said he.\n\n\"Do you not find it interesting?\"\n\n\"To a collector of fairy tales.\"\n\nDr. Mortimer drew a folded newspaper out of his pocket.\n\n\"Now, Mr. Holmes, we will give you something a little more recent. This is the Devon County Chronicle of May 14th of this year. It is a short account of the facts elicited at the death of Sir Charles Baskerville which occurred a few days before that date.\"\n\nMy friend leaned a little forward and his expression became intent. Our visitor readjusted his glasses and began:\n\n\"The recent sudden death of Sir Charles Baskerville, whose name has been mentioned as the probable Liberal candidate for Mid-Devon at the next election, has cast a gloom over the county. Though Sir Charles had resided at Baskerville Hall for a comparatively short period his amiability of character and extreme generosity had won the affection and respect of all who had been brought into contact with him. In these days of nouveaux riches it is refreshing to find a case where the scion of an old county family which has fallen upon evil days is able to make his own fortune and to bring it back with him to restore the fallen grandeur of his line. Sir Charles, as is well known, made large sums of money in South African speculation. More wise than those who go on until the wheel turns against them, he realized his gains and returned to England with them. It is only two years since he took up his residence at Baskerville Hall, and it is common talk how large were those schemes of reconstruction and improvement which have been interrupted by his death. Being himself childless, it was his openly expressed desire that the whole countryside should, within his own lifetime, profit by his good fortune, and many will have personal reasons for bewailing his untimely end. His generous donations to local and county charities have been frequently chronicled in these columns.\n\n\"The circumstances connected with the death of Sir Charles cannot be said to have been entirely cleared up by the inquest, but at least enough has been done to dispose of those rumours to which local superstition has given rise. There is no reason whatever to suspect foul play, or to imagine that death could be from any but natural causes. Sir Charles was a widower, and a man who may be said to have been in some ways of an eccentric habit of mind. In spite of his considerable wealth he was simple in his personal tastes, and his indoor servants at Baskerville Hall consisted of a married couple named Barrymore, the husband acting as butler and the wife as housekeeper. Their evidence, corroborated by that of several friends, tends to show that Sir Charles's health has for some time been impaired, and points especially to some affection of the heart, manifesting itself in changes of colour, breathlessness, and acute attacks of nervous depression. Dr. James Mortimer, the friend and medical attendant of the deceased, has given evidence to the same effect.\n\n\"The facts of the case are simple. Sir Charles Baskerville was in the habit every night before going to bed of walking down the famous yew alley of Baskerville Hall. The evidence of the Barrymores shows that this had been his custom. On the fourth of May Sir Charles had declared his intention of starting next day for London, and had ordered Barrymore to prepare his luggage. That night he went out as usual for his nocturnal walk, in the course of which he was in the habit of smoking a cigar. He never returned. At twelve o'clock Barrymore, finding the hall door still open, became alarmed, and, lighting a lantern, went in search of his master. The day had been wet, and Sir Charles's foot-marks were easily traced down the alley. Halfway down this walk there is a gate which leads out on to the moor. There were indications that Sir Charles had stood for some little time here. He then proceeded down the alley, and it was at the far end of it that his body was discovered. One fact which has not been explained is the statement of Barrymore that his master's footprints altered their character from the time that he passed the moor-gate, and that he appeared from thence onward to have been walking upon his toes. One Murphy, a gipsy horse-dealer, was on the moor at no great distance at the time, but he appears by his own confession to have been the worse for drink. He declares that he heard cries but is unable to state from what direction they came. No signs of violence were to be discovered upon Sir Charles's person, and though the doctor's evidence pointed to an almost incredible facial distortion\u2014so great that Dr. Mortimer refused at first to believe that it was indeed his friend and patient who lay before him\u2014it was explained that that is a symptom which is not unusual in cases of dyspn\u0153a and death from cardiac exhaustion. This explanation was borne out by the post-mortem examination, which showed long-standing organic disease, and the coroner's jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence. It is well that this is so, for it is obviously of the utmost importance that Sir Charles's heir should settle at the Hall and continue the good work which has been so sadly interrupted. Had the prosaic finding of the coroner not finally put an end to the romantic stories which have been whispered in connection with the affair, it might have been difficult to find a tenant for Baskerville Hall. It is understood that the next of kin is Mr. Henry Baskerville, if he be still alive, the son of Sir Charles Baskerville's younger brother. The young man when last heard of was in America, and inquiries are being instituted with a view to informing him of his good fortune.\"\n\nDr. Mortimer refolded his paper and replaced it in his pocket.\n\n\"Those are the public facts, Mr. Holmes, in connection with the death of Sir Charles Baskerville.\"\n\n\"I must thank you,\" said Sherlock Holmes, \"for calling my attention to a case which certainly presents some features of interest. I had observed some newspaper comment at the time, but I was exceedingly preoccupied by that little affair of the Vatican cameos, and in my anxiety to oblige the Pope I lost touch with several interesting English cases. This article, you say, contains all the public facts?\"\n\n\"It does.\"\n\n\"Then let me have the private ones.\" He leaned back, put his finger-tips together, and assumed his most impassive and judicial expression.\n\n\"In doing so,\" said Dr. Mortimer, who had begun to show signs of some strong emotion, \"I am telling that which I have not confided to anyone. My motive for withholding it from the coroner's inquiry is that a man of science shrinks from placing himself in the public position of seeming to indorse a popular superstition. I had the further motive that Baskerville Hall, as the paper says, would certainly remain untenanted if anything were done to increase its already rather grim reputation. For both these reasons I thought that I was justified in telling rather less than I knew, since no practical good could result from it, but with you there is no reason why I should not be perfectly frank.\n\n\"The moor is very sparsely inhabited, and those who live near each other are thrown very much together. For this reason I saw a good deal of Sir Charles Baskerville. With the exception of Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, and Mr. Stapleton, the naturalist, there are no other men of education within many miles. Sir Charles was a retiring man, but the chance of his illness brought us together, and a community of interests in science kept us so. He had brought back much scientific information from South Africa, and many a charming evening we have spent together discussing the comparative anatomy of the Bushman and the Hottentot.\n\n\"Within the last few months it became increasingly plain to me that Sir Charles's nervous system was strained to the breaking point. He had taken this legend which I have read you exceedingly to heart\u2014so much so that, although he would walk in his own grounds, nothing would induce him to go out upon the moor at night. Incredible as it may appear to you, Mr. Holmes, he was honestly convinced that a dreadful fate overhung his family, and certainly the records which he was able to give of his ancestors were not encouraging. The idea of some ghastly presence constantly haunted him, and on more than one occasion he has asked me whether I had on my medical journeys at night ever seen any strange creature or heard the baying of a hound. The latter question he put to me several times, and always with a voice which vibrated with excitement.\n\n\"I can well remember driving up to his house in the evening, some three weeks before the fatal event. He chanced to be at his hall door. I had descended from my gig and was standing in front of him, when I saw his eyes fix themselves over my shoulder and stare past me with an expression of the most dreadful horror. I whisked round and had just time to catch a glimpse of something which I took to be a large black calf passing at the head of the drive. So excited and alarmed was he that I was compelled to go down to the spot where the animal had been and look around for it. It was gone, however, and the incident appeared to make the worst impression upon his mind. I stayed with him all the evening, and it was on that occasion, to explain the emotion which he had shown, that he confided to my keeping that narrative which I read to you when first I came. I mention this small episode because it assumes some importance in view of the tragedy which followed, but I was convinced at the time that the matter was entirely trivial and that his excitement had no justification.\n\n\"It was at my advice that Sir Charles was about to go to London. His heart was, I knew, affected, and the constant anxiety in which he lived, however chimerical the cause of it might be, was evidently having a serious effect upon his health. I thought that a few months among the distractions of town would send him back a new man. Mr. Stapleton, a mutual friend who was much concerned at his state of health, was of the same opinion. At the last instant came this terrible catastrophe.\n\n\"On the night of Sir Charles's death Barrymore the butler, who made the discovery, sent Perkins the groom on horseback to me, and as I was sitting up late I was able to reach Baskerville Hall within an hour of the event. I checked and corroborated all the facts which were mentioned at the inquest. I followed the footsteps down the yew alley, I saw the spot at the moor-gate where he seemed to have waited, I remarked the change in the shape of the prints after that point, I noted that there were no other footsteps save those of Barrymore on the soft gravel, and finally I carefully examined the body, which had not been touched until my arrival. Sir Charles lay on his face, his arms out, his fingers dug into the ground, and his features convulsed with some strong emotion to such an extent that I could hardly have sworn to his identity. There was certainly no physical injury of any kind. But one false statement was made by Barrymore at the inquest. He said that there were no traces upon the ground round the body. He did not observe any. But I did\u2014some little distance off, but fresh and clear.\"\n\n\"Footprints?\"\n\n\"Footprints.\"\n\n\"A man's or a woman's?\"\n\nDr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Problem", + "text": "I confess that at these words a shudder passed through me. There was a thrill in the doctor's voice which showed that he was himself deeply moved by that which he told us. Holmes leaned forward in his excitement and his eyes had the hard, dry glitter which shot from them when he was keenly interested.\n\n\"You saw this?\"\n\n\"As clearly as I see you.\"\n\n\"And you said nothing?\"\n\n\"What was the use?\"\n\n\"How was it that no one else saw it?\"\n\n\"The marks were some twenty yards from the body and no one gave them a thought. I don't suppose I should have done so had I not known this legend.\"\n\n\"There are many sheep-dogs on the moor?\"\n\n\"No doubt, but this was no sheep-dog.\"\n\n\"You say it was large?\"\n\n\"Enormous.\"\n\n\"But it had not approached the body?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What sort of night was it?\"\n\n\"Damp and raw.\"\n\n\"But not actually raining?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What is the alley like?\"\n\n\"There are two lines of old yew hedge, twelve feet high and impenetrable. The walk in the centre is about eight feet across.\"\n\n\"Is there anything between the hedges and the walk?\"\n\n\"Yes, there is a strip of grass about six feet broad on either side.\"\n\n\"I understand that the yew hedge is penetrated at one point by a gate?\"\n\n\"Yes, the wicket-gate which leads on to the moor.\"\n\n\"Is there any other opening?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"So that to reach the yew alley one either has to come down it from the house or else to enter it by the moor-gate?\"\n\n\"There is an exit through a summer-house at the far end.\"\n\n\"Had Sir Charles reached this?\"\n\n\"No; he lay about fifty yards from it.\"\n\n\"Now, tell me, Dr. Mortimer\u2014and this is important\u2014the marks which you saw were on the path and not on the grass?\"\n\n\"No marks could show on the grass.\"\n\n\"Were they on the same side of the path as the moor-gate?\"\n\n\"Yes; they were on the edge of the path on the same side as the moor-gate.\"\n\n\"You interest me exceedingly. Another point. Was the wicket-gate closed?\"\n\n\"Closed and padlocked.\"\n\n\"How high was it?\"\n\n\"About four feet high.\"\n\n\"Then anyone could have got over it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And what marks did you see by the wicket-gate?\"\n\n\"None in particular.\"\n\n\"Good heaven! Did no one examine?\"\n\n\"Yes, I examined, myself.\"\n\n\"And found nothing?\"\n\n\"It was all very confused. Sir Charles had evidently stood there for five or ten minutes.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Because the ash had twice dropped from his cigar.\"\n\n\"Excellent! This is a colleague, Watson, after our own heart. But the marks?\"\n\n\"He had left his own marks all over that small patch of gravel. I could discern no others.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes struck his hand against his knee with an impatient gesture.\n\n\"If I had only been there!\" he cried. \"It is evidently a case of extraordinary interest, and one which presented immense opportunities to the scientific expert. That gravel page upon which I might have read so much has been long ere this smudged by the rain and defaced by the clogs of curious peasants. Oh, Dr. Mortimer, Dr. Mortimer, to think that you should not have called me in! You have indeed much to answer for.\"\n\n\"I could not call you in, Mr. Holmes, without disclosing these facts to the world, and I have already given my reasons for not wishing to do so. Besides, besides\u2014\"\n\n\"Why do you hesitate?\"\n\n\"There is a realm in which the most acute and most experienced of detectives is helpless.\"\n\n\"You mean that the thing is supernatural?\"\n\n\"I did not positively say so.\"\n\n\"No, but you evidently think it.\"\n\n\"Since the tragedy, Mr. Holmes, there have come to my ears several incidents which are hard to reconcile with the settled order of Nature.\"\n\n\"For example?\"\n\n\"I find that before the terrible event occurred several people had seen a creature upon the moor which corresponds with this Baskerville demon, and which could not possibly be any animal known to science. They all agreed that it was a huge creature, luminous, ghastly, and spectral. I have cross-examined these men, one of them a hard-headed countryman, one a farrier, and one a moorland farmer, who all tell the same story of this dreadful apparition, exactly corresponding to the hell-hound of the legend. I assure you that there is a reign of terror in the district, and that it is a hardy man who will cross the moor at night.\"\n\n\"And you, a trained man of science, believe it to be supernatural?\"\n\n\"I do not know what to believe.\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"I have hitherto confined my investigations to this world,\" said he. \"In a modest way I have combated evil, but to take on the Father of Evil himself would, perhaps, be too ambitious a task. Yet you must admit that the footmark is material.\"\n\n\"The original hound was material enough to tug a man's throat out, and yet he was diabolical as well.\"\n\n\"I see that you have quite gone over to the supernaturalists. But now, Dr. Mortimer, tell me this. If you hold these views, why have you come to consult me at all? You tell me in the same breath that it is useless to investigate Sir Charles's death, and that you desire me to do it.\"\n\n\"I did not say that I desired you to do it.\"\n\n\"Then, how can I assist you?\"\n\n\"By advising me as to what I should do with Sir Henry Baskerville, who arrives at Waterloo Station\"\u2014Dr. Mortimer looked at his watch\u2014\"in exactly one hour and a quarter.\"\n\n\"He being the heir?\"\n\n\"Yes. On the death of Sir Charles we inquired for this young gentleman and found that he had been farming in Canada. From the accounts which have reached us he is an excellent fellow in every way. I speak now not as a medical man but as a trustee and executor of Sir Charles's will.\"\n\n\"There is no other claimant, I presume?\"\n\n\"None. The only other kinsman whom we have been able to trace was Rodger Baskerville, the youngest of three brothers of whom poor Sir Charles was the elder. The second brother, who died young, is the father of this lad Henry. The third, Rodger, was the black sheep of the family. He came of the old masterful Baskerville strain and was the very image, they tell me, of the family picture of old Hugo. He made England too hot to hold him, fled to Central America, and died there in 1876 of yellow fever. Henry is the last of the Baskervilles. In one hour and five minutes I meet him at Waterloo Station. I have had a wire that he arrived at Southampton this morning. Now, Mr. Holmes, what would you advise me to do with him?\"\n\n\"Why should he not go to the home of his fathers?\"\n\n\"It seems natural, does it not? And yet, consider that every Baskerville who goes there meets with an evil fate. I feel sure that if Sir Charles could have spoken with me before his death he would have warned me against bringing this, the last of the old race, and the heir to great wealth, to that deadly place. And yet it cannot be denied that the prosperity of the whole poor, bleak countryside depends upon his presence. All the good work which has been done by Sir Charles will crash to the ground if there is no tenant of the Hall. I fear lest I should be swayed too much by my own obvious interest in the matter, and that is why I bring the case before you and ask for your advice.\"\n\nHolmes considered for a little time.\n\n\"Put into plain words, the matter is this,\" said he. \"In your opinion there is a diabolical agency which makes Dartmoor an unsafe abode for a Baskerville\u2014that is your opinion?\"\n\n\"At least I might go the length of saying that there is some evidence that this may be so.\"\n\n\"Exactly. But surely, if your supernatural theory be correct, it could work the young man evil in London as easily as in Devonshire. A devil with merely local powers like a parish vestry would be too inconceivable a thing.\"\n\n\"You put the matter more flippantly, Mr. Holmes, than you would probably do if you were brought into personal contact with these things. Your advice, then, as I understand it, is that the young man will be as safe in Devonshire as in London. He comes in fifty minutes. What would you recommend?\"\n\n\"I recommend, sir, that you take a cab, call off your spaniel who is scratching at my front door, and proceed to Waterloo to meet Sir Henry Baskerville.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"And then you will say nothing to him at all until I have made up my mind about the matter.\"\n\n\"How long will it take you to make up your mind?\"\n\n\"Twenty-four hours. At ten o'clock to-morrow, Dr. Mortimer, I will be much obliged to you if you will call upon me here, and it will be of help to me in my plans for the future if you will bring Sir Henry Baskerville with you.\"\n\n\"I will do so, Mr. Holmes.\" He scribbled the appointment on his shirtcuff and hurried off in his strange, peering, absent-minded fashion. Holmes stopped him at the head of the stair.\n\n\"Only one more question, Dr. Mortimer. You say that before Sir Charles Baskerville's death several people saw this apparition upon the moor?\"\n\n\"Three people did.\"\n\n\"Did any see it after?\"\n\n\"I have not heard of any.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Good-morning.\"\n\nHolmes returned to his seat with that quiet look of inward satisfaction which meant that he had a congenial task before him.\n\n\"Going out, Watson?\"\n\n\"Unless I can help you.\"\n\n\"No, my dear fellow, it is at the hour of action that I turn to you for aid. But this is splendid, really unique from some points of view. When you pass Bradley's, would you ask him to send up a pound of the strongest shag tobacco? Thank you. It would be as well if you could make it convenient not to return before evening. Then I should be very glad to compare impressions as to this most interesting problem which has been submitted to us this morning.\"\n\nI knew that seclusion and solitude were very necessary for my friend in those hours of intense mental concentration during which he weighed every particle of evidence, constructed alternative theories, balanced one against the other, and made up his mind as to which points were essential and which immaterial. I therefore spent the day at my club and did not return to Baker Street until evening. It was nearly nine o'clock when I found myself in the sitting-room once more.\n\nMy first impression as I opened the door was that a fire had broken out, for the room was so filled with smoke that the light of the lamp upon the table was blurred by it. As I entered, however, my fears were set at rest, for it was the acrid fumes of strong coarse tobacco which took me by the throat and set me coughing. Through the haze I had a vague vision of Holmes in his dressing-gown coiled up in an armchair with his black clay pipe between his lips. Several rolls of paper lay around him.\n\n\"Caught cold, Watson?\" said he.\n\n\"No, it's this poisonous atmosphere.\"\n\n\"I suppose it is pretty thick, now that you mention it.\"\n\n\"Thick! It is intolerable.\"\n\n\"Open the window, then! You have been at your club all day, I perceive.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\"\n\n\"Am I right?\"\n\n\"Certainly, but how\u2014?\"\n\nHe laughed at my bewildered expression.\n\n\"There is a delightful freshness about you, Watson, which makes it a pleasure to exercise any small powers which I possess at your expense. A gentleman goes forth on a showery and miry day. He returns immaculate in the evening with the gloss still on his hat and his boots. He has been a fixture therefore all day. He is not a man with intimate friends. Where, then, could he have been? Is it not obvious?\"\n\n\"Well, it is rather obvious.\"\n\n\"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Where do you think that I have been?\"\n\n\"A fixture also.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, I have been to Devonshire.\"\n\n\"In spirit?\"\n\n\"Exactly. My body has remained in this armchair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you left I sent down to Stamford's for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor, and my spirit has hovered over it all day. I flatter myself that I could find my way about.\"\n\n\"A large-scale map, I presume?\"\n\n\"Very large.\" He unrolled one section and held it over his knee. \"Here you have the particular district which concerns us. That is Baskerville Hall in the middle.\"\n\n\"With a wood round it?\"\n\n\"Exactly. I fancy the yew alley, though not marked under that name, must stretch along this line, with the moor, as you perceive, upon the right of it. This small clump of buildings here is the hamlet of Grimpen, where our friend Dr. Mortimer has his headquarters. Within a radius of five miles there are, as you see, only a very few scattered dwellings. Here is Lafter Hall, which was mentioned in the narrative. There is a house indicated here which may be the residence of the naturalist\u2014Stapleton, if I remember right, was his name. Here are two moorland farm-houses, High Tor and Foulmire. Then fourteen miles away the great convict prison of Princetown. Between and around these scattered points extends the desolate, lifeless moor. This, then, is the stage upon which tragedy has been played, and upon which we may help to play it again.\"\n\n\"It must be a wild place.\"\n\n\"Yes, the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did desire to have a hand in the affairs of men\u2014\"\n\n\"Then you are yourself inclining to the supernatural explanation.\"\n\n\"The devil's agents may be of flesh and blood, may they not? There are two questions waiting for us at the outset. The one is whether any crime has been committed at all; the second is, what is the crime and how was it committed? Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct, and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one. I think we'll shut that window again, if you don't mind. It is a singular thing, but I find that a concentrated atmosphere helps a concentration of thought. I have not pushed it to the length of getting into a box to think, but that is the logical outcome of my convictions. Have you turned the case over in your mind?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have thought a good deal of it in the course of the day.\"\n\n\"What do you make of it?\"\n\n\"It is very bewildering.\"\n\n\"It has certainly a character of its own. There are points of distinction about it. That change in the footprints, for example. What do you make of that?\"\n\n\"Mortimer said that the man had walked on tiptoe down that portion of the alley.\"\n\n\"He only repeated what some fool had said at the inquest. Why should a man walk on tiptoe down the alley?\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"He was running, Watson\u2014running desperately, running for his life, running until he burst his heart and fell dead upon his face.\"\n\n\"Running from what?\"\n\n\"There lies our problem. There are indications that the man was crazed with fear before ever he began to run.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\"\n\n\"I am presuming that the cause of his fears came to him across the moor. If that were so, and it seems most probable, only a man who had lost his wits would have run from the house instead of towards it. If the gipsy's evidence may be taken as true, he ran with cries for help in the direction where help was least likely to be. Then, again, whom was he waiting for that night, and why was he waiting for him in the yew alley rather than in his own house?\"\n\n\"You think that he was waiting for someone?\"\n\n\"The man was elderly and infirm. We can understand his taking an evening stroll, but the ground was damp and the night inclement. Is it natural that he should stand for five or ten minutes, as Dr. Mortimer, with more practical sense than I should have given him credit for, deduced from the cigar ash?\"\n\n\"But he went out every evening.\"\n\n\"I think it unlikely that he waited at the moor-gate every evening. On the contrary, the evidence is that he avoided the moor. That night he waited there. It was the night before he made his departure for London. The thing takes shape, Watson. It becomes coherent. Might I ask you to hand me my violin, and we will postpone all further thought upon this business until we have had the advantage of meeting Dr. Mortimer and Sir Henry Baskerville in the morning.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Sir Henry Baskerville", + "text": "Our breakfast table was cleared early, and Holmes waited in his dressing-gown for the promised interview. Our clients were punctual to their appointment, for the clock had just struck ten when Dr. Mortimer was shown up, followed by the young baronet. The latter was a small, alert, dark-eyed man about thirty years of age, very sturdily built, with thick black eyebrows and a strong, pugnacious face. He wore a ruddy-tinted tweed suit and had the weather-beaten appearance of one who has spent most of his time in the open air, and yet there was something in his steady eye and the quiet assurance of his bearing which indicated the gentleman.\n\n\"This is Sir Henry Baskerville,\" said Dr. Mortimer.\n\n\"Why, yes,\" said he, \"and the strange thing is, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, that if my friend here had not proposed coming round to you this morning I should have come on my own account. I understand that you think out little puzzles, and I've had one this morning which wants more thinking out than I am able to give it.\"\n\n\"Pray take a seat, Sir Henry. Do I understand you to say that you have yourself had some remarkable experience since you arrived in London?\"\n\n\"Nothing of much importance, Mr. Holmes. Only a joke, as like as not. It was this letter, if you can call it a letter, which reached me this morning.\"\n\nHe laid an envelope upon the table, and we all bent over it. It was of common quality, grayish in colour. The address, \"Sir Henry Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel,\" was printed in rough characters; the post-mark \"Charing Cross,\" and the date of posting the preceding evening.\n\n\"Who knew that you were going to the Northumberland Hotel?\" asked Holmes, glancing keenly across at our visitor.\n\n\"No one could have known. We only decided after I met Dr. Mortimer.\"\n\n\"But Dr. Mortimer was no doubt already stopping there?\"\n\n\"No, I had been staying with a friend,\" said the doctor. \"There was no possible indication that we intended to go to this hotel.\"\n\n\"Hum! Someone seems to be very deeply interested in your movements.\" Out of the envelope he took a half-sheet of foolscap paper folded into four. This he opened and spread flat upon the table. Across the middle of it a single sentence had been formed by the expedient of pasting printed words upon it. It ran:\n\nAs you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor.\n\nThe word \"moor\" only was printed in ink.\n\n\"Now,\" said Sir Henry Baskerville, \"perhaps you will tell me, Mr. Holmes, what in thunder is the meaning of that, and who it is that takes so much interest in my affairs?\"\n\n\"What do you make of it, Dr. Mortimer? You must allow that there is nothing supernatural about this, at any rate?\"\n\n\"No, sir, but it might very well come from someone who was convinced that the business is supernatural.\"\n\n\"What business?\" asked Sir Henry sharply. \"It seems to me that all you gentlemen know a great deal more than I do about my own affairs.\"\n\n\"You shall share our knowledge before you leave this room, Sir Henry. I promise you that,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"We will confine ourselves for the present with your permission to this very interesting document, which must have been put together and posted yesterday evening. Have you yesterday's Times, Watson?\"\n\n\"It is here in the corner.\"\n\n\"Might I trouble you for it\u2014the inside page, please, with the leading articles?\" He glanced swiftly over it, running his eyes up and down the columns. \"Capital article this on free trade. Permit me to give you an extract from it.\n\nYou may be cajoled into imagining that your own special trade or your own industry will be encouraged by a protective tariff, but it stands to reason that such legislation must in the long run keep away wealth from the country, diminish the value of our imports, and lower the general conditions of life in this island.\n\n\"What do you think of that, Watson?\" cried Holmes in high glee, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction. \"Don't you think that is an admirable sentiment?\"\n\nDr. Mortimer looked at Holmes with an air of professional interest, and Sir Henry Baskerville turned a pair of puzzled dark eyes upon me.\n\n\"I don't know much about the tariff and things of that kind,\" said he, \"but it seems to me we've got a bit off the trail so far as that note is concerned.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, I think we are particularly hot upon the trail, Sir Henry. Watson here knows more about my methods than you do, but I fear that even he has not quite grasped the significance of this sentence.\"\n\n\"No, I confess that I see no connection.\"\n\n\"And yet, my dear Watson, there is so very close a connection that the one is extracted out of the other. 'You,' 'your,' 'your,' 'life,' 'reason,' 'value,' 'keep away,' 'from the.' Don't you see now whence these words have been taken?\"\n\n\"By thunder, you're right! Well, if that isn't smart!\" cried Sir Henry.\n\n\"If any possible doubt remained it is settled by the fact that 'keep away' and 'from the' are cut out in one piece.\"\n\n\"Well, now\u2014so it is!\"\n\n\"Really, Mr. Holmes, this exceeds anything which I could have imagined,\" said Dr. Mortimer, gazing at my friend in amazement. \"I could understand anyone saying that the words were from a newspaper; but that you should name which, and add that it came from the leading article, is really one of the most remarkable things which I have ever known. How did you do it?\"\n\n\"I presume, Doctor, that you could tell the skull of a negro from that of an Esquimau?\"\n\n\"Most certainly.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"Because that is my special hobby. The differences are obvious. The supra-orbital crest, the facial angle, the maxillary curve, the\u2014\"\n\n\"But this is my special hobby, and the differences are equally obvious. There is as much difference to my eyes between the leaded bourgeois type of a Times article and the slovenly print of an evening half-penny paper as there could be between your negro and your Esquimau. The detection of types is one of the most elementary branches of knowledge to the special expert in crime, though I confess that once when I was very young I confused the Leeds Mercury with the Western Morning News. But a Times leader is entirely distinctive, and these words could have been taken from nothing else. As it was done yesterday the strong probability was that we should find the words in yesterday's issue.\"\n\n\"So far as I can follow you, then, Mr. Holmes,\" said Sir Henry Baskerville, \"someone cut out this message with a scissors\u2014\"\n\n\"Nail-scissors,\" said Holmes. \"You can see that it was a very short-bladed scissors, since the cutter had to take two snips over 'keep away.'\"\n\n\"That is so. Someone, then, cut out the message with a pair of short-bladed scissors, pasted it with paste\u2014\"\n\n\"Gum,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"With gum on to the paper. But I want to know why the word 'moor' should have been written?\"\n\n\"Because he could not find it in print. The other words were all simple and might be found in any issue, but 'moor' would be less common.\"\n\n\"Why, of course, that would explain it. Have you read anything else in this message, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"There are one or two indications, and yet the utmost pains have been taken to remove all clues. The address, you observe, is printed in rough characters. But the Times is a paper which is seldom found in any hands but those of the highly educated. We may take it, therefore, that the letter was composed by an educated man who wished to pose as an uneducated one, and his effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing might be known, or come to be known, by you. Again, you will observe that the words are not gummed on in an accurate line, but that some are much higher than others. 'Life,' for example, is quite out of its proper place. That may point to carelessness or it may point to agitation and hurry upon the part of the cutter. On the whole I incline to the latter view, since the matter was evidently important, and it is unlikely that the composer of such a letter would be careless. If he were in a hurry it opens up the interesting question why he should be in a hurry, since any letter posted up to early morning would reach Sir Henry before he would leave his hotel. Did the composer fear an interruption\u2014and from whom?\"\n\n\"We are coming now rather into the region of guesswork,\" said Dr. Mortimer.\n\n\"Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculation. Now, you would call it a guess, no doubt, but I am almost certain that this address has been written in a hotel.\"\n\n\"How in the world can you say that?\"\n\n\"If you examine it carefully you will see that both the pen and the ink have given the writer trouble. The pen has spluttered twice in a single word and has run dry three times in a short address, showing that there was very little ink in the bottle. Now, a private pen or ink-bottle is seldom allowed to be in such a state, and the combination of the two must be quite rare. But you know the hotel ink and the hotel pen, where it is rare to get anything else. Yes, I have very little hesitation in saying that could we examine the waste-paper baskets of the hotels around Charing Cross until we found the remains of the mutilated Times leader we could lay our hands straight upon the person who sent this singular message. Halloa! Halloa! What's this?\"\n\nHe was carefully examining the foolscap, upon which the words were pasted, holding it only an inch or two from his eyes.\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" said he, throwing it down. \"It is a blank half-sheet of paper, without even a water-mark upon it. I think we have drawn as much as we can from this curious letter; and now, Sir Henry, has anything else of interest happened to you since you have been in London?\"\n\n\"Why, no, Mr. Holmes. I think not.\"\n\n\"You have not observed anyone follow or watch you?\"\n\n\"I seem to have walked right into the thick of a dime novel,\" said our visitor. \"Why in thunder should anyone follow or watch me?\"\n\n\"We are coming to that. You have nothing else to report to us before we go into this matter?\"\n\n\"Well, it depends upon what you think worth reporting.\"\n\n\"I think anything out of the ordinary routine of life well worth reporting.\"\n\nSir Henry smiled.\n\n\"I don't know much of British life yet, for I have spent nearly all my time in the States and in Canada. But I hope that to lose one of your boots is not part of the ordinary routine of life over here.\"\n\n\"You have lost one of your boots?\"\n\n\"My dear sir,\" cried Dr. Mortimer, \"it is only mislaid. You will find it when you return to the hotel. What is the use of troubling Mr. Holmes with trifles of this kind?\"\n\n\"Well, he asked me for anything outside the ordinary routine.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Holmes, \"however foolish the incident may seem. You have lost one of your boots, you say?\"\n\n\"Well, mislaid it, anyhow. I put them both outside my door last night, and there was only one in the morning. I could get no sense out of the chap who cleans them. The worst of it is that I only bought the pair last night in the Strand, and I have never had them on.\"\n\n\"If you have never worn them, why did you put them out to be cleaned?\"\n\n\"They were tan boots and had never been varnished. That was why I put them out.\"\n\n\"Then I understand that on your arrival in London yesterday you went out at once and bought a pair of boots?\"\n\n\"I did a good deal of shopping. Dr. Mortimer here went round with me. You see, if I am to be squire down there I must dress the part, and it may be that I have got a little careless in my ways out West. Among other things I bought these brown boots\u2014gave six dollars for them\u2014and had one stolen before ever I had them on my feet.\"\n\n\"It seems a singularly useless thing to steal,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"I confess that I share Dr. Mortimer's belief that it will not be long before the missing boot is found.\"\n\n\"And, now, gentlemen,\" said the baronet with decision, \"it seems to me that I have spoken quite enough about the little that I know. It is time that you kept your promise and gave me a full account of what we are all driving at.\"\n\n\"Your request is a very reasonable one,\" Holmes answered. \"Dr. Mortimer, I think you could not do better than to tell your story as you told it to us.\"\n\nThus encouraged, our scientific friend drew his papers from his pocket and presented the whole case as he had done upon the morning before. Sir Henry Baskerville listened with the deepest attention and with an occasional exclamation of surprise.\n\n\"Well, I seem to have come into an inheritance with a vengeance,\" said he when the long narrative was finished. \"Of course, I've heard of the hound ever since I was in the nursery. It's the pet story of the family, though I never thought of taking it seriously before. But as to my uncle's death\u2014well, it all seems boiling up in my head, and I can't get it clear yet. You don't seem quite to have made up your mind whether it's a case for a policeman or a clergyman.\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"And now there's this affair of the letter to me at the hotel. I suppose that fits into its place.\"\n\n\"It seems to show that someone knows more than we do about what goes on upon the moor,\" said Dr. Mortimer.\n\n\"And also,\" said Holmes, \"that someone is not ill-disposed towards you, since they warn you of danger.\"\n\n\"Or it may be that they wish, for their own purposes, to scare me away.\"\n\n\"Well, of course, that is possible also. I am very much indebted to you, Dr. Mortimer, for introducing me to a problem which presents several interesting alternatives. But the practical point which we now have to decide, Sir Henry, is whether it is or is not advisable for you to go to Baskerville Hall.\"\n\n\"Why should I not go?\"\n\n\"There seems to be danger.\"\n\n\"Do you mean danger from this family fiend or do you mean danger from human beings?\"\n\n\"Well, that is what we have to find out.\"\n\n\"Whichever it is, my answer is fixed. There is no devil in hell, Mr. Holmes, and there is no man upon earth who can prevent me from going to the home of my own people, and you may take that to be my final answer.\" His dark brows knitted and his face flushed to a dusky red as he spoke. It was evident that the fiery temper of the Baskervilles was not extinct in this their last representative. \"Meanwhile,\" said he, \"I have hardly had time to think over all that you have told me. It's a big thing for a man to have to understand and to decide at one sitting. I should like to have a quiet hour by myself to make up my mind. Now, look here, Mr. Holmes, it's half-past eleven now and I am going back right away to my hotel. Suppose you and your friend, Dr. Watson, come round and lunch with us at two. I'll be able to tell you more clearly then how this thing strikes me.\"\n\n\"Is that convenient to you, Watson?\"\n\n\"Perfectly.\"\n\n\"Then you may expect us. Shall I have a cab called?\"\n\n\"I'd prefer to walk, for this affair has flurried me rather.\"\n\n\"I'll join you in a walk, with pleasure,\" said his companion.\n\n\"Then we meet again at two o'clock. Au revoir, and good-morning!\"\n\nWe heard the steps of our visitors descend the stair and the bang of the front door. In an instant Holmes had changed from the languid dreamer to the man of action.\n\n\"Your hat and boots, Watson, quick! Not a moment to lose!\" He rushed into his room in his dressing-gown and was back again in a few seconds in a frock-coat. We hurried together down the stairs and into the street. Dr. Mortimer and Baskerville were still visible about two hundred yards ahead of us in the direction of Oxford Street.\n\n\"Shall I run on and stop them?\"\n\n\"Not for the world, my dear Watson. I am perfectly satisfied with your company if you will tolerate mine. Our friends are wise, for it is certainly a very fine morning for a walk.\"\n\nHe quickened his pace until we had decreased the distance which divided us by about half. Then, still keeping a hundred yards behind, we followed into Oxford Street and so down Regent Street. Once our friends stopped and stared into a shop window, upon which Holmes did the same. An instant afterwards he gave a little cry of satisfaction, and, following the direction of his eager eyes, I saw that a hansom cab with a man inside which had halted on the other side of the street was now proceeding slowly onward again.\n\n\"There's our man, Watson! Come along! We'll have a good look at him, if we can do no more.\"\n\nAt that instant I was aware of a bushy black beard and a pair of piercing eyes turned upon us through the side window of the cab. Instantly the trapdoor at the top flew up, something was screamed to the driver, and the cab flew madly off down Regent Street. Holmes looked eagerly round for another, but no empty one was in sight. Then he dashed in wild pursuit amid the stream of the traffic, but the start was too great, and already the cab was out of sight.\n\n\"There now!\" said Holmes bitterly as he emerged panting and white with vexation from the tide of vehicles. \"Was ever such bad luck and such bad management, too? Watson, Watson, if you are an honest man you will record this also and set it against my successes!\"\n\n\"Who was the man?\"\n\n\"I have not an idea.\"\n\n\"A spy?\"\n\n\"Well, it was evident from what we have heard that Baskerville has been very closely shadowed by someone since he has been in town. How else could it be known so quickly that it was the Northumberland Hotel which he had chosen? If they had followed him the first day I argued that they would follow him also the second. You may have observed that I twice strolled over to the window while Dr. Mortimer was reading his legend.\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember.\"\n\n\"I was looking out for loiterers in the street, but I saw none. We are dealing with a clever man, Watson. This matter cuts very deep, and though I have not finally made up my mind whether it is a benevolent or a malevolent agency which is in touch with us, I am conscious always of power and design. When our friends left I at once followed them in the hopes of marking down their invisible attendant. So wily was he that he had not trusted himself upon foot, but he had availed himself of a cab so that he could loiter behind or dash past them and so escape their notice. His method had the additional advantage that if they were to take a cab he was all ready to follow them. It has, however, one obvious disadvantage.\"\n\n\"It puts him in the power of the cabman.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"What a pity we did not get the number!\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, clumsy as I have been, you surely do not seriously imagine that I neglected to get the number? No. 2704 is our man. But that is no use to us for the moment.\"\n\n\"I fail to see how you could have done more.\"\n\n\"On observing the cab I should have instantly turned and walked in the other direction. I should then at my leisure have hired a second cab and followed the first at a respectful distance, or, better still, have driven to the Northumberland Hotel and waited there. When our unknown had followed Baskerville home we should have had the opportunity of playing his own game upon himself and seeing where he made for. As it is, by an indiscreet eagerness, which was taken advantage of with extraordinary quickness and energy by our opponent, we have betrayed ourselves and lost our man.\"\n\nWe had been sauntering slowly down Regent Street during this conversation, and Dr. Mortimer, with his companion, had long vanished in front of us.\n\n\"There is no object in our following them,\" said Holmes. \"The shadow has departed and will not return. We must see what further cards we have in our hands and play them with decision. Could you swear to that man's face within the cab?\"\n\n\"I could swear only to the beard.\"\n\n\"And so could I\u2014from which I gather that in all probability it was a false one. A clever man upon so delicate an errand has no use for a beard save to conceal his features. Come in here, Watson!\"\n\nHe turned into one of the district messenger offices, where he was warmly greeted by the manager.\n\n\"Ah, Wilson, I see you have not forgotten the little case in which I had the good fortune to help you?\"\n\n\"No, sir, indeed I have not. You saved my good name, and perhaps my life.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, you exaggerate. I have some recollection, Wilson, that you had among your boys a lad named Cartwright, who showed some ability during the investigation.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he is still with us.\"\n\n\"Could you ring him up?\u2014thank you! And I should be glad to have change of this five-pound note.\"\n\nA lad of fourteen, with a bright, keen face, had obeyed the summons of the manager. He stood now gazing with great reverence at the famous detective.\n\n\"Let me have the Hotel Directory,\" said Holmes. \"Thank you! Now, Cartwright, there are the names of twenty-three hotels here, all in the immediate neighbourhood of Charing Cross. Do you see?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"You will visit each of these in turn.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"You will begin in each case by giving the outside porter one shilling. Here are twenty-three shillings.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"You will tell him that you want to see the waste-paper of yesterday. You will say that an important telegram has miscarried and that you are looking for it. You understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"But what you are really looking for is the centre page of the Times with some holes cut in it with scissors. Here is a copy of the Times. It is this page. You could easily recognize it, could you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"In each case the outside porter will send for the hall porter, to whom also you will give a shilling. Here are twenty-three shillings. You will then learn in possibly twenty cases out of the twenty-three that the waste of the day before has been burned or removed. In the three other cases you will be shown a heap of paper and you will look for this page of the Times among it. The odds are enormously against your finding it. There are ten shillings over in case of emergencies. Let me have a report by wire at Baker Street before evening. And now, Watson, it only remains for us to find out by wire the identity of the cabman, No. 2704, and then we will drop into one of the Bond Street picture galleries and fill in the time until we are due at the hotel.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Three Broken Threads", + "text": "Sherlock Holmes had, in a very remarkable degree, the power of detaching his mind at will. For two hours the strange business in which we had been involved appeared to be forgotten, and he was entirely absorbed in the pictures of the modern Belgian masters. He would talk of nothing but art, of which he had the crudest ideas, from our leaving the gallery until we found ourselves at the Northumberland Hotel.\n\n\"Sir Henry Baskerville is upstairs expecting you,\" said the clerk. \"He asked me to show you up at once when you came.\"\n\n\"Have you any objection to my looking at your register?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Not in the least.\"\n\nThe book showed that two names had been added after that of Baskerville. One was Theophilus Johnson and family, of Newcastle; the other Mrs. Oldmore and maid, of High Lodge, Alton.\n\n\"Surely that must be the same Johnson whom I used to know,\" said Holmes to the porter. \"A lawyer, is he not, gray-headed, and walks with a limp?\"\n\n\"No, sir, this is Mr. Johnson, the coal-owner, a very active gentleman, not older than yourself.\"\n\n\"Surely you are mistaken about his trade?\"\n\n\"No, sir! he has used this hotel for many years, and he is very well known to us.\"\n\n\"Ah, that settles it. Mrs. Oldmore, too; I seem to remember the name. Excuse my curiosity, but often in calling upon one friend one finds another.\"\n\n\"She is an invalid lady, sir. Her husband was once mayor of Gloucester. She always comes to us when she is in town.\"\n\n\"Thank you; I am afraid I cannot claim her acquaintance. We have established a most important fact by these questions, Watson,\" he continued in a low voice as we went upstairs together. \"We know now that the people who are so interested in our friend have not settled down in his own hotel. That means that while they are, as we have seen, very anxious to watch him, they are equally anxious that he should not see them. Now, this is a most suggestive fact.\"\n\n\"What does it suggest?\"\n\n\"It suggests\u2014halloa, my dear fellow, what on earth is the matter?\"\n\nAs we came round the top of the stairs we had run up against Sir Henry Baskerville himself. His face was flushed with anger, and he held an old and dusty boot in one of his hands. So furious was he that he was hardly articulate, and when he did speak it was in a much broader and more Western dialect than any which we had heard from him in the morning.\n\n\"Seems to me they are playing me for a sucker in this hotel,\" he cried. \"They'll find they've started in to monkey with the wrong man unless they are careful. By thunder, if that chap can't find my missing boot there will be trouble. I can take a joke with the best, Mr. Holmes, but they've got a bit over the mark this time.\"\n\n\"Still looking for your boot?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and mean to find it.\"\n\n\"But, surely, you said that it was a new brown boot?\"\n\n\"So it was, sir. And now it's an old black one.\"\n\n\"What! you don't mean to say\u2014?\"\n\n\"That's just what I do mean to say. I only had three pairs in the world\u2014the new brown, the old black, and the patent leathers, which I am wearing. Last night they took one of my brown ones, and to-day they have sneaked one of the black. Well, have you got it? Speak out, man, and don't stand staring!\"\n\nAn agitated German waiter had appeared upon the scene.\n\n\"No, sir; I have made inquiry all over the hotel, but I can hear no word of it.\"\n\n\"Well, either that boot comes back before sundown or I'll see the manager and tell him that I go right straight out of this hotel.\"\n\n\"It shall be found, sir\u2014I promise you that if you will have a little patience it will be found.\"\n\n\"Mind it is, for it's the last thing of mine that I'll lose in this den of thieves. Well, well, Mr. Holmes, you'll excuse my troubling you about such a trifle\u2014\"\n\n\"I think it's well worth troubling about.\"\n\n\"Why, you look very serious over it.\"\n\n\"How do you explain it?\"\n\n\"I just don't attempt to explain it. It seems the very maddest, queerest thing that ever happened to me.\"\n\n\"The queerest perhaps\u2014\" said Holmes thoughtfully.\n\n\"What do you make of it yourself?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't profess to understand it yet. This case of yours is very complex, Sir Henry. When taken in conjunction with your uncle's death I am not sure that of all the five hundred cases of capital importance which I have handled there is one which cuts so deep. But we hold several threads in our hands, and the odds are that one or other of them guides us to the truth. We may waste time in following the wrong one, but sooner or later we must come upon the right.\"\n\nWe had a pleasant luncheon in which little was said of the business which had brought us together. It was in the private sitting-room to which we afterwards repaired that Holmes asked Baskerville what were his intentions.\n\n\"To go to Baskerville Hall.\"\n\n\"And when?\"\n\n\"At the end of the week.\"\n\n\"On the whole,\" said Holmes, \"I think that your decision is a wise one. I have ample evidence that you are being dogged in London, and amid the millions of this great city it is difficult to discover who these people are or what their object can be. If their intentions are evil they might do you a mischief, and we should be powerless to prevent it. You did not know, Dr. Mortimer, that you were followed this morning from my house?\"\n\nDr. Mortimer started violently.\n\n\"Followed! By whom?\"\n\n\"That, unfortunately, is what I cannot tell you. Have you among your neighbours or acquaintances on Dartmoor any man with a black, full beard?\"\n\n\"No\u2014or, let me see\u2014why, yes. Barrymore, Sir Charles's butler, is a man with a full, black beard.\"\n\n\"Ha! Where is Barrymore?\"\n\n\"He is in charge of the Hall.\"\n\n\"We had best ascertain if he is really there, or if by any possibility he might be in London.\"\n\n\"How can you do that?\"\n\n\"Give me a telegraph form. 'Is all ready for Sir Henry?' That will do. Address to Mr. Barrymore. Baskerville Hall. What is the nearest telegraph-office? Grimpen. Very good, we will send a second wire to the postmaster, Grimpen: 'Telegram to Mr. Barrymore to be delivered into his own hand. If absent, please return wire to Sir Henry Baskerville, Northumberland Hotel.' That should let us know before evening whether Barrymore is at his post in Devonshire or not.\"\n\n\"That's so,\" said Baskerville. \"By the way, Dr. Mortimer, who is this Barrymore, anyhow?\"\n\n\"He is the son of the old caretaker, who is dead. They have looked after the Hall for four generations now. So far as I know, he and his wife are as respectable a couple as any in the county.\"\n\n\"At the same time,\" said Baskerville, \"it's clear enough that so long as there are none of the family at the Hall these people have a mighty fine home and nothing to do.\"\n\n\"That is true.\"\n\n\"Did Barrymore profit at all by Sir Charles's will?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"He and his wife had five hundred pounds each.\"\n\n\"Ha! Did they know that they would receive this?\"\n\n\"Yes; Sir Charles was very fond of talking about the provisions of his will.\"\n\n\"That is very interesting.\"\n\n\"I hope,\" said Dr. Mortimer, \"that you do not look with suspicious eyes upon everyone who received a legacy from Sir Charles, for I also had a thousand pounds left to me.\"\n\n\"Indeed! And anyone else?\"\n\n\"There were many insignificant sums to individuals, and a large number of public charities. The residue all went to Sir Henry.\"\n\n\"And how much was the residue?\"\n\n\"Seven hundred and forty thousand pounds.\"\n\nHolmes raised his eyebrows in surprise. \"I had no idea that so gigantic a sum was involved,\" said he.\n\n\"Sir Charles had the reputation of being rich, but we did not know how very rich he was until we came to examine his securities. The total value of the estate was close on to a million.\"\n\n\"Dear me! It is a stake for which a man might well play a desperate game. And one more question, Dr. Mortimer. Supposing that anything happened to our young friend here\u2014you will forgive the unpleasant hypothesis! \u2014who would inherit the estate?\"\n\n\"Since Rodger Baskerville, Sir Charles's younger brother, died unmarried, the estate would descend to the Desmonds, who are distant cousins. James Desmond is an elderly clergyman in Westmoreland.\"\n\n\"Thank you. These details are all of great interest. Have you met Mr. James Desmond?\"\n\n\"Yes; he once came down to visit Sir Charles. He is a man of venerable appearance and of saintly life. I remember that he refused to accept any settlement from Sir Charles, though he pressed it upon him.\"\n\n\"And this man of simple tastes would be the heir to Sir Charles's thousands.\"\n\n\"He would be the heir to the estate because that is entailed. He would also be the heir to the money unless it were willed otherwise by the present owner, who can, of course, do what he likes with it.\"\n\n\"And have you made your will, Sir Henry?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes, I have not. I've had no time, for it was only yesterday that I learned how matters stood. But in any case I feel that the money should go with the title and estate. That was my poor uncle's idea. How is the owner going to restore the glories of the Baskervilles if he has not money enough to keep up the property? House, land, and dollars must go together.\"\n\n\"Quite so. Well, Sir Henry, I am of one mind with you as to the advisability of your going down to Devonshire without delay. There is only one provision which I must make. You certainly must not go alone.\"\n\n\"Dr. Mortimer returns with me.\"\n\n\"But Dr. Mortimer has his practice to attend to, and his house is miles away from yours. With all the good will in the world he may be unable to help you. No, Sir Henry, you must take with you someone, a trusty man, who will be always by your side.\"\n\n\"Is it possible that you could come yourself, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"If matters came to a crisis I should endeavour to be present in person; but you can understand that, with my extensive consulting practice and with the constant appeals which reach me from many quarters, it is impossible for me to be absent from London for an indefinite time. At the present instant one of the most revered names in England is being besmirched by a blackmailer, and only I can stop a disastrous scandal. You will see how impossible it is for me to go to Dartmoor.\"\n\n\"Whom would you recommend, then?\"\n\nHolmes laid his hand upon my arm.\n\n\"If my friend would undertake it there is no man who is better worth having at your side when you are in a tight place. No one can say so more confidently than I.\"\n\nThe proposition took me completely by surprise, but before I had time to answer, Baskerville seized me by the hand and wrung it heartily.\n\n\"Well, now, that is real kind of you, Dr. Watson,\" said he. \"You see how it is with me, and you know just as much about the matter as I do. If you will come down to Baskerville Hall and see me through I'll never forget it.\"\n\nThe promise of adventure had always a fascination for me, and I was complimented by the words of Holmes and by the eagerness with which the baronet hailed me as a companion.\n\n\"I will come, with pleasure,\" said I. \"I do not know how I could employ my time better.\"\n\n\"And you will report very carefully to me,\" said Holmes. \"When a crisis comes, as it will do, I will direct how you shall act. I suppose that by Saturday all might be ready?\"\n\n\"Would that suit Dr. Watson?\"\n\n\"Perfectly.\"\n\n\"Then on Saturday, unless you hear to the contrary, we shall meet at the ten-thirty train from Paddington.\"\n\nWe had risen to depart when Baskerville gave a cry of triumph, and diving into one of the corners of the room he drew a brown boot from under a cabinet.\n\n\"My missing boot!\" he cried.\n\n\"May all our difficulties vanish as easily!\" said Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"But it is a very singular thing,\" Dr. Mortimer remarked. \"I searched this room carefully before lunch.\"\n\n\"And so did I,\"' said Baskerville. \"Every inch of it.\"\n\n\"There was certainly no boot in it then.\"\n\n\"In that case the waiter must have placed it there while we were lunching.\"\n\nThe German was sent for but professed to know nothing of the matter, nor could any inquiry clear it up. Another item had been added to that constant and apparently purposeless series of small mysteries which had succeeded each other so rapidly. Setting aside the whole grim story of Sir Charles's death, we had a line of inexplicable incidents all within the limits of two days, which included the receipt of the printed letter, the black-bearded spy in the hansom, the loss of the new brown boot, the loss of the old black boot, and now the return of the new brown boot. Holmes sat in silence in the cab as we drove back to Baker Street, and I knew from his drawn brows and keen face that his mind, like my own, was busy in endeavouring to frame some scheme into which all these strange and apparently disconnected episodes could be fitted. All afternoon and late into the evening he sat lost in tobacco and thought.\n\nJust before dinner two telegrams were handed in. The first ran:\n\nHave just heard that Barrymore is at the Hall.\n\nBASKERVILLE.\n\nThe second:\n\nVisited twenty-three hotels as directed, but sorry to report unable to trace cut sheet of Times.\n\nCARTWRIGHT.\n\n\"There go two of my threads, Watson. There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you. We must cast round for another scent.\"\n\n\"We have still the cabman who drove the spy.\"\n\n\"Exactly. I have wired to get his name and address from the Official Registry. I should not be surprised if this were an answer to my question.\"\n\nThe ring at the bell proved to be something even more satisfactory than an answer, however, for the door opened and a rough-looking fellow entered who was evidently the man himself.\n\n\"I got a message from the head office that a gent at this address had been inquiring for No. 2704,\" said he. \"I've driven my cab this seven years and never a word of complaint. I came here straight from the Yard to ask you to your face what you had against me.\"\n\n\"I have nothing in the world against you, my good man,\" said Holmes. \"On the contrary, I have half a sovereign for you if you will give me a clear answer to my questions.\"\n\n\"Well, I've had a good day and no mistake,\" said the cabman with a grin. \"What was it you wanted to ask, sir?\"\n\n\"First of all your name and address, in case I want you again.\"\n\n\"John Clayton, 3 Turpey Street, the Borough. My cab is out of Shipley's Yard, near Waterloo Station.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes made a note of it.\n\n\"Now, Clayton, tell me all about the fare who came and watched this house at ten o'clock this morning and afterwards followed the two gentlemen down Regent Street.\"\n\nThe man looked surprised and a little embarrassed. \"Why, there's no good my telling you things, for you seem to know as much as I do already,\" said he. \"The truth is that the gentleman told me that he was a detective and that I was to say nothing about him to anyone.\"\n\n\"My good fellow, this is a very serious business, and you may find yourself in a pretty bad position if you try to hide anything from me. You say that your fare told you that he was a detective?\"\n\n\"Yes, he did.\"\n\n\"When did he say this?\"\n\n\"When he left me.\"\n\n\"Did he say anything more?\"\n\n\"He mentioned his name.\"\n\nHolmes cast a swift glance of triumph at me. \"Oh, he mentioned his name, did he? That was imprudent. What was the name that he mentioned?\"\n\n\"His name,\" said the cabman, \"was Mr. Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\nNever have I seen my friend more completely taken aback than by the cabman's reply. For an instant he sat in silent amazement. Then he burst into a hearty laugh.\n\n\"A touch, Watson\u2014an undeniable touch!\" said he. \"I feel a foil as quick and supple as my own. He got home upon me very prettily that time. So his name was Sherlock Holmes, was it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, that was the gentleman's name.\"\n\n\"Excellent! Tell me where you picked him up and all that occurred.\"\n\n\"He hailed me at half-past nine in Trafalgar Square. He said that he was a detective, and he offered me two guineas if I would do exactly what he wanted all day and ask no questions. I was glad enough to agree. First we drove down to the Northumberland Hotel and waited there until two gentlemen came out and took a cab from the rank. We followed their cab until it pulled up somewhere near here.\"\n\n\"This very door,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Well, I couldn't be sure of that, but I dare say my fare knew all about it. We pulled up halfway down the street and waited an hour and a half. Then the two gentlemen passed us, walking, and we followed down Baker Street and along\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Until we got three-quarters down Regent Street. Then my gentleman threw up the trap, and he cried that I should drive right away to Waterloo Station as hard as I could go. I whipped up the mare and we were there under the ten minutes. Then he paid up his two guineas, like a good one, and away he went into the station. Only just as he was leaving he turned round and he said: 'It might interest you to know that you have been driving Mr. Sherlock Holmes.' That's how I come to know the name.\"\n\n\"I see. And you saw no more of him?\"\n\n\"Not after he went into the station.\"\n\n\"And how would you describe Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\"\n\nThe cabman scratched his head. \"Well, he wasn't altogether such an easy gentleman to describe. I'd put him at forty years of age, and he was of a middle height, two or three inches shorter than you, sir. He was dressed like a toff, and he had a black beard, cut square at the end, and a pale face. I don't know as I could say more than that.\"\n\n\"Colour of his eyes?\"\n\n\"No, I can't say that.\"\n\n\"Nothing more that you can remember?\"\n\n\"No, sir; nothing.\"\n\n\"Well, then, here is your half-sovereign. There's another one waiting for you if you can bring any more information. Good-night!\"\n\n\"Good-night, sir, and thank you!\"\n\nJohn Clayton departed chuckling, and Holmes turned to me with a shrug of his shoulders and a rueful smile.\n\n\"Snap goes our third thread, and we end where we began,\" said he. \"The cunning rascal! He knew our number, knew that Sir Henry Baskerville had consulted me, spotted who I was in Regent Street, conjectured that I had got the number of the cab and would lay my hands on the driver, and so sent back this audacious message. I tell you, Watson, this time we have got a foeman who is worthy of our steel. I've been checkmated in London. I can only wish you better luck in Devonshire. But I'm not easy in my mind about it.\"\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"About sending you. It's an ugly business, Watson, an ugly, dangerous business, and the more I see of it the less I like it. Yes, my dear fellow, you may laugh, but I give you my word that I shall be very glad to have you back safe and sound in Baker Street once more.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Baskerville Hall", + "text": "Sir Henry Baskerville and Dr. Mortimer were ready upon the appointed day, and we started as arranged for Devonshire. Mr. Sherlock Holmes drove with me to the station and gave me his last parting injunctions and advice.\n\n\"I will not bias your mind by suggesting theories or suspicions, Watson,\" said he; \"I wish you simply to report facts in the fullest possible manner to me, and you can leave me to do the theorizing.\"\n\n\"What sort of facts?\" I asked.\n\n\"Anything which may seem to have a bearing however indirect upon the case, and especially the relations between young Baskerville and his neighbours or any fresh particulars concerning the death of Sir Charles. I have made some inquiries myself in the last few days, but the results have, I fear, been negative. One thing only appears to be certain, and that is that Mr. James Desmond, who is the next heir, is an elderly gentleman of a very amiable disposition, so that this persecution does not arise from him. I really think that we may eliminate him entirely from our calculations. There remain the people who will actually surround Sir Henry Baskerville upon the moor.\"\n\n\"Would it not be well in the first place to get rid of this Barrymore couple?\"\n\n\"By no means. You could not make a greater mistake. If they are innocent it would be a cruel injustice, and if they are guilty we should be giving up all chance of bringing it home to them. No, no, we will preserve them upon our list of suspects. Then there is a groom at the Hall, if I remember right. There are two moorland farmers. There is our friend Dr. Mortimer, whom I believe to be entirely honest, and there is his wife, of whom we know nothing. There is this naturalist, Stapleton, and there is his sister, who is said to be a young lady of attractions. There is Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, who is also an unknown factor, and there are one or two other neighbours. These are the folk who must be your very special study.\"\n\n\"I will do my best.\"\n\n\"You have arms, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Yes, I thought it as well to take them.\"\n\n\"Most certainly. Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.\"\n\nOur friends had already secured a first-class carriage and were waiting for us upon the platform.\n\n\"No, we have no news of any kind,\" said Dr. Mortimer in answer to my friend's questions. \"I can swear to one thing, and that is that we have not been shadowed during the last two days. We have never gone out without keeping a sharp watch, and no one could have escaped our notice.\"\n\n\"You have always kept together, I presume?\"\n\n\"Except yesterday afternoon. I usually give up one day to pure amusement when I come to town, so I spent it at the Museum of the College of Surgeons.\"\n\n\"And I went to look at the folk in the park,\" said Baskerville. \"But we had no trouble of any kind.\"\n\n\"It was imprudent, all the same,\" said Holmes, shaking his head and looking very grave. \"I beg, Sir Henry, that you will not go about alone. Some great misfortune will befall you if you do. Did you get your other boot?\"\n\n\"No, sir, it is gone forever.\"\n\n\"Indeed. That is very interesting. Well, good-bye,\" he added as the train began to glide down the platform. \"Bear in mind, Sir Henry, one of the phrases in that queer old legend which Dr. Mortimer has read to us and avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted.\"\n\nI looked back at the platform when we had left it far behind and saw the tall, austere figure of Holmes standing motionless and gazing after us.\n\nThe journey was a swift and pleasant one, and I spent it in making the more intimate acquaintance of my two companions and in playing with Dr. Mortimer's spaniel. In a very few hours the brown earth had become ruddy, the brick had changed to granite, and red cows grazed in well-hedged fields where the lush grasses and more luxuriant vegetation spoke of a richer, if a damper, climate. Young Baskerville stared eagerly out of the window and cried aloud with delight as he recognized the familiar features of the Devon scenery.\n\n\"I've been over a good part of the world since I left it, Dr. Watson,\" said he; \"but I have never seen a place to compare with it.\"\n\n\"I never saw a Devonshire man who did not swear by his county,\" I remarked.\n\n\"It depends upon the breed of men quite as much as on the county,\" said Dr. Mortimer. \"A glance at our friend here reveals the rounded head of the Celt, which carries inside it the Celtic enthusiasm and power of attachment. Poor Sir Charles's head was of a very rare type, half Gaelic, half Ivernian in its characteristics. But you were very young when you last saw Baskerville Hall, were you not?\"\n\n\"I was a boy in my teens at the time of my father's death and had never seen the Hall, for he lived in a little cottage on the South Coast. Thence I went straight to a friend in America. I tell you it is all as new to me as it is to Dr. Watson, and I'm as keen as possible to see the moor.\"\n\n\"Are you? Then your wish is easily granted, for there is your first sight of the moor,\" said Dr. Mortimer, pointing out of the carriage window.\n\nOver the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream. Baskerville sat for a long time, his eyes fixed upon it, and I read upon his eager face how much it meant to him, this first sight of that strange spot where the men of his blood had held sway so long and left their mark so deep. There he sat, with his tweed suit and his American accent, in the corner of a prosaic railway-carriage, and yet as I looked at his dark and expressive face I felt more than ever how true a descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and masterful men. There were pride, valour, and strength in his thick brows, his sensitive nostrils, and his large hazel eyes. If on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely share it.\n\nThe train pulled up at a small wayside station and we all descended. Outside, beyond the low, white fence, a wagonette with a pair of cobs was waiting. Our coming was evidently a great event, for station-master and porters clustered round us to carry out our luggage. It was a sweet, simple country spot, but I was surprised to observe that by the gate there stood two soldierly men in dark uniforms who leaned upon their short rifles and glanced keenly at us as we passed. The coachman, a hard-faced, gnarled little fellow, saluted Sir Henry Baskerville, and in a few minutes we were flying swiftly down the broad, white road. Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.\n\nThe wagonette swung round into a side road, and we curved upward through deep lanes worn by centuries of wheels, high banks on either side, heavy with dripping moss and fleshy hart's-tongue ferns. Bronzing bracken and mottled bramble gleamed in the light of the sinking sun. Still steadily rising, we passed over a narrow granite bridge and skirted a noisy stream which gushed swiftly down, foaming and roaring amid the gray boulders. Both road and stream wound up through a valley dense with scrub oak and fir. At every turn Baskerville gave an exclamation of delight, looking eagerly about him and asking countless questions. To his eyes all seemed beautiful, but to me a tinge of melancholy lay upon the countryside, which bore so clearly the mark of the waning year. Yellow leaves carpeted the lanes and fluttered down upon us as we passed. The rattle of our wheels died away as we drove through drifts of rotting vegetation\u2014sad gifts, as it seemed to me, for Nature to throw before the carriage of the returning heir of the Baskervilles.\n\n\"Halloa!\" cried Dr. Mortimer, \"what is this?\"\n\nA steep curve of heath-clad land, an outlying spur of the moor, lay in front of us. On the summit, hard and clear like an equestrian statue upon its pedestal, was a mounted soldier, dark and stern, his rifle poised ready over his forearm. He was watching the road along which we travelled.\n\n\"What is this, Perkins?\" asked Dr. Mortimer.\n\nOur driver half turned in his seat.\n\n\"There's a convict escaped from Princetown, sir. He's been out three days now, and the warders watch every road and every station, but they've had no sight of him yet. The farmers about here don't like it, sir, and that's a fact.\"\n\n\"Well, I understand that they get five pounds if they can give information.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, but the chance of five pounds is but a poor thing compared to the chance of having your throat cut. You see, it isn't like any ordinary convict. This is a man that would stick at nothing.\"\n\n\"Who is he, then?\"\n\n\"It is Selden, the Notting Hill murderer.\"\n\nI remembered the case well, for it was one in which Holmes had taken an interest on account of the peculiar ferocity of the crime and the wanton brutality which had marked all the actions of the assassin. The commutation of his death sentence had been due to some doubts as to his complete sanity, so atrocious was his conduct. Our wagonette had topped a rise and in front of us rose the huge expanse of the moor, mottled with gnarled and craggy cairns and tors. A cold wind swept down from it and set us shivering. Somewhere there, on that desolate plain, was lurking this fiendish man, hiding in a burrow like a wild beast, his heart full of malignancy against the whole race which had cast him out. It needed but this to complete the grim suggestiveness of the barren waste, the chilling wind, and the darkling sky. Even Baskerville fell silent and pulled his overcoat more closely around him.\n\nWe had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees. The driver pointed with his whip.\n\n\"Baskerville Hall,\" said he.\n\nIts master had risen and was staring with flushed cheeks and shining eyes. A few minutes later we had reached the lodge-gates, a maze of fantastic tracery in wrought iron, with weather-bitten pillars on either side, blotched with lichens, and surmounted by the boars' heads of the Baskervilles. The lodge was a ruin of black granite and bared ribs of rafters, but facing it was a new building, half constructed, the first fruit of Sir Charles's South African gold.\n\nThrough the gateway we passed into the avenue, where the wheels were again hushed amid the leaves, and the old trees shot their branches in a sombre tunnel over our heads. Baskerville shuddered as he looked up the long, dark drive to where the house glimmered like a ghost at the farther end.\n\n\"Was it here?\" he asked in a low voice.\n\n\"No, no, the yew alley is on the other side.\"\n\nThe young heir glanced round with a gloomy face.\n\n\"It's no wonder my uncle felt as if trouble were coming on him in such a place as this,\" said he. \"It's enough to scare any man. I'll have a row of electric lamps up here inside of six months, and you won't know it again, with a thousand candle-power Swan and Edison right here in front of the hall door.\"\n\nThe avenue opened into a broad expanse of turf, and the house lay before us. In the fading light I could see that the centre was a heavy block of building from which a porch projected. The whole front was draped in ivy, with a patch clipped bare here and there where a window or a coat of arms broke through the dark veil. From this central block rose the twin towers, ancient, crenellated, and pierced with many loopholes. To right and left of the turrets were more modern wings of black granite. A dull light shone through heavy mullioned windows, and from the high chimneys which rose from the steep, high-angled roof there sprang a single black column of smoke.\n\n\"Welcome, Sir Henry! Welcome to Baskerville Hall!\"\n\nA tall man had stepped from the shadow of the porch to open the door of the wagonette. The figure of a woman was silhouetted against the yellow light of the hall. She came out and helped the man to hand down our bags.\n\n\"You don't mind my driving straight home, Sir Henry?\" said Dr. Mortimer. \"My wife is expecting me.\"\n\n\"Surely you will stay and have some dinner?\"\n\n\"No, I must go. I shall probably find some work awaiting me. I would stay to show you over the house, but Barrymore will be a better guide than I. Good-bye, and never hesitate night or day to send for me if I can be of service.\"\n\nThe wheels died away down the drive while Sir Henry and I turned into the hall, and the door clanged heavily behind us. It was a fine apartment in which we found ourselves, large, lofty, and heavily raftered with huge baulks of age-blackened oak. In the great old-fashioned fireplace behind the high iron dogs a log-fire crackled and snapped. Sir Henry and I held out our hands to it, for we were numb from our long drive. Then we gazed round us at the high, thin window of old stained glass, the oak panelling, the stags' heads, the coats of arms upon the walls, all dim and sombre in the subdued light of the central lamp.\n\n\"It's just as I imagined it,\" said Sir Henry. \"Is it not the very picture of an old family home? To think that this should be the same hall in which for five hundred years my people have lived. It strikes me solemn to think of it.\"\n\nI saw his dark face lit up with a boyish enthusiasm as he gazed about him. The light beat upon him where he stood, but long shadows trailed down the walls and hung like a black canopy above him. Barrymore had returned from taking our luggage to our rooms. He stood in front of us now with the subdued manner of a well-trained servant. He was a remarkable-looking man, tall, handsome, with a square black beard and pale, distinguished features.\n\n\"Would you wish dinner to be served at once, sir?\"\n\n\"Is it ready?\"\n\n\"In a very few minutes, sir. You will find hot water in your rooms. My wife and I will be happy, Sir Henry, to stay with you until you have made your fresh arrangements, but you will understand that under the new conditions this house will require a considerable staff.\"\n\n\"What new conditions?\"\n\n\"I only meant, sir, that Sir Charles led a very retired life, and we were able to look after his wants. You would, naturally, wish to have more company, and so you will need changes in your household.\"\n\n\"Do you mean that your wife and you wish to leave?\"\n\n\"Only when it is quite convenient to you, sir.\"\n\n\"But your family have been with us for several generations, have they not? I should be sorry to begin my life here by breaking an old family connection.\"\n\nI seemed to discern some signs of emotion upon the butler's white face.\n\n\"I feel that also, sir, and so does my wife. But to tell the truth, sir, we were both very much attached to Sir Charles and his death gave us a shock and made these surroundings very painful to us. I fear that we shall never again be easy in our minds at Baskerville Hall.\"\n\n\"But what do you intend to do?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt, sir, that we shall succeed in establishing ourselves in some business. Sir Charles's generosity has given us the means to do so. And now, sir, perhaps I had best show you to your rooms.\"\n\nA square balustraded gallery ran round the top of the old hall, approached by a double stair. From this central point two long corridors extended the whole length of the building, from which all the bedrooms opened. My own was in the same wing as Baskerville's and almost next door to it. These rooms appeared to be much more modern than the central part of the house, and the bright paper and numerous candles did something to remove the sombre impression which our arrival had left upon my mind.\n\nBut the dining-room which opened out of the hall was a place of shadow and gloom. It was a long chamber with a step separating the dais where the family sat from the lower portion reserved for their dependents. At one end a minstrel's gallery overlooked it. Black beams shot across above our heads, with a smoke-darkened ceiling beyond them. With rows of flaring torches to light it up, and the colour and rude hilarity of an old-time banquet, it might have softened; but now, when two black-clothed gentlemen sat in the little circle of light thrown by a shaded lamp, one's voice became hushed and one's spirit subdued. A dim line of ancestors, in every variety of dress, from the Elizabethan knight to the buck of the Regency, stared down upon us and daunted us by their silent company. We talked little, and I for one was glad when the meal was over and we were able to retire into the modern billiard-room and smoke a cigarette.\n\n\"My word, it isn't a very cheerful place,\" said Sir Henry. \"I suppose one can tone down to it, but I feel a bit out of the picture at present. I don't wonder that my uncle got a little jumpy if he lived all alone in such a house as this. However, if it suits you, we will retire early to-night, and perhaps things may seem more cheerful in the morning.\"\n\nI drew aside my curtains before I went to bed and looked out from my window. It opened upon the grassy space which lay in front of the hall door. Beyond, two copses of trees moaned and swung in a rising wind. A half moon broke through the rifts of racing clouds. In its cold light I saw beyond the trees a broken fringe of rocks, and the long, low curve of the melancholy moor. I closed the curtain, feeling that my last impression was in keeping with the rest.\n\nAnd yet it was not quite the last. I found myself weary and yet wakeful, tossing restlessly from side to side, seeking for the sleep which would not come. Far away a chiming clock struck out the quarters of the hours, but otherwise a deathly silence lay upon the old house. And then suddenly, in the very dead of the night, there came a sound to my ears, clear, resonant, and unmistakable. It was the sob of a woman, the muffled, strangling gasp of one who is torn by an uncontrollable sorrow. I sat up in bed and listened intently. The noise could not have been far away and was certainly in the house. For half an hour I waited with every nerve on the alert, but there came no other sound save the chiming clock and the rustle of the ivy on the wall." + }, + { + "title": "The Stapletons of Merripit House", + "text": "The fresh beauty of the following morning did something to efface from our minds the grim and gray impression which had been left upon both of us by our first experience of Baskerville Hall. As Sir Henry and I sat at breakfast the sunlight flooded in through the high mullioned windows, throwing watery patches of colour from the coats of arms which covered them. The dark panelling glowed like bronze in the golden rays, and it was hard to realize that this was indeed the chamber which had struck such a gloom into our souls upon the evening before.\n\n\"I guess it is ourselves and not the house that we have to blame!\" said the baronet. \"We were tired with our journey and chilled by our drive, so we took a gray view of the place. Now we are fresh and well, so it is all cheerful once more.\"\n\n\"And yet it was not entirely a question of imagination,\" I answered. \"Did you, for example, happen to hear someone, a woman I think, sobbing in the night?\"\n\n\"That is curious, for I did when I was half asleep fancy that I heard something of the sort. I waited quite a time, but there was no more of it, so I concluded that it was all a dream.\"\n\n\"I heard it distinctly, and I am sure that it was really the sob of a woman.\"\n\n\"We must ask about this right away.\" He rang the bell and asked Barrymore whether he could account for our experience. It seemed to me that the pallid features of the butler turned a shade paler still as he listened to his master's question.\n\n\"There are only two women in the house, Sir Henry,\" he answered. \"One is the scullery-maid, who sleeps in the other wing. The other is my wife, and I can answer for it that the sound could not have come from her.\"\n\nAnd yet he lied as he said it, for it chanced that after breakfast I met Mrs. Barrymore in the long corridor with the sun full upon her face. She was a large, impassive, heavy-featured woman with a stern set expression of mouth. But her telltale eyes were red and glanced at me from between swollen lids. It was she, then, who wept in the night, and if she did so her husband must know it. Yet he had taken the obvious risk of discovery in declaring that it was not so. Why had he done this? And why did she weep so bitterly? Already round this pale-faced, handsome, black-bearded man there was gathering an atmosphere of mystery and of gloom. It was he who had been the first to discover the body of Sir Charles, and we had only his word for all the circumstances which led up to the old man's death. Was it possible that it was Barrymore, after all, whom we had seen in the cab in Regent Street? The beard might well have been the same. The cabman had described a somewhat shorter man, but such an impression might easily have been erroneous. How could I settle the point forever? Obviously the first thing to do was to see the Grimpen postmaster and find whether the test telegram had really been placed in Barrymore's own hands. Be the answer what it might, I should at least have something to report to Sherlock Holmes.\n\nSir Henry had numerous papers to examine after breakfast, so that the time was propitious for my excursion. It was a pleasant walk of four miles along the edge of the moor, leading me at last to a small gray hamlet, in which two larger buildings, which proved to be the inn and the house of Dr. Mortimer, stood high above the rest. The postmaster, who was also the village grocer, had a clear recollection of the telegram.\n\n\"Certainly, sir,\" said he, \"I had the telegram delivered to Mr. Barrymore exactly as directed.\"\n\n\"Who delivered it?\"\n\n\"My boy here. James, you delivered that telegram to Mr. Barrymore at the Hall last week, did you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, father, I delivered it.\"\n\n\"Into his own hands?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, he was up in the loft at the time, so that I could not put it into his own hands, but I gave it into Mrs. Barrymore's hands, and she promised to deliver it at once.\"\n\n\"Did you see Mr. Barrymore?\"\n\n\"No, sir; I tell you he was in the loft.\"\n\n\"If you didn't see him, how do you know he was in the loft?\"\n\n\"Well, surely his own wife ought to know where he is,\" said the postmaster testily. \"Didn't he get the telegram? If there is any mistake it is for Mr. Barrymore himself to complain.\"\n\nIt seemed hopeless to pursue the inquiry any farther, but it was clear that in spite of Holmes's ruse we had no proof that Barrymore had not been in London all the time. Suppose that it were so\u2014suppose that the same man had been the last who had seen Sir Charles alive, and the first to dog the new heir when he returned to England. What then? Was he the agent of others or had he some sinister design of his own? What interest could he have in persecuting the Baskerville family? I thought of the strange warning clipped out of the leading article of the Times. Was that his work or was it possibly the doing of someone who was bent upon counteracting his schemes? The only conceivable motive was that which had been suggested by Sir Henry, that if the family could be scared away a comfortable and permanent home would be secured for the Barrymores. But surely such an explanation as that would be quite inadequate to account for the deep and subtle scheming which seemed to be weaving an invisible net round the young baronet. Holmes himself had said that no more complex case had come to him in all the long series of his sensational investigations. I prayed, as I walked back along the gray, lonely road, that my friend might soon be freed from his preoccupations and able to come down to take this heavy burden of responsibility from my shoulders.\n\nSuddenly my thoughts were interrupted by the sound of running feet behind me and by a voice which called me by name. I turned, expecting to see Dr. Mortimer, but to my surprise it was a stranger who was pursuing me. He was a small, slim, clean-shaven, prim-faced man, flaxen-haired and lean-jawed, between thirty and forty years of age, dressed in a gray suit and wearing a straw hat. A tin box for botanical specimens hung over his shoulder and he carried a green butterfly-net in one of his hands.\n\n\"You will, I am sure, excuse my presumption, Dr. Watson,\" said he as he came panting up to where I stood. \"Here on the moor we are homely folk and do not wait for formal introductions. You may possibly have heard my name from our mutual friend, Mortimer. I am Stapleton, of Merripit House.\"\n\n\"Your net and box would have told me as much,\" said I, \"for I knew that Mr. Stapleton was a naturalist. But how did you know me?\"\n\n\"I have been calling on Mortimer, and he pointed you out to me from the window of his surgery as you passed. As our road lay the same way I thought that I would overtake you and introduce myself. I trust that Sir Henry is none the worse for his journey?\"\n\n\"He is very well, thank you.\"\n\n\"We were all rather afraid that after the sad death of Sir Charles the new baronet might refuse to live here. It is asking much of a wealthy man to come down and bury himself in a place of this kind, but I need not tell you that it means a very great deal to the countryside. Sir Henry has, I suppose, no superstitious fears in the matter?\"\n\n\"I do not think that it is likely.\"\n\n\"Of course you know the legend of the fiend dog which haunts the family?\"\n\n\"I have heard it.\"\n\n\"It is extraordinary how credulous the peasants are about here! Any number of them are ready to swear that they have seen such a creature upon the moor.\" He spoke with a smile, but I seemed to read in his eyes that he took the matter more seriously. \"The story took a great hold upon the imagination of Sir Charles, and I have no doubt that it led to his tragic end.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"His nerves were so worked up that the appearance of any dog might have had a fatal effect upon his diseased heart. I fancy that he really did see something of the kind upon that last night in the yew alley. I feared that some disaster might occur, for I was very fond of the old man, and I knew that his heart was weak.\"\n\n\"How did you know that?\"\n\n\"My friend Mortimer told me.\"\n\n\"You think, then, that some dog pursued Sir Charles, and that he died of fright in consequence?\"\n\n\"Have you any better explanation?\"\n\n\"I have not come to any conclusion.\"\n\n\"Has Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\"\n\nThe words took away my breath for an instant, but a glance at the placid face and steadfast eyes of my companion showed that no surprise was intended.\n\n\"It is useless for us to pretend that we do not know you, Dr. Watson,\" said he. \"The records of your detective have reached us here, and you could not celebrate him without being known yourself. When Mortimer told me your name he could not deny your identity. If you are here, then it follows that Mr. Sherlock Holmes is interesting himself in the matter, and I am naturally curious to know what view he may take.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that I cannot answer that question.\"\n\n\"May I ask if he is going to honour us with a visit himself?\"\n\n\"He cannot leave town at present. He has other cases which engage his attention.\"\n\n\"What a pity! He might throw some light on that which is so dark to us. But as to your own researches, if there is any possible way in which I can be of service to you I trust that you will command me. If I had any indication of the nature of your suspicions or how you propose to investigate the case, I might perhaps even now give you some aid or advice.\"\n\n\"I assure you that I am simply here upon a visit to my friend, Sir Henry, and that I need no help of any kind.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Stapleton. \"You are perfectly right to be wary and discreet. I am justly reproved for what I feel was an unjustifiable intrusion, and I promise you that I will not mention the matter again.\"\n\nWe had come to a point where a narrow grassy path struck off from the road and wound away across the moor. A steep, boulder-sprinkled hill lay upon the right which had in bygone days been cut into a granite quarry. The face which was turned towards us formed a dark cliff, with ferns and brambles growing in its niches. From over a distant rise there floated a gray plume of smoke.\n\n\"A moderate walk along this moor-path brings us to Merripit House,\" said he. \"Perhaps you will spare an hour that I may have the pleasure of introducing you to my sister.\"\n\nMy first thought was that I should be by Sir Henry's side. But then I remembered the pile of papers and bills with which his study table was littered. It was certain that I could not help with those. And Holmes had expressly said that I should study the neighbours upon the moor. I accepted Stapleton's invitation, and we turned together down the path.\n\n\"It is a wonderful place, the moor,\" said he, looking round over the undulating downs, long green rollers, with crests of jagged granite foaming up into fantastic surges. \"You never tire of the moor. You cannot think the wonderful secrets which it contains. It is so vast, and so barren, and so mysterious.\"\n\n\"You know it well, then?\"\n\n\"I have only been here two years. The residents would call me a newcomer. We came shortly after Sir Charles settled. But my tastes led me to explore every part of the country round, and I should think that there are few men who know it better than I do.\"\n\n\"Is it hard to know?\"\n\n\"Very hard. You see, for example, this great plain to the north here with the queer hills breaking out of it. Do you observe anything remarkable about that?\"\n\n\"It would be a rare place for a gallop.\"\n\n\"You would naturally think so and the thought has cost several their lives before now. You notice those bright green spots scattered thickly over it?\"\n\n\"Yes, they seem more fertile than the rest.\"\n\nStapleton laughed.\n\n\"That is the great Grimpen Mire,\" said he. \"A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another of those miserable ponies!\"\n\nSomething brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonized, writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with horror, but my companion's nerves seemed to be stronger than mine.\n\n\"It's gone!\" said he. \"The mire has him. Two in two days, and many more, perhaps, for they get in the way of going there in the dry weather and never know the difference until the mire has them in its clutches. It's a bad place, the great Grimpen Mire.\"\n\n\"And you say you can penetrate it?\"\n\n\"Yes, there are one or two paths which a very active man can take. I have found them out.\"\n\n\"But why should you wish to go into so horrible a place?\"\n\n\"Well, you see the hills beyond? They are really islands cut off on all sides by the impassable mire, which has crawled round them in the course of years. That is where the rare plants and the butterflies are, if you have the wit to reach them.\"\n\n\"I shall try my luck some day.\"\n\nHe looked at me with a surprised face.\n\n\"For God's sake put such an idea out of your mind,\" said he. \"Your blood would be upon my head. I assure you that there would not be the least chance of your coming back alive. It is only by remembering certain complex landmarks that I am able to do it.\"\n\n\"Halloa!\" I cried. \"What is that?\"\n\nA long, low moan, indescribably sad, swept over the moor. It filled the whole air, and yet it was impossible to say whence it came. From a dull murmur it swelled into a deep roar, and then sank back into a melancholy, throbbing murmur once again. Stapleton looked at me with a curious expression in his face.\n\n\"Queer place, the moor!\" said he.\n\n\"But what is it?\"\n\n\"The peasants say it is the Hound of the Baskervilles calling for its prey. I've heard it once or twice before, but never quite so loud.\"\n\nI looked round, with a chill of fear in my heart, at the huge swelling plain, mottled with the green patches of rushes. Nothing stirred over the vast expanse save a pair of ravens, which croaked loudly from a tor behind us.\n\n\"You are an educated man. You don't believe such nonsense as that?\" said I. \"What do you think is the cause of so strange a sound?\"\n\n\"Bogs make queer noises sometimes. It's the mud settling, or the water rising, or something.\"\n\n\"No, no, that was a living voice.\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps it was. Did you ever hear a bittern booming?\"\n\n\"No, I never did.\"\n\n\"It's a very rare bird\u2014practically extinct\u2014in England now, but all things are possible upon the moor. Yes, I should not be surprised to learn that what we have heard is the cry of the last of the bitterns.\"\n\n\"It's the weirdest, strangest thing that ever I heard in my life.\"\n\n\"Yes, it's rather an uncanny place altogether. Look at the hillside yonder. What do you make of those?\"\n\nThe whole steep slope was covered with gray circular rings of stone, a score of them at least.\n\n\"What are they? Sheep-pens?\"\n\n\"No, they are the homes of our worthy ancestors. Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth and his couch if you have the curiosity to go inside.\"\n\n\"But it is quite a town. When was it inhabited?\"\n\n\"Neolithic man\u2014no date.\"\n\n\"What did he do?\"\n\n\"He grazed his cattle on these slopes, and he learned to dig for tin when the bronze sword began to supersede the stone axe. Look at the great trench in the opposite hill. That is his mark. Yes, you will find some very singular points about the moor, Dr. Watson. Oh, excuse me an instant! It is surely Cyclopides.\"\n\nA small fly or moth had fluttered across our path, and in an instant Stapleton was rushing with extraordinary energy and speed in pursuit of it. To my dismay the creature flew straight for the great mire, and my acquaintance never paused for an instant, bounding from tuft to tuft behind it, his green net waving in the air. His gray clothes and jerky, zigzag, irregular progress made him not unlike some huge moth himself. I was standing watching his pursuit with a mixture of admiration for his extraordinary activity and fear lest he should lose his footing in the treacherous mire when I heard the sound of steps and, turning round, found a woman near me upon the path. She had come from the direction in which the plume of smoke indicated the position of Merripit House, but the dip of the moor had hid her until she was quite close.\n\nI could not doubt that this was the Miss Stapleton of whom I had been told, since ladies of any sort must be few upon the moor, and I remembered that I had heard someone describe her as being a beauty. The woman who approached me was certainly that, and of a most uncommon type. There could not have been a greater contrast between brother and sister, for Stapleton was neutral tinted, with light hair and gray eyes, while she was darker than any brunette whom I have seen in England\u2014slim, elegant, and tall. She had a proud, finely cut face, so regular that it might have seemed impassive were it not for the sensitive mouth and the beautiful dark, eager eyes. With her perfect figure and elegant dress she was, indeed, a strange apparition upon a lonely moorland path. Her eyes were on her brother as I turned, and then she quickened her pace towards me. I had raised my hat and was about to make some explanatory remark when her own words turned all my thoughts into a new channel.\n\n\"Go back!\" she said. \"Go straight back to London, instantly.\"\n\nI could only stare at her in stupid surprise. Her eyes blazed at me, and she tapped the ground impatiently with her foot.\n\n\"Why should I go back?\" I asked.\n\n\"I cannot explain.\" She spoke in a low, eager voice, with a curious lisp in her utterance. \"But for God's sake do what I ask you. Go back and never set foot upon the moor again.\"\n\n\"But I have only just come.\"\n\n\"Man, man!\" she cried. \"Can you not tell when a warning is for your own good? Go back to London! Start to-night! Get away from this place at all costs! Hush, my brother is coming! Not a word of what I have said. Would you mind getting that orchid for me among the mare's-tails yonder? We are very rich in orchids on the moor, though, of course, you are rather late to see the beauties of the place.\"\n\nStapleton had abandoned the chase and came back to us breathing hard and flushed with his exertions.\n\n\"Halloa, Beryl!\" said he, and it seemed to me that the tone of his greeting was not altogether a cordial one.\n\n\"Well, Jack, you are very hot.\"\n\n\"Yes, I was chasing a Cyclopides. He is very rare and seldom found in the late autumn. What a pity that I should have missed him!\" He spoke unconcernedly, but his small light eyes glanced incessantly from the girl to me.\n\n\"You have introduced yourselves, I can see.\"\n\n\"Yes. I was telling Sir Henry that it was rather late for him to see the true beauties of the moor.\"\n\n\"Why, who do you think this is?\"\n\n\"I imagine that it must be Sir Henry Baskerville.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" said I. \"Only a humble commoner, but his friend. My name is Dr. Watson.\"\n\nA flush of vexation passed over her expressive face. \"We have been talking at cross purposes,\" said she.\n\n\"Why, you had not very much time for talk,\" her brother remarked with the same questioning eyes.\n\n\"I talked as if Dr. Watson were a resident instead of being merely a visitor,\" said she. \"It cannot much matter to him whether it is early or late for the orchids. But you will come on, will you not, and see Merripit House?\"\n\nA short walk brought us to it, a bleak moorland house, once the farm of some grazier in the old prosperous days, but now put into repair and turned into a modern dwelling. An orchard surrounded it, but the trees, as is usual upon the moor, were stunted and nipped, and the effect of the whole place was mean and melancholy. We were admitted by a strange, wizened, rusty-coated old manservant, who seemed in keeping with the house. Inside, however, there were large rooms furnished with an elegance in which I seemed to recognize the taste of the lady. As I looked from their windows at the interminable granite-flecked moor rolling unbroken to the farthest horizon I could not but marvel at what could have brought this highly educated man and this beautiful woman to live in such a place.\n\n\"Queer spot to choose, is it not?\" said he as if in answer to my thought. \"And yet we manage to make ourselves fairly happy, do we not, Beryl?\"\n\n\"Quite happy,\" said she, but there was no ring of conviction in her words.\n\n\"I had a school,\" said Stapleton. \"It was in the north country. The work to a man of my temperament was mechanical and uninteresting, but the privilege of living with youth, of helping to mould those young minds, and of impressing them with one's own character and ideals was very dear to me. However, the fates were against us. A serious epidemic broke out in the school and three of the boys died. It never recovered from the blow, and much of my capital was irretrievably swallowed up. And yet, if it were not for the loss of the charming companionship of the boys, I could rejoice over my own misfortune, for, with my strong tastes for botany and zoology, I find an unlimited field of work here, and my sister is as devoted to Nature as I am. All this, Dr. Watson, has been brought upon your head by your expression as you surveyed the moor out of our window.\"\n\n\"It certainly did cross my mind that it might be a little dull\u2014less for you, perhaps, than for your sister.\"\n\n\"No, no, I am never dull,\" said she quickly.\n\n\"We have books, we have our studies, and we have interesting neighbours. Dr. Mortimer is a most learned man in his own line. Poor Sir Charles was also an admirable companion. We knew him well and miss him more than I can tell. Do you think that I should intrude if I were to call this afternoon and make the acquaintance of Sir Henry?\"\n\n\"I am sure that he would be delighted.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps you would mention that I propose to do so. We may in our humble way do something to make things more easy for him until he becomes accustomed to his new surroundings. Will you come upstairs, Dr. Watson, and inspect my collection of Lepidoptera? I think it is the most complete one in the south-west of England. By the time that you have looked through them lunch will be almost ready.\"\n\nBut I was eager to get back to my charge. The melancholy of the moor, the death of the unfortunate pony, the weird sound which had been associated with the grim legend of the Baskervilles, all these things tinged my thoughts with sadness. Then on the top of these more or less vague impressions there had come the definite and distinct warning of Miss Stapleton, delivered with such intense earnestness that I could not doubt that some grave and deep reason lay behind it. I resisted all pressure to stay for lunch, and I set off at once upon my return journey, taking the grass-grown path by which we had come.\n\nIt seems, however, that there must have been some short cut for those who knew it, for before I had reached the road I was astounded to see Miss Stapleton sitting upon a rock by the side of the track. Her face was beautifully flushed with her exertions, and she held her hand to her side.\n\n\"I have run all the way in order to cut you off, Dr. Watson,\" said she. \"I had not even time to put on my hat. I must not stop, or my brother may miss me. I wanted to say to you how sorry I am about the stupid mistake I made in thinking that you were Sir Henry. Please forget the words I said, which have no application whatever to you.\"\n\n\"But I can't forget them, Miss Stapleton,\" said I. \"I am Sir Henry's friend, and his welfare is a very close concern of mine. Tell me why it was that you were so eager that Sir Henry should return to London.\"\n\n\"A woman's whim, Dr. Watson. When you know me better you will understand that I cannot always give reasons for what I say or do.\"\n\n\"No, no. I remember the thrill in your voice. I remember the look in your eyes. Please, please, be frank with me, Miss Stapleton, for ever since I have been here I have been conscious of shadows all round me. Life has become like that great Grimpen Mire, with little green patches everywhere into which one may sink and with no guide to point the track. Tell me then what it was that you meant, and I will promise to convey your warning to Sir Henry.\"\n\nAn expression of irresolution passed for an instant over her face, but her eyes had hardened again when she answered me.\n\n\"You make too much of it, Dr. Watson,\" said she. \"My brother and I were very much shocked by the death of Sir Charles. We knew him very intimately, for his favourite walk was over the moor to our house. He was deeply impressed with the curse which hung over his family, and when this tragedy came I naturally felt that there must be some grounds for the fears which he had expressed. I was distressed therefore when another member of the family came down to live here, and I felt that he should be warned of the danger which he will run. That was all which I intended to convey.\"\n\n\"But what is the danger?\"\n\n\"You know the story of the hound?\"\n\n\"I do not believe in such nonsense.\"\n\n\"But I do. If you have any influence with Sir Henry, take him away from a place which has always been fatal to his family. The world is wide. Why should he wish to live at the place of danger?\"\n\n\"Because it is the place of danger. That is Sir Henry's nature. I fear that unless you can give me some more definite information than this it would be impossible to get him to move.\"\n\n\"I cannot say anything definite, for I do not know anything definite.\"\n\n\"I would ask you one more question, Miss Stapleton. If you meant no more than this when you first spoke to me, why should you not wish your brother to overhear what you said? There is nothing to which he, or anyone else, could object.\"\n\n\"My brother is very anxious to have the Hall inhabited, for he thinks that it is for the good of the poor folk upon the moor. He would be very angry if he knew that I had said anything which might induce Sir Henry to go away. But I have done my duty now and I will say no more. I must get back, or he will miss me and suspect that I have seen you. Good-bye!\" She turned and had disappeared in a few minutes among the scattered boulders, while I, with my soul full of vague fears, pursued my way to Baskerville Hall." + }, + { + "title": "First Report of Dr. Watson", + "text": "From this point onward I will follow the course of events by transcribing my own letters to Mr. Sherlock Holmes which lie before me on the table. One page is missing, but otherwise they are exactly as written and show my feelings and suspicions of the moment more accurately than my memory, clear as it is upon these tragic events, can possibly do.\n\nBaskerville Hall, October 13th.\n\nMY DEAR HOLMES:\n\nMy previous letters and telegrams have kept you pretty well up to date as to all that has occurred in this most God-forsaken corner of the world. The longer one stays here the more does the spirit of the moor sink into one's soul, its vastness, and also its grim charm. When you are once out upon its bosom you have left all traces of modern England behind you, but, on the other hand, you are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of the prehistoric people. On all sides of you as you walk are the houses of these forgotten folk, with their graves and the huge monoliths which are supposed to have marked their temples. As you look at their gray stone huts against the scarred hillsides you leave your own age behind you, and if you were to see a skin-clad, hairy man crawl out from the low door, fitting a flint-tipped arrow on to the string of his bow, you would feel that his presence there was more natural than your own. The strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil. I am no antiquarian, but I could imagine that they were some unwarlike and harried race who were forced to accept that which none other would occupy.\n\nAll this, however, is foreign to the mission on which you sent me and will probably be very uninteresting to your severely practical mind. I can still remember your complete indifference as to whether the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun. Let me, therefore, return to the facts concerning Sir Henry Baskerville.\n\nIf you have not had any report within the last few days it is because up to to-day there was nothing of importance to relate. Then a very surprising circumstance occurred, which I shall tell you in due course. But, first of all, I must keep you in touch with some of the other factors in the situation.\n\nOne of these, concerning which I have said little, is the escaped convict upon the moor. There is strong reason now to believe that he has got right away, which is a considerable relief to the lonely householders of this district. A fortnight has passed since his flight, during which he has not been seen and nothing has been heard of him. It is surely inconceivable that he could have held out upon the moor during all that time. Of course, so far as his concealment goes there is no difficulty at all. Any one of these stone huts would give him a hiding-place. But there is nothing to eat unless he were to catch and slaughter one of the moor sheep. We think, therefore, that he has gone, and the outlying farmers sleep the better in consequence.\n\nWe are four able-bodied men in this household, so that we could take good care of ourselves, but I confess that I have had uneasy moments when I have thought of the Stapletons. They live miles from any help. There are one maid, an old manservant, the sister, and the brother, the latter not a very strong man. They would be helpless in the hands of a desperate fellow like this Notting Hill criminal if he could once effect an entrance. Both Sir Henry and I were concerned at their situation, and it was suggested that Perkins the groom should go over to sleep there, but Stapleton would not hear of it.\n\nThe fact is that our friend, the baronet, begins to display a considerable interest in our fair neighbour. It is not to be wondered at, for time hangs heavily in this lonely spot to an active man like him, and she is a very fascinating and beautiful woman. There is something tropical and exotic about her which forms a singular contrast to her cool and unemotional brother. Yet he also gives the idea of hidden fires. He has certainly a very marked influence over her, for I have seen her continually glance at him as she talked as if seeking approbation for what she said. I trust that he is kind to her. There is a dry glitter in his eyes and a firm set of his thin lips, which goes with a positive and possibly a harsh nature. You would find him an interesting study.\n\nHe came over to call upon Baskerville on that first day, and the very next morning he took us both to show us the spot where the legend of the wicked Hugo is supposed to have had its origin. It was an excursion of some miles across the moor to a place which is so dismal that it might have suggested the story. We found a short valley between rugged tors which led to an open, grassy space flecked over with the white cotton grass. In the middle of it rose two great stones, worn and sharpened at the upper end until they looked like the huge corroding fangs of some monstrous beast. In every way it corresponded with the scene of the old tragedy. Sir Henry was much interested and asked Stapleton more than once whether he did really believe in the possibility of the interference of the supernatural in the affairs of men. He spoke lightly, but it was evident that he was very much in earnest. Stapleton was guarded in his replies, but it was easy to see that he said less than he might, and that he would not express his whole opinion out of consideration for the feelings of the baronet. He told us of similar cases, where families had suffered from some evil influence, and he left us with the impression that he shared the popular view upon the matter.\n\nOn our way back we stayed for lunch at Merripit House, and it was there that Sir Henry made the acquaintance of Miss Stapleton. From the first moment that he saw her he appeared to be strongly attracted by her, and I am much mistaken if the feeling was not mutual. He referred to her again and again on our walk home, and since then hardly a day has passed that we have not seen something of the brother and sister. They dine here to-night, and there is some talk of our going to them next week. One would imagine that such a match would be very welcome to Stapleton, and yet I have more than once caught a look of the strongest disapprobation in his face when Sir Henry has been paying some attention to his sister. He is much attached to her, no doubt, and would lead a lonely life without her, but it would seem the height of selfishness if he were to stand in the way of her making so brilliant a marriage. Yet I am certain that he does not wish their intimacy to ripen into love, and I have several times observed that he has taken pains to prevent them from being t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate. By the way, your instructions to me never to allow Sir Henry to go out alone will become very much more onerous if a love affair were to be added to our other difficulties. My popularity would soon suffer if I were to carry out your orders to the letter.\n\nThe other day\u2014Thursday, to be more exact\u2014Dr. Mortimer lunched with us. He has been excavating a barrow at Long Down and has got a prehistoric skull which fills him with great joy. Never was there such a single-minded enthusiast as he! The Stapletons came in afterwards, and the good doctor took us all to the yew alley at Sir Henry's request to show us exactly how everything occurred upon that fatal night. It is a long, dismal walk, the yew alley, between two high walls of clipped hedge, with a narrow band of grass upon either side. At the far end is an old tumble-down summer-house. Halfway down is the moor-gate, where the old gentleman left his cigar-ash. It is a white wooden gate with a latch. Beyond it lies the wide moor. I remembered your theory of the affair and tried to picture all that had occurred. As the old man stood there he saw something coming across the moor, something which terrified him so that he lost his wits and ran and ran until he died of sheer horror and exhaustion. There was the long, gloomy tunnel down which he fled. And from what? A sheep-dog of the moor? Or a spectral hound, black, silent, and monstrous? Was there a human agency in the matter? Did the pale, watchful Barrymore know more than he cared to say? It was all dim and vague, but always there is the dark shadow of crime behind it.\n\nOne other neighbour I have met since I wrote last. This is Mr. Frankland, of Lafter Hall, who lives some four miles to the south of us. He is an elderly man, red-faced, white-haired, and choleric. His passion is for the British law, and he has spent a large fortune in litigation. He fights for the mere pleasure of fighting and is equally ready to take up either side of a question, so that it is no wonder that he has found it a costly amusement. Sometimes he will shut up a right of way and defy the parish to make him open it. At others he will with his own hands tear down some other man's gate and declare that a path has existed there from time immemorial, defying the owner to prosecute him for trespass. He is learned in old manorial and communal rights, and he applies his knowledge sometimes in favour of the villagers of Fernworthy and sometimes against them, so that he is periodically either carried in triumph down the village street or else burned in effigy, according to his latest exploit. He is said to have about seven lawsuits upon his hands at present, which will probably swallow up the remainder of his fortune and so draw his sting and leave him harmless for the future. Apart from the law he seems a kindly, good-natured person, and I only mention him because you were particular that I should send some description of the people who surround us. He is curiously employed at present, for, being an amateur astronomer, he has an excellent telescope, with which he lies upon the roof of his own house and sweeps the moor all day in the hope of catching a glimpse of the escaped convict. If he would confine his energies to this all would be well, but there are rumours that he intends to prosecute Dr. Mortimer for opening a grave without the consent of the next of kin because he dug up the neolithic skull in the barrow on Long Down. He helps to keep our lives from being monotonous and gives a little comic relief where it is badly needed.\n\nAnd now, having brought you up to date in the escaped convict, the Stapletons, Dr. Mortimer, and Frankland, of Lafter Hall, let me end on that which is most important and tell you more about the Barrymores, and especially about the surprising development of last night.\n\nFirst of all about the test telegram, which you sent from London in order to make sure that Barrymore was really here. I have already explained that the testimony of the postmaster shows that the test was worthless and that we have no proof one way or the other. I told Sir Henry how the matter stood, and he at once, in his downright fashion, had Barrymore up and asked him whether he had received the telegram himself. Barrymore said that he had.\n\n\"Did the boy deliver it into your own hands?\" asked Sir Henry.\n\nBarrymore looked surprised, and considered for a little time.\n\n\"No,\" said he, \"I was in the box-room at the time, and my wife brought it up to me.\"\n\n\"Did you answer it yourself?\"\n\n\"No; I told my wife what to answer and she went down to write it.\"\n\nIn the evening he recurred to the subject of his own accord.\n\n\"I could not quite understand the object of your questions this morning, Sir Henry,\" said he. \"I trust that they do not mean that I have done anything to forfeit your confidence?\"\n\nSir Henry had to assure him that it was not so and pacify him by giving him a considerable part of his old wardrobe, the London outfit having now all arrived.\n\nMrs. Barrymore is of interest to me. She is a heavy, solid person, very limited, intensely respectable, and inclined to be puritanical. You could hardly conceive a less emotional subject. Yet I have told you how, on the first night here, I heard her sobbing bitterly, and since then I have more than once observed traces of tears upon her face. Some deep sorrow gnaws ever at her heart. Sometimes I wonder if she has a guilty memory which haunts her, and sometimes I suspect Barrymore of being a domestic tyrant. I have always felt that there was something singular and questionable in this man's character, but the adventure of last night brings all my suspicions to a head.\n\nAnd yet it may seem a small matter in itself. You are aware that I am not a very sound sleeper, and since I have been on guard in this house my slumbers have been lighter than ever. Last night, about two in the morning, I was aroused by a stealthy step passing my room. I rose, opened my door, and peeped out. A long black shadow was trailing down the corridor. It was thrown by a man who walked softly down the passage with a candle held in his hand. He was in shirt and trousers, with no covering to his feet. I could merely see the outline, but his height told me that it was Barrymore. He walked very slowly and circumspectly, and there was something indescribably guilty and furtive in his whole appearance.\n\nI have told you that the corridor is broken by the balcony which runs round the hall, but that it is resumed upon the farther side. I waited until he had passed out of sight and then I followed him. When I came round the balcony he had reached the end of the farther corridor, and I could see from the glimmer of light through an open door that he had entered one of the rooms. Now, all these rooms are unfurnished and unoccupied, so that his expedition became more mysterious than ever. The light shone steadily as if he were standing motionless. I crept down the passage as noiselessly as I could and peeped round the corner of the door.\n\nBarrymore was crouching at the window with the candle held against the glass. His profile was half turned towards me, and his face seemed to be rigid with expectation as he stared out into the blackness of the moor. For some minutes he stood watching intently. Then he gave a deep groan and with an impatient gesture he put out the light. Instantly I made my way back to my room, and very shortly came the stealthy steps passing once more upon their return journey. Long afterwards when I had fallen into a light sleep I heard a key turn somewhere in a lock, but I could not tell whence the sound came. What it all means I cannot guess, but there is some secret business going on in this house of gloom which sooner or later we shall get to the bottom of. I do not trouble you with my theories, for you asked me to furnish you only with facts. I have had a long talk with Sir Henry this morning, and we have made a plan of campaign founded upon my observations of last night. I will not speak about it just now, but it should make my next report interesting reading." + }, + { + "title": "Second Report of Dr. Watson", + "text": "[ The Light Upon the Moor ]\n\nBaskerville Hall, Oct. 15th.\n\nMY DEAR HOLMES:\n\nIf I was compelled to leave you without much news during the early days of my mission you must acknowledge that I am making up for lost time, and that events are now crowding thick and fast upon us. In my last report I ended upon my top note with Barrymore at the window, and now I have quite a budget already which will, unless I am much mistaken, considerably surprise you. Things have taken a turn which I could not have anticipated. In some ways they have within the last forty-eight hours become much clearer and in some ways they have become more complicated. But I will tell you all and you shall judge for yourself.\n\nBefore breakfast on the morning following my adventure I went down the corridor and examined the room in which Barrymore had been on the night before. The western window through which he had stared so intently has, I noticed, one peculiarity above all other windows in the house\u2014it commands the nearest outlook on to the moor. There is an opening between two trees which enables one from this point of view to look right down upon it, while from all the other windows it is only a distant glimpse which can be obtained. It follows, therefore, that Barrymore, since only this window would serve the purpose, must have been looking out for something or somebody upon the moor. The night was very dark, so that I can hardly imagine how he could have hoped to see anyone. It had struck me that it was possible that some love intrigue was on foot. That would have accounted for his stealthy movements and also for the uneasiness of his wife. The man is a striking-looking fellow, very well equipped to steal the heart of a country girl, so that this theory seemed to have something to support it. That opening of the door which I had heard after I had returned to my room might mean that he had gone out to keep some clandestine appointment. So I reasoned with myself in the morning, and I tell you the direction of my suspicions, however much the result may have shown that they were unfounded.\n\nBut whatever the true explanation of Barrymore's movements might be, I felt that the responsibility of keeping them to myself until I could explain them was more than I could bear. I had an interview with the baronet in his study after breakfast, and I told him all that I had seen. He was less surprised than I had expected.\n\n\"I knew that Barrymore walked about nights, and I had a mind to speak to him about it,\" said he. \"Two or three times I have heard his steps in the passage, coming and going, just about the hour you name.\"\n\n\"Perhaps then he pays a visit every night to that particular window,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Perhaps he does. If so, we should be able to shadow him and see what it is that he is after. I wonder what your friend Holmes would do if he were here.\"\n\n\"I believe that he would do exactly what you now suggest,\" said I. \"He would follow Barrymore and see what he did.\"\n\n\"Then we shall do it together.\"\n\n\"But surely he would hear us.\"\n\n\"The man is rather deaf, and in any case we must take our chance of that. We'll sit up in my room to-night and wait until he passes.\" Sir Henry rubbed his hands with pleasure, and it was evident that he hailed the adventure as a relief to his somewhat quiet life upon the moor.\n\nThe baronet has been in communication with the architect who prepared the plans for Sir Charles, and with a contractor from London, so that we may expect great changes to begin here soon. There have been decorators and furnishers up from Plymouth, and it is evident that our friend has large ideas and means to spare no pains or expense to restore the grandeur of his family. When the house is renovated and refurnished, all that he will need will be a wife to make it complete. Between ourselves there are pretty clear signs that this will not be wanting if the lady is willing, for I have seldom seen a man more infatuated with a woman than he is with our beautiful neighbour, Miss Stapleton. And yet the course of true love does not run quite as smoothly as one would under the circumstances expect. Today, for example, its surface was broken by a very unexpected ripple, which has caused our friend considerable perplexity and annoyance.\n\nAfter the conversation which I have quoted about Barrymore, Sir Henry put on his hat and prepared to go out. As a matter of course I did the same.\n\n\"What, are you coming, Watson?\" he asked, looking at me in a curious way.\n\n\"That depends on whether you are going on the moor,\" said I.\n\n\"Yes, I am.\"\n\n\"Well, you know what my instructions are. I am sorry to intrude, but you heard how earnestly Holmes insisted that I should not leave you, and especially that you should not go alone upon the moor.\"\n\nSir Henry put his hand upon my shoulder with a pleasant smile.\n\n\"My dear fellow,\" said he, \"Holmes, with all his wisdom, did not foresee some things which have happened since I have been on the moor. You understand me? I am sure that you are the last man in the world who would wish to be a spoil-sport. I must go out alone.\"\n\nIt put me in a most awkward position. I was at a loss what to say or what to do, and before I had made up my mind he picked up his cane and was gone.\n\nBut when I came to think the matter over my conscience reproached me bitterly for having on any pretext allowed him to go out of my sight. I imagined what my feelings would be if I had to return to you and to confess that some misfortune had occurred through my disregard for your instructions. I assure you my cheeks flushed at the very thought. It might not even now be too late to overtake him, so I set off at once in the direction of Merripit House.\n\nI hurried along the road at the top of my speed without seeing anything of Sir Henry, until I came to the point where the moor path branches off. There, fearing that perhaps I had come in the wrong direction after all, I mounted a hill from which I could command a view\u2014the same hill which is cut into the dark quarry. Thence I saw him at once. He was on the moor path, about a quarter of a mile off, and a lady was by his side who could only be Miss Stapleton. It was clear that there was already an understanding between them and that they had met by appointment. They were walking slowly along in deep conversation, and I saw her making quick little movements of her hands as if she were very earnest in what she was saying, while he listened intently, and once or twice shook his head in strong dissent. I stood among the rocks watching them, very much puzzled as to what I should do next. To follow them and break into their intimate conversation seemed to be an outrage, and yet my clear duty was never for an instant to let him out of my sight. To act the spy upon a friend was a hateful task. Still, I could see no better course than to observe him from the hill, and to clear my conscience by confessing to him afterwards what I had done. It is true that if any sudden danger had threatened him I was too far away to be of use, and yet I am sure that you will agree with me that the position was very difficult, and that there was nothing more which I could do.\n\nOur friend, Sir Henry, and the lady had halted on the path and were standing deeply absorbed in their conversation, when I was suddenly aware that I was not the only witness of their interview. A wisp of green floating in the air caught my eye, and another glance showed me that it was carried on a stick by a man who was moving among the broken ground. It was Stapleton with his butterfly-net. He was very much closer to the pair than I was, and he appeared to be moving in their direction. At this instant Sir Henry suddenly drew Miss Stapleton to his side. His arm was round her, but it seemed to me that she was straining away from him with her face averted. He stooped his head to hers, and she raised one hand as if in protest. Next moment I saw them spring apart and turn hurriedly round. Stapleton was the cause of the interruption. He was running wildly towards them, his absurd net dangling behind him. He gesticulated and almost danced with excitement in front of the lovers. What the scene meant I could not imagine, but it seemed to me that Stapleton was abusing Sir Henry, who offered explanations, which became more angry as the other refused to accept them. The lady stood by in haughty silence. Finally Stapleton turned upon his heel and beckoned in a peremptory way to his sister, who, after an irresolute glance at Sir Henry, walked off by the side of her brother. The naturalist's angry gestures showed that the lady was included in his displeasure. The baronet stood for a minute looking after them, and then he walked slowly back the way that he had come, his head hanging, the very picture of dejection.\n\nWhat all this meant I could not imagine, but I was deeply ashamed to have witnessed so intimate a scene without my friend's knowledge. I ran down the hill therefore and met the baronet at the bottom. His face was flushed with anger and his brows were wrinkled, like one who is at his wit's ends what to do.\n\n\"Halloa, Watson! Where have you dropped from?\" said he. \"You don't mean to say that you came after me in spite of all?\"\n\nI explained everything to him: how I had found it impossible to remain behind, how I had followed him, and how I had witnessed all that had occurred. For an instant his eyes blazed at me, but my frankness disarmed his anger, and he broke at last into a rather rueful laugh.\n\n\"You would have thought the middle of that prairie a fairly safe place for a man to be private,\" said he, \"but, by thunder, the whole countryside seems to have been out to see me do my wooing\u2014and a mighty poor wooing at that! Where had you engaged a seat?\"\n\n\"I was on that hill.\"\n\n\"Quite in the back row, eh? But her brother was well up to the front. Did you see him come out on us?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did.\"\n\n\"Did he ever strike you as being crazy\u2014this brother of hers?\"\n\n\"I can't say that he ever did.\"\n\n\"I dare say not. I always thought him sane enough until to-day, but you can take it from me that either he or I ought to be in a straitjacket. What's the matter with me, anyhow? You've lived near me for some weeks, Watson. Tell me straight, now! Is there anything that would prevent me from making a good husband to a woman that I loved?\"\n\n\"I should say not.\"\n\n\"He can't object to my worldly position, so it must be myself that he has this down on. What has he against me? I never hurt man or woman in my life that I know of. And yet he would not so much as let me touch the tips of her fingers.\"\n\n\"Did he say so?\"\n\n\"That, and a deal more. I tell you, Watson, I've only known her these few weeks, but from the first I just felt that she was made for me, and she, too\u2014she was happy when she was with me, and that I'll swear. There's a light in a woman's eyes that speaks louder than words. But he has never let us get together, and it was only to-day for the first time that I saw a chance of having a few words with her alone. She was glad to meet me, but when she did it was not love that she would talk about, and she wouldn't have let me talk about it either if she could have stopped it. She kept coming back to it that this was a place of danger, and that she would never be happy until I had left it. I told her that since I had seen her I was in no hurry to leave it, and that if she really wanted me to go, the only way to work it was for her to arrange to go with me. With that I offered in as many words to marry her, but before she could answer, down came this brother of hers, running at us with a face on him like a madman. He was just white with rage, and those light eyes of his were blazing with fury. What was I doing with the lady? How dared I offer her attentions which were distasteful to her? Did I think that because I was a baronet I could do what I liked? If he had not been her brother I should have known better how to answer him. As it was I told him that my feelings towards his sister were such as I was not ashamed of, and that I hoped that she might honour me by becoming my wife. That seemed to make the matter no better, so then I lost my temper too, and I answered him rather more hotly than I should perhaps, considering that she was standing by. So it ended by his going off with her, as you saw, and here am I as badly puzzled a man as any in this county. Just tell me what it all means, Watson, and I'll owe you more than ever I can hope to pay.\"\n\nI tried one or two explanations, but, indeed, I was completely puzzled myself. Our friend's title, his fortune, his age, his character, and his appearance are all in his favour, and I know nothing against him unless it be this dark fate which runs in his family. That his advances should be rejected so brusquely without any reference to the lady's own wishes and that the lady should accept the situation without protest is very amazing. However, our conjectures were set at rest by a visit from Stapleton himself that very afternoon. He had come to offer apologies for his rudeness of the morning, and after a long private interview with Sir Henry in his study the upshot of their conversation was that the breach is quite healed, and that we are to dine at Merripit House next Friday as a sign of it.\n\n\"I don't say now that he isn't a crazy man,\" said Sir Henry; \"I can't forget the look in his eyes when he ran at me this morning, but I must allow that no man could make a more handsome apology than he has done.\"\n\n\"Did he give any explanation of his conduct?\"\n\n\"His sister is everything in his life, he says. That is natural enough, and I am glad that he should understand her value. They have always been together, and according to his account he has been a very lonely man with only her as a companion, so that the thought of losing her was really terrible to him. He had not understood, he said, that I was becoming attached to her, but when he saw with his own eyes that it was really so, and that she might be taken away from him, it gave him such a shock that for a time he was not responsible for what he said or did. He was very sorry for all that had passed, and he recognized how foolish and how selfish it was that he should imagine that he could hold a beautiful woman like his sister to himself for her whole life. If she had to leave him he had rather it was to a neighbour like myself than to anyone else. But in any case it was a blow to him, and it would take him some time before he could prepare himself to meet it. He would withdraw all opposition upon his part if I would promise for three months to let the matter rest and to be content with cultivating the lady's friendship during that time without claiming her love. This I promised, and so the matter rests.\"\n\nSo there is one of our small mysteries cleared up. It is something to have touched bottom anywhere in this bog in which we are floundering. We know now why Stapleton looked with disfavour upon his sister's suitor\u2014even when that suitor was so eligible a one as Sir Henry. And now I pass on to another thread which I have extricated out of the tangled skein, the mystery of the sobs in the night, of the tear-stained face of Mrs. Barrymore, of the secret journey of the butler to the western lattice window. Congratulate me, my dear Holmes, and tell me that I have not disappointed you as an agent\u2014that you do not regret the confidence which you showed in me when you sent me down. All these things have by one night's work been thoroughly cleared.\n\nI have said \"by one night's work,\" but, in truth, it was by two nights' work, for on the first we drew entirely blank. I sat up with Sir Henry in his rooms until nearly three o'clock in the morning, but no sound of any sort did we hear except the chiming clock upon the stairs. It was a most melancholy vigil and ended by each of us falling asleep in our chairs. Fortunately we were not discouraged, and we determined to try again. The next night we lowered the lamp and sat smoking cigarettes without making the least sound. It was incredible how slowly the hours crawled by, and yet we were helped through it by the same sort of patient interest which the hunter must feel as he watches the trap into which he hopes the game may wander. One struck, and two, and we had almost for the second time given it up in despair when in an instant we both sat bolt upright in our chairs, with all our weary senses keenly on the alert once more. We had heard the creak of a step in the passage.\n\nVery stealthily we heard it pass along until it died away in the distance. Then the baronet gently opened his door and we set out in pursuit. Already our man had gone round the gallery, and the corridor was all in darkness. Softly we stole along until we had come into the other wing. We were just in time to catch a glimpse of the tall, black-bearded figure, his shoulders rounded, as he tiptoed down the passage. Then he passed through the same door as before, and the light of the candle framed it in the darkness and shot one single yellow beam across the gloom of the corridor. We shuffled cautiously towards it, trying every plank before we dared to put our whole weight upon it. We had taken the precaution of leaving our boots behind us, but, even so, the old boards snapped and creaked beneath our tread. Sometimes it seemed impossible that he should fail to hear our approach. However, the man is fortunately rather deaf, and he was entirely preoccupied in that which he was doing. When at last we reached the door and peeped through we found him crouching at the window, candle in hand, his white, intent face pressed against the pane, exactly as I had seen him two nights before.\n\nWe had arranged no plan of campaign, but the baronet is a man to whom the most direct way is always the most natural. He walked into the room, and as he did so Barrymore sprang up from the window with a sharp hiss of his breath and stood, livid and trembling, before us. His dark eyes, glaring out of the white mask of his face, were full of horror and astonishment as he gazed from Sir Henry to me.\n\n\"What are you doing here, Barrymore?\"\n\n\"Nothing, sir.\" His agitation was so great that he could hardly speak, and the shadows sprang up and down from the shaking of his candle. \"It was the window, sir. I go round at night to see that they are fastened.\"\n\n\"On the second floor?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, all the windows.\"\n\n\"Look here, Barrymore,\" said Sir Henry sternly, \"we have made up our minds to have the truth out of you, so it will save you trouble to tell it sooner rather than later. Come, now! No lies! What were you doing at that window?\"\n\nThe fellow looked at us in a helpless way, and he wrung his hands together like one who is in the last extremity of doubt and misery.\n\n\"I was doing no harm, sir. I was holding a candle to the window.\"\n\n\"And why were you holding a candle to the window?\"\n\n\"Don't ask me, Sir Henry\u2014don't ask me! I give you my word, sir, that it is not my secret, and that I cannot tell it. If it concerned no one but myself I would not try to keep it from you.\"\n\nA sudden idea occurred to me, and I took the candle from the trembling hand of the butler.\n\n\"He must have been holding it as a signal,\" said I. \"Let us see if there is any answer.\" I held it as he had done, and stared out into the darkness of the night. Vaguely I could discern the black bank of the trees and the lighter expanse of the moor, for the moon was behind the clouds. And then I gave a cry of exultation, for a tiny pin-point of yellow light had suddenly transfixed the dark veil, and glowed steadily in the centre of the black square framed by the window.\n\n\"There it is!\" I cried.\n\n\"No, no, sir, it is nothing\u2014nothing at all!\" the butler broke in; \"I assure you, sir\u2014\"\n\n\"Move your light across the window, Watson!\" cried the baronet. \"See, the other moves also! Now, you rascal, do you deny that it is a signal? Come, speak up! Who is your confederate out yonder, and what is this conspiracy that is going on?\"\n\nThe man's face became openly defiant.\n\n\"It is my business, and not yours. I will not tell.\"\n\n\"Then you leave my employment right away.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir. If I must I must.\"\n\n\"And you go in disgrace. By thunder, you may well be ashamed of yourself. Your family has lived with mine for over a hundred years under this roof, and here I find you deep in some dark plot against me.\"\n\n\"No, no, sir; no, not against you!\" It was a woman's voice, and Mrs. Barrymore, paler and more horror-struck than her husband, was standing at the door. Her bulky figure in a shawl and skirt might have been comic were it not for the intensity of feeling upon her face.\n\n\"We have to go, Eliza. This is the end of it. You can pack our things,\" said the butler.\n\n\"Oh, John, John, have I brought you to this? It is my doing, Sir Henry\u2014all mine. He has done nothing except for my sake, and because I asked him.\"\n\n\"Speak out, then! What does it mean?\"\n\n\"My unhappy brother is starving on the moor. We cannot let him perish at our very gates. The light is a signal to him that food is ready for him, and his light out yonder is to show the spot to which to bring it.\"\n\n\"Then your brother is\u2014\"\n\n\"The escaped convict, sir\u2014Selden, the criminal.\"\n\n\"That's the truth, sir,\" said Barrymore. \"I said that it was not my secret and that I could not tell it to you. But now you have heard it, and you will see that if there was a plot it was not against you.\"\n\nThis, then, was the explanation of the stealthy expeditions at night and the light at the window. Sir Henry and I both stared at the woman in amazement. Was it possible that this stolidly respectable person was of the same blood as one of the most notorious criminals in the country?\n\n\"Yes, sir, my name was Selden, and he is my younger brother. We humoured him too much when he was a lad and gave him his own way in everything until he came to think that the world was made for his pleasure, and that he could do what he liked in it. Then as he grew older he met wicked companions, and the devil entered into him until he broke my mother's heart and dragged our name in the dirt. From crime to crime he sank lower and lower until it is only the mercy of God which has snatched him from the scaffold; but to me, sir, he was always the little curly-headed boy that I had nursed and played with as an elder sister would. That was why he broke prison, sir. He knew that I was here and that we could not refuse to help him. When he dragged himself here one night, weary and starving, with the warders hard at his heels, what could we do? We took him in and fed him and cared for him. Then you returned, sir, and my brother thought he would be safer on the moor than anywhere else until the hue and cry was over, so he lay in hiding there. But every second night we made sure if he was still there by putting a light in the window, and if there was an answer my husband took out some bread and meat to him. Every day we hoped that he was gone, but as long as he was there we could not desert him. That is the whole truth, as I am an honest Christian woman, and you will see that if there is blame in the matter it does not lie with my husband but with me, for whose sake he has done all that he has.\"\n\nThe woman's words came with an intense earnestness which carried conviction with them.\n\n\"Is this true, Barrymore?\"\n\n\"Yes, Sir Henry. Every word of it.\"\n\n\"Well, I cannot blame you for standing by your own wife. Forget what I have said. Go to your room, you two, and we shall talk further about this matter in the morning.\"\n\nWhen they were gone we looked out of the window again. Sir Henry had flung it open, and the cold night wind beat in upon our faces. Far away in the black distance there still glowed that one tiny point of yellow light.\n\n\"I wonder he dares,\" said Sir Henry.\n\n\"It may be so placed as to be only visible from here.\"\n\n\"Very likely. How far do you think it is?\"\n\n\"Out by the Cleft Tor, I think.\"\n\n\"Not more than a mile or two off.\"\n\n\"Hardly that.\"\n\n\"Well, it cannot be far if Barrymore had to carry out the food to it. And he is waiting, this villain, beside that candle. By thunder, Watson, I am going out to take that man!\"\n\nThe same thought had crossed my own mind. It was not as if the Barrymores had taken us into their confidence. Their secret had been forced from them. The man was a danger to the community, an unmitigated scoundrel for whom there was neither pity nor excuse. We were only doing our duty in taking this chance of putting him back where he could do no harm. With his brutal and violent nature, others would have to pay the price if we held our hands. Any night, for example, our neighbours the Stapletons might be attacked by him, and it may have been the thought of this which made Sir Henry so keen upon the adventure.\n\n\"I will come,\" said I.\n\n\"Then get your revolver and put on your boots. The sooner we start the better, as the fellow may put out his light and be off.\"\n\nIn five minutes we were outside the door, starting upon our expedition. We hurried through the dark shrubbery, amid the dull moaning of the autumn wind and the rustle of the falling leaves. The night air was heavy with the smell of damp and decay. Now and again the moon peeped out for an instant, but clouds were driving over the face of the sky, and just as we came out on the moor a thin rain began to fall. The light still burned steadily in front.\n\n\"Are you armed?\" I asked.\n\n\"I have a hunting-crop.\"\n\n\"We must close in on him rapidly, for he is said to be a desperate fellow. We shall take him by surprise and have him at our mercy before he can resist.\"\n\n\"I say, Watson,\" said the baronet, \"what would Holmes say to this? How about that hour of darkness in which the power of evil is exalted?\"\n\nAs if in answer to his words there rose suddenly out of the vast gloom of the moor that strange cry which I had already heard upon the borders of the great Grimpen Mire. It came with the wind through the silence of the night, a long, deep mutter, then a rising howl, and then the sad moan in which it died away. Again and again it sounded, the whole air throbbing with it, strident, wild, and menacing. The baronet caught my sleeve and his face glimmered white through the darkness.\n\n\"My God, what's that, Watson?\"\n\n\"I don't know. It's a sound they have on the moor. I heard it once before.\"\n\nIt died away, and an absolute silence closed in upon us. We stood straining our ears, but nothing came.\n\n\"Watson,\" said the baronet, \"it was the cry of a hound.\"\n\nMy blood ran cold in my veins, for there was a break in his voice which told of the sudden horror which had seized him.\n\n\"What do they call this sound?\" he asked.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The folk on the countryside.\"\n\n\"Oh, they are ignorant people. Why should you mind what they call it?\"\n\n\"Tell me, Watson. What do they say of it?\"\n\nI hesitated but could not escape the question.\n\n\"They say it is the cry of the Hound of the Baskervilles.\"\n\nHe groaned and was silent for a few moments.\n\n\"A hound it was,\" he said at last, \"but it seemed to come from miles away, over yonder, I think.\"\n\n\"It was hard to say whence it came.\"\n\n\"It rose and fell with the wind. Isn't that the direction of the great Grimpen Mire?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\"\n\n\"Well, it was up there. Come now, Watson, didn't you think yourself that it was the cry of a hound? I am not a child. You need not fear to speak the truth.\"\n\n\"Stapleton was with me when I heard it last. He said that it might be the calling of a strange bird.\"\n\n\"No, no, it was a hound. My God, can there be some truth in all these stories? Is it possible that I am really in danger from so dark a cause? You don't believe it, do you, Watson?\"\n\n\"No, no.\"\n\n\"And yet it was one thing to laugh about it in London, and it is another to stand out here in the darkness of the moor and to hear such a cry as that. And my uncle! There was the footprint of the hound beside him as he lay. It all fits together. I don't think that I am a coward, Watson, but that sound seemed to freeze my very blood. Feel my hand!\"\n\nIt was as cold as a block of marble.\n\n\"You'll be all right to-morrow.\"\n\n\"I don't think I'll get that cry out of my head. What do you advise that we do now?\"\n\n\"Shall we turn back?\"\n\n\"No, by thunder; we have come out to get our man, and we will do it. We after the convict, and a hell-hound, as likely as not, after us. Come on! We'll see it through if all the fiends of the pit were loose upon the moor.\"\n\nWe stumbled slowly along in the darkness, with the black loom of the craggy hills around us, and the yellow speck of light burning steadily in front. There is nothing so deceptive as the distance of a light upon a pitch-dark night, and sometimes the glimmer seemed to be far away upon the horizon and sometimes it might have been within a few yards of us. But at last we could see whence it came, and then we knew that we were indeed very close. A guttering candle was stuck in a crevice of the rocks which flanked it on each side so as to keep the wind from it and also to prevent it from being visible, save in the direction of Baskerville Hall. A boulder of granite concealed our approach, and crouching behind it we gazed over it at the signal light. It was strange to see this single candle burning there in the middle of the moor, with no sign of life near it\u2014just the one straight yellow flame and the gleam of the rock on each side of it.\n\n\"What shall we do now?\" whispered Sir Henry.\n\n\"Wait here. He must be near his light. Let us see if we can get a glimpse of him.\"\n\nThe words were hardly out of my mouth when we both saw him. Over the rocks, in the crevice of which the candle burned, there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides. The light beneath him was reflected in his small, cunning eyes which peered fiercely to right and left through the darkness like a crafty and savage animal who has heard the steps of the hunters.\n\nSomething had evidently aroused his suspicions. It may have been that Barrymore had some private signal which we had neglected to give, or the fellow may have had some other reason for thinking that all was not well, but I could read his fears upon his wicked face. Any instant he might dash out the light and vanish in the darkness. I sprang forward therefore, and Sir Henry did the same. At the same moment the convict screamed out a curse at us and hurled a rock which splintered up against the boulder which had sheltered us. I caught one glimpse of his short, squat, strongly-built figure as he sprang to his feet and turned to run. At the same moment by a lucky chance the moon broke through the clouds. We rushed over the brow of the hill, and there was our man running with great speed down the other side, springing over the stones in his way with the activity of a mountain goat. A lucky long shot of my revolver might have crippled him, but I had brought it only to defend myself if attacked and not to shoot an unarmed man who was running away.\n\nWe were both swift runners and in fairly good training, but we soon found that we had no chance of overtaking him. We saw him for a long time in the moonlight until he was only a small speck moving swiftly among the boulders upon the side of a distant hill. We ran and ran until we were completely blown, but the space between us grew ever wider. Finally we stopped and sat panting on two rocks, while we watched him disappearing in the distance.\n\nAnd it was at this moment that there occurred a most strange and unexpected thing. We had risen from our rocks and were turning to go home, having abandoned the hopeless chase. The moon was low upon the right, and the jagged pinnacle of a granite tor stood up against the lower curve of its silver disc. There, outlined as black as an ebony statue on that shining background, I saw the figure of a man upon the tor. Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes. I assure you that I have never in my life seen anything more clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place. It was not the convict. This man was far from the place where the latter had disappeared. Besides, he was a much taller man. With a cry of surprise I pointed him out to the baronet, but in the instant during which I had turned to grasp his arm the man was gone. There was the sharp pinnacle of granite still cutting the lower edge of the moon, but its peak bore no trace of that silent and motionless figure.\n\nI wished to go in that direction and to search the tor, but it was some distance away. The baronet's nerves were still quivering from that cry, which recalled the dark story of his family, and he was not in the mood for fresh adventures. He had not seen this lonely man upon the tor and could not feel the thrill which his strange presence and his commanding attitude had given to me. \"A warder, no doubt,\" said he. \"The moor has been thick with them since this fellow escaped.\" Well, perhaps his explanation may be the right one, but I should like to have some further proof of it. To-day we mean to communicate to the Princetown people where they should look for their missing man, but it is hard lines that we have not actually had the triumph of bringing him back as our own prisoner. Such are the adventures of last night, and you must acknowledge, my dear Holmes, that I have done you very well in the matter of a report. Much of what I tell you is no doubt quite irrelevant, but still I feel that it is best that I should let you have all the facts and leave you to select for yourself those which will be of most service to you in helping you to your conclusions. We are certainly making some progress. So far as the Barrymores go we have found the motive of their actions, and that has cleared up the situation very much. But the moor with its mysteries and its strange inhabitants remains as inscrutable as ever. Perhaps in my next I may be able to throw some light upon this also. Best of all would it be if you could come down to us. In any case you will hear from me again in the course of the next few days." + }, + { + "title": "Extract from the Diary of Dr. Watson", + "text": "So far I have been able to quote from the reports which I have forwarded during these early days to Sherlock Holmes. Now, however, I have arrived at a point in my narrative where I am compelled to abandon this method and to trust once more to my recollections, aided by the diary which I kept at the time. A few extracts from the latter will carry me on to those scenes which are indelibly fixed in every detail upon my memory. I proceed, then, from the morning which followed our abortive chase of the convict and our other strange experiences upon the moor.\n\nOctober 16th. A dull and foggy day with a drizzle of rain. The house is banked in with rolling clouds, which rise now and then to show the dreary curves of the moor, with thin, silver veins upon the sides of the hills, and the distant boulders gleaming where the light strikes upon their wet faces. It is melancholy outside and in. The baronet is in a black reaction after the excitements of the night. I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger\u2014ever present danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it.\n\nAnd have I not cause for such a feeling? Consider the long sequence of incidents which have all pointed to some sinister influence which is at work around us. There is the death of the last occupant of the Hall, fulfilling so exactly the conditions of the family legend, and there are the repeated reports from peasants of the appearance of a strange creature upon the moor. Twice I have with my own ears heard the sound which resembled the distant baying of a hound. It is incredible, impossible, that it should really be outside the ordinary laws of nature. A spectral hound which leaves material footmarks and fills the air with its howling is surely not to be thought of. Stapleton may fall in with such a superstition, and Mortimer also; but if I have one quality upon earth it is common sense, and nothing will persuade me to believe in such a thing. To do so would be to descend to the level of these poor peasants, who are not content with a mere fiend dog but must needs describe him with hell-fire shooting from his mouth and eyes. Holmes would not listen to such fancies, and I am his agent. But facts are facts, and I have twice heard this crying upon the moor. Suppose that there were really some huge hound loose upon it; that would go far to explain everything. But where could such a hound lie concealed, where did it get its food, where did it come from, how was it that no one saw it by day? It must be confessed that the natural explanation offers almost as many difficulties as the other. And always, apart from the hound, there is the fact of the human agency in London, the man in the cab, and the letter which warned Sir Henry against the moor. This at least was real, but it might have been the work of a protecting friend as easily as of an enemy. Where is that friend or enemy now? Has he remained in London, or has he followed us down here? Could he\u2014could he be the stranger whom I saw upon the tor?\n\nIt is true that I have had only the one glance at him, and yet there are some things to which I am ready to swear. He is no one whom I have seen down here, and I have now met all the neighbours. The figure was far taller than that of Stapleton, far thinner than that of Frankland. Barrymore it might possibly have been, but we had left him behind us, and I am certain that he could not have followed us. A stranger then is still dogging us, just as a stranger dogged us in London. We have never shaken him off. If I could lay my hands upon that man, then at last we might find ourselves at the end of all our difficulties. To this one purpose I must now devote all my energies.\n\nMy first impulse was to tell Sir Henry all my plans. My second and wisest one is to play my own game and speak as little as possible to anyone. He is silent and distrait. His nerves have been strangely shaken by that sound upon the moor. I will say nothing to add to his anxieties, but I will take my own steps to attain my own end.\n\nWe had a small scene this morning after breakfast. Barrymore asked leave to speak with Sir Henry, and they were closeted in his study some little time. Sitting in the billiard-room I more than once heard the sound of voices raised, and I had a pretty good idea what the point was which was under discussion. After a time the baronet opened his door and called for me.\n\n\"Barrymore considers that he has a grievance,\" he said. \"He thinks that it was unfair on our part to hunt his brother-in-law down when he, of his own free will, had told us the secret.\"\n\nThe butler was standing very pale but very collected before us.\n\n\"I may have spoken too warmly, sir,\" said he, \"and if I have, I am sure that I beg your pardon. At the same time, I was very much surprised when I heard you two gentlemen come back this morning and learned that you had been chasing Selden. The poor fellow has enough to fight against without my putting more upon his track.\"\n\n\"If you had told us of your own free will it would have been a different thing,\" said the baronet, \"you only told us, or rather your wife only told us, when it was forced from you and you could not help yourself.\"\n\n\"I didn't think you would have taken advantage of it, Sir Henry\u2014indeed I didn't.\"\n\n\"The man is a public danger. There are lonely houses scattered over the moor, and he is a fellow who would stick at nothing. You only want to get a glimpse of his face to see that. Look at Mr. Stapleton's house, for example, with no one but himself to defend it. There's no safety for anyone until he is under lock and key.\"\n\n\"He'll break into no house, sir. I give you my solemn word upon that. But he will never trouble anyone in this country again. I assure you, Sir Henry, that in a very few days the necessary arrangements will have been made and he will be on his way to South America. For God's sake, sir, I beg of you not to let the police know that he is still on the moor. They have given up the chase there, and he can lie quiet until the ship is ready for him. You can't tell on him without getting my wife and me into trouble. I beg you, sir, to say nothing to the police.\"\n\n\"What do you say, Watson?\"\n\nI shrugged my shoulders. \"If he were safely out of the country it would relieve the tax-payer of a burden.\"\n\n\"But how about the chance of his holding someone up before he goes?\"\n\n\"He would not do anything so mad, sir. We have provided him with all that he can want. To commit a crime would be to show where he was hiding.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" said Sir Henry. \"Well, Barrymore\u2014\"\n\n\"God bless you, sir, and thank you from my heart! It would have killed my poor wife had he been taken again.\"\n\n\"I guess we are aiding and abetting a felony, Watson? But, after what we have heard, I don't feel as if I could give the man up, so there is an end of it. All right, Barrymore, you can go.\"\n\nWith a few broken words of gratitude the man turned, but he hesitated and then came back.\n\n\"You've been so kind to us, sir, that I should like to do the best I can for you in return. I know something, Sir Henry, and perhaps I should have said it before, but it was long after the inquest that I found it out. I've never breathed a word about it yet to mortal man. It's about poor Sir Charles's death.\"\n\nThe baronet and I were both upon our feet. \"Do you know how he died?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I don't know that.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"I know why he was at the gate at that hour. It was to meet a woman.\"\n\n\"To meet a woman! He?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"And the woman's name?\"\n\n\"I can't give you the name, sir, but I can give you the initials. Her initials were L. L.\"\n\n\"How do you know this, Barrymore?\"\n\n\"Well, Sir Henry, your uncle had a letter that morning. He had usually a great many letters, for he was a public man and well known for his kind heart, so that everyone who was in trouble was glad to turn to him. But that morning, as it chanced, there was only this one letter, so I took the more notice of it. It was from Coombe Tracey, and it was addressed in a woman's hand.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, I thought no more of the matter, and never would have done had it not been for my wife. Only a few weeks ago she was cleaning out Sir Charles's study\u2014it had never been touched since his death\u2014and she found the ashes of a burned letter in the back of the grate. The greater part of it was charred to pieces, but one little slip, the end of a page, hung together, and the writing could still be read, though it was gray on a black ground. It seemed to us to be a postscript at the end of the letter, and it said: 'Please, please, as you are a gentleman, burn this letter, and be at the gate by ten o'clock.' Beneath it were signed the initials L. L.\"\n\n\"Have you got that slip?\"\n\n\"No, sir, it crumbled all to bits after we moved it.\"\n\n\"Had Sir Charles received any other letters in the same writing?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, I took no particular notice of his letters. I should not have noticed this one, only it happened to come alone.\"\n\n\"And you have no idea who L. L. is?\"\n\n\"No, sir. No more than you have. But I expect if we could lay our hands upon that lady we should know more about Sir Charles's death.\"\n\n\"I cannot understand, Barrymore, how you came to conceal this important information.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, it was immediately after that our own trouble came to us. And then again, sir, we were both of us very fond of Sir Charles, as we well might be considering all that he has done for us. To rake this up couldn't help our poor master, and it's well to go carefully when there's a lady in the case. Even the best of us\u2014\"\n\n\"You thought it might injure his reputation?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, I thought no good could come of it. But now you have been kind to us, and I feel as if it would be treating you unfairly not to tell you all that I know about the matter.\"\n\n\"Very good, Barrymore; you can go.\" When the butler had left us Sir Henry turned to me. \"Well, Watson, what do you think of this new light?\"\n\n\"It seems to leave the darkness rather blacker than before.\"\n\n\"So I think. But if we can only trace L. L. it should clear up the whole business. We have gained that much. We know that there is someone who has the facts if we can only find her. What do you think we should do?\"\n\n\"Let Holmes know all about it at once. It will give him the clue for which he has been seeking. I am much mistaken if it does not bring him down.\"\n\nI went at once to my room and drew up my report of the morning's conversation for Holmes. It was evident to me that he had been very busy of late, for the notes which I had from Baker Street were few and short, with no comments upon the information which I had supplied and hardly any reference to my mission. No doubt his blackmailing case is absorbing all his faculties. And yet this new factor must surely arrest his attention and renew his interest. I wish that he were here.\n\nOctober 17th. All day to-day the rain poured down, rustling on the ivy and dripping from the eaves. I thought of the convict out upon the bleak, cold, shelterless moor. Poor devil! Whatever his crimes, he has suffered something to atone for them. And then I thought of that other one\u2014the face in the cab, the figure against the moon. Was he also out in that deluge\u2014the unseen watcher, the man of darkness? In the evening I put on my waterproof and I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. God help those who wander into the great mire now, for even the firm uplands are becoming a morass. I found the black tor upon which I had seen the solitary watcher, and from its craggy summit I looked out myself across the melancholy downs. Rain squalls drifted across their russet face, and the heavy, slate-coloured clouds hung low over the landscape, trailing in gray wreaths down the sides of the fantastic hills. In the distant hollow on the left, half hidden by the mist, the two thin towers of Baskerville Hall rose above the trees. They were the only signs of human life which I could see, save only those prehistoric huts which lay thickly upon the slopes of the hills. Nowhere was there any trace of that lonely man whom I had seen on the same spot two nights before.\n\nAs I walked back I was overtaken by Dr. Mortimer driving in his dog-cart over a rough moorland track which led from the outlying farmhouse of Foulmire. He has been very attentive to us, and hardly a day has passed that he has not called at the Hall to see how we were getting on. He insisted upon my climbing into his dog-cart, and he gave me a lift homeward. I found him much troubled over the disappearance of his little spaniel. It had wandered on to the moor and had never come back. I gave him such consolation as I might, but I thought of the pony on the Grimpen Mire, and I do not fancy that he will see his little dog again.\n\n\"By the way, Mortimer,\" said I as we jolted along the rough road, \"I suppose there are few people living within driving distance of this whom you do not know?\"\n\n\"Hardly any, I think.\"\n\n\"Can you, then, tell me the name of any woman whose initials are L. L.?\"\n\nHe thought for a few minutes.\n\n\"No,\" said he. \"There are a few gipsies and labouring folk for whom I can't answer, but among the farmers or gentry there is no one whose initials are those. Wait a bit though,\" he added after a pause. \"There is Laura Lyons\u2014her initials are L. L.\u2014but she lives in Coombe Tracey.\"\n\n\"Who is she?\" I asked.\n\n\"She is Frankland's daughter.\"\n\n\"What! Old Frankland the crank?\"\n\n\"Exactly. She married an artist named Lyons, who came sketching on the moor. He proved to be a blackguard and deserted her. The fault from what I hear may not have been entirely on one side. Her father refused to have anything to do with her because she had married without his consent and perhaps for one or two other reasons as well. So, between the old sinner and the young one the girl has had a pretty bad time.\"\n\n\"How does she live?\"\n\n\"I fancy old Frankland allows her a pittance, but it cannot be more, for his own affairs are considerably involved. Whatever she may have deserved one could not allow her to go hopelessly to the bad. Her story got about, and several of the people here did something to enable her to earn an honest living. Stapleton did for one, and Sir Charles for another. I gave a trifle myself. It was to set her up in a typewriting business.\"\n\nHe wanted to know the object of my inquiries, but I managed to satisfy his curiosity without telling him too much, for there is no reason why we should take anyone into our confidence. To-morrow morning I shall find my way to Coombe Tracey, and if I can see this Mrs. Laura Lyons, of equivocal reputation, a long step will have been made towards clearing one incident in this chain of mysteries. I am certainly developing the wisdom of the serpent, for when Mortimer pressed his questions to an inconvenient extent I asked him casually to what type Frankland's skull belonged, and so heard nothing but craniology for the rest of our drive. I have not lived for years with Sherlock Holmes for nothing.\n\nI have only one other incident to record upon this tempestuous and melancholy day. This was my conversation with Barrymore just now, which gives me one more strong card which I can play in due time.\n\nMortimer had stayed to dinner, and he and the baronet played \u00e9cart\u00e9 afterwards. The butler brought me my coffee into the library, and I took the chance to ask him a few questions.\n\n\"Well,\" said I, \"has this precious relation of yours departed, or is he still lurking out yonder?\"\n\n\"I don't know, sir. I hope to heaven that he has gone, for he has brought nothing but trouble here! I've not heard of him since I left out food for him last, and that was three days ago.\"\n\n\"Did you see him then?\"\n\n\"No, sir, but the food was gone when next I went that way.\"\n\n\"Then he was certainly there?\"\n\n\"So you would think, sir, unless it was the other man who took it.\"\n\nI sat with my coffee-cup halfway to my lips and stared at Barrymore.\n\n\"You know that there is another man then?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; there is another man upon the moor.\"\n\n\"Have you seen him?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"How do you know of him then?\"\n\n\"Selden told me of him, sir, a week ago or more. He's in hiding, too, but he's not a convict as far as I can make out. I don't like it, Dr. Watson\u2014I tell you straight, sir, that I don't like it.\" He spoke with a sudden passion of earnestness.\n\n\"Now, listen to me, Barrymore! I have no interest in this matter but that of your master. I have come here with no object except to help him. Tell me, frankly, what it is that you don't like.\"\n\nBarrymore hesitated for a moment, as if he regretted his outburst or found it difficult to express his own feelings in words.\n\n\"It's all these goings-on, sir,\" he cried at last, waving his hand towards the rain-lashed window which faced the moor. \"There's foul play somewhere, and there's black villainy brewing, to that I'll swear! Very glad I should be, sir, to see Sir Henry on his way back to London again!\"\n\n\"But what is it that alarms you?\"\n\n\"Look at Sir Charles's death! That was bad enough, for all that the coroner said. Look at the noises on the moor at night. There's not a man would cross it after sundown if he was paid for it. Look at this stranger hiding out yonder, and watching and waiting! What's he waiting for? What does it mean? It means no good to anyone of the name of Baskerville, and very glad I shall be to be quit of it all on the day that Sir Henry's new servants are ready to take over the Hall.\"\n\n\"But about this stranger,\" said I. \"Can you tell me anything about him? What did Selden say? Did he find out where he hid, or what he was doing?\"\n\n\"He saw him once or twice, but he is a deep one and gives nothing away. At first he thought that he was the police, but soon he found that he had some lay of his own. A kind of gentleman he was, as far as he could see, but what he was doing he could not make out.\"\n\n\"And where did he say that he lived?\"\n\n\"Among the old houses on the hillside\u2014the stone huts where the old folk used to live.\"\n\n\"But how about his food?\"\n\n\"Selden found out that he has got a lad who works for him and brings all he needs. I dare say he goes to Coombe Tracey for what he wants.\"\n\n\"Very good, Barrymore. We may talk further of this some other time.\" When the butler had gone I walked over to the black window, and I looked through a blurred pane at the driving clouds and at the tossing outline of the wind-swept trees. It is a wild night indoors, and what must it be in a stone hut upon the moor. What passion of hatred can it be which leads a man to lurk in such a place at such a time! And what deep and earnest purpose can he have which calls for such a trial! There, in that hut upon the moor, seems to lie the very centre of that problem which has vexed me so sorely. I swear that another day shall not have passed before I have done all that man can do to reach the heart of the mystery." + }, + { + "title": "The Man on the Tor", + "text": "The extract from my private diary which forms the last chapter has brought my narrative up to the eighteenth of October, a time when these strange events began to move swiftly towards their terrible conclusion. The incidents of the next few days are indelibly graven upon my recollection, and I can tell them without reference to the notes made at the time. I start them from the day which succeeded that upon which I had established two facts of great importance, the one that Mrs. Laura Lyons of Coombe Tracey had written to Sir Charles Baskerville and made an appointment with him at the very place and hour that he met his death, the other that the lurking man upon the moor was to be found among the stone huts upon the hillside. With these two facts in my possession I felt that either my intelligence or my courage must be deficient if I could not throw some further light upon these dark places.\n\nI had no opportunity to tell the baronet what I had learned about Mrs. Lyons upon the evening before, for Dr. Mortimer remained with him at cards until it was very late. At breakfast, however, I informed him about my discovery and asked him whether he would care to accompany me to Coombe Tracey. At first he was very eager to come, but on second thoughts it seemed to both of us that if I went alone the results might be better. The more formal we made the visit the less information we might obtain. I left Sir Henry behind, therefore, not without some prickings of conscience, and drove off upon my new quest.\n\nWhen I reached Coombe Tracey I told Perkins to put up the horses, and I made inquiries for the lady whom I had come to interrogate. I had no difficulty in finding her rooms, which were central and well appointed. A maid showed me in without ceremony, and as I entered the sitting-room a lady, who was sitting before a Remington typewriter, sprang up with a pleasant smile of welcome. Her face fell, however, when she saw that I was a stranger, and she sat down again and asked me the object of my visit.\n\nThe first impression left by Mrs. Lyons was one of extreme beauty. Her eyes and hair were of the same rich hazel colour, and her cheeks, though considerably freckled, were flushed with the exquisite bloom of the brunette, the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose. Admiration was, I repeat, the first impression. But the second was criticism. There was something subtly wrong with the face, some coarseness of expression, some hardness, perhaps, of eye, some looseness of lip which marred its perfect beauty. But these, of course, are afterthoughts. At the moment I was simply conscious that I was in the presence of a very handsome woman, and that she was asking me the reasons for my visit. I had not quite understood until that instant how delicate my mission was.\n\n\"I have the pleasure,\" said I, \"of knowing your father.\"\n\nIt was a clumsy introduction, and the lady made me feel it.\n\n\"There is nothing in common between my father and me,\" she said. \"I owe him nothing, and his friends are not mine. If it were not for the late Sir Charles Baskerville and some other kind hearts I might have starved for all that my father cared.\"\n\n\"It was about the late Sir Charles Baskerville that I have come here to see you.\"\n\nThe freckles started out on the lady's face.\n\n\"What can I tell you about him?\" she asked, and her fingers played nervously over the stops of her typewriter.\n\n\"You knew him, did you not?\"\n\n\"I have already said that I owe a great deal to his kindness. If I am able to support myself it is largely due to the interest which he took in my unhappy situation.\"\n\n\"Did you correspond with him?\"\n\nThe lady looked quickly up with an angry gleam in her hazel eyes.\n\n\"What is the object of these questions?\" she asked sharply.\n\n\"The object is to avoid a public scandal. It is better that I should ask them here than that the matter should pass outside our control.\"\n\nShe was silent and her face was still very pale. At last she looked up with something reckless and defiant in her manner.\n\n\"Well, I'll answer,\" she said. \"What are your questions?\"\n\n\"Did you correspond with Sir Charles?\"\n\n\"I certainly wrote to him once or twice to acknowledge his delicacy and his generosity.\"\n\n\"Have you the dates of those letters?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Have you ever met him?\"\n\n\"Yes, once or twice, when he came into Coombe Tracey. He was a very retiring man, and he preferred to do good by stealth.\"\n\n\"But if you saw him so seldom and wrote so seldom, how did he know enough about your affairs to be able to help you, as you say that he has done?\"\n\nShe met my difficulty with the utmost readiness.\n\n\"There were several gentlemen who knew my sad history and united to help me. One was Mr. Stapleton, a neighbour and intimate friend of Sir Charles's. He was exceedingly kind, and it was through him that Sir Charles learned about my affairs.\"\n\nI knew already that Sir Charles Baskerville had made Stapleton his almoner upon several occasions, so the lady's statement bore the impress of truth upon it.\n\n\"Did you ever write to Sir Charles asking him to meet you?\" I continued.\n\nMrs. Lyons flushed with anger again.\n\n\"Really, sir, this is a very extraordinary question.\"\n\n\"I am sorry, madam, but I must repeat it.\"\n\n\"Then I answer, certainly not.\"\n\n\"Not on the very day of Sir Charles's death?\"\n\nThe flush had faded in an instant, and a deathly face was before me. Her dry lips could not speak the \"No\" which I saw rather than heard.\n\n\"Surely your memory deceives you,\" said I. \"I could even quote a passage of your letter. It ran 'Please, please, as you are a gentleman, burn this letter, and be at the gate by ten o'clock.'\"\n\nI thought that she had fainted, but she recovered herself by a supreme effort.\n\n\"Is there no such thing as a gentleman?\" she gasped.\n\n\"You do Sir Charles an injustice. He did burn the letter. But sometimes a letter may be legible even when burned. You acknowledge now that you wrote it?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did write it,\" she cried, pouring out her soul in a torrent of words. \"I did write it. Why should I deny it? I have no reason to be ashamed of it. I wished him to help me. I believed that if I had an interview I could gain his help, so I asked him to meet me.\"\n\n\"But why at such an hour?\"\n\n\"Because I had only just learned that he was going to London next day and might be away for months. There were reasons why I could not get there earlier.\"\n\n\"But why a rendezvous in the garden instead of a visit to the house?\"\n\n\"Do you think a woman could go alone at that hour to a bachelor's house?\"\n\n\"Well, what happened when you did get there?\"\n\n\"I never went.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Lyons!\"\n\n\"No, I swear it to you on all I hold sacred. I never went. Something intervened to prevent my going.\"\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"That is a private matter. I cannot tell it.\"\n\n\"You acknowledge then that you made an appointment with Sir Charles at the very hour and place at which he met his death, but you deny that you kept the appointment.\"\n\n\"That is the truth.\"\n\nAgain and again I cross-questioned her, but I could never get past that point.\n\n\"Mrs. Lyons,\" said I as I rose from this long and inconclusive interview, \"you are taking a very great responsibility and putting yourself in a very false position by not making an absolutely clean breast of all that you know. If I have to call in the aid of the police you will find how seriously you are compromised. If your position is innocent, why did you in the first instance deny having written to Sir Charles upon that date?\"\n\n\"Because I feared that some false conclusion might be drawn from it and that I might find myself involved in a scandal.\"\n\n\"And why were you so pressing that Sir Charles should destroy your letter?\"\n\n\"If you have read the letter you will know.\"\n\n\"I did not say that I had read all the letter.\"\n\n\"You quoted some of it.\"\n\n\"I quoted the postscript. The letter had, as I said, been burned and it was not all legible. I ask you once again why it was that you were so pressing that Sir Charles should destroy this letter which he received on the day of his death.\"\n\n\"The matter is a very private one.\"\n\n\"The more reason why you should avoid a public investigation.\"\n\n\"I will tell you, then. If you have heard anything of my unhappy history you will know that I made a rash marriage and had reason to regret it.\"\n\n\"I have heard so much.\"\n\n\"My life has been one incessant persecution from a husband whom I abhor. The law is upon his side, and every day I am faced by the possibility that he may force me to live with him. At the time that I wrote this letter to Sir Charles I had learned that there was a prospect of my regaining my freedom if certain expenses could be met. It meant everything to me\u2014peace of mind, happiness, self-respect\u2014everything. I knew Sir Charles's generosity, and I thought that if he heard the story from my own lips he would help me.\"\n\n\"Then how is it that you did not go?\"\n\n\"Because I received help in the interval from another source.\"\n\n\"Why then, did you not write to Sir Charles and explain this?\"\n\n\"So I should have done had I not seen his death in the paper next morning.\"\n\nThe woman's story hung coherently together, and all my questions were unable to shake it. I could only check it by finding if she had, indeed, instituted divorce proceedings against her husband at or about the time of the tragedy.\n\nIt was unlikely that she would dare to say that she had not been to Baskerville Hall if she really had been, for a trap would be necessary to take her there, and could not have returned to Coombe Tracey until the early hours of the morning. Such an excursion could not be kept secret. The probability was, therefore, that she was telling the truth, or, at least, a part of the truth. I came away baffled and disheartened. Once again I had reached that dead wall which seemed to be built across every path by which I tried to get at the object of my mission. And yet the more I thought of the lady's face and of her manner the more I felt that something was being held back from me. Why should she turn so pale? Why should she fight against every admission until it was forced from her? Why should she have been so reticent at the time of the tragedy? Surely the explanation of all this could not be as innocent as she would have me believe. For the moment I could proceed no farther in that direction, but must turn back to that other clue which was to be sought for among the stone huts upon the moor.\n\nAnd that was a most vague direction. I realized it as I drove back and noted how hill after hill showed traces of the ancient people. Barrymore's only indication had been that the stranger lived in one of these abandoned huts, and many hundreds of them are scattered throughout the length and breadth of the moor. But I had my own experience for a guide since it had shown me the man himself standing upon the summit of the Black Tor. That, then, should be the centre of my search. From there I should explore every hut upon the moor until I lighted upon the right one. If this man were inside it I should find out from his own lips, at the point of my revolver if necessary, who he was and why he had dogged us so long. He might slip away from us in the crowd of Regent Street, but it would puzzle him to do so upon the lonely moor. On the other hand, if I should find the hut and its tenant should not be within it I must remain there, however long the vigil, until he returned. Holmes had missed him in London. It would indeed be a triumph for me if I could run him to earth where my master had failed.\n\nLuck had been against us again and again in this inquiry, but now at last it came to my aid. And the messenger of good fortune was none other than Mr. Frankland, who was standing, gray-whiskered and red-faced, outside the gate of his garden, which opened on to the highroad along which I travelled.\n\n\"Good-day, Dr. Watson,\" cried he with unwonted good humour, \"you must really give your horses a rest and come in to have a glass of wine and to congratulate me.\"\n\nMy feelings towards him were very far from being friendly after what I had heard of his treatment of his daughter, but I was anxious to send Perkins and the wagonette home, and the opportunity was a good one. I alighted and sent a message to Sir Henry that I should walk over in time for dinner. Then I followed Frankland into his dining-room.\n\n\"It is a great day for me, sir\u2014one of the red-letter days of my life,\" he cried with many chuckles. \"I have brought off a double event. I mean to teach them in these parts that law is law, and that there is a man here who does not fear to invoke it. I have established a right of way through the centre of old Middleton's park, slap across it, sir, within a hundred yards of his own front door. What do you think of that? We'll teach these magnates that they cannot ride roughshod over the rights of the commoners, confound them! And I've closed the wood where the Fernworthy folk used to picnic. These infernal people seem to think that there are no rights of property, and that they can swarm where they like with their papers and their bottles. Both cases decided, Dr. Watson, and both in my favour. I haven't had such a day since I had Sir John Morland for trespass because he shot in his own warren.\"\n\n\"How on earth did you do that?\"\n\n\"Look it up in the books, sir. It will repay reading\u2014Frankland v. Morland, Court of Queen's Bench. It cost me \u00a3200, but I got my verdict.\"\n\n\"Did it do you any good?\"\n\n\"None, sir, none. I am proud to say that I had no interest in the matter. I act entirely from a sense of public duty. I have no doubt, for example, that the Fernworthy people will burn me in effigy to-night. I told the police last time they did it that they should stop these disgraceful exhibitions. The County Constabulary is in a scandalous state, sir, and it has not afforded me the protection to which I am entitled. The case of Frankland v. Regina will bring the matter before the attention of the public. I told them that they would have occasion to regret their treatment of me, and already my words have come true.\"\n\n\"How so?\" I asked.\n\nThe old man put on a very knowing expression.\n\n\"Because I could tell them what they are dying to know; but nothing would induce me to help the rascals in any way.\"\n\nI had been casting round for some excuse by which I could get away from his gossip, but now I began to wish to hear more of it. I had seen enough of the contrary nature of the old sinner to understand that any strong sign of interest would be the surest way to stop his confidences.\n\n\"Some poaching case, no doubt?\" said I with an indifferent manner.\n\n\"Ha, ha, my boy, a very much more important matter than that! What about the convict on the moor?\"\n\nI started. \"You don't mean that you know where he is?\" said I.\n\n\"I may not know exactly where he is, but I am quite sure that I could help the police to lay their hands on him. Has it never struck you that the way to catch that man was to find out where he got his food and so trace it to him?\"\n\nHe certainly seemed to be getting uncomfortably near the truth. \"No doubt,\" said I; \"but how do you know that he is anywhere upon the moor?\"\n\n\"I know it because I have seen with my own eyes the messenger who takes him his food.\"\n\nMy heart sank for Barrymore. It was a serious thing to be in the power of this spiteful old busybody. But his next remark took a weight from my mind.\n\n\"You'll be surprised to hear that his food is taken to him by a child. I see him every day through my telescope upon the roof. He passes along the same path at the same hour, and to whom should he be going except to the convict?\"\n\nHere was luck indeed! And yet I suppressed all appearance of interest. A child! Barrymore had said that our unknown was supplied by a boy. It was on his track, and not upon the convict's, that Frankland had stumbled. If I could get his knowledge it might save me a long and weary hunt. But incredulity and indifference were evidently my strongest cards.\n\n\"I should say that it was much more likely that it was the son of one of the moorland shepherds taking out his father's dinner.\"\n\nThe least appearance of opposition struck fire out of the old autocrat. His eyes looked malignantly at me, and his gray whiskers bristled like those of an angry cat.\n\n\"Indeed, sir!\" said he, pointing out over the wide-stretching moor. \"Do you see that Black Tor over yonder? Well, do you see the low hill beyond with the thornbush upon it? It is the stoniest part of the whole moor. Is that a place where a shepherd would be likely to take his station? Your suggestion, sir, is a most absurd one.\"\n\nI meekly answered that I had spoken without knowing all the facts. My submission pleased him and led him to further confidences.\n\n\"You may be sure, sir, that I have very good grounds before I come to an opinion. I have seen the boy again and again with his bundle. Every day, and sometimes twice a day, I have been able\u2014but wait a moment, Dr. Watson. Do my eyes deceive me, or is there at the present moment something moving upon that hillside?\"\n\nIt was several miles off, but I could distinctly see a small dark dot against the dull green and gray.\n\n\"Come, sir, come!\" cried Frankland, rushing upstairs. \"You will see with your own eyes and judge for yourself.\"\n\nThe telescope, a formidable instrument mounted upon a tripod, stood upon the flat leads of the house. Frankland clapped his eye to it and gave a cry of satisfaction.\n\n\"Quick, Dr. Watson, quick, before he passes over the hill!\"\n\nThere he was, sure enough, a small urchin with a little bundle upon his shoulder, toiling slowly up the hill. When he reached the crest I saw the ragged uncouth figure outlined for an instant against the cold blue sky. He looked round him with a furtive and stealthy air, as one who dreads pursuit. Then he vanished over the hill.\n\n\"Well! Am I right?\"\n\n\"Certainly, there is a boy who seems to have some secret errand.\"\n\n\"And what the errand is even a county constable could guess. But not one word shall they have from me, and I bind you to secrecy also, Dr. Watson. Not a word! You understand!\"\n\n\"Just as you wish.\"\n\n\"They have treated me shamefully\u2014shamefully. When the facts come out in Frankland v. Regina I venture to think that a thrill of indignation will run through the country. Nothing would induce me to help the police in any way. For all they cared it might have been me, instead of my effigy, which these rascals burned at the stake. Surely you are not going! You will help me to empty the decanter in honour of this great occasion!\"\n\nBut I resisted all his solicitations and succeeded in dissuading him from his announced intention of walking home with me. I kept the road as long as his eye was on me, and then I struck off across the moor and made for the stony hill over which the boy had disappeared. Everything was working in my favour, and I swore that it should not be through lack of energy or perseverance that I should miss the chance which fortune had thrown in my way.\n\nThe sun was already sinking when I reached the summit of the hill, and the long slopes beneath me were all golden-green on one side and gray shadow on the other. A haze lay low upon the farthest sky-line, out of which jutted the fantastic shapes of Belliver and Vixen Tor. Over the wide expanse there was no sound and no movement. One great gray bird, a gull or curlew, soared aloft in the blue heaven. He and I seemed to be the only living things between the huge arch of the sky and the desert beneath it. The barren scene, the sense of loneliness, and the mystery and urgency of my task all struck a chill into my heart. The boy was nowhere to be seen. But down beneath me in a cleft of the hills there was a circle of the old stone huts, and in the middle of them there was one which retained sufficient roof to act as a screen against the weather. My heart leaped within me as I saw it. This must be the burrow where the stranger lurked. At last my foot was on the threshold of his hiding place\u2014his secret was within my grasp.\n\nAs I approached the hut, walking as warily as Stapleton would do when with poised net he drew near the settled butterfly, I satisfied myself that the place had indeed been used as a habitation. A vague pathway among the boulders led to the dilapidated opening which served as a door. All was silent within. The unknown might be lurking there, or he might be prowling on the moor. My nerves tingled with the sense of adventure. Throwing aside my cigarette, I closed my hand upon the butt of my revolver and, walking swiftly up to the door, I looked in. The place was empty.\n\nBut there were ample signs that I had not come upon a false scent. This was certainly where the man lived. Some blankets rolled in a waterproof lay upon that very stone slab upon which neolithic man had once slumbered. The ashes of a fire were heaped in a rude grate. Beside it lay some cooking utensils and a bucket half-full of water. A litter of empty tins showed that the place had been occupied for some time, and I saw, as my eyes became accustomed to the checkered light, a pannikin and a half-full bottle of spirits standing in the corner. In the middle of the hut a flat stone served the purpose of a table, and upon this stood a small cloth bundle\u2014the same, no doubt, which I had seen through the telescope upon the shoulder of the boy. It contained a loaf of bread, a tinned tongue, and two tins of preserved peaches. As I set it down again, after having examined it, my heart leaped to see that beneath it there lay a sheet of paper with writing upon it. I raised it, and this was what I read, roughly scrawled in pencil: \"Dr. Watson has gone to Coombe Tracey.\"\n\nFor a minute I stood there with the paper in my hands thinking out the meaning of this curt message. It was I, then, and not Sir Henry, who was being dogged by this secret man. He had not followed me himself, but he had set an agent\u2014the boy, perhaps\u2014upon my track, and this was his report. Possibly I had taken no step since I had been upon the moor which had not been observed and reported. Always there was this feeling of an unseen force, a fine net drawn round us with infinite skill and delicacy, holding us so lightly that it was only at some supreme moment that one realized that one was indeed entangled in its meshes.\n\nIf there was one report there might be others, so I looked round the hut in search of them. There was no trace, however, of anything of the kind, nor could I discover any sign which might indicate the character or intentions of the man who lived in this singular place, save that he must be of Spartan habits and cared little for the comforts of life. When I thought of the heavy rains and looked at the gaping roof I understood how strong and immutable must be the purpose which had kept him in that inhospitable abode. Was he our malignant enemy, or was he by chance our guardian angel? I swore that I would not leave the hut until I knew.\n\nOutside the sun was sinking low and the west was blazing with scarlet and gold. Its reflection was shot back in ruddy patches by the distant pools which lay amid the great Grimpen Mire. There were the two towers of Baskerville Hall, and there a distant blur of smoke which marked the village of Grimpen. Between the two, behind the hill, was the house of the Stapletons. All was sweet and mellow and peaceful in the golden evening light, and yet as I looked at them my soul shared none of the peace of Nature but quivered at the vagueness and the terror of that interview which every instant was bringing nearer. With tingling nerves but a fixed purpose, I sat in the dark recess of the hut and waited with sombre patience for the coming of its tenant.\n\nAnd then at last I heard him. Far away came the sharp clink of a boot striking upon a stone. Then another and yet another, coming nearer and nearer. I shrank back into the darkest corner and cocked the pistol in my pocket, determined not to discover myself until I had an opportunity of seeing something of the stranger. There was a long pause which showed that he had stopped. Then once more the footsteps approached and a shadow fell across the opening of the hut.\n\n\"It is a lovely evening, my dear Watson,\" said a well-known voice. \"I really think that you will be more comfortable outside than in.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Death on the Moor", + "text": "For a moment or two I sat breathless, hardly able to believe my ears. Then my senses and my voice came back to me, while a crushing weight of responsibility seemed in an instant to be lifted from my soul. That cold, incisive, ironical voice could belong to but one man in all the world.\n\n\"Holmes!\" I cried\u2014\"Holmes!\"\n\n\"Come out,\" said he, \"and please be careful with the revolver.\"\n\nI stooped under the rude lintel, and there he sat upon a stone outside, his gray eyes dancing with amusement as they fell upon my astonished features. He was thin and worn, but clear and alert, his keen face bronzed by the sun and roughened by the wind. In his tweed suit and cloth cap he looked like any other tourist upon the moor, and he had contrived, with that catlike love of personal cleanliness which was one of his characteristics, that his chin should be as smooth and his linen as perfect as if he were in Baker Street.\n\n\"I never was more glad to see anyone in my life,\" said I as I wrung him by the hand.\n\n\"Or more astonished, eh?\"\n\n\"Well, I must confess to it.\"\n\n\"The surprise was not all on one side, I assure you. I had no idea that you had found my occasional retreat, still less that you were inside it, until I was within twenty paces of the door.\"\n\n\"My footprint, I presume?\"\n\n\"No, Watson; I fear that I could not undertake to recognize your footprint amid all the footprints of the world. If you seriously desire to deceive me you must change your tobacconist; for when I see the stub of a cigarette marked Bradley, Oxford Street, I know that my friend Watson is in the neighbourhood. You will see it there beside the path. You threw it down, no doubt, at that supreme moment when you charged into the empty hut.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"I thought as much\u2014and knowing your admirable tenacity I was convinced that you were sitting in ambush, a weapon within reach, waiting for the tenant to return. So you actually thought that I was the criminal?\"\n\n\"I did not know who you were, but I was determined to find out.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! And how did you localize me? You saw me, perhaps, on the night of the convict hunt, when I was so imprudent as to allow the moon to rise behind me?\"\n\n\"Yes, I saw you then.\"\n\n\"And have no doubt searched all the huts until you came to this one?\"\n\n\"No, your boy had been observed, and that gave me a guide where to look.\"\n\n\"The old gentleman with the telescope, no doubt. I could not make it out when first I saw the light flashing upon the lens.\" He rose and peeped into the hut. \"Ha, I see that Cartwright has brought up some supplies. What's this paper? So you have been to Coombe Tracey, have you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"To see Mrs. Laura Lyons?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Well done! Our researches have evidently been running on parallel lines, and when we unite our results I expect we shall have a fairly full knowledge of the case.\"\n\n\"Well, I am glad from my heart that you are here, for indeed the responsibility and the mystery were both becoming too much for my nerves. But how in the name of wonder did you come here, and what have you been doing? I thought that you were in Baker Street working out that case of blackmailing.\"\n\n\"That was what I wished you to think.\"\n\n\"Then you use me, and yet do not trust me!\" I cried with some bitterness. \"I think that I have deserved better at your hands, Holmes.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, you have been invaluable to me in this as in many other cases, and I beg that you will forgive me if I have seemed to play a trick upon you. In truth, it was partly for your own sake that I did it, and it was my appreciation of the danger which you ran which led me to come down and examine the matter for myself. Had I been with Sir Henry and you it is confident that my point of view would have been the same as yours, and my presence would have warned our very formidable opponents to be on their guard. As it is, I have been able to get about as I could not possibly have done had I been living in the Hall, and I remain an unknown factor in the business, ready to throw in all my weight at a critical moment.\"\n\n\"But why keep me in the dark?\"\n\n\"For you to know could not have helped us and might possibly have led to my discovery. You would have wished to tell me something, or in your kindness you would have brought me out some comfort or other, and so an unnecessary risk would be run. I brought Cartwright down with me\u2014you remember the little chap at the express office\u2014and he has seen after my simple wants: a loaf of bread and a clean collar. What does man want more? He has given me an extra pair of eyes upon a very active pair of feet, and both have been invaluable.\"\n\n\"Then my reports have all been wasted!\"\u2014My voice trembled as I recalled the pains and the pride with which I had composed them.\n\nHolmes took a bundle of papers from his pocket.\n\n\"Here are your reports, my dear fellow, and very well thumbed, I assure you. I made excellent arrangements, and they are only delayed one day upon their way. I must compliment you exceedingly upon the zeal and the intelligence which you have shown over an extraordinarily difficult case.\"\n\nI was still rather raw over the deception which had been practised upon me, but the warmth of Holmes's praise drove my anger from my mind. I felt also in my heart that he was right in what he said and that it was really best for our purpose that I should not have known that he was upon the moor.\n\n\"That's better,\" said he, seeing the shadow rise from my face. \"And now tell me the result of your visit to Mrs. Laura Lyons\u2014it was not difficult for me to guess that it was to see her that you had gone, for I am already aware that she is the one person in Coombe Tracey who might be of service to us in the matter. In fact, if you had not gone to-day it is exceedingly probable that I should have gone to-morrow.\"\n\nThe sun had set and dusk was settling over the moor. The air had turned chill and we withdrew into the hut for warmth. There, sitting together in the twilight, I told Holmes of my conversation with the lady. So interested was he that I had to repeat some of it twice before he was satisfied.\n\n\"This is most important,\" said he when I had concluded. \"It fills up a gap which I had been unable to bridge in this most complex affair. You are aware, perhaps, that a close intimacy exists between this lady and the man Stapleton?\"\n\n\"I did not know of a close intimacy.\"\n\n\"There can be no doubt about the matter. They meet, they write, there is a complete understanding between them. Now, this puts a very powerful weapon into our hands. If I could only use it to detach his wife\u2014\"\n\n\"His wife?\"\n\n\"I am giving you some information now, in return for all that you have given me. The lady who has passed here as Miss Stapleton is in reality his wife.\"\n\n\"Good heavens, Holmes! Are you sure of what you say? How could he have permitted Sir Henry to fall in love with her?\"\n\n\"Sir Henry's falling in love could do no harm to anyone except Sir Henry. He took particular care that Sir Henry did not make love to her, as you have yourself observed. I repeat that the lady is his wife and not his sister.\"\n\n\"But why this elaborate deception?\"\n\n\"Because he foresaw that she would be very much more useful to him in the character of a free woman.\"\n\nAll my unspoken instincts, my vague suspicions, suddenly took shape and centred upon the naturalist. In that impassive, colourless man, with his straw hat and his butterfly-net, I seemed to see something terrible\u2014a creature of infinite patience and craft, with a smiling face and a murderous heart.\n\n\"It is he, then, who is our enemy\u2014it is he who dogged us in London?\"\n\n\"So I read the riddle.\"\n\n\"And the warning\u2014it must have come from her!\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nThe shape of some monstrous villainy, half seen, half guessed, loomed through the darkness which had girt me so long.\n\n\"But are you sure of this, Holmes? How do you know that the woman is his wife?\"\n\n\"Because he so far forgot himself as to tell you a true piece of autobiography upon the occasion when he first met you, and I dare say he has many a time regretted it since. He was once a schoolmaster in the north of England. Now, there is no one more easy to trace than a schoolmaster. There are scholastic agencies by which one may identify any man who has been in the profession. A little investigation showed me that a school had come to grief under atrocious circumstances, and that the man who had owned it\u2014the name was different\u2014had disappeared with his wife. The descriptions agreed. When I learned that the missing man was devoted to entomology the identification was complete.\"\n\nThe darkness was rising, but much was still hidden by the shadows.\n\n\"If this woman is in truth his wife, where does Mrs. Laura Lyons come in?\" I asked.\n\n\"That is one of the points upon which your own researches have shed a light. Your interview with the lady has cleared the situation very much. I did not know about a projected divorce between herself and her husband. In that case, regarding Stapleton as an unmarried man, she counted no doubt upon becoming his wife.\"\n\n\"And when she is undeceived?\"\n\n\"Why, then we may find the lady of service. It must be our first duty to see her\u2014both of us\u2014to-morrow. Don't you think, Watson, that you are away from your charge rather long? Your place should be at Baskerville Hall.\"\n\nThe last red streaks had faded away in the west and night had settled upon the moor. A few faint stars were gleaming in a violet sky.\n\n\"One last question, Holmes,\" I said as I rose. \"Surely there is no need of secrecy between you and me. What is the meaning of it all? What is he after?\"\n\nHolmes's voice sank as he answered:\n\n\"It is murder, Watson\u2014refined, cold-blooded, deliberate murder. Do not ask me for particulars. My nets are closing upon him, even as his are upon Sir Henry, and with your help he is already almost at my mercy. There is but one danger which can threaten us. It is that he should strike before we are ready to do so. Another day\u2014two at the most\u2014and I have my case complete, but until then guard your charge as closely as ever a fond mother watched her ailing child. Your mission to-day has justified itself, and yet I could almost wish that you had not left his side. Hark!\"\n\nA terrible scream\u2014a prolonged yell of horror and anguish burst out of the silence of the moor. That frightful cry turned the blood to ice in my veins.\n\n\"Oh, my God!\" I gasped. \"What is it? What does it mean?\"\n\nHolmes had sprung to his feet, and I saw his dark, athletic outline at the door of the hut, his shoulders stooping, his head thrust forward, his face peering into the darkness.\n\n\"Hush!\" he whispered. \"Hush!\"\n\nThe cry had been loud on account of its vehemence, but it had pealed out from somewhere far off on the shadowy plain. Now it burst upon our ears, nearer, louder, more urgent than before.\n\n\"Where is it?\" Holmes whispered; and I knew from the thrill of his voice that he, the man of iron, was shaken to the soul. \"Where is it, Watson?\"\n\n\"There, I think.\" I pointed into the darkness.\n\n\"No, there!\"\n\nAgain the agonized cry swept through the silent night, louder and much nearer than ever. And a new sound mingled with it, a deep, muttered rumble, musical and yet menacing, rising and falling like the low, constant murmur of the sea.\n\n\"The hound!\" cried Holmes. \"Come, Watson, come! Great heavens, if we are too late!\"\n\nHe had started running swiftly over the moor, and I had followed at his heels. But now from somewhere among the broken ground immediately in front of us there came one last despairing yell, and then a dull, heavy thud. We halted and listened. Not another sound broke the heavy silence of the windless night.\n\nI saw Holmes put his hand to his forehead like a man distracted. He stamped his feet upon the ground.\n\n\"He has beaten us, Watson. We are too late.\"\n\n\"No, no, surely not!\"\n\n\"Fool that I was to hold my hand. And you, Watson, see what comes of abandoning your charge! But, by Heaven, if the worst has happened we'll avenge him!\"\n\nBlindly we ran through the gloom, blundering against boulders, forcing our way through gorse bushes, panting up hills and rushing down slopes, heading always in the direction whence those dreadful sounds had come. At every rise Holmes looked eagerly round him, but the shadows were thick upon the moor, and nothing moved upon its dreary face.\n\n\"Can you see anything?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"But, hark, what is that?\"\n\nA low moan had fallen upon our ears. There it was again upon our left! On that side a ridge of rocks ended in a sheer cliff which overlooked a stone-strewn slope. On its jagged face was spread-eagled some dark, irregular object. As we ran towards it the vague outline hardened into a definite shape. It was a prostrate man face downward upon the ground, the head doubled under him at a horrible angle, the shoulders rounded and the body hunched together as if in the act of throwing a somersault. So grotesque was the attitude that I could not for the instant realize that that moan had been the passing of his soul. Not a whisper, not a rustle, rose now from the dark figure over which we stooped. Holmes laid his hand upon him and held it up again with an exclamation of horror. The gleam of the match which he struck shone upon his clotted fingers and upon the ghastly pool which widened slowly from the crushed skull of the victim. And it shone upon something else which turned our hearts sick and faint within us\u2014the body of Sir Henry Baskerville!\n\nThere was no chance of either of us forgetting that peculiar ruddy tweed suit\u2014the very one which he had worn on the first morning that we had seen him in Baker Street. We caught the one clear glimpse of it, and then the match flickered and went out, even as the hope had gone out of our souls. Holmes groaned, and his face glimmered white through the darkness.\n\n\"The brute! the brute!\" I cried with clenched hands. \"Oh, Holmes, I shall never forgive myself for having left him to his fate.\"\n\n\"I am more to blame than you, Watson. In order to have my case well rounded and complete, I have thrown away the life of my client. It is the greatest blow which has befallen me in my career. But how could I know\u2014how could I know\u2014that he would risk his life alone upon the moor in the face of all my warnings?\"\n\n\"That we should have heard his screams\u2014my God, those screams!\u2014and yet have been unable to save him! Where is this brute of a hound which drove him to his death? It may be lurking among these rocks at this instant. And Stapleton, where is he? He shall answer for this deed.\"\n\n\"He shall. I will see to that. Uncle and nephew have been murdered\u2014the one frightened to death by the very sight of a beast which he thought to be supernatural, the other driven to his end in his wild flight to escape from it. But now we have to prove the connection between the man and the beast. Save from what we heard, we cannot even swear to the existence of the latter, since Sir Henry has evidently died from the fall. But, by heavens, cunning as he is, the fellow shall be in my power before another day is past!\"\n\nWe stood with bitter hearts on either side of the mangled body, overwhelmed by this sudden and irrevocable disaster which had brought all our long and weary labours to so piteous an end. Then as the moon rose we climbed to the top of the rocks over which our poor friend had fallen, and from the summit we gazed out over the shadowy moor, half silver and half gloom. Far away, miles off, in the direction of Grimpen, a single steady yellow light was shining. It could only come from the lonely abode of the Stapletons. With a bitter curse I shook my fist at it as I gazed.\n\n\"Why should we not seize him at once?\"\n\n\"Our case is not complete. The fellow is wary and cunning to the last degree. It is not what we know, but what we can prove. If we make one false move the villain may escape us yet.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\"\n\n\"There will be plenty for us to do to-morrow. To-night we can only perform the last offices to our poor friend.\"\n\nTogether we made our way down the precipitous slope and approached the body, black and clear against the silvered stones. The agony of those contorted limbs struck me with a spasm of pain and blurred my eyes with tears.\n\n\"We must send for help, Holmes! We cannot carry him all the way to the Hall. Good heavens, are you mad?\"\n\nHe had uttered a cry and bent over the body. Now he was dancing and laughing and wringing my hand. Could this be my stern, self-contained friend? These were hidden fires, indeed!\n\n\"A beard! A beard! The man has a beard!\"\n\n\"A beard?\"\n\n\"It is not the baronet\u2014it is\u2014why, it is my neighbour, the convict!\"\n\nWith feverish haste we had turned the body over, and that dripping beard was pointing up to the cold, clear moon. There could be no doubt about the beetling forehead, the sunken animal eyes. It was indeed the same face which had glared upon me in the light of the candle from over the rock\u2014the face of Selden, the criminal.\n\nThen in an instant it was all clear to me. I remembered how the baronet had told me that he had handed his old wardrobe to Barrymore. Barrymore had passed it on in order to help Selden in his escape. Boots, shirt, cap\u2014it was all Sir Henry's. The tragedy was still black enough, but this man had at least deserved death by the laws of his country. I told Holmes how the matter stood, my heart bubbling over with thankfulness and joy.\n\n\"Then the clothes have been the poor devil's death,\" said he. \"It is clear enough that the hound has been laid on from some article of Sir Henry's\u2014the boot which was abstracted in the hotel, in all probability\u2014and so ran this man down. There is one very singular thing, however: How came Selden, in the darkness, to know that the hound was on his trail?\"\n\n\"He heard him.\"\n\n\"To hear a hound upon the moor would not work a hard man like this convict into such a paroxysm of terror that he would risk recapture by screaming wildly for help. By his cries he must have run a long way after he knew the animal was on his track. How did he know?\"\n\n\"A greater mystery to me is why this hound, presuming that all our conjectures are correct\u2014\"\n\n\"I presume nothing.\"\n\n\"Well, then, why this hound should be loose to-night. I suppose that it does not always run loose upon the moor. Stapleton would not let it go unless he had reason to think that Sir Henry would be there.\"\n\n\"My difficulty is the more formidable of the two, for I think that we shall very shortly get an explanation of yours, while mine may remain forever a mystery. The question now is, what shall we do with this poor wretch's body? We cannot leave it here to the foxes and the ravens.\"\n\n\"I suggest that we put it in one of the huts until we can communicate with the police.\"\n\n\"Exactly. I have no doubt that you and I could carry it so far. Halloa, Watson, what's this? It's the man himself, by all that's wonderful and audacious! Not a word to show your suspicions\u2014not a word, or my plans crumble to the ground.\"\n\nA figure was approaching us over the moor, and I saw the dull red glow of a cigar. The moon shone upon him, and I could distinguish the dapper shape and jaunty walk of the naturalist. He stopped when he saw us, and then came on again.\n\n\"Why, Dr. Watson, that's not you, is it? You are the last man that I should have expected to see out on the moor at this time of night. But, dear me, what's this? Somebody hurt? Not\u2014don't tell me that it is our friend Sir Henry!\" He hurried past me and stooped over the dead man. I heard a sharp intake of his breath and the cigar fell from his fingers.\n\n\"Who\u2014who's this?\" he stammered.\n\n\"It is Selden, the man who escaped from Princetown.\"\n\nStapleton turned a ghastly face upon us, but by a supreme effort he had overcome his amazement and his disappointment. He looked sharply from Holmes to me.\n\n\"Dear me! What a very shocking affair! How did he die?\"\n\n\"He appears to have broken his neck by falling over these rocks. My friend and I were strolling on the moor when we heard a cry.\"\n\n\"I heard a cry also. That was what brought me out. I was uneasy about Sir Henry.\"\n\n\"Why about Sir Henry in particular?\" I could not help asking.\n\n\"Because I had suggested that he should come over. When he did not come I was surprised, and I naturally became alarmed for his safety when I heard cries upon the moor. By the way\"\u2014his eyes darted again from my face to Holmes's\u2014\"did you hear anything else besides a cry?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Holmes; \"did you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, you know the stories that the peasants tell about a phantom hound, and so on. It is said to be heard at night upon the moor. I was wondering if there were any evidence of such a sound to-night.\"\n\n\"We heard nothing of the kind,\" said I.\n\n\"And what is your theory of this poor fellow's death?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt that anxiety and exposure have driven him off his head. He has rushed about the moor in a crazy state and eventually fallen over here and broken his neck.\"\n\n\"That seems the most reasonable theory,\" said Stapleton, and he gave a sigh which I took to indicate his relief. \"What do you think about it, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\"\n\nMy friend bowed his compliments.\n\n\"You are quick at identification,\" said he.\n\n\"We have been expecting you in these parts since Dr. Watson came down. You are in time to see a tragedy.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed. I have no doubt that my friend's explanation will cover the facts. I will take an unpleasant remembrance back to London with me to-morrow.\"\n\n\"Oh, you return to-morrow?\"\n\n\"That is my intention.\"\n\n\"I hope your visit has cast some light upon those occurrences which have puzzled us?\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"One cannot always have the success for which one hopes. An investigator needs facts and not legends or rumours. It has not been a satisfactory case.\"\n\nMy friend spoke in his frankest and most unconcerned manner. Stapleton still looked hard at him. Then he turned to me.\n\n\"I would suggest carrying this poor fellow to my house, but it would give my sister such a fright that I do not feel justified in doing it. I think that if we put something over his face he will be safe until morning.\"\n\nAnd so it was arranged. Resisting Stapleton's offer of hospitality, Holmes and I set off to Baskerville Hall, leaving the naturalist to return alone. Looking back we saw the figure moving slowly away over the broad moor, and behind him that one black smudge on the silvered slope which showed where the man was lying who had come so horribly to his end." + }, + { + "title": "Fixing the Nets", + "text": "\"We're at close grips at last,\" said Holmes as we walked together across the moor. \"What a nerve the fellow has! How he pulled himself together in the face of what must have been a paralyzing shock when he found that the wrong man had fallen a victim to his plot. I told you in London, Watson, and I tell you now again, that we have never had a foeman more worthy of our steel.\"\n\n\"I am sorry that he has seen you.\"\n\n\"And so was I at first. But there was no getting out of it.\"\n\n\"What effect do you think it will have upon his plans now that he knows you are here?\"\n\n\"It may cause him to be more cautious, or it may drive him to desperate measures at once. Like most clever criminals, he may be too confident in his own cleverness and imagine that he has completely deceived us.\"\n\n\"Why should we not arrest him at once?\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, you were born to be a man of action. Your instinct is always to do something energetic. But supposing, for argument's sake, that we had him arrested to-night, what on earth the better off should we be for that? We could prove nothing against him. There's the devilish cunning of it! If he were acting through a human agent we could get some evidence, but if we were to drag this great dog to the light of day it would not help us in putting a rope round the neck of its master.\"\n\n\"Surely we have a case.\"\n\n\"Not a shadow of one\u2014only surmise and conjecture. We should be laughed out of court if we came with such a story and such evidence.\"\n\n\"There is Sir Charles's death.\"\n\n\"Found dead without a mark upon him. You and I know that he died of sheer fright, and we know also what frightened him; but how are we to get twelve stolid jurymen to know it? What signs are there of a hound? Where are the marks of its fangs? Of course we know that a hound does not bite a dead body and that Sir Charles was dead before ever the brute overtook him. But we have to prove all this, and we are not in a position to do it.\"\n\n\"Well, then, to-night?\"\n\n\"We are not much better off to-night. Again, there was no direct connection between the hound and the man's death. We never saw the hound. We heard it, but we could not prove that it was running upon this man's trail. There is a complete absence of motive. No, my dear fellow; we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we have no case at present, and that it is worth our while to run any risk in order to establish one.\"\n\n\"And how do you propose to do so?\"\n\n\"I have great hopes of what Mrs. Laura Lyons may do for us when the position of affairs is made clear to her. And I have my own plan as well. Sufficient for to-morrow is the evil thereof; but I hope before the day is past to have the upper hand at last.\"\n\nI could draw nothing further from him, and he walked, lost in thought, as far as the Baskerville gates.\n\n\"Are you coming up?\"\n\n\"Yes; I see no reason for further concealment. But one last word, Watson. Say nothing of the hound to Sir Henry. Let him think that Selden's death was as Stapleton would have us believe. He will have a better nerve for the ordeal which he will have to undergo to-morrow, when he is engaged, if I remember your report aright, to dine with these people.\"\n\n\"And so am I.\"\n\n\"Then you must excuse yourself and he must go alone. That will be easily arranged. And now, if we are too late for dinner, I think that we are both ready for our suppers.\"\n\nSir Henry was more pleased than surprised to see Sherlock Holmes, for he had for some days been expecting that recent events would bring him down from London. He did raise his eyebrows, however, when he found that my friend had neither any luggage nor any explanations for its absence. Between us we soon supplied his wants, and then over a belated supper we explained to the baronet as much of our experience as it seemed desirable that he should know. But first I had the unpleasant duty of breaking the news to Barrymore and his wife. To him it may have been an unmitigated relief, but she wept bitterly in her apron. To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.\n\n\"I've been moping in the house all day since Watson went off in the morning,\" said the baronet. \"I guess I should have some credit, for I have kept my promise. If I hadn't sworn not to go about alone I might have had a more lively evening, for I had a message from Stapleton asking me over there.\"\n\n\"I have no doubt that you would have had a more lively evening,\" said Holmes drily. \"By the way, I don't suppose you appreciate that we have been mourning over you as having broken your neck?\"\n\nSir Henry opened his eyes. \"How was that?\"\n\n\"This poor wretch was dressed in your clothes. I fear your servant who gave them to him may get into trouble with the police.\"\n\n\"That is unlikely. There was no mark on any of them, as far as I know.\"\n\n\"That's lucky for him\u2014in fact, it's lucky for all of you, since you are all on the wrong side of the law in this matter. I am not sure that as a conscientious detective my first duty is not to arrest the whole household. Watson's reports are most incriminating documents.\"\n\n\"But how about the case?\" asked the baronet. \"Have you made anything out of the tangle? I don't know that Watson and I are much the wiser since we came down.\"\n\n\"I think that I shall be in a position to make the situation rather more clear to you before long. It has been an exceedingly difficult and most complicated business. There are several points upon which we still want light\u2014but it is coming all the same.\"\n\n\"We've had one experience, as Watson has no doubt told you. We heard the hound on the moor, so I can swear that it is not all empty superstition. I had something to do with dogs when I was out West, and I know one when I hear one. If you can muzzle that one and put him on a chain I'll be ready to swear you are the greatest detective of all time.\"\n\n\"I think I will muzzle him and chain him all right if you will give me your help.\"\n\n\"Whatever you tell me to do I will do.\"\n\n\"Very good; and I will ask you also to do it blindly, without always asking the reason.\"\n\n\"Just as you like.\"\n\n\"If you will do this I think the chances are that our little problem will soon be solved. I have no doubt\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped suddenly and stared fixedly up over my head into the air. The lamp beat upon his face, and so intent was it and so still that it might have been that of a clear-cut classical statue, a personification of alertness and expectation.\n\n\"What is it?\" we both cried.\n\nI could see as he looked down that he was repressing some internal emotion. His features were still composed, but his eyes shone with amused exultation.\n\n\"Excuse the admiration of a connoisseur,\" said he as he waved his hand towards the line of portraits which covered the opposite wall. \"Watson won't allow that I know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy because our views upon the subject differ. Now, these are a really very fine series of portraits.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm glad to hear you say so,\" said Sir Henry, glancing with some surprise at my friend. \"I don't pretend to know much about these things, and I'd be a better judge of a horse or a steer than of a picture. I didn't know that you found time for such things.\"\n\n\"I know what is good when I see it, and I see it now. That's a Kneller, I'll swear, that lady in the blue silk over yonder, and the stout gentleman with the wig ought to be a Reynolds. They are all family portraits, I presume?\"\n\n\"Every one.\"\n\n\"Do you know the names?\"\n\n\"Barrymore has been coaching me in them, and I think I can say my lessons fairly well.\"\n\n\"Who is the gentleman with the telescope?\"\n\n\"That is Rear-Admiral Baskerville, who served under Rodney in the West Indies. The man with the blue coat and the roll of paper is Sir William Baskerville, who was Chairman of Committees of the House of Commons under Pitt.\"\n\n\"And this Cavalier opposite to me\u2014the one with the black velvet and the lace?\"\n\n\"Ah, you have a right to know about him. That is the cause of all the mischief, the wicked Hugo, who started the Hound of the Baskervilles. We're not likely to forget him.\"\n\nI gazed with interest and some surprise upon the portrait.\n\n\"Dear me!\" said Holmes, \"he seems a quiet, meek-mannered man enough, but I dare say that there was a lurking devil in his eyes. I had pictured him as a more robust and ruffianly person.\"\n\n\"There's no doubt about the authenticity, for the name and the date, 1647, are on the back of the canvas.\"\n\nHolmes said little more, but the picture of the old roysterer seemed to have a fascination for him, and his eyes were continually fixed upon it during supper. It was not until later, when Sir Henry had gone to his room, that I was able to follow the trend of his thoughts. He led me back into the banqueting-hall, his bedroom candle in his hand, and he held it up against the time-stained portrait on the wall.\n\n\"Do you see anything there?\"\n\nI looked at the broad plumed hat, the curling love-locks, the white lace collar, and the straight, severe face which was framed between them. It was not a brutal countenance, but it was prim, hard, and stern, with a firm-set, thin-lipped mouth, and a coldly intolerant eye.\n\n\"Is it like anyone you know?\"\n\n\"There is something of Sir Henry about the jaw.\"\n\n\"Just a suggestion, perhaps. But wait an instant!\" He stood upon a chair, and, holding up the light in his left hand, he curved his right arm over the broad hat and round the long ringlets.\n\n\"Good heavens!\" I cried in amazement.\n\nThe face of Stapleton had sprung out of the canvas.\n\n\"Ha, you see it now. My eyes have been trained to examine faces and not their trimmings. It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise.\"\n\n\"But this is marvellous. It might be his portrait.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is an interesting instance of a throwback, which appears to be both physical and spiritual. A study of family portraits is enough to convert a man to the doctrine of reincarnation. The fellow is a Baskerville\u2014that is evident.\"\n\n\"With designs upon the succession.\"\n\n\"Exactly. This chance of the picture has supplied us with one of our most obvious missing links. We have him, Watson, we have him, and I dare swear that before to-morrow night he will be fluttering in our net as helpless as one of his own butterflies. A pin, a cork, and a card, and we add him to the Baker Street collection!\" He burst into one of his rare fits of laughter as he turned away from the picture. I have not heard him laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody.\n\nI was up betimes in the morning, but Holmes was afoot earlier still, for I saw him as I dressed, coming up the drive.\n\n\"Yes, we should have a full day to-day,\" he remarked, and he rubbed his hands with the joy of action. \"The nets are all in place, and the drag is about to begin. We'll know before the day is out whether we have caught our big, lean-jawed pike, or whether he has got through the meshes.\"\n\n\"Have you been on the moor already?\"\n\n\"I have sent a report from Grimpen to Princetown as to the death of Selden. I think I can promise that none of you will be troubled in the matter. And I have also communicated with my faithful Cartwright, who would certainly have pined away at the door of my hut, as a dog does at his master's grave, if I had not set his mind at rest about my safety.\"\n\n\"What is the next move?\"\n\n\"To see Sir Henry. Ah, here he is!\"\n\n\"Good-morning, Holmes,\" said the baronet. \"You look like a general who is planning a battle with his chief of the staff.\"\n\n\"That is the exact situation. Watson was asking for orders.\"\n\n\"And so do I.\"\n\n\"Very good. You are engaged, as I understand, to dine with our friends the Stapletons to-night.\"\n\n\"I hope that you will come also. They are very hospitable people, and I am sure that they would be very glad to see you.\"\n\n\"I fear that Watson and I must go to London.\"\n\n\"To London?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think that we should be more useful there at the present juncture.\"\n\nThe baronet's face perceptibly lengthened.\n\n\"I hoped that you were going to see me through this business. The Hall and the moor are not very pleasant places when one is alone.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, you must trust me implicitly and do exactly what I tell you. You can tell your friends that we should have been happy to have come with you, but that urgent business required us to be in town. We hope very soon to return to Devonshire. Will you remember to give them that message?\"\n\n\"If you insist upon it.\"\n\n\"There is no alternative, I assure you.\"\n\nI saw by the baronet's clouded brow that he was deeply hurt by what he regarded as our desertion.\n\n\"When do you desire to go?\" he asked coldly.\n\n\"Immediately after breakfast. We will drive in to Coombe Tracey, but Watson will leave his things as a pledge that he will come back to you. Watson, you will send a note to Stapleton to tell him that you regret that you cannot come.\"\n\n\"I have a good mind to go to London with you,\" said the baronet. \"Why should I stay here alone?\"\n\n\"Because it is your post of duty. Because you gave me your word that you would do as you were told, and I tell you to stay.\"\n\n\"All right, then, I'll stay.\"\n\n\"One more direction! I wish you to drive to Merripit House. Send back your trap, however, and let them know that you intend to walk home.\"\n\n\"To walk across the moor?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But that is the very thing which you have so often cautioned me not to do.\"\n\n\"This time you may do it with safety. If I had not every confidence in your nerve and courage I would not suggest it, but it is essential that you should do it.\"\n\n\"Then I will do it.\"\n\n\"And as you value your life do not go across the moor in any direction save along the straight path which leads from Merripit House to the Grimpen Road, and is your natural way home.\"\n\n\"I will do just what you say.\"\n\n\"Very good. I should be glad to get away as soon after breakfast as possible, so as to reach London in the afternoon.\"\n\nI was much astounded by this programme, though I remembered that Holmes had said to Stapleton on the night before that his visit would terminate next day. It had not crossed my mind, however, that he would wish me to go with him, nor could I understand how we could both be absent at a moment which he himself declared to be critical. There was nothing for it, however, but implicit obedience; so we bade good-bye to our rueful friend, and a couple of hours afterwards we were at the station of Coombe Tracey and had dispatched the trap upon its return journey. A small boy was waiting upon the platform.\n\n\"Any orders, sir?\"\n\n\"You will take this train to town, Cartwright. The moment you arrive you will send a wire to Sir Henry Baskerville, in my name, to say that if he finds the pocketbook which I have dropped he is to send it by registered post to Baker Street.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"And ask at the station office if there is a message for me.\"\n\nThe boy returned with a telegram, which Holmes handed to me. It ran:\n\nWire received. Coming down with unsigned warrant. Arrive five-forty.\n\nLESTRADE.\n\n\"That is in answer to mine of this morning. He is the best of the professionals, I think, and we may need his assistance. Now, Watson, I think that we cannot employ our time better than by calling upon your acquaintance, Mrs. Laura Lyons.\"\n\nHis plan of campaign was beginning to be evident. He would use the baronet in order to convince the Stapletons that we were really gone, while we should actually return at the instant when we were likely to be needed. That telegram from London, if mentioned by Sir Henry to the Stapletons, must remove the last suspicions from their minds. Already I seemed to see our nets drawing closer around that lean-jawed pike.\n\nMrs. Laura Lyons was in her office, and Sherlock Holmes opened his interview with a frankness and directness which considerably amazed her.\n\n\"I am investigating the circumstances which attended the death of the late Sir Charles Baskerville,\" said he. \"My friend here, Dr. Watson, has informed me of what you have communicated, and also of what you have withheld in connection with that matter.\"\n\n\"What have I withheld?\" she asked defiantly.\n\n\"You have confessed that you asked Sir Charles to be at the gate at ten o'clock. We know that that was the place and hour of his death. You have withheld what the connection is between these events.\"\n\n\"There is no connection.\"\n\n\"In that case the coincidence must indeed be an extraordinary one. But I think that we shall succeed in establishing a connection, after all. I wish to be perfectly frank with you, Mrs. Lyons. We regard this case as one of murder, and the evidence may implicate not only your friend Mr. Stapleton but his wife as well.\"\n\nThe lady sprang from her chair.\n\n\"His wife!\" she cried.\n\n\"The fact is no longer a secret. The person who has passed for his sister is really his wife.\"\n\nMrs. Lyons had resumed her seat. Her hands were grasping the arms of her chair, and I saw that the pink nails had turned white with the pressure of her grip.\n\n\"His wife!\" she said again. \"His wife! He is not a married man.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"Prove it to me! Prove it to me! And if you can do so\u2014!\" The fierce flash of her eyes said more than any words.\n\n\"I have come prepared to do so,\" said Holmes, drawing several papers from his pocket. \"Here is a photograph of the couple taken in York four years ago. It is indorsed 'Mr. and Mrs. Vandeleur,' but you will have no difficulty in recognizing him, and her also, if you know her by sight. Here are three written descriptions by trustworthy witnesses of Mr. and Mrs. Vandeleur, who at that time kept St. Oliver's private school. Read them and see if you can doubt the identity of these people.\"\n\nShe glanced at them, and then looked up at us with the set, rigid face of a desperate woman.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes,\" she said, \"this man had offered me marriage on condition that I could get a divorce from my husband. He has lied to me, the villain, in every conceivable way. Not one word of truth has he ever told me. And why\u2014why? I imagined that all was for my own sake. But now I see that I was never anything but a tool in his hands. Why should I preserve faith with him who never kept any with me? Why should I try to shield him from the consequences of his own wicked acts? Ask me what you like, and there is nothing which I shall hold back. One thing I swear to you, and that is that when I wrote the letter I never dreamed of any harm to the old gentleman, who had been my kindest friend.\"\n\n\"I entirely believe you, madam,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"The recital of these events must be very painful to you, and perhaps it will make it easier if I tell you what occurred, and you can check me if I make any material mistake. The sending of this letter was suggested to you by Stapleton?\"\n\n\"He dictated it.\"\n\n\"I presume that the reason he gave was that you would receive help from Sir Charles for the legal expenses connected with your divorce?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"And then after you had sent the letter he dissuaded you from keeping the appointment?\"\n\n\"He told me that it would hurt his self-respect that any other man should find the money for such an object, and that though he was a poor man himself he would devote his last penny to removing the obstacles which divided us.\"\n\n\"He appears to be a very consistent character. And then you heard nothing until you read the reports of the death in the paper?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"And he made you swear to say nothing about your appointment with Sir Charles?\"\n\n\"He did. He said that the death was a very mysterious one, and that I should certainly be suspected if the facts came out. He frightened me into remaining silent.\"\n\n\"Quite so. But you had your suspicions?\"\n\nShe hesitated and looked down.\n\n\"I knew him,\" she said. \"But if he had kept faith with me I should always have done so with him.\"\n\n\"I think that on the whole you have had a fortunate escape,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"You have had him in your power and he knew it, and yet you are alive. You have been walking for some months very near to the edge of a precipice. We must wish you good-morning now, Mrs. Lyons, and it is probable that you will very shortly hear from us again.\"\n\n\"Our case becomes rounded off, and difficulty after difficulty thins away in front of us,\" said Holmes as we stood waiting for the arrival of the express from town. \"I shall soon be in the position of being able to put into a single connected narrative one of the most singular and sensational crimes of modern times. Students of criminology will remember the analogous incidents in Godno, in Little Russia, in the year '66, and of course there are the Anderson murders in North Carolina, but this case possesses some features which are entirely its own. Even now we have no clear case against this very wily man. But I shall be very much surprised if it is not clear enough before we go to bed this night.\"\n\nThe London express came roaring into the station, and a small, wiry bulldog of a man had sprung from a first-class carriage. We all three shook hands, and I saw at once from the reverential way in which Lestrade gazed at my companion that he had learned a good deal since the days when they had first worked together. I could well remember the scorn which the theories of the reasoner used then to excite in the practical man.\n\n\"Anything good?\" he asked.\n\n\"The biggest thing for years,\" said Holmes. \"We have two hours before we need think of starting. I think we might employ it in getting some dinner and then, Lestrade, we will take the London fog out of your throat by giving you a breath of the pure night air of Dartmoor. Never been there? Ah, well, I don't suppose you will forget your first visit.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Hound of the Baskervilles", + "text": "One of Sherlock Holmes's defects\u2014if, indeed, one may call it a defect\u2014was that he was exceedingly loath to communicate his full plans to any other person until the instant of their fulfilment. Partly it came no doubt from his own masterful nature, which loved to dominate and surprise those who were around him. Partly also from his professional caution, which urged him never to take any chances. The result, however, was very trying for those who were acting as his agents and assistants. I had often suffered under it, but never more so than during that long drive in the darkness. The great ordeal was in front of us; at last we were about to make our final effort, and yet Holmes had said nothing, and I could only surmise what his course of action would be. My nerves thrilled with anticipation when at last the cold wind upon our faces and the dark, void spaces on either side of the narrow road told me that we were back upon the moor once again. Every stride of the horses and every turn of the wheels was taking us nearer to our supreme adventure.\n\nOur conversation was hampered by the presence of the driver of the hired wagonette, so that we were forced to talk of trivial matters when our nerves were tense with emotion and anticipation. It was a relief to me, after that unnatural restraint, when we at last passed Frankland's house and knew that we were drawing near to the Hall and to the scene of action. We did not drive up to the door but got down near the gate of the avenue. The wagonette was paid off and ordered to return to Coombe Tracey forthwith, while we started to walk to Merripit House.\n\n\"Are you armed, Lestrade?\"\n\nThe little detective smiled.\n\n\"As long as I have my trousers I have a hip-pocket, and as long as I have my hip-pocket I have something in it.\"\n\n\"Good! My friend and I are also ready for emergencies.\"\n\n\"You're mighty close about this affair, Mr. Holmes. What's the game now?\"\n\n\"A waiting game.\"\n\n\"My word, it does not seem a very cheerful place,\" said the detective with a shiver, glancing round him at the gloomy slopes of the hill and at the huge lake of fog which lay over the Grimpen Mire. \"I see the lights of a house ahead of us.\"\n\n\"That is Merripit House and the end of our journey. I must request you to walk on tiptoe and not to talk above a whisper.\"\n\nWe moved cautiously along the track as if we were bound for the house, but Holmes halted us when we were about two hundred yards from it.\n\n\"This will do,\" said he. \"These rocks upon the right make an admirable screen.\"\n\n\"We are to wait here?\"\n\n\"Yes, we shall make our little ambush here. Get into this hollow, Lestrade. You have been inside the house, have you not, Watson? Can you tell the position of the rooms? What are those latticed windows at this end?\"\n\n\"I think they are the kitchen windows.\"\n\n\"And the one beyond, which shines so brightly?\"\n\n\"That is certainly the dining-room.\"\n\n\"The blinds are up. You know the lie of the land best. Creep forward quietly and see what they are doing\u2014but for heaven's sake don't let them know that they are watched!\"\n\nI tiptoed down the path and stooped behind the low wall which surrounded the stunted orchard. Creeping in its shadow I reached a point whence I could look straight through the uncurtained window.\n\nThere were only two men in the room, Sir Henry and Stapleton. They sat with their profiles towards me on either side of the round table. Both of them were smoking cigars, and coffee and wine were in front of them. Stapleton was talking with animation, but the baronet looked pale and distrait. Perhaps the thought of that lonely walk across the ill-omened moor was weighing heavily upon his mind.\n\nAs I watched them Stapleton rose and left the room, while Sir Henry filled his glass again and leaned back in his chair, puffing at his cigar. I heard the creak of a door and the crisp sound of boots upon gravel. The steps passed along the path on the other side of the wall under which I crouched. Looking over, I saw the naturalist pause at the door of an outhouse in the corner of the orchard. A key turned in a lock, and as he passed in there was a curious scuffling noise from within. He was only a minute or so inside, and then I heard the key turn once more and he passed me and re\u00ebntered the house. I saw him rejoin his guest, and I crept quietly back to where my companions were waiting to tell them what I had seen.\n\n\"You say, Watson, that the lady is not there?\" Holmes asked when I had finished my report.\n\n\"Where can she be, then, since there is no light in any other room except the kitchen?\"\n\n\"I cannot think where she is.\"\n\nI have said that over the great Grimpen Mire there hung a dense, white fog. It was drifting slowly in our direction and banked itself up like a wall on that side of us, low but thick and well defined. The moon shone on it, and it looked like a great shimmering ice-field, with the heads of the distant tors as rocks borne upon its surface. Holmes's face was turned towards it, and he muttered impatiently as he watched its sluggish drift.\n\n\"It's moving towards us, Watson.\"\n\n\"Is that serious?\"\n\n\"Very serious, indeed\u2014the one thing upon earth which could have disarranged my plans. He can't be very long, now. It is already ten o'clock. Our success and even his life may depend upon his coming out before the fog is over the path.\"\n\nThe night was clear and fine above us. The stars shone cold and bright, while a half-moon bathed the whole scene in a soft, uncertain light. Before us lay the dark bulk of the house, its serrated roof and bristling chimneys hard outlined against the silver-spangled sky. Broad bars of golden light from the lower windows stretched across the orchard and the moor. One of them was suddenly shut off. The servants had left the kitchen. There only remained the lamp in the dining-room where the two men, the murderous host and the unconscious guest, still chatted over their cigars.\n\nEvery minute that white woolly plain which covered one-half of the moor was drifting closer and closer to the house. Already the first thin wisps of it were curling across the golden square of the lighted window. The farther wall of the orchard was already invisible, and the trees were standing out of a swirl of white vapour. As we watched it the fog-wreaths came crawling round both corners of the house and rolled slowly into one dense bank, on which the upper floor and the roof floated like a strange ship upon a shadowy sea. Holmes struck his hand passionately upon the rock in front of us and stamped his feet in his impatience.\n\n\"If he isn't out in a quarter of an hour the path will be covered. In half an hour we won't be able to see our hands in front of us.\"\n\n\"Shall we move farther back upon higher ground?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think it would be as well.\"\n\nSo as the fog-bank flowed onward we fell back before it until we were half a mile from the house, and still that dense white sea, with the moon silvering its upper edge, swept slowly and inexorably on.\n\n\"We are going too far,\" said Holmes. \"We dare not take the chance of his being overtaken before he can reach us. At all costs we must hold our ground where we are.\" He dropped on his knees and clapped his ear to the ground. \"Thank God, I think that I hear him coming.\"\n\nA sound of quick steps broke the silence of the moor. Crouching among the stones we stared intently at the silver-tipped bank in front of us. The steps grew louder, and through the fog, as through a curtain, there stepped the man whom we were awaiting. He looked round him in surprise as he emerged into the clear, starlit night. Then he came swiftly along the path, passed close to where we lay, and went on up the long slope behind us. As he walked he glanced continually over either shoulder, like a man who is ill at ease.\n\n\"Hist!\" cried Holmes, and I heard the sharp click of a cocking pistol. \"Look out! It's coming!\"\n\nThere was a thin, crisp, continuous patter from somewhere in the heart of that crawling bank. The cloud was within fifty yards of where we lay, and we glared at it, all three, uncertain what horror was about to break from the heart of it. I was at Holmes's elbow, and I glanced for an instant at his face. It was pale and exultant, his eyes shining brightly in the moonlight. But suddenly they started forward in a rigid, fixed stare, and his lips parted in amazement. At the same instant Lestrade gave a yell of terror and threw himself face downward upon the ground. I sprang to my feet, my inert hand grasping my pistol, my mind paralyzed by the dreadful shape which had sprung out upon us from the shadows of the fog. A hound it was, an enormous coal-black hound, but not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen. Fire burst from its open mouth, its eyes glowed with a smouldering glare, its muzzle and hackles and dewlap were outlined in flickering flame. Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of the wall of fog.\n\nWith long bounds the huge black creature was leaping down the track, following hard upon the footsteps of our friend. So paralyzed were we by the apparition that we allowed him to pass before we had recovered our nerve. Then Holmes and I both fired together, and the creature gave a hideous howl, which showed that one at least had hit him. He did not pause, however, but bounded onward. Far away on the path we saw Sir Henry looking back, his face white in the moonlight, his hands raised in horror, glaring helplessly at the frightful thing which was hunting him down.\n\nBut that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal, and if we could wound him we could kill him. Never have I seen a man run as Holmes ran that night. I am reckoned fleet of foot, but he outpaced me as much as I outpaced the little professional. In front of us as we flew up the track we heard scream after scream from Sir Henry and the deep roar of the hound. I was in time to see the beast spring upon its victim, hurl him to the ground, and worry at his throat. But the next instant Holmes had emptied five barrels of his revolver into the creature's flank. With a last howl of agony and a vicious snap in the air, it rolled upon its back, four feet pawing furiously, and then fell limp upon its side. I stooped, panting, and pressed my pistol to the dreadful, shimmering head, but it was useless to press the trigger. The giant hound was dead.\n\nSir Henry lay insensible where he had fallen. We tore away his collar, and Holmes breathed a prayer of gratitude when we saw that there was no sign of a wound and that the rescue had been in time. Already our friend's eyelids shivered and he made a feeble effort to move. Lestrade thrust his brandy-flask between the baronet's teeth, and two frightened eyes were looking up at us.\n\n\"My God!\" he whispered. \"What was it? What, in heaven's name, was it?\"\n\n\"It's dead, whatever it is,\" said Holmes. \"We've laid the family ghost once and forever.\"\n\nIn mere size and strength it was a terrible creature which was lying stretched before us. It was not a pure bloodhound and it was not a pure mastiff; but it appeared to be a combination of the two\u2014gaunt, savage, and as large as a small lioness. Even now, in the stillness of death, the huge jaws seemed to be dripping with a bluish flame and the small, deep-set, cruel eyes were ringed with fire. I placed my hand upon the glowing muzzle, and as I held them up my own fingers smouldered and gleamed in the darkness.\n\n\"Phosphorus,\" I said.\n\n\"A cunning preparation of it,\" said Holmes, sniffing at the dead animal. \"There is no smell which might have interfered with his power of scent. We owe you a deep apology, Sir Henry, for having exposed you to this fright. I was prepared for a hound, but not for such a creature as this. And the fog gave us little time to receive him.\"\n\n\"You have saved my life.\"\n\n\"Having first endangered it. Are you strong enough to stand?\"\n\n\"Give me another mouthful of that brandy and I shall be ready for anything. So! Now, if you will help me up. What do you propose to do?\"\n\n\"To leave you here. You are not fit for further adventures tonight. If you will wait, one or other of us will go back with you to the Hall.\"\n\nHe tried to stagger to his feet; but he was still ghastly pale and trembling in every limb. We helped him to a rock, where he sat shivering with his face buried in his hands.\n\n\"We must leave you now,\" said Holmes. \"The rest of our work must be done, and every moment is of importance. We have our case, and now we only want our man.\n\n\"It's a thousand to one against our finding him at the house,\" he continued as we retraced our steps swiftly down the path. \"Those shots must have told him that the game was up.\"\n\n\"We were some distance off, and this fog may have deadened them.\"\n\n\"He followed the hound to call him off\u2014of that you may be certain. No, no, he's gone by this time! But we'll search the house and make sure.\"\n\nThe front door was open, so we rushed in and hurried from room to room to the amazement of a doddering old manservant, who met us in the passage. There was no light save in the dining-room, but Holmes caught up the lamp and left no corner of the house unexplored. No sign could we see of the man whom we were chasing. On the upper floor, however, one of the bedroom doors was locked.\n\n\"There's someone in here,\" cried Lestrade. \"I can hear a movement. Open this door!\"\n\nA faint moaning and rustling came from within. Holmes struck the door just over the lock with the flat of his foot and it flew open. Pistol in hand, we all three rushed into the room.\n\nBut there was no sign within it of that desperate and defiant villain whom we expected to see. Instead we were faced by an object so strange and so unexpected that we stood for a moment staring at it in amazement.\n\nThe room had been fashioned into a small museum, and the walls were lined by a number of glass-topped cases full of that collection of butterflies and moths the formation of which had been the relaxation of this complex and dangerous man. In the centre of this room there was an upright beam, which had been placed at some period as a support for the old worm-eaten baulk of timber which spanned the roof. To this post a figure was tied, so swathed and muffled in the sheets which had been used to secure it that one could not for the moment tell whether it was that of a man or a woman. One towel passed round the throat and was secured at the back of the pillar. Another covered the lower part of the face, and over it two dark eyes\u2014eyes full of grief and shame and a dreadful questioning\u2014stared back at us. In a minute we had torn off the gag, unswathed the bonds, and Mrs. Stapleton sank upon the floor in front of us. As her beautiful head fell upon her chest I saw the clear red weal of a whiplash across her neck.\n\n\"The brute!\" cried Holmes. \"Here, Lestrade, your brandy-bottle! Put her in the chair! She has fainted from ill-usage and exhaustion.\"\n\nShe opened her eyes again.\n\n\"Is he safe?\" she asked. \"Has he escaped?\"\n\n\"He cannot escape us, madam.\"\n\n\"No, no, I did not mean my husband. Sir Henry? Is he safe?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And the hound?\"\n\n\"It is dead.\"\n\nShe gave a long sigh of satisfaction.\n\n\"Thank God! Thank God! Oh, this villain! See how he has treated me!\" She shot her arms out from her sleeves, and we saw with horror that they were all mottled with bruises. \"But this is nothing\u2014nothing! It is my mind and soul that he has tortured and defiled. I could endure it all, ill-usage, solitude, a life of deception, everything, as long as I could still cling to the hope that I had his love, but now I know that in this also I have been his dupe and his tool.\" She broke into passionate sobbing as she spoke.\n\n\"You bear him no good will, madam,\" said Holmes. \"Tell us then where we shall find him. If you have ever aided him in evil, help us now and so atone.\"\n\n\"There is but one place where he can have fled,\" she answered. \"There is an old tin mine on an island in the heart of the mire. It was there that he kept his hound and there also he had made preparations so that he might have a refuge. That is where he would fly.\"\n\nThe fog-bank lay like white wool against the window. Holmes held the lamp towards it.\n\n\"See,\" said he. \"No one could find his way into the Grimpen Mire tonight.\"\n\nShe laughed and clapped her hands. Her eyes and teeth gleamed with fierce merriment.\n\n\"He may find his way in, but never out,\" she cried. \"How can he see the guiding wands tonight? We planted them together, he and I, to mark the pathway through the mire. Oh, if I could only have plucked them out to-day. Then indeed you would have had him at your mercy!\"\n\nIt was evident to us that all pursuit was in vain until the fog had lifted. Meanwhile we left Lestrade in possession of the house while Holmes and I went back with the baronet to Baskerville Hall. The story of the Stapletons could no longer be withheld from him, but he took the blow bravely when he learned the truth about the woman whom he had loved. But the shock of the night's adventures had shattered his nerves, and before morning he lay delirious in a high fever under the care of Dr. Mortimer. The two of them were destined to travel together round the world before Sir Henry had become once more the hale, hearty man that he had been before he became master of that ill-omened estate.\n\nAnd now I come rapidly to the conclusion of this singular narrative, in which I have tried to make the reader share those dark fears and vague surmises which clouded our lives so long and ended in so tragic a manner. On the morning after the death of the hound the fog had lifted and we were guided by Mrs. Stapleton to the point where they had found a pathway through the bog. It helped us to realize the horror of this woman's life when we saw the eagerness and joy with which she laid us on her husband's track. We left her standing upon the thin peninsula of firm, peaty soil which tapered out into the widespread bog. From the end of it a small wand planted here and there showed where the path zigzagged from tuft to tuft of rushes among those green-scummed pits and foul quagmires which barred the way to the stranger. Rank reeds and lush, slimy water-plants sent an odour of decay and a heavy miasmatic vapour onto our faces, while a false step plunged us more than once thigh-deep into the dark, quivering mire, which shook for yards in soft undulations around our feet. Its tenacious grip plucked at our heels as we walked, and when we sank into it it was as if some malignant hand was tugging us down into those obscene depths, so grim and purposeful was the clutch in which it held us. Once only we saw a trace that someone had passed that perilous way before us. From amid a tuft of cotton grass which bore it up out of the slime some dark thing was projecting. Holmes sank to his waist as he stepped from the path to seize it, and had we not been there to drag him out he could never have set his foot upon firm land again. He held an old black boot in the air. \"Meyers, Toronto,\" was printed on the leather inside.\n\n\"It is worth a mud bath,\" said he. \"It is our friend Sir Henry's missing boot.\"\n\n\"Thrown there by Stapleton in his flight.\"\n\n\"Exactly. He retained it in his hand after using it to set the hound upon the track. He fled when he knew the game was up, still clutching it. And he hurled it away at this point of his flight. We know at least that he came so far in safety.\"\n\nBut more than that we were never destined to know, though there was much which we might surmise. There was no chance of finding footsteps in the mire, for the rising mud oozed swiftly in upon them, but as we at last reached firmer ground beyond the morass we all looked eagerly for them. But no slightest sign of them ever met our eyes. If the earth told a true story, then Stapleton never reached that island of refuge towards which he struggled through the fog upon that last night. Somewhere in the heart of the great Grimpen Mire, down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in, this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried.\n\nMany traces we found of him in the bog-girt island where he had hid his savage ally. A huge driving-wheel and a shaft half-filled with rubbish showed the position of an abandoned mine. Beside it were the crumbling remains of the cottages of the miners, driven away no doubt by the foul reek of the surrounding swamp. In one of these a staple and chain with a quantity of gnawed bones showed where the animal had been confined. A skeleton with a tangle of brown hair adhering to it lay among the d\u00e9bris.\n\n\"A dog!\" said Holmes. \"By Jove, a curly-haired spaniel. Poor Mortimer will never see his pet again. Well, I do not know that this place contains any secret which we have not already fathomed. He could hide his hound, but he could not hush its voice, and hence came those cries which even in daylight were not pleasant to hear. On an emergency he could keep the hound in the outhouse at Merripit, but it was always a risk, and it was only on the supreme day, which he regarded as the end of all his efforts, that he dared do it. This paste in the tin is no doubt the luminous mixture with which the creature was daubed. It was suggested, of course, by the story of the family hell-hound, and by the desire to frighten old Sir Charles to death. No wonder the poor devil of a convict ran and screamed, even as our friend did, and as we ourselves might have done, when he saw such a creature bounding through the darkness of the moor upon his track. It was a cunning device, for, apart from the chance of driving your victim to his death, what peasant would venture to inquire too closely into such a creature should he get sight of it, as many have done, upon the moor? I said it in London, Watson, and I say it again now, that never yet have we helped to hunt down a more dangerous man than he who is lying yonder\"\u2014he swept his long arm towards the huge mottled expanse of green-splotched bog which stretched away until it merged into the russet slopes of the moor." + }, + { + "title": "A Retrospection", + "text": "It was the end of November, and Holmes and I sat, upon a raw and foggy night, on either side of a blazing fire in our sitting-room in Baker Street. Since the tragic upshot of our visit to Devonshire he had been engaged in two affairs of the utmost importance, in the first of which he had exposed the atrocious conduct of Colonel Upwood in connection with the famous card scandal of the Nonpareil Club, while in the second he had defended the unfortunate Mme. Montpensier from the charge of murder which hung over her in connection with the death of her step-daughter, Mlle. Car\u00e8re, the young lady who, as it will be remembered, was found six months later alive and married in New York. My friend was in excellent spirits over the success which had attended a succession of difficult and important cases, so that I was able to induce him to discuss the details of the Baskerville mystery. I had waited patiently for the opportunity, for I was aware that he would never permit cases to overlap, and that his clear and logical mind would not be drawn from its present work to dwell upon memories of the past. Sir Henry and Dr. Mortimer were, however, in London, on their way to that long voyage which had been recommended for the restoration of his shattered nerves. They had called upon us that very afternoon, so that it was natural that the subject should come up for discussion.\n\n\"The whole course of events,\" said Holmes, \"from the point of view of the man who called himself Stapleton was simple and direct, although to us, who had no means in the beginning of knowing the motives of his actions and could only learn part of the facts, it all appeared exceedingly complex. I have had the advantage of two conversations with Mrs. Stapleton, and the case has now been so entirely cleared up that I am not aware that there is anything which has remained a secret to us. You will find a few notes upon the matter under the heading B in my indexed list of cases.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would kindly give me a sketch of the course of events from memory.\"\n\n\"Certainly, though I cannot guarantee that I carry all the facts in my mind. Intense mental concentration has a curious way of blotting out what has passed. The barrister who has his case at his fingers' ends and is able to argue with an expert upon his own subject finds that a week or two of the courts will drive it all out of his head once more. So each of my cases displaces the last, and Mlle. Car\u00e8re has blurred my recollection of Baskerville Hall. To-morrow some other little problem may be submitted to my notice which will in turn dispossess the fair French lady and the infamous Upwood. So far as the case of the hound goes, however, I will give you the course of events as nearly as I can, and you will suggest anything which I may have forgotten.\n\n\"My inquiries show beyond all question that the family portrait did not lie, and that this fellow was indeed a Baskerville. He was a son of that Rodger Baskerville, the younger brother of Sir Charles, who fled with a sinister reputation to South America, where he was said to have died unmarried. He did, as a matter of fact, marry, and had one child, this fellow, whose real name is the same as his father's. He married Beryl Garcia, one of the beauties of Costa Rica, and, having purloined a considerable sum of public money, he changed his name to Vandeleur and fled to England, where he established a school in the east of Yorkshire. His reason for attempting this special line of business was that he had struck up an acquaintance with a consumptive tutor upon the voyage home, and that he had used this man's ability to make the undertaking a success. Fraser, the tutor, died, however, and the school which had begun well sank from disrepute into infamy. The Vandeleurs found it convenient to change their name to Stapleton, and he brought the remains of his fortune, his schemes for the future, and his taste for entomology to the south of England. I learned at the British Museum that he was a recognized authority upon the subject, and that the name of Vandeleur has been permanently attached to a certain moth which he had, in his Yorkshire days, been the first to describe.\n\n\"We now come to that portion of his life which has proved to be of such intense interest to us. The fellow had evidently made inquiry and found that only two lives intervened between him and a valuable estate. When he went to Devonshire his plans were, I believe, exceedingly hazy, but that he meant mischief from the first is evident from the way in which he took his wife with him in the character of his sister. The idea of using her as a decoy was clearly already in his mind, though he may not have been certain how the details of his plot were to be arranged. He meant in the end to have the estate, and he was ready to use any tool or run any risk for that end. His first act was to establish himself as near to his ancestral home as he could, and his second was to cultivate a friendship with Sir Charles Baskerville and with the neighbours.\n\n\"The baronet himself told him about the family hound, and so prepared the way for his own death. Stapleton, as I will continue to call him, knew that the old man's heart was weak and that a shock would kill him. So much he had learned from Dr. Mortimer. He had heard also that Sir Charles was superstitious and had taken this grim legend very seriously. His ingenious mind instantly suggested a way by which the baronet could be done to death, and yet it would be hardly possible to bring home the guilt to the real murderer.\n\n\"Having conceived the idea he proceeded to carry it out with considerable finesse. An ordinary schemer would have been content to work with a savage hound. The use of artificial means to make the creature diabolical was a flash of genius upon his part. The dog he bought in London from Ross and Mangles, the dealers in Fulham Road. It was the strongest and most savage in their possession. He brought it down by the North Devon line and walked a great distance over the moor so as to get it home without exciting any remarks. He had already on his insect hunts learned to penetrate the Grimpen Mire, and so had found a safe hiding-place for the creature. Here he kennelled it and waited his chance.\n\n\"But it was some time coming. The old gentleman could not be decoyed outside of his grounds at night. Several times Stapleton lurked about with his hound, but without avail. It was during these fruitless quests that he, or rather his ally, was seen by peasants, and that the legend of the demon dog received a new confirmation. He had hoped that his wife might lure Sir Charles to his ruin, but here she proved unexpectedly independent. She would not endeavour to entangle the old gentleman in a sentimental attachment which might deliver him over to his enemy. Threats and even, I am sorry to say, blows refused to move her. She would have nothing to do with it, and for a time Stapleton was at a deadlock.\n\n\"He found a way out of his difficulties through the chance that Sir Charles, who had conceived a friendship for him, made him the minister of his charity in the case of this unfortunate woman, Mrs. Laura Lyons. By representing himself as a single man he acquired complete influence over her, and he gave her to understand that in the event of her obtaining a divorce from her husband he would marry her. His plans were suddenly brought to a head by his knowledge that Sir Charles was about to leave the Hall on the advice of Dr. Mortimer, with whose opinion he himself pretended to coincide. He must act at once, or his victim might get beyond his power. He therefore put pressure upon Mrs. Lyons to write this letter, imploring the old man to give her an interview on the evening before his departure for London. He then, by a specious argument, prevented her from going, and so had the chance for which he had waited.\n\n\"Driving back in the evening from Coombe Tracey he was in time to get his hound, to treat it with his infernal paint, and to bring the beast round to the gate at which he had reason to expect that he would find the old gentleman waiting. The dog, incited by its master, sprang over the wicket-gate and pursued the unfortunate baronet, who fled screaming down the yew alley. In that gloomy tunnel it must indeed have been a dreadful sight to see that huge black creature, with its flaming jaws and blazing eyes, bounding after its victim. He fell dead at the end of the alley from heart disease and terror. The hound had kept upon the grassy border while the baronet had run down the path, so that no track but the man's was visible. On seeing him lying still the creature had probably approached to sniff at him, but finding him dead had turned away again. It was then that it left the print which was actually observed by Dr. Mortimer. The hound was called off and hurried away to its lair in the Grimpen Mire, and a mystery was left which puzzled the authorities, alarmed the countryside, and finally brought the case within the scope of our observation.\n\n\"So much for the death of Sir Charles Baskerville. You perceive the devilish cunning of it, for really it would be almost impossible to make a case against the real murderer. His only accomplice was one who could never give him away, and the grotesque, inconceivable nature of the device only served to make it more effective. Both of the women concerned in the case, Mrs. Stapleton and Mrs. Laura Lyons, were left with a strong suspicion against Stapleton. Mrs. Stapleton knew that he had designs upon the old man, and also of the existence of the hound. Mrs. Lyons knew neither of these things, but had been impressed by the death occurring at the time of an uncancelled appointment which was only known to him. However, both of them were under his influence, and he had nothing to fear from them. The first half of his task was successfully accomplished, but the more difficult still remained.\n\n\"It is possible that Stapleton did not know of the existence of an heir in Canada. In any case he would very soon learn it from his friend Dr. Mortimer, and he was told by the latter all details about the arrival of Henry Baskerville. Stapleton's first idea was that this young stranger from Canada might possibly be done to death in London without coming down to Devonshire at all. He distrusted his wife ever since she had refused to help him in laying a trap for the old man, and he dared not leave her long out of his sight for fear he should lose his influence over her. It was for this reason that he took her to London with him. They lodged, I find, at the Mexborough Private Hotel, in Craven Street, which was actually one of those called upon by my agent, in search of evidence. Here he kept his wife imprisoned in her room while he, disguised in a beard, followed Dr. Mortimer to Baker Street and afterwards to the station and to the Northumberland Hotel. His wife had some inkling of his plans; but she had such a fear of her husband\u2014a fear founded upon brutal ill-treatment\u2014that she dare not write to warn the man whom she knew to be in danger. If the letter should fall into Stapleton's hands her own life would not be safe. Eventually, as we know, she adopted the expedient of cutting out the words which would form the message, and addressing the letter in a disguised hand. It reached the baronet, and gave him the first warning of his danger.\n\n\"It was very essential for Stapleton to get some article of Sir Henry's attire so that, in case he was driven to use the dog, he might always have the means of setting him upon his track. With characteristic promptness and audacity he set about this at once, and we cannot doubt that the boots or chamber-maid of the hotel was well bribed to help him in his design. By chance, however, the first boot which was procured for him was a new one and, therefore, useless for his purpose. He then had it returned and obtained another\u2014a most instructive incident, since it proved conclusively to my mind that we were dealing with a real hound, as no other supposition could explain this anxiety to obtain an old boot and this indifference to a new one. The more outr\u00e9 and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined, and the very point which appears to complicate a case is, when duly considered and scientifically handled, the one which is most likely to elucidate it.\n\n\"Then we had the visit from our friends next morning, shadowed always by Stapleton in the cab. From his knowledge of our rooms and of my appearance, as well as from his general conduct, I am inclined to think that Stapleton's career of crime has been by no means limited to this single Baskerville affair. It is suggestive that during the last three years there have been four considerable burglaries in the west country, for none of which was any criminal ever arrested. The last of these, at Folkestone Court, in May, was remarkable for the cold-blooded pistolling of the page, who surprised the masked and solitary burglar. I cannot doubt that Stapleton recruited his waning resources in this fashion, and that for years he has been a desperate and dangerous man.\n\n\"We had an example of his readiness of resource that morning when he got away from us so successfully, and also of his audacity in sending back my own name to me through the cabman. From that moment he understood that I had taken over the case in London, and that therefore there was no chance for him there. He returned to Dartmoor and awaited the arrival of the baronet.\"\n\n\"One moment!\" said I. \"You have, no doubt, described the sequence of events correctly, but there is one point which you have left unexplained. What became of the hound when its master was in London?\"\n\n\"I have given some attention to this matter and it is undoubtedly of importance. There can be no question that Stapleton had a confidant, though it is unlikely that he ever placed himself in his power by sharing all his plans with him. There was an old manservant at Merripit House, whose name was Anthony. His connection with the Stapletons can be traced for several years, as far back as the schoolmastering days, so that he must have been aware that his master and mistress were really husband and wife. This man has disappeared and has escaped from the country. It is suggestive that Anthony is not a common name in England, while Antonio is so in all Spanish or Spanish-American countries. The man, like Mrs. Stapleton herself, spoke good English, but with a curious lisping accent. I have myself seen this old man cross the Grimpen Mire by the path which Stapleton had marked out. It is very probable, therefore, that in the absence of his master it was he who cared for the hound, though he may never have known the purpose for which the beast was used.\n\n\"The Stapletons then went down to Devonshire, whither they were soon followed by Sir Henry and you. One word now as to how I stood myself at that time. It may possibly recur to your memory that when I examined the paper upon which the printed words were fastened I made a close inspection for the water-mark. In doing so I held it within a few inches of my eyes, and was conscious of a faint smell of the scent known as white jessamine. There are seventy-five perfumes, which it is very necessary that a criminal expert should be able to distinguish from each other, and cases have more than once within my own experience depended upon their prompt recognition. The scent suggested the presence of a lady, and already my thoughts began to turn towards the Stapletons. Thus I had made certain of the hound, and had guessed at the criminal before ever we went to the west country.\n\n\"It was my game to watch Stapleton. It was evident, however, that I could not do this if I were with you, since he would be keenly on his guard. I deceived everybody, therefore, yourself included, and I came down secretly when I was supposed to be in London. My hardships were not so great as you imagined, though such trifling details must never interfere with the investigation of a case. I stayed for the most part at Coombe Tracey, and only used the hut upon the moor when it was necessary to be near the scene of action. Cartwright had come down with me, and in his disguise as a country boy he was of great assistance to me. I was dependent upon him for food and clean linen. When I was watching Stapleton, Cartwright was frequently watching you, so that I was able to keep my hand upon all the strings.\n\n\"I have already told you that your reports reached me rapidly, being forwarded instantly from Baker Street to Coombe Tracey. They were of great service to me, and especially that one incidentally truthful piece of biography of Stapleton's. I was able to establish the identity of the man and the woman and knew at last exactly how I stood. The case had been considerably complicated through the incident of the escaped convict and the relations between him and the Barrymores. This also you cleared up in a very effective way, though I had already come to the same conclusions from my own observations.\n\n\"By the time that you discovered me upon the moor I had a complete knowledge of the whole business, but I had not a case which could go to a jury. Even Stapleton's attempt upon Sir Henry that night which ended in the death of the unfortunate convict did not help us much in proving murder against our man. There seemed to be no alternative but to catch him red-handed, and to do so we had to use Sir Henry, alone and apparently unprotected, as a bait. We did so, and at the cost of a severe shock to our client we succeeded in completing our case and driving Stapleton to his destruction. That Sir Henry should have been exposed to this is, I must confess, a reproach to my management of the case, but we had no means of foreseeing the terrible and paralyzing spectacle which the beast presented, nor could we predict the fog which enabled him to burst upon us at such short notice. We succeeded in our object at a cost which both the specialist and Dr. Mortimer assure me will be a temporary one. A long journey may enable our friend to recover not only from his shattered nerves but also from his wounded feelings. His love for the lady was deep and sincere, and to him the saddest part of all this black business was that he should have been deceived by her.\n\n\"It only remains to indicate the part which she had played throughout. There can be no doubt that Stapleton exercised an influence over her which may have been love or may have been fear, or very possibly both, since they are by no means incompatible emotions. It was, at least, absolutely effective. At his command she consented to pass as his sister, though he found the limits of his power over her when he endeavoured to make her the direct accessory to murder. She was ready to warn Sir Henry so far as she could without implicating her husband, and again and again she tried to do so. Stapleton himself seems to have been capable of jealousy, and when he saw the baronet paying court to the lady, even though it was part of his own plan, still he could not help interrupting with a passionate outburst which revealed the fiery soul which his self-contained manner so cleverly concealed. By encouraging the intimacy he made it certain that Sir Henry would frequently come to Merripit House and that he would sooner or later get the opportunity which he desired. On the day of the crisis, however, his wife turned suddenly against him. She had learned something of the death of the convict, and she knew that the hound was being kept in the outhouse on the evening that Sir Henry was coming to dinner. She taxed her husband with his intended crime, and a furious scene followed in which he showed her for the first time that she had a rival in his love. Her fidelity turned in an instant to bitter hatred, and he saw that she would betray him. He tied her up, therefore, that she might have no chance of warning Sir Henry, and he hoped, no doubt, that when the whole countryside put down the baronet's death to the curse of his family, as they certainly would do, he could win his wife back to accept an accomplished fact and to keep silent upon what she knew. In this I fancy that in any case he made a miscalculation, and that, if we had not been there, his doom would none the less have been sealed. A woman of Spanish blood does not condone such an injury so lightly. And now, my dear Watson, without referring to my notes, I cannot give you a more detailed account of this curious case. I do not know that anything essential has been left unexplained.\"\n\n\"He could not hope to frighten Sir Henry to death as he had done the old uncle with his bogie hound.\"\n\n\"The beast was savage and half-starved. If its appearance did not frighten its victim to death, at least it would paralyze the resistance which might be offered.\"\n\n\"No doubt. There only remains one difficulty. If Stapleton came into the succession, how could he explain the fact that he, the heir, had been living unannounced under another name so close to the property? How could he claim it without causing suspicion and inquiry?\"\n\n\"It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it. The past and the present are within the field of my inquiry, but what a man may do in the future is a hard question to answer. Mrs. Stapleton has heard her husband discuss the problem on several occasions. There were three possible courses. He might claim the property from South America, establish his identity before the British authorities there, and so obtain the fortune without ever coming to England at all; or he might adopt an elaborate disguise during the short time that he need be in London; or, again, he might furnish an accomplice with the proofs and papers, putting him in as heir, and retaining a claim upon some proportion of his income. We cannot doubt from what we know of him that he would have found some way out of the difficulty. And now, my dear Watson, we have had some weeks of severe work, and for one evening, I think, we may turn our thoughts into more pleasant channels. I have a box for 'Les Huguenots,' Have you heard the De Reszkes? Might I trouble you then to be ready in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini's for a little dinner on the way?\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Tales of Unease", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "short stories", + "horror", + "gothic", + "mystery" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "TALES OF UNEASE", + "text": "[ The Ring of Thoth ]\n\nMr John Vansittart Smith FRS of 147a Gower Street was a man whose energy of purpose and clearness of thought might have placed him in the very first rank of scientific observers. He was the victim, however, of a universal ambition which prompted him to aim at distinction in many subjects rather than pre-eminence in one. In his early days he had shown an aptitude for zoology and for botany which caused his friends to look upon him as a second Darwin, but when a professorship was almost within his reach he had suddenly discontinued his studies and turned his whole attention to chemistry. Here his researches upon the spectra of the metals had won him his fellowship in the Royal Society; but again he played the coquette with his subject, and after a year\"s absence from the laboratory, he joined the Oriental Society, and delivered a paper on the hieroglyphic and demotic inscriptions of El Kab, thus giving a crowning example both of the versatility and of the inconstancy of his talents.\n\nThe most fickle of wooers, however, is apt to be caught at last, and so it was with John Vansittart Smith. The more he burrowed his way into Egyptology, the more impressed he became by the vast field which it opened to the enquirer and by the extreme importance of a subject which promised to throw a light upon the first germs of human civilisation and the origin of the greater part of our arts and sciences. So struck was Mr Smith that he straightway married an Egyptological young lady who had written upon the sixth dynasty, and having thus secured a sound base of operations he set himself to collect materials for a work which should unite the research of Lepsius and the ingenuity of Champollion. The preparation of this magnum opus entailed many hurried visits to the magnificent Egyptian collections of the Louvre, upon the last of which, no longer ago than the middle of last October, he became involved in a most strange and noteworthy adventure.\n\nThe trains had been slow and the Channel had been rough, so that the student arrived in Paris in a somewhat befogged and feverish condition. On reaching the H\u00f4tel de France, in the Rue Laffitte, he had thrown himself upon a sofa for a couple of hours, but finding that he was unable to sleep, he determined, in spite of his fatigue, to make his way to the Louvre, settle the point which he had come to decide, and take the evening train back to Dieppe. Having come to his conclusion, he donned his greatcoat, for it was a raw rainy day, and made his way across the Boulevard des Italiens and down the Avenue de l\"Op\u00e9ra. Once in the Louvre he was on familiar ground, and he speedily made his way to the collection of papyri which it was his intention to consult.\n\nThe warmest admirers of John Vansittart Smith could hardly claim for him that he was a handsome man. His high-beaked nose and prominent chin had something of the same acute and incisive character which distinguished his intellect. He held his head in a birdlike fashion, and birdlike, too, was the pecking motion with which, in conversation, he threw out his objections and retorts. As he stood, with the high collar of his greatcoat raised to his ears, he might have seen from the reflection in the glass case before him that his appearance was a singular one. Yet it came upon him as a sudden jar when an English voice behind him exclaimed in very audible tones, \"What a queer-looking mortal!\"\n\nThe student had a large amount of petty vanity in his composition which manifested itself by an ostentatious and overdone disregard of all personal considerations. He straightened his lips and looked rigidly at the roll of papyrus, while his heart filled with bitterness against the whole race of travelling Britons.\n\n\"Yes,\" said another voice, \"he really is an extraordinary fellow.\"\n\n\"Do you know,\" said the first speaker, \"one could almost believe that by the continual contemplation of mummies the chap has become half a mummy himself!\"\n\n\"He has certainly an Egyptian cast of countenance,\" said the other.\n\nJohn Vansittart Smith spun round upon his heel with the intention of shaming his countrymen by a corrosive remark or two. To his surprise and relief, the two young fellows who had been conversing had their shoulders turned towards him and were gazing at one of the Louvre attendants who was polishing some brasswork at the other side of the room.\n\n\"Carter will be waiting for us at the Palais Royal,\" said one tourist to the other, glancing at his watch, and they clattered away, leaving the student to his labours.\n\n\"I wonder what these chatterers call an Egyptian cast of countenance,\" thought John Vansittart Smith, and he moved his position slightly in order to catch a glimpse of the man\"s face. He started as his eyes fell upon it. It was indeed the very face with which his studies had made him familiar. The regular statuesque features, broad brow, well-rounded chin and dusky complexion were the exact counterpart of the innumerable statues, mummy-cases and pictures which adorned the walls of the apartment. The thing was beyond all coincidence. The man must be an Egyptian. The national angularity of the shoulders and narrowness of the hips were alone sufficient to identify him.\n\nJohn Vansittart Smith shuffled towards the attendant with some intention of addressing him. He was not light of touch in conversation, and found it difficult to strike the happy mean between the brusqueness of the superior and the geniality of the equal. As he came nearer, the man presented his side face to him, but kept his gaze still bent upon his work. Vansittart Smith, fixing his eyes upon the fellow\"s skin, was conscious of a sudden impression that there was something inhuman and preternatural about its appearance. Over the temple and cheek-bone it was as glazed and as shiny as varnished parchment. There was no suggestion of pores. One could not fancy a drop of moisture upon that arid surface. From brow to chin, however, it was cross-hatched by a million delicate wrinkles, which shot and interlaced as though Nature in some Maori mood had tried how wild and intricate a pattern she could devise.\n\n\"O\u00f9 est la collection de Memphis?\" asked the student, with the awkward air of a man who is devising a question merely for the purpose of opening a conversation.\n\n\"C\"est l\u00e0,\" replied the man brusquely, nodding his head at the other side of the room.\n\n\"Vous \u00eates un Egyptien, n\"est-ce pas?\" asked the Englishman.\n\nThe attendant looked up and turned his strange dark eyes upon his questioner. They were vitreous, with a misty dry shininess such as Vansittart Smith had never seen in a human head before. As he gazed into them he saw some strong emotion gather in their depths, which rose and deepened until it broke into a look of something akin both to horror and to hatred.\n\n\"Non, monsieur; je suis fran\u00e7ais.\" The man turned abruptly and bent low over his polishing. The student gazed at him for a moment in astonishment, and then turning to a chair in a retired corner behind one of the doors he proceeded to make notes of his researches among the papyri. His thoughts, however, refused to return into their natural groove. They would run upon the enigmatical attendant with the sphinx-like face and the parchment skin.\n\n\"Where have I seen such eyes?\" said Vansittart Smith to himself. \"There is something saurian about them, something reptilian. There\"s the membrana nictitans of the snakes,\" he mused, bethinking himself of his zoological studies. \"It gives a shiny effect. But there was something more here. There was a sense of power, of wisdom \u2013 so I read them \u2013 and of weariness, utter weariness, and ineffable despair. It may be all imagination, but I never had so strong an impression. By Jove, I must have another look at them!\" He rose and paced round the Egyptian rooms, but the man who had excited his curiosity had disappeared.\n\nThe student sat down again in his quiet corner, and continued to work at his notes. He had gained the information which he required from the papyri, and it only remained to write it down while it was still fresh in his memory. For a time his pencil travelled rapidly over the paper, but soon the lines became less level, the words more blurred and finally the pencil tinkled down upon the floor and the head of the student dropped heavily forward upon his chest. Tired out by his journey, he slept so soundly in his lonely post behind the door that neither the clanking civil guard, nor the footsteps of sightseers, nor even the loud hoarse bell which gives the signal for closing, were sufficient to arouse him.\n\nTwilight deepened into darkness, the bustle from the Rue de Rivoli waxed and then waned, distant Notre Dame clanged out the hour of midnight, and still the dark and lonely figure sat silently in the shadow. It was not until close upon one in the morning that, with a sudden gasp and an intaking of the breath, Vansittart Smith returned to consciousness. For a moment it flashed upon him that he had dropped asleep in his study chair at home. The moon was shining fitfully though the unshuttered window, however, and as his eye ran along the lines of mummies and the endless array of polished cases, he remembered clearly where he was and how he came there. The student was not a nervous man. He possessed that love of a novel situation which is peculiar to his race. Stretching out his cramped limbs, he looked at his watch and burst into a chuckle as he observed the hour. The episode would make an admirable anecdote to be introduced into his next paper as a relief to the graver and heavier speculations. He was a little cold, but wide awake and much refreshed. It was no wonder that the guardians had overlooked him, for the door threw its heavy black shadow right across him.\n\nThe complete silence was impressive. Neither outside nor inside was there a creak or a murmur. He was alone with the dead men of a dead civilisation. What though the outer city reeked of the garish nineteenth century! In all this chamber there was scarce an article, from the shrivelled ear of wheat to the pigment-box of the painter, which had not held its own against four thousand years. Here was the flotsam and jetsam washed up by the great ocean of time from that far-off empire. From stately Thebes, from lordly Luxor, from the great temples of Heliopolis, from a hundred rifled tombs, these relics had been brought. The student glanced round at the long-silent figures who flickered vaguely up through the gloom, at the busy toilers who were now so restful, and he fell into a reverent and thoughtful mood. An unwonted sense of his own youth and insignificance came over him. Leaning back in his chair, he gazed dreamily down the long vista of rooms, all silvery with the moonshine, which extended through the whole wing of the widespread building. His eyes fell upon the yellow glare of a distant lamp.\n\nJohn Vansittart Smith sat up on his chair with his nerves all on edge. The light was advancing slowly towards him, pausing from time to time, and then coming jerkily onwards. The bearer moved noiselessly. In the utter silence there was no suspicion of the pat of a footfall. An idea of robbers entered the Englishman\"s head. He snuggled up farther into the corner. The light was two rooms off. Now it was in the next chamber, and still there was no sound. With something approaching to a thrill of fear, the student observed a face, floating in the air as it were, behind the flare of the lamp. The figure was wrapped in shadow, but the light fell full upon the strange, eager face. There was no mistaking the metallic, glistening eyes and the cadaverous skin. It was the attendant with whom he had conversed.\n\nVansittart Smith\"s first impulse was to come forward and address him. A few words of explanation would set the matter clear, and lead doubtless to his being conducted to some side-door from which he might make his way to his hotel. As the man entered the chamber, however, there was something so stealthy in his movements, and so furtive in his expression, that the Englishman altered his intention. This was clearly no ordinary official walking the rounds. The fellow wore felt-soled slippers, stepped with a rising chest, and glanced quickly from left to right, while his hurried, gasping breathing thrilled the flame of his lamp. Vansittart Smith crouched silently back into the corner and watched him keenly, convinced that his errand was one of secret and probably sinister import.\n\nThere was no hesitation in the other\"s movements. He stepped lightly and swiftly across to one of the great cases, and drawing a key from his pocket, he unlocked it. From the upper shelf he pulled down a mummy, which he bore away with him, and laid it with much care and solicitude upon the ground. By it he placed his lamp, and then squatting down beside it in Eastern fashion he began with long, quivering fingers to undo the cerecloths and bandages which girt it round As the crackling rolls of linen peeled off one after the other, a strong aromatic odour filled the chamber, and fragments of scented wood and of spices pattered down upon the marble floor.\n\nIt was clear to John Vansittart Smith that this mummy had never been unswathed before. The operation interested him keenly. He thrilled all over with curiosity, and his birdlike head protruded farther and farther from behind the door. When, however, the last roll had been removed from the four-thousand-year-old head, it was all that he could do to stifle an outcry of amazement. First, a cascade of long, black, glossy tresses poured over the workman\"s hands and arms. A second turn of the bandage revealed a low, white forehead, with a pair of delicately arched eyebrows. A third uncovered a pair of bright, deeply fringed eyes and a straight, well-cut nose, while a fourth and last showed a sweet, full, sensitive mouth and a beautifully curved chin. The whole face was one of extraordinary loveliness, save for the one blemish that in the centre of the forehead there was a single irregular, coffee-coloured splotch. It was a triumph of the embalmer\"s art. Vansittart Smith\"s eyes grew larger and larger as he gazed upon it, and he chirruped in his throat with satisfaction.\n\nIts effect upon the Egyptologist was as nothing, however, compared with that which it produced upon the strange attendant. He threw his hands up into the air, burst into a harsh clatter of words, and then, hurling himself down upon the ground beside the mummy, he threw his arms round her and kissed her repeatedly upon the lips and brow. \"Ma petite!\" he groaned in French. \"Ma pauvre petite!\" His voice broke with emotion, and his innumerable wrinkles quivered and writhed, but the student observed in the lamplight that his shining eyes were still dry and tearless as two beads of steel. For some minutes he lay, with a twitching face, crooning and moaning over the beautiful head. Then he broke into a sudden smile, said some words in an unknown tongue, and sprang to his feet with the vigorous air of one who has braced himself for an effort.\n\nIn the centre of the room there was a large, circular case which contained, as the student had frequently remarked, a magnificent collection of early Egyptian rings and precious stones. To this the attendant strode, and unlocking it, threw it open. On the ledge at the side he placed his lamp, and beside it a small earthenware jar which he had drawn from his pocket. He then took a handful of rings from the case, and with a most serious and anxious face he proceeded to smear each in turn with some liquid substance from the earthen pot, holding them to the light as he did so. He was clearly disappointed with the first lot, for he threw them petulantly back into the case and drew out some more. One of these, a massive ring with a large crystal set in it, he seized and eagerly tested with the contents of the jar. Instantly he uttered a cry of joy, and threw out his arms in a wild gesture which upset the pot and set the liquid streaming across the floor to the very feet of the Englishman. The attendant drew a red handkerchief from his bosom, and mopping up the mess, he followed it into the corner, where in a moment he found himself face to face with his observer.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" said John Vansittart Smith, with all imaginable politeness; \"I have been unfortunate enough to fall asleep behind this door.\"\n\n\"And you have been watching me?\" the other asked in English, with a most venomous look on his corpse-like face.\n\nThe student was a man of veracity. \"I confess,\" said he, \"that I have noticed your movements, and that they have aroused my curiosity and interest in the highest degree.\"\n\nThe man drew a long, flamboyantly bladed knife from his bosom. \"You have had a very narrow escape,\" he said; \"had I seen you ten minutes ago, I should have driven this through your heart. As it is, if you touch me or interfere with me in any way you are a dead man.\"\n\n\"I have no wish to interfere with you,\" the student answered. \"My presence here is entirely accidental. All I ask is that you will have the extreme kindness to show me out through some side-door.\" He spoke with great suavity, for the man was still pressing the tip of his dagger against the palm of his left hand, as though to assure himself of its sharpness, while his face preserved its malignant expression.\n\n\"If I thought \u2013 \" said he. \"But no, perhaps it is as well. What is your name?\"\n\nThe Englishman gave it.\n\n\"Vansittart Smith,\" the other repeated. \"Are you the same Vansittart Smith who gave a paper in London upon El Kab? I saw a report of it. Your knowledge of the subject is contemptible.\"\n\n\"Sir!\" cried the Egyptologist.\n\n\"Yet it is superior to that of many who make even greater pretensions. The whole keystone of our old life in Egypt was not the inscriptions or monuments of which you make so much, but was our hermetic philosophy and mystic knowledge of which you say little or nothing.\"\n\n\"Our old life!\" repeated the scholar, wide-eyed; and then suddenly, \"Good God, look at the mummy\"s face!\"\n\nThe strange man turned and flashed his light upon the dead woman, uttering a long, doleful cry as he did so. The action of the air had already undone all the art of the embalmer. The skin had fallen away, the eyes had sunk inwards, the discoloured lips had writhed away from the yellow teeth, and the brown mark upon the forehead alone showed that it was indeed the same face which had shown such youth and beauty a few short minutes before.\n\nThe man flapped his hands together in grief and horror. Then mastering himself by a strong effort he turned his hard eyes once more upon the Englishman.\n\n\"It does not matter,\" he said, in a shaking voice. \"It does not really matter. I came here tonight with the fixed determination to do something. It is now done. All else is as nothing. I have found my quest. The old curse is broken. I can rejoin her. What matter about her inanimate shell so long as her spirit is awaiting me at the other side of the veil!\"\n\n\"These are wild words,\" said Vansittart Smith. He was becoming more and more convinced that he had to do with a madman.\n\n\"Time presses, and I must go,\" continued the other. \"The moment is at hand for which I have waited this weary time. But I must show you out first. Come with me.\"\n\nTaking up the lamp, he turned from the disordered chamber and led the student swiftly through the long series of the Egyptian, Assyrian and Persian apartments. At the end of the latter he pushed open a small door let into the wall and descended a winding, stone stair. The Englishman felt the cold, fresh air of the night upon his brow. There was a door opposite him which appeared to communicate with the street. To the right of this another door stood ajar, throwing a spurt of yellow light across the passage. \"Come in here!\" said the attendant shortly.\n\nVansittart Smith hesitated. He had hoped that he had come to the end of his adventure. Yet his curiosity was strong within him. He could not leave the matter unsolved, so he followed his strange companion into the lighted chamber.\n\nIt was a small room, such as is devoted to a concierge. A wood fire sparkled in the grate. At one side stood a truckle bed, and at the other a coarse, wooden chair, with a round table in the centre, which bore the remains of a meal. As the visitor\"s eye glanced round he could not but remark with an ever-recurring thrill that all the small details of the room were of the most quaint design and antique workmanship. The candlesticks, the vases upon the chimney-piece, the fire-irons, the ornaments upon the walls were all such as he had been wont to associate with the remote past. The gnarled, heavy-eyed man sat himself down upon the edge of the bed, and motioned his guest into the chair.\n\n\"There may be design in this,\" he said, still speaking excellent English. \"It may be decreed that I should leave some account behind as a warning to all rash mortals who would set their wits up against the workings of nature. I leave it with you. Make such use as you will of it. I speak to you now with my feet upon the threshold of the other world.\n\n\"I am, as you surmised, an Egyptian \u2013 not one of the down-trodden race of slaves who now inhabit the delta of the Nile, but a survivor of that fiercer and harder people who tamed the Hebrew, drove the Ethiopian back into the southern deserts, and built those mighty works which have been the envy and the wonder of all after generations. It was in the reign of Tuthmosis, sixteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, that I first saw the light. You shrink away from me. Wait, and you will see that I am more to be pitied than to be feared.\n\n\"My name was Sosra. My father had been the chief priest of Osiris in the great temple of Abaris, which stood in those days upon the Bubastic branch of the Nile. I was brought up in the temple and was trained in all those mystic arts which are spoken of in your own Bible. I was an apt pupil. Before I was sixteen I had learned all the wisest priest could teach me. From that time on I studied nature\"s secrets for myself, and shared my knowledge with no man.\n\n\"Of all the questions that attracted me there were none over which I laboured so long as over those which concern themselves with the nature of life. I probed deeply into the vital principle. The aim of medicine had been to drive away disease when it appeared. It seemed to me that a method might be devised which should so fortify the body as to prevent weakness or death from ever taking hold of it. It is useless that I should recount my researches. You would scarce comprehend them if I did. They were carried out partly upon animals, partly upon slaves and partly on myself. Suffice it that their result was to furnish me with a substance which, when injected into the blood, would endow the body with strength to resist the effects of time, of violence or of disease. It would not indeed confer immortality, but its potency would endure for many thousands of years. I used it upon a cat, and afterwards drugged the creature with the most deadly poisons. That cat is alive in Lower Egypt at the present moment. There was nothing of mystery or magic in the matter. It was simply a chemical discovery, which may well be made again.\n\n\"Love of life runs high in the young. It seemed to me that I had broken away from all human care now that I had abolished pain and driven death to such a distance. With a light heart I poured the accursed stuff into my veins. Then I looked round for someone whom I could benefit. There was a young priest of Thoth, Parmes by name, who had won my goodwill by his earnest nature and his devotion to his studies. To him I whispered my secret, and at his request I injected him with my elixir. I should now, I reflected, never be without a companion of the same age as myself.\n\n\"After this grand discovery I relaxed my studies to some extent, but Parmes continued his with redoubled energy. Every day I could see him working with his flasks and his distiller in the Temple of Thoth, but he said little to me as to the result of his labours. For my own part, I used to walk through the city and look around me with exultation as I reflected that all this was destined to pass away, and that only I should remain. The people would bow to me as they passed me, for the fame of my knowledge had gone abroad.\n\n\"There was war at this time, and the Great King had sent down his soldiers to the eastern boundary to drive away the Hyksos. A governor, too, was sent to Abaris, that he might hold it for the king. I had heard much of the beauty of the daughter of this governor, but one day as I walked out with Parmes we met her, borne upon the shoulders of her slaves. I was struck with love as with lightning. My heart went out from me. I could have thrown myself beneath the feet of her bearers. This was my woman. Life without her was impossible. I swore by the head of Horus that she should be mine. I swore it to the priest of Thoth. He turned away from me with a brow which was as black as midnight.\n\n\"There is no need to tell you of our wooing. She came to love me even as I loved her. I learned that Parmes had seen her before I did, and had shown her that he, too, loved her, but I could smile at his passion, for I knew that her heart was mine. The white plague had come upon the city and many were stricken, but I laid my hands upon the sick and nursed them without fear or scathe. She marvelled at my daring. Then I told her my secret, and begged her that she would let me use my art upon her.\n\n\" \"Your flower shall then be unwithered, Atma,\" I said. \"Other things may pass away, but you and I, and our great love for each other, shall outlive the tomb of King Chefru.\"\n\n\"But she was full of timid, maidenly objections. Was it right? she asked, was it not a thwarting of \"the will of the gods\"? If the great Osiris had wished that our years should be so long, would he not himself have brought it about?\n\n\"With fond and loving words I overcame her doubts, and yet she hesitated. It was a great question, she said. She would think it over for this one night. In the morning I should know of her resolution. Surely one night was not too much to ask. She wished to pray to Isis for help in her decision.\n\n\"With a sinking heart and a sad foreboding of evil I left her with her tirewomen. In the morning, when the early sacrifice was over, I hurried to her house. A frightened slave met me upon the steps. Her mistress was ill, she said, very ill. In a frenzy I broke my way through the attendants, and rushed through hall and corridor to my Atma\"s chamber. She lay upon her couch, her head high upon the pillow, with a pallid face and a glazed eye. On her forehead there blazed a single angry, purple patch. I knew that hell-mark of old. It was the scar of the white plague, the sign-manual of death.\n\n\"Why should I speak of that terrible time? For months I was mad, fevered, delirious, and yet I could not die. Never did an Arab thirst after the sweet wells as I longed after death. Could poison or steel have shortened the thread of my existence, I should soon have rejoined my love in the land with the narrow portal. I tried, but it was of no avail. The accursed influence was too strong upon me. One night as I lay upon my couch, weak and weary, Parmes, the priest of Thoth, came to my chamber. He stood in the circle of the lamplight, and he looked down upon me with eyes which were bright with a mad joy.\n\n\" \"Why did you let the maiden die?\" he asked; \"why did you not strengthen her as you strengthened me?\"\n\n\" \"I was too late,\" I answered. \"But I had forgot. You also loved her. You are my fellow in misfortune. Is it not terrible to think of the centuries which must pass ere we look upon her again? Fools, fools, that we were to take death to be our enemy!\"\n\n\" \"You may say that,\" he cried with a wild laugh; \"the words come well from your lips. For me they have no meaning.\"\n\n\" \"What mean you?\" I cried, raising myself upon my elbow. \"Surely, friend, this grief has turned your brain.\" His face was aflame with joy, and he writhed and shook like one who hath a devil.\n\n\" \"Do you know whither I go?\" he asked.\n\n\" \"Nay,\" I answered, \"I cannot tell.\"\n\n\" \"I go to her,\" said he. \"She lies embalmed in the farther tomb by the double palm tree beyond the city wall.\"\n\n\" \"Why do you go there?\" I asked.\n\n\" \"To die!\" he shrieked, \"to die! I am not bound by earthen fetters.\"\n\n\" \"But the elixir is in your blood,\" I cried.\n\n\" \"I can defy it,\" said he; \"I have found a stronger principle which will destroy it. It is working in my veins at this moment, and in an hour I shall be a dead man. I shall join her, and you shall remain behind.\"\n\n\"As I looked upon him I could see that he spoke words of truth. The light in his eye told me that he was indeed beyond the power of the elixir.\n\n\" \"You will teach me!\" I cried.\n\n\" \"Never!\" he answered.\n\n\" \"I implore you, by the wisdom of Thoth, by the majesty of Anubis!\"\n\n\" \"It is useless,\" he said coldly.\n\n\" \"Then I will find it out,\" I cried.\n\n\" \"You cannot,\" he answered; \"it came to me by chance. There is one ingredient which you can never get. Save that which is in the ring of Thoth, none will ever more be made.\"\n\n\" \"In the ring of Thoth!\" I repeated, \"where then is the ring of Thoth?\"\n\n\" \"That also you shall never know,\" he answered. \"You won her love. Who has won in the end? I leave you to your sordid earth life. My chains are broken. I must go!\" He turned upon his heel and fled from the chamber. In the morning came the news that the priest of Thoth was dead.\n\n\"My days after that were spent in study. I must find this subtle poison which was strong enough to undo the elixir. From early dawn to midnight I bent over the test-tube and the furnace. Above all, I collected the papyri and the chemical flasks of the priest of Thoth. Alas! they taught me little. Here and there some hint or stray expression would raise hope in my bosom, but no good ever came of it. Still, month after month, I struggled on. When my heart grew faint I would make my way to the tomb by the palm tree. There, standing by the dead casket from which the jewel had been rifled, I would feel her sweet presence, and would whisper to her that I would rejoin her if mortal wit could solve the riddle.\n\n\"Parmes had said that his discovery was connected with the ring of Thoth. I had some remembrance of the trinket. It was a large and weighty circlet, made not of gold but of a rarer and heavier metal brought from the mines of Mount Harbal. Platinum, you call it. The ring had, I remembered, a hollow crystal set in it, in which some few drops of liquid might be stored. Now, the secret of Parmes could not have to do with the metal alone, for there were many rings of that metal in the temple. Was it not more likely that he had stored his precious poison within the cavity of the crystal? I had scarce come to this conclusion before, in hunting through his papers, I came upon one which told me that it was indeed so, and that there was still some of the liquid unused.\n\n\"But how to find the ring? It was not upon him when he was stripped for the embalmer. Of that I made sure. Neither was it among his private effects. In vain I searched every room that he had entered, every box and vase and chattel that he had owned. I sifted the very sand of the desert in the places where he had been wont to walk; but, do what I would, I could come upon no traces of the ring of Thoth. Yet it may be that my labours would have overcome all obstacles had it not been for a new and unlooked-for misfortune.\n\n\"A great war had been waged against the Hyksos, and the captains of the Great King had been cut off in the desert, with all their bowmen and horsemen. The shepherd tribes were upon us like the locusts in a dry year. From the wilderness of Shur to the great, bitter lake there was blood by day and fire by night. Abaris was the bulwark of Egypt, but we could not keep the savages back. The city fell. The governor and the soldiers were put to the sword, and I, with many more, was led away into captivity.\n\n\"For years and years I tended cattle in the great plains by the Euphrates. My master died, and his son grew old, but I was still as far from death as ever. At last I escaped upon a swift camel, and made my way back to Egypt. The Hyksos had settled in the land which they had conquered, and their own king ruled over the country. Abaris had been torn down, the city had been burned, and of the great temple there was nothing left save an unsightly mound. Everywhere the tombs had been rifled and the monuments destroyed. Of my Atma\"s grave no sign was left. It was buried in the sands of the desert, and the palm tree which marked the spot had long disappeared. The papers of Parmes and the remains of the temple of Thoth were either destroyed or scattered far and wide over the deserts of Syria. All search after them was vain.\n\n\"From that time I gave up all hope of ever finding the ring or discovering the subtle drug. I set myself to live as patiently as might be until the effect of the elixir should wear away. How can you understand how terrible a thing time is, you who have experience only of the narrow course which lies between the cradle and the grave! I know it to my cost, I who have floated down the whole stream of history. I was old when Ilium fell. I was very old when Herodotus came to Memphis. I was bowed down with years when the new gospel came upon earth. Yet you see me much as other men are, with the cursed elixir still sweetening my blood, and guarding me against that which I would court. Now, at last, at last I have come to the end of it!\n\n\"I have travelled in all lands and I have dwelt with all nations. Every tongue is the same to me. I learned them all to help pass the weary time. I need not tell you how slowly they drifted by, the long dawn of modern civilisation, the dreary middle years, the dark times of barbarism. They are all behind me now. I have never looked with the eyes of love upon another woman. Atma knows that I have been constant to her.\n\n\"It was my custom to read all that the scholars had to say upon Ancient Egypt. I have been in many positions, sometimes affluent, sometimes poor, but I have always found enough to enable me to buy the journals which deal with such matters. Some nine months ago I was in San Francisco, and there I read an account of some discoveries made in the neighbourhood of Abaris. My heart leapt into my mouth as I read it. It said that the excavator had busied himself in exploring some tombs recently unearthed. In one there had been found an unopened mummy with an inscription upon the outer case setting forth that it contained the body of the daughter of the governor of the city in the days of Tuthmosis. It added that on removing the outer case there had been exposed a large platinum ring set with a crystal, which had been laid upon the breast of the embalmed woman. This, then, was where Parmes had hid the ring of Thoth. He might well say that it was safe, for no Egyptian would ever stain his soul by moving even the outer case of a buried friend.\n\n\"That very night I set off from San Francisco, and in a few weeks I found myself once more at Abaris, if a few sand-heaps and crumbling walls may retain the name of the great city. I hurried to the Frenchmen who were digging there and asked them for the ring. They replied that both the ring and the mummy had been sent to the Boulak Museum at Cairo. To Boulak I went, but only to be told that Mariette Bey had claimed them and had shipped them to the Louvre. I followed them, and there, at last, in the Egyptian chamber, I came, after close upon four thousand years, upon the remains of my Atma, and upon the ring for which I had sought so long.\n\n\"But how was I to lay hands upon them? How was I to have them for my very own? It chanced that the office of attendant was vacant. I went to the director. I convinced him that I knew much about Egypt. In my eagerness I said too much. He remarked that a professor\"s chair would suit me better than a seat in the conciergerie. I knew more, he said, than he did. It was only by blundering, and letting him think that he had overestimated my knowledge, that I prevailed upon him to let me move the few effects which I have retained into this chamber. It is my first and my last night here.\n\n\"Such is my story, Mr Vansittart Smith. I need not say more to a man of your perception. By a strange chance you have this night looked upon the face of the woman whom I loved in those far-off days. There were many rings with crystals in the case, and I had to test for the platinum to be sure of the one I wanted. A glance at the crystal has shown me that the liquid is indeed within it, and that I shall at last be able to shake off that accursed health which has been worse to me than the foulest disease. I have nothing more to say to you. I have unburdened myself. You may tell my story or you may withhold it at your pleasure. The choice rests with you. I owe you some amends, for you have had a narrow escape of your life this night. I was a desperate man, and not to be baulked in my purpose. Had I seen you before the thing was done, I might have put it beyond your power to oppose me or to raise an alarm. This is the door. It leads into the Rue de Rivoli. Good-night.\"\n\nThe Englishman glanced back. For a moment the lean figure of Sosra the Egyptian stood framed in the narrow doorway. The next the door had slammed, and the heavy rasping of a bolt broke on the silent night.\n\nIt was on the second day after his return to London that Mr John Vansittart Smith saw the following concise narrative in the Paris correspondence of The Times:\n\nCurious Occurrence in the Louvre \u2013 Yesterday morning a strange discovery was made in the principal Eastern chamber. The ouvriers who are employed to clean out the rooms in the morning found one of the attendants lying dead upon the floor with his arms round one of the mummies. So close was his embrace that it was only with the utmost difficulty that they were separated. One of the cases containing valuable rings had been opened and rifled. The authorities are of the opinion that the man was bearing away the mummy with some idea of selling it to a private collector, but that he was struck down in the very act by long-standing disease of the heart. It is said that he was a man of uncertain age and eccentric habits, without any living relations to mourn over his dramatic and untimely end.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Lord of Ch\u00e2teau Noir ]\n\nIt was in the days when the German armies had broken their way across France, and when the shattered forces of the young Republic had been swept away to the north of the Aisne and to the south of the Loire. Three broad streams of armed men had rolled slowly but irresistibly from the Rhine, now meandering to the north, now to the south, dividing, coalescing, but all uniting to form one great lake round Paris. And from this lake there welled out smaller streams, one to the north, one southward to Orl\u00e9ans, and a third westward to Normandy. Many a German trooper saw the sea for the first time when he rode his horse girth-deep into the waves at Dieppe.\n\nBlack and bitter were the thoughts of Frenchmen when they saw this weal of dishonour slashed across the fair face of their country. They had fought and they had been overborne. That swarming cavalry, those countless footmen, the masterful guns \u2013 they had tried and tried to make head against them. In battalions their invaders were not to be beaten; but man to man, or ten to ten, they were their equals. A brave Frenchman might still make a single German rue the day that he had left his own bank of the Rhine. Thus, unchronicled amid the battles and the sieges, there broke out another war, a war of individuals, with foul murder upon the one side and brutal reprisal on the other.\n\nColonel von Gramm, of the 24th Posen Infantry, had suffered severely during this new development. He commanded in the little Norman town of Les Andelys, and his outposts stretched amid the hamlets and farmhouses of the district round. No French force was within fifty miles of him, and yet morning after morning he had to listen to a black report of sentries found dead at their posts or of foraging parties which had never returned. Then the colonel would go forth in his wrath, and farmsteadings would blaze and villages tremble; but next morning there was still that same dismal tale to be told. Do what he might, he could not shake off his invisible enemies. And yet, it should not have been so hard, for from certain signs in common, in the plan and in the deed, it was certain that all these outrages came from a single source.\n\nColonel von Gramm had tried violence and it had failed. Gold might be more successful. He published it abroad over the countryside that five hundred francs would be paid for information. There was no response. Then eight hundred. The peasants were incorruptible. Then, goaded on by a murdered corporal, he rose to a thousand, and so bought the soul of Fran\u00e7ois Rejane, farm labourer, whose Norman avarice was a stronger passion than his French hatred.\n\n\"You say that you know who did these crimes?\" asked the Prussian colonel, eyeing with loathing the blue-bloused, rat-faced creature before him.\n\n\"Yes, colonel.\"\n\n\"And it was \u2013?\"\n\n\"Those thousand francs, colonel \u2013\"\n\n\"Not a sou until your story has been tested. Come! Who is it who has murdered my men?\"\n\n\"It is Count Eustace of Ch\u00e2teau Noir.\"\n\n\"You lie!\" cried the colonel, angrily. \"A gentleman and a nobleman could not have done such crimes.\"\n\nThe peasant shrugged his shoulders. \"It is evident to me that you do not know the count. It is this way, colonel. What I tell you is the truth, and I am not afraid that you should test it. The Count of Ch\u00e2teau Noir is a hard man: even at the best time he was a hard man. But of late he has been terrible. It was his son\"s death, you know. His son was under Douay, and he was taken, and then in escaping from Germany he met his death. It was the count\"s only child, and indeed we all think that it has driven him mad. With his peasants he follows the German armies. I do not know how many he has killed, but it is he who cuts the cross upon the foreheads, for it is the badge of his house.\"\n\nIt was true. The murdered sentries had each had a saltire cross slashed across their brows, as by a hunting-knife. The colonel bent his stiff back and ran his forefinger over the map which lay upon the table.\n\n\"The Ch\u00e2teau Noir is not more than four leagues,\" he said.\n\n\"Three and a kilometre, colonel.\"\n\n\"You know the place?\"\n\n\"I used to work there.\"\n\nColonel von Gramm rang the bell. \"Give this man food and detain him,\" said he to the sergeant.\n\n\"Why detain me, colonel? I can tell you no more.\n\n\"We shall need you as guide.\"\n\n\"As guide! But the count? If I were to fall into his hands? Ah, colonel \u2013\"\n\nThe Prussian commander waved him away. \"Send Captain Baumgarten to me at once,\" said he.\n\nThe officer who answered the summons was a man of middle age, heavy-jawed, blue-eyed, with a curving yellow moustache and a brick-red face which turned to an ivory white where his helmet had sheltered it. He was bald, with a shining, tightly-stretched scalp, at the back of which, as in a mirror, it was a favourite mess-joke of the subalterns to trim their moustaches. As a soldier he was slow, but reliable and brave. The colonel could trust him where a more dashing officer might be in danger.\n\n\"You will proceed to Ch\u00e2teau Noir tonight, captain,\" said he. \"A guide has been provided. You will arrest the count and bring him back. If there is an attempt at rescue, shoot him at once.\"\n\n\"How many men shall I take, colonel?\"\n\n\"Well, we are surrounded by spies, and our only chance is to pounce upon him before he knows that we are on the way. A large force will attract attention. On the other hand, you must not risk being cut off.\"\n\n\"I might march north, colonel, as if to join General Goeben. Then I could turn down this road which I see upon your map, and get to Ch\u00e2teau Noir before they could hear of us. In that case, with twenty men \u2013\"\n\n\"Very good, captain. I hope to see you with your prisoner tomorrow morning.\"\n\nIt was a cold December night when Captain Baumgarten marched out of Les Andelys with his twenty Poseners, and took the main road to the north-west. Two miles out he turned suddenly down a narrow, deeply-rutted track, and made swiftly for his man. A thin, cold rain was falling, swishing among the tall poplar trees and rustling in the fields on either side. The captain walked first with Moser, a veteran sergeant, beside him. The sergeant\"s wrist was fastened to that of the French peasant, and it had been whispered in his ear that in case of an ambush the first bullet fired would be through his head. Behind them the twenty infantrymen plodded along through the darkness, with their faces sunk to the rain and their boots squeaking in the soft, wet clay. They knew where they were going and why, and the thought upheld them, for they were bitter at the loss of their comrades. It was a cavalry job, they knew, but the cavalry were all on with the advance, and, besides, it was more fitting that the regiment should avenge its own dead men.\n\nIt was nearly eight when they left Les Andelys. At half-past eleven their guide stopped at a place where two high pillars, crowned with some heraldic stonework, flanked a huge iron gate. The wall in which it had been the opening had crumbled away, but the great gate still towered above the brambles and weeds which had overgrown its base. The Prussians made their way round it, and advanced stealthily, under the shadow of a tunnel of oak branches, up the long avenue, which was still cumbered by the leaves of last autumn. At the top they halted and reconnoitred.\n\nThe black ch\u00e2teau lay in front of them. The moon shone out between two rain-clouds and threw the old house into silver and shadow. It was shaped like an L, with a low arched door in front, and lines of small windows like the open ports of a man-of-war. Above was a dark roof breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it. A single light gleamed in one of the lower windows.\n\nThe captain whispered his orders to his men. Some were to creep to the front door, some to the back. Some were to watch the east, and some the west. He and the sergeant stole on tiptoe to the lighted window.\n\nIt was a small room into which they looked, very meanly furnished. An elderly man in the dress of a menial was reading a tattered paper by the light of a guttering candle. He leaned back in his wooden chair with his feet upon a box, while a bottle of white wine stood with a half-filled tumbler upon a stool beside him. The sergeant thrust his needle-gun through the glass, and the man sprang to his feet with a shriek.\n\n\"Silence, for your life! The house is surrounded and you cannot escape. Come round and open the door, or we will show you no mercy when we come in.\"\n\n\"For God\"s sake, don\"t shoot! I will open it! I will open it!\" He rushed from the room with his paper still crumpled up in his hand. An instant later, with a groaning of old locks and a rasping of bars, the low door swung open, and the Prussians poured into the stone-flagged passage.\n\n\"Where is Count Eustace de Ch\u00e2teau Noir?\"\n\n\"My master! He is out, sir.\"\n\n\"Out at this time of night? Your life for a lie!\"\n\n\"It is true, sir. He is out!\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"I do not know.\"\n\n\"Doing what?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell. No, it is no use your cocking your pistol, sir. You may kill me, but you cannot make me tell you that which I do not know.\"\n\n\"Is he often out at this hour?\"\n\n\"Frequently.\"\n\n\"And when does he come home?\"\n\n\"Before daybreak.\"\n\nCaptain Baumgarten rasped out a German oath. He had had his journey for nothing, then. The man\"s answers were only too likely to be true. It was what he might have expected. But at least he would search the house and make sure. Leaving a picket at the front door and another at the back, the sergeant and he drove the trembling butler in front of them \u2013 his shaking candle sending strange, flickering shadows over the old tapestries and the low, oak-raftered ceilings. They searched the whole house, from the huge, stone-flagged kitchen below to the dining-hall on the second floor, with its gallery for musicians and its panelling black with age, but nowhere was there a living creature. Up above in an attic they found Marie, the elderly wife of the butler; but the owner kept no other servants, and of his own presence there was no trace.\n\nIt was long, however, before Captain Baumgarten had satisfied himself upon the point. It was a difficult house to search. Thin stairs, which only one man could ascend at a time, connected lines of tortuous corridors. The walls were so thick that each room was cut off from its neighbour. Huge fireplaces yawned in each, while the windows were six feet deep in the wall. Captain Baumgarten stamped with his feet, and tore down curtains, and struck with the pommel of his sword. If there were secret hiding-places, he was not fortunate enough to find them.\n\n\"I have an idea,\" said he, at last, speaking in German to the sergeant. \"You will place a guard over this fellow, and make sure that he communicates with no one.\"\n\nYes, captain.\"\n\n\"And you will place four men in ambush at the front and at the back. It is likely enough that about daybreak our bird may return to the nest.\"\n\n\"And the others, captain?\"\n\n\"Let them have their suppers in the kitchen. This fellow will serve you with meat and wine. It is a wild night, and we shall be better here than on the country road.\"\n\n\"And yourself, captain?\"\n\n\"I will take my supper up here in the dining-hall. The logs are laid and we can light the fire. You will call me if there is any alarm. What can you give me for supper \u2013 you?\"\n\n\"Alas, monsieur, there was a time when I might have answered, \"What you wish!\" but now it is all that we can do to find a bottle of new claret and a cold pullet.\"\n\n\"That will do very well. Let a guard go about with him, sergeant, and let him feel the end of a bayonet if he plays us any tricks.\"\n\nCaptain Baumgarten was an old campaigner. In the Eastern provinces, and before that in Bohemia, he had learned the art of quartering himself upon the enemy. While the butler brought his supper he occupied himself in making his preparations for a comfortable night. He lit the candelabrum of ten candles upon the centre table. The fire was already burning up, crackling merrily, and sending spurts of blue, pungent smoke into the room. The captain walked to the window and looked out. The moon had gone in again, and it was raining heavily. He could hear the deep sough of the wind and see the dark loom of the trees, all swaying in the one direction. It was a sight which gave a zest to his comfortable quarters, and to the cold fowl and the bottle of wine which the butler had brought up for him. He was tired and hungry after his long tramp, so he threw his sword, his helmet and his revolver-belt down upon a chair and fell eagerly upon his supper. Then, with his glass of wine before him and his cigar between his lips, he tilted his chair back and looked about him.\n\nHe sat within a small circle of brilliant light which gleamed upon his silver shoulder-straps, and threw out his terracotta face, his heavy eyebrows and his yellow moustache. But outside that circle things were vague and shadowy in the old dining-hall. Two sides were oak-panelled and two were hung with faded tapestry, across which huntsmen and dogs and stags were still dimly streaming. Above the fireplace were rows of heraldic shields with the blazonings of the family and of its alliances, the fatal saltire cross breaking out on each of them.\n\nFour paintings of old seigneurs of Ch\u00e2teau Noir faced the fireplace, all men with hawk noses and bold, high features, so like each other that only the dress could distinguish the crusader from the cavalier of the Fronde. Captain Baumgarten, heavy with his repast, lay back in his chair looking up at them through the clouds of his tobacco smoke, and pondering over the strange chance which had sent him, a man from the Baltic coast, to eat his supper in the ancestral hall of these proud Norman chieftains. But the fire was hot and the captain\"s eyes were heavy. His chin sank slowly upon his chest, and the ten candles gleamed upon the broad white scalp.\n\nSuddenly a slight noise brought him to his feet. For an instant it seemed to his dazed senses that one of the pictures opposite had walked from its frame. There, beside the table, and almost within arm\"s length of him, was standing a huge man, silent, motionless, with no sign of life save his fierce, glinting eyes. He was black-haired, olive-skinned, with a pointed tuft of black beard and a great, fierce nose, towards which all his features seemed to run. His cheeks were wrinkled like a last year\"s apple, but his sweep of shoulder and bony, corded hands told of a strength which was unsapped by age. His arms were folded across his arching chest and his mouth was set in a fixed smile.\n\n\"Pray do not trouble yourself to look for your weapons,\" he said, as the Prussian cast a swift glance at the empty chair in which they had been laid. \"You have been, if you will allow me to say so, a little indiscreet to make yourself so much at home in a house every wall of which is honeycombed with secret passages. You will be amused to hear that forty men were watching you at your supper. Ah! what then?\"\n\nCaptain Baumgarten had taken a step forward with clenched fists. The Frenchman held up the revolver, which he grasped in his right hand while with the left he hurled the German back into his chair.\n\n\"Pray keep your seat,\" said he. \"You have no cause to trouble about your men. They have already been provided for. It is astonishing with these stone floors how little one can hear what goes on beneath. You have been relieved of your command, and have now only to think of yourself. May I ask what your name is?\"\n\n\"I am Captain Baumgarten, of the 24th Posen Regiment.\"\n\n\"Your French is excellent, though you incline, like most of your countrymen, to turn the p into a b. I have been amused to hear them cry, \"Avez biti\u00e9 sur moi!\" You know, doubtless, who it is who addresses you.\"\n\n\"The Count of Ch\u00e2teau Noir.\"\n\n\"Precisely. It would have been a misfortune if you had visited my ch\u00e2teau and I had been unable to have a word with you. I have had to do with many German soldiers, but never with an officer before. I have much to talk to you about.\"\n\nCaptain Baumgarten sat still in his chair. Brave as he was, there was something in this man\"s manner which made his skin creep with apprehension. His eyes glanced to right and to left, but his weapons were gone, and in a struggle he saw that he would be but a child to this gigantic adversary.\n\nThe count had picked up the claret bottle, and held it to the light: \"Tut! tut!\" said he. \"And was this the best that Pierre could do for you? I am ashamed to look you in the face, Captain Baumgarten. We must improve upon this.\"\n\nHe blew a call upon a whistle, which hung from his shooting-jacket. The old manservant was in the room in an instant.\n\n\"Chambertin from bin fifteen!\" he cried, and a minute later a grey bottle streaked with cobwebs was carried in as a nurse bears an infant. The count filled two glasses to the brim.\n\n\"Drink!\" said he. \"It is the very best in my cellars, and not to be matched between Rouen and Paris. Drink, sir, and be happy! There are cold joints below. There are two lobsters fresh from Honfleur. Will you not venture upon a second and more savoury supper?\"\n\nThe German officer shook his bead. He drained the glass, however, and his host filled it once more, pressing him to give an order for this or that dainty.\n\n\"There is nothing in my house which is not at your disposal. You have but to say the word. Well, then, you will allow me to tell you a story while you drink your wine. I have so longed to tell it to some German officer. It is about my son, my only child, Eustace, who was taken and died in escaping. It is a curious little story, and I think that I can promise you that you will never forget it.\n\n\"You must know, then, that my boy was in the artillery, a fine young fellow, Captain Baumgarten, and the pride of his mother. She died within a week of the news of his death reaching us. It was brought by a brother officer who was at his side throughout, and who escaped while my lad died. I want to tell you all that he told me.\n\n\"Eustace was taken at Weissenburg on the 4th of August. The prisoners were broken up into parties, and sent back into Germany by different routes. Eustace was taken upon the 5th to a village called Lauterburg, where he met with kindness from the German officer in command. This good colonel had the hungry lad to supper, offered him the best he had, opened a bottle of good wine, as I have tried to do for you, and gave him a cigar from his own case. Might I entreat you to take one from mine?\"\n\nThe German again shook his head. His horror of his companion had increased as he sat watching the lips that smiled and the eyes that glared.\n\n\"The colonel, as I say, was good to my boy. But, unluckily, the prisoners were moved next day across the Rhine to Ettlingen. They were not equally fortunate there. The officer who guarded them was a ruffian and a villain, Captain Baumgarten. He took a pleasure in humiliating and ill-treating the brave men who had fallen into his power. That night, upon my son answering fiercely back to some taunt of his, he struck him in the eye, like this!\"\n\nThe crash of the blow rang through the hall. The German\"s face fell forward, his hand up and blood oozing through his fingers. The count settled down in his chair once more.\n\n\"My boy was disfigured by the blow, and this villain made his appearance the object of his jeers. By the way, you look a little comical yourself at the present moment, captain, and your colonel would certainly say that you had been getting into mischief. To continue, however, my boy\"s youth and his destitution \u2013 for his pockets were empty \u2013 moved the pity of a kind-hearted major, and he advanced him ten napoleons from his own pocket, without security of any kind. Into your hands, Captain Baumgarten, I return these ten gold pieces, since I cannot learn the name of the lender. I am grateful from my heart for this kindness shown to my boy.\n\n\"The vile tyrant who commanded the escort accompanied the prisoners to Durlach, and from there to Carlsruhe. He heaped every outrage upon my lad, because the spirit of the Ch\u00e2teaux Noirs would not stoop to turn away his wrath by a feigned submission. Ay, this cowardly villain, whose heart\"s blood shall yet clot upon this hand, dared to strike my son with his open hand, to kick him, to tear hairs from his moustache \u2013 to use him thus \u2013 and thus \u2013 and thus!\"\n\nThe German writhed and struggled. He was helpless in the hands of this huge giant whose blows were raining upon him. When at last, blinded and half-senseless, he staggered to his feet, it was only to be hurled back again into the great oaken chair. He sobbed in his impotent anger and shame.\n\n\"My boy was frequently moved to tears by the humiliation of his position,\" continued the count. \"You will understand me when I say that it is a bitter thing to be helpless in the hands of an insolent and remorseless enemy. On arriving at Carlsruhe, however, his face, which had been wounded by the brutality of his guard, was bound up by a young Bavarian subaltern who was touched by his appearance. I regret to see that your eye is bleeding so. Will you permit me to bind it with my silk handkerchief?\"\n\nHe leaned forward, but the German dashed his hand aside.\n\n\"I am in your power, you monster!\" he cried; \"I can endure your brutalities, but not your hypocrisy.\"\n\nThe count shrugged his shoulders. \"I am taking things in their order, just as they occurred,\" said he. \"I was under vow to tell it to the first German officer with whom I could talk t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate. Let me see, I had got as far as the young Bavarian at Carlsruhe. I regret extremely that you will not permit me to use such slight skill in surgery as I possess. At Carlsruhe, my lad was shut up in the old caserne, where he remained for a fortnight. The worst pang of his captivity was that some unmannerly curs in the garrison would taunt him with his position as he sat by his window in the evening. That reminds me, captain, that you are not quite situated upon a bed of roses yourself, are you, now? You came to trap a wolf, my man, and now the beast has you down with his fangs in your throat. A family man, too, I should judge, by that well-filled tunic. Well, a widow the more will make little matter, and they do not usually remain widows long. Get back into the chair, you dog!\n\n\"Well, to continue my story \u2013 at the end of a fortnight my son and his friend escaped. I need not trouble you with the dangers which they ran, or with the privations which they endured. Suffice it that to disguise themselves they had to take the clothes of two peasants, whom they waylaid in a wood. Hiding by day and travelling by night, they had got as far into France as Remilly, and were within a mile \u2013 a single mile, captain \u2013 of crossing the German lines when a patrol of Uhlans came right upon them. Ah! it was hard, was it not, when they had come so far and were so near to safety?\"\n\nThe count blew a double call upon his whistle, and three hard-faced peasants entered the room.\n\n\"These must represent my Uhlans,\" said he. \"Well, then, the captain in command, finding that these men were French soldiers in civilian dress within the German lines, proceeded to hang them without trial or ceremony. I think, Jean, that the centre beam is the strongest.\"\n\nThe unfortunate soldier was dragged from his chair to where a noosed rope had been flung over one of the huge oaken rafters which spanned the room. The cord was slipped over his head, and he felt its harsh grip round his throat. The three peasants seized the other end, and looked to the count for his orders. The officer, pale, but firm, folded his arms and stared defiantly at the man who tortured him.\n\n\"You are now face to face with death, and I perceive from your lips that you are praying. My son was also face to face with death, and he prayed, also. It happened that a general officer came up, and he heard the lad praying for his mother, and it moved him so \u2013 he being himself a father \u2013 that he ordered his Uhlans away, and he remained, with his aide-de-camp only, beside the condemned men. And when he heard all the lad had to tell, that he was the only child of an old family and that his mother was in failing health, he threw off the rope as I throw off this, and he kissed him on either cheek, as I kiss you, and he bade him go, as I bid you go, and may every kind wish of that noble general, though none could stave off the fever which slew my son, descend now upon your head.\"\n\nAnd so it was that Captain Baumgarten, disfigured, blinded and bleeding, staggered out into the wind and the rain of that wild December dawn.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The New Catacomb ]\n\n\"Look here, Burger,\" said Kennedy, \"I do wish that you would confide in me.\"\n\nThe two famous students of Roman remains sat together in Kennedy\"s comfortable room overlooking the Corso. The night was cold, and they had both pulled up their chairs to the unsatisfactory Italian stove which threw out a zone of stuffiness rather than of warmth. Outside under the bright winter stars lay the modern Rome, the long, double chain of the electric lamps, the brilliantly lighted caf\u00e9s, the rushing carriages and the dense throng upon the footpaths. But inside, in the sumptuous chamber of the rich young English archaeologist, there was only old Rome to be seen. Cracked and timeworn friezes hung upon the walls, grey old busts of senators and soldiers with their fighting heads and their hard, cruel faces peered out from the corners. On the centre table, amidst a litter of inscriptions, fragments and ornaments, there stood the famous reconstruction by Kennedy of the Baths of Caracalla, which excited such interest and admiration when it was exhibited in Berlin. Amphorae hung from the ceiling and a litter of curiosities strewed the rich red Turkey carpet. And of them all there was not one which was not of the most unimpeachable authenticity, and of the utmost rarity and value; for Kennedy, though little more than thirty, had a European reputation in this particular branch of research, and was, moreover, provided with that long purse which either proves to be a fatal handicap to the student\"s energies, or, if his mind is still true to its purpose, gives him an enormous advantage in the race for fame. Kennedy had often been seduced by whim and pleasure from his studies, but his mind was an incisive one, capable of long and concentrated efforts which ended in sharp reactions of sensuous languor. His handsome face, with its high, white forehead, its aggressive nose and its somewhat loose and sensual mouth, was a fair index of the compromise between strength and weakness in his nature.\n\nOf a very different type was his companion, Julius Burger. He came of a curious blend, a German father and an Italian mother, with the robust qualities of the north mingling strangely with the softer graces of the south. Blue Teutonic eyes lightened his sun-browned face, and above them rose a square, massive forehead, with a fringe of close yellow curls lying round it. His strong, firm jaw was clean-shaven, and his companion had frequently remarked how much it suggested those old Roman busts which peered out from the shadows in the corners of his chamber. Under its bluff German strength there lay always a suggestion of Italian subtlety, but the smile was so honest, and the eyes so frank, that one understood that this was only an indication of his ancestry, with no actual bearing upon his character. In age and in reputation, he was on the same level as his English companion, but his life and his work had both been far more arduous. Twelve years before, he had come as a poor student to Rome, and had lived ever since upon some small endowment for research which had been awarded to him by the University of Bonn. Painfully, slowly and doggedly, with extraordinary tenacity and single-mindedness, he had climbed from rung to rung of the ladder of fame, until now he was a member of the Berlin Academy, and there was every reason to believe that he would shortly be promoted to the chair of the greatest of German universities. But the singleness of purpose which had brought him to the same high level as the rich and brilliant Englishman, had caused him in everything outside their work to stand infinitely below him. He had never found a pause in his studies in which to cultivate the social graces. It was only when he spoke of his own subject that his face was filled with life and soul. At other times he was silent and embarrassed, too conscious of his own limitations in larger subjects, and impatient of that small talk which is the conventional refuge of those who have no thoughts to express.\n\nAnd yet for some years there had been an acquaintanceship which appeared to be slowly ripening into a friendship between these two very different rivals. The base and origin of this lay in the fact that in their own studies each was the only one of the younger men who had knowledge and enthusiasm enough properly to appreciate the other. Their common interests and pursuits had brought them together, and each had been attracted by the other\"s knowledge. And then gradually something had been added to this. Kennedy had been amused by the frankness and simplicity of his rival, while Burger in turn had been fascinated by the brilliancy and vivacity which had made Kennedy such a favourite in Roman society. I say \"had\", because just at the moment the young Englishman was somewhat under a cloud. A love-affair, the details of which had never quite come out, had indicated a heartlessness and callousness upon his part which shocked many of his friends. But in the bachelor circles of students and artists in which he preferred to move, there is no very rigid code of honour in such matters, and though a head might be shaken or a pair of shoulders shrugged over the flight of two and the return of one, the general sentiment was probably one of curiosity and perhaps of envy rather than of reprobation.\n\n\"Look here, Burger,\" said Kennedy, looking hard at the placid face of his companion, \"I do wish that you would confide in me.\"\n\nAs he spoke he waved his hand in the direction of a rug which lay upon the floor. On the rug stood a long, shallow fruit-basket of the light wickerwork which is used in the Campagna, and this was heaped with a litter of objects, inscribed tiles, broken inscriptions, cracked mosaics, torn papyri, rusty metal ornaments, which to the uninitiated might have seemed to have come straight from a dustman\"s bin, but which a specialist would have speedily recognized as unique of their kind. The pile of odds and ends in the flat wickerwork basket supplied exactly one of those missing links of social development which are of such interest to the student. It was the German who had brought them in, and the Englishman\"s eyes were hungry as he looked at them.\n\n\"I won\"t interfere with your treasure-trove, but I should very much like to hear about it,\" he continued, while Burger very deliberately lit a cigar. \"It is evidently a discovery of the first importance. These inscriptions will make a sensation throughout Europe.\"\n\n\"For every one here there are a million there!\" said the German. \"There are so many that a dozen savants might spend a lifetime over them, and build up a reputation as solid as the Castle of St Angelo.\"\n\nKennedy sat thinking with his fine forehead wrinkled and his fingers playing with his long, fair moustache.\n\n\"You have given yourself away, Burger!\" said he at last. \"Your words can, only apply to one thing. You have discovered a new catacomb.\"\n\n\"I had no doubt that you had already come to that conclusion from an examination of these objects.\"\n\n\"Well, they certainly appeared to indicate it, but your last remarks make it certain. There is no place except a catacomb which could contain so vast a store of relics as you describe.\"\n\n\"Quite so. There is no mystery about that. I have discovered a new catacomb.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Ah, that is my secret, my dear Kennedy. Suffice it that it is so situated that there is not one chance in a million of anyone else coming upon it. Its date is different from that of any known catacomb, and it was reserved for the burial of the highest Christians, so that the remains and the relics are quite different from anything which has ever been seen before. If I was not aware of your knowledge and of your energy, my friend, I would not hesitate, under the pledge of secrecy, to tell you everything about it. But as it is I think that I must certainly prepare my own report of the matter before I expose myself to such formidable competition.\"\n\nKennedy loved his subject with a love which was almost a mania \u2013 a love which held him true to it amidst all the distractions which come to a wealthy and dissipated young man. He had ambition, but his ambition was secondary to his mere abstract joy and interest in everything which concerned the old life and history of the city. He yearned to see this new underworld which his companion had discovered.\n\n\"Look here, Burger,\" said he, earnestly, \"I assure you that you can trust me most implicitly in the matter. Nothing would induce me to put pen to paper about anything which I see until I have your express permission. I quite understand your feeling and I think it is most natural, but you have really nothing whatever to fear from me. On the other hand, if you don\"t tell me I shall make a systematic search, and I shall most certainly discover it. In that case, of course, I should make what use I liked of it, since I should be under no obligation to you.\"\n\nBurger smiled thoughtfully over his cigar.\n\n\"I have noticed, friend Kennedy,\" said he, \"that when I want information over any point you are not always so ready to supply it.\"\n\n\"When did you ever ask me anything that I did not tell you? You remember, for example, my giving you the material for your paper about the temple of the Vestals.\"\n\n\"Ah, well, that was not a matter of much importance. If I were to question you upon some intimate thing would you give me an answer, I wonder? This new catacomb is a very intimate thing to me, and I should certainly expect some sign of confidence in return.\"\n\n\"What you are driving at I cannot imagine,\" said the Englishman, \"but if you mean that you will answer my question about the catacomb if I answer any question which you may put to me I can assure you that I will certainly do so.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" said Burger, leaning luxuriously back in his settee, and puffing a blue tree of cigar-smoke into the air, \"tell me all about your relations with Miss Mary Saunderson.\"\n\nKennedy sprang up in his chair and glared angrily at his impassive companion.\n\n\"What the devil do you mean?\" he cried. \"What sort of a question is this? You may mean it as a joke, but you never made a worse one.\"\n\n\"No, I don\"t mean it as a joke,\" said Burger, simply. \"I am really rather interested in the details of the matter. I don\"t know much about the world and women and social life and that sort of thing, and such an incident has the fascination of the unknown for me. I know you, and I knew her by sight \u2013 I had even spoken to her once or twice. I should very much like to hear from your own lips exactly what it was that occurred between you.\"\n\n\"I won\"t tell you a word.\"\n\n\"That\"s all right. It was only my whim to see if you would give up a secret as easily as you expected me to give up my secret of the new catacomb. You wouldn\"t, and I didn\"t expect you to. But why should you expect otherwise of me? There\"s St John\"s clock striking ten. It is quite time that I was going home.\"\n\n\"No; wait a bit, Burger,\" said Kennedy; \"this is really a ridiculous caprice of yours to wish to know about an old love-affair which has burned out months ago. You know we look upon a man who kisses and tells as the greatest coward and villain possible.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" said the German, gathering up his basket of curiosities, \"when he tells anything about a girl which is previously unknown he must be so. But in this case, as you must be aware, it was a public matter which was the common talk of Rome, so that you are not really doing Miss Mary Saunderson any injury by discussing her case with me. But still, I respect your scruples, and so good-night!\"\n\n\"Wait a bit, Burger,\" said Kennedy, laying his hand upon the other\"s arm; \"I am very keen upon this catacomb business, and I can\"t let it drop quite so easily. Would you mind asking me something else in return \u2013 something not quite so eccentric this time?\"\n\n\"No, no; you have refused, and there is an end of it,\" said Burger, with his basket on his arm. \"No doubt you are quite right not to answer, and no doubt I am quite right also \u2013 and so again, my dear Kennedy, good-night!\"\n\nThe Englishman watched Burger cross the room, and he had his hand on the handle of the door before his host sprang up with the air of a man who is making the best of that which cannot be helped.\n\n\"Hold on, old fellow,\" said he; \"I think you are behaving in a most ridiculous fashion; but still, if this is your condition, I suppose that I must submit to it. I hate saying anything about a girl, but, as you say, it is all over Rome, and I don\"t suppose I can tell you anything which you do not know already. What was it you wanted to know?\"\n\nThe German came back to the stove, and, laying down his basket, he sank into his chair once more.\n\n\"May I have another cigar?\" said he. \"Thank you very much! I never smoke when I work, but I enjoy a chat much more when I am under the influence of tobacco. Now, as regards this young lady, with whom you had this little adventure. What in the world has become of her?\"\n\n\"She is at home with her own people.\"\n\n\"Oh, really \u2013 in England?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What part of England \u2013 London?\"\n\n\"No, Twickenham.\"\n\n\"You must excuse my curiosity, my dear Kennedy, and you must put it down to my ignorance of the world. No doubt it is quite a simple thing to persuade a young lady to go off with you for three weeks or so, and then to hand her over to her own family at \u2013 what did you call the place?\"\n\n\"Twickenham.\"\n\n\"Quite so \u2013 at Twickenham. But it is something so entirely outside my own experience that I cannot even imagine how you set about it. For example, if you had loved this girl your love could hardly disappear in three weeks, so I presume that you could not have loved her at all. But if you did not love her why should you make this great scandal which has damaged you and ruined her?\"\n\nKennedy looked moodily into the red eye of the stove.\n\n\"That\"s a logical way of looking at it, certainly,\" said he. \"Love is a big word, and it represents a good many different shades of feeling. I liked her, and \u2013 well, you say you\"ve seen her \u2013 you know how charming she could look. But still I am willing to admit, looking back, that I could never have really loved her.\"\n\n\"Then, my dear Kennedy, why did you do it?\"\n\n\"The adventure of the thing had a great deal to do with it.\"\n\n\"What! You are so fond of adventures?\"\n\n\"Where would the variety of life be without them? It was for an adventure that I first began to pay my attentions to her. I\"ve chased a good deal of game in my time, but there\"s no chase like that of a pretty woman. There was the piquant difficulty of it also, for, as she was the companion of Lady Emily Rood, it was almost impossible to see her alone. On the top of all the other obstacles which attracted me, I learned from her own lips very early in the proceedings that she was engaged.\"\n\n\"Mein Gott! To whom?\"\n\n\"She mentioned no names.\"\n\n\"I do not think that anyone knows that. So that made the adventure more alluring, did it?\"\n\n\"Well, it did certainly give a spice to it. Don\"t you think so?\"\n\n\"I tell you that I am very ignorant about these things.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, you can remember that the apple you stole from your neighbour\"s tree was always sweeter than that which fell from your own. And then I found that she cared for me.\"\n\n\"What \u2013 at once?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, it took about three months of sapping and mining. But at last I won her over. She understood that my judicial separation from my wife made it impossible for me to do the right thing by her \u2013 but she came all the same, and we had a delightful time, as long as it lasted.\"\n\n\"But how about the other man?\"\n\nKennedy shrugged his shoulders. \"I suppose it is the survival of the fittest,\" said he. \"If he had been the better man she would not have deserted him. Let\"s drop the subject, for I have had enough of it!\"\n\n\"Only one other thing. How did you get rid of her in three weeks?\"\n\n\"Well, we had both cooled down a bit, you understand. She absolutely refused, under any circumstances, to come back to face the people she had known in Rome. Now, of course, Rome is necessary to me, and I was already pining to be back at my work \u2013 so there was one obvious cause of separation. Then, again, her old father turned up at the hotel in London; and there was a scene, and the whole thing became so unpleasant that really \u2013 though I missed her dreadfully at first \u2013 I was very glad to slip out of it. Now, I rely upon you not to repeat anything of what I have said.\"\n\n\"My dear Kennedy, I should not dream of repeating it. But all that you say interests me very much, for it gives me an insight into your way of looking at things, which is entirely different from mine, for I have seen so little of life. And now you want to know about my new catacomb. There\"s no use my trying to describe it, for you would never find it by that. There is only one thing, and that is for me to take you there.\"\n\n\"That would be splendid.\"\n\n\"When would you like to come?\"\n\n\"The sooner the better. I am all impatience to see it.\"\n\n\"Well, it is a beautiful night \u2013 though a trifle cold. Suppose we start in an hour. We must be very careful to keep the matter to ourselves. If anyone saw us hunting in couples they would suspect that there was something going on.\"\n\n\"We can\"t be too cautious,\" said Kennedy. \"Is it far?\"\n\n\"Some miles.\"\n\n\"Not too far to walk?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, we could walk there easily.\"\n\n\"We had better do so, then. A cabman\"s suspicions would be aroused if he dropped us both at some lonely spot in the dead of the night.\"\n\n\"Quite so. I think it would be best for us to meet at the Gate of the Appian Way at midnight. I must go back to my lodgings for the matches and candles and things.\"\n\n\"All right, Burger! I think it is very kind of you to let me into this secret, and I promise you that I will write nothing about it until you have published your report. Goodbye for the present! You will find me at the Gate at twelve.\"\n\nThe cold, clear air was filled with the musical chimes from that city of clocks as Burger, wrapped in an Italian overcoat, with a lantern hanging from his hand, walked up to the rendezvous. Kennedy stepped out of the shadow to meet him.\n\n\"You are ardent in work as well as in love!\" said the German, laughing.\n\n\"Yes; I have been waiting here for nearly half an hour.\"\n\n\"I hope you left no clue as to where we were going.\"\n\n\"Not such a fool! By Jove, I am chilled to the bone! Come on, Burger, let us warm ourselves by a spurt of hard walking.\"\n\nTheir footsteps sounded loud and crisp upon the rough stone paving of the disappointing road which is all that is left of the most famous highway of the world. A peasant or two going home from the wine-shop, and a few carts of country produce coming up to Rome, were the only things which they met. They swung along, with the huge tombs looming up through the darkness upon each side of them, until they had come as far as the Catacombs of St Calixtus, and saw against a rising moon the great circular bastion of Cecilia Metella in front of them. Then Burger stopped with his hand to his side.\n\n\"Your legs are longer than mine, and you are more accustomed to walking,\" said he, laughing. \"I think that the place where we turn off is somewhere here. Yes, this is it, round the corner of the trattoria. Now, it is a very narrow path, so perhaps I had better go in front and you can follow.\"\n\nHe had lit his lantern, and by its light they were enabled to follow a narrow and devious track which wound across the marshes of the Campagna. The great Aqueduct of old Rome lay like a monstrous caterpillar across the moonlit landscape, and their road led them under one of its huge arches, and past the circle of crumbling bricks which marks the old arena. At last Burger stopped at a solitary wooden cow-house, and he drew a key from his pocket.\n\n\"Surely your catacomb is not inside a house!\" cried Kennedy.\n\n\"The entrance to it is. That is just the safeguard which we have against anyone else discovering it.\"\n\n\"Does the proprietor know of it?\"\n\n\"Not he. He had found one or two objects which made me almost certain that his house was built on the entrance to such a place. So I rented it from him, and did my excavations for myself. Come in, and shut the door behind you.\"\n\nIt was a long, empty building, with the mangers of the cows along one wall. Burger put his lantern down on the ground, and shaded its light in all directions save one by draping his overcoat round it.\n\n\"It might excite remark if anyone saw a light in this lonely place,\" said he. \"Just help me to move this boarding.\"\n\nThe flooring was loose in the corner, and plank by plank the two savants raised it and leaned it against the wall. Below there was a square aperture and a stair of old stone steps which led away down into the bowels of the earth.\n\n\"Be careful!\" cried Burger, as Kennedy, in his impatience, hurried down them. \"It is a perfect rabbits\" warren below, and if you were once to lose your way there the chances would be a hundred to one against your ever coming out again. Wait until I bring the light.\"\n\n\"How do you find your own way if it is so complicated?\"\n\n\"I had some very narrow escapes at first, but I have gradually learned to go about. There is a certain system to it, but it is one which a lost man, if he were in the dark, could not possibly find out. Even now I always spin out a ball of string behind me when I am going far into the catacomb. You can see for yourself that it is difficult, but every one of these passages divides and subdivides a dozen times before you go a hundred yards.\"\n\nThey had descended some twenty feet from the level of the byre, and they were standing now in a square chamber cut out of the soft tufa. The lantern cast a flickering light, bright below and dim above, over the cracked brown walls. In every direction were the black openings of passages which radiated from this common centre.\n\n\"I want you to follow me closely, my friend,\" said Burger. \"Do not loiter to look at anything upon the way, for the place to which I will take you contains all that you can see, and more. It will save time for us to go there direct.\"\n\nHe led the way down one of the corridors, and the Englishman followed closely at his heels. Every now and then the passage bifurcated, but Burger was evidently following some secret marks of his own, for he neither stopped nor hesitated. Everywhere along the walls, packed as in the berths upon an emigrant ship, lay the Christians of old Rome. The yellow light flickered over the shrivelled features of the mummies and gleamed upon rounded skulls and long, white arm bones crossed over fleshless chests. And everywhere as he passed Kennedy looked with wistful eyes upon inscriptions, funeral vessels, pictures, vestments, utensils, all lying as pious hands had placed them so many centuries ago. It was apparent to him, even in those hurried, passing glances, that this was the earliest and finest of the catacombs, containing such a storehouse of Roman remains as had never before come at one time under the observation of the student.\n\n\"What would happen if the light went out?\" he asked, as they hurried onwards.\n\n\"I have a spare candle and a box of matches in my pocket. By the way, Kennedy, have you any matches?\"\n\n\"No; you had better give me some.\"\n\n\"Oh, that is all right. There is no chance of our separating.\"\n\n\"How far are we going? It seems to me that we have walked at least a quarter of a mile.\"\n\n\"More than that, I think. There is really no limit to the tombs \u2013 at least, I have never been able to find any. This is a very difficult place, so I think that I will use our ball of string.\" He fastened one end of it to a projecting stone and he carried the coil in the breast of his coat, paying it out as he advanced. Kennedy saw that it was no unnecessary precaution, for the passages had become more complex and tortuous than ever, with a perfect network of intersecting corridors. But these all ended in one large circular hall with a square pedestal of tufa topped with a slab of marble at one end of it.\n\n\"By Jove!\" cried Kennedy in an ecstasy, as Burger swung his lantern over the marble. \"It is a Christian altar \u2013 probably the first one in existence. Here is the little consecration cross cut upon the corner of it. No doubt this circular space was used as a church.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Burger. \"If I had more time I should like to show you all the bodies which are buried in these niches upon the walls, for they are the early popes and bishops of the church, with their mitres, their crosiers, and full canonicals. Go over to that one and look at it!\"\n\nKennedy went across, and stared at the ghastly head which lay loosely on the shredded and mouldering mitre.\n\n\"This is most interesting,\" said he, and his voice seemed to boom against the concave vault. \"As far as my experience goes, it is unique. Bring the lantern over, Burger, for I want to see them all.\"\n\nBut the German had strolled away, and was standing in the middle of a yellow circle of light at the other side of the hall.\n\n\"Do you know how many wrong turnings there are between this and the stairs?\" he asked. \"There are over two thousand. No doubt it was one of the means of protection which the Christians adopted. The odds are two thousand to one against a man getting out, even if he had a light; but if he were in the dark it would, of course, be far more difficult.\"\n\n\"So I should think.\"\n\n\"And the darkness is something dreadful. I tried it once for an experiment. Let us try it again!\" He stooped to the lantern, and in an instant it was as if an invisible hand was squeezed tightly over each of Kennedy\"s eyes. Never had he known what such darkness was. It seemed to press upon him and to smother him. It was a solid obstacle against which the body shrank from advancing. He put his hands out to push it back from him.\n\n\"That will do, Burger,\" said he, \"let\"s have the light again.\"\n\nBut his companion began to laugh, and in that circular room the sound seemed to come from every side at once.\n\n\"You seem uneasy, friend Kennedy,\" said he.\n\n\"Go on, man, light the candle!\" said Kennedy impatiently.\n\n\"It\"s very strange, Kennedy, but I could not in the least tell by the sound in which direction you stand. Could you tell where I am?\"\n\n\"No; you seem to be on every side of me.\"\n\n\"If it were not for this string which I hold in my hand I should not have a notion which way to go.\"\n\n\"I dare say not. Strike a light, man, and have an end of this nonsense.\"\n\n\"Well, Kennedy, there are two things which I understand that you are very fond of. The one is an adventure, and the other is an obstacle to surmount. The adventure must be the finding of your way out of this catacomb. The obstacle will be the darkness and the two thousand wrong turns which make the way a little difficult to find. But you need not hurry, for you have plenty of time, and when you halt for a rest now and then, I should like you just to think of Miss Mary Saunderson, and whether you treated her quite fairly.\"\n\n\"You devil, what do you mean?\" roared Kennedy. He was running about in little circles and clasping at the solid blackness with both hands.\n\n\"Goodbye,\" said the mocking voice, and it was already at some distance. \"I really do not think, Kennedy, even by your own showing that you did the right thing by that girl. There was only one little thing which you appeared not to know, and I can supply it. Miss Saunderson was engaged to a poor ungainly devil of a student, and his name was Julius Burger.\"\n\nThere was a rustle somewhere, the vague sound of a foot striking a stone, and then there fell silence upon that old Christian church \u2013 stagnant, heavy silence which closed round Kennedy and shut him in like water round a drowning man.\n\nSome two months afterwards the following paragraph made the round of the European press:\n\nOne of the most interesting discoveries of recent years is that of the new catacomb in Rome, which lies some distance to the east of the well-known vaults of St Calixtus. The finding of this important burial-place, which is exceeding rich in most interesting early Christian remains, is due to the energy and sagacity of Dr Julius Burger, the young German specialist, who is rapidly taking the first place as an authority upon ancient Rome. Although the first to publish his discovery, it appears that a less fortunate adventurer had anticipated Dr Burger. Some months ago Mr Kennedy, the well-known English student, disappeared suddenly from his rooms in the Corso, and it was conjectured that his association with a recent scandal had driven him to leave Rome. It appears now that he had in reality fallen a victim to that fervid love of archaeology which had raised him to a distinguished place among living scholars. His body was discovered in the heart of the new catacomb, and it was evident from the condition of his feet and boots that he had tramped for days through the tortuous corridors which make these subterranean tombs so dangerous to explorers. The deceased gentleman had, with inexplicable rashness, made his way into this labyrinth without, as far as can be discovered, taking with him either candles or matches, so that his sad fate was the natural result of his own temerity. What makes the matter more painful is that Dr Julius Burger was an intimate friend of the deceased. His joy at the extraordinary find which he has been so fortunate as to make has been greatly marred by the terrible fate of his comrade and fellow-worker.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Case of Lady Sannox ]\n\nThe relations between Douglas Stone and the notorious Lady Sannox were very well known both among the fashionable circles of which she was a brilliant member, and the scientific bodies which numbered him among their most illustrious confr\u00e8res. There was naturally, therefore, a very widespread interest when it was announced one morning that the lady had absolutely and for ever taken the veil, and that the world would see her no more. When, at the very tail of this rumour, there came the assurance that the celebrated operating surgeon, the man of steel nerves, had been found in the morning by his valet, seated on one side of his bed, smiling pleasantly upon the universe, with both legs jammed into one side of his breeches and his great brain about as valuable as a cap full of porridge, the matter was strong enough to give quite a little thrill of interest to folk who had never hoped that their jaded nerves were capable of such a sensation.\n\nDouglas Stone in his prime was one of the most remarkable men in England. Indeed, he could hardly be said to have ever reached his prime, for he was but nine-and-thirty at the time of this little incident. Those who knew him best were aware that famous as he was as a surgeon, he might have succeeded with even greater rapidity in any of a dozen lines of life. He could have cut his way to fame as a soldier, struggled to it as an explorer, bullied for it in the courts or built it out of stone and iron as an engineer. He was born to be great, for he could plan what another man dare not do, and he could do what another man dare not plan. In surgery none could follow him. His nerve, his judgement, his intuition, were things apart. Again and again his knife cut away death, but grazed the very springs of life in doing it, until his assistants were as white as the patient. His energy, his audacity, his full-blooded self-confidence \u2013 does not the memory of them still linger to the south of Marylebone Road and the north of Oxford Street?\n\nHis vices were as magnificent as his virtues, and infinitely more picturesque. Large as was his income, and it was the third largest of all professional men in London, it was far beneath the luxury of his living. Deep in his complex nature lay a rich vein of sensualism, at the sport of which he placed all the prizes of his life. The eye, the ear, the touch, the palate, all were his masters. The bouquet of old vintages, the scent of rare exotics, the curves and tints of the daintiest potteries of Europe, it was to these that the quick-running stream of gold was transformed. And then there came his sudden mad passion for Lady Sannox, when a single interview with two challenging glances and a whispered word set him ablaze. She was the loveliest woman in London and the only one to him. He was one of the handsomest men in London, but not the only one to her. She had a liking for new experiences, and was gracious to most men who wooed her. It may have been cause or it may have been effect that Lord Sannox looked fifty, though he was but six-and-thirty.\n\nHe was a quiet, silent, neutral-tinted man, this lord, with thin lips and heavy eyelids, much given to gardening and full of home-like habits. He had at one time been fond of acting, had even rented a theatre in London, and on its boards had first seen Miss Marion Dawson, to whom he had offered his hand, his title and the third of a county. Since his marriage his early hobby had become distasteful to him. Even in private theatricals it was no longer possible to persuade him to exercise the talent which he had often shown that he possessed. He was happier with a spud and a watering-can among his orchids and chrysanthemums.\n\nIt was quite an interesting problem whether he was absolutely devoid of sense or miserably wanting in spirit. Did he know his lady\"s ways and condone them or was he a mere blind, doting fool? It was a point to be discussed over the teacups in snug little drawing-rooms or with the aid of a cigar in the bow windows of clubs. Bitter and plain were the comments among men upon his conduct. There was but one who had a good word to say for him, and he was the most silent member in the smoking-room. He had seen him break in a horse at the university, and it seemed to have left an impression upon his mind.\n\nBut when Douglas Stone became the favourite, all doubts as to Lord Sannox\"s knowledge or ignorance were set for ever at rest. There was no subterfuge about Stone. In his high-handed, impetuous fashion, he set all caution and discretion at defiance. The scandal became notorious. A learned body intimated that his name had been struck from the list of its vice-presidents. Two friends implored him to consider his professional credit. He cursed them all three, and spent forty guineas on a bangle to take with him to the lady. He was at her house every evening, and she drove in his carriage in the afternoons. There was not an attempt on either side to conceal their relations; but there came at last a little incident to interrupt them.\n\nIt was a dismal winter\"s night, very cold and gusty, with the wind whooping in the chimneys and blustering against the window-panes. A thin spatter of rain tinkled on the glass with each fresh sough of the gale, drowning for the instant the dull gurgle and drip from the eaves. Douglas Stone had finished his dinner, and sat by his fire in the study, a glass of rich port upon the malachite table at his elbow. As he raised it to his lips, he held it up against the lamplight, and watched with the eye of a connoisseur the tiny scales of beeswing which floated in its rich ruby depths. The fire, as it spurted up, threw fitful lights upon his bold, clear-cut face, with its widely opened grey eyes, its thick and yet firm lips, and the deep, square jaw, which had something Roman in its strength and its animalism. He smiled from time to time as he nestled back in his luxurious chair. Indeed, he had a right to feel well pleased, for, against the advice of six colleagues, he had performed an operation that day of which only two cases were on record, and the result had been brilliant beyond all expectation. No other man in London would have had the daring to plan, or the skill to execute, such a heroic measure.\n\nBut he had promised Lady Sannox to see her that evening and it was already half-past eight. His hand was outstretched to the bell to order the carriage when he heard the dull thud of the knocker. An instant later there was the shuffling of feet in the hall and the sharp closing of a door.\n\n\"A patient to see you, sir, in the consulting room,\" said the butler.\n\n\"About himself?\"\n\n\"No, sir; I think he wants you to go out.\"\n\n\"It is too late,\" cried Douglas Stone peevishly. \"I won\"t go.\"\n\n\"This is his card, sir.\"\n\nThe butler presented it upon the gold salver which had been given to his master by the wife of a Prime Minister.\n\n\" \"Hamil Ali, Smyrna\". Hum! The fellow is a Turk, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. He seems as if he came from abroad, sir. And he\"s in a terrible way.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut! I have an engagement. I must go somewhere else. But I\"ll see him. Show him in here, Pim.\"\n\nA few moments later the butler swung open the door and ushered in a small and decrepit man, who walked with a bent back and with the forward push of the face and blink of the eyes which goes with extreme short sight. His face was swarthy, and his hair and beard of the deepest black. In one hand he held a turban of white muslin striped with red, in the other a small chamois-leather bag.\n\n\"Good evening,\" said Douglas Stone, when the butler had closed the door. \"You speak English, I presume?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I am from Asia Minor, but I speak English when I speak slow.\"\n\n\"You wanted me to go out, I understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I wanted very much that you should see my wife.\"\n\n\"I could come in the morning, but I have an engagement which prevents me from seeing your wife tonight.\"\n\nThe Turk\"s answer was a singular one. He pulled the string which closed the mouth of the chamois-leather bag, and poured a flood of gold on to the table.\n\n\"There are one hundred pounds there,\" said he, \"and I promise you that it will not take you an hour. I have a cab ready at the door.\"\n\nDouglas Stone glanced at his watch. An hour would not make it too late to visit Lady Sannox. He had been there later. And the fee was an extraordinarily high one. He had been pressed by his creditors lately, and he could not afford to let such a chance pass. He would go.\n\n\"What is the case?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oh, it is so sad a one! So sad a one! You have not, perhaps heard of the daggers of the Almohades?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Ah, they are Eastern daggers of a great age and of a singular shape, with the hilt like what you call a stirrup. I am a curiosity dealer, you understand, and that is why I have come to England from Smyrna, but next week I go back once more. Many things I brought with me, and I have a few things left, but among them, to my sorrow, is one of these daggers.\"\n\n\"You will remember that I have an appointment, sir,\" said the surgeon, with some irritation; \"pray confine yourself to the necessary details.\"\n\n\"You will see that it is necessary. Today my wife fell down in a faint in the room in which I keep my wares, and she cut her lower lip upon this cursed dagger of the Almohades.\"\n\n\"I see,\" said Douglas Stone, rising. \"And you wish me to dress the wound?\"\n\n\"No, no, it is worse than that.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"These daggers are poisoned.\"\n\n\"Poisoned!\"\n\n\"Yes, and there is no man, East or West, who can tell now what is the poison or what the cure. But all that is known I know, for my father was in this trade before me, and we have had much to do with these poisoned weapons.\"\n\n\"What are the symptoms?\"\n\n\"Deep sleep, and death in thirty hours.\"\n\n\"And you say there is no cure. Why then should you pay me this considerable fee?\"\n\n\"No drug can cure, but the knife may.\"\n\n\"And how?\"\n\n\"The poison is slow of absorption. It remains for hours in the wound.\"\n\n\"Washing, then, might cleanse it?\"\n\n\"No more than in a snake bite. It is too subtle and too deadly.\"\n\n\"Excision of the wound, then?\"\n\n\"That is it. If it be on the finger, take the finger off. So said my father always. But think of where this wound is, and that it is my wife. It is dreadful!\"\n\nBut familiarity with such grim matters may take the finer edge from a man\"s sympathy. To Douglas Stone this was already an interesting case, and he brushed aside as irrelevant the feeble objections of the husband.\n\n\"It appears to be that or nothing,\" said he brusquely. \"It is better to lose a lip than a life.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, I know that you are right. Well, well, it is kismet, and it must be faced. I have the cab, and you will come with me and do this thing.\"\n\nDouglas Stone took his case of bistouries from a drawer, and placed it with a roll of bandage and a compress of lint in his pocket. He must waste no more time if he was to see Lady Sannox.\n\n\"I am ready,\" said he, pulling on his overcoat. \"Will you take a glass of wine before you go out into this cold air?\"\n\nHis visitor shrank away, with a protesting hand upraised. \"You forget that I am a Mussulman, and a true follower of the Prophet,\" said he. \"But tell me what is the bottle of green glass which you have placed in your pocket?\"\n\n\"It is chloroform.\"\n\n\"Ah, that also is forbidden to us. It is a spirit, and we make no use of such things.\"\n\n\"What! You would allow your wife to go through an operation without an anaesthetic?\"\n\n\"Ah! she will feel nothing, poor soul. The deep sleep has already come on, which is the first working of the poison. And then I have given her of our Smyrna opium. Come, sir, for already an hour has passed.\"\n\nAs they stepped out into the darkness, a sheet of rain was driven in upon their faces, and the hall lamp, which dangled from the arm of a marble caryatid, went out with a fluff. Pim, the butler, pushed the heavy door to, straining hard with his shoulder against the wind, while the two men groped their way towards the yellow glare which showed where the cab was waiting. An instant later they were rattling upon their journey.\n\n\"Is it far?\" asked Douglas Stone.\n\n\"Oh, no. We have a very little quiet place off the Euston Road.\"\n\nThe surgeon pressed the spring of his repeater and listened to the little tings which told him the hour. It was a quarter past nine. He calculated the distances, and the short time which it would take him to perform so trivial an operation. He ought to reach Lady Sannox by ten o\"clock. Through the fogged windows he saw the blurred gas lamps dancing past, with occasionally the broader glare of a shop front. The rain was pelting and rattling upon the leathern top of the carriage, and the wheels swashed as they rolled through puddle and mud. Opposite to him the white headgear of his companion gleamed faintly through the obscurity. The surgeon felt in his pockets and arranged his needles, his ligatures and his safety-pins, that no time might be wasted when they arrived. He chafed with impatience and drummed his foot upon the floor.\n\nBut the cab slowed down at last and pulled up. In an instant Douglas Stone was out, and the Smyrna merchant\"s toe was at his very heel.\n\n\"You can wait,\" said he to the driver.\n\nIt was a mean-looking house in a narrow and sordid street. The surgeon, who knew his London well, cast a swift glance into the shadows, but there was nothing distinctive \u2013 no shop, no movement, nothing but a double line of dull, flat-faced houses, a double stretch of wet flagstones which gleamed in the lamplight, and a double rush of water in the gutters which swirled and gurgled towards the sewer gratings. The door which faced them was blotched and discoloured, and a faint light in the fan pane above it served to show the dust and the grime which covered it. Above, in one of the bedroom windows, there was a dull yellow glimmer. The merchant knocked loudly, and, as he turned his dark face towards the light, Douglas Stone could see that it was contracted with anxiety. A bolt was drawn, and an elderly woman with a taper stood in the doorway, shielding the thin flame with her gnarled hand.\n\n\"Is all well?\" gasped the merchant.\n\n\"She is as you left her, sir.\"\n\n\"She has not spoken?\"\n\n\"No, she is in a deep sleep.\"\n\nThe merchant closed the door, and Douglas Stone walked down the narrow passage, glancing about him in some surprise as he did so. There was no oil-cloth, no mat, no hat-rack. Deep grey dust and heavy festoons of cobwebs met his eyes everywhere. Following the old woman up the winding stair, his firm footfall echoed harshly through the silent house. There was no carpet.\n\nThe bedroom was on the second landing. Douglas Stone followed the old nurse into it, with the merchant at his heels. Here, at least, there was furniture and to spare. The floor was littered and the corners piled with Turkish cabinets, inlaid tables, coats of chain-mail, strange pipes and grotesque weapons. A single small lamp stood upon a bracket on the wall. Douglas Stone took it down, and picking his way among the lumber, walked over to a couch in the corner on which lay a woman dressed in the Turkish fashion, with yashmak and veil. The lower part of the face was exposed, and the surgeon saw a jagged cut which zigzagged along the border of the underlip.\n\n\"You will forgive the yashmak,\" said the Turk. \"You know our views about women in the East.\"\n\nBut the surgeon was not thinking about the yashmak. This was no longer a woman to him. It was a case. He stooped and examined the wound carefully.\n\n\"There are no signs of irritation,\" said he. \"We might delay the operation until local symptoms develop.\"\n\nThe husband wrung his hands in uncontrollable agitation.\n\n\"Oh! sir, sir,\" he cried. \"Do not trifle. You do not know. It is deadly. I know, and I give you my assurance that an operation is absolutely necessary. Only the knife can save her.\"\n\n\"And yet I am inclined to wait,\" said Douglas Stone.\n\n\"That is enough,\" the Turk cried, angrily. \"Every minute is of importance, and I cannot stand here and see my wife allowed to sink. It only remains for me to give you my thanks for having come, and to call in some other surgeon before it is too late.\"\n\nDouglas Stone hesitated. To refund that hundred pounds was no pleasant matter. But of course if he left the case he must return the money. And if the Turk were right and the woman died, his position before a coroner might be an embarrassing one.\n\n\"You have had personal experience of this poison?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have.\"\n\n\"And you assure me that an operation is needful?\"\n\n\"I swear it by all that I hold sacred.\"\n\n\"The disfigurement will be frightful.\"\n\n\"I can understand that the mouth will not be a pretty one to kiss.\"\n\nDouglas Stone turned fiercely upon the man. The speech was a brutal one. But the Turk has his own fashion of talk and of thought, and there was no time for wrangling. Douglas Stone drew a bistoury from his case, opened it and felt the keen straight edge with his forefinger. Then he held the lamp closer to the bed. Two dark eyes were gazing up at him through the slit in the yashmak. They were all iris, and the pupil was hardly to be seen.\n\n\"You have given her a very heavy dose of opium.\"\n\n\"Yes, she has had a good dose.\"\n\nHe glanced again at the dark eyes which looked straight at his own. They were dull and lustreless, but, even as he gazed, a little shifting sparkle came into them, and the lips quivered.\n\n\"She is not absolutely unconscious,\" said he.\n\n\"Would it not be well to use the knife while it will be painless?\"\n\nThe same thought had crossed the surgeon\"s mind. He grasped the wounded lip with his forceps, and with two swift cuts he took out a broad V-shaped piece. The woman sprang up on the couch with a dreadful gurgling scream. Her covering was torn from her face. It was a face that he knew. In spite of that protruding upper lip and that slobber of blood, it was a face that he knew. She kept on putting her hand up to the gap and screaming. Douglas Stone sat down at the foot of the couch with his knife and his forceps. The room was whirling round, and he had felt something go like a ripping seam behind his ear. A bystander would have said that his face was the more ghastly of the two. As in a dream, or as if he had been looking at something at the play, he was conscious that the Turk\"s hair and beard lay upon the table, and that Lord Sannox was leaning against the wall with his hand to his side, laughing silently. The screams had died away now, and the dreadful head had dropped back again upon the pillow, but Douglas Stone still sat motionless, and Lord Sannox still chuckled quietly to himself.\n\n\"It was really very necessary for Marion, this operation,\" said he; \"not physically, but morally, you know, morally.\"\n\nDouglas Stone stooped forwards and began to play with the fringe of the coverlet. His knife tinkled down upon the ground, but he still held the forceps and something more.\n\n\"I had long intended to make a little example,\" said Lord Sannox, suavely. \"Your note of Wednesday miscarried, and I have it here in my pocket-book. I took some pains in carrying out my idea. The wound, by the way, was from nothing more dangerous than my signet ring.\"\n\nHe glanced keenly at his silent companion, and cocked the small revolver which he held in his coat pocket. But Douglas Stone was still picking at the coverlet.\n\n\"You see you have kept your appointment after all,\" said Lord Sannox.\n\nAnd at that Douglas Stone began to laugh. He laughed long and loudly. But Lord Sannox did not laugh now. Something like fear sharpened and hardened his features. He walked from the room, and he walked on tiptoe. The old woman was waiting outside.\n\n\"Attend to your mistress when she awakes,\" said Lord Sannox. Then he went down to the street. The cab was at the door, and the driver raised his hand to his hat.\n\n\"John,\" said Lord Sannox, \"you will take the doctor home first. He will want leading downstairs, I think. Tell his butler that he has been taken ill at a case.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir.\"\n\n\"Then you can take Lady Sannox home.\"\n\n\"And how about yourself, sir?\"\n\n\"Oh, my address for the next few months will be Hotel di Roma, Venice. Just see that the letters are sent on. And tell Stevens to exhibit all the purple chrysanthemums next Monday, and to wire me the result.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Brazilian Cat ]\n\nIt is hard luck on a young fellow to have expensive tastes, great expectations, aristocratic connections, but no actual money in his pocket and no profession by which he may earn any. The fact was that my father, a good, sanguine, easy-going man, had such confidence in the wealth and benevolence of his bachelor elder brother, Lord Southerton, that he took it for granted that I, his only son, would never be called upon to earn a living for myself. He imagined that if there were not a vacancy for me on the great Southerton Estates, at least there would be found some post in that diplomatic service which still remains the special preserve of our privileged classes. He died too early to realise how false his calculations had been. Neither my uncle nor the state took the slightest notice of me or showed any interest in my career. An occasional brace of pheasants, or basket of hares, was all that ever reached me to remind me that I was heir to Otwell House and one of the richest estates in the country. In the meantime, I found myself a bachelor and man about town, living in a suite of apartments in Grosvenor Mansions, with no occupation save that of pigeon-shooting and polo-playing at Hurlingham. Month by month, I realised that it was more and more difficult to get the brokers to renew my bills or to cash any further post-obits upon an unentailed property. Ruin lay right across my path, and every day I saw it clearer, nearer and more absolutely unavoidable.\n\nWhat made me feel my own poverty the more was that, apart from the great wealth of Lord Southerton, all my other relations were fairly well-to-do. The nearest of these was Everard King, my father\"s nephew and my own first cousin, who had spent an adventurous life in Brazil and had now returned to this country to settle down on his fortune. We never knew how he made his money, but he appeared to have plenty of it, for he bought the estate of Greylands, near Clipton-on-the-Marsh, in Suffolk. For the first year of his residence in England he took no more notice of me than my miserly uncle; but at last one summer morning, to my very great relief and joy, I received a letter asking me to come down that very day and spend a short visit at Greylands Court. I was expecting a rather long visit to Bankruptcy Court at the time, and this interruption seemed almost providential. If I could only get on terms with this unknown relative of mine, I might pull through yet. For the family credit, he could not let me go entirely to the wall. I ordered my valet to pack my valise, and I set off the same evening for Clipton-on-the-Marsh.\n\nAfter changing at Ipswich, a little local train deposited me at a small, deserted station lying amidst a rolling grassy country, with a sluggish and winding river curving in and out amidst the valleys, between high, silted banks, which showed that we were within reach of the tide. No carriage was awaiting me (I found afterwards that my telegram had been delayed), so I hired a dogcart at the local inn. The driver, an excellent fellow, was full of my relative\"s praises, and I learned from him that Mr Everard King was already a name to conjure with in that part of the country. He had entertained the schoolchildren, he had thrown his grounds open to visitors, he had subscribed to charities \u2013 in short, his benevolence had been so universal that my driver could only account for it on the supposition that he had parliamentary ambitions.\n\nMy attention was drawn away from my driver\"s panegyric by the appearance of a very beautiful bird which settled on a telegraph-post beside the road. At first I thought that it was a jay, but it was larger, with a brighter plumage. The driver accounted for its presence at once by saying that it belonged to the very man whom we were about to visit. It seems that the acclimatisation of foreign creatures was one of his hobbies, and that he had brought with him from Brazil a number of birds and beasts which he was endeavouring to rear in England. When once we had passed the gates of Greylands Park we had ample evidence of this taste of his. Some small spotted deer, a curious wild pig known, I believe, as a peccary, a gorgeously feathered oriole, some sort of armadillo and a singular lumbering in-toed beast like a very fat badger were among the creatures which I observed as we drove along the winding avenue.\n\nMr Everard King, my unknown cousin, was standing in person upon the steps of his house, for he had seen us in the distance and guessed that it was I. His appearance was very homely and benevolent, short and stout, forty-five years old, perhaps, with a round, good-humoured face, burned brown with the tropical sun and shot with a thousand wrinkles. He wore white linen clothes, in true planter style, with a cigar between his lips and a large panama hat upon the back of his head. It was such a figure as one associates with a verandahed bungalow, and it looked curiously out of place in front of this broad, stone English mansion, with its solid wings and its Palladio pillars before the doorway.\n\n\"My dear!\" he cried, glancing over his shoulder; \"my dear, here is our guest! Welcome, welcome to Greylands! I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Cousin Marshall, and I take it as a great compliment that you should honour this sleepy little country place with your presence.\"\n\nNothing could be more hearty than his manner, and he set me at my ease in an instant. But it needed all his cordiality to atone for the frigidity and even rudeness of his wife, a tall, haggard woman, who came forward at his summons. She was, I believe, of Brazilian extraction, though she spoke excellent English, and I excused her manners on the score of her ignorance of our customs. She did not attempt to conceal, however, either then or afterwards, that I was no very welcome visitor at Greylands Court. Her actual words were, as a rule, courteous, but she was the possessor of a pair of particularly expressive dark eyes, and I read in them very clearly from the first that she heartily wished me back in London once more.\n\nHowever, my debts were too pressing and my designs upon my wealthy relative were too vital for me to allow them to be upset by the ill-temper of his wife, so I disregarded her coldness and reciprocated the extreme cordiality of his welcome. No pains had been spared by him to make me comfortable. My room was a charming one. He implored me to tell him anything which could add to my happiness. It was on the tip of my tongue to inform him that a blank cheque would materially help towards that end, but I felt that it might be premature in the present state of our acquaintance. The dinner was excellent, and as we sat together afterwards over his Havanas and coffee, which later he told me was specially prepared upon his own plantation, it seemed to me that all my driver\"s eulogies were justified, and that I had never met a more large-hearted and hospitable man.\n\nBut, in spite of his cheery good nature, he was a man with a strong will and a fiery temper of his own. Of this I had an example upon the following morning. The curious aversion which Mrs Everard King had conceived towards me was so strong that her manner at breakfast was almost offensive. But her meaning became unmistakable when her husband had quitted the room.\n\n\"The best train in the day is at twelve fifteen,\" said she.\n\n\"But I was not thinking of going today,\" I answered, frankly \u2013 perhaps even defiantly, for I was determined not to be driven out by this woman.\n\n\"Oh, if it rests with you \u2013 \" said she, and stopped with a most insolent expression in her eyes.\n\n\"I am sure,\" I answered, \"that Mr Everard King would tell me if I were outstaying my welcome.\"\n\n\"What\"s this? What\"s this?\" said a voice, and there he was in the room. He had overheard my last words, and a glance at our faces had told him the rest. In an instant his chubby, cheery face set into an expression of absolute ferocity.\n\n\"Might I trouble you to walk outside, Marshall,\" said he? (I may mention that my own name is Marshall King.)\n\nHe closed the door behind me, and then, for an instant, I heard him talking in a low voice of concentrated passion to his wife. This gross breach of hospitality had evidently hit upon his tenderest point. I am no eavesdropper, so I walked out on to the lawn. Presently I heard a hurried step behind me, and there was the lady, her face pale with excitement and her eyes red with tears.\n\n\"My husband has asked me to apologise to you, Mr Marshall King,\" said she, standing with downcast eyes before me.\n\n\"Please do not say another word, Mrs King.\"\n\nHer dark eyes suddenly blazed out at me.\n\n\"You fool!\" she hissed, with frantic vehemence, and turning on her heel swept back to the house.\n\nThe insult was so outrageous, so insufferable, that I could only stand staring after her in bewilderment. I was still there when my host joined me. He was his cheery, chubby self once more.\n\n\"I hope that my wife has apologised for her foolish remarks,\" said he.\n\n\"Oh, yes \u2013 yes, certainly!\"\n\nHe put his hand through my arm and walked with me up and down the lawn.\n\n\"You must not take it seriously,\" said he. \"It would grieve me inexpressibly if you curtailed your visit by one hour. The fact is \u2013 there is no reason why there should be any concealment between relatives \u2013 that my poor dear wife is incredibly jealous. She hates that anyone \u2013 male or female \u2013 should for an instant come between us. Her ideal is a desert island and an eternal t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate. That gives you the clue to her actions, which are, I confess, upon this particular point, not very far removed from mania. Tell me that you will think no more of it.\"\n\n\"No, no; certainly not.\"\n\n\"Then light this cigar and come round with me and see my little menagerie.\"\n\nThe whole afternoon was occupied by this inspection, which included all the birds, beasts and even reptiles which he had imported. Some were free, some in cages, a few actually in the house. He spoke with enthusiasm of his successes and his failures, his births and his deaths, and he would cry out in his delight, like a schoolboy, when, as we walked, some gaudy bird would flutter up from the grass, or some curious beast slink into the cover. Finally he led me down a corridor which extended from one wing of the house. At the end of this there was a heavy door with a sliding shutter in it, and beside it there projected from the wall an iron handle attached to a wheel and a drum. A line of stout bars extended across the passage.\n\n\"I am about to show you the jewel of my collection,\" said he. \"There is only one other specimen in Europe, now that the Rotterdam cub is dead. It is a Brazilian cat.\"\n\n\"But how does that differ from any other cat?\"\n\n\"You will soon see that,\" said he, laughing. \"Will you kindly draw that shutter and look through?\"\n\nI did so, and found that I was gazing into a large, empty room, with stone flags, and small, barred windows upon the farther wall. In the centre of this room, lying in the middle of a golden patch of sunlight, there was stretched a huge creature, as large as a tiger, but as black and sleek as ebony. It was simply a very enormous and very well-kept black cat, and it cuddled up and basked in that yellow pool of light exactly as a cat would do. It was so graceful, so sinewy, and so gently and smoothly diabolical, that I could not take my eyes from the opening.\n\n\"Isn\"t he splendid?\" said my host, enthusiastically.\n\n\"Glorious! I never saw such a noble creature.\"\n\n\"Some people call it a black puma, but really it is not a puma at all. That fellow is nearly eleven feet from tail to tip. Four years ago he was a little ball of black fluff, with two yellow eyes staring out of it. He was sold me as a new-born cub up in the wild country at the head-waters of the Rio Negro. They speared his mother to death after she had killed a dozen of them.\"\n\n\"They are ferocious, then?\"\n\n\"The most absolutely treacherous and bloodthirsty creatures upon earth. You talk about a Brazilian cat to an up-country Indian, and see him get the jumps. They prefer humans to game. This fellow has never tasted living blood yet, but when he does he will be a terror. At present he won\"t stand anyone but me in his den. Even Baldwin, the groom, dare not go near him. As to me, I am his mother and father in one.\"\n\nAs he spoke he suddenly, to my astonishment, opened the door and slipped in, closing it instantly behind him. At the sound of his voice the huge, lithe creature rose, yawned and rubbed its round, black head affectionately against his side, while he patted and fondled it.\n\n\"Now, Tommy, into your cage!\" said he.\n\nThe monstrous cat walked over to one side of the room and coiled itself up under a grating. Everard King came out, and taking the iron handle which I have mentioned, he began to turn it. As he did so the line of bars in the corridor began to pass through a slot in the wall and closed up the front of this grating, so as to make an effective cage. When it was in position, he opened the door once more and invited me into the room, which was heavy with the pungent, musty smell peculiar to the great carnivora.\n\n\"That\"s how we work it,\" said he. \"We give him the run of the room for exercise, and then at night we put him in his cage. You can let him out by turning the handle from the passage, or you can, as you have seen, coop him up in the same way. No, no, you should not do that!\"\n\nI had put my hand between the bars to pat the glossy, heaving flank. He pulled it back, with a serious face.\n\n\"I assure you that he is not safe. Don\"t imagine that because I can take liberties with him anyone else can. He is very exclusive in his friends \u2013 aren\"t you, Tommy? Ah, he hears his lunch coming to him! Don\"t you, boy?\"\n\nA step had sounded in the stone-flagged passage and the creature had sprung to his feet and was pacing up and down the narrow cage, his yellow eyes gleaming and his scarlet tongue rippling and quivering over the white line of his jagged teeth. A groom entered with a coarse joint upon a tray, and thrust it through the bars to him. He pounced lightly upon it, carried it off to the corner, and there, holding it between his paws, tore and wrenched at it, raising his bloody muzzle every now and then to look at us. It was a malignant and yet fascinating sight.\n\n\"You can\"t wonder that I am fond of him, can you?\" said my host, as we left the room, \"especially when you consider that I have had the rearing of him. It was no joke bringing him over from the centre of South America; but here he is safe and sound \u2013 and, as I have said, far the most perfect specimen in Europe. The people at the Zoo are dying to have him, but I really can\"t part with him. Now, I think that I have inflicted my hobby upon you long enough, so we cannot do better than follow Tommy\"s example, and go to our lunch.\"\n\nMy South American relative was so engrossed by his grounds and their curious occupants, that I hardly gave him credit at first for having any interests outside them. That he had some, and pressing ones, was soon borne in upon me by the number of telegrams which he received. They arrived at all hours, and were always opened by him with the utmost eagerness and anxiety upon his face. Sometimes I imagined that it must be the Turf, and sometimes the Stock Exchange, but certainly he had some very urgent business going forward which was not transacted upon the downs of Suffolk. During the six days of my visit he had never fewer than three or four telegrams a day, and sometimes as many as seven or eight.\n\nI had occupied these six days so well, that by the end of them I had succeeded in getting upon the most cordial terms with my cousin. Every night we had sat up late in the billiard-room, he telling me the most extraordinary stories of his adventures in America \u2013 stories so desperate and reckless, that I could hardly associate them with the brown little chubby man before me. In return, I ventured upon some of my own reminiscences of London life, which interested him so much that he vowed he would come up to Grosvenor Mansions and stay with me. He was anxious to see the faster side of city life, and certainly, though I say it, he could not have chosen a more competent guide. It was not until the last day of my visit that I ventured to approach that which was on my mind. I told him frankly about my pecuniary difficulties and my impending ruin, and I asked his advice \u2013 though I hoped for something more solid. He listened attentively, puffing hard at his cigar.\n\n\"But surely,\" said he, \"you are the heir of our relative, Lord Southerton?\"\n\n\"I have every reason to believe so, but he would never make me any allowance.\"\n\n\"No, no, I have heard of his miserly ways. My poor Marshall, your position has been a very hard one. By the way, have you heard any news of Lord Southerton\"s health lately?\"\n\n\"He has always been in a critical condition ever since my childhood.\"\n\n\"Exactly \u2013 a creaking hinge, if ever there was one. Your inheritance may be a long way off. Dear me, how awkwardly situated you are!\"\n\n\"I had some hopes, sir, that you, knowing all the facts, might be inclined to advance \u2013\"\n\n\"Don\"t say another word, my dear boy,\" he cried, with the utmost cordiality; \"we shall talk it over tonight, and I give you my word that whatever is in my power shall be done.\"\n\nI was not sorry that my visit was drawing to a close, for it is unpleasant to feel that there is one person in the house who eagerly desires your departure. Mrs King\"s sallow face and forbidding eyes had become more and more hateful to me. She was no longer actively rude \u2013 her fear of her husband prevented he \u2013 but she pushed her insane jealousy to the extent of ignoring me, never addressing me, and in every way making my stay at Greylands as uncomfortable as she could. So offensive was her manner during that last day, that I should certainly have left had it not been for that interview with my host in the evening which would, I hoped, retrieve my broken fortunes.\n\nIt was very late when it occurred, for my relative, who had been receiving even more telegrams than usual during the day, went off to his study after dinner and only emerged when the household had retired to bed. I heard him go round locking the doors, as his custom was of a night, and finally he joined me in the billiard-room. His stout figure was wrapped in a dressing-gown and he wore a pair of red Turkish slippers without any heels. Settling down into an armchair, he brewed himself a glass of grog, in which I could not help noticing that the whisky considerably predominated over the water.\n\n\"My word!\" said he, \"what a night!\"\n\nIt was, indeed. The wind was howling and screaming round the house, and the latticed windows rattled and shook as if they were coming in. The glow of the yellow lamps and the flavour of our cigars seemed the brighter and more fragrant for the contrast.\n\n\"Now, my boy,\" said my host, \"we have the house and the night to ourselves. Let me have an idea of how your affairs stand, and I will see what can be done to set them in order. I wish to hear every detail.\"\n\nThus encouraged, I entered into a long exposition, in which all my tradesmen and creditors, from my landlord to my valet, figured in turn. I had notes in my pocket-book and I marshalled my facts and gave, I flatter myself, a very businesslike statement of my own unbusinesslike ways and lamentable position. I was depressed, however, to notice that my companion\"s eyes were vacant and his attention elsewhere. When he did occasionally throw out a remark it was so entirely perfunctory and pointless, that I was sure he had not in the least followed my remarks. Every now and then he roused himself and put on some show of interest, asking me to repeat or to explain more fully, but it was always to sink once more into the same brown study. At last he rose and threw the end of his cigar into the grate.\n\n\"I\"ll tell you what, my boy,\" said he. \"I never had a head for figures, so you will excuse me. You must jot it all down upon paper, and let me have a note of the amount. I\"ll understand it when I see it in black and white.\"\n\nThe proposal was encouraging. I promised to do so.\n\n\"And now it\"s time we were in bed. By Jove, there\"s one o\"clock striking in the hall.\"\n\nThe tingling of the chiming clock broke through the deep roar of the gale. The wind was sweeping past with the rush of a great river.\n\n\"I must see my cat before I go to bed,\" said my host. \"A high wind excites him. Will you come?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" said I.\n\n\"Then tread softly and don\"t speak, for everyone is asleep.\"\n\nWe passed quietly down the lamp-lit Persian-rugged hall, and through the door at the farther end. All was dark in the stone corridor, but a stable lantern hung on a hook, and my host took it down and lit it. There was no grating visible in the passage, so I knew that the beast was in its cage.\n\n\"Come in!\" said my relative, and opened the door.\n\nA deep growling as we entered showed that the storm had really excited the creature. In the flickering light of the lantern, we saw it, a huge black mass coiled in the corner of its den and throwing a squat, uncouth shadow upon the whitewashed wall. Its tail switched angrily among the straw.\n\n\"Poor Tommy is not in the best of tempers,\" said Everard King, holding up the lantern and looking in at him. \"What a black devil he looks, doesn\"t he? I must give him a little supper to put him in a better humour. Would you mind holding the lantern for a moment?\"\n\nI took it from his hand and he stepped to the door.\n\n\"His larder is just outside here,\" said he. \"You will excuse me for an instant, won\"t you?\" He passed out, and the door shut with a sharp metallic click behind him.\n\nThat hard crisp sound made my heart stand still. A sudden wave of terror passed over me. A vague perception of some monstrous treachery turned me cold. I sprang to the door, but there was no handle upon the inner side.\n\n\"Here!\" I cried. \"Let me out!\"\n\n\"All right! Don\"t make a row!\" said my host from the passage. \"You\"ve got the light all right.\"\n\n\"Yes, but I don\"t care about being locked in alone like this.\"\n\n\"Don\"t you?\" I heard his hearty, chuckling laugh. \"You won\"t be alone long.\"\n\n\"Let me out, sir!\" I repeated angrily. \"I tell you I don\"t allow practical jokes of this sort.\"\n\n\"Practical is the word,\" said he, with another hateful chuckle. And then suddenly I heard, amidst the roar of the storm, the creak and whine of the winch-handle turning and the rattle of the grating as it passed through the slot. Great God, he was letting loose the Brazilian cat!\n\nIn the light of the lantern I saw the bars sliding slowly before me. Already there was an opening a foot wide at the farther end. With a scream I seized the last bar with my hands and pulled with the strength of a madman. I was a madman with rage and horror. For a minute or more I held the thing motionless. I knew that he was straining with all his force upon the handle and that the leverage was sure to overcome me. I gave inch by inch, my feet sliding along the stones, and all the time I begged and prayed this inhuman monster to save me from this horrible death. I conjured him by his kinship. I reminded him that I was his guest; I begged to know what harm I had ever done him. His only answers were the tugs and jerks upon the handle, each of which, in spite of all my struggles, pulled another bar through the opening. Clinging and clutching, I was dragged across the whole front of the cage, until at last, with aching wrists and lacerated fingers, I gave up the hopeless struggle. The grating clanged back as I released it, and an instant later I heard the shuffle of the Turkish slippers in the passage, and the slam of the distant door. Then everything was silent.\n\nThe creature had never moved during this time. He lay still in the corner, and his tail had ceased switching. This apparition of a man adhering to his bars and dragged screaming across him had apparently filled him with amazement. I saw his great eyes staring steadily at me. I had dropped the lantern when I seized the bars, but it still burned upon the floor, and I made a movement to grasp it, with some idea that its light might protect me. But the instant I moved, the beast gave a deep and menacing growl. I stopped and stood still, quivering with fear in every limb. The cat (if one may call so fearful a creature by so homely a name) was not more than ten feet from me. The eyes glimmered like two disks of phosphorus in the darkness. They appalled and yet fascinated me. I could not take my own eyes from them. Nature plays strange tricks with us at such moments of intensity, and those glimmering lights waxed and waned with a steady rise and fall. Sometimes they seemed to be tiny points of extreme brilliancy \u2013 little electric sparks in the black obscurity \u2013 then they would widen and widen until all that corner of the room was filled with their shifting and sinister light. And then suddenly they went out altogether.\n\nThe beast had closed its eyes. I do not know whether there may be any truth in the old idea of the dominance of the human gaze, or whether the huge cat was simply drowsy, but the fact remains that, far from showing any symptom of attacking me, it simply rested its sleek, black head upon its huge forepaws and seemed to sleep. I stood, fearing to move lest I should rouse it into malignant life once more. But at least I was able to think clearly now that the baleful eyes were off me. Here I was shut up for the night with the ferocious beast. My own instincts, to say nothing of the words of the plausible villain who laid this trap for me, warned me that the animal was as savage as its master. How could I stave it off until morning? The door was hopeless, and so were the narrow, barred windows. There was no shelter anywhere in the bare, stone-flagged room. To cry for assistance was absurd. I knew that this den was an outhouse, and that the corridor which connected it with the house was at least a hundred feet long. Besides, with that gale thundering outside, my cries were not likely to be heard. I had only my own courage and my own wits to trust to.\n\nAnd then, with a fresh wave of horror, my eyes fell upon the lantern. The candle had burned low, and was already beginning to gutter. In ten minutes it would be out. I had only ten minutes then in which to do something, for I felt that if I were once left in the dark with that fearful beast I should be incapable of action. The very thought of it paralysed me. I cast my despairing eyes round this chamber of death, and they rested upon one spot which seemed to promise I will not say safety, but less immediate and imminent danger than the open floor.\n\nI have said that the cage had a top as well as a front, and this top was left standing when the front was wound through the slot in the wall. It consisted of bars at a few inches\" interval, with stout wire netting between, and it rested upon a strong stanchion at each end. It stood now as a great barred canopy over the crouching figure in the corner. The space between this iron shelf and the roof may have been from two to three feet. If I could only get up there, squeezed in between bars and ceiling, I should have only one vulnerable side. I should be safe from below, from behind, and from each side. Only on the open face of it could I be attacked. There, it is true, I had no protection whatever; but at least I should be out of the brute\"s path when he began to pace about his den. He would have to come out of his way to reach me. It was now or never, for once the light were out it would be impossible. With a gulp in my throat I sprang up, seized the iron edge of the top, and swung myself panting on to it. I writhed in, face downwards, and found myself looking straight into the terrible eyes and yawning jaws of the cat. Its fetid breath came up into my face like the steam from some foul pot.\n\nIt appeared, however, to be rather curious than angry. With a sleek ripple of its long black back it rose, stretched itself, and then rearing itself on its hind legs, with one forepaw against the wall, it raised the other and drew its claws across the wire meshes beneath me. One sharp, white hook tore through my trousers \u2013 for I may mention that I was still in evening dress \u2013 and dug a furrow in my knee. It was not meant as an attack, but rather as an experiment, for upon my giving a sharp cry of pain he dropped down again, and springing lightly into the room, he began walking swiftly round it, looking up every now and again in my direction. For my part I shuffled backwards until I lay with my back against the wall, screwing myself into the smallest space possible. The farther I got the more difficult it was for him to attack me.\n\nHe seemed more excited now that he had begun to move about, and he ran swiftly and noiselessly round and round the den, passing continually underneath the iron couch upon which I lay. It was wonderful to see so great a bulk passing like a shadow, with hardly the softest thudding of velvety pads. The candle was burning low \u2013 so low that I could hardly see the creature. And then, with a last flare and splutter, it went out altogether. I was alone with the cat in the dark!\n\nIt helps one to face a danger when one knows that one has done all that possibly can be done. There is nothing for it then but to quietly await the result. In this case, there was no chance of safety anywhere except the precise spot where I was. I stretched myself out, therefore, and lay silently, almost breathlessly, hoping that the beast might forget my presence if I did nothing to remind him. I reckoned that it must already be two o\"clock. At four it would be full dawn. I had not more than two hours to wait for daylight.\n\nOutside, the storm was still raging, and the rain lashed continually against the little windows. Inside, the poisonous and fetid air was overpowering. I could neither hear nor see the cat. I tried to think about other things \u2013 but only one had power enough to draw my mind from my terrible position. That was the contemplation of my cousin\"s villainy, his unparalleled hypocrisy, his malignant hatred of me. Beneath that cheerful face there lurked the spirit of a medieval assassin. And as I thought of it I saw more clearly how cunningly the thing had been arranged. He had apparently gone to bed with the others. No doubt he had his witnesses to prove it. Then, unknown to them, he had slipped down, had lured me into this den and abandoned me. His story would be so simple. He had left me to finish my cigar in the billiard-room. I had gone down on my own account to have a last look at the cat. I had entered the room without observing that the cage was opened, and I had been caught. How could such a crime be brought home to him? Suspicion, perhaps \u2013 but proof, never!\n\nHow slowly those dreadful two hours went by! Once I heard a low, rasping sound, which I took to be the creature licking its own fur. Several times those greenish eyes gleamed at me through the darkness, but never in a fixed stare, and my hopes grew stronger that my presence had been forgotten or ignored. At last the least faint glimmer of light came through the windows \u2013 I first dimly saw them as two grey squares upon the black wall, then grey turned to white, and I could see my terrible companion once more. And he, alas, could see me!\n\nIt was evident to me at once that he was in a much more dangerous and aggressive mood than when I had seen him last. The cold of the morning had irritated him, and he was hungry as well. With a continual growl he paced swiftly up and down the side of the room which was farthest from my refuge, his whiskers bristling angrily and his tail switching and lashing. As he turned at the corners his savage eyes always looked upwards at me with a dreadful menace. I knew then that he meant to kill me. Yet I found myself even at that moment admiring the sinuous grace of the devilish thing, its long, undulating, rippling movements, the gloss of its beautiful flanks, the vivid, palpitating scarlet of the glistening tongue which hung from the jet-black muzzle. And all the time that deep, threatening growl was rising and rising in an unbroken crescendo. I knew that the crisis was at hand.\n\nIt was a miserable hour to meet such a death \u2013 so cold, so comfortless, shivering in my light dress clothes upon this gridiron of torment upon which I was stretched. I tried to brace myself to it, to raise my soul above it, and at the same time, with the lucidity which comes to a perfectly desperate man, I cast round for some possible means of escape. One thing was clear to me. If that front of the cage was only back in its position once more, I could find a sure refuge behind it. Could I possibly pull it back? I hardly dared to move for fear of bringing the creature upon me. Slowly, very slowly, I put my hand forward until it grasped the edge of the front, the final bar which protruded through the wall. To my surprise it came quite easily to my jerk. Of course the difficulty of drawing it out arose from the fact that I was clinging to it. I pulled again, and three inches of it came through. It ran apparently on wheels. I pulled again... and then the cat sprang!\n\nIt was so quick, so sudden, that I never saw it happen. I simply heard the savage snarl and in an instant afterwards the blazing yellow eyes, the flattened black head with its red tongue and flashing teeth, were within reach of me. The impact of the creature shook the bars upon which I lay, until I thought (as far as I could think of anything at such a moment) that they were coming down. The cat swayed there for an instant, the head and front paws quite close to me, the hind paws clawing to find a grip upon the edge of the grating. I heard the claws rasping as they clung to the wire-netting and the breath of the beast made me sick. But its bound had been miscalculated. It could not retain its position. Slowly, grinning with rage, and scratching madly at the bars, it swung backwards and dropped heavily upon the floor. With a growl it instantly faced round to me and crouched for another spring.\n\nI knew that the next few moments would decide my fate. The creature had learned by experience. It would not miscalculate again. I must act promptly, fearlessly, if I were to have a chance of life. In an instant I had formed my plan. Pulling off my dress-coat, I threw it down over the head of the beast. At the same moment I dropped over the edge, seized the end of the front grating, and pulled it frantically out of the wall.\n\nIt came more easily than I could have expected. I rushed across the room, bearing it with me; but, as I rushed, the accident of my position put me upon the outer side. Had it been the other way, I might have come off scathless. As it was, there was a moment\"s pause as I stopped it and tried to pass in through the opening which I had left. That moment was enough to give time to the creature to toss off the coat with which I had blinded him and to spring upon me. I hurled myself through the gap and pulled the rails to behind me, but he seized my leg before I could entirely withdraw it. One stroke of that huge paw tore off my calf as a shaving of wood curls off before a plane. The next moment, bleeding and fainting, I was lying among the foul straw with a line of friendly bars between me and the creature which ramped so frantically against them.\n\nToo wounded to move and too faint to be conscious of fear, I could only lie, more dead than alive, and watch it. It pressed its broad, black chest against the bars and angled for me with its crooked paws as I have seen a kitten do before a mousetrap. It ripped my clothes, but, stretch as it would, it could not quite reach me. I have heard of the curious numbing effect produced by wounds from the great carnivora, and now I was destined to experience it, for I had lost all sense of personality and was as interested in the cat\"s failure or success as if it were some game which I was watching. And then gradually my mind drifted away into strange vague dreams, always with that black face and red tongue coming back into them, and so I lost myself in the nirvana of delirium, the blessed relief of those who are too sorely tried.\n\nTracing the course of events afterwards, I conclude that I must have been insensible for about two hours. What roused me to consciousness once more was that sharp metallic click which had been the precursor of my terrible experience. It was the shooting back of the spring lock. Then, before my senses were clear enough entirely to apprehend what they saw, I was aware of the round, benevolent face of my cousin peering in through the open door. What he saw evidently amazed him. There was the cat crouching on the floor. I was stretched upon my back in my shirtsleeves within the cage, my trousers torn to ribbons and a great pool of blood all round me. I can see his amazed face now, with the morning sunlight upon it. He peered at me, and peered again. Then he closed the door behind him, and advanced to the cage to see if I were really dead.\n\nI cannot undertake to say what happened. I was not in a fit state to witness or to chronicle such events. I can only say that I was suddenly conscious that his face was away from me \u2013 that he was looking towards the animal.\n\n\"Good old Tommy!\" he cried. \"Good old Tommy!\"\n\nThen he came near the bars, with his back still towards me.\n\n\"Down, you stupid beast!\" he roared. \"Down, sir! Don\"t you know your master?\"\n\nSuddenly even in my bemuddled brain a remembrance came of those words of his when he had said that the taste of blood would turn the cat into a fiend. My blood had done it, but he was to pay the price.\n\n\"Get away!\" he screamed. \"Get away, you devil! Baldwin! Baldwin! Oh, my God!\"\n\nAnd then I heard him fall, and rise, and fall again, with a sound like the ripping of sacking. His screams grew fainter until they were lost in the worrying snarl. And then, after I thought that he was dead, I saw, as in a nightmare, a blinded, tattered, blood-soaked figure running wildly round the room \u2013 and that was the last glimpse I had of him before I fainted once again.\n\nI was many months in my recovery \u2013 in fact, I cannot say that I have ever recovered, for to the end of my days I shall carry a stick as a sign of my night with the Brazilian cat. Baldwin, the groom, and the other servants could not tell what had occurred, when, drawn by the death-cries of their master, they found me behind the bars, and his remains \u2013 or what they afterwards discovered to be his remains - in the clutch of the creature which he had reared. They stalled him off with hot irons, and afterwards shot him through the loophole of the door before they could finally extricate me. I was carried to my bedroom, and there, under the roof of my would-be murderer, I remained between life and death for several weeks. They had sent for a surgeon from Clipton and a nurse from London, and in a month I was able to be carried to the station, and so conveyed back once more to Grosvenor Mansions.\n\nI have one remembrance of that illness, which might have been part of the ever-changing panorama conjured up by a delirious brain were it not so definitely fixed in my memory. One night, when the nurse was absent, the door of my chamber opened and a tall woman in blackest mourning slipped into the room. She came across to me and as she bent her sallow face I saw by the faint gleam of the nightlight that it was the Brazilian woman whom my cousin had married. She stared intently into my face, and her expression was more kindly than I had ever seen it.\n\n\"Are you conscious?\" she asked.\n\nI feebly nodded \u2013 for I was still very weak.\n\n\"Well, then, I only wished to say to you that you have yourself to blame. Did I not do all I could for you? From the beginning I tried to drive you from the house. By every means, short of betraying my husband, I tried to save you from him. I knew that he had a reason for bringing you here. I knew that he would never let you get away again. No one knew him as I knew him, who had suffered from him so often. I did not dare to tell you all this. He would have killed me. But I did my best for you. As things have turned out, you have been the best friend that I have ever had. You have set me free, and I fancied that nothing but death would do that. I am sorry if you are hurt, but I cannot reproach myself. I told you that you were a fool \u2013 and a fool you have been.\" She crept out of the room, the bitter, singular woman, and I was never destined to see her again. With what remained from her husband\"s property she went back to her native land, and I have heard that she afterwards took the veil at Pernambuco.\n\nIt was not until I had been back in London for some time that the doctors pronounced me to be well enough to do business. It was not a very welcome permission to me, for I feared that it would be the signal for an inrush of creditors; but it was Summers, my lawyer, who first took advantage of it.\n\n\"I am very glad to see that your lordship is so much better,\" said he. \"I have been waiting a long time to offer my congratulations.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Summers? This is no time for joking.\"\n\n\"I mean what I say,\" he answered. \"You have been Lord Southerton for the last six weeks, but we feared that it would retard your recovery if you were to learn it.\"\n\nLord Southerton! One of the richest peers in England! I could not believe my ears. And then suddenly I thought of the time which had elapsed, and how it coincided with my injuries.\n\n\"Then Lord Southerton must have died about the same time that I was hurt?\"\n\n\"His death occurred upon that very day.\" Summers looked hard at me as I spoke, and I am convinced \u2013 for he was a very shrewd fellow \u2013 that he had guessed the true state of the case. He paused for a moment as if awaiting a confidence from me, but I could not see what was to be gained by exposing such a family scandal.\n\n\"Yes, a very curious coincidence,\" he continued, with the same knowing look. \"Of course, you are aware that your cousin Everard King was the next heir to the estates. Now, if it had been you instead of him who had been torn to pieces by this tiger, or whatever it was, then of course he would have been Lord Southerton at the present moment.\"\n\n\"No doubt,\" said I.\n\n\"And he took such an interest in it,\" said Summers. \"I happen to know that the late Lord Southerton\"s valet was in his pay, and that he used to have telegrams from him every few hours to tell him how he was getting on. That would be about the time when you were down there. Was it not strange that he should wish to be so well informed, since he knew that he was not the direct heir?\"\n\n\"Very strange,\" said I. \"And now, Summers, if you will bring me my bills and a new chequebook, we will begin to get things into order.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Brown Hand ]\n\nEveryone knows that Sir Dominick Holden, the famous Indian surgeon, made me his heir, and that his death changed me in an hour from a hard-working and impecunious medical man to a well-to-do landed proprietor. Many know also that there were at least five people between the inheritance and me, and that Sir Dominick\"s selection appeared to be altogether arbitrary and whimsical. I can assure them, however, that they are quite mistaken, and that, although I only knew Sir Dominick in the closing years of his life, there were, none the less, very real reasons why he should show his goodwill towards me. As a matter of fact, though I say it myself, no man ever did more for another than I did for my Indian uncle. I cannot expect the story to be believed, but it is so singular that I should feel that it was a breach of duty if I did not put it upon record \u2013 so here it is, and your belief or incredulity is your own affair.\n\nSir Dominick Holden, CB, KCSL, and I don\"t know what besides, was the most distinguished Indian surgeon of his day. In the army originally, he afterwards settled down into civil practice in Bombay, and visited, as a consultant, every part of India. His name is best remembered in connection with the Oriental Hospital, which he founded and supported. The time came, however, when his iron constitution began to show signs of the long strain to which he had subjected it, and his brother practitioners (who were not, perhaps, entirely disinterested upon the point) were unanimous in recommending him to return to England. He held on so long as he could, but at last he developed nervous symptoms of a very pronounced character, and so came back, a broken man, to his native county of Wiltshire. He bought a considerable estate with an ancient manor house upon the edge of Salisbury Plain, and devoted his old age to the study of comparative pathology, which has been his learned hobby all his life and in which he was a foremost authority.\n\nWe of the family were, as may be imagined, much excited by the news of the return of this rich and childless uncle to England. On his part, although by no means exuberant in his hospitality, he showed some sense of his duty to his relations, and each of us in turn had an invitation to visit him. From the accounts of my cousins it appeared to be a melancholy business, and it was with mixed feelings that I at last received my own summons to appear at Rodenhurst. My wife was so carefully excluded from the invitation that my first impulse was to refuse it, but the interests of the children had to be considered, and so, with her consent, I set out one October afternoon upon my visit to Wiltshire, with little thought of what that visit was to entail.\n\nMy uncle\"s estate was situated where the arable land of the plains begins to swell upwards into the rounded chalk hills which are characteristic of the county. As I drove from Dinton Station in the waning light of that autumn day, I was impressed by the weird nature of the scenery. The few scattered cottages of the peasants were so dwarfed by the huge evidences of prehistoric life, that the present appeared to be a dream and the past to be the obtrusive and masterful reality. The road wound through the valleys, formed by a succession of grassy hills, and the summit of each was cut and carved into the most elaborate fortifications, some circular and some square but all on a scale which has defied the winds and the rains of many centuries. Some call them Roman and some British, but their true origin and the reasons for this particular tract of country being so interlaced with entrenchments have never been finally made clear. Here and there on the long, smooth, olive-coloured slopes there rose small, rounded barrows or tumuli. Beneath them lie the cremated ashes of the race which cut so deeply into the hills, but their graves tell us nothing save that a jar full of dust represents the man who once laboured under the sun.\n\nIt was through this weird country that I approached my uncle\"s residence of Rodenhurst, and the house was, as I found, in due keeping with its surroundings. Two broken and weather-stained pillars, each surmounted by a mutilated heraldic emblem, flanked the entrance to a neglected drive. A cold wind whistled though the elms which lined it and the air was full of the drifting leaves. At the far end, under the gloomy arch of trees, a single yellow lamp burned steadily. In the dim half-light of the coming night I saw a long, low building stretching out two irregular wings, with deep eaves, a sloping gambrel roof and walls which were criss-crossed with timber balks in the fashion of the Tudors. The cheery light of a fire flickered in the broad, latticed window to the left of the low-porched door, and this, as it proved, marked the study of my uncle, for it was thither that I was led by his butler in order to make my host\"s acquaintance.\n\nHe was cowering over his fire, for the moist chill of an English autumn had set him shivering. His lamp was unlit, and I only saw the red glow of the embers beating upon a huge, craggy face, with a Red Indian nose and cheek, and deep furrows and seams from eye to chin, the sinister marks of hidden volcanic fires. He sprang up at my entrance with something of an old-world courtesy and welcomed me warmly to Rodenhurst. At the same time I was conscious, as the lamp was carried in, that it was a very critical pair of light-blue eyes which looked out at me from under shaggy eyebrows, like scouts beneath a bush, and that this outlandish uncle of mine was carefully reading off my character with all the ease of a practised observer and an experienced man of the world.\n\nFor my part I looked at him, and looked again, for I had never seen a man whose appearance was more fitted to hold one\"s attention. His figure was the framework of a giant, but he had fallen away until his coat dangled straight down in a shocking fashion from a pair of broad and bony shoulders. All his limbs were huge and yet emaciated, and I could not take my gaze from his knobby wrists and long, gnarled hands. But his eyes \u2013 those peering, light-blue eyes \u2013 they were the most arrestive of any of his peculiarities. It was not their colour alone, nor was it the ambush of hair in which they lurked; but it was the expression which I read in them. For the appearance and bearing of the man were masterful, and one expected a certain corresponding arrogance in his eyes, but instead of that I read the look which tells of a spirit cowed and crushed, the furtive, expectant look of the dog whose master has taken the whip from the rack. I formed my own medical diagnosis upon one glance at those critical and yet appealing eyes. I believed that he was stricken with some mortal ailment, that he knew himself to be exposed to sudden death and that he lived in terror of it. Such was my judgement \u2013 a false one, as the event showed; but I mention it that it may help you to realise the look which I read in his eyes.\n\nMy uncle\"s welcome was, as I have said, a courteous one, and in an hour or so I found myself seated between him and his wife at a comfortable dinner, with curious, pungent delicacies upon the table and a stealthy, quick-eyed Oriental waiter behind his chair. The old couple had come round to that tragic imitation of the dawn of life when husband and wife, having lost or scattered all those who were their intimates, find themselves face to face and alone once more, their work done, and the end nearing fast. Those who have reached that stage in sweetness and love, who can change their winter into a gentle, Indian summer, have come as victors through the ordeal of life. Lady Holden was a small, alert woman with a kindly eye, and her expression as she glanced at him was a certificate of character to her husband. And yet, though I read a mutual love in their glances, I read also mutual horror, and recognised in her face some reflection of that stealthy fear which I had detected in his. Their talk was sometimes merry and sometimes sad, but there was a forced note in their merriment and a naturalness in their sadness which told me that a heavy heart beat upon either side of me.\n\nWe were sitting over our first glass of wine, and the servants had left the room, when the conversation took a turn which produced a remarkable effect upon my host and hostess. I cannot recall what it was which started the topic of the supernatural, but it ended in my showing them that the abnormal in psychical experiences was a subject to which I had, like many neurologists, devoted a great deal of attention. I concluded by narrating my experiences when, as a member of the Psychical Research Society, I had formed one of a committee of three who spent the night in a haunted house. Our adventures were neither exciting nor convincing, but, such as it was, the story appeared to interest my auditors in a remarkable degree. They listened with an eager silence, and I caught a look of intelligence between them which I could not understand. Lady Holden immediately afterwards rose and left the room.\n\nSir Dominick pushed the cigar-box over to me, and we smoked for some little time in silence. That huge, bony hand of his was twitching as he raised it with his cheroot to his lips, and I felt that the man\"s nerves were vibrating like fiddle-strings. My instincts told me that he was on the verge of some intimate confidence, and I feared to speak lest I should interrupt it. At last he turned towards me with a spasmodic gesture, like a man who throws his last scruple to the winds.\n\n\"From the little that I have seen of you it appears to me, Dr Hardacre,\" said he, \"that you are the very man I have wanted to meet.\"\n\n\"I am delighted to hear it, sir.\"\n\n\"Your head seems to be cool and steady. You will acquit me of any desire to flatter you, for the circumstances are too serious to permit of insincerities. You have some special knowledge upon these subjects, and you evidently view them from that philosophical standpoint which robs them of all vulgar terror. I presume that the sight of an apparition would not seriously discompose you?\"\n\n\"I think not, sir.\"\n\n\"Would even interest you, perhaps?\"\n\n\"Most intensely.\"\n\n\"As a psychical observer, you would probably investigate it in as impersonal a fashion as an astronomer investigates a wandering comet?\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\nHe gave a heavy sigh.\n\n\"Believe me, Dr Hardacre, there was a time when I could have spoken as you do now. My nerve was a byword in India. Even the Mutiny never shook it for an instant. And yet you see what I am reduced to \u2013 the most timorous man, perhaps, in all this county of Wiltshire. Do not speak too bravely upon this subject, or you may find yourself subjected to as long-drawn a test as I am \u2013 a test which can only end in the madhouse or the grave.\n\nI waited patiently until he should see fit to go further in his confidence. His preamble had, I need not say, filled me with interest and expectation.\n\n\"For some years, Dr Hardacre,\" he continued, \"my life and that of my wife have been made miserable by a cause which is so grotesque that it borders upon the ludicrous. And yet familiarity has never made it more easy to bear \u2013 on the contrary, as time passes my nerves become more worn and shattered by the constant attrition. If you have no physical fears, Dr Hardacre, I should very much value your opinion upon this phenomenon which troubles us so.\"\n\n\"For what it is worth my opinion is entirely at your service. May I ask the nature of the phenomenon?\"\n\n\"I think that your experiences will have a higher evidential value if you are not told in advance what you may expect to encounter. You are yourself aware of the quibbles of unconscious cerebration and subjective impressions with which a scientific sceptic may throw a doubt upon your statement. It would be as well to guard against them in advance.\"\n\n\"What shall I do, then?\"\n\n\"I will tell you. Would you mind following me this way?\" He led me out of the dining-room and down a long passage until we came to a terminal door. Inside there was a large, bare room fitted as a laboratory, with numerous scientific instruments and bottles. A shelf ran along one side, upon which there stood a long line of glass jars containing pathological and anatomical specimens.\n\n\"You see that I still dabble in some of my old studies,\" said Sir Dominick. \"These jars are the remains of what was once a most excellent collection, but unfortunately I lost the greater part of them when my house was burned down in Bombay in \"92. It was a most unfortunate affair for me \u2013 in more ways than one. I had examples of many rare conditions, and my splenic collection was probably unique. These are the survivors.\"\n\nI glanced over them and saw that they really were of a very great value and rarity from a pathological point of view: bloated organs, gaping cysts, distorted bones, odious parasites \u2013 a singular exhibition of the products of India.\n\n\"There is, as you see, a small settee here,\" said my host. \"It was far from our intention to offer a guest so meagre an accommodation, but since affairs have taken this turn, it would be a great kindness upon your part if you would consent to spend the night in this apartment. I beg that you will not hesitate to let me know if the idea should be at all repugnant to you.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" I said, \"it is most acceptable.\"\n\n\"My own room is the second on the left, so that if you should feel that you are in need of company a call would always bring me to your side.\"\n\n\"I trust that I shall not be compelled to disturb you.\"\n\n\"It is unlikely that I shall be asleep. I do not sleep much. Do not hesitate to summon me.\"\n\nAnd so with this agreement we joined Lady Holden in the drawing-room and talked of lighter things.\n\nIt was no affectation upon my part to say that the prospect of my night\"s adventure was an agreeable one. I have no pretence to greater physical courage than my neighbours, but familiarity with a subject robs it of those vague and undefined terrors which are the most appalling to the imaginative mind. The human brain is capable of only one strong emotion at a time, and if it be filled with curiosity or scientific enthusiasm, there is no room for fear. It is true that I had my uncle\"s assurance that he had himself originally taken this point of view, but I reflected that the breakdown of his nervous system might be due to his forty years in India as much as to any psychical experiences which had befallen him. I at least was sound in nerve and brain, and it was with something of the pleasurable thrill of anticipation with which the sportsman takes his position beside the haunt of his game that I shut the laboratory door behind me, and partially undressing, lay down upon the rug-covered settee.\n\nIt was not an ideal atmosphere for a bedroom. The air was heavy with many chemical odours, that of methylated spirit predominating. Nor were the decorations of my chamber very sedative. The odious line of glass jars with their relics of disease and suffering stretched in front of my very eyes. There was no blind to the window, and a three-quarter moon streamed its white light into the room, tracing a silver square with filigree lattices upon the opposite wall. When I had extinguished my candle this one bright patch in the midst of the general gloom had certainly an eerie and discomposing aspect. A rigid and absolute silence reigned throughout the old house, so that the low swish of the branches in the garden came softly and smoothly to my ears. It may have been the hypnotic lullaby of this gentle susurrus, or it may have been the result of my tiring day, but after many dozings and many efforts to regain my clearness of perception, I fell at last into a deep and dreamless sleep.\n\nI was awakened by some sound in the room, and I instantly raised myself upon my elbow on the couch. Some hours had passed, for the square patch upon the wall had slid downwards and sideways until it lay obliquely at the end of my bed. The rest of the room was in deep shadow. At first I could see nothing; presently, as my eyes became accustomed to the faint light, I was aware, with a thrill which all my scientific absorption could not entirely prevent, that something was moving slowly along the line of the wall. A gentle, shuffling sound, as of soft slippers, came to my ears, and I dimly discerned a human figure walking stealthily from the direction of the door. As it emerged into the patch of moonlight I saw very clearly what it was and how it was employed. It was a man, short and squat, dressed in some sort of dark-grey gown, which hung straight from his shoulders to his feet. The moon shone upon the side of his face, and I saw that it was chocolate-brown in colour, with a ball of black hair like a woman\"s at the back of his head. He walked slowly, and his eyes were cast upwards towards the line of bottles which contained those gruesome remnants of humanity. He seemed to examine each jar with attention, and then to pass on to the next. When he had come to the end of the line, immediately opposite my bed, he stopped, faced me, threw up his hands with a gesture of despair, and vanished from my sight.\n\nI have said that he threw up his hands, but I should have said his arms, for as he assumed that attitude of despair I observed a singular peculiarity about his appearance. He had only one hand! As the sleeves drooped down from the upflung arms I saw the left plainly, but the right ended in a knobby and unsightly stump. In every other way his appearance was so natural, and I had both seen and heard him so clearly, that I could easily have believed that he was an Indian servant of Sir Dominick\"s who had come into my room in search of something. It was only his sudden disappearance which suggested anything more sinister to me. As it was I sprang from my couch, lit a candle, and examined the whole room carefully. There were no signs of my visitor, and I was forced to conclude that there had really been something outside the normal laws of nature in his appearance. I lay awake for the remainder of the night, but nothing else occurred to disturb me.\n\nI am an early riser, but my uncle was an even earlier one, for I found him pacing up and down the lawn at the side of the house. He ran towards me in his eagerness when he saw me come out from the door.\n\n\"Well, well!\" he cried. \"Did you see him?\"\n\n\"An Indian with one hand?\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"Yes, I saw him\" \u2013 and I told him all that occurred. When I had finished, he led the way into his study.\n\n\"We have a little time before breakfast,\" said he. \"It will suffice to give you an explanation of this extraordinary affair \u2013 so far as I can explain that which is essentially inexplicable. In the first place, when I tell you that for four years I have never passed one single night, either in Bombay, aboard ship or here in England, without my sleep being broken by this fellow, you will understand why it is that I am a wreck of my former self. His programme is always the same. He appears by my bedside, shakes me roughly by the shoulder, passes from my room into the laboratory, walks slowly along the line of my bottles and then vanishes. For more than a thousand times he has gone through the same routine.\"\n\n\"What does he want?\"\n\n\"He wants his hand.\"\n\n\"His hand?\"\n\n\"Yes, it came about in this way. I was summoned to Peshawar for a consultation some ten years ago, and while there I was asked to look at the hand of a native who was passing through with an Afghan caravan. The fellow came from some mountain tribe living away at the back of beyond somewhere on the other side of Kaffiristan. He talked a bastard Pushtu, and it was all I could do to understand him. He was suffering from a soft sarcomatous swelling of one of the metacarpal joints, and I made him realise that it was only by losing his hand that he could hope to save his life. After much persuasion he consented to the operation, and he asked me, when it was over, what fee I demanded. The poor fellow was almost a beggar, so that the idea of a fee was absurd, but I answered in jest that my fee should be his hand and that I proposed to add it to my pathological collection.\n\n\"To my surprise he demurred very much to the suggestion, and he explained that according to his religion it was an all-important matter that the body should be reunited after death and so make a perfect dwelling for the spirit. The belief is, of course, an old one, and the mummies of the Egyptians arose from an analogous superstition. I answered him that his hand was already off, and asked him how he intended to preserve it. He replied that he would pickle it in salt and carry it about with him. I suggested that it might be safer in my keeping than his, and that I had better means than salt for preserving it. On realising that I really intended to keep it carefully, his opposition vanished instantly. \"But remember, sahib,\" said he, \"I shall want it back when I am dead.\" I laughed at the remark, and so the matter ended. I returned to my practice, and he no doubt in the course of time was able to continue his journey to Afghanistan.\n\n\"Well, as I told you last night, I had a bad fire in my house at Bombay. Half of it was burned down and, among other things, my pathological collection was largely destroyed. What you see are the poor remains of it. The hand of the human went with the rest, but I gave the matter no particular thought at the time. That was six years ago.\n\n\"Four years ago \u2013 two years after the fire \u2013 I was awakened one night by a furious tugging at my sleeve. I sat up under the impression that my favourite mastiff was trying to arouse me. Instead of this, I saw my Indian patient of long ago, dressed in the long, grey gown which was the badge of his people. He was holding up his stump and looking reproachfully at me. He then went over to my bottles, which at that time I kept in my room, and he examined them carefully, after which he gave a gesture of anger and vanished. I realised that he had just died, and that he had come to claim my promise that I should keep his limb in safety for him.\n\n\"Well, there you have it all, Dr Hardacre. Every night at the same hour for four years this performance has been repeated. It is a simple thing in itself, but it has worn me out like water dropping on a stone. It has brought a vile insomnia with it, for I cannot sleep now for the expectation of his coming. It has poisoned my old age and that of my wife, who has been the sharer in this great trouble. But there is the breakfast gong, and she will be waiting impatiently to know how it fared with you last night. We are both much indebted to you for your gallantry, for it takes something from the weight of our misfortune when we share it, even for a single night, with a friend, and it reassures us as to our sanity, which we are sometimes driven to question.\"\n\nThis was the curious narrative which Sir Dominick confided to me \u2013 a story which to many would have appeared to be a grotesque impossibility, but which, after my experience of the night before and my previous knowledge of such things, I was prepared to accept as an absolute fact. I thought deeply over the matter, and brought the whole range of my reading and experience to bear upon it. After breakfast, I surprised my host and hostess by announcing that I was returning to London by the next train.\n\n\"My dear doctor,\" cried Sir Dominick in great distress, \"you make me feel that I have been guilty of a gross breach of hospitality in intruding this unfortunate matter upon you. I should have borne my own burden.\"\n\n\"It is, indeed, that matter which is taking me to London,\" I answered; \"but you are mistaken, I assure you, if you think that my experience of last night was an unpleasant one to me. On the contrary, I am about to ask your permission to return in the evening and spend one more night in your laboratory. I am very eager to see this visitor once again.\"\n\nMy uncle was exceedingly anxious to know what I was about to do, but my fears of raising false hopes prevented me from telling him. I was back in my own consulting-room a little after luncheon, and was confirming my memory of a passage in a recent book upon occultism which had arrested my attention when I read it.\n\nIn the case of earth-bound spirits [said my authority], some one dominant idea obsessing them at the hour of death is sufficient to hold them in this material world. They are the amphibia of this life and of the next, capable of passing from one to the other as the turtle passes from land to water. The causes which may bind a soul so strongly to a life which its body has abandoned are any violent emotion. Avarice, revenge, anxiety, love and pity have all been known to have this effect. As a rule it springs from some unfulfilled wish, and when the wish has been fulfilled the material bond relaxes. There are many cases upon record which show the singular persistence of these visitors, and also their disappearance when their wishes have been fulfilled, or in some cases when a reasonable compromise has been effected.\n\n\"A reasonable compromise effected\" \u2013 those were the words which I had brooded over all the morning, and which I now verified in the original. No actual atonement could be made here \u2013 but a reasonable compromise! I made my way as fast as a train could take me to the Shadwell Seamen\"s Hospital, where my old friend Jack Hewett was house-surgeon. Without explaining the situation I made him understand what it was that I wanted.\n\n\"A brown man\"s hand!\" said he, in amazement. \"What in the world do you want that for?\"\n\n\"Never mind. I\"ll tell you some day. I know that your wards are full of Indians.\"\n\n\"I should think so. But a hand \u2013 \" He thought a little and then struck a bell.\n\n\"Travers,\" said he to a student-dresser, \"what became of the hands of the Lascar which we took off yesterday? I mean the fellow from the East India Dock who got caught in the steam winch.\"\n\n\"They are in the post-mortem room, sir.\"\n\n\"Just pack one of them in antiseptics and give it to Dr Hardacre.\"\n\nAnd so I found myself back at Rodenhurst before dinner with this curious outcome of my day in town. I still said nothing to Sir Dominick, but I slept that night in the laboratory, and I placed the Lascar\"s hand in one of the glass jars at the end of my couch.\n\nSo interested was I in the result of my experiment that sleep was out of the question. I sat with a shaded lamp beside me and waited patiently for my visitor. This time I saw him clearly from the first. He appeared beside the door, nebulous for an instant, and then hardening into as distinct an outline as any living man. The slippers beneath his grey gown were red and heelless, which accounted for the low, shuffling sound which he made as he walked. As on the previous night he passed slowly along the line of bottles until he paused before that which contained the hand. He reached up to it, his whole figure quivering with expectation, took it down, examined it eagerly, and then, with a face which was convulsed with fury and disappointment, he hurled it down on the floor. There was a crash which resounded through the house, and when I looked up the mutilated Indian had disappeared. A moment later my door flew open and Sir Dominick rushed in.\n\n\"You are not hurt?\" he cried.\n\n\"No \u2013 but deeply disappointed.\"\n\nHe looked in astonishment at the splinters of glass and the brown hand lying upon the floor.\n\n\"Good God!\" he cried. \"What is this?\"\n\nI told him my idea and its wretched sequel. He listened intently, but shook his head.\n\n\"It was well thought of,\" said he, \"but I fear that there is no such easy end to my sufferings. But one thing I now insist upon. It is that you shall never again upon any pretext occupy this room. My fears that something might have happened to you \u2013 when I heard that crash \u2013 have been the most acute of all the agonies which I have undergone. I will not expose myself to a repetition of it.\"\n\nHe allowed me, however, to spend the remainder of that night where I was, and I lay there worrying over the problem and lamenting my own failure. With the first light of morning there was the Lascar\"s hand still lying upon the floor to remind me of my fiasco. I lay looking at it \u2013 and as I lay suddenly an idea flew like a bullet through my head and brought me quivering with excitement out of my couch. I raised the grim relic from where it had fallen. Yes, it was indeed so. The hand was the left hand of the Lascar.\n\nBy the first train I was on my way to town, and hurried at once to the Seamen\"s Hospital. I remembered that both hands of the Lascar had been amputated, but I was terrified lest the precious organ which I was in search of might have been already consumed in the crematory. My suspense was soon ended. It had still been preserved in the post-mortem room. And so I returned to Rodenhurst in the evening with my mission accomplished and the material for a fresh experiment.\n\nBut Sir Dominick Holden would not hear of my occupying the laboratory again. To all my entreaties he turned a deaf car. It offended his sense of hospitality, and he could no longer permit it. I left the hand, therefore, as I had done its fellow the night before, and I occupied a comfortable bedroom in another portion of the house, some distance from the scene of my adventures.\n\nBut in spite of that my sleep was not destined to be uninterrupted. In the dead of night my host burst into my room, a lamp in his hand. His huge, gaunt figure was enveloped in a loose dressing-gown, and his whole appearance might certainly have seemed more formidable to a weak-nerved man than that of the Indian of the night before. But it was not his entrance so much as his expression which amazed me. He had turned suddenly younger by twenty years at the least. His eyes were shining, his features radiant, and he waved one hand in triumph over his head. I sat up astounded, staring sleepily at this extraordinary visitor. But his words soon drove the sleep from my eyes.\n\n\"We have done it! We have succeeded!\" he shouted. \"My dear Hardacre, how can I ever in this world repay you?\"\n\n\"You don\"t mean to say that it is all right?\"\n\n\"Indeed I do. I was sure that you would not mind being awakened to hear such blessed news.\"\n\n\"Mind! I should think not indeed. But is it really certain?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt whatever upon the point. I owe you such a debt, my dear nephew, as I have never owed a man before, and never expected to. What can I possibly do for you that is commensurate? Providence must have sent you to my rescue. You have saved both my reason and my life, for another six months of this must have seen me either in a cell or a coffin. And my wife \u2013 it was wearing her out before my eyes. Never could I have believed that any human being could have lifted this burden off me.\" He seized my hand and wrung it in his bony grip.\n\n\"It was only an experiment \u2013 a forlorn hope \u2013 but I am delighted from my heart that it has succeeded. But how do you know that it is all right? Have you seen something?\"\n\nHe seated himself at the foot of my bed.\n\n\"I have seen enough,\" said he. \"It satisfies me that I shall be troubled no more. What has passed is easily told. You know that at a certain hour this creature always comes to me. Tonight he arrived at the usual time, and aroused me with even more violence than is his custom. I can only surmise that his disappointment of last night increased the bitterness of his anger against me. He looked angrily at me, and then went on his usual round. But in a few minutes I saw him, for the first time since this persecution began, return to my chamber. He was smiling. I saw the gleam of his white teeth through the dim light. He stood facing me at the end of my bed and three times he made the low, Eastern salaam which is their solemn leave-taking. And the third time that he bowed he raised his arms over his head, and I saw his two hands outstretched in the air. So he vanished \u2013 as I believe, for ever.\"\n\nSo that is the curious experience which won me the affection and the gratitude of my celebrated uncle, the famous Indian surgeon. His anticipations were realised, and never again was he disturbed by the visits of the restless hillman in search of his lost member. Sir Dominick and Lady Holden spent a very happy old age, unclouded, so far as I know, by any trouble, and they finally died during the great influenza epidemic within a few weeks of each other. In his lifetime he always turned to me for advice in everything which concerned that English life of which he knew so little; and I aided him also in the purchase and development of his estates. It was no great surprise to me, therefore, that I found myself eventually promoted over the heads of five exasperated cousins, and changed in a single day from a hard-working country doctor into the head of an important Wiltshire family. I, at least, have reason to bless the memory of the man with the brown hand, and the day when I was fortunate enough to relieve Rodenhurst of his unwelcome presence.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Horror of the Heights ]\n\nThe idea that the extraordinary narrative which has been called The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment is an elaborate practical joke evolved by some unknown person, cursed with a perverted and sinister sense of humour, has now been abandoned by all who have examined the matter. The most macabre and imaginative of plotters would hesitate before linking his morbid fancies with the unquestioned and tragic facts which reinforce the statement. Though the assertions contained in it are amazing and even monstrous, it is none the less forcing itself upon the general intelligence that they are true, and that we must readjust our ideas to the new situation. This world of ours appears to be separated by a slight and precarious margin of safety from a most singular and unexpected danger. I will endeavour in this narrative, which reproduces the original document in its necessarily somewhat fragmentary form, to lay before the reader the whole of the facts up to date, prefacing my statement by saying that, if there be any who doubt the narrative of Joyce-Armstrong, there can be no question at all as to the facts concerning Lieutenant Myrtle RN and Mr Hay Connor, who undoubtedly met their end in the manner described.\n\nThe Joyce-Armstrong Fragment was found in the field which is called Lower Haycock, lying one mile to the westward of the village of Withyham, upon the Kent and Sussex border. It was on the 15th September last that an agricultural labourer, James Flynn, in the employment of Matthew Dodd, farmer, of the Chauntry Farm, Withyham, perceived a briar pipe lying near the footpath which skirts the hedge in Lower Haycock. A few paces farther on he picked up a pair of broken binocular glasses. Finally, among some nettles in the ditch, he caught sight of a flat, canvas-backed book, which proved to be a note-book with detachable leaves, some of which had come loose and were fluttering along the base of the hedge. These he collected, but some, including the first, were never recovered, and leave a deplorable hiatus in this all-important statement. The note-book was taken by the labourer to his master, who in turn showed it to Dr J. H. Atherton, of Hartfield. This gentleman at once recognised the need for an expert examination, and the manuscript was forwarded to the Aero Club in London, where it now lies.\n\nThe first two pages of the manuscript are missing. There is also one torn away at the end of the narrative, though none of these affect the general coherence of the story. It is conjectured that the missing opening is concerned with the record of Mr Joyce-Armstrong\"s qualifications as an aeronaut, which can be gathered from other sources and are admitted to be unsurpassed among the air-pilots of England. For many years he has been looked upon as among the most daring and the most intellectual of flying men, a combination which has enabled him to both invent and test several new devices, including the common gyroscopic attachment which is known by his name. The main body of the manuscript is written neatly in ink, but the last few lines are in pencil and are so ragged as to be hardly legible \u2013 exactly, in fact, as they might be expected to appear if they were scribbled off hurriedly from the seat of a moving aeroplane. There are, it may be added, several stains, both on the last page and on the outside cover which have been pronounced by the Home Office experts to be blood \u2013 probably human and certainly mammalian. The fact that something closely resembling the organism of malaria was discovered in this blood, and that Joyce-Armstrong is known to have suffered from intermittent fever, is a remarkable example of the new weapons which modern science has placed in the hands of our detectives.\n\nAnd now a word as to the personality of the author of this epoch-making statement. Joyce-Armstrong, according to the few friends who really knew something of the man, was a poet and a dreamer, as well as a mechanic and an inventor. He was a man of considerable wealth, much of which he had spent in the pursuit of his aeronautical hobby. He had four private aeroplanes in his hangars near Devizes, and is said to have made no fewer than one hundred and seventy ascents in the course of last year. He was a retiring man with dark moods, in which he would avoid the society of his fellows. Captain Dangerfield, who knew him better than anyone, says that there were times when his eccentricity threatened to develop into something more serious. His habit of carrying a shotgun with him in his aeroplane was one manifestation of it.\n\nAnother was the morbid effect which the fall of Lieutenant Myrtle had upon his mind. Myrtle, who was attempting the height record, fell from an altitude of something over thirty thousand feet. Horrible to narrate, his head was entirely obliterated, though his body and limbs preserved their configuration. At every gathering of airmen, Joyce-Armstrong, according to Dangerfield, would ask, with an enigmatic smile: \"And where, pray, is Myrtle\"s head?\"\n\nOn another occasion, after dinner at the mess of the Flying School on Salisbury Plain, he started a debate as to what will be the most permanent danger which airmen will have to encounter. Having listened to successive opinions as to air-pockets, faulty construction and over-banking, he ended by shrugging his shoulders and refusing to put forward his own views, though he gave the impression that they differed from any advanced by his companions.\n\nIt is worth remarking that after his own complete disappearance it was found that his private affairs were arranged with a precision which may show that he had a strong premonition of disaster. With these essential explanations I will now give the narrative exactly as it stands, beginning at page three of the blood-soaked note-book:\n\nNevertheless, when I dined at Rheims with Coselli and Gustav Raymond I found that neither of them was aware of any particular danger in the higher layers of the atmosphere. I did not actually say what was in my thoughts, but I got so near to it that if they had any corresponding idea they could not have failed to express it. But then they are two empty, vainglorious fellows with no thought beyond seeing their silly names in the newspaper. It is interesting to note that neither of them had ever been much beyond the twenty-thousand-foot level. Of course, men have been higher than this both in balloons and in the ascent of mountains. It must be well above that point that the aeroplane enters the danger zone \u2013 always presuming that my premonitions are correct.\n\nAeroplaning has been with us now for more than twenty years, and one might well ask: Why should this peril be only revealing itself in our day? The answer is obvious. In the old days of weak engines, when a hundred-horse-power Gnome or Green was considered ample for every need, the flights were very restricted. Now that three hundred horse-power is the rule rather than the exception, visits to the upper layers have become easier and more common. Some of us can remember how, in our youth, Garros made a world-wide reputation by attaining nineteen thousand feet, and it was considered a remarkable achievement to fly over the Alps. Our standard now has been immeasurably raised, and there are twenty high flights for one in former years. Many of them have been undertaken with impunity. The thirty-thousand-foot level has been reached time after time with no discomfort beyond cold and asthma. What does this prove? A visitor might descend upon this planet a thousand times and never see a tiger. Yet tigers exist, and if he chanced to come down into a jungle he might be devoured. There are jungles of the upper air, and there are worse things than tigers which inhabit them. I believe in time they will map these jungles accurately out. Even at the present moment I could name two of them. One of them lies over the Pau-Biarritz district of France. Another is just over my head as I write here in my house in Wiltshire. I rather think there is a third in the Hamburg-Wiesbaden district.\n\nIt was the disappearance of the airmen that first set me thinking. Of course, everyone said that they had fallen into the sea, but that did not satisfy me at all. First, there was Verrier in France; his machine was found near Bayonne, but they never got his body. There was the case of Baxter, who also vanished, though his engine and some of the iron fixings were found in a wood in Leicestershire. In that case, Dr Middleton, of Amesbury, who was watching the flight with a telescope, declares that just before the clouds obscured his view he saw the machine, which was at an enormous height, suddenly rise perpendicularly upwards in a succession of jerks in a manner that he would have thought to be impossible. That was the last seen of Baxter. There was a correspondence in the papers, but it never led to anything. There were several other similar cases, and then there was the death of Hay Connor. What a cackle there was about an unsolved mystery of the air, and what columns in the halfpenny papers, and yet how little was ever done to get to the bottom of the business! He came down in a tremendous vol plan\u00e9 from an unknown height. He never got off his machine and died in his pilot\"s seat. Died of what? \"Heart disease\", said the doctors. Rubbish! Hay Connor\"s heart was as sound as mine is. What did Venables say? Venables was the only man who was at his side when he died. He said that he was shivering and looked like a man who had been badly scared. \"Died of fright,\" said Venables, but could not imagine what he was frightened about. Only said one word to Venables, which sounded like, \"Monstrous.\" They could make nothing of that at the inquest. But I could make something of it. Monsters! That was the last word of poor Harry Hay Connor. And he did die of fright, just as Venables thought.\n\nAnd then there was Myrtle\"s head. Do you really believe \u2013 does anybody really believe \u2013 that a man\"s head could be driven clean into his body by the force of a fall? Well, perhaps it may be possible, but I, for one, have never believed that it was so with Myrtle. And the grease upon his clothes \u2013 \"all slimy with grease,\" said somebody at the inquest. Queer that nobody got thinking after that! I did \u2013 but, then, I had been thinking for a good long time. I\"ve made three ascents \u2013 how Dangerfield used to chaff me about my shotgun \u2013 but I\"ve never been high enough. Now, with this new light Paul Veroner machine and its one hundred and seventy-five Robur, I should easily touch the thirty thousand tomorrow. I\"ll have a shot at the record. Maybe I shall have a shot at something else as well. Of course, it\"s dangerous. If a fellow wants to avoid danger he had best keep out of flying altogether and subside finally into flannel slippers and a dressing-gown. But I\"ll visit the air-jungle tomorrow \u2013 and if there\"s anything there I shall know it. If I return, I\"ll find myself a bit of a celebrity. If I don\"t, this note-book may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents or mysteries, if you please.\n\nI chose my Paul Veroner monoplane for the job. There\"s nothing like a monoplane when real work is to be done. Beaumont found that out in very early days. For one thing it doesn\"t mind damp, and the weather looks as if we should be in the clouds all the time. It\"s a bonny little model and answers my hand like a tender-mouthed horse. The engine is a ten-cylinder rotary Robur working up to one hundred and seventy-five. It has all the modern improvements \u2013 enclosed fuselage, high-curved landing skids, brakes, gyroscopic steadiers and three speeds, worked by an alteration of the angle of the planes upon the Venetian-blind principle. I took a shotgun with me and a dozen cartridges filled with buckshot. You should have seen the face of Perkins, my old mechanic, when I directed him to put them in. I was dressed like an Arctic explorer, with two jerseys under my overalls, thick socks inside my padded boots, a storm-cap with flaps and my talc goggles. It was stifling outside the hangars, but I was going for the summit of the Himalayas, and had to dress for the part. Perkins knew there was something on and implored me to take him with me. Perhaps I should if I were using the biplane, but a monoplane is a one-man show \u2013 if you want to get the last foot of lift out of it. Of course, I took an oxygen bag; the man who goes for the altitude record without one will either be frozen or smothered \u2013 or both.\n\nI had a good look at the planes, the rudder-bar and the elevating lever before I got in. Everything was in order so far as I could see. Then I switched on my engine and found that she was running sweetly. When they let her go she rose almost at once upon the lowest speed. I circled my home field once or twice just to warm her up, and then with a wave to Perkins and the others, I flattened out my planes and put her on her highest. She skimmed like a swallow down wind for eight or ten miles until I turned her nose up a little and she began to climb in a great spiral for the cloud-bank above me. It\"s all-important to rise slowly and adapt yourself to the pressure as you go.\n\nIt was a close, warm day for an English September, and there was the hush and heaviness of impending rain. Now and then there came sudden puffs of wind from the south-west \u2013 one of them so gusty and unexpected that it caught me napping and turned me half-round for an instant. I remember the time when gusts and whirls and air-pockets used to be things of danger \u2013 before we learned to put an overmastering power into our engines. Just as I reached the cloud-banks, with the altimeter marking three thousand, down came the rain. My word, how it poured! It drummed upon my wings and lashed against my face, blurring my glasses so that I could hardly see. I got down on to a low speed, for it was painful to travel against it. As I got higher it became hail, and I had to turn tail to it. One of my cylinders was out of action \u2013 a dirty plug, I should imagine, but still I was rising steadily with plenty of power. After a bit the trouble passed, whatever it was, and I heard the full, deep-throated purr \u2013 the ten singing as one. That\"s where the beauty of our modern silencers comes in. We can at last control our engines by ear. How they squeal and squeak and sob when they are in trouble! All those cries for help were wasted in the old days, when every sound was swallowed up by the monstrous racket of the machine. If only the early aviators could come back to see the beauty and perfection of the mechanism which have been bought at the cost of their lives!\n\nAbout nine-thirty I was nearing the clouds. Down below me, all blurred and shadowed with rain, lay the vast expanse of Salisbury Plain. Half a dozen flying machines were doing hackwork at the thousand-foot level, looking like little black swallows against the green background. I dare say they were wondering what I was doing up in cloud-land. Suddenly a grey curtain drew across beneath me and the wet folds of vapour were swirling round my face. It was clammily cold and miserable. But I was above the hail-storm, and that was something gained. The cloud was as dark and thick as a London fog. In my anxiety to get clear, I cocked her nose up until the automatic alarm-bell rang, and I actually began to slide backwards. My sopped and dripping wings had made me heavier than I thought, but presently I was in lighter cloud, and soon had cleared the first layer. There was a second \u2013 opal-coloured and fleecy \u2013 at a great height above my head, a white, unbroken ceiling above, and a dark, unbroken floor below, with the monoplane labouring upwards upon a vast spiral between them. It is deadly lonely in these cloud-spaces. Once a great flight of some small water-birds went past me, flying very fast to the westwards. The quick whir of their wings and their musical cry were cheery to my ear. I fancy that they were teal, but I am a wretched zoologist. Now that we humans have become birds we must really learn to know our brethren by sight.\n\nThe wind down beneath me whirled and swayed the broad cloud-plain. Once a great eddy formed in it, a whirlpool of vapour, and through it, as down a funnel, I caught sight of the distant world. A large white biplane was passing at a vast depth beneath me. I fancy it was the morning mail service betwixt Bristol and London. Then the drift swirled inwards again and the great solitude was unbroken.\n\nJust after ten I touched the lower edge of the upper cloud-stratum. It consisted of fine diaphanous vapour drifting swiftly from the westward. The wind had been steadily rising all this time and it was now blowing a sharp breeze \u2013 twenty-eight an hour by my gauge. Already it was very cold, though my altimeter only marked nine thousand. The engines were working beautifully, and we went droning steadily upwards. The cloud-bank was thicker than I had expected, but at last it thinned out into a golden mist before me, and then in an instant I had shot out from it, and there was an unclouded sky and a brilliant sun above my head \u2013 all blue and gold above, all shining silver below, one vast, glimmering plain as far as my eyes could reach. It was a quarter past ten o\"clock, and the barograph needle pointed to twelve thousand eight hundred. Up I went and up, my ears concentrated upon the deep purring of my motor, my eyes busy always with the watch, the revolution indicator, the petrol lever and the oil pump. No wonder aviators are said to be a fearless race. With so many things to think of there is no time to trouble about oneself. About this time I noted how unreliable is the compass when above a certain height from earth. At fifteen thousand feet mine was pointing east and a point south. The sun and the wind gave me my true bearings.\n\nI had hoped to reach an eternal stillness in these high altitudes, but with every thousand feet of ascent the gale grew stronger. My machine groaned and trembled in every joint and rivet as she faced it, and swept away like a sheet of paper when I banked her on the turn, skimming down wind at a greater pace, perhaps, than ever mortal man has moved. Yet I had always to turn again and tack up in the wind\"s eye, for it was not merely a height record that I was after. By all my calculations it was above little Wiltshire that my air-jungle lay, and all my labour might be lost if I struck the outer layers at some farther point.\n\nWhen I reached the nineteen-thousand-foot level, which was about midday, the wind was so severe that I looked with some anxiety to the stays of my wings, expecting momentarily to see them snap or slacken. I even cast loose the parachute behind me, and fastened its hook into the ring of my leathern belt, so as to be ready for the worst. Now was the time when a bit of scamped work by the mechanic is paid for with the life of the aeronaut. But she held together bravely. Every cord and strut was humming and vibrating like so many harp-strings, but it was glorious to see how, for all the beating and the buffeting, she was still the conqueror of nature and the mistress of the sky. There is surely something divine in man himself that he should rise so superior to the limitations which creation seem to impose \u2013 rise, too, by such unselfish, heroic devotion as this air-conquest has shown. Talk of human degeneration! When has such a story as this been written in the annals of our race?\n\nThese were the thoughts in my head as I climbed that monstrous, inclined plane with the wind sometimes beating in my face and sometimes whistling behind my ears, while the cloud-land beneath me fell away to such a distance that the folds and hummocks of silver had all smoothed out into one flat, shining plain. But suddenly I had a horrible and unprecedented experience. I have known before what it is to be in what our neighbours have called a tourbillon, but never on such a scale as this. That huge, sweeping river of wind of which I have spoken had, as it appears, whirlpools within it which were as monstrous as itself. Without a moment\"s warning I was dragged suddenly into the heart of one. I spun round for a minute or two with such velocity that I almost lost my senses, and then fell suddenly, left wing foremost, down the vacuum funnel in the centre. I dropped like a stone and lost nearly a thousand feet. It was only my belt that kept me in my seat, and the shock and breathlessness left me hanging half-insensible over the side of the fuselage. But I am always capable of a supreme effort \u2013 it is my one great merit as an aviator. I was conscious that the descent was slower. The whirlpool was a cone rather than a funnel, and I had come to the apex. With a terrific wrench, throwing my weight all to one side, I levelled my planes and brought her head away from the wind. In an instant I had shot out of the eddies and was skimming down the sky. Then, shaken but victorious, I turned her nose up and began once more my steady grind on the upward spiral. I took a large sweep to avoid the danger-spot of the whirlpool, and soon I was safely above it. Just after one o\"clock I was twenty-one thousand feet above the sea-level. To my great joy I had topped the gale, and with every hundred feet of ascent the air grew stiller. On the other hand, it was very cold, and I was conscious of that peculiar nausea which goes with rarefaction of the air. For the first time I unscrewed the mouth of my oxygen bag and took an occasional whiff of the glorious gas. I could feel it running like a cordial through my veins, and I was exhilarated almost to the point of drunkenness. I shouted and sang as I soared upwards into the cold, still, outer world.\n\nIt is very clear to me that the insensibility which came upon Glaisher, and in a lesser degree upon Coxwell, when, in 1862, they ascended in a balloon to the height of thirty thousand feet, was due to the extreme speed with which a perpendicular ascent is made. Doing it at an easy gradient and accustoming oneself to the lessened barometric pressure by slow degrees, there are no such dreadful symptoms. At the same great height I found that even without my oxygen inhaler I could breathe without undue distress. It was bitterly cold, however, and my thermometer was at zero Fahrenheit. At one-thirty, I was nearly seven miles above the surface of the earth, and still ascending steadily. I found, however, that the rarefied air was giving markedly less support to my planes, and that my angle of ascent had to be considerably lowered in consequence. It was already clear that even with my light weight and strong engine-power there was a point in front of me where I should be held. To make matters worse, one of my sparking-plugs was in trouble again and there was intermittent misfiring in the engine. My heart was heavy with the fear of failure.\n\nIt was about that time that I had a most extraordinary experience. Something whizzed past me in a trail of smoke and exploded with a loud, hissing sound, sending forth a cloud of steam. For the instant I could not imagine what had happened. Then I remembered that the earth is for ever being bombarded by meteor stones, and would be hardly inhabitable were they not in nearly every case turned to vapour in the outer layers of the atmosphere. Here is a new danger for the high-altitude man, for two others passed me when I was nearing the forty-thousand-foot mark. I cannot doubt that at the edge of the earth\"s envelope the risk would be a very real one.\n\nMy barograph needle marked forty-one thousand three hundred when I became aware that I could go no farther. Physically, the strain was not as yet greater than I could bear but my machine had reached its limit. The attenuated air gave no firm support to the wings and the least tilt developed into side-slip, while she seemed sluggish on her controls. Possibly, had the engine been at its best, another thousand feet might have been within our capacity, but it was still misfiring, and two out of the ten cylinders appeared to be out of action. If I had not already reached the zone for which I was searching then I should never see it upon this journey. But was it not possible that I had attained it? Soaring in circles like a monstrous hawk upon the forty-thousand-foot level I let the monoplane guide herself, and with my Mannheim glass I made a careful observation of my surroundings. The heavens were perfectly clear; there was no indication of those dangers which I had imagined.\n\n\"I have said that I was soaring in circles. It struck me suddenly that I would do well to take a wider sweep and open up a new air-tract. If the hunter entered an earth-jungle he would drive through it if he wished to find his game. My reasoning had led me to believe that the air-jungle which I had imagined lay somewhere over Wiltshire. This should be to the south and west of me. I took my bearings from the sun, for the compass was hopeless, and no trace of earth was to be seen \u2013 nothing but the distant, silver cloud-plain. However, I got my direction as best I might and kept her head straight to the mark. I reckoned that my petrol supply would not last for more than another hour or so, but I could afford to use it to the last drop, since a single magnificent vol plan\u00e9 could at any time take me to the earth.\n\nSuddenly I was aware of something new. The air in front of me had lost its crystal clearness. It was full of long, ragged wisps of something which I can only compare to very fine cigarette smoke. It hung about in wreaths and coils, turning and twisting slowly in the sunlight. As the monoplane shot through it, I was aware of a faint taste of oil upon my lips, and there was a greasy scum upon the woodwork of the machine. Some infinitely fine organic matter appeared to be suspended in the atmosphere. There was no life there. It was inchoate and diffuse, extending for many square acres and then fringing off into the void. No, it was not life. But might it not be the remains of life? Above all, might it not be the food of life, of monstrous life, even as the humble grease of the ocean is the food for the mighty whale? The thought was in my mind when my eyes looked upwards and I saw the most wonderful vision that ever man has seen. Can I hope to convey it to you even as I saw it myself last Thursday?\n\nConceive a jellyfish such as sails in our summer seas, bell-shaped and of enormous size \u2013 far larger, I should judge, than the dome of St Paul\"s. It was of a light pink colour veined with a delicate green, but the whole huge fabric so tenuous that it was but a fairy outline against the dark blue sky. It pulsated with a delicate and regular rhythm. From it there depended two long, drooping, green tentacles, which swayed slowly backwards and forwards. This gorgeous vision passed gently with noiseless dignity over my head, as light and fragile as a soap-bubble, and drifted upon its stately way.\n\nI had half-turned my monoplane, that I might look after this beautiful creature, when, in a moment, I found myself amidst a perfect fleet of them, of all sizes, but none so large as the first. Some were quite small, but the majority about as big as an average balloon, and with much the same curvature at the top. There was in them a delicacy of texture and colouring which reminded me of the finest Venetian glass. Pale shades of pink and green were the prevailing tints, but all had a lovely iridescence where the sun shimmered through their dainty forms. Some hundreds of them drifted past me, a wonderful fairy squadron of strange unknown argosies of the sky \u2013 creatures whose forms and substance were so attuned to these pure heights that one could not conceive anything so delicate within actual sight or sound of earth.\n\nBut soon my attention was drawn to a new phenomenon \u2013 the serpents of the outer air. These were long, thin, fantastic coils of vapour-like material, which turned and twisted with great speed, flying round and round at such a pace that the eyes could hardly follow them. Some of these ghost-like creatures were twenty or thirty feet long, but it was difficult to tell their girth, for their outline was so hazy that it seemed to fade away into the air around them. These air-snakes were of a very light grey or smoke colour, with some darker lines within, which gave the impression of a definite organism. One of them whisked past my very face, and I was conscious of a cold, clammy contact, but their composition was so unsubstantial that I could not connect them with any thought of physical danger, any more than the beautiful bell-like creatures which had preceded them. There was no more solidity in their frames than in the floating spume from a broken wave.\n\nBut a more terrible experience was in store for me. Floating downwards from a great height there came a purplish patch of vapour, small as I saw it first, but rapidly enlarging as it approached me, until it appeared to be hundreds of square feet in size. Though fashioned of some transparent, jelly-like substance, it was none the less of much more definite outline and solid consistence than anything which I had seen before. There were more traces, too, of a physical organisation, especially two vast, shadowy, circular plates upon either side, which may have been eyes, and a perfectly solid white projection between them which was as curved and cruel as the beak of a vulture.\n\nThe whole aspect of this monster was formidable and threatening, and it kept changing its colour from a very light mauve to a dark, angry purple so thick that it cast a shadow as it drifted between my monoplane and the sun. On the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is waiting to pounce. Its method of progression \u2013 done so swiftly that it was not easy to follow \u2013 was to throw out a long, glutinous streamer in front of it, which in turn seemed to draw forward the rest of the writhing body. So elastic and gelatinous was it that never for two successive minutes was it the same shape, and yet each change made it more threatening and loathsome than the last.\n\nI knew that it meant mischief. Every purple flush of its hideous body told me so. The vague, goggling eyes which were turned always upon me were cold and merciless in their viscid hatred. I dipped the nose of my monoplane downwards to escape it. As I did so, as quick as a flash there shot out a long tentacle from this mass of floating blubber, and it fell as light and sinuous as a whiplash across the front of my machine. There was a loud hiss as it lay for a moment across the hot engine, and it whisked itself into the air again, while the huge, flat body drew itself together as if in sudden pain. I dipped to a vol piqu\u00e9, but again a tentacle fell over the monoplane and this time was shorn off by the propeller as easily as it might have cut through a smoke wreath. A long, gliding, sticky, serpent-like coil came from behind and caught me round the waist, dragging me out of the fuselage. I tore at it, my fingers sinking into the smooth, glue-like surface, and for an instant I disengaged myself, but only to be caught round the boot by another coil, which gave me a jerk that tilted me almost on to my back.\n\nAs I fell over I blazed off both barrels of my gun, though, indeed, it was like attacking an elephant with a pea-shooter to imagine that any human weapon could cripple that mighty bulk. And yet I aimed better than I knew, for, with a loud report, one of the great blisters upon the creature\"s back exploded with the puncture of the buckshot. It was very clear that my conjecture was right, and that these vast, clear bladders were distended with some lifting gas, for in an instant the huge, cloud-like body turned sideways, writhing desperately to find its balance, while the white beak snapped and gaped in horrible fury. But already I had shot away on the steepest glide that I dared to attempt, my engine still full on, the flying propeller and the force of gravity shooting me downwards like an aerolite. Far behind me I saw a dull, purplish smudge growing swiftly smaller and merging into the blue sky behind it. I was safe out of the deadly jungle of the outer air.\n\nOnce out of danger I throttled my engine, for nothing tears a machine to pieces quicker than running on full power from a height. It was a glorious, spiral vol plan\u00e9 from nearly eight miles of altitude \u2013 first, to the level of the silver cloud-bank, then to that of the storm-cloud beneath it, and finally, in beating rain, to the surface of the earth. I saw the Bristol Channel beneath me as I broke from the clouds, but, having still some petrol in my tank, I got twenty miles inland before I found myself stranded in a field half a mile from the village of Ashcombe. There I got three tins of petrol from a passing motor-car, and at ten minutes past six that evening I alighted gently in my own home meadow at Devizes, after such a journey as no mortal upon earth has ever yet taken and lived to tell the tale. I have seen the beauty and I have seen the horror of the heights \u2013 and greater beauty or greater horror than that is not within the ken of man.\n\nAnd now it is my plan to go once again before I give my results to the world. My reason for this is that I must surely have something to show by way of proof before I lay such a tale before my fellow-men. It is true that others will soon follow and will confirm what I have said, and yet I should wish to carry conviction from the first. Those lovely iridescent bubbles of the air should not be hard to capture. They drift slowly upon their way, and the swift monoplane could intercept their leisurely course. It is likely enough that they would dissolve in the heavier layers of the atmosphere, and that some small heap of amorphous jelly might be all that I should bring to earth with me. And yet something there would surely be by which I could substantiate my story. Yes, I will go, even if I run a risk by doing so. These purple horrors would not seem to be numerous. It is probable that I shall not see one. If I do I shall dive at once. At the worst there is always the shotgun and my knowledge of...\n\nHere a page of the manuscript is unfortunately missing. On the next page is written, in large, straggling writing:\n\nForty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!\n\nSuch in its entirety is The Joyce-Armstrong Fragment. Of the man nothing has since been seen. Pieces of his shattered monoplane have been picked up in the preserves of Mr Budd-Lushington upon the borders of Kent and Sussex, within a few miles of the spot where the note-book was discovered. If the unfortunate aviator\"s theory is correct that this air-jungle, as he called it, existed only over the south-west of England, then it would seem that he had fled from it at the full speed of his monoplane, but had been overtaken and devoured by these horrible creatures at some spot in the outer atmosphere above the place where the grim relics were found. The picture of that monoplane skimming down the sky, with the nameless terrors flying as swiftly beneath it and cutting it off always from the earth while they gradually closed in upon their victim, is one upon which a man who valued his sanity would prefer not to dwell. There are many, as I am aware, who still jeer at the facts which I have here set down, but even they must admit that Joyce-Armstrong has disappeared, and I would commend to them his own words: \"This note-book may explain what I am trying to do, and how I lost my life in doing it. But no drivel about accidents or mysteries, if you please.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Terror of the Blue John Gap ]\n\nThe following narrative was found among the papers of Dr James Hardcastle, who died of phthisis on February 4th, 1908, at 36 Upper Coventry Flats, South Kensington. Those who knew him best, while refusing to express an opinion upon this particular statement, are unanimous in asserting that he was a man of a sober and scientific turn of mind, absolutely devoid of imagination, and most unlikely to invent any abnormal series of events. The paper was contained in an envelope, which was docketed, \"A Short Account of the Circumstances which Occurred near the Misses Allerton\"s Farm in North-West Derbyshire in the Spring of Last Year\". The envelope was sealed, and on the other side was written in pencil:\n\nDear Seaton \u2013 It may interest and perhaps pain you to know that the incredulity with which you met my story has prevented me from ever opening my mouth upon the subject again. I leave this record after my death, and perhaps strangers may be found to have more confidence in me than my friend.\n\nEnquiry has failed to elicit who this Seaton may have been. I may add that the visit of the deceased to Allerton\"s Farm, and the general nature of the alarm there, apart from his particular explanation, have been absolutely established. With this foreword I append his account exactly as he left it. It is in the form of a diary, some entries in which have been expanded, while a few have been erased.\n\nApril 17 \u2013 Already I feel the benefit of this wonderful upland air. The farm of the Allertons lies fourteen hundred and twenty feet above sea-level, so it may well be a bracing climate. Beyond the usual morning cough I have very little discomfort, and, what with the fresh milk and the home-grown mutton, I have every chance of putting on weight. I think Saunderson will be pleased.\n\nThe two Miss Allertons are charmingly quaint and kind, two dear little hard-working old maids, who are ready to lavish all the heart which might have gone out to husband and to children upon an invalid stranger. Truly, the old maid is a most useful person, one of the reserve forces of the community. They talk of the superfluous woman, but what would the poor superfluous man do without her kindly presence? By the way, in their simplicity they very quickly let out the reason why Saunderson recommended their farm. The professor rose from the ranks himself, and I believe that in his youth he was not above scaring crows in these very fields.\n\nIt is a most lonely spot, and the walks are picturesque in the extreme. The farm consists of grazing land lying at the bottom of an irregular valley. On each side are the fantastic limestone hills, formed of rock so soft that you can break it away with your hands. All this country is hollow. Could you strike it with some gigantic hammer it would boom like a drum, or possibly cave in altogether and expose some huge subterranean sea. A great sea there must surely be, for on all sides the streams run into the mountain itself, never to reappear. There are gaps everywhere amid the rocks, and when you pass through them you find yourself in great caverns, which wind down into the bowels of the earth. I have a small bicycle lamp, and it is a perpetual joy to me to carry it into these weird solitudes, and to see the wonderful silver and black effect when I throw its light upon the stalactites which drape the lofty roofs. Shut off the lamp, and you are in the blackest darkness. Turn it on, and it is a scene from The Arabian Nights.\n\nBut there is one of these strange openings in the earth which has a special interest, for it is the handiwork, not of nature, but of man. I had never heard of Blue John when I came to these parts. It is the name given to a peculiar mineral of a beautiful purple shade, which is only found at one or two places in the world. It is so rare that an ordinary vase of Blue John would be valued at a great price. The Romans, with that extraordinary instinct of theirs, discovered that it was to be found in this valley, and sank a horizontal shaft deep into the mountain side. The opening of their mine has been called the Blue John Gap, a clean-cut arch in the rock, the mouth all overgrown with bushes. It is a goodly passage which the Roman miners cut, and it intersects some of the great water-worn caves, so that if you enter the Blue John Gap you would do well to mark your steps and to have a good store of candles or you may never make your way back to the daylight again. I have not yet gone deeply into it, but this very day I stood at the mouth of the arched tunnel and, peering down into the black recesses beyond, I vowed that when my health returned I would devote some holiday to exploring those mysterious depths and finding out for myself how far the Roman penetrated into the Derbyshire hills.\n\nStrange how superstitious these countrymen are! I should have thought better of young Armitage, for he is a man of some education and character, and a very fine fellow for his station in life. I was standing at the Blue John Gap when he came across the field to me.\n\n\"Well, doctor,\" said he, \"you\"re not afraid, anyhow.\"\n\n\"Afraid!\" I answered. \"Afraid of what?\"\n\n\"Of it,\" said he, with a jerk of his thumb towards the black vault, \"of the Terror that lives in the Blue John Cave.\"\n\nHow absurdly easy it is for a legend to arise in a lonely countryside! I examined him as to the reasons for his weird belief. It seems that from time to time sheep have been missing from the fields, carried bodily away, according to Armitage. That they could have wandered away of their own accord and disappeared among the mountains was an explanation to which he would not listen. On one occasion a pool of blood had been found, and some tufts of wool. That also, I pointed out, could be explained in a perfectly natural way. Further, the nights upon which sheep disappeared were invariably very dark, cloudy nights with no moon. This I met with the obvious retort that those were the nights which a commonplace sheep-stealer would naturally choose for his work. On one occasion a gap had been made in a wall, and some of the stones scattered for a considerable distance. Human agency again, in my opinion. Finally, Armitage clinched all his arguments by telling me that he had actually heard the Creature \u2013 indeed, that anyone could hear it who remained long enough at the Gap. It was a distant roaring of an immense volume. I could not but smile at this, knowing, as I do, the strange reverberations which come out of an underground water system running amid the chasms of a limestone formation. My incredulity annoyed Armitage so that he turned and left me with some abruptness.\n\nAnd now comes the queer point about the whole business. I was still standing near the mouth of the cave turning over in my mind the various statements of Armitage, and reflecting how readily they could be explained away, when suddenly, from the depth of the tunnel beside me, there issued a most extraordinary sound. How shall I describe it? First of all, it seemed to be a great distance away, far down in the bowels of the earth. Secondly, in spite of this suggestion of distance, it was very loud. Lastly, it was not a boom, nor a crash, such as one would associate with falling water or tumbling rock, but it was a high whine, tremulous and vibrating, almost like the whinnying of a horse. It was certainly a most remarkable experience, and one which for a moment, I must admit, gave a new significance to Armitage\"s words. I waited by the Blue John Gap for half an hour or more, but there was no return of the sound, so at last I wandered back to the farmhouse, rather mystified by what had occurred. Decidedly I shall explore that cavern when my strength is restored. Of course, Armitage\"s explanation is too absurd for discussion, and yet that sound was certainly very strange. It still rings in my ears as I write.\n\nApril 20 \u2013 In the last three days I have made several expeditions to the Blue John Gap, and have even penetrated some short distance, but my bicycle lantern is so small and weak that I dare not trust myself very far. I shall do the thing more systematically. I have heard no sound at all, and could almost believe that I had been the victim of some hallucination suggested, perhaps, by Armitage\"s conversation. Of course, the whole idea is absurd, and yet I must confess that those bushes at the entrance of the cave do present an appearance as if some heavy creature had forced its way through them. I begin to be keenly interested. I have said nothing to the Miss Allertons, for they are quite superstitious enough already, but I have bought some candles and mean to investigate for myself.\n\nI observed this morning that among the numerous tufts of sheep\"s wool which lay among the bushes near the cavern there was one which was smeared with blood. Of course, my reason tells me that if sheep wander into such rocky places they are likely to injure themselves, and yet somehow that splash of crimson gave me a sudden shock, and for a moment I found myself shrinking back in horror from the old Roman arch. A fetid breath seemed to ooze from the black depths into which I peered. Could it indeed be possible that some nameless thing, some dreadful presence, was lurking down yonder? I should have been incapable of such feelings in the days of my strength, but one grows more nervous and fanciful when one\"s health is shaken.\n\nFor the moment I weakened in my resolution, and was ready to leave the secret of the old mine, if one exists, for ever unsolved. But tonight my interest has returned and my nerves have grown more steady. Tomorrow I trust that I shall have gone more deeply into this matter.\n\nApril 22 \u2013 Let me try and set down as accurately as I can my extraordinary experience of yesterday. I started in the afternoon, and made my way to the Blue John Gap. I confess that my misgivings returned as I gazed into its depths, and I wished that I had brought a companion to share my exploration. Finally, with a return of resolution, I lit my candle, pushed my way through the briars, and descended into the rocky shaft.\n\nIt went down at an acute angle for some fifty feet, the floor being covered with broken stone. Thence there extended a long, straight passage cut in the solid rock. I am no geologist, but the lining of this corridor was certainly of some harder material than limestone, for there were points where I could actually see the tool-marks which the old miners had left in their excavation, as fresh as if they had been done yesterday. Down this strange, old-world corridor I stumbled, my feeble flame throwing a dim circle of light around me, which made the shadows beyond the more threatening and obscure. Finally, I came to a spot where the Roman tunnel opened into a water-worn cavern \u2013 a huge hall, hung with long white icicles of lime deposit. From this central chamber I could dimly perceive that a number of passages worn by the subterranean streams wound away into the depths of the earth. I was standing there wondering whether I had better return, or whether I dare venture farther into this dangerous labyrinth, when my eyes fell upon something at my feet which strongly arrested my attention.\n\nThe greater part of the floor of the cavern was covered with boulders of rock or with hard incrustations of lime, but at this particular point there had been a drip from the distant roof which had left a patch of soft mud. In the very centre of this there was a huge mark \u2013 an ill-defined blotch, deep, broad and irregular, as if a great boulder had fallen upon it. No loose stone lay near, however, nor was there anything to account for the impression. It was far too large to be caused by any possible animal, and besides, there was only the one, and the patch of mud was of such a size that no reasonable stride could have covered it. As I rose from the examination of that singular mark and then looked round into the black shadows which hemmed me in, I must confess that I felt for a moment a most unpleasant sinking of my heart, and that, do what I could, the candle trembled in my outstretched hand.\n\nI soon recovered my nerve, however, when I reflected how absurd it was to associate so huge and shapeless a mark with the track of any known animal. Even an elephant could not have produced it. I determined, therefore, that I would not be scared by vague and senseless fears from carrying out my exploration. Before proceeding, I took good note of a curious rock formation in the wall by which I could recognise the entrance of the Roman tunnel. The precaution was very necessary, for the great cave, so far as I could see it, was intersected by passages. Having made sure of my position, and reassured myself by examining my spare candles and my matches, I advanced slowly over the rocky and uneven surface of the cavern.\n\nAnd now I come to the point where I met with such sudden and desperate disaster. A stream, some twenty feet broad, ran across my path, and I walked for some little distance along the bank to find a spot where I could cross dry-shod. Finally, I came to a place where a single flat boulder lay near the centre, which I could reach in a stride. As it chanced, however, the rock had been cut away and made top-heavy by the rush of the stream, so that it tilted over as I landed on it and shot me into the ice-cold water. My candle went out, and I found myself floundering about in utter and absolute darkness.\n\nI staggered to my feet again, more amused than alarmed by my adventure. The candle had fallen from my hand, and was lost in the stream, but I had two others in my pocket, so that it was of no importance. I got one of them ready, and drew out my box of matches to light it. Only then did I realise my position. The box had been soaked in my fall into the river. It was impossible to strike the matches.\n\nA cold hand seemed to close round my heart as I realised my position. The darkness was opaque and horrible. It was so utter that one put one\"s hand up to one\"s face as if to press off something solid. I stood still, and by an effort I steadied myself. I tried to reconstruct in my mind a map of the floor of the cavern as I had last seen it. Alas! the bearings which had impressed themselves upon my mind were high on the wall, and not to be found by touch. Still, I remembered in a general way how the sides were situated, and I hoped that by groping my way along them I should at last come to the opening of the Roman tunnel. Moving very slowly, and continually striking against the rocks, I set out on this desperate quest.\n\nBut I very soon realised how impossible it was. In that black, velvety darkness one lost all one\"s bearings in an instant. Before I had made a dozen paces, I was utterly bewildered as to my whereabouts. The rippling of the stream, which was the one sound audible, showed me where it lay, but the moment that I left its bank I was utterly lost. The idea of finding my way back in absolute darkness through that limestone labyrinth was clearly an impossible one.\n\nI sat down upon a boulder and reflected upon my unfortunate plight. I had not told anyone that I proposed to come to the Blue John mine, and it was unlikely that a search party would come after me. Therefore I must trust to my own resources to get clear of the danger. There was only one hope, and that was that the matches might dry. When I fell into the river, only half of me had got thoroughly wet. My left shoulder had remained above the water. I took the box of matches, therefore, and put it into my left armpit. The moist air of the cavern might possibly be counteracted by the heat of my body, but even so, I knew that I could not hope to get a light for many hours. Meanwhile there was nothing for it but to wait.\n\nBy good luck I had slipped several biscuits into my pocket before I left the farmhouse. These I now devoured, and washed them down with a draught from that wretched stream which had been the cause of all my misfortunes. Then I felt about for a comfortable seat among the rocks, and, having discovered a place where I could get a support for my back, I stretched out my legs and settled myself down to wait. I was wretchedly damp and cold, but I tried to cheer myself with the reflection that modern science prescribed open windows and walks in all weather for my disease. Gradually, lulled by the monotonous gurgle of the stream, and by the absolute darkness, I sank into an uneasy slumber.\n\nHow long this lasted I cannot say. It may have been for an hour, it may have been for several. Suddenly I sat up on my rock couch, with every nerve thrilling and every sense acutely on the alert. Beyond all doubt I had heard a sound \u2013 some sound very distinct from the gurgling of the waters. It had passed, but the reverberation of it still lingered in my ear. Was it a search party? They would most certainly have shouted, and vague as this sound was which had wakened me, it was very distinct from the human voice. I sat palpitating and hardly daring to breathe. There it was again! And again! Now it had become continuous. It was a tread \u2013 yes, surely it was the tread of some living creature. But what a tread it was! It gave one the impression of enormous weight carried upon sponge-like feet, which gave forth a muffled but ear-filling sound. The darkness was as complete as ever, but the tread was regular and decisive. And it was coming beyond all question in my direction.\n\nMy skin grew cold and my hair stood on end as I listened to that steady and ponderous footfall. There was some creature there, and surely by the speed of its advance, it was one which could see in the dark. I crouched low on my rock and tried to blend myself into it. The steps grew nearer still, then stopped, and presently I was aware of a loud lapping and gurgling. The creature was drinking at the stream. Then again there was silence, broken by a succession of long sniffs and snorts of tremendous volume and energy. Had it caught the scent of me? My own nostrils were filled by a low fetid odour, mephitic and abominable. Then I heard the steps again. They were on my side of the stream now. The stones rattled within a few yards of where I lay. Hardly daring to breathe, I crouched upon my rock. Then the steps drew away. I heard the splash as it returned across the river, and the sound died away into the distance in the direction from which it had come.\n\nFor a long time I lay upon the rock, too much horrified to move. I thought of the sound which I had heard coming from the depths of the cave, of Armitage\"s fears, of the strange impression in the mud, and now came this final and absolute proof that there was indeed some inconceivable monster, something utterly unearthly and dreadful, which lurked in the hollow of the mountain. Of its nature or form I could frame no conception, save that it was both light-footed and gigantic. The combat between my reason, which told me that such things could not be, and my senses, which told me that they were, raged within me as I lay. Finally, I was almost ready to persuade myself that this experience had been part of some evil dream, and that my abnormal condition might have conjured up an hallucination. But there remained one final experience which removed the last possibility of doubt from my mind.\n\nI had taken my matches from my armpit and felt them. They seemed perfectly hard and dry. Stooping down into a crevice of the rocks, I tried one of them. To my delight it took fire at once. I lit the candle, and with a terrified backward glance into the obscure depths of the cavern, I hurried in the direction of the Roman passage. As I did so I passed the patch of mud on which I had seen the huge imprint. Now I stood astonished before it, for there were three similar imprints upon its surface, enormous in size, irregular in outline, of a depth which indicated the ponderous weight which had left them. Then a great terror surged over me. Stooping and shading my candle with my hand, I ran in a frenzy of fear to the rocky archway, hastened up it, and never stopped until, with weary feet and panting lungs, I rushed up the final slope of stones, broke through the tangle of briars, and flung myself exhausted upon the soft grass under the peaceful light of the stars. It was three in the morning when I reached the farmhouse, and today I am all unstrung and quivering after my terrific adventure. As yet I have told no one. I must move warily in the matter. What would the poor lonely women, or the uneducated yokels here think of it if I were to tell them my experience? Let me go to someone who can understand and advise.\n\nApril 25 \u2013 I was laid up in bed for two days after my incredible adventure in the cavern. I use the adjective with a very definite meaning, for I have had an experience since which has shocked me almost as much as the other. I have said that I was looking round for someone who could advise me. There is a Dr Mark Johnson who practises some few miles away, to whom I had a note of recommendation from Professor Saunderson. To him I drove, when I was strong enough to get about, and I recounted to him my whole strange experience. He listened intently, and then carefully examined me, paying special attention to my reflexes and to the pupils of my eyes. When he had finished, he refused to discuss my adventure, saying that it was entirely beyond him, but he gave me the card of a Mr Picton at Castleton, with the advice that I should instantly go to him and tell him the story exactly as I had done to himself. He was, according to my adviser, the very man who was pre-eminently suited to help me. I went on to the station, therefore, and made my way to the little town, which is some ten miles away. Mr Picton appeared to be a man of importance, as his brass plate was displayed upon the door of a considerable building on the outskirts of the town. I was about to ring his bell, when some misgiving came into my mind, and, crossing to a neighbouring shop, I asked the man behind the counter if he could tell me anything of Mr Picton. \"Why,\" said he, \"he is the best mad doctor in Derbyshire, and yonder is his asylum.\" You can imagine that it was not long before I had shaken the dust of Castleton from my feet and returned to the farm, cursing all unimaginative pedants who cannot conceive that there may be things in creation which have never yet chanced to come across their mole\"s vision. After all, now that I am cooler, I can afford to admit that I was no more sympathetic to Armitage than Dr Johnson has been to me.\n\nApril 27 \u2013 When I was a student I had the reputation of being a man of courage and enterprise. I remember that when there was a ghost-hunt at Coltbridge it was I who sat up in the haunted house. Is it advancing years (after all, I am only thirty-five) or is it this physical malady which has caused degeneration? Certainly my heart quails when I think of that horrible cavern in the hill, and the certainty that it has some monstrous occupant. What shall I do? There is not an hour in the day that I do not debate the question. If I say nothing, then the mystery remains unsolved. If I do say anything, then I have the alternative of mad alarm over the whole countryside, or of absolute incredulity which may end in consigning me to an asylum. On the whole, I think that my best course is to wait, and to prepare for some expedition which shall be more deliberate and better thought out than the last. As a first step I have been to Castleton and obtained a few essentials \u2013 a large acetylene lantern for one thing, and a good double-barrelled sporting rifle for another. The latter I have hired, but I have bought a dozen heavy game cartridges, which would bring down a rhinoceros. Now I am ready for my troglodyte friend. Give me better health and a little spate of energy, and I shall try conclusions with him yet. But who and what is he? Ah! there is the question which stands between me and my sleep. How many theories do I form, only to discard each in turn! It is all so utterly unthinkable. And yet the cry, the footmark, the tread in the cavern \u2013 no reasoning can get past these. I think of the old-world legends of dragons and of other monsters. Were they, perhaps, not such fairy-tales as we have thought? Can it be that there is some fact which underlies them, and am I, of all mortals, the one who is chosen to expose it?\n\nMay 3 \u2013 For several days I have been laid up by the vagaries of an English spring, and during those days there have been developments, the true and sinister meaning of which no one can appreciate save myself. I may say that we have had cloudy and moonless nights of late, which according to my information were the seasons upon which sheep disappeared. Well, sheep have disappeared. Two of the Misses Allerton\"s, one of old Pearson\"s of the Cat Walk, and one of Mrs Moulton\"s. Four in all during three nights. No trace is left of them at all, and the countryside is buzzing with rumours of gypsies and of sheep-stealers.\n\nBut there is something more serious than that. Young Armitage has disappeared also. He left his moorland cottage early on Wednesday night and has never been heard of since. He was an unattached man, so there is less sensation than would otherwise be the case. The popular explanation is that he owes money, and has found a situation in some other part of the country, whence he will presently write for his belongings. But I have grave misgivings. Is it not much more likely that the recent tragedy of the sheep has caused him to take some steps which may have ended in his own destruction? He may, for example, have lain in wait for the creature and been carried off by it into the recesses of the mountain. What an inconceivable fate for a civilised Englishman of the twentieth century! And yet I feel that it is possible and even probable. But in that case, how far am I answerable both for his death and for any other mishap which may occur? Surely with the knowledge I already possess it must be my duty to see that something is done, or if necessary to do it myself. It must be the latter, for this morning I went down to the local police-station and told my story. The inspector entered it all in a large book and bowed me out with commendable gravity, but I heard a burst of laughter before I had got down his garden path. No doubt he was recounting my adventure to his family.\n\nJune 10 \u2013 I am writing this, propped up in bed, six weeks after my last entry in this journal. I have gone through a terrible shock both to mind and body, arising from such an experience as has seldom befallen a human being before. But I have attained my end. The danger from the Terror which dwells in the Blue John Gap has passed never to return. Thus much at least I, a broken invalid, have done for the common good. Let me now recount what occurred as clearly as I may.\n\nThe night of Friday, May 3rd, was dark and cloudy \u2013 the very night for the monster to walk. About eleven o\"clock I went from the farmhouse with my lantern and my rifle, having first left a note upon the table of my bedroom in which I said that, if I were missing, search should be made for me in the direction of the Gap. I made my way to the mouth of the Roman shaft, and, having perched myself among the rocks close to the opening, I shut off my lantern and waited patiently with my loaded rifle ready to my hand.\n\nIt was a melancholy vigil. All down the winding valley I could see the scattered lights of the farmhouses, and the church clock of Chapel-le-Dale tolling the hours came faintly to my ears. These tokens of my fellow-men served only to make my own position seem the more lonely, and to call for a greater effort to overcome the terror which tempted me continually to get back to the farm and abandon for ever this dangerous quest. And yet there lies deep in every man a rooted self-respect which makes it hard for him to turn back from that which he has once undertaken. This feeling of personal pride was my salvation now, and it was that alone which held me fast when every instinct of my nature was dragging me away. I am glad now that I had the strength. In spite of all that it has cost me, my manhood is at least above reproach.\n\nTwelve o\"clock struck in the distant church, then one, then two. It was the darkest hour of the night. The clouds were drifting low, and there was not a star in the sky. An owl was hooting somewhere among the rocks, but no other sound, save the gentle sough of the wind, came to my ears. And then suddenly I heard it! From far away down the tunnel came those muffled steps, so soft and yet so ponderous. I heard also the rattle of stones as they gave way under that giant tread. They drew nearer. They were close upon me. I heard the crashing of the bushes round the entrance, and then dimly through the darkness I was conscious of the loom of some enormous shape, some monstrous inchoate creature, passing swiftly and very silently out from the tunnel. I was paralysed with fear and amazement. Long as I had waited, now that it had actually come I was unprepared for the shock. I lay motionless and breathless, whilst the great dark mass whisked by me and was swallowed up in the night.\n\nBut now I nerved myself for its return. No sound came from the sleeping countryside to tell of the horror which was loose. In no way could I judge how far off it was, what it was doing or when it might be back. But not a second time should my nerve fail me, not a second time should it pass unchallenged. I swore it between my clenched teeth as I laid my cocked rifle across the rock.\n\nAnd yet it nearly happened. There was no warning of approach now as the creature passed over the grass. Suddenly, like a dark, drifting shadow, the huge bulk loomed up once more before me, making for the entrance of the cave. Again came that paralysis of volition which held my crooked forefinger impotent upon the trigger. But with a desperate effort, I shook it off. Even as the brushwood rustled, and the monstrous beast blended with the shadow of the Gap, I fired at the retreating form. In the blaze of the gun I caught a glimpse of a great shaggy mass, something with rough and bristling hair of a withered grey colour fading away to white in its lower parts, the huge body supported upon short, thick, curving legs. I had just that glance, and then I heard the rattle of the stones as the creature tore down into its burrow. In an instant, with a triumphant revulsion of feeling, I had cast my fears to the wind and, uncovering my powerful lantern, with my rifle in my hand, I sprang down from my rock and rushed after the monster down the old Roman shaft.\n\nMy splendid lamp cast a brilliant flood of vivid light in front of me, very different from the yellow glimmer which had aided me down the same passage only twelve days before. As I ran, I saw the great beast lurching along before me, its huge bulk filling up the whole space from wall to wall. Its hair looked like coarse faded oakum and hung down in long, dense masses which swayed as it moved. It was like an enormous unclipped sheep in its fleece, but in size it was far larger than the largest elephant, and its breadth seemed to be nearly as great as its height. It fills me with amazement now to think that I should have dared to follow such a horror into the bowels of the earth, but when one\"s blood is up, and when one\"s quarry seems to be flying, the old primeval hunting-spirit awakes and prudence is cast to the wind. Rifle in hand, I ran at the top of my speed upon the trail of the monster.\n\nI had seen that the creature was swift. Now I was to find out to my cost that it was also very cunning. I had imagined that it was in panic flight, and that I had only to pursue it. The idea that it might turn upon me never entered my excited brain. I have already explained that the passage down which I was racing opened into a great central cave. Into this I rushed, fearful lest I should lose all trace of the beast. But he had turned upon his own traces, and in a moment we were face to face.\n\nThat picture, seen in the brilliant white light of the lantern, is etched for ever upon my brain. He had reared up on his hind legs as a bear would do, and stood above me, enormous, menacing \u2013 such a creature as no nightmare had ever brought to my imagination. I have said that he reared like a bear, and there was something bear-like \u2013 if one could conceive a bear which was tenfold the bulk of any bear seen upon earth \u2013 in his whole pose and attitude, in his great crooked forelegs with their ivory-white claws, in his rugged skin and in his red, gaping mouth, fringed with monstrous fangs. Only in one point did he differ from the bear, or from any other creature which walks the earth, and even at that supreme moment a shudder of horror passed over me as I observed that the eyes which glistened in the glow of my lantern were huge, projecting bulbs, white and sightless. For a moment his great paws swung over my head. The next he fell forward upon me, I and my broken lantern crashed to the earth and I remember no more.\n\nWhen I came to myself I was back in the farmhouse of the Allertons. Two days had passed since my terrible adventure in the Blue John Gap. It seems that I had lain all night in the cave, insensible from concussion of the brain, with my left arm and two ribs badly fractured. In the morning my note had been found, a search party of a dozen farmers assembled, and I had been tracked down and carried back to my bedroom, where I had lain in high delirium ever since. There was, it seems, no sign of the creature, and no bloodstain which would show that my bullet had found him as he passed. Save for my own plight and the marks upon the mud, there was nothing to prove that what I said was true.\n\nSix weeks have now elapsed, and I am able to sit out once more in the sunshine. Just opposite me is the steep hillside, grey with shaly rock, and yonder on its flank is the dark cleft which marks the opening of the Blue John Gap. But it is no longer a source of terror. Never again through that ill-omened tunnel shall any strange shape flit out into the world of men. The educated and the scientific, the Dr Johnsons and the like, may smile at my narrative, but the poorer folk of the countryside had never a doubt as to its truth. On the day after my recovering consciousness they assembled in their hundreds round the Blue John Gap. As the Castleton Courier said:\n\nIt was useless for our correspondent, or for any of the adventurous gentlemen who had come from Matlock, Buxton and other parts, to offer to descend, to explore the cave to the end and finally to test the extraordinary narrative of Dr James Hardcastle. The country people had taken the matter into their own hands, and from an early hour of the morning they had worked hard in stopping up the entrance of the tunnel. There is a sharp slope where the shaft begins, and great boulders, rolled along by many willing hands, were thrust down it until the Gap was absolutely sealed. So ends the episode which has caused such excitement throughout the country. Local opinion is fiercely divided upon the subject. On the one hand are those who point to Dr Hardcastle\"s impaired health, and to the possibility of cerebral lesions of tubercular origin giving rise to strange hallucinations. Some id\u00e9e fixe, according to these gentlemen, caused the doctor to wander down the tunnel, and a fall among the rocks was sufficient to account for his injuries. On the other hand, a legend of a strange creature in the Gap has existed for some months back, and the farmers look upon Dr Hardcastle\"s narrative and his personal injuries as a final corroboration. So the matter stands, and so the matter will continue to stand, for no definite solution seems to us to be now possible. It transcends human wit to give any scientific explanation which could cover the alleged facts.\n\nPerhaps before the Courier published these words they would have been wise to send their representative to me. I have thought the matter out, as no one else has had occasion to do, and it is possible that I might have removed some of the more obvious difficulties of the narrative and brought it one degree nearer to scientific acceptance. Let me then write down the only explanation which seems to me to elucidate what I know to my cost to have been a series of facts. My theory may seem to be wildly improbable, but at least no one can venture to say that it is impossible.\n\nMy view is \u2013 and it was formed, as is shown by my diary, before my personal adventure \u2013 that in this part of England there is a vast subterranean lake or sea, which is fed by the great number of streams which pass down through the limestone. Where there is a large collection of water there must also be some evaporation, mists or rain, and a possibility of vegetation. This in turn suggests that there may be animal life, arising, as the vegetable life would also do, from those seeds and types which had been introduced at an early period of the world\"s history, when communication with the outer air was more easy. This place had then developed a fauna and flora of its own, including such monsters as the one which I had seen, which may well have been the old cave-bear, enormously enlarged and modified by its new environment. For countless aeons the internal and the external creation had kept apart, growing steadily away from each other. Then there had come some rift in the depths of the mountain which had enabled one creature to wander up and, by means of the Roman tunnel, to reach the open air. Like all subterranean life, it had lost the power of sight, but this had no doubt been compensated for by nature in other directions. Certainly it had some means of finding its way about, and of hunting down the sheep upon the hillside. As to its choice of dark nights, it is part of my theory that light was painful to those great white eyeballs, and that it was only a pitch-black world which it could tolerate. Perhaps, indeed, it was the glare of my lantern which saved my life at that awful moment when we were face to face. So I read the riddle. I leave these facts behind me, and if you can explain them, do so; or if you choose to doubt them, do so. Neither your belief nor your incredulity can alter them, nor affect one whose task is nearly over.\n\nSo ended the strange narrative of Dr James Hardcastle.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Captain of the Polestar ]\n\nSeptember 11 \u2013 Lat. 81\u00b0 40\" N; long. 2\u00b0 E. Still lying-to amid enormous ice-fields. The one which stretches away to the north of us, and to which our ice-anchor is attached, cannot be smaller than an English county. To the right and left unbroken sheets extend to the horizon. This morning the mate reported that there were signs of pack ice to the southward. Should this form of sufficient thickness to bar our return, we shall be in a position of danger, as the food, I hear, is already running somewhat short. It is late in the season, and the nights are beginning to reappear. This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the fore-yard, the first since the beginning of May. There is considerable discontent among the crew, many of whom are anxious to get back home to be in time for the herring season, when labour always commands a high price upon the Scotch coast. As yet their displeasure is only signified by sullen countenances and black looks, but I heard from the second mate this afternoon that they contemplated sending a deputation to the captain to explain their grievance. I much doubt how he will receive it, as he is a man of fierce temper and very sensitive about anything approaching an infringement of his rights. I shall venture after dinner to say a few words to him upon the subject. I have always found that he will tolerate from me what he would resent from any other member of the crew. Amsterdam Island, at the north-west corner of Spitzbergen, is visible upon our starboard quarter \u2013 a rugged line of volcanic rocks, intersected by white seams, which represent glaciers. It is curious to think that at the present moment there is probably no human being nearer to us than the Danish settlements in the south of Greenland \u2013 a good nine hundred miles as the crow flies. A captain takes a great responsibility upon himself when he risks his vessel under such circumstances. No whaler has ever remained in these latitudes till so advanced a period of the year.\n\n9.00 p.m. \u2013 I have spoken to Captain Craigie, and though the result has been hardly satisfactory, I am bound to say that he listened to what I had to say very quietly and even deferentially. When I had finished he put on that air of iron determination which I have frequently observed upon his face, and paced rapidly backwards and forwards across the narrow cabin for some minutes. At first I feared that I had seriously offended him, but he dispelled the idea by sitting down again and putting his hand upon my arm with a gesture which almost amounted to a caress. There was a depth of tenderness too in his wild dark eyes which surprised me considerably. \"Look here, doctor,\" he said, \"I\"m sorry I ever took you \u2013 I am indeed \u2013 and I would give fifty pounds this minute to see you standing safe upon the Dundee quay. It\"s hit or miss with me this time. There are fish to the north of us. How dare you shake your head, sir, when I tell you I saw them blowing from the masthead?\" \u2013 this in a sudden burst of fury, though I was not conscious of having shown any signs of doubt. \"Two-and-twenty fish in as many minutes as I am a living man, and not one under ten foot. [Footnote: a whale is measured among whalers not by the length of its body, but by the length of its whalebone.] Now, doctor, do you think I can leave the country when there is only one infernal strip of ice between me and my fortune? If it came on to blow from the north tomorrow we could fill the ship and be away before the frost could catch us. If it came on to blow from the south \u2013 well, I suppose the men are paid for risking their lives, and as for myself it matters but little to me, for I have more to bind me to the other world than to this one. I confess that I am sorry for you, though. I wish I had old Angus Tait who was with me last voyage, for he was a man that would never be missed, and you \u2013 you said once that you were engaged, did you not?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered, snapping the spring of the locket which hung from my watch-chain, and holding up the little vignette of Flora.\n\n\"Curse you!\" he yelled, springing out of his seat, with his very beard bristling with passion. \"What is your happiness to me? What have I to do with her that you must dangle her photograph before my eyes?\" I almost thought that he was about to strike me in the frenzy of his rage, but with another imprecation he dashed open the door of the cabin and rushed out upon deck, leaving me considerably astonished at his extraordinary violence. It is the first time that he has ever shown me anything but courtesy and kindness. I can hear him pacing excitedly up and down overhead as I write these lines.\n\nI should like to give a sketch of the character of this man, but it seems presumptuous to attempt such a thing upon paper, when the idea in my own mind is at best a vague and uncertain one. Several times I have thought that I grasped the clue which might explain it, only to be disappointed by his presenting himself in some new light which would upset all my conclusions. It may be that no human eye but my own shall ever rest upon these lines, yet as a psychological study I shall attempt to leave some record of Captain Nicholas Craigie.\n\nA man\"s outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within. The captain is tall and well-formed, with dark, handsome face and a curious way of twitching his limbs, which may arise from nervousness or be simply an outcome of his excessive energy. His jaw and whole cast of countenance is manly and resolute, but the eyes are the distinctive feature of his face. They are of the very darkest hazel, bright and eager, with a singular mixture of recklessness in their expression, and of something else which I have sometimes thought was more allied with horror than any other emotion. Generally the former predominated, but on occasions, and more particularly when he was thoughtfully inclined, the look of fear would spread and deepen until it imparted a new character to his whole countenance. It is at these times that he is most subject to tempestuous fits of anger, and he seems to be aware of it, for I have known him lock himself up so that no one might approach him until his dark hour was passed. He sleeps badly, and I have heard him shouting during the night, but his cabin is some little distance from mine and I could never distinguish the words which he said.\n\nThis is one phase of his character, and the most disagreeable one. It is only through my close association with him, thrown together as we are day after day, that I have observed it. Otherwise he is an agreeable companion, well read and entertaining, and as gallant a seaman as ever trod a deck. I shall not easily forget the way in which he handled the ship when we were caught by a gale among the loose ice at the beginning of April. I have never seen him so cheerful, and even hilarious, as he was that night, as he paced backwards and forwards upon the bridge amid the flashing of the lightning and the howling of the wind. He has told me several times that the thought of death was a pleasant one to him, which is a sad thing for a young man to say; he cannot be much more than thirty, though his hair and moustache are already slightly grizzled. Some great sorrow must have overtaken him and blighted his whole life. Perhaps I should be the same if I lost my Flora \u2013 God knows! I think if it were not for her that I should care very little whether the wind blew from the north or the south tomorrow. There, I hear him come down the companion, and he has locked himself up in his room, which shows that he is still in an unamiable mood. And so to bed, as old Pepys would say, for the candle is burning down (we have to use them now since the nights are closing in) and the steward has turned in, so there are no hopes of another one.\n\nSeptember 12 \u2013 Calm, clear day, and still lying in the same position. What wind there is comes from the south-east, but it is very slight. Captain is in a better humour, and apologised to me at breakfast for his rudeness. He still looks somewhat distrait, however, and retains that wild look in his eyes which in a Highlander would mean that he was \"fey\" \u2013 at least so our chief engineer remarked to me, and he has some reputation among the Celtic portion of our crew as a seer and expounder of omens.\n\nIt is strange that superstition should have obtained such mastery over this hard-headed and practical race. I could not have believed to what an extent it is carried had I not observed it for myself. We have had a perfect epidemic of it this voyage, until I have felt inclined to serve out rations of sedatives and nerve-tonics with the Saturday allowance of grog. The first symptom of it was that shortly after leaving Shetland the men at the wheel used to complain that they heard plaintive cries and screams in the wake of the ship, as if something were following it and were unable to overtake it. This fiction has been kept up during the whole voyage, and on dark nights at the beginning of the seal-fishing it was only with great difficulty that men could be induced to do their spell. No doubt what they heard was either the creaking of the rudder-chains or the cry of some passing sea-bird. I have been fetched out of bed several times to listen to it, but I need hardly say that I was never able to distinguish anything unnatural. The men, however, are so absurdly positive upon the subject that it is hopeless to argue with them. I mentioned the matter to the captain once, but to my surprise he took it very gravely, and indeed appeared to be considerably disturbed by what I told him. I should have thought that he at least would have been above such vulgar delusions.\n\nAll this disquisition upon superstition leads me up to the fact that Mr Manson, our second mate, saw a ghost last night \u2013 or, at least, says that he did, which of course is the same thing. It is quite refreshing to have some new topic of conversation after the eternal routine of bears and whales which has served us for so many months. Manson swears the ship is haunted; and that he would not stay in her a day if he had any other place to go to. Indeed the fellow is honestly frightened, and I had to give him some chloral and bromide of potassium this morning to steady him down. He seemed quite indignant when I suggested that he had been having an extra glass the night before, and I was obliged to pacify him by keeping as grave a countenance as possible during his story, which he certainly narrated in a very straightforward and matter-of-fact way.\n\n\"I was on the bridge,\" he said, \"about four bells in the middle watch, just when the night was at its darkest. There was a bit of a moon, but the clouds were blowing across it so that you couldn\"t see far from the ship. John McLeod, the harpooner, came aft from the fo\"c\"sle-head and reported a strange noise on the starboard bow. I went forward and we both heard it, sometimes like a bairn crying and sometimes like a wench in pain. I\"ve been seventeen years to the country and I never heard seal, old or young, make a sound like that. As we were standing there on the fo\"c\"sle-head the moon came out from behind a cloud, and we both saw a sort of white figure moving across the ice-field in the same direction that we had heard the cries. We host sight of it for a while, but it came back on the port bow, and we could just make it out like a shadow on the ice. I sent a hand aft for the rifles, and McLeod and I went down on to the pack, thinking that maybe it might be a bear. When we got on the ice I lost sight of McLeod, but I pushed on in the direction where I could still hear the cries. I followed them for a mile or maybe more, and then running round a hummock I came right on to the top of it, standing and waiting for me seemingly. I don\"t know what it was. It wasn\"t a bear, anyway. It was tall and white and straight, and if it wasn\"t a man nor a woman, I\"ll stake my davy it was something worse. I made for the ship as hard as I could run, and precious glad I was to find myself aboard. I signed articles to do my duty by the ship, and on the ship I\"ll stay, but you don\"t catch me on the ice again after sundown.\"\n\nThat is his story, given as far as I can in his own words. I fancy what he saw must, in spite of his denial, have been a young bear erect upon its hind legs, an attitude which they often assume when alarmed. In the uncertain light this would bear a resemblance to a human figure, especially to a man whose nerves were already somewhat shaken. Whatever it may have been, the occurrence is unfortunate, for it has produced a most unpleasant effect upon the crew. Their looks are more sullen than before, and their discontent more open. The double grievance of being debarred from the herring fishing and of being detained in what they choose to call a haunted vessel, may lead them to do something rash. Even the harpooners, who are the oldest and steadiest among them, are joining in the general agitation.\n\nApart from this absurd outbreak of superstition, things are looking rather more cheerful. The pack which was forming to the south of us has partly cleared away, and the water is so warm as to lead me to believe that we are lying in one of those branches of the Gulf Stream which run up between Greenland and Spitzbergen. There are numerous small medusae and sea-lemons about the ship, with abundance of shrimps, so that there is every possibility of \"fish\" being sighted. Indeed one was seen blowing about dinner-time, but in such a position that it was impossible for the boats to follow it.\n\nSeptember 13 \u2013 Had an interesting conversation with the chief mate, Mr Milne, upon the bridge. It seems that our captain is as great an enigma to the seamen, and even to the owners of the vessel, as he has been to me. Mr Milne tells me that when the ship is paid off, upon returning from a voyage, Captain Craigie disappears and is not seen again until the approach of another season, when he walks quietly into the office of the company and asks whether his services will be required. He has no friend in Dundee, nor does anyone pretend to be acquainted with his early history. His position depends entirely upon his skill as a seaman, and the name for courage and coolness which he had earned in the capacity of mate, before being entrusted with a separate command. The unanimous opinion seems to be that he is not a Scotchman, and that his name is an assumed one. Mr Milne thinks that he has devoted himself to whaling simply for the reason that it is the most dangerous occupation which he could select, and that he courts death in every possible manner. He mentioned several instances of this, one of which is rather curious, if true. It seems that on one occasion he did not put in an appearance at the office, and a substitute had to be selected in his place. That was at the time of the last Russian and Turkish War. When he turned up again next spring he had a puckered wound in the side of his neck which he used to endeavour to conceal with his cravat. Whether the mate\"s inference that he had been engaged in the war is true or not I cannot say. It was certainly a strange coincidence.\n\nThe wind is veering round in an easterly direction, but is still very slight. I think the ice is lying closer than it did yesterday. As far as the eye can reach on every side there is one wide expanse of spotless white, only broken by an occasional rift or the dark shadow of a hummock. To the south there is the narrow lane of blue water which is our sole means of escape, and which is closing up every day. The captain is taking a heavy responsibility upon himself. I hear that the tank of potatoes has been finished, and even the biscuits are running short, but he preserves the same impassable countenance, and spends the greater part of the day at the crow\"s nest, sweeping the horizon with his glass. His manner is very variable, and he seems to avoid my society, but there has been no repetition of the violence which he showed the other night.\n\n7.30 p.m. \u2013 My deliberate opinion is that we are commanded by a madman. Nothing else can account for the extraordinary vagaries of Captain Craigie. It is fortunate that I have kept this journal of our voyage, as it will serve to justify us in case we have to put him under any sort of restraint, a step which I should only consent to as a last resource. Curiously enough it was he himself who suggested lunacy and not mere eccentricity as the secret of his strange conduct. He was standing upon the bridge about an hour ago, peering as usual through his glass, while I was walking up and down the quarter-deck. The majority of the men were below at their tea, for the watches have not been regularly kept of late. Tired of walking, I leaned against the bulwarks, and admired the mellow glow cast by the sinking sun upon the great ice-fields which surround us. I was suddenly aroused from the reverie into which I had fallen by a hoarse voice at my elbow, and starting round I found that the captain had descended and was standing by my side. He was staring out over the ice with an expression in which horror, surprise and something approaching to joy were contending for the mastery. In spite of the cold, great drops of perspiration were coursing down his forehead, and he was evidently fearfully excited. His limbs twitched like those of a man upon the verge of an epileptic fit, and the lines about his mouth were drawn and hard.\n\n\"Look!\" he gasped, seizing me by the wrist, but still keeping his eyes upon the distant ice and moving his head slowly in a horizontal direction, as if following some object which was moving across the field of vision. \"Look! There, man, there! Between the hummocks! Now coming out from behind the far one! You see her \u2013 you must see her! There still! Flying from me, by God, flying from me \u2013 and gone!\"\n\nHe uttered the last two words in a whisper of concentrated agony which shall never fade from my remembrance. Clinging to the ratlines he endeavoured to climb up upon the top of the bulwarks as if in the hope of obtaining a last glance at the departing object. His strength was not equal to the attempt, however, and he staggered back against the saloon skylights, where he leaned panting and exhausted. His face was so livid that I expected him to become unconscious, so I lost no time in leading him down the companion and stretching him upon one of the sofas in the cabin. I then poured him out some brandy, which I held to his lips, and which had a wonderful effect upon him, bringing the blood back into his white face and steadying his poor shaking limbs. He raised himself up upon his elbow, and looking round to see that we were alone, he beckoned to me to come and sit beside him.\n\n\"You saw it, didn\"t you?\" he asked, still in the same subdued awesome tone so foreign to the nature of the man.\n\n\"No, I saw nothing.\"\n\nHis head sank back again upon the cushions. \"No, he wouldn\"t without the glass,\" he murmured. \"He couldn\"t. It was the glass that showed her to me, and then the eyes of love \u2013 the eyes of love. I say, doc, don\"t let the steward in! He\"ll think I\"m mad. Just, bolt the door, will you!\"\n\nI rose and did what he had commanded.\n\nHe lay quiet for a while, lost in thought apparently, and then raised himself up upon his elbow again, and asked for some more brandy.\n\n\"You don\"t think I am, do you, doc?\" he asked, as I was putting the bottle back into the after-locker. \"Tell me now, as man to man, do you think that I am mad?\"\n\n\"I think you have something on your mind,\" I answered, \"which is exciting you and doing you a good deal of harm.\"\n\n\"Right there, lad!\" he cried, his eyes sparkling from the effects of the brandy. \"Plenty on my mind \u2013 plenty! But I can work out the latitude and the longitude, and I can handle my sextant and manage my logarithms. You couldn\"t prove me mad in a court of law, could you, now?\" It was curious to hear the man lying back and coolly arguing out the question of his own sanity.\n\n\"Perhaps not,\" I said; \"but still I think you would be wise to get home as soon as you can, and settle down to a quiet life for a while.\"\n\n\"Get home, eh?\" he muttered, with a sneer upon his face. \"One word for me and two for yourself, lad. Settle down with Flora \u2013 pretty little Flora. Are bad dreams signs of madness?\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" I answered.\n\n\"What else? What would be the first symptoms?\"\n\n\"Pains in the head, noises in the ears, flashes before the eyes, delusions \u2013\"\n\n\"Ah! what about them?\" he interrupted. \"What would you call a delusion?\"\n\n\"Seeing a thing which is not there is a delusion \u2013\"\n\n\"But she was there!\" he groaned to himself. \"She was there!\" and rising, he unbolted the door and walked with slow and uncertain steps to his own cabin, where I have no doubt that he will remain until tomorrow morning. His system seems to have received a terrible shock, whatever it may have been that he imagined himself to have seen. The man becomes a greater mystery every day, though I fear that the solution which he has himself suggested is the correct one, and that his reason is affected. I do not think that a guilty conscience has anything to do with his behaviour. The idea is a popular one among the officers and, I believe, the crew; but I have seen nothing to support it. He has not the air of a guilty man, but of one who has had terrible usage at the hands of fortune, and who should be regarded as a martyr rather than a criminal.\n\nThe wind is veering round to the south tonight. God help us if it blocks that narrow pass which is our only road to safety! Situated as we are on the edge of the main Arctic pack, or the \"barrier\" as it is called by the whalers, any wind from the north has the effect of shredding out the ice around us and allowing our escape, while a wind from the south blows up all the loose ice behind us, and hems us in between two packs. God help us, I say again!\n\nSeptember 14 \u2013 Sunday, and a day of rest. My fears have been confirmed, and the thin strip of blue water has disappeared from the southward. Nothing but the great motionless ice-fields around us, with their weird hummocks and fantastic pinnacles. There is a deathly silence over their wide expanse which is horrible. No lapping of the waves now, no cries of seagulls or straining of sails, but one deep universal silence in which the murmurs of the seamen and the creak of their boots upon the white shining deck seem discordant and out of place. Our only visitor was an Arctic fox, a rare animal upon the pack, though common enough upon the land. He did not come near the ship, however, but after surveying us from a distance fled rapidly across the ice. This was curious conduct, as they generally know nothing of man, and being of an inquisitive nature, become so familiar that they are easily captured. Incredible as it may seem, even this little incident produced a bad effect upon the crew. \"Yon puir beastie kens mair, ay, an\" sees mair nor you nor me!\" was the comment of one of the leading harpooners, and the others nodded their acquiescence. It is vain to attempt to argue against such puerile superstition. They have made up their minds that there is a curse upon the ship, and nothing will ever persuade them to the contrary.\n\nThe captain remained in seclusion all day except for about half an hour in the afternoon, when he came out upon the quarter-deck. I observed that he kept his eye fixed upon the spot where the vision of yesterday had appeared, and was quite prepared for another outburst, but none such came. He did not seem to see me, although I was standing close beside him. Divine service was read as usual by the chief engineer. It is a curious thing that in whaling vessels the Church of England Prayer Book is always employed, although there is never a member of that church among either officers or crew. Our men are all Roman Catholics or Presbyterians, the former predominating. Since a ritual is used which is foreign to both, neither can complain that the other is preferred to them, and they listen with all attention and devotion, so that the system has something to recommend it.\n\nA glorious sunset, which made the great fields of ice look like a lake of blood. I have never seen a finer and at the same time more weird effect. Wind is veering round. If it will blow twenty-four hours from the north all will yet be well.\n\nSeptember 15 \u2013 Today is Flora\"s birthday. Dear lass! it is well that she cannot see her boy, as she used to call me, shut up among the ice-fields with a crazy captain and a few weeks\" provisions. No doubt she scans the shipping list in the Scotsman every morning to see if we are reported from Shetland. I have to set an example to the men and look cheery and unconcerned; but God knows, my heart is very heavy at times.\n\nThe thermometer is at nineteen Fahrenheit today. There is but little wind, and what there is comes from an unfavourable quarter. Captain is in an excellent humour; I think he imagines he has seen some other omen or vision, poor fellow, during the night, for he came into my room early in the morning and, stooping down over my bunk, whispered, \"It wasn\"t a delusion, doc; it\"s all right!\" After breakfast he asked me to find out how much food was left, which the second mate and I proceeded to do. It is even less than we had expected. Forward they have half a tank full of biscuits, three barrels of salt meat, and a very limited supply of coffee beans and sugar. In the after-hold and lockers there are a good many luxuries, such as tinned salmon, soups, haricot mutton, etc., but they will go a very short way among a crew of fifty men. There are two barrels of flour in the store-room, and an unlimited supply of tobacco. Altogether there is about enough to keep the men on half rations for eighteen or twenty days \u2013 certainly not more. When we reported the state of things to the captain, he ordered all hands to be piped and addressed them from the quarter-deck. I never saw him to better advantage. With his tall, well-knit figure and dark animated face, he seemed a man born to command, and he discussed the situation in a cool sailor-like way which showed that while appreciating the danger he had an eye for every loophole of escape.\n\n\"My lads,\" he said, \"no doubt you think I brought you into this fix, if it is a fix, and maybe some of you feel bitter against me on account of it. But you must remember that for many a season no ship that comes to the country has brought in as much oil-money as the old Polestar, and every one of you has had his share of it. You can leave your wives behind you in comfort, while other poor fellows come back to find their lassies on the parish. If you have to thank me for the one you have to thank me for the other, and we may call it quits. We\"ve tried a bold venture before this and succeeded, so now that we\"ve tried one and failed we\"ve no cause to cry out about it. If the worst comes to the worse, we can make the land across the ice, and lay in a stock of seals which will keep us alive until the spring. It won\"t come to that, though, for you\"ll see the Scotch coast again before three weeks are out. At present every man must go on half rations, share and share alike, and no favour to any. Keep up your hearts and you\"ll pull through this as you\"ve pulled through many a danger before.\" These few simple words of his had a wonderful effect upon the crew. His former unpopularity was forgotten, and the old harpooner whom I have already mentioned for his superstition, led off three cheers, which were heartily joined in by all hands.\n\nSeptember 16 \u2013 The wind has veered round to the north during the night, and the ice shows some symptoms of opening out. The men are in a good humour in spite of the short allowance upon which they have been placed. Steam is kept up in the engine-room, that there may be no delay should an opportunity for escape present itself. The captain is in exuberant spirits, though he still retains that wild \"fey\" expression which I have already remarked upon. This burst of cheerfulness puzzles me more than his former gloom. I cannot understand it. I think I mentioned in an early part of this journal that one of his oddities is that he never permits any person to enter his cabin, but insists upon making his own bed, such as it is, and performing every other office for himself. To my surprise he handed me the key today and requested me to go down there and take the time by his chronometer while he measured the altitude of the sun at noon. It is a bare little room, containing a washing-stand and a few books, but little else in the way of luxury, except some pictures upon the walls. The majority of these are small cheap oleographs, but there was one watercolour sketch of the head of a young lady which arrested my attention. It was evidently a portrait, and not one of those fancy types of female beauty which sailors particularly affect. No artist could have evolved from his own mind such a curious mixture of character and weakness. The languid, dreamy eyes, with their drooping lashes, and the broad, low brow, unruffled by thought or care, were in strong contrast with the clean-cut, prominent jaw and the resolute set of the lower lip. Underneath it in one of the corners was written, M.B., aet. 19. That anyone in the short space of nineteen years of existence could develop such strength of will as was stamped upon her face seemed to me at the time to be well-nigh incredible. She must have been an extraordinary woman. Her features have thrown such a glamour over me that, though I had but a fleeting glance at them, I could, were I a draughtsman, reproduce them line for line upon this page of the journal. I wonder what part she has played in our captain\"s life. He has hung her picture at the end of his berth, so that his eyes continually rest upon it. Were he a less reserved man I should make some remark upon the subject. Of the other things in his cabin there was nothing worthy of mention \u2013 uniform coats, a camp-stool, small looking-glass, tobacco-box and numerous pipes, including an oriental hookah \u2013 which, by the by, gives some colour to Mr Milne\"s story about his participation in the war, though the connection may seem rather a distant one.\n\n11.20 p.m. \u2013 Captain just gone to bed after a long and interesting conversation on general topics. When he chooses he can be a most fascinating companion, being remarkably well read, and having the power of expressing his opinion forcibly without appearing to be dogmatic. I hate to have my intellectual toes trod upon. He spoke about the nature of the soul, and sketched out the views of Aristotle and Plato upon the subject in a masterly manner. He seems to have a leaning for metempsychosis and the doctrines of Pythagoras. In discussing them we touched upon modern spiritualism, and I made some joking allusion to the impostures of Slade, upon which, to my surprise, he warned me most impressively against confusing the innocent with the guilty, and argued that it would be as logical to brand Christianity as an error because Judas, who professed that religion, was a villain. He shortly afterwards bade me good-night and retired to his room.\n\nThe wind is freshening up, and blows steadily from the north. The nights are as dark now as they are in England. I hope tomorrow may set us free from our frozen fetters.\n\nSeptember 17 \u2013 The Bogie again. Thank heaven that I have strong nerves! The superstition of these poor fellows, and the circumstantial accounts which they give, with the utmost earnestness and self-conviction, would horrify any man not accustomed to their ways. There are many versions of the matter, but the sum-total of them all is that something uncanny has been flitting round the ship all night, and that Sandie McDonald of Peterhead and \"lang\" Peter Williamson of Shetland saw it, as also did Mr Milne on the bridge \u2013 so, having three witnesses, they can make a better case of it than the second mate did. I spoke to Milne after breakfast, and told him that he should be above such nonsense, and that as an officer he ought to set the men a better example. He shook his weathebeaten head ominously, but answered with characteristic caution, \"Mebbe, aye, mebbe na, doctor,\" he said, \"I didna ca\" it a ghaist. I canna\" say I preen my faith in sea-bogles an\" the like, though there\"s a mony as claims to ha\" seen a\" that and waur. I\"m no easy feared, but maybe your ain bluid would run a bit cauld, mun, if instead o\" speerin\" aboot it in daylicht ye were wi\" me last night, an\" seed an awfu\" like shape, white an\" gruesome, whiles here, whiles there, an\" it greetin\" and ca\"ing in the darkness like a bit lambie that hae lost its mither. Ye would na\" be sae ready to put it a\" doon to auld wives\" clavers then, I\"m thinkin\".\" I saw it was hopeless to reason with him, so contented myself with begging him as a personal favour to call me up the next time the spectre appeared \u2013 a request to which he acceded with many ejaculations expressive of his hopes that such an opportunity might never arise.\n\nAs I had hoped, the white desert behind us has become broken by many thin streaks of water which intersect it in all directions. Our latitude today was 80\u00b0 52\" N, which shows that there is a strong southerly drift upon the pack. Should the wind continue favourable it will break up as rapidly as it formed. At present we can do nothing but smoke and wait and hope for the best. I am rapidly becoming a fatalist. When dealing with such uncertain factors as wind and ice a man can be nothing else. Perhaps it was the wind and sand of the Arabian deserts which gave the minds of the original followers of Mahomet their tendency to bow to kismet.\n\nThese spectral alarms have a very bad effect upon the captain. I feared that it might excite his sensitive mind, and endeavoured to conceal the absurd story from him, but unfortunately he overheard one of the men making an allusion to it and insisted upon being informed about it. As I had expected, it brought out all his latent lunacy in an exaggerated form. I can hardly believe that this is the same man who discoursed philosophy last night with the most critical acumen and coolest judgement. He is pacing backwards and forwards upon the quarter-deck like a caged tiger, stopping now and again to throw out his hands with a yearning gesture, and stare impatiently out over the ice. He keeps up a continual mutter to himself, and once he called out, \"But a little time, love \u2013 but a little time!\" Poor fellow, it is sad to see a gallant seaman and accomplished gentleman reduced to such a pass and to think that imagination and delusion can cow a mind to which real danger was but the salt of life. Was ever a man in such a position as I, between a demented captain and a ghost-seeing mate? I sometimes think I am the only really sane man aboard the vessel \u2013 except perhaps the second engineer, who is a kind of ruminant, and would care nothing for all the fiends in the Red Sea so long as they would leave him alone and not disarrange his tools.\n\nThe ice is still opening rapidly, and there is every probability of our being able to make a start tomorrow morning. They will think I am inventing when I tell them at home all the strange things that have befallen me.\n\n12.00 p.m. \u2013 I have been a good deal startled, though I feel steadier now, thanks to a stiff glass of brandy. I am hardly myself yet, however, as this handwriting will testify. The fact is, that I have gone through a very strange experience and am beginning to doubt whether I was justified in branding everyone on board as madmen because they professed to have seen things which did not seem reasonable to my understanding. Pshaw! I am a fool to let such a trifle unnerve me; and yet, coming as it does after all these alarms, it has an additional significance, for I cannot doubt either Mr Manson\"s story or that of the mate, now that I have experienced that which I used formerly to scoff at.\n\nAfter all it was nothing very alarming \u2013 a mere sound, and that was all. I cannot expect that anyone reading this, if anyone ever should read it, will sympathise with my feelings or realise the effect which it produced upon me at the time. Supper was over, and I had gone on deck to have a quiet pipe before turning in. The night was very dark \u2013 so dark that, standing under the quarter-boat, I was unable to see the officer upon the bridge. I think I have already mentioned the extraordinary silence which prevails in these frozen seas. In other parts of the world, be they ever so barren, there is some slight vibration of the air \u2013 some faint hum, be it from the distant haunts of men, or from the leaves of the trees, or the wings of the birds, or even the faint rustle of the grass that covers the ground. One may not actively perceive the sound, and yet if it were withdrawn it would be missed. It is only here in these Arctic seas that stark, unfathomable stillness obtrudes itself upon you all in its gruesome reality. You find your tympanum straining to catch some little murmur, and dwelling eagerly upon every accidental sound within the vessel. In this state I was leaning against the bulwarks when there arose from the ice almost directly underneath me a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note such as prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul. The ghastly scream is still ringing in my ears. Grief, unutterable grief, seemed to be expressed in it, and a great longing, and yet through it all there was an occasional wild note of exultation. It shrilled out from close beside me, and yet as I glared into the darkness I could discern nothing. I waited some little time but without hearing any repetition of the sound, so I came below, more shaken than I have ever been in my life before. As I came down the companion I met Mr Milne coming up to relieve the watch. \"Weel, doctor,\" he said, \"maybe that\"s auld wives\" clavers tae? Did ye no hear it skirling? Maybe that\"s a supersteetion? What d\"ye think o\"t noo?\" I was obliged to apologise to the honest fellow, and acknowledge that I was as puzzled by it as he was. Perhaps tomorrow things may look different. At present I dare hardly write all that I think. Reading it again in days to come, when I have shaken off all these associations, I should despise myself for having been so weak.\n\nSeptember 18 \u2013 Passed a restless and uneasy night, still haunted by that strange sound. The captain does not look as if he had had much repose either, for his face is haggard and his eyes bloodshot. I have not told him of my adventure of last night, nor shall I. He is already restless and excited, standing up, sitting down, and apparently utterly unable to keep still.\n\nA fine lead appeared in the pack this morning, as I had expected, and we were able to cast off our ice-anchor and steam about twelve miles in a west-sou\"-westerly direction. We were then brought to a halt by a great floe as massive as any which we have left behind us. It bars our progress completely, so we can do nothing but anchor again and wait until it breaks up, which it will probably do within twenty-four hours, if the wind holds. Several bladder-nosed seals were seen swimming in the water, and one was shot, an immense creature more than eleven feet long. They are fierce, pugnacious animals, and are said to be more than a match for a bear. Fortunately they are slow and clumsy in their movements, so that there is little danger in attacking them upon the ice.\n\nThe captain evidently does not think we have seen the last of our troubles, though why he should take a gloomy view of the situation is more than I can fathom since everyone else on board considers that we have had a miraculous escape and are sure now to reach the open sea.\n\n\"I suppose you think it\"s all right now, doctor?\" he said, as we sat together after dinner.\n\n\"I hope so,\" I answered.\n\n\"We mustn\"t be too sure \u2013 and yet no doubt you are right. We\"ll all be in the arms of our own true loves before long, lad, won\"t we? But we mustn\"t be too sure \u2013 we mustn\"t be too sure.\"\n\nHe sat silent a little, swinging his leg thoughtfully backwards and forwards. \"Look here,\" he continued; \"it\"s a dangerous place this, even at its best \u2013 a treacherous, dangerous place. I have known men cut off very suddenly in a land like this. A slip would do it sometimes \u2013 a single slip, and down you go through a crack, and only a bubble on the green water to show where it was that you sank. It\"s a queer thing,\" he continued with a nervous laugh, \"but all the years I\"ve been in this country I never once thought of making a will \u2013 not that I have anything to leave in particular, but still when a man is exposed to danger he should have everything arranged and ready \u2013 don\"t you think so?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" I answered, wondering what on earth he was driving at.\n\n\"He feels better for knowing it\"s all settled,\" he went on. \"Now if anything should ever befall me, I hope that you will look after things for me. There is very little in the cabin, but such as it is I should like it to be sold, and the money divided in the same proportion as the oil-money among the crew. The chronometer I wish you to keep yourself as some slight remembrance of our voyage. Of course all this is a mere precaution, but I thought I would take the opportunity of speaking to you about it. I suppose I might rely upon you if there were any necessity?\"\n\n\"Most assuredly,\" I answered; \"and since you are taking this step, I may as well \u2013\"\n\n\"You! you!\" he interrupted. \"You\"re all right. What the devil is the matter with you? There, I didn\"t mean to be peppery, but I don\"t like to hear a young fellow, that has hardly begun life, speculating about death. Go up on deck and get some fresh air into your lungs instead of talking nonsense in the cabin, and encouraging me to do the same.\"\n\nThe more I think of this conversation of ours the less do I like it. Why should the man be settling his affairs at the very time when we seem to be emerging from all danger? There must be some method in his madness. Can it be that he contemplates suicide? I remember that upon one occasion he spoke in a deeply reverent manner of the heinousness of the crime of self-destruction. I shall keep my eye upon him, however, and though I cannot obtrude upon the privacy of his cabin, I shall at least make a point of remaining on deck as long as he stays up.\n\nMr Milne pooh-poohs my fears, and says it is only the \"skipper\"s little way\". He himself takes a very rosy view of the situation. According to him we shall be out of the ice by the day after tomorrow, pass Jan Meyen two days after that, and sight Shetland in little more than a week. I hope he may not be too sanguine. His opinion may be fairly balanced against the gloomy precautions of the captain, for he is an old and experienced seaman and weighs his words well before uttering them.\n\nThe long-impending catastrophe has come at last. I hardly know what to write about it. The captain is gone. He may come back to us again alive, but I fear me \u2013 I fear me. It is now seven o\"clock of the morning of the 19th of September. I have spent the whole night traversing the great ice-floe in front of us with a party of seamen in the hope of coming upon some trace of him, but in vain. I shall try to give some account of the circumstances which attended upon his disappearance. Should anyone ever chance to read the words which I put down, I trust they will remember that I do not write from conjecture or from hearsay, but that I, a sane and educated man, am describing accurately what actually occurred before my very eyes. My inferences are my own, but I shall be answerable for the facts.\n\nThe captain remained in excellent spirits after the conversation which I have recorded. He appeared to be nervous and impatient, however, frequently changing his position, and moving his limbs in an aimless choreic way which is characteristic of him at times. In a quarter of an hour he went upon deck seven times, only to descend after a few hurried paces. I followed him each time, for there was something about his face which confirmed my resolution of not letting him out of my sight. He seemed to observe the effect which his movements had produced, for he endeavoured by an overdone hilarity, laughing boisterously at the very smallest of jokes, to quiet my apprehensions.\n\nAfter supper he went on to the poop once more, and I with him. The night was dark and very still, save for the melancholy soughing of the wind among the spars. A thick cloud was coming up from the north-west, and the ragged tentacles which it threw out in front of it were drifting across the face of the moon, which only shone now and again through a rift in the wrack. The captain paced rapidly backwards and forwards, and then seeing me still dogging him, he came across and hinted that he thought I should be better below \u2013 which, I need hardly say, had the effect of strengthening my resolution to remain on deck.\n\nI think he forgot about my presence after this, for he stood silently leaning over the taffrail and peering out across the great desert of snow, part of which lay in shadow while part glittered mistily in the moonlight. Several times I could see by his movements that he was referring to his watch, and once he muttered a short sentence, of which I could only catch the one word \"ready\". I confess to having felt an eerie feeling creeping over me as I watched the loom of his tall figure through the darkness and noted how completely he fulfilled the idea of a man who is keeping a tryst. A tryst with whom? Some vague perception began to dawn upon me as I pieced one fact with another, but I was utterly unprepared for the sequel.\n\nBy the sudden intensity of his attitude I felt that he saw something. I crept up behind him. He was staring with an eager questioning gaze at what seemed to be a wreath of mist, blown swiftly in a line with the ship. It was a dim nebulous body, devoid of shape, sometimes more, sometimes less apparent, as the light fell on it. The moon was dimmed in its brilliancy at the moment by a canopy of thinnest cloud, like the coating of an anemone.\n\n\"Coming, lass, coming,\" cried the skipper, in a voice of unfathomable tenderness and compassion, like one who soothes a beloved one by some favour long looked for, and as pleasant to bestow as to receive.\n\nWhat followed happened in an instant. I had no power to interfere. He gave one spring to the top of the bulwarks and another which took him on to the ice, almost to the feet of the pale misty figure. He held out his hands as if to clasp it, and so ran into the darkness with outstretched arms and loving words. I still stood rigid and motionless, straining my eyes after his retreating form, until his voice died away in the distance. I never thought to see him again, but at that moment the moon shone out brilliantly through a chink in the cloudy heaven and illuminated the great field of ice. Then I saw his dark figure already a very long way off, running with prodigious speed across the frozen plain. That was the last glimpse which we caught of him \u2013 perhaps the last we ever shall. A party was organised to follow him, and I accompanied them, but the men\"s hearts were not in the work and nothing was found. Another will be formed within a few hours. I can hardly believe I have not been dreaming or suffering from some hideous nightmare as I write these things down.\n\n7.30 p.m. \u2013 Just returned dead beat and utterly tired out from a second unsuccessful search for the captain. The floe is of enormous extent, for though we have traversed at least twenty miles of its surface, there has been no sign of its coming to an end. The frost has been so severe of late that the overlying snow is frozen as hard as granite, otherwise we might have had the footsteps to guide us. The crew are anxious that we should cast off and steam round the floe and so to the southward, for the ice has opened up during the night, and the sea is visible upon the horizon. They argue that Captain Craigie is certainly dead, and that we are all risking our lives to no purpose by remaining when we have an opportunity of escape. Mr Milne and I have had the greatest difficulty in persuading them to wait until tomorrow night, and have been compelled to promise that we will not under any circumstances delay our departure longer than that. We propose therefore to take a few hours\" sleep and then to start upon a final search.\n\nSeptember 20, evening \u2013 I crossed the ice this morning with a party of men exploring the southern part of the floe, while Mr Milne went off in a northerly direction. We pushed on for ten or twelve miles without seeing a trace of any living thing, except a single bird, which fluttered a great way over our heads, and which by its flight I should judge to have been a falcon. The southern extremity of the ice-field tapered away into a long narrow spit which projected out into the sea. When we came to the base of this promontory, the men halted, but I begged them to continue to the extreme end of it, that we might have the satisfaction of knowing that no possible chance had been neglected.\n\nWe had hardly gone a hundred yards before McDonald of Peterhead cried out that he saw something in front of us and began to run. We all got a glimpse of it and ran too. At first it was only a vague darkness against the white ice, but as we raced along together it took the shape of a man, and eventually of the man of whom we were in search. He was lying face downwards upon a frozen bank. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman\"s jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the sea. To my eyes it seemed but a snowdrift, but many of my companions averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floe. I have learned never to ridicule any man\"s opinion, however strange it may seem. Sure it is that Captain Nicholas Craigie had met with no painful end, for there was a bright smile upon his blue pinched features, and his hands were still outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim world that lies beyond the grave.\n\nWe buried him the same afternoon with the ship\"s ensign around him and a thirty-two-pound shot at his feet. I read the burial service, while the rough sailors wept like children, for there were many who owed much to his kind heart and who showed now the affection which his strange ways had repelled during his lifetime. He went off the grating with a dull, sullen splash, and as I looked into the green water I saw him go down, down, down until he was but a little flickering patch of white hanging upon the outskirts of eternal darkness. Then even that faded away and he was gone. There he shall lie, with his secret and his sorrows and his mystery all still buried in his breast, until that great day when the sea shall give up its dead and Nicholas Craigie come out from among the ice with the smile upon his face and his stiffened arms outstretched in greeting. I pray that his lot may be a happier one in that life than it has been in this.\n\nI shall not continue my journal. Our road to home lies plain and clear before us and the great ice-field will soon be but a remembrance of the past. It will be some time before I get over the shock produced by recent events. When I began this record of our voyage I little thought of how I should be compelled to finish it. I am writing these final words in the lonely cabin, still starting at times and fancying I hear the quick nervous step of the dead man upon the deck above me. I entered his cabin tonight, as was my duty, to make a list of his effects in order that they might be entered in the official log. All was as it had been upon my previous visit, save that the picture which I have described as having hung at the end of his bed had been cut out of its frame, as with a knife, and was gone. With this last link in a strange chain of evidence I close my diary of the voyage of the Polestar.\n\nNote by Dr John McAlister Ray senior \u2013 I have read over the strange events connected with the death of the captain of the Polestar as narrated in the journal of my son. That everything occurred exactly as he describes it I have the fullest confidence, and, indeed, the most positive certainty, for I know him to be a strong-nerved and unimaginative man with the strictest regard for veracity. Still, the story is, on the face of it, so vague and so improbable that I was long opposed to its publication. Within the last few days, however, I have had independent testimony upon the subject which throws a new light upon it. I had run down to Edinburgh to attend a meeting of the British Medical Association, when I chanced to come across Dr P\u2014, an old college chum of mine, now practising at Saltash, in Devonshire. Upon my telling him of this experience of my son\"s, he declared to me that he was familiar with the captain, and proceeded, to my no small surprise, to give me a description of him which tallied remarkably well with that given in the journal, except that he depicted him as a younger man. According to his account, he had been engaged to a young lady of singular beauty residing upon the Cornish coast. During his absence at sea his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ How It Happened ]\n\nShe was a writing medium. This is what she wrote:\n\nI can remember some things upon that evening most distinctly, and others are like some vague, broken dreams. That is what makes it so difficult to tell a connected story. I have no idea now what it was that had taken me to London and brought me back so late. It just merges into all my other visits to London. But from the time that I got out at the little country station everything is extraordinarily clear. I can live it again \u2013 every instant of it.\n\nI remember so well walking down the platform and looking at the illuminated clock at the end which told me that it was half-past eleven. I remember also my wondering whether I could get home before midnight. Then I remember the big motor, with its glaring headlights and glitter of polished brass, waiting for me outside. It was my new thirty-horse-power Robur, which had only been delivered that day. I remember also asking Perkins, my chauffeur, how she had gone, and his saying that he thought she was excellent.\n\n\"I\"ll try her myself,\" said I, and I climbed into the driver\"s seat.\n\n\"The gears are not the same,\" said he. \"Perhaps, sir, I had better drive.\"\n\n\"No; I should like to try her,\" said I.\n\nAnd so we started on the five-mile drive for home.\n\nMy old car had the gears as they used always to be in notches on a bar. In this car you passed the gear-lever through a gate to get on the higher ones. It was not difficult to master, and soon I thought that I understood it. It was foolish, no doubt, to begin to learn a new system in the dark, but one often does foolish things and one has not always to pay the full price for them. I got along very well until I came to Claystall Hill. It is one of the worst hills in England, a mile and a half long and one in six in places, with three fairly sharp curves. My park gate stands at the very foot of it upon the main London road.\n\nWe were just over the brow of this hill, where the grade is steepest, when the trouble began. I had been on the top speed and wanted to get her on the free; but she stuck between gears, and I had to get her back on the top again. By this time she was going at a great rate, so I clapped on both brakes, and one after the other they gave way. I didn\"t mind so much when I felt my footbrake snap, but when I put all my weight on my side-brake, and the lever clanged to its full limit without a catch, it brought a cold sweat out of me. By this time we were fairly tearing down the slope. The lights were brilliant, and I brought her round the first curve all right. Then we did the second one, though it was a close shave for the ditch. There was a mile of straight then with the third curve beneath it and after that the gate of the park. If I could shoot into that harbour all would be well, for the slope up to the house would bring her to a stand.\n\nPerkins behaved splendidly. I should like that to be known. He was perfectly cool and alert. I had thought at the very beginning of taking the bank, and he read my intention.\n\n\"I wouldn\"t do it, sir,\" said he. \"At this pace it must go over and we should have it on the top of us.\"\n\nOf course he was right. He got to the electric switch and had it off, so we were in the free; but we were still running at a fearful pace. He laid his hands on the wheel.\n\n\"I\"ll keep her steady,\" said he, \"if you care to jump and chance it. We can never get round that curve. Better jump, sir.\"\n\n\"No,\" said I; \"I\"ll stick it out. You can jump if you like.\"\n\n\"I\"ll stick it with you, sir,\" said he.\n\nIf it had been the old car I should have jammed the gear-lever into the reverse and seen what would happen. I expect she would have stripped her gears or smashed up somehow, but it would have been a chance. As it was, I was helpless. Perkins tried to climb across, but you couldn\"t do it going at that pace. The wheels were whirring like a high wind and the big body creaking and groaning with the strain. But the lights were brilliant, and one could steer to an inch. I remember thinking what an awful and yet majestic sight we should appear to anyone who met us. It was a narrow road and we were just a great, roaring, golden death to anyone who came in our path.\n\nWe got round the corner with one wheel three feet high upon the bank. I thought we were surely over, but after staggering for a moment she righted and darted onwards. That was the third corner and the last one. There was only the park gate now. It was facing us but, as luck would have it, not facing us directly. It was about twenty yards to the left up the main road into which we ran. Perhaps I could have done it, but I expect that the steering-gear had been jarred when we ran on the bank. The wheel did not turn easily. We shot out of the lane. I saw the open gate on the left. I whirled round my wheel with all the strength of my wrists. Perkins and I threw our bodies across, and then the next instant, going at fifty miles an hour, my right wheel struck full on the right-hand pillar of my own gate. I heard the crash. I was conscious of flying through the air, and then \u2013 and then \u2013!\n\nWhen I became aware of my own existence once more I was among some brushwood in the shadow of the oaks upon the lodge side of the drive. A man was standing beside me. I imagined at first that it was Perkins, but when I looked again I saw that it was Stanley, a man whom I had known at college some years before, and for whom I had a really genuine affection. There was always something peculiarly sympathetic to me in Stanley\"s personality; and I was proud to think that I had some similar influence upon him. At the present moment I was surprised to see him, but I was like a man in a dream, giddy and shaken and quite prepared to take things as I found them without questioning them.\n\n\"What a smash!\" I said. \"Good Lord, what an awful smash!\"\n\nHe nodded his head, and even in the gloom I could see that he was smiling the gentle, wistful smile which I connected with him.\n\nI was quite unable to move. Indeed, I had not any desire to try to move. But my senses were exceedingly alert. I saw the wreck of the motor lit up by the moving lanterns. I saw the little group of people and heard the hushed voices. There were the lodge-keeper and his wife, and one or two more. They were taking no notice of me, but were very busy round the car. Then suddenly I heard a cry of pain.\n\n\"The weight is on him. Lift it easy,\" cried a voice.\n\n\"It\"s only my leg!\" said another one, which I recognised as Perkins\"s. \"Where\"s master?\" he cried.\n\n\"Here I am,\" I answered, but they did not seem to hear me. They were all bending over something which lay in front of the car.\n\nStanley laid his hand upon my shoulder, and his touch was inexpressibly soothing. I felt light and happy, in spite of all.\n\n\"No pain, of course?\" said he.\n\n\"None,\" said I.\n\n\"There never is,\" said he.\n\nAnd then suddenly a wave of amazement passed over me. Stanley! Stanley! Why, Stanley had surely died of enteric at Bloemfontein in the Boer War!\n\n\"Stanley!\" I cried, and the words seemed to choke my throat \u2013 \"Stanley, you are dead.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Playing with Fire ]\n\nI cannot pretend to say what occurred on the 14th of April last at No. 17 Badderly Gardens. Put down in black and white, my surmise might seem too crude, too grotesque, for serious consideration. And yet that something did occur, and that it was of a nature which will leave its mark upon every one of us for the rest of our lives, is as certain as the unanimous testimony of five witnesses can make it. I will not enter into any argument or speculation. I will only give a plain statement, which will be submitted to John Moir, Harvey Deacon and Mrs Delamere and withheld from publication unless they are prepared to corroborate every detail. I cannot obtain the sanction of Paul Le Duc, for he appears to have left the country.\n\nIt was John Moir (the well-known senior partner of Moir, Moir, and Sanderson) who had originally turned our attention to occult subjects. He had, like many very hard and practical men of business, a mystic side to his nature, which had led him to the examination, and eventually to the acceptance, of those elusive phenomena which are grouped together with much that is foolish, and much that is fraudulent, under the common heading of spiritualism. His researches, which had begun with an open mind, ended unhappily in dogma, and he became as positive and fanatical as any other bigot. He represented in our little group the body of men who have turned these singular phenomena into a new religion.\n\nMrs Delamere, our medium, was his sister, the wife of Delamere, the rising sculptor. Our experience had shown us that to work on these subjects without a medium was as futile as for an astronomer to make observations without a telescope. On the other hand, the introduction of a paid medium was hateful to all of us. Was it not obvious that he or she would feel bound to return some result for money received, and that the temptation to fraud would be an overpowering one? No phenomena could be relied upon which were produced at a guinea an hour. But, fortunately, Moir had discovered that his sister was mediumistic \u2013 in other words, that she was a battery of that animal magnetic force which is the only form of energy which is subtle enough to be acted upon from the spiritual plane as well as from our own material one. Of course, when I say this, I do not mean to beg the question; but I am simply indicating the theories upon which we were ourselves, rightly or wrongly, explaining what we saw. The lady came, not altogether with the approval of her husband, and though she never gave indications of any very great psychic force, we were able, at least, to obtain those usual phenomena of message-tilting which are at the same time so puerile and so inexplicable. Every Sunday evening we met in Harvey Deacon\"s studio at Badderly Gardens, the next house to the corner of Merton Park Road.\n\nHarvey Deacon\"s imaginative work in art would prepare anyone to find that he was an ardent lover of everything which was outr\u00e9 and sensational. A certain picturesqueness in the study of the occult had been the quality which had originally attracted him to it, but his attention was speedily arrested by some of those phenomena to which I have referred, and he was coming rapidly to the conclusion that what he had looked upon as an amusing romance and an after-dinner entertainment was really a very formidable reality. He is a man with a remarkably clear and logical brain \u2013 a true descendant of his ancestor, the well-known Scotch professor \u2013 and he represented in our small circle the critical element, the man who has no prejudices, is prepared to follow facts as far as he can see them, and refuses to theorise in advance of his data. His caution annoyed Moir as much as the latter\"s robust faith amused Deacon, but each in his own way was equally keen upon the matter.\n\nAnd I? What am I to say that I represented? I was not the devotee. I was not the scientific critic. Perhaps the best that I can claim for myself is that I was the dilettante man about town, anxious to be in the swim of every fresh movement, thankful for any new sensation which would take me out of myself and open up fresh possibilities of existence. I am not an enthusiast myself, but I like the company of those who are. Moir\"s talk, which made me feel as if we had a private pass-key through the door of death, filled me with a vague contentment. The soothing atmosphere of the seance with the darkened lights was delightful to me. In a word, the thing amused me, and so I was there.\n\nIt was, as I have said, upon the 14th of April last that the very singular event which I am about to put upon record took place. I was the first of the men to arrive at the studio, but Mrs Delamere was already there, having had afternoon tea with Mrs Harvey Deacon. The two ladies and Deacon himself were standing in front of an unfinished picture of his upon the easel. I am not an expert in art, and I have never professed to understand what Harvey Deacon meant by his pictures; but I could see in this instance that it was all very clever and imaginative, fairies and animals and allegorical figures of all sorts. The ladies were loud in their praises, and indeed the colour effect was a remarkable one.\n\n\"What do you think of it, Markham?\" he asked.\n\n\"Well, it\"s above me,\" said I. \"These beasts \u2013 what are they?\"\n\n\"Mythical monsters, imaginary creatures, heraldic emblems \u2013 a sort of weird, bizarre procession of them.\"\n\n\"With a white horse in front!\"\n\n\"It\"s not a horse,\" said he, rather testily \u2013 which was surprising, for he was a very good-humoured fellow as a rule, and hardly ever took himself seriously.\n\n\"What is it, then?\"\n\n\"Can\"t you see the horn in front? It\"s a unicorn. I told you they were heraldic beasts. Can\"t you recognise one?\"\n\n\"Very sorry, Deacon,\" said I, for he really seemed to be annoyed.\n\nHe laughed at his own irritation.\n\n\"Excuse me, Markham!\" said he; \"the fact is that I have had an awful job over the beast. All day I have been painting him in and painting him out, and trying to imagine what a real, live, ramping unicorn would look like. At last I got him, as I hoped; so when you failed to recognise it, it took me on the raw.\"\n\n\"Why, of course it\"s a unicorn,\" said I, for he was evidently depressed at my obtuseness. \"I can see the horn quite plainly, but I never saw a unicorn except beside the Royal Arms, and so I never thought of the creature. And these others are griffins and cockatrices, and dragons of sorts?\"\n\n\"Yes, I had no difficulty with them. It was the unicorn which bothered me. However, there\"s an end of it until tomorrow.\" He turned the picture round upon the easel, and we all chatted about other subjects.\n\nMoir was late that evening, and when he did arrive he brought with him, rather to our surprise, a small, stout Frenchman, whom he introduced as Monsieur Paul Le Duc. I say to our surprise, for we held a theory that any intrusion into our spiritual circle deranged the conditions, and introduced an element of suspicion. We knew that we could trust each other, but all our results were vitiated by the presence of an outsider. However, Moir soon reconciled us to the innovation. Monsieur Paul Le Duc was a famous student of occultism, a seer, a medium and a mystic. He was travelling in England with a letter of introduction to Moir from the president of the Parisian brothers of the Rosy Cross. What more natural than that he should bring him to our little seance or that we should feel honoured by his presence?\n\nHe was, as I have said, a small, stout man, undistinguished in appearance, with a broad, smooth, clean-shaven face, remarkable only for a pair of large, brown, velvety eyes, staring vaguely out in front of him. He was well dressed, with the manners of a gentleman, and his curious little turns of English speech set the ladies smiling. Mrs Deacon had a prejudice against our researches and left the room, upon which we lowered the lights, as was our custom, and drew up our chairs to the square mahogany table which stood in the centre of the studio. The light was subdued, but sufficient to allow us to see each other quite plainly. I remember that I could even observe the curious, podgy little square-topped hands which the Frenchman laid upon the table.\n\n\"What a fun!\" said he. \"It is many years since I have sat in this fashion, and it is to me amusing. Madame is medium. Does madame make the trance?\"\n\n\"Well, hardly that,\" said Mrs Delamere. \"But I am always conscious of extreme sleepiness.\"\n\n\"It is the first stage. Then you encourage it, and there comes the trance. When the trance comes, then out jumps your little spirit and in jumps another little spirit, and so you have direct talking or writing. You leave your machine to be worked by another. Hein? But what have unicorns to do with it?\"\n\nHarvey Deacon started in his chair. The Frenchman was moving his head slowly round and staring into the shadows which draped the walls.\n\n\"What a fun!\" said he. \"Always unicorns. Who has been thinking so hard upon a subject so bizarre?\"\n\n\"This is wonderful!\" cried Deacon. \"I have been trying to paint one all day. But how could you know it?\"\n\n\"You have been thinking of them in this room.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"But thoughts are things, my friend. When you imagine a thing you make a thing. You did not know it, hein? But I can see your unicorns because it is not only with my eye that I can see.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to say that I create a thing which has never existed by merely thinking of it?\"\n\n\"But certainly. It is the fact which lies under all other facts. That is why an evil thought is also a danger.\"\n\n\"They are, I suppose, upon the astral plane?\" said Moir.\n\n\"Ah, well, these are but words, my friends. They are there \u2013 somewhere \u2013 everywhere \u2013 I cannot tell myself. I see them. I could touch them.\"\n\n\"You could not make us see them.\"\n\n\"It is to materialise them. Hold! It is an experiment. But the power is wanting. Let us see what power we have, and then arrange what we shall do. May I place you as I wish?\"\n\n\"You evidently know a great deal more about it than we do,\" said Harvey Deacon; \"I wish that you would take complete control.\"\n\n\"It may be that the conditions are not good. But we will try what we can do. Madame will sit where she is, I next, and this gentleman beside me. Meester Moir will sit next to madame, because it is well to have blacks and blondes in turn. So! And now with your permission I will turn the lights all out.\"\n\n\"What is the advantage of the dark?\" I asked.\n\n\"Because the force with which we deal is a vibration of ether and so also is light. We have the wires all for ourselves now \u2013 hein? You will not be frightened in the darkness, madame? What a fun is such a seance!\"\n\nAt first the darkness appeared to be absolutely pitchy, but in a few minutes our eyes became so far accustomed to it that we could just make out each other\"s presence \u2013 very dimly and vaguely, it is true. I could see nothing else in the room \u2013 only the black loom of the motionless figures. We were all taking the matter much more seriously than we had ever done before.\n\n\"You will place your hands in front. It is hopeless that we touch, since we are so few round so large a table. You will compose yourself, madame, and if sleep should come to you you will not fight against it. And now we sit in silence and we expect \u2013 hein?\"\n\nSo we sat in silence and expected, staring out into the blackness in front of us. A clock ticked in the passage. A dog barked intermittently far away. Once or twice a cab rattled past in the street, and the gleam of its lamps through the chink in the curtains was a cheerful break in that gloomy vigil. I felt those physical symptoms with which previous seances had made me familiar \u2013 the coldness of the feet, the tingling in the hands, the glow of the palms, the feeling of a cold wind upon the back. Strange little shooting pains came in my forearms, especially as it seemed to me in my left one, which was nearest to our visitor \u2013 due no doubt to disturbance of the vascular system, but worthy of some attention all the same. At the same time I was conscious of a strained feeling of expectancy which was almost painful. From the rigid, absolute silence of my companions, I gathered that their nerves were as tense as my own.\n\nAnd then suddenly a sound came out of the darkness \u2013 a low, sibilant sound, the quick, thin breathing of a woman. Quicker and thinner yet it came, as between clenched teeth, to end in a loud gasp with a dull rustle of cloth.\n\n\"What\"s that? Is it all right?\" someone asked in the darkness.\n\n\"Yes, all is right,\" said the Frenchman. \"It is madame. She is in her trance. Now, gentlemen, if you will wait quiet you will see something, I think, which will interest you much.\"\n\nStill the ticking in the hall. Still the breathing, deeper and fuller now, from the medium. Still the occasional flash, more welcome than ever, of the passing lights of the hansoms. What a gap we were bridging, the half-raised veil of the eternal on the one side and the cabs of London on the other. The table was throbbing with a mighty pulse. It swayed steadily, rhythmically, with an easy swooping, scooping motion under our fingers. Sharp little raps and cracks came from its substance, file-firing, volley-firing, the sounds of a fagot burning briskly on a frosty night.\n\n\"There is much power,\" said the Frenchman. \"See it on the table!\"\n\nI had thought it was some delusion of my own, but all could see it now. There was a greenish-yellow phosphorescent light \u2013 or I should say a luminous vapour rather than a light \u2013 which lay over the surface of the table. It rolled and wreathed and undulated in dim glimmering folds, turning and swirling like clouds of smoke. I could see the white, square-ended hands of the French medium in this baleful light.\n\n\"What a fun!\" he cried. \"It is splendid!\"\n\n\"Shall we call the alphabet?\" asked Moir.\n\n\"But no \u2013 for we can do much better,\" said our visitor. \"It is but a clumsy thing to tilt the table for every letter of the alphabet, and with such a medium as madame we should do better than that.\"\n\n\"Yes, you will do better,\" said a voice.\n\n\"Who was that? Who spoke? Was that you, Markham?\"\n\n\"No, I did not speak.\"\n\n\"It was madame who spoke.\"\n\n\"But it was not her voice.\n\n\"Is that you, Mrs Delamere?\"\n\n\"It is not the medium, but it is the power which uses the organs of the medium,\" said the strange, deep voice.\n\n\"Where is Mrs Delamere? It will not hurt her, I trust.\"\n\n\"The medium is happy in another plane of existence. She has taken my place, as I have taken hers.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"It cannot matter to you who I am. I am one who has lived as you are living and who has died as you will die.\" We heard the creak and grate of a cab pulling up next door. There was an argument about the fare and the cabman grumbled hoarsely down the street. The green-yellow cloud still swirled faintly over the table, dull elsewhere, but glowing into a dim luminosity in the direction of the medium. It seemed to be piling itself up in front of her. A sense of fear and cold struck into my heart. It seemed to me that lightly and flippantly we had approached the most real and august of sacraments, that communion with the dead of which the fathers of the church had spoken.\n\n\"Don\"t you think we are going too far? Should we not break up this seance?\" I cried.\n\nBut the others were all earnest to see the end of it. They laughed at my scruples.\n\n\"All the powers are made for use,\" said Harvey Deacon. \"If we can do this, we should do this. Every new departure of knowledge has been called unlawful in its inception. It is right and proper that we should enquire into the nature of death.\"\n\n\"It is right and proper,\" said the voice.\n\n\"There, what more could you ask?\" cried Moir, who was much excited. \"Let us have a test. Will you give us a test that you are really there?\"\n\n\"What test do you demand?\"\n\n\"Well, now \u2013 I have some coins in my pocket. Will you tell me how many?\"\n\n\"We come back in the hope of teaching and of elevating, and not to guess childish riddles.\"\n\n\"Ha, ha, Meester Moir, you catch it that time,\" cried the Frenchman. \"But surely this is very good sense what the control is saying.\"\n\n\"It is a religion, not a game,\" said the cold, hard voice.\n\n\"Exactly \u2013 the very view I take of it,\" cried Moir. \"I am sure I am very sorry if I have asked a foolish question. You will not tell me who you are?\"\n\n\"What does it matter?\"\n\n\"Have you been a spirit long?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How long?\"\n\n\"We cannot reckon time as you do. Our conditions are different.\"\n\n\"Are you happy?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You would not wish to come back to life?\"\n\n\"No \u2013 certainly not.\"\n\n\"Are you busy?\"\n\n\"We could not be happy if we were not busy.\"\n\n\"What do you do?\"\n\n\"I have said that the conditions are entirely different.\"\n\n\"Can you give us no idea of your work?\"\n\n\"We labour for our own improvement and for the advancement of others.\"\n\n\"Do you like coming here tonight?\"\n\n\"I am glad to come if I can do any good by coming.\"\n\n\"Then to do good is your object?\"\n\n\"It is the object of all life on every plane.\"\n\n\"You see, Markham, that should answer your scruples.\"\n\nIt did, for my doubts had passed and only interest remained.\n\n\"Have you pain in your life?\" I asked.\n\n\"No; pain is a thing of the body.\"\n\n\"Have you mental pain?\"\n\n\"Yes; one may always be sad or anxious.\"\n\n\"Do you meet the friends whom you have known on earth?\"\n\n\"Some of them.\"\n\n\"Why only some of them?\"\n\n\"Only those who are sympathetic.\"\n\n\"Do husbands meet wives?\"\n\n\"Those who have truly loved.\"\n\n\"And the others?\"\n\n\"They are nothing to each other.\"\n\n\"There must be a spiritual connection?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Is what we are doing right?\"\n\n\"If done in the right spirit.\"\n\n\"What is the wrong spirit?\"\n\n\"Curiosity and levity.\"\n\n\"May harm come of that?\"\n\n\"Very serious harm.\"\n\n\"What sort of harm?\"\n\n\"You may call up forces over which you have no control.\"\n\n\"Evil forces?\"\n\n\"Undeveloped forces.\"\n\n\"You say they\"re dangerous. Dangerous to body or mind?\"\n\n\"Sometimes to both.\"\n\nThere was a pause, and the blackness seemed to grow blacker still while the yellow-green fog swirled and smoked upon the table.\n\n\"Any questions you would like to ask, Moir?\" said Harvey Deacon.\n\n\"Only this \u2013 do you pray in your world?\"\n\n\"One should pray in every world.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because it is the acknowledgement of forces outside ourselves.\"\n\n\"What religion do you hold over there?\"\n\n\"We differ exactly as you do.\"\n\n\"You have no certain knowledge?\"\n\n\"We have only faith.\"\n\n\"These questions of religion,\" said the Frenchman, \"they are of interest to you serious English people, but they are not so much fun. It seems to me that with this power here we might be able to have some great experience \u2013 hein? Something of which we could talk.\"\n\n\"But nothing could be more interesting than this,\" said Moir.\n\n\"Well, if you think so, that is very well,\" the Frenchman answered, peevishly. \"For my part, it seems to me that I have heard all this before, and that tonight I should weesh to try some experiment with all this force which is given to us. But if you have other questions, then ask them, and when you are finish we can try something more.\"\n\nBut the spell was broken. We asked and asked, but the medium sat silent in her chair. Only her deep, regular breathing showed that she was there. The mist still swirled upon the table.\n\n\"You have disturbed the harmony. She will not answer.\"\n\n\"But we have learned already all that she can tell \u2013 hein? For my part I wish to see something that I have never seen before.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"You will let me try?\"\n\n\"What would you do?\"\n\n\"I have said to you that thoughts are things. Now I wish to prove it to you, and to show you that which is only a thought. Yes, yes, I can do it and you will see. Now I ask you only to sit still and say nothing, and keep ever your hands quiet upon the table.\"\n\nThe room was blacker and more silent than ever. The same feeling of apprehension which had lain heavily upon me at the beginning of the seance was back at my heart once more. The roots of my hair were tingling.\n\n\"It is working! It is working!\" cried the Frenchman, and there was a crack in his voice as he spoke which told me that he also was strung to his tightest.\n\nThe luminous fog drifted slowly off the table and wavered and flickered across the room. There in the farther and darkest corner it gathered and glowed, hardening down into a shining core \u2013 a strange, shifty, luminous and yet non-illuminating patch of radiance, bright itself but throwing no rays into the darkness. It had changed from a greenish-yellow to a dusky sullen red. Then round this centre there coiled a dark, smoky substance, thickening, hardening, growing denser and blacker. And then the light went out, smothered in that which had grown round it.\n\n\"It has gone.\"\n\n\"Hush \u2013 there\"s something in the room.\"\n\nWe heard it in the corner where the light had been, something which breathed deeply and fidgeted in the darkness.\n\n\"What is it? Le Duc, what have you done?\"\n\n\"It is all right. No harm will come.\" The Frenchman\"s voice was treble with agitation.\n\n\"Good heavens, Moir, there\"s a large animal in the room. Here it is, close by my chair! Go away! Go away!\" It was Harvey Deacon\"s voice, and then came the sound of a blow upon some hard object. And then... And then... how can I tell you what happened then?\n\nSome huge thing hurtled against us in the darkness, rearing, stamping, smashing, springing, snorting. The table was splintered. We were scattered in every direction. It clattered and scrambled amongst us, rushing with horrible energy from one corner of the room to another. We were all screaming with fear, grovelling upon our hands and knees to get away from it. Something trod upon my left hand and I felt the bones splinter under the weight.\n\n\"A light! A light!\" someone yelled.\n\n\"Moir, you have matches, matches!\"\n\n\"No, I have none. Deacon, where are the matches? For God\"s sake, the matches!\"\n\n\"I can\"t find them. Here, you Frenchman, stop it!\"\n\n\"It is beyond me. Oh, mon Dieu, I cannot stop it. The door! Where is the door?\"\n\nMy hand, by good luck, lit upon the handle as I groped about in the darkness. The hard-breathing, snorting, rushing creature tore past me and butted with a fearful crash against the oaken partition. The instant that it had passed I turned the handle and next moment we were all outside, and the door shut behind us. From within came a horrible crashing and rending and stamping.\n\n\"What is it? In heaven\"s name, what is it?\"\n\n\"A horse. I saw it when the door opened. But Mrs Delamere \u2013?\"\n\n\"We must fetch her out. Come on, Markham; the longer we wait the less we shall like it.\"\n\nHe flung open the door and we rushed in. She was there on the ground amidst the splinters of her chair. We seized her and dragged her swiftly out, and as we gained the door I looked over my shoulder into the darkness. There were two strange eyes glowing at us, a rattle of hoofs and I had just time to slam the door when there came a crash upon it which split it from top to bottom.\n\n\"It\"s coming through! It\"s coming!\"\n\n\"Run, run for your lives!\" cried the Frenchman.\n\nAnother crash, and something shot through the riven door. It was a long white spike, gleaming in the lamplight. For a moment it shone before us, and then with a snap it disappeared again.\n\n\"Quick! Quick! This way!\" Harvey Deacon shouted. \"Carry her in! Here! Quick!\"\n\nWe had taken refuge in the dining-room and shut the heavy oak door. We laid the senseless woman upon the sofa, and as we did so, Moir, the hard man of business, drooped and fainted across the hearthrug. Harvey Deacon was as white as a corpse, jerking and twitching like an epileptic. With a crash we heard the studio door fly to pieces, and the snorting and stamping were in the passage, up and down, up and down, shaking the house with their fury. The Frenchman had sunk his face on his hands, and sobbed like a frightened child.\n\n\"What shall we do?\" I shook him roughly by the shoulder. \"Is a gun any use?\"\n\n\"No, no. The power will pass. Then it will end.\"\n\n\"You might have killed us all \u2013 you unspeakable fool \u2013 with your infernal experiments.\"\n\n\"I did not know. How could I tell that it would be frightened? It is mad with terror. It was his fault. He struck it.\"\n\nHarvey Deacon sprang up. \"Good heavens!\" he cried. A terrible scream had sounded through the house. \"It\"s my wife! Here, I\"m going out. If it\"s the Evil One himself I am going out!\"\n\nHe had thrown open the door and rushed out into the passage. At the end of it, at the foot of the stairs, Mrs Deacon was lying senseless, struck down by the sight which she had seen. But there was nothing else.\n\nWith eyes of horror we looked about us, but all was perfectly quiet and still. I approached the black square of the studio door, expecting with every slow step that some atrocious shape would hurl itself out of it. But nothing came, and all was silent inside the room. Peeping and peering, our hearts in our mouths, we came to the very threshold and stared into the darkness. There was still no sound, but in one direction there was also no darkness. A luminous, glowing cloud, with an incandescent centre, hovered in the corner of the room. Slowly it dimmed and faded, growing thinner and fainter, until at last the same dense, velvety blackness filled the whole studio. And with the last flickering gleam of that baleful light the Frenchman broke into a shout of joy.\n\n\"What a fun!\" he cried. \"No one is hurt, and only the door broken and the ladies frightened. But, my friends, we have done what has never been done before.\"\n\n\"And as far as I can help,\" said Harvey Deacon, \"it will certainly never be done again.\"\n\nAnd that was what befell on the 14th of April last at No. 17 Badderly Gardens. I began by saying that it would seem too grotesque to dogmatise as to what it was which actually did occur; but I give my impressions, our impressions (since they are corroborated by Harvey Deacon and John Moir), for what they are worth. You may, if it pleases you, imagine that we were the victims of an elaborate and extraordinary hoax. Or you may think with us that we underwent a very real and a very terrible experience. Or perhaps you may know more than we do of such occult matters and can inform us of some similar occurrence. In this latter case a letter to William Markham, 146M, Albany, would help to throw a light upon that which is very dark to us.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Leather Funnel ]\n\nMy friend Lionel Dacre lived in the Avenue de Wagram, Paris. His house was that small one with the iron railings and grass plot in front of it, on the left-hand side as you pass down from the Arc de Triomphe. I fancy that it had been there long before the avenue was constructed, for the grey tiles were stained with lichens and the walls were mildewed and discoloured with age. It looked a small house from the street, five windows in front, if I remember right, but it deepened into a single long chamber at the back. It was here that Dacre had that singular library of occult literature and the fantastic curiosities which served as a hobby for himself and an amusement for his friends. A wealthy man of refined and eccentric tastes, he had spent much of his life and fortune in gathering together what was said to be a unique private collection of Talmudic, cabalistic and magical works, many of them of great rarity and value. His tastes leaned toward the marvellous and the monstrous, and I have heard that his experiments in the direction of the unknown have passed all the bounds of civilisation and of decorum. To his English friends he never alluded to such matters, and took the tone of the student and virtuoso; but a Frenchman whose tastes were of the same nature has assured me that the worst excesses of the Black Mass have been perpetrated in that large and lofty hall, which is lined with the shelves of his books and the cases of his museum.\n\nDacre\"s appearance was enough to show that his deep interest in these psychic matters was intellectual rather than spiritual. There was no trace of asceticism upon his heavy face, but there was much mental force in his huge, dome-like skull, which curved upward from amongst his thinning locks like a snow-peak above its fringe of fir trees. His knowledge was greater than his wisdom and his powers were far superior to his character. The small bright eyes, buried deeply in his fleshy face, twinkled with intelligence and an unabated curiosity of life, but they were the eyes of a sensualist and an egotist. Enough of the man, for he is dead now, poor devil, dead at the very time that he had made sure that he had at last discovered the elixir of life. It is not with his complex character that I have to deal, but with the very strange and inexplicable incident which had its rise in my visit to him in the early spring of the year \"82.\n\nI had known Dacre in England, for my researches in the Assyrian Room of the British Museum had been conducted at the time when he was endeavouring to establish a mystic and esoteric meaning in the Babylonian tablets, and this community of interests had brought us together. Chance remarks had led to daily conversation, and that to something verging upon friendship. I had promised him that on my next visit to Paris I would call upon him. At the time when I was able to fulfil my compact I was living in a cottage at Fontainebleau, and as the evening trains were inconvenient, he asked me to spend the night in his house.\n\n\"I have only that one spare couch,\" said he, pointing to a broad sofa in his large salon; \"I hope that you will manage to be comfortable there.\"\n\nIt was a singular bedroom, with its high walls of brown volumes, but there could be no more agreeable furniture to a bookworm like myself, and there is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book. I assured him that I could desire no more charming chamber and no more congenial surroundings.\n\n\"If the fittings are neither convenient nor conventional, they are at least costly,\" said he, looking round at his shelves. \"I have expended nearly a quarter of a million of money upon these objects which surround you. Books, weapons, gems, carvings, tapestries, images \u2013 there is hardly a thing here which has not its history, and it is generally one worth telling.\"\n\nHe was seated as he spoke at one side of the open fireplace, and I at the other. His reading-table was on his right, and the strong lamp above it ringed it with a very vivid circle of golden light. A half-rolled palimpsest lay in the centre and around it were many quaint articles of bric-\u00e0-brac. One of these was a large funnel, such as is used for filling wine casks. It appeared to be made of black wood and to be rimmed with discoloured brass.\n\n\"That is a curious thing,\" I remarked. \"What is the history of that?\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said he, \"it is the very question which I have had occasion to ask myself. I would give a good deal to know. Take it in your hands and examine it.\"\n\nI did so, and found that what I had imagined to be wood was in reality leather, though age had dried it into an extreme hardness. It was a large funnel, and might hold a quart when full. The brass rim encircled the wide end, but the narrow was also tipped with metal.\n\n\"What do you make of it?\" asked Dacre.\n\n\"I should imagine that it belonged to some vintner or maltster in the Middle Ages,\" said I. \"I have seen in England leathern drinking flagons of the seventeenth century \u2013 \"black jacks\" as they were called \u2013 which were of the same colour and hardness as this filler.\"\n\n\"I dare say the date would be about the same,\" said Dacre, \"and, no doubt, also, it was used for filling a vessel with liquid. If my suspicions are correct, however, it was a queer vintner who used it, and a very singular cask which was filled. Do you observe nothing strange at the spout end of the funnel.\"\n\nAs I held it to the light I observed that at a spot some five inches above the brass tip the narrow neck of the leather funnel was all haggled and scored, as if someone had notched it round with a blunt knife. Only at that point was there any roughening of the dead black surface.\n\n\"Someone has tried to cut off the neck.\"\n\n\"Would you call it a cut?\"\n\n\"It is torn and lacerated. It must have taken some strength to leave these marks on such tough material, whatever the instrument may have been. But what do you think of it? I can tell that you know more than you say.\"\n\nDacre smiled, and his little eyes twinkled with knowledge.\n\n\"Have you included the psychology of dreams among your learned studies?\" he asked.\n\n\"I did not even know that there was such a psychology.\"\n\n\"My dear sir, that shelf above the gem case is filled with volumes, from Albertus Magnus onward, which deal with no other subject. It is a science in itself.\"\n\n\"A science of charlatans.\"\n\n\"The charlatan is always the pioneer. From the astrologer came the astronomer, from the alchemist the chemist, from the mesmerist the experimental psychologist. The quack of yesterday is the professor of tomorrow. Even such subtle and elusive things as dreams will in time be reduced to system and order. When that time comes the researches of our friends on the bookshelf yonder will no longer be the amusement of the mystic but the foundations of a science.\"\n\n\"Supposing that is so, what has the science of dreams to do with a large, black, brass-rimmed funnel?\"\n\n\"I will tell you. You know that I have an agent who is always on the lookout for rarities and curiosities for my collection. Some days ago he heard of a dealer upon one of the quais who had acquired some old rubbish found in a cupboard in an ancient house at the back of the Rue Mathurin, in the Quartier Latin. The dining-room of this old house is decorated with a coat of arms, chevrons and bars rouge upon a field argent, which proves, upon enquiry, to be the shield of Nicholas de la Reynie, a high official of King Louis XIV. There can be no doubt that the other articles in the cupboard date back to the early days of that king. The inference is, therefore, that they were all the property of this Nicholas de la Reynie, who was, as I understand, the gentleman specially concerned with the maintenance and execution of the Draconic laws of that epoch.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"I would ask you now to take the funnel into your hands once more and to examine the upper brass rim. Can you make out any lettering upon it?\"\n\nThere were certainly some scratches upon it, almost obliterated by time. The general effect was of several letters, the last of which bore some resemblance to a B.\n\n\"You make it a B?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do.\"\n\n\"So do I. In fact, I have no doubt whatever that it is a B.\"\n\n\"But the nobleman you mentioned would have had R for his initial.\"\n\n\"Exactly! That\"s the beauty of it. He owned this curious object and yet he had someone else\"s initials upon it. Why did he do this?\"\n\n\"I can\"t imagine; can you?\"\n\n\"Well, I might, perhaps, guess. Do you observe something drawn a little farther along the rim?\"\n\n\"I should say it was a crown.\"\n\n\"It is undoubtedly a crown; but if you examine it in a good light, you will convince yourself that it is not an ordinary crown. It is a heraldic crown \u2013 a badge of rank, and it consists of an alternation of four pearls and strawberry leaves, the proper badge of a marquis. We may infer, therefore, that the person whose initials end in B was entitled to wear that coronet.\"\n\n\"Then this common leather filler belonged to a marquis?\"\n\nDacre gave a peculiar smile.\n\n\"Or to some member of the family of a marquis,\" said he. \"So much we have clearly gathered from this engraved rim.\"\n\n\"But what has all this to do with dreams?\" I do not know whether it was from a look upon Dacre\"s face or from some subtle suggestion in his manner, but a feeling of repulsion, of unreasoning horror, came upon me as I looked at the gnarled old lump of leather.\n\n\"I have more than once received important information through my dreams,\" said my companion in the didactic manner which he loved to affect. \"I make it a rule now when I am in doubt upon any material point to place the article in question beside me as I sleep, and to hope for some enlightenment. The process does not appear to me to be very obscure, though it has not yet received the blessing of orthodox science. According to my theory, any object which has been intimately associated with any supreme paroxysm of human emotion, whether it be joy or pain, will retain a certain atmosphere or association which it is capable of communicating to a sensitive mind. By a sensitive mind I do not mean an abnormal one, but such a trained and educated mind as you or I possess.\"\n\n\"You mean, for example, that if I slept beside that old sword upon the wall, I might dream of some bloody incident in which that very sword took part?\"\n\n\"An excellent example, for, as a matter of fact, that sword was used in that fashion by me, and I saw in my sleep the death of its owner, who perished in a brisk skirmish which I have been unable to identify but which occurred at the time of the wars of the Frondists. If you think of it, some of our popular observances show that the fact has already been recognised by our ancestors, although we, in our wisdom, have classed it among superstitions.\"\n\n\"For example?\"\n\n\"Well, the placing of the bride\"s cake beneath the pillow in order that the sleeper may have pleasant dreams. That is one of several instances which you will find set forth in a small brochure which I am myself writing upon the subject. But to come back to the point, I slept one night with this funnel beside me and I had a dream which certainly throws a curious light upon its use and origin.\"\n\n\"What did you dream?\"\n\n\"I dreamed \u2013 \" He paused, and an intent look of interest came over his massive face. \"By Jove, that\"s well thought of,\" said he. \"This really will be an exceedingly interesting experiment. You are yourself a psychic subject \u2013 with nerves which respond readily to any impression.\"\n\n\"I have never tested myself in that direction.\"\n\n\"Then we shall test you tonight. Might I ask you as a very great favour, when you occupy that couch tonight, to sleep with this old funnel placed by the side of your pillow?\"\n\nThe request seemed to me a grotesque one; but I have myself, in my complex nature, a hunger after all which is bizarre and fantastic. I had not the faintest belief in Dacre\"s theory, nor any hopes for success in such an experiment; yet it amused me that the experiment should be made. Dacre, with great gravity, drew a small stand to the head of my settee, and placed the funnel upon it. Then, after a short conversation, he wished me good-night and left me.\n\nI sat for some little time smoking by the smouldering fire, and turning over in my mind the curious incident which had occurred and the strange experience which might lie before me. Sceptical as I was, there was something impressive in the assurance of Dacre\"s manner, and my extraordinary surroundings, the huge room with the strange and often sinister objects which were hung round it, struck solemnity into my soul. Finally I undressed, and turning out the lamp, I lay down. After long tossing I fell asleep. Let me try to describe as accurately as I can the scene which came to me in my dreams. It stands out now in my memory more clearly than anything which I have seen with my waking eyes.\n\nThere was a room which bore the appearance of a vault. Four spandrels from the corners ran up to join a sharp, cup-shaped roof. The architecture was rough, but very strong. It was evidently part of a great building.\n\nThree men in black, with curious, top-heavy, black velvet hats, sat in a line upon a red-carpeted dais. Their faces were very solemn and sad. On the left stood two long-gowned men with portfolios in their hands, which seemed to be stuffed with papers. Upon the right, looking towards me, was a small woman with blonde hair and singular, light-blue eyes \u2013 the eyes of a child. She was past her first youth, but could not yet be called middle-aged. Her figure was inclined to stoutness and her bearing was proud and confident. Her face was pale, but serene. It was a curious face, comely and yet feline, with a subtle suggestion of cruelty about the straight, strong little mouth and chubby jaw. She was draped in some sort of loose, white gown. Beside her stood a thin, eager priest, who whispered in her ear and continually raised a crucifix before her eyes. She turned her head and looked fixedly past the crucifix at the three men in black, who were, I felt, her judges.\n\nAs I gazed the three men stood up and said something, but I could distinguish no words, though I was aware that it was the central one who was speaking. They then swept out of the room, followed by the two men with the papers. At the same instant several rough-looking fellows in stout jerkins came bustling in and removed first the red carpet, and then the boards which formed the dais, so as to entirely clear the room. When the screen was removed I saw some singular articles of furniture behind it. One looked like a bed with wooden rollers at each end, and a winch handle to regulate its length. Another was a wooden horse. There were several other curious objects, and a number of swinging cords, which played over pulleys. It was not unlike a modern gymnasium.\n\nWhen the room had been cleared there appeared a new figure upon the scene. This was a tall, thin person clad in black, with a gaunt and austere face. The aspect of the man made me shudder. His clothes were all shining with grease and mottled with stains. He bore himself with a slow and impressive dignity, as if he took command of all things from the instant of his entrance. In spite of his rude appearance and sordid dress, it was now his business, his room, his to command. He carried a coil of light ropes over his left forearm. The lady looked him up and down with a searching glance, but her expression was unchanged. It was confident \u2013 even defiant. But it was very different with the priest. His face was ghastly white, and I saw the moisture glisten and run on his high, sloping forehead. He threw up his hands in prayer and he stooped continually to mutter frantic words in the lady\"s ear.\n\nThe man in black now advanced, and taking one of the cords from his left arm, he bound the woman\"s hands together. She held them meekly towards him as he did so. Then he took her arm with a rough grip and led her towards the wooden horse, which was little higher than her waist. On to this she was lifted and laid, with her back upon it and her face to the ceiling, while the priest, quivering with horror, had rushed out of the room. The woman\"s lips were moving rapidly and though I could hear nothing I knew that she was praying. Her feet hung down on either side of the horse, and I saw that the rough varlets in attendance had fastened cords to her ankles and secured the other ends to iron rings in the stone floor.\n\nMy heart sank within me as I saw these ominous preparations, and yet I was held by the fascination of horror and I could not take my eyes from the strange spectacle. A man had entered the room with a bucket of water in either hand. Another followed with a third bucket. They were laid beside the wooden horse. The second man had a wooden dipper \u2013 a bowl with a straight handle \u2013 in his other hand. This he gave to the man in black. At the same moment one of the varlets approached with a dark object in his hand, which even in my dream filled me with a vague feeling of familiarity. It was a leathern filler. With horrible energy he thrust it \u2013 but I could stand no more. My hair stood on end with horror. I writhed, I struggled, I broke through the bonds of sleep, and I burst with a shriek into my own life, and found myself lying shivering with terror in the huge library, with the moonlight flooding through the window and throwing strange silver and black traceries upon the opposite wall. Oh, what a blessed relief to feel that I was back in the nineteenth century \u2013 back out of that medieval vault into a world where men had human hearts within their bosoms. I sat up on my couch, trembling in every limb, my mind divided between thankfulness and horror. To think that such things were ever done \u2013 that they could be done without God striking the villains dead. Was it all a fantasy or did it really stand for something which had happened in the black, cruel days of the world\"s history? I sank my throbbing head upon my shaking hands. And then, suddenly, my heart seemed to stand still in my bosom, and I could not even scream, so great was my terror. Something was advancing towards me through the darkness of the room.\n\nIt is a horror coming upon a horror which breaks a man\"s spirit. I could not reason, I could not pray; I could only sit like a frozen image and glare at the dark figure which was coming down the great room. And then it moved out into the white lane of moonlight, and I breathed once more. It was Dacre, and his face showed that he was as frightened as myself.\n\n\"Was that you? For God\"s sake what\"s the matter?\" he asked in a husky voice.\n\n\"Oh, Dacre, I am glad to see you! I have been down into hell. It was dreadful.\"\n\n\"Then it was you who screamed?\"\n\n\"I dare say it was.\"\n\n\"It rang through the house. The servants are all terrified.\" He struck a match and lit the lamp. \"I think we may get the fire to burn up again,\" he added, throwing some logs upon the embers. \"Good God, my dear chap, how white you are! You look as if you had seen a ghost.\"\n\n\"So I have \u2013 several ghosts.\"\n\n\"The leather funnel has acted, then?\"\n\n\"I wouldn\"t sleep near the infernal thing again for all the money you could offer me.\"\n\nDacre chuckled.\n\n\"I expected that you would have a lively night of it,\" said he. \"You took it out of me in return, for that scream of yours wasn\"t a very pleasant sound at two in the morning. I suppose from what you say that you have seen the whole dreadful business.\"\n\n\"What dreadful business?\"\n\n\"The torture of the water \u2013 the \"Extraordinary Question\", as it was called in the genial days of \"Le Roi Soleil\". Did you stand it out to the end?\"\n\n\"No, thank God, I awoke before it really began.\"\n\n\"Ah! it is just as well for you. I held out till the third bucket. Well, it is an old story, and they are all in their graves now, anyhow, so what does it matter how they got there? I suppose that you have no idea what it was that you have seen?\"\n\n\"The torture of some criminal. She must have been a terrible malefactor indeed if her crimes are in proportion to her penalty.\"\n\n\"Well, we have that small consolation,\" said Dacre, wrapping his dressing-gown round him and crouching closer to the fire. \"They were in proportion to her penalty. That is to say, if I am correct in the lady\"s identity.\"\n\n\"How could you possibly know her identity?\"\n\nFor answer Dacre took down an old vellum-covered volume from the shelf.\n\n\"Just listen to this,\" said he; \"it is in the French of the seventeenth century, but I will give a rough translation as I go. You will judge for yourself whether I have solved the riddle or not.\n\n\"The prisoner was brought before the Grand Chambers and Tournelles of Parliament, sitting as a court of justice, charged with the murder of Master Dreux d\"Aubray, her father, and of her two brothers, MM. d\"Aubray, one being civil lieutenant and the other a counsellor of Parliament. In person it seemed hard to believe that she had really done such wicked deeds, for she was of a mild appearance and of short stature, with a fair skin and blue eyes. Yet the court, having found her guilty, condemned her to the ordinary and to the extraordinary question in order that she might be forced to name her accomplices, after which she should be carried in a cart to the Place de Gr\u00e8ve, there to have her head cut off, her body being afterwards burned and her ashes scattered to the winds.\n\n\"The date of this entry is July 16, 1676.\"\n\n\"It is interesting,\" said I, \"but not convincing. How do you prove the two women to be the same?\"\n\n\"I am coming to that. The narrative goes on to tell of the woman\"s behaviour when questioned. \"When the executioner approached her she recognised him by the cords which he held in his hands, and she at once held out her own hands to him, looking at him from head to foot without uttering a word.\" How\"s that?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was so.\"\n\n\"She gazed without wincing upon the wooden horse and rings which had twisted so many limbs and caused so many shrieks of agony. When her eyes fell upon the three pails of water, which were all ready for her, she said with a smile, \"All that water must have been brought here for the purpose of drowning me, monsieur. You have no idea, I trust, of making a person of my small stature swallow it all.\"\n\n\"Shall I read the details of the torture?\"\n\n\"No, for heaven\"s sake, don\"t.\"\n\n\"Here is a sentence which must surely show you that what is here recorded is the very scene which you have gazed upon tonight: \"The good Abb\u00e9 Pirot, unable to contemplate the agonies which were to be suffered by his penitent, had hurried from the room.\" Does that convince you?\"\n\n\"It does entirely. There can be no question that it is indeed the same event. But who, then, is this lady whose appearance was so attractive and whose end was so horrible?\"\n\nFor answer Dacre came across to me and placed the small lamp upon the table which stood by my bed. Lifting up the ill-omened filler, he turned the brass rim so that the light fell full upon it. Seen in this way the engraving seemed clearer than on the night before.\n\n\"We have already agreed that this is the badge of a marquis or of a marquise,\" said he. \"We have also settled that the last letter is B.\"\n\n\"It is undoubtedly so.\"\n\n\"I now suggest to you that the other letters from left to right are M, M, a small d, A, a small d and then the final B.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am sure that you are right. I can make out the two small d\"s quite plainly.\"\n\n\"What I have read to you tonight,\" said Dacre, \"is the official record of the trial of Marie Madeleine d\"Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, one of the most famous poisoners and murderers of all time.\"\n\nI sat in silence, overwhelmed at the extraordinary nature of the incident and at the completeness of the proof with which Dacre had exposed its real meaning. In a vague way I remembered some details of the woman\"s career, her unbridled debauchery, the cold-blooded and protracted torture of her sick father, the murder of her brothers for motives of petty gain. I recollected also that the bravery of her end had done something to atone for the horror of her life, and that all Paris had sympathised with her last moments and blessed her as a martyr within a few days of the time when they had cursed her as a murderess. One objection, and one only, occurred to my mind.\n\n\"How came her initials and her badge of rank upon the filler? Surely they did not carry their medieval homage to the nobility to the point of decorating instruments of torture with their titles?\"\n\n\"I was puzzled with the same point,\" said Dacre, \"but it admits of a simple explanation. The case excited extraordinary interest at the time, and nothing could be more natural than that La Reynie, the head of the police, should retain this filler as a grim souvenir. It was not often that a marchioness of France underwent the extraordinary question. That he should engrave her initials upon it for the information of others was surely a very ordinary proceeding upon his part.\"\n\n\"And this?\" I asked, pointing to the marks upon the leathern neck.\n\n\"She was a cruel tigress,\" said Dacre, as he turned away. \"I think it is evident that like other tigresses her teeth were both strong and sharp.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lot No. 249 ]\n\nOf the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee and of the cause of the great terror of Abercrombie Smith it may be that no absolute and final judgement will ever be delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself and such corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree Peterson, Fellow of Old\"s, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet in the main, the story must rest upon Smith alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of nature has been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of nature is, how dimly we can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great and terrible possibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put a limit to the strange bypaths into which the human spirit may wander.\n\nIn a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the centre under the weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace them up against wind and weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing two landings and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full and strong had been that tide of young, English life. And what was left now of all those hopes, those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here were the silent stair and the grey, old wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic device still to be read upon its surface, like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.\n\nIn the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms which opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room and of a bedroom, while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the one as a coal-cellar and the other as the living-room of the servant, or scout, Thomas Styles, whose duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied them now \u2013 Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him and William Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest storey.\n\nIt was ten o\"clock on a bright, spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his armchair, his feet upon the fender and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men \u2013 men whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust. Hastie, indeed, was stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar, but a coming examination had already cast its shadow over him and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week which health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models and anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as the nature of his studies, while a couple of single-sticks and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantelpiece hinted at the means by which, with Hastie\"s help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least-distant form. They knew each other very well \u2013 so well that they could sit now in that soothing silence which is the very highest development of companionship.\n\n\"Have some whisky,\" said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. \"Scotch in the jug and Irish in the bottle.\"\n\n\"No, thanks. I\"m in for the sculls. I don\"t liquor when I\"m training. How about you?\"\n\n\"I\"m reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone.\"\n\nHastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence. \"By the way, Smith,\" asked Hastie, presently, \"have you made the acquaintance of either of the fellows on your stair yet?\"\n\n\"Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more.\"\n\n\"Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but as much as I want. I don\"t think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there\"s much amiss with Monkhouse Lee.\"\n\n\"Meaning the thin one?\"\n\n\"Precisely. He is a gentlemanly little fellow. I don\"t think there is any vice in him. But then you can\"t know him without knowing Bellingham.\"\n\n\"Meaning the fat one?\"\n\n\"Yes, the fat one. And he\"s a man whom I, for one, would rather not know.\"\n\nAbercrombie Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced across at his companion. \"What\"s up, then?\" he asked. \"Drink? Cards? Cad? You used not to be censorious.\"\n\n\"Ah! you evidently don\"t know the man or you wouldn\"t ask. There\"s something damnable about him \u2013 something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices \u2013 an evil liver. He\"s no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his line that they have ever had in the college.\"\n\n\"Medicine or classics?\"\n\n\"Eastern languages. He\"s a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattled to the Arabs as if he had been born and nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger. Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham seemed to take it as his right, too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad of Old\"s, wasn\"t it?\"\n\n\"Why do you say you can\"t know Lee without knowing Bellingham?\"\n\n\"Because Bellingham is engaged to his sister Eveline. Such a bright little girl, Smith! I know the whole family well. It\"s disgusting to see that brute with her. A toad and a dove, that\"s what they always remind me of.\"\n\nAbercrombie Smith grinned and knocked his ashes out against the side of the grate.\n\n\"You show every card in your hand, old chap,\" said he. \"What a prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-thinking old man it is! You have really nothing against the fellow except that.\"\n\n\"Well, I\"ve known her ever since she was as long as that cherry-wood pipe, and I don\"t like to see her taking risks. And it is a risk. He looks beastly. And he has a beastly temper, a venomous temper. You remember his row with Long Norton?\"\n\n\"No; you always forget that I am a freshman.\"\n\n\"Ah, it was last winter. Of course. Well, you know the towpath along by the river. There were several fellows going along it, Bellingham in front, when they came on an old market-woman coming the other way. It had been raining \u2013 you know what those fields are like when it has rained \u2013 and the path ran between the river and a great puddle that was nearly as broad. Well, what does this swine do but keep the path and push the old girl into the mud, where she and her marketings came to terrible grief. It was a blackguard thing to do, and Long Norton, who is as gentle a fellow as ever stepped, told him what he thought of it. One word led to another, and it ended in Norton laying his stick across the fellow\"s shoulders. There was the deuce of a fuss about it and it\"s a treat to see the way in which Bellingham looks at Norton when they meet now. By Jove, Smith, it\"s nearly eleven o\"clock!\"\n\n\"No hurry. Light your pipe again.\"\n\n\"Not I. I\"m supposed to be in training. Here I\"ve been sitting gossiping when I ought to have been safely tucked up. I\"ll borrow your skull, if you can share it. Williams has had mine for a month. I\"ll take the little bones of your ear, too, if you are sure you won\"t need them. Thanks very much. Never mind a bag, I can carry them very well under my arm. Good night, my son, and take my tip as to your neighbour.\"\n\nWhen Hastie, bearing his anatomical plunder, had clattered off down the winding stair, Abercrombie Smith hurled his pipe into the wastepaper basket, and drawing his chair nearer to the lamp, plunged into a formidable, green-covered volume, adorned with great, coloured maps of that strange, internal kingdom of which we are the hapless and helpless monarchs. Though a freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in medicine, for he had worked for four years at Glasgow and at Berlin, and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his profession. With his firm mouth, broad forehead and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient and so strong that he might in the end overtop a more showy genius. A man who can hold his own among Scotchmen and North Germans is not a man to be easily set back. Smith had left a name at Glasgow and at Berlin, and he was bent now upon doing as much at Oxford, if hard work and devotion could accomplish it.\n\nHe had sat reading for about an hour, and the hands of the noisy carriage clock upon the side-table were rapidly closing together upon the twelve, when a sudden sound fell upon the student\"s ear \u2013 a sharp, rather shrill sound, like the hissing intake of a man\"s breath who gasps under some strong emotion. Smith laid down his book and slanted his ear to listen. There was no one on either side or above him, so that the interruption came certainly from the neighbour beneath \u2013 the same neighbour of whom Hastie had given so unsavoury an account. Smith knew him only as a flabby, pale-faced man of silent and studious habits, a man whose lamp threw a golden bar from the old turret even after he had extinguished his own. This community in lateness had formed a certain silent bond between them. It was soothing to Smith when the hours stole on towards dawning to feel that there was another so close who set as small a value upon his sleep as he did. Even now, as his thoughts turned towards him, Smith\"s feelings were kindly. Hastie was a good fellow, but he was rough, strong-fibred, with no imagination or sympathy. He could not tolerate departures from what he looked upon as the model type of manliness. If a man could not be measured by a public-school standard, then he was beyond the pale with Hastie. Like so many who are themselves robust, he was apt to confuse the constitution with the character, to ascribe to want of principle what was really a want of circulation. Smith, with his stronger mind, knew his friend\"s habit, and made allowance for it now as his thoughts turned towards the man beneath him.\n\nThere was no return of the singular sound, and Smith was about to turn to his work once more, when suddenly there broke out in the silence of the night a hoarse cry, a positive scream \u2013 the call of a man who is moved and shaken beyond all control. Smith sprang out of his chair and dropped his book. He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was something in this sudden, uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and prickled in his skin. Coming in such a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head. Should he rush down or was it better to wait? He had all the national hatred of making a scene, and he knew so little of his neighbour that he would not lightly intrude upon his affairs. For a moment he stood in doubt and even as he balanced the matter there was a quick rattle of footsteps upon the stairs, and young Monkhouse Lee, half-dressed and as white as ashes, burst into his room.\n\n\"Come down!\" he gasped. \"Bellingham\"s ill.\"\n\nAbercrombie Smith followed him closely downstairs into the sitting-room which was beneath his own, and intent as he was upon the matter in hand, he could not but take an amazed glance around him as he crossed the threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before \u2013 a museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf; while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was slung in a double noose.\n\nIn the centre of this singular chamber was a large, square table, littered with papers, bottles and the dried leaves of some graceful, palm-like plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together in order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the wall, as was evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of the table. The mummy itself, a horrid, black, withered thing, like a charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with its claw-like hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up against the sarcophagus was an old yellow scroll of papyrus and in front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of the room, his head thrown back, his widely opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the crocodile above him and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every expiration.\n\n\"My God! he\"s dying!\" cried Monkhouse Lee, distractedly.\n\nHe was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a Spanish rather than of an English type, with a Celtic intensity of manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of Abercrombie Smith.\n\n\"Only a faint, I think,\" said the medical student. \"Just give me a hand with him. You take his feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick all those little wooden devils off? What a litter it is! Now he will be all right if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has he been up to at all?\"\n\n\"I don\"t know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well, you know. It is very good of you to come down.\"\n\n\"His heart is going like a pair of castanets,\" said Smith, laying his band on the breast of the unconscious man. \"He seems to me to be frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him! What a face he has got on him!\"\n\nIt was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline were equally unnatural. It was white, not with the ordinary pallor of fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the under side of a sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time been considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and folds, and was shot with a meshwork of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled ears protruding at the sides. His light-grey eyes were still open, the pupils dilated and the balls projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed to Smith as he looked down upon him that he had never seen nature\"s danger signals flying so plainly upon a man\"s countenance, and his thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him an hour before.\n\n\"What the deuce can have frightened him so?\" he asked.\n\n\"It\"s the mummy.\"\n\n\"The mummy? How, then?\"\n\n\"I don\"t know. It\"s beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it. It\"s the second fright he has given me. It was the same last winter. I found him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him.\"\n\n\"What does he want with the mummy, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, he\"s a crank, you know. It\"s his hobby. He knows more about these things than any man in England. But I wish he wouldn\"t! Ah, he\"s beginning to come to.\"\n\nA faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham\"s ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids shivered like a sail after a calm. He clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath between his teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition around him. As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa, seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into a drawer, turned the key, and then staggered back on to the sofa.\n\n\"What\"s up?\" he asked. \"What do you chaps want?\"\n\n\"You\"ve been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss,\" said Monkhouse Lee. \"If our neighbour here from above hadn\"t come down, I\"m sure I don\"t know what I should have done with you.\"\n\n\"Ah, it\"s Abercrombie Smith,\" said Bellingham, glancing up at him. \"How very good of you to come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what a fool I am!\"\n\nHe sank his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of hysterical laughter.\n\n\"Look here! Drop it!\" cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder. \"Your nerves are all in a jangle. You must drop these little midnight games with mummies or you\"ll be going off your chump. You\"re all on wires now.\"\n\n\"I wonder,\" said Bellingham, \"whether you would be as cool as I am if you had seen \u2013\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with a mummy without trying your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of myself too much lately. But I am all right now. Please don\"t go, though. Just wait for a few minutes until I am quite myself.\"\n\n\"The room is very close,\" remarked Lee, throwing open the window and letting in the cool night air.\n\n\"It\"s balsamic resin,\" said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried palmate leaves from the table and frizzled it over the chimney of the lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a pungent, biting odour filled the chamber. \"It\"s the sacred plant \u2013 the plant of the priests,\" he remarked. \"Do you know anything of Eastern languages, Smith?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all. Not a word.\"\n\nThe answer seemed to lift a weight from the Egyptologist\"s mind.\n\n\"By the way,\" he continued, \"how long was it from the time that you ran down, until I came to my senses?\"\n\n\"Not long. Some four or five minutes.\"\n\n\"I thought it could not be very long,\" said he, drawing a long breath. \"But what a strange thing unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it were seconds or weeks. Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his tongue, he would tell us that this lapse of time has been but a closing of the eyes and a reopening of them. He is a singularly fine mummy, Smith.\"\n\nSmith stepped over to the table and looked down with a professional eye at the black and twisted form in front of him. The features, though horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black, coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made Smith\"s gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like covering, were exposed, and the sunken, leaden-hued abdomen, with the long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the lower limbs were wrapped round with coarse, yellow bandages. A number of little clove-like pieces of myrrh and of cassia were sprinkled over the body and lay scattered on the inside of the case.\n\n\"I don\"t know his name,\" said Bellingham, passing his hand over the shrivelled head. \"You see the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see it printed on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up.\"\n\n\"He has been a very pretty sort of fellow in his day,\" remarked Abercrombie Smith.\n\n\"He has been a giant. His mummy is six feet seven in length, and that would be a giant over there, for they were never a very robust race. Feel these great, knotted bones, too. He would be a nasty fellow to tackle.\"\n\n\"Perhaps these very hands helped to build the stones into the pyramids,\" suggested Monkhouse Lee, looking down with disgust in his eyes at the crooked, unclean talons.\n\n\"No fear. This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after in the most approved style. They did not serve hodsmen in that fashion. Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been calculated that this sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds in our money. Our friend was a noble at the least. What do you make of that small inscription near his feet, Smith?\"\n\n\"I told you that I know no Eastern tongue.\"\n\n\"Ah, so you did. It is the name of the embalmer, I take it. A very conscientious worker he must have been. I wonder how many modern works will survive four thousand years?\"\n\nHe kept on speaking lightly and rapidly, but it was evident to Abercrombie Smith that he was still palpitating with fear. His hands shook, his lower lip trembled and, look where he would, his eye always came sliding round to his gruesome companion. Through all his fear, however, there was a suspicion of triumph in his tone and manner. His eyes shone, and his footstep, as he paced the room, was brisk and jaunty. He gave the impression of a man who has gone through an ordeal, the marks of which he still bears upon him, but which has helped him to his end.\n\n\"You\"re not going yet?\" he cried, as Smith rose from the sofa.\n\nAt the prospect of solitude, his fears seemed to crowd back upon him and he stretched out a hand to detain him.\n\n\"Yes, I must go. I have my work to do. You are all right now. I think that with your nervous system you should take up some less morbid study.\"\n\n\"Oh, I am not nervous as a rule; and I have unwrapped mummies before.\"\n\n\"You fainted last time,\" observed Monkhouse Lee.\n\n\"Ah, yes, so I did. Well, I must have a nerve tonic or a course of electricity. You are not going, Lee?\"\n\n\"I\"ll do whatever you wish, Ned.\"\n\n\"Then I\"ll come down with you and have a shakedown on your sofa. Good night, Smith. I am so sorry to have disturbed you with my foolishness.\"\n\nThey shook hands, and as the medical student stumbled up the spiral and irregular stair he heard a key turn in a door and the steps of his two new acquaintances as they descended to the lower floor.\n\nIn this strange way began the acquaintance between Edward Bellingham and Abercrombie Smith, an acquaintance which the latter, at least, had no desire to push further. Bellingham, however, appeared to have taken a fancy to his rough-spoken neighbour, and made his advances in such a way that he could hardly be repulsed without absolute brutality. Twice he called to thank Smith for his assistance, and many times afterwards he looked in with books, papers and such other civilities as two bachelor neighbours can offer each other. He was, as Smith soon found, a man of wide reading, with catholic tastes and an extraordinary memory. His manner, too, was so pleasing and suave that one came, after a time, to overlook his repellent appearance. For a jaded and wearied man he was no unpleasant companion, and Smith found himself, after a time, looking forward to his visits, and even returning them.\n\nClever as he undoubtedly was, however, the medical student seemed to detect a dash of insanity in the man. He broke out at times into a high, inflated style of talk which was in contrast with the simplicity of his life.\n\n\"It is a wonderful thing,\" he cried, \"to feel that one can command powers of good and of evil \u2013 a ministering angel or a demon of vengeance.\" And again, of Monkhouse Lee, he said, \"Lee is a good fellow, an honest fellow, but he is without strength or ambition. He would not make a fit partner for a man with a great enterprise. He would not make a fit partner for me.\"\n\nAt such hints and innuendoes stolid Smith, puffing solemnly at his pipe, would simply raise his eyebrows and shake his head, with little interjections of medical wisdom as to earlier hours and fresher air.\n\nOne habit Bellingham had developed of late which Smith knew to be a frequent herald of a weakening mind. He appeared to be forever talking to himself. At late hours of the night, when there could be no visitor with him, Smith could still hear his voice beneath him in a low, muffled monologue, sunk almost to a whisper, and yet very audible in the silence. This solitary babbling annoyed and distracted the student, so that he spoke more than once to his neighbour about it. Bellingham, however, flushed up at the charge, and denied curtly that he had uttered a sound; indeed, he showed more annoyance over the matter than the occasion seemed to demand.\n\nHad Abercrombie Smith had any doubt as to his own ears he had not to go far to find corroboration. Tom Styles, the little wrinkled manservant who had attended to the wants of the lodgers in the turret for a longer time than any man\"s memory could carry him, was sorely put to it over the same matter.\n\n\"If you please, sir,\" said he, as he tidied down the top chamber one morning, \"do you think Mr Bellingham is all right, sir?\"\n\n\"All right, Styles?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Right in his head, sir.\"\n\n\"Why should he not be, then?\"\n\n\"Well, I don\"t know, sir. His habits has changed of late. He\"s not the same man he used to be, though I make free to say that he was never quite one of my gentlemen, like Mr Hastie or yourself, sir. He\"s took to talkin\" to himself something awful. I wonder it don\"t disturb you. I don\"t know what to make of him, sir.\"\n\n\"I don\"t know what business it is of yours, Styles.\"\n\n\"Well, I takes an interest, Mr Smith. It may be forward of me, but I can\"t help it. I feel sometimes as if I was mother and father to my young gentlemen. It all falls on me when things go wrong and the relations come. But Mr Bellingham, sir. I want to know what it is that walks about his room sometimes when he\"s out and when the door\"s locked on the outside.\"\n\n\"Eh? you\"re talking nonsense, Styles.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, sir; but I heard it mor\"n once with my own ears.\"\n\n\"Rubbish, Styles.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir. You\"ll ring the bell if you want me.\"\n\nAbercrombie Smith gave little heed to the gossip of the old manservant, but a small incident occurred a few days later which left an unpleasant effect upon his mind, and brought the words of Styles forcibly to his memory.\n\nBellingham had come up to see him late one night, and was entertaining him with an interesting account of the rock tombs of Beni Hassan in Upper Egypt, when Smith, whose hearing was remarkably acute, distinctly heard the sound of a door opening on the landing below.\n\n\"There\"s some fellow gone in or out of your room,\" he remarked.\n\nBellingham sprang up and stood helpless for a moment, with the expression of a man who is half-incredulous and half-afraid.\n\n\"I surely locked it. I am almost positive that I locked it,\" he stammered. \"No one could have opened it.\"\n\n\"Why, I hear someone coming up the steps now,\" said Smith.\n\nBellingham rushed out through the door, slammed it loudly behind him, and hurried down the stairs. About halfway down Smith heard him stop and thought he caught the sound of whispering. A moment later the door beneath him shut, a key creaked in a lock, and Bellingham, with beads of moisture upon his pale face, ascended the stairs once more and re-entered the room.\n\n\"It\"s all right,\" he said, throwing himself down in a chair. \"It was that fool of a dog. He had pushed the door open. I don\"t know how I came to forget to lock it.\"\n\n\"I didn\"t know you kept a dog,\" said Smith, looking very thoughtfully at the disturbed face of his companion.\n\n\"Yes, I haven\"t had him long. I must get rid of him. He\"s a great nuisance.\"\n\n\"He must be, if you find it so hard to shut him up. I should have thought that shutting the door would have been enough, without locking it.\"\n\n\"I want to prevent old Styles from letting him out. He\"s of some value, you know, and it would be awkward to lose him.\"\n\n\"I am a bit of a dog-fancier myself,\" said Smith, still gazing hard at his companion from the corner of his eyes. \"Perhaps you\"ll let me have a look at it.\"\n\n\"Certainly. But I am afraid it cannot be tonight; I have an appointment. Is that clock right? Then I am a quarter of an hour late already. You\"ll excuse me, I am sure.\"\n\nHe picked up his cap and hurried from the room. In spite of his appointment, Smith heard him re-enter his own chamber and lock his door upon the inside.\n\nThis interview left a disagreeable impression upon the medical student\"s mind. Bellingham had lied to him, and lied so clumsily that it looked as if he had desperate reasons for concealing the truth. Smith knew that his neighbour had no dog. He knew, also, that the step which he had heard upon the stairs was not the step of an animal. But if it were not, then what could it be? There was old Styles\" statement about the something which used to pace the room at times when the owner was absent. Could it be a woman? Smith rather inclined to the view. If so, it would mean disgrace and expulsion to Bellingham if it were discovered by the authorities, so that his anxiety and falsehoods might be accounted for. And yet it was inconceivable that an undergraduate could keep a woman in his rooms without being instantly detected. Be the explanation what it might, there was something ugly about it, and Smith determined, as he turned to his books, to discourage all further attempts at intimacy on the part of his soft-spoken and ill-favoured neighbour.\n\nBut his work was destined to interruption that night. He had hardly caught up the broken threads when a firm, heavy footfall came three steps at a time from below, and Hastie, in blazer and flannels, burst into the room.\n\n\"Still at it!\" said he, plumping down into his wonted armchair. \"What a chap you are to stew! I believe an earthquake might come and knock Oxford into a cocked hat, and you would sit perfectly placid with your books among the ruins. However, I won\"t bore you long. Three whiffs of baccy, and I am off.\"\n\n\"What\"s the news, then?\" asked Smith, cramming a plug of bird\"s-eye into his briar with his forefinger.\n\n\"Nothing very much. Wilson made seventy for the freshmen against the eleven. They say that they will play him instead of Buddicomb, for Buddicomb is clean off colour. He used to be able to bowl a little, but it\"s nothing but half-volleys and long hops now.\"\n\n\"Medium right,\" suggested Smith, with the intense gravity which comes upon a \"varsity man when he speaks of athletics.\n\n\"Inclining to fast, with a work from leg. Comes with the arm about three inches or so. He used to be nasty on a wet wicket. Oh, by the way, have you heard about Long Norton?\"\n\n\"What\"s that?\"\n\n\"He\"s been attacked.\"\n\n\"Attacked?\"\n\n\"Yes, just as he was turning out of the High Street, and within a hundred yards of the gate of Old\"s.\"\n\n\"But who \u2013\"\n\n\"Ah, that\"s the rub! If you said \"what\", you would be more grammatical. Norton swears that it was not human, and, indeed, from the scratches on his throat, I should be inclined to agree with him.\"\n\n\"What, then? Have we come down to spooks?\" Abercrombie Smith puffed his scientific contempt.\n\n\"Well, no; I don\"t think that is quite the idea, either. I am inclined to think that if any showman has lost a great ape lately, and the brute is in these parts, a jury would find a true bill against it. Norton passes that way every night, you know, about the same hour. There\"s a tree that hangs low over the path \u2013 the big elm from Rainy\"s garden. Norton thinks the thing dropped on him out of the tree. Anyhow, he was nearly strangled by two arms which, he says, were as strong and as thin as steel bands. He saw nothing; only those beastly arms that tightened and tightened on him. He yelled his head nearly off, and a couple of chaps came running, and the thing went over the wall like a cat. He never got a fair sight of it the whole time. It gave Norton a shake up, I can tell you. I tell him it has been as good as a change at the seaside for him.\"\n\n\"A garrotter, most likely,\" said Smith.\n\n\"Very possibly. Norton says not; but we don\"t mind what he says. The garrotter had long nails, and was pretty smart at swinging himself over walls. By the way, your beautiful neighbour would be pleased if he heard about it. He had a grudge against Norton, and he\"s not a man, from what I know of him, to forget his little debts. But hallo, old chap, what have you got in your noddle?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Smith answered curtly.\n\nHe had started in his chair, and the look had flashed over his face which comes upon a man who is struck suddenly by some unpleasant idea.\n\n\"You looked as if something I had said had taken you on the raw. By the way, you have made the acquaintance of Master B since I looked in last, have you not? Young Monkhouse Lee told me something to that effect.\"\n\n\"Yes; I know him slightly. He has been up here once or twice.\"\n\n\"Well, you\"re big enough and ugly enough to take care of yourself. He\"s not what I should call exactly a healthy sort of Johnny, though, no doubt, he\"s very clever, and all that. But you\"ll soon find out for yourself. Lee is all right; he\"s a very decent little fellow. Well, so long, old chap! I row Mullins for the vice-chancellor\"s pot on Wednesday week, so mind you come down, in case I don\"t see you before.\"\n\nBovine Smith laid down his pipe and turned stolidly to his books once more. But with all the will in the world, he found it very hard to keep his mind upon his work. It would slip away to brood upon the man beneath him, and upon the little mystery which hung round his chambers. Then his thoughts turned to this singular attack of which Hastie had spoken, and to the grudge which Bellingham was said to owe the object of it. The two ideas would persist in rising together in his mind, as though there were some close and intimate connection between them. And yet the suspicion was so dim and vague that it could not be put down in words.\n\n\"Confound the chap!\" cried Smith, as he shied his book on pathology across the room. \"He has spoiled my night\"s reading and that\"s reason enough, if there were no other, why I should steer clear of him in the future.\"\n\nFor ten days the medical student confined himself so closely to his studies that he neither saw nor heard anything of either of the men beneath him. At the hours when Bellingham had been accustomed to visit him, he took care to sport his oak, and though he more than once heard a knocking at his outer door, he resolutely refused to answer it. One afternoon, however, he was descending the stairs when, just as he was passing it, Bellingham\"s door flew open, and young Monkhouse Lee came out with his eyes sparkling and a dark flush of anger upon his olive cheeks. Close at his heels followed Bellingham, his fat, unhealthy face all quivering with malignant passion.\n\n\"You fool!\" he hissed. \"You\"ll be sorry.\"\n\n\"Very likely,\" cried the other. \"Mind what I say. It\"s off! I won\"t hear of it!\"\n\n\"You\"ve promised, anyhow.\"\n\n\"Oh, I\"ll keep that! I won\"t speak. But I\"d rather little Eva was in her grave. Once for all, it\"s off. She\"ll do what I say. We don\"t want to see you again.\"\n\nSo much Smith could not avoid hearing, but he hurried on, for he had no wish to be involved in their dispute. There had been a serious breach between them, that was clear enough, and Lee was going to cause the engagement with his sister to be broken off. Smith thought of Hastie\"s comparison of the toad and the dove, and was glad to think that the matter was at an end. Bellingham\"s face when he was in a passion was not pleasant to look upon. He was not a man to whom an innocent girl could be trusted for life. As he walked, Smith wondered languidly what could have caused the quarrel, and what the promise might be which Bellingham had been so anxious that Monkhouse Lee should keep.\n\nIt was the day of the sculling match between Hastie and Mullins, and a stream of men were making their way down to the banks of the Isis. A May sun was shining brightly, and the yellow path was barred with the black shadows of the tall elm-trees. On either side the grey colleges lay back from the road, the hoary old mothers of minds looking out from their high, mullioned windows at the tide of young life which swept so merrily past them. Black-clad tutors, prim officials, pale, reading men, brown-faced, straw-hatted young athletes in white sweaters or many-coloured blazers, all were hurrying towards the blue, winding river which curves through the Oxford meadows.\n\nAbercrombie Smith, with the intuition of an old oarsman, chose his position at the point where he knew that the struggle, if there were a struggle, would come. Far off he heard the hum which announced the start, the gathering roar of the approach, the thunder of running feet and the shouts of the men in the boats beneath him. A spray of half-clad, deep-breathing runners shot past him, and craning over their shoulders, he saw Hastie pulling a steady thirty-six, while his opponent, with a jerky forty, was a good boat\"s length behind him. Smith gave a cheer for his friend and, pulling out his watch, was starting off again for his chambers, when he felt a touch upon his shoulder and found that young Monkhouse Lee was beside him.\n\n\"I saw you there,\" he said, in a timid, deprecating way. \"I wanted to speak to you, if you could spare me a half-hour. This cottage is mine. I share it with Harrington of King\"s. Come in and have a cup of tea.\"\n\n\"I must be back presently,\" said Smith. \"I am hard on the grind at present. But I\"ll come in for a few minutes with pleasure. I wouldn\"t have come out only Hastie is a friend of mine.\"\n\n\"So he is of mine. Hasn\"t he a beautiful style? Mullins wasn\"t in it. But come into the cottage. It\"s a little den of a place, but it is pleasant to work in during the summer months.\"\n\nIt was a small, square, white building, with green doors and shutters and a rustic trellis-work porch, standing back some fifty yards from the river\"s bank. Inside, the main room was roughly fitted up as a study \u2013 deal table, unpainted shelves with books and a few cheap oleographs upon the wall. A kettle sang upon a spirit-stove and there were tea things upon a tray on the table.\n\n\"Try that chair and have a cigarette,\" said Lee. \"Let me pour you out a cup of tea. It\"s so good of you to come in, for I know that your time is a good deal taken up. I wanted to say to you that, if I were you, I should change my rooms at once.\"\n\nSmith sat staring with a lighted match in one hand and his unlit cigarette in the other.\n\n\"Yes; it must seem very extraordinary, and the worst of it is that I cannot give my reasons, for I am under a solemn promise \u2013 a very solemn promise. But I may go so far as to say that I don\"t think Bellingham is a very safe man to live near. I intend to camp out here as much as I can for a time.\"\n\n\"Not safe! What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Ah, that\"s what I mustn\"t say. But do take my advice and move your rooms. We had a grand row today. You must have heard us, for you came down the stairs.\"\n\n\"I saw that you had fallen out.\"\n\n\"He\"s a horrible chap, Smith. That is the only word for him. I have had doubts about him ever since that night when he fainted \u2013 you remember, when you came down. I taxed him today and he told me things that made my hair rise, and wanted me to stand in with him. I\"m not strait-laced, but I am a clergyman\"s son, you know, and I think there are some things which are quite beyond the pale. I only thank God that I found him out before it was too late, for he was to have married into my family.\"\n\n\"This is all very fine, Lee,\" said Abercrombie Smith curtly. \"But either you are saying a great deal too much or a great deal too little.\"\n\n\"I give you a warning.\"\n\n\"If there is real reason for warning, no promise can bind you. If I see a rascal about to blow a place up with dynamite no pledge will stand in my way of preventing him.\"\n\n\"Ah, but I cannot prevent him, and I can do nothing but warn you.\"\n\n\"Without saying what you warn me against.\"\n\n\"Against Bellingham.\"\n\n\"But that is childish. Why should I fear him, or any man?\"\n\n\"I can\"t tell you. I can only entreat you to change your rooms. You are in danger where you are. I don\"t even say that Bellingham would wish to injure you. But it might happen, for he is a dangerous neighbour just now.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I know more than you think,\" said Smith, looking keenly at the young man\"s boyish, earnest face. \"Suppose I tell you that someone else shares Bellingham\"s rooms.\"\n\nMonkhouse Lee sprang from his chair in uncontrollable excitement.\n\n\"You know, then?\" he gasped.\n\n\"A woman.\"\n\nLee dropped back again with a groan.\n\n\"My lips are sealed,\" he said. \"I must not speak.\"\n\n\"Well, anyhow,\" said Smith, rising, \"it is not likely that I should allow myself to be frightened out of rooms which suit me very nicely. It would be a little too feeble for me to move out all my goods and chattels because you say that Bellingham might in some unexplained way do me an injury. I think that I\"ll just take my chance, and stay where I am, and as I see that it\"s nearly five o\"clock, I must ask you to excuse me.\"\n\nHe bade the young student adieu in a few curt words and made his way homeward through the sweet spring evening, feeling half-ruffled, half-amused, as any other strong, unimaginative man might who has been menaced by a vague and shadowy danger.\n\nThere was one little indulgence which Abercrombie Smith always allowed himself however closely his work might press upon him. Twice a week, on the Tuesday and the Friday, it was his invariable custom to walk over to Farlingford, the residence of Dr Plumptree Peterson, situated about a mile and a half out of Oxford. Peterson had been a close friend of Smith\"s elder brother, Francis, and as he was a bachelor, fairly well-to-do, with a good cellar and a better library, his house was a pleasant goal for a man who was in need of a brisk walk. Twice a week, then, the medical student would swing out there along the dark country roads and spend a pleasant hour in Peterson\"s comfortable study, discussing, over a glass of old port, the gossip of the \"varsity or the latest developments of medicine or of surgery.\n\nOn the day which followed his interview with Monkhouse Lee, Smith shut up his books at a quarter past eight, the hour when he usually started for his friend\"s house. As he was leaving his room, however, his eyes chanced to fall upon one of the books which Bellingham had lent him, and his conscience pricked him for not having returned it. However repellent the man might be, he should not be treated with discourtesy. Taking the book, he walked downstairs and knocked at his neighbour\"s door. There was no answer; but on turning the handle he found that it was unlocked. Pleased at the thought of avoiding an interview, he stepped inside and placed the book with his card upon the table.\n\nThe lamp was turned half down, but Smith could see the details of the room plainly enough. It was all much as he had seen it before \u2013 the frieze, the animal-headed gods, the hanging crocodile and the table littered over with papers and dried leaves. The mummy case stood upright against the wall, but the mummy itself was missing. There was no sign of any second occupant of the room, and he felt as he withdrew that he had probably done Bellingham an injustice. Had he a guilty secret to preserve, he would hardly leave his door open so that all the world might enter.\n\nThe spiral stair was as black as pitch, and Smith was slowly making his way down its irregular steps, when he was suddenly conscious that something had passed him in the darkness. There was a faint sound, a whiff of air, a light brushing past his elbow, but so slight that he could scarcely be certain of it. He stopped and listened, but the wind was rustling among the ivy outside and he could hear nothing else.\n\n\"Is that you, Styles?\" he shouted.\n\nThere was no answer, and all was still behind him. It must have been a sudden gust of air, for there were crannies and cracks in the old turret. And yet he could almost have sworn that he heard a footfall by his very side. He had emerged into the quadrangle, still turning the matter over in his head, when a man came running swiftly across the smooth-cropped lawn.\n\n\"Is that you, Smith?\"\n\n\"Hallo, Hastie!\"\n\n\"For God\"s sake come at once! Young Lee is drowned! Here\"s Harrington of King\"s with the news. The doctor is out. You\"ll do, but come along at once. There may be life in him.\"\n\n\"Have you brandy?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I\"ll bring some. There\"s a flask on my table.\"\n\nSmith bounded up the stairs, taking three at a time, seized the flask and was rushing down with it, when, as he passed Bellingham\"s room, his eyes fell upon something which left him gasping and staring upon the landing.\n\nThe door, which he had closed behind him, was now open, and right in front of him, with the lamplight shining upon it, was the mummy case. Three minutes ago it had been empty. He could swear to that. Now it framed the lank body of its horrible occupant, who stood, grim and stark, with his black, shrivelled face towards the door. The form was lifeless and inert, but it seemed to Smith as he gazed that there still lingered a lurid spark of vitality, some faint sign of consciousness in the little eyes which lurked in the depths of the hollow sockets. So astounded and shaken was he that he had forgotten his errand and was still staring at the lean, sunken figure when the voice of his friend below recalled him to himself.\n\n\"Come on, Smith!\" he shouted. \"It\"s life and death, you know. Hurry up! Now, then,\" he added, as the medical student reappeared, \"let us do a sprint. It is well under a mile, and we should do it in five minutes. A human life is better worth running for than a pot.\"\n\nNeck and neck they dashed through the darkness, and did not pull up until, panting and spent, they had reached the little cottage by the river. Young Lee, limp and dripping like a broken water-plant, was stretched upon the sofa, the green scum of the river upon his black hair and a fringe of white foam upon his leaden-hued lips. Beside him knelt his fellow-student, Harrington, endeavouring to chafe some warmth back into his rigid limbs.\n\n\"I think there\"s life in him,\" said Smith, with his hand to the lad\"s side. \"Put your watch glass to his lips. Yes, there\"s dimming on it. You take one arm, Hastie. Now work it as I do, and we\"ll soon pull him round.\"\n\nFor ten minutes they worked in silence, inflating and depressing the chest of the unconscious man. At the end of that time a shiver ran through his body, his lips trembled and he opened his eyes. The three students burst out into an irrepressible cheer.\n\n\"Wake up, old chap. You\"ve frightened us quite enough.\"\n\n\"Have some brandy. Take a sip from the flask.\"\n\n\"He\"s all right now,\" said his companion Harrington. \"Heavens, what a fright I got! I was reading here, and he had gone out for a stroll as far as the river, when I heard a scream and a splash. Out I ran, and by the time I could find him and fish him out, all life seemed to have gone. Then Simpson couldn\"t get a doctor, for he has a game leg, and I had to run, and I don\"t know what I\"d have done without you fellows. That\"s right, old chap. Sit up.\"\n\nMonkhouse Lee had raised himself on his hands, and looked wildly about him.\n\n\"What\"s up?\" he asked. \"I\"ve been in the water. Ah, yes; I remember.\"\n\nA look of fear came into his eyes, and he sank his face into his hands.\n\n\"How did you fall in?\"\n\n\"I didn\"t fall in.\"\n\n\"How then?\"\n\n\"I was thrown in. I was standing by the bank and something from behind picked me up like a feather and hurled me in. I heard nothing and I saw nothing. But I know what it was, for all that.\"\n\n\"And so do I,\" whispered Smith.\n\nLee looked up with a quick glance of surprise.\n\n\"You\"ve learned, then?\" he said. \"You remember the advice I gave you?\"\n\n\"Yes, and I begin to think that I shall take it.\"\n\n\"I don\"t know what the deuce you fellows are talking about,\" said Hastie, \"but I think, if I were you, Harrington, I should get Lee to bed at once. It will be time enough to discuss the why and the wherefore when he is a little stronger. I think, Smith, you and I can leave him alone now. I am walking back to college; if you are coming in that direction, we can have a chat.\"\n\nBut it was little chat that they had upon their homeward path. Smith\"s mind was too full of the incidents of the evening, the absence of the mummy from his neighbour\"s rooms, the step that passed him on the stair, the reappearance \u2013 the extraordinary, inexplicable reappearance of the grisly thing \u2013 and then this attack upon Lee, corresponding so closely to the previous outrage upon another man against whom Bellingham bore a grudge. All this settled in his thoughts, together with the many little incidents which had previously turned him against his neighbour and the singular circumstances under which he was first called in to him. What had been a dim suspicion, a vague, fantastic conjecture, had suddenly taken form and stood out in his mind as a grim fact, a thing not to be denied. And yet, how monstrous it was! how unheard of! how entirely beyond all bounds of human experience. An impartial judge, or even the friend who walked by his side, would simply tell him that his eyes had deceived him, that the mummy had been there all the time, that young Lee had tumbled into the river as any other man tumbles into a river, and the blue pill was the best thing for a disordered liver. He felt that he would have said as much if the positions had been reversed. And yet he could swear that Bellingham was a murderer at heart and that he wielded a weapon such as no man had ever used in all the grim history of crime.\n\nHastie had branched off to his rooms with a few crisp and emphatic comments upon his friend\"s unsociability, and Abercrombie Smith crossed the quadrangle to his corner turret with a strong feeling of repulsion for his chambers and their associations. He would take Lee\"s advice and move his quarters as soon as possible, for how could a man study when his ear was ever straining for every murmur or footstep in the room below? He observed, as he crossed over the lawn, that the light was still shining in Bellingham\"s window, and as he passed up the staircase the door opened and the man himself looked out at him. With his fat, evil face he was like some bloated spider fresh from the weaving of his poisonous web.\n\n\"Good-evening,\" said he. \"Won\"t you come in?\"\n\n\"No,\" cried Smith fiercely.\n\n\"No? You are as busy as ever? I wanted to ask you about Lee. I was sorry to hear that there was a rumour that something was amiss with him.\" His features were grave, but there was the gleam of a hidden laugh in his eyes as he spoke. Smith saw it, and he could have knocked him down for it.\n\n\"You\"ll be sorrier still to hear that Monkhouse Lee is doing very well, and is out of all danger,\" he answered. \"Your hellish tricks have not come off this time. Oh, you needn\"t try to brazen it out. I know all about it.\"\n\nBellingham took a step back from the angry student and half-closed the door as if to protect himself.\n\n\"You are mad,\" he said. \"What do you mean? Do you assert that I had anything to do with Lee\"s accident?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" thundered Smith. \"You and that bag of bones behind you; you worked it between you. I tell you what it is, Master B, they have given up burning folk like you, but we still keep a hangman, and, by George! if any man in this college meets his death while you are here, I\"ll have you up, and if you don\"t swing for it, it won\"t be my fault. You\"ll find that your filthy Egyptian tricks won\"t answer in England.\"\n\n\"You\"re a raving lunatic,\" said Bellingham.\n\n\"All right. You just remember what I say, for you\"ll find that I\"ll be better than my word.\"\n\nThe door slammed and Smith went fuming up to his chamber, where he locked the door upon the inside and spent half the night in smoking his old briar and brooding over the strange events of the evening.\n\nNext morning Abercrombie Smith heard nothing of his neighbour, but Harrington called upon him in the afternoon to say that Lee was almost himself again. All day Smith stuck fast to his work, but in the evening he determined to pay the visit to his friend Dr Peterson upon which he had started the night before. A good walk and a friendly chat would be welcome to his jangled nerves.\n\nBellingham\"s door was shut as he passed, but glancing back when he was some distance from the turret, he saw his neighbour\"s head at the window outlined against the lamplight, his face pressed apparently against the glass as he gazed out into the darkness. It was a blessing to be away from all contact with him, if but for a few hours, and Smith stepped out briskly and breathed the soft spring air into his lungs. The half-moon lay in the west between two Gothic pinnacles, and threw upon the silvered street a dark tracery from the stonework above. There was a brisk breeze and light, fleecy clouds drifted swiftly across the sky. Old\"s was on the very border of the town, and in five minutes Smith found himself beyond the houses and between the hedges of a May-scented, Oxfordshire lane.\n\nIt was a lonely and little-frequented road which led to his friend\"s house. Early as it was, Smith did not meet a single soul upon his way. He walked briskly along until he came to the avenue gate which opened into the long gravel drive leading up to Farlingford. In front of him he could see the cosy, red light of the windows glimmering through the foliage. He stood with his hand upon the iron latch of the swinging gate and he glanced back at the road along which he had come. Something was coming swiftly down it.\n\nIt moved in the shadow of the hedge, silently and furtively, a dark, crouching figure, dimly visible against the black background. Even as he gazed back at it, it had lessened its distance by twenty paces and was fast closing upon him. Out of the darkness he had a glimpse of a scraggy neck and of two eyes that will ever haunt him in his dreams. He turned and with a cry of terror he ran for his life up the avenue. There were the red lights, the signals of safety, almost within a stone\"s-throw of him. He was a famous runner, but never had he run as he ran that night.\n\nThe heavy gate had swung into place behind him but he heard it dash open again before his pursuer. As he rushed madly and wildly through the night, he could hear a swift, dry patter behind him, and could see, as he threw back a glance, that this horror was bounding like a tiger at his heels, with blazing eyes and one stringy arm out-thrown. Thank God, the door was ajar. He could see the thin bar of light which shot from the lamp in the hall. Nearer yet sounded the clatter from behind. He heard a hoarse gurgling at his very shoulder. With a shriek he flung himself against the door, slammed and bolted it behind him, and sank half-fainting on to the hall chair.\n\n\"My goodness, Smith, what\"s the matter?\" asked Peterson, appearing at the door of his study.\n\n\"Give me some brandy.\"\n\nPeterson disappeared and came rushing out again with a glass and a decanter.\n\n\"You need it,\" he said, as his visitor drank off what he poured out for him. \"Why, man, you are as white as a cheese.\"\n\nSmith laid down his glass, rose up, and took a deep breath. \"I am my own man again now,\" said he. \"I was never so unmanned before. But, with your leave, Peterson, I will sleep here tonight, for I don\"t think I could face that road again except by daylight. It\"s weak, I know, but I can\"t help it.\"\n\nPeterson looked at his visitor with a very questioning eye.\n\n\"Of course you shall sleep here if you wish. I\"ll tell Mrs Burney to make up the spare bed. Where are you off to now?\"\n\n\"Come up with me to the window that overlooks the door. I want you to see what I have seen.\"\n\nThey went up to the window of the upper hall whence they could look down upon the approach to the house. The drive and the fields on either side lay quiet and still, bathed in the peaceful moonlight.\n\n\"Well, really, Smith,\" remarked Peterson, \"it is well that I know you to be an abstemious man. What in the world can have frightened you?\"\n\n\"I\"ll tell you presently. But where can it have gone? Ah, now, look, look! See the curve of the road just beyond your gate.\"\n\n\"Yes, I see; you needn\"t pinch my arm off. I saw someone pass. I should say a man, rather thin, apparently, and tall, very tall. But what of him? And what of yourself? You are still shaking like an aspen leaf.\"\n\n\"I have been within hand-grip of the devil, that\"s all. But come down to your study, and I shall tell you the whole story.\"\n\nHe did so. Under the cheery lamplight with a glass of wine on the table beside him and the portly form and florid face of his friend in front, he narrated, in their order, all the events, great and small, which had formed so singular a chain, from the night on which he had found Bellingham fainting in front of the mummy case until this horrid experience of an hour ago.\n\n\"There now,\" he said as he concluded, \"that\"s the whole, black business. It is monstrous and incredible, but it is true.\"\n\nDr Plumptree Peterson sat for some time in silence with a very puzzled expression upon his face.\n\n\"I never heard of such a thing in my life, never!\" he said at last. \"You have told me the facts. Now tell me your inferences.\"\n\n\"You can draw your own.\"\n\n\"But I should like to hear yours. You have thought over the matter, and I have not.\"\n\n\"Well, it must be a little vague in detail, but the main points seem to me to be clear enough. This fellow Bellingham, in his Eastern studies, has got hold of some infernal secret by which a mummy \u2013 or possibly only this particular mummy \u2013 can be temporarily brought to life. He was trying this disgusting business on the night when he fainted. No doubt the sight of the creature moving had shaken his nerve, even though he had expected it. You remember that almost the first words he said were to call out upon himself as a fool. Well, he got more hardened afterwards, and carried the matter through without fainting. The vitality which he could put into it was evidently only a passing thing, for I have seen it continually in its case as dead as this table. He has some elaborate process, I fancy, by which he brings the thing to pass. Having done it, he naturally bethought him that he might use the creature as an agent. It has intelligence and it has strength. For some purpose he took Lee into his confidence; but Lee, like a decent Christian, would have nothing to do with such a business. Then they had a row, and Lee vowed that he would tell his sister of Bellingham\"s true character. Bellingham\"s game was to prevent him, and he nearly managed it by setting this creature of his on his track. He had already tried its powers upon another man \u2013 Norton \u2013 towards whom he had a grudge. It is the merest chance that he has not two murders upon his soul. Then, when I taxed him with the matter, he had the strongest reasons for wishing to get me out of the way before I could convey my knowledge to anyone else. He got his chance when I went out, for he knew my habits and where I was bound for. I have had a narrow shave, Peterson, and it is mere luck you didn\"t find me on your doorstep in the morning. I\"m not a nervous man as a rule, and I never thought to have the fear of death put upon me as it was tonight.\"\n\n\"My dear boy, you take the matter too seriously,\" said his companion. \"Your nerves are out of order with your work, and you make too much of it. How could such a thing as this stride about the streets of Oxford, even at night, without being seen?\"\n\n\"It has been seen. There is quite a scare in the town about an escaped ape, as they imagine the creature to be. It is the talk of the place.\"\n\n\"Well, it\"s a striking chain of events. And yet, my dear fellow, you must allow that each incident in itself is capable of a more natural explanation.\"\n\n\"What! even my adventure of tonight?\"\n\n\"Certainly. You come out with your nerves all unstrung, and your head full of this theory of yours. Some gaunt, half-famished tramp steals after you, and seeing you run, is emboldened to pursue you. Your fears and imagination do the rest.\"\n\n\"It won\"t do, Peterson; it won\"t do.\"\n\n\"And again, in the instance of your finding the mummy case empty, and then a few moments later with an occupant, you know that it was lamplight, that the lamp was half turned down, and that you had no special reason to look hard at the case. It is quite possible that you may have overlooked the creature in the first instance.\"\n\n\"No, no; it is out of the question.\"\n\n\"And then Lee may have fallen into the river, and Norton been garrotted. It is certainly a formidable indictment that you have against Bellingham; but if you were to place it before a police magistrate, he would simply laugh in your face.\"\n\n\"I know he would. That is why I mean to take the matter into my own hands.\"\n\n\"Eh?\"\n\n\"Yes; I feel that a public duty rests upon me, and, besides, I must do it for my own safety, unless I choose to allow myself to be hunted by this beast out of the college, and that would be a little too feeble. I have quite made up my mind what I shall do. And first of all, may I use your paper and pens for an hour?\"\n\n\"Most certainly. You will find all that you want upon that side-table.\"\n\nAbercrombie Smith sat down before a sheet of foolscap, and for an hour and then for a second hour his pen travelled swiftly over it. Page after page was finished and tossed aside while his friend leaned back in his armchair, looking across at him with patient curiosity. At last, with an exclamation of satisfaction, Smith sprang to his feet, gathered his papers up into order, and laid the last one upon Peterson\"s desk.\n\n\"Kindly sign this as a witness,\" he said.\n\n\"A witness? Of what?\"\n\n\"Of my signature and of the date. The date is the most important. Why, Peterson, my life might hang upon it.\"\n\n\"My dear Smith, you are talking wildly. Let me beg you to go to bed.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, I never spoke so deliberately in my life. And I will promise to go to bed the moment you have signed it.\"\n\n\"But what is it?\"\n\n\"It is a statement of all that I have been telling you tonight. I wish you to witness it.\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" said Peterson, signing his name under that of his companion. \"There you are! But what is the idea?\"\n\n\"You will kindly retain it, and produce it in case I am arrested.\"\n\n\"Arrested? For what?\"\n\n\"For murder. It is quite on the cards. I wish to be ready for every event. There is only one course open to me, and I am determined to take it.\"\n\n\"For heaven\"s sake, don\"t do anything rash!\"\n\n\"Believe me, it would be far more rash to adopt any other course. I hope that we won\"t need to bother you, but it will ease my mind to know that you have this statement of my motives. And now I am ready to take your advice and to go to roost, for I want to be at my best in the morning.\"\n\nAbercrombie Smith was not an entirely pleasant man to have as an enemy. Slow and easy-tempered, he was formidable when driven to action. He brought to every purpose in life the same deliberate resoluteness which had distinguished him as a scientific student. He had laid his studies aside for a day, but he intended that the day should not be wasted. Not a word did he say to his host as to his plans, but by nine o\"clock he was well on his way to Oxford. In the High Street he stopped at Clifford\"s, the gun-maker\"s, and bought a heavy revolver with a box of central-fire cartridges. Six of them he slipped into the chambers, and half-cocking the weapon, placed it in the pocket of his coat. He then made his way to Hastie\"s rooms, where the big oarsman was lounging over his breakfast, with the Sporting Times propped up against the coffee-pot.\n\n\"Hallo! What\"s up?\" he asked. \"Have some coffee?\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I want you to come with me, Hastie, and do what I ask you.\"\n\n\"Certainly, my boy.\"\n\n\"And bring a heavy stick with you.\"\n\n\"Hallo!\" Hastie stared. \"Here\"s a hunting crop that would fell an ox.\"\n\n\"One other thing. You have a box of amputating knives. Give me the longest of them.\"\n\n\"There you are. You seem to be fairly on the war trail. Anything else?\"\n\n\"No; that will do.\" Smith placed the knife inside his coat, and led the way to the quadrangle. \"We are neither of us chickens, Hastie,\" said he. \"I think I can do this job alone, but I take you as a precaution. I am going to have a little talk with Bellingham. If I have only him to deal with, I won\"t, of course, need you. If I shout, however, up you come, and lam out with your whip as hard as you can lick. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"All right. I\"ll come if I hear you bellow.\"\n\n\"Stay here, then. I may be a little time, but don\"t budge until I come down.\"\n\n\"I\"m a fixture.\"\n\nSmith ascended the stairs, opened Bellingham\"s door and stepped in. Bellingham was seated behind his table, writing. Beside him, among his litter of strange possessions, towered the mummy case, with its sale number 249 still stuck upon its front, and its hideous occupant stiff and stark within it. Smith looked very deliberately round him, closed the door, and then, stepping across to the fireplace, struck a match and set the fire alight. Bellingham sat staring, with amazement and rage upon his bloated face.\n\n\"Well, really now, you make yourself at home,\" he gasped.\n\nSmith sat himself deliberately down, placing his watch upon the table, drew out his pistol, cocked it, and laid it in his lap. Then he took the long amputating knife from his bosom, and threw it down in front of Bellingham.\n\n\"Now, then,\" said he, \"just get to work and cut up that mummy.\"\n\n\"Oh, is that it?\" said Bellingham with a sneer.\n\n\"Yes, that is it. They tell me that the law can\"t touch you. But I have a law that will set matters straight. If in five minutes you have not set to work, I swear by the God who made me that I will put a bullet through your brain!\"\n\n\"You would murder me?\"\n\nBellingham had half-risen, and his face was the colour of putty.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And for what?\"\n\n\"To stop your mischief. One minute has gone.\"\n\n\"But what have I done?\"\n\n\"I know and you know.\"\n\n\"This is mere bullying.\"\n\n\"Two minutes are gone.\"\n\n\"But you must give reasons. You are a madman \u2013 a dangerous madman. Why should I destroy my own property? It is a valuable mummy.\"\n\n\"You must cut it up, and you must burn it.\"\n\n\"I will do no such thing.\"\n\n\"Four minutes are gone.\"\n\nSmith took up the pistol and he looked towards Bellingham with an inexorable face. As the second-hand stole round, he raised his hand and the finger twitched upon the trigger.\n\n\"There! there! I\"ll do it!\" screamed Bellingham.\n\nIn frantic haste he caught up the knife and hacked at the figure of the mummy, ever glancing round to see the eye and the weapon of his terrible visitor bent upon him. The creature crackled and snapped under every stab of the keen blade. A thick, yellow dust rose up from it. Spices and dried essences rained down upon the floor. Suddenly, with a rending crack, its backbone snapped asunder, and it fell, a brown heap of sprawling limbs, upon the floor.\n\n\"Now into the fire!\" said Smith.\n\nThe flames leaped and roared as the dried and tinder-like debris was piled upon it. The little room was like the stoke-hole of a steamer and the sweat ran down the faces of the two men; but still the one stooped and worked, while the other sat watching him with a set face. A thick, fat smoke oozed out from the fire, and a heavy smell of burned resin and singed hair filled the air. In a quarter of an hour a few charred and brittle sticks were all that was left of Lot No. 249.\n\n\"Perhaps that will satisfy you,\" snarled Bellingham, with hate and fear in his little grey eyes as he glanced back at his tormentor.\n\n\"No; I must make a clean sweep of all your materials. We must have no more devil\"s tricks. In with all these leaves! They may have something to do with it.\"\n\n\"And what now?\" asked Bellingham, when the leaves also had been added to the blaze.\n\n\"Now the roll of papyrus which you had on the table that night. It is in that drawer, I think.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" shouted Bellingham. \"Don\"t burn that! Why, man, you don\"t know what you do. It is unique; it contains wisdom which is nowhere else to be found.\"\n\n\"Out with it!\"\n\n\"But look here, Smith, you can\"t really mean it. I\"ll share the knowledge with you. I\"ll teach you all that is in it. Or, stay, let me only copy it before you burn it!\"\n\nSmith stepped forward and turned the key in the drawer. Taking out the yellow, curled roll of paper, he threw it into the fire, and pressed it down with his heel. Bellingham screamed, and grabbed at it; but Smith pushed him back and stood over it until it was reduced to a formless, grey ash.\n\n\"Now, Master B,\" said he, \"I think I have pretty well drawn your teeth. You\"ll hear from me again if you return to your old tricks. And now good-morning, for I must go back to my studies.\"\n\nAnd such is the narrative of Abercrombie Smith as to the singular events which occurred in Old College, Oxford, in the spring of \"84. As Bellingham left the university immediately afterwards, and was last heard of in the Sudan, there is no one who can contradict his statement. But the wisdom of men is small, and the ways of nature are strange, and who shall put a bound to the dark things which may be found by those who seek for them?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Los Amigos Fiasco ]\n\nI used to be the leading practitioner of Los Amigos. Of course, everyone has heard of the great electrical generating gear there. The town is widespread and there are dozens of little townlets and villages all around which receive their supply from the same centre, so that the works are on a very large scale. The Los Amigos folk say that they are the largest upon earth, but then we claim that for everything in Los Amigos except the gaol and the death rate. Those are said to be the smallest.\n\nNow, with so fine an electrical supply, it seemed to be a sinful waste of hemp that the Los Amigos criminals should perish in the old-fashioned manner. And then came the news of the electrocutions in the East, and how the results had not after all been so instantaneous as had been hoped. The Western engineers raised their eyebrows when they read of the puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they vowed in Los Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should be dealt handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There should be no reserve, said the engineers, but he should have all that they had got. And what the result of that would be none could predict, save that it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had a man been so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He was to be smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied combustion, and some disintegration and disappearance. They were waiting eagerly to settle the question by actual demonstration, and it was just at that moment that Duncan Warner came that way.\n\nWarner had been wanted by the law, and by nobody else, for many years. Desperado, murderer, train robber and road agent, he was a man beyond the pale of human pity. He had deserved a dozen deaths, and the Los Amigos folk grudged him so gaudy a one as that. He seemed to feel himself to be unworthy of it, for he made two frenzied attempts at escape. He was a powerful, muscular man, with a lion head, tangled black locks, and a sweeping beard which covered his broad chest. When he was tried, there was no finer head in all the crowded court. It\"s no new thing to find the best face looking from the dock. But his good looks could not balance his bad deeds. His advocate did all he knew, but the cards lay against him, and Duncan Warner was handed over to the mercy of the big Los Amigos dynamos.\n\nI was there at the committee meeting when the matter was discussed. The town council had chosen four experts to look after the arrangements. Three of them were admirable. There was Joseph McConnor, the very man who had designed the dynamos, and there was Joshua Westmacott, the chairman of the Los Amigos Electrical Supply Company Limited. Then there was myself, as the chief medical man, and lastly an old German of the name of Peter Stulpnagel. The Germans were a strong body at Los Amigos, and they all voted for their man. That was how he got on the committee. It was said that he had been a wonderful electrician at home, and he was eternally working with wires and insulators and Leyden jars; but, as he never seemed to get any further, or to have any results worth publishing, he came at last to be regarded as a harmless crank who had made science his hobby. We three practical men smiled when we heard that he had been elected as our colleague, and at the meeting we fixed it all up very nicely among ourselves without much thought of the old fellow who sat with his ears scooped forward in his hands, for he was a trifle hard of hearing, taking no more part in the proceedings than the gentlemen of the press who scribbled their notes on the back benches.\n\nWe did not take long to settle it all. In New York a strength of some two thousand volts had been used, and death had not been instantaneous. Evidently their shock had been too weak. Los Amigos should not fall into that error. The charge should be six times greater, and therefore, of course, it would be six times more effective. Nothing could possibly be more logical. The whole concentrated force of the great dynamos should be employed on Duncan Warner.\n\nSo we three settled it, and had already risen to break up the meeting, when our silent companion opened his mouth for the first time.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" said he, \"you appear to me to show an extraordinary ignorance upon the subject of electricity. You have not mastered the first principles of its actions upon a human being.\"\n\nThe committee was about to break into an angry reply to this brusque comment, but the chairman of the Electrical Company tapped his forehead to claim its indulgence for the crankiness of the speaker.\n\n\"Pray tell us, sir,\" said he, with an ironical smile, \"what is there in our conclusions with which you find fault?\"\n\n\"With your assumption that a large dose of electricity will merely increase the effect of a small dose. Do you not think it possible that it might have an entirely different result? Do you know anything, by actual experiment, of the effect of such powerful shocks?\"\n\n\"We know it by analogy,\" said the chairman pompously. \"All drugs increase their effect when they increase their dose; for example \u2013 for example \u2013\"\n\n\"Whisky,\" said Joseph McConnor.\n\n\"Quite so. Whisky. You see it there.\"\n\nPeter Stulpnagel smiled and shook his head. \"Your argument is not very good,\" said he. \"When I used to take whisky, I used to find that one glass would excite me, but that six would send me to sleep, which is just the opposite. Now, suppose that electricity were to act in just the opposite way also, what then?\"\n\nWe three practical men burst out laughing. We had known that our colleague was queer, but we never had thought that he would be as queer as this.\n\n\"What then?\" repeated Peter Stulpnagel.\n\n\"We\"ll take our chances,\" said the chairman.\n\n\"Pray consider,\" said Peter, \"that workmen who have touched the wires, and who have received shocks of only a few hundred volts, have died instantly. The fact is well known. And yet when a much greater force was used upon a criminal at New York, the man struggled for some little time. Do you not clearly see that the smaller dose is the more deadly?\"\n\n\"I think, gentlemen, that this discussion has been carried on quite long enough,\" said the chairman, rising again. \"The point, I take it, has already been decided by the majority of the committee, and Duncan Warner shall be electrocuted on Tuesday by the full strength of the Los Amigos dynamos. Is it not so?\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Joseph McConnor.\n\n\"I agree,\" said I.\n\n\"And I protest,\" said Peter Stulpnagel.\n\n\"Then the motion is carried, and your protest will be duly entered in the minutes,\" said the chairman, and so the sitting was dissolved.\n\nThe attendance at the electrocution was a very small one. We four members of the committee were, of course, present with the executioner, who was to act under our orders. The others were the United States marshal, the governor of the gaol, the chaplain and three members of the press. The room was a small, brick chamber, forming an out-house to the Central Electrical Station. It had been used as a laundry, and had an oven and copper at one side, but no other furniture save a single chair for the condemned man. A metal plate for his feet was placed in front of it, to which ran a thick, insulated wire. Above, another wire depended from the ceiling, which could be connected with a small, metallic rod projecting from a cap which was to be placed upon his head. When this connection was established Duncan Warner\"s hour was come.\n\nThere was a solemn hush as we waited for the coming of the prisoner. The practical engineers looked a little pale and fidgeted nervously with the wires. Even the hardened marshal was ill at ease, for a mere hanging was one thing and this blasting of flesh and blood a very different one. As to the pressmen, their faces were whiter than the sheets which lay before them. The only man who appeared to feel none of the influence of these preparations was the little German crank, who strolled from one to the other with a smile on his lips and mischief in his eyes. More than once he even went so far as to burst into a shout of laughter, until the chaplain sternly rebuked him for his ill-timed levity.\n\n\"How can you so far forget yourself, Mr Stulpnagel,\" said he, \"as to jest in the presence of death?\"\n\nBut the German was quite unabashed. \"If I were in the presence of death I should not jest,\" said he, \"but since I am not I may do what I choose.\"\n\nThis flippant reply was about to draw another and a sterner reproof from the chaplain when the door was swung open and two warders entered leading Duncan Warner between them. He glanced round him with a set face, stepped resolutely forward and seated himself upon the chair.\n\n\"Touch her off!\" said he.\n\nIt was barbarous to keep him in suspense. The chaplain murmured a few words in his ear, the attendant placed the cap upon his head, and then, while we all held our breath, the wire and the metal were brought in contact.\n\n\"Great Scott!\" shouted Duncan Warner.\n\nHe had bounded in his chair as the frightful shock crashed through his system. But he was not dead. On the contrary, his eyes gleamed far more brightly than they had done before. There was only one change, but it was a singular one. The black had passed from his hair and beard as the shadow passes from a landscape. They were both as white as snow. And yet there was no other sign of decay. His skin was smooth and plump and lustrous as a child\"s.\n\nThe marshal looked at the committee with a reproachful eye. \"There seems to be some hitch here, gentlemen,\" said he.\n\nWe three practical men looked at each other.\n\nPeter Stulpnagel smiled pensively.\n\n\"I think that another one should do it,\" said I.\n\nAgain the connection was made, and again Duncan Warner sprang in his chair and shouted, but, indeed, were it not that he still remained in the chair, none of us would have recognised him. His hair and his beard had shredded off in an instant, and the room looked like a barber\"s shop on a Saturday night. There he sat, his eyes still shining, his skin radiant with the glow of perfect health, but with a scalp as bald as a Dutch cheese and a chin without so much as a trace of down. He began to revolve one of his arms, slowly and doubtfully at first, but with more confidence as he went on.\n\n\"That jint,\" said he, \"has puzzled half the doctors on the Pacific Slope. It\"s as good as new, and as limber as a hickory twig.\"\n\n\"You are feeling pretty well?\" asked the old German.\n\n\"Never better in my life,\" said Duncan Warner cheerily.\n\nThe situation was a painful one. The marshal glared at the committee. Peter Stulpnagel grinned and rubbed his hands. The engineers scratched their heads. The bald-headed prisoner revolved his arm and looked pleased.\n\n\"I think that one more shock \u2013 \" began the chairman.\n\n\"No, sir,\" said the marshal; \"we\"ve had foolery enough for one morning. We are here for an execution, and an execution we\"ll have.\"\n\n\"What do you propose?\"\n\n\"There\"s a hook handy upon the ceiling. Fetch a rope, and we\"ll soon set this matter straight.\"\n\nThere was another awkward delay while the warders departed for the cord. Peter Stulpnagel bent over Duncan Warner and whispered something in his ear. The desperado stared in surprise.\n\n\"You don\"t say?\" he asked.\n\nThe German nodded.\n\n\"What! No ways?\"\n\nPeter shook his head, and the two began to laugh as though they shared some huge joke between them.\n\nThe rope was brought, and the marshal himself slipped the noose over the criminal\"s neck. Then the two warders, the assistant and he swung their victim into the air. For half an hour he hung \u2013 a dreadful sight \u2013 from the ceiling. Then in solemn silence they lowered him down, and one of the warders went out to order the shell to be brought round. But as he touched ground again what was our amazement when Duncan Warner put his hands up to his neck, loosened the noose, and took a long, deep breath.\n\n\"Paul Jefferson\"s sale is goin\" well,\" he remarked. \"I could see the crowd from up yonder,\" and he nodded at the hook in the ceiling.\n\n\"Up with him again!\" shouted the marshal, \"we\"ll get the life out of him somehow.\"\n\nIn an instant the victim was up at the hook once more. They kept him there for an hour, but when he came down he was perfectly garrulous.\n\n\"Old man Plunket goes too much to the Arcady Saloon,\" said he. \"Three times he\"s been there in an hour; and him with a family. Old man Plunket would do well to swear off.\"\n\nIt was monstrous and incredible, but there it was. There was no getting round it. The man was there talking when he ought to have been dead. We all sat staring in amazement, but United States Marshal Carpenter was not a man to be euchred so easily. He motioned the others to one side, so that the prisoner was left standing alone.\n\n\"Duncan Warner,\" said he slowly, \"you are here to play your part and I am here to play mine. Your game is to live if you can, and my game is to carry out the sentence of the law. You\"ve beat us on electricity. I\"ll give you one there. And you\"ve beat us on hanging, for you seem to thrive on it. But it\"s my turn to beat you now, for my duty has to be done.\"\n\nHe pulled a six-shooter from his coat as he spoke and fired all the shots through the body of the prisoner. The room was so filled with smoke that we could see nothing, but when it cleared the prisoner was still standing there, looking down in disgust at the front of his coat.\n\n\"Coats must be cheap where you come from,\" said he. \"Thirty dollars it cost me, and look at it now. The six holes in front are bad enough, but four of the balls have passed out, and a pretty fine state the back must be in.\n\nThe marshal\"s revolver fell from his hand, and he dropped his arms to his sides, a beaten man.\n\n\"Maybe some of you gentlemen can tell me what this means,\" said he, looking helplessly at the committee.\n\nPeter Stulpnagel took a step forward. \"I\"ll tell you all about it,\" said he.\n\n\"You seem to be the only person who knows anything.\"\n\n\"I am the only person who knows anything. I should have warned these gentlemen; but, as they would not listen to me, I have allowed them to learn by experience. What you have done with your electricity is that you have increased the man\"s vitality until he can defy death for centuries.\"\n\n\"Centuries!\"\n\n\"Yes, it will take the wear of hundreds of years to exhaust the enormous nervous energy with which you have drenched him. Electricity is life, and you have charged him with it to the utmost. Perhaps in fifty years you might execute him, but I am not sanguine about it.\"\n\n\"Great Scott! What shall I do with him?\" cried the unhappy marshal.\n\nPeter Stulpnagel shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"It seems to me that it does not much matter what you do with him now,\" said he.\n\n\"Maybe we could drain the electricity out of him again. Suppose we hang him up by the heels?\"\n\n\"No, no, it\"s out of the question.\"\n\n\"Well, well, he shall do no more mischief in Los Amigos, anyhow,\" said the marshal, with decision. \"He shall go into the new gaol. The prison will wear him out.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" said Peter Stulpnagel, \"I think that it is much more probable that he will wear out the prison.\"\n\nIt was rather a fiasco, and for years we didn\"t talk more about it than we could help, but it\"s no secret now, and I thought you might like to jot down the facts in your case-book.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Nightmare Room ]\n\nThe sitting-room of the Masons was a very singular apartment. At one end it was furnished with considerable luxury. The deep sofas, the low, luxurious chairs, the voluptuous statuettes and the rich curtains hanging from deep and ornamental screens of metalwork made a fitting frame for the lovely woman who was the mistress of the establishment. Mason, a young but wealthy man of affairs, had clearly spared no pains and no expense to meet every want and every whim of his beautiful wife. It was natural that he should do so, for she had given up much for his sake. The most famous dancer in France, the heroine of a dozen extraordinary romances, she had resigned her life of glittering pleasure in order to share the fate of the young American whose austere ways differed so widely from her own. In all that wealth could buy he tried to make amends for what she had lost. Some might perhaps have thought it in better taste had he not proclaimed this fact \u2013 had he not even allowed it to be printed \u2013 but save for some personal peculiarities of the sort, his conduct was that of a husband who has never for an instant ceased to be a lover. Even the presence of spectators would not prevent the public exhibition of his overpowering affection.\n\nBut the room was singular. At first it seemed familiar, and yet a longer acquaintance made one realise its sinister peculiarities. It was silent \u2013 very silent. No footfall could be heard upon those rich carpets and heavy rugs. A struggle \u2013 even the fall of a body \u2013 would make no sound. It was strangely colourless also, in a light which seemed always subdued. Nor was it all furnished in equal taste. One would have said that when the young banker had lavished thousands upon this boudoir, this inner jewel-case for his precious possession, he had failed to count the cost and had suddenly been arrested by a threat to his own solvency. It was luxurious where it looked out upon the busy street below. At the farther side it was bare, spartan, and reflected rather the taste of a most ascetic man than of a pleasure-loving woman. Perhaps that was why she only came there for a few hours, sometimes two, sometimes four, in the day, but while she was there she lived intensely, and within this nightmare room Lucille Mason was a very different and a more dangerous woman than elsewhere.\n\nDangerous \u2013 that was the word. Who could doubt it who saw her delicate figure stretched upon the great bearskin which draped the sofa. She was leaning upon her right elbow, her delicate but determined chin resting upon her hand, while her eyes, large and languishing, adorable but inexorable, stared out in front of her with a fixed intensity which had in it something vaguely terrible. It was a lovely face \u2013 a child\"s face, and yet nature had placed there some subtle mark, some indefinable expression, which told that a devil lurked within. It had been noticed that dogs shrank from her and that children screamed and ran from her caresses. There are instincts which are deeper than reason.\n\nUpon this particular afternoon something had greatly moved her. A letter was in her hand, which she read and reread with a tightening of those delicate little eyebrows and a grim setting of those delicious lips. Suddenly she started, and a shadow of fear softened the feline menace of her features. She raised herself upon her arm, and her eyes were fixed eagerly upon the door. She was listening intently \u2013 listening for something which she dreaded. For a moment a smile of relief played over her expressive face. Then with a look of horror she stuffed her letter into her dress. She had hardly done so before the door opened, and a young man came briskly into the room. It was Archie Mason, her husband \u2013 the man whom she had loved, the man for whom she had sacrificed her European fame, the man whom now she regarded as the one obstacle to a new and wonderful experience.\n\nThe American was a man of about thirty, clean-shaven, athletic, dressed to perfection in a closely cut suit which outlined his perfect figure. He stood at the door with his arms folded, looking intently at his wife, with a face which might have been a handsome, sun-tinted mask save for those vivid eyes. She still leaned upon her elbow, but her eyes were fixed on his. There was something terrible in the silent exchange. Each interrogated the other, and each conveyed the thought that the answer to their question was vital. He might have been asking, \"What have you done?\" She in her turn seemed to be saying, \"What do you know?\" Finally, he walked forward, sat down upon the bearskin beside her and, taking her delicate ear gently between his fingers, turned her face towards his.\n\n\"Lucille,\" he said, \"are you poisoning me?\"\n\nShe sprang back from his touch with horror in her face and protests upon her lips. Too moved to speak, her surprise and her anger showed themselves rather in her darting hands and her convulsed features. She tried to rise, but his grasp tightened upon her wrist. Again he asked a question, but this time it had deepened in its terrible significance.\n\n\"Lucille, why are you poisoning me?\"\n\n\"You are mad, Archie! Mad!\" she gasped.\n\nHis answer froze her blood. With pale parted lips and blanched cheeks, she could only stare at him in helpless silence whilst he drew a small bottle from his pocket and held it before her eyes.\n\n\"It is from your jewel-case!\" he cried.\n\nTwice she tried to speak and failed. At last the words came slowly one by one from her contorted lips: \"At least I never used it.\"\n\nAgain his hand sought his pocket. From it he drew a sheet of paper, which he unfolded and held before her.\n\n\"It is the certificate of Dr Angus. It shows the presence of twelve grains of antimony. I have also the evidence of Du Val, the chemist who sold it.\"\n\nHer face was terrible to look at. There was nothing to say. She could only lie with that fixed hopeless stare like some fierce creature in a fatal trap.\n\n\"Well?\" he asked.\n\nThere was no answer save a movement of desperation and appeal.\n\n\"Why?\" he said. \"I want to know why.\" As he spoke his eye caught the edge of the letter which she had thrust into her bosom. In an instant he had snatched it. With a cry of despair she tried to regain it, but he held her off with one hand while his eyes raced over it.\n\n\"Campbell!\" he gasped. \"It is Campbell!\"\n\nShe had found her courage again. There was nothing more to conceal. Her face set hard and firm. Her eyes were deadly as daggers.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, \"it is Campbell.\"\n\n\"My God! Campbell of all men!\"\n\nHe rose and walked swiftly about the room. Campbell, the grandest man that he had ever known, a man whose whole life had been one long record of self-denial, of courage, of every quality which marks the chosen man. And yet, he, too, had fallen a victim to this siren, and had been dragged down to such a level that he had betrayed, in intention if not in actual deed, the man whose hand he shook in friendship. It was incredible \u2013 and yet here was the passionate, pleading letter imploring his wife to fly and share the fate of a penniless man. Every word of the letter showed that Campbell had at least no thought of Mason\"s death, which would have removed all difficulties. That devilish solution was the outcome of the deep and wicked brain which brooded within that perfect habitation.\n\nMason was a man in a million, a philosopher, a thinker, with a broad and tender sympathy for others. For an instant his soul had been submerged in his bitterness. He could for that brief period have slain both his wife and Campbell, and gone to his own death with the serene mind of a man who has done his plain duty. But already, as he paced the room, milder thoughts bad begun to prevail. How could he blame Campbell? He knew the absolute witchery of this woman. It was not only her wonderful physical beauty. She had a unique power of seeming to take an interest in a man, in writhing into his inmost conscience, in penetrating those parts of his nature which were too sacred for the world, and in seeming to stimulate him towards ambition and even towards virtue. It was just there that the deadly cleverness of her net was shown. He remembered how it had been in his own case. She was free then \u2013 or so he thought \u2013 and he had been able to marry her. But suppose she had not been free. Suppose she had been married. And suppose she had taken possession of his soul in the same way. Would he have stopped there? Would he have been able to draw off with his unfulfilled longings? He was bound to admit that with all his New England strength he could not have done so. Why, then, should he feel so bitter with his unfortunate friend who was in the same position? It was pity and sympathy which filled his mind as he thought of Campbell.\n\nAnd she? There she lay upon the sofa, a poor broken butterfly, her dreams dispersed, her plot detected, her future dark and perilous. Even for her, poisoner as she was, his heart relented. He knew something of her history. He knew her as a spoiled child from birth, untamed, unchecked, sweeping everything easily before her from her cleverness, her beauty and her charm. She had never known an obstacle. And now one had risen across her path, and she had madly and wickedly tried to remove it. But if she had wished to remove it, was not that in itself a sign that he had been found wanting \u2013 that he was not the man who could bring her peace of mind and contentment of heart? He was too stern and self-contained for that sunny volatile nature. He was of the north, and she of the south; drawn strongly together for a time by the law of opposites, they were not made for permanent union. He should have seen this \u2013 he should have understood it. It was on him, with his superior brain, that the responsibility for the situation lay. His heart softened towards her as it would to a little child who was in helpless trouble. For a time he had paced the room in silence, his lips compressed, his hands clenched till his nails had marked his palms. Now with a sudden movement he sat beside her and took her cold and inert hand in his. One thought beat in his brain. \"Is it chivalry, or is it weakness?\" The question sounded in his ears, it framed itself before his eyes, he could almost fancy that it materialised itself and that he saw it in letters which all the world could read.\n\nIt had been a hard struggle, but he had conquered.\n\n\"You shall choose between us, dear,\" he said. \"If really you are sure \u2013 sure, you understand \u2013 that Campbell could make you happy as a husband, I will not be the obstacle.\"\n\n\"A divorce!\" she gasped.\n\nHis hand closed upon the bottle of poison. \"You can call it that,\" said he.\n\nA new strange light shone in her eyes as she looked at him. This was a man who had been unknown to her. The hard, practical American had vanished. In his place she seemed to have a glimpse of a hero and a saint, a man who could rise to an inhuman height of unselfish virtue. Both her hands were round that which held the fatal phial.\n\n\"Archie,\" she cried, \"you could forgive me even that!\"\n\nHe smiled at her. \"You are only a little wayward kiddie after all.\"\n\nHer arms were outstretched to him when there was a tap at the door, and the maid entered in the strange silent fashion in which all things moved in that nightmare room. There was a card on the tray. She glanced at it.\n\n\"Captain Campbell! I will not see him.\"\n\nMason sprang to his feet. \"On the contrary, he is most welcome. Show him up this instant.\"\n\nA few minutes later a tall, sunburned young soldier had been ushered into the room. He came forward with a smile upon his pleasant features, but as the door closed behind him and the faces before him resumed their natural expressions, he paused irresolutely and glanced from one to the other.\n\n\"Well?\" he asked.\n\nMason stepped forward and laid his hand upon his shoulder. \"I bear you no ill-will,\" he said.\n\n\"Ill-will?\"\n\n\"Yes, I know all. But I might have done the same myself had the position been reversed.\"\n\nCampbell stepped back and looked a question at the lady. She nodded and shrugged her graceful shoulders.\n\nMason smiled. \"You need not fear that it is a trap for a confession. We have had a frank talk upon the matter. See, Jack, you were always a sportsman. Here\"s a bottle. Never mind how it came here. If one or other of us drink it, it would clear the situation.\" His manner was wild, almost delirious. \"Lucille, which shall it be?\"\n\nThere had been a strange force at work in the nightmare room. A third man was there, though not one of the three who had stood in the crisis of their life\"s drama had time or thought for him. How long he had been there \u2013 how much he had heard \u2013 none could say. In the corner farthest from the little group he lay crouched against the wall, a sinister snake-like figure, silent and scarcely moving save for a nervous twitching of his clenched right hand. He was concealed from view by a square case and by a dark cloth drawn cunningly above it, so as to screen his features. Intent, watching eagerly every new phase of the drama, the moment had almost come for his intervention. But the three thought little of that. Absorbed in the interplay of their own emotions they had lost sight of a force stronger than themselves \u2013 a force which might at any moment dominate the scene.\n\n\"Are you game, Jack?\" asked Mason.\n\nThe soldier nodded.\n\n\"No! \u2013 for God\"s sake, no!\" cried the woman.\n\nMason had uncorked the bottle, and turning to the side-table he drew out a pack of cards. Cards and bottle stood together.\n\n\"We can\"t put the responsibility on her,\" he said. \"Come, Jack, the best of three.\"\n\nThe soldier approached the table. He fingered the fatal cards. The woman, leaning upon her hand, bent her face forward and stared with fascinated eyes.\n\nThen and only then the bolt fell.\n\nThe stranger had risen, pale and grave.\n\nAll three were suddenly aware of his presence. They faced him with eager enquiry in their eyes. He looked at them coldly, sadly, with something of the master in his bearing.\n\n\"How is it?\" they asked, all together.\n\n\"Rotten!\" he answered. \"Rotten! We\"ll take the whole reel once more tomorrow.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "mystery" + ], + "tags": [ + "short stories" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES", + "text": "[ THE ADVENTURE OF THE EMPTY HOUSE ]\n\nIt was in the spring of the year 1894 that all London was interested, and the fashionable world dismayed, by the murder of the Honourable Ronald Adair under most unusual and inexplicable circumstances. The public has already learned those particulars of the crime which came out in the police investigation, but a good deal was suppressed upon that occasion, since the case for the prosecution was so overwhelmingly strong that it was not necessary to bring forward all the facts. Only now, at the end of nearly ten years, am I allowed to supply those missing links which make up the whole of that remarkable chain. The crime was of interest in itself, but that interest was as nothing to me compared to the inconceivable sequel, which afforded me the greatest shock and surprise of any event in my adventurous life. Even now, after this long interval, I find myself thrilling as I think of it, and feeling once more that sudden flood of joy, amazement, and incredulity which utterly submerged my mind. Let me say to that public, which has shown some interest in those glimpses which I have occasionally given them of the thoughts and actions of a very remarkable man, that they are not to blame me if I have not shared my knowledge with them, for I should have considered it my first duty to do so, had I not been barred by a positive prohibition from his own lips, which was only withdrawn upon the third of last month.\n\nIt can be imagined that my close intimacy with Sherlock Holmes had interested me deeply in crime, and that after his disappearance I never failed to read with care the various problems which came before the public. And I even attempted, more than once, for my own private satisfaction, to employ his methods in their solution, though with indifferent success. There was none, however, which appealed to me like this tragedy of Ronald Adair. As I read the evidence at the inquest, which led up to a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown, I realized more clearly than I had ever done the loss which the community had sustained by the death of Sherlock Holmes. There were points about this strange business which would, I was sure, have specially appealed to him, and the efforts of the police would have been supplemented, or more probably anticipated, by the trained observation and the alert mind of the first criminal agent in Europe. All day, as I drove upon my round, I turned over the case in my mind and found no explanation which appeared to me to be adequate. At the risk of telling a twice-told tale, I will recapitulate the facts as they were known to the public at the conclusion of the inquest.\n\nThe Honourable Ronald Adair was the second son of the Earl of Maynooth, at that time governor of one of the Australian colonies. Adair's mother had returned from Australia to undergo the operation for cataract, and she, her son Ronald, and her daughter Hilda were living together at 427 Park Lane. The youth moved in the best society\u2014had, so far as was known, no enemies and no particular vices. He had been engaged to Miss Edith Woodley, of Carstairs, but the engagement had been broken off by mutual consent some months before, and there was no sign that it had left any very profound feeling behind it. For the rest of the man's life moved in a narrow and conventional circle, for his habits were quiet and his nature unemotional. Yet it was upon this easy-going young aristocrat that death came, in most strange and unexpected form, between the hours of ten and eleven-twenty on the night of March 30, 1894.\n\nRonald Adair was fond of cards\u2014playing continually, but never for such stakes as would hurt him. He was a member of the Baldwin, the Cavendish, and the Bagatelle card clubs. It was shown that, after dinner on the day of his death, he had played a rubber of whist at the latter club. He had also played there in the afternoon. The evidence of those who had played with him\u2014Mr. Murray, Sir John Hardy, and Colonel Moran\u2014showed that the game was whist, and that there was a fairly equal fall of the cards. Adair might have lost five pounds, but not more. His fortune was a considerable one, and such a loss could not in any way affect him. He had played nearly every day at one club or other, but he was a cautious player, and usually rose a winner. It came out in evidence that, in partnership with Colonel Moran, he had actually won as much as four hundred and twenty pounds in a sitting, some weeks before, from Godfrey Milner and Lord Balmoral. So much for his recent history as it came out at the inquest.\n\nOn the evening of the crime, he returned from the club exactly at ten. His mother and sister were out spending the evening with a relation. The servant deposed that she heard him enter the front room on the second floor, generally used as his sitting-room. She had lit a fire there, and as it smoked she had opened the window. No sound was heard from the room until eleven-twenty, the hour of the return of Lady Maynooth and her daughter. Desiring to say good-night, she attempted to enter her son's room. The door was locked on the inside, and no answer could be got to their cries and knocking. Help was obtained, and the door forced. The unfortunate young man was found lying near the table. His head had been horribly mutilated by an expanding revolver bullet, but no weapon of any sort was to be found in the room. On the table lay two banknotes for ten pounds each and seventeen pounds ten in silver and gold, the money arranged in little piles of varying amount. There were some figures also upon a sheet of paper, with the names of some club friends opposite to them, from which it was conjectured that before his death he was endeavouring to make out his losses or winnings at cards.\n\nA minute examination of the circumstances served only to make the case more complex. In the first place, no reason could be given why the young man should have fastened the door upon the inside. There was the possibility that the murderer had done this, and had afterwards escaped by the window. The drop was at least twenty feet, however, and a bed of crocuses in full bloom lay beneath. Neither the flowers nor the earth showed any sign of having been disturbed, nor were there any marks upon the narrow strip of grass which separated the house from the road. Apparently, therefore, it was the young man himself who had fastened the door. But how did he come by his death? No one could have climbed up to the window without leaving traces. Suppose a man had fired through the window, he would indeed be a remarkable shot who could with a revolver inflict so deadly a wound. Again, Park Lane is a frequented thoroughfare; there is a cab stand within a hundred yards of the house. No one had heard a shot. And yet there was the dead man, and there the revolver bullet, which had mushroomed out, as soft-nosed bullets will, and so inflicted a wound which must have caused instantaneous death. Such were the circumstances of the Park Lane Mystery, which were further complicated by entire absence of motive, since, as I have said, young Adair was not known to have any enemy, and no attempt had been made to remove the money or valuables in the room.\n\nAll day I turned these facts over in my mind, endeavouring to hit some theory which could reconcile them all, and to find that line of least resistance which my poor friend had declared to be the starting-point of every investigation. I confess that I made little progress. In the evening I strolled across the Park, and found myself about six o'clock at the Oxford Street end of Park Lane. A group of loafers upon the pavements, all staring up at a particular window, directed me to the house which I had come to see. A tall, thin man with coloured glasses, whom I strongly suspected of being a plain-clothes detective, was pointing out some theory of his own, while the others crowded round to listen to what he said. I got as near him as I could, but his observations seemed to me to be absurd, so I withdrew again in some disgust. As I did so I struck against an elderly, deformed man, who had been behind me, and I knocked down several books which he was carrying. I remember that as I picked them up, I observed the title of one of them, The Origin of Tree Worship, and it struck me that the fellow must be some poor bibliophile, who, either as a trade or as a hobby, was a collector of obscure volumes. I endeavoured to apologize for the accident, but it was evident that these books which I had so unfortunately maltreated were very precious objects in the eyes of their owner. With a snarl of contempt he turned upon his heel, and I saw his curved back and white side-whiskers disappear among the throng.\n\nMy observations of No. 427 Park Lane did little to clear up the problem in which I was interested. The house was separated from the street by a low wall and railing, the whole not more than five feet high. It was perfectly easy, therefore, for anyone to get into the garden, but the window was entirely inaccessible, since there was no waterpipe or anything which could help the most active man to climb it. More puzzled than ever, I retraced my steps to Kensington. I had not been in my study five minutes when the maid entered to say that a person desired to see me. To my astonishment it was none other than my strange old book collector, his sharp, wizened face peering out from a frame of white hair, and his precious volumes, a dozen of them at least, wedged under his right arm.\n\n\"You're surprised to see me, sir,\" said he, in a strange, croaking voice.\n\nI acknowledged that I was.\n\n\"Well, I've a conscience, sir, and when I chanced to see you go into this house, as I came hobbling after you, I thought to myself, I'll just step in and see that kind gentleman, and tell him that if I was a bit gruff in my manner there was not any harm meant, and that I am much obliged to him for picking up my books.\"\n\n\"You make too much of a trifle,\" said I. \"May I ask how you knew who I was?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, if it isn't too great a liberty, I am a neighbour of yours, for you'll find my little bookshop at the corner of Church Street, and very happy to see you, I am sure. Maybe you collect yourself, sir. Here's British Birds, and Catullus, and The Holy War\u2014a bargain, every one of them. With five volumes you could just fill that gap on that second shelf. It looks untidy, does it not, sir?\"\n\nI moved my head to look at the cabinet behind me. When I turned again, Sherlock Holmes was standing smiling at me across my study table. I rose to my feet, stared at him for some seconds in utter amazement, and then it appears that I must have fainted for the first and the last time in my life. Certainly a gray mist swirled before my eyes, and when it cleared I found my collar-ends undone and the tingling after-taste of brandy upon my lips. Holmes was bending over my chair, his flask in his hand.\n\n\"My dear Watson,\" said the well-remembered voice, \"I owe you a thousand apologies. I had no idea that you would be so affected.\"\n\nI gripped him by the arms.\n\n\"Holmes!\" I cried. \"Is it really you? Can it indeed be that you are alive? Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?\"\n\n\"Wait a moment,\" said he. \"Are you sure that you are really fit to discuss things? I have given you a serious shock by my unnecessarily dramatic reappearance.\"\n\n\"I am all right, but indeed, Holmes, I can hardly believe my eyes. Good heavens! to think that you\u2014you of all men\u2014should be standing in my study.\" Again I gripped him by the sleeve, and felt the thin, sinewy arm beneath it. \"Well, you're not a spirit, anyhow,\" said I. \"My dear chap, I'm overjoyed to see you. Sit down, and tell me how you came alive out of that dreadful chasm.\"\n\nHe sat opposite to me, and lit a cigarette in his old, nonchalant manner. He was dressed in the seedy frockcoat of the book merchant, but the rest of that individual lay in a pile of white hair and old books upon the table. Holmes looked even thinner and keener than of old, but there was a dead-white tinge in his aquiline face which told me that his life recently had not been a healthy one.\n\n\"I am glad to stretch myself, Watson,\" said he. \"It is no joke when a tall man has to take a foot off his stature for several hours on end. Now, my dear fellow, in the matter of these explanations, we have, if I may ask for your cooperation, a hard and dangerous night's work in front of us. Perhaps it would be better if I gave you an account of the whole situation when that work is finished.\"\n\n\"I am full of curiosity. I should much prefer to hear now.\"\n\n\"You'll come with me to-night?\"\n\n\"When you like and where you like.\"\n\n\"This is, indeed, like the old days. We shall have time for a mouthful of dinner before we need go. Well, then, about that chasm. I had no serious difficulty in getting out of it, for the very simple reason that I never was in it.\"\n\n\"You never were in it?\"\n\n\"No, Watson, I never was in it. My note to you was absolutely genuine. I had little doubt that I had come to the end of my career when I perceived the somewhat sinister figure of the late Professor Moriarty standing upon the narrow pathway which led to safety. I read an inexorable purpose in his gray eyes. I exchanged some remarks with him, therefore, and obtained his courteous permission to write the short note which you afterwards received. I left it with my cigarette-box and my stick, and I walked along the pathway, Moriarty still at my heels. When I reached the end I stood at bay. He drew no weapon, but he rushed at me and threw his long arms around me. He knew that his own game was up, and was only anxious to revenge himself upon me. We tottered together upon the brink of the fall. I have some knowledge, however, of baritsu, or the Japanese system of wrestling, which has more than once been very useful to me. I slipped through his grip, and he with a horrible scream kicked madly for a few seconds, and clawed the air with both his hands. But for all his efforts he could not get his balance, and over he went. With my face over the brink, I saw him fall for a long way. Then he struck a rock, bounded off, and splashed into the water.\"\n\nI listened with amazement to this explanation, which Holmes delivered between the puffs of his cigarette.\n\n\"But the tracks!\" I cried. \"I saw, with my own eyes, that two went down the path and none returned.\"\n\n\"It came about in this way. The instant that the Professor had disappeared, it struck me what a really extraordinarily lucky chance Fate had placed in my way. I knew that Moriarty was not the only man who had sworn my death. There were at least three others whose desire for vengeance upon me would only be increased by the death of their leader. They were all most dangerous men. One or other would certainly get me. On the other hand, if all the world was convinced that I was dead they would take liberties, these men, they would soon lay themselves open, and sooner or later I could destroy them. Then it would be time for me to announce that I was still in the land of the living. So rapidly does the brain act that I believe I had thought this all out before Professor Moriarty had reached the bottom of the Reichenbach Fall.\n\n\"I stood up and examined the rocky wall behind me. In your picturesque account of the matter, which I read with great interest some months later, you assert that the wall was sheer. That was not literally true. A few small footholds presented themselves, and there was some indication of a ledge. The cliff is so high that to climb it all was an obvious impossibility, and it was equally impossible to make my way along the wet path without leaving some tracks. I might, it is true, have reversed my boots, as I have done on similar occasions, but the sight of three sets of tracks in one direction would certainly have suggested a deception. On the whole, then, it was best that I should risk the climb. It was not a pleasant business, Watson. The fall roared beneath me. I am not a fanciful person, but I give you my word that I seemed to hear Moriarty's voice screaming at me out of the abyss. A mistake would have been fatal. More than once, as tufts of grass came out in my hand or my foot slipped in the wet notches of the rock, I thought that I was gone. But I struggled upward, and at last I reached a ledge several feet deep and covered with soft green moss, where I could lie unseen, in the most perfect comfort. There I was stretched, when you, my dear Watson, and all your following were investigating in the most sympathetic and inefficient manner the circumstances of my death.\n\n\"At last, when you had all formed your inevitable and totally erroneous conclusions, you departed for the hotel, and I was left alone. I had imagined that I had reached the end of my adventures, but a very unexpected occurrence showed me that there were surprises still in store for me. A huge rock, falling from above, boomed past me, struck the path, and bounded over into the chasm. For an instant I thought that it was an accident, but a moment later, looking up, I saw a man's head against the darkening sky, and another stone struck the very ledge upon which I was stretched, within a foot of my head. Of course, the meaning of this was obvious. Moriarty had not been alone. A confederate\u2014and even that one glance had told me how dangerous a man that confederate was\u2014had kept guard while the Professor had attacked me. From a distance, unseen by me, he had been a witness of his friend's death and of my escape. He had waited, and then making his way round to the top of the cliff, he had endeavoured to succeed where his comrade had failed.\n\n\"I did not take long to think about it, Watson. Again I saw that grim face look over the cliff, and I knew that it was the precursor of another stone. I scrambled down on to the path. I don't think I could have done it in cold blood. It was a hundred times more difficult than getting up. But I had no time to think of the danger, for another stone sang past me as I hung by my hands from the edge of the ledge. Halfway down I slipped, but, by the blessing of God, I landed, torn and bleeding, upon the path. I took to my heels, did ten miles over the mountains in the darkness, and a week later I found myself in Florence, with the certainty that no one in the world knew what had become of me.\n\n\"I had only one confidant\u2014my brother Mycroft. I owe you many apologies, my dear Watson, but it was all-important that it should be thought I was dead, and it is quite certain that you would not have written so convincing an account of my unhappy end had you not yourself thought that it was true. Several times during the last three years I have taken up my pen to write to you, but always I feared lest your affectionate regard for me should tempt you to some indiscretion which would betray my secret. For that reason I turned away from you this evening when you upset my books, for I was in danger at the time, and any show of surprise and emotion upon your part might have drawn attention to my identity and led to the most deplorable and irreparable results. As to Mycroft, I had to confide in him in order to obtain the money which I needed. The course of events in London did not run so well as I had hoped, for the trial of the Moriarty gang left two of its most dangerous members, my own most vindictive enemies, at liberty. I travelled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khal ifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France. Having concluded this to my satisfaction and learning that only one of my enemies was now left in London, I was about to return when my movements were hastened by the news of this very remarkable Park Lane Mystery, which not only appealed to me by its own merits, but which seemed to offer some most peculiar personal opportunities. I came over at once to London, called in my own person at Baker Street, threw Mrs. Hudson into violent hysterics, and found that Mycroft had preserved my rooms and my papers exactly as they had always been. So it was, my dear Watson, that at two o'clock to-day I found myself in my old armchair in my own old room, and only wishing that I could have seen my old friend Watson in the other chair which he has so often adorned.\"\n\nSuch was the remarkable narrative to which I listened on that April evening\u2014a narrative which would have been utterly incredible to me had it not been confirmed by the actual sight of the tall, spare figure and the keen, eager face, which I had never thought to see again. In some manner he had learned of my own sad bereavement, and his sympathy was shown in his manner rather than in his words. \"Work is the best antidote to sorrow, my dear Watson,\" said he; \"and I have a piece of work for us both to-night which, if we can bring it to a successful conclusion, will in itself justify a man's life on this planet.\" In vain I begged him to tell me more. \"You will hear and see enough before morning,\" he answered. \"We have three years of the past to discuss. Let that suffice until half-past nine, when we start upon the notable adventure of the empty house.\"\n\nIt was indeed like old times when, at that hour, I found myself seated beside him in a hansom, my revolver in my pocket, and the thrill of ad venture in my heart. Holmes was cold and stern and silent. As the gleam of the street-lamps flashed upon his austere features, I saw that his brows were drawn down in thought and his thin lips compressed. I knew not what wild beast we were about to hunt down in the dark jungle of criminal London, but I was well assured, from the bearing of this master huntsman, that the adventure was a most grave one\u2014while the sardonic smile which occasionally broke through his ascetic gloom boded little good for the object of our quest.\n\nI had imagined that we were bound for Baker Street, but Holmes stopped the cab at the corner of Cavendish Square. I observed that as he stepped out he gave a most searching glance to right and left, and at every subsequent street corner he took the utmost pains to assure that he was not followed. Our route was certainly a singular one. Holmes's knowledge of the byways of London was extraordinary, and on this occasion he passed rapidly and with an assured step through a network of mews and stables, the very existence of which I had never known. We emerged at last into a small road, lined with old, gloomy houses, which led us into Manchester Street, and so to Blandford Street. Here he turned swiftly down a narrow passage, passed through a wooden gate into a deserted yard, and then opened with a key the back door of a house. We entered together, and he closed it behind us.\n\nThe place was pitch dark, but it was evident to me that it was an empty house. Our feet creaked and crackled over the bare planking, and my outstretched hand touched a wall from which the paper was hanging in ribbons. Holmes's cold, thin fingers closed round my wrist and led me forward down a long hall, until I dimly saw the murky fanlight over the door. Here Holmes turned suddenly to the right, and we found ourselves in a large, square, empty room, heavily shadowed in the corners, but faintly lit in the centre from the lights of the street beyond. There was no lamp near, and the window was thick with dust, so that we could only just discern each other's figures within. My companion put his hand upon my shoulder and his lips close to my ear.\n\n\"Do you know where we are?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Surely that is Baker Street,\" I answered, staring through the dim window.\n\n\"Exactly. We are in Camden House, which stands opposite to our own old quarters.\"\n\n\"But why are we here?\"\n\n\"Because it commands so excellent a view of that picturesque pile. Might I trouble you, my dear Watson, to draw a little nearer to the window, taking every precaution not to show yourself, and then to look up at our old rooms\u2014the starting-point of so many of your little fairy-tales? We will see if my three years of absence have entirely taken away my power to surprise you.\"\n\nI crept forward and looked across at the familiar window. As my eyes fell upon it, I gave a gasp and a cry of amazement. The blind was down, and a strong light was burning in the room. The shadow of a man who was seated in a chair within was thrown in hard, black outline upon the luminous screen of the window. There was no mistaking the poise of the head, the squareness of the shoulders, the sharpness of the features. The face was turned half-round, and the effect was that of one of those black silhouettes which our grandparents loved to frame. It was a perfect reproduction of Holmes. So amazed was I that I threw out my hand to make sure that the man himself was standing beside me. He was quivering with silent laughter.\n\n\"Well?\" said he.\n\n\"Good heavens!\" I cried. \"It is marvellous.\"\n\n\"I trust that age doth not wither nor custom stale my infinite variety,\" said he, and I recognized in his voice the joy and pride which the artist takes in his own creation. \"It really is rather like me, is it not?\"\n\n\"I should be prepared to swear that it was you.\"\n\n\"The credit of the execution is due to Monsieur Oscar Meunier, of Grenoble, who spent some days in doing the moulding. It is a bust in wax. The rest I arranged myself during my visit to Baker Street this afternoon.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Because, my dear Watson, I had the strongest possible reason for wishing certain people to think that I was there when I was really elsewhere.\"\n\n\"And you thought the rooms were watched?\"\n\n\"I knew that they were watched.\"\n\n\"By whom?\"\n\n\"By my old enemies, Watson. By the charming society whose leader lies in the Reichenbach Fall. You must remember that they knew, and only they knew, that I was still alive. Sooner or later they believed that I should come back to my rooms. They watched them continuously, and this morning they saw me arrive.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because I recognized their sentinel when I glanced out of my window. He is a harmless enough fellow, Parker by name, a garroter by trade, and a remarkable performer upon the jew's-harp. I cared nothing for him. But I cared a great deal for the much more formidable person who was behind him, the bosom friend of Moriarty, the man who dropped the rocks over the cliff, the most cunning and dangerous criminal in London. That is the man who is after me to-night, Watson, and that is the man who is quite unaware that we are after him.\"\n\nMy friend's plans were gradually revealing themselves. From this convenient retreat, the watchers were being watched and the trackers tracked. That angular shadow up yonder was the bait, and we were the hunters. In silence we stood together in the darkness and watched the hurrying figures who passed and repassed in front of us. Holmes was silent and motionless; but I could tell that he was keenly alert, and that his eyes were fixed intently upon the stream of passers-by. It was a bleak and boisterous night, and the wind whistled shrilly down the long street. Many people were moving to and fro, most of them muffled in their coats and cravats. Once or twice it seemed to me that I had seen the same figure before, and I especially noticed two men who appeared to be sheltering themselves from the wind in the doorway of a house some distance up the street. I tried to draw my companion's attention to them; but he gave a little ejaculation of impatience, and continued to stare into the street. More than once he fidgeted with his feet and tapped rapidly with his fingers upon the wall. It was evident to me that he was becoming uneasy, and that his plans were not working out altogether as he had hoped. At last, as midnight approached and the street gradually cleared, he paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. I was about to make some remark to him, when I raised my eyes to the lighted window, and again experienced almost as great a surprise as before. I clutched Holmes's arm, and pointed upward.\n\n\"The shadow has moved!\" I cried.\n\nIt was indeed no longer the profile, but the back, which was turned towards us.\n\nThree years had certainly not smoothed the asperities of his temper or his impatience with a less active intelligence than his own.\n\n\"Of course it has moved,\" said he. \"Am I such a farcical bungler, Watson, that I should erect an obvious dummy, and expect that some of the sharpest men in Europe would be deceived by it? We have been in this room two hours, and Mrs. Hudson has made some change in that figure eight times, or once in every quarter of an hour. She works it from the front, so that her shadow may never be seen. Ah!\" He drew in his breath with a shrill, excited intake. In the dim light I saw his head thrown forward, his whole attitude rigid with attention. Outside the street was absolutely deserted. Those two men might still be crouching in the doorway, but I could no longer see them. All was still and dark, save only that brilliant yellow screen in front of us with the black figure outlined upon its centre. Again in the utter silence I heard that thin, sibilant note which spoke of intense suppressed excitement. An instant later he pulled me back into the blackest corner of the room, and I felt his warning hand upon my lips. The fingers which clutched me were quivering. Never had I known my friend more moved, and yet the dark street still stretched lonely and motionless before us.\n\nBut suddenly I was aware of that which his keener senses had already distinguished. A low, stealthy sound came to my ears, not from the direction of Baker Street, but from the back of the very house in which we lay concealed. A door opened and shut. An instant later steps crept down the passage\u2014steps which were meant to be silent, but which reverberated harshly through the empty house. Holmes crouched back against the wall, and I did the same, my hand closing upon the handle of my revolver. Peering through the gloom, I saw the vague outline of a man, a shade blacker than the blackness of the open door. He stood for an instant, and then he crept forward, crouching, menacing, into the room. He was within three yards of us, this sinister figure, and I had braced myself to meet his spring, before I realized that he had no idea of our presence. He passed close beside us, stole over to the window, and very softly and noiselessly raised it for half a foot. As he sank to the level of this opening, the light of the street, no longer dimmed by the dusty glass, fell full upon his face. The man seemed to be beside himself with excitement. His two eyes shone like stars, and his features were working convulsively. He was an elderly man, with a thin, projecting nose, a high, bald forehead, and a huge grizzled moustache. An opera hat was pushed to the back of his head, and an evening dress shirt-front gleamed out through his open overcoat. His face was gaunt and swarthy, scored with deep, savage lines. In his hand he carried what appeared to be a stick, but as he laid it down upon the floor it gave a metallic clang. Then from the pocket of his overcoat he drew a bulky object, and he busied himself in some task which ended with a loud, sharp click, as if a spring or bolt had fallen into its place. Still kneeling upon the floor he bent forward and threw all his weight and strength upon some lever, with the result that there came a long, whirling, grinding noise, ending once more in a powerful click. He straightened himself then, and I saw that what he held in his hand was a sort of gun, with a curiously misshapen butt. He opened it at the breech, put something in, and snapped the breech-lock. Then, crouching down, he rested the end of the barrel upon the ledge of the open window, and I saw his long moustache droop over the stock and his eye gleam as it peered along the sights. I heard a little sigh of satisfaction as he cuddled the butt into his shoulder, and saw that amazing target, the black man on the yellow ground, standing clear at the end of his foresight. For an instant he was rigid and motionless. Then his finger tightened on the trigger. There was a strange, loud whiz and a long, silvery tinkle of broken glass. At that instant Holmes sprang like a tiger on to the marksman's back, and hurled him flat upon his face. He was up again in a moment, and with convulsive strength he seized Holmes by the throat, but I struck him on the head with the butt of my revolver, and he dropped again upon the floor. I fell upon him, and as I held him my comrade blew a shrill call upon a whistle. There was the clatter of running feet upon the pavement, and two policemen in uniform, with one plain-clothes detective, rushed through the front entrance and into the room.\n\n\"That you, Lestrade?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes. I took the job myself. It's good to see you back in London, sir.\"\n\n\"I think you want a little unofficial help. Three undetected murders in one year won't do, Lestrade. But you handled the Molesey Mystery with less than your usual\u2014that's to say, you handled it fairly well.\"\n\nWe had all risen to our feet, our prisoner breathing hard, with a stalwart constable on each side of him. Already a few loiterers had begun to collect in the street. Holmes stepped up to the window, closed it, and dropped the blinds. Lestrade had produced two candles, and the policemen had uncovered their lanterns. I was able at last to have a good look at our prisoner.\n\nIt was a tremendously virile and yet sinister face which was turned towards us: With the brow of a philosopher above and the jaw of a sensualist below, the man must have started with great capacities for good or for evil. But one could not look upon his cruel blue eyes, with their drooping, cynical lids, or upon the fierce, aggressive nose and the threatening, deep-lined brow, without reading Nature's plainest danger-signals. He took no heed of any of us, but his eyes were fixed upon Holmes's face with an expression in which hatred and amazement were equally blended. \"You fiend!\" he kept on muttering. \"You clever, clever fiend!\"\n\n\"Ah, Colonel!\" said Holmes, arranging his rumpled collar. \" 'Journeys end in lovers' meetings,' as the old play says. I don't think I have had the pleasure of seeing you since you favoured me with those attentions as I lay on the ledge above the Reichenbach Fall.\"\n\nThe colonel still stared at my friend like a man in a trance. \"You cunning, cunning fiend!\" was all that he could say.\n\n\"I have not introduced you yet,\" said Holmes. \"This, gentlemen, is Colonel Sebastian Moran, once of Her Majesty's Indian Army, and the best heavy-game shot that our Eastern Empire has ever produced. I believe I am correct, Colonel, in saying that your bag of tigers still remains unrivalled?\"\n\nThe fierce old man said nothing, but still glared at my companion. With his savage eyes and bristling moustache he was wonderfully like a tiger himself.\n\n\"I wonder that my very simple stratagem could deceive so old a shikari,\" said Holmes. \"It must be very familiar to you. Have you not tethered a young kid under a tree, lain above it with your rifle, and waited for the bait to bring up your tiger? This empty house is my tree, and you are my tiger. You have possibly had other guns in reserve in case there should be several tigers, or in the unlikely supposition of your own aim failing you. These,\" he pointed around, \"are my other guns. The parallel is exact.\"\n\nColonel Moran sprang forward with a snarl of rage, but the constables dragged him back. The fury upon his face was terrible to look at.\n\n\"I confess that you had one small surprise for me,\" said Holmes. \"I did not anticipate that you would yourself make use of this empty house and this convenient front window. I had imagined you as operating from the street, where my friend Lestrade and his merry men were awaiting you. With that exception, all has gone as I expected.\"\n\nColonel Moran turned to the official detective.\n\n\"You may or may not have just cause for arresting me,\" said he, \"but at least there can be no reason why I should submit to the gibes of this person. If I am in the hands of the law, let things be done in a legal way.\"\n\n\"Well, that's reasonable enough,\" said Lestrade. \"Nothing further you have to say, Mr. Holmes, before we go?\"\n\nHolmes had picked up the powerful air-gun from the floor, and was examining its mechanism.\n\n\"An admirable and unique weapon,\" said he, \"noiseless and of tremendous power: I knew Von Herder, the blind German mechanic, who constructed it to the order of the late Professor Moriarty. For years I have been aware of its existence, though I have never before had the opportunity of handling it. I commend it very specially to your attention, Lestrade, and also the bullets which fit it.\"\n\n\"You can trust us to look after that, Mr. Holmes,\" said Lestrade, as the whole party moved towards the door. \"Anything further to say?\"\n\n\"Only to ask what charge you intend to prefer?\"\n\n\"What charge, sir? Why, of course, the attempted murder of Mr. Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\n\"Not so, Lestrade. I do not propose to appear in the matter at all. To you, and to you only, belongs the credit of the remarkable arrest which you have effected. Yes, Lestrade, I congratulate you! With your usual happy mixture of cunning and audacity, you have got him.\"\n\n\"Got him! Got whom, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"The man that the whole force has been seeking in vain\u2014Colonel Sebastian Moran, who shot the Honourable Ronald Adair with an expanding bullet from an air-gun through the open window of the second-floor front of No. 427 Park Lane, upon the thirtieth of last month. That's the charge, Lestrade. And now, Watson, if you can endure the draught from a broken window, I think that half an hour in my study over a cigar may afford you some profitable amusement.\"\n\nOur old chambers had been left unchanged through the supervision of Mycroft Holmes and the immediate care of Mrs. Hudson. As I entered I saw, it is true, an unwonted tidiness, but the old landmarks were all in their place. There were the chemical corner and the acid-stained, deal-topped table. There upon a shelf was the row of formidable scrap-books and books of reference which many of our fellow-citizens would have been so glad to burn. The diagrams, the violin-case, and the pipe-rack\u2014even the Persian slipper which contained the tobacco\u2014all met my eyes as I glanced round me. There were two occupants of the room\u2014one, Mrs. Hudson, who beamed upon us both as we entered\u2014the other, the strange dummy which had played so important a part in the evening's adventures. It was a wax-coloured model of my friend, so admirably done that it was a perfect facsimile. It stood on a small pedestal table with an old dressing-gown of Holmes's so draped round it that the illusion from the street was absolutely perfect.\n\n\"I hope you observed all precautions, Mrs. Hudson?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"I went to it on my knees, sir, just as you told me.\"\n\n\"Excellent. You carried the thing out very well. Did you observe where the bullet went?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'm afraid it has spoilt your beautiful bust, for it passed right through the head and flattened itself on the wall. I picked it up from the carpet. Here it is!\"\n\nHolmes held it out to me. \"A soft revolver bullet, as you perceive, Watson. There's genius in that, for who would expect to find such a thing fired from an air-gun? All right, Mrs. Hudson. I am much obliged for your assistance. And now, Watson, let me see you in your old seat once more, for there are several points which I should like to discuss with you.\"\n\nHe had thrown off the seedy frockcoat, and now he was the Holmes of old in the mouse-coloured dressing-gown which he took from his effigy.\n\n\"The old shikari's nerves have not lost their steadiness, nor his eyes their keenness,\" said he, with a laugh, as he inspected the shattered forehead of his bust.\n\n\"Plumb in the middle of the back of the head and smack through the brain. He was the best shot in India, and I expect that there are few better in London. Have you heard the name?\"\n\n\"No, I have not.\"\n\n\"Well, well, such is fame! But, then, if I remember right, you had not heard the name of Professor James Moriarty, who had one of the great brains of the century. Just give me down my index of biographies from the shelf.\"\n\nHe turned over the pages lazily, leaning back in his chair and blowing great clouds from his cigar.\n\n\"My collection of M's is a fine one,\" said he. \"Moriarty himself is enough to make any letter illustrious, and here is Morgan the poisoner, and Merridew of abominable memory, and Mathews; who knocked out my left canine in the waiting-room at Charing Cross, and, finally, here is our friend of to-night.\"\n\nHe handed over the book, and I read:\n\nMoran, Sebastian, Colonel. Unemployed. Formerly 1st Bangalore Pioneers. Born London, 1840. Son of Sir Augustus Moran, C.B., once British Minister to Persia. Educated Eton and Oxford. Served in Jowaki Campaign, Afghan Campaign, Charasiab (despatches), Sher pur, and Cabul. Author of Heavy Game of the Western Himalayas (1881); Three Months in the Jungle (1884). Address: Conduit Street. Clubs: The Anglo-Indian, the Tankerville, the Bagatelle Card Club.\n\nOn the margin was written, in Holmes's precise hand:\n\nThe second most dangerous man in London.\n\n\"This is astonishing,\" said I, as I handed back the volume. \"The man's career is that of an honourable soldier.\"\n\n\"It is true,\" Holmes answered. \"Up to a certain point he did well. He was always a man of iron nerve, and the story is still told in India how he crawled down a drain after a wounded man-eating tiger. There are some trees, Watson, which grow to a certain height, and then suddenly develop some unsightly eccentricity. You will see it often in humans. I have a theory that the individual represents in his development the whole procession of his ancestors, and that such a sudden turn to good or evil stands for some strong influence which came into the line of his pedigree. The person becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of his own family.\"\n\n\"It is surely rather fanciful.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't insist upon it. Whatever the cause, Colonel Moran began to go wrong. Without any open scandal, he still made India too hot to hold him. He retired, came to London, and again acquired an evil name. It was at this time that he was sought out by Professor Moriarty, to whom for a time he was chief of the staff. Moriarty supplied him liberally with money, and used him only in one or two very high-class jobs, which no ordinary criminal could have undertaken. You may have some recollection of the death of Mrs. Stewart, of Lauder, in 1887. Not? Well, I am sure Moran was at the bottom of it, but nothing could be proved. So cleverly was the colonel concealed that, even when the Moriarty gang was broken up, we could not incriminate him. You remember at that date, when I called upon you in your rooms, how I put up the shutters for fear of air-guns? No doubt you thought me fanciful. I knew exactly what I was doing, for I knew of the existence of this remarkable gun, and I knew also that one of the best shots in the world would be behind it. When we were in Switzerland he followed us with Moriarty, and it was undoubtedly he who gave me that evil five minutes on the Reichenbach ledge.\n\n\"You may think that I read the papers with some attention during my sojourn in France, on the look-out for any chance of laying him by the heels. So long as he was free in London, my life would really not have been worth living. Night and day the shadow would have been over me, and sooner or later his chance must have come. What could I do? I could not shoot him at sight, or I should myself be in the dock. There was no use appealing to a magistrate. They cannot interfere on the strength of what would appear to them to be a wild suspicion. So I could do nothing. But I watched the criminal news, knowing that sooner or later I should get him. Then came the death of this Ronald Adair. My chance had come at last. Knowing what I did, was it not certain that Colonel Moran had done it? He had played cards with the lad, he had followed him home from the club, he had shot him through the open window. There was not a doubt of it. The bullets alone are enough to put his head in a noose. I came over at once. I was seen by the sentinel, who would, I knew, direct the colonel's attention to my presence. He could not fail to connect my sudden return with his crime, and to be terribly alarmed. I was sure that he would make an attempt to get me out of the way at once, and would bring round his murderous weapon for that purpose. I left him an excellent mark in the window, and, having warned the police that they might be needed\u2014by the way, Watson, you spotted their presence in that doorway with unerring accuracy\u2014I took up what seemed to me to be a judicious post for observation, never dreaming that he would choose the same spot for his attack. Now, my dear Watson, does anything remain for me to explain?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said I. \"You have not made it clear what was Colonel Moran's motive in murdering the Honourable Ronald Adair?\"\n\n\"Ah! my dear Watson, there we come into those realms of conjecture, where the most logical mind may be at fault. Each may form his own hypothesis upon the present evidence, and yours is as likely to be correct as mine.\"\n\n\"You have formed one, then?\"\n\n\"I think that it is not difficult to explain the facts. It came out in evidence that Colonel Moran and young Adair had, between them, won a considerable amount of money. Now, Moran undoubtedly played foul\u2014of that I have long been aware. I believe that on the day of the murder Adair had discovered that Moran was cheating. Very likely he had spoken to him privately, and had threatened to expose him unless he voluntarily resigned his membership of the club, and promised not to play cards again. It is unlikely that a youngster like Adair would at once make a hideous scandal by exposing a well known man so much older than himself. Probably he acted as I suggest. The exclusion from his clubs would mean ruin to Moran, who lived by his ill-gotten card-gains. He therefore murdered Adair, who at the time was endeavouring to work out how much money he should himself return, since he could not profit by his partner's foul play. He locked the door lest the ladies should surprise him and insist upon knowing what he was doing with these names and coins. Will it pass?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt that you have hit upon the truth.\"\n\n\"It will be verified or disproved at the trial. Meanwhile, come what may, Colonel Moran will trouble us no more. The famous air-gun of Von Herder will embellish the Scotland Yard Museum, and once again Mr. Sherlock Holmes is free to devote his life to examine those interesting little problems which the complex life of London so plentifully presents.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE NORWOOD BUILDER", + "text": "[ From the point of view of the criminal expert,\" said Mr. Sherlock ]\n\nHolmes, \"London has become a singularly uninteresting city since the death of the late lamented Professor Moriarty.\"\n\n\"I can hardly think that you would find many decent citizens to agree with you,\" I answered.\n\n\"Well, well, I must not be selfish,\" said he, with a smile, as he pushed back his chair from the breakfast-table. \"The community is certainly the gainer, and no one the loser, save the poor out-of-work specialist, whose occupation has gone. With that man in the field, one's morning paper presented infinite possibilities. Often it was only the smallest trace, Watson, the faintest indication, and yet it was enough to tell me that the great malignant brain was there, as the gentlest tremors of the edges of the web remind one of the foul spider which lurks in the centre. Petty thefts, wanton assaults, purposeless outrage\u2014to the man who held the clue all could be worked into one connected whole. To the scientific student of the higher criminal world, no capital in Europe offered the advantages which London then possessed. But now\u2014\" He shrugged his shoulders in humorous deprecation of the state of things which he had himself done so much to produce.\n\nAt the time of which I speak, Holmes had been back for some months, and I at his request had sold my practice and returned to share the old quarters in Baker Street. A young doctor, named Verner, had purchased my small Kensington practice, and given with astonishingly little demur the highest price that I ventured to ask\u2014an incident which only explained itself some years later, when I found that Verner was a distant relation of Holmes, and that it was my friend who had really found the money.\n\nOur months of partnership had not been so uneventful as he had stated, for I find, on looking over my notes, that this period includes the case of the papers of ex-President Murillo, and also the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, which so nearly cost us both our lives. His cold and proud nature was always averse, however, from anything in the shape of public applause, and he bound me in the most stringent terms to say no further word of himself, his methods, or his successes\u2014a prohibition which, as I have explained, has only now been removed.\n\nMr. Sherlock Holmes was leaning back in his chair after his whimsical protest, and was unfolding his morning paper in a leisurely fashion, when our attention was arrested by a tremendous ring at the bell, followed immediately by a hollow drumming sound, as if someone were beating on the outer door with his fist. As it opened there came a tumultuous rush into the hall, rapid feet clattered up the stair, and an instant later a wild-eyed and frantic young man, pale, dishevelled, and palpitating, burst into the room. He looked from one to the other of us, and under our gaze of a inquiry he became conscious that some apology was needed for this unceremonious entry.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mr. Holmes,\" he cried. \"You mustn't blame me. I am nearly mad. Mr. Holmes, I am the unhappy John Hector McFarlane.\"\n\nHe made the announcement as if the name alone would explain both his visit and its manner, but I could see, by my companion's unresponsive face, that it meant no more to him than to me.\n\n\"Have a cigarette, Mr. McFarlane,\" said he, pushing his case across. \"I am sure that, with your symptoms, my friend Dr. Watson here would prescribe a sedative. The weather has been so very warm these last few days. Now, if you feel a little more composed, I should be glad if you would sit down in that chair, and tell us very slowly and quietly who you are, and what it is that you want. You mentioned your name, as if I should recognize it, but I assure you that, beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a Freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.\"\n\nFamiliar as I was with my friend's methods, it was not difficult for me to follow his deductions, and to observe the untidiness of attire, the sheaf of legal papers, the watch-charm, and the breathing which had prompted them. Our client, however, stared in amazement.\n\n\"Yes, I am all that, Mr. Holmes; and, in addition, I am the most unfortunate man at this moment in London. For heaven's sake, don't abandon me, Mr. Holmes! If they come to arrest me before I have finished my story, make them give me time, so that I may tell you the whole truth. I could go to jail happy if I knew that you were working for me outside.\"\n\n\"Arrest you!\" said Holmes. \"This is really most grati\u2014most interesting. On what charge do you expect to be arrested?\"\n\n\"Upon the charge of murdering Mr. Jonas Oldacre, of Lower Norwood.\"\n\nMy companion's expressive face showed a sympathy which was not, I am afraid, entirely unmixed with satisfaction.\n\n\"Dear me,\" said he, \"it was only this moment at breakfast that I was saying to my friend, Dr. Watson, that sensational cases had disappeared out of our papers.\"\n\nOur visitor stretched forward a quivering hand and picked up the Daily Telegraph, which still lay upon Holmes's knee.\n\n\"If you had looked at it, sir, you would have seen at a glance what the errand is on which I have come to you this morning. I feel as if my name and my misfortune must be in every man's mouth.\" He turned it over to expose the central page. \"Here it is, and with your permission I will read it to you. Listen to this, Mr. Holmes. The headlines are: 'Mysterious Affair at Lower Norwood. Disappearance of a Well Known Builder. Suspicion of Murder and Arson. A Clue to the Criminal.' That is the clue which they are already following, Mr. Holmes, and I know that it leads infallibly to me. I have been followed from London Bridge Station, and I am sure that they are only waiting for the warrant to arrest me. It will break my mother's heart\u2014it will break her heart!\" He wrung his hands in an agony of apprehension, and swayed backward and forward in his chair.\n\nI looked with interest upon this man, who was accused of being the perpetrator of a crime of violence. He was flaxen-haired and handsome, in a washed-out negative fashion, with frightened blue eyes, and a clean-shaven face, with a weak, sensitive mouth. His age may have been about twenty-seven, his dress and bearing that of a gentleman. From the pocket of his light summer overcoat protruded the bundle of endorsed papers which proclaimed his profession.\n\n\"We must use what time we have,\" said Holmes. \"Watson, would you have the kindness to take the paper and to read the paragraph in question?\"\n\nUnderneath the vigorous headlines which our client had quoted, I read the following suggestive narrative:\n\n\"Late last night, or early this morning, an incident occurred at Lower Norwood which points, it is feared, to a serious crime. Mr. Jonas Oldacre is a well known resident of that suburb, where he has carried on his business as a builder for many years. Mr. Oldacre is a bachelor, fifty-two years of age, and lives in Deep Dene House, at the Sydenham end of the road of that name. He has had the reputation of being a man of eccentric habits, secretive and retiring. For some years he has practically withdrawn from the business, in which he is said to have massed considerable wealth. A small timber-yard still exists, however, at the back of the house, and last night, about twelve o' clock, an alarm was given that one of the stacks was on fire. The engines were soon upon the spot, but the dry wood burned with great fury, and it was impossible to arrest the conflagration until the stack had been entirely consumed. Up to this point the incident bore the appearance of an ordinary accident, but fresh indications seem to point to serious crime. Surprise was expressed at the absence of the master of the establishment from the scene of the fire, and an inquiry followed, which showed that he had disappeared from the house. An examination of his room revealed that the bed had not been slept in, that a safe which stood in it was open, that a number of important papers were scattered about the room, and finally, that there were signs of a murderous struggle, slight traces of blood being found within the room, and an oaken walking-stick, which also showed stains of blood upon the handle. It is known that Mr. Jonas Oldacre had received a late visitor in his bedroom upon that night, and the stick found has been identified as the property of this person, who is a young London solicitor named John Hector McFarlane, junior partner of Graham and McFarlane, of 426 Gresham Buildings, E. C. The police believe that they have evidence in their possession which supplies a very convincing motive for the crime, and altogether it cannot be doubted that sensational developments will follow.\n\n\"LATER.\u2014It is rumoured as we go to press that Mr. John Hector McFarlane has actually been arrested on the charge of the murder of Mr. Jonas Oldacre. It is at least certain that a warrant has been issued. There have been further and sinister developments in the investigation at Norwood. Besides the signs of a struggle in the room of the unfortunate builder it is now known that the French windows of his bedroom (which is on the ground floor) were found to be open, that there were marks as if some bulky object had been dragged across to the wood-pile, and, finally, it is asserted that charred remains have been found among the charcoal ashes of the fire. The police theory is that a most sensational crime has been committed, that the victim was clubbed to death in his own bedroom, his papers rifled, and his dead body dragged across to the wood-stack, which was then ignited so as to hide all traces of the crime. The conduct of the criminal investigation has been left in the experienced hands of Inspector Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, who is following up the clues with his accustomed energy and sagacity.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes listened with closed eyes and fingertips together to this remarkable account.\n\n\"The case has certainly some points of interest,\" said he, in his languid fashion. \"May I ask, in the first place, Mr. McFarlane, how it is that you are still at liberty, since there appears to be enough evidence to justify your arrest?\"\n\n\"I live at Torrington Lodge, Blackheath, with my parents, Mr. Holmes, but last night, having to do business very late with Mr. Jonas Oldacre, I stayed at an hotel in Norwood, and came to my business from there. I knew nothing of this affair until I was in the train, when I read what you have just heard. I at once saw the horrible danger of my position, and I hurried to put the case into your hands. I have no doubt that I should have been arrested either at my city office or at my home. A man followed me from London Bridge Station, and I have no doubt\u2014Great heaven! what is that?\"\n\nIt was a clang of the bell, followed instantly by heavy steps upon the stair. A moment later, our old friend Lestrade appeared in the doorway. Over his shoulder I caught a glimpse of one or two uniformed policemen outside.\n\n\"Mr. John Hector McFarlane?\" said Lestrade.\n\nOur unfortunate client rose with a ghastly face.\n\n\"I arrest you for the wilful murder of Mr. Jonas Oldacre, of Lower Norwood.\"\n\nMcFarlane turned to us with a gesture of despair, and sank into his chair once more like one who is crushed.\n\n\"One moment, Lestrade,\" said Holmes. \"Half an hour more or less can make no difference to you, and the gentleman was about to give us an account of this very interesting affair, which might aid us in clearing it up.\"\n\n\"I think there will be no difficulty in clearing it up,\" said Lestrade, grimly.\n\n\"None the less, with your permission, I should be much interested to hear his account.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, it is difficult for me to refuse you anything, for you have been of use to the force once or twice in the past, and we owe you a good turn at Scotland Yard,\" said Lestrade. \"At the same time I must remain with my prisoner, and I am bound to warn him that anything he may say will appear in evidence against him.\"\n\n\"I wish nothing better,\" said our client. \"All I ask is that you should hear and recognize the absolute truth.\"\n\nLestrade looked at his watch. \"I'll give you half an hour,\" said he.\n\n\"I must explain first,\" said McFarlane. \"that I knew nothing of Mr. Jonas Oldacre. His name was familiar to me, for many years ago my parents were acquainted with him, but they drifted apart. I was very much surprised, therefore, when yesterday, about three o'clock in the afternoon, he walked into my office in the city. But I was still more astonished when he told me the object of his visit. He had in his hand several sheets of a notebook, covered with scribbled writing\u2014here they are\u2014and he laid them on my table.\n\n\"'Here is my will,' said he. 'I want you, Mr. McFarlane, to cast it into proper legal shape. I will sit here while you do so.'\n\n\"I set myself to copy it, and you can imagine my astonishment when I found that, with some reservations, he had left all his property to me. He was a strange little ferret-like man, with white eyelashes, and when I looked up at him I found his keen gray eyes fixed upon me with an amused expression. I could hardly believe my own senses as I read the terms of the will; but he explained that he was a bachelor with hardly any living relation, that he had known my parents in his youth, and that he had always heard of me as a very deserving young man, and was assured that his money would be in worthy hands. Of course, I could only stammer out my thanks. The will was duly finished, signed, and witnessed by my clerk. This is it on the blue paper, and these slips, as I have explained, are the rough draft. Mr. Jonas Oldacre then informed me that there were a number of documents\u2014building leases, title-deeds, mortgages, scrip, and so forth\u2014which it was necessary that I should see and understand. He said that his mind would not be easy until the whole thing was settled, and he begged me to come out to his house at Norwood that night, bringing the will with me, and to arrange matters. 'Remember, my boy, not one word to your parents about the affair until everything is settled. We will keep it as a little surprise for them.' He was very insistent upon this point, and made me promise it faithfully.\n\n\"You can imagine, Mr. Holmes, that I was not in a humour to refuse him anything that he might ask. He was my benefactor, and all my desire was to carry out his wishes in every particular. I sent a telegram home, therefore, to say that I had important business on hand, and that it was impossible for me to say how late I might be. Mr. Oldacre had told me that he would like me to have supper with him at nine, as he might not be home before that hour. I had some difficulty in finding his house, however, and it was nearly half-past before I reached it. I found him\u2014\"\n\n\"One moment!\" said Holmes. \"Who opened the door?\"\n\n\"A middle-aged woman, who was, I suppose, his housekeeper.\"\n\n\"And it was she, I presume, who mentioned your name?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said McFarlane.\n\n\"Pray proceed.\"\n\nMcFarlane wiped his damp brow, and then continued his narrative:\n\n\"I was shown by this woman into a sitting-room, where a frugal supper was laid out. Afterwards, Mr. Jonas Oldacre led me into his bedroom, in which there stood a heavy safe. This he opened and took out a mass of documents, which we went over together. It was between eleven and twelve when we finished. He remarked that we must not disturb the housekeeper. He showed me out through his own French window, which had been open all this time.\"\n\n\"Was the blind down?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"I will not be sure, but I believe that it was only half down. Yes, I remember how he pulled it up in order to swing open the window. I could not find my stick, and he said, 'Never mind, my boy, I shall see a good deal of you now, I hope, and I will keep your stick until you come back to claim it.' I left him there, the safe open, and the papers made up in packets upon the table. It was so late that I could not get back to Blackheath, so I spent the night at the Anerley Arms, and I knew nothing more until I read of this horrible affair in the morning.\"\n\n\"Anything more that you would like to ask, Mr. Holmes?\" said Lestrade, whose eyebrows had gone up once or twice during this remarkable explanation.\n\n\"Not until I have been to Blackheath.\"\n\n\"You mean to Norwood,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"Oh, yes, no doubt that is what I must have meant,\" said Holmes, with his enigmatical smile. Lestrade had learned by more experiences than he would care to acknowledge that that razor-like brain could cut through that which was impenetrable to him. I saw him look curiously at my companion.\n\n\"I think I should like to have a word with you presently, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said he. \"Now, Mr. McFarlane, two of my constables are at the door, and there is a four-wheeler waiting.\" The wretched young man arose, and with a last beseeching glance at us walked from the room. The officers conducted him to the cab, but Lestrade remained.\n\nHolmes had picked up the pages which formed the rough draft of the will, and was looking at them with the keenest interest upon his face.\n\n\"There are some points about that document, Lestrade, are there not?\" said he, pushing them over.\n\nThe official looked at them with a puzzled expression.\n\n\"I can read the first few lines, and these in the middle of the second page, and one or two at the end. Those are as clear as print,\" said he, \"but the writing in between is very bad, and there are three places where I cannot read it at all.\"\n\n\"What do you make of that?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Well, what do you make of it?\"\n\n\"That it was written in a train. The good writing represents stations, the bad writing movement, and the very bad writing passing over points. A scientific expert would pronounce at once that this was drawn up on a suburban line, since nowhere save in the immediate vicinity of a great city could there be so quick a succession of points. Granting that his whole journey was occupied in drawing up the will, then the train was an express, only stopping once between Norwood and London Bridge.\"\n\nLestrade began to laugh.\n\n\"You are too much for me when you begin to get on your theories, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"How does this bear on the case?\"\n\n\"Well, it corroborates the young man's story to the extent that the will was drawn up by Jonas Oldacre in his journey yesterday. It is curious\u2014is it not?\u2014that a man should draw up so important a document in so haphazard a fashion. It suggests that he did not think it was going to be of much practical importance. If a man drew up a will which he did not intend ever to be effective, he might do it so.\"\n\n\"Well, he drew up his own death warrant at the same time,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"Oh, you think so?\"\n\n\"Don't you?\"\n\n\"Well, it is quite possible, but the case is not clear to me yet.\"\n\n\"Not clear? Well, if that isn't clear, what could be clear? Here is a young man who learns suddenly that, if a certain older man dies, he will succeed to a fortune. What does he do? He says nothing to anyone, but he arranges that he shall go out on some pretext to see his client that night. He waits until the only other person in the house is in bed, and then in the solitude of a man's room he murders him, burns his body in the wood-pile, and departs to a neighbouring hotel. The blood-stains in the room and also on the stick are very slight. It is probable that he imagined his crime to be a bloodless one, and hoped that if the body were consumed it would hide all traces of the method of his death\u2014traces which, for some reason, must have pointed to him. Is not all this obvious?\"\n\n\"It strikes me, my good Lestrade, as being just a trifle too obvious,\" said Holmes. \"You do not add imagination to your other great qualities, but if you could for one moment put yourself in the place of this young man, would you choose the very night after the will had been made to commit your crime? Would it not seem dangerous to you to make so very close a relation between the two incidents? Again, would you choose an occasion when you are known to be in the house, when a servant has let you in? And, finally, would you take the great pains to conceal the body, and yet leave your own stick as a sign that you were the criminal? Confess, Lestrade, that all this is very unlikely.\"\n\n\"As to the stick, Mr. Holmes, you know as well as I do that a criminal is often flurried, and does such things, which a cool man would avoid. He was very likely afraid to go back to the room. Give me another theory that would fit the facts.\"\n\n\"I could very easily give you half a dozen,\" said Holmes. \"Here, for example, is a very possible and even probable one. I make you a free present of it. The older man is showing documents which are of evident value. A passing tramp sees them through the window, the blind of which is only half down. Exit the solicitor. Enter the tramp! He seizes a stick, which he observes there, kills Oldacre, and departs after burning the body.\"\n\n\"Why should the tramp burn the body?\"\n\n\"For the matter of that, why should McFarlane?\"\n\n\"To hide some evidence.\"\n\n\"Possibly the tramp wanted to hide that any murder at all had been committed.\"\n\n\"And why did the tramp take nothing?\"\n\n\"Because they were papers that he could not negotiate.\"\n\nLestrade shook his head, though it seemed to me that his manner was less absolutely assured than before.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, you may look for your tramp, and while you are finding him we will hold on to our man. The future will show which is right. Just notice this point, Mr. Holmes: that so far as we know, none of the papers were removed, and that the prisoner is the one man in the world who had no reason for removing them, since he was heir-at-law, and would come into them in any case.\"\n\nMy friend seemed struck by this remark.\n\n\"I don't mean to deny that the evidence is in some ways very strongly in favour of your theory,\" said he. \"I only wish to point out that there are other theories possible. As you say, the future will decide. Good-morning! I dare say that in the course of the day I shall drop in at Norwood and see how you are getting on.\"\n\nWhen the detective departed, my friend rose and made his preparations for the day's work with the alert air of a man who has a congenial task before him.\n\n\"My first movement, Watson,\" said he, as he bustled into his frock coat, \"must, as I said, be in the direction of Blackheath.\"\n\n\"And why not Norwood?\"\n\n\"Because we have in this case one singular incident coming close to the heels of another singular incident. The police are making the mistake of concentrating their attention upon the second, because it happens to be the one which is actually criminal. But it is evident to me that the logical way to approach the case is to begin by trying to throw some light upon the first incident\u2014the curious will, so suddenly made, and to so unexpected an heir. It may do something to simplify what followed. No, my dear fellow, I don't think you can help me. There is no prospect of danger, or I should not dream of stirring out without you. I trust that when I see you in the evening, I will be able to report that I have been able to do something for this unfortunate youngster, who has thrown himself upon my protection.\"\n\nIt was late when my friend returned, and I could see, by a glance at his haggard and anxious face, that the high hopes with which he had started had not been fulfilled. For an hour he droned away upon his violin, endeavouring to soothe his own ruffled spirits. At last he flung down the instrument, and plunged into a detailed account of his misadventures.\n\n\"It's all going wrong, Watson\u2014all as wrong as it can go. I kept a bold face before Lestrade, but, upon my soul, I believe that for once the fellow is on the right track and we are on the wrong. All my instincts are one way, and all the facts are the other, and I much fear that British juries have not yet attained that pitch of intelligence when they will give the preference to my theories over Lestrade's facts.\"\n\n\"Did you go to Blackheath?\"\n\n\"Yes, Watson, I went there, and I found very quickly that the late lamented Oldacre was a pretty considerable blackguard. The father was away in search of his son. The mother was at home\u2014a little, fluffy, blue-eyed person, in a tremor of fear and indignation. Of course, she would not admit even the possibility of his guilt. But she would not express either surprise or regret over the fate of Oldacre. On the contrary, she spoke of him with such bitterness that she was unconsciously considerably strengthening the case of the police for, of course, if her son had heard her speak of the man in this fashion, it would predispose him towards hatred and violence. 'He was more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being,' said she, 'and he always was, ever since he was a young man.'\n\n\"'You knew him at that time?' said I.\n\n\"'Yes, I knew him well, in fact, he was an old suitor of mine. Thank heaven that I had the sense to turn away from him and to marry a better, if poorer, man. I was engaged to him, Mr. Holmes, when I heard a shocking story of how he had turned a cat loose in an aviary, and I was so horrified at his brutal cruelty that I would have nothing more to do with him.' She rummaged in a bureau, and presently she produced a photograph of a woman, shamefully defaced and mutilated with a knife. 'That is my own photograph,' she said. 'He sent it to me in that state, with his curse, upon my wedding morning.'\n\n\"'Well,' said I, 'at least he has forgiven you now, since he has left all his property to your son.'\n\n\"'Neither my son nor I want anything from Jonas Oldacre, dead or alive!' she cried, with a proper spirit. 'There is a God in heaven, Mr. Holmes, and that same God who has punished that wicked man will show, in His own good time, that my son's hands are guiltless of his blood.'\n\n\"Well, I tried one or two leads, but could get at nothing which would help our hypothesis, and several points which would make against it. I gave it up at last, and off I went to Norwood.\n\n\"This place, Deep Dene House, is a big modern villa of staring brick, standing back in its own grounds, with a laurel-clumped lawn in front of it. To the right and some distance back from the road was the timber-yard which had been the scene of the fire. Here's a rough plan on a leaf of my notebook. This window on the left is the one which opens into Oldacre's room. You can look into it from the road, you see. That is about the only bit of consolation I have had to-day. Lestrade was not there, but his head constable did the honours. They had just found a great treasure-trove. They had spent the morning raking among the ashes of the burned wood-pile, and besides the charred organic remains they had secured several discoloured metal discs. I examined them with care, and there was no doubt that they were trouser buttons. I even distinguished that one of them was marked with the name of 'Hyams,' who was Oldacre's tailor. I then worked the lawn very carefully for signs and traces, but this drought has made everything as hard as iron. Nothing was to be seen save that some body or bundle had been dragged through a low privet hedge which is in a line with the wood-pile. All that, of course, fits in with the official theory. I crawled about the lawn with an August sun on my back. but I got up at the end of an hour no wiser than before.\n\n\"Well, after this fiasco I went into the bedroom and examined that also. The blood-stains were very slight, mere smears and discolourations, but undoubtedly fresh. The stick had been removed, but there also the marks were slight. There is no doubt about the stick belonging to our client. He admits it. Footmarks of both men could be made out on the carpet, but none of any third person, which again is a trick for the other side. They were piling up their score all the time and we were at a standstill.\n\n\"Only one little gleam of hope did I get\u2014and yet it amounted to nothing. I examined the contents of the safe, most of which had been taken out and left on the table. The papers had been made up into sealed envelopes, one or two of which had been opened by the police. They were not, so far as I could judge, of any great value, nor did the bank-book show that Mr. Oldacre was in such very affluent circumstances. But it seemed to me that all the papers were not there. There were allusions to some deeds\u2014possibly the more valuable\u2014which I could not find. This, of course, if we could definitely prove it, would turn Lestrade's argument against himself; for who would steal a thing if he knew that he would shortly inherit it?\n\n\"Finally, having drawn every other cover and picked up no scent, I tried my luck with the housekeeper. Mrs. Lexington is her name\u2014a little, dark, silent person, with suspicious and sidelong eyes. She could tell us something if she would\u2014I am convinced of it. But she was as close as wax. Yes, she had let Mr. McFarlane in at half-past nine. She wished her hand had withered before she had done so. She had gone to bed at half-past ten. Her room was at the other end of the house, and she could hear nothing of what passed. Mr. McFarlane had left his hat, and to the best of her belief his stick, in the hall. She had been awakened by the alarm of fire. Her poor, dear master had certainly been murdered. Had he any enemies? Well, every man had enemies, but Mr. Oldacre kept himself very much to himself, and only met people in the way of business. She had seen the buttons, and was sure that they belonged to the clothes which he had worn last night. The wood-pile was very dry, for it had not rained for a month. It burned like tinder, and by the time she reached the spot, nothing could be seen but flames. She and all the firemen smelled the burned flesh from inside it. She knew nothing of the papers, nor of Mr. Oldacre's private affairs.\n\n\"So, my dear Watson, there's my report of a failure. And yet\u2014and yet\u2014\" he clenched his thin hands in a paroxysm of conviction\u2014\"I know it's all wrong. I feel it in my bones. There is something that has not come out, and that housekeeper knows it. There was a sort of sulky defiance in her eyes, which only goes with guilty knowledge. However, there's no good talking any more about it, Watson; but unless some lucky chance comes our way I fear that the Norwood Disappearance Case will not figure in that chronicle of our successes which I foresee that a patient public will sooner or later have to endure.\"\n\n\"Surely.\" said I, \"the man's appearance would go far with any jury?\"\n\n\"That is a dangerous argument, my dear Watson. You remember that terrible murderer, Bert Stevens, who wanted us to get him off in '87? Was there ever a more mild-mannered, Sunday-school young man?\"\n\n\"It is true.\"\n\n\"Unless we succeed in establishing an alternative theory, this man is lost. You can hardly find a flaw in the case which can now be presented against him, and all further investigation has served to strengthen it. By the way, there is one curious little point about those papers which may serve us as the starting-point for an inquiry. On looking over the bank book I found that the low state of the balance was principally due to large checks which have been made out during the last year to Mr. Cornelius. I confess that I should be interested to know who this Mr. Cornelius may be with whom a retired builder has had such very large transactions. Is it possible that he has had a hand in the affair? Cornelius might be a broker, but we have found no scrip to correspond with these large payments. Failing any other indication, my researches must now take the direction of an inquiry at the bank for the gentleman who has cashed these checks. But I fear, my dear fellow, that our case will end ingloriously by Lestrade hanging our client, which will certainly be a triumph for Scotland Yard.\"\n\nI do not know how far Sherlock Holmes took any sleep that night, but when I came down to breakfast I found him pale and harassed, his bright eyes the brighter for the dark shadows round them. The carpet round his chair was littered with cigarette-ends and with the early editions of the morning papers. An open telegram lay upon the table.\n\n\"What do you think of this, Watson?\" he asked, tossing it across.\n\nIt was from Norwood, and ran as follows:\n\nImportant fresh evidence to hand. McFarlane's guilt definitely established. Advise you to abandon case.\n\nLESTRADE.\n\n\"This sounds serious,\" said I.\n\n\"It is Lestrade's little cock-a-doodle of victory,\" Holmes answered; with a bitter smile. \"And yet it may be premature to abandon the case. After all, important fresh evidence is a two-edged thing, and may possibly cut in a very different direction to that which Lestrade imagines. Take your breakfast, Watson, and we will go out together and see what we can do. I feel as if I shall need your company and your moral support to-day.\"\n\nMy friend had no breakfast himself, for it was one of his peculiarities that in his more intense moments he would permit himself no food, and I have known him presume upon his iron strength until he has fainted from pure inanition. \"At present I cannot spare energy and nerve force for digestion,\" he would say in answer to my medical remonstrances. I was not surprised, therefore, when this morning he left his untouched meal behind him, and started with me for Norwood. A crowd of morbid sightseers were still gathered round Deep Dene House, which was just such a suburban villa as I had pictured. Within the gates Lestrade met us, his face flushed with victory, his manner grossly triumphant.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, have you proved us to be wrong yet? Have you found your tramp?\" he cried.\n\n\"I have formed no conclusion whatever,\" my companion answered.\n\n\"But we formed ours yesterday, and now it proves to be correct, so you must acknowledge that we have been a little in front of you this time, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"You certainly have the air of something unusual having occurred,\" said Holmes.\n\nLestrade laughed loudly.\n\n\"You don't like being beaten any more than the rest of us do,\" said he. \"A man can't expect always to have it his own way, can he, Dr. Watson? Step this way, if you please, gentlemen, and I think I can convince you once for all that it was John McFarlane who did this crime.\"\n\nHe led us through the passage and out into a dark hall beyond.\n\n\"This is where young McFarlane must have come out to get his hat after the crime was done,\" said he. \"Now look at this.\" With dramatic suddenness he struck a match, and by its light exposed a stain of blood upon the whitewashed wall. As he held the match nearer, I saw that it was more than a stain. It was the well-marked print of a thumb.\n\n\"Look at that with your magnifying glass, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am doing so.\"\n\n\"You are aware that no two thumbmarks are alike?\"\n\n\"I have heard something of the kind.\"\n\n\"Well, then, will you please compare that print with this wax impression of young McFarlane's right thumb, taken by my orders this morning?\"\n\nAs he held the waxen print close to the blood-stain, it did not take a magnifying glass to see that the two were undoubtedly from the same thumb. It was evident to me that our unfortunate client was lost.\n\n\"That is final,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"Yes, that is final,\" I involuntarily echoed.\n\n\"It is final,\" said Holmes.\n\nSomething in his tone caught my ear, and I turned to look at him. An extraordinary change had come over his face. It was writhing with inward merriment. His two eyes were shining like stars. It seemed to me that he was making desperate efforts to restrain a convulsive attack of laughter.\n\n\"Dear me! Dear me!\" he said at last. \"Well, now, who would have thought it? And how deceptive appearances may be, to be sure! Such a nice young man to look at! It is a lesson to us not to trust our own judgment, is it not, Lestrade?\"\n\n\"Yes, some of us are a little too much inclined to be cock-sure, Mr. Holmes,\" said Lestrade. The man's insolence was maddening, but we could not resent it.\n\n\"What a providential thing that this young man should press his right thumb against the wall in taking his hat from the peg! Such a very natural action, too, if you come to think if it.\" Holmes was outwardly calm, but his whole body gave a wriggle of suppressed excitement as he spoke.\n\n\"By the way, Lestrade, who made this remarkable discovery?\"\n\n\"It was the housekeeper, Mrs. Lexington, who drew the night constable's attention to it.\"\n\n\"Where was the night constable?\"\n\n\"He remained on guard in the bedroom where the crime was committed, so as to see that nothing was touched.\"\n\n\"But why didn't the police see this mark yesterday?\"\n\n\"Well, we had no particular reason to make a careful examination of the hall. Besides, it's not in a very prominent place, as you see.\"\n\n\"No, no\u2014of course not. I suppose there is no doubt that the mark was there yesterday?\"\n\nLestrade looked at Holmes as if he thought he was going out of his mind. I confess that I was myself surprised both at his hilarious manner and at his rather wild observation.\n\n\"I don't know whether you think that McFarlane came out of jail in the dead of the night in order to strengthen the evidence against himself,\" said Lestrade. \"I leave it to any expert in the world whether that is not the mark of his thumb.\"\n\n\"It is unquestionably the mark of his thumb.\"\n\n\"There, that's enough.\" said Lestrade. \"I am a practical man, Mr. Holmes, and when I have got my evidence I come to my conclusions. If you have anything to say, you will find me writing my report in the sitting-room.\"\n\nHolmes had recovered his equanimity, though I still seemed to detect gleams of amusement in his expression.\n\n\"Dear me, this is a very sad development, Watson, is it not?\" said he. \"And yet there are singular points about it which hold out some hopes for our client.\"\n\n\"I am delighted to hear it,\" said I, heartily. \"I was afraid it was all up with him.\"\n\n\"I would hardly go so far as to say that, my dear Watson. The fact is that there is one really serious flaw in this evidence to which our friend attaches so much importance.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Holmes! What is it?\"\n\n\"Only this: that I know that that mark was not there when I examined the hall yesterday. And now, Watson, let us have a little stroll round in the sunshine.\"\n\nWith a confused brain, but with a heart into which some warmth of hope was returning, I accompanied my friend in a walk round the garden. Holmes took each face of the house in turn, and examined it with great interest. He then led the way inside, and went over the whole building from basement to attic. Most of the rooms were unfurnished, but none the less Holmes inspected them all minutely. Finally, on the top corridor, which ran outside three untenanted bedrooms, he again was seized with a spasm of merriment.\n\n\"There are really some very unique features about this case, Watson,\" said he. \"I think it is time now that we took our friend Lestrade into our confidence. He has had his little smile at our expense, and perhaps we may do as much by him, if my reading of this problem proves to be correct. Yes, yes, I think I see how we should approach it.\"\n\nThe Scotland Yard inspector was still writing in the parlour when Holmes interrupted him.\n\n\"I understood that you were writing a report of this case\" said he.\n\n\"So I am.\"\n\n\"Don't you think it may be a little premature? I can't help thinking that your evidence is not complete.\"\n\nLestrade knew my friend too well to disregard his words. He laid down his pen and looked curiously at him.\n\n\"What do you mean, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Only that there is an important witness whom you have not seen.\"\n\n\"Can you produce him?\"\n\n\"I think I can.\"\n\n\"Then do so.\"\n\n\"I will do my best. How many constables have you?\"\n\n\"There are three within call.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Holmes. \"May I ask if they are all large, able-bodied men with powerful voices?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt they are, though I fail to see what their voices have to do with it.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I can help you to see that and one or two other things as well,\" said Holmes. \"Kindly summon your men, and I will try.\"\n\nFive minutes later, three policemen had assembled in the hall.\n\n\"In the outhouse you will find a considerable quantity of straw,\" said Holmes. \"I will ask you to carry in two bundles of it. I think it will be of the greatest assistance in producing the witness whom I require. Thank you very much. I believe you have some matches in your pocket, Watson. Now, Mr. Lestrade, I will ask you all to accompany me to the top landing.\"\n\nAs I have said, there was a broad corridor there, which ran outside three empty bedrooms. At one end of the corridor we were all marshalled by Sherlock Holmes, the constables grinning and Lestrade staring at my friend with amazement, expectation, and derision chasing each other across his features. Holmes stood before us with the air of a conjurer who is performing a trick.\n\n\"Would you kindly send one of your constables for two buckets of water? Put the straw on the floor here, free from the wall on either side. Now I think that we are all ready.\"\n\nLestrade's face had begun to grow red and angry.\n\n\"I don't know whether you are playing a game with us, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said he. \"If you know anything, you can surely say it without all this tomfoolery.\"\n\n\"I assure you, my good Lestrade, that I have an excellent reason for everything that I do. You may possibly remember that you chaffed me a little, some hours ago, when the sun seemed on your side of the hedge, so you must not grudge me a little pomp and ceremony now. Might I ask you, Watson, to open that window, and then to put a match to the edge of the straw?\"\n\nI did so, and driven by the draught, a coil of gray smoke swirled down the corridor, while the dry straw crackled and flamed.\n\n\"Now we must see if we can find this witness for you, Lestrade. Might I ask you all to join in the cry of 'Fire!'? Now then; one, two, three\u2014\"\n\n\"Fire!\" we all yelled.\n\n\"Thank you. I will trouble you once again.\"\n\n\"Fire!\"\n\n\"Just once more, gentlemen, and all together.\"\n\n\"Fire!\" The shout must have rung over Norwood.\n\nIt had hardly died away when an amazing thing happened. A door suddenly flew open out of what appeared to be solid wall at the end of the corridor, and a little, wizened man darted out of it, like a rabbit out of its burrow.\n\n\"Capital!\" said Holmes, calmly. \"Watson, a bucket of water over the straw. That will do! Lestrade, allow me to present you with your principal missing witness, Mr. Jonas Oldacre.\"\n\nThe detective stared at the newcomer with blank amazement. The latter was blinking in the bright light of the corridor, and peering at us and at the smouldering fire. It was an odious face\u2014crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-gray eyes and white lashes.\n\n\"What's this, then?\" said Lestrade, at last. \"What have you been doing all this time, eh?\"\n\nOldacre gave an uneasy laugh; shrinking back from the furious red face of the angry detective.\n\n\"I have done no harm.\"\n\n\"No harm? You have done your best to get an innocent man hanged. If it wasn't for this gentleman here, I am not sure that you would not have succeeded.\"\n\nThe wretched creature began to whimper.\n\n\"I am sure, sir, it was only my practical joke.\"\n\n\"Oh! a joke, was it? You won't find the laugh on your side. I promise you. Take him down, and keep him in the sitting-room until I come. Mr. Holmes,\" he continued, when they had gone, \"I could not speak before the constables, but I don't mind saying, in the presence of Dr. Watson, that this is the brightest thing that you have done yet, though it is a mystery to me how you did it. You have saved an innocent man's life, and you have prevented a very grave scandal, which would have ruined my reputation in the Force.\"\n\nHolmes smiled, and clapped Lestrade upon the shoulder.\n\n\"Instead of being ruined, my good sir, you will find that your reputation has been enormously enhanced. Just make a few alterations in that report which you were writing, and they will understand how hard it is to throw dust in the eyes of Inspector Lestrade.\"\n\n\"And you don't want your name to appear?\"\n\n\"Not at all. The work is its own reward. Perhaps I shall get the credit also at some distant day, when I permit my zealous historian to lay out his foolscap once more\u2014eh, Watson? Well, now, let us see where this rat has been lurking.\"\n\nA lath-and-plaster partition had been run across the passage six feet from the end, with a door cunningly concealed in it. It was lit within by slits under the eaves. A few articles of furniture and a supply of food and water were within, together with a number of books and papers.\n\n\"There's the advantage of being a builder,\" said Holmes, as we came out. \"He was able to fix up his own little hiding-place without any confederate\u2014save, of course, that precious housekeeper of his, whom I should lose no time in adding to your bag, Lestrade.\"\n\n\"I'll take your advice. But how did you know of this place, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I made up my mind that the fellow was in hiding in the house. When I paced one corridor and found it six feet shorter than the corresponding one below, it was pretty clear where he was. I thought he had not the nerve to lie quiet before an alarm of fire. We could, of course, have gone in and taken him, but it amused me to make him reveal himself. Besides, I owed you a little mystification, Lestrade, for your chaff in the morning.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, you certainly got equal with me on that. But how in the world did you know that he was in the house at all?\"\n\n\"The thumbmark, Lestrade. You said it was final; and so it was, in a very different sense. I knew it had not been there the day before. I pay a good deal of attention to matters of detail, as you may have observed, and I had examined the hall, and was sure that the wall was clear. Therefore, it had been put on during the night.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"Very simply. When those packets were sealed up, Jonas Oldacre got McFarlane to secure one of the seals by putting his thumb upon the soft wax. It would be done so quickly and so naturally, that I daresay the young man himself has no recollection of it. Very likely it just so happened, and Oldacre had himself no notion of the use he would put it to. Brooding over the case in that den of his, it suddenly struck him what absolutely damning evidence he could make against McFarlane by using that thumbmark. It was the simplest thing in the world for him to take a wax impression from the seal, to moisten it in as much blood as he could get from a pin-prick, and to put the mark upon the wall during the night, either with his own hand or with that of his housekeeper. If you examine among those documents which he took with him into his retreat, I will lay you a wager that you find the seal with the thumbmark upon it.\"\n\n\"Wonderful!\" said Lestrade. \"Wonderful! It's all as clear as crystal, as you put it. But what is the object of this deep deception, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\nIt was amusing to me to see how the detective's overbearing manner had changed suddenly to that of a child asking questions of its teacher.\n\n\"Well, I don't think that is very hard to explain. A very deep, malicious, vindictive person is the gentleman who is now waiting for us downstairs. You know that he was once refused by McFarlane's mother? You don't! I told you that you should go to Blackheath first and Norwood afterwards. Well, this injury, as he would consider it, has rankled in his wicked, scheming brain, and all his life he has longed for vengeance, but never seen his chance. During the last year or two, things have gone against him\u2014secret speculation, I think\u2014and he finds himself in a bad way. He determines to swindle his creditors, and for this purpose he pays large checks to a certain Mr. Cornelius, who is, I imagine, himself under another name. I have not traced these checks yet, but I have no doubt that they were banked under that name at some provincial town where Oldacre from time to time led a double existence. He intended to change his name altogether, draw this money, and vanish, starting life again elsewhere.\n\n\"Well, that's likely enough.\"\n\n\"It would strike him that in disappearing he might throw all pursuit off his track, and at the same time have an ample and crushing revenge upon his old sweetheart, if he could give the impression that he had been murdered by her only child. It was a masterpiece of villainy, and he carried it out like a master. The idea of the will, which would give an obvious motive for the crime, the secret visit unknown to his own parents, the retention of the stick, the blood, and the animal remains and buttons in the wood-pile, all were admirable. It was a net from which it seemed to me, a few hours ago, that there was no possible escape. But he had not that supreme gift of the artist, the knowledge of when to stop. He wished to improve that which was already perfect\u2014to draw the rope tighter yet round the neck of his unfortunate victim\u2014and so he ruined all. Let us descend, Lestrade. There are just one or two questions that I would ask him.\"\n\nThe malignant creature was seated in his own parlour, with a policeman upon each side of him.\n\n\"It was a joke, my good sir\u2014a practical joke, nothing more,\" he whined incessantly. \"I assure you, sir, that I simply concealed myself in order to see the effect of my disappearance, and I am sure that you would not be so unjust as to imagine that I would have allowed any harm to befall poor young Mr. McFarlane.\"\n\n\"That's for a jury to decide,\" said Lestrade. \"Anyhow, we shall have you on a charge of conspiracy, if not for attempted murder.\"\n\n\"And you'll probably find that your creditors will impound the banking account of Mr. Cornelius,\" said Holmes.\n\nThe little man started, and turned his malignant eyes upon my friend.\n\n\"I have to thank you for a good deal,\" said he. \"Perhaps I'll pay my debt some day.\"\n\nHolmes smiled indulgently.\n\n\"I fancy that, for some few years, you will find your time very fully occupied,\" said he. \"By the way, what was it you put into the wood-pile besides your old trousers? A dead dog, or rabbits, or what? You won't tell? Dear me, how very unkind of you! Well, well, I daresay that a couple of rabbits would account both for the blood and for the charred ashes. If ever you write an account, Watson, you can make rabbits serve your turn.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE DANCING MEN", + "text": "Holmes had been seated for some hours in silence with his long, thin back curved over a chemical vessel in which he was brewing a particularly malodorous product. His head was sunk upon his breast, and he looked from my point of view like a strange, lank bird, with dull gray plumage and a black top-knot.\n\n\"So, Watson,\" said he, suddenly, \"you do not propose to invest in South African securities?\"\n\nI gave a start of astonishment. Accustomed as I was to Holmes's curious faculties, this sudden intrusion into my most intimate thoughts was utterly inexplicable.\n\n\"How on earth do you know that?\" I asked.\n\nHe wheeled round upon his stool, with a steaming test-tube in his hand, and a gleam of amusement in his deep-set eyes.\n\n\"Now, Watson, confess yourself utterly taken aback,\" said he.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"I ought to make you sign a paper to that effect.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because in five minutes you will say that it is all so absurdly simple.\"\n\n\"I am sure that I shall say nothing of the kind.\"\n\n\"You see, my dear Watson\"\u2014he propped his test-tube in the rack, and began to lecture with the air of a professor addressing his class\u2014\"it is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though possibly a meretricious, effect. Now, it was not really difficult, by an inspection of the groove between your left forefinger and thumb, to feel sure that you did not propose to invest your small capital in the gold fields.\"\n\n\"I see no connection.\"\n\n\"Very likely not; but I can quickly show you a close connection. Here are the missing links of the very simple chain: 1. You had chalk between your left finger and thumb when you returned from the club last night. 2. You put chalk there when you play billiards, to steady the cue. 3. You never play billiards except with Thurston. 4. You told me, four weeks ago, that Thurston had an option on some South African property which would expire in a month, and which he desired you to share with him. 5. Your check book is locked in my drawer, and you have not asked for the key. 6. You do not propose to invest your money in this manner.\"\n\n\"How absurdly simple!\" I cried.\n\n\"Quite so!\" said he, a little nettled. \"Every problem becomes very childish when once it is explained to you. Here is an unexplained one. See what you can make of that, friend Watson.\" He tossed a sheet of paper upon the table, and turned once more to his chemical analysis.\n\nI looked with amazement at the absurd hieroglyphics upon the paper.\n\n\"Why, Holmes, it is a child's drawing,\" I cried.\n\n\"Oh, that's your idea!\"\n\n\"What else should it be?\"\n\n\"That is what Mr. Hilton Cubitt, of Riding Thorpe Manor, Norfolk, is very anxious to know. This little conundrum came by the first post, and he was to follow by the next train. There's a ring at the bell, Watson. I should not be very much surprised if this were he.\"\n\nA heavy step was heard upon the stairs, and an instant later there entered a tall, ruddy, clean-shaven gentleman, whose clear eyes and florid cheeks told of a life led far from the fogs of Baker Street. He seemed to bring a whiff of his strong, fresh, bracing, east-coast air with him as he entered. Having shaken hands with each of us, he was about to sit down, when his eye rested upon the paper with the curious markings, which I had just examined and left upon the table.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, what do you make of these?\" he cried. \"They told me that you were fond of queer mysteries, and I don't think you can find a queerer one than that. I sent the paper on ahead, so that you might have time to study it before I came.\"\n\n\"It is certainly rather a curious production,\" said Holmes. \"At first sight it would appear to be some childish prank. It consists of a number of absurd little figures dancing across the paper upon which they are drawn. Why should you attribute any importance to so grotesque an object?\"\n\n\"I never should, Mr. Holmes. But my wife does. It is frightening her to death. She says nothing, but I can see terror in her eyes. That's why I want to sift the matter to the bottom.\"\n\nHolmes held up the paper so that the sunlight shone full upon it. It was a page torn from a notebook. The markings were done in pencil, and ran in this way:\n\nHolmes examined it for some time, and then, folding it carefully up, he placed it in his pocketbook.\n\n\"This promises to be a most interesting and unusual case,\" said he. \"You gave me a few particulars in your letter, Mr. Hilton Cubitt, but I should be very much obliged if you would kindly go over it all again for the benefit of my friend, Dr. Watson.\"\n\n\"I'm not much of a story-teller,\" said our visitor, nervously clasping and unclasping his great, strong hands. \"You'll just ask me anything that I don't make clear. I'll begin at the time of my marriage last year, but I want to say first of all that, though I'm not a rich man, my people have been at Riding Thorpe for a matter of five centuries, and there is no better known family in the County of Norfolk. Last year I came up to London for the Jubilee, and I stopped at a boardinghouse in Russell Square, because Parker, the vicar of our parish, was staying in it. There was an American young lady there\u2014Patrick was the name\u2014Elsie Patrick. In some way we became friends, until before my month was up I was as much in love as man could be. We were quietly married at a registry office, and we returned to Norfolk a wedded couple. You'll think it very mad, Mr. Holmes, that a man of a good old family should marry a wife in this fashion, knowing nothing of her past or of her people, but if you saw her and knew her, it would help you to understand.\n\n\"She was very straight about it, was Elsie. I can't say that she did not give me every chance of getting out of it if I wished to do so. 'I have had some very disagreeable associations in my life,' said she, 'I wish to forget all about them. I would rather never allude to the past, for it is very painful to me. If you take me, Hilton, you will take a woman who has nothing that she need be personally ashamed of; but you will have to be content with my word for it, and to allow me to be silent as to all that passed up to the time when I became yours. If these conditions are too hard, then go back to Norfolk, and leave me to the lonely life in which you found me.' It was only the day before our wedding that she said those very words to me. I told her that I was content to take her on her own terms, and I have been as good as my word.\n\n\"Well, we have been married now for a year, and very happy we have been. But about a month ago, at the end of June, I saw for the first time signs of trouble. One day my wife received a letter from America. I saw the American stamp. She turned deadly white, read the letter, and threw it into the fire. She made no allusion to it afterwards, and I made none, for a promise is a promise, but she has never known an easy hour from that moment. There is always a look of fear upon her face\u2014a look as if she were waiting and expecting. She would do better to trust me. She would find that I was her best friend. But until she speaks, I can say nothing. Mind you, she is a truthful woman, Mr. Holmes, and whatever trouble there may have been in her past life it has been no fault of hers. I am only a simple Norfolk squire, but there is not a man in England who ranks his family honour more highly than I do. She knows it well, and she knew it well before she married me. She would never bring any stain upon it\u2014of that I am sure.\n\n\"Well, now I come to the queer part of my story. About a week ago\u2014it was the Tuesday of last week\u2014I found on one of the window-sills a number of absurd little dancing figures like these upon the paper. They were scrawled with chalk. I thought that it was the stable-boy who had drawn them, but the lad swore he knew nothing about it. Anyhow, they had come there during the night. I had them washed out, and I only mentioned the matter to my wife afterwards. To my surprise, she took it very seriously, and begged me if any more came to let her see them. None did come for a week, and then yesterday morning I found this paper lying on the sundial in the garden. I showed it to Elsie, and down she dropped in a dead faint. Since then she has looked like a woman in a dream, half dazed, and with terror always lurking in her eyes. It was then that I wrote and sent the paper to you, Mr. Holmes. It was not a thing that I could take to the police, for they would have laughed at me, but you will tell me what to do. I am not a rich man, but if there is any danger threatening my little woman, I would spend my last copper to shield her.\"\n\nHe was a fine creature, this man of the old English soil\u2014simple, straight, and gentle, with his great, earnest blue eyes and broad, comely face. His love for his wife and his trust in her shone in his features. Holmes had listened to his story with the utmost attention, and now he sat for some time in silent thought.\n\n\"Don't you think, Mr. Cubitt,\" said he, at last, \"that your best plan would be to make a direct appeal to your wife, and to ask her to share her secret with you?\"\n\nHilton Cubitt shook his massive head.\n\n\"A promise is a promise, Mr. Holmes. If Elsie wished to tell me she would. If not, it is not for me to force her confidence. But I am justified in taking my own line\u2014and I will.\"\n\n\"Then I will help you with all my heart. In the first place, have you heard of any strangers being seen in your neighbourhood?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I presume that it is a very quiet place. Any fresh face would cause comment?\"\n\n\"In the immediate neighbourhood, yes. But we have several small watering-places not very far away. And the farmers take in lodgers.\"\n\n\"These hieroglyphics have evidently a meaning. If it is a purely arbitrary one, it may be impossible for us to solve it. If, on the other hand, it is systematic, I have no doubt that we shall get to the bottom of it. But this particular sample is so short that I can do nothing, and the facts which you have brought me are so indefinite that we have no basis for an investigation. I would suggest that you return to Norfolk, that you keep a keen lookout, and that you take an exact copy of any fresh dancing men which may appear. It is a thousand pities that we have not a reproduction of those which were done in chalk upon the window-sill. Make a discreet inquiry also as to any strangers in the neighbourhood. When you have collected some fresh evidence, come to me again. That is the best advice which I can give you, Mr. Hilton Cubitt. If there are any pressing fresh developments, I shall be always ready to run down and see you in your Norfolk home.\"\n\nThe interview left Sherlock Holmes very thoughtful, and several times in the next few days I saw him take his slip of paper from his notebook and look long and earnestly at the curious figures inscribed upon it. He made no allusion to the affair, however, until one afternoon a fortnight or so later. I was going out when he called me back.\n\n\"You had better stay here, Watson.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I had a wire from Hilton Cubitt this morning. You remember Hilton Cubitt, of the dancing men? He was to reach Liverpool Street at one-twenty. He may be here at any moment. I gather from his wire that there have been some new incidents of importance.\"\n\nWe had not long to wait, for our Norfolk squire came straight from the station as fast as a hansom could bring him. He was looking worried and depressed, with tired eyes and a lined forehead.\n\n\"It's getting on my nerves, this business, Mr. Holmes,\" said he, as he sank, like a wearied man, into an armchair. \"It's bad enough to feel that you are surrounded by unseen, unknown folk, who have some kind of design upon you, but when, in addition to that, you know that it is just killing your wife by inches, then it becomes as much as flesh and blood can endure. She's wearing away under it\u2014just wearing away before my eyes.\"\n\n\"Has she said anything yet?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes, she has not. And yet there have been times when the poor girl has wanted to speak, and yet could not quite bring herself to take the plunge. I have tried to help her, but I daresay I did it clumsily, and scared her from it. She has spoken about my old family, and our reputation in the county, and our pride in our unsullied honour, and I always felt it was leading to the point, but somehow it turned off before we got there.\"\n\n\"But you have found out something for yourself?\"\n\n\"A good deal, Mr. Holmes. I have several fresh dancing-men pictures for you to examine, and, what is more important, I have seen the fellow.\"\n\n\"What, the man who draws them?\"\n\n\"Yes, I saw him at his work. But I will tell you everything in order. When I got back after my visit to you, the very first thing I saw next morning was a fresh crop of dancing men. They had been drawn in chalk upon the black wooden door of the tool-house, which stands beside the lawn in full view of the front windows. I took an exact copy, and here it is.\" He unfolded a paper and laid it upon the table. Here is a copy of the hieroglyphics:\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Holmes. \"Excellent! Pray continue.\"\n\n\"When I had taken the copy, I rubbed out the marks, but, two mornings later, a fresh inscription had appeared. I have a copy of it here\":\n\nHolmes rubbed his hands and chuckled with delight.\n\n\"Our material is rapidly accumulating,\" said he.\n\n\"Three days later a message was left scrawled upon paper, and placed under a pebble upon the sundial. Here it is. The characters are, as you see, exactly the same as the last one. After that I determined to lie in wait, so I got out my revolver and I sat up in my study, which overlooks the lawn and garden. About two in the morning I was seated by the window, all being dark save for the moonlight outside, when I heard steps behind me, and there was my wife in her dressing-gown. She implored me to come to bed. I told her frankly that I wished to see who it was who played such absurd tricks upon us. She answered that it was some senseless practical joke, and that I should not take any notice of it.\n\n\"'If it really annoys you, Hilton, we might go and travel, you and I, and so avoid this nuisance.'\n\n\"'What, be driven out of our own house by a practical joker?' said I. 'Why, we should have the whole county laughing at us.'\n\n\"'Well, come to bed,' said she, 'and we can discuss it in the morning.'\n\n\"Suddenly, as she spoke, I saw her white face grow whiter yet in the moonlight, and her hand tightened upon my shoulder. Something was moving in the shadow of the tool-house. I saw a dark, creeping figure which crawled round the corner and squatted in front of the door. Seizing my pistol, I was rushing out, when my wife threw her arms round me and held me with convulsive strength. I tried to throw her off, but she clung to me most desperately. At last I got clear, but by the time I had opened the door and reached the house the creature was gone. He had left a trace of his presence, however, for there on the door was the very same arrangement of dancing men which had already twice appeared, and which I have copied on that paper. There was no other sign of the fellow anywhere, though I ran all over the grounds. And yet the amazing thing is that he must have been there all the time, for when I examined the door again in the morning, he had scrawled some more of his pictures under the line which I had already seen.\"\n\n\"Have you that fresh drawing?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is very short, but I made a copy of it, and here it is.\" Again he produced a paper. The new dance was in this form:\n\n\"Tell me,\" said Holmes\u2014and could see by his eyes that he was much excited\u2014\"was this a mere addition to the first or did it appear to be entirely separate?\"\n\n\"It was on a different panel of the door.\"\n\n\"Excellent! This is by far the most important of all for our purpose. It fills me with hopes. Now, Mr. Hilton Cubitt, please continue your most interesting statement.\"\n\n\"I have nothing more to say, Mr. Holmes, except that I was angry with my wife that night for having held me back when I might have caught the skulking rascal. She said that she feared that I might come to harm. For an instant it had crossed my mind that perhaps what she really feared was that he might come to harm, for I could not doubt that she knew who this man was, and what he meant by these strange signals. But there is a tone in my wife's voice, Mr. Holmes, and a look in her eyes which forbid doubt, and I am sure that it was indeed my own safety that was in her mind. There's the whole case, and now I want your advice as to what I ought to do. My own inclination is to put half a dozen of my farm lads in the shrubbery, and when this fellow comes again to give him such a hiding that he will leave us in peace for the future.\"\n\n\"I fear it is too deep a case for such simple remedies,\" said Holmes. \"How long can you stay in London?\"\n\n\"I must go back today. I would not leave my wife alone all night for anything. She is very nervous, and begged me to come back.\"\n\n\"I daresay you are right. But if you could have stopped, I might possibly have been able to return with you in a day or two. Meanwhile you will leave me these papers, and I think that it is very likely that I shall be able to pay you a visit shortly and to throw some light upon your case.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes preserved his calm professional manner until our visitor had left us, although it was easy for me, who knew him so well, to see that he was profoundly excited. The moment that Hilton Cubitt's broad back had disappeared through the door my comrade rushed to the table, laid out all the slips of paper containing dancing men in front of him, and threw himself into an intricate and elaborate calculation. For two hours I watched him as he covered sheet after sheet of paper with figures and letters, so completely absorbed in his task that he had evidently forgotten my presence. Sometimes he was making progress and whistled and sang at his work; sometimes he was puzzled, and would sit for long spells with a furrowed brow and a vacant eye. Finally he sprang from his chair with a cry of satisfaction, and walked up and down the room rubbing his hands together. Then he wrote a long telegram upon a cable form. \"If my answer to this is as I hope, you will have a very pretty case to add to your collection, Watson,\" said he. \"I expect that we shall be able to go down to Norfolk tomorrow, and to take our friend some very definite news as to the secret of his annoyance.\"\n\nI confess that I was filled with curiosity, but I was aware that Holmes liked to make his disclosures at his own time and in his own way, so I waited until it should suit him to take me into his confidence.\n\nBut there was a delay in that answering telegram, and two days of impatience followed, during which Holmes pricked up his ears at every ring of the bell. On the evening of the second there came a letter from Hilton Cubitt. All was quiet with him, save that a long inscription had appeared that morning upon the pedestal of the sundial. He inclosed a copy of it, which is here reproduced:\n\nHolmes bent over this grotesque frieze for some minutes, and then suddenly sprang to his feet with an exclamation of surprise and dismay. His face was haggard with anxiety.\n\n\"We have let this affair go far enough,\" said he. \"Is there a train to North Walsham to-night?\"\n\nI turned up the time-table. The last had just gone. \"Then we shall breakfast early and take the very first in the morning,\" said Holmes. \"Our presence is most urgently needed. Ah! here is our expected cablegram. One moment, Mrs. Hudson, there may be an answer. No, that is quite as I expected. This message makes it even more essential that we should not lose an hour in letting Hilton Cubitt know how matters stand, for it is a singular and a dangerous web in which our simple Norfolk squire is entangled.\"\n\nSo, indeed, it proved, and as I come to the dark conclusion of a story which had seemed to me to be only childish and bizarre, I experience once again the dismay and horror with which I was filled. Would that I had some brighter ending to communicate to my readers, but these are the chronicles of fact, and I must follow to their dark crisis the strange chain of events which for some days made Riding Thorpe Manor a household word through the length and breadth of England.\n\nWe had hardly alighted at North Walsham, and mentioned the name of our destination, when the stationmaster hurried towards us. \"I suppose that you are the detectives from London?\" said he.\n\nA look of annoyance passed over Holmes's face.\n\n\"What makes you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"Because Inspector Martin from Norwich has just passed through. But maybe you are the surgeons. She's not dead\u2014or wasn't by last accounts. You may be in time to save her yet\u2014though it be for the gallows.\"\n\nHolmes's brow was dark with anxiety.\n\n\"We are going to Riding Thorpe Manor,\" said he, \"but we have heard nothing of what has passed there.\"\n\n\"It's a terrible business,\" said the stationmaster. \"They are shot, both Mr. Hilton Cubitt and his wife. She shot him and then herself\u2014so the servants say. He's dead and her life is despaired of. Dear, dear, one of the oldest families in the county of Norfolk, and one of the most honoured.\"\n\nWithout a word Holmes hurried to a carriage, and during the long seven miles' drive he never opened his mouth. Seldom have I seen him so utterly despondent. He had been uneasy during all our journey from town, and I had observed that he had turned over the morning papers with anxious attention, but now this sudden realization of his worst fears left him in a blank melancholy. He leaned back in his seat, lost in gloomy speculation. Yet there was much around to interest us, for we were passing through as singular a countryside as any in England, where a few scattered cottages represented the population of to-day, while on every hand enormous square-towered churches bristled up from the flat green landscape and told of the glory and prosperity of old East Anglia. At last the violet rim of the German Ocean appeared over the green edge of the Norfolk coast, and the driver pointed with his whip to two old brick and timber gables which projected from a grove of trees. \"That's Riding Thorpe Manor,\" said he.\n\nAs we drove up to the porticoed front door, I observed in front of it, beside the tennis lawn, the black tool-house and the pedestalled sundial with which we had such strange associations. A dapper little man, with a quick, alert manner and a waxed moustache, had just descended from a high dog-cart. He introduced himself as Inspector Martin, of the Norfolk Constabulary, and he was considerably astonished when he heard the name of my companion.\n\n\"Why, Mr. Holmes, the crime was only committed at three this morning. How could you hear of it in London and get to the spot as soon as I?\"\n\n\"I anticipated it. I came in the hope of preventing it.\"\n\n\"Then you must have important evidence, of which we are ignorant, for they were said to be a most united couple.\"\n\n\"I have only the evidence of the dancing men,\" said Holmes. \"I will explain the matter to you later. Meanwhile, since it is too late to prevent this tragedy, I am very anxious that I should use the knowledge which I possess in order to insure that justice be done. Will you associate me in your investigation, or will you prefer that I should act independently?\"\n\n\"I should be proud to feel that we were acting together, Mr. Holmes,\" said the inspector, earnestly.\n\n\"In that case I should be glad to hear the evidence and to examine the premises without an instant of unnecessary delay.\"\n\nInspector Martin had the good sense to allow my friend to do things in his own fashion, and contented himself with carefully noting the results. The local surgeon, an old, white-haired man, had just come down from Mrs. Hilton Cubitt's room, and he reported that her injuries were serious, but not necessarily fatal. The bullet had passed through the front of her brain, and it would probably be some time before she could regain consciousness. On the question of whether she had been shot or had shot herself, he would not venture to express any decided opinion. Certainly the bullet had been discharged at very close quarters. There was only the one pistol found in the room, two barrels of which had been emptied. Mr. Hilton Cubitt had been shot through the heart. It was equally conceivable that he had shot her and then himself, or that she had been the criminal, for the revolver lay upon the floor midway between them.\n\n\"Has he been moved?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"We have moved nothing except the lady. We could not leave her lying wounded upon the floor.\"\n\n\"How long have you been here, Doctor?\"\n\n\"Since four o'clock.\"\n\n\"Anyone else?\"\n\n\"Yes, the constable here.\"\n\n\"And you have touched nothing?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"You have acted with great discretion. Who sent for you?\"\n\n\"The housemaid, Saunders.\"\n\n\"Was it she who gave the alarm?\"\n\n\"She and Mrs. King, the cook.\"\n\n\"Where are they now?\"\n\n\"In the kitchen, I believe.\"\n\n\"Then I think we had better hear their story at once.\"\n\nThe old hall, oak-panelled and high-windowed, had been turned into a court of investigation. Holmes sat in a great, old-fashioned chair, his inexorable eyes gleaming out of his haggard face. I could read in them a set purpose to devote his life to this quest until the client whom he had failed to save should at last be avenged. The trim Inspector Martin, the old, gray-headed country doctor, myself, and a stolid village policeman made up the rest of that strange company.\n\nThe two women told their story clearly enough. They had been aroused from their sleep by the sound of an explosion, which had been followed a minute later by a second one. They slept in adjoining rooms, and Mrs. King had rushed in to Saunders. Together they had descended the stairs. The door of the study was open, and a candle was burning upon the table. Their master lay upon his face in the centre of the room. He was quite dead. Near the window his wife was crouching, her head leaning against the wall. She was horribly wounded, and the side of her face was red with blood. She breathed heavily, but was incapable of saying anything. The passage, as well as the room, was full of smoke and the smell of powder. The window was certainly shut and fastened upon the inside. Both women were positive upon the point. They had at once sent for the doctor and for the constable. Then, with the aid of the groom and the stable-boy, they had conveyed their injured mistress to her room. Both she and her husband had occupied the bed. She was clad in her dress\u2014he in his dressing-gown, over his night clothes. Nothing had been moved in the study. So far as they knew, there had never been any quarrel between husband and wife. They had always looked upon them as a very united couple.\n\nThese were the main points of the servants' evidence. In answer to Inspector Martin, they were clear that every door was fastened upon the inside, and that no one could have escaped from the house. In answer to Holmes, they both remembered that they were conscious of the smell of powder from the moment that they ran out of their rooms upon the top floor. \"I commend that fact very carefully to your attention,\" said Holmes to his professional colleague. \"And now I think that we are in a position to undertake a thorough examination of the room.\"\n\nThe study proved to be a small chamber, lined on three sides with books, and with a writing-table facing an ordinary window, which looked out upon the garden. Our first attention was given to the body of the unfortunate squire, whose huge frame lay stretched across the room. His disordered dress showed that he had been hastily aroused from sleep. The bullet had been fired at him from the front, and had remained in his body, after penetrating the heart. His death had certainly been instantaneous and painless. There was no powder-marking either upon his dressing-gown or on his hands. According to the country surgeon, the lady had stains upon her face, but none upon her hand.\n\n\"The absence of the latter means nothing, though its presence may mean everything,\" said Holmes. \"Unless the powder from a badly fitting cartridge happens to spurt backward, one may fire many shots without leaving a sign. I would suggest that Mr. Cubitt's body may now be removed. I suppose, Doctor, you have not recovered the bullet which wounded the lady?\"\n\n\"A serious operation will be necessary before that can be done. But there are still four cartridges in the revolver. Two have been fired and two wounds inflicted, so that each bullet can be accounted for.\"\n\n\"So it would seem,\" said Holmes. \"Perhaps you can account also for the bullet which has so obviously struck the edge of the window?\"\n\nHe had turned suddenly, and his long, thin finger was pointing to a hole which had been drilled right through the lower windowsash, about an inch above the bottom.\n\n\"By George!\" cried the inspector. \"How ever did you see that?\"\n\n\"Because I looked for it.\"\n\n\"Wonderful!\" said the country doctor. \"You are certainly right, sir. Then a third shot has been fired, and therefore a third person must have been present. But who could that have been, and how could he have got away?\"\n\n\"That is the problem which we are now about to solve,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"You remember, Inspector Martin, when the servants said that on leaving their room they were at once conscious of a smell of powder, I remarked that the point was an extremely important one?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; but I confess I did not quite follow you.\"\n\n\"It suggested that at the time of the firing, the window as well as the door of the room had been open. Otherwise the fumes of powder could not have been blown so rapidly through the house. A draught in the room was necessary for that. Both door and window were only open for a very short time, however.\"\n\n\"How do you prove that?\"\n\n\"Because the candle was not guttered.\"\n\n\"Capital!\" cried the inspector. \"Capital!\"\n\n\"Feeling sure that the window had been open at the time of the tragedy, I conceived that there might have been a third person in the affair, who stood outside this opening and fired through it. Any shot directed at this person might hit the sash. I looked, and there, sure enough, was the bullet mark!\"\n\n\"But how came the window to be shut and fastened?\"\n\n\"The woman's first instinct would be to shut and fasten the window. But, halloa! what is this?\"\n\nIt was a lady's handbag which stood upon the study table\u2014a trim little handbag of crocodile-skin and silver. Holmes opened it and turned the contents out. There were twenty fifty-pound notes of the Bank of England, held together by an india-rubber band\u2014nothing else.\n\n\"This must be preserved, for it will figure in the trial,\" said Holmes, as he handed the bag with its contents to the inspector. \"It is now necessary that we should try to throw some light upon this third bullet, which has clearly, from the splintering of the wood, been fired from inside the room. I should like to see Mrs. King, the cook, again. You said, Mrs. King, that you were awakened by a loud explosion. When you said that, did you mean that it seemed to you to be louder than the second one?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, it wakened me from my sleep, so it is hard to judge. But it did seem very loud.\"\n\n\"You don't think that it might have been two shots fired almost at the same instant?\"\n\n\"I am sure I couldn't say, sir.\"\n\n\"I believe that it was undoubtedly so. I rather think, Inspector Martin, that we have now exhausted all that this room can teach us. If you will kindly step round with me, we shall see what fresh evidence the garden has to offer.\"\n\nA flower-bed extended up to the study window, and we all broke into an exclamation as we approached it. The flowers were trampled down, and the soft soil was imprinted all over with footmarks. Large, masculine feet they were, with peculiarly long, sharp toes. Holmes hunted about among the grass and leaves like a retriever after a wounded bird. Then, with a cry of satisfaction, he bent forward and picked up a little brazen cylinder.\n\n\"I thought so,\" said he; \"the revolver had an ejector, and here is the third cartridge. I really think, Inspector Martin, that our case is almost complete.\"\n\nThe country inspector's face had shown his intense amazement at the rapid and masterful progress of Holmes's investigation. At first he had shown some disposition to assert his own position, but now he was overcome with admiration, and ready to follow without question wherever Holmes led.\n\n\"Whom do you suspect?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'll go into that later. There are several points in this problem which I have not been able to explain to you yet. Now that I have got so far, I had best proceed on my own lines, and then clear the whole matter up once and for all.\"\n\n\"Just as you wish, Mr. Holmes, so long as we get our man.\"\n\n\"I have no desire to make mysteries, but it is impossible at the moment of action to enter into long and complex explanations. I have the threads of this affair all in my hand. Even if this lady should never recover consciousness, we can still reconstruct the events of last night, and insure that justice be done. First of all, I wish to know whether there is any inn in this neighbourhood known as 'Elrige's'?\"\n\nThe servants were cross-questioned, but none of them had heard of such a place. The stable-boy threw a light upon the matter by remembering that a farmer of that name lived some miles off, in the direction of East Ruston.\n\n\"Is it a lonely farm?\"\n\n\"Very lonely, sir.\"\n\n\"Perhaps they have not heard yet of all that happened here during the night?\"\n\n\"Maybe not, sir.\"\n\nHolmes thought for a little, and then a curious smile played over his face.\n\n\"Saddle a horse, my lad,\" said he. \"I shall wish you to take a note to Elrige's Farm.\"\n\nHe took from his pocket the various slips of the dancing men. With these in front of him he worked for some time at the study-table. Finally he handed a note to the boy, with directions to put it into the hands of the person to whom it was addressed, and especially to answer no questions of any sort which might be put to him. I saw the outside of the note, addressed in straggling, irregular characters, very unlike Holmes's usual precise hand. It was consigned to Mr. Abe Slaney, Elrige's Farm, East Ruston, Norfolk.\n\n\"I think, Inspector,\" Holmes remarked, \"that you would do well to telegraph for an escort, as, if my calculations prove to be correct, you may have a particularly dangerous prisoner to convey to the county jail. The boy who takes this note could no doubt forward your telegram. If there is an afternoon train to town, Watson, I think we should do well to take it, as I have a chemical analysis of some interest to finish, and this investigation draws rapidly to a close.\"\n\nWhen the youth had been dispatched with the note, Sherlock Holmes gave his instructions to the servants. If any visitor were to call asking for Mrs. Hilton Cubitt, no information should be given as to her condition, but he was to be shown at once into the drawing-room. He impressed these points upon them with the utmost earnestness. Finally he led the way into the drawing-room, with the remark that the business was now out of our hands, and that we must while away the time as best we might until we could see what was in store for us. The doctor had departed to his patients and only the inspector and myself remained.\n\n\"I think that I can help you to pass an hour in an interesting and profitable manner,\" said Holmes, drawing his chair up to the table, and spreading out in front of him the various papers upon which were recorded the antics of the dancing men. \"As to you, friend Watson, I owe you every atonement for having allowed your natural curiosity to remain so long unsatisfied. To you, Inspector, the whole incident may appeal as a remarkable professional study. I must tell you, first of all, the interesting circumstances connected with the previous consultations which Mr. Hilton Cubitt has had with me in Baker Street.\" He then shortly recapitulated the facts which have already been recorded. \"I have here in front of me these singular productions, at which one might smile, had they not proved themselves to be the forerunners of so terrible a tragedy. I am fairly familiar with all forms of secret writings, and am myself the author of a trifling monograph upon the subject, in which I analyze one hundred and sixty separate ciphers, but I confess that this is entirely new to me. The object of those who invented the system has apparently been to conceal that these characters convey a message, and to give the idea that they are the mere random sketches of children.\n\n\"Having once recognized, however, that the symbols stood for letters, and having applied the rules which guide us in all forms of secret writings, the solution was easy enough. The first message submitted to me was so short that it was impossible for me to do more than to say, with some confidence, that the symbolstood for E. As you are aware, E is the most common letter in the English alphabet, and it predominates to so marked an extent that even in a short sentence one would expect to find it most often. Out of fifteen symbols in the first message, four were the same, so it was reasonable to set this down as E. It is true that in some cases the figure was bearing a flag, and in some cases not, but it was probable, from the way in which the flags were distributed, that they were used to break the sentence up into words. I accepted this as a hypothesis, and noted that E was represented by.\n\n\"But now came the real difficulty of the inquiry. The order of the English letters after E is by no means well marked, and any preponderance which may be shown in an average of a printed sheet may be reversed in a single short sentence. Speaking roughly, T, A, O, I, N, S, H, R, D, and L are the numerical order in which letters occur; but T, A, O, and I are very nearly abreast of each other, and it would be an endless task to try each combination until a meaning was arrived at. I therefore waited for fresh material. In my second interview with Mr. Hilton Cubitt he was able to give me two other short sentences and one message, which appeared\u2014since there was no flag\u2014to be a single word. Here are the symbols. Now, in the single word I have already got the two E's coming second and fourth in a word of five letters. It might be 'sever,' or 'lever,' or 'never.' There can be no question that the latter as a reply to an appeal is far the most probable, and the circumstances pointed to its being a reply written by the lady. Accepting it as correct, we are now able to say that the symbolsstand respectively for N, V, and R.\n\n\"Even now I was in considerable difficulty, but a happy thought put me in possession of several other letters. It occurred to me that if these appeals came, as I expected, from someone who had been intimate with the lady in her early life, a combination which contained two E's with three letters between might very well stand for the name 'ELSIE.' On examination I found that such a combination formed the termination of the message which was three times repeated. It was certainly some appeal to 'Elsie.' In this way I had got my L, S, and I. But what appeal could it be? There were only four letters in the word which preceded 'Elsie,' and it ended in E. Surely the word must be 'COME.' I tried all other four letters ending in E, but could find none to fit the case. So now I was in possession of C, O, and M, and I was in a position to attack the first message once more, dividing it into words and putting dots for each symbol which was still unknown. So treated, it worked out in this fashion:\n\n. M . ERE .. E SL . NE.\n\n\"Now the first letter can only be A, which is a most useful discovery, since it occurs no fewer than three times in this short sentence, and the H is also apparent in the second word. Now it becomes:\n\nAM HERE A. E SLANE.\n\nOr, filling in the obvious vacancies in the name:\n\nAM HERE ABE SLANEY.\n\nI had so many letters now that I could proceed with considerable confidence to the second message, which worked out in this fashion:\n\nA . ELRI . ES.\n\nHere I could only make sense by putting T and G for the missing letters, and supposing that the name was that of some house or inn at which the writer was staying.\"\n\nInspector Martin and I had listened with the utmost interest to the full and clear account of how my friend had produced results which had led to so complete a command over our difficulties.\n\n\"What did you do then, sir?\" asked the inspector.\n\n\"I had every reason to suppose that this Abe Slaney was an American, since Abe is an American contraction, and since a letter from America had been the starting-point of all the trouble. I had also every cause to think that there was some criminal secret in the matter. The lady's allusions to her past, and her refusal to take her husband into her confidence, both pointed in that direction. I therefore cabled to my friend, Wilson Hargreave, of the New York Police Bureau, who has more than once made use of my knowledge of London crime. I asked him whether the name of Abe Slaney was known to him. Here is his reply: 'The most dangerous crook in Chicago.' On the very evening upon which I had his answer, Hilton Cubitt sent me the last message from Slaney. Working with known letters, it took this form:\n\nELSIE . RE . ARE TO MEET THY GO.\n\nThe addition of a P and a D completed a message which showed me that the rascal was proceeding from persuasion to threats, and my knowledge of the crooks of Chicago prepared me to find that he might very rapidly put his words into action. I at once came to Norfolk with my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson, but, unhappily, only in time to find that the worst had already occurred.\"\n\n\"It is a privilege to be associated with you in the handling of a case,\" said the inspector, warmly. \"You will excuse me, however, if I speak frankly to you. You are only answerable to yourself, but I have to answer to my superiors. If this Abe Slaney, living at Elrige's, is indeed the murderer, and if he has made his escape while I am seated here, I should certainly get into serious trouble.\"\n\n\"You need not be uneasy. He will not try to escape.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"To fly would be a confession of guilt.\"\n\n\"Then let us go to arrest him.\"\n\n\"I expect him here every instant.\"\n\n\"But why should he come?\"\n\n\"Because I have written, and asked him.\"\n\n\"But this is incredible, Mr. Holmes! Why should he come because you have asked him? Would not such a request rather rouse his suspicions and cause him to fly?\"\n\n\"I think I have known how to frame the letter,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"In fact, if I am not very much mistaken, here is the gentleman himself coming up the drive.\"\n\nA man was striding up the path which led to the door. He was a tall, handsome, swarthy fellow, clad in a suit of gray flannel, with a Panama hat, a bristling black beard, and a great, aggressive hooked nose, and flourishing a cane as he walked. He swaggered up the path as if the place belonged to him, and we heard his loud, confident peal at the bell.\n\n\"I think, gentlemen,\" said Holmes, quietly, \"that we had best take up our position behind the door. Every precaution is necessary when dealing with such a fellow. You will need your handcuffs, Inspector. You can leave the talking to me.\"\n\nWe waited in silence for a minute\u2014one of those minutes which one can never forget. Then the door opened and the man stepped in. In an instant Holmes clapped a pistol to his head, and Martin slipped the handcuffs over his wrists. It was all done so swiftly and deftly that the fellow was helpless before he knew that he was attacked. He glared from one to the other of us with a pair of blazing black eyes. Then he burst into a bitter laugh.\n\n\"Well, gentlemen, you have the drop on me this time. I seem to have knocked up against something hard. But I came here in answer to a letter from Mrs. Hilton Cubitt. Don't tell me that she is in this? Don't tell me that she helped to set a trap for me?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Hilton Cubitt was seriously injured, and is at death's door.\"\n\nThe man gave a hoarse cry of grief, which rang through the house.\n\n\"You're crazy!\" he cried, fiercely. \"It was he that was hurt, not she. Who would have hurt little Elsie? I may have threatened her\u2014God forgive me!\u2014but I would not have touched a hair of her pretty head. Take it back\u2014you! Say that she is not hurt!\"\n\n\"She was found, badly wounded, by the side of her dead husband.\"\n\nHe sank with a deep groan on to the settee, and buried his face in his manacled hands. For five minutes he was silent. Then he raised his face once more, and spoke with the cold composure of despair.\n\n\"I have nothing to hide from you, gentlemen,\" said he. \"If I shot the man he had his shot at me, and there's no murder in that. But if you think I could have hurt that woman, then you don't know either me or her. I tell you, there was never a man in this world loved a woman more than I loved her. I had a right to her. She was pledged to me years ago. Who was this Englishman that he should come between us? I tell you that I had the first right to her, and that I was only claiming my own.\"\n\n\"She broke away from your influence when she found the man that you are,\" said Holmes, sternly. \"She fled from America to avoid you, and she married an honourable gentleman in England. You dogged her and followed her and made her life a misery to her, in order to induce her to abandon the husband whom she loved and respected in order to fly with you, whom she feared and hated. You have ended by bringing about the death of a noble man and driving his wife to suicide. That is your record in this business, Mr. Abe Slaney, and you will answer for it to the law.\"\n\n\"If Elsie dies, I care nothing what becomes of me,\" said the American. He opened one of his hands, and looked at a note crumpled up in his palm. \"See here, mister,\" he cried, with a gleam of suspicion in his eyes, \"you're not trying to scare me over this, are you? If the lady is hurt as bad as you say, who was it that wrote this note?\" He tossed it forward on to the table.\n\n\"I wrote it, to bring you here.\"\n\n\"You wrote it? There was no one on earth outside the Joint who knew the secret of the dancing men. How came you to write it?\"\n\n\"What one man can invent another can discover,\" said Holmes. \"There is a cab coming to convey you to Norwich, Mr. Slaney. But, meanwhile, you have time to make some small reparation for the injury you have wrought. Are you aware that Mrs. Hilton Cubitt has herself lain under grave suspicion of the murder of her husband, and that it was only my presence here, and the knowledge which I happened to possess, which has saved her from the accusation? The least that you owe her is to make it clear to the whole world that she was in no way, directly or indirectly, responsible for his tragic end.\"\n\n\"I ask nothing better,\" said the American. \"I guess the very best case I can make for myself is the absolute naked truth.\"\n\n\"It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you,\" cried the inspector, with the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.\n\nSlaney shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"I'll chance that,\" said he. \"First of all, I want you gentlemen to understand that I have known this lady since she was a child. There were seven of us in a gang in Chicago, and Elsie's father was the boss of the Joint. He was a clever man, was old Patrick. It was he who invented that writing, which would pass as a child's scrawl unless you just happened to have the key to it. Well, Elsie learned some of our ways, but she couldn't stand the business, and she had a bit of honest money of her own, so she gave us all the slip and got away to London. She had been engaged to me, and she would have married me, I believe, if I had taken over another profession. but she would have nothing to do with anything on the cross. It was only after her marriage to this Englishman that I was able to find out where she was. I wrote to her, but got no answer. After that I came over, and, as letters were no use, I put my messages where she could read them.\n\n\"Well, I have been here a month now. I lived in that farm, where I had a room down below, and could get in and out every night, and no one the wiser. I tried all I could to coax Elsie away. I knew that she read the messages, for once she wrote an answer under one of them. Then my temper got the better of me, and I began to threaten her. She sent me a letter then, imploring me to go away, and saying that it would break her heart if any scandal should come upon her husband. She said that she would come down when her husband was asleep at three in the morning, and speak with me through the end window, if I would go away afterwards and leave her in peace. She came down and brought money with her, trying to bribe me to go. This made me mad and I caught her arm and tried to pull her through the window. At that moment in rushed the husband with his revolver in his hand. Elsie had sunk down upon the floor, and we were face to face. I was heeled also, and I held up my gun to scare him off and let me get away. He fired and missed me. I pulled off almost at the same instant, and down he dropped. I made away across the garden, and as I went I heard the window shut behind me. That's God's truth, gentlemen, every word of it; and I heard no more about it until that lad came riding up with a note which made me walk in here, like a jay, and give myself into your hands.\"\n\nA cab had driven up whilst the American had been talking. Two uniformed policemen sat inside. Inspector Martin rose and touched his prisoner on the shoulder.\n\n\"It is time for us to go.\"\n\n\"Can I see her first?\"\n\n\"No, she is not conscious. Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I only hope that, if ever again I have an important case, I shall have the good fortune to have you by my side.\"\n\nWe stood at the window and watched the cab drive away. As I turned back, my eye caught the pellet of paper which the prisoner had tossed upon the table. It was the note with which Holmes had decoyed him.\n\n\"See if you can read it, Watson,\" said he, with a smile.\n\nIt contained no word, but this little line of dancing men:\n\n\"If you use the code which I have explained,\" said Holmes, \"you will find that it simply means 'Come here at once.' I was convinced that it was an invitation which he would not refuse, since he could never imagine that it could come from anyone but the lady. And so, my dear Watson, we have ended by turning the dancing men to good when they have so often been the agents of evil, and I think that I have fulfilled my promise of giving you something unusual for your notebook. Three-forty is our train, and I fancy we should be back in Baker Street for dinner.\"\n\nOnly one word of epilogue. The American, Abe Slaney, was condemned to death at the winter assizes at Norwich, but his penalty was changed to penal servitude in consideration of mitigating circumstances, and the certainty that Hilton Cubitt had fired the first shot. Of Mrs. Hilton Cubitt I only know that I have heard she recovered entirely, and that she still remains a widow, devoting her whole life to the care of the poor and to the administration of her husband's estate." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE SOLITARY CYCLIST", + "text": "From the years 1894 to 1901 inclusive, Mr. Sherlock Holmes was a very busy man. It is safe to say that there was no public case of any difficulty in which he was not consulted during those eight years, and there were hundreds of private cases, some of them of the most intricate and extraordinary character, in which he played a prominent part. Many startling successes and a few unavoidable failures were the outcome of this long period of continuous work. As I have preserved very full notes of all these cases, and was myself personally engaged in many of them, it may be imagined that it is no easy task to know which I should select to lay before the public. I shall, however, preserve my former rule, and give the preference to those cases which derive their interest not so much from the brutality of the crime as from the ingenuity and dramatic quality of the solution. For this reason I will now lay before the reader the facts connected with Miss Violet Smith, the solitary cyclist of Charlington, and the curious sequel of our investigation, which culminated in unexpected tragedy. It is true that the circumstance did not admit of any striking illustration of those powers for which my friend was famous, but there were some points about the case which made it stand out in those long records of crime from which I gather the material for these little narratives.\n\nOn referring to my notebook for the year 1895, I find that it was upon Saturday, the 23d of April, that we first heard of Miss Violet Smith. Her visit was, I remember, extremely unwelcome to Holmes, for he was immersed at the moment in a very abstruse and complicated problem concerning the peculiar persecution to which John Vincent Harden, the well known tobacco millionaire, had been subjected. My friend, who loved above all things precision and concentration of thought, resented anything which distracted his attention from the matter in hand. And yet, without a harshness which was foreign to his nature, it was impossible to refuse to listen to the story of the young and beautiful woman, tall, graceful, and queenly, who presented herself at Baker Street late in the evening, and implored his assistance and advice. It was vain to urge that his time was already fully occupied, for the young lady had come with the determination to tell her story, and it was evident that nothing short of force could get her out of the room until she had done so. With a resigned air and a somewhat weary smile, Holmes begged the beautiful intruder to take a seat, and to inform us what it was that was troubling her.\n\n\"At least it cannot be your health,\" said he, as his keen eyes darted over her; \"so ardent a bicyclist must be full of energy.\"\n\nShe glanced down in surprise at her own feet, and I observed the slight roughening of the side of the sole caused by the friction of the edge of the pedal.\n\n\"Yes, I bicycle a good deal, Mr. Holmes, and that has something to do with my visit to you to-day.\"\n\nMy friend took the lady's ungloved hand, and examined it with as close an attention and as little sentiment as a scientist would show to a specimen.\n\n\"You will excuse me, I am sure. It is my business,\" said he, as he dropped it. \"I nearly fell into the error of supposing that you were typewriting. Of course, it is obvious that it is music. You observe the spatulate finger-ends, Watson, which is common to both professions? There is a spirituality about the face, however\"\u2014she gently turned it towards the light\u2014\"which the typewriter does not generate. This lady is a musician.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes, I teach music.\"\n\n\"In the country, I presume, from your complexion.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, near Farnham, on the borders of Surrey.\"\n\n\"A beautiful neighbourhood, and full of the most interesting associations. You remember, Watson, that it was near there that we took Archie Stamford, the forger. Now, Miss Violet, what has happened to you, near Farnham, on the borders of Surrey?\"\n\nThe young lady, with great clearness and composure, made the following curious statement:\n\n\"My father is dead, Mr. Holmes. He was James Smith, who conducted the orchestra at the old Imperial Theatre. My mother and I were left without a relation in the world except one uncle, Ralph Smith, who went to Africa twenty-five years ago, and we have never had a word from him since. When father died, we were left very poor, but one day we were told that there was an advertisement in the Times, inquiring for our whereabouts. You can imagine how excited we were, for we thought that someone had left us a fortune. We went at once to the lawyer whose name was given in the paper. There we met two gentlemen, Mr. Carruthers and Mr. Woodley, who were home on a visit from South Africa. They said that my uncle was a friend of theirs, that he had died some months before in great poverty in Johannesburg, and that he had asked them with his last breath to hunt up his relations, and see that they were in no want. It seemed strange to us that Uncle Ralph, who took no notice of us when he was alive, should be so careful to look after us when he was dead, but Mr. Carruthers explained that the reason was that my uncle had just heard of the death of his brother, and so felt responsible for our fate.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" said Holmes. \"When was this interview?\"\n\n\"Last December\u2014four months ago.\"\n\n\"Pray proceed.\"\n\n\"Mr. Woodley seemed to me to be a most odious person. He was for ever making eyes at me\u2014a coarse, puffy-faced, red-moustached young man, with his hair plastered down on each side of his forehead. I thought that he was perfectly hateful\u2014and I was sure that Cyril would not wish me to know such a person.\"\n\n\"Oh, Cyril is his name!\" said Holmes, smiling.\n\nThe young lady blushed and laughed.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes, Cyril Morton, an electrical engineer, and we hope to be married at the end of the summer. Dear me, how did I get talking about him? What I wished to say was that Mr. Woodley was perfectly odious, but that Mr. Carruthers, who was a much older man, was more agreeable. He was a dark, sallow, clean-shaven, silent person, but he had polite manners and a pleasant smile. He inquired how we were left, and on finding that we were very poor, he suggested that I should come and teach music to his only daughter, aged ten. I said that I did not like to leave my mother, on which he suggested that I should go home to her every weekend, and he offered me a hundred a year, which was certainly splendid pay. So it ended by my accepting, and I went down to Chiltern Grange, about six miles from Farnham. Mr. Carruthers was a widower, but he had engaged a lady housekeeper, a very respectable, elderly person, called Mrs. Dixon, to look after his establishment. The child was a dear, and everything promised well. Mr. Carruthers was very kind and very musical, and we had most pleasant evenings together. Every week end I went home to my mother in town.\n\n\"The first flaw in my happiness was the arrival of the red-moustached Mr. Woodley. He came for a visit of a week, and oh! it seemed three months to me. He was a dreadful person\u2014a bully to everyone else, but to me something infinitely worse. He made odious love to me, boasted of his wealth, said that if I married him I could have the finest diamonds in London, and finally, when I would have nothing to do with him, he seized me in his arms one day after dinner\u2014he was hideously strong\u2014and swore that he would not let me go until I had kissed him. Mr. Carruthers came in and tore him from me, on which he turned upon his own host, knocking him down and cutting his face open. That was the end of his visit, as you can imagine. Mr. Carruthers apologized to me next day, and assured me that I should never be exposed to such an insult again. I have not seen Mr. Woodley since.\n\n\"And now, Mr. Holmes, I come at last to the special thing which has caused me to ask your advice to-day. You must know that every Saturday forenoon I ride on my bicycle to Farnham Station, in order to get the 12:22 to town. The road from Chiltern Grange is a lonely one, and at one spot it is particularly so, for it lies for over a mile between Charlington Heath upon one side and the woods which lie round Charlington Hall upon the other. You could not find a more lonely tract of road anywhere, and it is quite rare to meet so much as a cart, or a peasant, until you reach the high road near Crooksbury Hill. Two weeks ago I was passing this place, when I chanced to look back over my shoulder, and about two hundred yards behind me I saw a man, also on a bicycle. He seemed to be a middle-aged man, with a short, dark beard. I looked back before I reached Farnham, but the man was gone, so I thought no more about it. But you can imagine how surprised I was, Mr. Holmes, when, on my return on the Monday, I saw the same man on the same stretch of road. My astonishment was increased when the incident occurred again, exactly as before, on the following Saturday and Monday. He always kept his distance and did not molest me in any way, but still it certainly was very odd. I mentioned it to Mr. Carruthers, who seemed interested in what I said, and told me that he had ordered a horse and trap, so that in future I should not pass over these lonely roads without some companion.\n\n\"The horse and trap were to have come this week, but for some reason they were not delivered, and again I had to cycle to the station. That was this morning. You can think that I looked out when I came to Charlington Heath, and there, sure enough, was the man, exactly as he had been the two weeks before. He always kept so far from me that I could not clearly see his face, but it was certainly someone whom I did not know. He was dressed in a dark suit with a cloth cap. The only thing about his face that I could clearly see was his dark beard. To-day I was not alarmed, but I was filled with curiosity, and I determined to find out who he was and what he wanted. I slowed down my machine, but he slowed down his. Then I stopped altogether, but he stopped also. Then I laid a trap for him. There is a sharp turning of the road, and I pedalled very quickly round this, and then I stopped and waited. I expected him to shoot round and pass me before he could stop. But he never appeared. Then I went back and looked round the corner. I could see a mile of road, but he was not on it. To make it the more extraordinary, there was no side road at this point down which he could have gone.\"\n\nHolmes chuckled and rubbed his hands. \"This case certainly presents some features of its own,\" said he. \"How much time elapsed between your turning the corner and your discovery that the road was clear?\"\n\n\"Two or three minutes.\"\n\n\"Then he could not have retreated down the road, and you say that there are no side roads?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Then he certainly took a footpath on one side or the other.\"\n\n\"It could not have been on the side of the heath, or I should have seen him.\"\n\n\"So, by the process of exclusion, we arrive at the fact that he made his way toward Charlington Hall, which, as I understand, is situated in its own grounds on one side of the road. Anything else?\"\n\n\"Nothing, Mr. Holmes, save that I was so perplexed that I felt I should not be happy until I had seen you and had your advice.\"\n\nHolmes sat in silence for some little time.\n\n\"Where is the gentleman to whom you are engaged?\" he asked at last.\n\n\"He is in the Midland Electrical Company, at Coventry.\"\n\n\"He would not pay you a surprise visit?\"\n\n\"Oh, Mr. Holmes! As if I should not know him!\"\n\n\"Have you had any other admirers?\"\n\n\"Several before I knew Cyril.\"\n\n\"And since?\"\n\n\"There was this dreadful man, Woodley, if you can call him an admirer.\"\n\n\"No one else?\"\n\nOur fair client seemed a little confused.\n\n\"Who was he?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Oh, it may be a mere fancy of mine; but it had seemed to me sometimes that my employer, Mr. Carruthers, takes a great deal of interest in me. We are thrown rather together. I play his accompaniments in the evening. He has never said anything. He is a perfect gentleman. But a girl always knows.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" Holmes looked grave. \"What does he do for a living?\"\n\n\"He is a rich man.\"\n\n\"No carriages or horses?\"\n\n\"Well, at least he is fairly well-to-do. But he goes into the city two or three times a week. He is deeply interested in South African gold shares.\"\n\n\"You will let me know any fresh development, Miss Smith. I am very busy just now, but I will find time to make some inquiries into your case. In the meantime, take no step without letting me know. Good-bye, and I trust that we shall have nothing but good news from you.\"\n\n\"It is part of the settled order of Nature that such a girl should have followers,\" said Holmes, as he pulled at his meditative pipe, \"but for choice not on bicycles in lonely country roads. Some secretive lover, beyond all doubt. But there are curious and suggestive details about the case, Watson.\"\n\n\"That he should appear only at that point?\"\n\n\"Exactly. Our first effort must be to find who are the tenants of Charlington Hall. Then, again, how about the connection between Carruthers and Woodley, since they appear to be men of such a different type? How came they both to be so keen upon looking up Ralph Smith's relations? One more point. What sort of a menage is it which pays double the market price for a governess but does not keep a horse, although six miles from the station? Odd, Watson\u2014very odd!\"\n\n\"You will go down?\"\n\n\"No, my dear fellow, you will go down. This may be some trifling intrigue, and I cannot break my other important research for the sake of it. On Monday you will arrive early at Farnham; you will conceal yourself near Charlington Heath; you will observe these facts for yourself, and act as your own judgment advises. Then, having inquired as to the occupants of the Hall, you will come back to me and report. And now, Watson, not another word of the matter until we have a few solid stepping-stones on which we may hope to get across to our solution.\"\n\nWe had ascertained from the lady that she went down upon the Monday by the train which leaves Waterloo at 9:50, so I started early and caught the 9:13. At Farnham Station I had no difficulty in being directed to Charlington Heath. It was impossible to mistake the scene of the young lady's adventure, for the road runs between the open heath on one side and an old yew hedge upon the other, surrounding a park which is studded with magnificent trees. There was a main gateway of lichen-studded stone, each side pillar surmounted by mouldering heraldic emblems, but besides this central carriage drive I observed several points where there were gaps in the hedge and paths leading through them. The house was invisible from the road, but the surroundings all spoke of gloom and decay.\n\nThe heath was covered with golden patches of flowering gorse, gleaming magnificently in the light of the bright spring sunshine. Behind one of these clumps I took up my position, so as to command both the gateway of the Hall and a long stretch of the road upon either side. It had been deserted when I left it, but now I saw a cyclist riding down it from the opposite direction to that in which I had come. He was clad in a dark suit, and I saw that he had a black beard. On reaching the end of the Charlington grounds, he sprang from his machine and led it through a gap in the hedge, disappearing from my view.\n\nA quarter of an hour passed, and then a second cyclist appeared. This time it was the young lady coming from the station. I saw her look about her as she came to the Charlington hedge. An instant later the man emerged from his hiding-place, sprang upon his cycle, and followed her. In all the broad landscape those were the only moving figures, the graceful girl sitting very straight upon her machine, and the man behind her bending low over his handle-bar with a curiously furtive suggestion in every movement. She looked back at him and slowed her pace. He slowed also. She stopped. He at once stopped, too, keeping two hundred yards behind her. Her next movement was as unexpected as it was spirited. She suddenly whisked her wheels round and dashed straight at him. He was as quick as she, however, and darted off in desperate flight. Presently she came back up the road again, her head haughtily in the air, not deigning to take any further notice of her silent attendant. He had turned also, and still kept his distance until the curve of the road hid them from my sight.\n\nI remained in my hiding-place, and it was well that I did so, for presently the man reappeared, cycling slowly back. He turned in at the Hall gates, and dismounted from his machine. For some minutes I could see him standing among the trees. His hands were raised, and he seemed to be settling his necktie. Then he mounted his cycle, and rode away from me down the drive towards the Hall. I ran across the heath and peered through the trees. Far away I could catch glimpses of the old gray building with its bristling Tudor chimneys, but the drive ran through a dense shrubbery, and I saw no more of my man.\n\nHowever, it seemed to me that I had done a fairly good morning's work, and I walked back in high spirits to Farnham. The local house agent could tell me nothing about Charlington Hall, and referred me to a well known firm in Pall Mall. There I halted on my way home, and met with courtesy from the representative. No, I could not have Charlington Hall for the summer. I was just too late. It had been let about a month ago. Mr. Williamson was the name of the tenant. He was a respectable, elderly gentleman. The polite agent was afraid he could say no more, as the affairs of his clients were not matters which he could discuss.\n\nMr. Sherlock Holmes listened with attention to the long report which I was able to present to him that evening, but it did not elicit that word of curt praise which I had hoped for and should have valued. On the contrary, his austere face was even more severe than usual as he commented upon the things that I had done and the things that I had not.\n\n\"Your hiding-place, my dear Watson, was very faulty. You should have been behind the hedge, then you would have had a close view of this interesting person. As it is, you were some hundreds of yards away and can tell me even less than Miss Smith. She thinks she does not know the man; I am convinced she does. Why, otherwise, should he be so desperately anxious that she should not get so near him as to see his features? You describe him as bending over the handle-bar. Concealment again, you see. You really have done remarkably badly. He returns to the house, and you want to find out who he is. You come to a London house agent!\"\n\n\"What should I have done?\" I cried, with some heat.\n\n\"Gone to the nearest public-house. That is the centre of country gossip. They would have told you every name, from the master to the scullery-maid. Williamson? It conveys nothing to my mind. If he is an elderly man he is not this active cyclist who sprints away from that young lady's athletic pursuit. What have we gained by your expedition? The knowledge that the girl's story is true. I never doubted it. That there is a connection between the cyclist and the Hall. I never doubted that either. That the Hall is tenanted by Williamson. Who's the better for that? Well, well, my dear sir, don't look so depressed. We can do little more until next Saturday, and in the meantime I may make one or two inquiries myself.\"\n\nNext morning, we had a note from Miss Smith, recounting shortly and accurately the very incidents which I had seen, but the pith of the letter lay in the postscript:\n\nI am sure that you will respect my confidence, Mr. Holmes, when I tell you that my place here has become difficult, owing to the fact that my employer has proposed marriage to me. I am convinced that his feelings are most deep and most honourable. At the same time, my promise is of course given. He took my refusal very seriously, but also very gently. You can understand, however, that the situation is a little strained.\n\n\"Our young friend seems to be getting into deep waters,\" said Holmes, thoughtfully, as he finished the letter. \"The case certainly presents more features of interest and more possibility of development than I had originally thought. I should be none the worse for a quiet, peaceful day in the country, and I am inclined to run down this afternoon and test one or two theories which I have formed.\"\n\nHolmes's quiet day in the country had a singular termination, for he arrived at Baker Street late in the evening, with a cut lip and a discoloured lump upon his forehead, besides a general air of dissipation which would have made his own person the fitting object of a Scotland Yard investigation. He was immensely tickled by his own adventures and laughed heartily as he recounted them.\n\n\"I get so little active exercise that it is always a treat,\" said he. \"You are aware that I have some proficiency in the good old British sport of boxing. Occasionally, it is of service; today, for example, I should have come to very ignominious grief without it.\"\n\nI begged him to tell me what had occurred.\n\n\"I found that country pub which I had already recommended to your notice, and there I made my discreet inquiries. I was in the bar, and a garrulous landlord was giving me all that I wanted. Williamson is a white-bearded man, and he lives alone with a small staff of servants at the Hall. There is some rumor that he is or has been a clergyman, but one or two incidents of his short residence at the Hall struck me as peculiarly unec clesiastical. I have already made some inquiries at a clerical agency, and they tell me that there was a man of that name in orders, whose career has been a singularly dark one. The landlord further informed me that there are usually weekend visitors\u2014'a warm lot, sir'\u2014at the Hall, and especially one gentleman with a red moustache, Mr. Woodley by name, who was always there. We had got as far as this, when who should walk in but the gentleman himself, who had been drinking his beer in the tap-room and had heard the whole conversation. Who was I? What did I want? What did I mean by asking questions? He had a fine flow of language, and his adjectives were very vigorous. He ended a string of abuse by a vicious backhander, which I failed to entirely avoid. The next few minutes were delicious. It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian. I emerged as you see me. Mr. Woodley went home in a cart. So ended my country trip, and it must be confessed that, however enjoyable, my day on the Surrey border has not been much more profitable than your own.\"\n\nThe Thursday brought us another letter from our client.\n\nYou will not be surprised, Mr. Holmes [said she] to hear that I am leaving Mr. Carruthers's employment. Even the high pay cannot reconcile me to the discomforts of my situation. On Saturday I come up to town, and I do not intend to return. Mr. Carruthers has got a trap, and so the dangers of the lonely road, if there ever were any dangers, are now over.\n\nAs to the special cause of my leaving, it is not merely the strained situation with Mr. Carruthers, but it is the reappearance of that odious man, Mr. Woodley. He was always hideous, but he looks more awful than ever now, for he appears to have had an accident, and he is much disfigured. I saw him out of the window, but I am glad to say I did not meet him. He had a long talk with Mr. Carruthers, who seemed much excited afterwards. Woodley must be staying in the neighbourhood, for he did not sleep here, and yet I caught a glimpse of him again this morning, slinking about in the shrubbery. I would sooner have a savage wild animal loose about the place. I loathe and fear him more than I can say. How can Mr. Carruthers endure such a creature for a moment? However, all my troubles will be over on Saturday.\n\n\"So I trust, Watson, so I trust,\" said Holmes, gravely. \"There is some deep intrigue going on round that little woman, and it is our duty to see that no one molests her upon that last journey. I think, Watson, that we must spare time to run down together on Saturday morning and make sure that this curious and inclusive investigation has no untoward ending.\"\n\nI confess that I had not up to now taken a very serious view of the case, which had seemed to me rather grotesque and bizarre than dangerous. That a man should lie in wait for and follow a very handsome woman is no unheard-of thing, and if he has so little audacity that he not only dared not address her, but even fled from her approach, he was not a very formidable assailant. The ruffian Woodley was a very different person, but, except on one occasion, he had not molested our client, and now he visited the house of Carruthers without intruding upon her presence. The man on the bicycle was doubtless a member of those weekend parties at the Hall of which the publican had spoken, but who he was, or what he wanted, was as obscure as ever. It was the severity of Holmes's manner and the fact that he slipped a revolver into his pocket before leaving our rooms which impressed me with the feeling that tragedy might prove to lurk behind this curious train of events.\n\nA rainy night had been followed by a glorious morning, and the heath-covered countryside, with the glowing clumps of flowering gorse, seemed all the more beautiful to eyes which were weary of the duns and drabs and slate grays of London. Holmes and I walked along the broad, sandy road inhaling the fresh morning air and rejoicing in the music of the birds and the fresh breath of the spring. From a rise of the road on the shoulder of Crooksbury Hill, we could see the grim Hall bristling out from amidst the ancient oaks, which, old as they were, were still younger than the building which they surrounded. Holmes pointed down the long tract of road which wound, a reddish yellow band, between the brown of the heath and the budding green of the woods. Far away, a black dot, we could see a vehicle moving in our direction. Holmes gave an exclamation of impatience.\n\n\"I have given a margin of half an hour,\" said he. \"If that is her trap, she must be making for the earlier train. I fear, Watson, that she will be past Charlington before we can possibly meet her.\"\n\nFrom the instant that we passed the rise, we could no longer see the vehicle, but we hastened onward at such a pace that my sedentary life began to tell upon me, and I was compelled to fall behind. Holmes, however, was always in training, for he had inexhaustible stores of nervous energy upon which to draw. His springy step never slowed until suddenly, when he was a hundred yards in front of me, he halted, and I saw him throw up his hand with a gesture of grief and despair. At the same instant an empty dog-cart, the horse cantering, the reins trailing, appeared round the curve of the road and rattled swiftly towards us.\n\n\"Too late, Watson, too late!\" cried Holmes, as I ran panting to his side. \"Fool that I was not to allow for that earlier train! It's abduction, Watson\u2014abduction! Murder! Heaven knows what! Block the road! Stop the horse! That's right. Now, jump in, and let us see if I can repair the consequences of my own blunder.\"\n\nWe had sprung into the dog-cart, and Holmes, after turning the horse, gave it a sharp cut with the whip, and we flew back along the road. As we turned the curve, the whole stretch of road between the Hall and the heath was opened up. I grasped Holmes's arm.\n\n\"That's the man!\" I gasped.\n\nA solitary cyclist was coming towards us. His head was down and his shoulders rounded, as he put every ounce of energy that he possessed on to the pedals. He was flying like a racer. Suddenly he raised his bearded face, saw us close to him, and pulled up, springing from his machine. That coal-black beard was in singular contrast to the pallor of his face, and his eyes were as bright as if he had a fever. He stared at us and at the dog-cart. Then a look of amazement came over his face.\n\n\"Halloa! Stop there!\" he shouted, holding his bicycle to block our road. \"Where did you get that dog-cart? Pull up, man!\" he yelled, drawing a pistol from his side pocket. \"Pull up, I say, or, by George, I'll put a bullet into your horse.\"\n\nHolmes threw the reins into my lap and sprang down from the cart.\n\n\"You're the man we want to see. Where is Miss Violet Smith?\" he said, in his quick, clear way.\n\n\"That's what I'm asking you. You're in her dog-cart. You ought to know where she is.\"\n\n\"We met the dog-cart on the road. There was no one in it. We drove back to help the young lady.\"\n\n\"Good Lord! Good Lord! What shall I do?\" cried the stranger, in an ecstasy of despair. \"They've got her, that hell-hound Woodley and the blackguard parson. Come, man, come, if you really are her friend. Stand by me and we'll save her, if I have to leave my carcass in Charlington Wood.\"\n\nHe ran distractedly, his pistol in his hand, towards a gap in the hedge. Holmes followed him, and I, leaving the horse grazing beside the road, followed Holmes.\n\n\"This is where they came through,\" said he, pointing to the marks of several feet upon the muddy path. \"Halloa! Stop a minute! Who's this in the bush?\"\n\nIt was a young fellow about seventeen, dressed like an ostler, with leather cords and gaiters. He lay upon his back, his knees drawn up, a terrible cut upon his head. He was insensible, but alive. A glance at his wound told me that it had not penetrated the bone.\n\n\"That's Peter, the groom,\" cried the stranger. \"He drove her. The beasts have pulled him off and clubbed him. Let him lie; we can't do him any good, but we may save her from the worst fate that can befall a woman.\"\n\nWe ran frantically down the path, which wound among the trees. We had reached the shrubbery which surrounded the house when Holmes pulled up.\n\n\"They didn't go to the house. Here are their marks on the left\u2014here, beside the laurel bushes. Ah! I said so.\"\n\nAs he spoke, a woman's shrill scream\u2014a scream which vibrated with a frenzy of horror\u2014burst from the thick, green clump of bushes in front of us. It ended suddenly on its highest note with a choke and a gurgle.\n\n\"This way! This way! They are in the bowling-alley,\" cried the stranger, darting through the bushes. \"Ah, the cowardly dogs! Follow me, gentlemen! Too late! too late! by the living Jingo!\"\n\nWe had broken suddenly into a lovely glade of greensward surrounded by ancient trees. On the farther side of it, under the shadow of a mighty oak, there stood a singular group of three people. One was a woman, our client, drooping and faint, a handkerchief round her mouth. Opposite her stood a brutal, heavy-faced, red-moustached young man, his gaitered legs parted wide, one arm akimbo, the other waving a riding crop, his whole attitude suggestive of triumphant bravado. Between them an elderly, gray-bearded man, wearing a short surplice over a light tweed suit, had evidently just completed the wedding service, for he pocketed his prayer-book as we appeared, and slapped the sinister bridegroom upon the back in jovial congratulation.\n\n\"They're married?\" I gasped.\n\n\"Come on!\" cried our guide; \"come on!\" He rushed across the glade, Holmes and I at his heels. As we approached, the lady staggered against the trunk of the tree for support. Williamson, the ex-clergyman, bowed to us with mock politeness, and the bully, Woodley, advanced with a shout of brutal and exultant laughter.\n\n\"You can take your beard off, Bob,\" said he. \"I know you, right enough. Well, you and your pals have just come in time for me to be able to introduce you to Mrs. Woodley.\"\n\nOur guide's answer was a singular one. He snatched off the dark beard which had disguised him and threw it on the ground, disclosing a long, sallow, clean-shaven face below it. Then he raised his revolver and covered the young ruffian, who was advancing upon him with his dangerous riding crop swinging in his hand.\n\n\"Yes,\" said our ally, \"I am Bob Carruthers. and I'll see this woman righted, if I have to swing for it. I told you what I'd do if you molested her, and, by the Lord! I'll be as good as my word.\"\n\n\"You're too late. She's my wife.\"\n\n\"No, she's your widow.\"\n\nHis revolver cracked, and I saw the blood spurt from the front of Woodley's waistcoat. He spun round with a scream and fell upon his back, his hideous red face turning suddenly to a dreadful mottled pallor. The old man, still clad in his surplice, burst into such a string of foul oaths as I have never heard, and pulled out a revolver of his own, but, before he could raise it, he was looking down the barrel of Holmes's weapon.\n\n\"Enough of this,\" said my friend, coldly. \"Drop that pistol! Watson, pick it up! Hold it to his head! Thank you. You, Carruthers, give me that revolver. We'll have no more violence. Come, hand it over!\"\n\n\"Who are you, then?\"\n\n\"My name is Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\n\"Good Lord!\"\n\n\"You have heard of me, I see. I will represent the official police until their arrival. Here, you!\" he shouted to a frightened groom, who had appeared at the edge of the glade. \"Come here. Take this note as hard as you can ride to Farnham.\" He scribbled a few words upon a leaf from his notebook. \"Give it to the superintendent at the police-station. Until he comes, I must detain you all under my personal custody.\"\n\nThe strong, masterful personality of Holmes dominated the tragic scene, and all were equally puppets in his hands. Williamson and Carruthers found themselves carrying the wounded Woodley into the house, and I gave my arm to the frightened girl. The injured man was laid on his bed, and at Holmes's request I examined him. I carried my report to where he sat in the old tapestry-hung dining-room with his two prisoners before him.\n\n\"He will live,\" said I.\n\n\"What!\" cried Carruthers, springing out of his chair. \"I'll go upstairs and finish him first. Do you tell me that that girl, that angel, is to be tied to Roaring Jack Woodley for life?\"\n\n\"You need not concern yourself about that,\" said Holmes. \"There are two very good reasons why she should, under no circumstances, be his wife. In the first place, we are very safe in questioning Mr. Williamson's right to solemnize a marriage.\"\n\n\"I have been ordained,\" cried the old rascal.\n\n\"And also unfrocked.\"\n\n\"Once a clergyman, always a clergyman.\"\n\n\"I think not. How about the licence?\"\n\n\"We had a licence for the marriage. I have it here in my pocket.\"\n\n\"Then you got it by a trick. But, in any case, a forced marriage is no marriage, but it is a very serious felony, as you will discover before you have finished. You'll have time to think the point out during the next ten years or so, unless I am mistaken. As to you, Carruthers, you would have done better to keep your pistol in your pocket.\"\n\n\"I begin to think so, Mr. Holmes, but when I thought of all the precaution I had taken to shield this girl\u2014for I loved her, Mr. Holmes, and it is the only time that ever I knew what love was\u2014it fairly drove me mad to think that she was in the power of the greatest brute and bully in South Africa\u2014a man whose name is a holy terror from Kimberley to Johannesburg. Why, Mr. Holmes, you'll hardly believe it, but ever since that girl has been in my employment I never once let her go past this house, where I knew the rascals were lurking, without following her on my bicycle, just to see that she came to no harm. I kept my distance from her, and I wore a beard, so that she should not recognize me, for she is a good and high-spirited girl, and she wouldn't have stayed in my employment long if she had thought that I was following her about the country roads.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell her of her danger?\"\n\n\"Because then, again, she would have left me, and I couldn't bear to face that. Even if she couldn't love me, it was a great deal to me just to see her dainty form about the house, and to hear the sound of her voice.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said I, \"you call that love, Mr. Carruthers, but I should call it selfishness.\"\n\n\"Maybe the two things go together. Anyhow, I couldn't let her go. Besides, with this crowd about, it was well that she should have someone near to look after her. Then, when the cable came, I knew they were bound to make a move.\"\n\n\"What cable?\"\n\nCarruthers took a telegram from his pocket.\n\n\"That's it,\" said he.\n\nIt was short and concise:\n\n\u2002THE OLD MAN IS DEAD.\n\n\"Hum!\" said Holmes. \"I think I see how things worked, and I can understand how this message would, as you say, bring them to a head. But while you wait, you might tell me what you can.\"\n\nThe old reprobate with the surplice burst into a volley of bad language.\n\n\"By heaven!\" said he, \"if you squeal on us, Bob Carruthers, I'll serve you as you served Jack Woodley. You can bleat about the girl to your heart's content, for that's your own affair, but if you round on your pals to this plain-clothes copper, it will be the worst day's work that ever you did.\"\n\n\"Your reverence need not be excited,\" said Holmes, lighting a cigarette. \"The case is clear enough against you, and all I ask is a few details for my private curiosity. However, if there's any difficulty in your telling me, I'll do the talking, and then you will see how far you have a chance of holding back your secrets. In the first place, three of you came from South Africa on this game\u2014you Williamson, you Carruthers, and Woodley.\"\n\n\"Lie number one,\" said the old man; \"I never saw either of them until two months ago, and I have never been in Africa in my life, so you can put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. Busybody Holmes!\"\n\n\"What he says is true,\" said Carruthers.\n\n\"Well, well, two of you came over. His reverence is our own home-made article. You had known Ralph Smith in South Africa. You had reason to believe he would not live long. You found out that his niece would inherit his fortune. How's that\u2014eh?\"\n\nCarruthers nodded and Williamson swore.\n\n\"She was next of kin, no doubt, and you were aware that the old fellow would make no will.\"\n\n\"Couldn't read or write,\" said Carruthers.\n\n\"So you came over, the two of you, and hunted up the girl. The idea was that one of you was to marry her, and the other have a share of the plunder. For some reason, Woodley was chosen as the husband. Why was that?\"\n\n\"We played cards for her on the voyage. He won.\"\n\n\"I see. You got the young lady into your service, and there Woodley was to do the courting. She recognized the drunken brute that he was, and would have nothing to do with him. Meanwhile, your arrangement was rather upset by the fact that you had yourself fallen in love with the lady. You could no longer bear the idea of this ruffian owning her?\"\n\n\"No, by George, I couldn't!\"\n\n\"There was a quarrel between you. He left you in a rage, and began to make his own plans independently of you.\"\n\n\"It strikes me, Williamson, there isn't very much that we can tell this gentleman,\" cried Carruthers, with a bitter laugh. \"Yes, we quarreled, and he knocked me down. I am level with him on that, anyhow. Then I lost sight of him. That was when he picked up with this outcast padre here. I found that they had set up housekeeping together at this place on the line that she had to pass for the station. I kept my eye on her after that, for I knew there was some devilry in the wind. I saw them from time to time, for I was anxious to know what they were after. Two days ago Woodley came up to my house with this cable, which showed that Ralph Smith was dead. He asked me if I would stand by the bargain. I said I would not. He asked me if I would marry the girl myself and give him a share. I said I would willingly do so, but that she would not have me. He said, 'Let us get her married first, and after a week or two she may see things a bit different.' I said I would have nothing to do with violence. So he went off cursing, like the foul-mouthed blackguard that he was, and swearing that he would have her yet. She was leaving me this weekend, and I had got a trap to take her to the station, but I was so uneasy in my mind that I followed her on my bicycle. She had got a start, however, and before I could catch her, the mischief was done. The first thing I knew about it was when I saw you two gentlemen driving back in her dog-cart.\"\n\nHolmes rose and tossed the end of his cigarette into the grate. \"I have been very obtuse, Watson,\" said he. \"When in your report you said that you had seen the cyclist as you thought arrange his necktie in the shrubbery, that alone should have told me all. However, we may congratulate ourselves upon a curious and, in some respects, a unique case. I perceive three of the county constabulary in the drive, and I am glad to see that the little ostler is able to keep pace with them, so it is likely that neither he nor the interesting bridegroom will be permanently damaged by their morning's adventures. I think, Watson, that in your medical capacity, you might wait upon Miss Smith and tell her that if she is sufficiently recovered, we shall be happy to escort her to her mother's home. If she is not quite convalescent, you will find that a hint that we were about to telegraph to a young electrician in the Midlands would probably complete the cure. As to you, Mr. Carruthers, I think that you have done what you could to make amends for your share in an evil plot. There is my card, sir, and if my evidence can be of help in your trial, it shall be at your disposal.\"\n\nIn the whirl of our incessant activity, it has often been difficult for me, as the reader has probably observed, to round off my narratives, and to give those final details which the curious might expect. Each case has been the prelude to another, and the crisis once over, the actors have passed for ever out of our busy lives. I find, however, a short note at the end of my manuscript dealing with this case, in which I have put it upon record that Miss Violet Smith did indeed inherit a large fortune, and that she is now the wife of Cyril Morton, the senior partner of Morton & Kennedy, the famous Westminster electricians. Williamson and Woodley were both tried for abduction and assault, the former getting seven years and the latter ten. Of the fate of Carruthers, I have no record, but I am sure that his assault was not viewed very gravely by the court, since Woodley had the reputation of being a most dangerous ruffian, and I think that a few months were sufficient to satisfy the demands of justice." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOL", + "text": "We have had some dramatic entrances and exits upon our small stage at Baker Street, but I cannot recollect anything more sudden and startling than the first appearance of Thorneycroft Huxtable, M.A., Ph.D., etc. His card, which seemed too small to carry the weight of his academic distinctions, preceded him by a few seconds, and then he entered himself\u2014so large, so pompous, and so dignified that he was the very embodiment of self-possession and solidity. And yet his first action, when the door had closed behind him, was to stagger against the table, whence he slipped down upon the floor, and there was that majestic figure prostrate and insensible upon our bearskin hearthrug.\n\nWe had sprung to our feet, and for a few moments we stared in silent amazement at this ponderous piece of wreckage, which told of some sudden and fatal storm far out on the ocean of life. Then Holmes hurried with a cushion for his head, and I with brandy for his lips. The heavy, white face was seamed with lines of trouble, the hanging pouches under the closed eyes were leaden in colour, the loose mouth drooped dolor ously at the corners, the rolling chins were unshaven. Collar and shirt bore the grime of a long journey, and the hair bristled unkempt from the well-shaped head. It was a sorely stricken man who lay before us.\n\n\"What is it, Watson?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Absolute exhaustion\u2014possibly mere hunger and fatigue,\" said I, with my finger on the thready pulse, where the stream of life trickled thin and small.\n\n\"Return ticket from Mackleton, in the north of England,\" said Holmes, drawing it from the watch-pocket. \"It is not twelve o'clock yet. He has certainly been an early starter.\"\n\nThe puckered eyelids had begun to quiver, and now a pair of vacant gray eyes looked up at us. An instant later the man had scrambled on to his feet, his face crimson with shame.\n\n\"Forgive this weakness, Mr. Holmes, I have been a little overwrought. Thank you, if I might have a glass of milk and a biscuit, I have no doubt that I should be better. I came personally, Mr. Holmes, in order to insure that you would return with me. I feared that no telegram would convince you of the absolute urgency of the case.\"\n\n\"When you are quite restored\u2014\"\n\n\"I am quite well again. I cannot imagine how I came to be so weak. I wish you, Mr. Holmes, to come to Mackleton with me by the next train.\"\n\nMy friend shook his head.\n\n\"My colleague, Dr. Watson, could tell you that we are very busy at present. I am retained in this case of the Ferrers Documents, and the Abergavenny murder is coming up for trial. Only a very important issue could call me from London at present.\"\n\n\"Important!\" Our visitor threw up his hands. \"Have you heard nothing of the abduction of the only son of the Duke of Holdernesse?\"\n\n\"What! the late Cabinet Minister?\"\n\n\"Exactly. We had tried to keep it out of the papers, but there was some rumor in the Globe last night. I thought it might have reached your ears.\"\n\nHolmes shot out his long, thin arm and picked out Volume \"H\" in his encyclopaedia of reference.\n\n\"'Holdernesse, 6th Duke, K.G., P.C.\u2014half the alphabet! 'Baron Beverley, Earl of Carston'\u2014dear me, what a list! 'Lord Lieutenant of Hallamshire since 1900. Married Edith, daughter of Sir Charles Appledore, 1888. Heir and only child, Lord Saltire. Owns about two hundred and fifty thousand acres. Minerals in Lancashire and Wales. Address: Canton House Terrace; Holdernesse Hall, Hallamshire; Carston Castle, Bangor, Wales. Lord of the Admiralty, 1872; Chief Secretary of State for\u2014' Well, well, this man is certainly one of the greatest subjects of the Crown!\"\n\n\"The greatest and perhaps the wealthiest. I am aware, Mr. Holmes, that you take a very high line in professional matters, and that you are prepared to work for the work's sake. I may tell you, however, that his Grace has already intimated that a check for five thousand pounds will be handed over to the person who can tell him where his son is, and another thousand to him who can name the man or men who have taken him.\"\n\n\"It is a princely offer,\" said Holmes. \"Watson, I think that we shall accompany Dr. Huxtable back to the north of England. And now, Dr. Huxtable, when you have consumed that milk, you will kindly tell me what has happened, when it happened, how it happened, and, finally, what Dr. Thorneycroft Huxtable, of the Priory School, near Mackleton, has to do with the matter, and why he comes three days after an event\u2014the state of your chin gives the date\u2014to ask for my humble services.\"\n\nOur visitor had consumed his milk and biscuits. The light had come back to his eyes and the colour to his cheeks, as he set himself with great vigour and lucidity to explain the situation.\n\n\"I must inform you, gentlemen, that the Priory is a preparatory school, of which I am the founder and principal. Huxtable's Sidelights on Horace may possibly recall my name o your memories. The Priory is, without exception, the best and most select preparatory school in England. Lord Leverstoke, the Earl of Blackwater, Sir Cathcart Soames\u2014they all have intrusted their sons to me. But I felt that my school had reached its zenith when, three weeks ago, the Duke of Holdernesse sent Mr. James Wilder, his secretary, with the intimation that young Lord Saltire, ten years old, his only son and heir, was about to be committed to my charge. Little did I think that this would be the prelude to the most crushing misfortune of my life.\n\n\"On May 1st the boy arrived, that being the beginning of the summer term. He was a charming youth, and he soon fell into our ways. I may tell you\u2014I trust that I am not indiscreet, but half-confidences are absurd in such a case\u2014that he was not entirely happy at home. It is an open secret that the Duke's married life had not been a peaceful one, and the matter had ended in a separation by mutual consent, the Duchess taking up her residence in the south of France. This had occurred very shortly before, and the boy's sympathies are known to have been strongly with his mother. He moped after her departure from Holdernesse Hall, and it was for this reason that the Duke desired to send him to my establishment. In a fortnight the boy was quite at home with us and was apparently absolutely happy.\n\n\"He was last seen on the night of May 13th\u2014that is, the night of last Monday. His room was on the second floor and was approached through another larger room, in which two boys were sleeping. These boys saw and heard nothing, so that it is certain that young Saltire did not pass out that way. His window was open, and there is a stout ivy plant leading to the ground. We could trace no footmarks below, but it is sure that this is the only possible exit.\n\n\"His absence was discovered at seven o'clock on Tuesday morning. His bed had been slept in. He had dressed himself fully, before going off, in his usual school suit of black Eton jacket and dark gray trousers. There were no signs that anyone had entered the room, and it is quite certain that anything in the nature of cries or a struggle would have been heard, since Caunter, the elder boy in the inner room, is a very light sleeper.\n\n\"When Lord Saltire's disappearance was discovered, I at once called a roll of the whole establishment\u2014boys, masters, and servants. It was then that we ascertained that Lord Saltire had not been alone in his flight. Heidegger, the German master, was missing. His room was on the second floor, at the farther end of the building, facing the same way as Lord Saltire's. His bed had also been slept in, but he had apparently gone away partly dressed, since his shirt and socks were lying on the floor. He had undoubtedly let himself down by the ivy, for we could see the marks of his feet where he had landed on the lawn. His bicycle was kept in a small shed beside this lawn, and it also was gone.\n\n\"He had been with me for two years, and came with the best references, but he was a silent, morose man, not very popular either with masters or boys. No trace could be found of the fugitives, and now, on Thursday morning, we are as ignorant as we were on Tuesday. Inquiry was, of course, made at once at Holdernesse Hall. It is only a few miles away, and we imagined that, in some sudden attack of homesickness, he had gone back to his father, but nothing had been heard of him. The Duke is greatly agitated, and, as to me, you have seen yourselves the state of nervous prostration to which the suspense and the responsibility have reduced me. Mr. Holmes, if ever you put forward your full powers, I implore you to do so now, for never in your life could you have a case which is more worthy of them.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes had listened with the utmost intentness to the statement of the unhappy schoolmaster. His drawn brows and the deep furrow between them showed that he needed no exhortation to concentrate all his attention upon a problem which, apart from the tremendous interests involved, must appeal so directly to his love of the complex and the unusual. He now drew out his notebook and jotted down one or two memoranda.\n\n\"You have been very remiss in not coming to me sooner,\" said he, severely. \"You start me on my investigation with a very serious handicap. It is inconceivable, for example, that this ivy and this lawn would have yielded nothing to an expert observer.\"\n\n\"I am not to blame, Mr. Holmes. His Grace was extremely desirous to avoid all public scandal. He was afraid of his family unhappiness being dragged before the world. He has a deep horror of anything of the kind.\"\n\n\"But there has been some official investigation?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and it has proved most disappointing. An apparent clue was at once obtained, since a boy and a young man were reported to have been seen leaving a neighbouring station by an early train. Only last night we had news that the couple had been hunted down in Liverpool, and they prove to have no connection whatever with the matter in hand. Then it was that in my despair and disappointment, after a sleepless night, I came straight to you by the early train.\"\n\n\"I suppose the local investigation was relaxed while this false clue was being followed up?\"\n\n\"It was entirely dropped.\"\n\n\"So that three days have been wasted: The affair has been most deplorably handled.\"\n\n\"I feel it and admit it.\"\n\n\"And yet the problem should be capable of ultimate solution. I shall be very happy to look into it. Have you been able to trace any connection between the missing boy and this German master?\"\n\n\"None at all.\"\n\n\"Was he in the master's class?\"\n\n\"No, he never exchanged a word with him, so far as I know.\"\n\n\"That is certainly very singular. Had the boy a bicycle?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Was any other bicycle missing?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Is that certain?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\n\"Well, now, you do not mean to seriously suggest that this German rode off upon a bicycle in the dead of the night, bearing the boy in his arms?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"Then what is the theory in your mind?\"\n\n\"The bicycle may have been a blind. It may have been hidden somewhere, and the pair gone off on foot.\"\n\n\"Quite so, but it seems rather an absurd blind, does it not? Were there other bicycles in this shed?\"\n\n\"Several.\"\n\n\"Would he not have hidden a couple, had he desired to give the idea that they had gone off upon them?\"\n\n\"I suppose he would.\"\n\n\"Of course he would. The blind theory won't do. But the incident is an admirable starting-point for an investigation. After all, a bicycle is not an easy thing to conceal or to destroy. One other question. Did anyone call to see the boy on the day before he disappeared?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did he get any letters?\"\n\n\"Yes, one letter.\"\n\n\"From whom?\"\n\n\"From his father.\"\n\n\"Do you open the boys' letters?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"How do you know it was from the father?\"\n\n\"The coat of arms was on the envelope, and it was addressed in the Duke's peculiar stiff hand. Besides, the Duke remembers having written.\"\n\n\"When had he a letter before that?\"\n\n\"Not for several days.\"\n\n\"Had he ever one from France?\"\n\n\"No, never.\"\n\n\"You see the point of my questions, of course. Either the boy was carried off by force or he went of his own free will. In the latter case, you would expect that some prompting from outside would be needed to make so young a lad do such a thing. If he has had no visitors, that prompting must have come in letters; hence I try to find out who were his correspondents.\"\n\n\"I fear I cannot help you much. His only correspondent, so far as I know, was his own father.\"\n\n\"Who wrote to him on the very day of his disappearance. Were the relations between father and son very friendly?\"\n\n\"His Grace is never very friendly with anyone. He is completely immersed in large public questions, and is rather inaccessible to all ordinary emotions. But he was always kind to the boy in his own way.\"\n\n\"But the sympathies of the latter were with the mother?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Did he say so?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"The Duke, then?\"\n\n\"Good heaven, no!\"\n\n\"Then how could you know?\"\n\n\"I have had some confidential talks with Mr. James Wilder, his Grace's secretary. It was he who gave me the information about Lord Saltire's feelings.\"\n\n\"I see. By the way, that last letter of the Duke's\u2014was it found in the boy's room after he was gone?\"\n\n\"No, he had taken it with him. I think, Mr. Holmes, it is time that we were leaving for Euston.\"\n\n\"I will order a four-wheeler. In a quarter of an hour, we shall be at your service. If you are telegraphing home, Dr. Huxtable, it would be well to allow the people in your neighbourhood to imagine that the inquiry is still going on in Liverpool, or wherever else that red herring led your pack. In the meantime I will do a little quiet work at your own doors, and perhaps the scent is not so cold but that two old hounds like Watson and myself may get a sniff of it.\"\n\nThat evening found us in the cold, bracing atmosphere of the Peak country, in which Dr. Huxtable's famous school is situated. It was already dark when we reached it. A card was lying on the hall table, and the butler whispered something to his master, who turned to us with agitation in every heavy feature.\n\n\"The Duke is here,\" said he. \"The Duke and Mr. Wilder are in the study. Come, gentlemen, and I will introduce you.\"\n\nI was, of course, familiar with the pictures of the famous statesman, but the man himself was very different from his representation. He was a tall and stately person, scrupulously dressed, with a drawn, thin face, and a nose which was grotesquely curved and long. His complexion was of a dead pallor, which was more startling by contrast with a long, dwindling beard of vivid red, which flowed down over his white waistcoat, with his watch-chain gleaming through its fringe. Such was the stately presence who looked stonily at us from the centre of Dr. Huxtable's hearthrug. Beside him stood a very young man, whom I understood to be Wilder, the private secretary. He was small, nervous, alert, with intelligent light-blue eyes and mobile features. It was he who at once, in an incisive and positive tone, opened the conversation.\n\n\"I called this morning, Dr. Huxtable, too late to prevent you from starting for London. I learned that your object was to invite Mr. Sherlock Holmes to undertake the conduct of this case. His Grace is surprised, Dr. Huxtable, that you should have taken such a step without consulting him.\"\n\n\"When I learned that the police had failed\u2014\"\n\n\"His Grace is by no means convinced that the police have failed.\"\n\n\"But surely, Mr. Wilder\u2014\"\n\n\"You are well aware, Dr. Huxtable, that his Grace is particularly anxious to avoid all public scandal. He prefers to take as few people as possible into his confidence.\"\n\n\"The matter can be easily remedied,\" said the browbeaten doctor; \"Mr. Sherlock Holmes can return to London by the morning train.\"\n\n\"Hardly that, Doctor, hardly that,\" said Holmes, in his blandest voice. \"This northern air is invigorating and pleasant, so I propose to spend a few days upon your moors, and to occupy my mind as best I may. Whether I have the shelter of your roof or of the village inn is, of course, for you to decide.\"\n\nI could see that the unfortunate doctor was in the last stage of indecision, from which he was rescued by the deep, sonorous voice of the red-bearded Duke, which boomed out like a dinner-gong.\n\n\"I agree with Mr. Wilder, Dr. Huxtable, that you would have done wisely to consult me. But since Mr. Holmes has already been taken into your confidence, it would indeed be absurd that we should not avail ourselves of his services. Far from going to the inn, Mr. Holmes, I should be pleased if you would come and stay with me at Holdernesse Hall.\"\n\n\"I thank your Grace. For the purposes of my investigation, I think that it would be wiser for me to remain at the scene of the mystery.\"\n\n\"Just as you like, Mr. Holmes. Any information which Mr. Wilder or I can give you is, of course, at your disposal.\"\n\n\"It will probably be necessary for me to see you at the Hall,\" said Holmes. \"I would only ask you now, sir, whether you have formed any explanation in your own mind as to the mysterious disappearance of your son?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I have not.\"\n\n\"Excuse me if I allude to that which is painful to you, but I have no alternative. Do you think that the Duchess had anything to do with the matter?\"\n\nThe great minister showed perceptible hesitation.\n\n\"I do not think so,\" he said, at last.\n\n\"The other most obvious explanation is that the child has been kidnapped for the purpose of levying ransom. You have not had any demand of the sort?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"One more question, your Grace. I understand that you wrote to your son upon the day when this incident occurred.\"\n\n\"No, I wrote upon the day before.\"\n\n\"Exactly. But he received it on that day?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Was there anything in your letter which might have unbalanced him or induced him to take such a step?\"\n\n\"No, sir, certainly not.\"\n\n\"Did you post that letter yourself?\"\n\nThe nobleman's reply was interrupted by his secretary, who broke in with some heat.\n\n\"His Grace is not in the habit of posting letters himself,\" said he. \"This letter was laid with others upon the study table, and I myself put them in the post-bag.\"\n\n\"You are sure this one was among them?\"\n\n\"Yes, I observed it.\"\n\n\"How many letters did your Grace write that day?\"\n\n\"Twenty or thirty. I have a large correspondence. But surely this is somewhat irrelevant?\"\n\n\"Not entirely,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"For my own part,\" the Duke continued, \"I have advised the police to turn their attention to the south of France. I have already said that I do not believe that the Duchess would encourage so monstrous an action, but the lad had the most wrong-headed opinions, and it is possible that he may have fled to her, aided and abetted by this German. I think, Dr. Huxtable, that we will now return to the Hall.\"\n\nI could see that there were other questions which Holmes would have wished to put, but the nobleman's abrupt manner showed that the interview was at an end. It was evident that to his intensely aristocratic nature this discussion of his intimate family affairs with a stranger was most abhorrent, and that he feared lest every fresh question would throw a fiercer light into the discreetly shadowed corners of his ducal history.\n\nWhen the nobleman and his secretary had left, my friend flung himself at once with characteristic eagerness into the investigation.\n\nThe boy's chamber was carefully examined, and yielded nothing save the absolute conviction that it was only through the window that he could have escaped. The German master's room and effects gave no further clue. In his case a trailer of ivy had given way under his weight, and we saw by the light of a lantern the mark on the lawn where his heels had come down. That one dint in the short, green grass was the only material witness left of this inexplicable nocturnal flight.\n\nSherlock Holmes left the house alone, and only returned after eleven. He had obtained a large ordnance map of the neighbourhood, and this he brought into my room, where he laid it out on the bed, and, having balanced the lamp in the middle of it, he began to smoke over it, and occasionally to point out objects of interest with the reeking amber of his pipe.\n\n\"This case grows upon me, Watson,\" said he. \"There are decidedly some points of interest in connection with it. In this early stage, I want you to realize those geographical features which may have a good deal to do with our investigation.\n\n\"Look at this map. This dark square is the Priory School. I'll put a pin in it. Now, this line is the main road. You see that it runs east and west past the school, and you see also that there is no side road for a mile either way. If these two folk passed away by road, it was this road.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"By a singular and happy chance, we are able to some extent to check what passed along this road during the night in question. At this point, where my pipe is now resting, a county constable was on duty from twelve to six. It is, as you perceive, the first cross-road on the east side. This man declares that he was not absent from his post for an instant, and he is positive that neither boy nor man could have gone that way unseen. I have spoken with this policeman to-night, and he appears to me to be a perfectly reliable person. That blocks this end. We have now to deal with the other. There is an inn here, the Red Bull, the landlady of which was ill. She had sent to Mackleton for a doctor, but he did not arrive until morning, being absent at another case. The people at the inn were alert all night, awaiting his coming, and one or other of them seems to have continually had an eye upon the road. They declare that no one passed. If their evidence is good, then we are fortunate enough to be able to block the west, and also to be able to say that the fugitives did not use the road at all.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOLMES'S MAP OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF THE SCHOOL", + "text": "\"But the bicycle?\" I objected.\n\n\"Quite so. We will come to the bicycle presently. To continue our reasoning: if these people did not go by the road, they must have traversed the country to the north of the house or to the south of the house. That is certain. Let us weigh the one against the other. On the south of the house is, as you perceive, a large district of arable land, cut up into small fields, with stone walls between them. There, I admit that a bicycle is impossible. We can dismiss the idea. We turn to the country on the north. Here there lies a grove of trees, marked as the 'Ragged Shaw,' and on the farther side stretches a great rolling moor, Lower Gill Moor, extending for ten miles and sloping gradually upward. Here, at one side of this wilderness, is Holdernesse Hall, ten miles by road, but only six across the moor. It is a peculiarly desolate plain. A few moor farmers have small holdings, where they rear sheep and cattle. Except these, the plover and the curlew are the only inhabitants until you come to the Chesterfield high road. There is a church there, you see, a few cottages, and an inn. Beyond that the hills become precipitous. Surely it is here to the north that our quest must lie.\"\n\n\"But the bicycle?\" I persisted.\n\n\"Well, well!\" said Holmes, impatiently. \"A good cyclist does not need a high road. The moor is intersected with paths, and the moon was at the full. Halloa! what is this?\"\n\nThere was an agitated knock at the door, and an instant afterwards Dr. Huxtable was in the room. In his hand he held a blue cricket-cap with a white chevron on the peak.\n\n\"At last we have a clue!\" he cried. \"Thank heaven! at last we are on the dear boy's track! It is his cap.\"\n\n\"Where was it found?\"\n\n\"In the van of the gipsies who camped on the moor. They left on Tuesday. To-day the police traced them down and examined their caravan. This was found.\"\n\n\"How do they account for it?\"\n\n\"They shuffled and lied\u2014said that they found it on the moor on Tuesday morning. They know where he is, the rascals! Thank goodness, they are all safe under lock and key. Either the fear of the law or the Duke's purse will certainly get out of them all that they know.\"\n\n\"So far, so good,\" said Holmes, when the doctor had at last left the room. \"It at least bears out the theory that it is on the side of the Lower Gill Moor that we must hope for results. The police have really done nothing locally, save the arrest of these gipsies. Look here, Watson! There is a watercourse across the moor. You see it marked here in the map. In some parts it widens into a morass. This is particularly so in the region between Holdernesse Hall and the school. It is vain to look elsewhere for tracks in this dry weather, but at that point there is certainly a chance of some record being left. I will call you early to-morrow morning, and you and I will try if we can throw some little light upon the mystery.\"\n\nThe day was just breaking when I woke to find the long, thin form of Holmes by my bedside. He was fully dressed, and had apparently already been out.\n\n\"I have done the lawn and the bicycle shed,\" said he. \"I have also had a ramble through the Ragged Shaw. Now, Watson, there is cocoa ready in the next room. I must beg you to hurry, for we have a great day before us.\"\n\nHis eyes shone, and his cheek was flushed with the exhilaration of the master workman who sees his work lie ready before him. A very different Holmes, this active, alert man, from the introspective and pallid dreamer of Baker Street. I felt, as I looked upon that supple figure, alive with nervous energy, that it was indeed a strenuous day that awaited us.\n\nAnd yet it opened in the blackest disappointment. With high hopes we struck across the peaty, russet moor, intersected with a thousand sheep paths, until we came to the broad, light-green belt which marked the morass between us and Holdernesse. Certainly, if the lad had gone homeward, he must have passed this, and he could not pass it without leaving his traces. But no sign of him or the German could be seen. With a darkening face my friend strode along the margin, eagerly observant of every muddy stain upon the mossy surface. Sheep-marks there were in profusion, and at one place, some miles down, cows had left their tracks. Nothing more.\n\n\"Check number one,\" said Holmes, looking gloomily over the rolling expanse of the moor. \"There is another morass down yonder, and a narrow neck between. Halloa! halloa! halloa! what have we here?\"\n\nWe had come on a small black ribbon of pathway. In the middle of it, clearly marked on the sodden soil, was the track of a bicycle.\n\n\"Hurrah!\" I cried. \"We have it.\"\n\nBut Holmes was shaking his head, and his face was puzzled and expectant rather than joyous.\n\n\"A bicycle, certainly, but not the bicycle,\" said he. \"I am familiar with forty-two different impressions left by tyres. This, as you perceive, is a Dunlop, with a patch upon the outer cover. Heidegger's tyres were Palmer's, leaving longitudinal stripes. Aveling, the mathematical master, was sure upon the point. Therefore, it is not Heidegger's track.\"\n\n\"The boy's, then?\"\n\n\"Possibly, if we could prove a bicycle to have been in his possession. But this we have utterly failed to do. This track, as you perceive, was made by a rider who was going from the direction of the school.\"\n\n\"Or towards it?\"\n\n\"No, no, my dear Watson. The more deeply sunk impression is of course, the hind wheel, upon which the weight rests. You perceive several places where it has passed across and obliterated the more shallow mark of the front one. It was undoubtedly heading away from the school. It may or may not be connected with our inquiry, but we will follow it backwards before we go any farther.\"\n\nWe did so, and at the end of a few hundred yards lost the tracks as we emerged from the boggy portion of the moor. Following the path backwards, we picked out another spot, where a spring trickled across it. Here, once again, was the mark of the bicycle, though nearly obliterated by the hoofs of cows. After that there was no sign, but the path ran right on into Ragged Shaw, the wood which backed on to the school. From this wood the cycle must have emerged. Holmes sat down on a boulder and rested his chin in his hands. I had smoked two cigarettes before he moved.\n\n\"Well, well,\" said he, at last. \"It is, of course, possible that a cunning man might change the tyres of his bicycle in order to leave unfamiliar tracks. A criminal who was capable of such a thought is a man whom I should be proud to do business with. We will leave this question undecided and hark back to our morass again, for we have left a good deal unexplored.\"\n\nWe continued our systematic survey of the edge of the sodden portion of the moor, and soon our perseverance was gloriously rewarded. Right across the lower part of the bog lay a miry path. Holmes gave a cry of delight as he approached it. An impression like a fine bundle of telegraph wires ran down the centre of it. It was the Palmer tyres.\n\n\"Here is Herr Heidegger, sure enough!\" cried Holmes, exultantly. \"My reasoning seems to have been pretty sound, Watson.\"\n\n\"I congratulate you.\"\n\n\"But we have a long way still to go. Kindly walk clear of the path. Now let us follow the trail. I fear that it will not lead very far.\"\n\nWe found, however, as we advanced that this portion of the moor is intersected with soft patches, and, though we frequently lost sight of the track, we always succeeded in picking it up once more.\n\n\"Do you observe,\" said Holmes. \"that the rider is now undoubtedly forcing the pace? There can be no doubt of it. Look at this impression, where you get both tyres clear. The one is as deep as the other. That can only mean that the rider is throwing his weight on to the handle-bar, as a man does when he is sprinting. By Jove! he has had a fall.\"\n\nThere was a broad, irregular smudge covering some yards of the track. Then there were a few footmarks, and the tyres reappeared once more.\n\n\"A side-slip,\" I suggested.\n\nHolmes held up a crumpled branch of flowering gorse. To my horror I perceived that the yellow blossoms were all dabbled with crimson. On the path, too, and among the heather were dark stains of clotted blood.\n\n\"Bad!\" said Holmes. \"Bad! Stand clear, Watson! Not an unnecessary footstep! What do I read here? He fell wounded\u2014he stood up\u2014he remounted\u2014he proceeded. But there is no other track. Cattle on this side path. He was surely not gored by a bull? Impossible! But I see no traces of anyone else. We must push on, Watson. Surely, with stains as well as the track to guide us, he cannot escape us now.\"\n\nOur search was not a very long one. The tracks of the tyre began to curve fantastically upon the wet and shining path. Suddenly, as I looked ahead, the gleam of metal caught my eye from amid the thick gorse-bushes. Out of them we dragged a bicycle, Palmer-tyred, one pedal bent, and the whole front of it horribly smeared and slobbered with blood. On the other side of the bushes, a shoe was projecting. We ran round, and there lay the unfortunate rider. He was a tall man, full-bearded, with spectacles, one glass of which had been knocked out. The cause of his death was a frightful blow upon the head, which had crushed in part of his skull. That he could have gone on after receiving such an injury said much for the vitality and courage of the man. He wore shoes, but no socks, and his open coat disclosed a nightshirt beneath it. It was undoubtedly the German master.\n\nHolmes turned the body over reverently, and examined it with great attention. He then sat in deep thought for a time, and I could see by his ruffled brow that this grim discovery had not, in his opinion, advanced us much in our inquiry.\n\n\"It is a little difficult to know what to do, Watson,\" said he, at last. \"My own inclinations are to push this inquiry on, for we have already lost so much time that we cannot afford to waste another hour. On the other hand, we are bound to inform the police of the discovery, and to see that this poor fellow's body is looked after.\"\n\n\"I could take a note back.\"\n\n\"But I need your company and assistance. Wait a bit! There is a fellow cutting peat up yonder. Bring him over here, and he will guide the police.\"\n\nI brought the peasant across, and Holmes dispatched the frightened man with a note to Dr. Huxtable.\n\n\"Now, Watson,\" said he, \"we have picked up two clues this morning. One is the bicycle with the Palmer tyre, and we see what that has led to. The other is the bicycle with the patched Dunlop. Before we start to investigate that, let us try to realize what we do know, so as to make the most of it, and to separate the essential from the accidental.\"\n\n\"First of all, I wish to impress upon you that the boy certainly left of his own free-will. He got down from his window and he went off, either alone or with someone. That is sure.\"\n\nI assented.\n\n\"Well, now, let us turn to this unfortunate German master. The boy was fully dressed when he fled. Therefore, he foresaw what he would do. But the German went without his socks. He certainly acted on very short notice.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly.\"\n\n\"Why did he go? Because, from his bedroom window, he saw the flight of the boy; because he wished to overtake him and bring him back. He seized his bicycle, pursued the lad, and in pursuing him met his death.\"\n\n\"So it would seem.\"\n\n\"Now I come to the critical part of my argument. The natural action of a man in pursuing a little boy would be to run after him. He would know that he could overtake him. But the German does not do so. He turns to his bicycle. I am told that he was an excellent cyclist. He would not do this, if he did not see that the boy had some swift means of escape.\"\n\n\"The other bicycle.\"\n\n\"Let us continue our reconstruction. He meets his death five miles from the school\u2014not by a bullet, mark you, which even a lad might conceivably discharge, but by a savage blow dealt by a vigorous arm. The lad, then, had a companion in his flight. And the flight was a swift one, since it took five miles before an expert cyclist could overtake them. Yet we survey the ground round the scene of the tragedy. What do we find? A few cattletracks, nothing more. I took a wide sweep round, and there is no path within fifty yards. Another cyclist could have had nothing to do with the actual murder, nor were there any human footmarks.\"\n\n\"Holmes,\" I cried, \"this is impossible.\"\n\n\"Admirable!\" he said. \"A most illuminating remark. It is impossible as I state it, and therefore I must in some respect have stated it wrong. Yet you saw for yourself. Can you suggest any fallacy?\"\n\n\"He could not have fractured his skull in a fall?\"\n\n\"In a morass, Watson?\"\n\n\"I am at my wit's end.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut, we have solved some worse problems. At least we have plenty of material, if we can only use it. Come, then, and, having exhausted the Palmer, let us see what the Dunlop with the patched cover has to offer us.\"\n\nWe picked up the track and followed it onward for some distance, but soon the moor rose into a long, heather-tufted curve, and we left the watercourse behind us. No further help from tracks could be hoped for. At the spot where we saw the last of the Dunlop tyre it might equally have led to Holdernesse Hall, the stately towers of which rose some miles to our left, or to a low, gray village which lay in front of us and marked the position of the Chesterfield high road.\n\nAs we approached the forbidding and squalid inn, with the sign of a game-cock above the door, Holmes gave a sudden groan, and clutched me by the shoulder to save himself from falling. He had had one of those violent strains of the ankle which leave a man helpless. With difficulty he limped up to the door, where a squat, dark, elderly man was smoking a black clay pipe.\n\n\"How are you, Mr. Reuben Hayes?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Who are you, and how do you get my name so pat?\" the countryman answered, with a suspicious flash of a pair of cunning eyes.\n\n\"Well, it's printed on the board above your head. It's easy to see a man who is master of his own house. I suppose you haven't such a thing as a carriage in your stables?\"\n\n\"No, I have not.\"\n\n\"I can hardly put my foot to the ground.\"\n\n\"Don't put it to the ground.\"\n\n\"But I can't walk.\"\n\n\"Well, then, hop.\"\n\nMr. Reuben Hayes's manner was far from gracious, but Holmes took it with admirable good-humour.\n\n\"Look here, my man,\" said he. \"This is really rather an awkward fix for me. I don't mind how I get on.\"\n\n\"Neither do I,\" said the morose landlord.\n\n\"The matter is very important. I would offer you a sovereign for the use of a bicycle.\"\n\nThe landlord pricked up his ears.\n\n\"Where do you want to go?\"\n\n\"To Holdernesse Hall.\"\n\n\"Pals of the Dook, I suppose?\" said the landlord, surveying our mud-stained garments with ironical eyes.\n\nHolmes laughed good-naturedly.\n\n\"He'll be glad to see us, anyhow.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because we bring him news of his lost son.\"\n\nThe landlord gave a very visible start.\n\n\"What, you're on his track?\"\n\n\"He has been heard of in Liverpool. They expect to get him every hour.\"\n\nAgain a swift change passed over the heavy, unshaven face. His manner was suddenly genial.\n\n\"I've less reason to wish the Dook well than most men,\" said he, \"for I was his head coachman once, and cruel bad he treated me. It was him that sacked me without a character on the word of a lying corn-chandler. But I'm glad to hear that the young lord was heard of in Liverpool, and I'll help you to take the news to the Hall.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Holmes. \"We'll have some food first. Then you can bring round the bicycle.\"\n\n\"I haven't got a bicycle.\"\n\nHolmes held up a sovereign.\n\n\"I tell you, man, that I haven't got one. I'll let you have two horses as far as the Hall.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said Holmes, \"we'll talk about it when we've had something to eat.\"\n\nWhen we were left alone in the stone-flagged kitchen, it was astonishing how rapidly that sprained ankle recovered. It was nearly nightfall, and we had eaten nothing since early morning, so that we spent some time over our meal. Holmes was lost in thought, and once or twice he walked over to the window and stared earnestly out. It opened on to a squalid courtyard. In the far comer was a smithy, where a grimy lad was at work. On the other side were the stables. Holmes had sat down again after one of these excursions, when he suddenly sprang out of his chair with a loud exclamation.\n\n\"By heaven, Watson, I believe that I've got it!\" he cried. \"Yes, yes, it must be so. Watson, do you remember seeing any cow-tracks to-day?\"\n\n\"Yes, several.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Well; everywhere. They were at the morass, and again on the path, and again near where poor Heidegger met his death.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Well, now, Watson, how many cows did you see on the moor?\"\n\n\"I don't remember seeing any.\"\n\n\"Strange, Watson, that we should see tracks all along our line, but never a cow on the whole moor. Very strange, Watson, eh?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is strange.\"\n\n\"Now, Watson, make an effort, throw your mind back. Can you see those tracks upon the path?\"\n\n\"Yes, I can.\"\n\n\"Can you recall that the tracks were sometimes like that, Watson\"\u2014he arranged a number of bread-crumbs in this fashion\u2014: : : : :\u2014\"and sometimes like this\"\u2014:.:.:.:.\u2014\"and occasionally like this\"\u2014. . . \"Can you remember that?\"\n\n\"No, I cannot.\"\n\n\"But I can. I could swear to it. However, we will go back at our leisure and verify it. What a blind beetle I have been, not to draw my conclusion.\"\n\n\"And what is your conclusion?\"\n\n\"Only that it is a remarkable cow which walks, canters, and gallops. By George! Watson, it was no brain of a country publican that thought out such a blind as that. The coast seems to be clear, save for that lad in the smithy. Let us slip out and see what we can see.\"\n\nThere were two rough-haired, unkempt horses in the tumble-down stable. Holmes raised the hind leg of one of them and laughed aloud.\n\n\"Old shoes, but newly shod\u2014old shoes, but new nails. This case deserves to be a classic. Let us go across to the smithy.\"\n\nThe lad continued his work without regarding us. I saw Holmes's eye darting to right and left among the litter of iron and wood which was scattered about the floor. Suddenly, however, we heard a step behind us, and there was the landlord, his heavy eyebrows drawn over his savage eyes, his swarthy features convulsed with passion. He held a short, metal-headed stick in his hand, and he advanced in so menacing a fashion that I was right glad to feel the revolver in my pocket.\n\n\"You infernal spies!\" the man cried. \"What are you doing there?\"\n\n\"Why, Mr. Reuben Hayes,\" said Holmes, coolly, \"one might think that you were afraid of our finding something out.\"\n\nThe man mastered himself with a violent effort, and his grim mouth loosened into a false laugh, which was more menacing than his frown.\n\n\"You're welcome to all you can find out in my smithy,\" said he. \"But look here, mister, I don't care for folk poking about my place without my leave, so the sooner you pay your score and get out of this the better I shall be pleased.\"\n\n\"All right, Mr. Hayes, no harm meant,\" said Holmes. \"We have been having a look at your horses, but I think I'll walk, after all. It's not far, I believe.\"\n\n\"Not more than two miles to the Hall gates. That's the road to the left.\" He watched us with sullen eyes until we had left his premises.\n\nWe did not go very far along the road, for Holmes stopped the instant that the curve hid us from the landlord's view.\n\n\"We were warm, as the children say, at that inn,\" said he. \"I seem to grow colder every step that I take away from it. No, no, I can't possibly leave it.\"\n\n\"I am convinced,\" said I, \"that this Reuben Hayes knows all about it. A more self-evident villain I never saw.\"\n\n\"Oh! he impressed you in that way, did he? There are the horses, there is the smithy. Yes, it is an interesting place, this Fighting Cock. I think we shall have another look at it in an unobtrusive way.\"\n\nA long, sloping hillside, dotted with gray limestone boulders, stretched behind us. We had turned off the road, and were making our way up the hill, when, looking in the direction of Holdernesse Hall, I saw a cyclist coming swiftly along.\n\n\"Get down, Watson!\" cried Holmes, with a heavy hand upon my shoulder. We had hardly sunk from view when the man flew past us on the road. Amid a rolling cloud of dust, I caught a glimpse of a pale, agitated face\u2014a face with horror in every lineament, the mouth open, the eyes staring wildly in front. It was like some strange caricature of the dapper James Wilder whom we had seen the night before.\n\n\"The Duke's secretary!\" cried Holmes. \"Come, Watson, let us see what he does.\"\n\nWe scrambled from rock to rock, until in a few moments we had made our way to a point from which we could see the front door of the inn. Wilder's bicycle was leaning against the wall beside it. No one was moving about the house, nor could we catch a glimpse of any faces at the windows. Slowly the twilight crept down as the sun sank behind the high towers of Holdernesse Hall. Then, in the gloom, we saw the two side-lamps of a trap light up in the stable-yard of the inn, and shortly afterwards heard the rattle of hoofs, as it wheeled out into the road and tore off at a furious pace in the direction of Chesterfield.\n\n\"What do you make of that, Watson?\" Holmes whispered.\n\n\"It looks like a flight.\"\n\n\"A single man in a dog-cart, so far as I could see. Well, it certainly was not Mr. James Wilder, for there he is at the door.\"\n\nA red square of light had sprung out of the darkness. In the middle of it was the black figure of the secretary, his head advanced, peering out into the night. It was evident that he was expecting someone. Then at last there were steps in the road, a second figure was visible for an instant against the light, the door shut, and all was black once more. Five minutes later a lamp was lit in a room upon the first floor.\n\n\"It seems to be a curious class of custom that is done by the Fighting Cock,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"The bar is on the other side.\"\n\n\"Quite so. These are what one may call the private guests. Now, what in the world is Mr. James Wilder doing in that den at this hour of night, and who is the companion who comes to meet him there? Come, Watson, we must really take a risk and try to investigate this a little more closely.\"\n\nTogether we stole down to the road and crept across to the door of the inn. The bicycle still leaned against the wall. Holmes struck a match and held it to the back wheel, and I heard him chuckle as the light fell upon a patched Dunlop tyre. Up above us was the lighted window.\n\n\"I must have a peep through that, Watson. If you bend your back and support yourself upon the wall, I think that I can manage.\"\n\nAn instant later, his feet were on my shoulders, but he was hardly up before he was down again.\n\n\"Come, my friend,\" said he, \"our day's work has been quite long enough. I think that we have gathered all that we can. It's a long walk to the school, and the sooner we get started the better.\"\n\nHe hardly opened his lips during that weary trudge across the moor, nor would he enter the school when he reached it, but went on to Mackleton Station, whence he could send some telegrams. Late at night I heard him consoling Dr. Huxtable, prostrated by the tragedy of his master's death, and later still he entered my room as alert and vigorous as he had been when he started in the morning. \"All goes well, my friend,\" said he. \"I promise that before to-morrow evening we shall have reached the solution of the mystery.\"\n\nAt eleven o'clock next morning my friend and I were walking up the famous yew avenue of Holdernesse Hall. We were ushered through the magnificent Elizabethan doorway and into his Grace's study. There we found Mr. James Wilder, demure and courtly, but with some trace of that wild terror of the night before still lurking in his furtive eyes and in his twitching features.\n\n\"You have come to see his Grace? I am sorry, but the fact is that the Duke is far from well. He has been very much upset by the tragic news. We received a telegram from Dr. Huxtable yesterday afternoon, which told us of your discovery.\"\n\n\"I must see the Duke, Mr. Wilder.\"\n\n\"But he is in his room.\"\n\n\"Then I must go to his room.\"\n\n\"I believe he is in his bed.\"\n\n\"I will see him there.\"\n\nHolmes's cold and inexorable manner showed the secretary that it was useless to argue with him.\n\n\"Very good, Mr. Holmes, I will tell him that you are here.\"\n\nAfter an hour's delay, the great nobleman appeared. His face was more cadaverous than ever, his shoulders had rounded, and he seemed to me to be an altogether older man than he had been the morning before. He greeted us with a stately courtesy and seated himself at his desk, his red beard streaming down on the table.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes?\" said he.\n\nBut my friend's eyes were fixed upon the secretary, who stood by his master's chair.\n\n\"I think, your Grace, that I could speak more freely in Mr. Wilder's absence.\"\n\nThe man turned a shade paler and cast a malignant glance at Holmes.\n\n\"If your Grace wishes\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, you had better go. Now, Mr. Holmes, what have you to say?\"\n\nMy friend waited until the door had closed behind the retreating secretary.\n\n\"The fact is, your Grace,\" said he, \"that my colleague, Dr. Watson, and myself had an assurance from Dr. Huxtable that a reward had been offered in this case. I should like to have this confirmed from your own lips.\"\n\n\"Certainly, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"It amounted, if I am correctly informed, to five thousand pounds to anyone who will tell you where your son is?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"And another thousand to the man who will name the person or persons who keep him in custody?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Under the latter heading is included, no doubt, not only those who may have taken him away, but also those who conspire to keep him in his present position?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" cried the Duke, impatiently. \"If you do your work well, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, you will have no reason to complain of niggardly treatment.\"\n\nMy friend rubbed his thin hands together with an appearance of avidity which was a surprise to me, who knew his frugal tastes.\n\n\"I fancy that I see your Grace's check-book upon the table,\" said he. \"I should be glad if you would make me out a check for six thousand pounds. It would be as well, perhaps, for you to cross it. The Capital and Counties Bank, Oxford Street branch are my agents.\"\n\nHis Grace sat very stern and upright in his chair and looked stonily at my friend.\n\n\"Is this a joke, Mr. Holmes? It is hardly a subject for pleasantry.\"\n\n\"Not at all, your Grace. I was never more earnest in my life.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, then?\"\n\n\"I mean that I have earned the reward. I know where your son is, and I know some, at least, of those who are holding him.\"\n\nThe Duke's beard had turned more aggressively red than ever against his ghastly white face.\n\n\"Where is he?\" he gasped.\n\n\"He is, or was last night, at the Fighting Cock Inn, about two miles from your park gate.\"\n\nThe Duke fell back in his chair.\n\n\"And whom do you accuse?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes's answer was an astounding one. He stepped swiftly forward and touched the Duke upon the shoulder.\n\n\"I accuse you,\" said he. \"And now, your Grace, I'll trouble you for that check.\"\n\nNever shall I forget the Duke's appearance as he sprang up and clawed with his hands, like one who is sinking into an abyss. Then, with an extraordinary effort of aristocratic self-command, he sat down and sank his face in his hands. It was some minutes before he spoke.\n\n\"How much do you know?\" he asked at last, without raising his head.\n\n\"I saw you together last night.\"\n\n\"Does anyone else beside your friend know?\"\n\n\"I have spoken to no one.\"\n\nThe Duke took a pen in his quivering fingers and opened his check-book.\n\n\"I shall be as good as my word, Mr. Holmes. I am about to write your check, however unwelcome the information which you have gained may be to me. When the offer was first made, I little thought the turn which events might take. But you and your friend are men of discretion, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I hardly understand your Grace.\"\n\n\"I must put it plainly, Mr. Holmes. If only you two know of this incident, there is no reason why it should go any farther. I think twelve thousand pounds is the sum that I owe you, is it not?\"\n\nBut Holmes smiled and shook his head.\n\n\"I fear, your Grace, that matters can hardly be arranged so easily. There is the death of this schoolmaster to be accounted for.\"\n\n\"But James knew nothing of that. You cannot hold him responsible for that. It was the work of this brutal ruffian whom he had the misfortune to employ.\"\n\n\"I must take the view, your Grace, that when a man embarks upon a crime, he is morally guilty of any other crime which may spring from it.\"\n\n\"Morally, Mr. Holmes. No doubt you are right. But surely not in the eyes of the law. A man cannot be condemned for a murder at which he was not present, and which he loathes and abhors as much as you do. The instant that he heard of it he made a complete confession to me, so filled was he with horror and remorse. He lost not an hour in breaking entirely with the murderer. Oh, Mr. Holmes, you must save him\u2014you must save him! I tell you that you must save him!\" The Duke had dropped the last attempt at self-command, and was pacing the room with a convulsed face and with his clenched hands raving in the air. At last he mastered himself and sat down once more at his desk. \"I appreciate your conduct in coming here before you spoke to anyone else,\" said he. \"At least, we may take counsel how far we can minimize this hideous scandal.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Holmes. \"I think, your Grace, that this can only be done by absolute frankness between us. I am disposed to help your Grace to the best of my ability, but, in order to do so, I must understand to the last detail how the matter stands. I realize that your words applied to Mr. James Wilder, and that he is not the murderer.\"\n\n\"No, the murderer has escaped.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes smiled demurely.\n\n\"Your Grace can hardly have heard of any small reputation which I possess, or you would not imagine that it is so easy to escape me. Mr. Reuben Hayes was arrested at Chesterfield, on my information, at eleven o'clock last night. I had a telegram from the head of the local police before I left the school this morning.\"\n\nThe Duke leaned back in his chair and stared with amazement at my friend.\n\n\"You seem to have powers that are hardly human,\" said he. \"So Reuben Hayes is taken? I am right glad to hear it, if it will not react upon the fate of James.\"\n\n\"Your secretary?\"\n\n\"No, sir, my son.\"\n\nIt was Holmes's turn to look astonished.\n\n\"I confess that this is entirely new to me, your Grace. I must beg you to be more explicit.\"\n\n\"I will conceal nothing from you. I agree with you that complete frankness, however painful it may be to me, is the best policy in this desperate situation to which James's folly and jealousy have reduced us. When I was a very young man, Mr. Holmes, I loved with such a love as comes only once in a lifetime. I offered the lady marriage, but she refused it on the grounds that such a match might mar my career. Had she lived, I would certainly never have married anyone else. She died, and left this one child, whom for her sake I have cherished and cared for. I could not acknowledge the paternity to the world, but I gave him the best of educa tions, and since he came to manhood I have kept him near my person. He surprised my secret, and has presumed ever since upon the claim which he has upon me, and upon his power of provoking a scandal which would be abhorrent to me. His presence had something to do with the unhappy issue of my marriage. Above all, he hated my young legitimate heir from the first with a persistent hatred. You may well ask me why, under these circumstances, I still kept James under my roof. I answer that it was because I could see his mother's face in his, and that for her dear sake there was no end to my long-suffering. All her pretty ways too\u2014there was not one of them which he could not suggest and bring back to my memory. I could not send him away. But I feared so much lest he should do Arthur\u2014that is, Lord Saltire\u2014a mischief, that I dispatched him for safety to Dr. Huxtable's school.\n\n\"James came into contact with this fellow Hayes, because the man was a tenant of mine, and James acted as agent. The fellow was a rascal from the beginning, but, in some extraordinary way, James became intimate with him. He had always a taste for low company. When James determined to kidnap Lord Saltire, it was of this man's service that he availed himself. You remember that I wrote to Arthur upon that last day. Well, James opened the letter and inserted a note asking Arthur to meet him in a little wood called the Ragged Shaw, which is near to the school. He used the Duchess's name, and in that way got the boy to come. That evening James bicycled over\u2014I am telling you what he has himself confessed to me\u2014and he told Arthur, whom he met in the wood, that his mother longed to see him, that she was awaiting him on the moor, and that if he would come back into the wood at midnight he would find a man with a horse, who would take him to her. Poor Arthur fell into the trap. He came to the appointment, and found this fellow Hayes with a led pony. Arthur mounted, and they set off together. It appears\u2014though this James only heard yesterday\u2014that they were pursued, that Hayes struck the pursuer with his stick, and that the man died of his injuries. Hayes brought Arthur to his public-house, the Fighting Cock, where he was confined in an upper room, under the care of Mrs. Hayes, who is a kindly woman, but entirely under the control of her brutal husband.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, that was the state of affairs when I first saw you two days ago. I had no more idea of the truth than you. You will ask me what was James's motive in doing such a deed. I answer that there was a great deal which was unreasoning and fanatical in the hatred which he bore my heir. In his view he should himself have been heir of all my estates, and he deeply resented those social laws which made it impossible. At the same time, he had a definite motive also. He was eager that I should break the entail, and he was of opinion that it lay in my power to do so. He intended to make a bargain with me\u2014to restore Arthur if I would break the entail, and so make it possible for the estate to be left to him by will. He knew well that I should never willingly invoke the aid of the police against him. I say that he would have proposed such a bargain to me; but he did not actually do so, for events moved too quickly for him, and he had not time to put his plans into practice.\n\n\"What brought all his wicked scheme to wreck was your discovery of this man Heidegger's dead body. James was seized with horror at the news. It came to us yesterday, as we sat together in this study. Dr. Huxtable had sent a telegram. James was so overwhelmed with grief and agitation that my suspicions, which had never been entirely absent, rose instantly to a certainty, and I taxed him with the deed. He made a complete voluntary confession. Then he implored me to keep his secret for three days longer, so as to give his wretched accomplice a chance of saving his guilty life. I yielded\u2014as I have always yielded\u2014to his prayers, and instantly James hurried off to the Fighting Cock to warn Hayes and give him the means of flight. I could not go there by daylight without provoking comment, but as soon as night fell I hurried off to see my dear Arthur. I found him safe and well, but horrified beyond expression by the dreadful deed he had witnessed. In deference to my promise, and much against my will, I consented to leave him there for three days, under the charge of Mrs. Hayes, since it was evident that it was impossible to inform the police where he was without telling them also who was the murderer, and I could not see how that murderer could be punished without ruin to my unfortunate James. You asked for frankness, Mr. Holmes, and I have taken you at your word, for I have now told you everything without an attempt at circumlocution or concealment. Do you in turn be as frank with me.\"\n\n\"I will,\" said Holmes. \"In the first place, your Grace, I am bound to tell you that you have placed yourself in a most serious position in the eyes of the law. You have condoned a felony, and you have aided the escape of a murderer, for I cannot doubt that any money which was taken by James Wilder to aid his accomplice in his flight came from your Grace's purse.\"\n\nThe Duke bowed his assent.\n\n\"This is, indeed, a most serious matter. Even more culpable in my opinion, your Grace, is your attitude towards your younger son. You leave him in this den for three days.\"\n\n\"Under solemn promises\u2014\"\n\n\"What are promises to such people as these? You have no guarantee that he will not be spirited away again. To humour your guilty older son, you have exposed your innocent younger son to imminent and unnecessary danger. It was a most unjustifiable action.\"\n\nThe proud lord of Holdernesse was not accustomed to be so rated in his own ducal hall. The blood flushed into his high forehead, but his conscience held him dumb.\n\n\"I will help you, but on one condition only. It is that you ring for the footman and let me give such orders as I like.\"\n\nWithout a word, the Duke pressed the electric bell. A servant entered.\n\n\"You will be glad to hear,\" said Holmes, \"that your young master is found. It is the Duke's desire that the carriage shall go at once to the Fighting Cock Inn to bring Lord Saltire home.\n\n\"Now,\" said Holmes, when the rejoicing lackey had disappeared, \"having secured the future, we can afford to be more lenient with the past. I am not in an official position, and there is no reason, so long as the ends of justice are served, why I should disclose all that I know. As to Hayes, I say nothing. The gallows awaits him, and I would do nothing to save him from it. What he will divulge I cannot tell, but I have no doubt that your Grace could make him understand that it is to his interest to be silent. From the police point of view he will have kidnapped the boy for the purpose of ransom. If they do not themselves find it out, I see no reason why I should prompt them to take a broader point of view. I would warn your Grace, however, that the continued presence of Mr. James Wilder in your household can only lead to misfortune.\"\n\n\"I understand that, Mr. Holmes, and it is already settled that he shall leave me forever, and go to seek his fortune in Australia.\"\n\n\"In that case, your Grace, since you have yourself stated that any unhappiness in your married life was caused by his presence, I would suggest that you make such amends as you can to the Duchess, and that you try to resume those relations which have been so unhappily interrupted.\"\n\n\"That also I have arranged, Mr. Holmes. I wrote to the Duchess this morning.\"\n\n\"In that case,\" said Holmes, rising, \"I think that my friend and I can congratulate ourselves upon several most happy results from our little visit to the North. There is one other small point upon which I desire some light. This fellow Hayes had shod his horses with shoes which counterfeited the tracks of cows. Was it from Mr. Wilder that he learned so extraordinary a device?\"\n\nThe Duke stood in thought for a moment, with a look of intense surprise on his face. Then he opened a door and showed us into a large room furnished as a museum. He led the way to a glass case in a corner, and pointed to the inscription.\n\n\"These shoes,\" it ran, \"were dug up in the moat of Holdernesse Hall. They are for the use of horses, but they are shaped below with a cloven foot of iron, so as to throw pursuers off the track. They are supposed to have belonged to some of the marauding Barons of Holdernesse in the Middle Ages.\"\n\nHolmes opened the case, and moistening his finger he passed it along the shoe. A thin film of recent mud was left upon his skin.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said he, as he replaced the glass. \"It is the second most interesting object that I have seen in the North.\"\n\n\"And the first?\"\n\nHolmes folded up his check and placed it carefully in his notebook. \"I am a poor man,\" said he, as he patted it affectionately, and thrust it into the depths of his inner pocket." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF BLACK PETER", + "text": "I have never known my friend to be in better form, both mental and physical, than in the year '95. His increasing fame had brought with it an immense practice, and I should be guilty of an indiscretion if I were even to hint at the identity of some of the illustrious clients who crossed our humble threshold in Baker Street. Holmes, however, like all great artists, lived for his art's sake, and, save in the case of the Duke of Hold-emesse, I have seldom known him claim any large reward for his inestimable services. So unworldly was he\u2014or so capricious\u2014that he frequently refused his help to the powerful and wealthy where the problem made no appeal to his sympathies, while he would devote weeks of most intense application to the affairs of some humble client whose case presented those strange and dramatic qualities which appealed to his imagination and challenged his ingenuity.\n\nIn this memorable year '95, a curious and incongruous succession of cases had engaged his attention, ranging from his famous investigation of the sudden death of Cardinal Tosca\u2014an inquiry which was carried out by him at the express desire of His Holiness the Pope\u2014down to his arrest of Wilson, the notorious canary-trainer, which removed a plague-spot from the East End of London. Close on the heels of these two famous cases came the tragedy of Woodman's Lee, and the very obscure circumstances which surrounded the death of Captain Peter Carey. No record of the doings of Mr. Sherlock Holmes would be complete which did not include some account of this very unusual affair.\n\nDuring the first week of July, my friend had been absent so often and so long from our lodgings that I knew he had something on hand. The fact that several rough-looking men called during that time and inquired for Captain Basil made me understand that Holmes was working somewhere under one of the numerous disguises and names with which he concealed his own formidable identity. He had at least five small refuges in different parts of London, in which he was able to change his personality. He said nothing of his business to me, and it was not my habit to force a confidence. The first positive sign which he gave me of the direction which his investigation was taking was an extraordinary one. He had gone out before breakfast, and I had sat down to mine when he strode into the room, his hat upon his head and a huge barbed-headed spear tucked like an umbrella under his arm.\n\n\"Good gracious, Holmes!\" I cried. \"You don't mean to say that you have been walking about London with that thing?\"\n\n\"I drove to the butcher's and back.\"\n\n\"The butcher's?\"\n\n\"And I return with an excellent appetite. There can be no question, my dear Watson, of the value of exercise before breakfast. But I am prepared to bet that you will not guess the form that my exercise has taken.\"\n\n\"I will not attempt it.\"\n\nHe chuckled as he poured out the coffee.\n\n\"If you could have looked into Allardyce's back shop, you would have seen a dead pig swung from a hook in the ceiling, and a gentleman in his shirt sleeves furiously stabbing at it with this weapon. I was that energetic person, and I have satisfied myself that by no exertion of my strength can I transfix the pig with a single blow. Perhaps you would care to try?\"\n\n\"Not for worlds. But why were you doing this?\"\n\n\"Because it seemed to me to have an indirect bearing upon the mystery of Woodman's Lee. Ah, Hopkins, I got your wire last night, and I have been expecting you. Come and join us.\"\n\nOur visitor was an exceedingly alert man, thirty years of age, dressed in a quiet tweed suit, but retaining the erect bearing of one who was accustomed to official uniform. I recognized him at once as Stanley Hopkins, a young police inspector, for whose future Holmes had high hopes, while he in turn professed the admiration and respect of a pupil for the scientific methods of the famous amateur. Hopkins's brow was clouded, and he sat down with an air of deep dejection.\n\n\"No, thank you, sir. I breakfasted before I came round. I spent the night in town, for I came up yesterday to report.\"\n\n\"And what had you to report?\"\n\n\"Failure, sir, absolute failure.\"\n\n\"You have made no progress?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Dear me! I must have a look at the matter.\"\n\n\"I wish to heavens that you would, Mr. Holmes. It's my first big chance, and I am at my wit's end. For goodness' sake, come down and lend me a hand.\"\n\n\"Well, well, it just happens that I have already read all the available evidence, including the report of the inquest, with some care. By the way, what do you make of that tobacco pouch, found on the scene of the crime? Is there no clue there?\"\n\nHopkins looked surprised.\n\n\"It was the man's own pouch, sir. His initials were inside it. And it was of sealskin\u2014and he was an old sealer.\"\n\n\"But he had no pipe.\"\n\n\"No, sir, we could find no pipe. Indeed, he smoked very little, and yet he might have kept some tobacco for his friends.\"\n\n\"No doubt. I only mention it because, if I had been handling the case, I should have been inclined to make that the starting-point of my investigation. However, my friend, Dr. Watson, knows nothing of this matter, and I should be none the worse for hearing the sequence of events once more. Just give us some short sketches of the essentials.\"\n\nStanley Hopkins drew a slip of paper from his pocket.\n\n\"I have a few dates here which will give you the career of the dead man, Captain Peter Carey. He was born in '45\u2014fifty years of age. He was a most daring and successful seal and whale fisher. In 1883 he commanded the steam sealer Sea Unicorn, of Dundee. He had then had several successful voyages in succession, and in the following year, 1884, he retired. After that he travelled for some years, and finally he bought a small place called Woodman's Lee, near Forest Row, in Sussex. There he has lived for six years, and there he died just a week ago to-day.\n\n\"There were some most singular points about the man. In ordinary life, he was a strict Puritan\u2014a silent, gloomy fellow. His household consisted of his wife, his daughter, aged twenty, and two female servants. These last were continually changing, for it was never a very cheery situation, and sometimes it became past all bearing. The man was an intermittent drunkard, and when he had the fit on him he was a perfect fiend. He has been known to drive his wife and daughter out of doors in the middle of the night and flog them through the park until the whole village outside the gates was aroused by their screams.\n\n\"He was summoned once for a savage assault upon the old vicar, who had called upon him to remonstrate with him upon his conduct. In short, Mr. Holmes, you would go far before you found a more dangerous man than Peter Carey, and I have heard that he bore the same character when he commanded his ship. He was known in the trade as Black Peter, and the name was given him, not only on account of his swarthy features and the colour of his huge beard, but for the humours which were the terror of all around him. I need not say that he was loathed and avoided by every one of his neighbours, and that I have not heard one single word of sorrow about his terrible end.\n\n\"You must have read in the account of the inquest about the man's cabin, Mr. Holmes, but perhaps your friend here has not heard of it. He had built himself a wooden outhouse\u2014he always called it the 'cabin'\u2014a few hundred yards from his house, and it was here that he slept every night. It was a little, single-roomed hut, sixteen feet by ten. He kept the key in his pocket, made his own bed, cleaned it himself, and allowed no other foot to cross the threshold. There are small windows on each side, which were covered by curtains and never opened. One of these windows was turned towards the high road, and when the light burned in it at night the folk used to point it out to each other and wonder what Black Peter was doing in there. That's the window, Mr. Holmes, which gave us one of the few bits of positive evidence that came out at the inquest.\n\n\"You remember that a stonemason, named Slater, walking from Forest Row about one o'clock in the morning\u2014two days before the murder\u2014stopped as he passed the grounds and looked at the square of light still shining among the trees. He swears that the shadow of a man's head turned sideways was clearly visible on the blind, and that this shadow was certainly not that of Peter Carey, whom he knew well. It was that of a bearded man, but the beard was short and bristled forward in a way very different from that of the captain. So he says, but he had been two hours in the public-house, and it is some distance from the road to the window. Besides, this refers to the Monday, and the crime was done upon the Wednesday.\n\n\"On the Tuesday, Peter Carey was in one of his blackest moods, flushed with drink and as savage as a dangerous wild beast. He roamed about the house, and the women ran for it when they heard him coming. Late in the evening, he went down to his own hut. About two o'clock the following morning, his daughter, who slept with her window open, heard a most fearful yell from that direction, but it was no unusual thing for him to bawl and shout when he was in drink, so no notice was taken. On rising at seven, one of the maids noticed that the door of the hut was open, but so great was the terror which the man caused that it was midday before anyone would venture down to see what had become of him. Peeping into the open door, they saw a sight which sent them flying, with white faces, into the village. Within an hour, I was on the spot and had taken over the case.\n\n\"Well, I have fairly steady nerves, as you know, Mr. Holmes, but I give you my word, that I got a shake when I put my head into that little house. It was droning like a harmonium with the flies and bluebottles, and the floor and walls were like a slaughter-house. He had called it a cabin, and a cabin it was, sure enough, for you would have thought that you were in a ship. There was a bunk at one end, a sea-chest, maps and charts, a picture of the Sea Unicorn, a line of logbooks on a shelf, all exactly as one would expect to find it in a captain's room. And there, in the middle of it, was the man himself\u2014his face twisted like a lost soul in torment, and his great brindled beard stuck upward in his agony. Right through his broad breast a steel harpoon had been driven, and it had sunk deep into the wood of the wall behind him. He was pinned like a beetle on a card. Of course, he was quite dead, and had been so from the instant that he had uttered that last yell of agony.\n\n\"I know your methods, sir, and I applied them. Before I permitted anything to be moved, I examined most carefully the ground outside, and also the floor of the room. There were no footmarks.\"\n\n\"Meaning that you saw none?\"\n\n\"I assure you, sir, that there were none.\"\n\n\"My good Hopkins, I have investigated many crimes, but I have never yet seen one which was committed by a flying creature. As long as the criminal remains upon two legs so long must there be some indentation, some abrasion, some trifling displacement which can be detected by the scientific searcher. It is incredible that this blood-bespattered room contained no trace which could have aided us. I understand, however, from the inquest that there were some objects which you failed to overlook?\"\n\nThe young inspector winced at my companion's ironical comments.\n\n\"I was a fool not to call you in at the time, Mr. Holmes. However, that's past praying for* now. Yes, there were several objects in the room which called for special attention. One was the harpoon with which the deed was committed. It had been snatched down from a rack on the wall. Two others remained there, and there was a vacant place for the third. On the stock was engraved 'SS. Sea Unicorn, Dundee.' This seemed to establish that the crime had been done in a moment of fury, and that the murderer had seized the first weapon which came in his way. The fact that the crime was committed at two in the morning, and yet Peter Carey was fully dressed, suggested that he had an appointment with the murderer, which is borne out by the fact that a bottle of rum and two dirty glasses stood upon the table.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Holmes; \"I think that both inferences are permissible. Was there any other spirit but rum in the room?\"\n\n\"Yes, there was a tantalus containing brandy and whisky on the sea-chest. It is of no importance to us, however, since the decanters were full, and it had therefore not been used.\"\n\n\"For all that, its presence has some significance,\" said Holmes. \"However, let us hear some more about the objects which do seem to you to bear upon the case.\"\n\n\"There was this tobacco-pouch upon the table.\"\n\n\"What part of the table?\"\n\n\"It lay in the middle. It was of coarse sealskin\u2014the straight-haired skin, with a leather thong to bind it. Inside was 'P. C.' on the flap. There was half an ounce of strong ship's tobacco in it.\"\n\n\"Excellent! What more?\"\n\nStanley Hopkins drew from his pocket a drab-covered notebook. The outside was rough and worn, the leaves discoloured. On the first page were written the initials \"J. H. N.\" and the date \"1883.\" Holmes laid it on the table and examined it in his minute way, while Hopkins and I gazed over each shoulder. On the second page were the printed letters \"C. P. R.,\" and then came several sheets of numbers. Another heading was \"Argentine,\" another \"Costa Rica,\" and another \"San Paulo,\" each with pages of signs and figures after it.\n\n\"What do you make of these?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"They appear to be lists of Stock Exchange securities. I thought that 'J. H. N.' were the initials of a broker, and that 'C. P. R.' may have been his client.\"\n\n\"Try Canadian Pacific Railway,\" said Holmes.\n\nStanley Hopkins swore between his teeth, and struck his thigh with his clenched hand.\n\n\"What a fool I have been!\" he cried. \"Of course, it is as you say. Then 'J. H. N.' are the only initials we have to solve. I have already examined the old Stock Exchange lists, and I can find no one in 1883, either in the house or among the outside brokers, whose initials correspond with these. Yet I feel that the clue is the most important one that I hold. You will admit, Mr. Holmes, that there is a possibility that these initials are those of the second person who was present\u2014in other words, of the murderer. I would also urge that the introduction into the case of a document relating to large masses of valuable securities gives us for the first time some indication of a motive for the crime.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes's face showed that he was thoroughly taken aback by this new development.\n\n\"I must admit both your points,\" said he. \"I confess that this notebook, which did not appear at the inquest, modifies any views which I may have formed. I had come to a theory of the crime in which I can find no place for this. Have you endeavoured to trace any of the securities here mentioned?\"\n\n\"Inquiries are now being made at the offices, but I fear that the complete register of the stockholders of these South American concerns is in South America, and that some weeks must elapse before we can trace the shares.\"\n\nHolmes had been examining the cover of the notebook with his magnifying lens.\n\n\"Surely there is some discolouration here,\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, sir, it is a blood-stain. I told you that I picked the book off the floor.\"\n\n\"Was the blood-stain above or below?\"\n\n\"On the side next to the boards.\"\n\n\"Which proves, of course, that the book was dropped after the crime was committed.\"\n\n\"Exactly, Mr. Holmes. I appreciated that point, and I conjectured that it was dropped by the murderer in his hurried flight. It lay near the door.\"\n\n\"I suppose that none of these securities have been found among the property of the dead man?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Have you any reason to suspect robbery?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Nothing seemed to have been touched.\"\n\n\"Dear me, it is certainly a very interesting case. Then there was a knife, was there not?\"\n\n\"A sheath-knife, still in its sheath. It lay at the feet of the dead man. Mrs. Carey has identified it as being her husband's property.\"\n\nHolmes was lost in thought for some time.\n\n\"Well,\" said he, at last, \"I suppose I shall have to come out and have a look at it.\"\n\nStanley Hopkins gave a cry of joy.\n\n\"Thank you, sir. That will, indeed, be a weight off my mind.\"\n\nHolmes shook his finger at the inspector.\n\n\"It would have been an easier task a week ago,\" said he. \"But even now my visit may not be entirely fruitless. Watson, if you can spare the time, I should be very glad of your company. If you will call a four-wheeler, Hopkins, we shall be ready to start for Forest Row in a quarter of an hour.\"\n\nAlighting at the small wayside station, we drove for some miles through the remains of widespread woods, which were once part of that great for est which for so long held the Saxon invaders at bay\u2014the impenetrable \"weald,\" for sixty years the bulwark of Britain. Vast sections of it have been cleared, for this is the seat of the first iron-works of the country, and the trees have been felled to smelt the ore. Now the richer fields of the North have absorbed the trade, and nothing save these ravaged groves and great scars in the earth show the work of the past. Here, in a clearing upon the green slope of a hill, stood a long, low, stone house, approached by a curving drive running through the fields. Nearer the road, and surrounded on three sides by bushes, was a small outhouse, one window and the door facing in our direction. It was the scene of the murder.\n\nStanley Hopkins led us first to the house, where he introduced us to a haggard, gray-haired woman, the widow of the murdered man, whose gaunt and deep-lined face, with the furtive look of terror in the depths of her red-rimmed eyes, told of the years of hardship and ill-usage which she had endured. With her was her daughter, a pale, fair-haired girl, whose eyes blazed defiantly at us as she told us that she was glad that her father was dead, and that she blessed the hand which had struck him down. It was a terrible household that Black Peter Carey had made for himself, and it was with a sense of relief that we found ourselves in the sunlight again and making our way along a path which had been worn across the fields by the feet of the dead man.\n\nThe outhouse was the simplest of dwellings, wooden-walled, shingle-roofed, one window beside the door and one on the farther side. Stanley Hopkins drew the key from his pocket and had stooped to the lock, when he paused with a look of attention and surprise upon his face.\n\n\"Someone has been tampering with it,\" he said.\n\nThere could be no doubt of the fact. The woodwork was cut, and the scratches showed white through the paint, as if they had been that instant done. Holmes had been examining the window.\n\n\"Someone has tried to force this also. Whoever it was has failed to make his way in. He must have been a very poor burglar.\"\n\n\"This is a most extraordinary thing,\" said the inspector. \"I could swear that these marks were not here yesterday evening.\"\n\n\"Some curious person from the village, perhaps,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Very unlikely. Few of them would dare to set foot in the grounds, far less try to force their way into the cabin. What do you think of it, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I think that fortune is very kind to us.\"\n\n\"You mean that the person will come again?\"\n\n\"It is very probable. He came expecting to find the door open. He tried to get in with the blade of a very small penknife. He could not manage it. What would he do?\"\n\n\"Come again next night with a more useful tool.\"\n\n\"So I should say. It will be our fault if we are not there to receive him. Meanwhile, let me see the inside of the cabin.\"\n\nThe traces of the tragedy had been removed, but the furniture within the little room still stood as it had been on the night of the crime. For two hours, with most intense concentration, Holmes examined every object in turn, but his face showed that his quest was not a successful one. Once only he paused in his patient investigation.\n\n\"Have you taken anything off this shelf, Hopkins?\"\n\n\"No, I have moved nothing.\"\n\n\"Something has been taken. There is less dust in this corner of the shelf than elsewhere. It may have been a book lying on its side. It may have been a box. Well, well, I can do nothing more. Let us walk in these beautiful woods, Watson, and give a few hours to the birds and the flowers. We shall meet you here later, Hopkins, and see if we can come to closer quarters with the gentleman who has paid this visit in the night.\"\n\nIt was past eleven o'clock when we formed our little ambuscade. Hopkins was for leaving the door of the hut open, but Holmes was of the opinion that this would rouse the suspicions of the stranger. The lock was a perfectly simple one, and only a strong blade was needed to push it back. Holmes also suggested that we should wait, not inside the hut, but outside it, among the bushes which grew round the farther window. In this way we should be able to watch our man if he struck a light, and see what his object was in this stealthy nocturnal visit.\n\nIt was a long and melancholy vigil, and yet brought with it something of the thrill which the hunter feels when he lies beside the water-pool, and waits for the coming of the thirsty beast of prey. What savage creature was it which might steal upon us out of the darkness? Was it a fierce tiger of crime, which could only be taken fighting hard with flashing fang and claw, or would it prove to be some skulking jackal, dangerous only to the weak and unguarded?\n\nIn absolute silence we crouched amongst the bushes, waiting for whatever might come. At first the steps of a few belated villagers, or the sound of voices from the village, lightened our vigil, but one by one these interruptions died away, and an absolute stillness fell upon us, save for the chimes of the distant church, which told us of the progress of the night, and for the rustle and whisper of a fine rain falling amid the foliage which roofed us in.\n\nHalf-past two had chimed, and it was the darkest hour which precedes the dawn, when we all started as a low but sharp click came from the direction of the gate. Someone had entered the drive. Again there was a long silence, and I had begun to fear that it was a false alarm, when a stealthy step was heard upon the other side of the hut, and a moment later a metallic scraping and clinking. The man was trying to force the lock. This time his skill was greater or his tool was better, for there was a sudden snap and the creak of the hinges. Then a match was struck, and next instant the steady light from a candle filled the interior of the hut. Through the gauze curtain our eyes were all riveted upon the scene within.\n\nThe nocturnal visitor was a young man, frail and thin, with a black moustache, which intensified the deadly pallor of his face. He could not have been much above twenty years of age. I have never seen any human being who appeared to be in such a pitiable fright, for his teeth were visibly chattering, and he was shaking in every limb. He was dressed like a gentleman, in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a cloth cap upon his head. We watched him staring round with frightened eyes. Then he laid the candle-end upon the table and disappeared from our view into one of the corners. He returned with a large book, one of the logbooks which formed a line upon the shelves. Leaning on the table, he rapidly turned over the leaves of this volume until he came to the entry which he sought. Then, with an angry gesture of his clenched hand, he closed the book, replaced it in the corner, and put out the light. He had hardly turned to leave the hut when Hopkins's hand was on the fellow's collar, and I heard his loud gasp of terror as he understood that he was taken. The candle was relit, and there was our wretched captive, shivering and cowering in the grasp of the detective. He sank down upon the sea-chest, and looked helplessly from one of us to the other.\n\n\"Now, my fine fellow,\" said Stanley Hopkins, \"who are you, and what do you want here?\"\n\nThe man pulled himself together, and faced us with an effort at self-composure.\n\n\"You are detectives, I suppose?\" said he. \"You imagine I am connected with the death of Captain Peter Carey. I assure you that I am innocent.\"\n\n\"We'll see about that,\" said Hopkins. \"First of all, what is your name?\"\n\n\"It is John Hopley Neligan.\"\n\nI saw Holmes and Hopkins exchange a quick glance.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Can I speak confidentially?\"\n\n\"No, certainly not.\"\n\n\"Why should I tell you?\"\n\n\"If you have no answer, it may go badly with you at the trial.\"\n\nThe young man winced.\n\n\"Well, I will tell you,\" he said. \"Why should I not? And yet I hate to think of this old scandal gaining a new lease of life. Did you ever hear of Dawson and Neligan?\"\n\nI could see, from Hopkins's face, that he never had, but Holmes was keenly interested.\n\n\"You mean the West Country bankers,\" said he. \"They failed for a million, ruined half the county families of Cornwall, and Neligan disappeared.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Neligan was my father.\"\n\nAt last we were getting something positive, and yet it seemed a long gap between an absconding banker and Captain Peter Carey pinned against the wall with one of his own harpoons. We all listened intently to the young man's words.\n\n\"It was my father who was really concerned. Dawson had retired. I was only ten years of age at the time, but I was old enough to feel the shame and horror of it all. It has always been said that my father stole all the securities and fled. It is not true. It was his belief that if he were given time in which to realize them, all would be well and every creditor paid in full. He started in his little yacht for Norway just before the warrant was issued for his arrest. I can remember that last night, when he bade farewell to my mother. He left us a list of the securities he was taking, and he swore that he would come back with his honour cleared, and that none who had trusted him would suffer. Well, no word was ever heard from him again. Both the yacht and he vanished utterly. We believed, my mother and I, that he and it, with the securities that he had taken with him, were at the bottom of the sea. We had a faithful friend, however, who is a business man, and it was he who discovered some time ago that some of the securities which my father had with him had reappeared on the London market. You can imagine our amazement. I spent months in trying to trace them, and at last, after many doubtings and difficulties, I discovered that the original seller had been Captain Peter Carey, the owner of this hut.\n\n\"Naturally, I made some inquiries about the man. I found that he had been in command of a whaler which was due to return from the Arctic seas at the very time when my father was crossing to Norway. The autumn of that year was a stormy one. and there was a long succession of southerly gales. My father's yacht may well have been blown to the north, and there met by Captain Peter Carey's ship. If that were so, what had become of my father? In any case, if I could prove from Peter Carey's evidence how these securities came on the market it would be a proof that my father had not sold them, and that he had no view to personal profit when he took them.\n\n\"I came down to Sussex with the intention of seeing the captain, but it was at this moment that his terrible death occurred. I read at the inquest a description of his cabin, in which it stated that the old logbooks of his vessel were preserved in it. It struck me that if I could see what occurred in the month of August, 1883, on board the Sea Unicorn, I might settle the mystery of my father's fate. I tried last night to get at these logbooks, but was unable to open the door. To-night I tried again and succeeded, but I find that the pages which deal with that month have been torn from the book. It was at that moment I found myself a prisoner in your hands.\"\n\n\"Is that all?\" asked Hopkins.\n\n\"Yes, that is all.\" His eyes shifted as he said it.\n\n\"You have nothing else to tell us?\"\n\nHe hesitated.\n\n\"No, there is nothing.\"\n\n\"You have not been here before last night?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then how do you account for that?\" cried Hopkins, as he held up the damning notebook, with the initials of our prisoner on the first leaf and the blood-stain on the cover.\n\nThe wretched man collapsed. He sank his face in his hands, and trembled all over.\n\n\"Where did you get it?\" he groaned. \"I did not know. I thought I had lost it at the hotel.\"\n\n\"That is enough,\" said Hopkins, sternly. \"Whatever else you have to say, you must say in court. You will walk down with me now to the police-station. Well, Mr. Holmes, I am very much obliged to you and to your friend for coming down to help me. As it turns out your presence was unnecessary, and I would have brought the case to this successful issue without you, but, none the less, I am grateful. Rooms have been reserved for you at the Brambletye Hotel, so we can all walk down to the village together.\"\n\n\"Well, Watson, what do you think of it?\" asked Holmes, as we travelled back next morning.\n\n\"I can see that you are not satisfied.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, my dear Watson, I am perfectly satisfied. At the same time, Stanley Hopkins's methods do not commend themselves to me. I am disappointed in Stanley Hopkins. I had hoped for better things from him. One should always look for a possible alternative, and provide against it. It is the first rule of criminal investigation.\"\n\n\"What, then, is the alternative?\"\n\n\"The line of investigation which I have myself been pursuing. It may give us nothing. I cannot tell. But at least I shall follow it to the end.\"\n\nSeveral letters were waiting for Holmes at Baker Street. He snatched one of them up, opened it, and burst out into a triumphant chuckle of laughter.\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! The alternative develops. Have you telegraph forms? Just write a couple of messages for me: 'Sumner, Shipping Agent, Ratcliff Highway. Send three men on, to arrive ten to-morrow morning.\u2014Basil.' That's my name in those parts. The other is: 'Inspector Stanley Hopkins, 46 Lord Street, Brixton. Come breakfast to-morrow at nine-thirty. Important. Wire if unable to come.\u2014Sherlock Holmes.' There, Watson, this infernal case has haunted me for ten days. I hereby banish it completely from my presence. To-morrow, I trust that we shall hear the last of it forever.\"\n\nSharp at the hour named Inspector Stanley Hopkins appeared, and we sat down together to the excellent breakfast which Mrs. Hudson had prepared. The young detective was in high spirits at his success.\n\n\"You really think that your solution must be correct?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"I could not imagine a more complete case.\"\n\n\"It did not seem to me conclusive.\"\n\n\"You astonish me, Mr. Holmes. What more could one ask for?\"\n\n\"Does your explanation cover every point?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly. I find that young Neligan arrived at the Brambletye Hotel on the very day of the crime. He came on the pretence of playing golf. His room was on the ground-floor, and he could get out when he liked. That very night he went down to Woodman's Lee, saw Peter Carey at the hut, quarrelled with him, and killed him with the harpoon. Then, horrified by what he had done, he fled out of the hut, dropping the notebook which he had brought with him in order to question Peter Carey about these different securities. You may have observed that some of them were marked with ticks, and the others\u2014the great majority\u2014were not. Those which are ticked have been traced on the London market, but the others, presumably, were still in the possession of Carey, and young Neligan, according to his own account, was anxious to recover them in order to do the right thing by his father's creditors. After his flight he did not dare to approach the hut again for some time, but at last he forced himself to do so in order to obtain the information which he needed. Surely that is all simple and obvious?\"\n\nHolmes smiled and shook his head.\n\n\"It seems to me to have only one drawback, Hopkins, and that is that it is intrinsically impossible. Have you tried to drive a harpoon through a body? No? Tut, tut, my dear sir, you must really pay attention to these details. My friend Watson could tell you that I spent a whole morning in that exercise. It is no easy matter, and requires a strong and practised arm. But this blow was delivered with such violence that the head of the weapon sank deep into the wall. Do you imagine that this anemic youth was capable of so frightful an assault? Is he the man who hobnobbed in rum and water with Black Peter in the dead of the night? Was it his profile that was seen on the blind two nights before? No, no, Hopkins, it is another and more formidable person for whom we must seek.\"\n\nThe detective's face had grown longer and longer during Holmes's speech. His hopes and his ambitions were all crumbling about him. But he would not abandon his position without a struggle.\n\n\"You can't deny that Neligan was present that night, Mr. Holmes. The book will prove that. I fancy that I have evidence enough to satisfy a jury, even if you are able to pick a hole in it. Besides, Mr. Holmes, I have laid my hand upon my man. As to this terrible person of yours, where is he?\"\n\n\"I rather fancy that he is on the stair,\" said Holmes, serenely. \"I think, Watson, that you would do well to put that revolver where you can reach it.\" He rose and laid a written paper upon a side-table. \"Now we are ready,\" said he.\n\nThere had been some talking in gruff voices outside, and now Mrs. Hudson opened the door to say that there were three men inquiring for Captain Basil.\n\n\"Show them in one by one,\" said Holmes.\n\nThe first who entered was a little Ribston pippin of a man, with ruddy cheeks and fluffy white side-whiskers. Holmes had drawn a letter from his pocket.\n\n\"What name?\" he asked.\n\n\"James Lancaster.\"\n\n\"I am sorry, Lancaster, but the berth is full. Here is half a sovereign for your trouble. Just step into this room and wait there for a few minutes.\"\n\nThe second man was a long, dried-up creature, with lank hair and sallow cheeks. His name was Hugh Pattins. He also received his dismissal, his half-sovereign, and the order to wait.\n\nThe third applicant was a man of remarkable appearance. A fierce bull-dog face was framed in a tangle of hair and beard, and two bold, dark eyes gleamed behind the cover of thick, tufted, overhung eyebrows. He saluted and stood sailor-fashion, turning his cap round in his hands.\n\n\"Your name?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Patrick Cairns.\"\n\n\"Harpooner?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Twenty-six voyages.\"\n\n\"Dundee, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"And ready to start with an exploring ship?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"What wages?\"\n\n\"Eight pounds a month.\"\n\n\"Could you start at once?\"\n\n\"As soon as I get my kit.\"\n\n\"Have you your papers?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" He took a sheaf of worn and greasy forms from his pocket. Holmes glanced over them and returned them.\n\n\"You are just the man I want,\" said he. \"Here's the agreement on the side-table. If you sign it the whole matter will be settled.\"\n\nThe seaman lurched across the room and took up the pen.\n\n\"Shall I sign here?\" he asked, stooping over the table.\n\nHolmes leaned over his shoulder and passed both hands over his neck.\n\n\"This will do,\" said he.\n\nI heard a click of steel and a bellow like an enraged bull. The next instant Holmes and the seaman were rolling on the ground together. He was a man of such gigantic strength that, even with the handcuffs which Holmes had so deftly fastened upon his wrists, he would have very quickly overpowered my friend had Hopkins and I not rushed to his rescue. Only when I pressed the cold muzzle of the revolver to his temple did he at last understand that resistance was vain. We lashed his ankles with cord, and rose breathless from the struggle.\n\n\"I must really apologize, Hopkins,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"I fear that the scrambled eggs are cold. However, you will enjoy the rest of your breakfast all the better, will you not, for the thought that you have brought your case to a triumphant conclusion.\"\n\nStanley Hopkins was speechless with amazement.\n\n\"I don't know what to say, Mr. Holmes,\" he blurted out at last, with a very red face. \"It seems to me that I have been making a fool of myself from the beginning. I understand now, what I should never have forgotten, that I am the pupil and you are the master. Even now I see what you have done, but I don't know how you did it or what it signifies.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said Holmes, good-humouredly. \"We all learn by experience, and your lesson this time is that you should never lose sight of the alternative. You were so absorbed in young Neligan that you could not spare a thought to Patrick Cairns, the true murderer of Peter Carey.\"\n\nThe hoarse voice of the seaman broke in on our conversation.\n\n\"See here, mister,\" said he, \"I make no complaint of being manhandled in this fashion, but I would have you call things by their right names. You say I murdered Peter Carey, I say I killed Peter Carey, and there's all the difference. Maybe you don't believe what I say. Maybe you think I am just slinging you a yarn.\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said Holmes. \"Let us hear what you have to say.\"\n\n\"It's soon told, and, by the Lord, every word of it is truth. I knew Black Peter, and when he pulled out his knife I whipped a harpoon through him sharp, for I knew that it was him or me. That's how he died. You can call it murder. Anyhow, I'd as soon die with a rope round my neck as with Black Peter's knife in my heart.\"\n\n\"How came you there?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"I'll tell it you from the beginning. Just sit me up a little, so as I can speak easy. It was in '83 that it happened\u2014August of that year. Peter Carey was master of the Sea Unicorn, and I was spare harpooner. We were coming out of the ice-pack on our way home, with head winds and a week's southerly gale, when we picked up a little craft that had been blown north. There was one man on her\u2014a landsman. The crew had thought she would founder and had made for the Norwegian coast in the dinghy. I guess they were all drowned. Well, we took him on board, this man, and he and the skipper had some long talks in the cabin. All the baggage we took off with him was one tin box. So far as I know, the man's name was never mentioned, and on the second night he disappeared as if he had never been. It was given out that he had either thrown himself overboard or fallen overboard in the heavy weather that we were having. Only one man knew what had happened to him, and that was me, for, with my own eyes, I saw the skipper tip up his heels and put him over the rail in the middle watch of a dark night, two days before we sighted the Shetland Lights.\n\n\"Well, I kept my knowledge to myself, and waited to see what would come of it. When we got back to Scotland it was easily hushed up, and nobody asked any questions. A stranger died by accident, and it was nobody's business to inquire. Shortly after Peter Carey gave up the sea, and it was long years before I could find where he was. I guessed that he had done the deed for the sake of what was in that tin box, and that he could afford now to pay me well for keeping my mouth shut.\n\n\"I found out where he was through a sailor man that had met him in London, and down I went to squeeze him. The first night he was reasonable enough, and was ready to give me what would make me free of the sea for life. We were to fix it all two nights later. When I came, I found him three parts drunk and in a vile temper. We sat down and we drank and we yarned about old times, but the more he drank the less I liked the look on his face. I spotted that harpoon upon the wall, and I thought I might need it before I was through. Then at last he broke out at me, spitting and cursing, with murder in his eyes and a great clasp-knife in his hand. He had not time to get it from the sheath before I had the harpoon through him. Heavens! what a yell he gave! and his face gets between me and my sleep. I stood there, with his blood splashing round me, and I waited for a bit, but all was quiet, so I took heart once more. I looked round, and there was the tin box on the shelf. I had as much right to it as Peter Carey, anyhow, so I took it with me and left the hut. Like a fool I left my baccy-pouch upon the table.\n\n\"Now I'll tell you the queerest part of the whole story. I had hardly got outside the hut when I heard someone coming, and I hid among the bushes. A man came slinking along, went into the hut, gave a cry as if he had seen a ghost, and legged it as hard as he could run until he was out of sight. Who he was or what he wanted is more than I can tell. For my part I walked ten miles, got a train at Tunbridge Wells, and so reached London, and no one the wiser.\n\n\"Well, when I came to examine the box I found there was no money in it, and nothing but papers that I would not dare to sell. I had lost my hold on Black Peter and was stranded in London without a shilling. There was only my trade left. I saw these advertisements about harpooners, and high wages, so I went to the shipping agents, and they sent me here. That's all I know, and I say again that if I killed Black Peter, the law should give me thanks, for I saved them the price of a hempen rope.\"\n\n\"A very clear statement,\" said Holmes, rising and lighting his pipe. \"I think, Hopkins, that you should lose no time in conveying your prisoner to a place of safety. This room is not well adapted for a cell, and Mr. Patrick Cairns occupies too large a proportion of our carpet.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes,\" said Hopkins, \"I do not know how to express my gratitude. Even now I do not understand how you attained this result.\"\n\n\"Simply by having the good fortune to get the right clue from the beginning. It is very possible if I had known about this notebook it might have led away my thoughts, as it did yours. But all I heard pointed in the one direction. The amazing strength, the skill in the use of the harpoon, the rum and water, the sealskin tobacco-pouch with the coarse tobacco\u2014all these pointed to a seaman, and one who had been a whaler. I was convinced that the initials 'P. C.' upon the pouch were a coincidence, and not those of Peter Carey, since he seldom smoked, and no pipe was found in his cabin. You remember that I asked whether whisky and brandy were in the cabin. You said they were. How many landsmen are there who would drink rum when they could get these other spirits? Yes, I was certain it was a seaman.\"\n\n\"And how did you find him?\"\n\n\"My dear sir, the problem had become a very simple one. If it were a seaman, it could only be a seaman who had been with him on the Sea Unicorn. So far as I could learn he had sailed in no other ship. I spent three days in wiring to Dundee, and at the end of that time I had ascertained the names of the crew of the Sea Unicorn in 1883. When I found Patrick Cairns among the harpooners, my research was nearing its end. I argued that the man was probably in London, and that he would desire to leave the country for a time. I therefore spent some days in the East End, devised an Arctic expedition, put forth tempting terms for harpooners who would serve under Captain Basil\u2014and behold the result!\"\n\n\"Wonderful!\" cried Hopkins. \"Wonderful!\"\n\n\"You must obtain the release of young Neligan as soon as possible,\" said Holmes. \"I confess that I think you owe him some apology. The tin box must be returned to him, but, of course, the securities which Peter Carey has sold are lost forever. There's the cab, Hopkins, and you can remove your man. If you want me for the trial, my address and that of Watson will be somewhere in Norway\u2014I'll send particulars later.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON", + "text": "It is years since the incidents of which I speak took place, and yet it is with diffidence that I allude to them. For a long time, even with the utmost discretion and reticence, it would have been impossible to make the facts public, but now the principal person concerned is beyond the reach of human law, and with due suppression the story may be told in such fashion as to injure no one. It records an absolutely unique experience in the career both of Mr. Sherlock Holmes and of myself. The reader will excuse me if I conceal the date or any other fact by which he might trace the actual occurrence.\n\nWe had been out for one of our evening rambles, Holmes and I, and had returned about six o'clock on a cold, frosty winter's evening. As Holmes turned up the lamp the light fell upon a card on the table. He glanced at it, and then, with an ejaculation of disgust, threw it on the floor. I picked it up and read:\n\n\u2002CHARLES AUGUSTUS MILVERTON,\n\n\u2002Appledore Towers,\n\n\u2002Hampstead.\n\n\u2002Agent.\n\n\"Who is he?\" I asked.\n\n\"The worst man in London,\" Holmes answered, as he sat down and stretched his legs before the fire. \"Is anything on the back of the card?\"\n\nI turned it over.\n\n\"Will call at 6:30\u2014C. A. M.,\" I read.\n\n\"Hum! He's about due. Do you feel a creeping, shrinking sensation, Watson, when you stand before the serpents in the Zoo, and see the slith ery, gliding, venomous creatures, with their deadly eyes and wicked, flattened faces? Well, that's how Milverton impresses me. I've had to do with fifty murderers in my career, but the worst of them never gave me the repulsion which I have for this fellow. And yet I can't get out of doing business with him\u2014indeed, he is here at my invitation.\"\n\n\"But who is he?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you, Watson. He is the king of all the blackmailers. Heaven help the man, and still more the woman, whose secret and reputation come into the power of Milverton! With a smiling face and a heart of marble, he will squeeze and squeeze until he has drained them dry. The fellow is a genius in his way, and would have made his mark in some more savoury trade. His method is as follows: He allows it to be known that he is prepared to pay very high sums for letters which compromise people of wealth and position. He receives these wares not only from treacherous valets or maids, but frequently from genteel ruffians, who have gained the confidence and affection of trusting women. He deals with no niggard hand. I happen to know that he paid seven hundred pounds to a footman for a note two lines in length, and that the ruin of a noble family was the result. Everything which is in the market goes to Milverton, and there are hundreds in this great city who turn white at his name. No one knows where his grip may fall, for he is far too rich and far too cunning to work from hand to mouth. He will hold a card back for years in order to play it at the moment when the stake is best worth winning. I have said that he is the worst man in London, and I would ask you how could one compare the ruffian, who in hot blood bludgeons his mate, with this man, who methodically and at his leisure tortures the soul and wrings the nerves in order to add to his already swollen money-bags?\"\n\nI had seldom heard my friend speak with such intensity of feeling.\n\n\"But surely,\" said I, \"the fellow must be within the grasp of the law?\"\n\n\"Technically, no doubt, but practically not. What would it profit a woman, for example, to get him a few months' imprisonment if her own ruin must immediately follow? His victims dare not hit back. If ever he blackmailed an innocent person, then indeed we should have him, but he is as cunning as the Evil One. No, no, we must find other ways to fight him.\"\n\n\"And why is he here?\"\n\n\"Because an illustrious client has placed her piteous case in my hands. It is the Lady Eva Blackwell, the most beautiful debutante of last season. She is to be married in a fortnight to the Earl of Dovercourt. This fiend has several imprudent letters\u2014imprudent, Watson, nothing worse\u2014which were written to an impecunious young squire in the country. They would suffice to break off the match. Milverton will send the letters to the Earl unless a large sum of money is paid him. I have been commissioned to meet him, and\u2014to make the best terms I can.\"\n\nAt that instant there was a clatter and a rattle in the street below. Looking down I saw a stately carriage and pair, the brilliant lamps gleaming on the glossy haunches of the noble chestnuts. A footman opened the door, and a small, stout man in a shaggy astrakhan overcoat descended. A minute later he was in the room.\n\nCharles Augustus Milverton was a man of fifty, with a large, intellectual head, a round, plump, hairless face, a perpetual frozen smile, and two keen gray eyes, which gleamed brightly from behind broad, gold-rimmed glasses. There was something of Mr. Pickwick's benevolence in his appearance, marred only by the insincerity of the fixed smile and by the hard glitter of those restless and penetrating eyes. His voice was as smooth and suave as his countenance, as he advanced with a plump little hand extended, murmuring his regret for having missed us at his first visit. Holmes disregarded the outstretched hand and looked at him with a face of granite. Milverton's smile broadened, he shrugged his shoulders, re moved his overcoat, folded it with great deliberation over the back of a chair, and then took a seat.\n\n\"This gentleman?\" said he, with a wave in my direction. \"Is it discreet? Is it right?\"\n\n\"Dr. Watson is my friend and partner.\"\n\n\"Very good, Mr. Holmes. It is only in your client's interests that I protested. The matter is so very delicate\u2014\"\n\n\"Dr. Watson has already heard of it.\"\n\n\"Then we can proceed to business. You say that you are acting for Lady Eva. Has she empowered you to accept my terms?\"\n\n\"What are your terms?\"\n\n\"Seven thousand pounds.\"\n\n\"And the alternative?\"\n\n\"My dear sir, it is painful for me to discuss it, but if the money is not paid on the 14th, there certainly will be no marriage on the 18th.\" His insufferable smile was more complacent than ever.\n\nHolmes thought for a little.\n\n\"You appear to me,\" he said, at last, \"to be taking matters too much for granted. I am, of course, familiar with the contents of these letters. My client will certainly do what I may advise. I shall counsel her to tell her future husband the whole story and to trust to his generosity.\"\n\nMilverton chuckled.\n\n\"You evidently do not know the Earl,\" said he.\n\nFrom the baffled look upon Holmes's face, I could see clearly that he did.\n\n\"What harm is there in the letters?\" he asked.\n\n\"They are sprightly\u2014very sprightly,\" Milverton answered. \"The lady was a charming correspondent. But I can assure you that the Earl of Dovercourt would fail to appreciate them. However, since you think otherwise, we will let it rest at that. It is purely a matter of business. If you think that it is in the best interests of your client that these letters should be placed in the hands of the Earl, then you would indeed be foolish to pay so large a sum of money to regain them.\" He rose and seized his astrakhan coat.\n\nHolmes was gray with anger and mortification.\n\n\"Wait a little,\" he said. \"You go too fast. We should certainly make every effort to avoid scandal in so delicate a matter.\"\n\nMilverton relapsed into his chair.\n\n\"I was sure that you would see it in that light,\" he purred.\n\n\"At the same time,\" Holmes continued, \"Lady Eva is not a wealthy woman. I assure you that two thousand pounds would be a drain upon her resources, and that the sum you name is utterly beyond her power. I beg, therefore, that you will moderate your demands, and that you will return the letters at the price I indicate, which is, I assure you, the highest that you can get.\"\n\nMilverton's smile broadened and his eyes twinkled humorously.\n\n\"I am aware that what you say is true about the lady's resources,\" said he. \"At the same time you must admit that the occasion of a lady's marriage is a very suitable time for her friends and relatives to make some little effort upon her behalf. They may hesitate as to an acceptable wedding present. Let me assure them that this little bundle of letters would give more joy than all the candelabra and butter-dishes in London.\"\n\n\"It is impossible,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Dear me, dear me, how unfortunate!\" cried Milverton, taking out a bulky pocketbook. \"I cannot help thinking that ladies are ill-advised in not making an effort. Look at this!\" He held up a little note with a coat-of-arms upon the envelope. \"That belongs to\u2014well, perhaps it is hardly fair to tell the name until to-morrow morning. But at that time it will be in the hands of the lady's husband. And all because she will not find a beggarly sum which she could get by turning her diamonds into paste. It is such a pity! Now, you remember the sudden end of the engagement between the Honourable Miss Miles and Colonel Dorking? Only two days before the wedding, there was a paragraph in the Morning Post to say that it was all off. And why? It is almost incredible, but the absurd sum of twelve hundred pounds would have settled the whole question. Is it not pitiful? And here I find you, a man of sense, boggling about terms, when your client's future and honour are at stake. You surprise me, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"What I say is true,\" Holmes answered. \"The money cannot be found. Surely it is better for you to take the substantial sum which I offer than to ruin this woman's career, which can profit you in no way?\"\n\n\"There you make a mistake, Mr. Holmes. An exposure would profit me indirectly to a considerable extent. I have eight or ten similar cases maturing. If it was circulated among them that I had made a severe example of the Lady Eva, I should find all of them much more open to reason. You see my point?\"\n\nHolmes sprang from his chair.\n\n\"Get behind him, Watson! Don't let him out! Now, sir, let us see the contents of that notebook.\"\n\nMilverton had glided as quick as a rat to the side of the room and stood with his back against the wall.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, Mr. Holmes,\" he said, turning the front of his coat and exhibiting the butt of a large revolver, which projected from the inside pocket. \"I have been expecting you to do something original. This has been done so often, and what good has ever come from it? I assure you that I am armed to the teeth, and I am perfectly prepared to use my weapons, knowing that the law will support me. Besides, your supposition that I would bring the letters here in a notebook is entirely mistaken. I would do nothing so foolish. And now, gentlemen, I have one or two little interviews this evening, and it is a long drive to Hampstead.\" He stepped forward, took up his coat, laid his hand on his revolver, and turned to the door. I picked up a chair, but Holmes shook his head, and I laid it down again. With a bow, a smile, and a twinkle, Milverton was out of the room, and a few moments after we heard the slam of the carriage door and the rattle of the wheels as he drove away.\n\nHolmes sat motionless by the fire, his hands buried deep in his trouser pockets, his chin sunk upon his breast, his eyes fixed upon the glowing embers. For half an hour he was silent and still. Then, with the gesture of a man who has taken his decision, he sprang to his feet and passed into his bedroom. A little later a rakish young workman, with a goatee beard and a swagger, lit his clay pipe at the lamp before descending into the street. \"I'll be back some time, Watson,\" said he, and vanished into the night. I understood that he had opened his campaign against Charles Augustus Milverton, but I little dreamed the strange shape which that campaign was destined to take.\n\nFor some days Holmes came and went at all hours in this attire, but beyond a remark that his time was spent at Hampstead, and that it was not wasted, I knew nothing of what he was doing. At last, however, on a wild, tempestuous evening, when the wind screamed and rattled against the windows, he returned from his last expedition, and having removed his disguise he sat before the fire and laughed heartily in his silent inward fashion.\n\n\"You would not call me a marrying man, Watson?\"\n\n\"No, indeed!\"\n\n\"You'll be interested to hear that I'm engaged.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow! I congrat\u2014\"\n\n\"To Milverton's housemaid.\"\n\n\"Good heavens, Holmes!\"\n\n\"I wanted information, Watson.\"\n\n\"Surely you have gone too far?\"\n\n\"It was a most necessary step. I am a plumber with a rising business, Escott, by name. I have walked out with her each evening, and I have talked with her. Good heavens, those talks! However, I have got all I wanted. I know Milverton's house as I know the palm of my hand.\"\n\n\"But the girl, Holmes?\"\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"You can't help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table. However, I rejoice to say that I have a hated rival, who will certainly cut me out the instant that my back is turned. What a splendid night it is!\"\n\n\"You like this weather?\"\n\n\"It suits my purpose. Watson, I mean to burgle Milverton's house to night.\"\n\nI had a catching of the breath, and my skin went cold at the words, which were slowly uttered in a tone of concentrated resolution. As a flash of lightning in the night shows up in an instant every detail of a wild landscape, so at one glance I seemed to see every possible result of such an action\u2014the detection, the capture, the honoured career ending in irreparable failure and disgrace, my friend himself lying at the mercy of the odious Milverton.\n\n\"For heaven's sake, Holmes, think what you are doing,\" I cried.\n\n\"My dear fellow, I have given it every consideration. I am never precipitate in my actions, nor would I adopt so energetic and, indeed, so dangerous a course, if any other were possible. Let us look at the matter clearly and fairly. I suppose that you will admit that the action is morally justifiable, though technically criminal. To burgle his house is no more than to forcibly take his pocketbook\u2014an action in which you were prepared to aid me.\"\n\nI turned it over in my mind.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"it is morally justifiable so long as our object is to take no articles save those which are used for an illegal purpose.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Since it is morally justifiable, I have only to consider the question of personal risk. Surely a gentleman should not lay much stress upon this, when a lady is in most desperate need of his help?\"\n\n\"You will be in such a false position.\"\n\n\"Well, that is part of the risk. There is no other possible way of regaining these letters. The unfortunate lady has not the money, and there are none of her people in whom she could confide. To-morrow is the last day of grace, and unless we can get the letters to-night, this villain will be as good as his word and will bring about her ruin. I must, therefore, abandon my client to her fate or I must play this last card. Between ourselves, Watson, it's a sporting duel between this fellow Milverton and me. He had, as you saw, the best of the first exchanges, but my self-respect and my reputation are concerned to fight it to a finish.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't like it, but I suppose it must be,\" said I. \"When do we start?\"\n\n\"You are not coming.\"\n\n\"Then you are not going,\" said I. \"I give you my word of honour\u2014and I never broke it in my life\u2014that I will take a cab straight to the police-station and give you away, unless you let me share this adventure with you.\"\n\n\"You can't help me.\"\n\n\"How do you know that? You can't tell what may happen. Anyway, my resolution is taken. Other people besides you have self-respect, and even reputations.\"\n\nHolmes had looked annoyed, but his brow cleared, and he clapped me on the shoulder.\n\n\"Well, well, my dear fellow, be it so. We have shared this same room for some years, and it would be amusing if we ended by sharing the same cell. You know, Watson, I don't mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. This is the chance of my lifetime in that direction. See here!\" He took a neat little leather case out of a drawer, and opening it he exhibited a number of shining instruments. \"This is a first-class, up-to-date burgling kit, with nickel-plated jemmy, diamond-tipped glass-cutter, adaptable keys, and every modern improvement which the march of civilization demands. Here, too, is my dark lantern. Everything is in order. Have you a pair of silent shoes?\"\n\n\"I have rubber-soled tennis shoes.\"\n\n\"Excellent! And a mask?\"\n\n\"I can make a couple out of black silk.\"\n\n\"I can see that you have a strong, natural turn for this sort of thing. Very good, do make the masks. We shall have some cold supper before we start. It is now nine-thirty. At eleven we shall drive as far as Church Row. It is a quarter of an hour's walk from there to Appledore Towers. We shall be at work before midnight. Milverton is a heavy sleeper, and retires punctually at ten-thirty. With any luck we should be back here by two, with the Lady Eva's letters in my pocket.\"\n\nHolmes and I put on our dress-clothes, so that we might appear to be two theatre-goers homeward bound. In Oxford Street we picked up a hansom and drove to an address in Hampstead. Here we paid off our cab, and with our great coats buttoned up, for it was bitterly cold, and the wind seemed to blow through us, we walked along the edge of the heath.\n\n\"It's a business that needs delicate treatment,\" said Holmes. \"These documents are contained in a safe in the fellow's study, and the study is the ante-room of his bed-chamber. On the other hand, like all these stout, little men who do themselves well, he is a plethoric sleeper, Agatha\u2014that's my fianc\u00e9e\u2014says it is a joke in the servants' hall that it's impossible to wake the master. He has a secretary who is devoted to his interests, and never budges from the study all day. That's why we are going at night. Then he has a beast of a dog which roams the garden. I met Agatha late the last two evenings, and she locks the brute up so as to give me a clear run. This is the house, this big one in its own grounds. Through the gate\u2014now to the right among the laurels. We might put on our masks here, I think. You see, there is not a glimmer of light in any of the windows, and everything is working splendidly.\"\n\nWith our black silk face-coverings, which turned us into two of the most truculent figures in London, we stole up to the silent, gloomy house. A sort of tiled veranda extended along one side of it, lined by several windows and two doors.\n\n\"That's his bedroom,\" Holmes whispered. \"This door opens straight into the study. It would suit us best, but it is bolted as well as locked, and we should make too much noise getting in. Come round here. There's a greenhouse which opens into the drawing-room.\"\n\nThe place was locked, but Holmes removed a circle of glass and turned the key from the inside. An instant afterwards he had closed the door behind us, and we had become felons in the eyes of the law. The thick, warm air of the conservatory and the rich, choking fragrance of exotic plants took us by the throat. He seized my hand in the darkness and led me swiftly past banks of shrubs which brushed against our faces. Holmes had remarkable powers, carefully cultivated, of seeing in the dark. Still holding my hand in one of his, he opened a door, and I was vaguely conscious that we had entered a large room in which a cigar had been smoked not long before. He felt his way among the furniture, opened another door, and closed it behind us. Putting out my hand I felt several coats hanging from the wall, and I understood that I was in a passage. We passed along it, and Holmes very gently opened a door upon the right-hand side. Something rushed out at us and my heart sprang into my mouth. but I could have laughed when I realized that it was the cat. A fire was burning in this new room, and again the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. Holmes entered on tiptoe, waited for me to follow, and then very gently closed the door. We were in Milverton's study, and a portiere at the farther side showed the entrance to his bedroom.\n\nIt was a good fire, and the room was illuminated by it. Near the door I saw the gleam of an electric switch, but it was unnecessary, even if it had been safe, to turn it on. At one side of the fireplace was a heavy curtain which covered the bay window we had seen from outside. On the other side was the door which communicated with the veranda. A desk stood in the centre, with a turning-chair of shining red leather. Opposite was a large bookcase, with a marble bust of Athene on the top. In the corner, between the bookcase and the wall, there stood a tall green safe, the firelight flashing back from the polished brass knobs upon its face. Holmes stole across and looked at it. Then he crept to the door of the bedroom, and stood with slanting head listening intently. No sound came from within. Meanwhile it had struck me that it would be wise to secure our retreat through the outer door, so I examined it. To my amazement, it was neither locked nor bolted. I touched Holmes on the arm, and he turned his masked face in that direction. I saw him start, and he was evidently as surprised as I.\n\n\"I don't like it,\" he whispered, putting his lips to my very ear. \"I can't quite make it out. Anyhow, we have no time to lose.\"\n\n\"Can I do anything?\"\n\n\"Yes, stand by the door. If you hear anyone come, bolt it on the inside, and we can get away as we came. If they come the other way, we can get through the door if our job is done, or hide behind these window curtains if it is not. Do you understand?\"\n\nI nodded, and stood by the door. My first feeling of fear had passed away, and I thrilled now with a keener zest than I had ever enjoyed when we were the defenders of the law instead of its defiers. The high object of our mission, the consciousness that it was unselfish and chivalrous, the villainous character of our opponent, all added to the sporting interest of the adventure. Far from feeling guilty, I rejoiced and exulted in our dangers. With a glow of admiration I watched Holmes unrolling his case of instruments and choosing his tool with the calm, scientific accuracy of a surgeon who performs a delicate operation. I knew that the opening of safes was a particular hobby with him, and I understood the joy which it gave him to be confronted with this green and gold monster, the dragon which held in its maw the reputations of many fair ladies. Turning up the cuffs of his dress-coat\u2014he had placed his overcoat on a chair\u2014Holmes laid out two drills, a jemmy, and several skeleton keys. I stood at the centre door with my eyes glancing at each of the others, ready for any emergency, though, indeed, my plans were somewhat vague as to what I should do if we were interrupted. For half an hour, Holmes worked with concentrated energy, laying down one tool, picking up another, handling each with the strength and delicacy of the trained mechanic. Finally I heard a click, the broad green door swung open, and inside I had a glimpse of a number of paper packets, each tied, sealed, and inscribed. Holmes picked one out, but it was hard to read by the flickering fire, and he drew out his little dark lantern, for it was too dangerous, with Milverton in the next room, to switch on the electric light. Suddenly I saw him halt, listen intently, and then in an instant he had swung the door of the safe to, picked up his coat, stuffed his tools into the pockets, and darted behind the window curtain, motioning me to do the same.\n\nIt was only when I had joined him there that I heard what had alarmed his quicker senses. There was a noise somewhere within the house. A door slammed in the distance. Then a confused, dull murmur broke itself into the measured thud of heavy footsteps rapidly approaching. They were in the passage outside the room. They paused at the door. The door opened. There was a sharp snick as the electric light was turned on. The door closed once more, and the pungent reek of a strong cigar was borne to our nostrils. Then the footsteps continued backward and forward, backward and forward, within a few yards of us. Finally there was a creak from a chair, and the footsteps ceased. Then a key clicked in a lock, and I heard the rustle of papers.\n\nSo far I had not dared to look out, but now I gently parted the division of the curtains in front of me and peeped through. From the pressure of Holmes's shoulder against mine, I knew that he was sharing my observations. Right in front of us, and almost within our reach, was the broad, rounded back of Milverton. It was evident that we had entirely miscalculated his movements, that he had never been to his bedroom, but that he had been sitting up in some smoking or billiard room in the farther wing of the house, the windows of which we had not seen. His broad, grizzled head, with its shining patch of baldness, was in the immediate foreground of our vision. He was leaning far back in the red leather chair, his legs outstretched, a long, black cigar projecting at an angle from his mouth. He wore a semi-military smoking jacket, claret-coloured, with a black velvet collar. In his hand he held a long, legal document which he was reading in an indolent fashion, blowing rings of tobacco smoke from his lips as he did so. There was no promise of a speedy departure in his composed bearing and his comfortable attitude.\n\nI felt Holmes's hand steal into mine and give me a reassuring shake, as if to say that the situation was within his powers, and that he was easy in his mind. I was not sure whether he had seen what was only too obvious from my position, that the door of the safe was imperfectly closed, and that Milverton might at any moment observe it. In my own mind I had determined that if I were sure, from the rigidity of his gaze, that it had caught his eye, I would at once spring out, throw my great coat over his head, pinion him, and leave the rest to Holmes. But Milverton never looked up. He was languidly interested by the papers in his hand, and page after page was turned as he followed the argument of the lawyer. At least, I thought, when he has finished the document and the cigar he will go to his room, but before he had reached the end of either, there came a remarkable development, which turned our thoughts into quite another channel.\n\nSeveral times I had observed that Milverton looked at his watch, and once he had risen and sat down again, with a gesture of impatience. The idea, however, that he might have an appointment at so strange an hour never occurred to me until a faint sound reached my ears from the veranda outside. Milverton dropped his papers and sat rigid in his chair. The sound was repeated, and then there came a gentle tap at the door. Milverton rose and opened it.\n\n\"Well,\" said he, curtly, \"you are nearly half an hour late.\"\n\nSo this was the explanation of the unlocked door and of the nocturnal vigil of Milverton. There was the gentle rustle of a woman's dress. I had closed the slit between the curtains as Milverton's face had turned in our direction, but now I ventured very carefully to open it once more. He had resumed his seat, the cigar still projecting at an insolent angle from the corner of his mouth. In front of him, in the full glare of the electric light, there stood a tall, slim, dark woman, a veil over her face, a mantle drawn round her chin. Her breath came quick and fast, and every inch of the lithe figure was quivering with strong emotion.\n\n\"Well,\" said Milverton, \"you made me lose a good night's rest, my dear. I hope you'll prove worth it. You couldn't come any other time\u2014eh?\"\n\nThe woman shook her head.\n\n\"Well, if you couldn't you couldn't. If the Countess is a hard mistress, you have your chance to get level with her now. Bless the girl, what are you shivering about? That's right. Pull yourself together. Now, let us get down to business.\" He took a notebook from the drawer of his desk. \"You say that you have five letters which compromise the Countess d'Albert. You want to sell them. I want to buy them. So far so good. It only remains to fix a price. I should want to inspect the letters, of course. If they are really good specimens\u2014Great heavens, is it you?\"\n\nThe woman, without a word, had raised her veil and dropped the mantle from her chin. It was a dark, handsome, clear-cut face which confronted Milverton\u2014a face with a curved nose, strong, dark eyebrows shading hard, glittering eyes, and a straight, thin-lipped mouth set in a dangerous smile.\n\n\"It is I,\" she said, \"the woman whose life you have ruined.\"\n\nMilverton laughed, but fear vibrated in his voice. \"You were so very obstinate,\" said he. \"Why did you drive me to such extremities? I assure you I wouldn't hurt a fly of my own accord, but every man has his business, and what was I to do? I put the price well within your means. You would not pay.\"\n\n\"So you sent the letters to my husband, and he\u2014the noblest gentleman that ever lived, a man whose boots I was never worthy to lace\u2014he broke his gallant heart and died. You remember that last night, when I came through that door, I begged and prayed you for mercy, and you laughed in my face as you are trying to laugh now, only your coward heart cannot keep your lips from twitching. Yes, you never thought to see me here again, but it was that night which taught me how I could meet you face to face, and alone. Well, Charles Milverton, what have you to say?\"\n\n\"Don't imagine that you can bully me,\" said he, rising to his feet. \"I have only to raise my voice, and I could call my servants and have you arrested. But I will make allowance for your natural anger. Leave the room at once as you came, and I will say no more.\"\n\nThe woman stood with her hand buried in her bosom, and the same deadly smile on her thin lips.\n\n\"You will ruin no more lives as you have ruined mine. You will wring no more hearts as you wrung mine. I will free the world of a poisonous thing. Take that, you hound\u2014and that!\u2014and that!\u2014and that!\u2014and that!\"\n\nShe had drawn a little gleaming revolver, and emptied barrel after barrel into Milverton's body, the muzzle within two feet of his shirt front. He shrank away and then fell forward upon the table, coughing furiously and clawing among the papers. Then he staggered to his feet, received another shot, and rolled upon the floor. \"You've done me,\" he cried, and lay still. The woman looked at him intently, and ground her heel into his upturned face. She looked again, but there was no sound or movement. I heard a sharp rustle, the night air blew into the heated room, and the avenger was gone.\n\nNo interference upon our part could have saved the man from his fate, but, as the woman poured bullet after bullet into Milverton's shrinking body I was about to spring out, when I felt Holmes's cold, strong grasp upon my wrist. I understood the whole argument of that firm, restraining grip\u2014that it was no affair of ours, that justice had overtaken a villain, that we had our own duties and our own objects, which were not to be lost sight of. But hardly had the woman rushed from the room when Holmes, with swift, silent steps, was over at the other door. He turned the key in the lock. At the same instant we heard voices in the house and the sound of hurrying feet. The revolver shots had roused the household. With perfect coolness Holmes slipped across to the safe, filled his two arms with bundles of letters, and poured them all into the fire. Again and again he did it, until the safe was empty. Someone turned the handle and beat upon the outside of the door. Holmes looked swiftly round. The letter which had been the messenger of death for Milverton lay, all mottled with his blood, upon the table. Holmes tossed it in among the blazing papers. Then he drew the key from the outer door, passed through after me, and locked it on the outside. \"This way, Watson,\" said he, \"we can scale the garden wall in this direction.\"\n\nI could not have believed that an alarm could have spread so swiftly. Looking back, the huge house was one blaze of light. The front door was open, and figures were rushing down the drive. The whole garden was alive with people, and one fellow raised a view-halloa as we emerged from the veranda and followed hard at our heels. Holmes seemed to know the grounds perfectly, and he threaded his way swiftly among a plantation of small trees, I close at his heels, and our foremost pursuer panting behind us. It was a six-foot wall which barred our path, but he sprang to the top and over. As I did the same I felt the hand of the man behind me grab at my ankle, but I kicked myself free and scrambled over a grass-strewn coping. I fell upon my face among some bushes, but Holmes had me on my feet in an instant, and together we dashed away across the huge expanse of Hampstead Heath. We had run two miles, I suppose, before Holmes at last halted and listened intently. All was absolute silence behind us. We had shaken off our pursuers and were safe.\n\nWe had breakfasted and were smoking our morning pipe on the day after the remarkable experience which I have recorded, when Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, very solemn and impressive, was ushered into our modest sitting-room.\n\n\"Good-morning, Mr. Holmes,\" said he; \"good-morning. May I ask if you are very busy just now?\"\n\n\"Not too busy to listen to you.\"\n\n\"I thought that, perhaps, if you had nothing particular on hand, you might care to assist us in a most remarkable case, which occurred only last night at Hampstead.\"\n\n\"Dear me!\" said Holmes. \"What was that?\"\n\n\"A murder\u2014a most dramatic and remarkable murder. I know how keen you are upon these things, and I would take it as a great favour if you would step down to Appledore Towers, and give us the benefit of your advice. It is no ordinary crime. We have had our eyes upon this Mr. Milverton for some time, and, between ourselves, he was a bit of a villain. He is known to have held papers which he used for blackmailing purposes. These papers have all been burned by the murderers. No article of value was taken, as it is probable that the criminals were men of good position, whose sole object was to prevent social exposure.\"\n\n\"Criminals?\" said Holmes. \"Plural?\"\n\n\"Yes, there were two of them. They were as nearly as possible captured red-handed. We have their footmarks, we have their description, it's ten to one that we trace them. The first fellow was a bit too active, but the second was caught by the undergardener, and only got away after a struggle. He was a middle-sized, strongly built man\u2014square jaw, thick neck, moustache, a mask over his eyes.\"\n\n\"That's rather vague,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"Why, it might be a description of Watson!\"\n\n\"It's true,\" said the inspector, with amusement. \"It might be a description of Watson.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm afraid I can't help you, Lestrade,\" said Holmes. \"The fact is that I knew this fellow Milverton, that I considered him one of the most dangerous men in London, and that I think there are certain crimes which the law cannot touch, and which therefore, to some extent, justify private revenge. No, it's no use arguing. I have made up my mind. My sympathies are with the criminals rather than with the victim, and I will not handle this case.\"\n\nHolmes had not said one word to me about the tragedy which we had witnessed, but I observed all the morning that he was in his most thoughtful mood, and he gave me the impression, from his vacant eyes and his abstracted manner, of a man who is striving to recall something to his memory. We were in the middle of our lunch, when he suddenly sprang to his feet. \"By Jove, Watson, I've got it!\" he cried. \"Take your hat! Come with me!\" He hurried at his top speed down Baker Street and along Oxford Street, until we had almost reached Regent Circus. Here, on the left hand, there stands a shop window filled with photographs of the celebrities and beauties of the day. Holmes's eyes fixed themselves upon one of them, and following his gaze I saw the picture of a regal and stately lady in Court dress, with a high diamond tiara upon her noble head. I looked at that delicately curved nose, at the marked eyebrows, at the straight mouth, and the strong little chin beneath it. Then I caught my breath as I read the time-honoured title of the great nobleman and statesman whose wife she had been. My eyes met those of Holmes, and he put his finger to his lips as we turned away from the window." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE SIX NAPOLEONS", + "text": "It was no very unusual thing for Mr. Lestrade, of Scotland Yard, to look in upon us of an evening, and his visits were welcome to Sherlock Holmes, for they enabled him to keep in touch with all that was going on at the police headquarters. In return for the news which Lestrade would bring, Holmes was always ready to listen with attention to the details of any case upon which the detective was engaged, and was able occasionally, without any active interference, to give some hint or suggestion drawn from his own vast knowledge and experience.\n\nOn this particular evening, Lestrade had spoken of the weather and the newspapers. Then he had fallen silent, puffing thoughtfully at his cigar. Holmes looked keenly at him.\n\n\"Anything remarkable on hand?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oh, no, Mr. Holmes\u2014nothing very particular.\"\n\n\"Then tell me about it.\"\n\nLestrade laughed.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, there is no use denying that there is something on my mind. And yet it is such an absurd business, that I hesitated to bother you about it. On the other hand, although it is trivial, it is undoubtedly queer, and I know that you have a taste for all that is out of the common. But, in my opinion, it comes more in Dr. Watson's line than ours.\"\n\n\"Disease?\" said I.\n\n\"Madness, anyhow. And a queer madness, too. You wouldn't think there was anyone living at this time of day who had such a hatred of Napoleon the First that he would break any image of him that he could see.\"\n\nHolmes sank back in his chair.\n\n\"That's no business of mine,\" said he.\n\n\"Exactly. That's what I said. But then, when the man commits burglary in order to break images which are not his own, that brings it away from the doctor and on to the policeman.\"\n\nHolmes sat up again.\n\n\"Burglary! This is more interesting. Let me hear the details.\"\n\nLestrade took out his official notebook and refreshed his memory from its pages.\n\n\"The first case reported was four days ago,\" said he. \"It was at the shop of Morse Hudson, who has a place for the sale of pictures and statues in the Kennington Road. The assistant had left the front shop for an instant, when he heard a crash, and hurrying in he found a plaster bust of Napoleon, which stood with several other works of art upon the counter, lying shivered into fragments. He rushed out into the road, but, although several passers-by declared that they had noticed a man run out of the shop, he could neither see anyone nor could he find any means of identifying the rascal. It seemed to be one of those senseless acts of Hooliganism which occur from time to time, and it was reported to the constable on the beat as such. The plaster cast was not worth more than a few shillings, and the whole affair appeared to be too childish for any particular investigation.\n\n\"The second case, however, was more serious, and also more singular. It occurred only last night.\n\n\"In Kennington Road, and within a few hundred yards of Morse Hudson's shop, there lives a well-known medical practitioner, named Dr. Barnicot, who has one of the largest practices upon the south side of the Thames. His residence and principal consulting-room is at Kennington Road, but he has a branch surgery and dispensary at Lower Brixton Road, two miles away. This Dr. Barnicot is an enthusiastic admirer of Napoleon, and his house is full of books, pictures, and relics of the French Emperor. Some little time ago he purchased from Morse Hudson two duplicate plaster casts of the famous head of Napoleon by the French sculptor, Devine. One of these he placed in his hall in the house at Kennington Road, and the other on the mantelpiece of the surgery at Lower Brixton. Well, when Dr. Barnicot came down this morning he was astonished to find that his house had been burgled during the night, but that nothing had been taken save the plaster head from the hall. It had been carried out and had been dashed savagely against the garden wall, under which its splintered fragments were discovered.\"\n\nHolmes rubbed his hands.\n\n\"This is certainly very novel,\" said he.\n\n\"I thought it would please you. But I have not got to the end yet. Dr. Barnicot was due at his surgery at twelve o'clock, and you can imagine his amazement when, on arriving there, he found that the window had been opened in the night, and that the broken pieces of his second bust were strewn all over the room. It had been smashed to atoms where it stood. In neither case were there any signs which could give us a clue as to the criminal or lunatic who had done the mischief. Now, Mr. Holmes, you have got the facts.\"\n\n\"They are singular, not to say grotesque,\" said Holmes. \"May I ask whether the two busts smashed in Dr. Barnicot's rooms were the exact duplicates of the one which was destroyed in Morse Hudson's shop?\"\n\n\"They were taken from the same mould.\"\n\n\"Such a fact must tell against the theory that the man who breaks them is influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon. Considering how many hundreds of statues of the great Emperor must exist in London, it is too much to suppose such a coincidence as that a promiscuous iconoclast should chance to begin upon three specimens of the same bust.\"\n\n\"Well, I thought as you do,\" said Lestrade. \"On the other hand, this Morse Hudson is the purveyor of busts in that part of London, and these three were the only ones which had been in his shop for years. So, although, as you say, there are many hundreds of statues in London, it is very probable that these three were the only ones in that district. Therefore, a local fanatic would begin with them. What do you think, Dr. Watson?\"\n\n\"There are no limits to the possibilities of monomania,\" I answered. \"There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'id\u00e9e fixe,' which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man who had read deeply about Napoleon, or who had possibly received some hereditary family injury through the great war, might conceivably form such an id\u00e9e fixe and under its influence be capable of any fantastic outrage.\"\n\n\"That won't do, my dear Watson,\" said Holmes, shaking his head, \"for no amount of id\u00e9e fixe would enable your interesting monomaniac to find out where these busts were situated.\"\n\n\"Well, how do you explain it?\"\n\n\"I don't attempt to do so. I would only observe that there is a certain method in the gentleman's eccentric proceedings. For example, in Dr. Barnicot's hall, where a sound might arouse the family, the bust was taken outside before being broken, whereas in the surgery, where there was less danger of an alarm, it was smashed where it stood. The affair seems absurdly trifling, and yet I dare call nothing trivial when I reflect that some of my most classic cases have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day. I can't afford, therefore, to smile at your three broken busts, Lestrade, and I shall be very much obliged to you if you will let me hear of any fresh development of so singular a chain of events.\"\n\nThe development for which my friend had asked came in a quicker and an infinitely more tragic form than he could have imagined. I was still dressing in my bedroom next morning, when there was a tap at the door and Holmes entered, a telegram in his hand. He read it aloud:\n\n\"Come instantly, 131 Pitt Street, Kensington.\n\n\"LESTRADE.\"\n\n\"What is it, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Don't know\u2014may be anything. But I suspect it is the sequel of the story of the statues. In that case our friend the image-breaker has begun operations in another quarter of London. There's coffee on the table, Watson, and I have a cab at the door.\"\n\nIn half an hour we had reached Pitt Street, a quiet little backwater just beside one of the briskest currents of London life. No. 131 was one of a row, all flat-chested, respectable, and most unromantic dwellings. As we drove up, we found the railings in front of the house lined by a curious crowd. Holmes whistled.\n\n\"By George! it's attempted murder at the least. Nothing less will hold the London message-boy. There's a deed of violence indicated in that fel low's round shoulders and outstretched neck. What's this, Watson? The top steps swilled down and the other ones dry. Footsteps enough, anyhow! Well, well, there's Lestrade at the front window, and we shall soon know all about it.\"\n\nThe official received us with a very grave face and showed us into a sitting-room, where an exceedingly unkempt and agitated elderly man, clad in a flannel dressing-gown, was pacing up and down. He was introduced to us as the owner of the house\u2014Mr. Horace Harker, of the Central Press Syndicate.\n\n\"It's the Napoleon bust business again,\" said Lestrade. \"You seemed interested last night, Mr. Holmes, so I thought perhaps you would be glad to be present now that the affair has taken a very much graver turn.\"\n\n\"What has it turned to, then?\"\n\n\"To murder. Mr. Harker, will you tell these gentlemen exactly what has occurred?\"\n\nThe man in the dressing-gown turned upon us with a most melancholy face.\n\n\"It's an extraordinary thing,\" said he, \"that all my life I have been collecting other people's news, and now that a real piece of news has come my own way I am so confused and bothered that I can't put two words together. If I had come in here as a journalist, I should have interviewed myself and had two columns in every evening paper. As it is, I am giving away valuable copy by telling my story over and over to a string of different people, and I can make no use of it myself. However, I've heard your name, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and if you'll only explain this queer business, I shall be paid for my trouble in telling you the story.\"\n\nHolmes sat down and listened.\n\n\"It all seems to centre round that bust of Napoleon which I bought for this very room about four months ago. I picked it up cheap from Harding Brothers, two doors from the High Street Station. A great deal of my journalistic work is done at night, and I often write until the early morning. So it was to-day. I was sitting in my den, which is at the back of the top of the house, about three o'clock, when I was convinced that I heard some sounds downstairs. I listened, but they were not repeated, and I concluded that they came from outside. Then suddenly, about five minutes later, there came a most horrible yell\u2014the most dreadful sound, Mr. Holmes, that ever I heard. It will ring in my ears as long as I live. I sat frozen with horror for a minute or two. Then I seized the poker and went downstairs. When I entered this room I found the window wide open, and I at once observed that the bust was gone from the mantelpiece. Why any burglar should take such a thing passes my understanding, for it was only a plaster cast and of no real value whatever.\n\n\"You can see for yourself that anyone going out through that open window could reach the front doorstep by taking a long stride. This was clearly what the burglar had done, so I went round and opened the door. Stepping out into the dark, I nearly fell over a dead man, who was lying there. I ran back for a light, and there was the poor fellow, a great gash in his throat and the whole place swimming in blood. He lay on his back, his knees drawn up, and his mouth horribly open. I shall see him in my dreams. I had just time to blow on my police-whistle, and then I must have fainted, for I knew nothing more until I found the policeman standing over me in the hall.\"\n\n\"Well, who was the murdered man?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"There's nothing to show who he was,\" said Lestrade. \"You shall see the body at the mortuary, but we have made nothing of it up to now. He is a tall man, sunburned, very powerful, not more than thirty. He is poorly dressed, and yet does not appear to be a labourer. A horn-handled clasp knife was lying in a pool of blood beside him. Whether it was the weapon which did the deed, or whether it belonged to the dead man, I do not know. There was no name on his clothing, and nothing in his pockets save an apple, some string, a shilling map of London, and a photograph. Here it is.\"\n\nIt was evidently taken by a snapshot from a small camera. It represented an alert, sharp-featured simian man, with thick eyebrows and a very peculiar projection of the lower part of the face, like the muzzle of a baboon.\n\n\"And what became of the bust?\" asked Holmes, after a careful study of this picture.\n\n\"We had news of it just before you came. It has been found in the front garden of an empty house in Campden House Road. It was broken into fragments. I am going round now to see it. Will you come?\"\n\n\"Certainly. I must just take one look round.\" He examined the carpet and the window. \"The fellow had either very long legs or was a most active man,\" said he. \"With an area beneath, it was no mean feat to reach that window-ledge and open that window. Getting back was comparatively simple. Are you coming with us to see the remains of your bust, Mr. Harker?\"\n\nThe disconsolate journalist had seated himself at a writing-table.\n\n\"I must try and make something of it,\" said he, \"though I have no doubt that the first editions of ther evening papers are out already with full details. It's like my luck! You remember when the stand fell at Don-caster? Well, I was the only journalist in the stand, and my journal the only one that had no account of it, for I was too shaken to write it. And now I'll be too late with a murder done on my own doorstep.\"\n\nAs we left the room, we heard his pen travelling shrilly over the foolscap.\n\nThe spot where the fragments of the bust had been found was only a few hundred yards away. For the first time our eyes rested upon this pre sentment of the great emperor, which seemed to raise such frantic and destructive hatred in the mind of the unknown. It lay scattered, in splintered shards, upon the grass. Holmes picked up several of them and examined them carefully. I was convinced, from his intent face and his purposeful manner, that at last he was upon a clue.\n\n\"Well?\" asked Lestrade.\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"We have a long way to go yet,\" said he. \"And yet\u2014and yet\u2014well, we have some suggestive facts to act upon. The possession of this trifling bust was worth more, in the eyes of this strange criminal, than a human life. That is one point. Then there is the singular fact that he did not break it in the house, or immediately outside the house, if to break it was his sole object.\"\n\n\"He was rattled and bustled by meeting this other fellow. He hardly knew what he was doing.\"\n\n\"Well, that's likely enough. But I wish to call your attention very particularly to the position of this house, in the garden of which the bust was destroyed.\"\n\nLestrade looked about him.\n\n\"It was an empty house, and so he knew that he would not be disturbed in the garden.\"\n\n\"Yes, but there is another empty house farther up the street which he must have passed before he came to this one. Why did he not break it there, since it is evident that every yard that he carried it increased the risk of someone meeting him?\"\n\n\"I give it up,\" said Lestrade.\n\nHolmes pointed to the street lamp above our heads.\n\n\"He could see what he was doing here, and he could not there. That was his reason.\"\n\n\"By Jove! that's true,\" said the detective. \"Now that I come to think of it, Dr. Barnicot's bust was broken not far from his red lamp. Well, Mr. Holmes, what are we to do with that fact?\"\n\n\"To remember it\u2014to docket it. We may come on something later which will bear upon it. What steps do you propose to take now, Lestrade?\"\n\n\"The most practical way of getting at it, in my opinion, is to identify the dead man. There should be no difficulty about that. When we have found who he is and who his associates are, we should have a good start in learning what he was doing in Pitt Street last night, and who it was who met him and killed him on the doorstep of Mr. Horace Harker. Don't you think so?\"\n\n\"No doubt; and yet it is not quite the way in which I should approach the case.\"\n\n\"What would you do then?\"\n\n\"Oh, you must not let me influence you in any way. I suggest that you go on your line and I on mine. We can compare notes afterwards, and each will supplement the other.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"If you are going back to Pitt Street, you might see Mr. Horace Harker. Tell him for me that I have quite made up my mind, and that it is certain that a dangerous homicidal lunatic, with Napoleonic delusions, was in his house last night. It will be useful for his article.\"\n\nLestrade stared.\n\n\"You don't seriously believe that?\"\n\nHolmes smiled.\n\n\"Don't I? Well, perhaps I don't. But I am sure that it will interest Mr. Horace Harker and the subscribers of the Central Press Syndicate. Now, Watson, I think that we shall find that we have a long and rather complex day's work before us. I should be glad, Lestrade, if you could make it convenient to meet us at Baker Street at six o'clock this evening. Until then I should like to keep this photograph, found in the dead man's pocket. It is possible that I may have to ask your company and assistance upon a small expedition which will have to be undertaken tonight, if my chain of reasoning should prove to be correct. Until then good-bye and good luck!\"\n\nSherlock Holmes and I walked together to the High Street, where we stopped at the shop of Harding Brothers, whence the bust had been purchased. A young assistant informed us that Mr. Harding would be absent until afternoon, and that he was himself a newcomer, who could give us no information. Holmes's face showed his disappointment and annoyance.\n\n\"Well, well, we can't expect to have it all our own way, Watson,\" he said, at last. \"We must come back in the afternoon, if Mr. Harding will not be here until then. I am, as you have no doubt surmised, endeavouring to trace these busts to their source, in order to find if there is not something peculiar which may account for their remarkable fate. Let us make for Mr. Morse Hudson, of the Kennington Road, and see if he can throw any light upon the problem.\"\n\nA drive of an hour brought us to the picture-dealer's establishment. He was a small, stout man with a red face and a peppery manner.\n\n\"Yes, sir. On my very counter, sir,\" said he. \"What we pay rates and taxes for I don't know, when any ruffian can come in and break one's goods. Yes, sir, it was I who sold Dr. Barnicot his two statues. Disgraceful, sir! A Nihilist plot\u2014that's what I make it. No one but an anarchist would go about breaking statues. Red republicans\u2014that's what I call 'em. Who did I get the statues from? I don't see what that has to do with it. Well, if you really want to know, I got them from Gelder & Co., in Church Street, Stepney. They are a well-known house in the trade, and have been this twenty years. How many had I? Three\u2014two and one are three\u2014two of Dr. Barnicot's, and one smashed in broad daylight on my own counter. Do I know that photograph? No, I don't. Yes, I do, though. Why, it's Beppo. He was a kind of Italian piece-work man, who made himself useful in the shop. He could carve a bit, and gild and frame, and do odd jobs. The fellow left me last week, and I've heard nothing of him since. No, I don't know where he came from nor where he went to. I had nothing against him while he was here. He was gone two days before the bust was smashed.\"\n\n\"Well, that's all we could reasonably expect from Morse Hudson,\" said Holmes, as we emerged from the shop. \"We have this Beppo as a common factor, both in Kennington and in Kensington, so that is worth a ten-mile drive. Now, Watson, let us make for Gelder & Co., of Stepney, the source and origin of the busts. I shall be surprised if we don't get some help down there.\"\n\nIn rapid succession we passed through the fringe of fashionable London, hotel London, theatrical London, literary London, commercial London, and, finally, maritime London, till we came to a riverside city of a hundred thousand souls, where the tenement houses swelter and reek with the outcasts of Europe. Here, in a broad thoroughfare, once the abode of wealthy city merchants, we found the sculpture works for which we searched. Outside was a considerable yard full of monumental masonry. Inside was a large room in which fifty workers were carving or moulding. The manager, a big blond German, received us civilly and gave a clear answer to all Holmes's questions. A reference to his books showed that hundreds of casts had been taken from a marble copy of Devine's head of Napoleon, but that the three which had been sent to Morse Hudson a year or so before had been half of a batch of six, the other three being sent to Harding Brothers, of Kensington. There was no reason why those six should be different from any of the other casts. He could suggest no possible cause why anyone should wish to destroy them\u2014in fact, he laughed at the idea. Their wholesale price was six shillings, but the retailer would get twelve or more. The cast was taken in two moulds from each side of the face, and then these two profiles of plaster of Paris were joined together to make the complete bust. The work was usually done by Italians, in the room we were in. When finished, the busts were put on a table in the passage to dry, and afterwards stored. That was all he could tell us.\n\nBut the production of the photograph had a remarkable effect upon the manager. His face flushed with anger, and his brows knotted over his blue Teutonic eyes.\n\n\"Ah, the rascal!\" he cried. \"Yes, indeed, I know him very well. This has always been a respectable establishment, and the only time that we have ever had the police in it was over this very fellow. It was more than a year ago now. He knifed another Italian in the street, and then he came to the works with the police on his heels, and he was taken here. Beppo was his name\u2014his second name I never knew. Serve me right for engaging a man with such a face. But he was a good workman\u2014one of the best.\"\n\n\"What did he get?\"\n\n\"The man lived and he got off with a year. I have no doubt he is out now, but he has not dared to show his nose here. We have a cousin of his here, and I daresay he could tell you where he is.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" cried Holmes, \"not a word to the cousin\u2014not a word, I beg of you. The matter is very important, and the farther I go with it, the more important it seems to grow. When you referred in your ledger to the sale of those casts I observed that the date was June 3rd of last year. Could you give me the date when Beppo was arrested?\"\n\n\"I could tell you roughly by the pay-list,\" the manager answered. \"Yes,\" he continued, after some turning over of pages, \"he was paid last on May 20th.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Holmes. \"I don't think that I need intrude upon your time and patience any more.\" With a last word of caution that he should say nothing as to our researches, we turned our faces westward once more.\n\nThe afternoon was far advanced before we were able to snatch a hasty luncheon at a restaurant. A news-bill at the entrance announced \"Kensington Outrage. Murder by a Madman,\" and the contents of the paper showed that Mr. Horace Harker had got his account into print after all. Two columns were occupied with a highly sensational and flowery rendering of the whole incident. Holmes propped it against the cruet-stand and read it while he ate. Once or twice he chuckled.\n\n\"This is all right, Watson,\" said he. \"Listen to this:\n\n\"It is satisfactory to know that there can be no difference of opinion upon this case, since Mr. Lestrade, one of the most experienced members of the official force, and Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the well-known consulting expert, have each come to the conclusion that the grotesque series of incidents, which have ended in so tragic a fashion, arise from lunacy rather than from deliberate crime. No explanation save mental aberration can cover the facts.\n\nThe Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it. And now, if you have quite finished, we will hark back to Kensington and see what the manager of Harding Brothers has to say on the matter.\"\n\nThe founder of that great emporium proved to be a brisk, crisp little person, very dapper and quick, with a clear head and a ready tongue.\n\n\"Yes, sir, I have already read the account in the evening papers. Mr. Horace Harker is a customer of ours. We supplied him with the bust some months ago. We ordered three busts of that sort from Gelder & Co., of Stepney. They are all sold now. To whom? Oh, I daresay by consulting our sales book we could very easily tell you. Yes, we have the entries here. One to Mr. Harker you see, and one to Mr. Josiah Brown, of Laburnum Lodge, Laburnum Vale, Chiswick, and one to Mr. Sandeford, of Lower Grove Road, Reading. No, I have never seen this face which you show me in the photograph. You would hardly forget it, would you, sir, for I've seldom seen an uglier. Have we any Italians on the staff? Yes, sir, we have several among our workpeople and cleaners. I daresay they might get a peep at that sales book if they wanted to. There is no particular reason for keeping a watch upon that book. Well, well, it's a very strange business, and I hope that you will let me know if anything comes of your inquiries.\"\n\nHolmes had taken several notes during Mr. Harding's evidence, and I could see that he was thoroughly satisfied by the turn which affairs were taking. He made no remark, however, save that, unless we hurried, we should be late for our appointment with Lestrade. Sure enough, when we reached Baker Street the detective was already there, and we found him pacing up and down in a fever of impatience. His look of importance showed that his day's work had not been in vain.\n\n\"Well?\" he asked. \"What luck, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"We have had a very busy day, and not entirely a wasted one,\" my friend explained. \"We have seen both the retailers and also the wholesale manufacturers. I can trace each of the busts now from the beginning.\"\n\n\"The busts!\" cried Lestrade. \"Well, well, you have your own methods, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and it is not for me to say a word against them, but I think I have done a better day's work than you. I have identified the dead man.\"\n\n\"You don't say so?\"\n\n\"And found a cause for the crime.\"\n\n\"Splendid!\"\n\n\"We have an inspector who makes a specialty of Saffron Hill and the Italian Quarter. Well, this dead man had some Catholic emblem round his neck, and that, along with his colour, made me think he was from the South. Inspector Hill knew him the moment he caught sight of him. His name is Pietro Venucci, from Naples, and he is one of the greatest cut-throats in London. He is connected with the Mafia, which, as you know, is a secret political society, enforcing its decrees by murder. Now, you see how the affair begins to clear up. The other fellow is probably an Italian also, and a member of the Mafia. He has broken the rules in some fashion. Pietro is set upon his track. Probably the photograph we found in his pocket is the man himself, so that he may not knife the wrong person. He dogs the fellow, he sees him enter a house, he waits outside for him, and in the scuffle he receives his own death-wound. How is that, Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\"\n\nHolmes clapped his hands approvingly.\n\n\"Excellent, Lestrade, excellent!\" he cried. \"But I didn't quite follow your explanation of the destruction of the busts.\"\n\n\"The busts! You never can get those busts out of your head. After all, that is nothing; petty larceny, six months at the most. It is the murder that we are really investigating, and I tell you that I am gathering all the threads into my hands.\"\n\n\"And the next stage?\"\n\n\"Is a very simple one. I shall go down with Hill to the Italian Quarter, find the man whose photograph we have got, and arrest him on the charge of murder. Will you come with us?\"\n\n\"I think not. I fancy we can attain our end in a simpler way. I can't say for certain, because it all depends\u2014well, it all depends upon a factor which is completely outside our control. But I have great hopes\u2014in fact, the betting is exactly two to one\u2014that if you will come with us tonight I shall be able to help you to lay him by the heels.\"\n\n\"In the Italian Quarter?\"\n\n\"No, I fancy Chiswick is an address which is more likely to find him. If you will come with me to Chiswick tonight, Lestrade, I'll promise to go to the Italian Quarter with you to-morrow, and no harm will be done by the delay. And now I think that a few hours' sleep would do us all good, for I do not propose to leave before eleven o'clock, and it is unlikely that we shall be back before morning. You'll dine with us, Lestrade, and then you are welcome to the sofa until it is time for us to start. In the meantime, Watson, I should be glad if you would ring for an express messenger, for I have a letter to send and it is important that it should go at once.\"\n\nHolmes spent the evening in rummaging among the files of the old daily papers with which one of our lumber-rooms was packed. When at last he descended, it was with triumph in his eyes, but he said nothing to either of us as to the result of his researches. For my own part, I had followed step by step the methods by which he had traced the various windings of this complex case, and, though I could not yet perceive the goal which we would reach, I understood clearly that Holmes expected this grotesque criminal to make an attempt upon the two remaining busts, one of which, I remembered, was at Chiswick. No doubt the object of our journey was to catch him in the very act, and I could not but admire the cunning with which my friend had inserted a wrong clue in the evening paper, so as to give the fellow the idea that he could continue his scheme with impunity. I was not surprised when Holmes suggested that I should take my revolver with me. He had himself picked up the loaded hunting-crop, which was his favourite weapon.\n\nA four-wheeler was at the door at eleven, and in it we drove to a spot at the other side of Hammersmith Bridge. Here the cabman was directed to wait. A short walk brought us to a secluded road fringed with pleasant houses, each standing in its own grounds. In the light of a street lamp we read \"Laburnum Villa\" upon the gatepost of one of them. The occupants had evidently retired to rest, for all was dark save for a fanlight over the hall door, which shed a single blurred circle on to the garden path. The wooden fence which separated the grounds from the road threw a dense black shadow upon the inner side, and here it was that we crouched.\n\n\"I fear that you'll have a long wait,\" Holmes whispered. \"We may thank our stars that it is not raining. I don't think we can even venture to smoke to pass the time. However, it's a two to one chance that we get something to pay us for our trouble.\"\n\nIt proved, however, that our vigil was not to be so long as Holmes had led us to fear, and it ended in a very sudden and singular fashion. In an instant, without the least sound to warn us of his coming, the garden gate swung open, and a lithe, dark figure, as swift and active as an ape, rushed up the garden path. We saw it whisk past the light thrown from over the door and disappear against the black shadow of the house. There was a long pause, during which we held our breath, and then a very gentle creaking sound came to our ears. The window was being opened. The noise ceased, and again there was a long silence. The fellow was making his way into the house. We saw the sudden flash of a dark lantern inside the room. What he sought was evidently not there, for again we saw the flash through another blind, and then through another.\n\n\"Let us get to the open window. We will nab him as he climbs out,\" Lestrade whispered.\n\nBut before we could move, the man had emerged again. As he came out into the glimmering patch of light, we saw that he carried something white under his arm. He looked stealthily all round him. The silence of the deserted street reassured him. Turning his back upon us he laid down his burden, and the next instant there was the sound of a sharp tap, followed by a clatter and rattle. The man was so intent upon what he was doing that he never heard our steps as we stole across the grass plot. With the bound of a tiger Holmes was on his back, and an instant later Lestrade and I had him by either wrist, and the handcuffs had been fastened. As we turned him over I saw a hideous, sallow face, with writhing, furious features, glaring up at us, and I knew that it was indeed the man of the photograph whom we had secured.\n\nBut it was not our prisoner to whom Holmes was giving his attention. Squatted on the doorstep, he was engaged in most carefully examining that which the man had brought from the house. It was a bust of Napoleon, like the one which we had seen that morning, and it had been broken into similar fragments. Carefully Holmes held each separate shard to the light, but in no way did it differ from any other shattered piece of plaster. He had just completed his examination when the hall lights flew up, the door opened, and the owner of the house, a jovial, rotund figure in shirt and trousers, presented himself.\n\n\"Mr. Josiah Brown, I suppose?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, sir; and you, no doubt, are Mr. Sherlock Holmes? I had the note which you sent by the express messenger, and I did exactly what you told me. We locked every door on the inside and awaited developments. Well, I'm very glad to see that you have got the rascal. I hope, gentlemen, that you will come in and have some refreshment.\"\n\nHowever, Lestrade was anxious to get his man into safe quarters, so within a few minutes our cab had been summoned and we were all four upon our way to London. Not a word would our captive say, but he glared at us from the shadow of his matted hair, and once, when my hand seemed within his reach, he snapped at it like a hungry wolf. We stayed long enough at the police-station to learn that a search of his clothing revealed nothing save a few shillings and a long sheath knife, the handle of which bore copious traces of recent blood.\n\n\"That's all right,\" said Lestrade, as we parted. \"Hill knows all these gentry, and he will give a name to him. You'll find that my theory of the Mafia will work out all right. But I'm sure I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mr. Holmes, for the workmanlike way in which you laid hands upon him. I don't quite understand it all yet.\"\n\n\"I fear it is rather too late an hour for explanations,\" said Holmes. \"Besides, there are one or two details which are not finished off, and it is one of those cases which are worth working out to the very end. If you will come round once more to my rooms at six o'clock to-morrow, I think I shall be able to show you that even now you have not grasped the entire meaning of this business, which presents some features which make it absolutely original in the history of crime. If ever I permit you to chronicle any more of my little problems, Watson, I foresee that you will enliven your pages by an account of the singular adventure of the Napoleonic busts.\"\n\nWhen we met again next evening, Lestrade was furnished with much information concerning our prisoner. His name, it appeared, was Beppo, second name unknown. He was a well-known ne'er-do-well among the Italian colony. He had once been a skilful sculptor and had earned an honest living, but he had taken to evil courses and had twice already been in jail\u2014once for a petty theft, and once, as we had already heard, for stabbing a fellow-countryman. He could talk English perfectly well. His reasons for destroying the busts were still unknown, and he refused to answer any questions upon the subject, but the police had discovered that these same busts might very well have been made by his own hands, since he was engaged in this class of work at the establishment of Gelder & Co. To all this information, much of which we already knew, Holmes listened with polite attention, but I, who knew him so well, could clearly see that his thoughts were elsewhere, and I detected a mixture of mingled uneasiness and expectation beneath that mask which he was wont to assume. At last he started in his chair, and his eyes brightened. There had been a ring at the bell. A minute later we heard steps upon the stairs, and an elderly red-faced man with grizzled side-whiskers was ushered in. In his right hand he carried an old-fashioned carpet-bag, which he placed upon the table.\n\n\"Is Mr. Sherlock Holmes here?\"\n\nMy friend bowed and smiled. \"Mr. Sandeford, of Reading, I suppose?\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, sir, I fear that I am a little late, but the trains were awkward. You wrote to me about a bust that is in my possession.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"I have your letter here. You said, 'I desire to possess a copy of Devine's Napoleon, and am prepared to pay you ten pounds for the one which is in your possession.' Is that right?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"I was very much surprised at your letter, for I could not imagine how you knew that I owned such a thing.\"\n\n\"Of course you must have been surprised, but the explanation is very simple. Mr. Harding, of Harding Brothers, said that they had sold you their last copy, and he gave me your address.\"\n\n\"Oh, that was it, was it? Did he tell you what I paid for it?\"\n\n\"No, he did not.\"\n\n\"Well, I am an honest man, though not a very rich one. I only gave fifteen shillings for the bust, and I think you ought to know that before I take ten pounds from you.\"\n\n\"I am sure the scruple does you honour, Mr. Sandeford. But I have named that price, so I intend to stick to it.\"\n\n\"Well, it is very handsome of you, Mr. Holmes. I brought the bust up with me, as you asked me to do. Here it is!\" He opened his bag, and at last we saw placed upon our table a complete specimen of that bust which we had already seen more than once in fragments.\n\nHolmes took a paper from his pocket and laid a ten-pound note upon the table.\n\n\"You will kindly sign that paper, Mr. Sandeford, in the presence of these witnesses. It is simply to say that you transfer every possible right that you ever had in the bust to me. I am a methodical man, you see, and you never know what turn events might take afterwards. Thank you, Mr. Sandeford; here is your money, and I wish you a very good evening.\"\n\nWhen our visitor had disappeared, Sherlock Holmes's movements were such as to rivet our attention. He began by taking a clean white cloth from a drawer and laying it over the table. Then he placed his newly acquired bust in the centre of the cloth. Finally, he picked up his hunting-crop and struck Napoleon a sharp blow on the top of the head. The figure broke into fragments, and Holmes bent eagerly over the shattered remains. Next instant, with a loud shout of triumph he held up one splinter, in which a round, dark object was fixed like a plum in a pudding.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he cried, \"let me introduce you to the famous black pearl of the Borgias.\"\n\nLestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke out clapping, as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes's pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.\n\n\"Yes, gentlemen,\" said he, \"it is the most famous pearl now existing in the world, and it has been my good fortune, by a connected chain of inductive reasoning, to trace it from the Prince of Colonna's bedroom at the Dacre Hotel, where it was lost, to the interior of this, the last of the six busts of Napoleon which were manufactured by Gelder & Co., of Stepney. You will remember, Lestrade, the sensation caused by the disappearance of this valuable jewel, and the vain efforts of the London police to recover it. I was myself consulted upon the case, but I was unable to throw any light upon it. Suspicion fell upon the maid of the Princess, who was an Italian, and it was proved that she had a brother in London, but we failed to trace any connection between them. The maid's name was Lucretia Venucci, and there is no doubt in my mind that this Pietro who was murdered two nights ago was the brother. I have been looking up the dates in the old files of the paper, and I find that the disappearance of the pearl was exactly two days before the arrest of Beppo, for some crime of violence\u2014an event which took place in the factory of Gelder & Co., at the very moment when these busts were being made. Now you clearly see the sequence of events, though you see them, of course, in the inverse order to the way in which they presented themselves to me. Beppo had the pearl in his possession. He may have stolen it from Pietro, he may have been Pietro's confederate, he may have been the go-between of Pietro and his sister. It is of no consequence to us which is the correct solution.\n\n\"The main fact is that he had the pearl, and at that moment, when it was on his person, he was pursued by the police. He made for the factory in which he worked, and he knew that he had only a few minutes in which to conceal this enormously valuable prize, which would otherwise be found on him when he was searched. Six plaster casts of Napoleon were drying in the passage. One of them was still soft. In an instant Beppo, a skilful workman, made a small hole in the wet plaster, dropped in the pearl, and with a few touches covered over the aperture once more. It was an admirable hiding-place. No one could possibly find it. But Beppo was condemned to a year's imprisonment, and in the meanwhile his six busts were scattered over London. He could not tell which contained his treasure. Only by breaking them could he see. Even shaking would tell him nothing, for as the plaster was wet it was probable that the pearl would adhere to it\u2014as, in fact, it has done. Beppo did not despair, and he conducted his search with considerable ingenuity and perseverance. Through a cousin who works with Gelder, he found out the retail firms who had bought the busts. He managed to find employment with Morse Hudson, and in that way tracked down three of them. The pearl was not there. Then, with the help of some Italian employ\u00e9, he succeeded in finding out where the other three busts had gone. The first was at Harker's. There he was dogged by his confederate, who held Beppo responsible for the loss of the pearl, and he stabbed him in the scuffle which followed.\"\n\n\"If he was his confederate, why should he carry his photograph?\" I asked.\n\n\"As a means of tracing him, if he wished to inquire about him from any third person. That was the obvious reason. Well, after the murder I calculated that Beppo would probably hurry rather than delay his movements. He would fear that the police would read his secret, and so he hastened on before they should get ahead of him. Of course, I could not say that he had not found the pearl in Harker's bust. I had not even concluded for certain that it was the pearl, but it was evident to me that he was looking for something, since he carried the bust past the other houses in order to break it in the garden which had a lamp overlooking it. Since Harker's bust was one in three, the chances were exactly as I told you\u2014two to one against the pearl being inside it. There remained two busts, and it was obvious that he would go for the London one first. I warned the inmates of the house, so as to avoid a second tragedy, and we went down, with the happiest results. By that time, of course, I knew for certain that it was the Borgia pearl that we were after. The name of the murdered man linked the one event with the other. There only remained a single bust\u2014the Reading one\u2014and the pearl must be there. I bought it in your presence from the owner\u2014and there it lies.\"\n\nWe sat in silence for a moment.\n\n\"Well,\" said Lestrade, \"I've seen you handle a good many cases, Mr. Holmes, but I don't know that I ever knew a more workmanlike one than that. We're not jealous of you at Scotland Yard. No, sir, we are very proud of you, and if you come down to-morrow, there's not a man, from the oldest inspector to the youngest constable, who wouldn't be glad to shake you by the hand.\"\n\n\"Thank you!\" said Holmes. \"Thank you!\" and as he turned away, it seemed to me that he was more nearly moved by the softer human emotions than I had ever seen him. A moment later he was the cold and practical thinker once more. \"Put the pearl in the safe, Watson,\" said he, \"and get out the papers of the Conk-Singleton forgery case. Good-bye, Lestrade. If any little problem comes your way, I shall be happy, if I can, to give you a hint or two as to its solution.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE STUDENTS", + "text": "It was in the year '95 that a combination of events, into which I need not enter, caused Mr. Sherlock Holmes and myself to spend some weeks in one of our great university towns, and it was during this time that the small but instructive adventure which I am about to relate befell us. It will be obvious that any details which would help the reader exactly to identify the college or the criminal would be injudicious and offensive. So painful a scandal may well be allowed to die out. With due discretion the incident itself may, however, be described, since it serves to illustrate some of those qualities for which my friend was remarkable. I will endeavour, in my statement, to avoid such terms as would serve to limit the events to any particular place, or give a clue as to the people concerned.\n\nWe were residing at the time in furnished lodgings close to a library where Sherlock Holmes was pursuing some laborious researches in early English charters\u2014researches which led to results so striking that they may be the subject of one of my future narratives. Here it was that one evening we received a visit from an acquaintance, Mr. Hilton Soames, tutor and lecturer at the College of St. Luke's. Mr. Soames was a tall, spare man, of a nervous and excitable temperament. I had always known him to be restless in his manner, but on this particular occasion he was in such a state of uncontrollable agitation that it was clear something very unusual had occurred.\n\n\"I trust, Mr. Holmes, that you can spare me a few hours of your valuable time. We have had a very painful incident at St. Luke's, and really, but for the happy chance of your being in town, I should have been at a loss what to do.\"\n\n\"I am very busy just now, and I desire no distractions,\" my friend answered. \"I should much prefer that you called in the aid of the police.\"\n\n\"No, no, my dear sir; such a course is utterly impossible. When once the law is evoked it cannot be stayed again, and this is just one of those cases where, for the credit of the college, it is most essential to avoid scandal. Your discretion is as well known as your powers, and you are the one man in the world who can help me. I beg you, Mr. Holmes, to do what you can.\"\n\nMy friend's temper had not improved since he had been deprived of the congenial surroundings of Baker Street. Without his scrapbooks, his chemicals, and his homely untidiness, he was an uncomfortable man. He shrugged his shoulders in ungracious acquiescence, while our visitor in hurried words and with much excitable gesticulation poured forth his story.\n\n\"I must explain to you, Mr. Holmes, that to-morrow is the first day of the examination for the Fortescue Scholarship. I am one of the examiners. My subject is Greek, and the first of the papers consists of a large passage of Greek translation which the candidate has not seen. This passage is printed on the examination paper, and it would naturally be an immense advantage if the candidate could prepare it in advance. For this reason, great care is taken to keep the paper secret.\n\n\"To-day, about three o'clock, the proofs of this paper arrived from the printers. The exercise consists of half a chapter of Thucydides. I had to read it over carefully, as the text must be absolutely correct. At four-thirty my task was not yet completed. I had, however, promised to take tea in a friend's rooms, so I left the proof upon my desk. I was absent rather more than an hour.\n\n\"You are aware, Mr. Holmes, that our college doors are double\u2014a green baize one within and a heavy oak one without. As I approached my outer door, I was amazed to see a key in it. For an instant I imagined that I had left my own there, but on feeling in my pocket I found that it was all right. The only duplicate which existed, so far as I knew, was that which belonged to my servant, Bannister\u2014a man who has looked after my room for ten years, and whose honesty is absolutely above suspicion. I found that the key was indeed his, that he had entered my room to know if I wanted tea, and that he had very carelessly left the key in the door when he came out. His visit to my room must have been within a very few minutes of my leaving it. His forgetfulness about the key would have mattered little upon any other occasion, but on this one day it has produced the most deplorable consequences.\n\n\"The moment I looked at my table, I was aware that someone had rummaged among my papers. The proof was in three long slips. I had left them all together. Now, I found that one of them was lying on the floor, one was on the side table near the window, and the third was where I had left it.\"\n\nHolmes stirred for the first time.\n\n\"The first page on the floor, the second in the window, the third where you left it,\" said he.\n\n\"Exactly, Mr. Holmes. You amaze me. How could you possibly know that?\"\n\n\"Pray continue your very interesting statement.\"\n\n\"For an instant I imagined that Bannister had taken the unpardonable liberty of examining my papers. He denied it, however, with the utmost earnestness, and I am convinced that he was speaking the truth. The alternative was that someone passing had observed the key in the door, had known that I was out, and had entered to look at the papers. A large sum of money is at stake, for the scholarship is a very valuable one, and an unscrupulous man might very well run a risk in order to gain an advantage over his fellows.\n\n\"Bannister was very much upset by the incident. He had nearly fainted when we found that the papers had undoubtedly been tampered with. I gave him a little brandy and left him collapsed in a chair, while I made a most careful examination of the room. I soon saw that the intruder had left other traces of his presence besides the rumpled papers. On the table in the window were several shreds from a pencil which had been sharpened. A broken tip of lead was lying there also. Evidently the rascal had copied the paper in a great hurry, had broken his pencil, and had been compelled to put a fresh point to it.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Holmes, who was recovering his good-humour as his attention became more engrossed by the case. \"Fortune has been your friend.\"\n\n\"This was not all. I have a new writing-table with a fine surface of red leather. I am prepared to swear, and so is Bannister, that it was smooth and unstained. Now I found a clean cut in it about three inches long\u2014not a mere scratch, but a positive cut. Not only this, but on the table I found a small ball of black dough or clay, with specks of something which looks like sawdust in it. I am convinced that these marks were left by the man who rifled the papers. There were no footmarks and no other evidence as to his identity. I was at my wit's end, when suddenly the happy thought occurred to me that you were in the town, and I came straight round to put the matter into your hands. Do help me, Mr. Holmes. You see my dilemma. Either I must find the man or else the examination must be postponed until fresh papers are prepared, and since this cannot be done without explanation, there will ensue a hideous scandal, which will throw a cloud not only on the college, but on the university. Above all things, I desire to settle the matter quietly and discreetly.\"\n\n\"I shall be happy to look into it and to give you such advice as I can,\" said Holmes, rising and putting on his overcoat. \"The case is not entirely devoid of interest. Had anyone visited you in your room after the papers came to you?\"\n\n\"Yes, young Daulat Ras, an Indian student, who lives on the same stair, came in to ask me some particulars about the examination.\n\n\"For which he was entered?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And the papers were on your table?\"\n\n\"To the best of my belief, they were rolled up.\"\n\n\"But might be recognized as proofs?\"\n\n\"Possibly.\"\n\n\"No one else in your room?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did anyone know that these proofs would be there?\"\n\n\"No one save the printer.\"\n\n\"Did this man Bannister know?\"\n\n\"No, certainly not. No one knew.\"\n\n\"Where is Bannister now?\"\n\n\"He was very ill, poor fellow. I left him collapsed in the chair. I was in such a hurry to come to you.\"\n\n\"You left your door open?\"\n\n\"I locked up the papers first.\"\n\n\"Then it amounts to this, Mr. Soames: that, unless the Indian student recognized the roll as being proofs, the man who tampered with them came upon them accidentally without knowing that they were there.\"\n\n\"So it seems to me.\"\n\nHolmes gave an enigmatic smile.\n\n\"Well,\" said he, \"let us go round. Not one of your cases, Watson\u2014mental, not physical. All right; come if you want to. Now, Mr. Soames\u2014at your disposal!\"\n\nThe sitting-room of our client opened by a long, low, latticed window on to the ancient lichen-tinted court of the old college. A Gothic arched door led to a worn stone staircase. On the ground floor was the tutor's room. Above were three students, one on each story. It was already twilight when we reached the scene of our problem. Holmes halted and looked earnestly at the window. Then he approached it, and, standing on tiptoe with his neck craned, he looked into the room.\n\n\"He must have entered through the door. There is no opening except the one pane,\" said our learned guide.\n\n\"Dear me!\" said Holmes, and he smiled in a singular way as he glanced at our companion. \"Well, if there is nothing to be learned here, we had best go inside.\"\n\nThe lecturer unlocked the outer door and ushered us into his room. We stood at the entrance while Holmes made an examination of the carpet.\n\n\"I am afraid there are no signs here,\" said he. \"One could hardly hope for any upon so dry a day. Your servant seems to have quite recovered. You left him in a chair, you say. Which chair?\"\n\n\"By the window there.\"\n\n\"I see. Near this little table. You can come in now. I have finished with the carpet. Let us take the little table first. Of course, what has happened is very clear. The man entered and took the papers, sheet by sheet, from the central table. He carried them over to the window table, because from there he could see if you came across the courtyard, and so could effect an escape.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, he could not,\" said Soames, \"for I entered by the side door.\"\n\n\"Ah, that's good! Well, anyhow, that was in his mind. Let me see the three strips. No finger impressions\u2014no! Well, he carried over this one first, and he copied it. How long would it take him to do that, using every possible contraction? A quarter of an hour, not less. Then he tossed it down and seized the next. He was in the midst of that when your return caused him to make a very hurried retreat\u2014very hurried, since he had not time to replace the papers which would tell you that he had been there. You were not aware of any hurrying feet on the stair as you entered the outer door?\"\n\n\"No, I can't say I was.\"\n\n\"Well, he wrote so furiously that he broke his pencil, and had, as you observe, to sharpen it again. This is of interest, Watson. The pencil was not an ordinary one. It was above the usual size, with a soft lead, the outer colour was dark blue, the maker's name was printed in silver lettering, and the piece remaining is only about an inch and a half long. Look for such a pencil, Mr. Soames, and you have got your man. When I add that he possesses a large and very blunt knife, you have an additional aid.\"\n\nMr. Soames was somewhat overwhelmed by this flood of information. \"I can follow the other points,\" said he, \"but really, in this matter of the length\u2014\"\n\nHolmes held out a small chip with the letters NN and a space of clear wood after them.\n\n\"You see?\"\n\n\"No, I fear that even now\u2014\"\n\n\"Watson, I have always done you an injustice. There are others. What could this NN be? It is at the end of a word. You are aware that Johann Faber is the most common maker's name. Is it not clear that there is just as much of the pencil left as usually follows the Johann?\" He held the small table sideways to the electric light. \"I was hoping that if the paper on which he wrote was thin, some trace of it might come through upon this polished surface. No, I see nothing. I don't think there is anything more to be learned here. Now for the central table. This small pellet is, I presume, the black, doughy mass you spoke of. Roughly pyramidal in shape and hollowed out, I perceive. As you say, there appear to be grains of sawdust in it. Dear me, this is very interesting. And the cut\u2014a positive tear, I see. It began with a thin scratch and ended in a jagged hole. I am much indebted to you for directing my attention to this case, Mr. Soames. Where does that door lead to?\"\n\n\"To my bedroom.\"\n\n\"Have you been in it since your adventure?\"\n\n\"No, I came straight away for you.\"\n\n\"I should like to have a glance round. What a charming, old-fashioned room! Perhaps you will kindly wait a minute, until I have examined the floor. No, I see nothing. What about this curtain? You hang your clothes behind it. If anyone were forced to conceal himself in this room he must do it there, since the bed is too low and the wardrobe too shallow. No one there, I suppose?\"\n\nAs Holmes drew the curtain I was aware, from some little rigidity and alertness of his attitude, that he was prepared for an emergency. As a matter of fact, the drawn curtain disclosed nothing but three or four suits of clothes hanging from a line of pegs. Holmes turned away, and stooped suddenly to the floor.\n\n\"Halloa! What's this?\" said he.\n\nIt was a small pyramid of black, putty-like stuff, exactly like the one upon the table of the study. Holmes held it out on his open palm in the glare of the electric light.\n\n\"Your visitor seems to have left traces in your bedroom as well as in your sitting-room, Mr. Soames.\"\n\n\"What could he have wanted there?\"\n\n\"I think it is clear enough. You came back by an unexpected way, and so he had no warning until you were at the very door. What could he do? He caught up everything which would betray him, and he rushed into your bedroom to conceal himself.\"\n\n\"Good gracious, Mr. Holmes, do you mean to tell me that, all the time I was talking to Bannister in this room, we had the man prisoner if we had only known it?\"\n\n\"So I read it.\"\n\n\"Surely there is another alternative, Mr. Holmes. I don't know whether you observed my bedroom window?\"\n\n\"Lattice-paned, lead framework, three separate windows, one swinging on hinge, and large enough to admit a man.\"\n\n\"Exactly. And it looks out on an angle of the courtyard so as to be partly invisible. The man might have effected his entrance there, left traces as he passed through the bedroom, and finally, finding the door open, have escaped that way.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head impatiently.\n\n\"Let us be practical,\" said he. \"I understand you to say that there are three students who use this stair, and are in the habit of passing your door?\"\n\n\"Yes, there are.\"\n\n\"And they are all in for this examination?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Have you any reason to suspect any one of them more than the others?\"\n\nSoames hesitated.\n\n\"It is a very delicate question,\" said he. \"One hardly likes to throw suspicion where there are no proofs.\"\n\n\"Let us hear the suspicions. I will look after the proofs.\"\n\n\"I will tell you, then, in a few words the character of the three men who inhabit these rooms. The lower of the three is Gilchrist, a fine scholar and athlete, plays in the Rugby team and the cricket team for the college, and got his Blue for the hurdles and the long jump. He is a fine, manly fellow. His father was the notorious Sir Jabez Gilchrist, who ruined himself on the turf. My scholar has been left very poor, but he is hard-working and industrious. He will do well.\n\n\"The second floor is inhabited by Daulat Ras, the Indian. He is a quiet, inscrutable fellow; as most of those Indians are. He is well up in his work, though his Greek is his weak subject. He is steady and methodical.\n\n\"The top floor belongs to Miles McLaren. He is a brilliant fellow when he chooses to work\u2014one of the brightest intellects of the university; but he is wayward, dissipated, and unprincipled. He was nearly expelled over a card scandal in his first year. He has been idling all this term, and he must look forward with dread to the examination.\"\n\n\"Then it is he whom you suspect?\"\n\n\"I dare not go so far as that. But, of the three, he is perhaps the least unlikely.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Now, Mr. Soames, let us have a look at your servant, Bannister.\"\n\nHe was a little, white-faced, clean-shaven, grizzly-haired fellow of fifty. He was still suffering from this sudden disturbance of the quiet routine of his life. His plump face was twitching with his nervousness, and his fingers could not keep still.\n\n\"We are investigating this unhappy business, Bannister,\" said his master.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" said Holmes, \"that you left your key in the door?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Was it not very extraordinary that you should do this on the very day when there were these papers inside?\"\n\n\"It was most unfortunate, sir. But I have occasionally done the same thing at other times.\"\n\n\"When did you enter the room?\"\n\n\"It was about half-past four. That is Mr. Soames's tea time.\"\n\n\"How long did you stay?\"\n\n\"When I saw that he was absent, I withdrew at once.\"\n\n\"Did you look at these papers on the table?\"\n\n\"No, sir\u2014certainly not.\"\n\n\"How came you to leave the key in the door?\"\n\n\"I had the tea-tray in my hand. I thought I would come back for the key. Then I forgot.\"\n\n\"Has the outer door a spring lock?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Then it was open all the time?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Anyone in the room could get out?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"When Mr. Soames returned and called for you, you were very much disturbed?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Such a thing has never happened during the many years that I have been here. I nearly fainted, sir.\"\n\n\"So I understand. Where were you when you began to feel bad?\"\n\n\"Where was I, sir? Why, here, near the door.\"\n\n\"That is singular, because you sat down in that chair over yonder near the corner. Why did you pass these other chairs?\"\n\n\"I don't know, sir, it didn't matter to me where I sat.\"\n\n\"I really don't think he knew much about it, Mr. Holmes. He was looking very bad\u2014quite ghastly.\"\n\n\"You stayed here when your master left?\"\n\n\"Only for a minute or so. Then I locked the door and went to my room.\"\n\n\"Whom do you suspect?\"\n\n\"Oh, I would not venture to say, sir. I don't believe there is any gentleman in this university who is capable of profiting by such an action. No, sir, I'll not believe it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, that will do,\" said Holmes. \"Oh, one more word. You have not mentioned to any of the three gentlemen whom you attend that anything is amiss?\"\n\n\"No, sir\u2014not a word.\"\n\n\"You haven't seen any of them?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Very good. Now, Mr. Soames, we will take a walk in the quadrangle, if you please.\"\n\nThree yellow squares of light shone above us in the gathering gloom.\n\n\"Your three birds are all in their nests,\" said Holmes, looking up. \"Halloa! What's that? One of them seems restless enough.\"\n\nIt was the Indian, whose dark silhouette appeared suddenly upon his blind. He was pacing swiftly up and down his room.\n\n\"I should like to have a peep at each of them,\" said Holmes. \"Is it possible?\"\n\n\"No difficulty in the world,\" Soames answered. \"This set of rooms is quite the oldest in the college, and it is not unusual for visitors to go over them. Come along, and I will personally conduct you.\"\n\n\"No names, please!\" said Holmes, as we knocked at Gilchrist's door. A tall, flaxen-haired, slim young fellow opened it, and made us welcome when he understood our errand. There were some really curious pieces of mediaeval domestic architecture within. Holmes was so charmed with one of them that he insisted on drawing it in his notebook, broke his pencil, had to borrow one from our host, and finally borrowed a knife to sharpen his own. The same curious accident happened to him in the rooms of the Indian\u2014a silent, little, hook-nosed fellow, who eyed us askance, and was obviously glad when Holmes's architectural studies had come to an end. I could not see that in either case Holmes had come upon the clue for which he was searching. Only at the third did our visit prove abortive. The outer door would not open to our knock, and nothing more substantial than a torrent of bad language came from behind it. \"I don't care who you are. You can go to blazes!\" roared the angry voice. \"To-morrow's the exam, and I won't be drawn by anyone.\"\n\n\"A rude fellow,\" said our guide, flushing with anger as we withdrew down the stair. \"Of course, he did not realize that it was I who was knocking, but none the less his conduct was very uncourteous, and, indeed, under the circumstances rather suspicious.\"\n\nHolmes's response was a curious one.\n\n\"Can you tell me his exact height?\" he asked.\n\n\"Really, Mr. Holmes, I cannot undertake to say. He is taller than the Indian, not so tall as Gilchrist. I suppose five foot six would be about it.\"\n\n\"That is very important,\" said Holmes. \"And now, Mr. Soames, I wish you good-night.\"\n\nOur guide cried aloud in his astonishment and dismay. \"Good gracious, Mr. Holmes, you are surely not going to leave me in this abrupt fashion! You don't seem to realize the position. To-morrow is the examination. I must take some definite action to-night. I cannot allow the examination to be held if one of the papers has been tampered with. The situation must be faced.\"\n\n\"You must leave it as it is. I shall drop round early to-morrow morning and chat the matter over. It is possible that I may be in a position then to indicate some course of action. Meanwhile, you change nothing\u2014nothing at all.\"\n\n\"Very good, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"You can be perfectly easy in your mind. We shall certainly find some way out of your difficulties. I will take the black clay with me, also the pencil cuttings. Good-bye.\"\n\nWhen we were out in the darkness of the quadrangle, we again looked up at the windows. The Indian still paced his room. The others were invisible.\n\n\"Well, Watson, what do you think of it?\" Holmes asked, as we came out into the main Street. \"Quite a little parlour game\u2014sort of three-card trick, is it not? There are your three men. It must be one of them. You take your choice. Which is yours?\"\n\n\"The foul-mouthed fellow at the top. He is the one with the worst record. And yet that Indian was a sly fellow also. Why should he be pacing his room all the time?\"\n\n\"There is nothing in that. Many men do it when they are trying to learn anything by heart.\"\n\n\"He looked at us in a queer way.\"\n\n\"So would you, if a flock of strangers came in on you when you were preparing for an examination next day, and every moment was of value. No, I see nothing in that. Pencils, too, and knives\u2014all was satisfactory. But that fellow does puzzle me.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Why, Bannister, the servant. What's his game in the matter?\"\n\n\"He impressed me as being a perfectly honest man.\"\n\n\"So he did me. That's the puzzling part. Why should a perfectly honest man\u2014Well, well, here's a large stationer's. We shall begin our researches here.\"\n\nThere were only four stationers of any consequences in the town, and at each Holmes produced his pencil chips, and bid high for a duplicate. All were agreed that one could be ordered, but that it was not a usual size of pencil, and that it was seldom kept in stock. My friend did not appear to be depressed by his failure, but shrugged his shoulders in half-humorous resignation.\n\n\"No good, my dear Watson. This, the best and only final clue, has run to nothing. But, indeed, I have little doubt that we can build up a sufficient case without it. By Jove! my dear fellow, it is nearly nine, and the landlady babbled of green peas at seven-thirty. What with your eternal tobacco, Watson, and your irregularity at meals, I expect that you will get notice to quit, and that I shall share your downfall\u2014not, however, before we have solved the problem of the nervous tutor, the careless servant, and the three enterprising students.\"\n\nHolmes made no further allusion to the matter that day, though he sat lost in thought for a long time after our belated dinner. At eight in the morning, he came into my room just as I finished my toilet.\n\n\"Well, Watson,\" said he, \"it is time we went down to St. Luke's. Can you do without breakfast?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"Soames will be in a dreadful fidget until we are able to tell him something positive.\"\n\n\"Have you anything positive to tell him?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\n\"You have formed a conclusion?\"\n\n\"Yes, my dear Watson, I have solved the mystery.\"\n\n\"But what fresh evidence could you have got?\"\n\n\"Aha! It is not for nothing that I have turned myself out of bed at the untimely hour of six. I have put in two hours' hard work and covered at least five miles, with something to show for it. Look at that!\"\n\nHe held out his hand. On the palm were three little pyramids of black, doughy clay.\n\n\"Why, Holmes, you had only two yesterday.\"\n\n\"And one more this morning. It is a fair argument that wherever No. 3 came from is also the source of Nos. 1 and 2. Eh, Watson? Well, come along and put friend Soames out of his pain.\"\n\nThe unfortunate tutor was certainly in a state of pitiable agitation when we found him in his chambers. In a few hours the examination would commence, and he was still in the dilemma between making the facts public and allowing the culprit to compete for the valuable scholarship. He could hardly stand still, so great was his mental agitation, and he ran towards Holmes with two eager hands outstretched.\n\n\"Thank heaven that you have come! I feared that you had given it up in despair. What am I to do? Shall the examination proceed?\"\n\n\"Yes, let it proceed, by all means.\"\n\n\"But this rascal?\"\n\n\"He shall not compete.\"\n\n\"You know him?\"\n\n\"I think so. If this matter is not to become public, we must give ourselves certain powers and resolve ourselves into a small private court-martial. You there, if you please, Soames! Watson, you here! I'll take the armchair in the middle. I think that we are now sufficiently imposing to strike terror into a guilty breast. Kindly ring the bell!\"\n\nBannister entered, and shrank back in evident surprise and fear at our judicial appearance.\n\n\"You will kindly close the door,\" said Holmes. \"Now, Bannister, will you please tell us the truth about yesterday's incident?\"\n\nThe man turned white to the roots of his hair.\n\n\"I have told you everything, sir.\"\n\n\"Nothing to add?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all, sir.\"\n\n\"Well, then, I must make some suggestions to you. When you sat down on that chair yesterday, did you do so in order to conceal some object which would have shown who had been in the room?\"\n\nBannister's face was ghastly.\n\n\"No, sir, certainly not.\"\n\n\"It is only a suggestion,\" said Holmes, suavely. \"I frankly admit that I am unable to prove it. But it seems probable enough, since the moment that Mr. Soames's back was turned, you released the man who was hiding in that bedroom.\"\n\nBannister licked his dry lips.\n\n\"There was no man, sir.\n\n\"Ah, that's a pity, Bannister. Up to now you may have spoken the truth, but now I know that you have lied.\"\n\nThe man's face set in sullen defiance.\n\n\"There was no man, sir.\"\n\n\"Come, come, Bannister!\"\n\n\"No, sir, there was no one.\"\n\n\"In that case, you can give us no further information. Would you please remain in the room? Stand over there near the bedroom door. Now, Soames, I am going to ask you to have the great kindness to go up to the room of young Gilchrist, and to ask him to step down into yours.\"\n\nAn instant later the tutor returned, bringing with him the student. He was a fine figure of a man, tall, lithe, and agile, with a springy step and a pleasant, open face. His troubled blue eyes glanced at each of us, and finally rested with an expression of blank dismay upon Bannister in the farther corner.\n\n\"Just close the door,\" said Holmes. \"Now, Mr. Gilchrist, we are all quite alone here, and no one need ever know one word of what passes between us. We can be perfectly frank with each other. We want to know, Mr. Gilchrist, how you, an honourable man, ever came to commit such an action as that of yesterday?\"\n\nThe unfortunate young man staggered back, and cast a look full of horror and reproach at Bannister.\n\n\"No, no, Mr. Gilchrist, sir, I never said a word\u2014never one word!\" cried the servant.\n\n\"No, but you have now,\" said Holmes. \"Now, sir, you must see that after Bannister's words your position is hopeless, and that your only chance lies in a frank confession.\"\n\nFor a moment Gilchrist, with upraised hand, tried to control his writhing features. The next he had thrown himself on his knees beside the table, and burying his face in his hands, he had burst into a storm of passionate sobbing.\n\n\"Come, come, said Holmes, kindly, \"it is human to err, and at least no one can accuse you of being a callous criminal. Perhaps it would be easier for you if I were to tell Mr. Soames what occurred, and you can check me where I am wrong. Shall I do so? Well, well, don't trouble to answer. Listen, and see that I do you no injustice.\n\n\"From the moment, Mr. Soames, that you said to me that no one, not even Bannister, could have told that the papers were in your room, the case began to take a definite shape in my mind. The printer one could, of course, dismiss. He could examine the papers in his own office. The Indian I also thought nothing of. If the proofs were in a roll, he could not possibly know what they were. On the other hand, it seemed an unthinkable coincidence that a man should dare to enter the room, and that by chance on that very day the papers were on the table. I dismissed that. The man who entered knew that the papers were there. How did he know?\n\n\"When I approached your room, I examined the window. You amused me by supposing that I was contemplating the possibility of someone having in broad daylight, under the eyes of all these opposite rooms, forced himself through it. Such an idea was absurd. I was measuring how tall a man would need to be in order to see, as he passed, what papers were on the central table. I am six feet high, and I could do it with an effort. No one less than that would have a chance. Already you see I had reason to think that, if one of your three students was a man of unusual height, he was the most worth watching of the three.\n\n\"I entered, and I took you into my confidence as to the suggestions of the side table. Of the centre table I could make nothing, until in your description of Gilchrist you mentioned that he was a long-distance jumper. Then the whole thing came to me in an instant, and I only needed certain corroborative proofs, which I speedily obtained.\n\n\"What happened was this: This young fellow had employed his afternoon at the athletic grounds, where he had been practising the jump. He returned carrying his jumping-shoes, which are provided, as you are aware, with several sharp spikes. As he passed your window he saw, by means of his great height, these proofs upon your table, and conjectured what they were. No harm would have been done had it not been that, as he passed your door, he perceived the key which had been left by the carelessness of your servant. A sudden impulse came over him to enter, and see if they were indeed the proofs. It was not a dangerous exploit, for he could always pretend that he had simply looked in to ask a question.\n\n\"Well, when he saw that they were indeed the proofs, it was then that he yielded to temptation. He put his shoes on the table. What was it you put on that chair near the window?\"\n\n\"Gloves,\" said the young man.\n\nHolmes looked triumphantly at Bannister. \"He put his gloves on the chair, and he took the proofs, sheet by sheet, to copy them. He thought the tutor must return by the main gate, and that he would see him. As we know, he came back by the side gate. Suddenly he heard him at the very door. There was no possible escape. He forgot his gloves, but he caught up his shoes and darted into the bedroom. You observe that the scratch on that table is slight at one side, but deepens in the direction of the bedroom door. That in itself is enough to show us that the shoe had been drawn in that direction, and that the culprit had taken refuge there. The earth round the spike had been left on the table, and a second sample was loosened and fell in the bedroom. I may add that I walked out to the athletic grounds this morning, saw that tenacious black clay is used in the jumping-pit, and carried away a specimen of it, together with some of the fine tan or sawdust which is strewn over it to prevent the athlete from slipping. Have I told the truth, Mr. Gilchrist?\"\n\nThe student had drawn himself erect.\n\n\"Yes, sir, it is true,\" said he.\n\n\"Good heavens! have you nothing to add?\" cried Soames.\n\n\"Yes, sir, I have, but the shock of this disgraceful exposure has bewildered me. I have a letter here, Mr. Soames, which I wrote to you early this morning in the middle of a restless night. It was before I knew that my sin had found me out. Here it is, sir. You will see that I have said, 'I have determined not to go in for the examination. I have been offered a commission in the Rhodesian Police, and I am going out to South Africa at once.'\"\n\n\"I am indeed pleased to hear that you did not intend to profit by your unfair advantage,\" said Soames. \"But why did you change your purpose?\"\n\nGilchrist pointed to Bannister.\n\n\"There is the man who set me in the right path,\" said he.\n\n\"Come now, Bannister,\" said Holmes. \"It will be clear to you, from what I have said, that only you could have let this young man out, since you were left in the room, and must have locked the door when you went out. As to his escaping by that window, it was incredible. Can you not clear up the last point in this mystery, and tell us the reasons for your action?\"\n\n\"It was simple enough, sir, if you only had known, but, with all your cleverness, it was impossible that you could know. Time was, sir, when I was butler to old Sir Jabez Gilchrist, this young gentleman's father. When he was ruined I came to the college as servant, but I never forgot my old employer because he was down in the world. I watched his son all I could for the sake of the old days. Well, sir, when I came into this room yesterday, when the alarm was given, the very first thing I saw was Mr. Gilchrist's tan gloves a-lying in that chair. I knew those gloves well, and I understood their message. If Mr. Soames saw them, the game was up. I flopped down into that chair, and nothing would budge me until Mr. Soames went for you. Then out came my poor young master, whom I had dandled on my knee, and confessed it all to me. Wasn't it natural, sir, that I should save him, and wasn't it natural also that I should try to speak to him as his dead father would have done, and make him understand that he could not profit by such a deed? Could you blame me, sir?\"\n\n\"No, indeed,\" said Holmes, heartily, springing to his feet. \"Well, Soames, I think we have cleared your little problem up, and our breakfast awaits us at home. Come, Watson! As to you, sir, I trust that a bright future awaits you in Rhodesia. For once you have fallen low. Let us see, in the future, how high you can rise.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN PINCE-NEZ", + "text": "When I look at the three massive manuscript volumes which contain our work for the year 1894, I confess that it is very difficult for me, out of such a wealth of material, to select the cases which are most interesting in themselves, and at the same time most conducive to a display of those peculiar powers for which my friend was famous. As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker. Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the singular contents of the ancient British barrow. The famous Smith-Mortimer succession case comes also within this period, and so does the tracking and arrest of Huret, the Boulevard assassin\u2014an exploit which won for Holmes an autograph letter of thanks from The French President and the Order of the Legion of Honour. Each of these would furnish a narrative, but on the whole I am of the opinion that none of them unites so many singular points of interest as the episode of Yoxley Old Place, which includes not only the lamentable death of young Willoughby Smith, but also those subsequent developments which threw so curious a light upon the causes of the crime.\n\nIt was a wild, tempestuous night, towards the close of November. Holmes and I sat together in silence all the evening, he engaged with a powerful lens decipering the remains of the original inscription upon a palimpsest, I deep in a recent treatise upon surgery. Outside the wind howled down Baker Street, while the rain beat fiercely against the windows. It was strange there, in the very depths of the town, with ten miles of man's handiwork on every side of us, to feel the iron grip of Nature, and to be conscious that to the huge elemental forces all London was no more than the molehills that dot the fields. I walked to the window, and looked out on the deserted street. The occasional lamps gleamed on the expanse of muddy road and shining pavement. A single cab was splashing its way from the Oxford Street end.\n\n\"Well, Watson, it's as well we have not to turn out to-night,\" said Holmes, laying aside his lens and rolling up the palimpsest. \"I've done enough for one sitting. It is trying work for the eyes. So far as I can make out, it is nothing more exciting than an Abbey's accounts dating from the second half of the fifteenth century. Halloa! halloa! halloa! What's this?\"\n\nAmid the droning of the wind there had come the stamping of a horse's hoofs, and the long grind of a wheel as it rasped against the curb. The cab which I had seen had pulled up at our door.\n\n\"What can he want?\" I ejaculated, as a man stepped out of it.\n\n\"Want? He wants us. And we, my poor Watson, want overcoats and cravats and goloshes, and every aid that man ever invented to fight the weather. Wait a bit, though! There's the cab off again! There's hope yet. He'd have kept it if he had wanted us to come. Run down, my dear fellow, and open the door, for all virtuous folk have been long in bed.\"\n\nWhen the light of the hall lamp fell upon our midnight visitor, I had no difficulty in recognizing him. It was young Stanley Hopkins, a promising detective, in whose career Holmes had several times shown a very practical interest.\n\n\"Is he in?\" he asked, eagerly.\n\n\"Come up, my dear sir,\" said Holmes's voice from above. \"I hope you have no designs upon us on such a night as this.\"\n\nThe detective mounted the stairs, and our lamp gleamed upon his shining waterproof. I helped him out of it, while Holmes knocked a blaze out of the logs in the grate.\n\n\"Now, my dear Hopkins, draw up and warm your toes,\" said he. \"Here's a cigar, and the doctor has a prescription containing hot water and a lemon, which is good medicine on a night like this. It must be something important which has brought you out in such a gale.\"\n\n\"It is indeed, Mr. Holmes. I've had a bustling afternoon, I promise you. Did you see anything of the Yoxley case in the latest editions?\"\n\n\"I've seen nothing later than the fifteenth century to-day.\"\n\n\"Well, it was only a paragraph, and all wrong at that, so you have not missed anything. I haven't let the grass grow under my feet. It's down in Kent, seven miles from Chatham and three from the railway line. I was wired for at 3:15, reached Yoxley Old Place at 5, conducted my investigation, was back at Charing Cross by the last train, and straight to you by cab.\"\n\n\"Which means, I suppose, that you are not quite clear about your case?\"\n\n\"It means that I can make neither head nor tail of it. So far as I can see, it is just as tangled a business as ever I handled, and yet at first it seemed so simple that one couldn't go wrong. There's no motive, Mr. Holmes. That's what bothers me\u2014I can't put my hand on a motive. Here's a man dead\u2014there's no denying that\u2014but, so far as I can see, no reason on earth why anyone should wish him harm.\"\n\nHolmes lit his cigar and leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"Let us hear about it,\" said he.\n\n\"I've got my facts pretty clear,\" said Stanley Hopkins. \"All I want now is to know what they all mean. The story, so far as I can make it out, is like this. Some years ago this country house, Yoxley Old Place, was taken by an elderly man, who gave the name of Professor Coram. He was an invalid, keeping his bed half the time, and the other half hobbling round the house with a stick or being pushed about the grounds by the gardener in a Bath chair.* He was well liked by the few neighbours who called upon him, and he has the reputation down there of being a very learned man. His household used to consist of an elderly housekeeper, Mrs. Marker, and of a maid, Susan Tarlton. These have both been with him since his arrival, and they seem to be women of excellent character. The professor is writing a learned book, and he found it necessary, about a year ago, to engage a secretary. The first two that he tried were not successes, but the third, Mr. Willoughby Smith, a very young man straight from the university, seems to have been just what his employer wanted. His work consisted in writing all the morning to the professor's dictation, and he usually spent the evening in hunting up references and passages which bore upon the next day's work. This Willoughby Smith has nothing against him, either as a boy at Uppingham or as a young man at Cambridge. I have seen his testimonials, and from the first he was a decent, quiet, hard-working fellow, with no weak spot in him at all. And yet this is the lad who has met his death this morning in the professor's study under circumstances which can point only to murder.\"\n\nThe wind howled and screamed at the windows. Holmes and I drew closer to the fire, while the young inspector slowly and point by point developed his singular narrative.\n\n\"If you were to search all England,\" said he, \"I don't suppose you could find a household more self-contained or freer from outside influences. Whole weeks would pass, and not one of them go past the garden gate. The professor was buried in his work and existed for nothing else. Young Smith knew nobody in the neighbourhood, and lived very much as his employer did. The two women had nothing to take them from the house. Mortimer, the gardener, who wheels the Bath chair, is an army pensioner\u2014an old Crimean man of excellent character. He does not live in the house, but in a three-roomed cottage at the other end of the garden. Those are the only people that you would find within the grounds of Yoxley Old Place. At the same time, the gate of the garden is a hundred yards from the main London to Chatham road. It opens with a latch, and there is nothing to prevent anyone from walking in.\n\n\"Now I will give you the evidence of Susan Tarlton, who is the only person who can say anything positive about the matter. It was in the forenoon, between eleven and twelve. She was engaged at the moment in hanging some curtains in the upstairs front bedroom. Professor Coram was still in bed, for when the weather is bad he seldom rises before midday. The housekeeper was busied with some work in the back of the house. Willoughby Smith had been in his bedroom, which he uses as a sitting-room, but the maid heard him at that moment pass along the passage and descend to the study immediately below her. She did not see him, but she says that she could not be mistaken in his quick, firm tread. She did not hear the study door close, but a minute or so later there was a dreadful cry in the room below. It was a wild, hoarse scream, so strange and unnatural that it might have come either from a man or a woman. At the same instant there was a heavy thud, which shook the old house, and then all was silence. The maid stood petrified for a moment, and then, recovering her courage, she ran downstairs. The study door was shut and she opened it. Inside, young Mr. Willoughby Smith was stretched upon the floor. At first she could see no injury, but as she tried to raise him she saw that blood was pouring from the underside of his neck. It was pierced by a very small but very deep wound, which had divided the carotid artery. The instrument with which the injury had been inflicted lay upon the carpet beside him. It was one of those small sealing-wax knives to be found on old-fashioned writing-tables, with an ivory handle and a stiff blade. It was part of the fittings of the professor's own desk.\n\n\"At first the maid thought that young Smith was already dead, but on pouring some water from the carafe over his forehead he opened his eyes for an instant. 'The professor,' he murmured\u2014'it was she.' The maid is prepared to swear that those were the exact words. He tried desperately to say something else, and he held his right hand up in the air. Then he fell back dead.\n\n\"In the meantime the housekeeper had also arrived upon the scene; but she was just too late to catch the young man's dying words. Leaving Susan with the body, she hurried to the professor's room. He was sitting up in bed horribly agitated, for he had heard enough to convince him that something terrible had occurred. Mrs. Marker is prepared to swear that the professor was still in his night-clothes, and indeed it was impossible for him to dress without the help of Mortimer, whose orders were to come at twelve o'clock. The professor declares that he heard the distant cry, but that he knows nothing more. He can give no explanation of the young man's last words, 'The professor\u2014it was she,' but imagines that they were the outcome of delirium. He believes that Willoughby Smith had not an enemy in the world, and can give no reason for the crime. His first action was to send Mortimer, the gardener, for the local police. A little later the chief constable sent for me. Nothing was moved before I got there, and strict orders were given that no one should walk upon the paths leading to the house. It was a splendid chance of putting your theories into practice, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. There was really nothing wanting.\"\n\n\"Except Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said my companion, with a somewhat bitter smile. \"Well, let us hear about it. What sort of job did you make of it?\"\n\n\"I must ask you first, Mr. Holmes, to glance at this rough plan, which will give you a general idea of the position of the professor's study and the various points of the case. It will help you in following my investigation.\"\n\nHe unfolded the rough chart, which I here reproduce, and he laid it across Holmes's knee. I rose and, standing behind Holmes, studied it over his shoulder.\n\n\"It is very rough, of course, and it only deals with the points which seem to me to be essential. All the rest you will see later for yourself. Now, first of all, presuming that the assassin entered the house, how did he or she come in? Undoubtedly by the garden path and the back door, from which there is direct access to the study. Any other way would have been exceedingly complicated. The escape must have also been made along that line, for of the two other exits from the room one was blocked by Susan as she ran downstairs and the other leads straight to the professor's bedroom. I therefore directed my attention at once to the garden path, which was saturated with recent rain, and would certainly show any footmarks.\n\n\"My examination showed me that I was dealing with a cautious and expert criminal. No footmarks were to be found on the path. There could be no question, however, that someone had passed along the grass border which lines the path, and that he had done so in order to avoid leaving a track. I could not find anything in the nature of a distinct impression, but the grass was trodden down, and someone had undoubtedly passed. It could only have been the murderer, since neither the gardener nor anyone else had been there that morning, and the rain had only begun during the night.\"\n\n\"One moment,\" said Holmes. \"Where does this path lead to?\"\n\n\"To the road.\"\n\n\"How long is it?\"\n\n\"A hundred yards or so.\"\n\n\"At the point where the path passes through the gate, you could surely pick up the tracks?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, the path was tiled at that point.\"\n\n\"Well, on the road itself?\"\n\n\"No, it was all trodden into mire.\"\n\n\"Tut-tut! Well, then, these tracks upon the grass, were they coming or going?\"\n\n\"It was impossible to say. There was never any outline.\"\n\n\"A large foot or a small?\"\n\n\"You could not distinguish.\"\n\nHolmes gave an ejaculation of impatience.\n\n\"It has been pouring rain and blowing a hurricane ever since,\" said he. \"It will be harder to read now than that palimpsest. Well, well, it can't be helped. What did you do, Hopkins, after you had made certain that you had made certain of nothing?\"\n\n\"I think I made certain of a good deal, Mr. Holmes. I knew that someone had entered the house cautiously from without. I next examined the corridor. It is lined with cocoanut matting and had taken no impression of any kind. This brought me into the study itself. It is a scantily furnished room. The main article is a large writing-table with a fixed bureau. This bureau consists of a double column of drawers, with a central small cupboard between them. The drawers were open, the cupboard locked. The drawers, it seems, were always open, and nothing of value was kept in them. There were some papers of importance in the cupboard, but there were no signs that this had been tampered with, and the professor assures me that nothing was missing. It is certain that no robbery has been committed.\n\n\"I come now to the body of the young man. It was found near the bureau, and just to the left of it, as marked upon that chart. The stab was on the right side of the neck and from behind forward, so that it is almost impossible that it could have been self-inflicted.\"\n\n\"Unless he fell upon the knife,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Exactly. The idea crossed my mind. But we found the knife some feet away from the body, so that seems impossible. Then, of course, there are the man's own dying words. And, finally, there was this very important piece of evidence which was found clasped in the dead man's right hand.\"\n\nFrom his pocket Stanley Hopkins drew a small paper packet. He unfolded it and disclosed a golden pince-nez, with two broken ends of black silk cord dangling from the end of it. \"Willoughby Smith had excellent sight,\" he added. \"There can be no question that this was snatched from the face or the person of the assassin.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes took the glasses into his hand, and examined them with the utmost attention and interest. He held them on his nose, endeavoured to read through them, went to the window and stared up the street with them, looked at them most minutely in the full light of the lamp, and finally, with a chuckle, seated himself at the table and wrote a few lines upon a sheet of paper, which he tossed across to Stanley Hopkins.\n\n\"That's the best I can do for you,\" said he. \"It may prove to be of some use.\"\n\nThe astonished detective read the note aloud. It ran as follows:\n\n\"Wanted, a woman of good address, attired like a lady. She has a remarkably thick nose, with eyes which are set close upon either side of it. She has a puckered forehead, a peering expression, and probably rounded shoulders. There are indications that she has had recourse to an optician at least twice during the last few months. As her glasses are of remarkable strength, and as opticians are not very numerous, there should be no difficulty in tracing her.\"\n\nHolmes smiled at the astonishment of Hopkins, which must have been reflected upon my features.\n\n\"Surely my deductions are simplicity itself,\" said he. \"It would be difficult to name any articles which afford a finer field for inference than a pair of glasses, especially so remarkable a pair as these. That they belong to a woman I infer from their delicacy, and also, of course, from the last words of the dying man. As to her being a person of refinement and well dressed, they are, as you perceive, handsomely mounted in solid gold, and it is inconceivable that anyone who wore such glasses could be slatternly in other respects. You will find that the clips are too wide for your nose, showing that the lady's nose was very broad at the base. This sort of nose is usually a short and coarse one, but there is a sufficient number of exceptions to prevent me from being dogmatic or from insisting upon this point in my description. My own face is a narrow one, and yet I find that I cannot get my eyes into the centre, nor near the centre, of these glasses. Therefore, the lady's eyes are set very near to the sides of the nose. You will perceive, Watson, that the glasses are concave and of unusual strength. A lady whose vision has been so extremely contracted all her life is sure to have the physical characteristics of such vision, which are seen in the forehead, the eyelids, and the shoulders.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"I can follow each of your arguments. I confess, however, that I am unable to understand how you arrive at the double visit to the optician.\"\n\nHolmes took the glasses in his hand.\n\n\"You will perceive,\" he said, \"that the clips are lined with tiny bands of cork to soften the pressure upon the nose. One of these is discoloured and worn to some slight extent, but the other is new. Evidently one has fallen off and been replaced. I should judge that the older of them has not been there more than a few months. They exactly correspond, so I gather that the lady went back to the same establishment for the second.\"\n\n\"By George, it's marvellous!\" cried Hopkins, in an ecstasy of admiration. \"To think that I had all that evidence in my hand and never knew it! I had intended, however, to go the round of the London opticians.\"\n\n\"Of course you would. Meanwhile, have you anything more to tell us about the case?\"\n\n\"Nothing, Mr. Holmes. I think that you know as much as I do now\u2014probably more. We have had inquiries made as to any stranger seen on the country roads or at the railway station. We have heard of none. What beats me is the utter want of all object in the crime. Not a ghost of a motive can anyone suggest.\"\n\n\"Ah! there I am not in a position to help you. But I suppose you want us to come out to-morrow?\"\n\n\"If it is not asking too much, Mr. Holmes. There's a train from Charing Cross to Chatham at six in the morning, and we should be at Yoxley Old Place between eight and nine.\"\n\n\"Then we shall take it. Your case has certainly some features of great interest, and I shall be delighted to look into it. Well, it's nearly one, and we had best get a few hours' sleep. I daresay you can manage all right on the sofa in front of the fire. I'll light my spirit lamp, and give you a cup of coffee before we start.\"\n\nThe gale had blown itself out next day, but it was a bitter morning when we started upon our journey. We saw the cold winter sun rise over the dreary marshes of the Thames and the long, sullen reaches of the river, which I shall ever associate with our pursuit of the Andaman Islander in the earlier days of our career. After a long and weary journey, we alighted at a small station some miles from Chatham. While a horse was being put into a trap at the local inn, we snatched a hurried breakfast, and so we were all ready for business when we at last arrived at Yoxley Old Place. A constable met us at the garden gate.\n\n\"Well, Wilson, any news?\"\n\n\"No, sir\u2014nothing.\"\n\n\"No reports of any stranger seen?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Down at the station they are certain that no stranger either came or went yesterday.\"\n\n\"Have you had inquiries made at inns and lodgings?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir: there is no one that we cannot account for.\"\n\n\"Well, it's only a reasonable walk to Chatham. Anyone might stay there or take a train without being observed. This is the garden path of which I spoke, Mr. Holmes. I'll pledge my word there was no mark on it yesterday.\"\n\n\"On which side were the marks on the grass?\"\n\n\"This side, sir. This narrow margin of grass between the path and the flowerbed. I can't see the traces now, but they were clear to me then.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes: someone has passed along,\" said Holmes, stooping over the grass border. \"Our lady must have picked her steps carefully, must she not, since on the one side she would leave a track on the path, and on the other an even clearer one on the soft bed?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, she must have been a cool hand.\"\n\nI saw an intent look pass over Holmes's face.\n\n\"You say that she must have come back this way?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, there is no other.\"\n\n\"On this strip of grass?\"\n\n\"Certainly, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Hum! It was a very remarkable performance\u2014very remarkable. Well, I think we have exhausted the path. Let us go farther. This garden door is usually kept open, I suppose? Then this visitor had nothing to do but to walk in. The idea of murder was not in her mind, or she would have provided herself with some sort of weapon, instead of having to pick this knife off the writing-table. She advanced along this corridor, leaving no traces upon the cocoanut matting. Then she found herself in this study. How long was she there? We have no means of judging.\"\n\n\"Not more than a few minutes, sir. I forgot to tell you that Mrs. Marker, the housekeeper, had been in there tidying not very long before\u2014about a quarter of an hour, she says.\"\n\n\"Well, that gives us a limit. Our lady enters this room, and what does she do? She goes over to the writing-table. What for? Not for anything in the drawers. If there had been anything worth her taking, it would surely have been locked up. No, it was for something in that wooden bureau. Halloa! what is that scratch upon the face of it? Just hold a match, Watson. Why did you not tell me of this, Hopkins?\"\n\nThe mark which he was examining began upon the brasswork on the righthand side of the keyhole, and extended for about four inches, where it had scratched the varnish from the surface.\n\n\"I noticed it, Mr. Holmes, but you'll always find scratches round a keyhole.\"\n\n\"This is recent, quite recent. See how the brass shines where it is cut. An old scratch would be the same colour as the surface. Look at it through my lens. There's the varnish, too, like earth on each side of a furrow. Is Mrs. Marker there?\"\n\nA sad-faced, elderly woman came into the room.\n\n\"Did you dust this bureau yesterday morning?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Did you notice this scratch?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I did not.\"\n\n\"I am sure you did not, for a duster would have swept away these shreds of varnish. Who has the key of this bureau?\"\n\n\"The professor keeps it on his watch-chain.\"\n\n\"Is it a simple key?\"\n\n\"No, sir, it is a Chubb's key.\"\n\n\"Very good. Mrs. Marker, you can go. Now we are making a little progress. Our lady enters the room, advances to the bureau, and either opens it or tries to do so. While she is thus engaged, young Willoughby Smith enters the room. In her hurry to withdraw the key, she makes this scratch upon the door. He seizes her, and she, snatching up the nearest object, which happens to be this knife, strikes at him in order to make him let go his hold. The blow is a fatal one. He falls and she escapes, either with or without the object for which she has come. Is Susan, the maid, there? Could anyone have got away through that door after the time that you heard the cry, Susan?\"\n\n\"No, sir, it is impossible. Before I got down the stair, I'd have seen anyone in the passage. Besides, the door never opened, or I would have heard it.\"\n\n\"That settles this exit. Then no doubt the lady went out the way she came. I understand that this other passage leads only to the professor's room. There is no exit that way?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"We shall go down it and make the acquaintance of the professor. Halloa, Hopkins! this is very important, very important indeed. The professor's corridor is also lined with cocoanut matting.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, what of that?\"\n\n\"Don't you see any bearing upon the case? Well, well. I don't insist upon it. No doubt I am wrong. And yet it seems to me to be suggestive. Come with me and introduce me.\"\n\nWe passed down the passage, which was of the same length as that which led to the garden. At the end was a short flight of steps ending in a door. Our guide knocked, and then ushered us into the professor's bedroom.\n\nIt was a very large chamber, lined with innumerable volumes, which had overflowed from the shelves and lay in piles in the corners, or were stacked all round at the base of the cases. The bed was in the centre of the room, and in it, propped up with pillows, was the owner of the house. I have seldom seen a more remarkable-looking person. It was a gaunt, aquiline face which was turned towards us, with piercing dark eyes, which lurked in deep hollows under overhung and tufted brows. His hair and beard were white, save that the latter was curiously stained with yellow around his mouth. A cigarette glowed amid the tangle of white hair, and the air of the room was fetid with stale tobacco smoke. As he held out his hand to Holmes, I perceived that it was also stained with yellow nicotine.\n\n\"A smoker, Mr. Holmes?\" said he, speaking in well-chosen English, with a curious little mincing accent. \"Pray take a cigarette. And you, sir? I can recommend them, for I have them especially prepared by Ionides, of Alexandria. He sends me a thousand at a time, and I grieve to say that I have to arrange for a fresh supply every fortnight. Bad, sir, very bad, but an old man has few pleasures. Tobacco and my work\u2014that is all that is left to me.\"\n\nHolmes had lit a cigarette and was shooting little darting glances all over the room.\n\n\"Tobacco and my work, but now only tobacco,\" the old man exclaimed. \"Alas! what a fatal interruption! Who could have foreseen such a terrible catastrophe? So estimable a young man! I assure you that, after a few months' training, he was an admirable assistant. What do you think of the matter, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I have not yet made up my mind.\"\n\n\"I shall indeed be indebted to you if you can throw a light where all is so dark to us. To a poor bookworm and invalid like myself such a blow is paralyzing. I seem to have lost the faculty of thought. But you are a man of action\u2014you are a man of affairs. It is part of the everyday routine of your life. You can preserve your balance in every emergency. We are fortunate, indeed, in having you at our side.\"\n\nHolmes was pacing up and down one side of the room whilst the old professor was talking. I observed that he was smoking with extraordinary rapidity. It was evident that he shared our host's liking for the fresh Alexandrian cigarettes.\n\n\"Yes, sir, it is a crushing blow,\" said the old man. \"That is my magnum opus\u2014 the pile of papers on the side table yonder. It is my analysis of the documents found in the Coptic monasteries of Syria and Egypt, a work which will cut deep at the very foundation of revealed religion. With my enfeebled health I do not know whether I shall ever be able to complete it, now that my assistant has been taken from me. Dear me! Mr. Holmes, why, you are even a quicker smoker than I am myself.\"\n\nHolmes smiled.\n\n\"I am a connoisseur,\" said he, taking another cigarette from the box\u2014his fourth\u2014and lighting it from the stub of that which he had finished. \"I will not trouble you with any lengthy cross-examination, Professor Coram, since I gather that you were in bed at the time of the crime, and could know nothing about it. I would only ask this: What do you imagine that this poor fellow meant by his last words: 'The professor\u2014it was she'?\"\n\nThe professor shook his head.\n\n\"Susan is a country girl,\" said he, \"and you know the incredible stupidity of that class. I fancy that the poor fellow murmured some incoherent, delirious words, and that she twisted them into this meaningless message.\"\n\n\"I see. You have no explanation yourself of the tragedy?\"\n\n\"Possibly an accident, possibly\u2014I only breathe it among ourselves\u2014a suicide. Young men have their hidden troubles\u2014some affair of the heart, perhaps, which we have never known. It is a more probable supposition than murder.\"\n\n\"But the eyeglasses?\"\n\n\"Ah! I am only a student\u2014a man of dreams. I cannot explain the practical things of life. But still, we are aware, my friend, that love-gages may take strange shapes. By all means take another cigarette. It is a pleasure to see anyone appreciate them so. A fan, a glove, glasses\u2014who knows what article may be carried as a token or treasured when a man puts an end to his life? This gentleman speaks of footsteps in the grass, but, after all, it is easy to be mistaken on such a point. As to the knife, it might well be thrown far from the unfortunate man as he fell. It is possible that I speak as a child, but to me it seems that Willoughby Smith has met his fate by his own hand.\"\n\nHolmes seemed struck by the theory thus put forward, and he continued to walk up and down for some time, lost in thought and consuming cigarette after cigarette.\n\n\"Tell me, Professor Coram,\" he said, at last, \"what is in that cupboard in the bureau?\"\n\n\"Nothing that would help a thief. Family papers, letters from my poor wife, diplomas of universities which have done me honour. Here is the key. You can look for yourself.\"\n\nHolmes picked up the key, and looked at it for an instant, then he handed it back.\n\n\"No, I hardly think that it would help me,\" said he. \"I should prefer to go quietly down to your garden, and turn the whole matter over in my head. There is something to be said for the theory of suicide which you have put forward. We must apologize for having intruded upon you, Professor Coram, and I promise that we won't disturb you until after lunch. At two o'clock we will come again, and report to you anything which may have happened in the interval.\"\n\nHolmes was curiously distrait, and we walked up and down the garden path for some time in silence.\n\n\"Have you a clue?\" I asked, at last.\n\n\"It depends upon those cigarettes that I smoked,\" said he. \"It is possible that I am utterly mistaken. The cigarettes will show me.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes,\" I exclaimed, \"how on earth\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, well, you may see for yourself. If not, there's no harm done. Of course, we always have the optician clue to fall back upon, but I take a short cut when I can get it. Ah, here is the good Mrs. Marker! Let us enjoy five minutes of instructive conversation with her.\"\n\nI may have remarked before that Holmes had, when he liked, a peculiarly ingratiating way with women, and that he very readily established terms of confidence with them. In half the time which he had named, he had captured the housekeeper's goodwill and was chatting with her as if he had known her for years.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes, it is as you say, sir. He does smoke something terrible. All day and sometimes all night, sir. I've seen that room of a morning\u2014well, sir, you'd have thought it was a London fog. Poor young Mr. Smith, he was a smoker also, but not as bad as the professor. His health\u2014well, I don't know that it's better nor worse for the smoking.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said Holmes, \"but it kills the appetite.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know about that, sir.\"\n\n\"I suppose the professor eats hardly anything?\"\n\n\"Well, he is variable. I'll say that for him.\"\n\n\"I'll wager he took no breakfast this morning, and won't face his lunch after all the cigarettes I saw him consume.\"\n\n\"Well, you're out there, sir, as it happens, for he ate a remarkable big breakfast this morning. I don't know when I've known him make a better one, and he's ordered a good dish of cutlets for his lunch. I'm surprised myself, for since I came into that room yesterday and saw young Mr. Smith lying there on the floor, I couldn't bear to look at food. Well, it takes all sorts to make a world, and the professor hasn't let it take his appetite away.\"\n\nWe loitered the morning away in the garden. Stanley Hopkins had gone down to the village to look into some rumours of a strange woman who had been seen by some children on the Chatham Road the previous morning. As to my friend, all his usual energy seemed to have deserted him. I had never known him handle a case in such a half-hearted fashion. Even the news brought back by Hopkins that he had found the children, and that they had undoubtedly seen a woman exactly corresponding with Holmes's description, and wearing either spectacles or eyeglasses, failed to rouse any sign of keen interest. He was more attentive when Susan, who waited upon us at lunch, volunteered the information that she believed Mr. Smith had been out for a walk yesterday morning, and that he had only returned half an hour before the tragedy occurred. I could not myself see the bearing of this incident, but I clearly perceived that Holmes was weaving it into the general scheme which he had formed in his brain. Suddenly he sprang from his chair and glanced at his watch. \"Two o'clock, gentlemen,\" said he. \"We must go up and have it out with our friend, the professor.\"\n\nThe old man had just finished his lunch, and certainly his empty dish bore evidence to the good appetite with which his housekeeper had credited him. He was, indeed, a weird figure as he turned his white mane and his glowing eyes towards us. The eternal cigarette smouldered in his mouth. He had been dressed and was seated in an armchair by the fire.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, have you solved this mystery yet?\" He shoved the large tin of cigarettes which stood on a table beside him towards my companion. Holmes stretched out his hand at the same moment, and between them they tipped the box over the edge. For a minute or two we were all on our knees retrieving stray cigarettes from impossible places. When we rose again, I observed Holmes's eyes were shining and his cheeks tinged with colour. Only at a crisis have I seen those battle-signals flying.\n\n\"Yes,\" said he, \"I have solved it.\"\n\nStanley Hopkins and I stared in amazement. Something like a sneer quivered over the gaunt features of the old professor.\n\n\"Indeed! In the garden?\"\n\n\"No, here.\"\n\n\"Here! When?\"\n\n\"This instant.\"\n\n\"You are surely joking, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. You compel me to tell you that this is too serious a matter to be treated in such a fashion.\"\n\n\"I have forged and tested every link of my chain, Professor Coram, and I am sure that it is sound. What your motives are, or what exact part you play in this strange business, I am not yet able to say. In a few minutes I shall probably hear it from your own lips. Meanwhile I will reconstruct what is past for your benefit, so that you may know the information which I still require.\n\n\"A lady yesterday entered your study. She came with the intention of possessing herself of certain documents which were in your bureau. She had a key of her own. I have had an opportunity of examining yours, and I do not find that slight discolouration which the scratch made upon the varnish would have produced. You were not an accessory, therefore, and she came, so far as I can read the evidence, without your knowledge to rob you.\"\n\nThe professor blew a cloud from his lips. \"This is most interesting and instructive,\" said he. \"Have you no more to add? Surely, having traced this lady so far, you can also say what has become of her.\"\n\n\"I will endeavour to do so. In the first place she was seized by your secretary, and stabbed him in order to escape. This catastrophe I am inclined to regard as an unhappy accident, for I am convinced that the lady had no intention of inflicting so grievous an injury. An assassin does not come unarmed. Horrified by what she had done, she rushed wildly away from the scene of the tragedy. Unfortunately for her, she had lost her glasses in the scuffle, and as she was extremely shortsighted she was really helpless without them. She ran down a corridor, which she imagined to be that by which she had come\u2014both were lined with cocoanut matting\u2014and it was only when it was too late that she understood that she had taken the wrong passage, and that her retreat was cut off behind her. What was she to do? She could not go back. She could not remain where she was. She must go on. She went on. She mounted a stair, pushed open a door, and found herself in your room.\"\n\nThe old man sat with his mouth open, staring wildly at Holmes. Amazement and fear were stamped upon his expressive features. Now, with an effort, he shrugged his shoulders and burst into insincere laughter.\n\n\"All very fine, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"But there is one little flaw in your splendid theory. I was myself in my room, and I never left it during the day.\"\n\n\"I am aware of that, Professor Coram.\"\n\n\"And you mean to say that I could lie upon that bed and not be aware that a woman had entered my room?\"\n\n\"I never said so. You were aware of it. You spoke with her. You recognized her. You aided her to escape.\"\n\nAgain the professor burst into high-keyed laughter. He had risen to his feet, and his eyes glowed like embers.\n\n\"You are mad!\" he cried. \"You are talking insanely. I helped her to escape? Where is she now?\"\n\n\"She is there,\" said Holmes, and he pointed to a high bookcase in the corner of the room.\n\nI saw the old man throw up his arms, a terrible convulsion passed over his grim face, and he fell back in his chair. At the same instant the bookcase at which Holmes pointed swung round upon a hinge, and a woman rushed out into the room. \"You are right!\" she cried, in a strange foreign voice. \"You are right! I am here.\"\n\nShe was brown with the dust and draped with the cobwebs which had come from the walls of her hiding-place. Her face, too, was streaked with grime, and at the best she could never have been handsome, for she had the exact physical characteristics which Holmes had divined, with, in addition, a long and obstinate chin. What with her natural blindness, and what with the change from dark to light, she stood as one dazed, blinking about her to see where and who we were. And yet, in spite of all these disadvantages, there was a certain nobility in the woman's bearing\u2014a gallantry in the defiant chin and in the upraised head, which compelled something of respect and admiration.\n\nStanley Hopkins had laid his hand upon her arm and claimed her as his prisoner, but she waved him aside gently, and yet with an over-mastering dignity which compelled obedience. The old man lay back in his chair with a twitching face, and stared at her with brooding eyes.\n\n\"Yes, sir, I am your prisoner,\" she said. \"From where I stood I could hear everything, and I know that you have learned the truth. I confess it all. It was I who killed the young man. But you are right\u2014you who say it was an accident. I did not even know that it was a knife which I held in my hand, for in my despair I snatched anything from the table and struck at him to make him let me go. It is the truth that I tell.\"\n\n\"Madam,\" said Holmes, \"I am sure that it is the truth. I fear that you are far from well.\"\n\nShe had turned a dreadful colour, the more ghastly under the dark dust-streaks upon her face. She seated herself on the side of the bed; then she resumed.\n\n\"I have only a little time here,\" she said, \"but I would have you to know the whole truth. I am this man's wife. He is not an Englishman. He is a Russian. His name I will not tell.\"\n\nFor the first time the old man stirred. \"God bless you, Anna!\" he cried. \"God bless you!\"\n\nShe cast a look of the deepest disdain in his direction. \"Why should you cling so hard to that wretched life of yours, Sergius?\" said she. \"It has done harm to many and good to none\u2014not even to yourself. However, it is not for me to cause the frail thread to be snapped before God's time. I have enough already upon my soul since I crossed the threshold of this cursed house. But I must speak or I shall be too late.\n\n\"I have said, gentlemen, that I am this man's wife. He was fifty and I a foolish girl of twenty when we married. It was in a city of Russia, a university\u2014I will not name the place.\"\n\n\"God bless you, Anna!\" murmured the old man again.\n\n\"We were reformers\u2014revolutionists\u2014Nihilists, you understand. He and I and many more. Then there came a time of trouble, a police officer was killed, many were arrested, evidence was wanted, and in order to save his own life and to earn a great reward, my husband betrayed his own wife and his companions. Yes, we were all arrested upon his confession. Some of us found our way to the gallows, and some to Siberia. I was among these last, but my term was not for life. My husband came to England with his ill-gotten gains and has lived in quiet ever since, knowing well that if the Brotherhood knew where he was not a week would pass before justice would be done.\"\n\nThe old man reached out a trembling hand and helped himself to a cigarette. \"I am in your hands, Anna,\" said he. \"You were always good to me.\"\n\n\"I have not yet told you the height of his villainy,\" said she. \"Among our comrades of the Order, there was one who was the friend of my heart. He was noble, unselfish, loving\u2014all that my husband was not. He hated violence. We were all guilty\u2014if that is guilt\u2014but he was not. He wrote forever dissuading us from such a course. These letters would have saved him. So would my diary, in which, from day to day, I had entered both my feelings towards him and the view which each of us had taken. My husband found and kept both diary and letters. He hid them, and he tried hard to swear away the young man's life. In this he failed, but Alexis was sent a convict to Siberia, where now, at this moment, he works in a salt mine. Think of that, you villain, you villain!\u2014now, now, at this very moment, Alexis, a man whose name you are not worthy to speak, works and lives like a slave, and yet I have your life in my hands, and I let you go.\"\n\n\"You were always a noble woman, Anna,\" said the old man, puffing at his cigarette.\n\nShe had risen, but she fell back again with a little cry of pain.\n\n\"I must finish,\" she said. \"When my term was over I set myself to get the diary and letters which, if sent to the Russian government, would procure my friend's release. I knew that my husband had come to England. After months of searching I discovered where he was. I knew that he still had the diary, for when I was in Siberia I had a letter from him once, reproaching me and quoting some passages from its pages. Yet I was sure that, with his revengeful nature, he would never give it to me of his own free-will. I must get it for myself. With this object I engaged an agent from a private detective firm, who entered my husband's house as a secretary\u2014it was your second secretary, Sergius, the one who left you so hurriedly. He found that papers were kept in the cupboard, and he got an impression of the key. He would not go farther. He furnished me with a plan of the house, and he told me that in the forenoon the study was always empty, as the secretary was employed up here. So at last I took my courage in both hands, and I came down to get the papers for myself. I succeeded; but at what a cost!\n\n\"I had just taken the papers and was locking the cupboard, when the young man seized me. I had seen him already that morning. He had met me on the road, and I had asked him to tell me where Professor Coram lived, not knowing that he was in his employ.\"\n\n\"Exactly! Exactly!\" said Holmes. \"The secretary came back, and told his employer of the woman he had met. Then, in his last breath, he tried to send a message that it was she\u2014the she whom he had just discussed with him.\"\n\n\"You must let me speak,\" said the woman, in an imperative voice, and her face contracted as if in pain. \"When he had fallen I rushed from the room, chose the wrong door, and found myself in my husband's room. He spoke of giving me up. I showed him that if he did so, his life was in my hands. If he gave me to the law, I could give him to the Brotherhood. It was not that I wished to live for my own sake, but it was that I desired to accomplish my purpose. He knew that I would do what I said\u2014that his own fate was involved in mine. For that reason, and for no other, he shielded me. He thrust me into that dark hiding-place\u2014a relic of old days, known only to himself. He took his meals in his own room, and so was able to give me part of his food. It was agreed that when the police left the house I should slip away by night and come back no more. But in some way you have read our plans.\" She tore from the bosom of her dress a small packet. \"These are my last words,\" said she; \"here is the packet which will save Alexis. I confide it to your honour and to your love of justice. Take it! You will deliver it at the Russian Embassy. Now, I have done my duty, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop her!\" cried Holmes. He had bounded across the room and had wrenched a small phial from her hand.\n\n\"Too late!\" she said, sinking back on the bed. \"Too late! I took the poison before I left my hiding-place. My head swims! I am going! I charge you, sir, to remember the packet.\"\n\n\"A simple case, and yet, in some ways, an instructive one,\" Holmes remarked, as we travelled back to town. \"it hinged from the outset upon the pince-nez. But for the fortunate chance of the dying man having seized these, I am not sure that we could ever have reached our solution. It was clear to me, from the strength of the glasses, that the wearer must have been very blind and helpless when deprived of them. When you asked me to believe that she walked along a narrow strip of grass without once making a false step, I remarked, as you may remember, that it was a noteworthy performance. In my mind I set it down as an impossible performance, save in the unlikely case that she had a second pair of glasses. I was forced, therefore, to consider seriously the hypothesis that she had remained within the house. On perceiving the similarity of the two corridors, it became clear that she might very easily have made such a mistake, and, in that case, it was evident that she must have entered the professor's room. I was keenly on the alert, therefore, for whatever would bear out this supposition, and I examined the room narrowly for anything in the shape of a hiding-place. The carpet seemed continuous and firmly nailed, so I dismissed the idea of a trap-door. There might well be a recess behind the books. As you are aware, such devices are common in old libraries. I observed that books were piled on the floor at all other points, but that one bookcase was left clear. This, then, might be the door. I could see no marks to guide me, but the carpet was of a dun colour, which lends itself very well to examination. I therefore smoked a great number of those excellent cigarettes, and I dropped the ash all over the space in front of the suspected bookcase. It was a simple trick, but exceedingly effective. I then went downstairs, and I ascertained, in your presence, Watson, without your perceiving the drift of my remarks, that Professor Coram's consumption of food had increased\u2014as one would expect when he is supplying a second person. We then ascended to the room again, when, by upsetting the cigarette-box, I obtained a very excellent view of the floor, and was able to see quite clearly, from the traces upon the cigarette ash, that the prisoner had in our absence come out from her retreat. Well, Hopkins, here we are at Charing Cross, and I congratulate you on having brought your case to a successful conclusion. You are going to headquarters, no doubt. I think, Watson, you and I will drive together to the Russian Embassy.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE MISSING THREE-QUARTER", + "text": "We were fairly accustomed to receive weird telegrams at Baker Street, but I have a particular recollection of one which reached us on a gloomy February morning, some seven or eight years ago, and gave Mr. Sherlock Holmes a puzzled quarter of an hour. It was addressed to him, and ran thus:\n\nPlease await me. Terrible misfortune. Right wing three-quarter missing, indispensable tomorrow.\n\nOVERTON.\n\n\"Strand postmark, and dispatched ten thirty-six,\" said Holmes. reading it over and over. \"Mr. Overton was evidently considerably excited when he sent it, and somewhat incoherent in consequence. Well, well, he will be here, I daresay, by the time I have looked through the Times, and then we shall know all about it. Even the most insignificant problem would be welcome in these stagnant days.\"\n\nThings had indeed been very slow with us, and I had learned to dread such periods of inaction, for I knew by experience that my companion's brain was so abnormally active that it was dangerous to leave it without material upon which to work. For years I had gradually weaned him from that drug mania which had threatened once to check his remarkable career. Now I knew that under ordinary conditions he no longer craved for this artificial stimulus, but I was well aware that the fiend was not dead but sleeping, and I have known that the sleep was a light one and the waking near when in periods of idleness I have seen the drawn look upon Holmes's ascetic face, and the brooding of his deep-set and inscrutable eyes. Therefore I blessed this Mr. Overton, whoever he might be, since he had come with his enigmatic message to break that dangerous calm which brought more peril to my friend than all the storms of his tempestuous life.\n\nAs we had expected, the telegram was soon followed by its sender, and the card of Mr. Cyril Overton, Trinity College, Cambridge, announced the arrival of an enormous young man, sixteen stone of solid bone and muscle, who spanned the doorway with his broad shoulders, and looked from one of us to the other with a comely face which was haggard with anxiety.\n\n\"Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\"\n\nMy companion bowed.\n\n\"I've been down to Scotland Yard, Mr. Holmes. I saw Inspector Stanley Hopkins. He advised me to come to you. He said the case, so far as he could see, was more in your line than in that of the regular police.\"\n\n\"Pray sit down and tell me what is the matter.\"\n\n\"It's awful, Mr. Holmes\u2014simply awful! I wonder my hair isn't gray. Godfrey Staunton\u2014you've heard of him, of course? He's simply the hinge that the whole team turns on. I'd rather spare two from the pack, and have Godfrey for my three-quarter line. Whether it's passing, or tackling, or dribbling, there's no one to touch him, and then, he's got the head, and can hold us all together. What am I to do? That's what I ask you, Mr. Holmes. There's Moorhouse, first reserve, but he is trained as a half, and he always edges right in on to the scrum instead of keeping out on the touchline. He's a fine place-kick, it's true, but then he has no judgment, and he can't sprint for nuts. Why, Morton or Johnson, the Oxford fliers, could romp round him. Stevenson is fast enough, but he couldn't drop from the twenty-five line, and a three-quarter who can't either punt or drop isn't worth a place for pace alone. No, Mr. Holmes, we are done unless you can help me to find Godfrey Staunton.\"\n\nMy friend had listened with amused surprise to this long speech, which was poured forth with extraordinary vigour and earnestness, every point being driven home by the slapping of a brawny hand upon the speaker's knee. When our visitor was silent Holmes stretched out his hand and took down letter \"S\" of his commonplace book. For once he dug in vain into that mine of varied information.\n\n\"There is Arthur H. Staunton, the rising young forger,\" said he, \"and there was Henry Staunton, whom I helped to hang, but Godfrey Staunton is a new name to me.\"\n\nIt was our visitor's turn to look surprised.\n\n\"Why, Mr. Holmes, I thought you knew things,\" said he. \"I suppose, then, if you have never heard of Godfrey Staunton, you don't know Cyril Overton either?\"\n\nHolmes shook his head good humouredly.\n\n\"Great Scott!\" cried the athlete. \"Why, I was first reserve for England against Wales, and I've skippered the 'Varsity all this year. But that's nothing! I didn't think there was a soul in England who didn't know Godfrey Staunton, the crack three-quarter, Cambridge, Blackheath, and five Internationals. Good Lord! Mr. Holmes, where have you lived?\"\n\nHolmes laughed at the young giant's na\u00efve astonishment.\n\n\"You live in a different world to me, Mr. Overton\u2014a sweeter and healthier one. My ramifications stretch out into many sections of society, but never, I am happy to say, into amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England. However, your unexpected visit this morning shows me that even in that world of fresh air and fair play, there may be work for me to do. So now, my good sir, I beg you to sit down and to tell me, slowly and quietly, exactly what it is that has occurred, and how you desire that I should help you.\"\n\nYoung Overton's face assumed the bothered look of the man who is more accustomed to using his muscles than his wits, but by degrees, with many repetitions and obscurities which I may omit from his narrative, he laid his strange story before us.\n\n\"It's this way, Mr. Holmes. As I have said, I am the skipper of the Rugger team of Cambridge 'Varsity, and Godfrey Staunton is my best man. Tomorrow we play Oxford. Yesterday we all came up, and we settled at Bentley's private hotel. At ten o'clock I went round and saw that all the fellows had gone to roost, for I believe in strict training and plenty of sleep to keep a team fit. I had a word or two with Godfrey before he turned in. He seemed to me to be pale and bothered. I asked him what was the matter. He said he was all right\u2014just a touch of headache. I bade him good-night and left him. Half an hour later, the porter tells me that a rough-looking man with a beard called with a note for Godfrey. He had not gone to bed, and the note was taken to his room. Godfrey read it, and fell back in a chair as if he had been pole-axed. The porter was so scared that he was going to fetch me, but Godfrey stopped him, had a drink of water, and pulled himself together. Then he went downstairs, said a few words to the man who was waiting in the hall, and the two of them went off together. The last that the porter saw of them, they were almost running down the street in the direction of the Strand. This morning Godfrey's room was empty, his bed had never been slept in, and his things were all just as I had seen them the night before. He had gone off at a moment's notice with this stranger, and no word has come from him since. I don't believe he will ever come back. He was a sportsman, was Godfrey, down to his marrow, and he wouldn't have stopped his training and let in his skipper if it were not for some cause that was too strong for him. No: I feel as if he were gone for good, and we should never see him again.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes listened with the deepest attention to this singular narrative.\n\n\"What did you do?\" he asked.\n\n\"I wired to Cambridge to learn if anything had been heard of him there. I have had an answer. No one has seen him.\"\n\n\"Could he have got back to Cambridge?\"\n\n\"Yes, there is a late train\u2014quarter-past eleven.\"\n\n\"But, so far as you can ascertain, he did not take it?\"\n\n\"No, he has not been seen.\"\n\n\"What did you do next?\"\n\n\"I wired to Lord Mount-James.\"\n\n\"Why to Lord Mount-James?\"\n\n\"Godfrey is an orphan, and Lord Mount-James is his nearest relative\u2014his uncle, I believe.\"\n\n\"Indeed. This throws new light upon the matter. Lord Mount-James is one of the richest men in England.\"\n\n\"So I've heard Godfrey say.\"\n\n\"And your friend was closely related?\"\n\n\"Yes, he was his heir, and the old boy is nearly eighty\u2014cram full of gout, too. They say he could chalk his billiard-cue with his knuckles. He never allowed Godfrey a shilling in his life, for he is an absolute miser, but it will all come to him right enough.\"\n\n\"Have you heard from Lord Mount-James?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What motive could your friend have in going to Lord Mount-James?\"\n\n\"Well, something was worrying him the night before, and if it was to do with money it is possible that he would make for his nearest relative, who had so much of it, though from all I have heard he would not have much chance of getting it. Godfrey was not fond of the old man. He would not go if he could help it.\"\n\n\"Well, we can soon determine that. If your friend was going to his relative, Lord Mount-James, you have then to explain the visit of this rough-looking fellow at so late an hour, and the agitation that was caused by his coming.\"\n\nCyril Overton pressed his hands to his head. \"I can make nothing of it,\" said he.\n\n\"Well, well, I have a clear day, and I shall be happy to look into the matter,\" said, Holmes. \"I should strongly recommend you to make your preparations for your match without reference to this young gentleman. It must, as you say, have been an overpowering necessity which tore him away in such a fashion, and the same necessity is likely to hold him away. Let us step round together to the hotel, and see if the porter can throw any fresh light upon the matter.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes was a past-master in the art of putting a humble witness at his ease, and very soon, in the privacy of Godfrey Staunton's abandoned room, he had extracted all that the porter had to tell. The visitor of the night before was not a gentleman, neither was he a workingman. He was simply what the porter described as a \"medium-looking chap,\" a man of fifty, beard grizzled, pale face, quietly dressed. He seemed himself to be agitated. The porter had observed his hand trembling when he had held out the note. Godfrey Staunton had crammed the note into his pocket. Staunton had not shaken hands with the man in the hall. They had exchanged a few sentences, of which the porter had only distinguished the one word \"time.\" Then they had hurried off in the manner described. It was just half-past ten by the hall clock.\n\n\"Let me see,\" said Holmes, seating himself on Staunton's bed. \"You are the day porter, are you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I go off duty at eleven.\"\n\n\"The night porter saw nothing, I suppose?\"\n\n\"No, sir, one theatre party came in late. No one else.\"\n\n\"Were you on duty all day yesterday?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Did you take any messages to Mr. Staunton?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, one telegram.\"\n\n\"Ah! that's interesting. What o'clock was this?\"\n\n\"About six.\"\n\n\"Where was Mr. Staunton when he received it?\"\n\n\"Here in his room.\"\n\n\"Were you present when he opened it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I waited to see if there was an answer.\"\n\n\"Well, was there?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he wrote an answer.\"\n\n\"Did you take it?\"\n\n\"No, he took it himself.\"\n\n\"But he wrote it in your presence?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I was standing by the door, and he with his back turned to that table. When he had written it he said: 'All right, porter, I will take this myself.'\"\n\n\"What did he write it with?\"\n\n\"A pen, sir.\"\n\n\"Was the telegraphic form one of these on the table?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, it was the top one.\"\n\nHolmes rose. Taking the forms, he carried them over to the window and carefully examined that which was uppermost.\n\n\"It's a pity he did not write in pencil,\" said he, throwing them down again with a shrug of disappointment. \"As you have no doubt frequently observed, Watson, the impression usually goes through\u2014a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage. However, I can find no trace here. I rejoice, however, to perceive that he wrote with a broad-pointed quill pen, and I can hardly doubt that we will find some impression upon this blotting-pad. Ah, yes, surely this is the very thing!\"\n\nHe tore off a strip of the blotting-paper and turned towards us the following hieroglyphic:\n\nCyril Overton was much excited. \"Hold it to the glass!\" he cried.\n\n\"That is unnecessary,\" said Holmes. \"The paper is thin, and the reverse will give the message. Here it is.\" He turned it over, and we read:\n\n\"So that is the tail end of the telegram which Godfrey Staunton dispatched within a few hours of his disappearance. There are at least six words of the message which have escaped us; but what remains\u2014'Stand by us for God's sake!'\u2014proves that this young man saw a formidable danger which approached him, and from which someone else could protect him. 'Us,' mark you! Another person was involved. Who should it be but the pale-faced, bearded man, who seemed himself in so nervous a state? What, then, is the connection between Godfrey Staunton and the bearded man? And what is the third source from which each of them sought for help against pressing danger? Our inquiry has already narrowed down to that.\"\n\n\"We have only to find to whom that telegram is addressed,\" I suggested.\n\n\"Exactly, my dear Watson. Your reflection, though profound, had already crossed my mind. But I daresay it may have come to your notice that, if you walk into a postoffice and demand to see the counterfoil of another man's message, there may be some disinclination on the part of the officials to oblige you. There is so much red tape in these matters. However, I have no doubt that with a little delicacy and finesse the end may be attained. Meanwhile, I should like in your presence, Mr. Overton, to go through these papers which have been left upon the table.\"\n\nThere were a number of letters, bills, and notebooks, which Holmes turned over and examined with quick, nervous fingers and darting, penetrating eyes. \"Nothing here,\" he said, at last. \"By the way, I suppose your friend was a healthy young fellow\u2014nothing amiss with him?\"\n\n\"Sound as a bell.\"\n\n\"Have you ever known him ill?\"\n\n\"Not a day. He has been laid up with a hack, and once he slipped his knee-cap, but that was nothing.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he was not so strong as you suppose. I should think he may have had some secret trouble. With your assent, I will put one or two of these papers in my pocket, in case they should bear upon our future inquiry.\"\n\n\"One moment\u2014one moment!\" cried a querulous voice, and we looked up to find a queer little old man, jerking and twitching in the doorway. He was dressed in rusty black, with a very broad-brimmed top-hat and a loose white necktie\u2014the whole effect being that of a very rustic parson or of an undertaker's mute. Yet, in spite of his shabby and even absurd appearance, his voice had a sharp crackle, and his manner a quick intensity which commanded attention.\n\n\"Who are you, sir, and by what right do you touch this gentleman's papers?\" he asked.\n\n\"I am a private detective, and I am endeavouring to explain his disappearance.\"\n\n\"Oh, you are, are you? And who instructed you, eh?\"\n\n\"This gentleman, Mr. Staunton's friend, was referred to me by Scotland Yard.\"\n\n\"Who are you, sir?\"\n\n\"I am Cyril Overton.\"\n\n\"Then it is you who sent me a telegram. My name is Lord Mount-James. I came round as quickly as the Bayswater bus would bring me. So you have instructed a detective?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"And are you prepared to meet the cost?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt, sir, that my friend Godfrey, when we find him, will be prepared to do that.\"\n\n\"But if he is never found, eh? Answer me that!\"\n\n\"In that case, no doubt his family\u2014\"\n\n\"Nothing of the sort, sir!\" screamed the little man. \"Don't look to me for a penny\u2014not a penny! You understand that, Mr. Detective! I am all the family that this young man has got, and I tell you that I am not responsible. If he has any expectations it is due to the fact that I have never wasted money, and I do not propose to begin to do so now. As to those papers with which you are making so free, I may tell you that in case there should be anything of any value among them, you will be held strictly to account for what you do with them.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"May I ask, in the meanwhile, whether you have yourself any theory to account for this young man's disappearance?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I have not. He is big enough and old enough to look after himself, and if he is so foolish as to lose himself, I entirely refuse to accept the responsibility of hunting for him.\"\n\n\"I quite understand your position,\" said Holmes, with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. \"Perhaps you don't quite understand mine. Godfrey Staunton appears to have been a poor man. If he has been kidnapped, it could not have been for anything which he himself possesses. The fame of your wealth has gone abroad, Lord Mount-James, and it is entirely possible that a gang of thieves have secured your nephew in order to gain from him some information as to your house, your habits, and your treasure.\"\n\nThe face of our unpleasant little visitor turned as white as his neck-cloth.\n\n\"Heavens, sir, what an idea! I never thought of such villainy! What inhuman rogues there are in the world! But Godfrey is a fine lad\u2014a staunch lad. Nothing would induce him to give his old uncle away. I'll have the plate moved over to the bank this evening. In the meantime spare no pains, Mr. Detective! I beg you to leave no stone unturned to bring him safely back. As to money, well, so far as a fiver or even a tenner goes you can always look to me.\"\n\nEven in his chastened frame of mind, the noble miser could give us no information which could help us, for he knew little of the private life of his nephew. Our only clue lay in the truncated telegram, and with a copy of this in his hand Holmes set forth to find a second link for his chain. We had shaken off Lord Mount-James, and Overton had gone to consult with the other members of his team over the misfortune which had befallen them.\n\nThere was a telegraph-office at a short distance from the hotel. We halted outside it.\n\n\"It's worth trying, Watson,\" said Holmes. \"Of course, with a warrant we could demand to see the counterfoils, but we have not reached that stage yet. I don't suppose they remember faces in so busy a place. Let us venture it.\"\n\n\"I am sorry to trouble you,\" said he, in his blandest manner, to the young, woman behind the grating; \"there is some small mistake about a telegram I sent yesterday. I have had no answer, and I very much fear that I must have omitted to put my name at the end. Could you tell me if this was so?\"\n\nThe young woman turned over a sheaf of counterfoils.\n\n\"What o'clock was it?\" she asked.\n\n\"A little after six.\"\n\n\"Whom was it to?\"\n\nHolmes put his finger to his lips and glanced at me. \"The last words in it were 'for God's sake,' \" he whispered, confidentially; \"I am very anxious at getting no answer.\"\n\nThe young woman separated one of the forms.\n\n\"This is it. There is no name,\" said she, smoothing it out upon the counter.\n\n\"Then that, of course, accounts for my getting no answer,\" said Holmes. \"Dear me, how very stupid of me, to be sure! Good-morning, miss, and many thanks for having relieved my mind.\" He chuckled and rubbed his hands when we found ourselves in the street once more.\n\n\"Well?\" I asked.\n\n\"We progress, my dear Watson, we progress. I had seven different schemes for getting a glimpse of that telegram, but I could hardly hope to succeed the very first time.\"\n\n\"And what have you gained?\"\n\n\"A starting-point for our investigation.\" He hailed a cab. \"King's Cross Station,\" said he.\n\n\"We have a journey, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think we must run down to Cambridge together. All the indications seem to me to point in that direction.\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" I asked, as we rattled up Gray's Inn Road, \"have you any suspicion yet as to the cause of the disappearance? I don't think that among all our cases I have known one where the motives are more obscure. Surely you don't really imagine that he may be kidnapped in order to give information against his wealthy uncle?\"\n\n\"I confess, my dear Watson, that that does not appeal to me as a very probable explanation. It struck me, however, as being the one which was most likely to interest that exceedingly unpleasant old person.\"\n\n\"It certainly did that; but what are your alternatives?\"\n\n\"I could mention several. You must admit that it is curious and suggestive that this incident should occur on the eve of this important match, and should involve the only man whose presence seems essential to the success of the side. It may, of course, be a coincidence, but it is interesting. Amateur sport is free from betting, but a good deal of outside betting goes on among the public, and it is possible that it might be worth someone's while to get at a player as the ruffians of the turf get at a race-horse. There is one explanation. A second very obvious one is that this young man really is the heir of a great property, however modest his means may at present be, and it is not impossible that a plot to hold him for ransom might be concocted.\"\n\n\"These theories take no account of the telegram.\"\n\n\"Quite true, Watson. The telegram still remains the only solid thing with which we have to deal, and we must not permit our attention to wander away from it. It is to gain light upon the purpose of this telegram that we are now upon our way to Cambridge. The path of our investigation is at present obscure, but I shall be very much surprised if before evening we have not cleared it up, or made a considerable advance along it.\"\n\nIt was already dark when we reached the old university city. Holmes took a cab at the station and ordered the man to drive to the house of Dr. Leslie Armstrong. A few minutes later, we had stopped at a large mansion on the busiest thoroughfare. We were shown in, and after a long wait were at last admitted into the consulting-room, where we found the doctor seated behind his table.\n\nIt argues the degree in which I had lost touch with my profession that the name of Leslie Armstrong was unknown to me. Now I am aware that he is not only one of the heads of the medical school of the university, but a thinker of European reputation in more than one branch of science. Yet even without knowing his brilliant record one could not fail to be impressed by a mere glance at the man, the square, massive face, the brooding eyes under the thatched brows, and the granite moulding of the inflexible jaw. A man of deep character, a man with an alert mind, grim, ascetic, self-contained, formidable\u2014so I read Dr. Leslie Armstrong. He held my friend's card in his hand, and he looked up with no very pleased expression upon his dour features.\n\n\"I have heard your name, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and I am aware of your profession\u2014one of which I by no means approve.\"\n\n\"In that, Doctor, you will find yourself in agreement with every criminal in the country,\" said my friend, quietly.\n\n\"So far as your efforts are directed towards the suppression of crime, sir, they must have the support of every reasonable member of the community, though I cannot doubt that the official machinery is amply sufficient for the purpose. Where your calling is more open to criticism is when you pry into the secrets of private individuals, when you rake up family matters which are better hidden, and when you incidentally waste the time of men who are more busy than yourself. At the present moment, for example, I should be writing a treatise instead of conversing with you.\"\n\n\"No doubt, Doctor; and yet the conversation may prove more important than the treatise. Incidentally, I may tell you that we are doing the reverse of what you very justly blame, and that we are endeavouring to prevent anything like public exposure of private matters which must necessarily follow when once the case is fairly in the hands of the official police. You may look upon me simply as an irregular pioneer, who goes in front of the regular forces of the country. I have come to ask you about Mr. Godfrey Staunton.\"\n\n\"What about him?\"\n\n\"You know him, do you not?\"\n\n\"He is an intimate friend of mine.\"\n\n\"You are aware that he has disappeared?\"\n\n\"Ah, indeed!\" There was no change of expression in the rugged features of the doctor.\n\n\"He left his hotel last night\u2014he has not been heard of.\"\n\n\"No doubt he will return.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow is the 'Varsity football match.\"\n\n\"I have no sympathy with these childish games. The young man's fate interests me deeply, since I know him and like him. The football match does not come within my horizon at all.\"\n\n\"I claim your sympathy, then, in my investigation of Mr. Staunton's fate. Do you know where he is?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"You have not seen him since yesterday?\"\n\n\"No, I have not.\"\n\n\"Was Mr. Staunton a healthy man?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\n\"Did you ever know him ill?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\nHolmes popped a sheet of paper before the doctor's eyes. \"Then perhaps you will explain this receipted bill for thirteen guineas, paid by Mr. Godfrey Staunton last month to Dr. Leslie Armstrong, of Cambridge. I picked it out from among the papers upon his desk.\"\n\nThe doctor flushed with anger.\n\n\"I do not feel that there is any reason why I should render an explanation to you, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\nHolmes replaced the bill in his notebook. \"If you prefer a public explanation, it must come sooner or later,\" said he. \"I have already told you that I can hush up that which others will be bound to publish, and you would really be wiser to take me into your complete confidence.\"\n\n\"I know nothing about it.\"\n\n\"Did you hear from Mr. Staunton in London?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"Dear me, dear me\u2014the post office again!\" Holmes sighed, wearily. \"A most urgent telegram was dispatched to you from London by Godfrey Staunton at six-fifteen yesterday evening\u2014a telegram which is undoubtedly associated with his disappearance\u2014and yet you have not had it. It is most culpable. I shall certainly go down to the office here and register a complaint.\"\n\nDr. Leslie Armstrong sprang up from behind his desk, and his dark face was crimson with fury.\n\n\"I'll trouble you to walk out of my house, sir,\" said he. \"You can tell your employer, Lord Mount-James, that I do not wish to have anything to do either with him or with his agents. No, sir\u2014not another word!\" He rang the bell furiously. \"John, show these gentlemen out!\" A pompous butler ushered us severely to the door, and we found ourselves in the street. Holmes burst out laughing.\n\n\"Dr. Leslie Armstrong is certainly a man of energy and character,\" said he. \"I have not seen a man who, if he turns his talents that way, was more calculated to fill the gap left by the illustrious Moriarty. And now, my poor Watson, here we are, stranded and friendless in this inhospitable town, which we cannot leave without abandoning our case. This little inn just opposite Armstrong's house is singularly adapted to our needs. If you would engage a front room and purchase the necessaries for the night, I may have time to make a few inquiries.\"\n\nThese few inquiries proved, however, to be a more lengthy proceeding than Holmes had imagined, for he did not return to the inn until nearly nine o'clock. He was pale and dejected, stained with dust, and exhausted with hunger and fatigue. A cold supper was ready upon the table, and when his needs were satisfied and his pipe alight he was ready to take that half comic and wholly philosophic view which was natural to him when his affairs were going awry. The sound of carriage wheels caused him to rise and glance out of the window. A brougham and pair of grays, under the glare of a gas-lamp, stood before the doctor's door.\n\n\"It's been out three hours,\" said Holmes; \"started at half-past six, and here it is back again. That gives a radius of ten or twelve miles, and he does it once, or sometimes twice, a day.\"\n\n\"No unusual thing for a doctor in practice.\"\n\n\"But Armstrong is not really a doctor in practice. He is a lecturer and a consultant, but he does not care for general practice, which distracts him from his literary work. Why, then, does he make these long journeys, which must be exceedingly irksome to him, and who is it that he visits?\"\n\n\"His coachman\u2014\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, can you doubt that it was to him that I first applied? I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained after that, and further inquiries out of the question. All that I have learned I got from a friendly native in the yard of our own inn. It was he who told me of the doctor's habits and of his daily journey. At that instant, to give point to his words, the carriage came round to the door.\"\n\n\"Could you not follow it?\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! You are scintillating this evening. The idea did cross my mind. There is, as you may have observed, a bicycle shop next to our inn. Into this I rushed, engaged a bicycle, and was able to get started before the carriage was quite out of sight. I rapidly overtook it, and then, keeping at a discreet distance of a hundred yards or so, I followed its lights until we were clear of the town. We had got well out on the country road, when a somewhat mortifying incident occurred. The carriage stopped, the doctor alighted, walked swiftly back to where I had also halted, and told me in an excellent sardonic fashion that he feared the road was narrow, and that he hoped his carriage did not impede the passage of my bicycle. Nothing could have been more admirable than his way of putting it. I at once rode past the carriage, and, keeping to the main road, I went on for a few miles, and then halted in a convenient place to see if the carriage passed. There was no sign of it, however, and so it became evident that it had turned down one of several side roads which I had observed. I rode back, but again saw nothing of the carriage, and now, as you perceive, it has returned after me. Of course, I had at the outset no particular reason to connect these journeys with the disappearance of Godfrey Staunton, and was only inclined to investigate them on the general grounds that everything which concerns Dr. Armstrong is at present of interest to us, but, now that I find he keeps so keen a look-out upon anyone who may follow him on these excursions, the affair appears more important, and I shall not be satisfied until I have made the matter clear.\"\n\n\"We can follow him tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Can we? It is not so easy as you seem to think. You are not familiar with Cambridgeshire scenery, are you? It does not lend itself to concealment. All this country that I passed over to-night is as flat and clean as the palm of your hand, and the man we are following is no fool, as he very clearly showed to-night. I have wired to Overton to let us know any fresh London developments at this address, and in the meantime we can only concentrate our attention upon Dr. Armstrong, whose name the obliging young lady at the office allowed me to read upon the counterfoil of Staunton's urgent message. He knows where the young man is\u2014to that I'll swear, and if he knows, then it must be our own fault if we cannot manage to know also. At present it must be admitted that the odd trick is in his possession, and, as you are aware, Watson, it is not my habit to leave the game in that condition.\"\n\nAnd yet the next day brought us no nearer to the solution of the mystery. A note was handed in after breakfast, which Holmes passed across to me with a smile.\n\n\u2002SIR [it ran]:\n\n\u2002I can assure you that you are wasting your time in dogging my movements. I have, as you discovered last night, a window at the back of my brougham, and if you desire a twenty-mile ride which will lead you to the spot from which you started, you have only to follow me. Meanwhile, I can inform you that no spying upon me can in any way help Mr. Godfrey Staunton, and I am convinced that the best service you can do to that gentleman is to return at once to London and to report to your employer that you are unable to trace him. Your time in Cambridge will certainly be wasted.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002LESLIE ARMSTRONG.\n\n\"An outspoken, honest antagonist is the doctor,\" said Holmes. \"Well, well, he excites my curiosity, and I must really know before I leave him.\"\n\n\"His carriage is at his door now,\" said I. \"There he is stepping into it. I saw him glance up at our window as he did so. Suppose I try my luck upon the bicycle?\"\n\n\"No, no, my dear Watson! With all respect for your natural acumen, I do not think that you are quite a match for the worthy doctor. I think that possibly I can attain our end by some independent explorations of my own. I am afraid that I must leave you to your own devices, as the appearance of two inquiring strangers upon a sleepy countryside might excite more gossip than I care for. No doubt you will find some sights to amuse you in this venerable city, and I hope to bring back a more favourable report to you before evening.\"\n\nOnce more, however, my friend was destined to be disappointed. He came back at night weary and unsuccessful.\n\n\"I have had a blank day, Watson. Having got the doctor's general direction, I spent the day in visiting all the villages upon that side of Cambridge, and comparing notes with publicans and other local news agencies. I have covered some ground. Chesterton, Histon, Waterbeach, and Oakington have each been explored, and have each proved disappointing. The daily appearance of a brougham and pair could hardly have been overlooked in such Sleepy Hollows. The doctor has scored once more. Is there a telegram for me?\"\n\n\"Yes, I opened it. Here it is:\n\nAsk for Pompey from Jeremy Dixon, Trinity College.\n\nI don't understand it.\"\n\n\"Oh, it is clear enough. It is from our friend Overton, and is in answer to a question from me. I'll just send round a note to Mr. Jeremy Dixon, and then I have no doubt that our luck will turn. By the way, is there any news of the match?\"\n\n\"Yes, the local evening paper has an excellent account in its last edition. Oxford won by a goal and two tries. The last sentences of the description say:\n\n\"The defeat of the Light Blues may be entirely attributed to the unfortunate absence of the crack International, Godfrey Staunton, whose want was felt at every instant of the game. The lack of combination in the three-quarter line and their weakness both in attack and defence more than neutralized the efforts of a heavy and hard-working pack.\"\n\n\"Then our friend Overton's forebodings have been justified,\" said Holmes. \"Personally I am in agreement with Dr. Armstrong, and football does not come within my horizon. Early to bed to-night, Watson, for I foresee that tomorrow may be an eventful day.\"\n\nI was horrified by my first glimpse of Holmes next morning. for he sat by the fire holding his tiny hypodermic syringe. I associated that instrument with the single weakness of his nature, and I feared the worst when I saw it glittering in his hand. He laughed at my expression of dismay and laid it upon the table.\n\n\"No, no, my dear fellow, there is no cause for alarm. It is not upon this occasion the instrument of evil, but it will rather prove to be the key which will unlock our mystery. On this syringe I base all my hopes. I have just returned from a small scouting expedition, and everything is favourable. Eat a good breakfast, Watson, for I propose to get upon Dr. Armstrong's trail to-day, and once on it I will not stop for rest or food until I run him to his burrow.\"\n\n\"In that case,\" said I, \"we had best carry our breakfast with us, for he is making an early start. His carriage is at the door.\"\n\n\"Never mind. Let him go. He will be clever if he can drive where I cannot follow him. When you have finished, come downstairs with me, and I will introduce you to a detective who is a very eminent specialist in the work that lies before us.\"\n\nWhen we descended I followed Holmes into the stable yard, where he opened the door of a loose-box and led out a squat, lop-eared, white-and-tan dog, something between a beagle and a foxhound.\n\n\"Let me introduce you to Pompey,\" said he. \"Pompey is the pride of the local draghounds\u2014no very great flier, as his build will show, but a staunch hound on a scent. Well, Pompey, you may not be fast, but I expect you will be too fast for a couple of middle-aged London gentlemen. so I will take the liberty of fastening this leather leash to your collar. Now, boy, came along, and show what you can do.\" He led him across to the doctor's door. The dog sniffed round for an instant, and then with a shrill whine of excitement started off down the street, tugging at his leash in his efforts to go faster. In half an hour, we were clear of the town and hastening down a country road.\n\n\"What have you done, Holmes?\" I asked.\n\n\"A threadbare and venerable device, but useful upon occasion. I walked into the doctor's yard this morning, and shot my syringe full of aniseed over the hind wheel. A draghound will follow aniseed from here to John o' Groat's, and our friend, Armstrong, would have to drive through the Cam before he would shake Pompey off his trail. Oh, the cunning rascal! This is how he gave me the slip the other night.\"\n\nThe dog had suddenly turned out of the main road into a grass-grown lane. Half a mile farther this opened into another broad road, and the trail turned hard to the right in the direction of the town, which we had just quitted. The road took a sweep to the south of the town, and continued in the opposite direction to that in which we started.\n\n\"This d\u00e9tour has been entirely for our benefit, then?\" said Holmes. \"No wonder that my inquiries among those villagers led to nothing. The doctor has certainly played the game for all it is worth, and one would like to know the reason for such elaborate deception. This should be the village of Trumpington to the right of us. And, by Jove! here is the brougham coming round the corner. Quick, Watson\u2014quick, or we are done!\"\n\nHe sprang through a gate into a field, dragging the reluctant Pompey after him. We had hardly got under the shelter of the hedge when the carriage rattled past. I caught a glimpse of Dr. Armstrong within, his shoulders bowed, his head sunk on his hands, the very image of distress. I could tell by my companion's graver face that he also had seen.\n\n\"I fear there is some dark ending to our quest,\" said he. \"It cannot be long before we know it. Come, Pompey! Ah, it is the cottage in the field!\"\n\nThere could be no doubt that we had reached the end of our journey. Pompey ran about and whined eagerly outside the gate, where the marks of the brougham's wheels were still to be seen. A footpath led across to the lonely cottage. Holmes tied the dog to the hedge, and we hastened onward. My friend knocked at the little rustic door, and knocked again without response. And yet the cottage was not deserted, for a low sound came to our ears\u2014a kind of drone of misery and despair which was indescribably melancholy. Holmes paused irresolute, and then he glanced back at the road which he had just traversed. A brougham was coming down it, and there could be no mistaking those gray horses.\n\n\"By Jove, the doctor is coming back!\" cried Holmes. \"That settles it. We are bound to see what it means before he comes.\"\n\nHe opened the door, and we stepped into the hall. The droning sound swelled louder upon our ears until it became one long, deep wail of distress. It came from upstairs. Holmes darted up, and I followed him. He pushed open a half-closed door, and we both stood appalled at the sight before us.\n\nA woman, young and beautiful, was lying dead upon the bed. Her calm, pale face, with dim, wide-opened blue eyes, looked upward from amid a great tangle of golden hair. At the foot of the bed, half sitting, half kneeling, his face buried in the clothes, was a young man, whose frame was racked by his sobs. So absorbed was he by his bitter grief, that he never looked up until Holmes's hand was on his shoulder.\n\n\"Are you Mr. Godfrey Staunton?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I am\u2014but you are too late. She is dead.\"\n\nThe man was so dazed that he could not be made to understand that we were anything but doctors who had been sent to his assistance. Holmes was endeavouring to utter a few words of consolation and to explain the alarm which had been caused to his friends by his sudden disappearance when there was a step upon the stairs, and there was the heavy, stern, questioning face of Dr. Armstrong at the door.\n\n\"So, gentlemen,\" said he, \"you have attained your end and have certainly chosen a particularly delicate moment for your intrusion. I would not brawl in the presence of death, but I can assure you that if I were a younger man your monstrous conduct would not pass with impunity.\"\n\n\"Excuse me, Dr. Armstrong, I think we are a little at cross-purposes,\" said my friend, with dignity. \"If you could step downstairs with us, we may each be able to give some light to the other upon this miserable affair.\"\n\nA minute later, the grim doctor and ourselves were in the sitting-room below.\n\n\"Well, sir?\" said he.\n\n\"I wish you to understand, in the first place, that I am not employed by Lord Mount-James, and that my sympathies in this matter are entirely against that nobleman. When a man is lost it is my duty to ascertain his fate, but having done so the matter ends so far as I am concerned, and so long as there is nothing criminal I am much more anxious to hush up private scandals than to give them publicity. If, as I imagine, there is no breach of the law in this matter, you can absolutely depend upon my discretion and my cooperation in keeping the facts out of the papers.\"\n\nDr. Armstrong took a quick step forward and wrung Holmes by the hand.\n\n\"You are a good fellow,\" said he. \"I had misjudged you. I thank heaven that my compunction at leaving poor Staunton all alone in this plight caused me to turn my carriage back and so to make your acquaintance. Knowing as much as you do, the situation is very easily explained. A year ago Godfrey Staunton lodged in London for a time and became passionately attached to his landlady's daughter, whom he married. She was as good as she was beautiful and as intelligent as she was good. No man need be ashamed of such a wife. But Godfrey was the heir to this crabbed old nobleman, and it was quite certain that the news of his marriage would have been the end of his inheritance. I knew the lad well, and I loved him for his many excellent qualities. I did all I could to help him to keep things straight. We did our very best to keep the thing from everyone, for, when once such a whisper gets about, it is not long before everyone has heard it. Thanks to this lonely cottage and his own discretion, Godfrey has up to now succeeded. Their secret was known to no one save to me and to one excellent servant, who has at present gone for assistance to Trumpington. But at last there came a terrible blow in the shape of dangerous illness to his wife. It was consumption of the most virulent kind. The poor boy was half crazed with grief, and yet he had to go to London to play this match, for he could not get out of it without explanations which would expose his secret. I tried to cheer him up by wire, and he sent me one in reply, imploring me to do all I could. This was the telegram which you appear in some inexplicable way to have seen. I did not tell him how urgent the danger was, for I knew that he could do no good here, but I sent the truth to the girl's father, and he very injudiciously communicated it to Godfrey. The result was that he came straight away in a state bordering on frenzy, and has remained in the same state, kneeling at the end of her bed, until this morning death put an end to her sufferings. That is all, Mr. Holmes. and I am sure that I can rely upon your discretion and that of your friend.\"\n\nHolmes grasped the doctor's hand.\n\n\"Come, Watson,\" said he, and we passed from that house of grief into the pale sunlight of the winter day." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE ABBEY GRANGE", + "text": "It was on a bitterly cold night and frosty morning, towards the end of the winter of '97, that I was awakened by a tugging at my shoulder. It was Holmes. The candle in his hand shone upon his eager, stooping face, and told me at a glance that something was amiss.\n\n\"Come, Watson, come!\" he cried. \"The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!\"\n\nTen minutes later we were both in a cab, and rattling through the silent streets on our way to Charing Cross Station. The first faint winter's dawn was beginning to appear, and we could dimly see the occasional figure of an early workman as he passed us, blurred and indistinct in the opalescent London reek. Holmes nestled in silence into his heavy coat, and I was glad to do the same, for the air was most bitter, and neither of us had broken our fast.\n\nIt was not until we had consumed some hot tea at the station and taken our places in the Kentish train that we were sufficiently thawed, he to speak and I to listen. Holmes drew a note from his pocket, and read aloud:\n\n\u2002Abbey Grange, Marsham, Kent,\n\n\u20023:30 A.M.\n\n\u2002\"MY DEAR MR. HOLMES:\n\n\u2002I should be very glad of your immediate assistance in what promises to be a most remarkable case. It is something quite in your line. Except for releasing the lady I will see that everything is kept exactly as I have found it, but I beg you not to lose an instant, as it is difficult to leave Sir Eustace there.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002STANLEY HOPKINS.\"\n\n\"Hopkins has called me in seven times, and on each occasion his summons has been entirely justified,\" said Holmes. \"I fancy that every one of his cases has found its way into your collection, and I must admit, Watson, that you have some power of selection, which atones for much which I deplore in your narratives. Your fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story instead of as a scientific exercise has ruined what might have been an instructive and even classical series of demonstrations. You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy, in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct, the reader.\"\n\n\"Why do you not write them yourself?\" I said, with some bitterness.\n\n\"I will, my dear Watson, I will. At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook, which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume. Our present research appears to be a case of murder.\"\n\n\"You think this Sir Eustace is dead, then?\"\n\n\"I should say so. Hopkins's writing shows considerable agitation, and he is not an emotional man. Yes, I gather there has been violence, and that the body is left for our inspection. A mere suicide would not have caused him to send for me. As to the release of the lady, it would appear that she has been locked in her room during the tragedy. We are moving in high life, Watson, crackling paper, 'E. B.' monogram, coat-of-arms, picturesque address. I think that friend Hopkins will live up to his reputation, and that we shall have an interesting morning. The crime was committed before twelve last night.\"\n\n\"How can you possibly tell?\"\n\n\"By an inspection of the trains, and by reckoning the time. The local police had to be called in, they had to communicate with Scotland Yard, Hopkins had to go out, and he in turn had to send for me. All that makes a fair night's work. Well, here we are at Chiselhurst Station, and we shall soon set our doubts at rest.\"\n\nA drive of a couple of miles through narrow country lanes brought us to a park gate, which was opened for us by an old lodge-keeper, whose haggard face bore the reflection of some great disaster. The avenue ran through a noble park, between lines of ancient elms, and ended in a low, widespread house, pillared in front after the fashion of Palladio. The central part was evidently of a great age and shrouded in ivy, but the large windows showed that modern changes had been carried out, and one wing of the house appeared to be entirely new. The youthful figure and alert, eager face of Inspector Stanley Hopkins confronted us in the open doorway.\n\n\"I'm very glad you have come, Mr. Holmes. And you, too, Dr. Watson. But, indeed, if I had my time over again, I should not have troubled you, for since the lady has come to herself, she has given so clear an account of the affair that there is not much left for us to do. You remember that Lewisham gang of burglars?\"\n\n\"What, the three Randalls?\"\n\n\"Exactly; the father and two sons. It's their work. I have not a doubt of it. They did a job at Sydenham a fortnight ago and were seen and de scribed. Rather cool to do another so soon and so near, but it is they, beyond all doubt. It's a hanging matter this time.\"\n\n\"Sir Eustace is dead, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, his head was knocked in with his own poker.\"\n\n\"Sir Eustace Brackenstall, the driver tells me.\"\n\n\"Exactly\u2014one of the richest men in Kent\u2014Lady Brackenstall is in the morning-room. Poor lady, she has had a most dreadful experience. She seemed half dead when I saw her first. I think you had best see her and hear her account of the facts. Then we will examine the dining-room together.\"\n\nLady Brackenstall was no ordinary person. Seldom have I seen so graceful a figure, so womanly a presence, and so beautiful a face. She was a blonde, golden-haired, blue-eyed, and would no doubt have had the perfect complexion which goes with such colouring, had not her recent experience left her drawn and haggard. Her sufferings were physical as well as mental, for over one eye rose a hideous, plum-coloured swelling, which her maid, a tall, austere woman, was bathing assiduously with vinegar and water. The lady lay back exhausted upon a couch, but her quick, observant gaze, as we entered the room, and the alert expression of her beautiful features, showed that neither her wits nor her courage had been shaken by her terrible experience. She was enveloped in a loose dressing-gown of blue and silver, but a black sequin-covered dinner-dress lay upon the couch beside her.\n\n\"I have told you all that happened, Mr. Hopkins,\" she said, wearily. \"Could you not repeat it for me? Well, if you think it necessary, I will tell these gentlemen what occurred. Have they been in the dining-room yet?\"\n\n\"I thought they had better hear your ladyship's story first.\"\n\n\"I shall be glad when you can arrange matters. It is horrible to me to think of him still lying there.\" She shuddered and buried her face in her hands. As she did so, the loose gown fell back from her forearms. Holmes uttered an exclamation.\n\n\"You have other injuries, madam! What is this?\" Two vivid red spots stood out on one of the white, round limbs. She hastily covered it.\n\n\"It is nothing. It has no connection with this hideous business to-night. If you and your friend will sit down, I will tell you all I can.\n\n\"I am the wife of Sir Eustace Brackenstall. I have been married about a year. I suppose that it is no use my attempting to conceal that our marriage has not been a happy one. I fear that all our neighbours would tell you that, even if I were to attempt to deny it. Perhaps the fault may be partly mine. I was brought up in the freer, less conventional atmosphere of South Australia, and this English life, with its proprieties and its primness, is not congenial to me. But the main reason lies in the one fact, which is notorious to everyone, and that is that Sir Eustace was a confirmed drunkard. To be with such a man for an hour is unpleasant. Can you imagine what it means for a sensitive and high-spirited woman to be tied to him for day and night? It is a sacrilege, a crime, a villainy to hold that such a marriage is binding. I say that these monstrous laws of yours will bring a curse upon the land\u2014God will not let such wickedness endure.\" For an instant she sat up, her cheeks flushed, and her eyes blazing from under the terrible mark upon her brow. Then the strong, soothing hand of the austere maid drew her head down on to the cushion, and the wild anger died away into passionate sobbing. At last she continued:\n\n\"I will tell you about last night. You are aware, perhaps, that in this house all the servants sleep in the modern wing. This central block is made up of the dwelling-rooms, with the kitchen behind and our bedroom above. My maid, Theresa, sleeps above my room. There is no one else, and no sound could alarm those who are in the farther wing. This must have been well known to the robbers, or they would not have acted as they did.\n\n\"Sir Eustace retired about half-past ten. The servants had already gone to their quarters. Only my maid was up, and she had remained in her room at the top of the house until I needed her services. I sat until after eleven in this room, absorbed in a book. Then I walked round to see that all was right before I went upstairs. It was my custom to do this myself, for, as I have explained, Sir Eustace was not always to be trusted. I went into the kitchen, the butler's pantry, the gun-room, the billiard-room, the drawing-room, and finally the dining-room. As I approached the window, which is covered with thick curtains, I suddenly felt the wind blow upon my face and realized that it was open. I flung the curtain aside and found myself face to face with a broad-shouldered elderly man, who had just stepped into the room. The window is a long French one, which really forms a door leading to the lawn. I held my bedroom candle lit in my hand, and, by its light, behind the first man I saw two others, who were in the act of entering. I stepped back, but the fellow was on me in an instant. He caught me first by the wrist and then by the throat. I opened my mouth to scream, but he struck me a savage blow with his fist over the eye, and felled me to the ground. I must have been unconscious for a few minutes, for when I came to myself, I found that they had torn down the bellrope, and had secured me tightly to the oaken chair which stands at the head of the dining-table. I was so firmly bound that I could not move, and a handkerchief round my mouth prevented me from uttering a sound. It was at this instant that my unfortunate husband entered the room. He had evidently heard some suspicious sounds, and he came prepared for such a scene as he found. He was dressed in nightshirt and trousers, with his favourite blackthorn cudgel in his hand. He rushed at the burglars, but another\u2014it was an elderly man\u2014stooped, picked the poker out of the grate and struck him a horrible blow as he passed. He fell with a groan and never moved again. I fainted once more, but again it could only have been for a very few minutes during which I was insensible. When I opened my eyes I found that they had collected the silver from the sideboard, and they had drawn a bottle of wine which stood there. Each of them had a glass in his hand. I have already told you, have I not, that one was elderly, with a beard, and the others young, hairless lads. They might have been a father with his two sons. They talked together in whispers. Then they came over and made sure that I was securely bound. Finally they withdrew, closing the window after them. It was quite a quarter of an hour before I got my mouth free. When I did so, my screams brought the maid to my assistance. The other servants were soon alarmed, and we sent for the local police, who instantly communicated with London. That is really all that I can tell you, gentlemen, and I trust that it will not be necessary for me to go over so painful a story again.\"\n\n\"Any questions, Mr. Holmes?\" asked Hopkins.\n\n\"I will not impose any further tax upon Lady Brackenstall's patience and time,\" said Holmes. \"Before I go into the dining-room, I should like to hear your experience.\" He looked at the maid.\n\n\"I saw the men before ever they came into the house,\" said she. \"As I sat by my bedroom window I saw three men in the moonlight down by the lodge gate yonder, but I thought nothing of it at the time. It was more than an hour after that I heard my mistress scream, and down I ran, to find her, poor lamb, just as she says, and him on the floor, with his blood and brains over the room. It was enough to drive a woman out of her wits, tied there, and her very dress spotted with him, but she never wanted courage, did Miss Mary Fraser of Adelaide, and Lady Brackenstall of Abbey Grange hasn't learned new ways. You've questioned her long enough, you gentlemen, and now she is coming to her own room, just with her old Theresa, to get the rest that she badly needs.\"\n\nWith a motherly tenderness the gaunt woman put her arm round her mistress and led her from the room.\n\n\"She has been with her all her life,\" said Hopkins. \"Nursed her as a baby, and came with her to England when they first left Australia, eighteen months ago. Theresa Wright is her name, and the kind of maid you don't pick up nowadays. This way, Mr. Holmes, if you please!\"\n\nThe keen interest had passed out of Holmes's expressive face, and I knew that with the mystery all the charm of the case had departed. There still remained an arrest to be effected, but what were these commonplace rogues that he should soil his hands with them? An abstruse and learned specialist who finds that he has been called in for a case of measles would experience something of the annoyance which I read in my friend's eyes. Yet the scene in the dining-room of the Abbey Grange was sufficiently strange to arrest his attention and to recall his waning interest.\n\nIt was a very large and high chamber, with carved oak ceiling, oaken panelling, and a fine array of deer's heads and ancient weapons around the walls. At the further end from the door was the high French window of which we had heard. Three smaller windows on the right-hand side filled the apartment with cold winter sunshine. On the left was a large, deep fireplace, with a massive, overhanging oak mantelpiece. Beside the fireplace was a heavy oaken chair with arms and crossbars at the bottom. In and out through the open woodwork was woven a crimson cord, which was secured at each side to the crosspiece below. In releasing the lady, the cord had been slipped off her, but the knots with which it had been secured still remained. These details only struck our attention afterwards, for our thoughts were entirely absorbed by the terrible object which lay upon the tigerskin hearthrug in front of the fire.\n\nIt was the body of a tall, well-made man, about forty years of age. He lay upon his back, his face upturned, with his white teeth grinning through his short, black beard. His two clenched hands were raised above his head, and a heavy, blackthorn stick lay across them. His dark, handsome, aquiline features were convulsed into a spasm of vindictive hatred, which had set his dead face in a terribly fiendish expression. He had evidently been in his bed when the alarm had broken out, for he wore a foppish, embroidered nightshirt, and his bare feet projected from his trousers. His head was horribly injured, and the whole room bore witness to the savage ferocity of the blow which had struck him down. Beside him lay the heavy poker, bent into a curve by the concussion. Holmes examined both it and the indescribable wreck which it had wrought.\n\n\"He must be a powerful man, this elder Randall,\" he remarked.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Hopkins. \"I have some record of the fellow, and he is a rough customer.\"\n\n\"You should have no difficulty in getting him.\"\n\n\"Not the slightest. We have been on the look-out for him, and there was some idea that he had got away to America. Now that we know that the gang are here, I don't see how they can escape. We have the news at every seaport already, and a reward will be offered before evening. What beats me is how they could have done so mad a thing, knowing that the lady could describe them and that we could not fail to recognize the description.\"\n\n\"Exactly. One would have expected that they would silence Lady Brackenstall as well.\"\n\n\"They may not have realized,\" I suggested, \"that she had recovered from her faint.\"\n\n\"That is likely enough. If she seemed to be senseless, they would not take her life. What about this poor fellow, Hopkins? I seem to have heard some queer stories about him.\"\n\n\"He was a good-hearted man when he was sober, but a perfect fiend when he was drunk, or rather when he was half drunk, for he seldom really went the whole way. The devil seemed to be in him at such times, and he was capable of anything. From what I hear, in spite of all his wealth and his title, he very nearly came our way once or twice. There was a scandal about his drenching a dog with petroleum and setting it on fire\u2014her ladyship's dog, to make the matter worse\u2014and that was only hushed up with difficulty. Then he threw a decanter at that maid, Theresa Wright\u2014there was trouble about that. On the whole, and between ourselves, it will be a brighter house without him. What are you looking at now?\"\n\nHolmes was down on his knees, examining with great attention the knots upon the red cord with which the lady had been secured. Then he carefully scrutinized the broken and frayed end where it had snapped off when the burglar had dragged it down.\n\n\"When this was pulled down, the bell in the kitchen must have rung loudly,\" he remarked.\n\n\"No one could hear it. The kitchen stands right at the back of the house.\"\n\n\"How did the burglar know no one would hear it? How dared he pull at a bellrope in that reckless fashion?\"\n\n\"Exactly, Mr. Holmes, exactly. You put the very question which I have asked myself again and again. There can be no doubt that this fellow must have known the house and its habits. He must have perfectly understood that the servants would all be in bed at that comparatively early hour, and that no one could possibly hear a bell ring in the kitchen. Therefore, he must have been in close league with one of the servants. Surely that is evident. But there are eight servants, and all of good character.\"\n\n\"Other things being equal,\" said Holmes, \"one would suspect the one at whose head the master threw a decanter. And yet that would involve treachery towards the mistress to whom this woman seems devoted. Well, well, the point is a minor one, and when you have Randall you will probably find no difficulty in securing his accomplice. The lady's story certainly seems to be corroborated, if it needed corroboration, by every detail which we see before us.\" He walked to the French window and threw it open. \"There are no signs here, but the ground is iron hard, and one would not expect them. I see that these candles in the mantelpiece have been lighted.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was by their light, and that of the lady's bedroom candle, that the burglars saw their way about.\"\n\n\"And what did they take?\"\n\n\"Well, they did not take much\u2014only half a dozen articles of plate off the sideboard. Lady Brackenstall thinks that they were themselves so disturbed by the death of Sir Eustace that they did not ransack the house, as they would otherwise have done.\"\n\n\"No doubt that is true, and yet they drank some wine, I understand.\"\n\n\"To steady their nerves.\"\n\n\"Exactly. These three glasses upon the sideboard have been untouched, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Yes, and the bottle stands as they left it.\"\n\n\"Let us look at it. Halloa, halloa! What is this?\"\n\nThe three glasses were grouped together, all of them tinged with wine, and one of them containing some dregs of beeswing. The bottle stood near them, two-thirds full, and beside it lay a long, deeply stained cork. Its appearance and the dust upon the bottle showed that it was no common vintage which the murderers had enjoyed.\n\nA change had come over Holmes's manner. He had lost his listless expression, and again I saw an alert light of interest in his keen, deep-set eyes. He raised the cork and examined it minutely.\n\n\"How did they draw it?\" he asked.\n\nHopkins pointed to a half-opened drawer. In it lay some table linen and a large corkscrew.\n\n\"Did Lady Brackenstall say that screw was used?\"\n\n\"No, you remember that she was senseless at the moment when the bottle was opened.\"\n\n\"Quite so. As a matter of fact, that screw was not used. This bottle was opened by a pocket screw, probably contained in a knife, and not more than an inch and a half long. If you will examine the top of the cork, you will observe that the screw was driven in three times before the cork was extracted. It has never been transfixed. This long screw would have transfixed it and drawn it up with a single pull. When you catch this fellow, you will find that he has one of these multiplex knives in his possession.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Hopkins.\n\n\"But these glasses do puzzle me, I confess. Lady Brackenstall actually saw the three men drinking, did she not?\"\n\n\"Yes; she was clear about that.\"\n\n\"Then there is an end of it. What more is to be said? And yet, you must admit, that the three glasses are very remarkable. Hopkins. What? You see nothing remarkable? Well, well, let it pass. Perhaps, when a man has special knowledge and special powers like my own, it rather encourages him to seek a complex explanation when a simpler one is at hand. Of course, it must be a mere chance about the glasses. Well, good-morning, Hopkins. I don't see that I can be of any use to you, and you appear to have your case very clear. You will let me know when Randall is arrested, and any further developments which may occur. I trust that I shall soon have to congratulate you upon a successful conclusion. Come, Watson, I fancy that we may employ ourselves more profitably at home.\"\n\nDuring our return journey, I could see by Holmes's face that he was much puzzled by something which he had observed. Every now and then, by an effort, he would throw off the impression, and talk as if the matter were clear, but then his doubts would settle down upon him again, and his knitted brows and abstracted eyes would show that his thoughts had gone back once more to the great dining-room of the Abbey Grange, in which this midnight tragedy had been enacted. At last, by a sudden impulse, just as our train was crawling out of a suburban station, he sprang on to the platform and pulled me out after him.\n\n\"Excuse me, my dear fellow,\" said he, as we watched the rear carriages of our train disappearing round a curve, \"I am sorry to make you the victim of what may seem a mere whim, but on my life, Watson, I simply can't leave that case in this condition. Every instinct that I possess cries out against it. It's wrong\u2014it's all wrong\u2014I'll swear that it's wrong. And yet the lady's story was complete, the maid's corroboration was sufficient, the detail was fairly exact. What have I to put up against that? Three wineglasses, that is all. But if I had not taken things for granted, if I had examined everything with care which I should have shown had we approached the case de novo and had no cut-and-dried story to warp my mind, should I not then have found something more definite to go upon? Of course I should. Sit down on this bench, Watson, until a train for Chiselhurst arrives, and allow me to lay the evidence before you, imploring you in the first instance to dismiss from your mind the idea that anything which the maid or her mistress may have said must necessarily be true. The lady's charming personality must not be permitted to warp our judgment.\n\n\"Surely there are details in her story which, if we looked at in cold blood, would excite our suspicion. These burglars made a considerable haul at Sydenham a fortnight ago. Some account of them and of their appearance was in the papers, and would naturally occur to anyone who wished to invent a story in which imaginary robbers should play a part. As a matter of fact, burglars who have done a good stroke of business are, as a rule, only too glad to enjoy the proceeds in peace and quiet without embarking on another perilous undertaking. Again, it is unusual for burglars to operate at so early an hour, it is unusual for burglars to strike a lady to prevent her screaming, since one would imagine that was the sure way to make her scream, it is unusual for them to commit murder when their numbers are sufficient to overpower one man, it is unusual for them to be content with a limited plunder when there was much more within their reach, and finally, I should say, that it was very unusual for such men to leave a bottle half empty. How do all these unusuals strike you, Watson?\"\n\n\"Their cumulative effect is certainly considerable, and yet each of them is quite possible in itself. The most unusual thing of all, as it seems to me, is that the lady should be tied to the chair.\"\n\n\"Well, I am not so clear about that, Watson, for it is evident that they must either kill her or else secure her in such a way that she could not give immediate notice of their escape. But at any rate I have shown, have I not, that there is a certain element of improbability about the lady's story? And now, on the top of this, comes the incident of the wineglasses.\"\n\n\"What about the wineglasses?\"\n\n\"Can you see them in your mind's eye?\"\n\n\"I see them clearly.\"\n\n\"We are told that three men drank from them. Does that strike you as likely?\"\n\n\"Why not? There was wine in each glass.\"\n\n\"Exactly, but there was beeswing only in one glass. You must have noticed that fact. What does that suggest to your mind?\"\n\n\"The last glass filled would be most likely to contain beeswing.\"\n\n\"Not at all. The bottle was full of it, and it is inconceivable that the first two glasses were clear and the third heavily charged with it. There are two possible explanations, and only two. One is that after the second glass was filled the bottle was violently agitated, and so the third glass received the beeswing. That does not appear probable. No, no, I am sure that I am right.\"\n\n\"What, then, do you suppose?\"\n\n\"That only two glasses were used, and that the dregs of both were poured into a third glass, so as to give the false impression that three people had been here. In that way all the beeswing would be in the last glass, would it not? Yes. I am convinced that this is so. But if I have hit upon the true explanation of this one small phenomenon, then in an instant the case rises from the commonplace to the exceedingly remarkable, for it can only mean that Lady Brackenstall and her maid have deliberately lied to us, that not one word of their story is to be believed, that they have some very strong reason for covering the real criminal, and that we must construct our case for ourselves without any help from them. That is the mission which now lies before us, and here, Watson, is the Sydenham train.\"\n\nThe household at the Abbey Grange were much surprised at our return, but Sherlock Holmes, finding that Stanley Hopkins had gone off to report to headquarters, took possession of the dining-room, locked the door upon the inside, and devoted himself for two hours to one of those minute and laborious investigations which form the solid basis on which his brilliant edifices of deduction were reared. Seated in a corner like an interested student who observes the demonstration of his professor, I followed every step of that remarkable research. The window, the curtains, the carpet, the chair, the rope\u2014each in turn was minutely examined and duly pondered. The body of the unfortunate baronet had been removed, and all else remained as we had seen it in the morning. Finally, to my astonishment, Holmes climbed up on to the massive mantelpiece. Far above his head hung the few inches of red cord which were still attached to the wire. For a long time he gazed upward at it, and then in an attempt to get nearer to it he rested his knee upon a wooden bracket on the wall. This brought his hand within a few inches of the broken end of the rope, but it was not this so much as the bracket itself which seemed to engage his attention. Finally, he sprang down with an ejaculation of satisfaction.\n\n\"It's all right, Watson,\" said he. \"We have got our case\u2014one of the most remarkable in our collection. But, dear me, how slow-witted I have been, and how nearly I have committed the blunder of my lifetime! Now, I think that, with a few missing links, my chain is almost complete.\"\n\n\"You have got your men?\"\n\n\"Man, Watson, man. Only one, but a very formidable person. Strong as a lion\u2014witness the blow that bent that poker! Six foot three in height, active as a squirrel, dexterous with his fingers, finally, remarkably quick-witted, for this whole ingenious story is of his concoction. Yes, Watson, we have come upon the handiwork of a very remarkable individual. And yet, in that bellrope, he has given us a clue which should not have left us a doubt.\"\n\n\"Where was the clue?\"\n\n\"Well, if you were to pull down a bellrope, Watson, where would you expect it to break? Surely at the spot where it is attached to the wire. Why should it break three inches from the top, as this one has done?\"\n\n\"Because it is frayed there?\"\n\n\"Exactly. This end, which we can examine, is frayed. He was cunning enough to do that with his knife. But the other end is not frayed. You could not observe that from here, but if you were on the mantelpiece you would see that it is cut clean off without any mark of fraying whatever. You can reconstruct what occurred. The man needed the rope. He would not tear it down for fear of giving the alarm by ringing the bell. What did he do? He sprang up on the mantelpiece, could not quite reach it, put his knee on the bracket\u2014you will see the impression in the dust\u2014and so got his knife to bear upon the cord. I could not reach the place by at least three inches\u2014from which I infer that he is at least three inches a bigger man than I. Look at that mark upon the seat of the oaken chair! What is it?\"\n\n\"Blood.\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly it is blood. This alone puts the lady's story out of court. If she were seated on the chair when the crime was done, how comes that mark? No, no, she was placed in the chair after the death of her husband. I'll wager that the black dress shows a corresponding mark to this. We have not yet met our Waterloo, Watson, but this is our Marengo, for it begins in defeat and ends in victory. I should like now to have a few words with the nurse, Theresa. We must be wary for a while, if we are to get the information which we want.\"\n\nShe was an interesting person, this stern Australian nurse\u2014taciturn, suspicious, ungracious, it took some time before Holmes's pleasant manner and frank acceptance of all that she said thawed her into a corresponding amiability. She did not attempt to conceal her hatred for her late employer.\n\n\"Yes, sir, it is true that he threw the decanter at me. I heard him call my mistress a name, and I told him that he would not dare to speak so if her brother had been there. Then it was that he threw it at me. He might have thrown a dozen if he had but left my bonny bird alone. He was forever ill-treating her, and she too proud to complain. She will not even tell me all that he has done to her. She never told me of those marks on her arm that you saw this morning, but I know very well that they come from a stab with a hatpin. The sly devil\u2014God forgive me that I should speak of him so, now that he is dead! But a devil he was, if ever one walked the earth. He was all honey when first we met him\u2014only eighteen months ago, and we both feel as if it were eighteen years. She had only just arrived in London. Yes, it was her first voyage\u2014she had never been from home before. He won her with his title and his money and his false London ways. If she made a mistake she has paid for it, if ever a woman did. What month did we meet him? Well, I tell you it was just after we arrived. We arrived in June, and it was July. They were married in January of last year. Yes, she is down in the morning-room again, and I have no doubt she will see you, but you must not ask too much of her, for she has gone through all that flesh and blood will stand.\"\n\nLady Brackenstall was reclining on the same couch, but looked brighter than before. The maid had entered with us, and began once more to foment the bruise upon her mistress's brow.\n\n\"I hope,\" said the lady, \"that you have not come to cross-examine me again?\"\n\n\"No,\" Holmes answered, in his gentlest voice, \"I will not cause you any unnecessary trouble, Lady Brackenstall, and my whole desire is to make things easy for you, for I am convinced that you are a much-tried woman. If you will treat me as a friend and trust me, you may find that I will justify your trust.\"\n\n\"What do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"To tell me the truth.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes!\"\n\n\"No, no, Lady Brackenstall\u2014it is no use. You may have heard of any little reputation which I possess. I will stake it all on the fact that your story is an absolute fabrication.\"\n\nMistress and maid were both staring at Holmes with pale faces and frightened eyes.\n\n\"You are an impudent fellow!\" cried Theresa. \"Do you mean to say that my mistress has told a lie?\"\n\nHolmes rose from his chair.\n\n\"Have you nothing to tell me?\"\n\n\"I have told you everything.\"\n\n\"Think once more, Lady Brackenstall. Would it not be better to be frank?\"\n\nFor an instant there was hesitation in her beautiful face. Then some new strong thought caused it to set like a mask.\n\n\"I have told you all I know.\"\n\nHolmes took his hat and shrugged his shoulders. \"I am sorry,\" he said, and without another word we left the room and the house. There was a pond in the park, and to this my friend led the way. It was frozen over, but a single hole was left for the convenience of a solitary swan. Holmes gazed at it, and then passed on to the lodge gate. There he scribbled a short note for Stanley Hopkins, and left it with the lodge-keeper.\n\n\"It may be a hit, or it may be a miss, but we are bound to do something for friend Hopkins, just to justify this second visit,\" said he. \"I will not quite take him into my confidence yet. I think our next scene of operations must be the shipping office of the Adelaide-Southampton line, which stands at the end of Pall Mall, if I remember right. There is a second line of steamers which connect South Australia with England, but we will draw the larger cover first.\"\n\nHolmes's card sent in to the manager ensured instant attention, and he was not long in acquiring all the information he needed. In June of '95, only one of their line had reached a home port. It was the Rock of Gibraltar, their largest and best boat. A reference to the passenger list showed that Miss Fraser, of Adelaide, with her maid had made the voyage in her. The boat was now somewhere south of the Suez Canal on her way to Australia. Her officers were the same as in '95, with one exception. The first officer, Mr. Jack Crocker, had been made a captain and was to take charge of their new ship, the Bass Rock, sailing in two days' time from Southampton. He lived at Sydenham, but he was likely to be in that morning for instructions, if we cared to wait for him.\n\nNo, Mr. Holmes had no desire to see him, but would be glad to know more about his record and character.\n\nHis record was magnificent. There was not an officer in the fleet to touch him. As to his character, he was reliable on duty, but a wild, desperate fellow off the deck of his ship\u2014hot-headed, excitable, but loyal, honest, and kind-hearted. That was the pith of the information with which Holmes left the office of the Adelaide-Southampton company. Thence he drove to Scotland Yard, but, instead of entering, he sat in his cab with his brows drawn down, lost in profound thought. Finally he drove round to the Charing Cross telegraph office, sent off a message, and then, at last, we made for Baker Street once more.\n\n\"No, I couldn't do it, Watson,\" said he, as we reentered our room. \"Once that warrant was made out, nothing on earth would save him. Once or twice in my career I feel that I have done more real harm by my discovery of the criminal than ever he had done by his crime. I have learned caution now, and I had rather play tricks with the law of England than with my own conscience. Let us know a little more before we act.\"\n\nBefore evening, we had a visit from Inspector Stanley Hopkins. Things were not going very well with him.\n\n\"I believe that you are a wizard, Mr. Holmes. I really do sometimes think that you have powers that are not human. Now, how on earth could you know that the stolen silver was at the bottom of that pond?\"\n\n\"I didn't know it.\"\n\n\"But you told me to examine it.\"\n\n\"You got it, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, I got it.\"\n\n\"I am very glad if I have helped you.\"\n\n\"But you haven't helped me. You have made the affair far more difficult. What sort of burglars are they who steal silver and then throw it into the nearest pond?\"\n\n\"It was certainly rather eccentric behaviour. I was merely going on the idea that if the silver had been taken by persons who did not want it\u2014who merely took it for a blind, as it were\u2014then they would naturally be anxious to get rid of it.\"\n\n\"But why should such an idea cross your mind?\"\n\n\"Well, I thought it was possible. When they came out through the French window, there was the pond with one tempting little hole in the ice, right in front of their noses. Could there be a better hiding-place?\"\n\n\"Ah, a hiding-place\u2014that is better!\" cried Stanley Hopkins. \"Yes, yes, I see it all now! It was early, there were folk upon the roads, they were afraid of being seen with the silver, so they sank it in the pond, intending to return for it when the coast was clear. Excellent, Mr. Holmes\u2014that is better than your idea of a blind.\"\n\n\"Quite so, you have got an admirable theory. I have no doubt that my own ideas were quite wild, but you must admit that they have ended in discovering the silver.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir\u2014yes. It was all your doing. But I have had a bad setback.\"\n\n\"A setback?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes. The Randall gang were arrested in New York this morning.\"\n\n\"Dear me, Hopkins! That is certainly rather against your theory that they committed a murder in Kent last night.\"\n\n\"It is fatal, Mr. Holmes\u2014absolutely fatal. Still, there are other gangs of three besides the Randalls, or it may be some new gang of which the police have never heard.\"\n\n\"Quite so, it is perfectly possible. What, are you off?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes, there is no rest for me until I have got to the bottom of the business. I suppose you have no hint to give me?\"\n\n\"I have given you one.\"\n\n\"Which?\"\n\n\"Well, I suggested a blind.\"\n\n\"But why, Mr. Holmes, why?\"\n\n\"Ah, that's the question, of course. But I commend the idea to your mind. You might possibly find that there was something in it. You won't stop for dinner? Well, good-bye, and let us know how you get on.\"\n\nDinner was over, and the table cleared before Holmes alluded to the matter again. He had lit his pipe and held his slippered feet to the cheerful blaze of the fire. Suddenly he looked at his watch.\n\n\"I expect developments, Watson.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Now\u2014within a few minutes. I dare say you thought I acted rather badly to Stanley Hopkins just now?\"\n\n\"I trust your judgment.\"\n\n\"A very sensible reply, Watson. You must look at it this way: what I know is unofficial, what he knows is official. I have the right to private judgment, but he has none. He must disclose all, or he is a traitor to his service. In a doubtful case I would not put him in so painful a position, and so I reserve my information until my own mind is clear upon the matter.\"\n\n\"But when will that be?\"\n\n\"The time has come. You will now be present at the last scene of a remarkable little drama.\"\n\nThere was a sound upon the stairs, and our door was opened to admit as fine a specimen of manhood as ever passed through it. He was a very tall young man, golden-moustached, blue-eyed, with a skin which had been burned by tropical suns, and a springy step, which showed that the huge frame was as active as it was strong. He closed the door behind him, and then he stood with clenched hands and heaving breast, choking down some overmastering emotion.\n\n\"Sit down, Captain Crocker. You got my telegram?\"\n\nOur visitor sank into an armchair and looked from one to the other of us with questioning eyes.\n\n\"I got your telegram, and I came at the hour you said. I heard that you had been down to the office. There was no getting away from you. Let's hear the worst. What are you going to do with me? Arrest me? Speak out, man! You can't sit there and play with me like a cat with a mouse.\"\n\n\"Give him a cigar,\" said Holmes. \"Bite on that, Captain Crocker, and don't let your nerves run away with you. I should not sit here smoking with you if I thought that you were a common criminal, you may be sure of that. Be frank with me and we may do some good. Play tricks with me, and I'll crush you.\"\n\n\"What do you wish me to do?\"\n\n\"To give me a true account of all that happened at the Abbey Grange last night\u2014a true account, mind you, with nothing added and nothing taken off. I know so much already that if you go one inch off the straight, I'll blow this police whistle from my window and the affair goes out of my hands forever.\"\n\nThe sailor thought for a little. Then he struck his leg with his great sun burned hand.\n\n\"I'll chance it,\" he cried. \"I believe you are a man of your word, and a white man, and I'll tell you the whole story. But one thing I will say first. So far as I am concerned, I regret nothing and I fear nothing, and I would do it all again and be proud of the job. Damn the beast, if he had as many lives as a cat, he would owe them all to me! But it's the lady, Mary\u2014Mary Fraser\u2014for never will I call her by that accursed name. When I think of getting her into trouble, I who would give my life just to bring one smile to her dear face, it's that that turns my soul into water. And yet\u2014and yet\u2014what less could I do? I'll tell you my story, gentlemen, and then I'll ask you, as man to man, what less could I do?\n\n\"I must go back a bit. You seem to know everything, so I expect that you know that I met her when she was a passenger and I was first officer of the Rock of Gibraltar. From the first day I met her, she was the only woman to me. Every day of that voyage I loved her more, and many a time since have I kneeled down in the darkness of the night watch and kissed the deck of that ship because I knew her dear feet had trod it. She was never engaged to me. She treated me as fairly as ever a woman treated a man. I have no complaint to make. It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.\n\n\"Next time I came back from sea, I heard of her marriage. Well, why shouldn't she marry whom she liked? Title and money\u2014who could carry them better than she? She was born for all that is beautiful and dainty. I didn't grieve over her marriage. I was not such a selfish hound as that. I just rejoiced that good luck had come her way, and that she had not thrown herself away on a penniless sailor. That's how I loved Mary Fraser.\n\n\"Well, I never thought to see her again, but last voyage I was promoted, and the new boat was not yet launched, so I had to wait for a couple of months with my people at Sydenham. One day out in a country lane I met Theresa Wright, her old maid. She told me all about her, about him, about everything. I tell you, gentlemen, it nearly drove me mad. This drunken hound, that he should dare to raise his hand to her, whose boots he was not worthy to lick! I met Theresa again. Then I met Mary herself\u2014and met her again. Then she would meet me no more. But the other day I had a notice that I was to start on my voyage within a week, and I determined that I would see her once before I left. Theresa was always my friend, for she loved Mary and hated this villain almost as much as I did. From her I learned the ways of the house. Mary used to sit up reading in her own little room downstairs. I crept round there last night and scratched at the window. At first she would not open to me, but in her heart I know that now she loves me, and she could not leave me in the frosty night. She whispered to me to come round to the big front window, and I found it open before me, so as to let me into the dining-room. Again I heard from her own lips things that made my blood boil, and again I cursed this brute who mishandled the woman I loved. Well, gentlemen, I was standing with her just inside the window, in all innocence, as God is my judge, when he rushed like a madman into the room, called her the vilest name that a man could use to a woman, and welted her across the face with the stick he had in his hand. I had sprung for the poker, and it was a fair fight between us. See here, on my arm, where his first blow fell. Then it was my turn, and I went through him as if he had been a rotten pumpkin. Do you think I was sorry? Not I! It was his life or mine, but far more than that, it was his life or hers, for how could I leave her in the power of this madman? That was how I killed him. Was I wrong? Well, then, what would either of you gentlemen have done, if you had been in my position?\"\n\n\"She had screamed when he struck her, and that brought old Theresa down from the room above. There was a bottle of wine on the sideboard, and I opened it and poured a little between Mary's lips, for she was half dead with shock. Then I took a drop myself. Theresa was as cool as ice, and it was her plot as much as mine. We must make it appear that burglars had done the thing. Theresa kept on repeating our story to her mistress, while I swarmed up and cut the rope of the bell. Then I lashed her in her chair, and frayed out the end of the rope to make it look natural, else they would wonder how in the world a burglar could have got up there to cut it. Then I gathered up a few plates and pots of silver, to carry out the idea of the robbery, and there I left them, with orders to give the alarm when I had a quarter of an hour's start. I dropped the silver into the pond, and made off for Sydenham, feeling that for once in my life I had done a real good night's work. And that's the truth and the whole truth, Mr. Holmes, if it costs me my neck.\"\n\nHolmes smoked for some time in silence. Then he crossed the room, and shook our visitor by the hand.\n\n\"That's what I think,\" said he. \"I know that every word is true, for you have hardly said a word which I did not know. No one but an acrobat or a sailor could have got up to that bellrope from the bracket, and no one but a sailor could have made the knots with which the cord was fastened to the chair. Only once had this lady been brought into contact with sailors, and that was on her voyage, and it was someone of her own class of life, since she was trying hard to shield him, and so showing that she loved him. You see how easy it was for me to lay my hands upon you when once I had started upon the right trail.\"\n\n\"I thought the police never could have seen through our dodge.\"\n\n\"And the police haven't, nor will they, to the best of my belief. Now, look here, Captain Crocker, this is a very serious matter, though I am willing to admit that you acted under the most extreme provocation to which any man could be subjected. I am not sure that in defence of your own life your action will not be pronounced legitimate. However, that is for a British jury to decide. Meanwhile I have so much sympathy for you that, if you choose to disappear in the next twenty-four hours. I will promise you that no one will hinder you.\"\n\n\"And then it will all come out?\"\n\n\"Certainly it will come out.\"\n\nThe sailor flushed with anger.\n\n\"What sort of proposal is that to make a man? I know enough of law to understand that Mary would be held as accomplice. Do you think I would leave her alone to face the music while I slunk away? No, sir, let them do their worst upon me, but for heaven's sake, Mr. Holmes, find some way of keeping my poor Mary out of the courts.\"\n\nHolmes for a second time held out his hand to the sailor.\n\n\"I was only testing you, and you ring true every time. Well, it is a great responsibility that I take upon myself, but I have given Hopkins an excellent hint, and if he can't avail himself of it I can do no more. See here, Captain Crocker, we'll do this in due form of law. You are the prisoner. Watson, you are a British jury, and I never met a man who was more eminently fitted to represent one. I am the judge. Now, gentleman of the jury, you have heard the evidence. Do you find the prisoner guilty or not guilty?\"\n\n\"Not guilty, my lord,\" said I.\n\n\"Vox populi, vox Dei. You are acquitted, Captain Crocker. So long as the law does not find some other victim you are safe from me. Come back to this lady in a year, and may her future and yours justify us in the judgment which we have pronounced this night!\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE SECOND STAIN", + "text": "I had intended \"The Adventure of the Abbey Grange\" to be the last of those exploits of my friend, Mr. Sherlock Holmes, which I should ever communicate to the public. This resolution of mine was not due to any lack of material, since I have notes of many hundreds of cases to which I have never alluded, nor was it caused by any waning interest on the part of my readers in the singular personality and unique methods of this remarkable man. The real reason lay in the reluctance which Mr. Holmes has shown to the continued publication of his experiences. So long as he was in actual professional practice the records of his successes were of some practical value to him, but since he has definitely retired from London and betaken himself to study and bee-farming on the Sussex Downs, notoriety has become hateful to him, and he has peremptorily requested that his wishes in this matter should be strictly observed. It was only upon my representing to him that I had given a promise that \"The Adventure of the Second Stain\" should be published when the times were ripe, and pointing out to him that it is only appropriate that this long series of episodes should culminate in the most important international case which he has ever been called upon to handle, that I at last succeeded in obtaining his consent that a carefully guarded account of the incident should at last be laid before the public. If in telling the story I seem to be somewhat vague in certain details, the public will readily understand that there is an excellent reason for my reticence.\n\nIt was, then, in a year, and even in a decade, that shall be nameless, that upon one Tuesday morning in autumn we found two visitors of European fame within the walls of our humble room in Baker Street. The one, austere, high-nosed, eagle-eyed, and dominant, was none other than the illustrious Lord Bellinger, twice Premier of Britain. The other, dark, clear-cut, and elegant, hardly yet of middle age, and endowed with every beauty of body and of mind, was the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope, Secretary for European Affairs, and the most rising statesman in the country. They sat side by side upon our paper-littered settee, and it was easy to see from their worn and anxious faces that it was business of the most pressing importance which had brought them. The Premier's thin, blue-veined hands were clasped tightly over the ivory head of his umbrella, and his gaunt, ascetic face looked gloomily from Holmes to me. The European Secretary pulled nervously at his moustache and fidgeted with the seals of his watch-chain.\n\n\"When I discovered my loss, Mr. Holmes, which was at eight o'clock this morning, I at once informed the Prime Minister. It was at his suggestion that we have both come to you.\"\n\n\"Have you informed the police?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" said the Prime Minister, with the quick, decisive manner for which he was famous. \"We have not done so, nor is it possible that we should do so. To inform the police must, in the long run, mean to inform the public. This is what we particularly desire to avoid.\"\n\n\"And why, sir?\"\n\n\"Because the document in question is of such immense importance that its publication might very easily\u2014I might almost say probably\u2014lead to European complications of the utmost moment. It is not too much to say that peace or war may hang upon the issue. Unless its recovery can be attended with the utmost secrecy, then it may as well not be recovered at all, for all that is aimed at by those who have taken it is that its contents should be generally known.\"\n\n\"I understand. Now, Mr. Trelawney Hope, I should be much obliged if you would tell me exactly the circumstances under which this document disappeared.\"\n\n\"That can be done in a very few words, Mr. Holmes. The letter\u2014for it was a letter from a foreign potentate\u2014was received six days ago. It was of such importance that I have never left it in my safe, but I have taken it across each evening to my house in Whitehall Terrace, and kept it in my bedroom in a locked despatch-box. It was there last night. Of that I am certain. I actually opened the box while I was dressing for dinner and saw the document inside. This morning it was gone. The despatch-box had stood beside the glass upon my dressing-table all night. I am a light sleeper, and so is my wife. We are both prepared to swear that no one could have entered the room during the night. And yet I repeat that the paper is gone.\"\n\n\"What time did you dine?\"\n\n\"Half-past seven.\"\n\n\"How long was it before you went to bed?\"\n\n\"My wife had gone to the theatre. I waited up for her. It was half-past eleven before we went to our room.\"\n\n\"Then for four hours the despatch-box had lain unguarded?\"\n\n\"No one is ever permitted to enter that room save the house-maid in the morning, and my valet, or my wife's maid, during the rest of the day. They are both trusty servants who have been with us for some time. Besides, neither of them could possibly have known that there was anything more valuable than the ordinary departmental papers in my despatch-box.\"\n\n\"Who did know of the existence of that letter?\"\n\n\"No one in the house.\"\n\n\"Surely your wife knew?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I had said nothing to my wife until I missed the paper this morning.\"\n\nThe Premier nodded approvingly.\n\n\"I have long known, sir, how high is your sense of public duty,\" said he. \"I am convinced that in the case of a secret of this importance it would rise superior to the most intimate domestic ties.\"\n\nThe European Secretary bowed.\n\n\"You do me no more than justice, sir. Until this morning I have never breathed one word to my wife upon this matter.\"\n\n\"Could she have guessed?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes, she could not have guessed\u2014nor could anyone have guessed.\"\n\n\"Have you lost any documents before?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Who is there in England who did know of the existence of this letter?\"\n\n\"Each member of the Cabinet was informed of it yesterday, but the pledge of secrecy which attends every Cabinet meeting was increased by the solemn warning which was given by the Prime Minister. Good heavens, to think that within a few hours I should myself have lost it!\" His handsome face was distorted with a spasm of despair, and his hands tore at his hair. For a moment we caught a glimpse of the natural man, impulsive, ardent, keenly sensitive. The next the aristocratic mask was replaced, and the gentle voice had returned. \"Besides the members of the Cabinet there are two, or possibly three, departmental officials who know of the letter. No one else in England, Mr. Holmes, I assure you.\"\n\n\"But abroad?\"\n\n\"I believe that no one abroad has seen it save the man who wrote it. I am well convinced that his Ministers\u2014that the usual official channels have not been employed.\"\n\nHolmes considered for some little time.\n\n\"Now, sir, I must ask you more particularly what this document is, and why its disappearance should have such momentous consequences?\"\n\nThe two statesmen exchanged a quick glance and the Premier's shaggy eyebrows gathered in a frown.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, the envelope is a long, thin one of pale blue colour. There is a seal of red wax stamped with a crouching lion. It is addressed in large, bold handwriting to\u2014\"\n\n\"I fear, sir,\" said Holmes, \"that, interesting and indeed essential as these details are, my inquiries must go more to the root of things. What was the letter?\"\n\n\"That is a State secret of the utmost importance, and I fear that I cannot tell you, nor do I see that it is necessary. If by the aid of the powers which you are said to possess you can find such an envelope as I describe with its enclosure, you will have deserved well of your country, and earned any reward which it lies in our power to bestow.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes rose with a smile.\n\n\"You are two of the most busy men in the country,\" said he, \"and in my own small way I have also a good many calls upon me. I regret exceedingly that I cannot help you in this matter, and any continuation of this interview would be a waste of time.\"\n\nThe Premier sprang to his feet with that quick, fierce gleam of his deep-set eyes before which a Cabinet has cowered. \"I am not accustomed, sir,\" he began, but mastered his anger and resumed his seat. For a minute or more we all sat in silence. Then the old statesman shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"We must accept your terms, Mr. Holmes. No doubt you are right, and it is unreasonable for us to expect you to act unless we give you our entire confidence.\"\n\n\"I agree with you,\" said the younger statesman.\n\n\"Then I will tell you, relying entirely upon your honour and that of your colleague, Dr. Watson. I may appeal to your patriotism also, for I could not imagine a greater misfortune for the country than that this affair should come out.\"\n\n\"You may safely trust us.\"\n\n\"The letter, then, is from a certain foreign potentate who has been ruffled by some recent Colonial developments of this country. It has been written hurriedly and upon his own responsibility entirely. Inquiries have shown that his Ministers know nothing of the matter. At the same time it is couched in so unfortunate a manner, and certain phrases in it are of so provocative a character, that its publication would undoubtedly lead to a most dangerous state of feeling in this country. There would be such a ferment, sir, that I do not hesitate to say that within a week of the publication of that letter this country would be involved in a great war.\"\n\nHolmes wrote a name upon a slip of paper and handed it to the Premier.\n\n\"Exactly. It was he. And it is this letter\u2014this letter which may well mean the expenditure of a thousand millions and the lives of a hundred thousand men\u2014which has become lost in this unaccountable fashion.\"\n\n\"Have you informed the sender?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, a cipher telegram has been despatched.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he desires the publication of the letter.\"\n\n\"No, sir, we have strong reason to believe that he already understands that he has acted in an indiscreet and hot-headed manner. It would be a greater blow to him and to his country than to us if this letter were to come out.\"\n\n\"If this is so, whose interest is it that the letter should come out? Why should anyone desire to steal it or to publish it?\"\n\n\"There, Mr. Holmes, you take me into regions of high international politics. But if you consider the European situation you will have no difficulty in perceiving the motive. The whole of Europe is an armed camp. There is a double league which makes a fair balance of military power. Great Britain holds the scales. If Britain were driven into war with one confederacy, it would assure the supremacy of the other confederacy, whether they joined in the war or not. Do you follow?\"\n\n\"Very clearly. It is then the interest of the enemies of this potentate to secure and publish this letter, so as to make a breach between his country and ours?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"And to whom would this document be sent if it fell into the hands of an enemy?\"\n\n\"To any of the great Chancelleries of Europe. It is probably speeding on its way thither at the present instant as fast as steam can take it.\"\n\nMr. Trelawney Hope dropped his head on his chest and groaned aloud. The Premier placed his hand kindly upon his shoulder.\n\n\"It is your misfortune, my dear fellow. No one can blame you. There is no precaution which you have neglected. Now, Mr. Holmes, you are in full possession of the facts. What course do you recommend?\"\n\nHolmes shook his head mournfully.\n\n\"You think, sir, that unless this document is recovered there will be war?\"\n\n\"I think it is very probable.\"\n\n\"Then, sir, prepare for war.\"\n\n\"That is a hard saying, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Consider the facts, sir. It is inconceivable that it was taken after eleven-thirty at night, since I understand that Mr. Hope and his wife were both in the room from that hour until the loss was found out. It was taken, then, yesterday evening between seven-thirty and eleven-thirty, probably near the earlier hour, since whoever took it evidently knew that it was there and would naturally secure it as early as possible. Now, sir, if a document of this importance were taken at that hour, where can it be now? No one has any reason to retain it. It has been passed rapidly on to those who need it. What chance have we now to overtake or even to trace it? It is beyond our reach.\"\n\nThe Prime Minister rose from the settee.\n\n\"What you say is perfectly logical, Mr. Holmes. I feel that the matter is indeed out of our hands.\"\n\n\"Let us presume, for argument's sake, that the document was taken by the maid or by the valet\u2014\"\n\n\"They are both old and tried servants.\"\n\n\"I understand you to say that your room is on the second floor, that there is no entrance from without, and that from within no one could go up unobserved. It must, then, be somebody in the house who has taken it. To whom would the thief take it? To one of several international spies and secret agents, whose names are tolerably familiar to me. There are three who may be said to be the heads of their profession. I will begin my research by going round and finding if each of them is at his post. If one is missing\u2014especially if he has disappeared since last night\u2014we will have some indication as to where the document has gone.\"\n\n\"Why should he be missing?\" asked the European Secretary. \"He would take the letter to an Embassy in London, as likely as not.\"\n\n\"I fancy not. These agents work independently, and their relations with the Embassies are often strained.\"\n\nThe Prime Minister nodded his acquiescence.\n\n\"I believe you are right, Mr. Holmes. He would take so valuable a prize to headquarters with his own hands. I think that your course of action is an excellent one. Meanwhile, Hope, we cannot neglect all our other duties on account of this one misfortune. Should there be any fresh developments during the day we shall communicate with you, and you will no doubt let us know the results of your own inquiries.\"\n\nThe two statesmen bowed and walked gravely from the room. When our illustrious visitors had departed Holmes lit his pipe in silence and sat for some time lost in the deepest thought. I had opened the morning paper and was immersed in a sensational crime which had occurred in London the night before, when my friend gave an exclamation, sprang to his feet, and laid his pipe down upon the mantelpiece.\n\n\"Yes,\" said he, \"there is no better way of approaching it. The situation is desperate, but not hopeless. Even now, if we could be sure which of them has taken it, it is just possible that it has not yet passed out of his hands. After all, it is a question of money with these fellows, and I have the British treasury behind me. If it's on the market I'll buy it\u2014if it means another penny on the income-tax. It is conceivable that the fellow might hold it back to see what bids come from this side before he tries his luck on the other. There are only those three capable of playing so bold a game\u2014there are Oberstein, La Rothiere, and Eduardo Lucas. I will see each of them.\"\n\nI glanced at my morning paper.\n\n\"Is that Eduardo Lucas of Godolphin Street?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You will not see him.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"He was murdered in his house last night.\"\n\nMy friend has so often astonished me in the course of our adventures that it was with a sense of exultation that I realized how completely I had astonished him. He stared in amazement, and then snatched the paper from my hands. This was the paragraph which I had been engaged in reading when he rose from his chair." + }, + { + "title": "MURDER IN WESTMINSTER", + "text": "A crime of mysterious character was committed last night at 16 Godolphin Street, one of the old-fashioned and secluded rows of eighteenth-century houses which lie between the river and the Abbey, almost in the shadow of the great Tower of the Houses of Parliament. This small but select mansion has been inhabited for some years by Mr. Eduardo Lucas, well known in society circles both on account of his charming personality and because he has the well-deserved reputation of being one of the best amateur tenors in the country. Mr. Lucas is an unmarried man, thirty-four years of age, and his establishment consists of Mrs. Pringle, an elderly housekeeper, and of Mitton, his valet. The former retires early and sleeps at the top of the house. The valet was out for the evening, visiting a friend at Hammersmith. From ten o'clock onward Mr. Lucas had the house to himself. What occurred during that time has not yet transpired, but at a quarter to twelve Police-constable Barrett, passing along Godolphin Street, observed that the door of No. 16 was ajar. He knocked, but received no answer. Perceiving a light in the front room, he advanced into the passage and again knocked, but without reply. He then pushed open the door and entered. The room was in a state of wild disorder, the furniture being all swept to one side, and one chair lying on its back in the centre. Beside this chair, and still grasping one of its legs, lay the unfortunate tenant of the house. He had been stabbed to the heart and must have died instantly. The knife with which the crime had been committed was a curved Indian dagger, plucked down from a trophy of Oriental arms which adorned one of the walls. Robbery does not appear to have been the motive of the crime, for there had been no attempt to remove the valuable contents of the room. Mr. Eduardo Lucas was so well known and popular that his violent and mysterious fate will arouse painful interest and intense sympathy in a widespread circle of friends.\n\n\"Well, Watson, what do you make of this?\" asked Holmes, after a long pause.\n\n\"It is an amazing coincidence.\"\n\n\"A coincidence! Here is one of the three men whom we had named as possible actors in this drama, and he meets a violent death during the very hours when we know that that drama was being enacted. The odds are enormous against its being coincidence. No figures could express them. No, my dear Watson, the two events are connected\u2014must be connected. It is for us to find the connection.\"\n\n\"But now the official police must know all.\"\n\n\"Not at all. They know all they see at Godolphin Street. They know\u2014and shall know\u2014nothing of Whitehall Terrace. Only we know of both events, and can trace the relation between them. There is one obvious point which would, in any case, have turned my suspicions against Lucas. Godolphin Street, Westminster, is only a few minutes' walk from Whitehall Terrace. The other secret agents whom I have named live in the extreme West End. It was easier, therefore, for Lucas than for the others to establish a connection or receive a message from the European Secretary's household\u2014a small thing, and yet where events are compressed into a few hours it may prove essential. Halloa! what have we here?\"\n\nMrs. Hudson had appeared with a lady's card upon her salver. Holmes glanced at it, raised his eyebrows, and handed it over to me.\n\n\"Ask Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope if she will be kind enough to step up,\" said he.\n\nA moment later our modest apartment, already so distinguished that morning, was further honoured by the entrance of the most lovely woman in London. I had often heard of the beauty of the youngest daughter of the Duke of Belminster, but no description of it, and no contemplation of colourless photographs, had prepared me for the subtle, delicate charm and the beautiful colouring of that exquisite head. And yet as we saw it that autumn morning, it was not its beauty which would be the first thing to impress the observer. The cheek was lovely but it was paled with emotion, the eyes were bright, but it was the brightness of fever, the sensitive mouth was tight and drawn in an effort after self-command. Terror\u2014not beauty\u2014was what sprang first to the eye as our fair visitor stood framed for an instant in the open door.\n\n\"Has my husband been here, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Yes, madam, he has been here.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, I implore you not to tell him that I came here.\" Holmes bowed coldly, and motioned the lady to a chair.\n\n\"Your ladyship places me in a very delicate position. I beg that you will sit down and tell me what you desire, but I fear that I cannot make any unconditional promise.\"\n\nShe swept across the room and seated herself with her back to the window. It was a queenly presence\u2014tall, graceful, and intensely womanly.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes,\" she said\u2014and her white-gloved hands clasped and unclasped as she spoke\u2014\"I will speak frankly to you in the hopes that it may induce you to speak frankly in return. There is complete confidence between my husband and me on all matters save one. That one is politics. On this his lips are sealed. He tells me nothing. Now, I am aware that there was a most deplorable occurrence in our house last night. I know that a paper has disappeared. But because the matter is political my husband refuses to take me into his complete confidence. Now it is essential\u2014essential, I say\u2014that I should thoroughly understand it. You are the only other person, save only these politicians, who knows the true facts. I beg you then, Mr. Holmes, to tell me exactly what has happened and what it will lead to. Tell me all, Mr. Holmes. Let no regard for your client's interests keep you silent, for I assure you that his interests, if he would only see it, would be best served by taking me into his complete confidence. What was this paper which was stolen?\"\n\n\"Madam, what you ask me is really impossible.\"\n\nShe groaned and sank her face in her hands.\n\n\"You must see that this is so, madam. If your husband thinks fit to keep you in the dark over this matter, is it for me, who has only learned the true facts under the pledge of professional secrecy, to tell what he has withheld? It is not fair to ask it. It is him whom you must ask.\"\n\n\"I have asked him. I come to you as a last resource. But without your telling me anything definite, Mr. Holmes, you may do a great service if you would enlighten me on one point.\"\n\n\"What is it, madam?\"\n\n\"Is my husband's political career likely to suffer through this incident?\"\n\n\"Well, madam, unless it is set right it may certainly have a very unfortunate effect.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" She drew in her breath sharply as one whose doubts are resolved.\n\n\"One more question, Mr. Holmes. From an expression which my husband dropped in the first shock of this disaster I understood that terrible public consequences might arise from the loss of this document.\"\n\n\"If he said so, I certainly cannot deny it.\"\n\n\"Of what nature are they?\"\n\n\"Nay, madam, there again you ask me more than I can possibly answer.\"\n\n\"Then I will take up no more of your time. I cannot blame you, Mr. Holmes, for having refused to speak more freely, and you on your side will not, I am sure, think the worse of me because I desire, even against his will, to share my husband's anxieties. Once more I beg that you will say nothing of my visit.\"\n\nShe looked back at us from the door, and I had a last impression of that beautiful haunted face, the startled eyes, and the drawn mouth. Then she was gone.\n\n\"Now, Watson, the fair sex is your department,\" said Holmes, with a smile, when the dwindling frou-frou of skirts had ended in the slam of the front door. \"What was the fair lady's game? What did she really want?\"\n\n\"Surely her own statement is clear and her anxiety very natural.\"\n\n\"Hum! Think of her appearance, Watson\u2014her manner, her suppressed excitement, her restlessness, her tenacity in asking questions. Remember that she comes of a caste who do not lightly show emotion.\"\n\n\"She was certainly much moved.\"\n\n\"Remember also the curious earnestness with which she assured us that it was best for her husband that she should know all. What did she mean by that? And you must have observed, Watson, how she manoeuvred to have the light at her back. She did not wish us to read her expression.\"\n\n\"Yes, she chose the one chair in the room.\"\n\n\"And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose\u2014that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs. Good-morning, Watson.\"\n\n\"You are off?\"\n\n\"Yes, I will while away the morning at Godolphin Street with our friends of the regular establishment. With Eduardo Lucas lies the solution of our problem, though I must admit that I have not an inkling as to what form it may take. It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts. Do you stay on guard, my good Watson, and receive any fresh visitors. I'll join you at lunch if I am able.\"\n\nAll that day and the next and the next Holmes was in a mood which his friends would call taciturn, and others morose. He ran out and ran in, smoked incessantly, played snatches on his violin, sank into reveries, devoured sandwiches at irregular hours, and hardly answered the casual questions which I put to him. It was evident to me that things were not going well with him or his quest. He would say nothing of the case, and it was from the papers that I learned the particulars of the inquest, and the arrest with the subsequent release of John Mitton, the valet of the deceased. The coroner's jury brought in the obvious Wilful Murder, but the parties remained as unknown as ever. No motive was suggested. The room was full of articles of value, but none had been taken. The dead man's papers had not been tampered with. They were carefully examined, and showed that he was a keen student of international politics, an indefatigable gossip, a remarkable linguist, and an untiring letter writer. He had been on intimate terms with the leading politicians of several countries. But nothing sensational was discovered among the documents which filled his drawers. As to his relations with women, they appeared to have been promiscuous but superficial. He had many acquaintances among them, but few friends, and no one whom he loved. His habits were regular, his conduct inoffensive. His death was an absolute mystery and likely to remain so.\n\nAs to the arrest of John Mitton, the valet, it was a council of despair as an alternative to absolute inaction. But no case could be sustained against him. He had visited friends in Hammersmith that night. The alibi was complete. It is true that he started home at an hour which should have brought him to Westminster before the time when the crime was discovered, but his own explanation that he had walked part of the way seemed probable enough in view of the fineness of the night. He had actually arrived at twelve o'clock, and appeared to be overwhelmed by the unexpected tragedy. He had always been on good terms with his master. Several of the dead man's possessions\u2014notably a small case of razors\u2014had been found in the valet's boxes, but he explained that they had been presents from the deceased, and the housekeeper was able to corroborate the story. Mitton had been in Lucas's employment for three years. It was noticeable that Lucas did not take Mitton on the Continent with him. Sometimes he visited Paris for three months on end, but Mitton was left in charge of the Godolphin Street house. As to the housekeeper, she had heard nothing on the night of the crime. If her master had a visitor he had himself admitted him.\n\nSo for three mornings the mystery remained, so far as I could follow it in the papers. If Holmes knew more, he kept his own counsel, but, as he told me that Inspector Lestrade had taken him into his confidence in the case, I knew that he was in close touch with every development. Upon the fourth day there appeared a long telegram from Paris which seemed to solve the whole question.\n\nA discovery has just been made by the Parisian police [said the Daily Telegraph] which raises the veil which hung round the tragic fate of Mr. Eduardo Lucas, who met his death by violence last Monday night at Godolphin Street, Westminster. Our readers will remember that the deceased gentleman was found stabbed in his room, and that some suspicion attached to his valet, but that the case broke down on an alibi. Yesterday a lady, who has been known as Mme. Henri Fournaye, occupying a small villa in the Rue Austerlitz, was reported to the authorities by her servants as being insane. An examination showed she had indeed developed mania of a dangerous and permanent form. On inquiry, the police have discovered that Mme. Henri Fournaye only returned from a journey to London on Tuesday last, and there is evidence to connect her with the crime at Westminster. A comparison of photographs has proved conclusively that M. Henri Fournaye and Eduardo Lucas were really one and the same person, and that the deceased had for some reason lived a double life in London and Paris. Mme. Fournaye, who is of Creole origin, is of an extremely excitable nature, and has suffered in the past from attacks of jealousy which have amounted to frenzy It is conjectured that it was in one of these that she committed the terrible crime which has caused such a sensation in London. Her movements upon the Monday night have not yet been traced, but it is undoubted that a woman answering to her description attracted much attention at Charing Cross Station on Tuesday morning by the wildness of her appearance and the violence of her gestures. It is probable, therefore, that the crime was either committed when insane, or that its immediate effect was to drive the unhappy woman out of her mind. At present she is unable to give any coherent account of the past, and the doctors hold out no hopes of the re\u00ebstablishment of her reason. There is evidence that a woman, who might have been Mme. Fournaye, was seen for some hours upon Monday night watching the house in Godolphin Street.\n\n\"What do you think of that, Holmes?\" I had read the account aloud to him, while he finished his breakfast.\n\n\"My dear Watson,\" said he, as he rose from the table and paced up and down the room, \"you are most long-suffering, but if I have told you nothing in the last three days, it is because there is nothing to tell. Even now this report from Paris does not help us much.\"\n\n\"Surely it is final as regards the man's death.\"\n\n\"The man's death is a mere incident\u2014a trivial episode\u2014in comparison with our real task, which is to trace this document and save a European catastrophe. Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened. I get reports almost hourly from the government, and it is certain that nowhere in Europe is there any sign of trouble. Now, if this letter were loose\u2014no, it can't be loose\u2014but if it isn't loose, where can it be? Who has it? Why is it held back? That's the question that beats in my brain like a hammer. Was it, indeed, a coincidence that Lucas should meet his death on the night when the letter disappeared? Did the letter ever reach him? If so, why is it not among his papers? Did this mad wife of his carry it off with her? If so, is it in her house in Paris? How could I search for it without the French police having their suspicions aroused? It is a case, my dear Watson, where the law is as dangerous to us as the criminals are. Every man's hand is against us, and yet the interests at stake are colossal. Should I bring it to a successful conclusion, it will certainly represent the crowning glory of my career. Ah, here is my latest from the front!\" He glanced hurriedly at the note which had been handed in. \"Halloa! Lestrade seems to have observed something of interest. Put on your hat, Watson, and we will stroll down together to Westminster.\"\n\nIt was my first visit to the scene of the crime\u2014a high, dingy, narrow-chested house, prim, formal, and solid, like the century which gave it birth. Lestrade's bulldog features gazed out at us from the front window, and he greeted us warmly when a big constable had opened the door and let us in. The room into which we were shown was that in which the crime had been committed, but no trace of it now remained save an ugly, irregular stain upon the carpet. This carpet was a small square drugget in the centre of the room, surrounded by a broad expanse of beautiful, old-fashioned wood-flooring in square blocks, highly polished. Over the fireplace was a magnificent trophy of weapons, one of which had been used on that tragic night. In the window was a sumptuous writing-desk, and every detail of the apartment, the pictures, the rugs, and the hangings, all pointed to a taste which was luxurious to the verge of effeminacy.\n\n\"Seen the Paris news?\" asked Lestrade.\n\nHolmes nodded.\n\n\"Our French friends seem to have touched the spot this time. No doubt it's just as they say. She knocked at the door\u2014surprise visit, I guess, for he kept his life in water-tight compartments\u2014he let her in, couldn't keep her in the street. She told him how she had traced him, reproached him. One thing led to another, and then with that dagger so handy the end soon came. It wasn't all done in an instant, though, for these chairs were all swept over yonder, and he had one in his hand as if he had tried to hold her off with it. We've got it all clear as if we had seen it.\"\n\nHolmes raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"And yet you have sent for me?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, that's another matter\u2014a mere trifle, but the sort of thing you take an interest in\u2014queer, you know, and what you might call freakish. It has nothing to do with the main fact\u2014can't have, on the face of it.\"\n\n\"What is it, then?\"\n\n\"Well, you know, after a crime of this sort we are very careful to keep things in their position. Nothing has been moved. Officer in charge here day and night. This morning, as the man was buried and the investigation over\u2014so far as this room is concerned\u2014we thought we could tidy up a bit. This carpet. You see, it is not fastened down, only just laid there. We had occasion to raise it. We found\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes? You found\u2014\"\n\nHolmes's face grew tense with anxiety.\n\n\"Well, I'm sure you would never guess in a hundred years what we did find. You see that stain on the carpet? Well, a great deal must have soaked through, must it not?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly it must.\"\n\n\"Well, you will be surprised to hear that there is no stain on the white woodwork to correspond.\"\n\n\"No stain! But there must\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, so you would say. But the fact remains that there isn't.\"\n\nHe took the corner of the carpet in his hand and, turning it over, he showed that it was indeed as he said.\n\n\"But the under side is as stained as the upper. It must have left a mark.\"\n\nLestrade chuckled with delight at having puzzled the famous expert.\n\n\"Now, I'll show you the explanation. There is a second stain, but it does not correspond with the other. See for yourself.\" As he spoke he turned over another portion of the carpet, and there, sure enough, was a great crimson spill upon the square white facing of the old-fashioned floor. \"What do you make of that, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Why, it is simple enough. The two stains did correspond, but the carpet has been turned round. As it was square and unfastened it was easily done.\"\n\n\"The official police don't need you, Mr. Holmes, to tell them that the carpet must have been turned round. That's clear enough, for the stains lie above each other\u2014if you lay it over this way. But what I want to know is, who shifted the carpet, and why?\"\n\nI could see from Holmes's rigid face that he was vibrating with inward excitement.\n\n\"Look here, Lestrade,\" said he, \"has that constable in the passage been in charge of the place all the time?\"\n\n\"Yes, he has.\"\n\n\"Well, take my advice. Examine him carefully. Don't do it before us. We'll wait here. You take him into the back room. You'll be more likely to get a confession out of him alone. Ask him how he dared to admit people and leave them alone in this room. Don't ask him if he has done it. Take it for granted. Tell him you know someone has been here. Press him. Tell him that a full confession is his only chance of forgiveness. Do exactly what I tell you!\"\n\n\"By George, if he knows I'll have it out of him!\" cried Lestrade. He darted into the hall, and a few moments later his bullying voice sounded from the back room.\n\n\"Now, Watson, now!\" cried Holmes with frenzied eagerness. All the demoniacal force of the man masked behind that listless manner burst out in a paroxysm of energy. He tore the drugget from the floor, and in an instant was down on his hands and knees clawing at each of the squares of wood beneath it. One turned sideways as he dug his nails into the edge of it. It hinged back like the lid of a box. A small black cavity opened beneath it. Holmes plunged his eager hand into it and drew it out with a bitter snarl of anger and disappointment. It was empty.\n\n\"Quick, Watson, quick! Get it back again!\" The wooden lid was replaced, and the drugget had only just been drawn straight when Lestrade's voice was heard in the passage. He found Holmes leaning languidly against the mantelpiece, resigned and patient, endeavouring to conceal his irrepressible yawns.\n\n\"Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Holmes. I can see that you are bored to death with the whole affair. Well, he has confessed, all right. Come in here, MacPherson. Let these gentlemen hear of your most inexcusable conduct.\"\n\nThe big constable, very hot and penitent, sidled into the room.\n\n\"I meant no harm, sir, I'm sure. The young woman came to the door last evening\u2014mistook the house, she did. And then we got talking. It's lonesome, when you're on duty here all day.\"\n\n\"Well, what happened then?\"\n\n\"She wanted to see where the crime was done\u2014had read about it in the papers, she said. She was a very respectable, well-spoken young woman, sir, and I saw no harm in letting her have a peep. When she saw that mark on the carpet, down she dropped on the floor, and lay as if she were dead. I ran to the back and got some water, but I could not bring her to. Then I went round the corner to the Ivy Plant for some brandy, and by the time I had brought it back the young woman had recovered and was off\u2014ashamed of herself, I daresay, and dared not face me.\"\n\n\"How about moving that drugget?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, it was a bit rumpled, certainly, when I came back. You see, she fell on it and it lies on a polished floor with nothing to keep it in place. I straightened it out afterwards.\"\n\n\"It's a lesson to you that you can't deceive me, Constable MacPherson,\" said Lestrade, with dignity. \"No doubt you thought that your breach of duty could never be discovered, and yet a mere glance at that drugget was enough to convince me that someone had been admitted to the room. It's lucky for you, my man, that nothing is missing, or you would find yourself in Queer Street. I'm sorry to have called you down over such a petty business, Mr. Holmes, but I thought the point of the second stain not corresponding with the first would interest you.\"\n\n\"Certainly, it was most interesting. Has this woman only been here once, constable?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, only once.\"\n\n\"Who was she?\"\n\n\"Don't know the name, sir. Was answering an advertisement about typewriting and came to the wrong number\u2014very pleasant, genteel young woman, sir.\"\n\n\"Tall? Handsome?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, she was a well-grown young woman. I suppose you might say she was handsome. Perhaps some would say she was very handsome. 'Oh, officer, do let me have a peep!' says she. She had pretty, coaxing ways, as you might say, and I thought there was no harm in letting her just put her head through the door.\"\n\n\"How was she dressed?\"\n\n\"Quiet, sir\u2014a long mantle down to her feet.\"\n\n\"What time was it?\"\n\n\"It was just growing dusk at the time. They were lighting the lamps as I came back with the brandy.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said Holmes. \"Come, Watson, I think that we have more important work elsewhere.\"\n\nAs we left the house Lestrade remained in the front room, while the repentant constable opened the door to let us out. Holmes turned on the step and held up something in his hand. The constable stared intently.\n\n\"Good Lord, sir!\" he cried, with amazement on his face. Holmes put his finger on his lips, replaced his hand in his breast pocket, and burst out laughing as we turned down the street. \"Excellent!\" said he. \"Come, friend Watson, the curtain rings up for the last act. You will be relieved to hear that there will be no war, that the Right Honourable Trelawney Hope will suffer no setback in his brilliant career, that the indiscreet Sovereign will receive no punishment for his indiscretion, that the Prime Minister will have no European complication to deal with, and that with a little tact and management upon our part nobody will be a penny the worse for what might have been a very ugly incident.\"\n\nMy mind filled with admiration for this extraordinary man.\n\n\"You have solved it!\" I cried.\n\n\"Hardly that, Watson. There are some points which are as dark as ever. But we have so much that it will be our own fault if we cannot get the rest. We will go straight to Whitehall Terrace and bring the matter to a head.\"\n\nWhen we arrived at the residence of the European Secretary it was for Lady Hilda Trelawney Hope that Sherlock Holmes inquired. We were shown into the morning-room.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes!\" said the lady, and her face was pink with her indignation. \"This is surely most unfair and ungenerous upon your part. I desired, as I have explained, to keep my visit to you a secret, lest my husband should think that I was intruding into his affairs. And yet you compromise me by coming here and so showing that there are business relations between us.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, madam, I had no possible alternative. I have been commissioned to recover this immensely important paper. I must therefore ask you, madam, to be kind enough to place it in my hands.\"\n\nThe lady sprang to her feet, with the colour all dashed in an instant from her beautiful face. Her eyes glazed\u2014she tottered\u2014I thought that she would faint. Then with a grand effort she rallied from the shock, and a supreme astonishment and indignation chased every other expression from her features.\n\n\"You\u2014you insult me, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Come, come, madam, it is useless. Give up the letter.\"\n\nShe darted to the bell.\n\n\"The butler shall show you out.\"\n\n\"Do not ring, Lady Hilda. If you do, then all my earnest efforts to avoid a scandal will be frustrated. Give up the letter and all will be set right. If you will work with me I can arrange everything. If you work against me I must expose you.\"\n\nShe stood grandly defiant, a queenly figure, her eyes fixed upon his as if she would read his very soul. Her hand was on the bell, but she had forborne to ring it.\n\n\"You are trying to frighten me. It is not a very manly thing, Mr. Holmes, to come here and browbeat a woman. You say that you know something. What is it that you know?\"\n\n\"Pray sit down, madam. You will hurt yourself there if you fall. I will not speak until you sit down. Thank you.\"\n\n\"I give you five minutes, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"One is enough, Lady Hilda. I know of your visit to Eduardo Lucas, of your giving him this document, of your ingenious return to the room last night, and of the manner in which you took the letter from the hiding-place under the carpet.\"\n\nShe stared at him with an ashen face and gulped twice before she could speak.\n\n\"You are mad, Mr. Holmes\u2014you are mad!\" she cried, at last.\n\nHe drew a small piece of cardboard from his pocket. It was the face of a woman cut out of a portrait.\n\n\"I have carried this because I thought it might be useful,\" said he. \"The policeman has recognized it.\"\n\nShe gave a gasp, and her head dropped back in the chair.\n\n\"Come, Lady Hilda. You have the letter. The matter may still be adjusted. I have no desire to bring trouble to you. My duty ends when I have returned the lost letter to your husband. Take my advice and be frank with me. It is your only chance.\"\n\nHer courage was admirable. Even now she would not own defeat.\n\n\"I tell you again, Mr. Holmes, that you are under some absurd illusion.\"\n\nHolmes rose from his chair.\n\n\"I am sorry for you, Lady Hilda. I have done my best for you. I can see that it is all in vain.\"\n\nHe rang the bell. The butler entered.\n\n\"Is Mr. Trelawney Hope at home?\"\n\n\"He will be home, sir, at a quarter to one.\"\n\nHolmes glanced at his watch.\n\n\"Still a quarter of an hour,\" said he. \"Very good, I shall wait.\"\n\nThe butler had hardly closed the door behind him when Lady Hilda was down on her knees at Holmes's feet, her hands outstretched, her beautiful face upturned and wet with her tears.\n\n\"Oh, spare me, Mr. Holmes! Spare me!\" she pleaded, in a frenzy of supplication. \"For heaven's sake, don't tell him! I love him so! I would not bring one shadow on his life, and this I know would break his noble heart.\"\n\nHolmes raised the lady. \"I am thankful, madam, that you have come to your senses even at this last moment! There is not an instant to lose. Where is the letter?\"\n\nShe darted across to a writing-desk, unlocked it, and drew out a long blue envelope.\n\n\"Here it is, Mr. Holmes. Would to heaven I had never seen it!\"\n\n\"How can we return it?\" Holmes muttered. \"Quick, quick, we must think of some way! Where is the despatch-box?\"\n\n\"Still in his bedroom.\"\n\n\"What a stroke of luck! Quick, madam, bring it here!\"\n\nA moment later she had appeared with a red flat box in her hand.\n\n\"How did you open it before? You have a duplicate key? Yes, of course you have. Open it!\"\n\nFrom out of her bosom Lady Hilda had drawn a small key. The box flew open. It was stuffed with papers. Holmes thrust the blue envelope deep down into the heart of them, between the leaves of some other document. The box was shut, locked, and returned to the bedroom.\n\n\"Now we are ready for him,\" said Holmes. \"We have still ten minutes. I am going far to screen you, Lady Hilda. In return you will spend the time in telling me frankly the real meaning of this extraordinary affair.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, I will tell you everything,\" cried the lady. \"Oh, Mr. Holmes, I would cut off my right hand before I gave him a moment of sorrow! There is no woman in all London who loves her husband as I do, and yet if he knew how I have acted\u2014how I have been compelled to act\u2014he would never forgive me. For his own honour stands so high that he could not forget or pardon a lapse in another. Help me, Mr. Holmes! My happiness, his happiness, our very lives are at stake!\"\n\n\"Quick, madam, the time grows short!\"\n\n\"It was a letter of mine, Mr. Holmes, an indiscreet letter written before my marriage\u2014a foolish letter, a letter of an impulsive, loving girl. I meant no harm, and yet he would have thought it criminal. Had he read that letter his confidence would have been forever destroyed. It is years since I wrote it. I had thought that the whole matter was forgotten. Then at last I heard from this man, Lucas, that it had passed into his hands, and that he would lay it before my husband. I implored his mercy. He said that he would return my letter if I would bring him a certain document which he described in my husband's despatch-box. He had some spy in the office who had told him of its existence. He assured me that no harm could come to my husband. Put yourself in my position, Mr. Holmes! What was I to do?\"\n\n\"Take your husband into your confidence.\"\n\n\"I could not, Mr. Holmes, I could not! On the one side seemed certain ruin, on the other, terrible as it seemed to take my husband's paper, still in a matter of politics I could not understand the consequences, while in a matter of love and trust they were only too clear to me. I did it, Mr. Holmes! I took an impression of his key. This man, Lucas, furnished a duplicate. I opened his despatch-box, took the paper, and conveyed it to Godolphin Street.\"\n\n\"What happened there, madam?\"\n\n\"I tapped at the door as agreed. Lucas opened it. I followed him into his room, leaving the hall door ajar behind me, for I feared to be alone with the man. I remember that there was a woman outside as I entered. Our business was soon done. He had my letter on his desk, I handed him the document. He gave me the letter. At this instant there was a sound at the door. There were steps in the passage. Lucas quickly turned back the drugget, thrust the document into some hiding-place there, and covered it over.\n\n\"What happened after that is like some fearful dream. I have a vision of a dark, frantic face, of a woman's voice, which screamed in French, 'My waiting is not in vain. At last, at last I have found you with her!' There was a savage struggle. I saw him with a chair in his hand, a knife gleamed in hers. I rushed from the horrible scene, ran from the house, and only next morning in the paper did I learn the dreadful result. That night I was happy, for I had my letter, and I had not seen yet what the future would bring.\n\n\"It was the next morning that I realized that I had only exchanged one trouble for another. My husband's anguish at the loss of his paper went to my heart. I could hardly prevent myself from there and then kneeling down at his feet and telling him what I had done. But that again would mean a confession of the past. I came to you that morning in order to understand the full enormity of my offence. From the instant that I grasped it my whole mind was turned to the one thought of getting back my husband's paper. It must still be where Lucas had placed it, for it was concealed before this dreadful woman entered the room. If it had not been for her coming, I should not have known where his hiding-place was. How was I to get into the room? For two days I watched the place, but the door was never left open. Last night I made a last attempt. What I did and how I succeeded, you have already learned. I brought the paper back with me, and thought of destroying it, since I could see no way of returning it without confessing my guilt to my husband. Heavens, I hear his step upon the stair!\"\n\nThe European Secretary burst excitedly into the room.\n\n\"Any news, Mr. Holmes, any news?\" he cried.\n\n\"I have some hopes.\"\n\n\"Ah, thank heaven!\" His face became radiant. \"The Prime Minister is lunching with me. May he share your hopes? He has nerves of steel, and yet I know that he has hardly slept since this terrible event. Jacobs, will you ask the Prime Minister to come up? As to you, dear, I fear that this is a matter of politics. We will join you in a few minutes in the dining-room.\"\n\nThe Prime Minister's manner was subdued, but I could see by the gleam of his eyes and the twitchings of his bony hands that he shared the excitement of his young colleague.\n\n\"I understand that you have something to report, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Purely negative as yet,\" my friend answered. \"I have inquired at every point where it might be, and I am sure that there is no danger to be apprehended.\"\n\n\"But that is not enough, Mr. Holmes. We cannot live forever on such a volcano. We must have something definite.\"\n\n\"I am in hopes of getting it. That is why I am here. The more I think of the matter the more convinced I am that the letter has never left this house.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes!\"\n\n\"If it had it would certainly have been public by now.\"\n\n\"But why should anyone take it in order to keep it in his house?\"\n\n\"I am not convinced that anyone did take it.\"\n\n\"Then how could it leave the despatch-box?\"\n\n\"I am not convinced that it ever did leave the despatch-box.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, this joking is very ill-timed. You have my assurance that it left the box.\"\n\n\"Have you examined the box since Tuesday morning?\"\n\n\"No. It was not necessary.\"\n\n\"You may conceivably have overlooked it.\"\n\n\"Impossible, I say.\"\n\n\"But I am not convinced of it. I have known such things to happen. I presume there are other papers there. Well, it may have got mixed with them.\"\n\n\"It was on the top.\"\n\n\"Someone may have shaken the box and displaced it.\"\n\n\"No, no, I had everything out.\"\n\n\"Surely it is easily decided, Hope,\" said the Premier. \"Let us have the despatch-box brought in.\"\n\nThe Secretary rang the bell.\n\n\"Jacobs, bring down my despatch-box. This is a farcical waste of time, but still, if nothing else will satisfy you, it shall be done. Thank you, Jacobs, put it here. I have always had the key on my watch-chain. Here are the papers, you see. Letter from Lord Merrow, report from Sir Charles Hardy, memorandum from Belgrade, note on the Russo-German grain taxes, letter from Madrid, note from Lord Flowers\u2014Good heavens! what is this? Lord Bellinger! Lord Bellinger!\"\n\nThe Premier snatched the blue envelope from his hand.\n\n\"Yes, it is it\u2014and the letter is intact. Hope, I congratulate you.\"\n\n\"Thank you! Thank you! What a weight from my heart. But this is inconceivable\u2014impossible. Mr. Holmes, you are a wizard, a sorcerer! How did you know it was there?\"\n\n\"Because I knew it was nowhere else.\"\n\n\"I cannot believe my eyes!\" He ran wildly to the door. \"Where is my wife? I must tell her that all is well. Hilda! Hilda!\" we heard his voice on the stairs.\n\nThe Premier looked at Holmes with twinkling eyes.\n\n\"Come, sir,\" said he. \"There is more in this than meets the eye. How came the letter back in the box?\"\n\nHolmes turned away smiling from the keen scrutiny of those wonderful eyes.\n\n\"We also have our diplomatic secrets,\" said he and, picking up his hat, he turned to the door." + }, + { + "title": "THE VALLEY OF FEAR", + "text": "[ THE TRAGEDY OF BIRLSTONE ]\n\n[ The Warning ]\n\n\"I am inclined to think\u2014\" said I.\n\n\"I should do so,\" Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently.\n\nI believe that I am one of the most long-suffering of mortals; but I'll admit that I was annoyed at the sardonic interruption. \"Really, Holmes,\" said I severely, \"you are a little trying at times.\"\n\nHe was too much absorbed with his own thoughts to give any immediate answer to my remonstrance. He leaned upon his hand, with his untasted breakfast before him, and he stared at the slip of paper which he had just drawn from its envelope. Then he took the envelope itself, held it up to the light, and very carefully studied both the exterior and the flap.\n\n\"It is Porlock's writing,\" said he thoughtfully. \"I can hardly doubt that it is Porlock's writing, though I have seen it only twice before. The Greek e with the peculiar top flourish is distinctive. But if it is Porlock then it must be something of the very first importance.\"\n\nHe was speaking to himself rather than to me; but my vexation disappeared in the interest which the words awakened.\n\n\"Who then is Porlock?\" I asked.\n\n\"Porlock, Watson, is a nom-de-plume, a mere identification mark; but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city. Porlock is important, not for himself, but for the great man with whom he is in touch. Picture to yourself the pilot fish with the shark, the jackal with the lion\u2014anything that is insignificant in companionship with what is formidable: not only formidable, Watson, but sinister\u2014in the highest degree sinister. That is where he comes within my purview. You have heard me speak of Professor Moriarty?\"\n\n\"The famous scientific criminal, as famous among crooks as\u2014\"\n\n\"My blushes, Watson!\" Holmes murmured in a deprecating voice.\n\n\"I was about to say, as he is unknown to the public.\"\n\n\"A touch! A distinct touch!\" cried Holmes. \"You are developing a certain unexpected vein of pawky humour, Watson, against which I must learn to guard myself. But in calling Moriarty a criminal you are uttering libel in the eyes of the law\u2014and there lie the glory and the wonder of it! The greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every deviltry, the controlling brain of the underworld, a brain which might have made or marred the destiny of nations\u2014that's the man! But so aloof is he from general suspicion, so immune from criticism, so admirable in his management and self-effacement, that for those very words that you have uttered he could hale you to a court and emerge with your year's pension as a so latium for his wounded character. Is he not the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it? Is this a man to traduce? Foul-mouthed doctor and slandered professor\u2014such would be your respective roles! That's genius, Watson. But if I am spared by lesser men, our day will surely come.\"\n\n\"May I be there to see!\" I exclaimed devoutly. \"But you were speaking of this man Porlock.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes\u2014the so-called Porlock is a link in the chain some little way from its great attachment. Porlock is not quite a sound link between ourselves. He is the only flaw in that chain so far as I have been able to test it.\"\n\n\"But no chain is stronger than its weakest link.\"\n\n\"Exactly, my dear Watson! Hence the extreme importance of Porlock. Led on by some rudimentary aspirations towards right, and encouraged by the judicious stimulation of an occasional ten-pound note sent to him by devious methods, he has once or twice given me advance information which has been of value\u2014that highest value which anticipates and prevents rather than avenges crime. I cannot doubt that, if we had the cipher, we should find that this communication is of the nature that I indicate.\"\n\nAgain Holmes flattened out the paper upon his unused plate. I rose and, leaning over him, stared down at the curious inscription, which ran as follows:\n\n\"What do you make of it, Holmes?\"\n\n\"It is obviously an attempt to convey secret information.\"\n\n\"But what is the use of a cipher message without the cipher?\"\n\n\"In this instance, none at all.\"\n\n\"Why do you say 'in this instance'?\"\n\n\"Because there are many ciphers which I would read as easily as I do the apocrypha of the agony column: such crude devices amuse the intelligence without fatiguing it. But this is different. It is clearly a reference to the words in a page of some book. Until I am told which page and which book I am powerless.\"\n\n\"But why 'Douglas' and 'Birlstone'?\"\n\n\"Clearly because those are words which were not contained in the page in question.\"\n\n\"Then why has he not indicated the book?\"\n\n\"Your native shrewdness, my dear Watson, that innate cunning which is the delight of your friends, would surely prevent you from inclosing cipher and message in the same envelope. Should it miscarry, you are undone. As it is, both have to go wrong before any harm comes from it. Our second post is now overdue, and I shall be surprised if it does not bring us either a further letter of explanation, or, as is more probable, the very volume to which these figures refer.\"\n\nHolmes's calculation was fulfilled within a very few minutes by the appearance of Billy, the page, with the very letter which we were expecting.\n\n\"The same writing,\" remarked Holmes, as he opened the envelope, \"and actually signed,\" he added in an exultant voice as he unfolded the epistle. \"Come, we are getting on, Watson.\" His brow clouded, however, as he glanced over the contents.\n\n\"Dear me, this is very disappointing! I fear, Watson, that all our expectations come to nothing. I trust that the man Porlock will come to no harm.\n\n\"DEAR MR. HOLMES [he says]:\n\nI will go no further in this matter. It is too dangerous\u2014he suspects me. I can see that he suspects me. He came to me quite unexpectedly after I had actually addressed this envelope with the intention of sending you the key to the cipher. I was able to cover it up. If he had seen it, it would have gone hard with me. But I read suspicion in his eyes. Please burn the cipher message, which can now be of no use to you.\n\nFRED PORLOCK.\"\n\nHolmes sat for some little time twisting this letter between his fingers, and frowning, as he stared into the fire.\n\n\"After all,\" he said at last, \"there may be nothing in it. It may be only his guilty conscience. Knowing himself to be a traitor, he may have read the accusation in the other's eyes.\"\n\n\"The other being, I presume, Professor Moriarty.\"\n\n\"No less! When any of that party talk about 'He' you know whom they mean. There is one predominant. 'He' for all of them.\"\n\n\"But what can he do?\"\n\n\"Hum! That's a large question. When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities. Anyhow, Friend Porlock is evidently scared out of his senses\u2014kindly compare the writing in the note to that upon its envelope; which was done, he tells us, before this ill-omened visit. The one is clear and firm. The other hardly legible.\"\n\n\"Why did he write at all? Why did he not simply drop it?\"\n\n\"Because he feared I would make some inquiry after him in that case, and possibly bring trouble on him.\"\n\n\"No doubt,\" said I. \"Of course.\" I had picked up the original cipher message and was bending my brows over it. \"It's pretty maddening to think that an important secret may lie here on this slip of paper, and that it is beyond human power to penetrate it.\n\nSherlock Holmes had pushed away his untasted breakfast and lit the unsavoury pipe which was the companion of his deepest meditations. \"I wonder!\" said he, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. \"Perhaps there are points which have escaped your Machiavellian intellect. Let us consider the problem in the light of pure reason. This man's reference is to a book. That is our point of departure.\"\n\n\"A somewhat vague one.\"\n\n\"Let us see then if we can narrow it down. As I focus my mind upon it, it seems rather less impenetrable. What indications have we as to this book?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Well, well, it is surely not quite so bad as that. The cipher message begins with a large 534, does it not? We may take it as a working hypothesis that 534 is the particular page to which the cipher refers. So our book has already become a large book, which is surely something gained. What other indications have we as to the nature of this large book? The next sign is C2. What do you make of that, Watson?\"\n\n\"Chapter the second, no doubt.\"\n\n\"Hardly that, Watson. You will, I am sure, agree with me that if the page be given, the number of the chapter is immaterial. Also that if page 534 finds us only in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.\"\n\n\"Column!\" I cried.\n\n\"Brilliant, Watson. You are scintillating this morning. If it is not column, then I am very much deceived. So now, you see, we begin to visualize a large book, printed in double columns, which are each of a considerable length, since one of the words is numbered in the document as the two hundred and ninety-third. Have we reached the limits of what reason can supply?\"\n\n\"I fear that we have.\"\n\n\"Surely you do yourself an injustice. One more coruscation, my dear Watson\u2014yet another brain-wave! Had the volume been an unusual one, he would have sent it to me. Instead of that, he had intended, before his plans were nipped, to send me the clue in this envelope. He says so in his note. This would seem to indicate that the book is one which he thought I would have no difficulty in finding for myself. He had it\u2014and he imagined that I would have it, too. In short, Watson, it is a very common book.\"\n\n\"What you say certainly sounds plausible.\"\n\n\"So we have contracted our field of search to a large book, printed in double columns and in common use.\"\n\n\"The Bible!\" I cried triumphantly.\n\n\"Good, Watson, good! But not, if I may say so, quite good enough! Even if I accepted the compliment for myself, I could hardly name any volume which would be less likely to lie at the elbow of one of Moriarty's associates. Besides, the editions of Holy Writ are so numerous that he could hardly suppose that two copies would have the same pagination. This is clearly a book which is standardized. He knows for certain that his page 534 will exactly agree with my page 534.\"\n\n\"But very few books would correspond with that.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Therein lies our salvation. Our search is narrowed down to standardized books which anyone may be supposed to possess.\"\n\n\"Bradshaw!\"\n\n\"There are difficulties, Watson. The vocabulary of Bradshaw is nervous and terse, but limited. The selection of words would hardly lend itself to the sending of general messages. We will eliminate Bradshaw. The dictionary is, I fear, inadmissible for the same reason. What then is left?\"\n\n\"An almanac!\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! I am very much mistaken if you have not touched the spot. An almanac! Let us consider the claims of Whitaker's Almanac. It is in common use. It has the requisite number of pages. It is in double column. Though reserved in its earlier vocabulary, it becomes, if I remember right, quite garrulous towards the end.\" He picked the volume from his desk. \"Here is page 534, column two, a substantial block of print dealing, I perceive, with the trade and resources of British India. Jot down the words, Watson! Number thirteen is 'Mahratta.' Not, I fear, a very auspicious beginning. Number one hundred and twenty-seven is 'Government'; which at least makes sense, though somewhat irrelevant to ourselves and Professor Moriarty. Now let us try again. What does the Mahratta government do? Alas! the next word is 'pig's-bristles.' We are undone, my good Watson! It is finished!\"\n\nHe had spoken in jesting vein, but the twitching of his bushy eyebrows bespoke his disappointment and irritation. I sat helpless and unhappy, staring into the fire. A long silence was broken by a sudden exclamation from Holmes, who dashed at a cupboard, from which he emerged with a second yellow-covered volume in his hand.\n\n\"We pay the price, Watson, for being too up-to-date!\" he cried. \"We are before our time, and suffer the usual penalties. Being the seventh of January, we have very properly laid in the new almanac. It is more than likely that Porlock took his message from the old one. No doubt he would have told us so had his letter of explanation been written. Now let us see what page 534 has in store for us. Number thirteen is 'There,' which is much more promising. Number one hundred and twenty-seven is 'is'\u2014'There is' \"\u2014Holmes's eyes were gleaming with excitement, and his thin, nervous fingers twitched as he counted the words\u2014\" 'danger.' Ha! Ha! Capital! Put that down, Watson. 'There is danger\u2014may\u2014come\u2014very\u2014soon\u2014one.' Then we have the name 'Douglas'\u2014'rich\u2014country\u2014now\u2014at\u2014Birlstone\u2014confidence\u2014is\u2014pressing.' There, Watson! What do you think of pure reason and its fruit? If the green-grocer had such a thing as a laurel wreath, I should send Billy round for it.\"\n\nI was staring at the strange message which I had scrawled, as he deciphered it, upon a sheet of foolscap on my knee.\n\n\"What a queer, scrambling way of expressing his meaning!\" said I.\n\n\"On the contrary, he has done quite remarkably well,\" said Holmes. \"When you search a single column for words with which to express your meaning, you can hardly expect to get everything you want. You are bound to leave something to the intelligence of your correspondent. The purport is perfectly clear. Some deviltry is intended against one Douglas, whoever he may be, residing as stated, a rich country gentleman. He is sure\u2014'confidence' was as near as he could get to 'confident' that it is pressing. There is our result\u2014and a very workmanlike little bit of analysis it was!\"\n\nHolmes had the impersonal joy of the true artist in his better work, even as he mourned darkly when it fell below the high level to which he aspired. He was still chuckling over his success when Billy swung open the door and Inspector MacDonald of Scotland Yard was ushered into the room.\n\nThose were the early days at the end of the '80's, when Alec MacDonald was far from having attained the national fame which he has now achieved. He was a young but trusted member of the detective force, who had distinguished himself in several cases which had been intrusted to him. His tall, bony figure gave promise of exceptional physical strength, while his great cranium and deep-set, lustrous eyes spoke no less clearly of the keen intelligence which twinkled out from behind his bushy eyebrows. He was a silent, precise man with a dour nature and a hard Aberdonian accent.\n\nTwice already in his career had Holmes helped him to attain success, his own sole reward being the intellectual joy of the problem. For this reason the affection and respect of the Scotchman for his amateur colleague were profound, and he showed them by the frankness with which he consulted Holmes in every difficulty. Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius, and MacDonald had talent enough for his profession to enable him to perceive that there was no humiliation in seeking the assistance of one who already stood alone in Europe, both in his gifts and in his experience. Holmes was not prone to friendship, but he was tolerant of the big Scotchman, and smiled at the sight of him.\n\n\"You are an early bird, Mr. Mac,\" said he. \"I wish you luck with your worm. I fear this means that there is some mischief afoot.\"\n\n\"If you said 'hope' instead of 'fear,' it would be nearer the truth, I'm thinking, Mr. Holmes,\" the inspector answered, with a knowing grin. \"Well, maybe a wee nip would keep out the raw morning chill. No, I won't smoke, I thank you. I'll have to be pushing on my way; for the early hours of a case are the precious ones, as no man knows better than your own self. But\u2014but\u2014\"\n\nThe inspector had stopped suddenly, and was staring with a look of absolute amazement at a paper upon the table. It was the sheet upon which I had scrawled the enigmatic message.\n\n\"Douglas!\" he stammered. \"Birlstone! What's this, Mr. Holmes? Man, it's witchcraft! Where in the name of all that is wonderful did you get those names?\"\n\n\"It is a cipher that Dr. Watson and I have had occasion to solve. But why\u2014what's amiss with the names?\"\n\nThe inspector looked from one to the other of us in dazed astonishment. \"Just this,\" said he, \"that Mr. Douglas of Birlstone Manor House was horribly murdered last night!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Sherlock Holmes Discourses", + "text": "It was one of those dramatic moments for which my friend existed. It would be an overstatement to say that he was shocked or even excited by the amazing announcement. Without having a tinge of cruelty in his singular composition, he was undoubtedly callous from long overstimulation. Yet, if his emotions were dulled, his intellectual perceptions were exceedingly active. There was no trace then of the honour which I had myself felt at this curt declaration; but his face showed rather the quiet and interested composure of the chemist who sees the crystals falling into position from his oversaturated solution.\n\n\"Remarkable!\" said he. \"Remarkable!\"\n\n\"You don't seem surprised.\"\n\n\"Interested, Mr. Mac, but hardly surprised. Why should I be surprised? I receive an anonymous communication from a quarter which I know to be important, warning me that danger threatens a certain person. Within an hour I learn that this danger has actually materialized and that the person is dead. I am interested; but, as you observe, I am not surprised.\"\n\nIn a few short sentences he explained to the inspector the facts about the letter and the cipher. MacDonald sat with his chin on his hands and his great sandy eyebrows bunched into a yellow tangle.\n\n\"I was going down to Birlstone this morning,\" said he. \"I had come to ask you if you cared to come with me\u2014you and your friend here. But from what you say we might perhaps be doing better work in London.\"\n\n\"I rather think not,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Hang it all, Mr. Holmes!\" cried the inspector. \"The papers will be full of the Birlstone mystery in a day or two; but where's the mystery if there is a man in London who prophesied the crime before ever it occurred? We have only to lay our hands on that man, and the rest will follow.\"\n\n\"No doubt, Mr. Mac. But how do you propose to lay your hands on the so-called Porlock?\"\n\nMacDonald turned over the letter which Holmes had handed him. \"Posted in Camberwell\u2014that doesn't help us much. Name, you say, is assumed. Not much to go on, certainly. Didn't you say that you have sent him money?\"\n\n\"Twice.\"\n\n\"And how?\"\n\n\"In notes to Camberwell postoffice.\"\n\n\"Did you ever trouble to see who called for them?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nThe inspector looked surprised, and a little shocked. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I always keep faith. I had promised when he first wrote that I would not try to trace him.\"\n\n\"You think there is someone behind him?\"\n\n\"I know there is.\"\n\n\"This professor that I've heard you mention?\"\n\n\"Exactly!\"\n\nInspector MacDonald smiled, and his eyelid quivered as he glanced towards me. \"I won't conceal from you, Mr. Holmes, that we think in the C. I. D. that you have a wee bit of a bee in your bonnet over this professor. I made some inquiries myself about the matter. He seems to be a very respectable, learned, and talented sort of man.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you've got so far as to recognize the talent.\"\n\n\"Man, you can't but recognize it! After I heard your view I made it my business to see him. I had a chat with him on eclipses. How the talk got that way I canna think; but he had out a reflector lantern and a globe, and made it all clear in a minute. He lent me a book; but I don't mind saying that it was a bit above my head, though I had a good Aberdeen upbringing. He'd have made a grand meenister with his thin face and gray hair and solemn-like way of talking. When he put his hand on my shoulder as we were parting, it was like a father's blessing before you go out into the cold, cruel world.\"\n\nHolmes chuckled and rubbed his hands. \"Great!\" he said. \"Great! Tell me, Friend MacDonald, this pleasing and touching interview was, I suppose, in the professor's study?\"\n\n\"That's so.\"\n\n\"A fine room, is it not?\"\n\n\"Very fine\u2014very handsome indeed, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"You sat in front of his writing desk?\"\n\n\"Just so.\"\n\n\"Sun in your eyes and his face in the shadow?\"\n\n\"Well, it was evening; but I mind that the lamp was turned on my face.\"\n\n\"It would be. Did you happen to observe a picture over the professor's head?\"\n\n\"I don't miss much, Mr. Holmes. Maybe I learned that from you. Yes, I saw the picture\u2014a young woman with her head on her hands, peeping at you sideways.\"\n\n\"That painting was by Jean Baptiste Greuze.\"\n\nThe inspector endeavoured to look interested.\n\n\"Jean Baptiste Greuze,\" Holmes continued, joining his finger tips and leaning well back in his chair, \"was a French artist who flourished be tween the years 1750 and 1800. I allude, of course, to his working career. Modern criticism has more than indorsed the high opinion formed of him by his contemporaries.\"\n\nThe inspector's eyes grew abstracted. \"Hadn't we better\u2014\" he said.\n\n\"We are doing so,\" Holmes interrupted. \"All that I am saying has a very direct and vital bearing upon what you have called the Birlstone Mystery. In fact, it may in a sense be called the very centre of it.\"\n\nMacDonald smiled feebly, and looked appealingly to me. \"Your thoughts move a bit too quick for me, Mr. Holmes. You leave out a link or two, and I can't get over the gap. What in the whole wide world can be the connection between this dead painting man and the affair at Birlstone?\"\n\n\"All knowledge comes useful to the detective,\" remarked Holmes. \"Even the trivial fact that in the year 1865 a picture by Greuze entitled La Jeune Fille \u00e0 l'Agneau fetched one million two hundred thousand francs\u2014more than forty thousand pounds\u2014at the Portalis sale may start a train of reflection in your mind.\"\n\nIt was clear that it did. The inspector looked honestly interested.\n\n\"I may remind you,\" Holmes continued, \"that the professor's salary can be ascertained in several trustworthy books of reference. It is seven hundred a year.\"\n\n\"Then how could he buy\u2014\"\n\n\"Quite so! How could he?\"\n\n\"Ay, that's remarkable,\" said the inspector thoughtfully. \"Talk away, Mr. Holmes. I'm just loving it. It's fine!\"\n\nHolmes smiled. He was always warmed by genuine admiration\u2014the characteristic of the real artist. \"What about Birlstone?\" he asked.\n\n\"We've time yet,\" said the inspector, glancing at his watch. \"I've a cab at the door, and it won't take us twenty minutes to Victoria. But about this picture: I thought you told me once, Mr. Holmes, that you had never met Professor Moriarty.\"\n\n\"No, I never have.\"\n\n\"Then how do you know about his rooms?\"\n\n\"Ah, that's another matter. I have been three times in his rooms, twice waiting for him under different pretexts and leaving before he came. Once\u2014well, I can hardly tell about the once to an official detective. It was on the last occasion that I took the liberty of running over his papers\u2014with the most unexpected results.\"\n\n\"You found something compromising?\"\n\n\"Absolutely nothing. That was what amazed me. However, you have now seen the point of the picture. It shows him to be a very wealthy man. How did he acquire wealth? He is unmarried. His younger brother is a station master in the west of England. His chair is worth seven hundred a year. And he owns a Greuze.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Surely the inference is plain.\"\n\n\"You mean that he has a great income and that he must earn it in an illegal fashion?\"\n\n\"Exactly. Of course I have other reasons for thinking so\u2014dozens of exiguous threads which lead vaguely up towards the centre of the web where the poisonous, motionless creature is lurking. I only mention the Greuze because it brings the matter within the range of your own observation.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, I admit that what you say is interesting: it's more than interesting\u2014it's just wonderful. But let us have it a little clearer if you can. Is it forgery, coining, burglary\u2014where does the money come from?\"\n\n\"Have you ever read of Jonathan Wild?\"\n\n\"Well, the name has a familiar sound. Someone in a novel, was he not? I don't take much stock of detectives in novels\u2014chaps that do things and never let you see how they do them. That's just inspiration: not business.\"\n\n\"Jonathan Wild wasn't a detective, and he wasn't in a novel. He was a master criminal, and he lived last century\u20141750 or thereabouts.\"\n\n\"Then he's no use to me. I'm a practical man.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mac, the most practical thing that you ever did in your life would be to shut yourself up for three months and read twelve hours a day at the annals of crime. Everything comes in circles\u2014even Professor Moriarty. Jonathan Wild was the hidden force of the London criminals, to whom he sold his brains and his organization on a fifteen per cent commission. The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before, and will be again. I'll tell you one or two things about Moriarty which may interest you.\"\n\n\"You'll interest me, right enough.\"\n\n\"I happen to know who is the first link in his chain\u2014a chain with this Napoleon-gone-wrong at one end, and a hundred broken fighting men, pickpockets, blackmailers, and card sharpers at the other, with every sort of crime in between. His chief of staff is Colonel Sebastian Moran, as aloof and guarded and inaccessible to the law as himself. What do you think he pays him?\"\n\n\"I'd like to hear.\"\n\n\"Six thousand a year. That's paying for brains, you see\u2014the American business principle. I learned that detail quite by chance. It's more than the Prime Minister gets. That gives you an idea of Moriarty's gains and of the scale on which he works. Another point: I made it my business to hunt down some of Moriarty's checks lately\u2014just common innocent checks that he pays his household bills with. They were drawn on six different banks. Does that make any impression on your mind?\"\n\n\"Queer, certainly! But what do you gather from it?\"\n\n\"That he wanted no gossip about his wealth. No single man should know what he had. I have no doubt that he has twenty banking accounts; the bulk of his fortune abroad in the Deutsche Bank or the Credit Lyonnais as likely as not. Sometime when you have a year or two to spare I commend to you the study of Professor Moriarty.\"\n\nInspector MacDonald had grown steadily more impressed as the conversation proceeded. He had lost himself in his interest. Now his practical Scotch intelligence brought him back with a snap to the matter in hand.\n\n\"He can keep, anyhow,\" said he. \"You've got us side-tracked with your interesting anecdotes, Mr. Holmes. What really counts is your remark that there is some connection between the professor and the crime. That you get from the warning received through the man Porlock. Can we for our present practical needs get any further than that?\"\n\n\"We may form some conception as to the motives of the crime. It is, as I gather from your original remarks, an inexplicable, or at least an unexplained, murder. Now, presuming that the source of the crime is as we suspect it to be, there might be two different motives. In the first place, I may tell you that Moriarty rules with a rod of iron over his people. His discipline is tremendous. There is only one punishment in his code. It is death. Now we might suppose that this murdered man\u2014this Douglas whose approaching fate was known by one of the arch-criminal's subordinates\u2014had in some way betrayed the chief. His punishment followed, and would be known to all\u2014if only to put the fear of death into them.\"\n\n\"Well, that is one suggestion, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"The other is that it has been engineered by Moriarty in the ordinary course of business. Was there any robbery?\"\n\n\"I have not heard.\"\n\n\"If so, it would, of course, be against the first hypothesis and in favour of the second. Moriarty may have been engaged to engineer it on a promise of part spoils, or he may have been paid so much down to manage it. Either is possible. But whichever it may be, or if it is some third combination, it is down at Birlstone that we must seek the solution. I know our man too well to suppose that he has left anything up here which may lead us to him.\"\n\n\"Then to Birlstone we must go!\" cried MacDonald, jumping from his chair. \"My word! it's later than I thought. I can give you, gentlemen, five minutes for preparation, and that is all.\"\n\n\"And ample for us both,\" said Holmes, as he sprang up and hastened to change from his dressing gown to his coat. \"While we are on our way, Mr. Mac, I will ask you to be good enough to tell me all about it.\"\n\n\"All about it\" proved to be disappointingly little, and yet there was enough to assure us that the case before us might well be worthy of the expert's closest attention. He brightened and rubbed his thin hands together as he listened to the meagre but remarkable details. A long series of sterile weeks lay behind us, and here at last there was a fitting object for those remarkable powers which, like all special gifts, become irksome to their owner when they are not in use. That razor brain blunted and rusted with inaction.\n\nSherlock Holmes's eyes glistened, his pale cheeks took a warmer hue, and his whole eager face shone with an inward light when the call for work reached him. Leaning forward in the cab, he listened intently to MacDonald's short sketch of the problem which awaited us in Sussex. The inspector was himself dependent, as he explained to us, upon a scribbled account forwarded to him by the milk train in the early hours of the morning. White Mason, the local officer, was a personal friend, and hence MacDonald had been notified much more promptly than is usual at Scotland Yard when provincials need their assistance. It is a very cold scent upon which the Metropolitan expert is generally asked to run.\n\nDEAR INSPECTOR MACDONALD [said the letter which he read to us]:\n\nOfficial requisition for your services is in separate envelope. This is for your private eye. Wire me what train in the morning you can get for Birlstone, and I will meet it\u2014or have it met if I am too occupied. This case is a snorter. Don't waste a moment in getting started. If you can bring Mr. Holmes, please do so; for he will find something after his own heart. We would think the whole thing had been fixed up for theatrical effect if there wasn't a dead man in the middle of it. My word! it is a snorter.\n\n\"Your friend seems to be no fool,\" remarked Holmes.\n\n\"No, sir, White Mason is a very live man, if I am any judge.\"\n\n\"Well, have you anything more?\"\n\n\"Only that he will give us every detail when we meet.\"\n\n\"Then how did you get at Mr. Douglas and the fact that he had been horribly murdered?\"\n\n\"That was in the inclosed official report. It didn't say 'horrible': that's not a recognized official term. It gave the name John Douglas. It mentioned that his injuries had been in the head, from the discharge of a shotgun. It also mentioned the hour of the alarm, which was close on to midnight last night. It added that the case was undoubtedly one of murder, but that no arrest had been made, and that the case was one which presented some very perplexing and extraordinary features. That's absolutely all we have at present, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Then, with your permission, we will leave it at that, Mr. Mac. The temptation to form premature theories upon insufficient data is the bane of our profession. I can see only two things for certain at present\u2014a great brain in London, and a dead man in Sussex. It's the chain between that we are going to trace.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Tragedy of Birlstone", + "text": "Now for a moment I will ask leave to remove my own insignificant personality and to describe events which occurred before we arrived upon the scene by the light of knowledge which came to us afterwards. Only in this way can I make the reader appreciate the people concerned and the strange setting in which their fate was cast.\n\nThe village of Birlstone is a small and very ancient cluster of half-timbered cottages on the northern border of the county of Sussex. For centuries it had remained unchanged; but within the last few years its picturesque appearance and situation have attracted a number of well-to-do residents, whose villas peep out from the woods around. These woods are locally supposed to be the extreme fringe of the great Weald forest, which thins away until it reaches the northern chalk downs. A number of small shops have come into being to meet the wants of the increased population; so there seems some prospect that Birlstone may soon grow from an ancient village into a modern town. It is the centre for a considerable area of country, since Tunbridge Wells, the nearest place of importance, is ten or twelve miles to the eastward, over the borders of Kent.\n\nAbout half a mile from the town, standing in an old park famous for its huge beech trees, is the ancient Manor House of Birlstone. Part of this venerable building dates back to the time of the first crusade, when Hugo de Capus built a fortalice in the centre of the estate, which had been granted to him by the Red King. This was destroyed by fire in 1543, and some of its smoke-blackened corner stones were used when, in Jacobean times, a brick country house rose upon the ruins of the feudal castle.\n\nThe Manor House, with its many gables and its small diamond-paned windows, was still much as the builder had left it in the early seventeenth century. Of the double moats which had guarded its more warlike predecessor, the outer had been allowed to dry up, and served the humble function of a kitchen garden. The inner one was still there, and lay forty feet in breadth, though now only a few feet in depth, round the whole house. A small stream fed it and continued beyond it, so that the sheet of water, though turbid, was never ditchlike or unhealthy. The ground floor windows were within a foot of the surface of the water.\n\nThe only approach to the house was over a drawbridge, the chains and windlass of which had long been rusted and broken. The latest tenants of the Manor House had, however, with characteristic energy, set this right, and the drawbridge was not only capable of being raised, but actually was raised every evening and lowered every morning. By thus renewing the custom of the old feudal days the Manor House was converted into an island during the night\u2014a fact which had a very direct bearing upon the mystery which was soon to engage the attention of all England.\n\nThe house had been untenanted for some years and was threatening to moulder into a picturesque decay when the Douglases took possession of it. This family consisted of only two individuals: John Douglas and his wife. Douglas was a remarkable man, both in character and in person. In age he may have been about fifty, with a strong-jawed, rugged face, a grizzling moustache, peculiarly keen gray eyes, and a wiry, vigorous figure which had lost nothing of the strength and activity of youth. He was cheery and genial to all, but somewhat offhand in his manners, giving the impression that he had seen life in social strata on some far lower horizon than the county society of Sussex.\n\nYet, though looked at with some curiosity and reserve by his more cultivated neighbours, he soon acquired a great popularity among the villagers, subscribing handsomely to all local objects, and attending their smoking concerts and other functions, where, having a remarkably rich tenor voice, he was always ready to oblige with an excellent song. He appeared to have plenty of money, which was said to have been gained in the California gold fields, and it was clear from his own talk and that of his wife that he had spent a part of his life in America.\n\nThe good impression which had been produced by his generosity and by his democratic manners was increased by a reputation gained for utter indifference to danger. Though a wretched rider, he turned out at every meet, and took the most amazing falls in his determination to hold his own with the best. When the vicarage caught fire he distinguished himself also by the fearlessness with which he reentered the building to save property, after the local fire brigade had given it up as impossible. Thus it came about that John Douglas of the Manor House had within five years won himself quite a reputation in Birlstone.\n\nHis wife, too, was popular with those who had made her acquaintance; though, after the English fashion, the callers upon a stranger who settled in the county without introductions were few and far between. This mattered the less to her, as she was retiring by disposition, and very much absorbed, to all appearance, in her husband and her domestic duties. It was known that she was an English lady who had met Mr. Douglas in London, he being at that time a widower. She was a beautiful woman, tall, dark, and slender, some twenty years younger than her husband; a disparity which seemed in no wise to mar the contentment of their family life.\n\nIt was remarked sometimes, however, by those who knew them best, that the confidence between the two did not appear to be complete, since the wife was either very reticent about her husband's past life, or else, as seemed more likely, was imperfectly informed about it. It had also been noted and commented upon by a few observant people that there were signs sometimes of some nerve-strain upon the part of Mrs. Douglas, and that she would display acute uneasiness if her absent husband should ever be particularly late in his return. On a quiet countryside, where all gossip is welcome, this weakness of the lady of the Manor House did not pass without remark, and it bulked larger upon people's memory when the events arose which gave it a very special significance.\n\nThere was yet another individual whose residence under that roof was, it is true, only an intermittent one, but whose presence at the time of the strange happenings which will now be narrated brought his name prominently before the public. This was Cecil James Barker, of Hales Lodge, Hampstead.\n\nCecil Barker's tall, loose-jointed figure was a familiar one in the main street of Birlstone village; for he was a frequent and welcome visitor at the Manor House. He was the more noticed as being the only friend of the past unknown life of Mr. Douglas who was ever seen in his new English surroundings. Barker was himself an undoubted Englishman; but by his remarks it was clear that he had first known Douglas in America and had there lived on intimate terms with him. He appeared to be a man of considerable wealth, and was reputed to be a bachelor.\n\nIn age he was rather younger than Douglas\u2014forty-five at the most\u2014a tall, straight, broad-chested fellow with a clean-shaved, prize-fighter face, thick, strong, black eyebrows, and a pair of masterful black eyes which might, even without the aid of his very capable hands, clear a way for him through a hostile crowd. He neither rode nor shot, but spent his days in wandering round the old village with his pipe in his mouth, or in driving with his host, or in his absence with his hostess, over the beautiful countryside. \"An easy-going, free-handed gentleman,\" said Ames, the butler. \"But, my word! I had rather not be the man that crossed him!\" He was cordial and intimate with Douglas, and he was no less friendly with his wife\u2014a friendship which more than once seemed to cause some irritation to the husband, so that even the servants were able to perceive his annoyance. Such was the third person who was one of the family when the catastrophe occurred.\n\nAs to the other denizens of the old building, it will suffice out of a large household to mention the prim, respectable, and capable Ames, and Mrs. Allen, a buxom and cheerful person, who relieved the lady of some of her household cares. The other six servants in the house bear no relation to the events of the night of January 6th.\n\nIt was at eleven forty-five that the first alarm reached the small local police station, in charge of Sergeant Wilson of the Sussex Constabulary. Cecil Barker, much excited, had rushed up to the door and pealed furiously upon the bell. A terrible tragedy had occurred at the Manor House, and John Douglas had been murdered. That was the breathless burden of his message. He had hurried back to the house, followed within a few minutes by the police sergeant, who arrived at the scene of the crime a little after twelve o'clock, after taking prompt steps to warn the county authorities that something serious was afoot.\n\nOn reaching the Manor House, the sergeant had found the drawbridge down, the windows lighted up, and the whole household in a state of wild confusion and alarm. The white-faced servants were huddling together in the hall, with the frightened butler wringing his hands in the doorway. Only Cecil Barker seemed to be master of himself and his emotions; he had opened the door which was nearest to the entrance and he had beckoned to the sergeant to follow him. At that moment there arrived Dr. Wood, a brisk and capable general practitioner from the village. The three men entered the fatal room together, while the horror-stricken butler followed at their heels, closing the door behind him to shut out the terrible scene from the maid servants.\n\nThe dead man lay on his back, sprawling with outstretched limbs in the centre of the room. He was clad only in a pink dressing gown, which covered his night clothes. There were carpet slippers on his bare feet. The doctor knelt beside him and held down the hand lamp which had stood on the table. One glance at the victim was enough to show the healer that his presence could be dispensed with. The man had been horribly injured. Lying across his chest was a curious weapon, a shotgun with the barrel sawed off a foot in front of the triggers. It was clear that this had been fired at close range and that he had received the whole charge in the face, blowing his head almost to pieces. The triggers had been wired together, so as to make the simultaneous discharge more destructive.\n\nThe country policeman was unnerved and troubled by the tremendous responsibility which had come so suddenly upon him. \"We will touch nothing until my superiors arrive,\" he said in a hushed voice, staring in horror at the dreadful head.\n\n\"Nothing has been touched up to now,\" said Cecil Barker. \"I'll answer for that. You see it all exactly as I found it.\"\n\n\"When was that?\" The sergeant had drawn out his notebook.\n\n\"It was just half-past eleven. I had not begun to undress, and I was sitting by the fire in my bedroom when I heard the report. It was not very loud\u2014it seemed to be muffled. I rushed down\u2014I don't suppose it was thirty seconds before I was in the room.\"\n\n\"Was the door open?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was open. Poor Douglas was lying as you see him. His bedroom candle was burning on the table. It was I who lit the lamp some minutes afterward.\"\n\n\"Did you see no one?\"\n\n\"No. I heard Mrs. Douglas coming down the stair behind me, and I rushed out to prevent her from seeing this dreadful sight. Mrs. Allen, the housekeeper, came and took her away. Ames had arrived, and we ran back into the room once more.\"\n\n\"But surely I have heard that the drawbridge is kept up all night.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was up until I lowered it.\"\n\n\"Then how could any murderer have got away? It is out of the question! Mr. Douglas must have shot himself.\"\n\n\"That was our first idea. But see!\" Barker drew aside the curtain, and showed that the long, diamond-paned window was open to its full extent. \"And look at this!\" He held the lamp down and illuminated a smudge of blood like the mark of a boot-sole upon the wooden sill. \"Someone has stood there in getting out.\"\n\n\"You mean that someone waded across the moat?\"\n\n\"Exactly!\"\n\n\"Then if you were in the room within half a minute of the crime, he must have been in the water at that very moment.\"\n\n\"I have not a doubt of it. I wish to heaven that I had rushed to the window! But the curtain screened it, as you can see, and so it never occurred to me. Then I heard the step of Mrs. Douglas, and I could not let her enter the room. It would have been too horrible.\"\n\n\"Horrible enough!\" said the doctor, looking at the shattered head and the terrible marks which surrounded it. \"I've never seen such injuries since the Birlstone railway smash.\"\n\n\"But, I say,\" remarked the police sergeant, whose slow, bucolic common sense was still pondering the open window. \"It's all very well your saying that a man escaped by wading this moat, but what I ask you is, how did he ever get into the house at all if the bridge was up?\"\n\n\"Ah, that's the question,\" said Barker.\n\n\"At what o'clock was it raised?\"\n\n\"It was nearly six o'clock,\" said Ames, the butler.\n\n\"I've heard,\" said the sergeant, \"that it was usually raised at sunset. That would be nearer half-past four than six at this time of year.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Douglas had visitors to tea,\" said Ames. \"I couldn't raise it until they went. Then I wound it up myself.\"\n\n\"Then it comes to this,\" said the sergeant: \"If anyone came from outside\u2014if they did\u2014they must have got in across the bridge before six and been in hiding ever since, until Mr. Douglas came into the room after eleven.\"\n\n\"That is so! Mr. Douglas went round the house every night the last thing before he turned in to see that the lights were right. That brought him in here. The man was waiting and shot him. Then he got away through the window and left his gun behind him. That's how I read it; for nothing else will fit the facts.\"\n\nThe sergeant picked up a card which lay beside the dead man on the floor. The initials V. V. and under them the number 341 were rudely scrawled in ink upon it.\n\n\"What's this?\" he asked, holding it up.\n\nBarker looked at it with curiosity. \"I never noticed it before,\" he said. \"The murderer must have left it behind him.\"\n\n\"V V.\u2014341. I can make no sense of that.\"\n\nThe sergeant kept turning it over in his big fingers. \"What's V V? Somebody's initials, maybe. What have you got there, Dr. Wood?\"\n\nIt was a good-sized hammer which had been lying on the rug in front of the fireplace\u2014a substantial, workmanlike hammer. Cecil Barker pointed to a box of brass-headed nails upon the mantelpiece.\n\n\"Mr. Douglas was altering the pictures yesterday,\" he said. \"I saw him myself, standing upon that chair and fixing the big picture above it. That accounts for the hammer.\"\n\n\"We'd best put it back on the rug where we found it,\" said the sergeant, scratching his puzzled head in his perplexity. \"It will want the best brains in the force to get to the bottom of this thing. It will be a London job before it is finished.\" He raised the hand lamp and walked slowly round the room. \"Hullo!\" he cried, excitedly, drawing the window curtain to one side. \"What o'clock were those curtains drawn?\"\n\n\"When the lamps were lit,\" said the butler. \"It would be shortly after four.\"\n\n\"Someone had been hiding here, sure enough.\" He held down the light, and the marks of muddy boots were very visible in the corner. \"I'm bound to say this bears out your theory, Mr. Barker. It looks as if the man got into the house after four when the curtains were drawn, and before six when the bridge was raised. He slipped into this room, because it was the first that he saw. There was no other place where he could hide, so he popped in behind this curtain. That all seems clear enough. It is likely that his main idea was to burgle the house; but Mr. Douglas chanced to come upon him, so he murdered him and escaped.\"\n\n\"That's how I read it,\" said Barker. \"But, I say, aren't we wasting precious time? Couldn't we start out and scour the country before the fellow gets away?\"\n\nThe sergeant considered for a moment.\n\n\"There are no trains before six in the morning; so he can't get away by rail. If he goes by road with his legs all dripping, it's odds that someone will notice him. Anyhow, I can't leave here myself until I am relieved. But I think none of you should go until we see more clearly, how we all stand.\"\n\nThe doctor had taken the lamp and was narrowly scrutinizing the body. \"What's this mark?\" he asked. \"Could this have any connection with the crime?\"\n\nThe dead man's right arm was thrust out from his dressing gown, and exposed as high as the elbow. About halfway up the forearm was a curious brown design, a triangle inside a circle, standing out in vivid relief upon the lard-coloured skin.\n\n\"It's not tattooed,\" said the doctor, peering through his glasses. I never saw anything like it. The man has been branded at some time as they brand cattle. What is the meaning of this?\"\n\n\"I don't profess to know the meaning of it,\" said Cecil Barker; \"but I have seen the mark on Douglas many times this last ten years.\"\n\n\"And so have I,\" said the butler. \"Many a time when the master has rolled up his sleeves I have noticed that very mark. I've often wondered what it could be.\"\n\n\"Then it has nothing to do with the crime, anyhow,\" said the sergeant. \"But it's a rum thing all the same. Everything about this case is rum. Well, what is it now?\"\n\nThe butler had given an exclamation of astonishment and was pointing at the dead man's outstretched hand.\n\n\"They've taken his wedding ring!\" he gasped.\n\n\"What!\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed. Master always wore his plain gold wedding ring on the little finger of his left hand. That ring with the rough nugget on it was above it, and the twisted snake ring on the third finger. There's the nugget and there's the snake, but the wedding ring is gone.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" said Barker.\n\n\"Do you tell me,\" said the sergeant, \"that the wedding ring was below the other?\"\n\n\"Always!\"\n\n\"Then the murderer or whoever it was, first took off this ring you call the nugget ring, then the wedding ring, and afterwards put the nugget ring back again.\"\n\n\"That is so!\"\n\nThe worthy country policeman shook his head. \"Seems to me the sooner we get London on to this case the better,\" said he. \"White Mason is a smart man. No local job has ever been too much for White Mason. It won't be long now before he is here to help us. But I expect we'll have to look to London before we are through. Anyhow, I'm not ashamed to say that it is a deal too thick for the likes of me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Darkness", + "text": "At three in the morning the chief Sussex detective, obeying the urgent call from Sergeant Wilson of Birlstone, arrived from headquarters in a light dog-cart behind a breathless trotter. By the five-forty train in the morning he had sent his message to Scotland Yard, and he was at the Birlstone station at twelve o'clock to welcome us. White Mason was a quiet, comfortable-looking person in a loose tweed suit, with a clean-shaved, ruddy face, a stoutish body, and powerful bandy legs adorned with gaiters, looking like a small farmer, a retired gamekeeper, or anything upon earth except a very favourable specimen of the provincial criminal officer.\n\n\"A real downright snorter, Mr. MacDonald!\" he kept repeating. \"We'll have the pressmen down like flies when they understand it. I'm hoping we will get our work done before they get poking their noses into it and messing up all the trails. There has been nothing like this that I can remember. There are some bits that will come home to you, Mr. Holmes, or I am mistaken. And you also, Dr. Watson; for the medicos will have a word to say before we finish. Your room is at the Westville Arms. There's no other place; but I hear that it is clean and good. The man will carry your bags. This way, gentlemen, if you please.\"\n\nHe was a very bustling and genial person, this Sussex detective. In ten minutes we had all found our quarters. In ten more we were seated in the parlour of the inn and being treated to a rapid sketch of those events which have been outlined in the previous chapter. MacDonald made an occasional note; while Holmes sat absorbed, with the expression of surprised and reverent admiration with which the botanist surveys the rare and precious bloom.\n\n\"Remarkable!\" he said, when the story was unfolded, \"most remarkable! I can hardly recall any case where the features have been more peculiar.\"\n\n\"I thought you would say so, Mr. Holmes,\" said White Mason in great delight. \"We're well up with the times in Sussex. I've told you now how matters were, up to the time when I took over from Sergeant Wilson between three and four this morning. My word! I made the old mare go! But I need not have been in such a hurry, as it turned out; for there was nothing immediate that I could do. Sergeant Wilson had all the facts. I checked them and considered them and maybe added a few of my own.\"\n\n\"What were they?\" asked Holmes eagerly.\n\n\"Well, I first had the hammer examined. There was Dr. Wood there to help me. We found no signs of violence upon it. I was hoping that if Mr. Douglas defended himself with the hammer, he might have left his mark upon the murderer before he dropped it on the mat. But there was no stain.\"\n\n\"That, of course, proves nothing at all,\" remarked Inspector MacDonald. \"There has been many a hammer murder and no trace on the hammer.\"\n\n\"Quite so. It doesn't prove it wasn't used. But there might have been stains, and that would have helped us. As a matter of fact there were none. Then I examined the gun. They were buckshot cartridges, and, as Sergeant Wilson pointed out, the triggers were wired together so that, if you pulled on the hinder one, both barrels were discharged. Whoever fixed that up had made up his mind that he was going to take no chances of missing his man. The sawed gun was not more than two foot long\u2014one could carry it easily under one's coat. There was no complete maker's name; but the printed letters P-E-N were on the fluting between the barrels, and the rest of the name had been cut off by the saw.\"\n\n\"A big P with a flourish above it, E and N smaller?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Pennsylvania Small Arms Company\u2014well-known American firm,\" said Holmes.\n\nWhite Mason gazed at my friend as the little village practitioner looks at the Harley Street specialist who by a word can solve the difficulties that perplex him.\n\n\"That is very helpful, Mr. Holmes. No doubt you are right. Wonderful! Wonderful! Do you carry the names of all the gun makers in the world in your memory?\"\n\nHolmes dismissed the subject with a wave.\n\n\"No doubt it is an American shotgun,\" White Mason continued. \"I seem to have read that a sawed-off shotgun is a weapon used in some parts of America. Apart from the name upon the barrel, the idea had occurred to me. There is some evidence, then, that this man who entered the house and killed its master was an American.\"\n\nMacDonald shook his head. \"Man, you are surely travelling overfast,\" said he. \"I have heard no evidence yet that any stranger was ever in the house at all.\"\n\n\"The open window, the blood on the sill, the queer card, the marks of boots in the corner, the gun!\"\n\n\"Nothing there that could not have been arranged. Mr. Douglas was an American, or had lived long in America. So had Mr. Barker. You don't need to import an American from outside in order to account for American doings.\"\n\n\"Ames, the butler\u2014\"\n\n\"What about him? Is he reliable?\"\n\n\"Ten years with Sir Charles Chandos\u2014as solid as a rock. He has been with Douglas ever since he took the Manor House five years ago. He has never seen a gun of this sort in the house.\"\n\n\"The gun was made to conceal. That's why the barrels were sawed. It would fit into any box. How could he swear there was no such gun in the house?\"\n\n\"Well, anyhow, he had never seen one.\"\n\nMacDonald shook his obstinate Scotch head. \"I'm not convinced yet that there was ever anyone in the house,\" said he. \"I'm asking you to conseedar\" (his accent became more Aberdonian as he lost himself in his argument) \"I'm asking you to conseedar what it involves if you suppose that this gun was ever brought into the house, and that all these strange things were done by a person from outside. Oh, man, it's just inconceivable! It's clean against common sense! I put it to you, Mr. Holmes, judging it by what we have heard.\"\n\n\"Well, state your case, Mr. Mac,\" said Holmes in his most judicial style.\n\n\"The man is not a burglar, supposing that he ever existed. The ring business and the card point to premeditated murder for some private reason. Very good. Here is a man who slips into a house with the deliberate intention of committing murder. He knows, if he knows anything, that he will have a deeficulty in making his escape, as the house is surrounded with water. What weapon would he choose? You would say the most silent in the world. Then he could hope when the deed was done to slip quickly from the window, to wade the moat, and to get away at his leisure. That's understandable. But is it understandable that he should go out of his way to bring with him the most noisy weapon he could select, knowing well that it will fetch every human being in the house to the spot as quick as they can run, and that it is all odds that he will be seen before he can get across the moat? Is that credible, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Well, you put the case strongly,\" my friend replied thoughtfully. \"It certainly needs a good deal of justification. May I ask, Mr. White Mason, whether you examined the farther side of the moat at once, to see if there were any signs of the man having climbed out from the water?\"\n\n\"There were no signs, Mr. Holmes. But it is a stone ledge, and one could hardly expect them.\"\n\n\"No tracks or marks?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"Ha! Would there be any objection, Mr. White Mason, to our going down to the house at once? There may possibly be some small point which might be suggestive.\"\n\n\"I was going to propose it, Mr. Holmes; but I thought it well to put you in touch with all the facts before we go. I suppose if anything should strike you\u2014\" White Mason looked doubtfully at the amateur.\n\n\"I have worked with Mr. Holmes before,\" said Inspector MacDonald. \"He plays the game.\"\n\n\"My own idea of the game, at any rate,\" said Holmes, with a smile. \"I go into a case to help the ends of justice and the work of the police. If I have ever separated myself from the official force, it is because they have first separated themselves from me. I have no wish ever to score at their expense. At the same time, Mr. White Mason, I claim the right to work in my own way and give my results at my own time\u2014complete rather than in stages.\"\n\n\"I am sure we are honoured by your presence and to show you all we know,\" said White Mason cordially. \"Come along, Dr. Watson, and when the time comes we'll all hope for a place in your book.\"\n\nWe walked down the quaint village street with a row of pollarded elms on each side of it. Just beyond were two ancient stone pillars, weather-stained and lichen-blotched, bearing upon their summits a shapeless something which had once been the rampant lion of Capus of Birlstone. A short walk along the winding drive with such sward and oaks around it as one only sees in rural England, then a sudden turn, and the long, low Jacobean house of dingy, liver-coloured brick lay before us, with an old-fashioned garden of cut yews on each side of it. As we approached it, there was the wooden drawbridge and the beautiful broad moat as still and luminous as quicksilver in the cold, winter sunshine.\n\nThree centuries had flowed past the old Manor House, centuries of births and of homecomings, of country dances and of the meetings of fox hunters. Strange that now in its old age this dark business should have cast its shadow upon the venerable walls! And yet those strange, peaked roofs and quaint, overhung gables were a fitting covering to grim and terrible intrigue. As I looked at the deep-set windows and the long sweep of the dull-coloured, water-lapped front, I felt that no more fitting scene could be set for such a tragedy.\n\n\"That's the window,\" said White Mason, \"that one on the immediate right of the drawbridge. It's open just as it was found last night.\"\n\n\"It looks rather narrow for a man to pass.\"\n\n\"Well, it wasn't a fat man, anyhow. We don't need your deductions, Mr. Holmes, to tell us that. But you or I could squeeze through all right.\"\n\nHolmes walked to the edge of the moat and looked across. Then he examined the stone ledge and the grass border beyond it.\n\n\"I've had a good look, Mr. Holmes,\" said White Mason. \"There is nothing there, no sign that anyone has landed\u2014but why should he leave any sign?\"\n\n\"Exactly. Why should he? Is the water always turbid?\"\n\n\"Generally about this colour. The stream brings down the clay.\"\n\n\"How deep is it?\"\n\n\"About two feet at each side and three in the middle.\"\n\n\"So we can put aside all idea of the man having been drowned in crossing.\"\n\n\"No, a child could not be drowned in it.\"\n\nWe walked across the drawbridge, and were admitted by a quaint, gnarled, dried-up person, who was the butler, Ames. The poor old fellow was white and quivering from the shock. The village sergeant, a tall, for mal, melancholy man, still held his vigil in the room of Fate. The doctor had departed.\n\n\"Anything fresh, Sergeant Wilson?\" asked White Mason.\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Then you can go home. You've had enough. We can send for you if we want you. The butler had better wait outside. Tell him to warn Mr. Cecil Barker, Mrs. Douglas, and the housekeeper that we may want a word with them presently. Now, gentlemen, perhaps you will allow me to give you the views I have formed first, and then you will be able to arrive at your own.\"\n\nHe impressed me, this country specialist. He had a solid grip of fact and a cool, clear, common-sense brain, which should take him some way in his profession. Holmes listened to him intently, with no sign of that impatience which the official exponent too often produced.\n\n\"Is it suicide, or is it murder\u2014that's our first question, gentlemen, is it not? If it were suicide, then we have to believe that this man began by taking off his wedding ring and concealing it; that he then came down here in his dressing gown, trampled mud into a corner behind the curtain in order to give the idea someone had waited for him, opened the window, put blood on the\u2014\"\n\n\"We can surely dismiss that,\" said MacDonald.\n\n\"So I think. Suicide is out of the question. Then a murder has been done. What we have to determine is, whether it was done by someone outside or inside the house.\"\n\n\"Well, let's hear the argument.\"\n\n\"There are considerable difficulties both ways, and yet one or the other it must be. We will suppose first that some person or persons inside the house did the crime. They got this man down here at a time when everything was still and yet no one was asleep. They then did the deed with the queerest and noisiest weapon in the world so as to tell everyone what had happened\u2014a weapon that was never seen in the house before. That does not seem a very likely start, does it?\"\n\n\"No, it does not.\"\n\n\"Well, then, everyone is agreed that after the alarm was given only a minute at the most had passed before the whole household\u2014not Mr. Cecil Barker alone, though he claims to have been the first, but Ames and all of them were on the spot. Do you tell me that in that time the guilty person managed to make footmarks in the corner, open the window, mark the sill with blood, take the wedding ring off the dead man's finger, and all the rest of it? It's impossible!\"\n\n\"You put it very clearly,\" said Holmes. \"I am inclined to agree with you.\"\n\n\"Well, then, we are driven back to the theory that it was done by someone from outside. We are still faced with some big difficulties; but anyhow they have ceased to be impossibilities. The man got into the house between four-thirty and six; that is to say, between dusk and the time when the bridge was raised. There had been some visitors, and the door was open; so there was nothing to prevent him. He may have been a common burglar, or he may have had some private grudge against Mr. Douglas. Since Mr. Douglas has spent most of his life in America, and this shotgun seems to be an American weapon, it would seem that the private grudge is the more likely theory. He slipped into this room because it was the first he came to, and he hid behind the curtain. There he remained until past eleven at night. At that time Mr. Douglas entered the room. It was a short interview, if there were any interview at all; for Mrs. Douglas declares that her husband had not left her more than a few minutes when she heard the shot.\"\n\n\"The candle shows that,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Exactly. The candle, which was a new one, is not burned more than half an inch. He must have placed it on the table before he was attacked; otherwise, of course, it would have fallen when he fell. This shows that he was not attacked the instant that he entered the room. When Mr. Barker arrived the candle was lit and the lamp was out.\"\n\n\"That's all clear enough.\"\n\n\"Well, now, we can reconstruct things on those lines. Mr. Douglas enters the room. He puts down the candle. A man appears from behind the curtain. He is armed with this gun. He demands the wedding ring\u2014Heaven only knows why, but so it must have been. Mr. Douglas gave it up. Then either in cold blood or in the course of a struggle\u2014Douglas may have gripped the hammer that was found upon the mat\u2014he shot Douglas in this horrible way. He dropped his gun and also it would seem this queer card\u2014V V 341, whatever that may mean\u2014and he made his escape through the window and across the moat at the very moment when Cecil Barker was discovering the crime. How's that, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Very interesting, but just a little unconvincing.\"\n\n\"Man, it would be absolute nonsense if it wasn't that anything else is even worse!\" cried MacDonald. \"Somebody killed the man, and whoever it was I could clearly prove to you that he should have done it some other way. What does he mean by allowing his retreat to be cut off like that? What does he mean by using a shotgun when silence was his one chance of escape? Come, Mr. Holmes, it's up to you to give us a lead, since you say Mr. White Mason's theory is unconvincing.\"\n\nHolmes had sat intently observant during this long discussion, missing no word that was said, with his keen eyes darting to right and to left, and his forehead wrinkled with speculation.\n\n\"I should like a few more facts before I get so far as a theory, Mr. Mac,\" said he, kneeling down beside the body. \"Dear me! these injuries are really appalling. Can we have the butler in for a moment?... Ames, I understand that you have often seen this very unusual mark\u2014a branded triangle inside a circle\u2014upon Mr. Douglas's forearm?\"\n\n\"Frequently, sir.\"\n\n\"You never heard any speculation as to what it meant?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"It must have caused great pain when it was inflicted. It is undoubtedly a burn. Now, I observe, Ames, that there is a small piece of plaster at the angle of Mr. Douglas's jaw. Did you observe that in life?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he cut himself in shaving yesterday morning.\"\n\n\"Did you ever know him to cut himself in shaving before?\"\n\n\"Not for a very long time, sir.\"\n\n\"Suggestive!\" said Holmes. \"It may, of course, be a mere coincidence, or it may point to some nervousness which would indicate that he had reason to apprehend danger. Had you noticed anything unusual in his conduct, yesterday, Ames?\"\n\n\"It struck me that he was a little restless and excited, sir.\"\n\n\"Ha! The attack may not have been entirely unexpected. We do seem to make a little progress, do we not? Perhaps you would rather do the questioning. Mr. Mac?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes, it's in better hands than mine.\"\n\n\"Well, then, we will pass to this card\u2014V V 341. It is rough cardboard. Have you any of the sort in the house?\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\"\n\nHolmes walked across to the desk and dabbed a little ink from each bottle on to the blotting paper. \"It was not printed in this room,\" he said; \"this is black ink and the other purplish. It was done by a thick pen, and these are fine. No, it was done elsewhere, I should say. Can you make anything of the inscription, Ames?\"\n\n\"No, sir, nothing.\"\n\n\"What do you think, Mr. Mac?\"\n\n\"It gives me the impression of a secret society of some sort; the same with his badge upon the forearm.\"\n\n\"That's my idea, too,\" said White Mason.\n\n\"Well, we can adopt it as a working hypothesis and then see how far our difficulties disappear. An agent from such a society makes his way into the house, waits for Mr. Douglas, blows his head nearly off with this weapon, and escapes by wading the moat, after leaving a card beside the dead man, which will, when mentioned in the papers, tell other members of the society that vengeance has been done. That all hangs together. But why this gun, of all weapons?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"And why the missing ring?\"\n\n\"Quite so.\"\n\n\"And why no arrest? It's past two now. I take it for granted that since dawn every constable within forty miles has been looking out for a wet stranger?\"\n\n\"That is so, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Well, unless he has a burrow close by or a change of clothes ready, they can hardly miss him. And yet they have missed him up to now!\" Holmes had gone to the window and was examining with his lens the blood mark on the sill. \"It is clearly the tread of a shoe. It is remarkably broad; a splay-foot, one would say. Curious, because, so far as one can trace any footmark in this mud-stained corner, one would say it was a more shapely sole. However, they are certainly very indistinct. What's this under the side table?\"\n\n\"Mr. Douglas's dumb-bells,\" said Ames.\n\n\"Dumb-bell\u2014there's only one. Where's the other?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Mr. Holmes. There may have been only one. I have not noticed them for months.\"\n\n\"One dumb-bell\u2014\" Holmes said seriously; but his remarks were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door.\n\nA tall, sunburned, capable-looking, clean-shaved man looked in at us. I had no difficulty in guessing that it was the Cecil Barker of whom I had heard. His masterful eyes travelled quickly with a questioning glance from face to face.\n\n\"Sorry to interrupt your consultation,\" said he, \"but you should hear the latest news.\"\n\n\"An arrest?\"\n\n\"No such luck. But they've found his bicycle. The fellow left his bicycle behind him. Come and have a look. It is within a hundred yards of the hall door.\"\n\nWe found three or four grooms and idlers standing in the drive inspecting a bicycle which had been drawn out from a clump of evergreens in which it had been concealed. It was a well used Rudge-Whitworth, splashed as from a considerable journey. There was a saddlebag with spanner and oilcan, but no clue as to the owner.\n\n\"It would be a grand help to the police,\" said the inspector, \"if these things were numbered and registered. But we must be thankful for what we've got. If we can't find where he went to, at least we are likely to get where he came from. But what in the name of all that is wonderful made the fellow leave it behind? And how in the world has he got away without it? We don't seem to get a gleam of light in the case, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Don't we?\" my friend answered thoughtfully. \"I wonder!\"" + }, + { + "title": "The People of the Drama", + "text": "Have you seen all you want of the study?\" asked White Mason as we reentered the house.\n\n\"For the time,\" said the inspector, and Holmes nodded.\n\n\"Then perhaps you would now like to hear the evidence of some of the people in the house. We could use the dining-room, Ames. Please come yourself first and tell us what you know.\"\n\nThe butler's account was a simple and a clear one, and he gave a convincing impression of sincerity. He had been engaged five years before, when Douglas first came to Birlstone. He understood that Mr. Douglas was a rich gentleman who had made his money in America. He had been a kind and considerate employer\u2014not quite what Ames was used to, perhaps; but one can't have everything. He never saw any signs of apprehension in Mr. Douglas: on the contrary, he was the most fearless man he had ever known. He ordered the drawbridge to be pulled up every night because it was the ancient custom of the old house, and he liked to keep the old ways up.\n\nMr. Douglas seldom went to London or left the village; but on the day before the crime he had been shopping at Tunbridge Wells. He (Ames) had observed some restlessness and excitement on the part of Mr. Douglas that day; for he had seemed impatient and irritable, which was unusual with him. He had not gone to bed that night; but was in the pantry at the back of the house, putting away the silver, when he heard the bell ring violently. He heard no shot; but it was hardly possible he would, as the pantry and kitchens were at the very back of the house and there were several closed doors and a long passage between. The housekeeper had come out of her room, attracted by the violent ringing of the bell. They had gone to the front of the house together.\n\nAs they reached the bottom of the stair he had seen Mrs. Douglas coming down it. No, she was not hurrying; it did not seem to him that she was particularly agitated. Just as she reached the bottom of the stair Mr. Barker had rushed out of the study. He had stopped Mrs. Douglas and begged her to go back.\n\n\"For God's sake, go back to your room!\" he cried. \"Poor Jack is dead! You can do nothing. For God's sake, go back!\"\n\nAfter some persuasion upon the stairs Mrs. Douglas had gone back. She did not scream. She made no outcry whatever. Mrs. Allen, the housekeeper, had taken her upstairs and stayed with her in the bedroom. Ames and Mr. Barker had then returned to the study, where they had found everything exactly as the police had seen it. The candle was not lit at that time; but the lamp was burning. They had looked out of the window; but the night was very dark and nothing could be seen or heard. They had then rushed out into the hall, where Ames had turned the windlass which lowered the drawbridge. Mr. Barker had then hurried off to get the police.\n\nSuch, in its essentials, was the evidence of the butler.\n\nThe account of Mrs. Allen, the housekeeper, was, so far as it went, a corroboration of that of her fellow servant. The housekeeper's room was rather nearer to the front of the house than the pantry in which Ames had been working. She was preparing to go to bed when the loud ringing of the bell had attracted her attention. She was a little hard of hearing. Perhaps that was why she had not heard the shot; but in any case the study was a long way off. She remembered hearing some sound which she imagined to be the slamming of a door. That was a good deal earlier\u2014half an hour at least before the ringing of the bell. When Mr. Ames ran to the front she went with him. She saw Mr. Barker, very pale and excited, come out of the study. He intercepted Mrs. Douglas, who was coming down the stairs. He entreated her to go back, and she answered him, but what she said could not be heard.\n\n\"Take her up! Stay with her!\" he had said to Mrs. Allen.\n\nShe had therefore taken her to the bedroom, and endeavoured to soothe her. She was greatly excited, trembling all over, but made no other attempt to go downstairs. She just sat in her dressing gown by her bedroom fire, with her head sunk in her hands. Mrs. Allen stayed with her most of the night. As to the other servants, they had all gone to bed, and the alarm did not reach them until just before the police arrived. They slept at the extreme back of the house, and could not possibly have heard anything.\n\nSo far the housekeeper could add nothing on cross-examination save lamentations and expressions of amazement.\n\nCecil Barker succeeded Mrs. Allen as a witness. As to the occurrences of the night before, he had very little to add to what he had already told the police. Personally, he was convinced that the murderer had escaped by the window. The bloodstain was conclusive, in his opinion, on that point. Besides, as the bridge was up. there was no other possible way of escaping. He could not explain what had become of the assassin or why he had not taken his bicycle, if it were indeed his. He could not possibly have been drowned in the moat, which was at no place more than three feet deep.\n\nIn his own mind he had a very definite theory about the murder. Douglas was a reticent man, and there were some chapters in his life of which he never spoke. He had emigrated to America when he was a very young man. He had prospered well, and Barker had first met him in California, where they had become partners in a successful mining claim at a place called Benito Canon. They had done very well; but Douglas had suddenly sold out and started for England. He was a widower at that time. Barker had afterwards realized his money and come to live in London. Thus they had renewed their friendship.\n\nDouglas had given him the impression that some danger was hanging over his head, and he had always looked upon his sudden departure from California, and also his renting a house in so quiet a place in England, as being connected with this peril. He imagined that some secret society, some implacable organization, was on Douglas's track, which would never rest until it killed him. Some remarks of his had given him this idea; though he had never told him what the society was, nor how he had come to offend it. He could only suppose that the legend upon the placard had some reference to this secret society.\n\n\"How long were you with Douglas in California?\" asked Inspector MacDonald.\n\n\"Five years altogether.\"\n\n\"He was a bachelor, you say?\"\n\n\"A widower.\"\n\n\"Have you ever heard where his first wife came from?\"\n\n\"No, I remember his saying that she was of German extraction, and I have seen her portrait. She was a very beautiful woman. She died of typhoid the year before I met him.\"\n\n\"You don't associate his past with any particular part of America?\"\n\n\"I have heard him talk of Chicago. He knew that city well and had worked there. I have heard him talk of the coal and iron districts. He had travelled a good deal in his time.\"\n\n\"Was he a politician? Had this secret society to do with politics?\"\n\n\"No, he cared nothing about politics.\"\n\n\"You have no reason to think it was criminal?\"\n\n\"On the contrary, I never met a straighter man in my life.\"\n\n\"Was there anything curious about his life in California?\"\n\n\"He liked best to stay and to work at our claim in the mountains. He would never go where other men were if he could help it. That's why I first thought that someone was after him. Then when he left so suddenly for Europe I made sure that it was so. I believe that he had a warning of some sort. Within a week of his leaving half a dozen men were inquiring for him.\"\n\n\"What sort of men?\"\n\n\"Well, they were a mighty hard-looking crowd. They came up to the claim and wanted to know where he was. I told them that he was gone to Europe and that I did not know where to find him. They meant him no good\u2014it was easy to see that.\"\n\n\"Were these men Americans\u2014Californians?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know about Californians. They were Americans, all right. But they were not miners. I don't know what they were, and was very glad to see their backs.\"\n\n\"That was six years ago?\"\n\n\"Nearer seven.\"\n\n\"And then you were together five years in California, so that this business dates back not less than eleven years at the least?\"\n\n\"That is so.\"\n\n\"It must be a very serious feud that would be kept up with such earnestness for as long as that. It would be no light thing that would give rise to it.\"\n\n\"I think it shadowed his whole life. It was never quite out of his mind.\"\n\n\"But if a man had a danger hanging over him, and knew what it was, don't you think he would turn to the police for protection?\"\n\n\"Maybe it was some danger that he could not be protected against. There's one thing you should know. He always went about armed. His revolver was never out of his pocket. But, by bad luck, he was in his dressing gown and had left it in the bedroom last night. Once the bridge was up, I guess he thought he was safe.\"\n\n\"I should like these dates a little clearer,\" said MacDonald. \"It is quite six years since Douglas left California. You followed him next year, did you not?\"\n\n\"That is so.\"\n\n\"And he had been married five years. You must have returned about the time of his marriage.\"\n\n\"About a month before. I was his best man.\"\n\n\"Did you know Mrs. Douglas before her marriage?\"\n\n\"No, I did not. I had been away from England for ten years.\"\n\n\"But you have seen a good deal of her since.\"\n\nBarker looked sternly at the detective. \"I have seen a good deal of him since,\" he answered. \"If I have seen her, it is because you cannot visit a man without knowing his wife. If you imagine there is any connection\u2014\"\n\n\"I imagine nothing, Mr. Barker. I am bound to make every inquiry which can bear upon the case. But I mean no offense.\"\n\n\"Some inquiries are offensive,\" Barker answered angrily.\n\n\"It's only the facts that we want. It is in your interest and everyone's interest that they should be cleared up. Did Mr. Douglas entirely approve your friendship with his wife?\"\n\nBarker grew paler, and his great, strong hands were clasped convulsively together. \"You have no right to ask such questions!\" he cried. \"What has this to do with the matter you are investigating?\"\n\n\"I must repeat the question.\"\n\n\"Well, I refuse to answer.\"\n\n\"You can refuse to answer; but you must be aware that your refusal is in itself an answer, for you would not refuse if you had not something to conceal.\"\n\nBarker stood for a moment with his face set grimly and his strong black eyebrows drawn low in intense thought. Then he looked up with a smile. \"Well, I guess you gentlemen are only doing your clear duty after all, and I have no right to stand in the way of it. I'd only ask you not to worry Mrs. Douglas over this matter; for she has enough upon her just now. I may tell you that poor Douglas had just one fault in the world, and that was his jealousy. He was fond of me\u2014no man could be fonder of a friend. And he was devoted to his wife. He loved me to come here, and was forever sending for me. And yet if his wife and I talked together or there seemed any sympathy between us, a kind of wave of jealousy would pass over him, and he would be off the handle and saying the wildest things in a moment. More than once I've sworn off coming for that reason, and then he would write me such penitent, imploring letters that I just had to. But you can take it from me, gentlemen, if it was my last word, that no man ever had a more loving, faithful wife\u2014and I can say also no friend could be more loyal than I!\"\n\nIt was spoken with fervour and feeling, and yet Inspector MacDonald could not dismiss the subject.\n\n\"You are aware,\" said he, \"that the dead man's wedding ring has been taken from his finger?\"\n\n\"So it appears,\" said Barker.\n\n\"What do you mean by 'appears'? You know it as a fact.\"\n\nThe man seemed confused and undecided. \"When I said 'appears' I meant that it was conceivable that he had himself taken off the ring.\"\n\n\"The mere fact that the ring should be absent, whoever may have removed it, would suggest to anyone's mind, would it not, that the marriage and the tragedy were connected?\"\n\nBarker shrugged his broad shoulders. \"I can't profess to say what it means,\" he answered. \"But if you mean to hint that it could reflect in any way upon this lady's honour\"\u2014his eyes blazed for an instant, and then with an evident effort he got a grip upon his own emotions\u2014\"well, you are on the wrong track, that's all.\"\n\n\"I don't know that I've anything else to ask you at present,\" said MacDonald, coldly.\n\n\"There was one small point,\" remarked Sherlock Holmes. \"When you entered the room there was only a candle lighted on the table, was there not?\"\n\n\"Yes, that was so.\"\n\n\"By its light you saw that some terrible incident had occurred?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"You at once rang for help?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And it arrived very speedily?\"\n\n\"Within a minute or so.\"\n\n\"Arid yet when they arrived they found that the candle was out and that the lamp had been lighted. That seems very remarkable.\"\n\nAgain Barker showed some signs of indecision. \"I don't see that it was remarkable, Mr. Holmes,\" he answered after a pause. \"The candle threw a very bad light. My first thought was to get a better one. The lamp was on the table; so I lit it.\"\n\n\"And blew out the candle?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nHolmes asked no further question, and Barker, with a deliberate look from one to the other of us, which had, as it seemed to me, something of defiance in it, turned and left the room.\n\nInspector MacDonald had sent up a note to the effect that he would wait upon Mrs. Douglas in her room; but she had replied that she would meet us in the dining room. She entered now, a tall and beautiful woman of thirty, reserved and self-possessed to a remarkable degree, very different from the tragic and distracted figure I had pictured. It is true that her face was pale and drawn, like that of one who has endured a great shock; but her manner was composed, and the finely moulded hand which she rested upon the edge of the table was as steady as my own. Her sad, appealing eyes travelled from one to the other of us with a curiously inquisitive expression. That questioning gaze transformed itself suddenly into abrupt speech.\n\n\"Have you found anything out yet?\" she asked.\n\nWas it my imagination that there was an undertone of fear rather than of hope in the question?\n\n\"We have taken every possible step, Mrs. Douglas,\" said the inspector. \"You may rest assured that nothing will be neglected.\"\n\n\"Spare no money,\" she said in a dead, even tone. \"It is my desire that every possible effort should be made.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you can tell us something which may throw some light upon the matter.\"\n\n\"I fear not; but all I know is at your service.\"\n\n\"We have heard from Mr. Cecil Barker that you did not actually see-that you were never in the room where the tragedy occurred?\"\n\n\"No, he turned me back upon the stairs. He begged me to return to my room.\"\n\n\"Quite so. You had heard the shot, and you had at once come down.\"\n\n\"I put on my dressing gown and then came down.\"\n\n\"How long was it after hearing the shot that you were stopped on the stair by Mr. Barker?\"\n\n\"It may have been a couple of minutes. It is so hard to reckon time at such a moment. He implored me not to go on. He assured me that I could do nothing. Then Mrs. Allen, the housekeeper, led me upstairs again. It was all like some dreadful dream.\"\n\n\"Can you give us any idea how long your husband had been downstairs before you heard the shot?\"\n\n\"No, I cannot say. He went from his dressing room, and I did not hear him go. He did the round of the house every night, for he was nervous of fire. It is the only thing that I have ever known him nervous of.\"\n\n\"That is just the point which I want to come to, Mrs. Douglas. You have known your husband only in England, have you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, we have been married five years.\"\n\n\"Have you heard him speak of anything which occurred in America and might bring some danger upon him?\"\n\nMrs. Douglas thought earnestly before she answered. \"Yes,\" she said at last, \"I have always felt that there was a danger hanging over him. He refused to discuss it with me. It was not from want of confidence in me\u2014there was the most complete love and confidence between us\u2014but it was out of his desire to keep all alarm away from me. He thought I should brood over it if I knew all, and so he was silent.\"\n\n\"How did you know it, then?\"\n\nMrs. Douglas's face lit with a quick smile. \"Can a husband ever carry about a secret all his life and a woman who loves him have no suspicion of it? I knew it by his refusal to talk about some episodes in his American life. I knew it by certain precautions he took. I knew it by certain words he let fall. I knew it by the way he looked at unexpected strangers. I was perfectly certain that he had some powerful enemies, that he believed they were on his track, and that he was always on his guard against them. I was so sure of it that for years I have been terrified if ever he came home later than was expected.\"\n\n\"Might I ask,\" asked Holmes, \"what the words were which attracted your attention?\"\n\n\"The Valley of Fear,\" the lady answered. \"That was an expression he has used when I questioned him. 'I have been in the Valley of Fear. I am not out of it yet.'\u2014'Are we never to get out of the Valley of Fear?' I have asked him when I have seen him more serious than usual. 'Sometimes I think that we never shall,' he has answered.\"\n\n\"Surely you asked him what he meant by the Valley of Fear?\"\n\n\"I did; but his face would become very grave and he would shake his head. 'It is bad enough that one of us should have been in its shadow,' he said. 'Please God it shall never fall upon you!' It was some real valley in which he had lived and in which something terrible had occurred to him, of that I am certain; but I can tell you no more.\"\n\n\"And he never mentioned any names?\"\n\n\"Yes, he was delirious with fever once when he had his hunting accident three years ago. Then I remember that there was a name that came continually to his lips. He spoke it with anger and a sort of horror. McGinty was the name\u2014Bodymaster McGinty. I asked him when he recovered who Bodymaster McGinty was, and whose body he was master of. 'Never of mine, thank God!' he answered with a laugh, and that was all I could get from him. But there is a connection between Bodymaster McGinty and the Valley of Fear.\"\n\n\"There is one other point,\" said Inspector MacDonald. \"You met Mr. Douglas in a boarding house in London, did you not, and became engaged to him there? Was there any romance, anything secret or mysterious, about the wedding?\"\n\n\"There was romance. There is always romance. There was nothing mysterious.\"\n\n\"He had no rival?\"\n\n\"No, I was quite free.\"\n\n\"You have heard, no doubt, that his wedding ring has been taken. Does that suggest anything to you? Suppose that some enemy of his old life had tracked him down and committed this crime, what possible reason could he have for taking his wedding ring?\"\n\nFor an instant I could have sworn that the faintest shadow of a smile flickered over the woman's lips.\n\n\"I really cannot tell,\" she answered. \"It is certainly a most extraordinary thing.\"\n\n\"Well, we will not detain you any longer, and we are sorry to have put you to this trouble at such a time,\" said the inspector. \"There are some other points, no doubt; but we can refer to you as they arise.\"\n\nShe rose, and I was again conscious of that quick, questioning glance with which she had just surveyed us. \"What impression has my evidence made upon you?\" The question might as well have been spoken. Then, with a bow, she swept from the room.\n\n\"She's a beautiful woman\u2014a very beautiful woman,\" said MacDonald thoughtfully, after the door had closed behind her. \"This man Barker has certainly been down here a good deal. He is a man who might be attractive to a woman. He admits that the dead man was jealous, and maybe he knew best himself what cause he had for jealousy. Then there's that wedding ring. You can't get past that. The man who tears a wedding ring off a dead man's\u2014What do you say to it, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\nMy friend had sat with his head upon his hands, sunk in the deepest thought. Now he rose and rang the bell. \"Ames,\" he said, when the butler entered, \"where is Mr. Cecil Barker now?\"\n\n\"I'll see, sir.\"\n\nHe came back in a moment to say that Barker was in the garden.\n\n\"Can you remember, Ames, what Mr. Barker had on his feet last night when you joined him in the study?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Holmes. He had a pair of bedroom slippers. I brought him his boots when he went for the police.\"\n\n\"Where are the slippers now?\"\n\n\"They are still under the chair in the hall.\"\n\n\"Very good, Ames. It is, of course, important for us to know which tracks may be Mr. Barker's and which from outside.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I may say that I noticed that the slippers were stained with blood\u2014so indeed were my own.\"\n\n\"That is natural enough, considering the condition of the room. Very good, Ames. We will ring if we want you.\"\n\nA few minutes later we were in the study. Holmes had brought with him the carpet slippers from the hall. As Ames had observed, the soles of both were dark with blood.\n\n\"Strange!\" murmured Holmes, as he stood in the light of the window and examined them minutely. \"Very strange indeed!\"\n\nStooping with one of his quick feline pounces, he placed the slipper upon the blood mark on the sill. It exactly corresponded. He smiled in silence at his colleagues.\n\nThe inspector was transfigured with excitement. His native accent rattled like a stick upon railings.\n\n\"Man,\" he cried, \"there's not a doubt of it! Barker has just marked the window himself. It's a good deal broader than any bootmark. I mind that you said it was a splay-foot, and here's the explanation. But what's the game, Mr. Holmes\u2014what's the game?\"\n\n\"Ay, what's the game?\" my friend repeated thoughtfully.\n\nWhite Mason chuckled and rubbed his fat hands together in his professional satisfaction. \"I said it was a snorter!\" he cried. \"And a real snorter it is!\"" + }, + { + "title": "A Dawning Light", + "text": "The three detectives had many matters of detail into which to inquire; so I returned alone to our modest quarters at the village inn. But before doing so I took a stroll in the curious old-world garden which flanked the house. Rows of very ancient yew trees cut into strange designs girded it round. Inside was a beautiful stretch of lawn with an old sundial in the middle, the whole effect so soothing and restful that it was welcome to my somewhat jangled nerves.\n\nIn that deeply peaceful atmosphere one could forget, or remember only as some fantastic nightmare, that darkened study with the sprawling, bloodstained figure on the floor. And yet, as I strolled round it and tried to steep my soul in its gentle balm, a strange incident occurred, which brought me back to the tragedy and left a sinister impression in my mind.\n\nI have said that a decoration of yew trees circled the garden. At the end farthest from the house they thickened into a continuous hedge. On the other side of this hedge, concealed from the eyes of anyone approaching from the direction of the house, there was a stone seat. As I approached the spot I was aware of voices, some remark in the deep tones of a man, answered by a little ripple of feminine laughter.\n\nAn instant later I had come round the end of the hedge and my eyes lit upon Mrs. Douglas and the man Barker before they were aware of my presence. Her appearance gave me a shock. In the dining-room she had been demure and discreet. Now all pretense of grief had passed away from her. Her eyes shone with the joy of living, and her face still quivered with amusement at some remark of her companion. He sat forward, his hands clasped and his forearms on his knees, with an answering smile upon his bold, handsome face. In an instant\u2014but it was just one instant too late\u2014they resumed their solemn masks as my figure came into view. A hurried word or two passed between them, and then Barker rose and came towards me.\n\n\"Excuse me, sir,\" said he, \"but am I addressing Dr. Watson?\"\n\nI bowed with a coldness which showed, I dare say, very plainly the impression which had been produced upon my mind.\n\n\"We thought that it was probably you, as your friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes is so well known. Would you mind coming over and speaking to Mrs. Douglas for one instant?\"\n\nI followed him with a dour face. Very clearly I could see in my mind's eye that shattered figure on the floor. Here within a few hours of the tragedy were his wife and his nearest friend laughing together behind a bush in the garden which had been his. I greeted the lady with reserve. I had grieved with her grief in the dining-room. Now I met her appealing gaze with an unresponsive eye.\n\n\"I fear that you think me callous and hard-hearted,\" said she.\n\nI shrugged my shoulders. \"It is no business of mine,\" said I.\n\n\"Perhaps some day you will do me justice. If you only realized\u2014\"\n\n\"There is no need why Dr. Watson should realize,\" said Barker quickly. \"As he has himself said, it is no possible business of his.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said I, \"and so I will beg leave to resume my walk.\"\n\n\"One moment, Dr. Watson,\" cried the woman in a pleading voice. \"There is one question which you can answer with more authority than anyone else in the world, and it may make a very great difference to me. You know Mr. Holmes and his relations with the police better than anyone else can. Supposing that a matter were brought confidentially to his knowledge, is it absolutely necessary that he should pass it on to the detectives?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's it,\" said Barker eagerly. \"Is he on his own or is he entirely in with them?\"\n\n\"I really don't know that I should be justified in discussing such a point.\"\n\n\"I beg\u2014I implore that you will, Dr. Watson! I assure you that you will be helping us\u2014helping me greatly if you will guide us on that point.\"\n\nThere was such a ring of sincerity in the woman's voice that for the instant I forgot all about her levity and was moved only to do her will.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes is an independent investigator,\" I said. \"He is his own master, and would act as his own judgment directed. At the same time, he would naturally feel loyalty towards the officials who were working on the same case, and he would not conceal from them anything which would help them in bringing a criminal to justice. Beyond this I can say nothing, and I would refer you to Mr. Holmes himself if you wanted fuller information.\"\n\nSo saying I raised my hat and went upon my way, leaving them still seated behind that concealing hedge. I looked back as I rounded the far end of it, and saw that they were still talking very earnestly together, and, as they were gazing after me, it was clear that it was our interview that was the subject of their debate.\n\n\"I wish none of their confidences,\" said Holmes, when I reported to him what had occurred. He had spent the whole afternoon at the Manor House in consultation with his two colleagues, and returned about five with a ravenous appetite for a high tea which I had ordered for him. \"No confidences, Watson; for they are mighty awkward if it comes to an arrest for conspiracy and murder.\"\n\n\"You think it will come to that?\"\n\nHe was in his most cheerful and debonair humour. \"My dear Watson, when I have exterminated that fourth egg I shall be ready to put you in touch with the whole situation. I don't say that we have fathomed it\u2014far from it\u2014but when we have traced the missing dumb-bell\u2014\"\n\n\"The dumb-bell!\"\n\n\"Dear me, Watson, is it possible that you have not penetrated the fact that the case hangs upon the missing dumb-bell? Well, well, you need not be downcast; for between ourselves I don't think that either Inspector Mac or the excellent local practitioner has grasped the overwhelming importance of this incident. One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell! Picture to yourself the unilateral development, the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!\"\n\nHe sat with his mouth full of toast and his eyes sparkling with mischief, watching my intellectual entanglement. The mere sight of his excellent appetite was an assurance of success; for I had very clear recollections of days and nights without a thought of food, when his baffled mind had chafed before some problem while his thin, eager features became more attenuated with the asceticism of complete mental concentration. Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one who makes a considered statement.\n\n\"A lie, Watson\u2014a great, big, thumping, obtrusive, uncompromising lie\u2014that's what meets us on the threshold! There is our starting point. The whole story told by Barker is a lie. But Barker's story is corroborated by Mrs. Douglas. Therefore she is lying also. They are both lying, and in a conspiracy. So now we have the clear problem. Why are they lying, and what is the truth which they are trying so hard to conceal? Let us try. Watson, you and I, if we can get behind the lie and reconstruct the truth.\n\n\"How do I know that they are lying? Because it is a clumsy fabrication which simply could not be true. Consider! According to the story given to us, the assassin had less than a minute after the murder had been committed to take that ring, which was under another ring, from the dead man's finger, to replace the other ring\u2014a thing which he would surely never have done\u2014and to put that singular card beside his victim. I say that this was obviously impossible.\n\n\"You may argue\u2014but I have too much respect for your judgment, Watson, to think that you will do so\u2014that the ring may have been taken before the man was killed. The fact that the candle had been lit only a short time shows that there had been no lengthy interview. Was Douglas, from what we hear of his fearless character, a man who would be likely to give up his wedding ring at such short notice, or could we conceive of his giving it up at all? No, no, Watson, the assassin was alone with the dead man for some time with the lamp lit. Of that I have no doubt at all.\n\n\"But the gunshot was apparently the cause of death. Therefore the shot must have been fired some time earlier than we are told. But there could be no mistake about such a matter as that. We are in the presence, therefore, of a deliberate conspiracy upon the part of the two people who heard the gunshot\u2014of the man Barker and of the woman Douglas. When on the top of this I am able to show that the blood mark on the windowsill was deliberately placed there by Barker, in order to give a false clue to the police, you will admit that the case grows dark against him.\n\n\"Now we have to ask ourselves at what hour the murder actually did occur. Up to half-past ten the servants were moving about the house; so it was certainly not before that time. At a quarter to eleven they had all gone to their rooms with the exception of Ames, who was in the pantry. I have been trying some experiments after you left us this afternoon, and I find that no noise which MacDonald can make in the study can penetrate to me in the pantry when the doors are all shut.\n\n\"It is otherwise, however, from the housekeeper's room. It is not so far down the corridor, and from it I could vaguely hear a voice when it was very loudly raised. The sound from a shotgun is to some extent muffled when the discharge is at very close range, as it undoubtedly was in this instance. It would not be very loud, and yet in the silence of the night it should have easily penetrated to Mrs. Allen's room. She is, as she has told us, somewhat deaf; but none the less she mentioned in her evidence that she did hear something like a door slamming half an hour before the alarm was given. Half an hour before the alarm was given would be a quarter to eleven. I have no doubt that what she heard was the report of the gun, and that this was the real instant of the murder.\n\n\"If this is so, we have now to determine what Barker and Mrs. Douglas, presuming that they are not the actual murderers, could have been doing from quarter to eleven, when the sound of the shot brought them down, until quarter past eleven, when they rang the bell and summoned the servants. What were they doing, and why did they not instantly give the alarm? That is the question which faces us, and when it has been answered we shall surely have gone some way to solve our problem.\"\n\n\"I am convinced myself,\" said I, \"that there is an understanding between those two people. She must be a heartless creature to sit laughing at some jest within a few hours of her husband's murder.\"\n\n\"Exactly. She does not shine as a wife even in her own account of what occurred. I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind, as you are aware, Watson, but my experience of life has taught me that there are few wives, having any regard for their husbands, who would let any man's spoken word stand between them and that husband's dead body. Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her. It was badly stage-managed; for even the rawest investigators must be struck by the absence of the usual feminine ululation. If there had been nothing else, this incident alone would have suggested a prearranged conspiracy to my mind.\"\n\n\"You think then, definitely, that Barker and Mrs. Douglas are guilty of the murder?\"\n\n\"There is an appalling directness about your questions, Watson, said Holmes, shaking his pipe at me. \"They come at me like bullets. If you put it that Mrs. Douglas and Barker know the truth about the murder, and are conspiring to conceal it, then I can give you a whole-souled answer. I am sure they do. But your more deadly proposition is not so clear. Let us for a moment consider the difficulties which stand in the way.\n\n\"We will suppose that this couple are united by the bonds of a guilty love, and that they have determined to get rid of the man who stands between them. It is a large supposition; for discreet inquiry among servants and others has failed to corroborate it in any way. On the contrary, there is a good deal of evidence that the Douglases were very attached to each other.\"\n\n\"That, I am sure, cannot be true,\" said I, thinking of the beautiful smiling face in the garden.\n\n\"Well, at least they gave that impression. However, we will suppose that they are an extraordinarily astute couple, who deceive everyone upon this point, and conspire to murder the husband. He happens to be a man over whose head some danger hangs\u2014\"\n\n\"We have only their word for that.\"\n\nHolmes looked thoughtful. \"I see, Watson. You are sketching out a theory by which everything they say from the beginning is false. According to your idea, there was never any hidden menace, or secret society, or Valley of Fear, or Boss MacSomebody, or anything else. Well, that is a good sweeping generalization. Let us see what that brings us to. They invent this theory to account for the crime. They then play up to the idea by leaving this bicycle in the park as proof of the existence of some outsider. The stain on the windowsill conveys the same idea. So does the card on the body, which might have been prepared in the house. That all fits into your hypothesis, Watson. But now we come on the nasty, angular, uncompromising bits which won't slip into their places. Why a cut-off shotgun of all weapons\u2014and an American one at that? How could they be so sure that the sound of it would not bring someone on to them? It's a mere chance as it is that Mrs. Allen did not start out to inquire for the slamming door. Why did your guilty couple do all this, Watson?\"\n\n\"I confess that I can't explain it.\"\n\n\"Then again, if a woman and her lover conspire to murder a husband, are they going to advertise their guilt by ostentatiously removing his wedding ring after his death? Does that strike you as very probable, Watson?\"\n\n\"No, it does not.\"\n\n\"And once again, if the thought of leaving a bicycle concealed outside had occurred to you, would it really have seemed worth doing when the dullest detective would naturally say this is an obvious blind, as the bicycle is the first thing which the fugitive needed in order to make his escape.\"\n\n\"I can conceive of no explanation.\"\n\n\"And yet there should be no combination of events for which the wit of man cannot conceive an explanation. Simply as a mental exercise, without any assertion that it is true, let me indicate a possible line of thought. It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?\n\n\"We will suppose that there was a guilty secret, a really shameful secret in the life of this man Douglas. This leads to his murder by someone who is, we will suppose, an avenger, someone from outside. This avenger, for some reason which I confess I am still at a loss to explain, took the dead man's wedding ring. The vendetta might conceivably date back to the man's first marriage, and the ring be taken for some such reason.\n\n\"Before this avenger got away, Barker and the wife had reached the room. The assassin convinced them that any attempt to arrest him would lead to the publication of some hideous scandal. They were converted to this idea, and preferred to let him go. For this purpose they probably lowered the bridge, which can be done quite noiselessly, and then raised it again. He made his escape, and for some reason thought that he could do so more safely on foot than on the bicycle. He therefore left his machine where it would not be discovered until he had got safely away. So far we are within the bounds of possibility, are we not?\"\n\n\"Well, it is possible, no doubt,\" said I, with some reserve.\n\n\"We have to remember, Watson, that whatever occurred is certainly something very extraordinary. Well, now, to continue our supposititious case, the couple\u2014not necessarily a guilty couple\u2014realize after the murderer is gone that they have placed themselves in a position in which it may be difficult for them to prove that they did not themselves either do the deed or connive at it. They rapidly and rather clumsily met the situation. The mark was put by Barker's bloodstained slipper upon the windowsill to suggest how the fugitive got away. They obviously were the two who must have heard the sound of the gun; so they gave the alarm exactly as they would have done, but a good half hour after the event.\"\n\n\"And how do you propose to prove all this?\"\n\n\"Well, if there were an outsider, he may be traced and taken. That would be the most effective of all proofs. But if not\u2014well, the resources of science are far from being exhausted. I think that an evening alone in that study would help me much.\"\n\n\"An evening alone!\"\n\n\"I propose to go up there presently. I have arranged it with the estimable Ames, who is by no means whole-hearted about Barker. I shall sit in that room and see if its atmosphere brings me inspiration. I'm a believer in the genius loci. You smile, Friend Watson. Well, we shall see. By the way, you have that big umbrella of yours, have you not?\"\n\n\"It is here.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll borrow that if I may.\"\n\n\"Nothing serious, my dear Watson, or I should certainly ask for yourassistance. But I'll take the umbrella. At present I am only awaiting the return of our colleagues from Tunbridge Wells, where they are at present engaged in trying for a likely owner to the bicycle.\"\n\n\"Certainly\u2014but what a wretched weapon! If there is danger\u2014\"\n\nIt was nightfall before Inspector MacDonald and White Mason came back from their expedition, and they arrived exultant, reporting a great advance in our investigation.\n\n\"Man, I'll admeet that I had my doubts if there was ever an outsider,\" said MacDonald; \"but that's all past now. We've had the bicycle identified, and we have a description of our man; so that's a long step on our journey.\"\n\n\"It sounds to me like the beginning of the end,\" said Holmes. \"I'm sure I congratulate you both with all my heart.\"\n\n\"Well, I started from the fact that Mr. Douglas had seemed disturbed since the day before, when he had been at Tunbridge Wells. It was at Tunbridge Wells then that he had become conscious of some danger. It was clear, therefore, that if a man had come over with a bicycle it was from Tunbridge Wells that he might be expected to have come. We took the bicycle over with us and showed it at the hotels. It was identified at once by the manager of the Eagle Commercial as belonging to a man named Hargrave, who had taken a room there two days before. This bicycle and a small valise were his whole belongings. He had registered his name as coming from London, but had given no address. The valise was London made, and the contents were British; but the man himself was undoubtedly an American.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said Holmes gleefully, \"you have indeed done some solid work while I have been sitting spinning theories with my friend! It's a lesson in being practical, Mr. Mac.\"\n\n\"Ay, it's just that, Mr. Holmes,\" said the inspector with satisfaction.\n\n\"But this may all fit in with your theories,\" I remarked.\n\n\"That may or may not be. But let us hear the end, Mr. Mac. Was there nothing to identify this man?\"\n\n\"So little that it was evident that he had carefully guarded himself against identification. There were no papers or letters, and no marking upon the clothes. A cycle map of the county lay on his bedroom table. He had left the hotel after breakfast yesterday morning on his bicycle, and no more was heard of him until our inquiries.\"\n\n\"That's what puzzles me, Mr. Holmes,\" said White Mason. \"If the fellow did not want the hue and cry raised over him, one would imagine that he would have returned and remained at the hotel as an inoffensive tourist. As it is, he must know that he will be reported to the police by the hotel manager and that his disappearance will be connected with the murder.\"\n\n\"So one would imagine. Still, he has been justified of his wisdom up to date, at any rate, since he has not been taken. But his description\u2014what of that?\"\n\nMacDonald referred to his notebook. \"Here we have it so far as they could give it. They don't seem to have taken any very particular stock of him; but still the porter, the clerk, and the chambermaid are all agreed that this about covers the points. He was a man about five foot nine in height, fifty or so years of age, his hair slightly grizzled, a grayish moustache, a curved nose, and a face which all of them described as fierce and forbidding.\"\n\n\"Well, bar the expression, that might almost be a description of Douglas himself,\" said Holmes. \"He is just over fifty, with grizzled hair and moustache, and about the same height. Did you get anything else?\"\n\n\"He was dressed in a heavy gray suit with a reefer jacket, and he wore a short yellow overcoat and a soft cap.\"\n\n\"What about the shotgun?\"\n\n\"It is less than two feet long. It could very well have fitted into his valise. He could have carried it inside his overcoat without difficulty.\"\n\n\"And how do you consider that all this bears upon the general case?\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes,\" said MacDonald, \"when we have got our man\u2014and you may be sure that I had his description on the wires within five minutes of hearing it\u2014we shall be better able to judge. But, even as it stands, we have surely gone a long way. We know that an American calling himself Hargrave came to Tunbridge Wells two days ago with bicycle and valise. In the latter was a sawed-off shotgun; so he came with the deliberate purpose of crime. Yesterday morning he set off for this place on his bicycle, with his gun concealed in his overcoat. No one saw him arrive, so far as we can learn; but he need not pass through the village to reach the park gates, and there are many cyclists upon the road. Presumably he at once concealed his cycle among the laurels where it was found, and possibly lurked there himself, with his eye on the house, waiting for Mr. Douglas to come out. The shotgun is a strange weapon to use inside a house; but he had intended to use it outside, and there it has very obvious advantages, as it would be impossible to miss with it, and the sound of shots is so common in an English sporting neighbourhood that no particular notice would be taken.\"\n\n\"That is all very clear,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Douglas did not appear. What was he to do next? He left his bicycle and approached the house in the twilight. He found the bridge down and no one about. He took his chance, intending, no doubt, to make some excuse if he met anyone. He met no one. He slipped into the first room that he saw, and concealed himself behind the curtain. Thence he could see the drawbridge go up, and he knew that his only escape was through the moat. He waited until quarter-past eleven, when Mr. Douglas upon his usual nightly round came into the room. He shot him and escaped, as arranged. He was aware that the bicycle would be described by the hotel people and be a clue against him; so he left it there and made his way by some other means to London or to some safe hiding place which he had already arranged. How is that, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Mac, it is very good and very clear so far as it goes. That is your end of the story. My end is that the crime was committed half an hour earlier than reported; that Mrs. Douglas and Barker are both in a conspiracy to conceal something; that they aided the murderer's escape\u2014or at least that they reached the room before he escaped\u2014and that they fabricated evidence of his escape through the window, whereas in all probability they had themselves let him go by lowering the bridge. That's my reading of the first half.\"\n\nThe two detectives shook their heads.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, if this is true, we only tumble out of one mystery into another,\" said the London inspector.\n\n\"And in some ways a worse one,\" added White Mason. \"The lady has never been in America in all her life. What possible connection could she have with an American assassin which would cause her to shelter him?\"\n\n\"I freely admit the difficulties,\" said Holmes. \"I propose to make a little investigation of my own to-night, and it is just possible that it may contribute something to the common cause.\"\n\n\"Can we help you, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"No, no! Darkness and Dr. Watson's umbrella\u2014my wants are simple. And Ames, the faithful Ames, no doubt he will stretch a point for me. All my lines of thought lead me back invariably to the one basic question\u2014why should an athletic man develop his frame upon so unnatural an instrument as a single dumb-bell?\"\n\nIt was late that night when Holmes returned from his solitary excursion. We slept in a double-bedded room, which was the best that the little country inn could do for us. I was already asleep when I was partly awakened by his entrance.\n\n\"Well, Holmes,\" I murmured, \"have you found anything out?\"\n\nHe stood beside me in silence, his candle in his hand. Then the tall, lean figure inclined towards me. \"I say, Watson,\" he whispered, \"would you be afraid to sleep in the same room with a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?\"\n\n\"Not in the least,\" I answered in astonishment.\n\n\"Ah, that's lucky,\" he said, and not another word would he utter that night." + }, + { + "title": "The Solution", + "text": "Next morning, after breakfast, we found Inspector MacDonald and White Mason seated in close consultation in the small parlour of the local police sergeant. On the table in front of them were piled a number of letters and telegrams, which they were carefully sorting and docketing. Three had been placed on one side.\n\n\"Still on the track of the elusive bicyclist?\" Holmes asked cheerfully. \"What is the latest news of the ruffian?\"\n\nMacDonald pointed ruefully to his heap of correspondence.\n\n\"He is at present reported from Leicester, Nottingham, Southampton, Derby, East Ham, Richmond, and fourteen other places. In three of them\u2014East Ham, Leicester, and Liverpool\u2014there is a clear case against him, and he has actually been arrested. The country seems to be full of the fugitives with yellow coats.\"\n\n\"Dear me!\" said Holmes sympathetically. \"Now, Mr. Mac, and you, Mr. White Mason, I wish to give you a very earnest piece of advice. When I went into this case with you I bargained, as you will no doubt remember, that I should not present you with half-proved theories, but that I should retain and work out my own ideas until I had satisfied myself that they were correct. For this reason I am not at the present moment telling you all that is in my mind. On the other hand, I said that I would play the game fairly by you, and I do not think it is a fair game to allow you for one unnecessary moment to waste your energies upon a profitless task. Therefore I am here to advise you this morning, and my advice to you is summed up in three words\u2014abandon the case.\"\n\nMacDonald and White Mason stared in amazement at their celebrated colleague.\n\n\"You consider it hopeless!\" cried the inspector.\n\n\"I consider your case to be hopeless. I do not consider that it is hopeless to arrive at the truth.\"\n\n\"But this cyclist. He is not an invention. We have his description, his valise, his bicycle. The fellow must be somewhere. Why should we not get him?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, no doubt he is somewhere, and no doubt we shall get him; but I would not have you waste your energies in East Ham or Liverpool. I am sure that we can find some shorter cut to a result.\"\n\n\"You are holding something back. It's hardly fair of you, Mr. Holmes.\" The inspector was annoyed.\n\n\"You know my methods of work, Mr. Mac. But I will hold it back for the shortest time possible. I only wish to verify my details in one way, which can very readily be done, and then I make my bow and return to London, leaving my results entirely at your service. I owe you too much to act otherwise; for in all my experience I cannot recall any more singular and interesting study.\"\n\n\"This is clean beyond me, Mr. Holmes. We saw you when we returned from Tunbridge Wells last night, and you were in general agreement with our results. What has happened since then to give you a completely new idea of the case?\"\n\n\"Well, since you ask me, I spent, as I told you that I would, some hours last night at the Manor House.\"\n\n\"Well, what happened?\"\n\n\"Ah, I can only give you a very general answer to that for the moment. By the way, I have been reading a short but clear and interesting account of the old building, purchasable at the modest sum of one penny from the local tobacconist.\"\n\nHere Holmes drew a small tract, embellished with a rude engraving of the ancient Manor House, from his waistcoat pocket.\n\n\"It immensely adds to the zest of an investigation, my dear Mr. Mac, when one is in conscious sympathy with the historical atmosphere of one's surroundings. Don't look so impatient; for I assure you that even so bald an account as this raises some sort of picture of the past in one's mind. Permit me to give you a sample. 'Erected in the fifth year of the reign of James I, and standing upon the site of a much older building, the Manor House of Birlstone presents one of the finest surviving examples of the moated Jacobean residence\u2014'\"\n\n\"You are making fools of us, Mr. Holmes!\"\n\n\"Tut, tut, Mr. Mac!\u2014the first sign of temper I have detected in you. Well, I won't read it verbatim, since you feel so strongly upon the subject. But when I tell you that there is some account of the taking of the place by a parliamentary colonel in 1644, of the concealment of Charles for several days in the course of the Civil War, and finally of a visit there by the second George, you will admit that there are various associations of interest connected with this ancient house.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt it, Mr. Holmes; but that is no business of ours.\"\n\n\"Is it not? Is it not? Breadth of view, my dear Mr. Mac, is one of the essentials of our profession. The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest. You will excuse these remarks from one who, though a mere connoisseur of crime, is still rather older and perhaps more experienced than yourself.\"\n\n\"I'm the first to admit that,\" said the detective heartily. \"You get to your point, I admit; but you have such a deuced round-the-corner way of doing it.\"\n\n\"Well, well, I'll drop past history and get down to present-day facts. I called last night, as I have already said, at the Manor House. I did not see either Barker or Mrs. Douglas. I saw no necessity to disturb them; but I was pleased to hear that the lady was not visibly pining and that she had partaken of an excellent dinner. My visit was specially made to the good Mr. Ames, with whom I exchanged some amiabilities, which culminated in his allowing me, without reference to anyone else, to sit alone for a time in the study.\"\n\n\"What! With that?\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"No, no, everything is now in order. You gave permission for that, Mr. Mac, as I am informed. The room was in its normal state, and in it I passed an instructive quarter of an hour.\"\n\n\"What were you doing?\"\n\n\"Well, not to make a mystery of so simple a matter, I was looking for the missing dumb-bell. It has always bulked rather large in my estimate of the case. I ended by finding it.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Ah, there we come to the edge of the unexplored. Let me go a little further, a very little further, and I will promise that you shall share everything that I know.\"\n\n\"Well, we're bound to take you on your own terms,\" said the inspector; \"but when it comes to telling us to abandon the case\u2014why in the name of goodness should we abandon the case?\"\n\n\"For the simple reason, my dear Mr. Mac, that you have not got the first idea what it is that you are investigating.\"\n\n\"We are investigating the murder of Mr. John Douglas of Birlstone Manor.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, so you are. But don't trouble to trace the mysterious gentleman upon the bicycle. I assure you that it won't help you.\"\n\n\"Then what do you suggest that we do?\"\n\n\"I will tell you exactly what to do, if you will do it.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm bound to say I've always found you had reason behind all your queer ways. I'll do what you advise.\"\n\n\"And you, Mr. White Mason?\"\n\nThe country detective looked helplessly from one to the other. Holmes and his methods were new to him. \"Well, if it is good enough for the inspector, it is good enough for me,\" he said at last.\n\n\"Capital!\" said Holmes. \"Well, then, I should recommend a nice, cheery country walk for both of you. They tell me that the views from Birlstone Ridge over the Weald are very remarkable. No doubt lunch could be got at some suitable hostelry; though my ignorance of the country prevents me from recommending one. In the evening, tired but happy\u2014\"\n\n\"Man, this is getting past a joke!\" cried MacDonald, rising angrily from his chair.\n\n\"Well, well, spend the day as you like,\" said Holmes, patting him cheerfully upon the shoulder. \"Do what you like and go where you will, but meet me here before dusk without fail\u2014without fail, Mr. Mac.\"\n\n\"That sounds more like sanity.\"\n\n\"All of it was excellent advice; but I don't insist, so long as you are here when I need you. But now, before we part, I want you to write a note to Mr. Barker.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"I'll dictate it, if you like. Ready?\n\n\"DEAR SIR:\n\nIt has struck me that it is our duty to drain the moat, in the hope that we may find some\u2014\"\n\n\"It's impossible,\" said the inspector. \"I've made inquiry.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut! My dear sir, please do what I ask you.\"\n\n\"Well, go on.\"\n\n\"\u2014in the hope that we may find something which may bear upon our investigation. I have made arrangements, and the workmen will be at work early to-morrow morning diverting the stream\u2014\"\n\n\"Impossible!\"\n\n\"\u2014diverting the stream; so I thought it best to explain matters beforehand.\n\nNow sign that, and send it by hand about four o'clock. At that hour we shall meet again in this room. Until then we may each do what we like; for I can assure you that this inquiry has come to a definite pause.\"\n\nEvening was drawing in when we reassembled. Holmes was very serious in his manner, myself curious, and the detectives obviously critical and annoyed.\n\n\"Well, gentlemen,\" said my friend gravely, \"I am asking you now to put everything to the test with me, and you will judge for yourselves whether the observations I have made justify the conclusions to which I have come. It is a chill evening, and I do not know how long our expedition may last; so I beg that you will wear your warmest coats. It is of the first importance that we should be in our places before it grows dark; so with your permission we shall get started at once.\"\n\nWe passed along the outer bounds of the Manor House park until we came to a place where there was a gap in the rails which fenced it. Through this we slipped, and then in the gathering gloom we followed Holmes until we had reached a shrubbery which lies nearly opposite to the main door and the drawbridge. The latter had not been raised. Holmes crouched down behind the screen of laurels, and we all three followed his example.\n\n\"Well, what are we to do now?\" asked MacDonald with some gruffness.\n\n\"Possess our souls in patience and make as little noise as possible,\" Holmes answered.\n\n\"What are we here for at all? I really think that you might treat us with more frankness\"\n\nHolmes laughed. \"Watson insists that I am the dramatist in real life,\" said he. \"Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder\u2014what can one make of such a d\u00e9nouement? But the quick inference, the subtle trap, the clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication of bold theories\u2014are these not the pride and the justification of our life's work? At the present moment you thrill with the glamour of the situation and the anticipation of the hunt. Where would be that thrill if I had been as definite as a timetable? I only ask a little patience, Mr. Mac, and all will be clear to you.\"\n\n\"Well, I hope the pride and justification and the rest of it will come before we all get our death of cold,\" said the London detective with comic resignation.\n\nWe all had good reason to join in the aspiration; for our vigil was a long and bitter one. Slowly the shadows darkened over the long, sombre face of the old house. A cold, damp reek from the moat chilled us to the bones and set our teeth chattering. There was a single lamp over the gateway and a steady globe of light in the fatal study. Everything else was dark and still.\n\n\"How long is this to last?\" asked the inspector finally. \"And what is it we are watching for?\"\n\n\"I have no more notion than you how long it is to last,\" Holmes answered with some asperity. \"If criminals would always schedule their movements like railway trains, it would certainly be more convenient for all of us. As to what it is we\u2014Well, that's what we are watching for!\"\n\nAs he spoke the bright, yellow light in the study was obscured by somebody passing to and fro before it. The laurels among which we lay were immediately opposite the window and not more than a hundred feet from it. Presently it was thrown open with a whining of hinges, and we could dimly see the dark outline of a man's head and shoulders looking out into the gloom. For some minutes he peered forth in furtive, stealthy fashion, as one who wishes to be assured that he is unobserved. Then he leaned forward, and in the intense silence we were aware of the soft lapping of agitated water. He seemed to be stirring up the moat with something which he held in his hand. Then suddenly he hauled something in as a fisherman lands a fish\u2014some large, round object which obscured the light as it was dragged through the open casement.\n\n\"Now!\" cried Holmes. \"Now!\"\n\nWe were all upon our feet, staggering after him with our stiffened limbs, while he ran swiftly across the bridge and rang violently at the bell. There was the rasping of bolts from the other side, and the amazed Ames stood in the entrance. Holmes brushed him aside without a word and, followed by all of us, rushed into the room which had been occupied by the man whom we had been watching.\n\nThe oil lamp on the table represented the glow which we had seen from outside. It was now in the hand of Cecil Barker, who held it towards us as we entered. Its light shone upon his strong, resolute, clean-shaved face and his menacing eyes.\n\n\"What the devil is the meaning of all this?\" he cried. \"What are you after, anyhow?\"\n\nHolmes took a swift glance round, and then pounced upon a sodden bundle tied together with cord which lay where it had been thrust under the writing table.\n\n\"This is what we are after, Mr. Barker\u2014this bundle, weighted with a dumb-bell, which you have just raised from the bottom of the moat.\"\n\nBarker stared at Holmes with amazement in his face. \"How in thunder came you to know anything about it?\" he asked.\n\n\"Simply that I put it there.\"\n\n\"You put it there! You!\"\n\n\"Perhaps I should have said 'replaced it there,\"' said Holmes. \"You will remember, Inspector MacDonald, that I was somewhat struck by the absence of a dumb-bell. I drew your attention to it; but with the pressure of other events you had hardly the time to give it the consideration which would have enabled you to draw deductions from it. When water is near and a weight is missing it is not a very far-fetched supposition that something has been sunk in the water. The idea was at least worth testing; so with the help of Ames, who admitted me to the room, and the crook of Dr. Watson's umbrella, I was able last night to fish up and inspect this bundle.\n\n\"It was of the first importance, however, that we should be able to prove who placed it there. This we accomplished by the very obvious device of announcing that the moat would be dried to-morrow, which had, of course, the effect that whoever had hidden the bundle would most certainly withdraw it the moment that darkness enabled him to do so. We have no less than four witnesses as to who it was who took advantage of the opportunity, and so, Mr. Barker, I think the word lies now with you.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes put the sopping bundle upon the table beside the lamp and undid the cord which bound it. From within he extracted a dumb-bell, which he tossed down to its fellow in the corner. Next he drew forth a pair of boots. \"American, as you perceive,\" he remarked, pointing to the toes. Then he laid upon the table a long, deadly, sheathed knife. Finally he unravelled a bundle of clothing, comprising a complete set of underclothes, socks, a gray tweed suit, and a short yellow overcoat.\n\n\"The clothes are commonplace,\" remarked Holmes, \"save only the overcoat, which is full of suggestive touches.\" He held it tenderly towards the light. \"Here, as you perceive, is the inner pocket prolonged into the lining in such fashion as to give ample space for the truncated fowling piece. The tailor's tab is on the neck\u2014'Neal, Outfitter, Vermissa, U. S. A.' I have spent an instructive afternoon in the rector's library, and have enlarged my knowledge by adding the fact that Vermissa is a flourishing little town at the head of one of the best known coal and iron valleys in the United States. I have some recollection, Mr. Barker, that you associated the coal districts with Mr. Douglas's first wife, and it would surely not be too far-fetched an inference that the V. V. upon the card by the dead body might stand for Vermissa Valley, or that this very valley which sends forth emissaries of murder may be that Valley of Fear of which we have heard. So much is fairly clear. And now, Mr. Barker, I seem to be standing rather in the way of your explanation.\"\n\nIt was a sight to see Cecil Barker's expressive face during this exposition of the great detective. Anger, amazement, consternation, and indecision swept over it in turn. Finally he took refuge in a somewhat acrid irony.\n\n\"You know such a lot, Mr. Holmes, perhaps you had better tell us some more,\" he sneered.\n\n\"I have no doubt that I could tell you a great deal more, Mr. Barker; but it would come with a better grace from you.\"\n\n\"Oh, you think so, do you? Well, all I can say is that if there's any secret here it is not my secret, and I am not the man to give it away.\"\n\n\"Well, if you take that line, Mr. Barker,\" said the inspector quietly, \"we must just keep you in sight until we have the warrant and can hold you.\"\n\n\"You can do what you damn please about that,\" said Barker defiantly.\n\nThe proceedings seemed to have come to a definite end so far as he was concerned; for one had only to look at that granite face to realize that no peine forte et dure would ever force him to plead against his will. The deadlock was broken, however, by a woman's voice. Mrs. Douglas had been standing listening at the half opened door, and now she entered the room.\n\n\"You have done enough for now, Cecil,\" said she. \"Whatever comes of it in the future, you have done enough.\"\n\n\"Enough and more than enough,\" remarked Sherlock Holmes gravely. \"I have every sympathy with you, madam, and I should strongly urge you to have some confidence in the common sense of our jurisdiction and to take the police voluntarily into your complete confidence. It may be that I am myself at fault for not following up the hint which you conveyed to me through my friend, Dr. Watson; but, at that time I had every reason to believe that you were directly concerned in the crime. Now I am assured that this is not so. At the same time, there is much that is unexplained, and I should strongly recommend that you ask Mr. Douglas to tell us his own story.\"\n\nMrs. Douglas gave a cry of astonishment at Holmes's words. The detectives and I must have echoed it, when we were aware of a man who seemed to have emerged from the wall, who advanced now from the gloom of the corner in which he had appeared. Mrs. Douglas turned, and in an instant her arms were round him. Barker had seized his outstretched hand.\n\n\"It's best this way, Jack,\" his wife repeated; \"I am sure that it is best.\"\n\n\"Indeed, yes, Mr. Douglas,\" said Sherlock Holmes, \"I am sure that you will find it best.\"\n\nThe man stood blinking at us with the dazed look of one who comes from the dark into the light. It was a remarkable face, bold gray eyes, a strong, short-clipped, grizzled moustache, a square, projecting chin, and a humorous mouth. He took a good look at us all, and then to my amazement he advanced to me and handed me a bundle of paper.\n\n\"I've heard of you,\" said he in a voice which was not quite English and not quite American, but was altogether mellow and pleasing. \"You are the historian of this bunch. Well, Dr. Watson, you've never had such a story as that pass through your hands before, and I'll lay my last dollar on that. Tell it your own way; but there are the facts, and you can't miss the public so long as you have those. I've been cooped up two days, and I've spent the daylight hours\u2014as much daylight as I could get in that rat trap\u2014in putting the thing into words. You're welcome to them\u2014you and your public. There's the story of the Valley of Fear.\"\n\n\"That's the past, Mr. Douglas,\" said Sherlock Holmes quietly. \"What we desire now is to hear your story of the present.\"\n\n\"You'll have it, sir,\" said Douglas. \"May I smoke as I talk? Well, thank you, Mr. Holmes. You're a smoker yourself, if I remember right, and you'll guess what it is to be sitting for two days with tobacco in your pocket and afraid that the smell will give you away.\" He leaned against the mantelpiece and sucked at the cigar which Holmes had handed him. \"I've heard of you, Mr. Holmes. I never guessed that I should meet you. But before you are through with that,\" he nodded at my papers, \"you will say I've brought you something fresh.\"\n\nInspector MacDonald had been staring at the newcomer with the greatest amazement. \"Well, this fairly beats me!\" he cried at last. \"If you are Mr. John Douglas of Birlstone Manor, then whose death have we been investigating for these two days, and where in the world have you sprung from now? You seemed to me to come out of the floor like a jack-in-a-box.\"\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Mac,\" said Holmes, shaking a reproving forefinger, \"you would not read that excellent local compilation which described the concealment of King Charles. People did not hide in those days without excellent hiding places, and the hiding place that has once been used may be again. I had persuaded myself that we should find Mr. Douglas under this roof.\"\n\n\"And how long have you been playing this trick upon us, Mr. Holmes?\" said the inspector angrily. \"How long have you allowed us to waste ourselves upon a search that you knew to be an absurd one?\"\n\n\"Not one instant, my dear Mr. Mac. Only last night did I form my views of the case. As they could not be put to the proof until this evening, I invited you and your colleague to take a holiday for the day. Pray what more could I do? When I found the suit of clothes in the moat, it at once became apparent to me that the body we had found could not have been the body of Mr. John Douglas at all, but must be that of the bicyclist from Tunbridge Wells. No other conclusion was possible. Therefore I had to determine where Mr. John Douglas himself could be, and the balance of probability was that with the connivance of his wife and his friend he was concealed in a house which had such conveniences for a fugitive, and awaiting quieter times when he could make his final escape.\"\n\n\"Well, you figured it out about right,\" said Douglas approvingly. \"I thought I'd dodge your British law; for I was not sure how I stood under it, and also I saw my chance to throw these hounds once for all off my track. Mind you, from first to last I have done nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing that I would not do again; but you'll judge that for yourselves when I tell you my story. Never mind warning me, Inspector: I'm ready to stand pat upon the truth.\n\n\"I'm not going to begin at the beginning. That's all there,\" he indicated my bundle of papers, \"and a mighty queer yarn you'll find it. It all comes down to this: That there are some men that have good cause to hate me and would give their last dollar to know that they had got me. So long as I am alive and they are alive, there is no safety in this world for me. They hunted me from Chicago to California, then they chased me out of America; but when I married and settled down in this quiet spot I thought my last years were going to be peaceable.\n\n\"I never explained to my wife how things were. Why should I pull her into it? She would never have a quiet moment again; but would always be imagining trouble. I fancy she knew something, for I may have dropped a word here or a word there; but until yesterday, after you gentlemen had seen her, she never knew the rights of the matter. She told you all she knew, and so did Barker here; for on the night when this thing happened there was mighty little time for explanations. She knows everything now, and I would have been a wiser man if I had told her sooner. But it was a hard question, dear,\" he took her hand for an instant in his own, \"and I acted for the best.\n\n\"Well, gentlemen, the day before these happenings I was over in Tunbridge Wells, and I got a glimpse of a man in the street. It was only a glimpse; but I have a quick eye for these things, and I never doubted who it was. It was the worst enemy I had among them all\u2014one who has been after me like a hungry wolf after a caribou all these years. I knew there was trouble coming, and I came home and made ready for it. I guessed I'd fight through it all right on my own, my luck was a proverb in the States about '76. I never doubted that it would be with me still.\n\n\"I was on my guard all that next day, and never went out into the park. It's as well, or he'd have had the drop on me with that buckshot gun of his before ever I could draw on him. After the bridge was up\u2014my mind was always more restful when that bridge was up in the evenings\u2014I put the thing clear out of my head. I never dreamed of his getting into the house and waiting for me. But when I made my round in my dressing gown, as was my habit, I had no sooner entered the study than I scented danger. I guess when a man has had dangers in his life\u2014and I've had more than most in my time\u2014there is a kind of sixth sense that waves the red flag. I saw the signal clear enough, and yet I couldn't tell you why. Next instant I spotted a boot under the window curtain, and then I saw why plain enough.\n\n\"I'd just the one candle that was in my hand; but there was a good light from the hall lamp through the open door. I put down the candle and jumped for a hammer that I'd left on the mantel. At the same moment he sprang at me. I saw the glint of a knife, and I lashed at him with the hammer. I got him somewhere; for the knife tinkled down on the floor. He dodged round the table as quick as an eel, and a moment later he'd got his gun from under his coat. I heard him cock it; but I had got hold of it before he could fire. I had it by the barrel, and we wrestled for it all ends up for a minute or more. It was death to the man that lost his grip.\n\n\"He never lost his grip; but he got it butt downward for a moment too long. Maybe it was I that pulled the trigger. Maybe we just jolted it off between us. Anyhow, he got both barrels in the face, and there I was, staring down at all that was left of Ted Baldwin. I'd recognized him in the township, and again when he sprang for me; but his own mother wouldn't recognize him as I saw him then. I'm used to rough work; but I fairly turned sick at the sight of him.\n\n\"I was hanging on the side of the table when Barker came hurrying down. I heard my wife coming, and I ran to the door and stopped her. It was no sight for a woman. I promised I'd come to her soon. I said a word or two to Barker\u2014he took it all in at a glance and we waited for the rest to come along. But there was no sign of them. Then we understood that they could hear nothing, and that all that had happened was known only to ourselves.\n\n\"It was at that instant that the idea came to me. I was fairly dazzled by the brilliance of it. The man's sleeve had slipped up and there was the branded mark of the lodge upon his forearm. See here!\"\n\nThe man whom we had known as Douglas turned up his own coat and cuff to show a brown triangle within a circle exactly like that which we had seen upon the dead man.\n\n\"It was the sight of that which started me on it. I seemed to see it all clear at a glance. There were his height and hair and figure, about the same as my own. No one could swear to his face, poor devil! I brought down this suit of clothes, and in a quarter of an hour Barker and I had put my dressing gown on him and he lay as you found him. We tied all his things into a bundle, and I weighted them with the only weight I could find and put them through the window. The card he had meant to lay upon my body was lying beside his own.\n\n\"My rings were put on his finger; but when it came to the wedding ring,\" he held out his muscular hand, \"you can see for yourselves that I had struck the limit. I have not moved it since the day I was married, and it would have taken a file to get it off. I don't know, anyhow, that I should have cared to part with it; but if I had wanted to I couldn't. So we just had to leave that detail to take care of itself. On the other hand, I brought a bit of plaster down and put it where I am wearing one myself at this instant. You slipped up there, Mr. Holmes, clever as you are; for if you had chanced to take off that plaster you would have found no cut underneath it.\n\n\"Well, that was the situation. If I could lie low for a while and then get away where I could be joined by my 'widow' we should have a chance at last of living in peace for the rest of our lives. These devils would give me no rest so long as I was above ground; but if they saw in the papers that Baldwin had got his man, there would be an end of all my troubles. I hadn't much time to make it all clear to Barker and to my wife; but they understood enough to be able to help me. I knew all about this hiding place, so did Ames; but it never entered his head to connect it with the matter. I retired into it, and it was up to Barker to do the rest.\n\n\"I guess you can fill in for yourselves what he did. He opened the window and made the mark on the sill to give an idea of how the murderer escaped. It was a tall order, that; but as the bridge was up there was no other way. Then, when everything was fixed, he rang the bell for all he was worth. What happened afterward you know. And so, gentlemen, you can do what you please; but I've told you the truth and the whole truth, so help me God! What I ask you now is how do I stand by the English law?\"\n\nThere was a silence which was broken by Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"The English law is in the main a just law. You will get no worse than your deserts from that, Mr. Douglas. But I would ask you how did this man know that you lived here, or how to get into your house, or where to hide to get you?\"\n\n\"I know nothing of this.\"\n\nHolmes's face was very white and grave. \"The story is not over yet, I fear,\" said he. \"You may find worse dangers than the English law, or even than your enemies from America. I see trouble before you, Mr. Douglas. You'll take my advice and still be on your guard.\"\n\nAnd now, my long-suffering readers, I will ask you to come away with me for a time, far from the Sussex Manor House of Birlstone, and far also from the year of grace in which we made our eventful journey which ended with the strange story of the man who had been known as John Douglas. I wish you to journey back some twenty years in time, and westward some thousands of miles in space, that I may lay before you a singular and terrible narrative\u2014so singular and so terrible that you may find it hard to believe that even as I tell it, even so did it occur.\n\nDo not think that I intrude one story before another is finished. As you read on you will find that this is not so. And when I have detailed those distant events and you have solved this mystery of the past, we shall meet once more in those rooms on Baker Street, where this, like so many other wonderful happenings, will find its end." + }, + { + "title": "THE SCOWRERS", + "text": "[ The Man ]\n\nIt was the fourth of February in the year 1875. It had been a severe winter, and the snow lay deep in the gorges of the Gilmerton Mountains. The steam ploughs had, however, kept the railroad open, and the evening train which connects the long line of coal-mining and iron-working settlements was slowly groaning its way up the steep gradients which lead from Stagville on the plain to Vermissa, the central township which lies at the head of Vermissa Valley. From this point the track sweeps downward to Bartons Crossing, Helmdale, and the purely agricultural county of Merton. It was a single-track railroad; but at every siding\u2014and they were numerous\u2014long lines of trucks piled with coal and iron ore told of the hidden wealth which had brought a rude population and a bustling life to this most desolate corner of the United States of America.\n\nFor desolate it was! Little could the first pioneer who had traversed it have ever imagined that the fairest prairies and the most lush water pastures were valueless compared to this gloomy land of black crag and tangled forest. Above the dark and often scarcely penetrable woods upon their flanks, the high, bare crowns of the mountains, white snow, and jagged rock towered upon each flank, leaving a long, winding, tortuous valley in the centre. Up this the little train was slowly crawling.\n\nThe oil lamps had just been lit in the leading passenger car, a long, bare carriage in which some twenty or thirty people were seated. The greater number of these were workmen returning from their day's toil in the lower part of the valley. At least a dozen, by their grimed faces and the safety lanterns which they carried, proclaimed themselves miners. These sat smoking in a group and conversed in low voices, glancing occasionally at two men on the opposite side of the car, whose uniforms and badges showed them to be policemen.\n\nSeveral women of the labouring class and one or two travellers who might have been small local storekeepers made up the rest of the company, with the exception of one young man in a corner by himself. It is with this man that we are concerned. Take a good look at him; for he is worth it.\n\nHe is a fresh-complexioned, middle-sized young man, not far, one would guess, from his thirtieth year. He has large, shrewd, humorous gray eyes which twinkle inquiringly from time to time as he looks round through his spectacles at the people about him. It is easy to see that he is of a sociable and possibly simple disposition, anxious to be friendly to all men. Anyone could pick him at once as gregarious in his habits and communicative in his nature, with a quick wit and a ready smile. And yet the man who studied him more closely might discern a certain firmness of jaw and grim tightness about the lips which would warn him that there were depths beyond, and that this pleasant, brown-haired young Irishman might conceivably leave his mark for good or evil upon any society to which he was introduced.\n\nHaving made one or two tentative remarks to the nearest miner, and receiving only short, gruff replies, the traveller resigned himself to uncongenial silence, staring moodily out of the window at the fading landscape.\n\nIt was not a cheering prospect. Through the growing gloom there pulsed the red glow of the furnaces on the sides of the hills. Great heaps of slag and dumps of cinders loomed up on each side, with the high shafts of the collieries towering above them. Huddled groups of mean, wooden houses, the windows of which were beginning to outline themselves in light, were scattered here and there along the line, and the frequent halting places were crowded with their swarthy inhabitants.\n\nThe iron and coal valleys of the Vermissa district were no resorts for the leisured or the cultured. Everywhere there were stern signs of the crudest battle of life, the rude work to be done, and the rude, strong workers who did it.\n\nThe young traveller gazed out into this dismal country with a face of mingled repulsion and interest, which showed that the scene was new to him. At intervals he drew from his pocket a bulky letter to which he referred, and on the margins of which he scribbled some notes. Once from the back of his waist he produced something which one would hardly have expected to find in the possession of so mild-mannered a man. It was a navy revolver of the largest size. As he turned it slantwise to the light, the glint upon the rims of the copper shells within the drum showed that it was fully loaded. He quickly restored it to his secret pocket, but not before it had been observed by a working man who had seated himself upon the adjoining bench.\n\n\"Hullo, mate!\" said he. \"You seem heeled and ready.\"\n\nThe young man smiled with an air of embarrassment.\n\n\"Yes,\" said he, \"we need them sometimes in the place I come from.\"\n\n\"And where may that be?\"\n\n\"I'm last from Chicago.\"\n\n\"A stranger in these parts?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You may find you need it here,\" said the workman.\n\n\"Ah! is that so?\" The young man seemed interested.\n\n\"Have you heard nothing of doings hereabouts?\"\n\n\"Nothing out of the way.\"\n\n\"Why, I thought the country was full of it. You'll hear quick enough. What made you come here?\"\n\n\"I heard there was always work for a willing man.\"\n\n\"Are you a member of the union?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Then you'll get your job, I guess. Have you any friends?\"\n\n\"Not yet; but I have the means of making them.\"\n\n\"How's that, then?\"\n\n\"I am one of the Eminent Order of Freemen. There's no town without a lodge, and where there is a lodge I'll find my friends.\"\n\nThe remark had a singular effect upon his companion. He glanced round suspiciously at the others in the car. The miners were still whispering among themselves. The two police officers were dozing. He came across, seated himself close to the young traveller, and held out his hand.\n\n\"Put it there,\" he said.\n\nA hand-grip passed between the two.\n\n\"I see you speak the truth,\" said the workman. \"But it's well to make certain.\" He raised his right hand to his right eyebrow. The traveller at once raised his left hand to his left eyebrow.\n\n\"Dark nights are unpleasant,\" said the workman.\n\n\"Yes, for strangers to travel,\" the other answered.\n\n\"That's good enough. I'm Brother Scanlan, Lodge 341, Vermissa Valley. Glad to see you in these parts.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'm Brother John McMurdo, Lodge 29, Chicago. Bodymaster J. H. Scott. But I am in luck to meet a brother so early.\"\n\n\"Well, there are plenty of us about. You won't find the order more flourishing anywhere in the States than right here in Vermissa Valley. But we could do with some lads like you. I can't understand a spry man of the union finding no work to do in Chicago.\"\n\n\"I found plenty of work to do,\" said McMurdo.\n\n\"Then why did you leave?\"\n\nMcMurdo nodded towards the policemen and smiled. \"I guess those chaps would be glad to know,\" he said.\n\nScanlan groaned sympathetically. \"In trouble?\" he asked in a whisper.\n\n\"Deep.\"\n\n\"A penitentiary job?\"\n\n\"And the rest.\"\n\n\"Not a killing!\"\n\n\"It's early days to talk of such things,\" said McMurdo with the air of a man who had been surprised into saying more than he intended. \"I've my own good reasons for leaving Chicago, and let that be enough for you. Who are you that you should take it on yourself to ask such things?\" His gray eyes gleamed with sudden and dangerous anger from behind his glasses.\n\n\"All right, mate, no offense meant. The boys will think none the worse of you, whatever you may have done. Where are you bound for now?\"\n\n\"Vermissa.\"\n\n\"That's the third halt down the line. Where are you staying?\"\n\nMcMurdo took out an envelope and held it close to the murky oil lamp. \"Here is the address\u2014Jacob Shafter, Sheridan Street. It's a boarding house that was recommended by a man I knew in Chicago.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know it; but Vermissa is out of my beat. I live at Hobson's Patch, and that's here where we are drawing up. But, say, there's one bit of advice I'll give you before we part: If you're in trouble in Vermissa, go straight to the Union House and see Boss McGinty. He is the Bodymaster of Vermissa Lodge, and nothing can happen in these parts unless Black Jack McGinty wants it. So long, mate! Maybe we'll meet in lodge one of these evenings. But mind my words: If you are in trouble, go to Boss McGinty\"\n\nScanlan descended, and McMurdo was left once again to his thoughts. Night had now fallen, and the flames of the frequent furnaces were roaring and leaping in the darkness. Against their lurid background dark figures were bending and straining, twisting and turning, with the motion of winch or of windlass, to the rhythm of an eternal clank and roar.\n\n\"I guess hell must look something like that,\" said a voice.\n\nMcMurdo turned and saw that one of the policemen had shifted in his seat and was staring out into the fiery waste.\n\n\"For that matter,\" said the other policeman, \"I allow that hell must be something like that. If there are worse devils down yonder than some we could name, it's more than I'd expect. I guess you are new to this part, young man?\"\n\n\"Well, what if I am?\" McMurdo answered in a surly voice.\n\n\"Just this, mister, that I should advise you to be careful in choosing your friends. I don't think I'd begin with Mike Scanlan or his gang if I were you.\"\n\n\"What the hell is it to you who are my friends?\" roared McMurdo in a voice which brought every head in the carriage round to witness the altercation. \"Did I ask you for your advice, or did you think me such a sucker that I couldn't move without it? You speak when you are spoken to, and by the Lord you'd have to wait a long time if it was me!\" He thrust out his face and grinned at the patrolmen like a snarling dog.\n\nThe two policemen, heavy, good-natured men, were taken aback by the extraordinary vehemence with which their friendly advances had been rejected.\n\n\"No offense, stranger,\" said one. \"It was a warning for your own good, seeing that you are, by your own showing, new to the place.\"\n\n\"I'm new to the place; but I'm not new to you and your kind!\" cried McMurdo in cold fury. \"I guess you're the same in all places, shoving your advice in when nobody asks for it.\"\n\n\"Maybe we'll see more of you before very long,\" said one of the patrolmen with a grin. \"You're a real hand-picked one, if I am a judge.\"\n\n\"I was thinking the same,\" remarked the other. \"I guess we may meet again.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of you, and don't you think it!\" cried McMurdo. \"My name's Jack McMurdo\u2014see? If you want me, you'll find me at Jacob Shafter's on Sheridan Street, Vermissa; so I'm not hiding from you, am I? Day or night I dare to look the like of you in the face\u2014don't make any mistake about that!\"\n\nThere was a murmur of sympathy and admiration from the miners at the dauntless demeanour of the newcomer, while the two policemen shrugged their shoulders and renewed a conversation between themselves.\n\nA few minutes later the train ran into the ill-lit station, and there was a general clearing; for Vermissa was by far the largest town on the line. McMurdo picked up his leather gripsack and was about to start off into the darkness, when one of the miners accosted him.\n\n\"By Gar, mate! you know how to speak to the cops,\" he said in a voice, of awe. \"It was grand to hear you. Let me carry your grip and show you the road. I'm passing Shafter's on the way to my own shack.\"\n\nThere was a chorus of friendly \"Good-nights\" from the other miners as they passed from the platform. Before ever he had set foot in it, McMurdo the turbulent had become a character in Vermissa.\n\nThe country had been a place of terror; but the town was in its way even more depressing. Down that long valley there was at least a certain gloomy grandeur in the huge fires and the clouds of drifting smoke, while the strength and industry of man found fitting monuments in the hills which he had spilled by the side of his monstrous excavations. But the town showed a dead level of mean ugliness and squalor. The broad street was churned up by the traffic into a horrible rutted paste of muddy snow. The sidewalks were narrow and uneven. The numerous gas-lamps served only to show more clearly a long line of wooden houses, each with its veranda facing the street, unkempt and dirty.\n\nAs they approached the centre of the town the scene was brightened by a row of well-lit stores, and even more by a cluster of saloons and gaming houses, in which the miners spent their hard-earned but generous wages.\n\n\"That's the Union House,\" said the guide, pointing to one saloon which rose almost to the dignity of being a hotel. \"Jack McGinty is the boss there.\"\n\n\"What sort of a man is he?\" McMurdo asked.\n\n\"What! have you never heard of the boss?\"\n\n\"How could I have heard of him when you know that I am a stranger in these parts?\"\n\n\"Well, I thought his name was known clear across the country. It's been in the papers often enough.\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"Well,\" the miner lowered his voice\u2014\"over the affairs.\"\n\n\"What affairs?\"\n\n\"Good Lord, mister! you are queer, if I must say it without offense. There's only one set of affairs that you'll hear of in these parts, and that's the affairs of the Scowrers.\"\n\n\"Why, I seem to have read of the Scowrers in Chicago. A gang of murderers, are they not?\"\n\n\"Hush, on your life!\" cried the miner, standing still in alarm, and gazing in amazement at his companion. \"Man, you won't live long in these parts if you speak in the open street like that. Many a man has had the life beaten out of him for less.\"\n\n\"Well, I know nothing about them. It's only what I have read.\"\n\n\"And I'm not saying that you have not read the truth.\" The man looked nervously round him as he spoke, peering into the shadows as if he feared to see some lurking danger. \"If killing is murder, then God knows there is murder and to spare. But don't you dare to breathe the name of Jack McGinty in connection with it, stranger; for every whisper goes back to him, and he is not one that is likely to let it pass. Now, that's the house you're after, that one standing back from the street. You'll find old Jacob Shafter that runs it as honest a man as lives in this township.\"\n\n\"I thank you,\" said McMurdo, and shaking hands with his new acquaintance he plodded, gripsack in hand, up the path which led to the dwelling house, at the door of which he gave a resounding knock.\n\nIt was opened at once by someone very different from what he had expected. It was a woman, young and singularly beautiful. She was of the German type, blonde and fair-haired, with the piquant contrast of a pair of beautiful dark eyes with which she surveyed the stranger with surprise and a pleasing embarrassment which brought a wave of colour over her pale face. Framed in the bright light of the open doorway, it seemed to McMurdo that he had never seen a more beautiful picture; the more attractive for its contrast with the sordid and gloomy surroundings. A lovely violet growing upon one of those black slag-heaps of the mines would not have seemed more surprising. So entranced was he that he stood staring without a word, and it was she who broke the silence.\n\n\"I thought it was father,\" said she with a pleasing little touch of a German accent. \"Did you come to see him? He is downtown. I expect him back every minute.\"\n\nMcMurdo continued to gaze at her in open admiration until her eyes dropped in confusion before this masterful visitor.\n\n\"No, miss,\" he said at last, \"I'm in no hurry to see him. But your house was recommended to me for board. I thought it might suit me\u2014and now I know it will.\"\n\n\"You are quick to make up your mind,\" said she with a smile.\n\n\"Anyone but a blind man could do as much,\" the other answered.\n\nShe laughed at the compliment. \"Come right in, sir,\" she said. \"I'm Miss Ettie Shafter, Mr. Shafter's daughter. My mother's dead, and I run the house. You can sit down by the stove in the front room until father comes along\u2014Ah, here he is! So you can fix things with him right away.\"\n\nA heavy, elderly man came plodding up the path. In a few words McMurdo explained his business. A man of the name of Murphy had given him the address in Chicago. He in turn had had it from someone else. Old Shafter was quite ready. The stranger made no bones about terms, agreed at once to every condition, and was apparently fairly flush of money. For seven dollars a week paid in advance he was to have board and lodging.\n\nSo it was that McMurdo, the self-confessed fugitive from justice, took up his abode under the roof of the Shafters, the first step which was to lead to so long and dark a train of events, ending in a far distant land." + }, + { + "title": "The Bodymaster", + "text": "McMurdo was a man who made his mark quickly. Wherever he was the folk around soon knew it. Within a week he had become infinitely the most important person at Shafter's. There were ten or a dozen boarders there; but they were honest foremen or commonplace clerks from the stores, of a very different calibre from the young Irishman. Of an evening when they gathered together his joke was always the readiest, his conversation the brightest, and his song the best. He was a born boon companion, with a magnetism which drew good humour from all around him.\n\nAnd yet he showed again and again, as he had shown in the railway carriage, a capacity for sudden, fierce anger, which compelled the respect and even the fear of those who met him. For the law, too, and all who were connected with it, he exhibited a bitter contempt which delighted some and alarmed others of his fellow boarders.\n\nFrom the first he made it evident, by his open admiration, that the daughter of the house had won his heart from the instant that he had set eyes upon her beauty and her grace. He was no backward suitor. On the second day he told her that he loved her, and from then onward he repeated the same story with an absolute disregard of what she might say to discourage him.\n\n\"Someone else?\" he would cry. \"Well, the worse luck for someone else! Let him look out for himself! Am I to lose my life's chance and all my heart's desire for someone else? You can keep on saying no, Ettie: the day will come when you will say yes, and I'm young enough to wait.\"\n\nHe was a dangerous suitor, with his glib Irish tongue, and his pretty, coaxing ways. There was about him also that glamour of experience and of mystery which attracts a woman's interest, and finally her love. He could talk of the sweet valleys of County Monaghan from which he came, of the lovely, distant island, the low hills and green meadows of which seemed the more beautiful when imagination viewed them from this place of grime and snow.\n\nThen he was versed in the life of the cities of the North, of Detroit, and the lumber camps of Michigan, and finally of Chicago, where he had worked in a planing mill. And afterwards came the hint of romance, the feeling that strange things had happened to him in that great city, so strange and so intimate that they might not be spoken of. He spoke wistfully of a sudden leaving, a breaking of old ties, a flight into a strange world, ending in this dreary valley, and Ettie listened, her dark eyes gleaming with pity and with sympathy\u2014those two qualities which may turn so rapidly and so naturally to love.\n\nMcMurdo had obtained a temporary job as bookkeeper; for he was a well-educated man. This kept him out most of the day, and he had not found occasion yet to report himself to the head of the lodge of the Eminent Order of Freemen. He was reminded of his omission, however, by a visit one evening from Mike Scanlan, the fellow member whom he had met in the train. Scanlan, the small, sharp-faced, nervous, black-eyed man, seemed glad to see him once more. After a glass or two of whisky he broached the object of his visit.\n\n\"Say, McMurdo,\" said he, \"I remembered your address, so I made bold to call. I'm surprised that you've not reported to the Bodymaster. Why haven't you seen Boss McGinty yet?\"\n\n\"Well, I had to find a job. I have been busy.\"\n\n\"You must find time for him if you have none for anything else. Good Lord, man! you're a fool not to have been down to the Union House and registered your name the first morning after you came here! If you run against him\u2014well, you mustn't, that's all!\"\n\nMcMurdo showed mild surprise. \"I've been a member of the lodge for over two years, Scanlan, but I never heard that duties were so pressing as all that.\"\n\n\"Maybe not in Chicago.\"\n\n\"Well, it's the same society here.\"\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\nScanlan looked at him long and fixedly. There was something sinister in his eyes.\n\n\"Isn't it?\"\n\n\"You'll tell me that in a month's time. I hear you had a talk with the patrolmen after I left the train.\"\n\n\"How did you know that?\"\n\n\"Oh, it got about\u2014things do get about for good and for bad in this district.\"\n\n\"Well, yes. I told the hounds what I thought of them.\"\n\n\"By the Lord, you'll be a man after McGinty's heart!\"\n\n\"What, does he hate the police too?\"\n\nScanlan burst out laughing. \"You go and see him, my lad,\" said he as he took his leave. \"It's not the police but you that he'll hate if you don't! Now, take a friend's advice and go at once!\"\n\nIt chanced that on the same evening McMurdo had another more pressing interview which urged him in the same direction. It may have been that his attentions to Ettie had been more evident than before, or that they had gradually obtruded themselves into the slow mind of his good German host; but, whatever the cause, the boarding-house keeper beckoned the young man into his private room and started on the subject without any circumlocution.\n\n\"It seems to me, mister,\" said he, \"that you are gettin' set on my Ettie. Ain't that so, or am I wrong?\"\n\n\"Yes, that is so,\" the young man answered.\n\n\"Vell, I vant to tell you right now that it ain't no manner of use. There's someone slipped in afore you.\"\n\n\"She told me so.\"\n\n\"Vell, you can lay that she told you truth. But did she tell you who it vas?\"\n\n\"No, I asked her; but she wouldn't tell.\"\n\n\"I dare say not, the leetle baggage! Perhaps she did not vish to frighten you avay.\"\n\n\"Frighten!\" McMurdo was on fire in a moment.\n\n\"Ah, yes, my friend! You need not be ashamed to be frightened of him. It is Teddy Baldwin.\"\n\n\"And who the devil is he?\"\n\n\"He is a boss of Scowrers.\"\n\n\"Scowrers! I've heard of them before. It's Scowrers here and Scowrers there, and always in a whisper! What are you all afraid of? Who are the Scowrers?\"\n\nThe boarding-house keeper instinctively sank his voice, as everyone did who talked about that terrible society. \"The Scowrers,\" said he, \"are the Eminent Order of Freemen!\"\n\nThe young man stared. \"Why, I am a member of that order myself.\"\n\n\"You! I vould never have had you in my house if I had known it\u2014not if you vere to pay me a hundred dollar a veek.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with the order? It's for charity and good fellowship. The rules say so.\"\n\n\"Maybe in some places. Not here!\"\n\n\"What is it here?\"\n\n\"It's a murder society, that's vat it is.\"\n\nMcMurdo laughed incredulously. \"How can you prove that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Prove it! Are there not fifty murders to prove it? Vat about Milman and Van Shorst, and the Nicholson family, and old Mr. Hyam, and little Billy James, and the others? Prove it! Is there a man or a voman in this valley vat does not know it?\"\n\n\"See here!\" said McMurdo earnestly. \"I want you to take back what you've said, or else make it good. One or the other you must do before I quit this room. Put yourself in my place. Here am I, a stranger in the town. I belong to a society that I know only as an innocent one. You'll find it through the length and breadth of the States; but always as an innocent one. Now, when I am counting upon joining it here, you tell me that it is the same as a murder society called the Scowrers. I guess you owe me either an apology or else an explanation, Mr. Shafter.\"\n\n\"I can but tell you vat the whole vorld knows, mister. The bosses of the one are the bosses of the other. If you offend the one, it is the other vat vill strike you. We have proved it too often.\"\n\n\"That's just gossip\u2014I want proof!\" said McMurdo.\n\n\"If you live here long you vill get your proof. But I forget that you are yourself one of them. You vill soon be as bad as the rest. But you vill find other lodgings, mister. I cannot have you here. Is it not bad enough that one of these people come courting my Ettie, and that I dare not turn him down, but that I should have another for my boarder? Yes, indeed, you shall not sleep here after to-night!\"\n\nMcMurdo found himself under sentence of banishment both from his comfortable quarters and from the girl whom he loved. He found her alone in the sitting-room that same evening, and he poured his troubles into her ear.\n\n\"Sure, your father is after giving me notice,\" he said. \"It's little I would care if it was just my room, but indeed, Ettie, though it's only a week that I've known you, you are the very breath of life to me, and I can't live without you!\"\n\n\"Oh, hush, Mr. McMurdo, don't speak so!\" said the girl. \"I have told you, have I not, that you are too late? There is another, and if I have not promised to marry him at once, at least I can promise no one else.\"\n\n\"Suppose I had been first, Ettie, would I have had a chance?\"\n\nThe girl sank her face into her hands. \"I wish to heaven that you had been first!\" she sobbed.\n\nMcMurdo was down on his knees before her in an instant. \"For God's sake, Ettie, let it stand at that!\" he cried. \"Will you ruin your life and my own for the sake of this promise? Follow your heart, acushla! 'Tis a safer guide than any promise before you knew what it was that you were saying.\"\n\nHe had seized Ettie's white hand between his own strong brown ones.\n\n\"Say that you will be mine, and we will face it out together!\"\n\n\"Not here?\"\n\n\"Yes, here.\"\n\n\"No, no, Jack!\" His arms were round her now. \"It could not be here. Could you take me away?\"\n\nA struggle passed for a moment over McMurdo's face; but it ended by setting like granite. \"No, here,\" he said. \"I'll hold you against the world, Ettie, right here where we are!\"\n\n\"Why should we not leave together?\"\n\n\"No, Ettie, I can't leave here.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"I'd never hold my head up again if I felt that I had been driven out. Besides, what is there to be afraid of? Are we not free folks in a free country? If you love me, and I you, who will dare to come between?\"\n\n\"You don't know, Jack. You've been here too short a time. You don't know this Baldwin. You don't know McGinty and his Scowrers.\"\n\n\"No, I don't know them, and I don't fear them, and I don't believe in them!\" said McMurdo. \"I've lived among rough men, my darling, and instead of fearing them it has always ended that they have feared me\u2014always, Ettie. It's mad on the face of it! If these men, as your father says, have done crime after crime in the valley, and if everyone knows them by name, how comes it that none are brought to justice? You answer me that, Ettie!\"\n\n\"Because no witness dares to appear against them. He would not live a month if he did. Also because they have always their own men to swear that the accused one was far from the scene of the crime. But surely, Jack, you must have read all this. I had understood that every paper in the United States was writing about it.\"\n\n\"Well, I have read something, it is true; but I had thought it was a story. Maybe these men have some reason in what they do. Maybe they are wronged and have no other way to help themselves.\"\n\n\"Oh, Jack, don't let me hear you speak so! That is how he speaks\u2014the other one!\"\n\n\"Baldwin\u2014he speaks like that, does he?\"\n\n\"And that is why I loathe him so. Oh, Jack, now I can tell you the truth. I loathe him with all my heart; but I fear him also. I fear him for myself; but above all I fear him for father. I know that some great sorrow would come upon us if I dared to say what I really felt. That is why I have put him off with half-promises. It was in real truth our only hope. But if you would fly with me, Jack, we could take father with us and live forever far from the power of these wicked men.\"\n\nAgain there was the struggle upon McMurdo's face, and again it set like granite. \"No harm shall come to you, Ettie\u2014nor to your father either. As to wicked men, I expect you may find that I am as bad as the worst of them before we're through.\"\n\n\"No, no, Jack! I would trust you anywhere.\"\n\nMcMurdo laughed bitterly. \"Good Lord! how little you know of me! Your innocent soul, my darling, could not even guess what is passing in mine. But, hullo, who's the visitor?\"\n\nThe door had opened suddenly, and a young fellow came swaggering in with the air of one who is the master. He was a handsome, dashing young man of about the same age and build as McMurdo himself. Under his broad-brimmed black felt hat, which he had not troubled to remove, a handsome face with fierce, domineering eyes and a curved hawk-bill of a nose looked savagely at the pair who sat by the stove.\n\nEttie had jumped to her feet full of confusion and alarm. \"I'm glad to see you, Mr. Baldwin,\" said she. \"You're earlier than I had thought. Come and sit down.\"\n\nBaldwin stood with his hands on his hips looking at McMurdo. \"Who is this?\" he asked curtly.\n\n\"It's a friend of mine, Mr. Baldwin, a new boarder here. Mr. McMurdo, may I introduce you to Mr. Baldwin?\"\n\nThe young men nodded in surly fashion to each other.\n\n\"Maybe Miss Ettie has told you how it is with us?\" said Baldwin.\n\n\"I didn't understand that there was any relation between you.\"\n\n\"Didn't you? Well, you can understand it now. You can take it from me that this young lady is mine, and you'll find it a very fine evening for a walk.\"\n\n\"Thank you, I am in no humour for a walk.\"\n\n\"Aren't you?\" The man's savage eyes were blazing with anger. \"Maybe you are in a humour for a fight, Mr. Boarder!\"\n\n\"That I am!\" cried McMurdo, springing to his feet. \"You never said a more welcome word.\"\n\n\"For God's sake, Jack! Oh, for God's sake!\" cried poor, distracted Ettie. \"Oh, Jack, Jack, he will hurt you!\"\n\n\"Oh, it's Jack, is it?\" said Baldwin with an oath. \"You've come to that already, have you?\"\n\n\"Oh, Ted, be reasonable\u2014be kind! For my sake, Ted, if ever you loved me, be big-hearted and forgiving!\"\n\n\"I think, Ettie, that if you were to leave us alone we could get this thing settled,\" said McMurdo quietly. \"Or maybe, Mr. Baldwin, you will take a turn down the street with me. It's a fine evening, and there's some open ground beyond the next block.\"\n\n\"I'll get even with you without needing to dirty my hands,\" said his enemy. \"You'll wish you had never set foot in this house before I am through with you!\"\n\n\"No time like the present,\" cried McMurdo.\n\n\"I'll choose my own time, mister. You can leave the time to me. See here!\" He suddenly rolled up his sleeve and showed upon his forearm a peculiar sign which appeared to have been branded there. It was a circle with a triangle within it. \"D'you know what that means?\"\n\n\"I neither know nor care!\"\n\n\"Well, you will know, I'll promise you that. You won't be much older, either. Perhaps Miss Ettie can tell you something about it. As to you, Ettie, you'll come back to me on your knees\u2014d'ye hear, girl?\u2014on your knees\u2014and then I'll tell you what your punishment may be. You've sowed\u2014and by the Lord, I'll see that you reap!\" He glanced at them both in fury. Then he turned upon his heel, and an instant later the outer door had banged behind him.\n\nFor a few moments McMurdo and the girl stood in silence. Then she threw her arms around him.\n\n\"Oh, Jack, how brave you were! But it is no use, you must fly! To night\u2014Jack\u2014to-night! It's your only hope. He will have your life. I read it in his horrible eyes. What chance have you against a dozen of them, with Boss McGinty and all the power of the lodge behind them?\"\n\nMcMurdo disengaged her hands, kissed her, and gently pushed her back into a chair. \"There, acushla, there! Don't be disturbed or fear for me. I'm a Freeman myself. I'm after telling your father about it. Maybe I am no better than the others; so don't make a saint of me. Perhaps you hate me too, now that I've told you as much?\"\n\n\"Hate you, Jack? While life lasts I could never do that! I've heard that there is no harm in being a Freeman anywhere but here; so why should I think the worse of you for that? But if you are a Freeman, Jack, why should you not go down and make a friend of Boss McGinty? Oh, hurry, Jack, hurry! Get your word in first, or the hounds will be on your trail.\"\n\n\"I was thinking the same thing,\" said McMurdo. \"I'll go right now and fix it. You can tell your father that I'll sleep here to-night and find some other quarters in the morning.\"\n\nThe bar of McGinty's saloon was crowded as usual; for it was the favourite loafing place of all the rougher elements of the town. The man was popular; for he had a rough, jovial disposition which formed a mask, covering a great deal which lay behind it. But apart from this popularity, the fear in which he was held throughout the township, and indeed down the whole thirty miles of the valley and past the mountains on each side of it, was enough in itself to fill his bar; for none could afford to neglect his good will.\n\nBesides those secret powers which it was universally believed that he exercised in so pitiless a fashion, he was a high public official, a municipal councillor, and a commissioner of roads, elected to the office through the votes of the ruffians who in turn expected to receive favours at his hands. Assessments and taxes were enormous; the public works were notoriously neglected, the accounts were slurred over by bribed auditors, and the decent citizen was terrorized into paying public blackmail, and holding his tongue lest some worse thing befall him.\n\nThus it was that, year by year, Boss McGinty's diamond pins became more obtrusive, his gold chains more weighty across a more gorgeous vest, and his saloon stretched farther and farther, until it threatened to absorb one whole side of the Market Square.\n\nMcMurdo pushed open the swinging door of the saloon and made his way amid the crowd of men within, through an atmosphere blurred with tobacco smoke and heavy with the smell of spirits. The place was brilliantly lighted, and the huge, heavily gilt minors upon every wall reflected and multiplied the garish illumination. There were several bartenders in their shirt sleeves, hard at work mixing drinks for the loungers who fringed the broad, brass-trimmed counter.\n\nAt the far end, with his body resting upon the bar and a cigar stuck at an acute angle from the corner of his mouth, stood a tall, strong, heavily built man who could be none other than the famous McGinty himself. He was a black-maned giant, bearded to the cheek-bones, and with a shock of raven hair which fell to his collar. His complexion was as swarthy as that of an Italian, and his eyes were of a strange dead black, which, combined with a slight squint, gave them a particularly sinister appearance.\n\nAll else in the man\u2014his noble proportions, his fine features, and his frank bearing\u2014fitted in with that jovial, man-to-man manner which he affected. Here, one would say, is a bluff, honest fellow, whose heart would be sound however rude his outspoken words might seem. It was only when those dead, dark eyes, deep and remorseless, were turned upon a man that he shrank within himself, feeling that he was face to face with an infinite possibility of latent evil, with a strength and courage and cunning behind it which made it a thousand times more deadly.\n\nHaving had a good look at his man, McMurdo elbowed his way forward with his usual careless audacity, and pushed himself through the little group of courtiers who were fawning upon the powerful boss, laughing uproariously at the smallest of his jokes. The young stranger's bold gray eyes looked back fearlessly through their glasses at the deadly black ones which turned sharply upon him.\n\n\"Well, young man, I can't call your face to mind.\"\n\n\"I'm new here, Mr. McGinty.\"\n\n\"You are not so new that you can't give a gentleman his proper title.\"\n\n\"He's Councillor McGinty, young man,\" said a voice from the group.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Councillor. I'm strange to the ways of the place. But I was advised to see you.\"\n\n\"Well, you see me. This is all there is. What d'you think of me?\"\n\n\"Well, it's early days. If your heart is as big as your body, and your soul as fine as your face, then I'd ask for nothing better,\" said McMurdo.\n\n\"By Gar! you've got an Irish tongue in your head anyhow,\" cried the saloon-keeper, not quite certain whether to humour this audacious visitor or to stand upon his dignity.\n\n\"So you are good enough to pass my appearance?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said McMurdo.\n\n\"And you were told to see me?\"\n\n\"I was.\"\n\n\"And who told you?\"\n\n\"Brother Scanlan of Lodge 341, Vermissa. I drink your health, Councillor, and to our better acquaintance.\" He raised a glass with which he had been served to his lips and elevated his little finger as he drank it.\n\nMcGinty, who had been watching him narrowly, raised his thick black eyebrows. \"Oh, it's like that, is it?\" said he. \"I'll have to look a bit closer into this, Mister\u2014\"\n\n\"McMurdo.\"\n\n\"A bit closer, Mr. McMurdo; for we don't take folk on trust in these parts, nor believe all we're told neither. Come in here for a moment, behind the bar.\"\n\nThere was a small room there, lined with barrels. McGinty carefully closed the door, and then seated himself on one of them, biting thoughtfully on his cigar and surveying his companion with those disquieting eyes. For a couple of minutes he sat in complete silence. McMurdo bore the inspection cheerfully, one hand in his coat pocket, the other twisting his brown moustache. Suddenly McGinty stooped and produced a wicked-looking revolver.\n\n\"See here, my joker,\" said he, \"if I thought you were playing any game on us, it would be short work for you.\"\n\n\"This is a strange welcome,\" McMurdo answered with some dignity, \"for the Bodymaster of a lodge of Freemen to give to a stranger brother.\"\n\n\"Ay, but it's just that same that you have to prove,\" said McGinty, \"and God help you if you fail! Where were you made?\"\n\n\"Lodge 29, Chicago.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"June 24, 1872.\"\n\n\"What Bodymaster?\"\n\n\"James H. Scott.\"\n\n\"Who is your district ruler?\"\n\n\"Bartholomew Wilson.\"\n\n\"Hum! You seem glib enough in your tests. What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Working, the same as you\u2014but a poorer job.\"\n\n\"You have your back answer quick enough.\"\n\n\"Yes, I was always quick of speech.\"\n\n\"Are you quick of action?\"\n\n\"I have had that name among those that knew me best.\"\n\n\"Well, we may try you sooner than you think. Have you heard anything of the lodge in these parts?\"\n\n\"I've heard that it takes a man to be a brother.\"\n\n\"True for you, Mr. McMurdo. Why did you leave Chicago?\"\n\n\"I'm damned if I tell you that!\"\n\nMcGinty opened his eyes. He was not used to being answered in such fashion, and it amused him. \"Why won't you tell me?\"\n\n\"Because no brother may tell another a lie.\"\n\n\"Then the truth is too bad to tell?\"\n\n\"You can put it that way if you like.\"\n\n\"See here, mister, you can't expect me, as Bodymaster, to pass into the lodge a man for whose past he can't answer.\"\n\nMcMurdo looked puzzled. Then he took a worn newspaper cutting from an inner pocket.\n\n\"You wouldn't squeal on a fellow?\" said he.\n\n\"I'll wipe my hand across your face if you say such words to me!\" cried McGinty hotly.\n\n\"You are right, Councillor,\" said McMurdo meekly. \"I should apologize. I spoke without thought. Well, I know that I am safe in your hands. Look at that clipping.\"\n\nMcGinty glanced his eyes over the account of the shooting of one Jonas Pinto, in the Lake Saloon, Market Street, Chicago, in the New Year week of 1874.\n\n\"Your work?\" he asked, as he handed back the paper.\n\nMcMurdo nodded.\n\n\"Why did you shoot him?\"\n\n\"I was helping Uncle Sam to make dollars. Maybe mine were not as good gold as his, but they looked as well and were cheaper to make. This man Pinto helped me to shove the queer\u2014\"\n\n\"To do what?\"\n\n\"Well, it means to pass the dollars out into circulation. Then he said he would split. Maybe he did split. I didn't wait to see. I just killed him and lighted out for the coal country.\"\n\n\"Why the coal country?\"\n\n\"'Cause I'd read in the papers that they weren't too particular in those parts.\"\n\nMcGinty laughed. \"You were first a coiner and then a murderer, and you came to these parts because you thought you'd be welcome.\"\n\n\"That's about the size of it,\" McMurdo answered.\n\n\"Well, I guess you'll go far. Say, can you make those dollars yet?\"\n\nMcMurdo took half a dozen from his pocket. \"Those never passed the Philadelphia mint,\" said he.\n\n\"You don't say!\" McGinty held them to the light in his enormous hand, which was hairy as a gorilla's. \"I can see no difference. Gar! you'll be a mighty useful brother, I'm thinking! We can do with a bad man or two among us, Friend McMurdo: for there are times when we have to take our own part. We'd soon be against the wall if we didn't shove back at those that were pushing us.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess I'll do my share of shoving with the rest of the boys.\"\n\n\"You seem to have a good nerve. You didn't squirm when I shoved this gun at you.\"\n\n\"It was not me that was in danger.\"\n\n\"Who then?\"\n\n\"It was you, Councillor.\" McMurdo drew a cocked pistol from the side pocket of his pea-jacket. \"I was covering you all the time. I guess my shot would have been as quick as yours.\"\n\n\"By Gar!\" McGinty flushed an angry red and then burst into a roar of laughter. \"Say, we've had no such holy terror come to hand this many a year. I reckon the lodge will learn to be proud of you.... Well, what the hell do you want? And can't I speak alone with a gentleman for five minutes but you must butt in on us?\"\n\nThe bartender stood abashed. \"I'm sorry, Councillor, but it's Ted Baldwin. He says he must see you this very minute.\"\n\nThe message was unnecessary; for the set, cruel face of the man himself was looking over the servant's shoulder. He pushed the bartender out and closed the door on him.\n\n\"So,\" said he with a furious glance at McMurdo, \"you got here first, did you? I've a word to say to you, Councillor, about this man.\"\n\n\"Then say it here and now before my face,\" cried McMurdo.\n\n\"I'll say it at my own time, in my own way.\"\n\n\"Tut! Tut!\" said McGinty, getting off his barrel. \"This will never do. We have a new brother here, Baldwin, and it's not for us to greet him in such fashion. Hold out your hand, man, and make it up!\"\n\n\"Never!\" cried Baldwin in a fury.\n\n\"I've offered to fight him if he thinks I have wronged him,\" said McMurdo. \"I'll fight him with fists, or, if that won't satisfy him, I'll fight him any other way he chooses. Now, I'll leave it to you, Councillor, to judge between us as a Bodymaster should.\"\n\n\"What is it, then?\"\n\n\"A young lady. She's free to choose for herself.\"\n\n\"Is she?\" cried Baldwin.\n\n\"As between two brothers of the lodge I should say that she was,\" said the Boss.\n\n\"Oh, that's your ruling, is it?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is, Ted Baldwin,\" said McGinty, with a wicked stare. \"Is it you that would dispute it?\"\n\n\"You would throw over one that has stood by you this five years in favour of a man that you never saw before in your life? You're not Bodymaster for life, Jack McGinty, and by God! when next it comes to a vote\u2014\"\n\nThe Councillor sprang at him like a tiger. His hand closed round the other's neck, and he hurled him back across one of the barrels. In his mad fury he would have squeezed the life out of him if McMurdo had not interfered.\n\n\"Easy, Councillor! For heaven's sake, go easy!\" he cried, as he dragged him back.\n\nMcGinty released his hold, and Baldwin, cowed and shaken, gasping for breath, and shivering in every limb, as one who has looked over the very edge of death, sat up on the barrel over which he had been hurled.\n\n\"You've been asking for it this many a day, Ted Baldwin\u2014now you've got it!\" cried McGinty, his huge chest rising and falling. \"Maybe you think if I was voted down from Bodymaster you would find yourself in my shoes. It's for the lodge to say that. But so long as I am the chief I'll have no man lift his voice against me or my rulings.\"\n\n\"I have nothing against you,\" mumbled Baldwin, feeling his throat.\n\n\"Well, then,\" cried the other, relapsing in a moment into a bluff joviality, \"we are all good friends again and there's an end of the matter.\"\n\nHe took a bottle of champagne down from the shelf and twisted out the cork.\n\n\"See now,\" he continued, as he filled three high glasses. \"Let us drink the quarrelling toast of the lodge. After that, as you know, there can be no bad blood between us. Now, then, the left hand on the apple of my throat. I say to you, Ted Baldwin, what is the offense, sir?\"\n\n\"The clouds are heavy,\" answered Baldwin.\n\n\"But they will forever brighten.\"\n\n\"And this I swear!\"\n\nThe men drank their glasses, and the same ceremony was performed between Baldwin and McMurdo.\n\n\"There!\" cried McGinty, rubbing his hands. \"That's the end of the black blood. You come under lodge discipline if it goes further, and that's a heavy hand in these parts, as Brother Baldwin knows\u2014and as you will damn soon find out, Brother McMurdo, if you ask for trouble!\"\n\n\"Faith, I'd be slow to do that,\" said McMurdo. He held out his hand to Baldwin. \"I'm quick to quarrel and quick to forgive. It's my hot Irish blood, they tell me. But it's over for me, and I bear no grudge.\"\n\nBaldwin had to take the proffered hand, for the baleful eye of the terrible Boss was upon him. But his sullen face showed how little the words of the other had moved him.\n\nMcGinty clapped them both on the shoulders. \"Tut! These girls! These girls!\" he cried. \"To think that the same petticoats should come between two of my boys! It's the devil's own luck! Well, it's the colleen inside of them that must settle the question; for it's outside the jurisdiction of a Bodymaster\u2014and the Lord be praised for that! We have enough on us, without the women as well. You'll have to be affiliated to Lodge 341, Brother McMurdo. We have our own ways and methods, different from Chicago. Saturday night is our meeting, and if you come then, we'll make you free forever of the Vermissa Valley.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Lodge 341, Vermissa", + "text": "On the day following the evening which had contained so many exciting events, McMurdo moved his lodgings from old Jacob Shafter's and took up his quarters at the Widow MacNamara's on the extreme outskirts of the town. Scanlan, his original acquaintance aboard the train, had occasion shortly afterwards to move into Vermissa, and the two lodged together. There was no other boarder, and the hostess was an easy-going old Irishwoman who left them to themselves; so that they had a freedom for speech and action welcome to men who had secrets in common.\n\nShafter had relented to the extent of letting McMurdo come to his meals there when he liked; so that his intercourse with Ettie was by no means broken. On the contrary, it drew closer and more intimate as the weeks went by.\n\nIn his bedroom at his new abode McMurdo felt it safe to take out the coining moulds, and under many a pledge of secrecy a number of brothers from the lodge were allowed to come in and see them, each carrying away in his pocket some examples of the false money, so cunningly struck that there was never the slightest difficulty or danger in passing it. Why, with such a wonderful art at his command, McMurdo should condescend to work at all was a perpetual mystery to his companions; though he made it clear to anyone who asked him that if he lived without any visible means it would very quickly bring the police upon his track.\n\nOne policeman was indeed after him already; but the incident, as luck would have it, did the adventurer a great deal more good than harm. After the first introduction there were few evenings when he did not find his way to McGinty's saloon, there to make closer acquaintance with \"the boys,\" which was the jovial title by which the dangerous gang who infested the place were known to one another. His dashing manner and fearlessness of speech made him a favourite with them all; while the rapid and scientific way in which he polished off his antagonist in an \"all in\" bar-room scrap earned the respect of that rough community. Another incident, however, raised him even higher in their estimation.\n\nJust at the crowded hour one night, the door opened and a man entered with the quiet blue uniform and peaked cap of the mine police. This was a special body raised by the railways and colliery owners to supplement the efforts of the ordinary civil police, who were perfectly helpless in the face of the organized ruffianism which terrorized the district. There was a hush as he entered, and many a curious glance was cast at him; but the relations between policemen and criminals are peculiar in some parts of the States, and McGinty himself, standing behind his counter, showed no surprise when the policeman enrolled himself among his customers.\n\n\"A straight whisky, for the night is bitter,\" said the police officer. \"I don't think we have met before, Councillor?\"\n\n\"You'll be the new captain?\" said McGinty.\n\n\"That's so. We're looking to you, Councillor, and to the other leading citizens, to help us in upholding law and order in this township. Captain Marvin is my name.\"\n\n\"We'd do better without you, Captain Marvin,\" said McGinty coldly; \"for we have our own police of the township, and no need for any imported goods. What are you but the paid tool of the capitalists, hired by them to club or shoot your poorer fellow citizen?\"\n\n\"Well, well, we won't argue about that,\" said the police officer good-humouredly. \"I expect we all do our duty same as we see it; but we can't all see it the same.\" He had drunk off his glass and had turned to go, when his eyes fell upon the face of Jack McMurdo, who was scowling at his elbow. \"Hullo! Hullo!\" he cried, looking him up and down. \"Here's an old acquaintance!\"\n\nMcMurdo shrank away from him. \"I was never a friend to you nor any other cursed copper in my life,\" said he.\n\n\"An acquaintance isn't always a friend,\" said the police captain, grinning. \"You're Jack McMurdo of Chicago, right enough, and don't you deny it!\"\n\nMcMurdo shrugged his shoulders. \"I'm not denying it,\" said he. \"D'ye think I'm ashamed of my own name?\"\n\n\"You've got good cause to be, anyhow.\"\n\n\"What the devil d'you mean by that?\" he roared with his fists clenched.\n\n\"No, no, Jack, bluster won't do with me. I was an officer in Chicago before ever I came to this darned coal bunker, and I know a Chicago crook when I see one.\"\n\nMcMurdo's face fell. \"Don't tell me that you're Marvin of the Chicago Central!\" he cried.\n\n\"Just the same old Teddy Marvin, at your service. We haven't forgotten the shooting of Jonas Pinto up there.\"\n\n\"I never shot him.\"\n\n\"Did you not? That's good impartial evidence, ain't it? Well, his death came in uncommon handy for you, or they would have had you for shoving the queer. Well, we can let that be bygones; for, between you and me\u2014and perhaps I'm going further than my duty in saying it\u2014they could get no clear case against you, and Chicago's open to you to-morrow.\"\n\n\"I'm very well where I am.\"\n\n\"Well, I've given you the pointer, and you're a sulky dog not to thank me for it.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose you mean well, and I do thank you,\" said McMurdo in no very gracious manner.\n\n\"It's mum with me so long as I see you living on the straight,\" said the captain. \"But, by the Lord! if you get off after this, it's another story! So good-night to you\u2014and good-night, Councillor.\"\n\nHe left the bar-room; but not before he had created a local hero. McMurdo's deeds in far Chicago had been whispered before. He had put off all questions with a smile, as one who did not wish to have greatness thrust upon him. But now the thing was officially confirmed. The bar loafers crowded round him and shook him heartily by the hand. He was free of the community from that time on. He could drink hard and show little trace of it; but that evening, had his mate Scanlan not been at hand to lead him home, the f\u00eated hero would surely have spent his night under the bar.\n\nOn a Saturday night McMurdo was introduced to the lodge. He had thought to pass in without ceremony as being an initiate of Chicago; but there were particular rites in Vermissa of which they were proud, and these had to be undergone by every postulant. The assembly met in a large room reserved for such purposes at the Union House. Some sixty members assembled at Vermissa; but that by no means represented the full strength of the organization, for there were several other lodges in the valley, and others across the mountains on each side, who exchanged members when any serious business was afoot, so that a crime might be done by men who were strangers to the locality. Altogether there were not less than five hundred scattered over the coal district.\n\nIn the bare assembly room the men were gathered round a long table. At the side was a second one laden with bottles and glasses, on which some members of the company were already turning their eyes. McGinty sat at the head with a flat black velvet cap upon his shock of tangled black hair, and a coloured purple stole round his neck, so that he seemed to be a priest presiding over some diabolical ritual. To right and left of him were the higher lodge officials, the cruel, handsome face of Ted Baldwin among them. Each of these wore some scarf or medallion as emblem of his office.\n\nThey were, for the most part, men of mature age; but the rest of the company consisted of young fellows from eighteen to twenty-five, the ready and capable agents who carried out the commands of their seniors. Among the older men were many whose features showed the tigerish, lawless souls within; but looking at the rank and file it was difficult to believe that these eager and open-faced young fellows were in very truth a dangerous gang of murderers, whose minds had suffered such complete moral perversion that they took a horrible pride in their proficiency at the business, and looked with deepest respect at the man who had the reputation of making what they called \"a clean job.\"\n\nTo their contorted natures it had become a spirited and chivalrous thing to volunteer for service against some man who had never injured them, and whom in many cases they had never seen in their lives. The crime committed, they quarrelled as to who had actually struck the fatal blow, and amused one another and the company by describing the cries and contortions of the murdered man.\n\nAt first they had shown some secrecy in their arrangements; but at the time which this narrative describes their proceedings were extraordinarily open, for the repeated failures of the law had proved to them that, on the one hand, no one would dare to witness against them, and on the other they had an unlimited number of staunch witnesses upon whom they could call, and a well-filled treasure chest from which they could draw the funds to engage the best legal talent in the state. In ten long years of outrage there had been no single conviction, and the only danger that ever threatened the Scowrers lay in the victim himself\u2014who, however outnumbered and taken by surprise, might and occasionally did leave his mark upon his assailants.\n\nMcMurdo had been warned that some ordeal lay before him; but no one would tell him in what it consisted. He was led now into an outer room by two solemn brothers. Through the plank partition he could hear the murmur of many voices from the assembly within. Once or twice he caught the sound of his own name, and he knew that they were discussing his candidacy. Then there entered an inner guard with a green and gold sash across his chest.\n\n\"The Bodymaster orders that he shall be trussed, blinded, and entered,\" said he.\n\nThe three of them removed his coat, turned up the sleeve of his right arm, and finally passed a rope round above the elbows and made it fast. They next placed a thick black cap right over his head and the upper part of his face, so that he could see nothing. He was then led into the assembly hall.\n\nIt was pitch dark and very oppressive under his hood. He heard the rustle and murmur of the people round him, and then the voice of McGinty sounded dull and distant through the covering of his ears.\n\n\"John McMurdo,\" said the voice, \"are you already a member of the Ancient Order of Freemen?\"\n\nHe bowed in assent.\n\n\"Is your lodge No. 29, Chicago?\"\n\nHe bowed again.\n\n\"Dark nights are unpleasant,\" said the voice.\n\n\"Yes, for strangers to travel,\" he answered.\n\n\"The clouds are heavy.\"\n\n\"Yes, a storm is approaching.\"\n\n\"Are the brethren satisfied?\" asked the Bodymaster.\n\nThere was a general murmur of assent.\n\n\"We know, Brother, by your sign and by your countersign that you are indeed one of us,\" said McGinty. \"We would have you know, however, that in this county and in other counties of these parts we have certain rites, and also certain duties of our own which call for good men. Are you ready to be tested?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Are you of stout heart?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"Take a stride forward to prove it.\"\n\nAs the words were said he felt two hard points in front of his eyes, pressing upon them so that it appeared as if he could not move forward without a danger of losing them. None the less, he nerved himself to step resolutely out, and as he did so the pressure melted away. There was a low murmur of applause.\n\n\"He is of stout heart,\" said the voice. \"Can you bear pain?\"\n\n\"As well as another,\" he answered.\n\n\"Test him!\"\n\nIt was all he could do to keep himself from screaming out, for an agonizing pain shot through his forearm. He nearly fainted at the sudden shock of it; but he bit his lip and clenched his hands to hide his agony.\n\n\"I can take more than that,\" said he.\n\nThis time there was loud applause. A finer first appearance had never been made in the lodge. Hands clapped him on the back, and the hood was plucked from his head. He stood blinking and smiling amid the congratulations of the brothers.\n\n\"One last word, Brother McMurdo,\" said McGinty. \"You have already sworn the oath of secrecy and fidelity, and you are aware that the punishment for any breach of it is instant and inevitable death?\"\n\n\"I am,\" said McMurdo.\n\n\"And you accept the rule of the Bodymaster for the time being under all circumstances?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Then in the name of Lodge 341, Vermissa, I welcome you to its privileges and debates. You will put the liquor on the table, Brother Scanlan, and we will drink to our worthy brother.\"\n\nMcMurdo's coat had been brought to him; but before putting it on he examined his right arm, which still smarted heavily. There on the flesh of the forearm was a circle with a triangle within it, deep and red, as the branding iron had left it. One or two of his neighbours pulled up their sleeves and showed their own lodge marks.\n\n\"We've all had it,\" said one; \"but not all as brave as you over it.\"\n\n\"Tut! It was nothing,\" said he; but it burned and ached all the same.\n\nWhen the drinks which followed the ceremony of initiation had all been disposed of, the business of the lodge proceeded. McMurdo, accustomed only to the prosaic performances of Chicago, listened with open ears and more surprise than he ventured to show to what followed.\n\n\"The first business on the agenda paper,\" said McGinty, \"is to read the following letter from Division Master Windle of Merton County Lodge 249. He says:\n\n\u2002\"DEAR SIR:\n\n\u2002There is a job to be done on Andrew Rae of Rae & Sturmash, coal owners near this place. You will remember that your lodge owes us a return, having had the service of two brethren in the matter of the patrolman last fall. You will send two good men, they will be taken charge of by Treasurer Higgins of this lodge, whose address you know. He will show them when to act and where. Yours in freedom,\n\n\u2002J. W. WINDLE, D. M. A. O. F.\n\n\"Windle has never refused us when we have had occasion to ask for the loan of a man or two, and it is not for us to refuse him.\" McGinty paused and looked round the room with his dull, malevolent eyes. \"Who will volunteer for the job?\"\n\nSeveral young fellows held up their hands. The Bodymaster looked at them with an approving smile.\n\n\"You'll do, Tiger Cormac. If you handle it as well as you did the last, you won't be wrong. And you, Wilson.\"\n\n\"I've no pistol,\" said the volunteer, a mere boy in his teens.\n\n\"It's your first, is it not? Well, you have to be blooded some time. It will be a great start for you. As to the pistol, you'll find it waiting for you, or I'm mistaken. If you report yourselves on Monday, it will be time enough. You'll get a great welcome when you return.\"\n\n\"Any reward this time?\" asked Cormac, a thick-set, dark-faced, brutal-looking young man, whose ferocity had earned him the nickname of \"Tiger.\"\n\n\"Never mind the reward. You just do it for the honour of the thing. Maybe when it is done there will be a few odd dollars at the bottom of the box.\"\n\n\"What has the man done?\" asked young Wilson.\n\n\"Sure, it's not for the likes of you to ask what the man has done. He has been judged over there. That's no business of ours. All we have to do is to carry it out for them, same as they would for us. Speaking of that, two brothers from the Merton lodge are coming over to us next week to do some business in this quarter.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\" asked someone.\n\n\"Faith, it is wiser not to ask. If you know nothing, you can testify nothing, and no trouble can come of it. But they are men who will make a clean job when they are about it.\"\n\n\"And time, too!\" cried Ted Baldwin. \"Folk are gettin' out of hand in these parts. It was only last week that three of our men were turned off by Foreman Blaker. It's been owing him a long time, and he'll get it full and proper.\"\n\n\"Get what?\" McMurdo whispered to his neighbour.\n\n\"The business end of a buckshot cartridge!\" cried the man with a loud laugh. \"What think you of our ways, Brother?\"\n\nMcMurdo's criminal soul seemed to have already absorbed the spirit of the vile association of which he was now a member. \"I like it well,\" said he. \"'Tis a proper place for a lad of mettle.\"\n\nSeveral of those who sat around heard his words and applauded them.\n\n\"What's that?\" cried the black-maned Bodymaster from the end of the table.\n\n\"'Tis our new brother, sir, who finds our ways to his taste.\"\n\nMcMurdo rose to his feet for an instant. \"I would say, Eminent Bodymaster, that if a man should be wanted I should take it as an honour to be chosen to help the lodge.\"\n\nThere was great applause at this. It was felt that a new sun was pushing its rim above the horizon. To some of the elders it seemed that the progress was a little too rapid.\n\n\"I would move,\" said the secretary, Harraway, a vulture-faced old graybeard who sat near the chairman, \"that Brother McMurdo should wait until it is the good pleasure of the lodge to employ him.\"\n\n\"Sure, that was what I meant; I'm in your hands,\" said McMurdo.\n\n\"Your time will come, Brother,\" said the chairman. \"We have marked you down as a willing man, and we believe that you will do good work in these parts. There is a small matter to-night in which you may take a hand if it so please you.\"\n\n\"I will wait for something that is worth while.\"\n\n\"You can come to-night, anyhow, and it will help you to know what we stand for in this community. I will make the announcement later. Meanwhile,\" he glanced at his agenda paper, \"I have one or two more points to bring before the meeting. First of all, I will ask the treasurer as to our bank balance. There is the pension to Jim Carnaway's widow. He was struck down doing the work of the lodge, and it is for us to see that she is not the loser.\"\n\n\"Jim was shot last month when they tried to kill Chester Wilcox of Marley Creek,\" McMurdo's neighbour informed him.\n\n\"The funds are good at the moment,\" said the treasurer, with the bankbook in front of him. \"The firms have been generous of late. Max Linder & Co. paid five hundred to be left alone. Walker Brothers sent in a hundred; but I took it on myself to return it and ask for five. If I do not hear by Wednesday, their winding gear may get out of order. We had to burn their breaker last year before they became reasonable. Then the West Section Coaling Company has paid its annual contribution. We have enough on hand to meet any obligations.\"\n\n\"What about Archie Swindon?\" asked a brother.\n\n\"He has sold out and left the district. The old devil left a note for us to say that he had rather be a free crossing sweeper in New York than a large mine owner under the power of a ring of blackmailers. By Gar! it was as well that he made a break for it before the note reached us! I guess he won't show his face in this valley again.\"\n\nAn elderly, clean-shaved man with a kindly face and a good brow rose from the end of the table which faced the chairman. \"Mr. Treasurer,\" he asked, \"may I ask who has bought the property of this man that we have driven out of the district?\"\n\n\"Yes, Brother Morris. It has been bought by the State & Merton County Railroad Company.\"\n\n\"And who bought the mines of Todman and of Lee that came into the market in the same way last year?\"\n\n\"The same company, Brother Morris.\"\n\n\"And who bought the ironworks of Manson and of Shuman, and of Van Deher and of Atwood, which have all been given up of late?\"\n\n\"They were all bought by the West Gilmerton General Mining Company.\"\n\n\"I don't see, Brother Morris,\" said the chairman, \"that it matters to us who buys them, since they can't carry them out of the district.\"\n\n\"With all respect to you, Eminent Bodymaster, I think it may matter very much to us. This process has been going on now for ten long years. We are gradually driving all the small men out of trade. What is the result? We find in their places great companies like the Railroad or the General Iron, who have their directors in New York or Philadelphia, and care nothing for our threats. We can take it out of their local bosses; but it only means that others will be sent in their stead. And we are making it dangerous for ourselves. The small men could not harm us. They had not the money nor the power. So long as we did not squeeze them too dry, they would stay on under our power. But if these big companies find that we stand between them and their profits, they will spare no pains and no expense to hunt us down and bring us to court.\"\n\nThere was a hush at these ominous words, and every face darkened as gloomy looks were exchanged. So omnipotent and unchallenged had they been that the very thought that there was possible retribution in the background had been banished from their minds. And yet the idea struck a chill to the most reckless of them.\n\n\"It is my advice,\" the speaker continued, \"that we go easier upon the small men. On the day that they have all been driven out the power of this society will have been broken.\"\n\nUnwelcome truths are not popular. There were angry cries as the speaker resumed his seat. McGinty rose with gloom upon his brow.\n\n\"Brother Morris,\" said he, \"you were always a croaker. So long as the members of this lodge stand together there is no power in the United States that can touch them. Sure, have we not tried it often enough in the law courts? I expect the big companies will find it easier to pay than to fight, same as the little companies do. And now, Brethren,\" McGinty took off his black velvet cap and his stole as he spoke, \"this lodge has finished its business for the evening, save for one small matter which may be mentioned when we are parting. The time has now come for fraternal refreshment and for harmony.\"\n\nStrange indeed is human nature. Here were these men, to whom murder was familiar, who again and again had struck down the father of the family, some man against whom they had no personal feeling, without one thought of compunction or of compassion for his weeping wife or helpless children, and yet the tender or pathetic in music could move them to tears. McMurdo had a fine tenor voice, and if he had failed to gain the good will of the lodge before, it could no longer have been withheld after he had thrilled them with \"I'm Sitting on the Stile, Mary,\" and \"On the Banks of Allan Water.\"\n\nIn his very first night the new recruit had made himself one of the most popular of the brethren, marked already for advancement and high office. There were other qualities needed, however, besides those of good fellowship, to make a worthy Freeman, and of these he was given an example before the evening was over. The whisky bottle had passed round many times, and the men were flushed and ripe for mischief when their Bodymaster rose once more to address them.\n\n\"Boys,\" said he, \"there's one man in this town that wants trimming up, and it's for you to see that he gets it. I'm speaking of James Stanger of the Herald. You've seen how he's been opening his mouth against us again?\"\n\nThere was a murmur of assent, with many a muttered oath. McGinty took a slip of paper from his waistcoat pocket.\n\n\"LAW AND ORDER!\"\n\nThat's how he heads it.\n\n\"REIGN OF TERROR IN THE COAL AND IRON DISTRICT\"\n\nTwelve years have now elapsed since the first assassinations which proved the existence of a criminal organization in our midst. From that day these outrages have never ceased, until now they have reached a pitch which makes us the opprobrium of the civilized world. Is it for such results as this that our great country welcomes to its bosom the alien who flies from the despotisms of Europe? Is it that they shall themselves become tyrants over the very men who have given them shelter, and that a state of terrorism and lawlessness should be established under the very shadow of the sacred folds of the starry Flag of Freedom which would raise horror in our minds if we read of it as existing under the most effete monarchy of the East? The men are known. The organization is patent and public. How long are we to endure it? Can we forever live\u2014\n\n\"Sure, I've read enough of the slush!\" cried the chairman, tossing the paper down upon the table. \"That's what he says of us. The question I'm asking you is what shall we say to him?\"\n\n\"Kill him!\" cried a dozen fierce voices.\n\n\"I protest against that,\" said Brother Morris, the man of the good brow and shaved face. \"I tell you, Brethren, that our hand is too heavy in this valley, and that there will come a point where in self-defense every man will unite to crush us out. James Stanger is an old man. He is respected in the township and the district. His paper stands for all that is solid in the valley. If that man is struck down, there will be a stir through this state that will only end with our destruction.\"\n\n\"And how would they bring about our destruction, Mr. Standback?\" cried McGinty. \"Is it by the police? Sure, half of them are in our pay and half of them afraid of us. Or is it by the law courts and the judge? Haven't we tried that before now, and what ever came of it?\"\n\n\"There is a Judge Lynch that might try the case,\" said Brother Morris.\n\nA general shout of anger greeted the suggestion.\n\n\"I have but to raise my finger,\" cried McGinty, \"and I could put two hundred men into this town that would clear it out from end to end.\" Then suddenly raising his voice and bending his huge black brows into a terrible frown, \"See here, Brother Morris, I have my eye on you, and have had for some time! You've no heart yourself, and you try to take the heart out of others. It will be an ill day for you, Brother Morris, when your own name comes on our agenda paper, and I'm thinking that it's just there that I ought to place it.\"\n\nMorris had turned deadly pale, and his knees seemed to give way under him as he fell back into his chair. He raised his glass in his trembling hand and drank before he could answer. \"I apologize, Eminent Bodymaster, to you and to every brother in this lodge if I have said more than I should. I am a faithful member\u2014you all know that\u2014and it is my fear lest evil come to the lodge which makes me speak in anxious words. But I have greater trust in your judgment than in my own, Eminent Bodymaster, and I promise you that I will not offend again.\"\n\nThe Bodymaster's scowl relaxed as he listened to the humble words. \"Very good, Brother Morris. It's myself that would be sorry if it were needful to give you a lesson. But so long as I am in this chair we shall be a united lodge in word and in deed. And now, boys,\" he continued, looking round at the company, \"I'll say this much, that if Stanger got his full deserts there would be more trouble than we need ask for. These editors hang together, and every journal in the state would be crying out for police and troops. But I guess you can give him a pretty severe warning. Will you fix it, Brother Baldwin?\"\n\n\"Sure!\" said the young man eagerly.\n\n\"How many will you take?\"\n\n\"Half a dozen, and two to guard the door. You'll come, Gower, and you, Mansel, and you, Scanlan, and the two Willabys.\"\n\n\"I promised the new brother he should go,\" said the chairman.\n\nTed Baldwin looked at McMurdo with eyes which showed that he had not forgotten nor forgiven. \"Well, he can come if he wants,\" he said in a surly voice. \"That's enough. The sooner we get to work the better.\"\n\nThe company broke up with shouts and yells and snatches of drunken song. The bar was still crowded with revellers, and many of the brethren remained there. The little band who had been told off for duty passed out into the street, proceeding in twos and threes along the sidewalk so as not to provoke attention. It was a bitterly cold night, with a half-moon shining brilliantly in a frosty, star-spangled sky. The men stopped and gathered in a yard which faced a high building. The words \"Vermissa Herald\" were printed in gold lettering between the brightly lit windows. From within came the clanking of the printing press.\n\n\"Here, you,\" said Baldwin to McMurdo, \"you can stand below at the door and see that the road is kept open for us. Arthur Willaby can stay with you. You others come with me. Have no fears, boys; for we have a dozen witnesses that we are in the Union Bar at this very moment.\"\n\nIt was nearly midnight, and the street was deserted save for one or two revellers upon their way home. The party crossed the road, and, pushing open the door of the newspaper office, Baldwin and his men rushed in and up the stair which faced them. McMurdo and another remained below. From the room above came a shout, a cry for help, and then the sound of trampling feet and of falling chairs. An instant later a gray-haired man rushed out on the landing.\n\nHe was seized before he could get farther, and his spectacles came tinkling down to McMurdo's feet. There was a thud and a groan. He was on his face, and half a dozen sticks were clattering together as they fell upon him. He writhed, and his long, thin limbs quivered under the blows. The others ceased at last; but Baldwin, his cruel face set in an infernal smile, was hacking at the man's head, which he vainly endeavoured to defend with his arms. His white hair was dabbled with patches of blood. Baldwin was still stooping over his victim, putting in a short, vicious blow whenever he could see a part exposed, when McMurdo dashed up the stair and pushed him back.\n\n\"You'll kill the man,\" said he. \"Drop it!\"\n\nBaldwin looked at him in amazement. \"Curse you!\" he cried. \"Who are you to interfere\u2014you that are new to the lodge? Stand back!\" He raised his stick; but McMurdo had whipped his pistol out of his hip pocket.\n\n\"Stand back yourself!\" he cried. \"I'll blow your face in if you lay a hand on me. As to the lodge, wasn't it the order of the Bodymaster that the man was not to be killed\u2014and what are you doing but killing him?\"\n\n\"It's truth he says,\" remarked one of the men.\n\n\"By Gar! you'd best hurry yourselves!\" cried the man below. \"The windows are all lighting up, and you'll have the whole town here inside of five minutes.\"\n\nThere was indeed the sound of shouting in the street, and a little group of compositors and pressmen was forming in the hall below and nerving itself to action. Leaving the limp and motionless body of the editor at the head of the stair, the criminals rushed down and made their way swiftly along the street. Having reached the Union House, some of them mixed with the crowd in McGinty's saloon, whispering across the bar to the Boss that the job had been well carried through. Others, and among them McMurdo, broke away into side streets, and so by devious paths to their own homes." + }, + { + "title": "The Valley of Fear", + "text": "When McMurdo awoke next morning he had good reason to remember his initiation into the lodge. His head ached with the effect of the drink, and his arm, where he had been branded, was hot and swollen. Having his own peculiar source of income, he was irregular in his attendance at his work; so he had a late breakfast, and remained at home for the morning writing a long letter to a friend. Afterwards he read the Daily Herald. In a special column put in at the last moment he read:\n\n\u2002OUTRAGE AT THE HERALD OFFICE\u2014EDITOR SERIOUSLY INJURED.\n\nIt was a short account of the facts with which he was himself more familiar than the writer could have been. It ended with the statement:\n\nThe matter is now in the hands of the police; but it can hardly be hoped that their exertions will be attended by any better results than in the past. Some of the men were recognized, and there is hope that a conviction may be obtained. The source of the outrage was, it need hardly be said, that infamous society which has held this community in bondage for so long a period, and against which the Herald has taken so uncompromising a stand. Mr. Stanger's many friends will rejoice to hear that, though he has been cruelly and brutally beaten, and though he has sustained severe injuries about the head, there is no immediate danger to his life.\n\nBelow it stated that a guard of police, armed with Winchester rifles, had been requisitioned for the defense of the office.\n\nMcMurdo had laid down the paper, and was lighting his pipe with a hand which was shaky from the excesses of the previous evening, when there was a knock outside, and his landlady brought to him a note which had just been handed in by a lad. It was unsigned, and ran thus:\n\nI should wish to speak to you; but would rather not do so in your house. You will find me beside the flagstaff upon Miller Hill. If you will come there now, I have something which it is important for you to hear and for me to say.\n\nMcMurdo read the note twice with the utmost surprise; for he could not imagine what it meant or who was the author of it. Had it been in a feminine hand, he might have imagined that it was the beginning of one of those adventures which had been familiar enough in his past life. But it was the writing of a man, and of a well educated one, too. Finally, after some hesitation, he determined to see the matter through.\n\nMiller Hill is an ill-kept public park in the very centre of the town. In summer it is a favourite resort of the people; but in winter it is desolate enough. From the top of it one has a view not only of the whole straggling, grimy town, but of the winding valley beneath, with its scattered mines and factories blackening the snow on each side of it, and of the wooded and white-capped ranges flanking it.\n\nMcMurdo strolled up the winding path hedged in with evergreens until he reached the deserted restaurant which forms the centre of summer gaiety. Beside it was a bare flagstaff, and underneath it a man, his hat drawn down and the collar of his overcoat turned up. When he turned his face McMurdo saw that it was Brother Morris, he who had incurred the anger of the Bodymaster the night before. The lodge sign was given and exchanged as they met.\n\n\"I wanted to have a word with you, Mr. McMurdo,\" said the older man, speaking with a hesitation which showed that he was on delicate ground. \"It was kind of you to come.\"\n\n\"Why did you not put your name to the note?\"\n\n\"One has to be cautious, mister. One never knows in times like these how a thing may come back to one. One never knows either who to trust or who not to trust.\"\n\n\"Surely one may trust brothers of the lodge.\"\n\n\"No, no, not always,\" cried Morris with vehemence. \"Whatever we say, even what we think, seems to go back to that man McGinty.\"\n\n\"Look here!\" said McMurdo sternly. \"It was only last night, as you know well, that I swore good faith to our Bodymaster. Would you be asking me to break my oath?\"\n\n\"If that is the view you take,\" said Morris sadly, \"I can only say that I am sorry I gave you the trouble to come and meet me. Things have come to a bad pass when two free citizens cannot speak their thoughts to each other.\"\n\nMcMurdo, who had been watching his companion very narrowly, relaxed somewhat in his bearing. \"Sure I spoke for myself only,\" said he. \"I am a newcomer, as you know, and I am strange to it all. It is not for me to open my mouth, Mr. Morris, and if you think well to say anything to me I am here to hear it.\"\n\n\"And to take it back to Boss McGinty!\" said Morris bitterly.\n\n\"Indeed, then, you do me injustice there,\" cried McMurdo. \"For myself I am loyal to the lodge, and so I tell you straight; but I would be a poor creature if I were to repeat to any other what you might say to me in confidence. It will go no further than me; though I warn you that you may get neither help nor sympathy.\"\n\n\"I have given up looking for either the one or the other,\" said Morris. \"I may be putting my very life in your hands by what I say; but, bad as you are\u2014and it seemed to me last night that you were shaping to be as bad as the worst\u2014still you are new to it, and your conscience cannot yet be as hardened as theirs. That was why I thought to speak with you.\"\n\n\"Well, what have you to say?\"\n\n\"If you give me away, may a curse be on you!\"\n\n\"Sure, I said I would not.\"\n\n\"I would ask you, then, when you joined the Freeman's society in Chicago and swore vows of charity and fidelity, did ever it cross your mind that you might find it would lead you to crime?\"\n\n\"If you call it crime,\" McMurdo answered.\n\n\"Call it crime!\" cried Morris, his voice vibrating with passion. \"You have seen little of it if you can call it anything else. Was it crime last night when a man old enough to be your father was beaten till the blood dripped from his white hairs? Was that crime\u2014or what else would you call it?\"\n\n\"There are some would say it was war,\" said McMurdo. \"a war of two classes with all in, so that each struck as best it could.\"\n\n\"Well, did you think of such a thing when you joined the Freeman's society at Chicago?\"\n\n\"No, I'm bound to say I did not.\"\n\n\"Nor did I when I joined it at Philadelphia. It was just a benefit club and a meeting place for one's fellows. Then I heard of this place\u2014curse the hour that the name first fell upon my ears!\u2014and I came to better myself! My God! to better myself! My wife and three children came with me. I started a drygoods store on Market Square, and I prospered well. The word had gone round that I was a Freeman, and I was forced to join the local lodge, same as you did last night. I've the badge of shame on my forearm and something worse branded on my heart. I found that I was under the orders of a black villain and caught in a meshwork of crime. What could I do? Every word I said to make things better was taken as treason, same as it was last night. I can't get away; for all I have in the world is in my store. If I leave the society, I know well that it means murder to me, and God knows what to my wife and children. Oh, man, it is awful\u2014awful!\" He put his hands to his face, and his body shook with convulsive sobs.\n\nMcMurdo shrugged his shoulders. \"You were too soft for the job,\" said he. \"You are the wrong sort for such work.\"\n\n\"I had a conscience and a religion; but they made me a criminal among them. I was chosen for a job. If I backed down, I knew well what would come to me. Maybe I'm a coward. Maybe it's the thought of my poor little woman and the children that makes me one. Anyhow I went. I guess it will haunt me forever.\n\n\"It was a lonely house, twenty miles from here, over the range yonder. I was told off for the door, same as you were last night. They could not trust me with the job. The others went in. When they came out their hands were crimson to the wrists. As we turned away a child was screaming out of the house behind us. It was a boy of five who had seen his father murdered. I nearly fainted with the horror of it, and yet I had to keep a bold and smiling face; for well I knew that if I did not it would be out of my house that they would come next with their bloody hands, and it would be my little Fred that would be screaming for his father.\n\n\"But I was a criminal then, part sharer in a murder, lost forever in this world, and lost also in the next. I am a good Catholic; but the priest would have no word with me when he heard I was a Scowrer, and I am excommunicated from my faith. That's how it stands with me. And I see you going down the same road, and I ask you what the end is to be. Are you ready to be a cold-blooded murderer also, or can we do anything to stop it?\"\n\n\"What would you do?\" asked McMurdo abruptly. \"You would not inform?\"\n\n\"God forbid!\" cried Morris. \"Sure, the very thought would cost me my life.\"\n\n\"That's well,\" said McMurdo. \"I'm thinking that you are a weak man and that you make too much of the matter.\"\n\n\"Too much! Wait till you have lived here, longer. Look down the valley! See the cloud of a hundred chimneys that overshadows it! I tell you that the cloud of murder hangs thicker and lower than that over the heads of the people. It is the Valley of Fear, the Valley of Death. The terror is in the hearts of the people from the dusk to the dawn. Wait, young man, and you will learn for yourself.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll let you know what I think when I have seen more,\" said McMurdo carelessly. \"What is very clear is that you are not the man for the place, and that the sooner you sell out\u2014if you only get a dime a dollar for what the business is worth\u2014the better it will be for you. What you have said is safe with me; but, by Gar! if I thought you were an informer\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no!\" cried Morris piteously.\n\n\"Well, let it rest at that. I'll bear what you have said in mind, and maybe some day I'll come back to it. I expect you meant kindly by speaking to me like this. Now I'll be getting home.\"\n\n\"One word before you go,\" said Morris. \"We may have been seen together. They may want to know what we have spoken about.\"\n\n\"Ah! that's well thought of.\"\n\n\"I offer you a clerkship in my store.\"\n\n\"And I refuse it. That's our business. Well, so long, Brother Morris, and may you find things go better with you in the future.\"\n\nThat same afternoon, as McMurdo sat smoking, lost in thought, beside the stove of his sitting-room, the door swung open and its framework was filled with the huge figure of Boss McGinty. He passed the sign, and then seating himself opposite to the young man he looked at him steadily for some time, a look which was as steadily returned.\n\n\"I'm not much of a visitor, Brother McMurdo,\" he said at last. \"I guess I am too busy over the folk that visit me. But I thought I'd stretch a point and drop down to see you in your own house.\"\n\n\"I'm proud to see you here, Councillor,\" McMurdo answered heartily, bringing his whisky bottle out of the cupboard. \"it's an honour that I had not expected.\"\n\n\"How's the arm?\" asked the Boss.\n\nMcMurdo made a wry face. \"Well, I'm not forgetting it,\" he said; \"but it's worth it.\"\n\n\"Yes, it's worth it,\" the other answered, \"to those that are loyal and go through with it and are a help to the lodge. What were you speaking to Brother Morris about on Miller Hill this morning?\"\n\nThe question came so suddenly that it was well that he had his answer prepared. He burst into a hearty laugh. \"Morris didn't know I could earn a living here at home. He shan't know either; for he has got too much conscience for the likes of me. But he's a good-hearted old chap. It was his idea that I was at a loose end, and that he would do me a good turn by offering me a clerkship in a drygoods store.\"\n\n\"Oh, that was it?\"\n\n\"Yes, that was it.\"\n\n\"And you refused it?\"\n\n\"Sure. Couldn't I earn ten times as much in my own bedroom with four hours' work?\"\n\n\"That's so. But I wouldn't get about too much with Morris.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Well, I guess because I tell you not. That's enough for most folk in these parts.\"\n\n\"It may be enough for most folk; but it ain't enough for me, Councillor,\" said McMurdo boldly. \"If you are a judge of men, you'll know that.\"\n\nThe swarthy giant glared at him, and his hairy paw closed for an instant round the glass as though he would hurl it at the head of his companion. Then he laughed in his loud, boisterous, insincere fashion.\n\n\"You're a queer card, for sure,\" said he. \"Well, if you want reasons, I'll give them. Did Morris say nothing to you against the lodge?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Nor against me?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, that's because he daren't trust you. But in his heart he is not a loyal brother. We know that well. So we watch him and we wait for the time to admonish him. I'm thinking that the time is drawing near. There's no room for scabby sheep in our pen. But if you keep company with a disloyal man, we might think that you were disloyal, too. See?\"\n\n\"There's no chance of my keeping company with him; for I dislike the man,\" McMurdo answered. \"As to being disloyal, if it was any man but you he would not use the word to me twice.\"\n\n\"Well, that's enough,\" said McGinty, draining off his glass. \"I came down to give you a word in season, and you've had it.\"\n\n\"I'd like to know,\" said McMurdo, \"how you ever came to learn that I had spoken with Morris at all?\"\n\nMcGinty laughed. \"It's my business to know what goes on in this township,\" said he. \"I guess you'd best reckon on my hearing all that passes. Well, time's up, and I'll just say\u2014\"\n\nBut his leavetaking was cut short in a very unexpected fashion. With a sudden crash the door flew open, and three frowning, intent faces glared in at them from under the peaks of police caps. McMurdo sprang to his feet and half drew his revolver; but his arm stopped midway as he became conscious that two Winchester rifles were levelled at his head. A man in uniform advanced into the room, a six-shooter in his hand. It was Captain Marvin, once of Chicago, and now, of the Mine Constabulary. He shook his head with a half-smile at McMurdo.\n\n\"I thought you'd be getting into trouble, Mr. Crooked McMurdo of Chicago,\" said he. \"Can't keep out of it, can you? Take your hat and come along with us.\"\n\n\"I guess you'll pay for this, Captain Marvin,\" said McGinty. \"Who are you, I'd like to know, to break into a house in this fashion and molest honest, law-abiding men?\"\n\n\"You're standing out in this deal, Councillor McGinty,\" said the police captain. \"We are not out after you, but after this man McMurdo. It is for you to help, not to hinder us in our duty.\"\n\n\"He is a friend of mine, and I'll answer for his conduct,\" said the Boss.\n\n\"By all accounts, Mr. McGinty, you may have to answer for your own conduct some of these days,\" the captain answered. \"This man McMurdo was a crook before ever he came here, and he's a crook still. Cover him, Patrolman, while I disarm him.\"\n\n\"There's my pistol,\" said McMurdo coolly. \"Maybe, Captain Marvin, if you and I were alone and face to face you would not take me so easily.\"\n\n\"Where's your warrant?\" asked McGinty. \"By Gar! a man might as well live in Russia as in Vermissa while folk like you are running the police. It's capitalist outrage, and you'll hear more of it, I reckon.\"\n\n\"You do what you think is your duty the best way you can. Councillor. We'll look after ours.\"\n\n\"What am I accused of?\" asked McMurdo.\n\n\"Of being concerned in the beating of old Editor Stanger at the Herald office. It wasn't your fault that it isn't a murder charge.\"\n\n\"Well, if that's all you have against him,\" cried McGinty with a laugh, \"you can save yourself a deal of trouble by dropping it right now. This man was with me in my saloon playing poker up to midnight, and I can bring a dozen to prove it.\"\n\n\"That's your affair, and I guess you can settle it in court to-morrow. Meanwhile, come on, McMurdo, and come quietly if you don't want a gun across your head. You stand wide, Mr. McGinty; for I warn you I will stand no resistance when I am on duty!\"\n\nSo determined was the appearance of the captain that both McMurdo and his boss were forced to accept the situation. The latter managed to have a few whispered words with the prisoner before they parted.\n\n\"What about\u2014\" he jerked his thumb upward to signify the coining plant.\n\n\"All right,\" whispered McMurdo, who had devised a safe hiding place under the floor.\n\n\"I'll bid you good-bye,\" said the Boss, shaking hands. \"I'll see Reilly the lawyer and take the defense upon myself. Take my word for it that they won't be able to hold you.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't bet on that. Guard the prisoner, you two, and shoot him if he tries any games. I'll search the house before I leave.\"\n\nHe did so; but apparently found no trace of the concealed plant. When he had descended he and his men escorted McMurdo to headquarters. Darkness had fallen, and a keen blizzard was blowing so that the streets were nearly deserted; but a few loiterers followed the group, and emboldened by invisibility shouted imprecations at the prisoner.\n\n\"Lynch the cursed Scowrer!\" they cried. \"Lynch him!\" They laughed and jeered as he was pushed into the police station. After a short, formal examination from the inspector in charge he was put into the common cell. Here he found Baldwin and three other criminals of the night before, all arrested that afternoon and waiting their trial next morning.\n\nBut even within this inner fortress of the law the long arm of the Freemen was able to extend. Late at night there came a jailer with a straw bundle for their bedding, out of which he extracted two bottles of whisky, some glasses, and a pack of cards. They spent a hilarious night, without an anxious thought as to the ordeal of the morning.\n\nNor had they cause, as the result was to show. The magistrate could not possibly, on the evidence, have held them for a higher court. On the one hand the compositors and pressmen were forced to admit that the light was uncertain, that they were themselves much perturbed, and that it was difficult for them to swear to the identity of the assailants; although they believed that the accused were among them. Cross examined by the clever attorney who had been engaged by McGinty, they were even more nebulous in their evidence.\n\nThe injured man had already deposed that he was so taken by surprise by the suddenness of the attack that he could state nothing beyond the fact that the first man who struck him wore a moustache. He added that he knew them to be Scowrers, since no one else in the community could possibly have any enmity to him, and he had long been threatened on account of his outspoken editorials. On the other hand, it was clearly shown by the united and unfaltering evidence of six citizens, including that high municipal official, Councillor McGinty, that the men had been at a card party at the Union House until an hour very much later than the commission of the outrage.\n\nNeedless to say that they were discharged with something very near to an apology from the bench for the inconvenience to which they had been put, together with an implied censure of Captain Marvin and the police for their officious zeal.\n\nThe verdict was greeted with loud applause by a court in which McMurdo saw many familiar faces. Brothers of the lodge smiled and waved. But there were others who sat with compressed lips and brooding eyes as the men filed out of the dock. One of them, a little, dark-bearded, resolute fellow, put the thoughts of himself and comrades into words as the ex-prisoners passed him.\n\n\"You damned murderers!\" he said. \"We'll fix you yet!\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Darkest Hour", + "text": "If anything had been needed to give an impetus to Jack McMurdo's popularity among his fellows it would have been his arrest and acquittal. That a man on the very night of joining the lodge should have done something which brought him before the magistrate was a new record in the annals of the society. Already he had earned the reputation of a good boon companion, a cheery reveller, and withal a man of high temper, who would not take an insult even from the all-powerful Boss himself. But in addition to this he impressed his comrades with the idea that among them all there was not one whose brain was so ready to devise a bloodthirsty scheme, or whose hand would be more capable of carrying it out. \"He'll be the boy for the clean job,\" said the oldsters to one another, and waited their time until they could set him to his work.\n\nMcGinty had instruments enough already; but he recognized that this was a supremely able one. He felt like a man holding a fierce bloodhound in leash. There were curs to do the smaller work; but some day he would slip this creature upon its prey. A few members of the lodge, Ted Baldwin among them, resented the rapid rise of the stranger and hated him for it; but they kept clear of him, for he was as ready to fight as to laugh.\n\nBut if he gained favour with his fellows, there was another quarter, one which had become even more vital to him, in which he lost it. Ettie Shafter's father would have nothing more to do with him, nor would he allow him to enter the house. Ettie herself was too deeply in love to give him up altogether, and yet her own good sense warned her of what would come from a marriage with a man who was regarded as a criminal.\n\nOne morning after a sleepless night she determined to see him, possibly for the last time, and make one strong endeavour to draw him from those evil influences which were sucking him down. She went to his house, as he had often begged her to do, and made her way into the room which he used as his sitting-room. He was seated at a table, with his back turned and a letter in front of him. A sudden spirit of girlish mischief came over her\u2014she was still only nineteen. He had not heard her when she pushed open the door. Now she tiptoed forward and laid her hand lightly upon his bended shoulders.\n\nIf she had expected to startle him, she certainly succeeded; but only in turn to be startled herself. With a tiger spring he turned on her, and his right hand was feeling for her throat. At the same instant with the other hand he crumpled up the paper that lay before him. For an instant he stood glaring. Then astonishment and joy took the place of the ferocity which had convulsed his features\u2014a ferocity which had sent her shrinking back in horror as from something which had never before intruded into her gentle life.\n\n\"It's you!\" said he, mopping his brow. \"And to think that you should come to me, heart of my heart, and I should find nothing better to do than to want to strangle you! Come then, darling,\" and he held out his arms, \"let me make it up to you.\"\n\nBut she had not recovered from that sudden glimpse of guilty fear which she had read in the man's face. All her woman's instinct told her that it was not the mere fright of a man who is startled. Guilt\u2014that was it\u2014guilt and fear!\n\n\"What's come over you, Jack?\" she cried. \"Why were you so scared of me? Oh, Jack, if your conscience was at ease, you would not have looked at me like that!\"\n\n\"Sure, I was thinking of other things, and when you came tripping so lightly on those fairy feet of yours\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no, it was more than that, Jack.\" Then a sudden suspicion seized her. \"Let me see that letter you were writing.\"\n\n\"Ah, Ettie, I couldn't do that.\"\n\nHer suspicions became certainties. \"It's to another woman,\" she cried. \"I know it! Why else should you hold it from me? Was it to your wife that you were writing? How am I to know that you are not a married man\u2014you, a stranger, that nobody knows?\"\n\n\"I am not married, Ettie. See now, I swear it! You're the only one woman on earth to me. By the cross of Christ I swear it!\"\n\nHe was so white with passionate earnestness that she could not but believe him.\n\n\"Well, then,\" she cried, \"why will you not show me the letter?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you, acushla,\" said he. \"I'm under oath not to show it, and just as I wouldn't break my word to you so I would keep it to those who hold my promise. It's the business of the lodge, and even to you it's secret. And if I was scared when a hand fell on me, can't you understand it when it might have been the hand of a detective?\"\n\nShe felt that he was telling the truth. He gathered her into his arms and kissed away her fears and doubts.\n\n\"Sit here by me, then. It's a queer throne for such a queen; but it's the best your poor lover can find. He'll do better for you some of these days, I'm thinking. Now your mind is easy once again, is it not?\"\n\n\"How can it ever be at ease, Jack, when I know that you are a criminal among criminals, when I never know the day that I may hear you are in court for murder? 'McMurdo the Scowrer,' that's what one of our boarders called you yesterday. It went through my heart like a knife.\"\n\n\"Sure, hard words break no bones.\"\n\n\"But they were true.\"\n\n\"Well, dear, it's not so bad as you think. We are but poor men that are trying in our own way to get our rights.\"\n\nEttie threw her arms round her lover's neck. \"Give it up, Jack! For my sake, for God's sake, give it up! It was to ask you that I came here to-day. Oh, Jack, see\u2014I beg it of you on my bended knees! Kneeling here before you I implore you to give it up!\"\n\nHe raised her and soothed her with her head against his breast.\n\n\"Sure, my darlin', you don't know what it is you are asking. How could I give it up when it would be to break my oath and to desert my comrades? If you could see how things stand with me you could never ask it of me. Besides, if I wanted to, how could I do it? You don't suppose that the lodge would let a man go free with all its secrets?\"\n\n\"I've thought of that, Jack. I've planned it all. Father has saved some money. He is weary of this place where the fear of these people darkens our lives. He is ready to go. We would fly together to Philadelphia or New York, where we would be safe from them.\"\n\nMcMurdo laughed. \"The lodge has a long arm. Do you think it could not stretch from here to Philadelphia or New York?\"\n\n\"Well, then, to the West, or to England, or to Germany, where father came from\u2014anywhere to get away from this Valley of Fear!\"\n\nMcMurdo thought of old Brother Morris. \"Sure, it is the second time I have heard the valley so named,\" said he. \"The shadow does indeed seem to lie heavy on some of you.\"\n\n\"It darkens every moment of our lives. Do you suppose that Ted Baldwin has ever forgiven us? If it were not that he fears you, what do you suppose our chances would be? If you saw the look in those dark, hungry eyes of his when they fall on me!\"\n\n\"By Gar! I'd teach him better manners if I caught him at it! But see here, little girl. I can't leave here. I can't\u2014take that from me once and for all. But if you will leave me to find my own way, I will try to prepare a way of getting honourably out of it.\"\n\n\"There is no honour in such a matter.\"\n\n\"Well, well, it's just how you look at it. But if you'll give me six months, I'll work it so that I can leave without being ashamed to look others in the face.\"\n\nThe girl laughed with joy. \"Six months!\" she cried. \"Is it a promise?\"\n\n\"Well, it may be seven or eight. But within a year at the furthest we will leave the valley behind us.\"\n\nIt was the most that Ettie could obtain, and yet it was something. There was this distant light to illuminate the gloom of the immediate future. She returned to her father's house more light-hearted than she had ever been since Jack McMurdo had come into her life.\n\nIt might be thought that as a member, all the doings of the society would be told to him; but he was soon to discover that the organization was wider and more complex than the simple lodge. Even Boss McGinty was ignorant as to many things; for there was an official named the County Delegate, living at Hobson's Patch farther down the line, who had power over several different lodges which he wielded in a sudden and arbitrary way. Only once did McMurdo see him, a sly, little gray-haired rat of a man, with a slinking gait and a sidelong glance which was charged with malice. Evans Pott was his name, and even the great Boss of Vermissa felt towards him something of the repulsion and fear which the huge Danton may have felt for the puny but dangerous Robespierre.\n\nOne day Scanlan, who was McMurdo's fellow boarder, received a note from McGinty inclosing one from Evans Pott, which informed him that he was sending over two good men, Lawler and Andrews, who had instructions to act in the neighbourhood; though it was best for the cause that no particulars as to their objects should be given. Would the Bodymaster see to it that suitable arrangements be made for their lodgings and comfort until the time for action should arrive? McGinty added that it was impossible for anyone to remain secret at the Union House, and that, therefore, he would be obliged if McMurdo and Scanlan would put the strangers up for a few days in their boarding house.\n\nThe same evening the two men arrived, each carrying his gripsack. Lawler was an elderly man, shrewd, silent, and self-contained, clad in an old black frock coat, which with his soft felt hat and ragged, grizzled beard gave him a general resemblance to an itinerant preacher. His companion Andrews was little more than a boy, frank-faced and cheerful, with the breezy manner of one who is out for a holiday and means to enjoy every minute of it. Both men were total abstainers, and behaved in all ways as exemplary members of the society, with the one simple exception that they were assassins who had often proved themselves to be most capable instruments for this association of murder. Lawler had already carried out fourteen commissions of the kind, and Andrews three.\n\nThey were, as McMurdo found, quite ready to converse about their deeds in the past, which they recounted with the half-bashful pride of men who had done good and unselfish service for the community. They were reticent, however, as to the immediate job in hand.\n\n\"They chose us because neither I nor the boy here drink,\" Lawler explained. \"They can count on us saying no more than we should. You must not take it amiss, but it is the orders of the County Delegate that we obey.\"\n\n\"Sure, we are all in it together,\" said Scanlan, McMurdo's mate, as the four sat together at supper.\n\n\"That's true enough, and we'll talk till the cows come home of the killing of Charlie Williams or of Simon Bird, or any other job in the past. But till the work is done we say nothing.\"\n\n\"There are half a dozen about here that I have a word to say to,\" said McMurdo, with an oath. \"I suppose it isn't Jack Knox of Ironhill that you are after. I'd go some way to see him get his deserts.\"\n\n\"No, it's not him yet.\"\n\n\"Or Herman Strauss?\"\n\n\"No, nor him either.\"\n\n\"Well, if you won't tell us we can't make you; but I'd be glad to know.\"\n\nLawler smiled and shook his head. He was not to be drawn.\n\nIn spite of the reticence of their guests, Scanlan and McMurdo were quite determined to be present at what they called \"the fun.\" When, therefore, at an early hour one morning McMurdo heard them creeping down the stairs he awakened Scanlan, and the two hurried on their clothes. When they were dressed they found that the others had stolen out, leaving the door open behind them. It was not yet dawn, and by the light of the lamps they could see the two men some distance down the street. They followed them warily, treading noiselessly in the deep snow.\n\nThe boarding house was near the edge of the town, and soon they were at the crossroads which is beyond its boundary. Here three men were waiting, with whom Lawler and Andrews held a short, eager conversation. Then they all moved on together. It was clearly some notable job which needed numbers. At this point there are several trails which lead to various mines. The strangers took that which led to the Crow Hill, a huge business which was in strong hands which had been able, thanks to their energetic and fearless New England manager, Josiah H. Dunn, to keep some order and discipline during the long reign of terror.\n\nDay was breaking now, and a line of workmen were slowly making their way, singly and in groups, along the blackened path.\n\nMcMurdo and Scanlan strolled on with the others, keeping in sight of the men whom they followed. A thick mist lay over them, and from the heart of it there came the sudden scream of a steam whistle. It was the ten-minute signal before the cages descended and the day's labour began.\n\nWhen they reached the open space round the mine shaft there were a hundred miners waiting, stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers; for it was bitterly cold. The strangers stood in a little group under the shadow of the engine house. Scanlan and McMurdo climbed a heap of slag from which the whole scene lay before them. They saw the mine engineer, a great bearded Scotchman named Menzies, come out of the engine house and blow his whistle for the cages to be lowered.\n\nAt the same instant a tall, loose-framed young man with a clean-shaved, earnest face advanced eagerly towards the pit head. As he came forward his eyes fell upon the group, silent and motionless, under the engine house. The men had drawn down their hats and turned up their collars to screen their faces. For a moment the presentiment of Death laid its cold hand upon the manager's heart. At the next he had shaken it off and saw only his duty towards intrusive strangers.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked as he advanced. \"What are you loitering there for?\"\n\nThere was no answer; but the lad Andrews stepped forward and shot him in the stomach. The hundred waiting miners stood as motionless and helpless as if they were paralyzed. The manager clapped his two hands to the wound and doubled himself up. Then he staggered away; but another of the assassins fired, and he went down sidewise, kicking and clawing among a heap of clinkers. Menzies, the Scotchman, gave a roar of rage at the sight and rushed with an iron spanner at the murderers; but was met by two balls in the face which dropped him dead at their very feet.\n\nThere was a surge forward of some of the miners, and an inarticulate cry of pity and of anger; but a couple of the strangers emptied their six-shooters over the heads of the crowd, and they broke and scattered, some of them rushing wildly back to their homes in Vermissa.\n\nWhen a few of the bravest had rallied, and there was a return to the mine, the murderous gang had vanished in the mists of morning, without a single witness being able to swear to the identity of these men who in front of a hundred spectators had wrought this double crime.\n\nScanlan and McMurdo made their way back; Scanlan somewhat subdued, for it was the first murder job that he had seen with his own eyes, and it appeared less funny than he had been led to believe. The horrible screams of the dead manager's wife pursued them as they hurried to the town. McMurdo was absorbed and silent; but he showed no sympathy for the weakening of his companion.\n\n\"Sure, it is like a war,\" he repeated. \"What is it but a war between us and them, and we hit back where we best can.\"\n\nThere was high revel in the lodge room at the Union House that night, not only over the killing of the manager and engineer of the Crow Hill mine, which would bring this organization into line with the other blackmailed and terror-stricken companies of the district, but also over a distant triumph which had been wrought by the hands of the lodge itself.\n\nIt would appear that when the County Delegate had sent over five good men to strike a blow in Vermissa, he had demanded that in return three Vermissa men should be secretly selected and sent across to kill William Hales of Stake Royal, one of the best known and most popular mine owners in the Gilmerton district, a man who was believed not to have an enemy in the world; for he was in all ways a model employer. He had insisted, however, upon efficiency in the work, and had, therefore, paid off certain drunken and idle employees who were members of the all-powerful society. Coffin notices hung outside his door had not weakened his resolution, and so in a free, civilized country he found himself condemned to death.\n\nThe execution had now been duly carried out. Ted Baldwin, who sprawled now in the seat of honour beside the Bodymaster, had been chief of the party. His flushed face and glazed, blood-shot eyes told of sleeplessness and drink. He and his two comrades had spent the night before among the mountains. They were unkempt and weather-stained. But no heroes, returning from a forlorn hope, could have had a warmer welcome from their comrades.\n\nThe story was told and retold amid cries of delight and shouts of laughter. They had waited for their man as he drove home at nightfall, taking their station at the top of a steep hill, where his horse must be at a walk. He was so furred to keep out the cold that he could not lay his hand on his pistol. They had pulled him out and shot him again and again. He had screamed for mercy. The screams were repeated for the amusement of the lodge.\n\n\"Let's hear again how he squealed,\" they cried.\n\n[ None of them knew the man; but there is eternal drama in a killing, and they had shown the Scowrers of Gilmerton that the Vermissa men were to be relied upon. driven up ]\n\nThere had been one contretemps; for a man and his wife had driven up while they were still emptying their revolvers into the silent body. It had been suggested that they should shoot them both; but they were harmless folk who were not connected with the mines, so they were sternly bidden to drive on and keep silent, lest a worse thing befall them. And so the blood-mottled figure had been left as a warning to all such hard-hearted employers, and the three noble avengers had hurried off into the mountains where unbroken nature comes down to the very edge of the furnaces and the slag heaps. Here they were, safe and sound, their work well done, and the plaudits of their companions in their ears.\n\nIt had been a great day for the Scowrers. The shadow had fallen even darker over the valley. But as the wise general chooses the moment of victory in which to redouble his efforts, so that his foes may have no time to steady themselves after disaster, so Boss McGinty, looking out upon the scene of his operations with his brooding and malicious eyes, had devised a new attack upon those who opposed him. That very night, as the half-drunken company broke up, he touched McMurdo on the arm and led him aside into that inner room where they had their first interview.\n\n\"See here, my lad,\" said he, \"I've got a job that's worthy of you at last. You'll have the doing of it in your own hands.\"\n\n\"Proud I am to hear it,\" McMurdo answered.\n\n\"You can take two men with you\u2014Manders and Reilly. They have been warned for service. We'll never be right in this district until Chester Wilcox has been settled, and you'll have the thanks of every lodge in the coal fields if you can down him.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best, anyhow. Who is he, and where shall I find him?\"\n\nMcGinty took his eternal half-chewed, half-smoked cigar from the corner of his mouth, and proceeded to draw a rough diagram on a page torn from his notebook.\n\n\"He's the chief foreman of the Iron Dike Company. He's a hard citizen, an old colour sergeant of the war, all scars and grizzle. We've had two tries at him; but had no luck, and Jim Carnaway lost his life over it. Now it's for you to take it over. That's the house\u2014all alone at the Iron Dike crossroad, same as you see here on the map\u2014without another within earshot. It's no good by day. He's armed and shoots quick and straight, with no questions asked. But at night\u2014well, there he is with his wife, three children, and a hired help. You can't pick or choose. It's all or none. If you could get a bag of blasting powder at the front door with a slow match to it\u2014\"\n\n\"What's the man done?\"\n\n\"Didn't I tell you he shot Jim Carnaway?\"\n\n\"Why did he shoot him?\"\n\n\"What in thunder has that to do with you? Carnaway was about his house at night, and he shot him. That's enough for me and you. You've got to settle the thing right.\"\n\n\"There's these two women and the children. Do they go up too?\"\n\n\"They have to\u2014else how can we get him?\"\n\n\"It seems hard on them; for they've done nothing.\"\n\n\"What sort of fool's talk is this? Do you back out?\"\n\n\"Easy, Councillor, easy! What have I ever said or done that you should think I would be after standing back from an order of the Bodymaster of my own lodge? If it's right or if it's wrong, it's for you to decide.\"\n\n\"You'll do it, then?\"\n\n\"Of course I will do it.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Well, you had best give me a night or two that I may see the house and make my plans. Then\u2014\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said McGinty, shaking him by the hand. \"I leave it with you. It will be a great day when you bring us the news. It's just the last stroke that will bring them all to their knees.\"\n\nMcMurdo thought long and deeply over the commission which had been so suddenly placed in his hands. The isolated house in which Chester Wilcox lived was about five miles off in an adjacent valley. That very night he started off all alone to prepare for the attempt. It was daylight before he returned from his reconnaissance. Next day he interviewed his two subordinates, Manders and Reilly, reckless youngsters who were as elated as if it were a deer-hunt.\n\nTwo nights later they met outside the town, all three armed, and one of them carrying a sack stuffed with the powder which was used in the quarries. It was two in the morning before they came to the lonely house. The night was a windy one, with broken clouds drifting swiftly across the face of a three-quarter moon. They had been warned to be on their guard against bloodhounds; so they moved forward cautiously, with their pistols cocked in their hands. But there was no sound save the howling of the wind, and no movement but the swaying branches above them.\n\nMcMurdo listened at the door of the lonely house; but all was still within. Then he leaned the powder bag against it, ripped a hole in it with his knife, and attached the fuse. When it was well alight he and his two companions took to their heels, and were some distance off, safe and snug in a sheltering ditch, before the shattering roar of the explosion, with the low, deep rumble of the collapsing building, told them that their work was done. No cleaner job had ever been carried out in the bloodstained annals of the society.\n\nBut alas that work so well organized and boldly carried out should all have gone for nothing! Warned by the fate of the various victims, and knowing that he was marked down for destruction, Chester Wilcox had moved himself and his family only the day before to some safer and less known quarters, where a guard of police should watch over them. It was an empty house which had been torn down by the gunpowder, and the grim old colour sergeant of the war was still teaching discipline to the miners of Iron Dike.\n\n\"Leave him to me, said McMurdo. \"He's my man, and I'll get him sure if I have to wait a year for him.\"\n\nA vote of thanks and confidence was passed in full lodge, and so for the time the matter ended. When a few weeks later it was reported in the papers that Wilcox had been shot at from an ambuscade, it was an open secret that McMurdo was still at work upon his unfinished job.\n\nSuch were the methods of the Society of Freemen, and such were the deeds of the Scowrers by which they spread their rule of fear over the great and rich district which was for so long a period haunted by their terrible presence. Why should these pages be stained by further crimes? Have I not said enough to show the men and their methods?\n\nThese deeds are written in history, and there are records wherein one may read the details of them. There one may learn of the shooting of Policemen Hunt and Evans because they had ventured to arrest two members of the society\u2014a double outrage planned at the Vermissa lodge and carried out in cold blood upon two helpless and disarmed men. There also one may read of the shooting of Mrs. Larbey when she was nursing her husband, who had been beaten almost to death by orders of Boss McGinty. The killing of the elder Jenkins, shortly followed by that of his brother, the mutilation of James Murdoch, the blowing up of the Stap-house family, and the murder of the Stendals all followed hard upon one another in the same terrible winter.\n\nDarkly the shadow lay upon the Valley of Fear. The spring had come with running brooks and blossoming trees. There was hope for all Nature bound so long in an iron grip; but nowhere was there any hope for the men and women who lived under the yoke of the terror. Never had the cloud above them been so dark and hopeless as in the early summer of the year 1875." + }, + { + "title": "Danger", + "text": "It was the height of the reign of terror. McMurdo, who had already been appointed Inner Deacon, with every prospect of some day succeeding McGinty as Bodymaster, was now so necessary to the councils of his comrades that nothing was done without his help and advice. The more popular he became, however, with the Freemen, the blacker were the scowls which greeted him as he passed along the streets of Vermissa. In spite of their terror the citizens were taking heart to band themselves together against their oppressors. Rumours had reached the lodge of secret gatherings in the Herald office and of distribution of firearms among the law-abiding people. But McGinty and his men were undisturbed by such reports. They were numerous, resolute, and well armed. Their opponents were scattered and powerless. It would all end, as it had done in the past, in aimless talk and possibly in impotent arrests. So said McGinty, McMurdo, and all the bolder spirits.\n\nIt was a Saturday evening in May. Saturday was always the lodge night, and McMurdo was leaving his house to attend it when Morris, the weaker brother of the order, came to see him. His brow was creased with care, and his kindly face was drawn and haggard.\n\n\"Can I speak with you freely, Mr. McMurdo?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"I can't forget that I spoke my heart to you once, and that you kept it to yourself, even though the Boss himself came to ask you about it.\"\n\n\"What else could I do if you trusted me? It wasn't that I agreed with what you said.\"\n\n\"I know that well. But you are the one that I can speak to and be safe. I've a secret here,\" he put his hand to his breast, \"and it is just burning the life out of me. I wish it had come to any one of you but me. If I tell it, it will mean murder, for sure. If I don't, it may bring the end of us all. God help me, but I am near out of my wits over it!\"\n\nMcMurdo looked at the man earnestly. He was trembling in every limb. He poured some whisky into a glass and handed it to him. \"That's the physic for the likes of you,\" said he. \"Now let me hear of it.\"\n\nMorris drank, and his white face took a tinge of colour. \"I can tell it to you all in one sentence,\" said he. \"There's a detective on our trail.\"\n\nMcMurdo stared at him in astonishment. \"Why, man, you're crazy,\" he said. \"Isn't the place full of police and detectives, and what harm did they ever do us?\"\n\n\"No, no, it's no man of the district. As you say, we know them, and it is little that they can do. But you've heard of Pinkerton's?\"\n\n\"I've read of some folk of that name.\"\n\n\"Well, you can take it from me you've no show when they are on your trail. It's not a take-it-or-miss-it government concern. It's a dead earnest business proposition that's out for results and keeps out till by hook or crook it gets them. If a Pinkerton man is deep in this business, we are all destroyed.\"\n\n\"We must kill him.\"\n\n\"Ah, it's the first thought that came to you! So it will be up at the lodge. Didn't I say to you that it would end in murder?\"\n\n\"Sure, what is murder? Isn't it common enough in these parts?\"\n\n\"It is, indeed; but it's not for me to point out the man that is to be murdered. I'd never rest easy again. And yet it's our own necks that may be at stake. In God's name what shall I do?\" He rocked to and fro in his agony of indecision.\n\nBut his words had moved McMurdo deeply. It was easy to see that he shared the other's opinion as to the danger, and the need for meeting it. He gripped Morris's shoulder and shook him in his earnestness.\n\n\"See here, man,\" he cried, and he almost screeched the words in his excitement, \"you won't gain anything by sitting keening like an old wife at a wake. Let's have the facts. Who is the fellow? Where is he? How did you hear of him? Why did you come to me?\"\n\n\"I came to you; for you are the one man that would advise me. I told you that I had a store in the East before I came here. I left good friends behind me, and one of them is in the telegraph service. Here's a letter that I had from him yesterday. It's this part from the top of the page. You can read it yourself.\"\n\nThis was what McMurdo read:\n\nHow are the Scowrers getting on in your parts? We read plenty of them in the papers. Between you and me I expect to hear news from you before long. Five big corporations and the two railroads have taken the thing up in dead earnest. They mean it, and you can bet they'll get there! They are right deep down into it. Pinkerton has taken hold under their orders, and his best man, Birdy Edwards, is operating. The thing has got to be stopped right now.\n\n\"Now read the postscript.\"\n\nOf course, what I give you is what I learned in business; so it goes no further. It's a queer cipher that you handle by the yard every day and can get no meaning from.\n\nMcMurdo sat in silence for some time, with the letter in his listless hands. The mist had lifted for a moment, and there was the abyss before him.\n\n\"Does anyone else know of this?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have told no one else.\"\n\n\"But this man\u2014your friend\u2014has he any other person that he would be likely to write to?\"\n\n\"Well, I dare say he knows one or two more.\"\n\n\"Of the lodge?\"\n\n\"It's likely enough.\"\n\n\"I was asking because it is likely that he may have given some description of this fellow Birdy Edwards\u2014then we could get on his trail.\"\n\n\"Well, it's possible. But I should not think he knew him. He is just telling me the news that came to him by way of business. How would he know this Pinkerton man?\"\n\nMcMurdo gave a violent start.\n\n\"By Gar!\" he cried, \"I've got him. What a fool I was not to know it. Lord! but we're in luck! We will fix him before he can do any harm. See here, Morris, will you leave this thing in my hands?\"\n\n\"Sure, if you will only take it off mine.\"\n\n\"I'll do that. You can stand right back and let me run it. Even your name need not be mentioned. I'll take it all on myself, as if it were to me that this letter has come. Will that content you?\"\n\n\"It's just what I would ask.\"\n\n\"Then leave it at that and keep your head shut. Now I'll get down to the lodge, and we'll soon make old man Pinkerton sorry for himself.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't kill this man?\"\n\n\"The less you know, Friend Morris, the easier your conscience will be, and the better you will sleep. Ask no questions, and let these things settle themselves. I have hold of it now.\"\n\nMorris shook his head sadly as he left. \"I feel that his blood is on my hands,\" he groaned.\n\n\"Self-protection is no murder, anyhow,\" said McMurdo, smiling grimly. \"It's him or us. I guess this man would destroy us all if we left him long in the valley. Why, Brother Morris, we'll have to elect you Bodymaster yet; for you've surely saved the lodge.\"\n\nAnd yet it was clear from his actions that he thought more seriously of this new intrusion than his words would show. It may have been his guilty conscience, it may have been the reputation of the Pinkerton organization, it may have been the knowledge that great, rich corporations had set themselves the task of clearing out the Scowrers; but, whatever his reason, his actions were those of a man who is preparing for the worst. Every paper which would incriminate him was destroyed before he left the house. After that he gave a long sigh of satisfaction; for it seemed to him that he was safe. And yet the danger must still have pressed somewhat upon him; for on his way to the lodge he stopped at old man Shafter's. The house was forbidden him; but when he tapped at the window Ettie came out to him. The dancing Irish deviltry had gone from her lover's eyes. She read his danger in his earnest face.\n\n\"Something has happened!\" she cried. \"Oh, Jack, you are in danger!\"\n\n\"Sure, it is not very bad, my sweetheart. And yet it may be wise that we make a move before it is worse.\"\n\n\"Make a move?\"\n\n\"I promised you once that I would go some day. I think the time is coming. I had news to-night, bad news, and I see trouble coming.\"\n\n\"The police?\"\n\n\"Well, a Pinkerton. But, sure, you wouldn't know what that is, acushla, nor what it may mean to the likes of me. I'm too deep in this thing, and I may have to get out of it quick. You said you would come with me if I went.\"\n\n\"Oh, Jack, it would be the saving of you!\"\n\n\"I'm an honest man in some things, Ettie. I wouldn't hurt a hair of your bonny head for all that the world can give, nor ever pull you down one inch from the golden throne above the clouds where I always see you. Would you trust me?\"\n\nShe put her hand in his without a word. \"Well, then, listen to what I say, and do as I order you; for indeed it's the only way for us. Things are going to happen in this valley. I feel it in my bones. There may be many of us that will have to look out for ourselves. I'm one, anyhow. If I go, by day or night, it's you that must come with me!\"\n\n\"I'd come after you, Jack.\"\n\n\"No, no, you shall come with me. If this valley is closed to me and I can never come back, how can I leave you behind, and me perhaps in hiding from the police with never a chance of a message? It's with me you must come. I know a good woman in the place I come from, and it's there I'd leave you till we can get married. Will you come?\"\n\n\"Yes, Jack, I will come.\"\n\n\"God bless you for your trust in me! It's a fiend out of hell that I should be if I abused it. Now, mark you, Ettie, it will be just a word to you, and when it reaches you, you will drop everything and come right down to the waiting room at the depot and stay there till I come for you.\"\n\n\"Day or night, I'll come at the word, Jack.\"\n\nSomewhat eased in mind, now that his own preparations for escape had been begun, McMurdo went on to the lodge. It had already assembled, and only by complicated signs and counter-signs could he pass through the outer guard and inner guard who close-tiled it. A buzz of pleasure and welcome greeted him as he entered. The long room was crowded, and through the haze of tobacco smoke he saw the tangled black mane of the Bodymaster, the cruel, unfriendly features of Baldwin, the vulture face of Harraway, the secretary, and a dozen more who were among the leaders of the lodge. He rejoiced that they should all be there to take counsel over his news.\n\n\"Indeed, it's glad we are to see you, Brother!\" cried the chairman. \"There's business here that wants a Solomon in judgment to set it right.\"\n\n\"It's Lander and Egan,\" explained his neighbour as he took his seat. \"They both claim the head money given by the lodge for the shooting of old man Crabbe over at Stylestown, and who's to say which fired the bullet?\"\n\nMcMurdo rose in his place and raised his hand. The expression of his face froze the attention of the audience. There was a dead hush of expectation.\n\n\"Eminent Bodymaster,\" he said, in a solemn voice, \"I claim urgency!\"\n\n\"Brother McMurdo claims urgency,\" said McGinty. \"It's a claim that by the rules of this lodge takes precedence. Now, Brother, we attend you.\"\n\nMcMurdo took the letter from his pocket.\n\n\"Eminent Bodymaster and Brethren,\" he said, \"I am the bearer of ill news this day; but it is better that it should be known and discussed, than that a blow should fall upon us without warning which would destroy us all. I have information that the most powerful and richest organizations in this state have bound themselves together for our destruction, and that at this very moment there is a Pinkerton detective, one Birdy Edwards, at work in the valley collecting the evidence which may put a rope round the necks of many of us, and send every man in this room into a felon's cell. That is the situation for the discussion of which I have made a claim of urgency.\"\n\nThere was a dead silence in the room. It was broken by the chairman.\n\n\"What is your evidence for this, Brother McMurdo?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is in this letter which has come into my hands,\" said McMurdo. He read the passage aloud. \"It is a matter of honour with me that I can give no further particulars about the letter, nor put it into your hands; but I assure you that there is nothing else in it which can affect the interests of the lodge. I put the case before you as it has reached me.\"\n\n\"Let me say, Mr. Chairman,\" said one of the older brethren, \"that I have heard of Birdy Edwards, and that he has the name of being the best man in the Pinkerton service.\"\n\n\"Does anyone know him by sight?\" asked McGinty.\n\n\"Yes,\" said McMurdo, \"I do.\"\n\nThere was a murmur of astonishment through the hall.\n\n\"I believe we hold him in the hollow of our hands,\" he continued with an exulting smile upon his face. \"If we act quickly and wisely, we can cut this thing short. If I have your confidence and your help, it is little that we have to fear.\"\n\n\"What have we to fear, anyhow? What can he know of our affairs?\"\n\n\"You might say so if all were as stanch as you, Councillor. But this man has all the millions of the capitalists at his back. Do you think there is no weaker brother among all our lodges that could not be bought? He will get at our secrets\u2014maybe has got them already. There's only one sure cure.\"\n\n\"That he never leaves the valley,\" said Baldwin.\n\nMcMurdo nodded. \"Good for you, Brother Baldwin,\" he said. \"You and I have had our differences, but you have said the true word to-night.\"\n\n\"Where is he, then? Where shall we know him?\"\n\n\"Eminent Bodymaster,\" said McMurdo, earnestly, \"I would put it to you that this is too vital a thing for us to discuss in open lodge. God forbid that I should throw a doubt on anyone here; but if so much as a word of gossip got to the ears of this man, there would be an end of any chance of our getting him. I would ask the lodge to choose a trusty committee, Mr. Chairman\u2014yourself, if I might suggest it, and Brother Baldwin here, and five more. Then I can talk freely of what I know and of what I advise should be done.\"\n\nThe proposition was at once adopted, and the committee chosen. Besides the chairman and Baldwin there were the vulture-faced secretary, Harraway, Tiger Cormac, the brutal young assassin, Carter, the treasurer, and the brothers Willaby, fearless and desperate men who would stick at nothing.\n\nThe usual revelry of the lodge was short and subdued: for there was a cloud upon the men's spirits, and many there for the first time began to see the cloud of avenging Law drifting up in that serene sky under which they had dwelt so long. The horrors they had dealt out to others had been so much a part of their settled lives that the thought of retribution had become a remote one, and so seemed the more startling now that it came so closely upon them. They broke up early and left their leaders to their council.\n\n\"Now, McMurdo!\" said McGinty when they were alone. The seven men sat frozen in their seats.\n\n\"I said just now that I knew Birdy Edwards,\" McMurdo explained. \"I need not tell you that he is not here under that name. He's a brave man, but not a crazy one. He passes under the name of Steve Wilson, and he is lodging at Hobson's Patch.\"\n\n\"How do you know this?\"\n\n\"Because I fell into talk with him. I thought little of it at the time, nor would have given it a second thought but for this letter; but now I'm sure it's the man. I met him on the cars when I went down the line on Wednesday\u2014a hard case if ever there was one. He said he was a reporter. I believed it for the moment. Wanted to know all he could about the Scowrers and what he called 'the outrages' for a New York paper. Asked me every kind of question so as to get something. You bet I was giving nothing away. 'I'd pay for it and pay well,' said he, 'if I could get some stuff that would suit my editor.' I said what I thought would please him best, and he handed me a twenty-dollar bill for my information. 'There's ten times that for you,' said he, 'if you can find me all that I want.'\"\n\n\"What did you tell him, then?\"\n\n\"Any stuff I could make up.\"\n\n\"How do you know he wasn't a newspaper man?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you. He got out at Hobson's Patch, and so did I. I chanced into the telegraph bureau, and he was leaving it.\n\n\"'See here,' said the operator after he'd gone out, 'I guess we should charge double rates for this.'\u2014'I guess you should,' said I. He had filled the form with stuff that might have been Chinese, for all we could make of it. 'He fires a sheet of this off every day,' said the clerk. 'Yes,' said I; 'it's special news for his paper, and he's scared that the others should tap it.' That was what the operator thought and what I thought at the time; but I think differently now.\"\n\n\"By Gar! I believe you are right,\" said McGinty. \"But what do you allow that we should do about it?\"\n\n\"Why not go right down now and fix him?\" someone suggested.\n\n\"Ay, the sooner the better.\"\n\n\"I'd start this next minute if I knew where we could find him,\" said McMurdo. \"He's in Hobson's Patch; but I don't know the house. I've got a plan, though, if you'll only take my advice.\"\n\n\"Well, what is it?\"\n\n\"I'll go to the Patch to-morrow morning. I'll find him through the operator. He can locate him, I guess. Well, then I'll tell him that I'm a Freeman myself. I'll offer him all the secrets of the lodge for a price. You bet he'll tumble to it. I'll tell him the papers are at my house, and that it's as much as my life would be worth to let him come while folk were about. He'll see that that's horse sense. Let him come at ten o'clock at night, and he shall see everything. That will fetch him sure.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"You can plan the rest for yourselves. Widow MacNamara's is a lonely house. She's as true as steel and as deaf as a post. There's only Scanlan and me in the house. If I get his promise\u2014and I'll let you know if I do\u2014I'd have the whole seven of you come to me by nine o'clock. We'll get him in. If ever he gets out alive\u2014well, he can talk of Birdy Edwards's luck for the rest of his days!\"\n\n\"There's going to be a vacancy at Pinkerton's or I'm mistaken. Leave it at that, McMurdo. At nine to-morrow we'll be with you. You once get the door shut behind him, and you can leave the rest with us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "The Trapping of Birdy Edwards", + "text": "As McMurdo had said, the house in which he lived was a lonely one and very well suited for such a crime as they had planned. It was on the extreme fringe of the town and stood well back from the road. In any other case the conspirators would have simply called out their man, as they had many a time before, and emptied their pistols into his body; but in this instance it was very necessary to find out how much he knew, how he knew it, and what had been passed on to his employers.\n\nIt was possible that they were already too late and that the work had been done. If that was indeed so, they could at least have their revenge upon the man who had done it. But they were hopeful that nothing of great importance had yet come to the detective's knowledge, as otherwise, they argued, he would not have troubled to write down and forward such trivial information as McMurdo claimed to have given him. However, all this they would learn from his own lips. Once in their power, they would find a way to make him speak. It was not the first time that they had handled an unwilling witness.\n\nMcMurdo went to Hobson's Patch as agreed. The police seemed to take particular interest in him that morning, and Captain Marvin\u2014he who had claimed the old acquaintance with him at Chicago\u2014actually addressed him as he waited at the station. McMurdo turned away and refused to speak with him. He was back from his mission in the afternoon, and saw McGinty at the Union House.\n\n\"He is coming,\" he said.\n\n\"Good!\" said McGinty. The giant was in his shirt sleeves, with chains and seals gleaming athwart his ample waistcoat and a diamond twinkling through the fringe of his bristling beard. Drink and politics had made the Boss a very rich as well as powerful man. The more terrible, therefore, seemed that glimpse of the prison or the gallows which had risen before him the night before.\n\n\"Do you reckon he knows much?\" he asked anxiously.\n\nMcMurdo shook his head gloomily. \"He's been here some time\u2014six weeks at the least. I guess he didn't come into these parts to look at the prospect. If he has been working among us all that time with the railroad money at his back, I should expect that he has got results, and that he has passed them on.\"\n\n\"There's not a weak man in the lodge,\" cried McGinty. \"True as steel, every man of them. And yet, by the Lord! there is that skunk Morris. What about him? If any man gives us away, it would be he. I've a mind to send a couple of the boys round before evening to give him a beating up and see what they can get from him.\"\n\n\"Well, there would be no harm in that,\" McMurdo answered. \"I won't deny that I have a liking for Morris and would be sorry to see him come to harm. He has spoken to me once or twice over lodge matters, and though he may not see them the same as you or I, he never seemed the sort that squeals. But still it is not for me to stand between him and you.\"\n\n\"I'll fix the old devil!\" said McGinty with an oath. \"I've had my eye on him this year past.\"\n\n\"Well, you know best about that,\" McMurdo answered. \"But whatever you do must be to-morrow; for we must lie low until the Pinkerton affair is settled up. We can't afford to set the police buzzing, to-day of all days.\"\n\n\"True for you,\" said McGinty. \"And we'll learn from Birdy Edwards himself where he got his news if we have to cut his heart out first. Did he seem to scent a trap?\"\n\nMcMurdo laughed. \"I guess I took him on his weak point,\" he said. \"If he could get on a good trail of the Scowrers, he's ready to follow it into hell. I took his money,\" McMurdo grinned as he produced a wad of dollar notes, \"and as much more when he has seen all my papers.\"\n\n\"What papers?\"\n\n\"Well, there are no papers. But I filled him up about constitutions and books of rules and forms of membership. He expects to get right down to the end of everything before he leaves.\"\n\n\"Faith, he's right there,\" said McGinty grimly. \"Didn't he ask you why you didn't bring him the papers?\"\n\n\"As if I would carry such things, and me a suspected man, and Captain Marvin after speaking to me this very day at the depot!\"\n\n\"Ay, I heard of that,\" said McGinty. \"I guess the heavy end of this business is coming on to you. We could put him down an old shaft when we've done with him; but however we work it we can't get past the man living at Hobson's Patch and you being there to-day.\"\n\nMcMurdo shrugged his shoulders. \"If we handle it right, they can never prove the killing,\" said he. \"No one can see him come to the house after dark, and I'll lay to it that no one will see him go. Now see here, Councillor, I'll show you my plan and I'll ask you to fit the others into it. You will all come in good time. Very well. He comes at ten. He is to tap three times, and me to open the door for him. Then I'll get behind him and shut it. He's our man then.\"\n\n\"That's all easy and plain.\"\n\n\"Yes; but the next step wants considering. He's a hard proposition. He's heavily armed. I've fooled him proper, and yet he is likely to be on his guard. Suppose I show him right into a room with seven men in it where he expected to find me alone. There is going to be shooting, and somebody is going to be hurt.\"\n\n\"That's so.\"\n\n\"And the noise is going to bring every damned copper in the township on top of it.\"\n\n\"I guess you are right.\"\n\n\"This is how I should work it. You will all be in the big room\u2014same as you saw when you had a chat with me. I'll open the door for him, show him into the parlour beside the door, and leave him there while I get the papers. That will give me the chance of telling you how things are shaping. Then I will go back to him with some faked papers. As he is reading them I will jump for him and get my grip on his pistol arm. You'll hear me call and in you will rush. The quicker the better; for he is as strong a man as I, and I may have more than I can manage. But I allow that I can hold him till you come.\"\n\n\"It's a good plan,\" said McGinty. \"The lodge will owe you a debt for this. I guess when I move out of the chair I can put a name to the man that's coming after me.\"\n\n\"Sure, Councillor, I am little more than a recruit,\" said McMurdo; but his face showed what he thought of the great man's compliment.\n\nWhen he had returned home he made his own preparations for the grim evening in front of him. First he cleaned, oiled, and loaded his Smith & Wesson revolver. Then he surveyed the room in which the detective was to be trapped. It was a large apartment, with a long deal table in the centre, and the big stove at one side. At each of the other sides were windows. There were no shutters on these: only light curtains which drew across. McMurdo examined these attentively. No doubt it must have struck him that the apartment was very exposed for so secret a meeting. Yet its distance from the road made it of less consequence. Finally he discussed the matter with his fellow lodger. Scanlan, though a Scowrer, was an inoffensive little man who was too weak to stand against the opinion of his comrades, but was secretly horrified by the deeds of blood at which he had sometimes been forced to assist. McMurdo told him shortly what was intended.\n\n\"And if I were you, Mike Scanlan, I would take a night off and keep clear of it. There will be bloody work here before morning.\"\n\n\"Well, indeed then, Mac,\" Scanlan answered. \"It's not the will but the nerve that is wanting in me. When I saw Manager Dunn go down at the colliery yonder it was just more than I could stand. I'm not made for it, same as you or McGinty. If the lodge will think none the worse of me, I'll just do as you advise and leave you to yourselves for the evening.\"\n\nThe men came in good time as arranged. They were outwardly respectable citizens, well clad and cleanly; but a judge of faces would have read little hope for Birdy Edwards in those hard mouths and remorseless eyes. There was not a man in the room whose hands had not been reddened a dozen times before. They were as hardened to human murder as a butcher to sheep.\n\nForemost, of course, both in appearance and in guilt, was the formidable Boss. Harraway, the secretary, was a lean, bitter man with a long, scraggy neck and nervous, jerky limbs, a man of incorruptible fidelity where the finances of the order were concerned, and with no notion of justice or honesty to anyone beyond. The treasurer, Carter, was a middle-aged man, with an impassive, rather sulky expression, and a yellow parchment skin. He was a capable organizer, and the actual details of nearly every outrage had sprung from his plotting brain. The two Willabys were men of action, tall, lithe young fellows with determined faces, while their companion, Tiger Cormac, a heavy, dark youth, was feared even by his own comrades for the ferocity of his disposition. These were the men who assembled that night under the roof of McMurdo for the killing of the Pinkerton detective.\n\nTheir host had placed whisky upon the table, and they had hastened to prime themselves for the work before them. Baldwin and Cormac were already half-drunk, and the liquor had brought out all their ferocity. Cormac placed his hands on the stove for an instant\u2014it had been lighted, for the nights were still cold.\n\n\"That will do,\" said he, with an oath.\n\n\"Ay,\" said Baldwin, catching his meaning. \"If he is strapped to that, we will have the truth out of him.\"\n\n\"We'll have the truth out of him, never fear,\" said McMurdo. He had nerves of steel, this man; for though the whole weight of the affair was on him his manner was as cool and unconcerned as ever. The others marked it and applauded.\n\n\"You are the one to handle him,\" said the Boss approvingly. \"Not a warning will he get till your hand is on his throat. It's pity there are no shutters to your windows.\"\n\nMcMurdo went from one to the other and drew the curtains tighter. \"Sure no one can spy upon us now. It's close upon the hour.\"\n\n\"Maybe he won't come. Maybe he'll get a sniff of danger,\" said the secretary.\n\n\"He'll come, never fear,\" McMurdo answered. \"He is as eager to come as you can be to see him. Hark to that!\"\n\nThey all sat like wax figures, some with their glasses arrested halfway to their lips. Three loud knocks had sounded at the door.\n\n\"Hush!\" McMurdo raised his hand in caution. An exulting glance went round the circle, and hands were laid upon hidden weapons.\n\n\"Not a sound, for your lives!\" McMurdo whispered, as he went from the room, closing the door carefully behind him.\n\nWith strained ears the murderers waited. They counted the steps of their comrade down the passage. Then they heard him open the outer door. There were a few words as of greeting. Then they were aware of a strange step inside and of an unfamiliar voice. An instant later came the slam of the door and the turning of the key in the lock. Their prey was safe within the trap. Tiger Cormac laughed horribly, and Boss McGinty clapped his great hand across his mouth.\n\n\"Be quiet, you fool!\" he whispered. \"You'll be the undoing of us yet!\"\n\nThere was a mutter of conversation from the next room. It seemed interminable. Then the door opened, and McMurdo appeared, his finger upon his lip.\n\nHe came to the end of the table and looked round at them. A subtle change had come over him. His manner was as of one who has great work to do. His face had set into granite firmness. His eyes shone with a fierce excitement behind his spectacles. He had become a visible leader of men. They stared at him with eager interest; but he said nothing. Still with the same singular gaze he looked from man to man.\n\n\"Well!\" cried Boss McGinty at last. \"Is he here? Is Birdy Edwards here?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" McMurdo answered slowly. \"Birdy Edwards is here. I am Birdy Edwards!\"\n\nThere were ten seconds after that brief speech during which the room might have been empty, so profound was the silence. The hissing of a kettle upon the stove rose sharp and strident to the ear. Seven white faces, all turned upward to this man who dominated them, were set motionless with utter terror. Then, with a sudden shivering of glass, a bristle of glistening rifle barrels broke through each window, while the curtains were torn from their hangings.\n\nAt the sight Boss McGinty gave the roar of a wounded bear and plunged for the half-opened door. A levelled revolver met him there with the stern blue eyes of Captain Marvin of the Mine Police gleaming behind the sights. The Boss recoiled and fell back into his chair.\n\n\"You're safer there, Councillor,\" said the man whom they had known as McMurdo. \"And you, Baldwin, if you don't take your hand off your pistol, you'll cheat the hangman yet. Pull it out, or by the Lord that made me\u2014There, that will do. There are forty armed men round this house, and you can figure it out for yourself what chance you have. Take their pistols, Marvin!\"\n\nThere was no possible resistance under the menace of those rifles. The men were disarmed. Sulky, sheepish, and amazed, they still sat round the table.\n\n\"I'd like to say a word to you before we separate,\" said the man who had trapped them. \"I guess we may not meet again until you see me on the stand in the courthouse. I'll give you something to think over between now and then. You know me now for what I am. At last I can put my cards on the table. I am Birdy Edwards of Pinkerton's. I was chosen to break up your gang. I had a hard and dangerous game to play. Not a soul, not one soul, not my nearest and dearest, knew that I was playing it. Only Captain Marvin here and my employers knew that. But it's over to-night, thank God, and I am the winner!\"\n\nThe seven pale, rigid faces looked up at him. There was unappeasable hatred in their eyes. He read the relentless threat.\n\n\"Maybe you think that the game is not over yet. Well, I take my chance of that. Anyhow, some of you will take no further hand, and there are sixty more besides yourselves that will see a jail this night. I'll tell you this, that when I was put upon this job I never believed there was such a society as yours. I thought it was paper talk, and that I would prove it so. They told me it was to do with the Freemen; so I went to Chicago and was made one. Then I was surer than ever that it was just paper talk; for I found no harm in the society, but a deal of good.\n\n\"Still, I had to carry out my job, and I came to the coal valleys. When I reached this place I learned that I was wrong and that it wasn't a dime novel after all. So I stayed to look after it. I never killed a man in Chicago. I never minted a dollar in my life. Those I gave you were as good as any others; but I never spent money better. But I knew the way into your good wishes, and so I pretended to you that the law was after me. It all worked just as I thought.\n\n\"So I joined your infernal lodge, and I took my share in your councils. Maybe they will say that I was as bad as you. They can say what they like, so long as I get you. But what is the truth? The night I joined you beat up old man Stanger. I could not warn him, for there was no time; but I held your hand, Baldwin, when you would have killed him. If ever I have suggested things, so as to keep my place among you, they were things which I knew I could prevent. I could not save Dunn and Menzies, for I did not know enough; but I will see that their murderers are hanged. I gave Chester Wilcox warning, so that when I blew his house in he and his folk were in hiding. There was many a crime that I could not stop; but if you look back and think how often your man came home the other road, or was down in town when you went for him, or stayed indoors when you thought he would come out, you'll see my work.\"\n\n\"You blasted traitor!\" hissed McGinty through his closed teeth.\n\n\"Ay, John McGinty, you may call me that if it eases your smart. You and your like have been the enemy of God and man in these parts. It took a man to get between you and the poor devils of men and women that you held under your grip. There was just one way of doing it, and I did it. You call me a traitor; but I guess there's many a thousand will call me a deliverer that went down into hell to save them. I've had three months of it. I wouldn't have three such months again if they let me loose in the treasury at Washington for it. I had to stay till I had it all, every man and every secret right here in this hand. I'd have waited a little longer if it hadn't come to my knowledge that my secret was coming out. A letter had come into the town that would have set you wise to it all. Then I had to act and act quickly.\n\n\"I've nothing more to say to you, except that when my time comes I'll die the easier when I think of the work I have done in this valley. Now, Marvin, I'll keep you no more. Take them in and get it over.\"\n\nThere is little more to tell. Scanlan had been given a sealed note to be left at the address of Miss Ettie Shafter, a mission which he had accepted with a wink and a knowing smile. In the early hours of the morning a beautiful woman and a much muffled man boarded a special train which had been sent by the railroad company, and made a swift, unbroken journey out of the land of danger. It was the last time that ever either Ettie or her lover set foot in the Valley of Fear. Ten days later they were married in Chicago, with old Jacob Shafter as witness of the wedding.\n\nThe trial of the Scowrers was held far from the place where their adherents might have terrified the guardians of the law. In vain they struggled. In vain the money of the lodge\u2014money squeezed by blackmail out of the whole countryside\u2014was spent like water in the attempt to save them. That cold, clear, unimpassioned statement from one who knew every detail of their lives, their organization, and their crimes was unshaken by all the wiles of their defenders. At last after so many years they were broken and scattered. The cloud was lifted forever from the valley.\n\nMcGinty met his fate upon the scaffold, cringing and whining when the last hour came. Eight of his chief followers shared his fate. Fifty-odd had various degrees of imprisonment. The work of Birdy Edwards was complete.\n\nAnd yet, as he had guessed, the game was not over yet. There was another hand to be played, and yet another and another. Ted Baldwin, for one, had escaped the scaffold; so had the Willabys; so had several others of the fiercest spirits of the gang. For ten years they were out of the world, and then came a day when they were free once more\u2014a day which Edwards, who knew his men, was very sure would be an end of his life of peace. They had sworn an oath on all that they thought holy to have his blood as a vengeance for their comrades. And well they strove to keep vow!\n\nFrom Chicago he was chased, after two attempts so near success that it was sure that the third would get him. From Chicago he went under a changed name to California, and it was there that the light went for a time out of his life when Ettie Edwards died. Once again he was nearly killed, and once again under the name of Douglas he worked in a lonely canon, where with an English partner named Barker he amassed a fortune. At last there came a warning to him that the bloodhounds were on his track once more, and he cleared\u2014only just in time\u2014for England. And thence came the John Douglas who for a second time married a worthy mate, and lived for five years as a Sussex country gentleman, a life which ended with the strange happenings of which we have heard." + }, + { + "title": "EPILOGUE", + "text": "The Police trial had passed, in which the case of John Douglas was referred to a higher court. So had the Quarter Sessions, at which he was acquitted as having acted in self-defense.\n\n\"Get him out of England at any cost,\" wrote Holmes to the wife. \"There are forces here which may be more dangerous than those he has escaped. There is no safety for your husband in England.\"\n\nTwo months had gone by, and the case had to some extent passed from our minds. Then one morning there came an enigmatic note slipped into our letter box. \"Dear me, Mr. Holmes. Dear me!\" said this singular epistle. There was neither superscription nor signature. I laughed at the quaint message; but Holmes showed unwonted seriousness.\n\n\"Deviltry, Watson!\" he remarked, and sat long with a clouded brow.\n\nLate last night Mrs. Hudson, our landlady, brought up a message, that a gentleman wished to see Holmes, and that the matter was of the utmost importance. Close at the heels of his messenger came Cecil Barker, our friend of the moated Manor House. His face was drawn and haggard.\n\n\"I've had bad news\u2014terrible news, Mr. Holmes,\" said he.\n\n\"I feared as much,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"You have not had a cable, have you?\"\n\n\"I have had a note from someone who has.\"\n\n\"It's poor Douglas. They tell me his name is Edwards; but he will always be Jack Douglas of Benito Canon to me. I told you that they started together for South Africa in the Palmyra three weeks ago.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"The ship reached Cape Town last night. I received this cable from Mrs. Douglas this morning:\n\nJack has been lost overboard in gale off St. Helena. No one knows how accident occurred.\n\nIVY DOUGLAS.\n\n\"Ha! It came like that, did it?\" said Holmes thoughtfully. \"Well, I've no doubt it was well stage-managed.\"\n\n\"You mean that you think there was no accident?\"\n\n\"None in the world.\"\n\n\"He was murdered?\"\n\n\"Surely!\"\n\n\"So I think also. These infernal Scowrers, this cursed vindictive nest of criminals\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no, my good sir,\" said Holmes. \"There is a master hand here. It is no case of sawed-off shotguns and clumsy six-shooters. You can tell an old master by the sweep of his brush. I can tell a Moriarty when I see one. This crime is from London, not from America.\"\n\n\"But for what motive?\"\n\n\"Because it is done by a man who cannot afford to fail, one whose whole unique position depends upon the fact that all he does must succeed. A great brain and a huge organization have been turned to the extinction of one man. It is crushing the nut with the triphammer, an absurd extravagance of energy\u2014but the nut is very effectually crushed all the same.\"\n\n\"How came this man to have anything to do with it?\"\n\n\"I can only say that the first word that ever came to us of the business was from one of his lieutenants. These Americans were well advised. Having an English job to do, they took into partnership, as any foreign criminal could do, this great consultant in crime. From that moment their man was doomed. At first he would content himself by using his machinery in order to find their victim. Then he would indicate how the matter might be treated. Finally, when he read in the reports of the failure of this agent, he would step in himself with a master touch. You heard me warn this man at Birlstone Manor House that the coming danger was greater than the past. Was I right?\"\n\nBarker beat his head with his clenched fist in his impotent anger. \"Do not tell me that we have to sit down under this? Do you say that no one can ever get level with this king devil?\"\n\n\"No, I don't say that,\" said Holmes, and his eyes seemed to be looking far into the future. \"I don't say that he can't be beat. But you must give me time\u2014you must give me time!\"\n\nWe all sat in silence for some minutes while those fateful eyes still strained to pierce the veil." + }, + { + "title": "HIS LAST BOW", + "text": "[ PREFACE ]\n\n[ His Last Bow ]\n\nThe friends of Mr. Sherlock Holmes will be glad to learn that he is still alive and well, though somewhat crippled by occasional attacks of rheumatism. He has, for many years, lived in a small farm upon the downs five miles from Eastbourne, where his time is divided between philosophy and agriculture. During this period of rest he has refused the most princely offers to take up various cases, having determined that his retirement was a permanent one. The approach of the German war caused him, however, to lay his remarkable combination of intellectual and practical activity at the disposal of the government, with historical results which are recounted in His Last Bow. Several previous experiences which have lain long in my portfolio have been added to His Last Bow so as to complete the volume.\n\nJOHN H. WATSON, M. D." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF WISTERIA LODGE", + "text": "1. The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles\n\nI find it recorded in my notebook that it was a bleak and windy day towards the end of March in the year 1892. Holmes had received a telegram while we sat at our lunch, and he had scribbled a reply. He made no remark, but the matter remained in his thoughts, for he stood in front of the fire afterwards with a thoughtful face, smoking his pipe, and casting an occasional glance at the message. Suddenly he turned upon me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes.\n\n\"I suppose, Watson, we must look upon you as a man of letters,\" said he. \"How do you define the word 'grotesque'?\"\n\n\"Strange\u2014remarkable,\" I suggested.\n\nHe shook his head at my definition.\n\n\"There is surely something more than that,\" said he; \"some underlying suggestion of the tragic and the terrible. If you cast your mind back to some of those narratives with which you have afflicted a long-suffering public, you will recognize how often the grotesque has deepened into the criminal. Think of that little affair of the red-headed men. That was grotesque enough in the outset, and yet it ended in a desperate attempt at robbery. Or, again, there was that most grotesque affair of the five orange pips, which led straight to a murderous conspiracy. The word puts me on the alert.\"\n\n\"Have you it there?\" I asked.\n\nHe read the telegram aloud.\n\n\"Have just had most incredible and grotesque experience. May I consult you?\n\n\u2002SCOTT ECCLES,\n\n\u2002Post-Office, Charing Cross.\"\n\n\"Man or woman?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, man, of course. No woman would ever send a reply-paid telegram. She would have come.\"\n\n\"Will you see him?\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, you know how bored I have been since we locked up Colonel Carruthers. My mind is like a racing engine, tearing itself to pieces because it is not connected up with the work for which it was built. Life is commonplace; the papers are sterile; audacity and romance seem to have passed forever from the criminal world. Can you ask me, then, whether I am ready to look into any new problem, however trivial it may prove? But here, unless I am mistaken, is our client.\"\n\nA measured step was heard upon the stairs, and a moment later a stout, tall, gray-whiskered and solemnly respectable person was ushered into the room. His life history was written in his heavy features and pompous manner. From his spats to his gold-rimmed spectacles he was a Conservative, a churchman, a good citizen, orthodox and conventional to the last degree. But some amazing experience had disturbed his native composure and left its traces in his bristling hair, his flushed, angry cheeks, and his flurried, excited manner. He plunged instantly into his business.\n\n\"I have had a most singular and unpleasant experience, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"Never in my life have I been placed in such a situation. It is most improper\u2014most outrageous. I must insist upon some explanation.\" He swelled and puffed in his anger.\n\n\"Pray sit down, Mr. Scott Eccles,\" said Holmes in a soothing voice. \"May I ask, in the first place, why you came to me at all?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, it did not appear to be a matter which concerned the police, and yet, when you have heard the facts, you must admit that I could not leave it where it was. Private detectives are a class with whom I have absolutely no sympathy, but none the less, having heard your name\u2014\"\n\n\"Quite so. But, in the second place, why did you not come at once?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHolmes glanced at his watch.\n\n\"It is a quarter-past two,\" he said. \"Your telegram was dispatched about one. But no one can glance at your toilet and attire without seeing that your disturbance dates from the moment of your waking.\"\n\nOur client smoothed down his unbrushed hair and felt his unshaven chin.\n\n\"You are right, Mr. Holmes. I never gave a thought to my toilet. I was only too glad to get out of such a house. But I have been running round making inquiries before I came to you. I went to the house agents, you know, and they said that Mr. Garcia's rent was paid up all right and that everything was in order at Wisteria Lodge.\"\n\n\"Come, come, sir,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"You are like my friend, Dr. Watson, who has a bad habit of telling his stories wrong end foremost. Please arrange your thoughts and let me know, in their due sequence, exactly what those events are which have sent you out unbrushed and unkempt, with dress boots and waistcoat buttoned awry, in search of advice and assistance.\"\n\nOur client looked down with a rueful face at his own unconventional appearance.\n\n\"I'm sure it must look very bad, Mr. Holmes, and I am not aware that in my whole life such a thing has ever happened before. But I will tell you the whole queer business, and when I have done so you will admit, I am sure, that there has been enough to excuse me.\"\n\nBut his narrative was nipped in the bud. There was a bustle outside, and Mrs. Hudson opened the door to usher in two robust and official-looking individuals, one of whom was well known to us as Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard, an energetic, gallant, and, within his limitations, a capable officer. He shook hands with Holmes and introduced his comrade as Inspector Baynes, of the Surrey Constabulary.\n\n\"We are hunting together, Mr. Holmes, and our trail lay in this direction.\" He turned his bulldog eyes upon our visitor. \"Are you Mr. John Scott Eccles, of Popham House, Lee?\"\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"We have been following you about all the morning.\"\n\n\"You traced him through the telegram, no doubt,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Exactly, Mr. Holmes. We picked up the scent at Charing Cross Post-Office and came on here.\"\n\n\"But why do you follow me? What do you want?\"\n\n\"We wish a statement, Mr. Scott Eccles, as to the events which led up to the death last night of Mr. Aloysius Garcia, of Wisteria Lodge, near Esher.\"\n\nOur client had sat up with staring eyes and every tinge of colour struck from his astonished face.\n\n\"Dead? Did you say he was dead?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he is dead.\"\n\n\"But how? An accident?\"\n\n\"Murder, if ever there was one upon earth.\"\n\n\"Good God! This is awful! You don't mean\u2014you don't mean that I am suspected?\"\n\n\"A letter of yours was found in the dead man's pocket, and we know by it that you had planned to pass last night at his house.\"\n\n\"So I did.\"\n\n\"Oh, you did, did you?\"\n\nOut came the official notebook.\n\n\"Wait a bit, Gregson,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"All you desire is a plain statement, is it not?\"\n\n\"And it is my duty to warn Mr. Scott Eccles that it may be used against him.\"\n\n\"Mr. Eccles was going to tell us about it when you entered the room. I think, Watson, a brandy and soda would do him no harm. Now, sir, I suggest that you take no notice of this addition to your audience, and that you proceed with your narrative exactly as you would have done had you never been interrupted.\"\n\nOur visitor had gulped off the brandy and the colour had returned to his face. With a dubious glance at the inspector's notebook, he plunged at once into his extraordinary statement.\n\n\"I am a bachelor,\" said he, \"and being of a sociable turn I cultivate a large number of friends. Among these are the family of a retired brewer called Melville, living at Albemarle Mansion, Kensington. It was at his table that I met some weeks ago a young fellow named Garcia. He was, I understood, of Spanish descent and connected in some way with the embassy. He spoke perfect English, was pleasing in his manners, and as good-looking a man as ever I saw in my life.\n\n\"In some way we struck up quite a friendship, this young fellow and I. He seemed to take a fancy to me from the first, and within two days of our meeting he came to see me at Lee. One thing led to another, and it ended in his inviting me out to spend a few days at his house, Wisteria Lodge. between Esher and Oxshott. Yesterday evening I went to Esher to fulfil this engagement.\n\n\"He had described his household to me before I went there. He lived with a faithful servant, a countryman of his own, who looked after all his needs. This fellow could speak English and did his housekeeping for him. Then there was a wonderful cook, he said, a half-breed whom he had picked up in his travels, who could serve an excellent dinner. I remember that he remarked what a queer household it was to find in the heart of Surrey, and that I agreed with him, though it has proved a good deal queerer than I thought.\n\n\"I drove to the place\u2014about two miles on the south side of Esher. The house was a fair-sized one, standing back from the road, with a curving drive which was banked with high ever-green shrubs. It was an old, tumble-down building in a crazy state of disrepair. When the trap pulled up on the grass-grown drive in front of the blotched and weather-stained door, I had doubts as to my wisdom in visiting a man whom I knew so slightly. He opened the door himself, however, and greeted me with a great show of cordiality. I was handed over to the manservant, a melancholy, swarthy individual, who led the way, my bag in his hand, to my bedroom. The whole place was depressing. Our dinner was t\u00eate-\u00e0-t\u00eate, and though my host did his best to be entertaining, his thoughts seemed to continually wander, and he talked so vaguely and wildly that I could hardly understand him. He continually drummed his fingers on the table, gnawed his nails, and gave other signs of nervous impatience. The dinner itself was neither well served nor well cooked, and the gloomy presence of the taciturn servant did not help to enliven us. I can assure you that many times in the course of the evening I wished that I could invent some excuse which would take me back to Lee.\n\n\"One thing comes back to my memory which may have a bearing upon the business that you two gentlemen are investigating. I thought nothing of it at the time. Near the end of dinner a note was handed in by the servant. I noticed that after my host had read it he seemed even more distrait and strange than before. He gave up all pretence at conversation and sat, smoking endless cigarettes, lost in his own thoughts, but he made no remark as to the contents. About eleven I was glad to go to bed. Some time later Garcia looked in at my door\u2014the room was dark at the time\u2014and asked me if I had rung. I said that I had not. He apologized for having disturbed me so late, saying that it was nearly one o'clock. I dropped off after this and slept soundly all night.\n\n\"And now I come to the amazing part of my tale. When I woke it was broad daylight. I glanced at my watch, and the time was nearly nine. I had particularly asked to be called at eight, so I was very much astonished at this forgetfulness. I sprang up and rang for the servant. There was no response. I rang again and again, with the same result. Then I came to the conclusion that the bell was out of order. I huddled on my clothes and hurried downstairs in an exceedingly bad temper to order some hot water. You can imagine my surprise when I found that there was no one there. I shouted in the hall. There was no answer. Then I ran from room to room. All were deserted. My host had shown me which was his bedroom the night before, so I knocked at the door. No reply. I turned the handle and walked in. The room was empty, and the bed had never been slept in. He had gone with the rest. The foreign host, the foreign footman, the foreign cook, all had vanished in the night! That was the end of my visit to Wisteria Lodge.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes was rubbing his hands and chuckling as he added this bizarre incident to his collection of strange episodes.\n\n\"Your experience is, so far as I know, perfectly unique,\" said he. \"May I ask, sir, what you did then?\"\n\n\"I was furious. My first idea was that I had been the victim of some absurd practical joke. I packed my things, banged the hall door behind me, and set off for Esher, with my bag in my hand. I called at Allan Brothers', the chief land agents in the village, and found that it was from this firm that the villa had been rented. It struck me that the whole proceeding could hardly be for the purpose of making a fool of me, and that the main object must be to get out of the rent. It is late in March, so quarter-day is at hand. But this theory would not work. The agent was obliged to me for my warning, but told me that the rent had been paid in advance. Then I made my way to town and called at the Spanish embassy. The man was unknown there. After this I went to see Melville, at whose house I had first met Garcia, but I found that he really knew rather less about him than I did. Finally when I got your reply to my wire I came out to you, since I gather that you are a person who gives advice in difficult cases. But now, Mr. Inspector, I understand, from what you said when you entered the room, that you can carry the story on, and that some tragedy has occurred. I can assure you that every word I have said is the truth, and that, outside of what I have told you, I know absolutely nothing about the fate of this man. My only desire is to help the law in every possible way.\"\n\n\"I am sure of it, Mr. Scott Eccles\u2014I am sure of it,\" said Inspector Gregson in a very amiable tone. \"I am bound to say that everything which you have said agrees very closely with the facts as they have come to our notice. For example, there was that note which arrived during dinner. Did you chance to observe what became of it?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did. Garcia rolled it up and threw it into the fire.\"\n\n\"What do you say to that, Mr. Baynes?\"\n\nThe country detective was a stout, puffy, red man, whose face was only redeemed from grossness by two extraordinarily bright eyes, almost hidden behind the heavy creases of cheek and brow. With a slow smile he drew a folded and discoloured scrap of paper from his pocket.\n\n\"It was a dog-grate, Mr. Holmes, and he overpitched it. I picked this out unburned from the back of it.\"\n\nHolmes smiled his appreciation.\n\n\"You must have examined the house very carefully to find a single pellet of paper.\"\n\n\"I did, Mr. Holmes. It's my way. Shall I read it, Mr. Gregson?\"\n\nThe Londoner nodded.\n\n\"The note is written upon ordinary cream-laid paper without watermark. It is a quarter-sheet. The paper is cut off in two snips with a short-bladed scissors. It has been folded over three times and sealed with purple wax, put on hurriedly and pressed down with some flat oval object. It is addressed to Mr. Garcia, Wisteria Lodge. It says:\n\nOur own colours, green and white. Green open, white shut. Main stair, first corridor, seventh right, green baize. Godspeed. D.\n\n\"It is a woman's writing, done with a sharp-pointed pen, but the address is either done with another pen or by someone else. It is thicker and bolder, as you see.\"\n\n\"A very remarkable note,\" said Holmes, glancing it over. \"I must compliment you, Mr. Baynes, upon your attention to detail in your examination of it. A few trifling points might perhaps be added. The oval seal is undoubtedly a plain sleeve-link\u2014what else is of such a shape? The scissors were bent nail scissors. Short as the two snips are, you can distinctly see the same slight curve in each.\"\n\nThe country detective chuckled.\n\n\"I thought I had squeezed all the juice out of it, but I see there was a little over,\" he said. \"I'm bound to say that I make nothing of the note except that there was something on hand, and that a woman, as usual, was at the bottom of it.\"\n\nMr. Scott Eccles had fidgeted in his seat during this conversation.\n\n\"I am glad you found the note, since it corroborates my story,\" said he. \"But I beg to point out that I have not yet heard what has happened to Mr. Garcia, nor what has become of his household.\"\n\n\"As to Garcia,\" said Gregson, \"that is easily answered. He was found dead this morning upon Oxshott Common, nearly a mile from his home. His head had been smashed to pulp by heavy blows of a sandbag or some such instrument, which had crushed rather than wounded. It is a lonely corner, and there is no house within a quarter of a mile of the spot. He had apparently been struck down first from behind, but his assailant had gone on beating him long after he was dead. It was a most furious assault. There are no footsteps nor any clue to the criminals.\"\n\n\"Robbed?\"\n\n\"No, there was no attempt at robbery.\"\n\n\"This is very painful\u2014very painful and terrible,\" said Mr. Scott Eccles in a querulous voice, \"but it is really uncommonly hard upon me. I had nothing to do with my host going off upon a nocturnal excursion and meeting so sad an end. How do I come to be mixed up with the case?\"\n\n\"Very simply, sir,\" Inspector Baynes answered. \"The only document found in the pocket of the deceased was a letter from you saying that you would be with him on the night of his death. It was the envelope of this letter which gave us the dead man's name and address. It was after nine this morning when we reached his house and found neither you nor anyone else inside it. I wired to Mr. Gregson to run you down in London while I examined Wisteria Lodge. Then I came into town, joined Mr. Gregson, and here we are.\"\n\n\"I think now,\" said Gregson, rising, \"we had best put this matter into an official shape. You will come round with us to the station, Mr. Scott Eccles, and let us have your statement in writing.\"\n\n\"Certainly, I will come at once. But I retain your services, Mr. Holmes. I desire you to spare no expense and no pains to get at the truth.\"\n\nMy friend turned to the country inspector.\n\n\"I suppose that you have no objection to my collaborating with you, Mr. Baynes?\"\n\n\"Highly honoured, sir, I am sure.\"\n\n\"You appear to have been very prompt and business-like in all that you have done. Was there any clue, may I ask, as to the exact hour that the man met his death?\"\n\n\"He had been there since one o'clock. There was rain about that time, and his death had certainly been before the rain.\"\n\n\"But that is perfectly impossible, Mr. Baynes,\" cried our client. \"His voice is unmistakable. I could swear to it that it was he who addressed me in my bedroom at that very hour.\"\n\n\"Remarkable, but by no means impossible,\" said Holmes, smiling.\n\n\"You have a clue?\" asked Gregson.\n\n\"On the face of it the case is not a very complex one, though it certainly presents some novel and interesting features. A further knowledge of facts is necessary before I would venture to give a final and definite opinion. By the way, Mr. Baynes, did you find anything remarkable besides this note in your examination of the house?\"\n\nThe detective looked at my friend in a singular way.\n\n\"There were,\" said he, \"one or two very remarkable things. Perhaps when I have finished at the police-station you would care to come out and give me your opinion of them.\"\n\n\"I am entirely at your service,\" said Sherlock Holmes, ringing the bell. \"You will show these gentlemen out, Mrs. Hudson, and kindly send the boy with this telegram. He is to pay a five-shilling reply.\"\n\nWe sat for some time in silence after our visitors had left. Holmes smoked hard, with his brows drawn down over his keen eyes, and his head thrust forward in the eager way characteristic of the man.\n\n\"Well, Watson,\" he asked, turning suddenly upon me, \"what do you make of it?\"\n\n\"I can make nothing of this mystification of Scott Eccles.\"\n\n\"But the crime?\"\n\n\"Well, taken with the disappearance of the man's companions, I should say that they were in some way concerned in the murder and had fled from justice.\"\n\n\"That is certainly a possible point of view. On the face of it you must admit, however, that it is very strange that his two servants should have been in a conspiracy against him and should have attacked him on the one night when he had a guest. They had him alone at their mercy every other night in the week.\"\n\n\"Then why did they fly?\"\n\n\"Quite so. Why did they fly? There is a big fact. Another big fact is the remarkable experience of our client, Scott Eccles. Now, my dear Watson, is it beyond the limits of human ingenuity to furnish an explanation which would cover both these big facts? If it were one which would also admit of the mysterious note with its very curious phraseology, why, then it would be worth accepting as a temporary hypothesis. If the fresh facts which come to our knowledge all fit themselves into the scheme, then our hypothesis may gradually become a solution.\"\n\n\"But what is our hypothesis?\"\n\nHolmes leaned back in his chair with half-closed eyes.\n\n\"You must admit, my dear Watson, that the idea of a joke is impossible. There were grave events afoot, as the sequel showed, and the coaxing of Scott Eccles to Wisteria Lodge had some connection with them.\"\n\n\"But what possible connection?\"\n\n\"Let us take it link by link. There is, on the face of it, something unnatural about this strange and sudden friendship between the young Spaniard and Scott Eccles. It was the former who forced the pace. He called upon Eccles at the other end of London on the very day after he first met him, and he kept in close touch with him until he got him down to Esher. Now, what did he want with Eccles? What could Eccles supply? I see no charm in the man. He is not particularly intelligent\u2014not a man likely to be congenial to a quick-witted Latin. Why, then, was he picked out from all the other people whom Garcia met as particularly suited to his purpose? Has he any one outstanding quality? I say that he has. He is the very type of conventional British respectability, and the very man as a witness to impress another Briton. You saw yourself how neither of the inspectors dreamed of questioning his statement, extraordinary as it was.\"\n\n\"But what was he to witness?\"\n\n\"Nothing, as things turned out, but everything had they gone another way. That is how I read the matter.\"\n\n\"I see, he might have proved an alibi.\"\n\n\"Exactly, my dear Watson; he might have proved an alibi. We will suppose, for argument's sake, that the household of Wisteria Lodge are confederates in some design. The attempt, whatever it may be, is to come off, we will say, before one o'clock. By some juggling of the clocks it is quite possible that they may have got Scott Eccles to bed earlier than he thought, but in any case it is likely that when Garcia went out of his way to tell him that it was one it was really not more than twelve. If Garcia could do whatever he had to do and be back by the hour mentioned he had evidently a powerful reply to any accusation. Here was this irreproachable Englishman ready to swear in any court of law that the accused was in his house all the time. It was an insurance against the worst.\"\n\n\"Yes; yes, I see that. But how about the disappearance of the others?\"\n\n\"I have not all my facts yet, but I do not think there are any insuperable difficulties. Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.\"\n\n\"And the message?\"\n\n\"How did it run? 'Our own colours, green and white.' Sounds like racing. 'Green open, white shut.' That is clearly a signal. 'Main stair, first corridor, seventh right, green baize.' This is an assignation. We may find a jealous husband at the bottom of it all. It was clearly a dangerous quest. She would not have said 'Godspeed' had it not been so. 'D'\u2014that should be a guide.\"\n\n\"The man was a Spaniard. I suggest that 'D' stands for Dolores, a common female name in Spain.\"\n\n\"Good, Watson, very good\u2014but quite inadmissible. A Spaniard would write to a Spaniard in Spanish. The writer of this note is certainly English. Well, we can only possess our souls in patience until this excellent inspector comes back for us. Meanwhile we can thank our lucky fate which has rescued us for a few short hours from the insufferable fatigues of idleness.\"\n\nAn answer had arrived to Holmes's telegram before our Surrey officer had returned. Holmes read it and was about to place it in his notebook when he caught a glimpse of my expectant face. He tossed it across with a laugh.\n\n\"We are moving in exalted circles,\" said he.\n\nThe telegram was a list of names and addresses:\n\nLord Harringby, The Dingle; Sir George Ffolliott, Oxshott Towers; Mr. Hynes Hynes, J.P., Purdey Place; Mr. James Baker Williams, For-ton Old Hall; Mr. Henderson, High Gable; Rev. Joshua Stone, Nether Walsling.\n\n\"This is a very obvious way of limiting our field of operations,\" said Holmes. \"No doubt Baynes, with his methodical mind, has already adopted some similar plan.\"\n\n\"I don't quite understand.\"\n\n\"Well, my dear fellow, we have already arrived at the conclusion that the message received by Garcia at dinner was an appointment or an assignation. Now, if the obvious reading of it is correct, and in order to keep this tryst one has to ascend a main stair and seek the seventh door in a corridor, it is perfectly clear that the house is a very large one. It is equally certain that this house cannot be more than a mile or two from Oxshott, since Garcia was walking in that direction and hoped, according to my reading of the facts, to be back in Wisteria Lodge in time to avail himself of an alibi, which would only be valid up to one o'clock. As the number of large houses close to Oxshott must be limited, I adopted the obvious method of sending to the agents mentioned by Scott Eccles and obtaining a list of them. Here they are in this telegram, and the other end of our tangled skein must lie among them.\"\n\nIt was nearly six o'clock before we found ourselves in the pretty Surrey village of Esher, with Inspector Baynes as our companion.\n\nHolmes and I had taken things for the night, and found comfortable quarters at the Bull. Finally we set out in the company of the detective on our visit to Wisteria Lodge. It was a cold, dark March evening, with a sharp wind and a fine rain beating upon our faces, a fit setting for the wild common over which our road passed and the tragic goal to which it led us.\n\n2. The Tiger of San Pedro\n\nA cold and melancholy walk of a couple of miles brought us to a high wooden gate, which opened into a gloomy avenue of chestnuts. The curved and shadowed drive led us to a low, dark house, pitch-black against a slate-coloured sky. From the front window upon the left of the door there peeped a glimmer of a feeble light.\n\n\"There's a constable in possession,\" said Baynes. \"I'll knock at the window.\" He stepped across the grass plot and tapped with his hand on the pane. Through the fogged glass I dimly saw a man spring up from a chair beside the fire, and heard a sharp cry from within the room. An instant later a white-faced, hard-breathing policeman had opened the door, the candle wavering in his trembling hand.\n\n\"What's the matter, Walters?\" asked Baynes sharply.\n\nThe man mopped his forehead with his handkerchief and gave a long sigh of relief.\n\n\"I am glad you have come, sir. It has been a long evening, and I don't think my nerve is as good as it was.\"\n\n\"Your nerve, Walters? I should not have thought you had a nerve in your body.\"\n\n\"Well, sir, it's this lonely, silent house and the queer thing in the kitchen. Then when you tapped at the window I thought it had come again.\"\n\n\"That what had come again?\"\n\n\"The devil, sir, for all I know. It was at the window.\"\n\n\"What was at the window, and when?\"\n\n\"It was just about two hours ago. The light was just fading. I was sitting reading in the chair. I don't know what made me look up, but there was a face looking in at me through the lower pane. Lord, sir, what a face it was! I'll see it in my dreams.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut, Walters. This is not talk for a police-constable.\"\n\n\"I know, sir, I know; but it shook me, sir, and there's no use to deny it. It wasn't black, sir, nor was it white, nor any colour that I know, but a kind of queer shade like clay with a splash of milk in it. Then there was the size of it\u2014it was twice yours, sir. And the look of it\u2014the great staring goggle eyes, and the line of white teeth like a hungry beast. I tell you, sir. I couldn't move a finger, nor get my breath, till it whisked away and was gone. Out I ran and through the shrubbery, but thank God there was no one there.\"\n\n\"If I didn't know you were a good man, Walters, I should put a black mark against you for this. If it were the devil himself a constable on duty should never thank God that he could not lay his hands upon him. I suppose the whole thing is not a vision and a touch of nerves?\"\n\n\"That, at least, is very easily settled,\" said Holmes, lighting his little pocket lantern. \"Yes,\" he reported, after a short examination of the grass bed, \"a number twelve shoe, I should say. If he was all on the same scale as his foot he must certainly have been a giant.\"\n\n\"What became of him?\"\n\n\"He seems to have broken through the shrubbery and made for the road.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said the inspector with a grave and thoughtful face, \"whoever he may have been, and whatever he may have wanted, he's gone for the present, and we have more immediate things to attend to. Now, Mr. Holmes, with your permission, I will show you round the house.\"\n\nThe various bedrooms and sitting-rooms had yielded nothing to a careful search. Apparently the tenants had brought little or nothing with them, and all the furniture down to the smallest details had been taken over with the house. A good deal of clothing with the stamp of Marx and Co., High Holborn, had been left behind. Telegraphic inquiries had been already made which showed that Marx knew nothing of his customer save that he was a good payer. Odds and ends, some pipes, a few novels, two of them in Spanish, an old-fashioned pinfire revolver, and a guitar were among the personal property.\n\n\"Nothing in all this,\" said Baynes, stalking, candle in hand, from room to room. \"But now, Mr. Holmes, I invite your attention to the kitchen.\"\n\nIt was a gloomy, high-ceilinged room at the back of the house, with a straw litter in one corner, which served apparently as a bed for the cook. The table was piled with half-eaten dishes and dirty plates, the debris of last night's dinner.\n\n\"Look at this,\" said Baynes. \"What do you make of it?\"\n\nHe held up his candle before an extraordinary object which stood at the back of the dresser. It was so wrinkled and shrunken and withered that it was difficult to say what it might have been. One could but say that it was black and leathery and that it bore some resemblance to a dwarfish, human figure. At first, as I examined it, I thought that it was a mummified negro baby, and then it seemed a very twisted and ancient monkey. Finally I was left in doubt as to whether it was animal or human. A double band of white shells was strung round the centre of it.\n\n\"Very interesting\u2014very interesting, indeed!\" said Holmes, peering at this sinister relic. \"Anything more?\"\n\nIn silence Baynes led the way to the sink and held forward his candle. The limbs and body of some large, white bird, torn savagely to pieces with the feathers still on, were littered all over it. Holmes pointed to the wattles on the severed head.\n\n\"A white cock,\" said he. \"Most interesting! It is really a very curious case.\"\n\nBut Mr. Baynes had kept his most sinister exhibit to the last. From under the sink he drew a zinc pail which contained a quantity of blood. Then from the table he took a platter heaped with small pieces of charred bone.\n\n\"Something has been killed and something has been burned. We raked all these out of the fire. We had a doctor in this morning. He says that they are not human.\"\n\nHolmes smiled and rubbed his hands.\n\n\"I must congratulate you, Inspector, on handling so distinctive and instructive a case. Your powers, if I may say so without offence, seem superior to your opportunities.\"\n\nInspector Baynes's small eyes twinkled with pleasure.\n\n\"You're right, Mr. Holmes. We stagnate in the provinces. A case of this sort gives a man a chance, and I hope that I shall take it. What do you make of these bones?\"\n\n\"A lamb, I should say, or a kid.\"\n\n\"And the white cock?\"\n\n\"Curious, Mr. Baynes, very curious. I should say almost unique.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, there must have been some very strange people with some very strange ways in this house. One of them is dead. Did his companions follow him and kill him? If they did we should have them, for every port is watched. But my own views are different. Yes, sir, my own views are very different.\"\n\n\"You have a theory then?\"\n\n\"And I'll work it myself, Mr. Holmes. It's only due to my own credit to do so. Your name is made, but I have still to make mine. I should be glad to be able to say afterwards that I had solved it without your help.\"\n\nHolmes laughed good-humouredly.\n\n\"Well, well, Inspector,\" said he. \"Do you follow your path and I will follow mine. My results are always very much at your service if you care to apply to me for them. I think that I have seen all that I wish in this house, and that my time may be more profitably employed elsewhere. Au revoir and good luck!\"\n\nI could tell by numerous subtle signs, which might have been lost upon anyone but myself, that Holmes was on a hot scent. As impassive as ever to the casual observer, there were none the less a subdued eagerness and suggestion of tension in his brightened eyes and brisker manner which assured me that the game was afoot. After his habit he said nothing, and after mine I asked no questions. Sufficient for me to share the sport and lend my humble help to the capture without distracting that intent brain with needless interruption. All would come round to me in due time.\n\nI waited, therefore\u2014but to my ever-deepening disappointment I waited in vain. Day succeeded day, and my friend took no step forward. One morning he spent in town, and I learned from a casual reference that he had visited the British Museum. Save for this one excursion, he spent his days in long and often solitary walks, or in chatting with a number of village gossips whose acquaintance he had cultivated.\n\n\"I'm sure, Watson, a week in the country will be invaluable to you,\" he remarked. \"It is very pleasant to see the first green shoots upon the hedges and the catkins on the hazels once again. With a spud, a tin box, and an elementary book on botany, there are instructive days to be spent.\" He prowled about with this equipment himself, but it was a poor show of plants which he would bring back of an evening.\n\nOccasionally in our rambles we came across Inspector Baynes. His fat, red face wreathed itself in smiles and his small eyes glittered as he greeted my companion. He said little about the case, but from that little we gathered that he also was not dissatisfied at the course of events. I must admit, however, that I was somewhat surprised when, some five days after the crime, I opened my morning paper to find in large letters:" + }, + { + "title": "THE OXSHOTT MYSTERY", + "text": "[ A SOLUTION ]\n\n[ ARREST OF SUPPOSED ASSASSIN ]\n\nHolmes sprang in his chair as if he had been stung when I read the headlines.\n\n\"By Jove!\" he cried. \"You don't mean that Baynes has got him?\"\n\n\"Apparently,\" said I as I read the following report:\n\n\"Great excitement was caused in Esher and the neighbouring district when it was learned late last night that an arrest had been effected in connection with the Oxshott murder. It will be remembered that Mr. Garcia, of Wisteria Lodge, was found dead on Oxshott Common, his body showing signs of extreme violence, and that on the same night his servant and his cook fled, which appeared to show their participation in the crime. It was suggested, but never proved, that the deceased gentleman may have had valuables in the house, and that their abstraction was the motive of the crime. Every effort was made by Inspector Baynes, who has the case in hand, to ascertain the hiding place of the fugitives, and he had good reason to believe that they had not gone far but were lurking in some retreat which had been already prepared. It was certain from the first, however, that they would eventually be detected, as the cook, from the evidence of one or two tradespeople who have caught a glimpse of him through the window, was a man of most remarkable appearance\u2014being a huge and hideous mulatto, with yellowish features of a pronounced negroid type. This man has been seen since the crime, for he was detected and pursued by Constable Walters on the same evening, when he had the audacity to revisit Wisteria Lodge. Inspector Baynes, considering that such a visit must have some purpose in view and was likely, therefore, to be repeated, abandoned the house but left an ambuscade in the shrubbery. The man walked into the trap and was captured last night after a struggle in which Constable Downing was badly bitten by the savage. We understand that when the prisoner is brought before the magistrates a remand will be applied for by the police, and that great developments are hoped from his capture.\"\n\n\"Really we must see Baynes at once,\" cried Holmes, picking up his hat. \"We will just catch him before he starts.\" We hurried down the village street and found, as we had expected, that the inspector was just leaving his lodgings.\n\n\"You've seen the paper, Mr. Holmes?\" he asked, holding one out to us.\n\n\"Yes, Baynes, I've seen it. Pray don't think it a liberty if I give you a word of friendly warning.\"\n\n\"Of warning, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I have looked into this case with some care, and I am not convinced that you are on the right lines. I don't want you to commit yourself too far unless you are sure.\"\n\n\"You're very kind, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"I assure you I speak for your good.\"\n\nIt seemed to me that something like a wink quivered for an instant over one of Mr. Baynes's tiny eyes.\n\n\"We agreed to work on our own lines, Mr. Holmes. That's what I am doing.\"\n\n\"Oh, very good,\" said Holmes. \"Don't blame me.\"\n\n\"No, sir; I believe you mean well by me. But we all have our own systems, Mr. Holmes. You have yours, and maybe I have mine.\"\n\n\"Let us say no more about it.\"\n\n\"You're welcome always to my news. This fellow is a perfect savage, as strong as a cart-horse and as fierce as the devil. He chewed Downing's thumb nearly off before they could master him. He hardly speaks a word of English, and we can get nothing out of him but grunts.\"\n\n\"And you think you have evidence that he murdered his late master?\"\n\n\"I didn't say so, Mr. Holmes; I didn't say so. We all have our little ways. You try yours and I will try mine. That's the agreement.\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders as we walked away together. \"I can't make the man out. He seems to be riding for a fall. Well, as he says, we must each try our own way and see what comes of it. But there's something in Inspector Baynes which I can't quite understand.\"\n\n\"Just sit down in that chair, Watson,\" said Sherlock Holmes when we had returned to our apartment at the Bull. \"I want to put you in touch with the situation, as I may need your help to-night. Let me show you the evolution of this case so far as I have been able to follow it. Simple as it has been in its leading features, it has none the less presented surprising difficulties in the way of an arrest. There are gaps in that direction which we have still to fill.\n\n\"We will go back to the note which was handed in to Garcia upon the evening of his death. We may put aside this idea of Baynes's that Garcia's servants were concerned in the matter. The proof of this lies in the fact that it was he who had arranged for the presence of Scott Eccles, which could only have been done for the purpose of an alibi. It was Garcia, then, who had an enterprise, and apparently a criminal enterprise, in hand that night in the course of which he met his death. I say 'criminal' because only a man with a criminal enterprise desires to establish an alibi. Who, then, is most likely to have taken his life? Surely the person against whom the criminal enterprise was directed. So far it seems to me that we are on safe ground.\n\n\"We can now see a reason for the disappearance of Garcia's household. They were all confederates in the same unknown crime. If it came off when Garcia returned, any possible suspicion would be warded off by the Englishman's evidence, and all would be well. But the attempt was a dangerous one, and if Garcia did not return by a certain hour it was probable that his own life had been sacrificed. It had been arranged, therefore, that in such a case his two subordinates were to make for some prearranged spot where they could escape investigation and be in a position afterwards to renew their attempt. That would fully explain the facts, would it not?\"\n\nThe whole inexplicable tangle seemed to straighten out before me. I wondered, as I always did, how it had not been obvious to me before.\n\n\"But why should one servant return?\"\n\n\"We can imagine that in the confusion of flight something precious, something which he could not bear to part with, had been left behind. That would explain his persistence, would it not?\"\n\n\"Well, what is the next step?\"\n\n\"The next step is the note received by Garcia at the dinner. It indicates a confederate at the other end. Now, where was the other end? I have already shown you that it could only lie in some large house, and that the number of large houses is limited. My first days in this village were devoted to a series of walks in which in the intervals of my botanical researches I made a reconnaissance of all the large houses and an examination of the family history of the occupants. One house, and only one, riveted my attention. It is the famous old Jacobean grange of High Gable, one mile on the farther side of Oxshott, and less than half a mile from the scene of the tragedy. The other mansions belonged to prosaic and respectable people who live far aloof from romance. But Mr. Henderson, of High Gable, was by all accounts a curious man to whom curious adventures might befall. I concentrated my attention, therefore, upon him and his household.\n\n\"A singular set of people, Watson\u2014the man himself the most singular of them all. I managed to see him on a plausible pretext, but I seemed to read in his dark, deep-set, brooding eyes that he was perfectly aware of my true business. He is a man of fifty, strong, active, with iron-gray hair, great bunched black eyebrows, the step of a deer, and the air of an emperor\u2014a fierce, masterful man, with a red-hot spirit behind his parchment face. He is either a foreigner or has lived long in the tropics, for he is yellow and sapless, but tough as whipcord. His friend and secretary, Mr. Lucas, is undoubtedly a foreigner, chocolate brown, wily, suave, and cat-like, with a poisonous gentleness of speech. You see, Watson, we have come already upon two sets of foreigners\u2014one at Wisteria Lodge and one at High Gable\u2014so our gaps are beginning to close.\n\n\"These two men, close and confidential friends, are the centre of the household; but there is one other person who for our immediate purpose may be even more important. Henderson has two children\u2014girls of eleven and thirteen. Their governess is a Miss Burnet, an Englishwoman of forty or thereabouts. There is also one confidential manservant. This little group forms the real family, for they travel about together, and Henderson is a great traveller, always on the move. It is only within the last few weeks that he has returned, after a year's absence, to High Gable. I may add that he is enormously rich, and whatever his whims may be he can very easily satisfy them. For the rest, his house is full of butlers, footmen, maidservants, and the usual overfed, underworked staff of a large English country-house.\n\n\"So much I learned partly from village gossip and partly from my own observation. There are no better instruments than discharged servants with a grievance, and I was lucky enough to find one. I call it luck, but it would not have come my way had I not been looking out for it. As Baynes remarks, we all have our systems. It was my system which enabled me to find John Warner, late gardener of High Gable, sacked in a moment of temper by his imperious employer. He in turn had friends among the indoor servants who unite in their fear and dislike of their master. So I had my key to the secrets of the establishment.\n\n\"Curious people, Watson! I don't pretend to understand it all yet, but very curious people anyway. It's a double-winged house, and the servants live on one side, the family on the other. There's no link between the two save for Henderson's own servant, who serves the family's meals. Everything is carried to a certain door, which forms the one connection. Governess and children hardly go out at all, except into the garden. Henderson never by any chance walks alone. His dark secretary is like his shadow. The gossip among the servants is that their master is terribly afraid of something. 'Sold his soul to the devil in exchange for money,' says Warner, 'and expects his creditor to come up and claim his own.' Where they came from, or who they are, nobody has an idea. They are very violent. Twice Henderson has lashed at folk with his dog-whip, and only his long purse and heavy compensation have kept him out of the courts.\n\n\"Well, now, Watson, let us judge the situation by this new information. We may take it that the letter came out of this strange household and was an invitation to Garcia to carry out some attempt which had already been planned. Who wrote the note? It was someone within the citadel, and it was a woman. Who then but Miss Burnet, the governess? All our reasoning seems to point that way. At any rate, we may take it as a hypothesis and see what consequences it would entail. I may add that Miss Burnet's age and character make it certain that my first idea that there might be a love interest in our story is out of the question.\n\n\"If she wrote the note she was presumably the friend and confederate of Garcia. What, then, might she be expected to do if she heard of his death? If he met it in some nefarious enterprise her lips might be sealed. Still, in her heart, she must retain bitterness and hatred against those who had killed him and would presumably help so far as she could to have revenge upon them. Could we see her, then, and try to use her? That was my first thought. But now we come to a sinister fact. Miss Burnet has not been seen by any human eye since the night of the murder. From that evening she has utterly vanished. Is she alive? Has she perhaps met her end on the same night as the friend whom she had summoned? Or is she merely a prisoner? There is the point which we still have to decide.\n\n\"You will appreciate the difficulty of the situation, Watson. There is nothing upon which we can apply for a warrant. Our whole scheme might seem fantastic if laid before a magistrate. The woman's disappearance counts for nothing, since in that extraordinary household any member of it might be invisible for a week. And yet she may at the present moment be in danger of her life. All I can do is to watch the house and leave my agent, Warner, on guard at the gates. We can't let such a situation continue. If the law can do nothing we must take the risk ourselves.\"\n\n\"What do you suggest?\"\n\n\"I know which is her room. It is accessible from the top of an outhouse. My suggestion is that you and I go to-night and see if we can strike at the very heart of the mystery.\"\n\nIt was not, I must confess, a very alluring prospect. The old house with its atmosphere of murder, the singular and formidable inhabitants, the unknown dangers of the approach, and the fact that we were putting ourselves legally in a false position all combined to damp my ardour. But there was something in the ice-cold reasoning of Holmes which made it impossible to shrink from any adventure which he might recommend. One knew that thus, and only thus, could a solution be found. I clasped his hand in silence, and the die was cast.\n\nBut it was not destined that our investigation should have so adventurous an ending. It was about five o'clock, and the shadows of the March evening were beginning to fall, when an excited rustic rushed into our room.\n\n\"They've gone, Mr. Holmes. They went by the last train. The lady broke away, and I've got her in a cab downstairs.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Warner!\" cried Holmes, springing to his feet. \"Watson, the gaps are closing rapidly.\"\n\nIn the cab was a woman, half-collapsed from nervous exhaustion. She bore upon her aquiline and emaciated face the traces of some recent tragedy. Her head hung listlessly upon her breast, but as she raised it and turned her dull eyes upon us I saw that her pupils were dark dots in the centre of the broad gray iris. She was drugged with opium.\n\n\"I watched at the gate, same as you advised, Mr. Holmes,\" said our emissary, the discharged gardener. \"When the carriage came out I followed it to the station. She was like one walking in her sleep, but when they tried to get her into the train she came to life and struggled. They pushed her into the carriage. She fought her way out again. I took her part, got her into a cab, and here we are. I shan't forget the face at the carriage window as I led her away. I'd have a short life if he had his way\u2014the black-eyed, scowling, yellow devil.\"\n\nWe carried her upstairs, laid her on the sofa, and a couple of cups of the strongest coffee soon cleared her brain from the mists of the drug. Baynes had been summoned by Holmes, and the situation rapidly explained to him.\n\n\"Why, sir, you've got me the very evidence I want,\" said the inspector warmly, shaking my friend by the hand. \"I was on the same scent as you from the first.\"\n\n\"What! You were after Henderson?\"\n\n\"Why, Mr. Holmes, when you were crawling in the shrubbery at High Gable I was up one of the trees in the plantation and saw you down below. It was just who would get his evidence first.\"\n\n\"Then why did you arrest the mulatto?\"\n\nBaynes chuckled.\n\n\"I was sure Henderson, as he calls himself, felt that he was suspected, and that he would lie low and make no move so long as he thought he was in any danger. I arrested the wrong man to make him believe that our eyes were off him. I knew he would be likely to clear off then and give us a chance of getting at Miss Burnet.\"\n\nHolmes laid his hand upon the inspector's shoulder.\n\n\"You will rise high in your profession. You have instinct and intuition,\" said he.\n\nBaynes flushed with pleasure.\n\n\"I've had a plain-clothes man waiting at the station all the week. Wherever the High Gable folk go he will keep them in sight. But he must have been hard put to it when Miss Burnet broke away. However, your man picked her up, and it all ends well. We can't arrest without her evidence, that is clear, so the sooner we get a statement the better.\"\n\n\"Every minute she gets stronger,\" said Holmes, glancing at the governess. \"But tell me, Baynes, who is this man Henderson?\"\n\n\"Henderson,\" the inspector answered, \"is Don Murillo, once called the Tiger of San Pedro.\"\n\nThe Tiger of San Pedro! The whole history of the man came back to me in a flash. He had made his name as the most lewd and bloodthirsty tyrant that had ever governed any country with a pretence to civilization. Strong, fearless, and energetic, he had sufficient virtue to enable him to impose his odious vices upon a cowering people for ten or twelve years. His name was a terror through all Central America. At the end of that time there was a universal rising against him. But he was as cunning as he was cruel, and at the first whisper of coming trouble he had secretly conveyed his treasures aboard a ship which was manned by devoted adherents. It was an empty palace which was stormed by the insurgents next day. The dictator, his two children, his secretary, and his wealth had all escaped them. From that moment he had vanished from the world, and his identity had been a frequent subject for comment in the European press.\n\n\"Yes, sir, Don Murillo, the Tiger of San Pedro,\" said Baynes. \"If you look it up you will find that the San Pedro colours are green and white, same as in the note, Mr. Holmes. Henderson he called himself, but I traced him back, Paris and Rome and Madrid to Barcelona, where his ship came in in '86. They've been looking for him all the time for their revenge, but it is only now that they have begun to find him out.\"\n\n\"They discovered him a year ago,\" said Miss Burnet, who had sat up and was now intently following the conversation. \"Once already his life has been attempted, but some evil spirit shielded him. Now, again, it is the noble, chivalrous Garcia who has fallen, while the monster goes safe. But another will come, and yet another, until some day justice will be done; that is as certain as the rise of to-morrow's sun.\" Her thin hands clenched, and her worn face blanched with the passion of her hatred.\n\n\"But how come you into this matter, Miss Burnet?\" asked Holmes. \"How can an English lady join in such a murderous affair?\"\n\n\"I join in it because there is no other way in the world by which justice can be gained. What does the law of England care for the rivers of blood shed years ago in San Pedro, or for the shipload of treasure which this man has stolen? To you they are like crimes committed in some other planet. But we know. We have learned the truth in sorrow and in suffering. To us there is no fiend in hell like Juan Murillo, and no peace in life while his victims still cry for vengeance.\"\n\n\"No doubt,\" said Holmes, \"he was as you say. I have heard that he was atrocious. But how are you affected?\"\n\n\"I will tell you it all. This villain's policy was to murder, on one pretext or another, every man who showed such promise that he might in time come to be a dangerous rival. My husband\u2014yes, my real name is Signora Victor Du rando\u2014was the San Pedro minister in London. He met me and married me there. A nobler man never lived upon earth. Unhappily, Murillo heard of his excellence, recalled him on some pretext, and had him shot. With a premonition of his fate he had refused to take me with him. His estates were confiscated, and I was left with a pittance and a broken heart.\n\n\"Then came the downfall of the tyrant. He escaped as you have just described. But the many whose lives he had ruined, whose nearest and dearest had suffered torture and death at his hands, would not let the matter rest. They banded themselves into a society which should never be dissolved until the work was done. It was my part after we had discovered in the transformed Henderson the fallen despot, to attach myself to his household and keep the others in touch with his movements. This I was able to do by securing the position of governess in his family. He little knew that the woman who faced him at every meal was the woman whose husband he had hurried at an hour's notice into eternity. I smiled on him, did my duty to his children, and bided my time. An attempt was made in Paris and failed. We zig-zagged swiftly here and there over Europe to throw off the pursuers and finally returned to this house, which he had taken upon his first arrival in England.\n\n\"But here also the ministers of justice were waiting. Knowing that he would return there, Garcia, who is the son of the former highest dignitary in San Pedro, was waiting with two trusty companions of humble station, all three fired with the same reasons for revenge. He could do little during the day, for Murillo took every precaution and never went out save with his satellite Lucas, or Lopez as he was known in the days of his greatness. At night, however, he slept alone, and the avenger might find him. On a certain evening, which had been prearranged, I sent my friend final instructions, for the man was forever on the alert and continually changed his room. I was to see that the doors were open and the signal of a green or white light in a window which faced the drive was to give notice if all was safe or if the attempt had better be postponed.\n\n\"But everything went wrong with us. In some way I had excited the suspicion of Lopez, the secretary. He crept up behind me and sprang upon me just as I had finished the note. He and his master dragged me to my room and held judgment upon me as a convicted traitress. Then and there they would have plunged their knives into me could they have seen how to escape the consequences of the deed. Finally, after much debate, they concluded that my murder was too dangerous. But they determined to get rid forever of Garcia. They had gagged me, and Murillo twisted my arm round until I gave him the address. I swear that he might have twisted it off had I understood what it would mean to Garcia. Lopez addressed the note which I had written, sealed it with his sleeve-link, and sent it by the hand of the servant, Jos\u00e9. How they murdered him I do not know, save that it was Murillo's hand who struck him down, for Lopez had remained to guard me. I believe he must have waited among the gorse bushes through which the path winds and struck him down as he passed. At first they were of a mind to let him enter the house and to kill him as a detected burglar; but they argued that if they were mixed up in an inquiry their own identity would at once be publicly disclosed and they would be open to further attacks. With the death of Garcia, the pursuit might cease, since such a death might frighten others from the task.\n\n\"All would now have been well for them had it not been for my knowledge of what they had done. I have no doubt that there were times when my life hung in the balance. I was confined to my room, terrorized by the most horrible threats, cruelly ill-used to break my spirit\u2014see this stab on my shoulder and the bruises from end to end of my arms\u2014and a gag was thrust into my mouth on the one occasion when I tried to call from the window. For five days this cruel imprisonment continued, with hardly enough food to hold body and soul together. This afternoon a good lunch was brought me, but the moment after I took it I knew that I had been drugged. In a sort of dream I remember being half-led, half-carried to the carriage; in the same state I was conveyed to the train. Only then, when the wheels were almost moving, did I suddenly realize that my liberty lay in my own hands. I sprang out, they tried to drag me back, and had it not been for the help of this good man, who led me to the cab, I should never have broken away. Now, thank God, I am beyond their power forever.\"\n\nWe had all listened intently to this remarkable statement. It was Holmes who broke the silence.\n\n\"Our difficulties are not over,\" he remarked, shaking his head. \"Our police work ends, but our legal work begins.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said I. \"A plausible lawyer could make it out as an act of self-defence. There may be a hundred crimes in the background, but it is only on this one that they can be tried.\"\n\n\"Come, come,\" said Baynes cheerily, \"I think better of the law than that. Self-defence is one thing. To entice a man in cold blood with the object of murdering him is another, whatever danger you may fear from him. No, no, we shall all be justified when we see the tenants of High Gable at the next Guildford Assizes.\"\n\nIt is a matter of history, however, that a little time was still to elapse before the Tiger of San Pedro should meet with his deserts. Wily and bold, he and his companion threw their pursuer off their track by entering a lodging-house in Edmonton Street and leaving by the back-gate into Curzon Square. From that day they were seen no more in England. Some six months afterwards the Marquess of Montalva and Signor Rulli, his secretary, were both murdered in their rooms at the Hotel Escurial at Madrid. The crime was ascribed to Nihilism, and the murderers were never arrested. Inspector Baynes visited us at Baker Street with a printed description of the dark face of the secretary, and of the masterful features, the magnetic black eyes, and the tufted brows of his master. We could not doubt that justice, if belated, had come at last.\n\n\"A chaotic case, my dear Watson,\" said Holmes over an evening pipe. \"It will not be possible for you to present it in that compact form which is dear to your heart. It covers two continents, concerns two groups of mysterious persons, and is further complicated by the highly respectable presence of our friend, Scott Eccles, whose inclusion shows me that the deceased Garcia had a scheming mind and a well-developed instinct of self-preservation. It is remarkable only for the fact that amid a perfect jungle of possibilities we, with our worthy collaborator, the inspector, have kept our close hold on the essentials and so been guided along the crooked and winding path. Is there any point which is not quite clear to you?\"\n\n\"The object of the mulatto cook's return?\"\n\n\"I think that the strange creature in the kitchen may account for it. The man was a primitive savage from the backwoods of San Pedro, and this was his fetish. When his companion and he had fled to some prearranged retreat\u2014already occupied, no doubt by a confederate\u2014the companion had persuaded him to leave so compromising an article of furniture. But the mulatto's heart was with it, and he was driven back to it next day, when, on reconnoitering through the window, he found policeman Walters in possession. He waited three days longer, and then his piety or his superstition drove him to try once more. Inspector Baynes, who, with his usual astuteness, had minimized the incident before me, had really recognized its importance and had left a trap into which the creature walked. Any other point, Watson?\"\n\n\"The torn bird, the pail of blood, the charred bones, all the mystery of that weird kitchen?\"\n\nHolmes smiled as he turned up an entry in his notebook.\n\n\"I spent a morning in the British Museum reading up on that and other points. Here is a quotation from Eckermann's Voodooism and the Negroid Religions:\n\nThe true voodoo-worshipper attempts nothing of importance without certain sacrifices which are intended to propitiate his unclean gods. In extreme cases these rites take the form of human sacrifices followed by cannibalism. The more usual victims are a white cock, which is plucked in pieces alive, or a black goat, whose throat is cut and body burned.\n\n\"So you see our savage friend was very orthodox in his ritual. It is grotesque, Watson,\" Holmes added, as he slowly fastened his notebook, \"but, as I have had occasion to remark, there is but one step from the grotesque to the horrible.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE CARDBOARD BOX", + "text": "In choosing a few typical cases which illustrate the remarkable mental qualities of my friend, Sherlock Holmes, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to select those which presented the minimum of sensationalism, while offering a fair field for his talents. It is, however, unfortunately impossible entirely to separate the sensational from the criminal, and a chronicler is left in the dilemma that he must either sacrifice details which are essential to his statement and so give a false impression of the problem, or he must use matter which chance, and not choice, has provided him with. With this short preface I shall turn to my notes of what proved to be a strange, though a peculiarly terrible, chain of events.\n\nIt was a blazing hot day in August. Baker Street was like an oven, and the glare of the sunlight upon the yellow brickwork of the house across the road was painful to the eye. It was hard to believe that these were the same walls which loomed so gloomily through the fogs of winter. Our blinds were half-drawn, and Holmes lay curled upon the sofa, reading and re-reading a letter which he had received by the morning post. For myself, my term of service in India had trained me to stand heat better than cold, and a thermometer at ninety was no hardship. But the morning paper was uninteresting. Parliament had risen. Everybody was out of town, and I yearned for the glades of the New Forest or the shingle of Southsea. A depleted bank account had caused me to postpone my holiday, and as to my companion, neither the country nor the sea presented the slightest attraction to him. He loved to lie in the very centre of five millions of people, with his filaments stretching out and running through them, responsive to every little rumour or suspicion of unsolved crime. Appreciation of nature found no place among his many gifts, and his only change was when he turned his mind from the evil-doer of the town to track down his brother of the country.\n\nFinding that Holmes was too absorbed for conversation I had tossed aside the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion's voice broke in upon my thoughts:\n\n\"You are right, Watson,\" said he. \"It does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute.\"\n\n\"Most preposterous!\" I exclaimed, and then suddenly realizing how he had echoed the inmost thought of my soul, I sat up in my chair and stared at him in blank amazement.\n\n\"What is this, Holmes?\" I cried. \"This is beyond anything which I could have imagined.\"\n\nHe laughed heartily at my perplexity.\n\n\"You remember,\" said he, \"that some little time ago when I read you the passage in one of Poe's sketches in which a close reasoner follows the unspoken thoughts of his companion, you were inclined to treat the matter as a mere tour-de-force of the author. On my remarking that I was constantly in the habit of doing the same thing you expressed incredulity.\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\"\n\n\"Perhaps not with your tongue, my dear Watson, but certainly with your eyebrows. So when I saw you throw down your paper and enter upon a train of thought, I was very happy to have the opportunity of reading it off, and eventually of breaking into it, as a proof that I had been in rapport with you.\"\n\nBut I was still far from satisfied. \"In the example which you read to me,\" said I, \"the reasoner drew his conclusions from the actions of the man whom he observed. If I remember right, he stumbled over a heap of stones, looked up at the stars, and so on. But I have been seated quietly in my chair, and what clues can I have given you?\"\n\n\"You do yourself an injustice. The features are given to man as the means by which he shall express his emotions, and yours are faithful servants.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to say that you read my train of thoughts from my features?\"\n\n\"Your features and especially your eyes. Perhaps you cannot yourself recall how your reverie commenced?\"\n\n\"No, I cannot.\"\n\n\"Then I will tell you. After throwing down your paper, which was the action which drew my attention to you, you sat for half a minute with a vacant expression. Then your eyes fixed themselves upon your newly framed picture of General Gordon, and I saw by the alteration in your face that a train of thought had been started. But it did not lead very far. Your eyes flashed across to the unframed portrait of Henry Ward Beecher which stands upon the top of your books. Then you glanced up at the wall, and of course your meaning was obvious. You were thinking that if the portrait were framed it would just cover that bare space and correspond with Gordon's picture over there.\"\n\n\"You have followed me wonderfully!\" I exclaimed.\n\n\"So far I could hardly have gone astray. But now your thoughts went back to Beecher, and you looked hard across as if you were studying the character in his features. Then your eyes ceased to pucker, but you continued to look across, and your face was thoughtful. You were recalling the incidents of Beecher's career. I was well aware that you could not do this without thinking of the mission which he undertook on behalf of the North at the time of the Civil War, for I remember your expressing your passionate indignation at the way in which he was received by the more turbulent of our people. You felt so strongly about it that I knew you could not think of Beecher without thinking of that also. When a moment later I saw your eyes wander away from the picture, I suspected that your mind had now turned to the Civil War, and when I observed that your lips set, your eyes sparkled, and your hands clenched I was positive that you were indeed thinking of the gallantry which was shown by both sides in that desperate struggle. But then, again, your face grew sadder; you shook your head. You were dwelling upon the sadness and horror and useless waste of life. Your hand stole towards your own old wound and a smile quivered on your lips, which showed me that the ridiculous side of this method of settling international questions had forced itself upon your mind. At this point I agreed with you that it was preposterous and was glad to find that all my deductions had been correct.\"\n\n\"Absolutely!\" said I. \"And now that you have explained it, I confess that I am as amazed as before.\"\n\n\"It was very superficial, my dear Watson, I assure you. I should not have intruded it upon your attention had you not shown some incredulity the other day. But I have in my hands here a little problem which may prove to be more difficult of solution than my small essay in thought reading. Have you observed in the paper a short paragraph referring to the remarkable contents of a packet sent through the post to Miss Cushing, of Cross Street, Croydon?'\n\n\"No. I saw nothing.\"\n\n\"Ah! then you must have overlooked it. Just toss it over to me. Here it is, under the financial column. Perhaps you would be good enough to read it aloud.\"\n\nI picked up the paper which he had thrown back to me and read the paragraph indicated. It was headed \"A Gruesome Packet.\"\n\n\"Miss Susan Cushing, living at Cross Street, Croydon, has been made the victim of what must be regarded as a peculiarly revolting practical joke unless some more sinister meaning should prove to be attached to the incident. At two o'clock yesterday afternoon a small packet, wrapped in brown paper, was handed in by the postman. A cardboard box was inside, which was filled with coarse salt. On emptying this, Miss Cushing was horrified to find two human ears, apparently quite freshly severed. The box had been sent by parcel post from Belfast upon the morning before. There is no indication as to the sender, and the matter is the more mysterious as Miss Cushing, who is a maiden lady of fifty, has led a most retired life, and has so few acquaintances or correspondents that it is a rare event for her to receive anything through the post. Some years ago, however, when she resided at Penge, she let apartments in her house to three young medical students, whom she was obliged to get rid of on account of their noisy and irregular habits. The police are of opinion that this outrage may have been perpetrated upon Miss Cushing by these youths, who owed her a grudge and who hoped to frighten her by sending her these relics of the dissecting-rooms. Some probability is lent to the theory by the fact that one of these students came from the north of Ireland, and, to the best of Miss Cushing's belief, from Belfast. In the meantime, the matter is being actively investigated, Mr. Lestrade, one of the very smartest of our detective officers, being in charge of the case.\"\n\n\"So much for the Daily Chronicle,\" said Holmes as I finished reading. \"Now for our friend Lestrade. I had a note from him this morning, in which he says:\n\n\"I think that this case is very much in your line. We have every hope of clearing the matter up, but we find a little difficulty in getting anything to work upon. We have, of course, wired to the Belfast post office, but a large number of parcels were handed in upon that day, and they have no means of identifying this particular one, or of remembering the sender. The box is a half-pound box of honeydew tobacco and does not help us in any way. The medical student theory still appears to me to be the most feasible, but if you should have a few hours to spare I should be very happy to see you out here. I shall be either at the house or in the police-station all day.\n\n\"What say you, Watson? Can you rise superior to the heat and run down to Croydon with me on the off chance of a case for your annals?\"\n\n\"I was longing for something to do.\"\n\n\"You shall have it then. Ring for our boots and tell them to order a cab. I'll be back in a moment when I have changed my dressing-gown and filled my cigar-case.\"\n\nA shower of rain fell while we were in the train, and the heat was far less oppressive in Croydon than in town. Holmes had sent on a wire, so that Lestrade, as wiry, as dapper, and as ferret-like as ever, was waiting for us at the station. A walk of five minutes took us to Cross Street, where Miss Cushing resided.\n\nIt was a very long street of two-story brick houses, neat and prim, with whitened stone steps and little groups of aproned women gossiping at the doors. Halfway down, Lestrade stopped and tapped at a door, which was opened by a small servant girl. Miss Cushing was sitting in the front room, into which we were ushered. She was a placid-faced woman, with large, gentle eyes, and grizzled hair curving down over her temples on each side. A worked antimacassar lay upon her lap and a basket of coloured silks stood upon a stool beside her.\n\n\"They are in the outhouse, those dreadful things,\" said she as Lestrade entered. \"I wish that you would take them away altogether.\"\n\n\"So I shall, Miss Cushing. I only kept them here until my friend, Mr. Holmes, should have seen them in your presence.\"\n\n\"Why in my presence, sir?\"\n\n\"In case he wished to ask any questions.\"\n\n\"What is the use of asking me questions when I tell you I know nothing whatever about it?\"\n\n\"Quite so, madam,\" said Holmes in his soothing way. \"I have no doubt that you have been annoyed more than enough already over this business.\"\n\n\"Indeed, I have, sir. I am a quiet woman and live a retired life. It is something new for me to see my name in the papers and to find the police in my house. I won't have those things in here, Mr. Lestrade. If you wish to see them you must go to the outhouse.\"\n\nIt was a small shed in the narrow garden which ran behind the house. Lestrade went in and brought out a yellow cardboard box, with a piece of brown paper and some string. There was a bench at the end of the path, and we all sat down while Holmes examined, one by one, the articles which Lestrade had handed to him.\n\n\"The string is exceedingly interesting,\" he remarked, holding it up to the light and sniffing at it. \"What do you make of this string, Lestrade?\"\n\n\"It has been tarred.\"\n\n\"Precisely. It is a piece of tarred twine. You have also, no doubt, remarked that Miss Cushing has cut the cord with a scissors, as can be seen by the double fray on each side. This is of importance.\"\n\n\"I cannot see the importance,\" said Lestrade.\n\n\"The importance lies in the fact that the knot is left intact, and that this knot is of a peculiar character.\"\n\n\"It is very neatly tied. I had already made a note to that effect,\" said Lestrade complacently.\n\n\"So much for the string, then,\" said Holmes, smiling, \"now for the box wrapper. Brown paper, with a distinct smell of coffee. What, did you not observe it? I think there can be no doubt of it. Address printed in rather straggling characters: 'Miss S. Cushing, Cross Street, Croydon.' Done with a broad-pointed pen, probably a J, and with very inferior ink. The word 'Croydon' has been originally spelled with an 'i,' which has been changed to 'y.' The parcel was directed, then, by a man\u2014the printing is distinctly masculine\u2014of limited education and unacquainted with the town of Croydon. So far, so good! The box is a yellow, half-pound honeydew box, with nothing distinctive save two thumb marks at the left bottom corner. It is filled with rough salt of the quality used for preserving hides and other of the coarser commercial purposes. And embedded in it are these very singular enclosures.\"\n\nHe took out the two ears as he spoke, and laying a board across his knee he examined them minutely, while Lestrade and I, bending forward on each side of him, glanced alternately at these dreadful relics and at the thoughtful, eager face of our companion. Finally he returned them to the box once more and sat for a while in deep meditation.\n\n\"You have observed, of course,\" said he at last, \"that the ears are not a pair.\n\n\"Yes, I have noticed that. But if this were the practical joke of some students from the dissecting-rooms, it would be as easy for them to send two odd ears as a pair.\"\n\n\"Precisely. But this is not a practical joke.\"\n\n\"You are sure of it?\"\n\n\"The presumption is strongly against it. Bodies in the dissecting-rooms are injected with preservative fluid. These ears bear no signs of this. They are fresh, too. They have been cut off with a blunt instrument, which would hardly happen if a student had done it. Again, carbolic or rectified spirits would be the preservatives which would suggest themselves to the medical mind, certainly not rough salt. I repeat that there is no practical joke here, but that we are investigating a serious crime.\"\n\nA vague thrill ran through me as I listened to my companion's words and saw the stern gravity which had hardened his features. This brutal preliminary seemed to shadow forth some strange and inexplicable horror in the background. Lestrade, however, shook his head like a man who is only half convinced.\n\n\"There are objections to the joke theory, no doubt,\" said he, \"but there are much stronger reasons against the other. We know that this woman has led a most quiet and respectable life at Penge and here for the last twenty years. She has hardly been away from her home for a day during that time. Why on earth, then, should any criminal send her the proofs of his guilt, especially as, unless she is a most consummate actress, she understands quite as little of the matter as we do?\"\n\n\"That is the problem which we have to solve,\" Holmes answered, \"and for my part I shall set about it by presuming that my reasoning is correct, and that a double murder has been committed. One of these ears is a woman's, small, finely formed, and pierced for an earring. The other is a man's, sun-burned discoloured, and also pierced for an earring. These two people are presumably dead, or we should have heard their story before now. To-day is Friday. The packet was posted on Thursday morning. The tragedy, then, occurred on Wednesday or Tuesday, or earlier. If the two people were murdered, who but their murderer would have sent this sign of his work to Miss Cushing? We may take it that the sender of the packet is the man whom we want. But he must have some strong reason for sending Miss Cushing this packet. What reason then? It must have been to tell her that the deed was done! or to pain her, perhaps. But in that case she knows who it is. Does she know? I doubt it. If she knew, why should she call the police in? She might have buried the ears, and no one would have been the wiser. That is what she would have done if she had wished to shield the criminal. But if she does not wish to shield him she would give his name. There is a tangle here which needs straightening out.\" He had been talking in a high, quick voice, staring blankly up over the garden fence, but now he sprang briskly to his feet and walked towards the house.\n\n\"I have a few questions to ask Miss Cushing,\" said he.\n\n\"In that case I may leave you here,\" said Lestrade, \"for I have another small business on hand. I think that I have nothing further to learn from Miss Cushing. You will find me at the police-station.\"\n\n\"We shall look in on our way to the train,\" answered Holmes. A moment later he and I were back in the front room, where the impassive lady was still quietly working away at her antimacassar. She put it down on her lap as we entered and looked at us with her frank, searching blue eyes.\n\n\"I am convinced, sir,\" she said, \"that this matter is a mistake, and that the parcel was never meant for me at all. I have said this several times to the gentleman from Scotland Yard, but he simply laughs at me. I have not an enemy in the world, as far as I know, so why should anyone play me such a trick?\"\n\n\"I am coming to be of the same opinion, Miss Cushing,\" said Holmes, taking a seat beside her. \"I think that it is more than probable\u2014\" he paused, and I was surprised, on glancing round to see that he was staring with singular intentness at the lady's profile. Surprise and satisfaction were both for an instant to be read upon his eager face, though when she glanced round to find out the cause of his silence he had become as demure as ever. I stared hard myself at her flat, grizzled hair, her trim cap, her little gilt earrings, her placid features; but I could see nothing which could account for my companion's evident excitement.\n\n\"There were one or two questions\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, I am weary of questions!\" cried Miss Cushing impatiently.\n\n\"You have two sisters, I believe.\"\n\n\"How could you know that?\"\n\n\"I observed the very instant that I entered the room that you have a portrait group of three ladies upon the mantelpiece, one of whom is undoubtedly yourself, while the others are so exceedingly like you that there could be no doubt of the relationship.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are quite right. Those are my sisters, Sarah and Mary.\"\n\n\"And here at my elbow is another portrait, taken at Liverpool, of your younger sister, in the company of a man who appears to be a steward by his uniform. I observe that she was unmarried at the time.\"\n\n\"You are very quick at observing.\"\n\n\"That is my trade.\"\n\n\"Well, you are quite right. But she was married to Mr. Browner a few days afterwards. He was on the South American line when that was taken, but he was so fond of her that he couldn't abide to leave her for so long, and he got into the Liverpool and London boats.\"\n\n\"Ah, the Conqueror, perhaps?\"\n\n\"No, the May Day, when last I heard. Jim came down here to see me once. That was before he broke the pledge; but afterwards he would always take drink when he was ashore, and a little drink would send him stark, staring mad. Ah! it was a bad day that ever he took a glass in his hand again. First he dropped me, then he quarrelled with Sarah, and now that Mary has stopped writing we don't know how things are going with them.\"\n\nIt was evident that Miss Cushing had come upon a subject on which she felt very deeply. Like most people who lead a lonely life, she was shy at first, but ended by becoming extremely communicative. She told us many details about her brother-in-law the steward, and then wandering off on the subject of her former lodgers, the medical students, she gave us a long account of their delinquencies, with their names and those of their hospitals. Holmes listened attentively to everything, throwing in a question from time to time.\n\n\"About your second sister, Sarah,\" said he. \"I wonder, since you are both maiden ladies, that you do not keep house together.\"\n\n\"Ah! you don't know Sarah's temper or you would wonder no more. I tried it when I came to Croydon, and we kept on until about two months ago, when we had to part. I don't want to say a word against my own sister, but she was always meddlesome and hard to please, was Sarah.\"\n\n\"You say that she quarrelled with your Liverpool relations.\"\n\n\"Yes, and they were the best of friends at one time. Why, she went up there to live in order to be near them. And now she has no word hard enough for Jim Browner. The last six months that she was here she would speak of nothing but his drinking and his ways. He had caught her meddling, I suspect, and given her a bit of his mind, and that was the start of it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Cushing,\" said Holmes, rising and bowing. \"Your sister Sarah lives, I think you said, at New Street, Wallington? Good-bye, and I am very sorry that you should have been troubled over a case with which, as you say, you have nothing whatever to do.\"\n\nThere was a cab passing as we came out, and Holmes hailed it.\n\n\"How far to Wallington?\" he asked.\n\n\"Only about a mile, sir.\"\n\n\"Very good. Jump in, Watson. We must strike while the iron is hot. Simple as the case is, there have been one or two very instructive details in connection with it. Just pull up at a telegraph office as you pass, cabby.\"\n\nHolmes sent off a short wire and for the rest of the drive lay back in the cab, with his hat tilted over his nose to keep the sun from his face. Our driver pulled up at a house which was not unlike the one which we had just quitted. My companion ordered him to wait, and had his hand upon the knocker, when the door opened and a grave young gentleman in black, with a very shiny hat, appeared on the step.\n\n\"Is Miss Cushing at home?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Miss Sarah Cushing is extremely ill,\" said he. \"She has been suffering since yesterday from brain symptoms of great severity. As her medical adviser, I cannot possibly take the responsibility of allowing anyone to see her. I should recommend you to call again in ten days.\" He drew on his gloves, closed the door, and marched off down the street.\n\n\"Well, if we can't we can't,\" said Holmes, cheerfully.\n\n\"Perhaps she could not or would not have told you much.\"\n\n\"I did not wish her to tell me anything. I only wanted to look at her. However, I think that I have got all that I want. Drive us to some decent hotel, cabby, where we may have some lunch, and afterwards we shall drop down upon friend Lestrade at the police-station.\"\n\nWe had a pleasant little meal together, during which Holmes would talk about nothing but violins, narrating with great exultation how he had purchased his own Stradivarius, which was worth at least five hundred guineas, at a Jew broker's in Tottenham Court Road for fifty-five shillings. This led him to Paganini, and we sat for an hour over a bottle of claret while he told me anecdote after anecdote of that extraordinary man. The afternoon was far advanced and the hot glare had softened into a mellow glow before we found ourselves at the police-station. Lestrade was waiting for us at the door.\n\n\"A telegram for you, Mr. Holmes,\" said he.\n\n\"Ha! It is the answer!\" He tore it open, glanced his eyes over it, and crumpled it into his pocket. \"That's all right,\" said he.\n\n\"Have you found out anything?\"\n\n\"I have found out everything!\"\n\n\"What!\" Lestrade stared at him in amazement. \"You are joking.\"\n\n\"I was never more serious in my life. A shocking crime has been committed, and I think I have now laid bare every detail of it.\"\n\n\"And the criminal?\"\n\nHolmes scribbled a few words upon the back of one of his visiting cards and threw it over to Lestrade.\n\n\"That is the name,\" he said. \"You cannot effect an arrest until to morrow night at the earliest. I should prefer that you do not mention my name at all in connection with the case, as I choose to be only associated with those crimes which present some difficulty in their solution. Come on, Watson.\" We strode off together to the station, leaving Lestrade still staring with a delighted face at the card which Holmes had thrown him.\n\n\"The case,\" said Sherlock Holmes as we chatted over our cigars that night in our rooms at Baker Street. \"is one where, as in the investigations which you have chronicled under the names of 'A Study in Scarlet' and of 'The Sign of Four,' we have been compelled to reason backward from effects to causes. I have written to Lestrade asking him to supply us with the details which are now wanting, and which he will only get after he has secured his man. That he may be safely trusted to do, for although he is absolutely devoid of reason, he is as tenacious as a bulldog when he once understands what he has to do, and, indeed, it is just this tenacity which has brought him to the top at Scotland Yard.\"\n\n\"Your case is not complete, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"It is fairly complete in essentials. We know who the author of the revolting business is, although one of the victims still escapes us. Of course, you have formed your own conclusions.\"\n\n\"I presume that this Jim Browner, the steward of a Liverpool boat, is the man whom you suspect?\"\n\n\"Oh! it is more than a suspicion.\"\n\n\"And yet I cannot see anything save very vague indications.\"\n\n\"On the contrary, to my mind nothing could be more clear. Let me run over the principal steps. We approached the case, you remember, with an absolutely blank mind, which is always an advantage. We had formed no theories. We were simply there to observe and to draw inferences from our observations. What did we see first? A very placid and respectable lady, who seemed quite innocent of any secret, and a portrait which showed me that she had two younger sisters. It instantly flashed across my mind that the box might have been meant for one of these. I set the idea aside as one which could be disproved or confirmed at our leisure. Then we went to the garden, as you remember, and we saw the very singular contents of the little yellow box.\n\n\"The string was of the quality which is used by sailmakers aboard ship, and at once a whiff of the sea was perceptible in our investigation. When I observed that the knot was one which is popular with sailors, that the parcel had been posted at a port, and that the male ear was pierced for an earring which is so much more common among sailors than landsmen, I was quite certain that all the actors in the tragedy were to be found among our seafaring classes.\n\n\"When I came to examine the address of the packet I observed that it was to Miss S. Cushing. Now, the oldest sister would, of course, be Miss Cushing, and although her initial was 'S' it might belong to one of the others as well. In that case we should have to commence our investigation from a fresh basis altogether. I therefore went into the house with the intention of clearing up this point. I was about to assure Miss Cushing that I was convinced that a mistake had been made when you may remember that I came suddenly to a stop. The fact was that I had just seen something which filled me with surprise and at the same time narrowed the field of our inquiry immensely.\n\n\"As a medical man, you are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear. Each ear is as a rule quite distinctive and differs from all other ones. In last year's Anthropological Journal you will find two short monographs from my pen upon the subject. I had, therefore, examined the ears in the box with the eyes of an expert and had carefully noted their anatomical peculiarities. Imagine my surprise, then, when on looking at Miss Cushing I perceived that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected. The matter was entirely beyond coincidence. There was the same shortening of the pinna, the same broad curve of the upper lobe, the same convolution of the inner cartilage. In all essentials it was the same ear.\n\n\"Of course I at once saw the enormous importance of the observation. It was evident that the victim was a blood relation, and probably a very close one. I began to talk to her about her family, and you remember that she at once gave us some exceedingly valuable details.\n\n\"In the first place, her sister's name was Sarah, and her address had until recently been the same, so that it was quite obvious how the mistake had occurred and for whom the packet was meant. Then we heard of this steward, married to the third sister, and learned that he had at one time been so intimate with Miss Sarah that she had actually gone up to Liverpool to be near the Browners, but a quarrel had afterwards divided them. This quarrel had put a stop to all communications for some months, so that if Browner had occasion to address a packet to Miss Sarah, he would undoubtedly have done so to her old address.\n\n\"And now the matter had begun to straighten itself out wonderfully. We had learned of the existence of this steward, an impulsive man, of strong passions\u2014you remember that he threw up what must have been a very superior berth in order to be nearer to his wife\u2014subject, too, to occasional fits of hard drinking. We had reason to believe that his wife had been murdered, and that a man\u2014presumably a seafaring man\u2014had been murdered at the same time. Jealousy, of course, at once suggests itself as the motive for the crime. And why should these proofs of the deed be sent to Miss Sarah Cushing? Probably because during her residence in Liverpool she had some hand in bringing about the events which led to the tragedy. You will observe that this line of boats calls at Belfast. Dublin, and Waterford; so that, presuming that Browner had committed the deed and had embarked at once upon his steamer, the May Day, Belfast would be the first place at which he could post his terrible packet.\n\n\"A second solution was at this stage obviously possible, and although I thought it exceedingly unlikely, I was determined to elucidate it before going further. An unsuccessful lover might have killed Mr. and Mrs. Browner, and the male ear might have belonged to the husband. There were many grave objections to this theory, but it was conceivable. I therefore sent off a telegram to my friend Algar, of the Liverpool force, and asked him to find out if Mrs. Browner were at home, and if Browner had departed in the May Day. Then we went on to Wallington to visit Miss Sarah.\n\n\"I was curious, in the first place, to see how far the family ear had been reproduced in her. Then, of course, she might give us very important information, but I was not sanguine that she would. She must have heard of the business the day before, since all Croydon was ringing with it, and she alone could have understood for whom the packet was meant. If she had been willing to help justice she would probably have communicated with the police already. However, it was clearly our duty to see her, so we went. We found that the news of the arrival of the packet\u2014for her illness dated from that time\u2014had such an effect upon her as to bring on brain fever. It was clearer than ever that she understood its full significance, but equally clear that we should have to wait some time for any assistance from her.\n\n\"However, we were really independent of her help. Our answers were waiting for us at the police-station, where I had directed Algar to send them. Nothing could be more conclusive. Mrs. Browner's house had been closed for more than three days, and the neighbours were of opinion that she had gone south to see her relatives. It had been ascertained at the shipping offices that Browner had left aboard of the May Day, and I calculate that she is due in the Thames to-morrow night. When he arrives he will be met by the obtuse but resolute Lestrade, and I have no doubt that we shall have all our details filled in.\"\n\nSherlock Holmes was not disappointed in his expectations. Two days later he received a bulky envelope, which contained a short note from the detective, and a typewritten document, which covered several pages of foolscap.\n\n\"Lestrade has got him all right,\" said Holmes, glancing up at me. \"Perhaps it would interest you to hear what he says.\"\n\n\u2002\"MY DEAR MR. HOLMES:\n\n\u2002\"In accordance with the scheme which we had formed in order to test our theories\" [\"the 'we' is rather fine, Watson, is it not?\"] \"I went down to the Albert Dock yesterday at 6 P. M., and boarded the S. S. May Day, belonging to the Liverpool, Dublin, and London Steam Packet Company. On inquiry, I found that there was a steward on board of the name of James Browner and that he had acted during the voyage in such an extraordinary manner that the captain had been compelled to relieve him of his duties. On descending to his berth, I found him seated upon a chest with his head sunk upon his hands, rocking himself to and fro. He is a big, powerful chap, clean-shaven, and very swarthy\u2014something like Aldridge, who helped us in the bogus laundry affair. He jumped up when he heard my business, and I had my whistle to my lips to call a couple of river police, who were round the corner, but he seemed to have no heart in him, and he held out his hands quietly enough for the darbies. We brought him along to the cells, and his box as well, for we thought there might be something incriminating; but, bar a big sharp knife such as most sailors have, we got nothing for our trouble. However, we find that we shall want no more evidence, for on being brought before the inspector at the station he asked leave to make a statement, which was, of course, taken down, just as he made it, by our shorthand man. We had three copies typewritten, one of which I enclose. The affair proves, as I always thought it would, to be an extremely simple one, but I am obliged to you for assisting me in my investigation. With kind regards,\n\n\u2002\"Yours very truly,\n\n\u2002\"G. LESTRADE.\n\n\"Hum! The investigation really was a very simple one,\" remarked Holmes, \"but I don't think it struck him in that light when he first called us in. However, let us see what Jim Browner has to say for himself. This is his statement as made before Inspector Montgomery at the Shadwell Police Station, and it has the advantage of being verbatim.\"\n\n\"'Have I anything to say? Yes, I have a deal to say. I have to make a clean breast of it all. You can hang me, or you can leave me alone. I don't care a plug which you do. I tell you I've not shut an eye in sleep since I did it, and I don't believe I ever will again until I get past all waking. Sometimes it's his face, but most generally it's hers. I'm never without one or the other before me. He looks frowning and black-like, but she has a kind o' surprise upon her face. Ay, the white lamb, she might well be surprised when she read death on a face that had seldom looked anything but love upon her before.\n\n\"'But it was Sarah's fault, and may the curse of a broken man put a blight on her and set the blood rotting in her veins! It's not that I want to clear myself. I know that I went back to drink, like the beast that I was. But she would have forgiven me; she would have stuck as close to me as a rope to a block if that woman had never darkened our door. For Sarah Cushing loved me\u2014that's the root of the business\u2014she loved me until all her love turned to poisonous hate when she knew that I thought more of my wife's footmark in the mud than I did of her whole body and soul.\n\n\"'There were three sisters altogether. The old one was just a good woman, the second was a devil, and the third was an angel. Sarah was thirty-three, and Mary was twenty-nine when I married. We were just as happy as the day was long when we set up house together, and in all Liverpool there was no better woman than my Mary. And then we asked Sarah up for a week, and the week grew into a month, and one thing led to another, until she was just one of ourselves.\n\n\"'I was blue ribbon at that time, and we were putting a little money by, and all was as bright as a new dollar. My God, whoever would have thought that it could have come to this? Whoever would have dreamed it?\n\n\"'I used to be home for the week-ends very often, and sometimes if the ship were held back for cargo I would have a whole week at a time, and in this way I saw a deal of my sister-in-law, Sarah. She was a fine tall woman, black and quick and fierce, with a proud way of carrying her head, and a glint from her eye like a spark from a flint. But when little Mary was there I had never a thought of her, and that I swear as I hope for God's mercy.\n\n\"'It had seemed to me sometimes that she liked to be alone with me, or to coax me out for a walk with her, but I had never thought anything of that. But one evening my eyes were opened. I had come up from the ship and found my wife out, but Sarah at home. \"Where's Mary?\" I asked. \"Oh, she has gone to pay some accounts.\" I was impatient and paced up and down the room. \"Can't you be happy for five minutes without Mary, Jim?\" says she. \"It's a bad compliment to me that you can't be contented with my society for so short a time.\" \"That's all right, my lass,\" said I, putting out my hand towards her in a kindly way, but she had it in both hers in an instant, and they burned as if they were in a fever. I looked into her eyes and I read it all there. There was no need for her to speak, nor for me either. I frowned and drew my hand away. Then she stood by my side in silence for a bit, and then put up her hand and patted me on the shoulder. \"Steady old Jim!\" said she, and with a kind o' mocking laugh, she ran out of the room.\n\n\"'Well, from that time Sarah hated me with her whole heart and soul, and she is a woman who can hate, too. I was a fool to let her go on biding with us\u2014a besotted fool\u2014but I never said a word to Mary, for I knew it would grieve her. Things went on much as before, but after a time I began to find that there was a bit of a change in Mary herself. She had always been so trusting and so innocent, but now she became queer and suspicious, wanting to know where I had been and what I had been doing, and whom my letters were from, and what I had in my pockets, and a thousand such follies. Day by day she grew queerer and more irritable, and we had ceaseless rows about nothing. I was fairly puzzled by it all. Sarah avoided me now, but she and Mary were just inseparable. I can see now how she was plotting and scheming and poisoning my wife's mind against me, but I was such a blind beetle that I could not understand it at the time. Then I broke my blue ribbon and began to drink again, but I think I should not have done it if Mary had been the same as ever. She had some reason to be disgusted with me now, and the gap between us began to be wider and wider. And then this Alec Fairbairn chipped in, and things became a thousand times blacker.\n\n\"'It was to see Sarah that he came to my house first, but soon it was to see us, for he was a man with winning ways, and he made friends wherever he went. He was a dashing, swaggering chap, smart and curled, who had seen half the world and could talk of what he had seen. He was good company, I won't deny it, and he had wonderful polite ways with him for a sailor man, so that I think there must have been a time when he knew more of the poop than the forecastle. For a month he was in and out of my house, and never once did it cross my mind that harm might come of his soft, tricky ways. And then at last something made me suspect, and from that day my peace was gone forever.\n\n\"'It was only a little thing, too. I had come into the parlour unexpected, and as I walked in at the door I saw a light of welcome on my wife's face. But as she saw who it was it faded again, and she turned away with a look of disappointment. That was enough for me. There was no one but Alec Fairbairn whose step she could have mistaken for mine. If I could have seen him then I should have killed him, for I have always been like a madman when my temper gets loose. Mary saw the devil's light in my eyes, and she ran forward with her hands on my sleeve. \"Don't, Jim, don't!\" says she. \"Where's Sarah?\" I asked. \"In the kitchen,\" says she. \"Sarah,\" says I as I went in, \"this man Fairbairn is never to darken my door again.\" \"Why not?\" says she. \"Because I order it.\" \"Oh!\" says she, \"if my friends are not good enough for this house, then I am not good enough for it either.\" \"You can do what you like,\" says I, \"but if Fairbairn shows his face here again I'll send you one of his ears for a keepsake.\" She was frightened by my face, I think, for she never answered a word, and the same evening she left my house.\n\n\"'Well, I don't know now whether it was pure devilry on the part of this woman, or whether she thought that she could turn me against my wife by encouraging her to misbehave. Anyway, she took a house just two streets off and let lodgings to sailors. Fairbairn used to stay there, and Mary would go round to have tea with her sister and him. How often she went I don't know, but I followed her one day, and as I broke in at the door Fairbairn got away over the back garden wall, like the cowardly skunk that he was. I swore to my wife that I would kill her if I found her in his company again, and I led her back with me, sobbing and trembling, and as white as a piece of paper. There was no trace of love between us any longer. I could see that she hated me and feared me, and when the thought of it drove me to drink, then she despised me as well.\n\n\"'Well, Sarah found that she could not make a living in Liverpool, so she went back, as I understand, to live with her sister in Croydon, and things jogged on much the same as ever at home. And then came this last week and all the misery and ruin.\n\n\"'It was in this way. We had gone on the May Day for a round voyage of seven days, but a hogshead got loose and started one of our plates, so that we had to put back into port for twelve hours. I left the ship and came home, thinking what a surprise it would be for my wife, and hoping that maybe she would be glad to see me so soon. The thought was in my head as I turned into my own street, and at that moment a cab passed me, and there she was, sitting by the side of Fairbairn, the two chatting and laughing, with never a thought for me as I stood watching them from the footpath.\n\n\"'I tell you, and I give you my word for it, that from that moment I was not my own master, and it is all like a dim dream when I look back on it. I had been drinking hard of late, and the two things together fairly turned my brain. There's something throbbing in my head now, like a docker's hammer, but that morning I seemed to have all Niagara whizzing and buzzing in my ears.\n\n\"'Well, I took to my heels, and I ran after the cab. I had a heavy oak stick in my hand, and I tell you I saw red from the first; but as I ran I got cunning, too, and hung back a little to see them without being seen. They pulled up soon at the railway station. There was a good crowd round the booking-office, so I got quite close to them without being seen. They took tickets for New Brighton. So did I, but I got in three carriages behind them. When we reached it they walked along the Parade, and I was never more than a hundred yards from them. At last I saw them hire a boat and start for a row, for it was a very hot day, and they thought, no doubt, that it would be cooler on the water.\n\n\"'It was just as if they had been given into my hands. There was a bit of a haze, and you could not see more than a few hundred yards. I hired a boat for myself; and I pulled after them. I could see the blur of their craft, but they were going nearly as fast as I, and they must have been a long mile from the shore before I caught them up. The haze was like a curtain all round us, and there were we three in the middle of it. My God, shall I ever forget their faces when they saw who was in the boat that was closing in upon them? She screamed out. He swore like a madman and jabbed at me with an oar, for he must have seen death in my eyes. I got past it and got one in with my stick that crushed his head like an egg. I would have spared her, perhaps, for all my madness, but she threw her arms round him, crying out to him, and calling him \"Alec.\" I struck again, and she lay stretched beside him. I was like a wild beast then that had tasted blood. If Sarah had been there, by the Lord, she should have joined them. I pulled out my knife, and\u2014well, there! I've said enough. It gave me a kind of savage joy when I thought how Sarah would feel when she had such signs as these of what her meddling had brought about. Then I tied the bodies into the boat, stove a plank, and stood by until they had sunk. I knew very well that the owner would think that they had lost their bearings in the haze, and had drifted off out to sea. I cleaned myself up, got back to land, and joined my ship without a soul having a suspicion of what had passed. That night I made up the packet for Sarah Cushing, and next day I sent it from Belfast.\n\n\"'There you have the whole truth of it. You can hang me, or do what you like with me, but you cannot punish me as I have been punished already. I cannot shut my eyes but I see those two faces staring at me\u2014staring at me as they stared when my boat broke through the haze. I killed them quick, but they are killing me slow; and if I have another night of it I shall be either mad or dead before morning. You won't put me alone into a cell, sir? For pity's sake don't, and may you be treated in your day of agony as you treat me now.'\n\n\"What is the meaning of it, Watson?\" said Holmes solemnly as he laid down the paper. \"What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE RED CIRCLE", + "text": "Well, Mrs. Warren, I cannot see that you have any particular cause for uneasiness, nor do I understand why I, whose time is of some value, should interfere in the matter. I really have other things to engage me.\" So spoke Sherlock Holmes and turned back to the great scrapbook in which he was arranging and indexing some of his recent material.\n\nBut the landlady had the pertinacity and also the cunning of her sex. She held her ground firmly.\n\n\"You arranged an affair for a lodger of mine last year,\" she said\u2014\"Mr. Fairdale Hobbs.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes\u2014a simple matter.\"\n\n\"But he would never cease talking of it\u2014your kindness, sir, and the way in which you brought light into the darkness. I remembered his words when I was in doubt and darkness myself. I know you could if you only would.\"\n\nHolmes was accessible upon the side of flattery, and also, to do him justice, upon the side of kindliness. The two forces made him lay down his gum-brush with a sigh of resignation and push back his chair.\n\n\"Well, well, Mrs. Warren, let us hear about it, then. You don't object to tobacco, I take it? Thank you, Watson\u2014the matches! You are uneasy, as I understand, because your new lodger remains in his rooms and you cannot see him. Why, bless you, Mrs. Warren, if I were your lodger you often would not see me for weeks on end.\"\n\n\"No doubt, sir; but this is different. It frightens me, Mr. Holmes. I can't sleep for fright. To hear his quick step moving here and moving there from early morning to late at night, and yet never to catch so much as a glimpse of him\u2014it's more than I can stand. My husband is as nervous over it as I am, but he is out at his work all day, while I get no rest from it. What is he hiding for? What has he done? Except for the girl, I am all alone in the house with him, and it's more than my nerves can stand.\"\n\nHolmes leaned forward and laid his long, thin fingers upon the woman's shoulder. He had an almost hypnotic power of soothing when he wished. The scared look faded from her eyes, and her agitated features smoothed into their usual commonplace. She sat down in the chair which he had indicated.\n\n\"If I take it up I must understand every detail,\" said he. \"Take time to consider. The smallest point may be the most essential. You say that the man came ten days ago and paid you for a fortnight's board and lodging?\"\n\n\"He asked my terms, sir. I said fifty shillings a week. There is a small sitting-room and bedroom, and all complete, at the top of the house.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"He said, 'I'll pay you five pounds a week if I can have it on my own terms.' I'm a poor woman, sir, and Mr. Warren earns little, and the money meant much to me. He took out a ten-pound note, and he held it out to me then and there. 'You can have the same every fortnight for a long time to come if you keep the terms,' he said. 'If not, I'll have no more to do with you.'\"\n\n\"What were the terms?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, they were that he was to have a key of the house. That was all right. Lodgers often have them. Also, that he was to be left entirely to himself and never, upon any excuse, to be disturbed.\"\n\n\"Nothing wonderful in that, surely?\"\n\n\"Not in reason, sir. But this is out of all reason. He has been there for ten days, and neither Mr. Warren, nor I, nor the girl has once set eyes upon him. We can hear that quick step of his pacing up and down, up and down, night, morning, and noon; but except on that first night he has never once gone out of the house.\"\n\n\"Oh, he went out the first night, did he?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and returned very late\u2014after we were all in bed. He told me after he had taken the rooms that he would do so and asked me not to bar the door. I heard him come up the stair after midnight.\"\n\n\"But his meals?\"\n\n\"It was his particular direction that we should always, when he rang, leave his meal upon a chair, outside his door. Then he rings again when he has finished, and we take it down from the same chair. If he wants anything else he prints it on a slip of paper and leaves it.\"\n\n\"Prints it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir; prints it in pencil. Just the word, nothing more. Here's one I brought to show you\u2014SOAP. Here's another\u2014MATCH. This is one he left the first morning\u2014DAILY GAZETTE. I leave that paper with his breakfast every morning.\"\n\n\"Dear me, Watson,\" said Holmes, staring with great curiosity at the slips of foolscap which the landlady had handed to him, \"this is certainly a little unusual. Seclusion I can understand; but why print? Printing is a clumsy process. Why not write? What would it suggest, Watson?\"\n\n\"That he desired to conceal his handwriting.\"\n\n\"But why? What can it matter to him that his landlady should have a word of his writing? Still, it may be as you say. Then, again, why such laconic messages?\"\n\n\"I cannot imagine.\"\n\n\"It opens a pleasing field for intelligent speculation. The words are written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil of a not unusual pattern. You will observe that the paper is torn away at the side here after the printing was done, so that the 's' of 'SOAP' is partly gone. Suggestive, Watson, is it not?\"\n\n\"Of caution?\"\n\n\"Exactly. There was evidently some mark, some thumbprint, something which might give a clue to the person's identity. Now, Mrs. Warren, you say that the man was of middle size, dark, and bearded. What age would he be?\"\n\n\"Youngish, sir\u2014not over thirty.\"\n\n\"Well, can you give me no further indications?\"\n\n\"He spoke good English, sir, and yet I thought he was a foreigner by his accent.\"\n\n\"And he was well dressed?\"\n\n\"Very smartly dressed, sir\u2014quite the gentleman. Dark clothes\u2014nothing you would note.\"\n\n\"He gave no name?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"And has had no letters or callers?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"But surely you or the girl enter his room of a morning?\"\n\n\"No, sir; he looks after himself entirely.\"\n\n\"Dear me! that is certainly remarkable. What about his luggage?\"\n\n\"He had one big brown bag with him\u2014nothing else.\"\n\n\"Well, we don't seem to have much material to help us. Do you say nothing has come out of that room\u2014absolutely nothing?\"\n\nThe landlady drew an envelope from her bag; from it she shook out two burnt matches and a cigarette-end upon the table.\n\n\"They were on his tray this morning. I brought them because I had heard that you can read great things out of small ones.\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"There is nothing here,\" said he. \"The matches have, of course, been used to light cigarettes. That is obvious from the shortness of the burnt end. Half the match is consumed in lighting a pipe or cigar. But, dear me! this cigarette stub is certainly remarkable. The gentleman was bearded and moustached, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"I don't understand that. I should say that only a clean-shaven man could have smoked this. Why, Watson, even your modest moustache would have been singed.\"\n\n\"A holder?\" I suggested.\n\n\"No, no; the end is matted. I suppose there could not be two people in your rooms, Mrs. Warren?\"\n\n\"No, sir. He eats so little that I often wonder it can keep life in one.\"\n\n\"Well, I think we must wait for a little more material. After all, you have nothing to complain of. You have received your rent, and he is not a troublesome lodger, though he is certainly an unusual one. He pays you well, and if he chooses to lie concealed it is no direct business of yours. We have no excuse for an intrusion upon his privacy until we have some reason to think that there is a guilty reason for it. I've taken up the matter, and I won't lose sight of it. Report to me if anything fresh occurs, and rely upon my assistance if it should be needed.\n\n\"There are certainly some points of interest in this case, Watson,\" he remarked when the landlady had left us. \"It may, of course, be trivial\u2014individual eccentricity; or it may be very much deeper than appears on the surface. The first thing that strikes one is the obvious possibility that the person now in the rooms may be entirely different from the one who engaged them.\"\n\n\"Why should you think so?\"\n\n\"Well, apart from this cigarette-end, was it not suggestive that the only time the lodger went out was immediately after his taking the rooms? He came back\u2014or someone came back\u2014when all witnesses were out of the way. We have no proof that the person who came back was the person who went out. Then, again, the man who took the rooms spoke English well. This other, however, prints 'match' when it should have been 'matches.' I can imagine that the word was taken out of a dictionary, which would give the noun but not the plural. The laconic style may be to conceal the absence of knowledge of English. Yes, Watson, there are good reasons to suspect that there has been a substitution of lodgers.\"\n\n\"But for what possible end?\"\n\n\"Ah! there lies our problem. There is one rather obvious line of investigation.\" He took down the great book in which, day by day, he filed the agony columns of the various London journals. \"Dear me!\" said he, turning over the pages, \"what a chorus of groans, cries, and bleatings! What a rag-bag of singular happenings! But surely the most valuable hunting-ground that ever was given to a student of the unusual! This person is alone and cannot be approached by letter without a breach of that absolute secrecy which is desired. How is any news or any message to reach him from without? Obviously by advertisement through a newspaper. There seems no other way, and fortunately we need concern ourselves with the one paper only. Here are the Daily Gazette extracts of the last fortnight. 'Lady with a black boa at Prince's Skating Club'\u2014that we may pass. 'Surely Jimmy will not break his mother's heart'\u2014that appears to be irrelevant. 'If the lady who fainted in the Brixton bus'\u2014she does not interest me. 'Every day my heart longs\u2014' Bleat, Watson\u2014unmitigated bleat! Ah, this is a little more possible. Listen to this: 'Be patient. Will find some sure means of communication. Meanwhile, this column. G.' That is two days after Mrs. Warren's lodger arrived. It sounds plausible, does it not? The mysterious one could understand English, even if he could not print it. Let us see if we can pick up the trace again. Yes, here we are\u2014three days later. 'Am making successful arrangements. Patience and prudence. The clouds will pass. G.' Nothing for a week after that. Then comes something much more definite: 'The path is clearing. If I find chance signal message remember code agreed\u2014one A, two B, and so on. You will hear soon. G.' That was in yesterday's paper, and there is nothing in to-day's. It's all very appropriate to Mrs. Warren's lodger. If we wait a little, Watson, I don't doubt that the affair will grow more intelligible.\"\n\nSo it proved; for in the morning I found my friend standing on the hearthrug with his back to the fire and a smile of complete satisfaction upon his face.\n\n\"How's this, Watson?\" he cried, picking up the paper from the table. \" 'High red house with white stone facings. Third floor. Second window left. After dusk. G.' That is definite enough. I think after breakfast we must make a little reconnaissance of Mrs. Warren's neighbourhood. Ah, Mrs. Warren! what news do you bring us this morning?\"\n\nOur client had suddenly burst into the room with an explosive energy which told of some new and momentous development.\n\n\"It's a police matter, Mr. Holmes!\" she cried. \"I'll have no more of it! He shall pack out of there with his baggage. I would have gone straight up and told him so, only I thought it was but fair to you to take your opinion first. But I'm at the end of my patience, and when it comes to knocking my old man about\u2014\"\n\n\"Knocking Mr. Warren about?\"\n\n\"Using him roughly, anyway.\"\n\n\"But who used him roughly?\"\n\n\"Ah! that's what we want to know! It was this morning, sir. Mr. Warren is a timekeeper at Morton and Waylight's, in Tottenham Court Road. He has to be out of the house before seven. Well, this morning he had not gone ten paces down the road when two men came up behind him, threw a coat over his head, and bundled him into a cab that was beside the curb. They drove him an hour, and then opened the door and shot him out. He lay in the roadway so shaken in his wits that he never saw what became of the cab. When he picked himself up he found he was on Hampstead Heath; so he took a bus home, and there he lies now on the sofa, while I came straight round to tell you what had happened.\"\n\n\"Most interesting,\" said Holmes. \"Did he observe the appearance of these men\u2014did he hear them talk?\"\n\n\"No; he is clean dazed. He just knows that he was lifted up as if by magic and dropped as if by magic. Two at least were in it, and maybe three.\"\n\n\"And you connect this attack with your lodger?\"\n\n\"Well, we've lived there fifteen years and no such happenings ever came before. I've had enough of him. Money's not everything. I'll have him out of my house before the day is done.\"\n\n\"Wait a bit, Mrs. Warren. Do nothing rash. I begin to think that this affair may be very much more important than appeared at first sight. It is clear now that some danger is threatening your lodger. It is equally clear that his enemies, lying in wait for him near your door, mistook your husband for him in the foggy morning light. On discovering their mistake they released him. What they would have done had it not been a mistake, we can only conjecture.\n\n\"Well, what am I to do, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I have a great fancy to see this lodger of yours, Mrs. Warren.\"\n\n\"I don't see how that is to be managed, unless you break in the door. I always hear him unlock it as I go down the stair after I leave the tray.\"\n\n\"He has to take the tray in. Surely we could conceal ourselves and see him do it.\"\n\nThe landlady thought for a moment.\n\n\"Well, sir, there's the box-room opposite. I could arrange a looking-glass, maybe, and if you were behind the door\u2014\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Holmes: \"When does he lunch?\"\n\n\"About one, sir.\"\n\n\"Then Dr. Watson and I will come round in time. For the present, Mrs. Warren, good-bye.\"\n\nAt half-past twelve we found ourselves upon the steps of Mrs. Warren's house\u2014a high, thin, yellow-brick edifice in Great Orme Street, a narrow thoroughfare at the northeast side of the British Museum. Standing as it does near the corner of the street, it commands a view down Howe Street, with its more pretentious houses. Holmes pointed with a chuckle to one of these, a row of residential flats, which projected so that they could not fail to catch the eye.\n\n\"See, Watson!\" said he. \" 'High red house with stone facings.' There is the signal station all right. We know the place, and we know the code; so surely our task should be simple. There's a 'to let' card in that window. It is evidently an empty flat to which the confederate has access. Well, Mrs. Warren, what now?\"\n\n\"I have it all ready for you. If you will both come up and leave your boots below on the landing, I'll put you there now.\"\n\nIt was an excellent hiding-place which she had arranged. The mirror was so placed that, seated in the dark, we could very plainly see the door opposite. We had hardly settled down in it, and Mrs. Warren left us, when a distant tinkle announced that our mysterious neighbour had rung. Presently the landlady appeared with the tray, laid it down upon a chair beside the closed door, and then, treading heavily, departed. Crouching together in the angle of the door, we kept our eyes fixed upon the mirror. Suddenly, as the landlady's footsteps died away, there was the creak of a turning key, the handle revolved, and two thin hands darted out and lifted the tray from the chair. An instant later it was hurriedly replaced, and I caught a glimpse of a dark, beautiful, horrified face glaring at the narrow opening of the box-room. Then the door crashed to, the key turned once more, and all was silence. Holmes twitched my sleeve, and together we stole down the stair.\n\n\"I will call again in the evening,\" said he to the expectant landlady. \"I think, Watson, we can discuss this business better in our own quarters.\"\n\n\"My surmise, as you saw, proved to be correct,\" said he, speaking from the depths of his easy-chair. \"There has been a substitution of lodgers. What I did not foresee is that we should find a woman, and no ordinary woman, Watson.\"\n\n\"She saw us.\"\n\n\"Well, she saw something to alarm her. That is certain. The general sequence of events is pretty clear, is it not? A couple seek refuge in London from a very terrible and instant danger. The measure of that danger is the rigour of their precautions. The man, who has some work which he must do, desires to leave the woman in absolute safety while he does it. It is not an easy problem, but he solved it in an original fashion, and so effectively that her presence was not even known to the landlady who supplies her with food. The printed messages, as is now evident, were to prevent her sex being discovered by her writing. The man cannot come near the woman, or he will guide their enemies to her. Since he cannot communicate with her direct, he has recourse to the agony column of a paper. So far all is clear.\"\n\n\"But what is at the root of it?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, Watson\u2014severely practical, as usual! What is at the root of it all? Mrs. Warren's whimsical problem enlarges somewhat and assumes a more sinister aspect as we proceed. This much we can say: that it is no ordinary love escapade. You saw the woman's face at the sign of danger. We have heard, too, of the attack upon the landlord, which was undoubtedly meant for the lodger. These alarms, and the desperate need for secrecy, argue that the matter is one of life or death. The attack upon Mr. Warren further shows that the enemy, whoever they are, are themselves not aware of the substitution of the female lodger for the male. It is very curious and complex, Watson.\"\n\n\"Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?\"\n\n\"What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?\"\n\n\"For my education, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case. There is neither money nor credit in it, and yet one would wish to tidy it up. When dusk comes we should find ourselves one stage advanced in our investigation.\"\n\nWhen we returned to Mrs. Warren's rooms, the gloom of a London winter evening had thickened into one gray curtain, a dead monotone of colour, broken only by the sharp yellow squares of the windows and the blurred haloes of the gas-lamps. As we peered from the darkened sitting-room of the lodging-house, one more dim light glimmered high up through the obscurity.\n\n\"Someone is moving in that room,\" said Holmes in a whisper, his gaunt and eager face thrust forward to the window-pane. \"Yes, I can see his shadow. There he is again! He has a candle in his hand. Now he is peering across. He wants to be sure that she is on the lookout. Now he begins to flash. Take the message also, Watson, that we may check each other. A single flash\u2014that is A, surely. Now, then. How many did you make it? Twenty. So did I. That should mean T. AT\u2014that's intelligible enough! Another T. Surely this is the beginning of a second word. Now, then\u2014TENTA. Dead stop. That can't be all, Watson? ATTENTA gives no sense. Nor is it any better as three words AT, TEN, TA, unless T. A. are a person's initials. There it goes again! What's that? ATTE\u2014why, it is the same message over again. Curious, Watson, very curious! Now he is off once more! AT-why, he is repeating it for the third time. ATTENTA three times! How often will he repeat it? No, that seems to be the finish. He has withdrawn from the window. What do you make of it, Watson?\"\n\n\"A cipher message, Holmes.\"\n\nMy companion gave a sudden chuckle of comprehension. \"And not a very obscure cipher, Watson,\" said he. \"Why, of course, it is Italian! The A means that it is addressed to a woman. 'Beware! Beware! Beware!' How's that, Watson?\"\n\n\"I believe you have hit it.\"\n\n\"Not a doubt of it. It is a very urgent message, thrice repeated to make it more so. But beware of what? Wait a bit; he is coming to the window once more.\"\n\nAgain we saw the dim silhouette of a crouching man and the whisk of the small flame across the window as the signals were renewed. They came more rapidly than before\u2014so rapid that it was hard to follow them.\n\n\"PERICOLO\u2014pericolo\u2014eh, what's that, Watson? 'Danger,' isn't it? Yes, by Jove, it's a danger signal. There he goes again! PERI. Halloa, what on earth\u2014\"\n\nThe light had suddenly gone out, the glimmering square of window had disappeared, and the third floor formed a dark band round the lofty building, with its tiers of shining casements. That last warning cry had been suddenly cut short. How, and by whom? The same thought occurred on the instant to us both. Holmes sprang up from where he crouched by the window.\n\n\"This is serious, Watson,\" he cried. \"There is some devilry going forward! Why should such a message stop in such a way? I should put Scotland Yard in touch with this business\u2014and yet, it is too pressing for us to leave.\"\n\n\"Shall I go for the police?\"\n\n\"We must define the situation a little more clearly. It may bear some more innocent interpretation. Come, Watson, let us go across ourselves and see what we can make of it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "As we walked rapidly down Howe Street I glanced back at the building which we had left. There, dimly outlined at the top window, I could see the shadow of a head, a woman's head, gazing tensely, rigidly, out into the night, waiting with breathless suspense for the renewal of that interrupted message. At the doorway of the Howe Street flats a man, muffled in a cravat and greatcoat, was leaning against the railing. He started as the hall-light fell upon our faces.\n\n\"Holmes!\" he cried.\n\n\"Why, Gregson!\" said my companion as he shook hands with the Scotland Yard detective. \"Journeys end with lovers' meetings. What brings you here?\"\n\n\"The same reasons that bring you, I expect,\" said Gregson. \"How you got on to it I can't imagine.\"\n\n\"Different threads, but leading up to the same tangle. I've been taking the signals.\"\n\n\"Signals?\"\n\n\"Yes, from that window. They broke off in the middle. We came over to see the reason. But since it is safe in your hands I see no object in continuing the business.\"\n\n\"Wait a bit!\" cried Gregson eagerly. \"I'll do you this justice, Mr. Holmes, that I was never in a case yet that I didn't feel stronger for having you on my side. There's only the one exit to these flats, so we have him safe.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"Well, well, we score over you for once, Mr. Holmes. You must give us best this time.\" He struck his stick sharply upon the ground, on which a cabman, his whip in his hand, sauntered over from a four-wheeler which stood on the far side of the street. \"May I introduce you to Mr. Sherlock Holmes?\" he said to the cabman. \"This is Mr. Leverton, of Pinkerton's American Agency.\"\n\n\"The hero of the Long Island cave mystery?\" said Holmes. \"Sir, I am pleased to meet you.\"\n\nThe American, a quiet, businesslike young man, with a clean-shaven, hatchet face, flushed up at the words of commendation. \"I am on the trail of my life now, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"If I can get Gorgiano\u2014\"\n\n\"What! Gorgiano of the Red Circle?\"\n\n\"Oh, he has a European fame, has he? Well, we've learned all about him in America. We know he is at the bottom of fifty murders, and yet we have nothing positive we can take him on. I tracked him over from New York, and I've been close to him for a week in London, waiting some excuse to get my hand on his collar. Mr. Gregson and I ran him to ground in that big tenement house, and there's only the one door, so he can't slip us. There's three folk come out since he went in, but I'll swear he wasn't one of them.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes talks of signals,\" said Gregson. \"I expect, as usual, he knows a good deal that we don't.\"\n\nIn a few clear words Holmes explained the situation as it had appeared to us.\n\nThe American struck his hands together with vexation.\n\n\"He's on to us!\" he cried.\n\n\"Why do you think so?\"\n\n\"Well, it figures out that way, does it not? Here he is, sending out messages to an accomplice\u2014there are several of his gang in London. Then suddenly, just as by your own account he was telling them that there was danger, he broke short off. What could it mean except that from the window he had suddenly either caught sight of us in the street, or in some way come to understand how close the danger was, and that he must act right away if he was to avoid it? What do you suggest, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"That we go up at once and see for ourselves.\"\n\n\"But we have no warrant for his arrest.\"\n\n\"He is in unoccupied premises under suspicious circumstances,\" said Gregson. \"That is good enough for the moment. When we have him by the heels we can see if New York can't help us to keep him. I'll take the responsibility of arresting him now.\"\n\nOur official detectives may blunder in the matter of intelligence, but never in that of courage. Gregson climbed the stair to arrest this desperate murderer with the same absolutely quiet and businesslike bearing with which he would have ascended the official staircase of Scotland Yard. The Pinkerton man had tried to push past him, but Gregson had firmly elbowed him back. London dangers were the privilege of the London force.\n\nThe door of the left-hand flat upon the third landing was standing ajar. Gregson pushed it open. Within all was absolute silence and darkness. I struck a match and lit the detective's lantern. As I did so, and as the flicker steadied into a flame, we all gave a gasp of surprise. On the deal boards of the carpetless floor there was outlined a fresh track of blood. The red steps pointed towards us and led away from an inner room, the door of which was closed. Gregson flung it open and held his light full blaze in front of him, while we all peered eagerly over his shoulders.\n\nIn the middle of the floor of the empty room was huddled the figure of an enormous man, his clean-shaven, swarthy face grotesquely horrible in its contortion and his head encircled by a ghastly crimson halo of blood, lying in a broad wet circle upon the white woodwork. His knees were drawn up, his hands thrown out in agony, and from the centre of his broad, brown, upturned throat there projected the white haft of a knife driven blade-deep into his body. Giant as he was, the man must have gone down like a pole-axed ox before that terrific blow. Beside his right hand a most formidable horn-handled, two-edged dagger lay upon the floor, and near it a black kid glove.\n\n\"By George! it's Black Gorgiano himself!\" cried the American detective. \"Someone has got ahead of us this time.\"\n\n\"Here is the candle in the window, Mr. Holmes,\" said Gregson. \"Why, whatever are you doing?\"\n\nHolmes had stepped across, had lit the candle, and was passing it backward and forward across the window-panes. Then he peered into the darkness, blew the candle out, and threw it on the floor.\n\n\"I rather think that will be helpful,\" said he. He came over and stood in deep thought while the two professionals were examining the body. \"You say that three people came out from the flat while you were waiting downstairs,\" said he at last. \"Did you observe them closely?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did.\"\n\n\"Was there a fellow about thirty, black-bearded, dark, of middle size?\"\n\n\"Yes; he was the last to pass me.\"\n\n\"That is your man, I fancy. I can give you his description, and we have a very excellent outline of his footmark. That should be enough for you.\"\n\n\"Not much, Mr. Holmes, among the millions of London.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not. That is why I thought it best to summon this lady to your aid.\"\n\nWe all turned round at the words. There, framed in the doorway, was a tall and beautiful woman\u2014the mysterious lodger of Bloomsbury. Slowly she advanced, her face pale and drawn with a frightful apprehension, her eyes fixed and staring, her terrified gaze riveted upon the dark figure on the floor.\n\n\"You have killed him!\" she muttered. \"Oh, Dio mio, you have killed him!\" Then I heard a sudden sharp intake of her breath, and she sprang into the air with a cry of joy. Round and round the room she danced, her hands clapping, her dark eyes gleaming with delighted wonder, and a thousand pretty Italian exclamations pouring from her lips. It was terrible and amazing to see such a woman so convulsed with joy at such a sight. Suddenly she stopped and gazed at us all with a questioning stare.\n\n\"But you! You are police, are you not? You have killed Giuseppe Gorgiano. Is it not so?\"\n\n\"We are police, madam.\"\n\nShe looked round into the shadows of the room.\n\n\"But where, then, is Gennaro?\" she asked. \"He is my husband, Gennaro Lucca. I am Emilia Lucca, and we are both from New York. Where is Gennaro? He called me this moment from this window, and I ran with all my speed.\"\n\n\"It was I who called,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"You! How could you call?\"\n\n\"Your cipher was not difficult, madam. Your presence here was desirable. I knew that I had only to flash 'Vieni' and you would surely come.\"\n\nThe beautiful Italian looked with awe at my companion.\n\n\"I do not understand how you know these things,\" she said. \"Giuseppe Gorgiano\u2014how did he\u2014\" She paused, and then suddenly her face lit up with pride and delight. \"Now I see it! My Gennaro! My splendid, beautiful Gennaro, who has guarded me safe from all harm, he did it, with his own strong hand he killed the monster! Oh, Gennaro, how wonderful you are! What woman could ever be worthy of such a man?\"\n\n\"Well, Mrs. Lucca,\" said the prosaic Gregson, laying his hand upon the lady's sleeve with as little sentiment as if she were a Notting Hill hooligan, \"I am not very clear yet who you are or what you are; but you've said enough to make it very clear that we shall want you at the Yard.\"\n\n\"One moment, Gregson,\" said Holmes. \"I rather fancy that this lady may be as anxious to give us information as we can be to get it. You understand, madam, that your husband will be arrested and tried for the death of the man who lies before us? What you say may be used in evidence. But if you think that he has acted from motives which are not criminal, and which he would wish to have known, then you cannot serve him better than by telling us the whole story.\"\n\n\"Now that Gorgiano is dead we fear nothing,\" said the lady. \"He was a devil and a monster, and there can be no judge in the world who would punish my husband for having killed him.\"\n\n\"In that case,\" said Holmes, \"my suggestion is that we lock this door, leave things as we found them, go with this lady to her room, and form our opinion after we have heard what it is that she has to say to us.\"\n\nHalf an hour later we were seated, all four, in the small sitting-room of Signora Lucca, listening to her remarkable narrative of those sinister events, the ending of which we had chanced to witness. She spoke in rapid and fluent but very unconventional English, which, for the sake of clearness, I will make grammatical.\n\n\"I was born in Posilippo, near Naples,\" said she, \"and was the daughter of Augusto Barelli, who was the chief lawyer and once the deputy of that part. Gennaro was in my father's employment, and I came to love him, as any woman must. He had neither money nor position\u2014nothing but his beauty and strength and energy\u2014so my father forbade the match. We fled together, were married at Bari, and sold my jewels to gain the money which would take us to America. This was four years ago, and we have been in New York ever since.\n\n\"Fortune was very good to us at first. Gennaro was able to do a service to an Italian gentleman\u2014he saved him from some ruffians in the place called the Bowery, and so made a powerful friend. His name was Tito Castalotte, and he was the senior partner of the great firm of Castalotte and Zamba, who are the chief fruit importers of New York. Signor Zamba is an invalid, and our new friend Castalotte has all power within the firm, which employs more than three hundred men. He took my husband into his employment, made him head of a department, and showed his good will towards him in every way. Signor Castalotte was a bachelor, and I believe that he felt as if Gennaro was his son, and both my husband and I loved him as if he were our father. We had taken and furnished a little house in Brooklyn, and our whole future seemed assured when that black cloud appeared which was soon to overspread our sky.\n\n\"One night, when Gennaro returned from his work, he brought a fellow-countryman back with him. His name was Gorgiano, and he had come also from Posilippo. He was a huge man, as you can testify, for you have looked upon his corpse. Not only was his body that of a giant but everything about him was grotesque, gigantic, and terrifying. His voice was like thunder in our little house. There was scarce room for the whirl of his great arms as he talked. His thoughts, his emotions, his passions, all were exaggerated and monstrous. He talked, or rather roared, with such energy that others could but sit and listen, cowed with the mighty stream of words. His eyes blazed at you and held you at his mercy. He was a terrible and wonderful man. I thank God that he is dead!\n\n\"He came again and again. Yet I was aware that Gennaro was no more happy than I was in his presence. My poor husband would sit pale and listless, listening to the endless raving upon politics and upon social questions which made up our visitor's conversation. Gennaro said nothing, but I, who knew him so well, could read in his face some emotion which I had never seen there before. At first I thought that it was dislike. And then, gradually, I understood that it was more than dislike. It was fear\u2014a deep, secret, shrinking fear. That night\u2014the night that I read his terror\u2014I put my arms round him and I implored him by his love for me and by all that he held dear to hold nothing from me, and to tell me why this huge man overshadowed him so.\n\n\"He told me, and my own heart grew cold as ice as I listened. My poor Gennaro, in his wild and fiery days, when all the world seemed against him and his mind was driven half mad by the injustices of life, had joined a Neapolitan society, the Red Circle, which was allied to the old Car bonari. The oaths and secrets of this brotherhood were frightful, but once within its rule no escape was possible. When we had fled to America Gennaro thought that he had cast it all off forever. What was his horror one evening to meet in the streets the very man who had initiated him in Naples, the giant Gorgiano, a man who had earned the name of 'Death' in the south of Italy, for he was red to the elbow in murder! He had come to New York to avoid the Italian police, and he had already planted a branch of this dreadful society in his new home. All this Gennaro told me and showed me a summons which he had received that very day, a Red Circle drawn upon the head of it telling him that a lodge would be held upon a certain date, and that his presence at it was required and ordered.\n\n\"That was bad enough, but worse was to come. I had noticed for some time that when Gorgiano came to us, as he constantly did, in the evening, he spoke much to me; and even when his words were to my husband those terrible, glaring, wild-beast eyes of his were always turned upon me. One night his secret came out. I had awakened what he called 'love' within him\u2014the love of a brute\u2014a savage. Gennaro had not yet returned when he came. He pushed his way in, seized me in his mighty arms, hugged me in his bear's embrace, covered me with kisses, and implored me to come away with him. I was struggling and screaming when Gennaro entered and attacked him. He struck Gennaro senseless and fled from the house which he was never more to enter. It was a deadly enemy that we made that night.\n\n\"A few days later came the meeting. Gennaro returned from it with a face which told me that something dreadful had occurred. It was worse than we could have imagined possible. The funds of the society were raised by blackmailing rich Italians and threatening them with violence should they refuse the money. It seems that Castalotte, our dear friend and benefactor, had been approached. He had refused to yield to threats, and he had handed the notices to the police. It was resolved now that such an example should be made of him as would prevent any other victim from rebelling. At the meeting it was arranged that he and his house should be blown up with dynamite. There was a drawing of lots as to who should carry out the deed. Gennaro saw our enemy's cruel face smiling at him as he dipped his hand in the bag. No doubt it had been prearranged in some fashion, for it was the fatal disc with the Red Circle upon it, the mandate for murder, which lay upon his palm. He was to kill his best friend, or he was to expose himself and me to the vengeance of his comrades. It was part of their fiendish system to punish those whom they feared or hated by injuring not only their own persons but those whom they loved, and it was the knowledge of this which hung as a terror over my poor Gennaro's head and drove him nearly crazy with apprehension.\n\n\"All that night we sat together, our arms round each other, each strengthening each for the troubles that lay before us. The very next evening had been fixed for the attempt. By midday my husband and I were on our way to London, but not before he had given our benefactor full warning of his danger, and had also left such information for the police as would safeguard his life for the future.\n\n\"The rest, gentlemen, you know for yourselves. We were sure that our enemies would be behind us like our own shadows. Gorgiano had his private reasons for vengeance, but in any case we knew how ruthless, cunning, and untiring he could be. Both Italy and America are full of stories of his dreadful powers. If ever they were exerted it would be now. My darling made use of the few clear days which our start had given us in arranging for a refuge for me in such a fashion that no possible danger could reach me. For his own part, he wished to be free that he might communicate both with the American and with the Italian police. I do not myself know where he lived, or how. All that I learned was through the columns of a newspaper. But once as I looked through my window, I saw two Italians watching the house, and I understood that in some way Gorgiano had found out our retreat. Finally Gennaro told me, through the paper, that he would signal to me from a certain window, but when the signals came they were nothing but warnings, which were suddenly interrupted. It is very clear to me now that he knew Gorgiano to be close upon him, and that, thank God! he was ready for him when he came. And now, gentlemen, I would ask you whether we have anything to fear from the law, or whether any judge upon earth would condemn my Gennaro for what he has done?\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Gregson,\" said the American, looking across at the official, \"I don't know what your British point of view may be, but I guess that in New York this lady's husband will receive a pretty general vote of thanks.\"\n\n\"She will have to come with me and see the chief,\" Gregson answered. \"If what she says is corroborated, I do not think she or her husband has much to fear. But what I can't make head or tail of, Mr. Holmes, is how on earth you got yourself mixed up in the matter.\"\n\n\"Education, Gregson, education. Still seeking knowledge at the old university. Well, Watson, you have one more specimen of the tragic and grotesque to add to your collection. By the way, it is not eight o'clock, and a Wagner night at Covent Garden! If we hurry, we might be in time for the second act.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE BRUCE-PARTINGTON PLANS", + "text": "In the third week of November, in the year 1895, a dense yellow fog settled down upon London. From the Monday to the Thursday I doubt whether it was ever possible from our windows in Baker Street to see the loom of the opposite houses. The first day Holmes had spent in cross-indexing his huge book of references. The second and third had been patiently occupied upon a subject which he had recently made his hobby\u2014the music of the Middle Ages. But when, for the fourth time, after pushing back our chairs from breakfast we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes, my comrade's impatient and active nature could endure this drab existence no longer. He paced restlessly about our sitting-room in a fever of suppressed energy, biting his nails, tapping the furniture, and chafing against inaction.\n\n\"Nothing of interest in the paper, Watson?\" he said.\n\nI was aware that by anything of interest, Holmes meant anything of criminal interest. There was the news of a revolution, of a possible war, and of an impending change of government; but these did not come within the horizon of my companion. I could see nothing recorded in the shape of crime which was not commonplace and futile. Holmes groaned and resumed his restless meanderings.\n\n\"The London criminal is certainly a dull fellow,\" said he in the querulous voice of the sportsman whose game has failed him. \"Look out of this window, Watson. See how the figures loom up, are dimly seen, and then blend once more into the cloud-bank. The thief or the murderer could roam London on such a day as the tiger does the jungle, unseen until he pounces, and then evident only to his victim.\"\n\n\"There have,\" said I, \"been numerous petty thefts.\"\n\nHolmes snorted his contempt.\n\n\"This great and sombre stage is set for something more worthy than that,\" said he. \"It is fortunate for this community that I am not a criminal.\"\n\n\"It is, indeed!\" said I heartily.\n\n\"Suppose that I were Brooks or Woodhouse, or any of the fifty men who have good reason for taking my life, how long could I survive against my own pursuit? A summons, a bogus appointment, and all would be over. It is well they don't have days of fog in the Latin countries\u2014the countries of assassination. By Jove! here comes something at last to break our dead monotony.\"\n\nIt was the maid with a telegram. Holmes tore it open and burst out laughing.\n\n\"Well, well! What next?\" said he. \"Brother Mycroft is coming round.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" I asked.\n\n\"Why not? It is as if you met a tram-car coming down a country lane. Mycroft has his rails and he runs on them. His Pall Mall lodgings, the Dio genes Club, Whitehall\u2014that is his cycle. Once, and only once, he has been here. What upheaval can possibly have derailed him?\"\n\n\"Does he not explain?\"\n\nHolmes handed me his brother's telegram.\n\nMust see you over Cadogan West. Coming at once.\n\nMYCROFT.\n\n\"Cadogan West? I have heard the name.\"\n\n\"It recalls nothing to my mind. But that Mycroft should break out in this erratic fashion! A planet might as well leave its orbit. By the way, do you know what Mycroft is?\"\n\nI had some vague recollection of an explanation at the time of the Adventure of the Greek Interpreter.\n\n\"You told me that he had some small office under the British government.\"\n\nHolmes chuckled.\n\n\"I did not know you quite so well in those days. One has to be discreet when one talks of high matters of state. You are right in thinking that he is under the British government. You would also be right in a sense if you said that occasionally he is the British government.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\"\n\n\"I thought I might surprise you. Mycroft draws four hundred and fifty pounds a year, remains a subordinate, has no ambitions of any kind, will receive neither honour nor title, but remains the most indispensable man in the country.\"\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"Well, his position is unique. He has made it for himself. There has never been anything like it before, nor will be again. He has the tidiest and most orderly brain, with the greatest capacity for storing facts, of any man living. The same great powers which I have turned to the detection of crime he has used for this particular business. The conclusions of every department are passed to him, and he is the central exchange, the clearing-house, which makes out the balance. All other men are specialists, but his specialism is omniscience. We will suppose that a minister needs information as to a point which involves the Navy, India, Canada and the bimetallic question; he could get his separate advices from various departments upon each, but only Mycroft can focus them all, and say offhand how each factor would affect the other. They began by using him as a short-cut, a convenience; now he has made himself an essential. In that great brain of his everything is pigeon-holed and can be handed out in an instant. Again and again his word has decided the national policy. He lives in it. He thinks of nothing else save when, as an intellectual exercise, he unbends if I call upon him and ask him to advise me on one of my little problems. But Jupiter is descending to-day. What on earth can it mean? Who is Cadogan West, and what is he to Mycroft?\"\n\n\"I have it,\" I cried, and plunged among the litter of papers upon the sofa. \"Yes, yes, here he is, sure enough! Cadogan West was the young man who was found dead on the Underground on Tuesday morning.\"\n\nHolmes sat up at attention, his pipe halfway to his lips.\n\n\"This must be serious, Watson. A death which has caused my brother to alter his habits can be no ordinary one. What in the world can he have to do with it? The case was featureless as I remember it. The young man had apparently fallen out of the train and killed himself. He had not been robbed, and there was no particular reason to suspect violence. Is that not so?\"\n\n\"There has been an inquest,\" said I, \"and a good many fresh facts have come out. Looked at more closely, I should certainly say that it was a curious case.\"\n\n\"Judging by its effect upon my brother, I should think it must be a most extraordinary one.\" He snuggled down in his armchair. \"Now, Watson, let us have the facts.\"\n\n\"The man's name was Arthur Cadogan West. He was twenty-seven years of age, unmarried, and a clerk at Woolwich Arsenal.\"\n\n\"Government employ. Behold the link with Brother Mycroft!\"\n\n\"He left Woolwich suddenly on Monday night. Was last seen by his fianc\u00e9e, Miss Violet Westbury, whom he left abruptly in the fog about 7:30 that evening. There was no quarrel between them and she can give no motive for his action. The next thing heard of him was when his dead body was discovered by a plate-layer named Mason, just outside Aldgate Station on the Underground system in London.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"The body was found at six on the Tuesday morning. It was lying wide of the metals upon the left hand of the track as one goes eastward, at a point close to the station, where the line emerges from the tunnel in which it runs. The head was badly crushed\u2014an injury which might well have been caused by a fall from the train. The body could only have come on the line in that way. Had it been carried down from any neighbouring street, it must have passed the station barriers, where a collector is always standing. This point seems absolutely certain.\"\n\n\"Very good. The case is definite enough. The man, dead or alive, either fell or was precipitated from a train. So much is clear to me. Continue.\"\n\n\"The trains which traverse the lines of rail beside which the body was found are those which run from west to east, some being purely Metropolitan, and some from Willesden and outlying junctions. It can be stated for certain that this young man, when he met his death, was travelling in this direction at some late hour of the night, but at what point he entered the train it is impossible to state.\"\n\n\"His ticket, of course, would show that.\"\n\n\"There was no ticket in his pockets.\"\n\n\"No ticket! Dear me, Watson, this is really very singular. According to my experience it is not possible to reach the platform of a Metropolitan train without exhibiting one's ticket. Presumably, then, the young man had one. Was it taken from him in order to conceal the station from which he came? It is possible. Or did he drop it in the carriage? That also is possible. But the point is of curious interest. I understand that there was no sign of robbery?\"\n\n\"Apparently not. There is a list here of his possessions. His purse contained two pounds fifteen. He had also a check-book on the Woolwich branch of the Capital and Counties Bank. Through this his identity was established. There were also two dress-circle tickets for the Woolwich Theatre, dated for that very evening. Also a small packet of technical papers.\"\n\nHolmes gave an exclamation of satisfaction.\n\n\"There we have it at last, Watson! British government\u2014Woolwich. Arsenal\u2014technical papers\u2014Brother Mycroft, the chain is complete. But here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to speak for himself.\"\n\nA moment later the tall and portly form of Mycroft Holmes was ushered into the room. Heavily built and massive, there was a suggestion of uncouth physical inertia in the figure, but above this unwieldy frame there was perched a head so masterful in its brow, so alert in its steel-gray, deep-set eyes, so firm in its lips, and so subtle in its play of expression, that after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind.\n\nAt his heels came our old friend Lestrade, of Scotland Yard\u2014thin and austere. The gravity of both their faces foretold some weighty quest. The detective shook hands without a word. Mycroft Holmes struggled out of his overcoat and subsided into an armchair.\n\n\"A most annoying business, Sherlock,\" said he. \"I extremely dislike altering my habits, but the powers that be would take no denial. In the present state of Siam it is most awkward that I should be away from the office. But it is a real crisis. I have never seen the Prime Minister so upset. As to the Admiralty\u2014it is buzzing like an overturned bee-hive. Have you read up the case?\"\n\n\"We have just done so. What were the technical papers?\"\n\n\"Ah, there's the point! Fortunately, it has not come out. The press would be furious if it did. The papers which this wretched youth had in his pocket were the plans of the Bruce-Partington submarine.\"\n\nMycroft Holmes spoke with a solemnity which showed his sense of the importance of the subject. His brother and I sat expectant.\n\n\"Surely you have heard of it? I thought everyone had heard of it.\"\n\n\"Only as a name.\"\n\n\"Its importance can hardly be exaggerated. It has been the most jealously guarded of all government secrets. You may take it from me that naval warfare becomes impossible within the radius of a Bruce-Partington's operation. Two years ago a very large sum was smuggled through the Estimates and was expended in acquiring a monopoly of the invention. Every effort has been made to keep the secret. The plans, which are exceedingly intricate, comprising some thirty separate patents, each essential to the working of the whole, are kept in an elaborate safe in a confidential office adjoining the arsenal, with burglar-proof doors and windows. Under no conceivable circumstances were the plans to be taken from the office. If the chief constructor of the Navy desired to consult them, even he was forced to go to the Woolwich office for the purpose. And yet here we find them in the pocket of a dead junior clerk in the heart of London. From an official point of view it's simply awful.\"\n\n\"But you have recovered them?\"\n\n\"No, Sherlock, no! That's the pinch. We have not. Ten papers were taken from Woolwich. There were seven in the pocket of Cadogan West. The three most essential are gone\u2014stolen, vanished. You must drop everything, Sherlock. Never mind your usual petty puzzles of the police-court. It's a vital international problem that you have to solve. Why did Cadogan West take the papers, where are the missing ones, how did he die, how came his body where it was found, how can the evil be set right? Find an answer to all these questions, and you will have done good service for your country.\"\n\n\"Why do you not solve it yourself, Mycroft? You can see as far as I.\"\n\n\"Possibly, Sherlock. But it is a question of getting details. Give me your details, and from an armchair I will return you an excellent expert opinion. But to run here and run there, to cross-question railway guards, and lie on my face with a lens to my eye\u2014it is not my m\u00e9tier. No, you are the one man who can clear the matter up. If you have a fancy to see your name in the next honours list\u2014\"\n\nMy friend smiled and shook his head.\n\n\"I play the game for the game's own sake,\" said he. \"But the problem certainly presents some points of interest, and I shall be very pleased to look into it. Some more facts, please.\"\n\n\"I have jotted down the more essential ones upon this sheet of paper, together with a few addresses which you will find of service. The actual official guardian of the papers is the famous government expert, Sir James Walter, whose decorations and sub-titles fill two lines of a book of reference. He has grown gray in the service, is a gentleman, a favoured guest in the most exalted houses, and, above all, a man whose patriotism is beyond suspicion. He is one of two who have a key of the safe. I may add that the papers were undoubtedly in the office during working hours on Monday, and that Sir James left for London about three o'clock taking his key with him. He was at the house of Admiral Sinclair at Barclay Square during the whole of the evening when this incident occurred.\"\n\n\"Has the fact been verified?\"\n\n\"Yes; his brother, Colonel Valentine Walter, has testified to his departure from Woolwich, and Admiral Sinclair to his arrival in London; so Sir James is no longer a direct factor in the problem.\"\n\n\"Who was the other man with a key?\"\n\n\"The senior clerk and draughtsman, Mr. Sidney Johnson. He is a man of forty, married, with five children. He is a silent, morose man, but he has, on the whole, an excellent record in the public service. He is unpopular with his colleagues, but a hard worker. According to his own account, corroborated only by the word of his wife, he was at home the whole of Monday evening after office hours, and his key has never left the watch-chain upon which it hangs.\"\n\n\"Tell us about Cadogan West.\"\n\n\"He has been ten years in the service and has done good work. He has the reputation of being hot-headed and impetuous, but a straight, honest man. We have nothing against him. He was next to Sidney Johnson in the office. His duties brought him into daily, personal contact with the plans. No one else had the handling of them.\"\n\n\"Who locked the plans up that night?\"\n\n\"Mr. Sidney Johnson, the senior clerk.\"\n\n\"Well, it is surely perfectly clear who took them away. They are actually found upon the person of this junior clerk, Cadogan West. That seems final, does it not?\"\n\n\"It does, Sherlock, and yet it leaves so much unexplained. In the first place, why did he take them?\"\n\n\"I presume they were of value?\"\n\n\"He could have got several thousands for them very easily.\"\n\n\"Can you suggest any possible motive for taking the papers to London except to sell them?\"\n\n\"No, I cannot.\"\n\n\"Then we must take that as our working hypothesis. Young West took the papers. Now this could only be done by having a false key\u2014\"\n\n\"Several false keys. He had to open the building and the room.\"\n\n\"He had, then, several false keys. He took the papers to London to sell the secret, intending, no doubt, to have the plans themselves back in the safe next morning before they were missed. While in London on this treasonable mission he met his end.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"We will suppose that he was travelling back to Woolwich when he was killed and thrown out of the compartment.\"\n\n\"Aldgate, where the body was found, is considerably past the station for London Bridge, which would be his route to Woolwich.\"\n\n\"Many circumstances could be imagined under which he would pass London Bridge. There was someone in the carriage, for example, with whom he was having an absorbing interview. This interview led to a violent scene in which he lost his life. Possibly he tried to leave the carriage, fell out on the line, and so met his end. The other closed the door. There was a thick fog, and nothing could be seen.\"\n\n\"No better explanation can be given with our present knowledge; and yet consider, Sherlock, how much you leave untouched. We will suppose, for argument's sake, that young Cadogan West had determined to convey these papers to London. He would naturally have made an appointment with the foreign agent and kept his evening clear. Instead of that he took two tickets for the theatre, escorted his fianc\u00e9e halfway there, and then suddenly disappeared.\"\n\n\"A blind,\" said Lestrade, who had sat listening with some impatience to the conversation.\n\n\"A very singular one. That is objection No. 1. Objection No. 2: We will suppose that he reaches London and sees the foreign agent. He must bring back the papers before morning or the toss will be discovered. He took away ten. Only seven were in his pocket. What had become of the other three? He certainly would not leave them of his own free will. Then, again, where is the price of his treason? One would have expected to find a large sum of money in his pocket.\"\n\n\"It seems to me perfectly clear,\" said Lestrade. \"I have no doubt at all as to what occurred. He took the papers to sell them. He saw the agent. They could not agree as to price. He started home again, but the agent went with him. In the train the agent murdered him, took the more essential papers, and threw his body from the carriage. That would account for everything, would it not?\"\n\n\"Why had he no ticket?\"\n\n\"The ticket would have shown which station was nearest the agent's house. Therefore he took it from the murdered man's pocket.\"\n\n\"Good, Lestrade, very good,\" said Holmes. \"Your theory holds together. But if this is true, then the case is at an end. On the one hand, the traitor is dead. On the other, the plans of the Bruce-Partington submarine are presumably already on the Continent. What is there for us to do?\"\n\n\"To act, Sherlock\u2014to act!\" cried Mycroft, springing to his feet. \"All my instincts are against this explanation. Use your powers! Go to the scene of the crime! See the people concerned! Leave no stone unturned! In all your career you have never had so great a chance of serving your country.\"\n\n\"Well, well!\" said Holmes, shrugging his shoulders. \"Come, Watson! And you, Lestrade, could you favour us with your company for an hour or two? We will begin our investigation by a visit to Aldgate Station. Good-bye, Mycroft. I shall let you have a report before evening, but I warn you in advance that you have little to expect.\"\n\nAn hour later Holmes, Lestrade and I stood upon the Underground railroad at the point where it emerges from the tunnel immediately before Aldgate Station. A courteous red-faced old gentleman represented the railway company.\n\n\"This is where the young man's body lay,\" said he, indicating a spot about three feet from the metals. \"It could not have fallen from above, for these, as you see, are all blank walls. Therefore, it could only have come from a train, and that train, so far as we can trace it, must have passed about midnight on Monday.\"\n\n\"Have the carriages been examined for any sign of violence?\"\n\n\"There are no such signs, and no ticket has been found.\"\n\n\"No record of a door being found open?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"We have had some fresh evidence this morning,\" said Lestrade. \"A passenger who passed Aldgate in an ordinary Metropolitan train about 11:40 on Monday night declares that he heard a heavy thud, as of a body striking the line, just before the train reached the station. There was dense fog, however, and nothing could be seen. He made no report of it at the time. Why, whatever is the matter with Mr. Holmes?\"\n\nMy friend was standing with an expression of strained intensity upon his face, staring at the railway metals where they curved out of the tunnel. Aldgate is a junction, and there was a network of points. On these his eager, questioning eyes were fixed, and I saw on his keen, alert face that tightening of the lips, that quiver of the nostrils, and concentration of the heavy, tufted brows which I knew so well.\n\n\"Points,\" he muttered; \"the points.\"\n\n\"What of it? What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I suppose there are no great number of points on a system such as this?\"\n\n\"No; there are very few.\"\n\n\"And a curve, too. Points, and a curve. By Jove! if it were only so.\"\n\n\"What is it, Mr. Holmes? Have you a clue?\"\n\n\"An idea\u2014an indication, no more. But the case certainly grows in interest. Unique, perfectly unique, and yet why not? I do not see any indications of bleeding on the line.\"\n\n\"There were hardly any.\"\n\n\"But I understand that there was a considerable wound.\"\n\n\"The bone was crushed, but there was no great external injury.\"\n\n\"And yet one would have expected some bleeding. Would it be possible for me to inspect the train which contained the passenger who heard the thud of a fall in the fog?\"\n\n\"I fear not, Mr. Holmes. The train has been broken up before now, and the carriages redistributed.\"\n\n\"I can assure you, Mr. Holmes,\" said Lestrade, \"that every carriage has been carefully examined. I saw to it myself.\"\n\nIt was one of my friend's most obvious weaknesses that he was impa tient with less alert intelligences than his own.\n\n\"Very likely,\" said he, turning away. \"As it happens, it was not the carriages which I desired to examine. Watson, we have done all we can here. We need not trouble you any further, Mr. Lestrade. I think our investigations must now carry us to Woolwich.\"\n\nAt London Bridge, Holmes wrote a telegram to his brother, which he handed to me before dispatching it. It ran thus:\n\nSee some light in the darkness, but it may possibly flicker out. Meanwhile, please send by messenger, to await return at Baker Street, a complete list of all foreign spies or international agents known to be in England, with full address.\n\nSHERLOCK.\n\n\"That should be helpful, Watson,\" he remarked as we took our seats in the Woolwich train. \"We certainly owe Brother Mycroft a debt for having introduced us to what promises to be a really very remarkable case.\"\n\nHis eager face still wore that expression of intense and high-strung energy, which showed me that some novel and suggestive circumstance had opened up a stimulating line of thought. See the foxhound with hanging ears and drooping tail as it lolls about the kennels, and compare it with the same hound as, with gleaming eyes and straining muscles, it runs upon a breast-high scent\u2014such was the change in Holmes since the morning. He was a different man from the limp and lounging figure in the mouse-coloured dressing-gown who had prowled so restlessly only a few hours before round the fog-girt room.\n\n\"There is material here. There is scope,\" said he. \"I am dull indeed not to have understood its possibilities.\"\n\n\"Even now they are dark to me.\"\n\n\"The end is dark to me also, but I have hold of one idea which may lead us far. The man met his death elsewhere, and his body was on the roof of a carriage.\"\n\n\"On the roof!\"\n\n\"Remarkable, is it not? But consider the facts. Is it a coincidence that it is found at the very point where the train pitches and sways as it comes round on the points? Is not that the place where an object upon the roof might be expected to fall off? The points would affect no object inside the train. Either the body fell from the roof, or a very curious coincidence has occurred. But now consider the question of the blood. Of course, there was no bleeding on the line if the body had bled elsewhere. Each fact is suggestive in itself. Together they have a cumulative force.\"\n\n\"And the ticket, too!\" I cried.\n\n\"Exactly. We could not explain the absence of a ticket. This would explain it. Everything fits together.\"\n\n\"But suppose it were so, we are still as far as ever from unravelling the mystery of his death. Indeed, it becomes not simpler but stranger.\"\n\n\"Perhaps,\" said Holmes thoughtfully, \"perhaps.\" He relapsed into a silent reverie, which lasted until the slow train drew up at last in Woolwich Station. There he called a cab and drew Mycroft's paper from his pocket.\n\n\"We have quite a little round of afternoon calls to make,\" said he. \"I think that Sir James Walter claims our first attention.\"\n\nThe house of the famous official was a fine villa with green lawns stretching down to the Thames. As we reached it the fog was lifting, and a thin, watery sunshine was breaking through. A butler answered our ring.\n\n\"Sir James, sir!\" said he with solemn face. \"Sir James died this morning.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" cried Holmes in amazement. \"How did he die?\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would care to step in, sir, and see his brother, Colonel Valentine?\"\n\n\"Yes, we had best do so.\"\n\nWe were ushered into a dim-lit drawing-room, where an instant later we were joined by a very tall, handsome, light-bearded man of fifty, the younger brother of the dead scientist. His wild eyes, stained cheeks, and unkempt hair all spoke of the sudden blow which had fallen upon the household. He was hardly articulate as he spoke of it.\n\n\"It was this horrible scandal,\" said he. \"My brother, Sir James, was a man of very sensitive honour, and he could not survive such an affair. It broke his heart. He was always so proud of the efficiency of his department, and this was a crushing blow.\"\n\n\"We had hoped that he might have given us some indications which would have helped us to clear the matter up.\"\n\n\"I assure you that it was all a mystery to him as it is to you and to all of us. He had already put all his knowledge at the disposal of the police. Naturally he had no doubt that Cadogan West was guilty. But all the rest was inconceivable.\"\n\n\"You cannot throw any new light upon the affair?\"\n\n\"I know nothing myself save what I have read or heard. I have no desire to be discourteous, but you can understand, Mr. Holmes, that we are much disturbed at present, and I must ask you to hasten this interview to an end.\"\n\n\"This is indeed an unexpected development,\" said my friend when we had regained the cab. \"I wonder if the death was natural, or whether the poor old fellow killed himself! If the latter, may it be taken as some sign of self-reproach for duty neglected? We must leave that question to the future. Now we shall turn to the Cadogan Wests.\"\n\nA small but well-kept house in the outskirts of the town sheltered the bereaved mother. The old lady was too dazed with grief to be of any use to us, but at her side was a white-faced young lady, who introduced herself as Miss Violet Westbury, the fianc\u00e9e of the dead man, and the last to see him upon that fatal night.\n\n\"I cannot explain it, Mr. Holmes,\" she said. \"I have not shut an eye since the tragedy, thinking, thinking, thinking, night and day, what the true meaning of it can be. Arthur was the most single-minded, chivalrous, patriotic man upon earth. He would have cut his right hand off before he would sell a State secret confided to his keeping. It is absurd, impossible, preposterous to anyone who knew him.\"\n\n\"But the facts, Miss Westbury?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes; I admit I cannot explain them.\"\n\n\"Was he in any want of money?\"\n\n\"No; his needs were very simple and his salary ample. He had saved a few hundreds, and we were to marry at the New Year.\"\n\n\"No signs of any mental excitement? Come, Miss Westbury, be absolutely frank with us.\"\n\nThe quick eye of my companion had noted some change in her manner. She coloured and hesitated.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said at last, \"I had a feeling that there was something on his mind.\"\n\n\"For long?\"\n\n\"Only for the last week or so. He was thoughtful and worried. Once I pressed him about it. He admitted that there was something, and that it was concerned with his official life. 'It is too serious for me to speak about, even to you,' said he. I could get nothing more.\"\n\nHolmes looked grave.\n\n\"Go on, Miss Westbury. Even if it seems to tell against him, go on. We cannot say what it may lead to.\"\n\n\"Indeed, I have nothing more to tell. Once or twice it seemed to me that he was on the point of telling me something. He spoke one evening of the importance of the secret, and I have some recollection that he said that no doubt foreign spies would pay a great deal to have it.\"\n\nMy friend's face grew graver still.\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"He said that we were slack about such matters\u2014that it would be easy for a traitor to get the plans.\"\n\n\"Was it only recently that he made such remarks?\"\n\n\"Yes, quite recently.\"\n\n\"Now tell us of that last evening.\"\n\n\"We were to go to the theatre. The fog was so thick that a cab was useless. We walked, and our way took us close to the office. Suddenly he darted away into the fog.\"\n\n\"Without a word?\"\n\n\"He gave an exclamation; that was all. I waited but he never returned. Then I walked home. Next morning, after the office opened, they came to inquire. About twelve o'clock we heard the terrible news. Oh, Mr. Holmes, if you could only, only save his honour! It was so much to him.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head sadly.\n\n\"Come, Watson,\" said he, \"our ways lie elsewhere. Our next station must be the office from which the papers were taken.\n\n\"It was black enough before against this young man, but our inquiries make it blacker,\" he remarked as the cab lumbered off. \"His coming marriage gives a motive for the crime. He naturally wanted money. The idea was in his head, since he spoke about it. He nearly made the girl an accomplice in the treason by telling her his plans. It is all very bad.\"\n\n\"But surely, Holmes, character goes for something? Then, again, why should he leave the girl in the street and dart away to commit a felony?\"\n\n\"Exactly! There are certainly objections. But it is a formidable case which they have to meet.\"\n\nMr. Sidney Johnson, the senior clerk, met us at the office and received us with that respect which my companion's card always commanded. He was a thin, gruff, bespectacled man of middle age, his cheeks haggard, and his hands twitching from the nervous strain to which he had been subjected.\n\n\"It is bad, Mr. Holmes, very bad! Have you heard of the death of the chief?\"\n\n\"We have just come from his house.\"\n\n\"The place is disorganized. The chief dead, Cadogan West dead, our papers stolen. And yet, when we closed our door on Monday evening, we were as efficient an office as any in the government service. Good God, it's dreadful to think of! That West, of all men, should have done such a thing!\"\n\n\"You are sure of his guilt, then?\"\n\n\"I can see no other way out of it. And yet I would have trusted him as I trust myself.\"\n\n\"At what hour was the office closed on Monday?\"\n\n\"At five.\"\n\n\"Did you close it?\"\n\n\"I am always the last man out.\"\n\n\"Where were the plans?\"\n\n\"In that safe. I put them there myself.\"\n\n\"Is there no watchman to the building?\"\n\n\"There is, but he has other departments to look after as well. He is an old soldier and a most trustworthy man. He saw nothing that evening. Of course the fog was very thick.\"\n\n\"Suppose that Cadogan West wished to make his way into the building after hours; he would need three keys, would he not, before he could reach the papers?\"\n\n\"Yes, he would. The key of the outer door, the key of the office, and the key of the safe.\"\n\n\"Only Sir James Walter and you had those keys?\"\n\n\"I had no keys of the doors\u2014only of the safe.\"\n\n\"Was Sir James a man who was orderly in his habits?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think he was. I know that so far as those three keys are concerned he kept them on the same ring. I have often seen them there.\"\n\n\"And that ring went with him to London?\"\n\n\"He said so.\"\n\n\"And your key never left your possession?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Then West, if he is the culprit, must have had a duplicate. And yet none was found upon his body. One other point: if a clerk in this office desired to sell the plans, would it not be simpler to copy the plans for himself than to take the originals, as was actually done?\"\n\n\"It would take considerable technical knowledge to copy the plans in an effective way.\"\n\n\"But I suppose either Sir James, or you, or West, had that technical knowledge?\"\n\n\"No doubt we had, but I beg you won't try to drag me into the matter, Mr. Holmes. What is the use of our speculating in this way when the original plans were actually found on West?\"\n\n\"Well, it is certainly singular that he should run the risk of taking originals if he could safely have taken copies, which would have equally served his turn.\"\n\n\"Singular, no doubt\u2014and yet he did so.\"\n\n\"Every inquiry in this case reveals something inexplicable. Now there are three papers still missing. They are, as I understand, the vital ones.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is so.\"\n\n\"Do you mean to say that anyone holding these three papers, and without the seven others, could construct a Bruce-Partington submarine?\"\n\n\"I reported to that effect to the Admiralty. But to-day I have been over the drawings again, and I am not so sure of it. The double valves with the automatic self-adjusting slots are drawn in one of the papers which have been returned. Until the foreigners had invented that for themselves they could not make the boat. Of course they might soon get over the difficulty.\"\n\n\"But the three missing drawings are the most important?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly.\"\n\n\"I think, with your permission, I will now take a stroll round the premises. I do not recall any other question which I desired to ask.\"\n\nHe examined the lock of the safe, the door of the room, and finally the iron shutters of the window. It was only when we were on the lawn outside that his interest was strongly excited. There was a laurel bush outside the window, and several of the branches bore signs of having been twisted or snapped. He examined them carefully with his lens, and then some dim and vague marks upon the earth beneath. Finally he asked the chief clerk to close the iron shutters, and he pointed out to me that they hardly met in the centre, and that it would be possible for anyone outside to see what was going on within the room.\n\n\"The indications are ruined by the three days' delay. They may mean something or nothing. Well, Watson, I do not think that Woolwich can help us further. It is a small crop which we have gathered. Let us see if we can do better in London.\"\n\nYet we added one more sheaf to our harvest before we left Woolwich Station. The clerk in the ticket office was able to say with confidence that he saw Cadogan West\u2014whom he knew well by sight\u2014upon the Monday night, and that he went to London by the 8:15 to London Bridge. He was alone and took a single third-class ticket. The clerk was struck at the time by his excited and nervous manner. So shaky was he that he could hardly pick up his change, and the clerk had helped him with it. A reference to the timetable showed that the 8:15 was the first train which it was possible for West to take after he had left the lady about 7:30.\n\n\"Let us reconstruct, Watson,\" said Holmes after half an hour of silence. \"I am not aware that in all our joint researches we have ever had a case which was more difficult to get at. Every fresh advance which we make only reveals a fresh ridge beyond. And yet we have surely made some appreciable progress.\n\n\"The effect of our inquiries at Woolwich has in the main been against young Cadogan West; but the indications at the window would lend themselves to a more favourable hypothesis. Let us suppose, for example, that he had been approached by some foreign agent. It might have been done under such pledges as would have prevented him from speaking of it, and yet would have affected his thoughts in the direction indicated by his remarks to his fianc\u00e9e. Very good. We will now suppose that as he went to the theatre with the young lady he suddenly, in the fog, caught a glimpse of this same agent going in the direction of the office. He was an impetuous man, quick in his decisions. Everything gave way to his duty. He followed the man, reached the window, saw the abstraction of the documents, and pursued the thief. In this way we get over the objection that no one would take originals when he could make copies. This outsider had to take originals. So far it holds together.\"\n\n\"What is the next step?\"\n\n\"Then we come into difficulties. One would imagine that under such circumstances the first act of young Cadogan West would be to seize the villain and raise the alarm. Why did he not do so? Could it have been an official superior who took the papers? That would explain West's conduct. Or could the chief have given West the slip in the fog, and West started at once to London to head him off from his own rooms, presuming that he knew where the rooms were? The call must have been very pressing, since he left his girl standing in the fog and made no effort to communicate with her. Our scent runs cold here, and there is a vast gap between either hypothesis and the laying of West's body, with seven papers in his pocket, on the roof of a Metropolitan train. My instinct now is to work from the other end. If Mycroft has given us the list of addresses we may be able to pick our man and follow two tracks instead of one.\"\n\nSurely enough, a note awaited us at Baker Street. A government messenger had brought it post-haste. Holmes glanced at it and threw it over to me.\n\nThere are numerous small fry, but few who would handle so big an affair. The only men worth considering are Adolph Meyer, of 13 Great George Street, Westminster; Louis La Rothi\u00e8re, of Campden Man sions, Notting Hill; and Hugo Oberstein, 13 Caulfield Gardens, Kens ington. The latter was known to be in town on Monday and is now reported as having left. Glad to hear you have seen some light. The\n\nCabinet awaits your final report with the utmost anxiety. Urgent rep resentations have arrived from the very highest quarter. The whole force of the State is at your back if you should need it.\n\nMYCROFT.\n\n\"I'm afraid,\" said Holmes smiling, \"that all the queen's horses and all the queen's men cannot avail in this matter.\" He had spread out his big map of London and leaned eagerly over it. \"Well, well,\" said he presently with an exclamation of satisfaction, \"things are turning a little in our direction at last. Why, Watson, I do honestly believe that we are going to pull it off, after all.\" He slapped me on the shoulder with a sudden burst of hilarity. \"I am going out now. It is only a reconnaissance. I will do nothing serious without my trusted comrade and biographer at my elbow. Do you stay here, and the odds are that you will see me again in an hour or two. If time hangs heavy get foolscap and a pen, and begin your narrative of how we saved the State.\"\n\nI felt some reflection of his elation in my own mind, for I knew well that he would not depart so far from his usual austerity of demeanour unless there was good cause for exultation. All the long November evening I waited, filled with impatience for his return. At last, shortly after nine o'clock, there arrived a messenger with a note:\n\n\u2002Am dining at Goldini's Restaurant, Gloucester Road, Kensington.\n\n\u2002Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver.\n\n\u2002S. H.\n\nIt was a nice equipment for a respectable citizen to carry through the dim, fog-draped streets. I stowed them all discreetly away in my overcoat and drove straight to the address given. There sat my friend at a little round table near the door of the garish Italian restaurant.\n\n\"Have you had something to eat? Then join me in a coffee and cu ra\u00e7ao. Try one of the proprietor's cigars. They are less poisonous than one would expect. Have you the tools?\"\n\n\"They are here, in my overcoat.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Let me give you a short sketch of what I have done, with some indication of what we are about to do. Now it must be evident to you, Watson, that this young man's body was placed on the roof of the train. That was clear from the instant that I determined the fact that it was from the roof, and not from a carriage, that he had fallen.\"\n\n\"Could it not have been dropped from a bridge?\"\n\n\"I should say it was impossible. If you examine the roofs you will find that they are slightly rounded, and there is no railing round them. Therefore, we can say for certain that young Cadogan West was placed on it.\"\n\n\"How could he be placed there?\"\n\n\"That was the question which we had to answer. There is only one possible way. You are aware that the Underground runs clear of tunnels at some points in the West End. I had a vague memory that as I have trav elled by it I have occasionally seen windows just above my head. Now, suppose that a train halted under such a window, would there be any difficulty in laying a body upon the roof?\"\n\n\"It seems most improbable.\"\n\n\"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Here all other contingencies have failed. When I found that the leading international agent, who had just left London, lived in a row of houses which abutted upon the Underground, I was so pleased that you were a little astonished at my sudden frivolity.\"\n\n\"Oh, that was it, was it?\"\n\n\"Yes, that was it. Mr. Hugo Oberstein, of 13 Caulfield Gardens, had become my objective. I began my operations at Gloucester Road Station, where a very helpful official walked with me along the track and allowed me to satisfy myself not only that the back-stair windows of Caulfield Gardens open on the line but the even more essential fact that, owing to the intersection of one of the larger railways, the Underground trains are frequently held motionless for some minutes at that very spot.\"\n\n\"Splendid, Holmes! You have got it!\"\n\n\"So far\u2014so far, Watson. We advance, but the goal is afar. Well, having seen the back of Caulfield Gardens, I visited the front and satisfied myself that the bird was indeed flown. It is a considerable house, unfurnished, so far as I could judge, in the upper rooms. Oberstein lived there with a single valet, who was probably a confederate entirely in his confidence. We must bear in mind that Oberstein has gone to the Continent to dispose of his booty, but not with any idea of flight; for he had no reason to fear a warrant, and the idea of an amateur domiciliary visit would certainly never occur to him. Yet that is precisely what we are about to make.\"\n\n\"Could we not get a warrant and legalize it?\"\n\n\"Hardly on the evidence.\"\n\n\"What can we hope to do?\"\n\n\"We cannot tell what correspondence may be there.\"\n\n\"I don't like it, Holmes.\"\n\n\"My dear fellow, you shall keep watch in the street. I'll do the criminal part. It's not a time to stick at trifles. Think of Mycroft's note, of the Admiralty, the Cabinet, the exalted person who waits for news. We are bound to go.\"\n\nMy answer was to rise from the table.\n\n\"You are right, Holmes. We are bound to go.\"\n\nHe sprang up and shook me by the hand.\n\n\"I knew you would not shrink at the last,\" said he, and for a moment I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen. The next instant he was his masterful, practical self once more.\n\n\"It is nearly half a mile, but there is no hurry. Let us walk,\" said he. \"Don't drop the instruments, I beg. Your arrest as a suspicious character would be a most unfortunate complication.\"\n\nCaulfield Gardens was one of those lines of flat-faced, pillared, and porticoed houses which are so prominent a product of the middle Victorian epoch in the West End of London. Next door there appeared to be a children's party, for the merry buzz of young voices and the clatter of a piano resounded through the night. The fog still hung about and screened us with its friendly shade. Holmes had lit his lantern and flashed it upon the massive door.\n\n\"This is a serious proposition,\" said he. \"It is certainly bolted as well as locked. We would do better in the area. There is an excellent archway down yonder in case a too zealous policeman should intrude. Give me a hand, Watson, and I'll do the same for you.\"\n\nA minute later we were both in the area. Hardly had we reached the dark shadows before the step of the policeman was heard in the fog above. As its soft rhythm died away, Holmes set to work upon the lower door. I saw him stoop and strain until with a sharp crash it flew open. We sprang through into the dark passage, closing the area door behind us. Holmes led the way up the curving, uncarpeted stair. His little fan of yellow light shone upon a low window.\n\n\"Here we are, Watson\u2014this must be the one.\" He threw it open, and as he did so there was a low, harsh murmur, growing steadily into a loud roar as a train dashed past us in the darkness. Holmes swept his light along the window-sill. It was thickly coated with soot from the passing engines, but the black surface was blurred and rubbed in places.\n\n\"You can see where they rested the body. Halloa, Watson! what is this? There can be no doubt that it is a blood mark.\" He was pointing to faint discolourations along the woodwork of the window. \"Here it is on the stone of the stair also. The demonstration is complete. Let us stay here until a train stops.\"\n\nWe had not long to wait. The very next train roared from the tunnel as before, but slowed in the open, and then, with a creaking of brakes, pulled up immediately beneath us. It was not four feet from the window-ledge to the roof of the carriages. Holmes softly closed the window.\n\n\"So far we are justified,\" said he. \"What do you think of it, Watson?\"\n\n\"A masterpiece. You have never risen to a greater height.\"\n\n\"I cannot agree with you there. From the moment that I conceived the idea of the body being upon the roof, which surely was not a very abstruse one, all the rest was inevitable. If it were not for the grave interests involved the affair up to this point would be insignificant. Our difficulties are still before us. But perhaps we may find something here which may help us.\"\n\nWe had ascended the kitchen stair and entered the suite of rooms upon the first floor. One was a dining-room, severely furnished and containing nothing of interest. A second was a bedroom, which also drew blank. The remaining room appeared more promising, and my companion settled down to a systematic examination. It was littered with books and papers, and was evidently used as a study. Swiftly and methodically Holmes turned over the contents of drawer after drawer and cupboard after cupboard, but no gleam of success came to brighten his austere face. At the end of an hour he was no further than when he started.\n\n\"The cunning dog has covered his tracks,\" said he. \"He has left nothing to incriminate him. His dangerous correspondence has been destroyed or removed. This is our last chance.\"\n\nIt was a small tin cash-box which stood upon the writing-desk. Holmes pried it open with his chisel. Several rolls of paper were within, covered with figures and calculations, without any note to show to what they referred. The recurring words \"water pressure\" and \"pressure to the square inch\" suggested some possible relation to a submarine. Holmes tossed them all impatiently aside. There only remained an envelope with some small newspaper slips inside it. He shook them out on the table, and at once I saw by his eager face that his hopes had been raised.\n\n\"What's this, Watson? Eh? What's this? Record of a series of messages in the advertisements of a paper. Daily Telegraph agony column by the print and paper. Right-hand top corner of a page. No dates\u2014but messages arrange themselves. This must be the first:\n\n\"Hoped to hear sooner. Terms agreed to. Write fully to address given on card.\n\nPIERROT.\n\n\"Next comes:\n\n\"Too complex for description. Must have full report. Stuff awaits you when goods delivered.\n\nPIERROT.\n\n\"Then comes:\n\n\"Matter presses. Must withdraw offer unless contract completed. Make appointment by letter. Will confirm by advertisement.\n\nPIERROT.\n\n\"Finally:\n\n\"Monday night after nine. Two taps. Only ourselves. Do not be so suspicious. Payment in hard cash when goods delivered. PIERROT.\n\nPIERROT.\n\n\"A fairly complete record, Watson! If we could only get at the man at the other end!\" He sat lost in thought, tapping his fingers on the table. Finally he sprang to his feet.\n\n\"Well, perhaps it won't be so difficult, after all. There is nothing more to be done here, Watson. I think we might drive round to the offices of the Daily Telegraph, and so bring a good day's work to a conclusion.\"\n\nMycroft Holmes and Lestrade had come round by appointment after breakfast next day and Sherlock Holmes had recounted to them our proceedings of the day before. The professional shook his head over our confessed burglary.\n\n\"We can't do these things in the force, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"No wonder you get results that are beyond us. But some of these days you'll go too far, and you'll find yourself and your friend in trouble.\"\n\n\"For England, home and beauty\u2014eh, Watson? Martyrs on the altar of our country. But what do you think of it, Mycroft?\"\n\n\"Excellent, Sherlock! Admirable! But what use will you make of it?\"\n\nHolmes picked up the Daily Telegraph which lay upon the table.\n\n\"Have you seen Pierrot's advertisement to-day?\"\n\n\"What? Another one?\"\n\n\"Yes, here it is:\n\n\"Tonight. Same hour. Same place. Two taps. Most vitally important. Your own safety at stake.\n\nPIERROT.\"\n\n\"By George!\" cried Lestrade. \"If he answers that we've got him!\"\n\n\"That was my idea when I put it in. I think if you could both make it convenient to come with us about eight o'clock to Caulfield Gardens we might possibly get a little nearer to a solution.\"\n\nOne of the most remarkable characteristics of Sherlock Holmes was his power of throwing his brain out of action and switching all his thoughts on to lighter things whenever he had convinced himself that he could no longer work to advantage. I remember that during the whole of that memorable day he lost himself in a monograph which he had undertaken upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus. For my own part I had none of this power of detachment, and the day, in consequence, appeared to be interminable. The great national importance of the issue, the suspense in high quarters, the direct nature of the experiment which we were trying\u2014all combined to work upon my nerve. It was a relief to me when at last, after a light dinner, we set out upon our expedition. Lestrade and Mycroft met us by appointment at the outside of Gloucester Road Station. The area door of Oberstein's house had been left open the night before, and it was necessary for me, as Mycroft Holmes absolutely and indignantly declined to climb the railings, to pass in and open the hall door. By nine o'clock we were all seated in the study, waiting patiently for our man.\n\nAn hour passed and yet another. When eleven struck, the measured beat of the great church clock seemed to sound the dirge of our hopes. Lestrade and Mycroft were fidgeting in their seats and looking twice a minute at their watches. Holmes sat silent and composed, his eyelids half shut, but every sense on the alert. He raised his head with a sudden jerk.\n\n\"He is coming,\" said he.\n\nThere had been a furtive step past the door. Now it returned. We heard a shuffling sound outside, and then two sharp taps with the knocker. Holmes rose, motioning to us to remain seated. The gas in the hall was a mere point of light. He opened the outer door, and then as a dark figure slipped past him he closed and fastened it. \"This way!\" we heard him say, and a moment later our man stood before us. Holmes had followed him closely, and as the man turned with a cry of surprise and alarm he caught him by the collar and threw him back into the room. Before our prisoner had recovered his balance the door was shut and Holmes standing with his back against it. The man glared round him, staggered, and fell senseless upon the floor. With the shock, his broad-brimmed hat flew from his head, his cravat slipped down from his lips, and there were the long light beard and the soft, handsome delicate features of Colonel Valentine Walter.\n\nHolmes gave a whistle of surprise.\n\n\"You can write me down an ass this time, Watson,\" said he. \"This was not the bird that I was looking for.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked Mycroft eagerly.\n\n\"The younger brother of the late Sir James Walter, the head of the Submarine Department. Yes, yes; I see the fall of the cards. He is coming to. I think that you had best leave his examination to me.\"\n\nWe had carried the prostrate body to the sofa. Now our prisoner sat up, looked round him with a horror-stricken face, and passed his hand over his forehead, like one who cannot believe his own senses.\n\n\"What is this?\" he asked. \"I came here to visit Mr. Oberstein.\"\n\n\"Everything is known, Colonel Walter,\" said Holmes. \"How an English gentleman could behave in such a manner is beyond my comprehension. But your whole correspondence and relations with Oberstein are within our knowledge. So also are the circumstances connected with the death of young Cadogan West. Let me advise you to gain at least the small credit for repentance and confession, since there are still some details which we can only learn from your lips.\"\n\nThe man groaned and sank his face in his hands. We waited, but he was silent.\n\n\"I can assure you,\" said Holmes, \"that every essential is already known. We know that you were pressed for money; that you took an impress of the keys which your brother held; and that you entered into a correspondence with Oberstein, who answered your letters through the advertisement columns of the Daily Telegraph. We are aware that you went down to the office in the fog on Monday night, but that you were seen and followed by young Cadogan West, who had probably some previous reason to suspect you. He saw your theft, but could not give the alarm, as it was just possible that you were taking the papers to your brother in London. Leaving all his private concerns, like the good citizen that he was, he followed you closely in the fog and kept at your heels until you reached this very house. There he intervened, and then it was, Colonel Walter, that to treason you added the more terrible crime of murder.\"\n\n\"I did not! I did not! Before God I swear that I did not!\" cried our wretched prisoner.\n\n\"Tell us, then, how Cadogan West met his end before you laid him upon the roof of a railway carriage.\"\n\n\"I will. I swear to you that I will. I did the rest. I confess it. It was just as you say. A Stock Exchange debt had to be paid. I needed the money badly. Oberstein offered me five thousand. It was to save myself from ruin. But as to murder, I am as innocent as you.\"\n\n\"What happened, then?\"\n\n\"He had his suspicions before, and he followed me as you describe. I never knew it until I was at the very door. It was thick fog, and one could not see three yards. I had given two taps and Oberstein had come to the door. The young man rushed up and demanded to know what we were about to do with the papers. Oberstein had a short life-preserver. He always carried it with him. As West forced his way after us into the house Oberstein struck him on the head. The blow was a fatal one. He was dead within five minutes. There he lay in the hall, and we were at our wit's end what to do. Then Oberstein had this idea about the trains which halted under his back window. But first he examined the papers which I had brought. He said that three of them were essential, and that he must keep them. 'You cannot keep them,' said I. 'There will be a dreadful row at Woolwich if they are not returned.' 'I must keep them,' said he, 'for they are so technical that it is impossible in the time to make copies.' 'Then they must all go back together tonight,' said I. He thought for a little, and then he cried out that he had it. 'Three I will keep,' said he. 'The others we will stuff into the pocket of this young man. When he is found the whole business will assuredly be put to his account.' I could see no other way out of it, so we did as he suggested. We waited half an hour at the window before a train stopped. It was so thick that nothing could be seen, and we had no difficulty in lowering West's body on to the train. That was the end of the matter so far as I was concerned.\"\n\n\"And your brother?\"\n\n\"He said nothing, but he had caught me once with his keys, and I think that he suspected. I read in his eyes that he suspected. As you know, he never held up his head again.\"\n\nThere was silence in the room. It was broken by Mycroft Holmes.\n\n\"Can you not make reparation? It would ease your conscience, and possibly your punishment.\"\n\n\"What reparation can I make?\"\n\n\"Where is Oberstein with the papers?\"\n\n\"I do not know.\"\n\n\"Did he give you no address?\"\n\n\"He said that letters to the Hotel du Louvre, Paris, would eventually reach him.\"\n\n\"Then reparation is still within your power,\" said Sherlock Holmes.\n\n\"I will do anything I can. I owe this fellow no particular good-will. He has been my ruin and my downfall.\"\n\n\"Here are paper and pen. Sit at this desk and write to my dictation. Direct the envelope to the address given. That is right. Now the letter:\n\n\"DEAR SIR:\n\nWith regard to our transaction, you will no doubt have observed by now that one essential detail is missing. I have a tracing which will make it complete. This has involved me in extra trouble, however, and I must ask you for a further advance of five hundred pounds. I will not trust it to the post, nor will I take anything but gold or notes. I would come to you abroad, but it would excite remark if I left the country at present. Therefore I shall expect to meet you in the smoking-room of the Charing Cross Hotel at noon on Saturday. Remember that only English notes, or gold, will be taken.\n\nThat will do very well. I shall be very much surprised if it does not fetch our man.\"\n\nAnd it did! It is a matter of history\u2014that secret history of a nation which is often so much more intimate and interesting than its public chronicles\u2014that Oberstein, eager to complete the coup of his lifetime, came to the lure and was safely engulfed for fifteen years in a British prison. In his trunk were found the invaluable Bruce-Partington plans, which he had put up for auction in all the naval centres of Europe.\n\nColonel Walter died in prison towards the end of the second year of his sentence. As to Holmes, he returned refreshed to his monograph upon the Polyphonic Motets of Lassus, which has since been printed for private circulation, and is said by experts to be the last word upon the subject. Some weeks afterwards I learned incidentally that my friend spent a day at Windsor, whence he returned with a remarkably fine emerald tie-pin. When I asked him if he had bought it, he answered that it was a present from a certain gracious lady in whose interests he had once been fortunate enough to carry out a small commission. He said no more; but I fancy that I could guess at that lady's august name, and I have little doubt that the emerald pin will forever recall to my friend's memory the adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE", + "text": "Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life which must have sorely tried her patience. His incredible untidiness, his addiction to music at strange hours, his occasional revolver practice within doors, his weird and often malodorous scientific experiments, and the atmosphere of violence and danger which hung around him made him the very worst tenant in London. On the other hand, his payments were princely. I have no doubt that the house might have been purchased at the price which Holmes paid for his rooms during the years that I was with him.\n\nThe landlady stood in the deepest awe of him and never dared to interfere with him, however outrageous his proceedings might seem. She was fond of him, too, for he had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent. Knowing how genuine was her regard for him, I listened earnestly to her story when she came to my rooms in the second year of my married life and told me of the sad condition to which my poor friend was reduced.\n\n\"He's dying, Dr. Watson,\" said she. \"For three days he has been sinking, and I doubt if he will last the day. He would not let me get a doctor. This morning when I saw his bones sticking out of his face and his great bright eyes looking at me I could stand no more of it. 'With your leave or without it, Mr. Holmes, I am going for a doctor this very hour,' said I. 'Let it be Watson, then,' said he. I wouldn't waste an hour in coming to him, sir, or you may not see him alive.\"\n\nI was horrified for I had heard nothing of his illness. I need not say that I rushed for my coat and my hat. As we drove back I asked for the details.\n\n\"There is little I can tell you, sir. He has been working at a case down at Rotherhithe, in an alley near the river, and he has brought this illness back with him. He took to his bed on Wednesday afternoon and has never moved since. For these three days neither food nor drink has passed his lips.\"\n\n\"Good God! Why did you not call in a doctor?\"\n\n\"He wouldn't have it, sir. You know how masterful he is. I didn't dare to disobey him. But he's not long for this world, as you'll see for yourself the moment that you set eyes on him.\"\n\nHe was indeed a deplorable spectacle. In the dim light of a foggy No vember day the sick room was a gloomy spot, but it was that gaunt, wasted face staring at me from the bed which sent a chill to my heart. His eyes had the brightness of fever, there was a hectic flush upon either cheek, and dark crusts clung to his lips; the thin hands upon the coverlet twitched incessantly, his voice was croaking and spasmodic. He lay listlessly as I entered the room, but the sight of me brought a gleam of recognition to his eyes.\n\n\"Well, Watson, we seem to have fallen upon evil days,\" said he in a feeble voice, but with something of his old carelessness of manner.\n\n\"My dear fellow!\" I cried, approaching him.\n\n\"Stand back! Stand right back!\" said he with the sharp imperiousness which I had associated only with moments of crisis. \"If you approach me, Watson, I shall order you out of the house.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Because it is my desire. Is that not enough?\"\n\nYes, Mrs. Hudson was right. He was more masterful than ever. It was pitiful, however, to see his exhaustion.\n\n\"I only wished to help,\" I explained.\n\n\"Exactly! You will help best by doing what you are told.\"\n\n\"Certainly, Holmes.\"\n\nHe relaxed the austerity of his manner.\n\n\"You are not angry?\" he asked, gasping for breath.\n\nPoor devil, how could I be angry when I saw him lying in such a plight before me?\n\n\"It's for your own sake, Watson,\" he croaked.\n\n\"For my sake?\"\n\n\"I know what is the matter with me. It is a coolie disease from Sumatra\u2014a thing that the Dutch know more about than we, though they have made little of it up to date. One thing only is certain. It is infallibly deadly, and it is horribly contagious.\"\n\nHe spoke now with a feverish energy, the long hands twitching and jerking as he motioned me away.\n\n\"Contagious by touch, Watson\u2014that's it, by touch. Keep your distance and all is well.\"\n\n\"Good heavens, Holmes! Do you suppose that such a consideration weighs with me for an instant? It would not affect me in the case of a stranger. Do you imagine it would prevent me from doing my duty to so old a friend?\"\n\nAgain I advanced, but he repulsed me with a look of furious anger.\n\n\"If you will stand there I will talk. If you do not you must leave the room.\"\n\nI have so deep a respect for the extraordinary qualities of Holmes that I have always deferred to his wishes, even when I least understood them. But now all my professional instincts were aroused. Let him be my master elsewhere, I at least was his in a sick room.\n\n\"Holmes,\" said I, \"you are not yourself. A sick man is but a child, and so I will treat you. Whether you like it or not, I will examine your symptoms and treat you for them.\"\n\nHe looked at me with venomous eyes.\n\n\"If I am to have a doctor whether I will or not, let me at least have someone in whom I have confidence,\" said he.\n\n\"Then you have none in me?\"\n\n\"In your friendship, certainly. But facts are facts, Watson, and, after all, you are only a general practitioner with very limited experience and mediocre qualifications. It is painful to have to say these things, but you leave me no choice.\"\n\nI was bitterly hurt.\n\n\"Such a remark is unworthy of you, Holmes. It shows me very clearly the state of your own nerves. But if you have no confidence in me I would not intrude my services. Let me bring Sir Jasper Meek or Penrose Fisher, or any of the best men in London. But someone you must have, and that is final. If you think that I am going to stand here and see you die without either helping you myself or bringing anyone else to help you, then you have mistaken your man.\"\n\n\"You mean well, Watson,\" said the sick man with something between a sob and a groan. \"Shall I demonstrate your own ignorance? What do you know, pray, of Tapanuli fever? What do you know of the black For mosa corruption?\"\n\n\"I have never heard of either.\"\n\n\"There are many problems of disease, many strange pathological possibilities, in the East, Watson.\" He paused after each sentence to collect his failing strength. \"I have learned so much during some recent researches which have a medico-criminal aspect. It was in the course of them that I contracted this complaint. You can do nothing.\"\n\n\"Possibly not. But I happen to know that Dr. Ainstree, the greatest living authority upon tropical disease, is now in London. All remonstrance is useless, Holmes, I am going this instant to fetch him.\" I turned resolutely to the door.\n\nNever have I had such a shock! In an instant, with a tiger-spring, the dying man had intercepted me. I heard the sharp snap of a twisted key. The next moment he had staggered back to his bed, exhausted and panting after his one tremendous outflame of energy.\n\n\"You won't take the key from me by force, Watson. I've got you, my friend. Here you are, and here you will stay until I will otherwise. But I'll humour you.\" (All this in little gasps, with terrible struggles for breath between.) \"You've only my own good at heart. Of course I know that very well. You shall have your way, but give me time to get my strength. Not now, Watson, not now. It's four o'clock. At six you can go.\"\n\n\"This is insanity, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Only two hours, Watson. I promise you will go at six. Are you content to wait?\"\n\n\"I seem to have no choice.\"\n\n\"None in the world, Watson. Thank you, I need no help in arranging the clothes. You will please keep your distance. Now, Watson, there is one other condition that I would make. You will seek help, not from the man you mention, but from the one that I choose.\"\n\n\"By all means.\"\n\n\"The first three sensible words that you have uttered since you entered this room, Watson. You will find some books over there. I am somewhat exhausted; I wonder how a battery feels when it pours electricity into a non-conductor? At six, Watson, we resume our conversation.\"\n\nBut it was destined to be resumed long before that hour, and in circumstances which gave me a shock hardly second to that caused by his spring to the door. I had stood for some minutes looking at the silent figure in the bed. His face was almost covered by the clothes and he appeared to be asleep. Then, unable to settle down to reading, I walked slowly round the room, examining the pictures of celebrated criminals with which every wall was adorned. Finally, in my aimless perambulation, I came to the mantelpiece. A litter of pipes, tobacco-pouches, syringes, penknives, revolver-cartridges, and other debris was scattered over it. In the midst of these was a small black and white ivory box with a sliding lid. It was a neat little thing, and I had stretched out my hand to examine it more closely when\u2014It was a dreadful cry that he gave\u2014a yell which might have been heard down the street. My skin went cold and my hair bristled at that horrible scream. As I turned I caught a glimpse of a convulsed face and frantic eyes. I stood paralyzed, with the little box in my hand.\n\n\"Put it down! Down, this instant, Watson\u2014this instant, I say!\" His head sank back upon the pillow and he gave a deep sigh of relief as I replaced the box upon the mantelpiece. \"I hate to have my things touched, Watson. You know that I hate it. You fidget me beyond endurance. You, a doctor\u2014you are enough to drive a patient into an asylum. Sit down, man, and let me have my rest!\"\n\nThe incident left a most unpleasant impression upon my mind. The violent and causeless excitement, followed by this brutality of speech, so far removed from his usual suavity, showed me how deep was the disorganization of his mind. Of all ruins, that of a noble mind is the most deplorable. I sat in silent dejection until the stipulated time had passed. He seemed to have been watching the clock as well as I, for it was hardly six before he began to talk with the same feverish animation as before.\n\n\"Now, Watson,\" said he. \"Have you any change in your pocket?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Any silver?\"\n\n\"A good deal.\"\n\n\"How many half-crowns?\"\n\n\"I have five.\"\n\n\"Ah, too few! Too few! How very unfortunate, Watson! However, such as they are you can put them in your watchpocket. And all the rest of your money in your left trouserpocket. Thank you. It will balance you so much better like that.\"\n\nThis was raving insanity. He shuddered, and again made a sound between a cough and a sob.\n\n\"You will now light the gas, Watson, but you will be very careful that not for one instant shall it be more than half on. I implore you to be careful, Watson. Thank you, that is excellent. No, you need not draw the blind. Now you will have the kindness to place some letters and papers upon this table within my reach. Thank you. Now some of that litter from the mantelpiece. Excellent, Watson! There is a sugar-tongs there. Kindly raise that small ivory box with its assistance. Place it here among the papers. Good! You can now go and fetch Mr. Culverton Smith, of 13 Lower Burke Street.\"\n\nTo tell the truth, my desire to fetch a doctor had somewhat weakened, for poor Holmes was so obviously delirious that it seemed dangerous to leave him. However, he was as eager now to consult the person named as he had been obstinate in refusing.\n\n\"I never heard the name,\" said I.\n\n\"Possibly not, my good Watson. It may surprise you to know that the man upon earth who is best versed in this disease is not a medical man, but a planter. Mr. Culverton Smith is a well-known resident of Sumatra, now visiting London. An outbreak of the disease upon his plantation, which was distant from medical aid, caused him to study it himself, with some rather far-reaching consequences. He is a very methodical person, and I did not desire you to start before six, because I was well aware that you would not find him in his study. If you could persuade him to come here and give us the benefit of his unique experience of this disease, the investigation of which has been his dearest hobby, I cannot doubt that he could help me.\"\n\nI give Holmes's remarks as a consecutive whole and will not attempt to indicate how they were interrupted by gaspings for breath and those clutchings of his hands which indicated the pain from which he was suffering. His appearance had changed for the worse during the few hours that I had been with him. Those hectic spots were more pronounced, the eyes shone more brightly out of darker hollows, and a cold sweat glimmered upon his brow. He still retained, however, the jaunty gallantry of his speech. To the last gasp he would always be the master.\n\n\"You will tell him exactly how you have left me,\" said he. \"You will convey the very impression which is in your own mind\u2014a dying man\u2014a dying and delirious man. Indeed, I cannot think why the whole bed of the ocean is not one solid mass of oysters, so prolific the creatures seem. Ah, I am wandering! Strange how the brain controls the brain! What was I saying, Watson?\"\n\n\"My directions for Mr. Culverton Smith.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, I remember. My life depends upon it. Plead with him, Watson. There is no good feeling between us. His nephew, Watson\u2014I had suspicions of foul play and I allowed him to see it. The boy died horribly. He has a grudge against me. You will soften him, Watson. Beg him, pray him, get him here by any means. He can save me\u2014only he!\"\n\n\"I will bring him in a cab, if I have to carry him down to it.\"\n\n\"You will do nothing of the sort. You will persuade him to come. And then you will return in front of him. Make any excuse so as not to come with him. Don't forget, Watson. You won't fail me. You never did fail me. No doubt there are natural enemies which limit the increase of the creatures. You and I, Watson, we have done our part. Shall the world, then, be overrun by oysters? No, no; horrible! You'll convey all that is in your mind.\"\n\nI left him full of the image of this magnificent intellect babbling like a foolish child. He had handed me the key, and with a happy thought I took it with me lest he should lock himself in. Mrs. Hudson was waiting, trembling and weeping, in the passage. Behind me as I passed from the flat I heard Holmes's high, thin voice in some delirious chant. Below, as I stood whistling for a cab, a man came on me through the fog.\n\n\"How is Mr. Holmes, sir?\" he asked.\n\nIt was an old acquaintance, Inspector Morton, of Scotland Yard, dressed in unofficial tweeds.\n\n\"He is very ill,\" I answered.\n\nHe looked at me in a most singular fashion. Had it not been too fiendish, I could have imagined that the gleam of the fanlight showed exultation in his face.\n\n\"I heard some rumour of it,\" said he.\n\nThe cab had driven up, and I left him.\n\nLower Burke Street proved to be a line of fine houses lying in the vague borderland between Notting Hill and Kensington. The particular one at which my cabman pulled up had an air of smug and demure respectability in its old-fashioned iron railings, its massive folding-door, and its shining brasswork. All was in keeping with a solemn butler who appeared framed in the pink radiance of a tinted electric light behind him.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Culverton Smith is in. Dr. Watson! Very good, sir, I will take up your card.\"\n\nMy humble name and title did not appear to impress Mr. Culverton Smith. Through the half-open door I heard a high, petulant, penetrating voice.\n\n\"Who is this person? What does he want? Dear me, Staples, how often have I said that I am not to be disturbed in my hours of study?\"\n\nThere came a gentle flow of soothing explanation from the butler.\n\n\"Well, I won't see him, Staples. I can't have my work interrupted like this. I am not at home. Say so. Tell him to come in the morning if he really must see me.\"\n\nAgain the gentle murmur.\n\n\"Well, well, give him that message. He can come in the morning, or he can stay away. My work must not be hindered.\"\n\nI thought of Holmes tossing upon his bed of sickness and counting the minutes, perhaps, until I could bring help to him. It was not a time to stand upon ceremony. His life depended upon my promptness. Before the apologetic butler had delivered his message I had pushed past him and was in the room.\n\nWith a shrill cry of anger a man rose from a reclining chair beside the fire. I saw a great yellow face, coarse-grained and greasy, with heavy, double-chin, and two sullen, menacing gray eyes which glared at me from under tufted and sandy brows. A high bald head had a small velvet smoking-cap poised coquettishly upon one side of its pink curve. The skull was of enormous capacity, and yet as I looked down I saw to my amazement that the figure of the man was small and frail, twisted in the shoulders and back like one who has suffered from rickets in his childhood.\n\n\"What's this?\" he cried in a high, screaming voice. \"What is the meaning of this intrusion? Didn't I send you word that I would see you to morrow morning?\"\n\n\"I am sorry,\" said I, \"but the matter cannot be delayed. Mr. Sherlock Holmes\u2014\"\n\nThe mention of my friend's name had an extraordinary effect upon the little man. The look of anger passed in an instant from his face. His features became tense and alert.\n\n\"Have you come from Holmes?\" he asked.\n\n\"I have just left him.\"\n\n\"What about Holmes? How is he?\"\n\n\"He is desperately ill. That is why I have come.\"\n\nThe man motioned me to a chair, and turned to resume his own. As he did so I caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror over the mantelpiece. I could have sworn that it was set in a malicious and abominable smile. Yet I persuaded myself that it must have been some nervous contraction which I had surprised, for he turned to me an instant later with genuine concern upon his features.\n\n\"I am sorry to hear this,\" said he. \"I only know Mr. Holmes through some business dealings which we have had, but I have every respect for his talents and his character. He is an amateur of crime, as I am of disease. For him the villain, for me the microbe. There are my prisons,\" he continued, pointing to a row of bottles and jars which stood upon a side table. \"Among those gelatine cultivations some of the very worst offenders in the world are now doing time.\"\n\n\"It was on account of your special knowledge that Mr. Holmes desired to see you. He has a high opinion of you and thought that you were the one man in London who could help him.\"\n\nThe little man started, and the jaunty smoking-cap slid to the floor.\n\n\"Why?\" he asked. \"Why should Mr. Holmes think that I could help him in his trouble?\"\n\n\"Because of your knowledge of Eastern diseases.\"\n\n\"But why should he think that this disease which he has contracted is Eastern?\"\n\n\"Because, in some professional inquiry, he has been working among Chinese sailors down in the docks.\"\n\nMr. Culverton Smith smiled pleasantly and picked up his smoking-cap.\n\n\"Oh, that's it\u2014is it?\" said he. \"I trust the matter is not so grave as you suppose. How long has he been ill?\"\n\n\"About three days.\"\n\n\"Is he delirious?\"\n\n\"Occasionally.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut! This sounds serious. It would be inhuman not to answer his call. I very much resent any interruption to my work, Dr. Watson, but this case is certainly exceptional. I will come with you at once.\"\n\nI remembered Holmes's injunction.\n\n\"I have another appointment,\" said I.\n\n\"Very good. I will go alone. I have a note of Mr. Holmes's address. You can rely upon my being there within half an hour at most.\"\n\nIt was with a sinking heart that I reentered Holmes's bedroom. For all that I knew the worst might have happened in my absence. To my enormous relief, he had improved greatly in the interval. His appearance was as ghastly as ever, but all trace of delirium had left him and he spoke in a feeble voice, it is true, but with even more than his usual crispness and lucidity.\n\n\"Well, did you see him, Watson?\"\n\n\"Yes; he is coming.\"\n\n\"Admirable, Watson! Admirable! You are the best of messengers.\"\n\n\"He wished to return with me.\"\n\n\"That would never do, Watson. That would be obviously impossible. Did he ask what ailed me?\"\n\n\"I told him about the Chinese in the East End.\"\n\n\"Exactly! Well, Watson, you have done all that a good friend could. You can now disappear from the scene.\"\n\n\"I must wait and hear his opinion, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Of course you must. But I have reasons to suppose that this opinion would be very much more frank and valuable if he imagines that we are alone. There is just room behind the head of my bed, Watson.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes!\"\n\n\"I fear there is no alternative, Watson. The room does not lend itself to concealment, which is as well, as it is the less likely to arouse suspicion. But just there, Watson, I fancy that it could be done.\" Suddenly he sat up with a rigid intentness upon his haggard face. \"There are the wheels, Watson. Quick, man, if you love me! And don't budge, whatever happens\u2014whatever happens, do you hear? Don't speak! Don't move! Just listen with all your ears.\" Then in an instant his sudden access of strength departed, and his masterful, purposeful talk droned away into the low, vague murmurings of a semi-delirious man.\n\nFrom the hiding-place into which I had been so swiftly hustled I heard the footfalls upon the stair, with the opening and the closing of the bedroom door. Then, to my surprise, there came a long silence, broken only by the heavy breathings and gaspings of the sick man. I could imagine that our visitor was standing by the bedside and looking down at the sufferer. At last that strange hush was broken.\n\n\"Holmes!\" he cried. \"Holmes!\" in the insistent tone of one who awak ens a sleeper. \"Can't you hear me, Holmes?\" There was a rustling, as if he had shaken the sick man roughly by the shoulder.\n\n\"Is that you, Mr. Smith?\" Holmes whispered. \"I hardly dared hope that you would come.\"\n\nThe other laughed.\n\n\"I should imagine not,\" he said. \"And yet, you see, I am here. Coals of fire, Holmes\u2014coals of fire!\"\n\n\"It is very good of you\u2014very noble of you. I appreciate your special knowledge.\"\n\nOur visitor sniggered.\n\n\"You do. You are, fortunately, the only man in London who does. Do you know what is the matter with you?\"\n\n\"The same,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Ah! You recognize the symptoms?\"\n\n\"Only too well.\"\n\n\"Well, I shouldn't be surprised, Holmes. I shouldn't be surprised if it were the same. A bad lookout for you if it is. Poor Victor was a dead man on the fourth day\u2014a strong, hearty young fellow. It was certainly, as you said, very surprising that he should have contracted an out-of-the-way Asiatic disease in the heart of London\u2014a disease, too, of which I had made such a very special study. Singular coincidence, Holmes. Very smart of you to notice it, but rather uncharitable to suggest that it was cause and effect.\"\n\n\"I knew that you did it.\"\n\n\"Oh, you did, did you? Well, you couldn't prove it, anyhow. But what do you think of yourself spreading reports about me like that, and then crawling to me for help the moment you are in trouble? What sort of a game is that\u2014eh?\"\n\nI heard the rasping, laboured breathing of the sick man. \"Give me the water!\" he gasped.\n\n\"You're precious near your end, my friend, but I don't want you to go till I have had a word with you. That's why I give you water. There, don't slop it about! That's right. Can you understand what I say?\"\n\nHolmes groaned.\n\n\"Do what you can for me. Let bygones be bygones,\" he whispered. \"I'll put the words out of my head\u2014I swear I will. Only cure me, and I'll forget it.\"\n\n\"Forget what?\"\n\n\"Well, about Victor Savage's death. You as good as admitted just now that you had done it. I'll forget it.\"\n\n\"You can forget it or remember it, just as you like. I don't see you in the witness-box. Quite another shaped box, my good Holmes, I assure you. It matters nothing to me that you should know how my nephew died. It's not him we are talking about. It's you.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes.\"\n\n\"The fellow who came for me\u2014I've forgotten his name\u2014said that you contracted it down in the East End among the sailors.\"\n\n\"I could only account for it so.\"\n\n\"You are proud of your brains, Holmes, are you not? Think yourself smart, don't you? You came across someone who was smarter this time. Now cast your mind back, Holmes. Can you think of no other way you could have got this thing?\"\n\n\"I can't think. My mind is gone. For heaven's sake help me!\"\n\n\"Yes, I will help you. I'll help you to understand just where you are and how you got there. I'd like you to know before you die.\"\n\n\"Give me something to ease my pain.\"\n\n\"Painful, is it? Yes, the coolies used to do some squealing towards the end. Takes you as cramp, I fancy.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes; it is cramp.\"\n\n\"Well, you can hear what I say, anyhow. Listen now! Can you remember any unusual incident in your life just about the time your symptoms began?\"\n\n\"No, no; nothing.\"\n\n\"Think again.\"\n\n\"I'm too ill to think.\"\n\n\"Well, then, I'll help you. Did anything come by post?\"\n\n\"By post?\"\n\n\"A box by chance?\"\n\n\"I'm fainting\u2014I'm gone!\"\n\n\"Listen, Holmes!\" There was a sound as if he was shaking the dying man, and it was all that I could do to hold myself quiet in my hiding-place. \"You must hear me. You shall hear me. Do you remember a box\u2014an ivory box? It came on Wednesday. You opened it\u2014do you remember?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I opened it. There was a sharp spring inside it. Some joke\u2014\"\n\n\"It was no joke, as you will find to your cost. You fool, you would have it and you have got it. Who asked you to cross my path? If you had left me alone I would not have hurt you.\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Holmes gasped. \"The spring! It drew blood. This box\u2014this on the table.\"\n\n\"The very one, by George! And it may as well leave the room in my pocket. There goes your last shred of evidence. But you have the truth now, Holmes, and you can die with the knowledge that I killed you. You knew too much of the fate of Victor Savage, so I have sent you to share it. You are very near your end, Holmes. I will sit here and I will watch you die.\"\n\nHolmes's voice had sunk to an almost inaudible whisper.\n\n\"What is that?\" said Smith. \"Turn up the gas? Ah, the shadows begin to fall, do they? Yes, I will turn it up, that I may see you the better.\" He crossed the room and the light suddenly brightened. \"Is there any other little service that I can do you, my friend?\"\n\n\"A match and a cigarette.\"\n\nI nearly called out in my joy and my amazement. He was speaking in his natural voice\u2014a little weak, perhaps, but the very voice I knew. There was a long pause, and I felt that Culverton Smith was standing in silent amazement looking down at his companion.\n\n\"What's the meaning of this?\" I heard him say at last in a dry, rasping tone.\n\n\"The best way of successfully acting a part is to be it,\" said Holmes. \"I give you my word that for three days I have tasted neither food nor drink until you were good enough to pour me out that glass of water. But it is the tobacco which I find most irksome. Ah, here are some cigarettes.\" I heard the striking of a match. \"That is very much better. Halloa! halloa! Do I hear the step of a friend?\"\n\nThere were footfalls outside, the door opened, and Inspector Morton appeared.\n\n\"All is in order and this is your man,\" said Holmes.\n\nThe officer gave the usual cautions.\n\n\"I arrest you on the charge of the murder of one Victor Savage,\" he concluded.\n\n\"And you might add of the attempted murder of one Sherlock Holmes,\" remarked my friend with a chuckle. \"To save an invalid trouble, Inspector, Mr. Culverton Smith was good enough to give our signal by turning up the gas. By the way, the prisoner has a small box in the right-hand pocket of his coat which it would be as well to remove. Thank you. I would handle it gingerly if I were you. Put it down here. It may play its part in the trial.\"\n\nThere was a sudden rush and a scuffle, followed by the clash of iron and a cry of pain.\n\n\"You'll only get yourself hurt,\" said the inspector. \"Stand still, will you?\" There was the click of the closing handcuffs.\n\n\"A nice trap!\" cried the high, snarling voice. \"It will bring you into the dock, Holmes, not me. He asked me to come here to cure him. I was sorry for him and I came. Now he will pretend, no doubt, that I have said anything which he may invent which will corroborate his insane suspicions. You can lie as you like, Holmes. My word is always as good as yours.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" cried Holmes. \"I had totally forgotten him. My dear Watson, I owe you a thousand apologies. To think that I should have overlooked you! I need not introduce you to Mr. Culverton Smith, since I understand that you met somewhat earlier in the evening. Have you the cab below? I will follow you when I am dressed, for I may be of some use at the station.\n\n\"I never needed it more,\" said Holmes as he refreshed himself with a glass of claret and some biscuits in the intervals of his toilet. \"However, as you know, my habits are irregular, and such a feat means less to me than to most men. It was very essential that I should impress Mrs. Hudson with the reality of my condition, since she was to convey it to you, and you in turn to him. You won't be offended, Watson? You will realize that among your many talents dissimulation finds no place, and that if you had shared my secret you would never have been able to impress Smith with the urgent necessity of his presence, which was the vital point of the whole scheme. Knowing his vindictive nature, I was perfectly certain that he would come to look upon his handiwork.\"\n\n\"But your appearance, Holmes\u2014your ghastly face?\"\n\n\"Three days of absolute fast does not improve one's beauty, Watson. For the rest, there is nothing which a sponge may not cure. With vaseline upon one's forehead, belladonna in one's eyes, rouge over the cheek-bones, and crusts of beeswax round one's lips, a very satisfying effect can be produced. Malingering is a subject upon which I have sometimes thought of writing a monograph. A little occasional talk about half-crowns, oysters, or any other extraneous subject produces a pleasing effect of delirium.\"\n\n\"But why would you not let me near you, since there was in truth no infection?\"\n\n\"Can you ask, my dear Watson? Do you imagine that I have no respect for your medical talents? Could I fancy that your astute judgment would pass a dying man who, however weak, had no rise of pulse or temperature? At four yards, I could deceive you. If I failed to do so, who would bring my Smith within my grasp? No, Watson, I would not touch that box. You can just see if you look at it sideways where the sharp spring like a viper's tooth emerges as you open it. I dare say it was by some such device that poor Savage, who stood between this monster and a reversion, was done to death. My correspondence, however, is, as you know, a varied one, and I am somewhat upon my guard against any packages which reach me. It was clear to me, however, that by pretending that he had really succeeded in his design I might surprise a confession. That pretence I have carried out with the thoroughness of the true artist. Thank you, Watson, you must help me on with my coat. When we have finished at the police-station I think that something nutritious at Simpson's would not be out of place.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE DISAPPEARANCE OF LADY FRANCES CARFAX", + "text": "But why Turkish?\" asked Mr. Sherlock Holmes, gazing fixedly at my boots. I was reclining in a cane-backed chair at the moment, and my protruded feet had attracted his ever-active attention.\n\n\"English,\" I answered in some surprise. \"I got them at Latimer's, in Oxford Street.\"\n\nHolmes smiled with an expression of weary patience.\n\n\"The bath!\" he said; \"the bath! Why the relaxing and expensive Turkish rather than the invigorating home-made article?\"\n\n\"Because for the last few days I have been feeling rheumatic and old. A Turkish bath is what we call an alternative in medicine\u2014a fresh starting-point, a cleanser of the system.\n\n\"By the way, Holmes,\" I added, \"I have no doubt the connection between my boots and a Turkish bath is a perfectly self-evident one to a logical mind, and yet I should be obliged to you if you would indicate it.\"\n\n\"The train of reasoning is not very obscure, Watson,\" said Holmes with a mischievous twinkle. \"It belongs to the same elementary class of deduction which I should illustrate if I were to ask you who shared your cab in your drive this morning.\"\n\n\"I don't admit that a fresh illustration is an explanation,\" said I with some asperity.\n\n\"Bravo, Watson! A very dignified and logical remonstrance. Let me see, what were the points? Take the last one first\u2014the cab. You observe that you have some splashes on the left sleeve and shoulder of your coat. Had you sat in the centre of a hansom you would probably have had no splashes, and if you had they would certainly have been symmetrical. Therefore it is clear that you sat at the side. Therefore it is equally clear that you had a companion.\"\n\n\"That is very evident.\"\n\n\"Absurdly commonplace, is it not?\"\n\n\"But the boots and the bath?\"\n\n\"Equally childish. You are in the habit of doing up your boots in a certain way. I see them on this occasion fastened with an elaborate double bow, which is not your usual method of tying them. You have, therefore, had them off. Who has tied them? A bootmaker\u2014or the boy at the bath. It is unlikely that it is the bootmaker, since your boots are nearly new. Well, what remains? The bath. Absurd, is it not? But, for all that, the Turkish bath has served a purpose.\"\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\n\"You say that you have had it because you need a change. Let me sug gest that you take one. How would Lausanne do, my dear Watson\u2014first-class tickets and all expenses paid on a princely scale?\"\n\n\"Splendid! But why?\"\n\nHolmes leaned back in his armchair and took his notebook from his pocket.\n\n\"One of the most dangerous classes in the world,\" said he, \"is the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory. She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel. She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and boarding-houses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed. I much fear that some evil has come to the Lady Frances Carfax.\"\n\nI was relieved at this sudden descent from the general to the particular. Holmes consulted his notes.\n\n\"Lady Frances,\" he continued, \"is the sole survivor of the direct family of the late Earl of Rufton. The estates went, as you may remember, in the male line. She was left with limited means, but with some very remarkable old Spanish jewellery of silver and curiously cut diamonds to which she was fondly attached\u2014too attached, for she refused to leave them with her banker and always carried them about with her. A rather pathetic figure, the Lady Frances, a beautiful woman, still in fresh middle age, and yet, by a strange chance, the last derelict of what only twenty years ago was a goodly fleet.\"\n\n\"What has happened to her, then?\"\n\n\"Ah, what has happened to the Lady Frances? Is she alive or dead? There is our problem. She is a lady of precise habits, and for four years it has been her invariable custom to write every second week to Miss Dobney, her old governess, who has long retired and lives in Camberwell. It is this Miss Dobney who has consulted me. Nearly five weeks have passed without a word. The last letter was from the Hotel National at Lausanne. Lady Frances seems to have left there and given no address. The family are anxious, and as they are exceedingly wealthy no sum will be spared if we can clear the matter up.\"\n\n\"Is Miss Dobney the only source of information? Surely she had other correspondents?\"\n\n\"There is one correspondent who is a sure draw, Watson. That is the bank. Single ladies must live, and their passbooks are compressed diaries. She banks at Silvester's. I have glanced over her account. The last check but one paid her bill at Lausanne, but it was a large one and probably left her with cash in hand. Only one check has been drawn since.\"\n\n\"To whom, and where?\"\n\n\"To Miss Marie Devine. There is nothing to show where the check was drawn. It was cashed at the Credit Lyonnais at Montpellier less than three weeks ago. The sum was fifty pounds.\"\n\n\"And who is Miss Marie Devine?\"\n\n\"That also I have been able to discover. Miss Marie Devine was the maid of Lady Frances Carfax. Why she should have paid her this check we have not yet determined. I have no doubt, however, that your researches will soon clear the matter up.\"\n\n\"My researches!\"\n\n\"Hence the health-giving expedition to Lausanne. You know that I cannot possibly leave London while old Abrahams is in such mortal terror of his life. Besides, on general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes. Go, then, my dear Watson, and if my humble counsel can ever be valued at so extravagant a rate as two pence a word, it waits your disposal night and day at the end of the Continental wire.\"\n\nTwo days later found me at the Hotel National at Lausanne, where I received every courtesy at the hands of M. Moser, the well-known manager. Lady Frances, as he informed me, had stayed there for several weeks. She had been much liked by all who met her. Her age was not more than forty. She was still handsome and bore every sign of having in her youth been a very lovely woman. M. Moser knew nothing of any valuable jewellery, but it had been remarked by the servants that the heavy trunk in the lady's bedroom was always scrupulously locked. Marie Devine, the maid, was as popular as her mistress. She was actually engaged to one of the head waiters in the hotel, and there was no difficulty in getting her address. It was 11 Rue de Trajan, Montpellier. All this I jotted down and felt that Holmes himself could not have been more adroit in collecting his facts.\n\nOnly one corner still remained in the shadow. No light which I possessed could clear up the cause for the lady's sudden departure. She was very happy at Lausanne. There was every reason to believe that she intended to remain for the season in her luxurious rooms overlooking the lake. And yet she had left at a single day's notice, which involved her in the useless payment of a week's rent. Only Jules Vibart, the lover of the maid, had any suggestion to offer. He connected the sudden departure with the visit to the hotel a day or two before of a tall, dark, bearded man. \"Un sauvage\u2014un veritable sauvage!\" cried Jules Vibart. The man had rooms somewhere in the town. He had been seen talking earnestly to Madame on the promenade by the lake. Then he had called. She had refused to see him. He was English, but of his name there was no record. Madame had left the place immediately afterwards. Jules Vibart, and, what was of more importance, Jules Vibart's sweetheart, thought that this call and this departure were cause and effect. Only one thing Jules would not discuss. That was the reason why Marie had left her mistress. Of that he could or would say nothing. If I wished to know, I must go to Montpellier and ask her.\n\nSo ended the first chapter of my inquiry. The second was devoted to the place which Lady Frances Carfax had sought when she left Lausanne. Concerning this there had been some secrecy, which confirmed the idea that she had gone with the intention of throwing someone off her track. Otherwise why should not her luggage have been openly labelled for Baden? Both she and it reached the Rhenish spa by some circuitous route. This much I gathered from the manager of Cook's local office. So to Baden I went, after dispatching to Holmes an account of all my proceedings and receiving in reply a telegram of half-humorous commendation.\n\nAt Baden the track was not difficult to follow. Lady Frances had stayed at the Englischer Hof for a fortnight. While there she had made the acquaintance of a Dr. Shlessinger and his wife, a missionary from South America. Like most lonely ladies, Lady Frances found her comfort and occupation in religion. Dr. Shlessinger's remarkable personality, his wholehearted devotion, and the fact that he was recovering from a disease contracted in the exercise of his apostolic duties affected her deeply. She had helped Mrs. Shlessinger in the nursing of the convalescent saint. He spent his day, as the manager described it to me, upon a lounge-chair on the veranda, with an attendant lady upon either side of him. He was preparing a map of the Holy Land, with special reference to the kingdom of the Midianites, upon which he was writing a monograph. Finally, having improved much in health, he and his wife had returned to London, and Lady Frances had started thither in their company. This was just three weeks before, and the manager had heard nothing since. As to the maid, Marie, she had gone off some days beforehand in floods of tears, after informing the other maids that she was leaving service forever. Dr. Shlessinger had paid the bill of the whole party before his departure.\n\n\"By the way,\" said the landlord in conclusion, \"you are not the only friend of Lady Frances Carfax who is inquiring after her just now. Only a week or so ago we had a man here upon the same errand.\"\n\n\"Did he give a name?\" I asked.\n\n\"None; but he was an Englishman, though of an unusual type.\"\n\n\"A savage?\" said I, linking my facts after the fashion of my illustrious friend.\n\n\"Exactly. That describes him very well. He is a bulky, bearded, sun burned fellow, who looks as if he would be more at home in a farmers' inn than in a fashionable hotel. A hard, fierce man, I should think, and one whom I should be sorry to offend.\"\n\nAlready the mystery began to define itself, as figures grow clearer with the lifting of a fog. Here was this good and pious lady pursued from place to place by a sinister and unrelenting figure. She feared him, or she would not have fled from Lausanne. He had still followed. Sooner or later he would overtake her. Had he already overtaken her? Was that the secret of her continued silence? Could the good people who were her companions not screen her from his violence or his blackmail? What horrible purpose, what deep design, lay behind this long pursuit? There was the problem which I had to solve.\n\nTo Holmes I wrote showing how rapidly and surely I had got down to the roots of the matter. In reply I had a telegram asking for a description of Dr. Shlessinger's left ear. Holmes's ideas of humour are strange and occasionally offensive, so I took no notice of his ill-timed jest\u2014indeed, I had already reached Montpellier in my pursuit of the maid, Marie, before his message came.\n\nI had no difficulty in finding the ex-servant and in learning all that she could tell me. She was a devoted creature, who had only left her mistress because she was sure that she was in good hands, and because her own approaching marriage made a separation inevitable in any case. Her mistress had, as she confessed with distress, shown some irritability of temper towards her during their stay in Baden, and had even questioned her once as if she had suspicions of her honesty, and this had made the parting easier than it would otherwise have been. Lady Frances had given her fifty pounds as a wedding-present. Like me, Marie viewed with deep distrust the stranger who had driven her mistress from Lausanne. With her own eyes she had seen him seize the lady's wrist with great violence on the public promenade by the lake. He was a fierce and terrible man. She believed that it was out of dread of him that Lady Frances had accepted the escort of the Shlessingers to London. She had never spoken to Marie about it, but many little signs had convinced the maid that her mistress lived in a state of continual nervous apprehension. So far she had got in her narrative, when suddenly she sprang from her chair and her face was convulsed with surprise and fear. \"See!\" she cried. \"The miscreant follows still! There is the very man of whom I speak.\"\n\nThrough the open sitting-room window I saw a huge, swarthy man with a bristling black beard walking slowly down the centre of the street and staring eagerly at the numbers of the houses. It was clear that, like myself, he was on the track of the maid. Acting upon the impulse of the moment, I rushed out and accosted him.\n\n\"You are an Englishman,\" I said.\n\n\"What if I am?\" he asked with a most villainous scowl.\n\n\"May I ask what your name is?\"\n\n\"No, you may not,\" said he with decision.\n\nThe situation was awkward, but the most direct way is often the best.\n\n\"Where is the Lady Frances Carfax?\" I asked.\n\nHe stared at me in amazement.\n\n\"What have you done with her? Why have you pursued her? I insist upon an answer!\" said I.\n\nThe fellow gave a bellow of anger and sprang upon me like a tiger. I have held my own in many a struggle, but the man had a grip of iron and the fury of a fiend. His hand was on my throat and my senses were nearly gone before an unshaven French ouvrier in a blue blouse darted out from a cabaret opposite, with a cudgel in his hand, and struck my assailant a sharp crack over the forearm, which made him leave go his hold. He stood for an instant fuming with rage and uncertain whether he should not renew his attack. Then, with a snarl of anger, he left me and entered the cottage from which I had just come. I turned to thank my preserver, who stood beside me in the roadway.\n\n\"Well, Watson,\" said he, \"a very pretty hash you have made of it! I rather think you had better come back with me to London by the night express.\"\n\nAn hour afterwards, Sherlock Holmes, in his usual garb and style, was seated in my private room at the hotel. His explanation of his sudden and opportune appearance was simplicity itself, for, finding that he could get away from London, he determined to head me off at the next obvious point of my travels. In the disguise of a workingman he had sat in the cabaret waiting for my appearance.\n\n\"And a singularly consistent investigation you have made, my dear Watson,\" said he. \"I cannot at the moment recall any possible blunder which you have omitted. The total effect of your proceeding has been to give the alarm everywhere and yet to discover nothing.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would have done no better,\" I answered bitterly.\n\n\"There is no 'perhaps' about it. I have done better. Here is the Hon. Philip Green, who is a fellow-lodger with you in this hotel, and we may find him the starting-point for a more successful investigation.\"\n\nA card had come up on a salver, and it was followed by the same bearded ruffian who had attacked me in the street. He started when he saw me.\n\n\"What is this, Mr. Holmes?\" he asked. \"I had your note and I have come. But what has this man to do with the matter?\"\n\n\"This is my old friend and associate, Dr. Watson, who is helping us in this affair.\"\n\nThe stranger held out a huge, sunburned hand, with a few words of apology.\n\n\"I hope I didn't harm you. When you accused me of hurting her I lost my grip of myself. Indeed, I'm not responsible in these days. My nerves are like live wires. But this situation is beyond me. What I want to know, in the first place, Mr. Holmes, is, how in the world you came to hear of my existence at all.\"\n\n\"I am in touch with Miss Dobney, Lady Frances's governess.\"\n\n\"Old Susan Dobney with the mob cap! I remember her well.\"\n\n\"And she remembers you. It was in the days before\u2014before you found it better to go to South Africa.\"\n\n\"Ah, I see you know my whole story. I need hide nothing from you. I swear to you, Mr. Holmes, that there never was in this world a man who loved a woman with a more wholehearted love than I had for Frances. I was a wild youngster, I know\u2014not worse than others of my class. But her mind was pure as snow. She could not bear a shadow of coarseness. So, when she came to hear of things that I had done, she would have no more to say to me. And yet she loved me\u2014that is the wonder of it!\u2014loved me well enough to remain single all her sainted days just for my sake alone. When the years had passed and I had made my money at Barberton I thought perhaps I could seek her out and soften her. I had heard that she was still unmarried. I found her at Lausanne and tried all I knew. She weakened, I think, but her will was strong, and when next I called she had left the town. I traced her to Baden, and then after a time heard that her maid was here. I'm a rough fellow, fresh from a rough life, and when Dr. Watson spoke to me as he did I lost hold of myself for a moment. But for God's sake tell me what has become of the Lady Frances.\"\n\n\"That is for us to find out,\" said Sherlock Holmes with peculiar gravity. \"What is your London address, Mr. Green?\"\n\n\"The Langham Hotel will find me.\"\n\n\"Then may I recommend that you return there and be on hand in case I should want you? I have no desire to encourage false hopes, but you may rest assured that all that can be done will be done for the safety of Lady Frances. I can say no more for the instant. I will leave you this card so that you may be able to keep in touch with us. Now, Watson, if you will pack your bag I will cable to Mrs. Hudson to make one of her best efforts for two hungry travellers at 7:30 to-morrow.\"\n\nA telegram was awaiting us when we reached our Baker Street rooms, which Holmes read with an exclamation of interest and threw across to me. \"Jagged or torn,\" was the message, and the place of origin, Baden.\n\n\"What is this?\" I asked.\n\n\"It is everything,\" Holmes answered. \"You may remember my seemingly irrelevant question as to this clerical gentleman's left ear. You did not answer it.\"\n\n\"I had left Baden and could not inquire.\"\n\n\"Exactly. For this reason I sent a duplicate to the manager of the Englischer Hof, whose answer lies here.\"\n\n\"What does it show?\"\n\n\"It shows, my dear Watson, that we are dealing with an exceptionally astute and dangerous man. The Rev. Dr. Shlessinger, missionary from South America, is none other than Holy Peters, one of the most unscrupulous rascals that Australia has ever evolved\u2014and for a young country it has turned out some very finished types. His particular specialty is the beguiling of lonely ladies by playing upon their religious feelings, and his so-called wife, an Englishwoman named Fraser, is a worthy helpmate. The nature of his tactics suggested his identity to me, and this physical peculiarity\u2014he was badly bitten in a saloon-fight at Adelaide in '89\u2014confirmed my suspicion. This poor lady is in the hands of a most in fernal couple, who will stick at nothing, Watson. That she is already dead is a very likely supposition. If not, she is undoubtedly in some sort of confinement and unable to write to Miss Dobney or her other friends. It is always possible that she never reached London, or that she has passed through it, but the former is improbable, as, with their system of registration, it is not easy for foreigners to play tricks with the Continental police; and the latter is also unlikely, as these rogues could not hope to find any other place where it would be as easy to keep a person under restraint. All my instincts tell me that she is in London, but as we have at present no possible means of telling where, we can only take the obvious steps, eat our dinner, and possess our souls in patience. Later in the evening I will stroll down and have a word with friend Lestrade at Scotland Yard.\"\n\nBut neither the official police nor Holmes's own small but very efficient organization sufficed to clear away the mystery. Amid the crowded millions of London the three persons we sought were as completely obliterated as if they had never lived. Advertisements were tried, and failed. Clues were followed, and led to nothing. Every criminal resort which Shlessinger might frequent was drawn in vain. His old associates were watched, but they kept clear of him. And then suddenly, after a week of helpless suspense, there came a flash of light. A silver-and-brilliant pendant of old Spanish design had been pawned at Bovington's, in Westminster Road. The pawner was a large, clean-shaven man of clerical appearance. His name and address were demonstrably false. The ear had escaped notice, but the description was surely that of Shlessinger.\n\nThree times had our bearded friend from the Langham called for news\u2014the third time within an hour of this fresh development. His clothes were getting looser on his great body. He seemed to be wilting away in his anxiety. \"If you will only give me something to do!\" was his constant wail. At last Holmes could oblige him.\n\n\"He has begun to pawn the jewels. We should get him now.\"\n\n\"But does this mean that any harm has befallen the Lady Frances?\"\n\nHolmes shook his head very gravely.\n\n\"Supposing that they have held her prisoner up to now, it is clear that they cannot let her loose without their own destruction. We must prepare for the worst.\"\n\n\"What can I do?\"\n\n\"These people do not know you by sight?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"It is possible that he will go to some other pawnbroker in the future. In that case, we must begin again. On the other hand, he has had a fair price and no questions asked, so if he is in need of ready-money he will probably come back to Bovington's. I will give you a note to them, and they will let you wait in the shop. If the fellow comes you will follow him home. But no indiscretion, and, above all, no violence. I put you on your honour that you will take no step without my knowledge and consent.\"\n\nFor two days the Hon. Philip Green (he was, I may mention, the son of the famous admiral of that name who commanded the Sea of Azof fleet in the Crimean War) brought us no news. On the evening of the third he rushed into our sitting-room, pale, trembling, with every muscle of his powerful frame quivering with excitement.\n\n\"We have him! We have him!\" he cried.\n\nHe was incoherent in his agitation. Holmes soothed him with a few words and thrust him into an armchair.\n\n\"Come, now, give us the order of events,\" said he.\n\n\"She came only an hour ago. It was the wife, this time, but the pendant she brought was the fellow of the other. She is a tall, pale woman, with ferret eyes.\"\n\n\"That is the lady,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"She left the office and I followed her. She walked up the Kennington Road, and I kept behind her. Presently she went into a shop. Mr. Holmes, it was an undertaker's.\"\n\nMy companion started. \"Well?\" he asked in that vibrant voice which told of the fiery soul behind the cold gray face.\n\n\"She was talking to the woman behind the counter. I entered as well. 'It is late,' I heard her say, or words to that effect. The woman was excusing herself. 'It should be there before now,' she answered. 'It took longer, being out of the ordinary.' They both stopped and looked at me, so I asked some question and then left the shop.\"\n\n\"You did excellently well. What happened next?\"\n\n\"The woman came out, but I had hid myself in a doorway. Her suspicions had been aroused, I think, for she looked round her. Then she called a cab and got in. I was lucky enough to get another and so to follow her. She got down at last at No. 36, Poultney Square, Brixton. I drove past, left my cab at the corner of the square, and watched the house.\"\n\n\"Did you see anyone?\"\n\n\"The windows were all in darkness save one on the lower floor. The blind was down, and I could not see in. I was standing there, wondering what I should do next, when a covered van drove up with two men in it. They descended, took something out of the van, and carried it up the steps to the hall door. Mr. Holmes, it was a coffin.\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"For an instant I was on the point of rushing in. The door had been opened to admit the men and their burden. It was the woman who had opened it. But as I stood there she caught a glimpse of me, and I think that she recognized me. I saw her start, and she hastily closed the door. I remembered my promise to you, and here I am.\"\n\n\"You have done excellent work,\" said Holmes, scribbling a few words upon a half-sheet of paper. \"We can do nothing legal without a warrant, and you can serve the cause best by taking this note down to the authorities and getting one. There may be some difficulty, but I should think that the sale of the jewellery should be sufficient. Lestrade will see to all details.\"\n\n\"But they may murder her in the meanwhile. What could the coffin mean, and for whom could it be but for her?\"\n\n\"We will do all that can be done, Mr. Green. Not a moment will be lost. Leave it in our hands. Now, Watson,\" he added as our client hurried away, \"he will set the regular forces on the move. We are, as usual, the irregulars, and we must take our own line of action. The situation strikes me as so desperate that the most extreme measures are justified. Not a moment is to be lost in getting to Poultney Square.\n\n\"Let us try to reconstruct the situation,\" said he as we drove swiftly past the Houses of Parliament and over Westminster Bridge. \"These villains have coaxed this unhappy lady to London, after first alienating her from her faithful maid. If she has written any letters they have been intercepted. Through some confederate they have engaged a furnished house. Once inside it, they have made her a prisoner, and they have become possessed of the valuable jewellery which has been their object from the first. Already they have begun to sell part of it, which seems safe enough to them, since they have no reason to think that anyone is interested in the lady's fate. When she is released she will, of course, denounce them. Therefore, she must not be released. But they cannot keep her under lock and key forever. So murder is their only solution.\"\n\n\"That seems very clear.\"\n\n\"Now we will take another line of reasoning. When you follow two separate chains of thought, Watson, you will find some point of intersection which should approximate to the truth. We will start now, not from the lady but from the coffin and argue backward. That incident proves, I fear, beyond all doubt that the lady is dead. It points also to an orthodox burial with proper accompaniment of medical certificate and official sanction. Had the lady been obviously murdered, they would have buried her in a hole in the back garden. But here all is open and regular. What does that mean? Surely that they have done her to death in some way which has deceived the doctor and simulated a natural end\u2014poisoning, perhaps. And yet how strange that they should ever let a doctor approach her unless he were a confederate, which is hardly a credible proposition.\"\n\n\"Could they have forged a medical certificate?\"\n\n\"Dangerous, Watson, very dangerous. No, I hardly see them doing that. Pull up, cabby! This is evidently the undertaker's, for we have just passed the pawnbroker's. Would you go in, Watson? Your appearance inspires confidence. Ask what hour the Poultney Square funeral takes place to-morrow.\"\n\nThe woman in the shop answered me without hesitation that it was to be at eight o'clock in the morning. \"You see, Watson, no mystery; everything aboveboard! In some way the legal forms have undoubtedly been complied with, and they think that they have little to fear. Well, there's nothing for it now but a direct frontal attack. Are you armed?\"\n\n\"My stick!\"\n\n\"Well, well, we shall be strong enough. 'Thrice is he armed who hath his quarrel just.' We simply can't afford to wait for the police or to keep within the four corners of the law. You can drive off, cabby. Now, Watson, we'll just take our luck together, as we have occasionally done in the past.\"\n\nHe had rung loudly at the door of a great dark house in the centre of Poultney Square. It was opened immediately, and the figure of a tall woman was outlined against the dim-lit hall.\n\n\"Well, what do you want?\" she asked sharply, peering at us through the darkness.\n\n\"I want to speak to Dr. Shlessinger,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"There is no such person here,\" she answered, and tried to close the door, but Holmes had jammed it with his foot.\n\n\"Well, I want to see the man who lives here, whatever he may call himself,\" said Holmes firmly.\n\nShe hesitated. Then she threw open the door. \"Well, come in!\" said she. \"My husband is not afraid to face any man in the world.\" She closed the door behind us and showed us into a sitting-room on the right side of the hall, turning up the gas as she left us. \"Mr. Peters will be with you in an instant,\" she said.\n\nHer words were literally true, for we had hardly time to look around the dusty and moth-eaten apartment in which we found ourselves before the door opened and a big, clean-shaven bald-headed man stepped lightly into the room. He had a large red face, with pendulous cheeks, and a general air of superficial benevolence which was marred by a cruel, vicious mouth.\n\n\"There is surely some mistake here, gentlemen,\" he said in an unctuous, make-everything-easy voice. \"I fancy that you have been misdirected. Possibly if you tried farther down the street\u2014\"\n\n\"That will do; we have no time to waste,\" said my companion firmly. \"You are Henry Peters, of Adelaide, late the Rev. Dr. Shlessinger, of Baden and South America. I am as sure of that as that my own name is Sherlock Holmes.\"\n\nPeters, as I will now call him, started and stared hard at his formidable pursuer. \"I guess your name does not frighten me, Mr. Holmes,\" said he coolly. \"When a man's conscience is easy you can't rattle him. What is your business in my house?\"\n\n\"I want to know what you have done with the Lady Frances Carfax, whom you brought away with you from Baden.\"\n\n\"I'd be very glad if you could tell me where that lady may be,\" Peters answered coolly. \"I've a bill against her for nearly a hundred pounds, and nothing to show for it but a couple of trumpery pendants that the dealer would hardly look at. She attached herself to Mrs. Peters and me at Baden\u2014it is a fact that I was using another name at the time\u2014and she stuck on to us until we came to London. I paid her bill and her ticket. Once in London, she gave us the slip, and, as I say, left these out-of-date jewels to pay her bills. You find her, Mr. Holmes, and I'm your debtor.\"\n\n\"I mean to find her,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"I'm going through this house till I do find her.\"\n\n\"Where is your warrant?\"\n\nHolmes half drew a revolver from his pocket. \"This will have to serve till a better one comes.\"\n\n\"Why, you are a common burglar.\"\n\n\"So you might describe me,\" said Holmes cheerfully. \"My companion is also a dangerous ruffian. And together we are going through your house.\"\n\nOur opponent opened the door.\n\n\"Fetch a policeman, Annie!\" said he. There was a whisk of feminine skirts down the passage, and the hall door was opened and shut.\n\n\"Our time is limited, Watson,\" said Holmes. \"If you try to stop us, Peters, you will most certainly get hurt. Where is that coffin which was brought into your house?\"\n\n\"What do you want with the coffin? It is in use. There is a body in it.\"\n\n\"I must see that body.\"\n\n\"Never with my consent.\"\n\n\"Then without it.\" With a quick movement Holmes pushed the fellow to one side and passed into the hall. A door half opened stood immediately before us. We entered. It was the dining-room. On the table, under a half-lit chandelier, the coffin was lying. Holmes turned up the gas and raised the lid. Deep down in the recesses of the coffin lay an emaciated figure. The glare from the lights above beat down upon an aged and withered face. By no possible process of cruelty, starvation, or disease could this worn-out wreck be the still beautiful Lady Frances. Holmes's face showed his amazement, and also his relief.\n\n\"Thank God!\" he muttered. \"It's someone else.\"\n\n\"Ah, you've blundered badly for once, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said Peters, who had followed us into the room.\n\n\"Who is this dead woman?\"\n\n\"Well, if you really must know, she is an old nurse of my wife's, Rose Spender by name, whom we found in the Brixton Workhouse Infirmary. We brought her round here, called in Dr. Horsom, of 13 Firbank Villas\u2014mind you take the address, Mr. Holmes\u2014and had her carefully tended, as Christian folk should. On the third day she died\u2014certificate says senile decay\u2014but that's only the doctor's opinion, and of course you know better. We ordered her funeral to be carried out by Stimson and Co., of the Kennington Road, who will bury her at eight o'clock to-morrow morning. Can you pick any hole in that, Mr. Holmes? You've made a silly blunder, and you may as well own up to it. I'd give something for a photograph of your gaping, staring face when you pulled aside that lid expecting to see the Lady Frances Carfax and only found a poor old woman of ninety.\"\n\nHolmes's expression was as impassive as ever under the jeers of his antagonist, but his clenched hands betrayed his acute annoyance.\n\n\"I am going through your house,\" said he.\n\n\"Are you, though!\" cried Peters as a woman's voice and heavy steps sounded in the passage. \"We'll soon see about that. This way, officers, if you please. These men have forced their way into my house, and I cannot get rid of them. Help me to put them out.\"\n\nA sergeant and a constable stood in the doorway. Holmes drew his card from his case.\n\n\"This is my name and address. This is my friend, Dr. Watson.\"\n\n\"Bless you, sir, we know you very well,\" said the sergeant, \"but you can't stay here without a warrant.\"\n\n\"Of course not. I quite understand that.\"\n\n\"Arrest him!\" cried Peters.\n\n\"We know where to lay our hands on this gentleman if he is wanted,\" said the sergeant majestically, \"but you'll have to go, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Yes, Watson, we shall have to go.\"\n\nA minute later we were in the street once more. Holmes was as cool as ever, but I was hot with anger and humiliation. The sergeant had followed us.\n\n\"Sorry, Mr. Holmes, but that's the law.\"\n\n\"Exactly, Sergeant, you could not do otherwise.\"\n\n\"I expect there was good reason for your presence there. If there is anything I can do\u2014\"\n\n\"It's a missing lady, Sergeant, and we think she is in that house. I expect a warrant presently.\"\n\n\"Then I'll keep my eye on the parties, Mr. Holmes. If anything comes along, I will surely let you know.\"\n\nIt was only nine o'clock, and we were off full cry upon the trail at once. First we drove to Brixton Workhouse Infirmary, where we found that it was indeed the truth that a charitable couple had called some days before, that they had claimed an imbecile old woman as a former servant, and that they had obtained permission to take her away with them. No surprise was expressed at the news that she had since died.\n\nThe doctor was our next goal. He had been called in, had found the woman dying of pure senility, had actually seen her pass away, and had signed the certificate in due form. \"I assure you that everything was perfectly normal and there was no room for foul play in the matter,\" said he. Nothing in the house had struck him as suspicious save that for people of their class it was remarkable that they should have no servant. So far and no farther went the doctor.\n\nFinally we found our way to Scotland Yard. There had been difficulties of procedure in regard to the warrant. Some delay was inevitable. The magistrate's signature might not be obtained until next morning. If Holmes would call about nine he could go down with Lestrade and see it acted upon. So ended the day, save that near midnight our friend, the sergeant, called to say that he had seen flickering lights here and there in the windows of the great dark house, but that no one had left it and none had entered. We could but pray for patience and wait for the morrow.\n\nSherlock Holmes was too irritable for conversation and too restless for sleep. I left him smoking hard, with his heavy, dark brows knotted together, and his long, nervous fingers tapping upon the arms of his chair, as he turned over in his mind every possible solution of the mystery. Several times in the course of the night I heard him prowling about the house. Finally, just after I had been called in the morning, he rushed into my room. He was in his dressing-gown, but his pale, hollow-eyed face told me that his night had been a sleepless one.\n\n\"What time was the funeral? Eight, was it not?\" he asked eagerly. \"Well, it is 7:20 now. Good heavens, Watson, what has become of any brains that God has given me? Quick, man, quick! It's life or death\u2014a hundred chances on death to one on life. I'll never forgive myself, never, if we are too late!\"\n\nFive minutes had not passed before we were flying in a hansom down Baker Street. But even so it was twenty-five to eight as we passed Big Ben, and eight struck as we tore down the Brixton Road. But others were late as well as we. Ten minutes after the hour the hearse was still standing at the door of the house, and even as our foaming horse came to a halt the coffin, supported by three men, appeared on the threshold. Holmes darted forward and barred their way.\n\n\"Take it back!\" he cried, laying his hand on the breast of the foremost. \"Take it back this instant!\"\n\n\"What the devil do you mean? Once again I ask you, where is your warrant?\" shouted the furious Peters, his big red face glaring over the farther end of the coffin.\n\n\"The warrant is on its way. This coffin shall remain in the house until it comes.\"\n\nThe authority in Holmes's voice had its effect upon the bearers. Peters had suddenly vanished into the house, and they obeyed these new orders. \"Quick, Watson, quick! Here is a screw-driver!\" he shouted as the coffin was replaced upon the table. \"Here's one for you, my man! A sovereign if the lid comes off in a minute! Ask no questions\u2014work away! That's good! Another! And another! Now pull all together! It's giving! It's giving! Ah, that does it at last.\"\n\nWith a united effort we tore off the coffin-lid. As we did so there came from the inside a stupefying and overpowering smell of chloroform. A body lay within, its head all wreathed in cotton-wool, which had been soaked in the narcotic. Holmes plucked it off and disclosed the statuesque face of a handsome and spiritual woman of middle age. In an instant he had passed his arm round the figure and raised her to a sitting position.\n\n\"Is she gone, Watson? Is there a spark left? Surely we are not too late!\"\n\nFor half an hour it seemed that we were. What with actual suffocation, and what with the poisonous fumes of the chloroform, the Lady Frances seemed to have passed the last point of recall. And then, at last, with artificial respiration, with injected ether, with every device that science could suggest, some flutter of life, some quiver of the eyelids, some dimming of a mirror, spoke of the slowly returning life. A cab had driven up, and Holmes, parting the blind, looked out at it. \"Here is Lestrade with his warrant,\" said he. \"He will find that his birds have flown. And here,\" he added as a heavy step hurried along the passage, \"is someone who has a better right to nurse this lady than we have. Good morning, Mr. Green; I think that the sooner we can move the Lady Frances the better. Meanwhile, the funeral may proceed, and the poor old woman who still lies in that coffin may go to her last resting-place alone.\"\n\n\"Should you care to add the case to your annals, my dear Watson,\" said Holmes that evening, \"it can only be as an example of that temporary eclipse to which even the best-balanced mind may be exposed. Such slips are common to all mortals, and the greatest is he who can recognize and repair them. To this modified credit I may, perhaps, make some claim. My night was haunted by the thought that somewhere a clue, a strange sentence, a curious observation, had come under my notice and had been too easily dismissed. Then, suddenly, in the gray of the morning, the words came back to me. It was the remark of the undertaker's wife, as reported by Philip Green. She had said, 'It should be there before now. It took longer, being out of the ordinary.' It was the coffin of which she spoke. It had been out of the ordinary. That could only mean that it had been made to some special measurement. But why? Why? Then in an instant I remembered the deep sides, and the little wasted figure at the bottom. Why so large a coffin for so small a body? To leave room for another body. Both would be buried under the one certificate. It had all been so clear, if only my own sight had not been dimmed. At eight the Lady Frances would be buried. Our one chance was to stop the coffin before it left the house.\n\n\"It was a desperate chance that we might find her alive, but it was a chance, as the result showed. These people had never, to my knowledge, done a murder. They might shrink from actual violence at the last. They could bury her with no sign of how she met her end, and even if she were exhumed there was a chance for them. I hoped that such considerations might prevail with them. You can reconstruct the scene well enough. You saw the horrible den upstairs, where the poor lady had been kept so long. They rushed in and overpowered her with their chloroform, carried her down, poured more into the coffin to insure against her waking, and then screwed down the lid. A clever device, Watson. It is new to me in the annals of crime. If our ex-missionary friends escape the clutches of Lestrade, I shall expect to hear of some brilliant incidents in their future career.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE DEVIL'S FOOT", + "text": "In recording from time to time some of the curious experiences and interesting recollections which I associate with my long and intimate friendship with Mr. Sherlock Holmes, I have continually been faced by difficulties caused by his own aversion to publicity. To his sombre and cynical spirit all popular applause was always abhorrent, and nothing amused him more at the end of a successful case than to hand over the actual exposure to some orthodox official, and to listen with a mocking smile to the general chorus of misplaced congratulation. It was indeed this attitude upon the part of my friend and certainly not any lack of interesting material which has caused me of late years to lay very few of my records before the public. My participation in some of his adventures was always a privilege which entailed discretion and reticence upon me.\n\nIt was, then, with considerable surprise that I received a telegram from Holmes last Tuesday\u2014he has never been known to write where a telegram would serve\u2014in the following terms:\n\nWhy not tell them of the Cornish horror\u2014strangest case I have handled.\n\nI have no idea what backward sweep of memory had brought the matter fresh to his mind, or what freak had caused him to desire that I should recount it; but I hasten, before another cancelling telegram may arrive, to hunt out the notes which give me the exact details of the case and to lay the narrative before my readers.\n\nIt was, then, in the spring of the year 1897 that Holmes's iron constitution showed some symptoms of giving way in the face of constant hard work of a most exacting kind, aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own. In March of that year Dr. Moore Agar, of Harley Street, whose dramatic introduction to Holmes I may some day recount, gave positive injunctions that the famous private agent lay aside all his cases and surrender himself to complete rest if he wished to avert an absolute breakdown. The state of his health was not a matter in which he himself took the faintest interest, for his mental detachment was absolute, but he was induced at last, on the threat of being permanently disqualified from work, to give himself a complete change of scene and air. Thus it was that in the early spring of that year we found ourselves together in a small cottage near Poldhu Bay, at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula.\n\nIt was a singular spot, and one peculiarly well suited to the grim humour of my patient. From the windows of our little whitewashed house, which stood high upon a grassy headland, we looked down upon the whole sinister semicircle of Mounts Bay, that old death trap of sailing vessels, with its fringe of black cliffs and surge-swept reefs on which innumerable seamen have met their end. With a northerly breeze it lies placid and sheltered, inviting the storm-tossed craft to tack into it for rest and protection.\n\nThen come the sudden swirl round of the wind, the blustering gale from the south-west, the dragging anchor, the lee shore, and the last battle in the creaming breakers. The wise mariner stands far out from that evil place.\n\nOn the land side our surroundings were as sombre as on the sea. It was a country of rolling moors, lonely and dun-coloured, with an occasional church tower to mark the site of some old-world village. In every direction upon these moors there were traces of some vanished race which had passed utterly away, and left as its sole record strange monuments of stone, irregular mounds which contained the burned ashes of the dead, and curious earthworks which hinted at prehistoric strife. The glamour and mystery of the place, with its sinister atmosphere of forgotten nations, appealed to the imagination of my friend, and he spent much of his time in long walks and solitary meditations upon the moor. The ancient Cornish language had also arrested his attention, and he had, I remember, conceived the idea that it was akin to the Chaldean, and had been largely derived from the Phoenician traders in tin. He had received a consignment of books upon philology and was settling down to develop this thesis when suddenly, to my sorrow and to his unfeigned delight, we found ourselves, even in that land of dreams, plunged into a problem at our very doors which was more intense, more engrossing, and infinitely more mysterious than any of those which had driven us from London. Our simple life and peaceful, healthy routine were violently interrupted, and we were precipitated into the midst of a series of events which caused the utmost excitement not only in Cornwall but throughout the whole west of England. Many of my readers may retain some recollection of what was called at the time \"The Cornish Horror,\" though a most imperfect account of the matter reached the London press. Now, after thirteen years, I will give the true details of this inconceivable affair to the public.\n\nI have said that scattered towers marked the villages which dotted this part of Cornwall. The nearest of these was the hamlet of Tredannick Wol las, where the cottages of a couple of hundred inhabitants clustered round an ancient, moss-grown church. The vicar of the parish, Mr. Roundhay, was something of an archaeologist, and as such Holmes had made his acquaintance. He was a middle-aged man, portly and affable, with a considerable fund of local lore. At his invitation we had taken tea at the vicarage and had come to know, also, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis, an independent gentleman, who increased the clergyman's scanty resources by taking rooms in his large, straggling house. The vicar, being a bachelor, was glad to come to such an arrangement, though he had little in common with his lodger, who was a thin, dark, spectacled man, with a stoop which gave the impression of actual, physical deformity. I remember that during our short visit we found the vicar garrulous, but his lodger strangely reticent, a sad-faced, introspective man, sitting with averted eyes, brooding apparently upon his own affairs.\n\nThese were the two men who entered abruptly into our little sitting-room on Tuesday, March the 16th, shortly after our breakfast hour, as we were smoking together, preparatory to our daily excursion upon the moors.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes,\" said the vicar in an agitated voice, \"the most extraordinary and tragic affair has occurred during the night. It is the most unheard-of business. We can only regard it as a special Providence that you should chance to be here at the time, for in all England you are the one man we need.\"\n\nI glared at the intrusive vicar with no very friendly eyes; but Holmes took his pipe from his lips and sat up in his chair like an old hound who hears the view-halloa. He waved his hand to the sofa, and our palpitating visitor with his agitated companion sat side by side upon it. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis was more self-contained than the clergyman, but the twitching of his thin hands and the brightness of his dark eyes showed that they shared a common emotion.\n\n\"Shall I speak or you?\" he asked of the vicar.\n\n\"Well, as you seem to have made the discovery, whatever it may be, and the vicar to have had it second-hand, perhaps you had better do the speaking,\" said Holmes.\n\nI glanced at the hastily clad clergyman, with the formally dressed lodger seated beside him, and was amused at the surprise which Holmes's simple deduction had brought to their faces.\n\n\"Perhaps I had best say a few words first,\" said the vicar, \"and then you can judge if you will listen to the details from Mr. Tregennis, or whether we should not hasten at once to the scene of this mysterious affair. I may explain, then, that our friend here spent last evening in the company of his two brothers, Owen and George, and of his sister Brenda, at their house of Tredannick Wartha, which is near the old stone cross upon the moor. He left them shortly after ten o'clock, playing cards round the dining-room table, in excellent health and spirits. This morning, being an early riser, he walked in that direction before breakfast and was overtaken by the carriage of Dr. Richards, who explained that he had just been sent for on a most urgent call to Tredannick Wartha. Mr. Mortimer Tregennis naturally went with him. When he arrived at Tredannick Wartha he found an extraordinary state of things. His two brothers and his sister were seated round the table exactly as he had left them, the cards still spread in front of them and the candles burned down to their sockets. The sister lay back stone-dead in her chair, while the two brothers sat on each side of her laughing, shouting, and singing, the senses stricken clean out of them. All three of them, the dead woman and the two demented men, retained upon their faces an expression of the utmost horror\u2014a convulsion of terror which was dreadful to look upon. There was no sign of the presence of anyone in the house, except Mrs. Porter, the old cook and housekeeper, who declared that she had slept deeply and heard no sound during the night. Nothing had been stolen or disarranged, and there is absolutely no explanation of what the horror can be which has frightened a woman to death and two strong men out of their senses. There is the situation, Mr. Holmes, in a nutshell, and if you can help us to clear it up you will have done a great work.\"\n\nI had hoped that in some way I could coax my companion back into the quiet which had been the object of our journey; but one glance at his intense face and contracted eyebrows told me how vain was now the expectation. He sat for some little time in silence, absorbed in the strange drama which had broken in upon our peace.\n\n\"I will look into this matter,\" he said at last. \"On the face of it, it would appear to be a case of a very exceptional nature. Have you been there yourself, Mr. Roundhay?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes. Mr. Tregennis brought back the account to the vicarage, and I at once hurried over with him to consult you.\"\n\n\"How far is it to the house where this singular tragedy occurred?\"\n\n\"About a mile inland.\"\n\n\"Then we shall walk over together. But before we start I must ask you a few questions, Mr. Mortimer Tregennis.\"\n\nThe other had been silent all this time, but I had observed that his more controlled excitement was even greater than the obtrusive emotion of the clergyman. He sat with a pale, drawn face, his anxious gaze fixed upon Holmes, and his thin hands clasped convulsively together. His pale lips quivered as he listened to the dreadful experience which had befallen his family, and his dark eyes seemed to reflect something of the horror of the scene.\n\n\"Ask what you like, Mr. Holmes,\" said he eagerly. \"It is a bad thing to speak of, but I will answer you the truth.\"\n\n\"Tell me about last night.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, I supped there, as the vicar has said, and my elder brother George proposed a game of whist afterwards. We sat down about nine o'clock. It was a quarter-past ten when I moved to go. I left them all round the table, as merry as could be.\"\n\n\"Who let you out?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Porter had gone to bed, so I let myself out. I shut the hall door behind me. The window of the room in which they sat was closed, but the blind was not drawn down. There was no change in door or window this morning, nor any reason to think that any stranger had been to the house. Yet there they sat, driven clean mad with terror, and Brenda lying dead of fright, with her head hanging over the arm of the chair. I'll never get the sight of that room out of my mind so long as I live.\"\n\n\"The facts, as you state them, are certainly most remarkable,\" said Holmes. \"I take it that you have no theory yourself which can in any way account for them?\"\n\n\"It's devilish, Mr. Holmes, devilish!\" cried Mortimer Tregennis. \"It is not of this world. Something has come into that room which has dashed the light of reason from their minds. What human contrivance could do that?\"\n\n\"I fear,\" said Holmes, \"that if the matter is beyond humanity it is certainly beyond me. Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back upon such a theory as this. As to yourself, Mr. Tregennis, I take it you were divided in some way from your family, since they lived together and you had rooms apart?\"\n\n\"That is so, Mr. Holmes, though the matter is past and done with. We were a family of tin-miners at Redruth, but we sold out our venture to a company, and so retired with enough to keep us. I won't deny that there was some feeling about the division of the money and it stood between us for a time, but it was all forgiven and forgotten, and we were the best of friends together.\"\n\n\"Looking back at the evening which you spent together, does anything stand out in your memory as throwing any possible light upon the tragedy? Think carefully, Mr. Tregennis, for any clue which can help me.\"\n\n\"There is nothing at all, sir.\"\n\n\"Your people were in their usual spirits?\"\n\n\"Never better.\"\n\n\"Were they nervous people? Did they ever show any apprehension of coming danger?\"\n\n\"Nothing of the kind.\"\n\n\"You have nothing to add then, which could assist me?\"\n\nMortimer Tregennis considered earnestly for a moment.\n\n\"There is one thing occurs to me,\" said he at last. \"As we sat at the table my back was to the window, and my brother George, he being my partner at cards, was facing it. I saw him once look hard over my shoulder, so I turned round and looked also. The blind was up and the window shut, but I could just make out the bushes on the lawn, and it seemed to me for a moment that I saw something moving among them. I couldn't even say if it was man or animal, but I just thought there was something there. When I asked him what he was looking at, he told me that he had the same feeling. That is all that I can say.\"\n\n\"Did you not investigate?\"\n\n\"No; the matter passed as unimportant.\"\n\n\"You left them, then, without any premonition of evil?\"\n\n\"None at all.\"\n\n\"I am not clear how you came to hear the news so early this morning.\"\n\n\"I am an early riser and generally take a walk before breakfast. This morning I had hardly started when the doctor in his carriage overtook me. He told me that old Mrs. Porter had sent a boy down with an urgent message. I sprang in beside him and we drove on. When we got there we looked into that dreadful room. The candles and the fire must have burned out hours before, and they had been sitting there in the dark until dawn had broken. The doctor said Brenda must have been dead at least six hours. There were no signs of violence. She just lay across the arm of the chair with that look on her face. George and Owen were singing snatches of songs and gibbering like two great apes. Oh, it was awful to see! I couldn't stand it, and the doctor was as white as a sheet. Indeed, he fell into a chair in a sort of faint, and we nearly had him on our hands as well.\"\n\n\"Remarkable\u2014most remarkable!\" said Holmes, rising and taking his hat. \"I think, perhaps, we had better go down to Tredannick Wartha without further delay. I confess that I have seldom known a case which at first sight presented a more singular problem.\"\n\nOur proceedings of that first morning did little to advance the investigation. It was marked, however, at the outset by an incident which left the most sinister impression upon my mind. The approach to the spot at which the tragedy occurred is down a narrow, winding, country lane. While we made our way along it we heard the rattle of a carriage coming towards us and stood aside to let it pass. As it drove by us I caught a glimpse through the closed window of a horribly contorted, grinning face glaring out at us. Those staring eyes and gnashing teeth flashed past us like a dreadful vision.\n\n\"My brothers!\" cried Mortimer Tregennis, white to his lips. \"They are taking them to Helston.\"\n\nWe looked with horror after the black carriage, lumbering upon its way. Then we turned our steps towards this ill-omened house in which they had met their strange fate.\n\nIt was a large and bright dwelling, rather a villa than a cottage, with a considerable garden which was already, in that Cornish air, well filled with spring flowers. Towards this garden the window of the sitting-room fronted, and from it, according to Mortimer Tregennis, must have come that thing of evil which had by sheer horror in a single instant blasted their minds. Holmes walked slowly and thoughtfully among the flower-plots and along the path before we entered the porch. So absorbed was he in his thoughts, I remember, that he stumbled over the watering-pot, upset its contents, and deluged both our feet and the garden path. Inside the house we were met by the elderly Cornish housekeeper, Mrs. Porter, who, with the aid of a young girl, looked after the wants of the family. She readily answered all Holmes's questions. She had heard nothing in the night. Her employers had all been in excellent spirits lately, and she had never known them more cheerful and prosperous. She had fainted with horror upon entering the room in the morning and seeing that dreadful company round the table. She had, when she recovered, thrown open the window to let the morning air in, and had run down to the lane, whence she sent a farm-lad for the doctor. The lady was on her bed upstairs if we cared to see her. It took four strong men to get the brothers into the asylum carriage. She would not herself stay in the house another day and was starting that very afternoon to rejoin her family at St. Ives.\n\nWe ascended the stairs and viewed the body. Miss Brenda Tregennis had been a very beautiful girl, though now verging upon middle age. Her dark, clear-cut face was handsome, even in death, but there still lingered upon it something of that convulsion of horror which had been her last human emotion. From her bedroom we descended to the sitting-room, where this strange tragedy had actually occurred. The charred ashes of the overnight fire lay in the grate. On the table were the four guttered and burned-out candles, with the cards scattered over its surface. The chairs had been moved back against the walls, but all else was as it had been the night before. Holmes paced with light, swift steps about the room; he sat in the various chairs, drawing them up and reconstructing their positions. He tested how much of the garden was visible; he examined the floor, the ceiling, and the fireplace; but never once did I see that sudden brightening of his eyes and tightening of his lips which would have told me that he saw some gleam of light in this utter darkness.\n\n\"Why a fire?\" he asked once. \"Had they always a fire in this small room on a spring evening?\"\n\nMortimer Tregennis explained that the night was cold and damp. For that reason, after his arrival, the fire was lit. \"What are you going to do now, Mr. Holmes?\" he asked.\n\nMy friend smiled and laid his hand upon my arm. \"I think, Watson, that I shall resume that course of tobacco-poisoning which you have so often and so justly condemned,\" said he. \"With your permission, gentlemen, we will now return to our cottage, for I am not aware that any new factor is likely to come to our notice here. I will turn the facts over in my mind, Mr. Tregennis, and should anything occur to me I will certainly communicate with you and the vicar. In the meantime I wish you both good-morning.\"\n\nIt was not until long after we were back in Poldhu Cottage that Holmes broke his complete and absorbed silence. He sat coiled in his armchair, his haggard and ascetic face hardly visible amid the blue swirl of his tobacco smoke, his black brows drawn down, his forehead contracted, his eyes vacant and far away. Finally he laid down his pipe and sprang to his feet.\n\n\"It won't do, Watson!\" said he with a laugh. \"Let us walk along the cliffs together and search for flint arrows. We are more likely to find them than clues to this problem. To let the brain work without sufficient material is like racing an engine. It racks itself to pieces. The sea air, sunshine, and patience, Watson\u2014all else will come.\n\n\"Now, let us calmly define our position, Watson,\" he continued as we skirted the cliffs together. \"Let us get a firm grip of the very little which we do know, so that when fresh facts arise we may be ready to fit them into their places. I take it, in the first place, that neither of us is prepared to admit diabolical intrusions into the affairs of men. Let us begin by ruling that entirely out of our minds. Very good. There remain three persons who have been grievously stricken by some conscious or unconscious human agency. That is firm ground. Now, when did this occur? Evidently, assuming his narrative to be true, it was immediately after Mr. Mortimer Tregennis had left the room. That is a very important point. The presumption is that it was within a few minutes afterwards. The cards still lay upon the table. It was already past their usual hour for bed. Yet they had not changed their position or pushed back their chairs. I repeat, then, that the occurrence was immediately after his departure, and not later than eleven o'clock last night.\n\n\"Our next obvious step is to check, so far as we can, the movements of Mortimer Tregennis after he left the room. In this there is no difficulty, and they seem to be above suspicion. Knowing my methods as you do, you were, of course, conscious of the somewhat clumsy water-pot expedient by which I obtained a clearer impress of his foot than might otherwise have been possible. The wet, sandy path took it admirably. Last night was also wet, you will remember, and it was not difficult\u2014having obtained a sample print\u2014to pick out his track among others and to follow his movements. He appears to have walked away swiftly in the direction of the vicarage.\n\n\"If, then, Mortimer Tregennis disappeared from the scene, and yet some outside person affected the cardplayers, how can we reconstruct that person, and how was such an impression of horror conveyed? Mrs. Porter may be eliminated. She is evidently harmless. Is there any evidence that someone crept up to the garden window and in some manner produced so terrific an effect that he drove those who saw it out of their senses? The only suggestion in this direction comes from Mortimer Tregennis himself, who says that his brother spoke about some movement in the garden. That is certainly remarkable, as the night was rainy, cloudy, and dark. Anyone who had the design to alarm these people would be compelled to place his very face against the glass before he could be seen. There is a three-foot flower-border outside this window, but no indication of a footmark. It is difficult to imagine, then, how an outsider could have made so terrible an impression upon the company, nor have we found any possible motive for so strange and elaborate an attempt. You perceive our difficulties, Watson?\"\n\n\"They are only too clear,\" I answered with conviction.\n\n\"And yet, with a little more material, we may prove that they are not insurmountable,\" said Holmes. \"I fancy that among your extensive archives, Watson, you may find some which were nearly as obscure. Meanwhile, we shall put the case aside until more accurate data are available, and devote the rest of our morning to the pursuit of neolithic man.\"\n\nI may have commented upon my friend's power of mental detachment, but never have I wondered at it more than upon that spring morning in Cornwall when for two hours he discoursed upon Celts, arrowheads, and shards, as lightly as if no sinister mystery were waiting for his solution. It was not until we had returned in the afternoon to our cottage that we found a visitor awaiting us, who soon brought our minds back to the matter in hand. Neither of us needed to be told who that visitor was. The huge body, the craggy and deeply seamed face with the fierce eyes and hawk-like nose, the grizzled hair which nearly brushed our cottage ceiling, the beard\u2014golden at the fringes and white near the lips, save for the nicotine stain from his perpetual cigar\u2014all these were as well known in London as in Africa, and could only be associated with the tremendous personality of Dr. Leon Sterndale, the great lion-hunter and explorer.\n\nWe had heard of his presence in the district and had once or twice caught sight of his tall figure upon the moorland paths. He made no advances to us, however, nor would we have dreamed of doing so to him, as it was well known that it was his love of seclusion which caused him to spend the greater part of the intervals between his journeys in a small bungalow buried in the lonely wood of Beauchamp Arriance. Here, amid his books and his maps, he lived an absolutely lonely life, attending to his own simple wants and paying little apparent heed to the affairs of his neighbours. It was a surprise to me, therefore, to hear him asking Holmes in an eager voice whether he had made any advance in his reconstruction of this mysterious episode. \"The county police are utterly at fault,\" said he, \"but perhaps your wider experience has suggested some conceivable explanation. My only claim to being taken into your confidence is that during my many residences here I have come to know this family of Tregennis very well\u2014indeed, upon my Cornish mother's side I could call them cousins\u2014and their strange fate has naturally been a great shock to me. I may tell you that I had got as far as Plymouth upon my way to Africa, but the news reached me this morning, and I came straight back again to help in the inquiry.\"\n\nHolmes raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"Did you lose your boat through it?\"\n\n\"I will take the next.\"\n\n\"Dear me! that is friendship indeed.\"\n\n\"I tell you they were relatives.\"\n\n\"Quite so\u2014cousins of your mother. Was your baggage aboard the ship?\"\n\n\"Some of it, but the main part at the hotel.\"\n\n\"I see. But surely this event could not have found its way into the Plymouth morning papers.\"\n\n\"No, sir; I had a telegram.\"\n\n\"Might I ask from whom?\"\n\nA shadow passed over the gaunt face of the explorer.\n\n\"You are very inquisitive, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"It is my business.\"\n\nWith an effort Dr. Sterndale recovered his ruffled composure.\n\n\"I have no objection to telling you,\" he said. \"It was Mr. Roundhay, the vicar, who sent me the telegram which recalled me.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Holmes. \"I may say in answer to your original question that I have not cleared my mind entirely on the subject of this case, but that I have every hope of reaching some conclusion. It would be premature to say more.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you would not mind telling me if your suspicions point in any particular direction?\"\n\n\"No, I can hardly answer that.\"\n\n\"Then I have wasted my time and need not prolong my visit.\" The famous doctor strode out of our cottage in considerable ill-humour, and within five minutes Holmes had followed him. I saw him no more until the evening, when he returned with a slow step and haggard face which assured me that he had made no great progress with his investigation. He glanced at a telegram which awaited him and threw it into the grate.\n\n\"From the Plymouth hotel, Watson,\" he said. \"I learned the name of it from the vicar, and I wired to make certain that Dr. Leon Sterndale's account was true. It appears that he did indeed spend last night there, and that he has actually allowed some of his baggage to go on to Africa, while he returned to be present at this investigation. What do you make of that, Watson?\"\n\n\"He is deeply interested.\"\n\n\"Deeply interested\u2014yes. There is a thread here which we have not yet grasped and which might lead us through the tangle. Cheer up, Watson, for I am very sure that our material has not yet all come to hand. When it does we may soon leave our difficulties behind us.\"\n\nLittle did I think how soon the words of Holmes would be realized, or how strange and sinister would be that new development which opened up an entirely fresh line of investigation. I was shaving at my window in the morning when I heard the rattle of hoofs and, looking up, saw a dog-cart coming at a gallop down the road. It pulled up at our door, and our friend, the vicar, sprang from it and rushed up our garden path. Holmes was already dressed, and we hastened down to meet him.\n\nOur visitor was so excited that he could hardly articulate, but at last in gasps and bursts his tragic story came out of him.\n\n\"We are devil-ridden, Mr. Holmes! My poor parish is devil-ridden!\" he cried. \"Satan himself is loose in it! We are given over into his hands!\" He danced about in his agitation, a ludicrous object if it were not for his ashy face and startled eyes. Finally he shot out his terrible news.\n\n\"Mr. Mortimer Tregennis died during the night, and with exactly the same symptoms as the rest of his family.\"\n\nHolmes sprang to his feet, all energy in an instant.\n\n\"Can you fit us both into your dog-cart?\"\n\n\"Yes, I can.\"\n\n\"Then, Watson, we will postpone our breakfast. Mr. Roundhay, we are entirely at your disposal. Hurry\u2014hurry, before things get disarranged.\"\n\nThe lodger occupied two rooms at the vicarage, which were in an angle by themselves, the one above the other. Below was a large sitting-room; above, his bedroom. They looked out upon a croquet lawn which came up to the windows. We had arrived before the doctor or the police, so that everything was absolutely undisturbed. Let me describe exactly the scene as we saw it upon that misty March morning. It has left an impression which can never be effaced from my mind.\n\nThe atmosphere of the room was of a horrible and depressing stuffiness. The servant who had first entered had thrown up the window, or it would have been even more intolerable. This might partly be due to the fact that a lamp stood flaring and smoking on the centre table. Beside it sat the dead man, leaning back in his chair, his thin beard projecting, his spectacles pushed up on to his forehead, and his lean dark face turned towards the window and twisted into the same distortion of terror which had marked the features of his dead sister. His limbs were convulsed and his fingers contorted as though he had died in a very paroxysm of fear. He was fully clothed, though there were signs that his dressing had been done in a hurry. We had already learned that his bed had been slept in, and that the tragic end had come to him in the early morning.\n\nOne realized the red-hot energy which underlay Holmes's phlegmatic exterior when one saw the sudden change which came over him from the moment that he entered the fatal apartment. In an instant he was tense and alert, his eyes shining, his face set, his limbs quivering with eager activity. He was out on the lawn, in through the window, round the room, and up into the bedroom, for all the world like a dashing foxhound drawing a cover. In the bedroom he made a rapid cast around and ended by throwing open the window, which appeared to give him some fresh cause for excitement, for he leaned out of it with loud ejaculations of interest and delight. Then he rushed down the stair, out through the open window, threw himself upon his face on the lawn, sprang up and into the room once more, all with the energy of the hunter who is at the very heels of his quarry. The lamp, which was an ordinary standard, he examined with minute care, making certain measurements upon its bowl. He carefully scrutinized with his lens the talc shield which covered the top of the chimney and scraped off some ashes which adhered to its upper surface, putting some of them into an envelope, which he placed in his pocketbook. Finally, just as the doctor and the official police put in an appearance, he beckoned to the vicar and we all three went out upon the lawn.\n\n\"I am glad to say that my investigation has not been entirely barren,\" he remarked. \"I cannot remain to discuss the matter with the police, but I should be exceedingly obliged, Mr. Roundhay, if you would give the inspector my compliments and direct his attention to the bedroom window and to the sitting-room lamp. Each is suggestive, and together they are almost conclusive. If the police would desire further information I shall be happy to see any of them at the cottage. And now, Watson, I think that, perhaps, we shall be better employed elsewhere.\"\n\nIt may be that the police resented the intrusion of an amateur, or that they imagined themselves to be upon some hopeful line of investigation; but it is certain that we heard nothing from them for the next two days. During this time Holmes spent some of his time smoking and dreaming in the cottage; but a greater portion in country walks which he undertook alone, returning after many hours without remark as to where he had been. One experiment served to show me the line of his investigation. He had bought a lamp which was the duplicate of the one which had burned in the room of Mortimer Tregennis on the morning of the tragedy. This he filled with the same oil as that used at the vicarage, and he carefully timed the period which it would take to be exhausted. Another experiment which he made was of a more unpleasant nature, and one which I am not likely ever to forget.\n\n\"You will remember, Watson,\" he remarked one afternoon, \"that there is a single common point of resemblance in the varying reports which have reached us. This concerns the effect of the atmosphere of the room in each case upon those who had first entered it. You will recollect that Mortimer Tregennis, in describing the episode of his last visit to his brother's house, remarked that the doctor on entering the room fell into a chair? You had forgotten? Well, I can answer for it that it was so. Now, you will remember also that Mrs. Porter, the housekeeper, told us that she herself fainted upon entering the room and had afterwards opened the window. In the second case\u2014that of Mortimer Tregennis himself\u2014you cannot have forgotten the horrible stuffiness of the room when we arrived, though the servant had thrown open the window. That servant, I found upon inquiry, was so ill that she had gone to her bed. You will admit, Watson, that these facts are very suggestive. In each case there is evidence of a poisonous atmosphere. In each case, also, there is combustion going on in the room\u2014in the one case a fire, in the other a lamp. The fire was needed, but the lamp was lit\u2014as a comparison of the oil consumed will show\u2014long after it was broad daylight. Why? Surely because there is some connection between three things\u2014the burning, the stuffy atmosphere, and, finally, the madness or death of those unfortunate people. That is clear, is it not?\"\n\n\"It would appear so.\"\n\n\"At least we may accept it as a working hypothesis. We will suppose, then, that something was burned in each case which produced an atmosphere causing strange toxic effects. Very good. In the first instance\u2014that of the Tregennis family\u2014this substance was placed in the fire. Now the window was shut, but the fire would naturally carry fumes to some extent up the chimney. Hence one would expect the effects of the poison to be less than in the second case, where there was less escape for the vapour. The result seems to indicate that it was so, since in the first case only the woman, who had presumably the more sensitive organism, was killed, the others exhibiting that temporary or permanent lunacy which is evidently the first effect of the drug. In the second case the result was complete. The facts, therefore, seem to bear out the theory of a poison which worked by combustion.\n\n\"With this train of reasoning in my head I naturally looked about in Mortimer Tregennis's room to find some remains of this substance. The obvious place to look was the talc shield or smoke-guard of the lamp. There, sure enough, I perceived a number of flaky ashes, and round the edges a fringe of brownish powder, which had not yet been consumed. Half of this I took, as you saw, and I placed it in an envelope.\"\n\n\"Why half, Holmes?\"\n\n\"It is not for me, my dear Watson, to stand in the way of the official police force. I leave them all the evidence which I found. The poison still remained upon the talc had they the wit to find it. Now, Watson, we will light our lamp; we will, however, take the precaution to open our window to avoid the premature decease of two deserving members of society, and you will seat yourself near that open window in an armchair unless, like a sensible man, you determine to have nothing to do with the affair. Oh, you will see it out, will you? I thought I knew my Watson. This chair I will place opposite yours, so that we may be the same distance from the poison and face to face. The door we will leave ajar. Each is now in a position to watch the other and to bring the experiment to an end should the symptoms seem alarming. Is that all clear? Well, then, I take our powder\u2014or what remains of it\u2014from the envelope, and I lay it above the burning lamp. So! Now, Watson, let us sit down and await developments.\"\n\nThey were not long in coming. I had hardly settled in my chair before I was conscious of a thick, musky odour, subtle and nauseous. At the very first whiff of it my brain and my imagination were beyond all control. A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe. Vague shapes swirled and swam amid the dark cloud-bank, each a menace and a warning of something coming, the advent of some unspeakable dweller upon the threshold, whose very shadow would blast my soul. A freezing horror took possession of me. I felt that my hair was rising, that my eyes were protruding, that my mouth was opened, and my tongue like leather. The turmoil within my brain was such that something must surely snap. I tried to scream and was vaguely aware of some hoarse croak which was my own voice, but distant and detached from myself. At the same moment, in some effort of escape, I broke through that cloud of despair and had a glimpse of Holmes's face, white, rigid, and drawn with horror\u2014the very look which I had seen upon the features of the dead. It was that vision which gave me an instant of sanity and of strength. I dashed from my chair, threw my arms round Holmes, and together we lurched through the door, and an instant afterwards had thrown ourselves down upon the grass plot and were lying side by side, conscious only of the glorious sunshine which was bursting its way through the hellish cloud of terror which had girt us in. Slowly it rose from our souls like the mists from a landscape until peace and reason had returned, and we were sitting upon the grass, wiping our clammy foreheads, and looking with apprehension at each other to mark the last traces of that terrific experience which we had undergone.\n\n\"Upon my word, Watson!\" said Holmes at last with an unsteady voice, \"I owe you both my thanks and an apology. It was an unjustifiable experiment even for one's self, and doubly so for a friend. I am really very sorry.\"\n\n\"You know,\" I answered with some emotion, for I had never seen so much of Holmes's heart before, \"that it is my greatest joy and privilege to help you.\"\n\nHe relapsed at once into the half-humorous, half-cynical vein which was his habitual attitude to those about him. \"It would be superfluous to drive us mad, my dear Watson,\" said he. \"A candid observer would certainly declare that we were so already before we embarked upon so wild an experiment. I confess that I never imagined that the effect could be so sudden and so severe.\" He dashed into the cottage, and, reappearing with the burning lamp held at full arm's length, he threw it among a bank of brambles. \"We must give the room a little time to clear. I take it, Watson, that you have no longer a shadow of a doubt as to how these tragedies were produced?\"\n\n\"None whatever.\"\n\n\"But the cause remains as obscure as before. Come into the arbour here and let us discuss it together. That villainous stuff seems still to linger round my throat. I think we must admit that all the evidence points to this man, Mortimer Tregennis, having been the criminal in the first tragedy, though he was the victim in the second one. We must remember, in the first place, that there is some story of a family quarrel, followed by a reconciliation. How bitter that quarrel may have been, or how hollow the reconciliation, we cannot tell. When I think of Mortimer Tregennis, with the foxy face and the small shrewd, beady eyes behind the spectacles, he is not a man whom I should judge to be of a particularly forgiving disposition. Well, in the next place, you will remember that this idea of someone moving in the garden, which took our attention for a moment from the real cause of the tragedy, emanated from him. He had a motive in misleading us. Finally, if he did not throw this substance into the fire at the moment of leaving the room, who did do so? The affair happened immediately after his departure. Had anyone else come in, the family would certainly have risen from the table. Besides, in peaceful Cornwall, visitors do not arrive after ten o'clock at night. We may take it, then, that all the evidence points to Mortimer Tregennis as the culprit.\"\n\n\"Then his own death was suicide!\"\n\n\"Well, Watson, it is on the face of it a not impossible supposition. The man who had the guilt upon his soul of having brought such a fate upon his own family might well be driven by remorse to inflict it upon himself. There are, however, some cogent reasons against it. Fortunately, there is one man in England who knows all about it, and I have made arrangements by which we shall hear the facts this afternoon from his own lips. Ah! he is a little before his time. Perhaps you would kindly step this way, Dr. Leon Sterndale. We have been conducting a chemical experiment indoors which has left our little room hardly fit for the reception of so distinguished a visitor.\"\n\nI had heard the click of the garden gate, and now the majestic figure of the great African explorer appeared upon the path. He turned in some surprise towards the rustic arbour in which we sat.\n\n\"You sent for me, Mr. Holmes. I had your note about an hour ago, and I have come, though I really do not know why I should obey your summons.\"\n\n\"Perhaps we can clear the point up before we separate,\" said Holmes. \"Meanwhile, I am much obliged to you for your courteous acquiescence. You will excuse this informal reception in the open air, but my friend Watson and I have nearly furnished an additional chapter to what the papers call the Cornish Horror, and we prefer a clear atmosphere for the present. Perhaps, since the matters which we have to discuss will affect you personally in a very intimate fashion, it is as well that we should talk where there can be no eavesdropping.\"\n\nThe explorer took his cigar from his lips and gazed sternly at my companion.\n\n\"I am at a loss to know, sir,\" he said, \"what you can have to speak about which affects me personally in a very intimate fashion.\"\n\n\"The killing of Mortimer Tregennis,\" said Holmes.\n\nFor a moment I wished that I were armed. Sterndale's fierce face turned to a dusky red, his eyes glared, and the knotted, passionate veins started out in his forehead, while he sprang forward with clenched hands towards my companion. Then he stopped, and with a violent effort he resumed a cold, rigid calmness, which was, perhaps, more suggestive of danger than his hot-headed outburst.\n\n\"I have lived so long among savages and beyond the law,\" said he, \"that I have got into the way of being a law to myself. You would do well, Mr. Holmes, not to forget it, for I have no desire to do you an injury.\"\n\n\"Nor have I any desire to do you an injury, Dr. Sterndale. Surely the clearest proof of it is that, knowing what I know, I have sent for you and not for the police.\"\n\nSterndale sat down with a gasp, overawed for, perhaps, the first time in his adventurous life. There was a calm assurance of power in Holmes's manner which could not be withstood. Our visitor stammered for a moment, his great hands opening and shutting in his agitation.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he asked at last. \"If this is bluff upon your part, Mr. Holmes, you have chosen a bad man for your experiment. Let us have no more beating about the bush. What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I will tell you,\" said Holmes, \"and the reason why I tell you is that I hope frankness may beget frankness. What my next step may be will depend entirely upon the nature of your own defence.\"\n\n\"My defence?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"My defence against what?\"\n\n\"Against the charge of killing Mortimer Tregennis.\"\n\nSterndale mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. \"Upon my word, you are getting on,\" said he. \"Do all your successes depend upon this prodigious power of bluff?\"\n\n\"The bluff,\" said Holmes sternly, \"is upon your side, Dr. Leon Sterndale, and not upon mine. As a proof I will tell you some of the facts upon which my conclusions are based. Of your return from Plymouth, allowing much of your property to go on to Africa, I will say nothing save that it first informed me that you were one of the factors which had to be taken into account in reconstructing this drama\u2014\"\n\n\"I came back\u2014\"\n\n\"I have heard your reasons and regard them as unconvincing and inadequate. We will pass that. You came down here to ask me whom I suspected. I refused to answer you. You then went to the vicarage, waited outside it for some time, and finally returned to your cottage.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"I followed you.\"\n\n\"I saw no one.\"\n\n\"That is what you may expect to see when I follow you. You spent a restless night at your cottage, and you formed certain plans, which in the early morning you proceeded to put into execution. Leaving your door just as day was breaking, you filled your pocket with some reddish gravel that was lying heaped beside your gate.\"\n\nSterndale gave a violent start and looked at Holmes in amazement.\n\n\"You then walked swiftly for the mile which separated you from the vicarage. You were wearing, I may remark, the same pair of ribbed tennis shoes which are at the present moment upon your feet. At the vicarage you passed through the orchard and the side hedge, coming out under the window of the lodger Tregennis. It was now daylight, but the household was not yet stirring. You drew some of the gravel from your pocket, and you threw it up at the window above you.\"\n\nSterndale sprang to his feet.\n\n\"I believe that you are the devil himself!\" he cried.\n\nHolmes smiled at the compliment. \"It took two, or possibly three, handfuls before the lodger came to the window. You beckoned him to come down. He dressed hurriedly and descended to his sitting-room. You entered by the window. There was an interview\u2014a short one\u2014during which you walked up and down the room. Then you passed out and closed the window, standing on the lawn outside smoking a cigar and watching what occurred. Finally, after the death of Tregennis, you withdrew as you had come. Now, Dr. Sterndale, how do you justify such conduct, and what were the motives for your actions? If you prevaricate or trifle with me, I give you my assurance that the matter will pass out of my hands forever.\"\n\nOur visitor's face had turned ashen gray as he listened to the words of his accuser. Now he sat for some time in thought with his face sunk in his hands. Then with a sudden impulsive gesture he plucked a photograph from his breast-pocket and threw it on the rustic table before us.\n\n\"That is why I have done it,\" said he.\n\nIt showed the bust and face of a very beautiful woman. Holmes stooped over it.\n\n\"Brenda Tregennis,\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, Brenda Tregennis,\" repeated our visitor. \"For years I have loved her. For years she has loved me. There is the secret of that Cornish seclusion which people have marvelled at. It has brought me close to the one thing on earth that was dear to me. I could not marry her, for I have a wife who has left me for years and yet whom, by the deplorable laws of England, I could not divorce. For years Brenda waited. For years I waited. And this is what we have waited for.\" A terrible sob shook his great frame, and he clutched his throat under his brindled beard. Then with an effort he mastered himself and spoke on:\n\n\"The vicar knew. He was in our confidence. He would tell you that she was an angel upon earth. That was why he telegraphed to me and I returned. What was my baggage or Africa to me when I learned that such a fate had come upon my darling? There you have the missing clue to my action, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Proceed,\" said my friend.\n\nDr. Sterndale drew from his pocket a paper packet and laid it upon the table. On the outside was written \"Radix pedis diaboli\" with a red poison label beneath it. He pushed it towards me. \"I understand that you are a doctor, sir. Have you ever heard of this preparation?\"\n\n\"Devil's-foot root! No, I have never heard of it.\"\n\n\"It is no reflection upon your professional knowledge,\" said he, \"for I believe that, save for one sample in a laboratory at Buda, there is no other specimen in Europe. It has not yet found its way either into the pharmacopoeia or into the literature of toxicology. The root is shaped like a foot, half human, half goatlike; hence the fanciful name given by a botanical missionary. It is used as an ordeal poison by the medicine-men in certain districts of West Africa and is kept as a secret among them. This particular specimen I obtained under very extraordinary circumstances in the Ubangi country.\" He opened the paper as he spoke and disclosed a heap of reddish-brown, snuff-like powder.\n\n\"Well, sir?\" asked Holmes sternly.\n\n\"I am about to tell you, Mr. Holmes, all that actually occurred, for you already know so much that it is clearly to my interest that you should know all. I have already explained the relationship in which I stood to the Tregennis family. For the sake of the sister I was friendly with the brothers. There was a family quarrel about money which estranged this man Mortimer, but it was supposed to be made up, and I afterwards met him as I did the others. He was a sly, subtle, scheming man, and several things arose which gave me a suspicion of him, but I had no cause for any positive quarrel.\n\n\"One day, only a couple of weeks ago, he came down to my cottage and I showed him some of my African curiosities. Among other things I exhibited this powder, and I told him of its strange properties, how it stimulates those brain centres which control the emotion of fear, and how either madness or death is the fate of the unhappy native who is subjected to the ordeal by the priest of his tribe. I told him also how powerless European science would be to detect it. How he took it I cannot say, for I never left the room, but there is no doubt that it was then, while I was opening cabinets and stooping to boxes, that he managed to abstract some of the devil's-foot root. I well remember how he plied me with questions as to the amount and the time that was needed for its effect, but I little dreamed that he could have a personal reason for asking.\n\n\"I thought no more of the matter until the vicar's telegram reached me at Plymouth. This villain had thought that I would be at sea before the news could reach me, and that I should be lost for years in Africa. But I returned at once. Of course, I could not listen to the details without feeling assured that my poison had been used. I came round to see you on the chance that some other explanation had suggested itself to you. But there could be none. I was convinced that Mortimer Tregennis was the murderer; that for the sake of money, and with the idea, perhaps, that if the other members of his family were all insane he would be the sole guardian of their joint property, he had used the devil's-foot powder upon them, driven two of them out of their senses, and killed his sister Brenda, the one human being whom I have ever loved or who has ever loved me. There was his crime; what was to be his punishment?\n\n\"Should I appeal to the law? Where were my proofs? I knew that the facts were true, but could I help to make a jury of countrymen believe so fantastic a story? I might or I might not. But I could not afford to fail. My soul cried out for revenge. I have said to you once before, Mr. Holmes, that I have spent much of my life outside the law, and that I have come at last to be a law to myself. So it was now. I determined that the fate which he had given to others should be shared by himself. Either that or I would do justice upon him with my own hand. In all England there can be no man who sets less value upon his own life than I do at the present moment.\n\n\"Now I have told you all. You have yourself supplied the rest. I did, as you say, after a restless night, set off early from my cottage. I foresaw the difficulty of arousing him, so I gathered some gravel from the pile which you have mentioned, and I used it to throw up to his window. He came down and admitted me through the window of the sitting-room. I laid his offence before him. I told him that I had come both as judge and executioner. The wretch sank into a chair, paralyzed at the sight of my revolver. I lit the lamp, put the powder above it, and stood outside the window, ready to carry out my threat to shoot him should he try to leave the room. In five minutes he died. My God! how he died! But my heart was flint, for he endured nothing which my innocent darling had not felt before him. There is my story, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps, if you loved a woman, you would have done as much yourself. At any rate, I am in your hands. You can take what steps you like. As I have already said, there is no man living who can fear death less than I do.\"\n\nHolmes sat for some little time in silence.\n\n\"What were your plans?\" he asked at last.\n\n\"I had intended to bury myself in central Africa. My work there is but half finished.\"\n\n\"Go and do the other half,\" said Holmes. \"I, at least, am not prepared to prevent you.\"\n\nDr. Sterndale raised his giant figure, bowed gravely, and walked from the arbour. Holmes lit his pipe and handed me his pouch.\n\n\"Some fumes which are not poisonous would be a welcome change,\" said he. \"I think you must agree, Watson, that it is not a case in which we are called upon to interfere. Our investigation has been independent, and our action shall be so also. You would not denounce the man?\"\n\n\"Certainly not,\" I answered.\n\n\"I have never loved, Watson, but if I did and if the woman I loved had met such an end, I might act even as our lawless lion-hunter has done. Who knows? Well, Watson, I will not offend your intelligence by explaining what is obvious. The gravel upon the window-sill was, of course, the starting-point of my research. It was unlike anything in the vicarage garden. Only when my attention had been drawn to Dr. Sterndale and his cottage did I find its counterpart. The lamp shining in broad daylight and the remains of powder upon the shield were successive links in a fairly obvious chain. And now, my dear Watson, I think we may dismiss the matter from our mind and go back with a clear conscience to the study of those Chaldean roots which are surely to be traced in the Cornish branch of the great Celtic speech.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HIS LAST BOW", + "text": "[ An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes ]\n\nIt was nine o'clock at night upon the second of August\u2014the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God's curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air. The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low in the distant west. Above, the stars were shining brightly, and below, the lights of the shipping glimmered in the bay. The two famous Germans stood beside the stone parapet of the garden walk, with the long, low, heavily gabled house behind them, and they looked down upon the broad sweep of the beach at the foot of the great chalk cliff on which Von Bork, like some wandering eagle, had perched himself four years before. They stood with their heads close together, talking in low, confidential tones. From below the two glowing ends of their cigars might have been the smouldering eyes of some malignant fiend looking down in the darkness.\n\nA remarkable man this Von Bork\u2014a man who could hardly be matched among all the devoted agents of the Kaiser. It was his talents which had first recommended him for the English mission, the most important mission of all, but since he had taken it over those talents had become more and more manifest to the half-dozen people in the world who were really in touch with the truth. One of these was his present companion, Baron Von Herling, the chief secretary of the legation, whose huge 100-horse-power Benz car was blocking the country lane as it waited to waft its owner back to London.\n\n\"So far as I can judge the trend of events, you will probably be back in Berlin within the week,\" the secretary was saying. \"When you get there, my dear Von Bork, I think you will be surprised at the welcome you will receive. I happen to know what is thought in the highest quarters of your work in this country.\" He was a huge man, the secretary, deep, broad, and tall, with a slow, heavy fashion of speech which had been his main asset in his political career.\n\nVon Bork laughed.\n\n\"They are not very hard to deceive,\" he remarked. \"A more docile, simple folk could not be imagined.\"\n\n\"I don't know about that,\" said the other thoughtfully. \"They have strange limits and one must learn to observe them. It is that surface simplicity of theirs which makes a trap for the stranger. One's first impression is that they are entirely soft. Then one comes suddenly upon something very hard, and you know that you have reached the limit and must adapt yourself to the fact. They have, for example, their insular conventions which simply must be observed.\"\n\n\"Meaning, 'good form' and that sort of thing?\" Von Bork sighed as one who had suffered much.\n\n\"Meaning British prejudice in all its queer manifestations. As an example I may quote one of my own worst blunders\u2014I can afford to talk of my blunders, for you know my work well enough to be aware of my successes. It was on my first arrival. I was invited to a week-end gathering at the country house of a cabinet minister. The conversation was amazingly indiscreet.\"\n\nVon Bork nodded. \"I've been there,\" said he dryly.\n\n\"Exactly. Well, I naturally sent a resume of the information to Berlin. Unfortunately our good chancellor is a little heavy-handed in these matters, and he transmitted a remark which showed that he was aware of what had been said. This, of course, took the trail straight up to me. You've no idea the harm that it did me. There was nothing soft about our British hosts on that occasion, I can assure you. I was two years living it down. Now you, with this sporting pose of yours\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no, don't call it a pose. A pose is an artificial thing. This is quite natural. I am a born sportsman. I enjoy it.\"\n\n\"Well, that makes it the more effective. You yacht against them, you hunt with them, you play polo, you match them in every game, your four-in-hand takes the prize at Olympia. I have even heard that you go the length of boxing with the young officers. What is the result? Nobody takes you seriously. You are a 'good old sport,' 'quite a decent fellow for a German,' a hard-drinking, night-club, knock-about-town, devil-may-care young fellow. And all the time this quiet country house of yours is the centre of half the mischief in England, and the sporting squire the most astute secret-service man in Europe. Genius, my dear Von Bork\u2014genius!\"\n\n\"You flatter me, Baron. But certainly I may claim that my four years in this country have not been unproductive. I've never shown you my little store. Would you mind stepping in for a moment?\"\n\nThe door of the study opened straight on to the terrace. Von Bork pushed it back, and, leading the way, he clicked the switch of the electric light. He then closed the door behind the bulky form which followed him and carefully adjusted the heavy curtain over the latticed window. Only when all these precautions had been taken and tested did he turn his sun burned aquiline face to his guest.\n\n\"Some of my papers have gone,\" said he. \"When my wife and the household left yesterday for Flushing they took the less important with them. I must, of course, claim the protection of the embassy for the others.\"\n\n\"Your name has already been filed as one of the personal suite. There will be no difficulties for you or your baggage. Of course, it is just possible that we may not have to go. England may leave France to her fate. We are sure that there is no binding treaty between them.\"\n\n\"And Belgium?\"\n\n\"Yes, and Belgium, too.\"\n\nVon Bork shook his head. \"I don't see how that could be. There is a definite treaty there. She could never recover from such a humiliation.\"\n\n\"She would at least have peace for the moment.\"\n\n\"But her honour?\"\n\n\"Tut, my dear sir, we live in a utilitarian age. Honour is a mediaeval conception. Besides England is not ready. It is an inconceivable thing, but even our special war tax of fifty million, which one would think made our purpose as clear as if we had advertised it on the front page of the Times, has not roused these people from their slumbers. Here and there one hears a question. It is my business to find an answer. Here and there also there is an irritation. It is my business to soothe it. But I can assure you that so far as the essentials go\u2014the storage of munitions, the preparation for submarine attack, the arrangements for making high explosives\u2014noth\u2014ing is prepared. How, then, can England come in, especially when we have stirred her up such a devil's brew of Irish civil war, window-breaking Fu ries, and God knows what to keep her thoughts at home.\"\n\n\"She must think of her future.\"\n\n\"Ah, that is another matter. I fancy that in the future we have our own very definite plans about England, and that your information will be very vital to us. It is to-day or to-morrow with Mr. John Bull. If he prefers to day we are perfectly ready. If it is to-morrow we shall be more ready still. I should think they would be wiser to fight with allies than without them, but that is their own affair. This week is their week of destiny. But you were speaking of your papers.\" He sat in the armchair with the light shining upon his broad bald head, while he puffed sedately at his cigar.\n\nThe large oak-panelled, book-lined room had a curtain hung in the further corner. When this was drawn it disclosed a large, brass-bound safe. Von Bork detached a small key from his watch chain, and after some considerable manipulation of the lock he swung open the heavy door.\n\n\"Look!\" said he, standing clear, with a wave of his hand.\n\nThe light shone vividly into the opened safe, and the secretary of the embassy gazed with an absorbed interest at the rows of stuffed pigeonholes with which it was furnished. Each pigeonhole had its label, and his eyes as he glanced along them read a long series of such titles as \"Fords,\" \"Harbour-defences,\" \"Aeroplanes,\" \"Ireland,\" \"Egypt,\" \"Portsmouth forts,\" \"The Channel,\" \"Rosythe,\" and a score of others. Each compartment was bristling with papers and plans.\n\n\"Colossal!\" said the secretary. Putting down his cigar he softly clapped his fat hands.\n\n\"And all in four years, Baron. Not such a bad show for the hard-drinking, hard-riding country squire. But the gem of my collection is coming and there is the setting all ready for it.\" He pointed to a space over which \"Naval Signals\" was printed.\n\n\"But you have a good dossier there already.\"\n\n\"Out of date and waste paper. The Admiralty in some way got the alarm and every code has been changed. It was a blow, Baron\u2014the worst setback in my whole campaign. But thanks to my check-book and the good Altamont all will be well to-night.\"\n\nThe Baron looked at his watch and gave a guttural exclamation of disappointment.\n\n\"Well, I really can wait no longer. You can imagine that things are moving at present in Canton Terrace and that we have all to be at our posts. I had hoped to be able to bring news of your great coup. Did Altamont name no hour?\"\n\nVon Bork pushed over a telegram.\n\nWill come without fail to-night and bring new sparking plugs.\n\nALTAMONT.\n\n\"Sparking plugs, eh?\"\n\n\"You see he poses as a motor expert and I keep a full garage. In our code everything likely to come up is named after some spare part. If he talks of a radiator it is a battleship, of an oil pump a cruiser, and so on. Sparking plugs are naval signals.\"\n\n\"From Portsmouth at midday,\" said the secretary, examining the superscription. \"By the way, what do you give him?\"\n\n\"Five hundred pounds for this particular job. Of course he has a salary as well.\"\n\n\"The greedy rogue. They are useful, these traitors, but I grudge them their blood money.\"\n\n\"I grudge Altamont nothing. He is a wonderful worker. If I pay him well, at least he delivers the goods, to use his own phrase. Besides he is not a traitor. I assure you that our most pan-Germanic Junker is a sucking dove in his feelings towards England as compared with a real bitter Irish-American.\"\n\n\"Oh, an Irish-American?\"\n\n\"If you heard him talk you would not doubt it. Sometimes I assure you I can hardly understand him. He seems to have declared war on the King's English as well as on the English king. Must you really go? He may be here any moment.\"\n\n\"No. I'm sorry, but I have already overstayed my time. We shall expect you early to-morrow, and when you get that signal book through the little door on the Duke of York's steps you can put a triumphant finis to your record in England. What! Tokay!\" He indicated a heavily sealed dust-covered bottle which stood with two high glasses upon a salver.\n\n\"May I offer you a glass before your journey?\"\n\n\"No, thanks. But it looks like revelry.\"\n\n\"Altamont has a nice taste in wines, and he took a fancy to my Tokay. He is a touchy fellow and needs humouring in small things. I have to study him, I assure you.\" They had strolled out on to the terrace again, and along it to the further end where at a touch from the Baron's chauffeur the great car shivered and chuckled. \"Those are the lights of Harwich, I suppose,\" said the secretary, pulling on his dust coat. \"How still and peaceful it all seems. There may be other lights within the week, and the English coast a less tranquil place! The heavens, too, may not be quite so peaceful if all that the good Zeppelin promises us comes true. By the way, who is that?\"\n\nOnly one window showed a light behind them; in it there stood a lamp, and beside it, seated at a table, was a dear old ruddy-faced woman in a country cap. She was bending over her knitting and stopping occasionally to stroke a large black cat upon a stool beside her.\n\n\"That is Martha, the only servant I have left.\"\n\nThe secretary chuckled.\n\n\"She might almost personify Britannia,\" said he, \"with her complete self-absorption and general air of comfortable somnolence. Well, au revoir, Von Bork!\" With a final wave of his hand he sprang into the car, and a moment later the two golden cones from the headlights shot forward through the darkness. The secretary lay back in the cushions of the luxurious limousine, with his thoughts so full of the impending European tragedy that he hardly observed that as his car swung round the village street it nearly passed over a little Ford coming in the opposite direction.\n\nVon Bork walked slowly back to the study when the last gleams of the motor lamps had faded into the distance. As he passed he observed that his old housekeeper had put out her lamp and retired. It was a new experience to him, the silence and dankness of his widespread house, for his family and household had been a large one. It was a relief to him, however, to think that they were all in safety and that, but for that one old woman who had lingered in the kitchen, he had the whole place to himself. There was a good deal of tidying up to do inside his study and he set himself to do it until his keen, handsome face was flushed with the heat of the burning papers. A leather valise stood beside his table, and into this he began to pack very neatly and systematically the precious contents of his safe. He had hardly got started with the work, however, when his quick ears caught the sound of a distant car. Instantly he gave an exclamation of satisfaction, strapped up the valise, shut the safe, locked it, and hurried out on to the terrace. He was just in time to see the lights of a small car come to a halt at the gate. A passenger sprang out of it and advanced swiftly towards him, while the chauffeur, a heavily built, elderly man with a gray moustache, settled down like one who resigns himself to a long vigil.\n\n\"Well?\" asked Von Bork eagerly, running forward to meet his visitor.\n\nFor answer the man waved a small brown-paper parcel triumphantly above his head.\n\n\"You can give me the glad hand to-night, mister,\" he cried. \"I'm bringing home the bacon at last.\"\n\n\"The signals?\"\n\n\"Same as I said in my cable. Every last one of them, semaphore, lamp code, Marconi\u2014a copy, mind you, not the original. That was too dangerous. But it's the real goods, and you can lay to that.\" He slapped the German upon the shoulder with a rough familiarity from which the other winced.\n\n\"Come in,\" he said. \"I'm all alone in the house. I was only waiting for this. Of course a copy is better than the original. If an original were missing they would change the whole thing. You think it's all safe about the copy?\"\n\nThe Irish-American had entered the study and stretched his long limbs from the armchair. He was a tall, gaunt man of sixty, with clear-cut features and a small goatee beard which gave him a general resemblance to the caricatures of Uncle Sam. A half-smoked, sodden cigar hung from the corner of his mouth, and as he sat down he struck a match and relit it. \"Making ready for a move?\" he remarked as he looked round him. \"Say, mister,\" he added, as his eyes fell upon the safe from which the curtain was now removed, \"you don't tell me you keep your papers in that?\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Gosh, in a wide-open contraption like that! And they reckon you to be some spy. Why, a Yankee crook would be into that with a can-opener. If I'd known that any letter of mine was goin' to lie loose in a thing like that I'd have been a mug to write to you at all.\"\n\n\"It would puzzle any crook to force that safe,\" Von Bork answered. \"You won't cut that metal with any tool.\"\n\n\"But the lock?\"\n\n\"No, it's a double combination lock. You know what that is?\"\n\n\"Search me,\" said the American.\n\n\"Well, you need a word as well as a set of figures before you can get the lock to work.\" He rose and showed a double-radiating disc round the keyhole. \"This outer one is for the letters, the inner one for the figures.\"\n\n\"Well, well, that's fine.\"\n\n\"So it's not quite as simple as you thought. It was four years ago that I had it made, and what do you think I chose for the word and figures?\"\n\n\"It's beyond me.\"\n\n\"Well, I chose August for the word, and 1914 for the figures, and here we are.\"\n\nThe American's face showed his surprise and admiration.\n\n\"My, but that was smart! You had it down to a fine thing.\"\n\n\"Yes, a few of us even then could have guessed the date. Here it is, and I'm shutting down to-morrow morning.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess you'll have to fix me up also. I'm not staying in this gol darned country all on my lonesome. In a week or less, from what I see, John Bull will be on his hind legs and fair ramping. I'd rather watch him from over the water.\"\n\n\"But you're an American citizen?\"\n\n\"Well, so was Jack James an American citizen, but he's doing time in Portland all the same. It cuts no ice with a British copper to tell him you're an American citizen. 'It's British law and order over here,' says he. By the way, mister, talking of Jack James, it seems to me you don't do much to cover your men.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Von Bork asked sharply.\n\n\"Well, you are their employer, ain't you? It's up to you to see that they don't fall down. But they do fall down, and when did you ever pick them up? There's James\u2014\"\n\n\"It was James's own fault. You know that yourself. He was too self willed for the job.\"\n\n\"James was a bonehead\u2014I give you that. Then there was Hollis.\"\n\n\"The man was mad.\"\n\n\"Well, he went a bit woozy towards the end. It's enough to make a man bughouse when he has to play a part from morning to night with a hundred guys all ready to set the coppers wise to him. But now there is Steiner\u2014\"\n\nVon Bork started violently, and his ruddy face turned a shade paler.\n\n\"What about Steiner?\"\n\n\"Well, they've got him, that's all. They raided his store last night, and he and his papers are all in Portsmouth jail. You'll go off and he, poor devil, will have to stand the racket, and lucky if he gets off with his life. That's why I want to get over the water as soon as you do.\"\n\nVon Bork was a strong, self-contained man, but it was easy to see that the news had shaken him.\n\n\"How could they have got on to Steiner?\" he muttered. \"That's the worst blow yet.\"\n\n\"Well, you nearly had a worse one, for I believe they are not far off me.\"\n\n\"You don't mean that!\"\n\n\"Sure thing. My landlady down Fratton way had some inquiries, and when I heard of it I guessed it was time for me to hustle. But what I want to know, mister, is how the coppers know these things? Steiner is the fifth man you've lost since I signed on with you, and I know the name of the sixth if I don't get a move on. How do you explain it, and ain't you ashamed to see your men go down like this?\"\n\nVon Bork flushed crimson.\n\n\"How dare you speak in such a way!\"\n\n\"If I didn't dare things, mister, I wouldn't be in your service. But I'll tell you straight what is in my mind. I've heard that with you German politicians when an agent has done his work you are not sorry to see him put away.\"\n\nVon Bork sprang to his feet.\n\n\"Do you dare to suggest that I have given away my own agents!\"\n\n\"I don't stand for that, mister, but there's a stool pigeon or a cross somewhere, and it's up to you to find out where it is. Anyhow I am taking no more chances. It's me for little Holland, and the sooner the better.\"\n\nVon Bork had mastered his anger.\n\n\"We have been allies too long to quarrel now at the very hour of victory,\" he said. \"You've done splendid work and taken risks, and I can't forget it. By all means go to Holland, and you can get a boat from Rotterdam to New York. No other line will be safe a week from now. I'll take that book and pack it with the rest.\"\n\nThe American held the small parcel in his hand, but made no motion to give it up.\n\n\"What about the dough?\" he asked.\n\n\"The what?\"\n\n\"The boodle. The reward. The \u00a3500. The gunner turned damned nasty at the last, and I had to square him with an extra hundred dollars or it would have been nitsky for you and me. 'Nothin' doin'!' says he, and he meant it, too, but the last hundred did it. It's cost me two hundred pound from first to last, so it isn't likely I'd give it up without gettin' my wad.\"\n\nVon Bork smiled with some bitterness. \"You don't seem to have a very high opinion of my honour,\" said he, \"you want the money before you give up the book.\"\n\n\"Well, mister, it is a business proposition.\"\n\n\"All right. Have your way.\" He sat down at the table and scribbled a check, which he tore from the book, but he refrained from handing it to his companion. \"After all, since we are to be on such terms, Mr. Altamont,\" said he, \"I don't see why I should trust you any more than you trust me. Do you understand?\" he added, looking back over his shoulder at the American. \"There's the check upon the table. I claim the right to examine that parcel before you pick the money up.\"\n\nThe American passed it over without a word. Von Bork undid a winding of string and two wrappers of paper. Then he sat gazing for a moment in silent amazement at a small blue book which lay before him. Across the cover was printed in golden letters Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. Only for one instant did the master spy glare at this strangely irrelevant inscription. The next he was gripped at the back of his neck by a grasp of iron, and a chloroformed sponge was held in front of his writhing face.\n\n\"Another glass, Watson!\" said Mr. Sherlock Holmes as he extended the bottle of Imperial Tokay.\n\nThe thickset chauffeur, who had seated himself by the table, pushed forward his glass with some eagerness.\n\n\"It is a good wine, Holmes.\"\n\n\"A remarkable wine, Watson. Our friend upon the sofa has assured me that it is from Franz Josef's special cellar at the Schoenbrunn Palace. Might I trouble you to open the window, for chloroform vapour does not help the palate.\"\n\nThe safe was ajar, and Holmes standing in front of it was removing dossier after dossier, swiftly examining each, and then packing it neatly in Von Bork's valise. The German lay upon the sofa sleeping stertorously with a strap round his upper arms and another round his legs.\n\n\"We need not hurry ourselves, Watson. We are safe from interruption. Would you mind touching the bell? There is no one in the house except old Martha, who has played her part to admiration. I got her the situation here when first I took the matter up. Ah, Martha, you will be glad to hear that all is well.\"\n\nThe pleasant old lady had appeared in the doorway. She curtseyed with a smile to Mr. Holmes, but glanced with some apprehension at the figure upon the sofa.\n\n\"It is all right, Martha. He has not been hurt at all.\"\n\n\"I am glad of that, Mr. Holmes. According to his lights he has been a kind master. He wanted me to go with his wife to Germany yesterday, but that would hardly have suited your plans, would it, sir?\"\n\n\"No, indeed, Martha. So long as you were here I was easy in my mind. We waited some time for your signal to-night.\"\n\n\"It was the secretary, sir.\"\n\n\"I know. His car passed ours.\"\n\n\"I thought he would never go. I knew that it would not suit your plans, sir, to find him here.\"\n\n\"No, indeed. Well, it only meant that we waited half an hour or so until I saw your lamp go out and knew that the coast was clear. You can report to me to-morrow in London, Martha, at Claridge's Hotel.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir.\"\n\n\"I suppose you have everything ready to leave.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. He posted seven letters to-day. I have the addresses as usual.\"\n\n\"Very good, Martha. I will look into them to-morrow. Good-night. These papers,\" he continued as the old lady vanished, \"are not of very great importance, for, of course, the information which they represent has been sent off long ago to the German government. These are the originals which could not safely be got out of the country.\"\n\n\"Then they are of no use.\"\n\n\"I should not go so far as to say that, Watson. They will at least show our people what is known and what is not. I may say that a good many of these papers have come through me, and I need not add are thoroughly untrustworthy. It would brighten my declining years to see a German cruiser navigating the Solent according to the mine-field plans which I have furnished. But you, Watson\"\u2014he stopped his work and took his old friend by the shoulders\u2014\"I've hardly seen you in the light yet. How have the years used you? You look the same blithe boy as ever.\"\n\n\"I feel twenty years younger, Holmes. I have seldom felt so happy as when I got your wire asking me to meet you at Harwich with the car. But you, Holmes\u2014you have changed very little\u2014save for that horrible goatee.\"\n\n\"These are the sacrifices one makes for one's country, Watson,\" said Holmes, pulling at his little tuft. \"To-morrow it will be but a dreadful memory. With my hair cut and a few other superficial changes I shall no doubt reappear at Claridge's to-morrow as I was before this American stunt\u2014I beg your pardon, Watson, my well of English seems to be permanently defiled\u2014before this American job came my way.\"\n\n\"But you have retired, Holmes. We heard of you as living the life of a hermit among your bees and your books in a small farm upon the South Downs.\"\n\n\"Exactly, Watson. Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years!\" He picked up the volume from the table and read out the whole title, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. \"Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.\"\n\n\"But how did you get to work again?\"\n\n\"Ah, I have often marvelled at it myself. The Foreign Minister alone I could have withstood, but when the Premier also deigned to visit my humble roof\u2014! The fact is, Watson, that this gentleman upon the sofa was a bit too good for our people. He was in a class by himself. Things were going wrong, and no one could understand why they were going wrong. Agents were suspected or even caught, but there was evidence of some strong and secret central force. It was absolutely necessary to expose it. Strong pressure was brought upon me to look into the matter. It has cost me two years, Watson, but they have not been devoid of excitement. When I say that I started my pilgrimage at Chicago, graduated in an Irish secret society at Buffalo, gave serious trouble to the constabulary at Skibbareen, and so eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realize that the matter was complex. Since then I have been honoured by his confidence, which has not prevented most of his plans going subtly wrong and five of his best agents being in prison. I watched them, Watson, and I picked them as they ripened. Well, sir, I hope that you are none the worse!\"\n\nThe last remark was addressed to Von Bork himself, who after much gasping and blinking had lain quietly listening to Holmes's statement. He broke out now into a furious stream of German invective, his face convulsed with passion. Holmes continued his swift investigation of documents while his prisoner cursed and swore.\n\n\"Though unmusical, German is the most expressive of all languages,\" he observed when Von Bork had stopped from pure exhaustion. \"Hullo! Hullo!\" he added as he looked hard at the corner of a tracing before putting it in the box. \"This should put another bird in the cage. I had no idea that the paymaster was such a rascal, though I have long had an eye upon him. Mister Von Bork, you have a great deal to answer for.\"\n\nThe prisoner had raised himself with some difficulty upon the sofa and was staring with a strange mixture of amazement and hatred at his captor.\n\n\"I shall get level with you, Altamont,\" he said, speaking with slow deliberation. \"If it takes me all my life I shall get level with you!\"\n\n\"The old sweet song,\" said Holmes. \"How often have I heard it in days gone by. It was a favourite ditty of the late lamented Professor Moriarty. Colonel Sebastian Moran has also been known to warble it. And yet I live and keep bees upon the South Downs.\"\n\n\"Curse you, you double traitor!\" cried the German, straining against his bonds and glaring murder from his furious eyes.\n\n\"No, no, it is not so bad as that,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"As my speech surely shows you, Mr. Altamont of Chicago had no existence in fact. I used him and he is gone.\"\n\n\"Then who are you?\"\n\n\"It is really immaterial who I am, but since the matter seems to interest you, Mr. Von Bork, I may say that this is not my first acquaintance with the members of your family. I have done a good deal of business in Germany in the past and my name is probably familiar to you.\"\n\n\"I would wish to know it,\" said the Prussian grimly.\n\n\"It was I who brought about the separation between Irene Adler and the late King of Bohemia when your cousin Heinrich was the Imperial Envoy. It was I also who saved from murder, by the Nihilist Klopman, Count Von und Zu Grafenstein, who was your mother's elder brother. It was I\u2014\"\n\nVon Bork sat up in amazement.\n\n\"There is only one man,\" he cried.\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Holmes.\n\nVon Bork groaned and sank back on the sofa. \"And most of that information came through you,\" he cried. \"What is it worth? What have I done? It is my ruin forever!\"\n\n\"It is certainly a little untrustworthy,\" said Holmes. \"It will require some checking and you have little time to check it. Your admiral may find the new guns rather larger than he expects, and the cruisers perhaps a trifle faster.\"\n\nVon Bork clutched at his own throat in despair.\n\n\"There are a good many other points of detail which will, no doubt, come to light in good time. But you have one quality which is very rare in a German, Mr. Von Bork: you are a sportsman and you will bear me no ill-will when you realize that you, who have outwitted so many other people, have at last been outwitted yourself. After all, you have done your best for your country, and I have done my best for mine, and what could be more natural? Besides,\" he added, not unkindly, as he laid his hand upon the shoulder of the prostrate man, \"it is better than to fall before some more ignoble foe. These papers are now ready, Watson. If you will help me with our prisoner, I think that we may get started for London at once.\"\n\nIt was no easy task to move Von Bork, for he was a strong and a desperate man. Finally, holding either arm, the two friends walked him very slowly down the garden walk which he had trod with such proud confidence when he received the congratulations of the famous diplomatist only a few hours before. After a short, final struggle he was hoisted, still bound hand and foot, into the spare seat of the little car. His precious valise was wedged in beside him.\n\n\"I trust that you are as comfortable as circumstances permit,\" said Holmes when the final arrangements were made. \"Should I be guilty of a liberty if I lit a cigar and placed it between your lips?\"\n\nBut all amenities were wasted upon the angry German.\n\n\"I suppose you realize, Mr. Sherlock Holmes,\" said he, \"that if your government bears you out in this treatment it becomes an act of war.\"\n\n\"What about your government and all this treatment?\" said Holmes, tapping the valise.\n\n\"You are a private individual. You have no warrant for my arrest. The whole proceeding is absolutely illegal and outrageous.\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Kidnapping a German subject.\"\n\n\"And stealing his private papers.\"\n\n\"Well, you realize your position, you and your accomplice here. If I were to shout for help as we pass through the village\u2014\"\n\n\"My dear sir, if you did anything so foolish you would probably enlarge the two limited titles of our village inns by giving us 'The Dangling Prussian' as a signpost. The Englishman is a patient creature, but at present his temper is a little inflamed, and it would be as well not to try him too far. No, Mr. Von Bork, you will go with us in a quiet, sensible fashion to Scotland Yard, whence you can send for your friend, Baron Von Herling, and see if even now you may not fill that place which he has reserved for you in the ambassadorial suite. As to you, Watson, you are joining us with your old service, as I understand, so London won't be out of your way. Stand with me here upon the terrace, for it may be the last quiet talk that we shall ever have.\"\n\nThe two friends chatted in intimate converse for a few minutes, recalling once again the days of the past, while their prisoner vainly wriggled to undo the bonds that held him. As they turned to the car Holmes pointed back to the moonlit sea and shook a thoughtful head.\n\n\"There's an east wind coming, Watson.\"\n\n\"I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.\"\n\n\"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. Start her up, Watson, for it's time that we were on our way. I have a check for five hundred pounds which should be cashed early, for the drawer is quite capable of stopping it if he can.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE CASE BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES", + "text": "[ PREFACE ]\n\n[ The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes ]\n\nI fear that Mr. Sherlock Holmes may become like one of those popular tenors who, having outlived their time, are still tempted to make repeated farewell bows to their indulgent audiences. This must cease and he must go the way of all flesh, material or imaginary. One likes to think that there is some fantastic limbo for the children of imagination, some strange, impossible place where the beaux of Fielding may still make love to the belles of Richardson, where Scott's heroes still may strut, Dickens's delightful Cockneys still raise a laugh, and Thackeray's worldlings continue to carry on their reprehensible careers. Perhaps in some humble corner of such a Valhalla, Sherlock and his Watson may for a time find a place, while some more astute sleuth with some even less astute comrade may fill the stage which they have vacated.\n\nHis career has been a long one\u2014though it is possible to exaggerate it; decrepit gentlemen who approach me and declare that his adventures formed the reading of their boyhood do not meet the response from me which they seem to expect. One is not anxious to have one's personal dates handled so unkindly. As a matter of cold fact, Holmes made his debut in A Study in Scarlet and in The Sign of Four, two small booklets which appeared between 1887 and 1889. It was in 1891 that \"A Scandal in Bohemia, \" the first of the long series of short stories, appeared in The Strand Magazine. The public seemed appreciative and desirous of more, so that from that date, thirty-nine years ago, they have been produced in a broken series which now contains no fewer than fifty-six stories, republished in The Adventures, The Memoirs, The Return, and His Last Bow, and there remain these twelve published during the last few years which are here produced under the title of The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes. He began his adventures in the very heart of the later Victorian era, carried it through the all-too-short reign of Edward, and has managed to hold his own little niche even in these feverish days. Thus it would be true to say that those who first read of him, as young men, have lived to see their own grown-up children following the same adventures in the same magazine. It is a striking example of the patience and loyalty of the British public.\n\nI had fully determined at the conclusion of The Memoirs to bring Holmes to an end, as I felt that my literary energies should not be directed too much into one channel. That pale, clear-cut face and loose-limbed figure were taking up an undue share of my imagination. I did the deed, but fortunately no coroner had pronounced upon the remains, and so, after a long interval, it was not difficult for me to respond to the flattering demand and to explain my rash act away. I have never regretted it, for I have not in actual practice found that these lighter sketches have prevented me from exploring and finding my limitations in such varied branches of literature as history, poetry, historical novels, psychic research, and the drama. Had Holmes never existed I could not have done more, though he may perhaps have stood a little in the way of the recognition of my more serious literary work.\n\nAnd so, reader, farewell to Sherlock Holmes! I thank you for your past constancy, and can but hope that some return has been made in the shape of that distraction from the worries of life and stimulating change of thought which can only be found in the fairy kingdom of romance.\n\nARTHUR CONAN DOYLE." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE ILLUSTRIOUS CLIENT", + "text": "It can't hurt now,\" was Mr. Sherlock Holmes's comment when, for the tenth time in as many years, I asked his leave to reveal the following narrative. So it was that at last I obtained permission to put on record what was, in some ways, the supreme moment of my friend's career.\n\nBoth Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else. On the upper floor of the Northumberland Avenue establishment there is an isolated corner where two couches he side by side, and it was on these that we lay upon September 3, 1902, the day when my narrative begins. I had asked him whether anything was stirring, and for answer he had shot his long, thin, nervous arm out of the sheets which enveloped him and had drawn an envelope from the inside pocket of the coat which hung beside him.\n\n\"It may be some fussy, self-important fool; it may be a matter of life or death,\" said he as he handed me the note. \"I know no more than this message tells me.\"\n\nIt was from the Carlton Club and dated the evening before. This is what I read:\n\nSir James Damery presents his compliments to Mr. Sherlock Holmes and will call upon him at 4:30 to-morrow. Sir James begs to say that the matter upon which he desires to consult Mr. Holmes is very delicate and also very important. He trusts, therefore, that Mr. Holmes will make every effort to grant this interview, and that he will confirm it over the telephone to the Carlton Club.\n\n\"I need not say that I have confirmed it, Watson,\" said Holmes as I returned the paper. \"Do you know anything of this man Damery?\"\n\n\"Only that this name is a household word in society.\"\n\n\"Well, I can tell you a little more than that. He has rather a reputation for arranging delicate matters which are to be kept out of the papers. You may remember his negotiations with Sir George Lewis over the Ham merford Will case. He is a man of the world with a natural turn for diplomacy. I am bound, therefore, to hope that it is not a false scent and that he has some real need for our assistance.\"\n\n\"Our?\"\n\n\"Well, if you will be so good, Watson.\"\n\n\"I shall be honoured.\"\n\n\"Then you have the hour\u20144:30. Until then we can put the matter out of our heads.\"\n\nI was living in my own rooms in Queen Anne Street at the time, but I was round at Baker Street before the time named. Sharp to the half-hour, Colonel Sir James Damery was announced. It is hardly necessary to describe him, for many will remember that large, bluff, honest personality, that broad, clean-shaven face, and, above all, that pleasant, mellow voice. Frankness shone from his gray Irish eyes, and good humour played round his mobile, smiling lips. His lucent top-hat, his dark frock-coat, indeed, every detail, from the pearl pin in the black satin cravat to the lavender spats over the varnished shoes, spoke of the meticulous care in dress for which he was famous. The big, masterful aristocrat dominated the little room.\n\n\"Of course, I was prepared to find Dr. Watson,\" he remarked with a courteous bow. \"His collaboration may be very necessary, for we are dealing on this occasion, Mr. Holmes, with a man to whom violence is familiar and who will, literally, stick at nothing. I should say that there is no more dangerous man in Europe.\"\n\n\"I have had several opponents to whom that flattering term has been applied,\" said Holmes with a smile. \"Don't you smoke? Then you will excuse me if I light my pipe. If your man is more dangerous than the late Professor Moriarty, or than the living Colonel Sebastian Moran, then he is indeed worth meeting. May I ask his name?\"\n\n\"Have you ever heard of Baron Gruner?\"\n\n\"You mean the Austrian murderer?\"\n\nColonel Damery threw up his kid-gloved hands with a laugh. \"There is no getting past you, Mr. Holmes! Wonderful! So you have already sized him up as a murderer?\"\n\n\"It is my business to follow the details of Continental crime. Who could possibly have read what happened at Prague and have any doubts as to the man's guilt! It was a purely technical legal point and the suspicious death of a witness that saved him! I am as sure that he killed his wife when the so-called 'accident' happened in the Splugen Pass as if I had seen him do it. I knew, also, that he had come to England and had a presentiment that sooner or later he would find me some work to do. Well, what has Baron Gruner been up to? I presume it is not this old tragedy which has come up again?\"\n\n\"No, it is more serious than that. To revenge crime is important, but to prevent it is more so. It is a terrible thing, Mr. Holmes, to see a dreadful event, an atrocious situation, preparing itself before your eyes, to clearly understand whither it will lead and yet to be utterly unable to avert it. Can a human being be placed in a more trying position?\"\n\n\"Perhaps not.\"\n\n\"Then you will sympathize with the client in whose interests I am acting.\"\n\n\"I did not understand that you were merely an intermediary. Who is the principal?\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, I must beg you not to press that question. It is important that I should be able to assure him that his honoured name has been in no way dragged into the matter. His motives are, to the last degree, honourable and chivalrous, but he prefers to remain unknown. I need not say that your fees will be assured and that you will be given a perfectly free hand. Surely the actual name of your client is immaterial?\"\n\n\"I am sorry,\" said Holmes. \"I am accustomed to have mystery at one end of my cases, but to have it at both ends is too confusing. I fear, Sir James, that I must decline to act.\"\n\nOur visitor was greatly disturbed. His large, sensitive face was darkened with emotion and disappointment.\n\n\"You hardly realize the effect of your own action, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"You place me in a most serious dilemma, for I am perfectly certain that you would be proud to take over the case if I could give you the facts, and yet a promise forbids me from revealing them all. May I, at least, lay all that I can before you?\"\n\n\"By all means, so long as it is understood that I commit myself to nothing.\"\n\n\"That is understood. In the first place, you have no doubt heard of General de Merville?\"\n\n\"De Merville of Khyber fame? Yes, I have heard of him.\"\n\n\"He has a daughter, Violet de Merville, young, rich, beautiful, accomplished, a wonder-woman in every way. It is this daughter, this lovely, innocent girl, whom we are endeavouring to save from the clutches of a fiend.\"\n\n\"Baron Gruner has some hold over her, then?\"\n\n\"The strongest of all holds where a woman is concerned\u2014the hold of love. The fellow is, as you may have heard, extraordinarily handsome, with a most fascinating manner, a gentle voice, and that air of romance and mystery which means so much to a woman. He is said to have the whole sex at his mercy and to have made ample use of the fact.\"\n\n\"But how came such a man to meet a lady of the standing of Miss Violet de Merville?\"\n\n\"It was on a Mediterranean yachting voyage. The company, though select, paid their own passages. No doubt the promoters hardly realized the Baron's true character until it was too late. The villain attached himself to the lady, and with such effect that he has completely and absolutely won her heart. To say that she loves him hardly expresses it. She dotes upon him; she is obsessed by him. Outside of him there is nothing on earth. She will not hear one word against him. Everything has been done to cure her of her madness, but in vain. To sum up, she proposes to marry him next month. As she is of age and has a will of iron, it is hard to know how to prevent her.\"\n\n\"Does she know about the Austrian episode?\"\n\n\"The cunning devil has told her every unsavoury public scandal of his past life, but always in such a way as to make himself out to be an innocent martyr. She absolutely accepts his version and will listen to no other.\"\n\n\"Dear me! But surely you have inadvertently let out the name of your client? It is no doubt General de Merville.\"\n\nOur visitor fidgeted in his chair.\n\n\"I could deceive you by saying so, Mr. Holmes, but it would not be true. De Merville is a broken man. The strong soldier has been utterly demoralized by this incident. He has lost the nerve which never failed him on the battlefield and has become a weak, doddering old man, utterly incapable of contending with a brilliant, forceful rascal like this Austrian. My client, however, is an old friend, one who has known the General intimately for many years and taken a paternal interest in this young girl since she wore short frocks. He cannot see this tragedy consummated without some attempt to stop it. There is nothing in which Scotland Yard can act. It was his own suggestion that you should be called in, but it was, as I have said, on the express stipulation that he should not be personally involved in the matter. I have no doubt, Mr. Holmes, with your great powers you could easily trace my client back through me, but I must ask you, as a point of honour, to refrain from doing so, and not to break in upon his incognito.\"\n\nHolmes gave a whimsical smile.\n\n\"I think I may safely promise that,\" said he. \"I may add that your problem interests me, and that I shall be prepared to look into it. How shall I keep in touch with you?\"\n\n\"The Carlton Club will find me. But in case of emergency, there is a private telephone call, 'XX.31.'\"\n\nHolmes noted it down and sat, still smiling, with the open memorandum-book upon his knee.\n\n\"The Baron's present address, please?\"\n\n\"Vernon Lodge, near Kingston. It is a large house. He has been fortunate in some rather shady speculations and is a rich man, which naturally makes him a more dangerous antagonist.\"\n\n\"Is he at home at present?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Apart from what you have told me, can you give me any further information about the man?\"\n\n\"He has expensive tastes. He is a horse fancier. For a short time he played polo at Hurlingham, but then this Prague affair got noised about and he had to leave. He collects books and pictures. He is a man with a considerable artistic side to his nature. He is, I believe, a recognized authority upon Chinese pottery and has written a book upon the subject.\"\n\n\"A complex mind,\" said Holmes. \"All great criminals have that. My old friend Charlie Peace was a violin virtuoso. Wainwright was no mean artist. I could quote many more. Well, Sir James, you will inform your client that I am turning my mind upon Baron Gruner. I can say no more. I have some sources of information of my own, and I dare say we may find some means of opening the matter up.\"\n\nWhen our visitor had left us Holmes sat so long in deep thought that it seemed to me that he had forgotten my presence. At last, however, he came briskly back to earth.\n\n\"Well, Watson, any views?\" he asked.\n\n\"I should think you had better see the young lady herself.\"\n\n\"My dear Watson, if her poor old broken father cannot move her, how shall I, a stranger, prevail? And yet there is something in the suggestion if all else fails. But I think we must begin from a different angle. I rather fancy that Shinwell Johnson might be a help.\"\n\nI have not had occasion to mention Shinwell Johnson in these memoirs because I have seldom drawn my cases from the latter phases of my friend's career. During the first years of the century he became a valuable assistant. Johnson, I grieve to say, made his name first as a very dangerous villain and served two terms at Parkhurst. Finally he repented and allied himself to Holmes, acting as his agent in the huge criminal underworld of London and obtaining information which often proved to be of vital importance. Had Johnson been a \"nark\" of the police he would soon have been exposed, but as he dealt with cases which never came directly into the courts, his activities were never realized by his companions. With the glamour of his two convictions upon him, he had the entr\u00e9e of every night-club, doss house, and gambling-den in the town, and his quick observation and active brain made him an ideal agent for gaining information. It was to him that Sherlock Holmes now proposed to turn.\n\nIt was not possible for me to follow the immediate steps taken by my friend, for I had some pressing professional business of my own, but I met him by appointment that evening at Simpson's, where, sitting at a small table in the front window and looking down at the rushing stream of life in the Strand, he told me something of what had passed.\n\n\"Johnson is on the prowl,\" said he. \"He may pick up some garbage in the darker recesses of the underworld, for it is down there, amid the black roots of crime, that we must hunt for this man's secrets.\"\n\n\"But if the lady will not accept what is already known, why should any fresh discovery of yours turn her from her purpose?\"\n\n\"Who knows, Watson? Woman's heart and mind are insoluble puzzles to the male. Murder might be condoned or explained, and yet some smaller offence might rankle. Baron Gruner remarked to me\u2014\"\n\n\"He remarked to you!\"\n\n\"Oh, to be sure, I had not told you of my plans. Well, Watson, I love to come to close grips with my man. I like to meet him eye to eye and read for myself the stuff that he is made of. When I had given Johnson his in structions I took a cab out to Kingston and found the Baron in a most affable mood.\"\n\n\"Did he recognize you?\"\n\n\"There was no difficulty about that, for I simply sent in my card. He is an excellent antagonist, cool as ice, silky voiced and soothing as one of your fashionable consultants, and poisonous as a cobra. He has breeding in him\u2014a real aristocrat of crime, with a superficial suggestion of afternoon tea and all the cruelty of the grave behind it. Yes, I am glad to have had my attention called to Baron Adelbert Gruner.\"\n\n\"You say he was affable?\"\n\n\"A purring cat who thinks he sees prospective mice. Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls. His greeting was characteristic. 'I rather thought I should see you sooner or later, Mr. Holmes,' said he. 'You have been engaged, no doubt by General de Merville, to endeavour to stop my marriage with his daughter, Violet. That is so, is it not?'\n\n\"I acquiesced.\n\n\"'My dear man,' said he, 'you will only ruin your own well-deserved reputation. It is not a case in which you can possibly succeed. You will have barren work, to say nothing of incurring some danger. Let me very strongly advise you to draw off at once.'\n\n\"'It is curious,' I answered, 'but that was the very advice which I had intended to give you. I have a respect for your brains, Baron, and the little which I have seen of your personality has not lessened it. Let me put it to you as man to man. No one wants to rake up your past and make you unduly uncomfortable. It is over, and you are now in smooth waters, but if you persist in this marriage you will raise up a swarm of powerful enemies who will never leave you alone until they have made England too hot to hold you. Is the game worth it? Surely you would be wiser if you left the lady alone. It would not be pleasant for you if these facts of your past were brought to her notice.'\n\n\"The Baron has little waxed tips of hair under his nose, like the short antenn\u00e6 of an insect. These quivered with amusement as he listened, and he finally broke into a gentle chuckle.\n\n\"'Excuse my amusement, Mr. Holmes,' said he, 'but it is really funny to see you trying to play a hand with no cards in it. I don't think anyone could do it better, but it is rather pathetic, all the same. Not a colour card there. Mr. Holmes, nothing but the smallest of the small.'\n\n\"'So you think.'\n\n\"'So I know. Let me make the thing clear to you, for my own hand is so strong that I can afford to show it. I have been fortunate enough to win the entire affection of this lady. This was given to me in spite of the fact that I told her very clearly of all the unhappy incidents in my past life. I also told her that certain wicked and designing persons\u2014I hope you rec ognize yourself\u2014would come to her and tell her these things, and I warned her how to treat them. You have heard of post-hypnotic suggestion, Mr. Holmes? Well, you will see how it works, for a man of personality can use hypnotism without any vulgar passes or tomfoolery. So she is ready for you and, I have no doubt, would give you an appointment, for she is quite amenable to her father's will\u2014save only in the one little matter.'\n\n\"Well, Watson, there seemed to be no more to say, so I took my leave with as much cold dignity as I could summon, but, as I had my hand on the door-handle, he stopped me.\n\n\"'By the way, Mr. Holmes,' said he, 'did you know Le Brun, the French agent?'\n\n\"'Yes,' said I.\n\n\"'Do you know what befell him?'\n\n\"'I heard that he was beaten by some Apaches in the Montmartre district and crippled for life.'\n\n\"'Quite true, Mr. Holmes. By a curious coincidence he had been inquiring into my affairs only a week before. Don't do it, Mr. Holmes; it's not a lucky thing to do. Several have found that out. My last word to you is, go your own way and let me go mine. Good-bye!'\n\n\"So there you are, Watson. You are up to date now.\"\n\n\"The fellow seems dangerous.\"\n\n\"Mighty dangerous. I disregard the blusterer, but this is the sort of man who says rather less than he means.\"\n\n\"Must you interfere? Does it really matter if he marries the girl?\"\n\n\"Considering that he undoubtedly murdered his last wife, I should say it mattered very much. Besides, the client! Well, well, we need not discuss that. When you have finished your coffee you had best come home with me, for the blithe Shinwell will be there with his report.\"\n\nWe found him sure enough, a huge, coarse, red-faced, scorbutic man, with a pair of vivid black eyes which were the only external sign of the very cunning mind within. It seems that he had dived down into what was peculiarly his kingdom, and beside him on the settee was a brand which he had brought up in the shape of a slim, flame-like young woman with a pale, intense face, youthful, and yet so worn with sin and sorrow that one read the terrible years which had left their leprous mark upon her.\n\n\"This is Miss Kitty Winter,\" said Shinwell Johnson, waving his fat hand as an introduction. \"What she don't know\u2014well, there, she'll speak for herself. Put my hand right on her, Mr. Holmes, within an hour of your message.\"\n\n\"I'm easy to find,\" said the young woman. \"Hell, London gets me every time. Same address for Porky Shinwell. We're old mates, Porky, you and I. But, by cripes! there is another who ought to be down in a lower hell than we if there was any justice in the world! That is the man you are after, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\nHolmes smiled. \"I gather we have your good wishes, Miss Winter,\"\n\n\"If I can help to put him where he belongs, I'm yours to the rattle.\" said our visitor with fierce energy. There was an intensity of hatred in her white, set face and her blazing eyes such as woman seldom and man never can attain. \"You needn't go into my past, Mr. Holmes. That's neither here nor there. But what I am Adelbert Gruner made me. If I could pull him down!\" She clutched frantically with her hands into the air. \"Oh, if I could only pull him into the pit where he has pushed so many!\"\n\n\"You know how the matter stands?\"\n\n\"Porky Shinwell has been telling me. He's after some other poor fool and wants to marry her this time. You want to stop it. Well, you surely know enough about this devil to prevent any decent girl in her senses wanting to be in the same parish with him.\"\n\n\"She is not in her senses. She is madly in love. She has been told all about him. She cares nothing.\"\n\n\"Told about the murder?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"My Lord, she must have a nerve!\"\n\n\"She puts them all down as slanders.\"\n\n\"Couldn't you lay proofs before her silly eyes?\"\n\n\"Well, can you help us do so?\"\n\n\"Ain'tIaproof myself? If I stood before her and told her how he used me\u2014\"\n\n\"Would you do this?\"\n\n\"Would I? Would I not!\"\n\n\"Well, it might be worth trying. But he has told her most of his sins and had pardon from her, and I understand she will not reopen the question.\"\n\n\"I'll lay he didn't tell her all,\" said Miss Winter. \"I caught a glimpse of one or two murders besides the one that made such a fuss. He would speak of someone in his velvet way and then look at me with a steady eye and say: 'He died within a month.' It wasn't hot air, either. But I took little notice\u2014you see, I loved him myself at that time. Whatever he did went with me, same as with this poor fool! There was just one thing that shook me. Yes, by cripes! if it had not been for his poisonous, lying tongue that explains and soothes, I'd have left him that very night. It's a book he has\u2014a brown leather book with a lock, and his arms in gold on the outside. I think he was a bit drunk that night, or he would not have shown it to me.\"\n\n\"What was it, then?\"\n\n\"I tell you, Mr. Holmes, this man collects women, and takes a pride in his collection, as some men collect moths or butterflies. He had it all in that book. Snapshot photographs, names, details, everything about them. It was a beastly book\u2014a book no man, even if he had come from the gutter, could have put together. But it was Adelbert Gruner's book all the same. 'Souls I have ruined.' He could have put that on the outside if he had been so minded. However, that's neither here nor there, for the book would not serve you, and, if it would, you can't get it.\"\n\n\"Where is it?\"\n\n\"How can I tell you where it is now? It's more than a year since I left him. I know where he kept it then. He's a precise, tidy cat of a man in many of his ways, so maybe it is still in the pigeon-hole of the old bureau in the inner study. Do you know his house?\"\n\n\"I've been in the study,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Have you, though? You haven't been slow on the job if you only started this morning. Maybe dear Adelbert has met his match this time. The outer study is the one with the Chinese crockery in it\u2014big glass cupboard between the windows. Then behind his desk is the door that leads to the inner study\u2014a small room where he keeps papers and things.\"\n\n\"Is he not afraid of burglars?\"\n\n\"Adelbert is no coward. His worst enemy couldn't say that of him. He can look after himself. There's a burglar alarm at night. Besides, what is there for a burglar\u2014unless they got away with all this fancy crockery?\"\n\n\"No good,\" said Shinwell Johnson with the decided voice of the expert. \"No fence wants stuff of that sort that you can neither melt nor sell.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" said Holmes. \"Well, now, Miss Winter, if you would call here to-morrow evening at five, I would consider in the meanwhile whether your suggestion of seeing this lady personally may not be arranged. I am exceedingly obliged to you for your cooperation. I need not say that my clients will consider liberally\u2014\"\n\n\"None of that, Mr. Holmes,\" cried the young woman. \"I am not out for money. Let me see this man in the mud, and I've got all I've worked for\u2014in the mud with my foot on his cursed face. That's my price. I'm with you to-morrow or any other day so long as you are on his track. Porky here can tell you always where to find me.\"\n\nI did not see Holmes again until the following evening when we dined once more at our Strand restaurant. He shrugged his shoulders when I asked him what luck he had had in his interview. Then he told the story, which I would repeat in this way. His hard, dry statement needs some little editing to soften it into the terms of real life.\n\n\"There was no difficulty at all about the appointment.\" said Holmes, \"for the girl glories in showing abject filial obedience in all secondary things in an attempt to atone for her flagrant breach of it in her engagement. The General 'phoned that all was ready, and the fiery Miss W. turned up according to schedule, so that at half-past five a cab deposited us outside 104 Berkeley Square, where the old soldier resides\u2014one of those awful gray London castles which would make a church seem frivolous. A footman showed us into a great yellow-curtained drawing-room, and there was the lady awaiting us, demure, pale, self-contained, as inflexible and remote as a snow image on a mountain.\n\n\"I don't quite know how to make her clear to you, Watson. Perhaps you may meet her before we are through, and you can use your own gift of words. She is beautiful, but with the ethereal other-world beauty of some fanatic whose thoughts are set on high. I have seen such faces in the pictures of the old masters of the Middle Ages. How a beastman could have laid his vile paws upon such a being of the beyond I cannot imagine. You may have noticed how extremes call to each other, the spiritual to the animal, the cave-man to the angel. You never saw a worse case than this.\n\n\"She knew what we had come for, of course\u2014that villain had lost no time in poisoning her mind against us. Miss Winter's advent rather amazed her, I think, but she waved us into our respective chairs like a reverend abbess receiving two rather leprous mendicants. If your head is inclined to swell, my dear Watson, take a course of Miss Violet de Merville.\n\n\"'Well, sir,' said she in a voice like the wind from an iceberg, 'your name is familiar to me. You have called, as I understand, to malign my fi-anc\u00e9, Baron Gruner. It is only by my father's request that I see you at all, and I warn you in advance that anything you can say could not possibly have the slightest effect upon my mind.'\n\n\"I was sorry for her, Watson. I thought of her for the moment as I would have thought of a daughter of my own. I am not often eloquent. I use my head, not my heart. But I really did plead with her with all the warmth of words that I could find in my nature. I pictured to her the awful position of the woman who only wakes to a man's character after she is his wife\u2014a woman who has to submit to be caressed by bloody hands and lecherous lips. I spared her nothing\u2014the shame, the fear, the agony, the hopelessness of it all. All my hot words could not bring one tinge of colour to those ivory cheeks or one gleam of emotion to those abstracted eyes. I thought of what the rascal had said about a post-hypnotic influence. One could really believe that she was living above the earth in some ecstatic dream. Yet there was nothing indefinite in her replies.\n\n\"'I have listened to you with patience, Mr. Holmes,' said she. 'The effect upon my mind is exactly as predicted. I am aware that Adelbert, that my fiance, has had a stormy life in which he has incurred bitter hatreds and most unjust aspersions. You are only the last of a series who have brought their slanders before me. Possibly you mean well, though I learn that you are a paid agent who would have been equally willing to act for the Baron as against him. But in any case I wish you to understand once for all that I love him and that he loves me, and that the opinion of all the world is no more to me than the twitter of those birds outside the window. If his noble nature has ever for an instant fallen, it may be that I have been specially sent to raise it to its true and lofty level. I am not clear'\u2014here she turned eyes upon my companion\u2014'who this young lady may be.'\n\n\"I was about to answer when the girl broke in like a whirlwind. If ever you saw flame and ice face to face, it was those two women.\n\n\"'I'll tell you who I am,' she cried, springing out of her chair, her mouth all twisted with passion\u2014'I am his last mistress. I am one of a hundred that he has tempted and used and ruined and thrown into the refuse heap, as he will you also. Your refuse heap is more likely to be a grave, and maybe that's the best. I tell you, you foolish woman, if you marry this man he'll be the death of you. It may be a broken heart or it may be a broken neck, but he'll have you one way or the other. It's not out of love for you I'm speaking. I don't care a tinker's curse whether you live or die. It's out of hate for him and to spite him and to get back on him for what he did to me. But it's all the same, and you needn't look at me like that, my fine lady, for you may be lower than I am before you are through with it.'\n\n\"'I should prefer not to discuss such matters,' said Miss de Merville coldly. 'Let me say once for all that I am aware of three passages in my fi-anc\u00e9's life in which he became entangled with designing women, and that I am assured of his hearty repentance for any evil that he may have done.'\n\n\"'Three passages!' screamed my companion. 'You fool! You unutterable fool!'\n\n\"'Mr. Holmes, I beg that you will bring this interview to an end,' said the icy voice. 'I have obeyed my father's wish in seeing you, but I am not compelled to listen to the ravings of this person.'\n\n\"With an oath Miss Winter darted forward, and if I had not caught her wrist she would have clutched this maddening woman by the hair. I dragged her towards the door and was lucky to get her back into the cab without a public scene, for she was beside herself with rage. In a cold way I felt pretty furious myself, Watson, for there was something indescribably annoying in the calm aloofness and supreme self-complaisance of the woman whom we were trying to save. So now once again you know exactly how we stand, and it is clear that I must plan some fresh opening move, for this gambit won't work. I'll keep in touch with you, Watson, for it is more than likely that you will have your part to play, though it is just possible that the next move may lie with them rather than with us.\"\n\nAnd it did. Their blow fell\u2014or his blow rather, for never could I believe that the lady was privy to it. I think I could show you the very paving-stone upon which I stood when my eyes fell upon the placard, and a pang of horror passed through my very soul. It was between the Grand Hotel and Charing Cross Station, where a one-legged news-vender displayed his evening papers. The date was just two days after the last conversation. There, black upon yellow, was the terrible news-sheet:" + }, + { + "title": "MURDEROUS ATTACK UPON", + "text": "[ SHERLOCK HOLMES ]\n\nI think I stood stunned for some moments. Then I have a confused recollection of snatching at a paper, of the remonstrance of the man, whom I had not paid, and, finally, of standing in the doorway of a chemist's shop while I turned up the fateful paragraph. This was how it ran:\n\nWe learn with regret that Mr. Sherlock Holmes, the well-known private detective, was the victim this morning of a murderous assault which has left him in a precarious position. There are no exact details to hand, but the event seems to have occurred about twelve o'clock in Regent Street, outside the Caf\u00e9 Royal. The attack was made by two men armed with sticks, and Mr. Holmes was beaten about the head and body, receiving injuries which the doctors describe as most serious. He was carried to Charing Cross Hospital and afterwards insisted upon being taken to his rooms in Baker Street. The miscreants who attacked him appear to have been respectably dressed men, who escaped from the bystanders by passing through the Caf\u00e9 Royal and out into Glasshouse Street behind it. No doubt they belonged to that criminal fraternity which has so often had occasion to bewail the activity and ingenuity of the injured man.\n\nI need not say that my eyes had hardly glanced over the paragraph before I had sprung into a hansom and was on my way to Baker Street. I found Sir Leslie Oakshott, the famous surgeon, in the hall and his brougham waiting at the curb.\n\n\"No immediate danger,\" was his report. \"Two lacerated scalp wounds and some considerable bruises. Several stitches have been necessary. Morphine has been injected and quiet is essential, but an interview of a few minutes would not be absolutely forbidden.\"\n\nWith this permission I stole into the darkened room. The sufferer was wide awake, and I heard my name in a hoarse whisper. The blind was three-quarters down, but one ray of sunlight slanted through and struck the bandaged head of the injured man. A crimson patch had soaked through the white linen compress. I sat beside him and bent my head.\n\n\"All right, Watson. Don't look so scared,\" he muttered in a very weak voice. \"It's not as bad as it seems.\"\n\n\"Thank God for that!\"\n\n\"I'm a bit of a single-stick expert, as you know. I took most of them on my guard. It was the second man that was too much for me.\"\n\n\"What can I do, Holmes? Of course, it was that damned fellow who set them on. I'll go and thrash the hide off him if you give the word.\"\n\n\"Good old Watson! No, we can do nothing there unless the police lay their hands on the men. But their get-away had been well prepared. We may be sure of that. Wait a little. I have my plans. The first thing is to exaggerate my injuries. They'll come to you for news. Put it on thick, Watson. Lucky if I live the week out\u2014concussion\u2014delirium\u2014what you like! You can't overdo it.\"\n\n\"But Sir Leslie Oakshott?\"\n\n\"Oh, he's all right. He shall see the worst side of me. I'll look after that.\"\n\n\"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Yes. Tell Shinwell Johnson to get that girl out of the way. Those beauties will be after her now. They know, of course, that she was with me in the case. If they dared to do me in it is not likely they will neglect her. That is urgent. Do it to-night.\"\n\n\"I'll go now. Anything more?\"\n\n\"Put my pipe on the table\u2014and the tobacco-slipper. Right! Come in each morning and we will plan our campaign.\"\n\nI arranged with Johnson that evening to take Miss Winter to a quiet suburb and see that she lay low until the danger was past.\n\nFor six days the public were under the impression that Holmes was at the door of death. The bulletins were very grave and there were sinister paragraphs in the papers. My continual visits assured me that it was not so bad as that. His wiry constitution and his determined will were working wonders. He was recovering fast, and I had suspicions at times that he was really finding himself faster than he pretended even to me. There was a curious secretive streak in the man which led to many dramatic effects, but left even his closest friend guessing as to what his exact plans might be. He pushed to an extreme the axiom that the only safe plotter was he who plotted alone. I was nearer him than anyone else, and yet I was always conscious of the gap between.\n\nOn the seventh day the stitches were taken out, in spite of which there was a report of erysipelas in the evening papers. The same evening papers had an announcement which I was bound, sick or well, to carry to my friend. It was simply that among the passengers on the Cunard boat Ruritania, starting from Liverpool on Friday, was the Baron Adelbert Gruner, who had some important financial business to settle in the States before his impending wedding to Miss Violet de Merville, only daughter of, etc., etc. Holmes listened to the news with a cold, concentrated look upon his pale face, which told me that it hit him hard.\n\n\"Friday!\" he cried. \"Only three clear days. I believe the rascal wants to put himself out of danger's way. But he won't, Watson! By the Lord Harry, he won't! Now, Watson, I want you to do something for me.\"\n\n\"I am here to be used, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Well, then, spend the next twenty-four hours in an intensive study of Chinese pottery.\"\n\nHe gave no explanations and I asked for none. By long experience I had learned the wisdom of obedience. But when I had left his room I walked down Baker Street, revolving in my head how on earth I was to carry out so strange an order. Finally I drove to the London Library in St. James's Square, put the matter to my friend Lomax, the sublibrarian, and departed to my rooms with a goodly volume under my arm.\n\nIt is said that the barrister who crams up a case with such care that he can examine an expert witness upon the Monday has forgotten all his forced knowledge before the Saturday. Certainly I should not like now to pose as an authority upon ceramics. And yet all that evening, and all that night with a short interval for rest, and all next morning, I was sucking in knowledge and committing names to memory. There I learned of the hall-marks of the great artist-decorators, of the mystery of cyclical dates, the marks of the Hung-wu and the beauties of the Yung-lo, the writings of Tang-ying, and the glories of the primitive period of the Sung and the Yuan. I was charged with all this information when I called upon Holmes next evening. He was out of bed now, though you would not have guessed it from the published reports, and he sat with his much-bandaged head resting upon his hand in the depth of his favourite armchair.\n\n\"Why, Holmes,\" I said, \"if one believed the papers, you are dying.\"\n\n\"That,\" said he, \"is the very impression which I intended to convey. And now, Watson, have you learned your lessons?\"\n\n\"At least I have tried to.\"\n\n\"Good. You could keep up an intelligent conversation on the subject?\"\n\n\"I believe I could.\"\n\n\"Then hand me that little box from the mantelpiece.\"\n\nHe opened the lid and took out a small object most carefully wrapped in some fine Eastern silk. This he unfolded, and disclosed a delicate little saucer of the most beautiful deep-blue colour.\n\n\"It needs careful handling, Watson. This is the real egg-shell pottery of the Ming dynasty. No finer piece ever passed through Christie's. A complete set of this would be worth a king's ransom\u2014in fact, it is doubtful if there is a complete set outside the imperial palace of Peking. The sight of this would drive a real connoisseur wild.\"\n\n\"What am I to do with it?\"\n\nHolmes handed me a card upon which was printed: \"Dr. Hill Barton, 369 Half Moon Street.\"\n\n\"That is your name for the evening, Watson. You will call upon Baron Gruner. I know something of his habits, and at half-past eight he would probably be disengaged. A note will tell him in advance that you are about to call, and you will say that you are bringing him a specimen of an absolutely unique set of Ming china. You may as well be a medical man, since that is a part which you can play without duplicity. You are a collector, this set has come your way, you have heard of the Baron's interest in the subject, and you are not averse to selling at a price.\"\n\n\"What price?\"\n\n\"Well asked, Watson. You would certainly fall down badly if you did not know the value of your own wares. This saucer was got for me by Sir James, and comes, I understand, from the collection of his client. You will not exaggerate if you say that it could hardly be matched in the world.\"\n\n\"I could perhaps suggest that the set should be valued by an expert.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! You scintillate to-day. Suggest Christie or Sotheby. Your delicacy prevents your putting a price for yourself.\"\n\n\"But if he won't see me?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, he will see you. He has the collection mania in its most acute form\u2014and especially on this subject, on which he is an acknowledged au thority. Sit down, Watson. and I will dictate the letter. No answer needed. You will merely say that you are coming, and why.\"\n\nIt was an admirable document, short, courteous, and stimulating to the curiosity of the connoisseur. A district messenger was duly dispatched with it. On the same evening, with the precious saucer in my hand and the card of Dr. Hill Barton in my pocket, I set off on my own adventure.\n\nThe beautiful house and grounds indicated that Baron Gruner was, as Sir James had said, a man of considerable wealth. A long winding drive, with banks of rare shrubs on either side, opened out into a great gravelled square adorned with statues. The place had been built by a South African gold king in the days of the great boom, and the long, low house with the turrets at the corners, though an architectural nightmare, was imposing in its size and solidity. A butler, who would have adorned a bench of bishops, showed me in and handed me over to a plush-clad footman, who ushered me into the Baron's presence.\n\nHe was standing at the open front of a great case which stood between the windows and which contained part of his Chinese collection. He turned as I entered with a small brown vase in his hand.\n\n\"Pray sit down, Doctor,\" said he. \"I was looking over my own treasures and wondering whether I could really afford to add to them. This little Tang specimen, which dates from the seventh century, would probably interest you. I am sure you never saw finer workmanship or a richer glaze. Have you the Ming saucer with you of which you spoke?\"\n\nI carefully unpacked it and handed it to him. He seated himself at his desk, pulled over the lamp, for it was growing dark, and set himself to examine it. As he did so the yellow light beat upon his own features, and I was able to study them at my ease.\n\nHe was certainly a remarkably handsome man. His European reputation for beauty was fully deserved. In figure he was not more than of middle size, but was built upon graceful and active lines. His face was swarthy, almost Oriental, with large, dark, languorous eyes which might easily hold an irresistible fascination for women. His hair and moustache were raven black, the latter short, pointed, and carefully waxed. His features were regular and pleasing, save only his straight, thin-lipped mouth. If ever I saw a murderer's mouth it was there\u2014a cruel, hard gash in the face, compressed, inexorable, and terrible. He was ill-advised to train his moustache away from it, for it was Nature's danger-signal, set as a warning to his victims. His voice was engaging and his manners perfect. In age I should have put him at little over thirty, though his record afterwards showed that he was forty-two.\n\n\"Very fine\u2014very fine indeed!\" he said at last. \"And you say you have a set of six to correspond. What puzzles me is that I should not have heard of such magnificent specimens. I only know of one in England to match this, and it is certainly not likely to be in the market. Would it be indiscreet if I were to ask you, Dr. Hill Barton, how you obtained this?\"\n\n\"Does it really matter?\" I asked with as careless an air as I could muster. \"You can see that the piece is genuine, and, as to the value, I am content to take an expert's valuation.\"\n\n\"Very mysterious,\" said he with a quick, suspicious flash of his dark eyes. \"In dealing with objects of such value, one naturally wishes to know all about the transaction. That the piece is genuine is certain. I have no doubts at all about that. But suppose\u2014I am bound to take every possibility into account\u2014that it should prove afterwards that you had no right to sell?\"\n\n\"I would guarantee you against any claim of the sort.\"\n\n\"That, of course, would open up the question as to what your guarantee was worth.\"\n\n\"My bankers would answer that.\"\n\n\"Quite so. And yet the whole transaction strikes me as rather unusual.\"\n\n\"You can do business or not,\" said I with indifference. \"I have given you the first offer as I understood that you were a connoisseur, but I shall have no difficulty in other quarters.\"\n\n\"Who told you I was a connoisseur?\"\n\n\"I was aware that you had written a book upon the subject.\"\n\n\"Have you read the book?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Dear me, this becomes more and more difficult for me to understand! You are a connoisseur and collector with a very valuable piece in your collection, and yet you have never troubled to consult the one book which would have told you of the real meaning and value of what you held. How do you explain that?\"\n\n\"I am a very busy man. I am a doctor in practice.\"\n\n\"That is no answer. If a man has a hobby he follows it up, whatever his other pursuits may be. You said in your note that you were a connoisseur.\"\n\n\"So I am.\"\n\n\"Might I ask you a few questions to test you? I am obliged to tell you, Doctor\u2014if you are indeed a doctor\u2014that the incident becomes more and more suspicious. I would ask you what do you know of the Emperor Shomu and how do you associate him with the Shoso-in near Nara? Dear me, does that puzzle you? Tell me a little about the Northern Wei dynasty and its place in the history of ceramics.\"\n\nI sprang from my chair in simulated anger.\n\n\"This is intolerable, sir,\" said I. \"I came here to do you a favour, and not to be examined as if I were a schoolboy. My knowledge on these subjects may be second only to your own, but I certainly shall not answer questions which have been put in so offensive a way.\"\n\nHe looked at me steadily. The languor had gone from his eyes. They suddenly glared. There was a gleam of teeth from between those cruel lips.\n\n\"What is the game? You are here as a spy. You are an emissary of Holmes. This is a trick that you are playing upon me. The fellow is dying I hear, so he sends his tools to keep watch upon me. You've made your way in here without leave, and, by God! you may find it harder to get out than to get in.\"\n\nHe had sprung to his feet, and I stepped back, bracing myself for an attack, for the man was beside himself with rage. He may have suspected me from the first; certainly this cross-examination had shown him the truth; but it was clear that I could not hope to deceive him. He dived his hand into a side-drawer and rummaged furiously. Then something struck upon his ear, for he stood listening intently.\n\n\"Ah!\" he cried. \"Ah!\" and dashed into the room behind him.\n\nTwo steps took me to the open door, and my mind will ever carry a clear picture of the scene within. The window leading out to the garden was wide open. Beside it, looking like some terrible ghost, his head girt with bloody bandages, his face drawn and white, stood Sherlock Holmes. The next instant he was through the gap, and I heard the crash of his body among the laurel bushes outside. With a howl of rage the master of the house rushed after him to the open window.\n\nAnd then! It was done in an instant, and yet I clearly saw it. An arm\u2014a woman's arm\u2014shot out from among the leaves. At the same instant the Baron uttered a horrible cry\u2014a yell which will always ring in my memory. He clapped his two hands to his face and rushed round the room, beating his head horribly against the walls. Then he fell upon the carpet, rolling and writhing, while scream after scream resounded through the house.\n\n\"Water! For God's sake, water!\" was his cry.\n\nI seized a carafe from a side-table and rushed to his aid. At the same moment the butler and several footmen ran in from the hall. I remember that one of them fainted as I knelt by the injured man and turned that awful face to the light of the lamp. The vitriol was eating into it everywhere and dripping from the ears and the chin. One eye was already white and glazed. The other was red and inflamed. The features which I had admired a few minutes before were now like some beautiful painting over which the artist has passed a wet and foul sponge. They were blurred, discoloured, inhuman, terrible.\n\nIn a few words I explained exactly what had occurred, so far as the vitriol attack was concerned. Some had climbed through the window and others had rushed out on to the lawn, but it was dark and it had begun to rain. Between his screams the victim raged and raved against the avenger. \"It was that hell-cat, Kitty Winter!\" he cried. \"Oh, the she-devil! She shall pay for it! She shall pay! Oh, God in heaven, this pain is more than I can bear!\"\n\nI bathed his face in oil, put cotton wadding on the raw surfaces, and administered a hypodermic of morphia. All suspicion of me had passed from his mind in the presence of this shock, and he clung to my hands as if I might have the power even yet to clear those dead-fish eyes which gazed up at me. I could have wept over the ruin had I not remembered very clearly the vile life which had led up to so hideous a change. It was loathsome to feel the pawing of his burning hands, and I was relieved when his family surgeon, closely followed by a specialist, came to relieve me of my charge. An inspector of police had also arrived, and to him I handed my real card. It would have been useless as well as foolish to do otherwise, for I was nearly as well known by sight at the Yard as Holmes himself. Then I left that house of gloom and terror. Within an hour I was at Baker Street.\n\nHolmes was seated in his familiar chair, looking very pale and exhausted. Apart from his injuries, even his iron nerves had been shocked by the events of the evening, and he listened with horror to my account of the Baron's transformation.\n\n\"The wages of sin, Watson\u2014the wages of sin!\" said he. \"Sooner or later it will always come. God knows, there was sin enough,\" he added, taking up a brown volume from the table. \"Here is the book the woman talked of. If this will not break off the marriage, nothing ever could. But it will, Watson. It must. No self-respecting woman could stand it.\"\n\n\"It is his love diary?\"\n\n\"Or his lust diary. Call it what you will. The moment the woman told us of it I realized what a tremendous weapon was there if we could but lay our hands on it. I said nothing at the time to indicate my thoughts, for this woman might have given it away. But I brooded over it. Then this assault upon me gave me the chance of letting the Baron think that no precautions need be taken against me. That was all to the good. I would have waited a little longer, but his visit to America forced my hand. He would never have left so compromising a document behind him. Therefore we had to act at once. Burglary at night is impossible. He takes precautions. But there was a chance in the evening if I could only be sure that his attention was engaged. That was where you and your blue saucer came in. But I had to be sure of the position of the book, and I knew I had only a few minutes in which to act, for my time was limited by your knowledge of Chinese pottery. Therefore I gathered the girl up at the last moment. How could I guess what the little packet was that she carried so carefully under her cloak? I thought she had come altogether on my business, but it seems she had some of her own.\"\n\n\"He guessed I came from you.\"\n\n\"I feared he would. But you held him in play just long enough for me to get the book, though not long enough for an unobserved escape. Ah, Sir James, I am very glad you have come!\"\n\nOur courtly friend had appeared in answer to a previous summons. He listened with the deepest attention to Holmes's account of what had occurred.\n\n\"You have done wonders\u2014wonders!\" he cried when he had heard the narrative. \"But if these injuries are as terrible as Dr. Watson describes, then surely our purpose of thwarting the marriage is sufficiently gained without the use of this horrible book.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head.\n\n\"Women of the De Merville type do not act like that. She would love him the more as a disfigured martyr. No, no. It is his moral side, not his physical, which we have to destroy. That book will bring her back to earth\u2014and I know nothing else that could. It is in his own writing. She cannot get past it.\"\n\nSir James carried away both it and the precious saucer. As I was myself overdue, I went down with him into the street. A brougham was waiting for him. He sprang in, gave a hurried order to the cockaded coachman, and drove swiftly away. He flung his overcoat half out of the window to cover the armorial bearings upon the panel, but I had seen them in the glare of our fanlight none the less. I gasped with surprise. Then I turned back and ascended the stair to Holmes's room.\n\n\"I have found out who our client is,\" I cried, bursting with my great news. \"Why, Holmes, it is\u2014\"\n\n\"It is a loyal friend and a chivalrous gentleman,\" said Holmes, holding up a restraining hand. \"Let that now and forever be enough for us.\"\n\nI do not know how the incriminating book was used. Sir James may have managed it. Or it is more probable that so delicate a task was entrusted to the young lady's father. The effect, at any rate, was all that could be desired. Three days later appeared a paragraph in the Morning Post to say that the marriage between Baron Adelbert Gruner and Miss Violet de Merville would not take place. The same paper had the first police-court hearing of the proceedings against Miss Kitty Winter on the grave charge of vitriol-throwing. Such extenuating circumstances came out in the trial that the sentence, as will be remembered, was the lowest that was possible for such an offence. Sherlock Holmes was threatened with a prosecution for burglary, but when an object is good and a client is sufficiently illustrious, even the rigid British law becomes human and elastic. My friend has not yet stood in the dock." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE BLANCHED SOLDIER", + "text": "The ideas of my friend Watson, though limited, are exceedingly pertinacious. For a long time he has worried me to write an experience of my own. Perhaps I have rather invited this persecution, since I have often had occasion to point out to him how superficial are his own accounts and to accuse him of pandering to popular taste instead of confining himself rigidly to facts and figures. \"Try it yourself, Holmes!\" he has retorted, and I am compelled to admit that, having taken my pen in my hand, I do begin to realize that the matter must be presented in such a way as may interest the reader. The following case can hardly fail to do so, as it is among the strangest happenings in my collection, though it chanced that Watson had no note of it in his collection. Speaking of my old friend and biographer, I would take this opportunity to remark that if I burden myself with a companion in my various little inquiries it is not done out of sentiment or caprice, but it is that Watson has some remarkable characteristics of his own to which in his modesty he has given small attention amid his exaggerated estimates of my own performances. A confederate who foresees your conclusions and course of action is always dangerous, but one to whom each development comes as a perpetual surprise, and to whom the future is always a closed book, is indeed an ideal helpmate.\n\nI find from my notebook that it was in January, 1903, just after the conclusion of the Boer War, that I had my visit from Mr. James M. Dodd, a big, fresh, sunburned, upstanding Briton. The good Watson had at that time deserted me for a wife, the only selfish action which I can recall in our association. I was alone.\n\nIt is my habit to sit with my back to the window and to place my visitors in the opposite chair, where the light falls full upon them. Mr. James M. Dodd seemed somewhat at a loss how to begin the interview. I did not attempt to help him, for his silence gave me more time for observation. I have found it wise to impress clients with a sense of power, and so I gave him some of my conclusions.\n\n\"From South Africa, sir, I perceive.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" he answered, with some surprise.\n\n\"Imperial Yeomanry, I fancy.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Middlesex Corps, no doubt.\"\n\n\"That is so. Mr. Holmes, you are a wizard.\"\n\nI smiled at his bewildered expression.\n\n\"When a gentleman of virile appearance enters my room with such tan upon his face as an English sun could never give, and with his handkerchief in his sleeve instead of in his pocket, it is not difficult to place him. You wear a short beard, which shows that you were not a regular. You have the cut of a riding-man. As to Middlesex, your card has already shown me that you are a stockbroker from Throgmorton Street. What other regiment would you join?\"\n\n\"You see everything.\"\n\n\"I see no more than you, but I have trained myself to notice what I see. However, Mr. Dodd, it was not to discuss the science of observation that you called upon me this morning. What has been happening at Tuxbury Old Park?\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes\u2014!\"\n\n\"My dear sir, there is no mystery. Your letter came with that heading, and as you fixed this appointment in very pressing terms it was clear that something sudden and important had occurred.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed. But the letter was written in the afternoon, and a good deal has happened since then. If Colonel Emsworth had not kicked me out\u2014\"\n\n\"Kicked you out!\"\n\n\"Well, that was what it amounted to. He is a hard nail, is Colonel Emsworth. The greatest martinet in the Army in his day, and it was a day of rough language, too. I couldn't have stuck the colonel if it had not been for Godfrey's sake.\"\n\nI lit my pipe and leaned back in my chair.\n\n\"Perhaps you will explain what you are talking about.\"\n\nMy client grinned mischievously.\n\n\"I had got into the way of supposing that you knew everything without being told,\" said he. \"But I will give you the facts, and I hope to God that you will be able to tell me what they mean. I've been awake all night puzzling my brain, and the more I think the more incredible does it become.\n\n\"When I joined up in January, 1901\u2014just two years ago\u2014young Godfrey Emsworth had joined the same squadron. He was Colonel Emsworth's only son\u2014Emsworth the Crimean V C.\u2014and he had the fighting blood in him, so it is no wonder he volunteered. There was not a finer lad in the regiment. We formed a friendship\u2014the sort of friendship which can only be made when one lives the same life and shares the same joys and sorrows. He was my mate\u2014and that means a good deal in the Army. We took the rough and the smooth together for a year of hard fighting. Then he was hit with a bullet from an elephant gun in the action near Diamond Hill outside Pretoria. I got one letter from the hospital at Cape Town and one from Southampton. Since then not a word\u2014not one word, Mr. Holmes, for six months and more, and he my closest pal.\n\n\"Well, when the war was over, and we all got back, I wrote to his father and asked where Godfrey was. No answer. I waited a bit and then I wrote again. This time I had a reply, short and gruff. Godfrey had gone on a voyage round the world, and it was not likely that he would be back for a year. That was all.\n\n\"I wasn't satisfied, Mr. Holmes. The whole thing seemed to me so damned unnatural. He was a good lad, and he would not drop a pal like that. It was not like him. Then, again, I happened to know that he was heir to a lot of money, and also that his father and he did not always hit it off too well. The old man was sometimes a bully, and young Godfrey had too much spirit to stand it. No, I wasn't satisfied, and I determined that I would get to the root of the matter. It happened, however, that my own affairs needed a lot of straightening out, after two years' absence, and so it is only this week that I have been able to take up Godfrey's case again. But since I have taken it up I mean to drop everything in order to see it through.\"\n\nMr. James M. Dodd appeared to be the sort of person whom it would be better to have as a friend than as an enemy. His blue eyes were stern and his square jaw had set hard as he spoke.\n\n\"Well, what have you done?\" I asked.\n\n\"My first move was to get down to his home, Tuxbury Old Park, near Bedford, and to see for myself how the ground lay. I wrote to the mother, therefore\u2014I had had quite enough of the curmudgeon of a father\u2014and I made a clean frontal attack: Godfrey was my chum, I had a great deal of interest which I might tell her of our common experiences, I should be in the neighbourhood, would there be any objection, et cetera? In reply I had quite an amiable answer from her and an offer to put me up for the night. That was what took me down on Monday.\n\n\"Tuxbury Old Hall is inaccessible\u2014five miles from anywhere. There was no trap at the station, so I had to walk, carrying my suitcase, and it was nearly dark before I arrived. It is a great wandering house, standing in a considerable park. I should judge it was of all sorts of ages and styles, starting on a half-timbered Elizabethan foundation and ending in a Victorian portico. Inside it was all panelling and tapestry and half-effaced old pictures, a house of shadows and mystery. There was a butler, old Ralph, who seemed about the same age as the house, and there was his wife, who might have been older. She had been Godfrey's nurse, and I had heard him speak of her as second only to his mother in his affections, so I was drawn to her in spite of her queer appearance. The mother I liked also\u2014a gentle little white mouse of a woman. It was only the colonel himself whom I barred.\n\n\"We had a bit of barney right away, and I should have walked back to the station if I had not felt that it might be playing his game for me to do so. I was shown straight into his study, and there I found him, a huge, bow-backed man with a smoky skin and a straggling gray beard, seated behind his littered desk. A red-veined nose jutted out like a vulture's beak, and two fierce gray eyes glared at me from under tufted brows. I could understand now why Godfrey seldom spoke of his father.\n\n\"'Well, sir,' said he in a rasping voice, 'I should be interested to know the real reasons for this visit.'\n\n\"I answered that I had explained them in my letter to his wife.\n\n\"'Yes, yes, you said that you had known Godfrey in Africa. We have, of course, only your word for that.'\n\n\"'I have his letters to me in my pocket.'\n\n\"'Kindly let me see them.'\n\n\"He glanced at the two which I handed him, and then he tossed them back.\n\n\"'Well, what then?' he asked.\n\n\"'I was fond of your son Godfrey, sir. Many ties and memories united us. Is it not natural that I should wonder at his sudden silence and should wish to know what has become of him?'\n\n\"'I have some recollections, sir, that I had already corresponded with you and had told you what had become of him. He has gone upon a voyage round the world. His health was in a poor way after his African experiences, and both his mother and I were of opinion that complete rest and change were needed. Kindly pass that explanation on to any other friends who may be interested in the matter.'\n\n\"'Certainly,' I answered. 'But perhaps you would have the goodness to let me have the name of the steamer and of the line by which he sailed, together with the date. I have no doubt that I should be able to get a letter through to him.'\n\n\"My request seemed both to puzzle and to irritate my host. His great eyebrows came down over his eyes, and he tapped his fingers impatiently on the table. He looked up at last with the expression of one who has seen his adversary make a dangerous move at chess, and has decided how to meet it.\n\n\"'Many people, Mr. Dodd,' said he, 'would take offence at your infernal pertinacity and would think that this insistence had reached the point of damned impertinence.'\n\n\"'You must put it down, sir, to my real love for your son.'\n\n\"'Exactly. I have already made every allowance upon that score. I must ask you, however, to drop these inquiries. Every family has its own inner knowledge and its own motives, which cannot always be made clear to outsiders, however well-intentioned. My wife is anxious to hear something of Godfrey's past which you are in a position to tell her, but I would ask you to let the present and the future alone. Such inquiries serve no useful purpose, sir, and place us in a delicate and difficult position.'\n\n\"So I came to a dead end, Mr. Holmes. There was no getting past it. I could only pretend to accept the situation and register a vow inwardly that I would never rest until my friend's fate had been cleared up. It was a dull evening. We dined quietly, the three of us, in a gloomy, faded old room. The lady questioned me eagerly about her son, but the old man seemed morose and depressed. I was so bored by the whole proceeding that I made an excuse as soon as I decently could and retired to my bedroom. It was a large, bare room on the ground floor, as gloomy as the rest of the house, but after a year of sleeping upon the veldt, Mr. Holmes, one is not too particular about one's quarters. I opened the curtains and looked out into the garden, remarking that it was a fine night with a bright half-moon. Then I sat down by the roaring fire with the lamp on a table beside me, and endeavoured to distract my mind with a novel. I was interrupted, however, by Ralph, the old butler, who came in with a fresh supply of coals.\n\n\"'I thought you might run short in the night-time, sir. It is bitter weather and these rooms are cold.'\n\n\"He hesitated before leaving the room, and when I looked round he was standing facing me with a wistful look upon his wrinkled face.\n\n\"'Beg your pardon, sir, but I could not help hearing what you said of young Master Godfrey at dinner. You know, sir, that my wife nursed him, and so I may say I am his foster-father. It's natural we should take an interest. And you say he carried himself well, sir?'\n\n\"'There was no braver man in the regiment. He pulled me out once from under the rifles of the Boers, or maybe I should not be here.'\n\n\"The old butler rubbed his skinny hands.\n\n\"'Yes, sir, yes, that is Master Godfrey all over. He was always courageous. There's not a tree in the park, sir, that he has not climbed. Nothing would stop him. He was a fine boy\u2014and oh, sir, he was a fine man.'\n\n\"I sprang to my feet.\n\n\"'Look here!' I cried. 'You say he was. You speak as if he were dead. What is all this mystery? What has become of Godfrey Emsworth?'\n\n\"I gripped the old man by the shoulder, but he shrank away.\n\n\"'I don't know what you mean, sir. Ask the master about Master Godfrey. He knows. It is not for me to interfere.'\n\n\"He was leaving the room, but I held his arm.\n\n\"'Listen,' I said. 'You are going to answer one question before you leave if I have to hold you all night. Is Godfrey dead?'\n\n\"He could not face my eyes. He was like a man hypnotized. The answer was dragged from his lips. It was a terrible and unexpected one.\n\n\"'I wish to God he was!' he cried, and, tearing himself free, he dashed from the room.\n\n\"You will think, Mr. Holmes, that I returned to my chair in no very happy state of mind. The old man's words seemed to me to bear only one interpretation. Clearly my poor friend had become involved in some criminal or, at the least, disreputable transaction which touched the family honour. That stern old man had sent his son away and hidden him from the world lest some scandal should come to light. Godfrey was a reckless fellow. He was easily influenced by those around him. No doubt he had fallen into bad hands and been misled to his ruin. It was a piteous business, if it was indeed so, but even now it was my duty to hunt him out and see if I could aid him. I was anxiously pondering the matter when I looked up, and there was Godfrey Emsworth standing before me.\"\n\nMy client had paused as one in deep emotion.\n\n\"Pray continue,\" I said. \"Your problem presents some very unusual features.\"\n\n\"He was outside the window, Mr. Holmes, with his face pressed against the glass. I have told you that I looked out at the night. When I did so I left the curtains partly open. His figure was framed in this gap. The window came down to the ground and I could see the whole length of it, but it was his face which held my gaze. He was deadly pale\u2014never have I seen a man so white. I reckon ghosts may look like that; but his eyes met mine, and they were the eyes of a living man. He sprang back when he saw that I was looking at him, and he vanished into the darkness.\n\n\"There was something shocking about the man, Mr. Holmes. It wasn't merely that ghastly face glimmering as white as cheese in the darkness. It was more subtle than that\u2014something slinking, something furtive, something guilty\u2014something very unlike the frank, manly lad that I had known. It left a feeling of horror in my mind.\n\n\"But when a man has been soldiering for a year or two with brother Boer as a playmate, he keeps his nerve and acts quickly. Godfrey had hardly vanished before I was at the window. There was an awkward catch, and I was some little time before I could throw it up. Then I nipped through and ran down the garden path in the direction that I thought he might have taken.\n\n\"It was a long path and the light was not very good, but it seemed to me something was moving ahead of me. I ran on and called his name, but it was no use. When I got to the end of the path there were several others branching in different directions to various outhouses. I stood hesitating, and as I did so I heard distinctly the sound of a closing door. It was not behind me in the house, but ahead of me, somewhere in the darkness. That was enough, Mr. Holmes, to assure me that what I had seen was not a vision. Godfrey had run away from me, and he had shut a door behind him. Of that I was certain.\n\n\"There was nothing more I could do, and I spent an uneasy night turning the matter over in my mind and trying to find some theory which would cover the facts. Next day I found the colonel rather more conciliatory, and as his wife remarked that there were some places of interest in the neighbourhood, it gave me an opening to ask whether my presence for one more night would incommode them. A somewhat grudging acquiescence from the old man gave me a clear day in which to make my observations. I was already perfectly convinced that Godfrey was in hiding somewhere near, but where and why remained to be solved.\n\n\"The house was so large and so rambling that a regiment might be hid away in it and no one the wiser. If the secret lay there it was difficult for me to penetrate it. But the door which I had heard close was certainly not in the house. I must explore the garden and see what I could find. There was no difficulty in the way, for the old people were busy in their own fashion and left me to my own devices.\n\n\"There were several small outhouses, but at the end of the garden there was a detached building of some size\u2014large enough for a gardener's or a gamekeeper's residence. Could this be the place whence the sound of that shutting door had come? I approached it in a careless fashion as though I were strolling aimlessly round the grounds. As I did so, a small, brisk, bearded man in a black coat and bowler hat\u2014not at all the gardener type\u2014came out of the door. To my surprise, he locked it after him and put the key in his pocket. Then he looked at me with some surprise on his face.\n\n\"'Are you a visitor here?' he asked.\n\n\"I explained that I was and that I was a friend of Godfrey's.\n\n\"'What a pity that he should be away on his travels, for he would have so liked to see me,' I continued.\n\n\"'Quite so. Exactly,' said he with a rather guilty air. 'No doubt you will renew your visit at some more propitious time.' He passed on, but when I turned I observed that he was standing watching me, half-concealed by the laurels at the far end of the garden.\n\n\"I had a good look at the little house as I passed it, but the windows were heavily curtained, and, so far as one could see, it was empty. I might spoil my own game and even be ordered off the premises if I were too audacious, for I was still conscious that I was being watched. Therefore, I strolled back to the house and waited for night before I went on with my inquiry. When all was dark and quiet I slipped out of my window and made my way as silently as possible to the mysterious lodge.\n\n\"I have said that it was heavily curtained, but now I found that the windows were shuttered as well. Some light, however, was breaking through one of them, so I concentrated my attention upon this. I was in luck, for the curtain had not been quite closed, and there was a crack in the shutter, so that I could see the inside of the room. It was a cheery place enough, a bright lamp and a blazing fire. Opposite to me was seated the little man whom I had seen in the morning. He was smoking a pipe and reading a paper.\"\n\n\"What paper?\" I asked.\n\nMy client seemed annoyed at the interruption of his narrative.\n\n\"Can it matter?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is most essential.\"\n\n\"I really took no notice.\"\n\n\"Possibly you observed whether it was a broad-leafed paper or of that smaller type which one associates with weeklies.\"\n\n\"Now that you mention it, it was not large. It might have been the Spectator. However, I had little thought to spare upon such details, for a second man was seated with his back to the window, and I could swear that this second man was Godfrey. I could not see his face, but I knew the familiar slope of his shoulders. He was leaning upon his elbow in an attitude of great melancholy, his body turned towards the fire. I was hesitating as to what I should do when there was a sharp tap on my shoulder, and there was Colonel Emsworth beside me.\n\n\"'This way, sir!' said he in a low voice. He walked in silence to the house, and I followed him into my own bedroom. He had picked up a time-table in the hall.\n\n\"'There is a train to London at 8:30,' said he. 'The trap will be at the door at eight.'\n\n\"He was white with rage, and, indeed, I felt myself in so difficult a position that I could only stammer out a few incoherent apologies in which I tried to excuse myself by urging my anxiety for my friend.\n\n\"'The matter will not bear discussion,' said he abruptly. 'You have made a most damnable intrusion into the privacy of our family. You were here as a guest and you have become a spy. I have nothing more to say, sir, save that I have no wish ever to see you again.'\n\n\"At this I lost my temper, Mr. Holmes, and I spoke with some warmth.\n\n\"'I have seen your son, and I am convinced that for some reason of your own you are concealing him from the world. I have no idea what your motives are in cutting him off in this fashion, but I am sure that he is no longer a free agent. I warn you, Colonel Emsworth, that until I am assured as to the safety and well-being of my friend I shall never desist in my efforts to get to the bottom of the mystery, and I shall certainly not allow myself to be intimidated by anything which you may say or do.'\n\n\"The old fellow looked diabolical, and I really thought he was about to attack me. I have said that he was a gaunt, fierce old giant, and though I am no weakling I might have been hard put to it to hold my own against him. However, after a long glare of rage he turned upon his heel and walked out of the room. For my part, I took the appointed train in the morning, with the full intention of coming straight to you and asking for your advice and assistance at the appointment for which I had already written.\"\n\nSuch was the problem which my visitor laid before me. It presented, as the astute reader will have already perceived, few difficulties in its solution, for a very limited choice of alternatives must get to the root of the matter. Still, elementary as it was, there were points of interest and novelty about it which may excuse my placing it upon record. I now proceeded, using my familiar method of logical analysis, to narrow down the possible solutions.\n\n\"The servants,\" I asked; \"how many were in the house?\"\n\n\"To the best of my belief there were only the old butler and his wife. They seemed to live in the simplest fashion.\"\n\n\"There was no servant, then, in the detached house?\"\n\n\"None, unless the little man with the beard acted as such. He seemed, however, to be quite a superior person.\"\n\n\"That seems very suggestive. Had you any indication that food was conveyed from the one house to the other?\"\n\n\"Now that you mention it, I did see old Ralph carrying a basket down the garden walk and going in the direction of this house. The idea of food did not occur to me at the moment.\"\n\n\"Did you make any local inquiries?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did. I spoke to the station-master and also to the innkeeper in the village. I simply asked if they knew anything of my old comrade, Godfrey Emsworth. Both of them assured me that he had gone for a voyage round the world. He had come home and then had almost at once started off again. The story was evidently universally accepted.\"\n\n\"You said nothing of your suspicions?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"That was very wise. The matter should certainly be inquired into. I will go back with you to Tuxbury Old Park.\"\n\n\"To-day?\"\n\nIt happened that at the moment I was clearing up the case which my friend Watson has described as that of the Abbey School, in which the Duke of Greyminster was so deeply involved. I had also a commission from the Sultan of Turkey which called for immediate action, as political consequences of the gravest kind might arise from its neglect. Therefore it was not until the beginning of the next week, as my diary records, that I was able to start forth on my mission to Bedfordshire in company with Mr. James M. Dodd. As we drove to Euston we picked up a grave and taciturn gentleman of iron-gray aspect, with whom I had made the necessary arrangements.\n\n\"This is an old friend,\" said I to Dodd. \"It is possible that his presence may be entirely unnecessary, and, on the other hand, it may be essential. It is not necessary at the present stage to go further into the matter.\"\n\nThe narratives of Watson have accustomed the reader, no doubt, to the fact that I do not waste words or disclose my thoughts while a case is actually under consideration. Dodd seemed surprised, but nothing more was said, and the three of us continued our journey together. In the train I asked Dodd one more question which I wished our companion to hear.\n\n\"You say that you saw your friend's face quite clearly at the window, so clearly that you are sure of his identity?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt about it whatever. His nose was pressed against the glass. The lamplight shone full upon him.\"\n\n\"It could not have been someone resembling him?\"\n\n\"No, no, it was he.\"\n\n\"But you say he was changed?\"\n\n\"Only in colour. His face was\u2014how shall I describe it?\u2014it was of a fish-belly-whiteness. It was bleached.\"\n\n\"Was it equally pale all over?\"\n\n\"I think not. It was his brow which I saw so clearly as it was pressed against the window.\"\n\n\"Did you call to him?\"\n\n\"I was too startled and horrified for the moment. Then I pursued him, as I have told you, but without result.\"\n\nMy case was practically complete, and there was only one small incident needed to round it off. When, after a considerable drive, we arrived at the strange old rambling house which my client had described, it was Ralph, the elderly butler, who opened the door. I had requisitioned the carriage for the day and had asked my elderly friend to remain within it unless we should summon him. Ralph, a little wrinkled old fellow, was in the conventional costume of black coat and pepper-and-salt trousers, with only one curious variant. He wore brown leather gloves, which at sight of us he instantly shuffled off, laying them down on the hall-table as we passed in. I have, as my friend Watson may have remarked, an abnormally acute set of senses, and a faint but incisive scent was apparent. It seemed to centre on the hall-table. I turned, placed my hat there, knocked it off, stooped to pick it up, and contrived to bring my nose within a foot of the gloves. Yes, it was undoubtedly from them that the curious tarry odour was oozing. I passed on into the study with my case complete. Alas, that I should have to show my hand so when I tell my own story! It was by concealing such links in the chain that Watson was enabled to produce his meretricious finales.\n\nColonel Emsworth was not in his room, but he came quickly enough on receipt of Ralph's message. We heard his quick, heavy step in the passage. The door was flung open and he rushed in with bristling beard and twisted features, as terrible an old man as ever I have seen. He held our cards in his hand, and he tore them up and stamped on the fragments.\n\n\"Have I not told you, you infernal busybody, that you are warned off the premises? Never dare to show your damned face here again. If you enter again without my leave I shall be within my rights if I use violence. I'll shoot you, sir! By God, I will! As to you, sir,\" turning upon me, \"I extend the same warning to you. I am familiar with your ignoble profession, but you must take your reputed talents to some other field. There is no opening for them here.\"\n\n\"I cannot leave here,\" said my client firmly, \"until I hear from Godfrey's own lips that he is under no restraint.\"\n\nOur involuntary host rang the bell.\n\n\"Ralph,\" he said, \"telephone down to the county police and ask the inspector to send up two constables. Tell him there are burglars in the house.\"\n\n\"One moment,\" said I. \"You must be aware, Mr. Dodd, that Colonel Emsworth is within his rights and that we have no legal status within his house. On the other hand, he should recognize that your action is prompted entirely by solicitude for his son. I venture to hope that if I were allowed to have five minutes' conversation with Colonel Emsworth I could certainly alter his view of the matter.\"\n\n\"I am not so easily altered,\" said the old soldier. \"Ralph, do what I have told you. What the devil are you waiting for? Ring up the police!\"\n\n\"Nothing of the sort,\" I said, putting my back to the door. \"Any police interference would bring about the very catastrophe which you dread.\" I took out my notebook and scribbled one word upon a loose sheet. \"That,\" said I as I handed it to Colonel Emsworth, \"is what has brought us here.\"\n\nHe stared at the writing with a face from which every expression save amazement had vanished.\n\n\"How do you know?\" he gasped, sitting down heavily in his chair.\n\n\"It is my business to know things. That is my trade.\"\n\nHe sat in deep thought, his gaunt hand tugging at his straggling beard. Then he made a gesture of resignation.\n\n\"Well, if you wish to see Godfrey, you shall. It is no doing of mine, but you have forced my hand. Ralph, tell Mr. Godfrey and Mr. Kent that in five minutes we shall be with them.\"\n\nAt the end of that time we passed down the garden path and found ourselves in front of the mystery house at the end. A small bearded man stood at the door with a look of considerable astonishment upon his face.\n\n\"This is very sudden, Colonel Emsworth,\" said he. \"This will disarrange all our plans.\"\n\n\"I can't help it, Mr. Kent. Our hands have been forced. Can Mr. Godfrey see us?\"\n\n\"Yes, he is waiting inside.\" He turned and led us into a large, plainly furnished front room. A man was standing with his back to the fire, and at the sight of him my client sprang forward with outstretched hand.\n\n\"Why, Godfrey, old man, this is fine!\"\n\nBut the other waved him back.\n\n\"Don't touch me, Jimmie. Keep your distance. Yes, you may well stare! I don't quite look the smart Lance-Corporal Emsworth, of B Squadron, do I?\"\n\nHis appearance was certainly extraordinary. One could see that he had indeed been a handsome man with clear-cut features sunburned by an African sun, but mottled in patches over this darker surface were curious whitish patches which had bleached his skin.\n\n\"That's why I don't court visitors,\" said he. \"I don't mind you, Jimmie, but I could have done without your friend. I suppose there is some good reason for it, but you have me at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\"I wanted to be sure that all was well with you, Godfrey. I saw you that night when you looked into my window, and I could not let the matter rest till I had cleared things up.\"\n\n\"Old Ralph told me you were there, and I couldn't help taking a peep at you. I hoped you would not have seen me, and I had to run to my burrow when I heard the window go up.\"\n\n\"But what in heaven's name is the matter?\"\n\n\"Well, it's not a long story to tell,\" said he, lighting a cigarette. \"You remember that morning fight at Buffelsspruit, outside Pretoria, on the Eastern railway line? You heard I was hit?\"\n\n\"Yes, I heard that but I never got particulars.\"\n\n\"Three of us got separated from the others. It was very broken country, you may remember. There was Simpson\u2014the fellow we called Baldy Simpson\u2014and Anderson, and I. We were clearing brother Boer, but he lay low and got the three of us. The other two were killed. I got an elephant bullet through my shoulder. I stuck on to my horse, however, and he galloped several miles before I fainted and rolled off the saddle.\n\n\"When I came to myself it was nightfall, and I raised myself up, feeling very weak and ill. To my surprise there was a house close beside me, a fairly large house with a broad stoep and many windows. It was deadly cold. You remember the kind of numb cold which used to come at evening, a deadly, sickening sort of cold, very different from a crisp healthy frost. Well, I was chilled to the bone, and my only hope seemed to lie in reaching that house. I staggered to my feet and dragged myself along, hardly conscious of what I did. I have a dim memory of slowly ascending the steps, entering a wide-opened door, passing into a large room which contained several beds, and throwing myself down with a gasp of satisfaction upon one of them. It was unmade, but that troubled me not at all. I drew the clothes over my shivering body and in a moment I was in a deep sleep.\n\n\"It was morning when I wakened, and it seemed to me that instead of coming out into a world of sanity I had emerged into some extraordinary nightmare. The African sun flooded through the big, curtainless windows, and every detail of the great, bare, whitewashed dormitory stood out hard and clear. In front of me was standing a small, dwarf-like man with a huge, bulbous head, who was jabbering excitedly in Dutch, waving two horrible hands which looked to me like brown sponges. Behind him stood a group of people who seemed to be intensely amused by the situation, but a chill came over me as I looked at them. Not one of them was a normal human being. Every one was twisted or swollen or disfigured in some strange way. The laughter of these strange monstrosities was a dreadful thing to hear.\n\n\"It seemed that none of them could speak English, but the situation wanted clearing up, for the creature with the big head was growing furiously angry, and, uttering wild-beast cries, he had laid his deformed hands upon me and was dragging me out of bed, regardless of the fresh flow of blood from my wound. The little monster was as strong as a bull, and I don't know what he might have done to me had not an elderly man who was clearly in authority been attracted to the room by the hubbub. He said a few stern words in Dutch, and my persecutor shrank away. Then he turned upon me, gazing at me in the utmost amazement.\n\n\"'How in the world did you come here?' he asked in amazement. 'Wait a bit! I see that you are tired out and that wounded shoulder of yours wants looking after. I am a doctor, and I'll soon have you tied up. But, man alive! you are in far greater danger here than ever you were on the battlefield. You are in the Leper Hospital, and you have slept in a leper's bed.'\n\n\"Need I tell you more, Jimmie? It seems that in view of the approaching battle all these poor creatures had been evacuated the day before. Then, as the British advanced, they had been brought back by this, their medical superintendent, who assured me that, though he believed he was immune to the disease, he would none the less never have dared to do what I had done. He put me in a private room, treated me kindly, and within a week or so I was removed to the general hospital at Pretoria.\n\n\"So there you have my tragedy. I hoped against hope, but it was not until I had reached home that the terrible signs which you see upon my face told me that I had not escaped. What was I to do? I was in this lonely house. We had two servants whom we could utterly trust. There was a house where I could live. Under pledge of secrecy, Mr. Kent, who is a surgeon, was prepared to stay with me. It seemed simple enough on those lines. The alternative was a dreadful one\u2014segregation for life among strangers with never a hope of release. But absolute secrecy was necessary, or even in this quiet countryside there would have been an outcry, and I should have been dragged to my horrible doom. Even you, Jimmie\u2014even you had to be kept in the dark. Why my father has relented I cannot imagine.\"\n\nColonel Emsworth pointed to me.\n\n\"This is the gentleman who forced my hand.\" He unfolded the scrap of paper on which I had written the word \"Leprosy.\" \"It seemed to me that if he knew so much as that it was safer that he should know all.\"\n\n\"And so it was,\" said I. \"Who knows but good may come of it? I understand that only Mr. Kent has seen the patient. May I ask, sir, if you are an authority on such complaints, which are, I understand, tropical or semi-tropical in their nature?\"\n\n\"I have the ordinary knowledge of the educated medical man,\" he observed with some stiffness.\n\n\"I have no doubt, sir, that you are fully competent, but I am sure that you will agree that in such a case a second opinion is valuable. You have avoided this, I understand, for fear that pressure should be put upon you to segregate the patient.\"\n\n\"That is so,\" said Colonel Emsworth.\n\n\"I foresaw this situation,\" I explained, \"and I have brought with me a friend whose discretion may absolutely be trusted. I was able once to do him a professional service, and he is ready to advise as a friend rather than as a specialist. His name is Sir James Saunders.\"\n\nThe prospect of an interview with Lord Roberts would not have excited greater wonder and pleasure in a raw subaltern than was now reflected upon the face of Mr. Kent.\n\n\"I shall indeed be proud,\" he murmured.\n\n\"Then I will ask Sir James to step this way. He is at present in the carriage outside the door. Meanwhile, Colonel Emsworth, we may perhaps assemble in your study, where I could give the necessary explanations.\"\n\nAnd here it is that I miss my Watson. By cunning questions and ejaculations of wonder he could elevate my simple art, which is but systematized common sense, into a prodigy. When I tell my own story I have no such aid. And yet I will give my process of thought even as I gave it to my small audience, which included Godfrey's mother in the study of Colonel Emsworth.\n\n\"That process,\" said I, \"starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. It may well be that several explanations remain, in which case one tries test after test until one or other of them has a convincing amount of support. We will now apply this principle to the case in point. As it was first presented to me, there were three possible explanations of the seclusion or incarceration of this gentleman in an outhouse of his father's mansion. There was the explanation that he was in hiding for a crime, or that he was mad and that they wished to avoid an asylum, or that he had some disease which caused his segregation. I could think of no other adequate solutions. These, then, had to be sifted and balanced against each other.\n\n\"The criminal solution would not bear inspection. No unsolved crime had been reported from that district. I was sure of that. If it were some crime not yet discovered, then clearly it would be to the interest of the family to get rid of the delinquent and send him abroad rather than keep him concealed at home. I could see no explanation for such a line of conduct.\n\n\"Insanity was more plausible. The presence of the second person in the outhouse suggested a keeper. The fact that he locked the door when he came out strengthened the supposition and gave the idea of constraint. On the other hand, this constraint could not be severe or the young man could not have got loose and come down to have a look at his friend. You will remember, Mr. Dodd, that I felt round for points, asking you, for example, about the paper which Mr. Kent was reading. Had it been the Lancet or the British Medical Journal it would have helped me. It is not illegal, however, to keep a lunatic upon private premises so long as there is a qualified person in attendance and that the authorities have been duly notified. Why, then, all this desperate desire for secrecy? Once again I could not get the theory to fit the facts.\n\n\"There remained the third possibility, into which, rare and unlikely as it was, everything seemed to fit. Leprosy is not uncommon in South Africa. By some extraordinary chance this youth might have contracted it. His people would be placed in a very dreadful position, since they would desire to save him from segregation. Great secrecy would be needed to prevent rumours from getting about and subsequent interference by the authorities. A devoted medical man, if sufficiently paid, would easily be found to take charge of the sufferer. There would be no reason why the latter should not be allowed freedom after dark. Bleaching of the skin is a common result of the disease. The case was a strong one\u2014so strong that I determined to act as if it were actually proved. When on arriving here I noticed that Ralph, who carries out the meals, had gloves which are impregnated with disinfectants, my last doubts were removed. A single word showed you, sir, that your secret was discovered, and if I wrote rather than said it, it was to prove to you that my discretion was to be trusted.\"\n\nI was finishing this little analysis of the case when the door was opened and the austere figure of the great dermatologist was ushered in. But for once his sphinx-like features had relaxed and there was a warm humanity in his eyes. He strode up to Colonel Emsworth and shook him by the hand.\n\n\"It is often my lot to bring ill-tidings and seldom good,\" said he. \"This occasion is the more welcome. It is not leprosy.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"A well-marked case of pseudo-leprosy or ichthyosis, a scale-like affection of the skin, unsightly, obstinate, but possibly curable, and certainly noninfective. Yes, Mr. Holmes, the coincidence is a remarkable one. But is it coincidence? Are there not subtle forces at work of which we know little? Are we assured that the apprehension from which this young man has no doubt suffered terribly since his exposure to its contagion may not produce a physical effect which simulates that which it fears? At any rate, I pledge my professional reputation\u2014But the lady has fainted! I think that Mr. Kent had better be with her until she recovers from this joyous shock.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE MAZARIN STONE", + "text": "It was pleasant to Dr. Watson to find himself once more in the untidy room of the first floor in Baker Street which had been the starting-point of so many remarkable adventures. He looked round him at the scientific charts upon the wall, the acid-charred bench of chemicals, the violin-case leaning in the comer, the coal-scuttle, which contained of old the pipes and tobacco. Finally, his eyes came round to the fresh and smiling face of Billy, the young but very wise and tactful page, who had helped a little to fill up the gap of loneliness and isolation which surrounded the saturnine figure of the great detective.\n\n\"It all seems very unchanged, Billy. You don't change, either. I hope the same can be said of him?\"\n\nBilly glanced with some solicitude at the closed door of the bedroom.\n\n\"I think he's in bed and asleep,\" he said.\n\nIt was seven in the evening of a lovely summer's day, but Dr. Watson was sufficiently familiar with the irregularity of his old friend's hours to feel no surprise at the idea.\n\n\"That means a case, I suppose?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he is very hard at it just now. I'm frightened for his health. He gets paler and thinner, and he eats nothing. 'When will you be pleased to dine, Mr. Holmes?' Mrs. Hudson asked. 'Seven-thirty, the day after to morrow,' said he. You know his way when he is keen on a case.\"\n\n\"Yes, Billy, I know.\"\n\n\"He's following someone. Yesterday he was out as a workman looking for a job. To-day he was an old woman. Fairly took me in, he did, and I ought to know his ways by now.\" Billy pointed with a grin to a very baggy parasol which leaned against the sofa. \"That's part of the old woman's outfit,\" he said.\n\n\"But what is it all about, Billy?\"\n\nBilly sank his voice, as one who discusses great secrets of State. \"I don't mind telling you, sir, but it should go no farther. It's this case of the Crown diamond.\"\n\n\"What\u2014the hundred-thousand-pound burglary?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. They must get it back, sir. Why, we had the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary both sitting on that very sofa. Mr. Holmes was very nice to them. He soon put them at their ease and promised he would do all he could. Then there is Lord Cantlemere\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, you know what that means. He's a stiff'un, sir, if I may say so. I can get along with the Prime Minister, and I've nothing against the Home Secretary, who seemed a civil, obliging sort of man, but I can't stand his Lordship. Neither can Mr. Holmes, sir. You see, he don't believe in Mr. Holmes and he was against employing him. He'd rather he failed.\"\n\n\"And Mr. Holmes knows it?\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes always knows whatever there is to know.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll hope he won't fail and that Lord Cantlemere will be confounded. But I say, Billy, what is that curtain for across the window?\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes had it put up there three days ago. We've got something funny behind it.\"\n\nBilly advanced and drew away the drapery which screened the alcove of the bow window.\n\nDr. Watson could not restrain a cry of amazement. There was a facsimile of his old friend, dressing-gown and all, the face turned three-quarters towards the window and downward, as though reading an invisible book, while the body was sunk deep in an armchair. Billy detached the head and held it in the air.\n\n\"We put it at different angles, so that it may seem more lifelike. I wouldn't dare touch it if the blind were not down. But when it's up you can see this from across the way.\"\n\n\"We used something of the sort once before.\"\n\n\"Before my time,\" said Billy. He drew the window curtains apart and looked out into the street. \"There are folk who watch us from over yonder. I can see a fellow now at the window. Have a look for yourself.\"\n\nWatson had taken a step forward when the bedroom door opened, and the long, thin form of Holmes emerged, his face pale and drawn, but his step and bearing as active as ever. With a single spring he was at the window, and had drawn the blind once more.\n\n\"That will do, Billy,\" said he. \"You were in danger of your life then, my boy, and I can't do without you just yet. Well, Watson, it is good to see you in your old quarters once again. You come at a critical moment.\"\n\n\"So I gather.\"\n\n\"You can go, Billy. That boy is a problem, Watson. How far am I justified in allowing him to be in danger?\"\n\n\"Danger of what, Holmes?\"\n\n\"Of sudden death. I'm expecting something this evening.\"\n\n\"Expecting what?\"\n\n\"To be murdered, Watson.\"\n\n\"No, no, you are joking, Holmes!\"\n\n\"Even my limited sense of humour could evolve a better joke than that. But we may be comfortable in the meantime, may we not? Is alcohol permitted? The gasogene and cigars are in the old place. Let me see you once more in the customary armchair. You have not, I hope, learned to despise my pipe and my lamentable tobacco? It has to take the place of food these days.\"\n\n\"But why not eat?\"\n\n\"Because the faculties become refined when you starve them. Why, surely, as a doctor, my dear Watson, you must admit that what your digestion gains in the way of blood supply is so much lost to the brain. I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix. Therefore, it is the brain I must consider.\"\n\n\"But this danger, Holmes?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, in case it should come off, it would perhaps be as well that you should burden your memory with the name and address of the murderer. You can give it to Scotland Yard, with my love and a parting blessing. Sylvius is the name\u2014Count Negretto Sylvius. Write it down, man, write it down! 136 Moorside Gardens, N.W. Got it?\"\n\nWatson's honest face was twitching with anxiety. He knew only too well the immense risks taken by Holmes and was well aware that what he said was more likely to be under-statement than exaggeration. Watson was always the man of action, and he rose to the occasion.\n\n\"Count me in, Holmes. I have nothing to do for a day or two.\"\n\n\"Your morals don't improve, Watson. You have added fibbing to your other vices. You bear every sign of the busy medical man, with calls on him every hour.\"\n\n\"Not such important ones. But can't you have this fellow arrested?\"\n\n\"Yes, Watson, I could. That's what worries him so.\"\n\n\"But why don't you?\"\n\n\"Because I don't know where the diamond is.\"\n\n\"Ah! Billy told me\u2014the missing Crown jewel!\"\n\n\"Yes, the great yellow Mazarin stone. I've cast my net and I have my fish. But I have not got the stone. What is the use of taking them? We can make the world a better place by laying them by the heels. But that is not what I am out for. It's the stone I want.\"\n\n\"And is this Count Sylvius one of your fish?\"\n\n\"Yes, and he's a shark. He bites. The other is Sam Merton, the boxer. Not a bad fellow, Sam, but the Count has used him. Sam's not a shark. He is a great big silly bull-headed gudgeon. But he is flopping about in my net all the same.\"\n\n\"Where is this Count Sylvius?\"\n\n\"I've been at his very elbow all the morning. You've seen me as an old lady, Watson. I was never more convincing. He actually picked up my parasol for me once. 'By your leave, madame,' said he\u2014half-Italian, you know, and with the Southern graces of manner when in the mood, but a devil incarnate in the other mood. Life is full of whimsical happenings, Watson.\"\n\n\"It might have been tragedy.\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps it might. I followed him to old Straubenzee's workshop in the Minories. Straubenzee made the air-gun\u2014a very pretty bit of work, as I understand, and I rather fancy it is in the opposite window at the present moment. Have you seen the dummy? Of course, Billy showed it to you. Well, it may get a bullet through its beautiful head at any moment. Ah, Billy, what is it?\"\n\nThe boy had reappeared in the room with a card upon a tray. Holmes glanced at it with raised eyebrows and an amused smile.\n\n\"The man himself. I had hardly expected this. Grasp the nettle, Watson! A man of nerve. Possibly you have heard of his reputation as a shooter of big game. It would indeed be a triumphant ending to his excellent sporting record if he added me to his bag. This is a proof that he feels my toe very close behind his heel.\"\n\n\"Send for the police.\"\n\n\"I probably shall. But not just yet. Would you glance carefully out of the window, Watson, and see if anyone is hanging about in the street?\"\n\nWatson looked warily round the edge of the curtain.\n\n\"Yes, there is one rough fellow near the door.\"\n\n\"That will be Sam Merton\u2014the faithful but rather fatuous Sam. Where is this gentleman, Billy?\"\n\n\"In the waiting-room, sir.\"\n\n\"Show him up when I ring.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"If I am not in the room, show him in all the same.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nWatson waited until the door was closed, and then he turned earnestly to his companion.\n\n\"Look here, Holmes, this is simply impossible. This is a desperate man, who sticks at nothing. He may have come to murder you.\"\n\n\"I should not be surprised.\"\n\n\"I insist upon staying with you.\"\n\n\"You would be horribly in the way.\"\n\n\"In his way?\"\n\n\"No, my dear fellow\u2014in my way.\"\n\n\"Well, I can't possibly leave you.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can, Watson. And you will, for you have never failed to play the game. I am sure you will play it to the end. This man has come for his own purpose, but he may stay for mine.\" Holmes took out his notebook and scribbled a few lines. \"Take a cab to Scotland Yard and give this to Youghal of the C. I. D. Come back with the police. The fellow's arrest will follow.\"\n\n\"I'll do that with joy.\"\n\n\"Before you return I may have just time enough to find out where the stone is.\" He touched the bell. \"I think we will go out through the bedroom. This second exit is exceedingly useful. I rather want to see my shark without his seeing me, and I have, as you will remember, my own way of doing it.\"\n\nIt was, therefore, an empty room into which Billy, a minute later, ushered Count Sylvius. The famous game-shot, sportsman, and man-about-town was a big, swarthy fellow, with a formidable dark moustache shading a cruel, thin-lipped mouth, and surmounted by a long, curved nose like the beak of an eagle. He was well dressed, but his brilliant necktie, shining pin, and glittering rings were flamboyant in their effect. As the door closed behind him he looked round him with fierce, startled eyes, like one who suspects a trap at every turn. Then he gave a violent start as he saw the impassive head and the collar of the dressing-gown which projected above the armchair in the window. At first his expression was one of pure amazement. Then the light of a horrible hope gleamed in his dark, murderous eyes. He took one more glance round to see that there were no witnesses, and then, on tiptoe, his thick stick half raised, he approached the silent figure. He was crouching for his final spring and blow when a cool, sardonic voice greeted him from the open bedroom door:\n\n\"Don't break it, Count! Don't break it!\"\n\nThe assassin staggered back, amazement in his convulsed face. For an instant he half raised his loaded cane once more, as if he would turn his violence from the effigy to the original; but there was something in that steady gray eye and mocking smile which caused his hand to sink to his side.\n\n\"It's a pretty little thing,\" said Holmes, advancing towards the image. \"Tavernier, the French modeller, made it. He is as good at waxworks as your friend Straubenzee is at air-guns.\"\n\n\"Air-guns, sir! What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Put your hat and stick on the side-table. Thank you! Pray take a seat. Would you care to put your revolver out also? Oh, very good, if you prefer to sit upon it. Your visit is really most opportune, for I wanted badly to have a few minutes' chat with you.\"\n\nThe Count scowled, with heavy, threatening eyebrows.\n\n\"I, too, wished to have some words with you, Holmes. That is why I am here. I won't deny that I intended to assault you just now.\"\n\nHolmes swung his leg on the edge of the table.\n\n\"I rather gathered that you had some idea of the sort in your head,\" said he. \"But why these personal attentions?\"\n\n\"Because you have gone out of your way to annoy me. Because you have put your creatures upon my track.\"\n\n\"My creatures! I assure you no!\"\n\n\"Nonsense! I have had them followed. Two can play at that game, Holmes.\"\n\n\"It is a small point, Count Sylvius, but perhaps you would kindly give me my prefix when you address me. You can understand that, with my routine of work, I should find myself on familiar terms with half the rogues' gallery, and you will agree that exceptions are invidious.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, then.\"\n\n\"Excellent! But I assure you you are mistaken about my alleged agents.\"\n\nCount Sylvius laughed contemptuously.\n\n\"Other people can observe as well as you. Yesterday there was an old sporting man. To-day it was an elderly woman. They held me in view all day.\"\n\n\"Really, sir, you compliment me. Old Baron Dowson said the night before he was hanged that in my case what the law had gained the stage had lost. And now you give my little impersonations your kindly praise?\"\n\n\"It was you\u2014you yourself?\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders. \"You can see in the corner the parasol which you so politely handed to me in the Minories before you began to suspect.\"\n\n\"If I had known, you might never\u2014\"\n\n\"Have seen this humble home again. I was well aware of it. We all have neglected opportunities to deplore. As it happens, you did not know, so here we are!\"\n\nThe Count's knotted brows gathered more heavily over his menacing eyes. \"What you say only makes the matter worse. It was not your agents but your play-acting, busybody self! You admit that you have dogged me. Why?\"\n\n\"Come now, Count. You used to shoot lions in Algeria.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Why? The sport\u2014the excitement\u2014the danger!\"\n\n\"And, no doubt, to free the country from a pest?\"\n\n\"Exactly!\"\n\n\"My reasons in a nutshell!\"\n\nThe Count sprang to his feet, and his hand involuntarily moved back to his hip-pocket.\n\n\"Sit down, sir, sit down! There was another, more practical, reason. I want that yellow diamond!\"\n\nCount Sylvius lay back in his chair with an evil smile.\n\n\"Upon my word!\" said he.\n\n\"You knew that I was after you for that. The real reason why you are here to-night is to find out how much I know about the matter and how far my removal is absolutely essential. Well, I should say that, from your point of view, it is absolutely essential, for I know all about it, save only one thing, which you are about to tell me.\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed! And pray, what is this missing fact?\"\n\n\"Where the Crown diamond now is.\"\n\nThe Count looked sharply at his companion. \"Oh, you want to know that, do you? How the devil should I be able to tell you where it is?\"\n\n\"You can, and you will.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\"\n\n\"You can't bluff me, Count Sylvius.\" Holmes's eyes, as he gazed at him, contracted and lightened until they were like two menacing points of steel. \"You are absolute plate-glass. I see to the very back of your mind.\"\n\n\"Then, of course, you see where the diamond is!\"\n\nHolmes clapped his hands with amusement, and then pointed a derisive finger. \"Then you do know. You have admitted it!\"\n\n\"I admit nothing.\"\n\n\"Now, Count, if you will be reasonable we can do business. If not, you will get hurt.\"\n\nCount Sylvius threw up his eyes to the ceiling. \"And you talk about bluff!\" said he.\n\nHolmes looked at him thoughtfully like a master chess-player who meditates his crowning move. Then he threw open the table drawer and drew out a squat notebook.\n\n\"Do you know what I keep in this book?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I do not!\"\n\n\"You!\"\n\n\"Me!\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, you! You are all here\u2014every action of your vile and dangerous life.\"\n\n\"Damn you, Holmes!\" cried the Count with blazing eyes. \"There are limits to my patience!\"\n\n\"It's all here, Count. The real facts as to the death of old Mrs. Harold, who left you the Blymer estate, which you so rapidly gambled away.\"\n\n\"You are dreaming!\"\n\n\"And the complete life history of Miss Minnie Warrender.\"\n\n\"Tut! You will make nothing of that!\"\n\n\"Plenty more here, Count. Here is the robbery in the train de-luxe to the Riviera on February 13, 1892. Here is the forged check in the same year on the Credit Lyonnais.\"\n\n\"No; you're wrong there.\"\n\n\"Then I am right on the others! Now, Count, you are a card-player. When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.\"\n\n\"What has all this talk to do with the jewel of which you spoke?\"\n\n\"Gently, Count. Restrain that eager mind! Let me get to the points in my own humdrum fashion. I have all this against you; but, above all, I have a clear case against both you and your fighting bully in the case of the Crown diamond.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\"\n\n\"I have the cabman who took you to Whitehall and the cabman who brought you away. I have the commissionaire who saw you near the case. I have Ikey Sanders, who refused to cut it up for you. Ikey has peached, and the game is up.\"\n\nThe veins stood out on the Count's forehead. His dark, hairy hands were clenched in a convulsion of restrained emotion. He tried to speak, but the words would not shape themselves.\n\n\"That's the hand I play from,\" said Holmes. \"I put it all upon the table. But one card is missing. It's the king of diamonds. I don't know where the stone is.\"\n\n\"You never shall know.\"\n\n\"No? Now, be reasonable, Count. Consider the situation. You are going to be locked up for twenty years. So is Sam Merton. What good are you going to get out of your diamond? None in the world. But if you hand it over\u2014well, I'll compound a felony. We don't want you or Sam. We want the stone. Give that up, and so far as I am concerned you can go free so long as you behave yourself in the future. If you make another slip\u2014well, it will be the last. But this time my commission is to get the stone, not you.\"\n\n\"But if I refuse?\"\n\n\"Why, then\u2014alas!\u2014it must be you and not the stone.\"\n\nBilly had appeared in answer to a ring.\n\n\"I think, Count, that it would be as well to have your friend Sam at this conference. After all, his interests should be represented. Billy, you will see a large and ugly gentleman outside the front door. Ask him to come up.\"\n\n\"If he won't come, sir?\"\n\n\"No violence, Billy. Don't be rough with him. If you tell him that Count Sylvius wants him he will certainly come.\"\n\n\"What are you going to do now?\" asked the Count as Billy disappeared.\n\n\"My friend Watson was with me just now. I told him that I had a shark and a gudgeon in my net; now I am drawing the net and up they come together.\"\n\nThe Count had risen from his chair, and his hand was behind his back. Holmes held something half protruding from the pocket of his dressing-gown.\n\n\"You won't die in your bed, Holmes.\"\n\n\"I have often had the same idea. Does it matter very much? After all, Count, your own exit is more likely to be perpendicular than horizontal. But these anticipations of the future are morbid. Why not give ourselves up to the unrestrained enjoyment of the present?\"\n\nA sudden wild-beast light sprang up in the dark, menacing eyes of the master criminal. Holmes's figure seemed to grow taller as he grew tense and ready.\n\n\"It is no use your fingering your revolver, my friend,\" he said in a quiet voice. \"You know perfectly well that you dare not use it, even if I gave you time to draw it. Nasty, noisy things, revolvers, Count. Better stick to air-guns. Ah! I think I hear the fairy footstep of your estimable partner. Good day, Mr. Merton. Rather dull in the street, is it not?\"\n\nThe prize-fighter, a heavily built young man with a stupid, obstinate, slab-sided face, stood awkwardly at the door, looking about him with a puzzled expression. Holmes's debonair manner was a new experience, and though he vaguely felt that it was hostile, he did not know how to counter it. He turned to his more astute comrade for help.\n\n\"What's the game now, Count? What's this fellow want? What's up?\" His voice was deep and raucous.\n\nThe Count shrugged his shoulders, and it was Holmes who answered.\n\n\"If I may put it in a nutshell, Mr. Merton, I should say it was all up.\"\n\nThe boxer still addressed his remarks to his associate.\n\n\"Is this cove trying to be funny, or what? I'm not in the funny mood myself.\"\n\n\"No, I expect not,\" said Holmes. \"I think I can promise you that you will feel even less humorous as the evening advances. Now, look here, Count Sylvius. I'm a busy man and I can't waste time. I'm going into that bedroom. Pray make yourselves quite at home in my absence. You can explain to your friend how the matter lies without the restraint of my presence. I shall try over the Hoffman 'Barcarole' upon my violin. In five minutes I shall return for your final answer. You quite grasp the alternative, do you not? Shall we take you, or shall we have the stone?\"\n\nHolmes withdrew, picking up his violin from the corner as he passed. A few moments later the long-drawn, wailing notes of that most haunting of tunes came faintly through the closed door of the bedroom.\n\n\"What is it, then?\" asked Merton anxiously as his companion turned to him. \"Does he know about the stone?\"\n\n\"He knows a damned sight too much about it. I'm not sure that he doesn't know all about it.\"\n\n\"Good Lord!\" The boxer's sallow face turned a shade whiter.\n\n\"Ikey Sanders has split on us.\"\n\n\"He has, has he? I'll do him down a thick 'un for that if I swing for it.\"\n\n\"That won't help us much. We've got to make up our minds what to do.\"\n\n\"Half a mo',\" said the boxer, looking suspiciously at the bedroom door. \"He's a leary cove that wants watching. I suppose he's not listening?\"\n\n\"How can he be listening with that music going?\"\n\n\"That's right. Maybe somebody's behind a curtain. Too many curtains in this room.\" As he looked round he suddenly saw for the first time the effigy in the window, and stood staring and pointing, too amazed for words.\n\n\"Tut! it's only a dummy,\" said the Count.\n\n\"A fake, is it? Well, strike me! Madame Tussaud ain't in it. It's the living spit of him, gown and all. But them curtains, Count!\"\n\n\"Oh, confound the curtains! We are wasting our time, and there is none too much. He can lag us over this stone.\"\n\n\"The deuce he can!\"\n\n\"But he'll let us slip if we only tell him where the swag is.\"\n\n\"What! Give it up? Give up a hundred thousand quid?\"\n\n\"It's one or the other.\"\n\nMerton scratched his short-cropped pate.\n\n\"He's alone in there. Let's do him in. If his light were out we should have nothing to fear.\"\n\nThe Count shook his head.\n\n\"He is armed and ready. If we shot him we could hardly get away in a place like this. Besides, it's likely enough that the police know whatever evidence he has got. Hallo! What was that?\"\n\nThere was a vague sound which seemed to come from the window. Both men sprang round, but all was quiet. Save for the one strange figure seated in the chair, the room was certainly empty.\n\n\"Something in the street,\" said Merton. \"Now, look here, guv'nor, you've got the brains. Surely you can think a way out of it. If slugging is no use then it's up to you.\"\n\n\"I've fooled better men than he,\" the Count answered. \"The stone is here in my secret pocket. I take no chances leaving it about. It can be out of England to-night and cut into four pieces in Amsterdam before Sunday. He knows nothing of Van Seddar.\"\n\n\"I thought Van Seddar was going next week.\"\n\n\"He was. But now he must get off by the next boat. One or other of us must slip round with the stone to Lime Street and tell him.\"\n\n\"But the false bottom ain't ready.\"\n\n\"Well, he must take it as it is and chance it. There's not a moment to lose.\" Again, with the sense of danger which becomes an instinct with the sportsman, he paused and looked hard at the window. Yes, it was surely from the street that the faint sound had come.\n\n\"As to Holmes,\" he continued, \"we can fool him easily enough. You see, the damned fool won't arrest us if he can get the stone. Well, we'll promise him the stone. We'll put him on the wrong track about it, and before he finds that it is the wrong track it will be in Holland and we out of the country.\"\n\n\"That sounds good to me!\" cried Sam Merton with a grin.\n\n\"You go on and tell the Dutchman to get a move on him. I'll see this sucker and fill him up with a bogus confession. I'll tell him that the stone is in Liverpool. Confound that whining music; it gets on my nerves! By the time he finds it isn't in Liverpool it will be in quarters and we on the blue water. Come back here, out of a line with that keyhole. Here is the stone.\"\n\n\"I wonder you dare carry it.\"\n\n\"Where could I have it safer? If we could take it out of Whitehall someone else could surely take it out of my lodgings.\"\n\n\"Let's have a look at it.\"\n\nCount Sylvius cast a somewhat unflattering glance at his associate and disregarded the unwashed hand which was extended towards him.\n\n\"What\u2014d'ye think I'm going to snatch it off you? See here, mister, I'm getting a bit tired of your ways.\"\n\n\"Well, well, no offence, Sam. We can't afford to quarrel. Come over to the window if you want to see the beauty properly. Now hold it to the light! Here!\"\n\n\"Thank you!\"\n\nWith a single spring Holmes had leaped from the dummy's chair and had grasped the precious jewel. He held it now in one hand, while his other pointed a revolver at the Count's head. The two villains staggered back in utter amazement. Before they had recovered Holmes had pressed the electric bell.\n\n\"No violence, gentlemen\u2014no violence, I beg of you! Consider the furniture! It must be very clear to you that your position is an impossible one. The police are waiting below.\"\n\nThe Count's bewilderment overmastered his rage and fear.\n\n\"But how the deuce\u2014?\" he gasped.\n\n\"Your surprise is very natural. You are not aware that a second door from my bedroom leads behind that curtain. I fancied that you must have heard me when I displaced the figure, but luck was on my side. It gave me a chance of listening to your racy conversation which would have been painfully constrained had you been aware of my presence.\"\n\nThe Count gave a gesture of resignation.\n\n\"We give you best, Holmes. I believe you are the devil himself.\"\n\n\"Not far from him, at any rate,\" Holmes answered with a polite smile.\n\nSam Merton's slow intellect had only gradually appreciated the situation. Now, as the sound of heavy steps came from the stairs outside, he broke silence at last.\n\n\"A fair cop!\" said he. \"But, I say, what about that bloomin' fiddle! I hear it yet.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut!\" Holmes answered. \"You are perfectly right. Let it play! These modern gramophones are a remarkable invention.\"\n\nThere was an inrush of police, the handcuffs clicked and the criminals were led to the waiting cab. Watson lingered with Holmes, congratulating him upon this fresh leaf added to his laurels. Once more their conversation was interrupted by the imperturbable Billy with his card-tray.\n\n\"Lord Cantlemere, sir.\"\n\n\"Show him up, Billy. This is the eminent peer who represents the very highest interests,\" said Holmes. \"He is an excellent and loyal person, but rather of the old regime. Shall we make him unbend? Dare we venture upon a slight liberty? He knows, we may conjecture, nothing of what has occurred.\"\n\nThe door opened to admit a thin, austere figure with a hatchet face and drooping mid-Victorian whiskers of a glossy blackness which hardly corresponded with the rounded shoulders and feeble gait. Holmes advanced affably, and shook an unresponsive hand.\n\n\"How do you do, Lord Cantlemere? It is chilly for the time of year, but rather warm indoors. May I take your overcoat?\"\n\n\"No, I thank you; I will not take it off.\"\n\nHolmes laid his hand insistently upon the sleeve.\n\n\"Pray allow me! My friend Dr. Watson would assure you that these changes of temperature are most insidious.\"\n\nHis Lordship shook himself free with some impatience.\n\n\"I am quite comfortable, sir. I have no need to stay. I have simply looked in to know how your self-appointed task was progressing.\"\n\n\"It is difficult\u2014very difficult.\"\n\n\"I feared that you would find it so.\"\n\nThere was a distinct sneer in the old courtier's words and manner.\n\n\"Every man finds his limitations, Mr. Holmes, but at least it cures us of the weakness of self-satisfaction.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I have been much perplexed.\"\n\n\"No doubt.\"\n\n\"Especially upon one point. Possibly you could help me upon it?\"\n\n\"You apply for my advice rather late in the day. I thought that you had your own all-sufficient methods. Still, I am ready to help you.\"\n\n\"You see, Lord Cantlemere, we can no doubt frame a case against the actual thieves.\"\n\n\"When you have caught them.\"\n\n\"Exactly. But the question is\u2014how shall we proceed against the receiver?\"\n\n\"Is this not rather premature?\"\n\n\"It is as well to have our plans ready. Now, what would you regard as final evidence against the receiver?\"\n\n\"The actual possession of the stone.\"\n\n\"You would arrest him upon that?\"\n\n\"Most undoubtedly.\"\n\nHolmes seldom laughed, but he got as near it as his old friend Watson could remember.\n\n\"In that case, my dear sir, I shall be under the painful necessity of advising your arrest.\"\n\nLord Cantlemere was very angry. Some of the ancient fires flickered up into his sallow cheeks.\n\n\"You take a great liberty, Mr. Holmes. In fifty years of official life I cannot recall such a case. I am a busy man, sir, engaged upon important affairs, and I have no time or taste for foolish jokes. I may tell you frankly, sir, that I have never been a believer in your powers, and that I have always been of the opinion that the matter was far safer in the hands of the regular police force. Your conduct confirms all my conclusions. I have the honour, sir, to wish you good-evening.\"\n\nHolmes had swiftly changed his position and was between the peer and the door.\n\n\"One moment, sir,\" said he. \"To actually go off with the Mazarin stone would be a more serious offence than to be found in temporary possession of it.\"\n\n\"Sir, this is intolerable! Let me pass.\"\n\n\"Put your hand in the right-hand pocket of your overcoat.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, sir?\"\n\n\"Come\u2014come, do what I ask.\"\n\nAn instant later the amazed peer was standing, blinking and stammering, with the great yellow stone on his shaking palm.\n\n\"What! What! How is this, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Too bad, Lord Cantlemere, too bad!\" cried Holmes. \"My old friend here will tell you that I have an impish habit of practical joking. Also that I can never resist a dramatic situation. I took the liberty\u2014the very great liberty, I admit\u2014of putting the stone into your pocket at the beginning of our interview.\"\n\nThe old peer stared from the stone to the smiling face before him.\n\n\"Sir, I am bewildered. But\u2014yes\u2014it is indeed the Mazarin stone. We are greatly your debtors, Mr. Holmes. Your sense of humour may, as you admit, be somewhat perverted, and its exhibition remarkably untimely, but at least I withdraw any reflection I have made upon your amazing professional powers. But how\u2014\"\n\n\"The case is but half finished; the details can wait. No doubt, Lord Cantlemere, your pleasure in telling of this successful result in the exalted circle to which you return will be some small atonement for my practical joke. Billy, you will show his Lordship out, and tell Mrs. Hudson that I should be glad if she would send up dinner for two as soon as possible.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GABLES", + "text": "I don't think that any of my adventures with Mr. Sherlock Holmes opened quite so abruptly, or so dramatically, as that which I associate with The Three Gables. I had not seen Holmes for some days and had no idea of the new channel into which his activities had been directed. He was in a chatty mood that morning, however, and had just settled me into the well-worn low armchair on one side of the fire, while he had curled down with his pipe in his mouth upon the opposite chair, when our visitor arrived. If I had said that a mad bull had arrived it would give a clearer impression of what occurred.\n\nThe door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room. He would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.\n\n\"Which of you gen'l'men is Masser Holmes?\" he asked.\n\nHolmes raised his pipe with a languid smile.\n\n\"Oh! it's you, is it?\" said our visitor, coming with an unpleasant, stealthy step round the angle of the table. \"See here, Masser Holmes, you keep your hands out of other folks' business. Leave folks to manage their own affairs. Got that, Masser Holmes?\"\n\n\"Keep on talking,\" said Holmes. \"It's fine.\"\n\n\"Oh! it's fine, is it?\" growled the savage. \"It won't be so damn fine if I have to trim you up a bit. I've handled your kind before now, and they didn't look fine when I was through with them. Look at that, Masser Holmes!\"\n\nHe swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend's nose. Holmes examined it closely with an air of great interest. \"Were you born so?\" he asked. \"Or did it come by degrees?\"\n\nIt may have been the icy coolness of my friend, or it may have been the slight clatter which I made as I picked up the poker. In any case, our visitor's manner became less flamboyant.\n\n\"Well, I've given you fair warnin',\" said he. \"I've a friend that's interested out Harrow way\u2014you know what I'm meaning\u2014and he don't intend to have no buttin' in by you. Got that? You ain't the law, and I ain't the law either, and if you come in I'll be on hand also. Don't you forget it.\"\n\n\"I've wanted to meet you for some time,\" said Holmes. \"I won't ask you to sit down, for I don't like the smell of you, but aren't you Steve Dixie, the bruiser?\"\n\n\"That's my name, Masser Holmes, and you'll get put through it for sure if you give me any lip.\"\n\n\"It is certainly the last thing you need,\" said Holmes, staring at our visitor's hideous mouth. \"But it was the killing of young Perkins outside the Holborn Bar\u2014What! you're not going?\"\n\nThe negro had sprung back, and his face was leaden. \"I won't listen to no such talk,\" said he. \"What have I to do with this 'ere Perkins, Masser Holmes? I was trainin' at the Bull Ring in Birmingham when this boy done gone get into trouble.\"\n\n\"Yes, you'll tell the magistrate about it, Steve,\" said Holmes. \"I've been watching you and Barney Stockdale\u2014\"\n\n\"So help me the Lord! Masser Holmes\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough. Get out of it. I'll pick you up when I want you.\"\n\n\"Good-mornin', Masser Holmes. I hope there ain't no hard feelin's about this 'ere visit?\"\n\n\"There will be unless you tell me who sent you.\"\n\n\"Why, there ain't no secret about that, Masser Holmes. It was that same gen'l'man that you have just done gone mention.\"\n\n\"And who set him on to it?\"\n\n\"S'elp me. I don't know, Masser Holmes. He just say, 'Steve, you go see Mr. Holmes, and tell him his life ain't safe if he go down Harrow way.' That's the whole truth.\" Without waiting for any further questioning, our visitor bolted out of the room almost as precipitately as he had entered. Holmes knocked out the ashes of his pipe with a quiet chuckle.\n\n\"I am glad you were not forced to break his woolly head, Watson. I observed your manoeuvres with the poker. But he is really rather a harmless fellow, a great muscular, foolish, blustering baby, and easily cowed, as you have seen. He is one of the Spencer John gang and has taken part in some dirty work of late which I may clear up when I have time. His immediate principal, Barney, is a more astute person. They specialize in assaults, in timidation, and the like. What I want to know is, who is at the back of them on this particular occasion?\"\n\n\"But why do they want to intimidate you?\"\n\n\"It is this Harrow Weald case. It decides me to look into the matter, for if it is worth anyone's while to take so much trouble, there must be something in it.\"\n\n\"But what is it?\"\n\n\"I was going to tell you when we had this comic interlude. Here is Mrs. Maberley's note. If you care to come with me we will wire her and go out at once.\"\n\n\u2002DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES [I read]:\n\n\u2002I have had a succession of strange incidents occur to me in connection with this house, and I should much value your advice. You would find me at home any time to-morrow. The house is within a short walk of the Weald Station. I believe that my late husband, Mortimer Maberley, was one of your early clients.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002MARY MABERLEY.\n\nThe address was \"The Three Gables, Harrow Weald.\"\n\n\"So that's that!\" said Holmes. \"And now, if you can spare the time, Watson, we will get upon our way.\"\n\nA short railway journey, and a shorter drive, brought us to the house, a brick and timber villa, standing in its own acre of undeveloped grassland. Three small projections above the upper windows made a feeble attempt to justify its name. Behind was a grove of melancholy, half-grown pines, and the whole aspect of the place was poor and depressing. None the less, we found the house to be well furnished, and the lady who received us was a most engaging elderly person, who bore every mark of refinement and culture.\n\n\"I remember your husband well, madam,\" said Holmes, \"though it is some years since he used my services in some trifling matter.\"\n\n\"Probably you would be more familiar with the name of my son Douglas.\"\n\nHolmes looked at her with great interest.\n\n\"Dear me! Are you the mother of Douglas Maberley? I knew him slightly. But of course all London knew him. What a magnificent creature he was! Where is he now?\"\n\n\"Dead, Mr. Holmes, dead! He was attach\u00e9 at Rome, and he died there of pneumonia last month.\"\n\n\"I am sorry. One could not connect death with such a man. I have never known anyone so vitally alive. He lived intensely\u2014every fibre of him!\"\n\n\"Too intensely, Mr. Holmes. That was the ruin of him. You remember him as he was\u2014debonair and splendid. You did not see the moody, morose, brooding creature into which he developed. His heart was broken. In a single month I seemed to see my gallant boy turn into a worn-out cynical man.\"\n\n\"A love affair\u2014a woman?\"\n\n\"Or a fiend. Well, it was not to talk of my poor lad that I asked you to come, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Dr. Watson and I are at your service.\"\n\n\"There have been some very strange happenings. I have been in this house more than a year now, and as I wished to lead a retired life I have seen little of my neighbours. Three days ago I had a call from a man who said that he was a house agent. He said that this house would exactly suit a client of his, and that if I would part with it money would be no object. It seemed to me very strange as there are several empty houses on the market which appear to be equally eligible, but naturally I was interested in what he said. I therefore named a price which was five hundred pounds more than I gave. He at once closed with the offer, but added that his client desired to buy the furniture as well and would I put a price upon it. Some of this furniture is from my old home, and it is, as you see, very good, so that I named a good round sum. To this also he at once agreed. I had always wanted to travel, and the bargain was so good a one that it really seemed that I should be my own mistress for the rest of my life.\n\n\"Yesterday the man arrived with the agreement all drawn out. Luckily I showed it to Mr. Sutro, my lawyer, who lives in Harrow. He said to me, 'This is a very strange document. Are you aware that if you sign it you could not legally take anything out of the house\u2014not even your own private possessions?' When the man came again in the evening I pointed this out, and I said that I meant only to sell the furniture.\n\n\"'No, no, everything,' said he.\n\n\"'But my clothes? My jewels?'\n\n\"'Well, well, some concession might be made for your personal effects. But nothing shall go out of the house unchecked. My client is a very liberal man, but he has his fads and his own way of doing things. It is everything or nothing with him.'\n\n\"'Then it must be nothing,' said I. And there the matter was left, but the whole thing seemed to me to be so unusual that I thought\u2014\"\n\nHere we had a very extraordinary interruption.\n\nHolmes raised his hand for silence. Then he strode across the room, flung open the door, and dragged in a great gaunt woman whom he had seized by the shoulder. She entered with ungainly struggle like some huge awkward chicken, torn, squawking, out of its coop.\n\n\"Leave me alone! What are you a-doin' of?\" she screeched.\n\n\"Why, Susan, what is this?\"\n\n\"Well, ma'am, I was comin' in to ask if the visitors was stayin' for lunch when this man jumped out at me.\"\n\n\"I have been listening to her for the last five minutes, but did not wish to interrupt your most interesting narrative. Just a little wheezy, Susan, are you not? You breathe too heavily for that kind of work.\"\n\nSusan turned a sulky but amazed face upon her captor. \"Who be you, anyhow, and what right have you a-pullin' me about like this?\"\n\n\"It was merely that I wished to ask a question in your presence. Did you, Mrs. Maberley, mention to anyone that you were going to write to me and consult me?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes, I did not.\"\n\n\"Who posted your letter?\"\n\n\"Susan did.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Now, Susan, to whom was it that you wrote or sent a message to say that your mistress was asking advice from me?\"\n\n\"It's a lie. I sent no message.\"\n\n\"Now, Susan, wheezy people may not live long, you know. It's a wicked thing to tell fibs. Whom did you tell?\"\n\n\"Susan!\" cried her mistress, \"I believe you are a bad, treacherous woman. I remember now that I saw you speaking to someone over the hedge.\"\n\n\"That was my own business,\" said the woman sullenly.\n\n\"Suppose I tell you that it was Barney Stockdale to whom you spoke?\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Well, if you know, what do you want to ask for?\"\n\n\"I was not sure, but I know now. Well now, Susan, it will be worth ten pounds to you if you will tell me who is at the back of Barney.\"\n\n\"Someone that could lay down a thousand pounds for every ten you have in the world.\"\n\n\"So, a rich man? No; you smiled\u2014a rich woman. Now we have got so far, you may as well give the name and earn the tenner.\"\n\n\"I'll see you in hell first.\"\n\n\"Oh, Susan! Language!\"\n\n\"I am clearing out of here. I've had enough of you all. I'll send for my box to-morrow.\" She flounced for the door.\n\n\"Good-bye, Susan. Paregoric is the stuff.... Now,\" he continued, turning suddenly from lively to severe when the door had closed behind the flushed and angry woman, \"this gang means business. Look how close they play the game. Your letter to me had the 10 P.M. postmark. And yet Susan passes the word to Barney. Barney has time to go to his employer and get instructions; he or she\u2014I incline to the latter from Susan's grin when she thought I had blundered\u2014forms a plan. Black Steve is called in, and I am warned off by eleven o'clock next morning. That's quick work, you know.\"\n\n\"But what do they want?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's the question. Who had the house before you?\"\n\n\"A retired sea captain called Ferguson.\"\n\n\"Anything remarkable about him?\"\n\n\"Not that ever I heard of.\"\n\n\"I was wondering whether he could have buried something. Of course, when people bury treasure nowadays they do it in the Post-Office bank. But there are always some lunatics about. It would be a dull world without them. At first I thought of some buried valuable. But why, in that case, should they want your furniture? You don't happen to have a Raphael or a first folio Shakespeare without knowing it?\"\n\n\"No, I don't think I have anything rarer than a Crown Derby tea-set.\"\n\n\"That would hardly justify all this mystery. Besides, why should they not openly state what they want? If they covet your tea-set, they can surely offer a price for it without buying you out, lock, stock, and barrel. No, as I read it, there is something which you do not know that you have, and which you would not give up if you did know.\"\n\n\"That is how I read it,\" said I.\n\n\"Dr. Watson agrees, so that settles it.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, what can it be?\"\n\n\"Let us see whether by this purely mental analysis we can get it to a finer point. You have been in this house a year.\"\n\n\"Nearly two.\"\n\n\"All the better. During this long period no one wants anything from you. Now suddenly within three or four days you have urgent demands. What would you gather from that?\"\n\n\"It can only mean,\" said I, \"that the object, whatever it may be, has only just come into the house.\"\n\n\"Settled once again,\" said Holmes. \"Now, Mrs. Maberley, has any object just arrived?\"\n\n\"No, I have bought nothing new this year.\"\n\n\"Indeed! That is very remarkable. Well, I think we had best let matters develop a little further until we have clearer data. Is that lawyer of yours a capable man?\"\n\n\"Mr. Sutro is most capable.\"\n\n\"Have you another maid, or was the fair Susan, who has just banged your front door, alone?\"\n\n\"I have a young girl.\"\n\n\"Try and get Sutro to spend a night or two in the house. You might possibly want protection.\"\n\n\"Against whom?\"\n\n\"Who knows? The matter is certainly obscure. If I can't find what they are after, I must approach the matter from the other end and try to get at the principal. Did this house-agent man give any address?\"\n\n\"Simply his card and occupation. Haines-Johnson, Auctioneer and Valuer.\"\n\n\"I don't think we shall find him in the directory. Honest business men don't conceal their place of business. Well, you will let me know any fresh development. I have taken up your case, and you may rely upon it that I shall see it through.\"\n\nAs we passed through the hall Holmes's eyes, which missed nothing, lighted upon several trunks and cases which were piled in a corner. The labels shone out upon them.\n\n\"'Milano.' 'Lucerne.' These are from Italy.\"\n\n\"They are poor Douglas's things.\"\n\n\"You have not unpacked them? How long have you had them?\"\n\n\"They arrived last week.\"\n\n\"But you said\u2014why, surely this might be the missing link. How do we know that there is not something of value there?\"\n\n\"There could not possibly be, Mr. Holmes. Poor Douglas had only his pay and a small annuity. What could he have of value?\"\n\nHolmes was lost in thought.\n\n\"Delay no longer, Mrs. Maberley,\" he said at last. \"Have these things taken upstairs to your bedroom. Examine them as soon as possible and see what they contain. I will come to-morrow and hear your report.\"\n\nIt was quite evident that The Three Gables was under very close surveillance, for as we came round the high hedge at the end of the lane there was the negro prize-fighter standing in the shadow. We came on him quite suddenly, and a grim and menacing figure he looked in that lonely place. Holmes clapped his hand to his pocket.\n\n\"Lookin' for your gun, Masser Holmes?\"\n\n\"No, for my scent-bottle, Steve.\"\n\n\"You are funny, Masser Holmes, ain't you?\"\n\n\"It won't be funny for you, Steve, if I get after you. I gave you fair warning this morning.\"\n\n\"Well, Masser Holmes, I done gone think over what you said, and I don't want no more talk about that affair of Masser Perkins. S'pose I can help you, Masser Holmes, I will.\"\n\n\"Well, then, tell me who is behind you on this job.\"\n\n\"So help me the Lord! Masser Holmes, I told you the truth before. I don't know. My boss Barney gives me orders and that's all.\"\n\n\"Well, just bear in mind, Steve, that the lady in that house, and everything under that roof, is under my protection. Don't forget it.\"\n\n\"All right, Masser Holmes. I'll remember.\"\n\n\"I've got him thoroughly frightened for his own skin, Watson,\" Holmes remarked as we walked on. \"I think he would double-cross his employer if he knew who he was. It was lucky I had some knowledge of the Spencer John crowd, and that Steve was one of them. Now, Watson, this is a case for Langdale Pike, and I am going to see him now. When I get back I may be clearer in the matter.\"\n\nI saw no more of Holmes during the day, but I could well imagine how he spent it, for Langdale Pike was his human book of reference upon all matters of social scandal. This strange, languid creature spent his waking hours in the bow window of a St. James's Street club and was the receiving-station as well as the transmitter for all the gossip of the metropolis. He made, it was said, a four-figure income by the paragraphs which he contributed every week to the garbage papers which cater to an inquisitive public. If ever, far down in the turbid depths of London life, there was some strange swirl or eddy, it was marked with automatic exactness by this human dial upon the surface. Holmes discreetly helped Langdale to knowledge, and on occasion was helped in turn.\n\nWhen I met my friend in his room early next morning, I was conscious from his bearing that all was well, but none the less a most unpleasant surprise was awaiting us. It took the shape of the following telegram:\n\nPlease come out at once. Client's house burgled in the night. Police in possession.\n\nSUTRO.\n\nHolmes whistled. \"The drama has come to a crisis, and quicker than I had expected. There is a great driving-power at the back of this business, Watson, which does not surprise me after what I have heard. This Sutro, of course, is her lawyer. I made a mistake, I fear, in not asking you to spend the night on guard. This fellow has clearly proved a broken reed. Well, there is nothing for it but another journey to Harrow Weald.\"\n\nWe found The Three Gables a very different establishment to the orderly household of the previous day. A small group of idlers had assembled at the garden gate, while a couple of constables were examining the windows and the geranium beds. Within we met a gray old gentleman, who introduced himself as the lawyer, together with a bustling, rubicund inspector, who greeted Holmes as an old friend.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, no chance for you in this case, I'm afraid. Just a common, ordinary burglary, and well within the capacity of the poor old police. No experts need apply.\"\n\n\"I am sure the case is in very good hands,\" said Holmes. \"Merely a common burglary, you say?\"\n\n\"Quite so. We know pretty well who the men are and where to find them. It is that gang of Barney Stockdale, with the big nigger in it\u2014they've been seen about here.\"\n\n\"Excellent! What did they get?\"\n\n\"Well, they don't seem to have got much. Mrs. Maberley was chloroformed and the house was\u2014Ah! here is the lady herself.\"\n\nOur friend of yesterday, looking very pale and ill, had entered the room, leaning upon a little maidservant.\n\n\"You gave me good advice, Mr. Holmes,\" said she, smiling ruefully. \"Alas, I did not take it! I did not wish to trouble Mr. Sutro, and so I was unprotected.\"\n\n\"I only heard of it this morning,\" the lawyer explained.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes advised me to have some friend in the house. I neglected his advice, and I have paid for it.\"\n\n\"You look wretchedly ill,\" said Holmes. \"Perhaps you are hardly equal to telling me what occurred.\"\n\n\"It is all here,\" said the inspector, tapping a bulky notebook.\n\n\"Still, if the lady is not too exhausted\u2014\"\n\n\"There is really so little to tell. I have no doubt that wicked Susan had planned an entrance for them. They must have known the house to an inch. I was conscious for a moment of the chloroform rag which was thrust over my mouth, but I have no notion how long I may have been senseless. When I woke, one man was at the bedside and another was rising with a bundle in his hand from among my son's baggage, which was partially opened and littered over the floor. Before he could get away I sprang up and seized him.\"\n\n\"You took a big risk,\" said the inspector.\n\n\"I clung to him, but he shook me off, and the other may have struck me, for I can remember no more. Mary the maid heard the noise and began screaming out of the window. That brought the police, but the rascals had got away.\"\n\n\"What did they take?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't think there is anything of value missing. I am sure there was nothing in my son's trunks.\"\n\n\"Did the men leave no clue?\"\n\n\"There was one sheet of paper which I may have torn from the man that I grasped. It was lying all crumpled on the floor. It is in my son's handwriting.\"\n\n\"Which means that it is not of much use,\" said the inspector. \"Now if it had been in the burglar's\u2014\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Holmes. \"What rugged common sense! None the less, I should be curious to see it.\"\n\nThe inspector drew a folded sheet of foolscap from his pocketbook.\n\n\"I never pass anything, however trifling,\" said he with some pompos ity. \"That is my advice to you, Mr. Holmes. In twenty-five years' experience I have learned my lesson. There is always the chance of finger-marks or something.\"\n\nHolmes inspected the sheet of paper.\n\n\"What do you make of it, Inspector?\"\n\n\"Seems to be the end of some queer novel, so far as I can see.\"\n\n\"It may certainly prove to be the end of a queer tale,\" said Holmes. \"You have noticed the number on the top of the page. It is two hundred and forty-five. Where are the odd two hundred and forty-four pages?\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose the burglars got those. Much good may it do them!\"\n\n\"It seems a queer thing to break into a house in order to steal such papers as that. Does it suggest anything to you, Inspector?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, it suggests that in their hurry the rascals just grabbed at what came first to hand. I wish them joy of what they got.\"\n\n\"Why should they go to my son's things?\" asked Mrs. Maberley.\n\n\"Well, they found nothing valuable downstairs, so they tried their luck upstairs. That is how I read it. What do you make of it, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I must think it over, Inspector. Come to the window, Watson.\" Then, as we stood together, he read over the fragment of paper. It began in the middle of a sentence and ran like this:\n\n\"...face bled considerably from the cuts and blows, but it was nothing to the bleeding of his heart as he saw that lovely face, the face for which he had been prepared to sacrifice his very life, looking out at his agony and humiliation. She smiled\u2014yes, by Heaven! she smiled, like the heartless fiend she was, as he looked up at her. It was at that moment that love died and hate was born. Man must live for something. If it is not for your embrace, my lady, then it shall surely be for your undoing and my complete revenge.\"\n\n\"Queer grammar!\" said Holmes with a smile as he handed the paper back to the inspector. \"Did you notice how the 'he' suddenly changed to 'my'? The writer was so carried away by his own story that he imagined himself at the supreme moment to be the hero.\"\n\n\"It seemed mighty poor stuff,\" said the inspector as he replaced it in his book. \"What! are you off, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I don't think there is anything more for me to do now that the case is in such capable hands. By the way, Mrs. Maberley, did you say you wished to travel?\"\n\n\"It has always been my dream, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Where would you like to go\u2014Cairo, Madeira, the Riviera?\"\n\n\"Oh, if I had the money I would go round the world.\"\n\n\"Quite so. Round the world. Well, good-morning. I may drop you a line in the evening.\" As we passed the window I caught a glimpse of the inspector's smile and shake of the head. \"These clever fellows have always a touch of madness.\" That was what I read in the inspector's smile.\n\n\"Now, Watson, we are at the last lap of our little journey,\" said Holmes when we were back in the roar of central London once more. \"I think we had best clear the matter up at once, and it would be well that you should come with me, for it is safer to have a witness when you are dealing with such a lady as Isadora Klein.\"\n\nWe had taken a cab and were speeding to some address in Grosvenor Square. Holmes had been sunk in thought, but he roused himself suddenly.\n\n\"By the way, Watson, I suppose you see it all clearly?\"\n\n\"No, I can't say that I do. I only gather that we are going to see the lady who is behind all this mischief.\"\n\n\"Exactly! But does the name Isadora Klein convey nothing to you? She was, of course, the celebrated beauty. There was never a woman to touch her. She is pure Spanish, the real blood of the masterful Conquis tadors, and her people have been leaders in Pernambuco for generations. She married the aged German sugar king, Klein, and presently found herself the richest as well as the most lovely widow upon earth. Then there was an interval of adventure when she pleased her own tastes. She had several lovers, and Douglas Maberley, one of the most striking men in London, was one of them. It was by all accounts more than an adventure with him. He was not a society butterfly but a strong, proud man who gave and expected all. But she is the 'belle dame sans merci' of fiction. When her caprice is satisfied the matter is ended, and if the other party in the matter can't take her word for it she knows how to bring it home to him.\"\n\n\"Then that was his own story\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah! you are piecing it together now. I hear that she is about to marry the young Duke of Lomond, who might almost be her son. His Grace's ma might overlook the age, but a big scandal would be a different matter, so it is imperative\u2014Ah! here we are.\"\n\nIt was one of the finest corner-houses of the West End. A machine-like footman took up our cards and returned with word that the lady was not at home. \"Then we shall wait until she is,\" said Holmes cheerfully.\n\nThe machine broke down.\n\n\"Not at home means not at home to you,\" said the footman.\n\n\"Good,\" Holmes answered. \"That means that we shall not have to wait. Kindly give this note to your mistress.\"\n\nHe scribbled three or four words upon a sheet of his notebook, folded it, and handed it to the man.\n\n\"What did you say, Holmes?\" I asked.\n\n\"I simply wrote: 'Shall it be the police, then?' I think that should pass us in.\"\n\nIt did\u2014with amazing celerity. A minute later we were in an Arabian Nights drawing-room, vast and wonderful, in a half gloom, picked out with an occasional pink electric light. The lady had come, I felt, to that time of life when even the proudest beauty finds the half light more welcome. She rose from a settee as we entered: tall, queenly, a perfect figure, a lovely mask-like face, with two wonderful Spanish eyes which looked murder at us both.\n\n\"What is this intrusion\u2014and this insulting message?\" she asked, holding up the slip of paper.\n\n\"I need not explain, madame. I have too much respect for your intelligence to do so\u2014though I confess that intelligence has been surprisingly at fault of late.\"\n\n\"How so, sir?\"\n\n\"By supposing that your hired bullies could frighten me from my work. Surely no man would take up my profession if it were not that danger attracts him. It was you, then, who forced me to examine the case of young Maberley.\"\n\n\"I have no idea what you are talking about. What have I to do with hired bullies?\"\n\nHolmes turned away wearily.\n\n\"Yes, I have underrated your intelligence. Well, good-afternoon!\"\n\n\"Stop! Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To Scotland Yard.\"\n\nWe had not got halfway to the door before she had overtaken us and was holding his arm. She had turned in a moment from steel to velvet.\n\n\"Come and sit down, gentlemen. Let us talk this matter over. I feel that I may be frank with you, Mr. Holmes. You have the feelings of a gentleman. How quick a woman's instinct is to find it out. I will treat you as a friend.\"\n\n\"I cannot promise to reciprocate, madame. I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go. I am ready to listen, and then I will tell you how I will act.\"\n\n\"No doubt it was foolish of me to threaten a brave man like yourself.\"\n\n\"What was really foolish, madame, is that you have placed yourself in the power of a band of rascals who may blackmail or give you away.\"\n\n\"No, no! I am not so simple. Since I have promised to be frank, I may say that no one, save Barney Stockdale and Susan, his wife, have the least idea who their employer is. As to them, well, it is not the first\u2014\" She smiled and nodded with a charming coquettish intimacy.\n\n\"I see. You've tested them before.\"\n\n\"They are good hounds who run silent.\"\n\n\"Such hounds have a way sooner or later of biting the hand that feeds them. They will be arrested for this burglary. The police are already after them.\"\n\n\"They will take what comes to them. That is what they are paid for. I shall not appear in the matter.\"\n\n\"Unless I bring you into it.\"\n\n\"No, no, you would not. You are a gentleman. It is a woman's secret.\"\n\n\"In the first place, you must give back this manuscript.\"\n\nShe broke into a ripple of laughter and walked to the fireplace. There was a calcined mass which she broke up with the poker. \"Shall I give this back?\" she asked. So roguish and exquisite did she look as she stood before us with a challenging smile that I felt of all Holmes's criminals this was the one whom he would find it hardest to face. However, he was immune from sentiment.\n\n\"That seals your fate,\" he said coldly. \"You are very prompt in your actions, madame, but you have overdone it on this occasion.\"\n\nShe threw the poker down with a clatter.\n\n\"How hard you are!\" she cried. \"May I tell you the whole story?\"\n\n\"I fancy I could tell it to you.\"\n\n\"But you must look at it with my eyes, Mr. Holmes. You must realize it from the point of view of a woman who sees all her life's ambition about to be ruined at the last moment. Is such a woman to be blamed if she protects herself?\"\n\n\"The original sin was yours.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes! I admit it. He was a dear boy, Douglas, but it so chanced that he could not fit into my plans. He wanted marriage\u2014marriage, Mr. Holmes\u2014with a penniless commoner. Nothing less would serve him. Then he became pertinacious. Because I had given he seemed to think that I still must give, and to him only. It was intolerable. At last I had to make him realize it.\"\n\n\"By hiring ruffians to beat him under your own window.\"\n\n\"You do indeed seem to know everything. Well, it is true. Barney and the boys drove him away, and were, I admit, a little rough in doing so. But what did he do then? Could I have believed that a gentleman would do such an act? He wrote a book in which he described his own story. I, of course, was the wolf; he the lamb. It was all there, under different names, of course; but who in all London would have failed to recognize it? What do you say to that, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Well, he was within his rights.\"\n\n\"It was as if the air of Italy had got into his blood and brought with it the old cruel Italian spirit. He wrote to me and sent me a copy of his book that I might have the torture of anticipation. There were two copies, he said\u2014one for me, one for his publisher.\"\n\n\"How did you know the publisher's had not reached him?\"\n\n\"I knew who his publisher was. It is not his only novel, you know. I found out that he had not heard from Italy. Then came Douglas's sudden death. So long as that other manuscript was in the world there was no safety for me. Of course, it must be among his effects, and these would be returned to his mother. I set the gang at work. One of them got into the house as servant. I wanted to do the thing honestly. I really and truly did. I was ready to buy the house and everything in it. I offered any price she cared to ask. I only tried the other way when everything else had failed. Now, Mr. Holmes, granting that I was too hard on Douglas\u2014and. God knows, I am sorry for it!\u2014what else could I do with my whole future at stake?\"\n\nSherlock Holmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"Well, well,\" said he, \"I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual. How much does it cost to go round the world in first-class style?\"\n\nThe lady stared in amazement.\n\n\"Could it be done on five thousand pounds?\"\n\n\"Well, I should think so, indeed!\"\n\n\"Very good. I think you will sign me a check for that, and I will see that it comes to Mrs. Maberley. You owe her a little change of air. Meantime, lady\"\u2014he wagged a cautionary forefinger\u2014\"have a care! Have a care! You can't play with edged tools forever without cutting those dainty hands.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE SUSSEX VAMPIRE", + "text": "Holmes had read carefully a note which the last post had brought him. Then, with the dry chuckle which was his nearest approach to a laugh, he tossed it over to me.\n\n\"For a mixture of the modem and the mediaeval, of the practical and of the wildly fanciful, I think this is surely the limit,\" said he. \"What do you make of it, Watson?\"\n\nI read as follows:\n\n\u200246, OLD JEWRY,\n\n\u2002Nov. 19th.\n\n\u2002Re Vampires\n\n\u2002SIR:\n\n\u2002Our client, Mr. Robert Ferguson, of Ferguson and Muirhead, tea brokers, of Mincing Lane, has made some inquiry from us in a communication of even date concerning vampires. As our firm specializes entirely upon the assessment of machinery the matter hardly comes within our purview, and we have therefore recommended Mr. Ferguson to call upon you and lay the matter before you. We have not forgotten your successful action in the case of Matilda Briggs.\n\n\u2002We are, sir,\n\n\u2002Faithfully yours,\n\n\u2002MORRISON, MORRISON, AND DODD.\n\n\u2002per E. J. C.\n\n\"Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson,\" said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. \"It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared. But what do we know about vampires? Does it come within our purview either? Anything is better than stagnation, but really we seem to have been switched on to a Grimms' fairy tale. Make a long arm, Watson, and see what V has to say.\"\n\nI leaned back and took down the great index volume to which he referred. Holmes balanced it on his knee, and his eyes moved slowly and lovingly over the record of old cases, mixed with the accumulated information of a lifetime.\n\n\"Voyage of the Gloria Scott,\" he read. \"That was a bad business. I have some recollection that you made a record of it, Watson, though I was unable to congratulate you upon the result. Victor Lynch, the forger. Venomous lizard or gila. Remarkable case, that! Vittoria, the circus belle. Vanderbilt and the Yeggman. Vipers. Vigor, the Hammersmith wonder. Hullo! Hullo! Good old index. You can't beat it. Listen to this, Watson. Vampirism in Hungary. And again, Vampires in Transylvania.\" He turned over the pages with eagerness, but after a short intent perusal he threw down the great book with a snarl of disappointment.\n\n\"Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy.\"\n\n\"But surely,\" said I, \"the vampire was not necessarily a dead man? A living person might have the habit. I have read, for example, of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth.\"\n\n\"You are right, Watson. It mentions the legend in one of these references. But are we to give serious attention to such things? This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply. I fear that we cannot take Mr. Robert Ferguson very seriously. Possibly this note may be from him and may throw some light upon what is worrying him.\"\n\nHe took up a second letter which had lain unnoticed upon the table while he had been absorbed with the first. This he began to read with a smile of amusement upon his face which gradually faded away into an expression of intense interest and concentration. When he had finished he sat for some little time lost in thought with the letter dangling from his fingers. Finally, with a start, he aroused himself from his reverie.\n\n\"Cheeseman's, Lamberley. Where is Lamberley, Watson?\"\n\n\"It is in Sussex, South of Horsham.\"\n\n\"Not very far, eh? And Cheeseman's?\"\n\n\"I know that country, Holmes. It is full of old houses which are named after the men who built them centuries ago. You get Odley's and Harvey's and Carriton's\u2014the folk are forgotten but their names live in their houses.\"\n\n\"Precisely,\" said Holmes coldly. It was one of the peculiarities of his proud, self-contained nature that though he docketed any fresh information very quietly and accurately in his brain, he seldom made any acknowledgment to the giver. \"I rather fancy we shall know a good deal more about Cheeseman's, Lamberley, before we are through. The letter is, as I had hoped, from Robert Ferguson. By the way, he claims acquaintance with you.\"\n\n\"With me!\"\n\n\"You had better read it.\"\n\nHe handed the letter across. It was headed with the address quoted.\n\n\u2002DEAR MR. HOLMES [it said]:\n\n\u2002I have been recommended to you by my lawyers, but indeed the matter is so extraordinarily delicate that it is most difficult to discuss. It concerns a friend for whom I am acting. This gentleman married some five years ago a Peruvian lady, the daughter of a Peruvian merchant, whom he had met in connection with the importation of nitrates. The lady was very beautiful, but the fact of her foreign birth and of her alien religion always caused a separation of interests and of feelings between husband and wife, so that after a time his love may have cooled towards her and he may have come to regard their union as a mistake. He felt there were sides of her character which he could never explore or understand. This was the more painful as she was as loving a wife as a man could have\u2014to all appearance absolutely devoted.\n\n\u2002Now for the point which I will make more plain when we meet. Indeed, this note is merely to give you a general idea of the situation and to ascertain whether you would care to interest yourself in the matter. The lady began to show some curious traits quite alien to her ordinarily sweet and gentle disposition. The gentleman had been married twice and he had one son by the first wife. This boy was now fifteen, a very charming and affectionate youth, though unhappily injured through an accident in childhood. Twice the wife was caught in the act of assaulting this poor lad in the most unprovoked way. Once she struck him with a stick and left a great weal on his arm.\n\n\u2002This was a small matter, however, compared with her conduct to her own child, a dear boy just under one year of age. On one occasion about a month ago this child had been left by its nurse for a few minutes. A loud cry from the baby, as of pain, called the nurse back. As she ran into the room she saw her employer, the lady, leaning over the baby and apparently biting his neck. There was a small wound in the neck from which a stream of blood had escaped. The nurse was so horrified that she wished to call the husband, but the lady implored her not to do so and actually gave her five pounds as a price for her silence. No explanation was ever given, and for the moment the matter was passed over.\n\n\u2002It left, however, a terrible impression upon the nurse's mind, and from that time she began to watch her mistress closely and to keep a closer guard upon the baby, whom she tenderly loved. It seemed to her that even as she watched the mother, so the mother watched her, and that every time she was compelled to leave the baby alone the mother was waiting to get at it. Day and night the nurse covered the child, and day and night the silent, watchful mother seemed to be lying in wait as a wolf waits for a lamb. It must read most incredible to you, and yet I beg you to take it seriously, for a child's life and a man's sanity may depend upon it.\n\n\u2002At last there came one dreadful day when the facts could no longer be concealed from the husband. The nurse's nerve had given way; she could stand the strain no longer, and she made a clean breast of it all to the man. To him it seemed as wild a tale as it may now seem to you. He knew his wife to be a loving wife, and, save for the assaults upon her stepson, a loving mother. Why, then, should she wound her own dear little baby? He told the nurse that she was dreaming, that her suspicions were those of a lunatic, and that such libels upon her mistress were not to be tolerated. While they were talking a sudden cry of pain was heard. Nurse and master rushed together to the nursery. Imagine his feelings, Mr. Holmes, as he saw his wife rise from a kneeling position beside the cot and saw blood upon the child's exposed neck and upon the sheet. With a cry of horror, he turned his wife's face to the light and saw blood all round her lips. It was she\u2014she beyond all question\u2014who had drunk the poor baby's blood.\n\n\u2002So the matter stands. She is now confined to her room. There has been no explanation. The husband is half demented. He knows, and I know, little of vampirism beyond the name. We had thought it was some wild tale of foreign parts. And yet here in the very heart of the English Sussex\u2014well, all this can be discussed with you in the morning. Will you see me? Will you use your great powers in aiding a distracted man? If so, kindly wire to Ferguson, Cheeseman's, Lamberley, and I will be at your rooms by ten o'clock.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002ROBERT FERGUSON.\n\n\u2002P. S. I believe your friend Watson played Rugby for Blackheath when I was three-quarter for Richmond. It is the only personal introduction which I can give.\n\n\"Of course I remembered him,\" said I as I laid down the letter. \"Big Bob Ferguson, the finest three-quarter Richmond ever had. He was always a good-natured chap. It's like him to be so concerned over a friend's case.\"\n\nHolmes looked at me thoughtfully and shook his head.\n\n\"I never get your limits, Watson,\" said he. \"There are unexplored possibilities about you. Take a wire down, like a good fellow. 'Will examine your case with pleasure.'\"\n\n\"Your case!\"\n\n\"We must not let him think that this agency is a home for the weak-minded. Of course it is his case. Send him that wire and let the matter rest till morning.\"\n\nPromptly at ten o'clock next morning Ferguson strode into our room. I had remembered him as a long, slab-sided man with loose limbs and a fine turn of speed which had carried him round many an opposing back. There is surely nothing in life more painful than to meet the wreck of a fine athlete whom one has known in his prime. His great frame had fallen in, his flaxen hair was scanty, and his shoulders were bowed. I fear that I roused corresponding emotions in him.\n\n\"Hullo, Watson,\" said he, and his voice was still deep and hearty. \"You don't look quite the man you did when I threw you over the ropes into the crowd at the Old Deer Park. I expect I have changed a bit also. But it's this last day or two that has aged me. I see by your telegram, Mr. Holmes, that it is no use my pretending to be anyone's deputy.\"\n\n\"It is simpler to deal direct,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Of course it is. But you can imagine how difficult it is when you are speaking of the one woman whom you are bound to protect and help. What can I do? How am I to go to the police with such a story? And yet the kiddies have got to be protected. Is it madness, Mr. Holmes? Is it something in the blood? Have you any similar case in your experience? For God's sake, give me some advice, for I am at my wit's end.\"\n\n\"Very naturally, Mr. Ferguson. Now sit here and pull yourself together and give me a few clear answers. I can assure you that I am very far from being at my wit's end, and that I am confident we shall find some solution. First of all, tell me what steps you have taken. Is your wife still near the children?\"\n\n\"We had a dreadful scene. She is a most loving woman, Mr. Holmes. If ever a woman loved a man with all her heart and soul, she loves me. She was cut to the heart that I should have discovered this horrible, this incredible, secret. She would not even speak. She gave no answer to my reproaches, save to gaze at me with a sort of wild, despairing look in her eyes. Then she rushed to her room and locked herself in. Since then she has refused to see me. She has a maid who was with her before her marriage, Dolores by name\u2014a friend rather than a servant. She takes her food to her.\"\n\n\"Then the child is in no immediate danger?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Mason, the nurse, has sworn that she will not leave it night or day. I can absolutely trust her. I am more uneasy about poor little Jack, for, as I told you in my note, he has twice been assaulted by her.\"\n\n\"But never wounded?\"\n\n\"No, she struck him savagely. It is the more terrible as he is a poor little inoffensive cripple.\" Ferguson's gaunt features softened as he spoke of his boy. \"You would think that the dear lad's condition would soften anyone's heart. A fall in childhood and a twisted spine, Mr. Holmes. But the dearest, most loving heart within.\"\n\nHolmes had picked up the letter of yesterday and was reading it over. \"What other inmates are there in your house, Mr. Ferguson?\"\n\n\"Two servants who have not been long with us. One stablehand, Michael, who sleeps in the house. My wife, myself, my boy Jack, baby, Dolores, and Mrs. Mason. That is all.\"\n\n\"I gather that you did not know your wife well at the time of your marriage?\"\n\n\"I had only known her a few weeks.\"\n\n\"How long had this maid Dolores been with her?\"\n\n\"Some years.\"\n\n\"Then your wife's character would really be better known by Dolores than by you?\"\n\n\"Yes, you may say so.\"\n\nHolmes made a note.\n\n\"I fancy,\" said he, \"that I may be of more use at Lamberley than here. It is eminently a case for personal investigation. If the lady remains in her room, our presence could not annoy or inconvenience her. Of course, we would stay at the inn.\"\n\nFerguson gave a gesture of relief.\n\n\"It is what I hoped, Mr. Holmes. There is an excellent train at two from Victoria if you could come.\"\n\n\"Of course we could come. There is a lull at present. I can give you my undivided energies. Watson, of course, comes with us. But there are one or two points upon which I wish to be very sure before I start. This unhappy lady, as I understand it, has appeared to assault both the children, her own baby and your little son?\"\n\n\"That is so.\"\n\n\"But the assaults take different forms, do they not? She has beaten your son.\"\n\n\"Once with a stick and once very savagely with her hands.\"\n\n\"Did she give no explanation why she struck him?\"\n\n\"None save that she hated him. Again and again she said so.\"\n\n\"Well, that is not unknown among stepmothers. A posthumous jealousy, we will say. Is the lady jealous by nature?\"\n\n\"Yes, she is very jealous\u2014jealous with all the strength of her fiery tropical love.\"\n\n\"But the boy\u2014he is fifteen, I understand, and probably very developed in mind, since his body has been circumscribed in action. Did he give you no explanation of these assaults?\"\n\n\"No, he declared there was no reason.\"\n\n\"Were they good friends at other times?\"\n\n\"No, there was never any love between them.\"\n\n\"Yet you say he is affectionate?\"\n\n\"Never in the world could there be so devoted a son. My life is his life. He is absorbed in what I say or do.\"\n\nOnce again Holmes made a note. For some time he sat lost in thought.\n\n\"No doubt you and the boy were great comrades before this second marriage. You were thrown very close together, were you not?\"\n\n\"Very much so.\"\n\n\"And the boy, having so affectionate a nature, was devoted, no doubt, to the memory of his mother?\"\n\n\"Most devoted.\"\n\n\"He would certainly seem to be a most interesting lad. There is one other point about these assaults. Were the strange attacks upon the baby and the assaults upon your son at the same period?\"\n\n\"In the first case it was so. It was as if some frenzy had seized her, and she had vented her rage upon both. In the second case it was only Jack who suffered. Mrs. Mason had no complaint to make about the baby.\"\n\n\"That certainly complicates matters.\"\n\n\"I don't quite follow you, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"Possibly not. One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them. A bad habit, Mr. Ferguson, but human nature is weak. I fear that your old friend here has given an exaggerated view of my scientific methods. However, I will only say at the present stage that your problem does not appear to me to be insoluble, and that you may expect to find us at Victoria at two o'clock.\"\n\nIt was evening of a dull, foggy November day when, having left our bags at the Chequers, Lamberley, we drove through the Sussex clay of a long winding lane and finally reached the isolated and ancient farmhouse in which Ferguson dwelt. It was a large, straggling building, very old in the centre, very new at the wings with towering Tudor chimneys and a lichen-spotted, high-pitched roof of Horsham slabs. The doorsteps were worn into curves, and the ancient tiles which lined the porch were marked with the rebus of a cheese and a man after the original builder. Within, the ceilings were corrugated with heavy oaken beams, and the uneven floors sagged into sharp curves. An odour of age and decay pervaded the whole crumbling building.\n\nThere was one very large central room into which Ferguson led us. Here, in a huge old-fashioned fireplace with an iron screen behind it dated 1670, there blazed and spluttered a splendid log fire.\n\nThe room, as I gazed round, was a most singular mixture of dates and of places. The half-panelled walls may well have belonged to the original yeoman farmer of the seventeenth century. They were ornamented, however, on the lower part by a line of well-chosen modern water-colours; while above, where yellow plaster took the place of oak, there was hung a fine collection of South American utensils and weapons, which had been brought, no doubt, by the Peruvian lady upstairs. Holmes rose, with that quick curiosity which sprang from his eager mind, and examined them with some care. He returned with his eyes full of thought.\n\n\"Hullo!\" he cried. \"Hullo!\"\n\nA spaniel had lain in a basket in the corner. It came slowly forward towards its master, walking with difficulty. Its hind legs moved irregularly and its tail was on the ground. It licked Ferguson's hand.\n\n\"What is it, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"The dog. What's the matter with it?\"\n\n\"That's what puzzled the vet. A sort of paralysis. Spinal meningitis, he thought. But it is passing. He'll be all right soon\u2014won't you, Carlo?\"\n\nA shiver of assent passed through the drooping tail. The dog's mournful eyes passed from one of us to the other. He knew that we were discussing his case.\n\n\"Did it come on suddenly?\"\n\n\"In a single night.\"\n\n\"How long ago?\"\n\n\"It may have been four months ago.\"\n\n\"Very remarkable. Very suggestive.\"\n\n\"What do you see in it, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"A confirmation of what I had already thought.\"\n\n\"For God's sake, what do you think, Mr. Holmes? It may be a mere intellectual puzzle to you, but it is life and death to me! My wife a would-be murderer\u2014my child in constant danger! Don't play with me, Mr. Holmes. It is too terribly serious.\"\n\nThe big Rugby three-quarter was trembling all over. Holmes put his hand soothingly upon his arm.\n\n\"I fear that there is pain for you, Mr. Ferguson, whatever the solution may be,\" said he. \"I would spare you all I can. I cannot say more for the instant, but before I leave this house I hope I may have something definite.\"\n\n\"Please God you may! If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I will go up to my wife's room and see if there has been any change.\"\n\nHe was away some minutes, during which Holmes resumed his examination of the curiosities upon the wall. When our host returned it was clear from his downcast face that he had made no progress. He brought with him a tall, slim, brown-faced girl.\n\n\"The tea is ready, Dolores,\" said Ferguson. \"See that your mistress has everything she can wish.\"\n\n\"She verra ill,\" cried the girl, looking with indignant eyes at her master. \"She no ask for food. She verra ill. She need doctor. I frightened stay alone with her without doctor.\"\n\nFerguson looked at me with a question in his eyes.\n\n\"I should be so glad if I could be of use.\"\n\n\"Would your mistress see Dr. Watson?\"\n\n\"I take him. I no ask leave. She needs doctor.\"\n\n\"Then I'll come with you at once.\"\n\nI followed the girl, who was quivering with strong emotion, up the staircase and down an ancient corridor. At the end was an iron-clamped and massive door. It struck me as I looked at it that if Ferguson tried to force his way to his wife he would find it no easy matter. The girl drew a key from her pocket, and the heavy oaken planks creaked upon their old hinges. I passed in and she swiftly followed, fastening the door behind her.\n\nOn the bed a woman was lying who was clearly in a high fever. She was only half conscious, but as I entered she raised a pair of frightened but beautiful eyes and glared at me in apprehension. Seeing a stranger, she appeared to be relieved and sank back with a sigh upon the pillow. I stepped up to her with a few reassuring words, and she lay still while I took her pulse and temperature. Both were high, and yet my impression was that the condition was rather that of mental and nervous excitement than of any actual seizure.\n\n\"She lie like that one day, two day. I 'fraid she die,\" said the girl.\n\nThe woman turned her flushed and handsome face towards me.\n\n\"Where is my husband?\"\n\n\"He is below and would wish to see you.\"\n\n\"I will not see him. I will not see him.\" Then she seemed to wander off into delirium. \"A fiend! A fiend! Oh, what shall I do with this devil?\"\n\n\"Can I help you in any way?\"\n\n\"No. No one can help. It is finished. All is destroyed. Do what I will, all is destroyed.\"\n\nThe woman must have some strange delusion. I could not see honest Bob Ferguson in the character of fiend or devil.\n\n\"Madame,\" I said, \"your husband loves you dearly. He is deeply grieved at this happening.\"\n\nAgain she turned on me those glorious eyes.\n\n\"He loves me. Yes. But do I not love him? Do I not love him even to sacrifice myself rather than break his dear heart? That is how I love him. And yet he could think of me\u2014he could speak of me so.\"\n\n\"He is full of grief, but he cannot understand.\"\n\n\"No, he cannot understand. But he should trust.\"\n\n\"Will you not see him?\" I suggested.\n\n\"No, no, I cannot forget those terrible words nor the look upon his face. I will not see him. Go now. You can do nothing for me. Tell him only one thing. I want my child. I have a right to my child. That is the only message I can send him.\" She turned her face to the wall and would say no more.\n\nI returned to the room downstairs, where Ferguson and Holmes still sat by the fire. Ferguson listened moodily to my account of the interview.\n\n\"How can I send her the child?\" he said. \"How do I know what strange impulse might come upon her? How can I ever forget how she rose from beside it with its blood upon her lips?\" He shuddered at the recollection. \"The child is safe with Mrs. Mason, and there he must remain.\"\n\nA smart maid, the only modern thing which we had seen in the house, had brought in some tea. As she was serving it the door opened and a youth entered the room. He was a remarkable lad, pale-faced and fair-haired, with excitable light blue eyes which blazed into a sudden flame of emotion and joy as they rested upon his father. He rushed forward and threw his arms round his neck with the abandon of a loving girl.\n\n\"Oh, daddy,\" he cried, \"I did not know that you were due yet. I should have been here to meet you. Oh, I am so glad to see you!\"\n\nFerguson gently disengaged himself from the embrace with some little show of embarrassment.\n\n\"Dear old chap,\" said he, patting the flaxen head with a very tender hand. \"I came early because my friends, Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson, have been persuaded to come down and spend an evening with us.\"\n\n\"Is that Mr. Holmes, the detective?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe youth looked at us with a very penetrating and, as it seemed to me, unfriendly gaze.\n\n\"What about your other child, Mr. Ferguson?\" asked Holmes. \"Might we make the acquaintance of the baby?\"\n\n\"Ask Mrs. Mason to bring baby down,\" said Ferguson. The boy went off with a curious, shambling gait which told my surgical eyes that he was suffering from a weak spine. Presently he returned, and behind him came a tall, gaunt woman bearing in her arms a very beautiful child, dark-eyed, golden-haired, a wonderful mixture of the Saxon and the Latin. Ferguson was evidently devoted to it, for he took it into his arms and fondled it most tenderly.\n\n\"Fancy anyone having the heart to hurt him,\" he muttered as he glanced down at the small, angry red pucker upon the cherub throat.\n\nIt was at this moment that I chanced to glance at Holmes and saw a most singular intentness in his expression. His face was as set as if it had been carved out of old ivory, and his eyes, which had glanced for a moment at father and child, were now fixed with eager curiosity upon something at the other side of the room. Following his gaze I could only guess that he was looking out through the window at the melancholy, dripping garden. It is true that a shutter had half closed outside and obstructed the view, but none the less it was certainly at the window that Holmes was fixing his concentrated attention. Then he smiled, and his eyes came back to the baby. On its chubby neck there was this small puckered mark. Without speaking, Holmes examined it with care. Finally he shook one of the dimpled fists which waved in front of him.\n\n\"Good-bye, little man. You have made a strange start in life. Nurse, I should wish to have a word with you in private.\"\n\nHe took her aside and spoke earnestly for a few minutes. I only heard the last words, which were: \"Your anxiety will soon, I hope, be set at rest.\" The woman, who seemed to be a sour, silent kind of creature, withdrew with the child.\n\n\"What is Mrs. Mason like?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"Not very prepossessing externally, as you can see, but a heart of gold, and devoted to the child.\"\n\n\"Do you like her, Jack?\" Holmes turned suddenly upon the boy. His expressive mobile face shadowed over, and he shook his head.\n\n\"Jacky has very strong likes and dislikes,\" said Ferguson, putting his arm round the boy. \"Luckily I am one of his likes.\"\n\nThe boy cooed and nestled his head upon his father's breast. Ferguson gently disengaged him.\n\n\"Run away, little Jacky,\" said he, and he watched his son with loving eyes until he disappeared. \"Now, Mr. Holmes,\" he continued when the boy was gone, \"I really feel that I have brought you on a fool's errand, for what can you possibly do save give me your sympathy? It must be an exceedingly delicate and complex affair from your point of view.\"\n\n\"It is certainly delicate,\" said my friend with an amused smile, \"but I have not been struck up to now with its complexity. It has been a case for intellectual deduction, but when this original intellectual deduction is confirmed point by point by quite a number of independent incidents, then the subjective becomes objective and we can say confidently that we have reached our goal. I had, in fact, reached it before we left Baker Street, and the rest has merely been observation and confirmation.\"\n\nFerguson put his big hand to his furrowed forehead.\n\n\"For heaven's sake, Holmes,\" he said hoarsely; \"if you can see the truth in this matter, do not keep me in suspense. How do I stand? What shall I do? I care nothing as to how you have found your facts so long as you have really got them.\"\n\n\"Certainly I owe you an explanation, and you shall have it. But you will permit me to handle the matter in my own way? Is the lady capable of seeing us, Watson?\"\n\n\"She is ill, but she is quite rational.\"\n\n\"Very good. It is only in her presence that we can clear the matter up. Let us go up to her.\"\n\n\"She will not see me,\" cried Ferguson.\n\n\"Oh, yes, she will,\" said Holmes. He scribbled a few lines upon a sheet of paper. \"You at least have the entr\u00e9e, Watson. Will you have the goodness to give the lady this note?\"\n\nI ascended again and handed the note to Dolores, who cautiously opened the door. A minute later I heard a cry from within, a cry in which joy and surprise seemed to be blended. Dolores looked out.\n\n\"She will see them. She will leesten,\" said she.\n\nAt my summons Ferguson and Holmes came up. As we entered the room Ferguson took a step or two towards his wife, who had raised herself in the bed, but she held out her hand to repulse him. He sank into an armchair, while Holmes seated himself beside him, after bowing to the lady, who looked at him with wide-eyed amazement.\n\n\"I think we can dispense with Dolores,\" said Holmes. \"Oh, very well, madame, if you would rather she stayed I can see no objection. Now, Mr. Ferguson, I am a busy man with many calls, and my methods have to be short and direct. The swiftest surgery is the least painful. Let me first say what will ease your mind. Your wife is a very good, a very loving, and a very ill-used woman.\"\n\nFerguson sat up with a cry of joy.\n\n\"Prove that, Mr. Holmes, and I am your debtor forever.\"\n\n\"I will do so, but in doing so I must wound you deeply in another direction.\"\n\n\"I care nothing so long as you clear my wife. Everything on earth is insignificant compared to that.\"\n\n\"Let me tell you, then, the train of reasoning which passed through my mind in Baker Street. The idea of a vampire was to me absurd. Such things do not happen in criminal practice in England. And yet your observation was precise. You had seen the lady rise from beside the child's cot with the blood upon her lips.\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"Did it not occur to you that a bleeding wound may be sucked for some other purpose than to draw the blood from it? Was there not a queen in English history2l who sucked such a wound to draw poison from it?\"\n\n\"Poison!\"\n\n\"A South American household. My instinct felt the presence of those weapons upon the wall before my eyes ever saw them. It might have been other poison, but that was what occurred to me. When I saw that little empty quiver beside the small bird-bow, it was just what I expected to see. If the child were pricked with one of those arrows dipped in curare or some other devilish drug, it would mean death if the venom were not sucked out.\n\n\"And the dog! If one were to use such a poison, would one not try it first in order to see that it had not lost its power? I did not foresee the dog, but at least I understand him and he fitted into my reconstruction.\n\n\"Now do you understand? Your wife feared such an attack. She saw it made and saved the child's life, and yet she shrank from telling you all the truth, for she knew how you loved the boy and feared lest it break your heart.\"\n\n\"Jacky!\"\n\n\"I watched him as you fondled the child just now. His face was clearly reflected in the glass of the window where the shutter formed a background. I saw such jealousy, such cruel hatred, as I have seldom seen in a human face.\"\n\n\"My Jacky!\"\n\n\"You have to face it, Mr. Ferguson. It is the more painful because it is a distorted love, a maniacal exaggerated love for you, and possibly for his dead mother, which has prompted his action. His very soul is consumed with hatred for this splendid child, whose health and beauty are a contrast to his own weakness.\"\n\n\"Good God! It is incredible!\"\n\n\"Have I spoken the truth, madame?\"\n\nThe lady was sobbing, with her face buried in the pillows. Now she turned to her husband.\n\n\"How could I tell you, Bob? I felt the blow it would be to you. It was better that I should wait and that it should come from some other lips than mine. When this gentleman, who seems to have powers of magic, wrote that he knew all, I was glad.\"\n\n\"I think a year at sea would be my prescription for Master Jacky,\" said Holmes, rising from his chair. \"Only one thing is still clouded, madame. We can quite understand your attacks upon Master Jacky. There is a limit to a mother's patience. But how did you dare to leave the child these last two days?\"\n\n\"I had told Mrs. Mason. She knew.\"\n\n\"Exactly. So I imagined.\"\n\nFerguson was standing by the bed, choking, his hands outstretched and quivering.\n\n\"This, I fancy, is the time for our exit, Watson,\" said Holmes in a whisper. \"If you will take one elbow of the too faithful Dolores, I will take the other. There, now,\" he added as he closed the door behind him, \"I think we may leave them to settle the rest among themselves.\"\n\nI have only one further note of this case. It is the letter which Holmes wrote in final answer to that with which the narrative begins. It ran thus:\n\n\u2002BAKER STREET,\n\n\u2002Nov. 21st.\n\n\u2002Re Vampires\n\n\u2002SIR:\n\n\u2002Referring to your letter of the 19th, I beg to state that I have looked into the inquiry of your client, Mr. Robert Ferguson, of Ferguson and Muirhead, tea brokers, of Mincing Lane, and that the matter has been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. With thanks for your recommendation, I am, sir,\n\n\u2002Faithfully yours,\n\n\u2002SHERLOCK HOLMES." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE THREE GARRIDEBS", + "text": "It may have been a comedy, or it may have been a tragedy. It cost one man his reason, it cost me a blood-letting, and it cost yet another man the penalties of the law. Yet there was certainly an element of comedy. Well, you shall judge for yourselves.\n\nI remember the date very well, for it was in the same month that Holmes refused a knighthood for services which may perhaps some day be described. I only refer to the matter in passing, for in my position of partner and confidant I am obliged to be particularly careful to avoid any indiscretion. I repeat, however, that this enables me to fix the date, which was the latter end of June, 1902, shortly after the conclusion of the South African War. Holmes had spent several days in bed, as was his habit from time to time, but he emerged that morning with a long foolscap document in his hand and a twinkle of amusement in his austere gray eyes.\n\n\"There is a chance for you to make some money, friend Watson,\" said he. \"Have you ever heard the name of Garrideb?\"\n\nI admitted that I had not.\n\n\"Well, if you can lay your hand upon a Garrideb, there's money in it.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Ah, that's a long story\u2014rather a whimsical one, too. I don't think in all our explorations of human complexities we have ever come upon anything more singular. The fellow will be here presently for cross-examination, so I won't open the matter up till he comes. But, meanwhile, that's the name we want.\"\n\nThe telephone directory lay on the table beside me, and I turned over the pages in a rather hopeless quest. But to my amazement there was this strange name in its due place. I gave a cry of triumph.\n\n\"Here you are, Holmes! Here it is!\"\n\nHolmes took the book from my hand.\n\n\"'Garrideb, N.,' \" he read, \" '136 Little Ryder Street, W.' Sorry to disappoint you, my dear Watson, but this is the man himself. That is the address upon his letter. We want another to match him.\"\n\nMrs. Hudson had come in with a card upon a tray. I took it up and glanced at it.\n\n\"Why, here it is!\" I cried in amazement. \"This is a different initial. John Garrideb, Counsellor at Law, Moorville, Kansas, U. S. A.\"\n\nHolmes smiled as he looked at the card. \"I am afraid you must make yet another effort, Watson,\" said he. \"This gentleman is also in the plot already, though I certainly did not expect to see him this morning. However, he is in a position to tell us a good deal which I want to know.\"\n\nA moment later he was in the room. Mr. John Garrideb, Counsellor at Law, was a short, powerful man with the round, fresh, clean-shaven face characteristic of so many American men of affairs. The general effect was chubby and rather childlike, so that one received the impression of quite a young man with a broad set smile upon his face. His eyes, however, were arresting. Seldom in any human head have I seen a pair which bespoke a more intense inward life, so bright were they, so alert, so responsive to every change of thought. His accent was American, but was not accompanied by any eccentricity of speech.\n\n\"Mr. Holmes?\" he asked, glancing from one to the other. \"Ah, yes! Your pictures are not unlike you, sir, if I may say so. I believe you have had a letter from my namesake, Mr. Nathan Garrideb, have you not?\"\n\n\"Pray sit down,\" said Sherlock Holmes. \"We shall, I fancy, have a good deal to discuss.\" He took up his sheets of foolscap. \"You are, of course, the Mr. John Garrideb mentioned in this document. But surely you have been in England some time?\"\n\n\"Why do you say that, Mr. Holmes?\" I seemed to read sudden suspicion in those expressive eyes.\n\n\"Your whole outfit is English.\"\n\nMr. Garrideb forced a laugh. \"I've read of your tricks, Mr. Holmes, but I never thought I would be the subject of them. Where do you read that?\"\n\n\"The shoulder cut of your coat, the toes of your boots\u2014could anyone doubt it?\"\n\n\"Well, well, I had no idea I was so obvious a Britisher. But business brought me over here some time ago, and so, as you say, my outfit is nearly all London. However, I guess your time is of value, and we did not meet to talk about the cut of my socks. What about getting down to that paper you hold in your hand?\"\n\nHolmes had in some way ruffled our visitor, whose chubby face had assumed a far less amiable expression.\n\n\"Patience! Patience, Mr. Garrideb!\" said my friend in a soothing voice. \"Dr. Watson would tell you that these little digressions of mine sometimes prove in the end to have some bearing on the matter. But why did Mr. Nathan Garrideb not come with you?\"\n\n\"Why did he ever drag you into it at all?\" asked our visitor with a sudden outflame of anger. \"What in thunder had you to do with it? Here was a bit of professional business between two gentlemen, and one of them must needs call in a detective! I saw him this morning, and he told me this fool-trick he had played me, and that's why I am here. But I feel bad about it, all the same.\"\n\n\"There was no reflection upon you, Mr. Garrideb. It was simply zeal upon his part to gain your end\u2014an end which is, I understand, equally vital for both of you. He knew that I had means of getting information, and, therefore, it was very natural that he should apply to me.\"\n\nOur visitor's angry face gradually cleared.\n\n\"Well, that puts it different,\" said he. \"When I went to see him this morning and he told me he had sent to a detective, I just asked for your address and came right away. I don't want police butting into a private matter. But if you are content just to help us find the man, there can be no harm in that.\"\n\n\"Well, that is just how it stands,\" said Holmes. \"And now, sir, since you are here, we had best have a clear account from your own lips. My friend here knows nothing of the details.\"\n\nMr. Garrideb surveyed me with not too friendly a gaze.\n\n\"Need he know?\" he asked.\n\n\"We usually work together.\"\n\n\"Well, there's no reason it should be kept a secret. I'll give you the facts as short as I can make them. If you came from Kansas I would not need to explain to you who Alexander Hamilton Garrideb was. He made his money in real estate, and afterwards in the wheat pit at Chicago, but he spent it in buying up as much land as would make one of your counties, lying along the Arkansas River, west of Fort Dodge. It's grazing-land and lumber-land and arable-land and mineralized-land, and just every sort of land that brings dollars to the man that owns it.\n\n\"He had no kith nor kin\u2014or, if he had, I never heard of it. But he took a kind of pride in the queerness of his name. That was what brought us together. I was in the law at Topeka, and one day I had a visit from the old man, and he was tickled to death to meet another man with his own name. It was his pet fad, and he was dead set to find out if there were any more Garridebs in the world. 'Find me another!' said he. I told him I was a busy man and could not spend my life hiking round the world in search of Garridebs. 'None the less,' said he, 'that is just what you will do if things pan out as I planned them.' I thought he was joking, but there was a powerful lot of meaning in the words, as I was soon to discover.\n\n\"For he died within a year of saying them, and he left a will behind him. It was the queerest will that has ever been filed in the State of Kansas. His property was divided into three parts, and I was to have one on condition that I found two Garridebs who would share the remainder. It's five million dollars for each if it is a cent, but we can't lay a finger on it until we all three stand in a row.\n\n\"It was so big a chance that I just let my legal practice slide and I set forth looking for Garridebs. There is not one in the United States. I went through it, sir, with a fine-toothed comb and never a Garrideb could I catch. Then I tried the old country. Sure enough there was the name in the London telephone directory. I went after him two days ago and explained the whole matter to him. But he is a lone man, like myself, with some women relations, but no men. It says three adult men in the will. So you see we still have a vacancy, and if you can help to fill it we will be very ready to pay your charges.\"\n\n\"Well, Watson,\" said Holmes with a smile, \"I said it was rather whimsical, did I not? I should have thought, sir, that your obvious way was to advertise in the agony columns of the papers.\"\n\n\"I have done that, Mr. Holmes. No replies.\"\n\n\"Dear me! Well, it is certainly a most curious little problem. I may take a glance at it in my leisure. By the way, it is curious that you should have come from Topeka. I used to have a correspondent\u2014he is dead now\u2014old Dr. Lysander Starr, who was mayor in 1890.\"\n\n\"Good old Dr. Starr!\" said our visitor. \"His name is still honoured. Well, Mr. Holmes, I suppose all we can do is to report to you and let you know how we progress. I reckon you will hear within a day or two.\" With this assurance our American bowed and departed.\n\nHolmes had lit his pipe, and he sat for some time with a curious smile upon his face.\n\n\"Well?\" I asked at last.\n\n\"I am wondering, Watson\u2014just wondering!\"\n\n\"At what?\"\n\nHolmes took his pipe from his lips.\n\n\"I was wondering, Watson, what on earth could be the object of this man in telling us such a rigmarole of lies. I nearly asked him so\u2014for there are times when a brutal frontal attack is the best policy\u2014but I judged it better to let him think he had fooled us. Here is a man with an English coat frayed at the elbow and trousers bagged at the knee with a year's wear, and yet by this document and by his own account he is a provincial American lately landed in London. There have been no advertisements in the agony columns. You know that I miss nothing there. They are my favourite covert for putting up a bird, and I would never have overlooked such a cock pheasant as that. I never knew a Dr. Lysander Starr, of Topeka. Touch him where you would he was false. I think the fellow is really an American, but he has worn his accent smooth with years of London. What is his game, then, and what motive lies behind this preposterous search for Garridebs? It's worth our attention, for, granting that the man is a rascal, he is certainly a complex and ingenious one. We must now find out if our other correspondent is a fraud also. Just ring him up, Watson.\"\n\nI did so, and heard a thin, quavering voice at the other end of the line.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I am Mr. Nathan Garrideb. Is Mr. Holmes there? I should very much like to have a word with Mr. Holmes.\"\n\nMy friend took the instrument and I heard the usual syncopated dialogue.\n\n\"Yes, he has been here. I understand that you don't know him.... How long?... Only two days!... Yes, yes, of course, it is a most captivating prospect. Will you be at home this evening? I suppose your namesake will not be there? Very good, we will come then, for I would rather have a chat without him.... Dr. Watson will come with me.... I understand from your note that you did not go out often.... Well, we shall be round about six. You need not mention it to the American lawyer.... Very good. Good-bye!\"\n\nIt was twilight of a lovely spring evening, and even Little Ryder Street, one of the smaller offshoots from the Edgware Road, within a stone-cast of old Tyburn Tree of evil memory, looked golden and wonderful in the slanting rays of the setting sun. The particular house to which we were directed was a large, old-fashioned, Early Georgian edifice, with a flat brick face broken only by two deep bay windows on the ground floor. It was on this ground floor that our client lived, and, indeed, the low windows proved to be the front of the huge room in which he spent his waking hours. Holmes pointed as we passed to the small brass plate which bore the curious name.\n\n\"Up some years, Watson,\" he remarked, indicating its discoloured surface. \"It's his real name, anyhow, and that is something to note.\"\n\nThe house had a common stair, and there were a number of names painted in the hall, some indicating offices and some private chambers. It was not a collection of residential flats, but rather the abode of Bohemian bachelors. Our client opened the door for us himself and apologized by saying that the woman in charge left at four o'clock. Mr. Nathan Garrideb proved to be a very tall, loose-jointed, round-backed person, gaunt and bald, some sixty-odd years of age. He had a cadaverous face, with the dull dead skin of a man to whom exercise was unknown. Large round spectacles and a small projecting goat's beard combined with his stooping attitude to give him an expression of peering curiosity. The general effect, however, was amiable, though eccentric.\n\nThe room was as curious as its occupant. It looked like a small museum. It was both broad and deep, with cupboards and cabinets all round, crowded with specimens, geological and anatomical. Cases of butterflies and moths flanked each side of the entrance. A large table in the centre was littered with all sorts of debris, while the tall brass tube of a powerful microscope bristled up among them. As I glanced round I was surprised at the universality of the man's interests. Here was a case of ancient coins. There was a cabinet of flint instruments. Behind his central table was a large cupboard of fossil bones. Above was a line of plaster skulls with such names as \"Neanderthal,\" \"Heidelberg,\" \"Cro-Magnon\" printed beneath them. It was clear that he was a student of many subjects. As he stood in front of us now, he held a piece of chamois leather in his right hand with which he was polishing a coin.\n\n\"Syracusan\u2014of the best period,\" he explained, holding it up. \"They degenerated greatly towards the end. At their best I hold them supreme, though some prefer the Alexandrian school. You will find a chair here, Mr. Holmes. Pray allow me to clear these bones. And you, sir\u2014ah, yes, Dr. Watson\u2014if you would have the goodness to put the Japanese vase to one side. You see round me my little interests in life. My doctor lectures me about never going out, but why should I go out when I have so much to hold me here? I can assure you that the adequate cataloguing of one of those cabinets would take me three good months.\"\n\nHolmes looked round him with curiosity.\n\n\"But do you tell me that you never go out?\" he said.\n\n\"Now and again I drive down to Sotheby's or Christie's. Otherwise I very seldom leave my room. I am not too strong, and my researches are very absorbing. But you can imagine, Mr. Holmes, what a terrific shock-pleasant but terrific\u2014it was for me when I heard of this unparalleled good fortune. It only needs one more Garrideb to complete the matter, and surely we can find one. I had a brother, but he is dead, and female relatives are disqualified. But there must surely be others in the world. I had heard that you handled strange cases, and that was why I sent to you. Of course, this American gentleman is quite right, and I should have taken his advice first, but I acted for the best.\"\n\n\"I think you acted very wisely indeed,\" said Holmes. \"But are you really anxious to acquire an estate in America?\"\n\n\"Certainly not, sir. Nothing would induce me to leave my collection. But this gentleman has assured me that he will buy me out as soon as we have established our claim. Five million dollars was the sum named. There are a dozen specimens in the market at the present moment which fill gaps in my collection, and which I am unable to purchase for want of a few hundred pounds. Just think what I could do with five million dollars. Why, I have the nucleus of a national collection. I shall be the Hans Sloane of my age.\"\n\nHis eyes gleamed behind his great spectacles. It was very clear that no pains would be spared by Mr. Nathan Garrideb in finding a namesake.\n\n\"I merely called to make your acquaintance, and there is no reason why I should interrupt your studies,\" said Holmes. \"I prefer to establish personal touch with those with whom I do business. There are few questions I need ask, for I have your very clear narrative in my pocket, and I filled up the blanks when this American gentleman called. I understand that up to this week you were unaware of his existence.\"\n\n\"That is so. He called last Tuesday.\"\n\n\"Did he tell you of our interview to-day?\"\n\n\"Yes, he came straight back to me. He had been very angry.\"\n\n\"Why should he be angry?\"\n\n\"He seemed to think it was some reflection on his honour. But he was quite cheerful again when he returned.\"\n\n\"Did he suggest any course of action?\"\n\n\"No, sir, he did not.\"\n\n\"Has he had, or asked for, any money from you?\"\n\n\"No, sir, never!\"\n\n\"You see no possible object he has in view?\"\n\n\"None, except what he states.\"\n\n\"Did you tell him of our telephone appointment?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I did.\"\n\nHolmes was lost in thought. I could see that he was puzzled.\n\n\"Have you any articles of great value in your collection?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I am not a rich man. It is a good collection, but not a very valuable one.\"\n\n\"You have no fear of burglars?\"\n\n\"Not the least.\"\n\n\"How long have you been in these rooms?\"\n\n\"Nearly five years.\"\n\nHolmes's cross-examination was interrupted by an imperative knocking at the door. No sooner had our client unlatched it than the American lawyer burst excitedly into the room.\n\n\"Here you are!\" he cried, waving a paper over his head. \"I thought I should be in time to get you. Mr. Nathan Garrideb, my congratulations! You are a rich man, sir. Our business is happily finished and all is well. As to you, Mr. Holmes, we can only say we are sorry if we have given you any useless trouble.\"\n\nHe handed over the paper to our client, who stood staring at a marked advertisement. Holmes and I leaned forward and read it over his shoulder. This is how it ran:" + }, + { + "title": "HOWARD GARRIDEB", + "text": "[ CONSTRUCTOR OF AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY ]\n\n\u2002Binders, reapers, steam and hand plows, drills, harrows,\n\n\u2002farmer's carts, buckboards, and all other appliances.\n\n\u2002Estimates for Artesian Wells\n\n\u2002Apply Grosvenor Buildings, Aston\n\n\"Glorious!\" gasped our host. \"That makes our third man.\"\n\n\"I had opened up inquiries in Birmingham,\" said the American, \"and my agent there has sent me this advertisement from a local paper. We must hustle and put the thing through. I have written to this man and told him that you will see him in his office to-morrow afternoon at four o'clock.\"\n\n\"You want me to see him?\"\n\n\"What do you say, Mr. Holmes? Don't you think it would be wiser? Here am I, a wandering American with a wonderful tale. Why should he believe what I tell him? But you are a Britisher with solid references, and he is bound to take notice of what you say. I would go with you if you wished, but I have a very busy day to-morrow, and I could always follow you if you are in any trouble.\"\n\n\"Well, I have not made such a journey for years.\"\n\n\"It is nothing, Mr. Garrideb. I have figured out our connections. You leave at twelve and should be there soon after two. Then you can be back the same night. All you have to do is to see this man, explain the matter, and get an affidavit of his existence. By the Lord!\" he added hotly, \"considering I've come all the way from the centre of America, it is surely little enough if you go a hundred miles in order to put this matter through.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" said Holmes. \"I think what this gentleman says is very true.\"\n\nMr. Nathan Garrideb shrugged his shoulders with a disconsolate air. \"Well, if you insist I shall go,\" said he. \"It is certainly hard for me to refuse you anything, considering the glory of hope that you have brought into my life.\"\n\n\"Then that is agreed,\" said Holmes, \"and no doubt you will let me have a report as soon as you can.\"\n\n\"I'll see to that,\" said the American. \"Well,\" he added, looking at his watch, \"I'll have to get on. I'll call to-morrow, Mr. Nathan, and see you off to Birmingham. Coming my way, Mr. Holmes? Well, then, good-bye, and we may have good news for you to-morrow night.\"\n\nI noticed that my friend's face cleared when the American left the room, and the look of thoughtful perplexity had vanished.\n\n\"I wish I could look over your collection, Mr. Garrideb,\" said he. \"In my profession all sorts of odd knowledge comes useful, and this room of yours is a storehouse of it.\"\n\nOur client shone with pleasure and his eyes gleamed from behind his big glasses.\n\n\"I had always heard, sir, that you were a very intelligent man,\" said he. \"I could take you round now if you have the time.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, I have not. But these specimens are so well labelled and classified that they hardly need your personal explanation. If I should be able to look in to-morrow, I presume that there would be no objection to my glancing over them?\"\n\n\"None at all. You are most welcome. The place will, of course, be shut up, but Mrs. Saunders is in the basement up to four o'clock and would let you in with her key.\"\n\n\"Well, I happen to be clear to-morrow afternoon. If you would say a word to Mrs. Saunders it would be quite in order. By the way, who is your houseagent?\"\n\nOur client was amazed at the sudden question.\n\n\"Holloway and Steele, in the Edgware Road. But why?\"\n\n\"I am a bit of an arch\u00e6ologist myself when it comes to houses,\" said Holmes, laughing. \"I was wondering if this was Queen Anne or Georgian.\"\n\n\"Georgian, beyond doubt.\"\n\n\"Really. I should have thought a little earlier. However, it is easily ascertained. Well, good-bye, Mr. Garrideb, and may you have every success in your Birmingham journey.\"\n\nThe houseagent's was close by, but we found that it was closed for the day, so we made our way back to Baker Street. It was not till after dinner that Holmes reverted to the subject.\n\n\"Our little problem draws to a close,\" said he. \"No doubt you have outlined the solution in your own mind.\"\n\n\"I can make neither head nor tail of it.\"\n\n\"The head is surely clear enough and the tail we should see to-morrow. Did you notice nothing curious about that advertisement?\"\n\n\"I saw that the word 'plough' was misspelt.\"\n\n\"Oh, you did notice that, did you? Come, Watson, you improve all the time. Yes, it was bad English but good American. The printer had set it up as received. Then the buckboards. That is American also. And artesian wells are commoner with them than with us. It was a typical American advertisement, but purporting to be from an English firm. What do you make of that?\"\n\n\"I can only suppose that this American lawyer put it in himself. What his object was I fail to understand.\"\n\n\"Well, there are alternative explanations. Anyhow, he wanted to get this good old fossil up to Birmingham. That is very clear. I might have told him that he was clearly going on a wild-goose chase, but, on second thoughts, it seemed better to clear the stage by letting him go. To morrow, Watson\u2014well, to-morrow will speak for itself.\"\n\nHolmes was up and out early. When he returned at lunchtime I noticed that his face was very grave.\n\n\"This is a more serious matter than I had expected, Watson,\" said he. \"It is fair to tell you so, though I know it will only be an additional reason to you for running your head into danger. I should know my Watson by now. But there is danger, and you should know it.\"\n\n\"Well, it is not the first we have shared, Holmes. I hope it may not be the last. What is the particular danger this time?\"\n\n\"We are up against a very hard case. I have identified Mr. John Garrideb, Counsellor at Law. He is none other than 'Killer' Evans, of sinister and murderous reputation.\"\n\n\"I fear I am none the wiser.\"\n\n\"Ah, it is not part of your profession to carry about a portable Newgate Calendar in your memory. I have been down to see friend Lestrade at the Yard. There may be an occasional want of imaginative intuition down there, but they lead the world for thoroughness and method. I had an idea that we might get on the track of our American friend in their records. Sure enough, I found his chubby face smiling up at me from the rogues' portrait gallery. 'James Winter, alias Morecroft, alias Killer Evans,' was the inscription below.\" Holmes drew an envelope from his pocket. \"I scribbled down a few points from his dossier: Aged forty-four. Native of Chicago. Known to have shot three men in the States. Escaped from penitentiary through political influence. Came to London in 1893. Shot a man over cards in a night-club in the Waterloo Road in January, 1895. Man died, but he was shown to have been the aggressor in the row. Dead man was identified as Rodger Prescott, famous as forger and coiner in Chicago. Killer Evans released in 1901. Has been under police supervision since, but so far as known has led an honest life. Very dangerous man, usually carries arms and is prepared to use them. That is our bird, Watson\u2014a sporting bird, as you must admit.\"\n\n\"But what is his game?\"\n\n\"Well, it begins to define itself. I have been to the houseagent's. Our client, as he told us, has been there five years. It was unlet for a year before then. The previous tenant was a gentleman at large named Waldron. Waldron's appearance was well remembered at the office. He had suddenly vanished and nothing more been heard of him. He was a tall, bearded man with very dark features. Now, Prescott, the man whom Killer Evans had shot, was, according to Scotland Yard, a tall, dark man with a beard. As a working hypothesis, I think we may take it that Prescott, the American criminal, used to live in the very room which our innocent friend now devotes to his museum. So at last we get a link, you see.\"\n\n\"And the next link?\"\n\n\"Well, we must go now and look for that.\"\n\nHe took a revolver from the drawer and handed it to me.\n\n\"I have my old favourite with me. If our Wild West friend tries to live up to his nickname, we must be ready for him. I'll give you an hour for a siesta, Watson, and then I think it will be time for our Ryder Street adventure.\"\n\nIt was just four o'clock when we reached the curious apartment of Nathan Garrideb. Mrs. Saunders, the caretaker, was about to leave, but she had no hesitation in admitting us, for the door shut with a spring lock, and Holmes promised to see that all was safe before we left. Shortly afterwards the outer door closed, her bonnet passed the bow window, and we knew that we were alone in the lower floor of the house. Holmes made a rapid examination of the premises. There was one cupboard in a dark comer which stood out a little from the wall. It was behind this that we eventually crouched while Holmes in a whisper outlined his intentions.\n\n\"He wanted to get our amiable friend out of his room\u2014that is very clear, and, as the collector never went out, it took some planning to do it. The whole of this Garrideb invention was apparently for no other end. I must say, Watson, that there is a certain devilish ingenuity about it, even if the queer name of the tenant did give him an opening which he could hardly have expected. He wove his plot with remarkable cunning.\"\n\n\"But what did he want?\"\n\n\"Well, that is what we are here to find out. It has nothing whatever to do with our client, so far as I can read the situation. It is something connected with the man he murdered\u2014the man who may have been his confederate in crime. There is some guilty secret in the room. That is how I read it. At first I thought our friend might have something in his collection more valuable than he knew\u2014something worth the attention of a big criminal. But the fact that Rodger Prescott of evil memory inhabited these rooms points to some deeper reason. Well, Watson, we can but possess our souls in patience and see what the hour may bring.\"\n\nThat hour was not long in striking. We crouched closer in the shadow as we heard the outer door open and shut. Then came the sharp, metallic snap of a key, and the American was in the room. He closed the door softly behind him, took a sharp glance around him to see that all was safe, threw off his overcoat, and walked up to the central table with the brisk manner of one who knows exactly what he has to do and how to do it. He pushed the table to one side, tore up the square of carpet on which it rested, rolled it completely back, and then, drawing a jemmy from his inside pocket, he knelt down and worked vigorously upon the floor. Presently we heard the sound of sliding boards, and an instant later a square had opened in the planks. Killer Evans struck a match, lit a stump of candle, and vanished from our view.\n\nClearly our moment had come. Holmes touched my wrist as a signal, and together we stole across to the open trap-door. Gently as we moved, however, the old floor must have creaked under our feet, for the head of our American, peering anxiously round, emerged suddenly from the open space. His face turned upon us with a glare of baffled rage, which gradually softened into a rather shamefaced grin as he realized that two pistols were pointed at his head.\n\n\"Well, well!\" said he coolly as he scrambled to the surface. \"I guess you have been one too many for me, Mr. Holmes. Saw through my game, I suppose, and played me for a sucker from the first. Well, sir, I hand it to you; you have me beat and\u2014\"\n\nIn an instant he had whisked out a revolver from his breast and had fired two shots. I felt a sudden hot sear as if a red-hot iron had been pressed to my thigh. There was a crash as Holmes's pistol came down on the man's head. I had a vision of him sprawling upon the floor with blood running down his face while Holmes rummaged him for weapons. Then my friend's wiry arms were round me, and he was leading me to a chair.\n\n\"You're not hurt, Watson? For God's sake, say that you are not hurt!\"\n\nIt was worth a wound\u2014it was worth many wounds\u2014to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask. The clear, hard eyes were dimmed for a moment, and the firm lips were shaking. For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain. All my years of humble but single-minded service culminated in that moment of revelation.\n\n\"It's nothing, Holmes. It's a mere scratch.\"\n\nHe had ripped up my trousers with his pocket-knife.\n\n\"You are right,\" he cried with an immense sigh of relief. \"It is quite superficial.\" His face set like flint as he glared at our prisoner, who was sitting up with a dazed face. \"By the Lord, it is as well for you. If you had killed Watson, you would not have got out of this room alive. Now, sir, what have you to say for yourself?\"\n\nHe had nothing to say for himself. He only sat and scowled. I leaned on Holmes's arm, and together we looked down into the small cellar which had been disclosed by the secret flap. It was still illuminated by the candle which Evans had taken down with him. Our eyes fell upon a mass of rusted machinery, great rolls of paper, a litter of bottles, and, neatly arranged upon a small table, a number of neat little bundles.\n\n\"A printing press\u2014a counterfeiter's outfit,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" said our prisoner, staggering slowly to his feet and then sinking into the chair. \"The greatest counterfeiter London ever saw. That's Prescott's machine, and those bundles on the table are two thousand of Prescott's notes worth a hundred each and fit to pass anywhere. Help yourselves, gentlemen. Call it a deal and let me beat it.\"\n\nHolmes laughed.\n\n\"We don't do things like that, Mr. Evans. There is no bolt-hole for you in this country. You shot this man Prescott, did you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and got five years for it, though it was he who pulled on me. Five years\u2014when I should have had a medal the size of a soup plate. No living man could tell a Prescott from a Bank of England, and if I hadn't put him out he would have flooded London with them. I was the only one in the world who knew where he made them. Can you wonder that I wanted to get to the place? And can you wonder that when I found this crazy boob of a bug-hunter with the queer name squatting right on the top of it, and never quitting his room, I had to do the best I could to shift him? Maybe I would have been wiser if I had put him away. It would have been easy enough, but I'm a soft-hearted guy that can't begin shooting unless the other man has a gun also. But say, Mr. Holmes, what have I done wrong, anyhow? I've not used this plant. I've not hurt this old stiff. Where do you get me?\"\n\n\"Only attempted murder, so far as I can see,\" said Holmes. \"But that's not our job. They take that at the next stage. What we wanted at present was just your sweet self. Please give the Yard a call, Watson. It won't be entirely unexpected.\"\n\nSo those were the facts about Killer Evans and his remarkable invention of the three Garridebs. We heard later that our poor old friend never got over the shock of his dissipated dreams. When his castle in the air fell down, it buried him beneath the ruins. He was last heard of at a nursing-home in Brixton. It was a glad day at the Yard when the Prescott outfit was discovered, for, though they knew that it existed, they had never been able, after the death of the man, to find out where it was. Evans had indeed done great service and caused several worthy C. I. D. men to sleep the sounder, for the counterfeiter stands in a class by himself as a public danger. They would willingly have subscribed to that soup-plate medal of which the criminal had spoken, but an unappreciative bench took a less favourable view, and the Killer returned to those shades from which he had just emerged." + }, + { + "title": "THE PROBLEM OF THOR BRIDGE", + "text": "Somewhere in the vaults of the bank of Cox and Co., at Charing Cross, there is a travel-worn and battered tin dispatch-box with my name, John H. Watson, M. D., Late Indian Army, painted upon the lid. It is crammed with papers, nearly all of which are records of cases to illustrate the curious problems which Mr. Sherlock Holmes had at various times to examine. Some, and not the least interesting, were complete failures, and as such will hardly bear narrating, since no final explanation is forthcoming. A problem without a solution may interest the student, but can hardly fail to annoy the casual reader. Among these unfinished tales is that of Mr. James Phillimore, who, stepping back into his own house to get his umbrella, was never more seen in this world. No less remarkable is that of the cutter Alicia, which sailed one spring morning into a small patch of mist from where she never again emerged, nor was anything further ever heard of herself and her crew. A third case worthy of note is that of Isadora Per sano, the well-known journalist and duellist, who was found stark staring mad with a match box in front of him which contained a remarkable worm said to be unknown to science. Apart from these unfathomed cases, there are some which involve the secrets of private families to an extent which would mean consternation in many exalted quarters if it were thought possible that they might find their way into print. I need not say that such a breach of confidence is unthinkable, and that these records will be separated and destroyed now that my friend has time to turn his energies to the matter. There remain a considerable residue of cases of greater or less interest which I might have edited before had I not feared to give the public a surfeit which might react upon the reputation of the man whom above all others I revere. In some I was myself concerned and can speak as an eye-witness, while in others I was either not present or played so small a part that they could only be told as by a third person. The following narrative is drawn from my own experience.\n\nIt was a wild morning in October, and I observed as I was dressing how the last remaining leaves were being whirled from the solitary plane tree which graces the yard behind our house. I descended to breakfast prepared to find my companion in depressed spirits, for, like all great artists, he was easily impressed by his surroundings. On the contrary, I found that he had nearly finished his meal, and that his mood was particularly bright and joyous, with that somewhat sinister cheerfulness which was characteristic of his lighter moments.\n\n\"You have a case, Holmes?\" I remarked.\n\n\"The faculty of deduction is certainly contagious, Watson,\" he answered. \"It has enabled you to probe my secret. Yes, I have a case. After a month of trivialities and stagnation the wheels move once more.\"\n\n\"Might I share it?\"\n\n\"There is little to share, but we may discuss it when you have consumed the two hard-boiled eggs with which our new cook has favoured us. Their condition may not be unconnected with the copy of the Family Herald which I observed yesterday upon the hall-table. Even so trivial a matter as cooking an egg demands an attention which is conscious of the passage of time and incompatible with the love romance in that excellent periodical.\"\n\nA quarter of an hour later the table had been cleared and we were face to face. He had drawn a letter from his pocket.\n\n\"You have heard of Neil Gibson, the Gold King?\" he said.\n\n\"You mean the American Senator?\"\n\n\"Well, he was once Senator for some Western state, but is better known as the greatest gold-mining magnate in the world.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know of him. He has surely lived in England for some time. His name is very familiar.\"\n\n\"Yes, he bought a considerable estate in Hampshire some five years ago. Possibly you have already heard of the tragic end of his wife?\"\n\n\"Of course. I remember it now. That is why the name is familiar. But I really know nothing of the details.\"\n\nHolmes waved his hand towards some papers on a chair. \"I had no idea that the case was coming my way or I should have had my extracts ready,\" said he. \"The fact is that the problem, though exceedingly sensational, appeared to present no difficulty. The interesting personality of the accused does not obscure the clearness of the evidence. That was the view taken by the coroner's jury and also in the police-court proceedings. It is now referred to the Assizes at Winchester. I fear it is a thankless business. I can discover facts, Watson, but I cannot change them. Unless some entirely new and unexpected ones come to light I do not see what my client can hope for.\"\n\n\"Your client?\"\n\n\"Ah, I forgot I had not told you. I am getting into your involved habit, Watson, of telling a story backward. You had best read this first.\"\n\nThe letter which he handed to me, written in a bold, masterful hand, ran as follows:\n\n\u2002CLARIDGE'S HOTEL,\n\n\u2002October 3rd.\n\n\u2002DEAR MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES:\n\n\u2002I can't see the best woman God ever made go to her death without doing all that is possible to save her. I can't explain things\u2014I can't even try to explain them, but I know beyond all doubt that Miss Dun bar is innocent. You know the facts\u2014who doesn't? It has been the gossip of the country. And never a voice raised for her! It's the damned injustice of it all that makes me crazy. That woman has a heart that wouldn't let her kill a fly. Well, I'll come at eleven to morrow and see if you can get some ray of light in the dark. Maybe I have a clue and don't know it. Anyhow, all I know and all I have and all I am are for your use if only you can save her. If ever in your life you showed your powers, put them now into this case.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002J. NEIL GIBSON.\n\n\"There you have it,\" said Sherlock Holmes, knocking out the ashes of his after-breakfast pipe and slowly refilling it. \"That is the gentleman I await. As to the story, you have hardly time to master all these papers, so I must give it to you in a nutshell if you are to take an intelligent interest in the proceedings. This man is the greatest financial power in the world, and a man, as I understand, of most violent and formidable character. He married a wife, the victim of this tragedy, of whom I know nothing save that she was past her prime, which was the more unfortunate as a very attractive governess superintended the education of two young children. These are the three people concerned, and the scene is a grand old manor house, the centre of a historical English state. Then as to the tragedy. The wife was found in the grounds nearly half a mile from the house, late at night, clad in her dinner dress, with a shawl over her shoulders and a revolver bullet through her brain. No weapon was found near her and there was no local clue as to the murder. No weapon near her. Watson\u2014mark that! The crime seems to have been committed late in the evening, and the body was found by a gamekeeper about eleven o'clock, when it was examined by the police and by a doctor before being carried up to the house. Is this too condensed, or can you follow it clearly?\"\n\n\"It is all very clear. But why suspect the governess?\"\n\n\"Well, in the first place there is some very direct evidence. A revolver with one discharged chamber and a calibre which corresponded with the bullet was found on the floor of her wardrobe.\" His eyes fixed and he repeated in broken words, \"On\u2014the\u2014floor\u2014of\u2014her\u2014wardrobe.\" Then he sank into silence, and I saw that some train of thought had been set moving which I should be foolish to interrupt. Suddenly with a start he emerged into brisk life once more. \"Yes, Watson, it was found. Pretty damning, eh? So the two juries thought. Then the dead woman had a note upon her making an appointment at that very place and signed by the governess. How's that? Finally there is the motive. Senator Gibson is an attractive person. If his wife dies, who more likely to succeed her than the young lady who had already by all accounts received pressing attentions from her employer? Love, fortune, power, all depending upon one middle-aged life. Ugly, Watson\u2014very ugly!\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed, Holmes.\"\n\n\"Nor could she prove an alibi. On the contrary, she had to admit that she was down near Thor Bridge\u2014that was the scene of the tragedy\u2014about that hour. She couldn't deny it, for some passing villager had seen her there.\"\n\n\"That really seems final.\"\n\n\"And yet, Watson\u2014and yet! This bridge\u2014a single broad span of stone with balustraded sides\u2014carries the drive over the narrowest part of a long, deep, reed-girt sheet of water. Thor Mere it is called. In the mouth of the bridge lay the dead woman. Such are the main facts. But here, if I mistake not, is our client, considerably before his time.\"\n\nBilly had opened the door, but the name which he announced was an unexpected one. Mr. Marlow Bates was a stranger to both of us. He was a thin, nervous wisp of a man with frightened eyes and a twitching, hesitating manner\u2014a man whom my own professional eye would judge to be on the brink of an absolute nervous breakdown.\n\n\"You seem agitated, Mr. Bates,\" said Holmes. \"Pray sit down. I fear I can only give you a short time, for I have an appointment at eleven.\"\n\n\"I know you have,\" our visitor gasped, shooting out short sentences like a man who is out of breath. \"Mr. Gibson is coming. Mr. Gibson is my employer. I am manager of his estate. Mr. Holmes, he is a villain\u2014an infernal villain.\"\n\n\"Strong language, Mr. Bates.\"\n\n\"I have to be emphatic, Mr. Holmes, for the time is so limited. I would not have him find me here for the world. He is almost due now. But I was so situated that I could not come earlier. His secretary, Mr. Ferguson, only told me this morning of his appointment with you.\"\n\n\"And you are his manager?\"\n\n\"I have given him notice. In a couple of weeks I shall have shaken off his accursed slavery. A hard man, Mr. Holmes, hard to all about him. Those public charities are a screen to cover his private iniquities. But his wife was his chief victim. He was brutal to her\u2014yes, sir, brutal! How she came by her death I do not know, but I am sure that he had made her life a misery to her. She was a creature of the tropics, a Brazilian by birth, as no doubt you know.\"\n\n\"No, it had escaped me.\"\n\n\"Tropical by birth and tropical by nature. A child of the sun and of passion. She had loved him as such women can love, but when her own physical charms had faded\u2014I am told that they once were great\u2014there was nothing to hold him. We all liked her and felt for her and hated him for the way that he treated her. But he is plausible and cunning. That is all I have to say to you. Don't take him at his face value. There is more behind. Now I'll go. No, no, don't detain me! He is almost due.\"\n\nWith a frightened look at the clock our strange visitor literally ran to the door and disappeared.\n\n\"Well! Well!\" said Holmes after an interval of silence. \"Mr. Gibson seems to have a nice loyal household. But the warning is a useful one, and now we can only wait till the man himself appears.\"\n\nSharp at the hour we heard a heavy step upon the stairs, and the famous millionaire was shown into the room. As I looked upon him I understood not only the fears and dislike of his manager but also the exe crations which so many business rivals have heaped upon his head. If I were a sculptor and desired to idealize the successful man of affairs, iron of nerve and leathery of conscience, I should choose Mr. Neil Gibson as my model. His tall, gaunt, craggy figure had a suggestion of hunger and rapacity. An Abraham Lincoln keyed to base uses instead of high ones would give some idea of the man. His face might have been chiselled in granite, hard-set, craggy, remorseless, with deep lines upon it, the scars of many a crisis. Cold gray eyes, looking shrewdly out from under bristling brows, surveyed us each in turn. He bowed in perfunctory fashion as Holmes mentioned my name, and then with a masterful air of possession he drew a chair up to my companion and seated himself with his bony knees almost touching him.\n\n\"Let me say right here, Mr. Holmes,\" he began, \"that money is nothing to me in this case. You can burn it if it's any use in lighting you to the truth. This woman is innocent and this woman has to be cleared, and it's up to you to do it. Name your figure!\"\n\n\"My professional charges are upon a fixed scale,\" said Holmes coldly. \"I do not vary them, save when I remit them altogether.\"\n\n\"Well, if dollars make no difference to you, think of the reputation. If you pull this off every paper in England and America will be booming you. You'll be the talk of two continents.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Gibson, I do not think that I am in need of booming. It may surprise you to know that I prefer to work anonymously, and that it is the problem itself which attracts me. But we are wasting time. Let us get down to the facts.\"\n\n\"I think that you will find all the main ones in the press reports. I don't know that I can add anything which will help you. But if there is anything you would wish more light upon\u2014well, I am here to give it.\"\n\n\"Well, there is just one point.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"What were the exact relations between you and Miss Dunbar?\"\n\nThe Gold King gave a violent start and half rose from his chair. Then his massive calm came back to him.\n\n\"I suppose you are within your rights\u2014and maybe doing your duty\u2014in asking such a question, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"We will agree to suppose so,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Then I can assure you that our relations were entirely and always those of an employer towards a young lady whom he never conversed with, or ever saw, save when she was in the company of his children.\"\n\nHolmes rose from his chair.\n\n\"I am a rather busy man, Mr. Gibson,\" said he, \"and I have no time or taste for aimless conversations. I wish you good-morning.\"\n\nOur visitor had risen also, and his great loose figure towered above Holmes. There was an angry gleam from under those bristling brows and a tinge of colour in the sallow cheeks.\n\n\"What the devil do you mean by this, Mr. Holmes? Do you dismiss my case?\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Gibson, at least I dismiss you. I should have thought my words were plain.\"\n\n\"Plain enough, but what's at the back of it? Raising the price on me, or afraid to tackle it, or what? I've a right to a plain answer.\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps you have,\" said Holmes. \"I'll give you one. This case is quite sufficiently complicated to start with without the further difficulty of false information.\"\n\n\"Meaning that I lie.\"\n\n\"Well, I was trying to express it as delicately as I could, but if you insist upon the word I will not contradict you.\"\n\nI sprang to my feet, for the expression upon the millionaire's face was fiendish in its intensity, and he had raised his great knotted fist. Holmes smiled languidly and reached his hand out for his pipe.\n\n\"Don't be noisy, Mr. Gibson. I find that after breakfast even the smallest argument is unsettling. I suggest that a stroll in the morning air and a little quiet thought will be greatly to your advantage.\"\n\nWith an effort the Gold King mastered his fury. I could not but admire him, for by a supreme self-command he had turned in a minute from a hot flame of anger to a frigid and contemptuous indifference.\n\n\"Well, it's your choice. I guess you know how to run your own business. I can't make you touch the case against your will. You've done yourself no good this morning, Mr. Holmes, for I have broken stronger men than you. No man ever crossed me and was the better for it.\"\n\n\"So many have said so, and yet here I am,\" said Holmes, smiling. \"Well, good-morning, Mr. Gibson. You have a good deal yet to learn.\"\n\nOur visitor made a noisy exit, but Holmes smoked in imperturbable silence with dreamy eyes fixed upon the ceiling.\n\n\"Any views, Watson?\" he asked at last.\n\n\"Well, Holmes, I must confess that when I consider that this is a man who would certainly brush any obstacle from his path, and when I remember that his wife may have been an obstacle and an object of dislike, as that man Bates plainly told us, it seems to me\u2014\"\n\n\"Exactly. And to me also.\"\n\n\"But what were his relations with the governess, and how did you discover them?\"\n\n\"Bluff, Watson, bluff! When I considered the passionate, unconventional, unbusinesslike tone of his letter and contrasted it with his self-contained manner and appearance, it was pretty clear that there was some deep emotion which centred upon the accused woman rather than upon the victim. We've got to understand the exact relations of those three people if we are to reach the truth. You saw the frontal attack which I made upon him, and how imperturbably he received it. Then I bluffed him by giving him the impression that I was absolutely certain, when in reality I was only extremely suspicious.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he will come back?\"\n\n\"He is sure to come back. He must come back. He can't leave it where it is. Ha! isn't that a ring? Yes, there is his footstep. Well, Mr. Gibson, I was just saying to Dr. Watson that you were somewhat overdue.\"\n\nThe Gold King had reentered the room in a more chastened mood than he had left it. His wounded pride still showed in his resentful eyes, but his common sense had shown him that he must yield if he would attain his end.\n\n\"I've been thinking it over, Mr. Holmes, and I feel that I have been hasty in taking your remarks amiss. You are justified in getting down to the facts, whatever they may be, and I think the more of you for it. I can assure you, however, that the relations between Miss Dunbar and me don't really touch this case.\"\n\n\"That is for me to decide, is it not?\"\n\n\"Yes, I guess that is so. You're like a surgeon who wants every symptom before he can give his diagnosis.\"\n\n\"Exactly. That expresses it. And it is only a patient who has an object in deceiving his surgeon who would conceal the facts of his case.\"\n\n\"That may be so, but you will admit, Mr. Holmes, that most men would shy off a bit when they are asked point-blank what their relations with a woman may be\u2014if there is really some serious feeling in the case. I guess most men have a little private reserve of their own in some corner of their souls where they don't welcome intruders. And you burst suddenly into it. But the object excuses you, since it was to try and save her. Well, the stakes are down and the reserve open, and you can explore where you will. What is it you want?\"\n\n\"The truth.\"\n\nThe Gold King paused for a moment as one who marshals his thoughts. His grim, deep-lined face had become even sadder and more grave.\n\n\"I can give it to you in a very few words, Mr. Holmes,\" said he at last. \"There are some things that are painful as well as difficult to say, so I won't go deeper than is needful. I met my wife when I was gold-hunting in Brazil. Maria Pinto was the daughter of a government official at Man aos, and she was very beautiful. I was young and ardent in those days, but even now, as I look back with colder blood and a more critical eye, I can see that she was rare and wonderful in her beauty. It was a deep rich nature, too, passionate, whole-hearted, tropical, ill-balanced, very different from the American women whom I had known. Well, to make a long story short, I loved her and I married her. It was only when the romance had passed\u2014and it lingered for years\u2014that I realized that we had nothing\u2014absolutely nothing\u2014in common. My love faded. If hers had faded also it might have been easier. But you know the wonderful way of women! Do what I might, nothing could turn her from me. If I have been harsh to her, even brutal as some have said, it has been because I knew that if I could kill her love, or if it turned to hate, it would be easier for both of us. But nothing changed her. She adored me in those English woods as she had adored me twenty years ago on the banks of the Amazon. Do what I might, she was as devoted as ever.\n\n\"Then came Miss Grace Dunbar. She answered our advertisement and became governess to our two children. Perhaps you have seen her portrait in the papers. The whole world has proclaimed that she also is a very beautiful woman. Now, I make no pretence to be more moral than my neighbours, and I will admit to you that I could not live under the same roof with such a woman and in daily contact with her without feeling a passionate regard for her. Do you blame me, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I do not blame you for feeling it. I should blame you if you expressed it, since this young lady was in a sense under your protection.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe so,\" said the millionaire, though for a moment the reproof had brought the old angry gleam into his eyes. \"I'm not pretending to be any better than I am. I guess all my life I've been a man that reached out his hand for what he wanted, and I never wanted anything more than the love and possession of that woman. I told her so.\"\n\n\"Oh, you did, did you?\"\n\nHolmes could look very formidable when he was moved.\n\n\"I said to her that if I could marry her I would, but that it was out of my power. I said that money was no object and that all I could do to make her happy and comfortable would be done.\"\n\n\"Very generous, I am sure,\" said Holmes with a sneer.\n\n\"See here, Mr. Holmes. I came to you on a question of evidence, not on a question of morals. I'm not asking for your criticism.\"\n\n\"It is only for the young lady's sake that I touch your case at all,\" said Holmes sternly. \"I don't know that anything she is accused of is really worse than what you have yourself admitted, that you have tried to ruin a defenceless girl who was under your roof. Some of you rich men have to be taught that all the world cannot be bribed into condoning your offences.\"\n\nTo my surprise the Gold King took the reproof with equanimity.\n\n\"That's how I feel myself about it now. I thank God that my plans did not work out as I intended. She would have none of it, and she wanted to leave the house instantly.\"\n\n\"Why did she not?\"\n\n\"Well, in the first place, others were dependent upon her, and it was no light matter for her to let them all down by sacrificing her living. When I had sworn\u2014as I did\u2014that she should never be molested again, she consented to remain. But there was another reason. She knew the influence she had over me, and that it was stronger than any other influence in the world. She wanted to use it for good.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Well, she knew something of my affairs. They are large, Mr. Holmes\u2014large beyond the belief of an ordinary man. I can make or break\u2014and it is usually break. It wasn't individuals only. It was communities, cities, even nations. Business is a hard game, and the weak go to the wall. I played the game for all it was worth. I never squealed myself, and I never cared if the other fellow squealed. But she saw it different. I guess she was right. She believed and said that a fortune for one man that was more than he needed should not be built on ten thousand ruined men who were left without the means of life. That was how she saw it, and I guess she could see past the dollars to something that was more lasting. She found that I listened to what she said, and she believed she was serving the world by influencing my actions. So she stayed\u2014and then this came along.\"\n\n\"Can you throw any light upon that?\"\n\nThe Gold King paused for a minute or more, his head sunk in his hands, lost in deep thought.\n\n\"It's very black against her. I can't deny that. And women lead an inward life and may do things beyond the judgment of a man. At first I was so rattled and taken aback that I was ready to think she had been led away in some extraordinary fashion that was clean against her usual nature. One explanation came into my head. I give it to you, Mr. Holmes, for what it is worth. There is no doubt that my wife was bitterly jealous. There is a soul-jealousy that can be as frantic as any body-jealousy, and though my wife had no cause\u2014and I think she understood this\u2014for the latter, she was aware that this English girl exerted an influence upon my mind and my acts that she herself never had. It was an influence for good, but that did not mend the matter. She was crazy with hatred, and the heat of the Amazon was always in her blood. She might have planned to murder Miss Dunbar\u2014or we will say to threaten her with a gun and so frighten her into leaving us. Then there might have been a scuffle and the gun gone off and shot the woman who held it.\"\n\n\"That possibility had already occurred to me,\" said Holmes. \"Indeed, it is the only obvious alternative to deliberate murder.\"\n\n\"But she utterly denies it.\"\n\n\"Well, that is not final\u2014is it? One can understand that a woman placed in so awful a position might hurry home still in her bewilderment holding the revolver. She might even throw it down among her clothes, hardly knowing what she was doing, and when it was found she might try to lie her way out by a total denial, since all explanation was impossible. What is against such a supposition?\"\n\n\"Miss Dunbar herself.\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps.\"\n\nHolmes looked at his watch. \"I have no doubt we can get the necessary permits this morning and reach Winchester by the evening train. When I have seen this young lady it is very possible that I may be of more use to you in the matter, though I cannot promise that my conclusions will necessarily be such as you desire.\"\n\nThere was some delay in the official pass, and instead of reaching Winchester that day we went down to Thor Place, the Hampshire estate of Mr. Neil Gibson. He did not accompany us himself, but we had the address of Sergeant Coventry, of the local police, who had first examined into the affair. He was a tall, thin, cadaverous man, with a secretive and mysterious manner which conveyed the idea that he knew or suspected a very great deal more than he dared say. He had a trick, too, of suddenly sinking his voice to a whisper as if he had come upon something of vital importance, though the information was usually commonplace enough. Behind these tricks of manner he soon showed himself to be a decent, honest fellow who was not too proud to admit that he was out of his depth and would welcome any help.\n\n\"Anyhow, I'd rather have you than Scotland Yard, Mr. Holmes,\" said he. \"If the Yard gets called into a case, then the local loses all credit for success and may be blamed for failure. Now, you play straight, so I've heard.\"\n\n\"I need not appear in the matter at all,\" said Holmes to the evident relief of our melancholy acquaintance. \"If I can clear it up I don't ask to have my name mentioned.\"\n\n\"Well, it's very handsome of you, I am sure. And your friend, Dr. Watson, can be trusted, I know. Now, Mr. Holmes, as we walk down to the place there is one question I should like to ask you. I'd breathe it to no soul but you.\" He looked round as though he hardly dare utter the words. \"Don't you think there might be a case against Mr. Neil Gibson himself?\"\n\n\"I have been considering that.\"\n\n\"You've not seen Miss Dunbar. She is a wonderful fine woman in every way. He may well have wished his wife out of the road. And these Americans are readier with pistols than our folk are. It was his pistol, you know.\"\n\n\"Was that clearly made out?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It was one of a pair that he had.\"\n\n\"One of a pair? Where is the other?\"\n\n\"Well, the gentleman has a lot of firearms of one sort and another. We never quite matched that particular pistol\u2014but the box was made for two.\"\n\n\"If it was one of a pair you should surely be able to match it.\"\n\n\"Well, we have them all laid out at the house if you would care to look them over.\"\n\n\"Later, perhaps. I think we will walk down together and have a look at the scene of the tragedy.\"\n\nThis conversation had taken place in the little front room of Sergeant Coventry's humble cottage which served as the local police-station. A walk of half a mile or so across a wind-swept heath, all gold and bronze with the fading ferns, brought us to a side-gate opening into the grounds of the Thor Place estate. A path led us through the pheasant preserves, and then from a clearing we saw the widespread, half-timbered house, half Tudor and half Georgian, upon the crest of the hill. Beside us there was a long, reedy pool, constricted in the centre where the main carriage drive passed over a stone bridge, but swelling into small lakes on either side. Our guide paused at the mouth of this bridge, and he pointed to the ground.\n\n\"That was where Mrs. Gibson's body lay. I marked it by that stone.\"\n\n\"I understand that you were there before it was moved?\"\n\n\"Yes, they sent for me at once.\"\n\n\"Who did?\"\n\n\"Mr. Gibson himself. The moment the alarm was given and he had rushed down with others from the house, he insisted that nothing should be moved until the police should arrive.\"\n\n\"That was sensible. I gathered from the newspaper report that the shot was fired from close quarters.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, very close.\"\n\n\"Near the right temple?\"\n\n\"Just behind it, sir.\"\n\n\"How did the body lie?\"\n\n\"On the back, sir. No trace of a struggle. No marks. No weapon. The short note from Miss Dunbar was clutched in her left hand.\"\n\n\"Clutched, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, we could hardly open the fingers.\"\n\n\"That is of great importance. It excludes the idea that anyone could have placed the note there after death in order to furnish a false clue. Dear me! The note, as I remember, was quite short:\n\nI will be at Thor Bridge at nine o'clock.\n\nG. DUNBAR.\n\nWas that not so?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Did Miss Dunbar admit writing it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"What was her explanation?\"\n\n\"Her defence was reserved for the Assizes. She would say nothing.\"\n\n\"The problem is certainly a very interesting one. The point of the letter is very obscure, is it not?\"\n\n\"Well, sir,\" said the guide, \"it seemed, if I may be so bold as to say so, the only really clear point in the whole case.\"\n\nHolmes shook his head.\n\n\"Granting that the letter is genuine and was really written, it was certainly received some time before\u2014say one hour or two. Why, then, was this lady still clasping it in her left hand? Why should she carry it so carefully? She did not need to refer to it in the interview. Does it not seem remarkable?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, as you put it, perhaps it does.\"\n\n\"I think I should like to sit quietly for a few minutes and think it out.\" He seated himself upon the stone ledge of the bridge, and I could see his quick gray eyes darting their questioning glances in every direction. Suddenly he sprang up again and ran across to the opposite parapet, whipped his lens from his pocket, and began to examine the stonework.\n\n\"This is curious,\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, sir, we saw the chip on the ledge. I expect it's been done by some passer-by.\"\n\nThe stonework was gray, but at this one point it showed white for a space not larger than a sixpence. When examined closely one could see that the surface was chipped as by a sharp blow.\n\n\"It took some violence to do that,\" said Holmes thoughtfully. With his cane he struck the ledge several times without leaving a mark. \"Yes, it was a hard knock. In a curious place, too. It was not from above but from below, for you see that it is on the lower edge of the parapet.\"\n\n\"But it is at least fifteen feet from the body.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is fifteen feet from the body. It may have nothing to do with the matter, but it is a point worth noting. I do not think that we have anything more to learn here. There were no footsteps, you say?\"\n\n\"The ground was iron hard, sir. There were no traces at all.\"\n\n\"Then we can go. We will go up to the house first and look over these weapons of which you speak. Then we shall get on to Winchester, for I should desire to see Miss Dunbar before we go farther.\"\n\nMr. Neil Gibson had not returned from town, but we saw in the house the neurotic Mr. Bates who had called upon us in the morning. He showed us with a sinister relish the formidable array of firearms of various shapes and sizes which his employer had accumulated in the course of an adventurous life.\n\n\"Mr. Gibson has his enemies, as anyone would expect who knew him and his methods,\" said he. \"He sleeps with a loaded revolver in the drawer beside his bed. He is a man of violence, sir, and there are times when all of us are afraid of him. I am sure that the poor lady who has passed was often terrified.\"\n\n\"Did you ever witness physical violence towards her?\"\n\n\"No, I cannot say that. But I have heard words which were nearly as bad\u2014words of cold, cutting contempt, even before the servants.\"\n\n\"Our millionaire does not seem to shine in private life,\" remarked Holmes as we made our way to the station. \"Well, Watson, we have come on a good many facts, some of them new ones, and yet I seem some way from my conclusion. In spite of the very evident dislike which Mr. Bates has to his employer, I gather from him that when the alarm came he was undoubtedly in his library. Dinner was over at 8:30 and all was normal up to then. It is true that the alarm was somewhat late in the evening, but the tragedy certainly occurred about the hour named in the note. There is no evidence at all that Mr. Gibson had been out of doors since his return from town at five o'clock. On the other hand, Miss Dunbar, as I understand it, admits that she had made an appointment to meet Mrs. Gibson at the bridge. Beyond this she would say nothing, as her lawyer had advised her to reserve her defence. We have several very vital questions to ask that young lady, and my mind will not be easy until we have seen her. I must confess that the case would seem to me to be very black against her if it were not for one thing.\"\n\n\"And what is that, Holmes?\"\n\n\"The finding of the pistol in her wardrobe.\"\n\n\"Dear me, Holmes!\" I cried, \"that seemed to me to be the most damning incident of all.\"\n\n\"Not so, Watson. It had struck me even at my first perfunctory reading as very strange, and now that I am in closer touch with the case it is my only firm ground for hope. We must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.\"\n\n\"I hardly follow you.\"\n\n\"Well now, Watson, suppose for a moment that we visualize you in the character of a woman who, in a cold, premeditated fashion, is about to get rid of a rival. You have planned it. A note has been written. The victim has come. You have your weapon. The crime is done. It has been workmanlike and complete. Do you tell me that after carrying out so crafty a crime you would now ruin your reputation as a criminal by forgetting to fling your weapon into those adjacent reed-beds which would forever cover it, but you must needs carry it carefully home and put it in your own wardrobe, the very first place that would be searched? Your best friends would hardly call you a schemer, Watson, and yet I could not picture you doing anything so crude as that.\"\n\n\"In the excitement of the moment\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no, Watson, I will not admit that it is possible. Where a crime is coolly premeditated, then the means of covering it are coolly premeditated also. I hope, therefore, that we are in the presence of a serious misconception.\"\n\n\"But there is so much to explain.\"\n\n\"Well, we shall set about explaining it. When once your point of view is changed, the very thing which was so damning becomes a clue to the truth. For example, there is this revolver. Miss Dunbar disclaims all knowledge of it. On our new theory she is speaking truth when she says so. Therefore, it was placed in her wardrobe. Who placed it there? Someone who wished to incriminate her. Was not that person the actual criminal? You see how we come at once upon a most fruitful line of inquiry.\"\n\nWe were compelled to spend the night at Winchester, as the formalities had not yet been completed, but next morning, in the company of Mr. Joyce Cummings, the rising barrister who was entrusted with the defence, we were allowed to see the young lady in her cell. I had expected from all that we had heard to see a beautiful woman, but I can never forget the effect which Miss Dunbar produced upon me. It was no wonder that even the masterful millionaire had found in her something more powerful than himself\u2014something which could control and guide him. One felt, too, as one looked at the strong, clear-cut, and yet sensitive face, that even should she be capable of some impetuous deed, none the less there was an innate nobility of character which would make her influence always for the good. She was a brunette, tall, with a noble figure and commanding presence, but her dark eyes had in them the appealing, helpless expression of the hunted creature who feels the nets around it, but can see no way out from the toils. Now, as she realized the presence and the help of my famous friend, there came a touch of colour in her wan cheeks and a light of hope began to glimmer in the glance which she turned upon us.\n\n\"Perhaps Mr. Neil Gibson has told you something of what occurred between us?\" she asked in a low, agitated voice.\n\n\"Yes,\" Holmes answered, \"you need not pain yourself by entering into that part of the story. After seeing you, I am prepared to accept Mr. Gibson's statement both as to the influence which you had over him and as to the innocence of your relations with him. But why was the whole situation not brought out in court?\"\n\n\"It seemed to me incredible that such a charge could be sustained. I thought that if we waited the whole thing must clear itself up without our being compelled to enter into painful details of the inner life of the family. But I understand that far from clearing it has become even more serious.\"\n\n\"My dear young lady,\" cried Holmes earnestly, \"I beg you to have no illusions upon the point. Mr. Cummings here would assure you that all the cards are at present against us, and that we must do everything that is possible if we are to win clear. It would be a cruel deception to pretend that you are not in very great danger. Give me all the help you can, then, to get at the truth.\"\n\n\"I will conceal nothing.\"\n\n\"Tell us, then, of your true relations with Mr. Gibson's wife.\"\n\n\"She hated me, Mr. Holmes. She hated me with all the fervour of her tropical nature. She was a woman who would do nothing by halves, and the measure of her love for her husband was the measure also of her hatred for me. It is probable that she misunderstood our relations. I would not wish to wrong her, but she loved so vividly in a physical sense that she could hardly understand the mental, and even spiritual, tie which held her husband to me, or imagine that it was only my desire to influence his power to good ends which kept me under his roof. I can see now that I was wrong. Nothing could justify me in remaining where I was a cause of unhappiness, and yet it is certain that the unhappiness would have remained even if I had left the house.\"\n\n\"Now, Miss Dunbar,\" said Holmes, \"I beg you to tell us exactly what occurred that evening.\"\n\n\"I can tell you the truth so far as I know it, Mr. Holmes, but I am in a position to prove nothing, and there are points\u2014the most vital points\u2014which I can neither explain nor can I imagine any explanation.\"\n\n\"If you will find the facts, perhaps others may find the explanation.\"\n\n\"With regard, then, to my presence at Thor Bridge that night, I received a note from Mrs. Gibson in the morning. It lay on the table of the schoolroom, and it may have been left there by her own hand. It implored me to see her there after dinner, said she had something important to say to me, and asked me to leave an answer on the sundial in the garden, as she desired no one to be in our confidence. I saw no reason for such secrecy, but I did as she asked, accepting the appointment. She asked me to destroy her note and I burned it in the schoolroom grate. She was very much afraid of her husband, who treated her with a harshness for which I frequently reproached him, and I could only imagine that she acted in this way because she did not wish him to know of our interview.\"\n\n\"Yet she kept your reply very carefully?\"\n\n\"Yes. I was surprised to hear that she had it in her hand when she died.\"\n\n\"Well, what happened then?\"\n\n\"I went down as I had promised. When I reached the bridge she was waiting for me. Never did I realize till that moment how this poor creature hated me. She was like a mad woman\u2014indeed, I think she was a mad woman, subtly mad with the deep power of deception which insane people may have. How else could she have met me with unconcern every day and yet had so raging a hatred of me in her heart? I will not say what she said. She poured her whole wild fury out in burning and horrible words. I did not even answer\u2014I could not. It was dreadful to see her. I put my hands to my ears and rushed away. When I left her she was standing, still shrieking out her curses at me, in the mouth of the bridge.\"\n\n\"Where she was afterwards found?\"\n\n\"Within a few yards from the spot.\"\n\n\"And yet, presuming that she met her death shortly after you left her, you heard no shot?\"\n\n\"No, I heard nothing. But, indeed, Mr. Holmes, I was so agitated and horrified by this terrible outbreak that I rushed to get back to the peace of my own room, and I was incapable of noticing anything which happened.\"\n\n\"You say that you returned to your room. Did you leave it again before next morning?\"\n\n\"Yes, when the alarm came that the poor creature had met her death I ran out with the others.\"\n\n\"Did you see Mr. Gibson?\"\n\n\"Yes, he had just returned from the bridge when I saw him. He had sent for the doctor and the police.\"\n\n\"Did he seem to you much perturbed?\"\n\n\"Mr. Gibson is a very strong, self-contained man. I do not think that he would ever show his emotions on the surface. But I, who knew him so well, could see that he was deeply concerned.\"\n\n\"Then we come to the all-important point. This pistol that was found in your room. Had you ever seen it before?\"\n\n\"Never, I swear it.\"\n\n\"When was it found?\"\n\n\"Next morning, when the police made their search.\"\n\n\"Among your clothes?\"\n\n\"Yes, on the floor of my wardrobe under my dresses.\"\n\n\"You could not guess how long it had been there?\"\n\n\"It had not been there the morning before.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because I tidied out the wardrobe.\"\n\n\"That is final. Then someone came into your room and placed the pistol there in order to inculpate you.\"\n\n\"It must have been so.\"\n\n\"And when?\"\n\n\"It could only have been at meal-time, or else at the hours when I would be in the schoolroom with the children.\"\n\n\"As you were when you got the note?\"\n\n\"Yes, from that time onward for the whole morning.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Dunbar. Is there any other point which could help me in the investigation?\"\n\n\"I can think of none.\"\n\n\"There was some sign of violence on the stonework of the bridge\u2014a perfectly fresh chip just opposite the body. Could you suggest any possible explanation of that?\"\n\n\"Surely it must be a mere coincidence.\"\n\n\"Curious, Miss Dunbar, very curious. Why should it appear at the very time of the tragedy, and why at the very place?\"\n\n\"But what could have caused it? Only great violence could have such an effect.\"\n\nHolmes did not answer. His pale, eager face had suddenly assumed that tense, far-away expression which I had learned to associate with the supreme manifestations of his genius. So evident was the crisis in his mind that none of us dared to speak, and we sat, barrister, prisoner, and myself, watching him in a concentrated and absorbed silence. Suddenly he sprang from his chair, vibrating with nervous energy and the pressing need for action.\n\n\"Come, Watson, come!\" he cried.\n\n\"What is it, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Never mind, my dear lady. You will hear from me, Mr. Cummings. With the help of the god of justice I will give you a case which will make England ring. You will get news by to-morrow, Miss Dunbar, and meanwhile take my assurance that the clouds are lifting and that I have every hope that the light of truth is breaking through.\"\n\nIt was not a long journey from Winchester to Thor Place, but it was long to me in my impatience, while for Holmes it was evident that it seemed endless; for, in his nervous restlessness, he could not sit still, but paced the carriage or drummed with his long, sensitive fingers upon the cushions beside him. Suddenly, however, as we neared our destination he seated himself opposite to me\u2014we had a first-class carriage to ourselves\u2014and laying a hand upon each of my knees he looked into my eyes with the peculiarly mischievous gaze which was characteristic of his more imp-like moods.\n\n\"Watson,\" said he, \"I have some recollection that you go armed upon these excursions of ours.\"\n\nIt was as well for him that I did so, for he took little care for his own safety when his mind was once absorbed by a problem, so that more than once my revolver had been a good friend in need. I reminded him of the fact.\n\n\"Yes, yes, I am a little absent-minded in such matters. But have you your revolver on you?\"\n\nI produced it from my hip-pocket, a short, handy, but very serviceable little weapon. He undid the catch, shook out the cartridges, and examined it with care.\n\n\"It's heavy\u2014remarkably heavy,\" said he.\n\n\"Yes, it is a solid bit of work.\"\n\nHe mused over it for a minute.\n\n\"Do you know, Watson,\" said he, \"I believe your revolver is going to have a very intimate connection with the mystery which we are investigating.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes, you are joking.\"\n\n\"No, Watson, I am very serious. There is a test before us. If the test comes off, all will be clear. And the test will depend upon the conduct of this little weapon. One cartridge out. Now we will replace the other five and put on the safety-catch. So! That increases the weight and makes it a better reproduction.\"\n\nI had no glimmer of what was in his mind, nor did he enlighten me, but sat lost in thought until we pulled up in the little Hampshire station. We secured a ramshackle trap, and in a quarter of an hour were at the house of our confidential friend, the sergeant.\n\n\"A clue, Mr. Holmes? What is it?\"\n\n\"It all depends upon the behaviour of Dr. Watson's revolver,\" said my friend. \"Here it is. Now, officer, can you give me ten yards of string?\"\n\nThe village shop provided a ball of stout twine.\n\n\"I think that this is all we will need,\" said Holmes. \"Now, if you please, we will get off on what I hope is the last stage of our journey.\"\n\nThe sun was setting and turning the rolling Hampshire moor into a wonderful autumnal panorama. The sergeant, with many critical and incredulous glances, which showed his deep doubts of the sanity of my companion, lurched along beside us. As we approached the scene of the crime I could see that my friend under all his habitual coolness was in truth deeply agitated.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said in answer to my remark, \"you have seen me miss my mark before, Watson. I have an instinct for such things, and yet it has sometimes played me false. It seemed a certainty when first it flashed across my mind in the cell at Winchester, but one drawback of an active mind is that one can always conceive alternative explanations which would make our scent a false one. And yet\u2014and yet\u2014Well, Watson, we can but try.\"\n\nAs he walked he had firmly tied one end of the string to the handle of the revolver. We had now reached the scene of the tragedy. With great care he marked out under the guidance of the policeman the exact spot where the body had been stretched. He then hunted among the heather and the ferns until he found a considerable stone. This he secured to the other end of his line of string, and he hung it over the parapet of the bridge so that it swung clear above the water. He then stood on the fatal spot, some distance from the edge of the bridge, with my revolver in his hand, the string being taut between the weapon and the heavy stone on the farther side.\n\n\"Now for it!\" he cried.\n\nAt the words he raised the pistol to his head, and then let go his grip. In an instant it had been whisked away by the weight of the stone, had struck with a sharp crack against the parapet, and had vanished over the side into the water. It had hardly gone before Holmes was kneeling beside the stonework, and a joyous cry showed that he had found what he expected.\n\n\"Was there ever a more exact demonstration?\" he cried. \"See, Watson, your revolver has solved the problem!\" As he spoke he pointed to a second chip of the exact size and shape of the first which had appeared on the under edge of the stone balustrade.\n\n\"We'll stay at the inn to-night,\" he continued as he rose and faced the astonished sergeant. \"You will, of course, get a grappling-hook and you will easily restore my friend's revolver. You will also find beside it the revolver, string and weight with which this vindictive woman attempted to disguise her own crime and to fasten a charge of murder upon an innocent victim. You can let Mr. Gibson know that I will see him in the morning, when steps can be taken for Miss Dunbar's vindication.\"\n\nLate that evening, as we sat together smoking our pipes in the village inn, Holmes gave me a brief review of what had passed.\n\n\"I fear, Watson,\" said he, \"that you will not improve any reputation which I may have acquired by adding the case of the Thor Bridge mystery to your annals. I have been sluggish in mind and wanting in that mixture of imagination and reality which is the basis of my art. I confess that the chip in the stonework was a sufficient clue to suggest the true solution, and that I blame myself for not having attained it sooner.\n\n\"It must be admitted that the workings of this unhappy woman's mind were deep and subtle, so that it was no very simple matter to unravel her plot. I do not think that in our adventures we have ever come across a stranger example of what perverted love can bring about. Whether Miss Dunbar was her rival in a physical or in a merely mental sense seems to have been equally unforgivable in her eyes. No doubt she blamed this innocent lady for all those harsh dealings and unkind words with which her husband tried to repel her too demonstrative affection. Her first resolution was to end her own life. Her second was to do it in such a way as to involve her victim in a fate which was worse far than any sudden death could be.\n\n\"We can follow the various steps quite clearly, and they show a remarkable subtlety of mind. A note was extracted very cleverly from Miss Dunbar which would make it appear that she had chosen the scene of the crime. In her anxiety that it should be discovered she somewhat overdid it by holding it in her hand to the last. This alone should have excited my suspicions earlier than it did.\n\n\"Then she took one of her husband's revolvers\u2014there was, as you saw, an arsenal in the house\u2014and kept it for her own use. A similar one she concealed that morning in Miss Dunbar's wardrobe after discharging one barrel, which she could easily do in the woods without attracting attention. She then went down to the bridge where she had contrived this exceedingly ingenious method for getting rid of her weapon. When Miss Dunbar appeared she used her last breath in pouring out her hatred, and then, when she was out of hearing, carried out her terrible purpose. Every link is now in its place and the chain is complete. The papers may ask why the mere was not dragged in the first instance, but it is easy to be wise after the event, and in any case the expanse of a reed-filled lake is no easy matter to drag unless you have a clear perception of what you are looking for and where. Well, Watson, we have helped a remarkable woman, and also a formidable man. Should they in the future join their forces, as seems not unlikely, the financial world may find that Mr. Neil Gibson has learned something in that schoolroom of sorrow where our earthly lessons are taught.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE CREEPING MAN", + "text": "Mr. Sherlock Holmes was always of opinion that I should publish the singular facts connected with Professor Presbury, if only to dispel once for all the ugly rumours which some twenty years ago agitated the university and were echoed in the learned societies of London. There were, however, certain obstacles in the way, and the true history of this curious case remained entombed in the tin box which contains so many records of my friend's adventures. Now we have at last obtained permission to ventilate the facts which formed one of the very last cases handled by Holmes before his retirement from practice. Even now a certain reticence and discretion have to be observed in laying the matter before the public.\n\nIt was one Sunday evening early in September of the year 1903 that I received one of Holmes's laconic messages:\n\nCome at once if convenient\u2014if inconvenient come all the same.\n\nS. H.\n\nThe relations between us in those latter days were peculiar. He was a man of habits, narrow and concentrated habits, and I had become one of them. As an institution I was like the violin, the shag tobacco, the old black pipe, the index books, and others perhaps less excusable. When it was a case of active work and a comrade was needed upon whose nerve he could place some reliance, my role was obvious. But apart from this I had uses. I was a whetstone for his mind. I stimulated him. He liked to think aloud in my presence. His remarks could hardly be said to be made to me\u2014many of them would have been as appropriately addressed to his bedstead\u2014but none the less, having formed the habit, it had become in some way helpful that I should register and interject. If I irritated him by a certain methodical slowness in my mentality, that irritation served only to make his own flame-like intuitions and impressions flash up the more vividly and swiftly. Such was my humble role in our alliance.\n\nWhen I arrived at Baker Street I found him huddled up in his armchair with updrawn knees, his pipe in his mouth and his brow furrowed with thought. It was clear that he was in the throes of some vexatious problem. With a wave of his hand he indicated my old armchair, but otherwise for half an hour he gave no sign that he was aware of my presence. Then with a start he seemed to come from his reverie, and with his usual whimsical smile he greeted me back to what had once been my home.\n\n\"You will excuse a certain abstraction of mind, my dear Watson,\" said he. \"Some curious facts have been submitted to me within the last twenty-four hours, and they in turn have given rise to some speculations of a more general character. I have serious thoughts of writing a small monograph upon the uses of dogs in the work of the detective.\"\n\n\"But surely, Holmes, this has been explored,\" said I. \"Bloodhounds\u2014sleuth-hounds\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no, Watson, that side of the matter is, of course, obvious. But there is another which is far more subtle. You may recollect that in the case which you, in your sensational way, coupled with the Copper Beeches, I was able, by watching the mind of the child, to form a deduction as to the criminal habits of the very smug and respectable father.\"\n\n\"Yes, I remember it well.\"\n\n\"My line of thoughts, about dogs is analogous. A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Surely, Holmes, this is a little far-fetched,\" said I.\n\nHe had refilled his pipe and resumed his seat, taking no notice of my comment.\n\n\"The practical application of what I have said is very close to the problem which I am investigating. It is a tangled skein, you understand, and I am looking for a loose end. One possible loose end lies in the question: Why does Professor Presbury's wolfhound, Roy, endeavour to bite him?\"\n\nI sank back in my chair in some disappointment. Was it for so trivial a question as this that I had been summoned from my work? Holmes glanced across at me.\n\n\"The same old Watson!\" said he. \"You never learn that the gravest issues may depend upon the smallest things. But is it not on the face of it strange that a staid, elderly philosopher\u2014you've heard of Presbury, of course, the famous Camford physiologist?\u2014that such a man, whose friend has been his devoted wolfhound, should now have been twice attacked by his own dog? What do you make of it?\"\n\n\"The dog is ill.\"\n\n\"Well, that has to be considered. But he attacks no one else, nor does he apparently molest his master, save on very special occasions. Curious, Watson\u2014very curious. But young Mr. Bennett is before his time if that is his ring. I had hoped to have a longer chat with you before he came.\"\n\nThere was a quick step on the stairs, a sharp tap at the door, and a moment later the new client presented himself. He was a tall, handsome youth about thirty, well dressed and elegant, but with something in his bearing which suggested the shyness of the student rather than the self-possession of the man of the world. He shook hands with Holmes, and then looked with some surprise at me.\n\n\"This matter is very delicate, Mr. Holmes,\" he said. \"Consider the re lation in which I stand to Professor Presbury both privately and publicly. I really can hardly justify myself if I speak before any third person.\"\n\n\"Have no fear, Mr. Bennett. Dr. Watson is the very soul of discretion, and I can assure you that this is a matter in which I am very likely to need an assistant.\"\n\n\"As you like, Mr. Holmes. You will, I am sure, understand my having some reserves in the matter.\"\n\n\"You will appreciate it, Watson, when I tell you that this gentleman, Mr. Trevor Bennett, is professional assistant to the great scientist, lives under his roof, and is engaged to his only daughter. Certainly we must agree that the professor has every claim upon his loyalty and devotion. But it may best be shown by taking the necessary steps to clear up this strange mystery.\"\n\n\"I hope so, Mr. Holmes. That is my one object. Does Dr. Watson know the situation?\"\n\n\"I have not had time to explain it.\"\n\n\"Then perhaps I had better go over the ground again explaining some fresh developments.\"\n\n\"I will do so myself,\" said Holmes, \"in order to show that I have the events in their due order. The professor, Watson, is a man of European reputation. His life has been academic. There has never been a breath of scandal. He is a widower with one daughter, Edith. He is, I gather, a man of very virile and positive, one might almost say combative, character. So the matter stood until a very few months ago.\n\n\"Then the current of his life was broken. He is sixty-one years of age, but he became engaged to the daughter of Professor Morphy, his colleague in the chair of comparative anatomy. It was not, as I understand, the reasoned courting of an elderly man but rather the passionate frenzy of youth, for no one could have shown himself a more devoted lover. The lady, Alice Morphy, was a very perfect girl both in mind and body, so that there was every excuse for the professor's infatuation. None the less, it did not meet with full approval in his own family.\"\n\n\"We thought it rather excessive,\" said our visitor.\n\n\"Exactly. Excessive and a little violent and unnatural. Professor Presbury was rich, however, and there was no objection upon the part of the father. The daughter, however, had other views, and there were already several candidates for her hand, who, if they were less eligible from a worldly point of view, were at least more of an age. The girl seemed to like the professor in spite of his eccentricities. It was only age which stood in the way.\n\n\"About this time a little mystery suddenly clouded the normal routine of the professor's life. He did what he had never done before. He left home and gave no indication where he was going. He was away a fortnight and returned looking rather travel-worn. He made no allusion to where he had been, although he was usually the frankest of men. It chanced, however, that our client here, Mr. Bennett, received a letter from a fellow-student in Prague, who said that he was glad to have seen Professor Presbury there, although he had not been able to talk to him. Only in this way did his own household learn where he had been.\n\n\"Now comes the point. From that time onward a curious change came over the professor. He became furtive and sly. Those around him had always the feeling that he was not the man that they had known, but that he was under some shadow which had darkened his higher qualities. His intellect was not affected. His lectures were as brilliant as ever. But always there was something new, something sinister and unexpected. His daughter, who was devoted to him, tried again and again to resume the old relations and to penetrate this mask which her father seemed to have put on. You, sir, as I understand, did the same\u2014but all was in vain. And now, Mr. Bennett, tell in your own words the incident of the letters.\"\n\n\"You must understand, Dr. Watson, that the professor had no secrets from me. If I were his son or his younger brother I could not have more completely enjoyed his confidence. As his secretary I handled every paper which came to him, and I opened and subdivided his letters. Shortly after his return all this was changed. He told me that certain letters might come to him from London which would be marked by a cross under the stamp. These were to be set aside for his own eyes only. I may say that several of these did pass through my hands, that they had the E. C. mark, and were in an illiterate handwriting. If he answered them at all the answers did not pass through my hands nor into the letter-basket in which our correspondence was collected.\"\n\n\"And the box,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"Ah, yes, the box. The professor brought back a little wooden box from his travels. It was the one thing which suggested a Continental tour, for it was one of those quaint carved things which one associates with Germany. This he placed in his instrument cupboard. One day, in looking for a canula, I took up the box. To my surprise he was very angry, and reproved me in words which were quite savage for my curiosity. It was the first time such a thing had happened, and I was deeply hurt. I endeavoured to explain that it was a mere accident that I had touched the box, but all the evening I was conscious that he looked at me harshly and that the incident was rankling in his mind.\" Mr. Bennett drew a little diary book from his pocket. \"That was on July 2d,\" said he.\n\n\"You are certainly an admirable witness,\" said Holmes. \"I may need some of these dates which you have noted.\"\n\n\"I learned method among other things from my great teacher. From the time that I observed abnormality in his behaviour I felt that it was my duty to study his case. Thus I have it here that it was on that very day, July 2d, that Roy attacked the professor as he came from his study into the hall. Again, on July 11th, there was a scene of the same sort, and then I have a note of yet another upon July 20th. After that we had to banish Roy to the stables. He was a dear, affectionate animal\u2014but I fear I weary you.\"\n\nMr. Bennett spoke in a tone of reproach, for it was very clear that Holmes was not listening. His face was rigid and his eyes gazed abstract-edly at the ceiling. With an effort he recovered himself.\n\n\"Singular! Most singular!\" he murmured. \"These details were new to me, Mr. Bennett. I think we have now fairly gone over the old ground, have we not? But you spoke of some fresh developments.\"\n\nThe pleasant, open face of our visitor clouded over, shadowed by some grim remembrance. \"What I speak of occurred the night before last,\" said he. \"I was lying awake about two in the morning, when I was aware of a dull muffled sound coming from the passage. I opened my door and peeped out. I should explain that the professor sleeps at the end of the passage\u2014\"\n\n\"The date being\u2014?\" asked Holmes.\n\nOur visitor was clearly annoyed at so irrelevant an interruption.\n\n\"I have said, sir, that it was the night before last\u2014that is, September 4th.\"\n\nHolmes nodded and smiled.\n\n\"Pray continue,\" said he.\n\n\"He sleeps at the end of the passage and would have to pass my door in order to reach the staircase. It was a really terrifying experience, Mr. Holmes. I think that I am as strong-nerved as my neighbours, but I was shaken by what I saw. The passage was dark save that one window halfway along it threw a patch of light. I could see that something was coming along the passage, something dark and crouching. Then suddenly it emerged into the light, and I saw that it was he. He was crawling, Mr. Holmes\u2014crawling! He was not quite on his hands and knees. I should rather say on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands. Yet he seemed to move with ease. I was so paralyzed by the sight that it was not until he had reached my door that I was able to step forward and ask if I could assist him. His answer was extraordinary. He sprang up, spat out some atrocious word at me, and hurried on past me, and down the staircase. I waited about for an hour, but he did not come back. It must have been daylight before he regained his room.\"\n\n\"Well, Watson, what make you of that?\" asked Holmes with the air of the pathologist who presents a rare specimen.\n\n\"Lumbago, possibly. I have known a severe attack make a man walk in just such a way, and nothing would be more trying to the temper.\"\n\n\"Good, Watson! You always keep us flat-footed on the ground. But we can hardly accept lumbago, since he was able to stand erect in a moment.\"\n\n\"He was never better in health,\" said Bennett. \"In fact, he is stronger than I have known him for years. But there are the facts, Mr. Holmes. It is not a case in which we can consult the police, and yet we are utterly at our wit's end as to what to do, and we feel in some strange way that we are drifting towards disaster. Edith\u2014Miss Presbury\u2014feels as I do, that we cannot wait passively any longer.\"\n\n\"It is certainly a very curious and suggestive case. What do you think, Watson?\"\n\n\"Speaking as a medical man,\" said I, \"it appears to be a case for an alienist. The old gentleman's cerebral processes were disturbed by the love affair. He made a journey abroad in the hope of breaking himself of the passion. His letters and the box may be connected with some other private transaction\u2014a loan, perhaps, or share certificates, which are in the box.\"\n\n\"And the wolfhound no doubt disapproved of the financial bargain. No, no, Watson, there is more in it than this. Now, I can only suggest\u2014\"\n\nWhat Sherlock Holmes was about to suggest will never be known, for at this moment the door opened and a young lady was shown into the room. As she appeared Mr. Bennett sprang up with a cry and ran forward with his hands out to meet those which she had herself outstretched.\n\n\"Edith, dear! Nothing the matter, I hope?\"\n\n\"I felt I must follow you. Oh, Jack, I have been so dreadfully frightened! It is awful to be there alone.\"\n\n\"Mr. Holmes, this is the young lady I spoke of. This is my fianc\u00e9e.\"\n\n\"We were gradually coming to that conclusion, were we not, Watson?\" Holmes answered with a smile. \"I take it, Miss Presbury, that there is some fresh development in the case, and that you thought we should know?\"\n\nOur new visitor, a bright, handsome girl of a conventional English type, smiled back at Holmes as she seated herself beside Mr. Bennett.\n\n\"When I found Mr. Bennett had left his hotel I thought I should probably find him here. Of course, he had told me that he would consult you. But, oh, Mr. Holmes, can you do nothing for my poor father?\"\n\n\"I have hopes, Miss Presbury, but the case is still obscure. Perhaps what you have to say may throw some fresh light upon it.\"\n\n\"It was last night, Mr. Holmes. He had been very strange all day. I am sure that there are times when he has no recollection of what he does. He lives as in a strange dream. Yesterday was such a day. It was not my father with whom I lived. His outward shell was there, but it was not really he.\"\n\n\"Tell me what happened.\"\n\n\"I was awakened in the night by the dog barking most furiously. Poor Roy, he is chained now near the stable. I may say that I always sleep with my door locked; for, as Jack\u2014as Mr. Bennett\u2014will tell you, we all have a feeling of impending danger. My room is on the second floor. It happened that the blind was up in my window, and there was bright moonlight outside. As I lay with my eyes fixed upon the square of light, listening to the frenzied barkings of the dog, I was amazed to my father's face looking in at me. Mr. Holmes, I nearly died of surprise and horror. There it was pressed against the windowpane, and one hand seemed to be raised as if to push up the window. If that window had opened, I think I should have gone mad. It was no delusion, Mr. Holmes. Don't deceive yourself by thinking so. I dare say it was twenty seconds or so that I lay paralyzed and watched the face. Then it vanished, but I could not\u2014I could not spring out of bed and look out after it. I lay cold and shivering till morning. At breakfast he was sharp and fierce in manner, and made no allusion to the adventure of the night. Neither did I, but I gave an excuse for coming to town\u2014and here I am.\"\n\nHolmes looked thoroughly surprised at Miss Presbury's narrative.\n\n\"My dear young lady, you say that your room is on second floor. Is there a long ladder in the garden?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Holmes, that is the amazing part of it. There is no possible way of reaching the window\u2014and yet he was there.\"\n\n\"The date being September 5th,\" said Holmes. \"That certainly complicates matters.\"\n\nIt was the young lady's turn to look surprised. \"This is the second time that you have alluded to the date, Mr. Holmes,\" said Bennett. \"Is it possible that it has any bearing upon the case?\"\n\n\"It is possible\u2014very possible\u2014and yet I have not my full material at present.\"\n\n\"Possibly you are thinking of the connection between insanity and phases of the moon?\"\n\n\"No, I assure you. It was quite a different line of thought. Possibly you can leave your notebook with me, and I will check the dates. Now I think, Watson, that our line of action is perfectly clear. This young lady has informed us\u2014and I have the greatest confidence in her intuition\u2014that her father remembers little or nothing which occurs upon certain dates. We will therefore call upon him as if he had given us an appointment upon such a date. He will put it down to his own lack of memory. Thus we will open our campaign by having a good close view of him.\"\n\n\"That is excellent,\" said Mr. Bennett. \"I warn you, however, that the professor is irascible and violent at times.\"\n\nHolmes smiled. \"There are reasons why we should come at once\u2014very cogent reasons if my theories hold good. To-morrow, Mr. Bennett, will certainly see us in Camford. There is, if I remember right, an inn called the Chequers where the port used to be above mediocrity and the linen was above reproach. I think, Watson, that our lot for the next few days might lie in less pleasant places.\"\n\nMonday morning found us on our way to the famous university town\u2014an easy effort on the part of Holmes, who had no roots to pull up, but one which involved frantic planning and hurrying on my part, as my practice was by this time not inconsiderable. Holmes made no allusion to the case until after we had deposited our suitcases at the ancient hostel of which he had spoken.\n\n\"I think, Watson, that we can catch the professor just before lunch. He lectures at eleven and should have an interval at home.\"\n\n\"What possible excuse have we for calling?\"\n\nHolmes glanced at his notebook.\n\n\"There was a period of excitement upon August 26th. We will assume that he is a little hazy as to what he does at such times. If we insist that we are there by appointment I think he will hardly venture to contradict us. Have you the effrontery necessary to put it through?\"\n\n\"We can but try.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! Compound of the Busy Bee and Excelsior. We can but try\u2014the motto of the firm. A friendly native will surely guide us.\"\n\nSuch a one on the back of a smart hansom swept us past a row of ancient colleges and, finally turning into a tree-lined drive, pulled up at the door of a charming house, girt round with lawns and covered with purple wisteria. Professor Presbury was certainly surrounded with every sign not only of comfort but of luxury. Even as we pulled up, a grizzled head appeared at the front window, and we were aware of a pair of keen eyes from under shaggy brows which surveyed us through large horn glasses. A moment later we were actually in his sanctum, and the mysterious scientist, whose vagaries had brought us from London, was standing before us. There was certainly no sign of eccentricity either in his manner or appearance, for he was a portly, large-featured man, grave, tall, and frock-coated, with the dignity of bearing which a lecturer needs. His eyes were his most remarkable feature, keen, observant, and clever to the verge of cunning.\n\nHe looked at our cards. \"Pray sit down gentlemen. What can I do for you?\"\n\nMr. Holmes smiled amiably.\n\n\"It was the question which I was about to put to you, Professor.\"\n\n\"To me, sir!\"\n\n\"Possibly there is some mistake. I heard through a second person that Professor Presbury of Camford had need of my services.\"\n\n\"Oh, indeed!\" It seemed to me that there was a malicious sparkle in the intense gray eyes. \"You heard that, did you? May I ask the name of your informant?\"\n\n\"I am sorry, Professor, but the matter was rather confidential. If I have made a mistake there is no harm done. I can only express my regret.\"\n\n\"Not at all. I should wish to go further into this matter. It interests me. Have you any scrap of writing, any letter or telegram, to bear out your assertion?\"\n\n\"No, I have not.\"\n\n\"I presume that you do not go so far as to assert that I summoned you?\"\n\n\"I would rather answer no questions,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"No, I dare say not,\" said the professor with asperity. \"However, that particular one can be answered very easily without your aid.\"\n\nHe walked across the room to the bell. Our London friend, Mr. Bennett, answered the call.\n\n\"Come in, Mr. Bennett. These two gentlemen have come from London under the impression that they have been summoned. You handle all my correspondence. Have you a note of anything going to a person named Holmes?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Bennett answered with a flush.\n\n\"That is conclusive,\" said the professor, glaring angrily at my companion. \"Now, sir\"\u2014he leaned forward with his two hands upon the table\u2014\"it seems to me that your position is a very questionable one.\"\n\nHolmes shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"I can only repeat that I am sorry that we have made a needless intrusion.\"\n\n\"Hardly enough, Mr. Holmes!\" the old man cried in a high screaming voice, with extraordinary malignancy upon his face. He got between us and the door as he spoke, and he shook his two hands at us with furious passion. \"You can hardly get out of it so easily as that.\" His face was convulsed, and he grinned and gibbered at us in his senseless rage. I am convinced that we should have had to fight our way out of the room if Mr. Bennett had not intervened.\n\n\"My dear Professor,\" he cried, \"consider your position! Consider the scandal at the university! Mr. Holmes is a well-known man. You cannot possibly treat him with such discourtesy.\"\n\nSulkily our host\u2014if I may call him so\u2014cleared the path to the door. We were glad to find ourselves outside the house and in the quiet of the tree-lined drive. Holmes seemed greatly amused by the episode.\n\n\"Our learned friend's nerves are somewhat out of order,\" said he. \"Perhaps our intrusion was a little crude, and yet we have gained that personal contact which I desired. But, dear me, Watson, he is surely at our heels. The villain still pursues us.\"\n\nThere were the sounds of running feet behind, but it was, to my relief, not the formidable professor but his assistant who appeared round the curve of the drive. He came panting up to us.\n\n\"I am so sorry, Mr. Holmes. I wished to apologize.\"\n\n\"My dear sir, there is no need. It is all in the way of professional experience.\"\n\n\"I have never seen him in a more dangerous mood. But he grows more sinister. You can understand now why his daughter and I are alarmed. And yet his mind is perfectly clear.\"\n\n\"Too clear!\" said Holmes. \"That was my miscalculation. It is evident that his memory is much more reliable than I had thought. By the way, can we, before we go, see the window of Miss Presbury's room?\"\n\nMr. Bennett pushed his way through some shrubs, and we had a view of the side of the house.\n\n\"It is there. The second on the left.\"\n\n\"Dear me, it seems hardly accessible. And yet you will observe that there is a creeper below and a water-pipe above which give some foothold.\"\n\n\"I could not climb it myself,\" said Mr. Bennett.\n\n\"Very likely. It would certainly be a dangerous exploit for any normal man.\"\n\n\"There was one other thing I wish to tell you, Mr. Holmes. I have the address of the man in London to whom the professor writes. He seems to have written this morning, and I got it from his blotting-paper. It is an ignoble position for a trusted secretary, but what else can I do?\"\n\nHolmes glanced at the paper and put it into his pocket.\n\n\"Dorak\u2014a curious name. Slavonic, I imagine. Well, it is an important link in the chain. We return to London this afternoon, Mr. Bennett. I see no good purpose to be served by our remaining. We cannot arrest the professor because he has done no crime, nor can we place him under constraint, for he cannot be proved to be mad. No action is as yet possible.\"\n\n\"Then what on earth are we to do?\"\n\n\"A little patience, Mr. Bennett. Things will soon develop. Unless I am mistaken, next Tuesday may mark a crisis. Certainly we shall be in Camford on that day. Meanwhile, the general position is undeniably unpleasant, and if Miss Presbury can prolong her visit\u2014\"\n\n\"That is easy.\"\n\n\"Then let her stay till we can assure her that all danger is past. Meanwhile, let him have his way and do not cross him. So long as he is in a good humour all is well.\"\n\n\"There he is!\" said Bennett in a startled whisper. Looking between the branches we saw the tall, erect figure emerge from the hall door and look around him. He stood leaning forward, his hands swinging straight before him, his head turning from side to side. The secretary with a last wave slipped off among the trees, and we saw him presently rejoin his employer, the two entering the house together in what seemed to be animated and even excited conversation.\n\n\"I expect the old gentleman has been putting two and two together,\" said Holmes as we walked hotelward. \"He struck me as having a particularly clear and logical brain from the little I saw of him. Explosive, no doubt, but then from his point of view he has something to explode about if detectives are put on his track and he suspects his own household of doing it. I rather fancy that friend Bennett is in for an uncomfortable time.\"\n\nHolmes stopped at a post-office and sent off a telegram on our way. The answer reached us in the evening, and he tossed it across to me.\n\n\u2002Have visited the Commercial Road and seen Dorak. Suave person,\n\n\u2002Bohemian, elderly. Keeps large general store.\n\n\u2002MERCER.\n\n\"Mercer is since your time,\" said Holmes. \"He is my general utility man who looks up routine business. It was important to know something of the man with whom our professor was so secretly corresponding. His nationality connects up with the Prague visit.\"\n\n\"Thank goodness that something connects with something,\" said I. \"At present we seem to be faced by a long series of inexplicable incidents with no bearing upon each other. For example, what possible connection can there be between an angry wolfhound and a visit to Bohemia, or either of them with a man crawling down a passage at night? As to your dates, that is the biggest mystification of all.\"\n\nHolmes smiled and rubbed his hands. We were, I may say, seated in the old sitting-room of the ancient hotel, with a bottle of the famous vintage of which Holmes had spoken on the table between us.\n\n\"Well, now, let us take the dates first,\" said he, his fingertips together and his manner as if he were addressing a class. \"This excellent young man's diary shows that there was trouble upon July 2d, and from then onward it seems to have been at nine-day intervals, with, so far as I remember, only one exception. Thus the last outbreak upon Friday was on September 3d, which also falls into the series, as did August 26th, which preceded it. The thing is beyond coincidence.\"\n\nI was forced to agree.\n\n\"Let us, then, form the provisional theory that every nine days the professor takes some strong drug which has a passing but highly poisonous effect. His naturally violent nature is intensified by it. He learned to take this drug while he was in Prague, and is now supplied with it by a Bohemian intermediary in London. This all hangs together, Watson!\"\n\n\"But the dog, the face at the window, the creeping man in the passage?\"\n\n\"Well, well, we have made a beginning. I should not expect any fresh developments until next Tuesday. In the meantime we can only keep in touch with friend Bennett and enjoy the amenities of this charming town.\"\n\nIn the morning Mr. Bennett slipped round to bring us the latest report. As Holmes had imagined, times had not been easy with him. Without exactly accusing him of being responsible for our presence, the professor had been very rough and rude in his speech, and evidently felt some strong grievance. This morning he was quite himself again, however, and had delivered his usual brilliant lecture to a crowded class. \"Apart from his queer fits,\" said Bennett, \"he has actually more energy and vitality than I can ever remember, nor was his brain ever clearer. But it's not he\u2014it's never the man whom we have known.\"\n\n\"I don't think you have anything to fear now for a week a least,\" Holmes answered. \"I am a busy man, and Dr. Watson has his patients to attend to. Let us agree that we meet here at this hour next Tuesday, and I shall be surprised if before we leave you again we are not able to explain, even if we cannot perhaps put an end to, your troubles. Meanwhile, keep us posted in what occurs.\"\n\nI saw nothing of my friend for the next few days, but on the following Monday evening I had a short note asking me to meet him next day at the train. From what he told me as we travelled up to Camford all was well, the peace of the professor's house had been unruffled, and his own conduct perfectly normal. This also was the report which was given us by Mr. Bennett himself when he called upon us that evening at our old quarters in the Chequers. \"He heard from his London correspondent to-day. There was a letter and there was a small packet, each with the cross under the stamp which warned me not to touch them. There has been nothing else.\"\n\n\"That may prove quite enough,\" said Holmes grimly. \"Now, Mr. Bennett, we shall, I think, come to some conclusion to-night. If my deductions are correct we should have an opportunity of bringing matters to a head. In order to do so it is necessary to hold the professor under observation. I would suggest, therefore, that you remain awake and on the lookout. Should you hear him pass your door, do not interrupt him, but follow him as discreetly as you can. Dr. Watson and I will not be far off. By the way, where is the key of that little box of which you spoke?\"\n\n\"Upon his watch-chain.\"\n\n\"I fancy our researches must lie in that direction. At the worst the lock should not be very formidable. Have you any other able-bodied man on the premises?\"\n\n\"There is the coachman, Macphail.\"\n\n\"Where does he sleep?\"\n\n\"Over the stables.\"\n\n\"We might possibly want him. Well, we can do no more until we see how things develop, Good-bye\u2014but I expect that we shall see you before morning.\"\n\nIt was nearly midnight before we took our station among some bushes immediately opposite the hall door of the professor. It was a fine night, but chilly, and we were glad of our warm overcoats. There was a breeze, and clouds were scudding across the sky, obscuring from time to time the half-moon. It would have been a dismal vigil were it not for the expectation and excitement which carried us along, and the assurance of my comrade that we had probably reached the end of the strange sequence of events which had engaged our attention.\n\n\"If the cycle of nine days holds good then we shall have the professor at his worst to-night,\" said Holmes. \"The fact that these strange symptoms began after his visit to Prague, that he is in secret correspondence with a Bohemian dealer in London, who presumably represents someone in Prague, and that he received a packet from him this very day, all point in one direction. What he takes and why he takes it are still beyond our ken, but that it emanates in some way from Prague is clear enough. He takes it under definite directions which regulate this ninth-day system, which was the first point which attracted my attention. But his symptoms are most remarkable. Did you observe his knuckles?\"\n\nI had to confess that I did not.\n\n\"Thick and horny in a way which is quite new in my experience. Always look at the hands first, Watson. Then cuffs, trouser-knees, and boots. Very curious knuckles which can only be explained by the mode of progression observed by\u2014\" Holmes paused and suddenly clapped his hand to his forehead. \"Oh, Watson, Watson, what a fool I have been! It seems incredible, and yet it must be true. All points in one direction. How could I miss seeing the connection of ideas? Those knuckles\u2014how could I have passed those knuckles? And the dog! And the ivy! It's surely time that I disappeared into that little farm of my dreams. Look out, Watson! Here he is! We shall have the chance of seeing for ourselves.\"\n\nThe hall door had slowly opened, and against the lamplit background we saw the tall figure of Professor Presbury. He was clad in his dressing gown. As he stood outlined in the doorway he was erect but leaning forward with dangling arms, as when we saw him last.\n\nNow he stepped forward into the drive, and an extraordinary change came over him. He sank down into a crouching position and moved along upon his hands and feet, skipping every now and then as if he were overflowing with energy and vitality. He moved along the face of the house and then round the corner. As he disappeared Bennett slipped through the hall door and softly followed him.\n\n\"Come, Watson, come!\" cried Holmes, and we stole as softly as we could through the bushes until we had gained a spot whence we could see the other side of the house, which was bathed in the light of the half-moon. The professor was clearly visible crouching at the foot of the ivy-covered wall. As we watched him he suddenly began with incredible agility to ascend it. From branch to branch he sprang, sure of foot and firm of grasp, climbing apparently in mere joy at his own powers, with no definite object in view. With his dressing-gown flapping on each side of him, he looked like some huge bat glued against the side of his own house, a great square dark patch upon the moonlit wall. Presently he tired of this amusement, and, dropping from branch to branch, he squatted down into the old attitude and moved towards the stables, creeping along in the same strange way as before. The wolfhound was out now, barking furiously, and more excited than ever when it actually caught sight of its master. It was straining on its chain and quivering with eagerness and rage. The professor squatted down very deliberately just out of reach of the hound and began to provoke it in every possible way. He took handfuls of pebbles from the drive and threw them in the dog's face, prodded him with a stick which he had picked up, flicked his hands about only a few inches from the gaping mouth, and endeavoured in every way to increase the animal's fury, which was already beyond all control. In all our adventures I do not know that I have ever seen a more strange sight than this impassive and still dignified figure crouching frog-like upon the ground and goading to a wilder exhibition of passion the maddened hound, which ramped and raged in front of him, by all manner of ingenious and calculated cruelty.\n\nAnd then in a moment it happened! It was not the chain that broke, but it was the collar that slipped, for it had been made for a thick-necked Newfoundland. We heard the rattle of falling metal, and the next instant dog and man were rolling on the ground together, the one roaring in rage, the other screaming in a strange shrill falsetto of terror. It was a very narrow thing for the professor's life. The savage creature had him fairly by the throat, its fangs had bitten deep, and he was senseless before we could reach them and drag the two apart. It might have been a dangerous task for us, but Bennett's voice and presence brought the great wolfhound instantly to reason. The uproar had brought the sleepy and astonished coachman from his room above the stables. \"I'm not surprised,\" said he, shaking his head. \"I've seen him at it before. I knew the dog would get him sooner or later.\"\n\nThe hound was secured, and together we carried the professor up to his room, where Bennett, who had a medical degree, helped me to dress his torn throat. The sharp teeth had passed dangerously near the carotid artery, and the h\u00e6morrhage was serious. In half an hour the danger was past, I had given the patient an injection of morphia, and he had sunk into deep sleep. Then, and only then, were we able to look at each other and to take stock of the situation.\n\n\"I think a first-class surgeon should see him,\" said I.\n\n\"For God's sake, no!\" cried Bennett. \"At present the scandal is confined to our own household. It is safe with us. If it gets beyond these walls it will never stop. Consider his position at the university, his European reputation, the feelings of his daughter.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" said Holmes. \"I think it may be quite possible to keep the matter to ourselves, and also to prevent its recurrence now that we have a free hand. The key from the watch-chain, Mr. Bennett. Macphail will guard the patient and let us know if there is any change. Let us see what we can find in the professor's mysterious box.\"\n\nThere was not much, but there was enough\u2014an empty phial, another nearly full, a hypodermic syringe, several letters in a crabbed, foreign hand. The marks on the envelopes showed that they were those which had disturbed the routine of the secretary, and each was dated from the Commercial Road and signed \"A. Dorak.\" They were mere invoices to say that a fresh bottle was being sent to Professor Presbury, or receipt to acknowledge money. There was one other envelope, however, in a more educated hand and bearing the Austrian stamp with the postmark of Prague. \"Here we have our material!\" cried Holmes as he tore out the enclosure.\n\n\u2002HONOURED COLLEAGUE [it ran]:\n\n\u2002Since your esteemed visit I have thought much of your case, and though in your circumstances there are some special reasons for the treatment, I would none the less enjoin caution, as my results have shown that it is not without danger of a kind.\n\n\u2002It is possible that the serum of anthropoid would have been better. I have, as I explained to you, used black-faced langur because a specimen was accessible. Langur is, of course, a crawler and climber, while anthropoid walks erect and is in all ways nearer.\n\n\u2002I beg you to take every possible precaution that there be no premature revelation of the process. I have one other client in England, and Dorak is my agent for both.\n\n\u2002Weekly reports will oblige.\n\n\u2002Yours with high esteem,\n\n\u2002H. LOWENSTEIN.\n\nLowenstein! The name brought back to me the memory of some snippet from a newspaper which spoke of an obscure scientist who was striving in some unknown way for the secret of rejuvenescence and the elixir of life. Lowenstein of Prague! Lowenstein with the wondrous strength-giving serum, tabooed by the profession because he refused to reveal its source. In a few words I said what I remembered. Bennett had taken a manual of zoology from the shelves. \"'Langur,'\" he read, \" 'the great black-faced monkey of the Himalayan slopes, biggest and most human of climbing monkeys.' Many details are added. Well, thanks to you, Mr. Holmes, it is very clear that we have traced the evil to its source.\"\n\n\"The real source,\" said Holmes, \"lies, of course, in that untimely love affair which gave our impetuous professor the idea that he could only gain his wish by turning himself into a younger man. When one tries to rise above Nature one is liable to fall below it. The highest type of man may revert to the animal if he leaves the straight road of destiny.\" He sat musing for a little with the phial in his hand, looking at the clear liquid within. \"When I have written to this man and told him that I hold him criminally responsible for the poisons which he circulates, we will have no more trouble. But it may recur. Others may find a better way. There is danger there\u2014a very real danger to humanity. Consider, Watson, that the material, the sensual, the worldly would all prolong their worthless lives. The spiritual would not avoid the call to something higher. It would be the survival of the least fit. What sort of cesspool may not our poor world become?\" Suddenly the dreamer disappeared, and Holmes, the man of action, sprang from his chair. \"I think there is nothing more to be said, Mr. Bennett. The various incidents will now fit themselves easily into the general scheme. The dog, of course, was aware of the change far more quickly than you. His smell would insure that. It was the monkey, not the professor, whom Roy attacked, just as it was the monkey who teased Roy. Climbing was a joy to the creature, and it was a mere chance, I take it, that the pastime brought him to the young lady's window. There is an early train to town, Watson, but I think we shall just have time for a cup of tea at the Chequers before we catch it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE LION'S MANE", + "text": "It is a most singular thing that a problem which was certainly as abstruse and unusual as any which I have faced in my long professional career should have come to me after my retirement, and be brought, as it were, to my very door. It occurred after my withdrawal to my little Sussex home, when I had given myself up entirely to that soothing life of Nature for which I had so often yearned during the long years spent amid the gloom of London. At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional week-end visit was the most that I ever saw of him. Thus I must act as my own chronicler. Ah! had he but been with me, how much he might have made of so wonderful a happening and of my eventual triumph against every difficulty! As it is, however, I must needs tell my tale in my own plain way, showing by my words each step upon the difficult road which lay before me as I searched for the mystery of the Lion's Mane.\n\nMy villa is situated upon the southern slope of the Downs, commanding a great view of the Channel. At this point the coast-line is entirely of chalk cliffs, which can only be descended by a single, long, tortuous path, which is steep and slippery. At the bottom of the path lie a hundred yards of pebbles and shingle, even when the tide is at full. Here and there, however, there are curves and hollows which make splendid swimming-pools filled afresh with each flow. This admirable beach extends for some miles in each direction, save only at one point where the little cove and village of Fulworth break the line.\n\nMy house is lonely. I, my old housekeeper, and my bees have the estate all to ourselves. Half a mile off, however, is Harold Stackhurst's well-known coaching establishment, The Gables, quite a large place, which contains some score of young fellows preparing for various professions, with a staff of several masters. Stackhurst himself was a well-known rowing Blue in his day, and an excellent all-round scholar. He and I were always friendly from the day I came to the coast, and he was the one man who was on such terms with me that we could drop in on each other in the evenings without an invitation.\n\nTowards the end of July 1907, there was a severe gale, the wind blowing up-channel, heaping the seas to the base of the cliffs and leaving a lagoon at the turn of the tide. On the morning of which I speak the wind had abated, and all Nature was newly washed and fresh. It was impossible to work upon so delightful a day, and I strolled out before breakfast to enjoy the exquisite air. I walked along the cliff path which led to the steep descent to the beach. As I walked I heard a shout behind me, and there was Harold Stackhurst waving his hand in cheery greeting.\n\n\"What a morning, Mr. Holmes! I thought I should see you out.\"\n\n\"Going for a swim, I see.\"\n\n\"At your old tricks again,\" he laughed, patting his bulging pocket. \"Yes. McPherson started early, and I expect I may find him there.\"\n\nFitzroy McPherson was the science master, a fine upstanding young fellow whose life had been crippled by heart trouble following rheumatic fever. He was a natural athlete, however, and excelled in every game which did not throw too great a strain upon him. Summer and winter he went for his swim, and, as I am a swimmer myself, I have often joined him.\n\nAt this moment we saw the man himself. His head showed above the edge of the cliff where the path ends. Then his whole figure appeared at the top, staggering like a drunken man. The next instant he threw up his hands and, with a terrible cry, fell upon his face. Stackhurst and I rushed forward\u2014it may have been fifty yards\u2014and turned him on his back. He was obviously dying. Those glazed sunken eyes and dreadful livid cheeks could mean nothing else. One glimmer of life came into his face for an instant, and he uttered two or three words with an eager air of warning. They were slurred and indistinct, but to my ear the last of them, which burst in a shriek from his lips, were \"the Lion's Mane.\" It was utterly irrelevant and unintelligible, and yet I could twist the sound into no other sense. Then he half raised himself from the ground, threw his arms into the air, and fell forward on his side. He was dead.\n\nMy companion was paralyzed by the sudden horror of it, but I, as may well be imagined, had every sense on the alert. And I had need, for it was speedily evident that we were in the presence of an extraordinary case. The man was dressed only in his Burberry overcoat, his trousers, and an unlaced pair of canvas shoes. As he fell over, his Burberry, which had been simply thrown round his shoulders, slipped off, exposing his trunk. We stared at it in amazement. His back was covered with dark red lines as though he had been terribly flogged by a thin wire scourge. The instrument with which this punishment had been inflicted was clearly flexible, for the long, angry weals curved round his shoulders and ribs. There was blood dripping down his chin, for he had bitten through his lower lip in the paroxysm of his agony. His drawn and distorted face told how terrible that agony had been.\n\nI was kneeling and Stackhurst standing by the body when a shadow fell across us, and we found that Ian Murdoch was by our side. Murdoch was the mathematical coach at the establishment, a tall, dark, thin man, so taciturn and aloof that none can be said to have been his friend. He seemed to live in some high, abstract region of surds and conic sections, with little to connect him with ordinary life. He was looked upon as an oddity by the students, and would have been their butt, but there was some strange outlandish blood in the man, which showed itself not only in his coal-black eyes and swarthy face but also in occasional outbreaks of temper, which could only be described as ferocious. On one occasion, being plagued by a little dog belonging to McPherson, he had caught the creature up and hurled it through the plate-glass window, an action for which Stackhurst would certainly have given him his dismissal had he not been a very valuable teacher. Such was the strange complex man who now appeared beside us. He seemed to be honestly shocked at the sight before him, though the incident of the dog may show that there was no great sympathy between the dead man and himself.\n\n\"Poor fellow! Poor fellow! What can I do? How can I help?\"\n\n\"Were you with him? Can you tell us what has happened?\"\n\n\"No, no, I was late this morning. I was not on the beach at all. I have come straight from The Gables. What can I do?\"\n\n\"You can hurry to the police-station at Fulworth. Report the matter at once.\"\n\nWithout a word he made off at top speed, and I proceeded to take the matter in hand, while Stackhurst, dazed at this tragedy, remained by the body. My first task naturally was to note who was on the beach. From the top of the path I could see the whole sweep of it, and it was absolutely deserted save that two or three dark figures could be seen far away moving towards the village of Fulworth. Having satisfied myself upon this point, I walked slowly down the path. There was clay or soft marl mixed with the chalk, and every here and there I saw the same footstep, both ascending and descending. No one else had gone down to the beach by this track that morning. At one place I observed the print of an open hand with the fingers towards the incline. This could only mean that poor McPherson had fallen as he ascended. There were rounded depressions, too, which suggested that he had come down upon his knees more than once. At the bottom of the path was the considerable lagoon left by the retreating tide. At the side of it McPherson had undressed, for there lay his towel on a rock. It was folded and dry, so that it would seem that, after all, he had never entered the water. Once or twice as I hunted round amid the hard shingle I came on little patches of sand where the print of his canvas shoe, and also of his naked foot, could be seen. The latter fact proved that he had made all ready to bathe, though the towel indicated that he had not actually done so.\n\nAnd here was the problem clearly defined\u2014as strange a one as had ever confronted me. The man had not been on the beach more than a quarter of an hour at the most. Stackhurst had followed him from The Gables, so there could be no doubt about that. He had gone to bathe and had stripped, as the naked footsteps showed. Then he had suddenly huddled on his clothes again\u2014they were all dishevelled and unfastened\u2014and he had returned without bathing, or at any rate without drying himself. And the reason for his change of purpose had been that he had been scourged in some savage, inhuman fashion, tortured until he bit his lip through in his agony, and was left with only strength enough to crawl away and to die. Who had done this barbarous deed? There were, it is true, small grottos and caves in the base of the cliffs, but the low sun shone directly into them, and there was no place for concealment. Then, again, there were those distant figures on the beach. They seemed too far away to have been connected with the crime, and the broad lagoon in which McPherson had intended to bathe lay between him and them, lapping up to the rocks. On the sea two or three fishing-boats were at no great distance. Their occupants might be examined at our leisure. There were several roads for inquiry, but none which led to any very obvious goal.\n\nWhen I at last returned to the body I found that a little group of wondering folk had gathered round it. Stackhurst was, of course, still there, and Ian Murdoch had just arrived with Anderson, the village constable, a big, ginger-moustached man of the slow, solid Sussex breed\u2014a breed which covers much good sense under a heavy, silent exterior. He listened to everything, took note of all we said, and finally drew me aside.\n\n\"I'd be glad of your advice, Mr. Holmes. This is a big thing for me to handle, and I'll hear of it from Lewes if I go wrong.\"\n\nI advised him to send for his immediate superior, and for a doctor; also to allow nothing to be moved, and as few fresh footmarks as possible to be made, until they came. In the meantime I searched the dead man's pockets. There were his handkerchief, a large knife, and a small folding card-case. From this projected a slip of paper, which I unfolded and handed to the constable. There was written on it in a scrawling, feminine hand:\n\nI will be there, you may be sure.\n\nMAUDIE.\n\nIt read like a love affair, an assignation, though when and where were a blank. The constable replaced it in the card-case and returned it with the other things to the pockets of the Burberry. Then, as nothing more suggested itself, I walked back to my house for breakfast, having first arranged that the base of the cliffs should be thoroughly searched.\n\nStackhurst was round in an hour or two to tell me that the body had been removed to The Gables, where the inquest would be held. He brought with him some serious and definite news. As I expected, nothing had been found in the small caves below the cliff, but he had examined the papers in McPherson's desk, and there were several which showed an intimate correspondence with a certain Miss Maud Bellamy, of Fulworth. We had then established the identity of the writer of the note.\n\n\"The police have the letters,\" he explained. \"I could not bring them. But there is no doubt that it was a serious love affair. I see no reason, however, to connect it with that horrible happening save, indeed, that the lady had made an appointment with him.\"\n\n\"But hardly at a bathing-pool which all of you were in the habit of using,\" I remarked.\n\n\"It is mere chance,\" said he, \"that several of the students were not with McPherson.\"\n\n\"Was it mere chance?\"\n\nStackhurst knit his brows in thought.\n\n\"Ian Murdoch held them back,\" said he. \"He would insist upon some algebraic demonstration before breakfast. Poor chap, he is dreadfully cut up about it all.\"\n\n\"And yet I gather that they were not friends.\"\n\n\"At one time they were not. But for a year or more Murdoch has been as near to McPherson as he ever could be to anyone. He is not of a very sympathetic disposition by nature.\"\n\n\"So I understand. I seem to remember your telling me once about a quarrel over the ill-usage of a dog.\"\n\n\"That blew over all right.\"\n\n\"But left some vindictive feeling, perhaps.\"\n\n\"No, no, I am sure they were real friends.\"\n\n\"Well, then, we must explore the matter of the girl. Do you know her?\"\n\n\"Everyone knows her. She is the beauty of the neighbourhood\u2014a real beauty, Holmes, who would draw attention everywhere. I knew that McPherson was attracted by her, but I had no notion that it had gone so far as these letters would seem to indicate.\"\n\n\"But who is she?\"\n\n\"She is the daughter of old Tom Bellamy who owns all the boats and bathing-cots at Fulworth. He was a fisherman to start with, but is now a man of some substance. He and his son William run the business.\"\n\n\"Shall we walk into Fulworth and see them?\"\n\n\"On what pretext?\"\n\n\"Oh, we can easily find a pretext. After all, this poor man did not ill-use himself in this outrageous way. Some human hand was on the handle of that scourge, if indeed it was a scourge which inflicted the injuries. His circle of acquaintances in this lonely place was surely limited. Let us follow it up in every direction and we can hardly fail to come upon the motive, which in turn should lead us to the criminal.\"\n\nIt would have been a pleasant walk across the thyme-scented downs had our minds not been poisoned by the tragedy we had witnessed. The village of Fulworth lies in a hollow curving in a semicircle round the bay. Behind the old-fashioned hamlet several modern houses have been built upon the rising ground. It was to one of these that Stackhurst guided me.\n\n\"That's The Haven, as Bellamy called it. The one with the corner tower and slate roof. Not bad for a man who started with nothing but\u2014By Jove, look at that!\"\n\nThe garden gate of The Haven had opened and a man had emerged. There was no mistaking that tall, angular, straggling figure. It was Ian Murdoch, the mathematician. A moment later we confronted him upon the road.\n\n\"Hullo!\" said Stackhurst. The man nodded, gave us a sideways glance from his curious dark eyes, and would have passed us, but his principal pulled him up.\n\n\"What were you doing there?\" he asked.\n\nMurdoch's face flushed with anger. \"I am your subordinate, sir, under your roof. I am not aware that I owe you any account of my private actions.\"\n\nStackhurst's nerves were near the surface after all he had endured. Otherwise, perhaps, he would have waited. Now he lost his temper completely.\n\n\"In the circumstances your answer is pure impertinence, Mr. Murdoch.\"\n\n\"Your own question might perhaps come under the same heading.\"\n\n\"This is not the first time that I have had to overlook your insubordinate ways. It will certainly be the last. You will kindly make fresh arrangements for your future as speedily as you can.\"\n\n\"I had intended to do so. I have lost to-day the only person who made The Gables habitable.\"\n\nHe strode off upon his way, while Stackhurst, with angry eyes, stood glaring after him. \"Is he not an impossible, intolerable man?\" he cried.\n\nThe one thing that impressed itself forcibly upon my mind was that Mr. Ian Murdoch was taking the first chance to open a path of escape from the scene of the crime. Suspicion, vague and nebulous, was now beginning to take outline in my mind. Perhaps the visit to the Bellamys might throw some further light upon the matter. Stackhurst pulled himself together, and we went forward to the house.\n\nMr. Bellamy proved to be a middle-aged man with a flaming red beard. He seemed to be in a very angry mood, and his face was soon as florid as his hair.\n\n\"No, sir, I do not desire any particulars. My son here\"\u2014indicating a powerful young man, with a heavy, sullen face, in the corner of the sitting-room\u2014\" is of one mind with me that Mr. McPherson's attentions to Maud were insulting. Yes, sir, the word 'marriage' was never mentioned, and yet there were letters and meetings, and a great deal more of which neither of us could approve. She has no mother, and we are her only guardians. We are determined\u2014\"\n\nBut the words were taken from his mouth by the appearance of the lady herself. There was no gainsaying that she would have graced any assembly in the world. Who could have imagined that so rare a flower would grow from such a root and in such an atmosphere? Women have seldom been an attraction to me, for my brain has always governed my heart, but I could not look upon her perfect clear-cut face, with all the soft freshness of the downlands in her delicate colouring, without realizing that no young man would cross her path unscathed. Such was the girl who had pushed open the door and stood now, wide-eyed and intense, in front of Harold Stackhurst.\n\n\"I know already that Fitzroy is dead,\" she said. \"Do not be afraid to tell me the particulars.\"\n\n\"This other gentleman of yours let us know the news,\" explained the father.\n\n\"There is no reason why my sister should be brought into the matter,\" growled the younger man.\n\nThe sister turned a sharp, fierce look upon him. \"This is my business, William. Kindly leave me to manage it in my own way. By all accounts there has been a crime committed. If I can help to show who did it, it is the least I can do for him who is gone.\"\n\nShe listened to a short account from my companion, with a composed concentration which showed me that she possessed strong character as well as great beauty. Maud Bellamy will always remain in my memory as a most complete and remarkable woman. It seems that she already knew me by sight, for she turned to me at the end.\n\n\"Bring them to justice, Mr. Holmes. You have my sympathy and my help, whoever they may be.\" It seemed to me that she glanced defiantly at her father and brother as she spoke.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said I. \"I value a woman's instinct in such matters. You use the word 'they.' You think that more than one was concerned?\"\n\n\"I knew Mr. McPherson well enough to be aware that he was a brave and a strong man. No single person could ever have inflicted such an outrage upon him.\"\n\n\"Might I have one word with you alone?\"\n\n\"I tell you, Maud, not to mix yourself up in the matter,\" cried her father angrily.\n\nShe looked at me helplessly. \"What can I do?\"\n\n\"The whole world will know the facts presently, so there can be no harm if I discuss them here,\" said I. \"I should have preferred privacy, but if your father will not allow it he must share the deliberations.\" Then I spoke of the note which had been found in the dead man's pocket. \"It is sure to be produced at the inquest. May I ask you to throw any light upon it that you can?\"\n\n\"I see no reason for mystery,\" she answered. \"We were engaged to be married, and we only kept it secret because Fitzroy's uncle, who is very old and said to be dying, might have disinherited him if he had married against his wish. There was no other reason.\"\n\n\"You could have told us,\" growled Mr. Bellamy.\n\n\"So I would, father, if you had ever shown sympathy.\"\n\n\"I object to my girl picking up with men outside her own station.\"\n\n\"It was your prejudice against him which prevented us from telling you. As to this appointment\"\u2014she fumbled in her dress and produced a crumpled note\u2014\"it was in answer to this.\"\n\nDEAREST [ran the message]:\n\nThe old place on the beach just after sunset on Tuesday. It is the only time I can get away.\n\nF. M.\n\n\"Tuesday was to-day, and I had meant to meet him to-night.\"\n\nI turned over the paper. \"This never came by post. How did you get it?\"\n\n\"I would rather not answer that question. It has really nothing to do with the matter which you are investigating. But anything which bears upon that I will most freely answer.\"\n\nShe was as good as her word, but there was nothing which was helpful in our investigation. She had no reason to think that her fiance had any hidden enemy, but she admitted that she had had several warm admirers.\n\n\"May I ask if Mr. Ian Murdoch was one of them?\"\n\nShe blushed and seemed confused.\n\n\"There was a time when I thought he was. But that was all changed when he understood the relations between Fitzroy and myself.\"\n\nAgain the shadow round this strange man seemed to me to be taking more definite shape. His record must be examined. His rooms must be privately searched. Stackhurst was a willing collaborator, for in his mind also suspicions were forming. We returned from our visit to The Haven with the hope that one free end of this tangled skein was already in our hands.\n\nA week passed. The inquest had thrown no light upon the matter and had been adjourned for further evidence. Stackhurst had made discreet inquiry about his subordinate, and there had been a superficial search of his room, but without result. Personally, I had gone over the whole ground again, both physically and mentally, but with no new conclusions. In all my chronicles the reader will find no case which brought me so completely to the limit of my powers. Even my imagination could conceive no solution to the mystery. And then there came the incident of the dog.\n\nIt was my old housekeeper who heard of it first by that strange wireless by which such people collect the news of the countryside.\n\n\"Sad story this, sir, about Mr. McPherson's dog,\" said she one evening.\n\nI do not encourage such conversations, but the words arrested my attention.\n\n\"What of Mr. McPherson's dog?\"\n\n\"Dead, sir. Died of grief for its master.\"\n\n\"Who told you this?\"\n\n\"Why, sir, everyone is talking of it. It took on terrible, and has eaten nothing for a week. Then to-day two of the young gentlemen from The Gables found it dead\u2014down on the beach, sir, at the very place where its master met his end.\"\n\n\"At the very place.\" The words stood out clear in my memory. Some dim perception that the matter was vital rose in my mind. That the dog should die was after the beautiful, faithful nature of dogs. But \"at the very place\"! Why should this lonely beach be fatal to it? Was it possible that it also had been sacrificed to some revengeful feud? Was it possible\u2014? Yes, the perception was dim, but already something was building up in my mind. In a few minutes I was on my way to The Gables, where I found Stackhurst in his study. At my request he sent for Sudbury and Blount, the two students who had found the dog.\n\n\"Yes, it lay on the very edge of the pool,\" said one of them. \"It must have followed the trail of its dead master.\"\n\nI saw the faithful little creature, an Airedale terrier, laid out upon the mat in the hall. The body was stiff and rigid, the eyes projecting, and the limbs contorted. There was agony in every line of it.\n\nFrom The Gables I walked down to the bathing-pool. The sun had sunk and the shadow of the great cliff lay black across the water, which glimmered dully like a sheet of lead. The place was deserted and there was no sign of life save for two sea-birds circling and screaming overhead. In the fading light I could dimly make out the little dog's spoor upon the sand round the very rock on which his master's towel had been laid. For a long time I stood in deep meditation while the shadows grew darker around me. My mind was filled with racing thoughts. You have known what it was to be in a nightmare in which you feel there is some all-important thing for which you search and which you know is there, though it remains forever just beyond your reach. That was how I felt that evening as I stood alone by that place of death. Then at last I turned and walked slowly homeward.\n\nI had just reached the top of the path when it came to me. Like a flash, I remembered the thing for which I had so eagerly and vainly grasped. You will know, or Watson has written in vain, that I hold a vast store of out-of-the-way knowledge without scientific system, but very available for the needs of my work. My mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein\u2014so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there. I had known that there was something which might bear upon this matter. It was still vague, but at least I knew how I could make it clear. It was monstrous, incredible, and yet it was always a possibility. I would test it to the full.\n\nThere is a great garret in my little house which is stuffed with books. It was into this that I plunged and rummaged for an hour. At the end of that time I emerged with a little chocolate and silver volume. Eagerly I turned up the chapter of which I had a dim remembrance. Yes, it was indeed a far-fetched and unlikely proposition, and yet I could not be at rest until I had made sure if it might, indeed, be so. It was late when I retired, with my mind eagerly awaiting the work of the morrow.\n\nBut that work met with an annoying interruption. I had hardly swallowed my early cup of tea and was starting for the beach when I had a call from Inspector Bardle of the Sussex Constabulary\u2014a steady, solid, bovine man with thoughtful eyes, which looked at me now with a very troubled expression.\n\n\"I know your immense experience, sir,\" said he. \"This is quite unofficial, of course, and need go no farther. But I am fairly up against it in this McPherson case. The question is, shall I make an arrest, or shall I not?\"\n\n\"Meaning Mr. Ian Murdoch?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. There is really no one else when you come to think of it. That's the advantage of this solitude. We narrow it down to a very small compass. If he did not do it, then who did?\"\n\n\"What have you against him?\"\n\nHe had gleaned along the same furrows as I had. There was Murdoch's character and the mystery which seemed to hang round the man. His furious bursts of temper, as shown in the incident of the dog. The fact that he had quarrelled with McPherson in the past, and that there was some reason to think that he might have resented his attentions to Miss Bellamy. He had all my points, but no fresh ones, save that Murdoch seemed to be making every preparation for departure.\n\n\"What would my position be if I let him slip away with all this evidence against him?\" The burly, phlegmatic man was sorely troubled in his mind.\n\n\"Consider,\" I said, \"all the essential gaps in your case. On the morning of the crime he can surely prove an alibi. He had been with his scholars till the last moment, and within a few minutes of McPherson's appearance he came upon us from behind. Then bear in mind the absolute impossibility that he could single-handed have inflicted this outrage upon a man quite as strong as himself. Finally, there is this question of the instrument with which these injuries were inflicted.\"\n\n\"What could it be but a scourge or flexible whip of some sort?\"\n\n\"Have you examined the marks?\" I asked.\n\n\"I have seen them. So has the doctor.\"\n\n\"But I have examined them very carefully with a lens. They have peculiarities.\"\n\n\"What are they, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\nI stepped to my bureau and brought out an enlarged photograph. \"This is my method in such cases,\" I explained.\n\n\"You certainly do things thoroughly, Mr. Holmes.\"\n\n\"I should hardly be what I am if I did not. Now let us consider this weal which extends round the right shoulder. Do you observe nothing remarkable?\"\n\n\"I can't say I do.\"\n\n\"Surely it is evident that it is unequal in its intensity. There is a dot of extravasated blood here, and another there. There are similar indications in this other weal down here. What can that mean?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. Have you?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I have. Perhaps I haven't. I may be able to say more soon. Anything which will define what made that mark will bring us a long way towards the criminal.\"\n\n\"It is, of course, an absurd idea,\" said the policeman, \"but if a red-hot net of wire had been laid across the back, then these better marked points would represent where the meshes crossed each other.\"\n\n\"A most ingenious comparison. Or shall we say a very stiff cat-o'-nine-tails with small hard knots upon it?\"\n\n\"By Jove, Mr. Holmes, I think you have hit it.\"\n\n\"Or there may be some very different cause, Mr. Bardle. But your case is far too weak for an arrest. Besides, we have those last words\u2014the 'Lion's Mane.'\"\n\n\"I have wondered whether Ian\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I have considered that. If the second word had borne any resemblance to Murdoch\u2014but it did not. He gave it almost in a shriek. I am sure that it was 'Mane.'\"\n\n\"Have you no alternative, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Perhaps I have. But I do not care to discuss it until there is something more solid to discuss.\"\n\n\"And when will that be?\"\n\n\"In an hour\u2014possibly less.\"\n\nThe inspector rubbed his chin and looked at me with dubious eyes.\n\n\"I wish I could see what was in your mind, Mr. Holmes. Perhaps it's those fishing-boats.\"\n\n\"No, no, they were too far out.\"\n\n\"Well, then, is it Bellamy and that big son of his? They were not too sweet upon Mr. McPherson. Could they have done him a mischief?\"\n\n\"No, no, you won't draw me until I am ready,\" said I with a smile. \"Now, Inspector, we each have our own work to do. Perhaps if you were to meet me here at midday\u2014\"\n\nSo far we had got when there came the tremendous interruption which was the beginning of the end.\n\nMy outer door was flung open, there were blundering footsteps in the passage, and Ian Murdoch staggered into the room, pallid, dishevelled, his clothes in wild disorder, clawing with his bony hands at the furniture to hold himself erect. \"Brandy! Brandy!\" he gasped, and fell groaning upon the sofa.\n\nHe was not alone. Behind him came Stackhurst, hatless and panting, almost as distrait as his companion.\n\n\"Yes, yes, brandy!\" he cried. \"The man is at his last gasp. It was all I could do to bring him here. He fainted twice upon the way.\"\n\nHalf a tumbler of the raw spirit brought about a wondrous change. He pushed himself up on one arm and swung his coat from his shoulders. \"For God's sake, oil, opium, morphia!\" he cried. \"Anything to ease this infernal agony!\"\n\nThe inspector and I cried out at the sight. There, crisscrossed upon the man's naked shoulder, was the same strange reticulated pattern of red, inflamed lines which had been the death-mark of Fitzroy McPherson.\n\nThe pain was evidently terrible and was more than local, for the sufferer's breathing would stop for a time, his face would turn black, and then with loud gasps he would clap his hand to his heart, while his brow dropped beads of sweat. At any moment he might die. More and more brandy was poured down his throat, each fresh dose bringing him back to life. Pads of cotton-wool soaked in salad-oil seemed to take the agony from the strange wounds. At last his head fell heavily upon the cushion. Exhausted Nature had taken refuge in its last storehouse of vitality. It was half a sleep and half a faint, but at least it was ease from pain.\n\nTo question him had been impossible, but the moment we were assured of his condition Stackhurst turned upon me.\n\n\"My God!\" he cried, \"what is it, Holmes? What is it?\"\n\n\"Where did you find him?\"\n\n\"Down on the beach. Exactly where poor McPherson met his end. If this man's heart had been weak as McPherson's was, he would not be here now. More than once I thought he was gone as I brought him up. It was too far to The Gables, so I made for you.\"\n\n\"Did you see him on the beach?\"\n\n\"I was walking on the cliff when I heard his cry. He was at the edge of the water, reeling about like a drunken man. I ran down, threw some clothes about him, and brought him up. For heaven's sake, Holmes, use all the powers you have and spare no pains to lift the curse from this place, for life is becoming unendurable. Can you, with all your worldwide reputation, do nothing for us?\"\n\n\"I think I can, Stackhurst. Come with me now! And you, Inspector, come along! We will see if we cannot deliver this murderer into your hands.\"\n\nLeaving the unconscious man in the charge of my housekeeper, we all three went down to the deadly lagoon. On the shingle there was piled a little heap of towels and clothes left by the stricken man. Slowly I walked round the edge of the water, my comrades in Indian file behind me. Most of the pool was quite shallow, but under the cliff where the beach was hollowed out it was four or five feet deep. It was to this part that a swimmer would naturally go, for it formed a beautiful pellucid green pool as clear as crystal. A line of rocks lay above it at the base of the cliff, and along this I led the way, peering eagerly into the depths beneath me. I had reached the deepest and stillest pool when my eyes caught that for which they were searching, and I burst into a shout of triumph.\n\n\"Cyanea!\" I cried. \"Cyanea! Behold the Lion's Mane!\"\n\nThe strange object at which I pointed did indeed look like a tangled mass torn from the mane of a lion. It lay upon a rocky shelf some three feet under the water, a curious waving, vibrating, hairy creature with streaks of silver among its yellow tresses. It pulsated with a slow, heavy dilation and contraction.\n\n\"It has done mischief enough. Its day is over!\" I cried. \"Help me, Stackhurst! Let us end the murderer forever.\"\n\nThere was a big boulder just above the ledge, and we pushed it until it fell with a tremendous splash into the water. When the ripples had cleared we saw that it had settled upon the ledge below. One flapping edge of yellow membrane showed that our victim was beneath it. A thick oily scum oozed out from below the stone and stained the water round, rising slowly to the surface.\n\n\"Well, this gets me!\" cried the inspector. \"What was it, Mr. Holmes? I'm born and bred in these parts, but I never saw such thing. It don't belong to Sussex.\"\n\n\"Just as well for Sussex,\" I remarked. \"It may have been the southwest gale that brought it up. Come back to my house, both of you, and I will give you the terrible experience of one who has good reason to remember his own meeting with the same peril of the seas.\"\n\nWhen we reached my study we found that Murdoch was so far recovered that he could sit up. He was dazed in mind, and every now and then was shaken by a paroxysm of pain. In broken words he explained that he had no notion what had occurred to him, save that terrific pangs had suddenly shot through him, and that it had taken all his fortitude to reach the bank.\n\n\"Here is a book,\" I said, taking up the little volume, \"which first brought light into what might have been forever dark. It is Out of Doors, by the famous observer, J. G. Wood. Wood himself very nearly perished from contact with this vile creature, so he wrote with a very full knowledge. Cyanea capillata is the miscreant's full name, and he can be as dangerous to life as, and far more painful than, the bite of the cobra. Let me briefly give this extract.\n\nIf the bather should see a loose roundish mass of tawny membranes and fibres, something like very large handfuls of lion's mane and silver paper, let him beware, for this is the fearful stinger, Cyanea capillata.\n\nCould our sinister acquaintance be more clearly described?\n\n\"He goes on to tell of his own encounter with one when swimming off the coast of Kent. He found that the creature radiated almost invisible filaments to the distance of fifty feet, and that anyone within that circumference from the deadly centre was in danger of death. Even at a distance the effect upon Wood was almost fatal.\n\nThe multitudinous threads caused light scarlet lines upon the skin which on closer examination resolved into minute dots or pustules, each dot charged as it were with a red-hot needle making its way through the nerves.\n\n\"The local pain was, as he explains, the least part of the exquisite torment.\n\nPangs shot through the chest, causing me to fall as if struck by a bullet. The pulsation would cease, and then the heart would give six or seven leaps as if it would force its way through the chest.\n\n\"It nearly killed him, although he had only been exposed to it in the disturbed ocean and not in the narrow calm waters of a bathing-pool. He says that he could hardly recognize himself afterwards, so white, wrinkled and shrivelled was his face. He gulped down brandy, a whole bottleful, and it seems to have saved his life. There is the book, Inspector. I leave it with you, and you cannot doubt that it contains a full explanation of the tragedy of poor McPherson.\"\n\n\"And incidentally exonerates me,\" remarked Ian Murdoch with a wry smile. \"I do not blame you, Inspector, nor you, Mr. Holmes, for your suspicions were natural. I feel that on the very eve of my arrest I have only cleared myself by sharing the fate of my poor friend.\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Murdoch. I was already upon the track, and had I been out as early as I intended I might well have saved you from this terrific experience.\"\n\n\"But how did you know, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles. That phrase 'the Lion's Mane' haunted my mind. I knew that I had seen it somewhere in an unexpected context. You have seen that it does describe the creature. I have no doubt that it was floating on the water when McPherson saw it, and that this phrase was the only one by which he could convey to us a warning as to the creature which had been his death.\"\n\n\"Then I, at least, am cleared,\" said Murdoch, rising slowly to his feet. \"There are one or two words of explanation which I should give, for I know the direction in which your inquiries have run. It is true that I loved this lady, but from the day when she chose my friend McPherson my one desire was to help her to happiness. I was well content to stand aside and act as their go-between. Often I carried their messages, and it was because I was in their confidence and because she was so dear to me that I hastened to tell her of my friend's death, lest someone should forestall me in a more sudden and heartless manner. She would not tell you, sir, of our relations lest you should disapprove and I might suffer. But with your leave I must try to get back to The Gables, for my bed will be very welcome.\"\n\nStackhurst held out his hand. \"Our nerves have all been at concert-pitch,\" said he. \"Forgive what is past, Murdoch. We shall understand each other better in the future.\" They passed out together with their arms linked in friendly fashion. The inspector remained, staring at me in silence with his ox-like eyes.\n\n\"Well, you've done it!\" he cried at last. \"I had read of you, but I never believed it. It's wonderful!\"\n\nI was forced to shake my head. To accept such praise was to lower one's own standards.\n\n\"I was slow at the outset\u2014culpably slow. Had the body been found in the water I could hardly have missed it. It was the towel which misled me. The poor fellow had never thought to dry himself, and so I in turn was led to believe that he had never been in the water. Why, then, should the attack of any water creature suggest itself to me? That was where I went astray. Well, well, Inspector, I often ventured to chaff you gentlemen of the police force, but Cyanea capillata very nearly avenged Scotland Yard.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE VEILED LODGER", + "text": "When one considers that Mr. Sherlock Holmes was in active practice for twenty-three years, and that during seventeen of these I was allowed to cooperate with him and to keep notes of his doings, it will be clear that I have a mass of material at my command. The problem has always been not to find but to choose. There is the long row of year-books which fill a shelf, and there are the dispatch-cases filled with documents, a perfect quarry for the student not only of crime but of the social and official scandals of the late Victorian era. Concerning these latter, I may say that the writers of agonized letters, who beg that the honour of their families or the reputation of famous forebears may not be touched, have nothing to fear. The discretion and high sense of professional honour which have always distinguished my friend are still at work in the choice of these memoirs, and no confidence will be abused. I deprecate, however, in the strongest way the attempts which have been made lately to get at and to destroy these papers. The source of these outrages is known, and if they are repeated I have Mr. Holmes's authority for saying that the whole story concerning the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant will be given to the public. There is at least one reader who will understand.\n\nIt is not reasonable to suppose that every one of these cases gave Holmes the opportunity of showing those curious gifts of instinct and observation which I have endeavoured to set forth in these memoirs. Sometimes he had with much effort to pick the fruit, sometimes it fell easily into his lap. But the most terrible human tragedies were often involved in those cases which brought him the fewest personal opportunities, and it is one of these which I now desire to record. In telling it, I have made a slight change of name and place, but otherwise the facts are as stated.\n\nOne forenoon\u2014it was late in 1896\u2014I received a hurried note from Holmes asking for my attendance. When I arrived I found him seated in a smoke-laden atmosphere, with an elderly, motherly woman of the buxom landlady type in the corresponding chair in front of him.\n\n\"This is Mrs. Merrilow, of South Brixton,\" said my friend with a wave of the hand. \"Mrs. Merrilow does not object to tobacco, Watson, if you wish to indulge your filthy habits. Mrs. Merrilow has an interesting story to tell which may well lead to further developments in which your presence may be useful.\"\n\n\"Anything I can do\u2014\"\n\n\"You will understand, Mrs. Merrilow, that if I come to Mrs. Ronder I should prefer to have a witness. You will make her understand that before we arrive.\"\n\n\"Lord bless you, Mr. Holmes,\" said our visitor, \"she is that anxious to see you that you might bring the whole parish at your heels!\"\n\n\"Then we shall come early in the afternoon. Let us see that we have our facts correct before we start. If we go over them it will help Dr. Watson to understand the situation. You say that Mrs. Ronder has been your lodger for seven years and that you have only once seen her face.\"\n\n\"And I wish to God I had not!\" said Mrs. Merrilow.\n\n\"It was, I understand, terribly mutilated.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Holmes, you would hardly say it was a face at all. That's how it looked. Our milkman got a glimpse of her once peeping out of the upper window, and he dropped his tin and the milk all over the front garden. That is the kind of face it is. When I saw her\u2014I happened on her unawares\u2014she covered up quick, and then she said, 'Now, Mrs. Merrilow, you know at last why it is that I never raise my veil.\"'\n\n\"Do you know anything about her history?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all.\"\n\n\"Did she give references when she came?\"\n\n\"No, sir, but she gave hard cash, and plenty of it. A quarter's rent right down on the table in advance and no arguing about terms. In these times a poor woman like me can't afford to turn down a chance like that.\"\n\n\"Did she give any reason for choosing your house?\"\n\n\"Mine stands well back from the road and is more private than most. Then, again, I only take the one, and I have no family of my own. I reckon she had tried others and found that mine suited her best. It's privacy she is after, and she is ready to pay for it.\"\n\n\"You say that she never showed her face from first to last save on the one accidental occasion. Well, it is a very remarkable story, most remarkable, and I don't wonder that you want it examined.\"\n\n\"I don't, Mr. Holmes. I am quite satisfied so long as I get my rent. You could not have a quieter lodger, or one who gives less trouble.\"\n\n\"Then what has brought matters to a head?\"\n\n\"Her health, Mr. Holmes. She seems to be wasting away. And there's something terrible on her mind. 'Murder!' she cries. 'Murder!' And once I heard her: 'You cruel beast! You monster!' she cried. It was in the night, and it fair rang through the house and sent the shivers through me. So I went to her in the morning. 'Mrs. Ronder,' I says, 'if you have anything that is troubling your soul, there's the clergy,' I says, 'and there's the police. Between them you should get some help.' 'For God's sake, not the police!' says she, 'and the clergy can't change what is past. And yet,' she says, 'it would ease my mind if someone knew the truth before I died.' 'Well,' says I, 'if you won't have the regulars, there is this detective man what we read about'\u2014beggin' your pardon, Mr. Holmes. And she, she fair jumped at it. 'That's the man,' says she. 'I wonder I never thought of it before. Bring him here, Mrs. Merrilow, and if he won't come, tell him I am the wife of Ronder's wild beast show. Say that, and give him the name Abbas Parva. Here it is as she wrote it, Abbas Parva. 'That will bring him if he's the man I think he is.'\"\n\n\"And it will, too,\" remarked Holmes. \"Very good, Mrs. Merrilow. I should like to have a little chat with Dr. Watson. That will carry us till lunch-time. About three o'clock you may expect to see us at your house in Brixton.\"\n\nOur visitor had no sooner waddled out of the room\u2014no other verb can describe Mrs. Merrilow's method of progression\u2014than Sherlock Holmes threw himself with fierce energy upon the pile of commonplace books in the corner. For a few minutes there was a constant swish of the leaves, and then with a grunt of satisfaction he came upon what he sought. So excited was he that he did not rise, but sat upon the floor like some strange Buddha, with crossed legs, the huge books all round him, and one open upon his knees.\n\n\"The case worried me at the time, Watson. Here are my marginal notes to prove it. I confess that I could make nothing of it. And yet I was convinced that the coroner was wrong. Have you no recollection of the Abbas Parva tragedy?\"\n\n\"None, Holmes.\"\n\n\"And yet you were with me then. But certainly my own impression was very superficial. For there was nothing to go by, and none of the parties had engaged my services. Perhaps you would care to read the papers?\"\n\n\"Could you not give me the points?\"\n\n\"That is very easily done. It will probably come back to your memory as I talk. Ronder, of course, was a household word. He was the rival of Wombwell, and of Sanger, one of the greatest showmen of his day. There is evidence, however, that he took to drink, and that both he and his show were on the down grade at the time of the great tragedy. The caravan had halted for the night at Abbas Parva, which is a small village in Berkshire, when this horror occurred. They were on their way to Wimbledon, travelling by road, and they were simply camping and not exhibiting, as the place is so small a one that it would not have paid them to open.\n\n\"They had among their exhibits a very fine North African lion. Sahara King was its name, and it was the habit, both of Ronder and his wife, to give exhibitions inside its cage. Here, you see, is a photograph of the performance by which you will perceive that Ronder was a huge porcine person and that his wife was a very magnificent woman. It was deposed at the inquest that there had been some signs that the lion was dangerous, but, as usual, familiarity begat contempt, and no notice was taken of the fact.\n\n\"It was usual for either Ronder or his wife to feed the lion at night. Sometimes one went, sometimes both, but they never allowed anyone else to do it, for they believed that so long as they were the food-carriers he would regard them as benefactors and would never molest them. On this particular night, seven years ago, they both went, and a very terrible happening followed, the details of which have never been made clear.\n\n\"It seems that the whole camp was roused near midnight by the roars of the animal and the screams of the woman. The different grooms and employees rushed from their tents, carrying lanterns, and by their light an awful sight was revealed. Ronder lay, with the back of his head crushed in and deep claw-marks across his scalp, some ten yards from the cage, which was open. Close to the door of the cage lay Mrs. Ronder upon her back, with the creature squatting and snarling above her. It had torn her face in such a fashion that it was never thought that she could live. Several of the circus men, headed by Leonardo, the strong man, and Griggs, the clown, drove the creature off with poles, upon which it sprang back into the cage and was at once locked in. How it had got loose was a mystery. It was conjectured that the pair intended to enter the cage, but that when the door was loosed the creature bounded out upon them. There was no other point of interest in the evidence save that the woman in a delirium of agony kept screaming, 'Coward! Coward!' as she was carried back to the van in which they lived. It was six months before she was fit to give evidence, but the inquest was duly held, with the obvious verdict of death from misadventure.\"\n\n\"What alternative could be conceived?\" said I.\n\n\"You may well say so. And yet there were one or two points which worried young Edmunds, of the Berkshire Constabulary. A smart lad that! He was sent later to Allahabad. That was how I came into the matter, for he dropped in and smoked a pipe or two over it.\"\n\n\"A thin, yellow-haired man?\"\n\n\"Exactly. I was sure you would pick up the trail presently.\"\n\n\"But what worried him?\"\n\n\"Well, we were both worried. It was so deucedly difficult to reconstruct the affair. Look at it from the lion's point of view. He is liberated. What does he do? He takes half a dozen bounds forward, which brings him to Ronder. Ronder turns to fly\u2014the claw-marks were on the back of his head\u2014but the lion strikes him down. Then, instead of bounding on and escaping, he returns to the woman, who was close to the cage, and he knocks her over and chews her face up. Then, again, those cries of hers would seem to imply that her husband had in some way failed her. What could the poor devil have done to help her? You see the difficulty?\"\n\n\"Quite.\"\n\n\"And then there was another thing. It comes back to me now as I think it over. There was some evidence that just at the time the lion roared and the woman screamed, a man began shouting in terror.\"\n\n\"This man Ronder, no doubt.\"\n\n\"Well, if his skull was smashed in you would hardly expect to hear from him again. There were at least two witnesses who spoke of the cries of a man being mingled with those of a woman.\"\n\n\"I should think the whole camp was crying out by then. As to the other points, I think I could suggest a solution.\"\n\n\"I should be glad to consider it.\"\n\n\"The two were together, ten yards from the cage, when the lion got loose. The man turned and was struck down. The woman conceived the idea of getting into the cage and shutting the door. It was her only refuge. She made for it, and just as she reached it the beast bounded after her and knocked her over. She was angry with her husband for having encouraged the beast's rage by turning. If they had faced it they might have cowed it. Hence her cries of 'Coward!'\"\n\n\"Brilliant, Watson! Only one flaw in your diamond.\"\n\n\"What is the flaw, Holmes?\"\n\n\"If they were both ten paces from the cage, how came the beast to get loose?\"\n\n\"Is it possible that they had some enemy who loosed it?\"\n\n\"And why should it attack them savagely when it was in the habit of playing with them, and doing tricks with them inside the cage?\"\n\n\"Possibly the same enemy had done something to enrage it.\"\n\nHolmes looked thoughtful and remained in silence for some moments.\n\n\"Well, Watson, there is this to be said for your theory. Ronder was a man of many enemies. Edmunds told me that in his cups he was horrible. A huge bully of a man, he cursed and slashed at everyone who came in his way. I expect those cries about a monster, of which our visitor has spoken, were nocturnal reminiscences of the dear departed. However, our speculations are futile until we have all the facts. There is a cold partridge on the sideboard, Watson, and a bottle of Montrachet. Let us renew our energies before we make a fresh call upon them.\"\n\nWhen our hansom deposited us at the house of Mrs. Merrilow, we found that plump lady blocking up the open door of her humble but retired abode. It was very clear that her chief preoccupation was lest she should lose a valuable lodger, and she implored, us, before showing us up, to say and do nothing which could lead to so undesirable an end. Then, having reassured her, we followed her up the straight, badly carpeted staircase and were shown into the room of the mysterious lodger.\n\nIt was a close, musty, ill-ventilated place, as might be expected, since its inmate seldom left it. From keeping beasts in a cage, the woman seemed, by some retribution of fate, to have become herself a beast in a cage. She sat now in a broken armchair in the shadowy corner of the room. Long years of inaction had coarsened the lines of her figure, but at some period it must have been beautiful, and was still full and voluptuous. A thick dark veil covered her face, but it was cut off close at her upper lip and disclosed a perfectly shaped mouth and a delicately rounded chin. I could well conceive that she had indeed been a very remarkable woman. Her voice, too, was well modulated and pleasing.\n\n\"My name is not unfamiliar to you, Mr. Holmes,\" said she. \"I thought that it would bring you.\"\n\n\"That is so, madam, though I do not know how you are aware that I was interested in your case.\"\n\n\"I learned it when I had recovered my health and was examined by Mr. Edmunds, the county detective. I fear I lied to him. Perhaps it would have been wiser had I told the truth.\"\n\n\"It is usually wiser to tell the truth. But why did you lie to him?\"\n\n\"Because the fate of someone else depended upon it. I know that he was a very worthless being, and yet I would not have his destruction upon my conscience. We had been so close\u2014so close!\"\n\n\"But has this impediment been removed?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. The person that I allude to is dead.\"\n\n\"Then why should you not now tell the police anything you know?\"\n\n\"Because there is another person to be considered. That other person is myself. I could not stand the scandal and publicity which would come from a police examination. I have not long to live, but I wish to die undisturbed. And yet I wanted to find one man of judgment to whom I could tell my terrible story, so that when I am gone all might be understood.\"\n\n\"You compliment me, madam. At the same time, I am a responsible person. I do not promise you that when you have spoken I may not myself think it my duty to refer the case to the police.\"\n\n\"I think not, Mr. Holmes. I know your character and methods too well, for I have followed your work for some years. Reading is the only pleasure which fate has left me, and I miss little which passes in the world. But in any case, I will take my chance of the use which you may make of my tragedy. It will ease my mind to tell it.\"\n\n\"My friend and I would be glad to hear it.\"\n\nThe woman rose and took from a drawer the photograph of a man. He was clearly a professional acrobat, a man of magnificent physique, taken with his huge arms folded across his swollen chest and a smile breaking from under his heavy moustache\u2014the self-satisfied smile of the man of many conquests.\n\n\"That is Leonardo,\" she said.\n\n\"Leonardo, the strong man, who gave evidence?\"\n\n\"The same. And this\u2014this is my husband.\"\n\nIt was a dreadful face\u2014a human pig, or rather a human wild boar, for it was formidable in its bestiality. One could imagine that vile mouth champing and foaming in its rage, and one could conceive those small, vicious eyes darting pure malignancy as they looked forth upon the world. Ruffian, bully, beast\u2014it was all written on that heavy-jowled face.\n\n\"Those two pictures will help you, gentlemen, to understand the story. I was a poor circus girl brought up on the sawdust, and doing springs through the hoop before I was ten. When I became a woman this man loved me, if such lust as his can be called love, and in an evil moment I became his wife. From that day I was in hell, and he the devil who tormented me. There was no one in the show who did not know of his treatment. He deserted me for others. He tied me down and lashed me with his riding-whip when I complained. They all pitied me and they all loathed him, but what could they do? They feared him, one and all. For he was terrible at all times, and murderous when he was drunk. Again and again he was had up for assault, and for cruelty to the beasts, but he had plenty of money and the fines were nothing to him. The best men all left us, and the show began to go downhill. It was only Leonardo and I who kept it up\u2014with little Jimmy Griggs, the clown. Poor devil, he had not much to be funny about, but he did what he could to hold things together.\n\n\"Then Leonardo came more and more into my life. You see what he was like. I know now the poor spirit that was hidden in that splendid body, but compared to my husband he seemed like the angel Gabriel. He pitied me and helped me, till at last our intimacy turned to love\u2014deep, deep, passionate love, such love as I had dreamed of but never hoped to feel. My husband suspected it, but I think that he was a coward as well as a bully, and that Leonardo was the one man that he was afraid of. He took revenge in his own way by torturing me more than ever. One night my cries brought Leonardo to the door of our van. We were near tragedy that night, and soon my lover and I understood that it could not be avoided. My husband was not fit to live. We planned that he should die.\n\n\"Leonardo had a clever, scheming brain. It was he who planned it. I do not say that to blame him, for I was ready to go with him every inch of the way. But I should never have had the wit to think of such a plan. We made a club\u2014Leonardo made it\u2014and in the leaden head he fastened five long steel nails, the points outward, with just such a spread as the lion's paw. This was to give my husband his death-blow, and yet to leave the evidence that it was the lion which we would loose who had done the deed.\n\n\"It was a pitch-dark night when my husband and I went down, as was our custom, to feed the beast. We carried with us the raw meat in a zinc pail. Leonardo was waiting at the corner of the big van which we should have to pass before we reached the cage. He was too slow, and we walked past him before he could strike, but he followed us on tiptoe and I heard the crash as the club smashed my husband's skull. My heart leaped with joy at the sound. I sprang forward, and I undid the catch which held the door of the great lion's cage.\n\n\"And then the terrible thing happened. You may have heard how quick these creatures are to scent human blood, and how it excites them. Some strange instinct had told the creature in one instant that a human being had been slain. As I slipped the bars it bounded out and was on me in an instant. Leonardo could have saved me. If he had rushed forward and struck the beast with his club he might have cowed it. But the man lost his nerve. I heard him shout in his terror, and then I saw him turn and fly. At the same instant the teeth of the lion met in my face. Its hot, filthy breath had already poisoned me and I was hardly conscious of pain. With the palms of my hands I tried to push the great steaming, blood-stained jaws away from me, and I screamed for help. I was conscious that the camp was stirring, and then dimly I remembered a group of men. Leonardo, Griggs, and others, dragging me from under the creature's paws. That was my last memory, Mr. Holmes, for many a weary month. When I came to myself and saw myself in the mirror, I cursed that lion\u2014oh, how I cursed him!\u2014not because he had torn away my beauty but because he had not torn away my life. I had but one desire, Mr. Holmes, and I had enough money to gratify it. It was that I should cover myself so that my poor face should be seen by none, and that I should dwell where none whom I had ever known should find me. That was all that was left to me to do\u2014and that is what I have done. A poor wounded beast that has crawled into its hole to die\u2014that is the end of Eugenia Ronder.\"\n\nWe sat in silence for some time after the unhappy woman had told her story. Then Holmes stretched out his long arm and patted her hand with such a show of sympathy as I had seldom known him to exhibit.\n\n\"Poor girl!\" he said. \"Poor girl! The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest. But what of this man Leonardo?\"\n\n\"I never saw him or heard from him again. Perhaps I have been wrong to feel so bitterly against him. He might as soon have loved one of the freaks whom we carried round the county as the thing which the lion had left. But a woman's love is not so easily set aside. He had left me under the beast's claws, he had deserted me in my need, and yet I could not bring myself to give him to the gallows. For myself, I cared nothing what became of me. What could be more dreadful than my actual life? But I stood between Leonardo and his fate.\"\n\n\"And he is dead?\"\n\n\"He was drowned last month when bathing near Margate. I saw his death in the paper.\"\n\n\"And what did he do with this five-clawed club, which is the most singular and ingenious part of all your story?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell, Mr. Holmes. There is a chalk-pit by the camp, with a deep green pool at the base of it. Perhaps in the depths of that pool\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, well, it is of little consequence now. The case is closed.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said the woman, \"the case is closed.\"\n\nWe had risen to go, but there was something in the woman's voice which arrested Holmes's attention. He turned swiftly upon her.\n\n\"Your life is not your own,\" he said. \"Keep your hands off it.\"\n\n\"What use is it to anyone?\"\n\n\"How can you tell? The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.\"\n\nThe woman's answer was a terrible one. She raised her veil and stepped forward into the light.\n\n\"I wonder if you would bear it,\" she said.\n\nIt was horrible. No words can describe the framework of a face when the face itself is gone. Two living and beautiful brown eyes looking sadly out from that grisly ruin did but make the view more awful. Holmes held up his hand in a gesture of pity and protest, and together we left the room.\n\nTwo days later, when I called upon my friend, he pointed with some pride to a small blue bottle upon his mantelpiece. I picked it up. There was a red poison label. A pleasant almondy odour rose when I opened it.\n\n\"Prussic acid?\" said I.\n\n\"Exactly. It came by post. 'I send you my temptation. I will follow your advice.' That was the message. I think, Watson, we can guess the name of the brave woman who sent it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF SHOSCOMBE OLD PLACE", + "text": "Sherlock Holmes had been bending for a long time over a low-power microscope. Now he straightened himself up and looked round at me in triumph.\n\n\"It is glue, Watson,\" said he. \"Unquestionably it is glue. Have a look at these scattered objects in the field!\"\n\nI stooped to the eyepiece and focussed for my vision.\n\n\"Those hairs are threads from a tweed coat. The irregular gray masses are dust. There are epithelial scales on the left. Those brown blobs in the centre are undoubtedly glue.\"\n\n\"Well,\" I said, laughing, \"I am prepared to take your word for it. Does anything depend upon it?\"\n\n\"It is a very fine demonstration,\" he answered. \"In the St. Pancras case you may remember that a cap was found beside the dead policeman. The accused man denies that it is his. But he is a picture-frame maker who habitually handles glue.\"\n\n\"Is it one of your cases?\"\n\n\"No; my friend, Merivale, of the Yard, asked me to look into the case. Since I ran down that coiner by the zinc and copper filings in the seam of his cuff they have begun to realize the importance of the microscope.\" He looked impatiently at his watch. \"I had a new client calling, but he is overdue. By the way, Watson, you know something of racing?\"\n\n\"I ought to. I pay for it with about half my wound pension.\"\n\n\"Then I'll make you my 'Handy Guide to the Turf.' What about Sir Robert Norberton? Does the name recall anything?\"\n\n\"Well, I should say so. He lives at Shoscombe Old Place, and I know it well, for my summer quarters were down there once. Norberton nearly came within your province once.\"\n\n\"How was that?\"\n\n\"It was when he horsewhipped Sam Brewer, the well-known Curzon Street money-lender, on Newmarket Heath. He nearly killed the man.\"\n\n\"Ah, he sounds interesting! Does he often indulge in that way?\"\n\n\"Well, he has the name of being a dangerous man. He is about the most daredevil rider in England\u2014second in the Grand National a few years back. He is one of those men who have overshot their true generation. He should have been a buck in the days of the Regency\u2014a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of fair ladies, and, by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find his way back again.\"\n\n\"Capital, Watson! A thumb-nail sketch. I seem to know the man. Now, can you give me some idea of Shoscombe Old Place?\"\n\n\"Only that it is in the centre of Shoscombe Park, and that the famous Shoscombe stud and training quarters are to be found there.\"\n\n\"And the head trainer,\" said Holmes, \"is John Mason. You need not look surprised at my knowledge, Watson, for this is a letter from him which I am unfolding. But let us have some more about Shoscombe. I seem to have struck a rich vein.\"\n\n\"There are the Shoscombe spaniels,\" said I. \"You hear of them at every dog show. The most exclusive breed in England. They are the special pride of the lady of Shoscombe Old Place.\"\n\n\"Sir Robert Norberton's wife, I presume!\"\n\n\"Sir Robert has never married. Just as well, I think, considering his prospects. He lives with his widowed sister, Lady Beatrice Falder.\"\n\n\"You mean that she lives with him?\"\n\n\"No, no. The place belonged to her late husband, Sir James. Norberton has no claim on it at all. It is only a life interest and reverts to her husband's brother. Meantime, she draws the rents every year.\"\n\n\"And brother Robert, I suppose, spends the said rents?\"\n\n\"That is about the size of it. He is a devil of a fellow and must lead her a most uneasy life. Yet I have heard that she is devoted to him. But, what is amiss at Shoscombe?\"\n\n\"Ah, that is just what I want to know. And here, I expect, is the man who can tell us.\"\n\nThe door had opened and the page had shown in a tall, clean-shaven man with the firm, austere expression which is only seen upon those who have to control horses or boys. Mr. John Mason had many of both under his sway, and he looked equal to the task. He bowed with cold self-possession and seated himself upon the chair to which Holmes had waved him.\n\n\"You had my note, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Yes, but it explained nothing.\"\n\n\"It was too delicate a thing for me to put the details on paper. And too complicated. It was only face to face I could do it.\"\n\n\"Well, we are at your disposal.\"\n\n\"First of all, Mr. Holmes, I think that my employer, Sir Robert, has gone mad.\"\n\nHolmes raised his eyebrows. \"This is Baker Street, not Harley Street,\" said he. \"But why do you say so?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, when a man does one queer thing, or two queer things, there may be a meaning to it, but when everything he does is queer, then you begin to wonder. I believe Shoscombe Prince and the Derby have turned his brain.\"\n\n\"That is a colt you are running?\"\n\n\"The best in England, Mr. Holmes. I should know, if anyone does. Now, I'll be plain with you, for I know you are gentlemen of honour and that it won't go beyond the room. Sir Robert has got to win this Derby. He's up to the neck, and it's his last chance. Everything he could raise or borrow is on the horse\u2014and at fine odds, too! You can get forties now, but it was nearer the hundred when he began to back him.\"\n\n\"But how is that if the horse is so good?\"\n\n\"The public don't know how good he is. Sir Robert has been too clever for the touts. He has the Prince's half-brother out for spins. You can't tell 'em apart. But there are two lengths in a furlong between them when it comes to a gallop. He thinks of nothing but the horse and the race. His whole life is on it. He's holding off the Jews till then. If the Prince fails him he is done.\"\n\n\"It seems a rather desperate gamble, but where does the madness come in?\"\n\n\"Well, first of all, you have only to look at him. I don't believe he sleeps at night. He is down at the stables at all hours. His eyes are wild. It has all been too much for his nerves. Then there is his conduct to Lady Beatrice!\"\n\n\"Ah! What is that?\"\n\n\"They have always been the best of friends. They had the same tastes, the two of them, and she loved the horses as much as he did. Every day at the same hour she would drive down to see them\u2014and, above all, she loved the Prince. He would prick up his ears when he heard the wheels on the gravel, and he would trot out each morning to the carriage to get his lump of sugar. But that's all over now.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Well, she seems to have lost all interest in the horses. For a week now she has driven past the stables with never so much as 'Good-morning'!\"\n\n\"You think there has been a quarrel?\"\n\n\"And a bitter, savage, spiteful quarrel at that. Why else would he give away her pet spaniel that she loved as if he were her child? He gave it a few days ago to old Barnes, what keeps the Green Dragon, three miles off, at Crendall.\"\n\n\"That certainly did seem strange.\"\n\n\"Of course, with her weak heart and dropsy one couldn't expect that she could get about with him, but he spent two hours every evening in her room. He might well do what he could, for she has been a rare good friend to him. But that's all over, too. He never goes near her. And she takes it to heart. She is brooding and sulky and drinking, Mr. Holmes\u2014drinking like a fish.\"\n\n\"Did she drink before this estrangement?\"\n\n\"Well, she took her glass, but now it is often a whole bottle of an evening. So Stephens, the butler, told me. It's all changed, Mr. Holmes, and there is something damned rotten about it. But then, again, what is master doing down at the old church crypt at night? And who is the man that meets him there?\"\n\nHolmes rubbed his hands.\n\n\"Go on, Mr. Mason. You get more and more interesting.\"\n\n\"It was the butler who saw him go. Twelve o'clock at night and raining hard. So next night I was up at the house and, sure enough, master was off again. Stephens and I went after him, but it was jumpy work, for it would have been a bad job if he had seen us. He's a terrible man with his fists if he gets started, and no respecter of persons. So we were shy of getting too near, but we marked him down all right. It was the haunted crypt that he was making for, and there was a man waiting for him there.\"\n\n\"What is this haunted crypt?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, there is an old ruined chapel in the park. It is so old that nobody could fix its date. And under it there's a crypt which has a bad name among us. It's a dark, damp, lonely place by day, but there are few in that county that would have the nerve to go near it at night. But master's not afraid. He never feared anything in his life. But what is he doing there in the night-time?\"\n\n\"Wait a bit!\" said Holmes. \"You say there is another man there. It must be one of your own stablemen, or someone from the house! Surely you have only to spot who it is and question him?\"\n\n\"It's no one I know.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\"\n\n\"Because I have seen him, Mr. Holmes. It was on that second night. Sir Robert turned and passed us\u2014me and Stephens, quaking in the bushes like two bunny-rabbits, for there was a bit of moon that night. But we could hear the other moving about behind. We were not afraid of him. So we up when Sir Robert was gone and pretended we were just having a walk like in the moonlight, and so we came right on him as casual and innocent as you please. 'Hullo, mate! who may you be?' says I. I guess he had not heard us coming, so he looked over his shoulder with a face as if he had seen the devil coming out of hell. He let out a yell, and away he went as hard as he could lick it in the darkness. He could run!\u2014I'll give him that. In a minute he was out of sight and hearing, and who he was, or what he was, we never found.\"\n\n\"But you saw him clearly in the moonlight?\"\n\n\"Yes, I would swear to his yellow face\u2014a mean dog, I should say. What could he have in common with Sir Robert?\"\n\nHolmes sat for some time lost in thought.\n\n\"Who keeps Lady Beatrice Falder company?\" he asked at last.\n\n\"There is her maid, Carrie Evans. She has been with her this five years.\"\n\n\"And is, no doubt, devoted?\"\n\nMr. Mason shuffled uncomfortably.\n\n\"She's devoted enough,\" he answered at last. \"But I won't say to whom.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" said Holmes.\n\n\"I can't tell tales out of school.\"\n\n\"I quite understand, Mr. Mason. Of course, the situation is clear enough. From Dr. Watson's description of Sir Robert I can realize that no woman is safe from him. Don't you think the quarrel between brother and sister may lie there?\"\n\n\"Well, the scandal has been pretty clear for a long time.\"\n\n\"But she may not have seen it before. Let us suppose that she has suddenly found it out. She wants to get rid of the woman. Her brother will not permit it. The invalid, with her weak heart and inability to get about, has no means of enforcing her will. The hated maid is still tied to her. The lady refuses to speak, sulks, takes to drink. Sir Robert in his anger takes her pet spaniel away from her. Does not all this hang together?\"\n\n\"Well, it might do\u2014so far as it goes.\"\n\n\"Exactly! As far as it goes. How would all that bear upon the visits by night to the old crypt? We can't fit that into our plot.\"\n\n\"No, sir, and there is something more that I can't fit in. Why should Sir Robert want to dig up a dead body?\"\n\nHolmes sat up abruptly.\n\n\"We only found it out yesterday\u2014after I had written to you. Yesterday Sir Robert had gone to London, so Stephens and I went down to the crypt. It was all in order, sir, except that in one corner was a bit of a human body.\"\n\n\"You informed the police, I suppose?\"\n\nOur visitor smiled grimly.\n\n\"Well, sir, I think it would hardly interest them. It was just the head and a few bones of a mummy. It may have been a thousand years old. But it wasn't there before. That I'll swear, and so will Stephens. It had been stowed away in a corner and covered over with a board, but that corner had always been empty before.\"\n\n\"What did you do with it?\"\n\n\"Well, we just left it there.\"\n\n\"That was wise. You say Sir Robert was away yesterday. Has he returned?\"\n\n\"We expect him back to-day.\"\n\n\"When did Sir Robert give away his sister's dog?\"\n\n\"It was just a week ago to-day. The creature was howling outside the old wellhouse, and Sir Robert was in one of his tantrums that morning. He caught it up, and I thought he would have killed it. Then he gave it to Sandy Bain, the jockey, and told him to take the dog to old Barnes at the Green Dragon, for he never wished to see it again.\"\n\nHolmes sat for some time in silent thought. He had lit the oldest and foulest of his pipes.\n\n\"I am not clear yet what you want me to do in this matter, Mr. Mason,\" he said at last. \"Can't you make it more definite?\"\n\n\"Perhaps this will make it more definite, Mr. Holmes,\" said our visitor.\n\nHe took a paper from his pocket, and, unwrapping it carefully, he exposed a charred fragment of bone.\n\nHolmes examined it with interest.\n\n\"Where did you get it?\"\n\n\"There is a central heating furnace in the cellar under Lady Beatrice's room. It's been off for some time, but Sir Robert complained of cold and had it on again.\n\n\"Harvey runs it\u2014he's one of my lads. This very morning he came to me with this which he found raking out the cinders. He didn't like the look of it.\"\n\n\"Nor do I,\" said Holmes. \"What do you make of it, Watson?\"\n\nIt was burned to a black cinder, but there could be no question as to its anatomical significance.\n\n\"It's the upper condyle of a human femur,\" said I.\n\n\"Exactly!\" Holmes had become very serious. \"When does this lad tend to the furnace?\"\n\n\"He makes it up every evening and then leaves it.\"\n\n\"Then anyone could visit it during the night?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Can you enter it from outside?\"\n\n\"There is one door from outside. There is another which leads up by a stair to the passage in which Lady Beatrice's room is situated.\"\n\n\"These are deep waters, Mr. Mason; deep and rather dirty. You say that Sir Robert was not at home last night?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Then, whoever was burning bones, it was not he.\"\n\n\"That's true, sir.\"\n\n\"What is the name of that inn you spoke of?\"\n\n\"The Green Dragon.\"\n\n\"Is there good fishing in that part of Berkshire?\" The honest trainer showed very clearly upon his face that he was convinced that yet another lunatic had come into his harassed life.\n\n\"Well, sir, I've heard there are trout in the mill-stream and pike in the Hall lake.\"\n\n\"That's good enough. Watson and I are famous fishermen\u2014are we not, Watson? You may address us in future at the Green Dragon. We should reach it to-night. I need not say that we don't want to see you, Mr. Mason, but a note will reach us, and no doubt I could find you if I want you. When we have gone a little farther into the matter I will let you have a considered opinion.\"\n\nThus it was that on a bright May evening Holmes and I found ourselves alone in a first-class carriage and bound for the little \"halt-on-demand\" station of Shoscombe. The rack above us was covered with a formidable litter of rods, reels, and baskets. On reaching our destination a short drive took us to an old-fashioned tavern, where a sporting host, Josiah Barnes, entered eagerly into our plans for the extirpation of the fish of the neighbourhood.\n\n\"What about the Hall lake and the chance of a pike?\" said Holmes.\n\nThe face of the innkeeper clouded.\n\n\"That wouldn't do, sir. You might chance to find yourself in the lake before you were through.\"\n\n\"How's that, then?\"\n\n\"It's Sir Robert, sir. He's terrible jealous of touts. If you two strangers were as near his training quarters as that he'd be after you as sure as fate. He ain't taking no chances, Sir Robert ain't.\"\n\n\"I've heard he has a horse entered for the Derby.\"\n\n\"Yes, and a good colt, too. He carries all our money for the race, and all Sir Robert's into the bargain. By the way\"\u2014he looked at us with thoughtful eyes\u2014\"I suppose you ain't on the turf yourselves?\"\n\n\"No, indeed. Just two weary Londoners who badly need some good Berkshire air.\"\n\n\"Well, you are in the right place for that. There is a deal of it lying about. But mind what I have told you about Sir Robert. He's the sort that strikes first and speaks afterwards. Keep clear of the park.\"\n\n\"Surely, Mr. Barnes! We certainly shall. By the way, that was a most beautiful spaniel that was whining in the hall.\"\n\n\"I should say it was. That was the real Shoscombe breed. There ain't a better in England.\"\n\n\"I am a dog-fancier myself,\" said Holmes. \"Now, if it is a fair question, what would a prize dog like that cost?\"\n\n\"More than I could pay, sir. It was Sir Robert himself who gave me this one. That's why I have to keep it on a lead. It would be off to the Hall in a jiffy if I gave it its head.\"\n\n\"We are getting some cards in our hand, Watson,\" said Holmes when the landlord had left us. \"It's not an easy one to play, but we may see our way in a day or two. By the way, Sir Robert is still in London, I hear. We might, perhaps, enter the sacred domain to-night without fear of bodily assault. There are one or two points on which I should like reassurance.\"\n\n\"Have you any theory, Holmes?\"\n\n\"Only this, Watson, that something happened a week or so ago which has cut deep into the life of the Shoscombe household. What is that something? We can only guess at it from its effects. They seem to be of a curiously mixed character. But that should surely help us. It is only the colourless, uneventful case which is hopeless.\n\n\"Let us consider our data. The brother no longer visits the beloved invalid sister. He gives away her favourite dog. Her dog, Watson! Does that suggest nothing to you?\"\n\n\"Nothing but the brother's spite.\"\n\n\"Well, it might be so. Or\u2014well, there is an alternative. Now to continue our review of the situation from the time that the quarrel, if there is a quarrel, began. The lady keeps her room, alters her habits, is not seen save when she drives out with her maid, refuses to stop at the stables to greet her favourite horse, and apparently takes to drink. That covers the case, does it not?\"\n\n\"Save for the business in the crypt.\"\n\n\"That is another line of thought. There are two, and I beg you will not tangle them. Line A, which concerns Lady Beatrice, has a vaguely sinister flavour, has it not?\"\n\n\"I can make nothing of it.\"\n\n\"Well, now, let us take up line B, which concerns Sir Robert. He is mad keen upon winning the Derby. He is in the hands of the Jews, and may at any moment be sold up and his racing stables seized by his creditors. He is a daring and desperate man. He derives his income from his sister. His sister's maid is his willing tool. So far we seem to be on fairly safe ground, do we not?\"\n\n\"But the crypt?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, the crypt! Let us suppose, Watson\u2014it is merely a scandalous supposition, a hypothesis put forward for argument's sake\u2014that Sir Robert has done away with his sister.\"\n\n\"My dear Holmes, it is out of the question.\"\n\n\"Very possibly, Watson. Sir Robert is a man of an honourable stock. But you do occasionally find a carrion crow among the eagles. Let us for a moment argue upon this supposition. He could not fly the country until he had realized his fortune, and that fortune could only be realized by bringing off this coup with Shoscombe Prince. Therefore, he has still to stand his ground. To do this he would have to dispose of the body of his victim, and he would also have to find a substitute who would impersonate her. With the maid as his confidante that would not be impossible. The woman's body might be conveyed to the crypt, which is a place so seldom visited, and it might be secretly destroyed at night in the furnace, leaving behind it such evidence as we have already seen. What say you to that, Watson?\"\n\n\"Well, it is all possible if you grant the original monstrous supposition.\"\n\n\"I think that there is a small experiment which we may try to-morrow, Watson, in order to throw some light on the matter. Meanwhile, if we mean to keep up our characters, I suggest that we have our host in for a glass of his own wine and hold some high converse upon eels and dace, which seems to be the straight road to his affections. We may chance to come upon some useful local gossip in the process.\"\n\nIn the morning Holmes discovered that we had come without our spoon-bait for jack, which absolved us from fishing for the day. About eleven o'clock we started for a walk, and he obtained leave to take the black spaniel with us.\n\n\"This is the place,\" said he as we came to two high park gates with heraldic griffins towering above them. \"About midday, Mr. Barnes informs me, the old lady takes a drive, and the carriage must slow down while the gates are opened. When it comes through, and before it gathers speed, I want you, Watson, to stop the coachman with some question. Never mind me. I shall stand behind this holly-bush and see what I can see.\"\n\nIt was not a long vigil. Within a quarter of an hour we saw the big open yellow barouche coming down the long avenue, with two splendid, high-stepping gray carriage horses in the shafts. Holmes crouched behind his bush with the dog. I stood unconcernedly swinging a cane in the roadway. A keeper ran out and the gates swung open.\n\nThe carriage had slowed to a walk, and I was able to get a good look at the occupants. A highly coloured young woman with flaxen hair and impudent eyes sat on the left. At her right was an elderly person with rounded back and a huddle of shawls about her face and shoulders which proclaimed the invalid. When the horses reached the highroad I held up my hand with an authoritative gesture, and as the coachman pulled up I inquired if Sir Robert was at Shoscombe Old Place.\n\nAt the same moment Holmes stepped out and released the spaniel. With a joyous cry it dashed forward to the carriage and sprang upon the step. Then in a moment its eager greeting changed to furious rage, and it snapped at the black skirt above it.\n\n\"Drive on! Drive on!\" shrieked a harsh voice. The coachman lashed the horses, and we were left standing in the roadway.\n\n\"Well, Watson, that's done it,\" said Holmes as he fastened the lead to the neck of the excited spaniel. \"He thought it was his mistress, and he found it was a stranger. Dogs don't make mistakes.\"\n\n\"But it was the voice of a man!\" I cried.\n\n\"Exactly! We have added one card to our hand, Watson, but it needs careful playing, all the same.\"\n\nMy companion seemed to have no further plans for the day, and we did actually use our fishing tackle in the mill-stream, with the result that we had a dish of trout for our supper. It was only after that meal that Holmes showed signs of renewed activity. Once more we found ourselves upon the same road as in the morning, which led us to the park gates. A tall, dark figure was awaiting us there, who proved to be our London acquaintance, Mr. John Mason, the trainer.\n\n\"Good-evening, gentlemen,\" said he. \"I got your note, Mr. Holmes. Sir Robert has not returned yet, but I hear that he is expected to-night.\"\n\n\"How far is this crypt from the house?\" asked Holmes.\n\n\"A good quarter of a mile.\"\n\n\"Then I think we can disregard him altogether.\"\n\n\"I can't afford to do that, Mr. Holmes. The moment he arrives he will want to see me to get the last news of Shoscombe Prince.\"\n\n\"I see! In that case we must work without you, Mr. Mason. You can show us the crypt and then leave us.\"\n\nIt was pitch-dark and without a moon, but Mason led us over the grass-lands until a dark mass loomed up in front of us which proved to be the ancient chapel. We entered the broken gap which was once the porch, and our guide, stumbling among heaps of loose masonry, picked his way to the corner of the building, where a steep stair led down into the crypt. Striking a match, he illuminated the melancholy place\u2014dismal and evil-smelling, with ancient crumbling walls of rough-hewn stone, and piles of coffins, some of lead and some of stone, extending upon one side right up to the arched and groined roof which lost itself in the shadows above our heads. Holmes had lit his lantern, which shot a tiny tunnel of vivid yellow light upon the mournful scene. Its rays were reflected back from the coffin-plates, many of them adorned with the griffin and coronet of this old family which carried its honours even to the gate of Death.\n\n\"You spoke of some bones, Mr. Mason. Could you show them before you go?\"\n\n\"They are here in this corner.\" The trainer strode across and then stood in silent surprise as our light was turned upon the place. \"They are gone,\" said he.\n\n\"So I expected,\" said Holmes, chuckling. \"I fancy the ashes of them might even now be found in that oven which had already consumed a part.\"\n\n\"But why in the world would anyone want to burn the bones of a man who has been dead a thousand years?\" asked John Mason.\n\n\"That is what we are here to find out,\" said Holmes. \"It may mean a long search, and we need not detain you. I fancy that we shall get our solution before morning.\"\n\nWhen John Mason had left us, Holmes set to work making a very careful examination of the graves, ranging from a very ancient one, which appeared to be Saxon, in the centre, through a long line of Norman Hugos and Odos, until we reached the Sir William and Sir Denis Falder of the eighteenth century. It was an hour or more before Holmes came to a leaden coffin standing on end before the entrance to the vault. I heard his little cry of satisfaction and was aware from his hurried but purposeful movements that he had reached a goal. With his lens he was eagerly examining the edges of the heavy lid. Then he drew from his pocket a short jemmy, a box-opener, which he thrust into a chink, levering back the whole front, which seemed to be secured by only a couple of clamps. There was a rending, tearing sound as it gave way, but it had hardly hinged back and partly revealed the contents before we had an unforeseen interruption.\n\nSomeone was walking in the chapel above. It was the firm, rapid step of one who came with a definite purpose and knew well the ground upon which he walked. A light streamed down the stairs, and an instant later the man who bore it was framed in the Gothic archway. He was a terrible figure, huge in stature and fierce in manner. A large stable-lantern which he held in front of him shone upward upon a strong, heavily moustached face and angry eyes, which glared round him into every recess of the vault, finally fixing themselves with a deadly stare upon my companion and myself.\n\n\"Who the devil are you?\" he thundered. \"And what are you doing upon my property?\" Then, as Holmes returned no answer, he took a couple of steps forward and raised a heavy stick which he carried. \"Do you hear me?\" he cried. \"Who are you? What are you doing here?\" His cudgel quivered in the air.\n\nBut instead of shrinking Holmes advanced to meet him.\n\n\"I also have a question to ask you, Sir Robert,\" he said in his sternest tone. \"Who is this? And what is it doing here?\"\n\nHe turned and tore open the coffin-lid behind him. In the glare of the lantern I saw a body swathed in a sheet from head to foot, with dreadful, witch-like features, all nose and chin, projecting at one end, the dim, glazed eyes staring from a discoloured and crumbling face.\n\nThe baronet had staggered back with a cry and supported himself against a stone sarcophagus.\n\n\"How came you to know of this?\" he cried. And then, with some return of his truculent manner: \"What business is it of yours?\"\n\n\"My name is Sherlock Holmes,\" said my companion. \"Possibly it is familiar to you. In any case, my business is that of every other good citizen\u2014to uphold the law. It seems to me that you have much to answer for.\"\n\nSir Robert glared for a moment, but Holmes's quiet voice and cool, assured manner had their effect.\n\n\"'Fore God, Mr. Holmes, it's all right,\" said he. \"Appearances are against me, I'll admit, but I could act no otherwise.\"\n\n\"I should be happy to think so, but I fear your explanations must be before the police.\"\n\nSir Robert shrugged his broad shoulders.\n\n\"Well, if it must be, it must. Come up to the house and you can judge for yourself how the matter stands.\"\n\nA quarter of an hour later we found ourselves in what I judge, from the lines of polished barrels behind glass covers, to be the gun-room of the old house. It was comfortably furnished, and here Sir Robert left us for a few moments. When he returned he had two companions with him; the one, the florid young woman whom we had seen in the carriage; the other, a small rat-faced man with a disagreeably furtive manner. These two wore an appearance of utter bewilderment, which showed that the baronet had not yet had time to explain to them the turn events had taken.\n\n\"There,\" said Sir Robert with a wave of his hand, \"are Mr. and Mrs. Norlett. Mrs. Norlett, under her maiden name of Evans, has for some years been my sister's confidential maid. I have brought them here because I feel that my best course is to explain the true position to you, and they are the two people upon earth who can substantiate what I say.\"\n\n\"Is this necessary, Sir Robert? Have you thought what you are doing?\" cried the woman.\n\n\"As to me, I entirely disclaim all responsibility,\" said her husband.\n\nSir Robert gave him a glance of contempt. \"I will take all responsibility,\" said he. \"Now, Mr. Holmes, listen to a plain statement of the facts.\n\n\"You have clearly gone pretty deeply into my affairs or I should not have found you where I did. Therefore, you know already, in all probability, that I am running a dark horse for the Derby and that everything depends upon my success. If I win, all is easy. If I lose\u2014well, I dare not think of that!\"\n\n\"I understand the position,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"I am dependent upon my sister, Lady Beatrice, for everything. But it is well known that her interest in the estate is for her own life only. For myself, I am deeply in the hands of the Jews. I have always known that if my sister were to die my creditors would be on to my estate like a flock of vultures. Everything would be seized\u2014my stables, my horses\u2014everything. Well, Mr. Holmes; my sister did die just a week ago.\"\n\n\"And you told no one!\"\n\n\"What could I do? Absolute ruin faced me. If I could stave things off for three weeks all would be well. Her maid's husband\u2014this man here\u2014is an actor. It came into our heads\u2014it came into my head\u2014that he could for that short period personate my sister. It was but a case of appearing daily in the carriage, for no one need enter her room save the maid. It was not difficult to arrange. My sister died of the dropsy which had long afflicted her.\"\n\n\"That will be for a coroner to decide.\"\n\n\"Her doctor would certify that for months her symptoms have threatened such an end.\"\n\n\"Well, what did you do?\"\n\n\"The body could not remain there. On the first night Norlett and I carried it out to the old wellhouse, which is now never used. We were followed, however, by her pet spaniel, which yapped continually at the door, so I felt some safer place was needed. I got rid of the spaniel, and we carried the body to the crypt of the church. There was no indignity or irreverence, Mr. Holmes. I do not feel that I have wronged the dead.\"\n\n\"Your conduct seems to me inexcusable, Sir Robert.\"\n\nThe baronet shook his head impatiently. \"It is easy to preach,\" said he. \"Perhaps you would have felt differently if you had been in my position. One cannot see all one's hopes and all one's plans shattered at the last moment and make no effort to save them. It seemed to me that it would be no unworthy resting-place if we put her for the time in one of the coffins of her husband's ancestors lying in what is still consecrated ground. We opened such a coffin, removed the contents, and placed her as you have seen her. As to the old relics which we took out, we could not leave them on the floor of the Crypt. Norlett and I removed them, and he descended at night and burned them in the central furnace. There is my story, Mr. Holmes, though how you forced my hand so that I have to tell it is more than I can say.\"\n\nHolmes sat for some time lost in thought.\n\n\"There is one flaw in your narrative, Sir Robert,\" he said at last. \"Your bets on the race, and therefore your hopes for the future, would hold good even if your creditors seized your estate.\"\n\n\"The horse would be part of the estate. What do they care for my bets? As likely as not they would not run him at all. My chief creditor is, unhappily, my most bitter enemy\u2014a rascally fellow, Sam Brewer, whom I was once compelled to horsewhip on Newmarket Heath. Do you suppose that he would try to save me?\"\n\n\"Well, Sir Robert,\" said Holmes, rising, \"this matter must, of course, be referred to the police. It was my duty to bring the facts to light, and there I must leave it. As to the morality or decency of your conduct, it is not for me to express an opinion. It is nearly midnight, Watson, and I think we may make our way back to our humble abode.\"\n\nIt is generally known now that this singular episode ended upon a hap pier note than Sir Robert's actions deserved. Shoscombe Prince did win the Derby, the sporting owner did net eighty thousand pounds in bets, and the creditors did hold their hand until the race was over, when they were paid in full, and enough was left to reestablish Sir Robert in a fair position in life. Both police and coroner took a lenient view of the transaction, and beyond a mild censure for the delay in registering the lady's decease, the lucky owner got away scatheless from this strange incident in a career which has now outlived its shadows and promises to end in an honoured old age." + }, + { + "title": "THE ADVENTURE OF THE RETIRED COLOURMAN", + "text": "Sherlock Holmes was in a melancholy and philosophic mood that morning. His alert practical nature was subject to such reactions.\n\n\"Did you see him?\" he asked.\n\n\"You mean the old fellow, who has just gone out?\"\n\n\"Precisely.\"\n\n\"Yes, I met him at the door.\"\n\n\"What did you think of him?\"\n\n\"A pathetic, futile, broken creature.\"\n\n\"Exactly, Watson. Pathetic and futile. But is not all life pathetic and futile? Is not his story a microcosm of the whole? We reach. We grasp. And what is left in our hands at the end? A shadow. Or worse than a shadow\u2014misery.\"\n\n\"Is he one of your clients?\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose I may call him so. He has been sent on by the Yard. Just as medical men occasionally send their incurables to a quack. They argue that they can do nothing more, and that whatever happens the patient can be no worse than he is.\"\n\n\"What is the matter?\"\n\nHolmes took a rather soiled card from the table. \"Josiah Amberley. He says he was junior partner of Brickfall and Amberley, who are manufacturers of artistic materials. You will see their names upon paint-boxes. He made his little pile, retired from business at the age of sixty-one, bought a house at Lewisham, and settled down to rest after a life of ceaseless grind. One would think his future was tolerably assured.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed.\"\n\nHolmes glanced over some notes which he had scribbled upon the back of an envelope.\n\n\"Retired in 1896, Watson. Early in 1897 he married a woman twenty years younger than himself\u2014a good-looking woman, too, if the photograph does not flatter. A competence, a wife, leisure\u2014it seemed a straight road which lay before him. And yet within two years he is, as you have seen, as broken and miserable a creature as crawls beneath the sun.\"\n\n\"But what has happened?\"\n\n\"The old story, Watson. A treacherous friend and a fickle wife. It would appear that Amberley has one hobby in life, and it is chess. Not far from him at Lewisham there lives a young doctor who is also a chess-player. I have noted his name as Dr. Ray Ernest. Ernest was frequently in the house, and an intimacy between him and Mrs. Amberley was a natural sequence, for you must admit that our unfortunate client has few out ward graces, whatever his inner virtues may be. The couple went off together last week\u2014destination untraced. What is more, the faithless spouse carried off the old man's deed-box as her personal luggage with a good part of his life's savings within. Can we find the lady? Can we save the money? A commonplace problem so far as it has developed, and yet a vital one for Josiah Amberley.\"\n\n\"What will you do about it?\"\n\n\"Well, the immediate question, my dear Watson, happens to be, What will you do?\u2014if you will be good enough to understudy me. You know that I am preoccupied with this case of the two Coptic Patriarchs, which should come to a head to-day. I really have not time to go out to Lewisham, and yet evidence taken on the spot has a special value. The old fellow was quite insistent that I should go, but I explained my difficulty. He is prepared to meet a representative.\"\n\n\"By all means,\" I answered. \"I confess I don't see that I can be of much service, but I am willing to do my best.\" And so it was that on a summer afternoon I set forth to Lewisham, little dreaming that within a week the affair in which I was engaging would be the eager debate of all England.\n\nIt was late that evening before I returned to Baker Street and gave an account of my mission. Holmes lay with his gaunt figure stretched in his deep chair, his pipe curling forth slow wreaths of acrid tobacco, while his eyelids drooped over his eyes so lazily that he might almost have been asleep were it not that at any halt or questionable passage of my narrative they half lifted, and two gray eyes, as bright and keen as rapiers, transfixed me with their searching glance.\n\n\"The Haven is the name of Mr. Josiah Amberley's house,\" I explained. \"I think it would interest you, Holmes. It is like some penurious patrician who has sunk into the company of his inferiors. You know that particular quarter, the monotonous brick streets, the weary suburban highways. Right in the middle of them, a little island of ancient culture and comfort, lies this old home, surrounded by a high sun-baked wall mottled with lichens and topped with moss, the sort of wall\u2014\"\n\n\"Cut out the poetry, Watson,\" said Holmes severely. \"I note that it was a high brick wall.\"\n\n\"Exactly. I should not have known which was The Haven had I not asked a lounger who was smoking in the street. I have a reason for mentioning him. He was a tall, dark, heavily moustached, rather military-looking man. He nodded in answer to my inquiry and gave me a curiously questioning glance, which came back to my memory a little later.\n\n\"I had hardly entered the gateway before I saw Mr. Amberley coming down the drive. I only had a glimpse of him this morning, and he certainly gave me the impression of a strange creature, but when I saw him in full light his appearance was even more abnormal.\"\n\n\"I have, of course, studied it, and yet I should be interested to have your impression,\" said Holmes.\n\n\"He seemed to me like a man who was literally bowed down by care. His back was curved as though he carried a heavy burden. Yet he was not the weakling that I had at first imagined, for his shoulders and chest have the framework of a giant, though his figure tapers away into a pair of spindled legs.\"\n\n\"Left shoe wrinkled, right one smooth.\"\n\n\"I did not observe that.\"\n\n\"No, you wouldn't. I spotted his artificial limb. But proceed.\"\n\n\"I was struck by the snaky locks of grizzled hair which curled from under his old straw hat, and his face with its fierce, eager expression and the deeply lined features.\"\n\n\"Very good, Watson. What did he say?\"\n\n\"He began pouring out the story of his grievances. We walked down the drive together, and of course I took a good look round. I have never seen a worse-kept place. The garden was all running to seed, giving me an impression of wild neglect in which the plants had been allowed to find the way of Nature rather than of art. How any decent woman could have tolerated such a state of things, I don't know. The house, too, was slatternly to the last degree, but the poor man seemed himself to be aware of it and to be trying to remedy it, for a great pot of green paint stood in the centre of the hall, and he was carrying a thick brush in his left hand. He had been working on the woodwork.\n\n\"He took me into his dingy sanctum, and we had a long chat. Of course, he was disappointed that you had not come yourself. 'I hardly expected,' he said, 'that so humble an individual as myself, especially after my heavy financial loss, could obtain the complete attention of so famous a man as Mr. Sherlock Holmes.'\n\n\"I assured him that the financial question did not arise. 'No, of course, it is art for art's sake with him,' said he, 'but even on the artistic side of crime he might have found something here to study. And human nature, Dr. Watson\u2014the black ingratitude of it all! When did I ever refuse one of her requests? Was ever a woman so pampered? And that young man\u2014he might have been my own son. He had the run of my house. And yet see how they have treated me! Oh, Dr. Watson, it is a dreadful, dreadful world!'\n\n\"That was the burden of his song for an hour or more. He had, it seems, no suspicion of an intrigue. They lived alone save for a woman who comes in by the day and leaves every evening at six. On that particular evening old Amberley, wishing to give his wife a treat, had taken two upper circle seats at the Haymarket Theatre. At the last moment she had complained of a headache and had refused to go. He had gone alone. There seemed to be no doubt about the fact, for he produced the unused ticket which he had taken for his wife.\"\n\n\"That is remarkable\u2014most remarkable,\" said Holmes, whose interest in the case seemed to be rising. \"Pray continue, Watson. I find your narrative most arresting. Did you personally examine this ticket? You did not, perchance, take the number?\"\n\n\"It so happens that I did,\" I answered with some pride. \"It chanced to be my old school number, thirty-one, and so is stuck in my head.\"\n\n\"Excellent, Watson! His seat, then, was either thirty or thirty-two.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" I answered with some mystification. \"And on B row.\"\n\n\"That is most satisfactory. What else did he tell you?\"\n\n\"He showed me his strong-room, as he called it. It really is a strong-room\u2014like a bank\u2014with iron door and shutter\u2014burglarproof, as he claimed. However, the woman seems to have had a duplicate key, and between them they had carried off some seven thousand pounds' worth of cash and securities.\"\n\n\"Securities! How could they dispose of those?\"\n\n\"He said that he had given the police a list and that he hoped they would be unsaleable. He had got back from the theatre about midnight and found the place plundered, the door and window open, and the fugitives gone. There was no letter or message, nor has he heard a word since. He at once gave the alarm to the police.\"\n\nHolmes brooded for some minutes.\n\n\"You say he was painting. What was he painting?\"\n\n\"Well, he was painting the passage. But he had already painted the door and woodwork of this room I spoke of.\"\n\n\"Does it not strike you as a strange occupation in the circumstances?\"\n\n\"'One must do something to ease an aching heart.' That was his own explanation. It was eccentric, no doubt, but he is clearly an eccentric man. He tore up one of his wife's photographs in my presence\u2014tore it up furiously in a tempest of passion. 'I never wish to see her damned face again,' he shrieked.\"\n\n\"Anything more, Watson?\"\n\n\"Yes, one thing which struck me more than anything else. I had driven to the Blackheath Station and had caught my train there when, just as it was starting, I saw a man dart into the carriage next to my own. You know that I have a quick eye for faces, Holmes. It was undoubtedly the tall, dark man whom I had addressed in the street. I saw him once more at London Bridge, and then I lost him in the crowd. But I am convinced that he was following me.\"\n\n\"No doubt! No doubt!\" said Holmes. \"A tall, dark, heavily moustached man, you say, with gray-tinted sun-glasses?\"\n\n\"Holmes, you are a wizard. I did not say so, but he had gray-tinted sun-glasses.\"\n\n\"And a Masonic tie-pin?\"\n\n\"Holmes!\"\n\n\"Quite simple, my dear Watson. But let us get down to what is practical. I must admit to you that the case, which seemed to me to be so absurdly simple as to be hardly worth my notice, is rapidly assuming a very different aspect. It is true that though in your mission you have missed everything of importance, yet even those things which have obtruded themselves upon your notice give rise to serious thought.\"\n\n\"What have I missed?\"\n\n\"Don't be hurt, my dear fellow. You know that I am quite impersonal. No one else would have done better. Some possibly not so well. But clearly you have missed some vital points. What is the opinion of the neighbours about this man Amberley and his wife? That surely is of importance. What of Dr. Ernest? Was he the gay Lothario one would expect? With your natural advantages, Watson, every lady is your helper and accomplice. What about the girl at the post-office, or the wife of the greengrocer? I can picture you whispering soft nothings with the young lady at the Blue Anchor, and receiving hard somethings in exchange. All this you have left undone.\"\n\n\"It can still be done.\"\n\n\"It has been done. Thanks to the telephone and the help of the Yard, I can usually get my essentials without leaving this room. As a matter of fact, my information confirms the man's story. He has the local repute of being a miser as well as a harsh and exacting husband. That he had a large sum of money in that strong-room of his is certain. So also is it that young Dr. Ernest, an unmarried man, played chess with Amberley, and probably played the fool with his wife. All this seems plain sailing, one would think that there was no more to be said\u2014and yet!\u2014and yet!\"\n\n\"Where lies the difficulty?\"\n\n\"In my imagination, perhaps. Well, leave it there, Watson. Let us escape from this weary workaday world by the side door of music. Carina sings to-night at the Albert Hall, and we have time to dress, dine, and enjoy.\"\n\nIn the morning I was up betimes, but some toast crumbs and two empty eggshells told me that my companion was earlier still. I found a scribbled note upon the table.\n\n\u2002DEAR WATSON:\n\n\u2002There are one or two points of contact which I should wish to establish with Mr. Josiah Amberley. When I have done so we can dismiss the case\u2014or not. I would only ask you to be on hand about three o'clock, as I conceive it possible that I may want you.\n\n\u2002S.H.\n\nI saw nothing of Holmes all day, but at the hour named he returned, grave, preoccupied, and aloof. At such times it was wiser to leave him to himself.\n\n\"Has Amberley been here yet?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Ah! I am expecting him.\"\n\nHe was not disappointed, for presently the old fellow arrived with a very worried and puzzled expression upon his austere face.\n\n\"I've had a telegram, Mr. Holmes. I can make nothing of it.\" He handed it over, and Holmes read it aloud.\n\n\"Come at once without fail. Can give you information as to your recent loss.\n\nELMAN.\n\nThe Vicarage.\"\n\n\"Dispatched at 2:10 from Little Purlington,\" said Holmes. \"Little Purlington is in Essex, I believe, not far from Frinton. Well, of course you will start at once. This is evidently from a responsible person, the vicar of the place. Where is my Crockford? Yes, here we have him: 'J. C. Elman, M. A., Living of Moosmoor cum Little Purlington.' Look up the trains, Watson.\"\n\n\"There is one at 5:20 from Liverpool Street.\"\n\n\"Excellent. You had best go with him, Watson. He may need help or advice. Clearly we have come to a crisis in this affair.\"\n\nBut our client seemed by no means eager to start.\n\n\"It's perfectly absurd, Mr. Holmes,\" he said. \"What can this man possibly know of what has occurred? It is waste of time and money.\"\n\n\"He would not have telegraphed to you if he did not know something. Wire at once that you are coming.\"\n\n\"I don't think I shall go.\"\n\nHolmes assumed his sternest aspect.\n\n\"It would make the worst possible impression both on the police and upon myself, Mr. Amberley, if when so obvious a clue arose you should refuse to follow it up. We should feel that you were not really in earnest in this investigation.\"\n\nOur client seemed horrified at the suggestion.\n\n\"Why, of course I shall go if you look at it in that way,\" said he. \"On the face of it, it seems absurd to suppose that this parson knows anything; but if you think\u2014\"\n\n\"I do think,\" said Holmes with emphasis, and so we were launched upon our journey. Holmes took me aside before we left the room and gave me one word of counsel, which showed that he considered the matter to be of importance. \"Whatever you do, see that he really does go,\" said he. \"Should he break away or return, get to the nearest telephone exchange and send the single word 'Bolted.' I will arrange here that it shall reach me wherever I am.\"\n\nLittle Purlington is not an easy place to reach, for it is on a branch line. My remembrance of the journey is not a pleasant one, for the weather was hot, the train slow, and my companion sullen and silent, hardly talking at all save to make an occasional sardonic remark as to the futility of our proceedings. When we at last reached the little station it was a two-mile drive before we came to the Vicarage, where a big, solemn, rather pompous clergyman received us in his study. Our telegram lay before him.\n\n\"Well, gentlemen,\" he asked, \"what can I do for you?\"\n\n\"We came,\" I explained, \"in answer to your wire.\"\n\n\"My wire! I sent no wire.\"\n\n\"I mean the wire which you sent to Mr. Josiah Amberley about his wife and his money.\"\n\n\"If this is a joke, sir, it is a very questionable one,\" said the vicar angrily. \"I have never heard of the gentleman you name, and I have not sent a wire to anyone.\"\n\nOur client and I looked at each other in amazement.\n\n\"Perhaps there is some mistake,\" said I; \"are there perhaps two vicarages? Here is the wire itself, signed Elman and dated from the Vicarage.\"\n\n\"There is only one vicarage, sir, and only one vicar, and this wire is a scandalous forgery, the origin of which shall certainly be investigated by the police. Meanwhile, I can see no possible object in prolonging this interview.\"\n\nSo Mr. Amberley and I found ourselves on the roadside in what seemed to me to be the most primitive village in England. We made for the telegraph office, but it was already closed. There was a telephone, however, at the little Railway Arms, and by it I got into touch with Holmes, who shared in our amazement at the result of our journey.\n\n\"Most singular!\" said the distant voice. \"Most remarkable! I much fear, my dear Watson, that there is no return train to-night. I have unwittingly condemned you to the horrors of a country inn. However, there is always Nature, Watson\u2014Nature and Josiah Amberley\u2014you can be in close commune with both.\" I heard his dry chuckle as he turned away.\n\nIt was soon apparent to me that my companion's reputation as a miser was not undeserved. He had grumbled at the expense of the journey, had insisted upon travelling third-class, and was now clamorous in his objections to the hotel bill. Next morning, when we did at last arrive in London, it was hard to say which of us was in the worse humour.\n\n\"You had best take Baker Street as we pass,\" said I. \"Mr. Holmes may have some fresh instructions.\"\n\n\"If they are not worth more than the last ones they are not of much use,\" said Amberley with a malevolent scowl. None the less, he kept me company. I had already warned Holmes by telegram of the hour of our arrival, but we found a message waiting that he was at Lewisham and would expect us there. That was a surprise, but an even greater one was to find that he was not alone in the sitting-room of our client. A stern-looking, impassive man sat beside him, a dark man with gray-tinted glasses and a large Masonic pin projecting from his tie.\n\n\"This is my friend Mr. Barker,\" said Holmes. \"He has been interesting himself also in your business, Mr. Josiah Amberley, though we have been working independently. But we both have the same question to ask you!\"\n\nMr. Amberley sat down heavily. He sensed impending danger. I read it in his straining eyes and his twitching features.\n\n\"What is the question, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Only this: What did you do with the bodies?\"\n\nThe man sprang to his feet with a hoarse scream. He clawed into the air with his bony hands. His mouth was open, and for the instant he looked like some horrible bird of prey. In a flash we got a glimpse of the real Josiah Amberley, a misshapen demon with a soul as distorted as his body. As he fell back into his chair he clapped his hand to his lips as if to stifle a cough. Holmes sprang at his throat like a tiger and twisted his face towards the ground. A white pellet fell from between his gasping lips.\n\n\"No short cuts, Josiah Amberley. Things must be done decently and in order. What about it, Barker?\"\n\n\"I have a cab at the door,\" said our taciturn companion.\n\n\"It is only a few hundred yards to the station. We will go together. You can stay here, Watson. I shall be back within half an hour.\"\n\nThe old colourman had the strength of a lion in that great trunk of his, but he was helpless in the hands of the two experienced man-handlers. Wriggling and twisting he was dragged to the waiting cab, and I was left to my solitary vigil in the ill-omened house. In less time than he had named, however, Holmes was back, in company with a smart young police inspector.\n\n\"I've left Barker to look after the formalities,\" said Holmes. \"You had not met Barker, Watson. He is my hated rival upon the Surrey shore. When you said a tall dark man it was not difficult for me to complete the picture. He has several good cases to his credit, has he not, Inspector?\"\n\n\"He has certainly interfered several times,\" the inspector answered with reserve.\n\n\"His methods are irregular, no doubt, like my own. The irregulars are useful sometimes, you know. You, for example, with your compulsory warning about whatever he said being used against him, could never have bluffed this rascal into what is virtually a confession.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not. But we get there all the same, Mr. Holmes. Don't imagine that we had not formed our own views of this case, and that we would not have laid our hands on our man. You will excuse us for feeling sore when you jump in with methods which we cannot use, and so rob us of the credit.\"\n\n\"There shall be no such robbery, MacKinnon. I assure you that I efface myself from now onward, and as to Barker, he has done nothing save what I told him.\"\n\nThe inspector seemed considerably relieved.\n\n\"That is very handsome of you, Mr. Holmes. Praise or blame can matter little to you, but it is very different to us when the newspapers begin to ask questions.\"\n\n\"Quite so. But they are pretty sure to ask questions anyhow, so it would be as well to have answers. What will you say, for example, when the intelligent and enterprising reporter asks you what the exact points were which aroused your suspicion, and finally gave you a certain conviction as to the real facts?\"\n\nThe inspector looked puzzled.\n\n\"We don't seem to have got any real facts yet, Mr. Holmes. You say that the prisoner, in the presence of three witnesses, practically confessed by trying to commit suicide, that he had murdered his wife and her lover. What other facts have you?\"\n\n\"Have you arranged for a search?\"\n\n\"There are three constables on their way.\"\n\n\"Then you will soon get the clearest fact of all. The bodies cannot be far away. Try the cellars and the garden. It should not take long to dig up the likely places. This house is older than the water-pipes. There must be a disused well somewhere. Try your luck there.\"\n\n\"But how did you know of it, and how was it done?\"\n\n\"I'll show you first how it was done, and then I will give the explanation which is due to you, and even more to my long-suffering friend here, who has been invaluable throughout. But, first, I would give you an insight into this man's mentality. It is a very unusual one\u2014so much so that I think his destination is more likely to be Broadmoor than the scaffold. He has, to a high degree, the sort of mind which one associates with the medi\u00e6val Italian nature rather than with the modern Briton. He was a miserable miser who made his wife so wretched by his niggardly ways that she was a ready prey for any adventurer. Such a one came upon the scene in the person of this chess-playing doctor. Amberley excelled at chess\u2014one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind. Like all misers, he was a jealous man, and his jealousy became a frantic mania. Rightly or wrongly, he suspected an intrigue. He determined to have his revenge, and he planned it with diabolical cleverness. Come here!\"\n\nHolmes led us along the passage with as much certainty as if he had lived in the house and halted at the open door of the strong-room.\n\n\"Pooh! What an awful smell of paint!\" cried the inspector.\n\n\"That was our first clue,\" said Holmes. \"You can thank Dr. Watson's observation for that, though he failed to draw the inference. It set my foot upon the trail. Why should this man at such a time be filling his house with strong odours? Obviously, to cover some other smell which he wished to conceal\u2014some guilty smell which would suggest suspicions. Then came the idea of a room such as you see here with iron door and shutter\u2014a hermetically sealed room. Put those two facts together, and whither do they lead? I could only determine that by examining the house myself. I was already certain that the case was serious, for I had examined the box-office chart at the Haymarket Theatre\u2014another of Dr. Watson's bull's-eyes\u2014and ascertained that neither B thirty nor thirty-two of the upper circle had been occupied that night. Therefore, Amberley had not been to the theatre, and his alibi fell to the ground. He made a bad slip when he allowed my astute friend to notice the number of the seat taken for his wife. The question now arose how I might be able to examine the house. I sent an agent to the most impossible village I could think of, and summoned my man to it at such an hour that he could not possibly get back. To prevent any miscarriage, Dr. Watson accompanied him. The good vicar's name I took, of course, out of my Crockford. Do I make it all clear to you?\"\n\n\"It is masterly,\" said the inspector in an awed voice.\n\n\"There being no fear of interruption I proceeded to burgle the house. Burglary has always been an alternative profession had I cared to adopt it, and I have little doubt that I should have come to the front. Observe what I found. You see the gas-pipe along the skirting here. Very good. It rises in the angle of the wall, and there is a tap here in the corner. The pipe runs out into the strong-room, as you can see, and ends in that plaster rose in the centre of the ceiling, where it is concealed by the ornamentation. That end is wide open. At any moment by turning the outside tap the room could be flooded with gas. With door and shutter closed and the tap full on I would not give two minutes of conscious sensation to anyone shut up in that little chamber. By what devilish device he decoyed them there I do not know, but once inside the door they were at his mercy.\"\n\nThe inspector examined the pipe with interest. \"One of our officers mentioned the smell of gas,\" said he, \"but of course the window and door were open then, and the paint\u2014or some of it\u2014was already about. He had begun the work of painting the day before, according to his story. But what next, Mr. Holmes?\"\n\n\"Well, then came an incident which was rather unexpected to myself. I was slipping through the pantry window in the early dawn when I felt a hand inside my collar, and a voice said: 'Now, you rascal, what are you doing in there?' When I could twist my head round I looked into the tinted spectacles of my friend and rival, Mr. Barker. It was a curious foregathering and set us both smiling. It seems that he had been engaged by Dr. Ray Ernest's family to make some investigations and had come to the same conclusion as to foul play. He had watched the house for some days and had spotted Dr. Watson as one of the obviously suspicious characters who had called there. He could hardly arrest Watson, but when he saw a man actually climbing out of the pantry window there came a limit to his restraint. Of course, I told him how matters stood and we continued the case together.\"\n\n\"Why him? Why not us?\"\n\n\"Because it was in my mind to put that little test which answered so admirably. I fear you would not have gone so far.\"\n\nThe inspector smiled.\n\n\"Well, maybe not. I understand that I have your word, Mr. Holmes, that you step right out of the case now and that you turn all your results over to us.\"\n\n\"Certainly, that is always my custom.\"\n\n\"Well, in the name of the force I thank you. It seems a clear case, as you put it, and there can't be much difficulty over the bodies.\"\n\n\"I'll show you a grim little bit of evidence,\" said Holmes, \"and I am sure Amberley himself never observed it. You'll get results, Inspector, by always putting yourself in the other fellow's place, and thinking what you would do yourself. It takes some imagination, but it pays. Now, we will suppose that you were shut up in this little room, had not two minutes to live, but wanted to get even with the fiend who was probably mocking at you from the other side of the door. What would you do?\"\n\n\"Write a message.\"\n\n\"Exactly. You would like to tell people how you died. No use writing on paper. That would be seen. If you wrote on the wall someone might rest upon it. Now, look here! Just above the skirting is scribbled with a purple indelible pencil: 'We we\u2014' That's all.\"\n\n\"What do you make of that?\"\n\n\"Well, it's only a foot above the ground. The poor devil was on the floor dying when he wrote it. He lost his senses before he could finish.\"\n\n\"He was writing, 'We were murdered.'\"\n\n\"That's how I read it. If you find an indelible pencil on the body\u2014\"\n\n\"We'll look out for it, you may be sure. But those securities? Clearly there was no robbery at all. And yet he did possess those bonds. We verified that.\"\n\n\"You may be sure he has them hidden in a safe place. When the whole elopement had passed into history, he would suddenly discover them and announce that the guilty couple had relented and sent back the plunder or had dropped it on the way.\"\n\n\"You certainly seem to have met every difficulty,\" said the inspector. \"Of course, he was bound to call us in, but why he should have gone to you I can't understand.\"\n\n\"Pure swank!\" Holmes answered. \"He felt so clever and so sure of himself that he imagined no one could touch him. He could say to any suspicious neighbour, 'Look at the steps I have taken. I have consulted not only the police but even Sherlock Holmes.'\"\n\nThe inspector laughed.\n\n\"We must forgive you your 'even,' Mr. Holmes,\" said he, \"it's as workmanlike a job as I can remember.\"\n\nA couple of days later my friend tossed across to me a copy of the biweekly North Surrey Observer. Under a series of flaming headlines, which began with \"The Haven Horror\" and ended with \"Brilliant Police Investigation,\" there was a packed column of print which gave the first consecutive account of the affair. The concluding paragraph is typical of the whole. It ran thus:\n\nThe remarkable acumen by which Inspector MacKinnon deduced from the smell of paint that some other smell, that of gas, for example, might be concealed; the bold deduction that the strong-room might also be the death-chamber, and the subsequent inquiry which led to the discovery of the bodies in a disused well, cleverly concealed by a dog-kennel, should live in the history of crime as a standing example of the intelligence of our professional detectives.\n\n\"Well, well, MacKinnon is a good fellow,\" said Holmes with a tolerant smile. \"You can file it in our archives, Watson. Some day the true story may be told.\"" + }, + { + "title": "TWO PARODIES BY SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE", + "text": "[ AN INTRODUCTION TO DOYLE'S PARODIES ]\n\nFrom nearly the very beginning of his existence, Sherlock Holmes has been the subject of parodies and spoofs. Arthur Conan Doyle himself took comic aim at his best-known creation in two of the better mock adventures. He contributed the first, \"The Field Bazaar: A Short Travesty,\" in 1896 to The Student, a publication at his alma mater, the University of Edinburgh, as a good-humored gift from a famed alumnus. The story was written between the time Holmes apparently had met his end in \"The Final Problem\" in 1893 and his \"resurrection\" in \"The Empty House\" in 1903. Can you detect any clue to the author's feelings about reviving Holmes in this delightful little mind-reading caper?\n\nThe second, \"How Watson Learned the Trick,\" was published in 1924, near the end of the Holmes cycle. It seems to counter an implied belief that the methods Holmes used to solve his crimes were not so hard to fathom, once you saw the predictable pattern at work in most of the stories: \"Oh, yeah? Let's see if you can do it!\"" + }, + { + "title": "TWO PARODIES BY SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE", + "text": "[ THE FIELD BAZAAR ]\n\n\"I should certainly do it,\" said Sherlock Holmes.\n\nI started at the interruption, for my companion had been eating his breakfast with his attention entirely centred upon the paper which was propped up by the coffee pot. Now I looked across at him to find his eyes fastened upon me with the half-amused, half-questioning expression which he usually assumed when he felt that he had made an intellectual point.\n\n\"Do what?\" I asked.\n\nHe smiled as he took his slipper from the mantelpiece and drew from it enough shag tobacco to fill the old clay pipe with which he invariably rounded off his breakfast.\n\n\"A most characteristic question of yours, Watson,\" said he. \"You will not, I am sure, be offended if I say that any reputation for sharpness which I may possess has been entirely gained by the admirable foil which you have made for me. Have I not heard of debutantes who have insisted upon plainness in their chaperones? There is a certain analogy.\"\n\nOur long companionship in the Baker Street rooms had left us on those easy terms of intimacy when much may be said without offence. And yet I acknowledge that I was nettled at his remark.\n\n\"I may be very obtuse,\" said I, \"but I confess that I am unable to see how you have managed to know that I was... I was...\"\n\n\"Asked to help in the Edinburgh University Bazaar.\"\n\n\"Precisely. The letter has only just come to hand, and I have not spoken to you since.\"\n\n\"In spite of that,\" said Holmes, leaning back in his chair and putting his finger tips together, \"I would even venture to suggest that the object of the bazaar is to enlarge the University cricket field.\"\n\nI looked at him in such bewilderment that he vibrated with silent laughter.\n\n\"The fact is, my dear Watson, that you are an excellent subject,\" said he. \"You are never blas\u00e9. You respond instantly to any external stimulus. Your mental processes may be slow but they are never obscure, and I found during breakfast that you were easier reading than the leader in the Times in front of me.\"\n\n\"I should be glad to know how you arrived at your conclusions,\" said I.\n\n\"I fear that my good nature in giving explanations has seriously compromised my reputation,\" said Holmes. \"But in this case the train of reasoning is based upon such obvious facts that no credit can be claimed for it. You entered the room with a thoughtful expression, the expression of a man who is debating some point in his mind. In your hand you held a solitary letter. Now last night you retired in the best of spirits, so it was clear that it was this letter in your hand which had caused the change in you.\"\n\n\"This is obvious.\"\n\n\"It is all obvious when it is explained to you. I naturally asked myself what the letter could contain which might have this effect upon you. As you walked you held the flap side of the envelope towards me, and I saw upon it the same shield-shaped device which I have observed upon your old college cricket cap. It was clear, then, that the request came from Edinburgh University\u2014or from some club connected with the University. When you reached the table you laid down the letter beside your plate with the address uppermost, and you walked over to look at the framed photograph upon the left of the mantelpiece.\"\n\nIt amazed me to see the accuracy with which he had observed my movements. \"What next?\" I asked.\n\n\"I began by glancing at the address, and I could tell, even at the distance of six feet, that it was an unofficial communication. This I gathered from the use of the word \"Doctor\" upon the address, to which, as a Bachelor of Medicine, you have no legal claim. I knew that University officials are pedantic in their correct use of titles, and I was thus enabled to say with certainty that your letter was unofficial. When on your return to the table you turned over your letter and allowed me to perceive that the enclosure was a printed one, the idea of a bazaar first occurred to me. I had already weighed the possibility of its being a political communication, but this seemed improbable in the present stagnant conditions of politics.\n\n\"When you returned to the table your face still retained its expression and it was evident that your examination of the photograph had not changed the current of your thoughts. In that case it must itself bear upon the subject in question. I turned my attention to the photograph, therefore, and saw at once that it consisted of yourself as a member of the Edinburgh University Eleven, with the pavilion and cricket-field in the background. My small experience of cricket clubs has taught me that next to churches and cavalry ensigns they are the most debt-laden things upon earth. When upon your return to the table I saw you take out your pencil and draw lines upon the envelope, I was convinced that you were endeavouring to realize some projected improvement which was to be brought about by a bazaar. Your face still showed some indecision, so that I was able to break in upon you with my advice that you should assist in so good an object.\"\n\nI could not help smiling at the extreme simplicity of his explanation.\n\n\"Of course, it was as easy as possible,\" said I.\n\nMy remark appeared to nettle him.\n\n\"I may add,\" said he, \"that the particular help which you have been asked to give was that you should write in their album, and that you have already made up your mind that the present incident will be the subject of your article.\"\n\n\"But how\u2014!\" I cried.\n\n\"It is as easy as possible,\" said he, \"and I leave its solution to your own ingenuity. In the meantime,\" he added, raising his paper, \"you will excuse me if I return to this very interesting article upon the trees of Cremona, and the exact reasons for their pre-eminence in the manufacture of violins. It is one of those small outlying problems to which I am sometimes tempted to direct my attention.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW WATSON LEARNED THE TRICK", + "text": "Watson had been watching his companion intently ever since he had sat down to the breakfast table. Holmes happened to look up and catch his eye.\n\n\"Well, Watson, what are you thinking about?\" he asked.\n\n\"About you.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes, Holmes, I was thinking how superficial are these tricks of yours, and how wonderful it is that the public should continue to show interest in them.\"\n\n\"I quite agree,\" said Holmes. \"In fact, I have a recollection that I have myself made a similar remark.\"\n\n\"Your methods,\" said Watson severely, \"are really easily acquired.\"\n\n\"No doubt,\" Holmes answered with a smile. \"Perhaps you will yourself give an example of this method of reasoning.\"\n\n\"With pleasure,\" said Watson. \"I am able to say that you were greatly preoccupied when you got up this morning.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said Holmes. \"How could you possibly know that?\"\n\n\"Because you are usually a very tidy man and yet you have forgotten to shave.\"\n\n\"Dear me! How very clever!\" said Holmes, \"I had no idea, Watson, that you were so apt a pupil. Has your eagle eye detected anything more?\"\n\n\"Yes, Holmes. You have a client named Barlow, and you have not been successful in his case.\"\n\n\"Dear me, how could you know that?\"\n\n\"I saw the name outside his envelope. When you opened it you gave a groan and thrust it into your pocket with a frown on your face.\"\n\n\"Admirable! You are indeed observant. Any other points?\"\n\n\"I fear, Holmes, that you have taken to financial speculation.\"\n\n\"How could you tell that, Watson?\"\n\n\"You opened the paper, turned to the financial page, and gave a loud exclamation of interest.\"\n\n\"Well, that is very clever of you Watson. Any more?\"\n\n\"Yes, Holmes, you have put on your black coat, instead of your dressing gown, which proves that you are expecting some important visitor at once.\"\n\n\"Anything more?\"\n\n\"I have no doubt that I could find other points, Holmes, but I only give you these few, in order to show you that there are other people in the world who can be as clever as you.\"\n\n\"And some not so clever,\" said Holmes. \"I admit that they are few, but I am afraid, my dear Watson, that I must count you among them.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Holmes?\"\n\n\"Well, my dear fellow, I fear your deductions have not been so happy as I should have wished.\"\n\n\"You mean that I was mistaken.\"\n\n\"Just a little that way, I fear. Let us take the points in their order: I did not shave because I have sent my razor to be sharpened. I put on my coat because I have, worse luck, an early meeting with my dentist. His name is Barlow, and the letter was to confirm the appointment. The cricket page is beside the financial one, and I turned to it to find if Surrey was holding its own against Kent. But go on, Watson, go on! It's a very superficial trick, and no doubt you will soon acquire it.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ COLLIER'S The National Weekly 29 DECEMBER 1923 ]\n\nIt was in October, 1876 that I began my medical course at the University of Edinburgh. The most notable of the characters whom I met was one Joseph Bell, surgeon at the Edinburgh Infirmary. Bell was a very remarkable man in body and mind. He was thin, wiry, dark with a high-nosed, acute face, penetrating grey eyes, angular shoulders, and a jerky way of walking. His voice was high and discordant. He was a very skilful surgeon, but his strong point was diagnosis, not only of disease, but of occupation and character. For some reason which I have never understood he singled me out from the drove of students who frequented his wards and made me his out-patient clerk, which meant that I had to array his out-patients, make simple notes of their cases, and then show them in, one by one, to the large room in which Bell sat in state surrounded by his dressers and students. Then I had ample chance of studying his methods and in noticing that he often learned more of the patient by a few quick glances than I had done by my questions. Occasionally the results were very dramatic, though there were times when he blundered. In one of his best cases he said to a civilian patient:\n\n\"Well, my man, you've served in the army?\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\"\n\n\"Not long discharged?\"\n\n\"No sir.\"\n\n\"A Highland regiment?\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\"\n\n\"A noncom officer?\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\"\n\n\"Stationed at Barbados?\"\n\n\"Aye, sir.\"\n\n\"You see, gentlemen,\" he would explain, \"the man was a respectful man, but did not remove his hat. They do not in the army, but he would have learned civilian ways had he been long discharged. He has an air of authority and he is obviously Scottish. As to Barbados, his complaint is elephantiasis, which is West Indian and not British.\" To his audience of Watsons it all seemed most miraculous until it was explained, and then it became simple enough. It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal. Bell took a keen interest in these detective tales and made suggestions, which were not, I am bound to say, very practical.\n\n[ The Twopenny Box ]\n\nI endeavoured almost from the first to compress the classes for a year into half a year, so as to have some months in which to earn a little money. It was at this time that I first learned that shillings might be earned in other ways than by filling phials. Some friend remarked to me that my letters were very vivid, and surely I could write some things to sell. I may say that the general aspiration toward literature was tremendously strong upon me, and that my mind was reaching out in what seemed an aimless way in all sorts of directions. I used to be allowed twopence for my lunch, that being the price of a mutton pie, but near the pie shop was a second-hand bookshop with a barrel full of old books and the legend, \"Your choice for 2d,\" stuck above it. Often the price of my luncheon used to be spent on some sample out of this barrel, and I have within reach of my arm, as I write these lines, copies of Gordon's Tacitus, Temple's works, Pope's Homer, Addison's Spectator and Swift's works, which all came out of the twopenny box.\n\nAnyone observing my actions and tastes would have said that so strong a spring would certainly overflow, but for my own part I never dreamed I could myself produce decent prose, and the remark of my friend, who was by no means given to flattery, took me greatly by sur prise. I sat down, however, and I wrote a little adventure story which I called \"The Mystery of the Sasassa Valley.\" To my great joy and surprise, it was accepted by Chambers's Journal, and I received three guineas. It mattered not that other attempts failed. I had done it once and I cheered myself by the thought that I could do it again.\n\nUpon emerging from Edinburgh as a bachelor of medicine in 1881, my plans were all exceedingly fluid and I was ready to join army, navy, Indian service, or anything which offered an opening. But after taking a trip in a cargo vessel along the west coast of Africa, I finally settled down to practice in Plymouth.\n\nI had at this time contributed several stories to London Society, a magazine now defunct, but then flourishing under the editorship of a Mr. Hogg. It had never entered my head yet that literature might give me a career, or anything beyond a little casual pocket money, but already it was a deciding factor in my life, for I could not have held on, and must have either starved or given in but for the few pounds which Mr. Hogg sent me.\n\nDuring the years before my marriage I had from time to time written short stories which were good enough to be marketable at very small prices\u2014five pounds on average\u2014but not good enough to reproduce. They are scattered about amid the pages of London Society, of All the Year Round, of Temple Bar, the Boys' Own Paper and other journals. There let them lie. They served their purpose in relieving me of a little of that financial burden which always pressed upon me. I can hardly have earned more than ten or fifteen pounds a year from this source, so that the idea of making a living by it never occurred to me. But though I was not putting out, I was taking in. I still have notebooks full of all sorts of knowledge which I acquired during that time. It is a great mistake to start putting out cargo when you have hardly stowed any on board.\n\n[ Enter Holmes and Watson ]\n\nI had for some time from 1884 onward been engaged upon a sensational book of adventure which I had called The Firm of Girdlestone, which represented my first attempt at a connected narrative. Save for occasional patches, it is a worthless book. I felt now that I was capable of something cleaner and crisper and more workmanlike. Gaboriau had rather attracted me by the neat dovetailing of his plots, and Poe's masterful detective, M. Dupin, had from boyhood been one of my heroes. But could I bring an addition of my own? I thought of my old teacher Joe Bell, of his eagle face, of his curious ways, of his eerie trick of spotting details. If he were a detective he would surely reduce this fascinating but unorganized business to something nearer to an exact science. I would try if I could get this effect. It was surely possible in real life, so why should I not make it plausible in fiction? It is all very well to say that a man is clever, but the reader wants to see examples of it\u2014such examples as Bell gave us every day in the wards.\n\nThe idea amused me. What should I call the fellow? I still possess the leaf of a notebook with various alternative names. One rebelled against the elementary art which gives some inkling of character in the name, and creates Mr. Sharps or Mr. Ferrets. First it was Sherringford Holmes; then it was Sherlock Holmes. He could not tell his own exploits, so he must have a commonplace comrade as a foil\u2014an educated man of action who could both join in the exploits and narrate them. A drab, quiet name for this unostentatious man. Watson would do. And so I had my purpose and wrote my Study in Scarlet.\n\nI knew that the book was as good as I could make it and I had high hopes. When Girdlestone used to come circling back with the precision of a homing pigeon I was grieved but not surprised, for I acquiesced in the decision. But when my little Holmes book began also to do the circular tour I was hurt, for I knew that it deserved a better fate. James Payn applauded, but found it both too short and too long, which was true enough. Arrowsmith received it in May 1886, and returned it unread in July. Two or three others sniffed and turned away. Finally, as Ward, Lock & Co. made a specialty of cheap and often sensational literature, I sent it to them. They said:\n\n\u2002DEAR SIR\u2014We have read your story and are pleased with it. We could not publish it this year, as the market is flooded at present with cheap fiction, but if you do not object to its being held over till next year, we will give you twenty-five pounds for the copyright.\n\n\u2002Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002WARD, LOCK & CO.\n\n\u2002Oct. 30, 1886.\n\nIt was not a very tempting offer, and even I, poor as I was, hesitated to accept it. It was not merely the small sum offered, but it was the long delay, for this book might open a road for me. I was heartsick, however, at repeated disappointments, and I felt that perhaps it was true wisdom to make sure of publicity, however late. Therefore I accepted, and the book became Beeton's Christmas Annual of 1887.\n\nIt was in consequence of a publishers' dinner, at which I was a guest, that I wrote The Sign of the Four, in which Holmes made his second appearance. But thereafter for a time he was laid on the shelf, for, encouraged by the kind reception which \"Micah Clarke\" had received from the critics, I now determined upon an even bolder and more ambitious flight.\n\nHence came my two books. The White Company, written in 1889, and Sir Nigel, written fourteen years later. Of the two I consider the latter the better book, but I have no hesitation in saying that the two of them taken together did thoroughly achieve my purpose, that they made an accurate picture of that great age, and that, as a single piece of work, they form the most complete, satisfying, and ambitious thing that I have ever done. All things find their level, but I believe that if I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one. *The work needed much research and I have still got my notebooks full of all sorts of lore. I cultivate a simple style and avoid long words so far as possible, and it may be that this surface of ease has sometimes caused the reader to underrate the amount of real research which lies in all my historical novels. It is not a matter which troubles me, however, for I have always felt that justice is done in the end, and that the real merit of any work is never permanently lost.\n\nI remember that as I wrote the last words of The White Company I felt a wave of exultation and, with a cry of \"That's done it!\" I hurled my inky pen across the room, where it left a black smudge upon the duck's-egg wall paper. I knew in my heart that the book would live and that it would illuminate our national traditions. Now that it has passed through fifty editions I suppose I may say with all modesty that my forecast has proved to be correct. This was the last book which I wrote in my days of doctoring at Southsea, and marks an epoch in my life, so I can now hark back to some other phases of my last years at Bush Villa before I broke away into a new existence.\n\nA number of monthly magazines were coming out at that time, notable among which was the Strand then, as now, under the very able editorship of Greenhough Smith. Considering these various journals with their disconnected stories, it had struck me that a single character running through a series, if only it engaged the attention of the reader, would bind that reader to that particular magazine.\n\nLooking round for my central character, I felt that Sherlock Holmes, whom I had already handled in two little books, would easily lend himself to a succession of short stories. These I began in the long hours of waiting in my consulting room. Smith liked them from the first, and encouraged me to go ahead with them.\n\nIt was at this time that I definitely saw how foolish I was to waste my literary earnings in keeping up an oculist's room in Wimpole Street, and I determined with a wild rush of joy to cut the painter and to trust forever to my power of writing. So I settled down with a stout heart to do some literary work worthy of the name. The difficulty of the Holmes work was that every story really needed as clear-cut and original a plot as a longish book would do. One cannot without effort spin plots at such a rate. They are apt to become thin or to break. I was determined, now that I had no longer the excuse of absolute pecuniary pressure, never again to write anything which was not as good as I could possibly make it, and therefore I would not write a Holmes story without a worthy plot and without a problem which interested my own mind, for that is the first requisite before you can interest anyone else. If I have been able to sustain this character for a long time, and if the public find, as they will find, that the last story is as good as the first, it is entirely due to the fact that I never, or hardly ever, forced a story. Some have thought there was a falling off in the stories, and the criticism was neatly expressed by a Cornish boatman who said to me, \"I think, sir, when Holmes fell over that cliff, he may not have killed himself, but all the same he was never quite the same man afterwards.\"\n\nI was weary, however, of inventing plots and I set myself now to do some work which would certainly be less renumerative but would be more ambitious from a literary point of view. I had long been attracted by the epoch of Louis XIV and by those Huguenots who were the French equivalents of our Puritans. I had a good knowledge of the memoirs of that date, and many notes already prepared, so that it did not take me long to write The Refugees.\n\nYet it was still the Sherlock Holmes stories for which the public clamoured, and these from time to time I endeavoured to supply. At last, after I had done two series of them, I saw that I was in danger of having my hand forced, and of being entirely identified with what I regarded as a lower stratum of literary achievement. Therefore, as a sign of my resolution, I determined to end the life of my hero. The idea was in my mind when I went with my wife for a short holiday in Switzerland, in the course of which we walked down the Lauterbrunnen Valley. I saw there the wonderful falls of Reichenbach, a terrible place, and that, I thought, would make a worthy tomb for poor Sherlock, even if I buried my banking account along with him. So there I laid him, fully determined that he should stay there\u2014as indeed for some twenty years he did.\n\nI was amazed at the concern expressed by the public. They say that a man is never properly appreciated until he is dead, and the general protest against my summary execution of Holmes taught me how many and how numerous were his friends. \"You brute\" was the beginning of the letter of remonstrance which one lady sent me, and I expect she spoke for others beside herself. I heard of many who wept. I fear I was utterly callous myself.\n\nJames Barrie is one of my oldest literary friends, and I knew him within a year or two of the time when we both came to London. He and I had one most unfortunate venture together. The facts were that he had promised Mr D'Oyly Carte that he would provide the libretto of a light opera for the Savoy. I was brought into the matter because Barrie's health failed on account of some family bereavement. I had an urgent telegram from him. I found him worried because he had bound himself by contract, and he felt in his present state unable to go forward with it. There were to be two acts, and he had written the first one, and had the rough scenario of the second. Would I come in with him and help him to complete it as part author? I did my best and wrote the lyrics for the second act, and much of the dialogue, but it had to take the predestined shape. The result was not good, and on the first night I felt inclined, like Charles Lamb, to hiss it from my box. The opera, Jane Annie, was one of the few failures in Barrie's brilliant career. We were well abused by the critics, but Barrie took it all in the bravest spirit, and I still retain the comic verses of consolation which I received from him next morning.\n\nThere followed a parody on Holmes, written on the flyleaves of one one of his books. It ran thus:\n\n[ The Adventure of the Two Collaborators ]\n\nIn bringing to a close the adventures of my friend Sherlock Holmes I am perforce reminded that he never, save on the occasion which, as you will now hear, brought his singular career to an end, consented to act in any mystery which was concerned with persons who made a livelihood by their pen. \"I am not particular about the people I mix among for business purposes,\" he would say, \"but at literary characters I draw the line.\"\n\nWe were in our rooms in Baker Street one evening. I was (I remember) by the centre table writing out \"The Adventure of the Man Without a Cork Leg\" (which had so puzzled the Royal Society and all the other scientific bodies of Europe), and Holmes was amusing himself with a little revolver practice.\n\nIt was his custom of a summer evening to fire round my head, just shaving my face, until he had made a photograph of me on the opposite wall, and it is a slight proof of his skill that many of these portraits in pistol shots are considered admirable likenesses.\n\nI happened to look out of the window, and, perceiving two gentlemen advancing rapidly along Baker Street, asked him who they were. He immediately lit his pipe, and, twisting himself on a chair into a figure 8, replied:\n\n\"They are two collaborators in comic opera, and their play has not been a triumph.\"\n\nI sprang from my chair to the ceiling in amazement, and he then explained:\n\n\"My dear Watson, they are obviously men who follow some low calling. That much even you should be able to read in their faces. Those little pieces of blue paper which they fling angrily from them are Durrant's Press Notices. Of these they have obviously hundreds about their person (see how their pockets bulge). They would not dance on them if they were pleasant reading.\"\n\nI again sprang to the ceiling (which is much dented) and shouted: \"Amazing! But they may be mere authors.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Holmes, \"for mere authors only get one press notice a week. Only criminals, dramatists, and actors get them by the hundred.\"\n\n\"Then they may be actors.\"\n\n\"No, actors would come in a carriage.\"\n\n\"Can you tell me anything else about them?\"\n\n\"A great deal. From the mud on the boots of the tall one I perceive that he comes from South Norwood. The other is obviously a Scotch author.\"\n\n\"How can you tell that?\"\n\n\"He is carrying in his pocket a book called (I clearly see) 'Auld Licht Something.' Would anyone but the author be likely to carry about a book with such a title?\"\n\nI had to confess that this was improbable.\n\nIt was now evident that the two men (if such they can be called) were seeking our lodgings. I have said (often) that Holmes seldom gave way to emotion of any kind, but he now turned livid with passion. Presently this gave place to a strange look of triumph.\n\n\"Watson,\" he said, \"that big fellow has for years taken the credit for my most remarkable doings, but at last I have him\u2014at last!\"\n\nUp I went to the ceiling, and when I returned the strangers were in the room.\n\n\"I perceive, gentlemen,\" said Mr. Sherlock Holmes, \"that you are at present afflicted by an extraordinary novelty.\"\n\nThe handsomer of our visitors asked in amazement how he knew this, but the big one only scowled.\n\n\"You forget that you wear a ring on your fourth finger,\" replied Mr. Holmes calmly.\n\nI was about to jump to the ceiling when the big brute interposed.\n\n\"That tommyrot is all very well for the public, Holmes,\" said he, \"but you can drop it before me. And, Watson, if you go up to the ceiling again I shall make you stay there.\"\n\nHere I observed a curious phenomenon. My friend Sherlock Holmes shrank. He became small before my eyes. I looked longingly at the ceiling, but dared not.\n\n\"Let us cut out the first four pages,\" said the big man, \"and proceed to business. I want to know why\u2014\"\n\n\"Allow me,\" said Mr. Holmes, with some of his old courage. \"You want to know why the public does not go to your opera.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said the other ironically, \"as you perceive by my shirt stud.\" He added more gravely: \"And as you can only find out in one way I must insist on your witnessing an entire performance of the piece.\"\n\nIt was an anxious moment for me. I shuddered, for I knew that if Holmes went I should have to go with him. But my friend had a heart of gold. \"Never!\" he cried fiercely. \"I will do anything for you save that.\"\n\n\"Your continued existence depends on it,\" said the big man menacingly.\n\n\"I would rather melt into air,\" replied Holmes proudly, taking another chair. \"But I can tell you why the public don't go to your piece without sitting the thing out myself.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because,\" replied Holmes calmly, \"they prefer to stay away.\"\n\nA dead silence followed that extraordinary remark. For a moment the two intruders gazed with awe upon the man who had unravelled their mystery so wonderfully. Then, drawing their knives\u2014\n\nHolmes grew less and less, until nothing was left save a ring of smoke which slowly circled to the ceiling.\n\nThe last words of great men are often noteworthy. These were the last words of Sherlock Holmes: \"Fool, fool! I have kept you in luxury for years. By my help you have ridden extensively in cabs where no author was ever seen before. Henceforth you will ride in buses!\"\n\nThe brute sank into a chair aghast. The other author did not turn a hair.\n\n\u2002To A. Conan Doyle,\n\n\u2002From his friend, J. M. BARRIE.\n\n[ Dangerous Ground ]\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Critic and the Snake ]\n\nThe impression that Holmes was a real person of flesh and blood may have been intensified by his frequent appearance upon the stage. After the withdrawal of my dramatization of \"Rodney Stone\" from a theatre upon which I held a six months' lease I determined to play a bold and energetic game and certainly I never played a bolder. When I saw the course that things were taking I shut myself up and devoted my whole mind to making a sensational Sherlock Holmes drama. I wrote it in a week and called it \"The Speckled Band,\" after the short story of that name. I do not think that I exaggerate if I say that within a fortnight of the one play shutting down I had a company working upon the rehearsals of the other. It was a considerable success.\n\nWe had a fine boa to play the title role, a snake which was the pride of my heart, so one can imagine my disgust when I saw that the critic of the Daily Telegraph ended his disparaging review by the words: \"The crisis of the play was produced by the appearance of a palpably artificial serpent.\" I was inclined to offer him a goodly sum if he would undertake to go to bed with it. We had several snakes at different times, but they were all inclined either to hang down from the hole in the wall like inanimate bell pulls, or else to turn back through the hole and get even with the stage carpenter, who pinched their tails in order to make them more lively. Finally we used artificial snakes, and everyone, including the stage carpenter, agreed that it was more satisfactory.\n\nI have had many letters addressed to Holmes with requests that I forward them. Watson has also had a number of letters in which he has been asked for the address or for the autograph of his more brilliant confr\u00e8re. A press-cutting agency wrote to Watson asking whether Holmes would not wish to subscribe. When Holmes retired, several elderly ladies were ready to keep house for him, and one sought to ingratiate herself by assuring me that she knew all about bee-keeping and could \"segregate the queen.\" I had considerable offers also for Holmes if he would examine and solve various family mysteries.\n\nI have often been asked whether I had myself the qualities which I depicted, or whether I was merely the Watson that I look. Of course I am well aware that it is one thing to grapple with a practical problem and quite another thing when you are allowed to solve it under your own conditions. At the same time a man cannot spin a character out of his own inner consciousness and make it really lifelike unless he has some possibilities of that character within him\u2014which is a dangerous admission for one who has drawn so many villains as I.\n\nI do not think that I ever realized what a living actual personality Holmes had become to the more guileless readers until I heard of the very pleasing story of the char-\u00e0-bancs of French schoolboys who, when asked what they wanted to see first in London, replied unanimously that they wanted to see Mr Holmes's lodgings in Baker Street. Many have asked me which house it is, but that is a point which, for excellent reasons, I will not decide." + }, + { + "title": "SOME PERSONALIA ABOUT SHERLOCK HOLMES", + "text": "At the request of the Editor I have spent some days in looking over an old letter-box in which from time to time I have placed letters referring directly or indirectly to the notorious Mr. Holmes. I wish now that I had been more careful in preserving the references to this gentleman and his little problems. A great many have been lost or mislaid. His biographer has been fortunate enough to find readers in many lands, and the reading has elicited the same sort of response, though in many cases that response has been in a tongue difficult to comprehend. Very often my distant correspondent could neither spell my own name nor that of my imaginary hero! Many such letters have been from Russians. Where the Russian letters have been in the vernacular I have been compelled, I am afraid, to take them as read, but when they have been in English they have been among the most curious in my collection. There was one young lady who began all her epistles with the words \"Good Lord.\" Another had a large amount of guile underlying her simplicity. Writing from Warsaw she stated that she had been bedridden for two years, and that my novels had been her only, etc., etc. So touched was I by this flattering statement that I at once prepared an autographed parcel of them to complete the fair invalid's collection. By good luck, however, I met a brother author upon the same day to whom I recounted the touching incident. With a cynical smile he drew an identical letter out of his pocket. His novels also had been for two years her only, etc., etc. I do not know how many more the lady had written to, but if, as I imagine, her correspondence had extended to several countries, she must have amassed a rather interesting library.\n\nThe young Russian's habit of addressing me as \"Good Lord\" had an even stranger parallel at home, which links it up with the subject of this article. Shortly after I received a knighthood I had a bill from a trades-man which was quite correct and businesslike in every detail save that it was made out to Sir Sherlock Holmes. I hope that I can stand a joke as well as my neighbours, but this particular piece of humour seemed rather misapplied, and I wrote sharply upon the subject. In response to my letter there arrived at my hotel a very repentant clerk, who expressed his sorrow at the incident, but kept on repeating the phrase, \"I assure you, sir, that it was bon\u00e2 fide.\" \"What do you mean by bon\u00e2 fide?\" I asked. \"Well, sir, my mates in the shop told me that you had been knighted, and that when a man was knighted he changed his name, and that you had taken that one.\" I need not say that my annoyance vanished, and that I laughed as heartily as his pals were probably doing round the corner.\n\nThere are certain problems which are continually recurring in these Sherlock Holmes letters. One of them has exercised men's minds in the most out-of-the-way places, from Labrador to Tibet; indeed, if a matter needs thought it is just the men in these outlying stations who have the time and solitude for it. I dare say I have had twenty letters upon the one point alone. It arises in \"The Adventure of the Priory School,\" where Holmes, glancing at the track of a bicycle, says, \"It is evidently going from us, not towards us.\" He did not give his reasoning, which my correspondents resent, and all assert that the deduction is impossible. As a matter of fact it is simple enough upon soft undulating ground such as the moor in question. The weight of the rider falls most upon the hind wheel, and in soft soil it makes a perceptibly deeper track. Where the machine goes up a slope this hind mark would be very much deeper; where it goes down a slope rapidly it would be hardly deeper at all. Thus the depth of the mark of the hind wheel would show which way the bike was travelling.\n\nOne of the quaintest proofs of Holmes's reality to many people is that I have frequently received autograph books by post, asking me to procure his signature. When it was announced that he was retiring from practice and intended to keep bees on the South Downs I had several letters offering to help him in his project. Two of them lie before me as I write. One says: \"Will Mr. Sherlock Holmes require a housekeeper for his country cottage at Christmas? I know someone who loves a quiet country life, and bees especially\u2014an old-fashioned, quiet woman.\" The other, which is addressed to Holmes himself, says: \"I see by some of the morning papers that you are about to retire and take up bee-keeping. If correct I shall be pleased to render you service by giving any advice you may require. I trust you will read this letter in the same spirit in which it is written, for I make this offer in return for many pleasant hours.\" Many other letters have reached me in which I have been implored to put my correspondents in touch with Mr Holmes, in order that he might elucidate some point in their private affairs.\n\nOccasionally I have been so far confused with my own character that I have been asked to take up professional work upon these lines. I had, I remember, one offer, in the case of an aristocratic murder trial in Poland some years ago, to go across and look into the matter upon my own terms. I need not say that I would not do such a thing for money, since I am diffident as to how far my own services would be of any value; but I have several times as an amateur been happy to have been of some assistance to people in distress. I can say, though I touch wood as I say it, that I have never entirely failed in any attempt which I have made to reduce Holmes's methods to practical use, save in one instance to which I allude later. For the case of Mr. Edalji I can claim little credit, for it did not take any elaborate deduction to come to the conclusion that a man who is practically blind did not make a journey at night which involved crossing a main line of railway, and would have tested a trained athlete had he been called upon to do it in the time. The man was obviously innocent, and it is a disgrace to this country that he has never received a penny of compensation for the three years which he spent in jail. A more complex case is that of Oscar Slater, who is still working out his sentence as a convict. I have examined the evidence carefully, including the supplementary evidence given at the very limited and unsatisfactory commission appointed to inquire into the matter, and I have not the faintest doubt that the man is innocent. When the judge asked him at the trial whether he had anything to say why the sentence of death for the murder of Miss Gilchrist should not be pronounced upon him, he cried aloud, \"My Lord, I did not know there was such a woman in the world.\" I am convinced that this was the literal truth. However, it is proverbially impossible to prove a negative, so there the matter must stand until the people of Scotland insist upon a real investigation into all the circumstances which surround this deplorable case.\n\nA few of the problems which have come my way have been very similar to some which I had invented for the exhibition of the reasoning of Mr. Holmes. I might perhaps quote one in which that gentleman's method of thought was copied with complete success. The case was as follows. A gentleman had disappeared. He had drawn a bank balance of forty pounds, which was known to be on him. It was feared that he had been murdered for the sake of the money. He had last been heard of stopping at a large hotel in London, having come from the country that day. In the evening he went to a music-hall performance, came out of it about ten o'clock, returned to his hotel, changed his evening clothes, which were found in his room next day, and disappeared utterly. No one saw him leave the hotel, but a man occupying a neighbouring room declared that he had heard him moving during the night. A week had elapsed at the time that I was consulted, but the police had discovered nothing. Where was the man?\n\nThese were the whole of the facts as communicated to me by his relatives in the country. Endeavouring to see the matter through the eyes of Mr. Holmes, I answered by return of post that he was evidently either in Glasgow or in Edinburgh. I proved later that he had as a fact gone to Edinburgh, though in the week that had passed he had moved to another part of Scotland.\n\nThere I should leave the matter, for, as Dr. Watson has often shown, a solution explained is a mystery spoiled. However, at this stage the reader can lay down the magazine and show how simple it all is by working out the problem for himself. He has all the data which were ever given to me. For the sake of those, however, who have no turn for such conundrums I will try to indicate the links which make the chain. The one advantage which I possessed was that I was familiar with the routine of London hotels\u2014though, I fancy, it differs little from that of hotels elsewhere.\n\nThe first thing was to look at the facts and separate what was certain from what was conjecture. It was all certain except the statement of the person who heard the missing man in the night. How could he tell such a sound from any other sound in a large hotel? That point could be disregarded if it traversed the general conclusions. The first clear deduction was that the man had meant to disappear. Why else should he draw all his money? He had got out of the hotel during the night. But there is a night-porter in all hotels, and it is impossible to get out without his knowledge when the door is once shut. The door is shut after the theatre-goers return\u2014say at twelve o'clock. Therefore the man left the hotel before twelve o'clock. He had come from the music-hall at ten, had changed his clothes, and had departed with his bag. No one had seen him do so. The inference is that he had done it at the moment when the hall was full of the returning guests, which is from eleven to eleven-thirty. After that hour, even if the door were still open, there are few people coming and going; so that he with his bag would certainly have been seen.\n\nHaving got so far upon firm ground we now ask ourselves why a man who desires to hide himself should go out at such an hour. If he intended to conceal himself in London he need never have gone to the hotel at all. Clearly, then, he was going to catch a train which would carry him away. But a man who is deposited by a train in any provincial station during the night is likely to be noticed, and he might be sure that when the alarm was raised and his description given some guard or porter would remember him. Therefore his destination would be some large town, which he would reach in daylight hours, as a terminus, where all his fellow-passengers would disembark and where he would lose himself in the crowd. When one turns up the time-table and sees that the great Scotch expresses bound for Edinburgh and Glasgow start about midnight, the goal is reached. As for his dress-suit, the fact that he abandoned it proved that he intended to adopt a line of life where there were no social amenities. This deduction also proved to be correct.\n\nI quote such a case in order to show that the general lines of reasoning advocated by Holmes have a real practical application to life. In another case where a girl had become engaged to a young foreigner who suddenly disappeared I was able by a similar process of deduction to show her very clearly both whither he had gone and how unworthy he was of her affections. On the other hand, these semi-scientific methods are occasionally laboured and slow as compared with the results of the rough-and-ready practical man. Lest I should seem to have been throwing bouquets either to myself or to Mr. Holmes, let me state that on the occasion of a burglary of the village inn, within a stone-throw of my house, the village constable, with no theories at all, had seized the culprit, while I had got no farther than that he was a left-handed man with nails in his boots.\n\nThe unusual or dramatic effects which lead to the invocation of Mr. Holmes in fiction are, of course, great aids to him in reaching a conclusion. It is the case where there is nothing to get hold of which is the deadly one. I heard of such a one in America which would certainly have presented a formidable problem. A gentleman of blameless life, starting off for a Sunday evening walk with his family, suddenly observed that he had forgotten his stick. He went back into the house, the door of which was still open, and he left his people waiting for him outside. He never reappeared, and from that day to this there has been no clue as to what befell him. This was certainly one of the strangest cases of which I have ever heard in real life.\n\nAnother very singular case came within my own observation. It was sent to me by an eminent London publisher. This gentleman had in his employment a head of department whose name we shall take as Musgrave. He was a hard-working person with no special feature in his character. Mr. Musgrave died, and several years after his death a letter was received addressed to him, care of his employers. It bore the postmark of a tourist resort in the West of Canada, and had the note \"Conf films\" upon the outside of the envelope, with the words \"Report Sy\" in one corner. The publishers naturally opened the envelope, as they had no note of the dead man's relatives. Inside were two blank sheets of paper. The letter, I may add, was registered. The publisher, being unable to make anything of this, sent it on to me, and I submitted the blank sheets to every possible chemical and heat test, with no result whatever. Beyond the fact that the writing appeared to be that of a woman, there is nothing to add to this account. The matter was, and remains, an insoluble mystery. How the correspondent could have something so secret to say to Mr. Musgrave and yet not be aware that this person had been dead for several years is very hard to understand\u2014or why blank sheets should be so carefully registered through the post. I may add that I did not trust the sheets to my own chemical tests, but had the best expert advice, without getting any result. Considered as a case it was a failure\u2014and a very tantalizing one.\n\nMr. Sherlock Holmes has always been a fair mark for practical jokers, and I have had numerous bogus cases of various degrees of ingenuity, marked cards, mysterious warnings, cipher messages, and other curious communications. Upon one occasion, as I was entering the hall to take part in an amateur billiard competition, I was handed a small packet which had been left for me. Upon opening it I found a piece of ordinary green chalk such as it used in billiards. I was amused by the incident, and I put the chalk into my waistcoat pocket and used it during the game. Afterwards I continued to use it until one day, some months later, as I rubbed the tip of my cue, the face of the chalk crumpled in, and I found it was hollow. From the recess thus exposed I drew out a small slip of paper with the words, \"From Ars\u00e8ne Lupin to Sherlock Holmes.\" Imagine the state of mind of the joker who took such trouble to accomplish such a result!\n\nOne of the mysteries submitted to Mr. Holmes was rather upon the psychic plane, and therefore beyond his powers. The facts as alleged are most remarkable, though I have no proof of their truth save that the lady wrote earnestly and gave both her name and address. The person, whom we will call Mrs. Seagrave, had been given a curious secondhand ring, snake-shaped, and of dull gold. This she took from her finger at night. One night she slept in it, and had a fearsome dream in which she seemed to be pushing off some furious creature which fastened its teeth into her arm. On awakening the pain in the arm continued, and next day the imprint of a double set of teeth appeared upon the arm, with one tooth of the lower jaw missing. The marks were in the shape of blue-black bruises which had not broken the skin. \"I do not know,\" says my correspondent, \"what made me think the ring had anything to do with the matter, but I took a dislike to the thing and did not wear it for some months, when, being on a visit, I took to wearing it again.\" To make a long story short, the same thing happened, and the lady settled the matter for ever by dropping her ring into the hottest corner of the kitchen-range. This curious story, which I believe to be genuine, may not be as supernatural as it seems. It is well known that in some subjects a strong mental impression does produce a physical effect. Thus a very vivid nightmare-dream with the impression of a bite might conceivably produce the mark of a bite. Such cases are well attested in medical annals. The second incident would, of course, arise by unconscious suggestion from the first. None the less, it is a very interesting little problem, whether psychic or material.\n\nBuried treasures are naturally among the problems which have come to Mr Holmes. One genuine case was accompanied by the diagram here reproduced. It refers to an Indiaman who was wrecked upon the South African coast in the year 1782. If I were a younger man I should be seriously inclined to go personally and look into that matter. The ship contained a remarkable treasure, including, I believe, the gold crown regalia of Delhi. It is surmised that they buried these near the coast and that this chart is a note of the spot. Each Indiaman in those days had its own semaphore code, and it is conjectured that the three marks upon the left are signals from a three-armed semaphore. Some record of their meaning might perhaps even now be found in the old papers of the India Office. The circle upon the right gives the compass bearings. The larger semicircle may be the curved edge of a reef or of a rock. The figures above are the indications how to reach the X which marks the treasure. Possibly they may give the bearings as 186 feet from the 4 upon the semicircle. The scene of the wreck is a lonely part of the country, but I shall be surprised if sooner or later someone does not seriously set to work to solve the mystery.\n\nOne last word before I close these jottings about my imaginary character. It is not given to every man to see the child of his brain endowed with life through the genius of a great sympathetic artist, but that was my good fortune when Mr. Gillette turned his mind and his great talents to putting Holmes upon the stage. I cannot end my remarks more fittingly than by my thanks to the man who changed a creature of thin air into an absolutely convincing human being." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "The Lost World", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "adventure", + "science fiction" + ], + "tags": [ + "dinosaurs", + "Professor Challenger" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "\"There Are Heroisms All Round Us\"\n\nMr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth,\u2014a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self. If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law. I am convinced that he really believed in his heart that I came round to the Chestnuts three days a week for the pleasure of his company, and very especially to hear his views upon bimetallism, a subject upon which he was by way of being an authority.\n\nFor an hour or more that evening I listened to his monotonous chirrup about bad money driving out good, the token value of silver, the depreciation of the rupee, and the true standards of exchange.\n\n\"Suppose,\" he cried with feeble violence, \"that all the debts in the world were called up simultaneously, and immediate payment insisted upon,\u2014what under our present conditions would happen then?\"\n\nI gave the self-evident answer that I should be a ruined man, upon which he jumped from his chair, reproved me for my habitual levity, which made it impossible for him to discuss any reasonable subject in my presence, and bounced off out of the room to dress for a Masonic meeting.\n\nAt last I was alone with Gladys, and the moment of Fate had come! All that evening I had felt like the soldier who awaits the signal which will send him on a forlorn hope; hope of victory and fear of repulse alternating in his mind.\n\nShe sat with that proud, delicate profile of hers outlined against the red curtain. How beautiful she was! And yet how aloof! We had been friends, quite good friends; but never could I get beyond the same comradeship which I might have established with one of my fellow-reporters upon the Gazette,\u2014perfectly frank, perfectly kindly, and perfectly unsexual. My instincts are all against a woman being too frank and at her ease with me. It is no compliment to a man. Where the real sex feeling begins, timidity and distrust are its companions, heritage from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in hand. The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure\u2014these, and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion. Even in my short life I had learned as much as that\u2014or had inherited it in that race memory which we call instinct.\n\nGladys was full of every womanly quality. Some judged her to be cold and hard; but such a thought was treason. That delicately bronzed skin, almost oriental in its coloring, that raven hair, the large liquid eyes, the full but exquisite lips,\u2014all the stigmata of passion were there. But I was sadly conscious that up to now I had never found the secret of drawing it forth. However, come what might, I should have done with suspense and bring matters to a head to-night. She could but refuse me, and better be a repulsed lover than an accepted brother.\n\nSo far my thoughts had carried me, and I was about to break the long and uneasy silence, when two critical, dark eyes looked round at me, and the proud head was shaken in smiling reproof. \"I have a presentiment that you are going to propose, Ned. I do wish you wouldn't; for things are so much nicer as they are.\"\n\nI drew my chair a little nearer. \"Now, how did you know that I was going to propose?\" I asked in genuine wonder.\n\n\"Don't women always know? Do you suppose any woman in the world was ever taken unawares? But\u2014oh, Ned, our friendship has been so good and so pleasant! What a pity to spoil it! Don't you feel how splendid it is that a young man and a young woman should be able to talk face to face as we have talked?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Gladys. You see, I can talk face to face with\u2014with the station-master.\" I can't imagine how that official came into the matter; but in he trotted, and set us both laughing. \"That does not satisfy me in the least. I want my arms round you, and your head on my breast, and\u2014oh, Gladys, I want\u2014\"\n\nShe had sprung from her chair, as she saw signs that I proposed to demonstrate some of my wants. \"You've spoiled everything, Ned,\" she said. \"It's all so beautiful and natural until this kind of thing comes in! It is such a pity! Why can't you control yourself?\"\n\n\"I didn't invent it,\" I pleaded. \"It's nature. It's love.\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps if both love, it may be different. I have never felt it.\"\n\n\"But you must\u2014you, with your beauty, with your soul! Oh, Gladys, you were made for love! You must love!\"\n\n\"One must wait till it comes.\"\n\n\"But why can't you love me, Gladys? Is it my appearance, or what?\"\n\nShe did unbend a little. She put forward a hand\u2014such a gracious, stooping attitude it was\u2014and she pressed back my head. Then she looked into my upturned face with a very wistful smile.\n\n\"No it isn't that,\" she said at last. \"You're not a conceited boy by nature, and so I can safely tell you it is not that. It's deeper.\"\n\n\"My character?\"\n\nShe nodded severely.\n\n\"What can I do to mend it? Do sit down and talk it over. No, really, I won't if you'll only sit down!\"\n\nShe looked at me with a wondering distrust which was much more to my mind than her whole-hearted confidence. How primitive and bestial it looks when you put it down in black and white!\u2014and perhaps after all it is only a feeling peculiar to myself. Anyhow, she sat down.\n\n\"Now tell me what's amiss with me?\"\n\n\"I'm in love with somebody else,\" said she.\n\nIt was my turn to jump out of my chair.\n\n\"It's nobody in particular,\" she explained, laughing at the expression of my face: \"only an ideal. I've never met the kind of man I mean.\"\n\n\"Tell me about him. What does he look like?\"\n\n\"Oh, he might look very much like you.\"\n\n\"How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I don't do? Just say the word,\u2014teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut, theosophist, superman. I'll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only give me an idea what would please you.\"\n\nShe laughed at the elasticity of my character. \"Well, in the first place, I don't think my ideal would speak like that,\" said she. \"He would be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a silly girl's whim. But, above all, he must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife's life of him I could so understand her love! And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband? These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul, and yet be the greater, not the less, on account of her love, honored by all the world as the inspirer of noble deeds.\"\n\nShe looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought down the whole level of the interview. I gripped myself hard, and went on with the argument.\n\n\"We can't all be Stanleys and Burtons,\" said I; \"besides, we don't get the chance,\u2014at least, I never had the chance. If I did, I should try to take it.\"\n\n\"But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I mean that he makes his own chances. You can't hold him back. I've never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done. It's for men to do them, and for women to reserve their love as a reward for such men. Look at that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon. It was blowing a gale of wind; but because he was announced to go he insisted on starting. The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia. That was the kind of man I mean. Think of the woman he loved, and how other women must have envied her! That's what I should like to be,\u2014envied for my man.\"\n\n\"I'd have done it to please you.\"\n\n\"But you shouldn't do it merely to please me. You should do it because you can't help yourself, because it's natural to you, because the man in you is crying out for heroic expression. Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month, could you not have gone down and helped those people, in spite of the choke-damp?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"You never said so.\"\n\n\"There was nothing worth bucking about.\"\n\n\"I didn't know.\" She looked at me with rather more interest. \"That was brave of you.\"\n\n\"I had to. If you want to write good copy, you must be where the things are.\"\n\n\"What a prosaic motive! It seems to take all the romance out of it. But, still, whatever your motive, I am glad that you went down that mine.\" She gave me her hand; but with such sweetness and dignity that I could only stoop and kiss it. \"I dare say I am merely a foolish woman with a young girl's fancies. And yet it is so real with me, so entirely part of my very self, that I cannot help acting upon it. If I marry, I do want to marry a famous man!\"\n\n\"Why should you not?\" I cried. \"It is women like you who brace men up. Give me a chance, and see if I will take it! Besides, as you say, men ought to MAKE their own chances, and not wait until they are given. Look at Clive\u2014just a clerk, and he conquered India! By George! I'll do something in the world yet!\"\n\nShe laughed at my sudden Irish effervescence. \"Why not?\" she said. \"You have everything a man could have,\u2014youth, health, strength, education, energy. I was sorry you spoke. And now I am glad\u2014so glad\u2014if it wakens these thoughts in you!\"\n\n\"And if I do\u2014\"\n\nHer dear hand rested like warm velvet upon my lips. \"Not another word, Sir! You should have been at the office for evening duty half an hour ago; only I hadn't the heart to remind you. Some day, perhaps, when you have won your place in the world, we shall talk it over again.\"\n\nAnd so it was that I found myself that foggy November evening pursuing the Camberwell tram with my heart glowing within me, and with the eager determination that not another day should elapse before I should find some deed which was worthy of my lady. But who\u2014who in all this wide world could ever have imagined the incredible shape which that deed was to take, or the strange steps by which I was led to the doing of it?\n\nAnd, after all, this opening chapter will seem to the reader to have nothing to do with my narrative; and yet there would have been no narrative without it, for it is only when a man goes out into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away as I did from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards. Behold me, then, at the office of the Daily Gazette, on the staff of which I was a most insignificant unit, with the settled determination that very night, if possible, to find the quest which should be worthy of my Gladys! Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her own glorification? Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the fever of his first love." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\"Try Your Luck with Professor Challenger\"\n\nI always liked McArdle, the crabbed, old, round-backed, red-headed news editor, and I rather hoped that he liked me. Of course, Beaumont was the real boss; but he lived in the rarefied atmosphere of some Olympian height from which he could distinguish nothing smaller than an international crisis or a split in the Cabinet. Sometimes we saw him passing in lonely majesty to his inner sanctum, with his eyes staring vaguely and his mind hovering over the Balkans or the Persian Gulf. He was above and beyond us. But McArdle was his first lieutenant, and it was he that we knew. The old man nodded as I entered the room, and he pushed his spectacles far up on his bald forehead.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Malone, from all I hear, you seem to be doing very well,\" said he in his kindly Scotch accent.\n\nI thanked him.\n\n\"The colliery explosion was excellent. So was the Southwark fire. You have the true descreeptive touch. What did you want to see me about?\"\n\n\"To ask a favor.\"\n\nHe looked alarmed, and his eyes shunned mine. \"Tut, tut! What is it?\"\n\n\"Do you think, Sir, that you could possibly send me on some mission for the paper? I would do my best to put it through and get you some good copy.\"\n\n\"What sort of meesion had you in your mind, Mr. Malone?\"\n\n\"Well, Sir, anything that had adventure and danger in it. I really would do my very best. The more difficult it was, the better it would suit me.\"\n\n\"You seem very anxious to lose your life.\"\n\n\"To justify my life, Sir.\"\n\n\"Dear me, Mr. Malone, this is very\u2014very exalted. I'm afraid the day for this sort of thing is rather past. The expense of the 'special meesion' business hardly justifies the result, and, of course, in any case it would only be an experienced man with a name that would command public confidence who would get such an order. The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for romance anywhere. Wait a bit, though!\" he added, with a sudden smile upon his face. \"Talking of the blank spaces of the map gives me an idea. What about exposing a fraud\u2014a modern Munchausen\u2014and making him rideeculous? You could show him up as the liar that he is! Eh, man, it would be fine. How does it appeal to you?\"\n\n\"Anything\u2014anywhere\u2014I care nothing.\"\n\nMcArdle was plunged in thought for some minutes.\n\n\"I wonder whether you could get on friendly\u2014or at least on talking terms with the fellow,\" he said, at last. \"You seem to have a sort of genius for establishing relations with people\u2014seempathy, I suppose, or animal magnetism, or youthful vitality, or something. I am conscious of it myself.\"\n\n\"You are very good, sir.\"\n\n\"So why should you not try your luck with Professor Challenger, of Enmore Park?\"\n\nI dare say I looked a little startled.\n\n\"Challenger!\" I cried. \"Professor Challenger, the famous zoologist! Wasn't he the man who broke the skull of Blundell, of the Telegraph?\"\n\nThe news editor smiled grimly.\n\n\"Do you mind? Didn't you say it was adventures you were after?\"\n\n\"It is all in the way of business, sir,\" I answered.\n\n\"Exactly. I don't suppose he can always be so violent as that. I'm thinking that Blundell got him at the wrong moment, maybe, or in the wrong fashion. You may have better luck, or more tact in handling him. There's something in your line there, I am sure, and the Gazette should work it.\"\n\n\"I really know nothing about him,\" said I. \"I only remember his name in connection with the police-court proceedings, for striking Blundell.\"\n\n\"I have a few notes for your guidance, Mr. Malone. I've had my eye on the Professor for some little time.\" He took a paper from a drawer. \"Here is a summary of his record. I give it you briefly:\u2014\n\n\"'Challenger, George Edward. Born: Largs, N. B., 1863. Educ.: Largs Academy; Edinburgh University. British Museum Assistant, 1892. Assistant-Keeper of Comparative Anthropology Department, 1893. Resigned after acrimonious correspondence same year. Winner of Crayston Medal for Zoological Research. Foreign Member of'\u2014well, quite a lot of things, about two inches of small type\u2014'Societe Belge, American Academy of Sciences, La Plata, etc., etc. Ex-President Palaeontological Society. Section H, British Association'\u2014so on, so on!\u2014'Publications: \"Some Observations Upon a Series of Kalmuck Skulls\"; \"Outlines of Vertebrate Evolution\"; and numerous papers, including \"The underlying fallacy of Weissmannism,\" which caused heated discussion at the Zoological Congress of Vienna. Recreations: Walking, Alpine climbing. Address: Enmore Park, Kensington, W.'\n\n\"There, take it with you. I've nothing more for you to-night.\"\n\nI pocketed the slip of paper.\n\n\"One moment, sir,\" I said, as I realized that it was a pink bald head, and not a red face, which was fronting me. \"I am not very clear yet why I am to interview this gentleman. What has he done?\"\n\nThe face flashed back again.\n\n\"Went to South America on a solitary expedeetion two years ago. Came back last year. Had undoubtedly been to South America, but refused to say exactly where. Began to tell his adventures in a vague way, but somebody started to pick holes, and he just shut up like an oyster. Something wonderful happened\u2014or the man's a champion liar, which is the more probable supposeetion. Had some damaged photographs, said to be fakes. Got so touchy that he assaults anyone who asks questions, and heaves reporters down the stairs. In my opinion he's just a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science. That's your man, Mr. Malone. Now, off you run, and see what you can make of him. You're big enough to look after yourself. Anyway, you are all safe. Employers' Liability Act, you know.\"\n\nA grinning red face turned once more into a pink oval, fringed with gingery fluff; the interview was at an end.\n\nI walked across to the Savage Club, but instead of turning into it I leaned upon the railings of Adelphi Terrace and gazed thoughtfully for a long time at the brown, oily river. I can always think most sanely and clearly in the open air. I took out the list of Professor Challenger's exploits, and I read it over under the electric lamp. Then I had what I can only regard as an inspiration. As a Pressman, I felt sure from what I had been told that I could never hope to get into touch with this cantankerous Professor. But these recriminations, twice mentioned in his skeleton biography, could only mean that he was a fanatic in science. Was there not an exposed margin there upon which he might be accessible? I would try.\n\nI entered the club. It was just after eleven, and the big room was fairly full, though the rush had not yet set in. I noticed a tall, thin, angular man seated in an arm-chair by the fire. He turned as I drew my chair up to him. It was the man of all others whom I should have chosen\u2014Tarp Henry, of the staff of Nature, a thin, dry, leathery creature, who was full, to those who knew him, of kindly humanity. I plunged instantly into my subject.\n\n\"What do you know of Professor Challenger?\"\n\n\"Challenger?\" He gathered his brows in scientific disapproval. \"Challenger was the man who came with some cock-and-bull story from South America.\"\n\n\"What story?\"\n\n\"Oh, it was rank nonsense about some queer animals he had discovered. I believe he has retracted since. Anyhow, he has suppressed it all. He gave an interview to Reuter's, and there was such a howl that he saw it wouldn't do. It was a discreditable business. There were one or two folk who were inclined to take him seriously, but he soon choked them off.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"Well, by his insufferable rudeness and impossible behavior. There was poor old Wadley, of the Zoological Institute. Wadley sent a message: 'The President of the Zoological Institute presents his compliments to Professor Challenger, and would take it as a personal favor if he would do them the honor to come to their next meeting.' The answer was unprintable.\"\n\n\"You don't say?\"\n\n\"Well, a bowdlerized version of it would run: 'Professor Challenger presents his compliments to the President of the Zoological Institute, and would take it as a personal favor if he would go to the devil.'\"\n\n\"Good Lord!\"\n\n\"Yes, I expect that's what old Wadley said. I remember his wail at the meeting, which began: 'In fifty years experience of scientific intercourse\u2014' It quite broke the old man up.\"\n\n\"Anything more about Challenger?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye. I'm a frontiersman from the extreme edge of the Knowable, and I feel quite out of place when I leave my study and come into touch with all you great, rough, hulking creatures. I'm too detached to talk scandal, and yet at scientific conversaziones I HAVE heard something of Challenger, for he is one of those men whom nobody can ignore. He's as clever as they make 'em\u2014a full-charged battery of force and vitality, but a quarrelsome, ill-conditioned faddist, and unscrupulous at that. He had gone the length of faking some photographs over the South American business.\"\n\n\"You say he is a faddist. What is his particular fad?\"\n\n\"He has a thousand, but the latest is something about Weissmann and Evolution. He had a fearful row about it in Vienna, I believe.\"\n\n\"Can't you tell me the point?\"\n\n\"Not at the moment, but a translation of the proceedings exists. We have it filed at the office. Would you care to come?\"\n\n\"It's just what I want. I have to interview the fellow, and I need some lead up to him. It's really awfully good of you to give me a lift. I'll go with you now, if it is not too late.\"\n\nHalf an hour later I was seated in the newspaper office with a huge tome in front of me, which had been opened at the article \"Weissmann versus Darwin,\" with the sub heading, \"Spirited Protest at Vienna. Lively Proceedings.\" My scientific education having been somewhat neglected, I was unable to follow the whole argument, but it was evident that the English Professor had handled his subject in a very aggressive fashion, and had thoroughly annoyed his Continental colleagues. \"Protests,\" \"Uproar,\" and \"General appeal to the Chairman\" were three of the first brackets which caught my eye. Most of the matter might have been written in Chinese for any definite meaning that it conveyed to my brain.\n\n\"I wish you could translate it into English for me,\" I said, pathetically, to my help-mate.\n\n\"Well, it is a translation.\"\n\n\"Then I'd better try my luck with the original.\"\n\n\"It is certainly rather deep for a layman.\"\n\n\"If I could only get a single good, meaty sentence which seemed to convey some sort of definite human idea, it would serve my turn. Ah, yes, this one will do. I seem in a vague way almost to understand it. I'll copy it out. This shall be my link with the terrible Professor.\"\n\n\"Nothing else I can do?\"\n\n\"Well, yes; I propose to write to him. If I could frame the letter here, and use your address it would give atmosphere.\"\n\n\"We'll have the fellow round here making a row and breaking the furniture.\"\n\n\"No, no; you'll see the letter\u2014nothing contentious, I assure you.\"\n\n\"Well, that's my chair and desk. You'll find paper there. I'd like to censor it before it goes.\"\n\nIt took some doing, but I flatter myself that it wasn't such a bad job when it was finished. I read it aloud to the critical bacteriologist with some pride in my handiwork.\n\n\u2002\"DEAR PROFESSOR CHALLENGER,\" it said, \"As a humble student of Nature, I have always taken the most profound interest in your speculations as to the differences between Darwin and Weissmann. I have recently had occasion to refresh my memory by re-reading\u2014\"\n\n\u2002\"You infernal liar!\" murmured Tarp Henry.\n\n\u2002\u2014\"by re-reading your masterly address at Vienna. That lucid and admirable statement seems to be the last word in the matter. There is one sentence in it, however\u2014namely: 'I protest strongly against the insufferable and entirely dogmatic assertion that each separate id is a microcosm possessed of an historical architecture elaborated slowly through the series of generations.' Have you no desire, in view of later research, to modify this statement? Do you not think that it is over-accentuated? With your permission, I would ask the favor of an interview, as I feel strongly upon the subject, and have certain suggestions which I could only elaborate in a personal conversation. With your consent, I trust to have the honor of calling at eleven o'clock the day after to-morrow (Wednesday) morning.\n\n\u2002\"I remain, Sir, with assurances of profound respect, yours very truly,\n\n\u2002EDWARD D. MALONE.\"\n\n\"How's that?\" I asked, triumphantly.\n\n\"Well if your conscience can stand it\u2014\"\n\n\"It has never failed me yet.\"\n\n\"But what do you mean to do?\"\n\n\"To get there. Once I am in his room I may see some opening. I may even go the length of open confession. If he is a sportsman he will be tickled.\"\n\n\"Tickled, indeed! He's much more likely to do the tickling. Chain mail, or an American football suit\u2014that's what you'll want. Well, good-bye. I'll have the answer for you here on Wednesday morning\u2014if he ever deigns to answer you. He is a violent, dangerous, cantankerous character, hated by everyone who comes across him, and the butt of the students, so far as they dare take a liberty with him. Perhaps it would be best for you if you never heard from the fellow at all.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"He is a Perfectly Impossible Person\"\n\nMy friend's fear or hope was not destined to be realized. When I called on Wednesday there was a letter with the West Kensington postmark upon it, and my name scrawled across the envelope in a handwriting which looked like a barbed-wire railing. The contents were as follows:\u2014\n\n\u2002\"ENMORE PARK, W.\n\n\u2002\"SIR,\u2014I have duly received your note, in which you claim to endorse my views, although I am not aware that they are dependent upon endorsement either from you or anyone else. You have ventured to use the word 'speculation' with regard to my statement upon the subject of Darwinism, and I would call your attention to the fact that such a word in such a connection is offensive to a degree. The context convinces me, however, that you have sinned rather through ignorance and tactlessness than through malice, so I am content to pass the matter by. You quote an isolated sentence from my lecture, and appear to have some difficulty in understanding it. I should have thought that only a sub-human intelligence could have failed to grasp the point, but if it really needs amplification I shall consent to see you at the hour named, though visits and visitors of every sort are exceeding distasteful to me. As to your suggestion that I may modify my opinion, I would have you know that it is not my habit to do so after a deliberate expression of my mature views. You will kindly show the envelope of this letter to my man, Austin, when you call, as he has to take every precaution to shield me from the intrusive rascals who call themselves 'journalists.'\n\n\u2002\"Yours faithfully,\n\n\u2002\"GEORGE EDWARD CHALLENGER.\"\n\nThis was the letter that I read aloud to Tarp Henry, who had come down early to hear the result of my venture. His only remark was, \"There's some new stuff, cuticura or something, which is better than arnica.\" Some people have such extraordinary notions of humor.\n\nIt was nearly half-past ten before I had received my message, but a taxicab took me round in good time for my appointment. It was an imposing porticoed house at which we stopped, and the heavily-curtained windows gave every indication of wealth upon the part of this formidable Professor. The door was opened by an odd, swarthy, dried-up person of uncertain age, with a dark pilot jacket and brown leather gaiters. I found afterwards that he was the chauffeur, who filled the gaps left by a succession of fugitive butlers. He looked me up and down with a searching light blue eye.\n\n\"Expected?\" he asked.\n\n\"An appointment.\"\n\n\"Got your letter?\"\n\nI produced the envelope.\n\n\"Right!\" He seemed to be a person of few words. Following him down the passage I was suddenly interrupted by a small woman, who stepped out from what proved to be the dining-room door. She was a bright, vivacious, dark-eyed lady, more French than English in her type.\n\n\"One moment,\" she said. \"You can wait, Austin. Step in here, sir. May I ask if you have met my husband before?\"\n\n\"No, madam, I have not had the honor.\"\n\n\"Then I apologize to you in advance. I must tell you that he is a perfectly impossible person\u2014absolutely impossible. If you are forewarned you will be the more ready to make allowances.\"\n\n\"It is most considerate of you, madam.\"\n\n\"Get quickly out of the room if he seems inclined to be violent. Don't wait to argue with him. Several people have been injured through doing that. Afterwards there is a public scandal and it reflects upon me and all of us. I suppose it wasn't about South America you wanted to see him?\"\n\nI could not lie to a lady.\n\n\"Dear me! That is his most dangerous subject. You won't believe a word he says\u2014I'm sure I don't wonder. But don't tell him so, for it makes him very violent. Pretend to believe him, and you may get through all right. Remember he believes it himself. Of that you may be assured. A more honest man never lived. Don't wait any longer or he may suspect. If you find him dangerous\u2014really dangerous\u2014ring the bell and hold him off until I come. Even at his worst I can usually control him.\"\n\nWith these encouraging words the lady handed me over to the taciturn Austin, who had waited like a bronze statue of discretion during our short interview, and I was conducted to the end of the passage. There was a tap at a door, a bull's bellow from within, and I was face to face with the Professor.\n\nHe sat in a rotating chair behind a broad table, which was covered with books, maps, and diagrams. As I entered, his seat spun round to face me. His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size which took one's breath away\u2014his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top-hat, had I ever ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-gray under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.\n\n\"Well?\" said he, with a most insolent stare. \"What now?\"\n\nI must keep up my deception for at least a little time longer, otherwise here was evidently an end of the interview.\n\n\"You were good enough to give me an appointment, sir,\" said I, humbly, producing his envelope.\n\nHe took my letter from his desk and laid it out before him.\n\n\"Oh, you are the young person who cannot understand plain English, are you? My general conclusions you are good enough to approve, as I understand?\"\n\n\"Entirely, sir\u2014entirely!\" I was very emphatic.\n\n\"Dear me! That strengthens my position very much, does it not? Your age and appearance make your support doubly valuable. Well, at least you are better than that herd of swine in Vienna, whose gregarious grunt is, however, not more offensive than the isolated effort of the British hog.\" He glared at me as the present representative of the beast.\n\n\"They seem to have behaved abominably,\" said I.\n\n\"I assure you that I can fight my own battles, and that I have no possible need of your sympathy. Put me alone, sir, and with my back to the wall. G. E. C. is happiest then. Well, sir, let us do what we can to curtail this visit, which can hardly be agreeable to you, and is inexpressibly irksome to me. You had, as I have been led to believe, some comments to make upon the proposition which I advanced in my thesis.\"\n\nThere was a brutal directness about his methods which made evasion difficult. I must still make play and wait for a better opening. It had seemed simple enough at a distance. Oh, my Irish wits, could they not help me now, when I needed help so sorely? He transfixed me with two sharp, steely eyes. \"Come, come!\" he rumbled.\n\n\"I am, of course, a mere student,\" said I, with a fatuous smile, \"hardly more, I might say, than an earnest inquirer. At the same time, it seemed to me that you were a little severe upon Weissmann in this matter. Has not the general evidence since that date tended to\u2014well, to strengthen his position?\"\n\n\"What evidence?\" He spoke with a menacing calm.\n\n\"Well, of course, I am aware that there is not any what you might call DEFINITE evidence. I alluded merely to the trend of modern thought and the general scientific point of view, if I might so express it.\"\n\nHe leaned forward with great earnestness.\n\n\"I suppose you are aware,\" said he, checking off points upon his fingers, \"that the cranial index is a constant factor?\"\n\n\"Naturally,\" said I.\n\n\"And that telegony is still sub judice?\"\n\n\"Undoubtedly.\"\n\n\"And that the germ plasm is different from the parthenogenetic egg?\"\n\n\"Why, surely!\" I cried, and gloried in my own audacity.\n\n\"But what does that prove?\" he asked, in a gentle, persuasive voice.\n\n\"Ah, what indeed?\" I murmured. \"What does it prove?\"\n\n\"Shall I tell you?\" he cooed.\n\n\"Pray do.\"\n\n\"It proves,\" he roared, with a sudden blast of fury, \"that you are the damnedest imposter in London\u2014a vile, crawling journalist, who has no more science than he has decency in his composition!\"\n\nHe had sprung to his feet with a mad rage in his eyes. Even at that moment of tension I found time for amazement at the discovery that he was quite a short man, his head not higher than my shoulder\u2014a stunted Hercules whose tremendous vitality had all run to depth, breadth, and brain.\n\n\"Gibberish!\" he cried, leaning forward, with his fingers on the table and his face projecting. \"That's what I have been talking to you, sir\u2014scientific gibberish! Did you think you could match cunning with me\u2014you with your walnut of a brain? You think you are omnipotent, you infernal scribblers, don't you? That your praise can make a man and your blame can break him? We must all bow to you, and try to get a favorable word, must we? This man shall have a leg up, and this man shall have a dressing down! Creeping vermin, I know you! You've got out of your station. Time was when your ears were clipped. You've lost your sense of proportion. Swollen gas-bags! I'll keep you in your proper place. Yes, sir, you haven't got over G. E. C. There's one man who is still your master. He warned you off, but if you WILL come, by the Lord you do it at your own risk. Forfeit, my good Mr. Malone, I claim forfeit! You have played a rather dangerous game, and it strikes me that you have lost it.\"\n\n\"Look here, sir,\" said I, backing to the door and opening it; \"you can be as abusive as you like. But there is a limit. You shall not assault me.\"\n\n\"Shall I not?\" He was slowly advancing in a peculiarly menacing way, but he stopped now and put his big hands into the side-pockets of a rather boyish short jacket which he wore. \"I have thrown several of you out of the house. You will be the fourth or fifth. Three pound fifteen each\u2014that is how it averaged. Expensive, but very necessary. Now, sir, why should you not follow your brethren? I rather think you must.\" He resumed his unpleasant and stealthy advance, pointing his toes as he walked, like a dancing master.\n\nI could have bolted for the hall door, but it would have been too ignominious. Besides, a little glow of righteous anger was springing up within me. I had been hopelessly in the wrong before, but this man's menaces were putting me in the right.\n\n\"I'll trouble you to keep your hands off, sir. I'll not stand it.\"\n\n\"Dear me!\" His black moustache lifted and a white fang twinkled in a sneer. \"You won't stand it, eh?\"\n\n\"Don't be such a fool, Professor!\" I cried. \"What can you hope for? I'm fifteen stone, as hard as nails, and play center three-quarter every Saturday for the London Irish. I'm not the man\u2014\"\n\nIt was at that moment that he rushed me. It was lucky that I had opened the door, or we should have gone through it. We did a Catharine-wheel together down the passage. Somehow we gathered up a chair upon our way, and bounded on with it towards the street. My mouth was full of his beard, our arms were locked, our bodies intertwined, and that infernal chair radiated its legs all round us. The watchful Austin had thrown open the hall door. We went with a back somersault down the front steps. I have seen the two Macs attempt something of the kind at the halls, but it appears to take some practise to do it without hurting oneself. The chair went to matchwood at the bottom, and we rolled apart into the gutter. He sprang to his feet, waving his fists and wheezing like an asthmatic.\n\n\"Had enough?\" he panted.\n\n\"You infernal bully!\" I cried, as I gathered myself together.\n\nThen and there we should have tried the thing out, for he was effervescing with fight, but fortunately I was rescued from an odious situation. A policeman was beside us, his notebook in his hand.\n\n\"What's all this? You ought to be ashamed\" said the policeman. It was the most rational remark which I had heard in Enmore Park. \"Well,\" he insisted, turning to me, \"what is it, then?\"\n\n\"This man attacked me,\" said I.\n\n\"Did you attack him?\" asked the policeman.\n\nThe Professor breathed hard and said nothing.\n\n\"It's not the first time, either,\" said the policeman, severely, shaking his head. \"You were in trouble last month for the same thing. You've blackened this young man's eye. Do you give him in charge, sir?\"\n\nI relented.\n\n\"No,\" said I, \"I do not.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" said the policeman.\n\n\"I was to blame myself. I intruded upon him. He gave me fair warning.\"\n\nThe policeman snapped up his notebook.\n\n\"Don't let us have any more such goings-on,\" said he. \"Now, then! Move on, there, move on!\" This to a butcher's boy, a maid, and one or two loafers who had collected. He clumped heavily down the street, driving this little flock before him. The Professor looked at me, and there was something humorous at the back of his eyes.\n\n\"Come in!\" said he. \"I've not done with you yet.\"\n\nThe speech had a sinister sound, but I followed him none the less into the house. The man-servant, Austin, like a wooden image, closed the door behind us." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"It's Just the very Biggest Thing in the World\"\n\nHardly was it shut when Mrs. Challenger darted out from the dining-room. The small woman was in a furious temper. She barred her husband's way like an enraged chicken in front of a bulldog. It was evident that she had seen my exit, but had not observed my return.\n\n\"You brute, George!\" she screamed. \"You've hurt that nice young man.\"\n\nHe jerked backwards with his thumb.\n\n\"Here he is, safe and sound behind me.\"\n\nShe was confused, but not unduly so.\n\n\"I am so sorry, I didn't see you.\"\n\n\"I assure you, madam, that it is all right.\"\n\n\"He has marked your poor face! Oh, George, what a brute you are! Nothing but scandals from one end of the week to the other. Everyone hating and making fun of you. You've finished my patience. This ends it.\"\n\n\"Dirty linen,\" he rumbled.\n\n\"It's not a secret,\" she cried. \"Do you suppose that the whole street\u2014the whole of London, for that matter\u2014 Get away, Austin, we don't want you here. Do you suppose they don't all talk about you? Where is your dignity? You, a man who should have been Regius Professor at a great University with a thousand students all revering you. Where is your dignity, George?\"\n\n\"How about yours, my dear?\"\n\n\"You try me too much. A ruffian\u2014a common brawling ruffian\u2014that's what you have become.\"\n\n\"Be good, Jessie.\"\n\n\"A roaring, raging bully!\"\n\n\"That's done it! Stool of penance!\" said he.\n\nTo my amazement he stooped, picked her up, and placed her sitting upon a high pedestal of black marble in the angle of the hall. It was at least seven feet high, and so thin that she could hardly balance upon it. A more absurd object than she presented cocked up there with her face convulsed with anger, her feet dangling, and her body rigid for fear of an upset, I could not imagine.\n\n\"Let me down!\" she wailed.\n\n\"Say 'please.'\"\n\n\"You brute, George! Let me down this instant!\"\n\n\"Come into the study, Mr. Malone.\"\n\n\"Really, sir\u2014!\" said I, looking at the lady.\n\n\"Here's Mr. Malone pleading for you, Jessie. Say 'please,' and down you come.\"\n\n\"Oh, you brute! Please! please!\"\n\nHe took her down as if she had been a canary.\n\n\"You must behave yourself, dear. Mr. Malone is a Pressman. He will have it all in his rag to-morrow, and sell an extra dozen among our neighbors. 'Strange story of high life'\u2014you felt fairly high on that pedestal, did you not? Then a sub-title, 'Glimpse of a singular menage.' He's a foul feeder, is Mr. Malone, a carrion eater, like all of his kind\u2014porcus ex grege diaboli\u2014a swine from the devil's herd. That's it, Malone\u2014what?\"\n\n\"You are really intolerable!\" said I, hotly.\n\nHe bellowed with laughter.\n\n\"We shall have a coalition presently,\" he boomed, looking from his wife to me and puffing out his enormous chest. Then, suddenly altering his tone, \"Excuse this frivolous family badinage, Mr. Malone. I called you back for some more serious purpose than to mix you up with our little domestic pleasantries. Run away, little woman, and don't fret.\" He placed a huge hand upon each of her shoulders. \"All that you say is perfectly true. I should be a better man if I did what you advise, but I shouldn't be quite George Edward Challenger. There are plenty of better men, my dear, but only one G. E. C. So make the best of him.\" He suddenly gave her a resounding kiss, which embarrassed me even more than his violence had done. \"Now, Mr. Malone,\" he continued, with a great accession of dignity, \"this way, if YOU please.\"\n\nWe re-entered the room which we had left so tumultuously ten minutes before. The Professor closed the door carefully behind us, motioned me into an arm-chair, and pushed a cigar-box under my nose.\n\n\"Real San Juan Colorado,\" he said. \"Excitable people like you are the better for narcotics. Heavens! don't bite it! Cut\u2014and cut with reverence! Now lean back, and listen attentively to whatever I may care to say to you. If any remark should occur to you, you can reserve it for some more opportune time.\n\n\"First of all, as to your return to my house after your most justifiable expulsion\"\u2014he protruded his beard, and stared at me as one who challenges and invites contradiction\u2014\"after, as I say, your well-merited expulsion. The reason lay in your answer to that most officious policeman, in which I seemed to discern some glimmering of good feeling upon your part\u2014more, at any rate, than I am accustomed to associate with your profession. In admitting that the fault of the incident lay with you, you gave some evidence of a certain mental detachment and breadth of view which attracted my favorable notice. The sub-species of the human race to which you unfortunately belong has always been below my mental horizon. Your words brought you suddenly above it. You swam up into my serious notice. For this reason I asked you to return with me, as I was minded to make your further acquaintance. You will kindly deposit your ash in the small Japanese tray on the bamboo table which stands at your left elbow.\"\n\nAll this he boomed forth like a professor addressing his class. He had swung round his revolving chair so as to face me, and he sat all puffed out like an enormous bull-frog, his head laid back and his eyes half-covered by supercilious lids. Now he suddenly turned himself sideways, and all I could see of him was tangled hair with a red, protruding ear. He was scratching about among the litter of papers upon his desk. He faced me presently with what looked like a very tattered sketch-book in his hand.\n\n\"I am going to talk to you about South America,\" said he. \"No comments if you please. First of all, I wish you to understand that nothing I tell you now is to be repeated in any public way unless you have my express permission. That permission will, in all human probability, never be given. Is that clear?\"\n\n\"It is very hard,\" said I. \"Surely a judicious account\u2014\"\n\nHe replaced the notebook upon the table.\n\n\"That ends it,\" said he. \"I wish you a very good morning.\"\n\n\"No, no!\" I cried. \"I submit to any conditions. So far as I can see, I have no choice.\"\n\n\"None in the world,\" said he.\n\n\"Well, then, I promise.\"\n\n\"Word of honor?\"\n\n\"Word of honor.\"\n\nHe looked at me with doubt in his insolent eyes.\n\n\"After all, what do I know about your honor?\" said he.\n\n\"Upon my word, sir,\" I cried, angrily, \"you take very great liberties! I have never been so insulted in my life.\"\n\nHe seemed more interested than annoyed at my outbreak.\n\n\"Round-headed,\" he muttered. \"Brachycephalic, gray-eyed, black-haired, with suggestion of the negroid. Celtic, I presume?\"\n\n\"I am an Irishman, sir.\"\n\n\"Irish Irish?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"That, of course, explains it. Let me see; you have given me your promise that my confidence will be respected? That confidence, I may say, will be far from complete. But I am prepared to give you a few indications which will be of interest. In the first place, you are probably aware that two years ago I made a journey to South America\u2014one which will be classical in the scientific history of the world? The object of my journey was to verify some conclusions of Wallace and of Bates, which could only be done by observing their reported facts under the same conditions in which they had themselves noted them. If my expedition had no other results it would still have been noteworthy, but a curious incident occurred to me while there which opened up an entirely fresh line of inquiry.\n\n\"You are aware\u2014or probably, in this half-educated age, you are not aware\u2014that the country round some parts of the Amazon is still only partially explored, and that a great number of tributaries, some of them entirely uncharted, run into the main river. It was my business to visit this little-known back-country and to examine its fauna, which furnished me with the materials for several chapters for that great and monumental work upon zoology which will be my life's justification. I was returning, my work accomplished, when I had occasion to spend a night at a small Indian village at a point where a certain tributary\u2014the name and position of which I withhold\u2014opens into the main river. The natives were Cucama Indians, an amiable but degraded race, with mental powers hardly superior to the average Londoner. I had effected some cures among them upon my way up the river, and had impressed them considerably with my personality, so that I was not surprised to find myself eagerly awaited upon my return. I gathered from their signs that someone had urgent need of my medical services, and I followed the chief to one of his huts. When I entered I found that the sufferer to whose aid I had been summoned had that instant expired. He was, to my surprise, no Indian, but a white man; indeed, I may say a very white man, for he was flaxen-haired and had some characteristics of an albino. He was clad in rags, was very emaciated, and bore every trace of prolonged hardship. So far as I could understand the account of the natives, he was a complete stranger to them, and had come upon their village through the woods alone and in the last stage of exhaustion.\n\n\"The man's knapsack lay beside the couch, and I examined the contents. His name was written upon a tab within it\u2014Maple White, Lake Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. It is a name to which I am prepared always to lift my hat. It is not too much to say that it will rank level with my own when the final credit of this business comes to be apportioned.\n\n\"From the contents of the knapsack it was evident that this man had been an artist and poet in search of effects. There were scraps of verse. I do not profess to be a judge of such things, but they appeared to me to be singularly wanting in merit. There were also some rather commonplace pictures of river scenery, a paint-box, a box of colored chalks, some brushes, that curved bone which lies upon my inkstand, a volume of Baxter's 'Moths and Butterflies,' a cheap revolver, and a few cartridges. Of personal equipment he either had none or he had lost it in his journey. Such were the total effects of this strange American Bohemian.\n\n\"I was turning away from him when I observed that something projected from the front of his ragged jacket. It was this sketch-book, which was as dilapidated then as you see it now. Indeed, I can assure you that a first folio of Shakespeare could not be treated with greater reverence than this relic has been since it came into my possession. I hand it to you now, and I ask you to take it page by page and to examine the contents.\"\n\nHe helped himself to a cigar and leaned back with a fiercely critical pair of eyes, taking note of the effect which this document would produce.\n\nI had opened the volume with some expectation of a revelation, though of what nature I could not imagine. The first page was disappointing, however, as it contained nothing but the picture of a very fat man in a pea-jacket, with the legend, \"Jimmy Colver on the Mail-boat,\" written beneath it. There followed several pages which were filled with small sketches of Indians and their ways. Then came a picture of a cheerful and corpulent ecclesiastic in a shovel hat, sitting opposite a very thin European, and the inscription: \"Lunch with Fra Cristofero at Rosario.\" Studies of women and babies accounted for several more pages, and then there was an unbroken series of animal drawings with such explanations as \"Manatee upon Sandbank,\" \"Turtles and Their Eggs,\" \"Black Ajouti under a Miriti Palm\"\u2014the matter disclosing some sort of pig-like animal; and finally came a double page of studies of long-snouted and very unpleasant saurians. I could make nothing of it, and said so to the Professor.\n\n\"Surely these are only crocodiles?\"\n\n\"Alligators! Alligators! There is hardly such a thing as a true crocodile in South America. The distinction between them\u2014\"\n\n\"I meant that I could see nothing unusual\u2014nothing to justify what you have said.\"\n\nHe smiled serenely.\n\n\"Try the next page,\" said he.\n\nI was still unable to sympathize. It was a full-page sketch of a landscape roughly tinted in color\u2014the kind of painting which an open-air artist takes as a guide to a future more elaborate effort. There was a pale-green foreground of feathery vegetation, which sloped upwards and ended in a line of cliffs dark red in color, and curiously ribbed like some basaltic formations which I have seen. They extended in an unbroken wall right across the background. At one point was an isolated pyramidal rock, crowned by a great tree, which appeared to be separated by a cleft from the main crag. Behind it all, a blue tropical sky. A thin green line of vegetation fringed the summit of the ruddy cliff.\n\n\"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is no doubt a curious formation,\" said I \"but I am not geologist enough to say that it is wonderful.\"\n\n\"Wonderful!\" he repeated. \"It is unique. It is incredible. No one on earth has ever dreamed of such a possibility. Now the next.\"\n\nI turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise. There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen. It was the wild dream of an opium smoker, a vision of delirium. The head was like that of a fowl, the body that of a bloated lizard, the trailing tail was furnished with upward-turned spikes, and the curved back was edged with a high serrated fringe, which looked like a dozen cocks' wattles placed behind each other. In front of this creature was an absurd mannikin, or dwarf, in human form, who stood staring at it.\n\n\"Well, what do you think of that?\" cried the Professor, rubbing his hands with an air of triumph.\n\n\"It is monstrous\u2014grotesque.\"\n\n\"But what made him draw such an animal?\"\n\n\"Trade gin, I should think.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's the best explanation you can give, is it?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, what is yours?\"\n\n\"The obvious one that the creature exists. That is actually sketched from the life.\"\n\nI should have laughed only that I had a vision of our doing another Catharine-wheel down the passage.\n\n\"No doubt,\" said I, \"no doubt,\" as one humors an imbecile. \"I confess, however,\" I added, \"that this tiny human figure puzzles me. If it were an Indian we could set it down as evidence of some pigmy race in America, but it appears to be a European in a sun-hat.\"\n\nThe Professor snorted like an angry buffalo. \"You really touch the limit,\" said he. \"You enlarge my view of the possible. Cerebral paresis! Mental inertia! Wonderful!\"\n\nHe was too absurd to make me angry. Indeed, it was a waste of energy, for if you were going to be angry with this man you would be angry all the time. I contented myself with smiling wearily. \"It struck me that the man was small,\" said I.\n\n\"Look here!\" he cried, leaning forward and dabbing a great hairy sausage of a finger on to the picture. \"You see that plant behind the animal; I suppose you thought it was a dandelion or a Brussels sprout\u2014what? Well, it is a vegetable ivory palm, and they run to about fifty or sixty feet. Don't you see that the man is put in for a purpose? He couldn't really have stood in front of that brute and lived to draw it. He sketched himself in to give a scale of heights. He was, we will say, over five feet high. The tree is ten times bigger, which is what one would expect.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" I cried. \"Then you think the beast was\u2014 Why, Charing Cross station would hardly make a kennel for such a brute!\"\n\n\"Apart from exaggeration, he is certainly a well-grown specimen,\" said the Professor, complacently.\n\n\"But,\" I cried, \"surely the whole experience of the human race is not to be set aside on account of a single sketch\"\u2014I had turned over the leaves and ascertained that there was nothing more in the book\u2014\"a single sketch by a wandering American artist who may have done it under hashish, or in the delirium of fever, or simply in order to gratify a freakish imagination. You can't, as a man of science, defend such a position as that.\"\n\nFor answer the Professor took a book down from a shelf.\n\n\"This is an excellent monograph by my gifted friend, Ray Lankester!\" said he. \"There is an illustration here which would interest you. Ah, yes, here it is! The inscription beneath it runs: 'Probable appearance in life of the Jurassic Dinosaur Stegosaurus. The hind leg alone is twice as tall as a full-grown man.' Well, what do you make of that?\"\n\nHe handed me the open book. I started as I looked at the picture. In this reconstructed animal of a dead world there was certainly a very great resemblance to the sketch of the unknown artist.\n\n\"That is certainly remarkable,\" said I.\n\n\"But you won't admit that it is final?\"\n\n\"Surely it might be a coincidence, or this American may have seen a picture of the kind and carried it in his memory. It would be likely to recur to a man in a delirium.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" said the Professor, indulgently; \"we leave it at that. I will now ask you to look at this bone.\" He handed over the one which he had already described as part of the dead man's possessions. It was about six inches long, and thicker than my thumb, with some indications of dried cartilage at one end of it.\n\n\"To what known creature does that bone belong?\" asked the Professor.\n\nI examined it with care and tried to recall some half-forgotten knowledge.\n\n\"It might be a very thick human collar-bone,\" I said.\n\nMy companion waved his hand in contemptuous deprecation.\n\n\"The human collar-bone is curved. This is straight. There is a groove upon its surface showing that a great tendon played across it, which could not be the case with a clavicle.\"\n\n\"Then I must confess that I don't know what it is.\"\n\n\"You need not be ashamed to expose your ignorance, for I don't suppose the whole South Kensington staff could give a name to it.\" He took a little bone the size of a bean out of a pill-box. \"So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What do you say to that?\"\n\n\"Surely in an elephant\u2014\"\n\nHe winced as if in pain.\n\n\"Don't! Don't talk of elephants in South America. Even in these days of Board schools\u2014\"\n\n\"Well,\" I interrupted, \"any large South American animal\u2014a tapir, for example.\"\n\n\"You may take it, young man, that I am versed in the elements of my business. This is not a conceivable bone either of a tapir or of any other creature known to zoology. It belongs to a very large, a very strong, and, by all analogy, a very fierce animal which exists upon the face of the earth, but has not yet come under the notice of science. You are still unconvinced?\"\n\n\"I am at least deeply interested.\"\n\n\"Then your case is not hopeless. I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round for it. We will now leave the dead American and proceed with my narrative. You can imagine that I could hardly come away from the Amazon without probing deeper into the matter. There were indications as to the direction from which the dead traveler had come. Indian legends would alone have been my guide, for I found that rumors of a strange land were common among all the riverine tribes. You have heard, no doubt, of Curupuri?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"Curupuri is the spirit of the woods, something terrible, something malevolent, something to be avoided. None can describe its shape or nature, but it is a word of terror along the Amazon. Now all tribes agree as to the direction in which Curupuri lives. It was the same direction from which the American had come. Something terrible lay that way. It was my business to find out what it was.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\" My flippancy was all gone. This massive man compelled one's attention and respect.\n\n\"I overcame the extreme reluctance of the natives\u2014a reluctance which extends even to talk upon the subject\u2014and by judicious persuasion and gifts, aided, I will admit, by some threats of coercion, I got two of them to act as guides. After many adventures which I need not describe, and after traveling a distance which I will not mention, in a direction which I withhold, we came at last to a tract of country which has never been described, nor, indeed, visited save by my unfortunate predecessor. Would you kindly look at this?\"\n\nHe handed me a photograph\u2014half-plate size.\n\n\"The unsatisfactory appearance of it is due to the fact,\" said he, \"that on descending the river the boat was upset and the case which contained the undeveloped films was broken, with disastrous results. Nearly all of them were totally ruined\u2014an irreparable loss. This is one of the few which partially escaped. This explanation of deficiencies or abnormalities you will kindly accept. There was talk of faking. I am not in a mood to argue such a point.\"\n\nThe photograph was certainly very off-colored. An unkind critic might easily have misinterpreted that dim surface. It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like an immense cataract seen in the distance, with a sloping, tree-clad plain in the foreground.\n\n\"I believe it is the same place as the painted picture,\" said I.\n\n\"It is the same place,\" the Professor answered. \"I found traces of the fellow's camp. Now look at this.\"\n\nIt was a nearer view of the same scene, though the photograph was extremely defective. I could distinctly see the isolated, tree-crowned pinnacle of rock which was detached from the crag.\n\n\"I have no doubt of it at all,\" said I.\n\n\"Well, that is something gained,\" said he. \"We progress, do we not? Now, will you please look at the top of that rocky pinnacle? Do you observe something there?\"\n\n\"An enormous tree.\"\n\n\"But on the tree?\"\n\n\"A large bird,\" said I.\n\nHe handed me a lens.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, peering through it, \"a large bird stands on the tree. It appears to have a considerable beak. I should say it was a pelican.\"\n\n\"I cannot congratulate you upon your eyesight,\" said the Professor. \"It is not a pelican, nor, indeed, is it a bird. It may interest you to know that I succeeded in shooting that particular specimen. It was the only absolute proof of my experiences which I was able to bring away with me.\"\n\n\"You have it, then?\" Here at last was tangible corroboration.\n\n\"I had it. It was unfortunately lost with so much else in the same boat accident which ruined my photographs. I clutched at it as it disappeared in the swirl of the rapids, and part of its wing was left in my hand. I was insensible when washed ashore, but the miserable remnant of my superb specimen was still intact; I now lay it before you.\"\n\nFrom a drawer he produced what seemed to me to be the upper portion of the wing of a large bat. It was at least two feet in length, a curved bone, with a membranous veil beneath it.\n\n\"A monstrous bat!\" I suggested.\n\n\"Nothing of the sort,\" said the Professor, severely. \"Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between? Now, in this case, the bone is certainly not the forearm, and you can see for yourself that this is a single membrane hanging upon a single bone, and therefore that it cannot belong to a bat. But if it is neither bird nor bat, what is it?\"\n\nMy small stock of knowledge was exhausted.\n\n\"I really do not know,\" said I.\n\nHe opened the standard work to which he had already referred me.\n\n\"Here,\" said he, pointing to the picture of an extraordinary flying monster, \"is an excellent reproduction of the dimorphodon, or pterodactyl, a flying reptile of the Jurassic period. On the next page is a diagram of the mechanism of its wing. Kindly compare it with the specimen in your hand.\"\n\nA wave of amazement passed over me as I looked. I was convinced. There could be no getting away from it. The cumulative proof was overwhelming. The sketch, the photographs, the narrative, and now the actual specimen\u2014the evidence was complete. I said so\u2014I said so warmly, for I felt that the Professor was an illused man. He leaned back in his chair with drooping eyelids and a tolerant smile, basking in this sudden gleam of sunshine.\n\n\"It's just the very biggest thing that I ever heard of!\" said I, though it was my journalistic rather than my scientific enthusiasm that was roused. \"It is colossal. You are a Columbus of science who has discovered a lost world. I'm awfully sorry if I seemed to doubt you. It was all so unthinkable. But I understand evidence when I see it, and this should be good enough for anyone.\"\n\nThe Professor purred with satisfaction.\n\n\"And then, sir, what did you do next?\"\n\n\"It was the wet season, Mr. Malone, and my stores were exhausted. I explored some portion of this huge cliff, but I was unable to find any way to scale it. The pyramidal rock upon which I saw and shot the pterodactyl was more accessible. Being something of a cragsman, I did manage to get half way to the top of that. From that height I had a better idea of the plateau upon the top of the crags. It appeared to be very large; neither to east nor to west could I see any end to the vista of green-capped cliffs. Below, it is a swampy, jungly region, full of snakes, insects, and fever. It is a natural protection to this singular country.\"\n\n\"Did you see any other trace of life?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I did not; but during the week that we lay encamped at the base of the cliff we heard some very strange noises from above.\"\n\n\"But the creature that the American drew? How do you account for that?\"\n\n\"We can only suppose that he must have made his way to the summit and seen it there. We know, therefore, that there is a way up. We know equally that it must be a very difficult one, otherwise the creatures would have come down and overrun the surrounding country. Surely that is clear?\"\n\n\"But how did they come to be there?\"\n\n\"I do not think that the problem is a very obscure one,\" said the Professor; \"there can only be one explanation. South America is, as you may have heard, a granite continent. At this single point in the interior there has been, in some far distant age, a great, sudden volcanic upheaval. These cliffs, I may remark, are basaltic, and therefore plutonic. An area, as large perhaps as Sussex, has been lifted up en bloc with all its living contents, and cut off by perpendicular precipices of a hardness which defies erosion from all the rest of the continent. What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear. You will observe that both the pterodactyl and the stegosaurus are Jurassic, and therefore of a great age in the order of life. They have been artificially conserved by those strange accidental conditions.\"\n\n\"But surely your evidence is conclusive. You have only to lay it before the proper authorities.\"\n\n\"So in my simplicity, I had imagined,\" said the Professor, bitterly. \"I can only tell you that it was not so, that I was met at every turn by incredulity, born partly of stupidity and partly of jealousy. It is not my nature, sir, to cringe to any man, or to seek to prove a fact if my word has been doubted. After the first I have not condescended to show such corroborative proofs as I possess. The subject became hateful to me\u2014I would not speak of it. When men like yourself, who represent the foolish curiosity of the public, came to disturb my privacy I was unable to meet them with dignified reserve. By nature I am, I admit, somewhat fiery, and under provocation I am inclined to be violent. I fear you may have remarked it.\"\n\nI nursed my eye and was silent.\n\n\"My wife has frequently remonstrated with me upon the subject, and yet I fancy that any man of honor would feel the same. To-night, however, I propose to give an extreme example of the control of the will over the emotions. I invite you to be present at the exhibition.\" He handed me a card from his desk. \"You will perceive that Mr. Percival Waldron, a naturalist of some popular repute, is announced to lecture at eight-thirty at the Zoological Institute's Hall upon 'The Record of the Ages.' I have been specially invited to be present upon the platform, and to move a vote of thanks to the lecturer. While doing so, I shall make it my business, with infinite tact and delicacy, to throw out a few remarks which may arouse the interest of the audience and cause some of them to desire to go more deeply into the matter. Nothing contentious, you understand, but only an indication that there are greater deeps beyond. I shall hold myself strongly in leash, and see whether by this self-restraint I attain a more favorable result.\"\n\n\"And I may come?\" I asked eagerly.\n\n\"Why, surely,\" he answered, cordially. He had an enormously massive genial manner, which was almost as overpowering as his violence. His smile of benevolence was a wonderful thing, when his cheeks would suddenly bunch into two red apples, between his half-closed eyes and his great black beard. \"By all means, come. It will be a comfort to me to know that I have one ally in the hall, however inefficient and ignorant of the subject he may be. I fancy there will be a large audience, for Waldron, though an absolute charlatan, has a considerable popular following. Now, Mr. Malone, I have given you rather more of my time than I had intended. The individual must not monopolize what is meant for the world. I shall be pleased to see you at the lecture to-night. In the meantime, you will understand that no public use is to be made of any of the material that I have given you.\"\n\n\"But Mr. McArdle\u2014my news editor, you know\u2014will want to know what I have done.\"\n\n\"Tell him what you like. You can say, among other things, that if he sends anyone else to intrude upon me I shall call upon him with a riding-whip. But I leave it to you that nothing of all this appears in print. Very good. Then the Zoological Institute's Hall at eight-thirty to-night.\" I had a last impression of red cheeks, blue rippling beard, and intolerant eyes, as he waved me out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\"Question!\"\n\nWhat with the physical shocks incidental to my first interview with Professor Challenger and the mental ones which accompanied the second, I was a somewhat demoralized journalist by the time I found myself in Enmore Park once more. In my aching head the one thought was throbbing that there really was truth in this man's story, that it was of tremendous consequence, and that it would work up into inconceivable copy for the Gazette when I could obtain permission to use it. A taxicab was waiting at the end of the road, so I sprang into it and drove down to the office. McArdle was at his post as usual.\n\n\"Well,\" he cried, expectantly, \"what may it run to? I'm thinking, young man, you have been in the wars. Don't tell me that he assaulted you.\"\n\n\"We had a little difference at first.\"\n\n\"What a man it is! What did you do?\"\n\n\"Well, he became more reasonable and we had a chat. But I got nothing out of him\u2014nothing for publication.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure about that. You got a black eye out of him, and that's for publication. We can't have this reign of terror, Mr. Malone. We must bring the man to his bearings. I'll have a leaderette on him to-morrow that will raise a blister. Just give me the material and I will engage to brand the fellow for ever. Professor Munchausen\u2014how's that for an inset headline? Sir John Mandeville redivivus\u2014Cagliostro\u2014all the imposters and bullies in history. I'll show him up for the fraud he is.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't do that, sir.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because he is not a fraud at all.\"\n\n\"What!\" roared McArdle. \"You don't mean to say you really believe this stuff of his about mammoths and mastodons and great sea sairpents?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know about that. I don't think he makes any claims of that kind. But I do believe he has got something new.\"\n\n\"Then for Heaven's sake, man, write it up!\"\n\n\"I'm longing to, but all I know he gave me in confidence and on condition that I didn't.\" I condensed into a few sentences the Professor's narrative. \"That's how it stands.\"\n\nMcArdle looked deeply incredulous.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Malone,\" he said at last, \"about this scientific meeting to-night; there can be no privacy about that, anyhow. I don't suppose any paper will want to report it, for Waldron has been reported already a dozen times, and no one is aware that Challenger will speak. We may get a scoop, if we are lucky. You'll be there in any case, so you'll just give us a pretty full report. I'll keep space up to midnight.\"\n\nMy day was a busy one, and I had an early dinner at the Savage Club with Tarp Henry, to whom I gave some account of my adventures. He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with laughter on hearing that the Professor had convinced me.\n\n\"My dear chap, things don't happen like that in real life. People don't stumble upon enormous discoveries and then lose their evidence. Leave that to the novelists. The fellow is as full of tricks as the monkey-house at the Zoo. It's all bosh.\"\n\n\"But the American poet?\"\n\n\"He never existed.\"\n\n\"I saw his sketch-book.\"\n\n\"Challenger's sketch-book.\"\n\n\"You think he drew that animal?\"\n\n\"Of course he did. Who else?\"\n\n\"Well, then, the photographs?\"\n\n\"There was nothing in the photographs. By your own admission you only saw a bird.\"\n\n\"A pterodactyl.\"\n\n\"That's what HE says. He put the pterodactyl into your head.\"\n\n\"Well, then, the bones?\"\n\n\"First one out of an Irish stew. Second one vamped up for the occasion. If you are clever and know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph.\"\n\nI began to feel uneasy. Perhaps, after all, I had been premature in my acquiescence. Then I had a sudden happy thought.\n\n\"Will you come to the meeting?\" I asked.\n\nTarp Henry looked thoughtful.\n\n\"He is not a popular person, the genial Challenger,\" said he. \"A lot of people have accounts to settle with him. I should say he is about the best-hated man in London. If the medical students turn out there will be no end of a rag. I don't want to get into a bear-garden.\"\n\n\"You might at least do him the justice to hear him state his own case.\"\n\n\"Well, perhaps it's only fair. All right. I'm your man for the evening.\"\n\nWhen we arrived at the hall we found a much greater concourse than I had expected. A line of electric broughams discharged their little cargoes of white-bearded professors, while the dark stream of humbler pedestrians, who crowded through the arched doorway, showed that the audience would be popular as well as scientific. Indeed, it became evident to us as soon as we had taken our seats that a youthful and even boyish spirit was abroad in the gallery and the back portions of the hall. Looking behind me, I could see rows of faces of the familiar medical student type. Apparently the great hospitals had each sent down their contingent. The behavior of the audience at present was good-humored, but mischievous. Scraps of popular songs were chorused with an enthusiasm which was a strange prelude to a scientific lecture, and there was already a tendency to personal chaff which promised a jovial evening to others, however embarrassing it might be to the recipients of these dubious honors.\n\nThus, when old Doctor Meldrum, with his well-known curly-brimmed opera-hat, appeared upon the platform, there was such a universal query of \"Where DID you get that tile?\" that he hurriedly removed it, and concealed it furtively under his chair. When gouty Professor Wadley limped down to his seat there were general affectionate inquiries from all parts of the hall as to the exact state of his poor toe, which caused him obvious embarrassment. The greatest demonstration of all, however, was at the entrance of my new acquaintance, Professor Challenger, when he passed down to take his place at the extreme end of the front row of the platform. Such a yell of welcome broke forth when his black beard first protruded round the corner that I began to suspect Tarp Henry was right in his surmise, and that this assemblage was there not merely for the sake of the lecture, but because it had got rumored abroad that the famous Professor would take part in the proceedings.\n\nThere was some sympathetic laughter on his entrance among the front benches of well-dressed spectators, as though the demonstration of the students in this instance was not unwelcome to them. That greeting was, indeed, a frightful outburst of sound, the uproar of the carnivora cage when the step of the bucket-bearing keeper is heard in the distance. There was an offensive tone in it, perhaps, and yet in the main it struck me as mere riotous outcry, the noisy reception of one who amused and interested them, rather than of one they disliked or despised. Challenger smiled with weary and tolerant contempt, as a kindly man would meet the yapping of a litter of puppies. He sat slowly down, blew out his chest, passed his hand caressingly down his beard, and looked with drooping eyelids and supercilious eyes at the crowded hall before him. The uproar of his advent had not yet died away when Professor Ronald Murray, the chairman, and Mr. Waldron, the lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and the proceedings began.\n\nProfessor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he has the common fault of most Englishmen of being inaudible. Why on earth people who have something to say which is worth hearing should not take the slight trouble to learn how to make it heard is one of the strange mysteries of modern life. Their methods are as reasonable as to try to pour some precious stuff from the spring to the reservoir through a non-conducting pipe, which could by the least effort be opened. Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to the water-carafe upon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to the silver candlestick upon his right. Then he sat down, and Mr. Waldron, the famous popular lecturer, rose amid a general murmur of applause. He was a stern, gaunt man, with a harsh voice, and an aggressive manner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in a way which was intelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack of being funny about the most unlikely objects, so that the precession of the Equinox or the formation of a vertebrate became a highly humorous process as treated by him.\n\nIt was a bird's-eye view of creation, as interpreted by science, which, in language always clear and sometimes picturesque, he unfolded before us. He told us of the globe, a huge mass of flaming gas, flaring through the heavens. Then he pictured the solidification, the cooling, the wrinkling which formed the mountains, the steam which turned to water, the slow preparation of the stage upon which was to be played the inexplicable drama of life. On the origin of life itself he was discreetly vague. That the germs of it could hardly have survived the original roasting was, he declared, fairly certain. Therefore it had come later. Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganic elements of the globe? Very likely. Had the germs of it arrived from outside upon a meteor? It was hardly conceivable. On the whole, the wisest man was the least dogmatic upon the point. We could not\u2014or at least we had not succeeded up to date in making organic life in our laboratories out of inorganic materials. The gulf between the dead and the living was something which our chemistry could not as yet bridge. But there was a higher and subtler chemistry of Nature, which, working with great forces over long epochs, might well produce results which were impossible for us. There the matter must be left.\n\nThis brought the lecturer to the great ladder of animal life, beginning low down in molluscs and feeble sea creatures, then up rung by rung through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-rat, a creature which brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of all mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the audience. (\"No, no,\" from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young gentleman in the red tie who cried \"No, no,\" and who presumably claimed to have been hatched out of an egg, would wait upon him after the lecture, he would be glad to see such a curiosity. (Laughter.) It was strange to think that the climax of all the age-long process of Nature had been the creation of that gentleman in the red tie. But had the process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as the final type\u2014the be-all and end-all of development? He hoped that he would not hurt the feelings of the gentleman in the red tie if he maintained that, whatever virtues that gentleman might possess in private life, still the vast processes of the universe were not fully justified if they were to end entirely in his production. Evolution was not a spent force, but one still working, and even greater achievements were in store.\n\nHaving thus, amid a general titter, played very prettily with his interrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture of the past, the drying of the seas, the emergence of the sandbank, the sluggish, viscous life which lay upon their margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the tendency of the sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud-flats, the abundance of food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth. \"Hence, ladies and gentlemen,\" he added, \"that frightful brood of saurians which still affright our eyes when seen in the Wealden or in the Solenhofen slates, but which were fortunately extinct long before the first appearance of mankind upon this planet.\"\n\n\"Question!\" boomed a voice from the platform.\n\nMr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humor, as exemplified upon the gentleman with the red tie, which made it perilous to interrupt him. But this interjection appeared to him so absurd that he was at a loss how to deal with it. So looks the Shakespearean who is confronted by a rancid Baconian, or the astronomer who is assailed by a flat-earth fanatic. He paused for a moment, and then, raising his voice, repeated slowly the words: \"Which were extinct before the coming of man.\"\n\n\"Question!\" boomed the voice once more.\n\nWaldron looked with amazement along the line of professors upon the platform until his eyes fell upon the figure of Challenger, who leaned back in his chair with closed eyes and an amused expression, as if he were smiling in his sleep.\n\n\"I see!\" said Waldron, with a shrug. \"It is my friend Professor Challenger,\" and amid laughter he renewed his lecture as if this was a final explanation and no more need be said.\n\nBut the incident was far from being closed. Whatever path the lecturer took amid the wilds of the past seemed invariably to lead him to some assertion as to extinct or prehistoric life which instantly brought the same bulls' bellow from the Professor. The audience began to anticipate it and to roar with delight when it came. The packed benches of students joined in, and every time Challenger's beard opened, before any sound could come forth, there was a yell of \"Question!\" from a hundred voices, and an answering counter cry of \"Order!\" and \"Shame!\" from as many more. Waldron, though a hardened lecturer and a strong man, became rattled. He hesitated, stammered, repeated himself, got snarled in a long sentence, and finally turned furiously upon the cause of his troubles.\n\n\"This is really intolerable!\" he cried, glaring across the platform. \"I must ask you, Professor Challenger, to cease these ignorant and unmannerly interruptions.\"\n\nThere was a hush over the hall, the students rigid with delight at seeing the high gods on Olympus quarrelling among themselves. Challenger levered his bulky figure slowly out of his chair.\n\n\"I must in turn ask you, Mr. Waldron,\" he said, \"to cease to make assertions which are not in strict accordance with scientific fact.\"\n\nThe words unloosed a tempest. \"Shame! Shame!\" \"Give him a hearing!\" \"Put him out!\" \"Shove him off the platform!\" \"Fair play!\" emerged from a general roar of amusement or execration. The chairman was on his feet flapping both his hands and bleating excitedly. \"Professor Challenger\u2014personal\u2014views\u2014later,\" were the solid peaks above his clouds of inaudible mutter. The interrupter bowed, smiled, stroked his beard, and relapsed into his chair. Waldron, very flushed and warlike, continued his observations. Now and then, as he made an assertion, he shot a venomous glance at his opponent, who seemed to be slumbering deeply, with the same broad, happy smile upon his face.\n\nAt last the lecture came to an end\u2014I am inclined to think that it was a premature one, as the peroration was hurried and disconnected. The thread of the argument had been rudely broken, and the audience was restless and expectant. Waldron sat down, and, after a chirrup from the chairman, Professor Challenger rose and advanced to the edge of the platform. In the interests of my paper I took down his speech verbatim.\n\n\"Ladies and Gentlemen,\" he began, amid a sustained interruption from the back. \"I beg pardon\u2014Ladies, Gentlemen, and Children\u2014I must apologize, I had inadvertently omitted a considerable section of this audience\" (tumult, during which the Professor stood with one hand raised and his enormous head nodding sympathetically, as if he were bestowing a pontifical blessing upon the crowd), \"I have been selected to move a vote of thanks to Mr. Waldron for the very picturesque and imaginative address to which we have just listened. There are points in it with which I disagree, and it has been my duty to indicate them as they arose, but, none the less, Mr. Waldron has accomplished his object well, that object being to give a simple and interesting account of what he conceives to have been the history of our planet. Popular lectures are the easiest to listen to, but Mr. Waldron\" (here he beamed and blinked at the lecturer) \"will excuse me when I say that they are necessarily both superficial and misleading, since they have to be graded to the comprehension of an ignorant audience.\" (Ironical cheering.) \"Popular lecturers are in their nature parasitic.\" (Angry gesture of protest from Mr. Waldron.) \"They exploit for fame or cash the work which has been done by their indigent and unknown brethren. One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into the temple of science, far outweighs any second-hand exposition which passes an idle hour, but can leave no useful result behind it. I put forward this obvious reflection, not out of any desire to disparage Mr. Waldron in particular, but that you may not lose your sense of proportion and mistake the acolyte for the high priest.\" (At this point Mr. Waldron whispered to the chairman, who half rose and said something severely to his water-carafe.) \"But enough of this!\" (Loud and prolonged cheers.) \"Let me pass to some subject of wider interest. What is the particular point upon which I, as an original investigator, have challenged our lecturer's accuracy? It is upon the permanence of certain types of animal life upon the earth. I do not speak upon this subject as an amateur, nor, I may add, as a popular lecturer, but I speak as one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere closely to facts, when I say that Mr. Waldron is very wrong in supposing that because he has never himself seen a so-called prehistoric animal, therefore these creatures no longer exist. They are indeed, as he has said, our ancestors, but they are, if I may use the expression, our contemporary ancestors, who can still be found with all their hideous and formidable characteristics if one has but the energy and hardihood to seek their haunts. Creatures which were supposed to be Jurassic, monsters who would hunt down and devour our largest and fiercest mammals, still exist.\" (Cries of \"Bosh!\" \"Prove it!\" \"How do YOU know?\" \"Question!\") \"How do I know, you ask me? I know because I have visited their secret haunts. I know because I have seen some of them.\" (Applause, uproar, and a voice, \"Liar!\") \"Am I a liar?\" (General hearty and noisy assent.) \"Did I hear someone say that I was a liar? Will the person who called me a liar kindly stand up that I may know him?\" (A voice, \"Here he is, sir!\" and an inoffensive little person in spectacles, struggling violently, was held up among a group of students.) \"Did you venture to call me a liar?\" (\"No, sir, no!\" shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-in-the-box.) \"If any person in this hall dares to doubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have a few words with him after the lecture.\" (\"Liar!\") \"Who said that?\" (Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the air.) \"If I come down among you\u2014\" (General chorus of \"Come, love, come!\" which interrupted the proceedings for some moments, while the chairman, standing up and waving both his arms, seemed to be conducting the music. The Professor, with his face flushed, his nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in a proper Berserk mood.) \"Every great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity\u2014the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the men who have risked their lives to open new fields to science. You persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I\u2014\" (Prolonged cheering and complete interruption.)\n\nAll this is from my hurried notes taken at the time, which give little notion of the absolute chaos to which the assembly had by this time been reduced. So terrific was the uproar that several ladies had already beaten a hurried retreat. Grave and reverend seniors seemed to have caught the prevailing spirit as badly as the students, and I saw white-bearded men rising and shaking their fists at the obdurate Professor. The whole great audience seethed and simmered like a boiling pot. The Professor took a step forward and raised both his hands. There was something so big and arresting and virile in the man that the clatter and shouting died gradually away before his commanding gesture and his masterful eyes. He seemed to have a definite message. They hushed to hear it.\n\n\"I will not detain you,\" he said. \"It is not worth it. Truth is truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men\u2014and, I fear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors\u2014cannot affect the matter. I claim that I have opened a new field of science. You dispute it.\" (Cheers.) \"Then I put you to the test. Will you accredit one or more of your own number to go out as your representatives and test my statement in your name?\"\n\nMr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the withered aspect of a theologian. He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether the results to which he had alluded in his remarks had been obtained during a journey to the headwaters of the Amazon made by him two years before.\n\nProfessor Challenger answered that they had.\n\nMr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger claimed to have made discoveries in those regions which had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of established scientific repute.\n\nProfessor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to be confusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality a somewhat larger river; that Mr. Summerlee might be interested to know that with the Orinoco, which communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of country were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not impossible for one person to find what another had missed.\n\nMr. Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated the difference between the Thames and the Amazon, which lay in the fact that any assertion about the former could be tested, while about the latter it could not. He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which prehistoric animals were to be found.\n\nProfessor Challenger replied that he reserved such information for good reasons of his own, but would be prepared to give it with proper precautions to a committee chosen from the audience. Would Mr. Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his story in person?\n\nMr. Summerlee: \"Yes, I will.\" (Great cheering.)\n\nProfessor Challenger: \"Then I guarantee that I will place in your hands such material as will enable you to find your way. It is only right, however, since Mr. Summerlee goes to check my statement that I should have one or more with him who may check his. I will not disguise from you that there are difficulties and dangers. Mr. Summerlee will need a younger colleague. May I ask for volunteers?\"\n\nIt is thus that the great crisis of a man's life springs out at him. Could I have imagined when I entered that hall that I was about to pledge myself to a wilder adventure than had ever come to me in my dreams? But Gladys\u2014was it not the very opportunity of which she spoke? Gladys would have told me to go. I had sprung to my feet. I was speaking, and yet I had prepared no words. Tarp Henry, my companion, was plucking at my skirts and I heard him whispering, \"Sit down, Malone! Don't make a public ass of yourself.\" At the same time I was aware that a tall, thin man, with dark gingery hair, a few seats in front of me, was also upon his feet. He glared back at me with hard angry eyes, but I refused to give way.\n\n\"I will go, Mr. Chairman,\" I kept repeating over and over again.\n\n\"Name! Name!\" cried the audience.\n\n\"My name is Edward Dunn Malone. I am the reporter of the Daily Gazette. I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced witness.\"\n\n\"What is YOUR name, sir?\" the chairman asked of my tall rival.\n\n\"I am Lord John Roxton. I have already been up the Amazon, I know all the ground, and have special qualifications for this investigation.\"\n\n\"Lord John Roxton's reputation as a sportsman and a traveler is, of course, world-famous,\" said the chairman; \"at the same time it would certainly be as well to have a member of the Press upon such an expedition.\"\n\n\"Then I move,\" said Professor Challenger, \"that both these gentlemen be elected, as representatives of this meeting, to accompany Professor Summerlee upon his journey to investigate and to report upon the truth of my statements.\"\n\nAnd so, amid shouting and cheering, our fate was decided, and I found myself borne away in the human current which swirled towards the door, with my mind half stunned by the vast new project which had risen so suddenly before it. As I emerged from the hall I was conscious for a moment of a rush of laughing students\u2014down the pavement, and of an arm wielding a heavy umbrella, which rose and fell in the midst of them. Then, amid a mixture of groans and cheers, Professor Challenger's electric brougham slid from the curb, and I found myself walking under the silvery lights of Regent Street, full of thoughts of Gladys and of wonder as to my future.\n\nSuddenly there was a touch at my elbow. I turned, and found myself looking into the humorous, masterful eyes of the tall, thin man who had volunteered to be my companion on this strange quest.\n\n\"Mr. Malone, I understand,\" said he. \"We are to be companions\u2014what? My rooms are just over the road, in the Albany. Perhaps you would have the kindness to spare me half an hour, for there are one or two things that I badly want to say to you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "\"I was the Flail of the Lord\"\n\nLord John Roxton and I turned down Vigo Street together and through the dingy portals of the famous aristocratic rookery. At the end of a long drab passage my new acquaintance pushed open a door and turned on an electric switch. A number of lamps shining through tinted shades bathed the whole great room before us in a ruddy radiance. Standing in the doorway and glancing round me, I had a general impression of extraordinary comfort and elegance combined with an atmosphere of masculine virility. Everywhere there were mingled the luxury of the wealthy man of taste and the careless untidiness of the bachelor. Rich furs and strange iridescent mats from some Oriental bazaar were scattered upon the floor. Pictures and prints which even my unpractised eyes could recognize as being of great price and rarity hung thick upon the walls. Sketches of boxers, of ballet-girls, and of racehorses alternated with a sensuous Fragonard, a martial Girardet, and a dreamy Turner. But amid these varied ornaments there were scattered the trophies which brought back strongly to my recollection the fact that Lord John Roxton was one of the great all-round sportsmen and athletes of his day. A dark-blue oar crossed with a cherry-pink one above his mantelpiece spoke of the old Oxonian and Leander man, while the foils and boxing-gloves above and below them were the tools of a man who had won supremacy with each. Like a dado round the room was the jutting line of splendid heavy game-heads, the best of their sort from every quarter of the world, with the rare white rhinoceros of the Lado Enclave drooping its supercilious lip above them all.\n\nIn the center of the rich red carpet was a black and gold Louis Quinze table, a lovely antique, now sacrilegiously desecrated with marks of glasses and the scars of cigar-stumps. On it stood a silver tray of smokables and a burnished spirit-stand, from which and an adjacent siphon my silent host proceeded to charge two high glasses. Having indicated an arm-chair to me and placed my refreshment near it, he handed me a long, smooth Havana. Then, seating himself opposite to me, he looked at me long and fixedly with his strange, twinkling, reckless eyes\u2014eyes of a cold light blue, the color of a glacier lake.\n\nThrough the thin haze of my cigar-smoke I noted the details of a face which was already familiar to me from many photographs\u2014the strongly-curved nose, the hollow, worn cheeks, the dark, ruddy hair, thin at the top, the crisp, virile moustaches, the small, aggressive tuft upon his projecting chin. Something there was of Napoleon III., something of Don Quixote, and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert, open-air lover of dogs and of horses. His skin was of a rich flower-pot red from sun and wind. His eyebrows were tufted and overhanging, which gave those naturally cold eyes an almost ferocious aspect, an impression which was increased by his strong and furrowed brow. In figure he was spare, but very strongly built\u2014indeed, he had often proved that there were few men in England capable of such sustained exertions. His height was a little over six feet, but he seemed shorter on account of a peculiar rounding of the shoulders. Such was the famous Lord John Roxton as he sat opposite to me, biting hard upon his cigar and watching me steadily in a long and embarrassing silence.\n\n\"Well,\" said he, at last, \"we've gone and done it, young fellah my lad.\" (This curious phrase he pronounced as if it were all one word\u2014\"young-fellah-me-lad.\") \"Yes, we've taken a jump, you an' me. I suppose, now, when you went into that room there was no such notion in your head\u2014what?\"\n\n\"No thought of it.\"\n\n\"The same here. No thought of it. And here we are, up to our necks in the tureen. Why, I've only been back three weeks from Uganda, and taken a place in Scotland, and signed the lease and all. Pretty goin's on\u2014what? How does it hit you?\"\n\n\"Well, it is all in the main line of my business. I am a journalist on the Gazette.\"\n\n\"Of course\u2014you said so when you took it on. By the way, I've got a small job for you, if you'll help me.\"\n\n\"With pleasure.\"\n\n\"Don't mind takin' a risk, do you?\"\n\n\"What is the risk?\"\n\n\"Well, it's Ballinger\u2014he's the risk. You've heard of him?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why, young fellah, where HAVE you lived? Sir John Ballinger is the best gentleman jock in the north country. I could hold him on the flat at my best, but over jumps he's my master. Well, it's an open secret that when he's out of trainin' he drinks hard\u2014strikin' an average, he calls it. He got delirium on Toosday, and has been ragin' like a devil ever since. His room is above this. The doctors say that it is all up with the old dear unless some food is got into him, but as he lies in bed with a revolver on his coverlet, and swears he will put six of the best through anyone that comes near him, there's been a bit of a strike among the serving-men. He's a hard nail, is Jack, and a dead shot, too, but you can't leave a Grand National winner to die like that\u2014what?\"\n\n\"What do you mean to do, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, my idea was that you and I could rush him. He may be dozin', and at the worst he can only wing one of us, and the other should have him. If we can get his bolster-cover round his arms and then 'phone up a stomach-pump, we'll give the old dear the supper of his life.\"\n\nIt was a rather desperate business to come suddenly into one's day's work. I don't think that I am a particularly brave man. I have an Irish imagination which makes the unknown and the untried more terrible than they are. On the other hand, I was brought up with a horror of cowardice and with a terror of such a stigma. I dare say that I could throw myself over a precipice, like the Hun in the history books, if my courage to do it were questioned, and yet it would surely be pride and fear, rather than courage, which would be my inspiration. Therefore, although every nerve in my body shrank from the whisky-maddened figure which I pictured in the room above, I still answered, in as careless a voice as I could command, that I was ready to go. Some further remark of Lord Roxton's about the danger only made me irritable.\n\n\"Talking won't make it any better,\" said I. \"Come on.\"\n\nI rose from my chair and he from his. Then with a little confidential chuckle of laughter, he patted me two or three times on the chest, finally pushing me back into my chair.\n\n\"All right, sonny my lad\u2014you'll do,\" said he. I looked up in surprise.\n\n\"I saw after Jack Ballinger myself this mornin'. He blew a hole in the skirt of my kimono, bless his shaky old hand, but we got a jacket on him, and he's to be all right in a week. I say, young fellah, I hope you don't mind\u2014what? You see, between you an' me close-tiled, I look on this South American business as a mighty serious thing, and if I have a pal with me I want a man I can bank on. So I sized you down, and I'm bound to say that you came well out of it. You see, it's all up to you and me, for this old Summerlee man will want dry-nursin' from the first. By the way, are you by any chance the Malone who is expected to get his Rugby cap for Ireland?\"\n\n\"A reserve, perhaps.\"\n\n\"I thought I remembered your face. Why, I was there when you got that try against Richmond\u2014as fine a swervin' run as I saw the whole season. I never miss a Rugby match if I can help it, for it is the manliest game we have left. Well, I didn't ask you in here just to talk sport. We've got to fix our business. Here are the sailin's, on the first page of the Times. There's a Booth boat for Para next Wednesday week, and if the Professor and you can work it, I think we should take it\u2014what? Very good, I'll fix it with him. What about your outfit?\"\n\n\"My paper will see to that.\"\n\n\"Can you shoot?\"\n\n\"About average Territorial standard.\"\n\n\"Good Lord! as bad as that? It's the last thing you young fellahs think of learnin'. You're all bees without stings, so far as lookin' after the hive goes. You'll look silly, some o' these days, when someone comes along an' sneaks the honey. But you'll need to hold your gun straight in South America, for, unless our friend the Professor is a madman or a liar, we may see some queer things before we get back. What gun have you?\"\n\nHe crossed to an oaken cupboard, and as he threw it open I caught a glimpse of glistening rows of parallel barrels, like the pipes of an organ.\n\n\"I'll see what I can spare you out of my own battery,\" said he.\n\nOne by one he took out a succession of beautiful rifles, opening and shutting them with a snap and a clang, and then patting them as he put them back into the rack as tenderly as a mother would fondle her children.\n\n\"This is a Bland's .577 axite express,\" said he. \"I got that big fellow with it.\" He glanced up at the white rhinoceros. \"Ten more yards, and he'd would have added me to HIS collection.\n\n'On that conical bullet his one chance hangs, 'Tis the weak one's advantage fair.'\n\nHope you know your Gordon, for he's the poet of the horse and the gun and the man that handles both. Now, here's a useful tool\u2014.470, telescopic sight, double ejector, point-blank up to three-fifty. That's the rifle I used against the Peruvian slave-drivers three years ago. I was the flail of the Lord up in those parts, I may tell you, though you won't find it in any Blue-book. There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again. That's why I made a little war on my own. Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself. Each of those nicks is for a slave murderer\u2014a good row of them\u2014what? That big one is for Pedro Lopez, the king of them all, that I killed in a backwater of the Putomayo River. Now, here's something that would do for you.\" He took out a beautiful brown-and-silver rifle. \"Well rubbered at the stock, sharply sighted, five cartridges to the clip. You can trust your life to that.\" He handed it to me and closed the door of his oak cabinet.\n\n\"By the way,\" he continued, coming back to his chair, \"what do you know of this Professor Challenger?\"\n\n\"I never saw him till to-day.\"\n\n\"Well, neither did I. It's funny we should both sail under sealed orders from a man we don't know. He seemed an uppish old bird. His brothers of science don't seem too fond of him, either. How came you to take an interest in the affair?\"\n\nI told him shortly my experiences of the morning, and he listened intently. Then he drew out a map of South America and laid it on the table.\n\n\"I believe every single word he said to you was the truth,\" said he, earnestly, \"and, mind you, I have something to go on when I speak like that. South America is a place I love, and I think, if you take it right through from Darien to Fuego, it's the grandest, richest, most wonderful bit of earth upon this planet. People don't know it yet, and don't realize what it may become. I've been up an' down it from end to end, and had two dry seasons in those very parts, as I told you when I spoke of the war I made on the slave-dealers. Well, when I was up there I heard some yarns of the same kind\u2014traditions of Indians and the like, but with somethin' behind them, no doubt. The more you knew of that country, young fellah, the more you would understand that anythin' was possible\u2014ANYTHIN'! There are just some narrow water-lanes along which folk travel, and outside that it is all darkness. Now, down here in the Matto Grande\"\u2014he swept his cigar over a part of the map\u2014\"or up in this corner where three countries meet, nothin' would surprise me. As that chap said to-night, there are fifty-thousand miles of waterway runnin' through a forest that is very near the size of Europe. You and I could be as far away from each other as Scotland is from Constantinople, and yet each of us be in the same great Brazilian forest. Man has just made a track here and a scrape there in the maze. Why, the river rises and falls the best part of forty feet, and half the country is a morass that you can't pass over. Why shouldn't somethin' new and wonderful lie in such a country? And why shouldn't we be the men to find it out? Besides,\" he added, his queer, gaunt face shining with delight, \"there's a sportin' risk in every mile of it. I'm like an old golf-ball\u2014I've had all the white paint knocked off me long ago. Life can whack me about now, and it can't leave a mark. But a sportin' risk, young fellah, that's the salt of existence. Then it's worth livin' again. We're all gettin' a deal too soft and dull and comfy. Give me the great waste lands and the wide spaces, with a gun in my fist and somethin' to look for that's worth findin'. I've tried war and steeplechasin' and aeroplanes, but this huntin' of beasts that look like a lobster-supper dream is a brand-new sensation.\" He chuckled with glee at the prospect.\n\nPerhaps I have dwelt too long upon this new acquaintance, but he is to be my comrade for many a day, and so I have tried to set him down as I first saw him, with his quaint personality and his queer little tricks of speech and of thought. It was only the need of getting in the account of my meeting which drew me at last from his company. I left him seated amid his pink radiance, oiling the lock of his favorite rifle, while he still chuckled to himself at the thought of the adventures which awaited us. It was very clear to me that if dangers lay before us I could not in all England have found a cooler head or a braver spirit with which to share them.\n\nThat night, wearied as I was after the wonderful happenings of the day, I sat late with McArdle, the news editor, explaining to him the whole situation, which he thought important enough to bring next morning before the notice of Sir George Beaumont, the chief. It was agreed that I should write home full accounts of my adventures in the shape of successive letters to McArdle, and that these should either be edited for the Gazette as they arrived, or held back to be published later, according to the wishes of Professor Challenger, since we could not yet know what conditions he might attach to those directions which should guide us to the unknown land. In response to a telephone inquiry, we received nothing more definite than a fulmination against the Press, ending up with the remark that if we would notify our boat he would hand us any directions which he might think it proper to give us at the moment of starting. A second question from us failed to elicit any answer at all, save a plaintive bleat from his wife to the effect that her husband was in a very violent temper already, and that she hoped we would do nothing to make it worse. A third attempt, later in the day, provoked a terrific crash, and a subsequent message from the Central Exchange that Professor Challenger's receiver had been shattered. After that we abandoned all attempt at communication.\n\nAnd now my patient readers, I can address you directly no longer. From now onwards (if, indeed, any continuation of this narrative should ever reach you) it can only be through the paper which I represent. In the hands of the editor I leave this account of the events which have led up to one of the most remarkable expeditions of all time, so that if I never return to England there shall be some record as to how the affair came about. I am writing these last lines in the saloon of the Booth liner Francisca, and they will go back by the pilot to the keeping of Mr. McArdle. Let me draw one last picture before I close the notebook\u2014a picture which is the last memory of the old country which I bear away with me. It is a wet, foggy morning in the late spring; a thin, cold rain is falling. Three shining mackintoshed figures are walking down the quay, making for the gang-plank of the great liner from which the blue-peter is flying. In front of them a porter pushes a trolley piled high with trunks, wraps, and gun-cases. Professor Summerlee, a long, melancholy figure, walks with dragging steps and drooping head, as one who is already profoundly sorry for himself. Lord John Roxton steps briskly, and his thin, eager face beams forth between his hunting-cap and his muffler. As for myself, I am glad to have got the bustling days of preparation and the pangs of leave-taking behind me, and I have no doubt that I show it in my bearing. Suddenly, just as we reach the vessel, there is a shout behind us. It is Professor Challenger, who had promised to see us off. He runs after us, a puffing, red-faced, irascible figure.\n\n\"No thank you,\" says he; \"I should much prefer not to go aboard. I have only a few words to say to you, and they can very well be said where we are. I beg you not to imagine that I am in any way indebted to you for making this journey. I would have you to understand that it is a matter of perfect indifference to me, and I refuse to entertain the most remote sense of personal obligation. Truth is truth, and nothing which you can report can affect it in any way, though it may excite the emotions and allay the curiosity of a number of very ineffectual people. My directions for your instruction and guidance are in this sealed envelope. You will open it when you reach a town upon the Amazon which is called Manaos, but not until the date and hour which is marked upon the outside. Have I made myself clear? I leave the strict observance of my conditions entirely to your honor. No, Mr. Malone, I will place no restriction upon your correspondence, since the ventilation of the facts is the object of your journey; but I demand that you shall give no particulars as to your exact destination, and that nothing be actually published until your return. Good-bye, sir. You have done something to mitigate my feelings for the loathsome profession to which you unhappily belong. Good-bye, Lord John. Science is, as I understand, a sealed book to you; but you may congratulate yourself upon the hunting-field which awaits you. You will, no doubt, have the opportunity of describing in the Field how you brought down the rocketing dimorphodon. And good-bye to you also, Professor Summerlee. If you are still capable of self-improvement, of which I am frankly unconvinced, you will surely return to London a wiser man.\"\n\nSo he turned upon his heel, and a minute later from the deck I could see his short, squat figure bobbing about in the distance as he made his way back to his train. Well, we are well down Channel now. There's the last bell for letters, and it's good-bye to the pilot. We'll be \"down, hull-down, on the old trail\" from now on. God bless all we leave behind us, and send us safely back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "\"To-morrow we Disappear into the Unknown\"\n\nI will not bore those whom this narrative may reach by an account of our luxurious voyage upon the Booth liner, nor will I tell of our week's stay at Para (save that I should wish to acknowledge the great kindness of the Pereira da Pinta Company in helping us to get together our equipment). I will also allude very briefly to our river journey, up a wide, slow-moving, clay-tinted stream, in a steamer which was little smaller than that which had carried us across the Atlantic. Eventually we found ourselves through the narrows of Obidos and reached the town of Manaos. Here we were rescued from the limited attractions of the local inn by Mr. Shortman, the representative of the British and Brazilian Trading Company. In his hospital Fazenda we spent our time until the day when we were empowered to open the letter of instructions given to us by Professor Challenger. Before I reach the surprising events of that date I would desire to give a clearer sketch of my comrades in this enterprise, and of the associates whom we had already gathered together in South America. I speak freely, and I leave the use of my material to your own discretion, Mr. McArdle, since it is through your hands that this report must pass before it reaches the world.\n\nThe scientific attainments of Professor Summerlee are too well known for me to trouble to recapitulate them. He is better equipped for a rough expedition of this sort than one would imagine at first sight. His tall, gaunt, stringy figure is insensible to fatigue, and his dry, half-sarcastic, and often wholly unsympathetic manner is uninfluenced by any change in his surroundings. Though in his sixty-sixth year, I have never heard him express any dissatisfaction at the occasional hardships which we have had to encounter. I had regarded his presence as an encumbrance to the expedition, but, as a matter of fact, I am now well convinced that his power of endurance is as great as my own. In temper he is naturally acid and sceptical. From the beginning he has never concealed his belief that Professor Challenger is an absolute fraud, that we are all embarked upon an absurd wild-goose chase and that we are likely to reap nothing but disappointment and danger in South America, and corresponding ridicule in England. Such are the views which, with much passionate distortion of his thin features and wagging of his thin, goat-like beard, he poured into our ears all the way from Southampton to Manaos. Since landing from the boat he has obtained some consolation from the beauty and variety of the insect and bird life around him, for he is absolutely whole-hearted in his devotion to science. He spends his days flitting through the woods with his shot-gun and his butterfly-net, and his evenings in mounting the many specimens he has acquired. Among his minor peculiarities are that he is careless as to his attire, unclean in his person, exceedingly absent-minded in his habits, and addicted to smoking a short briar pipe, which is seldom out of his mouth. He has been upon several scientific expeditions in his youth (he was with Robertson in Papua), and the life of the camp and the canoe is nothing fresh to him.\n\nLord John Roxton has some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other. He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique. As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of my narrative which I have left behind me in London. He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, dresses always with great care in white drill suits and high brown mosquito-boots, and shaves at least once a day. Like most men of action, he is laconic in speech, and sinks readily into his own thoughts, but he is always quick to answer a question or join in a conversation, talking in a queer, jerky, half-humorous fashion. His knowledge of the world, and very especially of South America, is surprising, and he has a whole-hearted belief in the possibilities of our journey which is not to be dashed by the sneers of Professor Summerlee. He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous because they are held in leash. He spoke little of his own exploits in Brazil and Peru, but it was a revelation to me to find the excitement which was caused by his presence among the riverine natives, who looked upon him as their champion and protector. The exploits of the Red Chief, as they called him, had become legends among them, but the real facts, as far as I could learn them, were amazing enough.\n\nThese were that Lord John had found himself some years before in that no-man's-land which is formed by the half-defined frontiers between Peru, Brazil, and Columbia. In this great district the wild rubber tree flourishes, and has become, as in the Congo, a curse to the natives which can only be compared to their forced labor under the Spaniards upon the old silver mines of Darien. A handful of villainous half-breeds dominated the country, armed such Indians as would support them, and turned the rest into slaves, terrorizing them with the most inhuman tortures in order to force them to gather the india-rubber, which was then floated down the river to Para. Lord John Roxton expostulated on behalf of the wretched victims, and received nothing but threats and insults for his pains. He then formally declared war against Pedro Lopez, the leader of the slave-drivers, enrolled a band of runaway slaves in his service, armed them, and conducted a campaign, which ended by his killing with his own hands the notorious half-breed and breaking down the system which he represented.\n\nNo wonder that the ginger-headed man with the silky voice and the free and easy manners was now looked upon with deep interest upon the banks of the great South American river, though the feelings he inspired were naturally mixed, since the gratitude of the natives was equaled by the resentment of those who desired to exploit them. One useful result of his former experiences was that he could talk fluently in the Lingoa Geral, which is the peculiar talk, one-third Portuguese and two-thirds Indian, which is current all over Brazil.\n\nI have said before that Lord John Roxton was a South Americomaniac. He could not speak of that great country without ardor, and this ardor was infectious, for, ignorant as I was, he fixed my attention and stimulated my curiosity. How I wish I could reproduce the glamour of his discourses, the peculiar mixture of accurate knowledge and of racy imagination which gave them their fascination, until even the Professor's cynical and sceptical smile would gradually vanish from his thin face as he listened. He would tell the history of the mighty river so rapidly explored (for some of the first conquerors of Peru actually crossed the entire continent upon its waters), and yet so unknown in regard to all that lay behind its ever-changing banks.\n\n\"What is there?\" he would cry, pointing to the north. \"Wood and marsh and unpenetrated jungle. Who knows what it may shelter? And there to the south? A wilderness of swampy forest, where no white man has ever been. The unknown is up against us on every side. Outside the narrow lines of the rivers what does anyone know? Who will say what is possible in such a country? Why should old man Challenger not be right?\" At which direct defiance the stubborn sneer would reappear upon Professor Summerlee's face, and he would sit, shaking his sardonic head in unsympathetic silence, behind the cloud of his briar-root pipe.\n\nSo much, for the moment, for my two white companions, whose characters and limitations will be further exposed, as surely as my own, as this narrative proceeds. But already we have enrolled certain retainers who may play no small part in what is to come. The first is a gigantic negro named Zambo, who is a black Hercules, as willing as any horse, and about as intelligent. Him we enlisted at Para, on the recommendation of the steamship company, on whose vessels he had learned to speak a halting English.\n\nIt was at Para also that we engaged Gomez and Manuel, two half-breeds from up the river, just come down with a cargo of redwood. They were swarthy fellows, bearded and fierce, as active and wiry as panthers. Both of them had spent their lives in those upper waters of the Amazon which we were about to explore, and it was this recommendation which had caused Lord John to engage them. One of them, Gomez, had the further advantage that he could speak excellent English. These men were willing to act as our personal servants, to cook, to row, or to make themselves useful in any way at a payment of fifteen dollars a month. Besides these, we had engaged three Mojo Indians from Bolivia, who are the most skilful at fishing and boat work of all the river tribes. The chief of these we called Mojo, after his tribe, and the others are known as Jose and Fernando. Three white men, then, two half-breeds, one negro, and three Indians made up the personnel of the little expedition which lay waiting for its instructions at Manaos before starting upon its singular quest.\n\nAt last, after a weary week, the day had come and the hour. I ask you to picture the shaded sitting-room of the Fazenda St. Ignatio, two miles inland from the town of Manaos. Outside lay the yellow, brassy glare of the sunshine, with the shadows of the palm trees as black and definite as the trees themselves. The air was calm, full of the eternal hum of insects, a tropical chorus of many octaves, from the deep drone of the bee to the high, keen pipe of the mosquito. Beyond the veranda was a small cleared garden, bounded with cactus hedges and adorned with clumps of flowering shrubs, round which the great blue butterflies and the tiny humming-birds fluttered and darted in crescents of sparkling light. Within we were seated round the cane table, on which lay a sealed envelope. Inscribed upon it, in the jagged handwriting of Professor Challenger, were the words:\u2014\n\n\"Instructions to Lord John Roxton and party. To be opened at Manaos upon July 15th, at 12 o'clock precisely.\"\n\nLord John had placed his watch upon the table beside him.\n\n\"We have seven more minutes,\" said he. \"The old dear is very precise.\"\n\nProfessor Summerlee gave an acid smile as he picked up the envelope in his gaunt hand.\n\n\"What can it possibly matter whether we open it now or in seven minutes?\" said he. \"It is all part and parcel of the same system of quackery and nonsense, for which I regret to say that the writer is notorious.\"\n\n\"Oh, come, we must play the game accordin' to rules,\" said Lord John. \"It's old man Challenger's show and we are here by his good will, so it would be rotten bad form if we didn't follow his instructions to the letter.\"\n\n\"A pretty business it is!\" cried the Professor, bitterly. \"It struck me as preposterous in London, but I'm bound to say that it seems even more so upon closer acquaintance. I don't know what is inside this envelope, but, unless it is something pretty definite, I shall be much tempted to take the next down-river boat and catch the Bolivia at Para. After all, I have some more responsible work in the world than to run about disproving the assertions of a lunatic. Now, Roxton, surely it is time.\"\n\n\"Time it is,\" said Lord John. \"You can blow the whistle.\" He took up the envelope and cut it with his penknife. From it he drew a folded sheet of paper. This he carefully opened out and flattened on the table. It was a blank sheet. He turned it over. Again it was blank. We looked at each other in a bewildered silence, which was broken by a discordant burst of derisive laughter from Professor Summerlee.\n\n\"It is an open admission,\" he cried. \"What more do you want? The fellow is a self-confessed humbug. We have only to return home and report him as the brazen imposter that he is.\"\n\n\"Invisible ink!\" I suggested.\n\n\"I don't think!\" said Lord Roxton, holding the paper to the light. \"No, young fellah my lad, there is no use deceiving yourself. I'll go bail for it that nothing has ever been written upon this paper.\"\n\n\"May I come in?\" boomed a voice from the veranda.\n\nThe shadow of a squat figure had stolen across the patch of sunlight. That voice! That monstrous breadth of shoulder! We sprang to our feet with a gasp of astonishment as Challenger, in a round, boyish straw-hat with a colored ribbon\u2014Challenger, with his hands in his jacket-pockets and his canvas shoes daintily pointing as he walked\u2014appeared in the open space before us. He threw back his head, and there he stood in the golden glow with all his old Assyrian luxuriance of beard, all his native insolence of drooping eyelids and intolerant eyes.\n\n\"I fear,\" said he, taking out his watch, \"that I am a few minutes too late. When I gave you this envelope I must confess that I had never intended that you should open it, for it had been my fixed intention to be with you before the hour. The unfortunate delay can be apportioned between a blundering pilot and an intrusive sandbank. I fear that it has given my colleague, Professor Summerlee, occasion to blaspheme.\"\n\n\"I am bound to say, sir,\" said Lord John, with some sternness of voice, \"that your turning up is a considerable relief to us, for our mission seemed to have come to a premature end. Even now I can't for the life of me understand why you should have worked it in so extraordinary a manner.\"\n\nInstead of answering, Professor Challenger entered, shook hands with myself and Lord John, bowed with ponderous insolence to Professor Summerlee, and sank back into a basket-chair, which creaked and swayed beneath his weight.\n\n\"Is all ready for your journey?\" he asked.\n\n\"We can start to-morrow.\"\n\n\"Then so you shall. You need no chart of directions now, since you will have the inestimable advantage of my own guidance. From the first I had determined that I would myself preside over your investigation. The most elaborate charts would, as you will readily admit, be a poor substitute for my own intelligence and advice. As to the small ruse which I played upon you in the matter of the envelope, it is clear that, had I told you all my intentions, I should have been forced to resist unwelcome pressure to travel out with you.\"\n\n\"Not from me, sir!\" exclaimed Professor Summerlee, heartily. \"So long as there was another ship upon the Atlantic.\"\n\nChallenger waved him away with his great hairy hand.\n\n\"Your common sense will, I am sure, sustain my objection and realize that it was better that I should direct my own movements and appear only at the exact moment when my presence was needed. That moment has now arrived. You are in safe hands. You will not now fail to reach your destination. From henceforth I take command of this expedition, and I must ask you to complete your preparations to-night, so that we may be able to make an early start in the morning. My time is of value, and the same thing may be said, no doubt, in a lesser degree of your own. I propose, therefore, that we push on as rapidly as possible, until I have demonstrated what you have come to see.\"\n\nLord John Roxton has chartered a large steam launch, the Esmeralda, which was to carry us up the river. So far as climate goes, it was immaterial what time we chose for our expedition, as the temperature ranges from seventy-five to ninety degrees both summer and winter, with no appreciable difference in heat. In moisture, however, it is otherwise; from December to May is the period of the rains, and during this time the river slowly rises until it attains a height of nearly forty feet above its low-water mark. It floods the banks, extends in great lagoons over a monstrous waste of country, and forms a huge district, called locally the Gapo, which is for the most part too marshy for foot-travel and too shallow for boating. About June the waters begin to fall, and are at their lowest at October or November. Thus our expedition was at the time of the dry season, when the great river and its tributaries were more or less in a normal condition.\n\nThe current of the river is a slight one, the drop being not greater than eight inches in a mile. No stream could be more convenient for navigation, since the prevailing wind is south-east, and sailing boats may make a continuous progress to the Peruvian frontier, dropping down again with the current. In our own case the excellent engines of the Esmeralda could disregard the sluggish flow of the stream, and we made as rapid progress as if we were navigating a stagnant lake. For three days we steamed north-westwards up a stream which even here, a thousand miles from its mouth, was still so enormous that from its center the two banks were mere shadows upon the distant skyline. On the fourth day after leaving Manaos we turned into a tributary which at its mouth was little smaller than the main stream. It narrowed rapidly, however, and after two more days' steaming we reached an Indian village, where the Professor insisted that we should land, and that the Esmeralda should be sent back to Manaos. We should soon come upon rapids, he explained, which would make its further use impossible. He added privately that we were now approaching the door of the unknown country, and that the fewer whom we took into our confidence the better it would be. To this end also he made each of us give our word of honor that we would publish or say nothing which would give any exact clue as to the whereabouts of our travels, while the servants were all solemnly sworn to the same effect. It is for this reason that I am compelled to be vague in my narrative, and I would warn my readers that in any map or diagram which I may give the relation of places to each other may be correct, but the points of the compass are carefully confused, so that in no way can it be taken as an actual guide to the country. Professor Challenger's reasons for secrecy may be valid or not, but we had no choice but to adopt them, for he was prepared to abandon the whole expedition rather than modify the conditions upon which he would guide us.\n\nIt was August 2nd when we snapped our last link with the outer world by bidding farewell to the Esmeralda. Since then four days have passed, during which we have engaged two large canoes from the Indians, made of so light a material (skins over a bamboo framework) that we should be able to carry them round any obstacle. These we have loaded with all our effects, and have engaged two additional Indians to help us in the navigation. I understand that they are the very two\u2014Ataca and Ipetu by name\u2014who accompanied Professor Challenger upon his previous journey. They appeared to be terrified at the prospect of repeating it, but the chief has patriarchal powers in these countries, and if the bargain is good in his eyes the clansman has little choice in the matter.\n\nSo to-morrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate. I have, according to our arrangement, addressed it to you, my dear Mr. McArdle, and I leave it to your discretion to delete, alter, or do what you like with it. From the assurance of Professor Challenger's manner\u2014and in spite of the continued scepticism of Professor Summerlee\u2014I have no doubt that our leader will make good his statement, and that we are really on the eve of some most remarkable experiences." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\"The Outlying Pickets of the New World\"\n\nOur friends at home may well rejoice with us, for we are at our goal, and up to a point, at least, we have shown that the statement of Professor Challenger can be verified. We have not, it is true, ascended the plateau, but it lies before us, and even Professor Summerlee is in a more chastened mood. Not that he will for an instant admit that his rival could be right, but he is less persistent in his incessant objections, and has sunk for the most part into an observant silence. I must hark back, however, and continue my narrative from where I dropped it. We are sending home one of our local Indians who is injured, and I am committing this letter to his charge, with considerable doubts in my mind as to whether it will ever come to hand.\n\nWhen I wrote last we were about to leave the Indian village where we had been deposited by the Esmeralda. I have to begin my report by bad news, for the first serious personal trouble (I pass over the incessant bickerings between the Professors) occurred this evening, and might have had a tragic ending. I have spoken of our English-speaking half-breed, Gomez\u2014a fine worker and a willing fellow, but afflicted, I fancy, with the vice of curiosity, which is common enough among such men. On the last evening he seems to have hid himself near the hut in which we were discussing our plans, and, being observed by our huge negro Zambo, who is as faithful as a dog and has the hatred which all his race bear to the half-breeds, he was dragged out and carried into our presence. Gomez whipped out his knife, however, and but for the huge strength of his captor, which enabled him to disarm him with one hand, he would certainly have stabbed him. The matter has ended in reprimands, the opponents have been compelled to shake hands, and there is every hope that all will be well. As to the feuds of the two learned men, they are continuous and bitter. It must be admitted that Challenger is provocative in the last degree, but Summerlee has an acid tongue, which makes matters worse. Last night Challenger said that he never cared to walk on the Thames Embankment and look up the river, as it was always sad to see one's own eventual goal. He is convinced, of course, that he is destined for Westminster Abbey. Summerlee rejoined, however, with a sour smile, by saying that he understood that Millbank Prison had been pulled down. Challenger's conceit is too colossal to allow him to be really annoyed. He only smiled in his beard and repeated \"Really! Really!\" in the pitying tone one would use to a child. Indeed, they are children both\u2014the one wizened and cantankerous, the other formidable and overbearing, yet each with a brain which has put him in the front rank of his scientific age. Brain, character, soul\u2014only as one sees more of life does one understand how distinct is each.\n\nThe very next day we did actually make our start upon this remarkable expedition. We found that all our possessions fitted very easily into the two canoes, and we divided our personnel, six in each, taking the obvious precaution in the interests of peace of putting one Professor into each canoe. Personally, I was with Challenger, who was in a beatific humor, moving about as one in a silent ecstasy and beaming benevolence from every feature. I have had some experience of him in other moods, however, and shall be the less surprised when the thunderstorms suddenly come up amidst the sunshine. If it is impossible to be at your ease, it is equally impossible to be dull in his company, for one is always in a state of half-tremulous doubt as to what sudden turn his formidable temper may take.\n\nFor two days we made our way up a good-sized river some hundreds of yards broad, and dark in color, but transparent, so that one could usually see the bottom. The affluents of the Amazon are, half of them, of this nature, while the other half are whitish and opaque, the difference depending upon the class of country through which they have flowed. The dark indicate vegetable decay, while the others point to clayey soil. Twice we came across rapids, and in each case made a portage of half a mile or so to avoid them. The woods on either side were primeval, which are more easily penetrated than woods of the second growth, and we had no great difficulty in carrying our canoes through them. How shall I ever forget the solemn mystery of it? The height of the trees and the thickness of the boles exceeded anything which I in my town-bred life could have imagined, shooting upwards in magnificent columns until, at an enormous distance above our heads, we could dimly discern the spot where they threw out their side-branches into Gothic upward curves which coalesced to form one great matted roof of verdure, through which only an occasional golden ray of sunshine shot downwards to trace a thin dazzling line of light amidst the majestic obscurity. As we walked noiselessly amid the thick, soft carpet of decaying vegetation the hush fell upon our souls which comes upon us in the twilight of the Abbey, and even Professor Challenger's full-chested notes sank into a whisper. Alone, I should have been ignorant of the names of these giant growths, but our men of science pointed out the cedars, the great silk cotton trees, and the redwood trees, with all that profusion of various plants which has made this continent the chief supplier to the human race of those gifts of Nature which depend upon the vegetable world, while it is the most backward in those products which come from animal life. Vivid orchids and wonderful colored lichens smoldered upon the swarthy tree-trunks and where a wandering shaft of light fell full upon the golden allamanda, the scarlet star-clusters of the tacsonia, or the rich deep blue of ipomaea, the effect was as a dream of fairyland. In these great wastes of forest, life, which abhors darkness, struggles ever upwards to the light. Every plant, even the smaller ones, curls and writhes to the green surface, twining itself round its stronger and taller brethren in the effort. Climbing plants are monstrous and luxuriant, but others which have never been known to climb elsewhere learn the art as an escape from that somber shadow, so that the common nettle, the jasmine, and even the jacitara palm tree can be seen circling the stems of the cedars and striving to reach their crowns. Of animal life there was no movement amid the majestic vaulted aisles which stretched from us as we walked, but a constant movement far above our heads told of that multitudinous world of snake and monkey, bird and sloth, which lived in the sunshine, and looked down in wonder at our tiny, dark, stumbling figures in the obscure depths immeasurably below them. At dawn and at sunset the howler monkeys screamed together and the parrakeets broke into shrill chatter, but during the hot hours of the day only the full drone of insects, like the beat of a distant surf, filled the ear, while nothing moved amid the solemn vistas of stupendous trunks, fading away into the darkness which held us in. Once some bandy-legged, lurching creature, an ant-eater or a bear, scuttled clumsily amid the shadows. It was the only sign of earth life which I saw in this great Amazonian forest.\n\nAnd yet there were indications that even human life itself was not far from us in those mysterious recesses. On the third day out we were aware of a singular deep throbbing in the air, rhythmic and solemn, coming and going fitfully throughout the morning. The two boats were paddling within a few yards of each other when first we heard it, and our Indians remained motionless, as if they had been turned to bronze, listening intently with expressions of terror upon their faces.\n\n\"What is it, then?\" I asked.\n\n\"Drums,\" said Lord John, carelessly; \"war drums. I have heard them before.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, war drums,\" said Gomez, the half-breed. \"Wild Indians, bravos, not mansos; they watch us every mile of the way; kill us if they can.\"\n\n\"How can they watch us?\" I asked, gazing into the dark, motionless void.\n\nThe half-breed shrugged his broad shoulders.\n\n\"The Indians know. They have their own way. They watch us. They talk the drum talk to each other. Kill us if they can.\"\n\nBy the afternoon of that day\u2014my pocket diary shows me that it was Tuesday, August 18th\u2014at least six or seven drums were throbbing from various points. Sometimes they beat quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes in obvious question and answer, one far to the east breaking out in a high staccato rattle, and being followed after a pause by a deep roll from the north. There was something indescribably nerve-shaking and menacing in that constant mutter, which seemed to shape itself into the very syllables of the half-breed, endlessly repeated, \"We will kill you if we can. We will kill you if we can.\" No one ever moved in the silent woods. All the peace and soothing of quiet Nature lay in that dark curtain of vegetation, but away from behind there came ever the one message from our fellow-man. \"We will kill you if we can,\" said the men in the east. \"We will kill you if we can,\" said the men in the north.\n\nAll day the drums rumbled and whispered, while their menace reflected itself in the faces of our colored companions. Even the hardy, swaggering half-breed seemed cowed. I learned, however, that day once for all that both Summerlee and Challenger possessed that highest type of bravery, the bravery of the scientific mind. Theirs was the spirit which upheld Darwin among the gauchos of the Argentine or Wallace among the head-hunters of Malaya. It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously, so that if it be steeped in curiosity as to science it has no room for merely personal considerations. All day amid that incessant and mysterious menace our two Professors watched every bird upon the wing, and every shrub upon the bank, with many a sharp wordy contention, when the snarl of Summerlee came quick upon the deep growl of Challenger, but with no more sense of danger and no more reference to drum-beating Indians than if they were seated together in the smoking-room of the Royal Society's Club in St. James's Street. Once only did they condescend to discuss them.\n\n\"Miranha or Amajuaca cannibals,\" said Challenger, jerking his thumb towards the reverberating wood.\n\n\"No doubt, sir,\" Summerlee answered. \"Like all such tribes, I shall expect to find them of poly-synthetic speech and of Mongolian type.\"\n\n\"Polysynthetic certainly,\" said Challenger, indulgently. \"I am not aware that any other type of language exists in this continent, and I have notes of more than a hundred. The Mongolian theory I regard with deep suspicion.\"\n\n\"I should have thought that even a limited knowledge of comparative anatomy would have helped to verify it,\" said Summerlee, bitterly.\n\nChallenger thrust out his aggressive chin until he was all beard and hat-rim. \"No doubt, sir, a limited knowledge would have that effect. When one's knowledge is exhaustive, one comes to other conclusions.\" They glared at each other in mutual defiance, while all round rose the distant whisper, \"We will kill you\u2014we will kill you if we can.\"\n\nThat night we moored our canoes with heavy stones for anchors in the center of the stream, and made every preparation for a possible attack. Nothing came, however, and with the dawn we pushed upon our way, the drum-beating dying out behind us. About three o'clock in the afternoon we came to a very steep rapid, more than a mile long\u2014the very one in which Professor Challenger had suffered disaster upon his first journey. I confess that the sight of it consoled me, for it was really the first direct corroboration, slight as it was, of the truth of his story. The Indians carried first our canoes and then our stores through the brushwood, which is very thick at this point, while we four whites, our rifles on our shoulders, walked between them and any danger coming from the woods. Before evening we had successfully passed the rapids, and made our way some ten miles above them, where we anchored for the night. At this point I reckoned that we had come not less than a hundred miles up the tributary from the main stream.\n\nIt was in the early forenoon of the next day that we made the great departure. Since dawn Professor Challenger had been acutely uneasy, continually scanning each bank of the river. Suddenly he gave an exclamation of satisfaction and pointed to a single tree, which projected at a peculiar angle over the side of the stream.\n\n\"What do you make of that?\" he asked.\n\n\"It is surely an Assai palm,\" said Summerlee.\n\n\"Exactly. It was an Assai palm which I took for my landmark. The secret opening is half a mile onwards upon the other side of the river. There is no break in the trees. That is the wonder and the mystery of it. There where you see light-green rushes instead of dark-green undergrowth, there between the great cotton woods, that is my private gate into the unknown. Push through, and you will understand.\"\n\nIt was indeed a wonderful place. Having reached the spot marked by a line of light-green rushes, we poled out two canoes through them for some hundreds of yards, and eventually emerged into a placid and shallow stream, running clear and transparent over a sandy bottom. It may have been twenty yards across, and was banked in on each side by most luxuriant vegetation. No one who had not observed that for a short distance reeds had taken the place of shrubs, could possibly have guessed the existence of such a stream or dreamed of the fairyland beyond.\n\nFor a fairyland it was\u2014the most wonderful that the imagination of man could conceive. The thick vegetation met overhead, interlacing into a natural pergola, and through this tunnel of verdure in a golden twilight flowed the green, pellucid river, beautiful in itself, but marvelous from the strange tints thrown by the vivid light from above filtered and tempered in its fall. Clear as crystal, motionless as a sheet of glass, green as the edge of an iceberg, it stretched in front of us under its leafy archway, every stroke of our paddles sending a thousand ripples across its shining surface. It was a fitting avenue to a land of wonders. All sign of the Indians had passed away, but animal life was more frequent, and the tameness of the creatures showed that they knew nothing of the hunter. Fuzzy little black-velvet monkeys, with snow-white teeth and gleaming, mocking eyes, chattered at us as we passed. With a dull, heavy splash an occasional cayman plunged in from the bank. Once a dark, clumsy tapir stared at us from a gap in the bushes, and then lumbered away through the forest; once, too, the yellow, sinuous form of a great puma whisked amid the brushwood, and its green, baleful eyes glared hatred at us over its tawny shoulder. Bird life was abundant, especially the wading birds, stork, heron, and ibis gathering in little groups, blue, scarlet, and white, upon every log which jutted from the bank, while beneath us the crystal water was alive with fish of every shape and color.\n\nFor three days we made our way up this tunnel of hazy green sunshine. On the longer stretches one could hardly tell as one looked ahead where the distant green water ended and the distant green archway began. The deep peace of this strange waterway was unbroken by any sign of man.\n\n\"No Indian here. Too much afraid. Curupuri,\" said Gomez.\n\n\"Curupuri is the spirit of the woods,\" Lord John explained. \"It's a name for any kind of devil. The poor beggars think that there is something fearsome in this direction, and therefore they avoid it.\"\n\nOn the third day it became evident that our journey in the canoes could not last much longer, for the stream was rapidly growing more shallow. Twice in as many hours we stuck upon the bottom. Finally we pulled the boats up among the brushwood and spent the night on the bank of the river. In the morning Lord John and I made our way for a couple of miles through the forest, keeping parallel with the stream; but as it grew ever shallower we returned and reported, what Professor Challenger had already suspected, that we had reached the highest point to which the canoes could be brought. We drew them up, therefore, and concealed them among the bushes, blazing a tree with our axes, so that we should find them again. Then we distributed the various burdens among us\u2014guns, ammunition, food, a tent, blankets, and the rest\u2014and, shouldering our packages, we set forth upon the more laborious stage of our journey.\n\nAn unfortunate quarrel between our pepper-pots marked the outset of our new stage. Challenger had from the moment of joining us issued directions to the whole party, much to the evident discontent of Summerlee. Now, upon his assigning some duty to his fellow-Professor (it was only the carrying of an aneroid barometer), the matter suddenly came to a head.\n\n\"May I ask, sir,\" said Summerlee, with vicious calm, \"in what capacity you take it upon yourself to issue these orders?\"\n\nChallenger glared and bristled.\n\n\"I do it, Professor Summerlee, as leader of this expedition.\"\n\n\"I am compelled to tell you, sir, that I do not recognize you in that capacity.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\" Challenger bowed with unwieldy sarcasm. \"Perhaps you would define my exact position.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. You are a man whose veracity is upon trial, and this committee is here to try it. You walk, sir, with your judges.\"\n\n\"Dear me!\" said Challenger, seating himself on the side of one of the canoes. \"In that case you will, of course, go on your way, and I will follow at my leisure. If I am not the leader you cannot expect me to lead.\"\n\nThank heaven that there were two sane men\u2014Lord John Roxton and myself\u2014to prevent the petulance and folly of our learned Professors from sending us back empty-handed to London. Such arguing and pleading and explaining before we could get them mollified! Then at last Summerlee, with his sneer and his pipe, would move forwards, and Challenger would come rolling and grumbling after. By some good fortune we discovered about this time that both our savants had the very poorest opinion of Dr. Illingworth of Edinburgh. Thenceforward that was our one safety, and every strained situation was relieved by our introducing the name of the Scotch zoologist, when both our Professors would form a temporary alliance and friendship in their detestation and abuse of this common rival.\n\nAdvancing in single file along the bank of the stream, we soon found that it narrowed down to a mere brook, and finally that it lost itself in a great green morass of sponge-like mosses, into which we sank up to our knees. The place was horribly haunted by clouds of mosquitoes and every form of flying pest, so we were glad to find solid ground again and to make a circuit among the trees, which enabled us to outflank this pestilent morass, which droned like an organ in the distance, so loud was it with insect life.\n\nOn the second day after leaving our canoes we found that the whole character of the country changed. Our road was persistently upwards, and as we ascended the woods became thinner and lost their tropical luxuriance. The huge trees of the alluvial Amazonian plain gave place to the Phoenix and coco palms, growing in scattered clumps, with thick brushwood between. In the damper hollows the Mauritia palms threw out their graceful drooping fronds. We traveled entirely by compass, and once or twice there were differences of opinion between Challenger and the two Indians, when, to quote the Professor's indignant words, the whole party agreed to \"trust the fallacious instincts of undeveloped savages rather than the highest product of modern European culture.\" That we were justified in doing so was shown upon the third day, when Challenger admitted that he recognized several landmarks of his former journey, and in one spot we actually came upon four fire-blackened stones, which must have marked a camping-place.\n\nThe road still ascended, and we crossed a rock-studded slope which took two days to traverse. The vegetation had again changed, and only the vegetable ivory tree remained, with a great profusion of wonderful orchids, among which I learned to recognize the rare Nuttonia Vexillaria and the glorious pink and scarlet blossoms of Cattleya and odontoglossum. Occasional brooks with pebbly bottoms and fern-draped banks gurgled down the shallow gorges in the hill, and offered good camping-grounds every evening on the banks of some rock-studded pool, where swarms of little blue-backed fish, about the size and shape of English trout, gave us a delicious supper.\n\nOn the ninth day after leaving the canoes, having done, as I reckon, about a hundred and twenty miles, we began to emerge from the trees, which had grown smaller until they were mere shrubs. Their place was taken by an immense wilderness of bamboo, which grew so thickly that we could only penetrate it by cutting a pathway with the machetes and billhooks of the Indians. It took us a long day, traveling from seven in the morning till eight at night, with only two breaks of one hour each, to get through this obstacle. Anything more monotonous and wearying could not be imagined, for, even at the most open places, I could not see more than ten or twelve yards, while usually my vision was limited to the back of Lord John's cotton jacket in front of me, and to the yellow wall within a foot of me on either side. From above came one thin knife-edge of sunshine, and fifteen feet over our heads one saw the tops of the reeds swaying against the deep blue sky. I do not know what kind of creatures inhabit such a thicket, but several times we heard the plunging of large, heavy animals quite close to us. From their sounds Lord John judged them to be some form of wild cattle. Just as night fell we cleared the belt of bamboos, and at once formed our camp, exhausted by the interminable day.\n\nEarly next morning we were again afoot, and found that the character of the country had changed once again. Behind us was the wall of bamboo, as definite as if it marked the course of a river. In front was an open plain, sloping slightly upwards and dotted with clumps of tree-ferns, the whole curving before us until it ended in a long, whale-backed ridge. This we reached about midday, only to find a shallow valley beyond, rising once again into a gentle incline which led to a low, rounded skyline. It was here, while we crossed the first of these hills, that an incident occurred which may or may not have been important.\n\nProfessor Challenger, who with the two local Indians was in the van of the party, stopped suddenly and pointed excitedly to the right. As he did so we saw, at the distance of a mile or so, something which appeared to be a huge gray bird flap slowly up from the ground and skim smoothly off, flying very low and straight, until it was lost among the tree-ferns.\n\n\"Did you see it?\" cried Challenger, in exultation. \"Summerlee, did you see it?\"\n\nHis colleague was staring at the spot where the creature had disappeared.\n\n\"What do you claim that it was?\" he asked.\n\n\"To the best of my belief, a pterodactyl.\"\n\nSummerlee burst into derisive laughter \"A pter-fiddlestick!\" said he. \"It was a stork, if ever I saw one.\"\n\nChallenger was too furious to speak. He simply swung his pack upon his back and continued upon his march. Lord John came abreast of me, however, and his face was more grave than was his wont. He had his Zeiss glasses in his hand.\n\n\"I focused it before it got over the trees,\" said he. \"I won't undertake to say what it was, but I'll risk my reputation as a sportsman that it wasn't any bird that ever I clapped eyes on in my life.\"\n\nSo there the matter stands. Are we really just at the edge of the unknown, encountering the outlying pickets of this lost world of which our leader speaks? I give you the incident as it occurred and you will know as much as I do. It stands alone, for we saw nothing more which could be called remarkable.\n\nAnd now, my readers, if ever I have any, I have brought you up the broad river, and through the screen of rushes, and down the green tunnel, and up the long slope of palm trees, and through the bamboo brake, and across the plain of tree-ferns. At last our destination lay in full sight of us. When we had crossed the second ridge we saw before us an irregular, palm-studded plain, and then the line of high red cliffs which I have seen in the picture. There it lies, even as I write, and there can be no question that it is the same. At the nearest point it is about seven miles from our present camp, and it curves away, stretching as far as I can see. Challenger struts about like a prize peacock, and Summerlee is silent, but still sceptical. Another day should bring some of our doubts to an end. Meanwhile, as Jose, whose arm was pierced by a broken bamboo, insists upon returning, I send this letter back in his charge, and only hope that it may eventually come to hand. I will write again as the occasion serves. I have enclosed with this a rough chart of our journey, which may have the effect of making the account rather easier to understand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "\"Who could have Foreseen it?\"\n\nA dreadful thing has happened to us. Who could have foreseen it? I cannot foresee any end to our troubles. It may be that we are condemned to spend our whole lives in this strange, inaccessible place. I am still so confused that I can hardly think clearly of the facts of the present or of the chances of the future. To my astounded senses the one seems most terrible and the other as black as night.\n\nNo men have ever found themselves in a worse position; nor is there any use in disclosing to you our exact geographical situation and asking our friends for a relief party. Even if they could send one, our fate will in all human probability be decided long before it could arrive in South America.\n\nWe are, in truth, as far from any human aid as if we were in the moon. If we are to win through, it is only our own qualities which can save us. I have as companions three remarkable men, men of great brain-power and of unshaken courage. There lies our one and only hope. It is only when I look upon the untroubled faces of my comrades that I see some glimmer through the darkness. Outwardly I trust that I appear as unconcerned as they. Inwardly I am filled with apprehension.\n\nLet me give you, with as much detail as I can, the sequence of events which have led us to this catastrophe.\n\nWhen I finished my last letter I stated that we were within seven miles from an enormous line of ruddy cliffs, which encircled, beyond all doubt, the plateau of which Professor Challenger spoke. Their height, as we approached them, seemed to me in some places to be greater than he had stated\u2014running up in parts to at least a thousand feet\u2014and they were curiously striated, in a manner which is, I believe, characteristic of basaltic upheavals. Something of the sort is to be seen in Salisbury Crags at Edinburgh. The summit showed every sign of a luxuriant vegetation, with bushes near the edge, and farther back many high trees. There was no indication of any life that we could see.\n\nThat night we pitched our camp immediately under the cliff\u2014a most wild and desolate spot. The crags above us were not merely perpendicular, but curved outwards at the top, so that ascent was out of the question. Close to us was the high thin pinnacle of rock which I believe I mentioned earlier in this narrative. It is like a broad red church spire, the top of it being level with the plateau, but a great chasm gaping between. On the summit of it there grew one high tree. Both pinnacle and cliff were comparatively low\u2014some five or six hundred feet, I should think.\n\n\"It was on that,\" said Professor Challenger, pointing to this tree, \"that the pterodactyl was perched. I climbed half-way up the rock before I shot him. I am inclined to think that a good mountaineer like myself could ascend the rock to the top, though he would, of course, be no nearer to the plateau when he had done so.\"\n\nAs Challenger spoke of his pterodactyl I glanced at Professor Summerlee, and for the first time I seemed to see some signs of a dawning credulity and repentance. There was no sneer upon his thin lips, but, on the contrary, a gray, drawn look of excitement and amazement. Challenger saw it, too, and reveled in the first taste of victory.\n\n\"Of course,\" said he, with his clumsy and ponderous sarcasm, \"Professor Summerlee will understand that when I speak of a pterodactyl I mean a stork\u2014only it is the kind of stork which has no feathers, a leathery skin, membranous wings, and teeth in its jaws.\" He grinned and blinked and bowed until his colleague turned and walked away.\n\nIn the morning, after a frugal breakfast of coffee and manioc\u2014we had to be economical of our stores\u2014we held a council of war as to the best method of ascending to the plateau above us.\n\nChallenger presided with a solemnity as if he were the Lord Chief Justice on the Bench. Picture him seated upon a rock, his absurd boyish straw hat tilted on the back of his head, his supercilious eyes dominating us from under his drooping lids, his great black beard wagging as he slowly defined our present situation and our future movements.\n\nBeneath him you might have seen the three of us\u2014myself, sunburnt, young, and vigorous after our open-air tramp; Summerlee, solemn but still critical, behind his eternal pipe; Lord John, as keen as a razor-edge, with his supple, alert figure leaning upon his rifle, and his eager eyes fixed eagerly upon the speaker. Behind us were grouped the two swarthy half-breeds and the little knot of Indians, while in front and above us towered those huge, ruddy ribs of rocks which kept us from our goal.\n\n\"I need not say,\" said our leader, \"that on the occasion of my last visit I exhausted every means of climbing the cliff, and where I failed I do not think that anyone else is likely to succeed, for I am something of a mountaineer. I had none of the appliances of a rock-climber with me, but I have taken the precaution to bring them now. With their aid I am positive I could climb that detached pinnacle to the summit; but so long as the main cliff overhangs, it is vain to attempt ascending that. I was hurried upon my last visit by the approach of the rainy season and by the exhaustion of my supplies. These considerations limited my time, and I can only claim that I have surveyed about six miles of the cliff to the east of us, finding no possible way up. What, then, shall we now do?\"\n\n\"There seems to be only one reasonable course,\" said Professor Summerlee. \"If you have explored the east, we should travel along the base of the cliff to the west, and seek for a practicable point for our ascent.\"\n\n\"That's it,\" said Lord John. \"The odds are that this plateau is of no great size, and we shall travel round it until we either find an easy way up it, or come back to the point from which we started.\"\n\n\"I have already explained to our young friend here,\" said Challenger (he has a way of alluding to me as if I were a school child ten years old), \"that it is quite impossible that there should be an easy way up anywhere, for the simple reason that if there were the summit would not be isolated, and those conditions would not obtain which have effected so singular an interference with the general laws of survival. Yet I admit that there may very well be places where an expert human climber may reach the summit, and yet a cumbrous and heavy animal be unable to descend. It is certain that there is a point where an ascent is possible.\"\n\n\"How do you know that, sir?\" asked Summerlee, sharply.\n\n\"Because my predecessor, the American Maple White, actually made such an ascent. How otherwise could he have seen the monster which he sketched in his notebook?\"\n\n\"There you reason somewhat ahead of the proved facts,\" said the stubborn Summerlee. \"I admit your plateau, because I have seen it; but I have not as yet satisfied myself that it contains any form of life whatever.\"\n\n\"What you admit, sir, or what you do not admit, is really of inconceivably small importance. I am glad to perceive that the plateau itself has actually obtruded itself upon your intelligence.\" He glanced up at it, and then, to our amazement, he sprang from his rock, and, seizing Summerlee by the neck, he tilted his face into the air. \"Now sir!\" he shouted, hoarse with excitement. \"Do I help you to realize that the plateau contains some animal life?\"\n\nI have said that a thick fringe of green overhung the edge of the cliff. Out of this there had emerged a black, glistening object. As it came slowly forth and overhung the chasm, we saw that it was a very large snake with a peculiar flat, spade-like head. It wavered and quivered above us for a minute, the morning sun gleaming upon its sleek, sinuous coils. Then it slowly drew inwards and disappeared.\n\nSummerlee had been so interested that he had stood unresisting while Challenger tilted his head into the air. Now he shook his colleague off and came back to his dignity.\n\n\"I should be glad, Professor Challenger,\" said he, \"if you could see your way to make any remarks which may occur to you without seizing me by the chin. Even the appearance of a very ordinary rock python does not appear to justify such a liberty.\"\n\n\"But there is life upon the plateau all the same,\" his colleague replied in triumph. \"And now, having demonstrated this important conclusion so that it is clear to anyone, however prejudiced or obtuse, I am of opinion that we cannot do better than break up our camp and travel to westward until we find some means of ascent.\"\n\nThe ground at the foot of the cliff was rocky and broken so that the going was slow and difficult. Suddenly we came, however, upon something which cheered our hearts. It was the site of an old encampment, with several empty Chicago meat tins, a bottle labeled \"Brandy,\" a broken tin-opener, and a quantity of other travelers' debris. A crumpled, disintegrated newspaper revealed itself as the Chicago Democrat, though the date had been obliterated.\n\n\"Not mine,\" said Challenger. \"It must be Maple White's.\"\n\nLord John had been gazing curiously at a great tree-fern which overshadowed the encampment. \"I say, look at this,\" said he. \"I believe it is meant for a sign-post.\"\n\nA slip of hard wood had been nailed to the tree in such a way as to point to the westward.\n\n\"Most certainly a sign-post,\" said Challenger. \"What else? Finding himself upon a dangerous errand, our pioneer has left this sign so that any party which follows him may know the way he has taken. Perhaps we shall come upon some other indications as we proceed.\"\n\nWe did indeed, but they were of a terrible and most unexpected nature. Immediately beneath the cliff there grew a considerable patch of high bamboo, like that which we had traversed in our journey. Many of these stems were twenty feet high, with sharp, strong tops, so that even as they stood they made formidable spears. We were passing along the edge of this cover when my eye was caught by the gleam of something white within it. Thrusting in my head between the stems, I found myself gazing at a fleshless skull. The whole skeleton was there, but the skull had detached itself and lay some feet nearer to the open.\n\nWith a few blows from the machetes of our Indians we cleared the spot and were able to study the details of this old tragedy. Only a few shreds of clothes could still be distinguished, but there were the remains of boots upon the bony feet, and it was very clear that the dead man was a European. A gold watch by Hudson, of New York, and a chain which held a stylographic pen, lay among the bones. There was also a silver cigarette-case, with \"J. C., from A. E. S.,\" upon the lid. The state of the metal seemed to show that the catastrophe had occurred no great time before.\n\n\"Who can he be?\" asked Lord John. \"Poor devil! every bone in his body seems to be broken.\"\n\n\"And the bamboo grows through his smashed ribs,\" said Summerlee. \"It is a fast-growing plant, but it is surely inconceivable that this body could have been here while the canes grew to be twenty feet in length.\"\n\n\"As to the man's identity,\" said Professor Challenger, \"I have no doubt whatever upon that point. As I made my way up the river before I reached you at the fazenda I instituted very particular inquiries about Maple White. At Para they knew nothing. Fortunately, I had a definite clew, for there was a particular picture in his sketch-book which showed him taking lunch with a certain ecclesiastic at Rosario. This priest I was able to find, and though he proved a very argumentative fellow, who took it absurdly amiss that I should point out to him the corrosive effect which modern science must have upon his beliefs, he none the less gave me some positive information. Maple White passed Rosario four years ago, or two years before I saw his dead body. He was not alone at the time, but there was a friend, an American named James Colver, who remained in the boat and did not meet this ecclesiastic. I think, therefore, that there can be no doubt that we are now looking upon the remains of this James Colver.\"\n\n\"Nor,\" said Lord John, \"is there much doubt as to how he met his death. He has fallen or been chucked from the top, and so been impaled. How else could he come by his broken bones, and how could he have been stuck through by these canes with their points so high above our heads?\"\n\nA hush came over us as we stood round these shattered remains and realized the truth of Lord John Roxton's words. The beetling head of the cliff projected over the cane-brake. Undoubtedly he had fallen from above. But had he fallen? Had it been an accident? Or\u2014already ominous and terrible possibilities began to form round that unknown land.\n\nWe moved off in silence, and continued to coast round the line of cliffs, which were as even and unbroken as some of those monstrous Antarctic ice-fields which I have seen depicted as stretching from horizon to horizon and towering high above the mast-heads of the exploring vessel.\n\nIn five miles we saw no rift or break. And then suddenly we perceived something which filled us with new hope. In a hollow of the rock, protected from rain, there was drawn a rough arrow in chalk, pointing still to the westwards.\n\n\"Maple White again,\" said Professor Challenger. \"He had some presentiment that worthy footsteps would follow close behind him.\"\n\n\"He had chalk, then?\"\n\n\"A box of colored chalks was among the effects I found in his knapsack. I remember that the white one was worn to a stump.\"\n\n\"That is certainly good evidence,\" said Summerlee. \"We can only accept his guidance and follow on to the westward.\"\n\nWe had proceeded some five more miles when again we saw a white arrow upon the rocks. It was at a point where the face of the cliff was for the first time split into a narrow cleft. Inside the cleft was a second guidance mark, which pointed right up it with the tip somewhat elevated, as if the spot indicated were above the level of the ground.\n\nIt was a solemn place, for the walls were so gigantic and the slit of blue sky so narrow and so obscured by a double fringe of verdure, that only a dim and shadowy light penetrated to the bottom. We had had no food for many hours, and were very weary with the stony and irregular journey, but our nerves were too strung to allow us to halt. We ordered the camp to be pitched, however, and, leaving the Indians to arrange it, we four, with the two half-breeds, proceeded up the narrow gorge.\n\nIt was not more than forty feet across at the mouth, but it rapidly closed until it ended in an acute angle, too straight and smooth for an ascent. Certainly it was not this which our pioneer had attempted to indicate. We made our way back\u2014the whole gorge was not more than a quarter of a mile deep\u2014and then suddenly the quick eyes of Lord John fell upon what we were seeking. High up above our heads, amid the dark shadows, there was one circle of deeper gloom. Surely it could only be the opening of a cave.\n\nThe base of the cliff was heaped with loose stones at the spot, and it was not difficult to clamber up. When we reached it, all doubt was removed. Not only was it an opening into the rock, but on the side of it there was marked once again the sign of the arrow. Here was the point, and this the means by which Maple White and his ill-fated comrade had made their ascent.\n\nWe were too excited to return to the camp, but must make our first exploration at once. Lord John had an electric torch in his knapsack, and this had to serve us as light. He advanced, throwing his little clear circlet of yellow radiance before him, while in single file we followed at his heels.\n\nThe cave had evidently been water-worn, the sides being smooth and the floor covered with rounded stones. It was of such a size that a single man could just fit through by stooping. For fifty yards it ran almost straight into the rock, and then it ascended at an angle of forty-five. Presently this incline became even steeper, and we found ourselves climbing upon hands and knees among loose rubble which slid from beneath us. Suddenly an exclamation broke from Lord Roxton.\n\n\"It's blocked!\" said he.\n\nClustering behind him we saw in the yellow field of light a wall of broken basalt which extended to the ceiling.\n\n\"The roof has fallen in!\"\n\nIn vain we dragged out some of the pieces. The only effect was that the larger ones became detached and threatened to roll down the gradient and crush us. It was evident that the obstacle was far beyond any efforts which we could make to remove it. The road by which Maple White had ascended was no longer available.\n\nToo much cast down to speak, we stumbled down the dark tunnel and made our way back to the camp.\n\nOne incident occurred, however, before we left the gorge, which is of importance in view of what came afterwards.\n\nWe had gathered in a little group at the bottom of the chasm, some forty feet beneath the mouth of the cave, when a huge rock rolled suddenly downwards\u2014and shot past us with tremendous force. It was the narrowest escape for one or all of us. We could not ourselves see whence the rock had come, but our half-breed servants, who were still at the opening of the cave, said that it had flown past them, and must therefore have fallen from the summit. Looking upwards, we could see no sign of movement above us amidst the green jungle which topped the cliff. There could be little doubt, however, that the stone was aimed at us, so the incident surely pointed to humanity\u2014and malevolent humanity\u2014upon the plateau.\n\nWe withdrew hurriedly from the chasm, our minds full of this new development and its bearing upon our plans. The situation was difficult enough before, but if the obstructions of Nature were increased by the deliberate opposition of man, then our case was indeed a hopeless one. And yet, as we looked up at that beautiful fringe of verdure only a few hundreds of feet above our heads, there was not one of us who could conceive the idea of returning to London until we had explored it to its depths.\n\nOn discussing the situation, we determined that our best course was to continue to coast round the plateau in the hope of finding some other means of reaching the top. The line of cliffs, which had decreased considerably in height, had already begun to trend from west to north, and if we could take this as representing the arc of a circle, the whole circumference could not be very great. At the worst, then, we should be back in a few days at our starting-point.\n\nWe made a march that day which totaled some two-and-twenty miles, without any change in our prospects. I may mention that our aneroid shows us that in the continual incline which we have ascended since we abandoned our canoes we have risen to no less than three thousand feet above sea-level. Hence there is a considerable change both in the temperature and in the vegetation. We have shaken off some of that horrible insect life which is the bane of tropical travel. A few palms still survive, and many tree-ferns, but the Amazonian trees have been all left behind. It was pleasant to see the convolvulus, the passion-flower, and the begonia, all reminding me of home, here among these inhospitable rocks. There was a red begonia just the same color as one that is kept in a pot in the window of a certain villa in Streatham\u2014but I am drifting into private reminiscence.\n\nThat night\u2014I am still speaking of the first day of our circumnavigation of the plateau\u2014a great experience awaited us, and one which for ever set at rest any doubt which we could have had as to the wonders so near us.\n\nYou will realize as you read it, my dear Mr. McArdle, and possibly for the first time that the paper has not sent me on a wild-goose chase, and that there is inconceivably fine copy waiting for the world whenever we have the Professor's leave to make use of it. I shall not dare to publish these articles unless I can bring back my proofs to England, or I shall be hailed as the journalistic Munchausen of all time. I have no doubt that you feel the same way yourself, and that you would not care to stake the whole credit of the Gazette upon this adventure until we can meet the chorus of criticism and scepticism which such articles must of necessity elicit. So this wonderful incident, which would make such a headline for the old paper, must still wait its turn in the editorial drawer.\n\nAnd yet it was all over in a flash, and there was no sequel to it, save in our own convictions.\n\nWhat occurred was this. Lord John had shot an ajouti\u2014which is a small, pig-like animal\u2014and, half of it having been given to the Indians, we were cooking the other half upon our fire. There is a chill in the air after dark, and we had all drawn close to the blaze. The night was moonless, but there were some stars, and one could see for a little distance across the plain. Well, suddenly out of the darkness, out of the night, there swooped something with a swish like an aeroplane. The whole group of us were covered for an instant by a canopy of leathery wings, and I had a momentary vision of a long, snake-like neck, a fierce, red, greedy eye, and a great snapping beak, filled, to my amazement, with little, gleaming teeth. The next instant it was gone\u2014and so was our dinner. A huge black shadow, twenty feet across, skimmed up into the air; for an instant the monster wings blotted out the stars, and then it vanished over the brow of the cliff above us. We all sat in amazed silence round the fire, like the heroes of Virgil when the Harpies came down upon them. It was Summerlee who was the first to speak.\n\n\"Professor Challenger,\" said he, in a solemn voice, which quavered with emotion, \"I owe you an apology. Sir, I am very much in the wrong, and I beg that you will forget what is past.\"\n\nIt was handsomely said, and the two men for the first time shook hands. So much we have gained by this clear vision of our first pterodactyl. It was worth a stolen supper to bring two such men together.\n\nBut if prehistoric life existed upon the plateau it was not superabundant, for we had no further glimpse of it during the next three days. During this time we traversed a barren and forbidding country, which alternated between stony desert and desolate marshes full of many wild-fowl, upon the north and east of the cliffs. From that direction the place is really inaccessible, and, were it not for a hardish ledge which runs at the very base of the precipice, we should have had to turn back. Many times we were up to our waists in the slime and blubber of an old, semi-tropical swamp. To make matters worse, the place seemed to be a favorite breeding-place of the Jaracaca snake, the most venomous and aggressive in South America. Again and again these horrible creatures came writhing and springing towards us across the surface of this putrid bog, and it was only by keeping our shot-guns for ever ready that we could feel safe from them. One funnel-shaped depression in the morass, of a livid green in color from some lichen which festered in it, will always remain as a nightmare memory in my mind. It seems to have been a special nest of these vermins, and the slopes were alive with them, all writhing in our direction, for it is a peculiarity of the Jaracaca that he will always attack man at first sight. There were too many for us to shoot, so we fairly took to our heels and ran until we were exhausted. I shall always remember as we looked back how far behind we could see the heads and necks of our horrible pursuers rising and falling amid the reeds. Jaracaca Swamp we named it in the map which we are constructing.\n\nThe cliffs upon the farther side had lost their ruddy tint, being chocolate-brown in color; the vegetation was more scattered along the top of them, and they had sunk to three or four hundred feet in height, but in no place did we find any point where they could be ascended. If anything, they were more impossible than at the first point where we had met them. Their absolute steepness is indicated in the photograph which I took over the stony desert.\n\n\"Surely,\" said I, as we discussed the situation, \"the rain must find its way down somehow. There are bound to be water-channels in the rocks.\"\n\n\"Our young friend has glimpses of lucidity,\" said Professor Challenger, patting me upon the shoulder.\n\n\"The rain must go somewhere,\" I repeated.\n\n\"He keeps a firm grip upon actuality. The only drawback is that we have conclusively proved by ocular demonstration that there are no water channels down the rocks.\"\n\n\"Where, then, does it go?\" I persisted.\n\n\"I think it may be fairly assumed that if it does not come outwards it must run inwards.\"\n\n\"Then there is a lake in the center.\"\n\n\"So I should suppose.\"\n\n\"It is more than likely that the lake may be an old crater,\" said Summerlee. \"The whole formation is, of course, highly volcanic. But, however that may be, I should expect to find the surface of the plateau slope inwards with a considerable sheet of water in the center, which may drain off, by some subterranean channel, into the marshes of the Jaracaca Swamp.\"\n\n\"Or evaporation might preserve an equilibrium,\" remarked Challenger, and the two learned men wandered off into one of their usual scientific arguments, which were as comprehensible as Chinese to the layman.\n\nOn the sixth day we completed our first circuit of the cliffs, and found ourselves back at the first camp, beside the isolated pinnacle of rock. We were a disconsolate party, for nothing could have been more minute than our investigation, and it was absolutely certain that there was no single point where the most active human being could possibly hope to scale the cliff. The place which Maple White's chalk-marks had indicated as his own means of access was now entirely impassable.\n\nWhat were we to do now? Our stores of provisions, supplemented by our guns, were holding out well, but the day must come when they would need replenishment. In a couple of months the rains might be expected, and we should be washed out of our camp. The rock was harder than marble, and any attempt at cutting a path for so great a height was more than our time or resources would admit. No wonder that we looked gloomily at each other that night, and sought our blankets with hardly a word exchanged. I remember that as I dropped off to sleep my last recollection was that Challenger was squatting, like a monstrous bull-frog, by the fire, his huge head in his hands, sunk apparently in the deepest thought, and entirely oblivious to the good-night which I wished him.\n\nBut it was a very different Challenger who greeted us in the morning\u2014a Challenger with contentment and self-congratulation shining from his whole person. He faced us as we assembled for breakfast with a deprecating false modesty in his eyes, as who should say, \"I know that I deserve all that you can say, but I pray you to spare my blushes by not saying it.\" His beard bristled exultantly, his chest was thrown out, and his hand was thrust into the front of his jacket. So, in his fancy, may he see himself sometimes, gracing the vacant pedestal in Trafalgar Square, and adding one more to the horrors of the London streets.\n\n\"Eureka!\" he cried, his teeth shining through his beard. \"Gentlemen, you may congratulate me and we may congratulate each other. The problem is solved.\"\n\n\"You have found a way up?\"\n\n\"I venture to think so.\"\n\n\"And where?\"\n\nFor answer he pointed to the spire-like pinnacle upon our right.\n\nOur faces\u2014or mine, at least\u2014fell as we surveyed it. That it could be climbed we had our companion's assurance. But a horrible abyss lay between it and the plateau.\n\n\"We can never get across,\" I gasped.\n\n\"We can at least all reach the summit,\" said he. \"When we are up I may be able to show you that the resources of an inventive mind are not yet exhausted.\"\n\nAfter breakfast we unpacked the bundle in which our leader had brought his climbing accessories. From it he took a coil of the strongest and lightest rope, a hundred and fifty feet in length, with climbing irons, clamps, and other devices. Lord John was an experienced mountaineer, and Summerlee had done some rough climbing at various times, so that I was really the novice at rock-work of the party; but my strength and activity may have made up for my want of experience.\n\nIt was not in reality a very stiff task, though there were moments which made my hair bristle upon my head. The first half was perfectly easy, but from there upwards it became continually steeper until, for the last fifty feet, we were literally clinging with our fingers and toes to tiny ledges and crevices in the rock. I could not have accomplished it, nor could Summerlee, if Challenger had not gained the summit (it was extraordinary to see such activity in so unwieldy a creature) and there fixed the rope round the trunk of the considerable tree which grew there. With this as our support, we were soon able to scramble up the jagged wall until we found ourselves upon the small grassy platform, some twenty-five feet each way, which formed the summit.\n\nThe first impression which I received when I had recovered my breath was of the extraordinary view over the country which we had traversed. The whole Brazilian plain seemed to lie beneath us, extending away and away until it ended in dim blue mists upon the farthest skyline. In the foreground was the long slope, strewn with rocks and dotted with tree-ferns; farther off in the middle distance, looking over the saddle-back hill, I could just see the yellow and green mass of bamboos through which we had passed; and then, gradually, the vegetation increased until it formed the huge forest which extended as far as the eyes could reach, and for a good two thousand miles beyond.\n\nI was still drinking in this wonderful panorama when the heavy hand of the Professor fell upon my shoulder.\n\n\"This way, my young friend,\" said he; \"vestigia nulla retrorsum. Never look rearwards, but always to our glorious goal.\"\n\nThe level of the plateau, when I turned, was exactly that on which we stood, and the green bank of bushes, with occasional trees, was so near that it was difficult to realize how inaccessible it remained. At a rough guess the gulf was forty feet across, but, so far as I could see, it might as well have been forty miles. I placed one arm round the trunk of the tree and leaned over the abyss. Far down were the small dark figures of our servants, looking up at us. The wall was absolutely precipitous, as was that which faced me.\n\n\"This is indeed curious,\" said the creaking voice of Professor Summerlee.\n\nI turned, and found that he was examining with great interest the tree to which I clung. That smooth bark and those small, ribbed leaves seemed familiar to my eyes. \"Why,\" I cried, \"it's a beech!\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said Summerlee. \"A fellow-countryman in a far land.\"\n\n\"Not only a fellow-countryman, my good sir,\" said Challenger, \"but also, if I may be allowed to enlarge your simile, an ally of the first value. This beech tree will be our saviour.\"\n\n\"By George!\" cried Lord John, \"a bridge!\"\n\n\"Exactly, my friends, a bridge! It is not for nothing that I expended an hour last night in focusing my mind upon the situation. I have some recollection of once remarking to our young friend here that G. E. C. is at his best when his back is to the wall. Last night you will admit that all our backs were to the wall. But where will-power and intellect go together, there is always a way out. A drawbridge had to be found which could be dropped across the abyss. Behold it!\"\n\nIt was certainly a brilliant idea. The tree was a good sixty feet in height, and if it only fell the right way it would easily cross the chasm. Challenger had slung the camp axe over his shoulder when he ascended. Now he handed it to me.\n\n\"Our young friend has the thews and sinews,\" said he. \"I think he will be the most useful at this task. I must beg, however, that you will kindly refrain from thinking for yourself, and that you will do exactly what you are told.\"\n\nUnder his direction I cut such gashes in the sides of the trees as would ensure that it should fall as we desired. It had already a strong, natural tilt in the direction of the plateau, so that the matter was not difficult. Finally I set to work in earnest upon the trunk, taking turn and turn with Lord John. In a little over an hour there was a loud crack, the tree swayed forward, and then crashed over, burying its branches among the bushes on the farther side. The severed trunk rolled to the very edge of our platform, and for one terrible second we all thought it was over. It balanced itself, however, a few inches from the edge, and there was our bridge to the unknown.\n\nAll of us, without a word, shook hands with Professor Challenger, who raised his straw hat and bowed deeply to each in turn.\n\n\"I claim the honor,\" said he, \"to be the first to cross to the unknown land\u2014a fitting subject, no doubt, for some future historical painting.\"\n\nHe had approached the bridge when Lord John laid his hand upon his coat.\n\n\"My dear chap,\" said he, \"I really cannot allow it.\"\n\n\"Cannot allow it, sir!\" The head went back and the beard forward.\n\n\"When it is a matter of science, don't you know, I follow your lead because you are by way of bein' a man of science. But it's up to you to follow me when you come into my department.\"\n\n\"Your department, sir?\"\n\n\"We all have our professions, and soldierin' is mine. We are, accordin' to my ideas, invadin' a new country, which may or may not be chock-full of enemies of sorts. To barge blindly into it for want of a little common sense and patience isn't my notion of management.\"\n\nThe remonstrance was too reasonable to be disregarded. Challenger tossed his head and shrugged his heavy shoulders.\n\n\"Well, sir, what do you propose?\"\n\n\"For all I know there may be a tribe of cannibals waitin' for lunch-time among those very bushes,\" said Lord John, looking across the bridge. \"It's better to learn wisdom before you get into a cookin'-pot; so we will content ourselves with hopin' that there is no trouble waitin' for us, and at the same time we will act as if there were. Malone and I will go down again, therefore, and we will fetch up the four rifles, together with Gomez and the other. One man can then go across and the rest will cover him with guns, until he sees that it is safe for the whole crowd to come along.\"\n\nChallenger sat down upon the cut stump and groaned his impatience; but Summerlee and I were of one mind that Lord John was our leader when such practical details were in question. The climb was a more simple thing now that the rope dangled down the face of the worst part of the ascent. Within an hour we had brought up the rifles and a shot-gun. The half-breeds had ascended also, and under Lord John's orders they had carried up a bale of provisions in case our first exploration should be a long one. We had each bandoliers of cartridges.\n\n\"Now, Challenger, if you really insist upon being the first man in,\" said Lord John, when every preparation was complete.\n\n\"I am much indebted to you for your gracious permission,\" said the angry Professor; for never was a man so intolerant of every form of authority. \"Since you are good enough to allow it, I shall most certainly take it upon myself to act as pioneer upon this occasion.\"\n\nSeating himself with a leg overhanging the abyss on each side, and his hatchet slung upon his back, Challenger hopped his way across the trunk and was soon at the other side. He clambered up and waved his arms in the air.\n\n\"At last!\" he cried; \"at last!\"\n\nI gazed anxiously at him, with a vague expectation that some terrible fate would dart at him from the curtain of green behind him. But all was quiet, save that a strange, many-colored bird flew up from under his feet and vanished among the trees.\n\nSummerlee was the second. His wiry energy is wonderful in so frail a frame. He insisted upon having two rifles slung upon his back, so that both Professors were armed when he had made his transit. I came next, and tried hard not to look down into the horrible gulf over which I was passing. Summerlee held out the butt-end of his rifle, and an instant later I was able to grasp his hand. As to Lord John, he walked across\u2014actually walked without support! He must have nerves of iron.\n\nAnd there we were, the four of us, upon the dreamland, the lost world, of Maple White. To all of us it seemed the moment of our supreme triumph. Who could have guessed that it was the prelude to our supreme disaster? Let me say in a few words how the crushing blow fell upon us.\n\nWe had turned away from the edge, and had penetrated about fifty yards of close brushwood, when there came a frightful rending crash from behind us. With one impulse we rushed back the way that we had come. The bridge was gone!\n\nFar down at the base of the cliff I saw, as I looked over, a tangled mass of branches and splintered trunk. It was our beech tree. Had the edge of the platform crumbled and let it through? For a moment this explanation was in all our minds. The next, from the farther side of the rocky pinnacle before us a swarthy face, the face of Gomez the half-breed, was slowly protruded. Yes, it was Gomez, but no longer the Gomez of the demure smile and the mask-like expression. Here was a face with flashing eyes and distorted features, a face convulsed with hatred and with the mad joy of gratified revenge.\n\n\"Lord Roxton!\" he shouted. \"Lord John Roxton!\"\n\n\"Well,\" said our companion, \"here I am.\"\n\nA shriek of laughter came across the abyss.\n\n\"Yes, there you are, you English dog, and there you will remain! I have waited and waited, and now has come my chance. You found it hard to get up; you will find it harder to get down. You cursed fools, you are trapped, every one of you!\"\n\nWe were too astounded to speak. We could only stand there staring in amazement. A great broken bough upon the grass showed whence he had gained his leverage to tilt over our bridge. The face had vanished, but presently it was up again, more frantic than before.\n\n\"We nearly killed you with a stone at the cave,\" he cried; \"but this is better. It is slower and more terrible. Your bones will whiten up there, and none will know where you lie or come to cover them. As you lie dying, think of Lopez, whom you shot five years ago on the Putomayo River. I am his brother, and, come what will I will die happy now, for his memory has been avenged.\" A furious hand was shaken at us, and then all was quiet.\n\nHad the half-breed simply wrought his vengeance and then escaped, all might have been well with him. It was that foolish, irresistible Latin impulse to be dramatic which brought his own downfall. Roxton, the man who had earned himself the name of the Flail of the Lord through three countries, was not one who could be safely taunted. The half-breed was descending on the farther side of the pinnacle; but before he could reach the ground Lord John had run along the edge of the plateau and gained a point from which he could see his man. There was a single crack of his rifle, and, though we saw nothing, we heard the scream and then the distant thud of the falling body. Roxton came back to us with a face of granite.\n\n\"I have been a blind simpleton,\" said he, bitterly, \"It's my folly that has brought you all into this trouble. I should have remembered that these people have long memories for blood-feuds, and have been more upon my guard.\"\n\n\"What about the other one? It took two of them to lever that tree over the edge.\"\n\n\"I could have shot him, but I let him go. He may have had no part in it. Perhaps it would have been better if I had killed him, for he must, as you say, have lent a hand.\"\n\nNow that we had the clue to his action, each of us could cast back and remember some sinister act upon the part of the half-breed\u2014his constant desire to know our plans, his arrest outside our tent when he was overhearing them, the furtive looks of hatred which from time to time one or other of us had surprised. We were still discussing it, endeavoring to adjust our minds to these new conditions, when a singular scene in the plain below arrested our attention.\n\nA man in white clothes, who could only be the surviving half-breed, was running as one does run when Death is the pacemaker. Behind him, only a few yards in his rear, bounded the huge ebony figure of Zambo, our devoted negro. Even as we looked, he sprang upon the back of the fugitive and flung his arms round his neck. They rolled on the ground together. An instant afterwards Zambo rose, looked at the prostrate man, and then, waving his hand joyously to us, came running in our direction. The white figure lay motionless in the middle of the great plain.\n\nOur two traitors had been destroyed, but the mischief that they had done lived after them. By no possible means could we get back to the pinnacle. We had been natives of the world; now we were natives of the plateau. The two things were separate and apart. There was the plain which led to the canoes. Yonder, beyond the violet, hazy horizon, was the stream which led back to civilization. But the link between was missing. No human ingenuity could suggest a means of bridging the chasm which yawned between ourselves and our past lives. One instant had altered the whole conditions of our existence.\n\nIt was at such a moment that I learned the stuff of which my three comrades were composed. They were grave, it is true, and thoughtful, but of an invincible serenity. For the moment we could only sit among the bushes in patience and wait the coming of Zambo. Presently his honest black face topped the rocks and his Herculean figure emerged upon the top of the pinnacle.\n\n\"What I do now?\" he cried. \"You tell me and I do it.\"\n\nIt was a question which it was easier to ask than to answer. One thing only was clear. He was our one trusty link with the outside world. On no account must he leave us.\n\n\"No no!\" he cried. \"I not leave you. Whatever come, you always find me here. But no able to keep Indians. Already they say too much Curupuri live on this place, and they go home. Now you leave them me no able to keep them.\"\n\nIt was a fact that our Indians had shown in many ways of late that they were weary of their journey and anxious to return. We realized that Zambo spoke the truth, and that it would be impossible for him to keep them.\n\n\"Make them wait till to-morrow, Zambo,\" I shouted; \"then I can send letter back by them.\"\n\n\"Very good, sarr! I promise they wait till to-morrow,\" said the negro. \"But what I do for you now?\"\n\nThere was plenty for him to do, and admirably the faithful fellow did it. First of all, under our directions, he undid the rope from the tree-stump and threw one end of it across to us. It was not thicker than a clothes-line, but it was of great strength, and though we could not make a bridge of it, we might well find it invaluable if we had any climbing to do. He then fastened his end of the rope to the package of supplies which had been carried up, and we were able to drag it across. This gave us the means of life for at least a week, even if we found nothing else. Finally he descended and carried up two other packets of mixed goods\u2014a box of ammunition and a number of other things, all of which we got across by throwing our rope to him and hauling it back. It was evening when he at last climbed down, with a final assurance that he would keep the Indians till next morning.\n\nAnd so it is that I have spent nearly the whole of this our first night upon the plateau writing up our experiences by the light of a single candle-lantern.\n\nWe supped and camped at the very edge of the cliff, quenching our thirst with two bottles of Apollinaris which were in one of the cases. It is vital to us to find water, but I think even Lord John himself had had adventures enough for one day, and none of us felt inclined to make the first push into the unknown. We forbore to light a fire or to make any unnecessary sound.\n\nTo-morrow (or to-day, rather, for it is already dawn as I write) we shall make our first venture into this strange land. When I shall be able to write again\u2014or if I ever shall write again\u2014I know not. Meanwhile, I can see that the Indians are still in their place, and I am sure that the faithful Zambo will be here presently to get my letter. I only trust that it will come to hand.\n\nP.S.\u2014The more I think the more desperate does our position seem. I see no possible hope of our return. If there were a high tree near the edge of the plateau we might drop a return bridge across, but there is none within fifty yards. Our united strength could not carry a trunk which would serve our purpose. The rope, of course, is far too short that we could descend by it. No, our position is hopeless\u2014hopeless!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\"The most Wonderful Things have Happened\"\n\nThe most wonderful things have happened and are continually happening to us. All the paper that I possess consists of five old notebooks and a lot of scraps, and I have only the one stylographic pencil; but so long as I can move my hand I will continue to set down our experiences and impressions, for, since we are the only men of the whole human race to see such things, it is of enormous importance that I should record them whilst they are fresh in my memory and before that fate which seems to be constantly impending does actually overtake us. Whether Zambo can at last take these letters to the river, or whether I shall myself in some miraculous way carry them back with me, or, finally, whether some daring explorer, coming upon our tracks with the advantage, perhaps, of a perfected monoplane, should find this bundle of manuscript, in any case I can see that what I am writing is destined to immortality as a classic of true adventure.\n\nOn the morning after our being trapped upon the plateau by the villainous Gomez we began a new stage in our experiences. The first incident in it was not such as to give me a very favorable opinion of the place to which we had wandered. As I roused myself from a short nap after day had dawned, my eyes fell upon a most singular appearance upon my own leg. My trouser had slipped up, exposing a few inches of my skin above my sock. On this there rested a large, purplish grape. Astonished at the sight, I leaned forward to pick it off, when, to my horror, it burst between my finger and thumb, squirting blood in every direction. My cry of disgust had brought the two professors to my side.\n\n\"Most interesting,\" said Summerlee, bending over my shin. \"An enormous blood-tick, as yet, I believe, unclassified.\"\n\n\"The first-fruits of our labors,\" said Challenger in his booming, pedantic fashion. \"We cannot do less than call it Ixodes Maloni. The very small inconvenience of being bitten, my young friend, cannot, I am sure, weigh with you as against the glorious privilege of having your name inscribed in the deathless roll of zoology. Unhappily you have crushed this fine specimen at the moment of satiation.\"\n\n\"Filthy vermin!\" I cried.\n\nProfessor Challenger raised his great eyebrows in protest, and placed a soothing paw upon my shoulder.\n\n\"You should cultivate the scientific eye and the detached scientific mind,\" said he. \"To a man of philosophic temperament like myself the blood-tick, with its lancet-like proboscis and its distending stomach, is as beautiful a work of Nature as the peacock or, for that matter, the aurora borealis. It pains me to hear you speak of it in so unappreciative a fashion. No doubt, with due diligence, we can secure some other specimen.\"\n\n\"There can be no doubt of that,\" said Summerlee, grimly, \"for one has just disappeared behind your shirt-collar.\"\n\nChallenger sprang into the air bellowing like a bull, and tore frantically at his coat and shirt to get them off. Summerlee and I laughed so that we could hardly help him. At last we exposed that monstrous torso (fifty-four inches, by the tailor's tape). His body was all matted with black hair, out of which jungle we picked the wandering tick before it had bitten him. But the bushes round were full of the horrible pests, and it was clear that we must shift our camp.\n\nBut first of all it was necessary to make our arrangements with the faithful negro, who appeared presently on the pinnacle with a number of tins of cocoa and biscuits, which he tossed over to us. Of the stores which remained below he was ordered to retain as much as would keep him for two months. The Indians were to have the remainder as a reward for their services and as payment for taking our letters back to the Amazon. Some hours later we saw them in single file far out upon the plain, each with a bundle on his head, making their way back along the path we had come. Zambo occupied our little tent at the base of the pinnacle, and there he remained, our one link with the world below.\n\nAnd now we had to decide upon our immediate movements. We shifted our position from among the tick-laden bushes until we came to a small clearing thickly surrounded by trees upon all sides. There were some flat slabs of rock in the center, with an excellent well close by, and there we sat in cleanly comfort while we made our first plans for the invasion of this new country. Birds were calling among the foliage\u2014especially one with a peculiar whooping cry which was new to us\u2014but beyond these sounds there were no signs of life.\n\nOur first care was to make some sort of list of our own stores, so that we might know what we had to rely upon. What with the things we had ourselves brought up and those which Zambo had sent across on the rope, we were fairly well supplied. Most important of all, in view of the dangers which might surround us, we had our four rifles and one thousand three hundred rounds, also a shot-gun, but not more than a hundred and fifty medium pellet cartridges. In the matter of provisions we had enough to last for several weeks, with a sufficiency of tobacco and a few scientific implements, including a large telescope and a good field-glass. All these things we collected together in the clearing, and as a first precaution, we cut down with our hatchet and knives a number of thorny bushes, which we piled round in a circle some fifteen yards in diameter. This was to be our headquarters for the time\u2014our place of refuge against sudden danger and the guard-house for our stores. Fort Challenger, we called it.\n\nIt was midday before we had made ourselves secure, but the heat was not oppressive, and the general character of the plateau, both in its temperature and in its vegetation, was almost temperate. The beech, the oak, and even the birch were to be found among the tangle of trees which girt us in. One huge gingko tree, topping all the others, shot its great limbs and maidenhair foliage over the fort which we had constructed. In its shade we continued our discussion, while Lord John, who had quickly taken command in the hour of action, gave us his views.\n\n\"So long as neither man nor beast has seen or heard us, we are safe,\" said he. \"From the time they know we are here our troubles begin. There are no signs that they have found us out as yet. So our game surely is to lie low for a time and spy out the land. We want to have a good look at our neighbors before we get on visitin' terms.\"\n\n\"But we must advance,\" I ventured to remark.\n\n\"By all means, sonny my boy! We will advance. But with common sense. We must never go so far that we can't get back to our base. Above all, we must never, unless it is life or death, fire off our guns.\"\n\n\"But YOU fired yesterday,\" said Summerlee.\n\n\"Well, it couldn't be helped. However, the wind was strong and blew outwards. It is not likely that the sound could have traveled far into the plateau. By the way, what shall we call this place? I suppose it is up to us to give it a name?\"\n\nThere were several suggestions, more or less happy, but Challenger's was final.\n\n\"It can only have one name,\" said he. \"It is called after the pioneer who discovered it. It is Maple White Land.\"\n\nMaple White Land it became, and so it is named in that chart which has become my special task. So it will, I trust, appear in the atlas of the future.\n\nThe peaceful penetration of Maple White Land was the pressing subject before us. We had the evidence of our own eyes that the place was inhabited by some unknown creatures, and there was that of Maple White's sketch-book to show that more dreadful and more dangerous monsters might still appear. That there might also prove to be human occupants and that they were of a malevolent character was suggested by the skeleton impaled upon the bamboos, which could not have got there had it not been dropped from above. Our situation, stranded without possibility of escape in such a land, was clearly full of danger, and our reasons endorsed every measure of caution which Lord John's experience could suggest. Yet it was surely impossible that we should halt on the edge of this world of mystery when our very souls were tingling with impatience to push forward and to pluck the heart from it.\n\nWe therefore blocked the entrance to our zareba by filling it up with several thorny bushes, and left our camp with the stores entirely surrounded by this protecting hedge. We then slowly and cautiously set forth into the unknown, following the course of the little stream which flowed from our spring, as it should always serve us as a guide on our return.\n\nHardly had we started when we came across signs that there were indeed wonders awaiting us. After a few hundred yards of thick forest, containing many trees which were quite unknown to me, but which Summerlee, who was the botanist of the party, recognized as forms of conifera and of cycadaceous plants which have long passed away in the world below, we entered a region where the stream widened out and formed a considerable bog. High reeds of a peculiar type grew thickly before us, which were pronounced to be equisetacea, or mare's-tails, with tree-ferns scattered amongst them, all of them swaying in a brisk wind. Suddenly Lord John, who was walking first, halted with uplifted hand.\n\n\"Look at this!\" said he. \"By George, this must be the trail of the father of all birds!\"\n\nAn enormous three-toed track was imprinted in the soft mud before us. The creature, whatever it was, had crossed the swamp and had passed on into the forest. We all stopped to examine that monstrous spoor. If it were indeed a bird\u2014and what animal could leave such a mark?\u2014its foot was so much larger than an ostrich's that its height upon the same scale must be enormous. Lord John looked eagerly round him and slipped two cartridges into his elephant-gun.\n\n\"I'll stake my good name as a shikarree,\" said he, \"that the track is a fresh one. The creature has not passed ten minutes. Look how the water is still oozing into that deeper print! By Jove! See, here is the mark of a little one!\"\n\nSure enough, smaller tracks of the same general form were running parallel to the large ones.\n\n\"But what do you make of this?\" cried Professor Summerlee, triumphantly, pointing to what looked like the huge print of a five-fingered human hand appearing among the three-toed marks.\n\n\"Wealden!\" cried Challenger, in an ecstasy. \"I've seen them in the Wealden clay. It is a creature walking erect upon three-toed feet, and occasionally putting one of its five-fingered forepaws upon the ground. Not a bird, my dear Roxton\u2014not a bird.\"\n\n\"A beast?\"\n\n\"No; a reptile\u2014a dinosaur. Nothing else could have left such a track. They puzzled a worthy Sussex doctor some ninety years ago; but who in the world could have hoped\u2014hoped\u2014to have seen a sight like that?\"\n\nHis words died away into a whisper, and we all stood in motionless amazement. Following the tracks, we had left the morass and passed through a screen of brushwood and trees. Beyond was an open glade, and in this were five of the most extraordinary creatures that I have ever seen. Crouching down among the bushes, we observed them at our leisure.\n\nThere were, as I say, five of them, two being adults and three young ones. In size they were enormous. Even the babies were as big as elephants, while the two large ones were far beyond all creatures I have ever seen. They had slate-colored skin, which was scaled like a lizard's and shimmered where the sun shone upon it. All five were sitting up, balancing themselves upon their broad, powerful tails and their huge three-toed hind-feet, while with their small five-fingered front-feet they pulled down the branches upon which they browsed. I do not know that I can bring their appearance home to you better than by saying that they looked like monstrous kangaroos, twenty feet in length, and with skins like black crocodiles.\n\nI do not know how long we stayed motionless gazing at this marvelous spectacle. A strong wind blew towards us and we were well concealed, so there was no chance of discovery. From time to time the little ones played round their parents in unwieldy gambols, the great beasts bounding into the air and falling with dull thuds upon the earth. The strength of the parents seemed to be limitless, for one of them, having some difficulty in reaching a bunch of foliage which grew upon a considerable-sized tree, put his fore-legs round the trunk and tore it down as if it had been a sapling. The action seemed, as I thought, to show not only the great development of its muscles, but also the small one of its brain, for the whole weight came crashing down upon the top of it, and it uttered a series of shrill yelps to show that, big as it was, there was a limit to what it could endure. The incident made it think, apparently, that the neighborhood was dangerous, for it slowly lurched off through the wood, followed by its mate and its three enormous infants. We saw the shimmering slaty gleam of their skins between the tree-trunks, and their heads undulating high above the brushwood. Then they vanished from our sight.\n\nI looked at my comrades. Lord John was standing at gaze with his finger on the trigger of his elephant-gun, his eager hunter's soul shining from his fierce eyes. What would he not give for one such head to place between the two crossed oars above the mantelpiece in his snuggery at the Albany! And yet his reason held him in, for all our exploration of the wonders of this unknown land depended upon our presence being concealed from its inhabitants. The two professors were in silent ecstasy. In their excitement they had unconsciously seized each other by the hand, and stood like two little children in the presence of a marvel, Challenger's cheeks bunched up into a seraphic smile, and Summerlee's sardonic face softening for the moment into wonder and reverence.\n\n\"Nunc dimittis!\" he cried at last. \"What will they say in England of this?\"\n\n\"My dear Summerlee, I will tell you with great confidence exactly what they will say in England,\" said Challenger. \"They will say that you are an infernal liar and a scientific charlatan, exactly as you and others said of me.\"\n\n\"In the face of photographs?\"\n\n\"Faked, Summerlee! Clumsily faked!\"\n\n\"In the face of specimens?\"\n\n\"Ah, there we may have them! Malone and his filthy Fleet Street crew may be all yelping our praises yet. August the twenty-eighth\u2014the day we saw five live iguanodons in a glade of Maple White Land. Put it down in your diary, my young friend, and send it to your rag.\"\n\n\"And be ready to get the toe-end of the editorial boot in return,\" said Lord John. \"Things look a bit different from the latitude of London, young fellah my lad. There's many a man who never tells his adventures, for he can't hope to be believed. Who's to blame them? For this will seem a bit of a dream to ourselves in a month or two. WHAT did you say they were?\"\n\n\"Iguanodons,\" said Summerlee. \"You'll find their footmarks all over the Hastings sands, in Kent, and in Sussex. The South of England was alive with them when there was plenty of good lush green-stuff to keep them going. Conditions have changed, and the beasts died. Here it seems that the conditions have not changed, and the beasts have lived.\"\n\n\"If ever we get out of this alive, I must have a head with me,\" said Lord John. \"Lord, how some of that Somaliland-Uganda crowd would turn a beautiful pea-green if they saw it! I don't know what you chaps think, but it strikes me that we are on mighty thin ice all this time.\"\n\nI had the same feeling of mystery and danger around us. In the gloom of the trees there seemed a constant menace and as we looked up into their shadowy foliage vague terrors crept into one's heart. It is true that these monstrous creatures which we had seen were lumbering, inoffensive brutes which were unlikely to hurt anyone, but in this world of wonders what other survivals might there not be\u2014what fierce, active horrors ready to pounce upon us from their lair among the rocks or brushwood? I knew little of prehistoric life, but I had a clear remembrance of one book which I had read in which it spoke of creatures who would live upon our lions and tigers as a cat lives upon mice. What if these also were to be found in the woods of Maple White Land!\n\nIt was destined that on this very morning\u2014our first in the new country\u2014we were to find out what strange hazards lay around us. It was a loathsome adventure, and one of which I hate to think. If, as Lord John said, the glade of the iguanodons will remain with us as a dream, then surely the swamp of the pterodactyls will forever be our nightmare. Let me set down exactly what occurred.\n\nWe passed very slowly through the woods, partly because Lord Roxton acted as scout before he would let us advance, and partly because at every second step one or other of our professors would fall, with a cry of wonder, before some flower or insect which presented him with a new type. We may have traveled two or three miles in all, keeping to the right of the line of the stream, when we came upon a considerable opening in the trees. A belt of brushwood led up to a tangle of rocks\u2014the whole plateau was strewn with boulders. We were walking slowly towards these rocks, among bushes which reached over our waists, when we became aware of a strange low gabbling and whistling sound, which filled the air with a constant clamor and appeared to come from some spot immediately before us. Lord John held up his hand as a signal for us to stop, and he made his way swiftly, stooping and running, to the line of rocks. We saw him peep over them and give a gesture of amazement. Then he stood staring as if forgetting us, so utterly entranced was he by what he saw. Finally he waved us to come on, holding up his hand as a signal for caution. His whole bearing made me feel that something wonderful but dangerous lay before us.\n\nCreeping to his side, we looked over the rocks. The place into which we gazed was a pit, and may, in the early days, have been one of the smaller volcanic blow-holes of the plateau. It was bowl-shaped and at the bottom, some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bullrushes. It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante. The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, gray, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely motionless save for the rolling of their red eyes or an occasional snap of their rat-trap beaks as a dragon-fly went past them. Their huge, membranous wings were closed by folding their forearms, so that they sat like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-colored shawls, and with their ferocious heads protruding above them. Large and small, not less than a thousand of these filthy creatures lay in the hollow before us.\n\nOur professors would gladly have stayed there all day, so entranced were they by this opportunity of studying the life of a prehistoric age. They pointed out the fish and dead birds lying about among the rocks as proving the nature of the food of these creatures, and I heard them congratulating each other on having cleared up the point why the bones of this flying dragon are found in such great numbers in certain well-defined areas, as in the Cambridge Green-sand, since it was now seen that, like penguins, they lived in gregarious fashion.\n\nFinally, however, Challenger, bent upon proving some point which Summerlee had contested, thrust his head over the rock and nearly brought destruction upon us all. In an instant the nearest male gave a shrill, whistling cry, and flapped its twenty-foot span of leathery wings as it soared up into the air. The females and young ones huddled together beside the water, while the whole circle of sentinels rose one after the other and sailed off into the sky. It was a wonderful sight to see at least a hundred creatures of such enormous size and hideous appearance all swooping like swallows with swift, shearing wing-strokes above us; but soon we realized that it was not one on which we could afford to linger. At first the great brutes flew round in a huge ring, as if to make sure what the exact extent of the danger might be. Then, the flight grew lower and the circle narrower, until they were whizzing round and round us, the dry, rustling flap of their huge slate-colored wings filling the air with a volume of sound that made me think of Hendon aerodrome upon a race day.\n\n\"Make for the wood and keep together,\" cried Lord John, clubbing his rifle. \"The brutes mean mischief.\"\n\nThe moment we attempted to retreat the circle closed in upon us, until the tips of the wings of those nearest to us nearly touched our faces. We beat at them with the stocks of our guns, but there was nothing solid or vulnerable to strike. Then suddenly out of the whizzing, slate-colored circle a long neck shot out, and a fierce beak made a thrust at us. Another and another followed. Summerlee gave a cry and put his hand to his face, from which the blood was streaming. I felt a prod at the back of my neck, and turned dizzy with the shock. Challenger fell, and as I stooped to pick him up I was again struck from behind and dropped on the top of him. At the same instant I heard the crash of Lord John's elephant-gun, and, looking up, saw one of the creatures with a broken wing struggling upon the ground, spitting and gurgling at us with a wide-opened beak and blood-shot, goggled eyes, like some devil in a medieval picture. Its comrades had flown higher at the sudden sound, and were circling above our heads.\n\n\"Now,\" cried Lord John, \"now for our lives!\"\n\nWe staggered through the brushwood, and even as we reached the trees the harpies were on us again. Summerlee was knocked down, but we tore him up and rushed among the trunks. Once there we were safe, for those huge wings had no space for their sweep beneath the branches. As we limped homewards, sadly mauled and discomfited, we saw them for a long time flying at a great height against the deep blue sky above our heads, soaring round and round, no bigger than wood-pigeons, with their eyes no doubt still following our progress. At last, however, as we reached the thicker woods they gave up the chase, and we saw them no more.\n\n\"A most interesting and convincing experience,\" said Challenger, as we halted beside the brook and he bathed a swollen knee. \"We are exceptionally well informed, Summerlee, as to the habits of the enraged pterodactyl.\"\n\nSummerlee was wiping the blood from a cut in his forehead, while I was tying up a nasty stab in the muscle of the neck. Lord John had the shoulder of his coat torn away, but the creature's teeth had only grazed the flesh.\n\n\"It is worth noting,\" Challenger continued, \"that our young friend has received an undoubted stab, while Lord John's coat could only have been torn by a bite. In my own case, I was beaten about the head by their wings, so we have had a remarkable exhibition of their various methods of offence.\"\n\n\"It has been touch and go for our lives,\" said Lord John, gravely, \"and I could not think of a more rotten sort of death than to be outed by such filthy vermin. I was sorry to fire my rifle, but, by Jove! there was no great choice.\"\n\n\"We should not be here if you hadn't,\" said I, with conviction.\n\n\"It may do no harm,\" said he. \"Among these woods there must be many loud cracks from splitting or falling trees which would be just like the sound of a gun. But now, if you are of my opinion, we have had thrills enough for one day, and had best get back to the surgical box at the camp for some carbolic. Who knows what venom these beasts may have in their hideous jaws?\"\n\nBut surely no men ever had just such a day since the world began. Some fresh surprise was ever in store for us. When, following the course of our brook, we at last reached our glade and saw the thorny barricade of our camp, we thought that our adventures were at an end. But we had something more to think of before we could rest. The gate of Fort Challenger had been untouched, the walls were unbroken, and yet it had been visited by some strange and powerful creature in our absence. No footmark showed a trace of its nature, and only the overhanging branch of the enormous ginko tree suggested how it might have come and gone; but of its malevolent strength there was ample evidence in the condition of our stores. They were strewn at random all over the ground, and one tin of meat had been crushed into pieces so as to extract the contents. A case of cartridges had been shattered into matchwood, and one of the brass shells lay shredded into pieces beside it. Again the feeling of vague horror came upon our souls, and we gazed round with frightened eyes at the dark shadows which lay around us, in all of which some fearsome shape might be lurking. How good it was when we were hailed by the voice of Zambo, and, going to the edge of the plateau, saw him sitting grinning at us upon the top of the opposite pinnacle.\n\n\"All well, Massa Challenger, all well!\" he cried. \"Me stay here. No fear. You always find me when you want.\"\n\nHis honest black face, and the immense view before us, which carried us half-way back to the affluent of the Amazon, helped us to remember that we really were upon this earth in the twentieth century, and had not by some magic been conveyed to some raw planet in its earliest and wildest state. How difficult it was to realize that the violet line upon the far horizon was well advanced to that great river upon which huge steamers ran, and folk talked of the small affairs of life, while we, marooned among the creatures of a bygone age, could but gaze towards it and yearn for all that it meant!\n\nOne other memory remains with me of this wonderful day, and with it I will close this letter. The two professors, their tempers aggravated no doubt by their injuries, had fallen out as to whether our assailants were of the genus pterodactylus or dimorphodon, and high words had ensued. To avoid their wrangling I moved some little way apart, and was seated smoking upon the trunk of a fallen tree, when Lord John strolled over in my direction.\n\n\"I say, Malone,\" said he, \"do you remember that place where those beasts were?\"\n\n\"Very clearly.\"\n\n\"A sort of volcanic pit, was it not?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" said I.\n\n\"Did you notice the soil?\"\n\n\"Rocks.\"\n\n\"But round the water\u2014where the reeds were?\"\n\n\"It was a bluish soil. It looked like clay.\"\n\n\"Exactly. A volcanic tube full of blue clay.\"\n\n\"What of that?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, nothing, nothing,\" said he, and strolled back to where the voices of the contending men of science rose in a prolonged duet, the high, strident note of Summerlee rising and falling to the sonorous bass of Challenger. I should have thought no more of Lord John's remark were it not that once again that night I heard him mutter to himself: \"Blue clay\u2014clay in a volcanic tube!\" They were the last words I heard before I dropped into an exhausted sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "\"For once I was the Hero\"\n\nLord John Roxton was right when he thought that some specially toxic quality might lie in the bite of the horrible creatures which had attacked us. On the morning after our first adventure upon the plateau, both Summerlee and I were in great pain and fever, while Challenger's knee was so bruised that he could hardly limp. We kept to our camp all day, therefore, Lord John busying himself, with such help as we could give him, in raising the height and thickness of the thorny walls which were our only defense. I remember that during the whole long day I was haunted by the feeling that we were closely observed, though by whom or whence I could give no guess.\n\nSo strong was the impression that I told Professor Challenger of it, who put it down to the cerebral excitement caused by my fever. Again and again I glanced round swiftly, with the conviction that I was about to see something, but only to meet the dark tangle of our hedge or the solemn and cavernous gloom of the great trees which arched above our heads. And yet the feeling grew ever stronger in my own mind that something observant and something malevolent was at our very elbow. I thought of the Indian superstition of the Curupuri\u2014the dreadful, lurking spirit of the woods\u2014and I could have imagined that his terrible presence haunted those who had invaded his most remote and sacred retreat.\n\nThat night (our third in Maple White Land) we had an experience which left a fearful impression upon our minds, and made us thankful that Lord John had worked so hard in making our retreat impregnable. We were all sleeping round our dying fire when we were aroused\u2014or, rather, I should say, shot out of our slumbers\u2014by a succession of the most frightful cries and screams to which I have ever listened. I know no sound to which I could compare this amazing tumult, which seemed to come from some spot within a few hundred yards of our camp. It was as ear-splitting as any whistle of a railway-engine; but whereas the whistle is a clear, mechanical, sharp-edged sound, this was far deeper in volume and vibrant with the uttermost strain of agony and horror. We clapped our hands to our ears to shut out that nerve-shaking appeal. A cold sweat broke out over my body, and my heart turned sick at the misery of it. All the woes of tortured life, all its stupendous indictment of high heaven, its innumerable sorrows, seemed to be centered and condensed into that one dreadful, agonized cry. And then, under this high-pitched, ringing sound there was another, more intermittent, a low, deep-chested laugh, a growling, throaty gurgle of merriment which formed a grotesque accompaniment to the shriek with which it was blended. For three or four minutes on end the fearsome duet continued, while all the foliage rustled with the rising of startled birds. Then it shut off as suddenly as it began. For a long time we sat in horrified silence. Then Lord John threw a bundle of twigs upon the fire, and their red glare lit up the intent faces of my companions and flickered over the great boughs above our heads.\n\n\"What was it?\" I whispered.\n\n\"We shall know in the morning,\" said Lord John. \"It was close to us\u2014not farther than the glade.\"\n\n\"We have been privileged to overhear a prehistoric tragedy, the sort of drama which occurred among the reeds upon the border of some Jurassic lagoon, when the greater dragon pinned the lesser among the slime,\" said Challenger, with more solemnity than I had ever heard in his voice. \"It was surely well for man that he came late in the order of creation. There were powers abroad in earlier days which no courage and no mechanism of his could have met. What could his sling, his throwing-stick, or his arrow avail him against such forces as have been loose to-night? Even with a modern rifle it would be all odds on the monster.\"\n\n\"I think I should back my little friend,\" said Lord John, caressing his Express. \"But the beast would certainly have a good sporting chance.\"\n\nSummerlee raised his hand.\n\n\"Hush!\" he cried. \"Surely I hear something?\"\n\nFrom the utter silence there emerged a deep, regular pat-pat. It was the tread of some animal\u2014the rhythm of soft but heavy pads placed cautiously upon the ground. It stole slowly round the camp, and then halted near our gateway. There was a low, sibilant rise and fall\u2014the breathing of the creature. Only our feeble hedge separated us from this horror of the night. Each of us had seized his rifle, and Lord John had pulled out a small bush to make an embrasure in the hedge.\n\n\"By George!\" he whispered. \"I think I can see it!\"\n\nI stooped and peered over his shoulder through the gap. Yes, I could see it, too. In the deep shadow of the tree there was a deeper shadow yet, black, inchoate, vague\u2014a crouching form full of savage vigor and menace. It was no higher than a horse, but the dim outline suggested vast bulk and strength. That hissing pant, as regular and full-volumed as the exhaust of an engine, spoke of a monstrous organism. Once, as it moved, I thought I saw the glint of two terrible, greenish eyes. There was an uneasy rustling, as if it were crawling slowly forward.\n\n\"I believe it is going to spring!\" said I, cocking my rifle.\n\n\"Don't fire! Don't fire!\" whispered Lord John. \"The crash of a gun in this silent night would be heard for miles. Keep it as a last card.\"\n\n\"If it gets over the hedge we're done,\" said Summerlee, and his voice crackled into a nervous laugh as he spoke.\n\n\"No, it must not get over,\" cried Lord John; \"but hold your fire to the last. Perhaps I can make something of the fellow. I'll chance it, anyhow.\"\n\nIt was as brave an act as ever I saw a man do. He stooped to the fire, picked up a blazing branch, and slipped in an instant through a sallyport which he had made in our gateway. The thing moved forward with a dreadful snarl. Lord John never hesitated, but, running towards it with a quick, light step, he dashed the flaming wood into the brute's face. For one moment I had a vision of a horrible mask like a giant toad's, of a warty, leprous skin, and of a loose mouth all beslobbered with fresh blood. The next, there was a crash in the underwood and our dreadful visitor was gone.\n\n\"I thought he wouldn't face the fire,\" said Lord John, laughing, as he came back and threw his branch among the faggots.\n\n\"You should not have taken such a risk!\" we all cried.\n\n\"There was nothin' else to be done. If he had got among us we should have shot each other in tryin' to down him. On the other hand, if we had fired through the hedge and wounded him he would soon have been on the top of us\u2014to say nothin' of giving ourselves away. On the whole, I think that we are jolly well out of it. What was he, then?\"\n\nOur learned men looked at each other with some hesitation.\n\n\"Personally, I am unable to classify the creature with any certainty,\" said Summerlee, lighting his pipe from the fire.\n\n\"In refusing to commit yourself you are but showing a proper scientific reserve,\" said Challenger, with massive condescension. \"I am not myself prepared to go farther than to say in general terms that we have almost certainly been in contact to-night with some form of carnivorous dinosaur. I have already expressed my anticipation that something of the sort might exist upon this plateau.\"\n\n\"We have to bear in mind,\" remarked Summerlee, \"that there are many prehistoric forms which have never come down to us. It would be rash to suppose that we can give a name to all that we are likely to meet.\"\n\n\"Exactly. A rough classification may be the best that we can attempt. To-morrow some further evidence may help us to an identification. Meantime we can only renew our interrupted slumbers.\"\n\n\"But not without a sentinel,\" said Lord John, with decision. \"We can't afford to take chances in a country like this. Two-hour spells in the future, for each of us.\"\n\n\"Then I'll just finish my pipe in starting the first one,\" said Professor Summerlee; and from that time onwards we never trusted ourselves again without a watchman.\n\nIn the morning it was not long before we discovered the source of the hideous uproar which had aroused us in the night. The iguanodon glade was the scene of a horrible butchery. From the pools of blood and the enormous lumps of flesh scattered in every direction over the green sward we imagined at first that a number of animals had been killed, but on examining the remains more closely we discovered that all this carnage came from one of these unwieldy monsters, which had been literally torn to pieces by some creature not larger, perhaps, but far more ferocious, than itself.\n\nOur two professors sat in absorbed argument, examining piece after piece, which showed the marks of savage teeth and of enormous claws.\n\n\"Our judgment must still be in abeyance,\" said Professor Challenger, with a huge slab of whitish-colored flesh across his knee. \"The indications would be consistent with the presence of a saber-toothed tiger, such as are still found among the breccia of our caverns; but the creature actually seen was undoubtedly of a larger and more reptilian character. Personally, I should pronounce for allosaurus.\"\n\n\"Or megalosaurus,\" said Summerlee.\n\n\"Exactly. Any one of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs would meet the case. Among them are to be found all the most terrible types of animal life that have ever cursed the earth or blessed a museum.\" He laughed sonorously at his own conceit, for, though he had little sense of humor, the crudest pleasantry from his own lips moved him always to roars of appreciation.\n\n\"The less noise the better,\" said Lord Roxton, curtly. \"We don't know who or what may be near us. If this fellah comes back for his breakfast and catches us here we won't have so much to laugh at. By the way, what is this mark upon the iguanodon's hide?\"\n\nOn the dull, scaly, slate-colored skin somewhere above the shoulder, there was a singular black circle of some substance which looked like asphalt. None of us could suggest what it meant, though Summerlee was of opinion that he had seen something similar upon one of the young ones two days before. Challenger said nothing, but looked pompous and puffy, as if he could if he would, so that finally Lord John asked his opinion direct.\n\n\"If your lordship will graciously permit me to open my mouth, I shall be happy to express my sentiments,\" said he, with elaborate sarcasm. \"I am not in the habit of being taken to task in the fashion which seems to be customary with your lordship. I was not aware that it was necessary to ask your permission before smiling at a harmless pleasantry.\"\n\nIt was not until he had received his apology that our touchy friend would suffer himself to be appeased. When at last his ruffled feelings were at ease, he addressed us at some length from his seat upon a fallen tree, speaking, as his habit was, as if he were imparting most precious information to a class of a thousand.\n\n\"With regard to the marking,\" said he, \"I am inclined to agree with my friend and colleague, Professor Summerlee, that the stains are from asphalt. As this plateau is, in its very nature, highly volcanic, and as asphalt is a substance which one associates with Plutonic forces, I cannot doubt that it exists in the free liquid state, and that the creatures may have come in contact with it. A much more important problem is the question as to the existence of the carnivorous monster which has left its traces in this glade. We know roughly that this plateau is not larger than an average English county. Within this confined space a certain number of creatures, mostly types which have passed away in the world below, have lived together for innumerable years. Now, it is very clear to me that in so long a period one would have expected that the carnivorous creatures, multiplying unchecked, would have exhausted their food supply and have been compelled to either modify their flesh-eating habits or die of hunger. This we see has not been so. We can only imagine, therefore, that the balance of Nature is preserved by some check which limits the numbers of these ferocious creatures. One of the many interesting problems, therefore, which await our solution is to discover what that check may be and how it operates. I venture to trust that we may have some future opportunity for the closer study of the carnivorous dinosaurs.\"\n\n\"And I venture to trust we may not,\" I observed.\n\nThe Professor only raised his great eyebrows, as the schoolmaster meets the irrelevant observation of the naughty boy.\n\n\"Perhaps Professor Summerlee may have an observation to make,\" he said, and the two savants ascended together into some rarefied scientific atmosphere, where the possibilities of a modification of the birth-rate were weighed against the decline of the food supply as a check in the struggle for existence.\n\nThat morning we mapped out a small portion of the plateau, avoiding the swamp of the pterodactyls, and keeping to the east of our brook instead of to the west. In that direction the country was still thickly wooded, with so much undergrowth that our progress was very slow.\n\nI have dwelt up to now upon the terrors of Maple White Land; but there was another side to the subject, for all that morning we wandered among lovely flowers\u2014mostly, as I observed, white or yellow in color, these being, as our professors explained, the primitive flower-shades. In many places the ground was absolutely covered with them, and as we walked ankle-deep on that wonderful yielding carpet, the scent was almost intoxicating in its sweetness and intensity. The homely English bee buzzed everywhere around us. Many of the trees under which we passed had their branches bowed down with fruit, some of which were of familiar sorts, while other varieties were new. By observing which of them were pecked by the birds we avoided all danger of poison and added a delicious variety to our food reserve. In the jungle which we traversed were numerous hard-trodden paths made by the wild beasts, and in the more marshy places we saw a profusion of strange footmarks, including many of the iguanodon. Once in a grove we observed several of these great creatures grazing, and Lord John, with his glass, was able to report that they also were spotted with asphalt, though in a different place to the one which we had examined in the morning. What this phenomenon meant we could not imagine.\n\nWe saw many small animals, such as porcupines, a scaly ant-eater, and a wild pig, piebald in color and with long curved tusks. Once, through a break in the trees, we saw a clear shoulder of green hill some distance away, and across this a large dun-colored animal was traveling at a considerable pace. It passed so swiftly that we were unable to say what it was; but if it were a deer, as was claimed by Lord John, it must have been as large as those monstrous Irish elk which are still dug up from time to time in the bogs of my native land.\n\nEver since the mysterious visit which had been paid to our camp we always returned to it with some misgivings. However, on this occasion we found everything in order.\n\nThat evening we had a grand discussion upon our present situation and future plans, which I must describe at some length, as it led to a new departure by which we were enabled to gain a more complete knowledge of Maple White Land than might have come in many weeks of exploring. It was Summerlee who opened the debate. All day he had been querulous in manner, and now some remark of Lord John's as to what we should do on the morrow brought all his bitterness to a head.\n\n\"What we ought to be doing to-day, to-morrow, and all the time,\" said he, \"is finding some way out of the trap into which we have fallen. You are all turning your brains towards getting into this country. I say that we should be scheming how to get out of it.\"\n\n\"I am surprised, sir,\" boomed Challenger, stroking his majestic beard, \"that any man of science should commit himself to so ignoble a sentiment. You are in a land which offers such an inducement to the ambitious naturalist as none ever has since the world began, and you suggest leaving it before we have acquired more than the most superficial knowledge of it or of its contents. I expected better things of you, Professor Summerlee.\"\n\n\"You must remember,\" said Summerlee, sourly, \"that I have a large class in London who are at present at the mercy of an extremely inefficient locum tenens. This makes my situation different from yours, Professor Challenger, since, so far as I know, you have never been entrusted with any responsible educational work.\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" said Challenger. \"I have felt it to be a sacrilege to divert a brain which is capable of the highest original research to any lesser object. That is why I have sternly set my face against any proffered scholastic appointment.\"\n\n\"For example?\" asked Summerlee, with a sneer; but Lord John hastened to change the conversation.\n\n\"I must say,\" said he, \"that I think it would be a mighty poor thing to go back to London before I know a great deal more of this place than I do at present.\"\n\n\"I could never dare to walk into the back office of my paper and face old McArdle,\" said I. (You will excuse the frankness of this report, will you not, sir?) \"He'd never forgive me for leaving such unexhausted copy behind me. Besides, so far as I can see it is not worth discussing, since we can't get down, even if we wanted.\"\n\n\"Our young friend makes up for many obvious mental lacunae by some measure of primitive common sense,\" remarked Challenger. \"The interests of his deplorable profession are immaterial to us; but, as he observes, we cannot get down in any case, so it is a waste of energy to discuss it.\"\n\n\"It is a waste of energy to do anything else,\" growled Summerlee from behind his pipe. \"Let me remind you that we came here upon a perfectly definite mission, entrusted to us at the meeting of the Zoological Institute in London. That mission was to test the truth of Professor Challenger's statements. Those statements, as I am bound to admit, we are now in a position to endorse. Our ostensible work is therefore done. As to the detail which remains to be worked out upon this plateau, it is so enormous that only a large expedition, with a very special equipment, could hope to cope with it. Should we attempt to do so ourselves, the only possible result must be that we shall never return with the important contribution to science which we have already gained. Professor Challenger has devised means for getting us on to this plateau when it appeared to be inaccessible; I think that we should now call upon him to use the same ingenuity in getting us back to the world from which we came.\"\n\nI confess that as Summerlee stated his view it struck me as altogether reasonable. Even Challenger was affected by the consideration that his enemies would never stand confuted if the confirmation of his statements should never reach those who had doubted them.\n\n\"The problem of the descent is at first sight a formidable one,\" said he, \"and yet I cannot doubt that the intellect can solve it. I am prepared to agree with our colleague that a protracted stay in Maple White Land is at present inadvisable, and that the question of our return will soon have to be faced. I absolutely refuse to leave, however, until we have made at least a superficial examination of this country, and are able to take back with us something in the nature of a chart.\"\n\nProfessor Summerlee gave a snort of impatience.\n\n\"We have spent two long days in exploration,\" said he, \"and we are no wiser as to the actual geography of the place than when we started. It is clear that it is all thickly wooded, and it would take months to penetrate it and to learn the relations of one part to another. If there were some central peak it would be different, but it all slopes downwards, so far as we can see. The farther we go the less likely it is that we will get any general view.\"\n\nIt was at that moment that I had my inspiration. My eyes chanced to light upon the enormous gnarled trunk of the gingko tree which cast its huge branches over us. Surely, if its bole exceeded that of all others, its height must do the same. If the rim of the plateau was indeed the highest point, then why should this mighty tree not prove to be a watchtower which commanded the whole country? Now, ever since I ran wild as a lad in Ireland I have been a bold and skilled tree-climber. My comrades might be my masters on the rocks, but I knew that I would be supreme among those branches. Could I only get my legs on to the lowest of the giant off-shoots, then it would be strange indeed if I could not make my way to the top. My comrades were delighted at my idea.\n\n\"Our young friend,\" said Challenger, bunching up the red apples of his cheeks, \"is capable of acrobatic exertions which would be impossible to a man of a more solid, though possibly of a more commanding, appearance. I applaud his resolution.\"\n\n\"By George, young fellah, you've put your hand on it!\" said Lord John, clapping me on the back. \"How we never came to think of it before I can't imagine! There's not more than an hour of daylight left, but if you take your notebook you may be able to get some rough sketch of the place. If we put these three ammunition cases under the branch, I will soon hoist you on to it.\"\n\nHe stood on the boxes while I faced the trunk, and was gently raising me when Challenger sprang forward and gave me such a thrust with his huge hand that he fairly shot me into the tree. With both arms clasping the branch, I scrambled hard with my feet until I had worked, first my body, and then my knees, onto it. There were three excellent off-shoots, like huge rungs of a ladder, above my head, and a tangle of convenient branches beyond, so that I clambered onwards with such speed that I soon lost sight of the ground and had nothing but foliage beneath me. Now and then I encountered a check, and once I had to shin up a creeper for eight or ten feet, but I made excellent progress, and the booming of Challenger's voice seemed to be a great distance beneath me. The tree was, however, enormous, and, looking upwards, I could see no thinning of the leaves above my head. There was some thick, bush-like clump which seemed to be a parasite upon a branch up which I was swarming. I leaned my head round it in order to see what was beyond, and I nearly fell out of the tree in my surprise and horror at what I saw.\n\nA face was gazing into mine\u2014at the distance of only a foot or two. The creature that owned it had been crouching behind the parasite, and had looked round it at the same instant that I did. It was a human face\u2014or at least it was far more human than any monkey's that I have ever seen. It was long, whitish, and blotched with pimples, the nose flattened, and the lower jaw projecting, with a bristle of coarse whiskers round the chin. The eyes, which were under thick and heavy brows, were bestial and ferocious, and as it opened its mouth to snarl what sounded like a curse at me I observed that it had curved, sharp canine teeth. For an instant I read hatred and menace in the evil eyes. Then, as quick as a flash, came an expression of overpowering fear. There was a crash of broken boughs as it dived wildly down into the tangle of green. I caught a glimpse of a hairy body like that of a reddish pig, and then it was gone amid a swirl of leaves and branches.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" shouted Roxton from below. \"Anything wrong with you?\"\n\n\"Did you see it?\" I cried, with my arms round the branch and all my nerves tingling.\n\n\"We heard a row, as if your foot had slipped. What was it?\"\n\nI was so shocked at the sudden and strange appearance of this ape-man that I hesitated whether I should not climb down again and tell my experience to my companions. But I was already so far up the great tree that it seemed a humiliation to return without having carried out my mission.\n\nAfter a long pause, therefore, to recover my breath and my courage, I continued my ascent. Once I put my weight upon a rotten branch and swung for a few seconds by my hands, but in the main it was all easy climbing. Gradually the leaves thinned around me, and I was aware, from the wind upon my face, that I had topped all the trees of the forest. I was determined, however, not to look about me before I had reached the very highest point, so I scrambled on until I had got so far that the topmost branch was bending beneath my weight. There I settled into a convenient fork, and, balancing myself securely, I found myself looking down at a most wonderful panorama of this strange country in which we found ourselves.\n\nThe sun was just above the western skyline, and the evening was a particularly bright and clear one, so that the whole extent of the plateau was visible beneath me. It was, as seen from this height, of an oval contour, with a breadth of about thirty miles and a width of twenty. Its general shape was that of a shallow funnel, all the sides sloping down to a considerable lake in the center. This lake may have been ten miles in circumference, and lay very green and beautiful in the evening light, with a thick fringe of reeds at its edges, and with its surface broken by several yellow sandbanks, which gleamed golden in the mellow sunshine. A number of long dark objects, which were too large for alligators and too long for canoes, lay upon the edges of these patches of sand. With my glass I could clearly see that they were alive, but what their nature might be I could not imagine.\n\nFrom the side of the plateau on which we were, slopes of woodland, with occasional glades, stretched down for five or six miles to the central lake. I could see at my very feet the glade of the iguanodons, and farther off was a round opening in the trees which marked the swamp of the pterodactyls. On the side facing me, however, the plateau presented a very different aspect. There the basalt cliffs of the outside were reproduced upon the inside, forming an escarpment about two hundred feet high, with a woody slope beneath it. Along the base of these red cliffs, some distance above the ground, I could see a number of dark holes through the glass, which I conjectured to be the mouths of caves. At the opening of one of these something white was shimmering, but I was unable to make out what it was. I sat charting the country until the sun had set and it was so dark that I could no longer distinguish details. Then I climbed down to my companions waiting for me so eagerly at the bottom of the great tree. For once I was the hero of the expedition. Alone I had thought of it, and alone I had done it; and here was the chart which would save us a month's blind groping among unknown dangers. Each of them shook me solemnly by the hand.\n\nBut before they discussed the details of my map I had to tell them of my encounter with the ape-man among the branches.\n\n\"He has been there all the time,\" said I.\n\n\"How do you know that?\" asked Lord John.\n\n\"Because I have never been without that feeling that something malevolent was watching us. I mentioned it to you, Professor Challenger.\"\n\n\"Our young friend certainly said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make him sensitive to such impressions.\"\n\n\"The whole theory of telepathy\u2014\" began Summerlee, filling his pipe.\n\n\"Is too vast to be now discussed,\" said Challenger, with decision. \"Tell me, now,\" he added, with the air of a bishop addressing a Sunday-school, \"did you happen to observe whether the creature could cross its thumb over its palm?\"\n\n\"No, indeed.\"\n\n\"Had it a tail?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Was the foot prehensile?\"\n\n\"I do not think it could have made off so fast among the branches if it could not get a grip with its feet.\"\n\n\"In South America there are, if my memory serves me\u2014you will check the observation, Professor Summerlee\u2014some thirty-six species of monkeys, but the anthropoid ape is unknown. It is clear, however, that he exists in this country, and that he is not the hairy, gorilla-like variety, which is never seen out of Africa or the East.\" (I was inclined to interpolate, as I looked at him, that I had seen his first cousin in Kensington.) \"This is a whiskered and colorless type, the latter characteristic pointing to the fact that he spends his days in arboreal seclusion. The question which we have to face is whether he approaches more closely to the ape or the man. In the latter case, he may well approximate to what the vulgar have called the 'missing link.' The solution of this problem is our immediate duty.\"\n\n\"It is nothing of the sort,\" said Summerlee, abruptly. \"Now that, through the intelligence and activity of Mr. Malone\" (I cannot help quoting the words), \"we have got our chart, our one and only immediate duty is to get ourselves safe and sound out of this awful place.\"\n\n\"The flesh-pots of civilization,\" groaned Challenger.\n\n\"The ink-pots of civilization, sir. It is our task to put on record what we have seen, and to leave the further exploration to others. You all agreed as much before Mr. Malone got us the chart.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Challenger, \"I admit that my mind will be more at ease when I am assured that the result of our expedition has been conveyed to our friends. How we are to get down from this place I have not as yet an idea. I have never yet encountered any problem, however, which my inventive brain was unable to solve, and I promise you that to-morrow I will turn my attention to the question of our descent.\" And so the matter was allowed to rest.\n\nBut that evening, by the light of the fire and of a single candle, the first map of the lost world was elaborated. Every detail which I had roughly noted from my watchtower was drawn out in its relative place. Challenger's pencil hovered over the great blank which marked the lake.\n\n\"What shall we call it?\" he asked.\n\n\"Why should you not take the chance of perpetuating your own name?\" said Summerlee, with his usual touch of acidity.\n\n\"I trust, sir, that my name will have other and more personal claims upon posterity,\" said Challenger, severely. \"Any ignoramus can hand down his worthless memory by imposing it upon a mountain or a river. I need no such monument.\"\n\nSummerlee, with a twisted smile, was about to make some fresh assault when Lord John hastened to intervene.\n\n\"It's up to you, young fellah, to name the lake,\" said he. \"You saw it first, and, by George, if you choose to put 'Lake Malone' on it, no one has a better right.\"\n\n\"By all means. Let our young friend give it a name,\" said Challenger.\n\n\"Then,\" said I, blushing, I dare say, as I said it, \"let it be named Lake Gladys.\"\n\n\"Don't you think the Central Lake would be more descriptive?\" remarked Summerlee.\n\n\"I should prefer Lake Gladys.\"\n\nChallenger looked at me sympathetically, and shook his great head in mock disapproval. \"Boys will be boys,\" said he. \"Lake Gladys let it be.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"It was Dreadful in the Forest\"\n\nI have said\u2014or perhaps I have not said, for my memory plays me sad tricks these days\u2014that I glowed with pride when three such men as my comrades thanked me for having saved, or at least greatly helped, the situation. As the youngster of the party, not merely in years, but in experience, character, knowledge, and all that goes to make a man, I had been overshadowed from the first. And now I was coming into my own. I warmed at the thought. Alas! for the pride which goes before a fall! That little glow of self-satisfaction, that added measure of self-confidence, were to lead me on that very night to the most dreadful experience of my life, ending with a shock which turns my heart sick when I think of it.\n\nIt came about in this way. I had been unduly excited by the adventure of the tree, and sleep seemed to be impossible. Summerlee was on guard, sitting hunched over our small fire, a quaint, angular figure, his rifle across his knees and his pointed, goat-like beard wagging with each weary nod of his head. Lord John lay silent, wrapped in the South American poncho which he wore, while Challenger snored with a roll and rattle which reverberated through the woods. The full moon was shining brightly, and the air was crisply cold. What a night for a walk! And then suddenly came the thought, \"Why not?\" Suppose I stole softly away, suppose I made my way down to the central lake, suppose I was back at breakfast with some record of the place\u2014would I not in that case be thought an even more worthy associate? Then, if Summerlee carried the day and some means of escape were found, we should return to London with first-hand knowledge of the central mystery of the plateau, to which I alone, of all men, would have penetrated. I thought of Gladys, with her \"There are heroisms all round us.\" I seemed to hear her voice as she said it. I thought also of McArdle. What a three column article for the paper! What a foundation for a career! A correspondentship in the next great war might be within my reach. I clutched at a gun\u2014my pockets were full of cartridges\u2014and, parting the thorn bushes at the gate of our zareba, quickly slipped out. My last glance showed me the unconscious Summerlee, most futile of sentinels, still nodding away like a queer mechanical toy in front of the smouldering fire.\n\nI had not gone a hundred yards before I deeply repented my rashness. I may have said somewhere in this chronicle that I am too imaginative to be a really courageous man, but that I have an overpowering fear of seeming afraid. This was the power which now carried me onwards. I simply could not slink back with nothing done. Even if my comrades should not have missed me, and should never know of my weakness, there would still remain some intolerable self-shame in my own soul. And yet I shuddered at the position in which I found myself, and would have given all I possessed at that moment to have been honorably free of the whole business.\n\nIt was dreadful in the forest. The trees grew so thickly and their foliage spread so widely that I could see nothing of the moonlight save that here and there the high branches made a tangled filigree against the starry sky. As the eyes became more used to the obscurity one learned that there were different degrees of darkness among the trees\u2014that some were dimly visible, while between and among them there were coal-black shadowed patches, like the mouths of caves, from which I shrank in horror as I passed. I thought of the despairing yell of the tortured iguanodon\u2014that dreadful cry which had echoed through the woods. I thought, too, of the glimpse I had in the light of Lord John's torch of that bloated, warty, blood-slavering muzzle. Even now I was on its hunting-ground. At any instant it might spring upon me from the shadows\u2014this nameless and horrible monster. I stopped, and, picking a cartridge from my pocket, I opened the breech of my gun. As I touched the lever my heart leaped within me. It was the shot-gun, not the rifle, which I had taken!\n\nAgain the impulse to return swept over me. Here, surely, was a most excellent reason for my failure\u2014one for which no one would think the less of me. But again the foolish pride fought against that very word. I could not\u2014must not\u2014fail. After all, my rifle would probably have been as useless as a shot-gun against such dangers as I might meet. If I were to go back to camp to change my weapon I could hardly expect to enter and to leave again without being seen. In that case there would be explanations, and my attempt would no longer be all my own. After a little hesitation, then, I screwed up my courage and continued upon my way, my useless gun under my arm.\n\nThe darkness of the forest had been alarming, but even worse was the white, still flood of moonlight in the open glade of the iguanodons. Hid among the bushes, I looked out at it. None of the great brutes were in sight. Perhaps the tragedy which had befallen one of them had driven them from their feeding-ground. In the misty, silvery night I could see no sign of any living thing. Taking courage, therefore, I slipped rapidly across it, and among the jungle on the farther side I picked up once again the brook which was my guide. It was a cheery companion, gurgling and chuckling as it ran, like the dear old trout-stream in the West Country where I have fished at night in my boyhood. So long as I followed it down I must come to the lake, and so long as I followed it back I must come to the camp. Often I had to lose sight of it on account of the tangled brushwood, but I was always within earshot of its tinkle and splash.\n\nAs one descended the slope the woods became thinner, and bushes, with occasional high trees, took the place of the forest. I could make good progress, therefore, and I could see without being seen. I passed close to the pterodactyl swamp, and as I did so, with a dry, crisp, leathery rattle of wings, one of these great creatures\u2014it was twenty feet at least from tip to tip\u2014rose up from somewhere near me and soared into the air. As it passed across the face of the moon the light shone clearly through the membranous wings, and it looked like a flying skeleton against the white, tropical radiance. I crouched low among the bushes, for I knew from past experience that with a single cry the creature could bring a hundred of its loathsome mates about my ears. It was not until it had settled again that I dared to steal onwards upon my journey.\n\nThe night had been exceedingly still, but as I advanced I became conscious of a low, rumbling sound, a continuous murmur, somewhere in front of me. This grew louder as I proceeded, until at last it was clearly quite close to me. When I stood still the sound was constant, so that it seemed to come from some stationary cause. It was like a boiling kettle or the bubbling of some great pot. Soon I came upon the source of it, for in the center of a small clearing I found a lake\u2014or a pool, rather, for it was not larger than the basin of the Trafalgar Square fountain\u2014of some black, pitch-like stuff, the surface of which rose and fell in great blisters of bursting gas. The air above it was shimmering with heat, and the ground round was so hot that I could hardly bear to lay my hand on it. It was clear that the great volcanic outburst which had raised this strange plateau so many years ago had not yet entirely spent its forces. Blackened rocks and mounds of lava I had already seen everywhere peeping out from amid the luxuriant vegetation which draped them, but this asphalt pool in the jungle was the first sign that we had of actual existing activity on the slopes of the ancient crater. I had no time to examine it further for I had need to hurry if I were to be back in camp in the morning.\n\nIt was a fearsome walk, and one which will be with me so long as memory holds. In the great moonlight clearings I slunk along among the shadows on the margin. In the jungle I crept forward, stopping with a beating heart whenever I heard, as I often did, the crash of breaking branches as some wild beast went past. Now and then great shadows loomed up for an instant and were gone\u2014great, silent shadows which seemed to prowl upon padded feet. How often I stopped with the intention of returning, and yet every time my pride conquered my fear, and sent me on again until my object should be attained.\n\nAt last (my watch showed that it was one in the morning) I saw the gleam of water amid the openings of the jungle, and ten minutes later I was among the reeds upon the borders of the central lake. I was exceedingly dry, so I lay down and took a long draught of its waters, which were fresh and cold. There was a broad pathway with many tracks upon it at the spot which I had found, so that it was clearly one of the drinking-places of the animals. Close to the water's edge there was a huge isolated block of lava. Up this I climbed, and, lying on the top, I had an excellent view in every direction.\n\nThe first thing which I saw filled me with amazement. When I described the view from the summit of the great tree, I said that on the farther cliff I could see a number of dark spots, which appeared to be the mouths of caves. Now, as I looked up at the same cliffs, I saw discs of light in every direction, ruddy, clearly-defined patches, like the port-holes of a liner in the darkness. For a moment I thought it was the lava-glow from some volcanic action; but this could not be so. Any volcanic action would surely be down in the hollow and not high among the rocks. What, then, was the alternative? It was wonderful, and yet it must surely be. These ruddy spots must be the reflection of fires within the caves\u2014fires which could only be lit by the hand of man. There were human beings, then, upon the plateau. How gloriously my expedition was justified! Here was news indeed for us to bear back with us to London!\n\nFor a long time I lay and watched these red, quivering blotches of light. I suppose they were ten miles off from me, yet even at that distance one could observe how, from time to time, they twinkled or were obscured as someone passed before them. What would I not have given to be able to crawl up to them, to peep in, and to take back some word to my comrades as to the appearance and character of the race who lived in so strange a place! It was out of the question for the moment, and yet surely we could not leave the plateau until we had some definite knowledge upon the point.\n\nLake Gladys\u2014my own lake\u2014lay like a sheet of quicksilver before me, with a reflected moon shining brightly in the center of it. It was shallow, for in many places I saw low sandbanks protruding above the water. Everywhere upon the still surface I could see signs of life, sometimes mere rings and ripples in the water, sometimes the gleam of a great silver-sided fish in the air, sometimes the arched, slate-colored back of some passing monster. Once upon a yellow sandbank I saw a creature like a huge swan, with a clumsy body and a high, flexible neck, shuffling about upon the margin. Presently it plunged in, and for some time I could see the arched neck and darting head undulating over the water. Then it dived, and I saw it no more.\n\nMy attention was soon drawn away from these distant sights and brought back to what was going on at my very feet. Two creatures like large armadillos had come down to the drinking-place, and were squatting at the edge of the water, their long, flexible tongues like red ribbons shooting in and out as they lapped. A huge deer, with branching horns, a magnificent creature which carried itself like a king, came down with its doe and two fawns and drank beside the armadillos. No such deer exist anywhere else upon earth, for the moose or elks which I have seen would hardly have reached its shoulders. Presently it gave a warning snort, and was off with its family among the reeds, while the armadillos also scuttled for shelter. A new-comer, a most monstrous animal, was coming down the path.\n\nFor a moment I wondered where I could have seen that ungainly shape, that arched back with triangular fringes along it, that strange bird-like head held close to the ground. Then it came back, to me. It was the stegosaurus\u2014the very creature which Maple White had preserved in his sketch-book, and which had been the first object which arrested the attention of Challenger! There he was\u2014perhaps the very specimen which the American artist had encountered. The ground shook beneath his tremendous weight, and his gulpings of water resounded through the still night. For five minutes he was so close to my rock that by stretching out my hand I could have touched the hideous waving hackles upon his back. Then he lumbered away and was lost among the boulders.\n\nLooking at my watch, I saw that it was half-past two o'clock, and high time, therefore, that I started upon my homeward journey. There was no difficulty about the direction in which I should return for all along I had kept the little brook upon my left, and it opened into the central lake within a stone's-throw of the boulder upon which I had been lying. I set off, therefore, in high spirits, for I felt that I had done good work and was bringing back a fine budget of news for my companions. Foremost of all, of course, were the sight of the fiery caves and the certainty that some troglodytic race inhabited them. But besides that I could speak from experience of the central lake. I could testify that it was full of strange creatures, and I had seen several land forms of primeval life which we had not before encountered. I reflected as I walked that few men in the world could have spent a stranger night or added more to human knowledge in the course of it.\n\nI was plodding up the slope, turning these thoughts over in my mind, and had reached a point which may have been half-way to home, when my mind was brought back to my own position by a strange noise behind me. It was something between a snore and a growl, low, deep, and exceedingly menacing. Some strange creature was evidently near me, but nothing could be seen, so I hastened more rapidly upon my way. I had traversed half a mile or so when suddenly the sound was repeated, still behind me, but louder and more menacing than before. My heart stood still within me as it flashed across me that the beast, whatever it was, must surely be after ME. My skin grew cold and my hair rose at the thought. That these monsters should tear each other to pieces was a part of the strange struggle for existence, but that they should turn upon modern man, that they should deliberately track and hunt down the predominant human, was a staggering and fearsome thought. I remembered again the blood-beslobbered face which we had seen in the glare of Lord John's torch, like some horrible vision from the deepest circle of Dante's hell. With my knees shaking beneath me, I stood and glared with starting eyes down the moonlit path which lay behind me. All was quiet as in a dream landscape. Silver clearings and the black patches of the bushes\u2014nothing else could I see. Then from out of the silence, imminent and threatening, there came once more that low, throaty croaking, far louder and closer than before. There could no longer be a doubt. Something was on my trail, and was closing in upon me every minute.\n\nI stood like a man paralyzed, still staring at the ground which I had traversed. Then suddenly I saw it. There was movement among the bushes at the far end of the clearing which I had just traversed. A great dark shadow disengaged itself and hopped out into the clear moonlight. I say \"hopped\" advisedly, for the beast moved like a kangaroo, springing along in an erect position upon its powerful hind legs, while its front ones were held bent in front of it. It was of enormous size and power, like an erect elephant, but its movements, in spite of its bulk, were exceedingly alert. For a moment, as I saw its shape, I hoped that it was an iguanodon, which I knew to be harmless, but, ignorant as I was, I soon saw that this was a very different creature. Instead of the gentle, deer-shaped head of the great three-toed leaf-eater, this beast had a broad, squat, toad-like face like that which had alarmed us in our camp. His ferocious cry and the horrible energy of his pursuit both assured me that this was surely one of the great flesh-eating dinosaurs, the most terrible beasts which have ever walked this earth. As the huge brute loped along it dropped forward upon its forepaws and brought its nose to the ground every twenty yards or so. It was smelling out my trail. Sometimes, for an instant, it was at fault. Then it would catch it up again and come bounding swiftly along the path I had taken.\n\nEven now when I think of that nightmare the sweat breaks out upon my brow. What could I do? My useless fowling-piece was in my hand. What help could I get from that? I looked desperately round for some rock or tree, but I was in a bushy jungle with nothing higher than a sapling within sight, while I knew that the creature behind me could tear down an ordinary tree as though it were a reed. My only possible chance lay in flight. I could not move swiftly over the rough, broken ground, but as I looked round me in despair I saw a well-marked, hard-beaten path which ran across in front of me. We had seen several of the sort, the runs of various wild beasts, during our expeditions. Along this I could perhaps hold my own, for I was a fast runner, and in excellent condition. Flinging away my useless gun, I set myself to do such a half-mile as I have never done before or since. My limbs ached, my chest heaved, I felt that my throat would burst for want of air, and yet with that horror behind me I ran and I ran and ran. At last I paused, hardly able to move. For a moment I thought that I had thrown him off. The path lay still behind me. And then suddenly, with a crashing and a rending, a thudding of giant feet and a panting of monster lungs the beast was upon me once more. He was at my very heels. I was lost.\n\nMadman that I was to linger so long before I fled! Up to then he had hunted by scent, and his movement was slow. But he had actually seen me as I started to run. From then onwards he had hunted by sight, for the path showed him where I had gone. Now, as he came round the curve, he was springing in great bounds. The moonlight shone upon his huge projecting eyes, the row of enormous teeth in his open mouth, and the gleaming fringe of claws upon his short, powerful forearms. With a scream of terror I turned and rushed wildly down the path. Behind me the thick, gasping breathing of the creature sounded louder and louder. His heavy footfall was beside me. Every instant I expected to feel his grip upon my back. And then suddenly there came a crash\u2014I was falling through space, and everything beyond was darkness and rest.\n\nAs I emerged from my unconsciousness\u2014which could not, I think, have lasted more than a few minutes\u2014I was aware of a most dreadful and penetrating smell. Putting out my hand in the darkness I came upon something which felt like a huge lump of meat, while my other hand closed upon a large bone. Up above me there was a circle of starlit sky, which showed me that I was lying at the bottom of a deep pit. Slowly I staggered to my feet and felt myself all over. I was stiff and sore from head to foot, but there was no limb which would not move, no joint which would not bend. As the circumstances of my fall came back into my confused brain, I looked up in terror, expecting to see that dreadful head silhouetted against the paling sky. There was no sign of the monster, however, nor could I hear any sound from above. I began to walk slowly round, therefore, feeling in every direction to find out what this strange place could be into which I had been so opportunely precipitated.\n\nIt was, as I have said, a pit, with sharply-sloping walls and a level bottom about twenty feet across. This bottom was littered with great gobbets of flesh, most of which was in the last state of putridity. The atmosphere was poisonous and horrible. After tripping and stumbling over these lumps of decay, I came suddenly against something hard, and I found that an upright post was firmly fixed in the center of the hollow. It was so high that I could not reach the top of it with my hand, and it appeared to be covered with grease.\n\nSuddenly I remembered that I had a tin box of wax-vestas in my pocket. Striking one of them, I was able at last to form some opinion of this place into which I had fallen. There could be no question as to its nature. It was a trap\u2014made by the hand of man. The post in the center, some nine feet long, was sharpened at the upper end, and was black with the stale blood of the creatures who had been impaled upon it. The remains scattered about were fragments of the victims, which had been cut away in order to clear the stake for the next who might blunder in. I remembered that Challenger had declared that man could not exist upon the plateau, since with his feeble weapons he could not hold his own against the monsters who roamed over it. But now it was clear enough how it could be done. In their narrow-mouthed caves the natives, whoever they might be, had refuges into which the huge saurians could not penetrate, while with their developed brains they were capable of setting such traps, covered with branches, across the paths which marked the run of the animals as would destroy them in spite of all their strength and activity. Man was always the master.\n\nThe sloping wall of the pit was not difficult for an active man to climb, but I hesitated long before I trusted myself within reach of the dreadful creature which had so nearly destroyed me. How did I know that he was not lurking in the nearest clump of bushes, waiting for my reappearance? I took heart, however, as I recalled a conversation between Challenger and Summerlee upon the habits of the great saurians. Both were agreed that the monsters were practically brainless, that there was no room for reason in their tiny cranial cavities, and that if they have disappeared from the rest of the world it was assuredly on account of their own stupidity, which made it impossible for them to adapt themselves to changing conditions.\n\nTo lie in wait for me now would mean that the creature had appreciated what had happened to me, and this in turn would argue some power connecting cause and effect. Surely it was more likely that a brainless creature, acting solely by vague predatory instinct, would give up the chase when I disappeared, and, after a pause of astonishment, would wander away in search of some other prey? I clambered to the edge of the pit and looked over. The stars were fading, the sky was whitening, and the cold wind of morning blew pleasantly upon my face. I could see or hear nothing of my enemy. Slowly I climbed out and sat for a while upon the ground, ready to spring back into my refuge if any danger should appear. Then, reassured by the absolute stillness and by the growing light, I took my courage in both hands and stole back along the path which I had come. Some distance down it I picked up my gun, and shortly afterwards struck the brook which was my guide. So, with many a frightened backward glance, I made for home.\n\nAnd suddenly there came something to remind me of my absent companions. In the clear, still morning air there sounded far away the sharp, hard note of a single rifle-shot. I paused and listened, but there was nothing more. For a moment I was shocked at the thought that some sudden danger might have befallen them. But then a simpler and more natural explanation came to my mind. It was now broad daylight. No doubt my absence had been noticed. They had imagined, that I was lost in the woods, and had fired this shot to guide me home. It is true that we had made a strict resolution against firing, but if it seemed to them that I might be in danger they would not hesitate. It was for me now to hurry on as fast as possible, and so to reassure them.\n\nI was weary and spent, so my progress was not so fast as I wished; but at last I came into regions which I knew. There was the swamp of the pterodactyls upon my left; there in front of me was the glade of the iguanodons. Now I was in the last belt of trees which separated me from Fort Challenger. I raised my voice in a cheery shout to allay their fears. No answering greeting came back to me. My heart sank at that ominous stillness. I quickened my pace into a run. The zareba rose before me, even as I had left it, but the gate was open. I rushed in. In the cold, morning light it was a fearful sight which met my eyes. Our effects were scattered in wild confusion over the ground; my comrades had disappeared, and close to the smouldering ashes of our fire the grass was stained crimson with a hideous pool of blood.\n\nI was so stunned by this sudden shock that for a time I must have nearly lost my reason. I have a vague recollection, as one remembers a bad dream, of rushing about through the woods all round the empty camp, calling wildly for my companions. No answer came back from the silent shadows. The horrible thought that I might never see them again, that I might find myself abandoned all alone in that dreadful place, with no possible way of descending into the world below, that I might live and die in that nightmare country, drove me to desperation. I could have torn my hair and beaten my head in my despair. Only now did I realize how I had learned to lean upon my companions, upon the serene self-confidence of Challenger, and upon the masterful, humorous coolness of Lord John Roxton. Without them I was like a child in the dark, helpless and powerless. I did not know which way to turn or what I should do first.\n\nAfter a period, during which I sat in bewilderment, I set myself to try and discover what sudden misfortune could have befallen my companions. The whole disordered appearance of the camp showed that there had been some sort of attack, and the rifle-shot no doubt marked the time when it had occurred. That there should have been only one shot showed that it had been all over in an instant. The rifles still lay upon the ground, and one of them\u2014Lord John's\u2014had the empty cartridge in the breech. The blankets of Challenger and of Summerlee beside the fire suggested that they had been asleep at the time. The cases of ammunition and of food were scattered about in a wild litter, together with our unfortunate cameras and plate-carriers, but none of them were missing. On the other hand, all the exposed provisions\u2014and I remembered that there were a considerable quantity of them\u2014were gone. They were animals, then, and not natives, who had made the inroad, for surely the latter would have left nothing behind.\n\nBut if animals, or some single terrible animal, then what had become of my comrades? A ferocious beast would surely have destroyed them and left their remains. It is true that there was that one hideous pool of blood, which told of violence. Such a monster as had pursued me during the night could have carried away a victim as easily as a cat would a mouse. In that case the others would have followed in pursuit. But then they would assuredly have taken their rifles with them. The more I tried to think it out with my confused and weary brain the less could I find any plausible explanation. I searched round in the forest, but could see no tracks which could help me to a conclusion. Once I lost myself, and it was only by good luck, and after an hour of wandering, that I found the camp once more.\n\nSuddenly a thought came to me and brought some little comfort to my heart. I was not absolutely alone in the world. Down at the bottom of the cliff, and within call of me, was waiting the faithful Zambo. I went to the edge of the plateau and looked over. Sure enough, he was squatting among his blankets beside his fire in his little camp. But, to my amazement, a second man was seated in front of him. For an instant my heart leaped for joy, as I thought that one of my comrades had made his way safely down. But a second glance dispelled the hope. The rising sun shone red upon the man's skin. He was an Indian. I shouted loudly and waved my handkerchief. Presently Zambo looked up, waved his hand, and turned to ascend the pinnacle. In a short time he was standing close to me and listening with deep distress to the story which I told him.\n\n\"Devil got them for sure, Massa Malone,\" said he. \"You got into the devil's country, sah, and he take you all to himself. You take advice, Massa Malone, and come down quick, else he get you as well.\"\n\n\"How can I come down, Zambo?\"\n\n\"You get creepers from trees, Massa Malone. Throw them over here. I make fast to this stump, and so you have bridge.\"\n\n\"We have thought of that. There are no creepers here which could bear us.\"\n\n\"Send for ropes, Massa Malone.\"\n\n\"Who can I send, and where?\"\n\n\"Send to Indian villages, sah. Plenty hide rope in Indian village. Indian down below; send him.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\n\n\"One of our Indians. Other ones beat him and take away his pay. He come back to us. Ready now to take letter, bring rope,\u2014anything.\"\n\nTo take a letter! Why not? Perhaps he might bring help; but in any case he would ensure that our lives were not spent for nothing, and that news of all that we had won for Science should reach our friends at home. I had two completed letters already waiting. I would spend the day in writing a third, which would bring my experiences absolutely up to date. The Indian could bear this back to the world. I ordered Zambo, therefore, to come again in the evening, and I spent my miserable and lonely day in recording my own adventures of the night before. I also drew up a note, to be given to any white merchant or captain of a steam-boat whom the Indian could find, imploring them to see that ropes were sent to us, since our lives must depend upon it. These documents I threw to Zambo in the evening, and also my purse, which contained three English sovereigns. These were to be given to the Indian, and he was promised twice as much if he returned with the ropes.\n\nSo now you will understand, my dear Mr. McArdle, how this communication reaches you, and you will also know the truth, in case you never hear again from your unfortunate correspondent. To-night I am too weary and too depressed to make my plans. To-morrow I must think out some way by which I shall keep in touch with this camp, and yet search round for any traces of my unhappy friends." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "\"A Sight which I shall Never Forget\"\n\nJust as the sun was setting upon that melancholy night I saw the lonely figure of the Indian upon the vast plain beneath me, and I watched him, our one faint hope of salvation, until he disappeared in the rising mists of evening which lay, rose-tinted from the setting sun, between the far-off river and me.\n\nIt was quite dark when I at last turned back to our stricken camp, and my last vision as I went was the red gleam of Zambo's fire, the one point of light in the wide world below, as was his faithful presence in my own shadowed soul. And yet I felt happier than I had done since this crushing blow had fallen upon me, for it was good to think that the world should know what we had done, so that at the worst our names should not perish with our bodies, but should go down to posterity associated with the result of our labors.\n\nIt was an awesome thing to sleep in that ill-fated camp; and yet it was even more unnerving to do so in the jungle. One or the other it must be. Prudence, on the one hand, warned me that I should remain on guard, but exhausted Nature, on the other, declared that I should do nothing of the kind. I climbed up on to a limb of the great gingko tree, but there was no secure perch on its rounded surface, and I should certainly have fallen off and broken my neck the moment I began to doze. I got down, therefore, and pondered over what I should do. Finally, I closed the door of the zareba, lit three separate fires in a triangle, and having eaten a hearty supper dropped off into a profound sleep, from which I had a strange and most welcome awakening. In the early morning, just as day was breaking, a hand was laid upon my arm, and starting up, with all my nerves in a tingle and my hand feeling for a rifle, I gave a cry of joy as in the cold gray light I saw Lord John Roxton kneeling beside me.\n\nIt was he\u2014and yet it was not he. I had left him calm in his bearing, correct in his person, prim in his dress. Now he was pale and wild-eyed, gasping as he breathed like one who has run far and fast. His gaunt face was scratched and bloody, his clothes were hanging in rags, and his hat was gone. I stared in amazement, but he gave me no chance for questions. He was grabbing at our stores all the time he spoke.\n\n\"Quick, young fellah! Quick!\" he cried. \"Every moment counts. Get the rifles, both of them. I have the other two. Now, all the cartridges you can gather. Fill up your pockets. Now, some food. Half a dozen tins will do. That's all right! Don't wait to talk or think. Get a move on, or we are done!\"\n\nStill half-awake, and unable to imagine what it all might mean, I found myself hurrying madly after him through the wood, a rifle under each arm and a pile of various stores in my hands. He dodged in and out through the thickest of the scrub until he came to a dense clump of brushwood. Into this he rushed, regardless of thorns, and threw himself into the heart of it, pulling me down by his side.\n\n\"There!\" he panted. \"I think we are safe here. They'll make for the camp as sure as fate. It will be their first idea. But this should puzzle 'em.\"\n\n\"What is it all?\" I asked, when I had got my breath. \"Where are the professors? And who is it that is after us?\"\n\n\"The ape-men,\" he cried. \"My God, what brutes! Don't raise your voice, for they have long ears\u2014sharp eyes, too, but no power of scent, so far as I could judge, so I don't think they can sniff us out. Where have you been, young fellah? You were well out of it.\"\n\nIn a few sentences I whispered what I had done.\n\n\"Pretty bad,\" said he, when he had heard of the dinosaur and the pit. \"It isn't quite the place for a rest cure. What? But I had no idea what its possibilities were until those devils got hold of us. The man-eatin' Papuans had me once, but they are Chesterfields compared to this crowd.\"\n\n\"How did it happen?\" I asked.\n\n\"It was in the early mornin'. Our learned friends were just stirrin'. Hadn't even begun to argue yet. Suddenly it rained apes. They came down as thick as apples out of a tree. They had been assemblin' in the dark, I suppose, until that great tree over our heads was heavy with them. I shot one of them through the belly, but before we knew where we were they had us spread-eagled on our backs. I call them apes, but they carried sticks and stones in their hands and jabbered talk to each other, and ended up by tyin' our hands with creepers, so they are ahead of any beast that I have seen in my wanderin's. Ape-men\u2014that's what they are\u2014Missin' Links, and I wish they had stayed missin'. They carried off their wounded comrade\u2014he was bleedin' like a pig\u2014and then they sat around us, and if ever I saw frozen murder it was in their faces. They were big fellows, as big as a man and a deal stronger. Curious glassy gray eyes they have, under red tufts, and they just sat and gloated and gloated. Challenger is no chicken, but even he was cowed. He managed to struggle to his feet, and yelled out at them to have done with it and get it over. I think he had gone a bit off his head at the suddenness of it, for he raged and cursed at them like a lunatic. If they had been a row of his favorite Pressmen he could not have slanged them worse.\"\n\n\"Well, what did they do?\" I was enthralled by the strange story which my companion was whispering into my ear, while all the time his keen eyes were shooting in every direction and his hand grasping his cocked rifle.\n\n\"I thought it was the end of us, but instead of that it started them on a new line. They all jabbered and chattered together. Then one of them stood out beside Challenger. You'll smile, young fellah, but 'pon my word they might have been kinsmen. I couldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. This old ape-man\u2014he was their chief\u2014was a sort of red Challenger, with every one of our friend's beauty points, only just a trifle more so. He had the short body, the big shoulders, the round chest, no neck, a great ruddy frill of a beard, the tufted eyebrows, the 'What do you want, damn you!' look about the eyes, and the whole catalogue. When the ape-man stood by Challenger and put his paw on his shoulder, the thing was complete. Summerlee was a bit hysterical, and he laughed till he cried. The ape-men laughed too\u2014or at least they put up the devil of a cacklin'\u2014and they set to work to drag us off through the forest. They wouldn't touch the guns and things\u2014thought them dangerous, I expect\u2014but they carried away all our loose food. Summerlee and I got some rough handlin' on the way\u2014there's my skin and my clothes to prove it\u2014for they took us a bee-line through the brambles, and their own hides are like leather. But Challenger was all right. Four of them carried him shoulder high, and he went like a Roman emperor. What's that?\"\n\nIt was a strange clicking noise in the distance not unlike castanets.\n\n\"There they go!\" said my companion, slipping cartridges into the second double barrelled \"Express.\" \"Load them all up, young fellah my lad, for we're not going to be taken alive, and don't you think it! That's the row they make when they are excited. By George! they'll have something to excite them if they put us up. The 'Last Stand of the Grays' won't be in it. 'With their rifles grasped in their stiffened hands, mid a ring of the dead and dyin',' as some fathead sings. Can you hear them now?\"\n\n\"Very far away.\"\n\n\"That little lot will do no good, but I expect their search parties are all over the wood. Well, I was telling you my tale of woe. They got us soon to this town of theirs\u2014about a thousand huts of branches and leaves in a great grove of trees near the edge of the cliff. It's three or four miles from here. The filthy beasts fingered me all over, and I feel as if I should never be clean again. They tied us up\u2014the fellow who handled me could tie like a bosun\u2014and there we lay with our toes up, beneath a tree, while a great brute stood guard over us with a club in his hand. When I say 'we' I mean Summerlee and myself. Old Challenger was up a tree, eatin' pines and havin' the time of his life. I'm bound to say that he managed to get some fruit to us, and with his own hands he loosened our bonds. If you'd seen him sitting up in that tree hob-nobbin' with his twin brother\u2014and singin' in that rollin' bass of his, 'Ring out, wild bells,' cause music of any kind seemed to put 'em in a good humor, you'd have smiled; but we weren't in much mood for laughin', as you can guess. They were inclined, within limits, to let him do what he liked, but they drew the line pretty sharply at us. It was a mighty consolation to us all to know that you were runnin' loose and had the archives in your keepin'.\n\n\"Well, now, young fellah, I'll tell you what will surprise you. You say you saw signs of men, and fires, traps, and the like. Well, we have seen the natives themselves. Poor devils they were, down-faced little chaps, and had enough to make them so. It seems that the humans hold one side of this plateau\u2014over yonder, where you saw the caves\u2014and the ape-men hold this side, and there is bloody war between them all the time. That's the situation, so far as I could follow it. Well, yesterday the ape-men got hold of a dozen of the humans and brought them in as prisoners. You never heard such a jabberin' and shriekin' in your life. The men were little red fellows, and had been bitten and clawed so that they could hardly walk. The ape-men put two of them to death there and then\u2014fairly pulled the arm off one of them\u2014it was perfectly beastly. Plucky little chaps they are, and hardly gave a squeak. But it turned us absolutely sick. Summerlee fainted, and even Challenger had as much as he could stand. I think they have cleared, don't you?\"\n\nWe listened intently, but nothing save the calling of the birds broke the deep peace of the forest. Lord Roxton went on with his story.\n\n\"I think you have had the escape of your life, young fellah my lad. It was catchin' those Indians that put you clean out of their heads, else they would have been back to the camp for you as sure as fate and gathered you in. Of course, as you said, they have been watchin' us from the beginnin' out of that tree, and they knew perfectly well that we were one short. However, they could think only of this new haul; so it was I, and not a bunch of apes, that dropped in on you in the morning. Well, we had a horrid business afterwards. My God! what a nightmare the whole thing is! You remember the great bristle of sharp canes down below where we found the skeleton of the American? Well, that is just under ape-town, and that's the jumpin'-off place of their prisoners. I expect there's heaps of skeletons there, if we looked for 'em. They have a sort of clear parade-ground on the top, and they make a proper ceremony about it. One by one the poor devils have to jump, and the game is to see whether they are merely dashed to pieces or whether they get skewered on the canes. They took us out to see it, and the whole tribe lined up on the edge. Four of the Indians jumped, and the canes went through 'em like knittin' needles through a pat of butter. No wonder we found that poor Yankee's skeleton with the canes growin' between his ribs. It was horrible\u2014but it was doocedly interestin' too. We were all fascinated to see them take the dive, even when we thought it would be our turn next on the spring-board.\n\n\"Well, it wasn't. They kept six of the Indians up for to-day\u2014that's how I understood it\u2014but I fancy we were to be the star performers in the show. Challenger might get off, but Summerlee and I were in the bill. Their language is more than half signs, and it was not hard to follow them. So I thought it was time we made a break for it. I had been plottin' it out a bit, and had one or two things clear in my mind. It was all on me, for Summerlee was useless and Challenger not much better. The only time they got together they got slangin' because they couldn't agree upon the scientific classification of these red-headed devils that had got hold of us. One said it was the dryopithecus of Java, the other said it was pithecanthropus. Madness, I call it\u2014Loonies, both. But, as I say, I had thought out one or two points that were helpful. One was that these brutes could not run as fast as a man in the open. They have short, bandy legs, you see, and heavy bodies. Even Challenger could give a few yards in a hundred to the best of them, and you or I would be a perfect Shrubb. Another point was that they knew nothin' about guns. I don't believe they ever understood how the fellow I shot came by his hurt. If we could get at our guns there was no sayin' what we could do.\n\n\"So I broke away early this mornin', gave my guard a kick in the tummy that laid him out, and sprinted for the camp. There I got you and the guns, and here we are.\"\n\n\"But the professors!\" I cried, in consternation.\n\n\"Well, we must just go back and fetch 'em. I couldn't bring 'em with me. Challenger was up the tree, and Summerlee was not fit for the effort. The only chance was to get the guns and try a rescue. Of course they may scupper them at once in revenge. I don't think they would touch Challenger, but I wouldn't answer for Summerlee. But they would have had him in any case. Of that I am certain. So I haven't made matters any worse by boltin'. But we are honor bound to go back and have them out or see it through with them. So you can make up your soul, young fellah my lad, for it will be one way or the other before evenin'.\"\n\nI have tried to imitate here Lord Roxton's jerky talk, his short, strong sentences, the half-humorous, half-reckless tone that ran through it all. But he was a born leader. As danger thickened his jaunty manner would increase, his speech become more racy, his cold eyes glitter into ardent life, and his Don Quixote moustache bristle with joyous excitement. His love of danger, his intense appreciation of the drama of an adventure\u2014all the more intense for being held tightly in\u2014his consistent view that every peril in life is a form of sport, a fierce game betwixt you and Fate, with Death as a forfeit, made him a wonderful companion at such hours. If it were not for our fears as to the fate of our companions, it would have been a positive joy to throw myself with such a man into such an affair. We were rising from our brushwood hiding-place when suddenly I felt his grip upon my arm.\n\n\"By George!\" he whispered, \"here they come!\"\n\nFrom where we lay we could look down a brown aisle, arched with green, formed by the trunks and branches. Along this a party of the ape-men were passing. They went in single file, with bent legs and rounded backs, their hands occasionally touching the ground, their heads turning to left and right as they trotted along. Their crouching gait took away from their height, but I should put them at five feet or so, with long arms and enormous chests. Many of them carried sticks, and at the distance they looked like a line of very hairy and deformed human beings. For a moment I caught this clear glimpse of them. Then they were lost among the bushes.\n\n\"Not this time,\" said Lord John, who had caught up his rifle. \"Our best chance is to lie quiet until they have given up the search. Then we shall see whether we can't get back to their town and hit 'em where it hurts most. Give 'em an hour and we'll march.\"\n\nWe filled in the time by opening one of our food tins and making sure of our breakfast. Lord Roxton had had nothing but some fruit since the morning before and ate like a starving man. Then, at last, our pockets bulging with cartridges and a rifle in each hand, we started off upon our mission of rescue. Before leaving it we carefully marked our little hiding-place among the brushwood and its bearing to Fort Challenger, that we might find it again if we needed it. We slunk through the bushes in silence until we came to the very edge of the cliff, close to the old camp. There we halted, and Lord John gave me some idea of his plans.\n\n\"So long as we are among the thick trees these swine are our masters,\" said he. \"They can see us and we cannot see them. But in the open it is different. There we can move faster than they. So we must stick to the open all we can. The edge of the plateau has fewer large trees than further inland. So that's our line of advance. Go slowly, keep your eyes open and your rifle ready. Above all, never let them get you prisoner while there is a cartridge left\u2014that's my last word to you, young fellah.\"\n\nWhen we reached the edge of the cliff I looked over and saw our good old black Zambo sitting smoking on a rock below us. I would have given a great deal to have hailed him and told him how we were placed, but it was too dangerous, lest we should be heard. The woods seemed to be full of the ape-men; again and again we heard their curious clicking chatter. At such times we plunged into the nearest clump of bushes and lay still until the sound had passed away. Our advance, therefore, was very slow, and two hours at least must have passed before I saw by Lord John's cautious movements that we must be close to our destination. He motioned to me to lie still, and he crawled forward himself. In a minute he was back again, his face quivering with eagerness.\n\n\"Come!\" said he. \"Come quick! I hope to the Lord we are not too late already!\"\n\nI found myself shaking with nervous excitement as I scrambled forward and lay down beside him, looking out through the bushes at a clearing which stretched before us.\n\nIt was a sight which I shall never forget until my dying day\u2014so weird, so impossible, that I do not know how I am to make you realize it, or how in a few years I shall bring myself to believe in it if I live to sit once more on a lounge in the Savage Club and look out on the drab solidity of the Embankment. I know that it will seem then to be some wild nightmare, some delirium of fever. Yet I will set it down now, while it is still fresh in my memory, and one at least, the man who lay in the damp grasses by my side, will know if I have lied.\n\nA wide, open space lay before us\u2014some hundreds of yards across\u2014all green turf and low bracken growing to the very edge of the cliff. Round this clearing there was a semicircle of trees with curious huts built of foliage piled one above the other among the branches. A rookery, with every nest a little house, would best convey the idea. The openings of these huts and the branches of the trees were thronged with a dense mob of ape-people, whom from their size I took to be the females and infants of the tribe. They formed the background of the picture, and were all looking out with eager interest at the same scene which fascinated and bewildered us.\n\nIn the open, and near the edge of the cliff, there had assembled a crowd of some hundred of these shaggy, red-haired creatures, many of them of immense size, and all of them horrible to look upon. There was a certain discipline among them, for none of them attempted to break the line which had been formed. In front there stood a small group of Indians\u2014little, clean-limbed, red fellows, whose skins glowed like polished bronze in the strong sunlight. A tall, thin white man was standing beside them, his head bowed, his arms folded, his whole attitude expressive of his horror and dejection. There was no mistaking the angular form of Professor Summerlee.\n\nIn front of and around this dejected group of prisoners were several ape-men, who watched them closely and made all escape impossible. Then, right out from all the others and close to the edge of the cliff, were two figures, so strange, and under other circumstances so ludicrous, that they absorbed my attention. The one was our comrade, Professor Challenger. The remains of his coat still hung in strips from his shoulders, but his shirt had been all torn out, and his great beard merged itself in the black tangle which covered his mighty chest. He had lost his hat, and his hair, which had grown long in our wanderings, was flying in wild disorder. A single day seemed to have changed him from the highest product of modern civilization to the most desperate savage in South America. Beside him stood his master, the king of the ape-men. In all things he was, as Lord John had said, the very image of our Professor, save that his coloring was red instead of black. The same short, broad figure, the same heavy shoulders, the same forward hang of the arms, the same bristling beard merging itself in the hairy chest. Only above the eyebrows, where the sloping forehead and low, curved skull of the ape-man were in sharp contrast to the broad brow and magnificent cranium of the European, could one see any marked difference. At every other point the king was an absurd parody of the Professor.\n\nAll this, which takes me so long to describe, impressed itself upon me in a few seconds. Then we had very different things to think of, for an active drama was in progress. Two of the ape-men had seized one of the Indians out of the group and dragged him forward to the edge of the cliff. The king raised his hand as a signal. They caught the man by his leg and arm, and swung him three times backwards and forwards with tremendous violence. Then, with a frightful heave they shot the poor wretch over the precipice. With such force did they throw him that he curved high in the air before beginning to drop. As he vanished from sight, the whole assembly, except the guards, rushed forward to the edge of the precipice, and there was a long pause of absolute silence, broken by a mad yell of delight. They sprang about, tossing their long, hairy arms in the air and howling with exultation. Then they fell back from the edge, formed themselves again into line, and waited for the next victim.\n\nThis time it was Summerlee. Two of his guards caught him by the wrists and pulled him brutally to the front. His thin figure and long limbs struggled and fluttered like a chicken being dragged from a coop. Challenger had turned to the king and waved his hands frantically before him. He was begging, pleading, imploring for his comrade's life. The ape-man pushed him roughly aside and shook his head. It was the last conscious movement he was to make upon earth. Lord John's rifle cracked, and the king sank down, a tangled red sprawling thing, upon the ground.\n\n\"Shoot into the thick of them! Shoot! sonny, shoot!\" cried my companion.\n\nThere are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man. I am tenderhearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. Yet the blood lust was on me now. I found myself on my feet emptying one magazine, then the other, clicking open the breech to re-load, snapping it to again, while cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter as I did so. With our four guns the two of us made a horrible havoc. Both the guards who held Summerlee were down, and he was staggering about like a drunken man in his amazement, unable to realize that he was a free man. The dense mob of ape-men ran about in bewilderment, marveling whence this storm of death was coming or what it might mean. They waved, gesticulated, screamed, and tripped up over those who had fallen. Then, with a sudden impulse, they all rushed in a howling crowd to the trees for shelter, leaving the ground behind them spotted with their stricken comrades. The prisoners were left for the moment standing alone in the middle of the clearing.\n\nChallenger's quick brain had grasped the situation. He seized the bewildered Summerlee by the arm, and they both ran towards us. Two of their guards bounded after them and fell to two bullets from Lord John. We ran forward into the open to meet our friends, and pressed a loaded rifle into the hands of each. But Summerlee was at the end of his strength. He could hardly totter. Already the ape-men were recovering from their panic. They were coming through the brushwood and threatening to cut us off. Challenger and I ran Summerlee along, one at each of his elbows, while Lord John covered our retreat, firing again and again as savage heads snarled at us out of the bushes. For a mile or more the chattering brutes were at our very heels. Then the pursuit slackened, for they learned our power and would no longer face that unerring rifle. When we had at last reached the camp, we looked back and found ourselves alone.\n\nSo it seemed to us; and yet we were mistaken. We had hardly closed the thornbush door of our zareba, clasped each other's hands, and thrown ourselves panting upon the ground beside our spring, when we heard a patter of feet and then a gentle, plaintive crying from outside our entrance. Lord Roxton rushed forward, rifle in hand, and threw it open. There, prostrate upon their faces, lay the little red figures of the four surviving Indians, trembling with fear of us and yet imploring our protection. With an expressive sweep of his hands one of them pointed to the woods around them, and indicated that they were full of danger. Then, darting forward, he threw his arms round Lord John's legs, and rested his face upon them.\n\n\"By George!\" cried our peer, pulling at his moustache in great perplexity, \"I say\u2014what the deuce are we to do with these people? Get up, little chappie, and take your face off my boots.\"\n\nSummerlee was sitting up and stuffing some tobacco into his old briar.\n\n\"We've got to see them safe,\" said he. \"You've pulled us all out of the jaws of death. My word! it was a good bit of work!\"\n\n\"Admirable!\" cried Challenger. \"Admirable! Not only we as individuals, but European science collectively, owe you a deep debt of gratitude for what you have done. I do not hesitate to say that the disappearance of Professor Summerlee and myself would have left an appreciable gap in modern zoological history. Our young friend here and you have done most excellently well.\"\n\nHe beamed at us with the old paternal smile, but European science would have been somewhat amazed could they have seen their chosen child, the hope of the future, with his tangled, unkempt head, his bare chest, and his tattered clothes. He had one of the meat-tins between his knees, and sat with a large piece of cold Australian mutton between his fingers. The Indian looked up at him, and then, with a little yelp, cringed to the ground and clung to Lord John's leg.\n\n\"Don't you be scared, my bonnie boy,\" said Lord John, patting the matted head in front of him. \"He can't stick your appearance, Challenger; and, by George! I don't wonder. All right, little chap, he's only a human, just the same as the rest of us.\"\n\n\"Really, sir!\" cried the Professor.\n\n\"Well, it's lucky for you, Challenger, that you ARE a little out of the ordinary. If you hadn't been so like the king\u2014\"\n\n\"Upon my word, Lord John, you allow yourself great latitude.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a fact.\"\n\n\"I beg, sir, that you will change the subject. Your remarks are irrelevant and unintelligible. The question before us is what are we to do with these Indians? The obvious thing is to escort them home, if we knew where their home was.\"\n\n\"There is no difficulty about that,\" said I. \"They live in the caves on the other side of the central lake.\"\n\n\"Our young friend here knows where they live. I gather that it is some distance.\"\n\n\"A good twenty miles,\" said I.\n\nSummerlee gave a groan.\n\n\"I, for one, could never get there. Surely I hear those brutes still howling upon our track.\"\n\nAs he spoke, from the dark recesses of the woods we heard far away the jabbering cry of the ape-men. The Indians once more set up a feeble wail of fear.\n\n\"We must move, and move quick!\" said Lord John. \"You help Summerlee, young fellah. These Indians will carry stores. Now, then, come along before they can see us.\"\n\nIn less than half-an-hour we had reached our brushwood retreat and concealed ourselves. All day we heard the excited calling of the ape-men in the direction of our old camp, but none of them came our way, and the tired fugitives, red and white, had a long, deep sleep. I was dozing myself in the evening when someone plucked my sleeve, and I found Challenger kneeling beside me.\n\n\"You keep a diary of these events, and you expect eventually to publish it, Mr. Malone,\" said he, with solemnity.\n\n\"I am only here as a Press reporter,\" I answered.\n\n\"Exactly. You may have heard some rather fatuous remarks of Lord John Roxton's which seemed to imply that there was some\u2014some resemblance\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I heard them.\"\n\n\"I need not say that any publicity given to such an idea\u2014any levity in your narrative of what occurred\u2014would be exceedingly offensive to me.\"\n\n\"I will keep well within the truth.\"\n\n\"Lord John's observations are frequently exceedingly fanciful, and he is capable of attributing the most absurd reasons to the respect which is always shown by the most undeveloped races to dignity and character. You follow my meaning?\"\n\n\"Entirely.\"\n\n\"I leave the matter to your discretion.\" Then, after a long pause, he added: \"The king of the ape-men was really a creature of great distinction\u2014a most remarkably handsome and intelligent personality. Did it not strike you?\"\n\n\"A most remarkable creature,\" said I.\n\nAnd the Professor, much eased in his mind, settled down to his slumber once more." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "\"Those Were the Real Conquests\"\n\nWe had imagined that our pursuers, the ape-men, knew nothing of our brushwood hiding-place, but we were soon to find out our mistake. There was no sound in the woods\u2014not a leaf moved upon the trees, and all was peace around us\u2014but we should have been warned by our first experience how cunningly and how patiently these creatures can watch and wait until their chance comes. Whatever fate may be mine through life, I am very sure that I shall never be nearer death than I was that morning. But I will tell you the thing in its due order.\n\nWe all awoke exhausted after the terrific emotions and scanty food of yesterday. Summerlee was still so weak that it was an effort for him to stand; but the old man was full of a sort of surly courage which would never admit defeat. A council was held, and it was agreed that we should wait quietly for an hour or two where we were, have our much-needed breakfast, and then make our way across the plateau and round the central lake to the caves where my observations had shown that the Indians lived. We relied upon the fact that we could count upon the good word of those whom we had rescued to ensure a warm welcome from their fellows. Then, with our mission accomplished and possessing a fuller knowledge of the secrets of Maple White Land, we should turn our whole thoughts to the vital problem of our escape and return. Even Challenger was ready to admit that we should then have done all for which we had come, and that our first duty from that time onwards was to carry back to civilization the amazing discoveries we had made.\n\nWe were able now to take a more leisurely view of the Indians whom we had rescued. They were small men, wiry, active, and well-built, with lank black hair tied up in a bunch behind their heads with a leathern thong, and leathern also were their loin-clothes. Their faces were hairless, well formed, and good-humored. The lobes of their ears, hanging ragged and bloody, showed that they had been pierced for some ornaments which their captors had torn out. Their speech, though unintelligible to us, was fluent among themselves, and as they pointed to each other and uttered the word \"Accala\" many times over, we gathered that this was the name of the nation. Occasionally, with faces which were convulsed with fear and hatred, they shook their clenched hands at the woods round and cried: \"Doda! Doda!\" which was surely their term for their enemies.\n\n\"What do you make of them, Challenger?\" asked Lord John. \"One thing is very clear to me, and that is that the little chap with the front of his head shaved is a chief among them.\"\n\nIt was indeed evident that this man stood apart from the others, and that they never ventured to address him without every sign of deep respect. He seemed to be the youngest of them all, and yet, so proud and high was his spirit that, upon Challenger laying his great hand upon his head, he started like a spurred horse and, with a quick flash of his dark eyes, moved further away from the Professor. Then, placing his hand upon his breast and holding himself with great dignity, he uttered the word \"Maretas\" several times. The Professor, unabashed, seized the nearest Indian by the shoulder and proceeded to lecture upon him as if he were a potted specimen in a class-room.\n\n\"The type of these people,\" said he in his sonorous fashion, \"whether judged by cranial capacity, facial angle, or any other test, cannot be regarded as a low one; on the contrary, we must place it as considerably higher in the scale than many South American tribes which I can mention. On no possible supposition can we explain the evolution of such a race in this place. For that matter, so great a gap separates these ape-men from the primitive animals which have survived upon this plateau, that it is inadmissible to think that they could have developed where we find them.\"\n\n\"Then where the dooce did they drop from?\" asked Lord John.\n\n\"A question which will, no doubt, be eagerly discussed in every scientific society in Europe and America,\" the Professor answered. \"My own reading of the situation for what it is worth\u2014\" he inflated his chest enormously and looked insolently around him at the words\u2014\"is that evolution has advanced under the peculiar conditions of this country up to the vertebrate stage, the old types surviving and living on in company with the newer ones. Thus we find such modern creatures as the tapir\u2014an animal with quite a respectable length of pedigree\u2014the great deer, and the ant-eater in the companionship of reptilian forms of jurassic type. So much is clear. And now come the ape-men and the Indian. What is the scientific mind to think of their presence? I can only account for it by an invasion from outside. It is probable that there existed an anthropoid ape in South America, who in past ages found his way to this place, and that he developed into the creatures we have seen, some of which\"\u2014here he looked hard at me\u2014\"were of an appearance and shape which, if it had been accompanied by corresponding intelligence, would, I do not hesitate to say, have reflected credit upon any living race. As to the Indians I cannot doubt that they are more recent immigrants from below. Under the stress of famine or of conquest they have made their way up here. Faced by ferocious creatures which they had never before seen, they took refuge in the caves which our young friend has described, but they have no doubt had a bitter fight to hold their own against wild beasts, and especially against the ape-men who would regard them as intruders, and wage a merciless war upon them with a cunning which the larger beasts would lack. Hence the fact that their numbers appear to be limited. Well, gentlemen, have I read you the riddle aright, or is there any point which you would query?\"\n\nProfessor Summerlee for once was too depressed to argue, though he shook his head violently as a token of general disagreement. Lord John merely scratched his scanty locks with the remark that he couldn't put up a fight as he wasn't in the same weight or class. For my own part I performed my usual role of bringing things down to a strictly prosaic and practical level by the remark that one of the Indians was missing.\n\n\"He has gone to fetch some water,\" said Lord Roxton. \"We fitted him up with an empty beef tin and he is off.\"\n\n\"To the old camp?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, to the brook. It's among the trees there. It can't be more than a couple of hundred yards. But the beggar is certainly taking his time.\"\n\n\"I'll go and look after him,\" said I. I picked up my rifle and strolled in the direction of the brook, leaving my friends to lay out the scanty breakfast. It may seem to you rash that even for so short a distance I should quit the shelter of our friendly thicket, but you will remember that we were many miles from Ape-town, that so far as we knew the creatures had not discovered our retreat, and that in any case with a rifle in my hands I had no fear of them. I had not yet learned their cunning or their strength.\n\nI could hear the murmur of our brook somewhere ahead of me, but there was a tangle of trees and brushwood between me and it. I was making my way through this at a point which was just out of sight of my companions, when, under one of the trees, I noticed something red huddled among the bushes. As I approached it, I was shocked to see that it was the dead body of the missing Indian. He lay upon his side, his limbs drawn up, and his head screwed round at a most unnatural angle, so that he seemed to be looking straight over his own shoulder. I gave a cry to warn my friends that something was amiss, and running forwards I stooped over the body. Surely my guardian angel was very near me then, for some instinct of fear, or it may have been some faint rustle of leaves, made me glance upwards. Out of the thick green foliage which hung low over my head, two long muscular arms covered with reddish hair were slowly descending. Another instant and the great stealthy hands would have been round my throat. I sprang backwards, but quick as I was, those hands were quicker still. Through my sudden spring they missed a fatal grip, but one of them caught the back of my neck and the other one my face. I threw my hands up to protect my throat, and the next moment the huge paw had slid down my face and closed over them. I was lifted lightly from the ground, and I felt an intolerable pressure forcing my head back and back until the strain upon the cervical spine was more than I could bear. My senses swam, but I still tore at the hand and forced it out from my chin. Looking up I saw a frightful face with cold inexorable light blue eyes looking down into mine. There was something hypnotic in those terrible eyes. I could struggle no longer. As the creature felt me grow limp in his grasp, two white canines gleamed for a moment at each side of the vile mouth, and the grip tightened still more upon my chin, forcing it always upwards and back. A thin, oval-tinted mist formed before my eyes and little silvery bells tinkled in my ears. Dully and far off I heard the crack of a rifle and was feebly aware of the shock as I was dropped to the earth, where I lay without sense or motion.\n\nI awoke to find myself on my back upon the grass in our lair within the thicket. Someone had brought the water from the brook, and Lord John was sprinkling my head with it, while Challenger and Summerlee were propping me up, with concern in their faces. For a moment I had a glimpse of the human spirits behind their scientific masks. It was really shock, rather than any injury, which had prostrated me, and in half-an-hour, in spite of aching head and stiff neck, I was sitting up and ready for anything.\n\n\"But you've had the escape of your life, young fellah my lad,\" said Lord Roxton. \"When I heard your cry and ran forward, and saw your head twisted half-off and your stohwassers kickin' in the air, I thought we were one short. I missed the beast in my flurry, but he dropped you all right and was off like a streak. By George! I wish I had fifty men with rifles. I'd clear out the whole infernal gang of them and leave this country a bit cleaner than we found it.\"\n\nIt was clear now that the ape-men had in some way marked us down, and that we were watched on every side. We had not so much to fear from them during the day, but they would be very likely to rush us by night; so the sooner we got away from their neighborhood the better. On three sides of us was absolute forest, and there we might find ourselves in an ambush. But on the fourth side\u2014that which sloped down in the direction of the lake\u2014there was only low scrub, with scattered trees and occasional open glades. It was, in fact, the route which I had myself taken in my solitary journey, and it led us straight for the Indian caves. This then must for every reason be our road.\n\nOne great regret we had, and that was to leave our old camp behind us, not only for the sake of the stores which remained there, but even more because we were losing touch with Zambo, our link with the outside world. However, we had a fair supply of cartridges and all our guns, so, for a time at least, we could look after ourselves, and we hoped soon to have a chance of returning and restoring our communications with our negro. He had faithfully promised to stay where he was, and we had not a doubt that he would be as good as his word.\n\nIt was in the early afternoon that we started upon our journey. The young chief walked at our head as our guide, but refused indignantly to carry any burden. Behind him came the two surviving Indians with our scanty possessions upon their backs. We four white men walked in the rear with rifles loaded and ready. As we started there broke from the thick silent woods behind us a sudden great ululation of the ape-men, which may have been a cheer of triumph at our departure or a jeer of contempt at our flight. Looking back we saw only the dense screen of trees, but that long-drawn yell told us how many of our enemies lurked among them. We saw no sign of pursuit, however, and soon we had got into more open country and beyond their power.\n\nAs I tramped along, the rearmost of the four, I could not help smiling at the appearance of my three companions in front. Was this the luxurious Lord John Roxton who had sat that evening in the Albany amidst his Persian rugs and his pictures in the pink radiance of the tinted lights? And was this the imposing Professor who had swelled behind the great desk in his massive study at Enmore Park? And, finally, could this be the austere and prim figure which had risen before the meeting at the Zoological Institute? No three tramps that one could have met in a Surrey lane could have looked more hopeless and bedraggled. We had, it is true, been only a week or so upon the top of the plateau, but all our spare clothing was in our camp below, and the one week had been a severe one upon us all, though least to me who had not to endure the handling of the ape-men. My three friends had all lost their hats, and had now bound handkerchiefs round their heads, their clothes hung in ribbons about them, and their unshaven grimy faces were hardly to be recognized. Both Summerlee and Challenger were limping heavily, while I still dragged my feet from weakness after the shock of the morning, and my neck was as stiff as a board from the murderous grip that held it. We were indeed a sorry crew, and I did not wonder to see our Indian companions glance back at us occasionally with horror and amazement on their faces.\n\nIn the late afternoon we reached the margin of the lake, and as we emerged from the bush and saw the sheet of water stretching before us our native friends set up a shrill cry of joy and pointed eagerly in front of them. It was indeed a wonderful sight which lay before us. Sweeping over the glassy surface was a great flotilla of canoes coming straight for the shore upon which we stood. They were some miles out when we first saw them, but they shot forward with great swiftness, and were soon so near that the rowers could distinguish our persons. Instantly a thunderous shout of delight burst from them, and we saw them rise from their seats, waving their paddles and spears madly in the air. Then bending to their work once more, they flew across the intervening water, beached their boats upon the sloping sand, and rushed up to us, prostrating themselves with loud cries of greeting before the young chief. Finally one of them, an elderly man, with a necklace and bracelet of great lustrous glass beads and the skin of some beautiful mottled amber-colored animal slung over his shoulders, ran forward and embraced most tenderly the youth whom we had saved. He then looked at us and asked some questions, after which he stepped up with much dignity and embraced us also each in turn. Then, at his order, the whole tribe lay down upon the ground before us in homage. Personally I felt shy and uncomfortable at this obsequious adoration, and I read the same feeling in the faces of Roxton and Summerlee, but Challenger expanded like a flower in the sun.\n\n\"They may be undeveloped types,\" said he, stroking his beard and looking round at them, \"but their deportment in the presence of their superiors might be a lesson to some of our more advanced Europeans. Strange how correct are the instincts of the natural man!\"\n\nIt was clear that the natives had come out upon the war-path, for every man carried his spear\u2014a long bamboo tipped with bone\u2014his bow and arrows, and some sort of club or stone battle-axe slung at his side. Their dark, angry glances at the woods from which we had come, and the frequent repetition of the word \"Doda,\" made it clear enough that this was a rescue party who had set forth to save or revenge the old chief's son, for such we gathered that the youth must be. A council was now held by the whole tribe squatting in a circle, whilst we sat near on a slab of basalt and watched their proceedings. Two or three warriors spoke, and finally our young friend made a spirited harangue with such eloquent features and gestures that we could understand it all as clearly as if we had known his language.\n\n\"What is the use of returning?\" he said. \"Sooner or later the thing must be done. Your comrades have been murdered. What if I have returned safe? These others have been done to death. There is no safety for any of us. We are assembled now and ready.\" Then he pointed to us. \"These strange men are our friends. They are great fighters, and they hate the ape-men even as we do. They command,\" here he pointed up to heaven, \"the thunder and the lightning. When shall we have such a chance again? Let us go forward, and either die now or live for the future in safety. How else shall we go back unashamed to our women?\"\n\nThe little red warriors hung upon the words of the speaker, and when he had finished they burst into a roar of applause, waving their rude weapons in the air. The old chief stepped forward to us, and asked us some questions, pointing at the same time to the woods. Lord John made a sign to him that he should wait for an answer and then he turned to us.\n\n\"Well, it's up to you to say what you will do,\" said he; \"for my part I have a score to settle with these monkey-folk, and if it ends by wiping them off the face of the earth I don't see that the earth need fret about it. I'm goin' with our little red pals and I mean to see them through the scrap. What do you say, young fellah?\"\n\n\"Of course I will come.\"\n\n\"And you, Challenger?\"\n\n\"I will assuredly co-operate.\"\n\n\"And you, Summerlee?\"\n\n\"We seem to be drifting very far from the object of this expedition, Lord John. I assure you that I little thought when I left my professional chair in London that it was for the purpose of heading a raid of savages upon a colony of anthropoid apes.\"\n\n\"To such base uses do we come,\" said Lord John, smiling. \"But we are up against it, so what's the decision?\"\n\n\"It seems a most questionable step,\" said Summerlee, argumentative to the last, \"but if you are all going, I hardly see how I can remain behind.\"\n\n\"Then it is settled,\" said Lord John, and turning to the chief he nodded and slapped his rifle.\n\nThe old fellow clasped our hands, each in turn, while his men cheered louder than ever. It was too late to advance that night, so the Indians settled down into a rude bivouac. On all sides their fires began to glimmer and smoke. Some of them who had disappeared into the jungle came back presently driving a young iguanodon before them. Like the others, it had a daub of asphalt upon its shoulder, and it was only when we saw one of the natives step forward with the air of an owner and give his consent to the beast's slaughter that we understood at last that these great creatures were as much private property as a herd of cattle, and that these symbols which had so perplexed us were nothing more than the marks of the owner. Helpless, torpid, and vegetarian, with great limbs but a minute brain, they could be rounded up and driven by a child. In a few minutes the huge beast had been cut up and slabs of him were hanging over a dozen camp fires, together with great scaly ganoid fish which had been speared in the lake.\n\nSummerlee had lain down and slept upon the sand, but we others roamed round the edge of the water, seeking to learn something more of this strange country. Twice we found pits of blue clay, such as we had already seen in the swamp of the pterodactyls. These were old volcanic vents, and for some reason excited the greatest interest in Lord John. What attracted Challenger, on the other hand, was a bubbling, gurgling mud geyser, where some strange gas formed great bursting bubbles upon the surface. He thrust a hollow reed into it and cried out with delight like a schoolboy then he was able, on touching it with a lighted match, to cause a sharp explosion and a blue flame at the far end of the tube. Still more pleased was he when, inverting a leathern pouch over the end of the reed, and so filling it with the gas, he was able to send it soaring up into the air.\n\n\"An inflammable gas, and one markedly lighter than the atmosphere. I should say beyond doubt that it contained a considerable proportion of free hydrogen. The resources of G. E. C. are not yet exhausted, my young friend. I may yet show you how a great mind molds all Nature to its use.\" He swelled with some secret purpose, but would say no more.\n\nThere was nothing which we could see upon the shore which seemed to me so wonderful as the great sheet of water before us. Our numbers and our noise had frightened all living creatures away, and save for a few pterodactyls, which soared round high above our heads while they waited for the carrion, all was still around the camp. But it was different out upon the rose-tinted waters of the central lake. It boiled and heaved with strange life. Great slate-colored backs and high serrated dorsal fins shot up with a fringe of silver, and then rolled down into the depths again. The sandbanks far out were spotted with uncouth crawling forms, huge turtles, strange saurians, and one great flat creature like a writhing, palpitating mat of black greasy leather, which flopped its way slowly to the lake. Here and there high serpent heads projected out of the water, cutting swiftly through it with a little collar of foam in front, and a long swirling wake behind, rising and falling in graceful, swan-like undulations as they went. It was not until one of these creatures wriggled on to a sandbank within a few hundred yards of us, and exposed a barrel-shaped body and huge flippers behind the long serpent neck, that Challenger, and Summerlee, who had joined us, broke out into their duet of wonder and admiration.\n\n\"Plesiosaurus! A fresh-water plesiosaurus!\" cried Summerlee. \"That I should have lived to see such a sight! We are blessed, my dear Challenger, above all zoologists since the world began!\"\n\nIt was not until the night had fallen, and the fires of our savage allies glowed red in the shadows, that our two men of science could be dragged away from the fascinations of that primeval lake. Even in the darkness as we lay upon the strand, we heard from time to time the snort and plunge of the huge creatures who lived therein.\n\nAt earliest dawn our camp was astir and an hour later we had started upon our memorable expedition. Often in my dreams have I thought that I might live to be a war correspondent. In what wildest one could I have conceived the nature of the campaign which it should be my lot to report! Here then is my first despatch from a field of battle:\n\nOur numbers had been reinforced during the night by a fresh batch of natives from the caves, and we may have been four or five hundred strong when we made our advance. A fringe of scouts was thrown out in front, and behind them the whole force in a solid column made their way up the long slope of the bush country until we were near the edge of the forest. Here they spread out into a long straggling line of spearmen and bowmen. Roxton and Summerlee took their position upon the right flank, while Challenger and I were on the left. It was a host of the stone age that we were accompanying to battle\u2014we with the last word of the gunsmith's art from St. James' Street and the Strand.\n\nWe had not long to wait for our enemy. A wild shrill clamor rose from the edge of the wood and suddenly a body of ape-men rushed out with clubs and stones, and made for the center of the Indian line. It was a valiant move but a foolish one, for the great bandy-legged creatures were slow of foot, while their opponents were as active as cats. It was horrible to see the fierce brutes with foaming mouths and glaring eyes, rushing and grasping, but forever missing their elusive enemies, while arrow after arrow buried itself in their hides. One great fellow ran past me roaring with pain, with a dozen darts sticking from his chest and ribs. In mercy I put a bullet through his skull, and he fell sprawling among the aloes. But this was the only shot fired, for the attack had been on the center of the line, and the Indians there had needed no help of ours in repulsing it. Of all the ape-men who had rushed out into the open, I do not think that one got back to cover.\n\nBut the matter was more deadly when we came among the trees. For an hour or more after we entered the wood, there was a desperate struggle in which for a time we hardly held our own. Springing out from among the scrub the ape-men with huge clubs broke in upon the Indians and often felled three or four of them before they could be speared. Their frightful blows shattered everything upon which they fell. One of them knocked Summerlee's rifle to matchwood and the next would have crushed his skull had an Indian not stabbed the beast to the heart. Other ape-men in the trees above us hurled down stones and logs of wood, occasionally dropping bodily on to our ranks and fighting furiously until they were felled. Once our allies broke under the pressure, and had it not been for the execution done by our rifles they would certainly have taken to their heels. But they were gallantly rallied by their old chief and came on with such a rush that the ape-men began in turn to give way. Summerlee was weaponless, but I was emptying my magazine as quick as I could fire, and on the further flank we heard the continuous cracking of our companion's rifles.\n\nThen in a moment came the panic and the collapse. Screaming and howling, the great creatures rushed away in all directions through the brushwood, while our allies yelled in their savage delight, following swiftly after their flying enemies. All the feuds of countless generations, all the hatreds and cruelties of their narrow history, all the memories of ill-usage and persecution were to be purged that day. At last man was to be supreme and the man-beast to find forever his allotted place. Fly as they would the fugitives were too slow to escape from the active savages, and from every side in the tangled woods we heard the exultant yells, the twanging of bows, and the crash and thud as ape-men were brought down from their hiding-places in the trees.\n\nI was following the others, when I found that Lord John and Challenger had come across to join us.\n\n\"It's over,\" said Lord John. \"I think we can leave the tidying up to them. Perhaps the less we see of it the better we shall sleep.\"\n\nChallenger's eyes were shining with the lust of slaughter.\n\n\"We have been privileged,\" he cried, strutting about like a gamecock, \"to be present at one of the typical decisive battles of history\u2014the battles which have determined the fate of the world. What, my friends, is the conquest of one nation by another? It is meaningless. Each produces the same result. But those fierce fights, when in the dawn of the ages the cave-dwellers held their own against the tiger folk, or the elephants first found that they had a master, those were the real conquests\u2014the victories that count. By this strange turn of fate we have seen and helped to decide even such a contest. Now upon this plateau the future must ever be for man.\"\n\nIt needed a robust faith in the end to justify such tragic means. As we advanced together through the woods we found the ape-men lying thick, transfixed with spears or arrows. Here and there a little group of shattered Indians marked where one of the anthropoids had turned to bay, and sold his life dearly. Always in front of us we heard the yelling and roaring which showed the direction of the pursuit. The ape-men had been driven back to their city, they had made a last stand there, once again they had been broken, and now we were in time to see the final fearful scene of all. Some eighty or a hundred males, the last survivors, had been driven across that same little clearing which led to the edge of the cliff, the scene of our own exploit two days before. As we arrived the Indians, a semicircle of spearmen, had closed in on them, and in a minute it was over, Thirty or forty died where they stood. The others, screaming and clawing, were thrust over the precipice, and went hurtling down, as their prisoners had of old, on to the sharp bamboos six hundred feet below. It was as Challenger had said, and the reign of man was assured forever in Maple White Land. The males were exterminated, Ape Town was destroyed, the females and young were driven away to live in bondage, and the long rivalry of untold centuries had reached its bloody end.\n\nFor us the victory brought much advantage. Once again we were able to visit our camp and get at our stores. Once more also we were able to communicate with Zambo, who had been terrified by the spectacle from afar of an avalanche of apes falling from the edge of the cliff.\n\n\"Come away, Massas, come away!\" he cried, his eyes starting from his head. \"The debbil get you sure if you stay up there.\"\n\n\"It is the voice of sanity!\" said Summerlee with conviction. \"We have had adventures enough and they are neither suitable to our character or our position. I hold you to your word, Challenger. From now onwards you devote your energies to getting us out of this horrible country and back once more to civilization.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "\"Our Eyes have seen Great Wonders\"\n\nI write this from day to day, but I trust that before I come to the end of it, I may be able to say that the light shines, at last, through our clouds. We are held here with no clear means of making our escape, and bitterly we chafe against it. Yet, I can well imagine that the day may come when we may be glad that we were kept, against our will, to see something more of the wonders of this singular place, and of the creatures who inhabit it.\n\nThe victory of the Indians and the annihilation of the ape-men, marked the turning point of our fortunes. From then onwards, we were in truth masters of the plateau, for the natives looked upon us with a mixture of fear and gratitude, since by our strange powers we had aided them to destroy their hereditary foe. For their own sakes they would, perhaps, be glad to see the departure of such formidable and incalculable people, but they have not themselves suggested any way by which we may reach the plains below. There had been, so far as we could follow their signs, a tunnel by which the place could be approached, the lower exit of which we had seen from below. By this, no doubt, both ape-men and Indians had at different epochs reached the top, and Maple White with his companion had taken the same way. Only the year before, however, there had been a terrific earthquake, and the upper end of the tunnel had fallen in and completely disappeared. The Indians now could only shake their heads and shrug their shoulders when we expressed by signs our desire to descend. It may be that they cannot, but it may also be that they will not, help us to get away.\n\nAt the end of the victorious campaign the surviving ape-folk were driven across the plateau (their wailings were horrible) and established in the neighborhood of the Indian caves, where they would, from now onwards, be a servile race under the eyes of their masters. It was a rude, raw, primeval version of the Jews in Babylon or the Israelites in Egypt. At night we could hear from amid the trees the long-drawn cry, as some primitive Ezekiel mourned for fallen greatness and recalled the departed glories of Ape Town. Hewers of wood and drawers of water, such were they from now onwards.\n\nWe had returned across the plateau with our allies two days after the battle, and made our camp at the foot of their cliffs. They would have had us share their caves with them, but Lord John would by no means consent to it considering that to do so would put us in their power if they were treacherously disposed. We kept our independence, therefore, and had our weapons ready for any emergency, while preserving the most friendly relations. We also continually visited their caves, which were most remarkable places, though whether made by man or by Nature we have never been able to determine. They were all on the one stratum, hollowed out of some soft rock which lay between the volcanic basalt forming the ruddy cliffs above them, and the hard granite which formed their base.\n\nThe openings were about eighty feet above the ground, and were led up to by long stone stairs, so narrow and steep that no large animal could mount them. Inside they were warm and dry, running in straight passages of varying length into the side of the hill, with smooth gray walls decorated with many excellent pictures done with charred sticks and representing the various animals of the plateau. If every living thing were swept from the country the future explorer would find upon the walls of these caves ample evidence of the strange fauna\u2014the dinosaurs, iguanodons, and fish lizards\u2014which had lived so recently upon earth.\n\nSince we had learned that the huge iguanodons were kept as tame herds by their owners, and were simply walking meat-stores, we had conceived that man, even with his primitive weapons, had established his ascendancy upon the plateau. We were soon to discover that it was not so, and that he was still there upon tolerance.\n\nIt was on the third day after our forming our camp near the Indian caves that the tragedy occurred. Challenger and Summerlee had gone off together that day to the lake where some of the natives, under their direction, were engaged in harpooning specimens of the great lizards. Lord John and I had remained in our camp, while a number of the Indians were scattered about upon the grassy slope in front of the caves engaged in different ways. Suddenly there was a shrill cry of alarm, with the word \"Stoa\" resounding from a hundred tongues. From every side men, women, and children were rushing wildly for shelter, swarming up the staircases and into the caves in a mad stampede.\n\nLooking up, we could see them waving their arms from the rocks above and beckoning to us to join them in their refuge. We had both seized our magazine rifles and ran out to see what the danger could be. Suddenly from the near belt of trees there broke forth a group of twelve or fifteen Indians, running for their lives, and at their very heels two of those frightful monsters which had disturbed our camp and pursued me upon my solitary journey. In shape they were like horrible toads, and moved in a succession of springs, but in size they were of an incredible bulk, larger than the largest elephant. We had never before seen them save at night, and indeed they are nocturnal animals save when disturbed in their lairs, as these had been. We now stood amazed at the sight, for their blotched and warty skins were of a curious fish-like iridescence, and the sunlight struck them with an ever-varying rainbow bloom as they moved.\n\nWe had little time to watch them, however, for in an instant they had overtaken the fugitives and were making a dire slaughter among them. Their method was to fall forward with their full weight upon each in turn, leaving him crushed and mangled, to bound on after the others. The wretched Indians screamed with terror, but were helpless, run as they would, before the relentless purpose and horrible activity of these monstrous creatures. One after another they went down, and there were not half-a-dozen surviving by the time my companion and I could come to their help. But our aid was of little avail and only involved us in the same peril. At the range of a couple of hundred yards we emptied our magazines, firing bullet after bullet into the beasts, but with no more effect than if we were pelting them with pellets of paper. Their slow reptilian natures cared nothing for wounds, and the springs of their lives, with no special brain center but scattered throughout their spinal cords, could not be tapped by any modern weapons. The most that we could do was to check their progress by distracting their attention with the flash and roar of our guns, and so to give both the natives and ourselves time to reach the steps which led to safety. But where the conical explosive bullets of the twentieth century were of no avail, the poisoned arrows of the natives, dipped in the juice of strophanthus and steeped afterwards in decayed carrion, could succeed. Such arrows were of little avail to the hunter who attacked the beast, because their action in that torpid circulation was slow, and before its powers failed it could certainly overtake and slay its assailant. But now, as the two monsters hounded us to the very foot of the stairs, a drift of darts came whistling from every chink in the cliff above them. In a minute they were feathered with them, and yet with no sign of pain they clawed and slobbered with impotent rage at the steps which would lead them to their victims, mounting clumsily up for a few yards and then sliding down again to the ground. But at last the poison worked. One of them gave a deep rumbling groan and dropped his huge squat head on to the earth. The other bounded round in an eccentric circle with shrill, wailing cries, and then lying down writhed in agony for some minutes before it also stiffened and lay still. With yells of triumph the Indians came flocking down from their caves and danced a frenzied dance of victory round the dead bodies, in mad joy that two more of the most dangerous of all their enemies had been slain. That night they cut up and removed the bodies, not to eat\u2014for the poison was still active\u2014but lest they should breed a pestilence. The great reptilian hearts, however, each as large as a cushion, still lay there, beating slowly and steadily, with a gentle rise and fall, in horrible independent life. It was only upon the third day that the ganglia ran down and the dreadful things were still.\n\nSome day, when I have a better desk than a meat-tin and more helpful tools than a worn stub of pencil and a last, tattered notebook, I will write some fuller account of the Accala Indians\u2014of our life amongst them, and of the glimpses which we had of the strange conditions of wondrous Maple White Land. Memory, at least, will never fail me, for so long as the breath of life is in me, every hour and every action of that period will stand out as hard and clear as do the first strange happenings of our childhood. No new impressions could efface those which are so deeply cut. When the time comes I will describe that wondrous moonlit night upon the great lake when a young ichthyosaurus\u2014a strange creature, half seal, half fish, to look at, with bone-covered eyes on each side of his snout, and a third eye fixed upon the top of his head\u2014was entangled in an Indian net, and nearly upset our canoe before we towed it ashore; the same night that a green water-snake shot out from the rushes and carried off in its coils the steersman of Challenger's canoe. I will tell, too, of the great nocturnal white thing\u2014to this day we do not know whether it was beast or reptile\u2014which lived in a vile swamp to the east of the lake, and flitted about with a faint phosphorescent glimmer in the darkness. The Indians were so terrified at it that they would not go near the place, and, though we twice made expeditions and saw it each time, we could not make our way through the deep marsh in which it lived. I can only say that it seemed to be larger than a cow and had the strangest musky odor. I will tell also of the huge bird which chased Challenger to the shelter of the rocks one day\u2014a great running bird, far taller than an ostrich, with a vulture-like neck and cruel head which made it a walking death. As Challenger climbed to safety one dart of that savage curving beak shore off the heel of his boot as if it had been cut with a chisel. This time at least modern weapons prevailed and the great creature, twelve feet from head to foot\u2014phororachus its name, according to our panting but exultant Professor\u2014went down before Lord Roxton's rifle in a flurry of waving feathers and kicking limbs, with two remorseless yellow eyes glaring up from the midst of it. May I live to see that flattened vicious skull in its own niche amid the trophies of the Albany. Finally, I will assuredly give some account of the toxodon, the giant ten-foot guinea pig, with projecting chisel teeth, which we killed as it drank in the gray of the morning by the side of the lake.\n\nAll this I shall some day write at fuller length, and amidst these more stirring days I would tenderly sketch in these lovely summer evenings, when with the deep blue sky above us we lay in good comradeship among the long grasses by the wood and marveled at the strange fowl that swept over us and the quaint new creatures which crept from their burrows to watch us, while above us the boughs of the bushes were heavy with luscious fruit, and below us strange and lovely flowers peeped at us from among the herbage; or those long moonlit nights when we lay out upon the shimmering surface of the great lake and watched with wonder and awe the huge circles rippling out from the sudden splash of some fantastic monster; or the greenish gleam, far down in the deep water, of some strange creature upon the confines of darkness. These are the scenes which my mind and my pen will dwell upon in every detail at some future day.\n\nBut, you will ask, why these experiences and why this delay, when you and your comrades should have been occupied day and night in the devising of some means by which you could return to the outer world? My answer is, that there was not one of us who was not working for this end, but that our work had been in vain. One fact we had very speedily discovered: The Indians would do nothing to help us. In every other way they were our friends\u2014one might almost say our devoted slaves\u2014but when it was suggested that they should help us to make and carry a plank which would bridge the chasm, or when we wished to get from them thongs of leather or liana to weave ropes which might help us, we were met by a good-humored, but an invincible, refusal. They would smile, twinkle their eyes, shake their heads, and there was the end of it. Even the old chief met us with the same obstinate denial, and it was only Maretas, the youngster whom we had saved, who looked wistfully at us and told us by his gestures that he was grieved for our thwarted wishes. Ever since their crowning triumph with the ape-men they looked upon us as supermen, who bore victory in the tubes of strange weapons, and they believed that so long as we remained with them good fortune would be theirs. A little red-skinned wife and a cave of our own were freely offered to each of us if we would but forget our own people and dwell forever upon the plateau. So far all had been kindly, however far apart our desires might be; but we felt well assured that our actual plans of a descent must be kept secret, for we had reason to fear that at the last they might try to hold us by force.\n\nIn spite of the danger from dinosaurs (which is not great save at night, for, as I may have said before, they are mostly nocturnal in their habits) I have twice in the last three weeks been over to our old camp in order to see our negro who still kept watch and ward below the cliff. My eyes strained eagerly across the great plain in the hope of seeing afar off the help for which we had prayed. But the long cactus-strewn levels still stretched away, empty and bare, to the distant line of the cane-brake.\n\n\"They will soon come now, Massa Malone. Before another week pass Indian come back and bring rope and fetch you down.\" Such was the cheery cry of our excellent Zambo.\n\nI had one strange experience as I came from this second visit which had involved my being away for a night from my companions. I was returning along the well-remembered route, and had reached a spot within a mile or so of the marsh of the pterodactyls, when I saw an extraordinary object approaching me. It was a man who walked inside a framework made of bent canes so that he was enclosed on all sides in a bell-shaped cage. As I drew nearer I was more amazed still to see that it was Lord John Roxton. When he saw me he slipped from under his curious protection and came towards me laughing, and yet, as I thought, with some confusion in his manner.\n\n\"Well, young fellah,\" said he, \"who would have thought of meetin' you up here?\"\n\n\"What in the world are you doing?\" I asked.\n\n\"Visitin' my friends, the pterodactyls,\" said he.\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Interestin' beasts, don't you think? But unsociable! Nasty rude ways with strangers, as you may remember. So I rigged this framework which keeps them from bein' too pressin' in their attentions.\"\n\n\"But what do you want in the swamp?\"\n\nHe looked at me with a very questioning eye, and I read hesitation in his face.\n\n\"Don't you think other people besides Professors can want to know things?\" he said at last. \"I'm studyin' the pretty dears. That's enough for you.\"\n\n\"No offense,\" said I.\n\nHis good-humor returned and he laughed.\n\n\"No offense, young fellah. I'm goin' to get a young devil chick for Challenger. That's one of my jobs. No, I don't want your company. I'm safe in this cage, and you are not. So long, and I'll be back in camp by night-fall.\"\n\nHe turned away and I left him wandering on through the wood with his extraordinary cage around him.\n\nIf Lord John's behavior at this time was strange, that of Challenger was more so. I may say that he seemed to possess an extraordinary fascination for the Indian women, and that he always carried a large spreading palm branch with which he beat them off as if they were flies, when their attentions became too pressing. To see him walking like a comic opera Sultan, with this badge of authority in his hand, his black beard bristling in front of him, his toes pointing at each step, and a train of wide-eyed Indian girls behind him, clad in their slender drapery of bark cloth, is one of the most grotesque of all the pictures which I will carry back with me. As to Summerlee, he was absorbed in the insect and bird life of the plateau, and spent his whole time (save that considerable portion which was devoted to abusing Challenger for not getting us out of our difficulties) in cleaning and mounting his specimens.\n\nChallenger had been in the habit of walking off by himself every morning and returning from time to time with looks of portentous solemnity, as one who bears the full weight of a great enterprise upon his shoulders. One day, palm branch in hand, and his crowd of adoring devotees behind him, he led us down to his hidden work-shop and took us into the secret of his plans.\n\nThe place was a small clearing in the center of a palm grove. In this was one of those boiling mud geysers which I have already described. Around its edge were scattered a number of leathern thongs cut from iguanodon hide, and a large collapsed membrane which proved to be the dried and scraped stomach of one of the great fish lizards from the lake. This huge sack had been sewn up at one end and only a small orifice left at the other. Into this opening several bamboo canes had been inserted and the other ends of these canes were in contact with conical clay funnels which collected the gas bubbling up through the mud of the geyser. Soon the flaccid organ began to slowly expand and show such a tendency to upward movements that Challenger fastened the cords which held it to the trunks of the surrounding trees. In half an hour a good-sized gas-bag had been formed, and the jerking and straining upon the thongs showed that it was capable of considerable lift. Challenger, like a glad father in the presence of his first-born, stood smiling and stroking his beard, in silent, self-satisfied content as he gazed at the creation of his brain. It was Summerlee who first broke the silence.\n\n\"You don't mean us to go up in that thing, Challenger?\" said he, in an acid voice.\n\n\"I mean, my dear Summerlee, to give you such a demonstration of its powers that after seeing it you will, I am sure, have no hesitation in trusting yourself to it.\"\n\n\"You can put it right out of your head now, at once,\" said Summerlee with decision, \"nothing on earth would induce me to commit such a folly. Lord John, I trust that you will not countenance such madness?\"\n\n\"Dooced ingenious, I call it,\" said our peer. \"I'd like to see how it works.\"\n\n\"So you shall,\" said Challenger. \"For some days I have exerted my whole brain force upon the problem of how we shall descend from these cliffs. We have satisfied ourselves that we cannot climb down and that there is no tunnel. We are also unable to construct any kind of bridge which may take us back to the pinnacle from which we came. How then shall I find a means to convey us? Some little time ago I had remarked to our young friend here that free hydrogen was evolved from the geyser. The idea of a balloon naturally followed. I was, I will admit, somewhat baffled by the difficulty of discovering an envelope to contain the gas, but the contemplation of the immense entrails of these reptiles supplied me with a solution to the problem. Behold the result!\"\n\nHe put one hand in the front of his ragged jacket and pointed proudly with the other.\n\nBy this time the gas-bag had swollen to a goodly rotundity and was jerking strongly upon its lashings.\n\n\"Midsummer madness!\" snorted Summerlee.\n\nLord John was delighted with the whole idea. \"Clever old dear, ain't he?\" he whispered to me, and then louder to Challenger. \"What about a car?\"\n\n\"The car will be my next care. I have already planned how it is to be made and attached. Meanwhile I will simply show you how capable my apparatus is of supporting the weight of each of us.\"\n\n\"All of us, surely?\"\n\n\"No, it is part of my plan that each in turn shall descend as in a parachute, and the balloon be drawn back by means which I shall have no difficulty in perfecting. If it will support the weight of one and let him gently down, it will have done all that is required of it. I will now show you its capacity in that direction.\"\n\nHe brought out a lump of basalt of a considerable size, constructed in the middle so that a cord could be easily attached to it. This cord was the one which we had brought with us on to the plateau after we had used it for climbing the pinnacle. It was over a hundred feet long, and though it was thin it was very strong. He had prepared a sort of collar of leather with many straps depending from it. This collar was placed over the dome of the balloon, and the hanging thongs were gathered together below, so that the pressure of any weight would be diffused over a considerable surface. Then the lump of basalt was fastened to the thongs, and the rope was allowed to hang from the end of it, being passed three times round the Professor's arm.\n\n\"I will now,\" said Challenger, with a smile of pleased anticipation, \"demonstrate the carrying power of my balloon.\" As he said so he cut with a knife the various lashings that held it.\n\nNever was our expedition in more imminent danger of complete annihilation. The inflated membrane shot up with frightful velocity into the air. In an instant Challenger was pulled off his feet and dragged after it. I had just time to throw my arms round his ascending waist when I was myself whipped up into the air. Lord John had me with a rat-trap grip round the legs, but I felt that he also was coming off the ground. For a moment I had a vision of four adventurers floating like a string of sausages over the land that they had explored. But, happily, there were limits to the strain which the rope would stand, though none apparently to the lifting powers of this infernal machine. There was a sharp crack, and we were in a heap upon the ground with coils of rope all over us. When we were able to stagger to our feet we saw far off in the deep blue sky one dark spot where the lump of basalt was speeding upon its way.\n\n\"Splendid!\" cried the undaunted Challenger, rubbing his injured arm. \"A most thorough and satisfactory demonstration! I could not have anticipated such a success. Within a week, gentlemen, I promise that a second balloon will be prepared, and that you can count upon taking in safety and comfort the first stage of our homeward journey.\" So far I have written each of the foregoing events as it occurred. Now I am rounding off my narrative from the old camp, where Zambo has waited so long, with all our difficulties and dangers left like a dream behind us upon the summit of those vast ruddy crags which tower above our heads. We have descended in safety, though in a most unexpected fashion, and all is well with us. In six weeks or two months we shall be in London, and it is possible that this letter may not reach you much earlier than we do ourselves. Already our hearts yearn and our spirits fly towards the great mother city which holds so much that is dear to us.\n\nIt was on the very evening of our perilous adventure with Challenger's home-made balloon that the change came in our fortunes. I have said that the one person from whom we had had some sign of sympathy in our attempts to get away was the young chief whom we had rescued. He alone had no desire to hold us against our will in a strange land. He had told us as much by his expressive language of signs. That evening, after dusk, he came down to our little camp, handed me (for some reason he had always shown his attentions to me, perhaps because I was the one who was nearest his age) a small roll of the bark of a tree, and then pointing solemnly up at the row of caves above him, he had put his finger to his lips as a sign of secrecy and had stolen back again to his people.\n\nI took the slip of bark to the firelight and we examined it together. It was about a foot square, and on the inner side there was a singular arrangement of lines, which I here reproduce:\n\nThey were neatly done in charcoal upon the white surface, and looked to me at first sight like some sort of rough musical score.\n\n\"Whatever it is, I can swear that it is of importance to us,\" said I. \"I could read that on his face as he gave it.\"\n\n\"Unless we have come upon a primitive practical joker,\" Summerlee suggested, \"which I should think would be one of the most elementary developments of man.\"\n\n\"It is clearly some sort of script,\" said Challenger.\n\n\"Looks like a guinea puzzle competition,\" remarked Lord John, craning his neck to have a look at it. Then suddenly he stretched out his hand and seized the puzzle.\n\n\"By George!\" he cried, \"I believe I've got it. The boy guessed right the very first time. See here! How many marks are on that paper? Eighteen. Well, if you come to think of it there are eighteen cave openings on the hill-side above us.\"\n\n\"He pointed up to the caves when he gave it to me,\" said I.\n\n\"Well, that settles it. This is a chart of the caves. What! Eighteen of them all in a row, some short, some deep, some branching, same as we saw them. It's a map, and here's a cross on it. What's the cross for? It is placed to mark one that is much deeper than the others.\"\n\n\"One that goes through,\" I cried.\n\n\"I believe our young friend has read the riddle,\" said Challenger. \"If the cave does not go through I do not understand why this person, who has every reason to mean us well, should have drawn our attention to it. But if it does go through and comes out at the corresponding point on the other side, we should not have more than a hundred feet to descend.\"\n\n\"A hundred feet!\" grumbled Summerlee.\n\n\"Well, our rope is still more than a hundred feet long,\" I cried. \"Surely we could get down.\"\n\n\"How about the Indians in the cave?\" Summerlee objected.\n\n\"There are no Indians in any of the caves above our heads,\" said I. \"They are all used as barns and store-houses. Why should we not go up now at once and spy out the land?\"\n\nThere is a dry bituminous wood upon the plateau\u2014a species of araucaria, according to our botanist\u2014which is always used by the Indians for torches. Each of us picked up a faggot of this, and we made our way up weed-covered steps to the particular cave which was marked in the drawing. It was, as I had said, empty, save for a great number of enormous bats, which flapped round our heads as we advanced into it. As we had no desire to draw the attention of the Indians to our proceedings, we stumbled along in the dark until we had gone round several curves and penetrated a considerable distance into the cavern. Then, at last, we lit our torches. It was a beautiful dry tunnel with smooth gray walls covered with native symbols, a curved roof which arched over our heads, and white glistening sand beneath our feet. We hurried eagerly along it until, with a deep groan of bitter disappointment, we were brought to a halt. A sheer wall of rock had appeared before us, with no chink through which a mouse could have slipped. There was no escape for us there.\n\nWe stood with bitter hearts staring at this unexpected obstacle. It was not the result of any convulsion, as in the case of the ascending tunnel. The end wall was exactly like the side ones. It was, and had always been, a cul-de-sac.\n\n\"Never mind, my friends,\" said the indomitable Challenger. \"You have still my firm promise of a balloon.\"\n\nSummerlee groaned.\n\n\"Can we be in the wrong cave?\" I suggested.\n\n\"No use, young fellah,\" said Lord John, with his finger on the chart. \"Seventeen from the right and second from the left. This is the cave sure enough.\"\n\nI looked at the mark to which his finger pointed, and I gave a sudden cry of joy.\n\n\"I believe I have it! Follow me! Follow me!\"\n\nI hurried back along the way we had come, my torch in my hand. \"Here,\" said I, pointing to some matches upon the ground, \"is where we lit up.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\n\"Well, it is marked as a forked cave, and in the darkness we passed the fork before the torches were lit. On the right side as we go out we should find the longer arm.\"\n\nIt was as I had said. We had not gone thirty yards before a great black opening loomed in the wall. We turned into it to find that we were in a much larger passage than before. Along it we hurried in breathless impatience for many hundreds of yards. Then, suddenly, in the black darkness of the arch in front of us we saw a gleam of dark red light. We stared in amazement. A sheet of steady flame seemed to cross the passage and to bar our way. We hastened towards it. No sound, no heat, no movement came from it, but still the great luminous curtain glowed before us, silvering all the cave and turning the sand to powdered jewels, until as we drew closer it discovered a circular edge.\n\n\"The moon, by George!\" cried Lord John. \"We are through, boys! We are through!\"\n\nIt was indeed the full moon which shone straight down the aperture which opened upon the cliffs. It was a small rift, not larger than a window, but it was enough for all our purposes. As we craned our necks through it we could see that the descent was not a very difficult one, and that the level ground was no very great way below us. It was no wonder that from below we had not observed the place, as the cliffs curved overhead and an ascent at the spot would have seemed so impossible as to discourage close inspection. We satisfied ourselves that with the help of our rope we could find our way down, and then returned, rejoicing, to our camp to make our preparations for the next evening.\n\nWhat we did we had to do quickly and secretly, since even at this last hour the Indians might hold us back. Our stores we would leave behind us, save only our guns and cartridges. But Challenger had some unwieldy stuff which he ardently desired to take with him, and one particular package, of which I may not speak, which gave us more labor than any. Slowly the day passed, but when the darkness fell we were ready for our departure. With much labor we got our things up the steps, and then, looking back, took one last long survey of that strange land, soon I fear to be vulgarized, the prey of hunter and prospector, but to each of us a dreamland of glamour and romance, a land where we had dared much, suffered much, and learned much\u2014OUR land, as we shall ever fondly call it. Along upon our left the neighboring caves each threw out its ruddy cheery firelight into the gloom. From the slope below us rose the voices of the Indians as they laughed and sang. Beyond was the long sweep of the woods, and in the center, shimmering vaguely through the gloom, was the great lake, the mother of strange monsters. Even as we looked a high whickering cry, the call of some weird animal, rang clear out of the darkness. It was the very voice of Maple White Land bidding us good-bye. We turned and plunged into the cave which led to home.\n\nTwo hours later, we, our packages, and all we owned, were at the foot of the cliff. Save for Challenger's luggage we had never a difficulty. Leaving it all where we descended, we started at once for Zambo's camp. In the early morning we approached it, but only to find, to our amazement, not one fire but a dozen upon the plain. The rescue party had arrived. There were twenty Indians from the river, with stakes, ropes, and all that could be useful for bridging the chasm. At least we shall have no difficulty now in carrying our packages, when to-morrow we begin to make our way back to the Amazon.\n\nAnd so, in humble and thankful mood, I close this account. Our eyes have seen great wonders and our souls are chastened by what we have endured. Each is in his own way a better and deeper man. It may be that when we reach Para we shall stop to refit. If we do, this letter will be a mail ahead. If not, it will reach London on the very day that I do. In either case, my dear Mr. McArdle, I hope very soon to shake you by the hand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "\"A Procession! A Procession!\"\n\nI should wish to place upon record here our gratitude to all our friends upon the Amazon for the very great kindness and hospitality which was shown to us upon our return journey. Very particularly would I thank Senhor Penalosa and other officials of the Brazilian Government for the special arrangements by which we were helped upon our way, and Senhor Pereira of Para, to whose forethought we owe the complete outfit for a decent appearance in the civilized world which we found ready for us at that town. It seemed a poor return for all the courtesy which we encountered that we should deceive our hosts and benefactors, but under the circumstances we had really no alternative, and I hereby tell them that they will only waste their time and their money if they attempt to follow upon our traces. Even the names have been altered in our accounts, and I am very sure that no one, from the most careful study of them, could come within a thousand miles of our unknown land.\n\nThe excitement which had been caused through those parts of South America which we had to traverse was imagined by us to be purely local, and I can assure our friends in England that we had no notion of the uproar which the mere rumor of our experiences had caused through Europe. It was not until the Ivernia was within five hundred miles of Southampton that the wireless messages from paper after paper and agency after agency, offering huge prices for a short return message as to our actual results, showed us how strained was the attention not only of the scientific world but of the general public. It was agreed among us, however, that no definite statement should be given to the Press until we had met the members of the Zoological Institute, since as delegates it was our clear duty to give our first report to the body from which we had received our commission of investigation. Thus, although we found Southampton full of Pressmen, we absolutely refused to give any information, which had the natural effect of focussing public attention upon the meeting which was advertised for the evening of November 7th. For this gathering, the Zoological Hall which had been the scene of the inception of our task was found to be far too small, and it was only in the Queen's Hall in Regent Street that accommodation could be found. It is now common knowledge the promoters might have ventured upon the Albert Hall and still found their space too scanty.\n\nIt was for the second evening after our arrival that the great meeting had been fixed. For the first, we had each, no doubt, our own pressing personal affairs to absorb us. Of mine I cannot yet speak. It may be that as it stands further from me I may think of it, and even speak of it, with less emotion. I have shown the reader in the beginning of this narrative where lay the springs of my action. It is but right, perhaps, that I should carry on the tale and show also the results. And yet the day may come when I would not have it otherwise. At least I have been driven forth to take part in a wondrous adventure, and I cannot but be thankful to the force that drove me.\n\nAnd now I turn to the last supreme eventful moment of our adventure. As I was racking my brain as to how I should best describe it, my eyes fell upon the issue of my own Journal for the morning of the 8th of November with the full and excellent account of my friend and fellow-reporter Macdona. What can I do better than transcribe his narrative\u2014headlines and all? I admit that the paper was exuberant in the matter, out of compliment to its own enterprise in sending a correspondent, but the other great dailies were hardly less full in their account. Thus, then, friend Mac in his report:\n\n\u2002THE NEW WORLD\n\n\u2002GREAT MEETING AT THE QUEEN'S HALL\n\n\u2002SCENES OF UPROAR\n\n\u2002EXTRAORDINARY INCIDENT\n\n\u2002WHAT WAS IT?\n\n\u2002NOCTURNAL RIOT IN REGENT STREET\n\n\u2002(Special)\n\n\"The much-discussed meeting of the Zoological Institute, convened to hear the report of the Committee of Investigation sent out last year to South America to test the assertions made by Professor Challenger as to the continued existence of prehistoric life upon that Continent, was held last night in the greater Queen's Hall, and it is safe to say that it is likely to be a red letter date in the history of Science, for the proceedings were of so remarkable and sensational a character that no one present is ever likely to forget them.\" (Oh, brother scribe Macdona, what a monstrous opening sentence!) \"The tickets were theoretically confined to members and their friends, but the latter is an elastic term, and long before eight o'clock, the hour fixed for the commencement of the proceedings, all parts of the Great Hall were tightly packed. The general public, however, which most unreasonably entertained a grievance at having been excluded, stormed the doors at a quarter to eight, after a prolonged melee in which several people were injured, including Inspector Scoble of H. Division, whose leg was unfortunately broken. After this unwarrantable invasion, which not only filled every passage, but even intruded upon the space set apart for the Press, it is estimated that nearly five thousand people awaited the arrival of the travelers. When they eventually appeared, they took their places in the front of a platform which already contained all the leading scientific men, not only of this country, but of France and of Germany. Sweden was also represented, in the person of Professor Sergius, the famous Zoologist of the University of Upsala. The entrance of the four heroes of the occasion was the signal for a remarkable demonstration of welcome, the whole audience rising and cheering for some minutes. An acute observer might, however, have detected some signs of dissent amid the applause, and gathered that the proceedings were likely to become more lively than harmonious. It may safely be prophesied, however, that no one could have foreseen the extraordinary turn which they were actually to take.\n\n\"Of the appearance of the four wanderers little need be said, since their photographs have for some time been appearing in all the papers. They bear few traces of the hardships which they are said to have undergone. Professor Challenger's beard may be more shaggy, Professor Summerlee's features more ascetic, Lord John Roxton's figure more gaunt, and all three may be burned to a darker tint than when they left our shores, but each appeared to be in most excellent health. As to our own representative, the well-known athlete and international Rugby football player, E. D. Malone, he looks trained to a hair, and as he surveyed the crowd a smile of good-humored contentment pervaded his honest but homely face.\" (All right, Mac, wait till I get you alone!)\n\n\"When quiet had been restored and the audience resumed their seats after the ovation which they had given to the travelers, the chairman, the Duke of Durham, addressed the meeting. 'He would not,' he said, 'stand for more than a moment between that vast assembly and the treat which lay before them. It was not for him to anticipate what Professor Summerlee, who was the spokesman of the committee, had to say to them, but it was common rumor that their expedition had been crowned by extraordinary success.' (Applause.) 'Apparently the age of romance was not dead, and there was common ground upon which the wildest imaginings of the novelist could meet the actual scientific investigations of the searcher for truth. He would only add, before he sat down, that he rejoiced\u2014and all of them would rejoice\u2014that these gentlemen had returned safe and sound from their difficult and dangerous task, for it cannot be denied that any disaster to such an expedition would have inflicted a well-nigh irreparable loss to the cause of Zoological science.' (Great applause, in which Professor Challenger was observed to join.)\n\n\"Professor Summerlee's rising was the signal for another extraordinary outbreak of enthusiasm, which broke out again at intervals throughout his address. That address will not be given in extenso in these columns, for the reason that a full account of the whole adventures of the expedition is being published as a supplement from the pen of our own special correspondent. Some general indications will therefore suffice. Having described the genesis of their journey, and paid a handsome tribute to his friend Professor Challenger, coupled with an apology for the incredulity with which his assertions, now fully vindicated, had been received, he gave the actual course of their journey, carefully withholding such information as would aid the public in any attempt to locate this remarkable plateau. Having described, in general terms, their course from the main river up to the time that they actually reached the base of the cliffs, he enthralled his hearers by his account of the difficulties encountered by the expedition in their repeated attempts to mount them, and finally described how they succeeded in their desperate endeavors, which cost the lives of their two devoted half-breed servants.\" (This amazing reading of the affair was the result of Summerlee's endeavors to avoid raising any questionable matter at the meeting.)\n\n\"Having conducted his audience in fancy to the summit, and marooned them there by reason of the fall of their bridge, the Professor proceeded to describe both the horrors and the attractions of that remarkable land. Of personal adventures he said little, but laid stress upon the rich harvest reaped by Science in the observations of the wonderful beast, bird, insect, and plant life of the plateau. Peculiarly rich in the coleoptera and in the lepidoptera, forty-six new species of the one and ninety-four of the other had been secured in the course of a few weeks. It was, however, in the larger animals, and especially in the larger animals supposed to have been long extinct, that the interest of the public was naturally centered. Of these he was able to give a goodly list, but had little doubt that it would be largely extended when the place had been more thoroughly investigated. He and his companions had seen at least a dozen creatures, most of them at a distance, which corresponded with nothing at present known to Science. These would in time be duly classified and examined. He instanced a snake, the cast skin of which, deep purple in color, was fifty-one feet in length, and mentioned a white creature, supposed to be mammalian, which gave forth well-marked phosphorescence in the darkness; also a large black moth, the bite of which was supposed by the Indians to be highly poisonous. Setting aside these entirely new forms of life, the plateau was very rich in known prehistoric forms, dating back in some cases to early Jurassic times. Among these he mentioned the gigantic and grotesque stegosaurus, seen once by Mr. Malone at a drinking-place by the lake, and drawn in the sketch-book of that adventurous American who had first penetrated this unknown world. He described also the iguanodon and the pterodactyl\u2014two of the first of the wonders which they had encountered. He then thrilled the assembly by some account of the terrible carnivorous dinosaurs, which had on more than one occasion pursued members of the party, and which were the most formidable of all the creatures which they had encountered. Thence he passed to the huge and ferocious bird, the phororachus, and to the great elk which still roams upon this upland. It was not, however, until he sketched the mysteries of the central lake that the full interest and enthusiasm of the audience were aroused. One had to pinch oneself to be sure that one was awake as one heard this sane and practical Professor in cold measured tones describing the monstrous three-eyed fish-lizards and the huge water-snakes which inhabit this enchanted sheet of water. Next he touched upon the Indians, and upon the extraordinary colony of anthropoid apes, which might be looked upon as an advance upon the pithecanthropus of Java, and as coming therefore nearer than any known form to that hypothetical creation, the missing link. Finally he described, amongst some merriment, the ingenious but highly dangerous aeronautic invention of Professor Challenger, and wound up a most memorable address by an account of the methods by which the committee did at last find their way back to civilization.\n\n\"It had been hoped that the proceedings would end there, and that a vote of thanks and congratulation, moved by Professor Sergius, of Upsala University, would be duly seconded and carried; but it was soon evident that the course of events was not destined to flow so smoothly. Symptoms of opposition had been evident from time to time during the evening, and now Dr. James Illingworth, of Edinburgh, rose in the center of the hall. Dr. Illingworth asked whether an amendment should not be taken before a resolution.\n\n\"THE CHAIRMAN: 'Yes, sir, if there must be an amendment.'\n\n\"DR. ILLINGWORTH: 'Your Grace, there must be an amendment.'\n\n\"THE CHAIRMAN: 'Then let us take it at once.'\n\n\"PROFESSOR SUMMERLEE (springing to his feet): 'Might I explain, your Grace, that this man is my personal enemy ever since our controversy in the Quarterly Journal of Science as to the true nature of Bathybius?'\n\n\"THE CHAIRMAN: 'I fear I cannot go into personal matters. Proceed.'\n\n\"Dr. Illingworth was imperfectly heard in part of his remarks on account of the strenuous opposition of the friends of the explorers. Some attempts were also made to pull him down. Being a man of enormous physique, however, and possessed of a very powerful voice, he dominated the tumult and succeeded in finishing his speech. It was clear, from the moment of his rising, that he had a number of friends and sympathizers in the hall, though they formed a minority in the audience. The attitude of the greater part of the public might be described as one of attentive neutrality.\n\n\"Dr. Illingworth began his remarks by expressing his high appreciation of the scientific work both of Professor Challenger and of Professor Summerlee. He much regretted that any personal bias should have been read into his remarks, which were entirely dictated by his desire for scientific truth. His position, in fact, was substantially the same as that taken up by Professor Summerlee at the last meeting. At that last meeting Professor Challenger had made certain assertions which had been queried by his colleague. Now this colleague came forward himself with the same assertions and expected them to remain unquestioned. Was this reasonable? ('Yes,' 'No,' and prolonged interruption, during which Professor Challenger was heard from the Press box to ask leave from the chairman to put Dr. Illingworth into the street.) A year ago one man said certain things. Now four men said other and more startling ones. Was this to constitute a final proof where the matters in question were of the most revolutionary and incredible character? There had been recent examples of travelers arriving from the unknown with certain tales which had been too readily accepted. Was the London Zoological Institute to place itself in this position? He admitted that the members of the committee were men of character. But human nature was very complex. Even Professors might be misled by the desire for notoriety. Like moths, we all love best to flutter in the light. Heavy-game shots liked to be in a position to cap the tales of their rivals, and journalists were not averse from sensational coups, even when imagination had to aid fact in the process. Each member of the committee had his own motive for making the most of his results. ('Shame! shame!') He had no desire to be offensive. ('You are!' and interruption.) The corroboration of these wondrous tales was really of the most slender description. What did it amount to? Some photographs. {Was it possible that in this age of ingenious manipulation photographs could be accepted as evidence?} What more? We have a story of a flight and a descent by ropes which precluded the production of larger specimens. It was ingenious, but not convincing. It was understood that Lord John Roxton claimed to have the skull of a phororachus. He could only say that he would like to see that skull.\n\n\"LORD JOHN ROXTON: 'Is this fellow calling me a liar?' (Uproar.)\n\n\"THE CHAIRMAN: 'Order! order! Dr. Illingworth, I must direct you to bring your remarks to a conclusion and to move your amendment.'\n\n\"DR. ILLINGWORTH: 'Your Grace, I have more to say, but I bow to your ruling. I move, then, that, while Professor Summerlee be thanked for his interesting address, the whole matter shall be regarded as 'non-proven,' and shall be referred back to a larger, and possibly more reliable Committee of Investigation.'\n\n\"It is difficult to describe the confusion caused by this amendment. A large section of the audience expressed their indignation at such a slur upon the travelers by noisy shouts of dissent and cries of, 'Don't put it!' 'Withdraw!' 'Turn him out!' On the other hand, the malcontents\u2014and it cannot be denied that they were fairly numerous\u2014cheered for the amendment, with cries of 'Order!' 'Chair!' and 'Fair play!' A scuffle broke out in the back benches, and blows were freely exchanged among the medical students who crowded that part of the hall. It was only the moderating influence of the presence of large numbers of ladies which prevented an absolute riot. Suddenly, however, there was a pause, a hush, and then complete silence. Professor Challenger was on his feet. His appearance and manner are peculiarly arresting, and as he raised his hand for order the whole audience settled down expectantly to give him a hearing.\n\n\"'It will be within the recollection of many present,' said Professor Challenger, 'that similar foolish and unmannerly scenes marked the last meeting at which I have been able to address them. On that occasion Professor Summerlee was the chief offender, and though he is now chastened and contrite, the matter could not be entirely forgotten. I have heard to-night similar, but even more offensive, sentiments from the person who has just sat down, and though it is a conscious effort of self-effacement to come down to that person's mental level, I will endeavor to do so, in order to allay any reasonable doubt which could possibly exist in the minds of anyone.' (Laughter and interruption.) 'I need not remind this audience that, though Professor Summerlee, as the head of the Committee of Investigation, has been put up to speak to-night, still it is I who am the real prime mover in this business, and that it is mainly to me that any successful result must be ascribed. I have safely conducted these three gentlemen to the spot mentioned, and I have, as you have heard, convinced them of the accuracy of my previous account. We had hoped that we should find upon our return that no one was so dense as to dispute our joint conclusions. Warned, however, by my previous experience, I have not come without such proofs as may convince a reasonable man. As explained by Professor Summerlee, our cameras have been tampered with by the ape-men when they ransacked our camp, and most of our negatives ruined.' (Jeers, laughter, and 'Tell us another!' from the back.) 'I have mentioned the ape-men, and I cannot forbear from saying that some of the sounds which now meet my ears bring back most vividly to my recollection my experiences with those interesting creatures.' (Laughter.) 'In spite of the destruction of so many invaluable negatives, there still remains in our collection a certain number of corroborative photographs showing the conditions of life upon the plateau. Did they accuse them of having forged these photographs?' (A voice, 'Yes,' and considerable interruption which ended in several men being put out of the hall.) 'The negatives were open to the inspection of experts. But what other evidence had they? Under the conditions of their escape it was naturally impossible to bring a large amount of baggage, but they had rescued Professor Summerlee's collections of butterflies and beetles, containing many new species. Was this not evidence?' (Several voices, 'No.') 'Who said no?'\n\n\"DR. ILLINGWORTH (rising): 'Our point is that such a collection might have been made in other places than a prehistoric plateau.' (Applause.)\n\n\"PROFESSOR CHALLENGER: 'No doubt, sir, we have to bow to your scientific authority, although I must admit that the name is unfamiliar. Passing, then, both the photographs and the entomological collection, I come to the varied and accurate information which we bring with us upon points which have never before been elucidated. For example, upon the domestic habits of the pterodactyl\u2014'(A voice: 'Bosh,' and uproar)\u2014'I say, that upon the domestic habits of the pterodactyl we can throw a flood of light. I can exhibit to you from my portfolio a picture of that creature taken from life which would convince you\u2014'\n\n\"DR. ILLINGWORTH: 'No picture could convince us of anything.'\n\n\"PROFESSOR CHALLENGER: 'You would require to see the thing itself?'\n\n\"DR. ILLINGWORTH: 'Undoubtedly.'\n\n\"PROFESSOR CHALLENGER: 'And you would accept that?'\n\n\"DR. ILLINGWORTH (laughing): 'Beyond a doubt.'\n\n\"It was at this point that the sensation of the evening arose\u2014a sensation so dramatic that it can never have been paralleled in the history of scientific gatherings. Professor Challenger raised his hand in the air as a signal, and at once our colleague, Mr. E. D. Malone, was observed to rise and to make his way to the back of the platform. An instant later he reappeared in company of a gigantic negro, the two of them bearing between them a large square packing-case. It was evidently of great weight, and was slowly carried forward and placed in front of the Professor's chair. All sound had hushed in the audience and everyone was absorbed in the spectacle before them. Professor Challenger drew off the top of the case, which formed a sliding lid. Peering down into the box he snapped his fingers several times and was heard from the Press seat to say, 'Come, then, pretty, pretty!' in a coaxing voice. An instant later, with a scratching, rattling sound, a most horrible and loathsome creature appeared from below and perched itself upon the side of the case. Even the unexpected fall of the Duke of Durham into the orchestra, which occurred at this moment, could not distract the petrified attention of the vast audience. The face of the creature was like the wildest gargoyle that the imagination of a mad medieval builder could have conceived. It was malicious, horrible, with two small red eyes as bright as points of burning coal. Its long, savage mouth, which was held half-open, was full of a double row of shark-like teeth. Its shoulders were humped, and round them were draped what appeared to be a faded gray shawl. It was the devil of our childhood in person. There was a turmoil in the audience\u2014someone screamed, two ladies in the front row fell senseless from their chairs, and there was a general movement upon the platform to follow their chairman into the orchestra. For a moment there was danger of a general panic. Professor Challenger threw up his hands to still the commotion, but the movement alarmed the creature beside him. Its strange shawl suddenly unfurled, spread, and fluttered as a pair of leathery wings. Its owner grabbed at its legs, but too late to hold it. It had sprung from the perch and was circling slowly round the Queen's Hall with a dry, leathery flapping of its ten-foot wings, while a putrid and insidious odor pervaded the room. The cries of the people in the galleries, who were alarmed at the near approach of those glowing eyes and that murderous beak, excited the creature to a frenzy. Faster and faster it flew, beating against walls and chandeliers in a blind frenzy of alarm. 'The window! For heaven's sake shut that window!' roared the Professor from the platform, dancing and wringing his hands in an agony of apprehension. Alas, his warning was too late! In a moment the creature, beating and bumping along the wall like a huge moth within a gas-shade, came upon the opening, squeezed its hideous bulk through it, and was gone. Professor Challenger fell back into his chair with his face buried in his hands, while the audience gave one long, deep sigh of relief as they realized that the incident was over.\n\n\"Then\u2014oh! how shall one describe what took place then\u2014when the full exuberance of the majority and the full reaction of the minority united to make one great wave of enthusiasm, which rolled from the back of the hall, gathering volume as it came, swept over the orchestra, submerged the platform, and carried the four heroes away upon its crest?\" (Good for you, Mac!) \"If the audience had done less than justice, surely it made ample amends. Every one was on his feet. Every one was moving, shouting, gesticulating. A dense crowd of cheering men were round the four travelers. 'Up with them! up with them!' cried a hundred voices. In a moment four figures shot up above the crowd. In vain they strove to break loose. They were held in their lofty places of honor. It would have been hard to let them down if it had been wished, so dense was the crowd around them. 'Regent Street! Regent Street!' sounded the voices. There was a swirl in the packed multitude, and a slow current, bearing the four upon their shoulders, made for the door. Out in the street the scene was extraordinary. An assemblage of not less than a hundred thousand people was waiting. The close-packed throng extended from the other side of the Langham Hotel to Oxford Circus. A roar of acclamation greeted the four adventurers as they appeared, high above the heads of the people, under the vivid electric lamps outside the hall. 'A procession! A procession!' was the cry. In a dense phalanx, blocking the streets from side to side, the crowd set forth, taking the route of Regent Street, Pall Mall, St. James's Street, and Piccadilly. The whole central traffic of London was held up, and many collisions were reported between the demonstrators upon the one side and the police and taxi-cabmen upon the other. Finally, it was not until after midnight that the four travelers were released at the entrance to Lord John Roxton's chambers in the Albany, and that the exuberant crowd, having sung 'They are Jolly Good Fellows' in chorus, concluded their program with 'God Save the King.' So ended one of the most remarkable evenings that London has seen for a considerable time.\"\n\nSo far my friend Macdona; and it may be taken as a fairly accurate, if florid, account of the proceedings. As to the main incident, it was a bewildering surprise to the audience, but not, I need hardly say, to us. The reader will remember how I met Lord John Roxton upon the very occasion when, in his protective crinoline, he had gone to bring the \"Devil's chick\" as he called it, for Professor Challenger. I have hinted also at the trouble which the Professor's baggage gave us when we left the plateau, and had I described our voyage I might have said a good deal of the worry we had to coax with putrid fish the appetite of our filthy companion. If I have not said much about it before, it was, of course, that the Professor's earnest desire was that no possible rumor of the unanswerable argument which we carried should be allowed to leak out until the moment came when his enemies were to be confuted.\n\nOne word as to the fate of the London pterodactyl. Nothing can be said to be certain upon this point. There is the evidence of two frightened women that it perched upon the roof of the Queen's Hall and remained there like a diabolical statue for some hours. The next day it came out in the evening papers that Private Miles, of the Coldstream Guards, on duty outside Marlborough House, had deserted his post without leave, and was therefore courtmartialed. Private Miles' account, that he dropped his rifle and took to his heels down the Mall because on looking up he had suddenly seen the devil between him and the moon, was not accepted by the Court, and yet it may have a direct bearing upon the point at issue. The only other evidence which I can adduce is from the log of the SS. Friesland, a Dutch-American liner, which asserts that at nine next morning, Start Point being at the time ten miles upon their starboard quarter, they were passed by something between a flying goat and a monstrous bat, which was heading at a prodigious pace south and west. If its homing instinct led it upon the right line, there can be no doubt that somewhere out in the wastes of the Atlantic the last European pterodactyl found its end.\n\nAnd Gladys\u2014oh, my Gladys!\u2014Gladys of the mystic lake, now to be renamed the Central, for never shall she have immortality through me. Did I not always see some hard fiber in her nature? Did I not, even at the time when I was proud to obey her behest, feel that it was surely a poor love which could drive a lover to his death or the danger of it? Did I not, in my truest thoughts, always recurring and always dismissed, see past the beauty of the face, and, peering into the soul, discern the twin shadows of selfishness and of fickleness glooming at the back of it? Did she love the heroic and the spectacular for its own noble sake, or was it for the glory which might, without effort or sacrifice, be reflected upon herself? Or are these thoughts the vain wisdom which comes after the event? It was the shock of my life. For a moment it had turned me to a cynic. But already, as I write, a week has passed, and we have had our momentous interview with Lord John Roxton and\u2014well, perhaps things might be worse.\n\nLet me tell it in a few words. No letter or telegram had come to me at Southampton, and I reached the little villa at Streatham about ten o'clock that night in a fever of alarm. Was she dead or alive? Where were all my nightly dreams of the open arms, the smiling face, the words of praise for her man who had risked his life to humor her whim? Already I was down from the high peaks and standing flat-footed upon earth. Yet some good reasons given might still lift me to the clouds once more. I rushed down the garden path, hammered at the door, heard the voice of Gladys within, pushed past the staring maid, and strode into the sitting-room. She was seated in a low settee under the shaded standard lamp by the piano. In three steps I was across the room and had both her hands in mine.\n\n\"Gladys!\" I cried, \"Gladys!\"\n\nShe looked up with amazement in her face. She was altered in some subtle way. The expression of her eyes, the hard upward stare, the set of the lips, was new to me. She drew back her hands.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she said.\n\n\"Gladys!\" I cried. \"What is the matter? You are my Gladys, are you not\u2014little Gladys Hungerton?\"\n\n\"No,\" said she, \"I am Gladys Potts. Let me introduce you to my husband.\"\n\nHow absurd life is! I found myself mechanically bowing and shaking hands with a little ginger-haired man who was coiled up in the deep arm-chair which had once been sacred to my own use. We bobbed and grinned in front of each other.\n\n\"Father lets us stay here. We are getting our house ready,\" said Gladys.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said I.\n\n\"You didn't get my letter at Para, then?\"\n\n\"No, I got no letter.\"\n\n\"Oh, what a pity! It would have made all clear.\"\n\n\"It is quite clear,\" said I.\n\n\"I've told William all about you,\" said she. \"We have no secrets. I am so sorry about it. But it couldn't have been so very deep, could it, if you could go off to the other end of the world and leave me here alone. You're not crabby, are you?\"\n\n\"No, no, not at all. I think I'll go.\"\n\n\"Have some refreshment,\" said the little man, and he added, in a confidential way, \"It's always like this, ain't it? And must be unless you had polygamy, only the other way round; you understand.\" He laughed like an idiot, while I made for the door.\n\nI was through it, when a sudden fantastic impulse came upon me, and I went back to my successful rival, who looked nervously at the electric push.\n\n\"Will you answer a question?\" I asked.\n\n\"Well, within reason,\" said he.\n\n\"How did you do it? Have you searched for hidden treasure, or discovered a pole, or done time on a pirate, or flown the Channel, or what? Where is the glamour of romance? How did you get it?\"\n\nHe stared at me with a hopeless expression upon his vacuous, good-natured, scrubby little face.\n\n\"Don't you think all this is a little too personal?\" he said.\n\n\"Well, just one question,\" I cried. \"What are you? What is your profession?\"\n\n\"I am a solicitor's clerk,\" said he. \"Second man at Johnson and Merivale's, 41 Chancery Lane.\"\n\n\"Good-night!\" said I, and vanished, like all disconsolate and broken-hearted heroes, into the darkness, with grief and rage and laughter all simmering within me like a boiling pot.\n\nOne more little scene, and I have done. Last night we all supped at Lord John Roxton's rooms, and sitting together afterwards we smoked in good comradeship and talked our adventures over. It was strange under these altered surroundings to see the old, well-known faces and figures. There was Challenger, with his smile of condescension, his drooping eyelids, his intolerant eyes, his aggressive beard, his huge chest, swelling and puffing as he laid down the law to Summerlee. And Summerlee, too, there he was with his short briar between his thin moustache and his gray goat's-beard, his worn face protruded in eager debate as he queried all Challenger's propositions. Finally, there was our host, with his rugged, eagle face, and his cold, blue, glacier eyes with always a shimmer of devilment and of humor down in the depths of them. Such is the last picture of them that I have carried away.\n\nIt was after supper, in his own sanctum\u2014the room of the pink radiance and the innumerable trophies\u2014that Lord John Roxton had something to say to us. From a cupboard he had brought an old cigar-box, and this he laid before him on the table.\n\n\"There's one thing,\" said he, \"that maybe I should have spoken about before this, but I wanted to know a little more clearly where I was. No use to raise hopes and let them down again. But it's facts, not hopes, with us now. You may remember that day we found the pterodactyl rookery in the swamp\u2014what? Well, somethin' in the lie of the land took my notice. Perhaps it has escaped you, so I will tell you. It was a volcanic vent full of blue clay.\" The Professors nodded.\n\n\"Well, now, in the whole world I've only had to do with one place that was a volcanic vent of blue clay. That was the great De Beers Diamond Mine of Kimberley\u2014what? So you see I got diamonds into my head. I rigged up a contraption to hold off those stinking beasts, and I spent a happy day there with a spud. This is what I got.\"\n\nHe opened his cigar-box, and tilting it over he poured about twenty or thirty rough stones, varying from the size of beans to that of chestnuts, on the table.\n\n\"Perhaps you think I should have told you then. Well, so I should, only I know there are a lot of traps for the unwary, and that stones may be of any size and yet of little value where color and consistency are clean off. Therefore, I brought them back, and on the first day at home I took one round to Spink's, and asked him to have it roughly cut and valued.\"\n\nHe took a pill-box from his pocket, and spilled out of it a beautiful glittering diamond, one of the finest stones that I have ever seen.\n\n\"There's the result,\" said he. \"He prices the lot at a minimum of two hundred thousand pounds. Of course it is fair shares between us. I won't hear of anythin' else. Well, Challenger, what will you do with your fifty thousand?\"\n\n\"If you really persist in your generous view,\" said the Professor, \"I should found a private museum, which has long been one of my dreams.\"\n\n\"And you, Summerlee?\"\n\n\"I would retire from teaching, and so find time for my final classification of the chalk fossils.\"\n\n\"I'll use my own,\" said Lord John Roxton, \"in fitting a well-formed expedition and having another look at the dear old plateau. As to you, young fellah, you, of course, will spend yours in gettin' married.\"\n\n\"Not just yet,\" said I, with a rueful smile. \"I think, if you will have me, that I would rather go with you.\"\n\nLord Roxton said nothing, but a brown hand was stretched out to me across the table." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "When the World Screamed", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "science fiction" + ], + "tags": [ + "Professor Challenger", + "Fiction", + "Short Stories" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "I had a vague recollection of having heard my friend Edward Malone, of the Gazette, speak of Professor Challenger, with whom he had been associated in some remarkable adventures. I am so busy, however, with my own profession, and my firm has been so overtaxed with orders, that I know little of what is going on in the world outside my own special interests. My general recollection was that Challenger has been depicted as a wild genius of a violent and intolerant disposition. I was greatly surprised to receive a business communication from him which was in the following terms:\n\n'14 (Bis), Enmore Gardens, Kensington. 'Sir,\u2014 'I have occasion to engage the services of an expert in Artesian borings. I will not conceal from you that my opinion of experts is not a high one, and that I have usually found that a man who, like myself, has a well-equipped brain can take a sounder and broader view than the man who professes a special knowledge (which, alas, is so often a mere profession), and is therefore limited in his outlook. None the less, I am disposed to give you a trial. Looking down the list of Artesian authorities, a certain oddity\u2014I had almost written absurdity\u2014in your name attracted my attention, and I found upon inquiry that my young friend, Mr. Edward Malone, was actually acquainted with you. I am therefore writing to say that I should be glad to have an interview with you, and that if you satisfy my requirements, and my standard is no mean one, I may be inclined to put a most important matter into your hands. I can say no more at present as the matter is of extreme secrecy, which can only be discussed by word of mouth. I beg, therefore, that you will at once cancel any engagement which you may happen to have, and that you will call upon me at the above address at 10.30 in the morning of next Friday. There is a scraper as well as a mat, and Mrs. Challenger is most particular.\n\n'I remain, Sir, as I began, 'George Edward Challenger.'\n\nI handed this letter to my chief clerk to answer, and he informed the Professor that Mr. Peerless Jones would be glad to keep the appointment as arranged. It was a perfectly civil business note, but it began with the phrase: 'Your letter (undated) has been received.'\n\nThis drew a second epistle from the Professor:\n\n'Sir,' he said and his writing looked like a barbed wire fence\u2014'I observe that you animadvert upon the trifle that my letter was undated. Might I draw your attention to the fact that, as some return for a monstrous taxation, our Government is in the habit of affixing a small circular sign or stamp upon the outside on the envelope which notifies the date of posting? Should this sign be missing or illegible your remedy lies with the proper postal authorities. Meanwhile, I would ask you to confine your observations to matters which concern the business over which I consult you, and to cease to comment upon the form which my own letters may assume.'\n\nIt was clear to me that I was dealing with a lunatic, so I thought it well before I went any further in the matter to call upon my friend Malone, whom I had known since the old days when we both played Rugger for Richmond. I found him the same jolly Irishman as ever, and much amused at my first brush with Challenger.\n\n'That's nothing, my boy,' said he. 'You'll feel as if you had been skinned alive when you have been with him five minutes. He beats the world for offensiveness.'\n\n'But why should the world put up with it?'\n\n'They don't. If you collected all the libel actions and all the rows and all the police-court assaults\u2014'\n\n'Assaults!'\n\n'Bless you, he would think nothing of throwing you downstairs if you have a disagreement. He is a primitive cave-man in a lounge suit. I can see him with a club in one hand and a jagged bit of flint in the other. Some people are born out of their proper century, but he is born out of his millennium. He belongs to the early neolithic or thereabouts.'\n\n'And he a professor!'\n\n'There is the wonder of it! It's the greatest brain in Europe, with a driving force behind it that can turn all his dreams into facts.\n\nThey do all they can to hold him back for his colleagues hate him like poison, but a lot of trawlers might as well try to hold back the Berengaria. He simply ignores them and steams on his way.'\n\n'Well,' said I, 'one thing is clear. I don't want to have anything to do with him. I'll cancel that appointment.'\n\n'Not a bit of it. You will keep it to the minute\u2014and mind that it is to the minute or you will hear of it.'\n\n'Why should I?'\n\n'Well, I'll tell you. First of all, don't take too seriously what I have said about old Challenger. Everyone who gets close to him learns to love him. There is no real harm in the old bear. Why, I remember how he carried an Indian baby with the smallpox on his back for a hundred miles from the back country down to the Madeira river. He is big every way. He won't hurt if you get right with him.'\n\n'I won't give him the chance.'\n\n'You will be a fool if you don't. Have you ever heard of the Hengist Down Mystery\u2014the shaft-sinking on the South Coast?'\n\n'Some secret coal-mining exploration, I understand.'\n\nMalone winked. 'Well, you can put it down as that if you like. You see, I am in the old man's confidence, and I can't say anything until he gives the word. But I may tell you this, for it has been in the Press. A man, Betterton, who made his money in rubber, left his whole estate to Challenger some years ago, with the provision that it should be used in the interests of science. It proved to be an enormous sum\u2014 several millions. Challenger then bought a property at Hengist Down, in Sussex. It was worthless land on the north edge of the chalk country, and he got a large tract of it, which he wired off. There was a deep gully in the middle of it. Here he began to make an excavation. He announced'\u2014here Malone winked again\u2014'that there was petroleum in England and that he meant to prove it. He built a little model village with a colony of well-paid workers who are all sworn to keep their mouths shut. The gully is wired off as well as the estate, and the place is guarded by bloodhounds. Several pressmen have nearly lost their lives, to say nothing of the seats of their trousers, from these creatures. It's a big operation, and Sir Thomas Morden's firm has it in hand, but they also are sworn to secrecy. Clearly the time has come when Artesian help is needed. Now, would you not be foolish to refuse such a job as that, with all the interest and experience and a big fat cheque at the end of it\u2014to say nothing of rubbing shoulders with the most wonderful man you have ever met or are ever likely to meet?'\n\nMalone's arguments prevailed, and Friday morning found me on my way to Enmore Gardens, I took such particular care to be in time that I found myself at the door twenty minutes too soon. I was waiting in the street when it struck me that I recognized the Rolls- Royce with the silver arrow mascot at the door. It was certainly that of Jack Devonshire, the junior partner of the great Morden firm. I had always known him as the most urbane of men, so that it was rather a shock to me when he suddenly appeared, and standing outside the door he raised both his hands, to heaven and said with great fervour: 'Damn him! Oh, damn him!'\n\n'What is up, Jack? You seem peeved this morning.'\n\n'Hullo, Peerless! Are you in on this job, too?'\n\n'There seems a chance of it.'\n\n'Well, you find it chastening to the temper.'\n\n'Rather more so than yours can stand, apparently.'\n\n'Well, I should say so. The butler's message to me was: \"The Professor desired me to say, sir, that he was rather busy at present eating an egg, and that if you would call at some more convenient time he would very likely see you.\" That was the message delivered by a servant. I may add that I had called to collect forty-two thousand pounds that he owes us.'\n\nI whistled.\n\n'You can't get your money?'\n\n'Oh, yes, he is all right about money. I'll do the old gorilla the justice to say that he is open- handed with money. But he pays when he likes and how he likes, and he cares for nobody.\n\nHowever, you go and try your luck and see how you like it.' With that he flung himself into his motor and was off.\n\nI waited with occasional glances at my watch until the zero hour should arrive. I am, if I may say so, a fairly hefty individual, and a runner-up for the Belsize Boxing Club middle-weights, but I have never faced an interview with such trepidation as this. It was not physical, for I was confident I could hold my own if this inspired lunatic should attack me, but it was a mixture of feelings in which fear of some public scandal and dread of losing a lucrative contract were mingled. However, things are always easier when imagination ceases and action begins. I snapped up my watch and made for the door.\n\nIt was opened by an old wooden-faced butler, a man who bore an expression, or an absence of expression, which gave the impression that he was so inured to shocks that nothing on earth would surprise him.\n\n'By appointment, sir?' he asked.\n\n'Certainly.'\n\nHe glanced at a list in his hand.\n\n'Your name, sir?... Quite so, Mr. Peerless Jones... Ten-thirty. Everything is in order. We have to be careful, Mr. Jones, for we are much annoyed by journalists. The Professor, as you may be aware, does not approve of the Press. This way, sir. Professor Challenger is now receiving.'\n\nThe next instant I found myself in the presence. I believe that my friend, Ted Malone, has described the man in his 'Lost World' yarn better than I can hope to do, so I'll leave it at that. All I was aware of was a huge trunk of a man behind a mahogany desk, with a great spade-shaped black beard and two large grey eyes half covered with insolent drooping eyelids. His big head sloped back, his beard bristled forward, and his whole appearance conveyed one single impression of arrogant intolerance. 'Well, what the devil do you want?' was written all over him. I laid my card on the table.\n\n'Ah yes,' he said, picking it up and handling it as if he disliked the smell of it. 'Of course. You are the expert so-called. Mr. Jones\u2014 Mr. Peerless Jones. You may thank your godfather, Mr. Jones, for it was this ludicrous prefix which first drew my attention to you.'\n\n'I am here, Professor Challenger, for a business interview and not to discuss my own name,' said I, with all the dignity I could master.\n\n'Dear me, you seem to be a very touchy person, Mr. Jones. Your nerves are in a highly irritable condition. We must walk warily in dealing with you, Mr. Jones. Pray sit down and compose yourself. I have been reading your little brochure upon the reclaiming of the Sinai Peninsula. Did you write it yourself?'\n\n'Naturally, sir. My name is on it.'\n\n'Quite so! Quite so! But it does not always follow, does it? However, I am prepared to accept your assertion. The book is not without merit of a sort. Beneath the dullness of the diction one gets glimpses of an occasional idea. There are germs of thought here and there. Are you a married man?'\n\n'No, sir. I am not.'\n\n'Then there is some chance of your keeping a secret.'\n\n'If I promised to do so, I would certainly keep my promise. 'So you say. My young friend, Malone'\u2014he spoke as if Ted were ten years of age\u2014'has a good opinion of you. He says that I may trust you. This trust is a very great one, for I am engaged just now in one of the greatest experiments\u2014I may even say the greatest experiment \u2014in the history of the world. I ask for your participation.'\n\n'I shall be honoured.'\n\n'It is indeed an honour. I will admit that I should have shared my labours with no one were it not that the gigantic nature of the undertaking calls for the highest technical skill. Now, Mr. Jones, having obtained your promise of inviolable secrecy, I come down to the essential point. It is this\u2014that the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed, as I believe, with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own.' Clearly the man was a lunatic.\n\n'Your brain, I observe,' he continued, 'fails to register. But it will gradually absorb the idea.\n\nYou will recall how a moor or heath resembles the hairy side of a giant animal. A certain analogy runs through all nature. You will then consider the secular rise and fall of land, which indicates the slow respiration of the creature. Finally, you will note the fidgetings and scratchings which appear to our Lilliputian perceptions as earthquakes and convulsions.'\n\n'What about volcanoes?' I asked.\n\n'Tut, tut! They correspond to the heat spots upon our own bodies.'\n\nMy brain whirled as I tried to find some answer to these monstrous contentions.\n\n'The temperature!' I cried. 'Is it not a fact that it rises rapidly as one descends, and that the centre of the earth is liquid heat?'\n\nHe waved my assertion aside.\n\n'You are probably aware, sir, since Council schools are now compulsory, that the earth is flattened at the poles. This means that the pole is nearer to the centre than any other point and would therefore be most affected by this heat of which you spoke. It is notorious, of course, that the conditions of the poles are tropical, is it not?'\n\n'The whole idea is utterly new to me.'\n\n'Of course it is. It is the privilege of the original thinker to put forward ideas which are new and usually unwelcome to the common clay. Now, sir, what is this?' He held up a small object which he had picked from the table.\n\n'I should say it is a sea-urchin.'\n\n'Exactly!' he cried, with an air of exaggerated surprise, as when an infant has done something clever. 'It is a sea-urchin\u2014a common echinus. Nature repeats itself in many forms regardless of the size. This echinus is a model, a prototype, of the world. You perceive that it is roughly circular, but flattened at the poles. Let us then regard the world as a huge echinus. What are your objections?'\n\nMy chief objection was that the thing was too absurd for argument, but I did not dare to say so. I fished around for some less sweeping assertion.\n\n'A living creature needs food,' I said. 'Where could the world sustain its huge bulk?'\n\n'An excellent point\u2014excellent!' said the Professor, with a huge air of patronage. 'You have a quick eye for the obvious, though you are slow in realizing the more subtle implications. How does the world get nourishment? Again we turn to our little friend the echinus. The water which surrounds it flows through the tubes of this small creature and provides its nutrition.'\n\n'Then you think that the water\u2014'\n\n'No, sir. The ether. The earth browses upon a circular path in the fields of space, and as it moves the ether is continually pouring through it and providing its vitality. Quite a flock of other little world-echini are doing the same thing, Venus, Mars, and the rest, each with its own field for grazing.'\n\nThe man was clearly mad, but there was no arguing with him. He accepted my silence as agreement and smiled at me in most beneficent fashion.\n\n'We are coming on, I perceive,' said he. 'Light is beginning to break in. A little dazzling at first, no doubt, but we will soon get used to it. Pray give me your attention while I found one or two more observations upon this little creature in my hand.\n\n'We will suppose that on this outer hard rind there were certain infinitely small insects which crawled upon the surface. Would the echinus ever be aware of their existence?'\n\n'I should say not.'\n\n'You can well imagine then, that the earth has not the least idea of the way in which it is utilized by the human race. It is quite unaware of this fungus growth of vegetation and evolution of tiny animalcules which has collected upon it during its travels round the sun as barnacles gather upon the ancient vessel. That is the present state of affairs, and that is what I propose to alter.'\n\nI stared in amazement. 'You propose to alter it?'\n\n'I propose to let the earth know that there is at least one person, George Edward Challenger, who calls for attention\u2014who, indeed, insists upon attention. It is certainly the first intimation it has ever had of the sort.'\n\n'And how, sir, will you do this?'\n\n'Ah, there we get down to business.\n\nYou have touched the spot. I will again call your attention to this interesting little creature which I hold in my hand. It is all nerves and sensibility beneath that protective crust. Is it not evident that if a parasitic animalcule desired to call its attention it would sink a hole in its shell and so stimulate its sensory apparatus?'\n\n'Certainly.'\n\n'Or, again, we will take the case of the homely flea or a mosquito which explores the surface of the human body. We may be unaware of its presence. But presently, when it sinks its proboscis through the skin, which is our crust, we are disagreeably reminded that we are not altogether alone. My plans now will no doubt begin to dawn upon you. Light breaks in the darkness.'\n\n'Good heavens! You propose to sink a shaft through the earth's crust?'\n\nHe closed his eyes with ineffable complacency.\n\n'You see before you,' he said, 'the first who will ever pierce that horny hide. I may even put it in the present tense and say who has pierced it.'\n\n'You have done it!'\n\n'With the very efficient aid of Morden and think I may say that I have done it. Several years of constant work which has been carried on night and day, and conducted by every known species of drill, borer, crusher, and explosive, has at last brought us to our goal.'\n\n'You don't mean to say you are through the crust!'\n\n'If your expressions denote bewilderment they may pass. If they denote incredulity\u2014'\n\n'No, sir, nothing of the kind.'\n\n'You will accept my statement without question. We are through the crust. It was exactly fourteen thousand four hundred and forty-two yards thick, or roughly eight miles. In the course of our sinking it may interest you to know that we have exposed a fortune in the matter of coal-beds which would probably in the long run defray the cost of the enterprise. Our chief difficulty has been the springs of water in the lower chalk and Hastings sands, but these we have overcome. The last stage has now been reached\u2014and the last stage is none other than Mr. Peerless Jones. You, sir, represent the mosquito. Your Artesian borer takes the place of the stinging proboscis. The brain has done its work. Exit the thinker. Enter the mechanical one, the peerless one, with his rod of metal. Do I make myself clear?'\n\n'You talk of eight miles!' I cried. 'Are you aware, sir, that five thousand feet is considered nearly the limit for Artesian borings? I am acquainted with one in upper Silesia which is six thousand two hundred feet deep, but it is looked upon as a wonder.'\n\n'You misunderstand me, Mr. Peerless. Either my explanation or your brain is at fault, and I will not insist upon which. I am well aware of the limits of Artesian borings, and it is not likely that I would have spent millions of pounds upon my colossal tunnel if a six-inch boring would have met my needs. All that I ask you is to have a drill ready which shall be as sharp as possible, not more than a hundred feet in length, and operated by an electric motor. An ordinary percussion drill driven home by a weight will meet every requirement.\n\n'Why by an electric motor?'\n\n'I am here, Mr. Jones, to give orders, not reasons. Before we finish it may happen\u2014it may, I say, happen\u2014that your very life may depend upon this drill being started from a distance by electricity. It can, I presume, be done?'\n\n'Certainly it can be done.'\n\n'Then prepare to do it. The matter is not yet ready for your actual presence, but your preparations may now be made. I have nothing more to say.'\n\n'But it is essential,' I expostulated, 'that you should let me know what soil the drill is to penetrate. Sand, or clay, or chalk would each need different treatment.'\n\n'Let us say jelly,' said Challenger. 'Yes, we will for the present suppose that you have to sink your drill into jelly. And now, Mr. Jones, I have matters of some importance to engage my mind, so I will wish you good morning. You can draw up a formal contract with mention of your charges for my Head of Works.'\n\nI bowed and turned, but before I reached the door my curiosity overcame me.\n\nHe was already writing furiously with a quill pen screeching over the paper, and he looked up angrily at my interruption.\n\n'Well, sir, what now? I had hoped you were gone.\n\n'I only wished to ask you, sir, what the object of so extraordinary an experiment can be?'\n\n'Away, sir, away!' he cried, angrily. 'Raise your mind above the base mercantile and utilitarian needs of commerce. Shake off your paltry standards of business. Science seeks knowledge. Let the knowledge lead us where it will, we still must seek it. To know once for all what we are, why we are, where we are, is that not in itself the greatest of all human aspirations? Away, sir, away!'\n\nHis great black head was bowed over his papers once more and blended with his beard. The quill pen screeched more shrilly than ever. So I left him, this extraordinary man, with my head in a whirl at the thought of the strange business in which I now found myself to be his partner.\n\nWhen I got back to my office I found Ted Malone waiting with a broad grin upon his face to know the result of my interview.\n\n'Well!' he cried. 'None the worse? No case of assault and battery? You must have handled him very tactfully. What do you think of the old boy?'\n\n'The most aggravating, insolent, intolerant, self-opinionated man I have ever met, but\u2014'\n\n'Exactly!' cried Malone. 'We all come to that \"but.\" Of course, he is all you say and a lot more, but one feels that so big a man is not to be measured in our scale, and that we can endure from him what we would not stand from any other living mortal. Is that not so?'\n\n'Well, I don't know him well enough yet to say, but I will admit that if he is not a mere bullying megalomaniac, and if what he says is true, then he certainly is in a class by himself. But is it true?'\n\n'Of course it is true. Challenger always delivers the goods. Now, where are you exactly in the matter? Has he told you about Hengist Down?'\n\n'Yes, in a sketchy sort of way.'\n\n'Well, you may take it from me that the whole thing is colossal colossal in conception and colossal in execution. He hates pressmen, but I am in his confidence, for he knows that I will publish no more than he authorizes. Therefore I have his plans, or some of his plans. He is such a deep old bird that one never is sure if one has really touched bottom. Anyhow, I know enough to assure you that Hengist Down is a practical proposition and nearly completed. My advice to you now is simply to await events, and meanwhile to get your gear all ready. You'll hear soon enough either from him or from me.'\n\nAs it happened, it was from Malone himself that I heard. He came round quite early to my office some weeks later, as the bearer of a message.\n\n'I've come from Challenger' said he.\n\n'You are like the pilot fish to the shark.'\n\n'I'm proud to be anything to him. He really is a wonder. He has done it all right. It's your turn now, and then he is ready to ring up the curtain.'\n\n'Well, I can't believe it until I see it, but I have everything ready and loaded on a lorry. I could start it off at any moment.'\n\n'Then do so at once. I've given you a tremendous character for energy and punctuality, so mind you don't let me down. In the meantime, come down with me by rail and I will give you an idea of what has to be done.'\n\nIt was a lovely spring morning\u2014May 22nd, to be exact\u2014when we made that fateful journey which brought me on to a stage which is destined to be historical. On the way Malone handed me a note from Challenger which I was to accept as my instructions.\n\n'Sir,' (it ran)\u2014\n\n'Upon arriving at Hengist Down you will put yourself at the disposal of Mr. Barforth, the Chief Engineer, who is in possession of my plans. My young friend, Malone, the bearer of this, is also in touch with me and may protect me from any personal contact. We have now experienced certain phenomena in the shaft at and below the fourteen thousand-foot level which fully bear out my views as to the nature of a planetary body, but some more sensational proof is needed before I can hope to make an impression upon the torpid intelligence of the modern scientific world.\n\nThat proof you are destined to afford, and they to witness. As you descend in the lifts you will observe, presuming that you have the rare quality of observation, that you pass in succession the secondary chalk beds, the coal measures, some Devonian and Cambrian indications, and finally the granite, through which the greater part of our tunnel is conducted. The bottom is now covered with tarpaulin, which I order you not to tamper with, as any clumsy handling of the sensitive inner cuticle of the earth might bring about premature results. At my instruction, two strong beams have been laid across the shaft twenty feet above the bottom, with a space between them. This space will act as a clip to hold up your Artesian tube. Fifty feet of drill will suffice, twenty of which will project below the beams, so that the point of the drill comes nearly down to the tarpaulin. As you value your life do not let it go further. Thirty feet will then project upwards in the shaft, and when you have released it we may assume that not less than forty feet of drill will bury itself in the earth's substance. As this substance is very soft I find that you will probably need no driving power, and that simply a release of the tube will suffice by its own weight to drive it into the layer which we have uncovered. These instructions would seem to be sufficient for any ordinary intelligence, but I have little doubt that you will need more, which can be referred to me through our young friend, Malone.\n\n'GEORGE EDWARD CHALLENGER.'\n\nIt can be imagined that when we arrived at the station of Storrington, near the northern foot of the South Downs, I was in a state of considerable nervous tension. A weather-worn Vauxhall thirty landaulette was awaiting us, and bumped us for six or seven miles over by-paths and lanes which, in spite of their natural seclusion, were deeply rutted and showed every sign of heavy traffic. A broken lorry lying in the grass at one point showed that others had found it rough going as well as we. Once a huge piece of machinery which seemed to be the valves and piston of a hydraulic pump projected itself, all rusted, from a clump of furze.\n\n'That's Challenger's doing,' said Malone, grinning.\n\n'Said it was one-tenth of an inch out of estimate, so he simply chucked it by the wayside.'\n\n'With a lawsuit to follow, no doubt.'\n\n'A lawsuit! My dear chap, we should have a court of our own. We have enough to keep a judge busy for a year. Government too. The old devil cares for no one. Rex v. George Challenger and George Challenger v. Rex. A nice devil's dance the two will have from one court to another. Well, here we are. All right, Jenkins, you can let us in!'\n\nA huge man with a notable cauliflower ear was peering into the car, a scowl of suspicion upon his face. He relaxed and saluted as he recognized my companion.\n\n'All right, Mr. Malone. I thought it was the American Associated Press.'\n\n'Oh, they are on the track, are they?'\n\n'They to-day, and The Times yesterday. Oh, they are buzzing round proper. Look at that!' He indicated a distant dot upon the sky-line.\n\n'See that glint ! That's the telescope of the Chicago Daily News. Yes, they are fair after us now. I've seen 'em in rows, same as the crows, along the Beacon yonder.'\n\n'Poor old Press gang!' said Malone, as we entered a gate in a formidable barbed wire fence. 'I am one of them myself, and I know how it feels.\n\nAt this moment we heard a plaintive bleat behind us of 'Malone! Ted Malone!' It came from a fat little man who had just arrived upon a motor-bike and was at present struggling in the Herculean grasp of the gatekeeper.\n\n'Here, let me go!' he sputtered. 'Keep your hands off! Malone, call off this gorilla of yours.'\n\n'Let him go, Jenkins! He's a friend of mine!' cried Malone. 'Well, old bean, what is it? What are you after in these parts? Fleet Street is your stamping ground\u2014not the wilds of Sussex.'\n\n'You know what I am after perfectly well,' said our visitor. 'I've got the assignment to write a story about Hengist Down and I can't go home without the copy.'\n\n'Sorry, Roy, but you can't get anything here.\n\nYou'll have to stay on that side of the wire. If you want more you must go and see Professor Challenger and get his leave.'\n\n'I've been,' said the journalist, ruefully. 'I went this morning.'\n\n'Well, what did he say?'\n\n'He said he would put me through the window.'\n\nMalone laughed.\n\n'And what did you say?'\n\n'I said, \"What's wrong with the door?\" and I skipped through it just to show there was nothing wrong with it. It was no time for argument. I just went. What with that bearded Assyrian bull in London, and this Thug down here, who has ruined my clean celluloid, you seem to be keeping queer company, Ted Malone.'\n\n'I can't help you, Roy; I would if I could. They say in Fleet Street that you have never been beaten, but you are up against it this time. Get back to the office, and if you just wait a few days I'll give you the news as soon as the old man allows.'\n\n'No chance of getting in?'\n\n'Not an earthly.'\n\n'Money no object?'\n\n'You should know better than to say that.'\n\n'They tell me it's a short cut to New Zealand.'\n\n'It will be a short cut to the hospital if you butt in here, Roy. Good-bye, now. We have some work to do of our own.\n\n'That's Roy Perkins, the war correspondent,' said Malone as we walked across the compound. 'We've broken his record, for he is supposed to be undefeatable. It's his fat, little innocent face that carries him through everything. We were on the same staff once. Now there'\u2014he pointed to a cluster of pleasant red-roofed bungalows\u2014'are the quarters of the men. They are a splendid lot of picked workers who are paid far above ordinary rates. They have to be bachelors and teetotallers, and under oath of secrecy. I don't think there has been any leakage up to now. That field is their football ground and the detached house is their library and recreation room. The old man is some organizer, I can assure you. This is Mr. Barforth, the head engineer-in-charge.'\n\nA long, thin, melancholy man with deep lines of anxiety upon his face had appeared before us. 'I expect you are the Artesian engineer,' said he, in a gloomy voice. 'I was told to expect you. I am glad you've come, for I don't mind telling you that the responsibility of this thing is getting on my nerves. We work away, and I never know if it's a gush of chalk water, or a seam of coal, or a squirt of petroleum, or maybe a touch of hell fire that is coming next. We've been spared the last up to now, but you may make the connection for all I know.'\n\n'Is it so hot down there?'\n\n'Well, it's hot. There's no denying it. And yet maybe it is not hotter than the barometric pressure and the confined space might account for. Of course, the ventilation is awful. We pump the air down, but two-hour shifts are the most the men can do\u2014and they are willing lads too. The Professor was down yesterday, and he was very pleased with it all. You had best join us at lunch, and then you will see it for yourself.'\n\nAfter a hurried and frugal meal we were introduced with loving assiduity upon the part of the manager to the contents of his engine-house, and to the miscellaneous scrapheap of disused implements with which the grass was littered. On one side was a huge dismantled Arrol hydraulic shovel, with which the first excavations had been rapidly made. Beside it was a great engine which worked a continuous steel rope on which the skips were fastened which drew up the debris by successive stages from the bottom of the shaft. In the power-house were several Escher Wyss turbines of great horse-power running at one hundred and forty revolutions a minute and governing hydraulic accumulators which evolved a pressure of fourteen hundred pounds per square inch, passing in three-inch pipes down the shaft and operating four rock drills with hollow cutters of the Brandt type. Abutting upon the engine-house was the electric house supplying power for a very large lighting instalment, and next to that again was an extra turbine of two hundred horse-power, which drove a ten-foot fan forcing air down a twelve-inch pipe to the bottom of the workings.\n\nAll these wonders were shown with many technical explanations by their proud operator, who was well on his way to boring me stiff, as I may in turn have done my reader. There came a welcome interruption, however, when I heard the roar of wheels and rejoiced to see my Leyland three-tonner come rolling and heaving over the grass, heaped up with tools and sections of tubing, and bearing my foreman, Peters, and a very grimy assistant in front. The two of them set to work at once to unload my stuff and to carry it in. Leaving them at their work, the manager, with Malone and myself, approached the shaft.\n\nIt was a wondrous place, on a very much larger scale than I had imagined. The spoil banks, which represented the thousands of tons removed, had been built up into a great horseshoe around it, which now made a considerable hill. In the concavity of this horseshoe, composed of chalk, clay, coal, and granite, there rose up a bristle of iron pillars and wheels from which the pumps and the lifts were operated. They connected with the brick power building which filled up the gap in the horseshoe. Beyond it lay the open mouth of the shaft, a huge yawning pit, some thirty or forty feet in diameter, lined and topped with brick and cement. As I craned my neck over the side and gazed down into the dreadful abyss, which I had been assured was eight miles deep, my brain reeled at the thought of what it represented. The sunlight struck the mouth of it diagonally, and I could only see some hundreds of yards of dirty white chalk, bricked here and there where the surface had seemed unstable. Even as I looked, however, I saw, far, far down in the darkness, a tiny speck of light, the smallest possible dot, but clear and steady against the inky background.\n\n'What is that light?' I asked.\n\nMalone bent over the parapet beside me.\n\n'That's one of the cages coming up,' said he. 'Rather wonderful, is it not? That is a mile or more from us, and that little gleam is a powerful arc lamp. It travels quickly, and will be here in a few minutes.'\n\nSure enough the pin-point of light came larger and larger, until it flooded the tube with its silvery radiance, and I had to turn away my eyes from its blinding glare. A moment later the iron cage clashed up to the landing stage, and four men crawled out of it and passed on to the entrance.\n\n'Nearly all in,' said Malone. 'It is no joke to do a two-hour shift at that depth. Well, some of your stuff is ready to hand here. I suppose the best thing we can do is to go down. Then you will be able to judge the situation for yourself.'\n\nThere was an annexe to the engine-house into which he led me. A number of baggy suits of the lightest tussore material were hanging from the wall. Following Malone's example I took off every stitch of my clothes, and put on one of these suits, together with a pair of rubber-soled slippers. Malone finished before I did and left the dressing-room. A moment later I heard a noise like ten dog-fights rolled into one, and rushing out I found my friend rolling on the ground with his arms round the workman who was helping to stack my artesian tubing. He was endeavouring to tear something from him to which the other was most desperately clinging. But Malone was too strong for him, tore the object out of his grasp, and danced upon it until it was shattered to pieces. Only then did I recognize that it was a photographic camera. My grimy-faced artisan rose ruefully from the floor.\n\n'Confound you, Ted Malone!' said he. 'That was a new ten-guinea machine.'\n\n'Can't help it, Roy. I saw you take the snap, and there was only one thing to do.'\n\n'How the devil did you get mixed up with my outfit?' I asked, with righteous indignation.\n\nThe rascal winked and grinned. 'There are always and means,' said he.\n\n'But don't blame your foreman. He thought it was just a rag. I swapped clothes with his assistant, and in I came.'\n\n'And out you go,' said Malone. 'No use arguing, Roy. If Challenger were here he would set the dogs on you. I've been in a hole myself so I won't be hard, but I am watch-dog here, and I can bite as well as bark.\n\nCome on! Out you march!'\n\nSo our enterprising visitor was marched by two grinning workmen out of the compound. So now the public will at last understand the genesis of that wonderful four-column article headed 'Mad Dream of a Scientist' with the subtitle. 'A Bee-line to Australia,' which appeared in The Adviser some days later and brought Challenger to the verge of apoplexy, and the editor of The Adviser to the most disagreeable and dangerous interview of his lifetime. The article was a highly coloured and exaggerated account of the adventure of Roy Perkins, 'our experienced war correspondent' and it contained such purple passages as 'this hirsute bully of Enmore Gardens,' 'a compound guarded by barbed wire, plug-uglies, and bloodhounds,' and finally, 'I was dragged from the edge of the Anglo-Australian tunnel by two ruffians, the more savage being a jack-of-all trades whom I had previously known by sight as a hanger-on of the journalistic profession, while the other, a sinister figure in a strange tropical garb, was posing as an Artesian engineer, though his appearance was more reminiscent of Whitechapel.' Having ticked us off in this way, the rascal had an elaborate description of rails at the pit mouth, and of a zigzag excavation by which funicular trains were to burrow into the earth.\n\nThe only practical inconvenience arising from the article was that it notably increased that line of loafers who sat upon the South Downs waiting for something to happen. The day came when it did happen and when they wished themselves elsewhere.\n\nMy foreman with his faked assistant had littered the place with all my apparatus, my bellbox, my crowsfoot, the V-drills, the rods, and the weight, but Malone insisted that we disregard all that and descend ourselves to the lowest level. To this end we entered the cage, which was of latticed steel, and in the company of the chief engineer we shot down into the bowels of the earth. There were a series of automatic lifts, each with its own operating station hollowed out in the side of the excavation. They operated with great speed, and the experience was more like a vertical railway journey than the deliberate fall which we associate with the British lift.\n\nSince the cage was latticed and brightly illuminated, we had a clear view of the strata which we passed. I was conscious of each of them as we flashed past. There were the sallow lower chalk, the coffee-coloured Hastings beds, the lighter Ashburnham beds, the dark carboniferous clays, and then, gleaming in the electric light, band after band of jet-black, sparkling coal alternating with the rings of clay. Here and there brickwork had been inserted, but as a rule the shaft was self-supported, and one could but marvel at the immense labour and mechanical skill which it represented. Beneath the coal-beds I was conscious of jumbled strata of a concrete-like appearance, and then we shot down into the primitive granite, where the quartz crystals gleamed and twinkled as if the dark walls were sown with the dust of diamonds. Down we went and ever down\u2014lower now than ever mortals had ever before penetrated. The archaic rocks varied wonderfully in colour, and I can never forget one broad belt of rose-coloured felspar, which shone with an unearthly beauty before our powerful lamps. Stage after stage, and lift after lift, the air getting ever closer and hotter until even the light tussore garments were intolerable and the sweat was pouring down into those rubber-soled slippers. At last, just as I was thinking that I could stand it no more, the last lift came to a stand and we stepped out upon a circular platform which had been cut in the rock. I noticed that Malone gave a curiously suspicious glance round at the walls as he did so. If I did not know him to be amongst the bravest of men, I should say that he was exceedingly nervous.\n\n'Funny-looking stuff,' said the chief engineer, passing his hand over the nearest section of rock. He held it to the light and showed that it was glistening with a curious slimy scum.\n\n'There have been shiverings and tremblings down here. I don't know what we are dealing with. The Professor seems pleased with it, but it's all new to me.'\n\n'I am bound to say I've seen that wall fairly shake itself,' said Malone. 'Last time I was down here we fixed those two cross-beams for your drill, and when we cut into it for the supports it winced at every stroke. The old man's theory seemed absurd in solid old London town, but down here, eight miles under the surface, I am not so sure about it.'\n\n'If you saw what was under that tarpaulin you would be even less sure,' said the engineer. 'All this lower rock cut like cheese, and when we were through it we came on a new formation like nothing on earth. \"Cover it up! Don't touch it!\" said the Professor. So we tarpaulined it according to his instructions, and there it lies.\n\n'Could we not have a look?'\n\nA frightened expression came over the engineer's lugubrious countenance.\n\n'It's no joke disobeying the Professor,' said he. 'He is so damn cunning, too, that you never know what check he has set on you. However, we'll have a peep and chance it.'\n\nHe turned down our reflector lamp so that the light gleamed upon the black tarpaulin. Then he stooped and, seizing a rope which connected up with the corner of the covering, he disclosed half-a-dozen square yards of the surface beneath it.\n\nIt was a most extraordinary and terrifying sight. The floor consisted of some greyish material, glazed and shiny, which rose and fell in slow palpitation. The throbs were not direct, but gave the impression of a gentle ripple or rhythm, which ran across the surface. This surface itself was not entirely homogeneous, but beneath it, seen as through ground glass, there were dim whitish patches or vacuoles, which varied constantly in shape and size. We stood all three gazing spell-bound at this extraordinary sight.\n\n'Does look rather like a skinned animal,' said Malone, in an awed whisper. 'The old man may not be so far out with his blessed echinus.'\n\n'Good Lord!' I cried. 'And am I to plunge a harpoon into that beast!'\n\n'That's your privilege, my son,' said Malone, 'and, sad to relate, unless I give it a miss in baulk, I shall have to be at your side when you do it.'\n\n'Well, I won't,' said the head engineer, with decision.\n\n'I was never clearer on anything than I am on that. If the old man insists, then I resign my portfolio. Good Lord, look at that!'\n\nThe grey surface gave a sudden heave upwards, welling towards us as a wave does when you look down from the bulwarks. Then it subsided and the dim beatings and throbbings continued as before. Barforth lowered the rope and replaced the tarpaulin.\n\n'Seemed almost as if it knew we were here,' said he.\n\n'Why should it swell up towards us like that? I expect the light had some sort of effect upon it.'\n\n'What am I expected to do now?' I asked. Mr. Barforth pointed to two beams which lay across the pit just under the stopping place of the lift. There was an interval of about nine inches between them.\n\n'That was the old man's idea,' said he. 'I think I could have fixed it better, but you might as well try to argue with a mad buffalo. It is easier and safer just to do whatever he says. His idea is that you should use your six-inch bore and fasten it in some way between these supports.'\n\n'Well, I don't think there would be much difficulty about that,' I answered. 'I'll take the job over as from to-day.'\n\nIt was, as one might imagine, the strangest experience of my very varied life which has included well-sinking in every continent upon earth. As Professor Challenger was so insistent that the operation should be started from a distance, and as I began to see a good deal of sense in his contention, I had to plan some method of electric control, which was easy enough as the pit was wired from top to bottom. With infinite care my foreman, Peters, and I brought down our lengths of tubing and stacked them on the rocky ledge. Then we raised the stage of the lowest lift so as to give ourselves room.\n\nAs we proposed to use the percussion system, for it would not do to trust entirely to gravity, we hung our hundred-pound weight over a pulley beneath the lift, and ran our tubes down beneath it with a V-shaped terminal. Finally, the rope which held the weight was secured to the side of the shaft in such a way that an electrical discharge would release it. It was delicate and difficult work done in a more than tropical heat, and with the ever-present feeling that a slip of a foot or the dropping of a tool upon the tarpaulin beneath us might bring about some inconceivable catastrophe. We were awed, too, by our surroundings. Again and again I have seen a strange quiver and shiver pass down the walls, and have even felt a dull throb against my hands as I touched them. Neither Peters nor I were very sorry when we signalled for the last time that we were ready for the surface, and were able to report to Mr. Barforth that Professor Challenger could make his experiment as soon as he chose.\n\nAnd it was not long that we had to wait. Only three days after my date of completion my notice arrived.\n\nIt was an ordinary invitation card such as one uses for 'at homes,' and it ran thus:\n\n\u2002PROFESSOR G. E. CHALLENGER, F.R.S. MD., D.Sc., etc.\n\n\u2002(late President Zoological Institute and holder of so many honorary degrees and appointments that they overtax the capacity of this card)\n\n\u2002requests the attendance of MR. JONES (no lady)\n\n\u2002at 11.30 a.m. of Tuesday, June 21st, to witness a remarkable triumph of mind over matter at HENGIST DOWN, SUSSEX.\n\n\u2002Special train Victoria 10.5. Passengers pay their own fares. Lunch after the experiment or not\u2014according to circumstances. Station, Storrington.\n\n\u2002'R.S.V.P. (and at once with name in block letters), 14 (Bis), Enmore Gardens, S.W.'\n\nI found that Malone had just received a similar missive over which he was chuckling.\n\n'It is mere swank sending it to us,' said he. 'We have to be there whatever happens, as the hangman said to the murderer. But I tell you this has set all London buzzing. The old man is where he likes to be, with a pin-point limelight right on his hairy old head.'\n\nAnd so at last the great day came. Personally I thought it well to go down the night before so as to be sure that everything was in order. Our borer was fixed in position, the weight was adjusted, the electric contacts could be easily switched on, and I was satisfied that my own part in this strange experiment would be carried out without a hitch. The electric controls were operated at a point some five hundred yards from the mouth of the shaft, to minimize any personal danger. When on the fateful morning, an ideal English summer day, I came to the surface with my mind assured, I climbed half-way up the slope of the Down in order to have a general view of the proceedings.\n\nAll the world seemed to be coming to Hengist Down. As far as we could see the roads were dotted with people. Motor-cars came bumping and swaying down the lanes, and discharged their passengers at the gate of the compound. This was in most cases the end of their progress. A powerful band of janitors waited at the entrance, and no promises or bribes, but only the production of the coveted buff tickets, could get them any farther. They dispersed therefore and joined the vast crowd which was already assembling on the side of the hill and covering the ridge with a dense mass of spectators. The place was like Epsom Downs on the Derby Day. Inside the compound certain areas had been wired-off, and the various privileged people were conducted to the particular pen to which they had been allotted. There was one for peers, one for members of the House of Commons, and one for the heads of learned societies and the men of fame in the scientific world, including Le Pellier of the Sorbonne and Dr. Driesinger of the Berlin Academy. A special reserved enclosure with sandbags and a corrugated iron roof was set aside for three members of the Royal Family.\n\nAt a quarter past eleven a succession of chars-a-bancs brought up specially-invited guests from the station and I went down into the compound to assist at the reception.\n\nProfessor Challenger stood by the select enclosure, resplendent in frock-coat, white waistcoat, and burnished top-hat, his expression a blend of overpowering and almost offensive benevolence, mixed with most portentous self-importance.\n\n'Clearly a typical victim of the Jehovah complex,' as one of his critics described him. He assisted in conducting and occasionally in propelling his guests into their proper places, and then, having gathered the elite of the company around him, he took his station upon the top of a convenient hillock and looked around him with the air of the chairman who expects some welcoming applause. As none was forthcoming, he plunged at once into his subject, his voice booming to the farthest extremities of the enclosure.\n\n'Gentlemen,' he roared, 'upon this occasion I have no need to include the ladies. If I have not invited them to be present with us this morning it is not, I can assure you, for want of appreciation, for I may say'\u2014with elephantine humour and mock modesty\u2014'that the relations between us upon both sides have always been excellent, and indeed intimate. The real reason is that some small element of danger is involved in our experiment, though it is not sufficient to justify the discomposure which I see upon many of your faces. It will interest the members of the Press to know that I have reserved very special seats for them upon the spoil banks which immediately overlook the scene of the operation. They have shown an interest which is sometimes indistinguishable from impertinence in my affairs, so that on this occasion at least they cannot complain that I have been remiss in studying their convenience. If nothing happens, which is always possible, I have at least done my best for them. If, on the other hand, something does happen, they will be in an excellent position to experience and record it, should they ultimately feel equal to the task.\n\n'It is, as you will readily understand, impossible for a man of science to explain to what I may describe, without undue disrespect, as the common herd, the various reasons for his conclusions or his actions. I hear some unmannerly interruptions, and I will ask the gentleman with the horn spectacles to cease waving his umbrella. (A voice: \"Your description of your guests, sir, is most offensive.\") Possibly it is my phrase, \"the common herd,\" which has ruffled the gentleman. Let us say, then, that my listeners are a most uncommon herd. We will not quibble over phrases. I was about to say, before I was interrupted by this unseemly remark, that the whole matter is very fully and lucidly discussed in my forthcoming volume upon the earth, which I may describe with all due modesty as one of the epoch-making books of the world's history. (General interruption and cries of \"Get down to the facts!\" \"What are we here for?\" \"Is this a practical joke?\") I was about to make the matter clear, and if I have any further interruption I shall be compelled to take means to preserve decency and order, the lack of which is so painfully obvious. The position is, then, that I have sunk a shaft through the crust of the earth and that I am about to try the effect of a vigorous stimulation of its sensory cortex, a delicate operation which will be carried out by my subordinates, Mr. Peerless Jones, a self-styled expert in Artesian borings, and Mr. Edward Malone, who represents myself upon this occasion. The exposed and sensitive substance will be pricked, and how it will react is a matter for conjecture. If you will now kindly take your seats these two gentlemen will descend into the pit and make the final adjustments. I will then press the electric button upon this table and the experiment will be complete.'\n\nAn audience after one of Challenger's harangues usually felt as if, like the earth, its protective epidermis had been pierced and its nerves laid bare. This assembly was no exception, and there was a dull murmur of criticism and resentment as they returned to their places.\n\nChallenger sat alone on the top of the mound, a small table beside him, his black mane and beard vibrating with excitement, a most portentous figure.\n\nNeither Malone nor I could admire the scene, however, for we hurried off upon our extraordinary errand. Twenty minutes later we were at the bottom of the shaft, and had pulled the tarpaulin from the exposed surface.\n\nIt was an amazing sight which lay before us. By some strange cosmic telepathy the old planet seemed to know that an unheard-of liberty was about to be attempted. The exposed surface was like a boiling pot. Great grey bubbles rose and burst with a crackling report. The air-spaces and vacuoles below the skin separated and coalesced in an agitated activity. The transverse ripples were stronger and faster in their rhythm than before. A dark purple fluid appeared to pulse in the tortuous anastomoses of channels which lay under the surface. The throb of life was in it all. A heavy smell made the air hardly fit for human lungs.\n\nMy gaze was fixed upon this strange spectacle when Malone at my elbow gave a sudden gasp of alarm. 'My God, Jones!' he cried. 'Look there!'\n\nI gave one glance, and the next instant I released the electric connection and I sprang into the lift. 'Come on!' I cried. 'It may be a race for life!'\n\nWhat we had seen was indeed alarming. The whole lower shaft, it would seem, had shared in the increased activity which we had observed below, and the walls were throbbing and pulsing in sympathy. This movement had reacted upon the holes in which the beams rested, and it was clear that a very little further retraction\u2014a matter of inches \u2014the beams would fall. If they did so then the sharp end of my rod would, of course, penetrate the earth quite independently of the electric release. Before that happened it was vital that Malone and I should be out of the shaft. To be eight miles down in the earth with the chance any instant of some extraordinary convulsion taking place was a terrible prospect. We fled wildly for the surface.\n\nShall either of us ever forget that nightmare journey? The lifts whizzed and buzzed and yet the minutes seemed to be hours. As we reached each stage we sprang out, jumped into the next lift, touched the release and flew onwards. Through the steel latticed roof we could see far away the little circle of light which marked the mouth of the shaft. Now it grew wider and wider, until it came full circle and our glad eyes rested upon the brickwork of the opening. Up we shot, and up \u2014and then at last in a glad moment of joy and thankfulness we sprang out of our prison and had our feet upon the green sward once more. But it was touch and go. We had not gone thirty paces from the shaft when far down in the depths my iron dart shot into the nerve ganglion of old Mother Earth and the great moment had arrived.\n\nWhat was it happened? Neither Malone nor I was in a position to say, for both of us were swept off our feet as by a cyclone and swirled along the grass, revolving round and round like two curling stones upon an ice rink. At the same time our ears were assailed by the most horrible yell that ever yet was heard. Who is there of all the hundreds who have attempted it who has ever yet described adequately that terrible cry? It was a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek. For a full minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralysing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence, and floating away through the still summer air until it went echoing along the whole South Coast and even reached our French neighbours across the Channel. No sound in history has ever equalled the cry of the injured Earth.\n\nDazed and deafened, Malone and I were aware of the shock and of the sound, but it is from the narrative of others that we learned the other details of that extraordinary scene.\n\nThe first emergence from the bowels of the earth consisted of the lift cages. The other machinery being against the walls escaped the blast, but the solid floors of the cages took the full force of the upward current. When several separate pellets are placed in a blow-pipe they still shoot forth in their order and separately from each other.\n\nSo the fourteen lift cages appeared one after the other in the air, each soaring after the other, and describing a glorious parabola which landed one of them in the sea near Worthing pier, and a second one in a field not far from Chichester. Spectators have averred that of all the strange sights that they had ever seen nothing could exceed that of the fourteen lift cages sailing serenely through the blue heavens.\n\nThen came the geyser. It was an enormous spout of vile treacly substance of the consistence of tar, which shot up into the air to a height which has been computed at two thousand feet. An inquisitive aeroplane, which had been hovering over the scene, was picked off as by an Archie and made a forced landing, man and machine buried in filth. This horrible stuff, which had a most penetrating and nauseous odour, may have represented the life blood of the planet, or it may be, as Professor Driesinger and the Berlin School maintain, that it is a protective secretion, analogous to that of the skunk, which Nature has provided in order to defend Mother Earth from intrusive Challengers. If that were so the prime offender, seated on his throne upon the hillock, escaped untarnished, while the unfortunate Press were so soaked and saturated, being in the direct line of fire, that none of them was capable of entering decent society for many weeks. This gush of putridity was blown southwards by the breeze, and descended upon the unhappy crowd who had waited so long and so patiently upon the crest of the Downs to see what would happen. There were no casualties. No home was left desolate, but many were made odoriferous, and still carry within their walls some souvenir of that great occasion.\n\nAnd then came the closing of the pit. As Nature slowly closes a wound from below upwards, so does the Earth with extreme rapidity mend any rent which is made in its vital substance. There was a prolonged high-pitched crash as the sides of the shaft came together, the sound, reverberating from the depths and then rising higher and higher until with a deafening bang the brick circle at the orifice flattened out and clashed together, while a tremor like a small earthquake shook down the spoil banks and piled a pyramid fifty feet high of debris and broken iron over the spot where the hole had been. Professor Challenger's experiment was not only finished, it was buried from human sight for ever. If it were not for the obelisk which has now been erected by the Royal Society it is doubtful if our descendants would ever know the exact site of that remarkable occurrence.\n\nAnd then came the grand finale. For a long period after these successive phenomena there was a hush and a tense stillness as folk reassembled their wits and tried to realize exactly what had occurred and how it had come about. And then suddenly the mighty achievement, the huge sweep of the conception, the genius and wonder of the execution, broke upon their minds. With one impulse they turned upon Challenger. From every part of the field there came the cries of admiration, and from his hillock he could look down upon the lake of upturned faces broken only by the rise and fall of the waving handkerchiefs. As I look back I see him best as I saw him then. He rose from his chair, his eyes half closed, a smile of conscious merit upon his face, his left hand upon his hip, his right buried in the breast of his frock-coat. Surely that picture will be fixed for ever, for I heard the cameras clicking round me like crickets in a field.\n\nThe June sun shone golden upon him as he turned gravely bowing to each quarter of the compass. Challenger the super scientist, Challenger the arch-pioneer, Challenger the first man of all men whom Mother Earth had been compelled to recognize.\n\nOnly a word by way of epilogue. It is of course well known that the effect of the experiment was a world-wide one. It is true that nowhere did the injured planet emit such a howl as at the actual point of penetration, but she showed that she was indeed one entity by her conduct elsewhere." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "The Tragedy of the Korosko", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "historical fiction", + "adventure" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "The public may possibly wonder why it is that they have never heard in the papers of the fate of the passengers of the Korosko. In these days of universal press agencies, responsive to the slightest stimulus, it may well seem incredible that an international incident of such importance should remain so long unchronicled. Suffice it that there were very valid reasons, both of a personal and of a political nature, for holding it back. The facts were well known to a good number of people at the time, and some version of them did actually appear in a provincial paper, but was generally discredited. They have now been thrown into narrative form, the incidents having been collated from the sworn statements of Colonel Cochrane Cochrane, of the Army and Navy Club, and from the letters of Miss Adams, of Boston, Mass.\n\nThese have been supplemented by the evidence of Captain Archer, of the Egyptian Camel Corps, as given before the secret Government inquiry at Cairo. Mr. James Stephens has refused to put his version of the matter into writing, but as these proofs have been submitted to him, and no correction or deletion has been made in them, it may be supposed that he has not succeeded in detecting any grave misstatement of fact, and that any objection which he may have to their publication depends rather upon private and personal scruples.\n\nThe Korosko, a turtle-bottomed, round-bowed stern-wheeler, with a 30-inch draught and the lines of a flat-iron, started upon the 13th of February in the year 1895, from Shellal, at the head of the first cataract, bound for Wady Halfa. I have a passenger card for the trip, which I here reproduce:\n\nS.W. \"KOROSKO,\" FEBRUARY 13TH. PASSENGERS.\n\nColonel Cochrane Cochrane London.\n\nMr. Cecil Brown London.\n\nJohn H. Headingly Boston, U.S.A.\n\nMiss Adams Boston, U.S.A.\n\nMiss S. Adams Worcester, Mass., U.S.A.\n\nMons. Fardet Paris.\n\nMr. and Mrs. Belmont Dublin.\n\nJames Stephens Manchester.\n\nRev. John Stuart Birmingham.\n\nMrs. Shlesinger, nurse and child Florence.\n\nThis was the party as it started from Shellal, with the intention of travelling up the two hundred miles of Nubian Nile which lie between the first and the second cataract.\n\nIt is a singular country, this Nubia. Varying in breadth from a few miles to as many yards (for the name is only applied to the narrow portion which is capable of cultivation), it extends in a thin, green, palm-fringed strip upon either side of the broad coffee-coloured river. Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa. On the other side an equally desolate wilderness is bounded only by the distant Red Sea. Between these two huge and barren expanses Nubia writhes like a green sandworm along the course of the river. Here and there it disappears altogether, and the Nile runs between black and sun-cracked hills, with the orange drift-sand lying like glaciers in their valleys. Everywhere one sees traces of vanished races and submerged civilisations. Grotesque graves dot the hills or stand up against the skyline: pyramidal graves, tumulus graves, rock graves\u2014everywhere, graves. And, occasionally, as the boat rounds a rocky point, one sees a deserted city up above\u2014houses, walls, battlements, with the sun shining through the empty window squares. Sometimes you learn that it has been Roman, sometimes Egyptian, sometimes all record of its name or origin has been absolutely lost. You ask yourself in amazement why any race should build in so uncouth a solitude, and you find it difficult to accept the theory that this has only been of value as a guard-house to the richer country down below, and that these frequent cities have been so many fortresses to hold off the wild and predatory men of the south. But whatever be their explanation, be it a fierce neighbour, or be it a climatic change, there they stand, these grim and silent cities, and up on the hills you can see the graves of their people, like the port-holes of a man-of-war. It is through this weird, dead country that the tourists smoke and gossip and flirt as they pass up to the Egyptian frontier.\n\nThe passengers of the Korosko formed a merry party, for most of them had travelled up together from Cairo to Assouan, and even Anglo-Saxon ice thaws rapidly upon the Nile. They were fortunate in being without the single disagreeable person who, in these small boats, is sufficient to mar the enjoyment of the whole party. On a vessel which is little more than a large steam launch, the bore, the cynic, or the grumbler holds the company at his mercy. But the Korosko was free from anything of the kind. Colonel Cochrane Cochrane was one of those officers whom the British Government, acting upon a large system of averages, declares at a certain age to be incapable of further service, and who demonstrate the worth of such a system by spending their declining years in exploring Morocco, or shooting lions in Somaliland. He was a dark, straight, aquiline man, with a courteously deferential manner, but a steady, questioning eye; very neat in his dress and precise in his habits, a gentleman to the tips of his trim finger-nails. In his Anglo-Saxon dislike to effusiveness he had cultivated a self-contained manner which was apt at first acquaintance to be repellent, and he seemed to those who really knew him to be at some pains to conceal the kind heart and human emotions which influenced his actions. It was respect rather than affection which he inspired among his fellow-travellers, for they felt, like all who had ever met him, that he was a man with whom acquaintance was unlikely to ripen into a friendship, though a friendship, when once attained, would be an unchanging and inseparable part of himself. He wore a grizzled military moustache, but his hair was singularly black for a man of his years. He made no allusion in his conversation to the numerous campaigns in which he had distinguished himself, and the reason usually given for his reticence was that they dated back to such early Victorian days that he had to sacrifice his military glory at the shrine of his perennial youth.\n\nMr. Cecil Brown\u2014to take the names in the chance order in which they appear upon the passenger list\u2014was a young diplomatist from a Continental Embassy, a man slightly tainted with the Oxford manner, and erring upon the side of unnatural and inhuman refinement, but full of interesting talk and cultured thought. He had a sad, handsome face, a small wax-tipped moustache, a low voice and a listless manner, which was relieved by a charming habit of suddenly lighting up into a rapid smile and gleam when anything caught his fancy. An acquired cynicism was eternally crushing and overlying his natural youthful enthusiasms, and he ignored what was obvious while expressing keen appreciation for what seemed to the average man to be either trivial or unhealthy. He chose Walter Pater for his travelling author, and sat all day, reserved but affable, under the awning, with his novel and his sketch-book upon a camp-stool beside him. His personal dignity prevented him from making advances to others, but if they chose to address him they found a courteous and amiable companion.\n\nThe Americans formed a group by themselves. John H. Headingly was a New Englander, a graduate of Harvard, who was completing his education by a tour round the world. He stood for the best type of young American\u2014quick, observant, serious, eager for knowledge and fairly free from prejudice, with a fine balance of unsectarian but earnest religious feeling which held him steady amid all the sudden gusts of youth. He had less of the appearance and more of the reality of culture than the young Oxford diplomatist, for he had keener emotions though less exact knowledge. Miss Adams and Miss Sadie Adams were aunt and niece, the former a little, energetic, hard-featured Bostonian old-maid, with a huge surplus of unused love behind her stern and swarthy features. She had never been from home before, and she was now busy upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt before she realised that the country needed putting to rights, and since the conviction struck her she had been very fully occupied. The saddle-galled donkeys, the starved pariah dogs, the flies round the eyes of the babies, the naked children, the importunate beggars, the ragged, untidy women\u2014they were all challenges to her conscience, and she plunged in bravely at her work of reformation. As she could not speak a word of the language, however, and was unable to make any of the delinquents understand what it was that she wanted, her passage up the Nile left the immemorial East very much as she had found it, but afforded a good deal of sympathetic amusement to her fellow-travellers. No one enjoyed her efforts more than her niece, Sadie, who shared with Mrs. Belmont the distinction of being the most popular person upon the boat. She was very young\u2014fresh from Smith College\u2014and she still possessed many both of the virtues and of the faults of a child. She had the frankness, the trusting confidence, the innocent straightforwardness, the high spirits, and also the loquacity and the want of reverence. But even her faults caused amusement, and if she had preserved many of the characteristics of a clever child, she was none the less a tall and handsome woman, who looked older than her years on account of that low curve of the hair over the ears, and that fullness of bodice and skirt which Mr. Gibson has either initiated or imitated. The whisk of those skirts, and the frank, incisive voice and pleasant, catching laugh were familiar and welcome sounds on board of the Korosko. Even the rigid Colonel softened into geniality, and the Oxford-bred diplomatist forgot to be unnatural with Miss Sadie Adams as a companion.\n\nThe other passengers may be dismissed more briefly. Some were interesting, some neutral, and all amiable. Monsieur Fardet was a good-natured but argumentative Frenchman, who held the most decided views as to the deep machinations of Great Britain, and the illegality of her position in Egypt. Mr. Belmont was an iron-grey, sturdy Irishman, famous as an astonishingly good long-range rifle-shot, who had carried off nearly every prize which Wimbledon or Bisley had to offer. With him was his wife, a very charming and refined woman, full of the pleasant playfulness of her country. Mrs. Shlesinger was a middle-aged widow, quiet and soothing, with her thoughts all taken up by her six-year-old child, as a mother's thoughts are likely to be in a boat which has an open rail for a bulwark. The Reverend John Stuart was a Nonconformist minister from Birmingham\u2014either a Presbyterian or a Congregationalist\u2014a man of immense stoutness, slow and torpid in his ways, but blessed with a considerable fund of homely humour, which made him, I am told, a very favourite preacher, and an effective speaker from advanced Radical platforms.\n\nFinally, there was Mr. James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake off the effects of an attack of influenza. Stephens was a man who, in the course of thirty years, had worked himself up from cleaning the firm's windows to managing its business. For most of that long time he had been absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the one idea of satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind and soul had become as formal and precise as the laws which he expounded. A fine and sensitive nature was in danger of being as warped as a busy city man's is liable to become. His work had become an engrained habit, and, being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in life to draw him away from it, so that his soul was being gradually bricked up like the body of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came this kindly illness, and Nature hustled James Stephens out of his groove, and sent him into the broad world far away from roaring Manchester and his shelves full of calf-skin authorities. At first he resented it deeply. Everything seemed trivial to him compared to his own petty routine. But gradually his eyes were opened, and he began dimly to see that it was his work which was trivial when compared to this wonderful, varied, inexplicable world of which he was so ignorant. Vaguely he realised that the interruption to his career might be more important than the career itself. All sorts of new interests took possession of him; and the middle-aged lawyer developed an after-glow of that youth which had been wasted among his books. His character was too formed to admit of his being anything but dry and precise in his ways, and a trifle pedantic in his mode of speech; but he read and thought and observed, scoring his \"Baedeker\" with underlinings and annotations as he had once done his \"Prideaux's Commentaries.\" He had travelled up from Cairo with the party, and had contracted a friendship with Miss Adams and her niece. The young American girl, with her chatter, her audacity, and her constant flow of high spirits, amused and interested him, and she in turn felt a mixture of respect and of pity for his knowledge and his limitations. So they became good friends, and people smiled to see his clouded face and her sunny one bending over the same guide-book.\n\nThe little Korosko puffed and spluttered her way up the river, kicking up the white water behind her, and making more noise and fuss over her five knots an hour than an Atlantic liner on a record voyage. On deck, under the thick awning, sat her little family of passengers, and every few hours she eased down and sidled up to the bank to allow them to visit one more of that innumerable succession of temples. The remains, however, grow more modern as one ascends from Cairo, and travellers who have sated themselves at Gizeh and Sakara with the contemplation of the very oldest buildings which the hands of man have constructed, become impatient of temples which are hardly older than the Christian era. Ruins which would be gazed upon with wonder and veneration in any other country are hardly noticed in Egypt. The tourists viewed with languid interest the half-Greek art of the Nubian bas-reliefs; they climbed the hill of Korosko to see the sun rise over the savage Eastern desert; they were moved to wonder by the great shrine of Abou-Simbel, where some old race has hollowed out a mountain as if it were a cheese; and, finally, upon the evening of the fourth day of their travels they arrived at Wady Halfa, the frontier garrison town, some few hours after they were due, on account of a small mishap in the engine-room. The next morning was to be devoted to an expedition to the famous rock of Abousir, from which a great view may be obtained of the second cataract. At eight-thirty, as the passengers sat on deck after dinner, Mansoor, the dragoman, half Copt, half Syrian, came forward, according to the nightly custom, to announce the programme for the morrow.\n\n\"Ladies and gentlemen,\" said he, plunging boldly into the rapid but broken stream of his English, \"to-morrow you will remember not to forget to rise when the gong strikes you for to compress the journey before twelve o'clock. Having arrived at the place where the donkeys expect us, we shall ride five miles over the desert, passing a temple of Ammon-ra, which dates itself from the eighteenth dynasty, upon the way, and so reach the celebrated pulpit rock of Abousir. The pulpit rock is supposed to have been called so, because it is a rock like a pulpit. When you have reached it you will know that you are on the very edge of civilisation, and that very little more will take you into the country of the Dervishes, which will be obvious to you at the top. Having passed the summit, you will perceive the full extremity of the second cataract, embracing wild natural beauties of the most dreadful variety. Here all very famous people carve their names\u2014and so you will carve your names also.\" Mansoor waited expectantly for a titter, and bowed to it when it arrived. \"You will then return to Wady Halfa, and there remain two hours to suspect the Camel Corps, including the grooming of the beasts, and the bazaar before returning, so I wish you a very happy good-night.\"\n\nThere was a gleam of his white teeth in the lamplight, and then his long, dark petticoats, his short English covercoat, and his red tarboosh vanished successively down the ladder. The low buzz of conversation which had been suspended by his coming broke out anew.\n\n\"I'm relying on you, Mr. Stephens, to tell me all about Abousir,\" said Miss Sadie Adams. \"I do like to know what I am looking at right there at the time, and not six hours afterwards in my state-room. I haven't got Abou-Simbel and the wall pictures straight in my mind yet, though I saw them yesterday.\"\n\n\"I never hope to keep up with it,\" said her aunt. \"When I am safe back in Commonwealth Avenue, and there's no dragoman to hustle me around, I'll have time to read about it all, and then I expect I shall begin to enthuse, and want to come right back again. But it's just too good of you, Mr. Stephens, to try and keep us informed.\"\n\n\"I thought that you might wish precise information, and so I prepared a small digest of the matter,\" said Stephens, handing a slip of paper to Miss Sadie. She looked at it in the light of the deck lamp, and broke into her low, hearty laugh.\n\n\"Re Abousir,\" she read; \"now, what do you mean by 're,' Mr. Stephens? You put 're Rameses the Second' on the last paper you gave me.\"\n\n\"It is a habit I have acquired, Miss Sadie,\" said Stephens; \"it is the custom in the legal profession when they make a memo.\"\n\n\"Make what, Mr. Stephens?\"\n\n\"A memo\u2014a memorandum, you know. We put re so-and-so to show what it is about.\"\n\n\"I suppose it's a good short way,\" said Miss Sadie, \"but it feels queer somehow when applied to scenery or to dead Egyptian kings. 'Re Cheops'\u2014doesn't that strike you as funny?\"\n\n\"No, I can't say that it does,\" said Stephens.\n\n\"I wonder if it is true that the English have less humour than the Americans, or whether it's just another kind of humour,\" said the girl. She had a quiet, abstracted way of talking as if she were thinking aloud. \"I used to imagine they had less, and yet, when you come to think of it, Dickens and Thackeray and Barrie, and so many other of the humourists we admire most are Britishers. Besides, I never in all my days heard people laugh so hard as in that London theatre. There was a man behind us, and every time he laughed Auntie looked round to see if a door had opened, he made such a draught. But you have some funny expressions, Mr. Stephens!\"\n\n\"What else strikes you as funny, Miss Sadie?\"\n\n\"Well, when you sent me the temple ticket and the little map, you began your letter, 'Enclosed, please find,' and then at the bottom, in brackets, you had '2 enclo.'\"\n\n\"That is the usual form in business.\"\n\n\"Yes, in business,\" said Sadie demurely, and there was a silence.\n\n\"There's one thing I wish,\" remarked Miss Adams, in the hard, metallic voice with which she disguised her softness of heart, \"and that is, that I could see the Legislature of this country and lay a few cold-drawn facts in front of them. I'd make a platform of my own, Mr. Stephens, and run a party on my ticket. A Bill for the compulsory use of eyewash would be one of my planks, and another would be for the abolition of those Yashmak veil things which turn a woman into a bale of cotton goods with a pair of eyes looking out of it.\"\n\n\"I never could think why they wore them,\" said Sadie; \"until one day I saw one with her veil lifted. Then I knew.\"\n\n\"They make me tired, those women,\" cried Miss Adams wrathfully. \"One might as well try to preach duty and decency and cleanliness to a line of bolsters. Why, good land, it was only yesterday at Abou-Simbel, Mr. Stephens, I was passing one of their houses\u2014if you can call a mud-pie like that a house\u2014and I saw two of the children at the door with the usual crust of flies round their eyes, and great holes in their poor little blue gowns! So I got off my donkey, and I turned up my sleeves, and I washed their faces well with my handkerchief, and sewed up the rents\u2014for in this country I would as soon think of going ashore without my needle-case as without my white umbrella, Mr. Stephens. Then as I warmed on the job I got into the room\u2014such a room!\u2014and I packed the folks out of it, and I fairly did the chores as if I had been the hired help. I've seen no more of that temple of Abou-Simbel than if I had never left Boston; but, my sakes, I saw more dust and mess than you would think they could crowd into a house the size of a Newport bathing-hut. From the time I pinned up my skirt until I came out with my face the colour of that smoke-stack, wasn't more than an hour, or maybe an hour and a half, but I had that house as clean and fresh as a new pine-wood box. I had a New York Herald with me, and I lined their shelf with paper for them. Well, Mr. Stephens, when I had done washing my hands outside, I came past the door again, and there were those two children sitting on the stoop with their eyes full of flies, and all just the same as ever, except that each had a little paper cap made out of the New York Herald upon his head. But, say, Sadie, it's going on to ten o'clock, and to-morrow an early excursion.\"\n\n\"It's just too beautiful, this purple sky and the great silver stars,\" said Sadie. \"Look at the silent desert and the black shadows of the hills. It's grand, but it's terrible too; and then when you think that we really are, as that dragoman said just now, on the very end of civilisation, and with nothing but savagery and bloodshed down there where the Southern Cross is twinkling so prettily, why, it's like standing on the beautiful edge of a live volcano.\"\n\n\"Shucks, Sadie, don't talk like that, child,\" said the older woman nervously. \"It's enough to scare any one to listen to you.\"\n\n\"Well, but don't you feel it yourself, Auntie? Look at that great desert stretching away and away until it is lost in the shadows. Hear the sad whisper of the wind across it! It's just the most solemn thing that ever I saw in my life.\"\n\n\"I'm glad we've found something that will make you solemn, my dear,\" said her Aunt. \"I've sometimes thought\u2014Sakes alive, what's that?\"\n\nFrom somewhere amongst the hill shadows upon the other side of the river there had risen a high shrill whimpering, rising and swelling, to end in a long weary wail.\n\n\"It's only a jackal, Miss Adams,\" said Stephens. \"I heard one when we went out to see the Sphinx by moonlight.\"\n\nBut the American lady had risen, and her face showed that her nerves had been ruffled.\n\n\"If I had my time over again I wouldn't have come past Assouan,\" said she. \"I can't think what possessed me to bring you all the way up here, Sadie. Your mother will think that I am clean crazy, and I'd never dare to look her in the eye if anything went wrong with us. I've seen all I want to see of this river, and all I ask now is to be back at Cairo again.\"\n\n\"Why, Auntie,\" cried the girl, \"it isn't like you to be faint-hearted.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know how it is, Sadie, but I feel a bit unstrung, and that beast caterwauling over yonder was just more than I could put up with. There's one consolation, we are scheduled to be on our way home to-morrow, after we've seen this one rock or temple, or whatever it is. I'm full up of rocks and temples, Mr. Stephens. I shouldn't mope if I never saw another. Come, Sadie! Good-night!\"\n\n\"Good-night! Good-night, Miss Adams!\"\n\nAnd the two ladies passed down to their cabins.\n\nMonsieur Fardet was chatting, in a subdued voice, with Headingly, the young Harvard graduate, bending forward confidentially between the whiffs of his cigarette.\n\n\"Dervishes, Mister Headingly!\" said he, speaking excellent English, but separating his syllables as a Frenchman will. \"There are no Dervishes. They do not exist.\"\n\n\"Why, I thought the woods were full of them,\" said the American.\n\nMonsieur Fardet glanced across to where the red core of Colonel Cochrane's cigar was glowing through the darkness.\n\n\"You are an American, and you do not like the English,\" he whispered. \"It is perfectly comprehended upon the Continent that the Americans are opposed to the English.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Headingly, with his slow, deliberate manner, \"I won't say that we have not our tiffs, and there are some of our people\u2014mostly of Irish stock\u2014who are always mad with England; but the most of us have a kindly thought for the mother country. You see they may be aggravating folk sometimes, but after all they are our own folk, and we can't wipe that off the slate.\"\n\n\"Eh bien!\" said the Frenchman. \"At least I can say to you what I could not without offence say to these others. And I repeat that there are no Dervishes. They were an invention of Lord Cromer in the year 1885.\"\n\n\"You don't say!\" cried Headingly.\n\n\"It is well known in Paris, and has been exposed in La Patrie and other of our so well-informed papers.\"\n\n\"Hut this is colossal,\" said Headingly. \"Do you mean to tell me, Monsieur Fardet, that the siege of Khartoum and the death of Gordon and the rest of it was just one great bluff?\"\n\n\"I will not deny that there was an emeute, but it was local, you understand, and now long forgotten. Since then there has been profound peace in the Soudan.\"\n\n\"But I have heard of raids, Monsieur Fardet, and I've read of battles, too, when the Arabs tried to invade Egypt. It was only Two days ago that we passed Toski, where the dragoman said there had been a fight. Is that all bluff also?\"\n\n\"Pah, my friend, you do not know the English. You look at them as you see them with their pipes and their contented faces, and you say, 'Now, these are good, simple folk, who will never hurt any one.' But all the time they are thinking and watching and planning. 'Here is Egypt weak,' they cry. 'Allons!' and down they swoop like a gull upon a crust. 'You have no right there,' says the world. 'Come out of it!' But England has already begun to tidy everything, just like the good Miss Adams when she forces her way into the house of an Arab. 'Come out,' says the world. 'Certainly,' says England; 'just wait one little minute until I have made everything nice and proper.' So the world waits for a year or so, and then it says once again, 'Come out.' 'Just wait a little,' says England; 'there is trouble at Khartoum, and when I have set that all right I shall be very glad to come out.' So they wait until it is all over, and then again they say, 'Come out.' 'How can I come out,' says England, 'when there are still raids and battles going on? If we were to leave, Egypt would be run over.' 'But there are no raids,' says the world. 'Oh, are there not?' says England, and then within a week sure enough the papers are full of some new raid of Dervishes. We are not all blind, Mister Headingly. We understand very well how such things can be done. A few Bedouins, a little backsheesh, some blank cartridges, and, behold\u2014a raid!\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" said the American, \"I'm glad to know the rights of this business, for it has often puzzled me. But what does England get out of it?\"\n\n\"She gets the country, monsieur.\"\n\n\"I see. You mean, for example, that there is a favourable tariff for British goods?\"\n\n\"No, monsieur; it is the same for all.\"\n\n\"Well, then, she gives the contracts to Britishers?\"\n\n\"Precisely, monsieur.\"\n\n\"For example, the railroad that they are building right through the country, the one that runs alongside the river, that would be a valuable contract for the British?\"\n\nMonsieur Fardet was an honest man, if an imaginative one.\n\n\"It is a French company, monsieur, which holds the railway contract,\" said he.\n\nThe American was puzzled.\n\n\"They don't seem to get much for their trouble,\" said he. \"Still, of course, there must be some indirect pull somewhere. For example, Egypt no doubt has to pay and keep all those red-coats in Cairo.\"\n\n\"Egypt, monsieur! No, they are paid by England.\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose they know their own business best, but they seem to me to take a great deal of trouble, and to get mighty little in exchange. If they don't mind keeping order and guarding the frontier, with a constant war against the Dervishes on their hands, I don't know why any one should object. I suppose no one denies that the prosperity of the country has increased enormously since they came. The revenue returns show that. They tell me also that the poorer folks have justice, which they never had before.\"\n\n\"What are they doing here at all?\" cried the Frenchman angrily. \"Let them go back to their island. We cannot have them all over the world.\"\n\n\"Well, certainly, to us Americans, who live all in our own land, it does seem strange how you European nations are for ever slopping over into some other country which was not meant for you. It's easy for us to talk, of course, for we have still got room and to spare for all our people. When we begin pushing each other over the edge we shall have to start annexing also. But at present just here in North Africa there is Italy in Abyssinia, and England in Egypt, and France in Algiers\u2014\"\n\n\"France!\" cried Monsieur Fardet. \"Algiers belongs to France.\n\nYou laugh, monsieur. I have the honour to wish you a very good-night.\"\n\nHe rose from his seat, and walked off, rigid with outraged patriotism, to his cabin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "The young American hesitated for a little, debating in his mind whether he should not go down and post up the daily record of his impressions which he kept for his home-staying sister. But the cigars of Colonel Cochrane and of Cecil Brown were still twinkling in the far corner of the deck, and the student was acquisitive in the search of information. He did not quite know how to lead up to the matter, but the Colonel very soon did it for him.\n\n\"Come on, Headingly,\" said he, pushing a camp-stool in his direction. \"This is the place for an antidote. I see that Fardet has been pouring politics into your ear.\"\n\n\"I can always recognise the confidential stoop of his shoulders when he discusses la haute politique,\" said the dandy diplomatist. \"But what a sacrilege upon a night like this! What a nocturne in blue and silver might be suggested by that moon rising above the desert. There is a movement in one of Mendelssohn's songs which seems to embody it all\u2014 a sense of vastness, of repetition, the cry of the wind over an interminable expanse. The subtler emotions which cannot be translated into words are still to be hinted at by chords and harmonies.\"\n\n\"It seems wilder and more savage than ever to-night,\" remarked the American. \"It gives me the same feeling of pitiless force that the Atlantic does upon a cold, dark, winter day. Perhaps it is the knowledge that we are right there on the very edge of any kind of law and order. How far do you suppose that we are from any Dervishes, Colonel Cochrane?\"\n\n\"Well, on the Arabian side,\" said the Colonel, \"we have the Egyptian fortified camp of Sarras about forty miles to the south of us. Beyond that are sixty miles of very wild country before you would come to the Dervish post at Akasheh. On this other side, however, there is nothing between us and them.\"\n\n\"Abousir is on this side, is it not?\"\n\n\"Yes. That is why the excursion to the Abousir Rock has been forbidden for the last year. But things are quieter now.\"\n\n\"What is to prevent them from coming down on that side?\"\n\n\"Absolutely nothing,\" said Cecil Brown, in his listless voice.\n\n\"Nothing, except their fears. The coming of course would be perfectly simple. The difficulty would lie in the return. They might find it hard to get back if their camels were spent, and the Halfa garrison with their beasts fresh got on their track. They know it as well as we do, and it has kept them from trying.\"\n\n\"It isn't safe to reckon upon a Dervish's fears,\" remarked Brown. \"We must always bear in mind that they are not amenable to the same motives as other people. Many of them are anxious to meet death, and all of them are absolute, uncompromising believers in destiny. They exist as a reductio ad absurdum of all bigotry\u2014a proof of how surely it leads towards blank barbarism.\"\n\n\"You think these people are a real menace to Egypt?\" asked the American. \"There seems from what I have heard to be some difference of opinion about it. Monsieur Fardet, for example, does not seem to think that the danger is a very pressing one.\"\n\n\"I am not a rich man,\" Colonel Cochrane answered after a little pause, \"but I am prepared to lay all I am worth, that within three years of the British officers being withdrawn, the Dervishes would be upon the Mediterranean. Where would the civilisation of Egypt be? Where would the hundreds of millions which have been invested in this country? Where the monuments which all nations look upon as most precious memorials of the past?\"\n\n\"Come now, Colonel,\" cried Headingly, laughing, \"surely you don't mean that they would shift the pyramids?\"\n\n\"You cannot foretell what they would do. There is no iconoclast in the world like an extreme Mohammedan. Last time they overran this country they burned the Alexandrian Library. You know that all representations of the human features are against the letter of the Koran. A statue is always an irreligious object in their eyes. What do these fellows care for the sentiment of Europe? The more they could offend it, the more delighted they would be. Down would go the Sphinx, the Colossi, the Statues of Abou-Simbel\u2014as the saints went down in England before Cromwell's troopers.\"\n\n\"Well now,\" said Headingly, in his slow, thoughtful fashion, \"suppose I grant you that the Dervishes could overrun Egypt, and suppose also that you English are holding them out, what I'm never done asking is, what reason have you for spending all these millions of dollars and the lives of so many of your men? What do you get out of it, more than France gets, or Germany, or any other country, that runs no risk and never lays out a cent?\"\n\n\"There are a good many Englishmen who are asking themselves that question,\" remarked Cecil Brown. \"It's my opinion that we have been the policemen of the world long enough. We policed the seas for pirates and slavers. Now we police the land for Dervishes and brigands and every sort of danger to civilisation. There is never a mad priest or a witch doctor, or a firebrand of any sort on this planet, who does not report his appearance by sniping the nearest British officer. One tires of it at last. If a Kurd breaks loose in Asia Minor, the world wants to know why Great Britain does not keep him in order. If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a Jehad in the Soudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it? Let Europe do its own dirty work.\"\n\n\"Well,\" said Colonel Cochrane, crossing his legs and leaning forward with the decision of n man who has definite opinions, \"I don't at all agree with you, Brown, and I think that to advocate such a course is to take a very limited view of our national duties. I think that behind national interests and diplomacy and all that there lies a great guiding force\u2014a Providence, in fact\u2014which is for ever getting the best out of each nation and using it for the good of the whole. When a nation ceases to respond, it is time that she went into hospital for a few centuries, like Spain or Greece\u2014the virtue has gone out of her. A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and what is profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere shirking not to undertake it.\"\n\nHeadingly nodded approvingly.\n\n\"Each has its own mission. Germany is predominant in abstract thought; France in literature, art, and grace. But we and you\u2014for the English-speakers are all in the same boat, however much the New York Sun may scream over it\u2014we and you have among our best men a higher conception of moral sense and public duty than is to be found in any other people. Now, these are the two qualities which are needed for directing a weaker race. You can't help them by abstract thought or by graceful art, but only by that moral sense which will hold the scales of Justice even, and keep itself free from every taint of corruption. That is how we rule India. We came there by a kind of natural law, like air rushing into a vacuum. All over the world, against our direct interests and our deliberate intentions, we are drawn into the same thing. And it will happen to you also. The pressure of destiny will force you to administer the Whole of America from Mexico to the Horn.\"\n\nHeadingly whistled.\n\n\"Our Jingoes would be pleased to hear you, Colonel Cochrane,\" said he.\n\n\"They'd vote you into our Senate and make you one of the Committee on Foreign Relations.\"\n\n\"The world is small, and it grows smaller every day. It's a single organic body, and one spot of gangrene is enough to vitiate the whole. There's no room upon it for dishonest, defaulting, tyrannical, irresponsible Governments. As long as they exist they will always be sources of trouble and of danger. But there are many races which appear to be so incapable of improvement that we can never hope to get a good Government out of them. What is to be done, then? The former device of Providence in such a case was extermination by some more virile stock\u2014 an Attila or a Tamerlane pruned off the weaker branch. Now, we have a more merciful substitution of rulers, or even of mere advice from a more advanced race. That is the case with the Central Asian Khanates and with the protected States of India. If the work has to be done, and if we are the best fitted for the work, then I think that it would be a cowardice and a crime to shirk it.\"\n\n\"But who is to decide whether it is a fitting case for your interference?\" objected the American. \"A predatory country could grab every other land in the world upon such a pretext.\"\n\n\"Events\u2014inexorable, inevitable events\u2014will decide it. Take this Egyptian business as an example. In 1881 there was nothing in this world further from the minds of our people than any interference with Egypt; and yet 1882 left us in possession of the country. There was never any choice in the chain of events. A massacre in the streets of Alexandria, and the mounting of guns to drive out our fleet\u2014which was there, you understand, in fulfilment of solemn treaty obligations\u2014led to the bombardment. The bombardment led to a landing to save the city from destruction. The landing caused an extension of operations\u2014and here we are, with the country upon our hands. At the time of trouble we begged and implored the French, or any one else, to come and help us to put the thing to rights, but they all deserted us when there was work to be done, although they are ready enough to scold and to impede us now. When we tried to get out of it, up came this wild Dervish movement, and we had to sit tighter than ever. We never wanted the task; but, now that it has come, we must put it through in a workmanlike manner. We've brought justice into the country, and purity of administration, and protection for the poor man. It has made more advance in the last twelve years than since the Moslem invasion in the seventh century. Except the pay of a couple of hundred men, who spend their money in the country, England has neither directly nor indirectly made a shilling out of it, and I don't believe you will find in history a more successful and more disinterested bit of work.\"\n\nHeadingly puffed thoughtfully at his cigarette.\n\n\"There is a house near ours, down on the Back Bay at Boston, which just ruins the whole prospect,\" said he. \"It has old chairs littered about the stoop, and the shingles are loose, and the garden runs wild; but I don't know that the neighbours are exactly justified in rushing in, and stamping around, and running the thing on their own lines.\"\n\n\"Not if it were on fire?\" asked the Colonel.\n\nHeadingly laughed, and rose from his camp-stool.\n\n\"Well, it doesn't come within the provisions of the Monroe Doctrine, Colonel,\" said he. \"I'm beginning to realise that modern Egypt is every bit as interesting as ancient, and that Rameses the Second wasn't the last live man in the country.\"\n\nThe two Englishmen rose and yawned.\n\n\"Yes, it's a whimsical freak of fortune which has sent men from a little island in the Atlantic to administer the land of the Pharaohs,\" remarked Cecil Brown. \"We shall pass away again, and never leave a trace among these successive races who have held the country, for it is not an Anglo-Saxon custom to write their deeds upon rocks. I dare say that the remains of a Cairo drainage system will be our most permanent record, unless they prove a thousand years hence that it was the work of the Hyksos kings. But here is the shore party come back.\"\n\nDown below they could hear the mellow Irish accents of Mrs. Belmont and the deep voice of her husband, the iron-grey rifle-shot. Mr. Stuart, the fat Birmingham clergyman, was thrashing out a question of piastres with a noisy donkey-boy, and the others were joining in with chaff and advice. Then the hubbub died away, the party from above came down the ladder, there were \"good-nights,\" the shutting of doors, and the little steamer lay silent, dark, and motionless in the shadow of the high Halfa bank. And beyond this one point of civilisation and of comfort there lay the limitless, savage, unchangeable desert, straw-coloured and dream-like in the moonlight, mottled over with the black shadows of the hills." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"Stoppa! Backa!\" cried the native pilot to the European engineer.\n\nThe bluff bows of the stern-wheeler had squelched into the soft brown mud, and the current had swept the boat alongside the bank. The long gangway was thrown across, and the six tall soldiers of the Soudanese escort filed along it, their light-blue gold-trimmed zouave uniforms, and their jaunty yellow and red forage-caps, showing up bravely in the clear morning light. Above them, on the top of the bank, was ranged the line of donkeys, and the air was full of the clamour of the boys. In shrill strident voices each was crying out the virtues of his own beast, and abusing that of his neighbour.\n\nColonel Cochrane and Mr. Belmont stood together in the bows, each wearing the broad white puggareed hat of the tourist. Miss Adams and her niece leaned against the rail beside them.\n\n\"Sorry your wife isn't coming, Belmont,\" said the Colonel.\n\n\"I think she had a touch of the sun yesterday. Her head aches very badly.\"\n\nHis voice was strong and thick like his figure.\n\n\"I should stay to keep her company, Mr. Belmont,\" said the little American old maid; \"but I learn that Mrs. Shlesinger finds the ride too long for her, and has some letters which she must mail to-day, so Mrs.\n\nBelmont will not be lonesome.\"\n\n\"You're very good, Miss Adams. We shall be back, you know, by two o'clock.\"\n\n\"Is that certain?\"\n\n\"It must be certain, for we are taking no lunch with us, and we shall be famished by then.\"\n\n\"Yes, I expect we shall be ready for a hock and seltzer at any rate,\" said the Colonel. \"This desert dust gives a flavour to the worst wine.\"\n\n\"Now, ladies and gentlemen!\" cried Mansoor, the dragoman, moving forward with something of the priest in his flowing garments and smooth, clean-shaven face. \"We must start early that we may return before the meridial heat of the weather.\" He ran his dark eyes over the little group of his tourists with a paternal expression. \"You take your green glasses, Miss Adams, for glare very great out in the desert. Ah, Mr. Stuart, I set aside very fine donkey for you\u2014prize donkey, sir, always put aside for the gentleman of most weight. Never mind to take your monument ticket to-day. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you please!\"\n\nLike a grotesque frieze the party moved one by one along the plank gangway and up the brown crumbling bank. Mr. Stephens led them, a thin, dry, serious figure, in an English straw hat. His red \"Baedeker\" gleamed under his arm, and in one hand he held a little paper of notes, as if it were a brief. He took Miss Sadie by one arm and her aunt by the other as they toiled up the bank, and the young girl's laughter rang frank and clear in the morning air as \"Baedeker\" came fluttering down at their feet. Mr. Belmont and Colonel Cochrane followed, the brims of their sun-hats touching as they discussed the relative advantages of the Mauser, the Lebel, and the Lee-Metford. Behind them walked Cecil Brown, listless, cynical, self-contained. The fat clergyman puffed slowly up the bank, with many gasping witticisms at his own defects. \"I'm one of those men who carry everything before them,\" said he, glancing ruefully at his rotundity, and chuckling wheezily at his own little joke. Last of all came Headingly, slight and tall, with the student stoop about his shoulders, and Fardet, the good-natured, fussy, argumentative Parisian.\n\n\"You see we have an escort to-day,\" he whispered to his companion.\n\n\"So I observed.\"\n\n\"Pah!\" cried the Frenchman, throwing out his arms in derision; \"as well have an escort from Paris to Versailles. This is all part of the play, Monsieur Headingly. It deceives no one, but it is part of the play. Pourquoi ces droles de militaires, dragoman, hein?\"\n\nIt was the dragoman's role to be all things to all men, so he looked cautiously round before he answered, to make sure that the English were mounted and out of earshot.\n\n\"C'est ridicule, monsieur!\" said he, shrugging his fat shoulders. \"Mais que voulez-vous? C'est l'ordre official Egyptien.\"\n\n\"Egyptien! Pah, Anglais, Anglais\u2014toujours Anglais!\" cried the angry Frenchman.\n\nThe frieze now was more grotesque than ever, but had changed suddenly to an equestrian one, sharply outlined against the deep-blue Egyptian sky. Those who have never ridden before have to ride in Egypt, and when the donkeys break into a canter, and the Nile Irregulars are at full charge, such a scene of flying veils, clutching hands, huddled swaying figures, and anxious faces is nowhere to be seen. Belmont, his square figure balanced upon a small white donkey, was waving his hat to his wife, who had come out upon the saloon-deck of the Korosko. Cochrane sat very erect with a stiff military seat, hands low, head high, and heels down, while beside him rode the young Oxford man, looking about him with drooping eyelids as if he thought the desert hardly respectable, and had his doubts about the Universe. Behind them the whole party was strung along the bank in varying stages of jolting and discomfort, a brown-faced, noisy donkey-boy running after each donkey. Looking back, they could see the little lead-coloured stern-wheeler, with the gleam of Mrs. Belmont's handkerchief from the deck. Beyond ran the broad, brown river, winding down in long curves to where, five miles off, the square, white block-houses upon the black, ragged hills marked the outskirts of Wady Halfa, which had been their starting-point that morning.\n\n\"Isn't it just too lovely for anything?\" cried Sadie joyously. \"I've got a donkey that runs on casters, and the saddle is just elegant. Did you ever see anything so cunning as these beads and things round his neck? You must make a memo. re donkey, Mr. Stephens. Isn't that correct legal English?\"\n\nStephens looked at the pretty, animated, boyish face looking up at him from under the coquettish straw hat, and he wished that he had the courage to tell her in her own language that she was just too sweet for anything. But he feared above all things lest he should offend her, and so put an end to their present pleasant intimacy. So his compliment dwindled into a smile.\n\n\"You look very happy,\" said he.\n\n\"Well, who could help feeling good with this dry, clear air, and the blue sky, and the crisp yellow sand, and a superb donkey to carry you? I've just got everything in the world to make me happy.\"\n\n\"Everything?\"\n\n\"Well, everything I have any use for just now.\"\n\n\"I suppose you never know what it is to be sad?\"\n\n\"Oh, when I am miserable, I am just too miserable for words. I've sat and cried for days and days at Smith's College, and the other girls were just crazy to know what I was crying about, and guessing what the reason was that I wouldn't tell them, when all the time the real true reason was that I didn't know myself. You know how it comes like a great dark shadow over you, and you don't know why or wherefore, but you've just got to settle down to it and be miserable.\"\n\n\"But you never had any real cause?\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Stephens, I've had such a good time all my life that I really don't think, when I look back, that I ever had any real cause for sorrow.\"\n\n\"Well, Miss Sadie, I hope with all my heart that you will be able to say the same when you are the same age as your aunt. Surely I hear her calling.\"\n\n\"I wish, Mr. Stephens, you would strike my donkey-boy with your whip if he hits the donkey again,\" cried Miss Adams, jogging up on a high, raw-boned beast. \"Hi, dragoman, Mansoor, you tell this boy that I won't have the animals ill used, and that he ought to be ashamed of himself. Yes, you little rascal, you ought! He's grinning at me like an advertisement for a tooth paste. Do you think, Mr. Stephens, that if I were to knit that black soldier a pair of woollen stockings he would be allowed to wear them? The poor creature has bandages round his legs.\"\n\n\"Those are his putties, Miss Adams,\" said Colonel Cochrane, looking back at her. \"We have found in India that they are the best support to the leg in marching. They are very much better than any stocking.\"\n\n\"Well, you don't say! They remind me mostly of a sick horse. But it's elegant to have the soldiers with us, though Monsieur Fardet tells me there's nothing for us to be scared about.\"\n\n\"That is only my opinion, Miss Adams,\" said the Frenchman hastily.\n\n\"It may be that Colonel Cochrane thinks otherwise.\"\n\n\"It is Monsieur Fardet's opinion against that of the officers who have the responsibility of caring for the safety of the frontier,\" said the Colonel coldly. \"At least we will all agree that they have the effect of making the scene very much more picturesque.\"\n\nThe desert upon their right lay in long curves of sand, like the dunes which might have fringed some forgotten primeval sea. Topping them they could see the black, craggy summits of the curious volcanic hills which rise upon the Libyan side. On the crest of the low sand-hills they would catch a glimpse every now and then of a tall, sky-blue soldier, walking swiftly, his rifle at the trail. For a moment the lank, warlike figure would be sharply silhouetted against the sky. Then he would dip into a hollow and disappear, while some hundred yards off another would show for an instant and vanish.\n\n\"Wherever are they raised?\" asked Sadie, watching the moving figures.\n\n\"They look to me just about the same tint as the hotel boys in the States.\"\n\n\"I thought some question might arise about them,\" said Mr. Stephens, who was never so happy as when he could anticipate some wish of the pretty American. \"I made one or two references this morning in the ship's library. Here it is\u2014re\u2014that's to say, about black soldiers. I have it on my notes that they are from the 10th Soudanese battalion of the Egyptian army. They are recruited from the Dinkas and the Shilluks\u2014two negroid tribes living to the south of the Dervish country, near the Equator.\"\n\n\"How can the recruits come through the Dervishes, then?\" asked Headingly sharply.\n\n\"I dare say there is no such very great difficulty over that,\" said Monsieur Fardet, with a wink at the American.\n\n\"The older men are the remains of the old black battalions. Some of them served with Gordon at Khartoum, and have his medal to show.\n\nThe others are many of them deserters from the Mahdi's army,\" said the Colonel.\n\n\"Well, so long as they are not wanted, they look right elegant in those blue jackets,\" Miss Adams observed. \"But if there was any trouble, I guess we would wish they were less ornamental and a bit whiter.\"\n\n\"I am not so sure of that, Miss Adams,\" said the Colonel. \"I have seen these fellows in the field, and I assure you that I have the utmost confidence in their steadiness.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll take your word without trying,\" said Miss Adams, with a decision which made every one smile.\n\nSo far their road had lain along the side of the river, which was swirling down upon their left hand deep and strong from the cataracts above. Here and there the rush of the current was broken by a black shining boulder over which the foam was spouting. Higher up they could see the white gleam of the rapids, and the banks grew into rugged cliffs, which were capped by a peculiar, outstanding semicircular rock. It did not require the dragoman's aid to tell the party that this was the famous landmark to which they were bound. A long, level stretch lay before them, and the donkeys took it at a canter. At the farther side were scattered rocks, black upon orange; and in the midst of them rose some broken shafts of pillars and a length of engraved wall, looking in its greyness and its solidity more like some work of Nature than of man. The fat, sleek dragoman had dismounted, and stood waiting in his petticoats and his covercoat for the stragglers to gather round him.\n\n\"This temple, ladies and gentlemen,\" he cried, with the air of an auctioneer who is about to sell it to the highest bidder, \"very fine example from the eighteenth dynasty. Here is the cartouche of Thotmes the Third,\" he pointed up with his donkey-whip at the rude, but deep, hieroglyphics upon the wall above him. \"He live sixteen hundred years before Christ, and this is made to remember his victorious exhibition into Mesopotamia. Here we have his history from the time that he was with his mother, until he return with captives tied to his chariot. In this you see him crowned with Lower Egypt, and with Upper Egypt offering up sacrifice in honour of his victory to the God Ammon-ra. Here he bring his captives before him, and he cut off each his right hand. In this corner you see little pile\u2014all right hands.\"\n\n\"My sakes, I shouldn't have liked to be here in those days,\" said Miss Adams.\n\n\"Why, there's nothing altered,\" remarked Cecil Brown. \"The East is still the East. I've no doubt that within a hundred miles, or perhaps a good deal less, from where you stand\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" whispered the Colonel, and the party shuffled on down the line of the wall with their faces up and their big hats thrown backwards. The sun behind them struck the old grey masonry with a brassy glare, and carried on to it the strange black shadows of the tourists, mixing them up with the grim, high-nosed, square-shouldered warriors, and the grotesque, rigid deities who lined it. The broad shadow of the Reverend John Stuart, of Birmingham, smudged out both the heathen King and the god whom he worshipped.\n\n\"What's this?\" he was asking in his wheezy voice, pointing up with a yellow Assouan cane.\n\n\"That is a hippopotamus,\" said the dragoman; and the tourists all tittered, for there was just a suspicion of Mr. Stuart himself in the carving.\n\n\"But it isn't bigger than a little pig,\" he protested. \"You see that the King is putting his spear through it with ease.\"\n\n\"They make it small to show that it was a very small thing to the King,\" said the dragoman. \"So you see that all the King's prisoners do not exceed his knee\u2014which is not because he was so much taller, but so much more powerful. You see that he is bigger than his horse, because he is a king and the other is only a horse. The same way, these small women whom you see here and there are just his trivial little wives.\"\n\n\"Well, now!\" cried Miss Adams indignantly. \"If they had sculpted that King's soul it would have needed a lens to see it. Fancy his allowing his wives to be put in like that.\"\n\n\"If he did it now, Miss Adams,\" said the Frenchman, \"he would have more fighting than ever in Mesopotamia. But time brings revenge. Perhaps the day will soon come when we have the picture of the big strong wife and the trivial little husband\u2014hein?\"\n\nCecil Brown and Headingly had dropped behind, for the glib comments of the dragoman, and the empty, light-hearted chatter of the tourists jarred upon their sense of solemnity. They stood in silence watching the grotesque procession, with its sun-hats and green veils, as it passed in the vivid sunshine down the front of the old grey wall. Above them two crested hoopoes were fluttering and calling amid the ruins of the pylon.\n\n\"Isn't it a sacrilege?\" said the Oxford man at last.\n\n\"Well, now, I'm glad you feel that about it, because it's how it always strikes me,\" Headingly answered with feeling. \"I'm not quite clear in my own mind how these things should be approached\u2014if they are to be approached at all\u2014but I am sure this is not the way. On the whole, I prefer the ruins that I have not seen to those which I have.\"\n\nThe young diplomatist looked up with his peculiarly bright smile, which faded away too soon into his languid, blase mask.\n\n\"I've got a map,\" said the American, \"and sometimes far away from anything in the very midst of the waterless, trackless desert, I see 'ruins' marked upon it\u2014or 'remains of a temple,' perhaps. For example, the temple of Jupiter Ammon, which was one of the most considerable shrines in the world, was hundreds of miles away back of anywhere. Those are the ruins, solitary, unseen, unchanging through the centuries, which appeal to one's imagination. But when I present a check at the door, and go in as if it were Barnum's show, all the subtle feeling of romance goes right out of it.\"\n\n\"Absolutely!\" said Cecil Brown, looking over the desert with his dark, intolerant eyes. \"If one could come wandering here alone\u2014stumble upon it by chance, as it were\u2014and find one's self in absolute solitude in the dim light of the temple, with these grotesque figures all round, it would be perfectly overwhelming. A man would be prostrated with wonder and awe. But when Belmont is puffing his bulldog pipe, and Stuart is wheezing, and Miss Sadie Adams is laughing\u2014\"\n\n\"And that jay of a dragoman speaking his piece,\" said Headingly; \"I want to stand and think all the time, and I never seem to get the chance. I was ripe for manslaughter when I stood before the Great Pyramid, and couldn't get a quiet moment because they would boost me on to the top. I took a kick at one man which would have sent him to the top in one jump if I had hit meat. But fancy travelling all the way from America to see the pyramid, and then finding nothing better to do than to kick an Arab in front of it!\"\n\nThe Oxford man laughed in his gentle, tired fashion. \"They are starting again,\" said he, and the two hastened forwards to take their places at the tail of the absurd procession.\n\nTheir route ran now among large, scattered boulders, and between stony, shingly hills. A narrow winding path curved in and out amongst the rocks. Behind them their view was cut off by similar hills, black and fantastic, like the slag-heaps at the shaft of a mine. A silence fell upon the little company, and even Sadie's bright face reflected the harshness of Nature. The escort had closed in, and marched beside them, their boots scrunching among the loose black rubble. Colonel Cochrane and Belmont were still riding together in the van.\n\n\"Do you know, Belmont,\" said the Colonel, in a low voice, \"you may think me a fool, but I don't like this one little bit.\"\n\nBelmont gave a short gruff laugh.\n\n\"It seemed all right in the saloon of the Korosko, but now that we are here we do seem rather up in the air,\" said he. \"Still, you know, a party comes here every week, and nothing has ever gone wrong.\"\n\n\"I don't mind taking my chances when I am on the war-path,\" the Colonel answered. \"That's all straightforward and in the way of business. But when you have women with you, and a helpless crowd like this, it becomes really dreadful. Of course, the chances are a hundred to one that we have no trouble; but if we should have\u2014well, it won't bear thinking about. The wonderful thing is their complete unconsciousness that there is any danger whatever.\"\n\n\"Well, I like the English tailor-made dresses well enough for walking, Mr. Stephens,\" said Miss Sadie from behind them. \"But for an afternoon dress, I think the French have more style than the English. Your milliners have a more severe cut, and they don't do the cunning little ribbons and bows and things in the same way.\"\n\nThe Colonel smiled at Belmont.\n\n\"She is quite serene in her mind, at any rate,\" said he. \"Of course, I wouldn't say what I think to any one but you, and I daresay it will all prove to be quite unfounded.\"\n\n\"Well, I could imagine parties of Dervishes on the prowl,\" said Belmont. \"But what I cannot imagine is that they should just happen to come to the pulpit rock on the very morning when we are due there.\"\n\n\"Considering that our movements have been freely advertised, and that every one knows a week beforehand what our programme is, and where we are to be found, it does not strike me as being such a wonderful coincidence.\"\n\n\"It is a very remote chance,\" said Belmont stoutly, but he was glad in his heart that his wife was safe and snug on board the steamer.\n\nAnd now they were clear of the rocks again, with a fine stretch of firm yellow sand extending to the very base of the conical hill which lay before them. \"Ay-ah! Ay-ah!\" cried the boys, whack came their sticks upon the flanks of the donkeys, which broke into a gallop, and away they all streamed over the plain. It was not until they had come to the end of the path which curves up the hill that the dragoman called a halt.\n\n\"Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are arrived for the so famous pulpit rock of Abousir. From the summit you will presently enjoy a panorama of remarkable fertility. But first you will observe that over the rocky side of the hill are everywhere cut the names of great men who have passed it in their travels, and some of these names are older than the time of Christ.\"\n\n\"Got Moses?\" asked Miss Adams.\n\n\"Auntie, I'm surprised at you!\" cried Sadie.\n\n\"Well, my dear, he was in Egypt, and he was a great man, and he may have passed this way.\"\n\n\"Moses's name very likely there, and the same with Herodotus,\" said the dragoman gravely. \"Both have been long worn away. But there on the brown rock you will see Belzoni. And up higher is Gordon. There is hardly a name famous in the Soudan which you will not find, if you like. And now, with your permission, we shall take good-bye of our donkeys and walk up the path, and you will see the river and the desert from the summit of the top.\"\n\nA minute or two of climbing brought them out upon the semicircular platform which crowns the rock. Below them on the far side was a perpendicular black cliff, a hundred and fifty feet high, with the swirling, foam-streaked river roaring past its base. The swish of the water and the low roar as it surged over the mid-stream boulders boomed through the hot, stagnant air. Far up and far down they could see the course of the river, a quarter of a mile in breadth, and running very deep and strong, with sleek black eddies and occasional spoutings of foam. On the other side was a frightful wilderness of black, scattered rocks, which were the debris carried down by the river at high flood. In no direction were there any signs of human beings or their dwellings.\n\n\"On the far side,\" said the dragoman, waving his donkey-whip towards the east, \"is the military line which conducts Wady Halfa to Sarras. Sarras lies to the south, under that black hill. Those two blue mountains which you see very far away are in Dongola, more than a hundred miles from Sarras. The railway there is forty miles long, and has been much annoyed by the Dervishes, who are very glad to turn the rails into spears. The telegraph wires are also much appreciated thereby. Now, if you will kindly turn round, I will explain, also, what we see upon the other side.\"\n\nIt was a view which, when once seen, must always haunt the mind. Such an expanse of savage and unrelieved desert might be part of some cold and burned-out planet rather than of this fertile and bountiful earth. Away and away it stretched to die into a soft, violet haze in the extremest distance. In the foreground the sand was of a bright golden yellow, which was quite dazzling in the sunshine. Here and there, in a scattered cordon, stood the six trusty negro soldiers leaning motionless upon their rifles, and each throwing a shadow which looked as solid as himself. But beyond this golden plain lay a low line of those black slag-heaps, with yellow sand-valleys winding between them. These in their turn were topped by higher and more fantastic hills, and these by others, peeping over each other's shoulders until they blended with that distant violet haze. None of these hills were of any height\u2014a few hundred feet at the most\u2014but their savage, saw-toothed crests, and their steep scarps of sun-baked stone, gave them a fierce character of their own.\n\n\"The Libyan Desert,\" said the dragoman, with a proud wave of his hand. \"The greatest desert in the world. Suppose you travel right west from here, and turn neither to the north nor to the south, the first houses you would come to would be in America. That make you home-sick, Miss Adams, I believe?\"\n\nBut the American old maid had her attention drawn away by the conduct of Sadie, who had caught her arm by one hand and was pointing over the desert with the other.\n\n\"Well, now, if that isn't too picturesque for anything!\" she cried, with a flush of excitement upon her pretty face. \"Do look, Mr. Stephens! That's just the one only thing we wanted to make it just perfectly grand. See the men upon the camels coming out from between those hills!\"\n\nThey all looked at the long string of red-turbaned riders who were winding out of the ravine, and there fell such a hush that the buzzing of the flies sounded quite loud upon their ears. Colonel Cochrane had lit a match, and he stood with it in one hand and the unlit cigarette in the other until the flame licked round his fingers. Belmont whistled. The dragoman stood staring with his mouth half-open, and a curious slaty tint in his full, red lips. The others looked from one to the other with an uneasy sense that there was something wrong. It was the Colonel who broke the silence.\n\n\"By George, Belmont, I believe the hundred-to-one chance has come off!\" said he." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"What's the meaning of this, Mansoor?\" cried Belmont harshly. \"Who are these people, and why are you standing staring as if you had lost your senses?\"\n\nThe dragoman made an effort to compose himself, and licked his dry lips before he answered.\n\n\"I do not know who they are,\" said he in a quavering voice.\n\n\"Who they are?\" cried the Frenchman. \"You can see who they are. They are armed men upon camels, Ababdeh, Bishareen\u2014Bedouins, in short, such as are employed by the Government upon the frontier.\"\n\n\"Be Jove, he may be right, Cochrane,\" said Belmont, looking inquiringly at the Colonel. \"Why shouldn't it be as he says? why shouldn't these fellows be friendlies?\"\n\n\"There are no friendlies upon this side of the river,\" said the Colonel abruptly; \"I am perfectly certain about that. There is no use in mincing matters. We must prepare for the worst.\"\n\nBut in spite of his words, they stood stock-still, in a huddled group, staring out over the plain. Their nerves were numbed by the sudden shock, and to all of them it was like a scene in a dream, vague, impersonal, and un-real. The men upon the camels had streamed out from a gorge which lay a mile or so distant on the side of the path along which they had travelled. Their retreat, therefore, was entirely cut off. It appeared, from the dust and the length of the line, to be quite an army which was emerging from the hills, for seventy men upon camels cover a considerable stretch of ground. Having reached the sandy plain, they very deliberately formed to the front, and then at the harsh call of a bugle they trotted forward in line, the parti-coloured figures all swaying and the sand smoking in a rolling yellow cloud at the heels of their camels. At the same moment the six black soldiers doubled in from the front with their Martinis at the trail, and snuggled down like well-trained skirmishers behind the rocks upon the haunch of the hill. Their breech blocks all snapped together as their corporal gave them the order to load.\n\nAnd now suddenly the first stupor of the excursionists passed away, and was succeeded by a frantic and impotent energy. They all ran about upon the plateau of rock in an aimless, foolish flurry, like frightened fowls in a yard. They could not bring themselves to acknowledge that there was no possible escape for them. Again and again they rushed to the edge of the great cliff which rose from the river, but the youngest and most daring of them could never have descended it. The two women clung one on each side of the trembling Mansoor, with a feeling that he was officially responsible for their safety. When he ran up and down in his desperation, his skirts and theirs all fluttered together. Stephens, the lawyer, kept close to Sadie Adams, muttering mechanically, \"Don't be alarmed, Miss Sadie; don't be at all alarmed!\" though his own limbs were twitching with agitation. Monsieur Fardet stamped about with a guttural rolling of r's, glancing angrily at his companions as if they had in some way betrayed him; while the fat clergyman stood with his umbrella up, staring stolidly with big, frightened eyes at the camel-men. Cecil Brown curled his small, prim moustache, and looked white, but contemptuous. The Colonel, Belmont, and the young Harvard graduate were the three most cool-headed and resourceful members of the party.\n\n\"Better stick together,\" said the Colonel. \"There's no escape for us, so we may as well remain united.\"\n\n\"They've halted,\" said Belmont.\n\n\"They are reconnoitring us. They know very well that there is no escape from them, and they are taking their time. I don't see what we can do.\"\n\n\"Suppose we hide the women,\" Headingly suggested. \"They can't know how many of us are here. When they have taken us, the women can come out of their hiding-place and make their way back to the boat.\"\n\n\"Admirable!\" cried Colonel Cochrane. \"Admirable! This way, please, Miss Adams. Bring the ladies here, Mansoor. There is not an instant to be lost.\"\n\nThere was a part of the plateau which was invisible from the plain, and here in feverish haste they built a little cairn. Many flaky slabs of stone were lying about, and it did not take long to prop the largest of these against a rock, so as to make a lean-to, and then to put two side-pieces to complete it. The slabs were of the same colour as the rock, so that to a casual glance the hiding-place was not very visible. The two ladies were squeezed into this, and they crouched together, Sadie's arms thrown round her aunt. When they had walled them up, the men turned with lighter hearts to see what was going on. As they did so there rang out the sharp, peremptory crack of a rifle-shot from the escort, followed by another and another, but these isolated shots were drowned in the long, spattering roll of an irregular volley from the plain, and the air was full of the phit-phit-phit of the bullets. The tourists all huddled behind the rocks, with the exception of the Frenchman, who still stamped angrily about, striking his sun-hat with his clenched hand. Belmont and Cochrane crawled down to where the Soudanese soldiers were firing slowly and steadily, resting their rifles upon the boulders in front of them.\n\nThe Arabs had halted about five hundred yards away, and it was evident from their leisurely movements that they were perfectly aware that there was no possible escape for the travellers. They had paused to ascertain their number before closing in upon them. Most of them were firing from the backs of their camels, but a few had dismounted and were kneeling here and there\u2014little shimmering white spots against the golden background. Their shots came sometimes singly in quick, sharp throbs, and sometimes in a rolling volley, with a sound like a boy's stick drawn across iron railings. The hill buzzed like a bee-hive, and the bullets made a sharp crackling as they struck against the rocks.\n\n\"You do no good by exposing yourself,\" said Belmont, drawing Colonel Cochrane behind a large jagged boulder, which already furnished a shelter for three of the Soudanese. \"A bullet is the best we have to hope for,\" said Cochrane grimly. \"What an infernal fool I have been, Belmont, not to protest more energetically against this ridiculous expedition! I deserve whatever I get, but it is hard on these poor souls who never knew the danger.\"\n\n\"I suppose there's no help for us?\"\n\n\"Not the faintest.\"\n\n\"Don't you think this firing might bring the troops up from Halfa?\"\n\n\"They'll never hear it. It is a good six miles from here to the steamer. From that to Halfa would be another five.\"\n\n\"Well, when we don't return, the steamer will give the alarm.\"\n\n\"And where shall we be by that time?\"\n\n\"My poor Norah! My poor little Norah!\" muttered Belmont, in the depths of his grizzled moustache.\n\n\"What do you suppose that they will do with us, Cochrane?\" he asked after a pause.\n\n\"They may cut our throats, or they may take us as slaves to Khartoum. I don't know that there is much to choose. There's one of us out of his troubles anyhow.\"\n\nThe soldier next them had sat down abruptly, and leaned forward over his knees. His movement and attitude were so natural that it was hard to realise that he had been shot through the head. He neither stirred nor groaned. His comrades bent over him for a moment, and then, shrugging their shoulders, they turned their dark faces to the Arabs once more. Belmont picked up the dead man's Martini and his ammunition-pouch.\n\n\"Only three more rounds, Cochrane,\" said he, with the little brass cylinders upon the palm of his hand. \"We've let them shoot too soon, and too often. We should have waited for the rush.\"\n\n\"You're a famous shot, Belmont,\" cried the Colonel. \"I've heard of you as one of the cracks. Don't you think you could pick off their leader?\"\n\n\"Which is he?\"\n\n\"As far as I can make out, it is that one on the white camel on their right front. I mean the fellow who is peering at us from under his two hands.\"\n\nBelmont thrust in his cartridge and altered the sights. \"It's a shocking bad light for judging distance,\" said he. \"This is where the low point-blank trajectory of the Lee-Metford comes in useful. Well, we'll try him at five hundred.\" He fired, but there was no change in the white camel or the peering rider.\n\n\"Did you see any sand fly?\"\n\n\"No, I saw nothing.\"\n\n\"I fancy I took my sight a trifle too full.\"\n\n\"Try him again.\"\n\nMan and rifle and rock were equally steady, but again the camel and chief remained unharmed. The third shot must have been nearer, for he moved a few paces to the right, as if he were becoming restless. Belmont threw the empty rifle down, with an exclamation of disgust.\n\n\"It's this confounded light,\" he cried, and his cheeks flushed with annoyance. \"Think of my wasting three cartridges in that fashion! If I had him at Bisley I'd shoot the turban off him, but this vibrating glare means refraction. What's the matter with the Frenchman?\"\n\nMonsieur Fardet was stamping about the plateau with the gestures of a man who has been stung by a wasp. \"S'cre nom! S'cre nom!\" he shouted, showing his strong white teeth under his black waxed moustache. He wrung his right hand violently, and as he did so he sent a little spray of blood from his finger-tips. A bullet had chipped his wrist. Headingly ran out from the cover where be had been crouching, with the intention of dragging the demented Frenchman into a place of safety, but he had not taken three paces before he was himself hit in the loins, and fell with a dreadful crash among the stones. He staggered to his feet, and then fell again in the same place, floundering up and down like a horse which has broken its back. \"I'm done!\" he whispered, as the Colonel ran to his aid, and then he lay still, with his china-white cheek against the black stones. When, but a year before, he had wandered under the elms of Cambridge, surely the last fate upon this earth which he could have predicted for himself would be that he should be slain by the bullet of a fanatical Mohammedan in the wilds of the Libyan Desert.\n\nMeanwhile the fire of the escort had ceased, for they had shot away their last cartridge. A second man had been killed, and a third\u2014who was the corporal in charge\u2014had received a bullet in his thigh. He sat upon a stone, tying up his injury with a grave, preoccupied look upon his wrinkled black face, like an old woman piecing together a broken plate. The three others fastened their bayonets with a determined metallic rasp and snap, and the air of men who intended to sell their lives dearly.\n\n\"They're coming!\" cried Belmont, looking over the plain.\n\n\"Let them come!\" the Colonel answered, putting his hands into his trouser-pockets. Suddenly he pulled one fist out, and shook it furiously in the air. \"Oh, the cads! the confounded cads!\" he shouted, and his eyes were congested with rage.\n\nIt was the fate of the poor donkey-boys which had carried the self-contained soldier out of his usual calm. During the firing they had remained huddled, a pitiable group, among the rocks at the base of the hill. Now upon the conviction that the charge of the Dervishes must come first upon them, they had sprung upon their animals with shrill, inarticulate cries of fear, and had galloped off across the plain. A small flanking-party of eight or ten camel-men had worked round while the firing had been going on, and these dashed in among the flying donkey-boys, hacking and hewing with a cold-blooded, deliberate ferocity. One little boy, in a flapping Galabeeah, kept ahead of his pursuers for a time, but the long stride of the camels ran him down, and an Arab thrust his spear into the middle of his stooping back. The small, white-clad corpses looked like a flock of sheep trailing over the desert.\n\nBut the people upon the rock had no time to think of the cruel fate of the donkey-boys. Even the Colonel, after that first indignant outburst, had forgotten all about them. The advancing camel-men had trotted to the bottom of the hill, had dismounted, and leaving their camels kneeling, had rushed furiously onward. Fifty of them were clambering up the path and over the rocks together, their red turbans appearing and vanishing again as they scrambled over the boulders. Without a shot or a pause they surged over the three black soldiers, killing one and stamping the other two down under their hurrying feet. So they burst on to the plateau at the top, where an unexpected resistance checked them for an instant.\n\nThe travellers, nestling up against one another, had awaited, each after his own fashion, the coming of the Arabs. The Colonel, with his hands back in his trouser-pockets, tried to whistle out of his dry lips. Belmont folded his arms and leaned against a rock, with a sulky frown upon his lowering face. So strangely do our minds act that his three successive misses, and the tarnish to his reputation as a marksman, was troubling him more than his impending fate. Cecil Brown stood erect, and plucked nervously at the upturned points of his little prim moustache. Monsieur Fardet groaned over his wounded wrist. Mr. Stephens, in sombre impotence, shook his head slowly, the living embodiment of prosaic law and order. Mr. Stuart stood, his umbrella still over him, with no expression upon his heavy face, or in his staring brown eyes. Headingly lay with that china-white cheek resting motionless upon the stones. His sun-hat had fallen off, and he looked quite boyish with his ruffled yellow hair and his unlined, clean-cut face. The dragoman sat upon a stone and played nervously with his donkey-whip. So the Arabs found them when they reached the summit of the hill.\n\nAnd then, just as the foremost rushed to lay hands upon them, a most unexpected incident arrested them. From the time of the first appearance of the Dervishes the fat clergyman of Birmingham had looked like a man in a cataleptic trance. He had neither moved nor spoken. But now he suddenly woke at a bound into strenuous and heroic energy. It may have been the mania of fear, or it may have been the blood of some Berserk ancestor which stirred suddenly in his veins; but he broke into a wild shout, and, catching up a stick, he struck right and left among the Arabs with a fury which was more savage than their own. One who helped to draw up this narrative has left it upon record that, of all the pictures which have been burned into his brain, there is none so clear as that of this man, his large face shining with perspiration, and his great body dancing about with unwieldy agility, as he struck at the shrinking, snarling savages. Then a spear-head flashed from behind a rock with a quick, vicious, upward thrust, the clergyman fell upon his hands and knees, and the horde poured over him to seize their unresisting victims. Knives glimmered before their eyes, rude hands clutched at their wrists and at their throats, and then, with brutal and unreasoning violence, they were hauled and pushed down the steep winding path to where the camels were waiting below. The Frenchman waved his unwounded hand as he walked. \"Vive le Khalifa! Vive le Madhi!\" he shouted, until a blow from behind with the butt-end of a Remington beat him into silence.\n\nAnd now they were herded in at the base of the Abousir rock, this little group of modern types who had fallen into the rough clutch of the seventh century\u2014for in all save the rifles in their hands there was nothing to distinguish these men from the desert warriors who first carried the crescent flag out of Arabia. The East does not change, and the Dervish raiders were not less brave, less cruel, or less fanatical than their forebears. They stood in a circle, leaning upon their guns and spears, and looking with exultant eyes at the dishevelled group of captives. They were clad in some approach to a uniform, red turbans gathered around the neck as well as the head, so that the fierce face looked out of a scarlet frame; yellow, untanned shoes, and white tunics with square brown patches let into them. All carried rifles, and one had a small discoloured bugle slung over his shoulder. Half of them were negroes\u2014fine, muscular men, with the limbs of a jet Hercules; and the other half were Baggara Arabs\u2014small, brown, and wiry, with little, vicious eyes, and thin, cruel lips. The chief was also a Baggara, but he was a taller man than the others, with a black beard which came down over his chest, and a pair of hard, cold eyes, which gleamed like glass from under his thick, black brows. They were fixed now upon his captives, and his features were grave with thought. Mr. Stuart had been brought down, his hat gone, his face still flushed with anger, and his trousers sticking in one part to his leg. The two surviving Soudanese soldiers, their black faces and blue coats blotched with crimson, stood silently at attention upon one side of this forlorn group of castaways.\n\nThe chief stood for some minutes, stroking his black beard, while his fierce eyes glanced from one pale face to another along the miserable line of his captives. In a harsh, imperious voice he said something which brought Mansoor, the dragoman, to the front, with bent back and outstretched supplicating palms. To his employers there had always seemed to be something comic in that flapping skirt and short covercoat above it; but now, under the glare of the mid-day sun, with those faces gathered round them, it appeared rather to add a grotesque horror to the scene. The dragoman salaamed and salaamed like some ungainly automatic doll, and then, as the chief rasped out a curt word or two, he fell suddenly upon his face, rubbing his forehead into the sand, and flapping upon it with his hands.\n\n\"What's that, Cochrane?\" asked Belmont. \"Why is he making an exhibition of himself?\"\n\n\"As far as I can understand, it is all up with us,\" the Colonel answered.\n\n\"But this is absurd,\" cried the Frenchman excitedly; \"why should these people wish any harm to me? I have never injured them. On the other hand, I have always been their friend. If I could but speak to them, I would make them comprehend. Hola, dragoman, Mansoor!\"\n\nThe excited gestures of Monsieur Fardet drew the sinister eyes of the Baggara chief upon him. Again he asked a curt question, and Mansoor, kneeling in front of him, answered it.\n\n\"Tell him that I am a Frenchman, dragoman. Tell him that I am a friend of the Khalifa. Tell him that my countrymen have never had any quarrel with him, but that his enemies are also ours.\"\n\n\"The chief asks what religion you call your own,\" said Mansoor. \"The Khalifa, he says, has no necessity for any friendship from those who are infidels and unbelievers.\"\n\n\"Tell him that in France we look upon all religions as good.\"\n\n\"The chief says that none but a blaspheming dog and the son of a dog would say that all religions are one as good as the other. He says that if you are indeed the friend of the Khalifa, you will accept the Koran and become a true believer upon the spot. If you will do so he will promise on his side to send you alive to Khartoum.\"\n\n\"And if not?\"\n\n\"You will fare in the same way as the others.\"\n\n\"Then you may make my compliments to monsieur the chief, and tell him that it is not the custom for Frenchmen to change their religion under compulsion.\"\n\nThe chief said a few words, and then turned to consult with a short, sturdy Arab at his elbow.\n\n\"He says, Monsieur Fardet,\" said the dragoman, \"that if you speak again he will make a trough out of you for the dogs to feed from. Say nothing to anger him, sir, for he is now talking what is to be done with us.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked the Colonel.\n\n\"It is Ali Wad Ibrahim, the same who raided last year, and killed all of the Nubian village.\"\n\n\"I've heard of him,\" said the Colonel. \"He has the name of being one of the boldest and the most fanatical of all the Khalifa's leaders. Thank God that the women are out of his clutches.\"\n\nThe two Arabs had been talking in that stern, restrained fashion which comes so strangely from a southern race. Now they both turned to the dragoman, who was still kneeling upon the sand. They plied him with questions, pointing first to one and then to another of their prisoners. Then they conferred together once more, and finally said something to Mansoor, with a contemptuous wave of the hand to indicate that he might convey it to the others.\n\n\"Thank Heaven, gentlemen, I think that we are saved for the present time,\" said Mansoor, wiping away the sand which had stuck to his perspiring forehead. \"Ali Wad Ibrahim says that though an unbeliever should have only the edge of the sword from one of the sons of the Prophet, yet it might be of more profit to the beit-el-mal at Omdurman if it had the gold which your people will pay for you. Until it comes you can work as the slaves of the Khalifa, unless he should decide to put you to death. You are to mount yourselves upon the spare camels and to ride with the party.\"\n\nThe chief had waited for the end of the explanation. \"Now he gave a brief order, and a negro stepped forward with a long, dull-coloured sword in his hand. The dragoman squealed like a rabbit who sees a ferret, and threw himself frantically down upon the sand once more.\n\n\"What is it, Cochrane?\" asked Cecil Brown\u2014for the Colonel had served in the East, and was the only one of the travellers who had a smattering of Arabic.\n\n\"As far as I can make out, he says there is no use keeping the dragoman, as no one would trouble to pay a ransom for him, and he is too fat to make a good slave.\"\n\n\"Poor devil!\" cried Brown. \"Here, Cochrane, tell them to let him go. We can't let him be butchered like this in front of us. Say that we will find the money amongst us. I will be answerable for any reasonable sum.\"\n\n\"I'll stand in as far as my means will allow,\" cried Belmont.\n\n\"We will sign a joint bond or indemnity,\" said the lawyer. \"If I had a paper and pencil I could throw it into shape in an instant, and the chief could rely upon its being perfectly correct and valid.\"\n\nBut the Colonel's Arabic was insufficient, and Mansoor himself was too maddened by fear to understand the offer which was being made for him. The negro looked a question at the chief, and then his long black arm swung upwards and his sword hissed over his shoulder. But the dragoman had screamed out something which arrested the blow, and which brought the chief and the lieutenant to his side with a new interest upon their swarthy faces. The others crowded in also, and formed a dense circle around the grovelling, pleading man.\n\nThe Colonel had not understood this sudden change, nor had the others fathomed the reason of it, but some instinct flashed it upon Stephens's horrified perceptions.\n\n\"Oh, you villain!\" he cried furiously. \"Hold your tongue, you miserable creature! Be silent! Better die\u2014a thousand times better die!\"\n\nBut it was too late, and already they could all see the base design by which the coward hoped to save his own life. He was about to betray the women. They saw the chief, with a brave man's contempt upon his stern face, make a sign of haughty assent, and then Mansoor spoke rapidly and earnestly, pointing up the hill. At a word from the Baggara, a dozen of the raiders rushed up the path and were lost to view upon the top. Then came a shrill cry, a horrible strenuous scream of surprise and terror, and an instant later the party streamed into sight again, dragging the women in their midst. Sadie, with her young, active limbs, kept up with them, as they sprang down the slope, encouraging her aunt all the while over her shoulder. The older lady, struggling amid the rushing white figures, looked with her thin limbs and open mouth like a chicken being dragged from a coop.\n\nThe chief's dark eyes glanced indifferently at Miss Adams, but gazed with a smouldering fire at the younger woman. Then he gave an abrupt order, and the prisoners were hurried in a miserable, hopeless drove to the cluster of kneeling camels. Their pockets had already been ransacked, and the contents thrown into one of the camel-food bags, the neck of which was tied up by Ali Wad Ibrahim's own hands.\n\n\"I say, Cochrane,\" whispered Belmont, looking with smouldering eyes at the wretched Mansoor, \"I've got a little hip revolver which they have not discovered. Shall I shoot that cursed dragoman for giving away the women?\"\n\nThe Colonel shook his head.\n\n\"You had better keep it,\" said he, with a sombre face. \"The women may find some other use for it before all is over.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The camels, some brown and some white, were kneeling in a long line, their champing jaws moving rhythmically from side to side, and their gracefully poised heads turning to right and left in a mincing, self-conscious fashion. Most of them were beautiful creatures, true Arabian trotters, with the slim limbs and finely turned necks which mark the breed; but among them were a few of the slower, heavier beasts, with ungroomed skins, disfigured by the black scars of old firings. These were loaded with the doora and the waterskins of the raiders, but a few minutes sufficed to redistribute their loads and to make place for the prisoners. None of these had been bound with the exception of Mr. Stuart\u2014for the Arabs, understanding that he was a clergyman, and accustomed to associate religion with violence, had looked upon his fierce outburst as quite natural, and regarded him now as the most dangerous and enterprising of their captives. His hands were therefore tied together with a plaited camel-halter, but the others, including the dragoman and the two wounded blacks, were allowed to mount without any precaution against their escape, save that which was afforded by the slowness of their beasts. Then, with a shouting of men and a roaring of camels, the creatures were jolted on to their legs, and the long, straggling procession set off with its back to the homely river, and its face to the shimmering, violet haze, which hung round the huge sweep of beautiful, terrible desert, striped tiger-fashion with black rock and with golden sand.\n\nNone of the white prisoners, with the exception of Colonel Cochrane, had ever been upon a camel before. It seemed an alarming distance to the ground when they looked down, and the curious swaying motion, with the insecurity of the saddle, made them sick and frightened. But their bodily discomfort was forgotten in the turmoil of bitter thoughts within. What a chasm gaped between their old life and their new! And yet how short was the time and space which divided them! Less than an hour ago they had stood upon the summit of that rock, and had laughed and chattered, or grumbled at the heat and flies, becoming peevish at small discomforts. Headingly had been hypercritical over the tints of Nature. They could not forget his own tint as he lay with his cheek upon the black stone. Sadie had chattered about tailor-made dresses and Parisian chiffons. Now she was clinging, half-crazy, to the pommel of a wooden saddle, with suicide rising as a red star of hope in her mind. Humanity, reason, argument\u2014all were gone, and there remained the brutal humiliation of force. And all the time, down there by the second rocky point, their steamer was waiting for them\u2014their saloon, with the white napery and the glittering glasses, the latest novel, and the London papers. The least imaginative of them could see it so clearly: the white awning, Mrs. Shlesinger with her yellow sun-hat, Mrs. Belmont lying back in the canvas chair. There it lay almost in sight of them, that little floating chip broken off from home, and every silent, ungainly step of the camels was carrying them more hopelessly away from it. That very morning how beneficent Providence had appeared, how pleasant was life!\u2014a little commonplace, perhaps, but so soothing and restful. And now!\n\nThe red headgear, patched jibbehs, and yellow boots had already shown to the Colonel that these men were no wandering party of robbers, but a troop from the regular army of the Khalifa. Now, as they struck across the desert, they showed that they possessed the rude discipline which their work demanded. A mile ahead, and far out on either flank, rode their scouts, dipping and rising among the yellow sand-hills. Ali Wad Ibrahim headed the caravan, and his short, sturdy lieutenant brought up the rear. The main party straggled over a couple of hundred yards, and in the middle was the little, dejected clump of prisoners. No attempt was made to keep them apart, and Mr. Stephens soon contrived that his camel should be between those of the two ladies.\n\n\"Don't be down-hearted, Miss Adams,\" said he. \"This is a most indefensible outrage, but there can be no question that steps will be taken in the proper quarter to set the matter right. I am convinced that we shall be subjected to nothing worse than a temporary inconvenience. If it had not been for that villain Mansoor, you need not have appeared at all.\"\n\nIt was shocking to see the change in the little Bostonian lady, for she had shrunk to an old woman in an hour. Her swarthy cheeks had fallen in, and her eyes shone wildly from sunken, darkened sockets. Her frightened glances were continually turned upon Sadie. There is surely some wrecker angel which can only gather her best treasures in moments of disaster. For here were all these worldlings going to their doom, and already frivolity and selfishness had passed away from them, and each was thinking and grieving only for the other. Sadie thought of her aunt, her aunt thought of Sadie, the men thought of the women, Belmont thought of his wife\u2014and then he thought of something else also, and he kicked his camel's shoulder with his heel, until he found himself upon the near side of Miss Adams.\n\n\"I've got something for you here,\" he whispered. \"We may be separated soon, so it is as well to make our arrangements.\"\n\n\"Separated!\" wailed Miss Adams.\n\n\"Don't speak loud, for that infernal Mansoor may give us away again.\n\nI hope it won't be so, but it might. We must be prepared for the worst.\n\nFor example, they might determine to get rid of us men and to keep you.\"\n\nMiss Adams shuddered.\n\n\"What am I to do? For God's sake tell me what I am to do, Mr. Belmont! I am an old woman. I have had my day. I could stand it if it was only myself. But Sadie\u2014I am clean crazed when I think of her. There's her mother waiting at home, and I\u2014\" She clasped her thin hands together in the agony of her thoughts.\n\n\"Put your hand out under your dust-cloak,\" said Belmont, sidling his camel up against hers. \"Don't miss your grip of it. There! Now hide it in your dress, and you'll always have a key to unlock any door.\"\n\nMiss Adams felt what it was which he had slipped into her hand, and she looked at him for a moment in bewilderment. Then she pursed up her lips and shook her stern, brown face in disapproval. But she pushed the little pistol into its hiding-place, all the same, and she rode with her thoughts in a whirl. Could this indeed be she, Eliza Adams, of Boston, whose narrow, happy life had oscillated between the comfortable house in Commonwealth Avenue and the Tremont Presbyterian Church? Here she was, hunched upon a camel, with her hand upon the butt of a pistol, and her mind weighing the justifications of murder. Oh, life, sly, sleek, treacherous life, how are we ever to trust you? Show us your worst and we can face it, but it is when you are sweetest and smoothest that we have most to fear from you.\n\n\"At the worst, Miss Sadie, it will only be a question of ransom,\" said Stephens, arguing against his own convictions. \"Besides, we are still dose to Egypt, far away from the Dervish country. There is sure to be an energetic pursuit. You must try not to lose your courage, and to hope for the best.\"\n\n\"No, I am not scared, Mr. Stephens,\" said Sadie, turning towards him a blanched face which belied her words. \"We're all in God's hands, and surely He won't be cruel to us. It is easy to talk about trusting Him when things are going well, but now is the real test. If He's up there behind that blue heaven\u2014\"\n\n\"He is,\" said a voice behind them, and they found that the Birmingham clergyman had joined the party. His tied hands clutched on to his Makloofa saddle, and his fat body swayed dangerously from side to side with every stride of the camel. His wounded leg was oozing with blood and clotted with flies, and the burning desert sun beat down upon his bare head, for he had lost both hat and umbrella in the scuffle. A rising fever flecked his large, white cheeks with a touch of colour, and brought a light into his brown ox-eyes. He had always seemed a somewhat gross and vulgar person to his fellow-travellers. Now, this bitter healing draught of sorrow had transformed him. He was purified, spiritualised, exalted. He had become so calmly strong that he made the others feel stronger as they looked upon him. He spoke of life and of death, of the present, and their hopes of the future; and the black cloud of their misery began to show a golden rift or two. Cecil Brown shrugged his shoulders, for he could not change in an hour the convictions of his life; but the others, even Fardet, the Frenchman, were touched and strengthened. They all took off their hats when he prayed. Then the Colonel made a turban out of his red silk cummerbund, and insisted that Mr. Stuart should wear it. With his homely dress and gorgeous headgear, he looked like a man who has dressed up to amuse the children.\n\nAnd now the dull, ceaseless, insufferable torment of thirst was added to the aching weariness which came from the motion of the camels. The sun glared down upon them, and then up again from the yellow sand, and the great plain shimmered and glowed until they felt as if they were riding over a cooling sheet of molten metal. Their lips were parched and dried, and their tongues like tags of leather. They lisped curiously in their speech, for it was only the vowel sounds which would come without an effort. Miss Adams's chin had dropped upon her chest, and her great hat concealed her face.\n\n\"Auntie will faint if she does not get water,\" said Sadie. \"Oh, Mr.\n\nStephens, is there nothing we could do?\"\n\nThe Dervishes riding near were all Baggara with the exception of one negro\u2014an uncouth fellow with a face pitted with small-pox. His expression seemed good-natured when compared with that of his Arab comrades, and Stephens ventured to touch his elbow and to point to his waterskin, and then to the exhausted lady. The negro shook his head brusquely, but at the same time he glanced significantly towards the Arabs, as if to say that, if it were not for them, he might act differently. Then he laid his black forefinger upon the breast of his jibbeh.\n\n\"Tippy Tilly,\" said he.\n\n\"What's that?\" asked Colonel Cochrane.\n\n\"Tippy Tilly,\" repeated the negro, sinking his voice as if he wished only the prisoners to hear him.\n\nThe Colonel shook his head.\n\n\"My Arabic won't bear much strain. I don't know what he is saying,\" said he.\n\n\"Tippy Tilly. Hicks Pasha,\" the negro repeated.\n\n\"I believe the fellow is friendly to us, but I can't quite make him out,\" said Cochrane to Belmont. \"Do you think that he means that his name is Tippy Tilly, and that he killed Hicks Pasha?\"\n\nThe negro showed his great white teeth at hearing his own words coming back to him. \"Aiwa!\" said he. \"Tippy Tilly\u2014Bimbashi Mormer\u2014Boum!\"\n\n\"By Jove, I've got it!\" cried Belmont. \"He's trying to speak English. Tippy Tilly is as near as he can get to Egyptian Artillery. He has served in the Egyptian Artillery under Bimbashi Mortimer. He was taken prisoner when Hicks Pasha was destroyed, and had to turn Dervish to save his skin. How's that?\"\n\nThe Colonel said a few words of Arabic and received a reply, but two of the Arabs closed up, and the negro quickened his pace and left them.\n\n\"You are quite right,\" said the Colonel. \"The fellow is friendly to us, and would rather fight for the Khedive than for the Khalifa. I don't know that he can do us any good, but I've been in worse holes than this, and come out right side up. After all, we are not out of reach of pursuit, and won't be for another forty-eight hours.\"\n\nBelmont calculated the matter out in his slow, deliberate fashion.\n\n\"It was about twelve that we were on the rock,\" said he. \"They would become alarmed aboard the steamer if we did not appear at two.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the Colonel interrupted, \"that was to be our lunch hour. I remember saying that when I came back I would have\u2014O Lord, it's best not to think of it!\"\n\n\"The reis was a sleepy old crock,\" Belmont continued, \"but I have absolute confidence in the promptness and decision of my wife. She would insist upon an immediate alarm being given. Suppose they started back at two-thirty, they should be at Halfa by three, since the journey is down stream. How long did they say that it took to turn out the Camel Corps?\"\n\n\"Give them an hour.\"\n\n\"And another hour to get them across the river. They would be at the Abousir Rock and pick up the tracks by six o'clock. After that it is a clear race. We are only four hours ahead, and some of these beasts are very spent. We may be saved yet, Cochrane!\"\n\n\"Some of us may. I don't expect to see the padre alive to-morrow, nor Miss Adams either. They are not made for this sort of thing either of them. Then again we must not forget that these people have a trick of murdering their prisoners when they see that there is a chance of a rescue. See here, Belmont, in case you get back and I don't, there's a matter of a mortgage that I want you to set right for me.\" They rode on with their shoulders inclined to each other, deep in the details of business.\n\nThe friendly negro who had talked of himself as Tippy Tilly had managed to slip a piece of cloth soaked in water into the hand of Mr. Stephens, and Miss Adams had moistened her lips with it. Even the few drops had given her renewed strength, and now that the first crushing shock was over, her wiry, elastic, Yankee nature began to reassert itself.\n\n\"These people don't look as if they would harm us, Mr. Stephens,\" said she. \"I guess they have a working religion of their own, such as it is, and that what's wrong to us is wrong to them.\"\n\nStephens shook his head in silence. He had seen the death of the donkey-boys, and she had not.\n\n\"Maybe we are sent to guide them into a better path,\" said the old lady.\n\n\"Maybe we are specially singled out for a good work among them.\"\n\nIf it were not for her niece her energetic and enterprising temperament was capable Of glorying in the chance of evangelising Khartoum, and turning Omdurman into a little well-drained broad-avenued replica of a New England town.\n\n\"Do you know what I am thinking of all the time?\" said Sadie. \"You remember that temple that we saw\u2014when was it? Why, it was this morning.\"\n\nThey gave an exclamation of surprise, all three of them. Yes, it had been this morning; and it seemed away and away in some dim past experience of their lives, so vast was the change, so new and so overpowering the thoughts which had come between. They rode in silence, full of this strange expansion of time, until at last Stephens reminded Sadie that she had left her remark unfinished.\n\n\"Oh yes; it was the wall picture on that temple that I was thinking of. Do you remember the poor string of prisoners who are being dragged along to the feet of the great king\u2014how dejected they looked among the warriors who led them? Who could\u2014who could have thought that within three hours the same fate should be our own? And Mr. Headingly\u2014\" She turned her face away and began to cry.\n\n\"Don't take on, Sadie,\" said her aunt; \"remember what the minister said just now, that we are all right there in the hollow of God's hand. Where do you think we are going, Mr. Stephens?\"\n\nThe red edge of his Baedeker still projected from the lawyer's pocket, for it had not been worth their captor's while to take it. He glanced down at it.\n\n\"If they will only leave me this, I will look up a few references when we halt. I have a general idea of the country, for I drew a small map of it the other day. The river runs from south to north, so we must be travelling almost due west. I suppose they feared pursuit if they kept too near the Nile bank. There is a caravan route, I remember, which runs parallel to the river, about seventy miles inland. If we continue in this direction for a day we ought to come to it. There is a line of wells through which it passes. It comes out at Assiout, if I remember right, upon the Egyptian side. On the other side, it leads away into the Dervish country\u2014so, perhaps\u2014\"\n\nHis words were interrupted by a high, eager voice, which broke suddenly into a torrent of jostling words, words without meaning, pouring strenuously out in angry assertions and foolish repetitions. The pink had deepened to scarlet upon Mr. Stuart's cheeks, his eyes were vacant but brilliant, and he gabbled, gabbled, gabbled as he rode. Kindly mother Nature! she will not let her children be mishandled too far. \"This is too much,\" she says; \"this wounded leg, these crusted lips, this anxious, weary mind. Come away for a time, until your body becomes more habitable.\" And so she coaxes the mind away into the Nirvana of delirium, while the little cell-workers tinker and toil within to get things better for its homecoming. When you see the veil of cruelty which nature wears, try and peer through it, and you will sometimes catch a glimpse of a very homely, kindly face behind.\n\nThe Arab guards looked askance at this sudden outbreak of the clergyman, for it verged upon lunacy, and lunacy is to them a fearsome and supernatural thing. One of them rode forward and spoke with the Emir. When he returned he said something to his comrades, one of whom closed in upon each side of the minister's camel, so as to prevent him from falling. The friendly negro sidled his beast up to the Colonel, and whispered to him.\n\n\"We are going to halt presently, Belmont,\" said Cochrane.\n\n\"Thank God! They may give us some water. We can't go on like this.\"\n\n\"I told Tippy Tilly that, if he could help us, we would turn him into a Bimbashi when we got him back into Egypt. I think he's willing enough if he only had the power. By Jove, Belmont, do look back at the river.\"\n\nTheir route, which had lain through sand-strewn khors with jagged, black edges\u2014places up which one would hardly think it possible that a camel could climb\u2014opened out now on to a hard, rolling plain, covered thickly with rounded pebbles, dipping and rising to the violet hills upon the horizon. So regular were the long, brown pebble-strewn curves, that they looked like the dark rollers of some monstrous ground-swell. Here and there a little straggling sage-green tuft of camel-grass sprouted up between the stones. Brown plains and violet hills\u2014nothing else in front of them! Behind lay the black jagged rocks through which they had passed with orange slopes of sand, and then far away a thin line of green to mark the course of the river. How cool and beautiful that green looked in the stark, abominable wilderness! On one side they could see the high rock\u2014the accursed rock which had tempted them to their ruin. On the other the river curved, and the sun gleamed upon the water. Oh, that liquid gleam, and the insurgent animal cravings, the brutal primitive longings, which for the instant took the soul out of all of them! They had lost families, countries, liberty, everything, but it was only of water, water, water, that they could think. Mr. Stuart in his delirium began roaring for oranges, and it was insufferable for them to have to listen to him. Only the rough, sturdy Irishman rose superior to that bodily craving. That gleam of river must be somewhere near Halfa, and his wife might be upon the very water at which he looked. He pulled his hat over his eyes, and rode in gloomy silence, biting at his strong, iron-grey moustache.\n\nSlowly the sun sank towards the west, and their shadows began to trail along the path where their hearts would go. It was cooler, and a desert breeze had sprung up, whispering over the rolling, stone-strewed plain. The Emir at their head had called his lieutenant to his side, and the pair had peered about, their eyes shaded by their hands, looking for some landmark. Then, with a satisfied grunt, the chief's camel had seemed to break short off at its knees, and then at its hocks, going down in three curious, broken-jointed jerks until its stomach was stretched upon the ground. As each succeeding camel reached the spot it lay down also, until they were all stretched in one long line. The riders sprang off, and laid out the chopped tibbin upon cloths in front of them, for no well-bred camel will eat from the ground. In their gentle eyes, their quiet, leisurely way of eating, and their condescending, mincing manner, there was something both feminine and genteel, as though a party of prim old maids had foregathered in the heart of the Libyan Desert.\n\nThere was no interference with the prisoners, either male or female, for how could they escape in the centre of that huge plain? The Emir came towards them once, and stood combing out his blue-black beard with his fingers, and looking thoughtfully at them out of his dark, sinister eyes. Miss Adams saw with a shudder that it was always upon Sadie that his gaze was fixed. Then, seeing their distress, he gave an order, and a negro brought a waterskin, from which he gave each of them about half a tumblerful. It was hot and muddy, and tasted of leather, but oh how delightful it was to their parched palates! The Emir said a few abrupt words to the dragoman, and left.\n\n\"Ladies and gentlemen,\" Mansoor began, with something of his old consequential manner; but a glare from the Colonel's eyes struck the words from his lips, and he broke away into a long, whimpering excuse for his conduct.\n\n\"How could I do anything otherwise,\" he wailed, \"with the very knife at my throat?\"\n\n\"You will have the very rope round your throat if we all see Egypt again,\" growled Cochrane savagely. \"In the meantime\u2014\"\n\n\"That's all right, Colonel,\" said Belmont. \"But for our own sakes we ought to know what the chief has said.\"\n\n\"For my part I'll have nothing to do with the blackguard.\"\n\n\"I think that that is going too far. We are bound to hear what he has to say.\" Cochrane shrugged his shoulders. Privations had made him irritable, and he had to bite his lip to keep down a bitter answer. He walked slowly away, with his straight-legged military stride.\n\n\"What did he say, then?\" asked Belmont, looking at the dragoman with an eye which was as stern as the Colonel's.\n\n\"He seems to be in a somewhat better manner than before. He said that if he had more water you should have it, but that he is himself short in supply. He said that to-morrow we shall come to the wells of Selimah, and everybody shall have plenty\u2014and the camels too.\"\n\n\"Did he say how long we stopped here?\"\n\n\"Very little rest, he said, and then forward! Oh, Mr. Belmont\u2014\"\n\n\"Hold your tongue!\" snapped the Irishman, and began once more to count times and distances. If it all worked out as he expected, if his wife had insisted upon the indolent reis giving an instant alarm at Halfa, then the pursuers should be already upon their track. The Camel Corps or the Egyptian Horse would travel by moonlight better and faster than in the day-time. He knew that it was the custom at Halfa to keep at least a squadron of them all ready to start at any instant. He had dined at the mess, and the officers had told him how quickly they could take the field. They had shown him the water-tanks and the food beside each of the beasts, and he had admired the completeness of the arrangements, with little thought as to what it might mean to him in the future. It would be at least an hour before they would all get started again from their present halting-place. That would be a clear hour gained. Perhaps by next morning\u2014\n\nAnd then, suddenly, his thoughts were terribly interrupted. The Colonel, raving like a madman, appeared upon the crest of the nearest slope, with an Arab hanging on to each of his wrists. His face was purple with rage and excitement, and he tugged and bent and writhed in his furious efforts to get free. \"You cursed murderers!\" he shrieked, and then, seeing the others in front of him, \"Belmont,\" he cried, \"they've killed Cecil Brown.\"\n\nWhat had happened was this. In his conflict with his own ill-humour, Cochrane had strolled over this nearest crest, and had found a group of camels in the hollow beyond, with a little knot of angry, loud-voiced men beside them. Brown was the centre of the group, pale, heavy-eyed, with his upturned, spiky moustache and listless manner. They had searched his pockets before, but now they were determined to tear off all his clothes in the hope of finding something which he had secreted. A hideous negro with silver bangles in his ears, grinned and jabbered in the young diplomatist's impassive face. There seemed to the Colonel to be something heroic and almost inhuman in that white calm, and those abstracted eyes. His coat was already open, and the Negro's great black paw flew up to his neck and tore his shirt down to the waist. And at the sound of that r-r-rip, and at the abhorrent touch of those coarse fingers, this man about town, this finished product of the nineteenth century, dropped his life-traditions and became a savage facing a savage. His face flushed, his lips curled back, he chattered his teeth like an ape, and his eyes\u2014those indolent eyes which had always twinkled so placidly\u2014were gorged and frantic. He threw himself upon the negro, and struck him again and again, feebly but viciously, in his broad, black face. He hit like a girl, round arm, with an open palm. The man winced away for an instant, appalled by this sudden blaze of passion. Then with an impatient, snarling cry, he slid a knife from his long loose sleeve and struck upwards under the whirling arm. Brown sat down at the blow and began to cough\u2014to cough as a man coughs who has choked at dinner, furiously, ceaselessly, spasm after spasm. Then the angry red cheeks turned to a mottled pallor, there were liquid sounds in his throat, and, clapping his hand to his mouth, he rolled over on to his side. The negro, with a brutal grunt of contempt, slid his knife up his sleeve once more, while the Colonel, frantic with impotent anger, was seized by the bystanders, and dragged, raving with fury, back to his forlorn party. His hands were lashed with a camel-halter, and he lay at last, in bitter silence, beside the delirious Nonconformist.\n\nSo Headingly was gone, and Cecil Brown was gone, and their haggard eyes were turned from one pale face to another, to know which they should lose next of that frieze of light-hearted riders who had stood out so clearly against the blue morning sky, when viewed from the deck-chairs of the Korosko. Two gone out of ten, and a third out of his mind. The pleasure trip was drawing to its climax.\n\nFardet, the Frenchman, was sitting alone with his chin resting upon his hands, and his elbows upon his knees, staring miserably out over the desert, when Belmont saw him start suddenly and prick up his head like a dog who hears a strange step. Then, with clenched fingers, he bent his face forward and stared fixedly towards the black eastern hills through which they had passed. Belmont followed his gaze, and, yes-yes\u2014there was something moving there! He saw the twinkle of metal, and the sudden gleam and flutter of some white garment. A Dervish vedette upon the flank turned his camel twice round as a danger signal, and discharged his rifle in the air. The echo of the crack had hardly died away before they were all in their saddles, Arabs and negroes. Another instant, and the camels were on their feet and moving slowly towards the point of alarm. Several armed men surrounded the prisoners, slipping cartridges into their Remingtons as a hint to them to remain still.\n\n\"By Heaven, they are men on camels!\" cried Cochrane, his troubles all forgotten as he strained his eyes to catch sight of these newcomers. \"I do believe that it is our own people.\" In the confusion he had tugged his hands free from the halter which bound them.\n\n\"They've been smarter than I gave them credit for,\" said Belmont, his eyes shining from under his thick brows. \"They are here a long two hours before we could have reasonably expected them. Hurrah, Monsieur Fardet, ca va bien, n'est ce pas?\"\n\n\"Hurrah, hurrah! merveilleusement bien! Vivent les Anglais! Vivent les Anglais!\" yelled the excited Frenchman, as the head of a column of camelry began to wind out from among the rocks.\n\n\"See here, Belmont,\" cried the Colonel. \"These fellows will want to shoot us if they see it is all up. I know their ways, and we must be ready for it. Will you be ready to jump on the fellow with the blind eye? and I'll take the big nigger, if I can get my arms round him. Stephens, you must do what you can. You, Fardet, comprenez vous? Il est necessaire to plug these Johnnies before they can hurt us. You, dragoman, tell those two Soudanese soldiers that they must be ready\u2014but, but\".... his words died into a murmur, and he swallowed once or twice. \"These are Arabs,\" said he, and it sounded like another voice.\n\nOf all the bitter day, it was the very bitterest moment. Happy Mr. Stuart lay upon the pebbles with his back against the ribs of his camel, and chuckled consumedly at some joke which those busy little cell-workers had come across in their repairs. His fat face was wreathed and creased with merriment. But the others, how sick, how heart-sick, were they all! The women cried. The men turned away in that silence which is beyond tears. Monsieur Fardet fell upon his face, and shook with dry sobbings.\n\nThe Arabs were firing their rifles as a welcome to their friends, and the others as they trotted their camels across the open returned the salutes and waved their rifles and lances in the air. They were a smaller band than the first one\u2014not more than thirty\u2014but dressed in the same red headgear and patched jibbehs. One of them carried a small white banner with a scarlet text scrawled across it. But there was something there which drew the eyes and the thoughts of the tourists away from everything else. The same fear gripped at each of their hearts, and the same impulse kept each of them silent. They stared at a swaying white figure half seen amidst the ranks of the desert warriors.\n\n\"What's that they have in the middle of them?\" cried Stephens at last.\n\n\"Look, Miss Adams! Surely it is a woman!\"\n\nThere was something there upon a camel, but it was difficult to catch a glimpse of it. And then suddenly, as the two bodies met, the riders opened out, and they saw it plainly.\n\n\"It's a white woman!\"\n\n\"The steamer has been taken!\"\n\nBelmont gave a cry that sounded high above everything.\n\n\"Norah, darling,\" he shouted, \"keep your heart up! I'm here, and it is all well!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "So the Korosko had been taken, and the chances of rescue upon which they had reckoned\u2014all those elaborate calculations of hours and distances\u2014were as unsubstantial as the mirage which shimmered upon the horizon. There would be no alarm at Halfa until it was found that the steamer did not return in the evening. Even now, when the Nile was only a thin green band upon the farthest horizon, the pursuit had probably not begun. In a hundred miles, or even less, they would be in the Dervish country. How small, then, was the chance that the Egyptian forces could overtake them. They all sank into a silent, sulky despair, with the exception of Belmont, who was held back by the guards as he strove to go to his wife's assistance.\n\nThe two bodies of camel-men had united, and the Arabs, in their grave, dignified fashion, were exchanging salutations and experiences, while the negroes grinned, chattered, and shouted, with the careless good-humour which even the Koran has not been able to alter. The leader of the newcomers was a greybeard, a worn, ascetic, high-nosed old man, abrupt and fierce in his manner, and soldierly in his bearing. The dragoman groaned when he saw him, and flapped his hands miserably with the air of a man who sees trouble accumulating upon trouble.\n\n\"It is the Emir Abderrahman,\" said he. \"I fear now that we shall never come to Khartoum alive.\"\n\nThe name meant nothing to the others, but Colonel Cochrane had heard of him as a monster of cruelty and fanaticism, a red-hot Moslem of the old fighting, preaching dispensation, who never hesitated to carry the fierce doctrines of the Koran to their final conclusions. He and the Emir Wad Ibrahim conferred gravely together, their camels side by side, and their red turbans inclined inwards, so that the black beard mingled with the white one. Then they both turned and stared long and fixedly at the poor, head-hanging huddle of prisoners. The younger man pointed and explained, while his senior listened with a sternly impassive face.\n\n\"Who's that nice-looking old gentleman in the white beard?\" asked Miss Adams, who had been the first to rally from the bitter disappointment.\n\n\"That is their leader now,\" Cochrane answered.\n\n\"You don't say that he takes command over that other one?\"\n\n\"Yes, lady,\" said the dragoman; \"he is now the head of all.\"\n\n\"Well, that's good for us. He puts me in mind of Elder Mathews who was at the Presbyterian Church in Minister Scott's time. Anyhow, I had rather be in his power than in the hands of that black-haired one with the flint eyes. Sadie, dear, you feel better now its cooler, don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, auntie; don't you fret about me. How are you yourself?\"\n\n\"Well, I'm stronger in faith than I was. I set you a poor example, Sadie, for I was clean crazed at first at the suddenness of it all, and at thinking of what your mother, who trusted you to me, would think about it. My land, there'll be some head-lines in the Boston Herald over this! I guess somebody will have to suffer for it.\"\n\n\"Poor Mr. Stuart!\" cried Sadie, as the monotonous droning voice of the delirious man came again to their ears. \"Come, auntie, and see if we cannot do something to relieve him.\"\n\n\"I'm uneasy about Mrs. Shlesinger and the child,\" said Colonel Cochrane.\n\n\"I can see your wife, Belmont, but I can see no one else.\"\n\n\"They are bringing her over,\" cried he. \"Thank God! We shall hear all about it. They haven't hurt you, Norah, have they?\" He ran forward to grasp and kiss the hand which his wife held down to him as he helped her from the camel.\n\nThe kind grey eyes and calm sweet face of the Irishwoman brought comfort and hope to the whole party. She was a devout Roman Catholic, and it is a creed which forms an excellent prop in hours of danger. To her, to the Anglican Colonel, to the Nonconformist minister, to the Presbyterian American, even to the two Pagan black riflemen, religion in its various forms was fulfilling the same beneficent office\u2014whispering always that the worst which the world can do is a small thing, and that, however harsh the ways of Providence may seem, it is, on the whole, the wisest and best thing for us that we should go cheerfully whither the Great Hand guides us. They had not a dogma in common, these fellows in misfortune; but they held the intimate, deeplying spirit, the calm, essential fatalism which is the world-old framework of religion, with fresh crops of dogmas growing like ephemeral lichens upon its granite surface.\n\n\"You poor things!\" she said. \"I can see that you have had a much worse time than I have. No, really, John, dear, I am quite well\u2014not even very thirsty, for our party filled their waterskins at the Nile, and they let me have as much as I wanted. But I don't see Mr. Headingly and Mr. Brown. And poor Mr. Stuart\u2014what a state he has been reduced to!\"\n\n\"Headingly and Brown are out of their troubles,\" her husband answered. \"You don't know how often I have thanked God to-day, Norah, that you were not with us. And here you are, after all.\"\n\n\"Where should I be but by my husband's side? I had much, much rather be here than safe at Halfa.\"\n\n\"Has any news gone to the town?\" asked the Colonel.\n\n\"One boat escaped. Mrs. Shlesinger and her child and maid were in it. I was downstairs in my cabin when the Arabs rushed on to the vessel. Those on deck had time to escape, for the boat was alongside. I don't know whether any of them were hit. The Arabs fired at them for some time.\"\n\n\"Did they?\" cried Belmont exultantly, his responsive Irish nature catching the sunshine in an instant. \"Then, be Jove, we'll do them yet, for the garrison must have heard the firing. What d'ye think, Cochrane? They must be full cry upon our scent this four hours. Any minute we might see the white puggaree of a British officer coming over that rise.\"\n\nBut disappointment had left the Colonel cold and sceptical.\n\n\"They need not come at all unless they come strong,\" said he.\n\n\"These fellows are picked men with good leaders, and on their own ground they will take a lot of beating.\" Suddenly he paused and looked at the Arabs. \"By George!\" said he, \"that's a sight worth seeing!\"\n\nThe great red sun was down with half its disc slipped behind the violet bank upon the horizon. It was the hour of Arab prayer. An older and more learned civilisation would have turned to that magnificent thing upon the skyline and adored that. But these wild children of the desert were nobler in essentials than the polished Persian. To them the ideal was higher than the material, and it was with their backs to the sun and their faces to the central shrine of their religion that they prayed. And how they prayed, these fanatical Moslems! Rapt, absorbed, with yearning eyes and shining faces, rising, stooping, grovelling with their foreheads upon their praying carpets. Who could doubt, as he watched their strenuous, heart-whole devotion, that here was a great living power in the world, reactionary but tremendous, countless millions all thinking as one from Cape Juby to the confines of China? Let a common wave pass over them, let a great soldier or organiser arise among them to use the grand material at his hand, and who shall say that this may not be the besom with which Providence may sweep the rotten, decadent, impossible, half-hearted south of Europe, as it did a thousand years ago, until it makes room for a sounder stock?\n\nAnd now as they rose to their feet the bugle rang out, and the prisoners understood that, having travelled all day, they were fated to travel all night also. Belmont groaned, for he had reckoned upon the pursuers catching them up before they left this camp. But the others had already got into the way of accepting the inevitable. A flat Arab loaf had been given to each of them\u2014what effort of the chef of the post-boat had ever tasted like that dry brown bread?\u2014and then, luxury of luxuries, they had a second ration of a glass of water, for the fresh-filled bags of the newcomers had provided an ample supply. If the body would but follow the lead of the soul as readily as the soul does that of the body, what a heaven the earth might be! I Now, with their base material wants satisfied for the instant, their spirits began to sing within them, and they mounted their camels with some sense of the romance of their position. Mr. Stuart remained babbling upon the ground, and the Arabs made no effort to lift him into his saddle. His large, white, upturned face glimmered through the gathering darkness.\n\n\"Hi, dragoman, tell them that they are forgetting Mr. Stuart,\" cried the Colonel.\n\n\"No use, sir,\" said Mansoor. \"They say that he is too fat, and that they will not take him any farther. He will die, they say, and why should they trouble about him?\"\n\n\"Not take him!\" cried Cochrane. \"Why, the man will perish of hunger and thirst. Where's the Emir? Hi!\" he shouted, as the black-bearded Arab passed, with a tone like that in which he used to summon a dilatory donkey-boy. The chief did not deign to answer him, but said something to one of the guards, who dashed the butt of his Remington into the Colonel's ribs. The old soldier fell forward gasping, and was carried on half senseless, clutching at the pommel of his saddle. The women began to cry, and the men, with muttered curses and clenched hands, writhed in that hell of impotent passion, where brutal injustice and ill-usage have to go without check or even remonstrance. Belmont gripped at his hip-pocket for his little revolver, and then remembered that he had already given it to Miss Adams. If his hot hand had clutched it, it would have meant the death of the Emir and the massacre of the party.\n\nAnd now as they rode onwards they saw one of the most singular of the phenomena of the Egyptian desert in front of them, though the ill-treatment of their companion had left them in no humour for the appreciation of its beauty. When the sun had sunk, the horizon had remained of a slaty-violet hue. But now this began to lighten and to brighten until a curious false dawn developed, and it seemed as if a vacillating sun was coming back along the path which it had just abandoned. A rosy pink hung over the west, with beautifully delicate sea-green tints along the upper edge of it. Slowly these faded into slate again, and the night had come. It was but twenty-four hours since they had sat in their canvas chairs discussing politics by starlight on the saloon deck of the Korosko; only twelve since they had breakfasted there and had started spruce and fresh upon their last pleasure trip. What a world of fresh impressions had come upon them since then! How rudely they had been jostled out of their take-it-for-granted complacency! The same shimmering silver stars, as they had looked upon last night, the same thin crescent of moon\u2014but they, what a chasm lay between that old pampered life and this!\n\nThe long line of camels moved as noiselessly as ghosts across the desert. Before and behind were the silent, swaying white figures of the Arabs. Not a sound anywhere, not the very faintest sound, until far away behind them they heard a human voice singing in a strong, droning, unmusical fashion. It had the strangest effect, this far-away voice, in that huge inarticulate wilderness. And then there came a well-known rhythm into that distant chant, and they could almost hear the words\u2014\n\nWe nightly pitch our moving tent,\n\nA day's march nearer home.\n\nWas Mr. Stuart in his right mind again, or was it some coincidence of his delirium, that he should have chosen this for his song? With moist eyes his friends looked back through the darkness, for well they knew that home was very near to this wanderer. Gradually the voice died away into a hum, and was absorbed once more into the masterful silence of the desert.\n\n\"My dear old chap, I hope you're not hurt?\" said Belmont, laying his hand upon Cochrane's knee.\n\nThe Colonel had straightened himself, though he still gasped a little in his breathing.\n\n\"I am all right again, now. Would you kindly show me which was the man who struck me?\"\n\n\"It was the fellow in front there\u2014with his camel beside Fardet's.\"\n\n\"The young fellow with the moustache\u2014I can't see him very well in this light, but I think I could pick him out again. Thank you, Belmont!\"\n\n\"But I thought some of your ribs were gone.\"\n\n\"No, it only knocked the wind out of me.\"\n\n\"You must be made of iron. It was a frightful blow. How could you rally from it so quickly?\"\n\nThe Colonel cleared his throat and hummed and stammered.\n\n\"The fact is, my dear Belmont\u2014I'm sure you would not let it go further\u2014above all not to the ladies; but I am rather older than I used to be, and rather than lose the military carriage which has always been dear to me, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Stays, be Jove!\" cried the astonished Irishman.\n\n\"Well, some slight artificial support,\" said the Colonel stiffly, and switched the conversation off to the chances of the morrow.\n\nIt still comes back in their dreams to those who are left, that long night's march in the desert. It was like a dream itself, the silence of it as they were borne forward upon those soft, shuffling sponge feet, and the flitting, flickering figures which oscillated upon every side of them. The whole universe seemed to be hung as a monstrous time-dial in front of them. A star would glimmer like a lantern on the very level of their path. They looked again, and it was a hand's-breadth up, and another was shining beneath it. Hour after hour the broad stream flowed sedately across the deep blue background, worlds and systems drifting majestically overhead, and pouring over the dark horizon. In their vastness and their beauty there was a vague consolation to the prisoners; for their own fate, and their own individuality, seemed trivial and unimportant amid the play of such tremendous forces. Slowly the grand procession swept across the heaven, first climbing, then hanging long with little apparent motion, and then sinking grandly downwards, until away in the east the first cold grey glimmer appeared, and their own haggard faces shocked each other's sight.\n\nThe day had tortured them with its heat, and now the night had brought the even more intolerable discomfort of cold. The Arabs swathed themselves in their gowns and wrapped up their heads. The prisoners beat their hands together and shivered miserably. Miss Adams felt it most, for she was very thin, with the impaired circulation of age. Stephens slipped off his Norfolk jacket and threw it over her shoulders. He rode beside Sadie, and whistled and chatted to make here believe that her aunt was really relieving him by carrying his jacket for him, but the attempt was too boisterous not to be obvious; and yet it was so far true that he probably felt the cold less than any of the party, for the old, old fire was burning in his heart, and a curious joy was inextricably mixed with all his misfortunes, so that he would have found it hard to say if this adventure had been the greatest evil or the greatest blessing of his lifetime. Aboard the boat, Sadie's youth, her beauty, her intelligence and humour, all made him realise that she could at the best only be expected to charitably endure him. But now he felt that he was really of some use to her, that every hour she was learning to turn to him as one turns to one's natural protector; and above all, he had begun to find himself\u2014to understand that there really was a strong, reliable man behind all the tricks of custom which had built up an artificial nature, which had imposed even upon himself. A little glow of self-respect began to warm his blood. He had missed his youth when he was young, and now in his middle age it was coming up like some beautiful belated flower.\n\n\"I do believe that you are all the time enjoying it, Mr. Stephens,\" said Sadie with some bitterness.\n\n\"I would not go so far as to say that,\" he answered. \"But I am quite certain that I would not leave you here.\"\n\nIt was the nearest approach to tenderness which he had ever put into a speech, and the girl looked at him in surprise.\n\n\"I think I've been a very wicked girl all my life,\" she said after a pause. \"Because I have had a good time myself, I never thought of those who were unhappy. This has struck me serious. If ever I get back I shall be a better woman\u2014a more earnest woman\u2014in the future.\"\n\n\"And I a better man. I suppose it is just for that that trouble comes to us. Look how it has brought out the virtues of all our friends. Take poor Mr. Stuart, for example. Should we ever have known what a noble, constant man he was? And see Belmont and his wife, in front of us there, going fearlessly forward, hand in hand, thinking only of each other. And Cochrane, who always seemed on board the boat to be a rather stand-offish, narrow sort of man! Look at his courage, and his unselfish indignation when any one is ill used. Fardet, too, is as brave as a lion. I think misfortune has done us all good.\"\n\nSadie sighed.\n\n\"Yes, if it would end right here one might say so; but if it goes on and on for a few weeks or months of misery, and then ends in death, I don't know where we reap the benefit of those improvements of character which it brings. Suppose you escape, what will you do?\"\n\nThe lawyer hesitated, but his professional instincts were still strong.\n\n\"I will consider whether an action lies, and against whom. It should be with the organisers of the expedition for taking us to the Abousir Rock\u2014or else with the Egyptian Government for not protecting their frontiers. It will be a nice legal question. And what will you do, Sadie?\"\n\nIt was the first time that he had ever dropped the formal Miss, but the girl was too much in earnest to notice it.\n\n\"I will be more tender to others,\" she said. \"I will try to make some one else happy in memory of the miseries which I have endured.\"\n\n\"You have done nothing all your life but made others happy. You cannot help doing it,\" said he. The darkness made it more easy for him to break through the reserve which was habitual with him. \"You need this rough schooling far less than any of us. How could your character be changed for the better?\"\n\n\"You show how little you know me. I have been very selfish and thoughtless.\"\n\n\"At least you had no need for all these strong emotions. You were sufficiently alive without them. Now it has been different with me.\"\n\n\"Why did you need emotions, Mr. Stephens?\"\n\n\"Because anything is better than stagnation. Pain is better than stagnation. I have only just begun to live. Hitherto I have been a machine upon the earth's surface. I was a one-ideaed man, and a one-ideaed man is only one remove from a dead man. That is what I have only just begun to realise. For all these years I have never been stirred, never felt a real throb of human emotion pass through me. I had no time for it. I had observed it in others, and I had vaguely wondered whether there was some want in me which prevented my sharing the experience of my fellow-mortals. But now these last few days have taught me how keenly I can live\u2014that I can have warm hopes, and deadly fears\u2014that I can hate, and that I can\u2014well, that I can have every strong feeling which the soul can experience. I have come to life. I may be on the brink of the grave, but at least I can say now that I have lived.\"\n\n\"And why did you lead this soul-killing life in England?\"\n\n\"I was ambitious\u2014I wanted to get on. And then there were my mother and my sisters to be thought of. Thank Heaven, here is the morning coming. Your aunt and you will soon cease to feel the cold.\"\n\n\"And you without your coat!\"\n\n\"Oh, I have a very good circulation. I can manage very well in my shirt-sleeves.\"\n\nAnd now the long, cold, weary night was over, and the deep blue-black sky had lightened to a wonderful mauve-violet, with the larger stars still glinting brightly out of it. Behind them the grey line had crept higher and higher, deepening into a delicate rose-pink, with the fan-like rays of the invisible sun shooting and quivering across it. Then, suddenly, they felt its warm touch upon their backs, and there were hard black shadows upon the sand in front of them. The Dervishes loosened their cloaks and proceeded to talk cheerily among themselves. The prisoners also began to thaw, and eagerly ate the doora which was served out for their breakfasts. A short halt had been called, and a cup of water handed to each.\n\n\"Can I speak to you, Colonel Cochrane?\" asked the dragoman.\n\n\"No, you can't,\" snapped the Colonel.\n\n\"But it is very important\u2014all our safety may come from it.\"\n\nThe Colonel frowned and pulled at his moustache.\n\n\"Well, what is it?\" he asked at last.\n\n\"You must trust to me, for it is as much to me as to you to get back to Egypt. My wife and home, and children, are on one part, and a slave for life upon the other. You have no cause to doubt it.\"\n\n\"Well, go on!\"\n\n\"You know the black man who spoke with you\u2014the one who had been with Hicks?\"\n\n\"Yes, what of him?\"\n\n\"He has been speaking with me during the night. I have had a long talk with him. He said that he could not very well understand you, nor you him, and so he came to me.\"\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"He said that there were eight Egyptian soldiers among the Arabs\u2014six black and two fellaheen. He said that he wished to have your promise that they should all have very good reward if they helped you to escape.\"\n\n\"Of course they shall.\"\n\n\"They asked for one hundred Egyptian pounds each.\"\n\n\"They shall have it.\"\n\n\"I told him that I would ask you, but that I was sure that you would agree to it.\"\n\n\"What do they propose to do?\"\n\n\"They could promise nothing, but what they thought best was that they should ride their camels not very far from you, so that if any chance should come they would be ready to take advantage.\"\n\n\"Well, you can go to him and promise two hundred pounds each if they will help us. You do not think we could buy over some Arabs?\"\n\nMansoor shook his head. \"Too much danger to try,\" said he.\n\n\"Suppose you try and fail, then that will be the end to all of us.\n\nI will go tell what you have said.\" He strolled off to where the old negro gunner was grooming his camel and waiting for his reply.\n\nThe Emirs had intended to halt for a half-hour at the most, but the baggage-camels which bore the prisoners were so worn out with the long, rapid march, that it was clearly impossible that they should move for some time. They had laid their long necks upon the ground, which is the last symptom of fatigue. The two chiefs shook their heads when they inspected them, and the terrible old man looked with his hard-lined, rock features at the captives. Then he said something to Mansoor, whose face turned a shade more sallow as he listened.\n\n\"The Emir Abderrahman says that if you do not become Moslem, it is not worth while delaying the whole caravan in order to carry you upon the baggage-camels. If it were not for you, he says that we could travel twice as fast. He wishes to know therefore, once for ever, if you will accept the Koran.\" Then in the same tone, as if he were still translating, he continued: \"You had far better consent, for if you do not he will most certainly put you all to death.\"\n\nThe unhappy prisoners looked at each other in despair. The two Emirs stood gravely watching them.\n\n\"For my part,\" said Cochrane, \"I had as soon die now as be a slave in Khartoum.\"\n\n\"What do you say, Norah?\" asked Belmont.\n\n\"If we die together, John, I don't think I shall be afraid.\"\n\n\"It is absurd that I should die for that in which I have never had belief,\" said Fardet. \"And yet it is not possible for the honour of a Frenchman that he should be converted in this fashion.\" He drew himself up, with his wounded wrist stuck into the front of his jacket, \"Je suis Chretien. J'y reste,\" he cried, a gallant falsehood in each sentence.\n\n\"What do you say, Mr. Stephens?\" asked Mansoor in a beseeching voice.\n\n\"If one of you would change, it might place them in a good humour.\n\nI implore you that you do what they ask.\"\n\n\"No, I can't,\" said the lawyer quietly.\n\n\"Well then, you, Miss Sadie? You, Miss Adams? It is only just to say it once, and you will be saved.\"\n\n\"Oh, auntie, do you think we might?\" whimpered the frightened girl.\n\n\"Would it be so very wrong if we said it?\"\n\nThe old lady threw her arms round her. \"No, no, my own dear little Sadie,\" she whispered. \"You'll be strong! You would just hate yourself for ever after. Keep your grip of me, dear, and pray if you find your strength is leaving you. Don't forget that your old aunt Eliza has you all the time by the hand.\"\n\nFor an instant they were heroic, this line of dishevelled, bedraggled pleasure-seekers. They were all looking Death in the face, and the closer they looked the less they feared him. They were conscious rather of a feeling of curiosity, together with the nervous tingling with which one approaches a dentist's chair. The dragoman made a motion of his hands and shoulders, as one who has tried and failed. The Emir Abderrahman said something to a negro, who hurried away.\n\n\"What does he want a scissors for?\" asked the Colonel.\n\n\"He is going to hurt the women,\" said Mansoor, with the same gesture of impotence.\n\nA cold chill fell upon them all. They stared about them in helpless horror. Death in the abstract was one thing, but these insufferable details were another. Each had been braced to endure any evil in his own person, but their hearts were still soft for each other. The women said nothing, but the men were all buzzing together.\n\n\"There's the pistol, Miss Adams,\" said Belmont. \"Give it here!\n\nWe won't be tortured! We won't stand it!\"\n\n\"Offer them money, Mansoor! Offer them anything!\" cried Stephens. \"Look here, I'll turn Mohammedan if they'll promise to leave the women alone. After all, it isn't binding\u2014it's under compulsion. But I can't see the women hurt.\"\n\n\"No, wait a bit, Stephens!\" said the Colonel. \"We mustn't lose our heads. I think I see a way out. See here, dragoman! You tell that greybearded old devil that we know nothing about his cursed tinpot religion. Put it smooth when you translate it. Tell him that he cannot expect us to adopt it until we know what particular brand of rot it is that he wants us to believe. Tell him that if he will instruct us, we are perfectly willing to listen to his teaching, and you can add that any creed which turns out such beauties as him, and that other bounder with the black beard, must claim the attention of every one.\"\n\nWith bows and suppliant sweepings of his hands the dragoman explained that the Christians were already full of doubt, and that it needed but a little more light of knowledge to guide them on to the path of Allah. The two Emirs stroked their beards and gazed suspiciously at them. Then Abderrahman spoke in his crisp, stern fashion to the dragoman, and the two strode away together. An instant later the bugle rang out as a signal to mount.\n\n\"What he says is this,\" Mansoor explained, as he rode in the middle of the prisoners. \"We shall reach the wells by mid-day, and there will be a rest. His own Moolah, a very good and learned man, will come to give you an hour of teaching. At the end of that time you will choose one way or the other. When you have chosen, it will be decided whether you are to go to Khartoum or to be put to death. That is his last word.\"\n\n\"They won't take ransom?\"\n\n\"Wad Ibrahim would, but the Emir Abderrahman is a terrible man.\n\nI advise you to give in to him.\"\n\n\"What have you done yourself? You are a Christian, too.\"\n\nMansoor blushed as deeply as his complexion would allow.\n\n\"I was yesterday morning. Perhaps I will be to-morrow morning. I serve the Lord as long as what He ask seem reasonable; but this is very otherwise.\"\n\nHe rode onwards amongst the guards with a freedom which showed that his change of faith had put him upon a very different footing to the other prisoners.\n\nSo they were to have a reprieve of a few hours, though they rode in that dark shadow of death which was closing in upon them. What is there in life that we should cling to it so? It is not the pleasures, for those whose hours are one long pain shrink away screaming when they see merciful Death holding his soothing arms out for them. It is not the associations, for we will change all of them before we walk of our own free-wills down that broad road which every son and daughter of man must tread. Is it the fear of losing the I, that dear, intimate I, which we think we know so well, although it is eternally doing things which surprise us? Is it that which makes the deliberate suicide cling madly to the bridge-pier as the river sweeps him by? Or is it that Nature is so afraid that all her weary workmen may suddenly throw down their tools and strike, that she has invented this fashion of keeping them constant to their present work? But there it is, and all these tired, harassed, humiliated folk rejoiced in the few more hours of suffering which were left to them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "There was nothing to show them as they journeyed onwards that they were not on the very spot that they had passed at sunset upon the evening before. The region of fantastic black hills and orange sand which bordered the river had long been left behind, and everywhere now was the same brown, rolling, gravelly plain, the ground-swell with the shining rounded pebbles upon its surface, and the occasional little sprouts of sage-green camel-grass. Behind and before it extended, to where far away in front of them it sloped upwards towards a line of violet hills. The sun was not high enough yet to cause the tropical shimmer, and the wide landscape, brown with its violet edging, stood out with a hard clearness in that dry, pure air. The long caravan straggled along at the slow swing of the baggage-camels. Far out on the flanks rode the vedettes, halting at every rise, and peering backwards with their hands shading their eyes. In the distance their spears and rifles seemed to stick out of them, straight and thin, like needles in knitting.\n\n\"How far do you suppose we are from the Nile?\" asked Cochrane. He rode with his chin on his shoulder and his eyes straining wistfully to the eastern skyline.\n\n\"A good fifty miles,\" Belmont answered.\n\n\"Not so much as that,\" said the Colonel. \"We could not have been moving more than fifteen or sixteen hours, and a camel does not do more than two and a half miles an hour unless it is trotting. That would only give about forty miles, but still it is, I fear, rather far for a rescue. I don't know that we are much the better for this postponement. What have we to hope for? We may just as well take our gruel.\"\n\n\"Never say die!\" cried the cheery Irishman. \"There's plenty of time between this and mid-day. Hamilton and Hedley of the Camel Corps are good boys, and they'll be after us like a streak. They'll have no baggage-camels to hold them back, you can lay your life on that! Little did I think, when I dined with them at mess that last night, and they were telling me all their precautions against a raid, that I should depend upon them for our lives.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll play the game out, but I'm not very hopeful,\" said Cochrane. \"Of course, we must keep the best face we can before the women. I see that Tippy Tilly is as good as his word, for those five niggers and the two brown Johnnies must be the men he speaks of. They all ride together and keep well up, but I can't see how they are going to help us.\"\n\n\"I've got my pistol back,\" whispered Belmont, and his square chin and strong mouth set like granite. \"If they try any games on the women, I mean to shoot them all three with my own hand, and then we'll die with our minds easy.\"\n\n\"Good man!\" said Cochrane, and they rode on in silence. None of them spoke much. A curious, dreamy, irresponsible feeling crept over them. It was as if they had all taken some narcotic drug\u2014the merciful anodyne which Nature uses when a great crisis has fretted the nerves too far. They thought of their friends and of their past lives in the comprehensive way in which one views that which is completed. A subtle sweetness mingled with the sadness of their fate. They were filled with the quiet serenity of despair.\n\n\"It's devilish pretty,\" said the Colonel, looking about him. \"I always had an idea that I should like to die in a real, good, yellow London fog. You couldn't change for the worse.\"\n\n\"I should have liked to have died in my sleep,\" said Sadie.\n\n\"How beautiful to wake up and find yourself in the other world!\n\nThere was a piece that Hetty Smith used to say at the College: 'Say not good-night, but in some brighter world wish me good-morning.'\"\n\nThe Puritan aunt shook her head at the idea. \"It's a terrible thing to go unprepared into the presence of your Maker,\" said she.\n\n\"It's the loneliness of death that is terrible,\" said Mrs. Belmont. \"If we and those whom we loved all passed over simultaneously, we should think no more of it than of changing our house.\"\n\n\"If the worst comes to the worst, we won't be lonely,\" said her husband. \"We'll all go together, and we shall find Brown and Headingly and Stuart waiting on the other side.\"\n\nThe Frenchman shrugged his shoulders. He had no belief in survival after death, but he envied the two Catholics the quiet way in which they took things for granted. He chuckled to think of what his friends in the Cafe Cubat would say if they learned that he had laid down his life for the Christian faith. Sometimes it amused and sometimes it maddened him, and he rode onwards with alternate gusts of laughter and of fury, nursing his wounded wrist all the time like a mother with a sick baby.\n\nAcross the brown of the hard, pebbly desert there had been visible for some time a single long, thin, yellow streak, extending north and south as far as they could see. It was a band of sand not more than a few hundred yards across, and rising at the highest to eight or ten feet. But the prisoners were astonished to observe that the Arabs pointed at this with an air of the utmost concern, and they halted when they came to the edge of it like men upon the brink of an unfordable river. It was very light, dusty sand, and every wandering breath of wind sent it dancing into the air like a whirl of midges. The Emir Abderrahman tried to force his camel into it, but the creature, after a step or two, stood still and shivered with terror. The two chiefs talked for a little, and then the whole caravan trailed off with their heads for the north, and the streak of sand upon their left.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Belmont, who found the dragoman riding at his elbow.\n\n\"Why are we going out of our course?\"\n\n\"Drift sand,\" Mansoor answered. \"Every sometimes the wind bring it all in one long place like that. To-morrow, if a wind comes, perhaps there will not be one grain left, but all will be carried up into the air again. An Arab will sometimes have to go fifty or a hundred miles to go round a drift. Suppose he tries to cross, his camel breaks its legs, and he himself is sucked in and swallowed.\"\n\n\"How long will this be?\"\n\n\"No one can say.\"\n\n\"Well, Cochrane, it's all in our favour. The longer the chase the better chance for the fresh camels!\" and for the hundredth time he looked back at the long, hard skyline behind them. There was the great, empty, dun-coloured desert, but where the glint of steel or the twinkle of white helmet for which he yearned?\n\nAnd soon they cleared the obstacle in their front. It spindled away into nothing, as a streak of dust would which has been blown across an empty room. It was curious to see that when it was so narrow that one could almost jump it, the Arabs would still go for many hundreds of yards rather than risk the crossing. Then, with good, hard country before them once more, the tired beasts were whipped up, and they ambled on with a double-jointed jogtrot, which set the prisoners nodding and bowing in grotesque and ludicrous misery. It was fun at first, and they smiled at each other, but soon the fun had become tragedy as the terrible camel-ache seized them by spine and waist, with its deep, dull throb, which rises gradually to a splitting agony.\n\n\"I can't stand it, Sadie,\" cried Miss Adams suddenly. \"I've done my best. I'm going to fall.\"\n\n\"No, no, auntie, you'll break your limbs if you do. Hold up, just a little, and maybe they'll stop.\"\n\n\"Lean back, and hold your saddle behind,\" said the Colonel. \"There, you'll find that will ease the strain.\" He took the puggaree from his hat, and tying the ends together, he slung it over her front pommel. \"Put your foot in the loop,\" said he. \"It will steady you like a stirrup.\"\n\nThe relief was instant, so Stephens did the same for Sadie. But presently one of the weary doora camels came down with a crash, its limbs starred out as if it had split asunder, and the caravan had to come down to its old sober gait.\n\n\"Is this another belt of drift sand?\" asked the Colonel presently.\n\n\"No, it's white,\" said Belmont. \"Here, Mansoor, what is that in front of us?\"\n\nBut the dragoman shook his head.\n\n\"I don't know what it is, sir. I never saw the same thing before.\"\n\nRight across the desert, from north to south, there was drawn a white line, as straight and clear as if it had been slashed with chalk across a brown table. It was very thin, but it extended without a break from horizon to horizon. Tippy Tilly said something to the dragoman.\n\n\"It's the great caravan route,\" said Mansoor.\n\n\"What makes it white, then?\"\n\n\"The bones.\"\n\nIt seemed incredible, and yet it was true, for as they drew nearer they saw that it was indeed a beaten track across the desert, hollowed out by long usage, and so covered with bones that they gave the impression of a continuous white ribbon. Long, snouty heads were scattered everywhere, and the lines of ribs were so continuous that it looked in places like the framework of a monstrous serpent. The endless road gleamed in the sun as if it were paved with ivory. For thousands of years this had been the highway over the desert, and during all that time no animal of all those countless caravans had died there without being preserved by the dry, antiseptic air. No wonder, then, that it was hardly possible to walk down it now without treading upon their skeletons.\n\n\"This must be the route I spoke of,\" said Stephens. \"I remember marking it upon the map I made for you, Miss Adams. Baedeker says that it has been disused on account of the cessation of all trade which followed the rise of the Dervishes, but that it used to be the main road by which the skins and gums of Darfur found their way down to Lower Egypt.\"\n\nThey looked at it with a listless curiosity, for there was enough to engross them at present in their own fates. The caravan struck to the south along the old desert track, and this Golgotha of a road seemed to be a fitting avenue for that which awaited them at the end of it. Weary camels and weary riders dragged on together towards their miserable goal.\n\nAnd now, as the critical moment approached which was to decide their fate, Colonel Cochrane, weighed down by his fears lest something terrible should befall the women, put his pride aside to the extent of asking the advice of the renegade dragoman. The fellow was a villain and a coward, but at least he was an Oriental, and he understood the Arab point of view. His change of religion had brought him into closer contact with the Dervishes, and he had overheard their intimate talk. Cochrane's stiff, aristocratic nature fought hard before he could bring himself to ask advice from such a man, and when he at last did so, it was in the gruffest and most unconciliatory voice.\n\n\"You know the rascals, and you have the same way of looking at things,\" said he. \"Our object is to keep things going for another twenty-four hours. After that it does not much matter what befalls us, for we shall be out of the reach of rescue. But how can we stave them off for another day?\"\n\n\"You know my advice,\" the dragoman answered; \"I have already answered it to you. If you will all become as I have, you will certainly be carried to Khartoum in safety. If you do not, you will never leave our next camping-place alive.\"\n\nThe Colonel's well-curved nose took a higher tilt, and an angry flush reddened his thin cheeks. He rode in silence for a little, for his Indian service had left him with a curried-prawn temper, which had had an extra touch of cayenne added to it by his recent experiences. It was some minutes before he could trust himself to reply.\n\n\"We'll set that aside,\" said he at last. \"Some things are possible and some are not. This is not.\"\n\n\"You need only pretend.\"\n\n\"That's enough,\" said the Colonel abruptly.\n\nMansoor shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"What is the use of asking me, if you become angry when I answer?\n\nIf you do not wish to do what I say, then try your own attempt.\n\nAt least you cannot say that I have not done all I could to save you.\"\n\n\"I'm not angry,\" the Colonel answered after a pause, in a more conciliatory voice, \"but this is climbing down rather farther than we care to go. Now, what I thought is this. You might, if you chose, give this priest, or Moolah, who is coming to us, a hint that we really are softening a bit upon the point. I don't think, considering the hole that we are in, that there can be very much objection to that. Then, when he comes, we might play up and take an interest and ask for more instruction, and in that way hold the matter over for a day or two. Don't you think that would be the best game?\"\n\n\"You will do as you like,\" said Mansoor. \"I have told you once for ever what I think. If you wish that I speak to the Moolah, I will do so. It is the fat, little man with the grey beard, upon the brown camel in front there. I may tell you that he has a name among them for converting the infidel, and he has a great pride in it, so that he would certainly prefer that you were not injured if he thought that he might bring you into Islam.\"\n\n\"Tell him that our minds are open, then,\" said the Colonel. \"I don't suppose the padre would have gone so far, but now that he is dead I think we may stretch a point. You go to him, Mansoor, and if you work it well we will agree to forget what is past. By the way, has Tippy Tilly said anything?\"\n\n\"No, sir. He has kept his men together, but he does not understand yet how he can help you.\"\n\n\"Neither do I. Well, you go to the Moolah, then, and I'll tell the others what we have agreed.\"\n\nThe prisoners all acquiesced in the Colonel's plan, with the exception of the old New England lady, who absolutely refused even to show any interest in the Mohammedan creed. \"I guess I am too old to bow the knee to Baal,\" she said. The most that she would concede was that she would not openly interfere with anything which her companions might say or do.\n\n\"And who is to argue with the priest?\" asked Fardet, as they all rode together, talking the matter over. \"It is very important that it should be done in a natural way, for if he thought that we were only trying to gain time, he would refuse to have any more to say to us.\"\n\n\"I think Cochrane should do it, as the proposal is his,\" said Belmont.\n\n\"Pardon me!\" cried the Frenchman. \"I will not say a word against our friend the Colonel, but it is not possible that a man should be fitted for everything. It will all come to nothing if he attempts it. The priest will see through the Colonel.\"\n\n\"Will he?\" said the Colonel with dignity.\n\n\"Yes, my friend, he will, for, like most of your countrymen, you are very wanting in sympathy for the ideas of other people, and it is the great fault which I find with you as a nation.\"\n\n\"Oh, drop the politics!\" cried Belmont impatiently.\n\n\"I do not talk politics. What I say is very practical. How can Colonel Cochrane pretend to this priest that he is really interested in his religion when, in effect, there is no religion in the world to him outside some little church in which he has been born and bred? I will say this for the Colonel, that I do not believe he is at all a hypocrite, and I am sure that he could not act well enough to deceive such a man as this priest.\"\n\nThe Colonel sat with a very stiff back and the blank face of a man who is not quite sure whether he is being complimented or insulted.\n\n\"You can do the talking yourself if you like,\" said he at last.\n\n\"I should he very glad to be relieved of it.\"\n\n\"I think that I am best fitted for it, since I am equally interested in all creeds. When I ask for information, it is because in verity I desire it, and not because I am playing a part.\"\n\n\"I certainly think that it would be much better if Monsieur Fardet would undertake it,\" said Mrs. Belmont with decision, and so the matter was arranged.\n\nThe sun was now high, and it shone with dazzling brightness upon the bleached bones which lay upon the road. Again the torture of thirst fell upon the little group of survivors, and again, as they rode with withered tongues and crusted lips, a vision of the saloon of the Korosko danced like a mirage before their eyes, and they saw the white napery, the wine-cards by the places, the long necks of the bottles, the siphons upon the sideboard. Sadie, who had borne up so well, became suddenly hysterical, and her shrieks of senseless laughter jarred horribly upon their nerves. Her aunt on one side of her, and Mr. Stephens on the other, did all they could to soothe her, and at last the weary, overstrung girl relapsed into something between a sleep and a faint, hanging limp over her pommel, and only kept from falling by the friends who clustered round her. The baggage-camels were as weary as their riders, and again and again they had to jerk at their nose-ropes to prevent them from lying down. From horizon to horizon stretched that one huge arch of speckless blue, and up its monstrous concavity crept the inexorable sun, like some splendid but barbarous deity, who claimed a tribute of human suffering as his immemorial right.\n\nTheir course still lay along the old trade route, but their progress was very slow, and more than once the two Emirs rode back together, and shook their heads as they looked at the weary baggage-camels on which the prisoners were perched. The greatest laggard of all was one which was ridden by a wounded Soudanese soldier. It was limping badly with a strained tendon, and it was only by constant prodding that it could be kept with the others. The Emir Wad Ibrahim raised his Remington, as the creature hobbled past, and sent a bullet through its brain. The wounded man flew forwards out of the high saddle, and fell heavily upon the hard track. His companions in misfortune, looking back, saw him stagger to his feet with a dazed face. At the same instant a Baggara slipped down from his camel with a sword in his hand.\n\n\"Don't look! don't look!\" cried Belmont to the ladies, and they all rode on with their faces to the south. They heard no sound, but the Baggara passed them a few minutes afterwards. He was cleaning his sword upon the hairy neck of his camel, and he glanced at them with a quick, malicious gleam of his teeth as he trotted by. But those who are at the lowest pitch of human misery are at least secured against the future. That vicious, threatening smile which might once have thrilled them left them now unmoved\u2014or stirred them at most to vague resentment. There were many things to interest them in this old trade route, had they been in a condition to take notice of them. Here and there along its course were the crumbling remains of ancient buildings, so old that no date could be assigned to them, but designed in some far-off civilisation to give the travellers shade from the sun or protection from the ever-lawless children of the desert. The mud bricks with which these refuges were constructed showed that the material had been carried over from the distant Nile. Once, upon the top of a little knoll, they saw the shattered plinth of a pillar of red Assouan granite, with the wide-winged symbol of the Egyptian god across it, and the cartouche of the second Rameses beneath. After three thousand years one cannot get away from the ineffaceable footprints of the warrior-king. It is surely the most wonderful survival of history that one should still be able to gaze upon him, high-nosed and masterful, as he lies with his powerful arms crossed upon his chest, majestic even in decay, in the Gizeh Museum. To the captives, the cartouche was a message of hope, as a sign that they were not outside the sphere of Egypt. \"They've left their card here once, and they may again,\" said Belmont, and they all tried to smile.\n\nAnd now they came upon one of the most satisfying sights on which the human eye can ever rest. Here and there, in the depressions at either side of the road, there had been a thin scurf of green, which meant that water was not very far from the surface. And then, quite suddenly, the track dipped down into a bowl-shaped hollow, with a most dainty group of palm-trees, and a lovely green sward at the bottom of it. The sun gleaming upon that brilliant patch of clear, restful colour, with the dark glow of the bare desert around it, made it shine like the purest emerald in a setting of burnished copper. And then it was not its beauty only, but its promise for the future: water, shade, all that weary travellers could ask for. Even Sadie was revived by the cheery sight, and the spent camels snorted and stepped out more briskly, stretching their long necks and sniffing the air as they went. After the unhomely harshness of the desert, it seemed to all of them that they had never seen anything more beautiful than this. They looked below at the green sward with the dark, star-like shadows of the palm-crowns; then they looked up at those deep green leaves against the rich blue of the sky, and they forgot their impending death in the beauty of that Nature to whose bosom they were about to return.\n\nThe wells in the centre of the grove consisted of seven large and two small saucer-like cavities filled with peat-coloured water, enough to form a plentiful supply for any caravan. Camels and men drank it greedily, though it was tainted by the all-pervading natron. The camels were picketed, the Arabs threw their sleeping-mats down in the shade, and the prisoners, after receiving a ration of dates and of doora, were told that they might do what they would during the heat of the day, and that the Moolah would come to them before sunset. The ladies were given the thicker shade of an acacia tree, and the men lay down under the palms. The great green leaves swished slowly above them; they heard the low hum of the Arab talk, and the dull champing of the camels, and then in an instant, by that most mysterious and least understood of miracles, one was in a green Irish valley, and another saw the long straight line of Commonwealth Avenue, and a third was dining at a little round table opposite to the bust of Nelson in the Army and Navy Club, and for him the swishing of the palm branches had been transformed into the long-drawn hum of Pall Mall. So the spirits went their several ways, wandering back along the strange, un-traced tracks of the memory, while the weary, grimy bodies lay senseless under the palm-trees in the Oasis of the Libyan Desert." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Colonel Cochrane was awakened from his slumber by some one pulling at his shoulder. As his eyes opened they fell upon the black, anxious face of Tippy Tilly, the old Egyptian gunner. His crooked finger was laid upon his thick, liver-coloured lips, and his dark eyes glanced from left to right with ceaseless vigilance.\n\n\"Lie quiet! Do not move!\" he whispered, in Arabic. \"I will lie here beside you, and they cannot tell me from the others. You can understand what I am saying?\"\n\n\"Yes, if you will talk slowly.\"\n\n\"Very good. I have no great trust in this black man, Mansoor. I had rather talk direct with the Miralai.\"\n\n\"What have you to say?\"\n\n\"I have waited long, until they should all be asleep, and now in another hour we shall be called to evening prayer. First of all, here is a pistol, that you may not say that you are without arms.\"\n\nIt was a clumsy, old-fashioned thing, but the Colonel saw the glint of a percussion cap upon the nipple, and knew that it was loaded. He slipped it into the inner pocket of his Norfolk jacket.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said he; \"speak slowly, so that I may understand you.\"\n\n\"There are eight of us who wish to go to Egypt. There are also four men in your party. One of us, Mehemet Ali, has fastened twelve camels together, which are the fastest of all save only those which are ridden by the Emirs. There are guards upon watch, but they are scattered in all directions. The twelve camels are close beside us here\u2014those twelve behind the acacia tree. If we can only get mounted and started, I do not think that many can overtake us, and we shall have our rifles for them. The guards are not strong enough to stop so many of us. The waterskins are all filled, and we may see the Nile again by to-morrow night.\"\n\nThe Colonel could not follow it all, but he understood enough to set a little spring of hope bubbling in his heart. The last terrible day had left its mark in his livid face and his hair, which was turning rapidly to grey. He might have been the father of the spruce well-preserved soldier who had paced with straight back and military stride up and down the saloon deck of the Korosko.\n\n\"That is excellent,\" said he. \"But what are we to do about the three ladies?\" The black soldier shrugged his shoulders. \"Mefeesh!\" said he. \"One of them is old, and in any case there are plenty more women if we get back to Egypt. These will not come to any hurt, but they will be placed in the harem of the Khalifa.\"\n\n\"What you say is nonsense,\" said the Colonel sternly. \"We shall take our women with us, or we shall not go at all.\"\n\n\"I think it is rather you who talk the thing without sense,\" the black man answered angrily. \"How can you ask my companions and me to do that which must end in failure? For years we have waited for such a chance as this, and now that it has come, you wish us to throw it away owing to this foolishness about the women.\"\n\n\"What have we promised you if we come back to Egypt?\" asked Cochrane.\n\n\"Two hundred Egyptian pounds and promotion in the army\u2014all upon the word of an Englishman.\"\n\n\"Very good. Then you shall have three hundred each if you can make some new plan by which you can take the women with you.\"\n\nTippy Tilly scratched his woolly head in his perplexity.\n\n\"We might, indeed, upon some excuse, bring three more of the faster camels round to this place. Indeed, there are three very good camels among those which are near the cooking fire. But how are we to get the women upon them?\u2014and if we had them upon them, we know very well that they would fall off when they began to gallop. I fear that you men will fall off, for it is no easy matter to remain upon a galloping camel; but as to the women, it is impossible. No, we shall leave the women, and if you will not leave the women, then we shall leave all of you and start by ourselves.\"\n\n\"Very good! Go!\" said the Colonel abruptly, and settled down as if to sleep once more. He knew that with Orientals it is the silent man who is most likely to have his way.\n\nThe negro turned and crept away for some little distance, where he was met by one of his fellaheen comrades, Mehemet Ali, who had charge of the camels. The two argued for some little time\u2014for those three hundred golden pieces were not to be lightly resigned. Then the negro crept back to Colonel Cochrane.\n\n\"Mehemet Ali has agreed,\" said he. \"He has gone to put the nose-rope upon three more of the camels. But it is foolishness, and we are all going to our death. Now come with me, and we shall awaken the women and tell them.\"\n\nThe Colonel shook his companions and whispered to them what was in the wind. Belmont and Fardet were ready for any risk. Stephens, to whom the prospect of a passive death presented little terror, was seized with a convulsion of fear when he thought of any active exertion to avoid it, and shivered in all his long, thin limbs. Then he pulled out his Baedeker and began to write his will upon the flyleaf, but his hand twitched so that he was hardly legible. By some strange gymnastic of the legal mind a death, even by violence, if accepted quietly, had a place in the order of things, while a death which overtook one galloping frantically over a desert was wholly irregular and discomposing. It was not dissolution which he feared, but the humiliation and agony of a fruitless struggle against it.\n\nColonel Cochrane and Tippy Tilly had crept together under the shadow of the great acacia tree to the spot where the women were lying. Sadie and her aunt lay with their arms round each other, the girl's head pillowed upon the old woman's bosom. Mrs. Belmont was awake, and entered into the scheme in an instant.\n\n\"But you must leave me,\" said Miss Adams earnestly. \"What does it matter at my age, anyhow?\"\n\n\"No, no, Aunt Eliza; I won't move without you! Don't you think it!\" cried the girl. \"You've got to come straight away or else we both stay right here where we are.\"\n\n\"Come, come, ma'am, there is no time for arguing, or nonsense,\" said the Colonel roughly. \"Our lives all depend upon your making an effort, and we cannot possibly leave you behind.\"\n\n\"But I will fall off.\"\n\n\"I'll tie you on with my puggaree. I wish I had the cummerbund which I lent poor Stuart. Now, Tippy, I think we might make a break for it!\"\n\nBut the black soldier had been staring with a disconsolate face out over the desert, and he turned upon his heel with an oath.\n\n\"There!\" said he sullenly. \"You see what comes of all your foolish talking! You have ruined our chances as well as your own!\"\n\nHalf-a-dozen mounted camel-men had appeared suddenly over the lip of the bowl-shaped hollow, standing out hard and clear against the evening sky where the copper basin met its great blue lid. They were travelling fast, and waved their rifles as they came. An instant later the bugle sounded an alarm, and the camp was up with a buzz like an overturned bee-hive. The Colonel ran back to his companions, and the black soldier to his camel. Stephens looked relieved, and Belmont sulky, while Monsieur Fardet raved, with his one uninjured hand in the air.\n\n\"Sacred name of a dog!\" he cried. \"Is there no end to it, then? Are we never to come out of the hands of these accursed Dervishes?\"\n\n\"Oh, they really are Dervishes, are they?\" said the Colonel in an acid voice. \"You seem to be altering your opinions. I thought they were an invention of the British Government.\"\n\nThe poor fellows' tempers were getting frayed and thin. The Colonel's sneer was like a match to a magazine, and in an instant the Frenchman was dancing in front of him with a broken torrent of angry words. His hand was clutching at Cochrane's throat before Belmont and Stephens could pull him off.\n\n\"If it were not for your grey hairs\u2014\" he said.\n\n\"Damn your impudence!\" cried the Colonel.\n\n\"If we have to die, let us die like gentlemen, and not like so many corner-boys,\" said Belmont with dignity.\n\n\"I only said I was glad to see that Monsieur Fardet has learned something from his adventures,\" the Colonel sneered.\n\n\"Shut up, Cochrane! What do you want to aggravate him for?\" cried the Irishman.\n\n\"Upon my word, Belmont, you forget yourself! I do not permit people to address me in this fashion.\"\n\n\"You should look after your own manners, then.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen, gentlemen, here are the ladies!\" cried Stephens, and the angry, over-strained men relapsed into a gloomy silence, pacing up and down, and jerking viciously at their moustaches. It is a very catching thing, ill-temper, for even Stephens began to be angry at their anger, and to scowl at them as they passed him. Here they were at a crisis in their fate, with the shadow of death above them, and yet their minds were all absorbed in some personal grievance so slight that they could hardly put it into words. Misfortune brings the human spirit to a rare height, but the pendulum still swings.\n\nBut soon their attention was drawn away to more important matters. A council of war was being held beside the wells, and the two Emirs, stern and composed, were listening to a voluble report from the leader of the patrol. The prisoners noticed that, though the fierce, old man stood like a graven image, the younger Emir passed his hand over his beard once or twice with a nervous gesture, the thin, brown fingers twitching among the long, black hair.\n\n\"I believe the Gippies are after us,\" said Belmont. \"Not very far off either, to judge by the fuss they are making.\"\n\n\"It looks like it. Something has scared them.\"\n\n\"Now he's giving orders. What can it be? Here, Mansoor, what is the matter?\"\n\nThe dragoman came running up with the light of hope shining upon his brown face.\n\n\"I think they have seen something to frighten them. I believe that the soldiers are behind us. They have given the order to fill the waterskins, and be ready for a start when the darkness comes. But I am ordered to gather you together, for the Moolah is coming to convert you all. I have already told him that you are all very much inclined to think the same with him.\"\n\nHow far Mansoor may have gone with his assurances may never be known, but the Mussulman preacher came walking towards them at this moment with a paternal and contented smile upon his face, as one who has a pleasant and easy task before him. He was a one-eyed man, with a fringe of grizzled beard and a face which was fat, but which looked as if it had once been fatter, for it was marked with many folds and creases. He had a green turban upon his head, which marked him as a Mecca pilgrim. In one hand he carried a small brown carpet, and in the other a parchment copy of the Koran. Laying his carpet upon the ground, he motioned Mansoor to his side, and then gave a circular sweep of his arm to signify that the prisoners should gather round him, and a downward wave which meant that they should be seated. So they grouped themselves round him, sitting on the short green sward under the palm-tree, these seven forlorn representatives of an alien creed, and in the midst of them sat the fat little preacher, his one eye dancing from face to face as he expounded the principles of his newer, cruder, and more earnest faith. They listened attentively and nodded their heads as Mansoor translated the exhortation, and with each sign of their acquiescence the Moolah became more amiable in his manner and more affectionate in his speech.\n\n\"For why should you die, my sweet lambs, when all that is asked of you is that you should set aside that which will carry you to everlasting Gehenna, and accept the law of Allah as written by his prophet, which will assuredly bring you unimaginable joys, as is promised in the Book of the Camel? For what says the chosen one?\"\u2014and he broke away into one of those dogmatic texts which pass in every creed as an argument. \"Besides, is it not clear that God is with us, since from the beginning, when we had but sticks against the rifles of the Turks, victory has always been with us? Have we not taken El Obeid, and taken Khartoum, and destroyed Hicks and slain Gordon, and prevailed against every one who has come against us? How, then, can it be said that the blessing of Allah does not rest upon us?\"\n\nThe Colonel had been looking about him during the long exhortation of the Moolah, and he had observed that the Dervishes were cleaning their guns, counting their cartridges, and making all the preparations of men who expected that they might soon be called upon to fight. The two Emirs were conferring together with grave faces, and the leader of the patrol pointed, as he spoke to them, in the direction of Egypt. It was evident that there was at least a chance of a rescue if they could only keep things going for a few more hours. The camels were not recovered yet from their long march, and the pursuers, if they were indeed close behind, were almost certain to overtake them.\n\n\"For God's sake, Fardet, try and keep him in play,\" said he. \"I believe we have a chance if we can only keep the ball rolling for another hour or so.\"\n\nBut a Frenchman's wounded dignity is not so easily appeased. Monsieur Fardet sat moodily with his back against the palm-tree, and his black brows drawn down. He said nothing, but he still pulled at his thick, strong moustache.\n\n\"Come on, Fardet! We depend upon you,\" said Belmont.\n\n\"Let Colonel Cochrane do it,\" the Frenchman answered snappishly.\n\n\"He takes too much upon himself this Colonel Cochrane.\"\n\n\"There! There!\" said Belmont soothingly, as if he were speaking to a fractious child. \"I am quite sure that the Colonel will express his regret at what has happened, and will acknowledge that he was in the wrong\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll do nothing of the sort,\" snapped the Colonel.\n\n\"Besides, that is merely a personal quarrel,\" Belmont continued hastily. \"It is for the good of the whole party that we wish you to speak with the Moolah, because we all feel that you are the best man for the job.\"\n\nBut the Frenchman only shrugged his shoulders and relapsed into a deeper gloom.\n\nThe Moolah looked from one to the other, and the kindly expression began to fade away from his large, baggy face. His mouth drew down at the corners, and became hard and severe.\n\n\"Have these infidels been playing with us, then?\" said he to the dragoman. \"Why is it that they talk among themselves and have nothing to say to me?\"\n\n\"He's getting impatient about it,\" said Cochrane. \"Perhaps I had better do what I can, Belmont, since this damned fellow has left us in the lurch.\"\n\nBut the ready wit of a woman saved the situation.\n\n\"I am sure, Monsieur Fardet,\" said Mrs. Belmont, \"that you, who are a Frenchman, and therefore a man of gallantry and honour, would not permit your own wounded feelings to interfere with the fulfilment of your promise and your duty towards three helpless ladies.\"\n\nFardet was on his feet in an instant, with his hand over his heart.\n\n\"You understand my nature, madame,\" he cried. \"I am incapable of abandoning a lady. I will do all that I can in this matter. Now, Mansoor, you may tell the holy man that I am ready to discuss through you the high matters of his faith with him.\"\n\nAnd he did it with an ingenuity which amazed his companions. He took the tone of a man who is strongly attracted, and yet has one single remaining shred of doubt to hold him back. Yet as that one shred was torn away by the Moolah, there was always some other stubborn little point which prevented his absolute acceptance of the faith of Islam. And his questions were all so mixed up with personal compliments to the priest and self-congratulations that they should have come under the teachings of so wise a man and so profound a theologian, that the hanging pouches under the Moolah's eyes quivered with his satisfaction, and he was led happily and hopefully onwards from explanation to explanation, while the blue overhead turned into violet, and the green leaves into black, until the great serene stars shone out once more between the crowns of the palm-trees.\n\n\"As to the learning of which you speak, my lamb,\" said the Moolah, in answer to some argument of Fardet's, \"I have myself studied at the University of El Azhar at Cairo, and I know that to which you allude. But the learning of the faithful is not as the learning of the unbeliever, and it is not fitting that we pry too deeply into the ways of Allah. Some stars have tails, oh my sweet lamb, and some have not; but what does it profit us to know which are which? For God made them all, and they are very safe in His hands. Therefore, my friend, be not puffed up by the foolish learning of the West, and understand that there is only one wisdom, which consists in following the will of Allah as His chosen prophet has laid it down for us in this book. And now, my lambs, I see that you are ready to come into Islam, and it is time, for that bugle tells that we are about to march, and it was the order of the excellent Emir Abderrahman that your choice should be taken, one way or the other, before ever we left the wells.\"\n\n\"Yet, my father, there are other points upon which I would gladly have instruction,\" said the Frenchman, \"for, indeed, it is a pleasure to hear your clear words after the cloudy accounts which we have had from other teachers.\"\n\nBut the Moolah had risen, and a gleam of suspicion twinkled in his single eye.\n\n\"This further instruction may well come afterwards,\" said he, \"since we shall travel together as far as Khartoum, and it will be a joy to me to see you grow in wisdom and in virtue as we go.\" He walked over to the fire, and stooping down, with the pompous slowness of a stout man, he returned with two half-charred sticks, which he laid cross-wise upon the ground. The Dervishes came clustering over to see the new converts admitted into the fold. They stood round in the dim light, tall and fantastic, with the high necks and supercilious heads of the camels swaying above them.\n\n\"Now,\" said the Moolah, and his voice had lost its conciliatory and persuasive tone, \"there is no more time for you. Here upon the ground I have made out of two sticks the foolish and superstitious symbol of your former creed. You will trample upon it, as a sign that you renounce it, and you will kiss the Koran, as a sign that you accept it, and what more you need in the way of instruction shall be given to you as you go.\"\n\nThey stood up, the four men and the three women, to meet the crisis of their fate. None of them, except perhaps Miss Adams and Mrs. Belmont, had any deep religious convictions. All of them were children of this world, and some of them disagreed with everything which that symbol upon the earth represented. But there was the European pride, the pride of the white race which swelled within them, and held them to the faith of their countrymen. It was a sinful, human, un-Christian motive, and yet it was about to make them public martyrs to the Christian creed. In the hush and tension of their nerves low sounds grew suddenly loud upon their ears. Those swishing palm-leaves above them were like a swift-flowing river, and far away they could hear the dull, soft thudding of a galloping camel.\n\n\"There's something coming,\" whispered Cochrane. \"Try and stave them off for five minutes longer, Fardet.\"\n\nThe Frenchman stepped out with a courteous wave of his uninjured arm, and the air of a man who is prepared to accommodate himself to anything.\n\n\"You will tell this holy man that I am quite ready to accept his teaching, and so I am sure are all my friends,\" said he to the dragoman. \"But there is one thing which I should wish him to do in order to set at rest any possible doubts which may remain in our hearts. Every true religion can be told by the miracles which those who profess it can bring about. Even I who am but a humble Christian, can, by virtue of my religion, do some of these. But you, since your religion is superior, can no doubt do far more, and so I beg you to give us a sign that we may be able to say that we know that the religion of Islam is the more powerful.\"\n\nBehind all his dignity and reserve, the Arab has a good fund of curiosity. The hush among the listening Arabs showed how the words of the Frenchman as translated by Mansoor appealed to them.\n\n\"Such things are in the hands of Allah,\" said the priest. \"It is not for us to disturb His laws. But if you have yourself such powers as you claim, let us be witnesses to them.\"\n\nThe Frenchman stepped forward, and raising his hand he took a large, shining date out of the Moolah's beard. This he swallowed and immediately produced once more from his left elbow. He had often given his little conjuring entertainment on board the boat, and his fellow-passengers had had some good-natured laughter at his expense, for he was not quite skilful enough to deceive the critical European intelligence. But now it looked as if this piece of obvious palming might be the point upon which all their fates would hang. A deep hum of surprise rose from the ring of Arabs, and deepened as the Frenchman drew another date from the nostril of a camel and tossed it into the air, from which, apparently, it never descended. That gaping sleeve was obvious enough to his companions, but the dim light was all in favour of the performer. So delighted and interested was the audience that they paid little heed to a mounted camel-man who trotted swiftly between the palm trunks. All might have been well had not Fardet, carried away by his own success, tried to repeat his trick once more, with the result that the date fell out of his palm, and the deception stood revealed. In vain he tried to pass on at once to another of his little stock. The Moolah said something, and an Arab struck Fardet across the shoulders with the thick shaft of his spear.\n\n\"We have had enough child's play,\" said the angry priest. \"Are we men or babes, that you should try to impose upon us in this manner? Here is the cross and the Koran\u2014which shall it be?\"\n\nFardet looked helplessly round at his companions.\n\n\"I can do no more; you asked for five minutes. You have had them,\" said he to Colonel Cochrane.\n\n\"And perhaps it is enough,\" the soldier answered. \"Here are the Emirs.\"\n\nThe camel-man, whose approach they had heard from afar, had made for the two Arab chiefs, and had delivered a brief report to them, stabbing with his forefinger in the direction from which he had come. There was a rapid exchange of words between the Emirs, and then they strode forward together to the group around the prisoners. Bigots and barbarians, they were none the less two most majestic men, as they advanced through the twilight of the palm grove. The fierce old greybeard raised his hand and spoke swiftly in short, abrupt sentences, and his savage followers yelped to him like hounds to a huntsman. The fire that smouldered in his arrogant eyes shone back at him from a hundred others. Here were to be read the strength and danger of the Mahdi movement; here in these convulsed faces, in that fringe of waving arms, in these frantic, red-hot souls, who asked nothing better than a bloody death, if their own hands might be bloody when they met it.\n\n\"Have the prisoners embraced the true faith?\" asked the Emir Abderrahman, looking at them with his cruel eyes.\n\nThe Moolah had his reputation to preserve, and it was not for him to confess to a failure.\n\n\"They were about to embrace it, when\u2014\n\n\"Let it rest for a little time, O Moolah.\" He gave an order, and the Arabs all sprang for their camels. The Emir Wad Ibrahim filed off at once with nearly half the party. The others were mounted and ready, with their rifles unslung.\n\n\"What's happened?\" asked Belmont.\n\n\"Things are looking up,\" cried the Colonel. \"By George, I think we are going to come through all right. The Gippy Camel Corps are hot on our trail.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"What else could have scared them?\"\n\n\"O Colonel, do you really think we shall be saved?\" sobbed Sadie. The dull routine of misery through which they had passed had deadened all their nerves until they seemed incapable of any acute sensation, but now this sudden return of hope brought agony with it like the recovery of a frost-bitten limb. Even the strong, self-contained Belmont was filled with doubts and apprehensions. He had been hopeful when there was no sign of relief, and now the approach of it set him trembling.\n\n\"Surely they wouldn't come very weak,\" he cried. \"Be Jove, if the Commandant let them come weak, he should be court-martialled.\"\n\n\"Sure we're in God's hands, anyway,\" said his wife, in her soothing, Irish voice. \"Kneel down with me, John, dear, if it's the last time, and pray that, earth or heaven, we may not be divided.\"\n\n\"Don't do that! Don't!\" cried the Colonel anxiously, for he saw that the eye of the Moolah was upon them. But it was too late, for the two Roman Catholics had dropped upon their knees and crossed themselves. A spasm of fury passed over the face of the Mussulman priest at this public testimony to the failure of his missionary efforts. He turned and said something to the Emir.\n\n\"Stand up!\" cried Mansoor. \"For your life's sake, stand up! He is asking for leave to put you to death.\"\n\n\"Let him do what he likes!\" said the obstinate Irishman; \"we will rise when our prayers are finished, and not before.\"\n\nThe Emir stood listening to the Moolah, with his baleful gaze upon the two kneeling figures. Then he gave one or two rapid orders, and four camels were brought forward. The baggage-camels which they had hitherto ridden were standing unsaddled where they had been tethered.\n\n\"Don't be a fool, Belmont!\" cried the Colonel; \"everything depends upon our humouring them. Do get up, Mrs. Belmont! You are only putting their backs up!\"\n\nThe Frenchman shrugged his shoulders as he looked at them. \"Mon Dieu!\" he cried, \"were there ever such impracticable people? Voila!\" he added, with a shriek, as the two American ladies fell upon their knees beside Mrs. Belmont. \"It is like the camels\u2014one down, all down! Was ever anything so absurd?\"\n\nBut Mr. Stephens had knelt down beside Sadie and buried his haggard face in his long, thin hands. Only the Colonel and Monsieur Fardet remained standing. Cochrane looked at the Frenchman with an interrogative eye.\n\n\"After all,\" said he, \"it is stupid to pray all your life, and not to pray now when we have nothing to hope for except through the goodness of Providence.\" He dropped upon his knees with a rigid, military back, but his grizzled, unshaven chin upon his chest. The Frenchman looked at his kneeling companions, and then his eyes travelled onwards to the angry faces of the Emir and Moolah.\n\n\"Sapristi!\" he growled. \"Do they suppose that a Frenchman is afraid of them?\" and so, with an ostentatious sign of the cross, he took his place upon his knees beside the others. Foul, bedraggled, and wretched, the seven figures knelt and waited humbly for their fate under the black shadow of the palm-tree.\n\nThe Emir turned to the Moolah with a mocking smile, and pointed at the results of his ministrations. Then he gave an order, and in an instant the four men were seized. A couple of deft turns with a camel-halter secured each of their wrists. Fardet screamed out, for the rope had bitten into his open wound. The others took it with the dignity of despair.\n\n\"You have ruined everything. I believe you have ruined me also!\" cried Mansoor, wringing his hands. \"The women are to get upon these three camels.\"\n\n\"Never!\" cried Belmont. \"We won't be separated!\" He plunged madly, but he was weak from privation, and two strong men held him by each elbow.\n\n\"Don't fret, John!\" cried his wife, as they hurried her towards the camel. \"No harm shall come to me. Don't struggle, or they'll hurt you, dear.\"\n\nThe four men writhed as they saw the women dragged away from them. All their agonies had been nothing to this. Sadie and her aunt appeared to be half senseless from fear. Only Mrs. Belmont kept a brave face. When they were seated the camels rose, and were led under the tree behind where the four men were standing.\n\n\"I've a pistol in me pocket,\" said Belmont, looking up at his wife.\n\n\"I would give me soul to be able to pass it to you.\"\n\n\"Keep it, John, and it may be useful yet. I have no fears. Ever since we prayed I have felt as if our guardian angels had their wings round us.\" She was like a guardian angel herself as she turned to the shrinking Sadie, and coaxed some little hope back into her despairing heart.\n\nThe short, thick Arab, who had been in command of Wad Ibrahim's rearguard, had Joined the Emir and the Moolah; the three consulted together, with occasional oblique glances towards the prisoners. Then the Emir spoke to Mansoor.\n\n\"The chief wishes to know which of you four is the richest man?\" said the dragoman. His fingers were twitching with nervousness and plucking incessantly at the front of his covercoat.\n\n\"Why does he wish to know?\" asked the Colonel.\n\n\"I do not know.\"\n\n\"But it is evident,\" cried Monsieur Fardet. \"He wishes to know which is the best worth keeping for his ransom.\"\n\n\"I think we should see this thing through together,\" said the Colonel. \"It's really for you to decide, Stephens, for I have no doubt that you are the richest of us.\"\n\n\"I don't know that I am,\" the lawyer answered; \"but in any case, I have no wish to be placed upon a different footing to the others.\"\n\nThe Emir spoke again in his harsh rasping voice.\n\n\"He says,\" Mansoor translated, \"that the baggage-camels are spent, and that there is only one beast left which can keep up. It is ready now for one of you, and you have to decide among yourselves which is to have it. If one is richer than the others, he will have the preference.\"\n\n\"Tell him that we are all equally rich.\"\n\n\"In that case he says that you are to choose at once which is to have the camel.\"\n\n\"And the others?\"\n\nThe dragoman shrugged his shoulders.\n\n\"Well,\" said the Colonel, \"if only one of us is to escape, I think you fellows will agree with me that it ought to be Belmont, since he is the married man.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, let it be Monsieur Belmont,\" cried Fardet.\n\n\"I think so also,\" said Stephens.\n\nBut the Irishman would not hear of it.\n\n\"No, no, share and share alike,\" he cried. \"All sink or all swim, and the devil take the flincher.\"\n\nThey wrangled among themselves until they became quite heated in this struggle of unselfishness. Some one had said that the Colonel should go because he was the oldest, and the Colonel was a very angry man.\n\n\"One would think I was an octogenarian,\" he cried. \"These remarks are quite uncalled for.\"\n\n\"Well, then,\" said Belmont, \"let us all refuse to go.\"\n\n\"But this is not very wise,\" cried the Frenchman. \"See, my friends! Here are the ladies being carried off alone. Surely it would be far better that one of us should be with them to advise them.\"\n\nThey looked at one another in perplexity. What Fardet said was obviously true, but how could one of them desert his comrades? The Emir himself suggested the solution.\n\n\"The chief says,\" said Mansoor, \"that if you cannot settle who is to go, you had better leave it to Allah and draw lots.\"\n\n\"I don't think we can do better,\" said the Colonel, and his three companions nodded their assent.\n\nIt was the Moolah who approached them with four splinters of palm-bark protruding from between his fingers.\n\n\"He says that he who draws the longest has the camel,\" said Mansoor.\n\n\"We must agree to abide absolutely by this,\" said Cochrane, and again his companions nodded.\n\nThe Dervishes had formed a semicircle in front of them, with a fringe of the oscillating heads of the camels. Before them was a cooking fire, which threw its red light over the group. The Emir was standing with his back to it, and his fierce face towards the prisoners. Behind the four men was a line of guards, and behind them again the three women, who looked down from their camels upon this tragedy. With a malicious smile, the fat, one-eyed Moolah advanced with his fist closed, and the four little brown spicules protruding from between his fingers.\n\nIt was to Belmont that he held them first. The Irishman gave an involuntary groan, and his wife gasped behind him, for the splinter came away in his hand. Then it was the Frenchman's turn, and his was half an inch longer than Belmont's. Then came Colonel Cochrane, whose piece was longer than the two others put together. Stephens' was no bigger than Belmont's. The Colonel was the winner of this terrible lottery.\n\n\"You're welcome to my place, Belmont,\" said he. \"I've neither wife nor child, and hardly a friend in the world. Go with your wife, and I'll stay.\"\n\n\"No, indeed! An agreement is an agreement. It's all fair play, and the prize to the luckiest.\"\n\n\"The Emir says that you are to mount at once,\" said Mansoor, and an Arab dragged the Colonel by his wrist-rope to the waiting camel.\n\n\"He will stay with the rearguard,\" said the Emir to his lieutenant.\n\n\"You can keep the women with you also.\"\n\n\"And this dragoman dog?\"\n\n\"Put him with the others.\"\n\n\"And they?\"\n\n\"Put them all to death.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "As none of the three could understand Arabic, the order of the Emir would have been unintelligible to them had it not been for the conduct of Mansoor. The unfortunate dragoman, after all his treachery and all his subservience and apostasy, found his worst fears realised when the Dervish leader gave his curt command. With a shriek of fear the poor wretch threw himself forward upon his face, and clutched at the edge of the Arab's jibbeh, clawing with his brown fingers at the edge of the cotton skirt. The Emir tugged to free himself, and then, finding that he was still held by that convulsive grip, he turned and kicked at Mansoor with the vicious impatience with which one drives off a pestering cur. The dragoman's high red tarboosh flew up into the air, and he lay groaning upon his face where the stunning blow of the Arab's horny foot had left him.\n\nAll was bustle and movement in the camp, for the old Emir had mounted his camel, and some of his party were already beginning to follow their companions. The squat lieutenant, the Moolah, and about a dozen Dervishes surrounded the prisoners. They had not mounted their camels, for they were told off to be the ministers of death. The three men understood as they looked upon their faces that the sand was running very low in the glass of their lives. Their hands were still bound, but their guards had ceased to hold them. They turned round, all three, and said good-bye to the women upon the camels.\n\n\"All up now, Norah,\" said Belmont. \"It's hard luck when there was a chance of a rescue, but we've done our best.\"\n\nFor the first time his wife had broken down. She was sobbing convulsively, with her face between her hands.\n\n\"Don't cry, little woman! We've had a good time together. Give my love to all friends at Bray! Remember me to Amy McCarthy and to the Blessingtons. You'll find there is enough and to spare, but I would take Roger's advice about the investments. Mind that!\"\n\n\"O John, I won't live without you!\" Sorrow for her sorrow broke the strong man down, and he buried his face in the hairy side of her camel. The two of them sobbed helplessly together.\n\nStephens meanwhile had pushed his way to Sadie's beast. She saw his worn earnest face looking up at her through the dim light.\n\n\"Don't be afraid for your aunt and for yourself,\" said he. \"I am sure that you will escape. Colonel Cochrane will look after you. The Egyptians cannot be far behind. I do hope you will have a good drink before you leave the wells. I wish I could give your aunt my jacket, for it will be cold to-night. I'm afraid I can't get it off. She should keep some of the bread, and eat it in the early morning.\"\n\nHe spoke quite quietly, like a man who is arranging the details of a picnic. A sudden glow of admiration for this quietly consistent man warmed her impulsive heart.\n\n\"How unselfish you are!\" she cried. \"I never saw any one like you. Talk about saints! There you stand in the very presence of death, and you think only of us.\"\n\n\"I want to say a last word to you, Sadie, if you don't mind. I should die so much happier. I have often wanted to speak to you, but I thought that perhaps you would laugh, for you never took anything very seriously, did you? That was quite natural of course with your high spirits, but still it was very serious to me. But now I am really a dead man, so it does not matter very much what I say.\"\n\n\"Oh don't, Mr. Stephens!\" cried the girl.\n\n\"I won't, if it is very painful to you. As I said, it would make me die happier, but I don't want to be selfish about it. If I thought it would darken your life afterwards, or be a sad recollection to you, I would not say another word.\"\n\n\"What did you wish to say?\"\n\n\"It was only to tell you how I loved you. I always loved you. From the first I was a different man when I was with you. But of course it was absurd, I knew that well enough. I never said anything, but I tried not to make myself ridiculous. But I just want you to know about it now that it can't matter one way or the other. You'll understand that I really do love you when I tell you that, if it were not that I knew you were frightened and unhappy, these last two days in which we have been always together would have been infinitely the happiest of my life.\"\n\nThe girl sat pale and silent, looking down with wondering eyes at his upturned face. She did not know what to do or say in the solemn presence of this love which burned so brightly under the shadow of death. To her child's heart it seemed incomprehensible\u2014and yet she understood that it was sweet and beautiful also.\n\n\"I won't say any more,\" said he; \"I can see that it only bothers you.\n\nBut I wanted you to know, and now you do know, so it is all right.\n\nThank you for listening so patiently and gently. Good-bye, little Sadie! I can't put my hand up. Will you put yours down?\"\n\nShe did so and Stephens kissed it. Then he turned and took his place once more between Belmont and Fardet. In his whole life of struggle and success he had never felt such a glow of quiet contentment as suffused him at that instant when the grip of death was closing upon him. There is no arguing about love. It is the innermost fact of life\u2014the one which obscures and changes all the others, the only one which is absolutely satisfying and complete. Pain is pleasure, and want is comfort, and death is sweetness when once that golden mist is round it. So it was that Stephens could have sung with joy as he faced his murderers. He really had not time to think about them. The important, all-engrossing, delightful thing was that she could not look upon him as a casual acquaintance any more. Through all her life she would think of him\u2014she would know.\n\nColonel Cochrane's camel was at one side, and the old soldier, whose wrists had been freed, had been looking down upon the scene, and wondering in his tenacious way whether all hope must really be abandoned. It was evident that the Arabs who were grouped round the victims were to remain behind with them, while the others who were mounted would guard the three women and himself. He could not understand why the throats of his companions had not been already cut, unless it were that with an Eastern refinement of cruelty this rearguard would wait until the Egyptians were close to them, so that the warm bodies of their victims might be an insult to the pursuers. No doubt that was the right explanation. The Colonel had heard of such a trick before.\n\nBut in that case there would not be more than twelve Arabs with the prisoners. Were there any of the friendly ones among them? If Tippy Tilly and six of his men were there, and if Belmont could get his arms free and his hand upon his revolver, they might come through yet. The Colonel craned his neck and groaned in his disappointment. He could see the faces of the guards in the firelight. They were all Baggara Arabs, men who were beyond either pity or bribery. Tippy Tilly and the others must have gone on with the advance. For the first time the stiff old soldier abandoned hope.\n\n\"Good-bye, you fellows! God bless you!\" he cried, as a negro pulled at his camel's nose-ring and made him follow the others. The women came after him, in a misery too deep for words. Their departure was a relief to the three men who were left.\n\n\"I am glad they are gone,\" said Stephens, from his heart.\n\n\"Yes, yes, it is better,\" cried Fardet. \"How long are we to wait?\"\n\n\"Not very long now,\" said Belmont grimly, as the Arabs closed in around them.\n\nThe Colonel and the three women gave one backward glance when they came to the edge of the oasis. Between the straight stems of the palms they saw the gleam of the fire, and above the group of Arabs they caught a last glimpse of the three white hats. An instant later, the camels began to trot, and when they looked back once more the palm grove was only a black clump with the vague twinkle of a light somewhere in the heart of it. As with yearning eyes they gazed at that throbbing red point in the darkness, they passed over the edge of the depression, and in an instant the huge, silent, moonlit desert was round them without a sign of the oasis which they had left. On every side the velvet, blue-black sky, with its blazing stars, sloped downwards to the vast, dun-coloured plain. The two were blurred into one at their point of junction.\n\nThe women had sat in the silence of despair, and the Colonel had been silent also\u2014for what could he say?\u2014but suddenly all four started in their saddles, and Sadie gave a sharp cry of dismay. In the hush of the night there had come from behind them the petulant crack of a rifle, then another, then several together, with a brisk rat-tat-tat, and then after an interval, one more.\n\n\"It may be the rescuers! It may be the Egyptians!\" cried Mrs. Belmont, with a sudden flicker of hope. \"Colonel Cochrane, don't you think it may be the Egyptians?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Sadie whimpered. \"It must be the Egyptians.\"\n\nThe Colonel had listened expectantly, but all was silent again. Then he took his hat off with a solemn gesture.\n\n\"There is no use deceiving ourselves, Mrs. Belmont,\" said he; \"we may as well face the truth. Our friends are gone from us, but they have met their end like brave men.\"\n\n\"But why should they fire their guns? They had... they had spears.\"\n\nShe shuddered as she said it.\n\n\"That is true,\" said the Colonel. \"I would not for the world take away any real grounds of hope which you may have; but on the other hand, there is no use in preparing bitter disappointments for ourselves. If we had been listening to an attack, we should have heard some reply. Besides, an Egyptian attack would have been an attack in force. No doubt it is, as you say, a little strange that they should have wasted their cartridges\u2014by Jove, look at that!\"\n\nHe was pointing over the eastern desert. Two figures were moving across its expanse, swiftly and stealthily, furtive dark shadows against the lighter ground. They saw them dimly, dipping and rising over the rolling desert, now lost, now reappearing in the uncertain light. They were flying away from the Arabs. And then, suddenly they halted upon the summit of a sand-hill, and the prisoners could see them outlined plainly against the sky. They were camel-men, but they sat their camels astride as a horseman sits his horse.\n\n\"Gippy Camel Corps!\" cried the Colonel.\n\n\"Two men,\" said Miss Adams, in a voice of despair.\n\n\"Only a vedette, ma'am! Throwing feelers out all over the desert.\n\nThis is one of them. Main body ten miles off, as likely as not.\n\nThere they go giving the alarm! Good old Camel Corps!\"\n\nThe self-contained, methodical soldier had suddenly turned almost inarticulate with his excitement. There was a red flash upon the top of the sand-hill, and then another, followed by the crack of the rifles. Then with a whisk the two figures were gone, as swiftly and silently as two trout in a stream.\n\nThe Arabs had halted for an instant, as if uncertain whether they should delay their journey to pursue them or not. There was nothing left to pursue now, for amid the undulations of the sand-drift the vedettes might have gone in any direction. The Emir galloped back along the line, with exhortations and orders. Then the camels began to trot, and the hopes of the prisoners were dulled by the agonies of the terrible jolt. Mile after mile, mile after mile, they sped onwards over that vast expanse, the women clinging as best they might to the pommels, the Colonel almost as spent as they, but still keenly on the look-out for any sign of the pursuers.\n\n\"I think... I think,\" cried Mrs. Belmont, \"that something is moving in front of us.\"\n\nThe Colonel raised himself upon his saddle, and screened his eyes from the moonshine.\n\n\"By Jove, you're right there, ma'am. There are men over yonder.\"\n\nThey could all see them now, a straggling line of riders far ahead of them in the desert.\n\n\"They are going in the same direction as we,\" cried Mrs. Belmont, whose eyes were very much better than the Colonel's.\n\nCochrane muttered an oath into his moustache.\n\n\"Look at the tracks there,\" said he; \"of course, it's our own vanguard who left the palm grove before us. The chief keeps us at this infernal pace in order to close up with them.\"\n\nAs they drew closer they could see plainly that it was indeed the other body of Arabs, and presently the Emir Wad Ibrahim came trotting back to take counsel with the Emir Abderrahman. They pointed in the direction in which the vedettes had appeared, and shook their heads like men who have many and grave misgivings. Then the raiders joined into one long, straggling line, and the whole body moved steadily on towards the Southern Cross, which was twinkling just over the skyline in front of them. Hour after hour the dreadful trot continued, while the fainting ladies clung on convulsively, and Cochrane, worn out but indomitable, encouraged them to hold out, and peered backwards over the desert for the first glad signs of their pursuers. The blood throbbed in his temples, and he cried that he heard the roll of drums coming out of the darkness. In his feverish delirium he saw clouds of pursuers at their very heels, and during the long night he was for ever crying glad tidings which ended in disappointment and heartache. The rise of the sun showed the desert stretching away around them with nothing moving upon its monstrous face except themselves. With dull eyes and heavy hearts they stared round at that huge and empty expanse. Their hopes thinned away like the light morning mist upon the horizon.\n\nIt was shocking to the ladies to look at their companion, and to think of the spruce, hale old soldier who had been their fellow-passenger from Cairo. As in the case of Miss Adams, old age seemed to have pounced upon him in one spring. His hair, which had grizzled hour by hour during his privations, was now of a silvery white. White stubble, too, had obscured the firm, clean line of his chin and throat. The veins of his face were injected, and his features were shot with heavy wrinkles. He rode with his back arched and his chin sunk upon his breast, for the old, time-rotted body was worn out, but in his bright, alert eyes there was always a trace of the gallant tenant who lived in the shattered house. Delirious, spent, and dying, he preserved his chivalrous, protecting air as he turned to the ladies, shot little scraps of advice and encouragement at them, and peered back continually for the help which never came.\n\nAn hour after sunrise the raiders called a halt, and food and water were served out to all. Then at a more moderate pace they pursued their southern journey, their long, straggling line trailing out over a quarter of a mile of desert. From their more careless bearing and the way in which they chatted as they rode, it was clear that they thought that they had shaken off their pursuers. Their direction now was east as well as south, and it was evidently their intention after this long detour to strike the Nile again at some point far above the Egyptian outposts. Already the character of the scenery was changing, and they were losing the long levels of the pebbly desert, and coming once more upon those fantastic, sunburned, black rocks, and that rich orange sand through which they had already passed. On every side of them rose the scaly, conical hills with their loose, slag-like debris, and jagged-edged khors, with sinuous streams of sand running like water-courses down their centre. The camels followed each other, twisting in and out among the boulders, and scrambling with their adhesive, spongy feet over places which would have been impossible for horses. Among the broken rocks those behind could sometimes only see the long, undulating, darting necks of the creatures in front, as if it were some nightmare procession of serpents. Indeed, it had much the effect of a dream upon the prisoners, for there was no sound, save the soft, dull padding and shuffling of the feet. The strange, wild frieze moved slowly and silently onwards amid a setting of black stone and yellow sand, with the one arch of vivid blue spanning the rugged edges of the ravine.\n\nMiss Adams, who had been frozen into silence during the long cold night, began to thaw now in the cheery warmth of the rising sun. She looked about her, and rubbed her thin hands together.\n\n\"Why, Sadie,\" she remarked, \"I thought I heard you in the night, dear, and now I see that you have been crying.\"\n\n\"I've been thinking, auntie.\"\n\n\"Well, we must try and think of others, dearie, and not of ourselves.\"\n\n\"It's not of myself, auntie.\"\n\n\"Never fret about me, Sadie.\"\n\n\"No, auntie, I was not thinking of you.\"\n\n\"Was it of any one in particular?\"\n\n\"Of Mr. Stephens, auntie. How gentle he was, and how brave! To think of him fixing up every little thing for us, and trying to pull his jacket over his poor roped-up hands, with those murderers waiting all round him. He's my saint and hero from now ever after.\"\n\n\"Well, he's out of his troubles anyhow,\" said Miss Adams, with that bluntness which the years bring with them.\n\n\"Then I wish I was also.\"\n\n\"I don't see how that would help him.\"\n\n\"Well, I think he might feel less lonesome,\" said Sadie, and drooped her saucy little chin upon her breast.\n\nThe four had been riding in silence for some little time, when the Colonel clapped his hand to his brow with a gesture of dismay.\n\n\"Good God!\" he cried, \"I am going off my head.\"\n\nAgain and again they had perceived it during the night, but he had seemed quite rational since daybreak. They were shocked therefore at this sudden outbreak, and tried to calm him with soothing words.\n\n\"Mad as a hatter,\" he shouted. \"Whatever do you think I saw?\"\n\n\"Don't trouble about it, whatever it was,\" said Mrs. Belmont, laying her hand soothingly upon his as the camels closed together. \"It is no wonder that you are overdone. You have thought and worked for all of us so long. We shall halt presently, and a few hours' sleep will quite restore you.\"\n\nBut the Colonel looked up again, and again he cried out in his agitation and surprise.\n\n\"I never saw anything plainer in my life,\" he groaned. \"It is on the point of rock on our right front\u2014poor old Stuart with my red cummerbund round his head just the same as we left him.\"\n\nThe ladies had followed the direction of the Colonel's frightened gaze, and in an instant they were all as amazed as he.\n\nThere was a black, bulging ridge like a bastion upon the right side of the terrible khor up which the camels were winding. At one point it rose into a small pinnacle. On this pinnacle stood a solitary, motionless figure, clad entirely in black, save for a brilliant dash of scarlet upon his head. There could not surely be two such short sturdy figures, or such large colourless faces, in the Libyan Desert. His shoulders were stooping forward, and he seemed to be staring intently down into the ravine. His pose and outline were like a caricature of the great Napoleon.\n\n\"Can it possibly be he?\"\n\n\"It must be. It is!\" cried the ladies. \"You see he is looking towards us and waving his hand.\"\n\n\"Good Heavens! They'll shoot him! Get down, you fool, or you'll be shot!\" roared the Colonel. But his dry throat would only emit a discordant croaking.\n\nSeveral of the Dervishes had seen the singular apparition upon the hill, and had unslung their Remingtons, but a long arm suddenly shot up behind the figure of the Birmingham clergyman, a brown hand seized upon his skirts, and he disappeared with a snap. Higher up the pass, just below the spot where Mr. Stuart had been standing, appeared the tall figure of the Emir Abderrahman. He had sprung upon a boulder, and was shouting and waving his arms, but the shouts were drowned in a long, rippling roar of musketry from each side of the khor. The bastion-like cliff was fringed with gun-barrels, with red tarbooshes drooping over the triggers. From the other lip also came the long spurts of flame and the angry clatter of the rifles. The raiders were caught in an ambuscade. The Emir fell, but was up again and waving. There was a splotch of blood upon his long white beard. He kept pointing and gesticulating, but his scattered followers could not understand what he wanted. Some of them came tearing down the pass, and some from behind were pushing to the front. A few dismounted and tried to climb up sword in hand to that deadly line of muzzles, but one by one they were hit, and came rolling from rock to rock to the bottom of the ravine. The shooting was not very good. One negro made his way unharmed up the whole side, only to have his brains dashed out with the butt-end of a Martini at the top. The Emir had fallen off his rock and lay in a crumpled heap, like a brown and white patchwork quilt, at the bottom of it. And then when half of them were down it became evident, even to those exalted fanatical souls, that there was no chance for them, and that they must get out of these fatal rocks and into the desert again. They galloped down the pass, and it is a frightful thing to see a camel galloping over broken ground. The beast's own terror, his ungainly bounds, the sprawl of his four legs all in the air together, his hideous cries, and the yells of his rider who is bucked high from his saddle with every spring, make a picture which is not to be forgotten. The women screamed as this mad torrent of frenzied creatures came pouring past them, but the Colonel edged his camel and theirs farther and farther in among the rocks and away from the retreating Arabs. The air was full of whistling bullets, and they could hear them smacking loudly against the stones all round them.\n\n\"Keep quiet, and they'll pass us,\" whispered the Colonel, who was all himself again now that the hour for action had arrived. \"I wish to Heaven I could see Tippy Tilly or any of his friends. Now is the time for them to help us.\" He watched the mad stream of fugitives as they flew past upon their shambling, squattering, loose-jointed beasts, but the black face of the Egyptian gunner was not among them.\n\nAnd now it really did seem as if the whole body of them, in their haste to get clear of the ravine, had not a thought to spend upon the prisoners. The rush was past, and only stragglers were running the gauntlet of the fierce fire which poured upon them from above. The last of all, a young Baggara with a black moustache and pointed beard, looked up as he passed and shook his sword in impotent passion at the Egyptian riflemen. At the same instant a bullet struck his camel, and the creature collapsed, all neck and legs, upon the ground. The young Arab sprang off its back, and, seizing its nose-ring, he beat it savagely with the flat of his sword to make it stand up. But the dim, glazing eye told its own tale, and in desert warfare the death of the beast is the death of the rider. The Baggara glared round like a lion at bay, his dark eyes flashing murderously from under his red turban. A crimson spot, and then another, sprang out upon his dark skin, but he never winced at the bullet wounds. His fierce gaze had fallen upon the prisoners, and with an exultant shout he was dashing towards them, his broad-bladed sword gleaming above his head. Miss Adams was the nearest to him, but at the sight of the rushing figure and the maniac face she threw herself off the camel upon the far side. The Arab bounded on to a rock and aimed a thrust at Mrs. Belmont, but before the point could reach her the Colonel leaned forward with his pistol and blew the man's head in. Yet with a concentrated rage, which was superior even to the agony of death, the fellow lay kicking and striking, bounding about among the loose stones like a fish upon the shingle.\n\n\"Don't be frightened, ladies,\" cried the Colonel. \"He is quite dead, I assure you. I am so sorry to have done this in your presence, but the fellow was dangerous. I had a little score of my own to settle with him, for he was the man who tried to break my ribs with his Remington. I hope you are not hurt, Miss Adams! One instant, and I will come down to you.\"\n\nBut the old Boston lady was by no means hurt, for the rocks had been so high that she had a very short distance to fall from her saddle. Sadie, Mrs. Belmont, and Colonel Cochrane had all descended by slipping on to the boulders and climbing down from them. But they found Miss Adams on her feet, and waving the remains of her green veil in triumph.\n\n\"Hurrah, Sadie! Hurrah, my own darling Sadie!\" she was shrieking.\n\n\"We are saved, my girl, we are saved after all.\"\n\n\"By George, so we are!\" cried the Colonel, and they all shouted in an ecstasy together.\n\nBut Sadie had learned to think more about others during those terrible days of schooling. Her arms were round Mrs. Belmont, and her cheek against hers.\n\n\"You dear, sweet angel,\" she cried, \"how can we have the heart to be glad when you\u2014when you\u2014\"\n\n\"But I don't believe it is so,\" cried the brave Irishwoman. \"No, I'll never believe it until I see John's body lying before me. And when I see that, I don't want to live to see anything more.\"\n\nThe last Dervish had clattered down the khor, and now above them on either cliff they could see the Egyptians\u2014tall, thin, square shouldered figures, looking, when outlined against the blue sky, wonderfully like the warriors in the ancient bas-reliefs. Their camels were in the background, and they were hurrying to join them. At the same time others began to ride down from the farther end of the ravine, their dark faces flushed and their eyes shining with the excitement of victory and pursuit. A very small Englishman, with a straw-coloured moustache and a weary manner, was riding at the head of them. He halted his camel beside the fugitives and saluted the ladies. He wore brown boots and brown belts with steel buckles, which looked trim and workmanlike against his khaki uniform.\n\n\"Had 'em that time\u2014had 'em proper!\" said he. \"Very glad to have been of any assistance, I'm sure. Hope you're none the worse for it all. What I mean, it's rather rough work for ladies.\"\n\n\"You're from Halfa, I suppose?\" asked the Colonel.\n\n\"No, we're from the other show. We're the Sarras crowd, you know. We met in the desert, and we headed 'em off, and the other Johnnies herded 'em behind. We've got 'em on toast, I tell you. Get up on that rock and you'll see things happen. It's going to be a knockout in one round this time.\"\n\n\"We left some of our people at the Wells. We are very uneasy about them,\" said the Colonel. \"I suppose you haven't heard anything of them?\"\n\nThe young officer looked serious and shook his head. \"Bad job that!\" said he. \"They're a poisonous crowd when you put 'em in a corner. What I mean, we never expected to see you alive, and we're very glad to pull any of you out of the fire. The most we hoped was that we might revenge you.\"\n\n\"Any other Englishman with you?\"\n\n\"Archer is with the flanking party. He'll have to come past, for I don't think there is any other way down. We've got one of your chaps up there\u2014a funny old bird with a red top-knot. See you later, I hope! Good day, ladies!\" He touched his helmet, tapped his camel, and trotted on after his men.\n\n\"We can't do better than stay where we are until they are all past,\" said the Colonel, for it was evident now that the men from above would have to come round. In a broken single file they went past, black men and brown, Soudanese and fellaheen, but all of the best, for the Camel Corps is the corps d'elite of the Egyptian army. Each had a brown bandolier over his chest and his rifle held across his thigh. A large man with a drooping black moustache and a pair of binoculars in his hand was riding at the side of them. \"Hulloa, Archer!\" croaked the Colonel. The officer looked at him with the vacant, unresponsive eye of a complete stranger.\n\n\"I'm Cochrane, you know! We travelled up together.\"\n\n\"Excuse me, sir, but you have the advantage of me,\" said the officer. \"I knew a Colonel Cochrane Cochrane, but you are not the man. He was three inches taller than you, with black hair and\u2014\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" cried the Colonel testily. \"You try a few days with the Dervishes, and see if your friends will recognise you!\"\n\n\"Good God, Cochrane, is it really you? I could not have believed it. Great Scott, what you must have been through! I've heard before of fellows going grey in a night, but, by Jove\u2014\"\n\n\"Quite so,\" said the Colonel, flushing.\n\n\"Allow me to hint to you, Archer, that if you could get some food and drink for these ladies, instead of discussing my personal appearance, it would be much more practical.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" said Captain Archer. \"Your friend Stuart knows that you are here, and he is bringing some stuff round for you. Poor fare, ladies, but the best we have! You're an old soldier, Cochrane. Get up on the rocks presently, and you'll see a lovely sight. No time to stop, for we shall be in action again in five minutes. Anything I can do before I go?\"\n\n\"You haven't got such a thing as a cigar?\" asked the Colonel wistfully.\n\nArcher drew a thick satisfying partaga from his case, and handed it down, with half-a-dozen wax vestas. Then he cantered after his men, and the old soldier leaned back against the rock and drew in the fragrant smoke. It was then that his jangled nerves knew the full virtue of tobacco, the gentle anodyne which stays the failing strength and soothes the worrying brain. He watched the dim blue reek swirling up from him, and he felt the pleasant aromatic bite upon his palate, while a restful languor crept over his weary and harassed body. The three ladies sat together upon a flat rock.\n\n\"Good land, what a sight you are, Sadie!\" cried Miss Adams suddenly, and it was the first reappearance of her old self. \"What would your mother say if she saw you? Why, sakes alive, your hair is full of straw and your frock clean crazy!\"\n\n\"I guess we all want some setting to rights,\" said Sadie, in a voice which was much more subdued than that of the Sadie of old. \"Mrs. Belmont, you look just too perfectly sweet anyhow, but if you'll allow me I'll fix your dress for you.\"\n\nBut Mrs. Belmont's eyes were far away, and she shook her head sadly as she gently put the girl's hands aside.\n\n\"I do not care how I look. I cannot think of it,\" said she; \"could you, if you had left the man you love behind you, as I have mine?\"\n\n\"I'm begin\u2014beginning to think I have,\" sobbed poor Sadie, and buried her hot face in Mrs. Belmont's motherly bosom." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "The Camel Corps had all passed onwards down the khor in pursuit of the retreating Dervishes, and for a few minutes the escaped prisoners had been left alone. But now there came a cheery voice calling upon them, and a red turban bobbed about among the rocks, with the large white face of the Nonconformist minister smiling from beneath it. He had a thick lance with which to support his injured leg, and this murderous crutch combined with his peaceful appearance to give him a most incongruous aspect\u2014as of a sheep which has suddenly developed claws. Behind him were two negroes with a basket and a waterskin.\n\n\"Not a word! Not a word!\" he cried, as he stumped up to them. \"I know exactly how you feel. I've been there myself. Bring the water, Ali! Only half a cup, Miss Adams; you shall have some more presently. Now your turn, Mrs. Belmont! Dear me, dear me, you poor souls, how my heart does bleed for you! There's bread and meat in the basket, but you must be very moderate at first.\" He chuckled with joy, and slapped his fat hands together as he watched them.\n\n\"But the others?\" he asked, his face turning grave again.\n\nThe Colonel shook his head. \"We left them behind at the wells. I fear that it is all over with them.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut!\" cried the clergyman, in a boisterous voice, which could not cover the despondency of his expression; \"you thought, no doubt, that it was all over with me, but here I am in spite of it. Never lose heart, Mrs. Belmont. Your husband's position could not possibly be as hopeless as mine was.\"\n\n\"When I saw you standing on that rock up yonder, I put it down to delirium,\" said the Colonel. \"If the ladies had not seen you, I should never have ventured to believe it.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that I behaved very badly. Captain Archer says that I nearly spoiled all their plans, and that I deserved to be tried by a drumhead court-martial and shot. The fact is that, when I heard the Arabs beneath me, I forgot myself in my anxiety to know if any of you were left.\"\n\n\"I wonder that you were not shot without any drumhead court-martial,\" said the Colonel. \"But how in the world did you get here?\"\n\n\"The Halfa people were close upon our track at the time when I was abandoned, and they picked me up in the desert. I must have been delirious, I suppose, for they tell me that they heard my voice, singing hymns, a long way off, and it was that, under the providence of God, which brought them to me. They had a camel ambulance, and I was quite myself again by next day. I came with the Sarras people after we met them, because they have the doctor with them. My wound is nothing, and he says that a man of my habit will be the better for the loss of blood. And now, my friends\"\u2014his big, brown eyes lost their twinkle, and became very solemn and reverent\u2014\"we have all been upon the very confines of death, and our dear companions may be so at this instant. The same Power which saved us may save them, and let us pray together that it may be so, always remembering that if, in spite of our prayers, it should not be so, then that also must be accepted as the best and wisest thing.\"\n\nSo they knelt together among the black rocks, and prayed as some of them had never prayed before. It was very well to discuss prayer and treat it lightly and philosophically upon the deck of the Korosko. It was easy to feel strong and self-confident in the comfortable deck-chair, with the slippered Arab handing round the coffee and liqueurs. But they had been swept out of that placid stream of existence, and dashed against the horrible, jagged facts of life. Battered and shaken, they must have something to cling to. A blind, inexorable destiny was too horrible a belief. A chastening power, acting intelligently and for a purpose\u2014a living, working power, tearing them out of their grooves, breaking down their small sectarian ways, forcing them into the better path\u2014that was what they had learned to realise during these days of horror. Great hands had closed suddenly upon them, and had moulded them into new shapes, and fitted them for new uses. Could such a power be deflected by any human supplication? It was that or nothing\u2014the last court of appeal, left open to injured humanity. And so they all prayed, as a lover loves, or a poet writes, from the very inside of their souls, and they rose with that singular, illogical feeling of inward peace and satisfaction which prayer only can give.\n\n\"Hush!\" said Cochrane. \"Listen!\"\n\nThe sound of a volley came crackling up the narrow khor, and then another and another. The Colonel was fidgeting about like an old horse which hears the bugle of the hunt and the yapping of the pack.\n\n\"Where can we see what is going on?\"\n\n\"Come this way! This way, if you please! There is a path up to the top. If the ladies will come after me, they will be spared the sight of anything painful.\"\n\nThe clergyman led them along the side to avoid the bodies which were littered thickly down the bottom of the khor. It was hard walking over the shingly, slaggy stones, but they made their way to the summit at last. Beneath them lay the vast expanse of the rolling desert, and in the foreground such a scene as none of them are ever likely to forget. In that perfectly dry and clear light, with the unvarying brown tint of the hard desert as a background, every detail stood out as clearly as if these were toy figures arranged upon a table within hand's-touch of them.\n\nThe Dervishes\u2014or what was left of them\u2014were riding slowly some little distance out in a confused crowd, their patchwork jibbehs and red turbans swaying with the motion of their camels. They did not present the appearance of men who were defeated, for their movements were very deliberate, but they looked about them and changed their formation as if they were uncertain what their tactics ought to be. It was no wonder that they were puzzled, for upon their spent camels their situation was as hopeless as could be conceived. The Sarras men had all emerged from the khor, and had dismounted, the beasts being held in groups of four, while the riflemen knelt in a long line with a woolly, curling fringe of smoke, sending volley after volley at the Arabs, who shot back in a desultory fashion from the backs of their camels. But it was not upon the sullen group of Dervishes, nor yet upon the long line of kneeling riflemen, that the eyes of the spectators were fixed. Far out upon the desert, three squadrons of the Halfa Camel Corps were coming up in a dense close column, which wheeled beautifully into a widespread semicircle as it approached. The Arabs were caught between two fires.\n\n\"By Jove!\" cried the Colonel. \"See that!\"\n\nThe camels of the Dervishes had all knelt down simultaneously, and the men had sprung from their backs. In front of them was a tall, stately figure, who could only be the Emir Wad Ibrahim. They saw him kneel for an instant in prayer. Then he rose, and taking something from his saddle he placed it very deliberately upon the sand and stood upon it.\n\n\"Good man!\" cried the Colonel. \"He is standing upon his sheepskin.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\" asked Stuart.\n\n\"Every Arab has a sheepskin upon his saddle. When he recognises that his position is perfectly hopeless, and yet is determined to fight to the death, he takes his sheepskin off and stands upon it until he dies. See, they are all upon their sheepskins. They will neither give nor take quarter now.\"\n\nThe drama beneath them was rapidly approaching its climax. The Halfa Corps was well up, and a ring of smoke and flame surrounded the clump of kneeling Dervishes, who answered it as best they could. Many of them were already down, but the rest loaded and fired with the unflinching courage which has always made them worthy antagonists. A dozen khaki-dressed figures upon the sand showed that it was no bloodless victory for the Egyptians. But now there was a stirring bugle call from the Sarras men, and another answered it from the Halfa Corps. Their camels were down also, and the men had formed up into a single, long, curved line. One last volley, and they were charging inwards with the wild inspiriting yell which the blacks had brought with them from their central African wilds. For a minute there was a mad vortex of rushing figures, rifle butts rising and falling, spear-heads gleaming and darting among the rolling dust cloud. Then the bugle rang out once more, the Egyptians fell back and formed up with the quick precision of highly disciplined troops, and there in the centre, each upon his sheepskin, lay the gallant barbarian and his raiders. The nineteenth century had been revenged upon the seventh.\n\nThe three women had stared horror-stricken and yet fascinated at the stirring scene before them. Now Sadie and her aunt were sobbing together. The Colonel had turned to them with some cheering words when his eyes fell upon the face of Mrs. Belmont. It was as white and set as if it were carved from ivory, and her large grey eyes were fixed as if she were in a trance.\n\n\"Good Heavens, Mrs. Belmont, what is the matter?\" he cried.\n\nFor answer she pointed out over the desert. Far away, miles on the other side of the scene of the fight, a small body of men were riding towards them.\n\n\"By Jove, yes; there's some one there. Who can it be?\"\n\nThey were all straining their eyes, but the distance was so great that they could only be sure that they were camel-men and about a dozen in number.\n\n\"It's those devils who were left behind in the palm grove,\" said Cochrane. \"There's no one else it can be. One consolation, they can't get away again. They've walked right into the lion's mouth.\"\n\nBut Mrs. Belmont was still gazing with the same fixed intensity, and the same ivory face. Now, with a wild shriek of joy, she threw her two hands into the air. \"It's they!\" she screamed. \"They are saved! It's they, Colonel, it's they! Oh, Miss Adams, Miss Adams, it is they!\" She capered about on the top of the hill with wild eyes like an excited child.\n\nHer companions would not believe her, for they could see nothing, but there are moments when our mortal senses are more acute than those who have never put their whole heart and soul into them can ever realise. Mrs. Belmont had already run down the rocky path, on the way to her camel, before they could distinguish that which had long before carried its glad message to her. In the van of the approaching party, three white dots shimmered in the sun, and they could only come from the three European hats. The riders were travelling swiftly, and by the time their comrades had started to meet them they could plainly see that it was indeed Belmont, Fardet, and Stephens, with the dragoman Mansoor, and the wounded Soudanese rifleman. As they came together they saw that their escort consisted of Tippy Tilly and the other old Egyptian soldiers. Belmont rushed onwards to meet his wife, but Fardet stopped to grasp the Colonel's hand.\n\n\"Vive la France! Vivent les Anglais!\" he was yelling. \"Tout va bien, n'est ce pas, Colonel? Ah, canaille! Vivent la croix et les Chretiens!\" He was incoherent in his delight.\n\nThe Colonel, too, was as enthusiastic as his Anglo-Saxon standard would permit. He could not gesticulate, but he laughed in the nervous crackling way which was his top-note of emotion.\n\n\"My dear boy, I am deuced glad to see you all again. I gave you up for lost. Never was as pleased at anything in my life! How did you get away?\"\n\n\"It was all your doing.\"\n\n\"Mine?\"\n\n\"Yes, my friend, and I have been quarrelling with you\u2014ungrateful wretch that I am!\"\n\n\"But how did I save you?\"\n\n\"It was you who arranged with this excellent Tippy Tilly and the others that they should have so much if they brought us alive into Egypt again. They slipped away in the darkness and hid themselves in the grove. Then, when we were left, they crept up with their rifles and shot the men who were about to murder us. That cursed Moolah, I am sorry they shot him, for I believe that I could have persuaded him to be a Christian. And now, with your permission, I will hurry on and embrace Miss Adams, for Belmont has his wife, and Stephens has Miss Sadie, so I think it is very evident that the sympathy of Miss Adams is reserved for me.\"\n\nA fortnight had passed away, and the special boat which had been placed at the disposal of the rescued tourists was already far north of Assiout. Next morning they would find themselves at Baliani, where one takes the express for Cairo. It was, therefore, their last evening together. Mrs. Shlesinger and her child, who had escaped unhurt, had already been sent down from the frontier. Miss Adams had been very ill after her privations, and this was the first time that she had been allowed to come upon deck after dinner. She sat now in a lounge chair, thinner, sterner, and kindlier than ever, while Sadie stood beside her and tucked the rugs around her shoulders. Mr. Stephens was carrying over the coffee and placing it on the wicker table beside them. On the other side of the deck Belmont and his wife were seated together in silent sympathy and contentment.\n\nMonsieur Fardet was leaning against the rail, and arguing about the remissness of the British Government in not taking a more complete control of the Egyptian frontier, while the Colonel stood very erect in front of him, with the red end of a cigar-stump protruding from under his moustache.\n\nBut what was the matter with the Colonel? Who would have recognised him who had only seen the broken old man in the Libyan Desert? There might be some little grizzling about the moustache, but the hair was back once more at the fine glossy black which had been so much admired upon the voyage up. With a stony face and an unsympathetic manner he had received, upon his return to Halfa, all the commiserations about the dreadful way in which his privations had blanched him, and then diving into his cabin, he had reappeared within an hour exactly as he had been before that fatal moment when he had been cut off from the manifold resources of civilisation. And he looked in such a sternly questioning manner at every one who stared at him, that no one had the moral courage to make any remark about this modern miracle. It was observed from that time forward that, if the Colonel had only to ride a hundred yards into the desert, he always began his preparations by putting a small black bottle with a pink label into the side-pocket of his coat. But those who knew him best at times when a man may best be known, said that the old soldier had a young man's heart and a young man's spirit\u2014 so that if he wished to keep a young man's colour also it was not very unreasonable after all.\n\nIt was very soothing and restful up there on the saloon deck, with no sound but the gentle lipping of the water as it rippled against the sides of the steamer. The red after-glow was in the western sky, and it mottled the broad, smooth river with crimson. Dimly they could discern the tall figures of herons standing upon the sand-banks, and farther off the line of riverside date-palms glided past them in a majestic procession. Once more the silver stars were twinkling out, the same clear, placid, inexorable stars to which their weary eyes had been so often upturned during the long nights of their desert martyrdom.\n\n\"Where do you put up in Cairo, Miss Adams?\" asked Mrs. Belmont at last.\n\n\"Shepheard's, I think.\"\n\n\"And you, Mr. Stephens?\"\n\n\"Oh, Shepheard's, decidedly.\"\n\n\"We are staying at the Continental. I hope we shall not lose sight of you.\"\n\n\"I don't want ever to lose sight of you, Mrs. Belmont,\" cried Sadie. \"Oh, you must come to the States, and we'll give you just a lovely time.\"\n\nMrs. Belmont laughed, in her pleasant, mellow fashion.\n\n\"We have our duty to do in Ireland, and we have been too long away from it already. My husband has his business, and I have my home, and they are both going to rack and ruin. Besides,\" she added slyly, \"it is just possible that if we did come to the States we might not find you there.\"\n\n\"We must all meet again,\" said Belmont, \"if only to talk our adventures over once more. It will be easier in a year or two. We are still too near them.\"\n\n\"And yet how far away and dream-like it all seems!\" remarked his wife. \"Providence is very good in softening disagreeable remembrances in our minds. All this feels to me as if it had happened in some previous existence.\"\n\nFardet held up his wrist with a cotton bandage still round it.\n\n\"The body does not forget as quickly as the mind. This does not look very dream-like or far away, Mrs. Belmont.\"\n\n\"How hard it is that some should be spared, and some not! If only Mr. Brown and Mr. Headingly were with us, then I should not have one care in the world,\" cried Sadie. \"Why should they have been taken, and we left?\"\n\nMr. Stuart had limped on to the deck with an open book in his hand, a thick stick supporting his injured leg.\n\n\"Why is the ripe fruit picked, and the unripe left?\" said he in answer to the young girl's exclamation. \"We know nothing of the spiritual state of these poor dear young fellows, but the great Master Gardener plucks His fruit according to His own knowledge. I brought you up a passage to read to you.\"\n\nThere was a lantern upon the table, and he sat down beside it. The yellow light shone upon his heavy cheek and the red edges of his book. The strong, steady voice rose above the wash of the water.\n\n\"'Let them give thanks whom the Lord hath redeemed and delivered from the hand of the enemy, and gathered them out of the lands, from the east, and from the west, from the north, and from the south. They went astray in the wilderness out of the way, and found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. So they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and He delivered them from their distress. He led them forth by the right way, that they might go to the city where they dwelt. Oh that men would therefore praise the Lord for His goodness, and declare the wonders that He doeth for the children of men.'\n\n\"It sounds as if it were composed for us, and yet it was written two thousand years ago,\" said the clergyman, as he closed the book. \"In every age man has been forced to acknowledge the guiding hand which leads him. For my part I don't believe that inspiration stopped two thousand years ago. When Tennyson wrote with such fervour and conviction\":\u2014\n\n'Oh, yet we trust that somehow good Will be the final goal of ill,'\n\n\"He was repeating the message which had been given to him, just as Micah or Ezekiel, when the world was younger, repeated some cruder and more elementary message.\"\n\n\"That is all very well, Mr. Stuart,\" said the Frenchman; \"you ask me to praise God for taking me out of danger and pain, but what I want to know is why, since He has arranged all things, He ever put me into that pain and danger. I have, in my opinion, more occasion to blame than to praise. You would not thank me for pulling you out of that river if it was also I who pushed you in. The most which you can claim for your Providence is that it has healed the wound which its own hand inflicted.\"\n\n\"I don't deny the difficulty,\" said the clergyman slowly; \"no one who is not self-deceived can deny the difficulty. Look how boldly Tennyson faced it in that same poem, the grandest and deepest and most obviously inspired in our language. Remember the effect which it had upon him.\"\n\n\u2003'I falter where I firmly trod,\n\n\u2003And falling with my weight of cares\n\n\u2003Upon the great world's altar stairs\n\n\u2003Which slope through darkness up to God;\n\n\u2003I stretch lame hands of faith and grope\n\n\u2003And gather dust and chaff, and call\n\n\u2003To what I feel is Lord of all,\n\n\u2003And faintly trust the larger hope.'\n\n\"It is the central mystery of mysteries\u2014the problem of sin and suffering, the one huge difficulty which the reasoner has to solve in order to vindicate the dealings of God with man. But take our own case as an example. I, for one, am very clear what I have got out of our experience. I say it with all humility, but I have a clearer view of my duties than ever I had before. It has taught me to be less remiss in saying what I think to be true, less indolent in doing what I feel to be right.\"\n\n\"And I,\" cried Sadie. \"It has taught me more than all my life put together. I have learned so much and unlearned so much. I am a different girl.\"\n\n\"I never understood my own nature before,\" said Stephens. \"I can hardly say that I had a nature to understand. I lived for what was unimportant, and I neglected what was vital.\"\n\n\"Oh, a good shake-up does nobody any harm,\" the Colonel remarked. \"Too much of the feather-bed-and-four-meals-a-day life is not good for man or woman.\"\n\n\"It is my firm belief,\" said Mrs. Belmont gravely, \"that there was not one of us who did not rise to a greater height during those days in the desert than ever before or since. When our sins come to be weighed, much may be forgiven us for the sake of those unselfish days.\"\n\nThey all sat in thoughtful silence for a little, while the scarlet streaks turned to carmine, and the grey shadows deepened, and the wild-fowl flew past in dark straggling V's over the dull metallic surface of the great smooth-flowing Nile. A cold wind had sprung up from the eastward, and some of the party rose to leave the deck. Stephens leaned forward to Sadie.\n\n\"Do you remember what you promised when you were in the desert?\" he whispered.\n\n\"What was that?\"\n\n\"You said that if you escaped you would try in future to make some one else happy.\"\n\n\"Then I must do so.\"\n\n\"You have,\" said he, and their hands met under the shadow of the table." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "The White Company", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "historical fiction", + "medieval" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "HOW THE BLACK SHEEP CAME FORTH FROM THE FOLD.", + "text": "The great bell of Beaulieu was ringing. Far away through the forest might be heard its musical clangor and swell. Peat-cutters on Blackdown and fishers upon the Exe heard the distant throbbing rising and falling upon the sultry summer air. It was a common sound in those parts\u2014as common as the chatter of the jays and the booming of the bittern. Yet the fishers and the peasants raised their heads and looked questions at each other, for the angelus had already gone and vespers was still far off. Why should the great bell of Beaulieu toll when the shadows were neither short nor long?\n\nAll round the Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long green-paved avenues of gnarled oaks and of lichened beeches the white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vineyard and the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and salterns, even from the distant iron-works of Sowley and the outlying grange of St. Leonard's, they had all turned their steps homewards. It had been no sudden call. A swift messenger had the night before sped round to the outlying dependencies of the Abbey, and had left the summons for every monk to be back in the cloisters by the third hour after noontide. So urgent a message had not been issued within the memory of old lay-brother Athanasius, who had cleaned the Abbey knocker since the year after the Battle of Bannockburn.\n\nA stranger who knew nothing either of the Abbey or of its immense resources might have gathered from the appearance of the brothers some conception of the varied duties which they were called upon to perform, and of the busy, widespread life which centred in the old monastery. As they swept gravely in by twos and by threes, with bended heads and muttering lips there were few who did not bear upon them some signs of their daily toil. Here were two with wrists and sleeves all spotted with the ruddy grape juice. There again was a bearded brother with a broad-headed axe and a bundle of faggots upon his shoulders, while beside him walked another with the shears under his arm and the white wool still clinging to his whiter gown. A long, straggling troop bore spades and mattocks while the two rearmost of all staggered along under a huge basket o' fresh-caught carp, for the morrow was Friday, and there were fifty platters to be filled and as many sturdy trenchermen behind them. Of all the throng there was scarce one who was not labor-stained and weary, for Abbot Berghersh was a hard man to himself and to others.\n\nMeanwhile, in the broad and lofty chamber set apart for occasions of import, the Abbot himself was pacing impatiently backwards and forwards, with his long white nervous hands clasped in front of him. His thin, thought-worn features and sunken, haggard cheeks bespoke one who had indeed beaten down that inner foe whom every man must face, but had none the less suffered sorely in the contest. In crushing his passions he had well-nigh crushed himself. Yet, frail as was his person there gleamed out ever and anon from under his drooping brows a flash of fierce energy, which recalled to men's minds that he came of a fighting stock, and that even now his twin-brother, Sir Bartholomew Berghersh, was one of the most famous of those stern warriors who had planted the Cross of St. George before the gates of Paris. With lips compressed and clouded brow, he strode up and down the oaken floor, the very genius and impersonation of asceticism, while the great bell still thundered and clanged above his head. At last the uproar died away in three last, measured throbs, and ere their echo had ceased the Abbot struck a small gong which summoned a lay-brother to his presence.\n\n\"Have the brethren come?\" he asked, in the Anglo-French dialect used in religious houses.\n\n\"They are here,\" the other answered, with his eyes cast down and his hands crossed upon his chest.\n\n\"All?\"\n\n\"Two and thirty of the seniors and fifteen of the novices, most holy father. Brother Mark of the Spicarium is sore smitten with a fever and could not come. He said that\u2014\"\n\n\"It boots not what he said. Fever or no, he should have come at my call. His spirit must be chastened, as must that of many more in this Abbey. You yourself, brother Francis, have twice raised your voice, so it hath come to my ears, when the reader in the refectory hath been dealing with the lives of God's most blessed saints. What hast thou to say?\"\n\nThe lay-brother stood meek and silent, with his arms still crossed in front of him.\n\n\"One thousand Aves and as many Credos, said standing with arms outstretched before the shrine of the Virgin, may help thee to remember that the Creator hath given us two ears and but one mouth, as a token that there is twice the work for the one as for the other. Where is the master of the novices?\"\n\n\"He is without, most holy father.\"\n\n\"Send him hither.\"\n\nThe sandalled feet clattered over the wooden floor, and the iron-bound door creaked upon its hinges. In a few moments it opened again to admit a short square monk with a heavy, composed face and an authoritative manner.\n\n\"You have sent for me, holy father?\"\n\n\"Yes, brother Jerome, I wish that this matter be disposed of with as little scandal as may be, and yet it is needful that the example should be a public one.\" The Abbot spoke in Latin now, as a language which was more fitted by its age and solemnity to convey the thoughts of two high dignitaries of the order.\n\n\"It would, perchance, be best that the novices be not admitted,\" suggested the master. \"This mention of a woman may turn their minds from their pious meditations to worldly and evil thoughts.\"\n\n\"Woman! woman!\" groaned the Abbot. \"Well has the holy Chrysostom termed them radix malorum. From Eve downwards, what good hath come from any of them? Who brings the plaint?\"\n\n\"It is brother Ambrose.\"\n\n\"A holy and devout young man.\"\n\n\"A light and a pattern to every novice.\"\n\n\"Let the matter be brought to an issue then according to our old-time monastic habit. Bid the chancellor and the sub-chancellor lead in the brothers according to age, together with brother John, the accused, and brother Ambrose, the accuser.\"\n\n\"And the novices?\"\n\n\"Let them bide in the north alley of the cloisters. Stay! Bid the sub-chancellor send out to them Thomas the lector to read unto them from the 'Gesta beati Benedicti.' It may save them from foolish and pernicious babbling.\"\n\nThe Abbot was left to himself once more, and bent his thin gray face over his illuminated breviary. So he remained while the senior monks filed slowly and sedately into the chamber seating themselves upon the long oaken benches which lined the wall on either side. At the further end, in two high chairs as large as that of the Abbot, though hardly as elaborately carved, sat the master of the novices and the chancellor, the latter a broad and portly priest, with dark mirthful eyes and a thick outgrowth of crisp black hair all round his tonsured head. Between them stood a lean, white-faced brother who appeared to be ill at ease, shifting his feet from side to side and tapping his chin nervously with the long parchment roll which he held in his hand. The Abbot, from his point of vantage, looked down on the two long lines of faces, placid and sun-browned for the most part, with the large bovine eyes and unlined features which told of their easy, unchanging existence. Then he turned his eager fiery gaze upon the pale-faced monk who faced him.\n\n\"This plaint is thine, as I learn, brother Ambrose,\" said he. \"May the holy Benedict, patron of our house, be present this day and aid us in our findings! How many counts are there?\"\n\n\"Three, most holy father,\" the brother answered in a low and quavering voice.\n\n\"Have you set them forth according to rule?\"\n\n\"They are here set down, most holy father, upon a cantle of sheepskin.\"\n\n\"Let the sheepskin be handed to the chancellor. Bring in brother John, and let him hear the plaints which have been urged against him.\"\n\nAt this order a lay-brother swung open the door, and two other lay-brothers entered leading between them a young novice of the order. He was a man of huge stature, dark-eyed and red-headed, with a peculiar half-humorous, half-defiant expression upon his bold, well-marked features. His cowl was thrown back upon his shoulders, and his gown, unfastened at the top, disclosed a round, sinewy neck, ruddy and corded like the bark of the fir. Thick, muscular arms, covered with a reddish down, protruded from the wide sleeves of his habit, while his white shirt, looped up upon one side, gave a glimpse of a huge knotty leg, scarred and torn with the scratches of brambles. With a bow to the Abbot, which had in it perhaps more pleasantry than reverence, the novice strode across to the carved prie-dieu which had been set apart for him, and stood silent and erect with his hand upon the gold bell which was used in the private orisons of the Abbot's own household. His dark eyes glanced rapidly over the assembly, and finally settled with a grim and menacing twinkle upon the face of his accuser.\n\nThe chancellor rose, and having slowly unrolled the parchment-scroll, proceeded to read it out in a thick and pompous voice, while a subdued rustle and movement among the brothers bespoke the interest with which they followed the proceedings.\n\n\"Charges brought upon the second Thursday after the Feast of the Assumption, in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and sixty-six, against brother John, formerly known as Hordle John, or John of Hordle, but now a novice in the holy monastic order of the Cistercians. Read upon the same day at the Abbey of Beaulieu in the presence of the most reverend Abbot Berghersh and of the assembled order.\n\n\"The charges against the said brother John are the following, namely, to wit:\n\n\"First, that on the above-mentioned Feast of the Assumption, small beer having been served to the novices in the proportion of one quart to each four, the said brother John did drain the pot at one draught to the detriment of brother Paul, brother Porphyry and brother Ambrose, who could scarce eat their none-meat of salted stock-fish on account of their exceeding dryness.\"\n\nAt this solemn indictment the novice raised his hand and twitched his lip, while even the placid senior brothers glanced across at each other and coughed to cover their amusement. The Abbot alone sat gray and immutable, with a drawn face and a brooding eye.\n\n\"Item, that having been told by the master of the novices that he should restrict his food for two days to a single three-pound loaf of bran and beans, for the greater honoring and glorifying of St. Monica, mother of the holy Augustine, he was heard by brother Ambrose and others to say that he wished twenty thousand devils would fly away with the said Monica, mother of the holy Augustine, or any other saint who came between a man and his meat. Item, that upon brother Ambrose reproving him for this blasphemous wish, he did hold the said brother face downwards over the piscatorium or fish-pond for a space during which the said brother was able to repeat a pater and four aves for the better fortifying of his soul against impending death.\"\n\nThere was a buzz and murmur among the white-frocked brethren at this grave charge; but the Abbot held up his long quivering hand. \"What then?\" said he.\n\n\"Item, that between nones and vespers on the feast of James the Less the said brother John was observed upon the Brockenhurst road, near the spot which is known as Hatchett's Pond in converse with a person of the other sex, being a maiden of the name of Mary Sowley, the daughter of the King's verderer. Item, that after sundry japes and jokes the said brother John did lift up the said Mary Sowley and did take, carry, and convey her across a stream, to the infinite relish of the devil and the exceeding detriment of his own soul, which scandalous and wilful falling away was witnessed by three members of our order.\"\n\nA dead silence throughout the room, with a rolling of heads and upturning of eyes, bespoke the pious horror of the community.\n\nThe Abbot drew his gray brows low over his fiercely questioning eyes.\n\n\"Who can vouch for this thing?\" he asked.\n\n\"That can I,\" answered the accuser. \"So too can brother Porphyry, who was with me, and brother Mark of the Spicarium, who hath been so much stirred and inwardly troubled by the sight that he now lies in a fever through it.\"\n\n\"And the woman?\" asked the Abbot. \"Did she not break into lamentation and woe that a brother should so demean himself?\"\n\n\"Nay, she smiled sweetly upon him and thanked him. I can vouch it and so can brother Porphyry.\"\n\n\"Canst thou?\" cried the Abbot, in a high, tempestuous tone. \"Canst thou so? Hast forgotten that the five-and-thirtieth rule of the order is that in the presence of a woman the face should be ever averted and the eyes cast down? Hast forgot it, I say? If your eyes were upon your sandals, how came ye to see this smile of which ye prate? A week in your cells, false brethren, a week of rye-bread and lentils, with double lauds and double matins, may help ye to remembrance of the laws under which ye live.\"\n\nAt this sudden outflame of wrath the two witnesses sank their faces on to their chests, and sat as men crushed. The Abbot turned his angry eyes away from them and bent them upon the accused, who met his searching gaze with a firm and composed face.\n\n\"What hast thou to say, brother John, upon these weighty things which are urged against you?\"\n\n\"Little enough, good father, little enough,\" said the novice, speaking English with a broad West Saxon drawl. The brothers, who were English to a man, pricked up their ears at the sound of the homely and yet unfamiliar speech; but the Abbot flushed red with anger, and struck his hand upon the oaken arm of his chair.\n\n\"What talk is this?\" he cried. \"Is this a tongue to be used within the walls of an old and well-famed monastery? But grace and learning have ever gone hand in hand, and when one is lost it is needless to look for the other.\"\n\n\"I know not about that,\" said brother John. \"I know only that the words come kindly to my mouth, for it was the speech of my fathers before me. Under your favor, I shall either use it now or hold my peace.\"\n\nThe Abbot patted his foot and nodded his head, as one who passes a point but does not forget it.\n\n\"For the matter of the ale,\" continued brother John, \"I had come in hot from the fields and had scarce got the taste of the thing before mine eye lit upon the bottom of the pot. It may be, too, that I spoke somewhat shortly concerning the bran and the beans, the same being poor provender and unfitted for a man of my inches. It is true also that I did lay my hands upon this jack-fool of a brother Ambrose, though, as you can see, I did him little scathe. As regards the maid, too, it is true that I did heft her over the stream, she having on her hosen and shoon, whilst I had but my wooden sandals, which could take no hurt from the water. I should have thought shame upon my manhood, as well as my monkhood, if I had held back my hand from her.\" He glanced around as he spoke with the half-amused look which he had worn during the whole proceedings.\n\n\"There is no need to go further,\" said the Abbot. \"He has confessed to all. It only remains for me to portion out the punishment which is due to his evil conduct.\"\n\nHe rose, and the two long lines of brothers followed his example, looking sideways with scared faces at the angry prelate.\n\n\"John of Hordle,\" he thundered, \"you have shown yourself during the two months of your novitiate to be a recreant monk, and one who is unworthy to wear the white garb which is the outer symbol of the spotless spirit. That dress shall therefore be stripped from thee, and thou shalt be cast into the outer world without benefit of clerkship, and without lot or part in the graces and blessings of those who dwell under the care of the Blessed Benedict. Thou shalt come back neither to Beaulieu nor to any of the granges of Beaulieu, and thy name shall be struck off the scrolls of the order.\"\n\nThe sentence appeared a terrible one to the older monks, who had become so used to the safe and regular life of the Abbey that they would have been as helpless as children in the outer world. From their pious oasis they looked dreamily out at the desert of life, a place full of stormings and strivings\u2014comfortless, restless, and overshadowed by evil. The young novice, however, appeared to have other thoughts, for his eyes sparkled and his smile broadened. It needed but that to add fresh fuel to the fiery mood of the prelate.\n\n\"So much for thy spiritual punishment,\" he cried. \"But it is to thy grosser feelings that we must turn in such natures as thine, and as thou art no longer under the shield of holy church there is the less difficulty. Ho there! lay-brothers\u2014Francis, Naomi, Joseph\u2014seize him and bind his arms! Drag him forth, and let the foresters and the porters scourge him from the precincts!\"\n\nAs these three brothers advanced towards him to carry out the Abbot's direction, the smile faded from the novice's face, and he glanced right and left with his fierce brown eyes, like a bull at a baiting. Then, with a sudden deep-chested shout, he tore up the heavy oaken prie-dieu and poised it to strike, taking two steps backward the while, that none might take him at a vantage.\n\n\"By the black rood of Waltham!\" he roared, \"if any knave among you lays a finger-end upon the edge of my gown, I will crush his skull like a filbert!\" With his thick knotted arms, his thundering voice, and his bristle of red hair, there was something so repellent in the man that the three brothers flew back at the very glare of him; and the two rows of white monks strained away from him like poplars in a tempest. The Abbot only sprang forward with shining eyes; but the chancellor and the master hung upon either arm and wrested him back out of danger's way.\n\n\"He is possessed of a devil!\" they shouted. \"Run, brother Ambrose, brother Joachim! Call Hugh of the Mill, and Woodman Wat, and Raoul with his arbalest and bolts. Tell them that we are in fear of our lives! Run, run! for the love of the Virgin!\"\n\nBut the novice was a strategist as well as a man of action. Springing forward, he hurled his unwieldy weapon at brother Ambrose, and, as desk and monk clattered on to the floor together, he sprang through the open door and down the winding stair. Sleepy old brother Athanasius, at the porter's cell, had a fleeting vision of twinkling feet and flying skirts; but before he had time to rub his eyes the recreant had passed the lodge, and was speeding as fast as his sandals could patter along the Lyndhurst Road." + }, + { + "title": "HOW ALLEYNE EDRICSON CAME OUT INTO THE WORLD.", + "text": "Never had the peaceful atmosphere of the old Cistercian house been so rudely ruffled. Never had there been insurrection so sudden, so short, and so successful. Yet the Abbot Berghersh was a man of too firm a grain to allow one bold outbreak to imperil the settled order of his great household. In a few hot and bitter words, he compared their false brother's exit to the expulsion of our first parents from the garden, and more than hinted that unless a reformation occurred some others of the community might find themselves in the same evil and perilous case. Having thus pointed the moral and reduced his flock to a fitting state of docility, he dismissed them once more to their labors and withdrew himself to his own private chamber, there to seek spiritual aid in the discharge of the duties of his high office.\n\nThe Abbot was still on his knees, when a gentle tapping at the door of his cell broke in upon his orisons.\n\nRising in no very good humor at the interruption, he gave the word to enter; but his look of impatience softened down into a pleasant and paternal smile as his eyes fell upon his visitor.\n\nHe was a thin-faced, yellow-haired youth, rather above the middle size, comely and well shapen, with straight, lithe figure and eager, boyish features. His clear, pensive gray eyes, and quick, delicate expression, spoke of a nature which had unfolded far from the boisterous joys and sorrows of the world. Yet there was a set of the mouth and a prominence of the chin which relieved him of any trace of effeminacy. Impulsive he might be, enthusiastic, sensitive, with something sympathetic and adaptive in his disposition; but an observer of nature's tokens would have confidently pledged himself that there was native firmness and strength underlying his gentle, monk-bred ways.\n\nThe youth was not clad in monastic garb, but in lay attire, though his jerkin, cloak and hose were all of a sombre hue, as befitted one who dwelt in sacred precincts. A broad leather strap hanging from his shoulder supported a scrip or satchel such as travellers were wont to carry. In one hand he grasped a thick staff pointed and shod with metal, while in the other he held his coif or bonnet, which bore in its front a broad pewter medal stamped with the image of Our Lady of Rocamadour.\n\n\"Art ready, then, fair son?\" said the Abbot. \"This is indeed a day of comings and of goings. It is strange that in one twelve hours the Abbey should have cast off its foulest weed and should now lose what we are fain to look upon as our choicest blossom.\"\n\n\"You speak too kindly, father,\" the youth answered. \"If I had my will I should never go forth, but should end my days here in Beaulieu. It hath been my home as far back as my mind can carry me, and it is a sore thing for me to have to leave it.\"\n\n\"Life brings many a cross,\" said the Abbot gently. \"Who is without them? Your going forth is a grief to us as well as to yourself. But there is no help. I had given my foreword and sacred promise to your father, Edric the Franklin, that at the age of twenty you should be sent out into the world to see for yourself how you liked the savor of it. Seat thee upon the settle, Alleyne, for you may need rest ere long.\"\n\nThe youth sat down as directed, but reluctantly and with diffidence. The Abbot stood by the narrow window, and his long black shadow fell slantwise across the rush-strewn floor.\n\n\"Twenty years ago,\" he said, \"your father, the Franklin of Minstead, died, leaving to the Abbey three hides of rich land in the hundred of Malwood, and leaving to us also his infant son on condition that we should rear him until he came to man's estate. This he did partly because your mother was dead, and partly because your elder brother, now Socman of Minstead, had already given sign of that fierce and rude nature which would make him no fit companion for you. It was his desire and request, however, that you should not remain in the cloisters, but should at a ripe age return into the world.\"\n\n\"But, father,\" interrupted the young man \"it is surely true that I am already advanced several degrees in clerkship?\"\n\n\"Yes, fair son, but not so far as to bar you from the garb you now wear or the life which you must now lead. You have been porter?\"\n\n\"Yes, father.\"\n\n\"Exorcist?\"\n\n\"Yes, father.\"\n\n\"Reader?\"\n\n\"Yes, father.\"\n\n\"Acolyte?\"\n\n\"Yes, father.\"\n\n\"But have sworn no vow of constancy or chastity?\"\n\n\"No, father.\"\n\n\"Then you are free to follow a worldly life. But let me hear, ere you start, what gifts you take away with you from Beaulieu? Some I already know. There is the playing of the citole and the rebeck. Our choir will be dumb without you. You carve too?\"\n\nThe youth's pale face flushed with the pride of the skilled workman. \"Yes, holy father,\" he answered. \"Thanks to good brother Bartholomew, I carve in wood and in ivory, and can do something also in silver and in bronze. From brother Francis I have learned to paint on vellum, on glass, and on metal, with a knowledge of those pigments and essences which can preserve the color against damp or a biting air. Brother Luke hath given me some skill in damask work, and in the enamelling of shrines, tabernacles, diptychs and triptychs. For the rest, I know a little of the making of covers, the cutting of precious stones, and the fashioning of instruments.\"\n\n\"A goodly list, truly,\" cried the superior with a smile. \"What clerk of Cambrig or of Oxenford could say as much? But of thy reading\u2014hast not so much to show there, I fear?\"\n\n\"No, father, it hath been slight enough. Yet, thanks to our good chancellor, I am not wholly unlettered. I have read Ockham, Bradwardine, and other of the schoolmen, together with the learned Duns Scotus and the book of the holy Aquinas.\"\n\n\"But of the things of this world, what have you gathered from your reading? From this high window you may catch a glimpse over the wooden point and the smoke of Bucklershard of the mouth of the Exe, and the shining sea. Now, I pray you Alleyne, if a man were to take a ship and spread sail across yonder waters, where might he hope to arrive?\"\n\nThe youth pondered, and drew a plan amongst the rushes with the point of his staff. \"Holy father,\" said he, \"he would come upon those parts of France which are held by the King's Majesty. But if he trended to the south he might reach Spain and the Barbary States. To his north would be Flanders and the country of the Eastlanders and of the Muscovites.\"\n\n\"True. And how if, after reaching the King's possessions, he still journeyed on to the eastward?\"\n\n\"He would then come upon that part of France which is still in dispute, and he might hope to reach the famous city of Avignon, where dwells our blessed father, the prop of Christendom.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"Then he would pass through the land of the Almains and the great Roman Empire, and so to the country of the Huns and of the Lithuanian pagans, beyond which lies the great city of Constantine and the kingdom of the unclean followers of Mahmoud.\"\n\n\"And beyond that, fair son?\"\n\n\"Beyond that is Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and the great river which hath its source in the Garden of Eden.\"\n\n\"And then?\"\n\n\"Nay, good father, I cannot tell. Methinks the end of the world is not far from there.\"\n\n\"Then we can still find something to teach thee, Alleyne,\" said the Abbot complaisantly. \"Know that many strange nations lie betwixt there and the end of the world. There is the country of the Amazons, and the country of the dwarfs, and the country of the fair but evil women who slay with beholding, like the basilisk. Beyond that again is the kingdom of Prester John and of the great Cham. These things I know for very sooth, for I had them from that pious Christian and valiant knight, Sir John de Mandeville, who stopped twice at Beaulieu on his way to and from Southampton, and discoursed to us concerning what he had seen from the reader's desk in the refectory, until there was many a good brother who got neither bit nor sup, so stricken were they by his strange tales.\"\n\n\"I would fain know, father,\" asked the young man, \"what there may be at the end of the world?\"\n\n\"There are some things,\" replied the Abbot gravely, \"into which it was never intended that we should inquire. But you have a long road before you. Whither will you first turn?\"\n\n\"To my brother's at Minstead. If he be indeed an ungodly and violent man, there is the more need that I should seek him out and see whether I cannot turn him to better ways.\"\n\nThe Abbot shook his head. \"The Socman of Minstead hath earned an evil name over the country side,\" he said. \"If you must go to him, see at least that he doth not turn you from the narrow path upon which you have learned to tread. But you are in God's keeping, and Godward should you ever look in danger and in trouble. Above all, shun the snares of women, for they are ever set for the foolish feet of the young. Kneel down, my child, and take an old man's blessing.\"\n\nAlleyne Edricson bent his head while the Abbot poured out his heartfelt supplication that Heaven would watch over this young soul, now going forth into the darkness and danger of the world. It was no mere form for either of them. To them the outside life of mankind did indeed seem to be one of violence and of sin, beset with physical and still more with spiritual danger. Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days. God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them. It was then with a lighter heart and a stouter courage that the young man turned from the Abbot's room, while the latter, following him to the stair-head, finally commended him to the protection of the holy Julian, patron of travellers.\n\nUnderneath, in the porch of the Abbey, the monks had gathered to give him a last God-speed. Many had brought some parting token by which he should remember them. There was brother Bartholomew with a crucifix of rare carved ivory, and brother Luke with a white-backed psalter adorned with golden bees, and brother Francis with the \"Slaying of the Innocents\" most daintily set forth upon vellum. All these were duly packed away deep in the traveller's scrip, and above them old pippin-faced brother Athanasius had placed a parcel of simnel bread and rammel cheese, with a small flask of the famous blue-sealed Abbey wine. So, amid hand-shakings and laughings and blessings, Alleyne Edricson turned his back upon Beaulieu.\n\nAt the turn of the road he stopped and gazed back. There was the widespread building which he knew so well, the Abbot's house, the long church, the cloisters with their line of arches, all bathed and mellowed in the evening sun. There too was the broad sweep of the river Exe, the old stone well, the canopied niche of the Virgin, and in the centre of all the cluster of white-robed figures who waved their hands to him. A sudden mist swam up before the young man's eyes, and he turned away upon his journey with a heavy heart and a choking throat." + }, + { + "title": "HOW HORDLE JOHN COZENED THE FULLER OF LYMINGTON.", + "text": "It is not, however, in the nature of things that a lad of twenty, with young life glowing in his veins and all the wide world before him, should spend his first hours of freedom in mourning for what he had left. Long ere Alleyne was out of sound of the Beaulieu bells he was striding sturdily along, swinging his staff and whistling as merrily as the birds in the thicket. It was an evening to raise a man's heart. The sun shining slantwise through the trees threw delicate traceries across the road, with bars of golden light between. Away in the distance before and behind, the green boughs, now turning in places to a coppery redness, shot their broad arches across the track. The still summer air was heavy with the resinous smell of the great forest. Here and there a tawny brook prattled out from among the underwood and lost itself again in the ferns and brambles upon the further side. Save the dull piping of insects and the sough of the leaves, there was silence everywhere\u2014the sweet restful silence of nature.\n\nAnd yet there was no want of life\u2014the whole wide wood was full of it. Now it was a lithe, furtive stoat which shot across the path upon some fell errand of its own; then it was a wild cat which squatted upon the outlying branch of an oak and peeped at the traveller with a yellow and dubious eye. Once it was a wild sow which scuttled out of the bracken, with two young sounders at her heels, and once a lordly red staggard walked daintily out from among the tree trunks, and looked around him with the fearless gaze of one who lived under the King's own high protection. Alleyne gave his staff a merry flourish, however, and the red deer bethought him that the King was far off, so streaked away from whence he came.\n\nThe youth had now journeyed considerably beyond the furthest domains of the Abbey. He was the more surprised therefore when, on coming round a turn in the path, he perceived a man clad in the familiar garb of the order, and seated in a clump of heather by the roadside. Alleyne had known every brother well, but this was a face which was new to him\u2014a face which was very red and puffed, working this way and that, as though the man were sore perplexed in his mind. Once he shook both hands furiously in the air, and twice he sprang from his seat and hurried down the road. When he rose, however, Alleyne observed that his robe was much too long and loose for him in every direction, trailing upon the ground and bagging about his ankles, so that even with trussed-up skirts he could make little progress. He ran once, but the long gown clogged him so that he slowed down into a shambling walk, and finally plumped into the heather once more.\n\n\"Young friend,\" said he, when Alleyne was abreast of him, \"I fear from thy garb that thou canst know little of the Abbey of Beaulieu.\"\n\n\"Then you are in error, friend,\" the clerk answered, \"for I have spent all my days within its walls.\"\n\n\"Hast so indeed?\" cried he. \"Then perhaps canst tell me the name of a great loathly lump of a brother wi' freckled face an' a hand like a spade. His eyes were black an' his hair was red an' his voice like the parish bull. I trow that there cannot be two alike in the same cloisters.\"\n\n\"That surely can be no other than brother John,\" said Alleyne. \"I trust he has done you no wrong, that you should be so hot against him.\"\n\n\"Wrong, quotha?\" cried the other, jumping out of the heather. \"Wrong! why he hath stolen every plack of clothing off my back, if that be a wrong, and hath left me here in this sorry frock of white falding, so that I have shame to go back to my wife, lest she think that I have donned her old kirtle. Harrow and alas that ever I should have met him!\"\n\n\"But how came this?\" asked the young clerk, who could scarce keep from laughter at the sight of the hot little man so swathed in the great white cloak.\n\n\"It came in this way,\" he said, sitting down once more: \"I was passing this way, hoping to reach Lymington ere nightfall when I came on this red-headed knave seated even where we are sitting now. I uncovered and louted as I passed thinking that he might be a holy man at his orisons, but he called to me and asked me if I had heard speak of the new indulgence in favor of the Cistercians. 'Not I,' I answered. 'Then the worse for thy soul!' said he; and with that he broke into a long tale how that on account of the virtues of the Abbot Berghersh it had been decreed by the Pope that whoever should wear the habit of a monk of Beaulieu for as long as he might say the seven psalms of David should be assured of the kingdom of Heaven. When I heard this I prayed him on my knees that he would give me the use of his gown, which after many contentions he at last agreed to do, on my paying him three marks towards the regilding of the image of Laurence the martyr. Having stripped his robe, I had no choice but to let him have the wearing of my good leathern jerkin and hose, for, as he said, it was chilling to the blood and unseemly to the eye to stand frockless whilst I made my orisons. He had scarce got them on, and it was a sore labor, seeing that my inches will scarce match my girth\u2014he had scarce got them on, I say, and I not yet at the end of the second psalm, when he bade me do honor to my new dress, and with that set off down the road as fast as feet would carry him. For myself, I could no more run than if I had been sown in a sack; so here I sit, and here I am like to sit, before I set eyes upon my clothes again.\"\n\n\"Nay, friend, take it not so sadly,\" said Alleyne, clapping the disconsolate one upon the shoulder. \"Canst change thy robe for a jerkin once more at the Abbey, unless perchance you have a friend near at hand.\"\n\n\"That have I,\" he answered, \"and close; but I care not to go nigh him in this plight, for his wife hath a gibing tongue, and will spread the tale until I could not show my face in any market from Fordingbridge to Southampton. But if you, fair sir, out of your kind charity would be pleased to go a matter of two bow-shots out of your way, you would do me such a service as I could scarce repay.\"\n\n\"With all my heart,\" said Alleyne readily.\n\n\"Then take this pathway on the left, I pray thee, and then the deer-track which passes on the right. You will then see under a great beech-tree the hut of a charcoal-burner. Give him my name, good sir, the name of Peter the fuller, of Lymington, and ask him for a change of raiment, that I may pursue my journey without delay. There are reasons why he would be loth to refuse me.\"\n\nAlleyne started off along the path indicated, and soon found the log-hut where the burner dwelt. He was away faggot-cutting in the forest, but his wife, a ruddy bustling dame, found the needful garments and tied them into a bundle. While she busied herself in finding and folding them, Alleyne Edricson stood by the open door looking in at her with much interest and some distrust, for he had never been so nigh to a woman before. She had round red arms, a dress of some sober woollen stuff, and a brass brooch the size of a cheese-cake stuck in the front of it.\n\n\"Peter the fuller!\" she kept repeating. \"Marry come up! if I were Peter the fuller's wife I would teach him better than to give his clothes to the first knave who asks for them. But he was always a poor, fond, silly creature, was Peter, though we are beholden to him for helping to bury our second son Wat, who was a 'prentice to him at Lymington in the year of the Black Death. But who are you, young sir?\"\n\n\"I am a clerk on my road from Beaulieu to Minstead.\"\n\n\"Aye, indeed! Hast been brought up at the Abbey then. I could read it from thy reddened cheek and downcast eye. Hast learned from the monks, I trow, to fear a woman as thou wouldst a lazar-house. Out upon them! that they should dishonor their own mothers by such teaching. A pretty world it would be with all the women out of it.\"\n\n\"Heaven forfend that such a thing should come to pass!\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"Amen and amen! But thou art a pretty lad, and the prettier for thy modest ways. It is easy to see from thy cheek that thou hast not spent thy days in the rain and the heat and the wind, as my poor Wat hath been forced to do.\"\n\n\"I have indeed seen little of life, good dame.\"\n\n\"Wilt find nothing in it to pay for the loss of thy own freshness. Here are the clothes, and Peter can leave them when next he comes this way. Holy Virgin! see the dust upon thy doublet! It were easy to see that there is no woman to tend to thee. So!\u2014that is better. Now buss me, boy.\"\n\nAlleyne stooped and kissed her, for the kiss was the common salutation of the age, and, as Erasmus long afterwards remarked, more used in England than in any other country. Yet it sent the blood to his temples again, and he wondered, as he turned away, what the Abbot Berghersh would have answered to so frank an invitation. He was still tingling from this new experience when he came out upon the high-road and saw a sight which drove all other thoughts from his mind.\n\nSome way down from where he had left him the unfortunate Peter was stamping and raving tenfold worse than before. Now, however, instead of the great white cloak, he had no clothes on at all, save a short woollen shirt and a pair of leather shoes. Far down the road a long-legged figure was running, with a bundle under one arm and the other hand to his side, like a man who laughs until he is sore.\n\n\"See him!\" yelled Peter. \"Look to him! You shall be my witness. He shall see Winchester jail for this. See where he goes with my cloak under his arm!\"\n\n\"Who then?\" cried Alleyne.\n\n\"Who but that cursed brother John. He hath not left me clothes enough to make a gallybagger. The double thief hath cozened me out of my gown.\"\n\n\"Stay though, my friend, it was his gown,\" objected Alleyne.\n\n\"It boots not. He hath them all\u2014gown, jerkin, hosen and all. Gramercy to him that he left me the shirt and the shoon. I doubt not that he will be back for them anon.\"\n\n\"But how came this?\" asked Alleyne, open-eyed with astonishment.\n\n\"Are those the clothes? For dear charity's sake give them to me. Not the Pope himself shall have these from me, though he sent the whole college of cardinals to ask it. How came it? Why, you had scarce gone ere this loathly John came running back again, and, when I oped mouth to reproach him, he asked me whether it was indeed likely that a man of prayer would leave his own godly raiment in order to take a layman's jerkin. He had, he said, but gone for a while that I might be the freer for my devotions. On this I plucked off the gown, and he with much show of haste did begin to undo his points; but when I threw his frock down he clipped it up and ran off all untrussed, leaving me in this sorry plight. He laughed so the while, like a great croaking frog, that I might have caught him had my breath not been as short as his legs were long.\"\n\nThe young man listened to this tale of wrong with all the seriousness that he could maintain; but at the sight of the pursy red-faced man and the dignity with which he bore him, the laughter came so thick upon him that he had to lean up against a tree-trunk. The fuller looked sadly and gravely at him; but finding that he still laughed, he bowed with much mock politeness and stalked onwards in his borrowed clothes. Alleyne watched him until he was small in the distance, and then, wiping the tears from his eyes, he set off briskly once more upon his journey." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BAILIFF OF SOUTHAMPTON SLEW THE TWO MASTERLESS MEN.", + "text": "The road along which he travelled was scarce as populous as most other roads in the kingdom, and far less so than those which lie between the larger towns. Yet from time to time Alleyne met other wayfarers, and more than once was overtaken by strings of pack mules and horsemen journeying in the same direction as himself. Once a begging friar came limping along in a brown habit, imploring in a most dolorous voice to give him a single groat to buy bread wherewith to save himself from impending death. Alleyne passed him swiftly by, for he had learned from the monks to have no love for the wandering friars, and, besides, there was a great half-gnawed mutton bone sticking out of his pouch to prove him a liar. Swiftly as he went, however, he could not escape the curse of the four blessed evangelists which the mendicant howled behind him. So dreadful are his execrations that the frightened lad thrust his fingers into his ear-holes, and ran until the fellow was but a brown smirch upon the yellow road.\n\nFurther on, at the edge of the woodland, he came upon a chapman and his wife, who sat upon a fallen tree. He had put his pack down as a table, and the two of them were devouring a great pasty, and washing it down with some drink from a stone jar. The chapman broke a rough jest as he passed, and the woman called shrilly to Alleyne to come and join them, on which the man, turning suddenly from mirth to wrath, began to belabor her with his cudgel. Alleyne hastened on, lest he make more mischief, and his heart was heavy as lead within him. Look where he would, he seemed to see nothing but injustice and violence and the hardness of man to man.\n\nBut even as he brooded sadly over it and pined for the sweet peace of the Abbey, he came on an open space dotted with holly bushes, where was the strangest sight that he had yet chanced upon. Near to the pathway lay a long clump of greenery, and from behind this there stuck straight up into the air four human legs clad in parti-colored hosen, yellow and black. Strangest of all was when a brisk tune struck suddenly up and the four legs began to kick and twitter in time to the music. Walking on tiptoe round the bushes, he stood in amazement to see two men bounding about on their heads, while they played, the one a viol and the other a pipe, as merrily and as truly as though they were seated in a choir. Alleyne crossed himself as he gazed at this unnatural sight, and could scarce hold his ground with a steady face, when the two dancers, catching sight of him, came bouncing in his direction. A spear's length from him, they each threw a somersault into the air, and came down upon their feet with smirking faces and their hands over their hearts.\n\n\"A guerdon\u2014a guerdon, my knight of the staring eyes!\" cried one.\n\n\"A gift, my prince!\" shouted the other. \"Any trifle will serve\u2014a purse of gold, or even a jewelled goblet.\"\n\nAlleyne thought of what he had read of demoniac possession\u2014the jumpings, the twitchings, the wild talk. It was in his mind to repeat over the exorcism proper to such attacks; but the two burst out a-laughing at his scared face, and turning on to their heads once more, clapped their heels in derision.\n\n\"Hast never seen tumblers before?\" asked the elder, a black-browed, swarthy man, as brown and supple as a hazel twig. \"Why shrink from us, then, as though we were the spawn of the Evil One?\"\n\n\"Why shrink, my honey-bird? Why so afeard, my sweet cinnamon?\" exclaimed the other, a loose-jointed lanky youth with a dancing, roguish eye.\n\n\"Truly, sirs, it is a new sight to me,\" the clerk answered. \"When I saw your four legs above the bush I could scarce credit my own eyes. Why is it that you do this thing?\"\n\n\"A dry question to answer,\" cried the younger, coming back on to his feet. \"A most husky question, my fair bird! But how? A flask, a flask!\u2014by all that is wonderful!\" He shot out his hand as he spoke, and plucking Alleyne's bottle out of his scrip, he deftly knocked the neck off, and poured the half of it down his throat. The rest he handed to his comrade, who drank the wine, and then, to the clerk's increasing amazement, made a show of swallowing the bottle, with such skill that Alleyne seemed to see it vanish down his throat. A moment later, however, he flung it over his head, and caught it bottom downwards upon the calf of his left leg.\n\n\"We thank you for the wine, kind sir,\" said he, \"and for the ready courtesy wherewith you offered it. Touching your question, we may tell you that we are strollers and jugglers, who, having performed with much applause at Winchester fair, are now on our way to the great Michaelmas market at Ringwood. As our art is a very fine and delicate one, however, we cannot let a day go by without exercising ourselves in it, to which end we choose some quiet and sheltered spot where we may break our journey. Here you find us; and we cannot wonder that you, who are new to tumbling, should be astounded, since many great barons, earls, marshals and knight, who have wandered as far as the Holy Land, are of one mind in saying that they have never seen a more noble or gracious performance. If you will be pleased to sit upon that stump, we will now continue our exercise.\"\n\nAlleyne sat down willingly as directed with two great bundles on either side of him which contained the strollers' dresses\u2014doublets of flame-colored silk and girdles of leather, spangled with brass and tin. The jugglers were on their heads once more, bounding about with rigid necks, playing the while in perfect time and tune. It chanced that out of one of the bundles there stuck the end of what the clerk saw to be a cittern, so drawing it forth, he tuned it up and twanged a harmony to the merry lilt which the dancers played. On that they dropped their own instruments, and putting their hands to the ground they hopped about faster and faster, ever shouting to him to play more briskly, until at last for very weariness all three had to stop.\n\n\"Well played, sweet poppet!\" cried the younger. \"Hast a rare touch on the strings.\"\n\n\"How knew you the tune?\" asked the other.\n\n\"I knew it not. I did but follow the notes I heard.\"\n\nBoth opened their eyes at this, and stared at Alleyne with as much amazement as he had shown at them.\n\n\"You have a fine trick of ear then,\" said one. \"We have long wished to meet such a man. Wilt join us and jog on to Ringwood? Thy duties shall be light, and thou shalt have two-pence a day and meat for supper every night.\"\n\n\"With as much beer as you can put away,\" said the other \"and a flask of Gascon wine on Sabbaths.\"\n\n\"Nay, it may not be. I have other work to do. I have tarried with you over long,\" quoth Alleyne, and resolutely set forth upon his journey once more. They ran behind him some little way, offering him first fourpence and then sixpence a day, but he only smiled and shook his head, until at last they fell away from him. Looking back, he saw that the smaller had mounted on the younger's shoulders, and that they stood so, some ten feet high, waving their adieus to him. He waved back to them, and then hastened on, the lighter of heart for having fallen in with these strange men of pleasure.\n\nAlleyne had gone no great distance for all the many small passages that had befallen him. Yet to him, used as he was to a life of such quiet that the failure of a brewing or the altering of an anthem had seemed to be of the deepest import, the quick changing play of the lights and shadows of life was strangely startling and interesting. A gulf seemed to divide this brisk uncertain existence from the old steady round of work and of prayer which he had left behind him. The few hours that had passed since he saw the Abbey tower stretched out in his memory until they outgrew whole months of the stagnant life of the cloister. As he walked and munched the soft bread from his scrip, it seemed strange to him to feel that it was still warm from the ovens of Beaulieu.\n\nWhen he passed Penerley, where were three cottages and a barn, he reached the edge of the tree country, and found the great barren heath of Blackdown stretching in front of him, all pink with heather and bronzed with the fading ferns. On the left the woods were still thick, but the road edged away from them and wound over the open. The sun lay low in the west upon a purple cloud, whence it threw a mild, chastening light over the wild moorland and glittered on the fringe of forest turning the withered leaves into flakes of dead gold, the brighter for the black depths behind them. To the seeing eye decay is as fair as growth, and death as life. The thought stole into Alleyne's heart as he looked upon the autumnal country side and marvelled at its beauty. He had little time to dwell upon it however, for there were still six good miles between him and the nearest inn. He sat down by the roadside to partake of his bread and cheese, and then with a lighter scrip he hastened upon his way.\n\nThere appeared to be more wayfarers on the down than in the forest. First he passed two Dominicans in their long black dresses, who swept by him with downcast looks and pattering lips, without so much as a glance at him. Then there came a gray friar, or minorite, with a good paunch upon him, walking slowly and looking about him with the air of a man who was at peace with himself and with all men. He stopped Alleyne to ask him whether it was not true that there was a hostel somewhere in those parts which was especially famous for the stewing of eels. The clerk having made answer that he had heard the eels of Sowley well spoken of, the friar sucked in his lips and hurried forward. Close at his heels came three laborers walking abreast, with spade and mattock over their shoulders. They sang some rude chorus right tunefully as they walked, but their English was so coarse and rough that to the ears of a cloister-bred man it sounded like a foreign and barbarous tongue. One of them carried a young bittern which they had caught upon the moor, and they offered it to Alleyne for a silver groat. Very glad he was to get safely past them, for, with their bristling red beards and their fierce blue eyes, they were uneasy men to bargain with upon a lonely moor.\n\nYet it is not always the burliest and the wildest who are the most to be dreaded. The workers looked hungrily at him, and then jogged onwards upon their way in slow, lumbering Saxon style. A worse man to deal with was a wooden-legged cripple who came hobbling down the path, so weak and so old to all appearance that a child need not stand in fear of him. Yet when Alleyne had passed him, of a sudden, out of pure devilment, he screamed out a curse at him, and sent a jagged flint stone hurtling past his ear. So horrid was the causeless rage of the crooked creature, that the clerk came over a cold thrill, and took to his heels until he was out of shot from stone or word. It seemed to him that in this country of England there was no protection for a man save that which lay in the strength of his own arm and the speed of his own foot. In the cloisters he had heard vague talk of the law\u2014the mighty law which was higher than prelate or baron, yet no sign could he see of it. What was the benefit of a law written fair upon parchment, he wondered, if there were no officers to enforce it. As it fell out, however, he had that very evening, ere the sun had set, a chance of seeing how stern was the grip of the English law when it did happen to seize the offender.\n\nA mile or so out upon the moor the road takes a very sudden dip into a hollow, with a peat-colored stream running swiftly down the centre of it. To the right of this stood, and stands to this day, an ancient barrow, or burying mound, covered deeply in a bristle of heather and bracken. Alleyne was plodding down the slope upon one side, when he saw an old dame coming towards him upon the other, limping with weariness and leaning heavily upon a stick. When she reached the edge of the stream she stood helpless, looking to right and to left for some ford. Where the path ran down a great stone had been fixed in the centre of the brook, but it was too far from the bank for her aged and uncertain feet. Twice she thrust forward at it, and twice she drew back, until at last, giving up in despair, she sat herself down by the brink and wrung her hands wearily. There she still sat when Alleyne reached the crossing.\n\n\"Come, mother,\" quoth he, \"it is not so very perilous a passage.\"\n\n\"Alas! good youth,\" she answered, \"I have a humor in the eyes, and though I can see that there is a stone there I can by no means be sure as to where it lies.\"\n\n\"That is easily amended,\" said he cheerily, and picking her lightly up, for she was much worn with time, he passed across with her. He could not but observe, however, that as he placed her down her knees seemed to fail her, and she could scarcely prop herself up with her staff.\n\n\"You are weak, mother,\" said he. \"Hast journeyed far, I wot.\"\n\n\"From Wiltshire, friend,\" said she, in a quavering voice; \"three days have I been on the road. I go to my son, who is one of the King's regarders at Brockenhurst. He has ever said that he would care for me in mine old age.\"\n\n\"And rightly too, mother, since you cared for him in his youth. But when have you broken fast?\"\n\n\"At Lyndenhurst; but alas! my money is at an end, and I could but get a dish of bran-porridge from the nunnery. Yet I trust that I may be able to reach Brockenhurst to-night, where I may have all that heart can desire; for oh! sir, but my son is a fine man, with a kindly heart of his own, and it is as good as food to me to think that he should have a doublet of Lincoln green to his back and be the King's own paid man.\"\n\n\"It is a long road yet to Brockenhurst,\" said Alleyne; \"but here is such bread and cheese as I have left, and here, too, is a penny which may help you to supper. May God be with you!\"\n\n\"May God be with you, young man!\" she cried. \"May He make your heart as glad as you have made mine!\" She turned away, still mumbling blessings, and Alleyne saw her short figure and her long shadow stumbling slowly up the slope.\n\nHe was moving away himself, when his eyes lit upon a strange sight, and one which sent a tingling through his skin. Out of the tangled scrub on the old overgrown barrow two human faces were looking out at him; the sinking sun glimmered full upon them, showing up every line and feature. The one was an oldish man with a thin beard, a crooked nose, and a broad red smudge from a birth-mark over his temple; the other was a negro, a thing rarely met in England at that day, and rarer still in the quiet southland parts. Alleyne had read of such folk, but had never seen one before, and could scarce take his eyes from the fellow's broad pouting lip and shining teeth. Even as he gazed, however, the two came writhing out from among the heather, and came down towards him with such a guilty, slinking carriage, that the clerk felt that there was no good in them, and hastened onwards upon his way.\n\nHe had not gained the crown of the slope, when he heard a sudden scuffle behind him and a feeble voice bleating for help. Looking round, there was the old dame down upon the roadway, with her red whimple flying on the breeze, while the two rogues, black and white, stooped over her, wresting away from her the penny and such other poor trifles as were worth the taking. At the sight of her thin limbs struggling in weak resistance, such a glow of fierce anger passed over Alleyne as set his head in a whirl. Dropping his scrip, he bounded over the stream once more, and made for the two villains, with his staff whirled over his shoulder and his gray eyes blazing with fury.\n\nThe robbers, however, were not disposed to leave their victim until they had worked their wicked will upon her. The black man, with the woman's crimson scarf tied round his swarthy head, stood forward in the centre of the path, with a long dull-colored knife in his hand, while the other, waving a ragged cudgel, cursed at Alleyne and dared him to come on. His blood was fairly aflame, however, and he needed no such challenge. Dashing at the black man, he smote at him with such good will that the other let his knife tinkle into the roadway, and hopped howling to a safer distance. The second rogue, however, made of sterner stuff, rushed in upon the clerk, and clipped him round the waist with a grip like a bear, shouting the while to his comrade to come round and stab him in the back. At this the negro took heart of grace, and picking up his dagger again he came stealing with prowling step and murderous eye, while the two swayed backwards and forwards, staggering this way and that. In the very midst of the scuffle, however, whilst Alleyne braced himself to feel the cold blade between his shoulders, there came a sudden scurry of hoofs, and the black man yelled with terror and ran for his life through the heather. The man with the birth-mark, too, struggled to break away, and Alleyne heard his teeth chatter and felt his limbs grow limp to his hand. At this sign of coming aid the clerk held on the tighter, and at last was able to pin his man down and glanced behind him to see where all the noise was coming from.\n\nDown the slanting road there was riding a big, burly man, clad in a tunic of purple velvet and driving a great black horse as hard as it could gallop. He leaned well over its neck as he rode, and made a heaving with his shoulders at every bound as though he were lifting the steed instead of it carrying him. In the rapid glance Alleyne saw that he had white doeskin gloves, a curling white feather in his flat velvet cap, and a broad gold, embroidered baldric across his bosom. Behind him rode six others, two and two, clad in sober brown jerkins, with the long yellow staves of their bows thrusting out from behind their right shoulders. Down the hill they thundered, over the brook and up to the scene of the contest.\n\n\"Here is one!\" said the leader, springing down from his reeking horse, and seizing the white rogue by the edge of his jerkin. \"This is one of them. I know him by that devil's touch upon his brow. Where are your cords, Peterkin? So! Bind him hand and foot. His last hour has come. And you, young man, who may you be?\"\n\n\"I am a clerk, sir, travelling from Beaulieu.\"\n\n\"A clerk!\" cried the other. \"Art from Oxenford or from Cambridge? Hast thou a letter from the chancellor of thy college giving thee a permit to beg? Let me see thy letter.\" He had a stern, square face, with bushy side whiskers and a very questioning eye.\n\n\"I am from Beaulieu Abbey, and I have no need to beg,\" said Alleyne, who was all of a tremble now that the ruffle was over.\n\n\"The better for thee,\" the other answered. \"Dost know who I am?\"\n\n\"No, sir, I do not.\"\n\n\"I am the law!\"\u2014nodding his head solemnly. \"I am the law of England and the mouthpiece of his most gracious and royal majesty, Edward the Third.\"\n\nAlleyne louted low to the King's representative. \"Truly you came in good time, honored sir,\" said he. \"A moment later and they would have slain me.\"\n\n\"But there should be another one,\" cried the man in the purple coat. \"There should be a black man. A shipman with St. Anthony's fire, and a black man who had served him as cook\u2014those are the pair that we are in chase of.\"\n\n\"The black man fled over to that side,\" said Alleyne, pointing towards the barrow.\n\n\"He could not have gone far, sir bailiff,\" cried one of the archers, unslinging his bow. \"He is in hiding somewhere, for he knew well, black paynim as he is, that our horses' four legs could outstrip his two.\"\n\n\"Then we shall have him,\" said the other. \"It shall never be said, whilst I am bailiff of Southampton, that any waster, riever, draw-latch or murtherer came scathless away from me and my posse. Leave that rogue lying. Now stretch out in line, my merry ones, with arrow on string, and I shall show you such sport as only the King can give. You on the left, Howett, and Thomas of Redbridge upon the right. So! Beat high and low among the heather, and a pot of wine to the lucky marksman.\"\n\nAs it chanced, however, the searchers had not far to seek. The negro had burrowed down into his hiding-place upon the barrow, where he might have lain snug enough, had it not been for the red gear upon his head. As he raised himself to look over the bracken at his enemies, the staring color caught the eye of the bailiff, who broke into a long screeching whoop and spurred forward sword in hand. Seeing himself discovered, the man rushed out from his hiding-place, and bounded at the top of his speed down the line of archers, keeping a good hundred paces to the front of them. The two who were on either side of Alleyne bent their bows as calmly as though they were shooting at the popinjay at the village fair.\n\n\"Seven yards windage, Hal,\" said one, whose hair was streaked with gray.\n\n\"Five,\" replied the other, letting loose his string. Alleyne gave a gulp in his throat, for the yellow streak seemed to pass through the man; but he still ran forward.\n\n\"Seven, you jack-fool,\" growled the first speaker, and his bow twanged like a harp-string. The black man sprang high up into the air, and shot out both his arms and his legs, coming down all asprawl among the heather. \"Right under the blade bone!\" quoth the archer, sauntering forward for his arrow.\n\n\"The old hound is the best when all is said,\" quoth the bailiff of Southampton, as they made back for the roadway. \"That means a quart of the best malmsey in Southampton this very night, Matthew Atwood. Art sure that he is dead?\"\n\n\"Dead as Pontius Pilate, worshipful sir.\"\n\n\"It is well. Now, as to the other knave. There are trees and to spare over yonder, but we have scarce leisure to make for them. Draw thy sword, Thomas of Redbridge, and hew me his head from his shoulders.\"\n\n\"A boon, gracious sir, a boon!\" cried the condemned man.\n\n\"What then?\" asked the bailiff.\n\n\"I will confess to my crime. It was indeed I and the black cook, both from the ship 'La Rose de Gloire,' of Southampton, who did set upon the Flanders merchant and rob him of his spicery and his mercery, for which, as we well know, you hold a warrant against us.\"\n\n\"There is little merit in this confession,\" quoth the bailiff sternly. \"Thou hast done evil within my bailiwick, and must die.\"\n\n\"But, sir,\" urged Alleyne, who was white to the lips at these bloody doings, \"he hath not yet come to trial.\"\n\n\"Young clerk,\" said the bailiff, \"you speak of that of which you know nothing. It is true that he hath not come to trial, but the trial hath come to him. He hath fled the law and is beyond its pale. Touch not that which is no concern of thine. But what is this boon, rogue, which you would crave?\"\n\n\"I have in my shoe, most worshipful sir, a strip of wood which belonged once to the bark wherein the blessed Paul was dashed up against the island of Melita. I bought it for two rose nobles from a shipman who came from the Levant. The boon I crave is that you will place it in my hands and let me die still grasping it. In this manner, not only shall my own eternal salvation be secured, but thine also, for I shall never cease to intercede for thee.\"\n\nAt the command of the bailiff they plucked off the fellow's shoe, and there sure enough at the side of the instep, wrapped in a piece of fine sendall, lay a long, dark splinter of wood. The archers doffed caps at the sight of it, and the bailiff crossed himself devoutly as he handed it to the robber.\n\n\"If it should chance,\" he said, \"that through the surpassing merits of the blessed Paul your sin-stained soul should gain a way into paradise, I trust that you will not forget that intercession which you have promised. Bear in mind too, that it is Herward the bailiff for whom you pray, and not Herward the sheriff, who is my uncle's son. Now, Thomas, I pray you dispatch, for we have a long ride before us and sun has already set.\"\n\nAlleyne gazed upon the scene\u2014the portly velvet-clad official, the knot of hard-faced archers with their hands to the bridles of their horses, the thief with his arms trussed back and his doublet turned down upon his shoulders. By the side of the track the old dame was standing, fastening her red whimple once more round her head. Even as he looked one of the archers drew his sword with a sharp whirr of steel and stept up to the lost man. The clerk hurried away in horror; but, ere he had gone many paces, he heard a sudden, sullen thump, with a choking, whistling sound at the end of it. A minute later the bailiff and four of his men rode past him on their journey back to Southampton, the other two having been chosen as grave-diggers. As they passed Alleyne saw that one of the men was wiping his sword-blade upon the mane of his horse. A deadly sickness came over him at the sight, and sitting down by the wayside he burst out weeping, with his nerves all in a jangle. It was a terrible world thought he, and it was hard to know which were the most to be dreaded, the knaves or the men of the law." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "HOW A STRANGE COMPANY GATHERED AT THE \"PIED MERLIN.\"\n\nThe night had already fallen, and the moon was shining between the rifts of ragged, drifting clouds, before Alleyne Edricson, footsore and weary from the unwonted exercise, found himself in front of the forest inn which stood upon the outskirts of Lyndhurst. The building was long and low, standing back a little from the road, with two flambeaux blazing on either side of the door as a welcome to the traveller. From one window there thrust forth a long pole with a bunch of greenery tied to the end of it\u2014a sign that liquor was to be sold within. As Alleyne walked up to it he perceived that it was rudely fashioned out of beams of wood, with twinkling lights all over where the glow from within shone through the chinks. The roof was poor and thatched; but in strange contrast to it there ran all along under the eaves a line of wooden shields, most gorgeously painted with chevron, bend, and saltire, and every heraldic device. By the door a horse stood tethered, the ruddy glow beating strongly upon his brown head and patient eyes, while his body stood back in the shadow.\n\nAlleyne stood still in the roadway for a few minutes reflecting upon what he should do. It was, he knew, only a few miles further to Minstead, where his brother dwelt. On the other hand, he had never seen this brother since childhood, and the reports which had come to his ears concerning him were seldom to his advantage. By all accounts he was a hard and a bitter man.\n\nIt might be an evil start to come to his door so late and claim the shelter of his roof. Better to sleep here at this inn, and then travel on to Minstead in the morning. If his brother would take him in, well and good.\n\nHe would bide with him for a time and do what he might to serve him. If, on the other hand, he should have hardened his heart against him, he could only go on his way and do the best he might by his skill as a craftsman and a scrivener. At the end of a year he would be free to return to the cloisters, for such had been his father's bequest. A monkish upbringing, one year in the world after the age of twenty, and then a free selection one way or the other\u2014it was a strange course which had been marked out for him. Such as it was, however, he had no choice but to follow it, and if he were to begin by making a friend of his brother he had best wait until morning before he knocked at his dwelling.\n\nThe rude plank door was ajar, but as Alleyne approached it there came from within such a gust of rough laughter and clatter of tongues that he stood irresolute upon the threshold. Summoning courage, however, and reflecting that it was a public dwelling, in which he had as much right as any other man, he pushed it open and stepped into the common room.\n\nThough it was an autumn evening and somewhat warm, a huge fire of heaped billets of wood crackled and sparkled in a broad, open grate, some of the smoke escaping up a rude chimney, but the greater part rolling out into the room, so that the air was thick with it, and a man coming from without could scarce catch his breath. On this fire a great cauldron bubbled and simmered, giving forth a rich and promising smell. Seated round it were a dozen or so folk, of all ages and conditions, who set up such a shout as Alleyne entered that he stood peering at them through the smoke, uncertain what this riotous greeting might portend.\n\n\"A rouse! A rouse!\" cried one rough looking fellow in a tattered jerkin. \"One more round of mead or ale and the score to the last comer.\"\n\n\"'Tis the law of the 'Pied Merlin,'\" shouted another. \"Ho there, Dame Eliza! Here is fresh custom come to the house, and not a drain for the company.\"\n\n\"I will take your orders, gentles; I will assuredly take your orders,\" the landlady answered, bustling in with her hands full of leathern drinking-cups. \"What is it that you drink, then? Beer for the lads of the forest, mead for the gleeman, strong waters for the tinker, and wine for the rest. It is an old custom of the house, young sir. It has been the use at the 'Pied Merlin' this many a year back that the company should drink to the health of the last comer. Is it your pleasure to humor it?\"\n\n\"Why, good dame,\" said Alleyne, \"I would not offend the customs of your house, but it is only sooth when I say that my purse is a thin one. As far as two pence will go, however, I shall be right glad to do my part.\"\n\n\"Plainly said and bravely spoken, my suckling friar,\" roared a deep voice, and a heavy hand fell upon Alleyne's shoulder. Looking up, he saw beside him his former cloister companion the renegade monk, Hordle John.\n\n\"By the thorn of Glastonbury! ill days are coming upon Beaulieu,\" said he. \"Here they have got rid in one day of the only two men within their walls\u2014for I have had mine eyes upon thee, youngster, and I know that for all thy baby-face there is the making of a man in thee. Then there is the Abbot, too. I am no friend of his, nor he of mine; but he has warm blood in his veins. He is the only man left among them. The others, what are they?\"\n\n\"They are holy men,\" Alleyne answered gravely.\n\n\"Holy men? Holy cabbages! Holy bean-pods! What do they do but live and suck in sustenance and grow fat? If that be holiness, I could show you hogs in this forest who are fit to head the calendar. Think you it was for such a life that this good arm was fixed upon my shoulder, or that head placed upon your neck? There is work in the world, man, and it is not by hiding behind stone walls that we shall do it.\"\n\n\"Why, then, did you join the brothers?\" asked Alleyne.\n\n\"A fair enough question; but it is as fairly answered. I joined them because Margery Alspaye, of Bolder, married Crooked Thomas of Ringwood, and left a certain John of Hordle in the cold, for that he was a ranting, roving blade who was not to be trusted in wedlock. That was why, being fond and hotheaded, I left the world; and that is why, having had time to take thought, I am right glad to find myself back in it once more. Ill betide the day that ever I took off my yeoman's jerkin to put on the white gown!\"\n\nWhilst he was speaking the landlady came in again, bearing a broad platter, upon which stood all the beakers and flagons charged to the brim with the brown ale or the ruby wine. Behind her came a maid with a high pile of wooden plates, and a great sheaf of spoons, one of which she handed round to each of the travellers. Two of the company, who were dressed in the weather-stained green doublet of foresters, lifted the big pot off the fire, and a third, with a huge pewter ladle, served out a portion of steaming collops to each guest. Alleyne bore his share and his ale-mug away with him to a retired trestle in the corner, where he could sup in peace and watch the strange scene, which was so different to those silent and well-ordered meals to which he was accustomed.\n\nThe room was not unlike a stable. The low ceiling, smoke-blackened and dingy, was pierced by several square trap-doors with rough-hewn ladders leading up to them. The walls of bare unpainted planks were studded here and there with great wooden pins, placed at irregular intervals and heights, from which hung over-tunics, wallets, whips, bridles, and saddles. Over the fireplace were suspended six or seven shields of wood, with coats-of-arms rudely daubed upon them, which showed by their varying degrees of smokiness and dirt that they had been placed there at different periods. There was no furniture, save a single long dresser covered with coarse crockery, and a number of wooden benches and trestles, the legs of which sank deeply into the soft clay floor, while the only light, save that of the fire, was furnished by three torches stuck in sockets on the wall, which flickered and crackled, giving forth a strong resinous odor. All this was novel and strange to the cloister-bred youth; but most interesting of all was the motley circle of guests who sat eating their collops round the blaze. They were a humble group of wayfarers, such as might have been found that night in any inn through the length and breadth of England; but to him they represented that vague world against which he had been so frequently and so earnestly warned. It did not seem to him from what he could see of it to be such a very wicked place after all.\n\nThree or four of the men round the fire were evidently underkeepers and verderers from the forest, sunburned and bearded, with the quick restless eye and lithe movements of the deer among which they lived. Close to the corner of the chimney sat a middle-aged gleeman, clad in a faded garb of Norwich cloth, the tunic of which was so outgrown that it did not fasten at the neck and at the waist. His face was swollen and coarse, and his watery protruding eyes spoke of a life which never wandered very far from the wine-pot. A gilt harp, blotched with many stains and with two of its strings missing, was tucked under one of his arms, while with the other he scooped greedily at his platter. Next to him sat two other men of about the same age, one with a trimming of fur to his coat, which gave him a dignity which was evidently dearer to him than his comfort, for he still drew it round him in spite of the hot glare of the faggots. The other, clad in a dirty russet suit with a long sweeping doublet, had a cunning, foxy face with keen, twinkling eyes and a peaky beard. Next to him sat Hordle John, and beside him three other rough unkempt fellows with tangled beards and matted hair\u2014free laborers from the adjoining farms, where small patches of freehold property had been suffered to remain scattered about in the heart of the royal demesne. The company was completed by a peasant in a rude dress of undyed sheepskin, with the old-fashioned galligaskins about his legs, and a gayly dressed young man with striped cloak jagged at the edges and parti-colored hosen, who looked about him with high disdain upon his face, and held a blue smelling-flask to his nose with one hand, while he brandished a busy spoon with the other. In the corner a very fat man was lying all asprawl upon a truss, snoring stertorously, and evidently in the last stage of drunkenness.\n\n\"That is Wat the limner,\" quoth the landlady, sitting down beside Alleyne, and pointing with the ladle to the sleeping man. \"That is he who paints the signs and the tokens. Alack and alas that ever I should have been fool enough to trust him! Now, young man, what manner of a bird would you suppose a pied merlin to be\u2014that being the proper sign of my hostel?\"\n\n\"Why,\" said Alleyne, \"a merlin is a bird of the same form as an eagle or a falcon. I can well remember that learned brother Bartholomew, who is deep in all the secrets of nature, pointed one out to me as we walked together near Vinney Ridge.\"\n\n\"A falcon or an eagle, quotha? And pied, that is of two several colors. So any man would say except this barrel of lies. He came to me, look you, saying that if I would furnish him with a gallon of ale, wherewith to strengthen himself as he worked, and also the pigments and a board, he would paint for me a noble pied merlin which I might hang along with the blazonry over my door. I, poor simple fool, gave him the ale and all that he craved, leaving him alone too, because he said that a man's mind must be left untroubled when he had great work to do. When I came back the gallon jar was empty, and he lay as you see him, with the board in front of him with this sorry device.\" She raised up a panel which was leaning against the wall, and showed a rude painting of a scraggy and angular fowl, with very long legs and a spotted body.\n\n\"Was that,\" she asked, \"like the bird which thou hast seen?\"\n\nAlleyne shook his head, smiling.\n\n\"No, nor any other bird that ever wagged a feather. It is most like a plucked pullet which has died of the spotted fever. And scarlet too! What would the gentles Sir Nicholas Boarhunte, or Sir Bernard Brocas, of Roche Court, say if they saw such a thing\u2014or, perhaps, even the King's own Majesty himself, who often has ridden past this way, and who loves his falcons as he loves his sons? It would be the downfall of my house.\"\n\n\"The matter is not past mending,\" said Alleyne. \"I pray you, good dame, to give me those three pigment-pots and the brush, and I shall try whether I cannot better this painting.\"\n\nDame Eliza looked doubtfully at him, as though fearing some other stratagem, but, as he made no demand for ale, she finally brought the paints, and watched him as he smeared on his background, talking the while about the folk round the fire.\n\n\"The four forest lads must be jogging soon,\" she said. \"They bide at Emery Down, a mile or more from here. Yeomen prickers they are, who tend to the King's hunt. The gleeman is called Floyting Will. He comes from the north country, but for many years he hath gone the round of the forest from Southampton to Christchurch. He drinks much and pays little but it would make your ribs crackle to hear him sing the 'Jest of Hendy Tobias.' Mayhap he will sing it when the ale has warmed him.\"\n\n\"Who are those next to him?\" asked Alleyne, much interested. \"He of the fur mantle has a wise and reverent face.\"\n\n\"He is a seller of pills and salves, very learned in humors, and rheums, and fluxes, and all manner of ailments. He wears, as you perceive, the vernicle of Sainted Luke, the first physician, upon his sleeve. May good St. Thomas of Kent grant that it may be long before either I or mine need his help! He is here to-night for herbergage, as are the others except the foresters. His neighbor is a tooth-drawer. That bag at his girdle is full of the teeth that he drew at Winchester fair. I warrant that there are more sound ones than sorry, for he is quick at his work and a trifle dim in the eye. The lusty man next him with the red head I have not seen before. The four on this side are all workers, three of them in the service of the bailiff of Sir Baldwin Redvers, and the other, he with the sheepskin, is, as I hear, a villein from the midlands who hath run from his master. His year and day are well-nigh up, when he will be a free man.\"\n\n\"And the other?\" asked Alleyne in a whisper. \"He is surely some very great man, for he looks as though he scorned those who were about him.\"\n\nThe landlady looked at him in a motherly way and shook her head. \"You have had no great truck with the world,\" she said, \"or you would have learned that it is the small men and not the great who hold their noses in the air. Look at those shields upon my wall and under my eaves. Each of them is the device of some noble lord or gallant knight who hath slept under my roof at one time or another. Yet milder men or easier to please I have never seen: eating my bacon and drinking my wine with a merry face, and paying my score with some courteous word or jest which was dearer to me than my profit. Those are the true gentles. But your chapman or your bearward will swear that there is a lime in the wine, and water in the ale, and fling off at the last with a curse instead of a blessing. This youth is a scholar from Cambrig, where men are wont to be blown out by a little knowledge, and lose the use of their hands in learning the laws of the Romans. But I must away to lay down the beds. So may the saints keep you and prosper you in your undertaking!\"\n\nThus left to himself, Alleyne drew his panel of wood where the light of one of the torches would strike full upon it, and worked away with all the pleasure of the trained craftsman, listening the while to the talk which went on round the fire. The peasant in the sheepskins, who had sat glum and silent all evening, had been so heated by his flagon of ale that he was talking loudly and angrily with clenched hands and flashing eyes.\n\n\"Sir Humphrey Tennant of Ashby may till his own fields for me,\" he cried. \"The castle has thrown its shadow upon the cottage over long. For three hundred years my folk have swinked and sweated, day in and day out, to keep the wine on the lord's table and the harness on the lord's back. Let him take off his plates and delve himself, if delving must be done.\"\n\n\"A proper spirit, my fair son!\" said one of the free laborers. \"I would that all men were of thy way of thinking.\"\n\n\"He would have sold me with his acres,\" the other cried, in a voice which was hoarse with passion. \"'The man, the woman and their litter'\u2014so ran the words of the dotard bailiff. Never a bullock on the farm was sold more lightly. Ha! he may wake some black night to find the flames licking about his ears\u2014for fire is a good friend to the poor man, and I have seen a smoking heap of ashes where over night there stood just such another castlewick as Ashby.\"\n\n\"This is a lad of mettle!\" shouted another of the laborers. \"He dares to give tongue to what all men think. Are we not all from Adam's loins, all with flesh and blood, and with the same mouth that must needs have food and drink? Where all this difference then between the ermine cloak and the leathern tunic, if what they cover is the same?\"\n\n\"Aye, Jenkin,\" said another, \"our foeman is under the stole and the vestment as much as under the helmet and plate of proof. We have as much to fear from the tonsure as from the hauberk. Strike at the noble and the priest shrieks, strike at priest and the noble lays his hand upon glaive. They are twin thieves who live upon our labor.\"\n\n\"It would take a clever man to live upon thy labor, Hugh,\" remarked one of the foresters, \"seeing that the half of thy time is spent in swilling mead at the 'Pied Merlin.'\"\n\n\"Better that than stealing the deer that thou art placed to guard, like some folk I know.\"\n\n\"If you dare open that swine's mouth against me,\" shouted the woodman, \"I'll crop your ears for you before the hangman has the doing of it, thou long-jawed lackbrain.\"\n\n\"Nay, gentles, gentles!\" cried Dame Eliza, in a singsong heedless voice, which showed that such bickerings were nightly things among her guests. \"No brawling or brabbling, gentles! Take heed to the good name of the house.\"\n\n\"Besides, if it comes to the cropping of ears, there are other folk who may say their say,\" quoth the third laborer. \"We are all freemen, and I trow that a yeoman's cudgel is as good as a forester's knife. By St. Anselm! it would be an evil day if we had to bend to our master's servants as well as to our masters.\"\n\n\"No man is my master save the King,\" the woodman answered. \"Who is there, save a false traitor, who would refuse to serve the English king?\"\n\n\"I know not about the English king,\" said the man Jenkin. \"What sort of English king is it who cannot lay his tongue to a word of English? You mind last year when he came down to Malwood, with his inner marshal and his outer marshal, his justiciar, his seneschal, and his four and twenty guardsmen. One noontide I was by Franklin Swinton's gate, when up he rides with a yeoman pricker at his heels. 'Ouvre,' he cried, 'ouvre,' or some such word, making signs for me to open the gate; and then 'Merci,' as though he were adrad of me. And you talk of an English king?\"\n\n\"I do not marvel at it,\" cried the Cambrig scholar, speaking in the high drawling voice which was common among his class. \"It is not a tongue for men of sweet birth and delicate upbringing. It is a foul, snorting, snarling manner of speech. For myself, I swear by the learned Polycarp that I have most ease with Hebrew, and after that perchance with Arabian.\"\n\n\"I will not hear a word said against old King Ned,\" cried Hordle John in a voice like a bull. \"What if he is fond of a bright eye and a saucy face. I know one of his subjects who could match him at that. If he cannot speak like an Englishman I trow that he can fight like an Englishman, and he was hammering at the gates of Paris while ale-house topers were grutching and grumbling at home.\"\n\nThis loud speech, coming from a man of so formidable an appearance, somewhat daunted the disloyal party, and they fell into a sullen silence, which enabled Alleyne to hear something of the talk which was going on in the further corner between the physician, the tooth-drawer and the gleeman.\n\n\"A raw rat,\" the man of drugs was saying, \"that is what it is ever my use to order for the plague\u2014a raw rat with its paunch cut open.\"\n\n\"Might it not be broiled, most learned sir?\" asked the tooth-drawer. \"A raw rat sounds a most sorry and cheerless dish.\"\n\n\"Not to be eaten,\" cried the physician, in high disdain. \"Why should any man eat such a thing?\"\n\n\"Why indeed?\" asked the gleeman, taking a long drain at his tankard.\n\n\"It is to be placed on the sore or swelling. For the rat, mark you, being a foul-living creature, hath a natural drawing or affinity for all foul things, so that the noxious humors pass from the man into the unclean beast.\"\n\n\"Would that cure the black death, master?\" asked Jenkin.\n\n\"Aye, truly would it, my fair son.\"\n\n\"Then I am right glad that there were none who knew of it. The black death is the best friend that ever the common folk had in England.\"\n\n\"How that then?\" asked Hordle John.\n\n\"Why, friend, it is easy to see that you have not worked with your hands or you would not need to ask. When half the folk in the country were dead it was then that the other half could pick and choose who they would work for, and for what wage. That is why I say that the murrain was the best friend that the borel folk ever had.\"\n\n\"True, Jenkin,\" said another workman; \"but it is not all good that is brought by it either. We well know that through it corn-land has been turned into pasture, so that flocks of sheep with perchance a single shepherd wander now where once a hundred men had work and wage.\"\n\n\"There is no great harm in that,\" remarked the tooth-drawer, \"for the sheep give many folk their living. There is not only the herd, but the shearer and brander, and then the dresser, the curer, the dyer, the fuller, the webster, the merchant, and a score of others.\"\n\n\"If it come to that.\" said one of the foresters, \"the tough meat of them will wear folks teeth out, and there is a trade for the man who can draw them.\"\n\nA general laugh followed this sally at the dentist's expense, in the midst of which the gleeman placed his battered harp upon his knee, and began to pick out a melody upon the frayed strings.\n\n\"Elbow room for Floyting Will!\" cried the woodmen. \"Twang us a merry lilt.\"\n\n\"Aye, aye, the 'Lasses of Lancaster,'\" one suggested.\n\n\"Or 'St. Simeon and the Devil.'\"\n\n\"Or the 'Jest of Hendy Tobias.'\"\n\nTo all these suggestions the jongleur made no response, but sat with his eye fixed abstractedly upon the ceiling, as one who calls words to his mind. Then, with a sudden sweep across the strings, he broke out into a song so gross and so foul that ere he had finished a verse the pure-minded lad sprang to his feet with the blood tingling in his face.\n\n\"How can you sing such things?\" he cried. \"You, too, an old man who should be an example to others.\"\n\nThe wayfarers all gazed in the utmost astonishment at the interruption.\n\n\"By the holy Dicon of Hampole! our silent clerk has found his tongue,\" said one of the woodmen. \"What is amiss with the song then? How has it offended your babyship?\"\n\n\"A milder and better mannered song hath never been heard within these walls,\" cried another. \"What sort of talk is this for a public inn?\"\n\n\"Shall it be a litany, my good clerk?\" shouted a third; \"or would a hymn be good enough to serve?\"\n\nThe jongleur had put down his harp in high dudgeon. \"Am I to be preached to by a child?\" he cried, staring across at Alleyne with an inflamed and angry countenance. \"Is a hairless infant to raise his tongue against me, when I have sung in every fair from Tweed to Trent, and have twice been named aloud by the High Court of the Minstrels at Beverley? I shall sing no more to-night.\"\n\n\"Nay, but you will so,\" said one of the laborers. \"Hi, Dame Eliza, bring a stoup of your best to Will to clear his throat. Go forward with thy song, and if our girl-faced clerk does not love it he can take to the road and go whence he came.\"\n\n\"Nay, but not too last,\" broke in Hordle John. \"There are two words in this matter. It may be that my little comrade has been over quick in reproof, he having gone early into the cloisters and seen little of the rough ways and words of the world. Yet there is truth in what he says, for, as you know well, the song was not of the cleanest. I shall stand by him, therefore, and he shall neither be put out on the road, nor shall his ears be offended indoors.\"\n\n\"Indeed, your high and mighty grace,\" sneered one of the yeomen, \"have you in sooth so ordained?\"\n\n\"By the Virgin!\" said a second, \"I think that you may both chance to find yourselves upon the road before long.\"\n\n\"And so belabored as to be scarce able to crawl along it,\" cried a third.\n\n\"Nay, I shall go! I shall go!\" said Alleyne hurriedly, as Hordle John began to slowly roll up his sleeve, and bare an arm like a leg of mutton. \"I would not have you brawl about me.\"\n\n\"Hush! lad,\" he whispered, \"I count them not a fly. They may find they have more tow on their distaff than they know how to spin. Stand thou clear and give me space.\"\n\nBoth the foresters and the laborers had risen from their bench, and Dame Eliza and the travelling doctor had flung themselves between the two parties with soft words and soothing gestures, when the door of the \"Pied Merlin\" was flung violently open, and the attention of the company was drawn from their own quarrel to the new-comer who had burst so unceremoniously upon them." + }, + { + "title": "HOW SAMKIN AYLWARD WAGERED HIS FEATHER-BED.", + "text": "He was a middle-sized man, of most massive and robust build, with an arching chest and extraordinary breadth of shoulder. His shaven face was as brown as a hazel-nut, tanned and dried by the weather, with harsh, well-marked features, which were not improved by a long white scar which stretched from the corner of his left nostril to the angle of the jaw. His eyes were bright and searching, with something of menace and of authority in their quick glitter, and his mouth was firm-set and hard, as befitted one who was wont to set his face against danger. A straight sword by his side and a painted long-bow jutting over his shoulder proclaimed his profession, while his scarred brigandine of chain-mail and his dinted steel cap showed that he was no holiday soldier, but one who was even now fresh from the wars. A white surcoat with the lion of St. George in red upon the centre covered his broad breast, while a sprig of new-plucked broom at the side of his head-gear gave a touch of gayety and grace to his grim, war-worn equipment.\n\n\"Ha!\" he cried, blinking like an owl in the sudden glare. \"Good even to you, comrades! Hola! a woman, by my soul!\" and in an instant he had clipped Dame Eliza round the waist and was kissing her violently. His eye happening to wander upon the maid, however, he instantly abandoned the mistress and danced off after the other, who scurried in confusion up one of the ladders, and dropped the heavy trap-door upon her pursuer. He then turned back and saluted the landlady once more with the utmost relish and satisfaction.\n\n\"La petite is frightened,\" said he. \"Ah, c'est l'amour, l'amour! Curse this trick of French, which will stick to my throat. I must wash it out with some good English ale. By my hilt! camarades, there is no drop of French blood in my body, and I am a true English bowman, Samkin Aylward by name; and I tell you, mes amis, that it warms my very heart-roots to set my feet on the dear old land once more. When I came off the galley at Hythe, this very day, I down on my bones, and I kissed the good brown earth, as I kiss thee now, ma belle, for it was eight long years since I had seen it. The very smell of it seemed life to me. But where are my six rascals? Hola, there! En avant!\"\n\nAt the order, six men, dressed as common drudges, marched solemnly into the room, each bearing a huge bundle upon his head. They formed in military line, while the soldier stood in front of them with stern eyes, checking off their several packages.\n\n\"Number one\u2014a French feather-bed with the two counterpanes of white sendall,\" said he.\n\n\"Here, worthy sir,\" answered the first of the bearers, laying a great package down in the corner.\n\n\"Number two\u2014seven ells of red Turkey cloth and nine ells of cloth of gold. Put it down by the other. Good dame, I prythee give each of these men a bottrine of wine or a jack of ale. Three\u2014a full piece of white Genoan velvet with twelve ells of purple silk. Thou rascal, there is dirt on the hem! Thou hast brushed it against some wall, coquin!\"\n\n\"Not I, most worthy sir,\" cried the carrier, shrinking away from the fierce eyes of the bowman.\n\n\"I say yes, dog! By the three kings! I have seen a man gasp out his last breath for less. Had you gone through the pain and unease that I have done to earn these things you would be at more care. I swear by my ten finger-bones that there is not one of them that hath not cost its weight in French blood! Four\u2014an incense-boat, a ewer of silver, a gold buckle and a cope worked in pearls. I found them, camarades, at the Church of St. Denis in the harrying of Narbonne, and I took them away with me lest they fall into the hands of the wicked. Five\u2014a cloak of fur turned up with minever, a gold goblet with stand and cover, and a box of rose-colored sugar. See that you lay them together. Six\u2014a box of monies, three pounds of Limousine gold-work, a pair of boots, silver tagged, and, lastly, a store of naping linen. So, the tally is complete! Here is a groat apiece, and you may go.\"\n\n\"Go whither, worthy sir?\" asked one of the carriers.\n\n\"Whither? To the devil if ye will. What is it to me? Now, ma belle, to supper. A pair of cold capons, a mortress of brawn, or what you will, with a flask or two of the right Gascony. I have crowns in my pouch, my sweet, and I mean to spend them. Bring in wine while the food is dressing. Buvons my brave lads; you shall each empty a stoup with me.\"\n\nHere was an offer which the company in an English inn at that or any other date are slow to refuse. The flagons were re-gathered and came back with the white foam dripping over their edges. Two of the woodmen and three of the laborers drank their portions off hurriedly and trooped off together, for their homes were distant and the hour late. The others, however, drew closer, leaving the place of honor to the right of the gleeman to the free-handed new-comer. He had thrown off his steel cap and his brigandine, and had placed them with his sword, his quiver and his painted long-bow, on the top of his varied heap of plunder in the corner. Now, with his thick and somewhat bowed legs stretched in front of the blaze, his green jerkin thrown open, and a great quart pot held in his corded fist, he looked the picture of comfort and of good-fellowship. His hard-set face had softened, and the thick crop of crisp brown curls which had been hidden by his helmet grew low upon his massive neck. He might have been forty years of age, though hard toil and harder pleasure had left their grim marks upon his features. Alleyne had ceased painting his pied merlin, and sat, brush in hand, staring with open eyes at a type of man so strange and so unlike any whom he had met. Men had been good or had been bad in his catalogue, but here was a man who was fierce one instant and gentle the next, with a curse on his lips and a smile in his eye. What was to be made of such a man as that?\n\nIt chanced that the soldier looked up and saw the questioning glance which the young clerk threw upon him. He raised his flagon and drank to him, with a merry flash of his white teeth.\n\n\"A toi, mon garcon,\" he cried. \"Hast surely never seen a man-at-arms, that thou shouldst stare so?\"\n\n\"I never have,\" said Alleyne frankly, \"though I have oft heard talk of their deeds.\"\n\n\"By my hilt!\" cried the other, \"if you were to cross the narrow sea you would find them as thick as bees at a tee-hole. Couldst not shoot a bolt down any street of Bordeaux, I warrant, but you would pink archer, squire, or knight. There are more breastplates than gaberdines to be seen, I promise you.\"\n\n\"And where got you all these pretty things?\" asked Hordle John, pointing at the heap in the corner.\n\n\"Where there is as much more waiting for any brave lad to pick it up. Where a good man can always earn a good wage, and where he need look upon no man as his paymaster, but just reach his hand out and help himself. Aye, it is a goodly and a proper life. And here I drink to mine old comrades, and the saints be with them! Arouse all together, me, enfants, under pain of my displeasure. To Sir Claude Latour and the White Company!\"\n\n\"Sir Claude Latour and the White Company!\" shouted the travellers, draining off their goblets.\n\n\"Well quaffed, mes braves! It is for me to fill your cups again, since you have drained them to my dear lads of the white jerkin. Hola! mon ange, bring wine and ale. How runs the old stave?\u2014\n\n\u2003We'll drink all together\n\n\u2003To the gray goose feather\n\n\u2003And the land where the gray goose flew.\"\n\nHe roared out the catch in a harsh, unmusical voice, and ended with a shout of laughter. \"I trust that I am a better bowman than a minstrel,\" said he.\n\n\"Methinks I have some remembrance of the lilt,\" remarked the gleeman, running his fingers over the strings, \"Hoping that it will give thee no offence, most holy sir\"\u2014with a vicious snap at Alleyne\u2014\"and with the kind permit of the company, I will even venture upon it.\"\n\nMany a time in the after days Alleyne Edricson seemed to see that scene, for all that so many which were stranger and more stirring were soon to crowd upon him. The fat, red-faced gleeman, the listening group, the archer with upraised finger beating in time to the music, and the huge sprawling figure of Hordle John, all thrown into red light and black shadow by the flickering fire in the centre\u2014memory was to come often lovingly back to it. At the time he was lost in admiration at the deft way in which the jongleur disguised the loss of his two missing strings, and the lusty, hearty fashion in which he trolled out his little ballad of the outland bowmen, which ran in some such fashion as this:\n\n\u2003What of the bow?\n\n\u2003The bow was made in England:\n\n\u2003Of true wood, of yew wood,\n\n\u2003The wood of English bows;\n\n\u2003So men who are free\n\n\u2003Love the old yew tree\n\n\u2003And the land where the yew tree grows.\n\n\u2003What of the cord?\n\n\u2003The cord was made in England:\n\n\u2003A rough cord, a tough cord,\n\n\u2003A cord that bowmen love;\n\n\u2003So we'll drain our jacks\n\n\u2003To the English flax\n\n\u2003And the land where the hemp was wove.\n\n\u2003What of the shaft?\n\n\u2003The shaft was cut in England:\n\n\u2003A long shaft, a strong shaft,\n\n\u2003Barbed and trim and true;\n\n\u2003So we'll drink all together\n\n\u2003To the gray goose feather\n\n\u2003And the land where the gray goose flew.\n\n\u2003What of the men?\n\n\u2003The men were bred in England:\n\n\u2003The bowman\u2014the yeoman\u2014\n\n\u2003The lads of dale and fell\n\n\u2003Here's to you\u2014and to you;\n\n\u2003To the hearts that are true\n\n\u2003And the land where the true hearts dwell.\n\n\"Well sung, by my hilt!\" shouted the archer in high delight. \"Many a night have I heard that song, both in the old war-time and after in the days of the White Company, when Black Simon of Norwich would lead the stave, and four hundred of the best bowmen that ever drew string would come roaring in upon the chorus. I have seen old John Hawkwood, the same who has led half the Company into Italy, stand laughing in his beard as he heard it, until his plates rattled again. But to get the full smack of it ye must yourselves be English bowmen, and be far off upon an outland soil.\"\n\nWhilst the song had been singing Dame Eliza and the maid had placed a board across two trestles, and had laid upon it the knife, the spoon, the salt, the tranchoir of bread, and finally the smoking dish which held the savory supper. The archer settled himself to it like one who had known what it was to find good food scarce; but his tongue still went as merrily as his teeth.\n\n\"It passes me,\" he cried, \"how all you lusty fellows can bide scratching your backs at home when there are such doings over the seas. Look at me\u2014what have I to do? It is but the eye to the cord, the cord to the shaft, and the shaft to the mark. There is the whole song of it. It is but what you do yourselves for pleasure upon a Sunday evening at the parish village butts.\"\n\n\"And the wage?\" asked a laborer.\n\n\"You see what the wage brings,\" he answered. \"I eat of the best, and I drink deep. I treat my friend, and I ask no friend to treat me. I clap a silk gown on my girl's back. Never a knight's lady shall be better betrimmed and betrinketed. How of all that, mon garcon? And how of the heap of trifles that you can see for yourselves in yonder corner? They are from the South French, every one, upon whom I have been making war. By my hilt! camarades, I think that I may let my plunder speak for itself.\"\n\n\"It seems indeed to be a goodly service,\" said the tooth-drawer.\n\n\"Tete bleu! yes, indeed. Then there is the chance of a ransom. Why, look you, in the affair at Brignais some four years back, when the companies slew James of Bourbon, and put his army to the sword, there was scarce a man of ours who had not count, baron, or knight. Peter Karsdale, who was but a common country lout newly brought over, with the English fleas still hopping under his doublet, laid his great hands upon the Sieur Amaury de Chatonville, who owns half Picardy, and had five thousand crowns out of him, with his horse and harness. 'Tis true that a French wench took it all off Peter as quick as the Frenchman paid it; but what then? By the twang of string! it would be a bad thing if money was not made to be spent; and how better than on woman\u2014eh, ma belle?\"\n\n\"It would indeed be a bad thing if we had not our brave archers to bring wealth and kindly customs into the country,\" quoth Dame Eliza, on whom the soldier's free and open ways had made a deep impression.\n\n\"A toi, ma cherie!\" said he, with his hand over his heart. \"Hola! there is la petite peeping from behind the door. A toi, aussi, ma petite! Mon Dieu! but the lass has a good color!\"\n\n\"There is one thing, fair sir,\" said the Cambridge student in his piping voice, \"which I would fain that you would make more clear. As I understand it, there was peace made at the town of Bretigny some six years back between our most gracious monarch and the King of the French. This being so, it seems most passing strange that you should talk so loudly of war and of companies when there is no quarrel between the French and us.\"\n\n\"Meaning that I lie,\" said the archer, laying down his knife.\n\n\"May heaven forfend!\" cried the student hastily. \"Magna est veritas sed rara, which means in the Latin tongue that archers are all honorable men. I come to you seeking knowledge, for it is my trade to learn.\"\n\n\"I fear that you are yet a 'prentice to that trade,\" quoth the soldier; \"for there is no child over the water but could answer what you ask. Know then that though there may be peace between our own provinces and the French, yet within the marches of France there is always war, for the country is much divided against itself, and is furthermore harried by bands of flayers, skinners, Brabacons, tardvenus, and the rest of them. When every man's grip is on his neighbor's throat, and every five-sous-piece of a baron is marching with tuck of drum to fight whom he will, it would be a strange thing if five hundred brave English boys could not pick up a living. Now that Sir John Hawkwood hath gone with the East Anglian lads and the Nottingham woodmen into the service of the Marquis of Montferrat to fight against the Lord of Milan, there are but ten score of us left, yet I trust that I may be able to bring some back with me to fill the ranks of the White Company. By the tooth of Peter! it would be a bad thing if I could not muster many a Hamptonshire man who would be ready to strike in under the red flag of St. George, and the more so if Sir Nigel Loring, of Christchurch, should don hauberk once more and take the lead of us.\"\n\n\"Ah, you would indeed be in luck then,\" quoth a woodman; \"for it is said that, setting aside the prince, and mayhap good old Sir John Chandos, there was not in the whole army a man of such tried courage.\"\n\n\"It is sooth, every word of it,\" the archer answered. \"I have seen him with these two eyes in a stricken field, and never did man carry himself better. Mon Dieu! yes, ye would not credit it to look at him, or to hearken to his soft voice, but from the sailing from Orwell down to the foray to Paris, and that is clear twenty years, there was not a skirmish, onfall, sally, bushment, escalado or battle, but Sir Nigel was in the heart of it. I go now to Christchurch with a letter to him from Sir Claude Latour to ask him if he will take the place of Sir John Hawkwood; and there is the more chance that he will if I bring one or two likely men at my heels. What say you, woodman: wilt leave the bucks to loose a shaft at a nobler mark?\"\n\nThe forester shook his head. \"I have wife and child at Emery Down,\" quoth he; \"I would not leave them for such a venture.\"\n\n\"You, then, young sir?\" asked the archer.\n\n\"Nay, I am a man of peace,\" said Alleyne Edricson. \"Besides, I have other work to do.\"\n\n\"Peste!\" growled the soldier, striking his flagon on the board until the dishes danced again. \"What, in the name of the devil, hath come over the folk? Why sit ye all moping by the fireside, like crows round a dead horse, when there is man's work to be done within a few short leagues of ye? Out upon you all, as a set of laggards and hang-backs! By my hilt I believe that the men of England are all in France already, and that what is left behind are in sooth the women dressed up in their paltocks and hosen.\"\n\n\"Archer,\" quoth Hordle John, \"you have lied more than once and more than twice; for which, and also because I see much in you to dislike, I am sorely tempted to lay you upon your back.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! then, I have found a man at last!\" shouted the bowman. \"And, 'fore God, you are a better man than I take you for if you can lay me on my back, mon garcon. I have won the ram more times than there are toes to my feet, and for seven long years I have found no man in the Company who could make my jerkin dusty.\"\n\n\"We have had enough bobance and boasting,\" said Hordle John, rising and throwing off his doublet. \"I will show you that there are better men left in England than ever went thieving to France.\"\n\n\"Pasques Dieu!\" cried the archer, loosening his jerkin, and eyeing his foeman over with the keen glance of one who is a judge of manhood. \"I have only once before seen such a body of a man. By your leave, my red-headed friend, I should be right sorry to exchange buffets with you; and I will allow that there is no man in the Company who would pull against you on a rope; so let that be a salve to your pride. On the other hand I should judge that you have led a life of ease for some months back, and that my muscle is harder than your own. I am ready to wager upon myself against you if you are not afeard.\"\n\n\"Afeard, thou lurden!\" growled big John. \"I never saw the face yet of the man that I was afeard of. Come out, and we shall see who is the better man.\"\n\n\"But the wager?\"\n\n\"I have nought to wager. Come out for the love and the lust of the thing.\"\n\n\"Nought to wager!\" cried the soldier. \"Why, you have that which I covet above all things. It is that big body of thine that I am after. See, now, mon garcon. I have a French feather-bed there, which I have been at pains to keep these years back. I had it at the sacking of Issodun, and the King himself hath not such a bed. If you throw me, it is thine; but, if I throw you, then you are under a vow to take bow and bill and hie with me to France, there to serve in the White Company as long as we be enrolled.\"\n\n\"A fair wager!\" cried all the travellers, moving back their benches and trestles, so as to give fair field for the wrestlers.\n\n\"Then you may bid farewell to your bed, soldier,\" said Hordle John.\n\n\"Nay; I shall keep the bed, and I shall have you to France in spite of your teeth, and you shall live to thank me for it. How shall it be, then, mon enfant? Collar and elbow, or close-lock, or catch how you can?\"\n\n\"To the devil with your tricks,\" said John, opening and shutting his great red hands. \"Stand forth, and let me clip thee.\"\n\n\"Shalt clip me as best you can then,\" quoth the archer, moving out into the open space, and keeping a most wary eye upon his opponent. He had thrown off his green jerkin, and his chest was covered only by a pink silk jupon, or undershirt, cut low in the neck and sleeveless. Hordle John was stripped from his waist upwards, and his huge body, with his great muscles swelling out like the gnarled roots of an oak, towered high above the soldier. The other, however, though near a foot shorter, was a man of great strength; and there was a gloss upon his white skin which was wanting in the heavier limbs of the renegade monk. He was quick on his feet, too, and skilled at the game; so that it was clear, from the poise of head and shine of eye, that he counted the chances to be in his favor. It would have been hard that night, through the whole length of England, to set up a finer pair in face of each other.\n\nBig John stood waiting in the centre with a sullen, menacing eye, and his red hair in a bristle, while the archer paced lightly and swiftly to the right and the left with crooked knee and hands advanced. Then with a sudden dash, so swift and fierce that the eye could scarce follow it, he flew in upon his man and locked his leg round him. It was a grip that, between men of equal strength, would mean a fall; but Hordle John tore him off from him as he might a rat, and hurled him across the room, so that his head cracked up against the wooden wall.\n\n\"Ma foi!\" cried the bowman, passing his fingers through his curls, \"you were not far from the feather-bed then, mon gar. A little more and this good hostel would have a new window.\"\n\nNothing daunted, he approached his man once more, but this time with more caution than before. With a quick feint he threw the other off his guard, and then, bounding upon him, threw his legs round his waist and his arms round his bull-neck, in the hope of bearing him to the ground with the sudden shock. With a bellow of rage, Hordle John squeezed him limp in his huge arms; and then, picking him up, cast him down upon the floor with a force which might well have splintered a bone or two, had not the archer with the most perfect coolness clung to the other's forearms to break his fall. As it was, he dropped upon his feet and kept his balance, though it sent a jar through his frame which set every joint a-creaking. He bounded back from his perilous foeman; but the other, heated by the bout, rushed madly after him, and so gave the practised wrestler the very vantage for which he had planned. As big John flung himself upon him, the archer ducked under the great red hands that clutched for him, and, catching his man round the thighs, hurled him over his shoulder\u2014helped as much by his own mad rush as by the trained strength of the heave. To Alleyne's eye, it was as if John had taken unto himself wings and flown. As he hurtled through the air, with giant limbs revolving, the lad's heart was in his mouth; for surely no man ever yet had such a fall and came scathless out of it. In truth, hardy as the man was, his neck had been assuredly broken had he not pitched head first on the very midriff of the drunken artist, who was slumbering so peacefully in the corner, all unaware of these stirring doings. The luckless limner, thus suddenly brought out from his dreams, sat up with a piercing yell, while Hordle John bounded back into the circle almost as rapidly as he had left it.\n\n\"One more fall, by all the saints!\" he cried, throwing out his arms.\n\n\"Not I,\" quoth the archer, pulling on his clothes, \"I have come well out of the business. I would sooner wrestle with the great bear of Navarre.\"\n\n\"It was a trick,\" cried John.\n\n\"Aye was it. By my ten finger-bones! it is a trick that will add a proper man to the ranks of the Company.\"\n\n\"Oh, for that,\" said the other, \"I count it not a fly; for I had promised myself a good hour ago that I should go with thee, since the life seems to be a goodly and proper one. Yet I would fain have had the feather-bed.\"\n\n\"I doubt it not, mon ami,\" quoth the archer, going back to his tankard. \"Here is to thee, lad, and may we be good comrades to each other! But, hola! what is it that ails our friend of the wrathful face?\"\n\nThe unfortunate limner had been sitting up rubbing himself ruefully and staring about with a vacant gaze, which showed that he knew neither where he was nor what had occurred to him. Suddenly, however, a flash of intelligence had come over his sodden features, and he rose and staggered for the door. \"'Ware the ale!\" he said in a hoarse whisper, shaking a warning finger at the company. \"Oh, holy Virgin, 'ware the ale!\" and slapping his hands to his injury, he flitted off into the darkness, amid a shout of laughter, in which the vanquished joined as merrily as the victor. The remaining forester and the two laborers were also ready for the road, and the rest of the company turned to the blankets which Dame Eliza and the maid had laid out for them upon the floor. Alleyne, weary with the unwonted excitements of the day, was soon in a deep slumber broken only by fleeting visions of twittering legs, cursing beggars, black robbers, and the many strange folk whom he had met at the \"Pied Merlin.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE THREE COMRADES JOURNEYED THROUGH THE WOODLANDS.", + "text": "At early dawn the country inn was all alive, for it was rare indeed that an hour of daylight would be wasted at a time when lighting was so scarce and dear. Indeed, early as it was when Dame Eliza began to stir, it seemed that others could be earlier still, for the door was ajar, and the learned student of Cambridge had taken himself off, with a mind which was too intent upon the high things of antiquity to stoop to consider the fourpence which he owed for bed and board. It was the shrill out-cry of the landlady when she found her loss, and the clucking of the hens, which had streamed in through the open door, that first broke in upon the slumbers of the tired wayfarers.\n\nOnce afoot, it was not long before the company began to disperse. A sleek mule with red trappings was brought round from some neighboring shed for the physician, and he ambled away with much dignity upon his road to Southampton. The tooth-drawer and the gleeman called for a cup of small ale apiece, and started off together for Ringwood fair, the old jongleur looking very yellow in the eye and swollen in the face after his overnight potations. The archer, however, who had drunk more than any man in the room, was as merry as a grig, and having kissed the matron and chased the maid up the ladder once more, he went out to the brook, and came back with the water dripping from his face and hair.\n\n\"Hola! my man of peace,\" he cried to Alleyne, \"whither are you bent this morning?\"\n\n\"To Minstead,\" quoth he. \"My brother Simon Edricson is socman there, and I go to bide with him for a while. I prythee, let me have my score, good dame.\"\n\n\"Score, indeed!\" cried she, standing with upraised hands in front of the panel on which Alleyne had worked the night before. \"Say, rather what it is that I owe to thee, good youth. Aye, this is indeed a pied merlin, and with a leveret under its claws, as I am a living woman. By the rood of Waltham! but thy touch is deft and dainty.\"\n\n\"And see the red eye of it!\" cried the maid.\n\n\"Aye, and the open beak.\"\n\n\"And the ruffled wing,\" added Hordle John.\n\n\"By my hilt!\" cried the archer, \"it is the very bird itself.\"\n\nThe young clerk flushed with pleasure at this chorus of praise, rude and indiscriminate indeed, and yet so much heartier and less grudging than any which he had ever heard from the critical brother Jerome, or the short-spoken Abbot. There was, it would seem, great kindness as well as great wickedness in this world, of which he had heard so little that was good. His hostess would hear nothing of his paying either for bed or for board, while the archer and Hordle John placed a hand upon either shoulder and led him off to the board, where some smoking fish, a dish of spinach, and a jug of milk were laid out for their breakfast.\n\n\"I should not be surprised to learn, mon camarade,\" said the soldier, as he heaped a slice of fish upon Alleyne's tranchoir of bread, \"that you could read written things, since you are so ready with your brushes and pigments.\"\n\n\"It would be shame to the good brothers of Beaulieu if I could not,\" he answered, \"seeing that I have been their clerk this ten years back.\"\n\nThe bowman looked at him with great respect. \"Think of that!\" said he. \"And you with not a hair to your face, and a skin like a girl. I can shoot three hundred and fifty paces with my little popper there, and four hundred and twenty with the great war-bow; yet I can make nothing of this, nor read my own name if you were to set 'Sam Aylward' up against me. In the whole Company there was only one man who could read, and he fell down a well at the taking of Ventadour, which proves what the thing is not suited to a soldier, though most needful to a clerk.\"\n\n\"I can make some show at it,\" said big John; \"though I was scarce long enough among the monks to catch the whole trick of it.\n\n\"Here, then, is something to try upon,\" quoth the archer, pulling a square of parchment from the inside of his tunic. It was tied securely with a broad band of purple silk, and firmly sealed at either end with a large red seal. John pored long and earnestly over the inscription upon the back, with his brows bent as one who bears up against great mental strain.\n\n\"Not having read much of late,\" he said, \"I am loth to say too much about what this may be. Some might say one thing and some another, just as one bowman loves the yew, and a second will not shoot save with the ash. To me, by the length and the look of it, I should judge this to be a verse from one of the Psalms.\"\n\nThe bowman shook his head. \"It is scarce likely,\" he said, \"that Sir Claude Latour should send me all the way across seas with nought more weighty than a psalm-verse. You have clean overshot the butts this time, mon camarade. Give it to the little one. I will wager my feather-bed that he makes more sense of it.\"\n\n\"Why, it is written in the French tongue,\" said Alleyne, \"and in a right clerkly hand. This is how it runs: 'A le moult puissant et moult honorable chevalier, Sir Nigel Loring de Christchurch, de son tres fidele ami Sir Claude Latour, capitaine de la Compagnie blanche, chatelain de Biscar, grand seigneur de Montchateau, vavaseur de le renomme Gaston, Comte de Foix, tenant les droits de la haute justice, de la milieu, et de la basse.' Which signifies in our speech: 'To the very powerful and very honorable knight, Sir Nigel Loring of Christchurch, from his very faithful friend Sir Claude Latour, captain of the White Company, chatelain of Biscar, grand lord of Montchateau and vassal to the renowned Gaston, Count of Foix, who holds the rights of the high justice, the middle and the low.'\"\n\n\"Look at that now!\" cried the bowman in triumph. \"That is just what he would have said.\"\n\n\"I can see now that it is even so,\" said John, examining the parchment again. \"Though I scarce understand this high, middle and low.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! you would understand it if you were Jacques Bonhomme. The low justice means that you may fleece him, and the middle that you may torture him, and the high that you may slay him. That is about the truth of it. But this is the letter which I am to take; and since the platter is clean it is time that we trussed up and were afoot. You come with me, mon gros Jean; and as to you, little one, where did you say that you journeyed?\"\n\n\"To Minstead.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. I know this forest country well, though I was born myself in the Hundred of Easebourne, in the Rape of Chichester, hard by the village of Midhurst. Yet I have not a word to say against the Hampton men, for there are no better comrades or truer archers in the whole Company than some who learned to loose the string in these very parts. We shall travel round with you to Minstead lad, seeing that it is little out of our way.\"\n\n\"I am ready,\" said Alleyne, right pleased at the thought of such company upon the road.\n\n\"So am not I. I must store my plunder at this inn, since the hostess is an honest woman. Hola! ma cherie, I wish to leave with you my gold-work, my velvet, my silk, my feather bed, my incense-boat, my ewer, my naping linen, and all the rest of it. I take only the money in a linen bag, and the box of rose colored sugar which is a gift from my captain to the Lady Loring. Wilt guard my treasure for me?\"\n\n\"It shall be put in the safest loft, good archer. Come when you may, you shall find it ready for you.\"\n\n\"Now, there is a true friend!\" cried the bowman, taking her hand. \"There is a bonne amie! English land and English women, say I, and French wine and French plunder. I shall be back anon, mon ange. I am a lonely man, my sweeting, and I must settle some day when the wars are over and done. Mayhap you and I\u2014\u2014Ah, mechante, mechante! There is la petite peeping from behind the door. Now, John, the sun is over the trees; you must be brisker than this when the bugleman blows 'Bows and Bills.'\"\n\n\"I have been waiting this time back,\" said Hordle John gruffly.\n\n\"Then we must be off. Adieu, ma vie! The two livres shall settle the score and buy some ribbons against the next kermesse. Do not forget Sam Aylward, for his heart shall ever be thine alone\u2014and thine, ma petite! So, marchons, and may St. Julian grant us as good quarters elsewhere!\"\n\nThe sun had risen over Ashurst and Denny woods, and was shining brightly, though the eastern wind had a sharp flavor to it, and the leaves were flickering thickly from the trees. In the High Street of Lyndhurst the wayfarers had to pick their way, for the little town was crowded with the guardsmen, grooms, and yeomen prickers who were attached to the King's hunt. The King himself was staying at Castle Malwood, but several of his suite had been compelled to seek such quarters as they might find in the wooden or wattle-and-daub cottages of the village. Here and there a small escutcheon, peeping from a glassless window, marked the night's lodging of knight or baron. These coats-of-arms could be read, where a scroll would be meaningless, and the bowman, like most men of his age, was well versed in the common symbols of heraldry.\n\n\"There is the Saracen's head of Sir Bernard Brocas,\" quoth he. \"I saw him last at the ruffle at Poictiers some ten years back, when he bore himself like a man. He is the master of the King's horse, and can sing a right jovial stave, though in that he cannot come nigh to Sir John Chandos, who is first at the board or in the saddle. Three martlets on a field azure, that must be one of the Luttrells. By the crescent upon it, it should be the second son of old Sir Hugh, who had a bolt through his ankle at the intaking of Romorantin, he having rushed into the fray ere his squire had time to clasp his solleret to his greave. There too is the hackle which is the old device of the De Brays. I have served under Sir Thomas de Bray, who was as jolly as a pie, and a lusty swordsman until he got too fat for his harness.\"\n\nSo the archer gossiped as the three wayfarers threaded their way among the stamping horses, the busy grooms, and the knots of pages and squires who disputed over the merits of their masters' horses and deer-hounds. As they passed the old church, which stood upon a mound at the left-hand side of the village street the door was flung open, and a stream of worshippers wound down the sloping path, coming from the morning mass, all chattering like a cloud of jays. Alleyne bent knee and doffed hat at the sight of the open door; but ere he had finished an ave his comrades were out of sight round the curve of the path, and he had to run to overtake them.\n\n\"What!\" he said, \"not one word of prayer before God's own open house? How can ye hope for His blessing upon the day?\"\n\n\"My friend,\" said Hordle John, \"I have prayed so much during the last two months, not only during the day, but at matins, lauds, and the like, when I could scarce keep my head upon my shoulders for nodding, that I feel that I have somewhat over-prayed myself.\"\n\n\"How can a man have too much religion?\" cried Alleyne earnestly. \"It is the one thing that availeth. A man is but a beast as he lives from day to day, eating and drinking, breathing and sleeping. It is only when he raises himself, and concerns himself with the immortal spirit within him, that he becomes in very truth a man. Bethink ye how sad a thing it would be that the blood of the Redeemer should be spilled to no purpose.\"\n\n\"Bless the lad, if he doth not blush like any girl, and yet preach like the whole College of Cardinals,\" cried the archer.\n\n\"In truth I blush that any one so weak and so unworthy as I should try to teach another that which he finds it so passing hard to follow himself.\"\n\n\"Prettily said, mon garcon. Touching that same slaying of the Redeemer, it was a bad business. A good padre in France read to us from a scroll the whole truth of the matter. The soldiers came upon him in the garden. In truth, these Apostles of His may have been holy men, but they were of no great account as men-at-arms. There was one, indeed, Sir Peter, who smote out like a true man; but, unless he is belied, he did but clip a varlet's ear, which was no very knightly deed. By these ten finger-bones! had I been there with Black Simon of Norwich, and but one score picked men of the Company, we had held them in play. Could we do no more, we had at least filled the false knight, Sir Judas, so full of English arrows that he would curse the day that ever he came on such an errand.\"\n\nThe young clerk smiled at his companion's earnestness. \"Had He wished help,\" he said, \"He could have summoned legions of archangels from heaven, so what need had He of your poor bow and arrow? Besides, bethink you of His own words\u2014that those who live by the sword shall perish by the sword.\"\n\n\"And how could man die better?\" asked the archer. \"If I had my wish, it would be to fall so\u2014not, mark you, in any mere skirmish of the Company, but in a stricken field, with the great lion banner waving over us and the red oriflamme in front, amid the shouting of my fellows and the twanging of the strings. But let it be sword, lance, or bolt that strikes me down: for I should think it shame to die from an iron ball from the fire-crake or bombard or any such unsoldierly weapon, which is only fitted to scare babes with its foolish noise and smoke.\"\n\n\"I have heard much even in the quiet cloisters of these new and dreadful engines,\" quoth Alleyne. \"It is said, though I can scarce bring myself to believe it, that they will send a ball twice as far as a bowman can shoot his shaft, and with such force as to break through armor of proof.\"\n\n\"True enough, my lad. But while the armorer is thrusting in his devil's-dust, and dropping his ball, and lighting his flambeau, I can very easily loose six shafts, or eight maybe, so he hath no great vantage after all. Yet I will not deny that at the intaking of a town it is well to have good store of bombards. I am told that at Calais they made dints in the wall that a man might put his head into. But surely, comrades, some one who is grievously hurt hath passed along this road before us.\"\n\nAll along the woodland track there did indeed run a scattered straggling trail of blood-marks, sometimes in single drops, and in other places in broad, ruddy gouts, smudged over the dead leaves or crimsoning the white flint stones.\n\n\"It must be a stricken deer,\" said John.\n\n\"Nay, I am woodman enough to see that no deer hath passed this way this morning; and yet the blood is fresh. But hark to the sound!\"\n\nThey stood listening all three with sidelong heads. Through the silence of the great forest there came a swishing, whistling sound, mingled with the most dolorous groans, and the voice of a man raised in a high quavering kind of song. The comrades hurried onwards eagerly, and topping the brow of a small rising they saw upon the other side the source from which these strange noises arose.\n\nA tall man, much stooped in the shoulders, was walking slowly with bended head and clasped hands in the centre of the path. He was dressed from head to foot in a long white linen cloth, and a high white cap with a red cross printed upon it. His gown was turned back from his shoulders, and the flesh there was a sight to make a man wince, for it was all beaten to a pulp, and the blood was soaking into his gown and trickling down upon the ground. Behind him walked a smaller man with his hair touched with gray, who was clad in the same white garb. He intoned a long whining rhyme in the French tongue, and at the end of every line he raised a thick cord, all jagged with pellets of lead, and smote his companion across the shoulders until the blood spurted again. Even as the three wayfarers stared, however, there was a sudden change, for the smaller man, having finished his song, loosened his own gown and handed the scourge to the other, who took up the stave once more and lashed his companion with all the strength of his bare and sinewy arm. So, alternately beating and beaten, they made their dolorous way through the beautiful woods and under the amber arches of the fading beech-trees, where the calm strength and majesty of Nature might serve to rebuke the foolish energies and misspent strivings of mankind.\n\nSuch a spectacle was new to Hordle John or to Alleyne Edricson; but the archer treated it lightly, as a common matter enough.\n\n\"These are the Beating Friars, otherwise called the Flagellants,\" quoth he. \"I marvel that ye should have come upon none of them before, for across the water they are as common as gallybaggers. I have heard that there are no English among them, but that they are from France, Italy and Bohemia. En avant, camarades! that we may have speech with them.\"\n\nAs they came up to them, Alleyne could hear the doleful dirge which the beater was chanting, bringing down his heavy whip at the end of each line, while the groans of the sufferer formed a sort of dismal chorus. It was in old French, and ran somewhat in this way:\n\n\u2003Or avant, entre nous tous freres\n\n\u2003Battons nos charognes bien fort\n\n\u2003En remembrant la grant misere\n\n\u2003De Dieu et sa piteuse mort\n\n\u2003Qui fut pris en la gent amere\n\n\u2003Et vendus et trais a tort\n\n\u2003Et bastu sa chair, vierge et dere\n\n\u2003Au nom de ce battons plus fort.\n\nThen at the end of the verse the scourge changed hands and the chanting began anew.\n\n\"Truly, holy fathers,\" said the archer in French as they came abreast of them, \"you have beaten enough for to-day. The road is all spotted like a shambles at Martinmas. Why should ye mishandle yourselves thus?\"\n\n\"C'est pour vos peches\u2014pour vos peches,\" they droned, looking at the travellers with sad lack-lustre eyes, and then bent to their bloody work once more without heed to the prayers and persuasions which were addressed to them. Finding all remonstrance useless, the three comrades hastened on their way, leaving these strange travellers to their dreary task.\n\n\"Mort Dieu!\" cried the bowman, \"there is a bucketful or more of my blood over in France, but it was all spilled in hot fight, and I should think twice before I drew it drop by drop as these friars are doing. By my hilt! our young one here is as white as a Picardy cheese. What is amiss then, mon cher?\"\n\n\"It is nothing,\" Alleyne answered. \"My life has been too quiet, I am not used to such sights.\"\n\n\"Ma foi!\" the other cried, \"I have never yet seen a man who was so stout of speech and yet so weak of heart.\"\n\n\"Not so, friend,\" quoth big John; \"it is not weakness of heart for I know the lad well. His heart is as good as thine or mine but he hath more in his pate than ever you will carry under that tin pot of thine, and as a consequence he can see farther into things, so that they weigh upon him more.\"\n\n\"Surely to any man it is a sad sight,\" said Alleyne, \"to see these holy men, who have done no sin themselves, suffering so for the sins of others. Saints are they, if in this age any may merit so high a name.\"\n\n\"I count them not a fly,\" cried Hordle John; \"for who is the better for all their whipping and yowling? They are like other friars, I trow, when all is done. Let them leave their backs alone, and beat the pride out of their hearts.\"\n\n\"By the three kings! there is sooth in what you say,\" remarked the archer. \"Besides, methinks if I were le bon Dieu, it would bring me little joy to see a poor devil cutting the flesh off his bones; and I should think that he had but a small opinion of me, that he should hope to please me by such provost-marshal work. No, by my hilt! I should look with a more loving eye upon a jolly archer who never harmed a fallen foe and never feared a hale one.\"\n\n\"Doubtless you mean no sin,\" said Alleyne. \"If your words are wild, it is not for me to judge them. Can you not see that there are other foes in this world besides Frenchmen, and as much glory to be gained in conquering them? Would it not be a proud day for knight or squire if he could overthrow seven adversaries in the lists? Yet here are we in the lists of life, and there come the seven black champions against us Sir Pride, Sir Covetousness, Sir Lust, Sir Anger, Sir Gluttony, Sir Envy, and Sir Sloth. Let a man lay those seven low, and he shall have the prize of the day, from the hands of the fairest queen of beauty, even from the Virgin-Mother herself. It is for this that these men mortify their flesh, and to set us an example, who would pamper ourselves overmuch. I say again that they are God's own saints, and I bow my head to them.\"\n\n\"And so you shall, mon petit,\" replied the archer. \"I have not heard a man speak better since old Dom Bertrand died, who was at one time chaplain to the White Company. He was a very valiant man, but at the battle of Brignais he was spitted through the body by a Hainault man-at-arms. For this we had an excommunication read against the man, when next we saw our holy father at Avignon; but as we had not his name, and knew nothing of him, save that he rode a dapple-gray roussin, I have feared sometimes that the blight may have settled upon the wrong man.\"\n\n\"Your Company has been, then, to bow knee before our holy father, the Pope Urban, the prop and centre of Christendom?\" asked Alleyne, much interested. \"Perchance you have yourself set eyes upon his august face?\"\n\n\"Twice I saw him,\" said the archer. \"He was a lean little rat of a man, with a scab on his chin. The first time we had five thousand crowns out of him, though he made much ado about it. The second time we asked ten thousand, but it was three days before we could come to terms, and I am of opinion myself that we might have done better by plundering the palace. His chamberlain and cardinals came forth, as I remember, to ask whether we would take seven thousand crowns with his blessing and a plenary absolution, or the ten thousand with his solemn ban by bell, book and candle. We were all of one mind that it was best to have the ten thousand with the curse; but in some way they prevailed upon Sir John, so that we were blest and shriven against our will. Perchance it is as well, for the Company were in need of it about that time.\"\n\nThe pious Alleyne was deeply shocked by this reminiscence. Involuntarily he glanced up and around to see if there were any trace of those opportune levin-flashes and thunderbolts which, in the \"Acta Sanctorum,\" were wont so often to cut short the loose talk of the scoffer. The autumn sun streamed down as brightly as ever, and the peaceful red path still wound in front of them through the rustling, yellow-tinted forest, Nature seemed to be too busy with her own concerns to heed the dignity of an outraged pontiff. Yet he felt a sense of weight and reproach within his breast, as though he had sinned himself in giving ear to such words. The teachings of twenty years cried out against such license. It was not until he had thrown himself down before one of the many wayside crosses, and had prayed from his heart both for the archer and for himself, that the dark cloud rolled back again from his spirit." + }, + { + "title": "THE THREE FRIENDS.", + "text": "His companions had passed on whilst he was at his orisons; but his young blood and the fresh morning air both invited him to a scamper. His staff in one hand and his scrip in the other, with springy step and floating locks, he raced along the forest path, as active and as graceful as a young deer. He had not far to go, however; for, on turning a corner, he came on a roadside cottage with a wooden fence-work around it, where stood big John and Aylward the bowman, staring at something within. As he came up with them, he saw that two little lads, the one about nine years of age and the other somewhat older, were standing on the plot in front of the cottage, each holding out a round stick in their left hands, with their arms stiff and straight from the shoulder, as silent and still as two small statues. They were pretty, blue-eyed, yellow-haired lads, well made and sturdy, with bronzed skins, which spoke of a woodland life.\n\n\"Here are young chips from an old bow stave!\" cried the soldier in great delight. \"This is the proper way to raise children. By my hilt! I could not have trained them better had I the ordering of it myself.\"\n\n\"What is it then?\" asked Hordle John. \"They stand very stiff, and I trust that they have not been struck so.\"\n\n\"Nay, they are training their left arms, that they may have a steady grasp of the bow. So my own father trained me, and six days a week I held out his walking-staff till my arm was heavy as lead. Hola, mes enfants! how long will you hold out?\"\n\n\"Until the sun is over the great lime-tree, good master,\" the elder answered.\n\n\"What would ye be, then? Woodmen? Verderers?\"\n\n\"Nay, soldiers,\" they cried both together.\n\n\"By the beard of my father! but ye are whelps of the true breed. Why so keen, then, to be soldiers?\"\n\n\"That we may fight the Scots,\" they answered. \"Daddy will send us to fight the Scots.\"\n\n\"And why the Scots, my pretty lads? We have seen French and Spanish galleys no further away than Southampton, but I doubt that it will be some time before the Scots find their way to these parts.\"\n\n\"Our business is with the Scots,\" quoth the elder; \"for it was the Scots who cut off daddy's string fingers and his thumbs.\"\n\n\"Aye, lads, it was that,\" said a deep voice from behind Alleyne's shoulder. Looking round, the wayfarers saw a gaunt, big-boned man, with sunken cheeks and a sallow face, who had come up behind them. He held up his two hands as he spoke, and showed that the thumbs and two first fingers had been torn away from each of them.\n\n\"Ma foi, camarade!\" cried Aylward. \"Who hath served thee in so shameful a fashion?\"\n\n\"It is easy to see, friend, that you were born far from the marches of Scotland,\" quoth the stranger, with a bitter smile. \"North of Humber there is no man who would not know the handiwork of Devil Douglas, the black Lord James.\"\n\n\"And how fell you into his hands?\" asked John.\n\n\"I am a man of the north country, from the town of Beverley and the wapentake of Holderness,\" he answered. \"There was a day when, from Trent to Tweed, there was no better marksman than Robin Heathcot. Yet, as you see, he hath left me, as he hath left many another poor border archer, with no grip for bill or bow. Yet the king hath given me a living here in the southlands, and please God these two lads of mine will pay off a debt that hath been owing over long. What is the price of daddy's thumbs, boys?\"\n\n\"Twenty Scottish lives,\" they answered together.\n\n\"And for the fingers?\"\n\n\"Half a score.\"\n\n\"When they can bend my war-bow, and bring down a squirrel at a hundred paces, I send them to take service under Johnny Copeland, the Lord of the Marches and Governor of Carlisle. By my soul! I would give the rest of my fingers to see the Douglas within arrow-flight of them.\"\n\n\"May you live to see it,\" quoth the bowman. \"And hark ye, mes enfants, take an old soldier's rede and lay your bodies to the bow, drawing from hip and thigh as much as from arm. Learn also, I pray you, to shoot with a dropping shaft; for though a bowman may at times be called upon to shoot straight and fast, yet it is more often that he has to do with a town-guard behind a wall, or an arbalestier with his mantlet raised when you cannot hope to do him scathe unless your shaft fall straight upon him from the clouds. I have not drawn string for two weeks, but I may be able to show ye how such shots should be made.\" He loosened his long-bow, slung his quiver round to the front, and then glanced keenly round for a fitting mark. There was a yellow and withered stump some way off, seen under the drooping branches of a lofty oak. The archer measured the distance with his eye; and then, drawing three shafts, he shot them off with such speed that the first had not reached the mark ere the last was on the string. Each arrow passed high over the oak; and, of the three, two stuck fair into the stump; while the third, caught in some wandering puff of wind, was driven a foot or two to one side.\n\n\"Good!\" cried the north countryman. \"Hearken to him lads! He is a master bowman. Your dad says amen to every word he says.\"\n\n\"By my hilt!\" said Aylward, \"if I am to preach on bowmanship, the whole long day would scarce give me time for my sermon. We have marksmen in the Company who will notch with a shaft every crevice and joint of a man-at-arm's harness, from the clasp of his bassinet to the hinge of his greave. But, with your favor, friend, I must gather my arrows again, for while a shaft costs a penny a poor man can scarce leave them sticking in wayside stumps. We must, then, on our road again, and I hope from my heart that you may train these two young goshawks here until they are ready for a cast even at such a quarry as you speak of.\"\n\nLeaving the thumbless archer and his brood, the wayfarers struck through the scattered huts of Emery Down, and out on to the broad rolling heath covered deep in ferns and in heather, where droves of the half-wild black forest pigs were rooting about amongst the hillocks. The woods about this point fall away to the left and the right, while the road curves upwards and the wind sweeps keenly over the swelling uplands. The broad strips of bracken glowed red and yellow against the black peaty soil, and a queenly doe who grazed among them turned her white front and her great questioning eyes towards the wayfarers. Alleyne gazed in admiration at the supple beauty of the creature; but the archer's fingers played with his quiver, and his eyes glistened with the fell instinct which urges a man to slaughter.\n\n\"Tete Dieu!\" he growled, \"were this France, or even Guienne, we should have a fresh haunch for our none-meat. Law or no law, I have a mind to loose a bolt at her.\"\n\n\"I would break your stave across my knee first,\" cried John, laying his great hand upon the bow. \"What! man, I am forest-born, and I know what comes of it. In our own township of Hordle two have lost their eyes and one his skin for this very thing. On my troth, I felt no great love when I first saw you, but since then I have conceived over much regard for you to wish to see the verderer's flayer at work upon you.\"\n\n\"It is my trade to risk my skin,\" growled the archer; but none the less he thrust his quiver over his hip again and turned his face for the west.\n\nAs they advanced, the path still tended upwards, running from heath into copses of holly and yew, and so back into heath again. It was joyful to hear the merry whistle of blackbirds as they darted from one clump of greenery to the other. Now and again a peaty amber colored stream rippled across their way, with ferny overgrown banks, where the blue kingfisher flitted busily from side to side, or the gray and pensive heron, swollen with trout and dignity, stood ankle-deep among the sedges. Chattering jays and loud wood-pigeons flapped thickly overhead, while ever and anon the measured tapping of Nature's carpenter, the great green woodpecker, sounded from each wayside grove. On either side, as the path mounted, the long sweep of country broadened and expanded, sloping down on the one side through yellow forest and brown moor to the distant smoke of Lymington and the blue misty channel which lay alongside the skyline, while to the north the woods rolled away, grove topping grove, to where in the furthest distance the white spire of Salisbury stood out hard and clear against the cloudless sky. To Alleyne whose days had been spent in the lowlying coastland, the eager upland air and the wide free country-side gave a sense of life and of the joy of living which made his young blood tingle in his veins. Even the heavy John was not unmoved by the beauty of their road, while the bowman whistled lustily or sang snatches of French love songs in a voice which might have scared the most stout-hearted maiden that ever hearkened to serenade.\n\n\"I have a liking for that north countryman,\" he remarked presently. \"He hath good power of hatred. Couldst see by his cheek and eye that he is as bitter as verjuice. I warm to a man who hath some gall in his liver.\"\n\n\"Ah me!\" sighed Alleyne. \"Would it not be better if he had some love in his heart?\"\n\n\"I would not say nay to that. By my hilt! I shall never be said to be traitor to the little king. Let a man love the sex. Pasques Dieu! they are made to be loved, les petites, from whimple down to shoe-string! I am right glad, mon garcon, to see that the good monks have trained thee so wisely and so well.\"\n\n\"Nay, I meant not worldly love, but rather that his heart should soften towards those who have wronged him.\"\n\nThe archer shook his head. \"A man should love those of his own breed,\" said he. \"But it is not nature that an English-born man should love a Scot or a Frenchman. Ma foi! you have not seen a drove of Nithsdale raiders on their Galloway nags, or you would not speak of loving them. I would as soon take Beelzebub himself to my arms. I fear, mon gar., that they have taught thee but badly at Beaulieu, for surely a bishop knows more of what is right and what is ill than an abbot can do, and I myself with these very eyes saw the Bishop of Lincoln hew into a Scottish hobeler with a battle-axe, which was a passing strange way of showing him that he loved him.\"\n\nAlleyne scarce saw his way to argue in the face of so decided an opinion on the part of a high dignitary of the Church. \"You have borne arms against the Scots, then?\" he asked.\n\n\"Why, man, I first loosed string in battle when I was but a lad, younger by two years than you, at Neville's Cross, under the Lord Mowbray. Later, I served under the Warden of Berwick, that very John Copeland of whom our friend spake, the same who held the King of Scots to ransom. Ma foi! it is rough soldiering, and a good school for one who would learn to be hardy and warwise.\"\n\n\"I have heard that the Scots are good men of war,\" said Hordle John.\n\n\"For axemen and for spearmen I have not seen their match,\" the archer answered. \"They can travel, too, with bag of meal and gridiron slung to their sword-belt, so that it is ill to follow them. There are scant crops and few beeves in the borderland, where a man must reap his grain with sickle in one fist and brown bill in the other. On the other hand, they are the sorriest archers that I have ever seen, and cannot so much as aim with the arbalest, to say nought of the long-bow. Again, they are mostly poor folk, even the nobles among them, so that there are few who can buy as good a brigandine of chain-mail as that which I am wearing, and it is ill for them to stand up against our own knights, who carry the price of five Scotch farms upon their chest and shoulders. Man for man, with equal weapons, they are as worthy and valiant men as could be found in the whole of Christendom.\"\n\n\"And the French?\" asked Alleyne, to whom the archer's light gossip had all the relish that the words of the man of action have for the recluse.\n\n\"The French are also very worthy men. We have had great good fortune in France, and it hath led to much bobance and camp-fire talk, but I have ever noticed that those who know the most have the least to say about it. I have seen Frenchmen fight both in open field, in the intaking and the defending of towns or castlewicks, in escalados, camisades, night forays, bushments, sallies, outfalls, and knightly spear-runnings. Their knights and squires, lad, are every whit as good as ours, and I could pick out a score of those who ride behind Du Guesclin who would hold the lists with sharpened lances against the best men in the army of England. On the other hand, their common folk are so crushed down with gabelle, and poll-tax, and every manner of cursed tallage, that the spirit has passed right out of them. It is a fool's plan to teach a man to be a cur in peace, and think that he will be a lion in war. Fleece them like sheep and sheep they will remain. If the nobles had not conquered the poor folk it is like enough that we should not have conquered the nobles.\"\n\n\"But they must be sorry folk to bow down to the rich in such a fashion,\" said big John. \"I am but a poor commoner of England myself, and yet I know something of charters, liberties franchises, usages, privileges, customs, and the like. If these be broken, then all men know that it is time to buy arrow-heads.\"\n\n\"Aye, but the men of the law are strong in France as well as the men of war. By my hilt! I hold that a man has more to fear there from the ink-pot of the one than from the iron of the other. There is ever some cursed sheepskin in their strong boxes to prove that the rich man should be richer and the poor man poorer. It would scarce pass in England, but they are quiet folk over the water.\"\n\n\"And what other nations have you seen in your travels, good sir?\" asked Alleyne Edricson. His young mind hungered for plain facts of life, after the long course of speculation and of mysticism on which he had been trained.\n\n\"I have seen the low countryman in arms, and I have nought to say against him. Heavy and slow is he by nature, and is not to be brought into battle for the sake of a lady's eyelash or the twang of a minstrel's string, like the hotter blood of the south. But ma foi! lay hand on his wool-bales, or trifle with his velvet of Bruges, and out buzzes every stout burgher, like bees from the tee-hole, ready to lay on as though it were his one business in life. By our lady! they have shown the French at Courtrai and elsewhere that they are as deft in wielding steel as in welding it.\"\n\n\"And the men of Spain?\"\n\n\"They too are very hardy soldiers, the more so as for many hundred years they have had to fight hard against the cursed followers of the black Mahound, who have pressed upon them from the south, and still, as I understand, hold the fairer half of the country. I had a turn with them upon the sea when they came over to Winchelsea and the good queen with her ladies sat upon the cliffs looking down at us, as if it had been joust or tourney. By my hilt! it was a sight that was worth the seeing, for all that was best in England was out on the water that day. We went forth in little ships and came back in great galleys\u2014for of fifty tall ships of Spain, over two score flew the Cross of St. George ere the sun had set. But now, youngster, I have answered you freely, and I trow it is time what you answered me. Let things be plat and plain between us. I am a man who shoots straight at his mark. You saw the things I had with me at yonder hostel: name which you will, save only the box of rose-colored sugar which I take to the Lady Loring, and you shall have it if you will but come with me to France.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Alleyne, \"I would gladly come with ye to France or where else ye will, just to list to your talk, and because ye are the only two friends that I have in the whole wide world outside of the cloisters; but, indeed, it may not be, for my duty is towards my brother, seeing that father and mother are dead, and he my elder. Besides, when ye talk of taking me to France, ye do not conceive how useless I should be to you, seeing that neither by training nor by nature am I fitted for the wars, and there seems to be nought but strife in those parts.\"\n\n\"That comes from my fool's talk,\" cried the archer; \"for being a man of no learning myself, my tongue turns to blades and targets, even as my hand does. Know then that for every parchment in England there are twenty in France. For every statue, cut gem, shrine, carven screen, or what else might please the eye of a learned clerk, there are a good hundred to our one. At the spoiling of Carcasonne I have seen chambers stored with writing, though not one man in our Company could read them. Again, in Arles and Nimes, and other towns that I could name, there are the great arches and fortalices still standing which were built of old by giant men who came from the south. Can I not see by your brightened eye how you would love to look upon these things? Come then with me, and, by these ten finger-bones! there is not one of them which you shall not see.\"\n\n\"I should indeed love to look upon them,\" Alleyne answered; \"but I have come from Beaulieu for a purpose, and I must be true to my service, even as thou art true to thine.\"\n\n\"Bethink you again, mon ami,\" quoth Aylward, \"that you might do much good yonder, since there are three hundred men in the Company, and none who has ever a word of grace for them, and yet the Virgin knows that there was never a set of men who were in more need of it. Sickerly the one duty may balance the other. Your brother hath done without you this many a year, and, as I gather, he hath never walked as far as Beaulieu to see you during all that time, so he cannot be in any great need of you.\"\n\n\"Besides,\" said John, \"the Socman of Minstead is a by-word through the forest, from Bramshaw Hill to Holmesley Walk. He is a drunken, brawling, perilous churl, as you may find to your cost.\"\n\n\"The more reason that I should strive to mend him,\" quoth Alleyne. \"There is no need to urge me, friends, for my own wishes would draw me to France, and it would be a joy to me if I could go with you. But indeed and indeed it cannot be, so here I take my leave of you, for yonder square tower amongst the trees upon the right must surely be the church of Minstead, and I may reach it by this path through the woods.\"\n\n\"Well, God be with thee, lad!\" cried the archer, pressing Alleyne to his heart. \"I am quick to love, and quick to hate and 'fore God I am loth to part.\"\n\n\"Would it not be well,\" said John, \"that we should wait here, and see what manner of greeting you have from your brother. You may prove to be as welcome as the king's purveyor to the village dame.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay,\" he answered; \"ye must not bide for me, for where I go I stay.\"\n\n\"Yet it may be as well that you should know whither we go,\" said the archer. \"We shall now journey south through the woods until we come out upon the Christchurch road, and so onwards, hoping to-night to reach the castle of Sir William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, of which Sir Nigel Loring is constable. There we shall bide, and it is like enough that for a month or more you may find us there, ere we are ready for our viage back to France.\"\n\nIt was hard indeed for Alleyne to break away from these two new but hearty friends, and so strong was the combat between his conscience and his inclinations that he dared not look round, lest his resolution should slip away from him. It was not until he was deep among the tree trunks that he cast a glance backwards, when he found that he could still see them through the branches on the road above him. The archer was standing with folded arms, his bow jutting from over his shoulder, and the sun gleaming brightly upon his headpiece and the links of his chain-mail. Beside him stood his giant recruit, still clad in the home-spun and ill-fitting garments of the fuller of Lymington, with arms and legs shooting out of his scanty garb. Even as Alleyne watched them they turned upon their heels and plodded off together upon their way." + }, + { + "title": "HOW STRANGE THINGS BEFELL IN MINSTEAD WOOD.", + "text": "The path which the young clerk had now to follow lay through a magnificent forest of the very heaviest timber, where the giant bowls of oak and of beech formed long aisles in every direction, shooting up their huge branches to build the majestic arches of Nature's own cathedral. Beneath lay a broad carpet of the softest and greenest moss, flecked over with fallen leaves, but yielding pleasantly to the foot of the traveller. The track which guided him was one so seldom used that in places it lost itself entirely among the grass, to reappear as a reddish rut between the distant tree trunks. It was very still here in the heart of the woodlands. The gentle rustle of the branches and the distant cooing of pigeons were the only sounds which broke in upon the silence, save that once Alleyne heard afar off a merry call upon a hunting bugle and the shrill yapping of the hounds.\n\nIt was not without some emotion that he looked upon the scene around him, for, in spite of his secluded life, he knew enough of the ancient greatness of his own family to be aware that the time had been when they had held undisputed and paramount sway over all that tract of country. His father could trace his pure Saxon lineage back to that Godfrey Malf who had held the manors of Bisterne and of Minstead at the time when the Norman first set mailed foot upon English soil. The afforestation of the district, however, and its conversion into a royal demesne had clipped off a large section of his estate, while other parts had been confiscated as a punishment for his supposed complicity in an abortive Saxon rising. The fate of the ancestor had been typical of that of his descendants. During three hundred years their domains had gradually contracted, sometimes through royal or feudal encroachment, and sometimes through such gifts to the Church as that with which Alleyne's father had opened the doors of Beaulieu Abbey to his younger son. The importance of the family had thus dwindled, but they still retained the old Saxon manor-house, with a couple of farms and a grove large enough to afford pannage to a hundred pigs\u2014\"sylva de centum porcis,\" as the old family parchments describe it. Above all, the owner of the soil could still hold his head high as the veritable Socman of Minstead\u2014that is, as holding the land in free socage, with no feudal superior, and answerable to no man lower than the king. Knowing this, Alleyne felt some little glow of worldly pride as he looked for the first time upon the land with which so many generations of his ancestors had been associated. He pushed on the quicker, twirling his staff merrily, and looking out at every turn of the path for some sign of the old Saxon residence. He was suddenly arrested, however, by the appearance of a wild-looking fellow armed with a club, who sprang out from behind a tree and barred his passage. He was a rough, powerful peasant, with cap and tunic of untanned sheepskin, leather breeches, and galligaskins round legs and feet.\n\n\"Stand!\" he shouted, raising his heavy cudgel to enforce the order. \"Who are you who walk so freely through the wood? Whither would you go, and what is your errand?\"\n\n\"Why should I answer your questions, my friend?\" said Alleyne, standing on his guard.\n\n\"Because your tongue may save your pate. But where have I looked upon your face before?\"\n\n\"No longer ago than last night at the 'Pied Merlin,'\" the clerk answered, recognizing the escaped serf who had been so outspoken as to his wrongs.\n\n\"By the Virgin! yes. You were the little clerk who sat so mum in the corner, and then cried fy on the gleeman. What hast in the scrip?\"\n\n\"Naught of any price.\"\n\n\"How can I tell that, clerk? Let me see.\"\n\n\"Not I.\"\n\n\"Fool! I could pull you limb from limb like a pullet. What would you have? Hast forgot that we are alone far from all men? How can your clerkship help you? Wouldst lose scrip and life too?\"\n\n\"I will part with neither without fight.\"\n\n\"A fight, quotha? A fight betwixt spurred cock and new hatched chicken! Thy fighting days may soon be over.\"\n\n\"Hadst asked me in the name of charity I would have given freely,\" cried Alleyne. \"As it stands, not one farthing shall you have with my free will, and when I see my brother, the Socman of Minstead, he will raise hue and cry from vill to vill, from hundred to hundred, until you are taken as a common robber and a scourge to the country.\"\n\nThe outlaw sank his club. \"The Socman's brother!\" he gasped. \"Now, by the keys of Peter! I had rather that hand withered and tongue was palsied ere I had struck or miscalled you. If you are the Socman's brother you are one of the right side, I warrant, for all your clerkly dress.\"\n\n\"His brother I am,\" said Alleyne. \"But if I were not, is that reason why you should molest me on the king's ground?\"\n\n\"I give not the pip of an apple for king or for noble,\" cried the serf passionately. \"Ill have I had from them, and ill I shall repay them. I am a good friend to my friends, and, by the Virgin! an evil foeman to my foes.\"\n\n\"And therefore the worst of foemen to thyself,\" said Alleyne. \"But I pray you, since you seem to know him, to point out to me the shortest path to my brother's house.\"\n\nThe serf was about to reply, when the clear ringing call of a bugle burst from the wood close behind them, and Alleyne caught sight for an instant of the dun side and white breast of a lordly stag glancing swiftly betwixt the distant tree trunks. A minute later came the shaggy deer-hounds, a dozen or fourteen of them, running on a hot scent, with nose to earth and tail in air. As they streamed past the silent forest around broke suddenly into loud life, with galloping of hoofs, crackling of brushwood, and the short, sharp cries of the hunters. Close behind the pack rode a fourrier and a yeoman-pricker, whooping on the laggards and encouraging the leaders, in the shrill half-French jargon which was the language of venery and woodcraft. Alleyne was still gazing after them, listening to the loud \"Hyke-a-Bayard! Hyke-a-Pomers! Hyke-a-Lebryt!\" with which they called upon their favorite hounds, when a group of horsemen crashed out through the underwood at the very spot where the serf and he were standing.\n\nThe one who led was a man between fifty and sixty years of age, war-worn and weather-beaten, with a broad, thoughtful forehead and eyes which shone brightly from under his fierce and overhung brows. His beard, streaked thickly with gray, bristled forward from his chin, and spoke of a passionate nature, while the long, finely cut face and firm mouth marked the leader of men. His figure was erect and soldierly, and he rode his horse with the careless grace of a man whose life had been spent in the saddle. In common garb, his masterful face and flashing eye would have marked him as one who was born to rule; but now, with his silken tunic powdered with golden fleurs-de-lis, his velvet mantle lined with the royal minever, and the lions of England stamped in silver upon his harness, none could fail to recognize the noble Edward, most warlike and powerful of all the long line of fighting monarchs who had ruled the Anglo-Norman race. Alleyne doffed hat and bowed head at the sight of him, but the serf folded his hands and leaned them upon his cudgel, looking with little love at the knot of nobles and knights-in-waiting who rode behind the king.\n\n\"Ha!\" cried Edward, reining up for an instant his powerful black steed. \"Le cerf est passe? Non? Ici, Brocas; tu parles Anglais.\"\n\n\"The deer, clowns?\" said a hard-visaged, swarthy-faced man, who rode at the king's elbow. \"If ye have headed it back it is as much as your ears are worth.\"\n\n\"It passed by the blighted beech there,\" said Alleyne, pointing, \"and the hounds were hard at its heels.\"\n\n\"It is well,\" cried Edward, still speaking in French: for, though he could understand English, he had never learned to express himself in so barbarous and unpolished a tongue. \"By my faith, sirs,\" he continued, half turning in his saddle to address his escort, \"unless my woodcraft is sadly at fault, it is a stag of six tines and the finest that we have roused this journey. A golden St. Hubert to the man who is the first to sound the mort.\" He shook his bridle as he spoke, and thundered away, his knights lying low upon their horses and galloping as hard as whip and spur would drive them, in the hope of winning the king's prize. Away they drove down the long green glade\u2014bay horses, black and gray, riders clad in every shade of velvet, fur, or silk, with glint of brazen horn and flash of knife and spear. One only lingered, the black-browed Baron Brocas, who, making a gambade which brought him within arm-sweep of the serf, slashed him across the face with his riding-whip. \"Doff, dog, doff,\" he hissed, \"when a monarch deigns to lower his eyes to such as you!\"\u2014then spurred through the underwood and was gone, with a gleam of steel shoes and flutter of dead leaves.\n\nThe villein took the cruel blow without wince or cry, as one to whom stripes are a birthright and an inheritance. His eyes flashed, however, and he shook his bony hand with a fierce wild gesture after the retreating figure.\n\n\"Black hound of Gascony,\" he muttered, \"evil the day that you and those like you set foot in free England! I know thy kennel of Rochecourt. The night will come when I may do to thee and thine what you and your class have wrought upon mine and me. May God smite me if I fail to smite thee, thou French robber, with thy wife and thy child and all that is under thy castle roof!\"\n\n\"Forbear!\" cried Alleyne. \"Mix not God's name with these unhallowed threats! And yet it was a coward's blow, and one to stir the blood and loose the tongue of the most peaceful. Let me find some soothing simples and lay them on the weal to draw the sting.\"\n\n\"Nay, there is but one thing that can draw the sting, and that the future may bring to me. But, clerk, if you would see your brother you must on, for there is a meeting to-day, and his merry men will await him ere the shadows turn from west to east. I pray you not to hold him back, for it would be an evil thing if all the stout lads were there and the leader amissing. I would come with you, but sooth to say I am stationed here and may not move. The path over yonder, betwixt the oak and the thorn, should bring you out into his nether field.\"\n\nAlleyne lost no time in following the directions of the wild, masterless man, whom he left among the trees where he had found him. His heart was the heavier for the encounter, not only because all bitterness and wrath were abhorrent to his gentle nature, but also because it disturbed him to hear his brother spoken of as though he were a chief of outlaws or the leader of a party against the state. Indeed, of all the things which he had seen yet in the world to surprise him there was none more strange than the hate which class appeared to bear to class. The talk of laborer, woodman and villein in the inn had all pointed to the widespread mutiny, and now his brother's name was spoken as though he were the very centre of the universal discontent. In good truth, the commons throughout the length and breadth of the land were heart-weary of this fine game of chivalry which had been played so long at their expense. So long as knight and baron were a strength and a guard to the kingdom they might be endured, but now, when all men knew that the great battles in France had been won by English yeomen and Welsh stabbers, warlike fame, the only fame to which his class had ever aspired, appeared to have deserted the plate-clad horsemen. The sports of the lists had done much in days gone by to impress the minds of the people, but the plumed and unwieldy champion was no longer an object either of fear or of reverence to men whose fathers and brothers had shot into the press at Crecy or Poitiers, and seen the proudest chivalry in the world unable to make head against the weapons of disciplined peasants. Power had changed hands. The protector had become the protected, and the whole fabric of the feudal system was tottering to a fall. Hence the fierce mutterings of the lower classes and the constant discontent, breaking out into local tumult and outrage, and culminating some years later in the great rising of Tyler. What Alleyne saw and wondered at in Hampshire would have appealed equally to the traveller in any other English county from the Channel to the marches of Scotland.\n\nHe was following the track, his misgivings increasing with every step which took him nearer to that home which he had never seen, when of a sudden the trees began to thin and the sward to spread out onto a broad, green lawn, where five cows lay in the sunshine and droves of black swine wandered unchecked. A brown forest stream swirled down the centre of this clearing, with a rude bridge flung across it, and on the other side was a second field sloping up to a long, lowlying wooden house, with thatched roof and open squares for windows. Alleyne gazed across at it with flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes\u2014for this, he knew, must be the home of his fathers. A wreath of blue smoke floated up through a hole in the thatch, and was the only sign of life in the place, save a great black hound which lay sleeping chained to the door-post. In the yellow shimmer of the autumn sunshine it lay as peacefully and as still as he had oft pictured it to himself in his dreams.\n\nHe was roused, however, from his pleasant reverie by the sound of voices, and two people emerged from the forest some little way to his right and moved across the field in the direction of the bridge. The one was a man with yellow flowing beard and very long hair of the same tint drooping over his shoulders; his dress of good Norwich cloth and his assured bearing marked him as a man of position, while the sombre hue of his clothes and the absence of all ornament contrasted with the flash and glitter which had marked the king's retinue. By his side walked a woman, tall and slight and dark, with lithe, graceful figure and clear-cut, composed features. Her jet-black hair was gathered back under a light pink coif, her head poised proudly upon her neck, and her step long and springy, like that of some wild, tireless woodland creature. She held her left hand in front of her, covered with a red velvet glove, and on the wrist a little brown falcon, very fluffy and bedraggled, which she smoothed and fondled as she walked. As she came out into the sunshine, Alleyne noticed that her light gown, slashed with pink, was all stained with earth and with moss upon one side from shoulder to hem. He stood in the shadow of an oak staring at her with parted lips, for this woman seemed to him to be the most beautiful and graceful creature that mind could conceive of. Such had he imagined the angels, and such he had tried to paint them in the Beaulieu missals; but here there was something human, were it only in the battered hawk and discolored dress, which sent a tingle and thrill through his nerves such as no dream of radiant and stainless spirit had ever yet been able to conjure up. Good, quiet, uncomplaining mother Nature, long slighted and miscalled, still bides her time and draws to her bosom the most errant of her children.\n\nThe two walked swiftly across the meadow to the narrow bridge, he in front and she a pace or two behind. There they paused, and stood for a few minutes face to face talking earnestly. Alleyne had read and had heard of love and of lovers. Such were these, doubtless\u2014this golden-bearded man and the fair damsel with the cold, proud face. Why else should they wander together in the woods, or be so lost in talk by rustic streams? And yet as he watched, uncertain whether to advance from the cover or to choose some other path to the house, he soon came to doubt the truth of this first conjecture. The man stood, tall and square, blocking the entrance to the bridge, and throwing out his hands as he spoke in a wild eager fashion, while the deep tones of his stormy voice rose at times into accents of menace and of anger. She stood fearlessly in front of him, still stroking her bird; but twice she threw a swift questioning glance over her shoulder, as one who is in search of aid. So moved was the young clerk by these mute appeals, that he came forth from the trees and crossed the meadow, uncertain what to do, and yet loth to hold back from one who might need his aid. So intent were they upon each other that neither took note of his approach; until, when he was close upon them, the man threw his arm roughly round the damsel's waist and drew her towards him, she straining her lithe, supple figure away and striking fiercely at him, while the hooded hawk screamed with ruffled wings and pecked blindly in its mistress's defence. Bird and maid, however, had but little chance against their assailant who, laughing loudly, caught her wrist in one hand while he drew her towards him with the other.\n\n\"The best rose has ever the longest thorns,\" said he. \"Quiet, little one, or you may do yourself a hurt. Must pay Saxon toll on Saxon land, my proud Maude, for all your airs and graces.\"\n\n\"You boor!\" she hissed. \"You base underbred clod! Is this your care and your hospitality? I would rather wed a branded serf from my father's fields. Leave go, I say\u2014\u2014Ah! good youth, Heaven has sent you. Make him loose me! By the honor of your mother, I pray you to stand by me and to make this knave loose me.\"\n\n\"Stand by you I will, and that blithely.\" said Alleyne. \"Surely, sir, you should take shame to hold the damsel against her will.\"\n\nThe man turned a face upon him which was lion-like in its strength and in its wrath. With his tangle of golden hair, his fierce blue eyes, and his large, well-marked features, he was the most comely man whom Alleyne had ever seen, and yet there was something so sinister and so fell in his expression that child or beast might well have shrunk from him. His brows were drawn, his cheek flushed, and there was a mad sparkle in his eyes which spoke of a wild, untamable nature.\n\n\"Young fool!\" he cried, holding the woman still to his side, though every line of her shrinking figure spoke her abhorrence. \"Do you keep your spoon in your own broth. I rede you to go on your way, lest worse befall you. This little wench has come with me and with me she shall bide.\"\n\n\"Liar!\" cried the woman; and, stooping her head, she suddenly bit fiercely into the broad brown hand which held her. He whipped it back with an oath, while she tore herself free and slipped behind Alleyne, cowering up against him like the trembling leveret who sees the falcon poising for the swoop above him.\n\n\"Stand off my land!\" the man said fiercely, heedless of the blood which trickled freely from his fingers. \"What have you to do here? By your dress you should be one of those cursed clerks who overrun the land like vile rats, poking and prying into other men's concerns, too caitiff to fight and too lazy to work. By the rood! if I had my will upon ye, I should nail you upon the abbey doors, as they hang vermin before their holes. Art neither man nor woman, young shaveling. Get thee back to thy fellows ere I lay hands upon you: for your foot is on my land, and I may slay you as a common draw-latch.\"\n\n\"Is this your land, then?\" gasped Alleyne.\n\n\"Would you dispute it, dog? Would you wish by trick or quibble to juggle me out of these last acres? Know, base-born knave, that you have dared this day to stand in the path of one whose race have been the advisers of kings and the leaders of hosts, ere ever this vile crew of Norman robbers came into the land, or such half-blood hounds as you were let loose to preach that the thief should have his booty and the honest man should sin if he strove to win back his own.\"\n\n\"You are the Socman of Minstead?\"\n\n\"That am I; and the son of Edric the Socman, of the pure blood of Godfrey the thane, by the only daughter of the house of Aluric, whose forefathers held the white-horse banner at the fatal fight where our shield was broken and our sword shivered. I tell you, clerk, that my folk held this land from Bramshaw Wood to the Ringwood road; and, by the soul of my father! it will be a strange thing if I am to be bearded upon the little that is left of it. Begone, I say, and meddle not with my affair.\"\n\n\"If you leave me now,\" whispered the woman, \"then shame forever upon your manhood.\"\n\n\"Surely, sir,\" said Alleyne, speaking in as persuasive and soothing a way as he could, \"if your birth is gentle, there is the more reason that your manners should be gentle too. I am well persuaded that you did but jest with this lady, and that you will now permit her to leave your land either alone or with me as a guide, if she should need one, through the wood. As to birth, it does not become me to boast, and there is sooth in what you say as to the unworthiness of clerks, but it is none the less true that I am as well born as you.\"\n\n\"Dog!\" cried the furious Socman, \"there is no man in the south who can say as much.\"\n\n\"Yet can I,\" said Alleyne smiling; \"for indeed I also am the son of Edric the Socman, of the pure blood of Godfrey the thane, by the only daughter of Aluric of Brockenhurst. Surely, dear brother,\" he continued, holding out his hand, \"you have a warmer greeting than this for me. There are but two boughs left upon this old, old Saxon trunk.\"\n\nHis elder brother dashed his hand aside with an oath, while an expression of malignant hatred passed over his passion-drawn features. \"You are the young cub of Beaulieu, then,\" said he. \"I might have known it by the sleek face and the slavish manner too monk-ridden and craven in spirit to answer back a rough word. Thy father, shaveling, with all his faults, had a man's heart; and there were few who could look him in the eyes on the day of his anger. But you! Look there, rat, on yonder field where the cows graze, and on that other beyond, and on the orchard hard by the church. Do you know that all these were squeezed out of your dying father by greedy priests, to pay for your upbringing in the cloisters? I, the Socman, am shorn of my lands that you may snivel Latin and eat bread for which you never did hand's turn. You rob me first, and now you would come preaching and whining, in search mayhap of another field or two for your priestly friends. Knave! my dogs shall be set upon you; but, meanwhile, stand out of my path, and stop me at your peril!\" As he spoke he rushed forward, and, throwing the lad to one side, caught the woman's wrist. Alleyne, however, as active as a young deer-hound, sprang to her aid and seized her by the other arm, raising his iron-shod staff as he did so.\n\n\"You may say what you will to me,\" he said between his clenched teeth\u2014\"it may be no better than I deserve; but, brother or no, I swear by my hopes of salvation that I will break your arm if you do not leave hold of the maid.\"\n\nThere was a ring in his voice and a flash in his eyes which promised that the blow would follow quick at the heels of the word. For a moment the blood of the long line of hotheaded thanes was too strong for the soft whisperings of the doctrine of meekness and mercy. He was conscious of a fierce wild thrill through his nerves and a throb of mad gladness at his heart, as his real human self burst for an instant the bonds of custom and of teaching which had held it so long. The socman sprang back, looking to left and to right for some stick or stone which might serve him for weapon; but finding none, he turned and ran at the top of his speed for the house, blowing the while upon a shrill whistle.\n\n\"Come!\" gasped the woman. \"Fly, friend, ere he come back.\"\n\n\"Nay, let him come!\" cried Alleyne. \"I shall not budge a foot for him or his dogs.\"\n\n\"Come, come!\" she cried, tugging at his arm. \"I know the man: he will kill you. Come, for the Virgin's sake, or for my sake, for I cannot go and leave you here.\"\n\n\"Come, then,\" said he; and they ran together to the cover of the woods. As they gained the edge of the brushwood, Alleyne, looking back, saw his brother come running out of the house again, with the sun gleaming upon his hair and his beard. He held something which flashed in his right hand, and he stooped at the threshold to unloose the black hound.\n\n\"This way!\" the woman whispered, in a low eager voice. \"Through the bushes to that forked ash. Do not heed me; I can run as fast as you, I trow. Now into the stream\u2014right in, over ankles, to throw the dog off, though I think it is but a common cur, like its master.\" As she spoke, she sprang herself into the shallow stream and ran swiftly up the centre of it, with the brown water bubbling over her feet and her hand outstretched toward the clinging branches of bramble or sapling. Alleyne followed close at her heels, with his mind in a whirl at this black welcome and sudden shifting of all his plans and hopes. Yet, grave as were his thoughts, they would still turn to wonder as he looked at the twinkling feet of his guide and saw her lithe figure bend this way and that, dipping under boughs, springing over stones, with a lightness and ease which made it no small task for him to keep up with her. At last, when he was almost out of breath, she suddenly threw herself down upon a mossy bank, between two holly-bushes, and looked ruefully at her own dripping feet and bedraggled skirt.\n\n\"Holy Mary!\" said she, \"what shall I do? Mother will keep me to my chamber for a month, and make me work at the tapestry of the nine bold knights. She promised as much last week, when I fell into Wilverley bog, and yet she knows that I cannot abide needlework.\"\n\nAlleyne, still standing in the stream, glanced down at the graceful pink-and-white figure, the curve of raven-black hair, and the proud, sensitive face which looked up frankly and confidingly at his own.\n\n\"We had best on,\" he said. \"He may yet overtake us.\"\n\n\"Not so. We are well off his land now, nor can he tell in this great wood which way we have taken. But you\u2014you had him at your mercy. Why did you not kill him?\"\n\n\"Kill him! My brother!\"\n\n\"And why not?\"\u2014with a quick gleam of her white teeth. \"He would have killed you. I know him, and I read it in his eyes. Had I had your staff I would have tried\u2014aye, and done it, too.\" She shook her clenched white hand as she spoke, and her lips tightened ominously.\n\n\"I am already sad in heart for what I have done,\" said he, sitting down on the bank, and sinking his face into his hands. \"God help me!\u2014all that is worst in me seemed to come uppermost. Another instant, and I had smitten him: the son of my own mother, the man whom I have longed to take to my heart. Alas! that I should still be so weak.\"\n\n\"Weak!\" she exclaimed, raising her black eyebrows. \"I do not think that even my father himself, who is a hard judge of manhood, would call you that. But it is, as you may think, sir, a very pleasant thing for me to hear that you are grieved at what you have done, and I can but rede that we should go back together, and you should make your peace with the Socman by handing back your prisoner. It is a sad thing that so small a thing as a woman should come between two who are of one blood.\"\n\nSimple Alleyne opened his eyes at this little spurt of feminine bitterness. \"Nay, lady,\" said he, \"that were worst of all. What man would be so caitiff and thrall as to fail you at your need? I have turned my brother against me, and now, alas! I appear to have given you offence also with my clumsy tongue. But, indeed, lady, I am torn both ways, and can scarce grasp in my mind what it is that has befallen.\"\n\n\"Nor can I marvel at that,\" said she, with a little tinkling laugh. \"You came in as the knight does in the jongleur's romances, between dragon and damsel, with small time for the asking of questions. Come,\" she went on, springing to her feet, and smoothing down her rumpled frock, \"let us walk through the shaw together, and we may come upon Bertrand with the horses. If poor Troubadour had not cast a shoe, we should not have had this trouble. Nay, I must have your arm: for, though I speak lightly, now that all is happily over I am as frightened as my brave Roland. See how his chest heaves, and his dear feathers all awry\u2014the little knight who would not have his lady mishandled.\" So she prattled on to her hawk, while Alleyne walked by her side, stealing a glance from time to time at this queenly and wayward woman. In silence they wandered together over the velvet turf and on through the broad Minstead woods, where the old lichen-draped beeches threw their circles of black shadow upon the sunlit sward.\n\n\"You have no wish, then, to hear my story?\" said she, at last.\n\n\"If it pleases you to tell it me,\" he answered.\n\n\"Oh!\" she cried tossing her head, \"if it is of so little interest to you, we had best let it bide.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said he eagerly, \"I would fain hear it.\"\n\n\"You have a right to know it, if you have lost a brother's favor through it. And yet\u2014\u2014Ah well, you are, as I understand, a clerk, so I must think of you as one step further in orders, and make you my father-confessor. Know then that this man has been a suitor for my hand, less as I think for my own sweet sake than because he hath ambition and had it on his mind that he might improve his fortunes by dipping into my father's strong box\u2014though the Virgin knows that he would have found little enough therein. My father, however, is a proud man, a gallant knight and tried soldier of the oldest blood, to whom this man's churlish birth and low descent\u2014\u2014Oh, lackaday! I had forgot that he was of the same strain as yourself.\"\n\n\"Nay, trouble not for that,\" said Alleyne, \"we are all from good mother Eve.\"\n\n\"Streams may spring from one source, and yet some be clear and some be foul,\" quoth she quickly. \"But, to be brief over the matter, my father would have none of his wooing, nor in sooth would I. On that he swore a vow against us, and as he is known to be a perilous man, with many outlaws and others at his back, my father forbade that I should hawk or hunt in any part of the wood to the north of the Christchurch road. As it chanced, however, this morning my little Roland here was loosed at a strong-winged heron, and page Bertrand and I rode on, with no thoughts but for the sport, until we found ourselves in Minstead woods. Small harm then, but that my horse Troubadour trod with a tender foot upon a sharp stick, rearing and throwing me to the ground. See to my gown, the third that I have befouled within the week. Woe worth me when Agatha the tire-woman sets eyes upon it!\"\n\n\"And what then, lady?\" asked Alleyne.\n\n\"Why, then away ran Troubadour, for belike I spurred him in falling, and Bertrand rode after him as hard as hoofs could bear him. When I rose there was the Socman himself by my side, with the news that I was on his land, but with so many courteous words besides, and such gallant bearing, that he prevailed upon me to come to his house for shelter, there to wait until the page return. By the grace of the Virgin and the help of my patron St. Magdalen, I stopped short ere I reached his door, though, as you saw, he strove to hale me up to it. And then\u2014ah-h-h-h!\"\u2014she shivered and chattered like one in an ague-fit.\n\n\"What is it?\" cried Alleyne, looking about in alarm.\n\n\"Nothing, friend, nothing! I was but thinking how I bit into his hand. Sooner would I bite living toad or poisoned snake. Oh, I shall loathe my lips forever! But you\u2014how brave you were, and how quick! How meek for yourself, and how bold for a stranger! If I were a man, I should wish to do what you have done.\"\n\n\"It was a small thing,\" he answered, with a tingle of pleasure at these sweet words of praise. \"But you\u2014what will you do?\"\n\n\"There is a great oak near here, and I think that Bertrand will bring the horses there, for it is an old hunting-tryst of ours. Then hey for home, and no more hawking to-day! A twelve-mile gallop will dry feet and skirt.\"\n\n\"But your father?\"\n\n\"Not one word shall I tell him. You do not know him; but I can tell you he is not a man to disobey as I have disobeyed him. He would avenge me, it is true, but it is not to him that I shall look for vengeance. Some day, perchance, in joust or in tourney, knight may wish to wear my colors, and then I shall tell him that if he does indeed crave my favor there is wrong unredressed, and the wronger the Socman of Minstead. So my knight shall find a venture such as bold knights love, and my debt shall be paid, and my father none the wiser, and one rogue the less in the world. Say, is not that a brave plan?\"\n\n\"Nay, lady, it is a thought which is unworthy of you. How can such as you speak of violence and of vengeance. Are none to be gentle and kind, none to be piteous and forgiving? Alas! it is a hard, cruel world, and I would that I had never left my abbey cell. To hear such words from your lips is as though I heard an angel of grace preaching the devil's own creed.\"\n\nShe started from him as a young colt who first feels the bit. \"Gramercy for your rede, young sir!\" she said, with a little curtsey. \"As I understand your words, you are grieved that you ever met me, and look upon me as a preaching devil. Why, my father is a bitter man when he is wroth, but hath never called me such a name as that. It may be his right and duty, but certes it is none of thine. So it would be best, since you think so lowly of me, that you should take this path to the left while I keep on upon this one; for it is clear that I can be no fit companion for you.\" So saying, with downcast lids and a dignity which was somewhat marred by her bedraggled skirt, she swept off down the muddy track, leaving Alleyne standing staring ruefully after her. He waited in vain for some backward glance or sign of relenting, but she walked on with a rigid neck until her dress was only a white flutter among the leaves. Then, with a sunken head and a heavy heart, he plodded wearily down the other path, wroth with himself for the rude and uncouth tongue which had given offence where so little was intended.\n\nHe had gone some way, lost in doubt and in self-reproach, his mind all tremulous with a thousand new-found thoughts and fears and wonderments, when of a sudden there was a light rustle of the leaves behind him, and, glancing round, there was this graceful, swift-footed creature, treading in his very shadow, with her proud head bowed, even as his was\u2014the picture of humility and repentance.\n\n\"I shall not vex you, nor even speak,\" she said; \"but I would fain keep with you while we are in the wood.\"\n\n\"Nay, you cannot vex me,\" he answered, all warm again at the very sight of her. \"It was my rough words which vexed you; but I have been thrown among men all my life, and indeed, with all the will, I scarce know how to temper my speech to a lady's ear.\"\n\n\"Then unsay it,\" cried she quickly; \"say that I was right to wish to have vengeance on the Socman.\"\n\n\"Nay, I cannot do that,\" he answered gravely.\n\n\"Then who is ungentle and unkind now?\" she cried in triumph. \"How stern and cold you are for one so young! Art surely no mere clerk, but bishop or cardinal at the least. Shouldst have crozier for staff and mitre for cap. Well, well, for your sake I will forgive the Socman and take vengeance on none but on my own wilful self who must needs run into danger's path. So will that please you, sir?\"\n\n\"There spoke your true self,\" said he; \"and you will find more pleasure in such forgiveness than in any vengeance.\"\n\nShe shook her head, as if by no means assured of it, and then with a sudden little cry, which had more of surprise than of joy in it, \"Here is Bertrand with the horses!\"\n\nDown the glade there came a little green-clad page with laughing eyes, and long curls floating behind him. He sat perched on a high bay horse, and held on to the bridle of a spirited black palfrey, the hides of both glistening from a long run.\n\n\"I have sought you everywhere, dear Lady Maude,\" said he in a piping voice, springing down from his horse and holding the stirrup. \"Troubadour galloped as far as Holmhill ere I could catch him. I trust that you have had no hurt or scath?\" He shot a questioning glance at Alleyne as he spoke.\n\n\"No, Bertrand,\" said she, \"thanks to this courteous stranger. And now, sir,\" she continued, springing into her saddle, \"it is not fit that I leave you without a word more. Clerk or no, you have acted this day as becomes a true knight. King Arthur and all his table could not have done more. It may be that, as some small return, my father or his kin may have power to advance your interest. He is not rich, but he is honored and hath great friends. Tell me what is your purpose, and see if he may not aid it.\"\n\n\"Alas! lady, I have now no purpose. I have but two friends in the world, and they have gone to Christchurch, where it is likely I shall join them.\"\n\n\"And where is Christchurch?\"\n\n\"At the castle which is held by the brave knight, Sir Nigel Loring, constable to the Earl of Salisbury.\"\n\nTo his surprise she burst out a-laughing, and, spurring her palfrey, dashed off down the glade, with her page riding behind her. Not one word did she say, but as she vanished amid the trees she half turned in her saddle and waved a last greeting. Long time he stood, half hoping that she might again come back to him; but the thud of the hoofs had died away, and there was no sound in all the woods but the gentle rustle and dropping of the leaves. At last he turned away and made his way back to the high-road\u2014another person from the light-hearted boy who had left it a short three hours before." + }, + { + "title": "HOW HORDLE JOHN FOUND A MAN WHOM HE MIGHT FOLLOW.", + "text": "If he might not return to Beaulieu within the year, and if his brother's dogs were to be set upon him if he showed face upon Minstead land, then indeed he was adrift upon earth. North, south, east, and west\u2014he might turn where he would, but all was equally chill and cheerless. The Abbot had rolled ten silver crowns in a lettuce-leaf and hid them away in the bottom of his scrip, but that would be a sorry support for twelve long months. In all the darkness there was but the one bright spot of the sturdy comrades whom he had left that morning; if he could find them again all would be well. The afternoon was not very advanced, for all that had befallen him. When a man is afoot at cock-crow much may be done in the day. If he walked fast he might yet overtake his friends ere they reached their destination. He pushed on therefore, now walking and now running. As he journeyed he bit into a crust which remained from his Beaulieu bread, and he washed it down by a draught from a woodland stream.\n\nIt was no easy or light thing to journey through this great forest, which was some twenty miles from east to west and a good sixteen from Bramshaw Woods in the north to Lymington in the south. Alleyne, however, had the good fortune to fall in with a woodman, axe upon shoulder, trudging along in the very direction that he wished to go. With his guidance he passed the fringe of Bolderwood Walk, famous for old ash and yew, through Mark Ash with its giant beech-trees, and on through the Knightwood groves, where the giant oak was already a great tree, but only one of many comely brothers. They plodded along together, the woodman and Alleyne, with little talk on either side, for their thoughts were as far asunder as the poles. The peasant's gossip had been of the hunt, of the bracken, of the gray-headed kites that had nested in Wood Fidley, and of the great catch of herring brought back by the boats of Pitt's Deep. The clerk's mind was on his brother, on his future\u2014above all on this strange, fierce, melting, beautiful woman who had broken so suddenly into his life, and as suddenly passed out of it again. So distrait was he and so random his answers, that the woodman took to whistling, and soon branched off upon the track to Burley, leaving Alleyne upon the main Christchurch road.\n\nDown this he pushed as fast as he might, hoping at every turn and rise to catch sight of his companions of the morning. From Vinney Ridge to Rhinefield Walk the woods grow thick and dense up to the very edges of the track, but beyond the country opens up into broad dun-colored moors, flecked with clumps of trees, and topping each other in long, low curves up to the dark lines of forest in the furthest distance. Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies. Once a white-necked sea eagle soared screaming high over the traveller's head, and again a flock of brown bustards popped up from among the bracken, and blundered away in their clumsy fashion, half running, half flying, with strident cry and whirr of wings.\n\nThere were folk, too, to be met upon the road\u2014beggars and couriers, chapmen and tinkers\u2014cheery fellows for the most part, with a rough jest and homely greeting for each other and for Alleyne. Near Shotwood he came upon five seamen, on their way from Poole to Southampton\u2014rude red-faced men, who shouted at him in a jargon which he could scarce understand, and held out to him a great pot from which they had been drinking\u2014nor would they let him pass until he had dipped pannikin in and taken a mouthful, which set him coughing and choking, with the tears running down his cheeks. Further on he met a sturdy black-bearded man, mounted on a brown horse, with a rosary in his right hand and a long two-handed sword jangling against his stirrup-iron. By his black robe and the eight-pointed cross upon his sleeve, Alleyne recognized him as one of the Knights Hospitallers of St. John of Jerusalem, whose presbytery was at Baddesley. He held up two fingers as he passed, with a \"Benedic, fili mi!\" whereat Alleyne doffed hat and bent knee, looking with much reverence at one who had devoted his life to the overthrow of the infidel. Poor simple lad! he had not learned yet that what men are and what men profess to be are very wide asunder, and that the Knights of St. John, having come into large part of the riches of the ill-fated Templars, were very much too comfortable to think of exchanging their palace for a tent, or the cellars of England for the thirsty deserts of Syria. Yet ignorance may be more precious than wisdom, for Alleyne as he walked on braced himself to a higher life by the thought of this other's sacrifice, and strengthened himself by his example which he could scarce have done had he known that the Hospitaller's mind ran more upon malmsey than on Mamelukes, and on venison rather than victories.\n\nAs he pressed on the plain turned to woods once more in the region of Wilverley Walk, and a cloud swept up from the south with the sun shining through the chinks of it. A few great drops came pattering loudly down, and then in a moment the steady swish of a brisk shower, with the dripping and dropping of the leaves. Alleyne, glancing round for shelter, saw a thick and lofty holly-bush, so hollowed out beneath that no house could have been drier. Under this canopy of green two men were already squatted, who waved their hands to Alleyne that he should join them. As he approached he saw that they had five dried herrings laid out in front of them, with a great hunch of wheaten bread and a leathern flask full of milk, but instead of setting to at their food they appeared to have forgot all about it, and were disputing together with flushed faces and angry gestures. It was easy to see by their dress and manner that they were two of those wandering students who formed about this time so enormous a multitude in every country in Europe. The one was long and thin, with melancholy features, while the other was fat and sleek, with a loud voice and the air of a man who is not to be gainsaid.\n\n\"Come hither, good youth,\" he cried, \"come hither! Vultus ingenui puer. Heed not the face of my good coz here. Foenum habet in cornu, as Don Horace has it; but I warrant him harmless for all that.\"\n\n\"Stint your bull's bellowing!\" exclaimed the other. \"If it come to Horace, I have a line in my mind: Loquaces si sapiat\u2014\u2014How doth it run? The English o't being that a man of sense should ever avoid a great talker. That being so, if all were men of sense then thou wouldst be a lonesome man, coz.\"\n\n\"Alas! Dicon, I fear that your logic is as bad as your philosophy or your divinity\u2014and God wot it would be hard to say a worse word than that for it. For, hark ye: granting, propter argumentum, that I am a talker, then the true reasoning runs that since all men of sense should avoid me, and thou hast not avoided me, but art at the present moment eating herrings with me under a holly-bush, ergo you are no man of sense, which is exactly what I have been dinning into your long ears ever since I first clapped eyes on your sunken chops.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut!\" cried the other. \"Your tongue goes like the clapper of a mill-wheel. Sit down here, friend, and partake of this herring. Understand first, however, that there are certain conditions attached to it.\"\n\n\"I had hoped,\" said Alleyne, falling into the humor of the twain, \"that a tranchoir of bread and a draught of milk might be attached to it.\"\n\n\"Hark to him, hark to him!\" cried the little fat man. \"It is even thus, Dicon! Wit, lad, is a catching thing, like the itch or the sweating sickness. I exude it round me; it is an aura. I tell you, coz, that no man can come within seventeen feet of me without catching a spark. Look at your own case. A duller man never stepped, and yet within the week you have said three things which might pass, and one thing the day we left Fordingbridge which I should not have been ashamed of myself.\"\n\n\"Enough, rattle-pate, enough!\" said the other. \"The milk you shall have and the bread also, friend, together with the herring, but you must hold the scales between us.\"\n\n\"If he hold the herring he holds the scales, my sapient brother,\" cried the fat man. \"But I pray you, good youth, to tell us whether you are a learned clerk, and, if so, whether you have studied at Oxenford or at Paris.\"\n\n\"I have some small stock of learning,\" Alleyne answered, picking at his herring, \"but I have been at neither of these places. I was bred amongst the Cistercian monks at Beaulieu Abbey.\"\n\n\"Pooh, pooh!\" they cried both together. \"What sort of an upbringing is that?\"\n\n\"Non cuivis contingit adire Corinthum,\" quoth Alleyne.\n\n\"Come, brother Stephen, he hath some tincture of letters,\" said the melancholy man more hopefully. \"He may be the better judge, since he hath no call to side with either of us. Now, attention, friend, and let your ears work as well as your nether jaw. Judex damnatur\u2014you know the old saw. Here am I upholding the good fame of the learned Duns Scotus against the foolish quibblings and poor silly reasonings of Willie Ockham.\"\n\n\"While I,\" quoth the other loudly, \"do maintain the good sense and extraordinary wisdom of that most learned William against the crack-brained fantasies of the muddy Scotchman, who hath hid such little wit as he has under so vast a pile of words, that it is like one drop of Gascony in a firkin of ditch-water. Solomon his wisdom would not suffice to say what the rogue means.\"\n\n\"Certes, Stephen Hapgood, his wisdom doth not suffice,\" cried the other. \"It is as though a mole cried out against the morning star, because he could not see it. But our dispute, friend, is concerning the nature of that subtle essence which we call thought. For I hold with the learned Scotus that thought is in very truth a thing, even as vapor or fumes, or many other substances which our gross bodily eyes are blind to. For, look you, that which produces a thing must be itself a thing, and if a man's thought may produce a written book, then must thought itself be a material thing, even as the book is. Have I expressed it? Do I make it plain?\"\n\n\"Whereas I hold,\" shouted the other, \"with my revered preceptor, doctor, praeclarus et excellentissimus, that all things are but thought; for when thought is gone I prythee where are the things then? Here are trees about us, and I see them because I think I see them, but if I have swooned, or sleep, or am in wine, then, my thought having gone forth from me, lo the trees go forth also. How now, coz, have I touched thee on the raw?\"\n\nAlleyne sat between them munching his bread, while the twain disputed across his knees, leaning forward with flushed faces and darting hands, in all the heat of argument. Never had he heard such jargon of scholastic philosophy, such fine-drawn distinctions, such cross-fire of major and minor, proposition, syllogism, attack and refutation. Question clattered upon answer like a sword on a buckler. The ancients, the fathers of the Church, the moderns, the Scriptures, the Arabians, were each sent hurtling against the other, while the rain still dripped and the dark holly-leaves glistened with the moisture. At last the fat man seemed to weary of it, for he set to work quietly upon his meal, while his opponent, as proud as the rooster who is left unchallenged upon the midden, crowed away in a last long burst of quotation and deduction. Suddenly, however, his eyes dropped upon his food, and he gave a howl of dismay.\n\n\"You double thief!\" he cried, \"you have eaten my herrings, and I without bite or sup since morning.\"\n\n\"That,\" quoth the other complacently, \"was my final argument, my crowning effort, or peroratio, as the orators have it. For, coz, since all thoughts are things, you have but to think a pair of herrings, and then conjure up a pottle of milk wherewith to wash them down.\"\n\n\"A brave piece of reasoning,\" cried the other, \"and I know of but one reply to it.\" On which, leaning forward, he caught his comrade a rousing smack across his rosy cheek. \"Nay, take it not amiss,\" he said, \"since all things are but thoughts, then that also is but a thought and may be disregarded.\"\n\nThis last argument, however, by no means commended itself to the pupil of Ockham, who plucked a great stick from the ground and signified his dissent by smiting the realist over the pate with it. By good fortune, the wood was so light and rotten that it went to a thousand splinters, but Alleyne thought it best to leave the twain to settle the matter at their leisure, the more so as the sun was shining brightly once more. Looking back down the pool-strewn road, he saw the two excited philosophers waving their hands and shouting at each other, but their babble soon became a mere drone in the distance, and a turn in the road hid them from his sight.\n\nAnd now after passing Holmesley Walk and the Wooton Heath, the forest began to shred out into scattered belts of trees, with gleam of cornfield and stretch of pasture-land between. Here and there by the wayside stood little knots of wattle-and-daub huts with shock-haired laborers lounging by the doors and red-cheeked children sprawling in the roadway. Back among the groves he could see the high gable ends and thatched roofs of the franklins' houses, on whose fields these men found employment, or more often a thick dark column of smoke marked their position and hinted at the coarse plenty within. By these signs Alleyne knew that he was on the very fringe of the forest, and therefore no great way from Christchurch. The sun was lying low in the west and shooting its level rays across the long sweep of rich green country, glinting on the white-fleeced sheep and throwing long shadows from the red kine who waded knee-deep in the juicy clover. Right glad was the traveller to see the high tower of Christchurch Priory gleaming in the mellow evening light, and gladder still when, on rounding a corner, he came upon his comrades of the morning seated astraddle upon a fallen tree. They had a flat space before them, on which they alternately threw little square pieces of bone, and were so intent upon their occupation that they never raised eye as he approached them. He observed with astonishment, as he drew near, that the archer's bow was on John's back, the archer's sword by John's side, and the steel cap laid upon the tree-trunk between them.\n\n\"Mort de ma vie!\" Aylward shouted, looking down at the dice. \"Never had I such cursed luck. A murrain on the bones! I have not thrown a good main since I left Navarre. A one and a three! En avant, camarade!\"\n\n\"Four and three,\" cried Hordle John, counting on his great fingers, \"that makes seven. Ho, archer, I have thy cap! Now have at thee for thy jerkin!\"\n\n\"Mon Dieu!\" he growled, \"I am like to reach Christchurch in my shirt.\" Then suddenly glancing up, \"Hola, by the splendor of heaven, here is our cher petit! Now, by my ten finger bones! this is a rare sight to mine eyes.\" He sprang up and threw his arms round Alleyne's neck, while John, no less pleased, but more backward and Saxon in his habits, stood grinning and bobbing by the wayside, with his newly won steel cap stuck wrong side foremost upon his tangle of red hair.\n\n\"Hast come to stop?\" cried the bowman, patting Alleyne all over in his delight. \"Shall not get away from us again!\"\n\n\"I wish no better,\" said he, with a pringling in the eyes at this hearty greeting.\n\n\"Well said, lad!\" cried big John. \"We three shall to the wars together, and the devil may fly away with the Abbot of Beaulieu! But your feet and hosen are all besmudged. Hast been in the water, or I am the more mistaken.\"\n\n\"I have in good sooth,\" Alleyne answered, and then as they journeyed on their way he told them the many things that had befallen him, his meeting with the villein, his sight of the king, his coming upon his brother, with all the tale of the black welcome and of the fair damsel. They strode on either side, each with an ear slanting towards him, but ere he had come to the end of his story the bowman had spun round upon his heel, and was hastening back the way they had come, breathing loudly through his nose.\n\n\"What then?\" asked Alleyne, trotting after him and gripping at his jerkin.\n\n\"I am back for Minstead, lad.\"\n\n\"And why, in the name of sense?\"\n\n\"To thrust a handful of steel into the Socman. What! hale a demoiselle against her will, and then loose dogs at his own brother! Let me go!\"\n\n\"Nenny, nenny!\" cried Alleyne, laughing. \"There was no scath done. Come back, friend\"\u2014and so, by mingled pushing and entreaties, they got his head round for Christchurch once more. Yet he walked with his chin upon his shoulder, until, catching sight of a maiden by a wayside well, the smiles came back to his face and peace to his heart.\n\n\"But you,\" said Alleyne, \"there have been changes with you also. Why should not the workman carry his tools? Where are bow and sword and cap\u2014and why so warlike, John?\"\n\n\"It is a game which friend Aylward hath been a-teaching of me.\"\n\n\"And I found him an over-apt pupil,\" grumbled the bowman. \"He hath stripped me as though I had fallen into the hands of the tardvenus. But, by my hilt! you must render them back to me, camarade, lest you bring discredit upon my mission, and I will pay you for them at armorers' prices.\"\n\n\"Take them back, man, and never heed the pay,\" said John. \"I did but wish to learn the feel of them, since I am like to have such trinkets hung to my own girdle for some years to come.\"\n\n\"Ma foi, he was born for a free companion!\" cried Aylward, \"He hath the very trick of speech and turn of thought. I take them back then, and indeed it gives me unease not to feel my yew-stave tapping against my leg bone. But see, mes garcons, on this side of the church rises the square and darkling tower of Earl Salisbury's castle, and even from here I seem to see on yonder banner the red roebuck of the Montacutes.\"\n\n\"Red upon white,\" said Alleyne, shading his eyes; \"but whether roebuck or no is more than I could vouch. How black is the great tower, and how bright the gleam of arms upon the wall! See below the flag, how it twinkles like a star!\"\n\n\"Aye, it is the steel headpiece of the watchman,\" remarked the archer. \"But we must on, if we are to be there before the drawbridge rises at the vespers bugle; for it is likely that sir Nigel, being so renowned a soldier, may keep hard discipline within the walls, and let no man enter after sundown.\" So saying, he quickened his pace, and the three comrades were soon close to the straggling and broad-spread town which centered round the noble church and the frowning castle.\n\nIt chanced on that very evening that Sir Nigel Loring, having supped before sunset, as was his custom, and having himself seen that Pommers and Cadsand, his two warhorses, with the thirteen hacks, the five jennets, my lady's three palfreys, and the great dapple-gray roussin, had all their needs supplied, had taken his dogs for an evening breather. Sixty or seventy of them, large and small, smooth and shaggy\u2014deer-hound, boar-hound, blood-hound, wolf-hound, mastiff, alaun, talbot, lurcher, terrier, spaniel\u2014snapping, yelling and whining, with score of lolling tongues and waving tails, came surging down the narrow lane which leads from the Twynham kennels to the bank of Avon. Two russet-clad varlets, with loud halloo and cracking whips, walked thigh-deep amid the swarm, guiding, controlling, and urging. Behind came Sir Nigel himself, with Lady Loring upon his arm, the pair walking slowly and sedately, as befitted both their age and their condition, while they watched with a smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout against the tawny gravel.\n\nSir Nigel was a slight man of poor stature, with soft lisping voice and gentle ways. So short was he that his wife, who was no very tall woman, had the better of him by the breadth of three fingers. His sight having been injured in his early wars by a basketful of lime which had been emptied over him when he led the Earl of Derby's stormers up the breach at Bergerac, he had contracted something of a stoop, with a blinking, peering expression of face. His age was six and forty, but the constant practice of arms, together with a cleanly life, had preserved his activity and endurance unimpaired, so that from a distance he seemed to have the slight limbs and swift grace of a boy. His face, however, was tanned of a dull yellow tint, with a leathery, poreless look, which spoke of rough outdoor doings, and the little pointed beard which he wore, in deference to the prevailing fashion, was streaked and shot with gray. His features were small, delicate, and regular, with clear-cut, curving nose, and eyes which jutted forward from the lids. His dress was simple and yet spruce. A Flandrish hat of beevor, bearing in the band the token of Our Lady of Embrun, was drawn low upon the left side to hide that ear which had been partly shorn from his head by a Flemish man-at-arms in a camp broil before Tournay. His cote-hardie, or tunic, and trunk-hosen were of a purple plum color, with long weepers which hung from either sleeve to below his knees. His shoes were of red leather, daintily pointed at the toes, but not yet prolonged to the extravagant lengths which the succeeding reign was to bring into fashion. A gold-embroidered belt of knighthood encircled his loins, with his arms, five roses gules on a field argent, cunningly worked upon the clasp. So stood Sir Nigel Loring upon the bridge of Avon, and talked lightly with his lady.\n\nAnd, certes, had the two visages alone been seen, and the stranger been asked which were the more likely to belong to the bold warrior whose name was loved by the roughest soldiery of Europe, he had assuredly selected the lady's. Her face was large and square and red, with fierce, thick brows, and the eyes of one who was accustomed to rule. Taller and broader than her husband, her flowing gown of sendall, and fur-lined tippet, could not conceal the gaunt and ungraceful outlines of her figure. It was the age of martial women. The deeds of black Agnes of Dunbar, of Lady Salisbury and of the Countess of Montfort, were still fresh in the public minds. With such examples before them the wives of the English captains had become as warlike as their mates, and ordered their castles in their absence with the prudence and discipline of veteran seneschals. Right easy were the Montacutes of their Castle of Twynham, and little had they to dread from roving galley or French squadron, while Lady Mary Loring had the ordering of it. Yet even in that age it was thought that, though a lady might have a soldier's heart, it was scarce as well that she should have a soldier's face. There were men who said that of all the stern passages and daring deeds by which Sir Nigel Loring had proved the true temper of his courage, not the least was his wooing and winning of so forbidding a dame.\n\n\"I tell you, my fair lord,\" she was saying, \"that it is no fit training for a demoiselle: hawks and hounds, rotes and citoles singing a French rondel, or reading the Gestes de Doon de Mayence, as I found her yesternight, pretending sleep, the artful, with the corner of the scroll thrusting forth from under her pillow. Lent her by Father Christopher of the priory, forsooth\u2014that is ever her answer. How shall all this help her when she has castle of her own to keep, with a hundred mouths all agape for beef and beer?\"\n\n\"True, my sweet bird, true,\" answered the knight, picking a comfit from his gold drageoir. \"The maid is like the young filly, which kicks heels and plunges for very lust of life. Give her time, dame, give her time.\"\n\n\"Well, I know that my father would have given me, not time, but a good hazel-stick across my shoulders. Ma foi! I know not what the world is coming to, when young maids may flout their elders. I wonder that you do not correct her, my fair lord.\"\n\n\"Nay, my heart's comfort, I never raised hand to woman yet, and it would be a passing strange thing if I began on my own flesh and blood. It was a woman's hand which cast this lime into mine eyes, and though I saw her stoop, and might well have stopped her ere she threw, I deemed it unworthy of my knighthood to hinder or balk one of her sex.\"\n\n\"The hussy!\" cried Lady Loring clenching her broad right hand. \"I would I had been at the side of her!\"\n\n\"And so would I, since you would have been the nearer me my own. But I doubt not that you are right, and that Maude's wings need clipping, which I may leave in your hands when I am gone, for, in sooth, this peaceful life is not for me, and were it not for your gracious kindness and loving care I could not abide it a week. I hear that there is talk of warlike muster at Bordeaux once more, and by St. Paul! it would be a new thing if the lions of England and the red pile of Chandos were to be seen in the field, and the roses of Loring were not waving by their side.\"\n\n\"Now woe worth me but I feared it!\" cried she, with the color all struck from her face. \"I have noted your absent mind, your kindling eye, your trying and riveting of old harness. Consider my sweet lord, that you have already won much honor, that we have seen but little of each other, that you bear upon your body the scar of over twenty wounds received in I know not how many bloody encounters. Have you not done enough for honor and the public cause?\"\n\n\"My lady, when our liege lord, the king, at three score years, and my Lord Chandos at three-score and ten, are blithe and ready to lay lance in rest for England's cause, it would ill be-seem me to prate of service done. It is sooth that I have received seven and twenty wounds. There is the more reason that I should be thankful that I am still long of breath and sound in limb. I have also seen some bickering and scuffling. Six great land battles I count, with four upon sea, and seven and fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments. I have held two and twenty towns, and I have been at the intaking of thirty-one. Surely then it would be bitter shame to me, and also to you, since my fame is yours, that I should now hold back if a man's work is to be done. Besides, bethink you how low is our purse, with bailiff and reeve ever croaking of empty farms and wasting lands. Were it not for this constableship which the Earl of Salisbury hath bestowed upon us we could scarce uphold the state which is fitting to our degree. Therefore, my sweeting, there is the more need that I should turn to where there is good pay to be earned and brave ransoms to be won.\"\n\n\"Ah, my dear lord,\" quoth she, with sad, weary eyes. \"I thought that at last I had you to mine own self, even though your youth had been spent afar from my side. Yet my voice, as I know well, should speed you on to glory and renown, not hold you back when fame is to be won. Yet what can I say, for all men know that your valor needs the curb and not the spur. It goes to my heart that you should ride forth now a mere knight bachelor, when there is no noble in the land who hath so good a claim to the square pennon, save only that you have not the money to uphold it.\"\n\n\"And whose fault that, my sweet bird?\" said he.\n\n\"No fault, my fair lord, but a virtue: for how many rich ransoms have you won, and yet have scattered the crowns among page and archer and varlet, until in a week you had not as much as would buy food and forage. It is a most knightly largesse, and yet withouten money how can man rise?\"\n\n\"Dirt and dross!\" cried he.\n\n\"What matter rise or fall, so that duty be done and honor gained. Banneret or bachelor, square pennon or forked, I would not give a denier for the difference, and the less since Sir John Chandos, chosen flower of English chivalry, is himself but a humble knight. But meanwhile fret not thyself, my heart's dove, for it is like that there may be no war waged, and we must await the news. But here are three strangers, and one, as I take it, a soldier fresh from service. It is likely that he may give us word of what is stirring over the water.\"\n\nLady Loring, glancing up, saw in the fading light three companions walking abreast down the road, all gray with dust, and stained with travel, yet chattering merrily between themselves. He in the midst was young and comely, with boyish open face and bright gray eyes, which glanced from right to left as though he found the world around him both new and pleasing. To his right walked a huge red-headed man, with broad smile and merry twinkle, whose clothes seemed to be bursting and splitting at every seam, as though he were some lusty chick who was breaking bravely from his shell. On the other side, with his knotted hand upon the young man's shoulder, came a stout and burly archer, brown and fierce eyed, with sword at belt and long yellow yew-stave peeping over his shoulder. Hard face, battered head piece, dinted brigandine, with faded red lion of St. George ramping on a discolored ground, all proclaimed as plainly as words that he was indeed from the land of war. He looked keenly at Sir Nigel as he approached, and then, plunging his hand under his breastplate, he stepped up to him with a rough, uncouth bow to the lady.\n\n\"Your pardon, fair sir,\" said he, \"but I know you the moment I clap eyes on you, though in sooth I have seen you oftener in steel than in velvet. I have drawn string besides you at La Roche-d'Errien, Romorantin, Maupertuis, Nogent, Auray, and other places.\"\n\n\"Then, good archer, I am right glad to welcome you to Twynham Castle, and in the steward's room you will find provant for yourself and comrades. To me also your face is known, though mine eyes play such tricks with me that I can scarce be sure of my own squire. Rest awhile, and you shall come to the hall anon and tell us what is passing in France, for I have heard that it is likely that our pennons may flutter to the south of the great Spanish mountains ere another year be passed.\"\n\n\"There was talk of it in Bordeaux,\" answered the archer, \"and I saw myself that the armorers and smiths were as busy as rats in a wheat-rick. But I bring you this letter from the valiant Gascon knight, Sir Claude Latour. And to you, Lady,\" he added after a pause, \"I bring from him this box of red sugar of Narbonne, with every courteous and knightly greeting which a gallant cavalier may make to a fair and noble dame.\"\n\nThis little speech had cost the blunt bowman much pains and planning; but he might have spared his breath, for the lady was quite as much absorbed as her lord in the letter, which they held between them, a hand on either corner, spelling it out very slowly, with drawn brows and muttering lips. As they read it, Alleyne, who stood with Hordle John a few paces back from their comrade, saw the lady catch her breath, while the knight laughed softly to himself.\n\n\"You see, dear heart,\" said he, \"that they will not leave the old dog in his kennel when the game is afoot. And what of this White Company, archer?\"\n\n\"Ah, sir, you speak of dogs,\" cried Aylward; \"but there are a pack of lusty hounds who are ready for any quarry, if they have but a good huntsman to halloo them on. Sir, we have been in the wars together, and I have seen many a brave following but never such a set of woodland boys as this. They do but want you at their head, and who will bar the way to them!\"\n\n\"Pardieu!\" said Sir Nigel, \"if they are all like their messenger, they are indeed men of whom a leader may be proud. Your name, good archer?\"\n\n\"Sam Aylward, sir, of the Hundred of Easebourne and the Rape of Chichester.\"\n\n\"And this giant behind you?\"\n\n\"He is big John, of Hordle, a forest man, who hath now taken service in the Company.\"\n\n\"A proper figure of a man at-arms,\" said the little knight. \"Why, man, you are no chicken, yet I warrant him the stronger man. See to that great stone from the coping which hath fallen upon the bridge. Four of my lazy varlets strove this day to carry it hence. I would that you two could put them to shame by budging it, though I fear that I overtask you, for it is of a grievous weight.\"\n\nHe pointed as he spoke to a huge rough-hewn block which lay by the roadside, deep sunken from its own weight in the reddish earth. The archer approached it, rolling back the sleeves of his jerkin, but with no very hopeful countenance, for indeed it was a mighty rock. John, however, put him aside with his left hand, and, stooping over the stone, he plucked it single-handed from its soft bed and swung it far into the stream. There it fell with mighty splash, one jagged end peaking out above the surface, while the waters bubbled and foamed with far-circling eddy.\n\n\"Good lack!\" cried Sir Nigel, and \"Good lack!\" cried his lady, while John stood laughing and wiping the caked dirt from his fingers.\n\n\"I have felt his arms round my ribs,\" said the bowman, \"and they crackle yet at the thought of it. This other comrade of mine is a right learned clerk, for all that he is so young, hight Alleyne, the son of Edric, brother to the Socman of Minstead.\"\n\n\"Young man,\" quoth Sir Nigel, sternly, \"if you are of the same way of thought as your brother, you may not pass under portcullis of mine.\"\n\n\"Nay, fair sir,\" cried Aylward hastily, \"I will be pledge for it that they have no thought in common; for this very day his brother hath set his dogs upon him, and driven him from his lands.\"\n\n\"And are you, too, of the White Company?\" asked Sir Nigel. \"Hast had small experience of war, if I may judge by your looks and bearing.\"\n\n\"I would fain to France with my friends here,\" Alleyne answered; \"but I am a man of peace\u2014a reader, exorcist, acolyte, and clerk.\"\n\n\"That need not hinder,\" quoth Sir Nigel.\n\n\"No, fair sir,\" cried the bowman joyously. \"Why, I myself have served two terms with Arnold de Cervolles, he whom they called the archpriest. By my hilt! I have seen him ere now, with monk's gown trussed to his knees, over his sandals in blood in the forefront of the battle. Yet, ere the last string had twanged, he would be down on his four bones among the stricken, and have them all houseled and shriven, as quick as shelling peas. Ma foi! there were those who wished that he would have less care for their souls and a little more for their bodies!\"\n\n\"It is well to have a learned clerk in every troop,\" said Sir Nigel. \"By St. Paul, there are men so caitiff that they think more of a scrivener's pen than of their lady's smile, and do their devoir in hopes that they may fill a line in a chronicle or make a tag to a jongleur's romance. I remember well that, at the siege of Retters, there was a little, sleek, fat clerk of the name of Chaucer, who was so apt at rondel, sirvente, or tonson, that no man dare give back a foot from the walls, lest he find it all set down in his rhymes and sung by every underling and varlet in the camp. But, my soul's bird, you hear me prate as though all were decided, when I have not yet taken counsel either with you or with my lady mother. Let us to the chamber, while these strangers find such fare as pantry and cellar may furnish.\"\n\n\"The night air strikes chill,\" said the lady, and turned down the road with her hand upon her lord's arm. The three comrades dropped behind and followed: Aylward much the lighter for having accomplished his mission, Alleyne full of wonderment at the humble bearing of so renowned a captain, and John loud with snorts and sneers, which spoke his disappointment and contempt.\n\n\"What ails the man?\" asked Aylward in surprise.\n\n\"I have been cozened and bejaped,\" quoth he gruffly.\n\n\"By whom, Sir Samson the strong?\"\n\n\"By thee, Sir Balaam the false prophet.\"\n\n\"By my hilt!\" cried the archer, \"I though I be not Balaam, yet I hold converse with the very creature that spake to him. What is amiss, then, and how have I played you false?\"\n\n\"Why, marry, did you not say, and Alleyne here will be my witness, that, if I would hie to the wars with you, you would place me under a leader who was second to none in all England for valor? Yet here you bring me to a shred of a man, peaky and ill-nourished, with eyes like a moulting owl, who must needs, forsooth, take counsel with his mother ere he buckle sword to girdle.\"\n\n\"Is that where the shoe galls?\" cried the bowman, and laughed aloud. \"I will ask you what you think of him three months hence, if we be all alive; for sure I am that\u2014\u2014\"\n\nAylward's words were interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub which broke out that instant some little way down the street in the direction of the Priory. There was deep-mouthed shouting of men, frightened shrieks of women, howling and barking of curs, and over all a sullen, thunderous rumble, indescribably menacing and terrible. Round the corner of the narrow street there came rushing a brace of whining dogs with tails tucked under their legs, and after them a white-faced burgher, with outstretched hands and widespread fingers, his hair all abristle and his eyes glinting back from one shoulder to the other, as though some great terror were at his very heels. \"Fly, my lady, fly!\" he screeched, and whizzed past them like bolt from bow; while close behind came lumbering a huge black bear, with red tongue lolling from his mouth, and a broken chain jangling behind him. To right and left the folk flew for arch and doorway. Hordle John caught up the Lady Loring as though she had been a feather, and sprang with her into an open porch; while Aylward, with a whirl of French oaths, plucked at his quiver and tried to unsling his bow. Alleyne, all unnerved at so strange and unwonted a sight, shrunk up against the wall with his eyes fixed upon the frenzied creature, which came bounding along with ungainly speed, looking the larger in the uncertain light, its huge jaws agape, with blood and slaver trickling to the ground. Sir Nigel alone, unconscious to all appearance of the universal panic, walked with unfaltering step up the centre of the road, a silken handkerchief in one hand and his gold comfit-box in the other. It sent the blood cold through Alleyne's veins to see that as they came together\u2014the man and the beast\u2014the creature reared up, with eyes ablaze with fear and hate, and whirled its great paws above the knight to smite him to the earth. He, however, blinking with puckered eyes, reached up his kerchief, and flicked the beast twice across the snout with it. \"Ah, saucy! saucy,\" quoth he, with gentle chiding; on which the bear, uncertain and puzzled, dropped its four legs to earth again, and, waddling back, was soon swathed in ropes by the bearward and a crowd of peasants who had been in close pursuit.\n\nA scared man was the keeper; for, having chained the brute to a stake while he drank a stoup of ale at the inn, it had been baited by stray curs, until, in wrath and madness, it had plucked loose the chain, and smitten or bitten all who came in its path. Most scared of all was he to find that the creature had come nigh to harm the Lord and Lady of the castle, who had power to place him in the stretch-neck or to have the skin scourged from his shoulders. Yet, when he came with bowed head and humble entreaty for forgiveness, he was met with a handful of small silver from Sir Nigel, whose dame, however, was less charitably disposed, being much ruffled in her dignity by the manner in which she had been hustled from her lord's side.\n\nAs they passed through the castle gate, John plucked at Aylward's sleeve, and the two fell behind.\n\n\"I must crave your pardon, comrade,\" said he, bluntly. \"I was a fool not to know that a little rooster may be the gamest. I believe that this man is indeed a leader whom we may follow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW A YOUNG SHEPHERD HAD A PERILOUS FLOCK.", + "text": "Black was the mouth of Twynham Castle, though a pair of torches burning at the further end of the gateway cast a red glare over the outer bailey, and sent a dim, ruddy flicker through the rough-hewn arch, rising and falling with fitful brightness. Over the door the travellers could discern the escutcheon of the Montacutes, a roebuck gules on a field argent, flanked on either side by smaller shields which bore the red roses of the veteran constable. As they passed over the drawbridge, Alleyne marked the gleam of arms in the embrasures to right and left, and they had scarce set foot upon the causeway ere a hoarse blare burst from a bugle, and, with screech of hinge and clank of chain, the ponderous bridge swung up into the air, drawn by unseen hands. At the same instant the huge portcullis came rattling down from above, and shut off the last fading light of day. Sir Nigel and his lady walked on in deep talk, while a fat under-steward took charge of the three comrades, and led them to the buttery, where beef, bread, and beer were kept ever in readiness for the wayfarer. After a hearty meal and a dip in the trough to wash the dust from them, they strolled forth into the bailey, where the bowman peered about through the darkness at wall and at keep, with the carping eyes of one who has seen something of sieges, and is not likely to be satisfied. To Alleyne and to John, however, it appeared to be as great and as stout a fortress as could be built by the hands of man.\n\nErected by Sir Balwin de Redvers in the old fighting days of the twelfth century, when men thought much of war and little of comfort, Castle Twynham had been designed as a stronghold pure and simple, unlike those later and more magnificent structures where warlike strength had been combined with the magnificence of a palace. From the time of the Edwards such buildings as Conway or Caernarvon castles, to say nothing of Royal Windsor, had shown that it was possible to secure luxury in peace as well as security in times of trouble. Sir Nigel's trust, however, still frowned above the smooth-flowing waters of the Avon, very much as the stern race of early Anglo-Normans had designed it. There were the broad outer and inner bailies, not paved, but sown with grass to nourish the sheep and cattle which might be driven in on sign of danger. All round were high and turreted walls, with at the corner a bare square-faced keep, gaunt and windowless, rearing up from a lofty mound, which made it almost inaccessible to an assailant. Against the bailey-walls were rows of frail wooden houses and leaning sheds, which gave shelter to the archers and men-at-arms who formed the garrison. The doors of these humble dwellings were mostly open, and against the yellow glare from within Alleyne could see the bearded fellows cleaning their harness, while their wives would come out for a gossip, with their needlework in their hands, and their long black shadows streaming across the yard. The air was full of the clack of their voices and the merry prattling of children, in strange contrast to the flash of arms and constant warlike challenge from the walls above.\n\n\"Methinks a company of school lads could hold this place against an army,\" quoth John.\n\n\"And so say I,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"Nay, there you are wide of the clout,\" the bowman said gravely. \"By my hilt! I have seen a stronger fortalice carried in a summer evening. I remember such a one in Picardy, with a name as long as a Gascon's pedigree. It was when I served under Sir Robert Knolles, before the days of the Company; and we came by good plunder at the sacking of it. I had myself a great silver bowl, with two goblets, and a plastron of Spanish steel. Pasques Dieu! there are some fine women over yonder! Mort de ma vie! see to that one in the doorway! I will go speak to her. But whom have we here?\"\n\n\"Is there an archer here hight Sam Aylward?\" asked a gaunt man-at-arms, clanking up to them across the courtyard.\n\n\"My name, friend,\" quoth the bowman.\n\n\"Then sure I have no need to tell thee mine,\" said the other.\n\n\"By the rood! if it is not Black Simon of Norwich!\" cried Aylward. \"A mon coeur, camarade, a mon coeur! Ah, but I am blithe to see thee!\" The two fell upon each other and hugged like bears.\n\n\"And where from, old blood and bones?\" asked the bowman.\n\n\"I am in service here. Tell me, comrade, is it sooth that we shall have another fling at these Frenchmen? It is so rumored in the guard-room, and that Sir Nigel will take the field once more.\"\n\n\"It is like enough, mon gar., as things go.\"\n\n\"Now may the Lord be praised!\" cried the other. \"This very night will I set apart a golden ouche to be offered on the shrine of my name-saint. I have pined for this, Aylward, as a young maid pines for her lover.\"\n\n\"Art so set on plunder then? Is the purse so light that there is not enough for a rouse? I have a bag at my belt, camarade, and you have but to put your fist into it for what you want. It was ever share and share between us.\"\n\n\"Nay, friend, it is not the Frenchman's gold, but the Frenchman's blood that I would have. I should not rest quiet in the grave, coz, if I had not another turn at them. For with us in France it has ever been fair and honest war\u2014a shut fist for the man, but a bended knee for the woman. But how was it at Winchelsea when their galleys came down upon it some few years back? I had an old mother there, lad, who had come down thither from the Midlands to be the nearer her son. They found her afterwards by her own hearthstone, thrust through by a Frenchman's bill. My second sister, my brother's wife, and her two children, they were but ash-heaps in the smoking ruins of their house. I will not say that we have not wrought great scath upon France, but women and children have been safe from us. And so, old friend, my heart is hot within me, and I long to hear the old battle-cry again, and, by God's truth! if Sir Nigel unfurls his pennon, here is one who will be right glad to feel the saddle-flaps under his knees.\"\n\n\"We have seen good work together, old war-dog,\" quoth Aylward; \"and, by my hilt! we may hope to see more ere we die. But we are more like to hawk at the Spanish woodcock than at the French heron, though certes it is rumored that Du Guesclin with all the best lances of France have taken service under the lions and towers of Castile. But, comrade, it is in my mind that there is some small matter of dispute still open between us.\"\n\n\"'Fore God, it is sooth!\" cried the other; \"I had forgot it. The provost-marshal and his men tore us apart when last we met.\"\n\n\"On which, friend, we vowed that we should settle the point when next we came together. Hast thy sword, I see, and the moon throws glimmer enough for such old night-birds as we. On guard, mon gar.! I have not heard clink of steel this month or more.\"\n\n\"Out from the shadow then,\" said the other, drawing his sword. \"A vow is a vow, and not lightly to be broken.\"\n\n\"A vow to the saints,\" cried Alleyne, \"is indeed not to be set aside; but this is a devil's vow, and, simple clerk as I am, I am yet the mouthpiece of the true church when I say that it were mortal sin to fight on such a quarrel. What! shall two grown men carry malice for years, and fly like snarling curs at each other's throats?\"\n\n\"No malice, my young clerk, no malice,\" quoth Black Simon, \"I have not a bitter drop in my heart for mine old comrade; but the quarrel, as he hath told you, is still open and unsettled. Fall on, Aylward!\"\n\n\"Not whilst I can stand between you,\" cried Alleyne, springing before the bowman. \"It is shame and sin to see two Christian Englishmen turn swords against each other like the frenzied bloodthirsty paynim.\"\n\n\"And, what is more,\" said Hordle John, suddenly appearing out of the buttery with the huge board upon which the pastry was rolled, \"if either raise sword I shall flatten him like a Shrovetide pancake. By the black rood! I shall drive him into the earth, like a nail into a door, rather than see you do scath to each other.\"\n\n\"'Fore God, this is a strange way of preaching peace,\" cried Black Simon. \"You may find the scath yourself, my lusty friend, if you raise your great cudgel to me. I had as lief have the castle drawbridge drop upon my pate.\"\n\n\"Tell me, Aylward,\" said Alleyne earnestly, with his hands outstretched to keep the pair asunder, \"what is the cause of quarrel, that we may see whether honorable settlement may not be arrived at?\"\n\nThe bowman looked down at his feet and then up at the moons \"Parbleu!\" he cried, \"the cause of quarrel? Why, mon petit, it was years ago in Limousin, and how can I bear in mind what was the cause of it? Simon there hath it at the end of his tongue.\"\n\n\"Not I, in troth,\" replied the other; \"I have had other things to think of. There was some sort of bickering over dice, or wine, or was it a woman, coz?\"\n\n\"Pasques Dieu! but you have nicked it,\" cried Aylward. \"It was indeed about a woman; and the quarrel must go forward, for I am still of the same mind as before.\"\n\n\"What of the woman, then?\" asked Simon. \"May the murrain strike me if I can call to mind aught about her.\"\n\n\"It was La Blanche Rose, maid at the sign of the 'Trois Corbeaux' at Limoges. Bless her pretty heart! Why, mon gar., I loved her.\"\n\n\"So did a many,\" quoth Simon. \"I call her to mind now. On the very day that we fought over the little hussy, she went off with Evan ap Price, a long-legged Welsh dagsman. They have a hostel of their own now, somewhere on the banks of the Garonne, where the landlord drinks so much of the liquor that there is little left for the customers.\"\n\n\"So ends our quarrel, then,\" said Aylward, sheathing his sword. \"A Welsh dagsman, i' faith! C'etait mauvais gout, camarade, and the more so when she had a jolly archer and a lusty man-at-arms to choose from.\"\n\n\"True, old lad. And it is as well that we can compose our differences honorably, for Sir Nigel had been out at the first clash of steel; and he hath sworn that if there be quarrelling in the garrison he would smite the right hand from the broilers. You know him of old, and that he is like to be as good as his word.\"\n\n\"Mort-Dieu! yes. But there are ale, mead, and wine in the buttery, and the steward a merry rogue, who will not haggle over a quart or two. Buvons, mon gar., for it is not every day that two old friends come together.\"\n\nThe old soldiers and Hordle John strode off together in all good fellowship. Alleyne had turned to follow them, when he felt a touch upon his shoulder, and found a young page by his side.\n\n\"The Lord Loring commands,\" said the boy, \"that you will follow me to the great chamber, and await him there.\"\n\n\"But my comrades?\"\n\n\"His commands were for you alone.\"\n\nAlleyne followed the messenger to the east end of the courtyard, where a broad flight of steps led up to the doorway of the main hall, the outer wall of which is washed by the waters of the Avon. As designed at first, no dwelling had been allotted to the lord of the castle and his family but the dark and dismal basement story of the keep. A more civilized or more effeminate generation, however, had refused to be pent up in such a cellar, and the hall with its neighboring chambers had been added for their accommodation. Up the broad steps Alleyne went, still following his boyish guide, until at the folding oak doors the latter paused, and ushered him into the main hall of the castle.\n\nOn entering the room the clerk looked round; but, seeing no one, he continued to stand, his cap in his hand, examining with the greatest interest a chamber which was so different to any to which he was accustomed. The days had gone by when a nobleman's hall was but a barn-like, rush-strewn enclosure, the common lounge and eating-room of every inmate of the castle. The Crusaders had brought back with them experiences of domestic luxuries, of Damascus carpets and rugs of Aleppo, which made them impatient of the hideous bareness and want of privacy which they found in their ancestral strongholds. Still stronger, however, had been the influence of the great French war; for, however well matched the nations might be in martial exercises, there could be no question but that our neighbors were infinitely superior to us in the arts of peace. A stream of returning knights, of wounded soldiers, and of unransomed French noblemen, had been for a quarter of a century continually pouring into England, every one of whom exerted an influence in the direction of greater domestic refinement, while shiploads of French furniture from Calais, Rouen, and other plundered towns, had supplied our own artisans with models on which to shape their work. Hence, in most English castles, and in Castle Twynham among the rest, chambers were to be found which would seem to be not wanting either in beauty or in comfort.\n\nIn the great stone fireplace a log fire was spurting and crackling, throwing out a ruddy glare which, with the four bracket-lamps which stood at each corner of the room, gave a bright and lightsome air to the whole apartment. Above was a wreath-work of blazonry, extending up to the carved and corniced oaken roof; while on either side stood the high canopied chairs placed for the master of the house and for his most honored guest. The walls were hung all round with most elaborate and brightly colored tapestry, representing the achievements of Sir Bevis of Hampton, and behind this convenient screen were stored the tables dormant and benches which would be needed for banquet or high festivity. The floor was of polished tiles, with a square of red and black diapered Flemish carpet in the centre; and many settees, cushions, folding chairs, and carved bancals littered all over it. At the further end was a long black buffet or dresser, thickly covered with gold cups, silver salvers, and other such valuables. All this Alleyne examined with curious eyes; but most interesting of all to him was a small ebony table at his very side, on which, by the side of a chess-board and the scattered chessmen, there lay an open manuscript written in a right clerkly hand, and set forth with brave flourishes and devices along the margins. In vain Alleyne bethought him of where he was, and of those laws of good breeding and decorum which should restrain him: those colored capitals and black even lines drew his hand down to them, as the loadstone draws the needle, until, almost before he knew it, he was standing with the romance of Garin de Montglane before his eyes, so absorbed in its contents as to be completely oblivious both of where he was and why he had come there.\n\nHe was brought back to himself, however, by a sudden little ripple of quick feminine laughter. Aghast, he dropped the manuscript among the chessmen and stared in bewilderment round the room. It was as empty and as still as ever. Again he stretched his hand out to the romance, and again came that roguish burst of merriment. He looked up at the ceiling, back at the closed door, and round at the stiff folds of motionless tapestry. Of a sudden, however, he caught a quick shimmer from the corner of a high-backed bancal in front of him, and, shifting a pace or two to the side, saw a white slender hand, which held a mirror of polished silver in such a way that the concealed observer could see without being seen. He stood irresolute, uncertain whether to advance or to take no notice; but, even as he hesitated, the mirror was whipped in, and a tall and stately young lady swept out from behind the oaken screen, with a dancing light of mischief in her eyes. Alleyne started with astonishment as he recognized the very maiden who had suffered from his brother's violence in the forest. She no longer wore her gay riding-dress, however, but was attired in a long sweeping robe of black velvet of Bruges, with delicate tracery of white lace at neck and at wrist, scarce to be seen against her ivory skin. Beautiful as she had seemed to him before, the lithe charm of her figure and the proud, free grace of her bearing were enhanced now by the rich simplicity of her attire.\n\n\"Ah, you start,\" said she, with the same sidelong look of mischief, \"and I cannot marvel at it. Didst not look to see the distressed damosel again. Oh that I were a minstrel, that I might put it into rhyme, with the whole romance\u2014the luckless maid, the wicked socman, and the virtuous clerk! So might our fame have gone down together for all time, and you be numbered with Sir Percival or Sir Galahad, or all the other rescuers of oppressed ladies.\"\n\n\"What I did,\" said Alleyne, \"was too small a thing for thanks; and yet, if I may say it without offence, it was too grave and near a matter for mirth and raillery. I had counted on my brother's love, but God has willed that it should be otherwise. It is a joy to me to see you again, lady, and to know that you have reached home in safety, if this be indeed your home.\"\n\n\"Yes, in sooth, Castle Twynham is my home, and Sir Nigel Loring my father, I should have told you so this morning, but you said that you were coming thither, so I bethought me that I might hold it back as a surprise to you. Oh dear, but it was brave to see you!\" she cried, bursting out a-laughing once more, and standing with her hand pressed to her side, and her half-closed eyes twinkling with amusement. \"You drew back and came forward with your eyes upon my book there, like the mouse who sniffs the cheese and yet dreads the trap.\"\n\n\"I take shame,\" said Alleyne, \"that I should have touched it.\"\n\n\"Nay, it warmed my very heart to see it. So glad was I, that I laughed for very pleasure. My fine preacher can himself be tempted then, thought I; he is not made of another clay to the rest of us.\"\n\n\"God help me! I am the weakest of the weak,\" groaned Alleyne. \"I pray that I may have more strength.\"\n\n\"And to what end?\" she asked sharply. \"If you are, as I understand, to shut yourself forever in your cell within the four walls of an abbey, then of what use would it be were your prayer to be answered?\"\n\n\"The use of my own salvation.\"\n\nShe turned from him with a pretty shrug and wave. \"Is that all?\" she said. \"Then you are no better than Father Christopher and the rest of them. Your own, your own, ever your own! My father is the king's man, and when he rides into the press of fight he is not thinking ever of the saving of his own poor body; he recks little enough if he leave it on the field. Why then should you, who are soldiers of the Spirit, be ever moping or hiding in cell or in cave, with minds full of your own concerns, while the world, which you should be mending, is going on its way, and neither sees nor hears you? Were ye all as thoughtless of your own souls as the soldier is of his body, ye would be of more avail to the souls of others.\"\n\n\"There is sooth in what you say, lady,\" Alleyne answered; \"and yet I scarce can see what you would have the clergy and the church to do.\"\n\n\"I would have them live as others and do men's work in the world, preaching by their lives rather than their words. I would have them come forth from their lonely places, mix with the borel folks, feel the pains and the pleasures, the cares and the rewards, the temptings and the stirrings of the common people. Let them toil and swinken, and labor, and plough the land, and take wives to themselves\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Alas! alas!\" cried Alleyne aghast, \"you have surely sucked this poison from the man Wicliffe, of whom I have heard such evil things.\"\n\n\"Nay, I know him not. I have learned it by looking from my own chamber window and marking these poor monks of the priory, their weary life, their profitless round. I have asked myself if the best which can be done with virtue is to shut it within high walls as though it were some savage creature. If the good will lock themselves up, and if the wicked will still wander free, then alas for the world!\"\n\nAlleyne looked at her in astonishment, for her cheek was flushed, her eyes gleaming, and her whole pose full of eloquence and conviction. Yet in an instant she had changed again to her old expression of merriment leavened with mischief.\n\n\"Wilt do what I ask?\" said she.\n\n\"What is it, lady?\"\n\n\"Oh, most ungallant clerk! A true knight would never have asked, but would have vowed upon the instant. 'Tis but to bear me out in what I say to my father.\"\n\n\"In what?\"\n\n\"In saying, if he ask, that it was south of the Christchurch road that I met you. I shall be shut up with the tire-women else, and have a week of spindle and bodkin, when I would fain be galloping Troubadour up Wilverley Walk, or loosing little Roland at the Vinney Ridge herons.\"\n\n\"I shall not answer him if he ask.\"\n\n\"Not answer! But he will have an answer. Nay, but you must not fail me, or it will go ill with me.\"\n\n\"But, lady,\" cried poor Alleyne in great distress, \"how can I say that it was to the south of the road when I know well that it was four miles to the north.\"\n\n\"You will not say it?\"\n\n\"Surely you will not, too, when you know that it is not so?\"\n\n\"Oh, I weary of your preaching!\" she cried, and swept away with a toss of her beautiful head, leaving Alleyne as cast down and ashamed as though he had himself proposed some infamous thing. She was back again in an instant, however, in another of her varying moods.\n\n\"Look at that, my friend!\" said she. \"If you had been shut up in abbey or in cell this day you could not have taught a wayward maiden to abide by the truth. Is it not so? What avail is the shepherd if he leaves his sheep.\"\n\n\"A sorry shepherd!\" said Alleyne humbly. \"But here is your noble father.\"\n\n\"And you shall see how worthy a pupil I am. Father, I am much beholden to this young clerk, who was of service to me and helped me this very morning in Minstead Woods, four miles to the north of the Christchurch road, where I had no call to be, you having ordered it otherwise.\" All this she reeled off in a loud voice, and then glanced with sidelong, questioning eyes at Alleyne for his approval.\n\nSir Nigel, who had entered the room with a silvery-haired old lady upon his arm, stared aghast at this sudden outburst of candor.\n\n\"Maude, Maude!\" said he, shaking his head, \"it is more hard for me to gain obedience from you than from the ten score drunken archers who followed me to Guienne. Yet, hush! little one, for your fair lady-mother will be here anon, and there is no need that she should know it. We will keep you from the provost-marshal this journey. Away to your chamber, sweeting, and keep a blithe face, for she who confesses is shriven. And now, fair mother,\" he continued, when his daughter had gone, \"sit you here by the fire, for your blood runs colder than it did. Alleyne Edricson, I would have a word with you, for I would fain that you should take service under me. And here in good time comes my lady, without whose counsel it is not my wont to decide aught of import; but, indeed, it was her own thought that you should come.\"\n\n\"For I have formed a good opinion of you, and can see that you are one who may be trusted,\" said the Lady Loring. \"And in good sooth my dear lord hath need of such a one by his side, for he recks so little of himself that there should be one there to look to his needs and meet his wants. You have seen the cloisters; it were well that you should see the world too, ere you make choice for life between them.\"\n\n\"It was for that very reason that my father willed that I should come forth into the world at my twentieth year,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"Then your father was a man of good counsel,\" said she, \"and you cannot carry out his will better than by going on this path, where all that is noble and gallant in England will be your companions.\"\n\n\"You can ride?\" asked Sir Nigel, looking at the youth with puckered eyes.\n\n\"Yes, I have ridden much at the abbey.\"\n\n\"Yet there is a difference betwixt a friar's hack and a warrior's destrier. You can sing and play?\"\n\n\"On citole, flute and rebeck.\"\n\n\"Good! You can read blazonry?\"\n\n\"Indifferent well.\"\n\n\"Then read this,\" quoth Sir Nigel, pointing upwards to one of the many quarterings which adorned the wall over the fireplace.\n\n\"Argent,\" Alleyne answered, \"a fess azure charged with three lozenges dividing three mullets sable. Over all, on an escutcheon of the first, a jambe gules.\"\n\n\"A jambe gules erased,\" said Sir Nigel, shaking his head solemnly. \"Yet it is not amiss for a monk-bred man. I trust that you are lowly and serviceable?\"\n\n\"I have served all my life, my lord.\"\n\n\"Canst carve too?\"\n\n\"I have carved two days a week for the brethren.\"\n\n\"A model truly! Wilt make a squire of squires. But tell me, I pray, canst curl hair?\"\n\n\"No, my lord, but I could learn.\"\n\n\"It is of import,\" said he, \"for I love to keep my hair well ordered, seeing that the weight of my helmet for thirty years hath in some degree frayed it upon the top.\" He pulled off his velvet cap of maintenance as he spoke, and displayed a pate which was as bald as an egg, and shone bravely in the firelight. \"You see,\" said he, whisking round, and showing one little strip where a line of scattered hairs, like the last survivors in some fatal field, still barely held their own against the fate which had fallen upon their comrades; \"these locks need some little oiling and curling, for I doubt not that if you look slantwise at my head, when the light is good, you will yourself perceive that there are places where the hair is sparse.\"\n\n\"It is for you also to bear the purse,\" said the lady; \"for my sweet lord is of so free and gracious a temper that he would give it gayly to the first who asked alms of him. All these things, with some knowledge of venerie, and of the management of horse, hawk and hound, with the grace and hardihood and courtesy which are proper to your age, will make you a fit squire for Sir Nigel Loring.\"\n\n\"Alas! lady,\" Alleyne answered, \"I know well the great honor that you have done me in deeming me worthy to wait upon so renowned a knight, yet I am so conscious of my own weakness that I scarce dare incur duties which I might be so ill-fitted to fulfil.\"\n\n\"Modesty and a humble mind,\" said she, \"are the very first and rarest gifts in page or squire. Your words prove that you have these, and all the rest is but the work of use and time. But there is no call for haste. Rest upon it for the night, and let your orisons ask for guidance in the matter. We knew your father well, and would fain help his son, though we have small cause to love your brother the Socman, who is forever stirring up strife in the county.\"\n\n\"We can scare hope,\" said Nigel, \"to have all ready for our start before the feast of St. Luke, for there is much to be done in the time. You will have leisure, therefore, if it please you to take service under me, in which to learn your devoir. Bertrand, my daughter's page, is hot to go; but in sooth he is over young for such rough work as may be before us.\"\n\n\"And I have one favor to crave from you,\" added the lady of the castle, as Alleyne turned to leave their presence. \"You have, as I understand, much learning which you have acquired at Beaulieu.\"\n\n\"Little enough, lady, compared with those who were my teachers.\"\n\n\"Yet enough for my purpose, I doubt not. For I would have you give an hour or two a day whilst you are with us in discoursing with my daughter, the Lady Maude; for she is somewhat backward, I fear, and hath no love for letters, save for these poor fond romances, which do but fill her empty head with dreams of enchanted maidens and of errant cavaliers. Father Christopher comes over after nones from the priory, but he is stricken with years and slow of speech, so that she gets small profit from his teaching. I would have you do what you can with her, and with Agatha my young tire-woman, and with Dorothy Pierpont.\"\n\nAnd so Alleyne found himself not only chosen as squire to a knight but also as squire to three damosels, which was even further from the part which he had thought to play in the world. Yet he could but agree to do what he might, and so went forth from the castle hall with his face flushed and his head in a whirl at the thought of the strange and perilous paths which his feet were destined to tread." + }, + { + "title": "HOW ALLEYNE LEARNED MORE THAN HE COULD TEACH.", + "text": "And now there came a time of stir and bustle, of furbishing of arms and clang of hammer from all the southland counties. Fast spread the tidings from thorpe to thorpe and from castle to castle, that the old game was afoot once more, and the lions and lilies to be in the field with the early spring. Great news this for that fierce old country, whose trade for a generation had been war, her exports archers and her imports prisoners. For six years her sons had chafed under an unwonted peace. Now they flew to their arms as to their birthright. The old soldiers of Crecy, of Nogent, and of Poictiers were glad to think that they might hear the war-trumpet once more, and gladder still were the hot youth who had chafed for years under the martial tales of their sires. To pierce the great mountains of the south, to fight the tamers of the fiery Moors, to follow the greatest captain of the age, to find sunny cornfields and vineyards, when the marches of Picardy and Normandy were as rare and bleak as the Jedburgh forests\u2014here was a golden prospect for a race of warriors. From sea to sea there was stringing of bows in the cottage and clang of steel in the castle.\n\nNor did it take long for every stronghold to pour forth its cavalry, and every hamlet its footmen. Through the late autumn and the early winter every road and country lane resounded with nakir and trumpet, with the neigh of the warhorse and the clatter of marching men. From the Wrekin in the Welsh marches to the Cotswolds in the west or Butser in the south, there was no hill-top from which the peasant might not have seen the bright shimmer of arms, the toss and flutter of plume and of pensil. From bye-path, from woodland clearing, or from winding moor-side track these little rivulets of steel united in the larger roads to form a broader stream, growing ever fuller and larger as it approached the nearest or most commodious seaport. And there all day, and day after day, there was bustle and crowding and labor, while the great ships loaded up, and one after the other spread their white pinions and darted off to the open sea, amid the clash of cymbals and rolling of drums and lusty shouts of those who went and of those who waited. From Orwell to the Dart there was no port which did not send forth its little fleet, gay with streamer and bunting, as for a joyous festival. Thus in the season of the waning days the might of England put forth on to the waters.\n\nIn the ancient and populous county of Hampshire there was no lack of leaders or of soldiers for a service which promised either honor or profit. In the north the Saracen's head of the Brocas and the scarlet fish of the De Roches were waving over a strong body of archers from Holt, Woolmer, and Harewood forests. De Borhunte was up in the east, and Sir John de Montague in the west. Sir Luke de Ponynges, Sir Thomas West, Sir Maurice de Bruin, Sir Arthur Lipscombe, Sir Walter Ramsey, and stout Sir Oliver Buttesthorn were all marching south with levies from Andover, Arlesford, Odiham and Winchester, while from Sussex came Sir John Clinton, Sir Thomas Cheyne, and Sir John Fallislee, with a troop of picked men-at-arms, making for their port at Southampton. Greatest of all the musters, however, was that of Twynham Castle, for the name and the fame of Sir Nigel Loring drew towards him the keenest and boldest spirits, all eager to serve under so valiant a leader. Archers from the New Forest and the Forest of Bere, billmen from the pleasant country which is watered by the Stour, the Avon, and the Itchen, young cavaliers from the ancient Hampshire houses, all were pushing for Christchurch to take service under the banner of the five scarlet roses.\n\nAnd now, could Sir Nigel have shown the bachelles of land which the laws of rank required, he might well have cut his forked pennon into a square banner, and taken such a following into the field as would have supported the dignity of a banneret. But poverty was heavy upon him, his land was scant, his coffers empty, and the very castle which covered him the holding of another. Sore was his heart when he saw rare bowmen and war-hardened spearmen turned away from his gates, for the lack of the money which might equip and pay them. Yet the letter which Aylward had brought him gave him powers which he was not slow to use. In it Sir Claude Latour, the Gascon lieutenant of the White Company, assured him that there remained in his keeping enough to fit out a hundred archers and twenty men-at-arms, which, joined to the three hundred veteran companions already in France, would make a force which any leader might be proud to command. Carefully and sagaciously the veteran knight chose out his men from the swarm of volunteers. Many an anxious consultation he held with Black Simon, Sam Aylward, and other of his more experienced followers, as to who should come and who should stay. By All Saints' day, however ere the last leaves had fluttered to earth in the Wilverley and Holmesley glades, he had filled up his full numbers, and mustered under his banner as stout a following of Hampshire foresters as ever twanged their war-bows. Twenty men-at-arms, too, well mounted and equipped, formed the cavalry of the party, while young Peter Terlake of Fareham, and Walter Ford of Botley, the martial sons of martial sires, came at their own cost to wait upon Sir Nigel and to share with Alleyne Edricson the duties of his squireship.\n\nYet, even after the enrolment, there was much to be done ere the party could proceed upon its way. For armor, swords, and lances, there was no need to take much forethought, for they were to be had both better and cheaper in Bordeaux than in England. With the long-bow, however, it was different. Yew staves indeed might be got in Spain, but it was well to take enough and to spare with them. Then three spare cords should be carried for each bow, with a great store of arrow-heads, besides the brigandines of chain mail, the wadded steel caps, and the brassarts or arm-guards, which were the proper equipment of the archer. Above all, the women for miles round were hard at work cutting the white surcoats which were the badge of the Company, and adorning them with the red lion of St. George upon the centre of the breast. When all was completed and the muster called in the castle yard the oldest soldier of the French wars was fain to confess that he had never looked upon a better equipped or more warlike body of men, from the old knight with his silk jupon, sitting his great black warhorse in the front of them, to Hordle John, the giant recruit, who leaned carelessly upon a huge black bowstave in the rear. Of the six score, fully half had seen service before, while a fair sprinkling were men who had followed the wars all their lives, and had a hand in those battles which had made the whole world ring with the fame and the wonder of the island infantry.\n\nSix long weeks were taken in these preparations, and it was close on Martinmas ere all was ready for a start. Nigh two months had Alleyne Edricson been in Castle Twynham\u2014months which were fated to turn the whole current of his life, to divert it from that dark and lonely bourne towards which it tended, and to guide it into freer and more sunlit channels. Already he had learned to bless his father for that wise provision which had made him seek to know the world ere he had ventured to renounce it.\n\nFor it was a different place from that which he had pictured\u2014very different from that which he had heard described when the master of the novices held forth to his charges upon the ravening wolves who lurked for them beyond the peaceful folds of Beaulieu. There was cruelty in it, doubtless, and lust and sin and sorrow; but were there not virtues to atone, robust positive virtues which did not shrink from temptation, which held their own in all the rough blasts of the work-a-day world? How colorless by contrast appeared the sinlessness which came from inability to sin, the conquest which was attained by flying from the enemy! Monk-bred as he was, Alleyne had native shrewdness and a mind which was young enough to form new conclusions and to outgrow old ones. He could not fail to see that the men with whom he was thrown in contact, rough-tongued, fierce and quarrelsome as they were, were yet of deeper nature and of more service in the world than the ox-eyed brethren who rose and ate and slept from year's end to year's end in their own narrow, stagnant circle of existence. Abbot Berghersh was a good man, but how was he better than this kindly knight, who lived as simple a life, held as lofty and inflexible an ideal of duty, and did with all his fearless heart whatever came to his hand to do? In turning from the service of the one to that of the other, Alleyne could not feel that he was lowering his aims in life. True that his gentle and thoughtful nature recoiled from the grim work of war, yet in those days of martial orders and militant brotherhoods there was no gulf fixed betwixt the priest and the soldier. The man of God and the man of the sword might without scandal be united in the same individual. Why then should he, a mere clerk, have scruples when so fair a chance lay in his way of carrying out the spirit as well as the letter of his father's provision. Much struggle it cost him, anxious spirit-questionings and midnight prayings, with many a doubt and a misgiving; but the issue was that ere he had been three days in Castle Twynham he had taken service under Sir Nigel, and had accepted horse and harness, the same to be paid for out of his share of the profits of the expedition. Henceforth for seven hours a day he strove in the tilt-yard to qualify himself to be a worthy squire to so worthy a knight. Young, supple and active, with all the pent energies from years of pure and healthy living, it was not long before he could manage his horse and his weapon well enough to earn an approving nod from critical men-at-arms, or to hold his own against Terlake and Ford, his fellow-servitors.\n\nBut were there no other considerations which swayed him from the cloisters towards the world? So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action. Yet to Alleyne had been opened now a side of life of which he had been as innocent as a child, but one which was of such deep import that it could not fail to influence him in choosing his path. A woman, in monkish precepts, had been the embodiment and concentration of what was dangerous and evil\u2014a focus whence spread all that was to be dreaded and avoided. So defiling was their presence that a true Cistercian might not raise his eyes to their face or touch their finger-tips under ban of church and fear of deadly sin. Yet here, day after day for an hour after nones, and for an hour before vespers, he found himself in close communion with three maidens, all young, all fair, and all therefore doubly dangerous from the monkish standpoint. Yet he found that in their presence he was conscious of a quick sympathy, a pleasant ease, a ready response to all that was most gentle and best in himself, which filled his soul with a vague and new-found joy.\n\nAnd yet the Lady Maude Loring was no easy pupil to handle. An older and more world-wise man might have been puzzled by her varying moods, her sudden prejudices, her quick resentment at all constraint and authority. Did a subject interest her, was there space in it for either romance or imagination, she would fly through it with her subtle, active mind, leaving her two fellow-students and even her teacher toiling behind her. On the other hand, were there dull patience needed with steady toil and strain of memory, no single fact could by any driving be fixed in her mind. Alleyne might talk to her of the stories of old gods and heroes, of gallant deeds and lofty aims, or he might hold forth upon moon and stars, and let his fancy wander over the hidden secrets of the universe, and he would have a rapt listener with flushed cheeks and eloquent eyes, who could repeat after him the very words which had fallen from his lips. But when it came to almagest and astrolabe, the counting of figures and reckoning of epicycles, away would go her thoughts to horse and hound, and a vacant eye and listless face would warn the teacher that he had lost his hold upon his scholar. Then he had but to bring out the old romance book from the priory, with befingered cover of sheepskin and gold letters upon a purple ground, to entice her wayward mind back to the paths of learning.\n\nAt times, too, when the wild fit was upon her, she would break into pertness and rebel openly against Alleyne's gentle firmness. Yet he would jog quietly on with his teachings, taking no heed to her mutiny, until suddenly she would be conquered by his patience, and break into self-revilings a hundred times stronger than her fault demanded. It chanced however that, on one of these mornings when the evil mood was upon her, Agatha the young tire-woman, thinking to please her mistress, began also to toss her head and make tart rejoinder to the teacher's questions. In an instant the Lady Maude had turned upon her two blazing eyes and a face which was blanched with anger.\n\n\"You would dare!\" said she. \"You would dare!\" The frightened tire-woman tried to excuse herself. \"But my fair lady,\" she stammered, \"what have I done? I have said no more than I heard.\"\n\n\"You would dare!\" repeated the lady in a choking voice. \"You, a graceless baggage, a foolish lackbrain, with no thought above the hemming of shifts. And he so kindly and hendy and long-suffering! You would\u2014ha, you may well flee the room!\"\n\nShe had spoken with a rising voice, and a clasping and opening of her long white fingers, so that it was no marvel that ere the speech was over the skirts of Agatha were whisking round the door and the click of her sobs to be heard dying swiftly away down the corridor.\n\nAlleyne stared open-eyed at this tigress who had sprung so suddenly to his rescue. \"There is no need for such anger,\" he said mildly. \"The maid's words have done me no scath. It is you yourself who have erred.\"\n\n\"I know it,\" she cried, \"I am a most wicked woman. But it is bad enough that one should misuse you. Ma foi! I will see that there is not a second one.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, no one has misused me,\" he answered. \"But the fault lies in your hot and bitter words. You have called her a baggage and a lackbrain, and I know not what.\"\n\n\"And you are he who taught me to speak the truth,\" she cried. \"Now I have spoken it, and yet I cannot please you. Lackbrain she is, and lackbrain I shall call her.\"\n\nSuch was a sample of the sudden janglings which marred the peace of that little class. As the weeks passed, however, they became fewer and less violent, as Alleyne's firm and constant nature gained sway and influence over the Lady Maude. And yet, sooth to say, there were times when he had to ask himself whether it was not the Lady Maude who was gaining sway and influence over him. If she were changing, so was he. In drawing her up from the world, he was day by day being himself dragged down towards it. In vain he strove and reasoned with himself as to the madness of letting his mind rest upon Sir Nigel's daughter. What was he\u2014a younger son, a penniless clerk, a squire unable to pay for his own harness\u2014that he should dare to raise his eyes to the fairest maid in Hampshire? So spake reason; but, in spite of all, her voice was ever in his ears and her image in his heart. Stronger than reason, stronger than cloister teachings, stronger than all that might hold him back, was that old, old tyrant who will brook no rival in the kingdom of youth.\n\nAnd yet it was a surprise and a shock to himself to find how deeply she had entered into his life; how completely those vague ambitions and yearnings which had filled his spiritual nature centred themselves now upon this thing of earth. He had scarce dared to face the change which had come upon him, when a few sudden chance words showed it all up hard and clear, like a lightning flash in the darkness.\n\nHe had ridden over to Poole, one November day, with his fellow-squire, Peter Terlake, in quest of certain yew-staves from Wat Swathling, the Dorsetshire armorer. The day for their departure had almost come, and the two youths spurred it over the lonely downs at the top of their speed on their homeward course, for evening had fallen and there was much to be done. Peter was a hard, wiry, brown faced, country-bred lad who looked on the coming war as the schoolboy looks on his holidays. This day, however, he had been sombre and mute, with scarce a word a mile to bestow upon his comrade.\n\n\"Tell me Alleyne Edricson,\" he broke out, suddenly, as they clattered along the winding track which leads over the Bournemouth hills, \"has it not seemed to you that of late the Lady Maude is paler and more silent than is her wont?\"\n\n\"It may be so,\" the other answered shortly.\n\n\"And would rather sit distrait by her oriel than ride gayly to the chase as of old. Methinks, Alleyne, it is this learning which you have taught her that has taken all the life and sap from her. It is more than she can master, like a heavy spear to a light rider.\"\n\n\"Her lady-mother has so ordered it,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"By our Lady! and withouten disrespect,\" quoth Terlake, \"it is in my mind that her lady-mother is more fitted to lead a company to a storming than to have the upbringing of this tender and milk-white maid. Hark ye, lad Alleyne, to what I never told man or woman yet. I love the fair Lady Maude, and would give the last drop of my heart's blood to serve her.\" He spoke with a gasping voice, and his face flushed crimson in the moonlight.\n\nAlleyne said nothing, but his heart seemed to turn to a lump of ice in his bosom.\n\n\"My father has broad acres,\" the other continued, \"from Fareham Creek to the slope of the Portsdown Hill. There is filling of granges, hewing of wood, malting of grain, and herding of sheep as much as heart could wish, and I the only son. Sure am I that Sir Nigel would be blithe at such a match.\"\n\n\"But how of the lady?\" asked Alleyne, with dry lips.\n\n\"Ah, lad, there lies my trouble. It is a toss of the head and a droop of the eyes if I say one word of what is in my mind. 'Twere as easy to woo the snow-dame that we shaped last winter in our castle yard. I did but ask her yesternight for her green veil, that I might bear it as a token or lambrequin upon my helm; but she flashed out at me that she kept it for a better man, and then all in a breath asked pardon for that she had spoke so rudely. Yet she would not take back the words either, nor would she grant the veil. Has it seemed to thee, Alleyne, that she loves any one?\"\n\n\"Nay, I cannot say,\" said Alleyne, with a wild throb of sudden hope in his heart.\n\n\"I have thought so, and yet I cannot name the man. Indeed, save myself, and Walter Ford, and you, who are half a clerk, and Father Christopher of the Priory, and Bertrand the page, who is there whom she sees?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell,\" quoth Alleyne shortly; and the two squires rode on again, each intent upon his own thoughts.\n\nNext day at morning lesson the teacher observed that his pupil was indeed looking pale and jaded, with listless eyes and a weary manner. He was heavy-hearted to note the grievous change in her.\n\n\"Your mistress, I fear, is ill, Agatha,\" he said to the tire-woman, when the Lady Maude had sought her chamber.\n\nThe maid looked aslant at him with laughing eyes. \"It is not an illness that kills,\" quoth she.\n\n\"Pray God not!\" he cried. \"But tell me, Agatha, what it is that ails her?\"\n\n\"Methinks that I could lay my hand upon another who is smitten with the same trouble,\" said she, with the same sidelong look. \"Canst not give a name to it, and thou so skilled in leech-craft?\"\n\n\"Nay, save that she seems aweary.\"\n\n\"Well, bethink you that it is but three days ere you will all be gone, and Castle Twynham be as dull as the Priory. Is there not enough there to cloud a lady's brow?\"\n\n\"In sooth, yes,\" he answered; \"I had forgot that she is about to lose her father.\"\n\n\"Her father!\" cried the tire-woman, with a little trill of laughter. \"Oh simple, simple!\" And she was off down the passage like arrow from bow, while Alleyne stood gazing after her, betwixt hope and doubt, scarce daring to put faith in the meaning which seemed to underlie her words." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE WHITE COMPANY SET FORTH TO THE WARS.", + "text": "St. Luke's day had come and had gone, and it was in the season of Martinmas, when the oxen are driven in to the slaughter, that the White Company was ready for its journey. Loud shrieked the brazen bugles from keep and from gateway, and merry was the rattle of the war-drum, as the men gathered in the outer bailey, with torches to light them, for the morn had not yet broken. Alleyne, from the window of the armory, looked down upon the strange scene\u2014the circles of yellow flickering light, the lines of stern and bearded faces, the quick shimmer of arms, and the lean heads of the horses. In front stood the bow-men, ten deep, with a fringe of under-officers, who paced hither and thither marshalling the ranks with curt precept or short rebuke. Behind were the little clump of steel-clad horsemen, their lances raised, with long pensils drooping down the oaken shafts. So silent and still were they, that they might have been metal-sheathed statues, were it not for the occasional quick, impatient stamp of their chargers, or the rattle of chamfron against neck-plates as they tossed and strained. A spear's length in front of them sat the spare and long-limbed figure of Black Simon, the Norwich fighting man, his fierce, deep-lined face framed in steel, and the silk guidon marked with the five scarlet roses slanting over his right shoulder. All round, in the edge of the circle of the light, stood the castle servants, the soldiers who were to form the garrison, and little knots of women, who sobbed in their aprons and called shrilly to their name-saints to watch over the Wat, or Will, or Peterkin who had turned his hand to the work of war.\n\nThe young squire was leaning forward, gazing at the stirring and martial scene, when he heard a short, quick gasp at his shoulder, and there was the Lady Maude, with her hand to her heart, leaning up against the wall, slender and fair, like a half-plucked lily. Her face was turned away from him, but he could see, by the sharp intake of her breath, that she was weeping bitterly.\n\n\"Alas! alas!\" he cried, all unnerved at the sight, \"why is it that you are so sad, lady?\"\n\n\"It is the sight of these brave men,\" she answered; \"and to think how many of them go and how few are like to find their way back. I have seen it before, when I was a little maid, in the year of the Prince's great battle. I remember then how they mustered in the bailey, even as they do now, and my lady-mother holding me in her arms at this very window that I might see the show.\"\n\n\"Please God, you will see them all back ere another year be out,\" said he.\n\nShe shook her head, looking round at him with flushed cheeks and eyes that sparkled in the lamp-light. \"Oh, but I hate myself for being a woman!\" she cried, with a stamp of her little foot. \"What can I do that is good? Here I must bide, and talk and sew and spin, and spin and sew and talk. Ever the same dull round, with nothing at the end of it. And now you are going too, who could carry my thoughts out of these gray walls, and raise my mind above tapestry and distaffs. What can I do? I am of no more use or value than that broken bowstave.\"\n\n\"You are of such value to me,\" he cried, in a whirl of hot, passionate words, \"that all else has become nought. You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought. Oh, Maude, I cannot live without you, I cannot leave you without a word of love. All is changed to me since I have known you. I am poor and lowly and all unworthy of you; but if great love may weigh down such defects, then mine may do it. Give me but one word of hope to take to the wars with me\u2014but one. Ah, you shrink, you shudder! My wild words have frightened you.\"\n\nTwice she opened her lips, and twice no sound came from them. At last she spoke in a hard and measured voice, as one who dare not trust herself to speak too freely.\n\n\"This is over sudden,\" she said; \"it is not so long since the world was nothing to you. You have changed once; perchance you may change again.\"\n\n\"Cruel!\" he cried, \"who hath changed me?\"\n\n\"And then your brother,\" she continued with a little laugh, disregarding his question. \"Methinks this hath become a family custom amongst the Edricsons. Nay, I am sorry; I did not mean a jibe. But, indeed, Alleyne, this hath come suddenly upon me, and I scarce know what to say.\"\n\n\"Say some word of hope, however distant\u2014some kind word that I may cherish in my heart.\"\n\n\"Nay, Alleyne, it were a cruel kindness, and you have been too good and true a friend to me that I should use you despitefully. There cannot be a closer link between us. It is madness to think of it. Were there no other reasons, it is enough that my father and your brother would both cry out against it.\"\n\n\"My brother, what has he to do with it? And your father\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Come, Alleyne, was it not you who would have me act fairly to all men, and, certes, to my father amongst them?\"\n\n\"You say truly,\" he cried, \"you say truly. But you do not reject me, Maude? You give me some ray of hope? I do not ask pledge or promise. Say only that I am not hateful to you\u2014that on some happier day I may hear kinder words from you.\"\n\nHer eyes softened upon him, and a kind answer was on her lips, when a hoarse shout, with the clatter of arms and stamping of steeds, rose up from the bailey below. At the sound her face set her eyes sparkled, and she stood with flushed cheek and head thrown back\u2014a woman's body, with a soul of fire.\n\n\"My father hath gone down,\" she cried. \"Your place is by his side. Nay, look not at me, Alleyne. It is no time for dallying. Win my father's love, and all may follow. It is when the brave soldier hath done his devoir that he hopes for his reward, Farewell, and may God be with you!\" She held out her white, slim hand to him, but as he bent his lips over it she whisked away and was gone, leaving in his outstretched hand the very green veil for which poor Peter Terlake had craved in vain. Again the hoarse cheering burst out from below, and he heard the clang of the rising portcullis. Pressing the veil to his lips, he thrust it into the bosom of his tunic, and rushed as fast as feet could bear him to arm himself and join the muster.\n\nThe raw morning had broken ere the hot spiced ale had been served round and the last farewell spoken. A cold wind blew up from the sea and ragged clouds drifted swiftly across the sky.\n\nThe Christchurch townsfolk stood huddled about the Bridge of Avon, the women pulling tight their shawls and the men swathing themselves in their gaberdines, while down the winding path from the castle came the van of the little army, their feet clanging on the hard, frozen road. First came Black Simon with his banner, bestriding a lean and powerful dapple-gray charger, as hard and wiry and warwise as himself. After him, riding three abreast, were nine men-at-arms, all picked soldiers, who had followed the French wars before, and knew the marches of Picardy as they knew the downs of their native Hampshire. They were armed to the teeth with lance, sword, and mace, with square shields notched at the upper right-hand corner to serve as a spear-rest. For defence each man wore a coat of interlaced leathern thongs, strengthened at the shoulder, elbow, and upper arm with slips of steel. Greaves and knee-pieces were also of leather backed by steel, and their gauntlets and shoes were of iron plates, craftily jointed. So, with jingle of arms and clatter of hoofs, they rode across the Bridge of Avon, while the burghers shouted lustily for the flag of the five roses and its gallant guard.\n\nClose at the heels of the horses came two-score archers bearded and burly, their round targets on their backs and their long yellow bows, the most deadly weapon that the wit of man had yet devised, thrusting forth from behind their shoulders. From each man's girdle hung sword or axe, according to his humor, and over the right hip there jutted out the leathern quiver with its bristle of goose, pigeon, and peacock feathers. Behind the bowmen strode two trumpeters blowing upon nakirs, and two drummers in parti-colored clothes. After them came twenty-seven sumpter horses carrying tent-poles, cloth, spare arms, spurs, wedges, cooking kettles, horse-shoes, bags of nails and the hundred other things which experience had shown to be needful in a harried and hostile country. A white mule with red trappings, led by a varlet, carried Sir Nigel's own napery and table comforts. Then came two-score more archers, ten more men-at-arms, and finally a rear guard of twenty bowmen, with big John towering in the front rank and the veteran Aylward marching by the side, his battered harness and faded surcoat in strange contrast with the snow-white jupons and shining brigandines of his companions. A quick cross-fire of greetings and questions and rough West Saxon jests flew from rank to rank, or were bandied about betwixt the marching archers and the gazing crowd.\n\n\"Hola, Gaffer Higginson!\" cried Aylward, as he spied the portly figure of the village innkeeper. \"No more of thy nut-brown, mon gar. We leave it behind us.\"\n\n\"By St. Paul, no!\" cried the other. \"You take it with you. Devil a drop have you left in the great kilderkin. It was time for you to go.\"\n\n\"If your cask is leer, I warrant your purse is full, gaffer,\" shouted Hordle John. \"See that you lay in good store of the best for our home-coming.\"\n\n\"See that you keep your throat whole for the drinking of it archer,\" cried a voice, and the crowd laughed at the rough pleasantry.\n\n\"If you will warrant the beer, I will warrant the throat,\" said John composedly.\n\n\"Close up the ranks!\" cried Aylward. \"En avant, mes enfants! Ah, by my finger bones, there is my sweet Mary from the Priory Mill! Ma foi, but she is beautiful! Adieu, Mary ma cherie! Mon coeur est toujours a toi. Brace your belt, Watkins, man, and swing your shoulders as a free companion should. By my hilt! your jerkins will be as dirty as mine ere you clap eyes on Hengistbury Head again.\"\n\nThe Company had marched to the turn of the road ere Sir Nigel Loring rode out from the gateway, mounted on Pommers, his great black warhorse, whose ponderous footfall on the wooden drawbridge echoed loudly from the gloomy arch which spanned it. Sir Nigel was still in his velvet dress of peace, with flat velvet cap of maintenance, and curling ostrich feather clasped in a golden brooch. To his three squires riding behind him it looked as though he bore the bird's egg as well as its feather, for the back of his bald pate shone like a globe of ivory. He bore no arms save the long and heavy sword which hung at his saddle-bow; but Terlake carried in front of him the high wivern-crested bassinet, Ford the heavy ash spear with swallow-tail pennon, while Alleyne was entrusted with the emblazoned shield. The Lady Loring rode her palfrey at her lord's bridle-arm, for she would see him as far as the edge of the forest, and ever and anon she turned her hard-lined face up wistfully to him and ran a questioning eye over his apparel and appointments.\n\n\"I trust that there is nothing forgot,\" she said, beckoning to Alleyne to ride on her further side. \"I trust him to you, Edricson. Hosen, shirts, cyclas, and under-jupons are in the brown basket on the left side of the mule. His wine he takes hot when the nights are cold, malvoisie or vernage, with as much spice as would cover the thumbnail. See that he hath a change if he come back hot from the tilting. There is goose-grease in a box, if the old scars ache at the turn of the weather. Let his blankets be dry and\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, my heart's life,\" the little knight interrupted, \"trouble not now about such matters. Why so pale and wan, Edricson? Is it not enow to make a man's heart dance to see this noble Company, such valiant men-at-arms, such lusty archers? By St. Paul! I would be ill to please if I were not blithe to see the red roses flying at the head of so noble a following!\"\n\n\"The purse I have already given you, Edricson,\" continue the lady. \"There are in it twenty-three marks, one noble, three shillings and fourpence, which is a great treasure for one man to carry. And I pray you to bear in mind, Edricson, that he hath two pair of shoes, those of red leather for common use, and the others with golden toe-chains, which he may wear should he chance to drink wine with the Prince or with Chandos.\"\n\n\"My sweet bird,\" said Sir Nigel, \"I am right loth to part from you, but we are now at the fringe of the forest, and it is not right that I should take the chatelaine too far from her trust.\"\n\n\"But oh, my dear lord,\" she cried with a trembling lip, \"let me bide with you for one furlong further\u2014or one and a half perhaps. You may spare me this out of the weary miles that you will journey along.\"\n\n\"Come, then, my heart's comfort,\" he answered. \"But I must crave a gage from thee. It is my custom, dearling, and hath been since I have first known thee, to proclaim by herald in such camps, townships, or fortalices as I may chance to visit, that my lady-love, being beyond compare the fairest and sweetest in Christendom, I should deem it great honor and kindly condescension if any cavalier would run three courses against me with sharpened lances, should he chance to have a lady whose claim he was willing to advance. I pray you then my fair dove, that you will vouchsafe to me one of those doeskin gloves, that I may wear it as the badge of her whose servant I shall ever be.\"\n\n\"Alack and alas for the fairest and sweetest!\" she cried. \"Fair and sweet I would fain be for your dear sake, my lord, but old I am and ugly, and the knights would laugh should you lay lance in rest in such a cause.\"\n\n\"Edricson,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"you have young eyes, and mine are somewhat bedimmed. Should you chance to see a knight laugh, or smile, or even, look you, arch his brows, or purse his mouth, or in any way show surprise that I should uphold the Lady Mary, you will take particular note of his name, his coat-armor, and his lodging. Your glove, my life's desire!\"\n\nThe Lady Mary Loring slipped her hand from her yellow leather gauntlet, and he, lifting it with dainty reverence, bound it to the front of his velvet cap.\n\n\"It is with mine other guardian angels,\" quoth he, pointing at the saints' medals which hung beside it. \"And now, my dearest, you have come far enow. May the Virgin guard and prosper thee! One kiss!\" He bent down from his saddle, and then, striking spurs into his horse's sides, he galloped at top speed after his men, with his three squires at his heels. Half a mile further, where the road topped a hill, they looked back, and the Lady Mary on her white palfrey was still where they had left her. A moment later they were on the downward slope, and she had vanished from their view." + }, + { + "title": "HOW SIR NIGEL SOUGHT FOR A WAYSIDE VENTURE.", + "text": "For a time Sir Nigel was very moody and downcast, with bent brows and eyes upon the pommel of his saddle. Edricson and Terlake rode behind him in little better case, while Ford, a careless and light-hearted youth, grinned at the melancholy of his companions, and flourished his lord's heavy spear, making a point to right and a point to left, as though he were a paladin contending against a host of assailants. Sir Nigel happened, however, to turn himself in his saddle-Ford instantly became as stiff and as rigid as though he had been struck with a palsy. The four rode alone, for the archers had passed a curve in the road, though Alleyne could still hear the heavy clump, clump of their marching, or catch a glimpse of the sparkle of steel through the tangle of leafless branches.\n\n\"Ride by my side, friends, I entreat of you,\" said the knight, reining in his steed that they might come abreast of him. \"For, since it hath pleased you to follow me to the wars, it were well that you should know how you may best serve me. I doubt not, Terlake, that you will show yourself a worthy son of a valiant father; and you, Ford, of yours; and you, Edricson, that you are mindful of the old-time house from which all men know that you are sprung. And first I would have you bear very steadfastly in mind that our setting forth is by no means for the purpose of gaining spoil or exacting ransom, though it may well happen that such may come to us also. We go to France, and from thence I trust to Spain, in humble search of a field in which we may win advancement and perchance some small share of glory. For this purpose I would have you know that it is not my wont to let any occasion pass where it is in any way possible that honor may be gained. I would have you bear this in mind, and give great heed to it that you may bring me word of all cartels, challenges, wrongs, tyrannies, infamies, and wronging of damsels. Nor is any occasion too small to take note of, for I have known such trifles as the dropping of a gauntlet, or the flicking of a breadcrumb, when well and properly followed up, lead to a most noble spear-running. But, Edricson, do I not see a cavalier who rides down yonder road amongst the nether shaw? It would be well, perchance, that you should give him greeting from me. And, should he be of gentle blood it may be that he would care to exchange thrusts with me.\"\n\n\"Why, my lord,\" quoth Ford, standing in his stirrups and shading his eyes, \"it is old Hob Davidson, the fat miller of Milton!\"\n\n\"Ah, so it is, indeed,\" said Sir Nigel, puckering his cheeks; \"but wayside ventures are not to be scorned, for I have seen no finer passages than are to be had from such chance meetings, when cavaliers are willing to advance themselves. I can well remember that two leagues from the town of Rheims I met a very valiant and courteous cavalier of France, with whom I had gentle and most honorable contention for upwards of an hour. It hath ever grieved me that I had not his name, for he smote upon me with a mace and went upon his way ere I was in condition to have much speech with him; but his arms were an allurion in chief above a fess azure. I was also on such an occasion thrust through the shoulder by Lyon de Montcourt, whom I met on the high road betwixt Libourne and Bordeaux. I met him but the once, but I have never seen a man for whom I bear a greater love and esteem. And so also with the squire Le Bourg Capillet, who would have been a very valiant captain had he lived.\"\n\n\"He is dead then?\" asked Alleyne Edricson.\n\n\"Alas! it was my ill fate to slay him in a bickering which broke out in a field near the township of Tarbes. I cannot call to mind how the thing came about, for it was in the year of the Prince's ride through Languedoc, when there was much fine skirmishing to be had at barriers. By St. Paul! I do not think that any honorable cavalier could ask for better chance of advancement than might be had by spurring forth before the army and riding to the gateways of Narbonne, or Bergerac or Mont Giscar, where some courteous gentleman would ever be at wait to do what he might to meet your wish or ease you of your vow. Such a one at Ventadour ran three courses with me betwixt daybreak and sunrise, to the great exaltation of his lady.\"\n\n\"And did you slay him also, my lord?\" asked Ford with reverence.\n\n\"I could never learn, for he was carried within the barrier, and as I had chanced to break the bone of my leg it was a great unease for me to ride or even to stand. Yet, by the goodness of heaven and the pious intercession of the valiant St. George, I was able to sit my charger in the ruffle of Poictiers, which was no very long time afterwards. But what have we here? A very fair and courtly maiden, or I mistake.\"\n\nIt was indeed a tall and buxom country lass, with a basket of spinach-leaves upon her head, and a great slab of bacon tucked under one arm. She bobbed a frightened curtsey as Sir Nigel swept his velvet hat from his head and reined up his great charger.\n\n\"God be with thee, fair maiden!\" said he.\n\n\"God guard thee, my lord!\" she answered, speaking in the broadest West Saxon speech, and balancing herself first on one foot and then on the other in her bashfulness.\n\n\"Fear not, my fair damsel,\" said Sir Nigel, \"but tell me if perchance a poor and most unworthy knight can in any wise be of service to you. Should it chance that you have been used despitefully, it may be that I may obtain justice for you.\"\n\n\"Lawk no, kind sir,\" she answered, clutching her bacon the tighter, as though some design upon it might be hid under this knightly offer. \"I be the milking wench o' fairmer Arnold, and he be as kind a maister as heart could wish.\"\n\n\"It is well,\" said he, and with a shake of the bridle rode on down the woodland path. \"I would have you bear in mind,\" he continued to his squires, \"that gentle courtesy is not, as is the base use of so many false knights, to be shown only to maidens of high degree, for there is no woman so humble that a true knight may not listen to her tale of wrong. But here comes a cavalier who is indeed in haste. Perchance it would be well that we should ask him whither he rides, for it may be that he is one who desires to advance himself in chivalry.\"\n\nThe bleak, hard, wind-swept road dipped down in front of them into a little valley, and then, writhing up the heathy slope upon the other side, lost itself among the gaunt pine-trees. Far away between the black lines of trunks the quick glitter of steel marked where the Company pursued its way. To the north stretched the tree country, but to the south, between two swelling downs, a glimpse might be caught of the cold gray shimmer of the sea, with the white fleck of a galley sail upon the distant skyline. Just in front of the travellers a horseman was urging his steed up the slope, driving it on with whip and spur as one who rides for a set purpose. As he clattered up, Alleyne could see that the roan horse was gray with dust and flecked with foam, as though it had left many a mile behind it. The rider was a stern-faced man, hard of mouth and dry of eye, with a heavy sword clanking at his side, and a stiff white bundle swathed in linen balanced across the pommel of his saddle.\n\n\"The king's messenger,\" he bawled as he came up to them. \"The messenger of the king. Clear the causeway for the king's own man.\"\n\n\"Not so loudly, friend,\" quoth the little knight, reining his horse half round to bar the path. \"I have myself been the king's man for thirty years or more, but I have not been wont to halloo about it on a peaceful highway.\"\n\n\"I ride in his service,\" cried the other, \"and I carry that which belongs to him. You bar my path at your peril.\"\n\n\"Yet I have known the king's enemies claim to ride in his same,\" said Sir Nigel. \"The foul fiend may lurk beneath a garment of light. We must have some sign or warrant of your mission.\"\n\n\"Then must I hew a passage,\" cried the stranger, with his shoulder braced round and his hand upon his hilt. \"I am not to be stopped on the king's service by every gadabout.\"\n\n\"Should you be a gentleman of quarterings and coat-armor,\" lisped Sir Nigel, \"I shall be very blithe to go further into the matter with you. If not, I have three very worthy squires, any one of whom would take the thing upon himself, and debate it with you in a very honorable way.\"\n\nThe man scowled from one to the other, and his hand stole away from his sword.\n\n\"You ask me for a sign,\" he said. \"Here is a sign for you, since you must have one.\" As he spoke he whirled the covering from the object in front of him and showed to their horror that it was a newly-severed human leg. \"By God's tooth!\" he continued, with a brutal laugh, \"you ask me if I am a man of quarterings, and it is even so, for I am officer to the verderer's court at Lyndhurst. This thievish leg is to hang at Milton, and the other is already at Brockenhurst, as a sign to all men of what comes of being over-fond of venison pasty.\"\n\n\"Faugh!\" cried Sir Nigel. \"Pass on the other side of the road, fellow, and let us have the wind of you. We shall trot our horses, my friends, across this pleasant valley, for, by Our Lady! a breath of God's fresh air is right welcome after such a sight.\"\n\n\"We hoped to snare a falcon,\" said he presently, \"but we netted a carrion-crow. Ma foi! but there are men whose hearts are tougher than a boar's hide. For me, I have played the old game of war since ever I had hair on my chin, and I have seen ten thousand brave men in one day with their faces to the sky, but I swear by Him who made me that I cannot abide the work of the butcher.\"\n\n\"And yet, my fair lord,\" said Edricson, \"there has, from what I hear, been much of such devil's work in France.\"\n\n\"Too much, too much,\" he answered. \"But I have ever observed that the foremost in the field are they who would scorn to mishandle a prisoner. By St. Paul! it is not they who carry the breach who are wont to sack the town, but the laggard knaves who come crowding in when a way has been cleared for them. But what is this among the trees?\"\n\n\"It is a shrine of Our Lady,\" said Terlake, \"and a blind beggar who lives by the alms of those who worship there.\"\n\n\"A shrine!\" cried the knight. \"Then let us put up an orison.\" Pulling off his cap, and clasping his hands, he chanted in a shrill voice: \"Benedictus dominus Deus meus, qui docet manus meas ad proelium, et digitos meos ad bellum.\" A strange figure he seemed to his three squires, perched on his huge horse, with his eyes upturned and the wintry sun shimmering upon his bald head. \"It is a noble prayer,\" he remarked, putting on his hat again, \"and it was taught to me by the noble Chandos himself. But how fares it with you, father? Methinks that I should have ruth upon you, seeing that I am myself like one who looks through a horn window while his neighbors have the clear crystal. Yet, by St. Paul! there is a long stride between the man who hath a horn casement and him who is walled in on every hand.\"\n\n\"Alas! fair sir,\" cried the blind old man, \"I have not seen the blessed blue of heaven this two-score years, since a levin flash burned the sight out of my head.\"\n\n\"You have been blind to much that is goodly and fair,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"but you have also been spared much that is sorry and foul. This very hour our eyes have been shocked with that which would have left you unmoved. But, by St. Paul! we must on, or our Company will think that they have lost their captain somewhat early in the venture. Throw the man my purse, Edricson, and let us go.\"\n\nAlleyne, lingering behind, bethought him of the Lady Loring's counsel, and reduced the noble gift which the knight had so freely bestowed to a single penny, which the beggar with many mumbled blessings thrust away into his wallet. Then, spurring his steed, the young squire rode at the top of his speed after his companions, and overtook them just at the spot where the trees fringe off into the moor and the straggling hamlet of Hordle lies scattered on either side of the winding and deeply-rutted track. The Company was already well-nigh through the village; but, as the knight and his squires closed up upon them, they heard the clamor of a strident voice, followed by a roar of deep-chested laughter from the ranks of the archers. Another minute brought them up with the rear-guard, where every man marched with his beard on his shoulder and a face which was agrin with merriment. By the side of the column walked a huge red-headed bowman, with his hands thrown out in argument and expostulation, while close at his heels followed a little wrinkled woman who poured forth a shrill volley of abuse, varied by an occasional thwack from her stick, given with all the force of her body, though she might have been beating one of the forest trees for all the effect that she seemed likely to produce.\n\n\"I trust, Aylward,\" said Sir Nigel gravely, as he rode up, \"that this doth not mean that any violence hath been offered to women. If such a thing happened, I tell you that the man shall hang, though he were the best archer that ever wore brassart.\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord,\" Aylward answered with a grin, \"it is violence which is offered to a man. He comes from Hordle, and this is his mother who hath come forth to welcome him.\"\n\n\"You rammucky lurden,\" she was howling, with a blow between each catch of her breath, \"you shammocking, yaping, over-long good-for-nought. I will teach thee! I will baste thee! Aye, by my faith!\"\n\n\"Whist, mother,\" said John, looking back at her from the tail of his eye, \"I go to France as an archer to give blows and to take them.\"\n\n\"To France, quotha?\" cried the old dame. \"Bide here with me, and I shall warrant you more blows than you are like to get in France. If blows be what you seek, you need not go further than Hordle.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! the good dame speaks truth,\" said Aylward. \"It seems to be the very home of them.\"\n\n\"What have you to say, you clean-shaved galley-beggar?\" cried the fiery dame, turning upon the archer. \"Can I not speak with my own son but you must let your tongue clack? A soldier, quotha, and never a hair on his face. I have seen a better soldier with pap for food and swaddling clothes for harness.\"\n\n\"Stand to it, Aylward,\" cried the archers, amid a fresh burst of laughter.\n\n\"Do not thwart her, comrade,\" said big John. \"She hath a proper spirit for her years and cannot abide to be thwarted. It is kindly and homely to me to hear her voice and to feel that she is behind me. But I must leave you now, mother, for the way is over-rough for your feet; but I will bring you back a silken gown, if there be one in France or Spain, and I will bring Jinny a silver penny; so good-bye to you, and God have you in His keeping!\" Whipping up the little woman, he lifted her lightly to his lips, and then, taking his place in the ranks again, marched on with the laughing Company.\n\n\"That was ever his way,\" she cried, appealing to Sir Nigel, who reined up his horse and listened with the greatest courtesy. \"He would jog on his own road for all that I could do to change him. First he must be a monk forsooth, and all because a wench was wise enough to turn her back on him. Then he joins a rascally crew and must needs trapse off to the wars, and me with no one to bait the fire if I be out, or tend the cow if I be home. Yet I have been a good mother to him. Three hazel switches a day have I broke across his shoulders, and he takes no more notice than you have seen him to-day.\"\n\n\"Doubt not that he will come back to you both safe and prosperous, my fair dame,\" quoth Sir Nigel. \"Meanwhile it grieves me that as I have already given my purse to a beggar up the road I\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, my lord,\" said Alleyne, \"I still have some moneys remaining.\"\n\n\"Then I pray you to give them to this very worthy woman.\" He cantered on as he spoke, while Alleyne, having dispensed two more pence, left the old dame standing by the furthest cottage of Hordle, with her shrill voice raised in blessings instead of revilings.\n\nThere were two cross-roads before they reached the Lymington Ford, and at each of then Sir Nigel pulled up his horse, and waited with many a curvet and gambade, craning his neck this way and that to see if fortune would send him a venture. Crossroads had, as he explained, been rare places for knightly spear-runnings, and in his youth it was no uncommon thing for a cavalier to abide for weeks at such a point, holding gentle debate with all comers, to his own advancement and the great honor of his lady. The times were changed, however, and the forest tracks wound away from them deserted and silent, with no trample of warhorse or clang of armor which might herald the approach of an adversary\u2014so that Sir Nigel rode on his way disconsolate. At the Lymington River they splashed through the ford, and lay in the meadows on the further side to eat the bread and salt meat which they carried upon the sumpter horses. Then, ere the sun was on the slope of the heavens, they had deftly trussed up again, and were swinging merrily upon their way, two hundred feet moving like two.\n\nThere is a third cross-road where the track from Boldre runs down to the old fishing village of Pitt's Deep. Down this, as they came abreast of it, there walked two men, the one a pace or two behind the other. The cavaliers could not but pull up their horses to look at them, for a stranger pair were never seen journeying together. The first was a misshapen, squalid man with cruel, cunning eyes and a shock of tangled red hair, bearing in his hands a small unpainted cross, which he held high so that all men might see it. He seemed to be in the last extremity of fright, with a face the color of clay and his limbs all ashake as one who hath an ague. Behind him, with his toe ever rasping upon the other's heels, there walked a very stern, black-bearded man with a hard eye and a set mouth. He bore over his shoulder a great knotted stick with three jagged nails stuck in the head of it, and from time to time he whirled it up in the air with a quivering arm, as though he could scarce hold back from dashing his companion's brains out. So in silence they walked under the spread of the branches on the grass-grown path from Boldre.\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" quoth the knight, \"but this is a passing strange sight, and perchance some very perilous and honorable venture may arise from it. I pray you, Edricson, to ride up to them and to ask them the cause of it.\"\n\nThere was no need, however, for him to move, for the twain came swiftly towards them until they were within a spear's length, when the man with the cross sat himself down sullenly upon a tussock of grass by the wayside, while the other stood beside him with his great cudgel still hanging over his head. So intent was he that he raised his eyes neither to knight nor squires, but kept them ever fixed with a savage glare upon his comrade.\n\n\"I pray you, friend,\" said Sir Nigel, \"to tell us truthfully who you are, and why you follow this man with such bitter enmity?\n\n\"So long as I am within the pale of the king's law,\" the stranger answered, \"I cannot see why I should render account to every passing wayfarer.\"\n\n\"You are no very shrewd reasoner, fellow,\" quoth the knight; \"for if it be within the law for you to threaten him with your club, then it is also lawful for me to threaten you with my sword.\"\n\nThe man with the cross was down in an instant on his knees upon the ground, with hands clasped above him and his face shining with hope. \"For dear Christ's sake, my fair lord,\" he cried in a crackling voice, \"I have at my belt a bag with a hundred rose nobles, and I will give it to you freely if you will but pass your sword through this man's body.\"\n\n\"How, you foul knave?\" exclaimed Sir Nigel hotly. \"Do you think that a cavalier's arm is to be bought like a packman's ware. By St. Paul! I have little doubt that this fellow hath some very good cause to hold you in hatred.\"\n\n\"Indeed, my fair sir, you speak sooth,\" quoth he with the club, while the other seated himself once more by the wayside. \"For this man is Peter Peterson, a very noted rieve, draw-latch, and murtherer, who has wrought much evil for many years in the parts about Winchester. It was but the other day, upon the feasts of the blessed Simon and Jude, that he slew my younger brother William in Bere Forest\u2014for which, by the black thorn of Glastonbury! I shall have his heart's blood, though I walk behind him to the further end of earth.\"\n\n\"But if this be indeed so,\" asked Sir Nigel, \"why is it that you have come with him so far through the forest?\"\n\n\"Because I am an honest Englishman, and will take no more than the law allows. For when the deed was done this foul and base wretch fled to sanctuary at St. Cross, and I, as you may think, after him with all the posse. The prior, however, hath so ordered that while he holds this cross no man may lay hand upon him without the ban of church, which heaven forfend from me or mine. Yet, if for an instant he lay the cross aside, or if he fail to journey to Pitt's Deep, where it is ordered that he shall take ship to outland parts, or if he take not the first ship, or if until the ship be ready he walk not every day into the sea as far as his loins, then he becomes outlaw, and I shall forthwith dash out his brains.\"\n\nAt this the man on the ground snarled up at him like a rat, while the other clenched his teeth, and shook his club, and looked down at him with murder in his eyes. Knight and squire gazed from rogue to avenger, but as it was a matter which none could mend they tarried no longer, but rode upon their way. Alleyne, looking back, saw that the murderer had drawn bread and cheese from his scrip, and was silently munching it, with the protecting cross still hugged to his breast, while the other, black and grim, stood in the sunlit road and threw his dark shadow athwart him." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE YELLOW COG SAILED FORTH FROM LEPE.", + "text": "That night the Company slept at St. Leonard's, in the great monastic barns and spicarium\u2014ground well known both to Alleyne and to John, for they were almost within sight of the Abbey of Beaulieu. A strange thrill it gave to the young squire to see the well-remembered white dress once more, and to hear the measured tolling of the deep vespers bell. At early dawn they passed across the broad, sluggish, reed-girt stream\u2014men, horses, and baggage in the flat ferry barges\u2014and so journeyed on through the fresh morning air past Exbury to Lepe. Topping the heathy down, they came of a sudden full in sight of the old seaport\u2014a cluster of houses, a trail of blue smoke, and a bristle of masts. To right and left the long blue curve of the Solent lapped in a fringe of foam upon the yellow beach. Some way out from the town a line of pessoners, creyers, and other small craft were rolling lazily on the gentle swell. Further out still lay a great merchant-ship, high ended, deep waisted, painted of a canary yellow, and towering above the fishing-boats like a swan among ducklings.\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" said the knight, \"our good merchant of Southampton hath not played us false, for methinks I can see our ship down yonder. He said that she would be of great size and of a yellow shade.\"\n\n\"By my hilt, yes!\" muttered Aylward; \"she is yellow as a kite's claw, and would carry as many men as there are pips in a pomegranate.\"\n\n\"It is as well,\" remarked Terlake; \"for methinks, my fair lord, that we are not the only ones who are waiting a passage to Gascony. Mine eye catches at times a flash and sparkle among yonder houses which assuredly never came from shipman's jacket or the gaberdine of a burgher.\"\n\n\"I can also see it,\" said Alleyne, shading his eyes with his hand. \"And I can see men-at-arms in yonder boats which ply betwixt the vessel and the shore. But methinks that we are very welcome here, for already they come forth to meet us.\"\n\nA tumultuous crowd of fishermen, citizens, and women had indeed swarmed out from the northern gate, and approached them up the side of the moor, waving their hands and dancing with joy, as though a great fear had been rolled back from their minds. At their head rode a very large and solemn man with a long chin and a drooping lip. He wore a fur tippet round his neck and a heavy gold chain over it, with a medallion which dangled in front of him.\n\n\"Welcome, most puissant and noble lord,\" he cried, doffing his bonnet to Black Simon. \"I have heard of your lordship's valiant deeds, and in sooth they might be expected from your lordship's face and bearing. Is there any small matter in which I may oblige you?\"\n\n\"Since you ask me,\" said the man-at-arms, \"I would take it kindly if you could spare a link or two of the chain which hangs round your neck.\"\n\n\"What, the corporation chain!\" cried the other in horror. \"The ancient chain of the township of Lepe! This is but a sorry jest, Sir Nigel.\"\n\n\"What the plague did you ask me for then?\" said Simon. \"But if it is Sir Nigel Loring with whom you would speak, that is he upon the black horse.\"\n\nThe Mayor of Lepe gazed with amazement on the mild face and slender frame of the famous warrior.\n\n\"Your pardon, my gracious lord,\" he cried. \"You see in me the mayor and chief magistrate of the ancient and powerful town of Lepe. I bid you very heartily welcome, and the more so as you are come at a moment when we are sore put to it for means of defence.'\n\n\"Ha!\" cried Sir Nigel, pricking up his ears.\n\n\"Yes, my lord, for the town being very ancient and the walls as old as the town, it follows that they are very ancient too. But there is a certain villainous and bloodthirsty Norman pirate hight Tete-noire, who, with a Genoan called Tito Caracci, commonly known as Spade-beard, hath been a mighty scourge upon these coasts. Indeed, my lord, they are very cruel and black-hearted men, graceless and ruthless, and if they should come to the ancient and powerful town of Lepe then\u2014\"\n\n\"Then good-bye to the ancient and powerful town of Lepe,\" quoth Ford, whose lightness of tongue could at times rise above his awe of Sir Nigel.\n\nThe knight, however, was too much intent upon the matter in hand to give heed to the flippancy of his squire. \"Have you then cause,\" he asked, \"to think that these men are about to venture an attempt upon you?\"\n\n\"They have come in two great galleys,\" answered the mayor, \"with two bank of oars on either side, and great store of engines of war and of men-at-arms. At Weymouth and at Portland they have murdered and ravished. Yesterday morning they were at Cowes, and we saw the smoke from the burning crofts. To-day they lie at their ease near Freshwater, and we fear much lest they come upon us and do us a mischief.\"\n\n\"We cannot tarry,\" said Sir Nigel, riding towards the town, with the mayor upon his left side; \"the Prince awaits us at Bordeaux, and we may not be behind the general muster. Yet I will promise you that on our way we shall find time to pass Freshwater and to prevail upon these rovers to leave you in peace.\"\n\n\"We are much beholden to you!\" cried the mayor \"But I cannot see, my lord, how, without a war-ship, you may venture against these men. With your archers, however, you might well hold the town and do them great scath if they attempt to land.\"\n\n\"There is a very proper cog out yonder,\" said Sir Nigel, \"it would be a very strange thing if any ship were not a war-ship when it had such men as these upon her decks. Certes, we shall do as I say, and that no later than this very day.\"\n\n\"My lord,\" said a rough-haired, dark-faced man, who walked by the knight's other stirrup, with his head sloped to catch all that he was saying. \"By your leave, I have no doubt that you are skilled in land fighting and the marshalling of lances, but, by my soul! you will find it another thing upon the sea. I am the master-shipman of this yellow cog, and my name is Goodwin Hawtayne. I have sailed since I was as high as this staff, and I have fought against these Normans and against the Genoese, as well as the Scotch, the Bretons, the Spanish, and the Moors. I tell you, sir, that my ship is over light and over frail for such work, and it will but end in our having our throats cut, or being sold as slaves to the Barbary heathen.\"\n\n\"I also have experienced one or two gentle and honorable ventures upon the sea,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"and I am right blithe to have so fair a task before us. I think, good master-shipman, that you and I may win great honor in this matter, and I can see very readily that you are a brave and stout man.\"\n\n\"I like it not,\" said the other sturdily. \"In God's name, I like it not. And yet Goodwin Hawtayne is not the man to stand back when his fellows are for pressing forward. By my soul! be it sink or swim, I shall turn her beak into Freshwater Bay, and if good Master Witherton, of Southampton, like not my handling of his ship then he may find another master-shipman.\"\n\nThey were close by the old north gate of the little town, and Alleyne, half turning in his saddle, looked back at the motley crowd who followed. The bowmen and men-at-arms had broken their ranks and were intermingled with the fishermen and citizens, whose laughing faces and hearty gestures bespoke the weight of care from which this welcome arrival had relieved them. Here and there among the moving throng of dark jerkins and of white surcoats were scattered dashes of scarlet and blue, the whimples or shawls of the women. Aylward, with a fishing lass on either arm, was vowing constancy alternately to her on the right and her on the left, while big John towered in the rear with a little chubby maiden enthroned upon his great shoulder, her soft white arm curled round his shining headpiece. So the throng moved on, until at the very gate it was brought to a stand by a wondrously fat man, who came darting forth from the town with rage in every feature of his rubicund face.\n\n\"How now, Sir Mayor?\" he roared, in a voice like a bull. \"How now, Sir Mayor? How of the clams and the scallops?\"\n\n\"By Our Lady! my sweet Sir Oliver,\" cried the mayor. \"I have had so much to think of, with these wicked villains so close upon us, that it had quite gone out of my head.\"\n\n\"Words, words!\" shouted the other furiously. \"Am I to be put off with words? I say to you again, how of the clams and scallops?\"\n\n\"My fair sir, you flatter me,\" cried the mayor. \"I am a peaceful trader, and I am not wont to be so shouted at upon so small a matter.\"\n\n\"Small!\" shrieked the other. \"Small! Clams and scallops! Ask me to your table to partake of the dainty of the town, and when I come a barren welcome and a bare board! Where is my spear-bearer?\"\n\n\"Nay, Sir Oliver, Sir Oliver!\" cried Sir Nigel, laughing.\n\n\"Let your anger be appeased, since instead of this dish you come upon an old friend and comrade.\"\n\n\"By St. Martin of Tours!\" shouted the fat knight, his wrath all changed in an instant to joy, \"if it is not my dear little game rooster of the Garonne. Ah, my sweet coz, I am right glad to see you. What days we have seen together!\"\n\n\"Aye, by my faith,\" cried Sir Nigel, with sparkling eyes, \"we have seen some valiant men, and we have shown our pennons in some noble skirmishes. By St. Paul! we have had great joys in France.\"\n\n\"And sorrows also,\" quoth the other. \"I have some sad memories of the land. Can you recall that which befell us at Libourne?\"\n\n\"Nay, I cannot call to mind that we ever so much as drew sword at the place.\"\n\n\"Man, man,\" cried Sir Oliver, \"your mind still runs on nought but blades and bassinets. Hast no space in thy frame for the softer joys. Ah, even now I can scarce speak of it unmoved. So noble a pie, such tender pigeons, and sugar in the gravy instead of salt! You were by my side that day, as were Sir Claude Latour and the Lord of Pommers.\"\n\n\"I remember it,\" said Sir Nigel, laughing, \"and how you harried the cook down the street, and spoke of setting fire to the inn. By St. Paul! most worthy mayor, my old friend is a perilous man, and I rede you that you compose your difference with him on such terms as you may.\"\n\n\"The clams and scallops shall be ready within the hour,\" the mayor answered. \"I had asked Sir Oliver Buttesthorn to do my humble board the honor to partake at it of the dainty upon which we take some little pride, but in sooth this alarm of pirates hath cast such a shadow on my wits that I am like one distrait. But I trust, Sir Nigel, that you will also partake of none-meat with me?\"\n\n\"I have overmuch to do,\" Sir Nigel answered, \"for we must be aboard, horse and man, as early as we may. How many do you muster, Sir Oliver?\"\n\n\"Three and forty. The forty are drunk, and the three are but indifferent sober. I have them all safe upon the ship.\"\n\n\"They had best find their wits again, for I shall have work for every man of them ere the sun set. It is my intention, if it seems good to you, to try a venture against these Norman and Genoese rovers.\"\n\n\"They carry caviare and certain very noble spices from the Levant aboard of ships from Genoa,\" quoth Sir Oliver. \"We may come to great profit through the business. I pray you, master-shipman, that when you go on board you pour a helmetful of sea-water over any of my rogues whom you may see there.\"\n\nLeaving the lusty knight and the Mayor of Lepe, Sir Nigel led the Company straight down to the water's edge, where long lines of flat lighters swiftly bore them to their vessel. Horse after horse was slung by main force up from the barges, and after kicking and plunging in empty air was dropped into the deep waist of the yellow cog, where rows of stalls stood ready for their safe keeping. Englishmen in those days were skilled and prompt in such matters, for it was so not long before that Edward had embarked as many as fifty thousand men in the port of Orwell, with their horses and their baggage, all in the space of four-and-twenty hours. So urgent was Sir Nigel on the shore, and so prompt was Goodwin Hawtayne on the cog, that Sir Oliver Buttesthorn had scarce swallowed his last scallop ere the peal of the trumpet and clang of nakir announced that all was ready and the anchor drawn. In the last boat which left the shore the two commanders sat together in the sheets, a strange contrast to one another, while under the feet of the rowers was a litter of huge stones which Sir Nigel had ordered to be carried to the cog. These once aboard, the ship set her broad mainsail, purple in color, and with a golden St. Christopher bearing Christ upon his shoulder in the centre of it. The breeze blew, the sail bellied, over heeled the portly vessel, and away she plunged through the smooth blue rollers, amid the clang of the minstrels on her poop and the shouting of the black crowd who fringed the yellow beach. To the left lay the green Island of Wight, with its long, low, curving hills peeping over each other's shoulders to the skyline; to the right the wooded Hampshire coast as far as eye could reach; above a steel-blue heaven, with a wintry sun shimmering down upon them, and enough of frost to set the breath a-smoking.\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" said Sir Nigel gayly, as he stood upon the poop and looked on either side of him, \"it is a land which is very well worth fighting for, and it were pity to go to France for what may be had at home. Did you not spy a crooked man upon the beach?\"\n\n\"Nay, I spied nothing,\" grumbled Sir Oliver, \"for I was hurried down with a clam stuck in my gizzard and an untasted goblet of Cyprus on the board behind me.\"\n\n\"I saw him, my fair lord,\" said Terlake, \"an old man with one shoulder higher than the other.\"\n\n\"'Tis a sign of good fortune,\" quoth Sir Nigel. \"Our path was also crossed by a woman and by a priest, so all should be well with us. What say you, Edricson?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell, my fair lord. The Romans of old were a very wise people, yet, certes, they placed their faith in such matters. So, too, did the Greeks, and divers other ancient peoples who were famed for their learning. Yet of the moderns there are many who scoff at all omens.\"\n\n\"There can be no manner of doubt about it,\" said Sir Oliver Buttesthorn, \"I can well remember that in Navarre one day it thundered on the left out of a cloudless sky. We knew that ill would come of it, nor had we long to wait. Only thirteen days after, a haunch of prime venison was carried from my very tent door by the wolves, and on the same day two flasks of old vernage turned sour and muddy.\"\n\n\"You may bring my harness from below,\" said Sir Nigel to his squires, \"and also, I pray you, bring up Sir Oliver's and we shall don it here. Ye may then see to your own gear; for this day you will, I hope, make a very honorable entrance into the field of chivalry, and prove yourselves to be very worthy and valiant squires. And now, Sir Oliver, as to our dispositions: would it please you that I should order them or will you?\"\n\n\"You, my cockerel, you. By Our Lady! I am no chicken, but I cannot claim to know as much of war as the squire of Sir Walter Manny. Settle the matter to your own liking.\"\n\n\"You shall fly your pennon upon the fore part, then, and I upon the poop. For foreguard I shall give you your own forty men, with two-score archers. Two-score men, with my own men-at-arms and squires, will serve as a poop-guard. Ten archers, with thirty shipmen, under the master, may hold the waist while ten lie aloft with stones and arbalests. How like you that?\"\n\n\"Good, by my faith, good! But here comes my harness, and I must to work, for I cannot slip into it as I was wont when first I set my face to the wars.\"\n\nMeanwhile there had been bustle and preparation in all parts of the great vessel. The archers stood in groups about the decks, new-stringing their bows, and testing that they were firm at the nocks. Among them moved Aylward and other of the older soldiers, with a few whispered words of precept here and of warning there.\n\n\"Stand to it, my hearts of gold,\" said the old bowman as he passed from knot to knot. \"By my hilt! we are in luck this journey. Bear in mind the old saying of the Company.\"\n\n\"What is that, Aylward?\" cried several, leaning on their bows and laughing at him.\n\n\"'Tis the master-bowyer's rede: 'Every bow well bent. Every shaft well sent. Every stave well nocked. Every string well locked.' There, with that jingle in his head, a bracer on his left hand, a shooting glove on his right, and a farthing's-worth of wax in his girdle, what more doth a bowman need?\"\n\n\"It would not be amiss,\" said Hordle John, \"if under his girdle he had tour farthings'-worth of wine.\"\n\n\"Work first, wine afterwards, mon camarade. But it is time that we took our order, for methinks that between the Needle rocks and the Alum cliffs yonder I can catch a glimpse of the topmasts of the galleys. Hewett, Cook, Johnson, Cunningham, your men are of the poop-guard. Thornbury, Walters, Hackett, Baddlesmere, you are with Sir Oliver on the forecastle. Simon, you bide with your lord's banner; but ten men must go forward.\"\n\nQuietly and promptly the men took their places, lying flat upon their faces on the deck, for such was Sir Nigel's order. Near the prow was planted Sir Oliver's spear, with his arms\u2014a boar's head gules upon a field of gold. Close by the stern stood Black Simon with the pennon of the house of Loring. In the waist gathered the Southampton mariners, hairy and burly men, with their jerkins thrown off, their waists braced tight, swords, mallets, and pole-axes in their hands. Their leader, Goodwin Hawtayne, stood upon the poop and talked with Sir Nigel, casting his eye up sometimes at the swelling sail, and then glancing back at the two seamen who held the tiller.\n\n\"Pass the word,\" said Sir Nigel, \"that no man shall stand to arms or draw his bow-string until my trumpeter shall sound. It would be well that we should seem to be a merchant-ship from Southampton and appear to flee from them.\"\n\n\"We shall see them anon,\" said the master-shipman. \"Ha, said I not so? There they lie, the water-snakes, in Freshwater Bay; and mark the reek of smoke from yonder point, where they have been at their devil's work. See how their shallops pull from the land! They have seen us and called their men aboard. Now they draw upon the anchor. See them like ants upon the forecastle! They stoop and heave like handy ship men. But, my fair lord, these are no niefs. I doubt but we have taken in hand more than we can do. Each of these ships is a galeasse, and of the largest and swiftest make.\"\n\n\"I would I had your eyes,\" said Sir Nigel, blinking at the pirate galleys. \"They seem very gallant ships, and I trust that we shall have much pleasance from our meeting with them. It would be well to pass the word that we should neither give nor take quarter this day. Have you perchance a priest or friar aboard this ship, Master Hawtayne?\"\n\n\"No, my fair lord.\"\n\n\"Well, well, it is no great matter for my Company, for they were all houseled and shriven ere we left Twynham Castle; and Father Christopher of the Priory gave me his word that they were as fit to march to heaven as to Gascony. But my mind misdoubts me as to these Winchester men who have come with Sir Oliver, for they appear to be a very ungodly crew. Pass the word that the men kneel, and that the under-officers repeat to them the pater, the ave, and the credo.\"\n\nWith a clank of arms, the rough archers and seamen took to their knees, with bent heads and crossed hands, listening to the hoarse mutter from the file-leaders. It was strange to mark the hush; so that the lapping of the water, the straining of the sail, and the creaking of the timbers grew louder of a sudden upon the ear. Many of the bowmen had drawn amulets and relics from their bosoms, while he who possessed some more than usually sanctified treasure passed it down the line of his comrades, that all might kiss and reap the virtue.\n\nThe yellow cog had now shot out from the narrow waters of the Solent, and was plunging and rolling on the long heave of the open channel. The wind blew freshly from the east, with a very keen edge to it; and the great sail bellied roundly out, laying the vessel over until the water hissed beneath her lee bulwarks. Broad and ungainly, she floundered from wave to wave, dipping her round bows deeply into the blue rollers, and sending the white flakes of foam in a spatter over her decks. On her larboard quarter lay the two dark galleys, which had already hoisted sail, and were shooting out from Freshwater Bay in swift pursuit, their double line of oars giving them a vantage which could not fail to bring them up with any vessel which trusted to sails alone. High and bluff the English cog; long, black and swift the pirate galleys, like two fierce lean wolves which have seen a lordly and unsuspecting stag walk past their forest lair.\n\n\"Shall we turn, my fair lord, or shall we carry on?\" asked the master-shipman, looking behind him with anxious eyes.\n\n\"Nay, we must carry on and play the part of the helpless merchant.\"\n\n\"But your pennons? They will see that we have two knights with us.\"\n\n\"Yet it would not be to a knight's honor or good name to lower his pennon. Let them be, and they will think that we are a wine-ship for Gascony, or that we bear the wool-bales of some mercer of the Staple. Ma foi, but they are very swift! They swoop upon us like two goshawks on a heron. Is there not some symbol or device upon their sails?\"\n\n\"That on the right,\" said Edricson, \"appears to have the head of an Ethiop upon it.\"\n\n\"'Tis the badge of Tete-noire, the Norman,\" cried a seaman-mariner. \"I have seen it before, when he harried us at Winchelsea. He is a wondrous large and strong man, with no ruth for man, woman, or beast. They say that he hath the strength of six; and, certes, he hath the crimes of six upon his soul. See, now, to the poor souls who swing at either end of his yard-arm!\"\n\nAt each end of the yard there did indeed hang the dark figure of a man, jolting and lurching with hideous jerkings of its limbs at every plunge and swoop of the galley.\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" said Sir Nigel, \"and by the help of St. George and Our Lady, it will be a very strange thing if our black-headed friend does not himself swing thence ere he be many hours older. But what is that upon the other galley?\"\n\n\"It is the red cross of Genoa. This Spade-beard is a very noted captain, and it is his boast that there are no seamen and no archers in the world who can compare with those who serve the Doge Boccanegra.\"\n\n\"That we shall prove,\" said Goodwin Hawtayne; \"but it would be well, ere they close with us, to raise up the mantlets and pavises as a screen against their bolts.\" He shouted a hoarse order, and his seamen worked swiftly and silently, heightening the bulwarks and strengthening them. The three ship's anchors were at Sir Nigel's command carried into the waist, and tied to the mast, with twenty feet of cable between, each under the care of four seamen. Eight others were stationed with leather water-bags to quench any fire-arrows which might come aboard, while others were sent up the mast, to lie along the yard and drop stones or shoot arrows as the occasion served.\n\n\"Let them be supplied with all that is heavy and weighty in the ship,\" said Sir Nigel.\n\n\"Then we must send them up Sir Oliver Buttesthorn,\" quoth Ford.\n\nThe knight looked at him with a face which struck the smile from his lips. \"No squire of mine,\" he said, \"shall ever make jest of a belted knight. And yet,\" he added, his eyes softening, \"I know that it is but a boy's mirth, with no sting in it. Yet I should ill do my part towards your father if I did not teach you to curb your tongue-play.\"\n\n\"They will lay us aboard on either quarter, my lord,\" cried the master. \"See how they stretch out from each other! The Norman hath a mangonel or a trabuch upon the forecastle. See, they bend to the levers! They are about to loose it.\"\n\n\"Aylward,\" cried the knight, \"pick your three trustiest archers, and see if you cannot do something to hinder their aim. Methinks they are within long arrow flight.\"\n\n\"Seventeen score paces,\" said the archer, running his eye backwards and forwards. \"By my ten finger-bones! it would be a strange thing if we could not notch a mark at that distance. Here, Watkin of Sowley, Arnold, Long Williams, let us show the rogues that they have English bowmen to deal with.\"\n\nThe three archers named stood at the further end of the poop, balancing themselves with feet widely spread and bows drawn, until the heads of the cloth-yard arrows were level with the centre of the stave. \"You are the surer, Watkin,\" said Aylward, standing by them with shaft upon string. \"Do you take the rogue with the red coif. You two bring down the man with the headpiece, and I will hold myself ready if you miss. Ma foi! they are about to loose her. Shoot, mes garcons, or you will be too late.\"\n\nThe throng of pirates had cleared away from the great wooden catapult, leaving two of their number to discharge it. One in a scarlet cap bent over it, steadying the jagged rock which was balanced on the spoon-shaped end of the long wooden lever. The other held the loop of the rope which would release the catch and send the unwieldy missile hurtling through the air. So for an instant they stood, showing hard and clear against the white sail behind them. The next, redcap had fallen across the stone with an arrow between his ribs; and the other, struck in the leg and in the throat, was writhing and spluttering upon the ground. As he toppled backwards he had loosed the spring, and the huge beam of wood, swinging round with tremendous force, cast the corpse of his comrade so close to the English ship that its mangled and distorted limbs grazed their very stern. As to the stone, it glanced off obliquely and fell midway between the vessels. A roar of cheering and of laughter broke from the rough archers and seamen at the sight, answered by a yell of rage from their pursuers.\n\n\"Lie low, mes enfants,\" cried Aylward, motioning with his left hand. \"They will learn wisdom. They are bringing forward shield and mantlet. We shall have some pebbles about our ears ere long.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE YELLOW COG FOUGHT THE TWO ROVER GALLEYS.", + "text": "The three vessels had been sweeping swiftly westwards, the cog still well to the front, although the galleys were slowly drawing in upon either quarter. To the left was a hard skyline unbroken by a sail. The island already lay like a cloud behind them, while right in front was St. Alban's Head, with Portland looming mistily in the farthest distance. Alleyne stood by the tiller, looking backwards, the fresh wind full in his teeth, the crisp winter air tingling on his face and blowing his yellow curls from under his bassinet. His cheeks were flushed and his eyes shining, for the blood of a hundred fighting Saxon ancestors was beginning to stir in his veins.\n\n\"What was that?\" he asked, as a hissing, sharp-drawn voice seemed to whisper in his ear. The steersman smiled, and pointed with his foot to where a short heavy crossbow quarrel stuck quivering in the boards. At the same instant the man stumbled forward upon his knees, and lay lifeless upon the deck, a blood-stained feather jutting out from his back. As Alleyne stooped to raise him, the air seemed to be alive with the sharp zip-zip of the bolts, and he could hear them pattering on the deck like apples at a tree-shaking.\n\n\"Raise two more mantlets by the poop-lanthorn,\" said Sir Nigel quietly.\n\n\"And another man to the tiller,\" cried the master-shipman.\n\n\"Keep them in play, Aylward, with ten of your men,\" the knight continued. \"And let ten of Sir Oliver's bowmen do as much for the Genoese. I have no mind as yet to show them how much they have to fear from us.\"\n\nTen picked shots under Aylward stood in line across the broad deck, and it was a lesson to the young squires who had seen nothing of war to note how orderly and how cool were these old soldiers, how quick the command, and how prompt the carrying out, ten moving like one. Their comrades crouched beneath the bulwarks, with many a rough jest and many a scrap of criticism or advice. \"Higher, Wat, higher!\" \"Put thy body into it, Will!\" \"Forget not the wind, Hal!\" So ran the muttered chorus, while high above it rose the sharp twanging of the strings, the hiss of the shafts, and the short \"Draw your arrow! Nick your arrow! Shoot wholly together!\" from the master-bowman.\n\nAnd now both mangonels were at work from the galleys, but so covered and protected that, save at the moment of discharge, no glimpse could be caught of them. A huge brown rock from the Genoese sang over their heads, and plunged sullenly into the slope of a wave. Another from the Norman whizzed into the waist, broke the back of a horse, and crashed its way through the side of the vessel. Two others, flying together, tore a great gap in the St. Christopher upon the sail, and brushed three of Sir Oliver's men-at-arms from the forecastle. The master-shipman looked at the knight with a troubled face.\n\n\"They keep their distance from us,\" said he. \"Our archery is over-good, and they will not close. What defence can we make against the stones?\"\n\n\"I think I may trick them,\" the knight answered cheerfully, and passed his order to the archers. Instantly five of them threw up their hands and fell prostrate upon the deck. One had already been slain by a bolt, so that there were but four upon their feet.\n\n\"That should give them heart,\" said Sir Nigel, eyeing the galleys, which crept along on either side, with a slow, measured swing of their great oars, the water swirling and foaming under their sharp stems.\n\n\"They still hold aloof,\" cried Hawtayne.\n\n\"Then down with two more,\" shouted their leader. \"That will do. Ma foi! but they come to our lure like chicks to the fowler. To your arms, men! The pennon behind me, and the squires round the pennon. Stand fast with the anchors in the waist, and be ready for a cast. Now blow out the trumpets, and may God's benison be with the honest men!\"\n\nAs he spoke a roar of voices and a roll of drums came from either galley, and the water was lashed into spray by the hurried beat of a hundred oars. Down they swooped, one on the right, one on the left, the sides and shrouds black with men and bristling with weapons. In heavy clusters they hung upon the forecastle all ready for a spring-faces white, faces brown, faces yellow, and faces black, fair Norsemen, swarthy Italians, fierce rovers from the Levant, and fiery Moors from the Barbary States, of all hues and countries, and marked solely by the common stamp of a wild-beast ferocity. Rasping up on either side, with oars trailing to save them from snapping, they poured in a living torrent with horrid yell and shrill whoop upon the defenceless merchantman.\n\nBut wilder yet was the cry, and shriller still the scream, when there rose up from the shadow of those silent bulwarks the long lines of the English bowmen, and the arrows whizzed in a deadly sleet among the unprepared masses upon the pirate decks. From the higher sides of the cog the bowmen could shoot straight down, at a range which was so short as to enable a cloth-yard shaft to pierce through mail-coats or to transfix a shield, though it were an inch thick of toughened wood. One moment Alleyne saw the galley's poop crowded with rushing figures, waving arms, exultant faces; the next it was a blood-smeared shambles, with bodies piled three deep upon each other, the living cowering behind the dead to shelter themselves from that sudden storm-blast of death. On either side the seamen whom Sir Nigel had chosen for the purpose had cast their anchors over the side of the galleys, so that the three vessels, locked in an iron grip, lurched heavily forward upon the swell.\n\nAnd now set in a fell and fierce fight, one of a thousand of which no chronicler has spoken and no poet sung. Through all the centuries and over all those southern waters nameless men have fought in nameless places, their sole monuments a protected coast and an unravaged country-side.\n\nFore and aft the archers had cleared the galleys' decks, but from either side the rovers had poured down into the waist, where the seamen and bowmen were pushed back and so mingled with their foes that it was impossible for their comrades above to draw string to help them. It was a wild chaos where axe and sword rose and fell, while Englishman, Norman, and Italian staggered and reeled on a deck which was cumbered with bodies and slippery with blood. The clang of blows, the cries of the stricken, the short, deep shout of the islanders, and the fierce whoops of the rovers, rose together in a deafening tumult, while the breath of the panting men went up in the wintry air like the smoke from a furnace. The giant Tete-noire, towering above his fellows and clad from head to foot in plate of proof, led on his boarders, waving a huge mace in the air, with which he struck to the deck every man who approached him. On the other side, Spade-beard, a dwarf in height, but of great breadth of shoulder and length of arm, had cut a road almost to the mast, with three-score Genoese men-at-arms close at his heels. Between these two formidable assailants the seamen were being slowly wedged more closely together, until they stood back to back under the mast with the rovers raging upon every side of them.\n\nBut help was close at hand. Sir Oliver Buttesthorn with his men-at-arms had swarmed down from the forecastle, while Sir Nigel, with his three squires, Black Simon, Aylward, Hordle John, and a score more, threw themselves from the poop and hurled themselves into the thickest of the fight. Alleyne, as in duty bound, kept his eyes fixed ever on his lord and pressed forward close at his heels. Often had he heard of Sir Nigel's prowess and skill with all knightly weapons, but all the tales that had reached his ears fell far short of the real quickness and coolness of the man. It was as if the devil was in him, for he sprang here and sprang there, now thrusting and now cutting, catching blows on his shield, turning them with his blade, stooping under the swing of an axe, springing over the sweep of a sword, so swift and so erratic that the man who braced himself for a blow at him might find him six paces off ere he could bring it down. Three pirates had fallen before him, and he had wounded Spade-beard in the neck, when the Norman giant sprang at him from the side with a slashing blow from his deadly mace. Sir Nigel stooped to avoid it, and at the same instant turned a thrust from the Genoese swordsman, but, his foot slipping in a pool of blood, he fell heavily to the ground. Alleyne sprang in front of the Norman, but his sword was shattered and he himself beaten to the ground by a second blow from the ponderous weapon. Ere the pirate chief could repeat it, however, John's iron grip fell upon his wrist, and he found that for once he was in the hands of a stronger man than himself.\n\nFiercely he strove to disengage his weapon, but Hordle John bent his arm slowly back until, with a sharp crack, like a breaking stave, it turned limp in his grasp, and the mace dropped from the nerveless fingers. In vain he tried to pluck it up with the other hand. Back and back still his foeman bent him, until, with a roar of pain and of fury, the giant clanged his full length upon the boards, while the glimmer of a knife before the bars of his helmet warned him that short would be his shrift if he moved.\n\nCowed and disheartened by the loss of their leader, the Normans had given back and were now streaming over the bulwarks on to their own galley, dropping a dozen at a time on to her deck. But the anchor still held them in its crooked claw, and Sir Oliver with fifty men was hard upon their heels. Now, too, the archers had room to draw their bows once more, and great stones from the yard of the cog came thundering and crashing among the flying rovers. Here and there they rushed with wild screams and curses, diving under the sail, crouching behind booms, huddling into corners like rabbits when the ferrets are upon them, as helpless and as hopeless. They were stern days, and if the honest soldier, too poor for a ransom, had no prospect of mercy upon the battle-field, what ruth was there for sea robbers, the enemies of humankind, taken in the very deed, with proofs of their crimes still swinging upon their yard-arm.\n\nBut the fight had taken a new and a strange turn upon the other side. Spade-beard and his men had given slowly back, hard pressed by Sir Nigel, Aylward, Black Simon, and the poop-guard. Foot by foot the Italian had retreated, his armor running blood at every joint, his shield split, his crest shorn, his voice fallen away to a mere gasping and croaking. Yet he faced his foemen with dauntless courage, dashing in, springing back, sure-footed, steady-handed, with a point which seemed to menace three at once. Beaten back on to the deck of his own vessel, and closely followed by a dozen Englishmen, he disengaged himself from them, ran swiftly down the deck, sprang back into the cog once more, cut the rope which held the anchor, and was back in an instant among his crossbowmen. At the same time the Genoese sailors thrust with their oars against the side of the cog, and a rapidly widening rift appeared between the two vessels.\n\n\"By St. George!\" cried Ford, \"we are cut off from Sir Nigel.\"\n\n\"He is lost,\" gasped Terlake. \"Come, let us spring for it.\" The two youths jumped with all their strength to reach the departing galley. Ford's feet reached the edge of the bulwarks, and his hand clutching a rope he swung himself on board. Terlake fell short, crashed in among the oars, and bounded off into the sea. Alleyne, staggering to the side, was about to hurl himself after him, but Hordle John dragged him back by the girdle.\n\n\"You can scarce stand, lad, far less jump,\" said he. \"See how the blood rips from your bassinet.\"\n\n\"My place is by the flag,\" cried Alleyne, vainly struggling to break from the other's hold.\n\n\"Bide here, man. You would need wings ere you could reach Sir Nigel's side.\"\n\nThe vessels were indeed so far apart now that the Genoese could use the full sweep of their oars, and draw away rapidly from the cog.\n\n\"My God, but it is a noble fight!\" shouted big John, clapping his hands. \"They have cleared the poop, and they spring into the waist. Well struck, my lord! Well struck, Aylward! See to Black Simon, how he storms among the shipmen! But this Spade-beard is a gallant warrior. He rallies his men upon the forecastle. He hath slain an archer. Ha! my lord is upon him. Look to it, Alleyne! See to the whirl and glitter of it!\"\n\n\"By heaven, Sir Nigel is down!\" cried the squire.\n\n\"Up!\" roared John. \"It was but a feint. He bears him back. He drives him to the side. Ah, by Our Lady, his sword is through him! They cry for mercy. Down goes the red cross, and up springs Simon with the scarlet roses!\"\n\nThe death of the Genoese leader did indeed bring the resistance to an end. Amid a thunder of cheering from cog and from galleys the forked pennon fluttered upon the forecastle, and the galley, sweeping round, came slowly back, as the slaves who rowed it learned the wishes of their new masters.\n\nThe two knights had come aboard the cog, and the grapplings having been thrown off, the three vessels now moved abreast through all the storm and rush of the fight Alleyne had been aware of the voice of Goodwin Hawtayne, the master-shipman, with his constant \"Hale the bowline! Veer the sheet!\" and strange it was to him to see how swiftly the blood-stained sailors turned from the strife to the ropes and back. Now the cog's head was turned Francewards, and the shipman walked the deck, a peaceful master-mariner once more.\n\n\"There is sad scath done to the cog, Sir Nigel,\" said he. \"Here is a hole in the side two ells across, the sail split through the centre, and the wood as bare as a friar's poll. In good sooth, I know not what I shall say to Master Witherton when I see the Itchen once more.\"\n\n\"By St. Paul! it would be a very sorry thing if we suffered you to be the worse of this day's work,\" said Sir Nigel. \"You shall take these galleys back with you, and Master Witherton may sell them. Then from the moneys he shall take as much as may make good the damage, and the rest he shall keep until our home-coming, when every man shall have his share. An image of silver fifteen inches high I have vowed to the Virgin, to be placed in her chapel within the Priory, for that she was pleased to allow me to come upon this Spade-beard, who seemed to me from what I have seen of him to be a very sprightly and valiant gentleman. But how fares it with you, Edricson?\"\n\n\"It is nothing, my fair lord,\" said Alleyne, who had now loosened his bassinet, which was cracked across by the Norman's blow. Even as he spoke, however, his head swirled round, and he fell to the deck with the blood gushing from his nose and mouth.\n\n\"He will come to anon,\" said the knight, stooping over him and passing his fingers through his hair. \"I have lost one very valiant and gentle squire this day. I can ill afford to lose another. How many men have fallen?\"\n\n\"I have pricked off the tally,\" said Aylward, who had come aboard with his lord. \"There are seven of the Winchester men, eleven seamen, your squire, young Master Terlake, and nine archers.\"\n\n\"And of the others?\"\n\n\"They are all dead\u2014save only the Norman knight who stands behind you. What would you that we should do with him?\"\n\n\"He must hang on his own yard,\" said Sir Nigel. \"It was my vow and must be done.\"\n\nThe pirate leader had stood by the bulwarks, a cord round his arms, and two stout archers on either side. At Sir Nigel's words he started violently, and his swarthy features blanched to a livid gray.\n\n\"How, Sir Knight?\" he cried in broken English. \"Que dites vous? To hang, le mort du chien! To hang!\"\n\n\"It is my vow,\" said Sir Nigel shortly. \"From what I hear, you thought little enough of hanging others.\"\n\n\"Peasants, base roturiers,\" cried the other. \"It is their fitting death. Mais Le Seigneur d'Andelys, avec le sang des rois dans ses veins! C'est incroyable!\"\n\nSir Nigel turned upon his heel, while two seamen cast a noose over the pirate's neck. At the touch of the cord he snapped the bonds which bound him, dashed one of the archers to the deck, and seizing the other round the waist sprang with him into the sea.\n\n\"By my hilt, he is gone!\" cried Aylward, rushing to the side. \"They have sunk together like a stone.\"\n\n\"I am right glad of it,\" answered Sir Nigel; \"for though it was against my vow to loose him, I deem that he has carried himself like a very gentle and debonnaire cavalier.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE YELLOW COG CROSSED THE BAR OF GIRONDE.", + "text": "For two days the yellow cog ran swiftly before a northeasterly wind, and on the dawn of the third the high land of Ushant lay like a mist upon the shimmering skyline. There came a plump of rain towards mid-day and the breeze died down, but it freshened again before nightfall, and Goodwin Hawtayne veered his sheet and held head for the south. Next morning they had passed Belle Isle, and ran through the midst of a fleet of transports returning from Guienne. Sir Nigel Loring and Sir Oliver Buttesthorn at once hung their shields over the side, and displayed their pennons as was the custom, noting with the keenest interest the answering symbols which told the names of the cavaliers who had been constrained by ill health or wounds to leave the prince at so critical a time.\n\nThat evening a great dun-colored cloud banked up in the west, and an anxious man was Goodwin Hawtayne, for a third part of his crew had been slain, and half the remainder were aboard the galleys, so that, with an injured ship, he was little fit to meet such a storm as sweeps over those waters. All night it blew in short fitful puffs, heeling the great cog over until the water curled over her lee bulwarks. As the wind still freshened the yard was lowered half way down the mast in the morning. Alleyne, wretchedly ill and weak, with his head still ringing from the blow which he had received, crawled up upon deck. Water-swept and aslant, it was preferable to the noisome, rat-haunted dungeons which served as cabins. There, clinging to the stout halliards of the sheet, he gazed with amazement at the long lines of black waves, each with its curling ridge of foam, racing in endless succession from out the inexhaustible west. A huge sombre cloud, flecked with livid blotches, stretched over the whole seaward skyline, with long ragged streamers whirled out in front of it. Far behind them the two galleys labored heavily, now sinking between the rollers until their yards were level with the waves, and again shooting up with a reeling, scooping motion until every spar and rope stood out hard against the sky. On the left the lowlying land stretched in a dim haze, rising here and there into a darker blur which marked the higher capes and headlands. The land of France! Alleyne's eyes shone as he gazed upon it. The land of France!\u2014the very words sounded as the call of a bugle in the ears of the youth of England. The land where their fathers had bled, the home of chivalry and of knightly deeds, the country of gallant men, of courtly women, of princely buildings, of the wise, the polished and the sainted. There it lay, so still and gray beneath the drifting wrack\u2014the home of things noble and of things shameful\u2014the theatre where a new name might be made or an old one marred. From his bosom to his lips came the crumpled veil, and he breathed a vow that if valor and goodwill could raise him to his lady's side, then death alone should hold him back from her. His thoughts were still in the woods of Minstead and the old armory of Twynham Castle, when the hoarse voice of the master-shipman brought them back once more to the Bay of Biscay.\n\n\"By my troth, young sir,\" he said, \"you are as long in the face as the devil at a christening, and I cannot marvel at it, for I have sailed these waters since I was as high as this whinyard, and yet I never saw more sure promise of an evil night.\"\n\n\"Nay, I had other things upon my mind,\" the squire answered.\n\n\"And so has every man,\" cried Hawtayne in an injured voice. \"Let the shipman see to it. It is the master-shipman's affair. Put it all upon good Master Hawtayne! Never had I so much care since first I blew trumpet and showed cartel at the west gate of Southampton.\"\n\n\"What is amiss then?\" asked Alleyne, for the man's words were as gusty as the weather.\n\n\"Amiss, quotha? Here am I with but half my mariners, and a hole in the ship where that twenty-devil stone struck us big enough to fit the fat widow of Northam through. It is well enough on this tack, but I would have you tell me what I am to do on the other. We are like to have salt water upon us until we be found pickled like the herrings in an Easterling's barrels.\"\n\n\"What says Sir Nigel to it?\"\n\n\"He is below pricking out the coat-armor of his mother's uncle. 'Pester me not with such small matters!' was all that I could get from him. Then there is Sir Oliver. 'Fry them in oil with a dressing of Gascony,' quoth he, and then swore at me because I had not been the cook. 'Walawa,' thought I, 'mad master, sober man'\u2014so away forward to the archers. Harrow and alas! but they were worse than the others.\"\n\n\"Would they not help you then?\"\n\n\"Nay, they sat tway and tway at a board, him that they call Aylward and the great red-headed man who snapped the Norman's arm-bone, and the black man from Norwich, and a score of others, rattling their dice in an archer's gauntlet for want of a box. 'The ship can scarce last much longer, my masters,' quoth I. 'That is your business, old swine's-head,' cried the black galliard. 'Le diable t'emporte,' says Aylward. 'A five, a four and the main,' shouted the big man, with a voice like the flap of a sail. Hark to them now, young sir, and say if I speak not sooth.\"\n\nAs he spoke, there sounded high above the shriek of the gale and the straining of the timbers a gust of oaths with a roar of deep-chested mirth from the gamblers in the forecastle.\n\n\"Can I be of avail?\" asked Alleyne. \"Say the word and the thing is done, if two hands may do it.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, your head I can see is still totty, and i' faith little head would you have, had your bassinet not stood your friend. All that may be done is already carried out, for we have stuffed the gape with sails and corded it without and within. Yet when we bale our bowline and veer the sheet our lives will hang upon the breach remaining blocked. See how yonder headland looms upon us through the mist! We must tack within three arrow flights, or we may find a rock through our timbers. Now, St. Christopher be praised! here is Sir Nigel, with whom I may confer.\"\n\n\"I prythee that you will pardon me,\" said the knight, clutching his way along the bulwark. \"I would not show lack of courtesy toward a worthy man, but I was deep in a matter of some weight, concerning which, Alleyne, I should be glad of your rede. It touches the question of dimidiation or impalement in the coat of mine uncle, Sir John Leighton of Shropshire, who took unto wife the widow of Sir Henry Oglander of Nunwell. The case has been much debated by pursuivants and kings-of-arms. But how is it with you, master shipman?\"\n\n\"Ill enough, my fair lord. The cog must go about anon, and I know not how we may keep the water out of her.\"\n\n\"Go call Sir Oliver!\" said Sir Nigel, and presently the portly knight made his way all astraddle down the slippery deck.\n\n\"By my soul, master-shipman, this passes all patience!\" he cried wrathfully. \"If this ship of yours must needs dance and skip like a clown at a kermesse, then I pray you that you will put me into one of these galeasses. I had but sat down to a flask of malvoisie and a mortress of brawn, as is my use about this hour, when there comes a cherking, and I find my wine over my legs and the flask in my lap, and then as I stoop to clip it there comes another cursed cherk, and there is a mortress of brawn stuck fast to the nape of my neck. At this moment I have two pages coursing after it from side to side, like hounds behind a leveret. Never did living pig gambol more lightly. But you have sent for me, Sir Nigel?\"\n\n\"I would fain have your rede, Sir Oliver, for Master Hawtayne hath fears that when we veer there may come danger from the hole in our side.\"\n\n\"Then do not veer,\" quoth Sir Oliver hastily. \"And now, fair sir, I must hasten back to see how my rogues have fared with the brawn.\"\n\n\"Nay, but this will scarce suffice,\" cried the shipman. \"If we do not veer we will be upon the rocks within the hour.\"\n\n\"Then veer,\" said Sir Oliver. \"There is my rede; and now, Sir Nigel, I must crave\u2014\u2014\"\n\nAt this instant, however, a startled shout rang out from two seamen upon the forecastle. \"Rocks!\" they yelled, stabbing into the air with their forefingers. \"Rocks beneath our very bows!\" Through the belly of a great black wave, not one hundred paces to the front of them, there thrust forth a huge jagged mass of brown stone, which spouted spray as though it were some crouching monster, while a dull menacing boom and roar filled the air.\n\n\"Yare! yare!\" screamed Goodwin Hawtayne, flinging himself upon the long pole which served as a tiller. \"Cut the halliard! Haul her over! Lay her two courses to the wind!\"\n\nOver swung the great boom, and the cog trembled and quivered within five spear-lengths of the breakers.\n\n\"She can scarce draw clear,\" cried Hawtayne, with his eyes from the sail to the seething line of foam. \"May the holy Julian stand by us and the thrice-sainted Christopher!\"\n\n\"If there be such peril, Sir Oliver,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"it would be very knightly and fitting that we should show our pennons. I pray you. Edricson, that you will command my guidon-bearer to put forward my banner.\"\n\n\"And sound the trumpets!\" cried Sir Oliver. \"In manus tuas, Domine! I am in the keeping of James of Compostella, to whose shrine I shall make pilgrimage, and in whose honor I vow that I will eat a carp each year upon his feast-day. Mon Dieu, but the waves roar! How is it with us now, master-shipman?\"\n\n\"We draw! We draw!\" cried Hawtayne, with his eyes still fixed upon the foam which hissed under the very bulge of the side. \"Ah, Holy Mother, be with us now!\"\n\nAs he spoke the cog rasped along the edge of the reef, and a long white curling sheet of wood was planed off from her side from waist to poop by a jutting horn of the rock. At the same instant she lay suddenly over, the sail drew full, and she plunged seawards amid the shoutings of the seamen and the archers.\n\n\"The Virgin be praised!\" cried the shipman, wiping his brow. \"For this shall bell swing and candle burn when I see Southampton Water once more. Cheerily, my hearts! Pull yarely on the bowline!\"\n\n\"By my soul! I would rather have a dry death,\" quoth Sir Oliver. \"Though, Mort Dieu! I have eaten so many fish that it were but justice that the fish should eat me. Now I must back to the cabin, for I have matters there which crave my attention.\"\n\n\"Nay, Sir Oliver, you had best bide with us, and still show your ensign,\" Sir Nigel answered; \"for, if I understand the matter aright, we have but turned from one danger to the other.\"\n\n\"Good Master Hawtayne,\" cried the boatswain, rushing aft, \"the water comes in upon us apace. The waves have driven in the sail wherewith we strove to stop the hole.\" As he spoke the seamen came swarming on to the poop and the forecastle to avoid the torrent which poured through the huge leak into the waist. High above the roar of the wind and the clash of the sea rose the shrill half-human cries of the horses, as they found the water rising rapidly around them.\n\n\"Stop it from without!\" cried Hawtayne, seizing the end of the wet sail with which the gap had been plugged. \"Speedily, my hearts, or we are gone!\" Swiftly they rove ropes to the corners, and then, rushing forward to the bows, they lowered them under the keel, and drew them tight in such a way that the sail should cover the outer face of the gap. The force of the rush of water was checked by this obstacle, but it still squirted plentifully from every side of it. At the sides the horses were above the belly, and in the centre a man from the poop could scarce touch the deck with a seven-foot spear. The cog lay lower in the water and the waves splashed freely over the weather bulwark.\n\n\"I fear that we can scarce bide upon this tack,\" cried Hawtayne; \"and yet the other will drive us on the rocks.\"\n\n\"Might we not haul down sail and wait for better times?\" suggested Sir Nigel.\n\n\"Nay, we should drift upon the rocks. Thirty years have I been on the sea, and never yet in greater straits. Yet we are in the hands of the Saints.\"\n\n\"Of whom,\" cried Sir Oliver, \"I look more particularly to St. James of Compostella, who hath already befriended us this day, and on whose feast I hereby vow that I shall eat a second carp, if he will but interpose a second time.\"\n\nThe wrack had thickened to seaward, and the coast was but a blurred line. Two vague shadows in the offing showed where the galeasses rolled and tossed upon the great Atlantic rollers, Hawtayne looked wistfully in their direction.\n\n\"If they would but lie closer we might find safety, even should the cog founder. You will bear me out with good Master Witherton of Southampton that I have done all that a shipman might. It would be well that you should doff camail and greaves, Sir Nigel, for, by the black rood! it is like enough that we shall have to swim for it.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said the little knight, \"it would be scarce fitting that a cavalier should throw off his harness for the fear of every puff of wind and puddle of water. I would rather that my Company should gather round me here on the poop, where we might abide together whatever God may be pleased to send. But, certes, Master Hawtayne, for all that my sight is none of the best, it is not the first time that I have seen that headland upon the left.\"\n\nThe seaman shaded his eyes with his hand, and gazed earnestly through the haze and spray. Suddenly he threw up his arms and shouted aloud in his joy.\n\n\"'Tis the point of La Tremblade!\" he cried. \"I had not thought that we were as far as Oleron. The Gironde lies before us, and once over the bar, and under shelter of the Tour de Cordouan, all will be well with us. Veer again, my hearts, and bring her to try with the main course!\"\n\nThe sail swung round once more, and the cog, battered and torn and well-nigh water-logged, staggered in for this haven of refuge. A bluff cape to the north and a long spit to the south marked the mouth of the noble river, with a lowlying island of silted sand in the centre, all shrouded and curtained by the spume of the breakers. A line of broken water traced the dangerous bar, which in clear day and balmy weather has cracked the back of many a tall ship.\n\n\"There is a channel,\" said Hawtayne, \"which was shown to me by the Prince's own pilot. Mark yonder tree upon the bank, and see the tower which rises behind it. If these two be held in a line, even as we hold them now, it may be done, though our ship draws two good ells more than when she put forth.\"\n\n\"God speed you, Master Hawtayne!\" cried Sir Oliver. \"Twice have we come scathless out of peril, and now for the third time I commend me to the blessed James of Compostella, to whom I vow\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, old friend,\" whispered Sir Nigel. \"You are like to bring a judgment upon us with these vows, which no living man could accomplish. Have I not already heard you vow to eat two carp in one day, and now you would venture upon a third?\"\n\n\"I pray you that you will order the Company to lie down,\" cried Hawtayne, who had taken the tiller and was gazing ahead with a fixed eye. \"In three minutes we shall either be lost or in safety.\"\n\nArchers and seamen lay flat upon the deck, waiting in stolid silence for whatever fate might come. Hawtayne bent his weight upon the tiller, and crouched to see under the bellying sail. Sir Oliver and Sir Nigel stood erect with hands crossed in front of the poop. Down swooped the great cog into the narrow channel which was the portal to safety. On either bow roared the shallow bar. Right ahead one small lane of black swirling water marked the pilot's course. But true was the eye and firm the hand which guided. A dull scraping came from beneath, the vessel quivered and shook, at the waist, at the quarter, and behind sounded that grim roaring of the waters, and with a plunge the yellow cog was over the bar and speeding swiftly up the broad and tranquil estuary of the Gironde." + }, + { + "title": "HOW SIR NIGEL LORING PUT A PATCH UPON HIS EYE.", + "text": "It was on the morning of Friday, the eight-and-twentieth day of November, two days before the feast of St. Andrew, that the cog and her two prisoners, after a weary tacking up the Gironde and the Garonne, dropped anchor at last in front of the noble city of Bordeaux. With wonder and admiration, Alleyne, leaning over the bulwarks, gazed at the forest of masts, the swarm of boats darting hither and thither on the bosom of the broad curving stream, and the gray crescent-shaped city which stretched with many a tower and minaret along the western shore. Never had he in his quiet life seen so great a town, nor was there in the whole of England, save London alone, one which might match it in size or in wealth. Here came the merchandise of all the fair countries which are watered by the Garonne and the Dordogne\u2014the cloths of the south, the skins of Guienne, the wines of the Medoc\u2014to be borne away to Hull, Exeter, Dartmouth, Bristol or Chester, in exchange for the wools and woolfels of England. Here too dwelt those famous smelters and welders who had made the Bordeaux steel the most trusty upon earth, and could give a temper to lance or to sword which might mean dear life to its owner. Alleyne could see the smoke of their forges reeking up in the clear morning air. The storm had died down now to a gentle breeze, which wafted to his ears the long-drawn stirring bugle-calls which sounded from the ancient ramparts.\n\n\"Hola, mon petit!\" said Aylward, coming up to where he stood. \"Thou art a squire now, and like enough to win the golden spurs, while I am still the master-bowman, and master-bowman I shall bide. I dare scarce wag my tongue so freely with you as when we tramped together past Wilverley Chase, else I might be your guide now, for indeed I know every house in Bordeaux as a friar knows the beads on his rosary.\"\n\n\"Nay, Aylward,\" said Alleyne, laying his hand upon the sleeve of his companion's frayed jerkin, \"you cannot think me so thrall as to throw aside an old friend because I have had some small share of good fortune. I take it unkind that you should have thought such evil of me.\"\n\n\"Nay, mon gar. 'Twas but a flight shot to see if the wind blew steady, though I were a rogue to doubt it.\"\n\n\"Why, had I not met you, Aylward, at the Lynhurst inn, who can say where I had now been! Certes, I had not gone to Twynham Castle, nor become squire to Sir Nigel, nor met\u2014\u2014\" He paused abruptly and flushed to his hair, but the bowman was too busy with his own thoughts to notice his young companion's embarrassment.\n\n\"It was a good hostel, that of the 'Pied Merlin,'\" he remarked. \"By my ten finger bones! when I hang bow on nail and change my brigandine for a tunic, I might do worse than take over the dame and her business.\"\n\n\"I thought,\" said Alleyne, \"that you were betrothed to some one at Christchurch.\"\n\n\"To three,\" Aylward answered moodily, \"to three. I fear I may not go back to Christchurch. I might chance to see hotter service in Hampshire than I have ever done in Gascony. But mark you now yonder lofty turret in the centre, which stands back from the river and hath a broad banner upon the summit. See the rising sun flashes full upon it and sparkles on the golden lions. 'Tis the royal banner of England, crossed by the prince's label. There he dwells in the Abbey of St. Andrew, where he hath kept his court these years back. Beside it is the minster of the same saint, who hath the town under his very special care.\"\n\n\"And how of yon gray turret on the left?\"\n\n\"'Tis the fane of St. Michael, as that upon the right is of St. Remi. There, too, above the poop of yonder nief, you see the towers of Saint Croix and of Pey Berland. Mark also the mighty ramparts which are pierced by the three water-gates, and sixteen others to the landward side.\"\n\n\"And how is it, good Aylward, that there comes so much music from the town? I seem to hear a hundred trumpets, all calling in chorus.\"\n\n\"It would be strange else, seeing that all the great lords of England and of Gascony are within the walls, and each would have his trumpeter blow as loud as his neighbor, lest it might be thought that his dignity had been abated. Ma foi! they make as much louster as a Scotch army, where every man fills himself with girdle-cakes, and sits up all night to blow upon the toodle-pipe. See all along the banks how the pages water the horses, and there beyond the town how they gallop them over the plain! For every horse you see a belted knight hath herbergage in the town, for, as I learn, the men-at-arms and archers have already gone forward to Dax.\"\n\n\"I trust, Aylward,\" said Sir Nigel, coming upon deck, \"that the men are ready for the land. Go tell them that the boats will be for them within the hour.\"\n\nThe archer raised his hand in salute, and hastened forward. In the meantime Sir Oliver had followed his brother knight, and the two paced the poop together, Sir Nigel in his plum-colored velvet suit with flat cap of the same, adorned in front with the Lady Loring's glove and girt round with a curling ostrich feather. The lusty knight, on the other hand, was clad in the very latest mode, with cote-hardie, doublet, pourpoint, court-pie, and paltock of olive-green, picked out with pink and jagged at the edges. A red chaperon or cap, with long hanging cornette, sat daintily on the back of his black-curled head, while his gold-hued shoes were twisted up a la poulaine, as though the toes were shooting forth a tendril which might hope in time to entwine itself around his massive leg.\n\n\"Once more, Sir Oliver,\" said Sir Nigel, looking shorewards with sparkling eyes, \"do we find ourselves at the gate of honor, the door which hath so often led us to all that is knightly and worthy. There flies the prince's banner, and it would be well that we haste ashore and pay our obeisance to him. The boats already swarm from the bank.\"\n\n\"There is a goodly hostel near the west gate, which is famed for the stewing of spiced pullets,\" remarked Sir Oliver. \"We might take the edge of our hunger off ere we seek the prince, for though his tables are gay with damask and silver he is no trencherman himself, and hath no sympathy for those who are his betters.\"\n\n\"His betters!\"\n\n\"His betters before the tranchoir, lad. Sniff not treason where none is meant. I have seen him smile in his quiet way because I had looked for the fourth time towards the carving squire. And indeed to watch him dallying with a little gobbet of bread, or sipping his cup of thrice-watered wine, is enough to make a man feel shame at his own hunger. Yet war and glory, my good friend, though well enough in their way, will not serve to tighten such a belt as clasps my waist.\"\n\n\"How read you that coat which hangs over yonder galley, Alleyne?\" asked Sir Nigel.\n\n\"Argent, a bend vert between cotises dancette gules.\"\n\n\"It is a northern coat. I have seen it in the train of the Percies. From the shields, there is not one of these vessels which hath not knight or baron aboard. I would mine eyes were better. How read you this upon the left?\"\n\n\"Argent and azure, a barry wavy of six.\"\n\n\"Ha, it is the sign of the Wiltshire Stourtons! And there beyond I see the red and silver of the Worsleys of Apuldercombe, who like myself are of Hampshire lineage. Close behind us is the moline cross of the gallant William Molyneux, and beside it the bloody chevrons of the Norfork Woodhouses, with the amulets of the Musgraves of Westmoreland. By St. Paul! it would be a very strange thing if so noble a company were to gather without some notable deed of arms arising from it. And here is our boat, Sir Oliver, so it seems best to me that we should go to the abbey with our squires, leaving Master Hawtayne to have his own way in the unloading.\"\n\nThe horses both of knights and squires were speedily lowered into a broad lighter, and reached the shore almost as soon as their masters. Sir Nigel bent his knee devoutly as he put foot on land, and taking a small black patch from his bosom he bound it tightly over his left eye.\n\n\"May the blessed George and the memory of my sweet lady-love raise high my heart!\" quoth he. \"And as a token I vow that I will not take this patch from my eye until I have seen something of this country of Spain, and done such a small deed as it lies in me to do. And this I swear upon the cross of my sword and upon the glove of my lady.\"\n\n\"In truth, you take me back twenty years, Nigel,\" quoth Sir Oliver, as they mounted and rode slowly through the water-gate. \"After Cadsand, I deem that the French thought that we were an army of the blind, for there was scarce a man who had not closed an eye for the greater love and honor of his lady. Yet it goes hard with you that you should darken one side, when with both open you can scarce tell a horse from a mule. In truth, friend, I think that you step over the line of reason in this matter.\"\n\n\"Sir Oliver Buttesthorn,\" said the little knight shortly, \"I would have you to understand that, blind as I am, I can yet see the path of honor very clearly, and that that is the road upon which I do not crave another man's guidance.\"\n\n\"By my soul,\" said Sir Oliver, \"you are as tart as verjuice this morning! If you are bent upon a quarrel with me I must leave you to your humor and drop into the 'Tete d'Or' here, for I marked a varlet pass the door who bare a smoking dish, which had, methought, a most excellent smell.\"\n\n\"Nenny, nenny,\" cried his comrade, laying his hand upon his knee; \"we have known each other over long to fall out, Oliver, like two raw pages at their first epreuves. You must come with me first to the prince, and then back to the hostel; though sure I am that it would grieve his heart that any gentle cavalier should turn from his board to a common tavern. But is not that my Lord Delewar who waves to us? Ha! my fair lord, God and Our Lady be with you! And there is Sir Robert Cheney. Good-morrow, Robert! I am right glad to see you.\"\n\nThe two knights walked their horses abreast, while Alleyne and Ford, with John Norbury, who was squire to Sir Oliver, kept some paces behind them, a spear's-length in front of Black Simon and of the Winchester guidon-bearer. Norbury, a lean, silent man, had been to those parts before, and sat his horse with a rigid neck; but the two young squires gazed eagerly to right or left, and plucked each other's sleeves to call attention to the many strange things on every side of them.\n\n\"See to the brave stalls!\" cried Alleyne. \"See to the noble armor set forth, and the costly taffeta\u2014and oh, Ford, see to where the scrivener sits with the pigments and the ink-horns, and the rolls of sheepskin as white as the Beaulieu napery! Saw man ever the like before?\"\n\n\"Nay, man, there are finer stalls in Cheapside,\" answered Ford, whose father had taken him to London on occasion of one of the Smithfield joustings. \"I have seen a silversmith's booth there which would serve to buy either side of this street. But mark these houses, Alleyne, how they thrust forth upon the top. And see to the coats-of-arms at every window, and banner or pensil on the roof.\"\n\n\"And the churches!\" cried Alleyne. \"The Priory at Christ church was a noble pile, but it was cold and bare, methinks, by one of these, with their frettings, and their carvings, and their traceries, as though some great ivy-plant of stone had curled and wantoned over the walls.\"\n\n\"And hark to the speech of the folk!\" said Ford. \"Was ever such a hissing and clacking? I wonder that they have not wit to learn English now that they have come under the English crown. By Richard of Hampole! there are fair faces amongst them. See the wench with the brown whimple! Out on you, Alleyne, that you would rather gaze upon dead stone than on living flesh!\"\n\nIt was little wonder that the richness and ornament, not only of church and of stall, but of every private house as well, should have impressed itself upon the young squires. The town was now at the height of its fortunes. Besides its trade and its armorers, other causes had combined to pour wealth into it. War, which had wrought evil upon so many fair cities around, had brought nought but good to this one. As her French sisters decayed she increased, for here, from north, and from east, and from south, came the plunder to be sold and the ransom money to be spent. Through all her sixteen landward gates there had set for many years a double tide of empty-handed soldiers hurrying Francewards, and of enriched and laden bands who brought their spoils home. The prince's court, too, with its swarm of noble barons and wealthy knights, many of whom, in imitation of their master, had brought their ladies and their children from England, all helped to swell the coffers of the burghers. Now, with this fresh influx of noblemen and cavaliers, food and lodging were scarce to be had, and the prince was hurrying forward his forces to Dax in Gascony to relieve the overcrowding of his capital.\n\nIn front of the minster and abbey of St. Andrew's was a large square crowded with priests, soldiers, women, friars, and burghers, who made it their common centre for sight-seeing and gossip. Amid the knot of noisy and gesticulating townsfolk, many small parties of mounted knights and squires threaded their way towards the prince's quarters, where the huge iron-clamped doors were thrown back to show that he held audience within. Two-score archers stood about the gateway, and beat back from time to time with their bowstaves the inquisitive and chattering crowd who swarmed round the portal. Two knights in full armor, with lances raised and closed visors, sat their horses on either side, while in the centre, with two pages to tend upon him, there stood a noble-faced man in flowing purple gown, who pricked off upon a sheet of parchment the style and title of each applicant, marshalling them in their due order, and giving to each the place and facility which his rank demanded. His long white beard and searching eyes imparted to him an air of masterful dignity, which was increased by his tabardlike vesture and the heraldic barret cap with triple plume which bespoke his office.\n\n\"It is Sir William de Pakington, the prince's own herald and scrivener,\" whispered Sir Nigel, as they pulled up amid the line of knights who waited admission. \"Ill fares it with the man who would venture to deceive him. He hath by rote the name of every knight of France or of England; and all the tree of his family, with his kinships, coat-armor, marriages, augmentations, abatements, and I know not what beside. We may leave our horses here with the varlets, and push forward with our squires.\"\n\nFollowing Sir Nigel's counsel, they pressed on upon foot until they were close to the prince's secretary, who was in high debate with a young and foppish knight, who was bent upon making his way past him.\n\n\"Mackworth!\" said the king-at-arms. \"It is in my mind, young sir, that you have not been presented before.\"\n\n\"Nay, it is but a day since I set foot in Bordeaux, but I feared lest the prince should think it strange that I had not waited upon him.\"\n\n\"The prince hath other things to think upon,\" quoth Sir William de Pakington; \"but if you be a Mackworth you must be a Mackworth of Normanton, and indeed I see now that your coat is sable and ermine.\"\n\n\"I am a Mackworth of Normanton,\" the other answered, with some uneasiness of manner.\n\n\"Then you must be Sir Stephen Mackworth, for I learn that when old Sir Guy died he came in for the arms and the name, the war-cry and the profit.\"\n\n\"Sir Stephen is my elder brother, and I am Arthur, the second son,\" said the youth.\n\n\"In sooth and in sooth!\" cried the king-at-arms with scornful eyes. \"And pray, sir second son, where is the cadency mark which should mark your rank. Dare you to wear your brother's coat without the crescent which should stamp you as his cadet. Away to your lodgings, and come not nigh the prince until the armorer hath placed the true charge upon your shield.\" As the youth withdrew in confusion, Sir William's keen eye singled out the five red roses from amid the overlapping shields and cloud of pennons which faced him.\n\n\"Ha!\" he cried, \"there are charges here which are above counterfeit. The roses of Loring and the boar's head of Buttesthorn may stand back in peace, but by my faith! they are not to be held back in war. Welcome, Sir Oliver, Sir Nigel! Chandos will be glad to his very heart-roots when he sees you. This way, my fair sirs. Your squires are doubtless worthy the fame of their masters. Down this passage, Sir Oliver! Edricson! Ha! one of the old strain of Hampshire Edricsons, I doubt not. And Ford, they are of a south Saxon stock, and of good repute. There are Norburys in Cheshire and in Wiltshire, and also, as I have heard, upon the borders. So, my fair sirs, and I shall see that you are shortly admitted.\"\n\nHe had finished his professional commentary by flinging open a folding door, and ushering the party into a broad hall, which was filled with a great number of people who were waiting, like themselves, for an audience. The room was very spacious, lighted on one side by three arched and mullioned windows, while opposite was a huge fireplace in which a pile of faggots was blazing merrily. Many of the company had crowded round the flames, for the weather was bitterly cold; but the two knights seated themselves upon a bancal, with their squires standing behind them. Looking down the room, Alleyne marked that both floor and ceiling were of the richest oak, the latter spanned by twelve arching beams, which were adorned at either end by the lilies and the lions of the royal arms. On the further side was a small door, on each side of which stood men-at-arms. From time to time an elderly man in black with rounded shoulders and a long white wand in his hand came softly forth from this inner room, and beckoned to one or other of the company, who doffed cap and followed him.\n\nThe two knights were deep in talk, when Alleyne became aware of a remarkable individual who was walking round the room in their direction. As he passed each knot of cavaliers every head turned to look after him, and it was evident, from the bows and respectful salutations on all sides, that the interest which he excited was not due merely to his strange personal appearance. He was tall and straight as a lance, though of a great age, for his hair, which curled from under his velvet cap of maintenance, was as white as the new-fallen snow. Yet, from the swing of his stride and the spring of his step, it was clear that he had not yet lost the fire and activity of his youth. His fierce hawk-like face was clean shaven like that of a priest, save for a long thin wisp of white moustache which drooped down half way to his shoulder. That he had been handsome might be easily judged from his high aquiline nose and clear-cut chin; but his features had been so distorted by the seams and scars of old wounds, and by the loss of one eye which had been torn from the socket, that there was little left to remind one of the dashing young knight who had been fifty years ago the fairest as well as the boldest of the English chivalry. Yet what knight was there in that hall of St. Andrew's who would not have gladly laid down youth, beauty, and all that he possessed to win the fame of this man? For who could be named with Chandos, the stainless knight, the wise councillor, the valiant warrior, the hero of Crecy, of Winchelsea, of Poictiers, of Auray, and of as many other battles as there were years to his life?\n\n\"Ha, my little heart of gold!\" he cried, darting forward suddenly and throwing his arms round Sir Nigel. \"I heard that you were here and have been seeking you.\"\n\n\"My fair and dear lord,\" said the knight, returning the warrior's embrace, \"I have indeed come back to you, for where else shall I go that I may learn to be a gentle and a hardy knight?\"\n\n\"By my troth!\" said Chandos with a smile, \"it is very fitting that we should be companions, Nigel, for since you have tied up one of your eyes, and I have had the mischance to lose one of mine, we have but a pair between us. Ah, Sir Oliver! you were on the blind side of me and I saw you not. A wise woman hath made prophecy that this blind side will one day be the death of me. We shall go in to the prince anon; but in truth he hath much upon his hands, for what with Pedro, and the King of Majorca, and the King of Navarre, who is no two days of the same mind, and the Gascon barons who are all chaffering for terms like so many hucksters, he hath an uneasy part to play. But how left you the Lady Loring?\"\n\n\"She was well, my fair lord, and sent her service and greetings to you.\"\n\n\"I am ever her knight and slave. And your journey, I trust that it was pleasant?\"\n\n\"As heart could wish. We had sight of two rover galleys, and even came to have some slight bickering with them.\"\n\n\"Ever in luck's way, Nigel!\" quoth Sir John. \"We must hear the tale anon. But I deem it best that ye should leave your squires and come with me, for, howsoe'er pressed the prince may be, I am very sure that he would be loth to keep two old comrades-in-arms upon the further side of the door. Follow close behind me, and I will forestall old Sir William, though I can scarce promise to roll forth your style and rank as is his wont.\" So saying, he led the way to the inner chamber, the two companions treading close at his heels, and nodding to right and left as they caught sight of familiar faces among the crowd." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "HOW THERE WAS STIR AT THE ABBEY OF ST. ANDREW'S.\n\nThe prince's reception-room, although of no great size, was fitted up with all the state and luxury which the fame and power of its owner demanded. A high dais at the further end was roofed in by a broad canopy of scarlet velvet spangled with silver fleurs-de-lis, and supported at either corner by silver rods. This was approached by four steps carpeted with the same material, while all round were scattered rich cushions, oriental mats and costly rugs of fur. The choicest tapestries which the looms of Arras could furnish draped the walls, whereon the battles of Judas Maccabaeus were set forth, with the Jewish warriors in plate of proof, with crest and lance and banderole, as the naive artists of the day were wont to depict them. A few rich settles and bancals, choicely carved and decorated with glazed leather hangings of the sort termed or basane, completed the furniture of the apartment, save that at one side of the dais there stood a lofty perch, upon which a cast of three solemn Prussian gerfalcons sat, hooded and jesseled, as silent and motionless as the royal fowler who stood beside them.\n\nIn the centre of the dais were two very high chairs with dorserets, which arched forwards over the heads of the occupants, the whole covered with light-blue silk thickly powdered with golden stars. On that to the right sat a very tall and well formed man with red hair, a livid face, and a cold blue eye, which had in it something peculiarly sinister and menacing. He lounged back in a careless position, and yawned repeatedly as though heartily weary of the proceedings, stooping from time to time to fondle a shaggy Spanish greyhound which lay stretched at his feet. On the other throne there was perched bolt upright, with prim demeanor, as though he felt himself to be upon his good behavior, a little, round, pippin faced person, who smiled and bobbed to every one whose eye he chanced to meet. Between and a little in front of them on a humble charette or stool, sat a slim, dark young man, whose quiet attire and modest manner would scarce proclaim him to be the most noted prince in Europe. A jupon of dark blue cloth, tagged with buckles and pendants of gold, seemed but a sombre and plain attire amidst the wealth of silk and ermine and gilt tissue of fustian with which he was surrounded. He sat with his two hands clasped round his knee, his head slightly bent, and an expression of impatience and of trouble upon his clear, well-chiselled features. Behind the thrones there stood two men in purple gowns, with ascetic, clean-shaven faces, and half a dozen other high dignitaries and office-holders of Aquitaine. Below on either side of the steps were forty or fifty barons, knights, and courtiers, ranged in a triple row to the right and the left, with a clear passage in the centre.\n\n\"There sits the prince,\" whispered Sir John Chandos, as they entered. \"He on the right is Pedro, whom we are about to put upon the Spanish throne. The other is Don James, whom we purpose with the aid of God to help to his throne in Majorca. Now follow me, and take it not to heart if he be a little short in his speech, for indeed his mind is full of many very weighty concerns.\"\n\nThe prince, however, had already observed their entrance, and, springing to his feet, he had advanced with a winning smile and the light of welcome in his eyes.\n\n\"We do not need your good offices as herald here, Sir John,\" said he in a low but clear voice; \"these valiant knights are very well known to me. Welcome to Aquitaine, Sir Nigel Loring and Sir Oliver Buttesthorn. Nay, keep your knee for my sweet father at Windsor. I would have your hands, my friends. We are like to give you some work to do ere you see the downs of Hampshire once more. Know you aught of Spain, Sir Oliver?\"\n\n\"Nought, my sire, save that I have heard men say that there is a dish named an olla which is prepared there, though I have never been clear in my mind as to whether it was but a ragout such as is to be found in the south, or whether there is some seasoning such as fennel or garlic which is peculiar to Spain.\"\n\n\"Your doubts, Sir Oliver, shall soon be resolved,\" answered the prince, laughing heartily, as did many of the barons who surrounded them. \"His majesty here will doubtless order that you have this dish hotly seasoned when we are all safely in Castile.\"\n\n\"I will have a hotly seasoned dish for some folk I know of,\" answered Don Pedro with a cold smile.\n\n\"But my friend Sir Oliver can fight right hardily without either bite or sup,\" remarked the prince. \"Did I not see him at Poictiers, when for two days we had not more than a crust of bread and a cup of foul water, yet carrying himself most valiantly. With my own eyes I saw him in the rout sweep the head from a knight of Picardy with one blow of his sword.\"\n\n\"The rogue got between me and the nearest French victual wain,\" muttered Sir Oliver, amid a fresh titter from those who were near enough to catch his words.\n\n\"How many have you in your train?\" asked the prince, assuming a graver mien.\n\n\"I have forty men-at-arms, sire,\" said Sir Oliver.\n\n\"And I have one hundred archers and a score of lancers, but there are two hundred men who wait for me on this side of the water upon the borders of Navarre.\"\n\n\"And who are they, Sir Nigel?\"\n\n\"They are a free company, sire, and they are called the White Company.\"\n\nTo the astonishment of the knight, his words provoked a burst of merriment from the barons round, in which the two kings and the prince were fain to join. Sir Nigel blinked mildly from one to the other, until at last perceiving a stout black-bearded knight at his elbow, whose laugh rang somewhat louder than the others, he touched him lightly upon the sleeve.\n\n\"Perchance, my fair sir,\" he whispered, \"there is some small vow of which I may relieve you. Might we not have some honorable debate upon the matter. Your gentle courtesy may perhaps grant me an exchange of thrusts.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, Sir Nigel,\" cried the prince, \"fasten not the offence upon Sir Robert Briquet, for we are one and all bogged in the same mire. Truth to say, our ears have just been vexed by the doings of the same company, and I have even now made vow to hang the man who held the rank of captain over it. I little thought to find him among the bravest of my own chosen chieftains. But the vow is now nought, for, as you have never seen your company, it would be a fool's act to blame you for their doings.\"\n\n\"My liege,\" said Sir Nigel, \"it is a very small matter that I should be hanged, albeit the manner of death is somewhat more ignoble than I had hoped for. On the other hand, it would be a very grievous thing that you, the Prince of England and the flower of knighthood, should make a vow, whether in ignorance or no, and fail to bring it to fulfilment.\"\n\n\"Vex not your mind on that,\" the prince answered, smiling. \"We have had a citizen from Montauban here this very day, who told us such a tale of sack and murder and pillage that it moved our blood; but our wrath was turned upon the man who was in authority over them.\"\n\n\"My dear and honored master,\" cried Nigel, in great anxiety, \"I fear me much that in your gentleness of heart you are straining this vow which you have taken. If there be so much as a shadow of a doubt as to the form of it, it were a thousand times best\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Peace! peace!\" cried the prince impatiently. \"I am very well able to look to my own vows and their performance. We hope to see you both in the banquet-hall anon. Meanwhile you will attend upon us with our train.\" He bowed, and Chandos, plucking Sir Oliver by the sleeve, led them both away to the back of the press of courtiers.\n\n\"Why, little coz,\" he whispered, \"you are very eager to have your neck in a noose. By my soul! had you asked as much from our new ally Don Pedro, he had not baulked you. Between friends, there is overmuch of the hangman in him, and too little of the prince. But indeed this White Company is a rough band, and may take some handling ere you find yourself safe in your captaincy.\"\n\n\"I doubt not, with the help of St. Paul, that I shall bring them to some order,\" Sir Nigel answered. \"But there are many faces here which are new to me, though others have been before me since first I waited upon my dear master, Sir Walter. I pray you to tell me, Sir John, who are these priests upon the dais?\"\n\n\"The one is the Archbishop of Bordeaux, Nigel, and the other the Bishop of Agen.\"\n\n\"And the dark knight with gray-streaked beard? By my troth, he seems to be a man of much wisdom and valor.\"\n\n\"He is Sir William Felton, who, with my unworthy self, is the chief counsellor of the prince, he being high steward and I the seneschal of Aquitaine.\"\n\n\"And the knights upon the right, beside Don Pedro?\"\n\n\"They are cavaliers of Spain who have followed him in his exile. The one at his elbow is Fernando de Castro, who is as brave and true a man as heart could wish. In front to the right are the Gascon lords. You may well tell them by their clouded brows, for there hath been some ill-will of late betwixt the prince and them. The tall and burly man is the Captal de Buch, whom I doubt not that you know, for a braver knight never laid lance in rest. That heavy-faced cavalier who plucks his skirts and whispers in his ear is Lord Oliver de Clisson, known also as the butcher. He it is who stirs up strife, and forever blows the dying embers into flame. The man with the mole upon his cheek is the Lord Pommers, and his two brothers stand behind him, with the Lord Lesparre, Lord de Rosem, Lord de Mucident, Sir Perducas d'Albret, the Souldich de la Trane, and others. Further back are knights from Quercy, Limousin, Saintonge, Poitou, and Aquitaine, with the valiant Sir Guiscard d'Angle. That is he in the rose-colored doublet with the ermine.\"\n\n\"And the knights upon this side?\"\n\n\"They are all Englishmen, some of the household and others who like yourself, are captains of companies. There is Lord Neville, Sir Stephen Cossington, and Sir Matthew Gourney, with Sir Walter Huet, Sir Thomas Banaster, and Sir Thomas Felton, who is the brother of the high steward. Mark well the man with the high nose and flaxen beard who hath placed his hand upon the shoulder of the dark hard-faced cavalier in the rust-stained jupon.\"\n\n\"Aye, by St. Paul!\" observed Sir Nigel, \"they both bear the print of their armor upon their cotes-hardies. Methinks they are men who breathe freer in a camp than a court.\"\n\n\"There are many of us who do that, Nigel,\" said Chandos, \"and the head of the court is, I dare warrant, among them. But of these two men the one is Sir Hugh Calverley, and the other is Sir Robert Knolles.\"\n\nSir Nigel and Sir Oliver craned their necks to have the clearer view of these famous warriors, the one a chosen leader of free companies, the other a man who by his fierce valor and energy had raised himself from the lowest ranks until he was second only to Chandos himself in the esteem of the army.\n\n\"He hath no light hand in war, hath Sir Robert,\" said Chandos. \"If he passes through a country you may tell it for some years to come. I have heard that in the north it is still the use to call a house which hath but the two gable ends left, without walls or roof, a Knolles' mitre.\"\n\n\"I have often heard of him,\" said Nigel, \"and I have hoped to be so far honored as to run a course with him. But hark, Sir John, what is amiss with the prince?\"\n\nWhilst Chandos had been conversing with the two knights a continuous stream of suitors had been ushered in, adventurers seeking to sell their swords and merchants clamoring over some grievance, a ship detained for the carriage of troops, or a tun of sweet wine which had the bottom knocked out by a troop of thirsty archers. A few words from the prince disposed of each case, and, if the applicant liked not the judgment, a quick glance from the prince's dark eyes sent him to the door with the grievance all gone out of him. The younger ruler had sat listlessly upon his stool with the two puppet monarchs enthroned behind him, but of a sudden a dark shadow passed over his face, and he sprang to his feet in one of those gusts of passion which were the single blot upon his noble and generous character.\n\n\"How now, Don Martin de la Carra?\" he cried. \"How now, sirrah? What message do you bring to us from our brother of Navarre?\"\n\nThe new-comer to whom this abrupt query had been addressed was a tall and exceedingly handsome cavalier who had just been ushered into the apartment. His swarthy cheek and raven black hair spoke of the fiery south, and he wore his long black cloak swathed across his chest and over his shoulders in a graceful sweeping fashion, which was neither English nor French. With stately steps and many profound bows, he advanced to the foot of the dais before replying to the prince's question.\n\n\"My powerful and illustrious master,\" he began, \"Charles, King of Navarre, Earl of Evreux, Count of Champagne, who also writeth himself Overlord of Bearn, hereby sends his love and greetings to his dear cousin Edward, the Prince of Wales, Governor of Aquitaine, Grand Commander of\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Tush! tush! Don Martin!\" interrupted the prince, who had been beating the ground with his foot impatiently during this stately preamble. \"We already know our cousin's titles and style, and, certes, we know our own. To the point, man, and at once. Are the passes open to us, or does your master go back from his word pledged to me at Libourne no later than last Michaelmas?\"\n\n\"It would ill become my gracious master, sire, to go back from promise given. He does but ask some delay and certain conditions and hostages\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Conditions! Hostages! Is he speaking to the Prince of England, or is it to the bourgeois provost of some half-captured town! Conditions, quotha? He may find much to mend in his own condition ere long. The passes are, then, closed to us?\"\n\n\"Nay, sire\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"They are open, then?\"\n\n\"Nay, sire, if you would but\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough, enough, Don Martin,\" cried the prince. \"It is a sorry sight to see so true a knight pleading in so false a cause. We know the doings of our cousin Charles. We know that while with the right hand he takes our fifty thousand crowns for the holding of the passes open, he hath his left outstretched to Henry of Trastamare, or to the King of France, all ready to take as many more for the keeping them closed. I know our good Charles, and, by my blessed name-saint the Confessor, he shall learn that I know him. He sets his kingdom up to the best bidder, like some scullion farrier selling a glandered horse. He is\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"My lord,\" cried Don Martin, \"I cannot stand there to hear such words of my master. Did they come from other lips, I should know better how to answer them.\"\n\nDon Pedro frowned and curled his lip, but the prince smiled and nodded his approbation.\n\n\"Your bearing and your words, Don Martin, are such I should have looked for in you,\" he remarked. \"You will tell the king, your master, that he hath been paid his price and that if he holds to his promise he hath my word for it that no scath shall come to his people, nor to their houses or gear. If, however, we have not his leave, I shall come close at the heels of this message without his leave, and bearing a key with me which shall open all that he may close.\" He stooped and whispered to Sir Robert Knolles and Sir Huge Calverley, who smiled as men well pleased, and hastened from the room.\n\n\"Our cousin Charles has had experience of our friendship,\" the prince continued, \"and now, by the Saints! he shall feel a touch of our displeasure. I send now a message to our cousin Charles which his whole kingdom may read. Let him take heed lest worse befall him. Where is my Lord Chandos? Ha, Sir John, I commend this worthy knight to your care. You will see that he hath refection, and such a purse of gold as may defray his charges, for indeed it is great honor to any court to have within it so noble and gentle a cavalier. How say you, sire?\" he asked, turning to the Spanish refugee, while the herald of Navarre was conducted from the chamber by the old warrior.\n\n\"It is not our custom in Spain to reward pertness in a messenger,\" Don Pedro answered, patting the head of his greyhound. \"Yet we have all heard the lengths to which your royal generosity runs.\"\n\n\"In sooth, yes,\" cried the King of Majorca.\n\n\"Who should know it better than we?\" said Don Pedro bitterly, \"since we have had to fly to you in our trouble as to the natural protector of all who are weak.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, as brothers to a brother,\" cried the prince, with sparkling eyes. \"We doubt not, with the help of God, to see you very soon restored to those thrones from which you have been so traitorously thrust.\"\n\n\"When that happy day comes,\" said Pedro, \"then Spain shall be to you as Aquitaine, and, be your project what it may, you may ever count on every troop and every ship over which flies the banner of Castile.\"\n\n\"And,\" added the other, \"upon every aid which the wealth and power of Majorca can bestow.\"\n\n\"Touching the hundred thousand crowns in which I stand your debtor,\" continued Pedro carelessly, \"it can no doubt\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Not a word, sire, not a word!\" cried the prince. \"It is not now when you are in grief that I would vex your mind with such base and sordid matters. I have said once and forever that I am yours with every bow-string of my army and every florin in my coffers.\"\n\n\"Ah! here is indeed a mirror of chivalry,\" said Don Pedro. \"I think, Sir Fernando, since the prince's bounty is stretched so far, that we may make further use of his gracious goodness to the extent of fifty thousand crowns. Good Sir William Felton, here, will doubtless settle the matter with you.\"\n\nThe stout old English counsellor looked somewhat blank at this prompt acceptance of his master's bounty.\n\n\"If it please you, sire,\" he said, \"the public funds are at their lowest, seeing that I have paid twelve thousand men of the companies, and the new taxes\u2014the hearth-tax and the wine-tax\u2014not yet come in. If you could wait until the promised help from England comes\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, my sweet cousin,\" cried Don Pedro. \"Had we known that your own coffers were so low, or that this sorry sum could have weighed one way or the other, we had been loth indeed\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Enough, sire, enough!\" said the prince, flushing with vexation. \"If the public funds be, indeed, so backward, Sir William, there is still, I trust, my own private credit, which hath never been drawn upon for my own uses, but is now ready in the cause of a friend in adversity. Go, raise this money upon our own jewels, if nought else may serve, and see that it be paid over to Don Fernando.\"\n\n\"In security I offer\u2014\u2014\" cried Don Pedro.\n\n\"Tush! tush!\" said the prince. \"I am not a Lombard, sire. Your kingly pledge is my security, without bond or seal. But I have tidings for you, my lords and lieges, that our brother of Lancaster is on his way for our capital with four hundred lances and as many archers to aid us in our venture. When he hath come, and when our fair consort is recovered in her health, which I trust by the grace of God may be ere many weeks be past, we shall then join the army at Dax, and set our banners to the breeze once more.\"\n\nA buzz of joy at the prospect of immediate action rose up from the group of warriors. The prince smiled at the martial ardor which shone upon every face around him.\n\n\"It will hearten you to know,\" he continued, \"that I have sure advices that this Henry is a very valiant leader, and that he has it in his power to make such a stand against us as promises to give us much honor and pleasure. Of his own people he hath brought together, as I learn, some fifty thousand, with twelve thousand of the French free companies, who are, as you know very valiant and expert men-at-arms. It is certain also, that the brave and worthy Bertrand de Guesclin hath ridden into France to the Duke of Anjou, and purposes to take back with him great levies from Picardy and Brittany. We hold Bertrand in high esteem, for he has oft before been at great pains to furnish us with an honorable encounter. What think you of it, my worthy Captal? He took you at Cocherel, and, by my soul I you will have the chance now to pay that score.\"\n\nThe Gascon warrior winced a little at the allusion, nor were his countrymen around him better pleased, for on the only occasion when they had encountered the arms of France without English aid they had met with a heavy defeat.\n\n\"There are some who say, sire,\" said the burly De Clisson, \"that the score is already overpaid, for that without Gascon help Bertrand had not been taken at Auray, nor had King John been overborne at Poictiers.\"\n\n\"By heaven! but this is too much,\" cried an English nobleman. \"Methinks that Gascony is too small a cock to crow so lustily.\"\n\n\"The smaller cock, my Lord Audley, may have the longer spur,\" remarked the Captal de Buch.\n\n\"May have its comb clipped if it make overmuch noise,\" broke in an Englishman.\n\n\"By our Lady of Rocamadour!\" cried the Lord of Mucident, \"this is more than I can abide. Sir John Charnell, you shall answer to me for those words!\"\n\n\"Freely, my lord, and when you will,\" returned the Englishman carelessly.\n\n\"My Lord de Clisson,\" cried Lord Audley, \"you look some, what fixedly in my direction. By God's soul! I should be right glad to go further into the matter with you.\"\n\n\"And you, my Lord of Pommers,\" said Sir Nigel, pushing his way to the front, \"it is in my mind that we might break a lance in gentle and honorable debate over the question.\"\n\nFor a moment a dozen challenges flashed backwards and forwards at this sudden bursting of the cloud which had lowered so long between the knights of the two nations. Furious and gesticulating the Gascons, white and cold and sneering the English, while the prince with a half smile glanced from one party to the other, like a man who loved to dwell upon a fiery scene, and yet dreaded least the mischief go so far that he might find it beyond his control.\n\n\"Friends, friends!\" he cried at last, \"this quarrel must go no further. The man shall answer to me, be he Gascon or English, who carries it beyond this room. I have overmuch need for your swords that you should turn them upon each other. Sir John Charnell, Lord Audley, you do not doubt the courage of our friends of Gascony?\"\n\n\"Not I, sire,\" Lord Audley answered. \"I have seen them fight too often not to know that they are very hardy and valiant gentlemen.\"\n\n\"And so say I,\" quoth the other Englishman; \"but, certes, there is no fear of our forgetting it while they have a tongue in their heads.\"\n\n\"Nay, Sir John,\" said the prince reprovingly, \"all peoples have their own use and customs. There are some who might call us cold and dull and silent. But you hear, my lords of Gascony, that these gentlemen had no thought to throw a slur upon your honor or your valor, so let all anger fade from your mind. Clisson, Captal, De Pommers, I have your word?\"\n\n\"We are your subjects, sire,\" said the Gascon barons, though with no very good grace. \"Your words are our law.\"\n\n\"Then shall we bury all cause of unkindness in a flagon of Malvoisie,\" said the prince, cheerily. \"Ho, there! the doors of the banquet-hall! I have been over long from my sweet spouse but I shall be back with you anon. Let the sewers serve and the minstrels play, while we drain a cup to the brave days that are before us in the south!\" He turned away, accompanied by the two monarchs, while the rest of the company, with many a compressed lip and menacing eye, filed slowly through the side-door to the great chamber in which the royal tables were set forth." + }, + { + "title": "HOW ALLEYNE WON HIS PLACE IN AN HONORABLE GUILD.", + "text": "Whilst the prince's council was sitting, Alleyne and Ford had remained in the outer hall, where they were soon surrounded by a noisy group of young Englishmen of their own rank, all eager to hear the latest news from England.\n\n\"How is it with the old man at Windsor?\" asked one.\n\n\"And how with the good Queen Philippa?\"\n\n\"And how with Dame Alice Perrers?\" cried a third.\n\n\"The devil take your tongue, Wat!\" shouted a tall young man, seizing the last speaker by the collar and giving him an admonitory shake. \"The prince would take your head off for those words.\"\n\n\"By God's coif! Wat would miss it but little,\" said another. \"It is as empty as a beggar's wallet.\"\n\n\"As empty as an English squire, coz,\" cried the first speaker. \"What a devil has become of the maitre-des-tables and his sewers? They have not put forth the trestles yet.\"\n\n\"Mon Dieu! if a man could eat himself into knighthood, Humphrey, you had been a banneret at the least,\" observed another, amid a burst of laughter.\n\n\"And if you could drink yourself in, old leather-head, you had been first baron of the realm,\" cried the aggrieved Humphrey. \"But how of England, my lads of Loring?\"\n\n\"I take it,\" said Ford, \"that it is much as it was when you were there last, save that perchance there is a little less noise there.\"\n\n\"And why less noise, young Solomon?\"\n\n\"Ah, that is for your wit to discover.\"\n\n\"Pardieu! here is a paladin come over, with the Hampshire mud still sticking to his shoes. He means that the noise is less for our being out of the country.\"\n\n\"They are very quick in these parts,\" said Ford, turning to Alleyne.\n\n\"How are we to take this, sir?\" asked the ruffling squire.\n\n\"You may take it as it comes,\" said Ford carelessly.\n\n\"Here is pertness!\" cried the other.\n\n\"Sir, I honor your truthfulness,\" said Ford.\n\n\"Stint it, Humphrey,\" said the tall squire, with a burst of laughter. \"You will have little credit from this gentleman, I perceive. Tongues are sharp in Hampshire, sir.\"\n\n\"And swords?\"\n\n\"Hum! we may prove that. In two days' time is the vepres du tournoi, when we may see if your lance is as quick as your wit.\"\n\n\"All very well, Roger Harcomb,\" cried a burly, bull-necked young man, whose square shoulders and massive limbs told of exceptional personal strength. \"You pass too lightly over the matter. We are not to be so easily overcrowed. The Lord Loring hath given his proofs; but we know nothing of his squires, save that one of them hath a railing tongue. And how of you, young sir?\" bringing his heavy hand down on Alleyne's shoulder.\n\n\"And what of me, young sir?\"\n\n\"Ma foi! this is my lady's page come over. Your cheek will be browner and your hand harder ere you see your mother again.\"\n\n\"If my hand is not hard, it is ready.\"\n\n\"Ready? Ready for what? For the hem of my lady's train?\"\n\n\"Ready to chastise insolence, sir,\" cried Alleyne with hashing eyes.\n\n\"Sweet little coz!\" answered the burly squire. \"Such a dainty color! Such a mellow voice! Eyes of a bashful maid, and hair like a three years' babe! Voila!\" He passed his thick fingers roughly through the youth's crisp golden curls.\n\n\"You seek to force a quarrel, sir,\" said the young man, white with anger.\n\n\"And what then?\"\n\n\"Why, you do it like a country boor, and not like a gentle squire. Hast been ill bred and as ill taught. I serve a master who could show you how such things should be done.\"\n\n\"And how would he do it, O pink of squires?\"\n\n\"He would neither be loud nor would he be unmannerly, but rather more gentle than is his wont. He would say, 'Sir, I should take it as an honor to do some small deed of arms against you, not for mine own glory or advancement, but rather for the fame of my lady and for the upholding of chivalry.' Then he would draw his glove, thus, and throw it on the ground; or, if he had cause to think that he had to deal with a churl, he might throw it in his face\u2014as I do now!\"\n\nA buzz of excitement went up from the knot of squires as Alleyne, his gentle nature turned by this causeless attack into fiery resolution, dashed his glove with all his strength into the sneering face of his antagonist. From all parts of the hall squires and pages came running, until a dense, swaying crowd surrounded the disputants.\n\n\"Your life for this!\" said the bully, with a face which was distorted with rage.\n\n\"If you can take it,\" returned Alleyne.\n\n\"Good lad!\" whispered Ford. \"Stick to it close as wax.\"\n\n\"I shall see justice,\" cried Norbury, Sir Oliver's silent attendant.\n\n\"You brought it upon yourself, John Tranter,\" said the tall squire, who had been addressed as Roger Harcomb. \"You must ever plague the new-comers. But it were shame if this went further. The lad hath shown a proper spirit.\"\n\n\"But a blow! a blow!\" cried several of the older squires. \"There must be a finish to this.\"\n\n\"Nay; Tranter first laid hand upon his head,\" said Harcomb. \"How say you, Tranter? The matter may rest where it stands?\"\n\n\"My name is known in these parts,\" said Tranter, proudly, \"I can let pass what might leave a stain upon another. Let him pick up his glove and say that he has done amiss.\"\n\n\"I would see him in the claws of the devil first,\" whispered Ford.\n\n\"You hear, young sir?\" said the peacemaker. \"Our friend will overlook the matter if you do but say that you have acted in heat and haste.\"\n\n\"I cannot say that,\" answered Alleyne.\n\n\"It is our custom, young sir, when new squires come amongst us from England, to test them in some such way. Bethink you that if a man have a destrier or a new lance he will ever try it in time of peace, lest in days of need it may fail him. How much more then is it proper to test those who are our comrades in arms.\"\n\n\"I would draw out if it may honorably be done,\" murmured Norbury in Alleyne's ear. \"The man is a noted swordsman and far above your strength.\"\n\nEdricson came, however, of that sturdy Saxon blood which is very slowly heated, but once up not easily to be cooled. The hint of danger which Norbury threw out was the one thing needed to harden his resolution.\n\n\"I came here at the back of my master,\" he said, \"and I looked on every man here as an Englishman and a friend. This gentleman hath shown me a rough welcome, and if I have answered him in the same spirit he has but himself to thank. I will pick the glove up; but, certes, I shall abide what I have done unless he first crave my pardon for what he hath said and done.\"\n\nTranter shrugged his shoulders. \"You have done what you could to save him, Harcomb,\" said he. \"We had best settle at once.\"\n\n\"So say I,\" cried Alleyne.\n\n\"The council will not break up until the banquet,\" remarked a gray-haired squire. \"You have a clear two hours.\"\n\n\"And the place?\"\n\n\"The tilting-yard is empty at this hour.\"\n\n\"Nay; it must not be within the grounds of the court, or it may go hard with all concerned if it come to the ears of the prince.\"\n\n\"But there is a quiet spot near the river,\" said one youth. \"We have but to pass through the abbey grounds, along the armory wall, past the church of St. Remi, and so down the Rue des Apotres.\"\n\n\"En avant, then!\" cried Tranter shortly, and the whole assembly flocked out into the open air, save only those whom the special orders of their masters held to their posts. These unfortunates crowded to the small casements, and craned their necks after the throng as far as they could catch a glimpse of them.\n\nClose to the banks of the Garonne there lay a little tract of green sward, with the high wall of a prior's garden upon one side and an orchard with a thick bristle of leafless apple-trees upon the other. The river ran deep and swift up to the steep bank; but there were few boats upon it, and the ships were moored far out in the centre of the stream. Here the two combatants drew their swords and threw off their doublets, for neither had any defensive armor. The duello with its stately etiquette had not yet come into vogue, but rough and sudden encounters were as common as they must ever be when hotheaded youth goes abroad with a weapon strapped to its waist. In such combats, as well as in the more formal sports of the tilting-yard, Tranter had won a name for strength and dexterity which had caused Norbury to utter his well-meant warning. On the other hand, Alleyne had used his weapons in constant exercise and practice for every day for many months, and being by nature quick of eye and prompt of hand, he might pass now as no mean swordsman. A strangely opposed pair they appeared as they approached each other: Tranter dark and stout and stiff, with hairy chest and corded arms, Alleyne a model of comeliness and grace, with his golden hair and his skin as fair as a woman's. An unequal fight it seemed to most; but there were a few, and they the most experienced, who saw something in the youth's steady gray eye and wary step which left the issue open to doubt.\n\n\"Hold, sirs, hold!\" cried Norbury, ere a blow had been struck. \"This gentleman hath a two-handed sword, a good foot longer than that of our friend.\"\n\n\"Take mine, Alleyne,\" said Ford.\n\n\"Nay, friends,\" he answered, \"I understand the weight and balance of mine own. To work, sir, for our lord may need us at the abbey!\"\n\nTranter's great sword was indeed a mighty vantage in his favor. He stood with his feet close together, his knees bent outwards, ready for a dash inwards or a spring out. The weapon he held straight up in front of him with blade erect, so that he might either bring it down with a swinging blow, or by a turn of the heavy blade he might guard his own head and body. A further protection lay in the broad and powerful guard which crossed the hilt, and which was furnished with a deep and narrow notch, in which an expert swordsman might catch his foeman's blade, and by a quick turn of his wrist might snap it across. Alleyne, on the other hand, must trust for his defence to his quick eye and active foot\u2014for his sword, though keen as a whetstone could make it, was of a light and graceful build with a narrow, sloping pommel and a tapering steel.\n\nTranter well knew his advantage and lost no time in putting it to use. As his opponent walked towards him he suddenly bounded forward and sent in a whistling cut which would have severed the other in twain had he not sprung lightly back from it. So close was it that the point ripped a gash in the jutting edge of his linen cyclas. Quick as a panther, Alleyne sprang in with a thrust, but Tranter, who was as active as he was strong, had already recovered himself and turned it aside with a movement of his heavy blade. Again he whizzed in a blow which made the spectators hold their breath, and again Alleyne very quickly and swiftly slipped from under it, and sent back two lightning thrusts which the other could scarce parry. So close were they to each other that Alleyne had no time to spring back from the next cut, which beat down his sword and grazed his forehead, sending the blood streaming into his eyes and down his cheeks. He sprang out beyond sword sweep, and the pair stood breathing heavily, while the crowd of young squires buzzed their applause.\n\n\"Bravely struck on both sides!\" cried Roger Harcomb. \"You have both won honor from this meeting, and it would be sin and shame to let it go further.\"\n\n\"You have done enough, Edricson,\" said Norbury.\n\n\"You have carried yourself well,\" cried several of the older squires.\n\n\"For my part, I have no wish to slay this young man,\" said Tranter, wiping his heated brow.\n\n\"Does this gentleman crave my pardon for having used me despitefully?\" asked Alleyne.\n\n\"Nay, not I.\"\n\n\"Then stand on your guard, sir!\" With a clatter and dash the two blades met once more, Alleyne pressing in so as to keep within the full sweep of the heavy blade, while Tranter as continually sprang back to have space for one of his fatal cuts. A three-parts-parried blow drew blood from Alleyne's left shoulder, but at the same moment he wounded Tranter slightly upon the thigh. Next instant, however, his blade had slipped into the fatal notch, there was a sharp cracking sound with a tinkling upon the ground, and he found a splintered piece of steel fifteen inches long was all that remained to him of his weapon.\n\n\"Your life is in my hands!\" cried Tranter, with a bitter smile.\n\n\"Nay, nay, he makes submission!\" broke in several squires.\n\n\"Another sword!\" cried Ford.\n\n\"Nay, sir,\" said Harcomb, \"that is not the custom.\"\n\n\"Throw down your hilt, Edricson,\" cried Norbury.\n\n\"Never!\" said Alleyne. \"Do you crave my pardon, sir?\"\n\n\"You are mad to ask it.\"\n\n\"Then on guard again!\" cried the young squire, and sprang in with a fire and a fury which more than made up for the shortness of his weapon. It had not escaped him that his opponent was breathing in short, hoarse gasps, like a man who is dizzy with fatigue. Now was the time for the purer living and the more agile limb to show their value. Back and back gave Tranter, ever seeking time for a last cut. On and on came Alleyne, his jagged point now at his foeman's face, now at his throat, now at his chest, still stabbing and thrusting to pass the line of steel which covered him. Yet his experienced foeman knew well that such efforts could not be long sustained. Let him relax for one instant, and his death-blow had come. Relax he must! Flesh and blood could not stand the strain. Already the thrusts were less fierce, the foot less ready, although there was no abatement of the spirit in the steady gray eyes. Tranter, cunning and wary from years of fighting, knew that his chance had come. He brushed aside the frail weapon which was opposed to him, whirled up his great blade, sprang back to get the fairer sweep\u2014and vanished into the waters of the Garonne.\n\nSo intent had the squires, both combatants and spectators, been on the matter in hand, that all thought of the steep bank and swift still stream had gone from their minds. It was not until Tranter, giving back before the other's fiery rush, was upon the very brink, that a general cry warned him of his danger. That last spring, which he hoped would have brought the fight to a bloody end, carried him clear of the edge, and he found himself in an instant eight feet deep in the ice-cold stream. Once and twice his gasping face and clutching fingers broke up through the still green water, sweeping outwards in the swirl of the current. In vain were sword-sheaths, apple-branches and belts linked together thrown out to him by his companions. Alleyne had dropped his shattered sword and was standing, trembling in every limb, with his rage all changed in an instant to pity. For the third time the drowning man came to the surface, his hands full of green slimy water-plants, his eyes turned in despair to the shore. Their glance fell upon Alleyne, and he could not withstand the mute appeal which he read in them. In an instant he, too, was in the Garonne, striking out with powerful strokes for his late foeman.\n\nYet the current was swift and strong, and, good swimmer as he was, it was no easy task which Alleyne had set himself. To clutch at Tranter and to seize him by the hair was the work of a few seconds, but to hold his head above water and to make their way out of the current was another matter. For a hundred strokes he did not seem to gain an inch. Then at last, amid a shout of joy and praise from the bank, they slowly drew clear into more stagnant water, at the instant that a rope, made of a dozen sword-belts linked together by the buckles, was thrown by Ford into their very hands. Three pulls from eager arms, and the two combatants, dripping and pale, were dragged up the bank, and lay panting upon the grass.\n\nJohn Tranter was the first to come to himself, for although he had been longer in the water, he had done nothing during that fierce battle with the current. He staggered to his feet and looked down upon his rescuer, who had raised himself upon his elbow, and was smiling faintly at the buzz of congratulation and of praise which broke from the squires around him.\n\n\"I am much beholden to you, sir,\" said Tranter, though in no very friendly voice. \"Certes, I should have been in the river now but for you, for I was born in Warwickshire, which is but a dry county, and there are few who swim in those parts.\"\n\n\"I ask no thanks,\" Alleyne answered shortly. \"Give me your hand to rise, Ford.\"\n\n\"The river has been my enemy,\" said Tranter, \"but it hath been a good friend to you, for it has saved your life this day.\"\n\n\"That is as it may be,\" returned Alleyne.\n\n\"But all is now well over,\" quoth Harcomb, \"and no scath come of it, which is more than I had at one time hoped for. Our young friend here hath very fairly and honestly earned his right to be craftsman of the Honorable Guild of the Squires of Bordeaux. Here is your doublet, Tranter.\"\n\n\"Alas for my poor sword which lies at the bottom of the Garonne!\" said the squire.\n\n\"Here is your pourpoint, Edricson,\" cried Norbury. \"Throw it over your shoulders, that you may have at least one dry garment.\"\n\n\"And now away back to the abbey!\" said several.\n\n\"One moment, sirs,\" cried Alleyne, who was leaning on Ford's shoulder, with the broken sword, which he had picked up, still clutched in his right hand. \"My ears may be somewhat dulled by the water, and perchance what has been said has escaped me, but I have not yet heard this gentleman crave pardon for the insults which he put upon me in the hall.\"\n\n\"What! do you still pursue the quarrel?\" asked Tranter.\n\n\"And why not, sir? I am slow to take up such things, but once afoot I shall follow it while I have life or breath.\"\n\n\"Ma foi! you have not too much of either, for you are as white as marble,\" said Harcomb bluntly. \"Take my rede, sir, and let it drop, for you have come very well out from it.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Alleyne, \"this quarrel is none of my making; but, now that I am here, I swear to you that I shall never leave this spot until I have that which I have come for: so ask my pardon, sir, or choose another glaive and to it again.\"\n\nThe young squire was deadly white from his exertions, both on the land and in the water. Soaking and stained, with a smear of blood on his white shoulder and another on his brow, there was still in his whole pose and set of face the trace of an inflexible resolution. His opponent's duller and more material mind quailed before the fire and intensity of a higher spiritual nature.\n\n\"I had not thought that you had taken it so amiss,\" said he awkwardly. \"It was but such a jest as we play upon each other, and, if you must have it so, I am sorry for it.\"\n\n\"Then I am sorry too,\" quoth Alleyne warmly, \"and here is my hand upon it.\"\n\n\"And the none-meat horn has blown three times,\" quoth Harcomb, as they all streamed in chattering groups from the ground. \"I know not what the prince's maitre-de-cuisine will say or think. By my troth! master Ford, your friend here is in need of a cup of wine, for he hath drunk deeply of Garonne water. I had not thought from his fair face that he had stood to this matter so shrewdly.\"\n\n\"Faith,\" said Ford, \"this air of Bordeaux hath turned our turtle-dove into a game-cock. A milder or more courteous youth never came out of Hampshire.\"\n\n\"His master also, as I understand, is a very mild and courteous gentleman,\" remarked Harcomb; \"yet I do not think that they are either of them men with whom it is very safe to trifle.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW AGOSTINO PISANO RISKED HIS HEAD.", + "text": "Even the squires' table at the Abbey of St. Andrew's at Bordeaux was on a very sumptuous scale while the prince held his court there. Here first, after the meagre fare of Beaulieu and the stinted board of the Lady Loring, Alleyne learned the lengths to which luxury and refinement might be pushed. Roasted peacocks, with the feathers all carefully replaced, so that the bird lay upon the dish even as it had strutted in life, boars' heads with the tusks gilded and the mouth lined with silver foil, jellies in the shape of the Twelve Apostles, and a great pasty which formed an exact model of the king's new castle at Windsor\u2014these were a few of the strange dishes which faced him. An archer had brought him a change of clothes from the cog, and he had already, with the elasticity of youth, shaken off the troubles and fatigues of the morning. A page from the inner banqueting-hall had come with word that their master intended to drink wine at the lodgings of the Lord Chandos that night, and that he desired his squires to sleep at the hotel of the \"Half Moon\" on the Rue des Apotres. Thither then they both set out in the twilight after the long course of juggling tricks and glee-singing with which the principal meal was concluded.\n\nA thin rain was falling as the two youths, with their cloaks over their heads, made their way on foot through the streets of the old town, leaving their horses in the royal stables. An occasional oil lamp at the corner of a street, or in the portico of some wealthy burgher, threw a faint glimmer over the shining cobblestones, and the varied motley crowd who, in spite of the weather, ebbed and flowed along every highway. In those scattered circles of dim radiance might be seen the whole busy panorama of life in a wealthy and martial city. Here passed the round-faced burgher, swollen with prosperity, his sweeping dark-clothed gaberdine, flat velvet cap, broad leather belt and dangling pouch all speaking of comfort and of wealth. Behind him his serving wench, her blue whimple over her head, and one hand thrust forth to bear the lanthorn which threw a golden bar of light along her master's path. Behind them a group of swaggering, half-drunken Yorkshire dalesmen, speaking a dialect which their own southland countrymen could scarce comprehend, their jerkins marked with the pelican, which showed that they had come over in the train of the north-country Stapletons. The burgher glanced back at their fierce faces and quickened his step, while the girl pulled her whimple closer round her, for there was a meaning in their wild eyes, as they stared at the purse and the maiden, which men of all tongues could understand. Then came archers of the guard, shrill-voiced women of the camp, English pages with their fair skins and blue wondering eyes, dark-robed friars, lounging men-at-arms, swarthy loud-tongued Gascon serving-men, seamen from the river, rude peasants of the Medoc, and becloaked and befeathered squires of the court, all jostling and pushing in an ever-changing, many-colored stream, while English, French, Welsh, Basque, and the varied dialects of Gascony and Guienne filled the air with their babel. From time to time the throng would be burst asunder and a lady's horse-litter would trot past tow torch-bearing archers walking in front of Gascon baron or English knight, as he sought his lodgings after the palace revels. Clatter of hoofs, clinking of weapons, shouts from the drunken brawlers, and high laughter of women, they all rose up, like the mist from a marsh, out of the crowded streets of the dim-lit city.\n\nOne couple out of the moving throng especially engaged the attention of the two young squires, the more so as they were going in their own direction and immediately in front of them. They consisted of a man and a girl, the former very tall with rounded shoulders, a limp of one foot, and a large flat object covered with dark cloth under his arm. His companion was young and straight, with a quick, elastic step and graceful bearing, though so swathed in a black mantle that little could be seen of her face save a flash of dark eyes and a curve of raven hair. The tall man leaned heavily upon her to take the weight off his tender foot, while he held his burden betwixt himself and the wall, cuddling it jealously to his side, and thrusting forward his young companion to act as a buttress whenever the pressure of the crowd threatened to bear him away. The evident anxiety of the man, the appearance of his attendant, and the joint care with which they defended their concealed possession, excited the interest of the two young Englishmen who walked within hand-touch of them.\n\n\"Courage, child!\" they heard the tall man exclaim in strange hybrid French. \"If we can win another sixty paces we are safe.\"\n\n\"Hold it safe, father,\" the other answered, in the same soft, mincing dialect. \"We have no cause for fear.\"\n\n\"Verily, they are heathens and barbarians,\" cried the man; \"mad, howling, drunken barbarians! Forty more paces, Tita mia, and I swear to the holy Eloi, patron of all learned craftsmen, that I will never set foot over my door again until the whole swarm are safely hived in their camp of Dax, or wherever else they curse with their presence. Twenty more paces, my treasure: Ah, my God! how they push and brawl! Get in their way, Tita mia! Put your little elbow bravely out! Set your shoulders squarely against them, girl! Why should you give way to these mad islanders? Ah, cospetto! we are ruined and destroyed!\"\n\nThe crowd had thickened in front, so that the lame man and the girl had come to a stand. Several half-drunken English archers, attracted, as the squires had been, by their singular appearance, were facing towards them, and peering at them through the dim light.\n\n\"By the three kings!\" cried one, \"here is an old dotard shrew to have so goodly a crutch! Use the leg that God hath given you, man, and do not bear so heavily upon the wench.\"\n\n\"Twenty devils fly away with him!\" shouted another. \"What, how, man! are brave archers to go maidless while an old man uses one as a walking-staff?\"\n\n\"Come with me, my honey-bird!\" cried a third, plucking at the girl's mantle.\n\n\"Nay, with me, my heart's desire!\" said the first. \"By St. George! our life is short, and we should be merry while we may. May I never see Chester Bridge again, if she is not a right winsome lass!\"\n\n\"What hath the old toad under his arm?\" cried one of the others. \"He hugs it to him as the devil hugged the pardoner.\"\n\n\"Let us see, old bag of bones; let us see what it is that you have under your arm!\" They crowded in upon him, while he, ignorant of their language, could but clutch the girl with one hand and the parcel with the other, looking wildly about in search of help.\n\n\"Nay, lads, nay!\" cried Ford, pushing back the nearest archer. \"This is but scurvy conduct. Keep your hands off, or it will be the worse for you.\"\n\n\"Keep your tongue still, or it will be the worse for you,\" shouted the most drunken of the archers. \"Who are you to spoil sport?\"\n\n\"A raw squire, new landed,\" said another. \"By St. Thomas of Kent! we are at the beck of our master, but we are not to be ordered by every babe whose mother hath sent him as far as Aquitaine.\"\n\n\"Oh, gentlemen,\" cried the girl in broken French, \"for dear Christ's sake stand by us, and do not let these terrible men do us an injury.\"\n\n\"Have no fears, lady,\" Alleyne answered. \"We shall see that all is well with you. Take your hand from the girl's wrist, you north-country rogue!\"\n\n\"Hold to her, Wat!\" said a great black-bearded man-at-arms, whose steel breastplate glimmered in the dusk. \"Keep your hands from your bodkins, you two, for that was my trade before you were born, and, by God's soul! I will drive a handful of steel through you if you move a finger.\"\n\n\"Thank God!\" said Alleyne suddenly, as he spied in the lamp-light a shock of blazing red hair which fringed a steel cap high above the heads of the crowd. \"Here is John, and Aylward, too! Help us, comrades, for there is wrong being done to this maid and to the old man.\"\n\n\"Hola, mon petit,\" said the old bowman, pushing his way through the crowd, with the huge forester at his heels. \"What is all this, then? By the twang of string! I think that you will have some work upon your hands if you are to right all the wrongs that you may see upon this side of the water. It is not to be thought that a troop of bowmen, with the wine buzzing in their ears, will be as soft-spoken as so many young clerks in an orchard. When you have been a year with the Company you will think less of such matters. But what is amiss here? The provost-marshal with his archers is coming this way, and some of you may find yourselves in the stretch-neck, if you take not heed.\"\n\n\"Why, it is old Sam Aylward of the White Company!\" shouted the man-at-arms. \"Why, Samkin, what hath come upon thee? I can call to mind the day when you were as roaring a blade as ever called himself a free companion. By my soul! from Limoges to Navarre, who was there who would kiss a wench or cut a throat as readily as bowman Aylward of Hawkwood's company?\"\n\n\"Like enough, Peter,\" said Aylward, \"and, by my hilt! I may not have changed so much. But it was ever a fair loose and a clear mark with me. The wench must be willing, or the man must be standing up against me, else, by these ten finger bones I either were safe enough for me.\"\n\nA glance at Aylward's resolute face, and at the huge shoulders of Hordle John, had convinced the archers that there was little to be got by violence. The girl and the old man began to shuffle on in the crowd without their tormentors venturing to stop them. Ford and Alleyne followed slowly behind them, but Aylward caught the latter by the shoulder.\n\n\"By my hilt! camarade,\" said he, \"I hear that you have done great things at the Abbey to-day, but I pray you to have a care, for it was I who brought you into the Company, and it would be a black day for me if aught were to befall you.\"\n\n\"Nay, Aylward, I will have a care.\"\n\n\"Thrust not forward into danger too much, mon petit. In a little time your wrist will be stronger and your cut more shrewd. There will be some of us at the 'Rose de Guienne' to-night, which is two doors from the hotel of the 'Half Moon,' so if you would drain a cup with a few simple archers you will be right welcome.\"\n\nAlleyne promised to be there if his duties would allow, and then, slipping through the crowd, he rejoined Ford, who was standing in talk with the two strangers, who had now reached their own doorstep.\n\n\"Brave young signor,\" cried the tall man, throwing his arms round Alleyne, \"how can we thank you enough for taking our parts against those horrible drunken barbarians. What should we have done without you? My Tita would have been dragged away, and my head would have been shivered into a thousand fragments.\"\n\n\"Nay, I scarce think that they would have mishandled you so,\" said Alleyne in surprise.\n\n\"Ho, ho!\" cried he with a high crowing laugh, \"it is not the head upon my shoulders that I think of. Cospetto! no. It is the head under my arm which you have preserved.\"\n\n\"Perhaps the signori would deign to come under our roof, father,\" said the maiden. \"If we bide here, who knows that some fresh tumult may not break out.\"\n\n\"Well said, Tita! Well said, my girl! I pray you, sirs, to honor my unworthy roof so far. A light, Giacomo! There are five steps up. Now two more. So! Here we are at last in safety. Corpo di Bacco! I would not have given ten maravedi for my head when those children of the devil were pushing us against the wall. Tita mia, you have been a brave girl, and it was better that you should be pulled and pushed than that my head should be broken.\"\n\n\"Yes indeed, father,\" said she earnestly.\n\n\"But those English! Ach! Take a Goth, a Hun, and a Vandal, mix them together and add a Barbary rover; then take this creature and make him drunk\u2014and you have an Englishman. My God I were ever such people upon earth! What place is free from them? I hear that they swarm in Italy even as they swarm here. Everywhere you will find them, except in heaven.\"\n\n\"Dear father,\" cried Tita, still supporting the angry old man, as he limped up the curved oaken stair. \"You must not forget that these good signori who have preserved us are also English.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. My pardon, sirs! Come into my rooms here. There are some who might find some pleasure in these paintings, but I learn the art of war is the only art which is held in honor in your island.\"\n\nThe low-roofed, oak-panelled room into which he conducted them was brilliantly lit by four scented oil lamps. Against the walls, upon the table, on the floor, and in every part of the chamber were great sheets of glass painted in the most brilliant colors. Ford and Edricson gazed around them in amazement, for never had they seen such magnificent works of art.\n\n\"You like them then,\" the lame artist cried, in answer to the look of pleasure and of surprise in their faces. \"There are then some of you who have a taste for such trifling.\"\n\n\"I could not have believed it,\" exclaimed Alleyne. \"What color! What outlines! See to this martyrdom of the holy Stephen, Ford. Could you not yourself pick up one of these stones which lie to the hand of the wicked murtherers?\"\n\n\"And see this stag, Alleyne, with the cross betwixt its horns. By my faith! I have never seen a better one at the Forest of Bere.\"\n\n\"And the green of this grass\u2014how bright and clear! Why all the painting that I have seen is but child's play beside this. This worthy gentleman must be one of those great painters of whom I have oft heard brother Bartholomew speak in the old days at Beaulieu.\"\n\nThe dark mobile face of the artist shone with pleasure at the unaffected delight of the two young Englishmen. His daughter had thrown off her mantle and disclosed a face of the finest and most delicate Italian beauty, which soon drew Ford's eyes from the pictures in front of him. Alleyne, however, continued with little cries of admiration and of wonderment to turn from the walls to the table and yet again to the walls.\n\n\"What think you of this, young sir?\" asked the painter, tearing off the cloth which concealed the flat object which he had borne beneath his arm. It was a leaf-shaped sheet of glass bearing upon it a face with a halo round it, so delicately outlined, and of so perfect a tint, that it might have been indeed a human face which gazed with sad and thoughtful eyes upon the young squire. He clapped his hands, with that thrill of joy which true art will ever give to a true artist.\n\n\"It is great!\" he cried. \"It is wonderful! But I marvel, sir, that you should have risked a work of such beauty and value by bearing it at night through so unruly a crowd.\"\n\n\"I have indeed been rash,\" said the artist. \"Some wine, Tita, from the Florence flask! Had it not been for you, I tremble to think of what might have come of it. See to the skin tint: it is not to be replaced, for paint as you will, it is not once in a hundred times that it is not either burned too brown in the furnace or else the color will not hold, and you get but a sickly white. There you can see the very veins and the throb of thee blood. Yes, diavolo! if it had broken, my heart would have broken too. It is for the choir window in the church of St. Remi, and we had gone, my little helper and I, to see if it was indeed of the size for the stonework. Night had fallen ere we finished, and what could we do save carry it home as best we might? But you, young sir, you speak as if you too knew something of the art.\"\n\n\"So little that I scarce dare speak of it in your presence,\" Alleyne answered. \"I have been cloister-bred, and it was no very great matter to handle the brush better than my brother novices.\"\n\n\"There are pigments, brush, and paper,\" said the old artist. \"I do not give you glass, for that is another matter, and takes much skill in the mixing of colors. Now I pray you to show me a touch of your art. I thank you, Tita! The Venetian glasses, cara mia, and fill them to the brim. A seat, signor!\"\n\nWhile Ford, in his English-French, was conversing with Tita in her Italian French, the old man was carefully examining his precious head to see that no scratch had been left upon its surface. When he glanced up again, Alleyne had, with a few bold strokes of the brush, tinted in a woman's face and neck upon the white sheet in front of him.\n\n\"Diavolo!\" exclaimed the old artist, standing with his head on one side, \"you have power; yes, cospetto! you have power, it is the face of an angel!\"\n\n\"It is the face of the Lady Maude Loring!\" cried Ford, even more astonished.\n\n\"Why, on my faith, it is not unlike her!\" said Alleyne, in some confusion.\n\n\"Ah! a portrait! So much the better. Young man, I am Agostino Pisano, the son of Andrea Pisano, and I say again that you have power. Further, I say, that, if you will stay with me, I will teach you all the secrets of the glass-stainers' mystery: the pigments and their thickening, which will fuse into the glass and which will not, the furnace and the glazing\u2014every trick and method you shall know.\"\n\n\"I would be right glad to study under such a master,\" said Alleyne; \"but I am sworn to follow my lord whilst this war lasts.\"\n\n\"War! war!\" cried the old Italian. \"Ever this talk of war. And the men that you hold to be great\u2014what are they? Have I not heard their names? Soldiers, butchers, destroyers! Ah, per Bacco! we have men in Italy who are in very truth great. You pull down, you despoil; but they build up, they restore. Ah, if you could but see my own dear Pisa, the Duomo, the cloisters of Campo Santo, the high Campanile, with the mellow throb of her bells upon the warm Italian air! Those are the works of great men. And I have seen them with my own eyes, these very eyes which look upon you. I have seen Andrea Orcagna, Taddeo Gaddi, Giottino, Stefano, Simone Memmi\u2014men whose very colors I am not worthy to mix. And I have seen the aged Giotto, and he in turn was pupil to Cimabue, before whom there was no art in Italy, for the Greeks were brought to paint the chapel of the Gondi at Florence. Ah, signori, there are the real great men whose names will be held in honor when your soldiers are shown to have been the enemies of humankind.\"\n\n\"Faith, sir,\" said Ford, \"there is something to say for the soldiers also, for, unless they be defended, how are all these gentlemen whom you have mentioned to preserve the pictures which they have painted?\"\n\n\"And all these!\" said Alleyne. \"Have you indeed done them all?\u2014and where are they to go?\"\n\n\"Yes, signor, they are all from my hand. Some are, as you see, upon one sheet, and some are in many pieces which may fasten together. There are some who do but paint upon the glass, and then, by placing another sheet of glass upon the top and fastening it, they keep the air from their painting. Yet I hold that the true art of my craft lies as much in the furnace as in the brush. See this rose window, which is from the model of the Church of the Holy Trinity at Vendome, and this other of the 'Finding of the Grail,' which is for the apse of the Abbey church. Time was when none but my countrymen could do these things; but there is Clement of Chartres and others in France who are very worthy workmen. But, ah! there is that ever shrieking brazen tongue which will not let us forget for one short hour that it is the arm of the savage, and not the hand of the master, which rules over the world.\"\n\nA stern, clear bugle call had sounded close at hand to summon some following together for the night.\n\n\"It is a sign to us as well,\" said Ford. \"I would fain stay here forever amid all these beautiful things\u2014\" staring hard at the blushing Tita as he spoke\u2014\"but we must be back at our lord's hostel ere he reach it.\" Amid renewed thanks and with promises to come again, the two squires bade their leave of the old Italian glass-stainer and his daughter. The streets were clearer now, and the rain had stopped, so they made their way quickly from the Rue du Roi, in which their new friends dwelt, to the Rue des Apotres, where the hostel of the \"Half Moon\" was situated." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "HOW THE BOWMEN HELD WASSAIL AT THE \"ROSE DE GUIENNE.\"\n\n\"Mon Dieu! Alleyne, saw you ever so lovely a face?\" cried Ford as they hurried along together. \"So pure, so peaceful, and so beautiful!\"\n\n\"In sooth, yes. And the hue of the skin the most perfect that ever I saw. Marked you also how the hair curled round the brow? It was wonder fine.\"\n\n\"Those eyes, too!\" cried Ford. \"How clear and how tender\u2014simple, and yet so full of thought!\"\n\n\"If there was a weakness it was in the chin,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"Nay. I saw none.\"\n\n\"It was well curved, it is true.\"\n\n\"Most daintily so.\"\n\n\"And yet\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"What then, Alleyne? Wouldst find flaw in the sun?\"\n\n\"Well, bethink you, Ford, would not more power and expression have been put into the face by a long and noble beard?\"\n\n\"Holy Virgin!\" cried Ford, \"the man is mad. A beard on the face of little Tita!\"\n\n\"Tita! Who spoke of Tita?\"\n\n\"Who spoke of aught else?\"\n\n\"It was the picture of St. Remi, man, of which I have been discoursing.\"\n\n\"You are indeed,\" cried Ford, laughing, \"a Goth, Hun, and Vandal, with all the other hard names which the old man called us. How could you think so much of a smear of pigments, when there was such a picture painted by the good God himself in the very room with you? But who is this?\"\n\n\"If it please you, sirs,\" said an archer, running across to them, \"Aylward and others would be right glad to see you. They are within here. He bade me say to you that the Lord Loring will not need your service to-night, as he sleeps with the Lord Chandos.\"\n\n\"By my faith!\" said Ford, \"we do not need a guide to lead us to their presence.\" As he spoke there came a roar of singing from the tavern upon the right, with shouts of laughter and stamping of feet. Passing under a low door, and down a stone-flagged passage, they found themselves in a long narrow hall lit up by a pair of blazing torches, one at either end. Trusses of straw had been thrown down along the walls, and reclining on them were some twenty or thirty archers, all of the Company, their steel caps and jacks thrown off, their tunics open and their great limbs sprawling upon the clay floor. At every man's elbow stood his leathern blackjack of beer, while at the further end a hogshead with its end knocked in promised an abundant supply for the future. Behind the hogshead, on a half circle of kegs, boxes, and rude settles, sat Aylward, John, Black Simon and three or four other leading men of the archers, together with Goodwin Hawtayne, the master-shipman, who had left his yellow cog in the river to have a last rouse with his friends of the Company. Ford and Alleyne took their seats between Aylward and Black Simon, without their entrance checking in any degree the hubbub which was going on.\n\n\"Ale, mes camarades?\" cried the bowman, \"or shall it be wine? Nay, but ye must have the one or the other. Here, Jacques, thou limb of the devil, bring a bottrine of the oldest vernage, and see that you do not shake it. Hast heard the news?\"\n\n\"Nay,\" cried both the squires.\n\n\"That we are to have a brave tourney.\"\n\n\"A tourney?\"\n\n\"Aye, lads. For the Captal du Buch hath sworn that he will find five knights from this side of the water who will ride over any five Englishmen who ever threw leg over saddle; and Chandos hath taken up the challenge, and the prince hath promised a golden vase for the man who carries himself best, and all the court is in a buzz over it.\"\n\n\"Why should the knights have all the sport?\" growled Hordle John. \"Could they not set up five archers for the honor of Aquitaine and of Gascony?\"\n\n\"Or five men-at-arms,\" said Black Simon.\n\n\"But who are the English knights?\" asked Hawtayne.\n\n\"There are three hundred and forty-one in the town,\" said Aylward, \"and I hear that three hundred and forty cartels and defiances have already been sent in, the only one missing being Sir John Ravensholme, who is in his bed with the sweating sickness, and cannot set foot to ground.\"\n\n\"I have heard of it from one of the archers of the guard,\" cried a bowman from among the straw; \"I hear that the prince wished to break a lance, but that Chandos would not hear of it, for the game is likely to be a rough one.\"\n\n\"Then there is Chandos.\"\n\n\"Nay, the prince would not permit it. He is to be marshal of the lists, with Sir William Felton and the Duc d'Armagnac. The English will be the Lord Audley, Sir Thomas Percy, Sir Thomas Wake, Sir William Beauchamp, and our own very good lord and leader.\"\n\n\"Hurrah for him, and God be with him!\" cried several. \"It is honor to draw string in his service.\"\n\n\"So you may well say,\" said Aylward. \"By my ten finger-bones! if you march behind the pennon of the five roses you are like to see all that a good bowman would wish to see. Ha! yes, mes garcons, you laugh, but, by my hilt! you may not laugh when you find yourselves where he will take you, for you can never tell what strange vow he may not have sworn to. I see that he has a patch over his eye, even as he had at Poictiers. There will come bloodshed of that patch, or I am the more mistaken.\"\n\n\"How chanced it at Poictiers, good Master Aylward?\" asked one of the young archers, leaning upon his elbows, with his eyes fixed respectfully upon the old bowman's rugged face.\n\n\"Aye, Aylward, tell us of it,\" cried Hordle John.\n\n\"Here is to old Samkin Aylward!\" shouted several at the further end of the room, waving their blackjacks in the air.\n\n\"Ask him!\" said Aylward modestly, nodding towards Black Simon. \"He saw more than I did. And yet, by the holy nails! there was not very much that I did not see either.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" said Simon, shaking his head, \"it was a great day. I never hope to see such another. There were some fine archers who drew their last shaft that day. We shall never see better men, Aylward.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! no. There was little Robby Withstaff, and Andrew Salblaster, and Wat Alspaye, who broke the neck of the German. Mon Dieu! what men they were! Take them how you would, at long butts or short, hoyles, rounds, or rovers, better bowmen never twirled a shaft over their thumbnails.\"\n\n\"But the fight, Aylward, the fight!\" cried several impatiently.\n\n\"Let me fill my jack first, boys, for it is a thirsty tale. It was at the first fall of the leaf that the prince set forth, and he passed through Auvergne, and Berry, and Anjou, and Touraine. In Auvergne the maids are kind, but the wines are sour. In Berry it is the women that are sour, but the wines are rich. Anjou, however, is a very good land for bowmen, for wine and women are all that heart could wish. In Touraine I got nothing save a broken pate, but at Vierzon I had a great good fortune, for I had a golden pyx from the minster, for which I afterwards got nine Genoan janes from the goldsmith in the Rue Mont Olive. From thence we went to Bourges, were I had a tunic of flame-colored silk and a very fine pair of shoes with tassels of silk and drops of silver.\"\n\n\"From a stall, Aylward?\" asked one of the young archers.\n\n\"Nay, from a man's feet, lad. I had reason to think that he might not need them again, seeing that a thirty-inch shaft had feathered in his back.\"\n\n\"And what then, Aylward?\"\n\n\"On we went, coz, some six thousand of us, until we came to Issodun, and there again a very great thing befell.\"\n\n\"A battle, Aylward?\"\n\n\"Nay, nay; a greater thing than that. There is little to be gained out of a battle, unless one have the fortune to win a ransom. At Issodun I and three Welshmen came upon a house which all others had passed, and we had the profit of it to ourselves. For myself, I had a fine feather-bed\u2014a thing which you will not see in a long day's journey in England. You have seen it, Alleyne, and you, John. You will bear me out that it is a noble bed. We put it on a sutler's mule, and bore it after the army. It was on my mind that I would lay it by until I came to start house of mine own, and I have it now in a very safe place near Lyndhurst.\"\n\n\"And what then, master-bowman?\" asked Hawtayne. \"By St. Christopher! it is indeed a fair and goodly life which you have chosen, for you gather up the spoil as a Warsash man gathers lobsters, without grace or favor from any man.\"\n\n\"You are right, master-shipman,\" said another of the older archers. \"It is an old bowyer's rede that the second feather of a fenny goose is better than the pinion of a tame one. Draw on old lad, for I have come between you and the clout.\"\n\n\"On we went then,\" said Aylward, after a long pull at his blackjack. \"There were some six thousand of us, with the prince and his knights, and the feather-bed upon a sutler's mule in the centre. We made great havoc in Touraine, until we came into Romorantin, where I chanced upon a gold chain and two bracelets of jasper, which were stolen from me the same day by a black-eyed wench from the Ardennes. Mon Dieu! there are some folk who have no fear of Domesday in them, and no sign of grace in their souls, for ever clutching and clawing at another man's chattels.\"\n\n\"But the battle, Aylward, the battle!\" cried several, amid a burst of laughter.\n\n\"I come to it, my young war-pups. Well, then, the King of France had followed us with fifty thousand men, and he made great haste to catch us, but when he had us he scarce knew what to do with us, for we were so drawn up among hedges and vineyards that they could not come nigh us, save by one lane. On both sides were archers, men-at-arms and knights behind, and in the centre the baggage, with my feather-bed upon a sutler's mule. Three hundred chosen knights came straight for it, and, indeed, they were very brave men, but such a drift of arrows met them that few came back. Then came the Germans, and they also fought very bravely, so that one or two broke through the archers and came as far as the feather-bed, but all to no purpose. Then out rides our own little hothead with the patch over his eye, and my Lord Audley with his four Cheshire squires, and a few others of like kidney, and after them went the prince and Chandos, and then the whole throng of us, with axe and sword, for we had shot away our arrows. Ma foi! it was a foolish thing, for we came forth from the hedges, and there was naught to guard the baggage had they ridden round behind us. But all went well with us, and the king was taken, and little Robby Withstaff and I fell in with a wain with twelve firkins of wine for the king's own table, and, by my hilt! if you ask me what happened after that, I cannot answer you, nor can little Robby Withstaff either.\"\n\n\"And next day?\"\n\n\"By my faith! we did not tarry long, but we hied back to Bordeaux, where we came in safety with the King of France and also the feather-bed. I sold my spoil, mes garcons, for as many gold-pieces as I could hold in my hufken, and for seven days I lit twelve wax candles upon the altar of St. Andrew; for if you forget the blessed when things are well with you, they are very likely to forget you when you have need of them. I have a score of one hundred and nineteen pounds of wax against the holy Andrew, and, as he was a very just man, I doubt not that I shall have full weigh and measure when I have most need of it.\"\n\n\"Tell me, master Aylward,\" cried a young fresh-faced archer at the further end of the room, \"what was this great battle about?\"\n\n\"Why, you jack-fool, what would it be about save who should wear the crown of France?\"\n\n\"I thought that mayhap it might be as to who should have this feather-bed of thine.\"\n\n\"If I come down to you, Silas, I may lay my belt across your shoulders,\" Aylward answered, amid a general shout of laughter. \"But it is time young chickens went to roost when they dare cackle against their elders. It is late, Simon.\"\n\n\"Nay, let us have another song.\"\n\n\"Here is Arnold of Sowley will troll as good a stave as any man in the Company.\"\n\n\"Nay, we have one here who is second to none,\" said Hawtayne, laying his hand upon big John's shoulder. \"I have heard him on the cog with a voice like the wave upon the shore. I pray you, friend, to give us 'The Bells of Milton,' or, if you will, 'The Franklin's Maid.'\"\n\nHordle John drew the back of his hand across his mouth, fixed his eyes upon the corner of the ceiling, and bellowed forth, in a voice which made the torches flicker, the southland ballad for which he had been asked:\u2014\n\n\u2003The franklin he hath gone to roam,\n\n\u2003The franklin's maid she bides at home,\n\n\u2003But she is cold and coy and staid,\n\n\u2003And who may win the franklin's maid?\n\n\u2003There came a knight of high renown\n\n\u2003In bassinet and ciclatoun;\n\n\u2003On bended knee full long he prayed,\n\n\u2003He might not win the franklin's maid.\n\n\u2003There came a squire so debonair\n\n\u2003His dress was rich, his words were fair,\n\n\u2003He sweetly sang, he deftly played:\n\n\u2003He could not win the franklin's maid.\n\n\u2003There came a mercer wonder-fine\n\n\u2003With velvet cap and gaberdine;\n\n\u2003For all his ships, for all his trade\n\n\u2003He could not buy the franklin's maid.\n\n\u2003There came an archer bold and true,\n\n\u2003With bracer guard and stave of yew;\n\n\u2003His purse was light, his jerkin frayed;\n\n\u2003Haro, alas! the franklin's maid!\n\n\u2003Oh, some have laughed and some have cried\n\n\u2003And some have scoured the country-side!\n\n\u2003But off they ride through wood and glade,\n\n\u2003The bowman and the franklin's maid.\n\nA roar of delight from his audience, with stamping of feet and beating of blackjacks against the ground, showed how thoroughly the song was to their taste, while John modestly retired into a quart pot, which he drained in four giant gulps. \"I sang that ditty in Hordle ale-house ere I ever thought to be an archer myself,\" quoth he.\n\n\"Fill up your stoups!\" cried Black Simon, thrusting his own goblet into the open hogshead in front of him. \"Here is a last cup to the White Company, and every brave boy who walks behind the roses of Loring!\"\n\n\"To the wood, the flax, and the gander's wing!\" said an old gray-headed archer on the right.\n\n\"To a gentle loose, and the King of Spain for a mark at fourteen score!\" cried another.\n\n\"To a bloody war!\" shouted a fourth. \"Many to go and few to come!\"\n\n\"With the most gold to the best steel!\" added a fifth.\n\n\"And a last cup to the maids of our heart!\" cried Aylward. \"A steady hand and a true eye, boys; so let two quarts be a bowman's portion.\" With shout and jest and snatch of song they streamed from the room, and all was peaceful once more in the \"Rose de Guienne.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW ENGLAND HELD THE LISTS AT BORDEAUX.", + "text": "So used were the good burghers of Bordeaux to martial display and knightly sport, that an ordinary joust or tournament was an everyday matter with them. The fame and brilliancy of the prince's court had drawn the knights-errant and pursuivants-of-arms from every part of Europe. In the long lists by the Garonne on the landward side of the northern gate there had been many a strange combat, when the Teutonic knight, fresh from the conquest of the Prussian heathen, ran a course against the knight of Calatrava, hardened by continual struggle against the Moors, or cavaliers from Portugal broke a lance with Scandinavian warriors from the further shore of the great Northern Ocean. Here fluttered many an outland pennon, bearing symbol and blazonry from the banks of the Danube, the wilds of Lithuania and the mountain strongholds of Hungary; for chivalry was of no clime and of no race, nor was any land so wild that the fame and name of the prince had not sounded through it from border to border.\n\nGreat, however, was the excitement through town and district when it was learned that on the third Wednesday in Advent there would be held a passage-at-arms in which five knights of England would hold the lists against all comers. The great concourse of noblemen and famous soldiers, the national character of the contest, and the fact that this was a last trial of arms before what promised to be an arduous and bloody war, all united to make the event one of the most notable and brilliant that Bordeaux had ever seen. On the eve of the contest the peasants flocked in from the whole district of the Medoc, and the fields beyond the walls were whitened with the tents of those who could find no warmer lodging. From the distant camp of Dax, too, and from Blaye, Bourge, Libourne, St. Emilion, Castillon, St. Macaire, Cardillac, Ryons, and all the cluster of flourishing towns which look upon Bordeaux as their mother, there thronged an unceasing stream of horsemen and of footmen, all converging upon the great city. By the morning of the day on which the courses were to be run, not less than eighty people had assembled round the lists and along the low grassy ridge which looks down upon the scene of the encounter.\n\nIt was, as may well be imagined, no easy matter among so many noted cavaliers to choose out five on either side who should have precedence over their fellows. A score of secondary combats had nearly arisen from the rivalries and bad blood created by the selection, and it was only the influence of the prince and the efforts of the older barons which kept the peace among so many eager and fiery soldiers. Not till the day before the courses were the shields finally hung out for the inspection of the ladies and the heralds, so that all men might know the names of the champions and have the opportunity to prefer any charge against them, should there be stain upon them which should disqualify them from taking part in so noble and honorable a ceremony.\n\nSir Hugh Calverley and Sir Robert Knolles had not yet returned from their raid into the marches of the Navarre, so that the English party were deprived of two of their most famous lances. Yet there remained so many good names that Chandos and Felton, to whom the selection had been referred, had many an earnest consultation, in which every feat of arms and failure or success of each candidate was weighed and balanced against the rival claims of his companions. Lord Audley of Cheshire, the hero of Poictiers, and Loring of Hampshire, who was held to be the second lance in the army, were easily fixed upon. Then, of the younger men, Sir Thomas Percy of Northumberland, Sir Thomas Wake of Yorkshire, and Sir William Beauchamp of Gloucestershire, were finally selected to uphold the honor of England. On the other side were the veteran Captal de Buch and the brawny Olivier de Clisson, with the free companion Sir Perducas d'Albret, the valiant Lord of Mucident, and Sigismond von Altenstadt, of the Teutonic Order. The older soldiers among the English shook their heads as they looked upon the escutcheons of these famous warriors, for they were all men who had spent their lives upon the saddle, and bravery and strength can avail little against experience and wisdom of war.\n\n\"By my faith! Sir John,\" said the prince as he rode through the winding streets on his way to the list, \"I should have been glad to have splintered a lance to-day. You have seen me hold a spear since I had strength to lift one, and should know best whether I do not merit a place among this honorable company.\"\n\n\"There is no better seat and no truer lance, sire,\" said Chandos; \"but, if I may say so without fear of offence, it were not fitting that you should join in this debate.\"\n\n\"And why, Sir John?\"\n\n\"Because, sire, it is not for you to take part with Gascons against English, or with English against Gascons, seeing that you are lord of both. We are not too well loved by the Gascons now, and it is but the golden link of your princely coronet which holds us together. If that be snapped I know not what would follow.\"\n\n\"Snapped, Sir John!\" cried the prince, with an angry sparkle in his dark eyes. \"What manner of talk is this? You speak as though the allegiance of our people were a thing which might be thrown off or on like a falcon's jessel.\"\n\n\"With a sorry hack one uses whip and spur, sire,\" said Chandos; \"but with a horse of blood and spirit a good cavalier is gentle and soothing, coaxing rather than forcing. These folk are strange people, and you must hold their love, even as you have it now, for you will get from their kindness what all the pennons in your army could not wring from them.\"\n\n\"You are over-grave to-day, John,\" the prince answered. \"We may keep such questions for our council-chamber. But how now, my brothers of Spain, and of Majorca, what think you of this challenge?\"\n\n\"I look to see some handsome joisting,\" said Don Pedro, who rode with the King of Majorca upon the right of the prince, while Chandos was on the left. \"By St. James of Compostella! but these burghers would bear some taxing. See to the broadcloth and velvet that the rogues bear upon their backs! By my troth! if they were my subjects they would be glad enough to wear falding and leather ere I had done with them. But mayhap it is best to let the wool grow long ere you clip it.\"\n\n\"It is our pride,\" the prince answered coldly, \"that we rule over freemen and not slaves.\"\n\n\"Every man to his own humor,\" said Pedro carelessly. \"Carajo! there is a sweet face at yonder window! Don Fernando, I pray you to mark the house, and to have the maid brought to us at the abbey.\"\n\n\"Nay, brother, nay!\" cried the prince impatiently. \"I have had occasion to tell you more than once that things are not ordered in this way in Aquitaine.\"\n\n\"A thousand pardons, dear friend,\" the Spaniard answered quickly, for a flush of anger had sprung to the dark cheek of the English prince. \"You make my exile so like a home that I forget at times that I am not in very truth back in Castile. Every land hath indeed its ways and manners; but I promise you, Edward, that when you are my guest in Toledo or Madrid you shall not yearn in vain for any commoner's daughter on whom you may deign to cast your eye.\"\n\n\"Your talk, sire,\" said the prince still more coldly, \"is not such as I love to hear from your lips. I have no taste for such amours as you speak of, and I have sworn that my name shall be coupled with that of no woman save my ever dear wife.\"\n\n\"Ever the mirror of true chivalry!\" exclaimed Pedro, while James of Majorca, frightened at the stern countenance of their all-powerful protector, plucked hard at the mantle of his brother exile.\n\n\"Have a care, cousin,\" he whispered; \"for the sake of the Virgin have a care, for you have angered him.\"\n\n\"Pshaw! fear not,\" the other answered in the same low tone. \"If I miss one stoop I will strike him on the next. Mark me else. Fair cousin,\" he continued, turning to the prince, \"these be rare men-at-arms and lusty bowmen. It would be hard indeed to match them.\"\n\n\"They have Journeyed far, sire, but they have never yet found their match.\"\n\n\"Nor ever will, I doubt not. I feel myself to be back upon my throne when I look at them. But tell me, dear coz, what shall we do next, when we have driven this bastard Henry from the kingdom which he hath filched?\"\n\n\"We shall then compel the King of Aragon to place our good friend and brother James of Majorca upon the throne.\"\n\n\"Noble and generous prince!\" cried the little monarch.\n\n\"That done,\" said King Pedro, glancing out of the corners of his eyes at the young conqueror, \"we shall unite the forces of England, of Aquitaine, of Spain and of Majorca. It would be shame to us if we did not do some great deed with such forces ready to our hand.\"\n\n\"You say truly, brother,\" cried the prince, his eyes kindling at the thought. \"Methinks that we could not do anything more pleasing to Our Lady than to drive the heathen Moors out of the country.\"\n\n\"I am with you, Edward, as true as hilt to blade. But, by St. James! we shall not let these Moors make mock at us from over the sea. We must take ship and thrust them from Africa.\"\n\n\"By heaven, yes!\" cried the prince. \"And it is the dream of my heart that our English pennons shall wave upon the Mount of Olives, and the lions and lilies float over the holy city.\"\n\n\"And why not, dear coz? Your bowmen have cleared a path to Paris, and why not to Jerusalem? Once there, your arms might rest.\"\n\n\"Nay, there is more to be done,\" cried the prince, carried away by the ambitious dream. \"There is still the city of Constantine to be taken, and war to be waged against the Soldan of Damascus. And beyond him again there is tribute to be levied from the Cham of Tartary and from the kingdom of Cathay. Ha! John, what say you? Can we not go as far eastward as Richard of the Lion Heart?\"\n\n\"Old John will bide at home, sire,\" said the rugged soldier. \"By my soul! as long as I am seneschal of Aquitaine I will find enough to do in guarding the marches which you have entrusted to me. It would be a blithe day for the King of France when he heard that the seas lay between him and us.\"\n\n\"By my soul! John,\" said the prince, \"I have never known you turn laggard before.\"\n\n\"The babbling hound, sire, is not always the first at the mort,\" the old knight answered.\n\n\"Nay, my true-heart! I have tried you too often not to know. But, by my soul! I have not seen so dense a throng since the day that we brought King John down Cheapside.\"\n\nIt was indeed an enormous crowd which covered the whole vast plain from the line of vineyards to the river bank. From the northern gate the prince and his companions looked down at a dark sea of heads, brightened here and there by the colored hoods of the women, or by the sparkling headpieces of archers and men-at-arms. In the centre of this vast assemblage the lists seemed but a narrow strip of green marked out with banners and streamers, while a gleam of white with a flutter of pennons at either end showed where the marquees were pitched which served as the dressing-rooms of the combatants. A path had been staked off from the city gate to the stands which had been erected for the court and the nobility. Down this, amid the shouts of the enormous multitude, the prince cantered with his two attendant kings, his high officers of state, and his long train of lords and ladies, courtiers, counsellors, and soldiers, with toss of plume and flash of jewel, sheen of silk and glint of gold\u2014as rich and gallant a show as heart could wish. The head of the cavalcade had reached the lists ere the rear had come clear of the city gate, for the fairest and the bravest had assembled from all the broad lands which are watered by the Dordogne and the Garonne. Here rode dark-browed cavaliers from the sunny south, fiery soldiers from Gascony, graceful courtiers of Limousin or Saintonge, and gallant young Englishmen from beyond the seas. Here too were the beautiful brunettes of the Gironde, with eyes which out-flashed their jewels, while beside them rode their blonde sisters of England, clear cut and aquiline, swathed in swans'-down and in ermine, for the air was biting though the sun was bright. Slowly the long and glittering train wound into the lists, until every horse had been tethered by the varlets in waiting, and every lord and lady seated in the long stands which stretched, rich in tapestry and velvet and blazoned arms, on either side of the centre of the arena.\n\nThe holders of the lists occupied the end which was nearest to the city gate. There, in front of their respective pavilions, flew the martlets of Audley, the roses of Loring, the scarlet bars of Wake, the lion of the Percies and the silver wings of the Beauchamps, each supported by a squire clad in hanging green stuff to represent so many Tritons, and bearing a huge conch-shell in their left hands. Behind the tents the great warhorses, armed at all points, champed and reared, while their masters sat at the doors of their pavilions, with their helmets upon their knees, chatting as to the order of the day's doings. The English archers and men-at-arms had mustered at that end of the lists, but the vast majority of the spectators were in favor of the attacking party, for the English had declined in popularity ever since the bitter dispute as to the disposal of the royal captive after the battle of Poictiers. Hence the applause was by no means general when the herald-at-arms proclaimed, after a flourish of trumpets, the names and styles of the knights who were prepared, for the honor of their country and for the love of their ladies, to hold the field against all who might do them the favor to run a course with them. On the other hand, a deafening burst of cheering greeted the rival herald, who, advancing from the other end of the lists, rolled forth the well-known titles of the five famous warriors who had accepted the defiance.\n\n\"Faith, John,\" said the prince, \"it sounds as though you were right. Ha! my grace D'Armagnac, it seems that our friends on this side will not grieve if our English champions lose the day.\"\n\n\"It may be so, sire,\" the Gascon nobleman answered. \"I have little doubt that in Smithfield or at Windsor an English crowd would favor their own countrymen.\"\n\n\"By my faith! that's easily seen,\" said the prince, laughing, \"for a few score English archers at yonder end are bellowing as though they would out-shout the mighty multitude. I fear that they will have little to shout over this tourney, for my gold vase has small prospect of crossing the water. What are the conditions, John?\"\n\n\"They are to tilt singly not less than three courses, sire, and the victory to rest with that party which shall have won the greater number of courses, each pair continuing till one or other have the vantage. He who carries himself best of the victors hath the prize, and he who is judged best of the other party hath a jewelled clasp. Shall I order that the nakirs sound, sire?\"\n\nThe prince nodded, and the trumpets rang out, while the champions rode forth one after the other, each meeting his opponent in the centre of the lists. Sir William Beauchamp went down before the practiced lance of the Captal de Buch. Sir Thomas Percy won the vantage over the Lord of Mucident, and the Lord Audley struck Sir Perducas d'Albret from the saddle. The burly De Clisson, however, restored the hopes of the attackers by beating to the ground Sir Thomas Wake of Yorkshire. So far, there was little to choose betwixt challengers and challenged.\n\n\"By Saint James of Santiago!\" cried Don Pedro, with a tinge of color upon his pale cheeks, \"win who will, this has been a most notable contest.\"\n\n\"Who comes next for England, John?\" asked the prince in a voice which quivered with excitement.\n\n\"Sir Nigel Loring of Hampshire, sire.\"\n\n\"Ha! he is a man of good courage, and skilled in the use of all weapons.\"\n\n\"He is indeed, sire. But his eyes, like my own, are the worse for wars. Yet he can tilt or play his part at hand-strokes as merrily as ever. It was he, sire, who won the golden crown which Queen Philippa, your royal mother, gave to be jousted for by all the knights of England after the harrying of Calais. I have heard that at Twynham Castle there is a buffet which groans beneath the weight of his prizes.\"\n\n\"I pray that my vase may join them,\" said the prince. \"But here is the cavalier of Germany, and by my soul! he looks like a man of great valor and hardiness. Let them run their full three courses, for the issue is over-great to hang upon one.\"\n\nAs the prince spoke, amid a loud flourish of trumpets and the shouting of the Gascon party, the last of the assailants rode gallantly into the lists. He was a man of great size, clad in black armor without blazonry or ornament of any kind, for all worldly display was forbidden by the rules of the military brotherhood to which he belonged. No plume or nobloy fluttered from his plain tilting salade, and even his lance was devoid of the customary banderole. A white mantle fluttered behind him, upon the left side of which was marked the broad black cross picked out with silver which was the well-known badge of the Teutonic Order. Mounted upon a horse as large, as black, and as forbidding as himself, he cantered slowly forward, with none of those prancings and gambades with which a cavalier was accustomed to show his command over his charger. Gravely and sternly he inclined his head to the prince, and took his place at the further end of the arena.\n\nHe had scarce done so before Sir Nigel rode out from the holders' enclosure, and galloping at full speed down the lists, drew his charger up before the prince's stand with a jerk which threw it back upon its haunches. With white armor, blazoned shield, and plume of ostrich-feathers from his helmet, he carried himself in so jaunty and joyous a fashion, with tossing pennon and curveting charger, that a shout of applause ran the full circle of the arena. With the air of a man who hastes to a joyous festival, he waved his lance in salute, and reining the pawing horse round without permitting its fore-feet to touch the ground, he hastened back to his station.\n\nA great hush fell over the huge multitude as the two last champions faced each other. A double issue seemed to rest upon their contest, for their personal fame was at stake as well as their party's honor. Both were famous warriors, but as their exploits had been performed in widely sundered countries, they had never before been able to cross lances. A course between such men would have been enough in itself to cause the keenest interest, apart from its being the crisis which would decide who should be the victors of the day. For a moment they waited\u2014the German sombre and collected, Sir Nigel quivering in every fibre with eagerness and fiery resolution. Then, amid a long-drawn breath from the spectators, the glove fell from the marshal's hand, and the two steel-clad horsemen met like a thunderclap in front of the royal stand. The German, though he reeled for an instant before the thrust of the Englishman, struck his opponent so fairly upon the vizor that the laces burst, the plumed helmet flew to pieces, and Sir Nigel galloped on down the lists with his bald head shimmering in the sunshine. A thousand waving scarves and tossing caps announced that the first bout had fallen to the popular party.\n\nThe Hampshire knight was not a man to be disheartened by a reverse. He spurred back to the pavilion, and was out in a few instants with another helmet. The second course was so equal that the keenest judges could not discern any vantage. Each struck fire from the other's shield, and each endured the jarring shock as though welded to the horse beneath him. In the final bout, however, Sir Nigel struck his opponent with so true an aim that the point of the lance caught between the bars of his vizor and tore the front of his helmet out, while the German, aiming somewhat low, and half stunned by the shock, had the misfortune to strike his adversary upon the thigh, a breach of the rules of the tilting-yard, by which he not only sacrificed his chances of success, but would also have forfeited his horse and his armor, had the English knight chosen to claim them. A roar of applause from the English soldiers, with an ominous silence from the vast crowd who pressed round the barriers, announced that the balance of victory lay with the holders. Already the ten champions had assembled in front of the prince to receive his award, when a harsh bugle call from the further end of the lists drew all eyes to a new and unexpected arrival." + }, + { + "title": "HOW A CHAMPION CAME FORTH FROM THE EAST.", + "text": "The Bordeaux lists were, as has already been explained, situated upon the plain near the river upon those great occasions when the tilting-ground in front of the Abbey of St. Andrew's was deemed to be too small to contain the crowd. On the eastern side of this plain the country-side sloped upwards, thick with vines in summer, but now ridged with the brown bare enclosures. Over the gently rising plain curved the white road which leads inland, usually flecked with travellers, but now with scarce a living form upon it, so completely had the lists drained all the district of its inhabitants. Strange it was to see such a vast concourse of people, and then to look upon that broad, white, empty highway which wound away, bleak and deserted, until it narrowed itself to a bare streak against the distant uplands.\n\nShortly after the contest had begun, any one looking from the lists along this road might have remarked, far away in the extreme distance, two brilliant and sparkling points which glittered and twinkled in the bright shimmer of the winter sun. Within an hour these had become clearer and nearer, until they might be seen to come from the reflection from the headpieces of two horsemen who were riding at the top of their speed in the direction of Bordeaux. Another half-hour had brought them so close that every point of their bearing and equipment could be discerned. The first was a knight in full armor, mounted upon a brown horse with a white blaze upon breast and forehead. He was a short man of great breadth of shoulder, with vizor closed, and no blazonry upon his simple white surcoat or plain black shield. The other, who was evidently his squire and attendant, was unarmed save for the helmet upon his head, but bore in his right hand a very long and heavy oaken spear which belonged to his master. In his left hand the squire held not only the reins of his own horse but those of a great black warhorse, fully harnessed, which trotted along at his side. Thus the three horses and their two riders rode swiftly to the lists, and it was the blare of the trumpet sounded by the squire as his lord rode into the arena which had broken in upon the prize-giving and drawn away the attention and interest of the spectators.\n\n\"Ha, John!\" cried the prince, craning his neck, \"who is this cavalier, and what is it that he desires?\"\n\n\"On my word, sire,\" replied Chandos, with the utmost surprise upon his face, \"it is my opinion that he is a Frenchman.\"\n\n\"A Frenchman!\" repeated Don Pedro. \"And how can you tell that, my Lord Chandos, when he has neither coat-armor, crest, or blazonry?\"\n\n\"By his armor, sire, which is rounder at elbow and at shoulder than any of Bordeaux or of England. Italian he might be were his bassinet more sloped, but I will swear that those plates were welded betwixt this and Rhine. Here comes his squire, however, and we shall hear what strange fortune hath brought him over the marches.\"\n\nAs he spoke the attendant cantered up the grassy enclosure, and pulling up his steed in front of the royal stand, blew a second fanfare upon his bugle. He was a raw-boned, swarthy-cheeked man, with black bristling beard and a swaggering bearing.\n\nHaving sounded his call, he thrust the bugle into his belt, and, pushing his way betwixt the groups of English and of Gascon knights, he reined up within a spear's length of the royal party.\n\n\"I come,\" he shouted in a hoarse, thick voice, with a strong Breton accent, \"as squire and herald from my master, who is a very valiant pursuivant-of-arms, and a liegeman to the great and powerful monarch, Charles, king of the French. My master has heard that there is jousting here, and prospect of honorable advancement, so he has come to ask that some English cavalier will vouchsafe for the love of his lady to run a course with sharpened lances with him, or to meet him with sword, mace, battle-axe, or dagger. He bade me say, however, that he would fight only with a true Englishman, and not with any mongrel who is neither English nor French, but speaks with the tongue of the one, and fights under the banner of the other.\"\n\n\"Sir!\" cried De Clisson, with a voice of thunder, while his countrymen clapped their hands to their swords. The squire, however, took no notice of their angry faces, but continued with his master's message.\n\n\"He is now ready, sire,\" he said, \"albeit his destrier has travelled many miles this day, and fast, for we were in fear lest we come too late for the jousting.\"\n\n\"Ye have indeed come too late,\" said the prince, \"seeing that the prize is about to be awarded; yet I doubt not that one of these gentlemen will run a course for the sake of honor with this cavalier of France.\"\n\n\"And as to the prize, sire,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"I am sure that I speak for all when I say this French knight hath our leave to bear it away with him if he can fairly win it.\"\n\n\"Bear word of this to your master,\" said the prince, \"and ask him which of these five Englishmen he would desire to meet. But stay; your master bears no coat-armor, and we have not yet heard his name.\"\n\n\"My master, sire, is under vow to the Virgin neither to reveal his name nor to open his vizor until he is back upon French ground once more.\"\n\n\"Yet what assurance have we,\" said the prince, \"that this is not some varlet masquerading in his master's harness, or some caitiff knight, the very touch of whose lance might bring infamy upon an honorable gentleman?\"\n\n\"It is not so, sire,\" cried the squire earnestly. \"There is no man upon earth who would demean himself by breaking a lance with my master.\"\n\n\"You speak out boldly, squire,\" the prince answered; \"but unless I have some further assurance of your master's noble birth and gentle name I cannot match the choicest lances of my court against him.\"\n\n\"You refuse, sire?\"\n\n\"I do refuse.\"\n\n\"Then, sire, I was bidden to ask you from my master whether you would consent if Sir John Chandos, upon hearing my master's name, should assure you that he was indeed a man with whom you might yourself cross swords without indignity.\"\n\n\"I ask no better,\" said the prince.\n\n\"Then I must ask, Lord Chandos, that you will step forth. I have your pledge that the name shall remain ever a secret, and that you will neither say nor write one word which might betray it. The name is\u2014\u2014\" He stooped down from his horse and whispered something into the old knight's ear which made him start with surprise, and stare with much curiosity at the distant Knight, who was sitting his charger at the further end of the arena.\n\n\"Is this indeed sooth?\" he exclaimed.\n\n\"It is, my lord, and I swear it by St. Ives of Brittany.\"\n\n\"I might have known it,\" said Chandos, twisting his moustache, and still looking thoughtfully at the cavalier.\n\n\"What then, Sir John?\" asked the prince.\n\n\"Sire, this is a knight whom it is indeed great honor to meet, and I would that your grace would grant me leave to send my squire for my harness, for I would dearly love to run a course with him.\n\n\"Nay, nay, Sir John, you have gained as much honor as one man can bear, and it were hard if you could not rest now. But I pray you, squire, to tell your master that he is very welcome to our court, and that wines and spices will be served him, if he would refresh himself before jousting.\"\n\n\"My master will not drink,\" said the squire.\n\n\"Let him then name the gentleman with whom he would break a spear.\"\n\n\"He would contend with these five knights, each to choose such weapons as suit him best.\"\n\n\"I perceive,\" said the prince, \"that your master is a man of great heart and high of enterprise. But the sun already is low in the west, and there will scarce be light for these courses. I pray you, gentlemen, to take your places, that we may see whether this stranger's deeds are as bold as his words.\"\n\nThe unknown knight had sat like a statue of steel, looking neither to the right nor to the left during these preliminaries. He had changed from the horse upon which he had ridden, and bestrode the black charger which his squire had led beside him. His immense breadth, his stern composed appearance, and the mode in which he handled his shield and his lance, were enough in themselves to convince the thousands of critical spectators that he was a dangerous opponent. Aylward, who stood in the front row of the archers with Simon, big John, and others of the Company, had been criticising the proceedings from the commencement with the ease and freedom of a man who had spent his life under arms and had learned in a hard school to know at a glance the points of a horse and his rider. He stared now at the stranger with a wrinkled brow and the air of a man who is striving to stir his memory.\n\n\"By my hilt! I have seen the thick body of him before to-day. Yet I cannot call to mind where it could have been. At Nogent belike, or was it at Auray? Mark me, lads, this man will prove to be one of the best lances of France, and there are no better in the world.\"\n\n\"It is but child's play, this poking game,\" said John. \"I would fain try my hand at it, for, by the black rood! I think that it might be amended.\"\n\n\"What then would you do, John?\" asked several.\n\n\"There are many things which might be done,\" said the forester thoughtfully. \"Methinks that I would begin by breaking my spear.\"\n\n\"So they all strive to do.\"\n\n\"Nay, but not upon another man's shield. I would break it over my own knee.\"\n\n\"And what the better for that, old beef and bones?\" asked Black Simon.\n\n\"So I would turn what is but a lady's bodkin of a weapon into a very handsome club.\"\n\n\"And then, John?\"\n\n\"Then I would take the other's spear into my arm or my leg, or where it pleased him best to put it, and I would dash out his brains with my club.\"\n\n\"By my ten finger-bones! old John,\" said Aylward, \"I would give my feather-bed to see you at a spear-running. This is a most courtly and gentle sport which you have devised.\"\n\n\"So it seems to me,\" said John seriously. \"Or, again, one might seize the other round the middle, pluck him off his horse and bear him to the pavilion, there to hold him to ransom.\"\n\n\"Good!\" cried Simon, amid a roar of laughter from all the archers round. \"By Thomas of Kent I we shall make a camp-marshal of thee, and thou shalt draw up rules for our jousting. But, John, who is it that you would uphold in this knightly and pleasing fashion?\"\n\n\"What mean you?\"\n\n\"Why, John, so strong and strange a tilter must fight for the brightness of his lady's eyes or the curve of her eyelash, even as Sir Nigel does for the Lady Loring.\"\n\n\"I know not about that,\" said the big archer, scratching his head in perplexity. \"Since Mary hath played me false, I can scarce fight for her.\"\n\n\"Yet any woman will serve.\"\n\n\"There is my mother then,\" said John. \"She was at much pains at my upbringing, and, by my soul! I will uphold the curve of her eyelashes, for it tickleth my very heart-root to think of her. But who is here?\"\n\n\"It is Sir William Beauchamp. He is a valiant man, but I fear that he is scarce firm enough upon the saddle to bear the thrust of such a tilter as this stranger promises to be.\"\n\nAylward's words were speedily justified, for even as he spoke the two knights met in the centre of the lists. Beauchamp struck his opponent a shrewd blow upon the helmet, but was met with so frightful a thrust that he whirled out of his saddle and rolled over and over upon the ground. Sir Thomas Percy met with little better success, for his shield was split, his vambrace torn and he himself wounded slightly in the side. Lord Audley and the unknown knight struck each other fairly upon the helmet; but, while the stranger sat as firm and rigid as ever upon his charger, the Englishman was bent back to his horse's cropper by the weight of the blow, and had galloped half-way down the lists ere he could recover himself. Sir Thomas Wake was beaten to the ground with a battle-axe\u2014that being the weapon which he had selected\u2014and had to be carried to his pavilion. These rapid successes, gained one after the other over four celebrated warriors, worked the crowd up to a pitch of wonder and admiration. Thunders of applause from the English soldiers, as well as from the citizens and peasants, showed how far the love of brave and knightly deeds could rise above the rivalries of race.\n\n\"By my soul! John,\" cried the prince, with his cheek flushed and his eyes shining, \"this is a man of good courage and great hardiness. I could not have thought that there was any single arm upon earth which could have overthrown these four champions.\"\n\n\"He is indeed, as I have said, sire, a knight from whom much honor is to be gained. But the lower edge of the sun is wet, and it will be beneath the sea ere long.\"\n\n\"Here is Sir Nigel Loring, on foot and with his sword,\" said the prince. \"I have heard that he is a fine swordsman.\"\n\n\"The finest in your army, sire,\" Chandos answered. \"Yet I doubt not that he will need all his skill this day.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the two combatants advanced from either end in full armor with their two-handed swords sloping over their shoulders. The stranger walked heavily and with a measured stride, while the English knight advanced as briskly as though there was no iron shell to weigh down the freedom of his limbs. At four paces distance they stopped, eyed each other for a moment, and then in an instant fell to work with a clatter and clang as though two sturdy smiths were busy upon their anvils. Up and down went the long, shining blades, round and round they circled in curves of glimmering light, crossing, meeting, disengaging, with flash of sparks at every parry. Here and there bounded Sir Nigel, his head erect, his jaunty plume fluttering in the air, while his dark opponent sent in crashing blow upon blow, following fiercely up with cut and with thrust, but never once getting past the practised blade of the skilled swordsman. The crowd roared with delight as Sir Nigel would stoop his head to avoid a blow, or by some slight movement of his body allow some terrible thrust to glance harmlessly past him. Suddenly, however, his time came. The Frenchman, whirling up his sword, showed for an instant a chink betwixt his shoulder piece and the rerebrace which guarded his upper arm. In dashed Sir Nigel, and out again so swiftly that the eye could not follow the quick play of his blade, but a trickle of blood from the stranger's shoulder, and a rapidly widening red smudge upon his white surcoat, showed where the thrust had taken effect. The wound was, however, but a slight one, and the Frenchman was about to renew his onset, when, at a sign from the prince, Chandos threw down his baton, and the marshals of the lists struck up the weapons and brought the contest to an end.\n\n\"It were time to check it,\" said the prince, smiling, \"for Sir Nigel is too good a man for me to lose, and, by the five holy wounds! if one of those cuts came home I should have fears for our champion. What think you, Pedro?\"\n\n\"I think, Edward, that the little man was very well able to take care of himself. For my part, I should wish to see so well matched a pair fight on while a drop of blood remained in their veins.\"\n\n\"We must have speech with him. Such a man must not go from my court without rest or sup. Bring him hither, Chandos, and, certes, if the Lord Loring hath resigned his claim upon this goblet, it is right and proper that this cavalier should carry it to France with him as a sign of the prowess that he has shown this day.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the knight-errant, who had remounted his warhorse, galloped forward to the royal stand, with a silken kerchief bound round his wounded arm. The setting sun cast a ruddy glare upon his burnished arms, and sent his long black shadow streaming behind him up the level clearing. Pulling up his steed, he slightly inclined his head, and sat in the stern and composed fashion with which he had borne himself throughout, heedless of the applauding shouts and the flutter of kerchiefs from the long lines of brave men and of fair women who were looking down upon him.\n\n\"Sir knight,\" said the prince, \"we have all marvelled this day at this great skill and valor with which God has been pleased to endow you. I would fain that you should tarry at our court, for a time at least, until your hurt is healed and your horses rested..\"\n\n\"My hurt is nothing, sire, nor are my horses weary,\" returned the stranger in a deep, stern voice.\n\n\"Will you not at least hie back to Bordeaux with us, that you may drain a cup of muscadine and sup at our table?\"\n\n\"I will neither drink your wine nor sit at your table,\" returned the other. \"I bear no love for you or for your race, and there is nought that I wish at your hands until the day when I see the last sail which bears you back to your island vanishing away against the western sky.\"\n\n\"These are bitter words, sir knight,\" said Prince Edward, with an angry frown.\n\n\"And they come from a bitter heart,\" answered the unknown knight. \"How long is it since there has been peace in my hapless country? Where are the steadings, and orchards, and vineyards, which made France fair? Where are the cities which made her great? From Providence to Burgundy we are beset by every prowling hireling in Christendom, who rend and tear the country which you have left too weak to guard her own marches. Is it not a by-word that a man may ride all day in that unhappy land without seeing thatch upon roof or hearing the crow of cock? Does not one fair kingdom content you, that you should strive so for this other one which has no love for you? Pardieu! a true Frenchman's words may well be bitter, for bitter is his lot and bitter his thoughts as he rides through his thrice unhappy country.\"\n\n\"Sir knight,\" said the prince, \"you speak like a brave man, and our cousin of France is happy in having a cavalier who is so fit to uphold his cause either with tongue or with sword. But if you think such evil of us, how comes it that you have trusted yourselves to us without warranty or safe-conduct?\"\n\n\"Because I knew that you would be here, sire. Had the man who sits upon your right been ruler of this land, I had indeed thought twice before I looked to him for aught that was knightly or generous.\" With a soldierly salute, he wheeled round his horse, and, galloping down the lists, disappeared amid the dense crowd of footmen and of horsemen who were streaming away from the scene of the tournament.\n\n\"The insolent villain!\" cried Pedro, glaring furiously after him. \"I have seen a man's tongue torn from his jaws for less. Would it not be well even now, Edward, to send horsemen to hale him back? Bethink you that it may be one of the royal house of France, or at least some knight whose loss would be a heavy blow to his master. Sir William Felton, you are well mounted, gallop after the caitiff, I pray you.\"\n\n\"Do so, Sir William,\" said the prince, \"and give him this purse of a hundred nobles as a sign of the respect which I bear for him; for, by St. George! he has served his master this day even as I would wish liegeman of mine to serve me.\" So saying, the prince turned his back upon the King of Spain, and springing upon his horse, rode slowly homewards to the Abbey of Saint Andrew's." + }, + { + "title": "HOW SIR NIGEL WROTE TO TWYNHAM CASTLE.", + "text": "On the morning after the jousting, when Alleyne Edricson went, as was his custom, into his master's chamber to wait upon him in his dressing and to curl his hair, he found him already up and very busily at work. He sat at a table by the window, a deer-hound on one side of him and a lurcher on the other, his feet tucked away under the trestle on which he sat, and his tongue in his cheek, with the air of a man who is much perplexed. A sheet of vellum lay upon the board in front of him, and he held a pen in his hand, with which he had been scribbling in a rude schoolboy hand. So many were the blots, however, and so numerous the scratches and erasures, that he had at last given it up in despair, and sat with his single uncovered eye cocked upwards at the ceiling, as one who waits upon inspiration.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" he cried, as Alleyne entered, \"you are the man who will stand by me in this matter. I have been in sore need of you, Alleyne.\"\n\n\"God be with you, my fair lord!\" the squire answered. \"I trust that you have taken no hurt from all that you have gone through yesterday.\"\n\n\"Nay; I feel the fresher for it, Alleyne. It has eased my joints, which were somewhat stiff from these years of peace. I trust, Alleyne, that thou didst very carefully note and mark the bearing and carriage of this knight of France; for it is time, now when you are young, that you should see all that is best, and mould your own actions in accordance. This was a man from whom much honor might be gained, and I have seldom met any one for whom I have conceived so much love and esteem. Could I but learn his name, I should send you to him with my cartel, that we might have further occasion to watch his goodly feats of arms.\"\n\n\"It is said, my fair lord, that none know his name save only the Lord Chandos, and that he is under vow not to speak it. So ran the gossip at the squires' table.\"\n\n\"Be he who he might, he was a very hardy gentleman. But I have a task here, Alleyne, which is harder to me than aught that was set before me yesterday.\"\n\n\"Can I help you, my lord?\"\n\n\"That indeed you can. I have been writing my greetings to my sweet wife; for I hear that a messenger goes from the prince to Southampton within the week, and he would gladly take a packet for me. I pray you, Alleyne, to cast your eyes upon what I have written, and see it they are such words as my lady will understand. My fingers, as you can see, are more used to iron and leather than to the drawing of strokes and turning of letters. What then? Is there aught amiss, that you should stare so?\"\n\n\"It is this first word, my lord. In what tongue were you pleased to write?\"\n\n\"In English; for my lady talks it more than she doth French.\n\n\"Yet this is no English word, my sweet lord. Here are four t's and never a letter betwixt them.\"\n\n\"By St. Paul! it seemed strange to my eye when I wrote it,\" said Sir Nigel. \"They bristle up together like a clump of lances. We must break their ranks and set them farther apart. The word is 'that.' Now I will read it to you, Alleyne, and you shall write it out fair; for we leave Bordeaux this day, and it would be great joy to me to think that the Lady Loring had word from me.\"\n\nAlleyne sat down as ordered, with a pen in his hand and a fresh sheet of parchment before him, while Sir Nigel slowly spelled out his letter, running his forefinger on from word to word.\n\n\"That my heart is with thee, my dear sweeting, is what thine own heart will assure thee of. All is well with us here, save that Pepin hath the mange on his back, and Pommers hath scarce yet got clear of his stiffness from being four days on ship-board, and the more so because the sea was very high, and we were like to founder on account of a hole in her side, which was made by a stone cast at us by certain sea-rovers, who may the saints have in their keeping, for they have gone from amongst us, as has young Terlake, and two-score mariners and archers, who would be the more welcome here as there is like to be a very fine war, with much honor and all hopes of advancement, for which I go to gather my Company together, who are now at Montaubon, where they pillage and destroy; yet I hope that, by God's help, I may be able to show that I am their master, even as, my sweet lady, I am thy servant.\"\n\n\"How of that, Alleyne?\" continued Sir Nigel, blinking at his squire, with an expression of some pride upon his face. \"Have I not told her all that hath befallen us?\"\n\n\"You have said much, my fair lord; and yet, if I may say so, it is somewhat crowded together, so that my Lady Loring can, mayhap, scarce follow it. Were it in shorter periods\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Nay, it boots me not how you marshal them, as long as they are all there at the muster. Let my lady have the words, and she will place them in such order as pleases her best. But I would have you add what it would please her to know.\"\n\n\"That will I,\" said Alleyne, blithely, and bent to the task.\n\n\"My fair lady and mistress,\" he wrote, \"God hath had us in His keeping, and my lord is well and in good cheer. He hath won much honor at the jousting before the prince, when he alone was able to make it good against a very valiant man from France. Touching the moneys, there is enough and to spare until we reach Montaubon. Herewith, my fair lady, I send my humble regards, entreating you that you will give the same to your daughter, the Lady Maude. May the holy saints have you both in their keeping is ever the prayer of thy servant, ALLEYNE EDRICSON.\"\n\n\"That is very fairly set forth,\" said Sir Nigel, nodding his bald head as each sentence was read to him. \"And for thyself, Alleyne, if there be any dear friend to whom you would fain give greeting, I can send it for thee within this packet.\"\n\n\"There is none,\" said Alleyne, sadly.\n\n\"Have you no kinsfolk, then?\"\n\n\"None, save my brother.\"\n\n\"Ha! I had forgotten that there was ill blood betwixt you. But are there none in all England who love thee?\"\n\n\"None that I dare say so.\"\n\n\"And none whom you love?\"\n\n\"Nay, I will not say that,\" said Alleyne.\n\nSir Nigel shook his head and laughed softly to himself, \"I see how it is with you,\" he said. \"Have I not noted your frequent sighs and vacant eye? Is she fair?\"\n\n\"She is indeed,\" cried Alleyne from his heart, all tingling at this sudden turn of the talk.\n\n\"And good?\"\n\n\"As an angel.\"\n\n\"And yet she loves you not?\"\n\n\"Nay, I cannot say that she loves another.\"\n\n\"Then you have hopes?\"\n\n\"I could not live else.\"\n\n\"Then must you strive to be worthy of her love. Be brave and pure, fearless to the strong and humble to the weak; and so, whether this love prosper or no, you will have fitted yourself to be honored by a maiden's love, which is, in sooth, the highest guerdon which a true knight can hope for.\"\n\n\"Indeed, my lord, I do so strive,\" said Alleyne; \"but she is so sweet, so dainty, and of so noble a spirit, that I fear me that I shall never be worthy of her.\"\n\n\"By thinking so you become worthy. Is she then of noble birth?\"\n\n\"She is, my lord,\" faltered Alleyne.\n\n\"Of a knightly house?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Have a care, Alleyne, have a care!\" said Sir Nigel, kindly. \"The higher the steed the greater the fall. Hawk not at that which may be beyond thy flight.\"\n\n\"My lord, I know little of the ways and usages of the world,\" cried Alleyne, \"but I would fain ask your rede upon the matter. You have known my father and my kin: is not my family one of good standing and repute?\"\n\n\"Beyond all question.\"\n\n\"And yet you warn me that I must not place my love too high.\"\n\n\"Were Minstead yours, Alleyne, then, by St. Paul! I cannot think that any family in the land would not be proud to take you among them, seeing that you come of so old a strain. But while the Socman lives\u2014\u2014Ha, by my soul! if this is not Sir Oliver's step I am the more mistaken.\"\n\nAs he spoke, a heavy footfall was heard without, and the portly knight flung open the door and strode into the room.\n\n\"Why, my little coz,\" said he, \"I have come across to tell you that I live above the barber's in the Rue de la Tour, and that there is a venison pasty in the oven and two flasks of the right vintage on the table. By St. James! a blind man might find the place, for one has but to get in the wind from it, and follow the savory smell. Put on your cloak, then, and come, for Sir Walter Hewett and Sir Robert Briquet, with one or two others, are awaiting us.\"\n\n\"Nay, Oliver, I cannot be with you, for I must to Montaubon this day.\"\n\n\"To Montaubon? But I have heard that your Company is to come with my forty Winchester rascals to Dax.\"\n\n\"If you will take charge of them, Oliver. For I will go to Montaubon with none save my two squires and two archers. Then, when I have found the rest of my Company I shall lead them to Dax. We set forth this morning.\"\n\n\"Then I must back to my pasty,\" said Sir Oliver. \"You will find us at Dax, I doubt not, unless the prince throw me into prison, for he is very wroth against me.\"\n\n\"And why, Oliver?\"\n\n\"Pardieu! because I have sent my cartel, gauntlet, and defiance to Sir John Chandos and to Sir William Felton.\"\n\n\"To Chandos? In God's name, Oliver, why have you done this?\"\n\n\"Because he and the other have used me despitefully.\"\n\n\"And how?\"\n\n\"Because they have passed me over in choosing those who should joust for England. Yourself and Audley I could pass, coz, for you are mature men; but who are Wake, and Percy, and Beauchamp? By my soul! I was prodding for my food into a camp-kettle when they were howling for their pap. Is a man of my weight and substance to be thrown aside for the first three half-grown lads who have learned the trick of the tilt-yard? But hark ye, coz, I think of sending my cartel also to the prince.\"\n\n\"Oliver! Oliver! You are mad!\"\n\n\"Not I, i' faith! I care not a denier whether he be prince or no. By Saint James! I see that your squire's eyes are starting from his head like a trussed crab. Well, friend, we are all three men of Hampshire, and not lightly to be jeered at.\"\n\n\"Has he jeered at you than?\"\n\n\"Pardieu! yes, 'Old Sir Oliver's heart is still stout,' said one of his court. 'Else had it been out of keeping with the rest of him,' quoth the prince. 'And his arm is strong,' said another. 'So is the backbone of his horse,' quoth the prince. This very day I will send him my cartel and defiance.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, my dear Oliver,\" said Sir Nigel, laying his hand upon his angry friend's arm. \"There is naught in this, for it was but saying that you were a strong and robust man, who had need of a good destrier. And as to Chandos and Felton, bethink you that if when you yourself were young the older lances had ever been preferred, how would you then have had the chance to earn the good name and fame which you now bear? You do not ride as light as you did, Oliver, and I ride lighter by the weight of my hair, but it would be an ill thing if in the evening of our lives we showed that our hearts were less true and loyal than of old. If such a knight as Sir Oliver Buttesthorn may turn against his own prince for the sake of a light word, then where are we to look for steadfast faith and constancy?\"\n\n\"Ah! my dear little coz, it is easy to sit in the sunshine and preach to the man in the shadow. Yet you could ever win me over to your side with that soft voice of yours. Let us think no more of it then. But, holy Mother! I had forgot the pasty, and it will be as scorched as Judas Iscariot! Come, Nigel, lest the foul fiend get the better of me again.\"\n\n\"For one hour, then; for we march at mid-day. Tell Aylward, Alleyne, that he is to come with me to Montaubon, and to choose one archer for his comrade. The rest will to Dax when the prince starts, which will be before the feast of the Epiphany. Have Pommers ready at mid-day with my sycamore lance, and place my harness on the sumpter mule.\"\n\nWith these brief directions, the two old soldiers strode off together, while Alleyne hastened to get all in order for their journey." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE THREE COMRADES GAINED A MIGHTY TREASURE.", + "text": "It was a bright, crisp winter's day when the little party set off from Bordeaux on their journey to Montaubon, where the missing half of their Company had last been heard of. Sir Nigel and Ford had ridden on in advance, the knight upon his hackney, while his great warhorse trotted beside his squire. Two hours later Alleyne Edricson followed; for he had the tavern reckoning to settle, and many other duties which fell to him as squire of the body. With him came Aylward and Hordle John, armed as of old, but mounted for their journey upon a pair of clumsy Landes horses, heavy-headed and shambling, but of great endurance, and capable of jogging along all day, even when between the knees of the huge archer, who turned the scale at two hundred and seventy pounds. They took with them the sumpter mules, which carried in panniers the wardrobe and table furniture of Sir Nigel; for the knight, though neither fop nor epicure, was very dainty in small matters, and loved, however bare the board or hard the life, that his napery should still be white and his spoon of silver.\n\nThere had been frost during the night, and the white hard road rang loud under their horses' irons as they spurred through the east gate of the town, along the same broad highway which the unknown French champion had traversed on the day of the jousts. The three rode abreast, Alleyne Edricson with his eyes cast down and his mind distrait, for his thoughts were busy with the conversation which he had had with Sir Nigel in the morning. Had he done well to say so much, or had he not done better to have said more? What would the knight have said had he confessed to his love for the Lady Maude? Would he cast him off in disgrace, or might he chide him as having abused the shelter of his roof? It had been ready upon his tongue to tell him all when Sir Oliver had broken in upon them. Perchance Sir Nigel, with his love of all the dying usages of chivalry, might have contrived some strange ordeal or feat of arms by which his love should be put to the test. Alleyne smiled as he wondered what fantastic and wondrous deed would be exacted from him. Whatever it was, he was ready for it, whether it were to hold the lists in the court of the King of Tartary, to carry a cartel to the Sultan of Baghdad, or to serve a term against the wild heathen of Prussia. Sir Nigel had said that his birth was high enough for any lady, if his fortune could but be amended. Often had Alleyne curled his lip at the beggarly craving for land or for gold which blinded man to the higher and more lasting issues of life. Now it seemed as though it were only by this same land and gold that he might hope to reach his heart's desire. But then, again, the Socman of Minstead was no friend to the Constable of Twynham Castle. It might happen that, should he amass riches by some happy fortune of war, this feud might hold the two families aloof. Even if Maude loved him, he knew her too well to think that she would wed him without the blessing of her father. Dark and murky was it all, but hope mounts high in youth, and it ever fluttered over all the turmoil of his thoughts like a white plume amid the shock of horsemen.\n\nIf Alleyne Edricson had enough to ponder over as he rode through the bare plains of Guienne, his two companions were more busy with the present and less thoughtful of the future. Aylward rode for half a mile with his chin upon his shoulder, looking back at a white kerchief which fluttered out of the gable window of a high house which peeped over the corner of the battlements. When at last a dip of the road hid it from his view, he cocked his steel cap, shrugged his broad shoulders, and rode on with laughter in his eyes, and his weather-beaten face all ashine with pleasant memories. John also rode in silence, but his eyes wandered slowly from one side of the road to the other, and he stared and pondered and nodded his head like a traveller who makes his notes and saves them up for the re-telling.\n\n\"By the rood!\" he broke out suddenly, slapping his thigh with his great red hand, \"I knew that there was something amissing, but I could not bring to my mind what it was.\"\n\n\"What was it then?\" asked Alleyne, coming with a start out of his reverie.\n\n\"Why, it is the hedgerows,\" roared John, with a shout of laughter. \"The country is all scraped as clear as a friar's poll. But indeed I cannot think much of the folk in these parts. Why do they not get to work and dig up these long rows of black and crooked stumps which I see on every hand? A franklin of Hampshire would think shame to have such litter upon his soil.\"\n\n\"Thou foolish old John!\" quoth Aylward. \"You should know better, since I have heard that the monks of Beaulieu could squeeze a good cup of wine from their own grapes. Know then that if these rows were dug up the wealth of the country would be gone, and mayhap there would be dry throats and gaping mouths in England, for in three months' time these black roots will blossom and snoot and burgeon, and from them will come many a good shipload of Medoc and Gascony which will cross the narrow seas. But see the church in the hollow, and the folk who cluster in the churchyard! By my hilt! it is a burial, and there is a passing bell!\" He pulled off his steel cap as he spoke and crossed himself, with a muttered prayer for the repose of the dead.\n\n\"There too,\" remarked Alleyne, as they rode on again, \"that which seems to the eye to be dead is still full of the sap of life, even as the vines were. Thus God hath written Himself and His laws very broadly on all that is around us, if our poor dull eyes and duller souls could but read what He hath set before us.\"\n\n\"Ha! mon petit,\" cried the bowman, \"you take me back to the days when you were new fledged, as sweet a little chick as ever pecked his way out of a monkish egg. I had feared that in gaining our debonair young man-at-arms we had lost our soft-spoken clerk. In truth, I have noted much change in you since we came from Twynham Castle.\"\n\n\"Surely it would be strange else, seeing that I have lived in a world so new to me. Yet I trust that there are many things in which I have not changed. If I have turned to serve an earthly master, and to carry arms for an earthly king, it would be an ill thing if I were to lose all thought of the great high King and Master of all, whose humble and unworthy servant I was ere ever I left Beaulieu. You, John, are also from the cloisters, but I trow that you do not feel that you have deserted the old service in taking on the new.\"\n\n\"I am a slow-witted man,\" said John, \"and, in sooth, when I try to think about such matters it casts a gloom upon me. Yet I do not look upon myself as a worse man in an archer's jerkin than I was in a white cowl, if that be what you mean.\"\n\n\"You have but changed from one white company to the other,\" quoth Aylward. \"But, by these ten finger-bones! it is a passing strange thing to me to think that it was but in the last fall of the leaf that we walked from Lyndhurst together, he so gentle and maidenly, and you, John, like a great red-limbed overgrown moon-calf; and now here you are as sprack a squire and as lusty an archer as ever passed down the highway from Bordeaux, while I am still the same old Samkin Aylward, with never a change, save that I have a few more sins on my soul and a few less crowns in my pouch. But I have never yet heard, John, what the reason was why you should come out of Beaulieu.\"\n\n\"There were seven reasons,\" said John thoughtfully. \"The first of them was that they threw me out.\"\n\n\"Ma foi! camarade, to the devil with the other six! That is enough for me and for thee also. I can see that they are very wise and discreet folk at Beaulieu. Ah! mon ange, what have you in the pipkin?\"\n\n\"It is milk, worthy sir,\" answered the peasant-maid, who stood by the door of a cottage with a jug in her hand. \"Would it please you, gentles, that I should bring you out three horns of it?\"\n\n\"Nay, ma petite, but here is a twosous piece for thy kindly tongue and for the sight of thy pretty face. Ma foi! but she has a bonne mine. I have a mind to bide and speak with her.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, Aylward,\" cried Alleyne. \"Sir Nigel will await us, and he in haste.\"\n\n\"True, true, camarade! Adieu, ma cherie! mon coeur est toujours a toi. Her mother is a well-grown woman also. See where she digs by the wayside. Ma foi! the riper fruit is ever the sweeter. Bon jour, ma belle dame! God have you in his keeping! Said Sir Nigel where he would await us?\"\n\n\"At Marmande or Aiguillon. He said that we could not pass him, seeing that there is but the one road.\"\n\n\"Aye, and it is a road that I know as I know the Midhurst parish butts,\" quoth the bowman. \"Thirty times have I journeyed it, forward and backward, and, by the twang of string! I am wont to come back this way more laden than I went. I have carried all that I had into France in a wallet, and it hath taken four sumpter-mules to carry it back again. God's benison on the man who first turned his hand to the making of war! But there, down in the dingle, is the church of Cardillac, and you may see the inn where three poplars grow beyond the village. Let us on, for a stoup of wine would hearten us upon our way.\"\n\nThe highway had lain through the swelling vineyard country, which stretched away to the north and east in gentle curves, with many a peeping spire and feudal tower, and cluster of village houses, all clear cut and hard in the bright wintry air. To their right stretched the blue Garonne, running swiftly seawards, with boats and barges dotted over its broad bosom. On the other side lay a strip of vineyard, and beyond it the desolate and sandy region of the Landes, all tangled with faded gorse and heath and broom, stretching away in unbroken gloom to the blue hills which lay low upon the furthest skyline. Behind them might still be seen the broad estuary of the Gironde, with the high towers of Saint Andre and Saint Remi shooting up from the plain. In front, amid radiating lines of poplars, lay the riverside townlet of Cardillac\u2014gray walls, white houses, and a feather of blue smoke.\n\n\"This is the 'Mouton d'Or,'\" said Aylward, as they pulled up their horses at a whitewashed straggling hostel. \"What ho there!\" he continued, beating upon the door with the hilt of his sword. \"Tapster, ostler, varlet, hark hither, and a wannion on your lazy limbs! Ha! Michel, as red in the nose as ever! Three jacks of the wine of the country, Michel\u2014for the air bites shrewdly. I pray you, Alleyne, to take note of this door, for I have a tale concerning it.\"\n\n\"Tell me, friend,\" said Alleyne to the portly red-faced innkeeper, \"has a knight and a squire passed this way within the hour?\"\n\n\"Nay, sir, it would be two hours back. Was he a small man, weak in the eyes, with a want of hair, and speaks very quiet when he is most to be feared?\"\n\n\"The same,\" the squire answered. \"But I marvel how you should know how he speaks when he is in wrath, for he is very gentle-minded with those who are beneath him.\"\n\n\"Praise to the saints! it was not I who angered him,\" said the fat Michel.\n\n\"Who, then?\"\n\n\"It was young Sieur de Crespigny of Saintonge, who chanced to be here, and made game of the Englishman, seeing that he was but a small man and hath a face which is full of peace. But indeed this good knight was a very quiet and patient man, for he saw that the Sieur de Crespigny was still young and spoke from an empty head, so he sat his horse and quaffed his wine, even as you are doing now, all heedless of the clacking tongue.\"\n\n\"And what then, Michel?\"\n\n\"Well, messieurs, it chanced that the Sieur de Crespigny, having said this and that, for the laughter of the varlets, cried out at last about the glove that the knight wore in his coif, asking if it was the custom in England for a man to wear a great archer's glove in his cap. Pardieu! I have never seen a man get off his horse as quick as did that stranger Englishman. Ere the words were past the other's lips he was beside him, his face nigh touching, and his breath hot upon his cheeks. 'I think, young sir,' quoth he softly, looking into the other's eyes, 'that now that I am nearer you will very clearly see that the glove is not an archer's glove.' 'Perchance not,' said the Sieur de Crespigny with a twitching lip. 'Nor is it large, but very small,' quoth the Englishman. 'Less large than I had thought,' said the other, looking down, for the knight's gaze was heavy upon his eyelids. 'And in every way such a glove as might be worn by the fairest and sweetest lady in England,' quoth the Englishman. 'It may be so,' said the Sieur de Crespigny, turning his face from him. 'I am myself weak in the eyes, and have often taken one thing for another,' quoth the knight, as he sprang back into his saddle and rode off, leaving the Sieur de Crespigny biting his nails before the door. Ha! by the five wounds, many men of war have drunk my wine, but never one was more to my fancy than this little Englishman.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! he is our master, Michel,\" quoth Aylward, \"and such men as we do not serve under a laggart. But here are four deniers, Michel, and God be with you! En avant, camarades! for we have a long road before us.\"\n\nAt a brisk trot the three friends left Cardillac and its wine-house behind them, riding without a halt past St. Macaire, and on by ferry over the river Dorpt. At the further side the road winds through La Reolle, Bazaille, and Marmande, with the sunlit river still gleaming upon the right, and the bare poplars bristling up upon either side. John and Alleyne rode silent on either side, but every inn, farm-steading, or castle brought back to Aylward some remembrance of love, foray, or plunder, with which to beguile the way.\n\n\"There is the smoke from Bazas, on the further side of Garonne,\" quoth he. \"There were three sisters yonder, the daughters of a farrier, and, by these ten finger-bones! a man might ride for a long June day and never set eyes upon such maidens. There was Marie, tall and grave, and Blanche petite and gay, and the dark Agnes, with eyes that went through you like a waxed arrow. I lingered there as long as four days, and was betrothed to them all; for it seemed shame to set one above her sisters, and might make ill blood in the family. Yet, for all my care, things were not merry in the house, and I thought it well to come away. There, too, is the mill of Le Souris. Old Pierre Le Caron, who owned it, was a right good comrade, and had ever a seat and a crust for a weary archer. He was a man who wrought hard at all that he turned his hand to; but he heated himself in grinding bones to mix with his flour, and so through over-diligence he brought a fever upon himself and died.\"\n\n\"Tell me, Aylward,\" said Alleyne, \"what was amiss with the door of yonder inn that you should ask me to observe it.\"\n\n\"Pardieu! yes, I had well-nigh forgot. What saw you on yonder door?\"\n\n\"I saw a square hole, through which doubtless the host may peep when he is not too sure of those who knock.\"\n\n\"And saw you naught else?\"\n\n\"I marked that beneath this hole there was a deep cut in the door, as though a great nail had been driven in.\"\n\n\"And naught else?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Had you looked more closely you might have seen that there was a stain upon the wood. The first time that I ever heard my comrade Black Simon laugh was in front of that door. I heard him once again when he slew a French squire with his teeth, he being unarmed and the Frenchman having a dagger.\"\n\n\"And why did Simon laugh in front of the inn-door!\" asked John.\n\n\"Simon is a hard and perilous man when he hath the bitter drop in him; and, by my hilt! he was born for war, for there is little sweetness or rest in him. This inn, the 'Mouton d'Or,' was kept in the old days by one Francois Gourval, who had a hard fist and a harder heart. It was said that many and many an archer coming from the wars had been served with wine with simples in it, until he slept, and had then been stripped of all by this Gourval. Then on the morrow, if he made complaint, this wicked Gourval would throw him out upon the road or beat him, for he was a very lusty man, and had many stout varlets in his service. This chanced to come to Simon's ears when we were at Bordeaux together, and he would have it that we should ride to Cardillac with a good hempen cord, and give this Gourval such a scourging as he merited. Forth we rode then, but when we came to the Mouton d'Or,' Gourval had had word of our coming and its purpose, so that the door was barred, nor was there any way into the house. 'Let us in, good Master Gourval!' cried Simon, and 'Let us in, good Master Gourval!' cried I, but no word could we get through the hole in the door, save that he would draw an arrow upon us unless we went on our way. 'Well, Master Gourval,' quoth Simon at last, 'this is but a sorry welcome, seeing that we have ridden so far just to shake you by the hand.' 'Canst shake me by the hand without coming in,' said Gourval. 'And how that?' asked Simon. 'By passing in your hand through the hole,' said he. 'Nay, my hand is wounded,' quoth Simon, 'and of such a size that I cannot pass it in.' 'That need not hinder,' said Gourval, who was hot to be rid of us, 'pass in your left hand.' 'But I have something for thee, Gourval,' said Simon. 'What then?' he asked. 'There was an English archer who slept here last week of the name of Hugh of Nutbourne.' 'We have had many rogues here,' said Gourval. 'His conscience hath been heavy within him because he owes you a debt of fourteen deniers, having drunk wine for which he hath never paid. For the easing of his soul, he asked me to pay the money to you as I passed.' Now this Gourval was very greedy for money, so he thrust forth his hand for the fourteen deniers, but Simon had his dagger ready and he pinned his hand to the door. 'I have paid the Englishman's debt, Gourval!' quoth he, and so rode away, laughing so that he could scarce sit his horse, leaving mine host still nailed to his door. Such is the story of the hole which you have marked, and of the smudge upon the wood. I have heard that from that time English archers have been better treated in the auberge of Cardillac. But what have we here by the wayside?\"\n\n\"It appears to be a very holy man,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"And, by the rood! he hath some strange wares,\" cried John. \"What are these bits of stone, and of wood, and rusted nails, which are set out in front of him?\"\n\nThe man whom they had remarked sat with his back against a cherry-tree, and his legs shooting out in front of him, like one who is greatly at his ease. Across his thighs was a wooden board, and scattered over it all manner of slips of wood and knobs of brick and stone, each laid separate from the other, as a huckster places his wares. He was dressed in a long gray gown, and wore a broad hat of the same color, much weather-stained, with three scallop-shells dangling from the brim. As they approached, the travellers observed that he was advanced in years, and that his eyes were upturned and yellow.\n\n\"Dear knights and gentlemen,\" he cried in a high crackling voice, \"worthy Christian cavaliers, will ye ride past and leave an aged pilgrim to die of hunger? The sight hast been burned from mine eyes by the sands of the Holy Land, and I have had neither crust of bread nor cup of wine these two days past.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! father,\" said Aylward, looking keenly at him, \"it is a marvel to me that thy girdle should have so goodly a span and clip thee so closely, if you have in sooth had so little to place within it.\"\n\n\"Kind stranger,\" answered the pilgrim, \"you have unwittingly spoken words which are very grievous to me to listen to. Yet I should be loth to blame you, for I doubt not that what you said was not meant to sadden me, nor to bring my sore affliction back to my mind. It ill becomes me to prate too much of what I have endured for the faith, and yet, since you have observed it, I must tell you that this thickness and roundness of the waist is caused by a dropsy brought on by over-haste in journeying from the house of Pilate to the Mount of Olives.\"\n\n\"There, Aylward,\" said Alleyne, with a reddened cheek, \"let that curb your blunt tongue. How could you bring a fresh pang to this holy man, who hath endured so much and hath journeyed as far as Christ's own blessed tomb?\"\n\n\"May the foul fiend strike me dumb!\" cried the bowman in hot repentance; but both the palmer and Alleyne threw up their hands to stop him.\n\n\"I forgive thee from my heart, dear brother,\" piped the blind man. \"But, oh, these wild words of thine are worse to mine ears than aught which you could say of me.\"\n\n\"Not another word shall I speak,\" said Aylward; \"but here is a franc for thee and I crave thy blessing.\"\n\n\"And here is another,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"And another,\" cried Hordle John.\n\nBut the blind palmer would have none of their alms. \"Foolish, foolish pride!\" he cried, beating upon his chest with his large brown hand. \"Foolish, foolish pride! How long then will it be ere I can scourge it forth? Am I then never to conquer it? Oh, strong, strong are the ties of flesh, and hard it is to subdue the spirit! I come, friends, of a noble house, and I cannot bring myself to touch this money, even though it be to save me from the grave.\"\n\n\"Alas! father,\" said Alleyne, \"how then can we be of help to thee?\"\n\n\"I had sat down here to die,\" quoth the palmer; \"but for many years I have carried in my wallet these precious things which you see set forth now before me. It were sin, thought I, that my secret should perish with me. I shall therefore sell these things to the first worthy passers-by, and from them I shall have money enough to take me to the shrine of Our Lady at Rocamadour, where I hope to lay these old bones.\"\n\n\"What are these treasures, then, father?\" asked Hordle John. \"I can but see an old rusty nail, with bits of stone and slips of wood.\"\n\n\"My friend,\" answered the palmer, \"not all the money that is in this country could pay a just price for these wares of mine. This nail,\" he continued, pulling off his hat and turning up his sightless orbs, \"is one of those wherewith man's salvation was secured. I had it, together with this piece of the true rood, from the five-and-twentieth descendant of Joseph of Arimathea, who still lives in Jerusalem alive and well, though latterly much afflicted by boils. Aye, you may well cross yourselves, and I beg that you will not breathe upon it or touch it with your fingers.\"\n\n\"And the wood and stone, holy father?\" asked Alleyne, with bated breath, as he stared awe-struck at his precious relics.\n\n\"This cantle of wood is from the true cross, this other from Noah his ark, and the third is from the door-post of the temple of the wise King Solomon. This stone was thrown at the sainted Stephen, and the other two are from the Tower of Babel. Here, too, is part of Aaron's rod, and a lock of hair from Elisha the prophet.\"\n\n\"But, father,\" quoth Alleyne, \"the holy Elisha was bald, which brought down upon him the revilements of the wicked children.\"\n\n\"It is very true that he had not much hair,\" said the palmer quickly, \"and it is this which makes this relic so exceeding precious. Take now your choice of these, my worthy gentlemen, and pay such a price as your consciences will suffer you to offer; for I am not a chapman nor a huckster, and I would never part with them, did I not know that I am very near to my reward.\"\n\n\"Aylward,\" said Alleyne excitedly, \"This is such a chance as few folk have twice in one life. The nail I must have, and I will give it to the abbey of Beaulieu, so that all the folk in England may go thither to wonder and to pray.\"\n\n\"And I will have the stone from the temple,\" cried Hordle John. \"What would not my old mother give to have it hung over her bed?\"\n\n\"And I will have Aaron's rod,\" quoth Aylward. \"I have but five florins in the world, and here are four of them.\"\n\n\"Here are three more,\" said John.\n\n\"And here are five more,\" added Alleyne. \"Holy father, I hand you twelve florins, which is all that we can give, though we well know how poor a pay it is for the wondrous things which you sell us.\"\n\n\"Down, pride, down!\" cried the pilgrim, still beating upon his chest. \"Can I not bend myself then to take this sorry sum which is offered me for that which has cost me the labors of a life. Give me the dross! Here are the precious relics, and, oh, I pray you that you will handle them softly and with reverence, else had I rather left my unworthy bones here by the wayside.\"\n\nWith doffed caps and eager hands, the comrades took their new and precious possessions, and pressed onwards upon their journey, leaving the aged palmer still seated under the cherry-tree. They rode in silence, each with his treasure in his hand, glancing at it from time to time, and scarce able to believe that chance had made them sole owners of relics of such holiness and worth that every abbey and church in Christendom would have bid eagerly for their possession. So they journeyed, full of this good fortune, until opposite the town of Le Mas, where John's horse cast a shoe, and they were glad to find a wayside smith who might set the matter to rights. To him Aylward narrated the good hap which had befallen them; but the smith, when his eyes lit upon the relics, leaned up against his anvil and laughed, with his hand to his side, until the tears hopped down his sooty cheeks.\n\n\"Why, masters,\" quoth he, \"this man is a coquillart, or seller of false relics, and was here in the smithy not two hours ago. This nail that he hath sold you was taken from my nail-box, and as to the wood and the stones, you will see a heap of both outside from which he hath filled his scrip.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay,\" cried Alleyne, \"this was a holy man who had journeyed to Jerusalem, and acquired a dropsy by running from the house of Pilate to the Mount of Olives.\"\n\n\"I know not about that,\" said the smith; \"but I know that a man with a gray palmer's hat and gown was here no very long time ago, and that he sat on yonder stump and ate a cold pullet and drank a flask of wine. Then he begged from me one of my nails, and filling his scrip with stones, he went upon his way. Look at these nails, and see if they are not the same as that which he has sold you.\"\n\n\"Now may God save us!\" cried Alleyne, all aghast. \"Is there no end then to the wickedness of humankind? He so humble, so aged, so loth to take our money\u2014and yet a villain and a cheat. Whom can we trust or believe in?\"\n\n\"I will after him,\" said Aylward, flinging himself into the saddle. \"Come, Alleyne, we may catch him ere John's horse be shod.\"\n\nAway they galloped together, and ere long they saw the old gray palmer walking slowly along in front of them. He turned, however, at the sound of their hoofs, and it was clear that his blindness was a cheat like all the rest of him, for he ran swiftly through a field and so into a wood, where none could follow him. They hurled their relics after him, and so rode back to the blacksmith's the poorer both in pocket and in faith." + }, + { + "title": "HOW ROGER CLUB-FOOT WAS PASSED INTO PARADISE.", + "text": "It was evening before the three comrades came into Aiguillon, There they found Sir Nigel Loring and Ford safely lodged at the sign of the \"Baton Rouge,\" where they supped on good fare and slept between lavender-scented sheets. It chanced, however, that a knight of Poitou, Sir Gaston d'Estelle, was staying there on his way back from Lithuania, where he had served a term with the Teutonic knights under the land-master of the presbytery of Marienberg. He and Sir Nigel sat late in high converse as to bushments, outfalls, and the intaking of cities, with many tales of warlike men and valiant deeds. Then their talk turned to minstrelsy, and the stranger knight drew forth a cittern, upon which he played the minne-lieder of the north, singing the while in a high cracked voice of Hildebrand and Brunhild and Siegfried, and all the strength and beauty of the land of Almain. To this Sir Nigel answered with the romances of Sir Eglamour, and of Sir Isumbras, and so through the long winter night they sat by the crackling wood-fire answering each other's songs until the crowing cocks joined in their concert. Yet, with scarce an hour of rest, Sir Nigel was as blithe and bright as ever as they set forth after breakfast upon their way.\n\n\"This Sir Gaston is a very worthy man,\" said he to his squires as they rode from the \"Baton Rouge.\" \"He hath a very strong desire to advance himself, and would have entered upon some small knightly debate with me, had he not chanced to have his arm-bone broken by the kick of a horse. I have conceived a great love for him, and I have promised him that when his bone is mended I will exchange thrusts with him. But we must keep to this road upon the left.\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord,\" quoth Aylward. \"The road to Montaubon is over the river, and so through Quercy and the Agenois.\"\n\n\"True, my good Aylward; but I have learned from this worthy knight, who hath come over the French marches, that there is a company of Englishmen who are burning and plundering in the country round Villefranche. I have little doubt, from what he says, that they are those whom we seek.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! it is like enough,\" said Aylward. \"By all accounts they had been so long at Montaubon, that there would be little there worth the taking. Then as they have already been in the south, they would come north to the country of the Aveyron.\"\n\n\"We shall follow the Lot until we come to Cahors, and then cross the marches into Villefranche,\" said Sir Nigel. \"By St. Paul! as we are but a small band, it is very likely that we may have some very honorable and pleasing adventure, for I hear that there is little peace upon the French border.\"\n\nAll morning they rode down a broad and winding road, barred with the shadows of poplars. Sir Nigel rode in front with his squires, while the two archers followed behind with the sumpter mule between them. They had left Aiguillon and the Garonne far to the south, and rode now by the tranquil Lot, which curves blue and placid through a gently rolling country. Alleyne could not but mark that, whereas in Guienne there had been many townlets and few castles, there were now many castles and few houses. On either hand gray walls and square grim keeps peeped out at every few miles from amid the forests while the few villages which they passed were all ringed round with rude walls, which spoke of the constant fear and sudden foray of a wild frontier land. Twice during the morning there came bands of horsemen swooping down upon them from the black gateways of wayside strongholds, with short, stern questions as to whence they came and what their errand. Bands of armed men clanked along the highway, and the few lines of laden mules which carried the merchandise of the trader were guarded by armed varlets, or by archers hired for the service.\n\n\"The peace of Bretigny hath not made much change in these parts,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"for the country is overrun with free companions and masterless men. Yonder towers, between the wood and the hill, mark the town of Cahors, and beyond it is the land of France. But here is a man by the wayside, and as he hath two horses and a squire I make little doubt that he is a knight. I pray you, Alleyne, to give him greeting from me, and to ask him for his titles and coat-armor. It may be that I can relieve him of some vow, or perchance he hath a lady whom he would wish to advance.\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord,\" said Alleyne, \"these are not horses and a squire, but mules and a varlet. The man is a mercer, for he hath a great bundle beside him.\"\n\n\"Now, God's blessing on your honest English voice!\" cried the stranger, pricking up his ears at the sound of Alleyne's words. \"Never have I heard music that was so sweet to mine ear. Come, Watkin lad, throw the bales over Laura's back! My heart was nigh broke, for it seemed that I had left all that was English behind me, and that I would never set eyes upon Norwich market square again.\" He was a tall, lusty, middle-aged man with a ruddy face, a brown forked beard shot with gray, and a broad Flanders hat set at the back of his head. His servant, as tall as himself, but gaunt and raw-boned, had swung the bales on the back of one mule, while the merchant mounted upon the other and rode to join the party. It was easy to see, as he approached, from the quality of his dress and the richness of his trappings, that he was a man of some wealth and position.\n\n\"Sir knight,\" said he, \"my name is David Micheldene, and I am a burgher and alderman of the good town of Norwich, where I live five doors from the church of Our Lady, as all men know on the banks of Yare. I have here my bales of cloth which I carry to Cahors\u2014woe worth the day that ever I started on such an errand! I crave your gracious protection upon the way for me, my servant, and my mercery; for I have already had many perilous passages, and have now learned that Roger Clubfoot, the robber-knight of Quercy, is out upon the road in front of me. I hereby agree to give you one rose-noble if you bring me safe to the inn of the 'Angel' in Cahors, the same to be repaid to me or my heirs if any harm come to me or my goods.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" answered Sir Nigel, \"I should be a sorry knight if I ask pay for standing by a countryman in a strange land. You may ride with me and welcome, Master Micheldene, and your varlet may follow with my archers.\"\n\n\"God's benison upon thy bounty!\" cried the stranger. \"Should you come to Norwich you may have cause to remember that you have been of service to Alderman Micheldene. It is not very far to Cahors, for surely I see the cathedral towers against the skyline; but I have heard much of this Roger Clubfoot, and the more I hear the less do I wish to look upon his face. Oh, but I am sick and weary of it all, and I would give half that I am worth to see my good dame sitting in peace beside me, and to hear the bells of Norwich town.\"\n\n\"Your words are strange to me,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"for you have the appearance of a stout man, and I see that you wear a sword by your side.\"\n\n\"Yet it is not my trade,\" answered the merchant. \"I doubt not that if I set you down in my shop at Norwich you might scarce tell fustian from falding, and know little difference between the velvet of Genoa and the three-piled cloth of Bruges. There you might well turn to me for help. But here on a lone roadside, with thick woods and robber-knights, I turn to you, for it is the business to which you have been reared.\"\n\n\"There is sooth in what you say, Master Micheldene,\" said Sir Nigel, \"and I trust that we may come upon this Roger Clubfoot, for I have heard that he is a very stout and skilful soldier, and a man from whom much honor is to be gained.\"\n\n\"He is a bloody robber,\" said the trader, curtly, \"and I wish I saw him kicking at the end of a halter.\"\n\n\"It is such men as he,\" Sir Nigel remarked, \"who give the true knight honorable deeds to do, whereby he may advance himself.\"\n\n\"It is such men as he,\" retorted Micheldene, \"who are like rats in a wheat-rick or moths in a woolfels, a harm and a hindrance to all peaceful and honest men.\"\n\n\"Yet, if the dangers of the road weigh so heavily upon you, master alderman, it is a great marvel to me that you should venture so far from home.\"\n\n\"And sometimes, sir knight, it is a marvel to myself. But I am a man who may grutch and grumble, but when I have set my face to do a thing I will not turn my back upon it until it be done. There is one, Francois Villet, at Cahors, who will send me wine-casks for my cloth-bales, so to Cahors I will go, though all the robber-knights of Christendom were to line the roads like yonder poplars.\"\n\n\"Stoutly spoken, master alderman! But how have you fared hitherto?\"\n\n\"As a lamb fares in a land of wolves. Five times we have had to beg and pray ere we could pass. Twice I have paid toll to the wardens of the road. Three times we have had to draw, and once at La Reolle we stood seer our wool-bales, Watkin and I, and we laid about us for as long as a man might chant a litany, slaying one rogue and wounding two others. By God's coif! we are men of peace, but we are free English burghers, not to be mishandled either in our country or abroad. Neither lord, baron, knight, or commoner shall have as much as a strike of flax of mine whilst I have strength to wag this sword.\"\n\n\"And a passing strange sword it is,\" quoth Sir Nigel. \"What make you, Alleyne, of these black lines which are drawn across the sheath?\"\n\n\"I cannot tell what they are, my fair lord.\"\n\n\"Nor can I,\" said Ford.\n\nThe merchant chuckled to himself. \"It was a thought of mine own,\" said he; \"for the sword was made by Thomas Wilson, the armorer, who is betrothed to my second daughter Margery. Know then that the sheath is one cloth-yard, in length, marked off according to feet and inches to serve me as a measuring wand. It is also of the exact weight of two pounds, so that I may use it in the balance.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"it is very clear to me that the sword is like thyself, good alderman, apt either for war or for peace. But I doubt not that even in England you have had much to suffer from the hands of robbers and outlaws.\"\n\n\"It was only last Lammastide, sir knight, that I was left for dead near Reading as I journeyed to Winchester fair. Yet I had the rogues up at the court of pie-powder, and they will harm no more peaceful traders.\"\n\n\"You travel much then!\"\n\n\"To Winchester, Linn mart, Bristol fair, Stourbridge, and Bartholomew's in London Town. The rest of the year you may ever find me five doors from the church of Our Lady, where I would from my heart that I was at this moment, for there is no air like Norwich air, and no water like the Yare, nor can all the wines of France compare with the beer of old Sam Yelverton who keeps the 'Dun Cow.' But, out and alack, here is an evil fruit which hangs upon this chestnut-tree!\"\n\nAs he spoke they had ridden round a curve of the road and come upon a great tree which shot one strong brown branch across their path. From the centre of this branch there hung a man, with his head at a horrid slant to his body and his toes just touching the ground. He was naked save for a linen under shirt and pair of woollen drawers. Beside him on a green bank there sat a small man with a solemn face, and a great bundle of papers of all colors thrusting forth from the scrip which lay beside him. He was very richly dressed, with furred robes, a scarlet hood, and wide hanging sleeves lined with flame-colored silk. A great gold chain hung round his neck, and rings glittered from every finger of his hands. On his lap he had a little pile of gold and of silver, which he was dropping, coin by coin, into a plump pouch which hung from his girdle.\n\n\"May the saints be with you, good travellers!\" he shouted, as the party rode up. \"May the four Evangelists watch over you! May the twelve Apostles bear you up! May the blessed army of martyrs direct your feet and lead you to eternal bliss!\"\n\n\"Gramercy for these good wishes!\" said Sir Nigel. \"But I perceive, master alderman, that this man who hangs here is, by mark of foot, the very robber-knight of whom we have spoken. But there is a cartel pinned upon his breast, and I pray you, Alleyne, to read it to me.\"\n\nThe dead robber swung slowly to and fro in the wintry wind, a fixed smile upon his swarthy face, and his bulging eyes still glaring down the highway of which he had so long been the terror; on a sheet of parchment upon his breast was printed in rude characters;" + }, + { + "title": "ROGER PIED-BOT.", + "text": "\u2003Par l'ordre du Senechal de\n\n\u2003Castelnau, et de l'Echevin de\n\n\u2003Cahors, servantes fideles du\n\n\u2003tres vaillant et tres puissant\n\n\u2003Edouard, Prince de Galles et d'Aquitaine.\n\n\u2003Ne touchez pas,\n\n\u2003Ne coutez pas,\n\n\u2003Ne depechez pas\n\n\"He took a sorry time in dying,\" said the man who sat beside him. \"He could stretch one toe to the ground and bear him self up, so that I thought he would never have done. Now at last, however, he is safely in paradise, and so I may jog on upon my earthly way.\" He mounted, as he spoke, a white mule which had been grazing by the wayside, all gay with fustian of gold and silver bells, and rode onward with Sir Nigel's party.\n\n\"How know you then that he is in paradise?\" asked Sir Nigel. \"All things are possible to God, but, certes, without a miracle, I should scarce expect to find the soul of Roger Clubfoot amongst the just.\"\n\n\"I know that he is there because I have just passed him in there,\" answered the stranger, rubbing his bejewelled hands together in placid satisfaction. \"It is my holy mission to be a sompnour or pardoner. I am the unworthy servant and delegate of him who holds the keys. A contrite heart and ten nobles to holy mother Church may stave off perdition; but he hath a pardon of the first degree, with a twenty-five livre benison, so that I doubt if he will so much as feel a twinge of purgatory. I came up even as the seneschal's archers were tying him up, and I gave him my foreword that I would bide with him until he had passed. There were two leaden crowns among the silver, but I would not for that stand in the way of his salvation.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said Sir Nigel, \"if you have indeed this power to open and to shut the gates of hope, then indeed you stand high above mankind. But if you do but claim to have it, and yet have it not, then it seems to me, master clerk, that you may yourself find the gate barred when you shall ask admittance.\"\n\n\"Small of faith! Small of faith!\" cried the sompnour. \"Ah, Sir Didymus yet walks upon earth! And yet no words of doubt can bring anger to mine heart, or a bitter word to my lip, for am I not a poor unworthy worker in the cause of gentleness and peace? Of all these pardons which I bear every one is stamped and signed by our holy father, the prop and centre of Christendom.\"\n\n\"Which of them?\" asked Sir Nigel.\n\n\"Ha, ha!\" cried the pardoner, shaking a jewelled forefinger. \"Thou wouldst be deep in the secrets of mother Church? Know then that I have both in my scrip. Those who hold with Urban shall have Urban's pardon, while I have Clement's for the Clementist\u2014or he who is in doubt may have both, so that come what may he shall be secure. I pray you that you will buy one, for war is bloody work, and the end is sudden with little time for thought or shrift. Or you, sir, for you seem to me to be a man who would do ill to trust to your own merits.\" This to the alderman of Norwich, who had listened to him with a frowning brow and a sneering lip.\n\n\"When I sell my cloth,\" quoth he, \"he who buys may weigh and feel and handle. These goods which you sell are not to be seen, nor is there any proof that you hold them. Certes, if mortal man might control God's mercy, it would be one of a lofty and God-like life, and not one who is decked out with rings and chains and silks, like a pleasure-wench at a kermesse.\n\n\"Thou wicked and shameless man!\" cried the clerk. \"Dost thou dare to raise thy voice against the unworthy servant of mother Church?\"\n\n\"Unworthy enough!\" quoth David Micheldene. \"I would have you to know, clerk, that I am a free English burgher, and that I dare say my mind to our father the Pope himself, let alone such a lacquey's lacquey as you!\"\n\n\"Base-born and foul-mouthed knave!\" cried the sompnour. \"You prate of holy things, to which your hog's mind can never rise. Keep silence, lest I call a curse upon you!\"\n\n\"Silence yourself!\" roared the other. \"Foul bird! we found thee by the gallows like a carrion-crow. A fine life thou hast of it with thy silks and thy baubles, cozening the last few shillings from the pouches of dying men. A fig for thy curse! Bide here, if you will take my rede, for we will make England too hot for such as you, when Master Wicliff has the ordering of it. Thou vile thief! it is you, and such as you, who bring an evil name upon the many churchmen who lead a pure and a holy life. Thou outside the door of heaven! Art more like to be inside the door of hell.\"\n\nAt this crowning insult the sompnour, with a face ashen with rage, raised up a quivering hand and began pouring Latin imprecations upon the angry alderman. The latter, however, was not a man to be quelled by words, for he caught up his ell-measure sword-sheath and belabored the cursing clerk with it. The latter, unable to escape from the shower of blows, set spurs to his mule and rode for his life, with his enemy thundering behind him. At sight of his master's sudden departure, the varlet Watkin set off after him, with the pack-mule beside him, so that the four clattered away down the road together, until they swept round a curve and their babble was but a drone in the distance. Sir Nigel and Alleyne gazed in astonishment at one another, while Ford burst out a-laughing.\n\n\"Pardieu!\" said the knight, \"this David Micheldene must be one of those Lollards about whom Father Christopher of the priory had so much to say. Yet he seemed to be no bad man from what I have seen of him.\"\n\n\"I have heard that Wicliff hath many followers in Norwich,\" answered Alleyne.\n\n\"By St. Paul! I have no great love for them,\" quoth Sir Nigel. \"I am a man who am slow to change; and, if you take away from me the faith that I have been taught, it would be long ere I could learn one to set in its place. It is but a chip here and a chip there, yet it may bring the tree down in time. Yet, on the other hand, I cannot but think it shame that a man should turn God's mercy on and off, as a cellarman doth wine with a spigot.\"\n\n\"Nor is it,\" said Alleyne, \"part of the teachings of that mother Church of which he had so much to say. There was sooth in what the alderman said of it.\"\n\n\"Then, by St. Paul! they may settle it betwixt them,\" quoth Sir Nigel. \"For me, I serve God, the king and my lady; and so long as I can keep the path of honor I am well content. My creed shall ever be that of Chandos:\n\n\"Fais ce que dois\u2014adviegne que peut,\n\nC'est commande au chevalier.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE COMRADES CAME OVER THE MARCHES OF FRANCE.", + "text": "After passing Cahors, the party branched away from the main road, and leaving the river to the north of them, followed a smaller track which wound over a vast and desolate plain. This path led them amid marshes and woods, until it brought them out into a glade with a broad stream swirling swiftly down the centre of it. Through this the horses splashed their way, and on the farther shore Sir Nigel announced to them that they were now within the borders of the land of France. For some miles they still followed the same lonely track, which led them through a dense wood, and then widening out, curved down to an open rolling country, such as they had traversed between Aiguillon and Cahors.\n\nIf it were grim and desolate upon the English border, however, what can describe the hideous barrenness of this ten times harried tract of France? The whole face of the country was scarred and disfigured, mottled over with the black blotches of burned farm-steadings, and the gray, gaunt gable-ends of what had been chateaux. Broken fences, crumbling walls, vineyards littered with stones, the shattered arches of bridges\u2014look where you might, the signs of ruin and rapine met the eye. Here and there only, on the farthest skyline, the gnarled turrets of a castle, or the graceful pinnacles of church or of monastery showed where the forces of the sword or of the spirit had preserved some small islet of security in this universal flood of misery. Moodily and in silence the little party rode along the narrow and irregular track, their hearts weighed down by this far-stretching land of despair. It was indeed a stricken and a blighted country, and a man might have ridden from Auvergne in the north to the marches of Foix, nor ever seen a smiling village or a thriving homestead.\n\nFrom time to time as they advanced they saw strange lean figures scraping and scratching amid the weeds and thistles, who, on sight of the band of horsemen, threw up their arms and dived in among the brushwood, as shy and as swift as wild animals. More than once, however, they came on families by the wayside, who were too weak from hunger and disease to fly, so that they could but sit like hares on a tussock, with panting chests and terror in their eyes. So gaunt were these poor folk, so worn and spent\u2014with bent and knotted frames, and sullen, hopeless, mutinous faces\u2014that it made the young Englishman heart-sick to look upon them. Indeed, it seemed as though all hope and light had gone so far from them that it was not to be brought back; for when Sir Nigel threw down a handful of silver among them there came no softening of their lined faces, but they clutched greedily at the coins, peering questioningly at him, and champing with their animal jaws. Here and there amid the brushwood the travellers saw the rude bundle of sticks which served them as a home\u2014more like a fowl's nest than the dwelling-place of man. Yet why should they build and strive, when the first adventurer who passed would set torch to their thatch, and when their own feudal lord would wring from them with blows and curses the last fruits of their toil? They sat at the lowest depth of human misery, and hugged a bitter comfort to their souls as they realized that they could go no lower. Yet they had still the human gift of speech, and would take council among themselves in their brushwood hovels, glaring with bleared eyes and pointing with thin fingers at the great widespread chateaux which ate like a cancer into the life of the country-side. When such men, who are beyond hope and fear, begin in their dim minds to see the source their woes, it may be an evil time for those who have wronged them. The weak man becomes strong when he has nothing, for then only can he feel the wild, mad thrill of despair. High and strong the chateaux, lowly and weak the brushwood hut; but God help the seigneur and his lady when the men of the brushwood set their hands to the work of revenge!\n\nThrough such country did the party ride for eight or it might be nine miles, until the sun began to slope down in the west and their shadows to stream down the road in front of them. Wary and careful they must be, with watchful eyes to the right and the left, for this was no man's land, and their only passports were those which hung from their belts. Frenchmen and Englishmen, Gascon and Provencal, Brabanter, Tardvenu, Scorcher, Flayer, and Free Companion, wandered and struggled over the whole of this accursed district. So bare and cheerless was the outlook, and so few and poor the dwellings, that Sir Nigel began to have fears as to whether he might find food and quarters for his little troop. It was a relief to him, therefore, when their narrow track opened out upon a larger road, and they saw some little way down it a square white house with a great bunch of holly hung out at the end of a stick from one of the upper windows.\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" said he, \"I am right glad; for I had feared that we might have neither provant nor herbergage. Ride on, Alleyne, and tell this innkeeper that an English knight with his party will lodge with him this night.\"\n\nAlleyne set spurs to his horse and reached the inn door a long bow-shot before his companions. Neither varlet nor ostler could be seen, so he pushed open the door and called loudly for the landlord. Three times he shouted, but, receiving no reply, he opened an inner door and advanced into the chief guest-room of the hostel.\n\nA very cheerful wood-fire was sputtering and cracking in an open grate at the further end of the apartment. At one side of this fire, in a high-backed oak chair, sat a lady, her face turned towards the door. The firelight played over her features, and Alleyne thought that he had never seen such queenly power, such dignity and strength, upon a woman's face. She might have been five-and-thirty years of age, with aquiline nose, firm yet sensitive mouth, dark curving brows, and deep-set eyes which shone and sparkled with a shifting brilliancy. Beautiful as she was, it was not her beauty which impressed itself upon the beholder; it was her strength, her power, the sense of wisdom which hung over the broad white brow, the decision which lay in the square jaw and delicately moulded chin. A chaplet of pearls sparkled amid her black hair, with a gauze of silver network flowing back from it over her shoulders; a black mantle was swathed round her, and she leaned back in her chair as one who is fresh from a journey.\n\nIn the opposite corner there sat a very burly and broad-shouldered man, clad in a black jerkin trimmed with sable, with a black velvet cap with curling white feather cocked upon the side of his head. A flask of red wine stood at his elbow, and he seemed to be very much at his ease, for his feet were stuck up on a stool, and between his thighs he held a dish full of nuts. These he cracked between his strong white teeth and chewed in a leisurely way, casting the shells into the blaze. As Alleyne gazed in at him he turned his face half round and cocked an eye at him over his shoulder. It seemed to the young Englishman that he had never seen so hideous a face, for the eyes were of the lightest green, the nose was broken and driven inwards, while the whole countenance was seared and puckered with wounds. The voice, too, when he spoke, was as deep and as fierce as the growl of a beast of prey.\n\n\"Young man,\" said he, \"I know not who you may be, and I am not much inclined to bestir myself, but if it were not that I am bent upon taking my ease, I swear, by the sword of Joshua! that I would lay my dog-whip across your shoulders for daring to fill the air with these discordant bellowings.\"\n\nTaken aback at this ungentle speech, and scarce knowing how to answer it fitly in the presence of the lady, Alleyne stood with his hand upon the handle of the door, while Sir Nigel and his companions dismounted. At the sound of these fresh voices, and of the tongue in which they spoke, the stranger crashed his dish of nuts down upon the floor, and began himself to call for the landlord until the whole house re-echoed with his roarings. With an ashen face the white-aproned host came running at his call, his hands shaking and his very hair bristling with apprehension. \"For the sake of God, sirs,\" he whispered as he passed, \"speak him fair and do not rouse him! For the love of the Virgin, be mild with him!\"\n\n\"Who is this, then?\" asked Sir Nigel.\n\nAlleyne was about to explain, when a fresh roar from the stranger interrupted him.\n\n\"Thou villain innkeeper,\" he shouted, \"did I not ask you when I brought my lady here whether your inn was clean?\"\n\n\"You did, sire.\"\n\n\"Did I not very particularly ask you whether there were any vermin in it?\"\n\n\"You did, sire.\"\n\n\"And you answered me?\"\n\n\"That there were not, sire.\"\n\n\"And yet ere I have been here an hour I find Englishmen crawling about within it. Where are we to be free from this pestilent race? Can a Frenchman upon French land not sit down in a French auberge without having his ears pained by the clack of their hideous talk? Send them packing, innkeeper, or it may be the worse for them and for you.\"\n\n\"I will, sire, I will!\" cried the frightened host, and bustled from the room, while the soft, soothing voice of the woman was heard remonstrating with her furious companion.\n\n\"Indeed, gentlemen, you had best go,\" said mine host. \"It is but six miles to Villefranche, where there are very good quarters at the sign of the 'Lion Rouge.'\"\n\n\"Nay,\" answered Sir Nigel, \"I cannot go until I have seen more of this person, for he appears to be a man from whom much is to be hoped. What is his name and title?\"\n\n\"It is not for my lips to name it unless by his desire. But I beg and pray you, gentlemen, that you will go from my house, for I know not what may come of it if his rage should gain the mastery of him.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" lisped Sir Nigel, \"this is certainly a man whom it is worth journeying far to know. Go tell him that a humble knight of England would make his further honorable acquaintance, not from any presumption, pride, or ill-will, but for the advancement of chivalry and the glory of our ladies. Give him greeting from Sir Nigel Loring, and say that the glove which I bear in my cap belongs to the most peerless and lovely of her sex, whom I am now ready to uphold against any lady whose claim he might be desirous of advancing.\"\n\nThe landlord was hesitating whether to carry this message or no, when the door of the inner room was flung open, and the stranger bounded out like a panther from its den, his hair bristling and his deformed face convulsed with anger.\n\n\"Still here!\" he snarled. \"Dogs of England, must ye be lashed hence? Tiphaine, my sword!\" He turned to seize his weapon, but as he did so his gaze fell upon the blazonry of sir Nigel's shield, and he stood staring, while the fire in his strange green eyes softened into a sly and humorous twinkle.\n\n\"Mort Dieu!\" cried he, \"it is my little swordsman of Bordeaux. I should remember that coat-armor, seeing that it is but three days since I looked upon it in the lists by Garonne. Ah! Sir Nigel, Sir Nigel! you owe me a return for this,\" and he touched his right arm, which was girt round just under the shoulder with a silken kerchief.\n\nBut the surprise of the stranger at the sight of Sir Nigel was as nothing compared with the astonishment and the delight which shone upon the face of the knight of Hampshire as he looked upon the strange face of the Frenchman. Twice he opened his mouth and twice he peered again, as though to assure himself that his eyes had not played him a trick.\n\n\"Bertrand!\" he gasped at last. \"Bertrand du Guesclin!\"\n\n\"By Saint Ives!\" shouted the French soldier, with a hoarse roar of laughter, \"it is well that I should ride with my vizor down, for he that has once seen my face does not need to be told my name. It is indeed I, Sir Nigel, and here is my hand! I give you my word that there are but three Englishmen in this world whom I would touch save with the sharp edge of the sword: the prince is one, Chandos the second, and you the third; for I have heard much that is good of you.\"\n\n\"I am growing aged, and am somewhat spent in the wars,\" quoth Sir Nigel; \"but I can lay by my sword now with an easy mind, for I can say that I have crossed swords with him who hath the bravest heart and the strongest arm of all this great kingdom of France. I have longed for it, I have dreamed of it, and now I can scarce bring my mind to understand that this great honor hath indeed been mine.\"\n\n\"By the Virgin of Rennes! you have given me cause to be very certain of it,\" said Du Guesclin, with a gleam of his broad white teeth.\n\n\"And perhaps, most honored sir, it would please you to continue the debate. Perhaps you would condescend to go farther into the matter. God He knows that I am unworthy of such honor, yet I can show my four-and-sixty quarterings, and I have been present at some bickerings and scufflings during these twenty years.\"\n\n\"Your fame is very well known to me, and I shall ask my lady to enter your name upon my tablets,\" said Sir Bertrand. \"There are many who wish to advance themselves, and who bide their turn, for I refuse no man who comes on such an errand. At present it may not be, for mine arm is stiff from this small touch, and I would fain do you full honor when we cross swords again. Come in with me, and let your squires come also, that my sweet spouse, the Lady Tiphaine, may say that she hath seen so famed and gentle a knight.\"\n\nInto the chamber they went in all peace and concord, where the Lady Tiphaine sat like queen on throne for each in turn to be presented to her. Sooth to say, the stout heart of Sir Nigel, which cared little for the wrath of her lion-like spouse, was somewhat shaken by the calm, cold face of this stately dame, for twenty years of camp-life had left him more at ease in the lists than in a lady's boudoir. He bethought him, too, as he looked at her set lips and deep-set questioning eyes, that he had heard strange tales of this same Lady Tiphaine du Guesclin. Was it not she who was said to lay hands upon the sick and raise them from their couches when the leeches had spent their last nostrums? Had she not forecast the future, and were there not times when in the loneliness of her chamber she was heard to hold converse with some being upon whom mortal eye never rested\u2014some dark familiar who passed where doors were barred and windows high? Sir Nigel sunk his eye and marked a cross on the side of his leg as he greeted this dangerous dame, and yet ere five minutes had passed he was hers, and not he only but his two young squires as well. The mind had gone out of them, and they could but look at this woman and listen to the words which fell from her lips\u2014words which thrilled through their nerves and stirred their souls like the battle-call of a bugle.\n\nOften in peaceful after-days was Alleyne to think of that scene of the wayside inn of Auvergne. The shadows of evening had fallen, and the corners of the long, low, wood-panelled room were draped in darkness. The sputtering wood fire threw out a circle of red flickering light which played over the little group of wayfarers, and showed up every line and shadow upon their faces. Sir Nigel sat with elbows upon knees, and chin upon hands, his patch still covering one eye, but his other shining like a star, while the ruddy light gleamed upon his smooth white head. Ford was seated at his left, his lips parted, his eyes staring, and a fleck of deep color on either cheek, his limbs all rigid as one who fears to move. On the other side the famous French captain leaned back in his chair, a litter of nut-shells upon his lap, his huge head half buried in a cushion, while his eyes wandered with an amused gleam from his dame to the staring, enraptured Englishmen. Then, last of all, that pale clear-cut face, that sweet clear voice, with its high thrilling talk of the deathlessness of glory, of the worthlessness of life, of the pain of ignoble joys, and of the joy which lies in all pains which lead to a noble end. Still, as the shadows deepened, she spoke of valor and virtue, of loyalty, honor, and fame, and still they sat drinking in her words while the fire burned down and the red ash turned to gray.\n\n\"By the sainted Ives!\" cried Du Guesclin at last, \"it is time that we spoke of what we are to do this night, for I cannot think that in this wayside auberge there are fit quarters for an honorable company.\"\n\nSir Nigel gave a long sigh as he came back from the dreams of chivalry and hardihood into which this strange woman's words had wafted him. \"I care not where I sleep,\" said he; \"but these are indeed somewhat rude lodgings for this fair lady.\"\n\n\"What contents my lord contents me,\" quoth she. \"I perceive, Sir Nigel, that you are under vow,\" she added, glancing at his covered eye.\n\n\"It is my purpose to attempt some small deed,\" he answered.\n\n\"And the glove\u2014is it your lady's?\"\n\n\"It is indeed my sweet wife's.\"\n\n\"Who is doubtless proud of you.\"\n\n\"Say rather I of her,\" quoth he quickly. \"God He knows that I am not worthy to be her humble servant. It is easy, lady, for a man to ride forth in the light of day, and do his devoir when all men have eyes for him. But in a woman's heart there is a strength and truth which asks no praise, and can but be known to him whose treasure it is.\"\n\nThe Lady Tiphaine smiled across at her husband. \"You have often told me, Bertrand, that there were very gentle knights amongst the English,\" quoth she.\n\n\"Aye, aye,\" said he moodily. \"But to horse, Sir Nigel, you and yours and we shall seek the chateau of Sir Tristram de Rochefort, which is two miles on this side of Villefranche. He is Seneschal of Auvergne, and mine old war companion.\"\n\n\"Certes, he would have a welcome for you,\" quoth Sir Nigel; \"but indeed he might look askance at one who comes without permit over the marches.\"\n\n\"By the Virgin! when he learns that you have come to draw away these rascals he will be very blithe to look upon your face. Innkeeper, here are ten gold pieces. What is over and above your reckoning you may take off from your charges to the next needy knight who comes this way. Come then, for it grows late and the horses are stamping in the roadway.\"\n\nThe Lady Tiphaine and her spouse sprang upon their steeds without setting feet to stirrup, and away they jingled down the white moonlit highway, with Sir Nigel at the lady's bridle-arm, and Ford a spear's length behind them. Alleyne had lingered for an instant in the passage, and as he did so there came a wild outcry from a chamber upon the left, and out there ran Aylward and John, laughing together like two schoolboys who are bent upon a prank. At sight of Alleyne they slunk past him with somewhat of a shame-faced air, and springing upon their horses galloped after their party. The hubbub within the chamber did not cease, however, but rather increased, with yells of: \"A moi, mes amis! A moi, camarades! A moi, l'honorable champion de l'Eveque de Montaubon! A la recousse de l'eglise sainte!\" So shrill was the outcry that both the innkeeper and Alleyne, with every varlet within hearing, rushed wildly to the scene of the uproar.\n\nIt was indeed a singular scene which met their eyes. The room was a long and lofty one, stone floored and bare, with a fire at the further end upon which a great pot was boiling. A deal table ran down the centre, with a wooden wine-pitcher upon it and two horn cups. Some way from it was a smaller table with a single beaker and a broken wine-bottle. From the heavy wooden rafters which formed the roof there hung rows of hooks which held up sides of bacon, joints of smoked beef, and strings of onions for winter use. In the very centre of all these, upon the largest hook of all, there hung a fat little red-faced man with enormous whiskers, kicking madly in the air and clawing at rafters, hams, and all else that was within hand-grasp. The huge steel hook had been passed through the collar of his leather jerkin, and there he hung like a fish on a line, writhing, twisting, and screaming, but utterly unable to free himself from his extraordinary position. It was not until Alleyne and the landlord had mounted on the table that they were able to lift him down, when he sank gasping with rage into a seat, and rolled his eyes round in every direction.\n\n\"Has he gone?\" quoth he.\n\n\"Gone? Who?\"\n\n\"He, the man with the red head, the giant man.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Alleyne, \"he hath gone.\"\n\n\"And comes not back?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"The better for him!\" cried the little man, with a long sigh of relief. \"Mon Dieu! What! am I not the champion of the Bishop of Montaubon? Ah, could I have descended, could I have come down, ere he fled! Then you would have seen. You would have beheld a spectacle then. There would have been one rascal the less upon earth. Ma, foi, yes!\"\n\n\"Good master Pelligny,\" said the landlord, \"these gentlemen have not gone very fast, and I have a horse in the stable at your disposal, for I would rather have such bloody doings as you threaten outside the four walls of mine auberge.\"\n\n\"I hurt my leg and cannot ride,\" quoth the bishop's champion. \"I strained a sinew on the day that I slew the three men at Castelnau.\"\n\n\"God save you, master Pelligny!\" cried the landlord. \"It must be an awesome thing to have so much blood upon one's soul. And yet I do not wish to see so valiant a man mishandled, and so I will, for friendship's sake, ride after this Englishman and bring him back to you.\"\n\n\"You shall not stir,\" cried the champion, seizing the innkeeper in a convulsive grasp. \"I have a love for you, Gaston, and I would not bring your house into ill repute, nor do such scath to these walls and chattels as must befall if two such men as this Englishman and I fall to work here.\"\n\n\"Nay, think not of me!\" cried the innkeeper. \"What are my walls when set against the honor of Francois Poursuivant d'Amour Pelligny, champion of the Bishop of Montaubon. My horse, Andre!\"\n\n\"By the saints, no! Gaston, I will not have it! You have said truly that it is an awesome thing to have such rough work upon one's soul. I am but a rude soldier, yet I have a mind. Mon Dieu! I reflect, I weigh, I balance. Shall I not meet this man again? Shall I not bear him in mind? Shall I not know him by his great paws and his red head? Ma foi, yes!\"\n\n\"And may I ask, sir,\" said Alleyne, \"why it is that you call yourself champion of the Bishop of Montaubon?\"\n\n\"You may ask aught which it is becoming to me to answer. The bishop hath need of a champion, because, if any cause be set to test of combat, it would scarce become his office to go down into the lists with leather and shield and cudgel to exchange blows with any varlet. He looks around him then for some tried fighting man, some honest smiter who can give a blow or take one. It is not for me to say how far he hath succeeded, but it is sooth that he who thinks that he hath but to do with the Bishop of Montaubon, finds himself face to face with Francois Poursuivant d'Amour Pelligny.\"\n\nAt this moment there was a clatter of hoofs upon the road, and a varlet by the door cried out that one of the Englishmen was coming back. The champion looked wildly about for some corner of safety, and was clambering up towards the window, when Ford's voice sounded from without, calling upon Alleyne to hasten, or he might scarce find his way. Bidding adieu to landlord and to champion, therefore, he set off at a gallop, and soon overtook the two archers.\n\n\"A pretty thing this, John,\" said he. \"Thou wilt have holy Church upon you if you hang her champions upon iron hooks in an inn kitchen.\"\n\n\"It was done without thinking,\" he answered apologetically, while Aylward burst into a shout of laughter.\n\n\"By my hilt! mon petit,\" said he, \"you would have laughed also could you have seen it. For this man was so swollen with pride that he would neither drink with us, nor sit at the same table with us, nor as much as answer a question, but must needs talk to the varlet all the time that it was well there was peace, and that he had slain more Englishmen than there were tags to his doublet. Our good old John could scarce lay his tongue to French enough to answer him, so he must needs reach out his great hand to him and place him very gently where you saw him. But we must on, for I can scarce hear their hoofs upon the road.\"\n\n\"I think that I can see them yet,\" said Ford, peering down the moonlit road.\n\n\"Pardieu! yes. Now they ride forth from the shadow. And yonder dark clump is the Castle of Villefranche. En avant camarades! or Sir Nigel may reach the gates before us. But hark, mes amis, what sound is that?\"\n\nAs he spoke the hoarse blast of a horn was heard from some woods upon the right. An answering call rung forth upon their left, and hard upon it two others from behind them.\n\n\"They are the horns of swine-herds,\" quoth Aylward. \"Though why they blow them so late I cannot tell.\"\n\n\"Let us on, then,\" said Ford, and the whole party, setting their spurs to their horses, soon found themselves at the Castle of Villefranche, where the drawbridge had already been lowered and the portcullis raised in response to the summons of Du Guesclin." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BLESSED HOUR OF SIGHT CAME TO THE LADY TIPHAINE.", + "text": "Sir Tristram de Rochefort, Seneschal of Auvergne and Lord of Villefranche, was a fierce and renowned soldier who had grown gray in the English wars. As lord of the marches and guardian of an exposed country-side, there was little rest for him even in times of so-called peace, and his whole life was spent in raids and outfalls upon the Brabanters, late-comers, flayers, free companions, and roving archers who wandered over his province. At times he would come back in triumph, and a dozen corpses swinging from the summit of his keep would warn evil-doers that there was still a law in the land. At others his ventures were not so happy, and he and his troop would spur it over the drawbridge with clatter of hoofs hard at their heels and whistle of arrows about their ears. Hard he was of hand and harder of heart, hated by his foes, and yet not loved by those whom he protected, for twice he had been taken prisoner, and twice his ransom had been wrung by dint of blows and tortures out of the starving peasants and ruined farmers. Wolves or watch-dogs, it was hard to say from which the sheep had most to fear.\n\nThe Castle of Villefranche was harsh and stern as its master. A broad moat, a high outer wall turreted at the corners, with a great black keep towering above all\u2014so it lay before them in the moonlight. By the light of two flambeaux, protruded through the narrow slit-shaped openings at either side of the ponderous gate, they caught a glimpse of the glitter of fierce eyes and of the gleam of the weapons of the guard. The sight of the two-headed eagle of Du Guesclin, however, was a passport into any fortalice in France, and ere they had passed the gate the old border knight came running forwards with hands out-thrown to greet his famous countryman. Nor was he less glad to see Sir Nigel, when the Englishman's errand was explained to him, for these archers had been a sore thorn in his side and had routed two expeditions which he had sent against them. A happy day it would be for the Seneschal of Auvergne when they should learn that the last yew bow was over the marches.\n\nThe material for a feast was ever at hand in days when, if there was grim want in the cottage, there was at least rude plenty in the castle. Within an hour the guests were seated around a board which creaked under the great pasties and joints of meat, varied by those more dainty dishes in which the French excelled, the spiced ortolan and the truffled beccaficoes. The Lady Rochefort, a bright and laughter-loving dame, sat upon the left of her warlike spouse, with Lady Tiphaine upon the right. Beneath sat Du Guesclin and Sir Nigel, with Sir Amory Monticourt, of the order of the Hospitallers, and Sir Otto Harnit, a wandering knight from the kingdom of Bohemia. These with Alleyne and Ford, four French squires, and the castle chaplain, made the company who sat together that night and made good cheer in the Castle of Villefranche. The great fire crackled in the grate, the hooded hawks slept upon their perches, the rough deer-hounds with expectant eyes crouched upon the tiled floor; close at the elbows of the guests stood the dapper little lilac-coated pages; the laugh and jest circled round and all was harmony and comfort. Little they recked of the brushwood men who crouched in their rags along the fringe of the forest and looked with wild and haggard eyes at the rich, warm glow which shot a golden bar of light from the high arched windows of the castle.\n\nSupper over, the tables dormant were cleared away as by magic and trestles and bancals arranged around the blazing fire, for there was a bitter nip in the air. The Lady Tiphaine had sunk back in her cushioned chair, and her long dark lashes drooped low over her sparkling eyes. Alleyne, glancing at her, noted that her breath came quick and short, and that her cheeks had blanched to a lily white. Du Guesclin eyed her keenly from time to time, and passed his broad brown fingers through his crisp, curly black hair with the air of a man who is perplexed in his mind.\n\n\"These folk here,\" said the knight of Bohemia, \"they do not seem too well fed.\"\n\n\"Ah, canaille!\" cried the Lord of Villefranche. \"You would scarce credit it, and yet it is sooth that when I was taken at Poictiers it was all that my wife and foster-brother could do to raise the money from them for my ransom. The sulky dogs would rather have three twists of a rack, or the thumbikins for an hour, than pay out a denier for their own feudal father and liege lord. Yet there is not one of them but hath an old stocking full of gold pieces hid away in a snug corner.\"\n\n\"Why do they not buy food then?\" asked Sir Nigel. \"By St. Paul! it seemed to me their bones were breaking through their skin.\"\n\n\"It is their grutching and grumbling which makes them thin. We have a saying here, Sir Nigel, that if you pummel Jacques Bonhomme he will pat you, but if you pat him he will pummel you. Doubtless you find it so in England.\"\n\n\"Ma foi, no!\" said Sir Nigel. \"I have two Englishmen of this class in my train, who are at this instant, I make little doubt, as full of your wine as any cask in your cellar. He who pummelled them might come by such a pat as he would be likely to remember.\"\n\n\"I cannot understand it,\" quoth the seneschal, \"for the English knights and nobles whom I have met were not men to brook the insolence of the base born.\"\n\n\"Perchance, my fair lord, the poor folk are sweeter and of a better countenance in England,\" laughed the Lady Rochefort. \"Mon Dieu! you cannot conceive to yourself how ugly they are! Without hair, without teeth, all twisted and bent; for me, I cannot think how the good God ever came to make such people. I cannot bear it, I, and so my trusty Raoul goes ever before me with a cudgel to drive them from my path.\"\n\n\"Yet they have souls, fair lady, they have souls!\" murmured the chaplain, a white-haired man with a weary, patient face.\n\n\"So I have heard you tell them,\" said the lord of the castle; \"and for myself, father, though I am a true son of holy Church, yet I think that you were better employed in saying your mass and in teaching the children of my men-at-arms, than in going over the country-side to put ideas in these folks' heads which would never have been there but for you. I have heard that you have said to them that their souls are as good as ours, and that it is likely that in another life they may stand as high as the oldest blood of Auvergne. For my part, I believe that there are so many worthy knights and gallant gentlemen in heaven who know how such things should be arranged, that there is little fear that we shall find ourselves mixed up with base roturiers and swine-herds. Tell your beads, father, and con your psalter, but do not come between me and those whom the king has given to me!\"\n\n\"God help them!\" cried the old priest. \"A higher King than yours has given them to me, and I tell you here in your own castle hall, Sir Tristram de Rochefort, that you have sinned deeply in your dealings with these poor folk, and that the hour will come, and may even now be at hand, when God's hand will be heavy upon you for what you have done.\" He rose as he spoke, and walked slowly from the room.\n\n\"Pest take him!\" cried the French knight. \"Now, what is a man to do with a priest, Sir Bertrand?\u2014for one can neither fight him like a man nor coax him like a woman.\"\n\n\"Ah, Sir Bertrand knows, the naughty one!\" cried the Lady Rochefort. \"Have we not all heard how he went to Avignon and squeezed fifty thousand crowns out of the Pope.\"\n\n\"Ma foi!\" said Sir Nigel, looking with a mixture of horror and admiration at Du Guesclin. \"Did not your heart sink within you? Were you not smitten with fears? Have you not felt a curse hang over you?\"\n\n\"I have not observed it,\" said the Frenchman carelessly. \"But by Saint Ives! Tristram, this chaplain of yours seems to me to be a worthy man, and you should give heed to his words, for though I care nothing for the curse of a bad pope, it would be a grief to me to have aught but a blessing from a good priest.\"\n\n\"Hark to that, my fair lord,\" cried the Lady Rochefort. \"Take heed, I pray thee, for I do not wish to have a blight cast over me, nor a palsy of the limbs. I remember that once before you angered Father Stephen, and my tire-woman said that I lost more hair in seven days than ever before in a month.\"\n\n\"If that be sign of sin, then, by Saint Paul! I have much upon my soul,\" said Sir Nigel, amid a general laugh. \"But in very truth, Sir Tristram, if I may venture a word of counsel, I should advise that you make your peace with this good man.\"\n\n\"He shall have four silver candlesticks,\" said the seneschal moodily. \"And yet I would that he would leave the folk alone. You cannot conceive in your mind how stubborn and brainless they are. Mules and pigs are full of reason beside them. God He knows that I have had great patience with them. It was but last week that, having to raise some money, I called up to the castle Jean Goubert, who, as all men know, has a casketful of gold pieces hidden away in some hollow tree. I give you my word that I did not so much as lay a stripe upon his fool's back, but after speaking with him, and telling him how needful the money was to me, I left him for the night to think over the matter in my dungeon. What think you that the dog did? Why, in the morning we found that he had made a rope from strips of his leathern jerkin, and had hung himself to the bar of the window.\"\n\n\"For me, I cannot conceive such wickedness!\" cried the lady.\n\n\"And there was Gertrude Le Boeuf, as fair a maiden as eye could see, but as bad and bitter as the rest of them. When young Amory de Valance was here last Lammastide he looked kindly upon the girl, and even spoke of taking her into his service. What does she do, with her dog of a father? Why, they tie themselves together and leap into the Linden Pool, where the water is five spears'-lengths deep. I give you my word that it was a great grief to young Amory, and it was days ere he could cast it from his mind. But how can one serve people who are so foolish and so ungrateful?\"\n\nWhilst the Seneschal of Villefranche had been detailing the evil doings of his tenants, Alleyne had been unable to take his eyes from the face of Lady Tiphaine. She had lain back in her chair, with drooping eyelids and bloodless face, so that he had feared at first her journey had weighed heavily upon her, and that the strength was ebbing out of her. Of a sudden, however, there came a change, for a dash of bright color flickered up on to either cheek, and her lids were slowly raised again upon eyes which sparkled with such lustre as Alleyne had never seen in human eyes before, while their gaze was fixed intently, not on the company, but on the dark tapestry which draped the wall. So transformed and so ethereal was her expression, that Alleyne, in his loftiest dream of archangel or of seraph, had never pictured so sweet, so womanly, and yet so wise a face. Glancing at Du Guesclin, Alleyne saw that he also was watching his wife closely, and from the twitching of his features, and the beads upon his brick-colored brow, it was easy to see that he was deeply agitated by the change which he marked in her.\n\n\"How is it with you, lady?\" he asked at last, in a tremulous voice.\n\nHer eyes remained fixed intently upon the wall, and there was a long pause ere she answered him. Her voice, too, which had been so clear and ringing, was now low and muffled as that of one who speaks from a distance.\n\n\"All is very well with me, Bertrand,\" said she. \"The blessed hour of sight has come round to me again.\"\n\n\"I could see it come! I could see it come!\" he exclaimed, passing his fingers through his hair with the same perplexed expression as before.\n\n\"This is untoward, Sir Tristram,\" he said at last. \"And I scarce know in what words to make it clear to you, and to your fair wife, and to Sir Nigel Loring, and to these other stranger knights. My tongue is a blunt one, and fitter to shout word of command than to clear up such a matter as this, of which I can myself understand little. This, however, I know, that my wife is come of a very sainted race, whom God hath in His wisdom endowed with wondrous powers, so that Tiphaine Raquenel was known throughout Brittany ere ever I first saw her at Dinan. Yet these powers are ever used for good, and they are the gift of God and not of the devil, which is the difference betwixt white magic and black.\"\n\n\"Perchance it would be as well that we should send for Father Stephen,\" said Sir Tristram.\n\n\"It would be best that he should come,\" cried the Hospitaller.\n\n\"And bring with him a flask of holy water,\" added the knight of Bohemia.\n\n\"Not so, gentlemen,\" answered Sir Bertrand. \"It is not needful that this priest should be called, and it is in my mind that in asking for this ye cast some slight shadow or slur upon the good name of my wife, as though it were still doubtful whether her power came to her from above or below. If ye have indeed such a doubt I pray that you will say so, that we may discuss the matter in a fitting way.\"\n\n\"For myself,\" said Sir Nigel, \"I have heard such words fall from the lips of this lady that I am of the opinion that there is no woman, save only one, who can be in any way compared to her in beauty and in goodness. Should any gentleman think otherwise, I should deem it great honor to run a small course with him, or debate the matter in whatever way might be most pleasing to him.\"\n\n\"Nay, it would ill become me to cast a slur upon a lady who is both my guest and the wife of my comrade-in-arms,\" said the Seneschal of Villefranche. \"I have perceived also that on her mantle there is marked a silver cross, which is surely sign enough that there is nought of evil in these strange powers which you say that she possesses.\"\n\nThis argument of the seneschal's appealed so powerfully to the Bohemian and to the Hospitaller that they at once intimated that their objections had been entirely overcome, while even the Lady Rochefort, who had sat shivering and crossing herself, ceased to cast glances at the door, and allowed her fears to turn to curiosity.\n\n\"Among the gifts which have been vouchsafed to my wife,\" said Du Guesclin, \"there is the wondrous one of seeing into the future; but it comes very seldom upon her, and goes as quickly, for none can command it. The blessed hour of sight, as she hath named it, has come but twice since I have known her, and I can vouch for it that all that she hath told me was true, for on the evening of the Battle of Auray she said that the morrow would be an ill day for me and for Charles of Blois. Ere the sun had sunk again he was dead, and I the prisoner of Sir John Chandos. Yet it is not every question that she can answer, but only those\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Bertrand, Bertrand!\" cried the lady in the same mutterings far-away voice, \"the blessed hour passes. Use it, Bertrand, while you may.\"\n\n\"I will, my sweet. Tell me, then, what fortune comes upon me?\"\n\n\"Danger, Bertrand\u2014deadly, pressing danger\u2014which creeps upon you and you know it not.\"\n\nThe French soldier burst into a thunderous laugh, and his green eyes twinkled with amusement. \"At what time during these twenty years would not that have been a true word?\" he cried. \"Danger is in the air that I breathe. But is this so very close, Tiphaine?\"\n\n\"Here\u2014now\u2014close upon you!\" The words came out in broken, strenuous speech, while the lady's fair face was writhed and drawn like that of one who looks upon a horror which strikes, the words from her lips. Du Guesclin gazed round the tapestried room, at the screens, the tables, the abace, the credence, the buffet with its silver salver, and the half-circle of friendly, wondering faces. There was an utter stillness, save for the sharp breathing of the Lady Tiphaine and for the gentle soughing of the wind outside, which wafted to their ears the distant call upon a swine-herd's horn.\n\n\"The danger may bide,\" said he, shrugging his broad shoulders. \"And now, Tiphaine, tell us what will come of this war in Spain.\"\n\n\"I can see little,\" she answered, straining her eyes and puckering her brow, as one who would fain clear her sight. \"There are mountains, and dry plains, and flash of arms and shouting of battle-cries. Yet it is whispered to me that by failure you will succeed.\"\n\n\"Ha! Sir Nigel, how like you that?\" quoth Bertrand, shaking his head. \"It is like mead and vinegar, half sweet, half sour. And is there no question which you would ask my lady?\"\n\n\"Certes there is. I would fain know, fair lady, how all things are at Twynham Castle, and above all how my sweet lady employs herself.\"\n\n\"To answer this I would fain lay hand upon one whose thoughts turn strongly to this castle which you have named. Nay, my Lord Loring, it is whispered to me that there is another here who hath thought more deeply of it than you.\"\n\n\"Thought more of mine own home?\" cried Sir Nigel. \"Lady, I fear that in this matter at least you are mistaken.\"\n\n\"Not so, Sir Nigel. Come hither, young man, young English squire with the gray eyes! Now give me your hand, and place it here across my brow, that I may see that which you have seen. What is this that rises before me? Mist, mist, rolling mist with a square black tower above it. See it shreds out, it thins, it rises, and there lies a castle in green plain, with the sea beneath it, and a great church within a bow-shot. There are two rivers which run through the meadows, and between them lie the tents of the besiegers.\"\n\n\"The besiegers!\" cried Alleyne, Ford, and Sir Nigel, all three in a breath.\n\n\"Yes, truly, and they press hard upon the castle, for they are an exceeding multitude and full of courage. See how they storm and rage against the gate, while some rear ladders, and others, line after line, sweep the walls with their arrows. They are many leaders who shout and beckon, and one, a tall man with a golden beard, who stands before the gate stamping his foot and hallooing them on, as a pricker doth the hounds. But those in the castle fight bravely. There is a woman, two women, who stand upon the walls, and give heart to the men-at-arms. They shower down arrows, darts and great stones. Ah! they have struck down the tall leader, and the others give back. The mist thickens and I can see no more.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said Sir Nigel, \"I do not think that there can be any such doings at Christchurch, and I am very easy of the fortalice so long as my sweet wife hangs the key of the outer bailey at the head of her bed. Yet I will not deny that you have pictured the castle as well as I could have done myself, and I am full of wonderment at all that I have heard and seen.\"\n\n\"I would, Lady Tiphaine,\" cried the Lady Rochefort, \"that you would use your power to tell me what hath befallen my golden bracelet which I wore when hawking upon the second Sunday of Advent, and have never set eyes upon since.\"\n\n\"Nay, lady,\" said du Guesclin, \"it does not befit so great and wondrous a power to pry and search and play the varlet even to the beautiful chatelaine of Villefranche. Ask a worthy question, and, with the blessing of God, you shall have a worthy answer.\"\n\n\"Then I would fain ask,\" cried one of the French squires, \"as to which may hope to conquer in these wars betwixt the English and ourselves.\"\n\n\"Both will conquer and each will hold its own,\" answered the Lady Tiphaine.\n\n\"Then we shall still hold Gascony and Guienne?\" cried Sir Nigel.\n\nThe lady shook her head. \"French land, French blood, French speech,\" she answered. \"They are French, and France shall have them.\"\n\n\"But not Bordeaux?\" cried Sir Nigel excitedly.\n\n\"Bordeaux also is for France.\"\n\n\"But Calais?\"\n\n\"Calais too.\"\n\n\"Woe worth me then, and ill hail to these evil words! If Bordeaux and Calais be gone, then what is left for England?\"\n\n\"It seems indeed that there are evil times coming upon your country,\" said Du Guesclin. \"In our fondest hopes we never thought to hold Bordeaux. By Saint Ives! this news hath warmed the heart within me. Our dear country will then be very great in the future, Tiphaine?\"\n\n\"Great, and rich, and beautiful,\" she cried. \"Far down the course of time I can see her still leading the nations, a wayward queen among the peoples, great in war, but greater in peace, quick in thought, deft in action, with her people's will for her sole monarch, from the sands of Calais to the blue seas of the south.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" cried Du Guesclin, with his eyes flashing in triumph, \"you hear her, Sir Nigel?\u2014and she never yet said word which was not sooth.\"\n\nThe English knight shook his head moodily. \"What of my own poor country?\" said he. \"I fear, lady, that what you have said bodes but small good for her.\"\n\nThe lady sat with parted lips, and her breath came quick and fast. \"My God!\" she cried, \"what is this that is shown me? Whence come they, these peoples, these lordly nations, these mighty countries which rise up before me? I look beyond, and others rise, and yet others, far and farther to the shores of the uttermost waters. They crowd! They swarm! The world is given to them, and it resounds with the clang of their hammers and the ringing of their church bells. They call them many names, and they rule them this way or that but they are all English, for I can hear the voices of the people. On I go, and onwards over seas where man hath never yet sailed, and I see a great land under new stars and a stranger sky, and still the land is England. Where have her children not gone? What have they not done? Her banner is planted on ice. Her banner is scorched in the sun. She lies athwart the lands, and her shadow is over the seas. Bertrand, Bertrand! we are undone for the buds of her bud are even as our choicest flower!\" Her voice rose into a wild cry, and throwing up her arms she sank back white and nerveless into the deep oaken chair.\n\n\"It is over,\" said Du Guesclin moodily, as he raised her drooping head with his strong brown hand. \"Wine for the lady, squire! The blessed hour of sight hath passed.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRUSHWOOD MEN CAME TO THE CHATEAU OF VILLEFRANCHE.", + "text": "It was late ere Alleyne Edricson, having carried Sir Nigel the goblet of spiced wine which it was his custom to drink after the curling of his hair, was able at last to seek his chamber. It was a stone-flagged room upon the second floor, with a bed in a recess for him, and two smaller pallets on the other side, on which Aylward and Hordle John were already snoring. Alleyne had knelt down to his evening orisons, when there came a tap at his door, and Ford entered with a small lamp in his hand. His face was deadly pale, and his hand shook until the shadows flickered up and down the wall.\n\n\"What is it, Ford?\" cried Alleyne, springing to his feet.\n\n\"I can scarce tell you,\" said he, sitting down on the side of the couch, and resting his chin upon his hand. \"I know not what to say or what to think.\"\n\n\"Has aught befallen you, then?\"\n\n\"Yes, or I have been slave to my own fancy. I tell you, lad, that I am all undone, like a fretted bow-string. Hark hither, Alleyne! it cannot be that you have forgotten little Tita, the daughter of the old glass-stainer at Bordeaux?\"\n\n\"I remember her well.\"\n\n\"She and I, Alleyne, broke the lucky groat together ere we parted, and she wears my ring upon her finger. 'Caro mio,' quoth she when last we parted, 'I shall be near thee in the wars, and thy danger will be my danger.' Alleyne, as God is my help, as I came up the stairs this night I saw her stand before me, her face in tears, her hands out as though in warning\u2014I saw it, Alleyne, even as I see those two archers upon their couches. Our very finger-tips seemed to meet, ere she thinned away like a mist in the sunshine.\"\n\n\"I would not give overmuch thought to it,\" answered Alleyne. \"Our minds will play us strange pranks, and bethink you that these words of the Lady Tiphaine Du Guesclin have wrought upon us and shaken us.\"\n\nFord shook his head. \"I saw little Tita as clearly as though I were back at the Rue des Apotres at Bordeaux,\" said he.\n\n\"But the hour is late, and I must go.\"\n\n\"Where do you sleep, then?\"\n\n\"In the chamber above you. May the saints be with us all!\" He rose from the couch and left the chamber, while Alleyne could hear his feet sounding upon the winding stair. The young squire walked across to the window and gazed out at the moonlit landscape, his mind absorbed by the thought of the Lady Tiphaine, and of the strange words that she had spoken as to what was going forward at Castle Twynham. Leaning his elbows upon the stonework, he was deeply plunged in reverie, when in a moment his thoughts were brought back to Villefranche and to the scene before him.\n\nThe window at which he stood was in the second floor of that portion of the castle which was nearest to the keep. In front lay the broad moat, with the moon lying upon its surface, now clear and round, now drawn lengthwise as the breeze stirred the waters. Beyond, the plain sloped down to a thick wood, while further to the left a second wood shut out the view. Between the two an open glade stretched, silvered in the moonshine, with the river curving across the lower end of it.\n\nAs he gazed, he saw of a sudden a man steal forth from the wood into the open clearing. He walked with his head sunk, his shoulders curved, and his knees bent, as one who strives hard to remain unseen. Ten paces from the fringe of trees he glanced around, and waving his hand he crouched down, and was lost to sight among a belt of furze-bushes. After him there came a second man, and after him a third, a fourth, and a fifth stealing across the narrow open space and darting into the shelter of the brushwood. Nine-and-seventy Alleyne counted of these dark figures flitting across the line of the moonlight. Many bore huge burdens upon their backs, though what it was that they carried he could not tell at the distance. Out of the one wood and into the other they passed, all with the same crouching, furtive gait, until the black bristle of trees had swallowed up the last of them.\n\nFor a moment Alleyne stood in the window, still staring down at the silent forest, uncertain as to what he should think of these midnight walkers. Then he bethought him that there was one beside him who was fitter to judge on such a matter. His fingers had scarce rested upon Aylward's shoulder ere the bowman was on his feet, with his hand outstretched to his sword.\n\n\"Qui va?\" he cried. \"Hola! mon petit. By my hilt! I thought there had been a camisade. What then, mon gar.?\"\n\n\"Come hither by the window, Aylward,\" said Alleyne. \"I have seen four-score men pass from yonder shaw across the glade, and nigh every man of them had a great burden on his back. What think you of it?\"\n\n\"I think nothing of it, mon camarade! There are as many masterless folk in this country as there are rabbits on Cowdray Down, and there are many who show their faces by night but would dance in a hempen collar if they stirred forth in the day. On all the French marches are droves of outcasts, reivers, spoilers, and draw-latches, of whom I judge that these are some, though I marvel that they should dare to come so nigh to the castle of the seneschal. All seems very quiet now,\" he added, peering out of the window.\n\n\"They are in the further wood,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"And there they may bide. Back to rest, mon petit; for, by my hilt! each day now will bring its own work. Yet it would be well to shoot the bolt in yonder door when one is in strange quarters. So!\" He threw himself down upon his pallet and in an instant was fast asleep.\n\nIt might have been about three o'clock in the morning when Alleyne was aroused from a troubled sleep by a low cry or exclamation. He listened, but, as he heard no more, he set it down as the challenge of the guard upon the walls, and dropped off to sleep once more. A few minutes later he was disturbed by a gentle creaking of his own door, as though some one were pushing cautiously against it, and immediately afterwards he heard the soft thud of cautious footsteps upon the stair which led to the room above, followed by a confused noise and a muffled groan. Alleyne sat up on his couch with all his nerves in a tingle, uncertain whether these sounds might come from a simple cause\u2014some sick archer and visiting leech perhaps\u2014or whether they might have a more sinister meaning. But what danger could threaten them here in this strong castle, under the care of famous warriors, with high walls and a broad moat around them? Who was there that could injure them? He had well-nigh persuaded himself that his fears were a foolish fancy, when his eyes fell upon that which sent the blood cold to his heart and left him gasping, with hands clutching at the counterpane.\n\nRight in front of him was the broad window of the chamber, with the moon shining brightly through it. For an instant something had obscured the light, and now a head was bobbing up and down outside, the face looking in at him, and swinging slowly from one side of the window to the other. Even in that dim light there could be no mistaking those features. Drawn, distorted and blood-stained, they were still those of the young fellow-squire who had sat so recently upon his own couch. With a cry of horror Alleyne sprang from his bed and rushed to the casement, while the two archers, aroused by the sound, seized their weapons and stared about them in bewilderment. One glance was enough to show Edricson that his fears were but too true. Foully murdered, with a score of wounds upon him and a rope round his neck, his poor friend had been cast from the upper window and swung slowly in the night wind, his body rasping against the wall and his disfigured face upon a level with the casement.\n\n\"My God!\" cried Alleyne, shaking in every limb. \"What has come upon us? What devil's deed is this?\"\n\n\"Here is flint and steel,\" said John stolidly. \"The lamp, Aylward! This moonshine softens a man's heart. Now we may use the eyes which God hath given us.\"\n\n\"By my hilt!\" cried Aylward, as the yellow flame flickered up, \"it is indeed young master Ford, and I think that this seneschal is a black villain, who dare not face us in the day but would murther us in our sleep. By the twang of string! if I do not soak a goose's feather with his heart's blood, it will be no fault of Samkin Aylward of the White Company.\"\n\n\"But, Aylward, think of the men whom I saw yesternight,\" said Alleyne. \"It may not be the seneschal. It may be that others have come into the castle. I must to Sir Nigel ere it be too late. Let me go, Aylward, for my place is by his side.\"\n\n\"One moment, mon gar. Put that steel headpiece on the end of my yew-stave. So! I will put it first through the door; for it is ill to come out when you can neither see nor guard yourself. Now, camarades, out swords and stand ready! Hola, by my hilt! it is time that we were stirring!\"\n\nAs he spoke, a sudden shouting broke forth in the castle, with the scream of a woman and the rush of many feet. Then came the sharp clink of clashing steel, and a roar like that of an angry lion\u2014\"Notre Dame Du Guesclin! St. Ives! St. Ives!\" The bow-man pulled back the bolt of the door, and thrust out the headpiece at the end of the bow. A clash, the clatter of the steel-cap upon the ground, and, ere the man who struck could heave up for another blow, the archer had passed his sword through his body. \"On, camarades, on!\" he cried; and, breaking fiercely past two men who threw themselves in his way, he sped down the broad corridor in the direction of the shouting.\n\nA sharp turning, and then a second one, brought them to the head of a short stair, from which they looked straight down upon the scene of the uproar. A square oak-floored hall lay beneath them, from which opened the doors of the principal guest-chambers. This hall was as light as day, for torches burned in numerous sconces upon the walls, throwing strange shadows from the tusked or antlered heads which ornamented them. At the very foot of the stair, close to the open door of their chamber, lay the seneschal and his wife: she with her head shorn from her shoulders, he thrust through with a sharpened stake, which still protruded from either side of his body. Three servants of the castle lay dead beside them, all torn and draggled, as though a pack of wolves had been upon them. In front of the central guest-chamber stood Du Guesclin and Sir Nigel, half-clad and unarmored, with the mad joy of battle gleaming in their eyes. Their heads were thrown back, their lips compressed, their blood-stained swords poised over their right shoulders, and their left feet thrown out. Three dead men lay huddled together in front of them: while a fourth, with the blood squirting from a severed vessel, lay back with updrawn knees, breathing in wheezy gasps. Further back\u2014all panting together, like the wind in a tree\u2014there stood a group of fierce, wild creatures, bare-armed and bare-legged, gaunt, unshaven, with deep-set murderous eyes and wild beast faces. With their flashing teeth, their bristling hair, their mad leapings and screamings, they seemed to Alleyne more like fiends from the pit than men of flesh and blood. Even as he looked, they broke into a hoarse yell and dashed once more upon the two knights, hurling themselves madly upon their sword-points; clutching, scrambling, biting, tearing, careless of wounds if they could but drag the two soldiers to earth. Sir Nigel was thrown down by the sheer weight of them, and Sir Bertrand with his thunderous war-cry was swinging round his heavy sword to clear a space for him to rise, when the whistle of two long English arrows, and the rush of the squire and the two English archers down the stairs, turned the tide of the combat. The assailants gave back, the knights rushed forward, and in a very few moments the hall was cleared, and Hordle John had hurled the last of the wild men down the steep steps which led from the end of it.\n\n\"Do not follow them,\" cried Du Guesclin. \"We are lost if we scatter. For myself I care not a denier, though it is a poor thing to meet one's end at the hands of such scum; but I have my dear lady here, who must by no means be risked. We have breathing-space now, and I would ask you, Sir Nigel, what it is that you would counsel?\"\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" answered Sir Nigel, \"I can by no means understand what hath befallen us, save that I have been woken up by your battle-cry, and, rushing forth, found myself in the midst of this small bickering. Harrow and alas for the lady and the seneschal! What dogs are they who have done this bloody deed?\"\n\n\"They are the Jacks, the men of the brushwood. They have the castle, though I know not how it hath come to pass. Look from this window into the bailey.\"\n\n\"By heaven!\" cried Sir Nigel, \"it is as bright as day with the torches. The gates stand open, and there are three thousand of them within the walls. See how they rush and scream and wave! What is it that they thrust out through the postern door? My God! it is a man-at-arms, and they pluck him limb from limb like hounds on a wolf. Now another, and yet another. They hold the whole castle, for I see their faces at the windows. See, there are some with great bundles on their backs.\"\n\n\"It is dried wood from the forest. They pile them against the walls and set them in a blaze. Who is this who tries to check them? By St. Ives! it is the good priest who spake for them in the hall. He kneels, he prays, he implores! What! villains, would ye raise hands against those who have befriended you? Ah, the butcher has struck him! He is down! They stamp him under their feet! They tear off his gown and wave it in the air! See now, how the flames lick up the walls! Are there none left to rally round us? With a hundred men we might hold our own.\"\n\n\"Oh, for my Company!\" cried Sir Nigel. \"But where is Ford, Alleyne?\"\n\n\"He is foully murdered, my fair lord.\"\n\n\"The saints receive him! May he rest in peace! But here come some at last who may give us counsel, for amid these passages it is ill to stir without a guide.\"\n\nAs he spoke, a French squire and the Bohemian knight came rushing down the steps, the latter bleeding from a slash across his forehead.\n\n\"All is lost!\" he cried. \"The castle is taken and on fire, the seneschal is slain, and there is nought left for us.\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"there is much left to us, for there is a very honorable contention before us, and a fair lady for whom to give our lives. There are many ways in which a man might die, but none better than this.\"\n\n\"You can tell us, Godfrey,\" said Du Guesclin to the French squire: \"how came these men into the castle, and what succors can we count upon? By St. Ives! if we come not quickly to some counsel we shall be burned like young rooks in a nest.\"\n\nThe squire, a dark, slender stripling, spoke firmly and quickly, as one who was trained to swift action. \"There is a passage under the earth into the castle,\" said he, \"and through it some of the Jacks made their way, casting open the gates for the others. They have had help from within the walls, and the men-at-arms were heavy with wine: they must have been slain in their beds, for these devils crept from room to room with soft step and ready knife. Sir Amory the Hospitaller was struck down with an axe as he rushed before us from his sleeping-chamber. Save only ourselves, I do not think that there are any left alive.\"\n\n\"What, then, would you counsel?\"\n\n\"That we make for the keep. It is unused, save in time of war, and the key hangs from my poor lord and master's belt.\"\n\n\"There are two keys there.\"\n\n\"It is the larger. Once there, we might hold the narrow stair; and at least, as the walls are of a greater thickness, it would be longer ere they could burn them. Could we but carry the lady across the bailey, all might be well with us.\"\n\n\"Nay; the lady hath seen something of the work of war,\" said Tiphaine coming forth, as white, as grave, and as unmoved as ever. \"I would not be a hamper to you, my dear spouse and gallant friend. Rest assured of this, that if all else fail I have always a safeguard here\"\u2014drawing a small silver-hilted poniard from her bosom\u2014\"which sets me beyond the fear of these vile and blood-stained wretches.\"\n\n\"Tiphaine,\" cried Du Guesclin, \"I have always loved you; and now, by Our Lady of Rennes! I love you more than ever. Did I not know that your hand will be as ready as your words I would myself turn my last blow upon you, ere you should fall into their hands. Lead on, Godfrey! A new golden pyx will shine in the minster of Dinan if we come safely through with it.\"\n\nThe attention of the insurgents had been drawn away from murder to plunder, and all over the castle might be heard their cries and whoops of delight as they dragged forth the rich tapestries, the silver flagons, and the carved furniture. Down in the courtyard half-clad wretches, their bare limbs all mottled with blood-stains, strutted about with plumed helmets upon their heads, or with the Lady Rochefort's silken gowns girt round their loins and trailing on the ground behind them. Casks of choice wine had been rolled out from the cellars, and starving peasants squatted, goblet in hand, draining off vintages which De Rochefort had set aside for noble and royal guests. Others, with slabs of bacon and joints of dried meat upon the ends of their pikes, held them up to the blaze or tore at them ravenously with their teeth. Yet all order had not been lost amongst them, for some hundreds of the better armed stood together in a silent group, leaning upon their rude weapons and looking up at the fire, which had spread so rapidly as to involve one whole side of the castle. Already Alleyne could hear the crackling and roaring of the flames, while the air was heavy with heat and full of the pungent whiff of burning wood." + }, + { + "title": "HOW FIVE MEN HELD THE KEEP OF VILLEFRANCHE.", + "text": "Under the guidance of the French squire the party passed down two narrow corridors. The first was empty, but at the head of the second stood a peasant sentry, who started off at the sight of them, yelling loudly to his comrades. \"Stop him, or we are undone!\" cried Du Guesclin, and had started to run, when Aylward's great war-bow twanged like a harp-string, and the man fell forward upon his face, with twitching limbs and clutching fingers. Within five paces of where he lay a narrow and little-used door led out into the bailey. From beyond it came such a Babel of hooting and screaming, horrible oaths and yet more horrible laughter, that the stoutest heart might have shrunk from casting down the frail barrier which faced them.\n\n\"Make straight for the keep!\" said Du Guesclin, in a sharp, stern whisper. \"The two archers in front, the lady in the centre, a squire on either side, while we three knights shall bide behind and beat back those who press upon us. So! Now open the door, and God have us in his holy keeping!\"\n\nFor a few moments it seemed that their object would be attained without danger, so swift and so silent had been their movements. They were half-way across the bailey ere the frantic, howling peasants made a movement to stop them. The few who threw themselves in their way were overpowered or brushed aside, while the pursuers were beaten back by the ready weapons of the three cavaliers. Unscathed they fought their way to the door of the keep, and faced round upon the swarming mob, while the squire thrust the great key into the lock.\n\n\"My God!\" he cried, \"it is the wrong key.\"\n\n\"The wrong key!\"\n\n\"Dolt, fool that I am! This is the key of the castle gate; the other opens the keep. I must back for it!\" He turned, with some wild intention of retracing his steps, but at the instant a great jagged rock, hurled by a brawny peasant, struck him full upon the ear, and he dropped senseless to the ground.\n\n\"This is key enough for me!\" quoth Hordle John, picking up the huge stone, and hurling it against the door with all the strength of his enormous body. The lock shivered, the wood smashed, the stone flew into five pieces, but the iron clamps still held the door in its position. Bending down, he thrust his great fingers under it, and with a heave raised the whole mass of wood and iron from its hinges. For a moment it tottered and swayed, and then, falling outward, buried him in its ruin, while his comrades rushed into the dark archway which led to safety.\n\n\"Up the steps, Tiphaine!\" cried Du Guesclin. \"Now round, friends, and beat them back!\" The mob of peasants had surged in upon their heels, but the two trustiest blades in Europe gleamed upon that narrow stair, and four of their number dropped upon the threshold. The others gave back, and gathered in a half circle round the open door, gnashing their teeth and shaking their clenched hands at the defenders. The body of the French squire had been dragged out by them and hacked to pieces. Three or four others had pulled John from under the door, when he suddenly bounded to his feet, and clutching one in either hand dashed them together with such force that they fell senseless across each other upon the ground. With a kick and a blow he freed himself from two others who clung to him, and in a moment he was within the portal with his comrades.\n\nYet their position was a desperate one. The peasants from far and near had been assembled for this deed of vengeance, and not less than six thousand were within or around the walls of the Chateau of Villefranche. Ill armed and half starved, they were still desperate men, to whom danger had lost all fears: for what was death that they should shun it to cling to such a life as theirs? The castle was theirs, and the roaring flames were spurting through the windows and flickering high above the turrets on two sides of the quadrangle. From either side they were sweeping down from room to room and from bastion to bastion in the direction of the keep. Faced by an army, and girt in by fire, were six men and one woman; but some of them were men so trained to danger and so wise in war that even now the combat was less unequal than it seemed. Courage and resource were penned in by desperation and numbers, while the great yellow sheets of flame threw their lurid glare over the scene of death.\n\n\"There is but space for two upon a step to give free play to our sword-arms,\" said Du Guesclin. \"Do you stand with me, Nigel, upon the lowest. France and England will fight together this night. Sir Otto, I pray you to stand behind us with this young squire. The archers may go higher yet and shoot over our heads. I would that we had our harness, Nigel.\"\n\n\"Often have I heard my dear Sir John Chandos say that a knight should never, even when a guest, be parted from it. Yet it will be more honor to us if we come well out of it. We have a vantage, since we see them against the light and they can scarce see us. It seems to me that they muster for an onslaught.\"\n\n\"If we can but keep them in play,\" said the Bohemian, \"it is likely that these flames may bring us succor if there be any true men in the country.\"\n\n\"Bethink you, my fair lord,\" said Alleyne to Sir Nigel, \"that we have never injured these men, nor have we cause of quarrel against them. Would it not be well, if but for the lady's sake, to speak them fair and see if we may not come to honorable terms with them?\"\n\n\"Not so, by St. Paul!\" cried Sir Nigel. \"It does not accord with mine honor, nor shall it ever be said that I, a knight of England, was ready to hold parley with men who have slain a fair lady and a holy priest.\"\n\n\"As well hold parley with a pack of ravening wolves,\" said the French captain. \"Ha! Notre Dame Du Guesclin! Saint Ives! Saint Ives!\"\n\nAs he thundered forth his war-cry, the Jacks who had been gathering before the black arch of the gateway rushed in madly in a desperate effort to carry the staircase. Their leaders were a small man, dark in the face, with his beard done up in two plaits, and another larger man, very bowed in the shoulders, with a huge club studded with sharp nails in his hand. The first had not taken three steps ere an arrow from Aylward's bow struck him full in the chest, and he fell coughing and spluttering across the threshold. The other rushed onwards, and breaking between Du Guesclin and Sir Nigel he dashed out the brains of the Bohemian with a single blow of his clumsy weapon. With three swords through him he still struggled on, and had almost won his way through them ere he fell dead upon the stair. Close at his heels came a hundred furious peasants, who flung themselves again and again against the five swords which confronted them. It was cut and parry and stab as quick as eye could see or hand act. The door was piled with bodies, and the stone floor was slippery with blood. The deep shout of Du Guesclin, the hard, hissing breath of the pressing multitude, the clatter of steel, the thud of falling bodies, and the screams of the stricken, made up such a medley as came often in after years to break upon Alleyne's sleep. Slowly and sullenly at last the throng drew off, with many a fierce backward glance, while eleven of their number lay huddled in front of the stair which they had failed to win.\n\n\"The dogs have had enough,\" said Du Guesclin.\n\n\"By Saint Paul! there appear to be some very worthy and valiant persons among them,\" observed Sir Nigel. \"They are men from whom, had they been of better birth, much honor and advancement might be gained. Even as it is, it is a great pleasure to have seen them. But what is this that they are bringing forward?\"\n\n\"It is as I feared,\" growled Du Guesclin. \"They will burn us out, since they cannot win their way past us. Shoot straight and hard, archers; for, by St. Ives! our good swords are of little use to us.\"\n\nAs he spoke, a dozen men rushed forward, each screening himself behind a huge fardel of brushwood. Hurling their burdens in one vast heap within the portal, they threw burning torches upon the top of it. The wood had been soaked in oil, for in an instant it was ablaze, and a long, hissing, yellow flame licked over the heads of the defenders, and drove them further up to the first floor of the keep. They had scarce reached it, however, ere they found that the wooden joists and planks of the flooring were already on fire. Dry and worm-eaten, a spark upon them became a smoulder, and a smoulder a blaze. A choking smoke filled the air, and the five could scarce grope their way to the staircase which led up to the very summit of the square tower.\n\nStrange was the scene which met their eyes from this eminence. Beneath them on every side stretched the long sweep of peaceful country, rolling plain, and tangled wood, all softened and mellowed in the silver moonshine. No light, nor movement, nor any sign of human aid could be seen, but far away the hoarse clangor of a heavy bell rose and fell upon the wintry air. Beneath and around them blazed the huge fire, roaring and crackling on every side of the bailey, and even as they looked the two corner turrets fell in with a deafening crash, and the whole castle was but a shapeless mass, spouting flames and smoke from every window and embrasure. The great black tower upon which they stood rose like a last island of refuge amid this sea of fire but the ominous crackling and roaring below showed that it would not be long ere it was engulfed also in the common ruin. At their very feet was the square courtyard, crowded with the howling and dancing peasants, their fierce faces upturned, their clenched hands waving, all drunk with bloodshed and with vengeance. A yell of execration and a scream of hideous laughter burst from the vast throng, as they saw the faces of the last survivors of their enemies peering down at them from the height of the keep. They still piled the brushwood round the base of the tower, and gambolled hand in hand around the blaze, screaming out the doggerel lines which had long been the watchword of the Jacquerie:\n\n\u2003Cessez, cessez, gens d'armes et pietons,\n\n\u2003De piller et manger le bonhomme\n\n\u2003Qui de longtemps Jacques Bonhomme\n\n\u2003Se nomme.\n\nTheir thin, shrill voices rose high above the roar of the flames and the crash of the masonry, like the yelping of a pack of wolves who see their quarry before them and know that they have well-nigh run him down.\n\n\"By my hilt!\" said Aylward to John, \"it is in my mind that we shall not see Spain this journey. It is a great joy to me that I have placed my feather-bed and other things of price with that worthy woman at Lyndhurst, who will now have the use of them. I have thirteen arrows yet, and if one of them fly unfleshed, then, by the twang of string! I shall deserve my doom. First at him who flaunts with my lady's silken frock. Clap in the clout, by God! though a hand's-breadth lower than I had meant. Now for the rogue with the head upon his pike. Ha! to the inch, John. When my eye is true, I am better at rovers than at long-butts or hoyles. A good shoot for you also, John! The villain hath fallen forward into the fire. But I pray you, John, to loose gently, and not to pluck with the drawing-hand, for it is a trick that hath marred many a fine bowman.\"\n\nWhilst the two archers were keeping up a brisk fire upon the mob beneath them, Du Guesclin and his lady were consulting with Sir Nigel upon their desperate situation.\n\n\"'Tis a strange end for one who has seen so many stricken fields,\" said the French chieftain. \"For me one death is as another, but it is the thought of my sweet lady which goes to my heart.\"\n\n\"Nay, Bertrand, I fear it as little as you,\" said she. \"Had I my dearest wish, it would be that we should go together.\"\n\n\"Well answered, fair lady!\" cried Sir Nigel. \"And very sure I am that my own sweet wife would have said the same. If the end be now come, I have had great good fortune in having lived in times when so much glory was to be won, and in knowing so many valiant gentlemen and knights. But why do you pluck my sleeve, Alleyne?\"\n\n\"If it please you, my fair lord, there are in this corner two great tubes of iron, with many heavy balls, which may perchance be those bombards and shot of which I have heard.\"\n\n\"By Saint Ives! it is true,\" cried Sir Bertrand, striding across to the recess where the ungainly, funnel-shaped, thick-ribbed engines were standing. \"Bombards they are, and of good size. We may shoot down upon them.\"\n\n\"Shoot with them, quotha?\" cried Aylward in high disdain, for pressing danger is the great leveller of classes. \"How is a man to take aim with these fool's toys, and how can he hope to do scath with them?\"\n\n\"I will show you,\" answered Sir Nigel; \"for here is the great box of powder, and if you will raise it for me, John, I will show you how it may be used. Come hither, where the folk are thickest round the fire. Now, Aylward, crane thy neck and see what would have been deemed an old wife's tale when we first turned our faces to the wars. Throw back the lid, John, and drop the box into the fire!\"\n\nA deafening roar, a fluff of bluish light, and the great square tower rocked and trembled from its very foundations, swaying this way and that like a reed in the wind. Amazed and dizzy, the defenders, clutching at the cracking parapets for support, saw great stones, burning beams of wood, and mangled bodies hurtling past them through the air. When they staggered to their feet once more, the whole keep had settled down upon one side, so that they could scarce keep their footing upon the sloping platform. Gazing over the edge, they looked down upon the horrible destruction which had been caused by the explosion. For forty yards round the portal the ground was black with writhing, screaming figures, who struggled up and hurled themselves down again, tossing this way and that, sightless, scorched, with fire bursting from their tattered clothing. Beyond this circle of death their comrades, bewildered and amazed, cowered away from this black tower and from these invincible men, who were most to be dreaded when hope was furthest from their hearts.\n\n\"A sally, Du Guesclin, a sally!\" cried Sir Nigel. \"By Saint Paul! they are in two minds, and a bold rush may turn them.\" He drew his sword as he spoke and darted down the winding stairs, closely followed by his four comrades. Ere he was at the first floor, however, he threw up his arms and stopped. \"Mon Dieu!\" he said, \"we are lost men!\"\n\n\"What then?\" cried those behind him.\n\n\"The wail hath fallen in, the stair is blocked, and the fire still rages below. By Saint Paul! friends, we have fought a very honorable fight, and may say in all humbleness that we have done our devoir, but I think that we may now go back to the Lady Tiphaine and say our orisons, for we have played our parts in this world, and it is time that we made ready for another.\"\n\nThe narrow pass was blocked by huge stones littered in wild confusion over each other, with the blue choking smoke reeking up through the crevices. The explosion had blown in the wall and cut off the only path by which they could descend. Pent in, a hundred feet from earth, with a furnace raging under them and a ravening multitude all round who thirsted for their blood, it seemed indeed as though no men had ever come through such peril with their lives. Slowly they made their way back to the summit, but as they came out upon it the Lady Tiphaine darted forward and caught her husband by the wrist.\n\n\"Bertrand,\" said she, \"hush and listen! I have heard the voices of men all singing together in a strange tongue.\"\n\nBreathless they stood and silent, but no sound came up to them, save the roar of the flames and the clamor of their enemies.\n\n\"It cannot be, lady,\" said Du Guesclin. \"This night hath over wrought you, and your senses play you false. What men ere there in this country who would sing in a strange tongue?\"\n\n\"Hola!\" yelled Aylward, leaping suddenly into the air with waving hands and joyous face. \"I thought I heard it ere we went down, and now I hear it again. We are saved, comrades! By these ten finger-bones, we are saved! It is the marching song of the White Company. Hush!\"\n\nWith upraised forefinger and slanting head, he stood listening. Suddenly there came swelling up a deep-voiced, rollicking chorus from somewhere out of the darkness. Never did choice or dainty ditty of Provence or Languedoc sound more sweetly in the ears than did the rough-tongued Saxon to the six who strained their ears from the blazing keep:\n\n\u2003We'll drink all together\n\n\u2003To the gray goose feather\n\n\u2003And the land where the gray goose flew.\n\n\"Ha, by my hilt!\" shouted Aylward, \"it is the dear old bow song of the Company. Here come two hundred as tight lads as ever twirled a shaft over their thumbnails. Hark to the dogs, how lustily they sing!\"\n\nNearer and clearer, swelling up out of the night, came the gay marching lilt:\n\n\u2003What of the bow?\n\n\u2003The bow was made in England.\n\n\u2003Of true wood, of yew wood,\n\n\u2003The wood of English bows;\n\n\u2003For men who are free\n\n\u2003Love the old yew-tree\n\n\u2003And the land where the yew tree grows.\n\n\u2003What of the men?\n\n\u2003The men were bred in England,\n\n\u2003The bowmen, the yeomen,\n\n\u2003The lads of the dale and fell,\n\n\u2003Here's to you and to you,\n\n\u2003To the hearts that are true,\n\n\u2003And the land where the true hearts dwell.\n\n\"They sing very joyfully,\" said Du Guesclin, \"as though they were going to a festival.\"\n\n\"It is their wont when there is work to be done.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" quoth Sir Nigel, \"it is in my mind that they come too late, for I cannot see how we are to come down from this tower.\"\n\n\"There they come, the hearts of gold!\" cried Aylward. \"See, they move out from the shadow. Now they cross the meadow. They are on the further side of the moat. Hola camarades, hola! Johnston, Eccles, Cooke, Harward, Bligh! Would ye see a fair lady and two gallant knights done foully to death?\"\n\n\"Who is there?\" shouted a deep voice from below. \"Who is this who speaks with an English tongue?\"\n\n\"It is I, old lad. It is Sam Aylward of the Company; and here is your captain, Sir Nigel Loring, and four others, all laid out to be grilled like an Easterling's herrings.\"\n\n\"Curse me if I did not think that it was the style of speech of old Samkin Aylward,\" said the voice, amid a buzz from the ranks. \"Wherever there are knocks going there is Sammy in the heart of it. But who are these ill-faced rogues who block the path? To your kennels, canaille! What! you dare look us in the eyes? Out swords, lads, and give them the flat of them! Waste not your shafts upon such runagate knaves.\"\n\nThere was little fight left in the peasants, however, still dazed by the explosion, amazed at their own losses and disheartened by the arrival of the disciplined archers. In a very few minutes they were in full flight for their brushwood homes, leaving the morning sun to rise upon a blackened and blood-stained ruin, where it had left the night before the magnificent castle of the Seneschal of Auvergne. Already the white lines in the east were deepening into pink as the archers gathered round the keep and took counsel how to rescue the survivors.\n\n\"Had we a rope,\" said Alleyne, \"there is one side which is not yet on fire, down which we might slip.\"\n\n\"But how to get a rope?\"\n\n\"It is an old trick,\" quoth Aylward. \"Hola! Johnston, cast me up a rope, even as you did at Maupertuis in the war time.\"\n\nThe grizzled archer thus addressed took several lengths of rope from his comrades, and knotting them firmly together, he stretched them out in the long shadow which the rising sun threw from the frowning keep. Then he fixed the yew-stave of his bow upon end and measured the long, thin, black line which it threw upon the turf.\n\n\"A six-foot stave throws a twelve-foot shadow,\" he muttered. \"The keep throws a shadow of sixty paces. Thirty paces of rope will be enow and to spare. Another strand, Watkin! Now pull at the end that all may be safe. So! It is ready for them.'\n\n\"But how are they to reach it?\" asked the young archer beside him.\n\n\"Watch and see, young fool's-head,\" growled the old bowman. He took a long string from his pouch and fastened one end to an arrow.\n\n\"All ready, Samkin?\"\n\n\"Ready, camarade.\"\n\n\"Close to your hand then.\" With an easy pull he sent the shaft flickering gently up, falling upon the stonework within a foot of where Aylward was standing. The other end was secured to the rope, so that in a minute a good strong cord was dangling from the only sound side of the blazing and shattered tower. The Lady Tiphaine was lowered with a noose drawn fast under the arms, and the other five slid swiftly down, amid the cheers and joyous outcry of their rescuers." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE COMPANY TOOK COUNSEL ROUND THE FALLEN TREE.", + "text": "\"Where is Sir Claude Latour?\" asked Sir Nigel, as his feet touched ground.\n\n\"He is in camp, near Montpezat, two hours' march from here, my fair lord,\" said Johnston, the grizzled bowman who commanded the archers.\n\n\"Then we shall march thither, for I would fain have you all back at Dax in time to be in the prince's vanguard.\"\n\n\"My lord,\" cried Alleyne, joyfully, \"here are our chargers in the field, and I see your harness amid the plunder which these rogues have left behind them.\"\n\n\"By Saint Ives! you speak sooth, young squire,\" said Du Guesclin. \"There is my horse and my lady's jennet. The knaves led them from the stables, but fled without them. Now, Nigel, it is great joy to me to have seen one of whom I have often heard. Yet we must leave you now, for I must be with the King of Spain ere your army crosses the mountains.\"\n\n\"I had thought that you were in Spain with the valiant Henry of Trastamare.\"\n\n\"I have been there, but I came to France to raise succor for him. I shall ride back, Nigel, with four thousand of the best lances of France at my back, so that your prince may find he hath a task which is worthy of him. God be with you, friend, and may we meet again in better times!\"\n\n\"I do not think,\" said Sir Nigel, as he stood by Alleyne's side looking after the French knight and his lady, \"that in all Christendom you will meet with a more stout-hearted man or a fairer and sweeter dame. But your face is pale and sad, Alleyne! Have you perchance met with some hurt during the ruffle?\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord, I was but thinking of my friend Ford, and how he sat upon my couch no later than yesternight.\"\n\nSir Nigel shook his head sadly. \"Two brave squires have I lost,\" said he. \"I know not why the young shoots should be plucked, and an old weed left standing, yet certes there must be come good reason, since God hath so planned it. Did you not note, Alleyne, that the Lady Tiphaine did give us warning last night that danger was coming upon us?\"\n\n\"She did, my lord.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! my mind misgives me as to what she saw at Twynham Castle. And yet I cannot think that any Scottish or French rovers could land in such force as to beleaguer the fortalice. Call the Company together, Aylward; and let us on, for it will be shame to us if we are not at Dax upon the trysting day.\"\n\nThe archers had spread themselves over the ruins, but a blast upon a bugle brought them all back to muster, with such booty as they could bear with them stuffed into their pouches or slung over their shoulders. As they formed into ranks, each man dropping silently into his place, Sir Nigel ran a questioning eye over them, and a smile of pleasure played over his face. Tall and sinewy, and brown, clear-eyed, hard-featured, with the stern and prompt bearing of experienced soldiers, it would be hard indeed for a leader to seek for a choicer following. Here and there in the ranks were old soldiers of the French wars, grizzled and lean, with fierce, puckered features and shaggy, bristling brows. The most, however, were young and dandy archers, with fresh English faces, their beards combed out, their hair curling from under their close steel hufkens, with gold or jewelled earrings gleaming in their ears, while their gold-spangled baldrics, their silken belts, and the chains which many of them wore round their thick brown necks, all spoke of the brave times which they had had as free companions. Each had a yew or hazel stave slung over his shoulder, plain and serviceable with the older men, but gaudily painted and carved at either end with the others. Steel caps, mail brigandines, white surcoats with the red lion of St. George, and sword or battle-axe swinging from their belts, completed this equipment, while in some cases the murderous maule or five-foot mallet was hung across the bowstave, being fastened to their leathern shoulder-belt by a hook in the centre of the handle. Sir Nigel's heart beat high as he looked upon their free bearing and fearless faces.\n\nFor two hours they marched through forest and marshland, along the left bank of the river Aveyron; Sir Nigel riding behind his Company, with Alleyne at his right hand, and Johnston, the old master bowman, walking by his left stirrup. Ere they had reached their journey's end the knight had learned all that he would know of his men, their doings and their intentions. Once, as they marched, they saw upon the further bank of the river a body of French men-at-arms, riding very swiftly in the direction of Villefranche.\n\n\"It is the Seneschal of Toulouse, with his following,\" said Johnston, shading his eyes with his hand. \"Had he been on this side of the water he might have attempted something upon us.\"\n\n\"I think that it would be well that we should cross,\" said Sir Nigel. \"It were pity to balk this worthy seneschal, should he desire to try some small feat of arms.\"\n\n\"Nay, there is no ford nearer than Tourville,\" answered the old archer. \"He is on his way to Villefranche, and short will be the shrift of any Jacks who come into his hands, for he is a man of short speech. It was he and the Seneschal of Beaucaire who hung Peter Wilkins, of the Company, last Lammastide; for which, by the black rood of Waltham! they shall hang themselves, if ever they come into our power. But here are our comrades, Sir Nigel, and here is our camp.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the forest pathway along which they marched opened out into a green glade, which sloped down towards the river. High, leafless trees girt it in on three sides, with a thick undergrowth of holly between their trunks. At the farther end of this forest clearing there stood forty or fifty huts, built very neatly from wood and clay, with the blue smoke curling out from the roofs. A dozen tethered horses and mules grazed around the encampment, while a number of archers lounged about: some shooting at marks, while others built up great wooden fires in the open, and hung their cooking kettles above them. At the sight of their returning comrades there was a shout of welcome, and a horseman, who had been exercising his charger behind the camp, came cantering down to them. He was a dapper, brisk man, very richly clad, with a round, clean-shaven face, and very bright black eyes, which danced and sparkled with excitement.\n\n\"Sir Nigel!\" he cried. \"Sir Nigel Loring, at last! By my soul we have awaited you this month past. Right welcome, Sir Nigel! You have had my letter?\"\n\n\"It was that which brought me here,\" said Sir Nigel. \"But indeed, Sir Claude Latour, it is a great wonder to me that you did not yourself lead these bowmen, for surely they could have found no better leader?\"\n\n\"None, none, by the Virgin of L'Esparre!\" he cried, speaking in the strange, thick Gascon speech which turns every v into a b. \"But you know what these islanders of yours are, Sir Nigel. They will not be led by any save their own blood and race. There is no persuading them. Not even I, Claude Latour Seigneur of Montchateau, master of the high justice, the middle and the low, could gain their favor. They must needs hold a council and put their two hundred thick heads together, and then there comes this fellow Aylward and another, as their spokesmen, to say that they will disband unless an Englishman of good name be set over them. There are many of them, as I understand, who come from some great forest which lies in Hampi, or Hampti\u2014I cannot lay my tongue to the name. Your dwelling is in those parts, and so their thoughts turned to you as their leader. But we had hoped that you would bring a hundred men with you.\"\n\n\"They are already at Dax, where we shall join them,\" said Sir Nigel. \"But let the men break their fast, and we shall then take counsel what to do.\"\n\n\"Come into my hut,\" said Sir Claude. \"It is but poor fare that I can lay before you\u2014milk, cheese, wine, and bacon\u2014yet your squire and yourself will doubtless excuse it. This is my house where the pennon flies before the door\u2014a small residence to contain the Lord of Montchateau.\"\n\nSir Nigel sat silent and distrait at his meal, while Alleyne hearkened to the clattering tongue of the Gascon, and to his talk of the glories of his own estate, his successes in love, and his triumphs in war.\n\n\"And now that you are here, Sir Nigel,\" he said at last, \"I have many fine ventures all ready for us. I have heard that Montpezat is of no great strength, and that there are two hundred thousand crowns in the castle. At Castelnau also there is a cobbler who is in my pay, and who will throw us a rope any dark night from his house by the town wall. I promise you that you shall thrust your arms elbow-deep among good silver pieces ere the nights are moonless again; for on every hand of us are fair women, rich wine, and good plunder, as much as heart could wish.\"\n\n\"I have other plans,\" answered Sir Nigel curtly; \"for I have come hither to lead these bowmen to the help of the prince, our master, who may have sore need of them ere he set Pedro upon the throne of Spain. It is my purpose to start this very day for Dax upon the Adour, where he hath now pitched his camp.\"\n\nThe face of the Gascon darkened, and his eyes flashed with resentment, \"For me,\" he said, \"I care little for this war, and I find the life which I lead a very joyous and pleasant one. I will not go to Dax.\"\n\n\"Nay, think again, Sir Claude,\" said Sir Nigel gently; \"for you have ever had the name of a true and loyal knight. Surely you will not hold back now when your master hath need of you.\"\n\n\"I will not go to Dax,\" the other shouted.\n\n\"But your devoir\u2014your oath of fealty?\"\n\n\"I say that I will not go.\"\n\n\"Then, Sir Claude, I must lead the Company without you.\"\n\n\"If they will follow,\" cried the Gascon with a sneer. \"These are not hired slaves, but free companions, who will do nothing save by their own good wills. In very sooth, my Lord Loring, they are ill men to trifle with, and it were easier to pluck a bone from a hungry bear than to lead a bowman out of a land of plenty and of pleasure.\"\n\n\"Then I pray you to gather them together,\" said Sir Nigel, \"and I will tell them what is in my mind; for if I am their leader they must to Dax, and if I am not then I know not what I am doing in Auvergne. Have my horse ready, Alleyne; for, by St. Paul! come what may, I must be upon the homeward road ere mid-day.\"\n\nA blast upon the bugle summoned the bowmen to counsel, and they gathered in little knots and groups around a great fallen tree which lay athwart the glade. Sir Nigel sprang lightly upon the trunk, and stood with blinking eye and firm lips looking down at the ring of upturned warlike faces.\n\n\"They tell me, bowmen,\" said he, \"that ye have grown so fond of ease and plunder and high living that ye are not to be moved from this pleasant country. But, by Saint Paul! I will believe no such thing of you, for I can readily see that you are all very valiant men, who would scorn to live here in peace when your prince hath so great a venture before him. Ye have chosen me as a leader, and a leader I will be if ye come with me to Spain; and I vow to you that my pennon of the five roses shall, if God give me strength and life, be ever where there is most honor to be gained. But if it be your wish to loll and loiter in these glades, bartering glory and renown for vile gold and ill-gotten riches, then ye must find another leader; for I have lived in honor, and in honor I trust that I shall die. If there be forest men or Hampshire men amongst ye, I call upon them to say whether they will follow the banner of Loring.\"\n\n\"Here's a Romsey man for you!\" cried a young bowman with a sprig of evergreen set in his helmet.\n\n\"And a lad from Alresford!\" shouted another.\n\n\"And from Milton!\"\n\n\"And from Burley!\"\n\n\"And from Lymington!\"\n\n\"And a little one from Brockenhurst!\" shouted a huge-limbed fellow who sprawled beneath a tree.\n\n\"By my hilt! lads,\" cried Aylward, jumping upon the fallen trunk, \"I think that we could not look the girls in the eyes if we let the prince cross the mountains and did not pull string to clear a path for him. It is very well in time of peace to lead such a life as we have had together, but now the war-banner is in the wind once more, and, by these ten finger-bones! if he go alone, old Samkin Aylward will walk beside it.\"\n\nThese words from a man as popular as Aylward decided many of the waverers, and a shout of approval burst from his audience.\n\n\"Far be it from me,\" said Sir Claude Latour suavely, \"to persuade you against this worthy archer, or against Sir Nigel Loring; yet we have been together in many ventures, and perchance it may not be amiss if I say to you what I think upon the matter.\"\n\n\"Peace for the little Gascon!\" cried the archers. \"Let every man have his word. Shoot straight for the mark, lad, and fair play for all.\"\n\n\"Bethink you, then,\" said Sir Claude, \"that you go under a hard rule, with neither freedom nor pleasure\u2014and for what? For sixpence a day, at the most; while now you may walk across the country and stretch out either hand to gather in whatever you have a mind for. What do we not hear of our comrades who have gone with Sir John Hawkwood to Italy? In one night they have held to ransom six hundred of the richest noblemen of Mantua. They camp before a great city, and the base burghers come forth with the keys, and then they make great spoil; or, if it please them better, they take so many horse-loads of silver as a composition; and so they journey on from state to state, rich and free and feared by all. Now, is not that the proper life for a soldier?\"\n\n\"The proper life for a robber!\" roared Hordle John, in his thundering voice.\n\n\"And yet there is much in what the Gascon says,\" said a swarthy fellow in a weather-stained doublet; \"and I for one would rather prosper in Italy than starve in Spain.\"\n\n\"You were always a cur and a traitor, Mark Shaw,\" cried Aylward. \"By my hilt! if you will stand forth and draw your sword I will warrant you that you will see neither one nor the other.\"\n\n\"Nay, Aylward,\" said Sir Nigel, \"we cannot mend the matter by broiling. Sir Claude, I think that what you have said does you little honor, and if my words aggrieve you I am ever ready to go deeper into the matter with you. But you shall have such men as will follow you, and you may go where you will, so that you come not with us. Let all who love their prince and country stand fast, while those who think more of a well-lined purse step forth upon the farther side.\"\n\nThirteen bowmen, with hung heads and sheepish faces, stepped forward with Mark Shaw and ranged themselves behind Sir Claude. Amid the hootings and hissings of their comrades, they marched off together to the Gascon's hut, while the main body broke up their meeting and set cheerily to work packing their possessions, furbishing their weapons, and preparing for the march which lay before them. Over the Tarn and the Garonne, through the vast quagmires of Armagnac, past the swift-flowing Losse, and so down the long valley of the Adour, there was many a long league to be crossed ere they could join themselves to that dark war-cloud which was drifting slowly southwards to the line of the snowy peaks, beyond which the banner of England had never yet been seen." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE ARMY MADE THE PASSAGE OF RONCESVALLES.", + "text": "The whole vast plain of Gascony and of Languedoc is an arid and profitless expanse in winter save where the swift-flowing Adour and her snow-fed tributaries, the Louts, the Oloron and the Pau, run down to the sea of Biscay. South of the Adour the jagged line of mountains which fringe the skyline send out long granite claws, running down into the lowlands and dividing them into \"gaves\" or stretches of valley. Hillocks grow into hills, and hills into mountains, each range overlying its neighbor, until they soar up in the giant chain which raises its spotless and untrodden peaks, white and dazzling, against the pale blue wintry sky.\n\nA quiet land is this\u2014a land where the slow-moving Basque, with his flat biretta-cap, his red sash and his hempen sandals, tills his scanty farm or drives his lean flock to their hillside pastures. It is the country of the wolf and the isard, of the brown bear and the mountain-goat, a land of bare rock and of rushing water. Yet here it was that the will of a great prince had now assembled a gallant army; so that from the Adour to the passes of Navarre the barren valleys and wind-swept wastes were populous with soldiers and loud with the shouting of orders and the neighing of horses. For the banners of war had been flung to the wind once more, and over those glistening peaks was the highway along which Honor pointed in an age when men had chosen her as their guide.\n\nAnd now all was ready for the enterprise. From Dax to St. Jean Pied-du-Port the country was mottled with the white tents of Gascons, Aquitanians and English, all eager for the advance. From all sides the free companions had trooped in, until not less than twelve thousand of these veteran troops were cantoned along the frontiers of Navarre. From England had arrived the prince's brother, the Duke of Lancaster, with four hundred knights in his train and a strong company of archers. Above all, an heir to the throne had been born in Bordeaux, and the prince might leave his spouse with an easy mind, for all was well with mother and with child.\n\nThe keys of the mountain passes still lay in the hands of the shifty and ignoble Charles of Navarre, who had chaffered and bargained both with the English and with the Spanish, taking money from the one side to hold them open and from the other to keep them sealed. The mallet hand of Edward, however, had shattered all the schemes and wiles of the plotter. Neither entreaty nor courtly remonstrance came from the English prince; but Sir Hugh Calverley passed silently over the border with his company, and the blazing walls of the two cities of Miranda and Puenta de la Reyna warned the unfaithful monarch that there were other metals besides gold, and that he was dealing with a man to whom it was unsafe to lie. His price was paid, his objections silenced, and the mountain gorges lay open to the invaders. From the Feast of the Epiphany there was mustering and massing, until, in the first week of February\u2014three days after the White Company joined the army\u2014the word was given for a general advance through the defile of Roncesvalles. At five in the cold winter's morning the bugles were blowing in the hamlet of St. Jean Pied-du-Port, and by six Sir Nigel's Company, three hundred strong, were on their way for the defile, pushing swiftly in the dim light up the steep curving road; for it was the prince's order that they should be the first to pass through, and that they should remain on guard at the further end until the whole army had emerged from the mountains. Day was already breaking in the east, and the summits of the great peaks had turned rosy red, while the valleys still lay in the shadow, when they found themselves with the cliffs on either hand and the long, rugged pass stretching away before them.\n\nSir Nigel rode his great black warhorse at the head of his archers, dressed in full armor, with Black Simon bearing his banner behind him, while Alleyne at his bridle-arm carried his blazoned shield and his well-steeled ashen spear. A proud and happy man was the knight, and many a time he turned in his saddle to look at the long column of bowmen who swung swiftly along behind him.\n\n\"By Saint Paul! Alleyne,\" said he, \"this pass is a very perilous place, and I would that the King of Navarre had held it against us, for it would have been a very honorable venture had it fallen to us to win a passage. I have heard the minstrels sing of one Sir Roland who was slain by the infidels in these very parts.\"\n\n\"If it please you, my fair lord,\" said Black Simon, \"I know something of these parts, for I have twice served a term with the King of Navarre. There is a hospice of monks yonder, where you may see the roof among the trees, and there it was that Sir Roland was slain. The village upon the left is Orbaiceta, and I know a house therein where the right wine of Jurancon is to be bought, if it would please you to quaff a morning cup.\"\n\n\"There is smoke yonder upon the right.\"\n\n\"That is a village named Les Aldudes, and I know a hostel there also where the wine is of the best. It is said that the innkeeper hath a buried treasure, and I doubt not, my fair lord, that if you grant me leave I could prevail upon him to tell us where he hath hid it.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, Simon,\" said Sir Nigel curtly, \"I pray you to forget these free companion tricks. Ha! Edricson, I see that you stare about you, and in good sooth these mountains must seem wondrous indeed to one who hath but seen Butser or the Portsdown hill.\"\n\nThe broken and rugged road had wound along the crests of low hills, with wooded ridges on either side of it over which peeped the loftier mountains, the distant Peak of the South and the vast Altabisca, which towered high above them and cast its black shadow from left to right across the valley. From where they now stood they could look forward down a long vista of beech woods and jagged rock-strewn wilderness, all white with snow, to where the pass opened out upon the uplands beyond. Behind them they could still catch a glimpse of the gray plains of Gascony, and could see her rivers gleaming like coils of silver in the sunshine. As far as eye could see from among the rocky gorges and the bristles of the pine woods there came the quick twinkle and glitter of steel, while the wind brought with it sudden distant bursts of martial music from the great host which rolled by every road and by-path towards the narrow pass of Roncesvalles. On the cliffs on either side might also be seen the flash of arms and the waving of pennons where the force of Navarre looked down upon the army of strangers who passed through their territories.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said Sir Nigel, blinking up at them, \"I think that we have much to hope for from these cavaliers, for they cluster very thickly upon our flanks. Pass word to the men, Aylward, that they unsling their bows, for I have no doubt that there are some very worthy gentlemen yonder who may give us some opportunity for honorable advancement.\"\n\n\"I hear that the prince hath the King of Navarre as hostage,\" said Alleyne, \"and it is said that he hath sworn to put him to death if there be any attack upon us.\"\n\n\"It was not so that war was made when good King Edward first turned his hand to it,\" said Sir Nigel sadly. \"Ah! Alleyne, I fear that you will never live to see such things, for the minds of men are more set upon money and gain than of old. By Saint Paul! it was a noble sight when two great armies would draw together upon a certain day, and all who had a vow would ride forth to discharge themselves of it. What noble spear-runnings have I not seen, and even in an humble way had a part in, when cavaliers would run a course for the easing of their souls and for the love of their ladies! Never a bad word have I for the French, for, though I have ridden twenty times up to their array, I have never yet failed to find some very gentle and worthy knight or squire who was willing to do what he might to enable me to attempt some small feat of arms. Then, when all cavaliers had been satisfied, the two armies would come to hand-strokes, and fight right merrily until one or other had the vantage. By Saint Paul! it was not our wont in those days to pay gold for the opening of passes, nor would we hold a king as hostage lest his people come to thrusts with us. In good sooth, if the war is to be carried out in such a fashion, then it is grief to me that I ever came away from Castle Twynham, for I would not have left my sweet lady had I not thought that there were deeds of arms to be done.\"\n\n\"But surely, my fair lord,\" said Alleyne, \"you have done some great feats of arms since we left the Lady Loring.\"\n\n\"I cannot call any to mind,\" answered Sir Nigel.\n\n\"There was the taking of the sea-rovers, and the holding of the keep against the Jacks.\"\n\n\"Nay, nay,\" said the knight, \"these were not feats of arms, but mere wayside ventures and the chances of travel. By Saint Paul! if it were not that these hills are over-steep for Pommers, I would ride to these cavaliers of Navarre and see if there were not some among them who would help me to take this patch from mine eye. It is a sad sight to see this very fine pass, which my own Company here could hold against an army, and yet to ride through it with as little profit as though it were the lane from my kennels to the Avon.\"\n\nAll morning Sir Nigel rode in a very ill-humor, with his Company tramping behind him. It was a toilsome march over broken ground and through snow, which came often as high as the knee, yet ere the sun had begun to sink they had reached the spot where the gorge opens out on to the uplands of Navarre, and could see the towers of Pampeluna jutting up against the southern skyline. Here the Company were quartered in a scattered mountain hamlet, and Alleyne spent the day looking down upon the swarming army which poured with gleam of spears and flaunt of standards through the narrow pass.\n\n\"Hola, mon gar.,\" said Aylward, seating himself upon a boulder by his side. \"This is indeed a fine sight upon which it is good to look, and a man might go far ere he would see so many brave men and fine horses. By my hilt! our little lord is wroth because we have come peacefully through the passes, but I will warrant him that we have fighting enow ere we turn our faces northward again. It is said that there are four-score thousand men behind the King of Spain, with Du Guesclin and all the best lances of France, who have sworn to shed their heart's blood ere this Pedro come again to the throne.\"\n\n\"Yet our own army is a great one,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"Nay, there are but seven-and-twenty thousand men. Chandos hath persuaded the prince to leave many behind, and indeed I think that he is right, for there is little food and less water in these parts for which we are bound. A man without his meat or a horse without his fodder is like a wet bow-string, fit for little. But voila, mon petit, here comes Chandos and his company, and there is many a pensil and banderole among yonder squadrons which show that the best blood of England is riding under his banners.\"\n\nWhilst Aylward had been speaking, a strong column of archers had defiled through the pass beneath them. They were followed by a banner-bearer who held high the scarlet wedge upon a silver field which proclaimed the presence of the famous warrior. He rode himself within a spear's-length of his standard, clad from neck to foot in steel, but draped in the long linen gown or parement which was destined to be the cause of his death. His plumed helmet was carried behind him by his body-squire, and his head was covered by a small purple cap, from under which his snow-white hair curled downwards to his shoulders. With his long beak-like nose and his single gleaming eye, which shone brightly from under a thick tuft of grizzled brow, he seemed to Alleyne to have something of the look of some fierce old bird of prey. For a moment he smiled, as his eye lit upon the banner of the five roses waving from the hamlet; but his course lay for Pampeluna, and he rode on after the archers.\n\nClose at his heels came sixteen squires, all chosen from the highest families, and behind them rode twelve hundred English knights, with gleam of steel and tossing of plumes, their harness jingling, their long straight swords clanking against their stirrup-irons, and the beat of their chargers' hoofs like the low deep roar of the sea upon the shore. Behind them marched six hundred Cheshire and Lancashire archers, bearing the badge of the Audleys, followed by the famous Lord Audley himself, with the four valiant squires, Dutton of Dutton, Delves of Doddington, Fowlehurst of Crewe, and Hawkestone of Wainehill, who had all won such glory at Poictiers. Two hundred heavily-armed cavalry rode behind the Audley standard, while close at their heels came the Duke of Lancaster with a glittering train, heralds tabarded with the royal arms riding three deep upon cream-colored chargers in front of him. On either side of the young prince rode the two seneschals of Aquitaine, Sir Guiscard d'Angle and Sir Stephen Cossington, the one bearing the banner of the province and the other that of Saint George. Away behind him as far as eye could reach rolled the far-stretching, unbroken river of steel\u2014rank after rank and column after column, with waving of plumes, glitter of arms, tossing of guidons, and flash and flutter of countless armorial devices. All day Alleyne looked down upon the changing scene, and all day the old bowman stood by his elbow, pointing out the crests of famous warriors and the arms of noble houses. Here were the gold mullets of the Pakingtons, the sable and ermine of the Mackworths, the scarlet bars of the Wakes, the gold and blue of the Grosvenors, the cinque-foils of the Cliftons, the annulets of the Musgraves, the silver pinions of the Beauchamps, the crosses of the Molineaux, the bloody chevron of the Woodhouses, the red and silver of the Worsleys, the swords of the Clarks, the boars'-heads of the Lucies, the crescents of the Boyntons, and the wolf and dagger of the Lipscombs. So through the sunny winter day the chivalry of England poured down through the dark pass of Roncesvalles to the plains of Spain.\n\nIt was on a Monday that the Duke of Lancaster's division passed safely through the Pyrenees. On the Tuesday there was a bitter frost, and the ground rung like iron beneath the feet of the horses; yet ere evening the prince himself, with the main battle of his army, had passed the gorge and united with his vanguard at Pampeluna. With him rode the King of Majorca, the hostage King of Navarre, and the fierce Don Pedro of Spain, whose pale blue eyes gleamed with a sinister light as they rested once more upon the distant peaks of the land which had disowned him. Under the royal banners rode many a bold Gascon baron and many a hot-blooded islander. Here were the high stewards of Aquitaine, of Saintonge, of La Rochelle, of Quercy, of Limousin, of Agenois, of Poitou, and of Bigorre, with the banners and musters of their provinces. Here also were the valiant Earl of Angus, Sir Thomas Banaster with his garter over his greave, Sir Nele Loring, second cousin to Sir Nigel, and a long column of Welsh footmen who marched under the red banner of Merlin. From dawn to sundown the long train wound through the pass, their breath reeking up upon the frosty air like the steam from a cauldron.\n\nThe weather was less keen upon the Wednesday, and the rear-guard made good their passage, with the bombards and the wagon-train. Free companions and Gascons made up this portion of the army to the number of ten thousand men. The fierce Sir Hugh Calverley, with his yellow mane, and the rugged Sir Robert Knolles, with their war-hardened and veteran companies of English bowmen, headed the long column; while behind them came the turbulent bands of the Bastard of Breteuil, Nandon de Bagerant, one-eyed Camus, Black Ortingo, La Nuit and others whose very names seem to smack of hard hands and ruthless deeds. With them also were the pick of the Gascon chivalry\u2014the old Duc d'Armagnac, his nephew Lord d'Albret, brooding and scowling over his wrongs, the giant Oliver de Clisson, the Captal de Buch, pink of knighthood, the sprightly Sir Perducas d'Albret, the red-bearded Lord d'Esparre, and a long train of needy and grasping border nobles, with long pedigrees and short purses, who had come down from their hillside strongholds, all hungering for the spoils and the ransoms of Spain. By the Thursday morning the whole army was encamped in the Vale of Pampeluna, and the prince had called his council to meet him in the old palace of the ancient city of Navarre." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE COMPANY MADE SPORT IN THE VALE OF PAMPELUNA.", + "text": "Whilst the council was sitting in Pampeluna the White Company, having encamped in a neighboring valley, close to the companies of La Nuit and of Black Ortingo, were amusing themselves with sword-play, wrestling, and shooting at the shields, which they had placed upon the hillside to serve them as butts. The younger archers, with their coats of mail thrown aside, their brown or flaxen hair tossing in the wind, and their jerkins turned back to give free play to their brawny chests and arms, stood in lines, each loosing his shaft in turn, while Johnston, Aylward, Black Simon, and half-a-score of the elders lounged up and down with critical eyes, and a word of rough praise or of curt censure for the marksmen. Behind stood knots of Gascon and Brabant crossbowmen from the companies of Ortingo and of La Nuit, leaning upon their unsightly weapons and watching the practice of the Englishmen.\n\n\"A good shot, Hewett, a good shot!\" said old Johnston to a young bowman, who stood with his bow in his left hand, gazing with parted lips after his flying shaft. \"You see, she finds the ring, as I knew she would from the moment that your string twanged.\"\n\n\"Loose it easy, steady, and yet sharp,\" said Aylward. \"By my hilt! mon gar., it is very well when you do but shoot at a shield, but when there is a man behind the shield, and he rides at you with wave of sword and glint of eyes from behind his vizor, you may find him a less easy mark.\"\n\n\"It is a mark that I have found before now,\" answered the young bowman.\n\n\"And shall again, camarade, I doubt not. But hola! Johnston, who is this who holds his bow like a crow-keeper?\"\n\n\"It is Silas Peterson, of Horsham. Do not wink with one eye and look with the other, Silas, and do not hop and dance after you shoot, with your tongue out, for that will not speed it upon its way. Stand straight and firm, as God made you. Move not the bow arm, and steady with the drawing hand!\"\n\n\"I' faith,\" said Black Simon, \"I am a spearman myself, and am more fitted for hand-strokes than for such work as this. Yet I have spent my days among bowmen, and I have seen many a brave shaft sped. I will not say but that we have some good marksmen here, and that this Company would be accounted a fine body of archers at any time or place. Yet I do not see any men who bend so strong a bow or shoot as true a shaft as those whom I have known.\"\n\n\"You say sooth,\" said Johnston, turning his seamed and grizzled face upon the man-at-arms. \"See yonder,\" he added, pointing to a bombard which lay within the camp: \"there is what hath done scath to good bowmanship, with its filthy soot and foolish roaring mouth. I wonder that a true knight, like our prince, should carry such a scurvy thing in his train. Robin, thou red-headed lurden, how oft must I tell thee not to shoot straight with a quarter-wind blowing across the mark?\"\n\n\"By these ten finger-bones! there were some fine bowmen at the intaking of Calais,\" said Aylward. \"I well remember that, on occasion of an outfall, a Genoan raised his arm over his mantlet, and shook it at us, a hundred paces from our line. There were twenty who loosed shafts at him, and when the man was afterwards slain it was found that he had taken eighteen through his forearm.\"\n\n\"And I can call to mind,\" remarked Johnston, \"that when the great cog 'Christopher,' which the French had taken from us, was moored two hundred paces from the shore, two archers, little Robin Withstaff and Elias Baddlesmere, in four shots each cut every strand of her hempen anchor-cord, so that she well-nigh came upon the rocks.\"\n\n\"Good shooting, i' faith rare shooting!\" said Black Simon. \"But I have seen you, Johnston, and you, Samkin Aylward, and one or two others who are still with us, shoot as well as the best. Was it not you, Johnston, who took the fat ox at Finsbury butts against the pick of London town?\"\n\nA sunburnt and black-eyed Brabanter had stood near the old archers, leaning upon a large crossbow and listening to their talk, which had been carried on in that hybrid camp dialect which both nations could understand. He was a squat, bull-necked man, clad in the iron helmet, mail tunic, and woollen gambesson of his class. A jacket with hanging sleeves, slashed with velvet at the neck and wrists, showed that he was a man of some consideration, an under-officer, or file-leader of his company.\n\n\"I cannot think,\" said he, \"why you English should be so fond of your six-foot stick. If it amuse you to bend it, well and good; but why should I strain and pull, when my little moulinet will do all for me, and better than I can do it for myself?\"\n\n\"I have seen good shooting with the prod and with the latch,\" said Aylward, \"but, by my hilt! camarade, with all respect to you and to your bow, I think that is but a woman's weapon, which a woman can point and loose as easily as a man.\"\n\n\"I know not about that,\" answered the Brabanter, \"but this I know, that though I have served for fourteen years, I have never yet seen an Englishman do aught with the long-bow which I could not do better with my arbalest. By the three kings! I would even go further, and say that I have done things with my arbalest which no Englishman could do with his long-bow.\"\n\n\"Well said, mon gar.,\" cried Aylward. \"A good cock has ever a brave call. Now, I have shot little of late, but there is Johnston here who will try a round with you for the honor of the Company.\"\n\n\"And I will lay a gallon of Jurancon wine upon the long-bow,\" said Black Simon, \"though I had rather, for my own drinking, that it were a quart of Twynham ale.\"\n\n\"I take both your challenge and your wager,\" said the man of Brabant, throwing off his jacket and glancing keenly about him with his black, twinkling eyes. \"I cannot see any fitting mark, for I care not to waste a bolt upon these shields, which a drunken boor could not miss at a village kermesse.\"\n\n\"This is a perilous man,\" whispered an English man-at-arms, plucking at Aylward's sleeve. \"He is the best marksman of all the crossbow companies and it was he who brought down the Constable de Bourbon at Brignais, I fear that your man will come by little honor with him.\"\n\n\"Yet I have seen Johnston shoot these twenty years, and I will not flinch from it. How say you, old war-hound, will you not have a flight shot or two with this springald?\"\n\n\"Tut, tut, Aylward,\" said the old bowman. \"My day is past, and it is for the younger ones to hold what we have gained. I take it unkindly of thee, Samkin, that thou shouldst call all eyes thus upon a broken bowman who could once shoot a fair shaft. Let me feel that bow, Wilkins! It is a Scotch bow, I see, for the upper nock is without and the lower within. By the black rood! it is a good piece of yew, well nocked, well strung, well waxed, and very joyful to the feel. I think even now that I might hit any large and goodly mark with a bow like this. Turn thy quiver to me, Aylward. I love an ash arrow pierced with cornel-wood for a roving shaft.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! and so do I,\" cried Aylward. \"These three gander-winged shafts are such.\"\n\n\"So I see, comrade. It has been my wont to choose a saddle-backed feather for a dead shaft, and a swine-backed for a smooth flier. I will take the two of them. Ah! Samkin, lad, the eye grows dim and the hand less firm as the years pass.\"\n\n\"Come then, are you not ready?\" said the Brabanter, who had watched with ill-concealed impatience the slow and methodic movements of his antagonist.\n\n\"I will venture a rover with you, or try long-butts or hoyles,\" said old Johnston. \"To my mind the long-bow is a better weapon than the arbalest, but it may be ill for me to prove it.\"\n\n\"So I think,\" quoth the other with a sneer. He drew his moulinet from his girdle, and fixing it to the windlass, he drew back the powerful double cord until it had clicked into the catch. Then from his quiver he drew a short, thick quarrel, which he placed with the utmost care upon the groove. Word had spread of what was going forward, and the rivals were already surrounded, not only by the English archers of the Company, but by hundreds of arbalestiers and men-at-arms from the bands of Ortingo and La Nuit, to the latter of which the Brabanter belonged.\n\n\"There is a mark yonder on the hill,\" said he; \"mayhap you can discern it.\"\n\n\"I see something,\" answered Johnston, shading his eyes with his hand; \"but it is a very long shoot.\"\n\n\"A fair shoot\u2014a fair shoot! Stand aside, Arnaud, lest you find a bolt through your gizzard. Now, comrade, I take no flight shot, and I give you the vantage of watching my shaft.\"\n\nAs he spoke he raised his arbalest to his shoulder and was about to pull the trigger, when a large gray stork flapped heavily into view skimming over the brow of the hill, and then soaring up into the air to pass the valley. Its shrill and piercing cries drew all eyes upon it, and, as it came nearer, a dark spot which circled above it resolved itself into a peregrine falcon, which hovered over its head, poising itself from time to time, and watching its chance of closing with its clumsy quarry. Nearer and nearer came the two birds, all absorbed in their own contest, the stork wheeling upwards, the hawk still fluttering above it, until they were not a hundred paces from the camp. The Brabanter raised his weapon to the sky, and there came the short, deep twang of his powerful string. His bolt struck the stork just where its wing meets the body, and the bird whirled aloft in a last convulsive flutter before falling wounded and flapping to the earth. A roar of applause burst from the crossbowmen; but at the instant that the bolt struck its mark old Johnston, who had stood listlessly with arrow on string, bent his bow and sped a shaft through the body of the falcon. Whipping the other from his belt, he sent it skimming some few feet from the earth with so true an aim that it struck and transfixed the stork for the second time ere it could reach the ground. A deep-chested shout of delight burst from the archers at the sight of this double feat, and Aylward, dancing with joy, threw his arms round the old marksman and embraced him with such vigor that their mail tunics clanged again.\n\n\"Ah! camarade,\" he cried, \"you shall have a stoup with me for this! What then, old dog, would not the hawk please thee, but thou must have the stork as well. Oh, to my heart again!\"\n\n\"It is a pretty piece of yew, and well strung,\" said Johnston with a twinkle in his deep-set gray eyes. \"Even an old broken bowman might find the clout with a bow like this.\"\n\n\"You have done very well,\" remarked the Brabanter in a surly voice. \"But it seems to me that you have not yet shown yourself to be a better marksman than I, for I have struck that at which I aimed, and, by the three kings! no man can do more.\"\n\n\"It would ill beseem me to claim to be a better marksman,\" answered Johnston, \"for I have heard great things of your skill. I did but wish to show that the long-bow could do that which an arbalest could not do, for you could not with your moulinet have your string ready to speed another shaft ere the bird drop to the earth.\"\n\n\"In that you have vantage,\" said the crossbowman. \"By Saint James! it is now my turn to show you where my weapon has the better of you. I pray you to draw a flight shaft with all your strength down the valley, that we may see the length of your shoot.\"\n\n\"That is a very strong prod of yours,\" said Johnston, shaking his grizzled head as he glanced at the thick arch and powerful strings of his rival's arbalest. \"I have little doubt that you can overshoot me, and yet I have seen bowmen who could send a cloth-yard arrow further than you could speed a quarrel.\"\n\n\"So I have heard,\" remarked the Brabanter; \"and yet it is a strange thing that these wondrous bowmen are never where I chance to be. Pace out the distances with a wand at every five score, and do you, Arnaud, stand at the fifth wand to carry back my bolts to me.\"\n\nA line was measured down the valley, and Johnston, drawing an arrow to the very head, sent it whistling over the row of wands.\n\n\"Bravely drawn! A rare shoot!\" shouted the bystanders.\n\n\"It is well up to the fourth mark.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! it is over it,\" cried Aylward. \"I can see where they have stooped to gather up the shaft.\"\n\n\"We shall hear anon,\" said Johnston quietly, and presently a young archer came running to say that the arrow had fallen twenty paces beyond the fourth wand.\n\n\"Four hundred paces and a score,\" cried Black Simon. \"I' faith, it is a very long flight. Yet wood and steel may do more than flesh and blood.\"\n\nThe Brabanter stepped forward with a smile of conscious triumph, and loosed the cord of his weapon. A shout burst from his comrades as they watched the swift and lofty flight of the heavy bolt.\n\n\"Over the fourth!\" groaned Aylward. \"By my hilt! I think that it is well up to the fifth.\"\n\n\"It is over the fifth!\" cried a Gascon loudly, and a comrade came running with waving arms to say that the bolt had pitched eight paces beyond the mark of the five hundred.\n\n\"Which weapon hath the vantage now?\" cried the Brabanter, Strutting proudly about with shouldered arbalest, amid the applause of his companions.\n\n\"You can overshoot me,\" said Johnston gently.\n\n\"Or any other man who ever bent a long-bow,\" cried his victorious adversary.\n\n\"Nay, not so fast,\" said a huge archer, whose mighty shoulders and red head towered high above the throng of his comrades. \"I must have a word with you ere you crow so loudly. Where is my little popper? By sainted Dick of Hampole! it will be a strange thing if I cannot outshoot that thing of thine, which to my eyes is more like a rat-trap than a bow. Will you try another flight, or do you stand by your last?\"\n\n\"Five hundred and eight paces will serve my turn,\" answered the Brabanter, looking askance at this new opponent.\n\n\"Tut, John,\" whispered Aylward, \"you never were a marksman. Why must you thrust your spoon into this dish?\"\n\n\"Easy and slow, Aylward. There are very many things which I cannot do, but there are also one or two which I have the trick of. It is in my mind that I can beat this shoot, if my bow will but hold together.\"\n\n\"Go on, old babe of the woods!\" \"Have at it, Hampshire!\" cried the archers laughing.\n\n\"By my soul! you may grin,\" cried John. \"But I learned how to make the long shoot from old Hob Miller of Milford.\" He took up a great black bow, as he spoke, and sitting down upon the ground he placed his two feet on either end of the stave. With an arrow fitted, he then pulled the string towards him with both hands until the head of the shaft was level with the wood. The great bow creaked and groaned and the cord vibrated with the tension.\n\n\"Who is this fool's-head who stands in the way of my shoot?\" said he, craning up his neck from the ground.\n\n\"He stands on the further side of my mark,\" answered the Brabanter, \"so he has little to fear from you.\"\n\n\"Well, the saints assoil him!\" cried John. \"Though I think he is over-near to be scathed.\" As he spoke he raised his two feet, with the bowstave upon their soles, and his cord twanged with a deep rich hum which might be heard across the valley. The measurer in the distance fell flat upon his face, and then jumping up again, he began to run in the opposite direction.\n\n\"Well shot, old lad! It is indeed over his head,\" cried the bowmen.\n\n\"Mon Dieu!\" exclaimed the Brabanter, \"who ever saw such a shoot?\"\n\n\"It is but a trick,\" quoth John. \"Many a time have I won a gallon of ale by covering a mile in three flights down Wilverley Chase.\"\n\n\"It fell a hundred and thirty paces beyond the fifth mark,\" shouted an archer in the distance.\n\n\"Six hundred and thirty paces! Mon Dieu! but that is a shoot! And yet it says nothing for your weapon, mon gros camarade, for it was by turning yourself into a crossbow that you did it.\"\n\n\"By my hilt! there is truth in that,\" cried Aylward. \"And now, friend, I will myself show you a vantage of the long-bow. I pray you to speed a bolt against yonder shield with all your force. It is an inch of elm with bull's hide over it.\"\n\n\"I scarce shot as many shafts at Brignais,\" growled the man of Brabant; \"though I found a better mark there than a cantle of bull's hide. But what is this, Englishman? The shield hangs not one hundred paces from me, and a blind man could strike it.\" He screwed up his string to the furthest pitch, and shot his quarrel at the dangling shield. Aylward, who had drawn an arrow from his quiver, carefully greased the head of it, and sped it at the same mark.\n\n\"Run, Wilkins,\" quoth he, \"and fetch me the shield.\"\n\nLong were the faces of the Englishmen and broad the laugh of the crossbowmen as the heavy mantlet was carried towards them, for there in the centre was the thick Brabant bolt driven deeply into the wood, while there was neither sign nor trace of the cloth-yard shaft.\n\n\"By the three kings!\" cried the Brabanter, \"this time at least there is no gainsaying which is the better weapon, or which the truer hand that held it. You have missed the shield, Englishman.\"\n\n\"Tarry a bit! tarry a bit, mon gar.!\" quoth Aylward, and turning round the shield he showed a round clear hole in the wood at the back of it. \"My shaft has passed through it, camarade, and I trow the one which goes through is more to be feared than that which bides on the way.\"\n\nThe Brabanter stamped his foot with mortification, and was about to make some angry reply, when Alleyne Edricson came riding up to the crowds of archers.\n\n\"Sir Nigel will be here anon,\" said he, \"and it is his wish to speak with the Company.\"\n\nIn an instant order and method took the place of general confusion. Bows, steel caps, and jacks were caught up from the grass. A long cordon cleared the camp of all strangers, while the main body fell into four lines with under-officers and file-leaders in front and on either flank. So they stood, silent and motionless, when their leader came riding towards them, his face shining and his whole small figure swelling with the news which he bore.\n\n\"Great honor has been done to us, men,\" cried he: \"for, of all the army, the prince has chosen us out that we should ride onwards into the lands of Spain to spy upon our enemies. Yet, as there are many of us, and as the service may not be to the liking of all, I pray that those will step forward from the ranks who have the will to follow me.\"\n\nThere was a rustle among the bowmen, but when Sir Nigel looked up at them no man stood forward from his fellows, but the four lines of men stretched unbroken as before. Sir Nigel blinked at them in amazement, and a look of the deepest sorrow shadowed his face.\n\n\"That I should live to see the day!\" he cried, \"What! not one\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"My fair lord,\" whispered Alleyne, \"they have all stepped forward.\"\n\n\"Ah, by Saint Paul! I see how it is with them. I could not think that they would desert me. We start at dawn tomorrow, and ye are to have the horses of Sir Robert Cheney's company. Be ready, I pray ye, at early cock-crow.\"\n\nA buzz of delight burst from the archers, as they broke their ranks and ran hither and thither, whooping and cheering like boys who have news of a holiday. Sir Nigel gazed after them with a smiling face, when a heavy hand fell upon his shoulder.\n\n\"What ho! my knight-errant of Twynham!\" said a voice, \"You are off to Ebro, I hear; and, by the holy fish of Tobias! you must take me under your banner.\"\n\n\"What! Sir Oliver Buttesthorn!\" cried Sir Nigel. \"I had heard that you were come into camp, and had hoped to see you. Glad and proud shall I be to have you with me.\"\n\n\"I have a most particular and weighty reason for wishing to go,\" said the sturdy knight.\n\n\"I can well believe it,\" returned Sir Nigel; \"I have met no man who is quicker to follow where honor leads.\"\n\n\"Nay, it is not for honor that I go, Nigel.\"\n\n\"For what then?\"\n\n\"For pullets.\"\n\n\"Pullets?\"\n\n\"Yes, for the rascal vanguard have cleared every hen from the country-side. It was this very morning that Norbury, my squire, lamed his horse in riding round in quest of one, for we have a bag of truffles, and nought to eat with them. Never have I seen such locusts as this vanguard of ours. Not a pullet shall we see until we are in front of them; so I shall leave my Winchester runagates to the care of the provost-marshal, and I shall hie south with you, Nigel, with my truffles at my saddle-bow.\"\n\n\"Oliver, Oliver, I know you over-well,\" said Sir Nigel, shaking his head, and the two old soldiers rode off together to their pavilion." + }, + { + "title": "HOW SIR NIGEL HAWKED AT AN EAGLE.", + "text": "To the south of Pampeluna in the kingdom of Navarre there stretched a high table-land, rising into bare, sterile hills, brown or gray in color, and strewn with huge boulders of granite. On the Gascon side of the great mountains there had been running streams, meadows, forests, and little nestling villages. Here, on the contrary, were nothing but naked rocks, poor pasture, and savage, stone-strewn wastes. Gloomy defiles or barrancas intersected this wild country with mountain torrents dashing and foaming between their rugged sides. The clatter of waters, the scream of the eagle, and the howling of wolves the only sounds which broke upon the silence in that dreary and inhospitable region.\n\nThrough this wild country it was that Sir Nigel and his Company pushed their way, riding at times through vast defiles where the brown, gnarled cliffs shot up on either side of them, and the sky was but a long winding blue slit between the clustering lines of box which fringed the lips of the precipices; or, again leading their horses along the narrow and rocky paths worn by the muleteers upon the edges of the chasm, where under their very elbows they could see the white streak which marked the gave which foamed a thousand feet below them. So for two days they pushed their way through the wild places of Navarre, past Fuente, over the rapid Ega, through Estella, until upon a winter's evening the mountains fell away from in front of them, and they saw the broad blue Ebro curving betwixt its double line or homesteads and of villages. The fishers of Viana were aroused that night by rough voices speaking in a strange tongue, and ere morning Sir Nigel and his men had ferried the river and were safe upon the land of Spain.\n\nAll the next day they lay in a pine wood near to the town of Logrono, resting their horses and taking counsel as to what they should do. Sir Nigel had with him Sir William Felton, Sir Oliver Buttesthorn, stout old Sir Simon Burley, the Scotch knight-errant, the Earl of Angus, and Sir Richard Causton, all accounted among the bravest knights in the army, together with sixty veteran men-at-arms, and three hundred and twenty archers. Spies had been sent out in the morning, and returned after nightfall to say that the King of Spain was encamped some fourteen miles off in the direction of Burgos, having with him twenty thousand horse and forty-five thousand foot.\n\nA dry-wood fire had been lit, and round this the leaders crouched, the glare beating upon their rugged faces, while the hardy archers lounged and chatted amid the tethered horses, while they munched their scanty provisions.\n\n\"For my part,\" said Sir Simon Burley, \"I am of opinion that we have already done that which we have come for. For do we not now know where the king is, and how great a following he hath, which was the end of our journey.\"\n\n\"True,\" answered Sir William Felton, \"but I have come on this venture because it is a long time since I have broken a spear in war, and, certes, I shall not go back until I have run a course with some cavalier of Spain. Let those go back who will, but I must see more of these Spaniards ere I turn.\"\n\n\"I will not leave you, Sir William,\" returned Sir Simon Burley; \"and yet, as an old soldier and one who hath seen much of war, I cannot but think that it is an ill thing for four hundred men to find themselves between an army of sixty thousand on the one side and a broad river on the other.\"\n\n\"Yet,\" said Sir Richard Causton, \"we cannot for the honor of England go back without a blow struck.\"\n\n\"Nor for the honor of Scotland either,\" cried the Earl of Angus. \"By Saint Andrew! I wish that I may never set eyes upon the water of Leith again, if I pluck my horse's bridle ere I have seen this camp of theirs.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! you have spoken very well,\" said Sir Nigel, \"and I have always heard that there were very worthy gentlemen among the Scots, and fine skirmishing to be had upon their border. Bethink you, Sir Simon, that we have this news from the lips of common spies, who can scarce tell us as much of the enemy and of his forces as the prince would wish to hear.\"\n\n\"You are the leader in this venture, Sir Nigel,\" the other answered, \"and I do but ride under your banner.\"\n\n\"Yet I would fain have your rede and counsel, Sir Simon. But, touching what you say of the river, we can take heed that we shall not have it at the back of us, for the prince hath now advanced to Salvatierra, and thence to Vittoria, so that if we come upon their camp from the further side we can make good our retreat.\"\n\n\"What then would you propose?\" asked Sir Simon, shaking his grizzled head as one who is but half convinced.\n\n\"That we ride forward ere the news reach them that we have crossed the river. In this way we may have sight of their army, and perchance even find occasion for some small deed against them.\"\n\n\"So be it, then,\" said Sir Simon Burley; and the rest of the council having approved, a scanty meal was hurriedly snatched, and the advance resumed under the cover of the darkness. All night they led their horses, stumbling and groping through wild defiles and rugged valleys, following the guidance of a frightened peasant who was strapped by the wrist to Black Simon's stirrup-leather. With the early dawn they found themselves in a black ravine, with others sloping away from it on either side, and the bare brown crags rising in long bleak terraces all round them.\n\n\"If it please you, fair lord,\" said Black Simon, \"this man hath misled us, and since there is no tree upon which we may hang him, it might be well to hurl him over yonder cliff.\"\n\nThe peasant, reading the soldier's meaning in his fierce eyes and harsh accents dropped upon his knees, screaming loudly for mercy.\n\n\"How comes it, dog?\" asked Sir William Felton in Spanish. \"Where is this camp to which you swore that you would lead us?\"\n\n\"By the sweet Virgin! By the blessed Mother of God!\" cried the trembling peasant, \"I swear to you that in the darkness I have myself lost the path.\"\n\n\"Over the cliff with him!\" shouted half a dozen voices; but ere the archers could drag him from the rocks to which he clung Sir Nigel had ridden up and called upon them to stop.\n\n\"How is this, sirs?\" said he. \"As long as the prince doth me the honor to entrust this venture to me, it is for me only to give orders; and, by Saint Paul! I shall be right blithe to go very deeply into the matter with any one to whom my words may give offence. How say you, Sir William? Or you, my Lord of Angus? Or you, Sir Richard?\"\n\n\"Nay, nay, Nigel!\" cried Sir William. \"This base peasant is too small a matter for old comrades to quarrel over. But he hath betrayed us, and certes he hath merited a dog's death.\"\n\n\"Hark ye, fellow,\" said Sir Nigel. \"We give you one more chance to find the path. We are about to gain much honor, Sir William, in this enterprise, and it would be a sorry thing if the first blood shed were that of an unworthy boor. Let us say our morning orisons, and it may chance that ere we finish he may strike upon the track.\"\n\nWith bowed heads and steel caps in hand, the archers stood at their horse's heads, while Sir Simon Burley repeated the Pater, the Ave, and the Credo. Long did Alleyne bear the scene in mind\u2014the knot of knights in their dull leaden-hued armor, the ruddy visage of Sir Oliver, the craggy features of the Scottish earl, the shining scalp of Sir Nigel, with the dense ring of hard, bearded faces and the long brown heads of the horses, all topped and circled by the beetling cliffs. Scarce had the last deep \"amen\" broken from the Company, when, in an instant, there rose the scream of a hundred bugles, with the deep rolling of drums and the clashing of cymbals, all sounding together in one deafening uproar. Knights and archers sprang to arms, convinced that some great host was upon them; but the guide dropped upon his knees and thanked Heaven for its mercies.\n\n\"We have found them, caballeros!\" he cried. \"This is their morning call. If ye will but deign to follow me, I will set them before you ere a man might tell his beads.\"\n\nAs he spoke he scrambled down one of the narrow ravines, and, climbing over a low ridge at the further end, he led them into a short valley with a stream purling down the centre of it and a very thick growth of elder and of box upon either side. Pushing their way through the dense brushwood, they looked out upon a scene which made their hearts beat harder and their breath come faster.\n\nIn front of them there lay a broad plain, watered by two winding streams and covered with grass, stretching away to where, in the furthest distance, the towers of Burgos bristled up against the light blue morning sky. Over all this vast meadow there lay a great city of tents\u2014thousands upon thousands of them, laid out in streets and in squares like a well-ordered town. High silken pavilions or colored marquees, shooting up from among the crowd of meaner dwellings, marked where the great lords and barons of Leon and Castile displayed their standards, while over the white roofs, as far as eye could reach, the waving of ancients, pavons, pensils, and banderoles, with flash of gold and glow of colors, proclaimed that all the chivalry of Iberia were mustered in the plain beneath them. Far off, in the centre of the camp, a huge palace of red and white silk, with the royal arms of Castile waiving from the summit, announced that the gallant Henry lay there in the midst of his warriors.\n\nAs the English adventurers, peeping out from behind their brushwood screen, looked down upon this wondrous sight they could see that the vast army in front of them was already afoot. The first pink light of the rising sun glittered upon the steel caps and breastplates of dense masses of slingers and of crossbowmen, who drilled and marched in the spaces which had been left for their exercise. A thousand columns of smoke reeked up into the pure morning air where the faggots were piled and the camp-kettles already simmering. In the open plain clouds of light horse galloped and swooped with swaying bodies and waving javelins, after the fashion which the Spanish had adopted from their Moorish enemies. All along by the sedgy banks of the rivers long lines of pages led their masters' chargers down to water, while the knights themselves lounged in gayly-dressed groups about the doors of their pavilions, or rode out, with their falcons upon their wrists and their greyhounds behind them, in quest of quail or of leveret.\n\n\"By my hilt! mon gar.!\" whispered Aylward to Alleyne, as the young squire stood with parted lips and wondering eyes, gazing down at the novel scene before him, \"we have been seeking them all night, but now that we have found them I know not what we are to do with them.\"\n\n\"You say sooth, Samkin,\" quoth old Johnston. \"I would that we were upon the far side of Ebro again, for there is neither honor nor profit to be gained here. What say you, Simon?\"\n\n\"By the rood!\" cried the fierce man-at-arms, \"I will see the color of their blood ere I turn my mare's head for the mountains. Am I a child, that I should ride for three days and nought but words at the end of it?\"\n\n\"Well said, my sweet honeysuckle!\" cried Hordle John. \"I am with you, like hilt to blade. Could I but lay hands upon one of those gay prancers yonder, I doubt not that I should have ransom enough from him to buy my mother a new cow.\"\n\n\"A cow!\" said Aylward. \"Say rather ten acres and a homestead on the banks of Avon.\"\n\n\"Say you so? Then, by our Lady! here is for yonder one in the red jerkin!\"\n\nHe was about to push recklessly forward into the open, when Sir Nigel himself darted in front of him, with his hand upon his breast.\n\n\"Back!\" said he. \"Our time is not yet come, and we must lie here until evening. Throw off your jacks and headpieces, least their eyes catch the shine, and tether the horses among the rocks.\"\n\nThe order was swiftly obeyed, and in ten minutes the archers were stretched along by the side of the brook, munching the bread and the bacon which they had brought in their bags, and craning their necks to watch the ever-changing scene beneath them. Very quiet and still they lay, save for a muttered jest or whispered order, for twice during the long morning they heard bugle-calls from amid the hills on either side of them, which showed that they had thrust themselves in between the outposts of the enemy. The leaders sat amongst the box-wood, and took counsel together as to what they should do; while from below there surged up the buzz of voices, the shouting, the neighing of horses, and all the uproar of a great camp.\n\n\"What boots it to wait?\" said Sir William Felton. \"Let us ride down upon their camp ere they discover us.\"\n\n\"And so say I,\" cried the Scottish earl; \"for they do not know that there is any enemy within thirty long leagues of them.\"\n\n\"For my part,\" said Sir Simon Burley, \"I think that it is madness, for you cannot hope to rout this great army; and where are you to go and what are you to do when they have turned upon you? How say you, Sir Oliver Buttesthorn?\"\n\n\"By the apple of Eve!\" cried the fat knight, \"it appears to me that this wind brings a very savory smell of garlic and of onions from their cooking-kettles. I am in favor of riding down upon them at once, if my old friend and comrade here is of the same mind.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said Sir Nigel, \"I have a plan by which we may attempt some small deed upon them, and yet, by the help of God, may be able to draw off again; which, as Sir Simon Burley hath said, would be scarce possible in any other way.\"\n\n\"How then, Sir Nigel?\" asked several voices.\n\n\"We shall lie here all day; for amid this brushwood it is ill for them to see us. Then when evening comes we shall sally out upon them and see if we may not gain some honorable advancement from them.\"\n\n\"But why then rather than now?\"\n\n\"Because we shall have nightfall to cover us when we draw off, so that we may make our way back through the mountains. I would station a score of archers here in the pass, with all our pennons jutting forth from the rocks, and as many nakirs and drums and bugles as we have with us, so that those who follow us in the fading light may think that the whole army of the prince is upon them, and fear to go further. What think you of my plan, Sir Simon?\"\n\n\"By my troth! I think very well of it,\" cried the prudent old commander. \"If four hundred men must needs run a tilt against sixty thousand, I cannot see how they can do it better or more safely.\"\n\n\"And so say I,\" cried Felton, heartily. \"But I wish the day were over, for it will be an ill thing for us if they chance to light upon us.\"\n\nThe words were scarce out of his mouth when there came a clatter of loose stones, the sharp clink of trotting hoofs, and a dark-faced cavalier, mounted upon a white horse, burst through the bushes and rode swiftly down the valley from the end which was farthest from the Spanish camp. Lightly armed, with his vizor open and a hawk perched upon his left wrist, he looked about him with the careless air of a man who is bent wholly upon pleasure, and unconscious of the possibility of danger. Suddenly, however, his eyes lit upon the fierce faces which glared out at him from the brushwood. With a cry of terror, he thrust his spurs into his horse's sides and dashed for the narrow opening of the gorge. For a moment it seemed as though he would have reached it, for he had trampled over or dashed aside the archers who threw themselves in his way; but Hordle John seized him by the foot in his grasp of iron and dragged him from the saddle, while two others caught the frightened horse.\n\n\"Ho, ho!\" roared the great archer. \"How many cows wilt buy my mother, if I set thee free?\"\n\n\"Hush that bull's bellowing!\" cried Sir Nigel impatiently. \"Bring the man here. By St. Paul! it is not the first time that we have met; for, if I mistake not, it is Don Diego Alvarez, who was once at the prince's court.\"\n\n\"It is indeed I,\" said the Spanish knight, speaking in the French tongue, \"and I pray you to pass your sword through my heart, for how can I live\u2014I, a caballero of Castile\u2014after being dragged from my horse by the base hands of a common archer?\"\n\n\"Fret not for that,\" answered Sir Nigel. \"For, in sooth, had he not pulled you down, a dozen cloth-yard shafts had crossed each other in your body.\"\n\n\"By St. James! it were better so than to be polluted by his touch,\" answered the Spaniard, with his black eyes sparkling with rage and hatred. \"I trust that I am now the prisoner of some honorable knight or gentleman.\"\n\n\"You are the prisoner of the man who took you, Sir Diego,\" answered Sir Nigel. \"And I may tell you that better men than either you or I have found themselves before now prisoners in the hands of archers of England.\"\n\n\"What ransom, then, does he demand?\" asked the Spaniard.\n\nBig John scratched his red head and grinned in high delight when the question was propounded to him. \"Tell him,\" said he, \"that I shall have ten cows and a bull too, if it be but a little one. Also a dress of blue sendall for mother and a red one for Joan; with five acres of pasture-land, two scythes, and a fine new grindstone. Likewise a small house, with stalls for the cows, and thirty-six gallons of beer for the thirsty weather.\"\n\n\"Tut, tut!\" cried Sir Nigel, laughing. \"All these things may be had for money; and I think, Don Diego, that five thousand crowns is not too much for so renowned a knight.\"\n\n\"It shall be duly paid him.\"\n\n\"For some days we must keep you with us; and I must crave leave also to use your shield, your armor, and your horse.\"\n\n\"My harness is yours by the law of arms,\" said the Spaniard, gloomily.\n\n\"I do but ask the loan of it. I have need of it this day, but it shall be duly returned to you. Set guards, Aylward, with arrow on string, at either end of the pass; for it may happen that some other cavaliers may visit us ere the time be come.\" All day the little band of Englishmen lay in the sheltered gorge, looking down upon the vast host of their unconscious enemies. Shortly after mid-day, a great uproar of shouting and cheering broke out in the camp, with mustering of men and calling of bugles. Clambering up among the rocks, the companions saw a long rolling cloud of dust along the whole eastern skyline, with the glint of spears and the flutter of pennons, which announced the approach of a large body of cavalry. For a moment a wild hope came upon them that perhaps the prince had moved more swiftly than had been planned, that he had crossed the Ebro, and that this was his vanguard sweeping to the attack.\n\n\"Surely I see the red pile of Chandos at the head of yonder squadron!\" cried Sir Richard Causton, shading his eyes with his hand.\n\n\"Not so,\" answered Sir Simon Burley, who had watched the approaching host with a darkening face. \"It is even as I feared. That is the double eagle of Du Guesclin.\"\n\n\"You say very truly,\" cried the Earl of Angus. \"These are the levies of France, for I can see the ensigns of the Marshal d'Andreghen, with that of the Lord of Antoing and of Briseuil, and of many another from Brittany and Anjou.\"\n\n\"By St. Paul! I am very glad of it,\" said Sir Nigel. \"Of these Spaniards I know nothing; but the French are very worthy gentlemen, and will do what they can for our advancement.\"\n\n\"There are at the least four thousand of them, and all men-at-arms,\" cried Sir William Felton. \"See, there is Bertrand himself, beside his banner, and there is King Henry, who rides to welcome him. Now they all turn and come into the camp together.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the vast throng of Spaniards and of Frenchmen trooped across the plain, with brandished arms and tossing banners. All day long the sound of revelry and of rejoicing from the crowded camp swelled up to the ears of the Englishmen, and they could see the soldiers of the two nations throwing themselves into each other's arms and dancing hand-in-hand round the blazing fires. The sun had sunk behind a cloud-bank in the west before Sir Nigel at last gave word that the men should resume their arms and have their horses ready. He had himself thrown off his armor, and had dressed himself from head to foot in the harness of the captured Spaniard.\n\n\"Sir William,\" said he, \"it is my intention to attempt a small deed, and I ask you therefore that you will lead this outfall upon the camp. For me, I will ride into their camp with my squire and two archers. I pray you to watch me, and to ride forth when I am come among the tents. You will leave twenty men behind here, as we planned this morning, and you will ride back here after you have ventured as far as seems good to you.\"\n\n\"I will do as you order, Nigel; but what is it that you propose to do?\"\n\n\"You will see anon, and indeed it is but a trifling matter. Alleyne, you will come with me, and lead a spare horse by the bridle. I will have the two archers who rode with us through France, for they are trusty men and of stout heart. Let them ride behind us, and let them leave their bows here among the bushes for it is not my wish that they should know that we are Englishmen. Say no word to any whom we may meet, and, if any speak to you, pass on as though you heard them not. Are you ready?\"\n\n\"I am ready, my fair lord,\" said Alleyne.\n\n\"And I,\" \"And I,\" cried Aylward and John.\n\n\"Then the rest I leave to your wisdom, Sir William; and if God sends us fortune we shall meet you again in this gorge ere it be dark.\"\n\nSo saying, Sir Nigel mounted the white horse of the Spanish cavalier, and rode quietly forth from his concealment with his three companions behind him, Alleyne leading his master's own steed by the bridle. So many small parties of French and Spanish horse were sweeping hither and thither that the small band attracted little notice, and making its way at a gentle trot across the plain, they came as far as the camp without challenge or hindrance. On and on they pushed past the endless lines of tents, amid the dense swarms of horsemen and of footmen, until the huge royal pavilion stretched in front of them. They were close upon it when of a sudden there broke out a wild hubbub from a distant portion of the camp, with screams and war-cries and all the wild tumult of battle. At the sound soldiers came rushing from their tents, knights shouted loudly for their squires, and there was mad turmoil on every hand of bewildered men and plunging horses. At the royal tent a crowd of gorgeously dressed servants ran hither and thither in helpless panic for the guard of soldiers who were stationed there had already ridden off in the direction of the alarm. A man-at-arms on either side of the doorway were the sole protectors of the royal dwelling.\n\n\"I have come for the king,\" whispered Sir Nigel; \"and, by Saint Paul! he must back with us or I must bide here.\"\n\nAlleyne and Aylward sprang from their horses, and flew at the two sentries, who were disarmed and beaten down in an instant by so furious and unexpected an attack. Sir Nigel dashed into the royal tent, and was followed by Hordle John as soon as the horses had been secured. From within came wild screamings and the clash of steel, and then the two emerged once more, their swords and forearms reddened with blood, while John bore over his shoulder the senseless body of a man whose gay surcoat, adorned with the lions and towers of Castile, proclaimed him to belong to the royal house. A crowd of white-faced sewers and pages swarmed at their heels, those behind pushing forwards, while the foremost shrank back from the fierce faces and reeking weapons of the adventurers. The senseless body was thrown across the spare horse, the four sprang to their saddles, and away they thundered with loose reins and busy spurs through the swarming camp.\n\nBut confusion and disorder still reigned among the Spaniards for Sir William Felton and his men had swept through half their camp, leaving a long litter of the dead and the dying to mark their course. Uncertain who were their attackers, and unable to tell their English enemies from their newly-arrived Breton allies, the Spanish knights rode wildly hither and thither in aimless fury. The mad turmoil, the mixture of races, and the fading light, were all in favor of the four who alone knew their own purpose among the vast uncertain multitude. Twice ere they reached open ground they had to break their way through small bodies of horses, and once there came a whistle of arrows and singing of stones about their ears; but, still dashing onwards, they shot out from among the tents and found their own comrades retreating for the mountains at no very great distance from them. Another five minutes of wild galloping over the plain, and they were all back in their gorge, while their pursuers fell back before the rolling of drums and blare of trumpets, which seemed to proclaim that the whole army of the prince was about to emerge from the mountain passes.\n\n\"By my soul! Nigel,\" cried Sir Oliver, waving a great boiled ham over his head, \"I have come by something which I may eat with my truffles! I had a hard fight for it, for there were three of them with their mouths open and the knives in their hands, all sitting agape round the table, when I rushed in upon them. How say you, Sir William, will you not try the smack of the famed Spanish swine, though we have but the brook water to wash it down?\"\n\n\"Later, Sir Oliver,\" answered the old soldier, wiping his grimed face. \"We must further into the mountains ere we be in safety. But what have we here, Nigel?\"\n\n\"It is a prisoner whom I have taken, and in sooth, as he came from the royal tent and wears the royal arms upon his jupon, I trust that he is the King of Spain.\"\n\n\"The King of Spain!\" cried the companions, crowding round in amazement.\n\n\"Nay, Sir Nigel,\" said Felton, peering at the prisoner through the uncertain light, \"I have twice seen Henry of Transtamare, and certes this man in no way resembles him.\"\n\n\"Then, by the light of heaven! I will ride back for him,\" cried Sir Nigel.\n\n\"Nay, nay, the camp is in arms, and it would be rank madness. Who are you, fellow?\" he added in Spanish, \"and how is it that you dare to wear the arms of Castile?\"\n\nThe prisoner was bent recovering the consciousness which had been squeezed from him by the grip of Hordle John. \"If it please you,\" he answered, \"I and nine others are the body-squires of the king, and must ever wear his arms, so as to shield him from even such perils as have threatened him this night. The king is at the tent of the brave Du Guesclin, where he will sup to night. But I am a caballero of Aragon, Don Sancho Penelosa, and, though I be no king, I am yet ready to pay a fitting price for my ransom.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! I will not touch your gold,\" cried Sir Nigel. \"Go back to your master and give him greeting from Sir Nigel Loring of Twynham Castle, telling him that I had hoped to make his better acquaintance this night, and that, if I have disordered his tent, it was but in my eagerness to know so famed and courteous a knight. Spur on, comrades! for we must cover many a league ere we can venture to light fire or to loosen girth. I had hoped to ride without this patch to-night, but it seems that I must carry it yet a little longer.\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW SIR NIGEL TOOK THE PATCH FROM HIS EYE.", + "text": "It was a cold, bleak morning in the beginning of March, and the mist was drifting in dense rolling clouds through the passes of the Cantabrian mountains. The Company, who had passed the night in a sheltered gully, were already astir, some crowding round the blazing fires and others romping or leaping over each other's backs for their limbs were chilled and the air biting. Here and there, through the dense haze which surrounded them, there loomed out huge pinnacles and jutting boulders of rock: while high above the sea of vapor there towered up one gigantic peak, with the pink glow of the early sunshine upon its snow-capped head. The ground was wet, the rocks dripping, the grass and evergreens sparkling with beads of moisture; yet the camp was loud with laughter and merriment, for a messenger had ridden in from the prince with words of heart-stirring praise for what they had done, and with orders that they should still abide in the forefront of the army.\n\nRound one of the fires were clustered four or five of the leading men of the archers, cleaning the rust from their weapons, and glancing impatiently from time to time at a great pot which smoked over the blaze. There was Aylward squatting cross-legged in his shirt, while he scrubbed away at his chain-mail brigandine, whistling loudly the while. On one side of him sat old Johnston, who was busy in trimming the feathers of some arrows to his liking; and on the other Hordle John, who lay with his great limbs all asprawl, and his headpiece balanced upon his uplifted foot. Black Simon of Norwich crouched amid the rocks, crooning an Eastland ballad to himself, while he whetted his sword upon a flat stone which lay across his knees; while beside him sat Alleyne Edricson, and Norbury, the silent squire of Sir Oliver, holding out their chilled hands towards the crackling faggots.\n\n\"Cast on another culpon, John, and stir the broth with thy sword-sheath,\" growled Johnston, looking anxiously for the twentieth time at the reeking pot.\n\n\"By my hilt!\" cried Aylward, \"now that John hath come by this great ransom, he will scarce abide the fare of poor archer lads. How say you, camarade? When you see Hordle once more, there will be no penny ale and fat bacon, but Gascon wines and baked meats every day of the seven.\"\n\n\"I know not about that,\" said John, kicking his helmet up into the air and catching it in his hand. \"I do but know that whether the broth be ready or no, I am about to dip this into it.\"\n\n\"It simmers and it boils,\" cried Johnston, pushing his hard-lined face through the smoke. In an instant the pot had been plucked from the blaze, and its contents had been scooped up in half a dozen steel headpieces, which were balanced betwixt their owners' knees, while, with spoon and gobbet of bread, they devoured their morning meal.\n\n\"It is ill weather for bows,\" remarked John at last, when, with a long sigh, he drained the last drop from his helmet. \"My strings are as limp as a cow's tail this morning.\"\n\n\"You should rub them with water glue,\" quoth Johnston. \"You remember, Samkin, that it was wetter than this on the morning of Crecy, and yet I cannot call to mind that there was aught amiss with our strings.\"\n\n\"It is in my thoughts,\" said Black Simon, still pensively grinding his sword, \"that we may have need of your strings ere sundown. I dreamed of the red cow last night.\"\n\n\"And what is this red cow, Simon?\" asked Alleyne.\n\n\"I know not, young sir; but I can only say that on the eve of Cadsand, and on the eve of Crecy, and on the eve of Nogent, I dreamed of a red cow; and now the dream has come upon me again, so I am now setting a very keen edge to my blade.\"\n\n\"Well said, old war-dog!\" cried Aylward. \"By my hilt! I pray that your dream may come true, for the prince hath not set us out here to drink broth or to gather whortle-berries. One more fight, and I am ready to hang up my bow, marry a wife, and take to the fire corner. But how now, Robin? Whom is it that you seek?\"\n\n\"The Lord Loring craves your attendance in his tent,\" said a young archer to Alleyne.\n\nThe squire rose and proceeded to the pavilion, where he found the knight seated upon a cushion, with his legs crossed in front of him and a broad ribbon of parchment laid across his knees, over which he was poring with frowning brows and pursed lips.\n\n\"It came this morning by the prince's messenger,\" said he, \"and was brought from England by Sir John Fallislee, who is new come from Sussex. What make you of this upon the outer side?\"\n\n\"It is fairly and clearly written,\" Alleyne answered, \"and it signifies To Sir Nigel Loring, Knight Constable of Twynham Castle, by the hand of Christopher, the servant of God at the Priory of Christchurch.\"\n\n\"So I read it,\" said Sir Nigel. \"Now I pray you to read what is set forth within.\"\n\nAlleyne turned to the letter, and, as his eyes rested upon it, his face turned pale and a cry of surprise and grief burst from his lips.\n\n\"What then?\" asked the knight, peering up at him anxiously. \"There is nought amiss with the Lady Mary or with the Lady Maude?\"\n\n\"It is my brother\u2014my poor unhappy brother!\" cried Alleyne, with his hand to his brow. \"He is dead.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul! I have never heard that he had shown so much love for you that you should mourn him so.\"\n\n\"Yet he was my brother\u2014the only kith or kin that I had upon earth. Mayhap he had cause to be bitter against me, for his land was given to the abbey for my upbringing. Alas! alas! and I raised my staff against him when last we met! He has been slain\u2014and slain, I fear, amidst crime and violence.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" said Sir Nigel. \"Read on, I pray you.\"\n\n\"'God be with thee, my honored lord, and have thee in his holy keeping. The Lady Loring hath asked me to set down in writing what hath befallen at Twynham, and all that concerns the death of thy ill neighbor the Socman of Minstead. For when ye had left us, this evil man gathered around him all outlaws, villeins, and masterless men, until they were come to such a force that they slew and scattered the king's men who went against them. Then, coming forth from the woods, they laid siege to thy castle, and for two days they girt us in and shot hard against us, with such numbers as were a marvel to see. Yet the Lady Loring held the place stoutly, and on the second day the Socman was slain\u2014by his own men, as some think\u2014so that we were delivered from their hands; for which praise be to all the saints, and more especially to the holy Anselm, upon whose feast it came to pass. The Lady Loring, and the Lady Maude, thy fair daughter, are in good health; and so also am I, save for an imposthume of the toe-joint, which hath been sent me for my sins. May all the saints preserve thee!'\"\n\n\"It was the vision of the Lady Tiphaine,\" said Sir Nigel, after a pause. \"Marked you not how she said that the leader was one with a yellow beard, and how he fell before the gate. But how came it, Alleyne, that this woman, to whom all things are as crystal, and who hath not said one word which has not come to pass, was yet so led astray as to say that your thoughts turned to Twynham Castle even more than my own?\"\n\n\"My fair lord,\" said Alleyne, with a flush on his weather-stained cheeks, \"the Lady Tiphaine may have spoken sooth when she said it; for Twynham Castle is in my heart by day and in my dreams by night.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" cried Sir Nigel, with a sidelong glance.\n\n\"Yes, my fair lord; for indeed I love your daughter, the Lady Maude; and, unworthy as I am, I would give my heart's blood to serve her.\"\n\n\"By St. Paul! Edricson,\" said the knight coldly, arching his eyebrows, \"you aim high in this matter. Our blood is very old.\"\n\n\"And mine also is very old,\" answered the squire.\n\n\"And the Lady Maude is our single child. All our name and lands centre upon her.\"\n\n\"Alas! that I should say it, but I also am now the only Edricson.\"\n\n\"And why have I not heard this from you before, Alleyne? In sooth, I think that you have used me ill.\"\n\n\"Nay, my fair lord, say not so; for I know not whether your daughter loves me, and there is no pledge between us.\"\n\nSir Nigel pondered for a few moments, and then burst out a-laughing. \"By St. Paul!\" said he, \"I know not why I should mix in the matter; for I have ever found that the Lady Maude was very well able to look to her own affairs. Since first she could stamp her little foot, she hath ever been able to get that for which she craved; and if she set her heart on thee, Alleyne, and thou on her, I do not think that this Spanish king, with his three-score thousand men, could hold you apart. Yet this I will say, that I would see you a full knight ere you go to my daughter with words of love. I have ever said that a brave lance should wed her; and, by my soul! Edricson, if God spare you, I think that you will acquit yourself well. But enough of such trifles, for we have our work before us, and it will be time to speak of this matter when we see the white cliffs of England once more. Go to Sir William Felton, I pray you, and ask him to come hither, for it is time that we were marching. There is no pass at the further end of the valley, and it is a perilous place should an enemy come upon us.\"\n\nAlleyne delivered his message, and then wandered forth from the camp, for his mind was all in a whirl with this unexpected news, and with his talk with Sir Nigel. Sitting upon a rock, with his burning brow resting upon his hands, he thought of his brother, of their quarrel, of the Lady Maude in her bedraggled riding-dress, of the gray old castle, of the proud pale face in the armory, and of the last fiery words with which she had sped him on his way. Then he was but a penniless, monk-bred lad, unknown and unfriended. Now he was himself Socman of Minstead, the head of an old stock, and the lord of an estate which, if reduced from its former size, was still ample to preserve the dignity of his family. Further, he had become a man of experience, was counted brave among brave men, had won the esteem and confidence of her father, and, above all, had been listened to by him when he told him the secret of his love. As to the gaining of knighthood, in such stirring times it was no great matter for a brave squire of gentle birth to aspire to that honor. He would leave his bones among these Spanish ravines, or he would do some deed which would call the eyes of men upon him.\n\nAlleyne was still seated on the rock, his griefs and his joys drifting swiftly over his mind like the shadow of clouds upon a sunlit meadow, when of a sudden he became conscious of a low, deep sound which came booming up to him through the fog. Close behind him he could hear the murmur of the bowmen, the occasional bursts of hoarse laughter, and the champing and stamping of their horses. Behind it all, however, came that low-pitched, deep-toned hum, which seemed to come from every quarter and to fill the whole air. In the old monastic days he remembered to have heard such a sound when he had walked out one windy night at Bucklershard, and had listened to the long waves breaking upon the shingly shore. Here, however, was neither wind nor sea, and yet the dull murmur rose ever louder and stronger out of the heart of the rolling sea of vapor. He turned and ran to the camp, shouting an alarm at the top of his voice.\n\nIt was but a hundred paces, and yet ere he had crossed it every bowman was ready at his horse's head, and the group of knights were out and listening intently to the ominous sound.\n\n\"It is a great body of horse,\" said Sir William Felton, \"and they are riding very swiftly hitherwards.\"\n\n\"Yet they must be from the prince's army,\" remarked Sir Richard Causton, \"for they come from the north.\"\n\n\"Nay,\" said the Earl of Angus, \"it is not so certain; for the peasant with whom we spoke last night said that it was rumored that Don Tello, the Spanish king's brother, had ridden with six thousand chosen men to beat up the prince's camp. It may be that on their backward road they have come this way.\"\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" cried Sir Nigel, \"I think that it is even as you say, for that same peasant had a sour face and a shifting eye, as one who bore us little good will. I doubt not that he has brought these cavaliers upon us.\"\n\n\"But the mist covers us,\" said Sir Simon Burley. \"We have yet time to ride through the further end of the pass.\"\n\n\"Were we a troop of mountain goats we might do so,\" answered Sir William Felton, \"but it is not to be passed by a company of horsemen. If these be indeed Don Tello and his men, then we must bide where we are, and do what we can to make them rue the day that they found us in their path.\"\n\n\"Well spoken, William!\" cried Sir Nigel, in high delight. \"If there be so many as has been said, then there will be much honor to be gained from them and every hope of advancement. But the sound has ceased, and I fear that they have gone some other way.\"\n\n\"Or mayhap they have come to the mouth of the gorge, and are marshalling their ranks. Hush and hearken! for they are no great way from us.\"\n\nThe Company stood peering into the dense fog-wreath, amidst a silence so profound that the dripping of the water from the rocks and the breathing of the horses grew loud upon the ear. Suddenly from out the sea of mist came the shrill sound of a neigh, followed by a long blast upon a bugle.\n\n\"It is a Spanish call, my fair lord,\" said Black Simon. \"It is used by their prickers and huntsmen when the beast hath not fled, but is still in its lair.\"\n\n\"By my faith!\" said Sir Nigel, smiling, \"if they are in a humor for venerie we may promise them some sport ere they sound the mort over us. But there is a hill in the centre of the gorge on which we might take our stand.\"\n\n\"I marked it yesternight,\" said Felton, \"and no better spot could be found for our purpose, for it is very steep at the back. It is but a bow-shot to the left, and, indeed, I can see the shadow of it.\"\n\nThe whole Company, leading their horses, passed across to the small hill which loomed in front of them out of the mist. It was indeed admirably designed for defence, for it sloped down in front, all jagged and boulder-strewn, while it fell away in a sheer cliff of a hundred feet or more. On the summit was a small uneven plateau, with a stretch across of a hundred paces, and a depth of half as much again.\n\n\"Unloose the horses!\" said Sir Nigel. \"We have no space for them, and if we hold our own we shall have horses and to spare when this day's work is done. Nay, keep yours, my fair sirs, for we may have work for them. Aylward, Johnston, let your men form a harrow on either side of the ridge. Sir Oliver and you, my Lord Angus, I give you the right wing, and the left to you, Sir Simon, and to you, Sir Richard Causton. I and Sir William Felton will hold the centre with our men-at-arms. Now order the ranks, and fling wide the banners, for our souls are God's and our bodies the king's, and our swords for Saint George and for England!\"\n\nSir Nigel had scarcely spoken when the mist seemed to thin in the valley, and to shred away into long ragged clouds which trailed from the edges of the cliffs. The gorge in which they had camped was a mere wedge-shaped cleft among the hills, three-quarters of a mile deep, with the small rugged rising upon which they stood at the further end, and the brown crags walling it in on three sides. As the mist parted, and the sun broke through, it gleamed and shimmered with dazzling brightness upon the armor and headpieces of a vast body of horsemen who stretched across the barranca from one cliff to the other, and extended backwards until their rear guard were far out upon the plain beyond. Line after line, and rank after rank, they choked the neck of the valley with a long vista of tossing pennons, twinkling lances, waving plumes and streaming banderoles, while the curvets and gambades of the chargers lent a constant motion and shimmer to the glittering, many-colored mass. A yell of exultation, and a forest of waving steel through the length and breadth of their column, announced that they could at last see their entrapped enemies, while the swelling notes of a hundred bugles and drums, mixed with the clash of Moorish cymbals, broke forth into a proud peal of martial triumph. Strange it was to these gallant and sparkling cavaliers of Spain to look upon this handful of men upon the hill, the thin lines of bowmen, the knots of knights and men-at-arms with armor rusted and discolored from long service, and to learn that these were indeed the soldiers whose fame and prowess had been the camp-fire talk of every army in Christendom. Very still and silent they stood, leaning upon their bows, while their leaders took counsel together in front of them. No clang of bugle rose from their stern ranks, but in the centre waved the leopards of England, on the right the ensign of their Company with the roses of Loring, and on the left, over three score of Welsh bowmen, there floated the red banner of Merlin with the boars'-heads of the Buttesthorns. Gravely and sedately they stood beneath the morning sun waiting for the onslaught of their foemen.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" said Sir Nigel, gazing with puckered eye down the valley, \"there appear to be some very worthy people among them. What is this golden banner which waves upon the left?\"\n\n\"It is the ensign of the Knights of Calatrava,\" answered Felton.\n\n\"And the other upon the right?\"\n\n\"It marks the Knights of Santiago, and I see by his flag that their grand-master rides at their head. There too is the banner of Castile amid yonder sparkling squadron which heads the main battle. There are six thousand men-at-arms with ten squadrons of slingers as far as I may judge their numbers.\"\n\n\"There are Frenchmen among them, my fair lord,\" remarked Black Simon. \"I can see the pennons of De Couvette, De Brieux, Saint Pol, and many others who struck in against us for Charles of Blois.\"\n\n\"You are right,\" said Sir William, \"for I can also see them. There is much Spanish blazonry also, if I could but read it. Don Diego, you know the arms of your own land. Who are they who have done us this honor?\"\n\nThe Spanish prisoner looked with exultant eyes upon the deep and serried ranks of his countrymen.\n\n\"By Saint James!\" said he, \"if ye fall this day ye fall by no mean hands, for the flower of the knighthood of Castile ride under the banner of Don Tello, with the chivalry of Asturias, Toledo, Leon, Cordova, Galicia, and Seville. I see the guidons of Albornez, Cacorla, Rodriguez, Tavora, with the two great orders, and the knights of France and of Aragon. If you will take my rede you will come to a composition with them, for they will give you such terms as you have given me.\"\n\n\"Nay, by Saint Paul! it were pity if so many brave men were drawn together, and no little deed of arms to come of it. Ha! William, they advance upon us; and, by my soul! it is a sight that is worth coming over the seas to see.\"\n\nAs he spoke, the two wings of the Spanish host, consisting of the Knights of Calatrava on the one side and of Santiago upon the other, came swooping swiftly down the valley, while the main body followed more slowly behind. Five hundred paces from the English the two great bodies of horse crossed each other, and, sweeping round in a curve, retired in feigned confusion towards their centre. Often in bygone wars had the Moors tempted the hot-blooded Spaniards from their places of strength by such pretended flights, but there were men upon the hill to whom every ruse an trick of war were as their daily trade and practice. Again and even nearer came the rallying Spaniards, and again with cry of fear and stooping bodies they swerved off to right and left, but the English still stood stolid and observant among their rocks. The vanguard halted a long bow shot from the hill, and with waving spears and vaunting shouts challenged their enemies to come forth, while two cavaliers, pricking forward from the glittering ranks, walked their horses slowly between the two arrays with targets braced and lances in rest like the challengers in a tourney.\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" cried Sir Nigel, with his one eye glowing like an ember, \"these appear to be two very worthy and debonair gentlemen. I do not call to mind when I have seen any people who seemed of so great a heart and so high of enterprise. We have our horses, Sir William: shall we not relieve them of any vow which they may have upon their souls?\"\n\nFelton's reply was to bound upon his charger, and to urge it down the slope, while Sir Nigel followed not three spears'-lengths behind him. It was a rugged course, rocky and uneven, yet the two knights, choosing their men, dashed onwards at the top of their speed, while the gallant Spaniards flew as swiftly to meet them. The one to whom Felton found himself opposed was a tall stripling with a stag's head upon his shield, while Sir Nigel's man was broad and squat with plain steel harness, and a pink and white torse bound round his helmet. The first struck Felton on the target with such force as to split it from side to side, but Sir William's lance crashed through the camail which shielded the Spaniard's throat, and he fell, screaming hoarsely, to the ground. Carried away by the heat and madness of fight, the English knight never drew rein, but charged straight on into the array of the knights of Calatrava. Long time the silent ranks upon the hill could see a swirl and eddy deep down in the heart of the Spanish column, with a circle of rearing chargers and flashing blades. Here and there tossed the white plume of the English helmet, rising and falling like the foam upon a wave, with the fierce gleam and sparkle ever circling round it until at last it had sunk from view, and another brave man had turned from war to peace.\n\nSir Nigel, meanwhile, had found a foeman worthy of his steel for his opponent was none other than Sebastian Gomez, the picked lance of the monkish Knights of Santiago, who had won fame in a hundred bloody combats with the Moors of Andalusia. So fierce was their meeting that their spears shivered up to the very grasp, and the horses reared backwards until it seemed that they must crash down upon their riders. Yet with consummate horsemanship they both swung round in a long curvet, and then plucking out their swords they lashed at each other like two lusty smiths hammering upon an anvil. The chargers spun round each other, biting and striking, while the two blades wheeled and whizzed and circled in gleams of dazzling light. Cut, parry, and thrust followed so swiftly upon each other that the eye could not follow them, until at last coming thigh to thigh, they cast their arms around each other and rolled off their saddles to the ground. The heavier Spaniard threw himself upon his enemy, and pinning him down beneath him raised his sword to slay him, while a shout of triumph rose from the ranks of his countrymen. But the fatal blow never fell, for even as his arm quivered before descending, the Spaniard gave a shudder, and stiffening himself rolled heavily over upon his side, with the blood gushing from his armpit and from the slit of his vizor. Sir Nigel sprang to his feet with his bloody dagger in his left hand and gazed down upon his adversary, but that fatal and sudden stab in the vital spot, which the Spaniard had exposed by raising his arm, had proved instantly mortal. The Englishman leaped upon his horse and made for the hill, at the very instant that a yell of rage from a thousand voices and the clang of a score of bugles announced the Spanish onset.\n\nBut the islanders were ready and eager for the encounter. With feet firmly planted, their sleeves rolled back to give free play to their muscles, their long yellow bowstaves in their left hands, and their quivers slung to the front, they had waited in the four-deep harrow formation which gave strength to their array, and yet permitted every man to draw his arrow freely without harm to those in front. Aylward and Johnston had been engaged in throwing light tufts of grass into the air to gauge the wind force, and a hoarse whisper passed down the ranks from the file-leaders to the men, with scraps of advice and admonition.\n\n\"Do not shoot outside the fifteen-score paces,\" cried Johnston. \"We may need all our shafts ere we have done with them.\"\n\n\"Better to overshoot than to undershoot,\" added Aylward. \"Better to strike the rear guard than to feather a shaft in the earth.\"\n\n\"Loose quick and sharp when they come,\" added another. \"Let it be the eye to the string, the string to the shaft, and the shaft to the mark. By Our Lady! their banners advance, and we must hold our ground now if ever we are to see Southampton Water again.\"\n\nAlleyne, standing with his sword drawn amidst the archers, saw a long toss and heave of the glittering squadrons. Then the front ranks began to surge slowly forward, to trot, to canter, to gallop, and in an instant the whole vast array was hurtling onward, line after line, the air full of the thunder of their cries, the ground shaking with the beat of their hoots, the valley choked with the rushing torrent of steel, topped by the waving plumes, the slanting spears and the fluttering banderoles. On they swept over the level and up to the slope, ere they met the blinding storm of the English arrows. Down went the whole ranks in a whirl of mad confusion, horses plunging and kicking, bewildered men falling, rising, staggering on or back, while ever new lines of horsemen came spurring through the gaps and urged their chargers up the fatal slope. All around him Alleyne could hear the stern, short orders of the master-bowmen, while the air was filled with the keen twanging of the strings and the swish and patter of the shafts. Right across the foot of the hill there had sprung up a long wall of struggling horses and stricken men, which ever grew and heightened as fresh squadrons poured on the attack. One young knight on a gray jennet leaped over his fallen comrades and galloped swiftly up the hill, shrieking loudly upon Saint James, ere he fell within a spear-length of the English line, with the feathers of arrows thrusting out from every crevice and joint of his armor. So for five long minutes the gallant horsemen of Spain and of France strove ever and again to force a passage, until the wailing note of a bugle called them back, and they rode slowly out of bow-shot, leaving their best and their bravest in the ghastly, blood-mottled heap behind them.\n\nBut there was little rest for the victors. Whilst the knights had charged them in front the slingers had crept round upon either flank and had gained a footing upon the cliffs and behind the outlying rocks. A storm of stones broke suddenly upon the defenders, who, drawn up in lines upon the exposed summit, offered a fair mark to their hidden foes. Johnston, the old archer, was struck upon the temple and fell dead without a groan, while fifteen of his bowmen and six of the men-at-arms were struck down at the same moment. The others lay on their faces to avoid the deadly hail, while at each side of the plateau a fringe of bowmen exchanged shots with the slingers and crossbowmen among the rocks, aiming mainly at those who had swarmed up the cliffs, and bursting into laughter and cheers when a well-aimed shaft brought one of their opponents toppling down from his lofty perch.\n\n\"I think, Nigel,\" said Sir Oliver, striding across to the little knight, \"that we should all acquit ourselves better had we our none-meat, for the sun is high in the heaven.\"\n\n\"By Saint Paul!\" quoth Sir Nigel, plucking the patch from his eye, \"I think that I am now clear of my vow, for this Spanish knight was a person from whom much honor might be won. Indeed, he was a very worthy gentleman, of good courage, and great hardiness, and it grieves me that he should have come by such a hurt. As to what you say of food, Oliver, it is not to be thought of, for we have nothing with us upon the hill.\"\n\n\"Nigel!\" cried Sir Simon Burley, hurrying up with consternation upon his face, \"Aylward tells me that there are not ten-score arrows left in all their sheaves. See! they are springing from their horses, and cutting their sollerets that they may rush upon us. Might we not even now make a retreat?\"\n\n\"My soul will retreat from my body first!\" cried the little knight. \"Here I am, and here I bide, while God gives me strength to lift a sword.\"\n\n\"And so say I!\" shouted Sir Oliver, throwing his mace high into the air and catching it again by the handle.\n\n\"To your arms, men!\" roared Sir Nigel. \"Shoot while you may, and then out sword, and let us live or die together!\"" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE WHITE COMPANY CAME TO BE DISBANDED.", + "text": "Then up rose from the hill in the rugged Cantabrian valley a sound such as had not been heard in those parts before, nor was again, until the streams which rippled amid the rocks had been frozen by over four hundred winters and thawed by as many returning springs. Deep and full and strong it thundered down the ravine, the fierce battle-call of a warrior race, the last stern welcome to whoso should join with them in that world-old game where the stake is death. Thrice it swelled forth and thrice it sank away, echoing and reverberating amidst the crags. Then, with set faces, the Company rose up among the storm of stones, and looked down upon the thousands who sped swiftly up the slope against them. Horse and spear had been set aside, but on foot, with sword and battle-axe, their broad shields slung in front of them, the chivalry of Spain rushed to the attack.\n\nAnd now arose a struggle so fell, so long, so evenly sustained, that even now the memory of it is handed down amongst the Cantabrian mountaineers and the ill-omened knoll is still pointed out by fathers to their children as the \"Altura de los Inglesos,\" where the men from across the sea fought the great fight with the knights of the south. The last arrow was quickly shot, nor could the slingers hurl their stones, so close were friend and foe. From side to side stretched the thin line of the English, lightly armed and quick-footed, while against it stormed and raged the pressing throng of fiery Spaniards and of gallant Bretons. The clink of crossing sword-blades, the dull thudding of heavy blows, the panting and gasping of weary and wounded men, all rose together in a wild, long-drawn note, which swelled upwards to the ears of the wondering peasants who looked down from the edges of the cliffs upon the swaying turmoil of the battle beneath them. Back and forward reeled the leopard banner, now borne up the slope by the rush and weight of the onslaught, now pushing downwards again as Sir Nigel, Burley, and Black Simon with their veteran men-at arms, flung themselves madly into the fray. Alleyne, at his lord's right hand, found himself swept hither and thither in the desperate struggle, exchanging savage thrusts one instant with a Spanish cavalier, and the next torn away by the whirl of men and dashed up against some new antagonist. To the right Sir Oliver, Aylward, Hordle John, and the bowmen of the Company fought furiously against the monkish Knights of Santiago, who were led up the hill by their prior\u2014a great, deep-chested man, who wore a brown monastic habit over his suit of mail. Three archers he slew in three giant strokes, but Sir Oliver flung his arms round him, and the two, staggering and straining, reeled backwards and fell, locked in each other's grasp, over the edge of the steep cliff which flanked the hill. In vain his knights stormed and raved against the thin line which barred their path: the sword of Aylward and the great axe of John gleamed in the forefront of the battle and huge jagged pieces of rock, hurled by the strong arms of the bowmen, crashed and hurtled amid their ranks. Slowly they gave back down the hill, the archers still hanging upon their skirts, with a long litter of writhing and twisted figures to mark the course which they had taken. At the same instant the Welshmen upon the left, led on by the Scotch earl, had charged out from among the rocks which sheltered them, and by the fury of their outfall had driven the Spaniards in front of them in headlong flight down the hill. In the centre only things seemed to be going ill with the defenders. Black Simon was down\u2014dying, as he would wish to have died, like a grim old wolf in its lair with a ring of his slain around him. Twice Sir Nigel had been overborne, and twice Alleyne had fought over him until he had staggered to his feet once more. Burley lay senseless, stunned by a blow from a mace, and half of the men-at-arms lay littered upon the ground around him. Sir Nigel's shield was broken, his crest shorn, his armor cut and smashed, and the vizor torn from his helmet; yet he sprang hither and thither with light foot and ready hand, engaging two Bretons and a Spaniard at the same instant\u2014thrusting, stooping, dashing in, springing out\u2014while Alleyne still fought by his side, stemming with a handful of men the fierce tide which surged up against them. Yet it would have fared ill with them had not the archers from either side closed in upon the flanks of the attackers, and pressed them very slowly and foot by foot down the long slope, until they were on the plain once more, where their fellows were already rallying for a fresh assault.\n\nBut terrible indeed was the cost at which the last had been repelled. Of the three hundred and seventy men who had held the crest, one hundred and seventy-two were left standing, many of whom were sorely wounded and weak from loss of blood. Sir Oliver Buttesthorn, Sir Richard Causton, Sir Simon Burley, Black Simon, Johnston, a hundred and fifty archers, and forty-seven men-at-arms had fallen, while the pitiless hail of stones was already whizzing and piping once more about their ears, threatening every instant to further reduce their numbers.\n\nSir Nigel looked about him at his shattered ranks, and his face flushed with a soldier's pride.\n\n\"By St. Paul!\" he cried, \"I have fought in many a little bickering, but never one that I would be more loth to have missed than this. But you are wounded, Alleyne?\"\n\n\"It is nought,\" answered his squire, stanching the blood which dripped from a sword-cut across his forehead.\n\n\"These gentlemen of Spain seem to be most courteous and worthy people. I see that they are already forming to continue this debate with us. Form up the bowmen two deep instead of four. By my faith! some very brave men have gone from among us. Aylward, you are a trusty soldier, for all that your shoulder has never felt accolade, nor your heels worn the gold spurs. Do you take charge of the right; I will hold the centre, and you, my Lord of Angus, the left.\"\n\n\"Ho! for Sir Samkin Aylward!\" cried a rough voice among the archers, and a roar of laughter greeted their new leader.\n\n\"By my hilt!\" said the old bowman, \"I never thought to lead a wing in a stricken field. Stand close, camarades, for, by these finger-bones! we must play the man this day.\"\n\n\"Come hither, Alleyne,\" said Sir Nigel, walking back to the edge of the cliff which formed the rear of their position. \"And you, Norbury,\" he continued, beckoning to the squire of Sir Oliver, \"do you also come here.\"\n\nThe two squires hurried across to him, and the three stood looking down into the rocky ravine which lay a hundred and fifty feet beneath them.\n\n\"The prince must hear of how things are with us,\" said the knight. \"Another onfall we may withstand, but they are many and we are few, so that the time must come when we can no longer form line across the hill. Yet if help were brought us we might hold the crest until it comes. See yonder horses which stray among the rocks beneath us?\"\n\n\"I see them, my fair lord.\"\n\n\"And see yonder path which winds along the hill upon the further end of the valley?\"\n\n\"I see it.\"\n\n\"Were you on those horses, and riding up yonder track, steep and rough as it is, I think that ye might gain the valley beyond. Then on to the prince, and tell him how we fare.\"\n\n\"But, my fair lord, how can we hope to reach the horses?\" asked Norbury.\n\n\"Ye cannot go round to them, for they would be upon ye ere ye could come to them. Think ye that ye have heart enough to clamber down this cliff?\"\n\n\"Had we but a rope.\"\n\n\"There is one here. It is but one hundred feet long, and for the rest ye must trust to God and to your fingers. Can you try it, Alleyne?\"\n\n\"With all my heart, my dear lord, but how can I leave you in such a strait?\"\n\n\"Nay, it is to serve me that ye go. And you, Norbury?\"\n\nThe silent squire said nothing, but he took up the rope, and, having examined it, he tied one end firmly round a projecting rock. Then he cast off his breastplate, thigh pieces, and greaves, while Alleyne followed his example.\n\n\"Tell Chandos, or Calverley, or Knolles, should the prince have gone forward,\" cried Sir Nigel. \"Now may God speed ye, for ye are brave and worthy men.\"\n\nIt was, indeed, a task which might make the heart of the bravest sink within him. The thin cord dangling down the face of the brown cliff seemed from above to reach little more than half-way down it. Beyond stretched the rugged rock, wet and shining, with a green tuft here and there thrusting out from it, but little sign of ridge or foothold. Far below the jagged points of the boulders bristled up, dark and menacing. Norbury tugged thrice with all his strength upon the cord, and then lowered himself over the edge, while a hundred anxious faces peered over at him as he slowly clambered downwards to the end of the rope. Twice he stretched out his foot, and twice he failed to reach the point at which he aimed, but even as he swung himself for a third effort a stone from a sling buzzed like a wasp from amid the rocks and struck him full upon the side of his head. His grasp relaxed, his feet slipped, and in an instant he was a crushed and mangled corpse upon the sharp ridges beneath him.\n\n\"If I have no better fortune,\" said Alleyne, leading Sir Nigel aside. \"I pray you, my dear lord, that you will give my humble service to the Lady Maude, and say to her that I was ever her true servant and most unworthy cavalier.\"\n\nThe old knight said no word, but he put a hand on either shoulder, and kissed his squire, with the tears shining in his eyes. Alleyne sprang to the rope, and sliding swiftly down, soon found himself at its extremity. From above it seemed as though rope and cliff were well-nigh touching, but now, when swinging a hundred feet down, the squire found that he could scarce reach the face of the rock with his foot, and that it was as smooth as glass, with no resting-place where a mouse could stand. Some three feet lower, however, his eye lit upon a long jagged crack which slanted downwards, and this he must reach if he would save not only his own poor life, but that of the eight-score men above him. Yet it were madness to spring for that narrow slit with nought but the wet, smooth rock to cling to. He swung for a moment, full of thought, and even as he hung there another of the hellish stones sang through his curls, and struck a chip from the face of the cliff. Up he clambered a few feet, drew up the loose end after him, unslung his belt, held on with knee and with elbow while he spliced the long, tough leathern belt to the end of the cord: then lowering himself as far as he could go, he swung backwards and forwards until his hand reached the crack, when he left the rope and clung to the face of the cliff. Another stone struck him on the side, and he heard a sound like a breaking stick, with a keen stabbing pain which shot through his chest. Yet it was no time now to think of pain or ache. There was his lord and his eight-score comrades, and they must be plucked from the jaws of death. On he clambered, with his hand shuffling down the long sloping crack, sometimes bearing all his weight upon his arms, at others finding some small shelf or tuft on which to rest his foot. Would he never pass over that fifty feet? He dared not look down and could but grope slowly onwards, his face to the cliff, his fingers clutching, his feet scraping and feeling for a support. Every vein and crack and mottling of that face of rock remained forever stamped upon his memory. At last, however, his foot came upon a broad resting-place and he ventured to cast a glance downwards. Thank God! he had reached the highest of those fatal pinnacles upon which his comrade had fallen. Quickly now he sprang from rock to rock until his feet were on the ground, and he had his hand stretched out for the horse's rein, when a sling-stone struck him on the head, and he dropped senseless upon the ground.\n\nAn evil blow it was for Alleyne, but a worse one still for him who struck it. The Spanish slinger, seeing the youth lie slain, and judging from his dress that he was no common man, rushed forward to plunder him, knowing well that the bowmen above him had expended their last shaft. He was still three paces, however, from his victim's side when John upon the cliff above plucked up a huge boulder, and, poising it for an instant, dropped it with fatal aim upon the slinger beneath him. It struck upon his shoulder, and hurled him, crushed and screaming, to the ground, while Alleyne, recalled to his senses by these shrill cries in his very ear, staggered on to his feet, and gazed wildly about him. His eyes fell upon the horses, grazing upon the scanty pasture, and in an instant all had come back to him\u2014his mission, his comrades, the need for haste. He was dizzy, sick, faint, but he must not die, and he must not tarry, for his life meant many lives that day. In an instant he was in his saddle and spurring down the valley. Loud rang the swift charger's hoofs over rock and reef, while the fire flew from the stroke of iron, and the loose stones showered up behind him. But his head was whirling round, the blood was gushing from his brow, his temple, his mouth. Ever keener and sharper was the deadly pain which shot like a red-hot arrow through his side. He felt that his eye was glazing, his senses slipping from him, his grasp upon the reins relaxing. Then with one mighty effort, he called up all his strength for a single minute. Stooping down, he loosened the stirrup-straps, bound his knees tightly to his saddle-flaps, twisted his hands in the bridle, and then, putting the gallant horse's head for the mountain path, he dashed the spurs in and fell forward fainting with his face buried in the coarse, black mane.\n\nLittle could he ever remember of that wild ride. Half conscious, but ever with the one thought beating in his mind, he goaded the horse onwards, rushing swiftly down steep ravines over huge boulders, along the edges of black abysses. Dim memories he had of beetling cliffs, of a group of huts with wondering faces at the doors, of foaming, clattering water, and of a bristle of mountain beeches. Once, ere he had ridden far, he heard behind him three deep, sullen shouts, which told him that his comrades had set their faces to the foe once more. Then all was blank, until he woke to find kindly blue English eyes peering down upon him and to hear the blessed sound of his country's speech. They were but a foraging party\u2014a hundred archers and as many men-at-arms\u2014but their leader was Sir Hugh Calverley, and he was not a man to bide idle when good blows were to be had not three leagues from him. A scout was sent flying with a message to the camp, and Sir Hugh, with his two hundred men, thundered off to the rescue. With them went Alleyne, still bound to his saddle, still dripping with blood, and swooning and recovering, and swooning once again. On they rode, and on, until, at last, topping a ridge, they looked down upon the fateful valley. Alas! and alas! for the sight that met their eyes.\n\nThere, beneath them, was the blood-bathed hill, and from the highest pinnacle there flaunted the yellow and white banner with the lions and the towers of the royal house of Castile. Up the long slope rushed ranks and ranks of men exultant, shouting, with waving pennons and brandished arms. Over the whole summit were dense throngs of knights, with no enemy that could be seen to face them, save only that at one corner of the plateau an eddy and swirl amid the crowded mass seemed to show that all resistance was not yet at an end. At the sight a deep groan of rage and of despair went up from the baffled rescuers, and, spurring on their horses, they clattered down the long and winding path which led to the valley beneath.\n\nBut they were too late to avenge, as they had been too late to save. Long ere they could gain the level ground, the Spaniards, seeing them riding swiftly amid the rocks, and being ignorant of their numbers, drew off from the captured hill, and, having secured their few prisoners, rode slowly in a long column, with drum-beating and cymbal-clashing, out of the valley. Their rear ranks were already passing out of sight ere the new-comers were urging their panting, foaming horses up the slope which had been the scene of that long drawn and bloody fight.\n\nAnd a fearsome sight it was that met their eyes! Across the lower end lay the dense heap of men and horses where the first arrow-storm had burst. Above, the bodies of the dead and the dying\u2014French, Spanish, and Aragonese\u2014lay thick and thicker, until they covered the whole ground two and three deep in one dreadful tangle of slaughter. Above them lay the Englishmen in their lines, even as they had stood, and higher yet upon the plateau a wild medley of the dead of all nations, where the last deadly grapple had left them. In the further corner, under the shadow of a great rock, there crouched seven bowmen, with great John in the centre of them\u2014all wounded, weary, and in sorry case, but still unconquered, with their blood-stained weapons waving and their voices ringing a welcome to their countrymen. Alleyne rode across to John, while Sir Hugh Calverley followed close behind him.\n\n\"By Saint George!\" cried Sir Hugh, \"I have never seen signs of so stern a fight, and I am right glad that we have been in time to save you.\"\n\n\"You have saved more than us,\" said John, pointing to the banner which leaned against the rock behind him.\n\n\"You have done nobly,\" cried the old free companion, gazing with a soldier's admiration at the huge frame and bold face of the archer. \"But why is it, my good fellow, that you sit upon this man.\"\n\n\"By the rood! I had forgot him,\" John answered, rising and dragging from under him no less a person than the Spanish caballero, Don Diego Alvarez. \"This man, my fair lord, means to me a new house, ten cows, one bull\u2014if it be but a little one\u2014a grindstone, and I know not what besides; so that I thought it well to sit upon him, lest he should take a fancy to leave me.\"\n\n\"Tell me, John,\" cried Alleyne faintly: \"where is my dear lord, Sir Nigel Loring?\"\n\n\"He is dead, I fear. I saw them throw his body across a horse and ride away with it, but I fear the life had gone from him.\"\n\n\"Now woe worth me! And where is Aylward?\"\n\n\"He sprang upon a riderless horse and rode after Sir Nigel to save him. I saw them throng around him, and he is either taken or slain.\"\n\n\"Blow the bugles!\" cried Sir Hugh, with a scowling brow. \"We must back to camp, and ere three days I trust that we may see these Spaniards again. I would fain have ye all in my company.\"\n\n\"We are of the White Company, my fair lord,\" said John.\n\n\"Nay, the White Company is here disbanded,\" answered Sir Hugh solemnly, looking round him at the lines of silent figures, \"Look to the brave squire, for I fear that he will never see the sun rise again.\"" + }, + { + "title": "OF THE HOME-COMING TO HAMPSHIRE.", + "text": "It was a bright July morning four months after that fatal fight in the Spanish barranca. A blue heaven stretched above, a green rolling plain undulated below, intersected with hedgerows and flecked with grazing sheep. The sun was yet low in the heaven, and the red cows stood in the long shadow of the elms, chewing the cud and gazing with great vacant eyes at two horsemen who were spurring it down the long white road which dipped and curved away back to where the towers and pinnacles beneath the flat-topped hill marked the old town of Winchester.\n\nOf the riders one was young, graceful, and fair, clad in plain doublet and hosen of blue Brussels cloth, which served to show his active and well-knit figure. A flat velvet cap was drawn forward to keep the glare from his eyes, and he rode with lips compressed and anxious face, as one who has much care upon his mind. Young as he was, and peaceful as was his dress, the dainty golden spurs which twinkled upon his heels proclaimed his knighthood, while a long seam upon his brow and a scar upon his temple gave a manly grace to his refined and delicate countenance. His comrade was a large, red-headed man upon a great black horse, with a huge canvas bag slung from his saddle-bow, which jingled and clinked with every movement of his steed. His broad, brown face was lighted up by a continual smile, and he looked slowly from side to side with eyes which twinkled and shone with delight. Well might John rejoice, for was he not back in his native Hampshire, had he not Don Diego's five thousand crowns rasping against his knee, and above all was he not himself squire now to Sir Alleyne Edricson, the young Socman of Minstead lately knighted by the sword of the Black Prince himself, and esteemed by the whole army as one of the most rising of the soldiers of England.\n\nFor the last stand of the Company had been told throughout Christendom wherever a brave deed of arms was loved, and honors had flowed in upon the few who had survived it. For two months Alleyne had wavered betwixt death and life, with a broken rib and a shattered head; yet youth and strength and a cleanly life were all upon his side, and he awoke from his long delirium to find that the war was over, that the Spaniards and their allies had been crushed at Navaretta, and that the prince had himself heard the tale of his ride for succor and had come in person to his bedside to touch his shoulder with his sword and to insure that so brave and true a man should die, if he could not live, within the order of chivalry. The instant that he could set foot to ground Alleyne had started in search of his lord, but no word could he hear of him, dead or alive, and he had come home now sad-hearted, in the hope of raising money upon his estates and so starting upon his quest once more. Landing at London, he had hurried on with a mind full of care, for he had heard no word from Hampshire since the short note which had announced his brother's death.\n\n\"By the rood!\" cried John, looking around him exultantly, \"where have we seen since we left such noble cows, such fleecy sheep, grass so green, or a man so drunk as yonder rogue who lies in the gap of the hedge?\"\n\n\"Ah, John,\" Alleyne answered wearily, \"it is well for you, but I never thought that my home-coming would be so sad a one. My heart is heavy for my dear lord and for Aylward, and I know not how I may break the news to the Lady Mary and to the Lady Maude, if they have not yet had tidings of it.\"\n\nJohn gave a groan which made the horses shy. \"It is indeed a black business,\" said he. \"But be not sad, for I shall give half these crowns to my old mother, and half will I add to the money which you may have, and so we shall buy that yellow cog wherein we sailed to Bordeaux, and in it we shall go forth and seek Sir Nigel.\"\n\nAlleyne smiled, but shook his head. \"Were he alive we should have had word of him ere now,\" said he. \"But what is this town before us?\"\n\n\"Why, it is Romsey!\" cried John. \"See the tower of the old gray church, and the long stretch of the nunnery. But here sits a very holy man, and I shall give him a crown for his prayers.\"\n\nThree large stones formed a rough cot by the roadside, and beside it, basking in the sun, sat the hermit, with clay-colored face, dull eyes, and long withered hands. With crossed ankles and sunken head, he sat as though all his life had passed out of him, with the beads slipping slowly through his thin, yellow fingers. Behind him lay the narrow cell, clay-floored and damp, comfortless, profitless and sordid. Beyond it there lay amid the trees the wattle-and-daub hut of a laborer, the door open, and the single room exposed to the view. The man ruddy and yellow-haired, stood leaning upon the spade wherewith he had been at work upon the garden patch. From behind him came the ripple of a happy woman's laughter, and two young urchins darted forth from the hut, bare-legged and towsy, while the mother, stepping out, laid her hand upon her husband's arm and watched the gambols of the children. The hermit frowned at the untoward noise which broke upon his prayers, but his brow relaxed as he looked upon the broad silver piece which John held out to him.\n\n\"There lies the image of our past and of our future,\" cried Alleyne, as they rode on upon their way. \"Now, which is better, to till God's earth, to have happy faces round one's knee, and to love and be loved, or to sit forever moaning over one's own soul, like a mother over a sick babe?\"\n\n\"I know not about that,\" said John, \"for it casts a great cloud over me when I think of such matters. But I know that my crown was well spent, for the man had the look of a very holy person. As to the other, there was nought holy about him that I could see, and it would be cheaper for me to pray for myself than to give a crown to one who spent his days in digging for lettuces.\"\n\nEre Alleyne could answer there swung round the curve of the road a lady's carriage drawn by three horses abreast with a postilion upon the outer one. Very fine and rich it was, with beams painted and gilt, wheels and spokes carved in strange figures, and over all an arched cover of red and white tapestry. Beneath its shade there sat a stout and elderly lady in a pink cote-hardie, leaning back among a pile of cushions, and plucking out her eyebrows with a small pair of silver tweezers. None could seem more safe and secure and at her ease than this lady, yet here also was a symbol of human life, for in an instant, even as Alleyne reined aside to let the carriage pass, a wheel flew out from among its fellows, and over it all toppled\u2014carving, tapestry and gilt\u2014in one wild heap, with the horses plunging, the postilion shouting, and the lady screaming from within. In an instant Alleyne and John were on foot, and had lifted her forth all in a shake with fear, but little the worse for her mischance.\n\n\"Now woe worth me!\" she cried, \"and ill fall on Michael Easover of Romsey! for I told him that the pin was loose, and yet he must needs gainsay me, like the foolish daffe that he is.\"\n\n\"I trust that you have taken no hurt, my fair lady,\" said Alleyne, conducting her to the bank, upon which John had already placed a cushion.\n\n\"Nay, I have had no scath, though I have lost my silver tweezers. Now, lack-a-day! did God ever put breath into such a fool as Michael Easover of Romsey? But I am much beholden to you, gentle sirs. Soldiers ye are, as one may readily see. I am myself a soldier's daughter,\" she added, casting a somewhat languishing glance at John, \"and my heart ever goes out to a brave man.\"\n\n\"We are indeed fresh from Spain,\" quoth Alleyne.\n\n\"From Spain, say you? Ah! it was an ill and sorry thing that so many should throw away the lives that Heaven gave them. In sooth, it is bad for those who fall, but worse for those who bide behind. I have but now bid farewell to one who hath lost all in this cruel war.\"\n\n\"And how that, lady?\"\n\n\"She is a young damsel of these parts, and she goes now into a nunnery. Alack! it is not a year since she was the fairest maid from Avon to Itchen, and now it was more than I could abide to wait at Romsey Nunnery to see her put the white veil upon her face, for she was made for a wife and not for the cloister. Did you ever, gentle sir, hear of a body of men called 'The White Company' over yonder?\"\n\n\"Surely so,\" cried both the comrades.\n\n\"Her father was the leader of it, and her lover served under him as squire. News hath come that not one of the Company was left alive, and so, poor lamb, she hath\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Lady!\" cried Alleyne, with catching breath, \"is it the Lady Maude Loring of whom you speak?\"\n\n\"It is, in sooth.\"\n\n\"Maude! And in a nunnery! Did, then, the thought of her father's death so move her?\"\n\n\"Her father!\" cried the lady, smiling. \"Nay; Maude is a good daughter, but I think it was this young golden-haired squire of whom I have heard who has made her turn her back upon the world.\"\n\n\"And I stand talking here!\" cried Alleyne wildly. \"Come, John, come!\"\n\nRushing to his horse, he swung himself into the saddle, and was off down the road in a rolling cloud of dust as fast as his good steed could bear him.\n\nGreat had been the rejoicing amid the Romsey nuns when the Lady Maude Loring had craved admission into their order\u2014for was she not sole child and heiress of the old knight, with farms and fiefs which she could bring to the great nunnery? Long and earnest had been the talks of the gaunt lady abbess, in which she had conjured the young novice to turn forever from the world, and to rest her bruised heart under the broad and peaceful shelter of the church. And now, when all was settled, and when abbess and lady superior had had their will, it was but fitting that some pomp and show should mark the glad occasion. Hence was it that the good burghers of Romsey were all in the streets, that gay flags and flowers brightened the path from the nunnery to the church, and that a long procession wound up to the old arched door leading up the bride to these spiritual nuptials. There was lay-sister Agatha with the high gold crucifix, and the three incense-bearers, and the two-and-twenty garbed in white, who cast flowers upon either side of them and sang sweetly the while. Then, with four attendants, came the novice, her drooping head wreathed with white blossoms, and, behind, the abbess and her council of older nuns, who were already counting in their minds whether their own bailiff could manage the farms of Twynham, or whether a reeve would be needed beneath him, to draw the utmost from these new possessions which this young novice was about to bring them.\n\nBut alas! for plots and plans when love and youth and nature, and above all, fortune are arrayed against them. Who is this travel-stained youth who dares to ride so madly through the lines of staring burghers? Why does he fling himself from his horse and stare so strangely about him? See how he has rushed through the incense-bearers, thrust aside lay-sister Agatha, scattered the two-and-twenty damosels who sang so sweetly\u2014and he stands before the novice with his hands outstretched, and his face shining, and the light of love in his gray eyes. Her foot is on the very lintel of the church, and yet he bars the way\u2014and she, she thinks no more of the wise words and holy rede of the lady abbess, but she hath given a sobbing cry and hath fallen forward with his arms around her drooping body and her wet cheek upon his breast. A sorry sight this for the gaunt abbess, an ill lesson too for the stainless two-and-twenty who have ever been taught that the way of nature is the way of sin. But Maude and Alleyne care little for this. A dank, cold air comes out from the black arch before them. Without, the sun shines bright and the birds are singing amid the ivy on the drooping beeches. Their choice is made, and they turn away hand-in-hand, with their backs to the darkness and their faces to the light.\n\nVery quiet was the wedding in the old priory church at Christchurch, where Father Christopher read the service, and there were few to see save the Lady Loring and John, and a dozen bowmen from the castle. The Lady of Twynham had drooped and pined for weary months, so that her face was harsher and less comely than before, yet she still hoped on, for her lord had come through so many dangers that she could scarce believe that he might be stricken down at last. It had been her wish to start for Spain and to search for him, but Alleyne had persuaded her to let him go in her place. There was much to look after, now that the lands of Minstead were joined to those of Twynham, and Alleyne had promised her that if she would but bide with his wife he would never come back to Hampshire again until he had gained some news, good or ill, of her lord and lover.\n\nThe yellow cog had been engaged, with Goodwin Hawtayne in command, and a month after the wedding Alleyne rode down to Bucklershard to see if she had come round yet from Southampton. On the way he passed the fishing village of Pitt's Deep, and marked that a little creyer or brig was tacking off the land, as though about to anchor there. On his way back, as he rode towards the village, he saw that she had indeed anchored, and that many boats were round her, bearing cargo to the shore.\n\nA bow-shot from Pitt's Deep there was an inn a little back from the road, very large and widespread, with a great green bush hung upon a pole from one of the upper windows. At this window he marked, as he rode up, that a man was seated who appeared to be craning his neck in his direction. Alleyne was still looking up at him, when a woman came rushing from the open door of the inn, and made as though she would climb a tree, looking back the while with a laughing face. Wondering what these doings might mean, Alleyne tied his horse to a tree, and was walking amid the trunks towards the inn, when there shot from the entrance a second woman who made also for the trees. Close at her heels came a burly, brown-faced man, who leaned against the door-post and laughed loudly with his hand to his side, \"Ah, mes belles!\" he cried, \"and is it thus you treat me? Ah, mes petites! I swear by these finger-bones that I would not hurt a hair of your pretty heads; but I have been among the black paynim, and, by my hilt! it does me good to look at your English cheeks. Come, drink a stoup of muscadine with me, mes anges, for my heart is warm to be among ye again.\"\n\nAt the sight of the man Alleyne had stood staring, but at the sound of his voice such a thrill of joy bubbled up in his heart that he had to bite his lip to keep himself from shouting outright. But a deeper pleasure yet was in store. Even as he looked, the window above was pushed outwards, and the voice of the man whom he had seen there came out from it. \"Aylward,\" cried the voice, \"I have seen just now a very worthy person come down the road, though my eyes could scarce discern whether he carried coat-armor. I pray you to wait upon him and tell him that a very humble knight of England abides here, so that if he be in need of advancement, or have any small vow upon his soul, or desire to exalt his lady, I may help him to accomplish it.\"\n\nAylward at this order came shuffling forward amid the trees, and in an instant the two men were clinging in each other's arms, laughing and shouting and patting each other in their delight; while old Sir Nigel came running with his sword, under the impression that some small bickering had broken out, only to embrace and be embraced himself, until all three were hoarse with their questions and outcries and congratulations.\n\nOn their journey home through the woods Alleyne learnt their wondrous story: how, when Sir Nigel came to his senses, he with his fellow-captive had been hurried to the coast, and conveyed by sea to their captor's castle; how upon the way they had been taken by a Barbary rover, and how they exchanged their light captivity for a seat on a galley bench and hard labor at the pirate's oars; how, in the port at Barbary, Sir Nigel had slain the Moorish captain, and had swum with Aylward to a small coaster which they had taken, and so made their way to England with a rich cargo to reward them for their toils. All this Alleyne listened to, until the dark keep of Twynham towered above them in the gloaming, and they saw the red sun lying athwart the rippling Avon. No need to speak of the glad hearts at Twynham Castle that night, nor of the rich offerings from out that Moorish cargo which found their way to the chapel of Father Christopher.\n\nSir Nigel Loring lived for many years, full of honor and laden with every blessing. He rode no more to the wars, but he found his way to every jousting within thirty miles; and the Hampshire youth treasured it as the highest honor when a word of praise fell from him as to their management of their horses, or their breaking of their lances. So he lived and so he died, the most revered and the happiest man in all his native shire.\n\nFor Sir Alleyne Edricson and for his beautiful bride the future had also naught but what was good. Twice he fought in France, and came back each time laden with honors. A high place at court was given to him, and he spent many years at Windsor under the second Richard and the fourth Henry\u2014where he received the honor of the Garter, and won the name of being a brave soldier, a true-hearted gentleman, and a great lover and patron of every art and science which refines or ennobles life.\n\nAs to John, he took unto himself a village maid, and settled in Lyndhurst, where his five thousand crowns made him the richest franklin for many miles around. For many years he drank his ale every night at the \"Pied Merlin,\" which was now kept by his friend Aylward, who had wedded the good widow to whom he had committed his plunder. The strong men and the bowmen of the country round used to drop in there of an evening to wrestle a fall with John or to shoot a round with Aylward; but, though a silver shilling was to be the prize of the victory, it has never been reported that any man earned much money in that fashion. So they lived, these men, in their own lusty, cheery fashion\u2014rude and rough, but honest, kindly and true. Let us thank God if we have outgrown their vices. Let us pray to God that we may ever hold their virtues. The sky may darken, and the clouds may gather, and again the day may come when Britain may have sore need of her children, on whatever shore of the sea they be found. Shall they not muster at her call?" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard", + "author": "Arthur Conan Doyle", + "genres": [ + "adventure", + "historical fiction" + ], + "tags": [ + "" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER CAME TO THE CASTLE OF GLOOM", + "text": "You do very well, my friends, to treat me with some little reverence, for in honouring me you are honouring both France and yourselves. It is not merely an old, grey-moustached officer whom you see eating his omelette or draining his glass, but it is a fragment of history. In me you see one of the last of those wonderful men, the men who were veterans when they were yet boys, who learned to use a sword earlier than a razor, and who during a hundred battles had never once let the enemy see the colour of their knapsacks. For twenty years we were teaching Europe how to fight, and even when they had learned their lesson it was only the thermometer, and never the bayonet, which could break the Grand Army down. Berlin, Naples, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, Moscow\u2014we stabled our horses in them all. Yes, my friends, I say again that you do well to send your children to me with flowers, for these ears have heard the trumpet calls of France, and these eyes have seen her standards in lands where they may never be seen again.\n\nEven now, when I doze in my arm-chair, I can see those great warriors stream before me\u2014the green-jacketed chasseurs, the giant cuirassiers, Poniatowsky's lancers, the white-mantled dragoons, the nodding bearskins of the horse grenadiers. And then there comes the thick, low rattle of the drums, and through wreaths of dust and smoke I see the line of high bonnets, the row of brown faces, the swing and toss of the long, red plumes amid the sloping lines of steel. And there rides Ney with his red head, and Lefebvre with his bulldog jaw, and Lannes with his Gascon swagger; and then amidst the gleam of brass and the flaunting feathers I catch a glimpse of him, the man with the pale smile, the rounded shoulders, and the far-off eyes. There is an end of my sleep, my friends, for up I spring from my chair, with a cracked voice calling and a silly hand outstretched, so that Madame Titaux has one more laugh at the old fellow who lives among the shadows.\n\nAlthough I was a full Chief of Brigade when the wars came to an end, and had every hope of soon being made a General of Division, it is still rather to my earlier days that I turn when I wish to talk of the glories and the trials of a soldier's life. For you will understand that when an officer has so many men and horses under him, he has his mind full of recruits and remounts, fodder and farriers, and quarters, so that even when he is not in the face of the enemy, life is a very serious matter for him. But when he is only a lieutenant or a captain he has nothing heavier than his epaulettes upon his shoulders, so that he can clink his spurs and swing his dolman, drain his glass and kiss his girl, thinking of nothing save of enjoying a gallant life. That is the time when he is likely to have adventures, and it is often to that time that I shall turn in the stories which I may have for you. So it will be tonight when I tell you of my visit to the Castle of Gloom; of the strange mission of Sub-Lieutenant Duroc, and of the horrible affair of the man who was once known as Jean Carabin, and afterwards as the Baron Straubenthal.\n\nYou must know, then, that in the February of 1807, immediately after the taking of Danzig, Major Legendre and I were commissioned to bring four hundred remounts from Prussia into Eastern Poland.\n\nThe hard weather, and especially the great battle at Eylau, had killed so many of the horses that there was some danger of our beautiful Tenth of Hussars becoming a battalion of light infantry. We knew, therefore, both the Major and I, that we should be very welcome at the front. We did not advance very rapidly, however, for the snow was deep, the roads detestable, and we had but twenty returning invalids to assist us. Besides, it is impossible, when you have a daily change of forage, and sometimes none at all, to move horses faster than a walk. I am aware that in the story-books the cavalry whirls past at the maddest of gallops; but for my own part, after twelve campaigns, I should be very satisfied to know that my brigade could always walk upon the march and trot in the presence of the enemy. This I say of the hussars and chasseurs, mark you, so that it is far more the case with cuirassiers or dragoons.\n\nFor myself I am fond of horses, and to have four hundred of them, of every age and shade and character, all under my own hands, was a very great pleasure to me. They were from Pomerania for the most part, though some were from Normandy and some from Alsace, and it amused us to notice that they differed in character as much as the people of those provinces. We observed also, what I have often proved since, that the nature of a horse can be told by his colour, from the coquettish light bay, full of fancies and nerves, to the hardy chestnut, and from the docile roan to the pig-headed rusty-black. All this has nothing in the world to do with my story, but how is an officer of cavalry to get on with his tale when he finds four hundred horses waiting for him at the outset? It is my habit, you see, to talk of that which interests myself and so I hope that I may interest you.\n\nWe crossed the Vistula opposite Marienwerder, and had got as far as Riesenberg, when Major Legendre came into my room in the post-house with an open paper in his hand.\n\n'You are to leave me,' said he, with despair upon his face.\n\nIt was no very great grief to me to do that, for he was, if I may say so, hardly worthy to have such a subaltern. I saluted, however, in silence.\n\n'It is an order from General Lasalle,' he continued; 'you are to proceed to Rossel instantly, and to report yourself at the headquarters of the regiment.'\n\nNo message could have pleased me better. I was already very well thought of by my superior officers. It was evident to me, therefore, that this sudden order meant that the regiment was about to see service once more, and that Lasalle understood how incomplete my squadron would be without me. It is true that it came at an inconvenient moment, for the keeper of the post-house had a daughter\u2014one of those ivory-skinned, black-haired Polish girls\u2014with whom I had hoped to have some further talk. Still, it is not for the pawn to argue when the fingers of the player move him from the square; so down I went, saddled my big black charger, Rataplan, and set off instantly upon my lonely journey.\n\nMy word, it was a treat for those poor Poles and Jews, who have so little to brighten their dull lives, to see such a picture as that before their doors! The frosty morning air made Rataplan's great black limbs and the beautiful curves of his back and sides gleam and shimmer with every gambade. As for me, the rattle of hoofs upon a road, and the jingle of bridle chains which comes with every toss of a saucy head, would even now set my blood dancing through my veins. You may think, then, how I carried myself in my five-and-twentieth year\u2014I, Etienne Gerard, the picked horseman and surest blade in the ten regiments of hussars. Blue was our colour in the Tenth\u2014a sky-blue dolman and pelisse with a scarlet front\u2014and it was said of us in the army that we could set a whole population running, the women towards us, and the men away. There were bright eyes in the Riesenberg windows that morning which seemed to beg me to tarry; but what can a soldier do, save to kiss his hand and shake his bridle as he rides upon his way?\n\nIt was a bleak season to ride through the poorest and ugliest country in Europe, but there was a cloudless sky above, and a bright, cold sun, which shimmered on the huge snowfields. My breath reeked into the frosty air, and Rataplan sent up two feathers of steam from his nostrils, while the icicles drooped from the side-irons of his bit. I let him trot to warm his limbs, while for my own part I had too much to think of to give much heed to the cold. To north and south stretched the great plains, mottled over with dark clumps of fir and lighter patches of larch. A few cottages peeped out here and there, but it was only three months since the Grand Army had passed that way, and you know what that meant to a country. The Poles were our friends, it was true, but out of a hundred thousand men, only the Guard had waggons, and the rest had to live as best they might. It did not surprise me, therefore, to see no signs of cattle and no smoke from the silent houses. A weal had been left across the country where the great host had passed, and it was said that even the rats were starved wherever the Emperor had led his men.\n\nBy midday I had got as far as the village of Saalfeldt, but as I was on the direct road for Osterode, where the Emperor was wintering, and also for the main camp of the seven divisions of infantry, the highway was choked with carriages and carts. What with artillery caissons and waggons and couriers, and the ever-thickening stream of recruits and stragglers, it seemed to me that it would be a very long time before I should join my comrades. The plains, however, were five feet deep in snow, so there was nothing for it but to plod upon our way. It was with joy, therefore, that I found a second road which branched away from the other, trending through a fir-wood towards the north. There was a small auberge at the cross-roads, and a patrol of the Third Hussars of Conflans\u2014the very regiment of which I was afterwards colonel\u2014were mounting their horses at the door. On the steps stood their officer, a slight, pale young man, who looked more like a young priest from a seminary than a leader of the devil-may-care rascals before him.\n\n'Good-day, sir,' said he, seeing that I pulled up my horse.\n\n'Good-day,' I answered. 'I am Lieutenant Etienne Gerard, of the Tenth.'\n\nI could see by his face that he had heard of me. Everybody had heard of me since my duel with the six fencing masters. My manner, however, served to put him at his ease with me.\n\n'I am Sub-Lieutenant Duroc, of the Third,' said he.\n\n'Newly joined?' I asked.\n\n'Last week.'\n\nI had thought as much, from his white face and from the way in which he let his men lounge upon their horses. It was not so long, however, since I had learned myself what it was like when a schoolboy has to give orders to veteran troopers. It made me blush, I remember, to shout abrupt commands to men who had seen more battles than I had years, and it would have come more natural for me to say, 'With your permission, we shall now wheel into line,' or, 'If you think it best, we shall trot.' I did not think the less of the lad, therefore, when I observed that his men were somewhat out of hand, but I gave them a glance which stiffened them in their saddles.\n\n'May I ask, monsieur, whether you are going by this northern road?' I asked.\n\n'My orders are to patrol it as far as Arensdorf,' said he.\n\n'Then I will, with your permission, ride so far with you,' said I. 'It is very clear that the longer way will be the faster.'\n\nSo it proved, for this road led away from the army into a country which was given over to Cossacks and marauders, and it was as bare as the other was crowded. Duroc and I rode in front, with our six troopers clattering in the rear. He was a good boy, this Duroc, with his head full of the nonsense that they teach at St Cyr, knowing more about Alexander and Pompey than how to mix a horse's fodder or care for a horse's feet. Still, he was, as I have said, a good boy, unspoiled as yet by the camp. It pleased me to hear him prattle away about his sister Marie and about his mother in Amiens. Presently we found ourselves at the village of Hayenau. Duroc rode up to the post-house and asked to see the master.\n\n'Can you tell me,' said he, 'whether the man who calls himself the Baron Straubenthal lives in these parts?'\n\nThe postmaster shook his head, and we rode upon our way. I took no notice of this, but when, at the next village, my comrade repeated the same question, with the same result, I could not help asking him who this Baron Straubenthal might be.\n\n'He is a man,' said Duroc, with a sudden flush upon his boyish face, 'to whom I have a very important message to convey.'\n\nWell, this was not satisfactory, but there was something in my companion's manner which told me that any further questioning would be distasteful to him. I said nothing more, therefore, but Duroc would still ask every peasant whom we met whether he could give him any news of the Baron Straubenthal.\n\nFor my own part I was endeavouring, as an officer of light cavalry should, to form an idea of the lay of the country, to note the course of the streams, and to mark the places where there should be fords. Every step was taking us farther from the camp round the flanks of which we were travelling. Far to the south a few plumes of grey smoke in the frosty air marked the position of some of our outposts. To the north, however, there was nothing between ourselves and the Russian winter quarters. Twice on the extreme horizon I caught a glimpse of the glitter of steel, and pointed it out to my companion. It was too distant for us to tell whence it came, but we had little doubt that it was from the lance-heads of marauding Cossacks.\n\nThe sun was just setting when we rode over a low hill and saw a small village upon our right, and on our left a high black castle, which jutted out from amongst the pine-woods. A farmer with his cart was approaching us\u2014a matted-haired, downcast fellow, in a sheepskin jacket.\n\n'What village is this?' asked Duroc.\n\n'It is Arensdorf,' he answered, in his barbarous German dialect.\n\n'Then here I am to stay the night,' said my young companion. Then, turning to the farmer, he asked his eternal question, 'Can you tell me where the Baron Straubenthal lives?'\n\n'Why, it is he who owns the Castle of Gloom,' said the farmer, pointing to the dark turrets over the distant fir forest.\n\nDuroc gave a shout like the sportsman who sees his game rising in front of him. The lad seemed to have gone off his head\u2014his eyes shining, his face deathly white, and such a grim set about his mouth as made the farmer shrink away from him. I can see him now, leaning forward on his brown horse, with his eager gaze fixed upon the great black tower.\n\n'Why do you call it the Castle of Gloom?' I asked.\n\n'Well, it's the name it bears upon the countryside,' said the farmer. 'By all accounts there have been some black doings up yonder. It's not for nothing that the wickedest man in Poland has been living there these fourteen years past.'\n\n'A Polish nobleman?' I asked.\n\n'Nay, we breed no such men in Poland,' he answered.\n\n'A Frenchman, then?' cried Duroc.\n\n'They say that he came from France.'\n\n'And with red hair?'\n\n'As red as a fox.'\n\n'Yes, yes, it is my man,' cried my companion, quivering all over in his excitement. 'It is the hand of Providence which has led me here. Who can say that there is not justice in this world? Come, Monsieur Gerard, for I must see the men safely quartered before I can attend to this private matter.'\n\nHe spurred on his horse, and ten minutes later we were at the door of the inn of Arensdorf, where his men were to find their quarters for the night.\n\nWell, all this was no affair of mine, and I could not imagine what the meaning of it might be. Rossel was still far off, but I determined to ride on for a few hours and take my chance of some wayside barn in which I could find shelter for Rataplan and myself. I had mounted my horse, therefore, after tossing off a cup of wine, when young Duroc came running out of the door and laid his hand upon my knee.\n\n'Monsieur Gerard,' he panted, 'I beg of you not to abandon me like this!'\n\n'My good sir,' said I, 'if you would tell me what is the matter and what you would wish me to do, I should be better able to tell you if I could be of any assistance to you.'\n\n'You can be of the very greatest,' he cried. 'Indeed, from all that I have heard of you, Monsieur Gerard, you are the one man whom I should wish to have by my side tonight.'\n\n'You forget that I am riding to join my regiment.'\n\n'You cannot, in any case, reach it tonight. Tomorrow will bring you to Rossel. By staying with me you will confer the very greatest kindness upon me, and you will aid me in a matter which concerns my own honour and the honour of my family. I am compelled, however, to confess to you that some personal danger may possibly be involved.'\n\nIt was a crafty thing for him to say. Of course, I sprang from Rataplan's back and ordered the groom to lead him back into the stables.\n\n'Come into the inn,' said I, 'and let me know exactly what it is that you wish me to do.'\n\nHe led the way into a sitting-room, and fastened the door lest we should be interrupted. He was a well-grown lad, and as he stood in the glare of the lamp, with the light beating upon his earnest face and upon his uniform of silver grey, which suited him to a marvel, I felt my heart warm towards him. Without going so far as to say that he carried himself as I had done at his age, there was at least similarity enough to make me feel in sympathy with him.\n\n'I can explain it all in a few words,' said he. 'If I have not already satisfied your very natural curiosity, it is because the subject is so painful a one to me that I can hardly bring myself to allude to it. I cannot, however, ask for your assistance without explaining to you exactly how the matter lies.\n\n'You must know, then, that my father was the well-known banker, Christophe Duroc, who was murdered by the people during the September massacres. As you are aware, the mob took possession of the prisons, chose three so-called judges to pass sentence upon the unhappy aristocrats, and then tore them to pieces when they were passed out into the street. My father had been a benefactor of the poor all his life. There were many to plead for him. He had the fever, too, and was carried in, half-dead, upon a blanket. Two of the judges were in favour of acquitting him; the third, a young Jacobin, whose huge body and brutal mind had made him a leader among these wretches, dragged him, with his own hands, from the litter, kicked him again and again with his heavy boots, and hurled him out of the door, where in an instant he was torn limb from limb under circumstances which are too horrible for me to describe. This, as you perceive, was murder, even under their own unlawful laws, for two of their own judges had pronounced in my father's favour.\n\n'Well, when the days of order came back again, my elder brother began to make inquiries about this man. I was only a child then, but it was a family matter, and it was discussed in my presence. The fellow's name was Carabin. He was one of Sansterre's Guard, and a noted duellist. A foreign lady named the Baroness Straubenthal having been dragged before the Jacobins, he had gained her liberty for her on the promise that she with her money and estates should be his. He had married her, taken her name and title, and escaped out of France at the time of the fall of Robespierre. What had become of him we had no means of learning.\n\n'You will think, doubtless, that it would be easy for us to find him, since we had both his name and his title. You must remember, however, that the Revolution left us without money, and that without money such a search is very difficult. Then came the Empire, and it became more difficult still, for, as you are aware, the Emperor considered that the 18th Brumaire brought all accounts to a settlement, and that on that day a veil had been drawn across the past. None the less, we kept our own family story and our own family plans.\n\n'My brother joined the army, and passed with it through all Southern Europe, asking everywhere for the Baron Straubenthal. Last October he was killed at Jena, with his mission still unfulfilled. Then it became my turn, and I have the good fortune to hear of the very man of whom I am in search at one of the first Polish villages which I have to visit, and within a fortnight of joining my regiment. And then, to make the matter even better, I find myself in the company of one whose name is never mentioned throughout the army save in connection with some daring and generous deed.'\n\nThis was all very well, and I listened to it with the greatest interest, but I was none the clearer as to what young Duroc wished me to do.\n\n'How can I be of service to you?' I asked.\n\n'By coming up with me.'\n\n'To the Castle?'\n\n'Precisely.'\n\n'When?'\n\n'At once.'\n\n'But what do you intend to do?'\n\n'I shall know what to do. But I wish you to be with me, all the same.'\n\nWell, it was never in my nature to refuse an adventure, and, besides, I had every sympathy with the lad's feelings. It is very well to forgive one's enemies, but one wishes to give them something to forgive also. I held out my hand to him, therefore.\n\n'I must be on my way for Rossel tomorrow morning, but tonight I am yours,' said I.\n\nWe left our troopers in snug quarters, and, as it was but a mile to the Castle, we did not disturb our horses. To tell the truth, I hate to see a cavalry man walk, and I hold that just as he is the most gallant thing upon earth when he has his saddle-flaps between his knees, so he is the most clumsy when he has to loop up his sabre and his sabre-tasche in one hand and turn in his toes for fear of catching the rowels of his spurs. Still, Duroc and I were of the age when one can carry things off, and I dare swear that no woman at least would have quarrelled with the appearance of the two young hussars, one in blue and one in grey, who set out that night from the Arensdorf post-house. We both carried our swords, and for my own part I slipped a pistol from my holster into the inside of my pelisse, for it seemed to me that there might be some wild work before us.\n\nThe track which led to the Castle wound through a pitch-black fir-wood, where we could see nothing save the ragged patch of stars above our heads. Presently, however, it opened up, and there was the Castle right in front of us, about as far as a carbine would carry. It was a huge, uncouth place, and bore every mark of being exceedingly old, with turrets at every corner, and a square keep on the side which was nearest to us. In all its great shadow there was no sign of light save from a single window, and no sound came from it. To me there was something awful in its size and its silence, which corresponded so well with its sinister name. My companion pressed on eagerly, and I followed him along the ill-kept path which led to the gate.\n\nThere was no bell or knocker upon the great iron-studded door, and it was only by pounding with the hilts of our sabres that we could attract attention. A thin, hawk-faced man, with a beard up to his temples, opened it at last. He carried a lantern in one hand, and in the other a chain which held an enormous black hound. His manner at the first moment was threatening, but the sight of our uniforms and of our faces turned it into one of sulky reserve.\n\n'The Baron Straubenthal does not receive visitors at so late an hour,' said he, speaking in very excellent French.\n\n'You can inform Baron Straubenthal that I have come eight hundred leagues to see him, and that I will not leave until I have done so,' said my companion. I could not myself have said it with a better voice and manner.\n\nThe fellow took a sidelong look at us, and tugged at his black beard in his perplexity.\n\n'To tell the truth, gentlemen,' said he, 'the Baron has a cup or two of wine in him at this hour, and you would certainly find him a more entertaining companion if you were to come again in the morning.'\n\nHe had opened the door a little wider as he spoke, and I saw by the light of the lamp in the hall behind him that three other rough fellows were standing there, one of whom held another of these monstrous hounds. Duroc must have seen it also, but it made no difference to his resolution.\n\n'Enough talk,' said he, pushing the man to one side. 'It is with your master that I have to deal.'\n\nThe fellows in the hall made way for him as he strode in among them, so great is the power of one man who knows what he wants over several who are not sure of themselves. My companion tapped one of them upon the shoulder with as much assurance as though he owned him.\n\n'Show me to the Baron,' said he.\n\nThe man shrugged his shoulders, and answered something in Polish. The fellow with the beard, who had shut and barred the front door, appeared to be the only one among them who could speak French.\n\n'Well, you shall have your way,' said he, with a sinister smile. 'You shall see the Baron. And perhaps, before you have finished, you will wish that you had taken my advice.'\n\nWe followed him down the hall, which was stone-flagged and very spacious, with skins scattered upon the floor, and the heads of wild beasts upon the walls. At the farther end he threw open a door, and we entered.\n\nIt was a small room, scantily furnished, with the same marks of neglect and decay which met us at every turn. The walls were hung with discoloured tapestry, which had come loose at one corner, so as to expose the rough stonework behind. A second door, hung with a curtain, faced us upon the other side. Between lay a square table, strewn with dirty dishes and the sordid remains of a meal. Several bottles were scattered over it. At the head of it, and facing us, there sat a huge man with a lion-like head and a great shock of orange-coloured hair. His beard was of the same glaring hue; matted and tangled and coarse as a horse's mane. I have seen some strange faces in my time, but never one more brutal than that, with its small, vicious, blue eyes, its white, crumpled cheeks, and the thick, hanging lip which protruded over his monstrous beard. His head swayed about on his shoulders, and he looked at us with the vague, dim gaze of a drunken man. Yet he was not so drunk but that our uniforms carried their message to him.\n\n'Well, my brave boys,' he hiccoughed. 'What is the latest news from Paris, eh? You're going to free Poland, I hear, and have meantime all become slaves yourselves\u2014slaves to a little aristocrat with his grey coat and his three-cornered hat. No more citizens either, I am told, and nothing but monsieur and madame. My faith, some more heads will have to roll into the sawdust basket some of these mornings.'\n\nDuroc advanced in silence, and stood by the ruffian's side.\n\n'Jean Carabin,' said he.\n\nThe Baron started, and the film of drunkenness seemed to be clearing from his eyes.\n\n'Jean Carabin,' said Duroc, once more.\n\nHe sat up and grasped the arms of his chair.\n\n'What do you mean by repeating that name, young man?' he asked.\n\n'Jean Carabin, you are a man whom I have long wished to meet.'\n\n'Supposing that I once had such a name, how can it concern you, since you must have been a child when I bore it?'\n\n'My name is Duroc.'\n\n'Not the son of\u2014\u2014?'\n\n'The son of the man you murdered.'\n\nThe Baron tried to laugh, but there was terror in his eyes.\n\n'We must let bygones be bygones, young man,' he cried. 'It was our life or theirs in those days: the aristocrats or the people. Your father was of the Gironde. He fell. I was of the mountain. Most of my comrades fell. It was all the fortune of war. We must forget all this and learn to know each other better, you and I.' He held out a red, twitching hand as he spoke.\n\n'Enough,' said young Duroc. 'If I were to pass my sabre through you as you sit in that chair, I should do what is just and right. I dishonour my blade by crossing it with yours. And yet you are a Frenchman, and have even held a commission under the same flag as myself. Rise, then, and defend yourself!'\n\n'Tut, tut!' cried the Baron. 'It is all very well for you young bloods\u2014'\n\nDuroc's patience could stand no more. He swung his open hand into the centre of the great orange beard. I saw a lip fringed with blood, and two glaring blue eyes above it.\n\n'You shall die for that blow.'\n\n'That is better,' said Duroc.\n\n'My sabre!' cried the other. 'I will not keep you waiting, I promise you!' and he hurried from the room.\n\nI have said that there was a second door covered with a curtain. Hardly had the Baron vanished when there ran from behind it a woman, young and beautiful. So swiftly and noiselessly did she move that she was between us in an instant, and it was only the shaking curtains which told us whence she had come.\n\n'I have seen it all,' she cried. 'Oh, sir, you have carried yourself splendidly.' She stooped to my companion's hand, and kissed it again and again ere he could disengage it from her grasp.\n\n'Nay, madame, why should you kiss my hand?' he cried.\n\n'Because it is the hand which struck him on his vile, lying mouth. Because it may be the hand which will avenge my mother. I am his step-daughter. The woman whose heart he broke was my mother. I loathe him, I fear him. Ah, there is his step!' In an instant she had vanished as suddenly as she had come. A moment later, the Baron entered with a drawn sword in his hand, and the fellow who had admitted us at his heels.\n\n'This is my secretary,' said he. 'He will be my friend in this affair. But we shall need more elbow-room than we can find here. Perhaps you will kindly come with me to a more spacious apartment.'\n\nIt was evidently impossible to fight in a chamber which was blocked by a great table. We followed him out, therefore, into the dimly-lit hall. At the farther end a light was shining through an open door.\n\n'We shall find what we want in here,' said the man with the dark beard. It was a large, empty room, with rows of barrels and cases round the walls. A strong lamp stood upon a shelf in the corner. The floor was level and true, so that no swordsman could ask for more. Duroc drew his sabre and sprang into it. The Baron stood back with a bow and motioned me to follow my companion. Hardly were my heels over the threshold when the heavy door crashed behind us and the key screamed in the lock. We were taken in a trap.\n\nFor a moment we could not realize it. Such incredible baseness was outside all our experiences. Then, as we understood how foolish we had been to trust for an instant a man with such a history, a flush of rage came over us, rage against his villainy and against our own stupidity. We rushed at the door together, beating it with our fists and kicking with our heavy boots. The sound of our blows and of our execrations must have resounded through the Castle. We called to this villain, hurling at him every name which might pierce even into his hardened soul. But the door was enormous\u2014such a door as one finds in mediaeval castles\u2014made of huge beams clamped together with iron. It was as easy to break as a square of the Old Guard. And our cries appeared to be of as little avail as our blows, for they only brought for answer the clattering echoes from the high roof above us. When you have done some soldiering, you soon learn to put up with what cannot be altered. It was I, then, who first recovered my calmness, and prevailed upon Duroc to join with me in examining the apartment which had become our dungeon.\n\nThere was only one window, which had no glass in it, and was so narrow that one could not so much as get one's head through. It was high up, and Duroc had to stand upon a barrel in order to see from it.\n\n'What can you see?' I asked.\n\n'Fir-woods and an avenue of snow between them,' said he. 'Ah!' he gave a cry of surprise.\n\nI sprang upon the barrel beside him. There was, as he said, a long, clear strip of snow in front. A man was riding down it, flogging his horse and galloping like a madman. As we watched, he grew smaller and smaller, until he was swallowed up by the black shadows of the forest.\n\n'What does that mean?' asked Duroc.\n\n'No good for us,' said I. 'He may have gone for some brigands to cut our throats. Let us see if we cannot find a way out of this mouse-trap before the cat can arrive.'\n\nThe one piece of good fortune in our favour was that beautiful lamp. It was nearly full of oil, and would last us until morning. In the dark our situation would have been far more difficult. By its light we proceeded to examine the packages and cases which lined the walls. In some places there was only a single line of them, while in one corner they were piled nearly to the ceiling. It seemed that we were in the storehouse of the Castle, for there were a great number of cheeses, vegetables of various kinds, bins full of dried fruits, and a line of wine barrels. One of these had a spigot in it, and as I had eaten little during the day, I was glad of a cup of claret and some food. As to Duroc, he would take nothing, but paced up and down the room in a fever of anger and impatience. 'I'll have him yet!' he cried, every now and then. 'The rascal shall not escape me!'\n\nThis was all very well, but it seemed to me, as I sat on a great round cheese eating my supper, that this youngster was thinking rather too much of his own family affairs and too little of the fine scrape into which he had got me. After all, his father had been dead fourteen years, and nothing could set that right; but here was Etienne Gerard, the most dashing lieutenant in the whole Grand Army, in imminent danger of being cut off at the very outset of his brilliant career. Who was ever to know the heights to which I might have risen if I were knocked on the head in this hole-and-corner business, which had nothing whatever to do with France or the Emperor? I could not help thinking what a fool I had been, when I had a fine war before me and everything which a man could desire, to go off on a hare-brained expedition of this sort, as if it were not enough to have a quarter of a million Russians to fight against, without plunging into all sorts of private quarrels as well.\n\n'That is all very well,' I said at last, as I heard Duroc muttering his threats. 'You may do what you like to him when you get the upper hand. At present the question rather is, what is he going to do to us?'\n\n'Let him do his worst!' cried the boy. 'I owe a duty to my father.'\n\n'That is mere foolishness,' said I. 'If you owe a duty to your father, I owe one to my mother, which is to get out of this business safe and sound.'\n\nMy remark brought him to his senses.\n\n'I have thought too much of myself!' he cried. 'Forgive me, Monsieur Gerard. Give me your advice as to what I should do.'\n\n'Well,' said I, 'it is not for our health that they have shut us up here among the cheeses. They mean to make an end of us if they can. That is certain. They hope that no one knows that we have come here, and that none will trace us if we remain. Do your hussars know where you have gone to?'\n\n'I said nothing.'\n\n'Hum! It is clear that we cannot be starved here. They must come to us if they are to kill us. Behind a barricade of barrels we could hold our own against the five rascals whom we have seen. That is, probably, why they have sent that messenger for assistance.'\n\n'We must get out before he returns.'\n\n'Precisely, if we are to get out at all.'\n\n'Could we not burn down this door?' he cried.\n\n'Nothing could be easier,' said I. 'There are several casks of oil in the corner. My only objection is that we should ourselves be nicely toasted, like two little oyster p\u00e2t\u00e9s.'\n\n'Can you not suggest something?' he cried, in despair. 'Ah, what is that?'\n\nThere had been a low sound at our little window, and a shadow came between the stars and ourselves. A small, white hand was stretched into the lamplight. Something glittered between the fingers.\n\n'Quick! quick!' cried a woman's voice.\n\nWe were on the barrel in an instant.\n\n'They have sent for the Cossacks. Your lives are at stake. Ah, I am lost! I am lost!'\n\nThere was the sound of rushing steps, a hoarse oath, a blow, and the stars were once more twinkling through the window. We stood helpless upon the barrel with our blood cold with horror. Half a minute afterwards we heard a smothered scream, ending in a choke. A great door slammed somewhere in the silent night.\n\n'Those ruffians have seized her. They will kill her,' I cried.\n\nDuroc sprang down with the inarticulate shouts of one whose reason has left him. He struck the door so frantically with his naked hands that he left a blotch of blood with every blow.\n\nHere is the key!' I shouted, picking one from the floor. 'She must have thrown it in at the instant that she was torn away.'\n\nMy companion snatched it from me with a shriek of joy. A moment later he dashed it down upon the boards. It was so small that it was lost in the enormous lock. Duroc sank upon one of the boxes with his head between his hands. He sobbed in his despair. I could have sobbed, too, when I thought of the woman and how helpless we were to save her.\n\nBut I am not easily baffled. After all, this key must have been sent to us for a purpose. The lady could not bring us that of the door, because this murderous step-father of hers would most certainly have it in his pocket. Yet this other must have a meaning, or why should she risk her life to place it in our hands? It would say little for our wits if we could not find out what that meaning might be.\n\nI set to work moving all the cases out from the wall, and Duroc, gaining new hope from my courage, helped me with all his strength. It was no light task, for many of them were large and heavy. On we went, working like maniacs, slinging barrels, cheeses, and boxes pell-mell into the middle of the room. At last there only remained one huge barrel of vodka, which stood in the corner. With our united strength we rolled it out, and there was a little low wooden door in the wainscot behind it. The key fitted, and with a cry of delight we saw it swing open before us. With the lamp in my hand, I squeezed my way in, followed by my companion.\n\nWe were in the powder-magazine of the Castle\u2014a rough, walled cellar, with barrels all round it, and one with the top staved in in the centre. The powder from it lay in a black heap upon the floor. Beyond there was another door, but it was locked.\n\n'We are no better off than before,' cried Duroc. 'We have no key.'\n\n'We have a dozen!' I cried.\n\n'Where?'\n\nI pointed to the line of powder barrels.\n\n'You would blow this door open?'\n\n'Precisely.'\n\n'But you would explode the magazine.'\n\nIt was true, but I was not at the end of my resources.\n\n'We will blow open the store-room door,' I cried.\n\nI ran back and seized a tin box which had been filled with candles. It was about the size of my busby\u2014large enough to hold several pounds of powder. Duroc filled it while I cut off the end of a candle. When we had finished, it would have puzzled a colonel of engineers to make a better petard. I put three cheeses on the top of each other and placed it above them, so as to lean against the lock. Then we lit our candle-end and ran for shelter, shutting the door of the magazine behind us.\n\nIt is no joke, my friends, to be among all those tons of powder, with the knowledge that if the flame of the explosion should penetrate through one thin door our blackened limbs would be shot higher than the Castle keep. Who could have believed that a half-inch of candle could take so long to burn? My ears were straining all the time for the thudding of the hoofs of the Cossacks who were coming to destroy us. I had almost made up my mind that the candle must have gone out when there was a smack like a bursting bomb, our door flew to bits, and pieces of cheese, with a shower of turnips, apples, and splinters of cases, were shot in among us. As we rushed out we had to stagger through an impenetrable smoke, with all sorts of d\u00e9bris beneath our feet, but there was a glimmering square where the dark door had been. The petard had done its work.\n\nIn fact, it had done more for us than we had even ventured to hope. It had shattered gaolers as well as gaol. The first thing that I saw as I came out into the hall was a man with a butcher's axe in his hand, lying flat upon his back, with a gaping wound across his forehead. The second was a huge dog, with two of its legs broken, twisting in agony upon the floor. As it raised itself up I saw the two broken ends flapping like flails. At the same instant I heard a cry, and there was Duroc, thrown against the wall, with the other hound's teeth in his throat. He pushed it off with his left hand, while again and again he passed his sabre through its body, but it was not until I blew out its brains with my pistol that the iron jaws relaxed, and the fierce, bloodshot eyes were glazed in death.\n\nThere was no time for us to pause. A woman's scream from in front\u2014a scream of mortal terror\u2014told us that even now we might be too late. There were two other men in the hall, but they cowered away from our drawn swords and furious faces. The blood was streaming from Duroc's neck and dyeing the grey fur of his pelisse. Such was the lad's fire, however, that he shot in front of me, and it was only over his shoulder that I caught a glimpse of the scene as we rushed into the chamber in which we had first seen the master of the Castle of Gloom.\n\nThe Baron was standing in the middle of the room, his tangled mane bristling like an angry lion. He was, as I have said, a huge man with enormous shoulders; and as he stood there, with his face flushed with rage and his sword advanced, I could not but think that, in spite of all his villainies, he had a proper figure for a grenadier. The lady lay cowering in a chair behind him. A weal across one of her white arms and a dog-whip upon the floor were enough to show that our escape had hardly been in time to save her from his brutality. He gave a howl like a wolf as we broke in, and was upon us in an instant, hacking and driving, with a curse at every blow.\n\nI have already said that the room gave no space for swordsmanship. My young companion was in front of me in the narrow passage between the table and the wall, so that I could only look on without being able to aid him. The lad knew something of his weapon, and was as fierce and active as a wild cat, but in so narrow a space the weight and strength of the giant gave him the advantage. Besides, he was an admirable swordsman. His parade and riposte were as quick as lightning. Twice he touched Duroc upon the shoulder, and then, as the lad slipped on a lunge, he whirled up his sword to finish him before he could recover his feet. I was quicker than he, however, and took the cut upon the pommel of my sabre.\n\n'Excuse me,' said I, 'but you have still to deal with Etienne Gerard.'\n\nHe drew back and leaned against the tapestry-covered wall, breathing in little, hoarse gasps, for his foul living was against him.\n\n'Take your breath,' said I. 'I will await your convenience.'\n\n'You have no cause of quarrel against me,' he panted.\n\n'I owe you some little attention,' said I, 'for having shut me up in your store-room. Besides, if all other were wanting, I see cause enough upon that lady's arm.'\n\n'Have your way, then!' he snarled, and leaped at me like a madman. For a minute I saw only the blazing blue eyes, and the red glazed point which stabbed and stabbed, rasping off to right or to left, and yet ever back at my throat and my breast. I had never thought that such good sword-play was to be found at Paris in the days of the Revolution. I do not suppose that in all my little affairs I have met six men who had a better knowledge of their weapon. But he knew that I was his master. He read death in my eyes, and I could see that he read it. The flush died from his face. His breath came in shorter and in thicker gasps. Yet he fought on, even after the final thrust had come, and died still hacking and cursing, with foul cries upon his lips, and his blood clotting upon his orange beard. I who speak to you have seen so many battles, that my old memory can scarce contain their names, and yet of all the terrible sights which these eyes have rested upon, there is none which I care to think of less than of that orange beard with the crimson stain in the centre, from which I had drawn my sword-point.\n\nIt was only afterwards that I had time to think of all this. His monstrous body had hardly crashed down upon the floor before the woman in the corner sprang to her feet, clapping her hands together and screaming out in her delight. For my part I was disgusted to see a woman take such delight in a deed of blood, and I gave no thought as to the terrible wrongs which must have befallen her before she could so far forget the gentleness of her sex. It was on my tongue to tell her sharply to be silent, when a strange, choking smell took the breath from my nostrils, and a sudden, yellow glare brought out the figures upon the faded hangings.\n\n'Duroc, Duroc!' I shouted, tugging at his shoulder. 'The Castle is on fire!'\n\nThe boy lay senseless upon the ground, exhausted by his wounds. I rushed out into the hall to see whence the danger came. It was our explosion which had set alight to the dry frame-work of the door. Inside the store-room some of the boxes were already blazing. I glanced in, and as I did so my blood was turned to water by the sight of the powder barrels beyond, and of the loose heap upon the floor. It might be seconds, it could not be more than minutes, before the flames would be at the edge of it. These eyes will be closed in death, my friends, before they cease to see those crawling lines of fire and the black heap beyond.\n\nHow little I can remember what followed. Vaguely I can recall how I rushed into the chamber of death, how I seized Duroc by one limp hand and dragged him down the hall, the woman keeping pace with me and pulling at the other arm. Out of the gateway we rushed, and on down the snow-covered path until we were on the fringe of the fir forest. It was at that moment that I heard a crash behind me, and, glancing round, saw a great spout of fire shoot up into the wintry sky. An instant later there seemed to come a second crash, far louder than the first. I saw the fir trees and the stars whirling round me, and I fell unconscious across the body of my comrade." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "It was some weeks before I came to myself in the post-house of Arensdorf, and longer still before I could be told all that had befallen me. It was Duroc, already able to go soldiering, who came to my bedside and gave me an account of it. He it was who told me how a piece of timber had struck me on the head and laid me almost dead upon the ground. From him, too, I learned how the Polish girl had run to Arensdorf, how she had roused our hussars, and how she had only just brought them back in time to save us from the spears of the Cossacks who had been summoned from their bivouac by that same black-bearded secretary whom we had seen galloping so swiftly over the snow. As to the brave lady who had twice saved our lives, I could not learn very much about her at that moment from Duroc, but when I chanced to meet him in Paris two years later, after the campaign of Wagram, I was not very much surprised to find that I needed no introduction to his bride, and that by the queer turns of fortune he had himself, had he chosen to use it, that very name and title of the Baron Straubenthal, which showed him to be the owner of the blackened ruins of the Castle of Gloom." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER SLEW THE BROTHERS OF AJACCIO", + "text": "When the Emperor needed an agent he was always very ready to do me the honour of recalling the name of Etienne Gerard, though it occasionally escaped him when rewards were to be distributed. Still, I was a colonel at twenty-eight, and the chief of a brigade at thirty-one, so that I have no reason to be dissatisfied with my career. Had the wars lasted another two or three years I might have grasped my b\u00e2ton, and the man who had his hand upon that was only one stride from a throne. Murat had changed his hussar's cap for a crown, and another light cavalry man might have done as much. However, all those dreams were driven away by Waterloo, and, although I was not able to write my name upon history, it is sufficiently well known by all who served with me in the great wars of the Empire.\n\nWhat I want to tell you tonight is about the very singular affair which first started me upon my rapid upward course, and which had the effect of establishing a secret bond between the Emperor and myself.\n\nThere is just one little word of warning which I must give you before I begin. When you hear me speak, you must always bear in mind that you are listening to one who has seen history from the inside. I am talking about what my ears have heard and my eyes have seen, so you must not try to confute me by quoting the opinions of some student or man of the pen, who has written a book of history or memoirs. There is much which is unknown by such people, and much which never will be known by the world. For my own part, I could tell you some very surprising things were it discreet to do so. The facts which I am about to relate to you tonight were kept secret by me during the Emperor's lifetime, because I gave him my promise that it should be so, but I do not think that there can be any harm now in my telling the remarkable part which I played.\n\nYou must know, then, that at the time of the Treaty of Tilsit I was a simple lieutenant in the 10th Hussars, without money or interest. It is true that my appearance and my gallantry were in my favour, and that I had already won a reputation as being one of the best swordsmen in the army; but amongst the host of brave men who surrounded the Emperor it needed more than this to insure a rapid career. I was confident, however, that my chance would come, though I never dreamed that it would take so remarkable a form.\n\nWhen the Emperor returned to Paris, after the declaration of peace in the year 1807, he spent much of his time with the Empress and the Court at Fontainebleau. It was the time when he was at the pinnacle of his career. He had in three successive campaigns humbled Austria, crushed Prussia, and made the Russians very glad to get upon the right side of the Niemen. The old Bulldog over the Channel was still growling, but he could not get very far from his kennel. If we could have made a perpetual peace at that moment, France would have taken a higher place than any nation since the days of the Romans. So I have heard the wise folk say, though for my part I had other things to think of. All the girls were glad to see the army back after its long absence, and you may be sure that I had my share of any favours that were going. You may judge how far I was a favourite in those days when I say that even now, in my sixtieth year\u2014but why should I dwell upon that which is already sufficiently well known?\n\nOur regiment of hussars was quartered with the horse chasseurs of the guard at Fontainebleau. It is, as you know, but a little place, buried in the heart of the forest, and it was wonderful at this time to see it crowded with Grand Dukes and Electors and Princes, who thronged round Napoleon like puppies round their master, each hoping that some bone might be thrown to him. There was more German than French to be heard in the street, for those who had helped us in the late war had come to beg for a reward, and those who had opposed us had come to try and escape their punishment.\n\nAnd all the time our little man, with his pale face and his cold, grey eyes, was riding to the hunt every morning, silent and brooding, all of them following in his train, in the hope that some word would escape him. And then, when the humour seized him, he would throw a hundred square miles to that man, or tear as much off the other, round off one kingdom by a river, or cut off another by a chain of mountains. That was how he used to do business, this little artilleryman, whom we had raised so high with our sabres and our bayonets. He was very civil to us always, for he knew where his power came from. We knew also, and showed it by the way in which we carried ourselves. We were agreed, you understand, that he was the finest leader in the world, but we did not forget that he had the finest men to lead.\n\nWell, one day I was seated in my quarters playing cards with young Morat, of the horse chasseurs, when the door opened and in walked Lasalle, who was our Colonel. You know what a fine, swaggering fellow he was, and the sky-blue uniform of the Tenth suited him to a marvel. My faith, we youngsters were so taken by him that we all swore and diced and drank and played the deuce whether we liked it or no, just that we might resemble our Colonel! We forgot that it was not because he drank or gambled that the Emperor was going to make him the head of the light cavalry, but because he had the surest eye for the nature of a position or for the strength of a column, and the best judgment as to when infantry could be broken, or whether guns were exposed, of any man in the army. We were too young to understand all that, however, so we waxed our moustaches and clicked our spurs and let the ferrules of our scabbards wear out by trailing them along the pavement in the hope that we should all become Lasalles. When he came clanking into my quarters, both Morat and I sprang to our feet.\n\n'My boy,' said he, clapping me on the shoulder, 'the Emperor wants to see you at four o'clock.'\n\nThe room whirled round me at the words, and I had to lean my hands upon the edge of the card-table.\n\n'What?' I cried. 'The Emperor!'\n\n'Precisely,' said he, smiling at my astonishment.\n\n'But the Emperor does not know of my existence, Colonel,' I protested. 'Why should he send for me?'\n\n'Well, that's just what puzzles me,' cried Lasalle, twirling his moustache. 'If he wanted the help of a good sabre, why should he descend to one of my lieutenants when he might have found all that he needed at the head of the regiment? However,' he added, clapping me on the shoulder again in his hearty fashion, 'every man has his chance. I have had mine, otherwise I should not be Colonel of the Tenth. I must not grudge you yours. Forwards, my boy, and may it be the first step towards changing your busby for a cocked hat.'\n\nIt was but two o'clock, so he left me, promising to come back and to accompany me to the palace. My faith, what a time I passed, and how many conjectures did I make as to what it was that the Emperor could want of me! I paced up and down my little room in a fever of anticipation. Sometimes I thought that perhaps he had heard of the guns which we had taken at Austerlitz; but, then, there were so many who had taken guns at Austerlitz, and two years had passed since the battle. Or it might be that he wished to reward me for my affair with the aide-de-camp of the Russian Emperor. But then again a cold fit would seize me, and I would fancy that he had sent for me to reprimand me. There were a few duels which he might have taken in ill part, and there were one or two little jokes in Paris since the peace.\n\nBut, no! I considered the words of Lasalle. 'If he had need of a brave man,' said Lasalle.\n\nIt was obvious that my Colonel had some idea of what was in the wind. If he had not known that it was to my advantage, he would not have been so cruel as to congratulate me. My heart glowed with joy as this conviction grew upon me, and I sat down to write to my mother and to tell her that the Emperor was waiting, at that very moment, to have my opinion upon a matter of importance. It made me smile as I wrote it to think that, wonderful as it appeared to me, it would probably only confirm my mother in her opinion of the Emperor's good sense.\n\nAt half-past three I heard a sabre come clanking against every step of my wooden stair. It was Lasalle, and with him was a lame gentleman, very neatly dressed in black with dapper ruffles and cuffs. We did not know many civilians, we of the army, but, my word, this was one whom we could not afford to ignore! I had only to glance at those twinkling eyes, the comical, upturned nose, and the straight, precise mouth, to know that I was in the presence of the one man in France whom even the Emperor had to consider.\n\n'This is Monsieur Etienne Gerard, Monsieur de Talleyrand,' said Lasalle.\n\nI saluted, and the statesman took me in from the top of my panache to the rowel of my spur, with a glance that played over me like a rapier point.\n\n'Have you explained to the lieutenant the circumstances under which he is summoned to the Emperor's presence?' he asked, in his dry, creaking voice.\n\nThey were such a contrast, these two men, that I could not help glancing from one to the other of them: the black, sly politician, and the big, sky-blue hussar with one fist on his hip and the other on the hilt of his sabre. They both took their seats as I looked, Talleyrand without a sound, and Lasalle with a clash and a jingle like a prancing charger.\n\n'It's this way, youngster,' said he, in his brusque fashion; 'I was with the Emperor in his private cabinet this morning when a note was brought in to him. He opened it, and as he did so he gave such a start that it fluttered down on to the floor. I handed it up to him again, but he was staring at the wall in front of him as if he had seen a ghost. \"Fratelli dell' Ajaccio,\" he muttered; and then again, \"Fratelli dell' Ajaccio.\" I don't pretend to know more Italian than a man can pick up in two campaigns, and I could make nothing of this. It seemed to me that he had gone out of his mind; and you would have said so also, Monsieur de Talleyrand, if you had seen the look in his eyes. He read the note, and then he sat for half an hour or more without moving.'\n\n'And you?' asked Talleyrand.\n\n'Why, I stood there not knowing what I ought to do. Presently he seemed to come back to his senses.\n\n'\"I suppose, Lasalle,\" said he, \"that you have some gallant young officers in the Tenth?\"\n\n'\"They are all that, sire,\" I answered.\n\n'\"If you had to pick one who was to be depended upon for action, but who would not think too much\u2014you understand me, Lasalle\u2014which would you select?\" he asked.\n\n'I saw that he needed an agent who would not penetrate too deeply into his plans.\n\n'\"I have one,\" said I, \"who is all spurs and moustaches, with never a thought beyond women and horses.\"\n\n'\"That is the man I want,\" said Napoleon. \"Bring him to my private cabinet at four o'clock.\"\n\n'So, youngster, I came straight away to you at once, and mind that you do credit to the 10th Hussars.'\n\nI was by no means flattered by the reasons which had led to my Colonel's choice, and I must have shown as much in my face, for he roared with laughter and Talleyrand gave a dry chuckle also.\n\n'Just one word of advice before you go, Monsieur Gerard,' said he: 'you are now coming into troubled waters, and you might find a worse pilot than myself. We have none of us any idea as to what this little affair means, and, between ourselves, it is very important for us, who have the destinies of France upon our shoulders, to keep ourselves in touch with all that goes on. You understand me, Monsieur Gerard?'\n\nI had not the least idea what he was driving at, but I bowed and tried to look as if it was clear to me.\n\n'Act very guardedly, then, and say nothing to anybody,' said Talleyrand. 'Colonel de Lasalle and I will not show ourselves in public with you, but we will await you here, and we will give you our advice when you have told us what has passed between the Emperor and yourself. It is time that you started now, for the Emperor never forgives unpunctuality.'\n\nOff I went on foot to the palace, which was only a hundred paces off. I made my way to the ante-chamber, where Duroc, with his grand new scarlet and gold coat, was fussing about among the crowd of people who were waiting. I heard him whisper to Monsieur de Caulaincourt that half of them were German Dukes who expected to be made Kings, and the other half German Dukes who expected to be made paupers. Duroc, when he heard my name, showed me straight in, and I found myself in the Emperor's presence.\n\nI had, of course, seen him in camp a hundred times, but I had never been face to face with him before. I have no doubt that if you had met him without knowing in the least who he was, you would simply have said that he was a sallow little fellow with a good forehead and fairly well-turned calves. His tight white cashmere breeches and white stockings showed off his legs to advantage. But even a stranger must have been struck by the singular look of his eyes, which could harden into an expression which would frighten a grenadier. It is said that even Auguereau, who was a man who had never known what fear was, quailed before Napoleon's gaze, at a time, too, when the Emperor was but an unknown soldier. He looked mildly enough at me, however, and motioned me to remain by the door. De Meneval was writing to his dictation, looking up at him between each sentence with his spaniel eyes.\n\n'That will do. You can go,' said the Emperor, abruptly. Then, when the secretary had left the room, he strode across with his hands behind his back, and he looked me up and down without a word. Though he was a small man himself, he was very fond of having fine-looking fellows about him, and so I think that my appearance gave him pleasure. For my own part, I raised one hand to the salute and held the other upon the hilt of my sabre, looking straight ahead of me, as a soldier should.\n\n'Well, Monsieur Gerard,' said he, at last, tapping his forefinger upon one of the brandebourgs of gold braid upon the front of my pelisse, 'I am informed that you are a very deserving young officer. Your Colonel gives me an excellent account of you.'\n\nI wished to make a brilliant reply, but I could think of nothing save Lasalle's phrase that I was all spurs and moustaches, so it ended in my saying nothing at all. The Emperor watched the struggle which must have shown itself upon my features, and when, finally, no answer came he did not appear to be displeased.\n\n'I believe that you are the very man that I want,' said he. 'Brave and clever men surround me upon every side. But a brave man who\u2014\u2014' He did not finish his sentence, and for my own part I could not understand what he was driving at. I contented myself with assuring him that he could count upon me to the death.\n\n'You are, as I understand, a good swordsman?' said he.\n\n'Tolerable, sire,' I answered.\n\n'You were chosen by your regiment to fight the champion of the Hussars of Chambarant?' said he.\n\nI was not sorry to find that he knew so much of my exploits.\n\n'My comrades, sire, did me that honour,' said I.\n\n'And for the sake of practice you insulted six fencing masters in the week before your duel?'\n\n'I had the privilege of being out seven times in as many days, sire,' said I.\n\n'And escaped without a scratch?'\n\n'The fencing master of the 23rd Light Infantry touched me on the left elbow, sire.'\n\n'Let us have no more child's play of the sort, monsieur,' he cried, turning suddenly to that cold rage of his which was so appalling. 'Do you imagine that I place veteran soldiers in these positions that you may practise quarte and tierce upon them? How am I to face Europe if my soldiers turn their points upon each other? Another word of your duelling, and I break you between these fingers.'\n\nI saw his plump white hands flash before my eyes as he spoke, and his voice had turned to the most discordant hissing and growling. My word, my skin pringled all over as I listened to him, and I would gladly have changed my position for that of the first man in the steepest and narrowest breach that ever swallowed up a storming party. He turned to the table, drank off a cup of coffee, and then when he faced me again every trace of this storm had vanished, and he wore that singular smile which came from his lips but never from his eyes.\n\n'I have need of your services, Monsieur Gerard,' said he. 'I may be safer with a good sword at my side, and there are reasons why yours should be the one which I select. But first of all I must bind you to secrecy. Whilst I live what passes between us today must be known to none but ourselves.'\n\nI thought of Talleyrand and of Lasalle, but I promised.\n\n'In the next place, I do not want your opinions or conjectures, and I wish you to do exactly what you are told.'\n\nI bowed.\n\n'It is your sword that I need, and not your brains. I will do the thinking. Is that clear to you?'\n\n'Yes, sire.'\n\n'You know the Chancellor's Grove, in the forest?'\n\nI bowed.\n\n'You know also the large double fir-tree where the hounds assembled on Tuesday?'\n\nHad he known that I met a girl under it three times a week, he would not have asked me. I bowed once more without remark.\n\n'Very good. You will meet me there at ten o'clock tonight.'\n\nI had got past being surprised at anything which might happen. If he had asked me to take his place upon the imperial throne I could only have nodded my busby.\n\n'We shall then proceed into the wood together,' said the Emperor. 'You will be armed with a sword, but not with pistols. You must address no remark to me, and I shall say nothing to you. We will advance in silence. You understand?'\n\n'I understand, sire.'\n\n'After a time we shall see a man, or more probably two men, under a certain tree. We shall approach them together. If I signal to you to defend me, you will have your sword ready. If, on the other hand, I speak to these men, you will wait and see what happens. If you are called upon to draw, you must see that neither of them, in the event of there being two, escapes from us. I shall myself assist you.'\n\n'Sire,' I cried, 'I have no doubt that two would not be too many for my sword; but would it not be better that I should bring a comrade than that you should be forced to join in such a struggle?'\n\n'Ta, ta, ta,' said he. 'I was a soldier before I was an Emperor. Do you think, then, that artillerymen have not swords as well as the hussars? But I ordered you not to argue with me. You will do exactly what I tell you. If swords are once out, neither of these men is to get away alive.'\n\n'They shall not, sire,' said I.\n\n'Very good. I have no more instructions for you. You can go.'\n\nI turned to the door, and then an idea occurring to me I turned.\n\n'I have been thinking, sire\u2014' said I.\n\nHe sprang at me with the ferocity of a wild beast. I really thought he would have struck me.\n\n'Thinking!' he cried. 'You, you! Do you imagine I chose you out because you could think? Let me hear of your doing such a thing again! You, the one man\u2014but, there! You meet me at the fir-tree at ten o'clock.'\n\nMy faith, I was right glad to get out of the room. If I have a good horse under me, and a sword clanking against my stirrup-iron, I know where I am. And in all that relates to green fodder or dry, barley and oats and rye, and the handling of squadrons upon the march, there is no one who can teach me very much. But when I meet a Chamberlain and a Marshal of the Palace, and have to pick my words with an Emperor, and find that everybody hints instead of talking straight out, I feel like a troop-horse who has been put in a lady's cal\u00e8che. It is not my trade, all this mincing and pretending. I have learned the manners of a gentleman, but never those of a courtier. I was right glad then to get into the fresh air again, and I ran away up to my quarters like a schoolboy who has just escaped from the seminary master.\n\nBut as I opened the door, the very first thing that my eye rested upon was a long pair of sky-blue legs with hussar boots, and a short pair of black ones with knee breeches and buckles. They both sprang up together to greet me.\n\n'Well, what news?' they cried, the two of them.\n\n'None,' I answered.\n\n'The Emperor refused to see you?'\n\n'No, I have seen him.'\n\n'And what did he say?'\n\n'Monsieur de Talleyrand,' I answered, 'I regret to say that it is quite impossible for me to tell you anything about it. I have promised the Emperor.'\n\n'Pooh, pooh, my dear young man,' said he, sidling up to me, as a cat does when it is about to rub itself against you. 'This is all among friends, you understand, and goes no farther than these four walls. Besides, the Emperor never meant to include me in this promise.'\n\n'It is but a minute's walk to the palace, Monsieur de Talleyrand,' I answered; 'if it would not be troubling you too much to ask you to step up to it and bring back the Emperor's written statement that he did not mean to include you in this promise, I shall be happy to tell you every word that passed.'\n\nHe showed his teeth at me then like the old fox that he was.\n\n'Monsieur Gerard appears to be a little puffed up,' said he. 'He is too young to see things in their just proportion. As he grows older he may understand that it is not always very discreet for a subaltern of cavalry to give such very abrupt refusals.'\n\nI did not know what to say to this, but Lasalle came to my aid in his downright fashion.\n\n'The lad is quite right,' said he. 'If I had known that there was a promise I should not have questioned him. You know very well, Monsieur de Talleyrand, that if he had answered you, you would have laughed in your sleeve and thought as much about him as I think of the bottle when the burgundy is gone. As for me, I promise you that the Tenth would have had no room for him, and that we should have lost our best swordsman if I had heard him give up the Emperor's secret.'\n\nBut the statesman became only the more bitter when he saw that I had the support of my Colonel.\n\n'I have heard, Colonel de Lasalle,' said he, with an icy dignity, 'that your opinion is of great weight upon the subject of light cavalry. Should I have occasion to seek information about that branch of the army, I shall be very happy to apply to you. At present, however, the matter concerns diplomacy, and you will permit me to form my own views upon that question. As long as the welfare of France and the safety of the Emperor's person are largely committed to my care, I will use every means in my power to secure them, even if it should be against the Emperor's own temporary wishes. I have the honour, Colonel de Lasalle, to wish you a very good-day!'\n\nHe shot a most unamiable glance in my direction, and, turning upon his heel, he walked with little, quick, noiseless steps out of the room.\n\nI could see from Lasalle's face that he did not at all relish finding himself at enmity with the powerful Minister. He rapped out an oath or two, and then, catching up his sabre and his cap, he clattered away down the stairs. As I looked out of the window I saw the two of them, the big blue man and the limping black one, going up the street together. Talleyrand was walking very rigidly, and Lasalle was waving his hands and talking, so I suppose he was trying to make his peace.\n\nThe Emperor had told me not to think, and I endeavoured to obey him. I took up the cards from the table where Morat had left them, and I tried to work out a few combinations at \u00e9cart\u00e9. But I could not remember which were trumps, and I threw them under the table in despair. Then I drew my sabre and practised giving point until I was weary, but it was all of no use at all. My mind would work, in spite of myself. At ten o'clock I was to meet the Emperor in the forest. Of all extraordinary combinations of events in the whole world, surely this was the last which would have occurred to me when I rose from my couch that morning. But the responsibility\u2014- the dreadful responsibility! It was all upon my shoulders. There was no one to halve it with me. It made me cold all over. Often as I have faced death upon the battle-field, I have never known what real fear was until that moment. But then I considered that after all I could but do my best like a brave and honourable gentleman, and above all obey the orders which I had received, to the very letter. And, if all went well, this would surely be the foundation of my fortunes. Thus, swaying between my fears and my hopes, I spent the long, long evening until it was time to keep my appointment.\n\nI put on my military overcoat, as I did not know how much of the night I might have to spend in the woods, and I fastened my sword outside it. I pulled off my hussar boots also, and wore a pair of shoes and gaiters, that I might be lighter upon my feet. Then I stole out of my quarters and made for the forest, feeling very much easier in my mind, for I am always at my best when the time of thought has passed and the moment for action arrived.\n\nI passed the barracks of the Chasseurs of the Guards, and the line of cafes all filled with uniforms. I caught a glimpse as I went by of the blue and gold of some of my comrades, amid the swarm of dark infantry coats and the light green of the Guides. There they sat, sipping their wine and smoking their cigars, little dreaming what their comrade had on hand. One of them, the chief of my squadron, caught sight of me in the lamplight, and came shouting after me into the street. I hurried on, however, pretending not to hear him, so he, with a curse at my deafness, went back at last to his wine bottle.\n\nIt is not very hard to get into the forest at Fontainebleau. The scattered trees steal their way into the very streets, like the tirailleurs in front of a column. I turned into a path, which led to the edge of the woods, and then I pushed rapidly forward towards the old fir-tree. It was a place which, as I have hinted, I had my own reasons for knowing well, and I could only thank the Fates that it was not one of the nights upon which L\u00e9onie would be waiting for me. The poor child would have died of terror at sight of the Emperor. He might have been too harsh with her\u2014and worse still, he might have been too kind.\n\nThere was a half moon shining, and, as I came up to our trysting-place, I saw that I was not the first to arrive. The Emperor was pacing up and down, his hands behind him and his face sunk somewhat forward upon his breast. He wore a grey great-coat with a capote over his head. I had seen him in such a dress in our winter campaign in Poland, and it was said that he used it because the hood was such an excellent disguise. He was always fond, whether in the camp or in Paris, of walking round at night, and overhearing the talk in the cabarets or round the fires. His figure, however, and his way of carrying his head and his hands were so well known that he was always recognized, and then the talkers would say whatever they thought would please him best.\n\nMy first thought was that he would be angry with me for having kept him waiting, but as I approached him, we heard the big church clock of Fontainebleau clang out the hour of ten. It was evident, therefore, that it was he who was too soon, and not I too late. I remembered his order that I should make no remark, so contented myself with halting within four paces of him, clicking my spurs together, grounding my sabre, and saluting. He glanced at me, and then without a word he turned and walked slowly through the forest, I keeping always about the same distance behind him. Once or twice he seemed to me to look apprehensively to right and to left, as if he feared that someone was observing us. I looked also, but although I have the keenest sight, it was quite impossible to see anything except the ragged patches of moonshine between the great black shadows of the trees. My ears are as quick as my eyes, and once or twice I thought that I heard a twig crack; but you know how many sounds there are in a forest at night, and how difficult it is even to say what direction they come from.\n\nWe walked for rather more than a mile, and I knew exactly what our destination was, long before we got there. In the centre of one of the glades, there is the shattered stump of what must at some time have been a most gigantic tree. It is called the Abbot's Beech, and there are so many ghostly stories about it, that I know many a brave soldier who would not care about mounting sentinel over it. However, I cared as little for such folly as the Emperor did, so we crossed the glade and made straight for the old broken trunk. As we approached, I saw that two men were waiting for us beneath it.\n\nWhen I first caught sight of them they were standing rather behind it, as if they were not anxious to be seen, but as we came nearer they emerged from its shadow and walked forward to meet us. The Emperor glanced back at me, and slackened his pace a little so that I came within arm's length of him. You may think that I had my hilt well to the front, and that I had a very good look at these two people who were approaching us.\n\nThe one was tall, remarkably so, and of very spare frame, while the other was rather below the usual height, and had a brisk, determined way of walking. They each wore black cloaks, which were slung right across their figures, and hung down upon one side, like the mantles of Murat's dragoons. They had flat black caps, like those I have since seen in Spain, which threw their faces into darkness, though I could see the gleam of their eyes from beneath them. With the moon behind them and their long black shadows walking in front, they were such figures as one might expect to meet at night near the Abbot's Beech. I can remember that they had a stealthy way of moving, and that as they approached, the moonshine formed two white diamonds between their legs and the legs of their shadows.\n\nThe Emperor had paused, and these two strangers came to a stand also within a few paces of us. I had drawn up close to my companion's elbow, so that the four of us were facing each other without a word spoken. My eyes were particularly fixed upon the taller one, because he was slightly the nearer to me, and I became certain as I watched him that he was in the last state of nervousness. His lean figure was quivering all over, and I heard a quick, thin panting like that of a tired dog. Suddenly one of them gave a short, hissing signal. The tall man bent his back and his knees like a diver about to spring, but before he could move, I had jumped with drawn sabre in front of him. At the same instant the smaller man bounded past me, and buried a long poniard in the Emperor's heart.\n\nMy God! the horror of that moment! It is a marvel that I did not drop dead myself. As in a dream, I saw the grey coat whirl convulsively round, and caught a glimpse in the moonlight of three inches of red point which jutted out from between the shoulders. Then down he fell with a dead man's gasp upon the grass, and the assassin, leaving his weapon buried in his victim, threw up both his hands and shrieked with joy. But I\u2014I drove my sword through his midriff with such frantic force, that the mere blow of the hilt against the end of his breast-bone sent him six paces before he fell, and left my reeking blade ready for the other. I sprang round upon him with such a lust for blood upon me as I had never felt, and never have felt, in all my days. As I turned, a dagger flashed before my eyes, and I felt the cold wind of it pass my neck and the villain's wrist jar upon my shoulder. I shortened my sword, but he winced away from me, and an instant afterwards was in full flight, bounding like a deer across the glade in the moonlight.\n\nBut he was not to escape me thus. I knew that the murderer's poniard had done its work. Young as I was, I had seen enough of war to know a mortal blow. I paused but for an instant to touch the cold hand.\n\n'Sire! Sire!' I cried, in an agony; and then as no sound came back and nothing moved, save an ever-widening dark circle in the moonlight, I knew that all was indeed over. I sprang madly to my feet, threw off my great-coat, and ran at the top of my speed after the remaining assassin.\n\nAh, how I blessed the wisdom which had caused me to come in shoes and gaiters! And the happy thought which had thrown off my coat. He could not get rid of his mantle, this wretch, or else he was too frightened to think of it. So it was that I gained upon him from the beginning. He must have been out of his wits, for he never tried to bury himself in the darker parts of the woods, but he flew on from glade to glade, until he came to the heath-land which leads up to the great Fontainebleau quarry. There I had him in full sight, and knew that he could not escape me. He ran well, it is true\u2014ran as a coward runs when his life is the stake. But I ran as Destiny runs when it gets behind a man's heels. Yard by yard I drew in upon him. He was rolling and staggering. I could hear the rasping and crackling of his breath. The great gulf of the quarry suddenly yawned in front of his path, and glancing at me over his shoulder, he gave a shriek of despair. The next instant he had vanished from my sight.\n\nVanished utterly, you understand. I rushed to the spot, and gazed down into the black abyss. Had he hurled himself over? I had almost made up my mind that he had done so, when a gentle sound rising and falling came out of the darkness beneath me. It was his breathing once more, and it showed me where he must be. He was hiding in the tool-house.\n\nAt the edge of the quarry and beneath the summit there is a small platform upon which stands a wooden hut for the use of the labourers. It was into this, then, that he had darted. Perhaps he had thought, the fool, that, in the darkness, I would not venture to follow him. He little knew Etienne Gerard. With a spring I was on the platform, with another I was through the doorway, and then, hearing him in the corner, I hurled myself down upon the top of him.\n\nHe fought like a wild cat, but he never had a chance with his shorter weapon. I think that I must have transfixed him with that first mad lunge, for, though he struck and struck, his blows had no power in them, and presently his dagger tinkled down upon the floor. When I was sure that he was dead, I rose up and passed out into the moonlight. I climbed on to the heath again, and wandered across it as nearly out of my mind as a man could be.\n\nWith the blood singing in my ears, and my naked sword still clutched in my hand, I walked aimlessly on until, looking round me, I found that I had come as far as the glade of the Abbot's Beech, and saw in the distance that gnarled stump which must ever be associated with the most terrible moment of my life. I sat down upon a fallen trunk with my sword across my knees and my head between my hands, and I tried to think about what had happened and what would happen in the future.\n\nThe Emperor had committed himself to my care. The Emperor was dead. Those were the two thoughts which clanged in my head, until I had no room for any other ones. He had come with me and he was dead. I had done what he had ordered when living. I had revenged him when dead. But what of all that? The world would look upon me as responsible. They might even look upon me as the assassin. What could I prove? What witnesses had I? Might I not have been the accomplice of these wretches? Yes, yes, I was eternally dishonoured\u2014the lowest, most despicable creature in all France. This, then, was the end of my fine military ambitions\u2014of the hopes of my mother. I laughed bitterly at the thought. And what was I to do now? Was I to go into Fontainebleau, to wake up the palace, and to inform them that the great Emperor had been murdered within a pace of me? I could not do it\u2014no, I could not do it! There was but one course for an honourable gentleman whom Fate had placed in so cruel a position. I would fall upon my dishonoured sword, and so share, since I could not avert, the Emperor's fate. I rose with my nerves strung to this last piteous deed, and as I did so, my eyes fell upon something which struck the breath from my lips. The Emperor was standing before me!\n\nHe was not more than ten yards off, with the moon shining straight upon his cold, pale face. He wore his grey overcoat, but the hood was turned back, and the front open, so that I could see the green coat of the Guides, and the white breeches. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his chin sunk forward upon his breast, in the way that was usual with him.\n\n'Well,' said he, in his hardest and most abrupt voice, 'what account do you give of yourself?'\n\nI believe that, if he had stood in silence for another minute, my brain would have given way. But those sharp military accents were exactly what I needed to bring me to myself. Living or dead, here was the Emperor standing before me and asking me questions. I sprang to the salute.\n\n'You have killed one, I see,' said he, jerking his head towards the beech.\n\n'Yes, sire.'\n\n'And the other escaped?'\n\n'No, sire, I killed him also.'\n\n'What!' he cried. 'Do I understand that you have killed them both?' He approached me as he spoke with a smile which set his teeth gleaming in the moonlight.\n\n'One body lies there, sire,' I answered. 'The other is in the tool-house at the quarry.'\n\n'Then the Brothers of Ajaccio are no more,' he cried, and after a pause, as if speaking to himself: 'The shadow has passed me for ever.' Then he bent forward and laid his hand upon my shoulder.\n\n'You have done very well, my young friend,' said he. 'You have lived up to your reputation.'\n\nHe was flesh and blood, then, this Emperor. I could feel the little, plump palm that rested upon me. And yet I could not get over what I had seen with my own eyes, and so I stared at him in such bewilderment that he broke once more into one of his smiles.\n\n'No, no, Monsieur Gerard,' said he, 'I am not a ghost, and you have not seen me killed. You will come here, and all will be clear to you.'\n\nHe turned as he spoke, and led the way towards the great beech stump.\n\nThe bodies were still lying upon the ground, and two men were standing beside them. As we approached I saw from the turbans that they were Roustem and Mustafa, the two Mameluke servants. The Emperor paused when he came to the grey figure upon the ground, and turning back the hood which shrouded the features, he showed a face which was very different from his own.\n\n'Here lies a faithful servant who has given up his life for his master,' said he. 'Monsieur de Goudin resembles me in figure and in manner, as you must admit.'\n\nWhat a delirium of joy came upon me when these few words made everything clear to me. He smiled again as he saw the delight which urged me to throw my arms round him and to embrace him, but he moved a step away, as if he had divined my impulse.\n\n'You are unhurt?' he asked.\n\n'I am unhurt, sire. But in another minute I should in my despair\u2014\u2014'\n\n'Tut, tut!' he interrupted. 'You did very well. He should himself have been more on his guard. I saw everything which passed.'\n\n'You saw it, sire!'\n\n'You did not hear me follow you through the wood, then? I hardly lost sight of you from the moment that you left your quarters until poor De Goudin fell. The counterfeit Emperor was in front of you and the real one behind. You will now escort me back to the palace.'\n\nHe whispered an order to his Mamelukes, who saluted in silence and remained where they were standing. For my part, I followed the Emperor with my pelisse bursting with pride. My word, I have always carried myself as a hussar should, but Lasalle himself never strutted and swung his dolman as I did that night. Who should clink his spurs and clatter his sabre if it were not I\u2014I, Etienne Gerard\u2014the confidant of the Emperor, the chosen swordsman of the light cavalry, the man who slew the would-be assassins of Napoleon? But he noticed my bearing and turned upon me like a blight.\n\n'Is that the way you carry yourself on a secret mission?' he hissed, with that cold glare in his eyes. 'Is it thus that you will make your comrades believe that nothing remarkable has occurred? Have done with this nonsense, monsieur, or you will find yourself transferred to the sappers, where you would have harder work and duller plumage.'\n\nThat was the way with the Emperor. If ever he thought that anyone might have a claim upon him, he took the first opportunity to show him the gulf that lay between. I saluted and was silent, but I must confess to you that it hurt me after all that had passed between us. He led on to the palace, where we passed through the side door and up into his own cabinet. There were a couple of grenadiers at the staircase, and their eyes started out from under their fur caps, I promise you, when they saw a young lieutenant of hussars going up to the Emperor's room at midnight. I stood by the door, as I had done in the afternoon, while he flung himself down in an arm-chair, and remained silent so long that it seemed to me that he had forgotten all about me. I ventured at last upon a slight cough to remind him.\n\n'Ah, Monsieur Gerard,' said he, 'you are very curious, no doubt, as to the meaning of all this?'\n\n'I am quite content, sire, if it is your pleasure not to tell me,' I answered.\n\n'Ta, ta, ta,' said he impatiently. 'These are only words. The moment that you were outside that door you would begin making inquiries about what it means. In two days your brother officers would know about it, in three days it would be all over Fontainebleau, and it would be in Paris on the fourth. Now, if I tell you enough to appease your curiosity, there is some reasonable hope that you may be able to keep the matter to yourself.'\n\nHe did not understand me, this Emperor, and yet I could only bow and be silent.\n\n'A few words will make it clear to you,' said he, speaking very swiftly and pacing up and down the room. 'They were Corsicans, these two men. I had known them in my youth. We had belonged to the same society\u2014Brothers of Ajaccio, as we called ourselves. It was founded in the old Paoli days, you understand, and we had some strict rules of our own which were not infringed with impunity.'\n\nA very grim look came over his face as he spoke, and it seemed to me that all that was French had gone out of him, and that it was the pure Corsican, the man of strong passions and of strange revenges, who stood before me. His memory had gone back to those early days of his, and for five minutes, wrapped in thought, he paced up and down the room with his quick little tiger steps. Then with an impatient wave of his hands he came back to his palace and to me.\n\n'The rules of such a society,' he continued, 'are all very well for a private citizen. In the old days there was no more loyal brother than I. But circumstances change, and it would be neither for my welfare nor for that of France that I should now submit myself to them. They wanted to hold me to it, and so brought their fate upon their own heads. These were the two chiefs of the order, and they had come from Corsica to summon me to meet them at the spot which they named. I knew what such a summons meant. No man had ever returned from obeying one. On the other hand, if I did not go, I was sure that disaster would follow. I am a brother myself, you remember, and I know their ways.'\n\nAgain there came that hardening of his mouth and cold glitter of his eyes.\n\n'You perceive my dilemma, Monsieur Gerard,' said he. 'How would you have acted yourself, under such circumstances?'\n\n'Given the word to the l0th Hussars, sire,' I cried. 'Patrols could have swept the woods from end to end, and brought these two rascals to your feet.'\n\nHe smiled, but he shook his head.\n\n'I had very excellent reasons why I did not wish them taken alive,' said he. 'You can understand that an assassin's tongue might be as dangerous a weapon as an assassin's dagger. I will not disguise from you that I wished to avoid scandal at all cost. That was why I ordered you to take no pistols with you. That also is why my Mamelukes will remove all traces of the affair, and nothing more will be heard about it. I thought of all possible plans, and I am convinced that I selected the best one. Had I sent more than one guard with De Goudin into the woods, then the brothers would not have appeared. They would not change their plans nor miss their chance for the sake of a single man. It was Colonel Lasalle's accidental presence at the moment when I received the summons which led to my choosing one of his hussars for the mission. I selected you, Monsieur Gerard, because I wanted a man who could handle a sword, and who would not pry more deeply into the affair than I desired. I trust that, in this respect, you will justify my choice as well as you have done in your bravery and skill.'\n\n'Sire,' I answered, 'you may rely upon it.'\n\n'As long as I live,' said he, 'you never open your lips upon this subject.'\n\n'I dismiss it entirely from my mind, sire. I will efface it from my recollection as if it had never been. I will promise you to go out of your cabinet at this moment exactly as I was when I entered it at four o'clock.'\n\n'You cannot do that,' said the Emperor, smiling. 'You were a lieutenant at that time. You will permit me, Captain, to wish you a very good-night.'" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER HELD THE KING", + "text": "Here, upon the lapel of my coat, you may see the ribbon of my decoration, but the medal itself I keep in a leathern pouch at home, and I never venture to take it out unless one of the modern peace generals, or some foreigner of distinction who finds himself in our little town, takes advantage of the opportunity to pay his respects to the well-known Brigadier Gerard. Then I place it upon my breast, and I give my moustache the old Marengo twist which brings a grey point into either eye. Yet with it all I fear that neither they, nor you either, my friends, will ever realize the man that I was. You know me only as a civilian\u2014with an air and a manner, it is true\u2014but still merely as a civilian. Had you seen me as I stood in the doorway of the inn at Alamo, on the 1st of July, in the year 1810, you would then have known what the hussar may attain to.\n\nFor a month I had lingered in that accursed village, and all on account of a lance-thrust in my ankle, which made it impossible for me to put my foot to the ground. There were three besides myself at first: old Bouvet, of the Hussars of Bercheny, Jacques Regnier, of the Cuirassiers, and a funny little voltigeur captain whose name I forget; but they all got well and hurried on to the front, while I sat gnawing my fingers and tearing my hair, and even, I must confess, weeping from time to time as I thought of my Hussars of Conflans, and the deplorable condition in which they must find themselves when deprived of their colonel. I was not a chief of brigade yet, you understand, although I already carried myself like one, but I was the youngest colonel in the whole service, and my regiment was wife and children to me. It went to my heart that they should be so bereaved. It is true that Villaret, the senior major, was an excellent soldier; but still, even among the best there are degrees of merit.\n\nAh, that happy July day of which I speak, when first I limped to the door and stood in the golden Spanish sunshine! It was but the evening before that I had heard from the regiment. They were at Pastores, on the other side of the mountains, face to face with the English\u2014not forty miles from me by road. But how was I to get to them? The same thrust which had pierced my ankle had slain my charger. I took advice both from Gomez, the landlord, and from an old priest who had slept that night in the inn, but neither of them could do more than assure me that there was not so much as a colt left upon the whole countryside.\n\nThe landlord would not hear of my crossing the mountains without an escort, for he assured me that El Cuchillo, the Spanish guerilla chief, was out that way with his band, and that it meant a death by torture to fall into his hands. The old priest observed, however, that he did not think a French hussar would be deterred by that, and if I had had any doubts, they would of course have been decided by his remark.\n\nBut a horse! How was I to get one? I was standing in the doorway, plotting and planning, when I heard the clink of shoes, and, looking up, I saw a great bearded man, with a blue cloak frogged across in military fashion, coming towards me. He was riding a big black horse with one white stocking on his near fore-leg.\n\n'Halloa, comrade!' said I, as he came up to me.\n\n'Halloa!' said he.\n\n'I am Colonel Gerard, of the Hussars,' said I. 'I have lain here wounded for a month, and I am now ready to rejoin my regiment at Pastores.'\n\n'I am Monsieur Vidal, of the commissariat,' he answered, 'and I am myself upon my way to Pastores. I should be glad to have your company, Colonel, for I hear that the mountains are far from safe.'\n\n'Alas,' said I, 'I have no horse. But if you will sell me yours, I will promise that an escort of hussars shall be sent back for you.'\n\nHe would not hear of it, and it was in vain that the landlord told him dreadful stories of the doings of El Cuchillo, and that I pointed out the duty which he owed to the army and to the country. He would not even argue, but called loudly for a cup of wine. I craftily asked him to dismount and to drink with me, but he must have seen something in my face, for he shook his head; and then, as I approached him with some thought of seizing him by the leg, he jerked his heels into his horse's flanks, and was off in a cloud of dust.\n\nMy faith! it was enough to make a man mad to see this fellow riding away so gaily to join his beef-barrels, and his brandy-casks, and then to think of my five hundred beautiful hussars without their leader. I was gazing after him with bitter thoughts in my mind, when who should touch me on the elbow but the little priest whom I have mentioned.\n\n'It is I who can help you,' he said. 'I am myself travelling south.'\n\nI put my arms about him and, as my ankle gave way at the same moment, we nearly rolled upon the ground together.\n\n'Get me to Pastores,' I cried, 'and you shall have a rosary of golden beads.' I had taken one from the Convent of Spiritu Santo. It shows how necessary it is to take what you can when you are upon a campaign, and how the most unlikely things may become useful.\n\n'I will take you,' he said, in very excellent French, 'not because I hope for any reward, but because it is my way always to do what I can to serve my fellow-man, and that is why I am so beloved wherever I go.'\n\nWith that he led me down the village to an old cow-house, in which we found a tumble-down sort of diligence, such as they used to run early in this century, between some of our remote villages. There were three old mules, too, none of which were strong enough to carry a man, but together they might draw the coach. The sight of their gaunt ribs and spavined legs gave me more delight than the whole two hundred and twenty hunters of the Emperor which I have seen in their stalls at Fontainebleau. In ten minutes the owner was harnessing them into the coach, with no very good will, however, for he was in mortal dread of this terrible Cuchillo. It was only by promising him riches in this world, while the priest threatened him with perdition in the next, that we at last got him safely upon the box with the reins between his fingers. Then he was in such a hurry to get off, out of fear lest we should find ourselves in the dark in the passes, that he hardly gave me time to renew my vows to the innkeeper's daughter. I cannot at this moment recall her name, but we wept together as we parted, and I can remember that she was a very beautiful woman. You will understand, my friends, that when a man like me, who has fought the men and kissed the women in fourteen separate kingdoms, gives a word of praise to the one or the other, it has a little meaning of its own.\n\nThe little priest had seemed a trifle grave when we kissed good-bye, but he soon proved himself the best of companions in the diligence. All the way he amused me with tales of his little parish up in the mountains, and I in my turn told him stories about the camp; but, my faith, I had to pick my steps, for when I said a word too much he would fidget in his seat and his face would show the pain that I had given him. And of course it is not the act of a gentleman to talk in anything but a proper manner to a religious man, though, with all the care in the world, one's words may get out of hand sometimes.\n\nHe had come from the north of Spain, as he told me, and was going to see his mother in a village of Estremadura, and as he spoke about her little peasant home, and her joy in seeing him, it brought my own mother so vividly to my thoughts that the tears started to my eyes. In his simplicity he showed me the little gifts which he was taking to her, and so kindly was his manner that I could readily believe him when he said he was loved wherever he went. He examined my own uniform with as much curiosity as a child, admiring the plume of my busby, and passing his fingers through the sable with which my dolman was trimmed. He drew my sword, too, and then when I told him how many men I had cut down with it, and set my finger on the notch made by the shoulder-bone of the Russian Emperor's aide-de-camp, he shuddered and placed the weapon under the leathern cushion, declaring that it made him sick to look at it.\n\nWell, we had been rolling and creaking on our way whilst this talk had been going forward, and as we reached the base of the mountains we could hear the rumbling of cannon far away upon the right. This came from Massena, who was, as I knew, besieging Ciudad Rodrigo. There was nothing I should have wished better than to have gone straight to him, for if, as some said, he had Jewish blood in his veins, he was the best Jew that I have heard of since Joshua's time. If you were in sight of his beaky nose and bold, black eyes, you were not likely to miss much of what was going on. Still, a siege is always a poor sort of a pick-and-shovel business, and there were better prospects with my hussars in front of the English. Every mile that passed, my heart grew lighter and lighter, until I found myself shouting and singing like a young ensign fresh from St Cyr, just to think of seeing all my fine horses and my gallant fellows once more.\n\nAs we penetrated the mountains the road grew rougher and the pass more savage. At first we had met a few muleteers, but now the whole country seemed deserted, which is not to be wondered at when you think that the French, the English, and the guerillas had each in turn had command over it. So bleak and wild was it, one great brown wrinkled cliff succeeding another, and the pass growing narrower and narrower, that I ceased to look out, but sat in silence, thinking of this and that, of women whom I had loved and of horses which I had handled. I was suddenly brought back from my dreams, however, by observing the difficulties of my companion, who was trying with a sort of brad-awl, which he had drawn out, to bore a hole through the leathern strap which held up his water-flask. As he worked with twitching fingers the strap escaped his grasp, and the wooden bottle fell at my feet. I stooped to pick it up, and as I did so the priest silently leaped upon my shoulders and drove his brad-awl into my eye!\n\nMy friends, I am, as you know, a man steeled to face every danger. When one has served from the affair of Zurich to that last fatal day of Waterloo, and has had the special medal, which I keep at home in a leathern pouch, one can afford to confess when one is frightened. It may console some of you, when your own nerves play you tricks, to remember that you have heard even me, Brigadier Gerard, say that I have been scared. And besides my terror at this horrible attack, and the maddening pain of my wound, there was a sudden feeling of loathing such as you might feel were some filthy tarantula to strike its fangs into you.\n\nI clutched the creature in both hands, and, hurling him on to the floor of the coach, I stamped on him with my heavy boots. He had drawn a pistol from the front of his soutane, but I kicked it out of his hand, and again I fell with my knees upon his chest. Then, for the first time, he screamed horribly, while I, half blinded, felt about for the sword which he had so cunningly concealed. My hand had just lighted upon it, and I was dashing the blood from my face to see where he lay that I might transfix him, when the whole coach turned partly over upon its side, and my weapon was jerked out of my grasp by the shock.\n\nBefore I could recover myself the door was burst open, and I was dragged by the heels on to the road. But even as I was torn out on to the flint stones, and realized that thirty ruffians were standing around me, I was filled with joy, for my pelisse had been pulled over my head in the struggle and was covering one of my eyes, and it was with my wounded eye that I was seeing this gang of brigands. You see for yourself by this pucker and scar how the thin blade passed between socket and ball, but it was only at that moment, when I was dragged from the coach, that I understood that my sight was not gone for ever. The creature's intention, doubtless, was to drive it through into my brain, and indeed he loosened some portion of the inner bone of my head, so that I afterwards had more trouble from that wound than from any one of the seventeen which I have received.\n\nThey dragged me out, these sons of dogs, with curses and execrations, beating me with their fists and kicking me as I lay upon the ground. I had frequently observed that the mountaineers wore cloth swathed round their feet, but never did I imagine that I should have so much cause to be thankful for it. Presently, seeing the blood upon my head, and that I lay quiet, they thought that I was unconscious, whereas I was storing every ugly face among them into my memory, so that I might see them all safely hanged if ever my chance came round. Brawny rascals they were, with yellow handkerchiefs round their heads, and great red sashes stuffed with weapons. They had rolled two rocks across the path, where it took a sharp turn, and it was these which had torn off one of the wheels of the coach and upset us. As to this reptile, who had acted the priest so cleverly and had told me so much of his parish and his mother, he, of course, had known where the ambuscade was laid, and had attempted to put me beyond all resistance at the moment when we reached it.\n\nI cannot tell you how frantic their rage was when they drew him out of the coach and saw the state to which I had reduced him. If he had not got all his deserts, he had, at least, something as a souvenir of his meeting with Etienne Gerard, for his legs dangled aimlessly about, and though the upper part of his body was convulsed with rage and pain, he sat straight down upon his feet when they tried to set him upright. But all the time his two little black eyes, which had seemed so kindly and so innocent in the coach, were glaring at me like a wounded cat, and he spat, and spat, and spat in my direction. My faith! when the wretches jerked me on to my feet again, and when I was dragged off up one of the mountain paths, I understood that a time was coming when I was to need all my courage and resource. My enemy was carried upon the shoulders of two men behind me, and I could hear his hissing and his reviling, first in one ear and then in the other, as I was hurried up the winding track.\n\nI suppose that it must have been for an hour that we ascended, and what with my wounded ankle and the pain from my eye, and the fear lest this wound should have spoiled my appearance, I have made no journey to which I look back with less pleasure. I have never been a good climber at any time, but it is astonishing what you can do, even with a stiff ankle, when you have a copper-coloured brigand at each elbow and a nine-inch blade within touch of your whiskers.\n\nWe came at last to a place where the path wound over a ridge, and descended upon the other side through thick pine-trees into a valley which opened to the south. In time of peace I had little doubt that the villains were all smugglers, and that these were the secret paths by which they crossed the Portuguese frontier. There were many mule-tracks, and once I was surprised to see the marks of a large horse where a stream had softened the track. These were explained when, on reaching a place where there was a clearing in the fir wood, I saw the animal itself haltered to a fallen tree. My eyes had hardly rested upon it, when I recognized the great black limbs and the white near fore-leg. It was the very horse which I had begged for in the morning.\n\nWhat, then, had become of Commissariat Vidal? Was it possible that there was another Frenchman in as perilous a plight as myself? The thought had hardly entered my head when our party stopped and one of them uttered a peculiar cry. It was answered from among the brambles which lined the base of a cliff at one side of a clearing, and an instant later ten or a dozen more brigands came out from amongst them, and the two parties greeted each other. The new-comers surrounded my friend of the brad-awl with cries of grief and sympathy, and then, turning upon me, they brandished their knives and howled at me like the gang of assassins that they were. So frantic were their gestures that I was convinced that my end had come, and was just bracing myself to meet it in a manner which should be worthy of my past reputation, when one of them gave an order and I was dragged roughly across the little glade to the brambles from which this new band had emerged.\n\nA narrow pathway led through them to a deep grotto in the side of the cliff. The sun was already setting outside, and in the cave itself it would have been quite dark but for a pair of torches which blazed from a socket on either side. Between them there was sitting at a rude table a very singular-looking person, whom I saw instantly, from the respect with which the others addressed him, could be none other than the brigand chief who had received, on account of his dreadful character, the sinister name of El Cuchillo.\n\nThe man whom I had injured had been carried in and placed upon the top of a barrel, his helpless legs dangling about in front of him, and his cat's eyes still darting glances of hatred at me. I understood, from the snatches of talk which I could follow between the chief and him, that he was the lieutenant of the band, and that part of his duties was to lie in wait with his smooth tongue and his peaceful garb for travellers like myself. When I thought of how many gallant officers may have been lured to their death by this monster of hypocrisy, it gave me a glow of pleasure to think that I had brought his villainies to an end\u2014though I feared it would be at the price of a life which neither the Emperor nor the army could well spare.\n\nAs the injured man still supported upon the barrel by two comrades, was explaining in Spanish all that had befallen him, I was held by several of the villains in front of the table at which the chief was seated, and had an excellent opportunity of observing him. I have seldom seen any man who was less like my idea of a brigand, and especially of a brigand with such a reputation that in a land of cruelty he had earned so dark a nickname. His face was bluff and broad and bland, with ruddy cheeks and comfortable little tufts of side-whiskers, which gave him the appearance of a well-to-do grocer of the Rue St Antoine. He had not any of those flaring sashes or gleaming weapons which distinguished his followers, but on the contrary he wore a good broadcloth coat like a respectable father of a family, and save for his brown leggings there was nothing to indicate a life among the mountains. His surroundings, too, corresponded with himself, and beside his snuff-box upon the table there stood a great brown book, which looked like a commercial ledger. Many other books were ranged along a plank between two powder-casks, and there was a great litter of papers, some of which had verses scribbled upon them. All this I took in while he, leaning indolently back in his chair, was listening to the report of his lieutenant. Having heard everything, he ordered the cripple to be carried out again, and I was left with my three guards, waiting to hear my fate. He took up his pen, and tapping his forehead with the handle of it, he pursed up his lips and looked out of the corner of his eyes at the roof of the grotto.\n\n'I suppose,' said he at last, speaking very excellent French, 'that you are not able to suggest a rhyme for the word Covilha.'\n\nI answered him that my acquaintance with the Spanish language was so limited that I was unable to oblige him.\n\n'It is a rich language,' said he, 'but less prolific in rhymes than either the German or the English. That is why our best work has been done in blank verse, a form of composition which is capable of reaching great heights. But I fear that such subjects are somewhat outside the range of a hussar.'\n\nI was about to answer that if they were good enough for a guerilla, they could not be too much for the light cavalry, but he was already stooping over his half-finished verse. Presently he threw down the pen with an exclamation of satisfaction, and declaimed a few lines which drew a cry of approval from the three ruffians who held me. His broad face blushed like a young girl who receives her first compliment.\n\n'The critics are in my favour, it appears,' said he; 'we amuse ourselves in our long evenings by singing our own ballads, you understand. I have some little facility in that direction, and I do not at all despair of seeing some of my poor efforts in print before long, and with \"Madrid\" upon the title-page, too. But we must get back to business. May I ask what your name is?'\n\n'Etienne Gerard.'\n\n'Rank?'\n\n'Colonel.'\n\n'Corps?'\n\n'The Third Hussars of Conflans.'\n\n'You are young for a colonel.'\n\n'My career has been an eventful one.'\n\n'Tut, that makes it the sadder,' said he, with his bland smile.\n\nI made no answer to that, but I tried to show him by my bearing that I was ready for the worst which could befall me.\n\n'By the way, I rather fancy that we have had some of your corps here,' said he, turning over the pages of his big brown register. 'We endeavour to keep a record of our operations. Here is a heading under June 24th. Have you not a young officer named Soubiron, a tall, slight youth with light hair?'\n\n'Certainly.'\n\n'I see that we buried him upon that date.'\n\n'Poor lad!' I cried. 'And how did he die?'\n\n'We buried him.'\n\n'But before you buried him?'\n\n'You misunderstand me, Colonel. He was not dead before we buried him.'\n\n'You buried him alive!'\n\nFor a moment I was too stunned to act. Then I hurled myself upon the man, as he sat with that placid smile of his upon his lips, and I would have torn his throat out had the three wretches not dragged me away from him. Again and again I made for him, panting and cursing, shaking off this man and that, straining and wrenching, but never quite free. At last, with my jacket torn nearly off my back and blood dripping from my wrists, I was hauled backwards in the bight of a rope and cords passed round my ankles and my arms.\n\n'You sleek hound!' I cried. 'If ever I have you at my sword's point, I will teach you to maltreat one of my lads. You will find, you bloodthirsty beast, that my Emperor has long arms, and though you lie here like a rat in its hole, the time will come when he will tear you out of it, and you and your vermin will perish together.'\n\nMy faith, I have a rough side to my tongue, and there was not a hard word that I had learned in fourteen campaigns which I did not let fly at him; but he sat with the handle of his pen tapping against his forehead and his eyes squinting up at the roof as if he had conceived the idea of some new stanza. It was this occupation of his which showed me how I might get my point into him.\n\n'You spawn!' said I; 'you think that you are safe here, but your life may be as short as that of your absurd verses, and God knows that it could not be shorter than that.'\n\nAh, you should have seen him bound from his chair when I said the words. This vile monster, who dispensed death and torture as a grocer serves out his figs, had one raw nerve then which I could prod at pleasure. His face grew livid, and those little bourgeois side-whiskers quivered and thrilled with passion.\n\n'Very good, Colonel. You have said enough,' he cried, in a choking voice. 'You say that you have had a very distinguished career. I promise you also a very distinguished ending. Colonel Etienne Gerard of the Third Hussars shall have a death of his own.'\n\n'And I only beg,' said I, 'that you will not commemorate it in verse.' I had one or two little ironies to utter, but he cut me short by a furious gesture which caused my three guards to drag me from the cave.\n\nOur interview, which I have told you as nearly as I can remember it, must have lasted some time, for it was quite dark when we came out, and the moon was shining very clearly in the heavens. The brigands had lighted a great fire of the dried branches of the fir-trees; not, of course, for warmth, since the night was already very sultry, but to cook their evening meal. A huge copper pot hung over the blaze, and the rascals were lying all round in the yellow glare, so that the scene looked like one of those pictures which Junot stole out of Madrid. There are some soldiers who profess to care nothing for art and the like, but I have always been drawn towards it myself, in which respect I show my good taste and my breeding. I remember, for example, that when Lefebvre was selling the plunder after the fall of Danzig, I bought a very fine picture, called 'Nymphs Surprised in a Wood,' and I carried it with me through two campaigns, until my charger had the misfortune to put his hoof through it.\n\nI only tell you this, however, to show you that I was never a mere rough soldier like Rapp or Ney. As I lay in that brigands' camp, I had little time or inclination to think about such matters. They had thrown me down under a tree, the three villains squatting round and smoking their cigarettes within hands' touch of me. What to do I could not imagine. In my whole career I do not suppose that I have ten times been in as hopeless a situation. 'But courage,' thought I. 'Courage, my brave boy! You were not made a Colonel of Hussars at twenty-eight because you could dance a cotillon. You are a picked man, Etienne; a man who has come through more than two hundred affairs, and this little one is surely not going to be the last.' I began eagerly to glance about for some chance of escape, and as I did so I saw something which filled me with great astonishment.\n\nI have already told you that a large fire was burning in the centre of the glade. What with its glare, and what with the moonlight, everything was as clear as possible. On the other side of the glade there was a single tall fir-tree which attracted my attention because its trunk and lower branches were discoloured, as if a large fire had recently been lit underneath it. A clump of bushes grew in front of it which concealed the base. Well, as I looked towards it, I was surprised to see projecting above the bush, and fastened apparently to the tree, a pair of fine riding boots with the toes upwards. At first I thought that they were tied there, but as I looked harder I saw that they were secured by a great nail which was hammered through the foot of each. And then, suddenly, with a thrill of horror, I understood that these were not empty boots; and moving my head a little to the right, I was able to see who it was that had been fastened there, and why a fire had been lit beneath the tree. It is not pleasant to speak or to think of horrors, my friends, and I do not wish to give any of you bad dreams tonight\u2014but I cannot take you among the Spanish guerillas without showing you what kind of men they were, and the sort of warfare that they waged. I will only say that I understood why Monsieur Vidal's horse was waiting masterless in the grove, and that I hoped he had met this terrible fate with sprightliness and courage, as a good Frenchman ought.\n\nIt was not a very cheering sight for me, as you can imagine. When I had been with their chief in the grotto I had been so carried away by my rage at the cruel death of young Soubiron, who was one of the brightest lads who ever threw his thigh over a charger, that I had never given a thought to my own position. Perhaps it would have been more politic had I spoken the ruffian fair, but it was too late now. The cork was drawn and I must drain the wine. Besides, if the harmless commissariat man were put to such a death, what hope was there for me, who had snapped the spine of their lieutenant? No, I was doomed in any case, and it was as well perhaps that I should have put the best face on the matter. This beast could bear witness that Etienne Gerard had died as he had lived, and that one prisoner at least had not quailed before him. I lay there thinking of the various girls who would mourn for me, and of my dear old mother, and of the deplorable loss which I should be, both to my regiment and to the Emperor, and I am not ashamed to confess to you that I shed tears as I thought of the general consternation which my premature end would give rise to.\n\nBut all the time I was taking the very keenest notice of everything which might possibly help me. I am not a man who would lie like a sick horse waiting for the farrier sergeant and the pole-axe. First I would give a little tug at my ankle cords, and then another at those which were round my wrists, and all the time that I was trying to loosen them I was peering round to see if I could find something which was in my favour. There was one thing which was very evident. A hussar is but half formed without a horse, and there was my other half quietly grazing within thirty yards of me. Then I observed yet another thing. The path by which we had come over the mountains was so steep that a horse could only be led across it slowly and with difficulty, but in the other direction the ground appeared to be more open, and to lead straight down into a gently-sloping valley. Had I but my feet in yonder stirrups and my sabre in my hand, a single bold dash might take me out of the power of these vermin of the rocks.\n\nI was still thinking it over and straining with my wrists and my ankles, when their chief came out from his grotto, and after some talk with his lieutenant, who lay groaning near the fire, they both nodded their heads and looked across at me. He then said some few words to the band, who clapped their hands and laughed uproariously. Things looked ominous, and I was delighted to feel that my hands were so far free that I could easily slip them through the cords if I wished. But with my ankles I feared that I could do nothing, for when I strained it brought such pain into my lance-wound that I had to gnaw my moustache to keep from crying out. I could only lie still, half-free and half-bound, and see what turn things were likely to take.\n\nFor a little I could not make out what they were after. One of the rascals climbed up a well-grown fir-tree upon one side of the glade, and tied a rope round the top of the trunk. He then fastened another rope in the same fashion to a similar tree upon the other side. The two loose ends were now dangling down, and I waited with some curiosity, and just a little trepidation also, to see what they would do next. The whole band pulled upon one of the ropes until they had bent the strong young tree down into a semi-circle, and they then fastened it to a stump, so as to hold it so. When they had bent the other tree down in a similar fashion, the two summits were within a few feet of each other, though, as you understand, they would each spring back into their original position the instant that they were released. I already saw the diabolical plan which these miscreants had formed.\n\n'I presume that you are a strong man, Colonel,' said the chief, coming towards me with his hateful smile.\n\n'If you will have the kindness to loosen these cords,' I answered, 'I will show you how strong I am.'\n\n'We were all interested to see whether you were as strong as these two young saplings,' said he. 'It is our intention, you see, to tie one end of each rope round your ankles and then let the trees go. If you are stronger than the trees, then, of course, no harm would be done; if, on the other hand, the trees are stronger than you, why, in that case, Colonel, we may have a souvenir of you upon each side of our little glade.'\n\nHe laughed as he spoke, and at the sight of it the whole forty of them laughed also. Even now if I am in my darker humour, or if I have a touch of my old Lithuanian ague, I see in my sleep that ring of dark, savage faces, with their cruel eyes, and the firelight flashing upon their strong white teeth.\n\nIt is astonishing\u2014and I have heard many make the same remark\u2014how acute one's senses become at such a crisis as this. I am convinced that at no moment is one living so vividly, so acutely, as at the instant when a violent and foreseen death overtakes one. I could smell the resinous fagots, I could see every twig upon the ground, I could hear every rustle of the branches, as I have never smelled or seen or heard save at such times of danger. And so it was that long before anyone else, before even the time when the chief had addressed me, I had heard a low, monotonous sound, far away indeed, and yet coming nearer at every instant. At first it was but a murmur, a rumble, but by the time he had finished speaking, while the assassins were untying my ankles in order to lead me to the scene of my murder, I heard, as plainly as ever I heard anything in my life, the clinking of horseshoes and the jingling of bridle-chains, with the clank of sabres against stirrup-irons. Is it likely that I, who had lived with the light cavalry since the first hair shaded my lip, would mistake the sound of troopers on the march?\n\n'Help, comrades, help!' I shrieked, and though they struck me across the mouth and tried to drag me up to the trees, I kept on yelling, 'Help me, my brave boys! Help me, my children! They are murdering your colonel!'\n\nFor the moment my wounds and my troubles had brought on a delirium, and I looked for nothing less than my five hundred hussars, kettle-drums and all, to appear at the opening of the glade.\n\nBut that which really appeared was very different to anything which I had conceived. Into the clear space there came galloping a fine young man upon a most beautiful roan horse. He was fresh-faced and pleasant-looking, with the most debonair bearing in the world and the most gallant way of carrying himself\u2014a way which reminded me somewhat of my own. He wore a singular coat which had once been red all over, but which was now stained to the colour of a withered oak-leaf wherever the weather could reach it. His shoulder-straps, however, were of golden lace, and he had a bright metal helmet upon his head, with a coquettish white plume upon one side of its crest. He trotted his horse up the glade, while behind him rode four cavaliers in the same dress\u2014all clean-shaven, with round, comely faces, looking to me more like monks than dragoons. At a short, gruff order they halted with a rattle of arms, while their leader cantered forward, the fire beating upon his eager face and the beautiful head of his charger. I knew, of course, by the strange coats that they were English. It was the first sight that I had ever had of them, but from their stout bearing and their masterful way I could see at a glance that what I had always been told was true, and that they were excellent people to fight against.\n\n'Well, well, well!' cried the young officer, in sufficiently bad French, 'what game are you up to here? Who was that who was yelling for help, and what are you trying to do to him?'\n\nIt was at that moment that I learned to bless those months which Obriant, the descendant of the Irish kings, had spent in teaching me the tongue of the English. My ankles had just been freed, so that I had only to slip my hands out of the cords, and with a single rush I had flown across, picked up my sabre where it lay by the fire, and hurled myself on to the saddle of poor Vidal's horse. Yes, for all my wounded ankle, I never put foot to stirrup, but was in the seat in a single bound. I tore the halter from the tree, and before these villains could so much as snap a pistol at me I was beside the English officer.\n\n'I surrender to you, sir,' I cried; though I daresay my English was not very much better than his French. 'If you will look at that tree to the left you will see what these villains do to the honourable gentlemen who fall into their hands.'\n\nThe fire had flared up at that moment, and there was poor Vidal exposed before them, as horrible an object as one could see in a nightmare. 'Godam!' cried the officer, and 'Godam!' cried each of the four troopers, which is the same as with us when we cry 'Mon Dieu!' Out rasped the five swords, and the four men closed up. One, who wore a sergeant's chevrons, laughed and clapped me on the shoulder.\n\n'Fight for your skin, froggy,' said he.\n\nAh, it was so fine to have a horse between my thighs and a weapon in my grip. I waved it above my head and shouted in my exultation. The chief had come forward with that odious smiling face of his.\n\n'Your excellency will observe that this Frenchman is our prisoner,' said he.\n\n'You are a rascally robber,' said the Englishman, shaking his sword at him. 'It is a disgrace to us to have such allies. By my faith, if Lord Wellington were of my mind we would swing you up on the nearest tree.'\n\n'But my prisoner?' said the brigand, in his suave voice.\n\n'He shall come with us to the British camp.'\n\n'Just a word in your ear before you take him.'\n\nHe approached the young officer, and then turning as quick as a flash, he fired his pistol in my face. The bullet scored its way through my hair and burst a hole on each side of my busby. Seeing that he had missed me, he raised the pistol and was about to hurl it at me when the English sergeant, with a single back-handed cut, nearly severed his head from his body. His blood had not reached the ground, nor the last curse died on his lips, before the whole horde was upon us, but with a dozen bounds and as many slashes we were all safely out of the glade, and galloping down the winding track which led to the valley.\n\nIt was not until we had left the ravine far behind us and were right out in the open fields that we ventured to halt, and to see what injuries we had sustained. For me, wounded and weary as I was, my heart was beating proudly, and my chest was nearly bursting my tunic to think that I, Etienne Gerard, had left this gang of murderers so much by which to remember me. My faith, they would think twice before they ventured again to lay hands upon one of the Third Hussars. So carried away was I that I made a small oration to these brave Englishmen, and told them who it was that they had helped to rescue. I would have spoken of glory also, and of the sympathies of brave men, but the officer cut me short.\n\n'That's all right,' said he. 'Any injuries, Sergeant?'\n\n'Trooper Jones's horse hit with a pistol bullet on the fetlock.'\n\n'Trooper Jones to go with us. Sergeant Halliday, with troopers Harvey and Smith, to keep to the right until they touch the vedettes of the German Hussars.'\n\nSo these three jingled away together, while the officer and I, followed at some distance by the trooper whose horse had been wounded, rode straight down in the direction of the English camp. Very soon we had opened our hearts, for we each liked the other from the beginning. He was of the nobility, this brave lad, and he had been sent out scouting by Lord Wellington to see if there were any signs of our advancing through the mountains. It is one advantage of a wandering life like mine, that you learn to pick up those bits of knowledge which distinguish the man of the world. I have, for example, hardly ever met a Frenchman who could repeat an English title correctly. If I had not travelled I should not be able to say with confidence that this young man's real name was Milor the Hon. Sir Russell, Bart., this last being an honourable distinction, so that it was as the Bart that I usually addressed him, just as in Spanish one might say 'the Don.'\n\nAs we rode beneath the moonlight in the lovely Spanish night, we spoke our minds to each other, as if we were brothers. We were both of an age, you see, both of the light cavalry also (the Sixteenth Light Dragoons was his regiment), and both with the same hopes and ambitions. Never have I learned to know a man so quickly as I did the Bart. He gave me the name of a girl whom he had loved at a garden called Vauxhall, and, for my own part, I spoke to him of little Coralie, of the Opera. He took a lock of hair from his bosom, and I a garter. Then we nearly quarrelled over hussar and dragoon, for he was absurdly proud of his regiment, and you should have seen him curl his lip and clap his hand to his hilt when I said that I hoped it might never be its misfortune to come in the way of the Third. Finally, he began to speak about what the English call sport, and he told such stories of the money which he had lost over which of two cocks could kill the other, or which of two men could strike the other the most in a fight for a prize, that I was filled with astonishment. He was ready to bet upon anything in the most wonderful manner, and when I chanced to see a shooting star he was anxious to bet that he would see more than me, twenty-five francs a star, and it was only when I explained that my purse was in the hands of the brigands that he would give over the idea.\n\nWell, we chatted away in this very amiable fashion until the day began to break, when suddenly we heard a great volley of musketry from somewhere in front of us. It was very rocky and broken ground, and I thought, although I could see nothing, that a general engagement had broken out. The Bart laughed at my idea, however, and explained that the sound came from the English camp, where every man emptied his piece each morning so as to make sure of having a dry priming.\n\n'In another mile we shall be up with the outposts,' said he.\n\nI glanced round at this, and I perceived that we had trotted along at so good a pace during the time that we were keeping up our pleasant chat, that the dragoon with the lame horse was altogether out of sight. I looked on every side, but in the whole of that vast rocky valley there was no one save only the Bart and I\u2014both of us armed, you understand, and both of us well mounted. I began to ask myself whether after all it was quite necessary that I should ride that mile which would bring me to the British outposts.\n\nNow, I wish to be very clear with you on this point, my friends, for I would not have you think that I was acting dishonourably or ungratefully to the man who had helped me away from the brigands. You must remember that of all duties the strongest is that which a commanding officer owes to his men. You must also bear in mind that war is a game which is played under fixed rules, and when these rules are broken one must at once claim the forfeit. If, for example, I had given a parole, then I should have been an infamous wretch had I dreamed of escaping. But no parole had been asked of me. Out of over-confidence, and the chance of the lame horse dropping behind, the Bart had permitted me to get upon equal terms with him. Had it been I who had taken him, I should have used him as courteously as he had me, but, at the same time, I should have respected his enterprise so far as to have deprived him of his sword, and seen that I had at least one guard beside myself. I reined up my horse and explained this to him, asking him at the same time whether he saw any breach of honour in my leaving him.\n\nHe thought about it, and several times repeated that which the English say when they mean 'Mon Dieu.'\n\n'You would give me the slip, would you?' said he.\n\n'If you can give no reason against it.'\n\n'The only reason that I can think of,' said the Bart, 'is that I should instantly cut your head off if you were to attempt it.'\n\n'Two can play at that game, my dear Bart,' said I.\n\n'Then we'll see who can play at it best,' he cried, pulling out his sword.\n\nI had drawn mine also, but I was quite determined not to hurt this admirable young man who had been my benefactor.\n\n'Consider,' said I, 'you say that I am your prisoner. I might with equal reason say that you are mine. We are alone here, and though I have no doubt that you are an excellent swordsman, you can hardly hope to hold your own against the best blade in the six light cavalry brigades.'\n\nHis answer was a cut at my head. I parried and shore off half of his white plume. He thrust at my breast. I turned his point and cut away the other half of his cockade.\n\n'Curse your monkey-tricks!' he cried, as I wheeled my horse away from him.\n\n'Why should you strike at me?' said I. 'You see that I will not strike back.'\n\n'That's all very well,' said he; 'but you've got to come along with me to the camp.'\n\n'I shall never see the camp,' said I.\n\n'I'll lay you nine to four you do,' he cried, as he made at me, sword in hand.\n\nBut those words of his put something new into my head. Could we not decide the matter in some better way than fighting? The Bart was placing me in such a position that I should have to hurt him, or he would certainly hurt me. I avoided his rush, though his sword-point was within an inch of my neck.\n\n'I have a proposal,' I cried. 'We shall throw dice as to which is the prisoner of the other.'\n\nHe smiled at this. It appealed to his love of sport.\n\n'Where are your dice?' he cried.\n\n'I have none.'\n\n'Nor I. But I have cards.'\n\n'Cards let it be,' said I.\n\n'And the game?'\n\n'I leave it to you.'\n\n'\u00c9cart\u00e9, then\u2014the best of three.'\n\nI could not help smiling as I agreed, for I do not suppose that there were three men in France who were my masters at the game. I told the Bart as much as we dismounted. He smiled also as he listened.\n\n'I was counted the best player at Watier's,' said he. 'With even luck you deserve to get off if you beat me.'\n\nSo we tethered our two horses and sat down one on either side of a great flat rock. The Bart took a pack of cards out of his tunic, and I had only to see him shuffle to convince me that I had no novice to deal with. We cut, and the deal fell to him.\n\nMy faith, it was a stake worth playing for. He wished to add a hundred gold pieces a game, but what was money when the fate of Colonel Etienne Gerard hung upon the cards? I felt as though all those who had reason to be interested in the game\u2014my mother, my hussars, the Sixth Corps d'Arm\u00e9e, Ney, Massena, even the Emperor himself\u2014were forming a ring round us in that desolate valley. Heavens, what a blow to one and all of them should the cards go against me! But I was confident, for my \u00e9cart\u00e9 play was as famous as my swordsmanship, and save old Bouvet of the Hussars of Bercheny, who won seventy-six out of one hundred and fifty games off me, I have always had the best of a series.\n\nThe first game I won right off, though I must confess that the cards were with me, and that my adversary could have done no more. In the second, I never played better and saved a trick by a finesse, but the Bart voled me once, marked the king, and ran out in the second hand. My faith, we were so excited that he laid his helmet down beside him and I my busby.\n\n'I'll lay my roan mare against your black horse,' said he.\n\n'Done!' said I.\n\n'Sword against sword.'\n\n'Done!' said I.\n\n'Saddle, bridle, and stirrups!' he cried.\n\n'Done!' I shouted.\n\nI had caught this spirit of sport from him. I would have laid my hussars against his dragoons had they been ours to pledge.\n\nAnd then began the game of games. Oh, he played, this Englishman\u2014he played in a way that was worthy of such a stake. But I, my friends, I was superb! Of the five which I had to make to win, I gained three on the first hand. The Bart bit his moustache and drummed his hands, while I already felt myself at the head of my dear little rascals. On the second, I turned the king, but lost two tricks\u2014and my score was four to his two. When I saw my next hand I could not but give a cry of delight. 'If I cannot gain my freedom on this,' thought I, 'I deserve to remain for ever in chains.'\n\nGive me the cards, landlord, and I will lay them out on the table for you.\n\nHere was my hand: knave and ace of clubs, queen and knave of diamonds, and king of hearts. Clubs were trumps, mark you, and I had but one point between me and freedom. He knew it was the crisis, and he undid his tunic. I threw my dolman on the ground. He led the ten of spades. I took it with my ace of trumps. One point in my favour. The correct play was to clear the trumps, and I led the knave. Down came the queen upon it, and the game was equal. He led the eight of spades, and I could only discard my queen of diamonds. Then came the seven of spades, and the hair stood straight up on my head. We each threw down a king at the final. He had won two points, and my beautiful hand had been mastered by his inferior one. I could have rolled on the ground as I thought of it. They used to play very good \u00e9cart\u00e9 at Watier's in the year '10. I say it\u2014I, Brigadier Gerard.\n\nThe last game was now four all. This next hand must settle it one way or the other. He undid his sash, and I put away my sword-belt. He was cool, this Englishman, and I tried to be so also, but the perspiration would trickle into my eyes. The deal lay with him, and I may confess to you, my friends, that my hands shook so that I could hardly pick my cards from the rock. But when I raised them, what was the first thing that my eyes rested upon? It was the king, the king, the glorious king of trumps! My mouth was open to declare it when the words were frozen upon my lips by the appearance of my comrade.\n\nHe held his cards in his hand, but his jaw had fallen, and his eyes were staring over my shoulder with the most dreadful expression of consternation and surprise. I whisked round, and I was myself amazed at what I saw.\n\nThree men were standing quite close to us\u2014fifteen m\u00e8tres at the farthest. The middle one was of a good height, and yet not too tall\u2014about the same height, in fact, that I am myself. He was clad in a dark uniform with a small cocked hat, and some sort of white plume upon the side. But I had little thought of his dress. It was his face, his gaunt cheeks, his beak-like nose, his masterful blue eyes, his thin, firm slit of a mouth which made one feel that this was a wonderful man, a man of a million. His brows were tied into a knot, and he cast such a glance at my poor Bart from under them that one by one the cards came fluttering down from his nerveless fingers. Of the two other men, one, who had a face as brown and hard as though it had been carved out of old oak, wore a bright red coat, while the other, a fine portly man with bushy side-whiskers, was in a blue jacket with gold facings. Some little distance behind, three orderlies were holding as many horses, and an escort of dragoons was waiting in the rear.\n\n'Heh, Crauford, what the deuce is this?' asked the thin man.\n\n'D'you hear, sir?' cried the man with the red coat. 'Lord Wellington wants to know what this means.'\n\nMy poor Bart broke into an account of all that had occurred, but that rock-face never softened for an instant.\n\n'Pretty fine, 'pon my word, General Crauford,' he broke in. 'The discipline of this force must be maintained, sir. Report yourself at headquarters as a prisoner.'\n\nIt was dreadful to me to see the Bart mount his horse and ride off with hanging head. I could not endure it. I threw myself before this English General. I pleaded with him for my friend. I told him how I, Colonel Gerard, would witness what a dashing young officer he was. Ah, my eloquence might have melted the hardest heart; I brought tears to my own eyes, but none to his. My voice broke, and I could say no more.\n\n'What weight do you put on your mules, sir, in the French service?' he asked. Yes, that was all this phlegmatic Englishman had to answer to these burning words of mine. That was his reply to what would have made a Frenchman weep upon my shoulder.\n\n'What weight on a mule?' asked the man with the red coat.\n\n'Two hundred and ten pounds,' said I.\n\n'Then you load them deucedly badly,' said Lord Wellington. 'Remove the prisoner to the rear.'\n\nHis dragoons closed in upon me, and I\u2014I was driven mad, as I thought that the game had been in my hands, and that I ought at that moment to be a free man. I held the cards up in front of the General.\n\n'See, my lord!' I cried; 'I played for my freedom and I won, for, as you perceive, I hold the king.'\n\nFor the first time a slight smile softened his gaunt face.\n\n'On the contrary,' said he, as he mounted his horse, 'it is I who won, for, as you perceive, my King holds you.'" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE KING HELD THE BRIGADIER", + "text": "Murat was undoubtedly an excellent cavalry officer, but he had too much swagger, which spoils many a good soldier. Lasalle, too, was a very dashing leader, but he ruined himself with wine and folly. Now I, Etienne Gerard, was always totally devoid of swagger, and at the same time I was very abstemious, except, maybe, at the end of a campaign, or when I met an old comrade-in-arms. For these reasons I might, perhaps, had it not been for a certain diffidence, have claimed to be the most valuable officer in my own branch of the Service. It is true that I never rose to be more than a chief of brigade, but then, as everyone knows, no one had a chance of rising to the top unless he had the good fortune to be with the Emperor in his early campaigns. Except Lasalle, and Labau, and Drouet, I can hardly remember any one of the generals who had not already made his name before the Egyptian business. Even I, with all my brilliant qualities, could only attain the head of my brigade, and also the special medal of honour, which I received from the Emperor himself, and which I keep at home in a leathern pouch.\n\nBut though I never rose higher than this, my qualities were very well known to those who had served with me, and also to the English. After they had captured me in the way which I described to you the other night, they kept a very good guard over me at Oporto, and I promise you that they did not give such a formidable opponent a chance of slipping through their fingers. It was on the 10th of August that I was escorted on board the transport which was to take us to England, and behold me before the end of the month in the great prison which had been built for us at Dartmoor!\n\n'L'h\u00f4tel Fran\u00e7ais, et Pension,' we used to call it, for you understand that we were all brave men there, and that we did not lose our spirits because we were in adversity.\n\nIt was only those officers who refused to give their parole who were confined at Dartmoor, and most of the prisoners were seamen, or from the ranks. You ask me, perhaps, why it was that I did not give this parole, and so enjoy the same good treatment as most of my brother officers. Well, I had two reasons, and both of them were sufficiently strong.\n\nIn the first place, I had so much confidence in myself, that I was quite convinced that I could escape. In the second, my family, though of good repute, has never been wealthy, and I could not bring myself to take anything from the small income of my mother. On the other hand, it would never do for a man like me to be outshone by the bourgeois society of an English country town, or to be without the means of showing courtesies and attentions to those ladies whom I should attract. It was for these reasons that I preferred to be buried in the dreadful prison of Dartmoor. I wish now to tell you of my adventures in England, and how far Milor Wellington's words were true when he said that his King would hold me.\n\nAnd first of all I may say that if it were not that I have set off to tell you about what befell myself, I could keep you here until morning with my stories about Dartmoor itself, and about the singular things which occurred there. It was one of the very strangest places in the whole world, for there, in the middle of that great desolate waste, were herded together seven or eight thousand men\u2014warriors, you understand, men of experience and courage. Around there were a double wall and a ditch, and warders and soldiers; but, my faith! you could not coop men like that up like rabbits in a hutch! They would escape by twos and tens and twenties, and then the cannon would boom, and the search parties run, and we, who were left behind, would laugh and dance and shout 'Vive l'Empereur' until the warders would turn their muskets upon us in their passion. And then we would have our little mutinies, too, and up would come the infantry and the guns from Plymouth, and that would set us yelling 'Vive l'Empereur' once more, as though we wished them to hear us in Paris. We had lively moments at Dartmoor, and we contrived that those who were about us should be lively also.\n\nYou must know that the prisoners there had their own Courts of Justice, in which they tried their own cases, and inflicted their own punishments. Stealing and quarrelling were punished\u2014but most of all treachery. When I came there first there was a man, Meunier, from Rheims, who had given information of some plot to escape. Well, that night, owing to some form or other which had to be gone through, they did not take him out from among the other prisoners, and though he wept and screamed, and grovelled upon the ground, they left him there amongst the comrades whom he had betrayed. That night there was a trial with a whispered accusation and a whispered defence, a gagged prisoner, and a judge whom none could see. In the morning, when they came for their man with papers for his release, there was not as much of him left as you could put upon your thumb-nail. They were ingenious people, these prisoners, and they had their own way of managing.\n\nWe officers, however, lived in a separate wing, and a very singular group of people we were. They had left us our uniforms, so that there was hardly a corps which had served under Victor, or Massena, or Ney, which was not represented there, and some had been there from the time when Junot was beaten at Vimiera. We had chasseurs in their green tunics, and hussars, like myself, and blue-coated dragoons, and white-fronted lancers, and voltigeurs, and grenadiers, and the men of the artillery and engineers. But the greater part were naval officers, for the English had had the better of us upon the seas. I could never understand this until I journeyed myself from Oporto to Plymouth, when I lay for seven days upon my back, and could not have stirred had I seen the eagle of the regiment carried off before my eyes. It was in perfidious weather like this that Nelson took advantage of us.\n\nI had no sooner got into Dartmoor than I began to plan to get out again, and you can readily believe that, with wits sharpened by twelve years of warfare, it was not very long before I saw my way.\n\nYou must know, in the first place, that I had a very great advantage in having some knowledge of the English language. I learned it during the months that I spent before Danzig, from Adjutant Obriant, of the Regiment Irlandais, who was sprung from the ancient kings of the country. I was quickly able to speak it with some facility, for I do not take long to master anything to which I set my mind. In three months I could not only express my meaning, but I could use the idioms of the people. It was Obriant who taught me to say 'Be jabers,' just as we might say 'Ma foi'; and also 'The curse of Crummle!' which means 'Ventre bleu!' Many a time I have seen the English smile with pleasure when they have heard me speak so much like one of themselves.\n\nWe officers were put two in a cell, which was very little to my taste, for my room-mate was a tall, silent man named Beaumont, of the Flying Artillery, who had been taken by the English cavalry at Astorga.\n\nIt is seldom I meet a man of whom I cannot make a friend, for my disposition and manners are\u2014as you know them. But this fellow had never a smile for my jests, nor an ear for my sorrows, but would sit looking at me with his sullen eyes, until sometimes I thought that his two years of captivity had driven him crazy. Ah, how I longed that old Bouvet, or any of my comrades of the hussars, was there, instead of this mummy of a man. But such as he was I had to make the best of him, and it was very evident that no escape could be made unless he were my partner in it, for what could I possibly do without him observing me? I hinted at it, therefore, and then by degrees I spoke more plainly, until it seemed to me that I had prevailed upon him to share my lot.\n\nI tried the walls, and I tried the floor, and I tried the ceiling, but though I tapped and probed, they all appeared to be very thick and solid. The door was of iron, shutting with a spring lock, and provided with a small grating, through which a warder looked twice in every night. Within there were two beds, two stools, two washstands\u2014nothing more. It was enough for my wants, for when had I had as much during those twelve years spent in camps? But how was I to get out? Night after night I thought of my five hundred hussars, and had dreadful nightmares, in which I fancied that the whole regiment needed shoeing, or that my horses were all bloated with green fodder, or that they were foundered from bogland, or that six squadrons were clubbed in the presence of the Emperor. Then I would awake in a cold sweat, and set to work picking and tapping at the walls once more; for I knew very well that there is no difficulty which cannot be overcome by a ready brain and a pair of cunning hands.\n\nThere was a single window in our cell, which was too small to admit a child. It was further defended by a thick iron bar in the centre. It was not a very promising point of escape, as you will allow, but I became more and more convinced that our efforts must be directed towards it. To make matters worse, it only led out into the exercise yard, which was surrounded by two high walls. Still, as I said to my sullen comrade, it is time to talk of the Vistula when you are over the Rhine. I got a small piece of iron, therefore, from the fittings of my bed, and I set to work to loosen the plaster at the top and the bottom of the bar. Three hours I would work, and then leap into my bed upon the sound of the warder's step. Then another three hours, and then very often another yet, for I found that Beaumont was so slow and clumsy at it that it was on myself only that I could rely.\n\nI pictured to myself my Third of Hussars waiting just outside that window, with kettle-drums and standards and leopard-skin schabraques all complete. Then I would work like a madman, until my iron was crusted with blood, as if with rust. And so, night by night, I loosened that stony plaster, and hid it away in the stuffing of my pillow, until the hour came when the iron shook; and then with one good wrench it came off in my hand, and my first step had been made towards freedom.\n\nYou will ask me what better off I was, since, as I have said, a child could not have fitted through the opening. I will tell you. I had gained two things\u2014a tool and a weapon. With the one I might loosen the stone which flanked the window. With the other I might defend myself when I had scrambled through. So now I turned my attention to that stone, and I picked and picked with the sharpened end of my bar until I had worked out the mortar all round. You understand, of course, that during the day I replaced everything in its position, and that the warder was never permitted to see a speck upon the floor. At the end of three weeks I had separated the stone, and had the rapture of drawing it through, and seeing a hole left with ten stars shining through it, where there had been but four before. All was ready for us now, and I had replaced the stone, smearing the edges of it round with a little fat and soot, so as to hide the cracks where the mortar should have been. In three nights the moon would be gone, and that seemed the best time for our attempt.\n\nI had now no doubt at all about getting into the yards, but I had very considerable misgivings as to how I was to get out again. It would be too humiliating, after trying here, and trying there, to have to go back to my hole again in despair, or to be arrested by the guards outside, and thrown into those damp underground cells which are reserved for prisoners who are caught in escaping. I set to work, therefore, to plan what I should do. I have never, as you know, had the chance of showing what I could do as a general. Sometimes, after a glass or two of wine, I have found myself capable of thinking out surprising combinations, and have felt that if Napoleon had intrusted me with an army corps, things might have gone differently with him. But however that may be, there is no doubt that in the small stratagems of war, and in that quickness of invention which is so necessary for an officer of light cavalry, I could hold my own against anyone. It was now that I had need of it, and I felt sure that it would not fail me.\n\nThe inner wall which I had to scale was built of bricks, 12ft. high, with a row of iron spikes, 3in. apart upon the top. The outer I had only caught a glimpse of once or twice, when the gate of the exercise yard was open. It appeared to be about the same height, and was also spiked at the top. The space between the walls was over twenty feet, and I had reason to believe that there were no sentries there, except at the gates. On the other hand, I knew that there was a line of soldiers outside. Behold the little nut, my friends, which I had to open with no crackers, save these two hands.\n\nOne thing upon which I relied was the height of my comrade Beaumont. I have already said that he was a very tall man, six feet at least, and it seemed to me that if I could mount upon his shoulders, and get my hands upon the spikes, I could easily scale the wall. Could I pull my big companion up after me? That was the question, for when I set forth with a comrade, even though it be one for whom I bear no affection, nothing on earth would make me abandon him. If I climbed the wall and he could not follow me, I should be compelled to return to him. He did not seem to concern himself much about it, however, so I hoped that he had confidence in his own activity.\n\nThen another very important matter was the choice of the sentry who should be on duty in front of my window at the time of our attempt. They were changed every two hours to insure their vigilance, but I, who watched them closely each night out of my window, knew that there was a great difference between them. There were some who were so keen that a rat could not cross the yard unseen, while others thought only of their own ease, and could sleep as soundly leaning upon a musket as if they were at home upon a feather bed. There was one especially, a fat, heavy man, who would retire into the shadow of the wall and doze so comfortably during his two hours, that I have dropped pieces of plaster from my window at his very feet, without his observing it. By good luck, this fellow's watch was due from twelve to two upon the night which we had fixed upon for our enterprise.\n\nAs the last day passed, I was so filled with nervous agitation that I could not control myself, but ran ceaselessly about my cell, like a mouse in a cage. Every moment I thought that the warder would detect the looseness of the bar, or that the sentry would observe the unmortared stone, which I could not conceal outside, as I did within. As for my companion, he sat brooding upon the end of his bed, looking at me in a sidelong fashion from time to time, and biting his nails like one who is deep in thought.\n\n'Courage, my friend!' I cried, slapping him upon the shoulder. 'You will see your guns before another month be past.'\n\n'That is very well,' said he. 'But whither will you fly when you get free?'\n\n'To the coast,' I answered. 'All comes right for a brave man, and I shall make straight for my regiment.'\n\n'You are more likely to make straight for the underground cells, or for the Portsmouth hulks,' said he.\n\n'A soldier takes his chances,' I remarked. 'It is only the poltroon who reckons always upon the worst.'\n\nI raised a flush in each of his sallow cheeks at that, and I was glad of it, for it was the first sign of spirit which I had ever observed in him. For a moment he put his hand out towards his water-jug, as though he would have hurled it at me, but then he shrugged his shoulders and sat in silence once more, biting his nails, and scowling down at the floor. I could not but think, as I looked at him, that perhaps I was doing the Flying Artillery a very bad service by bringing him back to them.\n\nI never in my life have known an evening pass as slowly as that one. Towards nightfall a wind sprang up, and as the darkness deepened it blew harder and harder, until a terrible gale was whistling over the moor. As I looked out of my window I could not catch a glimpse of a star, and the black clouds were flying low across the heavens. The rain was pouring down, and what with its hissing and splashing, and the howling and screaming of the wind, it was impossible for me to hear the steps of the sentinels. 'If I cannot hear them,' thought I, 'then it is unlikely that they can hear me'; and I waited with the utmost impatience until the time when the inspector should have come round for his nightly peep through our grating. Then having peered through the darkness, and seen nothing of the sentry, who was doubtless crouching in some corner out of the rain, I felt that the moment was come. I removed the bar, pulled out the stone, and motioned to my companion to pass through.\n\n'After you, Colonel,' said he.\n\n'Will you not go first?' I asked.\n\n'I had rather you showed me the way.'\n\n'Come after me, then, but come silently, as you value your life.'\n\nIn the darkness I could hear the fellow's teeth chattering, and I wondered whether a man ever had such a partner in a desperate enterprise. I seized the bar, however, and mounting upon my stool, I thrust my head and shoulders into the hole. I had wriggled through as far as my waist, when my companion seized me suddenly by the knees, and yelled at the top of his voice: 'Help! Help! A prisoner is escaping!'\n\nAh, my friends, what did I not feel at that moment! Of course, I saw in an instant the game of this vile creature. Why should he risk his skin in climbing walls when he might be sure of a free pardon from the English for having prevented the escape of one so much more distinguished than himself? I had recognized him as a poltroon and a sneak, but I had not understood the depth of baseness to which he could descend. One who has spent his life among gentlemen and men of honour does not think of such things until they happen.\n\nThe blockhead did not seem to understand that he was lost more certainly than I. I writhed back in the darkness, and seizing him by the throat, I struck him twice with my iron bar. At the first blow he yelped as a little cur does when you tread upon its paw. At the second, down he fell with a groan upon the floor. Then I seated myself upon my bed, and waited resignedly for whatever punishment my gaolers might inflict upon me.\n\nBut a minute passed and yet another, with no sound save the heavy, snoring breathing of the senseless wretch upon the floor. Was it possible, then, that amid the fury of the storm his warning cries had passed unheeded? At first it was but a tiny hope, another minute and it was probable, another and it was certain. There was no sound in the corridor, none in the courtyard. I wiped the cold sweat from my brow, and asked myself what I should do next.\n\nOne thing seemed certain. The man on the floor must die. If I left him I could not tell how short a time it might be before he gave the alarm. I dare not strike a light, so I felt about in the darkness until my hand came upon something wet, which I knew to be his head. I raised my iron bar, but there was something, my friends, which prevented me from bringing it down. In the heat of fight I have slain many men\u2014men of honour, too, who had done me no injury. Yet here was this wretch, a creature too foul to live, who had tried to work me so great a mischief, and yet I could not bring myself to crush his skull in. Such deeds are very well for a Spanish partida\u2014or for that matter a sansculotte of the Faubourg St Antoine\u2014but not for a soldier and a gentleman like me.\n\nHowever, the heavy breathing of the fellow made me hope that it might be a very long time before he recovered his senses. I gagged him, therefore, and bound him with strips of blanket to the bed, so that in his weakened condition there was good reason to think that, in any case, he might not get free before the next visit of the warder. But now again I was faced with new difficulties, for you will remember that I had relied upon his height to help me over the walls. I could have sat down and shed tears of despair had not the thought of my mother and of the Emperor come to sustain me. 'Courage!' said I. 'If it were anyone but Etienne Gerard he would be in a bad fix now; that is a young man who is not so easily caught.'\n\nI set to work therefore upon Beaumont's sheet as well as my own, and by tearing them into strips and then plaiting them together, I made a very excellent rope. This I tied securely to the centre of my iron bar, which was a little over a foot in length. Then I slipped out into the yard, where the rain was pouring and the wind screaming louder than ever. I kept in the shadow of the prison wall, but it was as black as the ace of spades, and I could not see my own hand in front of me. Unless I walked into the sentinel I felt that I had nothing to fear from him. When I had come under the wall I threw up my bar, and to my joy it stuck the very first time between the spikes at the top. I climbed up my rope, pulled it after me, and dropped down on the other side. Then I scaled the second wall, and was sitting astride among the spikes upon the top, when I saw something twinkle in the darkness beneath me. It was the bayonet of the sentinel below, and so close was it (the second wall being rather lower than the first) that I could easily, by leaning over, have unscrewed it from its socket. There he was, humming a tune to himself, and cuddling up against the wall to keep himself warm, little thinking that a desperate man within a few feet of him was within an ace of stabbing him to the heart with his own weapon. I was already bracing myself for the spring when the fellow, with an oath, shouldered his musket, and I heard his steps squelching through the mud as he resumed his beat. I slipped down my rope, and, leaving it hanging, I ran at the top of my speed across the moor.\n\nHeavens, how I ran! The wind buffeted my face and buzzed in my nostrils. The rain pringled upon my skin and hissed past my ears. I stumbled into holes. I tripped over bushes. I fell among brambles. I was torn and breathless and bleeding. My tongue was like leather, my feet like lead, and my heart beating like a kettle-drum. Still I ran, and I ran, and I ran.\n\nBut I had not lost my head, my friends. Everything was done with a purpose. Our fugitives always made for the coast. I was determined to go inland, and the more so as I had told Beaumont the opposite. I would fly to the north, and they would seek me in the south. Perhaps you will ask me how I could tell which was which on such a night. I answer that it was by the wind. I had observed in the prison that it came from the north, and so, as long as I kept my face to it, I was going in the right direction.\n\nWell, I was rushing along in this fashion when, suddenly, I saw two yellow lights shining out of the darkness in front of me. I paused for a moment, uncertain what I should do. I was still in my hussar uniform, you understand, and it seemed to me that the very first thing that I should aim at was to get some dress which should not betray me. If these lights came from a cottage, it was probable enough that I might find what I wanted there. I approached, therefore, feeling very sorry that I had left my iron bar behind; for I was determined to fight to the death before I should be retaken.\n\nBut very soon I found that there was no cottage there. The lights were two lamps hung upon each side of a carriage, and by their glare I saw that a broad road lay in front of me. Crouching among the bushes, I observed that there were two horses to the equipage, that a small post-boy was standing at their heads, and that one of the wheels was lying in the road beside him. I can see them now, my friends: the steaming creatures, the stunted lad with his hands to their bits, and the big, black coach, all shining with the rain, and balanced upon its three wheels. As I looked, the window was lowered, and a pretty little face under a bonnet peeped out from it.\n\n'What shall I do?' the lady cried to the post-boy, in a voice of despair. 'Sir Charles is certainly lost, and I shall have to spend the night upon the moor.'\n\n'Perhaps I can be of some assistance to madame,' said I, scrambling out from among the bushes into the glare of the lamps. A woman in distress is a sacred thing to me, and this one was beautiful. You must not forget that, although I was a colonel, I was only eight-and-twenty years of age.\n\nMy word, how she screamed, and how the post-boy stared! You will understand that after that long race in the darkness, with my shako broken in, my face smeared with dirt, and my uniform all stained and torn with brambles, I was not entirely the sort of gentleman whom one would choose to meet in the middle of a lonely moor. Still, after the first surprise, she soon understood that I was her very humble servant, and I could even read in her pretty eyes that my manner and bearing had not failed to produce an impression upon her.\n\n'I am sorry to have startled you, madame,' said I. 'I chanced to overhear your remark, and I could not refrain from offering you my assistance.' I bowed as I spoke. You know my bow, and can realize what its effect was upon the lady.\n\n'I am much indebted to you, sir,' said she. 'We have had a terrible journey since we left Tavistock. Finally, one of our wheels came off, and here we are helpless in the middle of the moor. My husband, Sir Charles, has gone on to get help, and I much fear that he must have lost his way.'\n\nI was about to attempt some consolation, when I saw beside the lady a black travelling coat, faced with astrakhan, which her companion must have left behind him. It was exactly what I needed to conceal my uniform. It is true that I felt very much like a highway robber, but then, what would you have? Necessity has no law, and I was in an enemy's country.\n\n'I presume, madame, that this is your husband's coat,' I remarked. 'You will, I am sure, forgive me, if I am compelled to\u2014' I pulled it through the window as I spoke.\n\nI could not bear to see the look of surprise and fear and disgust which came over her face.\n\n'Oh, I have been mistaken in you!' she cried. 'You came to rob me, then, and not to help me. You have the bearing of a gentleman, and yet you steal my husband's coat.'\n\n'Madame,' said I, 'I beg that you will not condemn me until you know everything. It is quite necessary that I should take this coat, but if you will have the goodness to tell me who it is who is fortunate enough to be your husband, I shall see that the coat is sent back to him.'\n\nHer face softened a little, though she still tried to look severe. 'My husband,' she answered, 'is Sir Charles Meredith, and he is travelling to Dartmoor Prison, upon important Government business. I only ask you, sir, to go upon your way, and to take nothing which belongs to him.'\n\n'There is only one thing which belongs to him that I covet,' said I.\n\n'And you have taken it from the carriage,' she cried.\n\n'No,' I answered. 'It still remains there.'\n\nShe laughed in her frank English way.\n\n'If, instead of paying me compliments, you were to return my husband's coat\u2014' she began.\n\n'Madame,' I answered, 'what you ask is quite impossible. If you will allow me to come into the carriage, I will explain to you how necessary this coat is to me.'\n\nHeaven knows into what foolishness I might have plunged myself had we not, at this instant, heard a faint halloa in the distance, which was answered by a shout from the little post-boy. In the rain and the darkness, I saw a lantern some distance from us, but approaching rapidly.\n\n'I am sorry, madame, that I am forced to leave you,' said I. 'You can assure your husband that I shall take every care of his coat.' Hurried as I was, I ventured to pause a moment to salute the lady's hand, which she snatched through the window with an admirable pretence of being offended at my presumption. Then, as the lantern was quite close to me, and the post-boy seemed inclined to interfere with my flight, I tucked my precious overcoat under my arm, and dashed off into the darkness.\n\nAnd now I set myself to the task of putting as broad a stretch of moor between the prison and myself as the remaining hours of darkness would allow. Setting my face to the wind once more, I ran until I fell from exhaustion. Then, after five minutes of panting among the heather, I made another start, until again my knees gave way beneath me. I was young and hard, with muscles of steel, and a frame which had been toughened by twelve years of camp and field. Thus I was able to keep up this wild flight for another three hours, during which I still guided myself, you understand, by keeping the wind in my face. At the end of that time I calculated that I had put nearly twenty miles between the prison and myself. Day was about to break, so I crouched down among the heather upon the top of one of those small hills which abound in that country, with the intention of hiding myself until nightfall. It was no new thing for me to sleep in the wind and the rain, so, wrapping myself up in my thick warm cloak, I soon sank into a doze.\n\nBut it was not a refreshing slumber. I tossed and tumbled amid a series of vile dreams, in which everything seemed to go wrong with me. At last, I remember, I was charging an unshaken square of Hungarian Grenadiers, with a single squadron upon spent horses, just as I did at Elchingen. I stood in my stirrups to shout 'Vive l'Empereur!' and as I did so, there came the answering roar from my hussars, 'Vive l'Empereur!' I sprang from my rough bed, with the words still ringing in my ears, and then, as I rubbed my eyes, and wondered if I were mad, the same cry came again, five thousand voices in one long-drawn yell. I looked out from my screen of brambles, and saw in the clear light of morning the very last thing that I should either have expected or chosen.\n\nIt was Dartmoor Prison! There it stretched, grim and hideous, within a furlong of me. Had I run on for a few more minutes in the dark, I should have butted my shako against the wall. I was so taken aback at the sight, that I could scarcely realize what had happened. Then it all became clear to me, and I struck my head with my hands in my despair. The wind had veered from north to south during the night, and I, keeping my face always towards it, had run ten miles out and ten miles in, winding up where I had started. When I thought of my hurry, my falls, my mad rushing and jumping, all ending in this, it seemed so absurd, that my grief changed suddenly to amusement, and I fell among the brambles, and laughed, and laughed, until my sides were sore. Then I rolled myself up in my cloak and considered seriously what I should do.\n\nOne lesson which I have learned in my roaming life, my friends, is never to call anything a misfortune until you have seen the end of it. Is not every hour a fresh point of view? In this case I soon perceived that accident had done for me as much as the most profound cunning. My guards naturally commenced their search from the place where I had taken Sir Charles Meredith's coat, and from my hiding-place I could see them hurrying along the road to that point. Not one of them ever dreamed that I could have doubled back from there, and I lay quite undisturbed in the little bush-covered cup at the summit of my knoll. The prisoners had, of course, learned of my escape, and all day exultant yells, like that which had aroused me in the morning, resounded over the moor, bearing a welcome message of sympathy and companionship to my ears. How little did they dream that on the top of that very mound, which they could see from their windows, was lying the comrade whose escape they were celebrating? As for me\u2014I could look down upon this poor herd of idle warriors, as they paced about the great exercise yard, or gathered in little groups, gesticulating joyfully over my success. Once I heard a howl of execration, and I saw Beaumont, his head all covered with bandages, being led across the yard by two of the warders. I cannot tell you the pleasure which this sight gave me, for it proved that I had not killed him, and also that the others knew the true story of what had passed. They had all known me too well to think that I could have abandoned him.\n\nAll that long day I lay behind my screen of bushes, listening to the bells which struck the hours below.\n\nMy pockets were filled with bread which I had saved out of my allowance, and on searching my borrowed overcoat I came upon a silver flask, full of excellent brandy and water, so that I was able to get through the day without hardship. The only other things in the pockets were a red silk handkerchief, a tortoise-shell snuff-box, and a blue envelope, with a red seal, addressed to the Governor of Dartmoor Prison. As to the first two, I determined to send them back when I should return the coat itself.\n\nThe letter caused me more perplexity, for the Governor had always shown me every courtesy, and it offended my sense of honour that I should interfere with his correspondence. I had almost made up my mind to leave it under a stone upon the roadway within musket-shot of the gate. This would guide them in their search for me, however, and so, on the whole, I saw no better way than just to carry the letter with me in the hope that I might find some means of sending it back to him. Meanwhile I packed it safely away in my inner-most pocket.\n\nThere was a warm sun to dry my clothes, and when night fell I was ready for my journey. I promise you that there were no mistakes this time. I took the stars for my guides, as every hussar should be taught to do, and I put eight good leagues between myself and the prison. My plan now was to obtain a complete suit of clothes from the first person whom I could waylay, and I should then find my way to the north coast, where there were many smugglers and fishermen who would be ready to earn the reward which was paid by the Emperor to those who brought escaping prisoners across the Channel. I had taken the panache from my shako so that it might escape notice, but even with my fine overcoat I feared that sooner or later my uniform would betray me. My first care must be to provide myself with a complete disguise.\n\nWhen day broke, I saw a river upon my right and a small town upon my left\u2014the blue smoke reeking up above the moor. I should have liked well to have entered it, because it would have interested me to see something of the customs of the English, which differ very much from those of other nations. Much as I should have wished, however, to have seen them eat their raw meat and sell their wives, it would have been dangerous until I had got rid of my uniform. My cap, my moustache, and my speech would all help to betray me. I continued to travel towards the north therefore, looking about me continually, but never catching a glimpse of my pursuers.\n\nAbout midday I came to where, in a secluded valley, there stood a single small cottage without any other building in sight. It was a neat little house, with a rustic porch and a small garden in front of it, with a swarm of cocks and hens. I lay down among the ferns and watched it, for it seemed to be exactly the kind of place where I might obtain what I wanted. My bread was finished, and I was exceedingly hungry after my long journey; I determined, therefore, to make a short reconnaissance, and then to march up to this cottage, summon it to surrender, and help myself to all that I needed. It could at least provide me with a chicken and with an omelette. My mouth watered at the thought.\n\nAs I lay there, wondering who could live in this lonely place, a brisk little fellow came out through the porch, accompanied by another older man, who carried two large clubs in his hands. These he handed to his young companion, who swung them up and down, and round and round, with extraordinary swiftness. The other, standing beside him, appeared to watch him with great attention, and occasionally to advise him. Finally he took a rope, and began skipping like a girl, the other still gravely observing him. As you may think, I was utterly puzzled as to what these people could be, and could only surmise that the one was a doctor, and the other a patient who had submitted himself to some singular method of treatment.\n\nWell, as I lay watching and wondering, the older man brought out a great-coat, and held it while the other put it on and buttoned it to his chin. The day was a warmish one, so that this proceeding amazed me even more than the other. 'At least,' thought I, 'it is evident that his exercise is over'; but, far from this being so, the man began to run, in spite of his heavy coat, and as it chanced, he came right over the moor in my direction. His companion had re-entered the house, so that this arrangement suited me admirably. I would take the small man's clothing, and hurry on to some village where I could buy provisions. The chickens were certainly tempting, but still there were at least two men in the house, so perhaps it would be wiser for me, since I had no arms, to keep away from it.\n\nI lay quietly then among the ferns. Presently I heard the steps of the runner, and there he was quite close to me, with his huge coat, and the perspiration running down his face. He seemed to be a very solid man\u2014but small\u2014so small that I feared that his clothes might be of little use to me. When I jumped out upon him he stopped running, and looked at me in the greatest astonishment.\n\n'Blow my dickey,' said he, 'give it a name, guv'nor! Is it a circus, or what?'\n\nThat was how he talked, though I cannot pretend to tell you what he meant by it.\n\n'You will excuse me, sir,' said I, 'but I am under the necessity of asking you to give me your clothes.'\n\n'Give you what?' he cried.\n\n'Your clothes.'\n\n'Well, if this don't lick cock-fighting!' said he. 'What am I to give you my clothes for?'\n\n'Because I need them.'\n\n'And suppose I won't?'\n\n'Be jabers,' said I, 'I shall have no choice but to take them.'\n\nHe stood with his hands in the pockets of his great-coat, and a most amused smile upon his square-jawed, clean-shaven face.\n\n'You'll take them, will you?' said he. 'You're a very leery cove, by the look of you, but I can tell you that you've got the wrong sow by the ear this time. I know who you are. You're a runaway Frenchy, from the prison yonder, as anyone could tell with half an eye. But you don't know who I am, else you wouldn't try such a plant as that. Why, man, I'm the Bristol Bustler, nine stone champion, and them's my training quarters down yonder.'\n\nHe stared at me as if this announcement of his would have crushed me to the earth, but I smiled at him in my turn, and looked him up and down, with a twirl of my moustache.\n\n'You may be a very brave man, sir,' said I, 'but when I tell you that you are opposed to Colonel Etienne Gerard, of the Hussars of Conflans, you will see the necessity of giving up your clothes without further parley.'\n\n'Look here, mounseer, drop it!' he cried; 'this'll end by your getting pepper.'\n\n'Your clothes, sir, this instant!' I shouted, advancing fiercely upon him.\n\nFor answer he threw off his heavy great-coat, and stood in a singular attitude, with one arm out, and the other across his chest, looking at me with a curious smile. For myself, I knew nothing of the methods of fighting which these people have, but on horse or on foot, with arms or without them, I am always ready to take my own part. You understand that a soldier cannot always choose his own methods, and that it is time to howl when you are living among wolves. I rushed at him, therefore, with a warlike shout, and kicked him with both my feet. At the same moment my heels flew into the air, I saw as many flashes as at Austerlitz, and the back of my head came down with a crash upon a stone. After that I can remember nothing more.\n\nWhen I came to myself I was lying upon a truckle-bed, in a bare, half-furnished room. My head was ringing like a bell, and when I put up my hand, there was a lump like a walnut over one of my eyes. My nose was full of a pungent smell, and I soon found that a strip of paper soaked in vinegar was fastened across my brow. At the other end of the room this terrible little man was sitting with his knee bare, and his elderly companion was rubbing it with some liniment. The latter seemed to be in the worst of tempers, and he kept up a continual scolding, which the other listened to with a gloomy face.\n\n'Never heard tell of such a thing in my life,' he was saying. 'In training for a month with all the weight of it on my shoulders, and then when I get you as fit as a trout, and within two days of fighting the likeliest man on the list, you let yourself into a by-battle with a foreigner.'\n\n'There, there! Stow your gab!' said the other, sulkily. 'You're a very good trainer, Jim, but you'd be better with less jaw.'\n\n'I should think it was time to jaw,' the elderly man answered. 'If this knee don't get well before next Wednesday, they'll have it that you fought a cross, and a pretty job you'll have next time you look for a backer.'\n\n'Fought a cross!' growled the other. 'I've won nineteen battles, and no man ever so much as dared to say the word \"cross\" in my hearin'. How the deuce was I to get out of it when the cove wanted the very clothes off my back?'\n\n'Tut, man; you knew that the beak and the guards were within a mile of you. You could have set them on to him as well then as now. You'd have got your clothes back again all right.'\n\n'Well, strike me!' said the Bustler. 'I don't often break my trainin', but when it comes to givin' up my clothes to a Frenchy who couldn't hit a dint in a pat o' butter, why, it's more than I can swaller.'\n\n'Pooh, man, what are the clothes worth? D'you know that Lord Rufton alone has five thousand pounds on you? When you jump the ropes on Wednesday, you'll carry every penny of fifty thousand into the ring. A pretty thing to turn up with a swollen knee and a story about a Frenchman!'\n\n'I never thought he'd ha' kicked,' said the Bustler.\n\n'I suppose you expected he'd fight Broughton's rules, and strict P.R.? Why, you silly, they don't know what fighting is in France.'\n\n'My friends,' said I, sitting up on my bed, 'I do not understand very much of what you say, but when you speak like that it is foolishness. We know so much about fighting in France, that we have paid our little visit to nearly every capital in Europe, and very soon we are coming to London. But we fight like soldiers, you understand, and not like gamins in the gutter. You strike me on the head. I kick you on the knee. It is child's play. But if you will give me a sword, and take another one, I will show you how we fight over the water.'\n\nThey both stared at me in their solid, English way.\n\n'Well, I'm glad you're not dead, mounseer,' said the elder one at last. 'There wasn't much sign of life in you when the Bustler and me carried you down. That head of yours ain't thick enough to stop the crook of the hardest hitter in Bristol.'\n\n'He's a game cove, too, and he came for me like a bantam,' said the other, still rubbing his knee. 'I got my old left-right in, and he went over as if he had been pole-axed. It wasn't my fault, mounseer. I told you you'd get pepper if you went on.'\n\n'Well, it's something to say all your life, that you've been handled by the finest light-weight in England,' said the older man, looking at me with an expression of congratulation upon his face. 'You've had him at his best, too\u2014in the pink of condition, and trained by Jim Hunter.'\n\n'I am used to hard knocks,' said I, unbuttoning my tunic, and showing my two musket wounds. Then I bared my ankle also, and showed the place in my eye where the guerilla had stabbed me.\n\n'He can take his gruel,' said the Bustler.\n\n'What a glutton he'd have made for the middle-weights,' remarked the trainer; 'with six months' coaching he'd astonish the fancy. It's a pity he's got to go back to prison.'\n\nI did not like that last remark at all. I buttoned up my coat and rose from the bed.\n\n'I must ask you to let me continue my journey,' said I.\n\n'There's no help for it, mounseer,' the trainer answered. 'It's a hard thing to send such a man as you back to such a place, but business is business, and there's a twenty pound reward. They were here this morning, looking for you, and I expect they'll be round again.'\n\nHis words turned my heart to lead.\n\n'Surely, you would not betray me!' I cried. 'I will send you twice twenty pounds on the day that I set foot upon France. I swear it upon the honour of a French gentleman.'\n\nBut I only got head-shakes for a reply. I pleaded, I argued, I spoke of the English hospitality and the fellowship of brave men, but I might as well have been addressing the two great wooden clubs which stood balanced upon the floor in front of me. There was no sign of sympathy upon their bull-faces.\n\n'Business is business, mounseer,' the old trainer repeated. 'Besides, how am I to put the Bustler into the ring on Wednesday if he's jugged by the beak for aidin' and abettin' a prisoner of war? I've got to look after the Bustler, and I take no risks.'\n\nThis, then, was the end of all my struggles and strivings. I was to be led back again like a poor silly sheep who has broken through the hurdles. They little knew me who could fancy that I should submit to such a fate. I had heard enough to tell me where the weak point of these two men was, and I showed, as I have often showed before, that Etienne Gerard is never so terrible as when all hope seems to have deserted him. With a single spring I seized one of the clubs and swung it over the head of the Bustler.\n\n'Come what may,' I cried, 'you shall be spoiled for Wednesday.'\n\nThe fellow growled out an oath, and would have sprung at me, but the other flung his arms round him and pinned him to the chair.\n\n'Not if I know it, Bustler,' he screamed. 'None of your games while I am by. Get away out of this, Frenchy. We only want to see your back. Run away, run away, or he'll get loose!'\n\nIt was good advice, I thought, and I ran to the door, but as I came out into the open air my head swam round and I had to lean against the porch to save myself from falling. Consider all that I had been through, the anxiety of my escape, the long, useless flight in the storm, the day spent amid wet ferns, with only bread for food, the second journey by night, and now the injuries which I had received in attempting to deprive the little man of his clothes. Was it wonderful that even I should reach the limits of my endurance?\n\nI stood there in my heavy coat and my poor battered shako, my chin upon my chest, and my eyelids over my eyes. I had done my best, and I could do no more. It was the sound of horses' hoofs which made me at last raise my head, and there was the grey-moustached Governor of Dartmoor Prison not ten paces in front of me, with six mounted warders behind him!\n\n'So, Colonel,' said he, with a bitter smile, 'we have found you once more.'\n\nWhen a brave man has done his utmost, and has failed, he shows his breeding by the manner in which he accepts his defeat. For me, I took the letter which I had in my pocket, and stepping forward, I handed it with such grace of manner as I could summon to the Governor.\n\n'It has been my misfortune, sir, to detain one of your letters,' said I.\n\nHe looked at me in amazement, and beckoned to the warders to arrest me. Then he broke the seal of the letter. I saw a curious expression come over his face as he read it.\n\n'This must be the letter which Sir Charles Meredith lost,' said he.\n\n'It was in the pocket of his coat.'\n\n'You have carried it for two days?'\n\n'Since the night before last.'\n\n'And never looked at the contents?'\n\nI showed him by my manner that he had committed an indiscretion in asking a question which one gentleman should not have put to another.\n\nTo my surprise he burst out into a roar of laughter.\n\n'Colonel,' said he, wiping the tears from his eyes, 'you have really given both yourself and us a great deal of unnecessary trouble. Allow me to read the letter which you carried with you in your flight.'\n\nAnd this was what I heard:\u2014\n\n'On receipt of this you are directed to release Colonel Etienne Gerard, of the 3rd Hussars, who has been exchanged against Colonel Mason, of the Horse Artillery, now in Verdun.'\n\nAnd as he read it, he laughed again, and the warders laughed, and the two men from the cottage laughed, and then, as I heard this universal merriment, and thought of all my hopes and fears, and my struggles and dangers, what could a debonair soldier do but lean against the porch once more, and laugh as heartily as any of them? And of them all was it not I who had the best reason to laugh, since in front of me I could see my dear France, and my mother, and the Emperor, and my horsemen; while behind lay the gloomy prison, and the heavy hand of the English King?" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER TOOK THE FIELD AGAINST THE MARSHAL MILLEFLEURS", + "text": "Massena was a thin, sour little fellow, and after his hunting accident he had only one eye, but when it looked out from under his cocked hat there was not much upon a field of battle which escaped it. He could stand in front of a battalion, and with a single sweep tell you if a buckle or a gaiter button were out of place. Neither the officers nor the men were very fond of him, for he was, as you know, a miser, and soldiers love that their leaders should be free-handed. At the same time, when it came to work they had a very high respect for him, and they would rather fight under him than under anyone except the Emperor himself, and Lannes, when he was alive. After all, if he had a tight grasp upon his money-bags, there was a day also, you must remember, when that same grip was upon Zurich and Genoa. He clutched on to his positions as he did to his strong box, and it took a very clever man to loosen him from either.\n\nWhen I received his summons I went gladly to his headquarters, for I was always a great favourite of his, and there was no officer of whom he thought more highly. That was the best of serving with those good old generals, that they knew enough to be able to pick out a fine soldier when they saw one. He was seated alone in his tent, with his chin upon his hand, and his brow as wrinkled as if he had been asked for a subscription. He smiled, however, when he saw me before him.\n\n'Good day, Colonel Gerard.'\n\n'Good day, Marshal.'\n\n'How is the Third of Hussars?'\n\n'Seven hundred incomparable men upon seven hundred excellent horses.'\n\n'And your wounds\u2014are they healed?'\n\n'My wounds never heal, Marshal,' I answered.\n\n'And why?'\n\n'Because I have always new ones.'\n\n'General Rapp must look to his laurels,' said he, his face all breaking into wrinkles as he laughed. 'He has had twenty-one from the enemy's bullets, and as many from Larrey's knives and probes. Knowing that you were hurt, Colonel, I have spared you of late.'\n\n'Which hurt me most of all.'\n\n'Tut, tut! Since the English got behind these accursed lines of Torres Vedras, there has been little for us to do. You did not miss much during your imprisonment at Dartmoor. But now we are on the eve of action.'\n\n'We advance?'\n\n'No, retire.'\n\nMy face must have shown my dismay. What, retire before this sacred dog of a Wellington\u2014he who had listened unmoved to my words, and had sent me to his land of fogs? I could have sobbed as I thought of it.\n\n'What would you have?' cried Massena impatiently. 'When one is in check, it is necessary to move the king.'\n\n'Forwards,' I suggested.\n\nHe shook his grizzled head.\n\n'The lines are not to be forced,' said he. 'I have already lost General St. Croix and more men than I can replace. On the other hand, we have been here at Santarem for nearly six months. There is not a pound of flour nor a jug of wine on the countryside. We must retire.'\n\n'There are flour and wine in Lisbon,' I persisted.\n\n'Tut, you speak as if an army could charge in and charge out again like your regiment of hussars. If Soult were here with thirty thousand men\u2014but he will not come. I sent for you, however, Colonel Gerard, to say that I have a very singular and important expedition which I intend to place under your direction.'\n\nI pricked up my ears, as you can imagine. The Marshal unrolled a great map of the country and spread it upon the table. He flattened it out with his little, hairy hands.\n\n'This is Santarem,' he said pointing.\n\nI nodded.\n\n'And here, twenty-five miles to the east, is Almeixal, celebrated for its vintages and for its enormous Abbey.'\n\nAgain I nodded; I could not think what was coming.\n\n'Have you heard of the Marshal Millefleurs?' asked Massena.\n\n'I have served with all the Marshals,' said I, 'but there is none of that name.'\n\n'It is but the nickname which the soldiers have given him,' said Massena. 'If you had not been away from us for some months, it would not be necessary for me to tell you about him. He is an Englishman, and a man of good breeding. It is on account of his manners that they have given him his title. I wish you to go to this polite Englishman at Almeixal.'\n\n'Yes, Marshal.'\n\n'And to hang him to the nearest tree.'\n\n'Certainly, Marshal.'\n\nI turned briskly upon my heels, but Massena recalled me before I could reach the opening of his tent.\n\n'One moment, Colonel,' said he; 'you had best learn how matters stand before you start. You must know, then, that this Marshal Millefleurs, whose real name is Alexis Morgan, is a man of very great ingenuity and bravery. He was an officer in the English Guards, but having been broken for cheating at cards, he left the army. In some manner he gathered a number of English deserters round him and took to the mountains. French stragglers and Portuguese brigands joined him, and he found himself at the head of five hundred men. With these he took possession of the Abbey of Almeixal, sent the monks about their business, fortified the place, and gathered in the plunder of all the country round.'\n\n'For which it is high time he was hanged,' said I, making once more for the door.\n\n'One instant!' cried the Marshal, smiling at my impatience. 'The worst remains behind. Only last week the Dowager Countess of La Ronda, the richest woman in Spain, was taken by these ruffians in the passes as she was journeying from King Joseph's Court to visit her grandson. She is now a prisoner in the Abbey, and is only protected by her\u2014\u2014'\n\n'Grandmotherhood,' I suggested.\n\n'Her power of paying a ransom,' said Massena. 'You have three missions, then: To rescue this unfortunate lady; to punish this villain; and, if possible, to break up this nest of brigands. It will be a proof of the confidence which I have in you when I say that I can only spare you half a squadron with which to accomplish all this.'\n\nMy word, I could hardly believe my ears! I thought that I should have had my regiment at the least.\n\n'I would give you more,' said he, 'but I commence my retreat today, and Wellington is so strong in horse that every trooper becomes of importance. I cannot spare you another man. You will see what you can do, and you will report yourself to me at Abrantes not later than tomorrow night.'\n\nIt was very complimentary that he should rate my powers so high, but it was also a little embarrassing. I was to rescue an old lady, to hang an Englishman, and to break up a band of five hundred assassins\u2014all with fifty men. But after all, the fifty men were Hussars of Conflans, and they had an Etienne Gerard to lead them. As I came out into the warm Portuguese sunshine my confidence had returned to me, and I had already begun to wonder whether the medal which I had so often deserved might not be waiting for me at Almeixal.\n\nYou may be sure that I did not take my fifty men at hap-hazard. They were all old soldiers of the German wars, some of them with three stripes, and most of them with two. Oudet and Papilette, two of the best sub-officers in the regiment, were at their head. When I had them formed up in fours, all in silver grey and upon chestnut horses, with their leopard skin shabracks and their little red panaches, my heart beat high at the sight. I could not look at their weather-stained faces, with the great moustaches which bristled over their chin-straps, without feeling a glow of confidence, and, between ourselves, I have no doubt that that was exactly how they felt when they saw their young Colonel on his great black war-horse riding at their head.\n\nWell, when we got free of the camp and over the Tagus, I threw out my advance and my flankers, keeping my own place at the head of the main body. Looking back from the hills above Santarem, we could see the dark lines of Massena's army, with the flash and twinkle of the sabres and bayonets as he moved his regiments into position for their retreat. To the south lay the scattered red patches of the English outposts, and behind the grey smoke-cloud which rose from Wellington's camp\u2014thick, oily smoke, which seemed to our poor starving fellows to bear with it the rich smell of seething camp-kettles. Away to the west lay a curve of blue sea flecked with the white sails of the English ships.\n\nYou will understand that as we were riding to the east, our road lay away from both armies. Our own marauders, however, and the scouting parties of the English, covered the country, and it was necessary with my small troop that I should take every precaution. During the whole day we rode over desolate hill-sides, the lower portions covered by the budding vines, but the upper turning from green to grey, and jagged along the skyline like the back of a starved horse. Mountain streams crossed our path, running west to the Tagus, and once we came to a deep, strong river, which might have checked us had I not found the ford by observing where houses had been built opposite each other upon either bank. Between them, as every scout should know, you will find your ford. There was none to give us information, for neither man nor beast, nor any living thing except great clouds of crows, was to be seen during our journey.\n\nThe sun was beginning to sink when we came to a valley clear in the centre, but shrouded by huge oak trees upon either side. We could not be more than a few miles from Almeixal, so it seemed to me to be best to keep among the groves, for the spring had been an early one and the leaves were already thick enough to conceal us. We were riding then in open order among the great trunks, when one of my flankers came galloping up.\n\n'There are English across the valley, Colonel,' he cried, as he saluted.\n\n'Cavalry or infantry?'\n\n'Dragoons, Colonel,' said he; 'I saw the gleam of their helmets, and heard the neigh of a horse.'\n\nHalting my men I hastened to the edge of the wood. There could be no doubt about it. A party of English cavalry was travelling in a line with us, and in the same direction. I caught a glimpse of their red coats and of their flashing arms glowing and twinkling among the tree-trunks. Once, as they passed through a small clearing, I could see their whole force, and I judged that they were of about the same strength as my own\u2014a half squadron at the most.\n\nYou who have heard some of my little adventures will give me credit for being quick in my decisions, and prompt in carrying them out. But here I must confess that I was in two minds. On the one hand there was the chance of a fine cavalry skirmish with the English. On the other hand, there was my mission at the Abbey of Almeixal, which seemed already to be so much above my power. If I were to lose any of my men, it was certain that I should be unable to carry out my orders. I was sitting my horse, with my chin in my gauntlet, looking across at the rippling gleams of light from the further wood, when suddenly one of these red-coated Englishmen rode out from the cover, pointing at me and breaking into a shrill whoop and halloa as if I had been a fox. Three others joined him, and one who was a bugler sounded a call, which brought the whole of them into the open. They were, as I had thought, a half squadron, and they formed a double line with a front of twenty-five, their officer\u2014the one who had whooped at me\u2014at their head.\n\nFor my own part, I had instantly brought my own troopers into the same formation, so that there we were, hussars and dragoons, with only two hundred yards of grassy sward between us. They carried themselves well, those red-coated troopers, with their silver helmets, their high white plumes, and their long, gleaming swords; while, on the other hand, I am sure that they would acknowledge that they had never looked upon finer light horsemen than the fifty hussars of Conflans who were facing them. They were heavier, it is true, and they may have seemed the smarter, for Wellington used to make them burnish their metal work, which was not usual among us. On the other hand, it is well known that the English tunics were too tight for the sword-arm, which gave our men an advantage. As to bravery, foolish, inexperienced people of every nation always think that their own soldiers are braver than any others. There is no nation in the world which does not entertain this idea. But when one has seen as much as I have done, one understands that there is no very marked difference, and that although nations differ very much in discipline, they are all equally brave\u2014except that the French have rather more courage than the rest.\n\nWell, the cork was drawn and the glasses ready, when suddenly the English officer raised his sword to me as if in a challenge, and cantered his horse across the grassland. My word, there is no finer sight upon earth than that of a gallant man upon a gallant steed! I could have halted there just to watch him as he came with such careless grace, his sabre down by his horse's shoulder, his head thrown back, his white plume tossing\u2014youth and strength and courage, with the violet evening sky above and the oak trees behind. But it was not for me to stand and stare. Etienne Gerard may have his faults, but, my faith, he was never accused of being backward in taking his own part. The old horse, Rataplan, knew me so well that he had started off before ever I gave the first shake to the bridle.\n\nThere are two things in this world that I am very slow to forget: the face of a pretty woman, and the legs of a fine horse. Well, as we drew together, I kept on saying, 'Where have I seen those great roan shoulders? Where have I seen that dainty fetlock?' Then suddenly I remembered, and as I looked up at the reckless eyes and the challenging smile, whom should I recognize but the man who had saved me from the brigands and played me for my freedom\u2014he whose correct title was Milor the Hon. Sir Russell Bart!\n\n'Bart!' I shouted.\n\nHe had his arm raised for a cut, and three parts of his body open to my point, for he did not know very much about the use of the sword. As I brought my hilt to the salute he dropped his hand and stared at me.\n\n'Halloa!' said he. 'It's Gerard!' You would have thought by his manner that I had met him by appointment. For my own part, I would have embraced him had he but come an inch of the way to meet me.\n\n'I thought we were in for some sport,' said he. 'I never dreamed that it was you.'\n\nI found this tone of disappointment somewhat irritating. Instead of being glad at having met a friend, he was sorry at having missed an enemy.\n\n'I should have been happy to join in your sport, my dear Bart,' said I. 'But I really cannot turn my sword upon a man who saved my life.'\n\n'Tut, never mind about that.'\n\n'No, it is impossible. I should never forgive myself.'\n\n'You make too much of a trifle.'\n\n'My mother's one desire is to embrace you. If ever you should be in Gascony\u2014\u2014'\n\n'Lord Wellington is coming there with 60,000 men.'\n\n'Then one of them will have a chance of surviving,' said I, laughing. 'In the meantime, put your sword in your sheath!'\n\nOur horses were standing head to tail, and the Bart put out his hand and patted me on the thigh.\n\n'You're a good chap, Gerard,' said he. 'I only wish you had been born on the right side of the Channel.'\n\n'I was,' said I.\n\n'Poor devil!' he cried, with such an earnestness of pity that he set me laughing again. 'But look here, Gerard,' he continued; 'this is all very well, but it is not business, you know. I don't know what Massena would say to it, but our Chief would jump out of his riding-boots if he saw us. We weren't sent out here for a picnic\u2014either of us.'\n\n'What would you have?'\n\n'Well, we had a little argument about our hussars and dragoons, if you remember. I've got fifty of the Sixteenth all chewing their carbine bullets behind me. You've got as many fine-looking boys over yonder, who seem to be fidgeting in their saddles. If you and I took the right flanks we should not spoil each other's beauty\u2014though a little blood-letting is a friendly thing in this climate.'\n\nThere seemed to me to be a good deal of sense in what he said. For the moment Mr Alexis Morgan and the Countess of La Ronda and the Abbey of Almeixal went right out of my head, and I could only think of the fine level turf and of the beautiful skirmish which we might have.\n\n'Very good, Bart,' said I. 'We have seen the front of your dragoons. We shall now have a look at their backs.'\n\n'Any betting?' he asked.\n\n'The stake,' said I, 'is nothing less than the honour of the Hussars of Conflans.'\n\n'Well, come on!' he answered. 'If we break you, well and good\u2014if you break us, it will be all the better for Marshal Millefleurs.'\n\nWhen he said that I could only stare at him in astonishment.\n\n'Why for Marshal Millefleurs?' I asked.\n\n'It is the name of a rascal who lives out this way. My dragoons have been sent by Lord Wellington to see him safely hanged.'\n\n'Name of a name!' I cried. 'Why, my hussars have been sent by Massena for that very object.'\n\nWe burst out laughing at that, and sheathed our swords. There was a whirr of steel from behind us as our troopers followed our example.\n\n'We are allies!' he cried.\n\n'For a day.'\n\n'We must join forces.'\n\n'There is no doubt of it.'\n\nAnd so, instead of fighting, we wheeled our half squadrons round and moved in two little columns down the valley, the shakos and the helmets turned inwards, and the men looking their neighbours up and down, like old fighting dogs with tattered ears who have learned to respect each other's teeth. The most were on the broad grin, but there were some on either side who looked black and challenging, especially the English sergeant and my own sub-officer Papilette. They were men of habit, you see, who could not change all their ways of thinking in a moment. Besides, Papilette had lost his only brother at Busaco. As for the Bart and me, we rode together at the head and chatted about all that had occurred to us since that famous game of \u00e9cart\u00e9 of which I have told you.\n\nFor my own part, I spoke to him of my adventures in England. They are a very singular people, these English. Although he knew that I had been engaged in twelve campaigns, yet I am sure that the Bart thought more highly of me because I had had an affair with the Bristol Bustler. He told me, too, that the Colonel who presided over his court-martial for playing cards with a prisoner acquitted him of neglect of duty, but nearly broke him because he thought that he had not cleared his trumps before leading his suit. Yes, indeed, they are a singular people.\n\nAt the end of the valley the road curved over some rising ground before winding down into another wider valley beyond. We called a halt when we came to the top; for there, right in front of us, at the distance of about three miles, was a scattered, grey town, with a single enormous building upon the flank of the mountain which overlooked it. We could not doubt that we were at last in sight of the Abbey that held the gang of rascals whom we had come to disperse. It was only now, I think, that we fully understood what a task lay in front of us, for the place was a veritable fortress, and it was evident that cavalry should never have been sent out upon such an errand.\n\n'That's got nothing to do with us,' said the Bart; Wellington and Massena can settle that between them.'\n\n'Courage!' I answered. 'Pir\u00e9 took Leipzig with fifty hussars.'\n\n'Had they been dragoons,' said the Bart, laughing, 'he would have had Berlin. But you are senior officer; give us a lead, and we'll see who will be the first to flinch.'\n\n'Well,' said I, 'whatever we do must be done at once, for my orders are to be on my way to Abrantes by tomorrow night. But we must have some information first, and here is someone who should be able to give it to us.'\n\nThere was a square, whitewashed house standing by the roadside, which appeared, from the bush hanging over the door, to be one of those wayside tabernas which are provided for the muleteers. A lantern was hung in the porch, and by its light we saw two men, the one in the brown habit of a Capuchin monk, and the other girt with an apron, which showed him to be the landlord. They were conversing together so earnestly that we were upon them before they were aware of us. The innkeeper turned to fly, but one of the Englishmen seized him by the hair, and held him tight.\n\n'For mercy's sake, spare me,' he yelled. 'My house has been gutted by the French and harried by the English, and my feet have been burned by the brigands. I swear by the Virgin that I have neither money nor food in my inn, and the good Father Abbot, who is starving upon my doorstep, will be witness to it.'\n\n'Indeed, sir,' said the Capuchin, in excellent French, 'what this worthy man says is very true. He is one of the many victims to these cruel wars, although his loss is but a feather-weight compared to mine. Let him go,' he added, in English, to the trooper, 'he is too weak to fly, even if he desired to.'\n\nIn the light of the lantern I saw that this monk was a magnificent man, dark and bearded, with the eyes of a hawk, and so tall that his cowl came up to Rataplan's ears. He wore the look of one who had been through much suffering, but he carried himself like a king, and we could form some opinion of his learning when we each heard him talk our own language as fluently as if he were born to it.\n\n'You have nothing to fear,' said I, to the trembling innkeeper. 'As to you, father, you are, if I am not mistaken, the very man who can give us the information which we require.'\n\n'All that I have is at your service, my son. But,' he added, with a wan smile, 'my Lenten fare is always somewhat meagre, and this year it has been such that I must ask you for a crust of bread if I am to have the strength to answer your questions.'\n\nWe bore two days' rations in our haversacks, so that he soon had the little he asked for. It was dreadful to see the wolfish way in which he seized the piece of dried goat's flesh which I was able to offer him.\n\n'Time presses, and we must come to the point,' said I. 'We want your advice as to the weak points of yonder Abbey, and concerning the habits of the rascals who infest it.'\n\nHe cried out something which I took to be Latin, with his hands clasped and his eyes upturned. 'The prayer of the just availeth much,' said he, 'and yet I had not dared to hope that mine would have been so speedily answered. In me you see the unfortunate Abbot of Almeixal, who has been cast out by this rabble of three armies with their heretical leader. Oh! to think of what I have lost!' his voice broke, and the tears hung upon his lashes.\n\n'Cheer up, sir,' said the Bart. 'I'll lay nine to four that we have you back again by tomorrow night.'\n\nIt is not of my own welfare that I think,' said he, 'nor even of that of my poor, scattered flock. But it is of the holy relics which are left in the sacrilegious hands of these robbers.'\n\n'It's even betting whether they would ever bother their heads about them,' said the Bart. 'But show us the way inside the gates, and we'll soon clear the place out for you.'\n\nIn a few short words the good Abbot gave us the very points that we wished to know. But all that he said only made our task more formidable. The walls of the Abbey were forty feet high. The lower windows were barricaded, and the whole building loopholed for musketry fire. The gang preserved military discipline, and their sentries were too numerous for us to hope to take them by surprise. It was more than ever evident that a battalion of grenadiers and a couple of breaching pieces were what was needed. I raised my eyebrows, and the Bart began to whistle.\n\n'We must have a shot at it, come what may,' said he.\n\nThe men had already dismounted, and, having watered their horses, were eating their suppers. For my own part I went into the sitting-room of the inn with the Abbot and the Bart, that we might talk about our plans.\n\nI had a little cognac in my sauve vie, and I divided it among us\u2014just enough to wet our moustaches.\n\n'It is unlikely,' said I, 'that those rascals know anything about our coming. I have seen no signs of scouts along the road. My own plan is that we should conceal ourselves in some neighbouring wood, and then, when they open their gates, charge down upon them and take them by surprise.'\n\nThe Bart was of opinion that this was the best that we could do, but, when we came to talk it over, the Abbot made us see that there were difficulties in the way.\n\n'Save on the side of the town, there is no place within a mile of the Abbey where you could shelter man or horse,' said he. 'As to the townsfolk, they are not to be trusted. I fear, my son, that your excellent plan would have little chance of success in the face of the vigilant guard which these men keep.'\n\n'I see no other way,' answered I. 'Hussars of Conflans are not so plentiful that I can afford to run half a squadron of them against a forty-foot wall with five hundred infantry behind it.'\n\n'I am a man of peace,' said the Abbot, 'and yet I may, perhaps, give a word of counsel. I know these villains and their ways. Who should do so better, seeing that I have stayed for a month in this lonely spot, looking down in weariness of heart at the Abbey which was my own? I will tell you now what I should myself do if I were in your place.'\n\n'Pray tell us, father,' we cried, both together.\n\n'You must know that bodies of deserters, both French and English, are continually coming in to them, carrying their weapons with them. Now, what is there to prevent you and your men from pretending to be such a body, and so making your way into the Abbey?'\n\nI was amazed at the simplicity of the thing, and I embraced the good Abbot. The Bart, however, had some objections to offer.\n\n'That is all very well,' said he, 'but if these fellows are as sharp as you say, it is not very likely that they are going to let a hundred armed strangers into their crib. From all I have heard of Mr Morgan, or Marshal Millefleurs, or whatever the rascal's name is, I give him credit for more sense than that.'\n\n'Well, then,' I cried, 'let us send fifty in, and let them at daybreak throw open the gates to the other fifty, who will be waiting outside.'\n\nWe discussed the question at great length and with much foresight and discretion. If it had been Massena and Wellington instead of two young officers of light cavalry, we could not have weighed it all with more judgment. At last we agreed, the Bart and I, that one of us should indeed go with fifty men, under pretence of being deserters, and that in the early morning he should gain command of the gate and admit the others. The Abbot, it is true, was still of opinion that it was dangerous to divide our force, but finding that we were both of the same mind, he shrugged his shoulders and gave in.\n\n'There is only one thing that I would ask,' said he. 'If you lay hands upon this Marshal Millefleurs\u2014this dog of a brigand\u2014what will you do with him?'\n\n'Hang him,' I answered.\n\n'It is too easy a death,' cried the Capuchin, with a vindictive glow in his dark eyes. 'Had I my way with him\u2014but, oh, what thoughts are these for a servant of God to harbour!' He clapped his hands to his forehead like one who is half demented by his troubles, and rushed out of the room.\n\nThere was an important point which we had still to settle, and that was whether the French or the English party should have the honour of entering the Abbey first. My faith, it was asking a great deal of Etienne Gerard that he should give place to any man at such a time! But the poor Bart pleaded so hard, urging the few skirmishes which he had seen against my four-and-seventy engagements, that at last I consented that he should go. We had just clasped hands over the matter when there broke out such a shouting and cursing and yelling from the front of the inn, that out we rushed with our drawn sabres in our hands, convinced that the brigands were upon us.\n\nYou may imagine our feelings when, by the light of the lantern which hung from the porch, we saw a score of our hussars and dragoons all mixed in one wild heap, red coats and blue, helmets and busbies, pommelling each other to their hearts' content. We flung ourselves upon them, imploring, threatening, tugging at a lace collar, or at a spurred heel, until, at last, we had dragged them all apart. There they stood, flushed and bleeding, glaring at each other, and all panting together like a line of troop horses after a ten-mile chase. It was only with our drawn swords that we could keep them from each other's throats. The poor Capuchin stood in the porch in his long brown habit, wringing his hands and calling upon all the saints for mercy.\n\nHe was, indeed, as I found upon inquiry, the innocent cause of all the turmoil, for, not understanding how soldiers look upon such things, he had made some remark to the English sergeant that it was a pity that his squadron was not as good as the French. The words were not out of his mouth before a dragoon knocked down the nearest hussar, and then, in a moment, they all flew at each other like tigers. We would trust them no more after that, but the Bart moved his men to the front of the inn, and I mine to the back, the English all scowling and silent, and our fellows shaking their fists and chattering, each after the fashion of their own people.\n\nWell, as our plans were made, we thought it best to carry them out at once, lest some fresh cause of quarrel should break out between our followers. The Bart and his men rode off, therefore, he having first torn the lace from his sleeves, and the gorget and sash from his uniform, so that he might pass as a simple trooper. He explained to his men what it was that was expected of them, and though they did not raise a cry or wave their weapons as mine might have done, there was an expression upon their stolid and clean-shaven faces which filled me with confidence. Their tunics were left unbuttoned, their scabbards and helmets stained with dirt, and their harness badly fastened, so that they might look the part of deserters, without order or discipline. At six o'clock next morning they were to gain command of the main gate of the Abbey, while at that same hour my hussars were to gallop up to it from outside. The Bart and I pledged our words to it before he trotted off with his detachment. My sergeant, Papilette, with two troopers, followed the English at a distance, and returned in half an hour to say that, after some parley, and the flashing of lanterns upon them from the grille, they had been admitted into the Abbey.\n\nSo far, then, all had gone well. It was a cloudy night with a sprinkling of rain, which was in our favour, as there was the less chance of our presence being discovered. My vedettes I placed two hundred yards in every direction, to guard against a surprise, and also to prevent any peasant who might stumble upon us from carrying the news to the Abbey. Oudin and Papilette were to take turns of duty, while the others with their horses had snug quarters in a great wooden granary. Having walked round and seen that all was as it should be, I flung myself upon the bed which the innkeeper had set apart for me, and fell into a dreamless sleep.\n\nNo doubt you have heard my name mentioned as being the beau-ideal of a soldier, and that not only by friends and admirers like our fellow-townsfolk, but also by old officers of the great wars who have shared the fortunes of those famous campaigns with me. Truth and modesty compel me to say, however, that this is not so. There are some gifts which I lack\u2014very few, no doubt\u2014but, still, amid the vast armies of the Emperor there may have been some who were free from those blemishes which stood between me and perfection. Of bravery I say nothing. Those who have seen me in the field are best fitted to speak about that. I have often heard the soldiers discussing round the camp-fires as to who was the bravest man in the Grand Army. Some said Murat, and some said Lasalle, and some Ney; but for my own part, when they asked me, I merely shrugged my shoulders and smiled. It would have seemed mere conceit if I had answered that there was no man braver than Brigadier Gerard. At the same time, facts are facts, and a man knows best what his own feelings are. But there are other gifts besides bravery which are necessary for a soldier, and one of them is that he should be a light sleeper. Now, from my boyhood onwards, I have been hard to wake, and it was this which brought me to ruin upon that night.\n\nIt may have been about two o'clock in the morning that I was suddenly conscious of a feeling of suffocation. I tried to call out, but there was something which prevented me from uttering a sound. I struggled to rise, but I could only flounder like a hamstrung horse. I was strapped at the ankles, strapped at the knees, and strapped again at the wrists. Only my eyes were free to move, and there at the foot of my couch, by the light of a Portuguese lamp, whom should I see but the Abbot and the innkeeper!\n\nThe latter's heavy, white face had appeared to me when I looked upon it the evening before to express nothing but stupidity and terror. Now, on the contrary, every feature bespoke brutality and ferocity. Never have I seen a more dreadful-looking villain. In his hand he held a long, dull-coloured knife. The Abbot, on the other hand, was as polished and as dignified as ever. His Capuchin gown had been thrown open, however, and I saw beneath it a black, frogged coat, such as I have seen among the English officers. As our eyes met he leaned over the wooden end of the bed and laughed silently until it creaked again.\n\n'You will, I am sure, excuse my mirth, my dear Colonel Gerard,' said he. 'The fact is, that the expression upon your face when you grasped the situation was just a little funny. I have no doubt that you are an excellent soldier, but I hardly think that you are fit to measure wits with the Marshal Millefleurs, as your fellows have been good enough to call me. You appear to have given me credit for singularly little intelligence, which argues, if I may be allowed to say so, a want of acuteness upon your own part. Indeed, with the single exception of my thick-headed compatriot, the British dragoon, I have never met anyone who was less competent to carry out such a mission.'\n\nYou can imagine how I felt and how I looked, as I listened to this insolent harangue, which was all delivered in that flowery and condescending manner which had gained this rascal his nickname. I could say nothing, but they must have read my threat in my eyes, for the fellow who had played the part of the innkeeper whispered something to his companion.\n\n'No, no, my dear Chenier, he will be infinitely more valuable alive,' said he. 'By the way, Colonel, it is just as well that you are a sound sleeper, for my friend here, who is a little rough in his ways, would certainly have cut your throat if you had raised any alarm. I should recommend you to keep in his good graces, for Sergeant Chenier, late of the 7th Imperial Light Infantry, is a much more dangerous person than Captain Alexis Morgan, of His Majesty's foot-guards.'\n\nChenier grinned and shook his knife at me, while I tried to look the loathing which I felt at the thought that a soldier of the Emperor could fall so low.\n\n'It may amuse you to know,' said the Marshal, in that soft, suave voice of his, 'that both your expeditions were watched from the time that you left your respective camps. I think that you will allow that Chenier and I played our parts with some subtlety. We had made every arrangement for your reception at the Abbey, though we had hoped to receive the whole squadron instead of half. When the gates are secured behind them, our visitors will find themselves in a very charming little mediaeval quadrangle, with no possible exit, commanded by musketry fire from a hundred windows. They may choose to be shot down; or they may choose to surrender. Between ourselves, I have not the slightest doubt that they have been wise enough to do the latter. But since you are naturally interested in the matter, we thought that you would care to come with us and to see for yourself. I think I can promise you that you will find your titled friend waiting for you at the Abbey with a face as long as your own.'\n\nThe two villains began whispering together, debating, as far as I could hear, which was the best way of avoiding my vedettes.\n\n'I will make sure that it is all clear upon the other side of the barn,' said the Marshal at last. 'You will stay here, my good Chenier, and if the prisoner gives any trouble you will know what to do.'\n\nSo we were left together, this murderous renegade and I\u2014he sitting at the end of the bed, sharpening his knife upon his boot in the light of the single smoky little oil-lamp. As to me, I only wonder now, as I look back upon it, that I did not go mad with vexation and self-reproach as I lay helplessly upon the couch, unable to utter a word or move a finger, with the knowledge that my fifty gallant lads were so close to me, and yet with no means of letting them know the straits to which I was reduced. It was no new thing for me to be a prisoner; but to be taken by these renegades, and to be led into their Abbey in the midst of their jeers, befooled and out-witted by their insolent leaders\u2014that was indeed more than I could endure. The knife of the butcher beside me would cut less deeply than that.\n\nI twitched softly at my wrists, and then at my ankles, but whichever of the two had secured me was no bungler at his work. I could not move either of them an inch. Then I tried to work the handkerchief down over my mouth, but the ruffian beside me raised his knife with such a threatening snarl that I had to desist. I was lying still looking at his bull neck, and wondering whether it would ever be my good fortune to fit it for a cravat, when I heard returning steps coming down the inn passage and up the stair. What word would the villain bring back? If he found it impossible to kidnap me, he would probably murder me where I lay. For my own part, I was indifferent which it might be, and I looked at the doorway with the contempt and defiance which I longed to put into words. But you can imagine my feelings, my dear friends, when, instead of the tall figure and dark, sneering face of the Capuchin, my eyes fell upon the grey pelisse and huge moustaches of my good little sub-officer, Papilette!\n\nThe French soldier of those days had seen too much to be ever taken by surprise. His eyes had hardly rested upon my bound figure and the sinister face beside me before he had seen how the matter lay.\n\n'Sacred name of a dog!' he growled, and out flashed his great sabre. Chenier sprang forward at him with his knife, and then, thinking better of it, he darted back and stabbed frantically at my heart. For my own part, I had hurled myself off the bed on the side opposite to him, and the blade grazed my side before ripping its way through blanket and sheet. An instant later I heard the thud of a heavy fall, and then almost simultaneously a second object struck the floor\u2014something lighter but harder, which rolled under the bed. I will not horrify you with details, my friends. Suffice it that Papilette was one of the strongest swordsmen in the regiment, and that his sabre was heavy and sharp. It left a red blotch upon my wrists and my ankles, as it cut the thongs which bound me.\n\nWhen I had thrown off my gag, the first use which I made of my lips was to kiss the sergeant's scarred cheeks. The next was to ask him if all was well with the command. Yes, they had had no alarms. Oudin had just relieved him, and he had come to report. Had he seen the Abbot? No, he had seen nothing of him. Then we must form a cordon and prevent his escape. I was hurrying out to give the orders, when I heard a slow and measured step enter the door below, and come creaking up the stairs.\n\nPapilette understood it all in an instant. 'You are not to kill him,' I whispered, and thrust him into the shadow on one side of the door; I crouched on the other. Up he came, up and up, and every footfall seemed to be upon my heart. The brown skirt of his gown was not over the threshold before we were both on him, like two wolves on a buck. Down we crashed, the three of us, he fighting like a tiger, and with such amazing strength that he might have broken away from the two of us. Thrice he got to his feet, and thrice we had him over again, until Papilette made him feel that there was a point to his sabre. He had sense enough then to know that the game was up, and to lie still while I lashed him with the very cords which had been round my own limbs.\n\n'There has been a fresh deal, my fine fellow,' said I, 'and you will find that I have some of the trumps in my hand this time.'\n\n'Luck always comes to the aid of a fool,' he answered. 'Perhaps it is as well, otherwise the world would fall too completely into the power of the astute. So, you have killed Chenier, I see. He was an insubordinate dog, and always smelt abominably of garlic. Might I trouble you to lay me upon the bed? The floor of these Portuguese tabernas is hardly a fitting couch for anyone who has prejudices in favour of cleanliness.'\n\nI could not but admire the coolness of the man, and the way in which he preserved the same insolent air of condescension in spite of this sudden turning of the tables. I dispatched Papilette to summon a guard, whilst I stood over our prisoner with my drawn sword, never taking my eyes off him for an instant, for I must confess that I had conceived a great respect for his audacity and resource.\n\n'I trust,' said he, 'that your men will treat me in a becoming manner.'\n\n'You will get your deserts\u2014you may depend upon that.'\n\n'I ask nothing more. You may not be aware of my exalted birth, but I am so placed that I cannot name my father without treason, nor my mother without a scandal. I cannot claim Royal honours, but these things are so much more graceful when they are conceded without a claim. The thongs are cutting my skin. Might I beg you to loosen them?'\n\n'You do not give me credit for much intelligence,' I remarked, repeating his own words.\n\n'Touch\u00e9,' he cried, like a pinked fencer. 'But here come your men, so it matters little whether you loosen them or not.'\n\nI ordered the gown to be stripped from him and placed him under a strong guard. Then, as morning was already breaking, I had to consider what my next step was to be. The poor Bart and his Englishmen had fallen victims to the deep scheme which might, had we adopted all the crafty suggestions of our adviser, have ended in the capture of the whole instead of the half of our force. I must extricate them if it were still possible. Then there was the old lady, the Countess of La Ronda, to be thought of. As to the Abbey, since its garrison was on the alert it was hopeless to think of capturing that. All turned now upon the value which they placed upon their leader. The game depended upon my playing that one card. I will tell you how boldly and how skilfully I played it.\n\nIt was hardly light before my bugler blew the assembly, and out we trotted on to the plain. My prisoner was placed on horseback in the very centre of the troops. It chanced that there was a large tree just out of musket-shot from the main gate of the Abbey, and under this we halted. Had they opened the great doors in order to attack us, I should have charged home upon them; but, as I had expected, they stood upon the defensive, lining the long wall and pouring down a torrent of hootings and taunts and derisive laughter upon us. A few fired their muskets, but finding that we were out of reach they soon ceased to waste their powder. It was the strangest sight to see that mixture of uniforms, French, English, and Portuguese, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, all wagging their heads and shaking their fists at us.\n\nMy word, their hubbub soon died away when we opened our ranks, and showed whom we had got in the midst of us! There was silence for a few seconds, and then such a howl of rage and grief! I could see some of them dancing like mad-men upon the wall. He must have been a singular person, this prisoner of ours, to have gained the affection of such a gang.\n\nI had brought a rope from the inn, and we slung it over the lower bough of the tree.\n\n'You will permit me, monsieur, to undo your collar,' said Papilette, with mock politeness.\n\n'If your hands are perfectly clean,' answered our prisoner, and set the whole half-squadron laughing.\n\nThere was another yell from the wall, followed by a profound hush as the noose was tightened round Marshal Millefleurs' neck. Then came a shriek from a bugle, the Abbey gates flew open, and three men rushed out waving white cloths in their hands. Ah, how my heart bounded with joy at the sight of them. And yet I would not advance an inch to meet them, so that all the eagerness might seem to be upon their side. I allowed my trumpeter, however, to wave a handkerchief in reply, upon which the three envoys came running towards us. The Marshal, still pinioned, and with the rope round his neck, sat his horse with a half smile, as one who is slightly bored and yet strives out of courtesy not to show it. If I were in such a situation I could not wish to carry myself better, and surely I can say no more than that.\n\nThey were a singular trio, these ambassadors. The one was a Portuguese ca\u00e7adore in his dark uniform, the second a French chasseur in the lightest green, and the third a big English artilleryman in blue and gold. They saluted, all three, and the Frenchman did the talking.\n\n'We have thirty-seven English dragoons in our hands,' said he. 'We give you our most solemn oath that they shall all hang from the Abbey wall within five minutes of the death of our Marshal.'\n\n'Thirty-seven!' I cried. 'You have fifty-one.'\n\n'Fourteen were cut down before they could be secured.'\n\n'And the officer?'\n\n'He would not surrender his sword save with his life. It was not our fault. We would have saved him if we could.'\n\nAlas for my poor Bart! I had met him but twice, and yet he was a man very much after my heart. I have always had a regard for the English for the sake of that one friend. A braver man and a worse swordsman I have never met.\n\nI did not, as you may think, take these rascals' word for anything. Papilette was dispatched with one of them, and returned to say that it was too true. I had now to think of the living.\n\n'You will release the thirty-seven dragoons if I free your leader?'\n\n'We will give you ten of them.'\n\n'Up with him!' I cried.\n\n'Twenty,' shouted the chasseur.\n\n'No more words,' said I. 'Pull on the rope!'\n\n'All of them,' cried the envoy, as the cord tightened round the Marshal's neck.\n\n'With horses and arms?'\n\nThey could see that I was not a man to jest with.\n\n'All complete,' said the chasseur, sulkily.\n\n'And the Countess of La Ronda as well?' said I.\n\nBut here I met with firmer opposition. No threats of mine could induce them to give up the Countess. We tightened the cord. We moved the horse. We did all but leave the Marshal suspended. If once I broke his neck the dragoons were dead men. It was as precious to me as to them.\n\n'Allow me to remark,' said the Marshal, blandly, 'that you are exposing me to a risk of a quinsy. Do you not think, since there is a difference of opinion upon this point, that it would be an excellent idea to consult the lady herself? We would neither of us, I am sure, wish to override her own inclinations.'\n\nNothing could be more satisfactory. You can imagine how quickly I grasped at so simple a solution. In ten minutes she was before us, a most stately dame, with her grey curls peeping out from under her mantilla. Her face was as yellow as though it reflected the countless doubloons of her treasury.\n\n'This gentleman,' said the Marshal, 'is exceedingly anxious to convey you to a place where you will never see us more. It is for you to decide whether you would wish to go with him, or whether you prefer to remain with me.'\n\nShe was at his horse's side in an instant. 'My own Alexis,' she cried, 'nothing can ever part us.'\n\nHe looked at me with a sneer upon his handsome face.\n\n'By the way, you made a small slip of the tongue, my dear Colonel,' said he. 'Except by courtesy, no such person exists as the Dowager Countess of La Ronda. The lady whom I have the honour to present to you is my very dear wife, Mrs Alexis Morgan\u2014or shall I say Madame la Mar\u00e8chale Millefleurs?'\n\nIt was at this moment that I came to the conclusion that I was dealing with the cleverest, and also the most unscrupulous, man whom I had ever met. As I looked upon this unfortunate old woman my soul was filled with wonder and disgust. As for her, her eyes were raised to his face with such a look as a young recruit might give to the Emperor.\n\n'So be it,' said I at last; 'give me the dragoons and let me go.'\n\nThey were brought out with their horses and weapons, and the rope was taken from the Marshal's neck.\n\n'Good-bye, my dear Colonel,' said he. 'I am afraid that you will have rather a lame account to give of your mission, when you find your way back to Massena, though, from all I hear, he will probably be too busy to think of you. I am free to confess that you have extricated yourself from your difficulties with greater ability than I had given you credit for. I presume that there is nothing which I can do for you before you go?'\n\n'There is one thing.'\n\n'And that is?'\n\n'To give fitting burial to this young officer and his men.'\n\n'I pledge my word to it.'\n\n'And there is one other.'\n\n'Name it.'\n\n'To give me five minutes in the open with a sword in your hand and a horse between your legs.'\n\n'Tut, tut!' said he. 'I should either have to cut short your promising career, or else to bid adieu to my own bonny bride. It is unreasonable to ask such a request of a man in the first joys of matrimony.'\n\nI gathered my horsemen together and wheeled them into column.\n\n'Au revoir,' I cried, shaking my sword at him. 'The next time you may not escape so easily.'\n\n'Au revoir,' he answered. 'When you are weary of the Emperor, you will always find a commission waiting for you in the service of the Marshal Millefleurs.'" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER PLAYED FOR A KINGDOM", + "text": "It has sometimes struck me that some of you, when you have heard me tell these little adventures of mine, may have gone away with the impression that I was conceited. There could not be a greater mistake than this, for I have always observed that really fine soldiers are free from this failing. It is true that I have had to depict myself sometimes as brave, sometimes as full of resource, always as interesting; but, then, it really was so, and I had to take the facts as I found them. It would be an unworthy affectation if I were to pretend that my career has been anything but a fine one. The incident which I will tell you tonight, however, is one which you will understand that only a modest man would describe. After all, when one has attained such a position as mine, one can afford to speak of what an ordinary man might be tempted to conceal.\n\nYou must know, then, that after the Russian campaign the remains of our poor army were quartered along the western bank of the Elbe, where they might thaw their frozen blood and try, with the help of the good German beer, to put a little between their skin and their bones. There were some things which we could not hope to regain, for I daresay that three large commissariat fourgons would not have sufficed to carry the fingers and the toes which the army had shed during that retreat. Still, lean and crippled as we were, we had much to be thankful for when we thought of our poor comrades whom we had left behind, and of the snowfields\u2014the horrible, horrible snowfields. To this day, my friends, I do not care to see red and white together. Even my red cap thrown down upon my white counterpane has given me dreams in which I have seen those monstrous plains, the reeling, tortured army, and the crimson smears which glared upon the snow behind them. You will coax no story out of me about that business, for the thought of it is enough to turn my wine to vinegar and my tobacco to straw.\n\nOf the half-million who crossed the Elbe in the autumn of the year '12 about forty thousand infantry were left in the spring of '13. But they were terrible men, these forty thousand: men of iron, eaters of horses, and sleepers in the snow; filled, too, with rage and bitterness against the Russians. They would hold the Elbe until the great army of conscripts, which the Emperor was raising in France, should be ready to help them to cross it once more.\n\nBut the cavalry was in a deplorable condition. My own hussars were at Borna, and when I paraded them first, I burst into tears at the sight of them. My fine men and my beautiful horses\u2014it broke my heart to see the state to which they were reduced. 'But, courage,' I thought, 'they have lost much, but their Colonel is still left to them.' I set to work, therefore, to repair their disasters, and had already constructed two good squadrons, when an order came that all colonels of cavalry should repair instantly to the dep\u00f4ts of the regiments in France to organize the recruits and the remounts for the coming campaign.\n\nYou will think, doubtless, that I was over-joyed at this chance of visiting home once more. I will not deny that it was a pleasure to me to know that I should see my mother again, and there were a few girls who would be very glad at the news; but there were others in the army who had a stronger claim. I would have given my place to any who had wives and children whom they might not see again. However, there is no arguing when the blue paper with the little red seal arrives, so within an hour I was off upon my great ride from the Elbe to the Vosges. At last I was to have a period of quiet. War lay behind my mare's tail and peace in front of her nostrils. So I thought, as the sound of the bugles died in the distance, and the long, white road curled away in front of me through plain and forest and mountain, with France somewhere beyond the blue haze which lay upon the horizon.\n\nIt is interesting, but it is also fatiguing, to ride in the rear of an army. In the harvest time our soldiers could do without supplies, for they had been trained to pluck the grain in the fields as they passed, and to grind it for themselves in their bivouacs. It was at that time of year, therefore, that those swift marches were performed which were the wonder and the despair of Europe. But now the starving men had to be made robust once more, and I was forced to draw into the ditch continually as the Coburg sheep and the Bavarian bullocks came streaming past with waggon loads of Berlin beer and good French cognac. Sometimes, too, I would hear the dry rattle of the drums and the shrill whistle of the fifes, and long columns of our good little infantry men would swing past me with the white dust lying thick upon their blue tunics. These were old soldiers drawn from the garrisons of our German fortresses, for it was not until May that the new conscripts began to arrive from France.\n\nWell, I was rather tired of this eternal stopping and dodging, so that I was not sorry when I came to Altenburg to find that the road divided, and that I could take the southern and quieter branch. There were few wayfarers between there and Greiz, and the road wound through groves of oaks and beeches, which shot their branches across the path. You will think it strange that a Colonel of hussars should again and again pull up his horse in order to admire the beauty of the feathery branches and the little, green, new-budded leaves, but if you had spent six months among the fir trees of Russia you would be able to understand me.\n\nThere was something, however, which pleased me very much less than the beauty of the forests, and that was the words and looks of the folk who lived in the woodland villages. We had always been excellent friends with the Germans, and during the last six years they had never seemed to bear us any malice for having made a little free with their country. We had shown kindnesses to the men and received them from the women, so that good, comfortable Germany was a second home to all of us. But now there was something which I could not understand in the behaviour of the people. The travellers made no answer to my salute; the foresters turned their heads away to avoid seeing me; and in the villages the folk would gather into knots in the roadway and would scowl at me as I passed. Even women would do this, and it was something new for me in those days to see anything but a smile in a woman's eyes when they were turned upon me.\n\nIt was in the hamlet of Schmolin, just ten miles out of Altenburg, that the thing became most marked. I had stopped at the little inn there just to damp my moustache and to wash the dust out of poor Violette's throat. It was my way to give some little compliment, or possibly a kiss, to the maid who served me; but this one would have neither the one nor the other, but darted a glance at me like a bayonet-thrust. Then when I raised my glass to the folk who drank their beer by the door they turned their backs on me, save only one fellow, who cried, 'Here's a toast for you, boys! Here's to the letter T!' At that they all emptied their beer mugs and laughed; but it was not a laugh that had good-fellowship in it.\n\nI was turning this over in my head and wondering what their boorish conduct could mean, when I saw, as I rode from the village, a great T new carved upon a tree. I had already seen more than one in my morning's ride, but I had given no thought to them until the words of the beer-drinker gave them an importance. It chanced that a respectable-looking person was riding past me at the moment, so I turned to him for information.\n\n'Can you tell me, sir,' said I, 'what this letter T is?'\n\nHe looked at it and then at me in the most singular fashion. 'Young man,' said he, 'it is not the letter N.' Then before I could ask further he clapped his spurs into his horses ribs and rode, stomach to earth, upon his way.\n\nAt first his words had no particular significance in my mind, but as I trotted onwards Violette chanced to half turn her dainty head, and my eyes were caught by the gleam of the brazen N's at the end of the bridle-chain. It was the Emperor's mark. And those T's meant something which was opposite to it. Things had been happening in Germany, then, during our absence, and the giant sleeper had begun to stir. I thought of the mutinous faces that I had seen, and I felt that if I could only have looked into the hearts of these people I might have had some strange news to bring into France with me. It made me the more eager to get my remounts, and to see ten strong squadrons behind my kettle-drums once more.\n\nWhile these thoughts were passing through my head I had been alternately walking and trotting, as a man should who has a long journey before, and a willing horse beneath, him. The woods were very open at this point, and beside the road there lay a great heap of fagots. As I passed there came a sharp sound from among them, and, glancing round, I saw a face looking out at me\u2014a hot, red face, like that of a man who is beside himself with excitement and anxiety. A second glance told me that it was the very person with whom I had talked an hour before in the village.\n\n'Come nearer!' he hissed. 'Nearer still! Now dismount and pretend to be mending the stirrup leather. Spies may be watching us, and it means death to me if I am seen helping you.'\n\n'Death!' I whispered. 'From whom?'\n\n'From the Tugendbund. From Lutzow's night-riders. You Frenchmen are living on a powder magazine, and the match has been struck that will fire it.'\n\n'But this is all strange to me,' said I, still fumbling at the leathers of my horse. 'What is this Tugendbund?'\n\n'It is the secret society which has planned the great rising which is to drive you out of Germany, just as you have been driven out of Russia.'\n\n'And these T's stand for it?'\n\n'They are the signal. I should have told you all this in the village, but I dared not be seen speaking with you. I galloped through the woods to cut you off, and concealed both my horse and myself.'\n\n'I am very much indebted to you,' said I, 'and the more so as you are the only German that I have met today from whom I have had common civility.'\n\n'All that I possess I have gained through contracting for the French armies,' said he. 'Your Emperor has been a good friend to me. But I beg that you will ride on now, for we have talked long enough. Beware only of Lutzow's night-riders!'\n\n'Banditti?' I asked.\n\n'All that is best in Germany,' said he. 'But for God's sake ride forwards, for I have risked my life and exposed my good name in order to carry you this warning.'\n\nWell, if I had been heavy with thought before, you can think how I felt after my strange talk with the man among the fagots. What came home to me even more than his words was his shivering, broken voice, his twitching face, and his eyes glancing swiftly to right and left, and opening in horror whenever a branch cracked upon a tree. It was clear that he was in the last extremity of terror, and it is possible that he had cause, for shortly after I had left him I heard a distant gunshot and a shouting from somewhere behind me. It may have been some sportsman halloaing to his dogs, but I never again heard of or saw the man who had given me my warning.\n\nI kept a good look-out after this, riding swiftly where the country was open, and slowly where there might be an ambuscade. It was serious for me, since 500 good miles of German soil lay in front of me; but somehow I did not take it very much to heart, for the Germans had always seemed to me to be a kindly, gentle people, whose hands closed more readily round a pipe-stem than a sword-hilt\u2014not out of want of valour, you understand, but because they are genial, open souls, who would rather be on good terms with all men. I did not know then that beneath that homely surface there lurks a devilry as fierce as, and far more persistent than, that of the Castilian or the Italian.\n\nAnd it was not long before I had shown to me that there was something more serious abroad than rough words and hard looks. I had come to a spot where the road runs upwards through a wild tract of heath-land and vanishes into an oak wood. I may have been half-way up the hill when, looking forward, I saw something gleaming under the shadow of the tree-trunks, and a man came out with a coat which was so slashed and spangled with gold that he blazed like a fire in the sunlight. He appeared to be very drunk, for he reeled and staggered as he came towards me. One of his hands was held up to his ear and clutched a great red handkerchief, which was fixed to his neck.\n\nI had reined up the mare and was looking at him with some disgust, for it seemed strange to me that one who wore so gorgeous a uniform should show himself in such a state in broad daylight. For his part, he looked hard in my direction and came slowly onwards, stopping from time to time and swaying about as he gazed at me. Suddenly, as I again advanced, he screamed out his thanks to Christ, and, lurching forwards, he fell with a crash upon the dusty road. His hands flew forward with the fall, and I saw that what I had taken for a red cloth was a monstrous wound, which had left a great gap in his neck, from which a dark blood-clot hung, like an epaulette upon his shoulder.\n\n'My God!' I cried, as I sprang to his aid. 'And I thought that you were drunk!'\n\n'Not drunk, but dying,' said he. 'But thank Heaven that I have seen a French officer while I have still strength to speak.'\n\nI laid him among the heather and poured some brandy down his throat. All round us was the vast countryside, green and peaceful, with nothing living in sight save only the mutilated man beside me.\n\n'Who has done this?' I asked, 'and what are you? You are French, and yet the uniform is strange to me.'\n\n'It is that of the Emperor's new guard of honour. I am the Marquis of Ch\u00e2teau St Arnaud, and I am the ninth of my blood who has died in the service of France. I have been pursued and wounded by the night-riders of Lutzow, but I hid among the brushwood yonder, and waited in the hope that a Frenchman might pass. I could not be sure at first if you were friend or foe, but I felt that death was very near, and that I must take the chance.'\n\n'Keep your heart up, comrade,' said I; 'I have seen a man with a worse wound who has lived to boast of it.'\n\n'No, no,' he whispered; 'I am going fast.' He laid his hand upon mine as he spoke, and I saw that his finger-nails were already blue. 'But I have papers here in my tunic which you must carry at once to the Prince of Saxe-Felstein, at his Castle of Hof. He is still true to us, but the Princess is our deadly enemy. She is striving to make him declare against us. If he does so, it will determine all those who are wavering, for the King of Prussia is his uncle and the King of Bavaria his cousin. These papers will hold him to us if they can only reach him before he takes the last step. Place them in his hands tonight, and, perhaps, you will have saved all Germany for the Emperor. Had my horse not been shot, I might, wounded as I am\u2014\u2014' He choked, and the cold hand tightened into a grip, which left mine as bloodless as itself. Then, with a groan, his head jerked back, and it was all over with him.\n\nHere was a fine start for my journey home. I was left with a commission of which I knew little, which would lead me to delay the pressing needs of my hussars, and which at the same time was of such importance that it was impossible for me to avoid it. I opened the Marquis's tunic, the brilliance of which had been devised by the Emperor in order to attract those young aristocrats from whom he hoped to raise these new regiments of his Guard. It was a small packet of papers which I drew out, tied up with silk, and addressed to the Prince of Saxe-Felstein. In the corner, in a sprawling, untidy hand, which I knew to be the Emperor's own, was written: 'Pressing and most important.' It was an order to me, those four words\u2014an order as clear as if it had come straight from the firm lips with the cold grey eyes looking into mine. My troopers might wait for their horses, the dead Marquis might lie where I had laid him amongst the heather, but if the mare and her rider had a breath left in them the papers should reach the Prince that night.\n\nI should not have feared to ride by the road through the wood, for I have learned in Spain that the safest time to pass through a guerilla country is after an outrage, and that the moment of danger is when all is peaceful. When I came to look upon my map, however, I saw that Hof lay further to the south of me, and that I might reach it more directly by keeping to the moors. Off I set, therefore, and had not gone fifty yards before two carbine shots rang out of the brushwood and a bullet hummed past me like a bee. It was clear that the night-riders were bolder in their ways than the brigands of Spain, and that my mission would have ended where it had begun if I had kept to the road.\n\nIt was a mad ride, that\u2014a ride with a loose rein, girth-deep in heather and in gorse, plunging through bushes, flying down hill-sides, with my neck at the mercy of my dear little Violette. But she\u2014she never slipped, she never faltered, as swift and as surefooted as if she knew that her rider carried the fate of all Germany beneath the buttons of his pelisse. And I\u2014I had long borne the name of being the best horseman in the six brigades of light cavalry, but I never rode as I rode then. My friend the Bart had told me of how they hunt the fox in England, but the swiftest fox would have been captured by me that day. The wild pigeons which flew overhead did not take a straighter course than Violette and I below. As an officer, I have always been ready to sacrifice myself for my men, though the Emperor would not have thanked me for it, for he had many men, but only one\u2014well, cavalry leaders of the first class are rare.\n\nBut here I had an object which was indeed worth a sacrifice, and I thought no more of my life than of the clods of earth that flew from my darling's heels.\n\nWe struck the road once more as the light was failing, and galloped into the little village of Lobenstein. But we had hardly got upon the cobblestones when off came one of the mare's shoes, and I had to lead her to the village smithy. His fire was low, and his day's work done, so that it would be an hour at the least before I could hope to push on to Hof. Cursing at the delay, I strode into the village inn and ordered a cold chicken and some wine to be served for my dinner. It was but a few miles to Hof, and I had every hope that I might deliver my papers to the Prince on that very night, and be on my way for France next morning with despatches for the Emperor in my bosom. I will tell you now what befell me in the inn of Lobenstein.\n\nThe chicken had been served and the wine drawn, and I had turned upon both as a man may who has ridden such a ride, when I was aware of a murmur and a scuffling in the hall outside my door. At first I thought that it was some brawl between peasants in their cups, and I left them to settle their own affairs. But of a sudden there broke from among the low, sullen growl of the voices such a sound as would send Etienne Gerard leaping from his death-bed. It was the whimpering cry of a woman in pain. Down clattered my knife and my fork, and in an instant I was in the thick of the crowd which had gathered outside my door.\n\nThe heavy-cheeked landlord was there and his flaxen-haired wife, the two men from the stables, a chambermaid, and two or three villagers. All of them, women and men, were flushed and angry, while there in the centre of them, with pale cheeks and terror in her eyes, stood the loveliest woman that ever a soldier would wish to look upon. With her queenly head thrown back, and a touch of defiance mingled with her fear, she looked as she gazed round her like a creature of a different race from the vile, coarse-featured crew who surrounded her. I had not taken two steps from my door before she sprang to meet me, her hand resting upon my arm and her blue eyes sparkling with joy and triumph.\n\n'A French soldier and gentleman!' she cried. 'Now at last I am safe.'\n\n'Yes, madam, you are safe,' said I, and I could not resist taking her hand in mine in order that I might reassure her. 'You have only to command me,' I added, kissing the hand as a sign that I meant what I was saying.\n\n'I am Polish,' she cried; 'the Countess Palotta is my name. They abuse me because I love the French. I do not know what they might have done to me had Heaven not sent you to my help.'\n\nI kissed her hand again lest she should doubt my intentions. Then I turned upon the crew with such an expression as I know how to assume. In an instant the hall was empty.\n\n'Countess,' said I, 'you are now under my protection. You are faint, and a glass of wine is necessary to restore you.' I offered her my arm and escorted her into my room, where she sat by my side at the table and took the refreshment which I offered her.\n\nHow she blossomed out in my presence, this woman, like a flower before the sun! She lit up the room with her beauty. She must have read my admiration in my eyes, and it seemed to me that I also could see something of the sort in her own. Ah! my friends, I was no ordinary-looking man when I was in my thirtieth year. In the whole light cavalry it would have been hard to find a finer pair of whiskers. Murat's may have been a shade longer, but the best judges are agreed that Murat's were a shade too long. And then I had a manner. Some women are to be approached in one way and some in another, just as a siege is an affair of fascines and gabions in hard weather and of trenches in soft. But the man who can mix daring with timidity, who can be outrageous with an air of humility, and presumptuous with a tone of deference, that is the man whom mothers have to fear. For myself, I felt that I was the guardian of this lonely lady, and knowing what a dangerous man I had to deal with, I kept strict watch upon myself. Still, even a guardian has his privileges, and I did not neglect them.\n\nBut her talk was as charming as her face. In a few words she explained that she was travelling to Poland, and that her brother who had been her escort had fallen ill upon the way. She had more than once met with ill-treatment from the country folk because she could not conceal her good-will towards the French. Then turning from her own affairs she questioned me about the army, and so came round to myself and my own exploits. They were familiar to her, she said, for she knew several of Poniatowski's officers, and they had spoken of my doings. Yet she would be glad to hear them from my own lips. Never have I had so delightful a conversation. Most women make the mistake of talking rather too much about their own affairs, but this one listened to my tales just as you are listening now, ever asking for more and more and more. The hours slipped rapidly by, and it was with horror that I heard the village clock strike eleven, and so learned that for four hours I had forgotten the Emperor's business.\n\n'Pardon me, my dear lady,' I cried, springing to my feet, 'but I must go on instantly to Hof.'\n\nShe rose also, and looked at me with a pale, reproachful face. 'And me?' she said. 'What is to become of me?'\n\n'It is the Emperor's affair. I have already stayed far too long. My duty calls me, and I must go.'\n\n'You must go? And I must be abandoned alone to these savages? Oh, why did I ever meet you? Why did you ever teach me to rely upon your strength?' Her eyes glazed over, and in an instant she was sobbing upon my bosom.\n\nHere was a trying moment for a guardian! Here was a time when he had to keep a watch upon a forward young officer. But I was equal to it. I smoothed her rich brown hair and whispered such consolations as I could think of in her ear, with one arm round her, it is true, but that was to hold her lest she should faint. She turned her tear-stained face to mine. 'Water,' she whispered. 'For God's sake, water!'\n\nI saw that in another moment she would be senseless. I laid the drooping head upon the sofa, and then rushed furiously from the room, hunting from chamber to chamber for a carafe. It was some minutes before I could get one and hurry back with it. You can imagine my feelings to find the room empty and the lady gone.\n\nNot only was she gone, but her cap and silver-mounted riding switch which had lain upon the table were gone also. I rushed out and roared for the landlord. He knew nothing of the matter, had never seen the woman before, and did not care if he never saw her again. Had the peasants at the door seen anyone ride away? No, they had seen nobody. I searched here and searched there, until at last I chanced to find myself in front of a mirror, where I stood with my eyes staring and my jaw as far dropped as the chin-strap of my shako would allow.\n\nFour buttons of my pelisse were open, and it did not need me to put my hand up to know that my precious papers were gone. Oh! the depth of cunning that lurks in a woman's heart. She had robbed me, this creature, robbed me as she clung to my breast. Even while I smoothed her hair, and whispered kind words into her ear, her hands had been at work beneath my dolman. And here I was, at the very last step of my journey, without the power of carrying out this mission which had already deprived one good man of his life, and was likely to rob another one of his credit. What would the Emperor say when he heard that I had lost his despatches? Would the army believe it of Etienne Gerard? And when they heard that a woman's hand had coaxed them from me, what laughter there would be at mess-table and at camp-fire! I could have rolled upon the ground in my despair.\n\nBut one thing was certain\u2014all this affair of the fracas in the hall and the persecution of the so-called Countess was a piece of acting from the beginning. This villainous innkeeper must be in the plot. From him I might learn who she was and where my papers had gone. I snatched my sabre from the table and rushed out in search of him. But the scoundrel had guessed what I would do, and had made his preparations for me. It was in the corner of the yard that I found him, a blunderbuss in his hands and a mastiff held upon a leash by his son. The two stable-hands, with pitchforks, stood upon either side, and the wife held a great lantern behind him, so as to guide his aim.\n\n'Ride away, sir, ride away!' he cried, with a crackling voice. 'Your horse is at the door, and no one will meddle with you if you go your way; but if you come against us, you are alone against three brave men.'\n\nI had only the dog to fear, for the two forks and the blunderbuss were shaking about like branches in a wind. Still, I considered that, though I might force an answer with my sword-point at the throat of this fat rascal, still I should have no means of knowing whether that answer was the truth. It would be a struggle, then, with much to lose and nothing certain to gain. I looked them up and down, therefore, in a way that set their foolish weapons shaking worse than ever, and then, throwing myself upon my mare, I galloped away with the shrill laughter of the landlady jarring upon my ears.\n\nI had already formed my resolution. Although I had lost my papers, I could make a very good guess as to what their contents would be, and this I would say from my own lips to the Prince of Saxe-Felstein, as though the Emperor had commissioned me to convey it in that way. It was a bold stroke and a dangerous one, but if I went too far I could afterwards be disavowed. It was that or nothing, and when all Germany hung on the balance the game should not be lost if the nerve of one man could save it.\n\nIt was midnight when I rode into Hof, but every window was blazing, which was enough it itself, in that sleepy country, to tell the ferment of excitement in which the people were. There was hooting and jeering as I rode through the crowded streets, and once a stone sang past my head, but I kept upon my way, neither slowing nor quickening my pace, until I came to the palace. It was lit from base to battlement, and the dark shadows, coming and going against the yellow glare, spoke of the turmoil within. For my part, I handed my mare to a groom at the gate, and striding in I demanded, in such a voice as an ambassador should have, to see the Prince instantly, upon business which would brook no delay.\n\nThe hall was dark, but I was conscious as I entered of a buzz of innumerable voices, which hushed into silence as I loudly proclaimed my mission. Some great meeting was being held then\u2014a meeting which, as my instincts told me, was to decide this very question of war and peace. It was possible that I might still be in time to turn the scale for the Emperor and for France. As to the major-domo, he looked blackly at me, and showing me into a small ante-chamber he left me. A minute later he returned to say that the Prince could not be disturbed at present, but that the Princess would take my message.\n\nThe Princess! What use was there in giving it to her? Had I not been warned that she was German in heart and soul, and that it was she who was turning her husband and her State against us?\n\n'It is the Prince that I must see,' said I.\n\n'Nay, it is the Princess,' said a voice at the door, and a woman swept into the chamber. 'Von Rosen, you had best stay with us. Now, sir, what is it that you have to say to either Prince or Princess of Saxe-Felstein?'\n\nAt the first sound of the voice I had sprung to my feet. At the first glance I had thrilled with anger. Not twice in a lifetime does one meet that noble figure, that queenly head, and those eyes as blue as the Garonne, and as chilling as her winter waters.\n\n'Time presses, sir!' she cried, with an impatient tap of her foot. 'What have you to say to me?'\n\n'What have I to say to you?' I cried. 'What can I say, save that you have taught me never to trust a woman more? You have ruined and dishonoured me for ever.'\n\nShe looked with arched brows at her attendant.\n\n'Is this the raving of fever, or does it come from some less innocent cause?' said she. 'Perhaps a little blood-letting\u2014'\n\n'Ah, you can act!' I cried. 'You have shown me that already.'\n\n'Do you mean that we have met before?'\n\n'I mean that you have robbed me within the last two hours.'\n\n'This is past all bearing,' she cried, with an admirable affectation of anger. 'You claim, as I understand, to be an ambassador, but there are limits to the privileges which such an office brings with it.'\n\n'You brazen it admirably,' said I. 'Your Highness will not make a fool of me twice in one night.' I sprang forward and, stooping down, caught up the hem of her dress. 'You would have done well to change it after you had ridden so far and so fast,' said I.\n\nIt was like the dawn upon a snow-peak to see her ivory cheeks flush suddenly to crimson.\n\n'Insolent!' she cried. 'Call the foresters and have him thrust from the palace'\n\n'I will see the Prince first.'\n\n'You will never see the Prince. Ah! Hold him, Von Rosen, hold him.'\n\nShe had forgotten the man with whom she had to deal\u2014was it likely that I would wait until they could bring their rascals? She had shown me her cards too soon. Her game was to stand between me and her husband. Mine was to speak face to face with him at any cost. One spring took me out of the chamber. In another I had crossed the hall. An instant later I had burst into the great room from which the murmur of the meeting had come. At the far end I saw a figure upon a high chair under a da\u00efs. Beneath him was a line of high dignitaries, and then on every side I saw vaguely the heads of a vast assembly. Into the centre of the room I strode, my sabre clanking, my shako under my arm.\n\n'I am the messenger of the Emperor,' I shouted. 'I bear his message to His Highness the Prince of Saxe-Felstein.'\n\nThe man beneath the da\u00efs raised his head, and I saw that his face was thin and wan, and that his back was bowed as though some huge burden was balanced between his shoulders.\n\n'Your name, sir?' he asked.\n\n'Colonel Etienne Gerard, of the Third Hussars.'\n\nEvery face in the gathering was turned upon me, and I heard the rustle of the innumerable necks and saw countless eyes without meeting one friendly one amongst them. The woman had swept past me, and was whispering, with many shakes of her head and dartings of her hands, into the Prince's ear. For my own part I threw out my chest and curled my moustache, glancing round in my own debonair fashion at the assembly. They were men, all of them, professors from the college, a sprinkling of their students, soldiers, gentlemen, artisans, all very silent and serious. In one corner there sat a group of men in black, with riding-coats drawn over their shoulders. They leaned their heads to each other, whispering under their breath, and with every movement I caught the clank of their sabres or the clink of their spurs.\n\n'The Emperor's private letter to me informs me that it is the Marquis Ch\u00e2teau St Arnaud who is bearing his despatches,' said the Prince.\n\n'The Marquis has been foully murdered,' I answered, and a buzz rose up from the people as I spoke. Many heads were turned, I noticed, towards the dark men in the cloaks.\n\n'Where are your papers?' asked the Prince.\n\n'I have none.'\n\nA fierce clamour rose instantly around me. 'He is a spy! He plays a part!' they cried. 'Hang him!' roared a deep voice from the corner, and a dozen others took up the shout. For my part, I drew out my handkerchief and nicked the dust from the fur of my pelisse. The Prince held out his thin hands, and the tumult died away.\n\n'Where, then, are your credentials, and what is your message?'\n\n'My uniform is my credential, and my message is for your private ear.'\n\nHe passed his hand over his forehead with the gesture of a weak man who is at his wits' end what to do. The Princess stood beside him with her hand upon his throne, and again whispered in his ear.\n\n'We are here in council together, some of my trusty subjects and myself,' said he. 'I have no secrets from them, and whatever message the Emperor may send to me at such a time concerns their interests no less than mine.'\n\nThere was a hum of applause at this, and every eye was turned once more upon me. My faith, it was an awkward position in which I found myself, for it is one thing to address eight hundred hussars, and another to speak to such an audience on such a subject. But I fixed my eyes upon the Prince, and tried to say just what I should have said if we had been alone, shouting it out, too, as though I had my regiment on parade.\n\n'You have often expressed friendship for the Emperor,' I cried. 'It is now at last that this friendship is about to be tried. If you will stand firm, he will reward you as only he can reward. It is an easy thing for him to turn a Prince into a King and a province into a power. His eyes are fixed upon you, and though you can do little to harm him, you can ruin yourself. At this moment he is crossing the Rhine with two hundred thousand men. Every fortress in the country is in his hands. He will be upon you in a week, and if you have played him false, God help both you and your people. You think that he is weakened because a few of us got the chilblains last winter. Look there!' I cried, pointing to a great star which blazed through the window above the Prince's head. 'That is the Emperor's star. When it wanes, he will wane\u2014but not before.'\n\nYou would have been proud of me, my friends, if you could have seen and heard me, for I clashed my sabre as I spoke, and swung my dolman as though my regiment was picketed outside in the courtyard. They listened to me in silence, but the back of the Prince bowed more and more as though the burden which weighed upon it was greater than his strength. He looked round with haggard eyes.\n\n'We have heard a Frenchman speak for France,' said he. 'Let us have a German speak for Germany.'\n\nThe folk glanced at each other, and whispered to their neighbours. My speech, as I think, had its effect, and no man wished to be the first to commit himself in the eyes of the Emperor. The Princess looked round her with blazing eyes, and her clear voice broke the silence.\n\n'Is a woman to give this Frenchman his answer?' she cried. 'Is it possible, then, that among the night-riders of Lutzow there is none who can use his tongue as well as his sabre?'\n\nOver went a table with a crash, and a young man had bounded upon one of the chairs. He had the face of one inspired\u2014pale, eager, with wild hawk eyes, and tangled hair. His sword hung straight from his side, and his riding-boots were brown with mire.\n\n'It is Korner!' the people cried. 'It is young Korner, the poet! Ah, he will sing, he will sing.'\n\nAnd he sang! It was soft, at first, and dreamy, telling of old Germany, the mother of nations, of the rich, warm plains, and the grey cities, and the fame of dead heroes. But then verse after verse rang like a trumpet-call. It was of the Germany of now, the Germany which had been taken unawares and overthrown, but which was up again, and snapping the bonds upon her giant limbs. What was life that one should covet it? What was glorious death that one should shun it? The mother, the great mother, was calling. Her sigh was in the night wind. She was crying to her own children for help. Would they come? Would they come? Would they come?\n\nAh, that terrible song, the spirit face and the ringing voice! Where were I, and France, and the Emperor? They did not shout, these people\u2014they howled. They were up on the chairs and the tables. They were raving, sobbing, the tears running down their faces. Korner had sprung from the chair, and his comrades were round him with their sabres in the air. A flush had come into the pale face of the Prince, and he rose from his throne.\n\n'Colonel Gerard,' said he, 'you have heard the answer which you are to carry to your Emperor. The die is cast, my children. Your Prince and you must stand or fall together.'\n\nHe bowed to show that all was over, and the people with a shout made for the door to carry the tidings into the town. For my own part, I had done all that a brave man might, and so I was not sorry to be carried out amid the stream. Why should I linger in the palace? I had had my answer and must carry it, such as it was. I wished neither to see Hof nor its people again until I entered it at the head of a vanguard. I turned from the throng, then, and walked silently and sadly in the direction in which they had led the mare.\n\nIt was dark down there by the stables, and I was peering round for the hostler, when suddenly my two arms were seized from behind. There were hands at my wrists and at my throat, and I felt the cold muzzle of a pistol under my ear.\n\n'Keep your lips closed, you French dog,' whispered a fierce voice. 'We have him, captain.'\n\n'Have you the bridle?'\n\n'Here it is.'\n\n'Sling it over his head.'\n\nI felt the cold coil of leather tighten round my neck. An hostler with a stable lantern had come out and was gazing upon the scene. In its dim light I saw stern faces breaking everywhere through the gloom, with the black caps and dark cloaks of the night-riders.\n\n'What would you do with him, captain?' cried a voice.\n\n'Hang him at the palace gate.'\n\n'An ambassador?'\n\n'An ambassador without papers.'\n\n'But the Prince?'\n\n'Tut, man, do you not see that the Prince will then be committed to our side? He will be beyond all hope of forgiveness. At present he may swing round tomorrow as he has done before. He may eat his words, but a dead hussar is more than he can explain.'\n\n'No, no, Von Strelitz, we cannot do it,' said another voice.\n\n'Can we not? I shall show you that!' and there came a jerk on the bridle which nearly pulled me to the ground. At the same instant a sword flashed and the leather was cut through within two inches of my neck.\n\n'By Heaven, Korner, this is rank mutiny,' cried the captain. 'You may hang yourself before you are through with it.'\n\n'I have drawn my sword as a soldier and not as a brigand,' said the young poet. 'Blood may dim its blade, but never dishonour. Comrades, will you stand by and see this gentleman mishandled?'\n\nA dozen sabres flew from their sheaths, and it was evident that my friends and my foes were about equally balanced. But the angry voices and the gleam of steel had brought the folk running from all parts.\n\n'The Princess!' they cried. 'The Princess is coming!'\n\nAnd even as they spoke I saw her in front of us, her sweet face framed in the darkness. I had cause to hate her, for she had cheated and befooled me, and yet it thrilled me then and thrills me now to think that my arms have embraced her, and that I have felt the scent of her hair in my nostrils. I know not whether she lies under her German earth, or whether she still lingers, a grey-haired woman in her Castle of Hof, but she lives ever, young and lovely, in the heart and memory of Etienne Gerard.\n\n'For shame!' she cried, sweeping up to me, and tearing with her own hands the noose from my neck. 'You are fighting in God's own quarrel, and yet you would begin with such a devil's deed as this. This man is mine, and he who touches a hair of his head will answer for it to me.'\n\nThey were glad enough to slink off into the darkness before those scornful eyes. Then she turned once more to me.\n\n'You can follow me, Colonel Gerard,' she said. 'I have a word that I would speak to you.'\n\nI walked behind her to the chamber into which I had originally been shown. She closed the door, and then looked at me with the archest twinkle in her eyes.\n\n'Is it not confiding of me to trust myself with you?' said she. 'You will remember that it is the Princess of Saxe-Felstein and not the poor Countess Palotta of Poland.'\n\n'Be the name what it might,' I answered, 'I helped a lady whom I believed to be in distress, and I have been robbed of my papers and almost of my honour as a reward.'\n\n'Colonel Gerard,' said she, 'we have been playing a game, you and I, and the stake was a heavy one. You have shown by delivering a message which was never given to you that you would stand at nothing in the cause of your country. My heart is German and yours is French, and I also would go all lengths, even to deceit and to theft, if at this crisis I could help my suffering fatherland. You see how frank I am.'\n\n'You tell me nothing that I have not seen.'\n\n'But now that the game is played and won, why should we bear malice? I will say this, that if ever I were in such a plight as that which I pretended in the inn of Lobenstein, I should never wish to meet a more gallant protector or a truer-hearted gentleman than Colonel Etienne Gerard. I had never thought that I could feel for a Frenchman as I felt for you when I slipped the papers from your breast.'\n\n'But you took them, none the less.'\n\n'They were necessary to me and to Germany. I knew the arguments which they contained and the effect which they would have upon the Prince. If they had reached him all would have been lost.'\n\n'Why should your Highness descend to such expedients when a score of these brigands, who wished to hang me at your castle gate, would have done the work as well?'\n\n'They are not brigands, but the best blood of Germany,' she cried, hotly. 'If you have been roughly used, you will remember the indignities to which every German has been subjected, from the Queen of Prussia downwards. As to why I did not have you waylaid upon the road, I may say that I had parties out on all sides, and that I was waiting at Lobenstein to hear of their success. When instead of their news you yourself arrived I was in despair, for there was only the one weak woman betwixt you and my husband. You see the straits to which I was driven before I used the weapon of my sex.'\n\n'I confess that you have conquered me, your Highness, and it only remains for me to leave you in possession of the field.'\n\n'But you will take your papers with you.' She held them out to me as she spoke. 'The Prince has crossed the Rubicon now, and nothing can bring him back. You can return these to the Emperor, and tell him that we refused to receive them. No one can accuse you then of having lost your despatches. Good-bye, Colonel Gerard, and the best I can wish you is that when you reach France you may remain there. In a year's time there will be no place for a Frenchman upon this side of the Rhine.'\n\nAnd thus it was that I played the Princess of Saxe-Felstein with all Germany for a stake, and lost my game to her. I had much to think of as I walked my poor, tired Violette along the highway which leads westward from Hof. But amid all the thoughts there came back to me always the proud, beautiful face of the German woman, and the voice of the soldier-poet as he sang from the chair. And I understood then that there was something terrible in this strong, patient Germany\u2014this mother root of nations\u2014and I saw that such a land, so old and so beloved, never could be conquered. And as I rode I saw that the dawn was breaking, and that the great star at which I had pointed through the palace window was dim and pale in the western sky." + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER WON HIS MEDAL", + "text": "The Duke of Tarentum, or Macdonald, as his old comrades prefer to call him, was, as I could perceive, in the vilest of tempers. His grim, Scotch face was like one of those grotesque door-knockers which one sees in the Faubourg St Germain. We heard afterwards that the Emperor had said in jest that he would have sent him against Wellington in the South, but that he was afraid to trust him within the sound of the pipes. Major Charpentier and I could plainly see that he was smouldering with anger.\n\n'Brigadier Gerard of the Hussars,' said he, with the air of the corporal with the recruit.\n\nI saluted.\n\n'Major Charpentier of the Horse Grenadiers.'\n\nMy companion answered to his name.\n\n'The Emperor has a mission for you.'\n\nWithout more ado he flung open the door and announced us.\n\nI have seen Napoleon ten times on horseback to once on foot, and I think that he does wisely to show himself to the troops in this fashion, for he cuts a very good figure in the saddle. As we saw him now he was the shortest man out of six by a good hand's breadth, and yet I am no very big man myself, though I ride quite heavy enough for a hussar. It is evident, too, that his body is too long for his legs. With his big, round head, his curved shoulders, and his clean-shaven face, he is more like a Professor at the Sorbonne than the first soldier in France. Every man to his taste, but it seems to me that, if I could clap a pair of fine light cavalry whiskers, like my own, on to him, it would do him no harm. He has a firm mouth, however, and his eyes are remarkable. I have seen them once turned on me in anger, and I had rather ride at a square on a spent horse than face them again. I am not a man who is easily daunted, either.\n\nHe was standing at the side of the room, away from the window, looking up at a great map of the country which was hung upon the wall. Berthier stood beside him, trying to look wise, and just as we entered, Napoleon snatched his sword impatiently from him and pointed with it on the map. He was talking fast and low, but I heard him say, 'The valley of the Meuse,' and twice he repeated 'Berlin.' As we entered, his aide-de-camp advanced to us, but the Emperor stopped him and beckoned us to his side.\n\n'You have not yet received the cross of honour, Brigadier Gerard?' he asked.\n\nI replied that I had not, and was about to add that it was not for want of having deserved it, when he cut me short in his decided fashion.\n\n'And you, Major?' he asked.\n\n'No, sire.'\n\n'Then you shall both have your opportunity now.'\n\nHe led us to the great map upon the wall and placed the tip of Berthier's sword on Rheims.\n\n'I will be frank with you, gentlemen, as with two comrades. You have both been with me since Marengo, I believe?' He had a strangely pleasant smile, which used to light up his pale face with a kind of cold sunshine. 'Here at Rheims are our present headquarters on this the 14th of March. Very good. Here is Paris, distant by road a good twenty-five leagues. Blucher lies to the north, Schwarzenberg to the south.' He prodded at the map with the sword as he spoke.\n\n'Now,' said he, 'the further into the country these people march, the more completely I shall crush them. They are about to advance upon Paris. Very good. Let them do so. My brother, the King of Spain, will be there with a hundred thousand men. It is to him that I send you. You will hand him this letter, a copy of which I confide to each of you. It is to tell him that I am coming at once, in two days' time, with every man and horse and gun to his relief. I must give them forty-eight hours to recover. Then straight to Paris! You understand me, gentlemen?'\n\nAh, if I could tell you the glow of pride which it gave me to be taken into the great man's confidence in this way. As he handed our letters to us I clicked my spurs and threw out my chest, smiling and nodding to let him know that I saw what he would be after. He smiled also, and rested his hand for a moment upon the cape of my dolman. I would have given half my arrears of pay if my mother could have seen me at that instant.\n\n'I will show you your route,' said he, turning back to the map. 'Your orders are to ride together as far as Bazoches. You will then separate, the one making for Paris by Oulchy and Neuilly, and the other to the north by Braine, Soissons, and Senlis. Have you anything to say, Brigadier Gerard?'\n\nI am a rough soldier, but I have words and ideas. I had begun to speak about glory and the peril of France when he cut me short.\n\n'And you, Major Charpentier?'\n\n'If we find our route unsafe, are we at liberty to choose another?' said he.\n\n'Soldiers do not choose, they obey.' He inclined his head to show that we were dismissed, and turned round to Berthier. I do not know what he said, but I heard them both laughing.\n\nWell, as you may think, we lost little time in getting upon our way. In half an hour we were riding down the High Street of Rheims, and it struck twelve o'clock as we passed the Cathedral. I had my little grey mare, Violette, the one which Sebastiani had wished to buy after Dresden. It is the fastest horse in the six brigades of light cavalry, and was only beaten by the Duke of Rovigo's racer from England. As to Charpentier, he had the kind of horse which a horse grenadier or a cuirassier would be likely to ride: a back like a bedstead, you understand, and legs like the posts. He is a hulking fellow himself, so that they looked a singular pair. And yet in his insane conceit he ogled the girls as they waved their handkerchiefs to me from the windows, and he twirled his ugly red moustache up into his eyes, just as if it were to him that their attention was addressed.\n\nWhen we came out of the town we passed through the French camp, and then across the battle-field of yesterday, which was still covered both by our own poor fellows and by the Russians. But of the two the camp was the sadder sight. Our army was thawing away. The Guards were all right, though the young guard was full of conscripts. The artillery and the heavy cavalry were also good if there were more of them, but the infantry privates with their under officers looked like schoolboys with their masters. And we had no reserves. When one considered that there were 80,000 Prussians to the north and 150,000 Russians and Austrians to the south, it might make even the bravest man grave.\n\nFor my own part, I confess that I shed a tear until the thought came that the Emperor was still with us, and that on that very morning he had placed his hand upon my dolman and had promised me a medal of honour. This set me singing, and I spurred Violette on, until Charpentier had to beg me to have mercy on his great, snorting, panting camel. The road was beaten into paste and rutted two feet deep by the artillery, so that he was right in saying that it was not the place for a gallop.\n\nI have never been very friendly with this Charpentier; and now for twenty miles of the way I could not draw a word from him. He rode with his brows puckered and his chin upon his breast, like a man who is heavy with thought. More than once I asked him what was on his mind, thinking that, perhaps, with my quicker intelligence I might set the matter straight. His answer always was that it was his mission of which he was thinking, which surprised me, because, although I had never thought much of his intelligence, still it seemed to me to be impossible that anyone could be puzzled by so simple and soldierly a task.\n\nWell, we came at last to Bazoches, where he was to take the southern road and I the northern. He half turned in his saddle before he left me, and he looked at me with a singular expression of inquiry in his face.\n\n'What do you make of it, Brigadier?' he asked.\n\n'Of what?'\n\n'Of our mission.'\n\n'Surely it is plain enough.'\n\n'You think so? Why should the Emperor tell us his plans?'\n\n'Because he recognized our intelligence.'\n\nMy companion laughed in a manner which I found annoying.\n\n'May I ask what you intend to do if you find these villages full of Prussians?' he asked.\n\n'I shall obey my orders.'\n\n'But you will be killed.'\n\n'Very possibly.'\n\nHe laughed again, and so offensively that I clapped my hand to my sword. But before I could tell him what I thought of his stupidity and rudeness he had wheeled his horse, and was lumbering away down the other road. I saw his big fur cap vanish over the brow of the hill, and then I rode upon my way, wondering at his conduct. From time to time I put my hand to the breast of my tunic and felt the paper crackle beneath my fingers. Ah, my precious paper, which should be turned into the little silver medal for which I had yearned so long. All the way from Braine to Sermoise I was thinking of what my mother would say when she saw it.\n\nI stopped to give Violette a meal at a wayside auberge on the side of a hill not far from Soissons\u2014a place surrounded by old oaks, and with so many crows that one could scarce hear one's own voice. It was from the innkeeper that I learned that Marmont had fallen back two days before, and that the Prussians were over the Aisne. An hour later, in the fading light, I saw two of their vedettes upon the hill to the right, and then, as darkness gathered, the heavens to the north were all glimmering from the lights of a bivouac.\n\nWhen I heard that Blucher had been there for two days, I was much surprised that the Emperor should not have known that the country through which he had ordered me to carry my precious letter was already occupied by the enemy. Still, I thought of the tone of his voice when he said to Charpentier that a soldier must not choose, but must obey. I should follow the route he had laid down for me as long as Violette could move a hoof or I a finger upon her bridle. All the way from Sermoise to Soissons, where the road dips up and down, curving among fir woods, I kept my pistol ready and my sword-belt braced, pushing on swiftly where the path was straight, and then coming slowly round the corners in the way we learned in Spain.\n\nWhen I came to the farmhouse which lies to the right of the road just after you cross the wooden bridge over the Crise, near where the great statue of the Virgin stands, a woman cried to me from the field, saying that the Prussians were in Soissons. A small party of their lancers, she said, had come in that very afternoon, and a whole division was expected before midnight. I did not wait to hear the end of her tale, but clapped spurs into Violette, and in five minutes was galloping her into the town.\n\nThree Uhlans were at the mouth of the main street, their horses tethered, and they gossiping together, each with a pipe as long as my sabre. I saw them well in the light of an open door, but of me they could have seen only the flash of Violette's grey side and the black flutter of my cloak. A moment later I flew through a stream of them rushing from an open gateway. Violette's shoulder sent one of them reeling, and I stabbed at another but missed him. Pang, pang, went two carbines, but I had flown round the curve of the street, and never so much as heard the hiss of the balls. Ah, we were great, both Violette and I. She lay down to it like a coursed hare, the fire flying from her hoofs. I stood in my stirrups and brandished my sword. Someone sprang for my bridle. I sliced him through the arm, and I heard him howling behind me. Two horsemen closed upon me. I cut one down and outpaced the other. A minute later I was clear of the town, and flying down a broad white road with the black poplars on either side. For a time I heard the rattle of hoofs behind me, but they died and died until I could not tell them from the throbbing of my own heart. Soon I pulled up and listened, but all was silent. They had given up the chase.\n\nWell, the first thing that I did was to dismount and to lead my mare into a small wood through which a stream ran. There I watered her and rubbed her down, giving her two pieces of sugar soaked in cognac from my flask. She was spent from the sharp chase, but it was wonderful to see how she came round with a half-hour's rest. When my thighs closed upon her again, I could tell by the spring and the swing of her that it would not be her fault if I did not win my way safe to Paris.\n\nI must have been well within the enemy's lines now, for I heard a number of them shouting one of their rough drinking songs out of a house by the roadside, and I went round by the fields to avoid it. At another time two men came out into the moonlight (for by this time it was a cloudless night) and shouted something in German, but I galloped on without heeding them, and they were afraid to fire, for their own hussars are dressed exactly as I was. It is best to take no notice at these times, and then they put you down as a deaf man.\n\nIt was a lovely moon, and every tree threw a black bar across the road. I could see the countryside just as if it were daytime, and very peaceful it looked, save that there was a great fire raging somewhere in the north. In the silence of the night-time, and with the knowledge that danger was in front and behind me, the sight of that great distant fire was very striking and awesome. But I am not easily clouded, for I have seen too many singular things, so I hummed a tune between my teeth and thought of little Lisette, whom I might see in Paris. My mind was full of her when, trotting round a corner, I came straight upon half-a-dozen German dragoons, who were sitting round a brushwood fire by the roadside.\n\nI am an excellent soldier. I do not say this because I am prejudiced in my own favour, but because I really am so. I can weigh every chance in a moment, and decide with as much certainty as though I had brooded for a week. Now I saw like a flash that, come what might, I should be chased, and on a horse which had already done a long twelve leagues. But it was better to be chased onwards than to be chased back. On this moonlit night, with fresh horses behind me, I must take my risk in either case; but if I were to shake them off, I preferred that it should be near Senlis than near Soissons.\n\nAll this flashed on me as if by instinct, you understand. My eyes had hardly rested on the bearded faces under the brass helmets before my rowels had touched Violette, and she was off with a rattle like a pas-de-charge. Oh, the shouting and rushing and stamping from behind us! Three of them fired and three swung themselves on to their horses. A bullet rapped on the crupper of my saddle with a noise like a stick on a door. Violette sprang madly forward, and I thought she had been wounded, but it was only a graze above the near fore-fetlock. Ah, the dear little mare, how I loved her when I felt her settle down into that long, easy gallop of hers, her hoofs going like a Spanish girl's castanets. I could not hold myself. I turned on my saddle and shouted and raved, 'Vive l'Empereur!' I screamed and laughed at the gust of oaths that came back to me.\n\nBut it was not over yet. If she had been fresh she might have gained a mile in five. Now she could only hold her own with a very little over. There was one of them, a young boy of an officer, who was better mounted than the others. He drew ahead with every stride. Two hundred yards behind him were two troopers, but I saw every time that I glanced round that the distance between them was increasing. The other three who had waited to shoot were a long way in the rear.\n\nThe officer's mount was a bay\u2014a fine horse, though not to be spoken of with Violette; yet it was a powerful brute, and it seemed to me that in a few miles its freshness might tell. I waited until the lad was a long way in front of his comrades, and then I eased my mare down a little\u2014a very, very little, so that he might think he was really catching me. When he came within pistol-shot of me I drew and cocked my own pistol, and laid my chin upon my shoulder to see what he would do. He did not offer to fire, and I soon discerned the cause. The silly boy had taken his pistols from his holsters when he had camped for the night. He wagged his sword at me now and roared some threat or other. He did not seem to understand that he was at my mercy. I eased Violette down until there was not the length of a long lance between the grey tail and the bay muzzle.\n\n'Rendezvous!' he yelled.\n\n'I must compliment monsieur upon his French,' said I, resting the barrel of my pistol upon my bridle-arm, which I have always found best when shooting from the saddle. I aimed at his face, and could see, even in the moonlight, how white he grew when he understood that it was all up with him. But even as my finger pressed the trigger I thought of his mother, and I put my ball through his horse's shoulder. I fear he hurt himself in the fall, for it was a fearful crash, but I had my letter to think of, so I stretched the mare into a gallop once more.\n\nBut they were not so easily shaken off, these brigands. The two troopers thought no more of their young officer than if he had been a recruit thrown in the riding-school. They left him to the others and thundered on after me. I had pulled up on the brow of a hill, thinking that I had heard the last of them; but, my faith, I soon saw there was no time for loitering, so away we went, the mare tossing her head and I my shako, to show what we thought of two dragoons who tried to catch a hussar. But at this moment, even while I laughed at the thought, my heart stood still within me, for there at the end of the long white road was a black patch of cavalry waiting to receive me. To a young soldier it might have seemed the shadow of the trees, but to me it was a troop of hussars, and, turn where I could, death seemed to be waiting for me.\n\nWell, I had the dragoons behind me and the hussars in front. Never since Moscow have I seemed to be in such peril. But for the honour of the brigade I had rather be cut down by a light cavalryman than by a heavy. I never drew bridle, therefore, or hesitated for an instant, but I let Violette have her head. I remember that I tried to pray as I rode, but I am a little out of practice at such things, and the only words I could remember were the prayer for fine weather which we used at the school on the evening before holidays. Even this seemed better than nothing, and I was pattering it out, when suddenly I heard French voices in front of me. Ah, mon Dieu, but the joy went through my heart like a musket-ball. They were ours\u2014our own dear little rascals from the corps of Marmont. Round whisked my two dragoons and galloped for their lives, with the moon gleaming on their brass helmets, while I trotted up to my friends with no undue haste, for I would have them understand that though a hussar may fly, it is not in his nature to fly very fast. Yet I fear that Violette's heaving flanks and foam-spattered muzzle gave the lie to my careless bearing.\n\nWho should be at the head of the troop but old Bouvet, whom I saved at Leipzig! When he saw me his little pink eyes filled with tears, and, indeed, I could not but shed a few myself at the sight of his joy. I told him of my mission, but he laughed when I said that I must pass through Senlis.\n\n'The enemy is there,' said he. 'You cannot go.'\n\n'I prefer to go where the enemy is,' I answered.\n\n'But why not go straight to Paris with your despatch? Why should you choose to pass through the one place where you are almost sure to be taken or killed?'\n\n'A soldier does not choose\u2014he obeys,' said I, just as I had heard Napoleon say it.\n\nOld Bouvet laughed in his wheezy way, until I had to give my moustachios a twirl and look him up and down in a manner which brought him to reason.\n\n'Well', said he, 'you had best come along with us, for we are all bound for Senlis. Our orders are to reconnoitre the place. A squadron of Poniatowski's Polish Lancers are in front of us. If you must ride through it, it is possible that we may be able to go with you.'\n\nSo away we went, jingling and clanking through the quiet night until we came up with the Poles\u2014fine old soldiers all of them, though a trifle heavy for their horses. It was a treat to see them, for they could not have carried themselves better if they had belonged to my own brigade. We rode together, until in the early morning we saw the lights of Senlis. A peasant was coming along with a cart, and from him we learned how things were going there.\n\nHis information was certain, for his brother was the Mayor's coachman, and he had spoken with him late the night before. There was a single squadron of Cossacks\u2014or a polk, as they call it in their frightful language\u2014quartered upon the Mayor's house, which stands at the corner of the market-place, and is the largest building in the town. A whole division of Prussion infantry was encamped in the woods to the north, but only the Cossacks were in Senlis. Ah, what a chance to avenge ourselves upon these barbarians, whose cruelty to our poor countryfolk was the talk at every camp fire.\n\nWe were into the town like a torrent, hacked down the vedettes, rode over the guard, and were smashing in the doors of the Mayor's house before they understood that there was a Frenchman within twenty miles of them. We saw horrid heads at the windows\u2014heads bearded to the temples, with tangled hair and sheepskin caps, and silly, gaping mouths. 'Hourra! Hourra!' they shrieked, and fired with their carbines, but our fellows were into the house and at their throats before they had wiped the sleep out of their eyes. It was dreadful to see how the Poles flung themselves upon them, like starving wolves upon a herd of fat bucks\u2014for, as you know, the Poles have a blood feud against the Cossacks. The most were killed in the upper rooms, whither they had fled for shelter, and the blood was pouring down into the hall like rain from a roof. They are terrible soldiers, these Poles, though I think they are a trifle heavy for their horses. Man for man, they are as big as Kellerman's cuirassiers. Their equipment is, of course, much lighter, since they are without the cuirass, back-plate, and helmet.\n\nWell, it was at this point that I made an error\u2014a very serious error it must be admitted. Up to this moment I had carried out my mission in a manner which only my modesty prevents me from describing as remarkable. But now I did that which an official would condemn and a soldier excuse.\n\nThere is no doubt that the mare was spent, but still it is true that I might have galloped on through Senlis and reached the country, where I should have had no enemy between me and Paris. But what hussar can ride past a fight and never draw rein? It is to ask too much of him. Besides, I thought that if Violette had an hour of rest I might have three hours the better at the other end. Then on the top of it came those heads at the windows, with their sheepskin hats and their barbarous cries. I sprang from my saddle, threw Violette's bridle over a rail-post, and ran into the house with the rest. It is true that I was too late to be of service, and that I was nearly wounded by a lance-thrust from one of these dying savages. Still, it is a pity to miss even the smallest affair, for one never knows what opportunity for advancement may present itself. I have seen more soldierly work in outpost skirmishes and little gallop-and-hack affairs of the kind than in any of the Emperor's big battles.\n\nWhen the house was cleared I took a bucket of water out for Violette, and our peasant guide showed me where the good Mayor kept his fodder. My faith, but the little sweetheart was ready for it. Then I sponged down her legs, and leaving her still tethered I went back into the house to find a mouthful for myself, so that I should not need to halt again until I was in Paris.\n\nAnd now I come to the part of my story which may seem singular to you, although I could tell you at least ten things every bit as queer which have happened to me in my lifetime. You can understand that, to a man who spends his life in scouting and vedette duties on the bloody ground which lies between two great armies, there are many chances of strange experiences. I'll tell you, however, exactly what occurred.\n\nOld Bouvet was waiting in the passage when I entered, and he asked me whether we might not crack a bottle of wine together. 'My faith, we must not be long,' said he. 'There are ten thousand of Theilmann's Prussians in the woods up yonder.'\n\n'Where is the wine?' I asked.\n\n'Ah, you may trust two hussars to find where the wine is,' said he, and taking a candle in his hand, he led the way down the stone stairs into the kitchen.\n\nWhen we got there we found another door, which opened on to a winding stair with the cellar at the bottom. The Cossacks had been there before us, as was easily seen by the broken bottles littered all over it. However, the Mayor was a bon-vivant, and I do not wish to have a better set of bins to pick from. Chambertin, Graves, Alicant, white wine and red, sparkling and still, they lay in pyramids peeping coyly out of sawdust. Old Bouvet stood with his candle looking here and peeping there, purring in his throat like a cat before a milk-pail. He had picked upon a Burgundy at last, and had his hand outstretched to the bottle when there came a roar of musketry from above us, a rush of feet, and such a yelping and screaming as I have never listened to. The Prussians were upon us!\n\nBouvet is a brave man: I will say that for him. He flashed out his sword and away he clattered up the stone steps, his spurs clinking as he ran. I followed him, but just as we came out into the kitchen passage a tremendous shout told us that the house had been recaptured.\n\n'It is all over,' I cried, grasping at Bouvet's sleeve.\n\n'There is one more to die,' he shouted, and away he went like a madman up the second stair. In effect, I should have gone to my death also had I been in his place, for he had done very wrong in not throwing out his scouts to warn him if the Germans advanced upon him. For an instant I was about to rush up with him, and then I bethought myself that, after all, I had my own mission to think of, and that if I were taken the important letter of the Emperor would be sacrificed. I let Bouvet die alone, therefore, and I went down into the cellar again, closing the door behind me.\n\nWell, it was not a very rosy prospect down there either. Bouvet had dropped the candle when the alarm came, and I, pawing about in the darkness, could find nothing but broken bottles. At last I came upon the candle, which had rolled under the curve of a cask, but, try as I would with my tinderbox, I could not light it. The reason was that the wick had been wet in a puddle of wine, so suspecting that this might be the case, I cut the end off with my sword. Then I found that it lighted easily enough. But what to do I could not imagine. The scoundrels upstairs were shouting themselves hoarse, several hundred of them from the sound, and it was clear that some of them would soon want to moisten their throats. There would be an end to a dashing soldier, and of the mission and of the medal. I thought of my mother and I thought of the Emperor. It made me weep to think that the one would lose so excellent a son and the other the best light cavalry officer he ever had since Lasalle's time. But presently I dashed the tears from my eyes. 'Courage!' I cried, striking myself upon the chest. 'Courage, my brave boy. Is it possible that one who has come safely from Moscow without so much as a frost-bite will die in a French wine-cellar?' At the thought I was up on my feet and clutching at the letter in my tunic, for the crackle of it gave me courage.\n\nMy first plan was to set fire to the house, in the hope of escaping in the confusion. My second to get into an empty wine-cask. I was looking round to see if I could find one, when suddenly, in the corner, I espied a little low door, painted of the same grey colour as the wall, so that it was only a man with quick sight who would have noticed it. I pushed against it, and at first I imagined that it was locked. Presently, however, it gave a little, and then I understood that it was held by the pressure of something on the other side. I put my feet against a hogshead of wine, and I gave such a push that the door flew open and I came down with a crash upon my back, the candle flying out of my hands, so that I found myself in darkness once more. I picked myself up and stared through the black archway into the gloom beyond.\n\nThere was a slight ray of light coming from some slit or grating. The dawn had broken outside, and I could dimly see the long, curving sides of several huge casks, which made me think that perhaps this was where the Mayor kept his reserves of wine while they were maturing. At any rate, it seemed to be a safer hiding-place than the outer cellar, so gathering up my candle, I was just closing the door behind me, when I suddenly saw something which filled me with amazement, and even, I confess, with the smallest little touch of fear.\n\nI have said that at the further end of the cellar there was a dim grey fan of light striking downwards from somewhere near the roof. Well, as I peered through the darkness, I suddenly saw a great, tall man skip into this belt of daylight, and then out again into the darkness at the further end. My word, I gave such a start that my shako nearly broke its chin-strap! It was only a glance, but, none the less, I had time to see that the fellow had a hairy Cossack cap on his head, and that he was a great, long-legged, broad-shouldered brigand, with a sabre at his waist. My faith, even Etienne Gerard was a little staggered at being left alone with such a creature in the dark.\n\nBut only for a moment. 'Courage!' I thought. 'Am I not a hussar, a brigadier, too, at the age of thirty-one, and the chosen messenger of the Emperor?' After all, this skulker had more cause to be afraid of me than I of him. And then suddenly I understood that he was afraid\u2014horribly afraid. I could read it from his quick step and his bent shoulders as he ran among the barrels, like a rat making for its hole. And, of course, it must have been he who had held the door against me, and not some packing-case or wine-cask as I had imagined. He was the pursued then, and I the pursuer. Aha, I felt my whiskers bristle as I advanced upon him through the darkness! He would find that he had no chicken to deal with, this robber from the North. For the moment I was magnificent.\n\nAt first I had feared to light my candle lest I should make a mark of myself, but now, after cracking my shin over a box, and catching my spurs in some canvas, I thought the bolder course the wiser. I lit it, therefore, and then I advanced with long strides, my sword in my hand. 'Come out, you rascal!' I cried. 'Nothing can save you. You will at last meet with your deserts.'\n\nI held my candle high, and presently I caught a glimpse of the man's head staring at me over a barrel. He had a gold chevron on his black cap, and the expression of his face told me in an instant that he was an officer and a man of refinement.\n\n'Monsieur,' he cried, in excellent French, 'I surrender myself on a promise of quarter. But if I do not have your promise, I will then sell my life as dearly as I can.'\n\n'Sir,' said I, 'a Frenchman knows how to treat an unfortunate enemy. Your life is safe.' With that he handed his sword over the top of the barrel, and I bowed with the candle on my heart. 'Whom have I the honour of capturing?' I asked.\n\n'I am the Count Boutkine, of the Emperor's own Don Cossacks,' said he. 'I came out with my troop to reconnoitre Senlis, and as we found no sign of your people we determined to spend the night here.'\n\n'And would it be an indiscretion,' I asked, 'if I were to inquire how you came into the back cellar?'\n\n'Nothing more simple,' said he. 'It was our intention to start at early dawn. Feeling chilled after dressing, I thought that a cup of wine would do me no harm, so I came down to see what I could find. As I was rummaging about, the house was suddenly carried by assault so rapidly that by the time I had climbed the stairs it was all over. It only remained for me to save myself, so I came down here and hid myself in the back cellar, where you have found me.'\n\nI thought of how old Bouvet had behaved under the same conditions, and the tears sprang to my eyes as I contemplated the glory of France. Then I had to consider what I should do next. It was clear that this Russian Count, being in the back cellar while we were in the front one, had not heard the sounds which would have told him that the house was once again in the hands of his own allies. If he should once understand this the tables would be turned, and I should be his prisoner instead of he being mine. What was I to do? I was at my wits' end, when suddenly there came to me an idea so brilliant that I could not but be amazed at my own invention.\n\n'Count Boutkine,' said I, 'I find myself in a most difficult position.'\n\n'And why?' he asked.\n\n'Because I have promised you your life.'\n\nHis jaw dropped a little.\n\n'You would not withdraw your promise?' he cried.\n\n'If the worst comes to the worst I can die in your defence,' said I; 'but the difficulties are great.'\n\n'What is it, then?' he asked.\n\n'I will be frank with you,' said I. 'You must know that our fellows, and especially the Poles, are so incensed against the Cossacks that the mere sight of the uniform drives them mad. They precipitate themselves instantly upon the wearer and tear him limb from limb. Even their officers cannot restrain them.'\n\nThe Russian grew pale at my words and the way in which I said them.\n\n'But this is terrible,' said he.\n\n'Horrible!' said I. 'If we were to go up together at this moment I cannot promise how far I could protect you.'\n\n'I am in your hands,' he cried. 'What would you suggest that we should do? Would it not be best that I should remain here?'\n\n'That worst of all.'\n\n'And why?'\n\n'Because our fellows will ransack the house presently, and then you would be cut to pieces. No, no, I must go and break it to them. But even then, when once they see that accursed uniform, I do not know what may happen.'\n\n'Should I then take the uniform off?'\n\n'Excellent!' I cried. 'Hold, we have it! You will take your uniform off and put on mine. That will make you sacred to every French soldier.'\n\n'It is not the French I fear so much as the Poles.'\n\n'But my uniform will be a safeguard against either.'\n\n'How can I thank you?' he cried. 'But you\u2014what are you to wear?'\n\n'I will wear yours.'\n\n'And perhaps fall a victim to your generosity?'\n\n'It is my duty to take the risk,' I answered; 'but I have no fears. I will ascend in your uniform. A hundred swords will be turned upon me. \"Hold!\" I will shout, \"I am the Brigadier Gerard!\" Then they will see my face. They will know me. And I will tell them about you. Under the shield of these clothes you will be sacred.'\n\nHis fingers trembled with eagerness as he tore off his tunic. His boots and breeches were much like my own, so there was no need to change them, but I gave him my hussar jacket, my dolman, my shako, my sword-belt, and my sabre-tasche, while I took in exchange his high sheepskin cap with the gold chevron, his fur-trimmed coat, and his crooked sword. Be it well understood that in changing the tunics I did not forget to change my thrice-precious letter also from my old one to my new.\n\n'With your leave,' said I, 'I shall now bind you to a barrel.'\n\nHe made a great fuss over this, but I have learned in my soldiering never to throw away chances, and how could I tell that he might not, when my back was turned, see how the matter really stood, and break in upon my plans? He was leaning against a barrel at the time, so I ran six times round it with a rope, and then tied it with a big knot behind. If he wished to come upstairs he would, at least, have to carry a thousand litres of good French wine for a knapsack. I then shut the door of the back cellar behind me, so that he might not hear what was going forward, and tossing the candle away I ascended the kitchen stair.\n\nThere were only about twenty steps, and yet, while I came up them, I seemed to have time to think of everything that I had ever hoped to do. It was the same feeling that I had at Eylau when I lay with my broken leg and saw the horse artillery galloping down upon me. Of course, I knew that if I were taken I should be shot instantly as being disguised within the enemy's lines. Still, it was a glorious death\u2014in the direct service of the Emperor\u2014and I reflected that there could not be less than five lines, and perhaps seven, in the Moniteur about me. Palaret had eight lines, and I am sure that he had not so fine a career.\n\nWhen I made my way out into the hall, with all the nonchalance in my face and manner that I could assume, the very first thing that I saw was Bouvet's dead body, with his legs drawn up and a broken sword in his hand. I could see by the black smudge that he had been shot at close quarters. I should have wished to salute as I went by, for he was a gallant man, but I feared lest I should be seen, and so I passed on.\n\nThe front of the hall was full of Prussian infantry, who were knocking loopholes in the wall, as though they expected that there might be yet another attack. Their officer, a little man, was running about giving directions. They were all too busy to take much notice of me, but another officer, who was standing by the door with a long pipe in his mouth, strode across and clapped me on the shoulder, pointing to the dead bodies of our poor hussars, and saying something which was meant for a jest, for his long beard opened and showed every fang in his head. I laughed heartily also, and said the only Russian words that I knew. I learned them from little Sophie, at Wilna, and they meant: 'If the night is fine we shall meet under the oak tree, but if it rains we shall meet in the byre.' It was all the same to this German, however, and I have no doubt that he gave me credit for saying something very witty indeed, for he roared laughing, and slapped me on my shoulder again. I nodded to him and marched out of the hall-door as coolly as if I were the commandant of the garrison.\n\nThere were a hundred horses tethered about outside, most of them belonging to the Poles and hussars. Good little Violette was waiting with the others, and she whinnied when she saw me coming towards her. But I would not mount her. No. I was much too cunning for that. On the contrary, I chose the most shaggy little Cossack horse that I could see, and I sprang upon it with as much assurance as though it had belonged to my father before me. It had a great bag of plunder slung over its neck, and this I laid upon Violette's back, and led her along beside me. Never have you seen such a picture of the Cossack returning from the foray. It was superb.\n\nWell, the town was full of Prussians by this time. They lined the side-walks and pointed me out to each other, saying, as I could judge from their gestures, 'There goes one of those devils of Cossacks. They are the boys for foraging and plunder.'\n\nOne or two officers spoke to me with an air of authority, but I shook my head and smiled, and said, 'If the night is fine we shall meet under the oak tree, but if it rains we shall meet in the byre,' at which they shrugged their shoulders and gave the matter up. In this way I worked along until I was beyond the northern outskirt of the town. I could see in the roadway two lancer vedettes with their black and white pennons, and I knew that when I was once past these I should be a free man once more. I made my pony trot, therefore, Violette rubbing her nose against my knee all the time, and looking up at me to ask how she had deserved that this hairy doormat of a creature should be preferred to her. I was not more than a hundred yards from the Uhlans when, suddenly, you can imagine my feelings when I saw a real Cossack coming galloping along the road towards me.\n\nAh, my friend, you who read this, if you have any heart, you will feel for a man like me, who had gone through so many dangers and trials, only at this very last moment to be confronted with one which appeared to put an end to everything. I will confess that for a moment I lost heart, and was inclined to throw myself down in my despair, and to cry out that I had been betrayed. But, no; I was not beaten even now. I opened two buttons of my tunic so that I might get easily at the Emperor's message, for it was my fixed determination when all hope was gone to swallow the letter and then die sword in hand. Then I felt that my little, crooked sword was loose in its sheath, and I trotted on to where the vedettes were waiting. They seemed inclined to stop me, but I pointed to the other Cossack, who was still a couple of hundred yards off, and they, understanding that I merely wished to meet him, let me pass with a salute.\n\nI dug my spurs into my pony then, for if I were only far enough from the lancers I thought I might manage the Cossack without much difficulty. He was an officer, a large, bearded man, with a gold chevron in his cap, just the same as mine. As I advanced he unconsciously aided me by pulling up his horse, so that I had a fine start of the vedettes. On I came for him, and I could see wonder changing to suspicion in his brown eyes as he looked at me and at my pony, and at my equipment. I do not know what it was that was wrong, but he saw something which was as it should not be. He shouted out a question, and then when I gave no answer he pulled out his sword. I was glad in my heart to see him do so, for I had always rather fight than cut down an unsuspecting enemy. Now I made at him full tilt, and, parrying his cut, I got my point in just under the fourth button of his tunic. Down he went, and the weight of him nearly took me off my horse before I could disengage. I never glanced at him to see if he were living or dead, for I sprang off my pony and on to Violette, with a shake of my bridle and a kiss of my hand to the two Uhlans behind me. They galloped after me, shouting, but Violette had had her rest, and was just as fresh as when she started. I took the first side road to the west and then the first to the south, which would take me away from the enemy's country. On we went and on, every stride taking me further from my foes and nearer to my friends. At last, when I reached the end of a long stretch of road, and looking back from it could see no sign of any pursuers, I understood that my troubles were over.\n\nAnd it gave me a glow of happiness, as I rode, to think that I had done to the letter what the Emperor had ordered. What would he say when he saw me? What could he say which would do justice to the incredible way in which I had risen above every danger? He had ordered me to go through Sermoise, Soissons, and Senlis, little dreaming that they were all three occupied by the enemy. And yet I had done it. I had borne his letter in safety through each of these towns. Hussars, dragoons, lancers, Cossacks, and infantry\u2014I had run the gauntlet of all of them, and had come out unharmed.\n\nWhen I had got as far as Dammartin I caught a first glimpse of our own outposts. There was a troop of dragoons in a field, and of course I could see from the horsehair crests that they were French. I galloped towards them in order to ask them if all was safe between there and Paris, and as I rode I felt such a pride at having won my way back to my friends again, that I could not refrain from waving my sword in the air.\n\nAt this a young officer galloped out from among the dragoons, also brandishing his sword, and it warmed my heart to think that he should come riding with such ardour and enthusiasm to greet me. I made Violette caracole, and as we came together I brandished my sword more gallantly than ever, but you can imagine my feelings when he suddenly made a cut at me which would certainly have taken my head off if I had not fallen forward with my nose in Violette's mane. My faith, it whistled just over my cap like an east wind. Of course, it came from this accursed Cossack uniform which, in my excitement, I had forgotten all about, and this young dragoon had imagined that I was some Russian champion who was challenging the French cavalry. My word, he was a frightened man when he understood how near he had been to killing the celebrated Brigadier Gerard.\n\nWell, the road was clear, and about three o'clock in the afternoon I was at St Denis, though it took me a long two hours to get from there to Paris, for the road was blocked with commissariat waggons and guns of the artillery reserve, which was going north to Marmont and Mortier. You cannot conceive the excitement which my appearance in such a costume made in Paris, and when I came to the Rue de Rivoli I should think I had a quarter of a mile of folk riding or running behind me. Word had got about from the dragoons (two of whom had come with me), and everybody knew about my adventures and how I had come by my uniform. It was a triumph\u2014men shouting and women waving their handkerchiefs and blowing kisses from the windows.\n\nAlthough I am a man singularly free from conceit, still I must confess that, on this one occasion, I could not restrain myself from showing that this reception gratified me. The Russian's coat had hung very loose upon me, but now I threw out my chest until it was as tight as a sausage-skin. And my little sweetheart of a mare tossed her mane and pawed with her front hoofs, frisking her tail about as though she said, 'We've done it together this time. It is to us that commissions should be intrusted.' When I kissed her between the nostrils as I dismounted at the gate of the Tuileries, there was as much shouting as if a bulletin had been read from the Grand Army.\n\nI was hardly in costume to visit a King; but, after all, if one has a soldierly figure one can do without all that. I was shown up straight away to Joseph, whom I had often seen in Spain. He seemed as stout, as quiet, and as amiable as ever. Talleyrand was in the room with him, or I suppose I should call him the Duke of Benevento, but I confess that I like old names best. He read my letter when Joseph Buonaparte handed it to him, and then he looked at me with the strangest expression in those funny little, twinkling eyes of his.\n\n'Were you the only messenger?' he asked.\n\n'There was one other, sir,' said I. 'Major Charpentier, of the Horse Grenadiers.'\n\n'He has not yet arrived,' said the King of Spain.\n\n'If you had seen the legs of his horse, sire, you would not wonder at it,' I remarked.\n\n'There may be other reasons,' said Talleyrand, and he gave that singular smile of his.\n\nWell, they paid me a compliment or two, though they might have said a good deal more and yet have said too little. I bowed myself out, and very glad I was to get away, for I hate a Court as much as I love a camp. Away I went to my old friend Chaubert, in the Rue Miromesnil, and there I got his hussar uniform, which fitted me very well. He and Lisette and I supped together in his rooms, and all my dangers were forgotten. In the morning I found Violette ready for another twenty-league stretch. It was my intention to return instantly to the Emperor's headquarters, for I was, as you may well imagine, impatient to hear his words of praise, and to receive my reward.\n\nI need not say that I rode back by a safe route, for I had seen quite enough of Uhlans and Cossacks. I passed through Meaux and Ch\u00e2teau Thierry, and so in the evening I arrived at Rheims, where Napoleon was still lying. The bodies of our fellows and of St Prest's Russians had all been buried, and I could see changes in the camp also. The soldiers looked better cared for; some of the cavalry had received remounts, and everything was in excellent order. It was wonderful what a good general can effect in a couple of days.\n\nWhen I came to the headquarters I was shown straight into the Emperor's room. He was drinking coffee at a writing-table, with a big plan drawn out on paper in front of him. Berthier and Macdonald were leaning, one over each shoulder, and he was talking so quickly that I don't believe that either of them could catch a half of what he was saying. But when his eyes fell upon me he dropped the pen on to the chart, and he sprang up with a look in his pale face which struck me cold.\n\n'What the deuce are you doing here?' he shouted. When he was angry he had a voice like a peacock.\n\n'I have the honour to report to you, sire,' said I, 'that I have delivered your despatch safely to the King of Spain.'\n\n'What!' he yelled, and his two eyes transfixed me like bayonets. Oh, those dreadful eyes, shifting from grey to blue, like steel in the sunshine. I can see them now when I have a bad dream.\n\n'What has become of Charpentier?' he asked.\n\n'He is captured,' said Macdonald.\n\n'By whom?'\n\n'The Russians.'\n\n'The Cossacks?'\n\n'No, a single Cossack.'\n\n'He gave himself up?'\n\n'Without resistance.'\n\n'He is an intelligent officer. You will see that the medal of honour is awarded to him.'\n\nWhen I heard those words I had to rub my eyes to make sure that I was awake.\n\n'As to you,' cried the Emperor, taking a step forward as if he would have struck me, 'you brain of a hare, what do you think that you were sent upon this mission for? Do you conceive that I would send a really important message by such a hand as yours, and through every village which the enemy holds? How you came through them passes my comprehension; but if your fellow-messenger had had but as little sense as you, my whole plan of campaign would have been ruined. Can you not see, coglione, that this message contained false news, and that it was intended to deceive the enemy whilst I put a very different scheme into execution?'\n\nWhen I heard those cruel words and saw the angry, white face which glared at me, I had to hold the back of a chair, for my mind was failing me and my knees would hardly bear me up. But then I took courage as I reflected that I was an honourable gentleman, and that my whole life had been spent in toiling for this man and for my beloved country.\n\n'Sire,' said I, and the tears would trickle down my cheeks whilst I spoke, 'when you are dealing with a man like me you would find it wiser to deal openly. Had I known that you had wished the despatch to fall into the hands of the enemy, I would have seen that it came there. As I believed that I was to guard it, I was prepared to sacrifice my life for it. I do not believe, sire, that any man in the world ever met with more toils and perils than I have done in trying to carry out what I thought was your will.'\n\nI dashed the tears from my eyes as I spoke, and with such fire and spirit as I could command I gave him an account of it all, of my dash through Soissons, my brush with the dragoons, my adventure in Senlis, my rencontre with Count Boutkine in the cellar, my disguise, my meeting with the Cossack officer, my flight, and how at the last moment I was nearly cut down by a French dragoon. The Emperor, Berthier, and Macdonald listened with astonishment on their faces. When I had finished Napoleon stepped forward and he pinched me by the ear.\n\n'There, there!' said he. 'Forget anything which I may have said. I would have done better to trust you. You may go.'\n\nI turned to the door, and my hand was upon the handle, when the Emperor called upon me to stop.\n\n'You will see,' said he, turning to the Duke of Tarentum, 'that Brigadier Gerard has the special medal of honour, for I believe that if he has the thickest head he has also the stoutest heart in my army.'" + }, + { + "title": "HOW THE BRIGADIER WAS TEMPTED BY THE DEVIL", + "text": "The spring is at hand, my friends. I can see the little green spear-heads breaking out once more upon the chestnut trees, and the cafe tables have all been moved into the sunshine. It is more pleasant to sit there, and yet I do not wish to tell my little stories to the whole town. You have heard my doings as a lieutenant, as a squadron officer, as a colonel, as the chief of a brigade. But now I suddenly become something higher and more important. I become history.\n\nIf you have read of those closing years of the life of the Emperor which were spent in the Island of St Helena, you will remember that, again and again, he implored permission to send out one single letter which should be unopened by those who held him. Many times he made this request, and even went so far as to promise that he would provide for his own wants and cease to be an expense to the British Government if it were granted to him. But his guardians knew that he was a terrible man, this pale, fat gentleman in the straw hat, and they dared not grant him what he asked. Many have wondered who it was to whom he could have had anything so secret to say. Some have supposed that it was to his wife, and some that it was to his father-in-law; some that it was to the Emperor Alexander, and some to Marshal Soult. What will you think of me, my friends, when I tell you it was to me\u2014to me, the Brigadier Gerard\u2014that the Emperor wished to write? Yes, humble as you see me, with only my 100 francs a month of half-pay between me and hunger, it is none the less true that I was always in the Emperor's mind, and that he would have given his left hand for five minutes' talk with me. I will tell you tonight how this came about.\n\nIt was after the Battle of F\u00e9re-Champenoise where the conscripts in their blouses and their sabots made such a fine stand, that we, the more long-headed of us, began to understand that it was all over with us. Our reserve ammunition had been taken in the battle, and we were left with silent guns and empty caissons. Our cavalry, too, was in a deplorable condition, and my own brigade had been destroyed in the charge at Craonne. Then came the news that the enemy had taken Paris, that the citizens had mounted the white cockade; and finally, most terrible of all, that Marmont and his corps had gone over to the Bourbons. We looked at each other and asked how many more of our generals were going to turn against us. Already there were Jourdan, Marmont, Murat, Bernadotte, and Jomini\u2014though nobody minded much about Jomini, for his pen was always sharper than his sword. We had been ready to fight Europe, but it looked now as though we were to fight Europe and half of France as well.\n\nWe had come to Fontainebleau by a long, forced march, and there we were assembled, the poor remnants of us, the corps of Ney, the corps of my cousin Gerard, and the corps of Macdonald: twenty-five thousand in all, with seven thousand of the guard. But we had our prestige, which was worth fifty thousand, and our Emperor, who was worth fifty thousand more. He was always among us, serene, smiling, confident, taking his snuff and playing with his little riding-whip. Never in the days of his greatest victories have I admired him as much as I did during the Campaign of France.\n\nOne evening I was with a few of my officers, drinking a glass of wine of Suresnes. I mention that it was wine of Suresnes just to show you that times were not very good with us. Suddenly I was disturbed by a message from Berthier that he wished to see me. When I speak of my old comrades-in-arms, I will, with your permission, leave out all the fine foreign titles which they had picked up during the wars. They are excellent for a Court, but you never heard them in the camp, for we could not afford to do away with our Ney, our Rapp, or our Soult\u2014names which were as stirring to our ears as the blare of our trumpets blowing the reveille. It was Berthier, then, who sent to say that he wished to see me.\n\nHe had a suite of rooms at the end of the gallery of Francis the First, not very far from those of the Emperor. In the ante-chamber were waiting two men whom I knew well: Colonel Despienne, of the 57th of the line, and Captain Tremeau, of the Voltigeurs. They were both old soldiers\u2014Tremeau had carried a musket in Egypt\u2014and they were also both famous in the army for their courage and their skill with weapons. Tremeau had become a little stiff in the wrist, but Despienne was capable at his best of making me exert myself. He was a tiny fellow, about three inches short of the proper height for a man\u2014he was exactly three inches shorter than myself\u2014but both with the sabre and with the small-sword he had several times almost held his own against me when we used to exhibit at Verron's Hall of Arms in the Palais Royal. You may think that it made us sniff something in the wind when we found three such men called together into one room. You cannot see the lettuce and dressing without suspecting a salad.\n\n'Name of a pipe!' said Tremeau, in his barrack-room fashion. 'Are we then expecting three champions of the Bourbons?'\n\nTo all of us the idea appeared not improbable. Certainly in the whole army we were the very three who might have been chosen to meet them.\n\n'The Prince of Neufch\u00e2tel desires to speak with the Brigadier Gerard,' said a footman, appearing at the door.\n\nIn I went, leaving my two companions consumed with impatience behind me. It was a small room, but very gorgeously furnished. Berthier was seated opposite to me at a little table, with a pen in his hand and a note-book open before him. He was looking weary and slovenly\u2014very different from that Berthier who used to give the fashion to the army, and who had so often set us poorer officers tearing our hair by trimming his pelisse with fur one campaign, and with grey astrakhan the next. On his clean-shaven, comely face there was an expression of trouble, and he looked at me as I entered his chamber in a way which had in it something furtive and displeasing.\n\n'Chief of Brigade Gerard!' said he.\n\n'At your service, your Highness!' I answered.\n\n'I must ask you, before I go further, to promise me, upon your honour as a gentleman and a soldier, that what is about to pass between us shall never be mentioned to any third person.'\n\nMy word, this was a fine beginning! I had no choice but to give the promise required.\n\n'You must know, then, that it is all over with the Emperor,' said he, looking down at the table and speaking very slowly, as if he had a hard task in getting out the words. 'Jourdan at Rouen and Marmont at Paris have both mounted the white cockade, and it is rumoured that Talleyrand has talked Ney into doing the same. It is evident that further resistance is useless, and that it can only bring misery upon our country. I wish to ask you, therefore, whether you are prepared to join me in laying hands upon the Emperor's person, and bringing the war to a conclusion by delivering him over to the allies?'\n\nI assure you that when I heard this infamous proposition put forward by the man who had been the earliest friend of the Emperor, and who had received greater favours from him than any of his followers, I could only stand and stare at him in amazement. For his part he tapped his pen-handle against his teeth, and looked at me with a slanting head.\n\n'Well?' he asked.\n\n'I am a little deaf on one side,' said I, coldly. 'There are some things which I cannot hear. I beg that you will permit me to return to my duties.'\n\n'Nay, but you must not be headstrong,' rising up and laying his hand upon my shoulder. 'You are aware that the Senate has declared against Napoleon, and that the Emperor Alexander refuses to treat with him.'\n\n'Sir,' I cried, with passion, 'I would have you know that I do not care the dregs of a wine-glass for the Senate or for the Emperor Alexander either.'\n\n'Then for what do you care?'\n\n'For my own honour and for the service of my glorious master, the Emperor Napoleon.'\n\n'That is all very well,' said Berthier, peevishly, shrugging his shoulders. 'Facts are facts, and as men of the world, we must look them in the face. Are we to stand against the will of the nation? Are we to have civil war on the top of all our misfortunes? And, besides, we are thinning away. Every hour comes the news of fresh desertions. We have still time to make our peace, and, indeed, to earn the highest regard, by giving up the Emperor.'\n\nI shook so with passion that my sabre clattered against my thigh.\n\n'Sir,' I cried, 'I never thought to have seen the day when a Marshal of France would have so far degraded himself as to put forward such a proposal. I leave you to your own conscience; but as for me, until I have the Emperor's own order, there shall always be the sword of Etienne Gerard between his enemies and himself.'\n\nI was so moved by my own words and by the fine position which I had taken up, that my voice broke, and I could hardly refrain from tears. I should have liked the whole army to have seen me as I stood with my head so proudly erect and my hand upon my heart proclaiming my devotion to the Emperor in his adversity. It was one of the supreme moments of my life.\n\n'Very good,' said Berthier, ringing a bell for the lackey. 'You will show the Chief of Brigade Gerard into the salon.'\n\nThe footman led me into an inner room, where he desired me to be seated. For my own part, my only desire was to get away, and I could not understand why they should wish to detain me. When one has had no change of uniform during a whole winter's campaign, one does not feel at home in a palace.\n\nI had been there about a quarter of an hour when the footman opened the door again, and in came Colonel Despienne. Good heavens, what a sight he was! His face was as white as a guardsman's gaiters, his eyes projecting, the veins swollen upon his forehead, and every hair of his moustache bristling like those of an angry cat. He was too angry to speak, and could only shake his hands at the ceiling and make a gurgling in his throat. 'Parricide! Viper!' those were the words that I could catch as he stamped up and down the room.\n\nOf course it was evident to me that he had been subjected to the same infamous proposals as I had, and that he had received them in the same spirit. His lips were sealed to me, as mine were to him, by the promise which we had taken, but I contented myself with muttering 'Atrocious! Unspeakable!'\u2014so that he might know that I was in agreement with him.\n\nWell, we were still there, he striding furiously up and down, and I seated in the corner, when suddenly a most extraordinary uproar broke out in the room which we had just quitted. There was a snarling, worrying growl, like that of a fierce dog which has got his grip. Then came a crash and a voice calling for help. In we rushed, the two of us, and, my faith, we were none too soon.\n\nOld Tremeau and Berthier were rolling together upon the floor, with the table upon the top of them. The Captain had one of his great, skinny yellow hands upon the Marshal's throat, and already his face was lead-coloured, and his eyes were starting from their sockets. As to Tremeau, he was beside himself, with foam upon the corners of his lips, and such a frantic expression upon him that I am convinced, had we not loosened his iron grip, finger by finger, that it would never have relaxed while the Marshal lived. His nails were white with the power of his grasp.\n\n'I have been tempted by the devil!' he cried, as he staggered to his feet. 'Yes, I have been tempted by the devil!'\n\nAs to Berthier, he could only lean against the wall, and pant for a couple of minutes, putting his hands up to his throat and rolling his head about. Then, with an angry gesture, he turned to the heavy blue curtain which hung behind his chair.\n\nThe curtain was torn to one side and the Emperor stepped out into the room. We sprang to the salute, we three old soldiers, but it was all like a scene in a dream to us, and our eyes were as far out as Berthier's had been. Napoleon was dressed in his green-coated chasseur uniform, and he held his little, silver-headed switch in his hand. He looked at us each in turn, with a smile upon his face\u2014that frightful smile in which neither eyes nor brow joined\u2014and each in turn had, I believe, a pringling on his skin, for that was the effect which the Emperor's gaze had upon most of us. Then he walked across to Berthier and put his hand upon his shoulder.\n\n'You must not quarrel with blows, my dear Prince,' said he; 'they are your title to nobility.' He spoke in that soft, caressing manner which he could assume. There was no one who could make the French tongue sound so pretty as the Emperor, and no one who could make it more harsh and terrible.\n\n'I believe he would have killed me,' cried Berthier, still rolling his head about.\n\n'Tut, tut! I should have come to your help had these officers not heard your cries. But I trust that you are not really hurt!' He spoke with earnestness, for he was in truth very fond of Berthier\u2014more so than of any man, unless it were of poor Duroc.\n\nBerthier laughed, though not with a very good grace.\n\n'It is new for me to receive my injuries from French hands,' said he.\n\n'And yet it was in the cause of France,' returned the Emperor. Then, turning to us, he took old Tremeau by the ear. 'Ah, old grumbler,' said he, 'you were one of my Egyptian grenadiers, were you not, and had your musket of honour at Marengo. I remember you very well, my good friend. So the old fires are not yet extinguished! They still burn up when you think that your Emperor is wronged. And you, Colonel Despienne, you would not even listen to the tempter. And you, Gerard, your faithful sword is ever to be between me and my enemies. Well, well, I have had some traitors about me, but now at last we are beginning to see who are the true men.'\n\nYou can fancy, my friends, the thrill of joy which it gave us when the greatest man in the whole world spoke to us in this fashion. Tremeau shook until I thought he would have fallen, and the tears ran down his gigantic moustache. If you had not seen it, you could never believe the influence which the Emperor had upon those coarse-grained, savage old veterans.\n\n'Well, my faithful friends,' said he, 'if you will follow me into this room, I will explain to you the meaning of this little farce which we have been acting. I beg, Berthier, that you will remain in this chamber, and so make sure that no one interrupts us.'\n\nIt was new for us to be doing business, with a Marshal of France as sentry at the door. However, we followed the Emperor as we were ordered, and he led us into the recess of the window, gathering us around him and sinking his voice as he addressed us.\n\n'I have picked you out of the whole army,' said he, 'as being not only the most formidable but also the most faithful of my soldiers. I was convinced that you were all three men who would never waver in your fidelity to me. If I have ventured to put that fidelity to the proof, and to watch you while attempts were at my orders made upon your honour, it was only because, in the days when I have found the blackest treason amongst my own flesh and blood, it is necessary that I should be doubly circumspect. Suffice it that I am well convinced now that I can rely upon your valour.'\n\n'To the death, sire!' cried Tremeau, and we both repeated it after him.\n\nNapoleon drew us all yet a little closer to him, and sank his voice still lower.\n\n'What I say to you now I have said to no one\u2014not to my wife or my brothers; only to you. It is all up with us, my friends. We have come to our last rally. The game is finished, and we must make provision accordingly.'\n\nMy heart seemed to have changed to a nine-pounder ball as I listened to him. We had hoped against hope, but now when he, the man who was always serene and who always had reserves\u2014when he, in that quiet, impassive voice of his, said that everything was over, we realized that the clouds had shut for ever, and the last gleam gone. Tremeau snarled and gripped at his sabre, Despienne ground his teeth, and for my own part I threw out my chest and clicked my heels to show the Emperor that there were some spirits which could rise to adversity.\n\n'My papers and my fortune must be secured,' whispered the Emperor. 'The whole course of the future may depend upon my having them safe. They are our base for the next attempt\u2014for I am very sure that these poor Bourbons would find that my footstool is too large to make a throne for them. Where am I to keep these precious things? My belongings will be searched\u2014so will the houses of my supporters. They must be secured and concealed by men whom I can trust with that which is more precious to me than my life. Out of the whole of France, you are those whom I have chosen for this sacred trust.\n\n'In the first place, I will tell you what these papers are. You shall not say that I have made you blind agents in the matter. They are the official proof of my divorce from Josephine, of my legal marriage to Marie Louise, and of the birth of my son and heir, the King of Rome. If we cannot prove each of these, the future claim of my family to the throne of France falls to the ground. Then there are securities to the value of forty millions of francs\u2014an immense sum, my friends, but of no more value than this riding-switch when compared to the other papers of which I have spoken. I tell you these things that you may realize the enormous importance of the task which I am committing to your care. Listen, now, while I inform you where you are to get these papers, and what you are to do with them.\n\n'They were handed over to my trusty friend, the Countess Walewski, at Paris, this morning. At five o'clock she starts for Fontainebleau in her blue berline. She should reach here between half-past nine and ten. The papers will be concealed in the berline, in a hiding-place which none know but herself. She has been warned that her carriage will be stopped outside the town by three mounted officers, and she will hand the packet over to your care. You are the younger man, Gerard, but you are of the senior grade. I confide to your care this amethyst ring, which you will show the lady as a token of your mission, and which you will leave with her as a receipt for her papers.\n\n'Having received the packet, you will ride with it into the forest as far as the ruined dove-house\u2014the Colombier. It is possible that I may meet you there\u2014but if it seems to me to be dangerous, I will send my body-servant, Mustapha, whose directions you may take as being mine. There is no roof to the Colombier, and tonight will be a full moon. At the right of the entrance you will find three spades leaning against the wall. With these you will dig a hole three feet deep in the north-eastern corner\u2014that is, in the corner to the left of the door, and nearest to Fontainebleau. Having buried the papers, you will replace the soil with great care, and you will then report to me at the palace.'\n\nThese were the Emperor's directions, but given with an accuracy and minuteness of detail such as no one but himself could put into an order. When he had finished, he made us swear to keep his secret as long as he lived, and as long as the papers should remain buried. Again and again he made us swear it before he dismissed us from his presence.\n\nColonel Despienne had quarters at the 'Sign of the Pheasant,' and it was there that we supped together. We were all three men who had been trained to take the strangest turns of fortune as part of our daily life and business, yet we were all flushed and moved by the extraordinary interview which we had had, and by the thought of the great adventure which lay before us. For my own part, it had been my fate three several times to take my orders from the lips of the Emperor himself, but neither the incident of the Ajaccio murderers nor the famous ride which I made to Paris appeared to offer such opportunities as this new and most intimate commission.\n\n'If things go right with the Emperor,' said Despienne, 'we shall all live to be marshals yet.'\n\nWe drank with him to our future cocked hats and our b\u00e2tons.\n\nIt was agreed between us that we should make our way separately to our rendezvous, which was to be the first milestone upon the Paris road. In this way we should avoid the gossip which might get about if three men who were so well known were to be seen riding out together. My little Violette had cast a shoe that morning, and the farrier was at work upon her when I returned, so that my comrades were already there when I arrived at the trysting-place. I had taken with me not only my sabre, but also my new pair of English rifled pistols, with a mallet for knocking in the charges. They had cost me a hundred and fifty francs at Trouvel's, in the Rue de Rivoli, but they would carry far further and straighter than the others. It was with one of them that I had saved old Bouvet's life at Leipzig.\n\nThe night was cloudless, and there was a brilliant moon behind us, so that we always had three black horsemen riding down the white road in front of us. The country is so thickly wooded, however, that we could not see very far. The great palace clock had already struck ten, but there was no sign of the Countess. We began to fear that something might have prevented her from starting.\n\nAnd then suddenly we heard her in the distance. Very faint at first were the birr of wheels and the tat-tat-tat of the horses' feet. Then they grew louder and clearer and louder yet, until a pair of yellow lanterns swung round the curve, and in their light we saw the two big brown horses tearing along the high, blue carriage at the back of them. The postilion pulled them up panting and foaming within a few yards of us. In a moment we were at the window and had raised our hands in a salute to the beautiful pale face which looked out at us.\n\n'We are the three officers of the Emperor, madame,' said I, in a low voice, leaning my face down to the open window. 'You have already been warned that we should wait upon you.'\n\nThe Countess had a very beautiful, cream-tinted complexion of a sort which I particularly admire, but she grew whiter and whiter as she looked up at me. Harsh lines deepened upon her face until she seemed, even as I looked at her, to turn from youth into age.\n\n'It is evident to me,' she said, 'that you are three impostors.'\n\nIf she had struck me across the face with her delicate hand she could not have startled me more. It was not her words only, but the bitterness with which she hissed them out.\n\n'Indeed, madame,' said I. 'You do us less than justice. These are the Colonel Despienne and Captain Tremeau. For myself, my name is Brigadier Gerard, and I have only to mention it to assure anyone who has heard of me that\u2014\u2014'\n\n'Oh, you villains!' she interrupted. 'You think that because I am only a woman I am very easily to be hoodwinked! You miserable impostors!'\n\nI looked at Despienne, who had turned white with anger, and at Tremeau, who was tugging at his moustache.\n\n'Madame,' said I, coldly, 'when the Emperor did us the honour to intrust us with this mission, he gave me this amethyst ring as a token. I had not thought that three honourable gentlemen would have needed such corroboration, but I can only confute your unworthy suspicions by placing it in your hands.'\n\nShe held it up in the light of the carriage lamp, and the most dreadful expression of grief and of horror contorted her face.\n\n'It is his!' she screamed, and then, 'Oh, my God, what have I done? What have I done?'\n\nI felt that something terrible had befallen. 'Quick, madame, quick!' I cried. 'Give us the papers!'\n\n'I have already given them.'\n\n'Given them! To whom?'\n\n'To three officers.'\n\n'When?'\n\n'Within the half-hour.'\n\n'Where are they?'\n\n'God help me, I do not know. They stopped the berline, and I handed them over to them without hesitation, thinking that they had come from the Emperor.'\n\nIt was a thunder-clap. But those are the moments when I am at my finest.\n\n'You remain here,' said I, to my comrades. 'If three horsemen pass you, stop them at any hazard. The lady will describe them to you. I will be with you presently.' One shake of the bridle, and I was flying into Fontainebleau as only Violette could have carried me. At the palace I flung myself off, rushed up the stairs, brushed aside the lackeys who would have stopped me, and pushed my way into the Emperor's own cabinet. He and Macdonald were busy with pencil and compasses over a chart. He looked up with an angry frown at my sudden entry, but his face changed colour when he saw that it was I.\n\n'You can leave us, Marshal,' said he, and then, the instant the door was closed: 'What news about the papers?'\n\n'They are gone!' said I, and in a few curt words I told him what had happened. His face was calm, but I saw the compasses quiver in his hand.\n\n'You must recover them, Gerard!' he cried. 'The destinies of my dynasty are at stake. Not a moment is to be lost! To horse, sir, to horse!'\n\n'Who are they, sire?'\n\n'I cannot tell. I am surrounded with treason. But they will take them to Paris. To whom should they carry them but to the villain Talleyrand? Yes, yes, they are on the Paris road, and may yet be overtaken. With the three best mounts in my stables and\u2014\u2014'\n\nI did not wait to hear the end of the sentence. I was already clattering down the stairs. I am sure that five minutes had not passed before I was galloping Violette out of the town with the bridle of one of the Emperor's own Arab chargers in either hand. They wished me to take three, but I should have never dared to look my Violette in the face again. I feel that the spectacle must have been superb when I dashed up to my comrades and pulled the horses on to their haunches in the moonlight.\n\n'No one has passed?'\n\n'No one.'\n\n'Then they are on the Paris road. Quick! Up and after them!'\n\nThey did not take long, those good soldiers. In a flash they were upon the Emperor's horses, and their own left masterless by the roadside. Then away we went upon our long chase, I in the centre, Despienne upon my right, and Tremeau a little behind, for he was the heavier man. Heavens, how we galloped! The twelve flying hoofs roared and roared along the hard, smooth road. Poplars and moon, black bars and silver streaks, for mile after mile our course lay along the same chequered track, with our shadows in front and our dust behind. We could hear the rasping of bolts and the creaking of shutters from the cottages as we thundered past them, but we were only three dark blurs upon the road by the time that the folk could look after us. It was just striking midnight as we raced into Corbail; but an hostler with a bucket in either hand was throwing his black shadow across the golden fan which was cast from the open door of the inn.\n\n'Three riders!' I gasped. 'Have they passed?'\n\n'I have just been watering their horses,' said he. 'I should think they\u2014\u2014'\n\n'On, on, my friends!' and away we flew, striking fire from the cobblestones of the little town. A gendarme tried to stop up, but his voice was drowned by our rattle and clatter. The houses slid past, and we were out on the country road again, with a clear twenty miles between ourselves and Paris. How could they escape us, with the finest horses in France behind them? Not one of the three had turned a hair, but Violette was always a head and shoulders to the front. She was going within herself too, and I knew by the spring of her that I had only to let her stretch herself, and the Emperor's horses would see the colour of her tail.\n\n'There they are!' cried Despienne.\n\n'We have them!' growled Tremeau.\n\n'On, comrades, on!' I shouted, once more.\n\nA long stretch of white road lay before us in the moonlight. Far away down it we could see three cavaliers, lying low upon their horses' necks. Every instant they grew larger and clearer as we gained upon them. I could see quite plainly that the two upon either side were wrapped in mantles and rode upon chestnut horses, whilst the man between them was dressed in a chasseur uniform and mounted upon a grey. They were keeping abreast, but it was easy enough to see from the way in which he gathered his legs for each spring that the centre horse was far the fresher of the three. And the rider appeared to be the leader of the party, for we continually saw the glint of his face in the moonshine as he looked back to measure the distance between us. At first it was only a glimmer, then it was cut across with a moustache, and at last when we began to feel their dust in our throats I could give a name to my man.\n\n'Halt, Colonel de Montluc!' I shouted. 'Halt, in the Emperor's name!'\n\nI had known him for years as a daring officer and an unprincipled rascal. Indeed, there was a score between us, for he had shot my friend, Treville, at Warsaw, pulling his trigger, as some said, a good second before the drop of the handkerchief.\n\nWell, the words were hardly out of my mouth when his two comrades wheeled round and fired their pistols at us. I heard Despienne give a terrible cry, and at the same instant both Tremeau and I let drive at the same man. He fell forward with his hands swinging on each side of his horse's neck. His comrade spurred on to Tremeau, sabre in hand, and I heard the crash which comes when a strong cut is met by a stronger parry. For my own part I never turned my head, but I touched Violette with the spur for the first time and flew after the leader. That he should leave his comrades and fly was proof enough that I should leave mine and follow.\n\nHe had gained a couple of hundred paces, but the good little mare set that right before we could have passed two milestones. It was in vain that he spurred and thrashed like a gunner driver on a soft road. His hat flew off with his exertions, and his bald head gleamed in the moonshine. But do what he might, he still heard the rattle of the hoofs growing louder and louder behind him. I could not have been twenty yards from him, and the shadow head was touching the shadow haunch, when he turned with a curse in his saddle and emptied both his pistols, one after the other, into Violette.\n\nI have been wounded myself so often that I have to stop and think before I can tell you the exact number of times. I have been hit by musket balls, by pistol bullets, and by bursting shells, besides being pierced by bayonet, lance, sabre, and finally by a brad-awl, which was the most painful of any. Yet out of all these injuries I have never known the same deadly sickness as came over me when I felt the poor, silent, patient creature, which I had come to love more than anything in the world except my mother and the Emperor, reel and stagger beneath me. I pulled my second pistol from my holster and fired point-blank between the fellow's broad shoulders. He slashed his horse across the flank with his whip, and for a moment I thought that I had missed him. But then on the green of his chasseur jacket I saw an ever-widening black smudge, and he began to sway in his saddle, very slightly at first, but more and more with every bound, until at last over he went, with his foot caught in the stirrup, and his shoulders thud-thud-thudding along the road, until the drag was too much for the tired horse, and I closed my hand upon the foam-spattered bridle-chain. As I pulled him up it eased the stirrup leather, and the spurred heel clinked loudly as it fell.\n\n'Your papers!' I cried, springing from my saddle. 'This instant!'\n\nBut even as I said, it, the huddle of the green body and the fantastic sprawl of the limbs in the moonlight told me clearly enough that it was all over with him. My bullet had passed through his heart, and it was only his own iron will which had held him so long in the saddle. He had lived hard, this Montluc, and I will do him justice to say that he died hard also.\n\nBut it was the papers\u2014always the papers\u2014of which I thought. I opened his tunic and I felt in his shirt. Then I searched his holsters and his sabre-tasche. Finally I dragged off his boots, and undid his horse's girth so as to hunt under the saddle. There was not a nook or crevice which I did not ransack. It was useless. They were not upon him.\n\nWhen this stunning blow came upon me I could have sat down by the roadside and wept. Fate seemed to be fighting against me, and that is an enemy from whom even a gallant hussar might not be ashamed to flinch. I stood with my arm over the neck of my poor wounded Violette, and I tried to think it all out, that I might act in the wisest way. I was aware that the Emperor had no great respect for my wits, and I longed to show him that he had done me an injustice. Montluc had not the papers. And yet Montluc had sacrificed his companions in order to make his escape. I could make nothing of that. On the other hand, it was clear that, if he had not got them, one or other of his comrades had. One of them was certainly dead. The other I had left fighting with Tremeau, and if he escaped from the old swordsman he had still to pass me. Clearly, my work lay behind me.\n\nI hammered fresh charges into my pistols after I had turned this over in my head. Then I put them back in the holsters, and I examined my little mare, she jerking her head and cocking her ears the while, as if to tell me that an old soldier like herself did not make a fuss about a scratch or two. The first shot had merely grazed her off-shoulder, leaving a skin-mark, as if she had brushed a wall. The second was more serious. It had passed through the muscle of her neck, but already it had ceased to bleed. I reflected that if she weakened I could mount Montluc's grey, and meanwhile I led him along beside us, for he was a fine horse, worth fifteen hundred francs at the least, and it seemed to me that no one had a better right to him than I.\n\nWell, I was all impatience now to get back to the others, and I had just given Violette her head, when suddenly I saw something glimmering in a field by the roadside. It was the brass-work upon the chasseur hat which had flown from Montluc's head; and at the sight of it a thought made me jump in the saddle. How could the hat have flown off? With its weight, would it not have simply dropped? And here it lay, fifteen paces from the roadway! Of course, he must have thrown it off when he had made sure that I would overtake him. And if he threw it off\u2014I did not stop to reason any more, but sprang from the mare with my heart beating the pas-de-charge. Yes, it was all right this time. There, in the crown of the hat was stuffed a roll of papers in a parchment wrapper bound round with yellow ribbon. I pulled it out with the one hand and, holding the hat in the other, I danced for joy in the moonlight. The Emperor would see that he had not made a mistake when he put his affairs into the charge of Etienne Gerard.\n\nI had a safe pocket on the inside of my tunic just over my heart, where I kept a few little things which were dear to me, and into this I thrust my precious roll. Then I sprang upon Violette, and was pushing forward to see what had become of Tremeau, when I saw a horseman riding across the field in the distance. At the same instant I heard the sound of hoofs approaching me, and there in the moonlight was the Emperor upon his white charger, dressed in his grey overcoat and his three-cornered hat, just as I had seen him so often upon the field of battle.\n\n'Well!' he cried, in the sharp, sergeant-major way of his. 'Where are my papers?'\n\nI spurred forward and presented them without a word. He broke the ribbon and ran his eyes rapidly over them. Then, as we sat our horses head to tail, he threw his left arm across me with his hand upon my shoulder. Yes, my friends, simple as you see me, I have been embraced by my great master.\n\n'Gerard,' he cried, 'you are a marvel!'\n\nI did not wish to contradict him, and it brought a flush of joy upon my cheeks to know that he had done me justice at last.\n\n'Where is the thief, Gerard?' he asked.\n\n'Dead, sire.'\n\n'You killed him?'\n\n'He wounded my horse, sire, and would have escaped had I not shot him.'\n\n'Did you recognize him?'\n\n'De Montluc is his name, sire\u2014a Colonel of Chasseurs.'\n\n'Tut,' said the Emperor. 'We have got the poor pawn, but the hand which plays the game is still out of our reach.' He sat in silent thought for a little, with his chin sunk upon his chest. 'Ah, Talleyrand, Talleyrand,' I heard him mutter, 'if I had been in your place and you in mine, you would have crushed a viper when you held it under your heel. For five years I have known you for what you are, and yet I have let you live to sting me. Never mind, my brave,' he continued, turning to me, 'there will come a day of reckoning for everybody, and when it arrives, I promise you that my friends will be remembered as well as my enemies.'\n\n'Sire,' said I, for I had had time for thought as well as he, 'if your plans about these papers have been carried to the ears of your enemies, I trust you do not think that it was owing to any indiscretion upon the part of myself or of my comrades.'\n\n'It would be hardly reasonable for me to do so,' he answered, 'seeing that this plot was hatched in Paris, and that you only had your orders a few hours ago.'\n\n'Then how\u2014\u2014?'\n\n'Enough,' he cried, sternly. 'You take an undue advantage of your position.'\n\nThat was always the way with the Emperor. He would chat with you as with a friend and a brother, and then when he had wiled you into forgetting the gulf which lay between you, he would suddenly, with a word or with a look, remind you that it was as impassable as ever. When I have fondled my old hound until he has been encouraged to paw my knees, and I have then thrust him down again, it has made me think of the Emperor and his ways.\n\nHe reined his horse round, and I followed him in silence and with a heavy heart. But when he spoke again his words were enough to drive all thought of myself out of my mind.\n\n'I could not sleep until I knew how you had fared,' said he. 'I have paid a price for my papers. There are not so many of my old soldiers left that I can afford to lose two in one night.'\n\nWhen he said 'two' it turned me cold.\n\n'Colonel Despienne was shot, sire,' I stammered.\n\n'And Captain Tremeau cut down. Had I been a few minutes earlier, I might have saved him. The other escaped across the fields.'\n\nI remembered that I had seen a horseman a moment before I had met the Emperor. He had taken to the fields to avoid me, but if I had known, and Violette been unwounded, the old soldier would not have gone unavenged. I was thinking sadly of his sword-play, and wondering whether it was his stiffening wrist which had been fatal to him, when Napoleon spoke again.\n\n'Yes, Brigadier,' said he, 'you are now the only man who will know where these papers are concealed.'\n\nIt must have been imagination, my friends, but for an instant I may confess that it seemed to me that there was a tone in the Emperor's voice which was not altogether one of sorrow. But the dark thought had hardly time to form itself in my mind before he let me see that I was doing him an injustice.\n\n'Yes, I have paid a price for my papers,' he said, and I heard them crackle as he put his hand up to his bosom. 'No man has ever had more faithful servants\u2014no man since the beginning of the world.'\n\nAs he spoke we came upon the scene of the struggle. Colonel Despienne and the man whom we had shot lay together some distance down the road, while their horses grazed contentedly beneath the poplars. Captain Tremeau lay in front of us upon his back, with his arms and legs stretched out, and his sabre broken short off in his hand. His tunic was open, and a huge blood-clot hung like a dark handkerchief out of a slit in his white shirt. I could see the gleam of his clenched teeth from under his immense moustache.\n\nThe Emperor sprang from his horse and bent down over the dead man.\n\n'He was with me since Rivoli,' said he, sadly. 'He was one of my old grumblers in Egypt.'\n\nAnd the voice brought the man back from the dead. I saw his eyelids shiver. He twitched his arm, and moved the sword-hilt a few inches. He was trying to raise it in salute. Then the mouth opened, and the hilt tinkled down on to the ground.\n\n'May we all die as gallantly,' said the Emperor, as he rose, and from my heart I added 'Amen.'\n\nThere was a farm within fifty yards of where we were standing, and the farmer, roused from his sleep by the clatter of hoofs and the cracking of pistols, had rushed out to the roadside. We saw him now, dumb with fear and astonishment, staring open-eyed at the Emperor. It was to him that we committed the care of the four dead men and of the horses also. For my own part, I thought it best to leave Violette with him and to take De Montluc's grey with me, for he could not refuse to give me back my own mare, whilst there might be difficulties about the other. Besides, my little friend's wound had to be considered, and we had a long return ride before us.\n\nThe Emperor did not at first talk much upon the way. Perhaps the deaths of Despienne and Tremeau still weighed heavily upon his spirits. He was always a reserved man, and in those times, when every hour brought him the news of some success of his enemies or defection of his friends, one could not expect him to be a merry companion. Nevertheless, when I reflected that he was carrying in his bosom those papers which he valued so highly, and which only a few hours ago appeared to be for ever lost, and when I further thought that it was I, Etienne Gerard, who had placed them there, I felt that I had deserved some little consideration. The same idea may have occurred to him, for when we had at last left the Paris high road, and had entered the forest, he began of his own accord to tell me that which I should have most liked to have asked him.\n\n'As to the papers,' said he, 'I have already told you that there is no one now, except you and me, who knows where they are to be concealed. My Mameluke carried the spades to the pigeon-house, but I have told him nothing. Our plans, however, for bringing the packet from Paris have been formed since Monday. There were three in the secret, a woman and two men. The woman I would trust with my life; which of the two men has betrayed us I do not know, but I think that I may promise to find out.'\n\nWe were riding in the shadow of the trees at the time, and I could hear him slapping his riding-whip against his boot, and taking pinch after pinch of snuff, as was his way when he was excited.\n\n'You wonder, no doubt,' said he, after a pause, 'why these rascals did not stop the carriage at Paris instead of at the entrance to Fontainebleau.'\n\nIn truth, the objection had not occurred to me, but I did not wish to appear to have less wits than he gave me credit for, so I answered that it was indeed surprising.\n\n'Had they done so they would have made a public scandal, and run a chance of missing their end. Short of taking the berline to pieces, they could not have discovered the hiding-place. He planned it well\u2014he could always plan well\u2014and he chose his agents well also. But mine were the better.'\n\nIt is not for me to repeat to you, my friends, all that was said to me by the Emperor as we walked our horses amid the black shadows and through the moon-silvered glades of the great forest. Every word of it is impressed upon my memory, and before I pass away it is likely that I will place it all upon paper, so that others may read it in the days to come. He spoke freely of his past, and something also of his future; of the devotion of Macdonald, of the treason of Marmont, of the little King of Rome, concerning whom he talked with as much tenderness as any bourgeois father of a single child; and, finally, of his father-in-law, the Emperor of Austria, who would, he thought, stand between his enemies and himself. For myself, I dared not say a word, remembering how I had already brought a rebuke upon myself; but I rode by his side, hardly able to believe that this was indeed the great Emperor, the man whose glance sent a thrill through me, who was now pouring out his thoughts to me in short, eager sentences, the words rattling and racing like the hoofs of a galloping squadron. It is possible that, after the word-splittings and diplomacy of a Court, it was a relief to him to speak his mind to a plain soldier like myself.\n\nIn this way the Emperor and I\u2014even after years it sends a flush of pride into my cheeks to be able to put those words together\u2014the Emperor and I walked our horses through the Forest of Fontainebleau, until we came at last to the Colombier. The three spades were propped against the wall upon the right-hand side of the ruined door, and at the sight of them the tears sprang to my eyes as I thought of the hands for which they were intended. The Emperor seized one and I another.\n\n'Quick!' said he. 'The dawn will be upon us before we get back to the palace.'\n\nWe dug the hole, and placing the papers in one of my pistol holsters to screen them from the damp, we laid them at the bottom and covered them up. We then carefully removed all marks of the ground having been disturbed, and we placed a large stone upon the top. I dare say that since the Emperor was a young gunner, and helped to train his pieces against Toulon, he had not worked so hard with his hands. He was mopping his forehead with his silk handkerchief long before we had come to the end of our task.\n\nThe first grey cold light of morning was stealing through the tree trunks when we came out together from the old pigeon-house. The Emperor laid his hand upon my shoulder as I stood ready to help him to mount.\n\n'We have left the papers there,' said he, solemnly, 'and I desire that you shall leave all thought of them there also. Let the recollection of them pass entirely from your mind, to be revived only when you receive a direct order under my own hand and seal. From this time onwards you forget all that has passed.'\n\n'I forget it, sire,' said I.\n\nWe rode together to the edge of the town, where he desired that I should separate from him. I had saluted, and was turning my horse, when he called me back.\n\n'It is easy to mistake the points of the compass in the forest,' said he. 'Would you not say that it was in the north-eastern corner that we buried them?'\n\n'Buried what, sire?'\n\n'The papers, of course,' he cried, impatiently.\n\n'What papers, sire?'\n\n'Name of a name! Why, the papers that you have recovered for me.'\n\n'I am really at a loss to know what your Majesty is talking about.'\n\nHe flushed with anger for a moment, and then he burst out laughing.\n\n'Very good, Brigadier!' he cried. 'I begin to believe that you are as good a diplomatist as you are a soldier, and I cannot say more than that.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "So that was my strange adventure in which I found myself the friend and confident agent of the Emperor. When he returned from Elba he refrained from digging up the papers until his position should be secure, and they still remained in the corner of the old pigeon-house after his exile to St Helena. It was at this time that he was desirous of getting them into the hands of his own supporters, and for that purpose he wrote me, as I afterwards learned, three letters, all of which were intercepted by his guardians. Finally, he offered to support himself and his own establishment\u2014which he might very easily have done out of the gigantic sum which belonged to him\u2014if they would only pass one of his letters unopened. This request was refused, and so, up to his death in '21, the papers still remained where I have told you. How they came to be dug up by Count Bertrand and myself, and who eventually obtained them, is a story which I would tell you, were it not that the end has not yet come.\n\nSome day you will hear of those papers, and you will see how, after he has been so long in his grave, that great man can still set Europe shaking. When that day comes, you will think of Etienne Gerard, and you will tell your children that you have heard the story from the lips of the man who was the only one living of all who took part in that strange history\u2014the man who was tempted by Marshal Berthier, who led that wild pursuit upon the Paris road, who was honoured by the embrace of the Emperor, and who rode with him by moonlight in the Forest of Fontainebleau. The buds are bursting and the birds are calling, my friends. You may find better things to do in the sunlight than listening to the stories of an old, broken soldier. And yet you may well treasure what I say, for the buds will have burst and the birds sung in many seasons before France will see such another ruler as he whose servants we were proud to be." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Artificial Intelligence.json b/Artificial Intelligence.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..f4ba78e48a6cc432cb41e8e066235c7494ea533b --- /dev/null +++ b/Artificial Intelligence.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:50fc4585cfd494cdab082d7b8b2188b98e6fbb580fd9d67e253d5bba8503201c +size 30131566 diff --git a/Childrens.json b/Childrens.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..cfc9ddde36cbf9f755a175ccc390a16e9510be9c --- /dev/null +++ b/Childrens.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:a824cc30e27de7a987ffd9f8b83b34658ce82064d3fb8c167607d4366ee5b310 +size 20111009 diff --git a/Christmas.json b/Christmas.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..3b1dedc439f5c42c2aa3117522be727fcfb2c2bd --- /dev/null +++ b/Christmas.json @@ -0,0 +1,1773 @@ +[ + { + "title": "(Tassamara 2.5) The Spirits of Christmas", + "author": "Sarah Wynde", + "genres": [ + "fantasy", + "paranormal" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "The Spirits of Christmas", + "text": "\"It's so bizarre,\" Akira said thoughtfully, staring up at the motionless ceiling fan.\n\n\"Is the baby moving?\" Zane asked, sliding a hand along the slight curve of her belly. He hadn't been able to feel a kick yet, but that didn't stop him from trying.\n\n\"No, not that.\" Akira tilted her head sideways, letting it come to rest against his shoulder, feeling content with her position despite her mild exasperation at her body's demands.\n\n\"Bizarre,\" Zane repeated. \"Would that be the miracle of life growing inside you?\"\n\n\"A natural process that women have been managing for thousands of years.\" Her voice was dry. Of course, it was a little strange that she knew she'd met her baby's previous incarnation\u2014she imagined that not too many women throughout history could claim the same. But no, that wasn't what she'd been thinking about.\n\n\"What then?\" Zane stroked up, long fingers reaching the underside of her breast and lightly tracing a pattern along her skin.\n\n\"How much I want red meat.\" Not just red meat. Steak. Gorgeous steak. Red in the middle, seared dark on the outside. Mmm, with salt. Luscious salt, bursting with flavor on her tongue. Or maybe a hamburger, juicy and rich, dripping with... ick. Fat and blood. That's what hamburgers dripped with. But even knowing that didn't change the way her mouth watered at the thought.\n\nZane chuckled.\n\n\"It doesn't make sense,\" Akira protested.\n\n\"Sure it does. The baby needs some protein.\"\n\n\"I ate a pound of edamame last night. A whole pound. That's about five times the amount of protein the average person needs.\"\n\nZane's hand stilled. \"I read something...\" He pulled away, Akira's head dropping to the pillow as he got out of the bed and crossed to the dresser on the other side of the room.\n\n\"Hey!\" she complained. She'd been comfortable. And his clever hands had been starting to stir up something a little more interesting than hunger for steak.\n\nHe looked back over his shoulder and grinned at her. \"Coming right back,\" he promised. He grabbed his smartphone and started tapping. \"Soy,\" he reported, \"contains phytic acid.\"\n\nAkira raised her eyebrows. \"And?\" She'd never even heard of phytic acid. Why had Zane?\n\n\"It blocks the absorption of minerals.\" He joined her on the bed again, lying down and putting a proprietary arm over her body.\n\n\"Minerals such as?\"\n\n\"Calcium, magnesium, and iron,\" he said cheerfully. \"Also zinc and mercury, if they matter.\"\n\n\"Let me see that.\" Akira held out a hand for his phone and he passed it to her, a small smile playing around his lips.\n\nShe read the information on the website he'd found, scowling. \"Damn it. All right, maybe I'm craving meat because I need iron. Fine, I'll eat broccoli.\" She couldn't suppress a shudder at the thought. Broccoli. She loved broccoli. But not for the past few months. Just the thought of it brought a nasty taste into her mouth.\n\nZane leaned down. \"Good job, Henry,\" he whispered to her abdomen. \"You and me, bud? We're gonna be friends.\"\n\nAkira groaned. What was a semi-vegetarian doing getting involved with a confirmed meat-and-potatoes man? Worse, having his baby?\n\nZane grinned. \"How about I pick up a couple filets? Fire up the grill? We can have steak and baked potatoes for dinner tonight.\"\n\n\"Steak and salad,\" she answered grumpily.\n\n\"Baked potatoes. With butter. Maybe some sour cream.\"\n\nAkira closed her eyes. Why did that sound so good? What was Henry doing to her? Having her body taken over by a sentient creature with his own tastes and desires was not what she had expected from pregnancy. Was it like this for every new mother?\n\n\"Knock, knock!\" The cheery voice from the other side of the bedroom door stopped Akira's response to Zane before she could make it. She called out, \"What is it, Rose?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to interrupt, but...\" Rose paused and Akira's eyes narrowed. Was that nerves she heard in the ghost girl's tone? Rose wasn't the nervous type. \"I need your help.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\"I can't believe I'm doing this.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it'll be okay. She acts real mean, but she wasn't like that when I knew her.\"\n\n\"When you knew her? When she was alive, you mean?\" Akira didn't bother to look toward the ghost seated in the passenger seat next to her. Florida drivers were insane. She needed to keep her eyes on the road.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Rose responded eagerly. \"She was a few years younger than me in school, so I didn't know her well, but she was nice enough.\"\n\n\"Nice enough. Huh.\" Akira thought back to the mean old woman ghost she'd met briefly on her first day in Tassamara. Meredith, her realtor, had been showing Akira houses supposedly available to rent. Akira hadn't even been willing to go into the little lakefront cottage. The angry ghost grumbling on the porch had made it clear that she wasn't welcome. \"Is that what they call damning with faint praise?\"\n\n\"No, really,\" Rose answered. \"I've visited her a few times recently. As long as you're not planning on moving into her house, she'll be perfectly friendly.\"\n\n\"That's the problem, isn't it?\" This time Akira dared a glance at her passenger. To Akira, the ghost looked almost like a typical teenage girl, with only her full skirt and blonde curls showing that she was out of her own time.\n\n\"Yes.\" A little frown between her eyes revealed Rose's worry. \"She's determined to get rid of the new tenant.\"\n\nAkira turned her gaze back to the road. Determined. She didn't like determined ghosts. She didn't like angry ghosts, either. She sighed. \"I was supposed to be writing Christmas cards and wedding invitations today.\"\n\n\"Zane said he'd take care of them,\" Rose said.\n\nAkira didn't roll her eyes, but a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, as she tried to imagine Zane's version of a formal invitation. It wouldn't be neat calligraphy, that was for sure. If she had to guess, he was picking up the phone and calling most of the people on their list. And then he'd tell her they were all set.\n\nShe dropped a hand to her belly. Rose had promised there'd be no danger from this ghost, but Akira still didn't like the thought of taking any chances with the baby. But she'd be careful. The slightest sign of dangerous energy from the old woman's ghost and she'd be back in the car and headed away, she thought, as she pulled the car over and looked at the small house.\n\nNo ghost stood on the porch, but she couldn't see any sparkling energy either.\n\nShe got out of the car and closed the door. Turning away from the house, so that no one would be able to see her lips move, she said to Rose, \"You just want me to talk to the tenant?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Rose said quickly. \"That's all. Find out if she's willing to move.\"\n\n\"What am I supposed to tell her?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But I'm worried that Hannah will start trying to drive her out. She's only held off because \u2013 well, you'll see.\"\n\nAkira nibbled on her lower lip before turning toward the house. As she walked up the short path to the front door, she tried to think of what she could say. Should she tell the truth? Or come up with a plausible lie?\n\nMaybe she could claim that something was wrong with the house. Mold, maybe. Or some undetectable poison in the air, like radon gas. Oh, or she could say that it was a former meth lab. No one would want to live in it if they thought they were being exposed to poisonous chemicals.\n\nPerfect.\n\nOf course, the owners of the house might be angry about losing their tenant to a lie. Would they sue her? Could they?\n\nShe reached the porch, still trying to decide what to say. Behind a closed screen, the front door stood wide open. A small boy crouched on the foyer floor, a wooden train in each hand, earnestly talking to himself. \"I am spendid, so I should not have to do dat job, Thomas. But James, you must take da fate to da dock. It is a Vewy Impohtant deyivey.\"\n\nAkira paused, wondering whether to interrupt him or find the doorbell.\n\nThe boy looked up at her. He had big, solemn brown eyes framed with dark lashes, short close-cropped dark hair, and cheeks so round and chubby they belonged on a chipmunk. She smiled at him. It was impossible not to.\n\nHe smiled back, exuberant joy radiating from him. \"Mama, da pwetty yady is back. And she bought a fend,\" he called out, scrambling to his feet. \"Mean yady, mean yady, ya fend is heah.\" He dashed away.\n\nAkira's brows raised in surprise. She glanced at Rose. Rose shrugged and stepped through the screen door. \"Hannah?\" she called out as she followed the boy into the house. \"I brought Akira to meet you.\"\n\nAkira tucked her hands under her arms nervously. The boy could see ghosts. Would that be a problem? Oh dear, she wished she was at home, enjoying her Saturday and planning her wedding. Or getting ready for Christmas. She and Zane had bought a tree and decorated it the previous weekend, but she wanted to bake Christmas cookies and the holiday was only a couple short weeks away.\n\n\"Toby, please stop that. How many times have I had to say it? There is no mean lady living here. It's just us, sweetheart.\" The female voice that answered him from the back of the house sounded tired, but kind. And not at all southern.\n\nAkira's unease deepened. Although some Tassamara natives had strong southern accents, plenty of people in central Florida didn't and she'd never felt like her own Californian tones stood out. But this woman clipped the 't' on 'it' and pronounced the 'r' in 'here' in a decidedly northern, maybe even British style. What could she be doing in Tassamara?\n\nShe looked for the button to ring the bell. The porch paint was fresh and glossy, but the button was old-fashioned, set deep in the door frame and lower than Akira expected it to be. She pushed it firmly, hearing a rattle and buzz echo through the house.\n\n\"Yes?\" The woman was a shadowed figure in the back of the hallway, but sounded wary, edging toward hostile.\n\nAkira forced a smile, trying to make it bright and friendly and inwardly cursing Rose. \"Hi. I'm not selling anything. Or looking for a donation.\"\n\nThe woman came no closer.\n\n\"Or, you know, trying to convert you. I'm not religious. Not that religious is bad. No offense, I hope. I actually think it's sort of nice of the Jehovah's Witnesses to care enough about other people's souls to spend their free time getting doors slammed in their faces.\" Akira paused and swallowed and took a deep breath. This was ridiculous.\n\n\"Quit dithering,\" Rose said from behind the woman. \"Good heavens, you'd think you'd never introduced yourself to a neighbor before.\"\n\nAkira tried to think if she ever had introduced herself to a neighbor. She was more the keep-to-herself type, really.\n\nThe woman took a few steps toward the door. She was wiping her hands on a dishtowel, which she slung over her shoulder with casual ease, but Akira barely noticed. The woman was tall, probably six feet or maybe even a little more, mostly thin, with long slender arms and legs, and gorgeous, with an exotic look that matched that of her son, minus the chipmunk cheeks.\n\n\"Oh,\" Akira said with relief. \"When are you due?\"\n\nThe woman put a hand on her great mound of belly. She could have swallowed a basketball. Or maybe even a beach ball. The big kind.\n\n\"In a few weeks,\" she said briefly. \"May I help you with something?\"\n\n\"I'm not due until June.\" Akira patted her own stomach. Her bump was barely noticeable, she knew. She wasn't even wearing maternity clothes yet. \"Still, if you stay in Tassamara our kids will start school together.\"\n\n\"Really?\" The woman's stiff expression melted into delight. \"How nice. Please, come in.\" She unlatched the screen door and opened it, waving Akira inside.\n\n\"Ooh, well done,\" Rose said with approval, clapping her hands together gently. \"Now just talk about babies a bit to soften her up.\"\n\n\"Hmmph.\" Akira couldn't see the mean old lady ghost, who must have been standing behind Rose, but she knew that had to be her. \"She don't need softening. She needs to get out.\"\n\n\"Now, Hannah,\" Rose started, but Akira ignored them as she followed the other woman into the living room. She glanced around curiously. She hadn't come into the house when Meredith had brought her by but it was attractive, with smoothly painted walls, polished wood floors, and modern double-pane windows. The furniture, though, looked like rejects from Goodwill, including a square-edged plaid sofa that must have been new in the 1970's, a battered coffee table, and a patched armchair. Cardboard boxes, some open, some still sealed, were stacked in the corners of the room. A small artificial Christmas tree sat on a side table, its branches heavy with ornaments that were too big for it.\n\n\"We're a little\u2026well.\" The woman waved her hand at the boxes as if to apologize for them, before saying, \"Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee?\"\n\n\"Tea would be wonderful, thank you,\" Akira answered, sinking down onto the couch. The cushions had worn away and it felt like sitting on a rock, but she smiled as the woman nodded and hurried away.\n\nThe little boy had followed them in and stood in the doorway, thumb firmly planted in his mouth, staring at Akira as if she had two heads.\n\n\"Hi,\" Akira tried, feeling shy and a little awkward. She'd never dealt with children much.\n\nWait.\n\nShe'd never dealt with children at all. She tried to remember if she'd ever even spoken to a boy his age.\n\nOh, shit.\n\nHer breathing suddenly became shallow, the gasps of an impending panic attack hovering, as she tried to recall one occasion\u2014just one, any time in her life, in her whole entire life\u2014that she had ever spoken to a child as small as the one that was staring at her.\n\nAnd she was going to be a mother? She was going to be responsible for nurturing a person that size? It was brain freeze. Like the panic felt in nightmares about final exams for classes you didn't know you were taking or walks down Main Street naked.\n\nShe knew she didn't whimper. Her throat was far too closed off for that.\n\n\"Cut it out. Akira, stop it.\" Rose's words finally penetrated Akira's fog of fear.\n\n\"I can't have a baby,\" Akira mumbled. \"I don't know anything about kids. I don't know how to be a mother. I didn't even have a mother. She died when I was tiny. I don't know how to do this. I don't know how\u2014ow.\"\n\nThe sizzle as the ghostly energy passed through her head felt like an electric shock, only cold. She put her hand up to her cheek. \"Ouch,\" she repeated.\n\n\"You needed it,\" the old woman ghost said, entirely without sympathy. \"Don't be stupid. People have children all the time. You'll be fine.\"\n\nAkira worked her jaw. Shit. That hurt. It wasn't like a physical hit\u2014she wouldn't bruise\u2014but the pain lingered.\n\n\"Da mean yady hit you,\" the little boy said.\n\n\"She sure did,\" Akira answered, rubbing her face.\n\n\"Mama can't see heah.\" The boy tilted his head to the side, as if considering whether or not to pay the asking price at an auction. Akira wondered what was on sale and whether it was her.\n\nWarily, she said, \"Most people can't. She's a ghost.\"\n\nHis eyes went wide, wider than nature had already left them. \"Like Caspah?\"\n\nThe smile tugged at her cheeks but she kept her face straight as she answered, \"Maybe more like his cousins. Or brothers. Whoever those other mean ghosts are.\" She didn't look at Hannah, but she heard her harrumph of disapproval.\n\n\"And da pwetty yady?\" he asked eagerly.\n\n\"Rose,\" she answered. She glanced over at the girl ghost, wondering why Rose hadn't introduced herself to the boy.\n\nRose shook her head. \"He can't hear us,\" she said quietly. \"Seeing us will pass, probably soon.\"\n\n\"Yike da fyower?\" he asked.\n\nAkira nodded.\n\n\"She's pwettier dan dem,\" he said. \"She should be a daisy.\"\n\nRose laughed and patted her blonde hair. \"Tell him roses smell better,\" she suggested to Akira, before blowing a kiss to the boy.\n\nAkira passed along the message as the boy's mother came back into the room, a teapot in one hand, and the handles of two mugs looped around her other index finger.\n\nHannah snorted. \"Not even a tray. And she'll chip the dishes carrying them like that.\"\n\n\"Do you take milk or lemon?\" The woman asked.\n\n\"Black is fine,\" Akira responded as the woman set the pot on the table. \"You're not from around here, are you?\"\n\n\"No.\" The woman put the mugs down with a slight clatter. \"Is it that obvious?\"\n\n\"Southerners think tea is a cold drink with lots of ice and lots of sweetener,\" Akira answered her. Drat. She'd guessed as much already, but if the woman had been a local, telling her the truth\u2014that her house was haunted by an unfriendly ghost\u2014might have worked.\n\n\"Is that what you wanted?\" About to sit down, the woman paused, looking dismayed. \"I can get some ice.\"\n\n\"No, no.\" Akira shook her head. \"I'm not from here, either. I like my tea hot.\"\n\n\"Oh, where are you from?\" Within seconds, they'd introduced themselves and were chatting, about the south, about Tassamara, about babies. The woman, Nora, was friendly but reticent. She seemed eager to talk about the town, reluctant to reveal anything about herself.\n\n\"So how did you know I was pregnant?\" Nora finally asked.\n\nAkira blinked, not sure what to say.\n\n\"Oh, she thinks you came by to meet her because you're both having babies. That would have been right nice of you,\" Rose said, nodding approval.\n\n\"Meredith mentioned it.\" Akira felt her cheeks turning pink at the lie. She leaned forward, setting her half-empty mug on the table.\n\n\"Meredith?\" Nora questioned, taking a sip of her tea, long brown fingers wrapped around her mug.\n\n\"Your realtor?\"\n\nNora shook her head.\n\n\"Did you work with someone else from her office?\" Akira's voice didn't squeak. In fact, she was pleased with herself for the calmness of her response.\n\n\"I didn't work with anyone,\" Nora said, frowning.\n\n\"How did you rent the house?\" Oh, dear. Akira felt like she was digging a hole, deeper and deeper. Lying was always such a bad idea. Avoiding tricky questions worked so much better.\n\n\"I... know the owner.\" Nora's words were careful, but Akira noticed how her fingers had tightened on the mug.\n\nAkira lifted one shoulder in a shrug. \"I guess I just assumed,\" she said quickly. \"It's such a small town. Everyone knows everything. Have you had a chance to try the bistro yet?\"\n\nNora's eyes were wary. \"No, we haven't gotten out much.\"\n\nToby had been leaning against her leg, listening to the conversation and watching Akira with a curiosity that she had been trying to ignore. Nora put a gentle hand on his head, stroking the dark fuzz as if it soothed her.\n\n\"Maggie's a wonderful cook. She makes incredible eggplant parmesan.\"\n\nNora's answering murmur was noncommittal. She lifted her mug to her lips.\n\n\"Good waffles, too,\" Akira added with a smile directed at Toby.\n\n\"She know da mean yady. And da pwetty yady. Da pwetty yady's named aftah a fwower.\" Toby suddenly volunteered.\n\nNora's mug jerked convulsively. \"Is that what you were talking about?\" she asked with pretended ease.\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Toby looked up at his mother. \"Da mean yady hit heah and it hurt,\" he said in a whisper so loud that Akira was sure it could be heard down the street.\n\n\"Okay.\" Nora smiled down at him. But her eyes, when she raised them to Akira, shot daggers. \"Why don't you go find your trains, darling? I think Edward might have been in that last box I opened.\"\n\n\"Da one in da kitchen?\" Toby asked, sounding hopeful.\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\nWith a jubilant, \"Yay, Edward,\" he pushed himself away from her and ran off.\n\n\"How old is he?\" Akira asked, hoping she sounded polite, not panicked. \"He seems very verbal.\"\n\n\"Are you insane?\" Nora's whisper was much quieter and much, much angrier. \"Bad enough that he imagines mean people living with us, but you go and tell him that the mean people hit you? Do you want him to have nightmares?\"\n\nAkira opened her mouth. Then she closed it. Then she tried again. \"That's not what happened.\"\n\n\"Was he lying?\" Nora sounded calmer, sadder, as if a 'yes' would be nothing more than she expected.\n\nAkira paused. Hell. She hated this. She glanced at Rose, who nodded encouragingly, and with a sigh, said, \"No. Not really.\"\n\nNora set her mug down with a sharp thud. \"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"Your house is haunted.\" Akira knew as soon as she said it that it was too blunt, that Nora wouldn't react well, and she was right.\n\nNora half-laughed and then her face hardened. \"I don't know how you found us, but I'm not stupid enough to fall for this. Get out.\" She stood up.\n\nAkira didn't move. \"Hannah, the ghost who lives here, doesn't want tenants,\" she said, keeping her voice even with an effort. She hated this, hated it with a passion, and she was so going to yell at Rose when they got home. But she'd done these negotiations before. Once a ghost sucked her in to trying to help it, it was easier to just keep going.\n\n\"About time you told her so,\" Hannah snapped. Akira had successfully ignored the old woman's complaints while she'd talked to Nora, but she'd been aware of them. Hannah was determined that Nora and Toby should leave.\n\n\"Not helpful,\" Rose muttered, looking worried.\n\n\"Hannah?\" Nora looked startled and then her lips firmed and she said, enunciating every letter, \"Hannah can go to hell. And you can join her there. Get out of my house.\"\n\nAkira blew out a long breath. For a moment, she sat and thought while Nora glared at her. And then she stood. Hannah hadn't known Nora in life so no private information could convince her of the truth of Akira's words. Without that, what did Akira have? Just Toby. And using the boy to persuade his mother that ghosts were real seemed unfair.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\" Hannah sounded angry and Akira glanced in her direction. Edges pink, but nothing to worry about. The ghost was nowhere close to losing control.\n\n\"I don't know how to convince you,\" Akira said, turning away from Hannah and back to Nora. \"But it's a small town. If you decide you need me, ask anyone.\"\n\n\"I won't need you.\" Nora gestured toward the front door, scorn in every line of her body.\n\nAkira tried to smile. \"You never know.\"\n\nOnce on the sidewalk, she sighed.\n\n\"That didn't go well.\" Rose was right behind her.\n\n\"The making friends part started off okay.\" Akira kicked at a crack in the pavement, feeling gloomy. She'd never found it easy to make friends, but her ten minutes of casual conversation with Nora had been nice. The other woman had shown a natural warmth and wry humor that Akira enjoyed.\n\n\"You need to tell her to get out,\" Hannah hissed. She'd followed them out, too, and was standing next to Akira's car. \"I don't want them here.\"\n\nAkira's eyes narrowed. She looked at the distance between the car and the porch, trying to measure how far apart they were. She'd assumed that Hannah was tied to her house in the way that ghosts who died untimely deaths tended to be. Was she wrong?\n\n\"Why not?\" she asked. \"They seem as if they'd be good company. The boy can even see you.\"\n\n\"This house belongs to my son,\" Hannah snapped. \"No one else.\" She crossed her arms over her chest, half hostile, half defensive at revealing so much.\n\nAkira refrained from rolling her eyes. \"Your son has been trying to rent it out for at least a year,\" she said, mustering all the patience she could manage. \"Why can't you be happy for him that he's finally found someone to pay a few bills?\"\n\nHannah glared. \"He hasn't visited once. Not once. And I need...\" She looked away, but Akira had already caught sight of the tears in her eyes.\n\n\"Oh, hell.\" Akira stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans and hunched her shoulders. \"You could leave any time, couldn't you?\"\n\n\"I'm not going until I've said good-bye.\" Hannah grated out the words through clenched teeth. \"And\u2026\" She swallowed and said in a much smaller voice, \"\u2026and apologized.\"\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, Akira saw a flicker of movement at the window. She looked back at the house. Nora was watching them. Well, or her, anyway. Great. Not that their chance of real friendship had ever been high, but being seen talking to herself on the sidewalk couldn't help.\n\nStill, it gave her an idea. \"Okay, but you don't need Nora and Toby gone. What you want is for your son to come home, right?\"\n\nHannah nodded stiffly.\n\n\"Zane can find anybody,\" Akira said with confidence. \"You leave Nora and Toby alone and he'll find your son. We'll make him visit you.\"\n\n\"How will you get him here?\" Hannah asked, her suspicion clear.\n\n\"Leave that to us,\" Akira said. \"Do we have a deal?\"\n\nHannah pursed her lips. \"Two weeks,\" she said finally. \"I'll give you two weeks.\" She pointed back at the house melodramatically. \"After that, I will do my best to make her existence hell on earth.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Akira stared at where the ceiling fan should be. She couldn't see it in the darkness but she knew it was there.\n\nIt's a natural process, she told herself. Women have been managing for thousands of years. She'd said that to Zane so blithely just a few days ago. But that had been about her body making the baby. Sure, it was a miracle, but it was an ineluctable miracle\u2014her body would take care of the details without her.\n\nRaising a child, on the other hand, was a process consisting of innumerable daily decision points. Decision points that she had no idea how to make.\n\nIt was stupid to be scared. There was no point. Like it or not\u2014and she did like it, very much, or at least she had just a few short days ago\u2014the baby was on his way.\n\nThe thought was terrifying.\n\n\"Rose, Rose.\" Akira lifted her head. Had she heard someone calling Rose's name? The sound was like a whispered hiss, at the very edge of her hearing. She listened, but it didn't happen again. She rolled over, burying her face in her pillow.\n\nShe shouldn't be lying awake worrying about her not-so-theoretical future child; she should be worrying about Toby and Nora. Finding Hannah's son hadn't proven as easy as Akira had expected. Zane's gift worked best when he could touch an object that was connected to the person or thing that he was trying to find. Akira suspected it was some form of quantum entanglement. Unfortunately, he couldn't touch a ghost.\n\nAnd Akira was very afraid that she'd screwed up. Maybe big time. Asking Meredith about the owner of the house had seemed like a logical next step. The realtor had to know how to get in touch with him, right? But Meredith had been surprised to hear that anyone was living there.\n\nThe owner had had the house remodeled, planning to live in it himself. Apparently, he'd then changed his mind and posted it for rent over a year ago. Meredith had never managed to find a tenant.\n\n\"Ever since the real estate crash, Florida's got more houses than people. Even in Tassamara, some are always empty,\" she'd told Akira. \"And there's something about that one. People just don't like it. It's a sweet little house, great light, top-of-the-line appliances. Seriously, I'd love to have that double oven in my kitchen. But I've shown it a dozen times and\u2026\" Her voice trailed off and her eyes narrowed. \"You wouldn't even go inside.\"\n\nAkira'd shrugged, feeling awkward. News traveled and most people in Tassamara knew she saw ghosts. Still, she didn't like to talk about them. The absolute last thing she wanted was for her life to turn into an on-going episode of some ghost-hunting reality television show.\n\n\"Huh,\" Meredith said thoughtfully. She tapped a pencil on her desk. \"But I haven't heard anything from the owner about taking it off the market. Let me get in touch with him and get back to you.\"\n\n\"Can't you just give me his contact info?\" Akira asked.\n\nMeredith's answer came after a long pause. \"You're about to marry the source of 70% of my business,\" she said. \"I will if you insist. But I'd rather not. Respecting people's privacy\u2014everyone's privacy\u2014is important to me.\" She waited.\n\nAkira had gotten the message. It wasn't a threat, not really. But keeping secrets was a two way street.\n\n\"I'll ask him to contact you as soon as he can,\" Meredith added, more gently.\n\nAkira had had to accept that. But what if the owner hadn't given permission for Nora to be there? Akira rolled over, snuggling closer to Zane.\n\nHe was asleep, damn him.\n\nNo, not damn him. She loved him. She did. She adored so much about him, including his calm certainty that everything would work out fine. She just wished some of that calm would rub off on it. She draped her arm over his chest and pulled herself closer.\n\n\"Mmm?\" he murmured a question.\n\n\"Love you,\" she whispered, feeling the undercurrent of desperate nerves in her own voice. What kind of mom would she be? She felt tears prickling the back of her eyes and furiously blinked them back. This was crazy. She was crazy.\n\n\"Hey.\" He shifted under her arm, turning to face her. The room was dark, but he reached a hand up, tracing it along her arm and shoulder until he reached her face. \"Are you freaking out again?\"\n\n\"Kind of,\" she admitted in a tiny voice.\n\n\"Do you want the science lecture?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" She sniffled.\n\n\"Pregnancy causes hormone production to increase,\" Zane dutifully started. \"Estrogen, progesterone, and human chorionic\u2026\"\n\n\"Gonadotropin,\" she prompted.\n\n\"Right, that one,\" he agreed, sliding his hand from her face down and around to her back so that his arm was around her. \"All of them affect emotion. They're making a nice, safe, nurturing place for Henry to grow, but the side effects are rough on you. It's just chemistry, babe.\"\n\nAkira's eyes still prickled but her lips curled up nonetheless. All her life, science had been a refuge to her. People make no sense? That's okay, because science does. Having Zane help her retreat into scientific analysis when she felt bad was\u2026 the tears spilled over.\n\n\"Hey,\" he protested, pulling her closer so that she was pressed against him. \"That's not how it's supposed to go.\"\n\n\"No, I'm happy,\" she said through her tears. \"That was\u2014you are\u2014I don't know how I got so lucky. I\u2014\" She took a few deep shaky breaths, trying to hold back the full-fledged bawl that was impending.\n\n\"Akira.\" Rose's voice came from right behind Akira's shoulder. \"I need you.\"\n\nAkira rolled away from Zane, startled. \"Rose!\" she protested. \"Our bedroom is supposed to be private, remember? We talked about this.\"\n\nIn the darkness, Rose stood above her, glowing. Not pink or red or the colors of upset ghost that Akira had seen before, but a steady gold light, shining like a halo outlining the teenage girl's image.\n\nAkira quit complaining. \"Wow.\"\n\n\"I need you,\" Rose said again.\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Hannah's here. She says something is wrong with Nora.\"\n\nAkira was out of bed almost before Rose finished her sentence. \"Come on,\" she told Zane. \"We have to go.\"\n\n\"Do I get to find out where?\" he asked, voice dry, but he was already sitting up, reaching for the lamp on the bedside table.\n\nAs he flipped the switch, light chasing away the shadows, Akira smiled at him. In a mood swing that was already starting to feel almost normal, she felt completely, serenely, intensely happy. Worrying about something she could immediately do something about was much better than worrying about a future that she couldn't control. And as long as Zane was with her, everything would be fine." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"Should we ring the doorbell?\" she asked tentatively. Hannah and Rose had disappeared into the house, but she and Zane weren't ghosts and couldn't walk through walls.\n\n\"As opposed to what exactly? It's 2AM.\"\n\n\"Good point.\" The porch was dark, but Akira felt around where she remembered the doorbell to be. She found it and pushed hard, then waited, tapping one foot anxiously. \"If she doesn't answer the door, what do we do? Call for help? Break a window? Keep ringing and hope someone wakes up?\" she asked, throwing out possibilities as fast as she could think of them.\n\nZane reached around her and put his hand on the door, then mumbled something grumpy under his breath, opened the screen door, and tried again. \"Oh, clever,\" he said with approval, holding the screen door open with his shoulder. \"She must be tall.\"\n\n\"Um, yeah.\" Akira watched, bemused, as Zane reached up to the porch light, high on the wall. He unscrewed the top, a bronzed steel square that sat firmly on glass walls, as if he were going to change the unlit bulb inside, and lifted it off carefully. A key was taped to the interior.\n\n\"How did you\u2026\" Akira started in wonder, before shaking her head and falling silent.\n\n\"Locks and keys, they're connected.\" Zane started to pick at the tape before pausing, cocking his head to one side. \"Sounds as if we don't need it.\"\n\nThe light came on first. Akira forced a smile at the tiny circle in the door as Zane returned the top of the light to its base, leaving the key in place. She hoped Nora wouldn't walk away in disgust.\n\nRose popped out through the wall. Akira blinked hard, two, three times. Rose's glow was even more intense than it had been. She was lighting up the darkness like a solar flare.\n\n\"She's sick,\" Rose said hurriedly. \"I don't understand what's wrong, but she's pulling energy out of me like a vampire. She needs a doctor. Or a hospital. Or something.\"\n\n\"She's pulling what?\" Akira asked. She took a nervous step away from Rose. Spirit energy, even unusually pretty spirit energy, made her uneasy.\n\nThe door flew open. \"What are you doing here?\" Nora glared.\n\nZane's hand dropped onto Akira's shoulder, a comforting weight, as she stared at Nora. \"You got fat.\"\n\nNora closed her eyes. \"It's the middle of the night. Why are you at my door?\"\n\n\"Hannah said\u2014\" Akira started, before stopping. \"No, you're fat.\"\n\n\"I'm pregnant. Pregnant women gain weight,\" Nora snapped. But Akira ignored her. Nora had been rotund with pregnancy before, but more like a balloon halfway up a stick than a comfortably maternal cushion. Now, though, even her face was puffy and swollen.\n\n\"She's sick,\" Rose whispered into Akira's ear. \"Really sick.\"\n\nAkira nudged Zane with her elbow. \"Call an ambulance.\"\n\nNora stared at her. \"Are you insane? Are you\u2014oh, that's a stupid question. You think you see ghosts. You are crazy. You need help. Go away.\"\n\nShe started to slam the door, but Akira stuck her hand out and caught it, pushing against the wood and stepping forward and into the house. \"What happened before?\"\n\nNora pulled herself up, but the hand draped across her mound of belly was more revealing. The brown fingers looked like fat sausages. \"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"She passed out,\" Hannah reported, hovering behind Nora. Akira glanced at her. The old woman had never looked anything but hostile, but her scowl now held concern, not just annoyance. \"It looked like some kind of a fit. She twitched and shook.\"\n\n\"Hannah says you fainted,\" Akira reported. \"And maybe had a seizure?\"\n\nBehind her, she could hear Zane on the phone, giving the address of the house.\n\n\"What the\u2014\" For a moment, Nora looked almost afraid. Then she lifted her chin high and said poisonously, \"I have no idea what's wrong with you. But I am not some gullible idiot. I don't know why you want to scare me away, but if you've got cameras on this house, you might as well stop recording. You're not going to see anything interesting.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm.\" Akira ignored her. She was trying desperately to remember what it meant that Nora was so much fatter than she had been. She'd been reading books about pregnancy. She knew she'd seen something about rapid weight gain.\n\n\"Ooh,\" Rose squeaked. \"That's so weird.\" Akira glanced at her. Rose had her arm outstretched toward Nora's belly and warm yellow light was flowing from her open hand toward the woman's midsection.\n\n\"I don't remember.\" Akira bit her lip, chewing on it uncertainly. She ought to know this. But she was almost more worried about what was happening with Rose. Should she be dragging the ghostly teenager away from Nora somehow? Or yelling at Nora to get away? Ghostly energy could be dangerous.\n\nBut the glow didn't look threatening. And this was Rose. She tried to remember what Dillon had told her about his other dimensional experience. Rose had managed to withstand the energy storm so maybe her energy was somehow different, either on another frequency or composed of different particles?\n\n\"Preeclampsia,\" Zane said from behind her. \"High blood pressure.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Akira's hands met, in a triumphant clap, before she clasped her fingers together nervously, as if in prayer. \"You need to go to a hospital, right away,\" she told Nora.\n\nShe was no longer worried about Rose's energy. The ghost girl had brought Akira back from the dead and had helped Dillon when he was lost in another dimension. Akira refused to believe that anything Rose would do could harm Nora and her baby. And although she didn't know what was happening with Rose's spirit energy, in the physical world she knew that Nora needed help.\n\nFor the first time, Nora looked more vulnerable than angry. \"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you do,\" Akira answered her. \"You're not stupid. You know something's wrong. If Hannah can tell that you're in trouble, you must know you are, too.\"\n\nNora paused. One hand rose to pull her light cotton robe closed at the throat. \"I can't leave Toby.\"\n\nAkira froze. Oh, dear. Oh\u2026dear. \"His father?\" she asked tentatively. Nora had said nothing about a partner or husband when they first met, but she'd assumed there must be a man somewhere.\n\n\"Not available.\" Nora pursed her mouth. \"The baby's not due until January. I'll call my doctor in the morning.\"\n\nAkira glanced at Zane, uncertain.\n\n\"Nope.\" Calmly, as if he barged his way into strangers' houses every day, he urged Akira forward a few more steps and stepped into the house behind her. \"Zane Latimer.\" He introduced himself to Nora easily, holding out a hand for her to shake. \"Do you have a bag packed for the hospital?\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" Nora fell back a few steps automatically and then drew herself up. She was just an inch or so shorter than Zane, Akira noted, impressed. It must be nice to go through life able to reach the top shelf. \"If you don't leave, I'm calling the police.\"\n\n\"You do that,\" he said agreeably. \"I'm not sure who's on night duty this week. Maybe Tim? But I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. Job gets boring, after all. You want my phone?\" He pulled his phone back out of his pocket and held it up as if he'd pass it to her if she nodded.\n\n\"You people are insane.\" Nora spat the words out, face flushed.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Rose murmured. \"I think maybe it's a bad idea to make her mad.\"\n\nShe passed through Akira to step closer to Nora. Akira shivered convulsively as Rose's energy sparkled inside her, but as Rose moved away, she stared after her, startled. Ghost energy felt like ice usually, a chill so cold it was painful. Rose felt more like a shot of whiskey, burning its way through her veins but leaving a soothing buzz in its wake. Whatever it was, it was unlike any spirit energy that Akira had ever felt before.\n\n\"What are you doing, Rose?\" Akira asked as the ghost first touched Nora's expanded midriff, then wrapped an arm around Nora's shoulders as if half-hugging her.\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" Rose sounded dreamy. She started humming under her breath. \"Calming, I think.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Hannah said unexpectedly. \"If the girl's blood pressure is too high, getting excited can't be good for her.\"\n\nNora did look calmer or possibly dizzy. Her eyes were almost unfocused, as if she were listening to Rose and no longer entirely present.\n\nZane slipped his phone back into his pocket and shot a questioning look at Akira. In the distance, Akira could hear a siren. \"What's going on?\" he asked quietly.\n\n\"Rose. Some kind of ghostly energy. I think she's trying to lower Nora's blood pressure.\" Akira breathed her response, voice barely above a whisper, not wanting to break into Nora's reverie.\n\nZane's eyebrows arched in surprise. \"Did you know she could do that?\"\n\nAkira shook her head. This was all new to her. Maybe spirit energy worked on a spectrum, like electromagnetic radiation? Rose's new ghostly energy might be a different frequency than the energy that Akira had experienced before. Like infrared versus ultraviolet. If only she'd found a way to measure spirit energy.\n\nBut she pushed thoughts of the science away. At the moment, their first priority was to get medical attention for Nora, and to decide what to do about the small boy presumably still sound asleep somewhere in the house. And maybe later Rose would let Akira run some tests." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Where the hell was Rose when she was needed? Akira thought irately. She wanted that magic calming potion back. Like, desperately, like, right now. She wasn't sure who she wanted it for, though, whether it was for Toby or herself.\n\nToby paused.\n\nAkira held her breath.\n\n\"I\u2014I\u2014I\u2014\" he gasped. \"I want my mama!\" And then the wails started again.\n\n\"Spank him,\" snapped Hannah. \"Shock him out of it.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to hit him because he's scared,\" Akira hissed at the ghost. \"Why would that make him feel better?\"\n\nHe was like a siren, like a wind-up toy that went on and on and then trickled down, and then started up again. Akira found herself wondering why his throat didn't hurt. If she cried like that, it would be painful. Shouldn't the pain make him stop?\n\nShe pressed her back against the wall, appreciating the solid feel of it behind her. This had to be a nightmare. It had seemed so logical when Rose accompanied Nora in the ambulance and Zane followed them both to the hospital.\n\nHe'd never met Toby; Nora, who seemed completely dazed by then, would be happier about leaving Toby with a strange woman than a strange man; and he could handle Nora's paperwork with a wave of his GD administrative wand and/or the platinum credit card in his wallet.\n\nAkira had agreed. But she'd been hoping, despite all logical evidence to the contrary, that Nora would be home before Toby woke up. A quick check at the ER, some pills to lower her blood-pressure, and why not?\n\nNo such luck, though.\n\n\"Fine, if you won't, I will.\" Hannah strode across the room to where Toby was sitting up in his twin bed, sobbing. \"Quit crying or I'll give you something to cry about,\" she growled.\n\nHe looked at her for a silent second as he gulped in a breath and then the heartbroken sobbing started again.\n\nShe raised her arm, lifting it high. \"I mean it,\" she threatened.\n\n\"Don't you dare!\" Akira raced across the room, interposing herself between Toby and Hannah and glaring. \"If you even try, I will... I will... I will exorcise you!\"\n\n\"Ha,\" the old woman snorted. \"As if.\"\n\nAkira's glare didn't change.\n\nA smug smile crept across Hannah's lips. \"Worked, didn't it?\"\n\nAkira blinked as she realized that behind her, Toby had fallen silent. Tentatively, she turned. Toby was watching, eyes big, thumb locked between his lips. \"I won't let her hurt you.\"\n\nHe pulled his thumb out of his mouth. \"She not dere.\" He leaned forward and waved his hand through Hannah, then promptly tucked his thumb back into his mouth and sat back.\n\n\"Oh.\" Akira felt stupid. She should have realized. If the ghosts weren't quite real to Toby, a hit of their energy wouldn't sizzle him like it did her.\n\n\"Offer him food,\" Hannah said. \"Quick, before he remembers he's sad.\"\n\nAkira opened her mouth to object\u2014if the boy was scared about losing his mother, food wasn't going to solve his problem\u2014but then she paused. Food often did make people feel better. \"Are you hungry?\"\n\nHe nodded, still wary.\n\nTen minutes later, in the kitchen, Akira pinched the bridge of her nose. Those were real tears dripping down Toby's face, real snot coming out of his nose, but it wasn't as if she could un-put the spoon in the yogurt. She'd had no idea that breaking the smooth surface meant that the food would become inedible.\n\n\"I should have warned you,\" Hannah said. \"He's one of that kind. My boy was like that, too. Every little thing needed to be just right.\"\n\n\"Toby, sweetie, it's the same,\" Akira tried desperately. She took a bite of the yogurt. \"See? Yum.\"\n\n\"No, no, no,\" Hannah groaned as Toby sobbed harder. \"That won't do it. Offer him ice cream.\"\n\n\"What?\" Akira said, sticking the spoon back in the yogurt. \"He can't have ice cream for breakfast.\"\n\n\"Oh, please,\" Hannah snapped. \"There's no difference between ice cream and that crap.\"\n\n\"Ice cream has more fat, more sugar, less calcium.\" Akira waved the spoon, then took another bite of the yogurt. Toby might not want it, but she and Henry needed food, too, and it tasted delicious to her.\n\n\"So what? Some days you need ice cream.\" Hannah nodded toward Toby. He'd stopped crying for the moment and was again watching them with big brown eyes.\n\nAkira sighed and took another bite of yogurt. \"Ice cream?\" she offered.\n\nA cautious smile lit up Toby's face. He nodded.\n\n\"I can't believe you fed your kid ice cream for breakfast,\" Akira muttered to Hannah as she watched Toby happily spooning up the last melted drips of vanilla.\n\nHannah scowled. \"I didn't.\"\n\n\"You didn't? But\u2014\" Akira nodded toward Toby in protest. She'd listened to Hannah, thinking the older woman knew what she was talking about. She felt deceived.\n\n\"After Nick was grown and gone, I took in fosters,\" Hannah said. She fell silent for a moment, looking lost in memory, then shook her head and went on brusquely. \"Ice cream for breakfast once in a while doesn't hurt them. Kids don't figure getting it once means they'll get it all the time and showing you're willing to do whatever you can to make a bad day better means a lot. I wish I'd learned sooner how much little treats matter.\"\n\nAkira looked at the old woman. In repose, the harsh lines woven by time creased her cheeks and pulled her face down, but her eyes weren't as mean as Akira had thought they were.\n\n\"We haven't found Nick yet,\" Akira said cautiously. \"But Meredith left him a message asking him to call me.\"\n\nHannah shook her head, her eyes on Toby. \"He's never coming home. He hated it here. Always dreaming. Always working on how to get away.\" The muscles in her face worked for a moment and then she sniffed hard and brushed a hand across her nose. \"But don't think I'll let them stay here,\" she said firmly. \"I don't want company.\"\n\nWhile she was wondering what she could say to reconcile Hannah to Nora and Toby's presence, Akira's phone buzzed. She pulled it out automatically and her lips curled up as she read Zane's text. Baby girl. Five pounds, eight ounces. Doing fine. Home soon.\n\n\"We're going to find him,\" she told Hannah. \"I don't know how, but we will.\" They had to. Nora needed a safe place to live. And even if Hannah couldn't hit Toby, living with an angry ghost wouldn't be good for either him or his brand-new baby sister." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "\"So James is really splendid,\" Zane said, a red train in one hand, a blue train in the other. \"But Edward is the oldest train?\"\n\n\"James dinks he is spyendid,\" Toby told him patiently. \"But he has to pull de cars, too.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Zane nodded, adding, as he put the red train down on the track. \"Good work ethic there.\"\n\nFrom her prone position on the hard sofa, hands cradling her cheek, Akira smiled sleepily. Zane, her sweetheart, her love, her future husband, was encouraging a work ethic? That was unexpected. Not that Zane was opposed to work; he just thought it sensible to minimize it when possible.\n\nShe let her eyes drift closed. It had been a late night, or rather a very, very early morning, and if it weren't for the two ghosts arguing behind her, she could easily fall asleep to the soothing sounds of Zane and Toby earnestly discussing the rules of train-dom, of which there were many. But Rose and Hannah's debate had too strong a hold on her.\n\n\"You'll like it,\" Rose claimed. \"It's not like you think it is, but it's nice.\"\n\n\"You didn't like it. You ain't there.\"\n\nWhen Hannah got mad, her southern accent got a lot stronger, Akira noted, eyes still resolutely closed.\n\n\"That has nothing to do with it.\"\n\n\"Course it does!\"\n\n\"I died when I was seventeen. I never left my house after that. I never grew up. You got married, you had a kid, you did stuff. You should be ready to spread your wings and learn how to fly now.\"\n\n\"That's just stupid,\" Hannah scoffed. \"You expect me to believe everyone who dies gets wings, like some kinda angel?\"\n\nRose stamped her foot. \"That's a\u2026a whatdyacallit, a synonym. A comparison. You don't need wings over there.\"\n\nA metaphor, Akira thought, but she didn't say the words out loud.\n\nHannah sniffed. \"I'm not going and you can't make me.\"\n\n\"I don't want to make you. But you can't make people's lives miserable over here.\"\n\n\"All they have to do is get out of my house,\" Hannah snapped. She stomped across the room and stood between Zane and Toby.\n\nAkira squeezed her eyes shut. Hannah was so stubborn. Her moment of softness over breakfast had disappeared after Akira had mentioned Nick. If anything, the news of Nora's baby girl had made her more determined than ever. She wasn't losing control. Her energy wasn't spiking the way that of some ghosts did. But she was pulling in power from the atmosphere, making it colder around her, and then using that energy for petty acts of malice.\n\n\"That's so weird,\" Zane muttered. Akira opened her eyes and looked across the room to where Zane and Toby sat on the floor next to a complicated layout of wooden train tracks, Hannah still standing between them.\n\n\"Stop dat.\" Toby ordered.\n\n\"Stop what?\" Zane asked, sounding perplexed. He picked up a brown freight car and turned it over, examining its fastener. \"It looks as if the magnet reversed polarity temporarily. But I don't know how that's possible.\"\n\n\"Not you,\" Toby told him. \"It's da mean yady. She is baking da train.\"\n\n\"Baking? The mean lady?\" Zane asked.\n\n\"Hannah,\" Akira said, sitting up and swinging her feet around to the floor. She glared at the old woman who glared back at her.\n\n\"Ah.\" Zane set the train back down on the track carefully. He looked at Toby and then at Akira. \"Is that why it's so cold?\"\n\nShe nodded briefly.\n\n\"She does dat,\" Toby reported matter-of-factly. He picked up one of the cars, a green passenger car, and tried to link it to the freight car before shaking his head.\n\n\"Seriously, Hannah?\" Rose said, crossing her arms over her chest. \"You're going to pick on a little boy?\"\n\n\"I want him out! I want all of you out!\" Hannah said. \"This is my home and I don't want people here.\"\n\n\"You okay, little man?\" Zane asked, putting his hand on Toby's arm. \"You look cold. You need a sweater?\"\n\n\"You gave us two weeks to find Nick, Hannah, and our time is not up yet,\" Akira said firmly. \"You leave Toby alone.\"\n\nTwo weeks. She should have bargained for more time. Two weeks would be the day after Christmas. Maybe Nora would be willing to move out if she now believed that the house was haunted? But finding a new place to live and packing for a move over Christmas while taking care of a newborn baby and a toddler on her own would be miserable, even if she let Akira and Zane help. No, Akira couldn't count on that.\n\nShe wasn't even sure she wanted to. Rose was right. Hannah should move on. This wasn't life. Unlike Rose, who thoroughly enjoyed her existence and was endlessly fascinated by the world around her, Hannah seemed trapped, tied here by regrets and sorrow.\n\n\"What's she saying?\" Zane asked, sounding distracted. Akira glanced at him. He had a strange expression on his face, as if he was listening to far-off music, his head tilted to one side, his eyes puzzled.\n\n\"Can you hear her?\" Akira asked, startled. That would be different.\n\n\"No, no.\" He shook his head, attention back in the room, and grinned at her, but the expression didn't entirely make it to his still narrowed eyes.\n\n\"She wants us to go.\"\n\nZane stood in one smooth, fluid movement. \"Let's go, then.\"\n\n\"What?\" Akira protested. \"We can't take Toby away.\"\n\n\"Sure we can,\" Zane said easily. Whatever had been bothering him seemed to be gone as if it never was. \"Nora and the baby will be in the hospital overnight. Toby can stay with us, and Hannah can have the house to herself.\"\n\nStay with us? Akira wanted to protest. Their house wasn't childproof. They had no toys. Where would he sleep? What would he eat? How would they take care of him? But her brows drew down and she stayed silent as she glanced at Hannah.\n\nShe tried not to let ghosts bully her, but it might not be a bad idea to let the old woman feel an empty house again. Maybe the silence would remind her that company wasn't so bad. And Akira wanted a chance to talk to Rose in private, away from the older woman, about that golden energy and what it might mean.\n\n\"Go and good riddance.\" Hannah grumped, stomping away from Toby and Zane toward the kitchen.\n\n\"Come on, bud. Let's go get your stuff together.\" Zane held his hand out to Toby and the little boy stood and slid his own into it obligingly.\n\n\"Can we bring da trains?\" Toby asked.\n\n\"Sure. We'll pack up some of the track, too, and maybe even that little barrel house so we can load 'em up.\"\n\n\"Dat is de barra' yoader,\" Toby corrected him.\n\nZane blinked. \"Barrel loader. Got it. Not a house.\" He grinned at the little boy.\n\nToby had taken to Zane like peanut butter to jelly, Akira thought. All right, she could do this. They could do this. As long as Zane was around, they'd be fine.\n\nAn hour later, she was not so sanguine. \"What do you mean you need to run an errand and it might take a while?\"\n\nZane ran his hand though his hair, looking guilty. \"Ah, well...\"\n\n\"You can't leave me alone with him,\" she hissed, glancing over her shoulder at Toby pushing his train along their coffee table. \"I don't know anything about taking care of a child. I fed him ice cream for breakfast!\"\n\nZane looked startled for a second before laughing. He slid his hand around her waist to the small of her back. \"Did you have some, too?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" She put her arms up and around his neck and leaned into him, letting herself relax against his warmth, tucking her cheek into his shoulder. \"Who eats ice cream for breakfast?\"\n\nHe chuckled and she felt his breath stirring her ear as he whispered, \"There's a box of chocolates under the Christmas tree for Grace. You can feed him those for lunch if you like.\"\n\nShe snorted in protest, not lifting her head. Not likely.\n\n\"Seriously, though, I have to go,\" he continued.\n\nAt that she did pull her head away, looking up into his eyes. \"Where? And why?\" She wanted to clutch his arms and refuse to let him leave, but she didn't.\n\nHe hemmed and hawed and finally said, \"It's almost Christmas.\"\n\n\"I know that.\"\n\n\"I need to go get something. A present.\"\n\n\"No, you don't.\" She shook her head fervently. \"No. There is no present more important than being here right now.\"\n\n\"It'll be a good present,\" Zane tried.\n\n\"No,\" she repeated. \"No. No. No.\"\n\nAs the door closed behind him, she resisted the urge to kick it. What was she supposed to do now?\n\nShe covered her face with her hands trying to hide from the reality that she was alone with a very, very small person, then dropped them and straightened her back. She was being idiotic. How hard could it be after all? She could do this.\n\nShe'd start by feeding Toby some lunch. Maybe not the healthiest lunch\u2014she wouldn't try for a tofu stir-fry or anything too ambitious\u2014but she had peanut butter and jelly and bread. Every toddler liked PBJ, right? It was like a universal law.\n\nToby didn't.\n\nOr at least he didn't like her PBJ. Her peanut butter had lumps in it. Crunchy bits. All of Akira's persuasive abilities couldn't convince Toby that peanut butter was meant to have peanuts in it. It wouldn't have mattered anyway, because her jam was the wrong color. It was too red. A bad red. And the bread\u2026Toby poked at it disconsolately.\n\n\"You could take a bite and see,\" she suggested. \"Maybe it tastes better than it looks.\"\n\n\"I did.\" He pointed to the edge where the tiniest nibble of crumb might be gone. \"It didn't.\"\n\nThe ringing doorbell was a welcome interruption from the big brown eyes staring forlornly at her from across the table.\n\nMeredith thrust the take-out container in her direction in a rush of words, \"I was at Maggie's when Zane swung by and I needed to talk to you anyway, so I said I'd drop this off. But I can't stay\u2014I've got a million things to do. I left a message with Nick Bendow but I haven't heard back from him yet. His manager, though, said that he's on an international tour and has been gone for months.\"\n\n\"A what?\"\n\n\"Yeah, fun, isn't it? He's a musician. Anyway, the manager didn't know anything about Nick letting someone use the house. He's going to check, but I think your tenant is probably a squatter. Thank you so much for letting me know. It could have turned into a huge problem, but I'll call the sheriff and get it taken care of.\"\n\n\"Wait, wait.\" Akira put a hand up in protest. \"What does that mean, get it taken care of?\"\n\n\"Well, get her out of there.\" Meredith raised her eyebrows. \"If she broke the locks to get in, it's a crime. And the sooner I get her out the better. Squatting is a serious problem in Florida; I don't want to wind up spending months in court fighting her.\"\n\nAkira took a deep breath. This was the solution she needed, wasn't it? If the sheriff evicted Nora, Hannah would be happy and no one would be in any danger from her. Toby might not be able to feel Hannah now, but Akira didn't know what would happen to him if Hannah lost control. But still, what would Nora and her kids do if they lost their home? And at Christmas? And it would be terrible if Nora got arrested. But Akira's pause to think took too long.\n\n\"Gotta run,\" Meredith said, glancing at her watch. \"Later. And Merry Christmas!\" With that, she was gone, heels clicking as she hurried down the path, red hair glinting in the sun.\n\nAkira walked back to the kitchen carrying the container and biting her lower lip so hard it hurt. She knew the Latimers would help Nora if she asked them to. She probably didn't even have to ask. For all she knew, Zane had already texted Grace and a moving van was at the house, packing up Nora's possessions to move her someplace safer. But Nora didn't seem like someone who would easily accept help like that. In fact, Nora didn't like someone who would easily accept any help.\n\nMaybe Rose could hypnotize her again?\n\n\"Rose.\" Akira called to the ghost girl as she reached the kitchen. \"I need to talk to you.\" Rose had accompanied Nora to the hospital in the ambulance, returning with Zane in the morning, and the two of them hadn't had a chance to talk about last night's events.\n\n\"It was amazing. Amazing.\" Rose twirled around in the middle of the kitchen floor, her skirt flaring up, her hair spinning with her.\n\n\"What was?\" Akira crossed to the counter.\n\n\"I saw a baby get born. A baby. She was so tiny. She was so... it was so... it was so gross. Really, just ew. The whole thing. Ick. Disgusting. I can't believe you have to do that. But then after, there was a baby. And she blinked. Her eyelashes were the littlest, teeniest-tiniest eyelashes you ever saw, just little dark specks on her eyes. They were so adorable.\"\n\nAkira smiled as she lifted the lid off the container. And then she frowned, distracted from Rose's enthusiasm by the food in front of her. What was this? Everything Maggie made was good so she was sure it would be tasty, but she'd never seen it before. It was sort of like her favorite vegetable biryani, only\u2026not. Those were chunks of chicken, she thought, poking at it with a sense of rising indignation. What had Maggie made?\n\n\"What dat?\" asked Toby, sliding off his chair and joining her. He stood on tiptoes as Akira lifted the container down to show him.\n\nBefore she could tell him that it was biryani and he wouldn't like it, he heaved a huge sigh of relief. \"Subiyan. Yes, peas. Dank you.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"For me?\" he asked, looking up at her, face plaintive. \"I yike.\"\n\n\"Um, sure,\" Akira said. This looked an awful lot like some kind of stir-fried rice to her. \"How do you feel about tofu?\"\n\n\"Tofu pasghetti or tofu smoovie? Or de cheese square tofu or da tofu on sayad? I no yike on sayad.\"\n\nAkira translated all of that without much difficulty as she reached for a bowl, and it renewed her resolve. Another semi-vegetarian had moved to Tassamara. That made the town's count two. Three if they included Toby. Somehow she had to figure out how to keep them here." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Ba-de-ba-ba.\n\nAkira opened sleepy eyes.\n\nBa-de-ba-ba.\n\nShe picked up her phone and glared at the screen, licking dry lips and yawning. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Good morning, love.\"\n\n\"Jerk,\" she mumbled at him. \"What time is it?\"\n\n\"Oh, insanely early.\" Zane sounded much too cheerful for a man who hadn't come home all night. \"You ready to wake up?\"\n\n\"No.\" She clicked the off button and set the phone back down, then rolled over and stared at her sleeping companion. Toby was adorable asleep, the chipmunk cheeks eminently kissable, the short dark curls a scruff that she longed to pet.\n\nBa-de-ba-ba.\n\nHer phone rang again. She closed her eyes. She could ignore it. She would ignore it. But he'd keep calling. She could turn the ringer off. But eventually she'd have to deal with him.\n\n\"Where the hell are you?\" she hissed into the phone.\n\n\"I know. I'm sorry.\" He sounded contrite but also amused. Or was that pleased with himself? Her eyes narrowed and she shifted to try to get a look at the clock. It was after seven, but not much after.\n\n\"Your errand took you twenty hours,\" she snapped, doing the math with ease.\n\n\"Yeah, I didn't expect that,\" he said. \"Also, though, I haven't slept in, um, thirty, maybe?\"\n\nAkira blinked. She'd napped at Nora's house after Zane and Nora and Rose went off to the hospital. It hadn't been good sleep, but it had been some. And she'd dozed a little during the day. And at seven-thirty the previous evening, when Toby started yawning, she'd put them both to bed with relief. She might not be ready to wake up but that was because she hated waking up, not because she needed sleep.\n\nShe rolled over and stared up at the ceiling, phone to her ear. \"Are you tired, sweetie?\" she asked with mock sympathy. \"I'm in bed. Our bed. It's nice and warm, cozy and soft.\" She let her voice drop to a croon. \"I'm wearing that silk tank top you like, the black one that's too short, with that weird v-neck and those tiny straps.\"\n\n\"Are you really?\" The groan behind the words was fully satisfying.\n\n\"No, of course not,\" she said, returning to her normal voice. \"I've got company. I'm wearing a t-shirt.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I hope he doesn't wet the bed.\"\n\n\"Ugh. But no, I don't think so.\" She looked at Toby again. The conversation hadn't disturbed him. His sleep was deep and his breathing even. \"Where are you?\"\n\n\"Nora's getting released from the hospital at 8,\" he said, ignoring her question. \"I've arranged for a ride home for her and the baby. Can you be at the house by 9 to meet her?\"\n\n\"What about the sheriff?\" Akira asked with a yawn. Zane had refused to tell her where he was or what he was doing but they'd texted back and forth the previous day about her worries.\n\n\"He's holding off. He told Meredith that he'd check as soon as he could but that they were real busy with Christmas week, vacations, and that drug mess that just went down. It'll be okay, though.\"\n\n\"Mmm.\" Akira closed her eyes.\n\n\"Don't go back to sleep,\" Zane ordered. \"Akira? Come on, babe, 9 o'clock at Nora's house.\"\n\n\"Hannah's house,\" Akira corrected him. That was the problem, she thought sleepily. Whose house was it, really? Did it belong to the living or to the dead?\n\n\"Nick's house,\" he corrected her. Ah, of course. But the mysterious Nick was absent.\n\nAbruptly, Akira sat up. \"Did you find Nick?\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Zane's answer was a satisfied hum, wordless but still revealing.\n\n\"Is it okay with him that Nora is there?\" Akira demanded. \"Is he coming home? Will he tell Hannah to move on?\"\n\n\"I'll see you at the house, babe. As close to 9 as I can manage.\" Click.\n\nAkira glared at the phone. Then she smiled and shoved the covers away. Almost two hours was plenty of time to find out what Toby thought about tofu scrambled eggs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Nora looked both exhausted and radiant, Akira thought, as the woman stepped out of the front seat of a black Mercedes sedan that had pulled up in front of the house. Dave, a familiar face to Akira, stepped out of the driver's side and tapped his forehead at her in a friendly, casual salute. She smiled at him as Toby raced down the path to his mother, who crouched down to meet his hug.\n\nToby was talking and Nora was listening intently as Dave walked around the car and opened the back door, reaching inside and unbuckling a car seat. He pulled it out and motioned toward the house. \"I'll bring her in for you, shall I?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" she protested, reaching for the handle of the car seat, before grimacing and touching her abdomen briefly. \"You've done too much. I can get it.\"\n\n\"Paycheck, remember?\" he said cheerfully. \"I do what the boss says and it pays my mortgage. Doesn't matter to me whether it's flying through a tornado or carrying a mite like this. You gotta figure you might be saving my life, though, by keeping me away from those tornadoes.\" He grinned at her and she smiled back. Toby slipped his hand into hers and together they followed Dave up the path.\n\n\"Howdy, Akira.\" Dave nodded to her as Akira stood from her seat on the porch steps, greeting him and hurrying to pull open the screened door. He carried the baby inside and set her down on the floor by the couch, before looking down at her and giving a shake of his head. \"You ever seen anything as tiny as that?\" he asked Akira in a hushed voice as she joined him.\n\nShe looked down at the baby. What had Zane said, five pounds something? Nora's daughter had to be smaller than that. She was minute. Infinitely small. The tiniest thing Akira had ever seen. And yet somehow she sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Akira dropped to her knees next to the car seat and looked at the baby's fingers. That had to be wrong. There was no way it was possible for human fingers to be so, so, so incredibly tiny. And yet they were.\n\nDave and Nora were talking by the door, Nora thanking Dave and Dave brushing her off.\n\n\"Is dat my baby sistah?\" Toby asked Akira.\n\nShe looked at the little boy standing next to her, soberly looking down at the newborn.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" she said, wondering how Toby felt about the whole thing.\n\nHe crouched next to the car seat and took a long look. Then, carefully, gently, he placed a red wooden train next to the sleeping baby's leg. \"You can pay wit James,\" he told her in a loud whisper. \"When you yake up.\" With that he stood and wandered away, apparently done with the whole thing, and ready to get back to train-ville.\n\nAkira smiled after him as Nora came into the room and dropped down onto the hard couch.\n\n\"She's beautiful,\" Akira told the other woman.\n\n\"Hmph,\" Hannah snorted from behind her. \"She looks like a little old man.\"\n\nNora smiled, eyes tired. \"Thank you for everything. Taking care of Toby and\u2014\" She gestured as if trying to find words to encompass what she meant, before adding, \"\u2014the other night.\"\n\n\"It was my pleasure,\" Akira answered with genuine truth. Once over the scary hurdles of his morning dismay and his highly specific preferences in food, she and Toby had had fun together. They'd set up his train tracks and played with the trains, walked down to the little park in town and admired the ducks, eaten dinner at the bistro, even visited Mrs. Swanson and had their auras read. (Toby's was a lovely shade of green, which meant, according to the old woman, \"Don't bother to argue with him, dear, he's very strong-willed.\" Mrs. Swanson still hadn't decided what Akira's deep, almost iridescent blue aura signified.)\n\n\"It was a mistake to come here.\" Nora rubbed a hand over her face. \"I thought I had more time.\"\n\n\"Why did you?\" Akira asked.\n\nNora shook her head as if she wasn't sure of the answer to the question, before giving a soft chuckle. \"Have you read the pregnancy books yet?\"\n\n\"Some of them.\"\n\n\"When they talk about the nesting instinct, they're not kidding. We were in the city, Toby and me, and everything was so busy and crowded and chaotic. And cold. It started to snow and Toby had the sniffles and I was miserable. On Thanksgiving weekend, I just couldn't take it anymore. I felt like I had to get to a place that was peaceful, safer. Not to mention warm and sunny. So I packed up Toby and some stuff and headed here.\"\n\n\"The city?\" Akira asked, wondering. None of that sounded as if Nora was homeless and desperate. Maybe getting evicted wouldn't be a problem.\n\n\"New York,\" Nora replied, as if there was only one city.\n\nAkira blinked. Nora and Toby had come here from New York? But... \"Your furniture?\" she asked with a look around the room at the beat-up furniture.\n\n\"Oh, that was all in storage down here,\" Nora said, as the baby opened her eyes and started to fuss. \"Can you pass her to me?\"\n\nAkira, still kneeling next to the baby, looked down at the little girl's face. The sweet sleeping peaceful look was gone, replaced by an uncertain scowl. While she watched, the baby opened and closed her tiny mouth like a goldfish gasping for air. \"You want me to pick her up?\"\n\n\"I'm a little stiff,\" Nora said, sounding apologetic. Akira's doubt must have been obvious, because Nora added, \"She doesn't bite. And you won't drop her. You are going to have one of your own pretty soon, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Akira licked her lips and reached for the straps that kept the baby secure. As she fumbled with the buckle, footsteps sounded on the porch and a male voice called out Nora's name.\n\nWhere should she put her hands? Akira wondered. Under the arms? Or sideways under the legs? Weren't you supposed to hold babies' heads up? Something about their necks being wobbly? Oh, dear. She really wasn't sure she was ready for this. But as she lifted the baby out of the car seat, one hand scooping low, the other pressing against the baby's back and cupping the soft little head, a breathless smile spread across Akira's face. The baby was so light, so little, so warm and alive. Feeling her breathe and her tiny wiggle of protest at the movement was both amazing and terrifying.\n\nCarefully, still kneeling, she turned to hand the baby to Nora and paused. She'd been so engrossed in the baby, so focused on what she was doing that she'd been completely oblivious to what was going on behind her. Automatically, she pulled the baby closer, cradling her as she took in the sight of Nora locked in the embrace of a tall stranger, Toby hanging on his leg like a happy monkey, Hannah standing frozen next to the table that held the tiny Christmas tree, and Zane, a cheerful grin curving his lips, in the doorway.\n\nShe'd been right.\n\nZane had found Nick.\n\nAnd Nick and Nora weren't strangers.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\" Nick pulled his mouth away from Nora's long enough to ask, but didn't give her a chance to answer, kissing her again with renewed intensity.\n\n\"Dada, Dada,\" Toby chanted. \"Dada, we moved. To Fyorida.\"\n\nNora was half-crying, half-laughing as Nick finally let her go and pulled her down onto the couch. She cradled his face in her hands, staring into his eyes and stroking his cheeks as if she couldn't believe she was touching him. \"I knew you'd come home if I told you and it was your big chance. I didn't want to screw it up. But what are you doing here? How did you get here? What about the tour?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to miss Christmas with the two of you,\" he said. He didn't look away from Nora but his arm opened to welcome Toby as the boy clambered into his lap. \"I was on my way to New York.\"\n\n\"But what about the New Year's shows? You only had another two weeks to go.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Yeah, I have to go back for those.\"\n\n\"Nick! Are you insane?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he told her, before kissing her again. \"Although not as insane as you. When were you going to tell me about the baby?\"\n\nNora's eyes were bright but her expression contrite. \"Her due date was right after you got home and Toby was so late\u2014I figured you'd have a couple weeks to get used to the idea. I didn't think I'd be having her without you.\"\n\n\"Mama had a baby in her tummy,\" Toby offered.\n\nNick rubbed the top of Toby's head, leaving his other hand on the back of Nora's neck as he rested his forehead against hers. \"I was hoping to convince you to come back with me for the last few shows.\"\n\n\"To Australia?\" Nora's jaw dropped and her eyes widened. \"Okay, now I know you've lost your mind.\"\n\n\"Nope,\" he said, \"Just filled our bank account. We sold out all our shows in Sydney. Tom's talking money with record labels, serious money. Dropping a few thou on a spectacular New Year's Eve would have been cool. Guess maybe not this year, though, huh?\"\n\nNora's smile was radiant. \"Not this year,\" she agreed, looking toward Akira and the baby. Akira smiled back at her and stepped forward, handing over the baby with only a little regret at losing the moment.\n\nZane came to stand next to her, wrapping his arm around her and dropping his chin onto the top of her head.\n\nAkira leaned back against him. \"Why didn't you tell me?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Nora didn't mention him,\" Zane answered her quietly. \"When I realized that he was Toby's father, I didn't know if she was hiding or running away from him. I made Lucas come with me to check him out. If he was any threat to Nora... well, Hannah would have been out of luck.\"\n\n\"You could have told me what you were doing,\" she complained half-heartedly. It was hard to be angry as she looked at the little family on the couch, all doting on the baby.\n\n\"I didn't want to take the chance on upsetting Hannah until we knew for sure.\"\n\nAkira's lips quirked up. She might not like angry ghosts, but after their experience this summer when a desperate ghost had caused Akira's heart to stop beating, Zane was even warier than she was.\n\n\"And I didn't realize it would take so long,\" he added.\n\n\"Why did it?\"\n\nShe felt more than heard him yawn above her. \"Moving target. When I first touched Toby, Nick was somewhere around Atlanta. By the time I headed out, he was north of Charlotte. I realized that he was on a plane pretty quickly, but I didn't think we'd have to go all the way to New York to find him.\"\n\nNew York. Akira shook her head. Only Zane would think it made sense to hop on a plane and fly hundreds of miles away to check on whether a total stranger was a safe person for another stranger to see. \"I've never been to New York.\"\n\n\"Really?\" He sounded surprised. \"Hmm, maybe we should have our own spectacular New Year's.\"\n\nAkira started to turn into him, lifting her face to be kissed. She didn't know whether she wanted to go to New York for New Year's but she loved that he wanted to give it to her. Before she could finish turning, though, a long drawn-out gasp from across the room had her spinning back out. The sound was filled with a pain so deep that it hurt Akira just to hear it. Still standing by the tree, Hannah had her fist clenched against her mouth, tears in her eyes.\n\nWhat had happened?\n\n\"Dat is heah name?\" Toby was asking, putting a gentle finger on his sister's cheek.\n\n\"It was my mother's name,\" Nick told him. \"Your grandma. You never got to meet her, but you would have liked her. And she would have loved you.\" His tone held a hint of humor, but also a thickening of grief.\n\n\"Dat is da mean yady's name, too.\"\n\n\"My mom wasn't mean,\" Nick said, frowning. \"She was tough. Strict and\u2014well, she could be fierce. You followed her rules or else. Like some other people I know,\" he added with an exchange of glances and a smile at Nora.\n\nHa, Akira thought. She bet Nick had tried to feed Toby more than once.\n\n\"But she was absolutely fair. And she loved me. A lot. She did her best for me and she\u2026\" Nick stopped speaking and Akira could see that he was choking up. He swallowed, blinking hard a few times, before continuing. \"I wanted to make her proud, but I never got the chance.\"\n\nAkira pressed her lips together. She didn't think of her own mother often. She'd only rarely wondered what that absent stranger might have been like. But for perhaps the first time, she wondered now what her mother thought of her and whether she would have been proud.\n\n\"Stop talking, Dada,\" Toby ordered. \"You are making da mean yady sad. She is cwying now.\"\n\n\"Tell him I was always proud of him. Always,\" Hannah ordered Akira, her tears rolling freely down her face. \"Please.\"\n\nRelatives. Akira hated these conversations, but what could she do? With Zane a comforting presence against her back, she quietly relayed Hannah's message.\n\n\"Ha.\" Nick's smile was wry. \"That's a nice thought, but she hated my music. Oh, she supported it\u2014she paid for lessons, came to my school concerts, was right there for me. But she\u2014\" He put his hand up and rubbed his chin, hiding the telltale quiver of his lips.\n\nAkira frowned, confused, before she realized that Nick thought she was offering soothing platitudes, not telling him exactly what his mother was telling her.\n\n\"The mean yady,\" she said dryly, then corrected her own pronunciation, with a hasty, \"lady, is your mom and she's been waiting for you to come home so she could apologize.\"\n\nShe waited. Would he be an arguer? Would he want proof? Would he order her out of the house like Nora had? Would he tell her she was crazy and needed help?\n\nNick looked her straight in the eyes, his brown eyes steady on her own, and then his glance flickered up to Zane's face. He looked down at Toby. \"Where's Grandma, Toby?\"\n\nToby pointed at the side of the Christmas tree as Akira's eyebrows shot straight up. How unexpected. The corner of her mouth twisted in amused realization as Zane whispered in her ear, \"He did grow up here, remember. Live in Tassamara long enough and you do develop an open mind.\"\n\nLater, although not much later, she walked out of the house, hand-in-hand with Zane, feeling a quiet contentment.\n\n\"So is Hannah going to move on?\" Zane asked.\n\nAkira shrugged. \"Pretty soon, probably. But I think she'll stick around to see a little more of her grandchildren first.\"\n\n\"Living in a haunted house isn't so bad,\" Zane said tolerantly, before adding with a grin, \"Having a ghost around sure added to the excitement this week.\"\n\nAkira paused, one hand on the door of her car. \"I'm not so sure Rose is a ghost anymore,\" she said slowly. She'd tried to talk to the ghost girl yesterday, but Rose had been entirely unhelpful about the energy. All she'd wanted to talk about was seeing the baby be born. About mid-afternoon, she'd wandered off, the way she often did, Akira thought possibly to visit Nora in the hospital again.\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Zane asked, frowning.\n\n\"I wish you could have seen her,\" Akira said. \"This golden light poured out of her like she was some kind of intra-dimensional energy conduit.\"\n\n\"Intra-what?\"\n\n\"I've never seen anything like it. I've definitely never seen a ghost do anything like that before. It was amazing. I'm thinking that ghost energy, or maybe it should be called spirit energy, is on a spectrum, like electromagnetic radiation. Ghost energy, the kind that I feel, could just be a band of the spectrum, a short part of it. Like ultraviolet on the electromagnetic spectrum. And the rest of the spectrum could contain\u2014I don't even know. Other forms of energy. Other frequencies.\" Akira's words were starting to spill over one another in her enthusiasm.\n\n\"Whoa, whoa.\" Zane put a hand up in laughing protest. \"I haven't slept in two days, love. You're making me dizzy. What do you think Rose is, if she's not a ghost?\"\n\n\"I think\u2026\" Akira paused, before saying, somewhat primly, \"I think the technical term might be angel.\"\n\nZane opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then Zane put his hands on either side of Akira's face, cupping her cheeks, and bent his head to hers, taking her lips in a strong, searching kiss. \"That felt real,\" he said when he finally lifted his head.\n\nShe laughed up at him, unlocking her hands from behind his neck. \"Oh, I'm real.\"\n\n\"And you just said that you think Rose is an angel?\"\n\nShe nodded, a little uncertainly, searching his expression for any sign of doubt or disbelief or a dawning awareness that she was insane. But none of those were there.\n\nHe nodded. And then with a raised eyebrow, said, \"You know, it's been a long couple of days. You think Henry would be up for red meat for dinner tonight?\"\n\nAkira put a hand across her belly. \"I think he might like that.\"\n\n\"How about we go home, spend the day in bed, and finish it off with steak on the grill?\"\n\nAkira put a hand on his shirt front, one finger playing with a button. \"Did you ever finish the wedding invitations?\"\n\nA pained looked crossed his face. \"Ah\u2026about that\u2026\"\n\n\"I've had plenty of sleep,\" she interrupted him. \"So how about we go home, you sleep, I address invitations, and then when you've had enough sleep, we barbecue. And then we spend the rest of the weekend in bed?\"\n\nZane grinned at her. \"Woman after my own heart,\" he whispered as he bent his head to kiss her.\n\nMan who holds mine, she thought, as she kissed him back." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Lily Bard 3", + "author": "Charlaine Harris", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "My situation was as surreal as one of those slo-mo nightmares Hollywood uses to pad B movies.\n\nI was sitting in the bed of a moving Dodge Ram pickup. I was enthroned on a wobbly plastic lawn chair, thinly disguised by a red plush couch throw edged with fringe. A crowd lined both sides of the street, waving and yelling. From time to time, I dipped my hand into the white plastic bucket settled on my lap, coming up with a fistful of candy to pitch to the spectators.\n\nThough I was clothed, which I understand is not the case in many dreams, my clothes were hardly typical. I was wearing a red Santa hat with a big white ball on the end, bright new green sweats, and I had a disgusting artificial holly corsage pinned to my chest. I was trying to smile.\n\nSpotting a familiar face in the crowd, a face pasted with an unconcealed smirk, I pitched the next peppermint with deliberate accuracy. It smacked my neighbor, Carlton Cockroft, right in the middle of the chest, wiping off that smirk for at least a second.\n\nThe pickup paused, continuing a familiar and irritating pattern that had begun minutes after the parade had started lurching down Main Street. One of the bands ahead of us had stopped to blare out a Christmas song, and I had to smile and wave at the same damn people over and over until the song was finished.\n\nMy face hurt.\n\nAt least in the green sweats, with a layer of thermal underwear underneath, I was fairly warm, which was more than I could say for the girls who had enthusiastically agreed to ride on the Body Time float directly ahead. They also were wearing Santa hats, but below the hats they wore only scanty exercise outfits, since at their age making an impact was more important than staying comfortable and healthy.\n\n\"How you doing back there?\" Raphael Roundtree called, leaning out of the pickup window to give me an inquiring glance.\n\nI glared back at him. Raphael was wearing a coat, scarf, and gloves, and the heat in the cab of the truck was turned on full blast. His round brown face looked plain old smug.\n\n\"Just fine,\" I said ferociously.\n\n\"Lily, Lily, Lily,\" he said, shaking his head. \"Slap that smile back on, girl. You're gonna scare customers away, rather than pick some up.\"\n\nI cast my gaze to heaven to indicate I was asking for patience. But instead of a clear gray sky, I found myself staring at tacky fake greenery strung across the street. Everywhere I looked, the trappings of the season had taken over. Shakespeare doesn't have a lot of money for Christmas decorations, so I'd seen the same ones every holiday in the four-plus years I'd spent in this little Arkansas town. Every alternate streetlight had a big candle suspended on a curved \"candleholder.\" The other streetlights sported bells.\n\nThe town's seasonal centerpiece (since the manger scene had to be removed) was a huge Christmas tree on the courthouse lawn; the churches sponsored a big public party to decorate it. In consequence, it looked very homey rather than elegant\u2014typical of Shakespeare, come to think of it. Once we passed the courthouse, the parade would be nearly over.\n\nThere was a little tree in the pickup bed with me, but it was artificial. I'd decorated it with gold stiffened ribbon, gold ornaments, and gold and white artificial flowers. A discreet sign attached to it read, tree decorating done by appointment. Businesses and homes. This new service I was providing was definitely designed for people who'd opted for elegance.\n\nThe banners on the sides of the pickup read, Shakespeare's cleaning and errands, followed by my phone number. Since Carlton, my accountant, had advised it so strongly, I had finally made myself a business. Carlton further advised me to begin to establish a public presence, very much against my own inclinations.\n\nSo here I was in the damn Christmas parade.\n\n\"Smile!\" called Janet Shook, who was marching in place right behind the pickup. She made a face at me, then turned to the forty or so kids following her and said, \"Okay, kids! Let's Shakespearecise!\" The children, amazingly, did not throw up, maybe because none of them was over ten. They all attended the town-sponsored \"Safe After School\" program that employed Janet, and they seemed happy to obey her. They all began to do jumping jacks.\n\nI envied them. Despite my insulation, sitting still was taking its toll. Though Shakespeare has very mild winters as a rule, today was the coldest temperature for Christmas parade day in seven years, the local radio station had informed us.\n\nJanet's kids looked red-cheeked and sparkly eyed, and so did Janet. The jumping jacks had turned into a kind of dance. At least, I guessed it was. I am not exactly tuned in to popular culture.\n\nI was still stretching my lips up to smile at the surrounding faces, but it was a real strain. Relief overwhelmed me as the truck began moving again. I started tossing candy and waving.\n\nThis was hell. But unlike hell, it was finite. Eventually, the candy bucket was empty and the parade had reached its endpoint, the parking lot of Superette Grocery. Raphael and his oldest son helped me take the tree back to the travel agent's office for whom I'd decorated it, and they carted the plastic chair back to their own backyard. I'd thanked Raphael and paid him for his gas and time, though he'd protested.\n\n\"It was worth it just to see you smile that long. Your face is gonna be sore tomorrow,\" Raphael said gleefully.\n\nWhat became of the red plush throw I don't know and don't want to know.\n\nJack was not exactly sympathetic when he called me from Little Rock that night. In fact, he laughed.\n\n\"Did anyone film this parade?\" he asked, gasping with the end convulsions of his mirth.\n\n\"I hope not.\"\n\n\"Come on, Lily, loosen up,\" he said. I could still hear the humor in his voice. \"What are you doing this holiday?\"\n\nThis seemed like a touchy question to me. Jack Leeds and I had been seeing each other for about seven weeks. We were too new to take it for granted that we'd be spending Christmas together, and too unsure to have had any frank discussion about making arrangements.\n\n\"I have to go home,\" I said flatly. \"To Bartley.\"\n\nA long silence.\n\n\"How do you feel about that?\" Jack asked cautiously.\n\nI steeled myself to be honest. Frank. Open. \"I have to go to my sister Varena's wedding. I'm a bridesmaid.\"\n\nNow he didn't laugh.\n\n\"How long has it been since you saw your folks?\" he asked.\n\nIt was strange that I didn't know the answer. \"I guess maybe... six months? Eight? I met them in Little Rock one day... around Easter. It's years since I've seen Varena.\"\n\n\"And you don't want to go now?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, relieved to be able to speak the truth. When I'd been arranging my week off work, after my employers got over the shock of my asking, they'd been almost universally delighted to hear that I was going to my sister's wedding. They couldn't tell me fast enough that it was fine for me to miss a week. They'd asked about my sister's age (twenty-eight, younger than me by three years), her fianc\u00e9 (a pharmacist, widowed, with a little daughter), and what I was going to wear in the wedding. (I didn't know. I'd sent Varena some money and my size when she said she'd settled on bridesmaids' dresses, but I hadn't seen her selection.)\n\n\"So when can I see you?\" Jack asked.\n\nI felt a warm trickle of relief. I was never sure what was going to happen next with us. It seemed possible to me that someday Jack wouldn't call at all.\n\n\"I'll be in Bartley all the week before Christmas,\" I said. \"I was planning on getting back to my house by Christmas Day.\"\n\n\"Miss having Christmas at home?\" I could feel Jack's surprise echoing over the telephone line.\n\n\"I will be home\u2014here\u2014for Christmas,\" I said sharply. \"What about you?\"\n\n\"I don't have any plans. My brother and his wife asked me, but they didn't sound real sincere, if you know what I mean.\" Jack's parents had both died within the past four years.\n\n\"You want to come here?\" My face tensed with anxiety as I waited to hear his answer.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, and his voice was so gentle I knew he could tell how much it had cost me to ask. \"Will you put up mistletoe? Everywhere?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" I said, trying not to sound as relieved as I was, or as happy as I felt. I bit my lip, suppressing a lot of things. \"Do you want have a real Christmas dinner?\"\n\n\"Turkey?\" he said hopefully. \"Cornbread dressing?\"\n\n\"I can do that.\"\n\n\"Cranberry sauce?\"\n\n\"I can do that.\"\n\n\"English peas?\"\n\n\"Spinach Madeleine,\" I countered.\n\n\"Sounds good. What can I bring?\"\n\n\"Wine.\" I seldom drank alcohol, but I thought with Jack around a drink or two might be all right.\n\n\"OK. If you think of anything else, give me a call. I've got some work to finish up here within the next week, then I have a meeting about a job I might take on. So I may not get down there until Christmas.\"\n\n\"Actually, I have a lot to do right now, too. Everyone's trying to get extra cleaning done, giving Christmas parties, putting up trees in their offices.\"\n\nIt was just over three weeks until Christmas. That was a long time to spend without seeing Jack. Even though I knew I was going to be working hard the entire period, since I counted going home to the wedding as a sort of subcategory of work, I felt a sharp pang at the thought of three weeks' separation.\n\n\"That seems like a long time,\" he said suddenly.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHaving admitted that, both of us backed hastily away.\n\n\"Well, I'll be calling you,\" Jack said briskly.\n\nHe'd be sprawled on the couch in his apartment in Little Rock as he talked on the phone. His thick dark hair would be pulled back in a ponytail. The cold weather would have made the scar on his face stand out, thin and white, a little puckered where it began at the hairline close to his right eye. If Jack had met with a client today, he'd be wearing nice slacks and a sports coat, wing tips, a dress shirt, and a tie. If he'd been working surveillance, or doing the computer work that increasingly formed the bulk of a private detective's routine, he'd be in jeans and a sweater.\n\n\"What are you wearing?\" I asked suddenly.\n\n\"I thought I was supposed to ask you that.\" He sounded amused, again.\n\nI kept a stubborn silence.\n\n\"Oh, OK. I'm wearing\u2014you want me to start with the bottom or the top?\u2014Reeboks, white athletic socks, navy blue sweatpants, Jockeys, and a Marvel Gym T-shirt. I just got home from working out.\"\n\n\"Dress up at Christmas.\"\n\n\"A suit?\"\n\n\"Oh, maybe you don't have to go that far. But nice.\"\n\n\"OK,\" he said cautiously.\n\nChristmas this year was on a Friday. I had only two Saturday clients at the moment, and neither of them would be open the day after Christmas. Maybe I could get them done on Christmas morning, before Jack got here.\n\n\"Bring clothes for two days,\" I said. \"We can have Friday afternoon and Saturday and Sunday.\" I suddenly realized I'd assumed, and I took a sharp breath. \"That is, if you can stay that long. If you want to.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" he said. His voice sounded rougher, darker. \"Yes, I want to.\"\n\n\"Are you smiling?\"\n\n\"You could say so,\" he affirmed. \"All over.\"\n\nI smiled a little myself. \"OK, see you then.\"\n\n\"Where'd you say your family was? Bartley, right? I was talking to a friend of mine about that a couple of nights ago.\"\n\nIt felt strange to know he had talked about me. \"Yes, Bartley. It's in the Delta, a little north and a lot east of Little Rock.\"\n\n\"Hmmm. It'll be OK, seeing your family. You can tell me all about it.\"\n\n\"OK.\" That did sound good, realizing I could talk about it afterward, that I wouldn't come home to silence and emptiness, drag through days and days rehashing the tensions in my family.\n\nInstead of saying this to Jack, I said, \"Good-bye.\"\n\nI heard him respond as I laid the receiver down. We always had a hard time ending conversations.\n\nThere are two towns in Arkansas named Montrose. The next day, I drove to the one that had shopping.\n\nSince I no longer worked for the Winthrops, I had more free time on my hands than I could afford: That was the only reason I'd listened when Carlton had proposed the Christmas parade appearance. Until more people opted for my services, I had just about two free mornings a week. This free morning, I'd gone to Body Time for my workout (it was triceps day), come home to shower and dress, and stopped by the office of the little Shakespeare paper to place an ad in the classifieds (\"Give your wife her secret Christmas wish\u2014a maid\").\n\nAnd now here I was, involuntarily listening\u2014once again\u2014to taped Christmas carols, surrounded by people who were shopping with some air of excitement and anticipation. I was about to do what I like least to do: spend money when I had little coming in, and spend that money on clothing.\n\nIn what I thought of as my previous life, the life I'd led in Memphis as scheduler for a large cleaning service, I'd been quite a dresser. In that life, I'd had long brown hair, and lifting two twenty-pound dumbbells had made my arms tremble. I'd also been naive beyond belief. I had believed that all women were sisters under the skin, and that underneath all the crap, men were basically decent and honest.\n\nI made an involuntary sound of disgust at the memory, and the white-haired lady sitting on the bench a yard away said, \"Yes, it is a little overwhelming after a month and more, isn't it?\"\n\nI turned to look at her. Short and stout, she had chosen to wear a Christmas sweatshirt with reindeer on it and green slacks. Her shoes could have been advertised as \"comfort-plus walkers.\" She smiled at me. She was alone like I was, and she had more to say.\n\n\"They start the selling season so early, and the stores put up the decorations almost before they clear the Halloween stuff away! Takes you right out of the mood, doesn't it!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I agreed. I swung back to glance in the window, seeing my reflection... checking. Yes, I was Lily, the newer version, short blond hair, muscles like hard elastic bands, wary and alert. Strangers generally tended to address their remarks to someone else.\n\n\"It's a shame about Christmas,\" I told the old woman and walked away.\n\nI pulled the list out of my purse. It would never be shorter unless I could mark something off by making a purchase. My mother had very carefully written down all the social events included in my sister's prewedding buildup and starred all the ones I was absolutely required to attend. She had included notes on what I should wear, in case I'd forgotten what was appropriate for Bartley society.\n\nUnspoken in the letter, though I could read the words in invisible ink, was the plea that I honor my sister by wearing suitable clothes and making an effort to be \"social.\"\n\nI was a grown woman, thirty-one. I was not childish enough, or crazy enough, to cause Varena and my parents distress by inappropriate clothing and behavior.\n\nBut as I went into the best department store in the mall, as I stared over the racks and racks of clothing, I found myself completely at a loss. There were too many choices for a woman who'd simplified her life down to the bone. A saleswoman asked if she could help me, and I shook my head.\n\nThis paralysis was humiliating. I prodded my brain. I could do this. I should get...\n\n\"Lily,\" said a warm, deep voice.\n\nI followed it up, and up, to the face of my friend Bobo Winthrop. Bobo's face had lost the element of boy that had made it sweet. He was a nineteen-year-old man.\n\nWithout a thought, I put my arms around him. The last time I'd seen Bobo, he'd been involved in a family tragedy that had torn the Winthrop clan in two. He'd transferred to a college out of state, somewhere in Florida. He looked as if he'd made the most of it. He was tan, had apparently lost a little weight.\n\nHe hugged me back even more eagerly. Then as I leaned back to look at him again, he kissed me, but he was wise enough to break it off before it became an issue.\n\n\"Are you out of school for the holidays?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes, and after that I'll start back here at U of A.\" The University of Arkansas had a large campus at Montrose, though some of the Shakespeare kids preferred the biggest establishment in Fayetteville, or the Little Rock branch.\n\nWe looked at each other, in silent agreement not to discuss the reasons Bobo had left the state for a while.\n\n\"What are you doing today, Lily? Not at work?\"\n\n\"No,\" I answered shortly, hoping he wouldn't ask me to spell out the fact that his mother no longer employed me, and as a result, I'd lost a couple of other clients.\n\nHe gave me a look that I could only characterize as assessing. \"And you're here shopping?\"\n\n\"My sister's getting married. I have to go home for the wedding and the prewedding parties.\"\n\n\"So, you're here to get something to wear.\" Bobo eyed me a minute more. \"And you don't like to shop.\"\n\n\"Right,\" I said disconsolately.\n\n\"Got to go to a shower?\"\n\n\"I have a list,\" I told him, aware of how bleak my voice sounded.\n\n\"Let's see.\"\n\nI handed him the sheet of stationery.\n\n\"A shower... two showers. A dinner. Then the rehearsal dinner. The wedding. You'll be a bridesmaid?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"So she's got your dress for that?\"\n\nI nodded again.\n\n\"So, what do you need?\"\n\n\"I have a nice black suit,\" I said.\n\nBobo looked expectantly at me.\n\n\"That's it.\"\n\n\"Oh, wow, Lily,\" he said, suddenly sounding his age. \"Do you ever have shopping to do.\"\n\nThat evening I spread out my purchases on the bed. I'd had to use my charge card, but everything I'd gotten I could use for a long time.\n\nA pair of well-cut black slacks. For one shower, I'd wear them with a gold satin vest and an off-white silk blouse. For the second, I'd wear them with an electric blue silk shell and a black jacket. I could wear the shoes that went with the black suit, or a pair of blue leather pumps that had been on sale. I could wear my good black suit to the rehearsal dinner. For the dinner party I had a white dress, sleeveless, that I could wear in the winter with the black jacket, in the summer by itself. I had the correct underpinnings for each outfit, and I had bought a pair of gold hoop earrings and a big gold free-form pin. I already had diamond earrings and a diamond bar pin my grandmother had left me.\n\nThis was all thanks to Bobo's advice.\n\n\"You must have read some of Amber Jean's girls' magazines,\" I had accused him. Bobo had a younger sister.\n\n\"Nah. That's the only shopping wisdom I have to offer. 'Everything has to match or coordinate.' I guess I learned it from my mom. She has whole sections of clothes that can be mixed and matched.\"\n\nI should have remembered that. I used to clean out Beanie Winthrop's closet twice a year.\n\n\"Are you living at home?\" I had asked when he'd turned to go. I was a little hesitant about asking Bobo any questions that might pertain to his family, so strained was the Winthrop situation.\n\n\"No. I have an apartment here. On Chert Avenue. I just moved in, to be ready for the spring semester.\" Bobo had flushed, for the first time looking awkward. \"I'm trying to spend some time at home, so my folks don't feel too... ditched.\" He'd run his fingers through his floppy blond hair. \"How've you been doing? You still seeing that private detective?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Still working out?\" he'd added hastily, getting off dangerous ground.\n\nI'd nodded.\n\nHe'd hugged me again and gone about whatever his errand was, leaving me to a saleswoman named Marianna. She'd homed in on us when Bobo had joined me, and now that he had left, she was stuck with me.\n\nAfter I'd gotten over the sticker shock, it felt almost good to have new clothes. I cut off the tags and hung all the new things in the closet in the guest bedroom, spacing the hangers so the clothes wouldn't wrinkle. Days afterward, I found myself looking at them from time to time, opening the door suspiciously as if my new garments might have gone back to the store.\n\nI'd always been very careful with makeup, with my hair; I keep my legs shaved as smooth as a baby's bottom. I like to know what I look like; I like to control it. But I don't want people to turn to look at me, I don't want people to notice me. The jeans and sweats I wore to clean houses, to bathe dogs, to fill some shut-in's grocery list, acted as camouflage. Practical, cheap, camouflage.\n\nPeople would look at me when I wore my new clothes.\n\nMade uneasy by all these changes, by the prospect of going back to Bartley, I plunged myself into what work I had. I still cleaned Carrie Thrush's office every Saturday, and Carrie had mentioned she wanted me to come more often, but I had to be sure it wasn't because she thought I was hurting financially. Pity shouldn't have any part in a business arrangement, or a friendship.\n\nI had the Drinkwaters' house, and the travel agent's office, and Dr. Sizemore's office. I still cleaned Deedra Dean's apartment, and I was working more hours for Mrs. Rossiter, who had broken her arm while she was walking Durwood, her old cocker spaniel. But it wasn't enough.\n\nI did get the job of decorating two more office Christmas trees, and I did a good job on one and an outstanding job on the other, which was a very visible advertisement since it stood in the Chamber of Commerce office. I used birds and fruit for that one, and the warm, hushed colors and carefully concealed lights made the tree a little more peaceful than some of the others I saw around town.\n\nI'd quit taking the Little Rock newspaper to cut back on expenses until my client list built up. So I was in Dr. Sizemore's office, on a Tuesday afternoon, when I saw the creased section from one of the Sunday editions. I scooped it up to dump into the recycle bin, and my gaze happened to land on the headline \"Unsolved Crimes Mean No Happy Holiday.\" The paper was dated two days after Thanksgiving, which told me that one of the office staff had stuffed it somewhere and then unearthed it in her pre-Christmas cleaning.\n\nI sank down onto the edge of one of the waiting room chairs to read the first three paragraphs.\n\nIn the yearly effort to pack as many holiday-related stories as possible into the paper, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette had interviewed the families of people who had been murdered (if the murder was unsolved) or abducted (if the abductee hadn't been found).\n\nI wouldn't have continued to read the article, since it's just the kind of thing that brings back too many bad memories, if it hadn't been for the picture of the baby.\n\nThe cutline under the picture read, \"Summer Dawn Macklesby at the time of her disappearance. Summer has been missing for almost eight years.\"\n\nShe was a tiny infant in the picture, perhaps a week old. She had a little lace bow attached somehow to a scanty strand of hair.\n\nThough I knew it would make me miserable, I found myself searching for the child's name again, in the column of text. It jumped out at me about halfway through the story, past the mother of three who'd been gunned down at an automated teller on Christmas Eve and the engaged convenience store clerk raped and knifed to death on her Thanksgiving birthday.\n\n\"Eight years ago this week, Summer Dawn Macklesby was snatched from her infant seat on her parents' enclosed front porch in suburban Conway,\" the sentence began. \"Teresa Macklesby, preparing for a shopping expedition, left her infant daughter on the porch while she stepped back into the house to retrieve a package she intended to mail before Christmas. While she was in the house, the telephone rang, and though Macklesby is sure she was absent from the porch no longer than five minutes, by the time she returned Summer Dawn had vanished.\"\n\nI closed my eyes. I folded the paper so I couldn't read the rest of the story and carried it to the recycle bin and dumped it in as if it were contaminated with the grief and agony implied in that one partial story.\n\nThat night I had to walk.\n\nSome nights sleep played a cheap trick on me and hid. Those nights, no matter how tired I was, no matter what energy I needed for the day to come, I had to walk. Though these episodes were less frequent than even a year ago, they still occurred perhaps once every two weeks.\n\nSometimes I made sure nobody saw me. Sometimes I strode down the middle of the street. My thoughts were seldom pleasant on walking nights, and yet my mind could not be at peace any more than my body.\n\nI haven't ever understood it.\n\nAfter all, as I often tell myself, the Bad Thing has already happened. I do not need to fear anymore.\n\nDoesn't everyone wait for the Bad Thing? Every woman I've ever known does. Maybe men have a Bad Thing, too, and they don't admit it. A woman's Bad Thing, of course, is being abducted, raped, and knifed; left bleeding, an object of revulsion and pity to those who find her, be she dead or alive.\n\nWell, that had happened to me.\n\nSince I had never been a mother, I had never had to imagine any other disasters. But tonight I thought maybe there was a Worse Thing. The Worse Thing would be having your child taken. The Worse Thing would be years of imagining that child's bones lying in the mud in some ditch, or your child alive and being molested methodically by some monster.\n\nNot knowing.\n\nThanks to that glimpse of newspaper, I was imagining that now.\n\nI hoped Summer Dawn Macklesby was dead. I hoped she had died within an hour of her abduction. I hoped for that hour she had been unconscious. As I walked and walked in the cold night, that seemed to me to be the best-case scenario.\n\nOf course, it was possible that some loving couple who desperately wanted a little girl had just picked up Summer Dawn and had bought her everything her heart desired and enrolled her in an excellent school and were doing a great job of raising her.\n\nBut I didn't believe that stories like Summer Dawn Macklesby's could have a happy ending, just like I didn't believe that all people are basically good. I didn't believe that God gave you compensation for your griefs. I didn't believe that when one door closes, another opens.\n\nI believed that was crap." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "I was going to miss some karate classes while I was in Bartley. And the gym would be closed for Christmas Eve, Christmas, and the day after. Maybe I could do calisthenics in my room to compensate? And my sore shoulder could use a rest. So as I packed my bag to leave, I tried not to grumble any more than I already had. I had to make this visit, had to do it with grace.\n\nAs I drove to Bartley, which was about a three-hour journey east and a little north from Shakespeare, I tried to drum up some sort of pleasurable anticipation about the coming visit.\n\nIt would have been more straightforward if I hated my parents. I loved them.\n\nIt was in no way their fault that my abduction, rape, and mutilation had made such a media roar that my life, and theirs, had changed even more than was inevitable.\n\nAnd it was in no way their fault that no one I'd grown up with seemed to be able to treat me as a normal person, after that second, public, rape in the spotlight of the press and the TV cameras.\n\nNor was it my parents' fault that my boyfriend of two years had quit seeing me after the press turned their attention away from him.\n\nNone of it was their fault\u2014or mine\u2014but it had permanently altered the relationships between us. My mother and father couldn't look at me without thinking of what had happened to me. They couldn't talk to me without it coloring the most commonplace conversation. My only sibling, Varena, who had always been more relaxed and elastic than I had, had never been able to understand why I didn't recover more swiftly and get on with my life as it had been before; and my parents didn't know how to get in contact with the woman I'd become.\n\nWeary of scrambling through this emotional equivalent of a hamster exercise wheel, I was nearly glad to see the outskirts of Bartley\u2014the poor rickety homes and marginal businesses that blotch the approach to most small towns.\n\nThen I was rolling past the filling station where my parents gassed their cars; past the dry cleaner where Mother took their coats; past the Presbyterian church they'd attended all their lives, where they'd been baptized, married, christened their daughters, from which they would be buried.\n\nI turned down the familiar street. On the next block, the house I grew up in was wearing its winter coat. The rosebushes had been trimmed back. The smooth grass of the big yard was pale after the frost. The house sat in the middle of the large lot, surrounded by my father's rose beds. A huge Christmas wreath made from twined grapevines and little gold toy trumpets hung on the front door, and the decorated tree was visible in the big picture window in the living room. Mom and Dad had repainted the house when Varena and Dill got engaged, so it was gleaming white for the wedding festivities.\n\nI parked to the side of the driveway on a concrete apron my parents had poured when Varena and I began driving. We'd had friends over all the time, and my folks got tired of their own vehicles getting blocked in.\n\nI eased out of my car and looked at the house for a long moment, stretching my legs after the drive. It had seemed so big when I'd lived in it. I had always felt so lucky to grow up in this house.\n\nNow I saw a fairly typical built-in-the-fifties house, with a double garage, a living room, a den, a big kitchen, a dining room, and three bedrooms, two baths.\n\nThere was a workroom at the back of the garage for my father\u2014not that he ever did anything in it, but men needed a workroom. Just like there was a sewing machine in the corner of my parents' bedroom, because a woman ought to have a sewing machine\u2014not that my mother ever sewed more than a ripped seam. And we Bards had a full complement of family silver\u2014not that we ever ate with it. Someday, in the course of time, Varena and I would divide that silver between us, and the care of it would be on our shoulders; that heavy, ornate silver that was too fine and too much trouble to use.\n\nI got my suitcase and my hanging bag out of the backseat and went up to the front door. My feet felt heavier with every step.\n\nI was home.\n\nVarena answered the door, and we gave each other a quick look of assessment and a tentative hug.\n\nVarena was looking good.\n\nI had been the prettier when we were girls. My eyes are bluer, my nose is straighter, my lips are fuller. But that doesn't have much meaning for me anymore. I think it still matters very much to Varena. Her hair is long and naturally a redder brown than mine had been. She wears blue contacts, which intensify her eye color to an almost bizarre extent. Her nose turns up a little, and she is about two inches shorter, with bigger breasts and a bigger bottom.\n\n\"How is the wedding process?\" I asked.\n\nShe widened her eyes and made her hands tremble. On edge.\n\nBeyond her, I could see the tables that had been set up to accommodate the presents.\n\n\"Wow,\" I said, shaking my head in acknowledgment of the sight. There were three long tables (I was sure my folks had borrowed them from the church) draped in gleaming white tablecloths, and every inch was covered with consumer goods. Wineglasses, cloth napkins and tablecloths, china, silver\u2014more silver\u2014vases, letter openers, picture albums, knives and cutting boards, toasters, blankets...\n\n\"People are being so sweet,\" Varena said, and I could tell that was her stock response; not that she didn't mean it, but I was sure she'd said that over and over and over to visitors.\n\n\"Well, no one's ever had to spend anything on us, have they?\" I observed, raising my eyebrows. Neither Varena or I had ever been married, unlike some in our high school circles who'd been divorced twice by now.\n\nMy mother came into the living room from the den. She was pale, but then she always is, like me. Varena likes to tan, and my father does inevitably; he'd rather be out working in the yard than almost anything.\n\n\"Oh, sugar!\" my mother said and folded me to her. My mother is shorter than me, bone-thin, and her hair is such a faded blond it's almost white. Her eyes are blue like every member of our family's, but their color seems to have faded in the past five or six years. She's never had to wear glasses, her hearing is excellent, and she beat breast cancer ten years ago. She doesn't wear clothes that are at all trendy or fashionable, but she never looks frumpy, either.\n\nThe months, the years, seemed to dissolve. It felt like I'd seen them yesterday.\n\n\"Where's Dad?\" I asked.\n\n\"He's gone down to the church to get another table,\" Varena explained, trying not to smile too broadly. My mother suppressed the curve of her own lips.\n\n\"Is he rolling in this wedding stuff?\"\n\n\"You know it,\" Varena said. \"He just loves it. He's been waiting for this for years.\"\n\n\"This'll be the wedding of the decade in Bartley,\" I said.\n\n\"Well,\" Varena began, as we all started down the hall to my old room, \"if Mrs. Kingery can get here, it may be.\" Her voice sounded a little whiny, a bit flat, as though this worry or complaint were so long-standing she'd worn out the emotion behind it.\n\n\"Dill's mother may not come?\" I asked, incredulous. \"So, she's really old and sick... or what?\"\n\nMy mother sighed. \"We can't quite decide what the problem is,\" she explained. She stared off into the distance for a moment, as if the clue to Varena's future mother-in-law's behavior was written on the lawn outside the window.\n\nVarena had taken my hanging bag and opened the closet to hook the hangers over the rod. I put my suitcase on the triple dresser that had been my pride and joy at age sixteen. Varena looked back at me over her shoulder.\n\n\"I think,\" she said, \"that maybe Mrs. Kingery was just so crazy about Dill's first wife that she hates to see her replaced. You know, with Anna being their child, and all.\"\n\n\"Seems to me like she'd be glad that Anna's going to have such a good stepmother,\" I said, though in truth, I'd never thought what kind of stepmother Varena would make.\n\n\"That would be the sensible attitude.\" My mother sighed. \"I just don't know, and you can't ask point-blank.\"\n\nI could. But I knew they wouldn't want me to.\n\n\"She'll have to come to the rehearsal, right?\"\n\nMy mother and my sister looked anxiously at each other.\n\n\"We think she will,\" Varena said. \"But Dill can't seem to tell me what that woman will do.\"\n\nDill (Dillard) Kingery's mother was still in Dill's hometown, which I thought was Pine Bluff.\n\n\"How long have you been dating Dill?\" I asked.\n\n\"Seven years,\" Varena said, smiling brightly. This, too, was obviously a question that had been asked many times since Varena and Dill had announced their engagement.\n\n\"Dill is older than you?\"\n\n\"Yeah, he's even older than you,\" my sister said.\n\nSome things never change.\n\nWe heard my father's yell from the front door. \"One a you come help me with this damn thing?\" he bellowed.\n\nI got there first.\n\nMy father, who is stocky and short and bald as an eight ball, had hauled the long table out of the bed of his pickup to the front door and definitely needed help getting it up the steps.\n\n\"Hey, pigeon,\" he said, his smile radiant.\n\nI figured that would fade soon enough, so I hugged him while I could. Then I lifted the front of the table, which he'd propped against the iron railing that bordered the steps up to the front door.\n\n\"You sure that's not too heavy for you?\" Dad fussed. He had always had the delusion that the attack I'd endured somehow had made me weak internally, that I was now frail in some invisible manner. The fact that I could bench-press 120 pounds, sometimes more, had no influence on this delusion.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I said.\n\nHe picked up the rear of the table, which was the kind with metal legs that fold underneath for easy carrying. With a little maneuvering, we got it up the steps and into the living room. While I held the table on its side, he pulled out the metal legs and locked them into place. We swung the table upright. The whole time he worried out loud about me doing too much, straining myself.\n\nI began to get that tight, hot feeling behind my eyes.\n\nMy mother appeared in the nick of time with yet another spotless white tablecloth. Without speaking she shook it out. I took the loose end, and together we spread it evenly over the table. My father talked the whole time, about the number of wedding presents Varena and Dill had gotten, about the number of wedding invitations they'd sent, about the acceptances they'd received, about the reception...\n\nI eyed him covertly while we transferred some of the crowded presents to the new table. Dad didn't look good. His face seemed redder than it should have been, his legs seemed to be giving him pain, and his hands shook a little. I knew he'd been diagnosed with high blood pressure and arthritis.\n\nThere was an awkward pause, once we'd gotten our little task accomplished.\n\n\"Ride over to my apartment with me and see the dress,\" Varena offered.\n\n\"OK.\"\n\nWe got in Varena's car for the short drive over to her apartment, which was a small yellow cottage to the side of a big old yellow house where Emory and Meredith Osborn lived with their little girl and a new baby, Varena explained.\n\n\"When the Osborns bought this house from old Mrs. Smitherton\u2014she had to go into Dogwood Manor, did I tell you?\u2014I was worried they'd raise the rent, but they didn't. I like them both, not that I see them that much. The little girl is cute, always got a bow in her hair. She plays with Anna sometimes. Meredith keeps Anna and the O'Sheas' little girl after school, now and then.\"\n\nI thought I remembered that the O'Sheas were the Presbyterian minister and his wife. They'd come after I'd begun living in Shakespeare.\n\nVarena was chattering away, as if she could hardly wait to fill me in on all the details of her life. Or as if she were uncomfortable with me.\n\nWe pulled into the driveway and passed the larger house to park in front of Varena's place. It was a copy of the house in miniature, done in pale yellow siding with dark green shutters and white trim.\n\nA little girl was playing the yard, a thin child with long brown hair. Sure enough, a perky red-and-green bow was clipped right above her bangs. On this cold day, she was wearing a sweatsuit topped by a coat and earmuffs, but still she looked chilly. She waved as Varena got out of her car.\n\n\"Hey, Miss Varena,\" she called politely. She held a ball in her hands. When I got out of the passenger's door, she stared at me with curiosity.\n\n\"Eve, this is my sister, Lily.\" Varena turned to me. \"Eve has a sister, too, a new one.\"\n\n\"What's her name?\" I asked, since that seemed indicated. I am very uneasy around children.\n\n\"Jane Lilith,\" Eve mumbled.\n\n\"That's pretty,\" I said, because I couldn't think of anything else to say.\n\n\"Is your sister taking a nap right now?\" Varena asked.\n\n\"Yeah, and my mom too,\" the girl said forlornly.\n\n\"Come in and see my dress,\" Varena invited.\n\nEve really brightened up. Varena seemed to have a way with children. We trailed into the little front room of the house and followed Varena back to her bedroom. The closet door was open, and the wedding dress, swathed in plastic, was hanging on a special hanger that fitted over the top of the door.\n\nWell, it was white and it was a wedding dress.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" I said instantly. I am not stupid.\n\nEve was awestruck. \"Oooo,\" she said breathlessly.\n\nVarena laughed, and as I looked at my sister, I saw how warm and responsive her face was, how good-natured she looked. \"I'm glad you like it,\" she said and went on talking to the child in an easy way that was totally beyond me.\n\n\"Can you pick me up so I can see the scarf?\" Eve asked Varena.\n\nI looked where the child was pointing. The veil, yards and yards of it, attached to an elaborate sort of tiara, was in a separate bag attached to the one holding the dress.\n\n\"Oh, honey, you're too big for me to pick up,\" Varena said, shaking her head. I could feel my eyebrows crawl up. Was it possible Varena couldn't lift this girl? I assessed the child. Seventy-five pounds, tops. I squatted, wrapped my arms around her hips, and lifted.\n\nEve squealed with surprise and delight. She turned to look down at me.\n\n\"Can you see?\" I asked.\n\nEve examined the veil, admired the glittering sequined tiara, and went all dreamy-eyed for a minute or two.\n\n\"You can put me down now,\" she said eventually, and I gently lowered her to the floor. The girl turned to give me a long stare of evaluation.\n\n\"You're really strong,\" she said admiringly. \"I bet nobody messes with you.\"\n\nI could practically taste Varena's sudden silence.\n\n\"No,\" I told the little girl. \"Nobody messes with me now.\"\n\nEve's narrow face turned thoughtful. She thanked Varena for showing her the dress and veil in a perfectly polite way, but she seemed almost abstracted as she said she'd better be getting home.\n\nVarena saw Eve out. \"Oh, Dill's here!\" she exclaimed in a happy voice. I stared at the frothy white construction of a dress for a moment more before I followed Varena to the living room.\n\nI'd known Dill Kingery since he moved to Bartley. He'd just begun dating Varena when the whole eruption in my life had occurred. He'd been a great solace to my sister during that time, when the whole family had needed all the help we could get.\n\nThey'd continued dating ever since. It had been a long engagement, long enough for Varena to bear a good amount of teasing from her coworkers at the tiny Bartley hospital.\n\nLooking at Dill now, I wondered why he'd dragged his feet. I didn't think he'd been beating other women off with a stick. Dill was perfectly nice and perfectly pleasant, but you wouldn't turn to look at him twice on the street. My sister's fianc\u00e9 had thinning sandy hair, attractive brown eyes, wire-rimmed glasses, and a happy smile. His daughter, Anna, was another skinny little eight-year-old, with thick, shoulder-length brown hair that was lighter than her father's. Anna had her dad's eyes and smile. Anna's mother had died when Anna was about eighteen months old, Dill had told us, in a car accident.\n\nI watched while Anna hugged Varena. She was about to run to play with Eve when Dill stopped her. \"Say hi to your aunt Lily,\" he said firmly.\n\n\"Hey, Aunt Lily,\" Anna said and gave me a casual wave of the hand, which I returned. \"Can I play with Eve now, Daddy?\"\n\n\"OK, sweetie,\" Dill said, and the two girls clattered outside while Dill turned to me to give me a hug. I had to endure it, so I did, but I'm not a casual toucher. And I hadn't quite adjusted to being \"Aunt Lily.\"\n\nDill asked me the usual questions you ask of someone you haven't seen in while, and I managed to answer civilly. I was tensing up already, and nothing had happened to make me so. What was wrong with me? I stared out the front window while Dill and my sister talked over the plans for the evening. Tonight, I gathered, Dill was attending his bachelor dinner, while Varena and I and Mother were going to a wedding shower.\n\nAs I watched the two little girls playing on the front lawn, heaving the beach ball back and forth between them and running a lot, I tried to recall playing with Varena like that. Surely we had? But I couldn't dredge up a single recollection.\n\nWithout asking me, Dill told Varena he'd run me home so she could start getting ready. I looked at my watch. If Varena needed three hours to get ready for a party, she needed help, in my opinion. But Varena seemed pleased with Dill's offer, so I went outside to stand by Dill's Bronco. A tiny, thin woman had come outside of the bigger house to call to Eve.\n\n\"Hey,\" she said when she noticed me.\n\n\"Hello,\" I said.\n\nEve came running up, Anna in tow.\n\n\"This is Varena's sister, Mama,\" she said. \"She came for the wedding. Miss Varena showed me her dress, and Miss Lily picked me up so I could see the veil. You wouldn't believe how strong Miss Lily is! I bet she can lift a horse!\"\n\n\"Oh, my goodness,\" said Eve's mama, her thin face transformed by a sweet smile. \"I better say hello, then. I'm Eve's mother, as I'm sure you figured. Meredith Osborn.\"\n\n\"Hello again,\" I said. \"Lily Bard.\" This woman had just had a baby, according to Varena, but she looked no larger than a child herself. Losing \"baby weight\" was not going to be a problem for Meredith Osborn. I didn't think Meredith Osborn was over thirty-one, my age, and she might be even younger.\n\n\"Can you pick us both up, Miss Lily?\" Eve asked, and my niece-to-be suddenly looked much more interested in me.\n\n\"I think so,\" I said and bent my knees. \"One on either side, now!\"\n\nThe girls each picked a side, and I hooked my arms around them and stood, making sure I was steady. The girls were squealing with excitement. \"Hold still,\" I reminded them, and they stopped the thrashing that I had worried would topple us all over onto the driveway.\n\n\"We're queens of the world,\" Anna shouted extravagantly, sweeping her arm to indicate her turf. \"Look at how high up we are!\"\n\nDill had been talking to Varena in the doorway, but now he glanced over to find out what Anna was doing. His face looked almost comical with surprise when he saw the girls.\n\nWith the anxious smile of someone who is trying not to panic, he strode over. \"Better get down, sweetie! You're a big load for Miss Lily.\"\n\n\"They're both small,\" I said mildly and surrendered Anna to her dad. I swung Eve in front of me and set her down gently. She grinned up at me. Her mother was looking at her with that smile of love women get when they look at their kids. A little mewling sound came from the house. \"I hear your sister crying,\" Meredith Osborn said wearily. \"We better go in and see. Good-bye, Miss Bard, nice to meet you.\"\n\nI nodded at Meredith and gave Eve a little smile. Her brown eyes, peering up at me, looked enormous. She grinned at me, a smile stretching from one ear to another, and dashed in after her mother.\n\nAnna and her father were already in the Bronco, so I climbed in, too. Dill chatted all the way back to my parents' home, but I half tuned him out. I had already talked to more people today than I normally spoke to in three or four days in Shakespeare. I was out of the habit of chitchat.\n\nI got out at my folks' with a nod to Dill and Anna and strode into the house. My mother was fluttering around the kitchen, trying to get something ready for us to eat before we went to the shower. My dad was in the bathroom getting ready for the bachelor dinner.\n\nMy mother was worried that some of Dill's friends might get carried away and have a stripper perform at the party. I shrugged. My father wouldn't be mortally offended.\n\n\"It's your dad's blood pressure I'm really worried about,\" Mom said with a half smile. \"If a naked woman popped out of a cake, no telling what might happen!\"\n\nI poured iced tea and set the glasses on the table. \"It doesn't seem too likely that anyone will do that,\" I said, because she was looking for reassurance. \"Dill's not a kid, and it's not his first marriage. I don't think any of his local friends are likely to get that carried away.\" I sat down at my place.\n\n\"You're right,\" Mom said with some relief. \"You always have such good sense, Lily.\"\n\nNot always.\n\n\"Are you... seeing anyone... now, honey?\" Mom asked gently.\n\nI stared up at her as she hovered over the table, plates in her hands. I almost said no automatically.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe fleeting look of sheer relief and pleasure that flashed across my mother's pale, narrow face was so intense I felt like taking back my yes. I was feeling my way with Jack every hour we were together, and to have our relationship classified as a standard dating situation made me horribly anxious.\n\n\"Can you tell me a little about him?\" Mom's voice was calm, her hands steady as she set the plates down at our places. She sat down across from me and began to stir sugar into her tea.\n\nI had no idea what to say.\n\n\"Oh, that's all right, I don't want to intrude on your privacy,\" she said after a moment, flustered.\n\n\"No,\" I said just as quickly. It seemed awful to me that we were so leery of each other's every word and silence. \"No, that's... no, it's OK. He...\" I pictured Jack, and a tide of longing swept over me, so intense and painful that it took my breath away. After it ebbed, I said, \"He's a private detective. He lives in Little Rock. He's thirty-five.\"\n\nMy mother put her sandwich down on her plate and began smiling. \"That's wonderful, honey. What's his name? Has he been married before?\"\n\n\"Yes. His name is Jack Leeds.\"\n\n\"Any kids?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"That's easier.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Though I know little Anna so well now, at first when Dill and Varena began dating... Anna was so little, not even toilet trained, and Dill's mother didn't seem to want to come to take care of Anna, though she was a cute little toddler...\"\n\n\"That worried you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she admitted, nodding her faded blond head. \"Yes, it did. I didn't know if Varena could handle it. She never enjoyed baby-sitting very much, and she never talked about having babies, like most girls do. But she and Anna seemed to take to each other just fine. Sometimes she gets fed up with Anna's little tricks, and sometimes Anna reminds Varena that she isn't her real mother, but for the most part they get along great.\"\n\n\"Dill wasn't in the car wreck that killed his wife?\"\n\n\"No, it was a one-car accident. Evidently, Judy, his wife, had just dropped off Anna at a sitter's.\"\n\n\"That was before Dill moved here?\"\n\n\"Yes, just a few months before. He'd been living up northwest of Little Rock. He says he felt he just couldn't bear to raise Anna there, every day having to pass the spot where his wife died.\"\n\n\"So he moves to a town where he doesn't know a soul, where he doesn't have any family to help him raise Anna.\" I spoke before I thought.\n\nMy mother gave me a sharp look. \"And we're mighty glad he did,\" she said firmly. \"The pharmacy here was up for sale, and it's been wonderful to have it open, so we have a choice.\" There was a chain pharmacy in Bartley, too.\n\n\"Of course,\" I said, to keep the peace.\n\nWe finished our meal in silence. My father stomped through on his way out the kitchen door to his car, grousing the whole time about not fitting in at a bachelor dinner. We could tell he was really gleeful about being invited. He had a wrapped present tucked under his arm, and when I asked what it was, his face turned even redder. He pulled on his topcoat and slammed the back door behind him without answering.\n\n\"I suspect he bought one of those nasty gag gifts,\" Mom said with a little smile as she listened to Father back out of the driveway.\n\nI loved getting surprised by my mother. \"I'll do the dishes while you get ready,\" I said.\n\n\"You need to try on your bridesmaid dress!\" she said abruptly as she was rising to leave the kitchen.\n\n\"Right now?\"\n\n\"What if we need to take it up?\"\n\n\"Oh... all right.\" This was not a moment I'd anticipated with any pleasure. Bridesmaids' dresses are notorious for being unusable, and I'd paid for this one as a good bridesmaid should. But I hadn't seen it yet. I had a horrible, wincing moment of picturing the dress as red velvet with fake fur trim to suit the Christmas motif.\n\nI should have had more trust in Varena. The dress, which was hanging in my bedroom closet swathed in plastic like Varena's own dress, was deep burgundy velvet, with a band of matching satin ribbon sewed under the breasts. In back, where the edges of the ribbon came together, there was a matching bow\u2014but it was detachable. The dress had a high neckline but was cut low in the back. My sister didn't want her bridesmaids demure, that was for sure.\n\n\"Try it on,\" Mother urged. I could tell she wouldn't be happy until I did. With my back to her, I pulled off my shirt and wriggled out of my shoes and jeans. But I had to turn to face her to get the dress, which she'd been divesting of its plastic bag.\n\nEvery time, the impact of my scars hit her in the heart. She took a deep, ragged breath and handed me the dress, and I got it over my head as quickly as possible. I turned so she could zip me, and together we looked at it in the mirror. Both our pairs of eyes went immediately to the neckline. Perfect. Nothing showed. Thank you, Varena.\n\n\"It looks beautiful,\" Mother said stoutly. \"Stand up straight, now.\" (As if I slouched.) The dress did fit well, and who doesn't love the feel of velvet?\n\n\"What kind of flowers are we carrying?\"\n\n\"The bridesmaids' bouquets are going to be long sprays of glads and some other stuff,\" Mother said, who strictly left the gardening to my father. \"You're the maid of honor, you know.\"\n\nVarena hadn't seen me in three years.\n\nThis wasn't just a wedding, then. This was a full-scale family reconciliation.\n\nI was willing, but I didn't know if I was able. Plus, I hadn't been to a wedding in a long time.\n\n\"Do I have to do anything special?\"\n\n\"You have to carry the ring Varena's giving Dill. You have to take her bouquet while she's saying her vows.\" Mom smiled at me, and her washed-blue eyes crinkled around the corners of her eyelids. When my mother smiled, her whole face smiled with her. \"You're lucky she didn't pick a dress with a ten-foot train, because you'd have to turn it around for her before she leaves the church.\"\n\nI thought I could remember the ring and the bouquet.\n\n\"I'll have to thank her for the honor,\" I said, and Mom's face sagged for just a minute. She thought I was being sarcastic.\n\n\"I mean it,\" I told her, and I could almost feel her relax.\n\nHad I been so frightening, so unpredictable, so rude?\n\nWhen I'd worked my way carefully out of the dress, and pulled my T-shirt back on, I patted my mother gently on the shoulder as she made sure the dress was absolutely even on its padded hanger.\n\nShe smiled fleetingly at me, and then we went back to the kitchen to clean up." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "I wore the off-white blouse, gold vest, and black pants to the shower. I buttoned the blouse all the way up to the neck. My makeup was light and perfect, and my hair fluffed out in the right way. I looked fine, I decided, appropriate. I worked on relaxing, buckled into the backseat of my mother's car.\n\nWe picked up Varena on the way. This was at least her second shower, but she was as excited and pleased as though celebrating her forthcoming marriage was an original idea.\n\nWe drove across town to the home of the shower hostess, Margie Lipscom. Margie was another nurse at the little Bartley hospital, which was always threatened with closing or being closed. Margie was married to one of the more prominent lawyers in Bartley, which was actually not saying much. Bartley is a Delta town, and in this phase of its existence, that means poor.\n\nIt meant that at least seventy percent of the town's population was on welfare.\n\nWhen I'd been growing up, it had just meant that Bartley was flat. You don't know what flat is until you've lived in the Delta.\n\nI missed the low, rolling hills around Shakespeare. I missed the ratty Christmas decorations. I missed my house. I missed my gym.\n\nI would have given anything to be selfish enough to jump in my car and drive home.\n\nI took slow, deep breaths, like I did before I attempted to lift a weight that was a real challenge. Like I did before we sparred in karate class.\n\nMom drove past Bartley's dilapidated motel, and I glanced into its U of rooms. There was a car parked there\u2014 that, in itself, was nearly amazing\u2014and it looked like... my heart began to stutter in an uncomfortable way.\n\nI shook my head. Couldn't be.\n\nWe parked on the street in front of the white-painted brick house all lit up like a birthday cake. There was a white-and-silver paper wedding bell fixed to the front door. A stout redhead stood just within the foyer... Margie Lipscom. I'd known her as a plump brunette.\n\nMy mother got patted, my sister got hugged, and I was greeted with a shriek.\n\n\"Oh, Lily! Girl, you look beautiful!\" Margie exclaimed. She grabbed me and embraced me. I endured it. Margie was my age, had never been a particular friend of mine; she had grown closer to my sister when they began working together. Margie had always been a hooter and a hugger. She was going to fuss extra over me now, because she felt sorry for me.\n\n\"Isn't she even prettier, Frieda?\" Margie said to my mother. Overcompensating for her discomfort.\n\n\"Lily has always been lovely,\" my mother said calmly.\n\n\"Well, let's go see everyone!\" Margie grabbed my hand and led me into the living room. I was biting the inside of my mouth. I was having a little flutter of panic and anger, the sort of nervous spasm I hadn't had in a long time. A long, long time.\n\nI found a smile and fixed it on my face.\n\nAfter I'd nodded to everyone and said, \"Tell you later,\" in answer to almost every query, I was able to sit in a straight chair that had been crammed into a corner of the crowded living room. After that, all I had to do was aim a pleasant look in the direction of the loudest speaker, and I was fine.\n\nThis was a lingerie shower, and I'd gotten Varena a present when I'd shopped for myself in Montrose. She hadn't expected a gift from me, hadn't noticed me bring it into the house. She looked up at me in surprise when she read the card on the front. I may have imagined it, but she looked a little apprehensive.\n\nMy gift was a nightgown, full-length, with spaghetti straps and lace panels\u2014sheer lace panels\u2014over the breasts. It was black. It was beautiful. It was really, really sexy. As Varena was ripping off the paper, I was suddenly convinced I'd made a terrible mistake. The most daring garment Varena had received so far was a tiger-print teddy, and there had been some red faces over that.\n\nWhen Varena shook out the gown and held it up, there was a moment of silence, during which I decided I might as well sneak out the back way. Then Varena said, \"Wow. This is for the wedding night.\" And there was a chorus of \"Oooo\" and \"Oh, boy!\"\n\n\"Lily, this is beautiful,\" Varena said directly. \"And I bet Dill's gonna thank you, too!\"\n\nThere was a chorus of laughter, and then the next gift was passed to my sister to open.\n\nI relaxed and coasted on autopilot for the rest of the evening.\n\nDuring the punch and cakes, the talk turned to Bartley's purse snatcher. This seemed an urban sort of crime for Bartley, so I paid attention. Margie was saying, \"And he stole Diane's purse right off her arm and ran off with it!\"\n\n\"Did she get a good look at him?\" the minister's wife asked. Lou O'Shea was a buxom brunette with a ski-jump nose and intelligent eyes. I'd never met her before. I hadn't been to church, in Bartley or anywhere else, in years.\n\n\"Just a black guy, medium height,\" Margie said. \"Could be a hundred people.\"\n\n\"She's all right?\" my mother asked.\n\n\"Well, he knocked her down to the sidewalk, so she had some scrapes and bruises. It could've been a lot worse.\"\n\nAfter a second's thoughtful pause, a few eyes slid in my direction. I was the worse it could have been.\n\nBut I was used to that. I kept my face blank, and the little moment passed. A purse snatching did not seem as remarkable as it would have a few years ago. Now, with gang presence and drugs in every tiny town up and down the interstate and all in between, what happened to Diane Dykeman, a sales clerk at one of the local clothing stores, didn't seem so bad. She seemed lucky to be unhurt, rather than unfortunate to have her purse snatched at all.\n\nAfter a tedious two and a half hours we drove home, taking a different route this time since we were giving a lift to Lou O'Shea, whose husband had dropped her off on his way to a meeting. The Presbyterian manse was a large redbrick home that matched the adjacent church. I half listened to the backseat conversation between Varena and Lou, enough to gather that Lou, like Meredith Osborn, had an eight-year-old girl and another, younger child. When we pulled into the driveway, Lou seemed reluctant to get out.\n\n\"I'm afraid it doesn't make Krista any fonder of Luke, him crying so much,\" Lou told us with a heavy sigh. \"She's not too enthusiastic about her little brother right now.\"\n\n\"Krista is Anna's age, they play together a lot,\" Varena reminded me.\n\n\"It'll all straighten out,\" my mother said in her soothing way. \"Sooner or later you'll find out why Luke cries all night, and he'll stop. And then Krista will forget all about it. She's a smart little girl, Lou.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Lou said instantly, back on her mettle as a minister's wife. \"Thanks for the lift. I'll see you-all tomorrow afternoon!\"\n\nWhen we were driving away, Varena said, \"Lou'll be coming to the rehearsal dinner tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"Isn't it traditional to have the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding?\" I didn't want to sound critical, but I was faintly curious.\n\n\"Yes. Dill had originally scheduled it for that night,\" Mother said. I was being subtly reminded that the groom's family had the responsibility for the rehearsal dinner. \"But Sarah May's was already booked for the two evenings before the wedding! So we just moved it to three nights, and the couple giving the supper for Dill and Varena rescheduled it to the night before the wedding, bless them.\"\n\nI nodded, hardly paying attention. I was absolutely confident I would be told what to do, when. I found myself wanting to be alone so badly I could taste it. When we got to Varena's, I unloaded the shower presents with great dispatch, and at my folks' house, I said a brief good-night to Mom before heading for my room.\n\nMy father hadn't yet gotten home from the bachelor party. I hoped he wasn't drinking and smoking cigars. His blood pressure would soar.\n\nI sat in the little chair in my room and read for a long time, a biography I'd brought with me. Then I hooked my feet under the bed and did sit-ups, I dropped and did pushups, and I did eighty leg lifts. After that, it was time for a relaxing shower. I noticed that my father had come in at some point and turned out the remaining lights.\n\nBut even after the hot shower, I felt itchy. I couldn't walk in Bartley. People would talk about my family. The police weren't used to me. They might stop me\u2014if I saw any. The Bartley police force was not large.\n\nI pushed the temptation away and forced myself to climb in the bed. I worked three crossword puzzles in a book I found in the bedside table drawer. Somehow, trying to think of a five-letter word meaning an earth-covered Indian dwelling did the trick. Finally, I was able to draw a curtain on a very long day.\n\nUnfortunately, the next was more of the same.\n\nBefore noon, I decided that everyone in my family should have had to go to work until an hour before the wedding.\n\nMy father had taken two weeks' vacation from the electric company. Since my mother was a housewife, she was always at work\u2014but still in the house, constantly thinking of things that just had to be done. Varena had just taken three weeks' leave from her job at the hospital, and even Dill was often leaving the drugstore to his normally part-time assistant, a young mother who was also a pharmacist.\n\nMore presents arrived, to be unwrapped and admired and entered on the list. More thank-you notes had to be written. The two other bridesmaids had to stop by and admire and check on last-minute plans. The minister, Jess O'Shea, came in for a minute to verify a couple of things. He had smooth dark blond hair and was quietly good-looking in a blocky, square-jawed way: I hoped he was as good as he was handsome, because I'd always imagined that ministers were prime targets for neurotic\u2014or just hopeful\u2014members of their congregation.\n\nHis little girl was in tow. Chunky Krista, whose hair was the same dark brown as her mother's but not as perfectly smooth, was sleepy-eyed and cross with her baby brother's nocturnal activity, just as Lou had predicted. Krista was in a whiny mood.\n\n\"Luke cried all night,\" she said sullenly when someone asked her for the third time where her brother was.\n\n\"Oh, Krista!\" one of the other bridesmaids said disapprovingly. Varena's lifelong best friend, Tootsie Monahan, was blond and round-faced and low on brain cells. \"How can you say that about a little kid like Luke? Toddlers are so cute.\"\n\nI saw Krista's face flush. Tootsie was pushing the old guilt button hard. I'd been leaning against the wall in the living room. I shoved off and maneuvered myself closer to the little girl.\n\n\"Varena cried all night when she was baby,\" I told Krista very quietly.\n\nKrista looked up at me unbelievingly. Her round hazel eyes, definitely her best feature, fastened on me with every appearance of skepticism. \"Did not,\" she said tentatively.\n\n\"Did too.\" I nodded firmly and drifted into the kitchen, where I managed to sneak Krista some sort of carbonated drink that she really enjoyed. She probably wasn't supposed to have it. Then I wandered around the house, from time to time retreating to my room and shutting the door for ten minutes. (That was the length of time, I'd found from trial and error, before someone missed me and came to see how I was, what I was doing.)\n\nVarena popped her head in my door about 12:45 to ask me if I'd go with her to the doctor's. \"I need to go in to pick up my birth-control pill prescription, but I want Dr. LeMay to check my ears. The right one is feeling a little achy, and I'm scared it'll be a full-blown infection by the wedding day. Binnie said come on in, he'd see me before the afternoon patients stacked up.\"\n\nOne of the perks of being a nurse was the quick in-and-out you got at the local doctors' offices, Varena had told me years ago. As long as I could remember, Varena had suffered from allergies, which frequently caused ear infections. She had always developed them at the most inconvenient times. Like four days before her wedding.\n\nI followed her out to her car with a sense of release. \"I know you need to get out of the house,\" Varena said, giving me a little sideways glance. We pulled out of the driveway and began the short hop to Dr. LeMay's office.\n\n\"Is it that obvious?\"\n\n\"Only to someone who knows you,\" Varena said ruefully. \"Yes, Lily, it's like seeing a tiger in a cage at the zoo. Back and forth, back and forth, giving all the people who walk by that ferocious stare.\"\n\n\"Surely not that bad,\" I said anxiously. \"I don't want to upset them.\"\n\n\"I know you don't. And I'm glad to see you caring.\"\n\n\"I never stopped.\"\n\n\"You could have fooled me.\"\n\n\"I just didn't have the extra...\" Staying sane had taken all the energy I had. Trying to reassure other people had been simply impossible.\n\n\"I think I understand, finally,\" Varena said. \"I'm sorry I brought it up. Mom and Dad know, better than me, that you care about them.\"\n\nI was being forgiven for something I hadn't done, or at least had done only in Varena's opinion. But she was making an effort. I would make an effort, too.\n\nDr. LeMay was still based in the same little building in which he'd practiced medicine his entire career, all forty years of it. He must be nearing retirement age, his nurse Binnie Armstrong, too. They'd been a team for twenty-five years, I figured.\n\nVarena pulled into one of the angled parking spots, and we went down the narrow sidewalk to the front door. A matching door, the one that had been labeled \"Blacks Only\" at the beginning of Dr. LeMay's practice, had been replaced by a picture window. In the past five years, a set of bars had been installed across the vulnerable glass. Kind of wrapped up Bartley's history in a nutshell, I decided.\n\nThe door had been painted blue to match the eaves, but the paint had already chipped to show a long-familiar shade of green underneath. I twisted the knob and pushed, stepping in ahead of Varena.\n\nThe little building was oddly silent. No phones ringing, no copier running, no radio playing, no piped-in music.\n\nI turned to look at my sister. Something was wrong. But Varena's gaze slid away from mine. She wasn't going to admit it, yet.\n\n\"Binnie!\" she called too cheerfully. \"Lily and I are here! Come see her.\" She stared at the closed door on the other side of the waiting room, the door leading back to the examining rooms and offices. The glass that enclosed the receptionist's cubicle remained empty.\n\nWe heard a faint, terrible sound. It was the sound of someone dying. I had heard it before.\n\nI took six steps across the waiting room and opened the second door. The familiar hall, with three rooms to the right and three rooms to the left, was now floored with imitation wood-pattern linoleum instead of the speckled beige pattern I remembered, I thought incongruously.\n\nThen I noticed the advancing rivulet of blood, the only movement in the hall. I traced it, not really wanting to find the source, but in that small space it was all too obvious. A woman in a once-white uniform lay in the doorway of the middle room on the right.\n\n\"Binnie,\" screamed Varena, her hands flying up to her face. But then my sister remembered that she was a nurse, and she was instantly on her knees by the bloody woman. It was hard to discern the contours of Binnie Armstrong's face and head, she was so bludgeoned. It was from her throat the noise had come.\n\nWhile Varena knelt by her, trying to take her pulse, Binnie Armstrong died. I watched her whole body relax in final abandonment.\n\nI glanced in the door to the right, the one to the receptionist's little office. Clean and empty. I looked in the room to the left, an examining room. Clean and empty. I moved carefully down the hall, while my sister did CPR on the dead nurse, and I cautiously craned around the door of the next room on the left, another examining room. Empty. The doorway Binnie lay in led to the tiny lab and storage room. I stepped carefully past my sister and found Dr. LeMay in the last room to the right, his office.\n\n\"Varena,\" I said sharply.\n\nVarena looked up, dabbled with blood from the corpse.\n\n\"Binnie's dead, Varena.\" I nodded in the direction of the office. \"Come check Dr. LeMay.\"\n\nVarena leaped to her feet and took a couple of steps to stare in the door. Then she was moving to the other side of the desk to take his pulse but shaking her head as she went.\n\n\"He was killed at his desk,\" she said, as though that made it worse.\n\nDr. LeMay's white hair was clotted with blood. It was pooled on the desk where his head lay. His glasses were askew, ugly black-framed trifocals, and I wanted so badly to set them square on his face\u2014as if, when I did, he would see again. I had known Dr. LeMay my whole life. He had delivered me.\n\nVarena touched his hand, which was resting on the desk. I noticed in a stunned, slow way that it was absolutely clean. He had not had a chance to fight back. The first blow had been a devastating one. The room was full of paper, files and claim forms and team physicals... most of it now spotted with blood.\n\n\"He's gone,\" Varena whispered, not that there had been any doubt.\n\n\"We need to get out of here,\" I said, my voice loud and sharp in the little room with its awful sights and smells.\n\nAnd we stared at each other, our eyes widening with a sudden shared terror.\n\nI jerked my head toward the front door, and Varena scooted past me. She ran out while I waited to see if anything moved.\n\nI was the only live person in the office.\n\nI followed Varena out.\n\nShe was already across the street at the State Farm Insurance office, pulling open the glass door and lifting the receiver off the phone on the receptionist's desk. That stout and permed lady, wearing a bright red blouse and a Christmas corsage, was looking up at Varena as if she were speaking Navaho into the telephone. Within two minutes a police car pulled up in front of Dr. LeMay's office, and a tall, thin black man got out.\n\n\"You the one called in?\" he asked.\n\n\"My sister, in the office over there.\" I nodded toward the plate-glass window, through which Varena could be seen sitting in the client's chair, sobbing. The woman with the corsage was bending over her, offering Varena some tissues.\n\n\"I'm Detective Brainerd,\" the man said reassuringly, as though I'd indicated I'd thought he might be an imposter. \"Did you go in the building here?\" Yes.\n\n\"Did you see Dr. LeMay and his nurse?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And they're dead.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Is there anyone else in the building?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"So, is there a gas leak, or was there a fire smoldering, maybe smoke inhalation...?\"\n\n\"They were both beaten.\" My gaze skimmed the top of the old, old gum trees lining the street. \"To death.\"\n\n\"Okay, now. I'll tell you what we're going to do here.\"\n\nHe was extremely nervous, and I didn't blame him one bit.\n\n\"You're gonna stay right here, ma'am, while I go in there and take a look. Don't go anywhere, now.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nI waited by the police car, the cold gray day pinching my face and hands.\n\nThis is a world of carnage and cruelty: I had momentarily put that aside in the false security of my hometown, in the optimistic atmosphere of my sister's marriage.\n\nI began to detach from the scene, to float away, escaping this town, this building, these dead. It had been a long time since I'd retreated like this, gone to the remote place where I was not responsible for feeling.\n\nA young woman was standing in front of me in a paramedic's uniform.\n\n\"Ma'am? Ma'am? Are you all right?\" Her dark, anxious face peered into mine, her black hair stiff, smooth, and shoulder length under a cap with a caduceus patch on it.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Officer Brainerd said you had seen the bodies.\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Are you... maybe you better come sit down over here, ma'am.\"\n\nMy eyes followed her pointing finger to the rear of the ambulance.\n\n\"No, thanks,\" I said politely. \"My sister is over there in the State Farm office, though. She might need help.\"\n\n\"I think you may need a little help yourself, ma'am,\" the woman said earnestly, loudly, as though I was retarded, as though I couldn't tell the difference between clinical shock and just being numb.\n\n\"No.\" I said it as finally and definitely as I knew how. I waited. I heard her muttering to someone else, but she did leave me alone after that. Varena came to stand beside me. Her eyes were red, and her makeup was streaked.\n\n\"Let's go home,\" she said.\n\n\"The policeman told me to wait.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nJust then the same policeman, Brainerd, came striding out of the doctor's office. He'd gotten over his fit of nerves, and he'd seen the worst. He was focused, ready to go to work. He asked us a lot of questions, keeping us out in the cold for half an hour when we'd told him the sum of our knowledge in one minute.\n\nFinally, we buckled up in Varena's car. As she started back to our parents' house, I switched Varena's heater to full blast. I glanced over at my sister. Her face was blanched by the cold, her eyes red from crying with her contacts in. She'd pulled her hair back this morning in a ponytail, with a bright red scarf tied over the elastic band. The scarf still looked crisp and cheerful, though Varena had wilted. Varena's eyes met mine while we were waiting our turn at a four-way stop. She said, \"The drug cabinet was closed and full.\"\n\n\"I saw.\" Dr. LeMay had always kept the samples, and his supplies, in the same cabinet in the lab, a glass-front old-fashioned one. Since I'd been his patient as a child, that cabinet had stood in the same place with the same sort of contents. It would have surprised me profoundly if Dr. LeMay had ever kept anything very street-desirable... he'd have antibiotics, antihistamines, skin ointments, that kind of thing, I thought vaguely. Maybe painkillers.\n\nLike Varena, I'd seen past Binnie's body that the cabinet door was shut and everything in the room was orderly. It didn't seem likely that the same person who would commit such messy murders would leave the drug cabinet so neat if he'd searched it.\n\n\"I don't know what to make of that,\" I told Varena. She shook her head. She didn't, either. I stared out of the window at the familiar passing scenery, wishing I was anywhere but in Bartley.\n\n\"Lily, are you all right?\" Varena asked, her voice curiously hesitant.\n\n\"Sure, are you?\" I sounded more abrupt than I'd intended.\n\n\"I have to be, don't I? The wedding rehearsal is tonight, and I don't see how we can call it off. Plus, I've seen worse, frankly. It's just it being Dr. LeMay and Binnie that gave me such a wallop.\"\n\nMy sister sounded simply matter-of-fact. It hit me forcefully that Varena, as a nurse, had seen more blood and pain and awfulness than I would see in a lifetime. She was practical. After overcoming the initial shock, she was tough. She pulled into our parents' driveway and switched off the ignition.\n\n\"You're right. You can't call it off. People die all the time, Varena, and you can't derail your wedding because of it.\"\n\nWe were just the Practical Sisters.\n\n\"Right,\" she said, looking at me oddly. \"We have to go in and tell Mom and Dad.\"\n\nI stared at the house in front of us as if I had never seen it.\n\n\"Yes. Let's go.\"\n\nBut it was Varena who got out of the car first. And it was Varena who told my parents the bad news, in a grave, firm voice that somehow implied that any emotional display would be in bad taste." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "The rehearsal was scheduled for six o'clock, and we arrived at the Presbyterian church on the dot. Tootsie Monahan was already there, her hair in long curly strands like a show poodle's, talking and laughing with Dill and his best man. It was apparent that no one was going to talk about the death of the doctor and his nurse, unless they went into a corner and whispered. Everyone was struggling to keep this a joyous occasion, or at the very least to hold the emotional level above grim.\n\nI was introduced to Berry Duff, Dill's former college roommate and present best man, with some significance. After all, we were both single and in the same age group. The barely unspoken hope was that something might happen.\n\nBerry Duff was very tall, with thinning dark hair, wide dark eyes, and an enviable olive complexion. He was a farmer in Mississippi, had been divorced for about three years, and, I was given to understand, the embodiment of all things desirable: well-to-do, solid, religious, divorced without child custody. Dill managed to cram a surprising amount of that information into his introduction, and after a few minutes' conversation with Berry, I learned the rest.\n\nBerry seemed like a nice guy, and it was pleasant to stand with him while we waited for the players to assemble. I was not much of a person for small talk, and Berry didn't seem to mind, which was refreshing. He took his time poking around conversationally for some common ground, found it in dislike of movie theaters and love of weight lifting, which he'd enjoyed in college.\n\nI was wearing the white dress with the black jacket. At the last minute my mother had insisted I needed some color besides my lipstick, a point I was willing to concede. She'd put a filmy scarf in autumn reds and golds around my neck and anchored it with the gold pin I'd brought.\n\n\"You look very nice,\" Dill said, on one of his pass-bys. He and Varena seemed to be awfully nervous and were inventing errands to send them pacing around the small church. We were all hovering near the front, since the back was in darkness beyond the last pew. The door close to the pulpit, opening into a hall leading past the minister's study, gave a pneumatic hiss as people came and went. The heavier door beyond the big open area at the back of the church thudded from time to time as the members of the wedding party assembled.\n\nFinally, everyone was there. Varena; Tootsie; me; the other bridesmaid, Janna Russell; my mother and father; Jess and Lou O'Shea, the one in his capacity as minister and the other in her capacity as church organist; Dill; Berry Duff; Dill's unmarried younger brother Jay; a cousin of Dill's, Matthew Kingery; the florist who'd been hired to supply the wedding flowers, who would double as wedding director; and miracle of miracles, Dill's mother, Lula. Watching the relief spread over Varena's face as the old woman stomped in on Jay's arm made me want to take Lula Kingery aside and have a few sharp words with her.\n\nI watched the woman closely while the florist was giving the assembled group some directions. It didn't take long to conclude that Dill's mother was a few bricks short of a load. She was inappropriately dressed (a short-sleeved floral housedress with a hole in it, high heels with rhinestone buckles), which was in itself no clear signal of mental derangement, but when you added the ensemble to her out-of-the-ballpark questions (\"Do I have to walk down the aisle too?\") and her constant hand and eye movement, the sum total was significant.\n\nWell. So Dill's family had a skeleton, too.\n\nNotch one up for my family. At least I could pretty much be relied on to do the right thing, if I actually made an appearance. Dill's mom was definitely a loose cannon.\n\nVarena was handling Mrs. Kingery with amazing tact and kindness. So were my parents. I felt a proprietary swell of pride at my folks' goodness and had to resume my conversation with Berry Duff to cover the rush of emotion.\n\nAfter even more last-minute toing and froing, the rehearsal began. Patsy Green, the florist, gathered us together and gave us our marching orders. We took our positions to walk through the ceremonial paces.\n\nGetting the cues straight from Lou O'Shea on the organ, an usher escorted Mrs. Kingery to her place at the front of the church. Then my mother was guided to her front pew on the other side.\n\nWhile I clustered with the other bridesmaids at the back of the church, Jess O'Shea came in from the hall that ran in front of his office to the church sanctuary. He went to the top of the steps in front of the altar and stood there smiling. Dill entered the sanctuary from the same door, accompanied by Berry, who grinned at me. Then I walked down the aisle, listening with one ear to the florist's adjuration to walk slowly and smoothly.\n\nI always walk smoothly.\n\nShe reminded me to smile.\n\nJay Kingery came in from the hall, and Janna started down the aisle. Then the groomsman, cousin Matthew, took his place, and Tootsie did her long walk. I set off on cue, with Patsy Green hissing \"Smile!\" at my back.\n\nThen the piece de resistance. Varena came down the aisle on my father's arm, and she looked flushed and happy. So did Dad. Dill was beaming like a fool at his bride. Berry raised an eyebrow at me, and I felt my mouth twitch in response.\n\n\"That went well!\" Patsy Green called from the back of the church. She began walking toward us, and we all turned to listen to her comments. I wasn't at all surprised it had fallen into place, since almost everyone in the party was old enough to have played a role in a score of weddings and been a major participant in a daunting number.\n\nMy attention drifted, and I began looking around the church, the one I'd attended every Sunday as a child. The walls always seemed newly painted a brilliant white, and the carpet was always replaced with same deep green as the cushions on the pews. The high ceiling always made me think up\u2014space, infinity, the omnipotent unknown.\n\nI heard a little cough and brought my gaze down from the infinite to stare into the pews. Someone was in the shadows at the back of the church. My heart started pounding in an uncomfortable way. Before I had formed a thought, I began to walk down the steps and the long strip of green carpet. I didn't even feel my feet moving.\n\nHe stood up and moved to the door.\n\nAt the moment I reached him, he opened the door for me, and we stepped out into the cold night. In one move, he pulled me to him and kissed me.\n\n\"Jack,\" I said when I could breathe, \"Jack.\"\n\nMy hands went under his suit coat to touch his back through his striped shirt.\n\nHe kissed me again. His hands tightened on me, pressed me harder against his body.\n\n\"Glad to see me,\" I observed after a while. My breathing was not even.\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said hoarsely.\n\nI pulled away a little to look at him. \"You're wearing a tie.\"\n\n\"I knew you'd be dressed up. I had to look as nice as you.\"\n\n\"You a psychic detective?\"\n\n\"Just a damn good one.\"\n\n\"Umhum. What are you doing in Bartley?\"\n\n\"You don't think I'm here just to see you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You're almost wrong.\"\n\n\"Almost?\" I felt a mixture of relief and disappointment.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. Last week, I was clearing off my desk so I could come down here to lend you some moral support\u2014or maybe morale support\u2014when I got a call from an old friend of mine.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"Can I tell you later? Say, at my motel room?\"\n\n\"That was your car I saw! How long have you been here?\" For a moment I wondered if Jack had revealed his presence just because he'd figured I'd identify his car sooner or later, in a town the size of Bartley.\n\n\"Since yesterday. Later? God, you look good,\" he said, and his mouth traveled down my neck. His fingers pulled the scarf away from my neck. Despite the cold, I began to have that warmth that meant I was just as glad to see him, especially after the horrors of the day.\n\n\"OK, I'll come by to hear your story, but it'll have to be after the rehearsal dinner,\" I said firmly. I gasped a second later. \"No, Jack. This is my sister's wedding. This is a have-to.\"\n\n\"I admire a woman who sticks to her principles.\" His voice was low and rough.\n\n\"Will you come in and meet my family?\"\n\n\"That's why I'm wearing the suit.\"\n\nI looked up at him with some suspicion. Jack is a little older than I am and four inches taller. In the security lights of the church parking lot, I could see that he had his black hair brushed back into a neat ponytail, as usual. He has a beautiful thin, prominent nose, and his lips are thin and sculpted. Jack used to be a Memphis policeman, until he left the force after his involvement in an unsavory and bloody scandal.\n\nHe's got lips, he knows how to use 'em, I thought, almost intoxicated by his presence. Only Jack could get me in the mood to paraphrase an old ZZ Top song.\n\n\"Let's go do the right thing, before I try something here in the parking lot,\" he suggested.\n\nI stared at him and turned to walk back in the church. Somehow, I expected him to vanish between the door and the altar, but he followed me in and down the aisle, flanking me when we reached the clustered wedding party. Naturally enough, they were all staring our way. I could feel my face harden. I hate explaining myself.\n\nAnd Jack stepped up beside me, put his arm around me, and said, \"You must be Lily's mother! I'm Jack Leeds, Lily's...\"\n\nI waited with some interest while Jack, normally a smooth talker, floundered at the end of the sentence.\n\n\"Boyfriend,\" he finished, with a certain inaccuracy.\n\n\"Frieda Bard,\" my mother said, looking a little stunned. \"This is my husband, Gerald.\"\n\n\"Mr. Bard,\" Jack said respectfully, \"glad to meet you.\"\n\nMy father pumped Jack's hand, beaming like someone who's just found Ed McMahon and a camera crew on his doorstep. Even the ponytail and the scar on Jack's right cheek didn't diminish my father's smile. Jack's suit was expensive, a very muted brown plaid that brought out the color of his hazel eyes. His shoes were polished. He looked prosperous, healthy, clean shaven, and I looked happy. That was enough for my dad, at least for the moment.\n\n\"And you must be Varena.\" Jack turned to my sister.\n\nWhen would everyone stop looking like deer caught in headlights? You'd think I was a damn leper, they were so amazed I had a man. Jack actually kissed Varena, a quick light one on the forehead. \"Kiss the bride for luck,\" he said, with that sudden, brilliant smile that was so winning.\n\nDill recovered quickest.\n\n\"I'm about to join the family,\" he told Jack. \"I'm Dill Kingery.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you.\" The shake again.\n\nAnd it went on from there, with me not saying a word. Jack glad-handed the men and gave the women a flash of clean, earnest sexuality. Even off-kilter Mrs. Kingery beamed at him in a dazed way. \"You're trouble on the hoof, and I know it,\" she said firmly.\n\nEveryone froze in horror, but Jack laughed with genuine amusement. The moment passed, and I saw Dill close his eyes in relief.\n\n\"I'll take off, since you're in the middle of your special occasion,\" Jack told the group generally, with no hint of a hint in his voice. \"I just wanted to meet Lily's folks.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Dill said instantly, \"we'd really enjoy your joining us for the rehearsal dinner.\"\n\nJack did the polite thing and declined, mentioning the important family occasion and the fact that he had arrived unannounced.\n\nDill repeated his invitation. Social Ping-Pong.\n\nWhen Varena joined in, Jack allowed himself to be persuaded.\n\nHe retired to sit at the back of the church. My eyes followed him every inch of the way.\n\nWe walked through the ceremony again. I went through my paces on autopilot. Patsy Green reminded me again to smile. This time she sounded a little sharper.\n\nI was thinking hard during the rest of the rehearsal, but I couldn't come to any conclusion. Could it possibly be true that Jack was here for me? He had admitted he had another reason, but he'd said he was coming here anyway. If that was true...\n\nBut it was too painful to believe.\n\nJack had already been here when Dr. LeMay and Binnie Armstrong were done to death. So his arrival couldn't be connected with the double murder.\n\n\"Looks like I'm too late on the scene,\" Berry said to me in a pleasant way after Patsy Green and the O'Sheas agreed we had the procedure down pat. We were just outside the church doors.\n\n\"That's so flattering of you,\" I said with a genuine smile. For once, I had said the right thing. He smiled back at me.\n\n\"Lily!\" Jack called. He was holding open the passenger door of his car. I couldn't imagine why.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" I told Berry and strolled over. \"Since when,\" I muttered, conscious of my voice carrying in the cold clear air, \"have you found it necessary to hold doors for me?\"\n\nJack looked wounded. \"Darlin', I'm your slave.\" He seemed to be imitating Berry's Delta accent.\n\n\"Don't be an ass,\" I whispered. \"Seeing you is so good. Don't ruin it.\"\n\nHe stared down at me as I swung my legs into his car. The taut muscles around his mouth relaxed. \"All right,\" he said and shut the door.\n\nWe backed up to follow the other cars out of the parking lot.\n\n\"You found the doctor today,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes. How did you know?\"\n\n\"I brought my police scanner. Are you OK?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How much do you know about Dill Kingery?\" he asked.\n\nI felt as though he'd punched me in the stomach. I had to sit silent to gather breath, my panic was so complete and sudden. \"Is something wrong with him?\" I asked finally, my voice coming out not so much angry as scared. Varena's face smiling up at Dill came into my mind, the long engagement, the relationship Varena had worked so hard to build up with Dill's daughter, Varena's cheerful acceptance of crazy Mrs. Kingery...\n\n\"Probably nothing. Just tell me.\"\n\n\"He's a pharmacist. He's a widower. He's a father. He pays his bills on time. His mother is crazy.\"\n\n\"That's the old biddy who said I was trouble?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She was right.\n\n\"The first wife's been dead how long?\"\n\n\"Six or seven years. Anna doesn't remember her.\"\n\n\"And Jess O'Shea? The preacher?\"\n\nI looked over at Jack as we passed a streetlight. His expression was tense, almost angry. That made two of us. \"I don't know anything about him. I've met his wife and little girl. They have a boy, too.\"\n\n\"He coming to the rehearsal dinner?\"\n\n\"The minister usually does. Yes, I heard them say they'd gotten a sitter.\"\n\nI wanted to hit Jack, a not uncommon situation.\n\nWe pulled into Sarah May's Restaurant parking lot. Jack parked a little away from the other cars.\n\n\"I can't believe you've upset me this much in five minutes,\" I said, hearing my own voice coming out distant and cold. And shaking.\n\nHe stared through the windshield at the restaurant windows. They were edged with flickering Christmas lights. The glow flashed across his face. Damn blinking lights. After what felt like a very long time, Jack turned to me. He took my left hand with his right.\n\n\"Lily, when I explain what I'm working on, you'll forgive me,\" he said, with a kind of painful sincerity I was forced to respect. He sat holding my hand, making no move to open his door, waiting for me to extend him... trust? Advance absolution? I felt as if he'd opened a cavity in my chest and turned a spotlight on it.\n\nI nodded sharply, opened my door, and got out. We met in front of the car. He took my hand again, and we went into Sarah May's.\n\nSarah Cawthorne, half of the Sarah May of the name, showed us to the private room that Dill had reserved for the party. Of course, all of us but Jack and Mrs. Kingery had been in it many times, since it was one of two places in Bartley you could dine out privately. I saw that it had been recently carpeted and wallpapered in the apparently perpetually popular hunter green and burgundy, and the artificial Christmas tree in the corner had been decorated with burgundy and off-white lace and matching ribbons. This tree was lit, too, of course, draped with the small clear lights, and thank God they didn't blink.\n\nThe tables had Christmas centerpieces in the same colors, and the place mats were cloth and so were the napkins. (This was very swank for Bartley.) The U-shaped banquet arrangement hadn't changed, though, and as we all drifted to our seats I realized that Jack was maneuvering us toward the O'Sheas. He was steering me unobtrusively with his hand on my back, and I was reminded of a puppet sitting on a ventriloquist's knee, the controlling hand hidden in a hole in the puppet's back. Jack caught my look, and his hand dropped away.\n\nDill was already standing behind a chair with my sister on one side and his mother on the other, so only Jess O'Shea was available as a target.\n\nJack managed to slot us between the O'Sheas. I was between the two men, and to Jack's right was Lou. Across the table from us was Patsy Green, squired by one of the ushers, a banker who played golf with Dill, I remembered.\n\nThe salads were served almost immediately, and Dill properly asked Jess to say grace. Of course, Jess obliged. Next to me, Jack bowed his head and shut his eyes, but his hand found mine and his fingers wrapped tightly around mine. He brought my hand to his mouth and kissed it\u2014I could feel his warm lips, the hint of teeth\u2014then deposited the hand back in my lap and relaxed his grip. When Jess said, \"Amen,\" Jack let go and spread his napkin on his lap as though the little moment had been a dream.\n\nI glanced up and down the table to see if anyone had noticed, and the only eyes that met mine were my mother's. She looked as though she were half embarrassed by the sexuality of the gesture... but pleased by the emotional wallop of it.\n\nI had no idea what my own face looked like. A salad was placed in front of me, and I stared down blindly at it. When the waitress asked me what dressing I wanted, I answered her at random, and she dolloped my lettuce and tomato with a bright orange substance.\n\nJack began gently questioning Lou about her life. He was so good at it that few civilians would have suspected he had a hidden agenda. I tried not to speculate on the nature of that agenda.\n\nI turned to Jess, who was having a little trouble with a jar of bacon bits. After the nicely decorated room, plunking the jar of bits down on the table reminded me firmly we were in Bartley. I held out my hand with a give-me curve of the fingers.\n\nSomewhat surprised, Jess handed me the jar. I gripped it firmly, inhaled. I twisted as I exhaled. The lid came off. I handed the jar to him.\n\nWhen I looked up in his face, there was a kind of dubious amusement on it.\n\nDubious was OK. Amusement wasn't.\n\n\"You're very strong,\" he observed.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. I took a bite of salad, then remembered that Jack needed to know more about this man.\n\n\"Did you grow up in a town bigger than Bartley?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, not bigger at all,\" he said genially. \"Ocolona, Mississippi. My folks still live there.\"\n\n\"And your wife, is she from Mississippi also?\"\n\nI hated this.\n\n\"Yes, but from Pass Christian. We met in college at Ole Miss.\"\n\n\"And then you went to seminary?\"\n\n\"Yes, four years at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Lou and I just had to put our trust in the Lord. It was a long separation. In fact, after the first two years, I missed being away from her so much, we got married. She held any job she could get in the area while I worked to graduate. She played the organ at churches, she played the piano for parties. She even worked at a fast-food place, God bless her.\" Jess's square, handsome face relaxed and warmed as he talked about his wife. I felt acutely uncomfortable.\n\nThe salad dressing was thick as sour cream, and sweet. I shoved the most heavily laden lettuce to one side and tried to eat the rest. I couldn't just sit there and question him.\n\n\"And you,\" he began the conversational return, \"what's your occupation?\"\n\nSomeone who didn't know my life history?\n\n\"I'm a house cleaner, and I run errands for people. I decorate Christmas trees for businesses. I take old ladies grocery shopping.\"\n\n\"A girl Friday, though I guess 'girl' is politically incorrect now.\" He gave the strained smile of a conservative paying lip service to liberality.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said.\n\n\"And you live in Arkansas?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I prodded myself mentally. \"Shakespeare.\"\n\n\"Any bigger than Bartley?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe eyed me with a determined smile. \"And have you lived there long?\"\n\n\"Over four years now. I bought a house.\" There, that was contributing to the conversation. What did Jack want to know about this man?\n\n\"What do you do in your spare time?\"\n\n\"I work out. Lifting weights. And I take karate.\" And now I see Jack. The thought sent a warm rush through my pelvis. I remembered his lips against my hand.\n\n\"And your friend Mr. Leeds? Does he live in Shakespeare?\"\n\n\"No, Jack lives in Little Rock.\"\n\n\"He works there, too?\"\n\nDid Jack want it known what he did?\n\n\"His job takes him different places,\" I said neutrally. \"Did Lou have Luke\u2014isn't that your little boy's name?\u2014 here in the Shakespeare hospital?\" People really like to talk about their childbirth experiences.\n\n\"Yes, right here at the hospital. We were a little worried... there are some emergencies this hospital can't handle. But Lou is healthy, and indications were that the baby was healthy, so we decided it would be better to show our faith in the local people. And it was just a great experience.\"\n\nLucky for you and Luke and Lou, I thought. \"And Krista?\" I asked, thinking this meal would never end. We hadn't even gotten our entrees. \"Did you have her here? No, she's at least eight, and you've been here only three years, I believe?\"\n\n\"Right. No, we moved here from Philadelphia with Krista.\" But something about the way he said it was odd.\n\n\"She was born at one of the big hospitals there? That must have been a very different experience from having your little boy here.\"\n\nHe said, \"Are you older than Varena?\"\n\nWhoa. Change of subject. And a clumsy one. Anyone could tell I was older than Varena.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You must have traveled around some in your life, too,\" the minister observed. The strip lights above the table winked off his blond hair, about ten shades darker than mine and certainly more natural. \"You've been in Shakespeare for about four years... did you ever live here, in Bartley, after you got out of college?\"\n\n\"I lived in Memphis after I graduated from college,\" I said, knowing that would probably cue his memory. Someone had to have told him the story, since he'd been living here more than three years. My history was part of town folklore, just like Mrs. Fontenot shooting her equally married lover on the courthouse lawn in 1931.\n\n\"Memphis,\" he repeated, suddenly looking a little uneasy.\n\n\"Yes, I worked for a big housecleaning service there as a scheduler and supervisor,\" I said deliberately.\n\nThat flipped his memory switch. I saw his pleasant, bland face grow rigid, trying to restrain his dismay at his faux pas.\n\n\"Of course, that was years ago, now,\" I said, easing him off the horns of the dilemma.\n\n\"Yes, a long time,\" he said. He looked sorry for me for a minute, then said tactfully, \"I haven't had a chance to ask Dill where he and Varena plan to go on their honeymoon.\"\n\nI nodded dismissively and turned to Jack just at the instant he turned to me. Our eyes met, and he smiled that smile that altered his whole face, deep arcs appearing from his nose to his lips. Instead of the tough reserve of his defense-against-the-world face, he looked infectiously happy.\n\nI leaned over so my lips almost touched his ear. \"I have an early Christmas present for you,\" I said very softly.\n\nHis eyes flared wide in surmise.\n\n\"You'll like it very much,\" I promised, breathing the words.\n\nDuring the rest of the meal, whenever Jack wasn't engaged in talking to Lou O'Shea or charming my mother, he was giving me little glances full of speculation.\n\nWe left soon after the dessert plates were cleared away. Jack seemed torn between talking to Dill and Varena and rushing me back to his hotel. I made it as difficult for him as I possibly could. As we stood making conversation with Dill, I held his hand and made circles on his palm with my thumb, very gently, very lightly.\n\nAfter a few seconds, he dropped my hand to grip my arm almost painfully.\n\n\"Good-bye, Frieda, Gerald,\" he said to my parents, after he'd thanked Dill for inviting him. My mother and father beamed happily at him. \"I'll be bringing Lily home later. We have some catching up to do.\"\n\nI could see my father's mouth open to ask where this \"catching up\" would take place, and I saw my mother's elbow connect with his ribs, a gentle reminder to my father that I was nearly thirty-two. So Dad kept his smile in place, but it was weaker.\n\nWaving at everyone, smiling hard, we got out the door and hurried through the freezing air to scramble into Jack's car. We had scarcely shut the doors when Jack put his fingers under my chin and turned my face to his. His mouth covered mine in a long, breathless kiss. His hands began reacquainting themselves with my topography.\n\n\"The others'll be coming out in a minute,\" I reminded him.\n\nJack said something really vile and turned on his engine. We drove to the motel in silence, Jack keeping both hands on the wheel and his eyes straight ahead.\n\n\"This place is horrible,\" he warned me, unlocking the door and pushing it open. He reached in past me to switch on a light.\n\nI pulled the drapes shut all the way and turned to him, sliding out of my black jacket as I turned. He was wrapped around me before I had my arm out of the second sleeve. We undressed in stages, interrupted by the long making out that Jack loved. He was fumbling in his suitcase with one hand for those little square foil packages, when I said, \"Christmas present.\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows.\n\n\"I got an implant. You don't have to use anything.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lily,\" he breathed, closing his eyes to savor the moment. He looked like a Boy Scout who'd just been given the ingredients for S'mores. I wondered when he would work out the other implications of my gift. Then Jack slid on top of me, and I quit caring.\n\nWe were wrapped in the bed together an hour later, having finally pulled down the spread and the blanket and the sheets. The sheets, at least, looked clean. One of Jack's legs was thrown across mine, securing me.\n\n\"Why are you here?\" I asked. This was when Jack liked to talk.\n\n\"Lily,\" he said slowly, taking pleasure in saying it. \"I was going to come to see you here. I did think you might need me, or at least that seeing me might help.\" One long finger traced my spine as I lay facing him, my face tucked in the hollow of his neck. To my horror, I could feel my nose clog up and my eyes fill. I kept my face turned down. A tear trickled down my cheek, and since I was on my side it ran into the curve of one nostril and then underneath. So elegant.\n\n\"And then Roy called me. You remember Roy?\"\n\nI nodded, so he could feel my head move.\n\nI recalled Roy Costimiglia as a short, stout man with thinning gray hair, probably in his late fifties. You could pass him six times on the street and never remember you'd seen him before. Roy was the detective with whom Jack had served his two-year apprenticeship.\n\n\"Roy and I had talked over supper one night when Roy's wife was out of town, so he knew I was seeing a woman who had originally come from Bartley. He called because he'd been given one more lead to run down in a case he's had for four years.\"\n\nI surreptitiously wiped my face with a bit of sheet.\n\n\"What case is that?\" My voice did not sound too wobbly.\n\n\"Summer Dawn Macklesby.\" Jack's voice was as bleak and grim as I'd ever heard it. \"You remember the baby girl who was kidnapped?\"\n\nAnd I felt cold all over again.\n\n\"I read just a little of the update story in the paper.\"\n\n\"So did a lot of people, and one of them reacted pretty strangely. The last paragraph of the article mentioned that Roy has been working for the Macklesby family for the past few years. Through Roy, the Macklesbys have run down every lead, checked every piece of information, every rumor, that's come to them for the past four and a half years... ever since they felt the police had more or less given up on the case. The Macklesbys hoped there would be some response to the story, and that's why they consented to do it. They're really nice people. I've met them. Of course, they've kind of disintegrated since she's been gone... the baby.\"\n\nJack kissed my cheek, and his arms tightened around me. He knew I had been crying. He was not going to talk about it.\n\n\"What response was there to the story? A phone call?\"\n\n\"This.\" Jack sat up on the side of the bed. He unlocked his briefcase and pulled out two pieces of paper. The first was a copy of the same article I'd seen in the newspaper, with the sad picture of the Macklesbys now and the old picture of the baby in her infant seat. The Macklesbys looked as though something had chewed them up and spit them out: Teresa Macklesby, especially, was haggard with eyes that had seen hell. Her husband, Simon's, face was almost taut with restraint, and the hand that rested on his knee was clenched in a fist.\n\nThe second piece of paper was a picture from the local elementary school memory book, last year's edition; \"The Hartley Banner\" was printed, with the date, across the top of the page, page 23. The picture at the top of the page, below the heading, was an enlarged black-and-white snapshot of three little girls playing on a slide. The one flying down, her long hair trailing behind her, was Eve Osborn. The girl waiting her turn at the top of the slide was Krista O'Shea, looking much happier than I'd seen her. The child climbing the ladder had turned to smile at the camera, and my breath caught in my throat.\n\nThe caption read, \"These second graders enjoy the new playground equipment donated in March by Bartley Tractor and Tire Company and Choctaw County Welding.\"\n\n\"This was paper-clipped to the article from the paper,\" Jack said. \"It was in a mailing envelope postmarked Bartley. Someone here in town thinks one of these little girls is Summer Dawn Macklesby.\"\n\n\"Oh, no.\"\n\nHis finger brushed the third child's face. \"Dill's girl? Anna Kingery?\"\n\nI nodded, covered my own face with my hands.\n\n\"Sweetheart, I have to do this.\"\n\n\"Why did you come instead of Roy?\"\n\n\"Because Roy had a heart attack two days ago. He called me from his hospital bed.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\"Is he going to be OK?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Jack said. He was sad, and angry, too, though I wasn't sure where the anger came in. Maybe his own helplessness. \"All those years of eating wrong and not exercising... but the main thing is, he just has a bad heart.\"\n\nI sat up, too, and put my arms around Jack. For a moment he accepted the comfort. He rested his head on my shoulder, his arms encircling me. I'd taken the band off his ponytail, and his long black hair fell soft against my skin. But then he raised his head and looked at me, our faces inches apart.\n\n\"I have to do this, Lily. For Roy. He took me in and trained me. If it was anyone but him, any case but one involving a child, I'd turn it down since it concerns someone close to you... but this I have to do.\" Even if Anna Kingery turned out to be Summer Dawn Macklesby, even if Varena's life was ruined. I looked back at him, the pain in my heart so complicated I could not think how to express it.\n\n\"If he did that,\" Jack said, so intent on me he had read my silent thoughts, \"you couldn't let her marry him anyway.\"\n\nI nodded, still trying to accommodate this sharp pang. For all the years we'd spent apart, for all our estrangement, Varena was my sister, and we were the only people in the world who shared, who would remember, our common family life.\n\n\"This has to be resolved before the wedding,\" I said.\n\n\"Two days? Three?\"\n\nI actually had to think. \"Three.\"\n\n\"Shit,\" Jack said.\n\n\"What do you have?\" I pulled away from him, and his head began to lower to my breasts, as if drawn by a magnet. I grabbed his ears. \"Jack, we have to finish talking.\"\n\n\"Then you'll have to cover up.\" He got his bathrobe out of the tiny closet and tossed it to me. It was the one he carried when he traveled, a thin, red, silky one, and I belted it around me.\n\n\"That's not much better,\" he said after a thorough look. \"But it'll have to do.\" He pulled on a T-shirt and some Jockeys. He set his briefcase on the bed, and because it was cold in that bleak motel room, we both crawled back under the covers, sitting with our backs propped against the wall.\n\nJack put on his reading glasses, little half-lens ones that made him even sexier. I didn't know how long he'd used them, but he'd only recently begun wearing them in front of me. This was the first time I hadn't appreciated the effect.\n\n\"First, to find out who the little girls were, Roy hired Aunt Betty.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"You haven't met Aunt Betty yet. She's another PI, lives in Little Rock. She's amazing. In her fifties, hair dyed a medium brown, looks respectable to the core. She looks like everybody's Aunt Betty. Her real name is Elizabeth Fry. People tell her the most amazing things, because she looks like... well, their aunt! And damn, that woman can listen!\"\n\n\"Why'd Roy send her instead of you?\"\n\n\"Well, surprise, but in some situations I don't blend in like Aunt Betty does. I was good for the Shakespeare job since I look just like someone who'd work in a sporting goods store, but I don't look like I could go around a small town asking for the names of little girls and get away with it. Right?\"\n\nI tried not to laugh. That was certainly true.\n\n\"So that's the kind of job Aunt Betty's perfect for. She found out who prints the most school memory books in the state, went to them, told them she was from a private school and she was looking for a printer. The guy gave her all kinds of samples to show her parents committee.\"\n\nJack seemed to want me to acknowledge Aunt Betty's cleverness, so I nodded.\n\n\"Then,\" he continued, \"Betty comes down to Bartley, goes in to see the elementary school principal, shows her all the samples of memory books she has, and tells the principal she works for a printing company that can give them a competitive bid on the next memory book.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"Then she asks to see this year's Bartley memory book, notices the slide picture, asks the principal who the photographer was, maybe her company might be able to use him for extra work. Betty figured the shot was good enough to justify the lie.\"\n\nI shook my head. Betty must be persuasive and totally respectable and nonthreatening. I'd known the elementary school principal, Beryl Trotter, for fifteen years, and she was not a fool.\n\n\"How does it help, having the whole book?\" I asked.\n\n\"If worst had come to worst, we would have looked at all the faces in the class section until we had them matched, so we could get their names. Or Betty would have called on the man who took the picture and coasted the conversation along until he told her who the girls were. But, as it happened, Mrs. Trotter asked Betty to have a cup of coffee, and Betty found out everything from Mrs. Trotter.\"\n\n\"The names of the girls? Their parents? Everything?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\nThis was a little frightening.\n\n\"So, once we had the names of the parents, we were able to do some background on the O'Sheas, since he's a minister and they have several professional directories that give little biographies. Dill, too, because the pharmacists have a state association. Chock full of information. The Osborns were harder. Aunt Betty had to go to Makepeace Furniture, pretend she'd just moved in and was shopping for a new table. It was risky. But she managed to talk to Emory, find out a few things about him, and get out without having to give a local address or mention any local relatives whom he could check up on.\"\n\n\"So then you knew the names of the girls and their parents, and some facts about their parents.\"\n\n\"Yep. Then we got busy on the computers, and then I started traveling.\"\n\nI felt overwhelmed. I'd never talked to Jack in any depth about what he did. I'd never fully realized that one of the qualifications for a successful private detective is the ability to lie convincingly and at the drop of a hat. I pulled away from Jack a little. He took some papers from his briefcase.\n\n\"This is a computer-enhanced drawing of Summer Dawn as she may look now,\" he said, apparently not conscious of my unhappiness. \"Of course, we have photographs of her only as an infant. Who knows how accurate this is?\"\n\nI looked at the picture. It looked like someone, all right, but it could have been any of the girls. I decided that the drawing looked most like Krista O'Shea, because it depicted Summer Dawn still plump-cheeked, like the baby snapshot the newspaper had printed.\n\n\"I thought these were supposed to be really accurate,\" I said. \"Does it look so anonymous because she was a baby when she vanished?\"\n\n\"Partly. And as it happens, none of the pictures of Summer Dawn was really good to use for this. The Macklesbys took fewer pictures of her than of their other two children because Summer Dawn was the third child, and the third child just doesn't get photographed as much as number one and number two. The picture that appeared in the newspaper was really the best one the parents had. They had an appointment to get Summer's picture made the week she disappeared.\"\n\nI didn't want to think about that. I shuffled the top drawing, looked at the other three. The second was of the same face but framed by long, straight hair. In the third, a somewhat thinner-cheeked version of Summer Dawn was topped with short, wavy hair. There was a fourth, with medium-length hair and glasses.\n\n\"One of her sisters is nearsighted,\" Jack explained.\n\nEight years.\n\n\"She has sisters?\" I kept my voice level. At least I tried.\n\n\"Yeah. Two. They're fourteen and sixteen, now. Teenagers, with posters on their walls of musicians I've never listened to. Closets full of clothes. Boyfriends. And a little sister they don't remember at all.\"\n\n\"The Macklesbys must have money.\" Hiring a private detective for all those years would be expensive, and paying for the extra services of Aunt Betty and Jack.\n\n\"They're well-off. Simon Macklesby reacted to the kidnapping by throwing himself into his work. He's a partner in an office supplies business that's taken off since offices became computerized. No matter how much money they've got, the Macklesbys were lucky they went to Roy instead of to someone who would really soak them. There were months when he didn't have anything to show them, no work to do. Some guys... and some women... would've made things up to pad the file.\"\n\nIt was a relief to find that Roy was as honest as I'd always thought him, after Jack's obvious admiration at Aunt Betty's creative lying. There was a separation, thank God, between lying on the job and relating to people in real life.\n\n\"What do you know?\" I asked him, my fear finally showing in my voice.\n\n\"I know that the O'Shea girl is adopted, at least that's what the O'Sheas' neighbors in Philadelphia recall.\"\n\nI remembered the slight change in Jess O'Shea's face when I'd asked him how the big-city hospital had been different from the tiny one in Bartley.\n\n\"You've been to Pennsylvania?\"\n\n\"Their Philadelphia neighbors were seminary students like Jess, so naturally they've scattered. I've used other PIs in Florida, Kentucky, and Indiana. According to the people who'd talk to us, the O'Sheas arranged to adopt the baby girl of the sister of another seminary student. The O'Sheas had gotten a pretty discouraging work-up from a fertility specialist in Philadelphia. The sister had to give the baby up because she was in late-stage AIDS. Her family wouldn't take the baby because they believed the baby might be carrying the disease. It didn't matter that the baby had tested negative. In fact, the couple in Tennessee, the one I interviewed myself, are still convinced the little girl might have been 'carrying' AIDS, despite the testing the doctors did.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"How do you get people to tell you this?\"\n\n\"I'm persuasive, in case you hadn't noticed.\" Jack ran his hand down my leg and leered at me. Then he sobered.\n\n\"So why are the O'Sheas still on your list?\"\n\n\"One, Krista O'Shea is in the picture that Roy got. Two, what if this isn't the same girl they adopted?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"What if the tests were wrong? What if that child was born with AIDS, or died from some other cause? What if Lou O'Shea abducted Summer Dawn to take her place? What if the O'Sheas bought her?\"\n\n\"That seems so far-fetched. They were up in Philadelphia for at least a few months after they adopted Krista. Summer Dawn was abducted in Conway, right?\"\n\n\"Yes. But the O'Sheas have cousins living in the Conway area, cousins they visited when Jess finished the seminary. The dates coincide. So I can't rule them out. It's circumstantially possible. If they bought Summer Dawn from someone who abducted her, they would know that was illegal. They maybe pretended the baby was the one they'd adopted.\"\n\n\"What about Anna?\" I asked sharply.\n\n\"Judy Kingery, Dill's first wife, was mentally ill.\"\n\nI'd resumed studying the pictures. I turned to stare at Jack.\n\n\"Her auto accident was almost certainly suicide.\" His clear hazel eyes peered at me over his reading glasses.\n\n\"Oh, poor Dill.\" No wonder he'd taken his time dating Varena. He would be extra cautious after a hellish marriage like that, yoked to a woman with so many problems after his upbringing by a woman who was not exactly compos mentis.\n\n\"We can't be sure the wife didn't do something crazy. Maybe she killed their own baby and stole Summer Dawn as compensation. The Kingerys were living in Conway at the time the baby was taken. Maybe Judy Kingery snatched Summer Dawn and gave Dill some incredibly persuasive story.\"\n\n\"You're saying... it might be possible that Dill didn't know?\"\n\nJack shrugged. \"It's possible,\" he said but not with any great conviction.\n\nI blew out a deep breath of tension. \"OK, Eve Osborn.\"\n\n\"The Osborns moved here from a little town on the interstate about ten miles from Conway. He's worked at furniture stores since he got out of junior college. Meredith Osborn didn't make it through a whole year of college before she married him. Emory Ted Osborn...\" Jack was peering through his glasses at a page of notes. \"Emory sells furniture and appliances at Makepeace Furniture Center. Oh, I told you that when I told you Betty went to meet him there.\"\n\nMakepeace Furniture Center was Bartley's best. It sold only upscale furniture and appliances, and it was located on the town square, having gradually crept through two or three buildings on one side.\n\n\"Emory have any criminal record?\"\n\nJack shook his head. \"None of these people do.\"\n\n\"Surely there's something that excludes Eve Osborn?\"\n\n\"You know her?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do. The Osborns own the little place my sister lives in. It's right in back of their house.\"\n\n\"I've driven by. I didn't realize your sister rented the cottage.\"\n\n\"Did you know that Meredith Osborn baby-sits both Anna and Krista from time to time? I met the mother and the little girl, Eve, when I was at Varena's a couple of days ago.\"\n\n\"What did you think?\"\n\n\"There's a new baby, a girl. Mrs. Osborn is about as big as some twelve-year-olds, and she seems nice enough. Eve is a... well, a little girl, maybe a little shy. Real thin, like her mother. I haven't met Emory.\"\n\n\"He's small, too, thin and blond. He's got that really fair coloring, light blue eyes, invisible eyelashes. Looks like he still doesn't have to shave. Very reserved. Smiles a lot.\"\n\n\"So, where was Eve born?\"\n\n\"That's why she can't be eliminated. Eve was a home birth,\" Jack said, both eyebrows raised as far as they could go. \"Emory delivered her. He'd had some paramedic training. The baby evidently came too fast for them to get to the hospital.\"\n\n\"Meredith had the baby at her house?\" Though I knew historically that women had been having their babies at home far longer than they'd had them in hospitals, the idea jarred me.\n\n\"Yep.\" Jack's face expressed such distaste that I found myself hoping Jack was never trapped in a stalled elevator with a pregnant woman.\n\nWe stayed snuggled in the bed and each other's warmth a while more, talking ourselves in circles. I could not make this go away, and I could not stop Jack from investigating, even if I thought that right... which I didn't. I had tremendous pity for the anguished parents who had been wanting their child for so many years, and I had pity for my sister, whose life might be ruined in the three days before her wedding. There didn't seem to be anything I could do to affect the outcome of Jack's investigation.\n\nIt had been a long day.\n\nI thought of the scene in the doctor's office, the devastation that had visited the two aging workhorses in their old office.\n\nWrapping my arms around my knees, I told Jack about Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong. He listened with close attention and asked me a lot more questions than I could answer.\n\n\"Do you think this could be connected with what you're investigating?\" I asked.\n\n\"I don't see how.\" He took off his glasses, put them on the night table. \"But it does seem like quite a coincidence that they're killed this week, just when I come on the scene, just when there's a new development in the Macklesby case. I've tried to be very discreet, but sooner or later in a town this size, everyone's gonna know why I'm here. You're providing me with cover right now, but it won't last if I ask the wrong questions.\"\n\nI looked at Jack's watch then and slid out the bed. The room felt even colder after I'd been warmed by Jack. I wanted more than anything to lie beside him tonight, but I couldn't.\n\n\"I have to get back,\" I said, pulling on my clothes and trying to make them look as neat and straight as they had been earlier.\n\nJack got out of bed, too, but not as rapidly.\n\n\"I guess you have to,\" he said with an attempt at wistfulness.\n\n\"You know I have to go to their house tonight,\" I said, but not harshly. He'd pulled his slacks on by then. I was putting on my jacket when he began kissing me again. I tried to push him away when he made his first pass, but at his second, I put my arms around him.\n\n\"I know that you having gotten the implant, me not using a condom anymore, means you know I'm sleeping only with you,\" he told me.\n\nIt meant something else, too. \"Ah... it means I'm not sleeping with anyone else, either,\" I reminded him.\n\nAfter a moment of pregnant silence, he squeezed me so tightly I could not breathe, and he made an inarticulate noise. Suddenly I knew we were feeling exactly the same thing\u2014just for a second, a flash, but it was a flash so bright it blinded me.\n\nThen we had to bounce away from each other, frightened by the intimacy. Jack swung away to put on his shirt; I sat down to slide my feet into my shoes. I ran my fingers through my hair, took care of a button I'd skipped.\n\nWe were silent on the ride to my house, the bitter cold biting into our bones. When we pulled into the driveway I saw one light burning on the dimmest setting, in the living room. Jack leaned over to give me a quick kiss, and I was out of the car in a wink, running across the frosty lawn to the front door.\n\nI locked the door behind me and went to the picture window. Looking out the small triangle unobscured by the Christmas tree, I saw Jack's car back out and start back to the motel. The sheets of his bed would smell like me.\n\nOnce in my room, where my mother had left a lamp on, I slowly undressed. It was too late to shower; it might wake my parents, if they weren't in their room lying awake to make sure I was home safe, like they'd done when I was a teenager. There was no counting the sleepless nights I'd given them.\n\nFleetingly, I thought about Teresa and Simon Macklesby. How many good nights' rest had they managed in the eight years since their daughter had vanished?\n\nThe murders of the doctor and his nurse, the strain of the wedding rehearsal, and the shock of all Jack had told me should have kept me awake. But being with Jack had drained the tension from me. Even if we hadn't had sex, I thought with some surprise, I would have felt better. I crawled in my bed, turned on my side, slid my hand under the pillow, and was immediately asleep.\n\nThe next day I had showered and dressed before I came out to have some coffee and breakfast. I'd done some sit-ups and leg lifts in my room so I wouldn't feel like a slug the rest of the day. My parents were both at the table, sections of newspaper propped up, when I got a mug from the cabinet.\n\n\"Good morning,\" my mother said with a smile.\n\nMy father grunted and nodded.\n\n\"How was your date last night?\" Mother ventured when I was sitting with them.\n\n\"Fine,\" I said. My toast popped up, and I put it on a plate.\n\nDad peered over his glasses at me. \"Got home late,\" he observed.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How long you been dating this man? Your mother says you told her he was a private detective? Isn't that kind of dangerous?\"\n\nI answered the safest question. \"I've been dating him for a few weeks.\"\n\n\"You think he might be serious?\"\n\n\"Sometimes.\"\n\nMy father regarded me with some exasperation. \"Now, what does that mean?\"\n\n\"I think it means she doesn't want to answer any more questions, Gerald,\" Mother said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, hiding a little smile.\n\n\"A father needs to know about men who are seeing his girl,\" my father said.\n\n\"This girl is almost thirty-two,\" I reminded him, trying to keep my voice gentle.\n\nHe shook his head. \"I don't believe it. Why, that would make me old, gosh dog it!\"\n\nWe all laughed as the little touchy moment passed.\n\nDad got up to shave, following his nearly invariable morning routine. He stuck his head back in the door just as I bit into my toast. \"Can you make any kind of living as a detective?\" he asked, then hurried away before I could either laugh or throw my toast at him.\n\n\"The paper says,\" my mother began when I'd finished my coffee, \"that Dave LeMay and Binnie Armstrong were killed right before you and Varena found them.\"\n\n\"I thought so,\" I said after a pause.\n\n\"You touched them?\"\n\n\"Varena did. She's the nurse,\" I said, reminding my mother that I was not the only one present when awful things happened.\n\n\"That's true,\" my mother said slowly, as one who has received a revelation of which she's half proud, half dismayed. \"She has to deal with things like that all the time.\"\n\n\"That bad or worse.\" Once upon a time, Varena had given me a graphic description of a motorcycle rider who'd stretched out his arm at the wrong moment and come into the hospital without it. A passerby had had the presence of mind to wrap it in the blanket his dog sat on when it rode in the car and bring it into the hospital. I had seen bad things... maybe just as bad... but I didn't think I could have dealt calmly with that. Varena had been excited\u2014not by the crisis but by her team's effective response.\n\nEvidently she didn't talk about some aspects of being a nurse, at least to our mother.\n\n\"I never quite pictured her job that way.\" Mother looked thoughtful, as if she were seeing her younger daughter in a different light.\n\nI read the comics for a minute or two, Ann Landers, the horoscopes, the scrambled words, the \"find the errors\" drawing. I never had time to do this at home. Thank God.\n\n\"What's on the agenda today?\" I asked, without feeling one bit excited. The pleasure of Jack's presence in town had faded, to be replaced by the gnawing anxiety of his suspicions.\n\n\"Oh, there's the shower at Grace's in the afternoon, but this morning we have to go to Corbett's to pick up a few things they called us about.\"\n\nCorbett's was the town's premier gift shop. Every bride with any claim to class went to Corbett's to register her china and silver patterns, and also to indicate a range of acceptable colors that would look good in the bride's future kitchen and bath. Corbett's also carried small appliances, pricey kitchenware, and sheets and table linens. Many brides left an all-encompassing list at Corbett's. Varena and I had always called it the \"I want it\" list.\n\nTwo hours later\u2014two dragging, boring hours later\u2014we were in Varena's car, parallel parking on Bartley's town square. The old post office crumbled on one side, while the courthouse, in the center on a manicured lawn, was festooned with Christmas decorations. Unlike Shakespeare, Bartley was holding on to its manger scene, though I had never found plastic figures in a wooden shed exactly spiritual. Carols blared endlessly from the speakers located around the square, and all the merchants had lined their store windows with twinkling colored lights and artificial snow.\n\nIf there was a true religious emotion to be felt about Christmas, I had been too numbed by all this claptrap to feel it for the past three years.\n\nI was glad to see Varena click the \"lock\" button on her key-ring control, and the car gave its little honk! to show it had received her command. Naturally we all looked at the car as it made the sound, a senseless but natural reaction, and I almost didn't see the running man until too late.\n\nHe was coming for us out of nowhere, his hand already outstretched to grab my mother's purse, which she was clutching loosely under her right arm.\n\nWith a positive rush of pleasure, I planted my left foot, came up with my right knee, and flicked my foot out to catch him in the jaw. In real life (as opposed to movies) high kicks are risky and energy draining: The knee and the groin are much more reliable targets. But this was my chance to land a high kick, and I took it. Thanks to hours and hours of practice, my instep smacked his jaw correctly, and he staggered. I got him again on the way down, though it was not as effective an impact. It hastened his fall rather than damaging him further.\n\nHe managed to land on his knees, and I seized his right arm and twisted it sharply behind him. He screamed and hit the pavement, and I kept his arm behind and up at an angle I knew to be extremely painful. I was on his right, out of reach of his left hand if he could manage to lever himself up to grab for my ankle.\n\n\"I'll break your arm if you move,\" I told him sincerely.\n\nHe believed me. He lay on the sidewalk, panting for breath\u2014sobbing for breath, really.\n\nI glanced up to see my mother and sister staring not at their assailant but at me, with stunned amazement making their faces foolish.\n\n\"Call the police,\" I prompted them.\n\nVarena kind of jumped and ran into Corbett's. She was doing a lot of police calling these days. The Bard sisters were on a roll.\n\nThe man I'd downed was short, stocky, black. He had on a ragged coat, and he smelled. I figured this was probably the same man who'd taken Diane Dykeman's purse a couple of days ago.\n\n\"Let me up, bitch,\" he said now, having gathered enough breath to speak.\n\n\"Be polite,\" I said, my voice harsh. I gave his arm a yank upward, and he screamed.\n\n\"Oh, Lily,\" my mother gasped. \"Oh, honey. Do you have to...?\" Her voice trailed off as I looked up to meet her eyes.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"I have to.\"\n\nA siren went off right behind me. The patrol officer must have been two blocks away when he got the call from the dispatcher, so he put on his siren. It nearly made me lose my grip. The car had \"Bartley Police Department\" printed in an arc over the Bartley town symbol, some complicated mishmash involving cotton and tractors. Under the symbol, the word \"Chief\" was centered in large letters.\n\n\"What we got here?\" called the man in the uniform as he bounded up on the sidewalk. He had brown hair and a neat mustache. He was lean except for a curious potbelly, like a five-month pregnancy. He looked at the man on the sidewalk, at my grip on his arm.\n\n\"Hey, Lily,\" he said, after assessing all this. \"What you got here?\"\n\n\"Chandler?\" I said, peering up at his face. \"Chandler McAdoo?\"\n\n\"In the flesh,\" he drawled. \"You caught you a purse snatcher?\"\n\n\"So it seems.\"\n\n\"Hi, Miz Bard,\" Chandler said, nodding at my mother, who nodded back automatically. I looked up at her shocked face, thinking as I did so that nothing could make her feel better for a little bit. Being the victim of a random crime was a shocking experience.\n\nChandler McAdoo had been my lab partner in high school, one memorable semester. We had done the frog thing together. I had been holding the knife\u2014or the scalpel? I couldn't remember\u2014and I had been on the verge of going silly-girl squeamish, when Chandler had looked me straight in the eye and told me I was a weak and useless critter if I couldn't cut one little hole in a dead frog.\n\nHe was right, I had figured, and I had cut.\n\nThat wasn't the only thing Chandler McAdoo had dared me to do, but it was the only dare I'd taken.\n\nChandler bent over now with his handcuffs, and with a practiced move, he had my prisoner cuffed before the man knew what was happening. I rose, with a courteous assist from Chief Chandler, and while I was telling him what had happened, he hauled the cuffed man to his feet and propelled the prisoner toward the squad car.\n\nHe listened, made a call on his radio.\n\nI stared at every move he made, unable to square this man, this police chief with his severe haircut and cool eyes, with the boy who'd gotten drunk with me on Rebel Yell.\n\n\"Where you think he came from?\" Chandler asked, as if it weren't too important. My mother had been coaxed inside the store by Varena and the sales clerks.\n\n\"Must have been there,\" I decided, pointing at the alley running between Corbett's and the furniture store. \"That's the only place he could've been hiding unseen.\" It was a narrow alley, and if he'd been just a few feet inside it, he would have been invisible. \"Where was Diane Dykeman when her purse was snatched?\"\n\nChandler cocked an eye at me. \"She was over by Dill's pharmacy, two blocks away,\" he said. \"The snatcher dodged back in the alley, and we couldn't track him. I don't see how we could have missed this guy, but I guess he could have hidden until we'd checked the alley behind the store. There are more little niches and hidey-holes in this downtown area than you can shake a stick at.\"\n\nI nodded. Since the downtown area of Bartley was more than a hundred and fifty years old, during which time the Square businesses had flourished and gone broke in cycles, I could well believe it.\n\n\"You stay put,\" Chandler said and strode down the alley. I sighed and stayed put. I glanced at my watch once or twice. He was gone for seven minutes.\n\n\"I think he's been sleeping back there,\" Chandler said when he reemerged onto the sidewalk. Suddenly my high school buddy was galvanized, and there wasn't any languid small-town-cop air about him anymore. \"I didn't find Diane's purse, but there're some refrigerator cartons and a nest of rags.\"\n\nChandler had that saving-the-punchline air. He bent into his car and used the radio again.\n\n\"I just called Brainerd, who answered the call on the murder cases,\" he told me after he straightened. \"Come look.\"\n\nI followed Chandler down the alley. We arrived at the T junction, where this little alley joined the larger one running behind the buildings on the west of the square. There was a refrigerator carton tucked into a niche behind some bushes that had made their precarious lives in the cracks in the rough pavement. Chandler pointed, and I followed his finger to see a length of rusty pipe close to but not visible from the carton, as I figured it. The pipe had been placed on a broken drain that had formerly run from the top of the flat-roofed furniture store to the gutter, and the placement rendered it all but invisible if it had not been stained at one end. The pipe, more than two feet long and about two inches in diameter, was darker at one end than the other.\n\n\"Bloodstains?\" Chandler said. \"Dave LeMay, I'm thinking.\"\n\nI stared at the pipe again and understood.\n\nThe same man who might have beaten to death the doctor and his nurse had come that close to my mother. For a savage second, I wished I had kicked him harder and longer. I could have broken his arm, or his skull so easily while I had him down on the sidewalk. I stared out of the alley. I could just glimpse the man's profile as he sat in Chandler's car. That face was vacant. Nobody home.\n\n\"You go on in the store, Lily,\" Chandler said, maybe reading my face too easily. \"Your mama might need you right now, Varena too. We'll talk later.\"\n\nI spun on my heel and strode down the alley to the street, to enter the glass-paned front door of Corbett's. A bell attached to the door tinkled, and the little crowd around my mother shifted to absorb me.\n\nThere was a couch positioned opposite the Bride's Area, where all the local brides' and grooms' selections of china and silverware were displayed. Mother was sitting on that sofa, Varena beside her explaining what had happened.\n\nAnother police car pulled to the curb outside, spurring more activity. Amid all the bustle, the telephoning, and the concern on the faces of the women around her, my mother gradually recovered her color and composure. When she knew Mom was okay, Varena took me aside and gripped my arm.\n\n\"Way to go, Sis,\" she said.\n\nI shrugged.\n\n\"You did good.\"\n\nI almost shrugged again and looked away. But instead I ventured a smile.\n\nAnd Varena smiled back.\n\n\"Hey, I hate to interrupt this sister-sister talk,\" Chandler said, sticking his head in the shop door, \"but I gotta take statements from you three.\"\n\nSo we all went down to the little Bartley police station, one block away, to make our statements. What had happened had been so quick and simple, really just a matter of a few seconds, that it didn't take long. As we left, Chandler reminded us to stop by the station the next day to sign our statements.\n\nChandler motioned me to remain. I obediently lagged behind. I looked curiously at him. He didn't, wouldn't, meet my eyes.\n\n\"They ever catch 'em, Lily?\"\n\nThe back of my neck prickled and tightened. \"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Damn.\" And back into his tiny office he strode, all the equipment he wore on his belt making every step a statement of certainty. I took a deep breath and hurried to catch up with Mom and Varena.\n\nWe still had to go back to Corbett's Gift Shop. The women in my family weren't going to let a little thing like an attempted theft deter them from their appointed rounds. So we slid back into our little wedding groove. Varena got the basket full of presents she'd come to pick up, Mother accepted compliments on Varena's impending marriage, I was patted on the back (though somewhat gingerly) for stopping the purse snatcher, and when my adrenaline jolt finally expired... I was back to being bored.\n\nWe drove home to open and record the presents. While Mother and Varena told Daddy about our unexpectedly exciting shopping expedition, I wandered into the living room and stared out the front window. I switched on the Christmas tree lights, found that they blinked, shut them off.\n\nI wondered what Jack was doing.\n\nI found myself thinking about the homeless man I'd kicked. I thought of the redness of his eyes, the stubble on his face, his dishevelment, his smell. Would Dr. LeMay have remained seated behind his desk if such a man had come into his office? I didn't think so.\n\nAnd Dr. LeMay must have died first. If he'd heard Binnie Armstrong speaking to an unknown man, Binnie being attacked, he would never have been caught sitting. He would have been up and around the desk, struggling, despite his age. He had been a proud man, a man's man.\n\nIf that sad specimen had made his way into the doctor's office when it was officially closed, Dr. LeMay would have shown him the door, or told him to make an appointment, or called the police, or referred him to the emergency room doctor who drove out from Pine Bluff every day. Dave LeMay would have dealt with the homeless man any number of ways.\n\nBut he wouldn't have stayed behind his desk.\n\nThe intruder would have had the pipe in his hands. He hadn't come upon a rusty pipe in the doctor's office. And if the intruder had entered with the pipe, he had intended to kill Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong.\n\nI shook my head as I stared out the living room window. I was not a law enforcement officer or any kind of detective, but several things about the homeless-man-as-murderer scenario just didn't make sense. And the more I thought about it, the fishier it seemed: If the homeless man had killed Dr. LeMay and Mrs. Armstrong, why hadn't he robbed the place? Could the horror of what he'd done have driven him out before he accomplished his purpose?\n\nIf he was innocent, how had the murder weapon\u2014what Chandler McAdoo seemed to think was the murder weapon\u2014come to be in the alley? If this man was clever enough to hide Diane Dykeman's purse, which he almost certainly had stolen, why hadn't he been clever enough to get rid of the evidence of a much more serious crime?\n\nI'll tell you what I'd do, I thought. If I wanted to commit a murder and pin it on a throwaway person, I'd put the murder weapon right by a homeless man, moreover a black homeless man... someone with no local ties, no likely alibi, and already reported to be a purse snatcher.\n\nThat's what I'd do.\n\nThe back door to the doctor's office had been locked, I recalled. So the murderer had come in the front, as Varena and I had. He had walked past the doorway of the room in which Mrs. Armstrong was working, and she had not been alarmed. Binnie Armstrong had been lying in the doorway, so she had calmly continued whatever she had been doing in the little lab.\n\nSo. The murderer\u2014carrying the pipe\u2014walks into the office, which is officially closed. The murderer passes Binnie Armstrong, who stays right where she is. Then the murderer had gone into Dr. LeMay's office, looked at the old man on the other side of the piled desk, spoken to him. Though the killer had had a length of pipe in one hand, still the doctor hadn't been alarmed.\n\nI felt goosebumps shiver down my arms.\n\nWithout warning\u2014since Dr. LeMay was still in his chair, which was still pushed right up to the desk\u2014the murderer had lifted the pipe and hit Dr. LeMay over the head, kept hitting him, until he was just tissue. Then the killer had stepped out into the hall, and while Binnie was hurrying from the lab to investigate the awful sounds she'd heard, he hit her, too... until she was on the verge of death.\n\nThen he'd stepped out the front door and gotten into his vehicle... but surely he must have been covered in blood?\n\nI frowned. Here was a snag. Even the most angelic of white men could not step out in front of the doctor's office in the daytime with blood-soaked clothing, carrying a bloody pipe.\n\n\"Lily?\" My mother's voice. \"Lily?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I thought we'd have an early lunch, since the shower is this afternoon.\"\n\n\"OK.\" I tried to control the lurch of my stomach at the thought of food.\n\n\"It's on the table. I've called you twice.\"\n\n\"Oh. Sorry.\" As I reluctantly dipped my spoon into my mother's homemade beef soup, I tried to get back on my train of thought, but it had rolled out of the station.\n\nHere we all were, sitting around the kitchen table, just as we had for so many years.\n\nSuddenly, this scene seemed overwhelmingly bleak. Here we still were, the four of us.\n\n\"Excuse me, I have to walk,\" I said, pushing away from the table. The three of them looked up at me, a familiar dismay dragging at their mouths. But the compulsion had gotten so strong that I could no longer play my part.\n\nI threw on my coat, pulled on gloves as I left the house.\n\nThe first block was bliss. Even in the freezing cold, even in the face of the sharp wind, I was by myself. At least the sun was shining in its watery winter way, and the clear colors of the pines and holly bushes against the pale blue sky made my eyes blink with pleasure. The branches of the hardwood trees looked like a bleak version of lace. Our neighbor's big brown dog barked and trailed my progress for the length of his yard, but he stopped at that and gave me no more trouble. I remembered I had to nod when cars went past, but in Bartley that was not so frequent, even at lunchtime.\n\nI turned a corner to put the wind behind me, and in time I passed the Presbyterian church and the manse, where the O'Sheas lived. I wondered if the toddler, Luke, was letting Lou sleep. But I couldn't think about the O'Sheas without thinking of the picture that Roy Costimiglia had received in the mail.\n\nWhoever sent that picture obviously knew which girl was the abducted Summer Dawn Macklesby. That particular picture, attached to that particular article, sent to the Macklesbys' PI, was intended to lead Roy Costimiglia to one conclusion. Why hadn't the anonymous sender gone one step farther and circled the child's face? Why the ambiguity?\n\nThat was a real puzzle.\n\nOf course... if you could figure out who'd sent it... you could find out why. Maybe.\n\nGreat piece of detection, Lily, I told myself scornfully, and walked even faster. A brown mailing envelope that could be bought at any Wal-Mart, a picture from a yearbook that hundreds of students had purchased... well, one copy would be missing that page now. Page 23, I remembered, from looking so hard at the one in Jack's briefcase.\n\nOf course, the whole thing was really Jack's problem. Furthermore, it was a problem Jack was being paid to solve.\n\nBut I needed to know the answer before Varena married Dill Kingery. And the fact was evident that, though Jack was a trained and dogged detective, I was the one on the inside track, here in Bartley.\n\nSo I tried to imagine some way I could help Jack, some information I could discover for him.\n\nI couldn't think of a damn thing I could do.\n\nBut maybe something would come to me.\n\nThe harder and longer I walked, the better I felt. I was breathing easier: The claustrophobia induced by family closeness was loosening its knot.\n\nI glanced at my watch and stopped dead in my tracks.\n\nIt was time for Varena's shower.\n\nLuckily, I had been meandering around in my parents' neighborhood, so I was only four blocks away from their house. I set out quickly, arriving at the front door within minutes. They'd left it unlocked, which was a relief. I dashed to my bedroom, skinned out of my jeans and sweater, and pulled on my black pants-blue blouse-black jacket combination. I checked the shower location and dashed out the door.\n\nI was only ten minutes late.\n\nThis was a kitchen shower at the home of Mother's best friend, Grace Parks. Grace lived on a street of large homes, and hers was one of the largest. She had daily help, I remembered, and I cast a professional eye over the house as I entered.\n\nYou wouldn't catch Grace looking relieved to see me, but the lines bracketing her generous mouth did relax when I came in. She gave me a ritual hug and a pat on the shoulder that was just a little too forceful, as she told me my mother and sister were in the living room waiting for me. I'd always liked Grace, who would be blond until the day she died. Grace seemed indestructible. Her brown eyes were always made up, her curvy figure had never sagged (at least on the surface), and she wore magnificent jewelry quite routinely.\n\nShe slid me into a chair she'd saved right by my mother and answered a question from one of the assembled guests even as she was putting the pencil and notepad in my hands. I stared at it blankly for a moment until I realized I'd been assigned the task of recording the gifts and givers.\n\nI gave Mom a cautious smile, and she cautiously smiled back. Varena gave me a compound look, irritation and relief mixed in equal parts. \"Sorry,\" I said quietly.\n\n\"You made it,\" my mother said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact.\n\nI nodded at the circle of women in Grace's huge living room, recognizing most of them from the shower two days ago. These people would be just as relieved as Varena to have the wedding over with. More people seemed to have been invited to this shower; maybe since Grace had such a large home, she'd told Varena to expand the basic guest list.\n\nBecause I'd been thinking of their daughters, I particularly noticed Meredith Osborn and Lou O'Shea. Mrs. Kingery was sitting on the other side of Varena, which was a relief. It seemed unfair to me that Dill should have such a nerve-wracking mother after his wife had been unstable enough to kill herself. I could see why he'd be attracted to Varena, who had always seemed to be one of the most stable and balanced people I'd ever known.\n\nIt was the first time I'd realized that. It's strange how you can know someone all your life and still not spell out her strong and weak points to yourself.\n\nThis shower had a kitchen theme. All the guests had been asked to include their favorite recipe with their gift. As we began the grand opening, I got busy. My handwriting is not elegant, but it is clear, and I tried to do a thorough job. Some boxes were stuffed with little things rather than a single gift, like a set of dish towels. Diane Dykeman (she of the snatched purse) had given Varena a set of measuring spoons and measuring cups, a little scale, and a chart of weight equivalencies, and I had to use my most microscopic writing to enter everything.\n\nThis was really an excellent job to have, I decided, because I didn't have to talk to anyone. The story about me kicking the purse snatcher wasn't town currency yet, and Mother and Varena were avoiding the subject. But I was pretty sure it would begin to make the rounds when time came for refreshments.\n\nWhen that moment arrived\u2014when all the gifts had been opened and Grace Parks had vanished for a significant time\u2014she reappeared at my elbow and asked me to pour the punch.\n\nIt occurred to me that Grace understood me pretty well. I gave her an assessing look as I took my place at one end of her massive oval dining table, polished to a gleaming shine, bisected by a Christmas runner and covered with the usual shower food: nuts, cake, finger sandwiches, mints, snack mix.\n\n\"You're like me,\" Grace said. She gave me a direct look. \"You like to be busy more than you like to sit and listen.\"\n\nIt had never crossed my mind that I was in any way like the elegant Grace Parks. I nodded and began to fill my ladle for the first one around the table\u2014Varena, of course, the honoree.\n\nI had to do no more than say \"Punch?\" after that and smile and nod.\n\nAfter a long time, it was over, and once again we loaded gifts into the car, thanked Grace profusely, and drove home to unload.\n\nAfter I'd changed back to jeans and the sweater, Varena asked me if I'd go to her cottage with her to help pack. She'd been moving her things slowly into Dill's house over the past month, beginning with the things she needed least.\n\nOf course I agreed, relieved both at the prospect of being busy and of being helpful. We had a quick sandwich and went over to the cottage, with a few stops along the way. Dill, Varena told me, was spending some quality time with Anna, who'd been showing signs of being overwhelmed by all the wedding excitement.\n\n\"I've reached the point where all I can do here at my place is sleep,\" she told me, after she'd put her sweats on. \"But I kept the lease up until the end of December, because I really didn't want to move back in with the folks.\" I nodded. I could see that once she did that, she and Dill would have lost whatever privacy they had. Or did Varena just want to ensure she had a break from our parents?\n\n\"What do you have left to pack?\"\n\nVarena began to open closets, showing me what she hadn't managed to empty out before now.\n\nWe'd stopped behind some stores to collect boxes. Downtown had been empty, now that most of the businesses were closed. It was fully dark at six o'clock this time of year, and the night was very cold. The cottage seemed warm and homey in contrast to the blackness outside.\n\nI was assigned to pack the tiny closet by the front door, which contained things like extra lightbulbs, extension cords, batteries, and the vacuum cleaner. As I began to pack them in a sturdy box, Varena started wrapping some pots and pans with newspaper. We worked in comfortable silence for a little while.\n\nVarena had just asked me if I wanted some instant hot chocolate when we heard the sound of someone walking outside the cottage.\n\nThe scare we'd had that morning must have made us jumpy. Both of us raised our heads like deer hearing the sound of the hunter's boots. Peripherally, I saw Varena turn to me, but I shook my head slightly to make her keep silent.\n\nThen someone kicked the front door.\n\nVarena shrieked.\n\n\"Who is it?\" I called, standing to one side of the door.\n\n\"Jack,\" he yelled. \"Let me in!\"\n\nI caught my breath in a rattling gasp, frightened and furious at being so. I yanked the door open, ready to let him know how much I appreciated being jolted like that. The words died in my throat when I opened the door. Jack was carrying Meredith Osborn. She was covered in blood.\n\nBehind me I heard Varena pick up the phone, punch in 911. She spoke tersely to whoever answered.\n\nJack was haggard with shock. Some of Meredith Osborn's blood was smeared on him. He was breathing raggedly. Though she was a small woman, he'd been carrying her as a dead weight.\n\nVarena picked up a sheet she'd just folded and flung it over the couch in one movement, and Jack gladly laid the little woman down. When he'd deposited his burden he stood for a moment with his arms still curved. Then with a groan he straightened them, his shoulders moving unconsciously in an effort to relax strained muscles.\n\nVarena was already on her knees beside the couch, her hands on her landlady's wrist. She was shaking her head.\n\n\"She's got a pulse, but it's...\" Varena shook her head again. \"She's been lying outside.\" The dying woman's face was ice-white, and the cold was rolling off the tiny body, eddying through the warm room.\n\nWe heard the sound of the ambulance in the distance.\n\nMeredith Osborn opened her eyes. They fixed on mine.\n\nSomeone had struck her across her face, and her lips were cracked, had bled. Underneath the blood, they were blue, to match the tinge of her fingernails.\n\nHer mouth opened. \"The children,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Varena said instantly. \"They're fine.\"\n\nMeredith Osborn turned her gaze from my face to Varena's. Her mouth moved again. She tried as hard as she could to tell Varena something.\n\nInstead, she died." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "I held on to Jack. He held on to me. We'd seen people die\u2014 bad people, violent people, people who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. This young woman, newly a mother, beaten and left in the freezing air, was something else again.\n\nIt was Varena who ran over to the Osborn house to see if the children were there, Varena who discovered that the house was empty and silent. And, twenty minutes later, it was Varena who saw the car with Emory Osborn, Eve, and the baby Jane pull into the driveway, to be met with the news that would change their lives forever.\n\nLanky Detective Brainerd was on duty again, or still on duty, and he eyed me dubiously, even after we explained what had happened.\n\n\"What were you doing here?\" he asked Jack directly. \"I don't believe you're from here, sir.\"\n\n\"No, sir, I'm not. I'm here to visit Lily, and I'm staying at the Delta Motel.\" Jack let go of me and stepped closer to Brainerd.\n\nI kept my gaze on the floor. I didn't know if Jack was making a mistake or not, keeping his business in Bartley a secret.\n\n\"How'd you know Miss Bard was here?\"\n\n\"Her car is here,\" Jack said.\n\nIt was true, we'd come in my car. Mother had taken Varena to the wedding shower, so I'd given her a ride from their place over to the cottage.\n\nAfter her burst of energy, Varena was slumped in an armchair, staring into space.\n\n\"So you stopped here to see Miss Bard...?\"\n\n\"And when I got out of the car, I thought I heard a noise from behind the big house,\" Jack said calmly. \"So I thought I'd check it out before I alarmed Lily and Varena.\"\n\n\"You found Mrs. Osborn.\"\n\n\"Yes. She was lying between the back of the house and their garage.\"\n\n\"Did she speak to you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"She said nothing?\"\n\n\"No. She didn't seem to know I'd picked her up.\"\n\n\"But she spoke when she was lying on the couch?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said.\n\nJack and Detective Brainerd turned simultaneously.\n\n\"And what did she say?\" the policeman asked.\n\n\"She said, 'The children.'\"\n\n\"And that's all?\"\n\n\"That's all.\"\n\nBrainerd looked thoughtful, as well he might.\n\nWhat had Meredith Osborn meant? Had the last thoughts of the dying woman simply been dwelling on the children she was leaving behind? Or did those words mean more? Were her two children in danger? Or was she thinking of the three girls in the picture?\n\nWhoever had sent the picture to Jack's friend Roy had started a deadly train of events.\n\nAfter the ambulance removed Meredith's body, I stared out the side window of Varena's cottage, watching the police search the backyard where she had lain bleeding and freezing.\n\nI was full of anger.\n\nThe death of Meredith Osborn had not even had the mercy of being fast. Dave LeMay and Binnie Armstrong had had only moments to fear death\u2014and those were dreadful moments, I fully appreciated that, believe me. But lying in your own backyard, unable to summon help, feeling your own end creeping through you... I closed my eyes, felt myself shudder. I knew something about hours of fear, about being certain your death was imminent and unavoidable. I had been spared, finally. Meredith Osborn had not.\n\nJack put an arm around my shoulder.\n\n\"I want to go away,\" I whispered.\n\nI couldn't, and we both knew it.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" I said at a more conversational volume, hearing my voice's coldness. \"I'm being silly.\"\n\nJack sighed. \"I wish I could go away, too.\"\n\n\"What killed her?\"\n\n\"Not a gun. Knife wounds, I think.\"\n\nI shivered. I hated knives.\n\n\"Did we bring this here with us, Jack?\" I whispered.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"This was here before we came. But it won't be here when I leave.\" When Jack got his teeth into something, he didn't let go, even when he was biting the wrong part.\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" I told him, quietly. \"Tomorrow we'll talk.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nI was taking Varena home to spend the night. She couldn't sleep in this cottage. She was ready, standing staring out the side window at the lit backyard, the figures moving around it. So I tried to walk out the door. But after I'd stepped away from Jack I reached back to grip his wrist. I couldn't seem to let go. I looked down at my feet, struggling with myself.\n\n\"Lily?\" Under the questioning tone, his voice was hoarse.\n\nI bit my lip, hard.\n\n\"I'm gone,\" I said, letting go of him. \"I'll see you in the morning, at eight. At the motel.\" I glanced at his face.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Lock her cottage when the police let you go, OK?\"\n\nVarena didn't seem to hear us. She stood like a statue at that window, her overnight bag on the floor beside her.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, still looking intently at me.\n\n\"Then I'll see you tomorrow,\" I said and turned my back on him and walked out, beckoning to my sister to follow.\n\nI have done so many hard things, but that was one of the hardest.\n\nIt was only nine by the time we got to my parents' house, but it felt like midnight. I didn't want to see anyone or talk to anyone, and yet somehow my parents had to be told, had to be talked to. Luckily for me, Varena had regained her balance by the time she saw my mother, and though she cried a little, she managed to relate the horrible death of Meredith Osborn.\n\n\"Should I just cancel the wedding?\" she asked tearfully.\n\nI knew my mother would talk her out of it. I really couldn't bear to be with people right now. I went to my room and shut the door firmly. My father came to stand outside in the hall; I knew his footsteps.\n\n\"Are you okay, pumpkin?\" he called.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Do you want to be alone?\"\n\nI clenched my fists until even my short fingernails bit into my palms. \"Yes, please.\"\n\n\"OK.\" Off he went, God bless him.\n\nI lay on the hard bed, hands clasped across my stomach, and thought.\n\nI could not imagine how I could find out any more information about the three girls who might be Summer Dawn. But I was convinced that Meredith Osborn's death had come about because she knew which girl was not who she seemed to be. I tried to picture Lou O'Shea or the Reverend O'Shea attacking Meredith in the freezing cold of her backyard, but I just could not. Still less could I imagine mild Dill Kingery stabbing Meredith into silence. Dill's mother was certainly off-base, but I'd never seen any tendency to violence. Mrs. Kingery just seemed daffy.\n\nI thought of Meredith Osborn taking care of Krista O'Shea and Anna Kingery. What could she have seen\u2014or heard\u2014that would lead her to think she knew that one of the girls had been born with a different identity?\n\nI'd never had a baby, so I didn't know what happened bureaucratically when you gave birth. Some hospitals, I knew, took little footprints\u2014I'd seen them framed on the walls of the Althaus family when I cleaned for them. And of course there was the birth certificate. And pictures. A lot of hospitals took pictures, for the parents. To me, all babies pretty much looked the same, red and scrunch-faced, or brown and scrunch-faced. That some had hair and some didn't was the only obvious distinction I could see.\n\nI had learned, also from the much-birthed Carol Althaus, that the fingerprints police or volunteers sometimes took at mall booths were not helpful because often they were of poor quality. I didn't know if that was true, but it sounded reasonable. I was willing to bet the same reasons would render any existing baby footprints of Summer Dawn unusable.\n\nSo fingerprints and footprints were a no go. DNA testing could prove Summer Dawn's identity, I was sure, but of course you had to know whom to test. I couldn't see Jack demanding that the three girls undergo DNA testing. Well, I could see him demanding it, but I could also see all three sets of parents turning him down cold.\n\nI stared at the ceiling until I realized my mind was going through the same cycle of thought, over and over, and it was no more productive than it had been the first time I'd gone through it.\n\nI remembered, as I was undressing and pulling on a nightgown, that when Jack had first come to my bed, the next morning I'd made myself a promise: never to ask Jack for anything.\n\nI was having a hard time keeping that promise.\n\nAs I lay once again on the bed I'd slept in as a virgin, I had to remind myself over and over that there was a corollary to that promise: not to offer what was not asked for.\n\nI heard my sister next door in her old room, going through the same motions I'd gone through. I was sure she was hurting, sure she was suffering doubly since this blood and gore was happening at the time that was supposed to be the happiest in her life.\n\nI felt helpless.\n\nIt was the most galling feeling in the world.\n\nI was up and out of the house the next morning before my parents were stirring. I couldn't wait for eight o'clock. I rose, took a hasty shower, and yanked on ordinary clothes, not much caring what they were as long as they were warm.\n\nI started my car with a little difficulty and drove through the frosty streets. There were a few more cars at the motel, so my knock at Jack's door was quiet.\n\nHe opened it after just a second, and I stepped inside. Jack closed the door quickly behind me, shirtless and shivering in the gust of cold air that entered with me.\n\nWhat I had been going to do, planning to do, was sit in one of the two uncomfortable vinyl-covered chairs while Jack sat in the other and discuss his plans and how I could help.\n\nWhat happened was, the minute the door was closed we were on each other like hungry wolves. When I touched him, my hands were pleased with everything they encountered. When I kissed him, I wanted him instantly. I was shaking so hard with wanting him that I couldn't get my clothes off, and he pulled my sweatshirt over my head and yanked down my jeans and underwear, helping me step out of them, pulling me to the bed into his nest of residual warmth.\n\nAfterward, we lay with our arms around each other. I didn't care that my left arm was going to sleep, he didn't seem to mind that there wasn't an altogether comfortable place for his right leg.\n\nHe whispered my name in my ear. I smoothed his hair, tangled and loose, back from his face. I ran my fingers over the stubble on his chin. There were words in my mouth that I would not say. I clamped my teeth over them and continued to touch him. That stupid, fragile, ludicrous swelling in my chest had to remain contained.\n\nHis hands were occupied, too, and after a few minutes we made love again, not as frantically. There was nothing I wanted so much as to stay in that sorry motel bed, as long as Jack was in it.\n\nI was dressing (again) after another quick shower. \"What are you going to do next?\" I asked, hearing the reluctance in my voice.\n\n\"Find out which of the little girls had seen Dr. LeMay recently.\"\n\n\"I figured that had something to do with it. After all, the homeless man was in jail when Meredith Osborn was killed.\"\n\n\"She wasn't beaten like the doctor and his nurse.\" Jack had been brushing his hair back into its ponytail. Now he gave me a curious look. He was wearing a long-sleeved polo shirt striped rust and brown, and the scar that ran down his cheek to his jaw seemed whiter in contrast. He ran a belt through the loops on his khakis. \"Might have been a different killer.\"\n\n\"Umhum,\" I said skeptically. \"All of a sudden, Bartley is full of brutal murders. And you're trying to find a missing child. This is just coincidence.\"\n\nHe gave me the look that I'd learned meant he was up to something: It was a sideways look, a quick flash of the eyes, to gauge my mood.\n\n\"The homeless man's name is Christopher Darby Sims.\"\n\n\"OK, I'll bite. How'd you know that?\"\n\n\"I have a connection here at the police department.\"\n\nI wondered uneasily if this was one of those good ole boy things, or if Jack meant he'd bribed a cop. Or perhaps both.\n\n\"So, can this connection look through the doctor's records?\"\n\n\"I can't ask that much. I'm feeling my way. Are you still squeamish about frogs?\" Jack asked, a little smile turning up the corners of his mouth.\n\n\"Chandler McAdoo.\"\n\nJack lifted a corner of the curtain, peered out at the bleak day and the depressing motel court. \"I stopped by the police station yesterday. Once I mentioned your name and hinted pretty strongly that we were tight, Chandler began to talk to me. He's given me some fascinating stories about your teen years.\" He tried not to grin too broadly.\n\nAs long as Chandler hadn't told him about the later years. \"I can't even remember what I was like then,\" I said. And I was speaking the literal truth. \"I can remember some of the things we got up to,\" I said, smiling a little, tentatively. \"But I can't for the life of me recall what I felt. Too much water under the bridge, I guess.\" It was like I could see a silent movie of my life without hearing sound or feeling emotion. I shrugged. What was gone, was gone.\n\n\"I'm memorizing some stories,\" Jack warned me. \"And when you least expect it...\"\n\nI tightened my shoelaces, still smiling, and kissed Jack good-bye. \"Call me when you know something or want me to do something,\" I told him. I felt the smile slide right off my mouth. \"I want this over.\"\n\nJack nodded. \"I do, too,\" he said, his voice even. \"And then I never want to see Teresa and Simon Macklesby again.\"\n\nI looked up at him, reading his face. I touched his cheek with my fingers. \"You can do this,\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah, I should be able to,\" he told me, his voice bleak and empty.\n\n\"What's your program for the morning?\" I asked.\n\n\"I'm helping Dill put a floor in his attic.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I just happened to be in the pharmacy yesterday afternoon and we were talking, and he told me that was what he was going to be doing this morning, no matter how cold it was. He wanted to get the job finished before the wedding. So I said I didn't have anything to do since you were wrapped up in wedding plans, and I'd be glad to lend him a hand.\"\n\n\"And ask him a few questions while you're at it?\"\n\n\"Possibly.\" Jack smiled at me, that charming smile that coaxed so much information out of citizens.\n\nI drove home, trying to think my way through a maze.\n\nMy family was up, Varena shaky but much better. They'd had a conference while I was gone and made up their minds to go through with the wedding no matter what. I was glad I'd missed that one, glad the decision had been made without me. If Varena had postponed her wedding, it would have made the time frame easier, but I had a concern I hadn't shared with Jack.\n\nI was afraid\u2014if the murderer of Dr. LeMay, Mrs. Armstrong, and Meredith Osborn was the same person\u2014that this criminal was getting frantic. And a person frantically trying to conceal a crime was likely to kill the strongest link between him and the crime.\n\nIn this case, that would be Summer Dawn Macklesby.\n\nOn one level, it didn't seem likely that whoever'd gone to such extreme lengths to conceal the original crime\u2014the abduction\u2014would even consider killing the girl. But on another level, it seemed obvious, even likely.\n\nI knew nothing that could help solve this crime. What did I know how to do? I knew how to clean and how to fight.\n\nI also knew where people were most likely to hide things. Cleaning had certainly taught me that. Objects could be mislaid anywhere (though I had a mental list of places I checked first, when employers asked me to keep my eyes open for some missing item) but hidden... that was a different matter.\n\nSo? I asked myself sarcastically. How was that going to help?\n\n\"Could you, sweetheart?\" my mother was saying.\n\n\"What?\" I asked, my voice sharp and quick. She'd startled me.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" my mother said, her voice making it clear I should be saying that to her. \"I asked if you would mind going over to Varena's place and finishing her packing?\"\n\nI wasn't sure why I was being asked to do this. Was Varena too scared to be there by herself? And it wasn't supposed to bother me? But maybe I'd been woolgathering while they'd spelled it out.\n\nVarena certainly looked as if she needed sleep and a holiday. And this, right before the happiest time of her life.\n\n\"Of course,\" I said. \"What about the wedding dress?\"\n\n\"Oh, my heavens!\" Mother exclaimed. \"We've got to get that out right away!\" Mother's pale face flushed. Somehow, the wedding dress was at risk in that apartment. Galvanized by this sudden urgency, Mother shooed me into my car and bundled herself up in record time.\n\nShe followed me over to Varena's and took the dress home personally, carrying it from the cottage to the car as though it were the crown and scepter of royalty.\n\nI was left alone in Varena's place, an oddly unsettling feeling. It was like surreptitiously going through her drawers. I shrugged. I was here to do a job. That thought was very normal, very steadying, after all we'd seen lately.\n\nI counted boxes, moved the ones already full out to my car trunk after labeling them with Varena's black marker. \"Martha Stewart, that's me,\" I muttered and folded out the flaps on another box, placing it by the nearest closet. This was a little double closet with sliding doors in Varena's tiny hall. It held only a few linens and towels. I guessed Varena had already moved the others.\n\nJust as I'd picked up the first handful, trying to restrain myself from shaking the sheets out and refolding them, there was a knock on the door. I looked through Varena's peephole. The knocker was a blond man, small, fair, with red-rimmed blue eyes. He looked mild and sad. I was sure I knew who it was.\n\n\"Emory Osborn,\" he said, when I opened the door. I shook his hand. His was that soft boneless handshake some men give a woman, as though they're scared if they squeeze with all their masculine power they'll break her delicate fingers. It felt like shaking hands with the Pillsbury Dough Boy. This was something Jess O'Shea and Emory Osborn had in common.\n\n\"Come in,\" I said. After all, he owned the cottage.\n\nEmory Osborn stepped over the threshold. The widower was maybe 5' 7\", not much taller than I. He was very fair and blue-eyed, handsome on a small scale, and he had the most flawless skin I'd ever seen on a man. Right at the moment, it was pink from the cold.\n\n\"I'm sorry for your loss,\" I told him.\n\nHe looked directly at me then. \"You were here in the cottage last night?\"\n\n\"Yes, I was.\"\n\n\"You saw her?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"She was alive.\"\n\nI shifted uneasily. \"Yes,\" I told him reluctantly.\n\n\"Did she speak?\"\n\n\"She asked after the children.\"\n\n\"The children?\"\n\n\"That's all.\"\n\nHis eyes closed, and for one awful moment I thought he was going to cry.\n\n\"Have a seat,\" I said abruptly. I startled him into sitting down in the nearest chair, an armchair that must be Varena's favorite from the way she'd positioned it.\n\n\"Let me get you some hot chocolate.\" I went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer. I knew there would be some since Varena'd offered it to me the night before. There it was, on the counter where she'd set it, along with two mugs. Luckily, the microwave was built-in, so I was able to heat the water in it. I stirred in the powder. It wasn't very good, but it was hot and sweet, and he looked in need of both sugar and warmth.\n\n\"Where are the children?\" I asked as I put his mug on the small oak table by the chair.\n\n\"They're with church members,\" he said. His voice was rich but not big.\n\n\"So, what can I do for you?\" It didn't seem that he would say anything else unless I prompted him.\n\n\"I wanted to see where she died.\"\n\nThis was very nearly intolerable. \"There, on the couch,\" I said brusquely.\n\nHe stared. \"There aren't any stains,\" he told me.\n\n\"Varena slung a sheet over it.\" This was beyond strange. The back of my neck began to prickle. I wasn't going to sit knee to knee with him\u2014I'd been perched on the ottoman that matched the chair\u2014and point out where Meredith's head had been, what spot her feet had touched.\n\n\"Before your friend put Meredith down?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I jumped up to pull a fitted sheet from the closet. Giving way to an almost irresistible compulsion, I refolded it, and knew I'd straighten all the rest, too. The hell with Varena's finer feelings.\n\n\"And he is\u2014?\"\n\n\"My friend.\" I could hear my voice get flatter and harder.\n\n\"You're angry with me, I'm afraid,\" he said wearily. And sure enough, he was weeping, tears were running down his cheeks. He blotted them automatically with a well-used handkerchief.\n\n\"You shouldn't put yourself through this.\" My tone was still not the one a nice woman would use to a widower. I meant he shouldn't put me through it.\n\n\"I feel like God's abandoned me and the kids. I'm heartbroken,\" and I reflected I'd never actually heard anyone use that word out loud, \"and my faith has left me,\" he finished, without taking a breath. He put his face in his hands.\n\nOh, man. I didn't want to hear this. I didn't want to be here.\n\nThrough the uncurtained window, I saw a car pull in behind mine in the cottage's narrow driveway. Jess O'Shea got out and began his way to the door, his head bowed. A minister\u2014just the person to deal with a lapse of faith and recent bereavement. I opened the door before he had a chance to knock.\n\n\"Jess,\" I said. Even I could hear the naked relief in my voice. \"Emory Osborn is here, and he is really, really...\" I stood there, nodding significantly, unable to pin down exactly what Emory Osborn was.\n\nJess O'Shea seemed to be taking in my drift. He stepped around me and over to the smaller man, claiming my former seat on the ottoman. He took Emory's hands in his.\n\nI tried to block out the two men's voices as I continued the job of packing, despite the feeling I should leave while Emory talked with his minister. But Emory had the option of going to his own house if he wanted complete privacy. If I looked at it practically, he'd known I was here and come in the cottage anyway...\n\nJess and Emory were praying together now, the fervent expression on Emory's face the only one I could see. Jess's back was bent and his hands clasped in front of his face. The two fair heads were close together.\n\nThen Dill stepped in, looking at the two men praying, at me folding, trying to keep my eyes to myself. He looked startled and not too happy at this tableau.\n\nAll three dads in the same room. Except that one of them was probably not really a father at all but a thief who had stolen his fatherhood.\n\nDill turned to me, his whole face a question. I shrugged.\n\n\"Where's Varena?\" he whispered.\n\n\"At our folks',\" I whispered. \"You go over there. You two need to talk about what's going to happen. And aren't you supposed to be meeting Jack at your place?\" I gave him a little push with my hand, and he took a step back before he recovered his footing. Possibly I'd pushed a little harder than I'd planned.\n\nAfter Dill obediently got in his car and left, I finished refolding and found I had packed all the remaining items in the linen closet. I checked the bathroom cabinet. It held only a few things, which I also boxed.\n\nWhen I turned around, Jess O'Shea was right behind me. My arms tensed immediately and my hands fisted.\n\n\"Sorry, did I surprise you?\" he asked, with apparent innocence. Yes.\n\n\"I think Emory is feeling a little better. We're going over to his house. Thanks for comforting him.\"\n\nI couldn't recall any comforting I'd done; it must have been in the eye of the comfortee. I made a noncommittal sound.\n\n\"I'm so glad you've returned to reconcile with your family,\" Jess said, all in a rush. \"I know this has meant so much to them.\"\n\nThis was his business? I raised my eyebrows.\n\nHe reddened when I didn't speak. \"I guess it's a professional hazard, giving out emotional pats on the back,\" he said finally. \"I apologize.\"\n\nI nodded. \"How is Krista?\" I asked.\n\n\"She's fine,\" he said, surprised. \"It's a little hard to get her to understand that her friend's mother is gone, she seems not to see it as a reality yet. That can be a blessing, you know. I think we'll be keeping Eve for a while until Emory can cope a little better. Maybe the baby, too, if Lou thinks she can handle it.\"\n\n\"Didn't Lou tell me she'd taken Krista to the doctor last week?\" I asked.\n\nIf Jess noticed the contrast between my lack of response to his observations about my family and my willingness to chatter about his child, he didn't comment on it. Parents almost always seem willing to believe other people are as fascinated with their children as they are.\n\n\"No,\" he said, obviously searching his memory. \"Krista hasn't even had a cold since we started her on her allergy shots last summer.\" His face lightened. \"Before that, we were in to Dr. LeMay's every week, it seemed like! My goodness, this is so much better. Lou gives Krista the shots herself.\"\n\nI nodded and began opening cabinets in the kitchen. Jess took the hint and left, pulling on his heavy coat as he walked across the yard. Evidently he wasn't going to stay at Emory's long.\n\nAfter he left I wrote a note on a pad I found under Varena's phone. I hopped in my car and drove to the motel. As I'd expected, Jack's car wasn't there. I pulled up in front of his room. I squatted and slid the note under his door.\n\nIt said, \"Krista O'Shea didn't go to the doctor recently.\" I didn't sign it. Who else would be leaving Jack a note?\n\nOn my way back to Varena's, I scavenged alleys for more boxes. I was particularly interested in the alley behind the gift store and furniture store.\n\nIt was clean, for an alley, and I even scored a couple of very decent boxes before I began my search. There was a Dumpster back there; I was sure the police had been through it, since it was suspiciously empty. The appliance carton Christopher Sims had been using for shelter was gone, too, maybe appropriated by the police.\n\nI looked down the alley in both directions. Main Street was on one end, and anyone driving east would be able to glance down the alley and catch a glimpse of whoever was in it, unless that person was in the niche where Sims's box had been located.\n\nTo the south end of the alley was a quiet street with small businesses in older houses and a few remaining homes still occupied by one family apiece. That street, Macon, saw quite a lot of foot traffic; the square's parking space was severely limited, so downtown shoppers were always looking for a spot within walking distance.\n\nIt sure would be easy to catch a glimpse of Christopher Darby Sims while he squatted in this alley. It sure would be tempting to capitalize on the presence of a homeless black in Bartley. It would be no trouble at all to slip through the alley with, say, a length of bloody pipe. Deposit it behind a handy box.\n\nThe back door of the furniture store opened. A woman about my age came out, looking cautiously at me.\n\n\"Hi,\" she called. She was clearly waiting for me to account for my presence.\n\n\"I'm collecting boxes for my sister's move,\" I told her, gesturing toward my car with its open trunk.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, relief written on her face in big bold letters. \"I hate to seem suspicious, but we had a... Lily?\"\n\n\"Maude? Mary Maude?\" I was looking at her just as incredulously.\n\nShe came down the back steps of the building in a rush and threw her arms around me. I staggered back under her weight. Mary Maude was still pretty and always would be, but she was considerably rounder than she had been in high school. I made myself hug her back. \"Mary Maude Plummer,\" I said tentatively, patting her plump shoulder very gently.\n\n\"Well, it was Mary Maude Baumgartner for about five years, and now it's back to Plummer,\" she told me, sniffing a little. Mary Maude had always been emotional. I had a clenched feeling around my heart. I had a lot of memories of this woman.\n\n\"You never called me,\" she said now, looking up at me. She meant, after the rape. I could never get away from it here.\n\n\"I never called anyone,\" I said. I had to tell Mary Maude the truth. \"I couldn't face doing it. I had too hard a time.\"\n\nHer eyes filled with tears. \"But I've always loved you.\"\n\nAlways right to the emotional truth, no matter how uncomfortable. Could this be why I'd never called Mary Maude after my Bad Time? We'd let go of each other, taken a step back.\n\nI remembered another important truth. \"I love you too,\" I said. \"But I couldn't stand to be around people who were always thinking about what had happened to me. I couldn't do it.\"\n\nShe nodded. Her red hair, almost to her shoulders, turned under in a neat curve all the way around, and she had heavy gold earrings in her pierced ears. \"I think I can understand that. I've been all these years forgiving you for refusing my comfort.\"\n\n\"Are we all right?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said, smiling up at me. \"We're all right, now.\"\n\nWe both gave a little laugh, half happy, half embarrassed.\n\n\"So, you're getting boxes for Varena?\"\n\n\"Yeah. She's getting her stuff out of the cottage. The wedding's day after tomorrow. And after the murder last night...\"\n\n\"Oh, right, that's the place Varena rented! You know, the husband, Emory, works right here, with me.\" And Mary Maude pointed at the door from which she'd issued. \"He's the sweetest guy.\"\n\nHe would certainly have been aware of Christopher Sims's presence in the alley in back of the store.\n\n\"So, I guess you knew this guy was living back here, the purse snatcher?\"\n\n\"Well, we'd caught glimpses. Just in the two days before the police got him. Wait... my God, Lily, was that you who kicked him?\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"Wow, girl, what have you done with yourself?\" She eyed me up and down.\n\n\"Taken karate for a few years, worked out some.\"\n\n\"I can tell! You were so brave, too!\"\n\n\"So you knew Sims was back here?\"\n\n\"Huh? Oh, yeah. But we weren't sure what to do about it. We've never had any problem like that, and we were trying to decide what the safe thing to do was, and what the Christian thing to do was. It's tough when that might not be the same thing! We got Jess O'Shea down here to talk to the man, try to see where he wanted a bus ticket to, you know? Or if he was sick. Or hungry.\"\n\nSo Jess had actually met the man.\n\n\"What did Jess say?\"\n\n\"He said this Sims guy told him he was just fine right where he was, he had been getting handouts from some people in the, you know, black community, and he was just going to stay in the alley until God guided him somewhere else.\"\n\n\"Somewhere where they had more purses?\"\n\n\"Could be.\" Mary Maude laughed. \"I hear Diane positively identified him. He told Diane at the police station that he was an angel and was trying to point out to Diane the hazards of possessing too many worldly goods.\"\n\n\"That's original.\"\n\n\"Yeah, give him points for a talent for fiction, anyway.\"\n\n\"He say anything about the murders?\" Since Mary Maude apparently had such access to the local gossip pipeline, I thought I might as well tap in.\n\n\"No. Isn't that a little strange? You'd think on one hand he'd be too deranged to understand that the murders are so much more serious, and yet he's saying that he never saw the pipe until the police found it stuffed behind his box, you know, the one where he was sleeping.\"\n\nI noticed that Mary Maude had come to check me out without a coat on, and she was shivering in her expensive white blouse and sweater-vest embroidered in holly and Christmas ornaments. Our reunion had its own background sound track, as the loudspeakers positioned around the square continued to blare out Christmas music.\n\n\"How do you stand it?\" I asked, nodding my head toward the noise in the square.\n\n\"The carols? Oh, after a while you just tune them out,\" she said wearily. \"They just leach the spirit out of me.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's what made the purse snatcher deranged,\"\n\nI offered, and she burst into laughter. Mary Maude had always laughed easily, charmingly, making it impossible not at least to smile along with her.\n\nShe hugged me again, made me promise to call her when I came back to town after the wedding, and scampered back into the store, her body shaking with the cold. I stood looking after her for a minute. Then I threw a couple more boxes into the car and drove carefully out of the alley.\n\nWithin a block of turning out onto the side street, Macon, I passed Dill's pharmacy.\n\nI had a lot to think about.\n\nI would have given almost anything to have had my punching bag.\n\nI returned to Varena's place and packed everything I could find. Every half hour or so, I straightened up and looked out the window. There were lots of visitors at the Osborn house: women dropping off food, mostly. Emory appeared in the yard from time to time, walking restlessly, and a couple of times he was crying. Once he drove off in his car, returning in less than an hour. But he didn't knock on the cottage door again, to my great relief.\n\nI had carefully folded Varena's remaining clothes and placed them in suitcases, since I didn't know what she'd planned on taking on the honeymoon. Most of her clothes were already at Dill's.\n\nFinally, by three o'clock, all Varena's belongings were packed. I moved all the boxes into my car, except for a short stack by the front door that just couldn't fit. And of course, there was the remaining furniture, but that wasn't my problem.\n\nI began cleaning the apartment.\n\nIt felt surprisingly good to have something to clean. Varena, while not a slob, was no compulsive housekeeper, and there was plenty to do. I was also actively enjoying the break from my family and the alone time.\n\nAs I was running the vacuum, I heard a heavy knock on the door. I jumped. I hadn't heard a car pull up, but then I wouldn't have over the drone of the machine.\n\nI opened the door. Jack was there, and he was angry.\n\n\"What?\" I asked.\n\nHe pushed past me. \"My room at the motel got broken into.\" He was furious. \"Someone came in through the bathroom window. It looks out on a field. No one saw.\"\n\n\"Anything taken?\"\n\n\"No. Whoever it was rummaged through everything, broke the lock on my briefcase.\"\n\nI had an ominous sinking somewhere in the region of my stomach. \"Did you find my note?\"\n\n\"What?\" He stared at me, anger giving way to something else.\n\n\"I left you a note.\" I sat down abruptly on the ottoman. \"I left you a note,\" I repeated stupidly. \"About Krista O'Shea.\"\n\n\"You signed it?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What did it say?\"\n\n\"That she hadn't been to the doctor in weeks.\"\n\nJack's eyes flickered from item to item in the clean room, as he thought about what I'd told him.\n\n\"Did you call the police?\" I asked.\n\n\"They were there when I pulled in. Mr. Patel, the manager, had called. He had seen the window was broken when he went to put the garbage out behind the building.\"\n\n\"What did you tell them?\"\n\n\"The truth. That my things had been gone through but nothing had been stolen. I hadn't left any money in my room. I never do. And I don't carry valuable things with me.\"\n\nJack felt angry and sick because his space, however temporary, had been invaded, and his things had been riffled. I understand that feeling all too well. But Jack would never talk about it in those terms, because he was a man.\n\n\"So now someone knows exactly why I'm here in Bartley.\" He'd cover that violated feeling with practical considerations.\n\n\"That person also knows I have an accomplice,\" he continued.\n\nThat was one way to put it.\n\nSuddenly I stood, walked over to the window. I was crackling with restless energy. Trouble was coming, and every nerve in my body was warning me to get in my car and go home to Shakespeare.\n\nBut I couldn't go. My family kept me here.\n\nNo, that wasn't completely true. I could have brought myself to leave my family if I felt threatened enough. Jack kept me here.\n\nWithout a thought in my head, I made a fist and would have driven it into the window if Jack hadn't caught my arm.\n\nI rounded on him, crazy with jolts of feeling that I wouldn't identify. Instead of striking him, I ran my arm around his neck and drew him ferociously to me. The stresses and strains on me were almost intolerable.\n\nJack, understandably surprised-, made a questioning noise but then shut up. He let go of the arm he was gripping and tentatively put his own arms around me. We stood silently for what seemed like a long time.\n\n\"So,\" he said, \"you want to talk about whatever this is that's got you so upset? Have you run out of tolerance for being in your parents' house? Has your sister made you mad? Or... have you found out something else about her fianc\u00e9?\"\n\nI pushed away from him and began to pace the room.\n\n\"I have some ideas,\" I said.\n\nHis dark brows flew up. I should've kept my mouth shut. I didn't want to have the whole conversation: I'd tell him I would get in the houses, he'd tell me it was his job, blah blah blah. Why not skip the whole thing?\n\n\"Lily, I'm going to get mad at you,\" Jack said with a sort of fatalistic certainty.\n\n\"You can't do the things I can do. What's your next step now?\" I challenged him. \"Is there one more thing you can find out here?\"\n\nSure enough, he was looking angry already. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and glanced around for something handy to kick. Finding nothing, he too began pacing. We shifted around the room as if we were sword fighters waiting for our opponent to give us an opening.\n\n\"Ask the chief if I can go in and look at those files at Dr. LeMay's,\" he suggested defiantly.\n\n\"It'll never happen.\" I knew Chandler: He would go only so far.\n\n\"Find whatever the murderer was wearing when he killed the doctor and the nurse and Meredith Osborn.\"\n\nSo Jack had decided, as I had, that the killer had worn some covering garment over his clothes.\n\n\"It's not gonna be in the house,\" I told him.\n\n\"You think not?\"\n\n\"I know not. When people hide something like that, they want it to be close but not as personally close as their own house.\"\n\n\"You're thinking carport, garage?\"\n\nI nodded. \"Or car. But you know as well as I do that'll put you in a terrible position legally. Before you do that, isn't there anything else you can try?\"\n\n\"I'd hoped to get something from Dill. He's a nice guy, but he just won't talk about his first marriage. At least his attic has a good floored section now.\" Jack gave a short laugh. \"I thought about going back to reinterview the couple that lived next door to Meredith and Emory when they had their first child,\" Jack said reluctantly. \"I've been reviewing what they said, and I think I see a hole in their account.\"\n\n\"Where do they live?\"\n\n\"The podunk town north of Little Rock where the Osborns lived before they came here. You know... the one not far from Conway.\"\n\n\"What was the hole?\"\n\n\"Not so much a hole, as... something the woman said just didn't make sense. She said that Meredith told her the baby coming was the saddest day of her life. And Meredith told her that the home birth had been terrible.\"\n\nThat could be significant or just plain nothing more than what it was, the outpourings of a woman who'd just experienced childbirth for the first time.\n\n\"She had the second baby in the hospital,\" I observed. \"At least, I assume so; I think someone would have mentioned it before now if she'd had Jane J Lilith at home.\" But I made a mental note to check.\n\n\"Why would Meredith have to die?\" Jack said. \"Why Meredith?\" He wasn't talking to me, not really. He was staring out the front window, his hands still in his pockets. Seen in profile, he looked stern and frightening. If I mentally lopped off his ponytail, I could see how he'd looked as a cop. I would not have been afraid of being beaten if I'd been arrested by him, I thought, but I would have known I'd be a fool to try to escape.\n\n\"She baby-sat the other two girls,\" I offered.\n\nJack nodded. \"So she knew them all physically. She'd have an opportunity, sooner or later, to see each girl naked. But the Macklesby baby didn't have any distinguishing physical marks.\"\n\n\"So who do you think sent you the picture?\"\n\n\"I think it was Meredith Osborn.\" He turned from the window to look at me directly. \"I think she sent it because she wanted to right some great wrong. And I think that's why she was killed.\"\n\n\"What were you really doing the night she died?\"\n\n\"I was on my way to ask her some questions,\" he said. \"I'd driven past the Bartley Grill, and I saw her husband and the kids inside. The baby was on the table in one of those carriers, and he and Eve were chattering away. So I knew Meredith was home by herself, and I thought she might know more about the picture.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Roy had brushed the picture and the envelope for fingerprints. There weren't any on the picture\u2014it had been wiped\u2014but there was one on the envelope, on the tape used to seal the flap. It was a clear print, very small. You'd told me how little Meredith was. Did you ever notice how tiny her hands were?\"\n\nI never had.\n\n\"I'd hoped to get some fingerprints of hers to compare. I planned on ringing the doorbell, telling her that I was a detective in town on a job as well as being your boyfriend. I was going to hand her a photo, ask her to identify it. When she said she didn't know the subject, I would put the photo in a bag and later test it for fingerprints.\"\n\nIf I were in the Osborn house I could find something I could almost bet would have her fingerprints on it. I could also check to see if Eve's memory book was missing a page.\n\n\"But I don't want you getting into this. You saw how she died,\" Jack said brutally. I looked up sharply. He was standing right in front of me.\n\n\"I can tell when you're going to do something; you get this stubborn clench to your jaw,\" he continued. \"What's in your head, Lily?\"\n\n\"Cleaning,\" I said.\n\n\"Cleaning what?\"\n\n\"Cleaning the Osborn house, and the Kingery house.\"\n\nHe thought that over. \"This isn't your case,\" he said.\n\n\"I want us out of here by Christmas.\"\n\n\"Me too,\" he said fervently.\n\n\"Well, then,\" I said, concluding our discussion.\n\n\"Did I just say something I didn't know I said?\"\n\n\"We agree on getting this done by Christmas.\"\n\nJack gave me a dark look. \"So, I'm driving out of here,\" he said abruptly. \"I'll call you. Don't do anything that could put you in danger.\"\n\n\"Drive careful,\" I told him. He gave me an unloving peck on the cheek, another suspicious look, and, without further ado, he left. I watched through the uncurtained window as Jack fastened his seat belt and backed out of. the driveway.\n\nThen I went over to the widower and offered to clean his house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Since Emory was so fine-boned and fair, the swollen red eyes made him look rabbity. Those eyes hardly seemed to register my identity. He was completely preoccupied, eaten up from the inside out.\n\n\"Ah, yes? What can I do for you?\" he asked me, his voice coming from a great interior distance.\n\n\"I've come to clean your house.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That's what I do for a living, clean. This is what I can offer you in your time of trouble.\"\n\nHe was still bewildered. I was unhappy with myself, so it was more difficult to keep my impatience under wraps.\n\n\"My sister...\" he faltered. \"She'll be coming tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Then you need the house clean for her arrival.\"\n\nHe stared some more. I stared right back. Behind him, down a dark hall, I saw Eve creep out of an open doorway. She looked like a little ghost of herself.\n\n\"Miss Lily,\" she said. \"Thanks for coming.\"\n\nIt was what she'd heard her father say to callers all day, and her attempt to be adult gave my heart a little pang. I also wondered what Eve was doing at home, when I'd thought she was with the O'Sheas.\n\nEmory finally stood aside so I could enter, but he still seemed uncertain. I glanced at my watch, letting him know how valuable I thought my time was, and that shook him from his lethargy.\n\n\"This is so kind of you, Miss... Bard,\" he said. \"Is there anything we need to...?\"\n\n\"I expect Eve can show me where things are.\" I am no grief counselor. I don't know squat about children. But it's always better to be busy.\n\n\"That would be good,\" Emory said vaguely. \"So I'll...\" and he just wandered off. \"Oh, Eve,\" he said over his shoulder, \"remember your company manners. Stay with Miss Bard.\"\n\nEve looked a little resentful, but she replied, \"Yes, Daddy.\"\n\nThe girl and I looked at each other carefully. \"Where's the baby?\" I asked.\n\n\"She's at the O'Sheas' house. I was there for a while, too, but Daddy said I needed to come home.\"\n\n\"All right, then. Where is the kitchen?\"\n\nHer lips curved in an incredulous smile. Surely everyone knew where the kitchen was! But Eve was polite, and she guided me to the back of the house and to the right.\n\n\"Where's all the cleaning stuff?\" I asked. I set my purse down on the kitchen counter, shrugged off my coat, and hung it on one of the kitchen chairs.\n\nEve opened a cupboard in the adjacent washroom. I could see that the laundry basket was full of clothes.\n\n\"Maybe you better show me the house before I start.\"\n\nSo the little girl showed me her home. It was a large older house, with high ceilings and dark hardwood paneling and floors that needed work. I noticed the register of a floor furnace. I hadn't seen one of those in years. A Christmas tree decorated with religious symbols stood in the living room, the family's only communal room. The sofa, coffee table, and chair combo was maple with upholstery of a muted brown plaid. Clean but hideous.\n\nEmory was slumped in the chair, his hand wrapped around a cold mug that had held coffee. I knew it was cold because I could see the ring around the middle. He'd had a drink after it had been sitting a spell. He didn't acknowledge our passage through the room. I wondered if I'd have to dust him like a piece of furniture.\n\nThe master bedroom was tidy, but the furniture needed polishing. Eve's room... well, her bed had been made haphazardly, but the floor was littered with Barbies and coloring books. The baby's room was neatest, since the baby couldn't walk yet. The diaper pail needed emptying. The bathroom needed a complete scrubbing. The kitchen was not too bad.\n\n\"Where are the sheets?\" I asked.\n\nEve said, \"Mama's are in there.\" She pointed to the double closet in the master bedroom.\n\nI stripped down the double bed, carried the dirty sheets to the washroom, started a load of wash. Back in the bedroom, I opened the closet door.\n\n\"There's Mama's stool,\" Eve said helpfully. \"She always needs it to get things down from the closet shelf.\"\n\nI was at least six inches taller than Meredith Osborn had been, and I could easily reach the shelf. But if I wanted to look at what was behind the sheets, the stool would be handy.\n\nI stepped up, lifted the set of sheets, and scanned the contents of the closet shelf. Another blanket for the bed, a box marked \"Shoe Polish,\" a cheap metal box for files and important papers. Then, under a pile of purses, I spotted a box marked \"Eve.\" After I'd snapped the clean sheets on the bed, I sent Eve out of the room to fetch a dustcloth and the furniture polish.\n\nI lifted down the box and opened it. I had to clench my teeth to make myself examine its contents. My sense of invasion was overwhelming.\n\nIn the box were faded \"Welcome, Baby\" cards, the kind family and friends send a couple when they have a child. I quickly riffled through them. They were only what they seemed. Also in the box was a little rattle and a baby outfit. It was soft knit, yellow, with little green giraffes scattered over it, the usual snap crotch and long sleeves. It had been folded carefully. Eve's coming home from the hospital outfit, maybe. But Eve had been born at home, I remembered. Well, then, Meredith's favorite of all Eve's baby clothes. My mother had some of mine and Varena's still packed away in our attic.\n\nI closed the box and popped it back into position. By the time Eve returned, I had the flowered bedspread smoothed flat and taut across the bed and the blanket folded at the foot.\n\nTogether, we polished and dusted. Eve naturally didn't do things the most efficient way, since she was a grieving eight-year-old child. I am rigid about the way I like housework done and not used to working with anyone, but I managed it.\n\nI'd had a pang of worry about Eve handling her mother's belongings, but Eve seemed to do that so matter-of-factly that I wondered if she didn't yet comprehend that her mother would not be returning.\n\nIn the course of cleaning that room I made sure I examined every nook and cranny. Short of going through the chest of drawers and the drawers in the night tables, I saw what there was to see in that bedroom: under the bed, the corners of the closet, the backs and bottoms of almost every single piece of furniture. Later, when I began to put the laundry away, I even caught glimpses of what was in the drawers. Just the usual stuff, as far as I could tell.\n\nOne drawer of the little desk in the corner was stacked with medical bills related to Meredith's pregnancy. At a glance, it had been a difficult one. I hoped the furniture store had a group policy.\n\n\"Shake the can, Eve,\" I reminded her, and she shook the yellow aerosol can of furniture polish. \"Now, spray.\"\n\nShe carefully sent a stream of polish onto the bare top of the desk. I swabbed with a cloth, over and over, then put the letter rack, mug full of pens and pencils, and box containing stamps and return address labels back in their former positions. When Eve excused herself to use the bathroom, I gritted my teeth and did something that disgusted me: I picked up Meredith Osborn's hairbrush, which could reasonably be assumed to have her fingerprints on it, wrapped it in a discarded plastic cleaner's bag, and stepped through to the kitchen and shoved it in my purse.\n\nI was back in the Osborns' bedroom, tamping the stack of papers so the edges were square and neat, when Eve came back.\n\n\"Those are Mama's bills,\" she said importantly. \"We always pay our bills.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" I gathered the cleaning things and handed some of them to Eve. \"We've finished here.\"\n\nAs we began to work on Eve's room, I could tell that the little girl was getting bored, after the novelty of helping me work wore thin.\n\n\"Where'd you eat last night?\" I asked casually.\n\n\"We went to the restaurant,\" she said. \"I got a milkshake. Jane slept the whole time. It was great.\"\n\n\"Your dad was with you,\" I observed.\n\n\"Yeah, he wanted to give Mama a night off,\" Eve said approvingly. Then the ending of that night off hit her in the face, and I saw her pleasure in the little memory of the milkshake crumple. I could not ask her any more questions about last night.\n\n\"Why don't you find your last school memory book and show me who your friends are?\" I suggested, as I got her clean sheets out of her little closet and began to remake her single bed.\n\n\"Oh, sure!\" Eve said enthusiastically. She began to rummage through the low bookcase that was filled with children's books and knickknacks. Nothing in the bookcase seemed to be in any particular order, and I wasn't too surprised when Eve told me she couldn't come up with her most recent memory book. She fetched one from two years ago instead and had an excellent time telling me the name of every child in every picture. I was required only to smile and nod, and every now and then I said, \"Really?\" As casually as I could manage it, I went through the books in the bookcase myself. The past year's memory book wasn't there.\n\nEve relaxed perceptibly as she looked at the pictures of her friends and acquaintances.\n\n\"Did you go to the doctor last week, Eve?\" I asked casually.\n\n\"Why do you want to know that?\" she asked.\n\nI was floored. It hadn't occurred to me that a child would ask me why I wanted to know.\n\n\"I just wondered what doctor you went to.\"\n\n\"Doctor LeMay.\" Her brown eyes looked huge as she thought about her answer. \"He's dead, too,\" she said wearily, as if the whole world was dying around her. To Eve, it must have felt so.\n\nI could not think of a natural, painless way to ask again, and I just couldn't put the girl through any more grief. To my surprise, Eve volunteered, \"Mama went with me.\"\n\n\"She did?\" I tried to keep my voice as noncommittal as possible.\n\n\"Yep. She liked Dr. LeMay, Miss Binnie, too.\"\n\nI nodded, lifting a stack of coloring books and shaking them into an orderly rectangle.\n\n\"It hurt, but it was over before too long,\" Eve said, obviously quoting someone.\n\n\"What was over?\" I asked.\n\n\"They took my blood,\" Eve said importantly.\n\n\"Yuck.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it hurt,\" said the girl, shaking her head just like a middle-aged woman, philosophically. \"But some things hurt, and you just gotta handle it.\"\n\nI nodded. This was a lot of stoical philosophy from a third grader.\n\n\"I was losing weight, and my mama thought something might be wrong,\" Eve explained.\n\n\"So, what was wrong?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Eve looked down at her feet. \"She never said.\"\n\nI nodded as if that were quite usual. But what Eve had told me worried me, worried me badly. What if something really was wrong physically with the child? Surely her father knew about it, about the visit and the blood test? What if Eve were anemic or had some worse disease?\n\nShe looked healthy enough to me, but I was certainly willing to concede that I was hardly a competent judge. Eve was thin and pale, yes, but not abnormally so. Her hair shone and her teeth looked sound and clean, she smelled good and she stood like she was comfortable, and she was able to meet my eyes: The absence of any of these conditions is reason to worry, their presence reassuring. So why wasn't I relaxing?\n\nWe moved on to the baby's room, Eve shadowing my every step. From time to time the doorbell rang, and I would hear Emory drift through the house to answer it, but the callers never stayed long. Faced with Emory's naked grief, it would be hard to stand and chat.\n\nAfter I'd finished the baby's room and the bathroom, I entered the kitchen to find that food was accumulating faster than Emory could store it. He was standing there with a plastic bowl in his hands, a bowl wrapped in the rose-colored plastic wrap that was so popular locally. I opened the refrigerator and evaluated the situation.\n\n\"Hmmm,\" I said. I began removing everything. Emory put the bowl down and helped. All the little odds and ends of leftovers went into the garbage, the dishes they'd been in went in the sink, and I wiped down the bottom shelf where there'd been a little spillage.\n\n\"Do you have a list?\" I asked Emory.\n\nHe seemed to come out of his trance. \"A list?\" he asked, as if he'd never heard the word.\n\n\"You need to keep a list of who brings what food in what dish. Do you have a piece of paper handy?\" That sister of Emory's needed to get here fast.\n\n\"Daddy, I've got notebook paper in my room!\" Eve said and ran off to fetch it.\n\n\"I guess I knew that, but I forgot,\" Emory said. He blinked his red eyes, seemed to wake up a little. When Eve dashed into the kitchen with several sheets of paper, he hugged her. She wriggled in his grasp.\n\n\"We have to start the list, Daddy!\" She looked up at him sternly.\n\nI thought that Eve had probably been hugged and patted enough for two lifetimes in the day just past.\n\nShe began the list herself, in shaky and idiosyncratic writing. I told her how to do it, and she perched on a stool at the counter, laboriously entering the food gifts on one side, the bringer on the other, and a star when there was a dish that had to be returned.\n\nGalvanized by our activity, Emory began making calls from the telephone on the kitchen counter. I gathered from the snatches of conversation I overheard that he was calling the police department to find out when they thought Meredith's body could come back from its autopsy in Little Rock, making arrangements for the music at the funeral service, checking in at work, trying to start his life back into motion. He began writing his own list, in tiny, illegible writing. It was a list of things to do before the funeral, he told me in his quiet voice. I was glad to see him shake off his torpor.\n\nIt was getting late so I accelerated my work rate, sweeping and mopping and wiping down the kitchen counters with dispatch. I selected a few dishes for Emory and Eve's supper, leaving them on the counter with heating instructions. Emory was still talking on the phone, so I just drifted out of the room with Eve behind me. I pulled on my coat, pulled up the strap of the purse.\n\n\"Can you come back, Lily?\" Eve asked. \"You know how to do everything.\"\n\nI looked down at her. I was betraying this child and her father, abusing their trust. Eve's admiration for me was painful.\n\n\"I can't come back tomorrow, no,\" I said as gently as I was capable of. \"Varena's getting married the day after, and I still have a lot to do for that. But I'll try to see you again.\"\n\n\"OK.\" She took that in a soldierlike way, which I was beginning to understand was typical of Eve Osborn. \"And thank you for helping today,\" Eve said, after a couple of gulps. Very much woman of the house.\n\n\"I figured cleaning would be more use than more food.\"\n\n\"You were right,\" she said soberly. \"The house looks so much nicer.\"\n\n\"See ya,\" I said. I bent to give her a little hug. I felt awkward. \"Take care of yourself.\" What a stupid thing to tell a child, I castigated myself, but I had no idea what else to say.\n\nEmory was standing by the front door. I felt like snarling. I had almost made it out without talking to him. \"I can't thank you enough for this,\" he said, his sincerity painful and unwelcome.\n\n\"It was nothing.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" he insisted. \"It meant so much to us.\" He was going to cry again.\n\nOh, hell. \"Good-bye,\" I told him firmly and was out the door.\n\nGlancing down at my watch again as I walked out to my car, I realized there was no way to get out of explaining to my folks where I'd been and what I'd been doing.\n\nTo compound my guilt, my parents thought I'd done a wonderful Christian thing, helping out Emory Osborn in his hour of travail. I had to let them think the best of me when I least deserved it.\n\nI tried hard to pack my guilt into a smaller space in my heart. Reduced to the most basic terms, the Osborns now had a clean house in which to receive visitors. And I had a negative report for Jack. I hadn't discovered anything of note, except for Eve's trip to the doctor. Though I had stolen the brush.\n\nWhen Varena emerged from her room, looking almost as weepy as Emory, I put the second part of my plan into effect.\n\n\"I'm in the cleaning mood,\" I told her. \"How about me cleaning Dill's house, so it'll be nice for your first Christmas together?\" Varena and Dill weren't leaving for their honeymoon until after Christmas, so they'd be together at home with Anna.\n\nSomehow, since my mission was to save Varena grief, I didn't feel quite as guilty as I had when I'd told Emory I was going to clean his house. But I had a sour taste in my mouth, and I figured it was self-disgust.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Varena said, surprise evident in her voice. \"That would really be a load off my mind. You're sure?\"\n\n\"You know I need something to do,\" I told her truthfully.\n\n\"Bless your heart,\" Varena said with compassion, giving me a hug. Somehow, my sister's unwanted sympathy stiffened my resolve.\n\nThen the doorbell rang, and it was some friends of my parents', just back from a trip to see the Christmas decorations at Pigeon Forge. They were full of their trip and had brought a present for Dill and Varena. It was easy for me to slip off to my room after a proper greeting. I took a hot, hot shower and waited for Jack to call me.\n\nHe didn't. The phone rang off the wall that evening, the callers ranging from friends wanting to check on wedding plans, Dill asking for Varena, credit card companies wanting to extend new cards to my parents, and church members trying to arrange a meal for the Osborn family after the relatives had arrived for Meredith's funeral.\n\nBut no Jack.\n\nSomething was niggling at me, and I wanted to look at the pictures of Summer Dawn at eight. I wanted to ask Jack some questions. I wanted to look at his briefcase. That was the closest I could get to figuring out what was bothering me.\n\nAbout eight-thirty, I called Chandler McAdoo. \"Let's go riding,\" I said.\n\nChandler pulled into my parents' drive in his own vehicle, a Jeep. He was wearing a heavy red-and-white-plaid flannel shirt, a camo jacket, jeans, and Nikes.\n\nMy mother answered the door before I could get there.\n\n\"Chandler,\" she said, sounding a little at sea. \"Did you need to ask us something about the other day?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I'm here to pick up Lily.\" He was wearing an Arkansas Travellers gimme cap, and the bill of it tilted as he nodded at me. I was pulling on my coat.\n\n\"This brings back old times,\" my mother said with a smile.\n\n\"See you in a while, Mom,\" I said, zipping up my old red Squall jacket.\n\n\"Okay, sweetie. You two have a good time.\"\n\nI liked the Jeep. Chandler kept it spick-and-span, and I approved. Jack tended to distribute paperwork all over his car.\n\n\"So, where we going?\" Chandler asked.\n\n\"It's too cold and we're too old for Frankel's Pond,\" I said. \"What about the Heart of the Delta?\"\n\n\"The Heart it is,\" he said.\n\nBy the time we scooted into a booth at the home-owned diner we'd patronized all through high school, I was in the midst of being updated about Chandler's two stabs at marriage, the little boy he was so proud of (by Cindy, wife number two), and the current woman in his life\u2014Tootsie Monahan, my least favorite of Varena's bridesmaids.\n\nWhen we had glanced at the menu\u2014which seemed almost eerily the same as it had been when I was sixteen, except for the prices\u2014and had given the waitress our order (a hamburger with everything and fries for Chandler, a butterscotch milkshake for me), Chandler gave me a sharp, let's-get-down-to-it look.\n\n\"So what's the deal with this guy you've hooked up with?\"\n\n\"Jack.\"\n\n\"I know his damn name. What's his business here?\"\n\nChandler and I stared at each other for a moment. I took a deep breath.\n\n\"He's tracing an...\" I stopped dead. How could I do this? Where did my loyalty lie?\n\nChandler made a rotary movement with his hand, wanting me to spill it out.\n\nChandler had already told Jack several things, operating on his affection for me. But the actual physical effort of opening my mouth, telling him Jack's business, was almost impossible. I closed my eyes for a second, took a deep breath. \"A missing person,\" I said.\n\nHe absorbed that.\n\n\"Okay, tell me.\"\n\nI hesitated. \"It's not my call.\"\n\n\"What do you want from me, Lily?\"\n\nChandler's face was infinitely older.\n\nOh, Jesus, I hated this.\n\n\"Tell me what people were doing when Meredith Osborn was killed. I don't know if that has anything to do with Jack's job, Chandler, and that's the truth. I was in that house, just a few feet away from her, and if there's anything I know it's how to fight.\" I hadn't known how that bothered me until I said it. \"I didn't have a chance to lift a finger to help her. Just tell me about that evening.\"\n\nHe could do that without violating any laws, I figured.\n\n\"What people were doing. What happened to Meredith.\" Chandler appeared to be thinking, his eyes focused on the saltshaker with its grains of rice showing yellower than the stark white of the salt.\n\nI didn't know I'd been holding my breath until Chandler began talking. He folded his small hands in front of him, and his face took on a faintly stern, stiff set that I realized must be his professional demeanor.\n\n\"Mrs. Osborn died, as far as I could tell by a visual exam, from multiple stab wounds to the chest,\" he began. \"She'd been hit in the face, maybe to knock her on the ground so the stabbing would be easier. The attack took place in the backyard. It would have required only a minute or two. She wasn't able to move more than a yard after she was stabbed. Her wounds were very severe. Plus, the temperature was below freezing, and she didn't have a coat on.\"\n\n\"But she did move that one yard.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Toward Varena's little house.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nI could feel my mouth compress in a hard line and my eyes narrow, in what my friend Marshall had once called my \"fist face.\"\n\n\"What kind of knife?\"\n\n\"Some kind of single-blade kitchen knife, looked like, but we have to wait on the autopsy to be sure. We haven't found any kind of knife.\"\n\n\"Did you go in the Osborns' house?\"\n\n\"Sure. We had to see if the killer was in there, and the back door was unlocked.\"\n\n\"So someone had made a noise, or called Meredith out of the house...?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Something like that, we figure. She wasn't scared. She would have stayed in the house and locked the back door if she'd been scared. She could have called us. The phone was working, I checked. Instead, she went outside.\"\n\nUnspoken between us lay the inescapable conclusion that Meredith had seen someone she knew and trusted in the yard.\n\n\"When does Emory say he left the house?\"\n\n\"About seven. He had the two little girls. He wanted to give his wife some time to herself, he said. She'd had a hard time with the baby's birth, wasn't getting her strength back, and so on.\"\n\nI raised my brows.\n\n\"Yes, the waitress confirms that Emory got to the restaurant about five after. It took about forty-five minutes for Emory and Eve to eat, and then the baby woke up and Emory gave her a bottle, burped her, the whole nine yards. So they left the restaurant maybe fifteen minutes after eight. Emory had some things to pick up at the Kmart, so he took the girls with him in there, and they got some vitamins and other junk... that brings us up to around eight-fifty, nine o'clock, somewhere in there.\"\n\n\"Then he comes home.\"\n\n\"Then he comes home,\" Chandler agreed. \"He was mighty tore up. Turned white as a sheet.\"\n\n\"You had already searched the house?\"\n\n\"Yes, had to. Didn't find any evidence anyone but the family had been in it. Nothing suspicious in any way. No forced entry, no threatening messages in the answering machine, no sign of a struggle... a big zero.\"\n\n\"Chandler...\" I hesitated. But I could think of no other way to find out. \"Did you search his car?\"\n\nChandler shifted in his seat. \"No. Do you think we should have?\"\n\n\"Did you ask Eve if her dad had stopped back by the house for anything?\"\n\n\"I did my best to ask her that. I had to be real careful how I put it, didn't want the girl to think we figured her dad had done it. She's just eight!\" Chandler looked at me angrily, as if that were my doing.\n\n\"What did she say?\" I asked, keeping my voice very quiet and level.\n\n\"She said they went to the restaurant. Period. Then to Kmart. Period.\"\n\nI nodded, looked away. \"Where was Jess O'Shea?\" I asked.\n\nI could feel the heat of Chandler's glare even though I was looking over at the chipped Formica counter.\n\n\"Dave asked Emory what church he went to, and when he said Presbyterian, we called Jess,\" Chandler said slowly. \"Lou said he was over in his office counseling a member of the congregation.\"\n\n\"Did you call over there?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Get an answer?\"\n\n\"Yes. But he said he couldn't come right that second.\"\n\nI wondered if Jess had actually come over to the Osborns' house that night. I couldn't remember if the scene between him and Emory the next day had given me a sense of an original encounter or a continuation of a dialogue begun the night before. I had been so embarrassed that I had tried to block out their conversation.\n\n\"Did he give a reason?\"\n\n\"I just assumed he had to finish talking to whoever was there.\"\n\nThe upshot was, Jess had been away from home and the police had not asked him to account for his time. There was no reason why they should, from their point of view.\n\nVarena had told me Dill was going to spend the evening at home with Anna. I didn't think Dill was the kind of father who'd leave Anna in the house by herself, but he could have worked it out somehow, I guessed. I wondered if I could think of a way to ask questions that wouldn't make red flags go up in Varena's mind.\n\n\"Lily, if someone's safety is at stake, or if you have any idea at all who killed that poor woman, you are legally obliged to tell me. Morally, too.\"\n\nI looked into Chandler's round brown eyes. I'd known this man my whole life, been friends with him, off and on, that long. When I'd come home to Bartley after my spectacular victimization and subsequent media bath, Chandler had been a constant visitor. He'd been between marriages, and we had gone out to eat together, ridden around together, spent time together so I could get away from my family and their love that was just choking me.\n\nDuring that time, seven years ago, we had also shared a horribly embarrassing evening in the big pickup Chandler had been driving then. But I was sure we both did our best not to remember that.\n\n\"I don't know the identity of anyone who is in danger,\" I said carefully. \"I don't know who killed Meredith.\" That was absolutely true.\n\n\"You should tell me everything you know,\" Chandler said, his voice so low and intent it was as scary as a snake's rattle.\n\nMy hands, resting on the worn gray and pink Formica of the table's surface, clenched into hard fists. My heels dug into the wooden base of the booth, giving me launching power. A startled look crossed Chandler's face, and he leaned away from me.\n\n\"What's in your mind?\" he asked sharply, and he brushed his empty plate to one side without taking his eyes off me, clearing his own deck for action.\n\nFor once, I was anxious to explain myself. But I couldn't. I took a couple of deep breaths, made myself relax.\n\n\"You love this man,\" he said.\n\nI started to shake my head side to side: no. But I said, \"Yes.\"\n\n\"This is the one.\"\n\nI nodded, a jerky little up-and-down movement.\n\n\"And he doesn't... he can handle... what happened to you?\"\n\n\"He doesn't mind the scars,\" I said, my voice as light and smooth as the changing scenery of a dream.\n\nChandler turned red. His eyes left mine, focused on the pattern of the Formica.\n\n\"It's OK,\" I told him, just above a whisper.\n\n\"Does he... does he know how lucky he is?\" Chandler asked, not able to think of any other way of asking me if Jack loved me back.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Lily, if you want me to have a serious talk with this joker, just say the word.\" And he really meant it. I looked at Chandler with new eyes. This man would put himself through a humiliating conversation and not think twice about it.\n\n\"Will you make him go down on one knee and swear to forsake all others?\" I was smiling a little, I couldn't help it.\n\n\"Damn straight.\"\n\nThis, too, he meant.\n\n\"What a great guy you are,\" I said. All the aggression leaked out of me, as if I was a balloon with a pinhole. \"You've been talking with Jack, haven't you?\"\n\n\"He's an ex-cop, and no matter how his career ended,\" and Chandler flushed uncomfortably since Jack had not exactly left the Memphis police force under creditable circumstances, \"Jack Leeds was a good detective and made some good arrests. I called the Memphis cops, talked to a friend of mine there, as soon as I realized who he was.\"\n\nThat was interesting. Chandler had known Jack was in town probably before I did\u2014and had checked up on him.\n\n\"Fact is, the only thing this guy knew against Jack was that he'd hooked up with a shady cleaning lady,\" Chandler said with a grin.\n\nI grinned back. All the tension was gone, and we were old friends together. Without asking, Chandler paid for my milkshake and his meal, and I slid out of the booth and into my coat.\n\nWhen he dropped me off at home, Chandler gave me a kiss on the cheek. We hadn't said another word about Meredith Osborn, or Dr. LeMay, or Jack. I knew Chandler had backed off only because he owed me, on some level: The last time we'd been together had been a terrible evening for both of us. Whatever the reason, I was grateful. But I knew that if Chandler thought I was concealing something that would contribute to solving the murders that had taken place in the town he was sworn to protect, he would come down on me like a ton of bricks.\n\nWe might be old friends, but we were both weighted down with adult burdens.\n\nJack didn't call.\n\nThat night I lay sleepless, my arms rigidly at my sides, watching the bars of moonlight striping the ceiling of my old room. It was the distillation of the all the bad nights I'd had in the past seven years; except in my parents' house, I could not resort to my usual methods of escape and relief. Finally I got up, sat in the little slipper chair in the corner of the room, and turned on the lamp.\n\nI'd finished my biography. Luckily I'd brought some paperbacks with me from Varena's, anticipating just such a night... not that I would have picked these books if I'd had much choice. The first was a book of advice on dealing with your stepchildren, and the second was a historical romance. Its cover featured a guy with an amazing physique. I stared at his bare, hairless chest with its immense pectorals, wondering if even my sensei's musculature would match this man's. I found it very unlikely that a sensible fighting man would wear his shirt halfway off his shoulders in that inconvenient and impractical way, and I thought it even sillier that his lady friend would choose to try to embrace him when he was leaning down from a horse. I calculated his weight, the angle of his upper body, and the pull she was exerting. I factored in the high wind blowing her hair out in a fan, and decided Lord Robert Dumaury was going to end up on the ground at Phillipetta Dunmore's feet within seconds, probably dislocating his shoulder in the process... and that's if he was lucky. I shook my head.\n\nSo I plowed through the advice, learning more about being a new mother to a growing not-your-own child than I ever wanted to know. This paperback showed serious signs of being read and reread. I hoped it would be of more use to Varena than Ms. Dunmore's adventures with Pectoral Man.\n\nI would have given anything for a good thick biography.\n\nI got halfway through the book before sleep overcame me. I was still in the chair, the lamp still on, when I woke at seven to the sounds of my family stirring.\n\nI felt exhausted, almost too tired to move.\n\nI did some push-ups, tried some leg lifts. But my muscles felt slack and weak, as if I were recovering from major surgery. Slowly, I pulled on my sweats. I'd committed my morning to cleaning Dill's house. But instead of rising and getting into the bathroom, I sat back in the chair with my face covered by my hands.\n\nBeing involved in this child abduction felt so wrong, so bad, but for my family's sake I couldn't imagine what else I could do. With a sigh of sheer weariness, I hauled myself to my feet and opened the bedroom door to reenter my family's life.\n\nIt was like dipping your toes into a quiet pond, only to have a whirlpool suck you under.\n\nSince this was the day before the wedding, Mother and Varena had every hour mapped out. Mother had to go to the local seamstress's house to pick up the dress she planned to wear tomorrow: It had required hemming. She had to drop in on the caterer to go over final arrangements for the reception. She and Varena had to take Anna to a friend's birthday party, and then to pick up Anna's flower girl dress, which was being shipped to the local Penney's catalog store after some delay. (Due to a last-minute growth spurt, Anna's fancy dress, bought months before, was now too tight in the shoulders, so Varena had had to scour catalogs for a quickly purchasable substitute.) Both Varena and my mother were determined that Anna should try the dress on instantly.\n\nThe list of errands grew longer and longer. I found myself tuning out after the first few items. Dill dropped Anna off to run errands with Varena and Mom, and Anna and I sat together at the kitchen table in the strange peace that lies at the eye of the storm.\n\n\"Is getting married always like this, Aunt Lily?\" Anna asked wearily.\n\n\"No. You can just elope.\"\n\n\"Elope? Like the animal?\"\n\n\"It's like an antelope only in that you run fast. When you elope, the man and woman who are getting married get in the car and drive somewhere and get married where nobody knows them. Then they come home and tell their families.\"\n\n\"I think that's what I'm gonna do,\" Anna told me.\n\n\"No. Have a big wedding. Pay them back for all this,\" I advised.\n\nAnna grinned. \"I'll invite everyone in the whole town,\" she said. \"And Little Rock, too!\"\n\n\"That'll do it.\" I nodded approvingly.\n\n\"Maybe in the whole world.\"\n\n\"Even better.\"\n\n\"Do you have a boyfriend, Aunt Lily?\" Yes.\n\n\"Does he write you notes?\" Anna made a squeezed face, like she felt she was asking a stupid question, but she wanted to know the answer anyway.\n\n\"He calls me on the phone,\" I said. \"Sometimes.\"\n\n\"Does he...\" Anna was rummaging in her brain for other things grown-up boyfriends might do. \"Does he send you flowers and candy?\"\n\n\"He hasn't yet.\"\n\n\"What does he do to show you he likes you?\"\n\nCouldn't share that with an eight-year-old. \"He hugs me,\" I told her.\n\n\"Ewwww. Does he kiss you?\"\n\n\"Yeah, sometimes.\"\n\n\"Bobby Mitzer kissed me,\" Anna said in a whisper.\n\n\"No kidding? Did you like it?\"\n\n\"Ewwww.\"\n\n\"Maybe he's just not the right guy,\" I said, and we smiled at each other.\n\nThen Mom and Verena told Anna they had been ready to go for minutes and inquired why she was still sitting at the table as if we had all day.\n\n\"You can manage at Dill's by yourself, can't you?\" Varena asked anxiously. She'd returned from dropping Anna off at the party, complete with present. \"You sure don't have to do it if you don't want to.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" I said, hearing my voice come out flat and cold. I'd enjoyed talking to Anna, but now I felt exhausted again.\n\nMother eyed me sharply. \"You didn't sleep well,\" she said. \"Bad dreams again?\" And she and Varena and my father stared at me with matching expressions of concern.\n\n\"I'm absolutely all right,\" I said, trying to be civil, hating them thinking about the ordeal again. Was I being disgustingly self-pitying? It was just being home.\n\nFor the first time it occurred to me that if I'd been able to stay longer after the attack, if I'd toughed it out, they might have become used to me again, and they would have seen my life as a continuation, not a broken line. But I'd felt compelled to leave, and their clearest, most recent memory of me was of a woman in horrible pain of both kinds, plagued by nightmares waking and sleeping.\n\n\"I'll go clean now.\" I pulled on my coat.\n\n\"Dill's at work checking his inventory,\" Varena said. \"I don't know how long he'll be. We'll be picking Anna up and taking her straight to Penney's from the party. Then we'll come back here.\" I nodded and went to get my purse.\n\nMother and Varena were still fine-tuning their agenda when I walked out the door. My father was working a crossword puzzle, a half smile on his face as he caught snatches of their discussion. He didn't loathe this wedding frenzy, as most men did or pretended to. He loved it. He was having a great time fussing about the cost of the reception, whether he needed to go to the church to borrow yet another table for the still-incoming gifts, whether Varena had written every single thank-you note promptly.\n\nI touched Father's shoulder as I went by, and he reached up and captured my hand. After a second, he patted it gently and let me go.\n\nDill owned an undistinguished three-bedroom, three bath ranch-style in the newest section of Bartley. Varena had given me a key. It still felt strange to find a locked door in my little hometown. When I'd been growing up, no one had ever locked anything.\n\nOn the way to Dill's, I'd seen another homeless person, this one a white woman. She was gray-haired but sturdy looking, pedaling an ancient bicycle laden down with an assortment of strange items bound together with nylon rope.\n\nThe night before, my parents' friends had been talking about gang activity at the Bartley High School. Gangs! In the Arkansas Delta! In flat, remote, tiny, impoverished Bartley.\n\nI guess in some corner of my mind, I'd expected Bartley would remain untouched by the currents of the world, would retain its small-town safety and assurance. Home had changed. I could go there again, but its character was permanently altered.\n\nAbruptly, I was sick of myself and my problems. It was high time I got back to work.\n\nI started, as I like to do, with a survey of the job to be done. Dill's house, which looked freshly painted and carpeted, was fairly straight and fairly clean\u2014but, like the Osborns', it was showing signs of a few days of neglect. Varena wasn't the only one feeling the effects of prolonged wedding fever.\n\nI had no guide here to show me where everything was. I wondered if Anna would have been as interesting a helper as Eve had been the day before.\n\nThat recalled me to the purpose of my cleaning offer. Before anything or anyone could interrupt me, I searched Anna's room for her memory book. As I searched, naturally I picked up her room, which was a real mess. I slung soiled clothes into the hamper, stacked school papers, tossed dolls into a clear Rubbermaid tub firmly labeled \"Dolls and doll clothes.\"\n\nI found the memory book under her bed. Page 23 was missing.\n\nI rocked back on my haunches, feeling as though an adversary had socked me in the stomach.\n\n\"No,\" I said out loud, hearing the misery in my own voice.\n\nAfter a few minutes trying to think, I stuck the book in the rack on Anna's little desk and kept on cleaning. There was nothing else for me to do.\n\nI had to face the fact that the page that had been sent to Roy Costimiglia and passed to Jack had almost certainly come from Anna's book. But, I told myself, that didn't have to mean Anna was Summer Dawn Macklesby.\n\nThe book being in Dill's house perhaps raised the odds that someone besides Meredith Osborn might have mailed the page to Roy Costimiglia. At least, that was what I thought. But I wished I'd found the book anywhere but here.\n\nIf Anna was the abducted child, Dill could be suffering from the terrible dichotomy of wanting to square things with Summer's family and wanting to keep his beloved daughter. What if his unstable wife had been the one to kidnap the Macklesby baby, and Dill had just now become aware of it? He'd raised Anna as his own for eight years.\n\nAnd if Dill's first wife had abducted Summer Dawn, what had happened to their biological baby?\n\nAs I paired Anna's shoes and placed them on a rack in the closet, I saw a familiar blue cover peeking from behind a pair of rain boots. I frowned and squatted, reaching back in the closet and finally managing to slide a finger between the book and wall. I fished out the book and flipped it over to read the cover.\n\nIt was another copy of the memory book.\n\nI opened it, hoping fervently that Anna had written her name in it. No name.\n\n\"Shit,\" I said out loud. When I'd been young, and we'd gotten our yearbooks, or memory books, or whatever you wanted to call them, the first thing we'd done was write our names inside.\n\nOne of these books had to be Anna's. If Jack's basic assumption was correct, if the person who'd sent the memory book page to Roy Costimiglia wasn't a complete lunatic, then the other book belonged to either Eve or Krista, and it was someone very close to one of them who had sent the picture. Like someone in their house. A parent.\n\nDill was using the third bedroom as a study. There was a framed picture of Dill holding a baby I presumed was Anna. The snapshot had obviously been taken in a hospital room, and Anna looked like a newborn. But to me all babies looked more or less the same, and the infant Dill was gazing at so lovingly could have been Anna, or it could have been another child. The baby was swaddled in a receiving blanket.\n\nI cleaned, scrubbed, and worried at the problem. I straightened and dusted and vacuumed and polished and mopped, and the activity did me good. But I didn't solve anything.\n\nWhen I went in Anna's room yet again to return a Barbie I'd found in the kitchen, I looked more closely at Anna's collection of framed snapshots. One was of a woman I was sure must be Dill's first wife, Anna's mother. She was buxom, like Varena; and like Varena her hair was brown, her eyes blue. Aside from those superficial similarities, she didn't look at all like my sister, really. I stared at the picture, trying to read the woman's character in this likeness. Was there something tense, something a little desperate, in the way she was clutching the little dog on her lap? Was her smile strained, insincere?\n\nI shook my head. I would never have given the picture two thoughts if I hadn't known that the woman had eventually killed herself. So much despair, so well hidden. Dill had an unstable mother, had married an unstable wife. I was frightened that he could see something deep in Varena that we didn't suspect, some inner weakness, that attracted him or made him feel comfortable with her. But Varena seemed sane and sturdy to me, and I have a built-in Geiger counter for the ripples of instability in others.\n\nIt felt odd to see Varena's clothes hanging in half of Dill's closet, her china in his cabinets. She had really and truly moved into Dill's house. That intimacy bore in on me how much Varena would lose if Anna was someone else's daughter, for surely there would be the scandal to end all scandals... media coverage, intense and drenching. I shivered. I knew how that could affect your life.\n\nThe wedding was so close. One more day.\n\nVery reluctantly, I reentered Dill's office and opened the filing cabinet. I had put on a pair of fresh rubber gloves, and I kept them on. That shows you how guilty I was feeling.\n\nBut this had to be done.\n\nDill was an orderly man, and I quickly found the file labeled simply \"Anna\u2014Year One.\" There was a separate file for each year of her life, containing drawings, pictures, and a page of cute things she'd said or done. The school-age files were crammed with report cards and test scores.\n\nAs far as I was concerned, Anna's first year was the most important. The file contained Anna's birth certificate, a record of her immunizations, her baby book, and some negatives in a white envelope marked \"Baby Is Born.\" The handwriting wasn't Dill's. There was not a thing there that would prove Anna's identity one way or another. No blood type, no record of any distinguishing characteristic. A certificate from the hospital had Anna's baby footprints in black ink. I would ask Jack if the Macklesbys had similar prints of Summer Dawn's. If the contour of the foot was completely different from Anna's, surely that would mean something?\n\nBlind alley. Dead end.\n\nSuddenly I remember the negatives marked \"Birth Pictures.\" Where were the family photo albums?\n\nI found them in a cabinet in the living room and blessed Dill for being orderly. They were labeled by year.\n\nI yanked out the one marked with Anna's birth year. There were the pictures: a red infant in a doctor's arms, streaked with blood and other fluids, mouth open in a yell; the baby, now held by a masked and gowned Dill, the baby's round little bottom toward the camera\u2014presumably this one had been taken by a nurse. In the corner of the picture, her face just visible, was the woman in the picture in Anna's room. Her mother, Judy.\n\nAnd on the baby's bottom, a big brown birthmark.\n\nThis was proof, wasn't it? This was indisputably a delivery room picture, this was indisputably the baby born to Dill and his wife, Judy. And this baby, shown in a third picture cradled in the arms of the woman in the picture in Anna's room, was absolutely positively the original Anna Kingery.\n\nThe elation at finding something certain helped me through the pang of guilt I suffered as I extracted the key picture from the album. It, too, went in my purse, after I'd returned the photo album to its former position.\n\nI finished my cleaning, surveyed the house, found it good. I put the garbage in the wheeled cans, swept the front and back steps. I was done. I went back in to put the broom away.\n\nDill was standing in the kitchen.\n\nHe had a pile of mail in his hands, was shuffling through it. When the broom hit the floor, Dill looked up sharply.\n\n\"Hi, Lily, this was mighty fine of you,\" he said. He smiled at me, his bland and forgettable face beaming nothing but goodwill. \"Hey, did I scare you? I thought you heard me pull into the garage.\"\n\nHe must have come in the back door while I was sweeping at the front.\n\nStill tense all over, I bent to retrieve the broom, glad my face was hidden for a moment while I recovered.\n\n\"I saw Varena downtown,\" he said, as I straightened and moved to the broom closet. \"I can't believe after all this waiting, it's finally going to be our wedding day tomorrow.\"\n\nI wrung out a dishrag I'd forgotten and draped it neatly over the sink divider.\n\n\"Lily, won't you turn to look at me?\"\n\nI turned to meet his eyes.\n\n\"Lily, I know you and I have never gotten close. But I don't have a sister, and I hope you'll be one to me.\"\n\nI was repelled. Emotional appeals were not the way to make a relationship happen.\n\n\"You don't know how hard it's always been for Varena.\"\n\nI raised my eyebrows. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Being your sister.\"\n\nI took a deep breath. I held my hand palm up. Explain?\n\n\"She would kill me if she knew I was saying this.\" He shook his head at his own daring. \"She never felt as pretty as you, as smart as you.\"\n\nThat didn't matter now. It hadn't mattered for more than a decade.\n\n\"Varena,\" I began, and my voice sounded rusty, \"is a grown woman. We haven't been teenagers for years.\"\n\n\"When you're a younger sister, apparently you have baggage you carry with you always. Varena thinks so, anyway. She always felt like an also-ran. With your parents. With your teachers. With your boyfriends.\"\n\nWhat crap was this? I gave Dill a cold stare.\n\n\"And when you got raped...\"\n\nI'll give him that, he went right on and said the word.\n\n\"...and all the focus was on you, and all you wanted was to get rid of it, I think in some way it gave Varena some... satisfaction.\"\n\nWhich would have made her feel guilty.\n\n\"And of course, she began to feel guilty about that, about even feeling a particle of righteousness about your getting hurt.\"\n\n\"Your point being?\"\n\n\"You don't seem happy to be here. At the wedding. In the town. You don't seem happy for your sister.\"\n\nI couldn't quite see the connection between the two statements. Was I supposed to wag my tail since Varena was getting married... because she'd felt guilty when I got raped? I didn't have any active animosity toward Dill Kingery, so I tried to work through his thought.\n\nI shook my head. I wasn't making any connections. \"Since Varena wants to marry you, I'm glad she is,\" I said cautiously. I wasn't about to apologize for being who I was, what I had become.\n\nDill looked at me. He sighed. \"Well, that's as good as it's gonna get, I guess,\" he said, with a tight little smile.\n\nGuess so.\n\n\"What about you?\" I asked. \"You married one unstable wife. Your mother's not exactly predictable. I hope you see nothing like that in Varena.\"\n\nHe threw back his head and laughed.\n\n\"You take the cake, you really do, Lily,\" he said, shaking his head. He didn't seem to find that endearing. \"You don't say much, but you go for the throat when you decide to talk. I think that's what your parents have been dying to ask me for the past two years.\"\n\nI waited.\n\n\"No,\" he said, quite seriously now. \"I see nothing like that in Varena. But that's why I dated her for so long. That's why our engagement went on forever. I had to be sure. For my sake, and especially for Anna's sake. I think Varena is the sanest woman I ever met.\"\n\n\"Did your wife ever threaten to hurt Anna?\"\n\nHe turned white as a sheet. I'd never seen anyone pale so fast. \"What\u2014how\u2014\" He was spluttering.\n\n\"Before she killed herself, did she threaten to hurt Anna?\"\n\nIt was like I was a cobra and he was a mouse.\n\n\"What have you heard?\" he choked out.\n\n\"Just a guess. Did she try to hurt Anna?\"\n\n\"Please go now,\" he said finally. \"Lily, please go.\"\n\nI'd certainly handled that well. What a masterly interrogation! At least, I reflected, Dill and I had been equally unpleasant to each other, though I might have the edge since I'd talked about something new, something that wasn't common currency in Bartley\u2014at least, judging by Dill's reaction.\n\nI was willing to bet I wouldn't be invited to go on vacations with Dill and Varena.\n\nIt seemed possible that Dill's first wife had been capable\u2014 at least in Dill's estimation\u2014of harming her baby. And page 23 was missing from a memory book that was most probably Anna's.\n\nI understood what the word \"heartsick\" meant. I tried to comfort myself with the thought of Anna's birthmark. At least I'd learned one fact.\n\nAs I backed out of Dill's driveway I discovered I didn't want to go home.\n\nI began cruising aimlessly\u2014shades of being a teenager, when \"riding around\" had been a legitimate activity\u2014and didn't know where I was going until I found myself parking at the town square.\n\nI went into the furniture store, and a bell tinkled as the door swung shut. Mary Maude Plummer was typing something into a computer at a desk behind a high counter in the middle of the store. Reading glasses perched at the end of her nose, and she was wearing her business face, competent and no-nonsense.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" she asked and then looked up from the computer screen. \"Oh, Lily!\" she said happily, her face changing from the inside out.\n\n\"Come go riding,\" I suggested. \"I've got the car.\"\n\n\"Your mom let you have it?\" Mary Maude dissolved in giggles. She glanced around at the empty store. \"Maybe I can, really! Emory,\" she called. Out of the shadows at the back of the store, Emory Osborn materialized like a thin, blond ghost.\n\n\"Hello, Miss Bard,\" he said, his voice wispy.\n\n\"Emory, can you watch the store while I take my lunch hour?\" Mary Maude asked in the gentle, earnest voice you use with slow children. \"Jerry and Sam should be back in just a minute.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Emory said. He looked as if a good wind would whisk him away.\n\n\"Thanks.\" Mary Maude fished her purse from some hidden spot under the counter.\n\nWhen we were far enough away that Emory couldn't hear us, Mary Maude muttered, \"He should never have tried to come to work today. But his sister's here, and she's managing the home front, so I think he didn't have anything else to do.\"\n\nWe went out the front door like two girls skipping school. I noticed how professional and groomed Mary Maude looked in her winter white suit, a sharp, unwelcome contrast to me in my sweats.\n\n\"I've been cleaning Dill's house,\" I explained, suddenly self-conscious. I couldn't remember apologizing for my clothes, not for years.\n\n\"That's what you do for a living now?\" Mary Maude asked as she buckled up.\n\n\"Yep,\" I said flatly.\n\n\"Boy, did you ever think I'd end up selling furniture and you'd end up cleaning it?\"\n\nWe shook our heads simultaneously.\n\n\"I'll bet you're tops at what you do,\" Mary said, matter-of-factly.\n\nI was surprised and oddly touched. \"I'll bet you sell a lot of furniture,\" I offered and was even more surprised to find that I meant it.\n\n\"I do pretty well,\" she answered, her voice offhand. She looked at me, and her face crinkled in a smile. \"You know, Lily, sometimes I just can't believe we grew up!\"\n\nThat was never my problem. \"Sometimes I can't remember I was ever a teen,\" I said.\n\n\"But here we are, alive, in good health, single but not without hope, and backed by family and friends,\" Mary Maude said, almost chanting.\n\nI raised my eyebrows.\n\n\"I have to practice counting my blessings all the time,\" she explained, and I laughed. \"See, that didn't hurt,\" she said.\n\nWe ate lunch at a fast-food place decorated with tinsel and lights and artificial snow. A Santa Claus robot nodded and waved from a plastic sleigh.\n\nFor a little while we just got used to each other. We talked about people we'd known and where they were now, how many times they'd been married and to whom. Mary Maude touched on her divorce and the baby she'd lost to crib death. We didn't need to talk about my past; it was too well known. But Mary asked me some questions about Shakespeare, about my daily life, and to my pleasure it was easy to answer.\n\nShe, too, asked if I was seeing someone special.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, trying not to stare down at my hands. \"A man from Little Rock. Jack Leeds.\"\n\n\"Oh, is he the ponytail guy who showed up at the wedding rehearsal?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I said, not even trying to look up this time. \"How'd you know?\" Why was I even asking, knowing the Bartley grapevine as I did?\n\n\"Lou O'Shea was in yesterday. She and Jess have a bed on layaway for Krista for Christmas.\"\n\n\"They seem like a nice couple,\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah, they are,\" Mary Maude agreed, dipping a french fry in a puddle of ketchup. She'd made a trail of paper napkins to keep her winter white in a pristine state. \"They sure are having a hard time with that Krista since they had Luke.\"\n\n\"That's what I hear. You reckon she feels unloved now that the little boy's here?\"\n\n\"I suppose, though they were real open with her about her being adopted and telling her they loved her enough to pick her out. But I guess maybe she feels like Luke is really theirs, and she isn't.\"\n\nI said I hadn't realized that the O'Sheas were so open about Krista being adopted.\n\n\"Lou more than Jess,\" Mary Maude commented. \"Lou has always been more out-front than her husband, but I guess he's had more practice at keeping secrets, him being a minister and all.\"\n\nMinisters do have to keep a lot of secrets. I hadn't thought of that before. I got up to get some more tea\u2014and another napkin for Mary Maude.\n\n\"Lou tells me the man you're seeing is quite a looker,\" Mary Maude said slyly, bringing the conversation back to the most interesting topic.\n\nIt had never occurred to me someone as conventional as Lou O'Shea would find him so. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Is he sweet to you?\" Mary Maude sounded wistful.\n\nThis was everyone's day to want to know about Jack. First Anna, now Mary Maude. Weddings must bring it out in women. \"Sweet,\" I said, trying the word on Jack to see how it fit. \"No. He's not sweet.\"\n\nSurprise hiked up Mary Maude's eyebrows. \"Not sweet! Well, then! Is he rich?\"\n\n\"No,\" I answered without hesitation.\n\n\"Then why are you seeing him?\" Suddenly her cheeks got pinker, and she looked simultaneously delighted and embarrassed. \"Is he...?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I told her, trying not to look as self-conscious as I felt.\n\n\"Oh, girl,\" said Mary Maude, shaking her head and giggling-\n\n\"Emory is single now,\" I observed, trying to steer the conversation away from me and into a channel that might lead to some knowledge.\n\nShe didn't waste time looking shocked. \"Never in a million years,\" Mary Maude told me as she consumed her last french fry.\n\n\"Why are you so sure about that?\"\n\n\"Aside from the fact that now it would mean taking on a newborn baby and an eight-year-old girl, there's the man himself. I never met anyone as hard to read as Emory. He's polite as the day is long, he never uses bad language, he's... yes, he is... sweet. Old ladies just love him. But Emory's not a simple man, and he's not my idea of red-blooded.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Not that I think he's gay,\" Mary Maude protested hastily. \"It's just that, for example, we were outside the store watching the Harvest Festival parade, back in September, and all the beauty queens were coming by riding on the top of the convertibles, like we did?\"\n\nI'd completely forgotten that. Maybe that was why riding in the Shakespeare parade had plowed up my feelings so deeply?\n\n\"And Emory just wasn't interested. You know? You can tell when a man is appreciating women. And he wasn't. He enjoyed the floats and the bands. He loved the little girls, you know, Little Miss Pumpkin Patch, that kind of thing, and he told me he'd even thought of entering Eve, but his wife didn't like the idea. But those big gals in their sequin dresses and push-up bras didn't do a thing for Emory. No, I'm going to have to look farther than the furniture store to find someone to date.\"\n\nI made an indeterminate noise.\n\n\"Now, we were talking earlier about Lou and Jess O'Shea. They were watching that parade catty-corner to where I was standing, and believe me, honey! That Jess can enjoy grown-up women!\"\n\n\"But he doesn't...?\"\n\n\"Oh, Lord, no! He is devoted to Lou. But he's not blind, either.\" Mary Maude looked at her watch. \"Oh, girl! I have to get back.\"\n\nWe tossed our litter into a can and walked out still talking. Well, Mary Maude was talking, and I was listening, but I was agreeable to listening. And when I dropped her off at Makepeace Furniture, I gave her a quick hug.\n\nI couldn't think of anywhere to go but back to my parents' house.\n\nI walked right into yet another crisis. The couples dinner in honor of Varena and Dill, which had been rescheduled at least twice, was once again endangered. The high school senior who had been booked to baby-sit Krista, her little brother Luke, and Anna had caught the flu.\n\nAccording to Varena, who was sitting at the kitchen table with the tiny Bartley phone book open before her, she and Lou had called every adolescent known to baby-sit in Bartley, and all of them were either flu victims or already attending a teen Christmas party the Methodist church was giving.\n\nThis seemed to be a crisis I had no part in other than to look sympathetic. Then a solution to a couple of problems occurred to me, and I knew what I had to do.\n\nJack would owe me permanently, as far as I was concerned.\n\nI tapped Varena on the shoulder. \"I'll do it,\" I told her.\n\n\"What?\" She'd been in the middle of a semihysterical outburst to my mother.\n\n\"I'll do it,\" I repeated.\n\n\"You'll... baby-sit?\"\n\n\"That's what I said.\" I was feeling touchy at the sheer incredulity in my sister's voice.\n\n\"Have you ever kept kids before?\"\n\n\"Do you need a baby-sitter or don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, it would be wonderful, but... are you sure you wouldn't mind? You've never been... I mean, you've always said that children weren't your... special thing.\"\n\n\"I can do it.\"\n\n\"Well! That would be\u2014just great,\" Varena said stoutly, obviously realizing she had to show no reservations, no matter what she felt.\n\nActually, I had kept the four Althaus kids one afternoon and evening when Jay Althaus had been in a car wreck and Carol had had to go to the hospital. Both sets of grandparents had been out of town. Carol had been a frantic, panicked, pathetic mother and wife by the time I answered her phone call.\n\nSo I knew how to change diapers and bathe a baby, and the oldest Althaus boy had showed me how to heat up a bottle. I might not be Mary Poppins, but all the children would be alive and fed and clean by the time the parents got home.\n\nVarena was on the phone with Lou O'Shea, giving her the good news.\n\n\"She's glad to do it,\" Varena was saying, still trying not to sound amazed. \"So Lily should be there about, what? Six? Will the kids have eaten? Oh, OK. And there'll be Anna, Krista, your little boy... oh, really? Oh, gosh. Let me ask her.\"\n\nVarena covered the receiver. She was making a big effort to look cheerful and unconcerned. \"Lily, Lou says they've agreed to keep the Osborn kids, too. At the time, they thought Shelley was coming with her boyfriend.\" Shelley was the flu-ridden teenager.\n\nI took a deep, cleansing breath, like I did in karate class before I began my kata. \"No problem,\" I said.\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\nI confined myself to a nod.\n\n\"That's not a problem, she says,\" Varena said chirpily into the phone. \"Right, it'll only last three hours at the most, two more likely, and we'll be just a few blocks away.\"\n\nSounded like Lou was a little concerned at the prospect of my baby-sitting such a mob.\n\nThe doorbell rang, and my mother hustled into the living room to answer it. I heard her say, \"Hello, again!\" with a kind of supercharged enthusiasm that alerted me. Sure enough, she led Jack into the kitchen with a pleased, proud air, as though she'd snagged him just when he was about to get away.\n\nI found myself on my feet and going to him before I even knew I was moving. His arms slid around me and he gave me a kiss, but a kiss that said my parents were looking at him over my shoulder.\n\n\"Well, young man, it's nice to see you again. We'd begun to think we wouldn't get to lay eyes on you before you left town.\" My father was being bluff and hearty.\n\nJack was wearing a blue-and-green-plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans, and his thick hair was brushed smoothly back, gathered at the nape of his neck with an elastic band. I patted his shoulder gently and stepped away from him.\n\n\"I saw a mighty lot of presents in the living room,\" Jack said to my father. \"Looks like you-all are having a wedding.\" He smiled, and those seductive deep lines suddenly appeared in parentheses from his nose to the corners of his thin, mobile mouth.\n\nMother, Father, and Varena laughed, as charmed by his smile as I was.\n\n\"As a matter of fact,\" Jack went on, \"I hoped this would be appropriate.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you,\" Varena said, surprised and showing it, taking the shallow wrapped box Jack pulled out of one jacket pocket.\n\nWhen I turned to watch Varena opened the present, Jack's arm went around my waist and pulled me against him, my back to his chest. I could feel the corners of my mouth tug up, and I looked down at my hands, resting on the arms crossed below my breasts. I took a deep breath. I made an effort to focus on the box Varena was holding.\n\nShe lifted the lid. From the tissue, she extracted an antique silver cake server, a lovely piece with engraving. When Varena passed it around, I could see the curling script read \"V K 1889.\"\n\n\"This is just beautiful,\" Varena said, delighted and not a little stunned. \"However did you find it?\"\n\n\"Sheer luck,\" Jack said. He was pressed very firmly against my bottom. \"I just happened to be in an antiques store and it caught my eye.\"\n\nI could see the wheels turning in my mother's head. I knew she was thinking that this was a serious present. Such a gift announced that Jack planned to be seeing me for some time, since he was displaying such a great desire to please my family. My father's face lit up (way too obviously) as the same idea occurred to him.\n\nI felt I was watching a tribal ritual unfold.\n\n\"I have to put this somewhere conspicuous, so everyone'll notice it,\" Varena told Jack, plainly wanting him to realize she was very pleased indeed.\n\n\"I'm glad you like it,\" he said.\n\nAnd before you could say Jack Robinson, Jack Leeds was installed at my parents' kitchen table, a grilled cheese sandwich and bowl of soup in front of him, Varena and my mother waiting on him hand and foot.\n\nAfter he'd eaten, Mother and Varena practically threw us out of the kitchen so I wouldn't have to help with the dishes. They were flabbergasted when Jack offered to wash. They turned him down with fatuous smiles, and by the time I climbed into Jack's car I was torn between laughter and exasperation.\n\n\"I think they approve of me,\" Jack said with a straight face.\n\n\"Well, you are breathing.\"\n\nHe laughed, but he stopped abruptly and looked at me with an expression I couldn't decipher. He started the engine.\n\n\"Where are we going? I have to be at the manse at 6:00,\" I reminded him. Mother and Varena had immediately told Jack I'd volunteered to keep the kids.\n\n\"We need to talk,\" he said. We were silent on the ride to the motel, Jack grim and taciturn, I uneasily aware that I was not on the same page.\n\nAs we turned on the corner by the Presbyterian manse, I thought of Krista, Anna, and Eve.\n\nAnd, oddly, I suddenly remembered spending nights with other girls when I was really young. I remembered how I'd carry a whole suitcase full of stuff with me for an overnight visit, everything and anything I thought we might want to play with, or look at, or gossip about.\n\nIncluding a memory book." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Jack was staying in a different room, since the motel manager was having the bathroom window fixed from the break-in in the room he'd had before.\n\nI was already on edge when we went in, and when Jack sat on one of the stuffed vinyl-covered armchairs, all my systems went on defense. I perched on the edge of the other chair and eyed him warily.\n\n\"I saw you last night,\" he said without preamble.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"Out with your old boyfriend.\"\n\nI made my breathing slow, fighting the rage that swept through me. I gripped the armrests of the damn orange chair. \"You got back to town early, and you didn't call me. Did you come back on purpose to spy on me?\"\n\nHis back stiffened. He was doing a little chair gripping of his own. \"Of course not, Lily! I missed you, and I finished what I was doing early, and I drove all afternoon to get back here. Then I saw you in that diner with the cop.\"\n\n\"Were we kissing, Jack?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Were we holding hands, Jack?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Was I looking at him with love, Jack?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Did he look happy, Jack?\"\n\n\"No.\" Jack bowed his head, rubbed his forehead with his fingertips.\n\n\"Let me tell you what happened the last time I went on a date with Chandler McAdoo, Jack.\" I bent to his level until he had to look me in the eyes or be a coward. \"It was seven years ago, the bad time, and I had been back in Bartley for two months. Chandler and I went to the movies, and then we drove out to the lake, like we'd done when we were kids.\"\n\nJack's hazel eyes didn't flinch, and he was listening. I knew it.\n\n\"So when we were at the lake, Chandler wanted to kiss me, and I wanted to feel like a real woman again, so I let him. I even enjoyed it... a little. And then it went a little farther, and he pulled my T-shirt up. Want to know what happened then, Jack? Chandler started crying. The scars were real fresh then, red. He cried when he saw my body. And that's the last I saw of Chandler for seven years.\"\n\nA heavy silence settled in the cold motel room.\n\n\"Pardon me,\" Jack said finally. He was absolutely sincere, not mouthing a social catchall. \"Pardon me.\"\n\n\"Jack, you never believed I was sneaking behind your back.\"\n\n\"I didn't?\" He looked a little angry and a little amused.\n\n\"You gave Varena her present before you even discussed last night with me,\" I said. \"You knew all along we weren't... parting.\" I had almost used the phrase \"breaking up,\" but it seemed too childish.\n\nAbruptly, Jack's face went absolutely still, as if he'd had a revelation of some kind.\n\nHe turned his eyes to me. \"How could he cry?\" Jack asked me. \"You are so beautiful.\"\n\nI was still speechless, but for another reason. Jack had never said anything remotely like this.\n\n\"Don't pity me,\" I said softly.\n\n\"Lily, you said I never really doubted you. Now, I say, you know that pity is the last thing I feel for you.\"\n\nHe lay with his chest to my back, one arm thrown around me. He was still awake, I could tell. I had another hour and a half, by my watch.\n\nI didn't want to think about Summer Dawn. I didn't want to think about the dead people littering the path to her recovery.\n\nI wanted to touch Jack. I wanted to twine my fingers in his hair. I wanted to understand his thoughts.\n\nBut he was a man with a job to do, and he wanted more than anything in the world to take Summer Dawn back to her parents. While he kept his arm around me and from time to time dropped a kiss on my neck, his thoughts had drifted away from me, and mine had to follow.\n\nReluctantly, I began to tell him what I'd found: the two memory books, one whole and one mutilated, in Anna Kingery's room; the absence of the same book at Eve Osborn's. I told him that Eve Osborn had been to the doctor recently, that I didn't yet know about Anna. I told him about Anna's mother... the woman we were assuming was Anna's mother. And I pulled the plastic-wrapped brush and the birth photo of Anna out of my purse and placed them by Jack's briefcase.\n\nI rolled over to face him when I'd finished. I don't know what he saw in my face, but he said, \"Damn,\" under his breath, and looked away from me.\n\n\"Have you learned anything?\" I asked, to get that expression off his face.\n\n\"Like I said, my trip was pretty much of a washout,\" he told me, but not as if he was upset about it. I guess private eyes encounter a lot of dead-end streets. \"But early this morning, I wandered into the police station and took Chandler and a guy named Roger out for coffee and doughnuts. Since I used to be a cop, and they wanted to prove that small-town cops can be just as sharp as city cops, they were pretty forthcoming.\"\n\nI stroked his hair away from his face and nodded to show him I was listening. I didn't want to tell him they'd have told him nothing if Chandler hadn't checked up on him and talked to me about him.\n\n\"They told me the pipe recovered in the alley was definitely the one used to kill the doctor and his nurse,\" Jack said. \"And Christopher Sims's fingerprints were nowhere on it. The pipe has a rusty surface, and some cloth had been run over it. Whoever tried to clean it didn't do a good job. He left one partial. It doesn't match Sims's. He's still in custody for the purse snatching, but I don't think he'll be charged with the murder any time soon.\"\n\n\"Is he making sense?\"\n\n\"Not a lot. He told the police he'd had a lot of visitors in his new home, which I gather means the alley behind the stores. That location in the alley is close to every father in this case. Jess O'Shea came to visit Sims as a minister, Emory works in Makepeace Furniture, which backs onto that alley, and Kingery's pharmacy is a block away.\"\n\n\"I noticed that.\"\n\n\"Of course you did,\" he said and bent to kiss me. My arms went around his neck, and the kiss lasted longer than he thought it was going to. \"I want you again,\" he told me, his voice low and rough.\n\n\"I noticed that, too.\" I pressed against him gently. \"But the wedding is tomorrow. Let me tell you about tonight. Since I'm going to baby-sit all the children\u2014Eve, the baby, Krista, Luke, and Anna\u2014at the O'Sheas' house, maybe I can learn something from the children, or from being in that house.\"\n\n\"Where are all the parents going?\"\n\n\"To a dinner. It's a couples thing, so I was glad to get out of it.\"\n\n\"Who would they have paired you with?\" Jack asked.\n\nI realized for the first time that I was causing a hostess some seating problems. \"I don't know,\" I admitted. \"I guess that friend of Dill's, Berry Duff.\"\n\n\"Has he been by your folks' much?\"\n\n\"No, I think he went right home after the rehearsal dinner. He'll come back into town today, if I remember right, and spend the night somewhere here in town. I guess here at the motel.\"\n\n\"He admired you.\"\n\n\"Sure, I'm everyone's dream girl,\" I said, hearing the sharp edge in my voice, unable to stop it.\n\n\"Did you like him?\"\n\nWhat the hell was this? \"He's nice enough,\" I said.\n\n\"You could be with him,\" he said. His light hazel eyes fixed on mine. He didn't blink. \"He wouldn't drag you into things like this.\"\n\n\"Hmmm,\" I said thoughtfully, \"Berry is awful cute... and he has his own farm. Varena was telling me how beautiful his house is. It's part of the spring garden tour.\"\n\nFor a second Jack's face was a real picture. Then he pounced on me. He pinned me by the shoulders and scooted his body sideways until it lay over mine.\n\n\"Are you teasing me, house cleaner?\"\n\n\"What do you think, detective?\"\n\n\"I think I've got you where I want you,\" he said, and his mouth descended.\n\n\"Jack,\" I said after a moment, \"I need to tell you something.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Don't ever hold me down.\"\n\nJack rolled off instantly, his hands up in a surrender position.\n\n\"It's just that you feel so good,\" he said. \"And... sometimes I think if I don't weigh you down you'll just drift away.\" He looked off to the side, then back at me. \"What the hell did that mean?\" he asked, shaking his head at his own fancy.\n\nI knew exactly what he meant.\n\n\"I have to go back to the house,\" I said. \"I'll be at the O'Sheas' from about five-thirty on.\" I swung myself up and sat with my back to him, since I had to begin getting my clothes out of the heap by the bed.\n\nI felt his hand on my back, stroking. I shivered.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" I said over my shoulder, as I bent to retrieve my bra.\n\n\"Oh, I have an idea or two,\" he said casually. He hooked the bra for me.\n\nJack was going to do something illegal.\n\n\"Like what?\" I pulled my shirt over my head.\n\n\"Oh... I might get into the doctor's office tonight.\"\n\n\"Who would let you in? You can't possibly be thinking of breaking in?\"\n\n\"I think it won't be a problem,\" he assured me.\n\n\"You know anything you learn that way isn't real evidence,\" I said incredulously. \"I've watched enough TV to know that.\"\n\n\"Can you think of another way for me to find out their blood types?\"\n\n\"Blood types? I thought you said Summer Dawn hadn't had her blood typed? And are you sure the blood types would be in a file at Dr. LeMay's office?\"\n\n\"All three families went to him.\"\n\n\"But how many kids need to have their blood taken?\"\n\n\"You said Eve had. If I can eliminate at least one of them, that'll be good,\" he argued. \"I realized that there were only a couple of blood types she could be. In fact, it was Chandler's discussion of your high school biology class that reminded me.\"\n\n\"What blood type would Summer Dawn be?\"\n\n\"Her mother's A and her father's O. So Summer has to be A or O.\" Jack had been consulting a page from a sheaf of Xeroxed material.\n\n\"So if Anna and Eve are type B or AB, they can't be Summer Dawn. It would have to be Krista.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"I hope it isn't Anna,\" I said, sorry immediately I'd said it out loud, and with that edge of desperation in my voice.\n\n\"I hope not, too, for your sister's sake,\" Jack said briskly, and I was even sorrier I'd said anything. I could feel him shoving off my fear, reminding me he had a job to do that he was compelled to finish. I hated the necessity for the reminder. \"Here, here's your sock.\"\n\n\"Jack, what if they're all A or O?\" I took the sock from him and pulled it on. I had my shoe tied before he answered.\n\n\"I don't know. I'll think of something,\" he said, but not with any hope in his voice. \"Maybe that's not the way to go. I'll call Aunt Betty and see if she's got any ideas. I'll be in and out, so try here if you need me. Something's gotta break tonight.\"\n\nBefore I left my folks' house for the O'Sheas', I dialed a Shakespeare number to talk to my friend Carrie Thrush. As I'd hoped, she was still at her office, having seen her last patient just minutes before.\n\n\"How are you?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, surprise in her voice. \"I'll be glad when flu season is over.\"\n\n\"The house is okay?\" Carrie had agreed to stop by once or twice, check to make sure the mail carrier had obeyed my \"stop mail\" card. I hadn't thought it was much of an imposition, since she was dating Claude Friedrich, who lived in the apartment next door. In fact, I would have asked Claude himself to do it if he hadn't been still limping from a leg injury.\n\n\"Lily, your house is fine,\" Carrie said, good-humored toleration in her low voice. \"How are you doing?\"\n\n\"OK,\" I said grudgingly.\n\n\"Well, we'll be glad to see you come home. Oh, you'll want to know this! Old Mr. Winthrop died yesterday, out at his place. He had a massive heart attack at the supper table. Arnita said he just slumped over in the sweet potatoes. She called nine-one-one, but it was too late.\"\n\nI figured the whole Winthrop family had to be relieved that the old tyrant was dead, but it wouldn't be decent to admit it.\n\n\"That family has been through everything this year,\" Carrie commented, not at all put off by my lack of response.\n\n\"I saw Bobo before I left,\" I told her.\n\n\"His Jeep went by your house twice yesterday evening.\"\n\n\"Hmmm.\"\n\n\"He's carrying a big torch.\"\n\nI cleared my throat. \"Well, he'll meet a gal his own age who doesn't kowtow to him because he's a Winthrop. He's just nineteen.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Carrie sounded amused. \"Besides, you have your own private dick.\" This was Carrie's little term for Jack. She thought it was really funny. She was definitely smiling on the other end of the line. \"How is your family?\" she asked.\n\n\"This wedding has got everyone crazy.\"\n\n\"And speaking of Jack, have you heard from him?\"\n\n\"He\u2014ahhh\u2014he's here.\"\n\n\"There? In Bartley?\" Carry was startled and impressed.\n\n\"It's work,\" I said hastily. \"He's got a job here.\"\n\n\"Right. How coincidental!\"\n\n\"True,\" I told her warningly. \"He's working.\"\n\n\"So you haven't seen him at all, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"Oh, well... a couple of times.\"\n\n\"He come by the house?\"\n\n\"Yes. He did.\"\n\n\"Met your parents,\" she prompted.\n\n\"Well, OK, he did.\"\n\n\"O\u2014kay.\" She drew out the word as if she'd proved a point. \"He coming back to Shakespeare with you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"For Christmas?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Way to go, Lily!\"\n\n\"We'll see,\" I said skeptically. \"And you? You'll be there?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm cooking and Claude is coming to my house. I was going to go to my folks', even though it's such a long drive, but when I found out Claude was going to be on his own, I told them I'd have to see them in the spring.\"\n\n\"Moving fast, there.\"\n\n\"Nothing to stop us, is there? He's in his forties and I'm in my midthirties.\"\n\nI said, \"No point taking it slow.\"\n\n\"Damn straight!\" Carrie's voice grew muffled as she told her nurse to call someone and give him his test results. Then her voice grew clearer. \"So you're coming home when?\"\n\n\"The day after the wedding,\" I said firmly. \"I can't stand it another minute.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"See you then, Lily.\"\n\n\"OK. Thanks for checking the house.\"\n\n\"No problem.\"\n\nWe said good-bye and hung up, both with a few things to think about.\n\nI could tell that Carrie's relationship with Chief of Police Claude Friedrich was flourishing. I hoped it would last. I'd liked both of them for months before they'd ever looked at each other.\n\nI found myself wondering how Bobo was feeling about the death of his grandfather. I was sure he felt some grief, but it must be at least a little mixed with relief. Now Bobo and his parents would have some peace, some time to recoup. It was almost possible they would rehire me.\n\nI dragged myself back to the here and now. It was nearly time for me to go to my baby-sitting stint. I would be in the O'Sheas' house; I could search it as I had the Kingery house and the Osborn house. I was staring at myself in the mirror in the bathroom, refluffing my hair and powdering my face, when I finally registered how miserable I looked.\n\nCouldn't be helped.\n\nIn my room, I pulled on my Christmas sweatsuit, the one I'd worn in the parade. I guess I thought the bright color might make me seem more kid-friendly. I ate a bowl of leftover fruit salad, all that I could find in the refrigerator since everyone else in the house was going to the supper.\n\nDill's friend Berry Duff rang the doorbell while I was washing up, and I let him in. He smiled down at me.\n\n\"You look cheerful,\" he remarked.\n\n\"I'm going to baby-sit.\"\n\nHis face fell. \"Oh, I was looking forward to talking to you at the dinner.\"\n\n\"Last-minute emergency. The baby-sitter came down with the flu and they couldn't find another one.\"\n\n\"I hope it goes smoothly,\" Berry said, rather doubtfully, I thought. \"I have kids of my own, and a handful at a time is kind of a rough evening.\"\n\n\"How old are yours?\" I asked politely.\n\n\"I got one who's nine, one who's in the tenth grade... let's see... Daniel's fifteen now. They're both good kids. I don't get to see them often enough.\"\n\nI remembered that his wife had custody of the children. \"Do they live close enough for you to see them regularly?\" I asked.\n\n\"Every other weekend,\" he answered. He looked sad and angry. \"That's just not as good, nowhere near as good, as watching them grow up every day.\" He folded himself into one of the kitchen chairs, and I returned to the sink to finish drying the dishes.\n\n\"But you know where they are,\" I said, surprising even myself. \"You know that they're safe. You can pick up the phone and call them.\"\n\nBerry stared at me in understandable surprise. \"That's true,\" he said slowly, feeling his way. \"I'm sure the situation could be worse. You're saying, if my wife ran off with them, went underground, like some spouses do to keep the other parent away from the kids? That would be horrible. I guess I'd just go crazy.\" Berry mulled it over for a minute. \"I'd do anything to get them back, if that happened,\" he concluded. He looked up at me. \"My God, girl, how did we get on this depressing topic? This is supposed to be a happy household! Wedding tomorrow!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"Wedding tomorrow.\" I had to be resolute. This was not a problem I could solve by hitting or kicking. I puzzled Berry further by patting his shoulder, before I pulled on my coat and called good-bye to my parents.\n\nI thought there was something I'd forgotten to tell Jack today, something small but important. But I couldn't make it float to the surface of my mind.\n\nThe O'Sheas had plenty of room in the Presbyterian manse, since the preacher for whom the home had been built had been the father of five. Of course, that had been in 1938. Now the manse was an underinsulated money pit in need of complete rewiring, Lou told me within the first five minutes after my arrival. I could see that she had some legitimate gripes, because the long, narrow shape of the living area made it hard to group furniture, just for starters. And though there was a fireplace, and it was decorated for the season, the chimney needed so much repair that it wasn't functional.\n\nThe preacher's wife was encased in a sage green suit and black suede pumps. Her dark hair was carefully turned under all the way around in a smooth pageboy, and her ski-jump nose had been minimized by some subtle makeup. Lou was clearly looking forward to getting out of her house without the kids in tow, but just as clearly she was little anxious about my keeping them. She was doing her best not to show her worry, but the third time she pointed out the list of emergency phone numbers right by the telephone, I had a very sharp answer practically tottering on the edge of my tongue.\n\nInstead, of course, I took a cleansing breath and nodded. But there may have been something grim in the set of my mouth, because Lou did a double take and apologized profusely for being overprotective. To cut short her apologies, she bent to plug in the Christmas tree, which almost filled a quarter of the room.\n\nThe lights began to blink.\n\nI clenched my teeth to keep from saying something Lou was sure to find unacceptable.\n\nThe manse seemed as commercial as any other house tricked out for the season, with long plastic candy canes propped on either side of the nonfunctional hearth, where fireplace tools would ordinarily stand. A silver garland was draped between the corners of the mantelpiece, and Lou had hung long plastic icicles from the garland.\n\nOpposite the hearth was a central window before which the tree was positioned. However, under the tree, instead of presents there stood a nativity scene, with a wooden stable and a full complement of shepherds, Joseph and Mary, camels and cows, and the baby Jesus in a manger.\n\nHandsome Jess strode into the room, wearing a dark suit enlivened by a fancy Christmas vest. He was carrying Meredith Osborn's baby, Jane, and Jane was not happy.\n\nIt was time for me to prove my worth. I steeled myself to hold out my arms, and he placed the shrieking Jane in them.\n\n\"Is she due for a bottle?\" I yelled.\n\n\"No,\" bellowed Jess, \"I just fed her.\"\n\nThen she needed burping. After eating came burping, then excreting, then sleeping. This was what I had learned about babies. I turned Jane so she was upright and pointed over my shoulder and began patting her gently with my right hand. Little red-faced thing... she was so tiny. Jane had wisps of curling blond hair here and there on her smooth head. Her eyes were squeezed shut with rage, but as soon as I turned her upright she seemed to be crying with less volume. Her little eyes opened and looked hazily at me.\n\n\"Hi,\" I said, feeling I should talk to her.\n\nThe other children came piling into the room. Krista's little brother Luke was a cement block of a toddler, so square and heavy that he stomped rather than walked. He was dark-haired like Lou, but he would have the heavy-jawed good looks of his father.\n\nThe most amazing belch erupted from the baby. Her body relaxed against my shoulder, which suddenly felt wet.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Lou said. \"Oh, Lily...\"\n\n\"Should have slung a diaper over your shoulder.\" Jess's advice was just a little too late.\n\nI looked directly into the baby's eyes, and she made one of those little baby noises. Her tiny hands flailed the air.\n\n\"I'll hold her while you clean up,\" Eve volunteered, while Krista said, \"Ewww! Look at the white stuff on Miss Lily's shoulder!\"\n\n\"Sit in the chair,\" I told Eve.\n\nEve settled herself in the nearest armchair, her legs crossed on the seat. I settled Eve's sister into her lap and checked to make sure that Eve was holding the baby correctly. She was.\n\nFollowed by the herd of kids, I went to the bathroom, got a washcloth out of the linen closet, and dampened it to rub the worst of the belched liquid off my shoulder. I didn't want to smell it all night. Krista kept up a running commentary the whole time, Anna seemed conflicted between being sympathetic toward her future aunt and rolling in the grossness of baby throw up like Krista, and Luke just stared while holding his left ear with his left hand and gripping the hair on the top of his head with his right, a posture that made him look like he was receiving signals from another planet.\n\nI realized that Luke was probably still wearing diapers, too.\n\nThe O'Sheas called good-bye as they escaped from the houseful of children, and I tossed the washrag into the dirty clothes hamper and glanced at my watch. It was time to change Jane.\n\nI settled Luke in the far end of the living room in front of the television, watching a Christmas cartoon and communicating with Mars. He chose to sit almost inside the branches of the Christmas tree. The blinking didn't seem to bother him.\n\nThe girls all followed me to the baby's room. Eve was proprietary because the baby was her sister, Krista was hoping to see poop so she could provide running commentary on its grossness, and Anna was still waiting to see which way the wind blew.\n\nGrabbing a fresh disposable diaper, I placed the baby on the changing table and went through the laborious and complicated process of unsnapping the crotch of Jane's sleeper. Mentally reviewing how I'd changed the Althaus baby, I opened the pull tabs on the old diaper, lifted Jane by the legs, removed the soiled diaper, pulled a wipe from the box on the end of the changing table, cleaned the pertinent areas, and pushed the new diaper under Jane. I ran the front part between her tiny legs, pulled the adhesive tabs shut, and reinserted the baby into the sleeper, getting the snaps wrong only one time.\n\nThe three girls decided this was boring. I watched them troop through the door to go to Krista's room. They were so superficially similar, yet so different. All were eight years old, give or take a few months; all were within three inches of being the same height; they had brown hair and brown eyes. But Eve's hair was long and looked as if someone had taken a curling iron to it, and Eve was thin and pale. Krista, blocky and with higher color, had short, thick, darker hair and a more decisive demeanor. Her jaw jutted out like she was about to take it on the chin. Anna had shoulder-length light brown hair, a medium build, and a ready smile.\n\nOne of these three little girls was not who she thought she was. Her parents were not the people she had always identified as her parents. Her home was not really her home; she belonged elsewhere. She was not the oldest child in the family but the youngest. Everything in her life had been a lie.\n\nI wondered what Jack was doing. I hoped whatever it was, he wouldn't get caught.\n\nI carried the baby into the living room with me. Luke was still absorbed in the television, but he half turned as I entered and asked me for a snack.\n\nWith the attention to detail you have to have around kids, I put Jane in her infant seat, fastened the strap and buckle arrangement that prevented her from falling out, and fetched Luke a banana from the chaotic kitchen.\n\n\"I want chips. I don't like nanas,\" he said.\n\nI exhaled gently. \"If you eat your banana, I'll get you some chips,\" I said as diplomatically as I am able. \"After supper. I'll be putting supper on the table in just a minute.\"\n\n\"Miss Lily!\" shrieked Eve. \"Come look at us!\"\n\nIgnoring Luke's continued complaints about bananas, I strode down the hall to the room that must be Krista's, judging from all the signs on the door warning Luke never to come in.\n\nIt didn't seem possible the girls could have done so much to themselves in such a short time. Both Krista and Anna were daubed with makeup and swathed in full dress-up regalia: net skirts, feathered hats, tiny high heels. Eve, sitting on Krista's bed, was much more modestly decked out, and she wore no makeup at all.\n\nI looked at Krista's and Anna's lurid faces and had a flash of horror before I realized that if all this stuff had been in Krista's room, this must be an approved activity.\n\n\"You look... charming,\" I said, having no idea what an acceptable response would be.\n\n\"I'm the prettiest!\" Krista said insistently.\n\nIf the basis for selection was heavy makeup, Krista was right.\n\n\"Why don't you wear makeup, Miss Lily?\" Eve asked.\n\nThe three girls crowded around and analyzed my face.\n\n\"She's got mascara on,\" Anna decided.\n\n\"Red stuff? Rouge?\" Krista was peering at my cheeks.\n\n\"Eye shadow,\" Eve said triumphantly.\n\n\"More isn't always better,\" I said, to deaf ears.\n\n\"If you wore a lot of makeup, you'd be beautiful, Aunt Lily,\" Anna said surprisingly.\n\n\"Thank you, Anna. I'd better go see how the baby is.\"\n\nLuke had unsnapped the baby's sleeper and pulled it from her tiny feet. He was bending over her with a pair of tiny, sharp fingernail scissors.\n\n\"What are you doing, Luke?\" I asked when I could draw my breath.\n\n\"I'm gonna help you out,\" he said happily. \"I'm gonna cut baby Jane's toenails.\"\n\nI shuddered. \"I appreciate your wanting to help. But you have to wait for Jane's daddy to say whether or not he wants you to do that.\" That seemed pretty diplomatic to me.\n\nLuke insisted vehemently that Jane's long toenails were endangering her life and had to be trimmed now.\n\nI began to dislike this child very seriously.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" I said quietly, cutting right through all his justification.\n\nLuke shut right up. He looked plenty scared.\n\nGood.\n\n\"Don't touch the baby unless I ask you to,\" I said. I thought I was making a simple declarative sentence, but possibly Luke was good at interpreting voice tone. He dropped the scissors. I picked them up and shoved them in my sweatpants pocket where I could be certain he wouldn't reclaim them.\n\nI picked up the infant seat and took Jane into the kitchen with me to set out the children's meal. Lou had left canned funny-shaped pasta in sauce, which I wouldn't have fed to my dog, if I'd had one. I heated it, trying not to inhale. I spooned it into bowls, then cut squares of Jell-O and put them on plates, adding apple slices that Lou had already prepared. I poured milk.\n\nThe kids ran in and scooted into chairs the minute I called them, even Luke. Without prompting, they all bowed their heads and said the \"God is great\" prayer in unison. I was caught flat-footed, halfway to the refrigerator to put the milk carton away.\n\nThe next fifty minutes were... trying.\n\nI understand that close to Christmas children get excited. I realize that children in packs are more excitable than children separately. I have heard that having a sitter instead of parental supervision causes kids to push their limits, or rather, their sitter's. But I had to take several deep breaths as the kids rampaged through their supper. I perched on a stool, baby Jane in her infant seat on the kitchen counter beside me. Jane, at least, was asleep. A sleeping baby is a near-perfect thing.\n\nAs I wiped up slopped tomato sauce, put more sliced apples into Luke's bowl, stopped Krista from poking Anna with a spoon, I gradually became aware that Eve was quieter than the others. She had to make a visible effort to join in the hilarity.\n\nOf course, her mother had just died.\n\nSo I kept a wary eye on Eve.\n\nFar from planning to learn something that evening, I was beginning to hope merely to survive it. I'd thought I'd get a moment to look for family records. That was so clearly impossible, I was convinced I'd leave as ignorant as when I'd come.\n\nKrista took care of the problem for me.\n\nReaching for the crackers I'd set in the center of the table, she knocked over her milk, which cascaded off the table into Anna's lap. Anna shrieked, called Krista a butthead, and darted a terrified glance at me. This was not approved language in the Kingery household, and since I was almost her aunt, I gave Anna the obligatory stern look.\n\n\"Do you have a change of pants here?\" I asked.\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" said a subdued Anna.\n\n\"Krista, you wipe up the milk with this towel while I take Anna to change. I'll need to put those pants right in the washer.\"\n\nI picked up the baby in her infant seat and carried her with me down the hall, trying not to jostle her from her sleep. Anna hurried ahead of me, wanting to change and get back to her friends.\n\nI could tell that Anna was not comfortable taking off her clothes with me in the room, but we'd done a little bonding that morning and she didn't want to hurt my feelings by asking me to leave. God knows I hated invading anyone's privacy, but I had to do it. After I found a safe spot on the floor for Jane, I picked up the room while Anna untied her shoes and divested herself of her socks, pants, and panties. I had my back to her, but I was facing a mirror when her panties came down, and since she had her back to me, I was able to see clearly the dark brown splotch of the birthmark on her hip.\n\nI had to lean against the wall. A wave of relief almost bowled me over. Anna having that birthmark simply had to mean that Anna was the baby in the birth picture with her mother and Dill, their original and true child, and not Summer Dawn Macklesby.\n\nI had something to be thankful for, after all.\n\nI picked up the wet clothes, and Anna, having pulled on some dry ones, dashed out of the room to finish her supper.\n\nI was about to pick up Jane when Eve came in. She stood, her arms behind her back, looking at her shoes. Something about the way she was standing put me on full alert.\n\n\"Miss Lily, you remember that day you came to our house and cleaned up?\" she asked, as though it had been weeks before.\n\nI stood stock still. I saw myself opening the box on the shelf...\n\n\"Wait,\" I told her. \"I want to talk to you. Wait just one moment.\"\n\nThe nearest telephone, and the one that was the most private, was the one in the master bedroom across the hall.\n\nI looked through the phone book, found the number of Jack's motel. Please let him be there, please let him be there...\n\nMr. Patel connected me to Jack's room. Jack answered on the second ring.\n\n\"Jack, open your briefcase,\" I said.\n\nSome assorted sounds over the other end.\n\n\"OK, it's done.\"\n\n\"The picture of the baby.\"\n\n\"Summer Dawn? The one that was in the paper?\"\n\n\"Yes, that one. What is the baby wearing?\"\n\n\"One of those one-piece things.\"\n\n\"Jack, what does it look like?\"\n\n\"Ah, long arms and legs, snaps...\"\n\n\"What is the pattern?\"\n\n\"Oh. Little animals, looks like.\"\n\nI took a deep, deep breath. \"Jack, what kind of animal?\"\n\n\"Giraffes,\" he said, after a long, analytical pause.\n\n\"Oh God,\" I said, scarcely conscious of what I was saying.\n\nEve came into the bedroom. She had picked up the baby and brought her with her. I looked at her white face, and I am sure I looked as stricken as I felt.\n\n\"Miss Lily,\" she said, and her voice was limp and a little sad. \"My dad's at the door. He came to get us.\"\n\n\"He's here,\" I said into the phone and hung up.\n\nI got on my knees in front of Eve. \"What were you going to tell me?\" I asked. \"I was wrong to go use the phone when you were waiting to talk to me. Tell me now.\"\n\nMy intensity was making her nervous, I could see, but it wasn't something I could turn off. At least she knew I was taking her seriously.\n\n\"He's here now, it's... I have to go home.\"\n\n\"No, you need to tell me.\" I said it as gently as I could, but firmly.\n\n\"You're strong,\" she said slowly. Her eyes couldn't meet mine. \"My dad said my mom was weak. But you're not.\"\n\n\"I'm strong.\" I said it flatly, with as much assurance as I could pack into a statement.\n\n\"Maybe... you could tell him me and Jane need to spend the night here, like we were supposed to? So he won't take us home?\"\n\nShe'd intended to tell me something else.\n\nI wondered how much time I had before Emory came to find out what was keeping us.\n\n\"Why don't you want to go home?\" I asked, as if we had all the time in the world.\n\n\"Maybe if he really wanted me to come, Jane could stay here with you?\" Eve asked, and suddenly tears were trembling in her eyes. \"She's so little.\"\n\n\"He won't get her.\"\n\nEve looked almost giddy with relief.\n\n\"You don't want to go,\" I said.\n\n\"Please, no,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Then he won't get you.\"\n\nTelling a father he couldn't have his kids was not going to go over well. I hoped Jack had found something, or Emory would make that one wrong move.\n\nHe'd have to. He'd have to be provoked.\n\nTime to take my gloves off.\n\n\"Stay here,\" I told Eve. \"This may get kind of awful, but I'm not letting anyone take you and Jane out of this house.\"\n\nEve suddenly looked frightened by what she had unleashed, realizing on some level that the monster was out of the closet now, and nothing would make it go back in. She had taken her life, and her sister's, in her own hands at the ripe old age of eight. I am sure she was wishing she could take back her words, her appeal.\n\n\"It's out of your hands now,\" I said. \"This is grown-up stuff.\"\n\nShe looked relieved, and then she did something that sent shivers down my back: She picked up the baby in her carrier and took her to a corner of the bedroom, pulling out the straight-backed chair that blocked it, crouching down behind it with the baby beside her.\n\n\"Throw Reverend O'Shea's bathrobe over the chair,\" the little voice suggested. \"He won't find us, maybe.\"\n\nI felt my whole body clench. I picked up the blue velour bathrobe that Jess had left lying across the foot of the bed and draped it over the chair.\n\n\"I'll be back in a minute,\" I said and went down the hall to the living room, Anna's milk-stained clothes still under my arm. I tossed them into the washroom as I passed it. I was trying to keep things as normal as I could. There were children here, in my care.\n\nEmory was standing just inside the front door. He was wearing jeans and a short jacket. He'd pulled his gloves off and stuck them in a pocket. His blond hair was brushed smooth, and he looked as if he'd just shaved. It was like... I hesitated to say this, even to myself.\n\nIt was like he was here to pick up his date.\n\nHis guileless blue eyes met mine with no hesitation. Luke, Anna, and Krista were playing a video game at the other end of the room.\n\n\"Hey, Miss Bard.\" He looked a little puzzled. \"I sent Eve back to tell you I'd decided the girls should spend the night at home, after all. I've imposed on the O'Sheas too much.\"\n\nI walked over to the television. I had to turn off the screen before the children would look at me. Krista and Luke were surprised and angry, though they were too well raised to say anything. But Anna somehow knew that something was wrong. She stared at me, her eyes as round as quarters, but she didn't ask any questions.\n\n\"You three go back and play in Krista's room,\" I said. Luke opened his mouth to protest, took a second look at me, and jumped up to run back to his sister's room. Krista gave me a mutinous glare, but when Anna, casting several backward looks, followed Luke, Krista left too.\n\nEmory had moved closer to the hall leading down to the bedrooms. He was leaning on the mantel, in fact. He'd pulled off his jacket. He was still smiling gently at the children as they passed him. I moved closer.\n\n\"The girls are going to stay here tonight,\" I said.\n\nHis smile began to twitch around the edges. \"I can take my children when I want, Miss Bard,\" he told me. \"I'd thought I needed time alone with my sister to plan the funeral service, but she had to go home to Little Rock tonight, so I want my girls to come home.\"\n\n\"The girls are going to stay here tonight.\"\n\n\"Eve!\" he bellowed suddenly. \"Come out here right now!\"\n\nI heard the children in Krista's room fall silent.\n\n\"Stay where you are!\" I called, hoping each and every one of them understood I meant it.\n\n\"How can you tell me I can't have my kids?\" Emory looked almost tearful, not angry, but there was something in the way he was standing that kept me on the edge of wary.\n\nTruth or dare. \"I can tell you that so easy, Emory,\" I said. \"I know about you.\"\n\nSomething scary flared in his expression for just a second. \"What the heck are you talking about?\" he said, permitting himself to show a reasonable anger and disgust. \"I came to get my little girls! You can't keep my little girls if I want them!\"\n\n\"Depends on what you want them for, you son of a bitch.\"\n\nIt was the bad language that cracked Emory's facade.\n\nHe came at me then. He grabbed one of the plastic icicles suspended from the garland on the O'Sheas' mantel, and if I hadn't caught his wrist, it would have been embedded in my neck. I overbalanced while I was keeping the tip away from my throat, and over we went. As Emory and I hit the floor with a thud, I could hear the children begin to wail, but it seemed far away and unimportant just now. I'd fallen sideways, and my right hand was trapped.\n\nEmory was small and looked frail, but he was stronger than I'd expected. I was gripping his forearm with my left hand, keeping the hard plastic away from my neck, knowing that if he succeeded in driving it in I would surely die. His other hand fastened around my neck, and I heard my own choking noises.\n\nI wrenched my shoulder in a desperate effort to pull my right hand out from under my body. Finally it was free, and I found my pocket. I pulled out the nail scissors and sunk them into Emory's side.\n\nHe howled and yanked sideways, and somehow I lost the scissors. But now I had two free hands. With both of them I forced his right hand back, heaved myself against him, and over we rolled with me on top but with his left hand still digging into my throat. I pushed his right arm back and down, though his braced left arm kept me too far away to force it to the ground and break it. I struggled to straddle him and finally managed it. By now I was seeing a wash of gray strewn with spots instead of living room furniture. I pushed up on my knees and then let my weight fall down on him as hard as I could. The air whooshed out of Emory's lungs then, and he was trying to gasp for oxygen, but I thought maybe I would give out first. I raised up and collapsed on him again, but like a snake he took advantage of my movement to start to roll on his side, and since I was pushing his right arm in that direction, I went, too, and now we were on the floor under the Christmas tree, the tiny colored lights blinking, blinking.\n\nI could see the lights blinking through the gray fog, and they maddened me.\n\nAbruptly, I let go of Emory's arm and snatched a loop of lights from the tree branches. I swung the loop around Emory's neck, but I wasn't able to switch hands to give myself a good cross pull. He drove the tip of the plastic icicle into my throat.\n\nThe plastic tip was duller than a knife, and I am muscular, so it still hadn't penetrated by the time the string of blinking lights around Emory's neck began to take effect.\n\nHe took his left hand from my throat to claw at the lights, his major error since I'd been right on the verge of checking out of consciousness. I was able to roll my head to the side to minimize the pressure of the icicle. I was doing much better until Emory, scrabbling around with that left hand, seized the stable of the manger scene and brought it down on my head.\n\nI was out only a minute, but in that minute the room had emptied and the house had grown silent. I rolled to my knees and pushed up on the couch. I took an experimental step. Well, I could walk. I didn't know how much more I was capable of doing, but I seized the nearest thing I could strike with, one of the long plastic candy canes that Lou had set on each side of the hearth, and I started down the hall, pressing myself against the wall. I passed the washroom on my left and a closet on my right. The next door on my left was Krista's room. The door was open.\n\nI cautiously looked around the door frame. The three children were sitting on Krista's bed, Anna and Krista with their arms around each other, Luke frantically sucking on his fingers and pulling his hair. Krista gave a little shriek when she saw me. I put my finger across my lips, and she nodded in a panicky way. But Anna's eyes were wide and staring as if she was trying to think of how to tell me something.\n\nI wondered if they would trust me, the mean stranger they didn't know, or Emory, the sweet man they'd seen around for years.\n\n\"Did he find Eve?\" I asked, in a voice just above a whisper.\n\n\"No, he didn't,\" Emory said and stepped out from behind the door. He'd gone by the kitchen; I saw by the knife in his hand.\n\nAnna screamed. I didn't blame her.\n\n\"Anna,\" said Emory. \"Sweet little girls don't make noise.\" Anna choked back another scream, scared to death he would get near her, and the resulting sound was terrifying. Emory glanced her way.\n\nI stepped all the way into the room, raised the plastic candy cane, and brought it down on Emory's arm with all the fury I had in me.\n\n\"I'm not sweet,\" I said.\n\nHe howled and dropped the knife. I put one foot on it and scooted it behind me with the toe of my shoe, just as Emory charged. The plastic candy cane must not have been very intimidating.\n\nThis time I was ready, and as he lunged toward me, I stepped to one side, stuck out one foot, and as he stumbled over it, I brought the candy cane down again on the back of his neck.\n\nIf the children hadn't been there I would have kicked him or broken one of his arms, to make sure I wouldn't have to deal with him again. But the children were there, Luke screaming and wailing with all the abandon of a two-year-old, and Anna and Krista both sobbing.\n\nWould hitting him again be any more traumatic for them? I thought not and raised my foot.\n\nBut Chandler McAdoo said, \"No.\"\n\nAll the fight went out of me in a gust. I let the red-and-white-striped plastic fall from my fingers to the carpet, told myself I should comfort the children. But I realized in a dim way that I was not at all comforting right now.\n\n\"Eve and Jane are behind the chair in the bedroom across the hall,\" I said. I sounded exhausted, even to myself.\n\n\"I know,\" Chandler said. \"Eve called nine-one-one.\"\n\n\"Miss Lily?\" called a tiny, shaky voice.\n\nI made myself plod into the master bedroom. Eve's head popped up from behind the chair. I sat on the end of the bed.\n\n\"You can bring Jane out now,\" I said. \"Thank you for calling the police. That was so smart, so brave.\" Eve pushed the chair out and picked up the infant seat, though now it was almost too heavy for her thin arms.\n\nChandler shut the door.\n\nIt promptly came open again and Jack came in.\n\nHe paused and looked me over. \"Anything broken?\" he asked.\n\n\"No.\" I shook my head and wondered for a second if I would be able to stop. It felt like pendulum set in motion. I rubbed my throat absently.\n\n\"Bruise,\" said Jack. I watched him try to decide how to approach me and Eve.\n\nWith great effort, I lifted my hand and patted Eve on the head. Then I folded her in my arms as she began to cry.\n\nI sat with Eve in my lap that night as she told the police what had been happening in the yellow house on Fulbright Street. Chandler was there, and Jack\u2014and Lou O'Shea, since Jess had passionately wanted to be there as Eve's pastor, but Eve had shown a definite preference for Lou.\n\nDaddy, it seemed, had started getting funny when it became apparent that the bills from Meredith's pregnancy and delivery were going to be substantial. He began to enjoy playing with his eight-year-old daughter.\n\n\"He always liked me to wear lipstick and makeup,\" Eve said. \"He liked me to play dress up all the time.\"\n\n\"What did your mom have to say about that, Eve?\" Chandler asked in a neutral voice.\n\n\"She thought it was funny, at first.\"\n\n\"When did things change?\"\n\n\"About Thanksgiving, I guess.\"\n\nIt was just after Thanksgiving that the article about unsolved crimes had appeared in the Little Rock paper. With the picture of the baby in the giraffe sleeper. The same baby sleeper that Meredith had kept all these years in a box on the closet shelf, as a memento of her baby's first days.\n\n\"Mama wasn't happy. She'd walk around the house and cry. She had a hard time taking care of Jane. She...\" Eve's voice dropped almost to a whisper. \"She asked me funny questions.\"\n\n\"About...?\" Chandler again.\n\n\"About did Daddy touch me funny.\"\n\n\"Oh. What did you tell her?\" Chandler sounded quiet and respectful of Eve, as if this was a very ordinary conversation. I had not known my old friend could be this way.\n\n\"No, he never touched me... there. But he liked to play Come Here Little Girl.\"\n\nMy stomach heaved.\n\nI won't go through it all, but the gist of it was that Emory liked to deck Eve in lipstick and rouge and call her over to him as if they were strangers and induce her to touch him through his pants.\n\n\"So what else happened?\" Chandler asked after a moment.\n\n\"He and Mama had a fight. Mama said they had to talk about when I was born, and Daddy said he wouldn't, and Mama said... oh, I don't remember.\"\n\nHad Meredith asked him if Eve was their baby? Had she asked him if he was molesting the child?\n\n\"Then Mama or Daddy got my memory book and took a page out of it. I didn't see them do it, but when I got home one day, the page was missing, my favorite picture of me and Anna and Krista. It had been cut out real neat, so I think Mama did it. So the next time I spent the night with Anna, I took it over there with me, so Mama couldn't cut out any more pages.\"\n\nJack and I met each other's eyes.\n\n\"Then Mama said I needed a blood test. So I went to Dr. LeMay, and he and Miss Binnie took some blood and said they were going to test it, and I had sure been a good girl, and he gave me a piece of candy.\n\n\"Mama told me not to tell anyone, but Daddy saw the needle mark when he bathed me that night! But I didn't tell, I didn't!\" Big tears rolled down Eve's cheeks.\n\n\"No one thinks you did anything wrong,\" I said.\n\nI hadn't realized how tense she was until she relaxed.\n\n\"So Daddy found out. I think he went looking and found the paper Mama got from the doctor.\"\n\nThe lab results? A receipt for whatever Meredith had paid for the blood test?\n\n\"So the next night he said Mama needed a break and he was going to take us out.\"\n\n\"And you got in the car, right?\" Chandler asked.\n\n\"Yep, me and Jane. I was buckling her car seat when Daddy said he'd left his gloves. He opened the trunk and got something out and put it on, and he went in the house. After a few minutes he came back out with something under his arm, and he put it in the trunk and we went out to eat. When we got home...\" Eve began to cry in earnest then.\n\nChandler slipped out with Emory's keys to open Emory's trunk. He came back in five minutes.\n\n\"I got some people looking and taking pictures,\" he said quietly. \"Come on, sweetie, let's put you on a bed for a little while, so you can lie still.\"\n\nLou, who had tears running down her face, held out her arms to Eve, and Eve allowed Lou to pick her up and carry her off.\n\n\"What was in the trunk?\" Jack asked.\n\n\"A clear plastic raincoat with lots of stains and a single-edge kitchen knife.\"\n\nI shuddered.\n\nJack and Chandler began to have a very important talk.\n\nChandler called over to the men searching the house on Fulbright Street. In about thirty minutes, thin Detective Brainerd brought a familiar shoe box into the bedroom at the manse.\n\nJack put on gloves, opened the box, and began to smile.\n\nDill and Varena had taken Anna home long before, and I could assume they'd made a report to my parents about where I was.\n\nJack dropped me at his motel room while he went to the jail to have a conversation with Emory Osborn.\n\nWhen he returned, I was still lying on the bed staring at the ceiling. I still had my coat on. My throat hurt.\n\nWithout speaking, Jack consulted an address book he fished out of his briefcase. Then he picked up the phone, took a deep breath, and began dialing.\n\n\"Roy? How you doing? Yeah, I know what time it is. But I thought you should be the one to call Teresa and Simon. Tell them we got the little girl... of course I wouldn't kid about something like that. No, I don't want to call them, it's your case.\" Jack held the phone away from his ear, and I could hear Roy Costimiglia shouting on the other end. When the sound had abated a little, Jack started talking, telling Roy as much as he could in a few sentences.\n\n\"No, I don't know... they better call their lawyer, have her come down before they come down. I think there's a lot of steps to go through, but Osborn actually admitted it. Yeah.\" Jack eased back on the bed until he was lying beside me, his body snug against mine. \"He delivered his own baby at home, and the baby died. I think there's something kinda hinky about that, it was a baby boy... and he definitely likes little girls. Anyway, he felt guilty and he couldn't tell his wife. He gave her a strong painkiller he'd been taking for a back injury, she conked out, he began riding around trying to think of how to tell her the baby didn't make it. He lived right close to Conway, and he found himself just cruising through Conway at random, he says. Yeah, I don't know whether to buy that, either, especially in view... wait, let me finish.\" Jack pulled off his shoes. \"He says he rode through the Macklesbys' neighborhood, recognized the house because he'd delivered a couch there about four months before. He liked Teresa, thought she was pretty. Suddenly he remembered that Teresa had been pregnant, wondered if she'd had the baby... he watched the house for a while, says he was too distraught to go home and face his wife. Suddenly, he got his chance to make everything better. He saw Teresa come out onto the porch with the baby in her carrier, stop, put her down, and go back in the house. She was such a bad mother she didn't deserve a baby, he decided, and she already had two, anyway. His wife didn't have one. He took Summer Dawn home with him.\"\n\nRoy must have been talking again. I could feel my eyes grow heavy now that Jack's warmth relaxed me. I turned on my side facing him, my eyes closing just for a minute since he had the bedside lamp on and the glare was unpleasant.\n\n\"He took Meredith to the doctor the next day, told the doctor that he'd taken the baby to a pediatrician already. He couldn't have their doctor examine the baby, because he figured that the umbilical thingy was more healed than it would be on a one-day-old baby.\"\n\nRoy talked for a minute. It was a distant buzz. I kept my eyes shut.\n\n\"Yeah, he's confessed all the way. Says it was all his wife's fault for having a baby that died and it being a boy, for interrupting his fun with the little girl he'd so thoughtfully gotten for her, for beginning to wonder where that little girl had come from when she saw the photo in the paper... evidently, Meredith took the little girl in for a blood test, found out she couldn't be her daughter. But she loved her so much, she couldn't make up her mind what to do. Emory found out about the blood test, decided Meredith was a traitor, and killed her. He broke into my hotel room, found the pages she'd mailed me... it made him feel justified.\"\n\nSome more talk.\n\nThen Jack asked, \"You gonna call them now or wait till the morning?\"\n\nSometime after that, I lost track of what Jack was saying.\n\n\"Baby?\"\n\nI blinked. \"What?\"\n\n\"Baby, it's morning.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You got to go home and get ready for the wedding, Lily.\"\n\nMy eyes flew open. It was definitely daytime. In a panic, I glanced at the bedside clock. I exhaled a long sigh of relief when I saw it was only eight o'clock.\n\nJack was standing by the bed. He'd just gotten out of the shower.\n\nNormally in the morning I jump out of bed and get moving, but I felt so groggy. Then I remembered the night before, and I knew where I was.\n\n\"Oh, I do have to get home, I hope they're not worried,\" I said. \"I've been so good this whole visit, I've done everything right! I hate to blow it the last day.\"\n\nJack laughed. It was a good sound.\n\nI sat up. He'd taken my coat off some time during the night. I'd slept in my clothes, with no shower, and I needed to brush my teeth in the worst possible way. When Jack bent down to hug me, I backed off.\n\n\"No no no,\" I said firmly. \"Not now. I'm disgusting.\"\n\nWhen Jack saw I meant it, he perched in one of the vinyl chairs. \"Want me to go get us some coffee?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oh, bless you for thinking of it, but I better get to my folks' and let them see me.\"\n\n\"Then I'll see you at the wedding.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" I reached out, stroked his arm. \"What were you doing last night?\"\n\n\"While you were confronting the real kidnapper?\" Jack looked at me darkly. \"Well, sweetheart, I was rear-ending your soon-to-be brother-in-law.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I decided the only way to look inside the car trunks\u2014 which, if you'll remember, was your suggestion\u2014was to have a little accident with the cars involved. It would be reasonable to look in the trunk after that. I figured if I hit them just right, the trunk would open anyway.\"\n\n\"Did you hit Jess?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"And Dill, too?\"\n\n\"I was about to. But I was thinking I'd get whiplash, so I'd decided just to out-and-out break into Emory's. Then I got your call. I got to the O'Sheas' house just as your ex-boyfriend was pulling up. He cuffed me.\"\n\n\"He what?\"\n\n\"I didn't want him going in ahead of me, so he cuffed me.\"\n\nI didn't know what to say. I was trying not to smile.\n\n\"I better go get cleaned up,\" I told him. \"You'll be there?\"\n\n\"I brought my suit,\" he reminded me.\n\nThe only day it was possible for my parents not to cast me disapproving looks was Varena's wedding day. They were not excited that Jack had dropped me off in front of the house in broad daylight, with me wearing yesterday's clothes.\n\nBut in the melee of the wedding day\u2014and the day before\u2014it could be legitimately ignored.\n\nI took a very long shower and brushed my teeth twice. To regain control of myself, I shaved my legs and armpits, plucked my eyebrows, spent ten or fifteen minutes putting on lotions and makeup.\n\nIt was only after I came into the kitchen in my bathrobe to drink some coffee that my mother spotted the bruise.\n\nShe put her own mug down with a clunk.\n\n\"Your neck, Lily.\"\n\nI looked in a little mirror in the hall outside the kitchen. My neck had a spectacular dark bruise.\n\n\"Emory,\" I explained, for the first time noticing how hoarse my voice was. I touched the dark splotch. Sore. Very sore.\n\n\"It's OK,\" I said, \"really. Just need to drink something hot.\"\n\nAnd that's all we said about the night before.\n\nIt was the best luck I ever had, that day being Varena's wedding day.\n\nAnd the next morning, Christmas Day, I drove home to Shakespeare.\n\nI thought during the drive: I thought what would become of the baby, Jane, whom Eve (I had to think of her as Eve Osborn) regarded as her sister. I wondered what would happen in the days to come, when the Macklesbys would finally get to put their arms around their daughter. I wondered when I'd have to go back to testify at Emory's trial. It gave me the cold shakes, thinking of going back to Bartley again, but I would feel more amenable when the time was closer, I hoped.\n\nI didn't have to talk to anyone or listen to anyone for four whole hours.\n\nThe tatty outskirts of Shakespeare were so welcome to my eyes that I almost cried.\n\nThe decorations, the smoke coming out of the chimneys, the empty lawns and streets: Today was Christmas.\n\nIf my friend Dr. Carrie Thrush had remembered, the turkey would be thawed and waiting to be put in the oven.\n\nAnd Jack, having detoured to Little Rock to pick up some more clothes, was on his way.\n\nThe presents I'd bought him were wrapped and in my closet. The spinach Madeleine, the sweet potato casserole, and the cranberry sauce were in the freezer.\n\nI shed the past as I pulled into my own driveway.\n\nI would have a Shakespeare Christmas." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Ghost Huntress 7) The Tidings", + "author": "Marley Gibson", + "genres": [ + "Christmas", + "paranormal" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "\u2002To Professor Deidre Knight, who tossed me the magical bean seed of an idea so that I could plant it, water it, and watch it grow into a gigantic paranormal beanstalk for readers to climb up this holiday season. Wow, there's a sentence that includes everything but the kitchen sink! Thank you for constantly inspiring me.\n\n\u2002\"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future! The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this.\"\n\n\u2014Ebenezer Scrooge from Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol\n\n[ STANZA 1: KAITLIN'S APPRENTICE ]\n\nI can't freakin' believe how utterly stressed out and exasperated this ridiculous joke of a Christmas season is making me. In a nod to Mr. Dickens's time-tested opus, my holiday spirit is akin to Old Jacob Marley: dead as a doornail. And poor, misunderstood Ebenezer Scrooge was definitely on to something with his 'tude and outlook\u2014even back in his day\u2014on this taxing and hectic time of year.\n\nBah! Humbug!\n\nIt'll take all my strength and intestinal fortitude just to model through these last few days of December to get to the other side of the calendar flip.\n\nNothing's going right and everyone wants a piece of me. There aren't enough hours in the day to get everyone else's \"to do\" lists accomplished. Not that I'm a selfish cow who doesn't understand the true meaning of the holiday, but after all I've been through recently, is it too much to want some quality Kendall time for just\u2026being? The frustration rolling through my veins is enough to rattle my chains. And I'm not a Dickens ghost at all \u2013 although I've encountered plenty.\n\nI'm seriously about one inch close to the point of making a grand proclamation that Christmas is canceled.\n\nA long, pent-up sigh escapes me as I try to concentrate on this tarot card reading I've got going for Suzanne Pilfer, the nice postal clerk who's been working extra hours sorting and stacking Priority Mail packages, just so she can have some time off to go up to Stone Mountain to enjoy a lovely roasted goose dinner with her daughter, Chandra Pilfer, and her eight year old grandson, Max. The cards don't have anything encouraging for me to tell to Suzanne, though. Instead, my psychic headache tap dances away at my temple as visions of Suzanne's future materialize to me. Sadly, the premonition grips at my heart like it's juicing a fresh orange. I see little Max, wigged out over his new video games Santa brought him, but it's not a lasting kid high. Because I also see that Max will inevitably be fighting spinal meningitis in the near future. Geez, what part of \"Happy Holidays\" does that fall under?\n\nSuzanne taps a red glittery nail on the table bringing me back into the present. \"So what does that card mean, Kendall?\"\n\nI wince inwardly, tamping down my desire to flip the table like a gansta' and walk out, thereby erasing the message from the cards. How do I relay the news of her grandson to this sweet lady when all she really wants to know about is her own financial security, her daughter's happiness, and if there will still be a United States space program in the future so Max can become an astronaut?\n\nLying isn't really part of the whole enlightened and awakened game when doing a reading. It doesn't lend to your integrity as a budding psychic, one who people come to for guidance and answers. However, I can't just, like, ruin this woman's Christmas or her holiday or her\u2026 everything. I swallow hard at the need to spread good tidings and great joy to Ms. Pilfer.\n\nI move my hand to indicate the Ace of Wands lying on the velvet table cloth. \"This card usually signifies a new spark of energy. A new passion.\"\n\nHer face lights up and she sits tall. \"Ooo, I like the sound of that.\"\n\nGulping down my own distress, I force away the image of Max crashing his bicycle into the side of his mother's car that seems to be replaying non-stop in the DVR of my brain. I brush aside Max's possible skull trauma that allows nasal cavity bacteria to creep in and spread the meningitis through his young body. I'm certainly no medical doctor\u2014just a teenage psychic who picks up energies and sees visions\u2014so who am I to rain on Suzanne's family parade? I blink hard to ponder on this card's meaning.\n\nKeep it positive and light.\n\n\"You might be out to discover some new concept or philosophy or a change in your career path. Or, it could mean a new man in your life.\"\n\nA smile brightens her sun-wrinkled sixty year old face. \"Well, my Walter has been gone for eight years.\"\n\nI nod. \"Pay attention to any surges in your personal energy. The Ace of Wands is telling you to pick up this opportunity and start walking.\"\n\nWalking. How ironic. Sadly, Max will have difficulty with the simplest trip across a room if the meningitis visualization is true.\n\n\"You're so good at this, Kendall,\" Ms. Pilfer tells me. \"I do so enjoy your readings.\"\n\nShe opens her black leather Betsey Johnson wallet\u2014that my intuition tells me she sniped with three minutes to go in a recent eBay auction\u2014and passes over a twenty dollar bill. Reluctantly, I take it from her and try to offer the best smile that I can.\n\n\"You have a h-h-happy holiday, Miss Suzanne.\"\n\n\"Same to you, dear.\"\n\nAs she heads out the door into the chilly December day, a clog of emotion lodges itself in my throat and I sense tears beginning to well up. Good thing it didn't happen in front of a client.\n\nMy heartbeat hammers away inside my chest and I feel the proverbial weight of the world rest on my shoulders. As much as I'm trying to work with my still-developing gift, the empathy aspect of it sometimes makes me want to crawl under the kitchen table, curl up into the fetal position, and suck my thumb.\n\nI blink away the nonsense swimming around in my own head. Overhead, the Muzak in the store pipes up with Burl Ives's \"Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,\" and I want to hurl the pack of tarot cards at the corner speaker. Anger and defeat and sheer exhaustion roil through my body and I want to scream out at someone.\n\nSchool has been a stress-bomb with a multitude of calculus exams eating at my very brain cells, coupled with miles and miles of reading and essay assignments in AP English class. Then, I've been working extended hours here at Loreen's store, Divining Women, assuaging the townsfolk of Radisson, Georgia, about their futures. Who am I to tell these people about their possible paths when my own is so bumpy and uncertain at the moment?\n\nMy besties and fellow ghost huntresses, Celia Nichols, Taylor Tillson, Becca Asiaf, and I have been overrun with paranormal investigation requests of late, as well. You'd think every freaking ghost, spook, specter, apparition, presence, wraith, phantom, demon, whatever in Radisson and surrounding counties had nothing better to do other than annoy the crap out of their host families. After all the cases we've handled since the school year started, I'm about EMF'd, EVP'd, and KII'd to death. Pun intended.\n\nOn top of everything else, Loreen and Father Mass are getting married Christmas Eve night and I'm the maid of honor. That's wicked cool and\u2014as the title says\u2014a total honor. Thing is, I've taken the task to the extreme, trying to shoulder the burden of the event's deadlines, seating charts, and floral arrangements for Loreen while she tends to all of her last minute items like the bad dress fitting in Buckhead, the caterer who refuses to take the walnuts out of the red velvet wedding cake, and the fact that her own father wants nothing to do with the ceremony. Most depressing of all, though, is that it finally hits me that Patrick's blowing off being together for Christmas so he can go diving in Belize with his dad at something called The Blue Hole. After everything we've been through, I just wanted to be with my sweetie, and spend time making out under the mistletoe and dancing in his arms at the wedding reception.\n\nAnd don't even get me started on the queen diva herself, my little sister, Kaitlin. Casa Moorehead has become The Kaitlin Show. She won the part of the major soloist/angel in the church pageant, beating out her best friend, Penny Carmichael. Kaitlin gets to stand high atop the living Christmas tree in a fancy, sparkly gown, and sing \"O, Holy Night\" during the Eucharist service. Not that I wanted the role\u2014God knows I couldn't hit the high C in that song\u2014but it's propelled our household into a frenzied high of all-Kaitlin, all-day. I feel like an unwelcomed stranger as Mom tends to my sister's costume, planning out her hair design, and calling every living soul in Radisson on her cell to brag about Kaitlin's starring part.\n\nI suppose I should be proud of my sister and all of that, but I can't bring myself to rah-rah, thereby putting a spotlight on Kaitlin and making her the center of attention, like she so desires twenty-four/seven.\n\nSchool, Patrick's vacay, the wedding, and Kaitlin's drama aside\u2026 there's the ultimate in final straw department. One of those last drops of trouble that cause the emotional liquids to spill over. The type of thing that breaks the camel's back and depresses an already tense and terse teenager: I had longed to have some holiday bonding time with my newly-discovered grandparents, Anna and John Faulkner. They're the parents of my deceased birth mother, Emily, and I only just found them last summer when I was in Italy. I wanted nothing more than to have them with me on Christmas morning as we all awakened to my mother's breakfast smorgasbord of frittata, home fries, fresh baked bread, and, yes, figgy pudding. A family tradition that dates back in the Moorehead household to before I was even born.\n\nOf course, now, that's all out the window because my grandparents got a \"good deal\" they \"couldn't pass up\" and opted to take a seniors cruise throughout the Mediterranean instead of flying from Italy to the states to be with me.\n\nSeriously\u2026 bah freakin' humbug!\n\nWhy wouldn't I want to cancel Christmas?\n\nI honestly just want to go to bed Christmas Eve and wake up the Monday after New Year's, ready for whatever academic challenges the next school semester holds for me.\n\nAnother sigh escapes from me, bouncing off the walls of Loreen's now empty shop. Other than requests for readings and the occasional candle purchases, our foot traffic has been nil this holiday shopping season. The folks of Radisson are off in Atlanta spending their hard-earned money on trinkets and presents their relatives likely won't appreciate. I know I don't care what I get for Christmas this year.\n\nSo what?\n\nWho cares?\n\nWhat's the point?\n\nI nab my bag, turn off the heat, the lights, and the annoying Muzak, and lock up the shop. Outside, a whipping chill surrounds me with tickling fingers of annoyance. Not cold enough for a good, strong, blast of snow to blanket the city, but not warm enough that I can go without tucking my North Face jacket tightly under my chin. The bright, white, decorative lights wrapped around the street lamps spring to life and fill the Square in a holiday glow. Emerald greenery with red bows and finely crafted wreaths hang from nearly every business door, the evergreen scent wafting in the air with each gust of December wind. In the center of the Square, a full nativity scene in a small, handcrafted stable is showcased with a huge orangey spotlight on the Baby Jesus. Too bad one of the wise men has fallen over with his face in the hay, totally ruining the effect.\n\nThe ginormous gifted tannenbaum from Radisson's sister city, Radisson, Saskatchewan, Canada, stands tall in front of City Hall where my dad works. Oversized silver and gold ornaments sway in the night breeze. I wish it all meant something to me. I wish it had an effect on me. I wish it mattered.\n\nDon't get me wrong. Typically, I adore everything December. I am, after all, a Capricorn myself, born on the twenty-second of the month. I'm eighteen now. An adult. Able to cast a vote in an election, go to war, and move out on my own. Not that I want to do the latter two. As I trudge along the sidewalk headed for home, I recollect days gone by. A different life I once led: I thrived in my former Chicago existence, frolicking in the thick, wet snow, shopping for hours up and down the Miracle Mile, and peering at the window displays on State Street with my nose pressed against the glass staring wide-eyed at the shiny, sparkling ornaments and festive decorations.\n\nNow look at me. I'm not the same Kendall I was then.\n\nI'm changed.\n\nSure, I'm older, but I've had a lot of shit happen. I'm the poster child for it. A new town, a new school, a psychic awakening, a near-death experience, finding out I'm adopted, boys coming in and out of my life, and now this. This squeezing, wrenching, gasping, scraping, clutching\u2014okay, I took that from Dickens\u2014at my heart, tugging me in directions I didn't know I was headed in. The harshness of my recent experiences\u2014dealing with the dead, helping them pass into the light, or facing down malevolent and belligerent spirits who mean harm to me and my friends\u2014well, it toughens up a person. It gives you a hard edge you didn't otherwise have before, a tight grip around your soul that sucks the meaning of everything out of the corners of your brain.\n\nEven though Radisson isn't freezing, I am icy cold on the inside suddenly. Resentful and offended. Disappointed and disjointed. The idea of the familial warmth of Christmas morning does nothing to thaw the ice-age thickness of bitterness within me. Neither does the glory of a worshipful church pageant or the impending wedded bliss of my good friends.\n\nFifteen minutes later, I burst through the back door of our house. My three cats, Buckley, Eleanor, and Natalie, scatter away in surprise as I barrel past their food bowls. I toss my bag and purse on the kitchen table and move to the counter to seek something warm and caffeinated.\n\n\"Kendall? Is that you?\" my mom calls out.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\" I grab a mug, fill it with water from the Brita, and slide it into the microwave to heat for two minutes.\n\n\"I'm so glad you're home,\" she says from the front stairwell.\n\nI smile at the thought of Mom missing me even though I've just been away for the last day of school and working at Loreen's store. The microwave beeps out and I add a tea bag to the water to steep\u2014something I learned to appreciate during my time in London over the summer.\n\nMom's footsteps sound out overhead and I hear her shuffle down the steps. My annoyance at the world ebbs for a mere sec as I anticipate the loving embrace she's surely going to wrap me in when she appears next to me here in the kitchen. And boy, could I ever use one of my mom's hugs.\n\nIt doesn't happen, though, as she stops in front of me with a grimace on her face. \"You've got to help me, Kendall.\"\n\nSo much for my hug. \"Umm, okay. What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Kaitlin tore the hem of her angel gown when she was trying it on earlier. I told her not to wear her soccer shoes, but she stubbornly refused. Look at this mess those cleats caused.\" Mom holds up the shimmery white and silver fabric with the hem dangling off the left side in a gnarled way. \"I've got to run out to JoAnn's for more fabric to finish the gossamer wings in time for tomorrow night's service. You simply have to stitch this up, please.\"\n\n\"Me?\" I ask incredulously. \"Why me?\"\n\nMom's face tightens. \"Please, Kendall. Don't give me any lip. This is important to your sister.\"\n\nYet no one cares about what's important to me. I hang my head in defeat.\n\nDisappointment coats me. Not only from the lack of hugging, but the somewhat Cinderella-esque feeling of only being needed to do someone else's dirty work. That's what these past few weeks have been all about, though. School first. Kaitlin's spotlight. Patrick's dive trip. My grandparents' cruise. Loreen and Mass's wedding.\n\nWhere do I fit into all of this?\n\nI snatch the garment out of Mom's hand and take the Tupperware container that has all of her sewing accoutrements. Mom slides her purse up onto her shoulder and disappears through the back door.\n\n\"Stupid Kaitlin.\" Brat extraordinaire. Not even my real sister. But Mom and Dad's real daughter. Immediately, I tamp down the heartburn of guilt over the thought. Mom and Dad have never treated me differently or shown favoritism\u2026 at least not until now. I guess the brat deservers some attention after all the stupidity I've been dealing with.\n\nI plop down in the arm chair in the corner of the kitchen and feel my bottom lip protrude into a downright pout. Even though I hear the heater kick on, nothing can warm me right now. I've moved beyond the winter chill. I've bought property in Bitterville where I'm pelted with the cold reality that this Christmas officially sucks.\n\nNo one cares about me, my wants, my needs, my desires. Not that I'm some narcissistic, needy person like Courtney Langdon at school. However, no one has stopped for one second to ask me how I am or what I'm up to. No one's really thought to focus on how stressed out I am or how I can't sleep through the night lately.\n\nJust then, Buckley chases Eleanor through the kitchen playfully and even they don't stop to pay any mind to me. \"Don't act like I'm the one who fills your magical unending Iams food dishes daily!\"\n\nThey continue along in their play. I continue to linger in my angst.\n\nThe wind rattles the kitchen window pane and I hear the pine needles scrape against the glass. I stab the thread through the eye of the needle and roll the end of the strand into a tiny knot. Kaitlin should be doing this herself. Why should I have to be responsible to help out all because I'm the oldest and happen to have taken an embroidery class three years ago?\n\nI plunge the needle into the fabric and straight into my index finger.\n\n\"Crap!\"\n\nA scarlet ooze of blood clouds out of my skin.\n\nAnd just like that, no good deed goes unpunished.\n\nSee what I mean? Bah-freaking-humbug." + }, + { + "title": "STANZA 2: A CHEERLEADER'S GHOST", + "text": "I rummage through the junk drawer in the kitchen to try and find a Band-Aid from this century.\n\n\"Stupid Kaitlin,\" I mutter again, sucking the fresh blood off my finger.\n\nAs I roll the bandage around the reddened pin prick, I muse on how I ought to be happy in a million ways, like the song says. I usually adore Christmas, especially Christmas Eve. It's just that everything is so\u2026 stupid right now. Sure, we've got this massive evergreen in the living room decorated to the hilt with all of the ornaments Kaitlin and I handmade over the years\u2014from pathetic macaroni, yarn, and glue art, to more sophisticated painted clay shapes\u2014but where's the snow? Where are the mittens, scarves, and boots? There's no hill covered in ice to slide down. No frozen-over lake to skate on. Instead, Mom has a few logs burning in the fireplace to try and institute a genuine holiday experience. I shake my head at the ridiculousness of it.\n\nAs I sit back and return to stitching Kaitlin's dress, the door of the house bursts open. Buckley lets out a loud mewl and I hear the human mimicking of the kitty language.\n\n\"A merry Christmas, Kendall! God save you!\" cries out my best friend, Celia Nichols.\n\n\"It's not Christmas yet,\" I say in my best Scrooge voice.\n\nCelia twirls\u2014yes, she twirls\u2014into the kitchen so quickly at me, I barely have the chance to prepare for the over-the-shoulder hug she layers on me.\n\n\"A merry Christmas eve-eve, Kendall,\" she corrects.\n\n\"Seriously. Bah humbug.\"\n\nShe harrumphs at me. \"You took Mr. Rorek's Dickens assignment too literal, K. School's out, we've got two weeks of vacay, and life is good.\"\n\nI slice my eyes up at her and glare. \"For you, maybe.\"\n\n\"Oh, you don't mean that.\"\n\nMid-stitch, I say, \"Yeah, I do. Why are you so frickin' merry?\"\n\nCelia pushes her black hair behind her ears and smiles at me. Not just a normal run-of-the-mill-happy grin. No, it's one of those movie star, up-on-the-silver-screen type of glints that tells me she's got something to share.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nLike a giddy girl, she says, \"Jason gave me my Christmas present early.\"\n\nA weak smile crosses my face. Not because Celia's now dating my ex, Jason Tillson, but because she's so ridonkulously in love and it shows. \"That's great,\" I force out. \"What'd he get you?\"\n\nShe pushes up the sleeve of her black sweater to reveal a pretty substantial piece of arm jewelry. \"It's the Pandora World Travelers bracelet.\"\n\nI nearly gag on my intake of breath. \"Holy crap, Celia! That's like an eight hundred dollar bracelet!\"\n\nHer eyes widen and she nods. \"I know. I totally freaked when I opened the box. But Jason told me his mother got it from Delta's lost and found. She discovered it on the floor in first class after one of her flights from New York to Atlanta. She did the whole turn into the proper authorities and such and waited like three months. When no one claimed it, she got to keep it. Jason thought it would be the perfect gift for me since it's got a London bus, the Eiffel Tower, an airplane, and the Roman Colosseum\u2014all things that are memories of our European trip together.\"\n\nI finger the charms \u2013 one with a camera, a peace sign, and Big Ben \u2013 remembering our summer journey. A trip that turned Celia and Jason into a couple. The same voyage that helped me finally discover my grandparents.\n\n\"If you weren't already the richest girl in Radisson, Celia, you would be with this piece of silver,\" I say, and force a smile.\n\n\"Don't be mad,\" she says. \"It was dumb luck, honestly. I'm sure Patrick has something incredible for you.\"\n\nI wave her away with my hand and keep sewing. \"I can't think about that,\" I tell her. \"He's got other things on agenda. He left already on his trip to Belize with his dad.\" Anger and frustration bubble under my skin. \"Things have been so tight for him and his dad,\" I say. \"I can't believe they're spending so much money going on a diving trip. He should have his head examined.\"\n\nCelia's glee fades into a frown. \"He didn't give you a present before he left?\"\n\nI shake my head.\n\nShe reaches out and pats my sewing hand. \"I'm sure he'll bring you something wicked cool from Belize. It's known for its, umm, you know\u2026 Belize stuff.\"\n\nI can't help but laugh at her attempt to cheer me up.\n\n\"So, my parents are having this big blow out dinner on Boxing Day,\" Celia tells me. \"You know, instead of tossing out the leftovers and such, they're pulling out the full, traditional, English stops and opening the house up to everyone in town to come over for a big after Christmas party.\"\n\n\"That sounds like fun,\" I say, knowing I don't want any part of it. By the twenty-sixth, I'll have fulfilled my sisterly duties to Kaitlin and her starring pageantry. My daughterly obligation helping out on Christmas day, and my maid of honor role to Loreen as she stand at the altar with Father Mass will be finished, as well. I don't care about after Christmas sales, bowl games, or parades. I plan on cowering under the covers with my ereader and music, barricading the outside world away from me.\n\nCelia continues. \"Dad's also inviting the folks from the shelter to come. You know, so they have more than just a soup-kitchen type holiday.\" Her face falls. \"There are so many more homeless people in Radisson than before. I thought with the new distribution center opening soon and jobs coming available, people would be doing better. So, we're just trying to help out.\"\n\n\"That's nice of you.\" And it is. But I just can't feel charitable right now when my own heart feels hollow and abandoned. \"You have to be careful, though, about who you just let wander around your house, Cel. You guys have, like, tons of art and silverware that someone could just walk away with.\"\n\nShe giggles at me. \"It's Christmas, Kendall. My dad has more than he could ever want or need. He wants to share.\"\n\nI stab the needle in and out of the hem, nearly finished. Kaitlin better appreciate this, but she probably won't\u2026 as usual.\n\n\"Come on, Kendall, say you'll come. What else do you have to do?\" Celia asks.\n\nMy mouth falls open and I feel my eyes grow wide in shock and awe.\n\n\"God, Kendall,\" she stumbles out. \"I didn't mean that. I'm a total idiot. I meant that Patrick won't be back yet and it'll be good to have your company. Everyone's going to be there: Taylor, Becca, Shelby-Nicole, Jason\u2026 it wouldn't be the same without you.\"\n\nI smile weakly at her as I set Kaitlin's gown on the table. \"You're hopeless,\" I say.\n\nShe lifts a brow at me. \"How so?\"\n\n\"You are so in love with Jason Tillson.\"\n\nRed stains her cheeks, then she confesses, \"Totally. Just like you're in love with Patrick Lynn.\"\n\nI'll give her that one.\n\n\"Say you'll come,\" she prods.\n\n\"I'll try. Okay? We'll see if my mood has improved by then.\"\n\nShe stands and laughs at me. \"I'm sure there's a pill your mom, the nurse, can give you for your Bah Humbuggery.\"\n\n\"Whatev\u2026.\"\n\nAs Celia exits out the back, the front door of the house bursts open and a melee of feet on the hardwood floor sounds out. My ears are treated to the near-bleeding sensation of the incessant chatter and squealing of fifteen-year-old girls. They pound their way through the dining room and into the kitchen: six sweaty soccer players covered in mud and dirt, now delving through our refrigerator for water and energy drinks.\n\n\"Kaitlin!\" I shout. \"Mom's told you not to track through the house after a soccer game.\"\n\n\"But we won, Kendall! You don't understand,\" she squeals. \"Like, this was the game. Brittney scored the last goal and then I flew in front of our goal to save the game.\" Underneath the caked-on red Georgia mud on my sister's face, I can make out her triumphant grin.\n\nShe moves as if to hug me, but then pulls back.\n\n\"That's awesome,\" I say, still correcting her. \"You still don't need to be in the house like that.\"\n\nShe lowers her eyes. \"You're right. Sorry. Hey, you want to see the trophy?\"\n\nI wave off her accomplishment. \"Not right now. I'm busy fixing your dress.\"\n\nI don't need my psychic abilities to read the disappointment on her face. Is she actually reaching out to me? I'm not sure since it's been so long.\n\nWe both begin to speak. My words are heard first. \"Why don't you guys go out on the deck and I'll bring the water and stuff out.\"\n\nA weak smile crosses her face. \"Thanks, Kendall.\" She turns to herd her crew toward the screened-in porch out back.\n\nGathering an armload of bottled water and a pack of Double Stuff Oreos, I swing through the door and place the refreshments on the table for Kaitlin and her friends. I know I should be all, like, big sister proud of the little brat and her accomplishment, but it only adds to how everything is all about her these days.\n\nKaitlin.\n\nThe real Moorehead daughter.\n\nNot the adopted one.\n\nNot like anyone necessarily treats me differently. I just feel different of late.\n\n\"Oh crap! I need to get going,\" Kaitlin's friend, Brittney says with a pout on her face.\n\n\"Why?\" Kaitlin asks.\n\nBrittney tosses a long, white box that she's been holding up on the table. \"I'm supposed to go with my mom and these other ladies to put flowers on the graves at the cemetery for the Daughters of the American Revolution.\"\n\n\"You can't leave. We're celebrating!\" Kaitlin pushes the container toward me. \"Kendall can do it.\"\n\nI pop to attention. \"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" my sister says. \"You're all into ghosts and spirits and stuff. Why don't you go do the flowers for Brittney so she can stay here with us?\"\n\n\"Please, Kendall,\" Brittney whines, followed by a course of other pleas from the girls.\n\nSeriously? First, I'm Kaitlin's seamstress. Now I'm her florist? I stop my annoyance for a minute and think this through. I need to be the bigger person, the big sis, and help out. Kaitlin's got her posse celebrating with her, so I should give them space and get out of the house.\n\n\"Sure, I'll do it.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Kendall! You're the best,\" Kaitlin says. Then, she surprises the hell out of me by giving me a tight hug. \"Really. Thanks.\"\n\n\"Ummm\u2026 okay.\"\n\nIs my sister actually starting to grow up? Wow. As I'm about to hug her back, she pulls away and returns to her friends. I smile inwardly at the rare sisterly moment that's literally as long as a finger snap.\n\nBundling back up in my coat, I thread my hounds tooth scarf around my neck. Since the sun is setting, the chill in the air is starting to nip a little harder. Not like Chicago lake effect cold, but I'll take this.\n\nIt takes five minutes for me to walk the small Radisson back streets to the city cemetery, a place I've been to many times in my ghost hunting and in my soul searching. This time, I hope to encounter nothing more than the other ladies of the DAR.\n\nA woman with long, blond hair waves to me. \"Kendall, it's so good to see you, hon.\" It's Mayor Donn Shy. She's a frequent tarot customer. My friends and I helped clear her house of a belligerent ghost.\n\n\"Hey, there,\" I say, returning the greeting. \"I'm filling in for Brittney who's over at my house celebrating a major soccer win.\"\n\nThe mayor's mouth stretches open. \"Well, that's certainly a lot more interesting than honoring the dead.\" She laughs and I join in, for no reason.\n\n\"We've covered the back lot,\" she tells me. \"If you can take that section over there, that would be wonderful. Plenty of graves from the American Revolution all the way up to Vietnam. Just place one of the poppies on the headstone, dear.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" I say with a nod.\n\nLeaving the white box on a nearby bench, I gather the ruby-red poppies into my hand and start walking the line of graves. An Army sergeant to my left. A Navy seal to the right. An unknown Civil War solider to the left. A WWII nurse on the right. Each receives a flower of memory, and I inwardly thank each of them for their service to our country and our freedom.\n\nAs I walk amongst the burial plots, I think of all the souls and spirits I've encountered during my psychic awakening. How many I've helped crossover into the light, and others who've fought me tooth and nail. A certain melancholy covers me as I remember a simpler time when all I worried about at Christmas was if I'd fall asleep early enough so that Santa would deliver the presents on time. Or thoughts of galoshes-ing up and joining the other neighborhood kids as we built snowmen and had fights from our snow forts on each side of the street of our Chicago neighborhood.\n\nNow, I'm so wrapped up with everyone else's to-dos, that I've pretty much forgotten who I am and what I want. I place a poppy on the tombstone of a Private B. D. Alanis and wonder if his life was spent serving others constantly, or if he ever had a chance to do the things he wanted to do.\n\nOn his headstone sits a marble angel, bent on her knees and her hands folded together in prayer. Peaceful. Serene. And\u2026.\n\nAlive?\n\nI jump back\u2014you'd think I'd be used to ghosts and spirits by now\u2014as the face of the angel springs to life, her features stretching and yawning as the essence within awakens. Not just awakens, but transforms into a face. One I hadn't thought of since her funeral last year. I rub my eyes at the apparition in the marble before me. It can't be.\n\nThen again, it can. So many strange things have happened to me since moving to Radisson, Georgia.\n\nThe stone angel's face morphs into that of my dearly departed friend. A Radisson High School cheerleader who was killed in a tragic car accident.\n\nIt couldn't be, though. I helped her pass into the light. She has no business remaining here.\n\nI glance over the knoll to the left and see the freshly grown grass plot of Farah Lewis, my classmate, my friend. Then, I turn back to the grave marker where the angel's face took on Farah's features. It was her face, but not anymore.\n\nSurely I'm going nuts, beans, and crackers.\n\nI stare at the angel again, rattled to my core, fearing that I didn't do my job and Farah has been relinquished to float the earth in some sort of purgatory.\n\n\"Get over it, Kendall,\" I hear.\n\nI spin around only to find myself alone. The other ladies from the DAR are too spread out in the cemetery for me to hear or see them.\n\n\"Okay, who's here?\" I ask bravely.\n\nThe wind whistles through the bare pecan trees and carries on it the soft sound of the bells from the Methodist church ringing out \"O Come All Ye Faithful.\"\n\n\"The faithful has come,\" I say to no one. \"Show yourself or else I can't help you.\"\n\n\"Oh, but Kendall,\" the soft voice says. \"I'm here to help you.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"You know who I am.\"\n\nI bite my lip to stave off my growing annoyance\u2026 and fear. \"Seriously. I don't have time for games. It's getting dark, it's cold, and I need to get home.\"\n\n\"To what? Everyone who's ignoring you?\" the voice asks.\n\nTears threaten behind my eyes at this mocking spirit, one that knows the downward spiraling direction of my life. \"You don't scare me. Just show yourself and tell me what you want.\"\n\nThere. That sounded authoritative.\n\nBefore I know it, a thin mist creeps around my ankles and feet, lowering the temperature in the cemetery to a chilling degree of frost. A swirling vector of blue and white light in front of me makes me take a few steps back. I fist my hands together at my side, as if that will do any good against a malevolent spirit.\n\nThrough the brightness, a soft, warm smile appears, surrounded by the light chocolate skin and sky blue eyes I remember so well.\n\nHands on her hip, she says to me with a smirk, \"Don't tell me you don't remember your old friend, Farah.\"\n\nThe same face. The very same.\n\nI do everything in my power not to pass the hell out." + }, + { + "title": "STANZA 3: A DIRECTIVE FOR THE NIGHT", + "text": "When I find my voice, I say, \"Farah, I helped you pass you into the light. What are you doing here?\"\n\nShe's no longer wearing the cheerleader uniform she had on when she was killed in the car accident. The same outfit I saw her in until she walked into the light. The very ensemble her parents donated to the school for them to make into a memorial. In its place, Farah is wearing a flowing white gown, sleeveless, and off the shoulder with sequins on the bodice. If I didn't know that she'd passed away tragically, I'd say she was practicing for a turn down the catwalk at the next Miss Georgia USA pageant.\n\nShe points to her gown. \"It's really lovely, isn't it?\"\n\n\"You look great,\" I say. \"But\u2026.\"\n\n\"The afterlife is good for me,\" she tells me. \"They really do have choirs of angels in heaven. I had to best this one girl for lead vocals in the upcoming Christmas pageant. She can't hit a high C like I can.\"\n\nFarah was a budding opera singer before her death. No one in Radisson could hold a candle to that girl's voice. Apparently, neither can anyone in heaven.\n\nI frown at her, though, an disbelieving look no doubt crossing my face. \"So, if you're all happy and singing up in heaven, why are you here right now?\"\n\nShe spreads her hands. \"I'd think that's pretty obvious.\"\n\n\"What do you want from me?\" I ask.\n\nFarah's booming voice, louder than any freight train of Cat5 hurricane, encompasses me. \"Oh honey, you have no idea.\"\n\nI drop the remaining poppies to the ground and cover my ears from the roaring sound of her words. My knees buckle from trembling and I fall forward. The sod is moist with evening dew and I feel it soak into my jeans, yet I can't move.\n\nThis ghost of my friend, who I crossed into the light, stands before me going against everything I've learned in my experiences investigating the paranormal. She shouldn't be here. She should be at peace. I should be at peace from her.\n\nThe built-up angst and anxiety of the weeks, and the disappointment leading up to this day, climb right up on my shoulders and press down like a cheerleader attempting a stunt. I'm not strong enough to hold up, though. Tears fall from my eyes as I think of my grandparents, Patrick, Celia and Jason, Loreen and Mass, Kaitlin and my parents. Everything. All of it. Who am I? Where do I fit in? Do I even belong?\n\n\"That's why I'm here, Kendall,\" the ghost says.\n\nSniffing, I ask, \"Why? To show me that I've failed?\"\n\nFarah's right next to me. \"Failed how?\"\n\nLooking up at her, I blink hard. \"You're here. I'm not a good ghost huntress if I can't keep you where you belong.\"\n\nFarah's laugh is as melodic as her singing voice. \"You believe in so many things, Kendall. But do you believe in yourself?\"\n\nI wipe my eyes with the back of my hand, the tears turning to near ice on my skin from the cold wind whipping around. \"What's the point? I'm a throw-away kid with no real family of my own. I'm part of someone else's household. All I'm good for is talking with the dead that wander the earth, but I can't even keep them in their place if you're any indication.\"\n\n\"Now it's my turn to 'Bah! Humbug!'\" Farah says, mockingly. \"We spirits are all tasked with certain things. We get to walk around all y'all and check in on those we care about. We still get to live in heaven and do our thing, but if we don't use our knowledge to help the living, then the living might make the same mistakes we made.\"\n\nI sit up. \"You mean, even if you pass into the light, you can still, like, be around your loved ones?\" Is my birth mom still with me and I just don't know it?\n\nFarah nods. \"I watch after my mama all the time. I always will. Just like she watched after me when I was growing up.\"\n\nMy heart hurts at the thought of Farah's grieving mother. Of my own tenderness and pain over discovering Emily and then having her fade away. So much to bear in such a short time. I mean, I think I've handled it okay up to now, but there's something about this Christmas season that really does make me want to jump off a cliff. Not that anyone would even notice with the way things have been going lately. I don't need to be the center of attention; I just need to be included in the warmth and glow and not merely as someone to do all the dirty work.\n\nFarah pulls a long, chunky necklace from the inside of her dress. \"This is the chain I made while I was alive. Every link and lock in it was made by me \u2013 my thoughts, actions, deeds, free will, love, hate, everything. I wear it now and always as a reminder of the things that held me back. What about your own chain, Kendall?\"\n\nI shake my head back and forth as my body trembles in the cold. \"This isn't happening. It's not happening.\"\n\n\"Yeah. It is.\"\n\n\"I haven't done anything wrong for you to come down from heaven and haunt me, Farah.\"\n\nShe laughs again. \"Oh, KM, you're so cute. Thing is, you are one angst-ridden, full of self-pity, woe-is-me girlfriend. You need to get over yourself before you start building up your own clunky necklace that you'll have to wear around for all eternity once you get up here to heaven.\"\n\nMy eyes pop open. \"I'm not ready to die! There are still so many things I want to do. Graduate high school, go to college, have a career, get married, have babies, all of it. Come on, Farah, tell me something good. Something positive.\"\n\n\"That's not really up to me, KM. You've got to get out of this holiday funk.\"\n\nStubbornly, I square up my chin. \"It's too hard.\"\n\nFarah spreads the layers of her dress out, displacing the mist hanging around us. \"I know where you're coming from. Christmas was always a belly-buster for me. Hours and hours of rehearsals. Singing day in and day out, praying I'd have my voice for the major performance. Add on to that my grandmother who lived with us who was always needed help because of her colostomy bag. Then there was working the food pantry at the church and giving out the pies. I don't remember actually enjoying the last three or four Christmases of my life because of the busy-ness of the season. I rarely looked up into the heavens to search out the star of God's promise to us. I never really thought about how Mary and Joseph were treated like crap by everyone and forced to stay in a barn where their baby was born. I mean, you have problems? Geesh\u2026 try being pregnant with a kid no one believes was conceived by God, and homeless, and poor and hungry. We've got it made, Kendall.\"\n\nI totally get what she's saying, but what can I do about something that happened over two thousand years ago when I can't even get a grip on my own life now?\n\nFarah shakes a finger at me. \"Seriously, KM, you have to listen to me. I have to get going in a minute.\"\n\nI sort of lunge for her; my arms connecting with nothing but air as I swing around. \"You can't leave me. You have to explain everything. You have to tell me what I'm doing wrong.\"\n\nA sigh escapes from Farah. \"I'm not here to tell you the answers. I'm here to tell you that you don't have to carry all of these burdens. That your heart can be light. You don't have to miss out on the holidays like I did because of how you perceive things to be. Let me help you escape the fate that fell on me.\"\n\nShocked and out of breath, I manage to ask, \"Am I going to die young, too?\"\n\nShe shrugs. \"All I know is you've got to get your act together, Kendall. And you're going to be visited by other spirits.\"\n\nI snicker unconsciously. \"Let me guess, three, right?\"\n\nShe flattens her lips. \"It's not a joke. But yes. Three.\"\n\nMaybe she listened too hard in Mr. Rorek's class about Dickens, as well. \"And if I listen to these three visitors, everything will be okay?\"\n\n\"Perhaps.\" Farah smoothes her hand down the front of her flowing dress. \"You can avoid certain fates in life if you just stop to think things through with your heart and not your head.\"\n\n\"What does that even mean?\"\n\n\"It means your first visitor will see you after midnight tonight. Officially Christmas Eve. Then the second visitor will be right after that, and then the third will follow. Listen to them. Learn from them. You have the chance to alter your present and influence your future.\"\n\nI stand and wipe the dirt and grass off of my clothes. \"But every breath we take, every step we make\u2014and I don't mean that in a Police singing sort of way\u2014can amend the path of our lives.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Farah says. \"And it's all up to you.\"\n\n\"Kendall, dear, are you finished over there?\" Mayor Shy shouts at me through the mist.\n\nI turn to seek her out, but see nothing. Then I spin back to where Farah was standing and she, too, is gone.\n\n\"Whattaya know about that?\"\n\n\"Kendall?\" the mayor calls again from the darkness.\n\nAny traces of the burnt orange sunset are now gone, replaced by inky blackness. My skin feels clammy and cold around me and I want to go home.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" I say back. \"I-I-I'm all finished.\"\n\nI join the rest of the ladies and hand over the remainder of the now wilted poppies. Then, without saying much more, I excuse myself and run home. I mean, literally. I run the four blocks, not stopping for any reason as if the devil himself is chasing me.\n\nOnce inside, I bypass the kitchen that is a mess thanks to Kaitlin and her friends, ignore the pizza box with a note attached to it\u2014from my mother telling me she's taking Kaitlin to practice and this is my dinner\u2026 I can read it psychically\u2014and head straight upstairs to the bathroom. There, I strip down to my birthday suit and step into the shower. I jerk on the knobs and adjust the shower head until the water is punishing me with hot streams. I let it rain over me, washing away the encounter with Farah, and scrubbing away at the elves of self-doubt that have been my constant companions of late.\n\nI try to shuck off the warning Farah gave. Not to end up like her. To take the time to appreciate life and enjoy things more. Can I? Is that possible when I have a gift like I do? When I'm visited by spirits like her? And now, I can expect three more spirits over the course of the night.\n\nWTF? Geez Louise! Who will they be? What will they expect of me? Do I need to get dressed and be ready, sitting on the edge of my bed?\n\nThis is seriously the last thing I want to deal with right now.\n\nI turn off the nozzles of the shower and reach for a towel. The Downy-soft fabric is comforting against my skin as I wipe away the water. I shake off what happened earlier. The visit from Farah was nothing but an apparition. My mind playing tricks on me. My psychic abilities poking fun at me and making me see things that weren't even there.\n\nBack in my room, I change into my flannel Sponge Bob\u2014there will be no judging\u2014pajamas and toe socks with the black cats on the bottom. I spend fifteen minutes upside down as I blow dry my hair, brushing it to smooth out the curls.\n\nFinally, I lie down on the bed and crawl under the covers. My teeth chatter slightly as I hear the familiar hiss of the heater coming to life. This is certainly no Chicago winter, but I'm still absolutely frozen to the bone. I squeeze my eyes shut, thinking the temperature drop might be due to paranormal activity. Can't they leave me alone for one night?\n\nI peel my eyelids open and fortunately there aren't any visitors in my room. All of the lights are off except for the ones that swirl around the tiny silver and pink Christmas tree I got out of the attic. The mauve hue reflecting off the tinsel warms and relaxes me as I sink deeper into my mattress.\n\nIn the darkness, the shadows of two cat tails reflect on the side wall. Before I know it, Eleanor and Natalie hop up on the bed and end up in one big furry bundle at my feet, washing each other and purring at the same time. See, even my cats are busy multi-tasking.\n\nA deep sigh escapes from me as I close my eyes. Tomorrow's a big day. Christmas Eve and all that the day implies. I have to be at the church early for the parishioner's breakfast, followed by wrapping presents for the kids at the cancer hospital in Atlanta and other duties. Then, the icing of the day: Kaitlin's big Christmas Eve performance, followed by Loreen and Mass's wedding.\n\nMy mouth yawns wide, nearly dislocating my jaw. I don't know if I've ever been this tired before. It's as though someone slipped me a Benadryl or five.\n\nFighting the exhaustion won't do me good anymore. Not when tomorrow is going to be a back breaker for me. I have to be on, on, on.\n\nGlancing at the clock on my bedside table, I see that it's a smidgen before eight-thirty. I know it's early, but I'll just meditate and unwind. My eyes flutter shut again and I start counting backwards from one hundred to help me relax.\n\n\"One hundred. Ninety-nine. Ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. Ninety\u2026\"\n\nNext thing I know, I'm out like a light." + }, + { + "title": "STANZA 4: THE FIRST VISITING SPIRIT", + "text": "I wake up thirsty and needing to pee.\n\nRolling over to my right, I try to see my clock, but it's so damn dark, even the numbers aren't illuminated. In fact, my entire room is blanketed in utter blackness. Either my pink Christmas tree burned out or someone unplugged it while I was asleep. I can't make out any shapes, furniture, or windows in my room. It's as though I'm in some sort of antechamber, locked away from everyone and everything. I squint into the darkness, wishing I had the excellent night vision that my cats possess. No such luck.\n\nThen I hear the clanging of the chimes from Mom's grandfather clock. It sounds out, echoing around me almost, as I count along with the dongs. Twelve. It's midnight already? Damn, I must have been more wiped than I thought if I've slept for almost four hours already. But how can I be hearing the grandfather clock so distinctly when it sits in the front hallway downstairs?\n\nI scramble out of my bed and move to the window seat nearby. I ball my hands up and gently rub my fists into my eye sockets to jostle myself awake. I swear, as I peer out the window, there is frost and snow on the panes. It couldn't be, though. The forecast didn't call for any sort of Winter Wonderland for our holiday celebration.\n\nSomething outside doesn't appear normal, though. The moon is full and shining brightly up above, however it's not casting a shadow on my lawn. Instead, creepy, swirling tendrils of fog surround my house, slithering up the sides and beckoning to me with vaporous fingers. I wrap my arms around myself against the chill that crosses my skin. My flannel pjs aren't doing much to help keep me warm.\n\n\"Then get back under the covers, dumb ass,\" I say to myself.\n\nFollowing my own lead, I dive back under the comforter and tug it up tightly to my chin, dislodging Eleanor and Natalie who are sound asleep at the foot of my bed. They grunt little cat sounds out at me, but return to their napping.\n\nThoughts of a bathroom run or even a sip of water fade away as I try to go back to sleep. I flip onto my side and pull my knees against my chest, nestling under the blankets to try and get warm. Then, the weirdest thing happens.\n\nThe grandfather clock chimes again.\n\nBong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong-bong.\n\nTwelve? Again?\n\n\"It's already rung twelve times.\"\n\nWhat's going on? That clock is an antique, but it's never broken, or messed up the hour like this.\n\nThen, everything flashes white bright.\n\nI jerk my arm up to cover my face, bracing for whatever onslaught has hit. My entire room is bathed in a near-blinding spotlight pointed directly into my eyes. Dust particles dance in the air as the intense light beams on me. I swat around with my hands, as if that's going to do any good.\n\nIt's not.\n\n\"Give me a break!\" I shout, to who or whom, I don't know.\n\nWham! Bam!\n\nThe light disappears and I hear my bedroom door creak open.\n\nSlowly\u2026.\n\nSlowly\u2026.\n\nSlowly\u2026.\n\n\"Who's there? Mom? Dad? Kaitlin?\"\n\n\"It's none of them.\" The voice is indistinguishable as male or female to my ears.\n\nA peculiar figure enters my room. It's not a kid, but it's not an adult either. It's just this white, floaty, ethereal thing. It's as though I need a prescription for contacts or glasses; everything around me is blurred and distorted as I try to distinguish who or what this is at the foot of my bed.\n\n\"Who are you?\" I demand.\n\n\"You know me, Kendall,\" the voice says, very childlike.\n\nBefore me, the image begins to sharpen. The straggly mess of hair suddenly smooths into stylish golden curls pinned back with glittery diamond-like combs that shimmer and shine. The wrinkled and gray complexion becomes ivory and young and vibrant. Blue eyes, like freshly mined sapphires, twinkle beneath gorgeous dark eyelashes. The figure's hands traverse up its front as if taking note of the flowing white robe with gold brocade trim. Bare feet with a perfect French pedicure show from underneath the garment, toe rings sparkling on each foot. The robe is belted with ropes of what appear to be pure, spun gold from a fairy tale. A knot of white roses, blue orchids, and baby's breath are bunched in the figure's right hand. Finally, a gorgeous, glitzy crown of mountain-peaked rhinestones appears on the head of the apparition.\n\nIf I weren't so jealous of the jewels and bling this specter was cloaked in, I might be doing everything in my power to jump out the window to get away from this creature.\n\n\"Wh-wh-who are you?\"\n\nThe faceless spirit says nothing. It only laughs. Not even a laugh, but a giggle.\n\nThen it hits me. Maybe the convo in the cemetery wasn't in my mind.\n\n\"Are you the first visiting spirit Farah told me about earlier tonight?\"\n\n\"That I am,\" the voice says. She says.\n\nShe. It's a she.\n\nMy furious heartbeat begins to slow momentarily. This girl doesn't sound like she wants to hurt me or anything. Still\u2026.\n\n\"Seriously. Who and/or what are you?\" I ask in a demanding tone.\n\n\"Come on, Kendall. It's me,\" the spirit says. And just like that, the beautiful face of one of my best friends morphs onto the figure.\n\n\"Taylor? Is that you?\" I ask incredulously. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nTaylor Tillson shakes her head, causing the crown on her head to wobble a bit. She catches a glimpse of herself in my dresser mirror and poses. \"I don't have the first clue. But don't I look fabulous?\" She fingers the tiara. \"I think our society should institute a fashion law that all women must wear these regularly.\"\n\nI blink hard, trying to understand. \"Taylor, can we get past the bling for a second? What are you doing here?\"\n\nTurning away from the mirror, she sort of snaps into her role. \"Oh, right. I'm, like, the Ghost of Christmas Past.\"\n\nMy mouth hitches to the side. \"Really? That's what you're going with?\"\n\nTaylor lifts her arms, causing the robe to spread out, and then drops them back to her side. \"I'm not really in control here. I'm just supposed to show you the past.\"\n\n\"My past?\"\n\n\"Ummm, yeah.\"\n\nI rub my eyes again. \"Are you for real or is this a dream?\"\n\nTaylor shrugs and she twists again to check her headdress in the mirror. \"Why don't you conjure up a tiara for yourself, too?\"\n\nA long sigh escapes from me. \"I didn't realize I had invented all of this to begin with.\" I crawl to the end of my bed and sit, staring at her. \"Why are you here?\"\n\n\"Like I said, I'm the Ghost of Christmas Past. I'm supposed to show you how wonderful Christmas was and how much you loved it. You know, to get you out of your funk and give you an attitude adjustment. I'm here for your benefit.\" She pouts at me. \"You've totally been Miss Fickle Puss lately, Kendall. What's with the 'bah humbug?' You have so much to be thankful for, you don't even realize it.\"\n\nI frown back. \"How do you know? You've barely known me a year. You have no idea what my life was like before I moved to Radisson.\" It was normal. Boring. Staid.\n\nTaylor raises her flower-filled hand high. \"Then why don't you show me?\"\n\nMy brows crease. \"What? Like turn on my computer and bring up my Flickr account with all of my old family pictures?\"\n\nTaylor rolls her eyes. \"No. Like, get up out of bed and come with me.\"\n\nI glance down at my pajamas. \"I'm not exactly dressed for a field trip.\"\n\nShe puts her hands on her hip. \"Don't backtalk me, Kendall. Get up!\"\n\nI step onto the floor and wiggle my toes inside my socks. \"Geez, Taylor. Bitchy much?\"\n\n\"I'm not Taylor. I'm the Ghost of Christmas Past. Come on.\" She flashes a bright smile and offers me her arm.\n\n\"Are we going outside or something?\"\n\n\"We're going to fly!\"\n\nI place my hand in hers and she tugs me over to the window seat. She steps up in her bare feet and pulls me along with her. The shutters fly open and a frigid night wind captures my attention. Even though I'm only in my pjs, I'm not cold at all.\n\nI turn to Taylor. \"So, what? You can fly now?\"\n\nShe smiles out at me. \"We're about to find out.\"\n\nI resist the jerk or her hand. \"I'm not exactly thrilled about falling one story and landing in my mother's hydrangea bushes.\"\n\nTaylor says, \"I've got this covered.\"\n\nWith that, we are out the window. Walking on air\u2026 literally. And then, we are flying. Like Superman, Iron Man, Wonder Woman\u2014wait, she has an invisible plane, right?\u2014and all of those other comic book heroes. My backyard becomes but a speck below me, as does my house. We soar over Celia's mansion, above the cemetery, and up, up, and away from the twinkling red and green lights of decorated downtown Radisson.\n\nThere's no more mist and it's not as wretchedly dark. Instead, the world below is a palette of smudged colors, mixing together in a conglomerate of hues, shades, and beauty. I've been parasailing before; however, it doesn't even come close to this. I feel like an angel, as though I'm being called homeward. Before I know it, the bold and brilliant lights of the Windy City, my birth place\u2014my beautiful former residence\u2014come into view. We zoom past airplanes coming in for a landing at O'Hare. We sail over Lake Michigan. We zip down the Miracle Mile filled with shops and stores sporting their Christmas decorations and holiday cheer.\n\n\"Oh, my God, Taylor! We're in Chicago!\"\n\nI haven't been back here since the moving truck pulled away, headed for Georgia filled with all our worldly belongings. The air is tinged with the sweetness from the Brach's Candy Warehouse. A waft of grilled brats and Chicago red hots from a street vendor makes me drool unconsciously for the culinary delight. And the snow. It's so fresh, white, and thick. I long to run through Grant Park or go for a spin on the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. I wonder if the Bears or Blackhawks or playing right now?\n\nTaylor tugs on my arm and clicks her tongue. \"We're not here for sports, Kendall.\" She adjusts our flight slightly north of the city and we touch down on the wet pavement of the sidewalk. To my left is a white sign with blue lettering. An N and M merged together. The symbol for Northwestern Memorial Hospital: the place where I was born.\n\n\"What are we doing here?\" I ask.\n\n\"You need to see your past, Kendall.\"\n\n\"I know my past, Taylor. My mother died here after she had me. Thanks for reminding me of that depressing moment. I never knew her except as an imaginary friend when I was little and a ghost when I started having psychic visions.\"\n\nTaylor grins and adjusts her shiny tiara. \"Be quiet. You have more than one mother, cherie.\"\n\nWe walk into the hospital. Into a time long past. We blend into the scenery, unseen by the residents of this time. They're concerned with their own matters. Funny, no one's sitting around with their noses buried in a Smartphone. People are actually watching TV, talking to each other, and reading. Imagine that. There was life before technology.\n\nWe slide into the emergency room where I see a conclave of doctors and nurses standing outside a curtained off area. A young nurse with neat brown hair is pleading to the doctor on call.\n\n\"She's lost so much blood. I don't think she's going to make it much longer,\" the nurse says. \"She's slipping and it seems as though she has no will to survive.\"\n\n\"And the child?\"\n\nThe nurse lowers her eyes. \"She's only four pounds and three ounces, but her vitals are good. We have her in the incubator on a ventilator. She's so\u2026 tiny, frail, and alone.\"\n\nWhen the nurse looks up this time, I recognize her eyes. Those soft hazel orbs that have watched over me since the night of my birth.\n\n\"Mom.\" I choke on my whisper.\n\n\"She's was a total babe,\" Taylor says. \"She still is, actually.\"\n\nI don't even realize that I'm crying as I follow Sarah Moorehead into the neonatal care unit. A gasp escapes me when I see her reach her hand toward a miniscule clear box filled with tubes and monitors and hoses and\u2026\n\n\"Holy crap! Is that me?\"\n\nA squirming little purple-ish human wriggles and cries inside the container. I don't hear myself, but I know that Baby Me is not happy.\n\n\"You're adorable,\" Taylor says. \"Look at the love on Miss Sarah's face. You were hers even then, Kendall.\"\n\nI wipe a wayward tear with the back of my hand and continue to observe.\n\n\"Shhh, little girl,\" my mom says to me. \"Don't you worry about anything. I'm not going to let anything happen to you. You just concentrate on getting stronger and breathing on your own. I'm not going anywhere.\"\n\nShe places her hand inside the incubator and, almost instinctively, my tiny, premature one\u2014not much bigger than any of my baby dolls'\u2014reaches out and wraps around her index finger. Mom bursts into tears and laughter all at the same time.\n\nI do the same, as does Taylor.\n\n\"You two are making me ruin my awesome Ghost of Christmas Past makeup.\" Taylor pulls me away from the scene before I'm ready to go. \"Come on. We've got a lot to cover.\"\n\n\"But wait, I want to\u2014\"\n\nZap! Bam!\n\nSuddenly, the hospital scene is gone. We're now in a small apartment\u2026 somewhere. A white bassinette sits against the wall to the left in a room painted a light yellow on the walls and midnight blue on the ceiling with white star bursts all overhead.\n\nTotal recognition dings me upside the head.\n\n\"This was my room,\" I say to Taylor. \"We lived here until I was five. I used to lie in my bed and count the stars up there.\"\n\nShe snickers. \"I guess that's why you're doing so well in our natural science classes.\"\n\n\"I always have been a sucker for astronomy.\"\n\nAs we're standing there, Mom and Dad arrive with a fidgeting bundle of baby. It's me again. Only, I'm a little bigger and breathing on my own.\n\n\"Welcome home, Kendall,\" Dad says with great pride.\n\nMom gently places me in the crib and covers me with a light-pink blanket that has lambs printed all over it. She twists the button on the mobile above the bed, and soon shapes of stars, moons, and planets are spinning around over my head. My eyes seem as though I'm watching the figurines that spin around with the tinkly music playing. Who knows, though? I certainly have no memory of this.\n\nMom hugs onto Dad and the two of them are so damn happy as they're looking at me.\n\n\"I can't believe she's really ours, David.\"\n\n\"She is, Sarah. We'll make sure she's completely taken care of and loved beyond reason.\"\n\nA tear falls from Mom's eye and I want to go to her, to both of them, and get in on the hug-fest. \"Poor little soul. I never, ever want her to know the pain and tragedy that brought her into this world. She's ours, David. No one can take her away from us.\"\n\nHe kisses her on the top of her head and holds her tight. \"I'll never let it happen. She's our Christmas miracle.\"\n\nMom laughs. \"Honey, it's March. She's been in the hospital for three months while we took care of the adoption papers. Are you having a lapse of time?\"\n\nDad withdraws from her, mirth overcoming him. \"I know, but I thought we'd celebrate anyway since Kendall didn't get to have her first Christmas. She was born three days before the twenty-fifth, so she's definitely our special holiday present.\" He steps out of the room and then returns with a one foot silver and pink Christmas tree.\n\n\"That's the tree I have up in my room,\" I exclaim. \"I had no idea.\"\n\n\"Of course, you didn't,\" my ghostly Taylor says.\n\nMom squeals. \"Oh, David! It's so girly and perfect. I love it.\"\n\nHe places the aluminum tree on the dresser next to my crib and plugs it in. The lights sparkle and twinkle; I see my baby eyes shift to see the pretty colors.\n\n\"Look,\" Mom says. \"She loves it.\"\n\n\"There's more.\" Dad reaches up underneath the base of the small tree and flips a switch. A music box plays out the tune \"There's No Place Like Home for the Holidays.\" I coo along with the sound.\n\n\"That's right, Kendall,\" Mom says. \"You're home.\"\n\n\"Home,\" I repeat in a whisper as I watch.\n\n\"You okay?\" Taylor asks.\n\nAll I can do is nod. I had no idea that my parents shared a belated Christmas with me when they brought me home. I also didn't know the tree in my room was the very one Dad bought to welcome his new baby girl.\n\n\"I wish I could hug them,\" I say. \"I love them so much.\"\n\n\"I know you do.\" Taylor pats me on the arm and tightens the belt on her robe. \"Come on, I've got another Christmas to show you.\"\n\nThe fresh tears from my eyes blur the family scene. Before I can protest leaving, I'm whisked away by my spirit guide to another time. Another memory.\n\n\"Where are we now?\" We're standing in a rather non-descript hallway.\n\nThen I hear her.\n\n\"Oh, my gosh! Kendall! Santa's been here! Hurry up!\"\n\nThe screams and shouts of a young girl greet us as we move deeper into the scene. I remember the staircase to the left with the curving bannister and the third step that's loose and creaks when you cross it. The hall opens into a living room that sports the plaid couch my dad\u2014and no one else\u2014loved so much. A huge leather lounge chair sits nearby, and there's a large fireplace with logs set up, ready to be burned. Jammed-packed stockings hang from the mantel, threatening to compromise the integrity of the bent tacks holding them up. An empty glass of milk stands next to a plate of cookie crumbs. Nice touch, Mom and Dad.\n\n\"Kendall! Hurry!\" The shouts are from my little sister, Kaitlin, and I know where I am. She bounds into the living room of our former brownstone in Lincoln Park. She slides across the hardwood floor in her socked feet. Her brown hair is a God-awful mess and her smile is missing three teeth. \"A bike!\" she yells.\n\n\"Wait for me!\" I hear from upstairs, followed by the pounding of footsteps.\n\nI land with a thud on the floor and rush over to my little sister. Well, my just-turned nine-year-old self does. Which makes Kaitlin six, going on seven. We're wearing matching Disney princess nightgowns. Mine is blue for Cinderella and Kaitlin's is green for Arielle, the little mermaid.\n\n\"Do I hear my girls?\" Mom asks from the kitchen.\n\n\"Mommy! He came! He came!\" I scream at her as she makes her way into the room, holding a steaming cup of coffee. My own smile is missing a tooth or two, as well.\n\nKaitlin rushes over and grabs my hand. We crawl around under the decorated evergreen, pulling out packages and boxes and gifts, not even stopping to see which one is for whom.\n\nKaitlin squeals. \"Look! It's a Barbie dream house.\"\n\nI kneel next to her as we tear away the wrapping paper.\n\n\"Girls! Wait for Daddy,\" Mom scolds.\n\n\"Daddy, don't make us wait!\" I yell at the ceiling.\n\nBefore we know it, Dad clomps down the stairs in his robe, his glasses askew on his face. A huge yawn lets me know now that he didn't sleep very much that night, too busy getting everything in place for his daughters. Back then, I didn't notice a thing and totally believed in the Santa legend.\n\n\"Okay, have at it,\" Mom says.\n\nKaitlin and I exchange a knowing glance and then rip into everything.\n\n\"You two are a powerful force to be reckoned with,\" Taylor notes.\n\nI grin at the memory playing out before me. \"We used to be.\"\n\nI watch as we open boxes of Barbie supplies, a couple of Bratz dolls, a Razor scooter for each of us, a bike for Kaitlin, and ice skates for me. Then we unpack sweaters, jeans, socks, stuffed animals, some collectible Beanie Babies, candy galore, Pokemon trading cards, and a few board games. My heart aches as I see how Kaitlin and I work in tandem, attacking the Christmas gifts, organizing them, and actually sharing with each other.\n\n\"I can't believe how cute she is,\" Taylor notes. \"What a huge heart she has! And boy, does she idolize her big sister.\"\n\nI wave Taylor off. \"No, she doesn't.\"\n\nThe ghost scoffs at me. \"Are you not seeing what I'm seeing?\"\n\nI turn back and observe my younger self with my sister. Every move I make, Kaitlin does the same. I pick up my Barbie; she picks up hers. I grab the Bratz doll; Kaitlin does too. She's watching me, smiling, and\u2026 glowing.\n\nMom steps into the living room with two plates of food that smells heavenly. \"I have orange-glazed cinnamon rolls and regular cinnamon rolls.\"\n\n\"Orange for me,\" I say without a doubt.\n\n\"Me, too,\" Kaitlin agrees.\n\nThe scene before me warms my heart and I feel tears might loom again. What I see is nothing short of beautiful and oh, so special. Two little girls\u2014sisters by circumstance\u2014completely into each other as they share pastries and glasses of milk while they sit nestled amongst their Christmas presents and the discarded gift wrap.\n\nMy younger self waves the Bratz doll at Kaitlin. \"I want you to name her.\"\n\nKaitlin's smile is overwhelming and her eyes are huge. \"You do? Oh, my gosh. Okay, okay\u2026 I'm going to name her\u2026 Emily.\"\n\n\"Emily? Why Emily?\" I ask.\n\n\"She's your pretend friend, right?\" Kaitlin asks. \"The one you play with all the time instead of me?\"\n\nI reach for Taylor's hand, listening to this exchange. I remember Emily, my birth mom, being with me. Only, I had no clue who she really was back then. I hadn't realized Kaitlin knew about her. I didn't know how my interaction with the ghost affected her. I watch and listen.\n\nYoung Kendall dives on Kaitlin and hugs her like crazy. \"I'm sorry Kai-Kai. I'd rather play with you. No more pretend friend. I'll tell her to go away.\"\n\n\"Really? Then we can play more?\"\n\n\"Sure thing. Let's pick another name for the doll,\" I say to my sister.\n\n\"Esmeralda,\" Kaitlin says with a toothless giggle.\n\n\"That's a silly name,\" I say. \"Just like you're silly.\" And then I dive on her again to start the Christmas tickle-fest.\n\nI sigh long and hard as I witness two sisters totally crazy about each other, best friends and playmates.\n\n\"What happened to us?\" I say the ghost, to myself, to no one.\n\n\"People change,\" Taylor says.\n\nMy heart actually hurts in my chest as I try to figure out how Kaitlin and I grew so far apart. It happened mostly when we moved to Radisson and I started having my whole psychic awakening. I reached out more to Celia, Taylor, and Becca, and focused on our ghost hunting efforts. Kaitlin wasn't even in the picture. I feel horrible over having ignored her and not including her more in my life after our big move. Leaving Chicago was difficult for all of us, yet I'd never stopped to really talk to Kaitlin about it. Maybe that's why she became so bratty\u2014she's just been acting out.\n\nI feel the spirit gazing at me, reading my thoughts.\n\n\"You can make it right with her,\" Taylor says.\n\n\"I know. I don't want to lose her. I want us to be best friends again like we used to be.\"\n\n\"Then do it.\"\n\nThe tears are warm on the brim of my eyes. \"How?\"\n\n\"You'll figure it out. You've already seen how beautiful, special, and memorable Christmas can be,\" the ghost says to me. \"You've got to recapture that essence of the season and what family means. You can't let\u2014sorry\u2014life's bullshit get in the way of what's really important.\"\n\n\"Such language,\" I say with a giggle.\n\n\"Whatever. I hope the memories of the past have shown you how important family is in our lives. Not just the family we're born into, but he family that chooses us. You were chosen, Kendall. You're special. Don't ever forget that.\"\n\nI nod, unable to speak.\n\nShe glances at a crystal wristwatch hidden under her flowing sleeve. \"Shoot! I don't have much time left,\" she says. \"Hmmm, I wonder if when you're done with me, I'll have to give back this awesome robe and Miss America crown.\"\n\nI lift a brow. \"Is that really what's important here?\"\n\nShe smirks. \"Well, it is for me.\"\n\nMy head aches from the time travel and the reminiscences of happier times. I don't know if I can mend the broken fence between my sister and me. Can we ever get back those na\u00efve days of just being little girls who played with dolls and dressed alike? \"I can't take any more of this.\"\n\n\"Oh honey, don't blame me for the things you're seeing. They're necessary,\" Taylor says.\n\n\"Quit torturing me, Taylor. I want to go back to sleep!\"\n\n\"So you're done with me?\" the ghost asks with a pout.\n\nHands on hips, I say flatly, \"Yeah. I'm all set. I've got a shitload to do tomorrow and you're keeping me awake. I appreciate the memory lane stroll, but it's not going to change my exhaustion and attitude. Can we go home?\"\n\nTaylor's bottom lip juts out. \"Fine. Be that way.\"\n\nI reach forward and snag the tiara from her head. \"You look stupid in that. You can't keep it.\"\n\nNext thing I know, I'm back in my room and the spirit of Christmas Past in the form of my friend, Taylor, is gone in a burst of white light.\n\nBut the blinding spot flashes one more time and I see a ghostly hand reach through a misted vortex to snag the tiara away from me.\n\nI bolt up out of the bed with a start, drenched in sweat.\n\nWhat just happened? Was that real? Or was it a dream?\n\nMy chest is rising and falling at a just-ran-a-marathon rate and I kick the covers away. The cats growl at me and scatter away as the blankets interrupt their fifteenth nap of the day.\n\nI run my hands through my damp hair and let out a moan. \"What a weird-ass dream. That was messed up.\" A tiara-fied, fancy-robed Taylor as the Ghost of Christmas Past. Yeah, right. I can't wait to tell her.\n\nSheer enervation covers me in an intoxicating drowsiness.\n\nI sink back into the mattress, curl up on my side, and slide into another deep sleep." + }, + { + "title": "STANZA 5: THE SECOND VISITING SPIRIT", + "text": "My own snoring awakens me and I groan.\n\nThe grandfather clock sounds again.\n\nBong!\n\nOne bong. One freaking bong. Meaning it's one in the morning.\n\nDid I actually sleep for an hour or was it for a few brief moments?\n\nI swear, the universe is totally mucking with me, not letting me sleep.\n\nSomnambulism is only going to make me surlier come the morning.\n\nI let out an impatient sigh and am shocked to see my breath dancing in the air. The temperature in my room hasn't just dropped, it has plummeted. Either that, or Dad didn't pay the power bill. Then, my ghost hunting instincts kick in and everything becomes clear. The abrupt and extreme cold can only mean one thing: A spirit is manifesting.\n\n\"Okay, who's here now?\" I ask. This time, I'm not going to be surprised by who's visiting my bed chamber.\n\nNothing.\n\nWaiting.\n\nMore sighing.\n\nThe reverberation of the clock bong echoes in my brain. I tangle my fingers together under the covers, not only for warmth, but in anticipation of my second visitor of the night, as predicted by Farah.\n\nThe minutes tick away.\n\nSo much that I have no idea how long I've been lying here staring at the ceiling.\n\n\"Oh, this is ridonkulous!\" I sit up and throw the covers away, this time actually getting up to make that bathroom visit.\n\nAs I reach to grasp the door knob, I hear a rattling in the direction of my closet.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nTurning, I step over and put my ear to the door.\n\n\"I hear you, Kendall,\" the voice says. \"Come on in.\"\n\n\"Come in the closet.\" I put my hands on my hips. \"Isn't it more customary to come out of the closet?\"\n\n\"Not in this case,\" the voice tells me.\n\nI huff my frustration and then pull the door open. The minute I step into the walk-in, it transforms right before my very eyes. Holly sprigs are everywhere and red berries hang from the leaves. Snow glistens in bunches on the tips of branches, hanging heavy with the wintry burden. The pungent aroma of mistletoe touches my nose as I move deeper into the Christmas-y scene. Lights sparkle up ahead, beckoning me with twinkling fingers. A saxophone plays a moaning version of \"Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.\" Suddenly, I smell them, too. Sweet and woodsy. Piquant and fiery. As the sassy reed instrument continues to accompany my dream, I walk through the crowded evergreens, each decorated in white ornaments, silver tinsel, and golden lights shining bright. Ahead, a banquet table is spread out with enough food to serve the entire town of Radisson. A cooked goose with crisp buttered skin, sizzling sausages, a roasted suckling pig, heaps of dressing, mashed potatoes, peas, green bean casserole\u2014my fave!\u2014as well as a spiral ham with pineapples and cherries decorating the top. There are barrels of oysters, a tray of freshly peeled Gulf shrimp, and broiled Maine lobster tails. A fountain of melted butter flows constantly in the middle of the table, surrounded by hundreds of white candles flickering amongst the decorations of pine cones, greenery, and fresh cranberries.\n\nI had no idea my closet was a veritable cornucopia of gourmet foods. My mouth drools involuntarily and I press forward to grasp one of the fine china plates at the edge of the table so I can help myself to the bounty.\n\nWhat? I'm hungry.\n\n\"I didn't say you could start eating yet,\" I hear from behind me.\n\nI jump a bit, glad that I'm not actually holding a dish because I would have totally dropped it. When I turn, I can't help but laugh like a crazy person.\n\n\"What?\" the ghost asks.\n\n\"You!\" I point at the apparition before me.\n\n\"You need to take me seriously. I'm the Ghost of Christmas Present,\" it says.\n\n\"Then you,\" I start, \"need a better outfit.\"\n\nThe spirit is literally cloaked in an old, white bed sheet with arms spread wide. Thick silver chains crisscross over its chest, clanging and banging together in a ghostly stereotype gone bad.\n\n\"Look, Kendall,\" exclaims the ghost. \"This is your dream, not mine. You're the one choosing the costumers here.\"\n\nTaken aback, I snort. \"Umm, okay. Didn't know that. I, err, give you permission to change into something more\u2026 appropriate.\n\n\"Thank heavens.\"\n\nThe chains fall to the ground and the ghost chucks off the white sheet, tossing it aside. When the spirit flips their head back, I gasp at who I see before me. Dark hair, clear eyes, and that perfect-straight smile that came from expensive dental work a few years back.\n\n\"Celia!\"\n\n\"No,\" she says. \"I'm not Celia. I am the Ghost of Christmas Present. I already told you that.\"\n\nShe's now wearing an emerald green robe trimmed in white fur around the neck, wrists, and hemline. A wreath of holly sits in her dark tresses with sparkles of icy diamond-like crystals spread about. She has a long, silver sword around her waist, as though she's a knight of old.\n\nI scrunch up my face. \"Is that real fur? You know how cruel that is?\"\n\nCelia shakes her head. \"Again\u2026 your fantasy, K. We'll call it faux and be done with it, okay?\"\n\nToo stunned at the sight before me, I nod. \"Sure.\" I clear my throat. \"So what are you here to teach me?\"\n\n\"Not sure yet, but I have this.\" From behind her, she pulls out a large golden torch, much like the one that's used in the Olympics, and it immediately ignites itself.\n\n\"You've never seen anything like this before, have you?\" she asks.\n\n\"Not in person.\"\n\nCelia smiles. \"I think it's, like, my magical Ghost of Christmas Present thing.\"\n\n\"Whatever works,\" I say with a snicker. \"Where are we off to?\"\n\n\"I thought I'd show you what's in store tomorrow at the church and all around town. There's so much more than what you see on the surface.\"\n\n\"I'm ready when you are.\" The meal beside me forgotten, I cross my arms over my chest and heave an intake of air. \"Taylor schooled me on my Christmas past a little while ago. Really got me thinking about a lot of things. I suppose you're here to do the same?\"\n\n\"And how,\" Celia says.\n\nI stand tall, prepared for the next lesson. \"Okay, tell me what to do.\"\n\nCelia walks toward me and brushes off the flowing sleeves of her velvety robe. \"Touch it.\"\n\nMy brow lifts. \"I beg your pardon?\"\n\nCelia smirks at me. \"My robe, dork. Touch my robe.\"\n\nI slide my hand up her forearm, clutching at her elbow.\n\nAnd we're off!\n\nThe banquet feast, all of the fowl, pork, veg, fruits, and decorations\u2026poof\u2026as if they were never there. The Christmas trees lift into the air and disappear, one by one, in a bubble-popping sound.\n\nWe fly high over Radisson, looking down at the city as it awakens on Christmas Eve morning. The traffic lights flash yellow in the early morning hour. The pace is slow and appreciative; no one rushing to get to work or check their e-mail. Carolers stand on the front steps of the Episcopal and Methodist churches in a bit of a merriment throw-down, trading songs of celebration. I see Kaitlin amongst those at Christ the Redeemer Holy Episcopal Church. She's in her element, singing her heart out. I do notice that the hem of her dress appears frayed. Did I not do a good sewing job? I totally suck. But Kaitlin doesn't seem to care. She's the most brilliantly happy I've ever seen her. My chest pounds with pride at her accomplishment of starring in the Christmas pageant tonight. I really shouldn't have been such a tart about supporting her and helping with her dress.\n\nCelia and I continue along, peeking in on the merchants on the Square opening for last minute shoppers. The flower shop with its yards and yards of greenery, red bows, and fully bloomed poinsettias. The coffee shop with its freshly brewed pots of caffeine to fuel the townspeople. The grocery store with its last-minute food items, baked goods, and various proteins that will soon be roasted, baked, deep-friend, and served to family and friends.\n\nThough I mostly despise the crass commercialism of the holiday season, I see a deeper need for it all of a sudden. These merchants provide a service to the families gathering together for their yearly celebration. There's nothing wrong with a sale here, a special there. It's all good.\n\nTime speeds before us as the people of Radisson move about in fast-forward motion like ants in a farm. Children saying their prayers and getting tucked in early in anticipation of Santa's arrival. Parents with glasses reading instructional manuals on how to put together those bikes, Barbie houses, and set up Xbox systems and other electronics.\n\nAcross town, though, my psychic senses pick up the cry of a family in need. One not so fortunate this holiday season.\n\nSuzanne Pilfer is sitting down at the dining room table with her daughter, Chandra, and grandson, Max, who've come to Radisson from Stone Mountain. Max\u2026 the one I had the premonition about. My bottom lip juts out, as I remember the tarot card reading. I should have told Miss Suzanne what I saw. A head's up on a possibility of what might happen.\n\n\"Let's go see her, then, shall we?\" Celia mentions.\n\nAnd like that\u2026 we're instantly in the modest home of Radisson's most dedicated postal worker, Suzanne Pilfer.\n\nI stand by and listen as Suzanne and her daughter speak softly, their heads bent together, while Max watches one of those predictable Disney Channel programs in the background.\n\n\"I can't tell him, Mother,\" Chandra says. \"It'll break his heart.\"\n\nSuzanne reaches across the table and pats her daughter's hand. \"Those bastards. Laying you off right before Christmas. They didn't even give you severance?\"\n\nChandra shakes her head. \"I was counting on that promised Christmas bonus to get Max the dirt bike he wants. I was going to go to Mega-Mart and get it off layaway where it's been since August.\" She plunges her hands into her thick hair and lets out a guttural moan. \"How did it come to this? Stephen hasn't paid child support in eight months and now this.\"\n\n\"It'll be okay, sweetie,\" Suzanne tells her. \"I don't have much, but I have some savings. I was going to use it to pay off some medical bills, but it's more important that my grandson be taken care of. I'll go down to the bank and get the cash out so we can get Max his present.\"\n\n\"I won't let you do that, Mother.\" Chandra heaves a sigh and reaches for a Kleenex. \"This is my mess. My responsibility.\"\n\n\"But I'm your mother,\" Suzanne says.\n\n\"And I'm his,\" her daughter responds.\n\nMy heart hurts watching this, remembering the tarot cards showing me that the bike and an injury from it cause Max's meningitis. I nudge Celia with my shoulder. \"He shouldn't get that bike. Is there something else we can help get them as a present?\"\n\nCelia blinks hard several times. \"I'm a ghost, Kendall. I can't do things like that right now. Besides, this might not even happen. Just listen.\"\n\n\"Ugh!\" Now I stab my hands into my hair. \"What about that torch? Is it magical or anything?\"\n\nShe screws up her mouth. \"I have no clue.\"\n\nFrustrated, I begin to pace. \"Suzanne is the nicest person and works so hard taking care of everyone in town. Can't we rally people to help them?\"\n\nCelia adjusts her hair wreath. \"I thought you didn't care about the holidays. Didn't you just want to wake up and have it be the middle of January? Now you're concerned about the plight of one Radisson family?\"\n\n\"Because they don't deserve to not have a Christmas or to lose Max!\" I find that I'm in Celia's face, so I back down. \"I'm sorry. It's just not fair.\"\n\n\"Not much in life is fair, Kendall. You of all people should know that.\"\n\nI bite my bottom lip. \"I suppose so. What can I do to help them, though?\"\n\nCelia shrugs and gnaws at a hangnail on her right hand. \"Just remember what's going on here. Remember those around you who aren't so fortunate, you know? You inherited all this money from your birth father's estate. I'm not saying you have to spend every penny, but instead of wallowing around in the self-pity of calculus, physics, and other scholarly challenges, coupled with all the attention Kaitlin is getting, along with Loreen and Mass's wedding\u2026 well, it's simple.\"\n\nCelia stops talking and stuffs her hands in the pocket of her velvet robe.\n\n\"What's simple?\" I need her to completely spell it out for me.\n\nHer eyes darken and she towers over me, with a booming voice like thunder. \"Get the hell over yourself!\"\n\nI recoil in utter dread that soon subsides to hysterical laughter.\n\n\"Don't laugh at me,\" Celia says. \"I'm supposed to scare the crap out of you.\"\n\nI shake my head. \"You do, sort of\u2026 I mean, you don't really. It's you, Cel. In a green bathrobe, you know? But I understand what you're trying to tell me.\"\n\nCelia waggles her torch at me. \"The point is, there are people here on this earth, right here in Radisson who watch everything. They see you grow, develop, and mature. They know what kind of person you're going to turn out to be when you get older. They know who hates. Who envies. Who has ill-will, and precious pride. We have to learn from them, take care of them, and let them see that mankind isn't all about greed and selfishness.\n\n\"I'm volunteering at the church to help feed people,\" I note.\n\nThe ghost acknowledges me with a head nod. \"That's a good start. You're doing it, though, out of duty. Do it because it's who you are. What you have to do.\"\n\nShe's right. I'm going to be more philanthropic here in town. Not so much tossing around my trust fund money\u2014that's mostly earmarked for my college education\u2014but I can give back more of myself. I can step up to do more at church, at school, with Loreen\u2026 everywhere.\n\n\"You need to see something else,\" Celia says. \"Grab the robe again.\"\n\nI clutch the fabric and we're off again. Swooshing through time and space as if it's nothing at all. We speed past the shoreline of Georgia, then Florida, heading farther south into the Caribbean and over the azure waters filled with tropical fish and precious coral. The ghost sets us down gently in the middle of a village hanging on the edge of the water. Sail boats, fishing vessels, and charters line the docks with offers for deep sea adventures for tourists. The sky overhead is the most brilliant blue I've seen since first gazing into the eyes of my former boyfriend\u2014now Celia's boyfriend\u2014Jason Tillson. A nearby open market bustles with Caribbean folk buying all sorts of assorted foods and supplies this sunny morning.\n\nCelia breaths in deeply, absorbing the surroundings. \"It's spectacular here.\"\n\nI close my eyes and let the warmth of the sun bathe over me. \"It really is.\" Then I add, \"Where are we exactly?\"\n\nShe turns her bold gaze on me. \"Belize.\"\n\nMy mouth flattens. \"So we're checking up on Patrick, huh? Mr. Dive Boy who wanted to be a hundred feet down in the ocean instead of spending Christmas with me. Where are we going to find him? Sitting poolside? Floating in the water? Having grilled shrimp and lobster instead of a big Christmas turkey?\"\n\nAnger seethes through me for some stupid reason. Patrick has every right to spend his holiday any way he wants to. I guess I just thought it would have been more special if we'd been together\u2014if he'd been my date to Loreen and Mass's wedding instead of diving with his dad.\n\n\"'There is nothing either good, or bad, but thinking makes it so,'\" Celia says to me.\n\nI lighten up for a sec. \"Wow, even as the Ghost of Christmas Present, you still quote Shakespeare to me. Hamlet, Act Two, Scene Two.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Celia says. \"But do you know what it means?\"\n\nI pause for a moment, knowing where she's heading with this lesson. \"Our mind usually takes over and decides whether something is good or bad, judging when we probably shouldn't. In reality, there is no good or bad.\"\n\nCelia waves her torch at me, the flames dancing dangerously close to my face. \"The Bard would be very proud of you, Kendall. Now, let's go\u2026 not judge.\"\n\nRapidly, we find ourselves in an expansive green field. Horses graze nearby and there are two cows checking out our every move. Up ahead, I see a house that's deep into construction. It looks as if the roof was ripped away by a storm or something. However, a crew of three guys is climbing down a ladder, sweaty from the work they've been doing to repair the damage. I squint to see who they are, but we're too far away.\n\n\"Can't you just snap us over there?\" I ask the ghost.\n\nCelia lifts her shoulders. \"The walking will do us good.\"\n\nI roll my eyes. \"Honestly.\"\n\nBy the time we get to the house, I see a plethora of building materials spread around. A sign to the right reads, \"A Project of Habitat for Humanity.\"\n\n\"How awesome,\" I say. \"These people are getting their home rebuilt. Was there a hurricane or something?\"\n\nCelia nods her head. \"A tropical storm skirted the island not too long ago. We never really heard about it on the news at home because it didn't happen to us, you know? That whole 'out of sight, out of mind' sort of thing.\"\n\nA black couple pulls up in a Toyota truck, bringing with them a box that's so heavy both of them have to carry it.\n\n\"We're here!\" they shout.\n\nI hear whoops and hollers from within. I follow along quietly\u2014not like they can hear me\u2014into the house. The windows are open, allowing the cool breeze to blow through the structure. Construction rules the inside, as well, but I notice the small kitchen is intact. On the other side of it is a door to the back porch where I see people gathered. A huge picnic table is covered with a smooth cloth and the newly arrived couple speaks furiously in Spanish as they dole out the bounty.\n\nNot quite like the banquet table in my closet, but there are fresh bananas, papayas, a bushel of steamed shrimp, several thick, freshly caught fish\u2014probably snapper or jacks\u2014and something that looks like sugar cane.\n\n\"Joseph, you be outdoin' yourself,\" an older lady sings. \"You come help us in the kitchen while Beatrice cooks them fish.\"\n\nThe grill must have already been fired up because I can smell the charring of the fresh seafood as it sizzles away.\n\n\"I hope y'all like mashed potatoes,\" I hear a familiar voice call out.\n\nI freeze for a moment, not believing my own ears.\n\nThen another voice I know says, \"My boy makes the best mashed potatoes. Lots of salt and butter is his secret.\"\n\nThe older woman cackles and smacks the white man playfully on his shoulder.\n\nIs that\u2026 Patrick's dad?\n\nThe mashed potato maker spins around, in search of said salt, and my mouth falls open.\n\n\"Patrick!\"\n\n\"He can't hear you,\" Celia scolds.\n\n\"I don't care!\" I rush forward into the festive kitchen. \"Patrick! What are you doing here? I thought you were diving?\" Yet, he's\u2026cooking? I had no idea he could cook. Or build anything, for that matter.\n\nCelia touches me delicately on the shoulder. \"Like I said, he doesn't see or hear you.\"\n\nI stretch my arms out, fingering the tool belt that hangs from his slender waist. His gray and white camouflage shorts are filthy dirty and his black T-shirt is torn in the back. Caught on a nail earlier. \"We're connected psychically. How did I not know he was doing this?\"\n\nGhostly Celia screws up her face. \"Because you were wallowing in your own self-pity to really care?\"\n\nI spin to her. \"Hey! That's not fair.\" Her eyes bore into me. \"Okay, so it's sort of fair.\"\n\nPatrick moves around this lady's kitchen, preparing the potatoes while Beatrice and Joseph cook the fish outside. Patrick's dad hauls in a large cooler full of soda, water, iced tea, and fruit punch as their hostess fusses about.\n\n\"They lost everything,\" Celia tells me. \"Their roof was ripped off, most of their personal items and memorabilia were blown away, and their son, Edgar, died.\"\n\nHand to my heart, I let my eyes flutter closed. I can see Edgar\u2014nineteen\u2014a strong guy who worked on a dive boat taking tourists out to the Blue Hole, as he tried to batten things down in the storm. The hood of his truck ripped off in the vicious, swirling winds, and knocked him in the head, killing him instantly. The father\u2014I'm picking up that his name is George\u2014was grieve-stricken and hospitalized afterwards for heart problems. The mother\u2014Joyce\u2014contacted Habitat for Humanity for help.\n\nAnd they sent Patrick and his dad.\n\n\"He's not down here just Jolly Rogering around. He's here to make a difference. He's helping people.\"\n\nCelia puts her finger to her nose and points at me. \"Give that girl a blue ribbon.\"\n\nI'm not sure if I could possibly love him more than I do right now, knowing he sacrificed his own Christmas to help others. I want to go to him, hug him, kiss him, hold his face in my hands and peer into those Hershey Eyes that I adore so much. Tell him what a bitch I've been. Let him know I'm sorry for the pity party. That I'm wicked proud of him for who he is and what he does.\n\nPatrick stops mashing the potatoes and spoons them into one of Joyce's large fiesta ware dishes. As he walks outside to set it on the table, he lets out a long sigh.\n\nBeatrice turns to him and smiles. \"Now that's the sign of a young man missin' his love.\"\n\nPatrick laughs and closes his eyes for a second, a little embarrassed. I can tell because of the pink stain on his sunburned cheeks. \"I wish Kendall could be here. She'd love this country, the people, helping out.\"\n\nI'm surprised to hear him say this, although I beam at his words.\n\n\"She be beautiful, eh?\" Joyce asks.\n\n\"The prettiest,\" Patrick says.\n\n\"You bring her down here anytime,\" George tells him. \"You've helped restore our home. It's ours to share.\"\n\nTears of joy pour down my face mixed together with ones of regret because I had no idea what Patrick was up to.\n\nIt's announced that the fish is finished cooking and so Patrick, his dad, and the two couples take their seats around the table. Drinks are distributed and plates are filled. George leads a quick blessing and then everyone dives in to the bounty.\n\nPatrick holds up his soda. \"God bless us, everyone!\"\n\n\"Amen!\" Joyce and Beatrice say at the same time.\n\nOver in the corner, I see a faint spirit of Edgar watching over them. I wave at him and he smiles back at me. He's not really in limbo like other ghosts I've encountered in and around Radisson. Instead, it just appears that he's checking in on his family. He gives me the okay sign with his fingers and I know all is well.\n\n\"Hey, I can see a ghost,\" Celia says. \"Of course, I'm technically one right now, so I guess it doesn't count.\"\n\nScowling at her, I ask, \"I thought you said this was a dream?\"\n\n\"It's whatever it needs to be to help you along the way, Kendall.\"\n\nIn the blink of an eye, we're back in Radisson in front of Loreen's shop. She's turning off the lights and locking up. I see her walk to her car and note the white linen dress bag in the back. Her wedding dress. She fingers the top of it and smiles knowingly.\n\n\"There's my bride,\" I hear behind us. I turn to see Father Massimo who is absolutely beaming with happiness. He embraces Loreen and there's a bit of older person PDA right here on the Main Street of Radisson. A little embarrassed, I look away, giving them some privacy.\n\nWhen they come up for air, Mass says, \"I can't wait until tonight.\"\n\n\"Me, neither,\" Loreen says in a breathy way. \"It seems almost unreal.\"\n\nHe touches his hand to her cheek. \"I assure you, it's all very real.\"\n\nShe drops her gaze. \"My father won't be here. He refuses.\"\n\n\"And my brother's flight from Boston is delayed. He may not make it in time. The right people will be with us, Loreen. We'll be together. That's all that matters.\"\n\nShe heaves a deep breath. \"I hope Kendall is her old self.\"\n\nI pop to attention at the mention of my name. \"Huh? What?\"\n\n\"I've been praying for her,\" Mass says. \"She's been through a lot and we put a ton of responsibilities on her with this wedding. She'll be okay. She's a tough girl.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" Loreen says. \"I love her so much. If it weren't for her, you and I never would have found each other.\"\n\nMass's eyes sparkle\u2014yes, they sparkle\u2014at her. \"Oh, we would have found each other.\"\n\nI drop my head. \"I'm a total ass.\"\n\n\"Yeah, pretty much,\" Celia agrees.\n\nI'm about to scoff at her when I realize she's right. I'm right. Loreen's right. I have been a horrible person. Not myself. Patrick's in another country helping strangers, and I'm moaning and carping about doing things for my family, sister, and mentor.\n\n\"You can make everything right,\" the ghost tells me. \"Only you, though.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I say. \"I may be asleep, but my eyes are wide open.\"\n\nThe bell tower of City Hall chimes once more, clanging twelve times. I cock my head. \"Midnight was an hour ago.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" my guide says. \"It's time to go.\"\n\nLoreen glances my way, as if sensing that I'm there. I wave weakly and then duck my head. Celia sweeps her arms wide, holding the torch high in a blazing flame. The long sleeves of her robe extend to fluttering curtains of green felt, covering me in confusion and mist. \"Be well, Kendall.\"\n\nCelia, my Ghost of Christmas Present, disappears and leaves something dark in her wake. I try to sidestep it; however, it knows where to find me.\n\nUp from the ground arises a black mass, stretching bony fingers and pulling me under. Down, down, down.\n\nI'm totally screwed." + }, + { + "title": "STANZA 6: THE THIRD VISITING SPIRIT", + "text": "\"What are you doing, Kendall?\" I hear a male voice call out to me.\n\nI open my eyes and see that I haven't actually been sucked into a vortex from hell as I first thought. Rather, I'm just in the darkened Radisson cemetery, shrouded in the hanging branches of leafless trees with a hooded figure standing over me.\n\n\"I seriously can't take much more of this,\" I tell the phantom before me. When this spirit moves, a frigid chill travels in a halo around him. He's cloaked as if a mystery, an enigma, a warning.\n\nHolding my hands in front of me, I climb back to my feet and slough off the dirt from my pajamas. \"Look, I know you're here to bitch me out about all the things I've been doing wrong. Let me assure you, I got it. I'm down with it. There are things I have to change, starting with my attitude.\n\nThe figure just stands stock-still before me. A satiny, black robe-ish garment hangs from broad shoulders. The head is covered with a hood, masking the spirit's face, eyes, and other features.\n\nA booming voice sounds forthlike the mighty wind. \"I am the Ghost of Christmas Future. Of Christmas Yet to Come.\"\n\nI literally feel my body shake from my cheeks all the way down to my toes. A pain in my chest threatens to undo me with its firm clutch of dread. I think I've handled tonight pretty well\u2026 up until this point. Now, I just want to get home, crawl back into my bed, and sleep until the dawn awakens.\n\n\"Hey, there,\" I manage to eke out. \"What's in store for me?\"\n\nThe ghost stretches out a large hand which points away from the cemetery. Well, good for that. I'm creeped out enough as it is without being in the frickin' graveyard with this spook. When he doesn't move to join me, I summon my courage and face him with my best ghost huntress attitude and spunk.\n\nI pop my hip out to the side and cross my hands in front of me. \"Let me guess. You're gonna show me all sorts of eerie and terrifying things that haven't happened to me yet. Right?\"\n\nThe hooded head bobs up and down, no feature revealed.\n\nAn unclear and ambiguous horror skitters through me as I stand before this ghost. Underneath his veil, I can sense his eyes penetrating through me, judging and waiting.\n\nPowering up my nerve, I say, \"Look, dude, I'm sort of like a professional ghost huntress. I work with spirits and ghosts all the time. Usually not as much as I have tonight, but I've been pushed, shoved, teased, tortured, tormented, frightened, spooked, threatened, and provoked by plenty of paranormal entities. You don't scare me. You're actually annoying me.\"\n\nThe ghost cocks his head, as if studying me.\n\n\"Oh, for God's sake! Talk to me, dammit!\"\n\n\"Fine!\" the spirit says and jerks the hood off of his face.\n\nI nearly choke on my laughter. \"Patrick! Are you kidding me? You're the Ghost of Christmas Future?\"\n\nHe scowls at me and pushes the hood off of his neck. \"Whatever. I was trying to get into the role and you ruined it.\"\n\nPart of me wants to run and hug him, kiss the mess out of him, but he's not really here. It's not my Patrick, rather a dream Patrick here to walk me through the final stage of whatever it is I'm experiencing.\n\nHe slices his eyes up and tries to be somber. \"This is really important, Kendall. I'm not supposed to do the talking. You're supposed to figure things out on your own.\"\n\nI gesture with my hand for him to lead the way.\n\nThe silky fabric of Patrick's robe drags the ground, making a dusty path that I follow. We weave our way through the Radisson streets with ease\u2014why couldn't we fly like the other ghosts?\u2014to Fogarty Street. We pass the drugstore, the library, and then come to stop in front of a white building I haven't visited since Farah's death.\n\n\"Why are we at Bryant-Jennings Funeral home?\"\n\nTwo women I don't recognize push past me, hurrying up the front steps. \"I can't believe he's dead. He was just a little thing,\" the woman in a black pantsuit says.\n\nHer companion sniffles. \"His mother and grandmother are devastated. You know his father hasn't been to see him in the three years since the accident?\"\n\n\"Shameful,\" the first woman says.\n\nFacing Patrick, I ask, \"Who are they talking about? Is it someone we know?\"\n\nHe points up into the funeral home, so I head on in.\n\n\"When did he pass away?\" the pantsuit woman asks in a whisper once we're inside.\n\n\"Late last night,\" another mourner says.\n\nDeeper into the room, I push past unseen faces to get to the open coffin. I'm used to seeing the dead, so why should this be any different?\n\nOh, but this one is vastly unlike any before.\n\nWhen I gaze into the cherry wood coffin, my hands lift to cover my horror at what I see. Max Pilfer, about age twelve, slumbers silently and unmoving in his satin bedding.\n\n\"No!\" I cry out.\n\nTo my right, his mother, Chandra, weeps into a knotted up wad of tissues while Miss Suzanne sits dazed and confused.\n\n\"The meningitis just destroyed him,\" Chandra says between tears and sips of air.\n\n\"No, no, no,\" I continue.\n\n\"You knew, Kendall,\" ghostly Patrick says.\n\nI spin on my heels and am in his face. \"Don't put this on me! I'm just a teenage psychic. What do I know? I'm not a doctor or a miracle worker!\"\n\n\"You saw it, though,\" he stresses. \"The cards warned you.\"\n\n\"The cards aren't always right!\" My head's going to explode. This isn't fair. This isn't how it should be.\n\nPatrick grips my shoulders and shakes me slightly. \"The fact is, Kendall, you have a gift. One you still haven't completely embraced. Some days you're good with it, others, you run from it. You can't escape who you are\u2026 what you are. You have to help people.\"\n\n\"I do,\" I say to him through my tears. \"I do the best I can. I'm just a kid.\" My head drops and my hair shields me from the reality of Max's funeral going on around me.\n\n\"That's just it, Kendall.\" Patrick lifts my chin up with his index finger and laser-beams his gaze into mine. \"You're no longer a kid. You just turned eighteen and this isn't the present. It's the future. You're an adult now. This is who you are. It's not something you can tamp down and walk away from. It's what you are.\"\n\nWith a sniff, I say, \"I should have told Suzanne. I could have warned her or given her the information as a possibility. It's all in the way I couch the premonitions, visions, and intuitions.\"\n\nPatrick smiles at me. \"Now you've got it.\"\n\n\"So, I can rectify this?\" I practically beg.\n\n\"It's just one potential future, Kendall.\"\n\nI let out a sigh of relief. It's short-lived, though. Patrick crooks his head to the door and out we go.\n\n\"There's more.\"\n\nI gulp down hard. \"I was afraid you were going to say that.\"\n\nWithout flight or fancy, we're suddenly\u2026 I don't know where. Phantom Patrick stretches out his hand and pulls me along with him. I sense eyes on me from every direction, hidden behind corners, peering from windows. A chill creeps up my back and my skin itches.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I ask.\n\n\"A bad neighborhood,\" is the ghost's response.\n\nIt's not a somewhere I've ever been to before in my life. The storefronts are run-down, with broken windows and graffiti covering the outer walls. Drunks stumble out of clubs, barely able to walk a straight line or, God forbid, try to drive. The air is wrought with the stench of rotten beer, stale cigarettes, and\u2026 eww\u2026 is that urine?\n\nI stifle a gag by putting my hand to my mouth. \"Seriously? This is my future?\"\n\n\"Not yours,\" Patrick warns. \"Someone you love, but deserted.\"\n\nWho? Who in the world\u2014that I love and care about\u2014could possibly be any bit attached to a cesspool area such as this?\n\nWe duck into an alley, stepping over bags of garbage that have been pillaged through. My stomach lurches from the sour odor of the trash and something akin to rotting rat corpses. I've been in Halloween horror houses before, yet nothing could ever prepare me for how discombobulated I am walking through this neighborhood.\n\nNails and broken glass scatter in front of us. I pick my way carefully through it knowing I'm only in socked feet. It would be my luck to come out of this dream with a shard of something in my big toe.\n\n\"You'll be fine,\" Phantom Patrick tells me. \"This way. We're almost there.\"\n\nThis is a place of ill-repute. An area where you wouldn't want to send your worst enemy. Here, secrets are spilled, reputations lost, and lives ruined. There are no good guys. No strong characters. No redeemable values. No fairy godmothers. Only criminals, miscreants, and troublemakers.\n\n\"Over there.\" Patrick points across the street to a corner building. It's made of painted cinderblock and has a flashing red neon sign overhead that reads \"Live Nudes.\"\n\nLive Nudes? Well, I certainly don't want to see dead ones. For that matter, I don't want to see nudes at all.\n\n\"You're taking me to a strip club?\" I ask, disbelieving.\n\n\"I don't have a choice,\" he tells me.\n\nMy heart pounds inside my chest, throbbing with an ache of the unknown. Apparently in this future scenario, I'm not privy to my psychic abilities that can head off the mystery of this situation.\n\nWe pass through the wall of the building and into the dingy red-lit hue of the night club's interior. Patrons spread throughout the bar, dancing and drinking and smoking. I feel the need to choke and cough although the odor really has no effect on me. In the center of the room, there's a large stage with a red curtain on the back. Three silver poles dot the left, middle, and right of the platform. A horseshoe-shaped bar juts out from the front of the area and it's filled with the impatient audience members waiting for the next performer.\n\nPatrick motions me to the front where we take two cracked red-leather bar stools that have seen better days.\n\n\"This is disgusting. Who could have ended up here?\"\n\nI think of my friend, Becca Asiaf, who as a bit of a wild child in her Goth days when I first moved to Radisson. Since joining our ghost huntress group, though, she no longer dresses all in black and is really into her music. Surely this isn't her future. Or is it?\n\n\"Is Becca the DJ here?\"\n\nPatrick shakes his head. \"Not even close.\"\n\nCelia Nichols would never darken the doors of a place like this. She's going to MIT or Stanford or Georgia Tech to become a Ph.D. in some sort of engineering or similar. It can't be Taylor Tillson, can it? Unquestionably, Taylor's had a rough time with her parents' divorce, her mother's attempted suicide, and having to live a semester in Alaska. But she's one tough cookie who has her shit together. There's no way she's going to come out from behind that red curtain.\n\nI think of some of my classmates who haven't always been that nice to me, particularly Courtney Langdon. While I get a five-second fantasy laugh that maybe she's the one working here, it's quickly squashed with the desire to help her find her way, if that's who it is. Stephanie Crawford is sort of stiff when she does her cheerleader routines, so I doubt swinging on a metal pole would be her style.\n\nThen who?\n\n\"You'll see,\" Patrick informs me.\n\nAs he speaks, the house lights dim, a spotlight shines on the middle of the stage, and the emcee's voice crackles through the PA system. \"And now, what you've been waiting for. Put your hands together for our very own Christmas treat, ready for the unwrapping.\"\n\n\"Eww\u2026 gross.\"\n\n\"Put your hands together for Mrs. Claus!\"\n\nA gnarly techno beat grinds out and the crowd of unmentionables begins to come to life, fist pumping, waving cash overhead, and drunkenly swaying in time with the music.\n\nThe red curtain parts and a young woman, probably in her mid-twenties, steps out in a red-velvet bikini with white trimmed fur. She's wearing a Santa hat, a pout, and not much else. I'm tempted to look away, but I know her. At least, that's what Phantom Patrick says. Yet, this girl looks weathered and tired, abused and used. Her body is shapely and her face is attractive underneath all of that caked-on makeup. I can't tell if the red hair is a wig or if it's dyed that color.\n\nAs she begins to do the bumps and grinds to the nasty beat, I feel as though my heart has been crushed in a fist of revulsion and disillusionment. Through the thick mascara and heavily lined lids, I see eyes that I'd know anywhere. The smile of a once-innocent girl who so looked up to me\u2026 until we grew apart.\n\n\"Kaitlin,\" I say in a choked whisper.\n\nPatrick props his elbows on the bar. \"In the flesh.\"\n\nI glare at him as hard as I've ever glared at anyone in my life. \"That was inappropriate.\"\n\n\"Perhaps, but it's the truth. Look at her up there.\"\n\nI can't. I can't sit here and watch my baby sister do a strip tease for these malefactors waving sweaty, crinkled dollar bills at her. Overturning my bar stool, I rush the stage.\n\n\"Kaitlin! Stop this! This isn't who you are!\"\n\n\"Who is she, Kendall?\" Patrick shouts.\n\nTears blind my vision as my sister continues her routine. \"Kai-Kai! Please don't! You're so much better than this. How did you end up here?\"\n\n\"Do you really want to know?\" the ghost asks of me.\n\nI growl at him. \"I can't control another person's life or their destiny. Kai-Kai\u2026 don't\u2026.\"\n\nPhantom Patrick plays with the sleeve of his long, black robe. \"No, you can't. However, you can greatly influence someone else. The rift between you and Kaitlin just grew and grew and grew until it ripped your family apart. She moved out, never went to college, never spoke to you or your parents again. Now look at her.\"\n\n\"I don't want to.\"\n\nI desperately try to throw myself before my sister, blocking her rotation on the pole in front of her. But I'm just an unseen visitor in this time, so my efforts fail.\n\n\"Oh Kaitlin\u2026 I'm so sorry. I'm so, so sorry.\"\n\nFalling to my knees, I break down in horrendous sobs as my little sister\u2014no longer little, but a full-grown woman\u2014degrades herself in front of these drunken animals. With each dance move, she spits in the face of everything she's been taught in life by our parents.\n\nI feel my heart breaking into the four chambers of ventricles and atriums. \"I don't want this. I don't want this at all. Please\u2026.\"\n\nI shouldn't have complained about fixing Kaitlin's dress. I should have asked to see her trophy. I should have sat out on the porch and celebrated the soccer win with her and her friends. Would that have stopped this horrible collision course my sister's on?\n\nGhostly Patrick encompasses me and lifts me off the ground. \"Okay, there, I think we've made our point.\"\n\nPoof!\n\nThe stinky bar, revolting patrons, and alternate universe Kaitlin are gone.\n\n\"I got it!\" I say to my guide. \"I've. Got. It.\"\n\nPatrick rubs my hair to sooth me. I don't know if anything will ever erase that horrid scene from my mind, even if it was only a \"possibility\" or merely a dream.\n\n\"Don't you have anything happy to show me?\" I ask as I wipe away remnants of my crying jag.\n\n\"As a matter of fact, I do.\"\n\nHe pushes up the sleeves of his Reaper-ish cloak and snaps his fingers.\n\nI'm now in a snow-filled park. Chubby white flakes sail peacefully down from the sky, landing in drifts around me. A Christmas tree off in the distance flickers in the twilight. Ice sculptures of penguins, castles, and a full Santa sleigh are spotlighted for all to see. Skaters circle around in a nearby rink, bundled up for the cold in fleece, gloves, and scarves.\n\n\"Where are we?\" I ask.\n\n\"I believe we're in Boston,\" Patrick tells me.\n\nI look all around me. \"This is the Boston Common. It's gorgeous!\" All of the surrounding trees are draped in white lights, outlining their bare branches in a wintry beauty. \"I've always wanted to come here.\"\n\n\"Now you have. This way, please. I want to show you something.\"\n\nI follow Phantom Patrick down the paved path that's been shoveled to clear the snow out of the way. The fresh dusting of icy wonder tickles my nose and eyelashes, just like in the song, \"My Favorite Things.\"\n\nBright lights flood the area before us. It's a man-made skating rink filled with tons of people taking a turn this Christmas Eve. Yes, it's Christmas Eve here in Boston. I can feel it in my bones. A nearby sign says the place is called \"Frog Pond.\" How quaint. It's what I've always pictured New England to be.\n\n\"I used to ice skate,\" I tell the ghost. \"When I lived in Chicago, my dad took Kaitlin and me to the rink every Saturday in December. I was pretty good,\" I say with a smile.\n\n\"You still are,\" Patrick says, pointing out into the middle of the rink.\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"There you are.\"\n\nI crook my head to get a good look at the woman in the middle of the ice, spinning around in a graceful manner. Her hair is pulled to the side in a long braid and she's wearing a black knit hat and a Burberry scarf with matching gloves.\n\n\"That's\u2026 me?\"\n\n\"Yep. Sure is,\" Patrick affirms.\n\nI'm not exactly partial to Burberry, but we'll go with it. Wow. I turned out all right. I'm not fat or skinny; I'm just right. Normal. I'm probably about thirty-five, thirty-six years old, although I'm not positive. And I look remarkably happy.\n\n\"Mommy! Mommy! Show me how to do that!\" a little girl of about eight yells.\n\nMy heart halts and then restarts like a NASCAR engine. \"Did she call me Mommy?\"\n\n\"She sure did,\" the ghost says.\n\n\"Me too, me too!\" another girl of the very same age and size echoes.\n\nI glance back at Patrick. \"Are those my kids? I have twin girls?\"\n\nHe smiles. \"Looks like it.\"\n\nThe older me skates to a stop in front of the first girl who is toothless in front, much like my sister, Kaitlin, was that faithful Christmas morning in Lincoln Park. The other girl appears the same, only their faces are slightly different. Fraternal twins, I'd guess. Oh, my God. They are absolutely a-dor-a-ble! I watch in awe as I take each girl by their mittened hands and help them skate around with the rest of the crowd.\n\nSamantha and Claire.\n\nDon't ask me how I know their names. I just do. They're perfect little miracles of preciousness. I've never felt this overwhelming heart palpitation before like I'm experiencing now. I am in love with them. They are part of me. I'm their mom! They're so amazing. Where did they get that jet-black hair, though? And those cat-like green eyes?\n\n\"Wave at Daddy,\" Future Me tells them as we skate by where Patrick and I are standing.\n\nHe looks at me and holds his hands up. \"Don't look at me. I'm just the guide.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe points, again\u2014which he's been doing a lot of as my ghostly guide. His aim lands on a tall man standing in the middle of the ice with his phone video recording the twins and me. He's dressed in gray slacks and a black Navy pea coat. A scarf of red and green circles his neck.\n\n\"Look at me, Daddy,\" Claire exclaims.\n\n\"That's my girl,\" the man says to her.\n\nWho the hell is he?\n\nBefore I can verbalize the question, I watch Older Kendall and the girls skate straight toward the tall, dark, and handsome man. Not just attractive, but head turning, stunning, dazzling\u2014Holy Mother of Christmas Past, Present, and Future\u2026who is that gorgeous hunk of man?\n\n\"Oh, Rafe! Look at them, sweetie,\" I say as we come to a stop in front of him. Samantha and Claire wave at the camera and blow kisses.\n\n\"I love you, Daddy! Merry Christmas.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas, my angels,\" this Rafe guy says back.\n\n\"What the hell kind of name is Rafe?\" I ask, trying to figure all of this out. \"It sounds like a pirate or a romance novel hero. Or someone from a soap opera.\"\n\nAnd then I watch in horror\u2014or delight\u2014as this beautiful man reaches out, cups Older Kendall's face in his hand, and pulls her\u2026 me \u2026 to him in a fiery kiss while the snow continues to float down.\n\nPatrick lets out a long, high, wolf-like whistle.\n\nI spin away and look at the ghostly guide. \"What on God's green earth is going on over there?\"\n\nHe hitches his smile to the corner. \"Looks like you hooked up with someone and had a couple of babies.\"\n\nI fling my arms about. \"I know what it looks like! Why isn't it you out there? Why aren't those your babies?\"\n\nBetrayal coats me like the falling snow as I spy myself macking on this strange man with the black hair and clear green eyes.\n\nPatrick lifts his arms in surrender. \"How the flagnon should I know, Kendall?\"\n\n\"Well, excuse me, Gallaxhar!\" Since Patrick and I've watched \"Monsters vs. Aliens\" a hundred times, I'm not surprised his ghost is fighting with the movie quotes.\n\nHe scoffs at me, though. \"First off, I'm not really your Patrick. I'm just a figment of your imagination or a dream, or whatever. Secondly, I'm just showing you one conceivable future.\"\n\nPanting, I try to slow my rapid breathing. \"Is there a third point?\"\n\nThe ghost\u2014who represents the guy I'm in love with right now\u2014smiles and points for like the fortieth time. \"Third? Sure. You look pretty damn perfectly happy.\"\n\nAll the blood rushes to my head and I feel as though I might faint. I can't, though. Instead, I take a peek at the possible future family I could be a part of. Those cherubic faces. That hot, sexy man. The perfect picture of a happy family. I'm treacherously somewhat jazzed by it. Only for a moment, though.\n\nI hug myself to the phantom before me, his satin cloak encompassing me. \"But I want to be pretty damn perfectly happy with you, Patrick.\"\n\nThe ghost's lips brush the top of my head. \"You very well may be. Only the future will tell. It's up to you, Kendall.\"\n\n\"I want to go home,\" I whine.\n\n\"In due time.\"\n\n\"In due now.\" I snuggle deeper into his arms. \"I've learned a lot of lessons tonight from you, Celia, and Taylor\u2026 or whoever you all are. Do I have the power to change anything?\"\n\nPatrick nods his head. \"We have the power to change every moment of every day.\"\n\n\"I get it. I'll do what I can. I'll be a better person. I'll take care of others. I'll protect my family. I'll love fiercely and live passionately. I'll speak my mind and be the best person I can be.\"\n\nHe sets me back and lifts my face so that our gazes sync up. \"That's all any of us can do, you know?\"\n\nI close my eyes, secure in the knowledge that every day brings new opportunity, hope, excitement, friendship, support, and most of all\u2026 love.\n\nWhen I lift my lids, Phantom Patrick and I are back in my bedroom, standing next to the pink and silver Christmas tree that lights everything in its soft glow.\n\n\"I know you're leaving soon. So, what's next?\"\n\nThe ghost smiles down at me. He clears his throat. \"'Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.'\"\n\nI snicker hard. \"Oh, dear God. You're quoting Ebenezer Scrooge to me.\"\n\n\"Why, yes, I am.\"\n\n\"Dude, I've been Scrooged enough for one night.\"\n\n\"The message is still the same, Kendall. You know what you have to do.\"\n\nI certainly do, so I quote a little Dickens myself. (Mr. Rorek would be so proud of me.) \"'I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all three shall strive within me.'\"\n\nPhantom Patrick bobs his head. \"Very impressive.\"\n\nCoyly, I twist a bit and say, \"I had to learn it for my oral exam. Got an A.\"\n\n\"Of course, you did.\" He escorts me over to the bed and turns the covers down for me. I climb underneath the blanket and smile up at him.\n\nHe blows me a kiss.\n\nI catch it, and then I fall back into a deep, deep sleep." + }, + { + "title": "STANZA 7: THE TIDINGS", + "text": "The alarm on my phone sounds its electronic beeps, alerting me that it's nine a.m., so I slowly come into the land of the conscious.\n\nI swallow hard and peel my eyes open, almost afraid of what I'll see this time. Remarkably, it's nothing more than Buckley, Eleanor, and Natalie all curled together next to me with cat tongues racing in a three-kitty bath-fest. The morning sun spills through my curtains, providing a golden pathway toward the door. My little pink and silver Christmas tree still burns brightly, representing so much more to me now than just a mere seasonal decoration.\n\nMy bed. My room. My tree. My cats.\n\nIt's Christmas Eve. Radisson, Georgia. Present day. And, I'll face it with a smile, cheer, and praise.\n\nI scoop up the nearest kitty, Buckley, and kiss him on the crooked gray spot on his nose. \"What a night! What. A. Night!\"\n\nBuckley loops his tongue out to swathe my cheek. Nothing like a kitty kiss to start the day.\n\nI set him back down with his sisters and then spring out of bed. I rush over to the window to confirm that it's my house, my yard, my Radisson outside. Nothing's changed--yet, so much has.\n\nI bounce downstairs where I find Mom making her famous orange cinnamon rolls.\n\n\"Hey, it's not Christmas morning, yet,\" I say, walking into the kitchen.\n\nMom laughs. \"I was just making extras to take to the church for the pre-pageant party.\" I give the plate of sweet gooeyness a come-hither look. \"Just one, Kendall.\"\n\nI nab the closest one to me and waste no time taking a ginormous bite. \"One is never enough,\" I say with my mouth full.\n\nAs I finish chewing, I hear a shuffling behind me and turn to see Kaitlin standing there. Her hair is still wet from her recent shower and slicked straight in place. Without thought or reserve, I rush the few steps to her and hug her as tightly as I possibly can.\n\n\"Kai-Kai, I love you soooooo much!\" I say, unabashedly.\n\nI can tell she's taken aback at first, then her thin arms surround me and hug back. \"I love you, too, Kendall.\"\n\nWe stand like that for a moment as Mom does everything in her power to quell her tears.\n\n\"I think the star soloist of the church's Christmas Eve pageant deserves a breakfast treat, don't you, Mom?\"\n\nShe winks at both of us and presents two plates. \"Cinnamon or orange?\"\n\nKaitlin glances between us. \"Whatever Kendall's having.\"\n\nI drag an orange one off the plate and feed it to her. All three of us crack up laughing and it feels so\u2026 right. It doesn't matter that our blood isn't from the same place. Our love is.\n\n\"You are going to be amazing tonight,\" I tell my sister. \"I'll be on the front row cheering you on. I'm going to Tweet and Facebook about it and let everyone know that my sister is the best singer in all of Radisson!\"\n\nShe's astonished and I love the depth of the smile on her face. \"You'll do that?\"\n\n\"Oh, hell yeah!\"\n\n\"Kendall,\" Mom snaps. \"Language.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" I say with a laugh. \"Heck yeah.\"\n\n\"Don't you have a lot to do today?\" Mom asks me.\n\n\"I certainly do. But before I head over to the church, I need to make a very important house call.\" I glance at my sis. \"Wanna ride along?\"\n\nShe ponders the invite and then stops herself. \"I want to, but I've got to get ready and help Mom get my stuff together for the pageant.\"\n\n\"No worries,\" I say. \"Another time. Anytime, in fact. I've got a car; I can drive you anywhere you need to be\u2026 school, soccer, or just to hang out. Okay?\"\n\nKaitlin launches herself in my arms again and mutters into my chest. \"Thanks for fixing my angel dress, Kendall. You're the best sister ever.\"\n\n\"So are you.\"\n\n\"I'll see you guys over at the church in a bit.\" I run upstairs to dress, quickly reversing directions with my keys fisted in my hand. I have a full tarot card reading explanation that needs to be delivered.\n\nASAP!\n\nThe door opens, and immediately rosemary and sage attack my olfactory senses.\n\n\"Kendall! What are you doing here?\" Suzanne Pilfer asks of me.\n\n\"Hey, Ms. Pilfer. May I come in a sec? I know you're cooking, but I won't keep you long.\"\n\nShe steps aside. \"Of course, dear. Come right in.\"\n\nI follow her back to the kitchen that is filled with every holiday food item possible. There's no sign of trouble or duress, so I'm assuming Chandra didn't lose her job, after all. It was only one possibility. \"Are you making herb stuffing?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Miss Suzanne says. \"It's my grandmother's recipe and Max's favorite.\"\n\nI shift from one foot to the other. \"That's why I'm here,\" I tell her. \"I have something to tell you about Max.\"\n\nHer face drops. \"Is he okay? You're not picking up some psychic vision, are you?\"\n\nI wring my hands together in front of me and muster up bravery to continue. \"No and yes. When we did your tarot card reading, I had a premonition that Max is going to fall from his Christmas bicycle and the severity of the injury is going to bring on spinal meningitis that could really mess up his life.\"\n\n\"Glorious and merciful Father!\" Suzanne says in a gasp. \"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"I'm telling you now\u2026 but only as a safeguard.\" I wet my lips and try to quaff down the lump in my throat. \"I'm just a psychic and not everything I see comes to fruition. It's a possibility, you understand. However, I had to tell you what I saw, if only to serve as prevention. Max is going to be wicked psyched about his bike\u2014sorry, didn't mean to rhyme\u2014and I just want to make sure you guys explain all the safety precautions to him.\"\n\n\"Of course we will, Kendall. Yes, of course.\" I'm warmed by Suzanne's assurance and know that I did the right thing coming here. \"Why didn't you tell me yesterday?\" she presses.\n\n\"I suppose I didn't want to ruin your holiday with a mere hunch.\"\n\nHer smile brightens. \"I'll take your hunches to the bank any day, Kendall.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Ms. Pilfer. Please give my best to Chandra and Max for me. Merry Christmas!\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas to you and your family, as well.\"\n\nI leave her house and let out the pent up anxiety caught within my lungs. Hopefully, I've altered the present and the future for Max and his family.\n\nNow, what about mine?\n\n\"Hey, baby!\" Patrick says when he answers my call.\n\n\"You know I'm psychic, right?\" I begin with a chuckle.\n\n\"As am I,\" he says.\n\n\"So, I know you didn't go to Belize to go diving.\"\n\nSilence.\n\nHush.\n\nShushies.\n\nMore silence.\n\nThen a soft chortle. \"Well, technically, I have gone diving. It's just not my main purpose down here.\"\n\n\"I know, baby. I think it's amazing what you and your dad are doing for George and Joyce, working with Habitat for Humanity.\"\n\nI can almost see Patrick tossing his head back as the laughter pours out over the phone call. \"Damn, you are good, Kendall Moorehead.\"\n\nI smile into the device. \"That's what I'm told. So, how much more work do you have to do on the house?\"\n\nHe shuffles the phone a bit. \"It was taking a little longer than expected, but then a crew from Seattle came in to join us two days ago. A guy named Randall and his two kids, Sam and Claire. Randall's an electrician, so he was able to do stuff a lot faster than Dad and I could with just George and\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014did you say Sam and Claire?\"\n\n\"Yeah, why?\"\n\nAs in my possible future twin daughters? How could Patrick know that? Or was my dream a psychic bleed-over of my intuition of what Patrick's experiencing?\n\n\"Kendall? What's wrong?\"\n\nNo need to explain something that hasn't even happened. \"Oh, nothing. I just like those names for girls: Samantha and Claire.\"\n\n\"Well, Sam's a boy.\"\n\n\"Don't you be flirting with Claire then,\" I say with laugh.\n\nPatrick's voice softens. \"I only have eyes for you.\"\n\nI pause and let the warmth of his words cover me in comfort.\n\n\"I love you, Kendall.\"\n\n\"Love you, too. I wish you were here for the wedding tonight.\"\n\n\"I know. Send Loreen and Father Mass my best,\" he says. \"I'm where I need to be.\"\n\n\"Of course you are, baby.\"\n\nAnd it only makes me love him more.\n\nThe rest of the day is spent happily serving food to the needy of Radisson from the kitchen of the Episcopal Church. Pies, breads, casseroles, and hams are distributed with enough left over to feed the next town. I also manage to make a run to Farah's grave to leave a fully blossomed poinsettia plant. I help Father Mass and Loreen\u2014who wasn't going to be bothered with the silly superstition of not seeing her groom before the wedding\u2014put a gazillion white candles out on the altar and windows of the church for the pageant and the wedding. The platform of the living Christmas tree will easily break down after Kaitlin's solo so the wedding can take place.\n\nFather Mass's mentor, Father Andrew Calder from the School of Theology at The University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, arrives as we finish up tacking the bows onto the pews. Father Calder is going to be performing the wedding and bless the couple in their union and life together.\n\n\"I'm so happy for you, Massimo,\" Father Calder tells his former student. \"I assume since you've done hundreds of weddings yourself, we don't need to have a rehearsal?\"\n\nMass laughs a bit nervously. \"We're good, Father. It's just Loreen and Kendall on the bride's side and my brother, Raffaele, may not even make it.\"\n\n\"Why's that?\" Father Calder asks.\n\n\"Snow in Boston shut down Logan Airport last night. A lot of canceled flights, but he's doing his best to get here.\"\n\n\"I'll pray that the weather cooperates,\" the priest says.\n\nLoreen grips Mass's arm and she looks up at him. \"He'll make it, hon.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you have confidence,\" my priest says.\n\n\"Do you need a best man back up?\" I ask.\n\nMass thinks for a second. \"I'd say Patrick if he were here.\"\n\n\"Someone call my name?\"\n\nI nearly faint dead away when I see my handsome boyfriend, tanned from his time in the Caribbean, saunter down the aisle of the church with nothing but me in his sights.\n\n\"What? How? Where?\"\n\nPatrick scoops me up into his arms, up off the floor, and spins me around. He puts me down and kisses me softly, but firmly. \"I caught an early flight back to surprise you. I had to be here for the wedding after all Loreen and Mass have done for us.\"\n\n\"Where were you when we talked?\"\n\n\"Leaving the airport in Atlanta. Did it sound legit?\"\n\n\"Way too legit!\"\n\nI throw my arms around Patrick's neck, wondering how he managed to fool me over the phone. I don't care, though. He's here! We can spend Christmas together. I pull his face to mine for a long, wonderful kiss.\n\n\"Hey, now,\" Father Calder interrupts. \"I'm not doing a double wedding tonight, am I?\"\n\nPatrick and I separate and I feel the blush painting my face. \"Sorry, Father.\"\n\n\"Young love,\" he says. \"It's beautiful.\"\n\nI shine a smile at Loreen and Mass. \"Yes, it is.\"\n\nStepping back, Patrick has an evil, sly grin on his face. \"Okay, wait. I have another present for you. Rather, another surprise. This one's bigger than me.\"\n\n\"I don't think that's possible,\" I say to him.\n\nLoreen joins in. \"Oh, it's pretty big, Kendall.\"\n\nShe comes up behind me and places her hands over my eyes. \"Really? You guys are nuts.\"\n\nI do my best to tune my psychic senses in to what's going on, but it's like Loreen is blocking any intuition.\n\nFootsteps fall in front of me. One set. Two sets.\n\nThen I hear the older woman giggle and I smell her Oil of Olay lotion.\n\n\"Grandma!\"\n\nI push Loreen's hands aside and run forward to meet up with my grandmother, Anna Faulkner.\n\n\"Hello, my precious.\" She takes my face in her hands, kissing me on the cheek. \"Oh, John, look at her. She's grown up since just this summer.\"\n\nMy grandpa moves in and bear hugs me. \"My Kendall! I'm so glad we changed our plans and came across the pond.\"\n\nI swear, I'm the teary-est person ever. I can't stop crying. \"What made you change your mind? I thought you had this deal on a cruise that you couldn't pass up?\"\n\nGrandma's wrinkled face grins widely at me. \"Honey, the Mediterranean will be there forever. We can't waste any more moments with you now that you're in our lives.\"\n\nMass looks down at Loreen. \"Why are you crying?\"\n\nShe shakes her head. \"Because she's happy. We've got out Kendall back, so that makes me happy. You make me happy.\"\n\nHe wraps his arms around her. \"Well, all of you women better stop with the waterworks or you'll be puffy in the wedding pictures tonight. Nobody wants that.\"\n\nI squeeze myself between my grandparents and shoot up a prayer to God, thanking him for bringing my loved ones to me. For sending those spirits, or angels, or visions\u2014whatever they were\u2014to get me back on course.\n\nSeriously, God bless us, everyone!\n\nTears fill my eyes\u2014in a prideful way this time and not to ruin my awesome Taylor-done makeup job\u2014as I watch Kaitlin on the top platform of the living Christmas tree, her hair curled and pulled back from her face and her silver dress shining in the spotlight. She sings like a true angel, and even God up in heaven must be pleased.\n\nDad hasn't stopped videoing the performance and Mom hasn't quit bawling. It's okay that they gush over Kaitlin. She's their kid, too. It doesn't have to be all about me, all of the time. We're a family. One that happened by luck, fate, and love.\n\nMy grandparents sit in the pew with us beaming up at Kaitlin as if she's theirs, as well. And she is. We're all together. A merry little Christmas after all.\n\nAs soon as the service is finished, several of the men in the choir break down the staging and quickly rearrange the altar for the wedding ceremony.\n\nI slip into the ladies' room and change into my maid of honor dress. It's a snazzy number in red satin, off one shoulder, and to the floor. My hair, adorned with baby's breath, is swept up off my neck with plenty of curling tendrils framing my face. Tonight's not about me, but I do feel extremely pretty in this amazing dress. I can't wait for Patrick to see me. I'm damn-near giddy knowing that he's here after all.\n\nLoreen steps out from behind the dressing room screen and I gasp.\n\n\"Oh, Loreen! You look phenomenal!\"\n\nShe blushes underneath her perfect makeup job. \"You think? I wasn't sure if it was me or not.\"\n\nThe white silk dress hugs her slim figure from the simple bodice to the flowing skirt that just barely touches the floor. On her arms is a tiny hint of a lace jacket that is more like long sleeves covering her skin. Around her neck, she's wearing a strand of pearls my mom loaned her that complement the teardrop earrings of pearl and rhinestones. Her hair is curled and styled in a low chignon with diamond-like clips holding a sheer veil to her head. A fairy princess on her magical day. She couldn't be more beautiful than she is at this very moment.\n\n\"It is you. It totally is.\"\n\nShe touches her head, then her ears, and finally her neck. \"Something old is me\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014stop that!\"\n\n\"Something new is the dress. Something borrowed would be Sarah's pearls. Kendall, I don't have anything blue!\"\n\nI hold my hand up. \"Never fear. For Kendall is here.\"\n\nWe laugh together, Loreen's more nervous titters than anything.\n\nEven though her bouquet is made of red roses, Christmas greens, and a flowing white bow, I reach into my purse and pull out the blue gift and attach it to the underside of her nosegay.\n\n\"What is that?\" she asks.\n\n\"It's a flat bead bracelet made of lapis lazuli. I got it off eBay for you. The stone helps clear the mind so you can see things clearly. Use it only with love in your heart, understanding in your mind, and wisdom in your soul.\"\n\nShe rubs her fingers against the stones and then pulls me in for a hug. \"I've taught you well, my friend.\"\n\n\"Yes, you have.\" I set her away from me and admire her inner and outer beauty.\n\nRolling her eyes, she laughs in spite of herself. \"Who would have thought the town freak and outcast would be marrying the handsome, bachelor Episcopal priest?\"\n\n\"Me,\" I say with great conviction. \"There's nothing wrong with you, Loreen. You're one of the most wonderful people I've ever met. I'm so honored to stand with you and Father Mass today.\"\n\n\"I'm blessed to have you as a friend.\" She pauses for a moment. \"I only wish my own father would have been here. It is what it is, though.\"\n\n\"It's his loss, Loreen. When you get in the church, Patrick is going to be standing there to walk you down the aisle.\"\n\nShe puts her hand to her heart. \"That is so sweet of him.\"\n\n\"He wants to do it. Then, if Mass's brother doesn't make it in time, Patrick will stand with us, as well.\"\n\n\"In my mind's eye, I've seen his plane landing at Hartsfield airport. My senses tell me he won't let his brother down.\"\n\nI adjust her veil over her shoulders. \"Well, it's not about him, either. This is your day. Yours and Mass's. Everything's going to be perfect.\"\n\nI see her eyes begin to fill with tears, so I start waving my hands around at her. \"No, no, no. Taylor will freak if you ruin the magic makeup she did on your face.\"\n\nLoreen carefully dabs at her eyes with a tissue and then tosses it aside.\n\nStrains from the string quarter sound out with \"Jesus, Joy of Man's Desiring\" and I know that's our cue.\n\n\"Ready?\" I ask, taking her hand.\n\n\"Am I ever.\"\n\nWe make our way to the vestibule and I clutch my small bouquet of red roses to my hip. Patrick's waiting there for us in a black tuxedo, looking ever so handsome. I slowly step into the church and proceed down the aisle to the altar. I wink at Mom, Dad, Kai-Kai, and the grandparents. The church is aglow in the orange luminosity of the candlelight. Father Calder stands at the front dressed in a formal robe with white satin vestments. Father Mass waits for his bride, wearing a sharp Armani tux, seemingly relaxed and cool.\n\nRiiiiight. I know better.\n\nI wink at him as I take my place on the left of the altar.\n\nThe musical quarter transitions into The Bridal Chorus and the whole congregation rises. Before Loreen and Patrick can start in, there's a small ruckus in the back of the church.\n\nMass's smile vivifies and relief cascades over him. \"He made it,\" he says to Father Calder and me. \"My brother made it.\"\n\n\"That's Raffaele?\" Father Calder asks. \"The Lord is good. It's a blessing.\"\n\nI can't really see down the aisle since everyone is standing, but I make out a dark figure moving through the audience to embrace Mass in a massive hug.\n\n\"I'm sorry, bro,\" he says quietly. \"Delta got me here as fast as they could.\"\n\n\"It's okay, Rafe. You're here. That's all that matters. It's all good.\"\n\nWh-wh-what did he call him?\n\nI struggle to breathe and I feel my knees begin to buckle.\n\nIt's not all good.\n\nIt's not remotely good.\n\nIt's not even in the purlieu of the district of good.\n\nBecause, although my attention should be turned toward my wonderful friend, mentor, and bride, I can't help but stare slack-jawed at the gorgeous guy standing across from me in the best man position. A guy I've seen before, only not on this plane of existence. And not this young.\n\nI've met his future self.\n\nA future self I'm apparently intimately acquainted with.\n\nPatrick kisses Loreen on the cheek and hands her off to Father Mass before taking a seat in the congregation. As Father Calder begins the wedding ceremony, with the standard, \"Dearly Beloved,\" I do everything in my power not to hyperventilate.\n\nWe turn to face the wedding couple and Mass's brother gives me a heartbreakingly stunning smile. I feel it shoot across the altar at me and attack my entire being from coifed hair to high-heeled feet.\n\nHo. Ly. Crap!\n\nI was fully prepared to meet Father Mass's younger brother, Raffaele Castellano, a sophomore pre-med student at Harvard University.\n\nI was not prepared to meet the man from my dream of Christmas Future.\n\nThe man who apparently fathers my twin daughters, Samantha and Claire.\n\nThe man whom I might possibly marry.\n\nThe man named\u2026 Rafe.\n\nMy heartbeat quadruples and I know I'm going to need medical attention before the cutting of the cake.\n\nI have no idea what to do.\n\nExcerpt from Ghost Huntress: The Journey (Book 6)" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "I never know when my visions or trances will hit me.\n\nSometimes it's when I'm just hanging out with Celia or playing with my cats Eleanor, Buckley, and Natalie, at home. Most of the time it's when I'm in deep R.E.M.\n\nThis time, it's like everything around me freezes in a stop-motion way. If someone had just come through the room, tripped, and spilled a bag of popcorn, the kernels would be dangling in the air, frozen in time while my vision comes and goes.\n\nSlowly, I look over to my right and see my spirit guide, Anona, materialize.\n\nShe's unlike anyone I've ever seen or met in person. Of Native American decent, Anona stands before me barefoot, wearing a long, tan cloak with leather ties at the neck and waist. Her long, shiny black hair is straight and pulled to one side. Her dark brown eyes show her intense concern over what's going on here.\n\n\"Kendall, you're delving into an area you shouldn't mess with,\" she warns.\n\nI shake my head, foggy almost from the daze I'm in. \"I'm not doing it, Anona.\"\n\n\"There are dark forces at work in this universe that we don't understand.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about. Christian? Is he a dark force?\"\n\nShe shakes her head. \"That boy is a fool.\"\n\n\"I can't stop him,\" I tell her, not even feeling my lips move.\n\nAnona spreads her arms wide. \"I can't protect you against this, Kendall.\"\n\n\"What is it, though?\"\n\n\"You've gone too far from my reach,\" Anona says. \"There's nothing I can do.\"\n\nI seriously don't get what she's telling me. My spirit guides constantly speak to me in riddles and puzzles. Why can't they just say what's on their mind? \"You promised you'd take care of me.\"\n\n\"There is another,\" she says softly. \"Another who is watching over you.\"\n\nI perk up some from my stupor. \"Emily? She's back?\" I ask, almost begging. As soon as Emily, my first spirit guide, revealed herself to me as my birth mother\u2026 I lost her. She'd been with me my whole life, but as soon as I knew the truth, it allowed her to pass into the light. Great for her. Sucked for me. She'd sent Anona to be with me on the other side. But I want my mother. \"Emily? Is she here again? Is she with me? Anona! Talk to me! Tell me!\"\n\nAnona brings her head down and closes her eyes, unanswering. And then she fades away.\n\nJust like that, everything begins to move around me again, as though nothing unusual happened to me.\n\nI have no idea how long I was out, or if anyone even noticed my spell-like state.\n\nPatrick is over in the corner talking to Oliver. Taylor is setting up video cameras around the room. Maddie and Jess have their digital recorders out to try and capture electronic voice phenomena (EVP), while Celia is in full tech geek mode getting base readings of Mrs. Flanders's house with her EMF detector. Jason's tagging along with her, taking notes. At least he's doing something useful and helpful instead of glowering.\n\nChristian and Jayne set up at the nearby table, with him polishing up his Ouija board as Jayne sets out the planchette\u2014the wooden pointer used on the board.\n\nI rub my head trying to ease the throbbing of my psychic headache that always follows one of my vision trips. Or maybe it's in anticipation of what's to come this evening.\n\nThe doorbell rings.\n\nMrs. Flanders excuses herself.\n\nOliver follows her.\n\nPatrick glances over at me and smiles weakly. He knows something that I can't sense.\n\nBut I don't need to, because everything's revealed when two guys bumble into the living room with a video camera and sound equipment.\n\n\"Thanks for coming so quickly,\" Oliver says. \"We definitely want to get this on film. It'll be great for the sizzle reel we're going to pitch to the network.\"\n\nTaylor's bright smile clicks into place. \"We're going to be on television?\"\n\n\"No way,\" Jess says.\n\nOliver twists his mustache. \"Actually, I've had an idea, based on Christian's experiences here in the UK, to feature him on a new show. It's all in the development stage right now, but this is the ideal event to film and see how everything looks.\"\n\nMy spirit sinks and I feel myself slouch into the sofa. \"So, we're just props here?\"\n\nOliver places his hand on my shoulder. \"No, no, Kendall. Do what you need to do during the investigation. I just want the camera crew to focus on Christian and what he's seeing, feeling, and experiencing.\"\n\nOnce peek over at him and I know what he's feeling. He's gazing into a small mirror that Jayne's holding, checking his face and hair and dabbing a bit of pancake makeup on his cheeks.\n\n\"He's putting on makeup?\" I say incredulously.\n\nCelia plops down on the couch next to me. \"What's going on here?\"\n\n\"The Christian Campbell show, it looks like.\"\n\n\"So, Mr. Bates?\" Taylor asks. \"What are we supposed to do?\"\n\n\"Be natural, Taylor. Just do what you always do on an investigation.\"\n\nShe looks over at me and shrugs. I lift my hands in defeat. It's clear that we ghost huntresses aren't needed here.\n\n\"Where shall I be?\" Mrs. Flanders asks.\n\n\"I think it would be perfect if everyone gathers around the table,\" Christian directs. \"Mrs. Flanders to my right. Jayne to my left. And the rest of you\u2026\" He trails off and syncs his eyes with mine. A slight sneer lifts the corner of his mouth. \"Well, the rest of you can just fill in the spaces and not fanny about.\"\n\nCelia sucks in. \"Fanny about? What does that even mean?\" She glares and then lowers her voice. \"I don't think I like this jerk.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" I say.\n\nPatrick comes over and offers his hand to me. \"Might as well join the dog and pony show,\" he says with a laugh.\n\nEveryone's in place at the table, Taylor's filming for our own purposes, but Niles and Jamie, the film crew, are set up and it's literally\u2026. \"Action!\"\n\nChristian begins using the Ouija board with Mrs. Flanders and Jayne assisting in using the planchette. It begins sliding across the slick surface passing over letters and numbers, circling back, and bringing the pointer around in circles.\n\nIn the full spotlight, Christian closes his eyes and speaks out in a booming voice. \"Who is here with us tonight? Show yourself to us. Use this divination tool to come forth.\"\n\nI knee Patrick under the table and he loops his fingers through mine.\n\nThis is complete crap, I say to him.\n\nIt's all for show.\n\n\"Come forth and show yourself. Who are you? Who has been terrorizing this house, this woman, her daughter?\" Christian chants in a monotone.\n\nThe camera crew moves in to show Christian's hands on the planchette as it travels aggressively on the table.\n\nD.\n\nO.\n\nJ.\n\nO.\n\n\"Dojo,\" Christian repeats. \"So, it is you.\"\n\n\"Who is Dojo?\" Jayne asks, peeping over her glasses.\n\nChristian turns to her. \"Never address a demon by name.\"\n\nShe shakes her head, her blond ponytail swaying. \"But you just\u2014\"\n\nChristian tosses his head back. \"I am familiar with this one. He is known to me.\"\n\nOliver steps in near Christian. \"Tell us what you're experiencing, Christian.\"\n\nThe young Scot closes his eyes again and lolls his head from left to right. Then he speaks again. \"I have known you, Dojo, for years. You are the spirit that has haunted and terrorized me since I was a little boy.\"\n\nI reach out with my psychic senses to see what, if anything is present or near to us. My abilities aren't picking up a thing. I don't know if that's because there's nothing here and Christian's just a big tool bag, or if this Dojo person is focused on his demonic task.\n\nChristian's eyes fly open and he screams out. He grabs the Ouija board and lifts it over his head, shaking it fiercely. Mrs. Flanders covers her head in protection and Jayne dives under the table. I watch as Christian falls back into the chair and starts flailing about.\n\n\"You can't have me. You never have. I-I-I\u2026\" Christian slams the board to the table and then flops back into the chair, like he's passed out.\n\nI stifle the desire to laugh, as does Celia. Instead, we watch the floor show.\n\nThen Christian rises, and in a voice that's nothing like his thick Scottish brogue, he says, \"I am Dojo. You have called me and I have come.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Mrs. Flanders says on the verge of tears. \"Are you the one who has been causing trouble here?\"\n\n\"I am,\" Christian says deeply. \"I am Dojo. You summoned me. Now, what do you want?\"\n\nOliver looks at our host. \"He's doing what we call channeling, Mrs. Flanders. He's allowed this spirit to overtake him and speak through him so we can communicate.\"\n\nShe blinks hard and looks around the table. \"Oh, well, then.\"\n\n\"I am Dojo. You have crossed me. You have empowered me. I shall never leave you. Just as I have ruled over this boy since his birth. His power comes from me. Dojo.\"\n\nNo one in the room moves. Not even the sound guy trying to stretch the boom mike in. From what I'm picking up, my friends don't know whether Christian is the real thing or if he's just crazy out of his mind.\n\nI think it may be a recipe that includes both ingredients.\n\nPurchase Ghost Huntress: The Journey." + }, + { + "title": "Excerpt from POSER", + "text": "\"Chai! Come on, Squirt. We've got to get going, the car's waiting,\" Claire-Ann shouts up the stairs of our massive penthouse loft that overlooks South Beach and the Atlantic Ocean.\n\nI cringe and keep brushing the knot out of my dark brown hair. Hair that's way too long for its own good. Claire-Ann won't dare let me cut it; no way, no how.\n\n\"Why does she always call you 'Squirt?'\" my best friend, Katy Kingston, asks from my bed. She's sprawled out painting her nails with my Club Monaco Nail Lacquer Duo of Froth and Wave. I picked it up at the photo shoot yesterday afternoon for Fendi Casa Designs, a local Miami Beach furniture designer. I was lying on this sand-colored satin couch with my hand draped over my face. To hide my slightly crooked schnoz, no doubt.\n\nI reach for my bottle of Tommy Girl and spritz a stream on my neck and chest. To hell with that crap about spray, delay, and walk away crap. If I pay good money for perfume, it's going on me. It's this thing I have for smells. Or rather, my fear that I'll smell. Shower time prior to an evening out is a ritual in itself for me. Deodorant soap like Lever, Dial, or Irish Spring, followed by a luffaing with Avon Brown Sugar body scrub. Then there's the whole lather, rinse, repeat, condition with the Biolage Energizing Shampoo and Detangling Solution Conditioner I buy religiously. Once I'm out of the shower, it's time for clear gel stick deodorant, followed by a good blast of Secret spray, a generous spread of Avon's African shea butter lotion and Aveda foot relief. I also overdo it on the facial moisturization so as to not have to resort to face lifts when I'm in my late forties (like my mother.) First, a layer of Clinique's Skin Texture lotion, followed by their Moisture Surge and a good dabbling around with the Daily Eye Benefits. Am I the walking poster child for Sephora or what?\n\nBut back to Katy's question instead of cataloging the products spread out before me. \"Claire-Ann calls me 'Squirt' in reference to my conception.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Frozen Pop. Sperm donor. Get it. Squirt.\"\n\n\"Ohhhh, that's right! I keep forgetting that. Shit, Chai, don't you ever wonder who the guy was?\"\n\nI shrug as I reach for my lipstick. It's always been Claire-Ann and me... no one else. \"You can't miss what you've never had, you know? I mean, I know he was a student in New York back in the late 80s and was supposedly becoming a doctor. That's all I really need to know.\"\n\nMaybe that's why I have this internal itch to go into the medical profession myself. Seems like the Frozen Pop passed on his learning genes. God knows, I certainly didn't get my academic achievement from high school drop-out, Claire-Ann.\n\nKaty blows on her wet nails and leans back on my bed. \"See, if it were me, I'd have to, like, call the Sperm Bank of New York and find out who the swimmers belonged to. What my roots and heritage are.\"\n\n\"Roots and heritage? Are you Alex Hailey? You should be in drama club instead of me,\" I say with a laugh. \"It's pretty simple. Claire-Ann had reached a point in her life where she wanted off the drugs and wanted a baby. She bought a test tube and voila, Instant Chai.\"\n\n\"You're so blas\u00e9 about it.\"\n\n\"Why shouldn't I be? It's not like I can change it.\"\n\n\"It's just so...weird, Chai.\"\n\n\"It's never been an issue, honestly.\"\n\nKaty tosses her short, bobbed blonde hair around. \"I couldn't go through life not knowing who my dad is.\"\n\nI drop the silver lipstick case onto the table. \"That's 'cause your dad is one of the richest men in Miami.\"\n\nThis time it's Katy's turn to shrug. Kathryn Irene Kingston lives the perfect life, ensconced in her Star Island mansion (next door to JaRule\u2014actually, he's just renting, but still...), her mom works for the Miami Beach Tourism Bureau and her rich father lavishes them with expensive gifts galore. Not that I want that, but her mom cooks a mean pot roast, helps Katy with her homework, and encourages her to go to college instead of pushing her toward the cutthroat world of fashion modeling.\n\n\"Chai, are you ready?\" Claire-Ann shouts again. Only this time, I hear her coming up the stairs.\n\n\"I'm almost done.\"\n\n\"Wear the Jimmy Choo gold sandals I bought you last week. They'll make your legs look a mile long. You need to be taller.\"\n\nRight, because models have to be a certain weight and height. Heaven forbid that my five-eight isn't considered Glamazon enough. I'm sure that's my father's fault.\n\nClaire-Ann enters my bedroom decked out in hip BCBG fashion (that's probably too young-looking for her, but she wears it well) and her makeup draw perfectly on her too-too tightly pulled face. Damn Dr. Sheldon for the last face lift that makes her appear slightly Asian.\n\n\"Hey, Katy. You going with us, honey?\" Claire-Ann asks.\n\n\"Not tonight. I have a date with Rick Sommers.\"\n\n\"On a Thursday night?\" I ask, like it's some big deal for anyone in our clique to go out on a school night. God knows Claire-Ann drags me out enough when I should be doing homework.\n\n\"It's a study date,\" Katy says, beaming. She's been digging Rick for a time now. Good for her making some headway with him.\n\nI sigh. Katy gets to do real high school things, like study and go on dates\u2014with one of the hottest hunks in school\u2014and go to bed at a decent hour. Me, I'm up all night, in the gym first thing in the morning, and then I hit the ground running with school, photo shoots, and just being Claire-Ann's daughter, which is a full-time job in itself. It's amazing I can keep up this pace she's got me on without major medication. Besides, the guys at school who've shown interest in me only pay attention to me because of my quasi-celebrity status. High school boys are so stupid. I can't wait to get to college.\n\n\"Rick's the guy Chai says you've got the hots for?\" Claire-Ann prods.\n\n\"Mom!\" She hates when I address her that way.\n\nShe hands me a glass of champagne. \"Well, that's what you told me. Remember to use a condom, Katy.\"\n\nKaty rolls her eyes and laughs. She thinks Claire-Ann is the coolest and that I'm totally lucky to have a mom like her. Me, I want a real mom, not a girlfriend.\n\nClaire-Ann waggles the crystal flute at me. \"Here, have some before we leave. This is a big night.\"\n\nBig indeed. It's Betty Ford Night at Priv\u00e9, a hot club attached to Opium Garden down below Fifth Street that allows eighteen plus in on week nights. I tamp down my disgust at poking fun of the long ago-former first lady's penchant for alcohol. Hell, I don't even get carded there, or anywhere for that matter. Age has never been an issue for me. I look older than my years and when I'm with Claire-Ann, no one questions.\n\nAt Priv\u00e9, you can usually spot a good portion of the Miami Dolphins' defensive core puffing away on cigars and pounding back expensive cocktails, as well as various Heat players and Marlins hitters, not to mention the hottest people in the hip-hop music scene. Miami Beach is da bomb, da place. And Priv\u00e9 is a see-and-be-seen sort of establishment. No cutoff jeans and tourist shirts there.\n\nTonight, Claire-Ann is in search of producers to pitch her new reality TV show idea, as well as a photographer who'll make me his prot\u00e9g\u00e9e. Both ideas are like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack. I just want to take a long, hot bath and read the latest David Baldacci novel Katy brought me.\n\n\"I don't want champagne,\" I say, picking up the convo with my mom. Champagne again. Always champagne with Claire-Ann. The stuff gives me a headache. Unlike other people my age who would be super-psyched at being supplied booze by their parents. To me it's no big deal when it's handed to you. Where's the challenge? How is that rebelling?\n\nFor me, rebellion comes in the form of an online Common Application aimed at Columbia University's Admissions Office.\n\nBut we won't tell Claire-Ann about that just yet.\n\nIt's not that I hate my mother. I don't. At all. I love her and she's a great person. Thing is, she wants me to be her. She'd give nothing more than for me to be a top fashion model at eighteen\u2014just like she was. Of course, Claire-Ann was escaping an abusive, dysfunctional family in Ohio when she broke free and got discovered in New York in the late 70s. She had that feathered, fashionable-then hair that would've made Farrah Fawcett look like a hag. I mean, I give the modeling my all\u2014for Claire-Ann's sake\u2014and I try to succeed, but in the past year since I started this whole \"Chai needs to be a model\" thing, I seem to only get jobs that her friends hire for or ones that feature poses that hide my\u2014\n\n\"Put a little more base and powder on the top of your nose, sweetie, to de-emphasize that crook.\" Claire-Ann leans in and reaches for the large makeup brush. \"Let me.\"\n\nHastily, I shove her away and bite on my bottom lip. Yes, okay, I have a bit of a crooked nose! I know it, Katy knows it, everyone at school knows it, Claire-Ann knows it, and so do most of the photographers in the Miami area. It's not like I'm disfigured, though. Enough with the exaggeration and dramatics. God knows I've had to learn to pose properly to make sure it doesn't take over the photos.\n\nI mean, look at Owen Wilson. He's a total babe who gets plenty of movie deals and his nose looks like it survived a car wreck or a crack with a baseball bat. Why is my nose a constant topic of conversation?\n\nClaire-Ann even took me in\u2014I thought we were going in for one of her checkups\u2014to Dr. Sheldon for a consultation for rhinoplasty. I'm sorry, but this is the nose I was born with and it's not that bad! Cameron Diaz's nose is a little crooked, too, but it never kept her from getting movie roles. It's part of her charm. Just like Tyra Banks and her big-ass forehead that's made her millions. Besides, I'm certainly not spending weeks with black eyes and bandages and wicked pain just so my nose won't stand out so much. That's so not me.\n\nNevertheless, I smear the Mac foundation on my nose and blend with a sponge as I stare at myself in the mirror. Actually, I've never thought being a model was my calling in life. I don't consider myself as particularly pretty or traffic stopping, like my mother. Even after five plastic surgeries, she's still head turningly gorgeous.\n\nWhen I was little, I successfully eluded many of her attempts to enter me into beauty pageants and modeling competitions. But when I hit sixteen and my boobs fully developed and my waist started curving in just right, Claire-Ann was determined I follow in her footsteps.\n\nMy eyes shift up now and I meet her ice blue stare. Not ice blue meaning she's pissed at me. Ice blue in that her eyes are the color of the Arctic waters\u2014her true trademark and the one thing that made her stand out in the fashion crowds of the 80s. Hypnotic. Mesmerizing. Million-dollar orbs.\n\n\"That's much better,\" she says, smiling at me in the reflection. \"You sure as shit didn't get that nose from me.\"\n\nNo, I didn't. I didn't get a whole hell of a lot from Claire-Ann except my figure. My dark eyes, dark hair and yes, the nose that offends all came from the Frozen Pop. All right, the nose isn't that bad, but with Claire-Ann always pointing it out to me my whole life, I feel like it must look like Gerard Depardieu or something to her. Hmmm...maybe he was the sperm donor?\n\n\"So who are you guys hoping to meet tonight?\" Katy asks. \"Big date with Craig, Claire-Ann?\"\n\n\"No, Craig's nothing serious.\" Claire-Ann flips her dark blonde hair over her shoulder and examines her makeup in the mirror. \"But I did get wind that a couple of producers and some big name photographers will be there this evening.\"\n\nI sigh extra hard. Craig, a.k.a. Guy of the Moment. He's an investment banker in Miami who has been wooing my mother. I think she's just into him for the sex. And it's me who has to hear them when they're going at it. Ewww! The building's built to withstand hurricane-force winds, but not Claire-Ann's ecstatic shrieks.\n\n\"What kind of producers?\" Katy asks. She digs conversing with my mother. To her it's like watching The View in person.\n\n\"Well, my sources tell me there's a guy from Bravo who's scouting for his next big reality show. And since Miami Beach is such a hot locale, what better place to look than here?\"\n\n\"Why would we care about a reality TV producer?\" I ask.\n\nWith great excitement, Claire-Ann says, \"So we can get our own show! Mother and daughter in the modeling industry. If they can make stars out of a bunch of Orange County housewives and trashy people from the Jersey Shore, why not us? It'll be fabulous.\"\n\n\"Absolutely not! I'm not going to be fodder for people's entertainment pleasure. Jesus, Claire-Ann, it's bad enough you send me on these shoots and stuff without\u2014\" I stop myself before I tell her what I really feel like doing this whole modeling thing. The pained look on her face\u2014which is a miracle, considering all of the Botox\u2014says I've almost crossed the line. \"I only mean that it's, like, been done before.\"\n\nHer left brow lifts. \"Who?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but surely it's been done.\"\n\nShe waves me off. \"We'll be better than anything that's been on before.\"\n\nPoor Claire-Ann. The camera doesn't love her like it once did, but she still has feelings for it. Unrequited love.\n\nI stand and smooth out the Prada pants I borrowed from Claire-Ann. I've got them paired with a matching Prada top, square neckline with a seamed Empire waist. The creamy ivory fabric looks great on my freshly spray-tanned skin. It may be early March in South Beach, but I've had nada time to get any sun with the schedule I've been keeping. It's all I can do to keep up my grades, hoping Columbia University will deem me suitable for entrance into their freshman class in the fall.\n\nClaire-Ann strokes my long hair and smiles approvingly. \"There's my lovely girl. I'll meet you downstairs. Katy, we can drop you off on the way if you want.\"\n\n\"That's okay, Claire-Ann. I've got my car,\" Katy says. She hops off the bed and hands over the Vogue magazine that's been sitting beside her. \"Too bad you have to go to this party and can't stay home gawking at your boyfriend.\"\n\n\"My boyfriend? What the\u2014\"\n\nI look at the magazine and nearly gasp when I see the photo she's pointing out. Ooo, hadn't seen that yet. Droolingly handsome, barefoot Ty Willingham dressed in white linen Armani in a two-page spread for A|X. The guy's got piercing chocolate eyes, a stern chin with his signature cleft in it, and thick, shiny black hair. My fingers could get lost in that mop for at least a week. No one on earth should be allowed to look that fucking amazing.\n\nExcept maybe male super model extraordinaire, Ty Willingham.\n\nI can't believe this guy is my age.\n\n\"God, I wish he were my boyfriend,\" I say with a bit of a sigh. \"I wouldn't have to think twice about giving him my virginity.\"\n\nKaty lights up. \"You know, I read on the InsaneMiami blog that he and his family are moving here. His father is this power stock broker in Manhattan who had a heart attack, so the doctors told him to move to a warmer climate.\"\n\nMy heart trips over itself at the thought of running into Ty Willingham on Ocean Drive or at one of the hotel bars on Collins. Of meeting him and sharing a moment. Of falling at his feet and admitting that I have a poster of him on the inside of my closet door. So juvenile of me, but a girl can dream.\n\n\"Chai Devareaux!\" Claire-Ann calls out from the lower level. \"Get your skinny little ass down here now! Our car service is waiting!\"\n\n\"Wish me luck tonight,\" I say to Katy as I grab my Kate Spade clutch. \"Claire-Ann's convinced, as you saw, that tonight's the night I get discovered.\"\n\nKaty screws up her face. \"But is that what you want?\"\n\nI let out a long breath. \"It's what Claire-Ann wants. And as long as I'm under her roof, living off her money and all that stuff, I've got to do as she says. Besides, I'm not in drama class for nothing. I can act exactly like she wants: mature, sophisticated, fashionable, and most of all, interested.\"\n\n\"Okay, strut your stuff, g'friend. If there's one thing you did inherit from her, it's your walk. Go get 'em, babe!\"\n\nHeading down the stairs, I stand tall and confident, ready to face the long evening ahead. Underneath the foofed hair and perfect makeup is the real me. The girl who simply wants to go to college, get away from her mom, be on her own. The woman beneath the fa\u00e7ade who longs to be a doctor, help others, and make a difference.\n\nFor tonight\u2014and for the next few weeks (until I hear from Columbia) I'll suck it up and keep playing the game. I've done so well up until now.\n\nAt the base of the staircase, Claire-Ann puts her hand over her heart. \"You truly are breathtaking, sweetie.\"\n\nAnd somehow, I feel like I am.\n\nPurchase Poser." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Oddjobs 2.5) Last Christmas", + "author": "Heide Goody", + "genres": [ + "urban fantasy", + "humor", + "short story" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Last Christmas", + "text": "Luke believed in Father Christmas, so when he heard the scraping at his window on Christmas Eve he knew who was out there.\n\nIf asked who brought the presents on Christmas night, Luke knew that it was the jolly fat man with his sleigh and his reindeer. He knew that the other kids in his year 6 class, the ones with cruel, inept or stubbornly honest parents, said that there was no Santa and that it was just your parents pretending, but Luke didn't buy that explanation. Luke had seen Father Christmas on TV, had a received an e-mail from him the year before last, he'd seen the videos of children flying out to meet him in Lapland. The choice between believing in a little magic or a worldwide adult conspiracy would always tip in magic's favour. And if there were cracks in the Santa logic or grey areas in Luke's belief then he papered over those cracks and ignored those uncertainties as any religious person would.\n\nLuke believed in Father Christmas but that didn't stop him being frightened by the sound. He hunkered down on his side, bunched his quilt under his neck, screwed his eyes shut and pretended to be sleep or dead or invisible.\n\nHe sees you when you're sleeping, thought Luke. He knows when you're awake.\n\nThe scratching was followed by the softer sound of the window opening. A waft of chilly night air brushed over his exposed ear. Luke didn't move. There was a hard sound, like wooden heels stepping onto his window sill, the radiator and then much more quietly onto the carpet floor. Luke didn't move. Father Christmas \u2013 it must be Father Christmas, it must \u2013 stood in the centre of Luke's bedroom, his hard shoes brushing against the toys that littered the limited floor space. Father Christmas breathed like he had a blocked nose, a raspy, throaty sound. Breathing, surveying. Luke didn't move.\n\nAnd then Father Christmas approached and Luke's petrified mind retreated further down. He was asleep. He was dead. He was invisible.\n\nWarm breath now played over Luke's exposed ear. It crept into Luke's nostrils. The smell was dense, built up of layers of sweat and filth and old food. And for a split second, Luke considered that the figure crouched over him might not be Father Christmas after all\u2026\n\nA hand with nails \u2013 with claws \u2013 grabbed Luke's shoulder and flipped him over. He opened his mouth to shout and something hard and rectangular was slammed into his chest \u2013 a box? \u2013 and as Luke drew another breath, he was swung upside down and his face mushed against a mass of foetid fur, hide and muscle.\n\nWith two steps, the thing that had him was on the window sill again. A push and a swing and Luke was in the frozen air and being hauled upwards, up the outside of Cleveland Tower. Survival instincts over-ruled fear and Luke opened his eyes. Holloway Circus roundabout was hundreds of feet below him, the concrete pagoda at its centre a tiny spire, the hour hand in the clock of the roundabout. Orange street lights and the neon frontages of the fast food outlets across the road looked almost festive. Directly below him was the ragged hide of the monster that held him. He saw its hoofs, sure and swift, finding purchase in the section gaps of the tower block wall.\n\nA blast of wind stung Luke's and drew blurry tears.\n\nHe cried out as the thing bounded over the lip of the building and onto the roof. The creature dropped Luke. He rolled onto the roof, still instinctively clutching the box that had been thrust into his arms. He coughed and gasped and tried to blink away his tears. The cold bit into him. There was no snow in the air but it felt as if there should be.\n\nThe creature \u2013 it must have been at least eight feet tall, not including the huge curved horns \u2013 stalked across the roof. The children in the cage began to keen and sob as the thing approached. It was a tall cage but barely wide enough for the four children within. Luke saw the dirty, ancient leather straps that looped round from the top of the cage to the middle. Shoulder straps. So the beast could carry it. Carry its catch.\n\nThe creature slide a greasy bolt on the roof of the cage, opened it and turned to Luke.\n\nLuke saw its face for the first time \u2013 the snout, the eyes, the tongue.\n\nKrampus, thought Luke, too scared and addled to remember where he had even heard the name but perfectly aware of what the word meant and of what was going to happen to him now.\n\n\"Excuse me, sir. Is that your cage?\" called a voice from across the roof, which was not what Luke expected to happen next at all.\n\nA man and a woman stood by the door to the stairs. The white man was tall and broad-shouldered, like a WWE wrestler. The Asian woman was positively tiny in comparison. The man wore a suit and tie. The tiny woman wore a tiny black party dress that, in Luke's prepubescent opinion, didn't cover as much flesh as it should. Luke was shivering in his thin pyjamas. He couldn't imagine the woman was much warmer.\n\nThe Krampus wheeled towards them and with clawed arms spread wide hissed threateningly.\n\n\"Not sure if I quite got that,\" said the man, walking towards the beast. \"I asked you if this was your cage.\"\n\nThe Krampus mumbled something around his massive voice-strangling tongue that sounded like, \"Por thlagn meschth Sheol-Niggurauth. Pon thfyeh. Pon thfyeh.\"\n\nThe man gave an uncomprehending shrug and turned back to the woman, who was gripping the edge of the doorway and not going anywhere.\n\n\"Help me out, Nina. I struggle at the best of time. But with the tongue and the whole speech impediment, I haven't a clue.\"\n\n\"You need help?\" she replied and Luke realised she was very drunk. \"I was quite happy in that bar, Rod, and you made me climb five hundred flights of stairs to \u2013\"\n\n\"It wasn't five hundred flights. There's no building with five hundred \u2013\"\n\n\"- five hundred flights of stairs,\" she insisted, \"and expect me to speak Venislarn goat dialects! It's bloody freezing up here if you hadn't noticed!\"\n\n\"I think you can put your own needs aside for just one moment.\"\n\n\"But it's Christmas.\"\n\n\"A time for a charity and a spot of human kindness,\" the man, Rod, sighed and turned back to the Krampus.\n\n\"Sorry about this.\" He flashed an ID card at the monster. \"If you could try to speak in English. My colleague started the office party a little early. This. Your cage?\"\n\nThe Krampus gestured. Yes, of course it was his bloody cage.\n\n\"Right,\" said Rod. He gave Luke a small reassuring smile and made soothing gestures to the terrified kids in the cage. \"And you are collecting these for\u2026?\"\n\n\"Myem-un per Yoth-Sheol-Niggurauth. Skeidl kro \u2013\"\n\n\"English, please.\"\n\n\"Moth-er,\" it lisped horribly. \"Sheol-Niggurauth. Black Beast with Thousand Young, Suckler of Mis-er-y.\"\n\n\"Thought so,\" said Rod. He dipped into his jacket pocket for a sheet of paper and, as he did, Luke saw that the big guy had a pistol holstered under there like he was a spy or a cop or something. James Bond versus the Krampus.\n\nRod unfolded the piece of paper, checked the details on it and then held it out for the Krampus to read.\n\n\"Under the Treaty of Birmingham as instated by the court of Yo-Morgantus \u2013\"\n\n\"Yoch leis kod junq!\" spat the Krampus defiantly and grabbed his hairy crotch for emphasis.\n\n\"Do you kiss your mom with that mouth?\" retorted Nina.\n\n\"Dho set ruvae.\"\n\n\"What? Never?\" said Nina. \"Aw. I mean, I know there's a thousand of you but everyone needs some quality time with their mom.\"\n\n\"Fat hurrech bu'nin Mair-Rauth!\"\n\n\"- As instated by the court of Yo-Morgantus,\" persevered Rod, \"you have a fixed quota for the year.\"\n\n\"Zha! Is end of year,\" said the Krampus.\n\n\"Not for another\u2026\" He consulted his wristwatch. \"It's not even nine o'clock, so it's eight days until new year. Then you can start fishing again.\"\n\n\"But is nee-ded,\" said the Krampus thickly and licked his lips with that monstrous tongue. The tip of his tongue even dipped inside his crooked nostril for a moment or two and Luke, despite his fear, was impressed by that.\n\n\"Needed for what?\" said Rod.\n\n\"To give.\"\n\n\"Give what?\"\n\n\"Give heart.\" The Krampus mimed eating an apple except it wasn't apples he was collecting. Not by a long shot. \"Give heart to moth-er. Special gift.\"\n\n\"Well, we all like to give our mum a special something for Christmas.\"\n\n\"Do they know it's Christmas time at all?\" sang Nina apropos of nothing.\n\n\"But,\" said Rod, in the adult tones of one who knew they were doing all the work (Luke's mom used it all the time), \"you're going to have to throw these ones back. Rules.\"\n\n\"Shut clau!\"\n\n\"Your god's rules. If mummy Niggurauth wants to take the matter up with Lord Morgantus then that's for her to sort out. You and us, we're just the little people. So, get the kids out of the cage.\"\n\nThe Krampus turned to his haul with a growl of frustration and then turned back to Rod imploringly.\n\n\"But is naughty children.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\nThe Krampus reached through the bars of the cage and grabbed the tallest girl by the arm. She squealed and struggled.\n\n\"Is troll,\" said the Krampus. \"Puts pic-ture of school friend's vos glun'u on in-ter-net.\"\n\n\"Did she?\" said Nina, shocked.\n\n\"Snap-chat,\" said the Krampus.\n\n\"Doesn't matter,\" said Rod.\n\nThe Krampus grabbed a lad who was trying to cower at the back of the cage.\n\n\"Hit Ger-man Shepherd with stones.\"\n\n\"A dog?\" asked Rod. \"Or\u2026 or an actual shepherd?\"\n\n\"Called Wolfie.\"\n\n\"Yep. Still not narrowed it down. Mate, listen. They might be the naughtiest kids in the city but they're not yours. Let them out now.\"\n\nThe Krampus strode towards Luke. Luke shuffled a foot back, the box tumbling from his lap but he found himself trapped between the Krampus and the edge of the roof. The Krampus pointed a wickedly long nail at him.\n\n\"Bar-gain,\" it said.\n\n\"What?\" Luke whispered.\n\n\"You can't have him,\" said Rod.\n\n\"Bar-gain!\" growled the Krampus.\n\n\"Just shoot it!\" yelled Luke. \"Shoot it!\"\n\nThe Krampus cast an enraged glare at Rod.\n\n\"Byach, muda khi umlaq!\" it swore furiously.\n\n\"What did you say?\" slurred Nina as though only now becoming conscious of the situation. \"What did you call me?\"\n\n\"Muda khi umlaq, lat wei!\"\n\n\"F'ing fighting talk,\" she snarled. \"You'd better start playing ball or we're gonna take this outside.\"\n\n\"We are outside,\" pointed out Rod.\n\nNina looked around herself slowly and nodded in reluctant agreement.\n\n\"You'd better start playing ball,\" she told the Krampus, \"or we're gonna take this inside, ya hear?\"\n\nBy this time, the Krampus had rooted around under the rags and fur that covered its body and produced an old-fashioned device with chunky buttons.\n\n\"Bar-gain,\" said the Krampus and clicked the device. It hissed for a second and then Luke heard himself, heard his own voice say, \"No, I would. I'd give anything for a PS4.\"\n\nThe Krampus clicked it off. Luke stared.\n\n\"We were just talking,\" he said. \"Josh has got one. I've only got an Xbox. We were just talking.\"\n\n\"Bar-gain,\" said the Krampus and stamped its hoof.\n\nFor the first time, Luke looked properly at the box the Krampus had forced upon him. It had been bashed and battered and the Christmas wrapping paper, which look as if it had been applied by someone without eyes or hands had mostly ripped away. Beneath the paper, the logo and image on the cover were unmistakeable. It was a Playstation console.\n\n\"But\u2026\"\n\nRod was double-checking his sheet of paper.\n\n\"Well, technically,\" he said, \"items offered in trade aren't part of the quota system.\"\n\n\"But\u2026\"\n\n\"What?\" said Nina. \"Fuzz-face is allowed to take him?\"\n\nRod gave her a helpless look and blew out his cheeks.\n\n\"He is.\"\n\n\"You can't let him!\" shouted Luke.\n\nHe looked at the children in the cage. An inkling that they were saved and he was not was beginning to dawn on certain faces. Luke despised them all and would have traded them in a heartbeat. Heartbeat. His heart.\n\n\"You can't!\" he screamed but Luke could see by the adults' faces that they were going to let the beast have him. And so could the Krampus.\n\nThe shaggy goat-faced giant went to the cage, opened the door and, one-by-one, hoisted the children out and deposited them in on the exposed roof in their onesies, their dressing gowns and their slippers. Each one was a stab in Luke's heart.\n\nRod clicked his fingers and gestured for the children to come over to him. He ushered them on towards Nina and the door.\n\nLuke kicked at the badly-wrapped present he had unfairly trade his life for and then spotted something.\n\n\"Hey!\" he shouted. \"This is a Playstation 3.\"\n\n\"Pff!\" spat the Krampus and waved his complaint aside.\n\n\"It's a PS3,\" he repeated. \"I wanted a PS4.\"\n\n\"Is good present,\" said the Krampus.\n\n\"I wouldn't give you a quid for this tat.\"\n\nThe Krampus stomped over.\n\n\"Is box. Is game. Bar-gain,\" he snarled with a fearsome finality.\n\n\"It isn't the same though, is it?\" said Nina, stepping from the shelter of the doorway for the first time and making her way across the roof on unstable high heels. \"Is it, Rod?\"\n\n\"Don't ask me,\" said Rod. \"Last games machine I had was a ZX Spectrum.\"\n\n\"They couldn't be more different. The PS4 has got a completely new architecture. It's hundreds of times more powerful than the 3. And the controller is infinitely better.\"\n\n\"Is good present,\" said the Krampus but there was a confusion in his eyes.\n\n\"It's not what he wanted.\"\n\n\"Man in shop said\u2026\"\n\n\"It's not what he wanted,\" said Rod.\n\n\"The deal's off,\" said Nina.\n\nThe Krampus' monstrous mouth worked in growing bewilderment and annoyance. He looked at the children he had already given up and the boy he was now about to lose.\n\n\"No!\" he shouted. \"Bar-gain! Playsta-tion! Mine!\"\n\n\"You want to make a complaint,\" said Rod, \"you come down to the office after the bank holiday.\"\n\n\"Bank hol-i\u2026? No! Mine!\"\n\nLuke saw the big man's hand rise towards the holster in his jacket but he was too slow. The Krampus' jaw distended impossibly and it produced a discordant roar of defiance, its tongue flapping about like a flag in the wind, before the creature turned, sprinted at Luke, scooped him up and leapt from the roof.\n\nRod ran to the edge of the roof, gun drawn. The goat beast, the Krol-Rauth or Krampus, was falling away towards the Holloway roundabout. With impossible strength, it struck out with its hoofs, skidded down the concrete pagoda at the roundabout's centre and bounded across to the far pavement. Nina could see the indecision in Rod's body language.\n\n\"And the answer's no,\" she said.\n\n\"You don't know that,\" he said.\n\n\"You'd be street pizza.\"\n\n\"But maybe I could\u2026 angle myself and grab the flags outside the Radisson Hotel or\u2026\" He saw a windblown flap of paper near his feet and picked it up. \"Bugger.\" He ran for the stairs.\n\n\"You lot, downstairs,\" Nina instructed the freed children and herded them ahead of her. Partway down the stairs, they passed a woman coming slowly up the stairs.\n\n\"Do you like children?\" said Nina.\n\n\"Do I what?\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Nina. \"Here are some free children. They're yours.\"\n\n\"They're not my children.\"\n\n\"Stay with her,\" Nina told them and ran on.\n\n\"They're not mine!\" yelled the woman but Nina was gone, running as fast as she could on high heels and with a skinful of alcohol inside her. She wished she had asked Rod for a piggy back, but suspected that travel sickness would rapidly follow, and it might put a considerable dent in their working relationship if she honked down his neck.\n\nFive hundred flights of stairs later (or something that felt very much like it) she ran out onto the street. Rod was long gone. A group of youths waited for the lights to change so that they could cross Suffolk Street.\n\n\"Hey, you! Your trainers. Give them to me,\" she said to the smallest one.\n\n\"Gotta be shittin' me. Get lost,\" said the youth.\n\nNina bent over to catch her breath and considered using vomit as a tactical weapon.\n\nThe youngest's mate nudged him. \"Hundred and you might be talkin',\" he said.\n\nNina rolled her eyes. \"I am not paying a hundred pounds for second-hand toe cheese.\" She dug in her pocket. \"Fifty's all I've got, and you can have these as well.\" She slipped out of her high heels. A look passed between the small youth and his mate.\n\nMoments later, she was wearing luminous trainers and sprinting out towards New Street the still twinkling lights of the pedestrianised shopping area.\n\nLuke had seen The Snowman and, although perhaps he was beyond the age to be entranced by such whimsical and simplistic cartoons, he had always been transported by the notion of the boy and his snowman, flying through the night air to Father Christmas' North Pole home. Being hauled across the city roofs by a galloping Krampus didn't compare at all. The goat-monster bounced, leapt and tumbled its grip around Luke's middle simultaneously painfully tight and dangerously loose.\n\nLuke heard the beep of taxi horns and the roars of rooftop ducts, he caught glimpses of headlights, Christmas lights and the whole world caught in the vast mirrored frontage of New Street station and suddenly they had stopped.\n\nThe Krampus perched on a rooftop. It was a wooden, snow-covered rooftop and Father Christmas stood next to them. However, the snow was painted on and Father Christmas was a life-sized effigy in plastic or something.\n\nLuke gasped for breath and groaned at the pain in his ribs and stomach. They had come to a stop on top of one of the stalls in the German market. Luke looked up and down the hill. Yes, he recognised the place. Up the hill, under blue and white snowflake Christmas lights, the wooden huts of stollen stalls, hot dog vendors, toy-sellers and mulled wine bars, stretched up towards the Town Hall and the big carousel ride. Down the hill, pretzel-mongers, market-traders and knick-knack merchants led down to the Bullring and the bronze bull statue (which this year had been dressed up as a Christmas pudding and didn't look at all pleased about it). If Luke remembered correctly, the large hut they had come to rest on was a beer hall. Shoppers and revellers and those who could multi-task and do both still thronged the stalls. None looked up at Luke.\n\n\"Put me down, please,\" he asked the Krampus.\n\nThe Krampus shook him to silence him and scoured the local area.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" said Luke.\n\n\"Shop,\" growled the Krampus and, rolling Luke under his arm like so much laundry, leapt again.\n\nRod was nowhere in sight but she ran anyway, phoning his number as she did.\n\n\"Campbell,\" he answered.\n\n\"Where are you?\"\n\n\"Following a hunch.\"\n\n\"Yeah? I think he's heading to the German market,\" she panted in reply.\n\n\"Why? Cos he needs a snowflake bauble or a warm pretzel?\"\n\n\"Something one of the Fish Boys told me.\"\n\nShe heard Rod snort. Intelligence tips from wannabe gangstas with gills, half-Venislarn or not, were perhaps less than golden.\n\n\"And your hunch?\" she said, prepared to be equally dismissive.\n\n\"He dropped the receipt,\" said Rod.\n\nAt the upstairs floor customer service counter of PC Electrical, the Krampus clutched Luke tightly by the hand and tried to explain himself to the sales assistant.\n\n\"Must change present,\" growled the Krampus and waved the badly clawed box in the sales assistant's face.\n\n\"Sir, I'm afraid we can't exchange goods that have been used,\" said the sales assistant.\n\n\"Not used! Is wrong present!\" howled the Krampus. He leaned over the man, his tongue dragging across the counter top, leaving a trail of slime.\n\n\"Used or damaged, sir. The packaging is not intact.\"\n\nThe Krampus reared up and started to roar. Luke tugged on the monster's hand.\n\n\"What this, er, my dad really means,\" he said, \"is he would like someone to explain the difference between the games consoles.\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" beamed the sales assistant. \"I can do that. Tell me then, will you be wanting to access high definition video content from the device?\"\n\nThe Krampus gave a small shrug and made a vague slobbering noise.\n\n\"Pretend he knows nothing,\" said Luke. \"Take him through all the basics. Slowly. Really slowly.\"\n\nThe sales assistant looked at Luke.\n\n\"Why'd you come to the shops in your pyjamas?\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" said Luke, flicking a finger between himself and the Krampus.\n\nThe assistant shrugged.\n\n\"I understand the Krampus costume but this\u2026 Or are you meant to be a naughty child the Krampus has stolen?\"\n\n\"Not meant to be,\" said Luke.\n\nNina grabbed Rod's arm just as he was about the enter PC Electrical.\n\n\"Is he in there?\" she said.\n\n\"I'm just about to find out,\" he said. \"I was heading straight here and then I thought I saw something. Another creature. I thought it was Venislarn and then I realised it was just a horse skull on a stick, you know like a hobby horse and \u2013\" He did a double-take. \"You stopped to pick up gluhwein.\"\n\n\"My body chemistry was all out of whack,\" she said, sipping the cup of hot wine. \"I've come right down from my party mood.\"\n\n\"I hardly think that alcohol's going to help.\"\n\n\"It doesn't count as alcohol, it's a restorative. It was a Mair-Rauth.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The thing you saw,\" said Nina. \"The Mair-Rauth or Mari Lwyd. Billy Goat Gruff mentioned it on the roof. Another of Sheol-Niggurauth's offspring. I think there's some sort of sibling rivalry going on and, if the Fish Boys are to be believed, mummy has taken up residence right here in the \u2013\"\n\nThere was a muffled crash from within the shop and an alarm began to ring.\n\nThe two consular agents ran inside, both armed, he with a Glock pistol, she with a half-cup of mulled wine. They found the Krol-Rauth, Luke still firmly in his grip, furiously ripping stock from the shelves in a fit of wild unhappiness.\n\n\"I only wanted to explain the benefits of taking out a PC Electrical extended warranty guarantee,\" whimpered the sales assistant as he sheltered behind a display stand of laser printers.\n\nRod drew a bead on the creature, right between its horns. Killing Venislarn was generally a big no-no but this guy had crossed a line and was now pissing all over it.\n\n\"Freeze!\"\n\nThe Krol-Rauth turned, impotent fury in his eyes.\n\n\"Not fair!\" it roared.\n\n\"Come on now. We all get a bit over-excited at Christmas,\" said Nina. \"Why don't we go get a drink?\"\n\n\"Un-fair exchange pol-i-cy!\"\n\n\"Been there, done that,\" Rod agreed.\n\n\"Kod junq,\" it swore miserably but they could see that the fight had gone from him.\n\nThe big guy took Luke's hand as they left the store. Luke was ten years old and any bloke who tried to hold his hand would normally be due a swift kick in the shins and a shout of \"Stranger danger!\" but Luke was tired and aching and just wanted to go home.\n\nThe Krampus followed with a box he'd snatched off the shelves.\n\nThe sales assistant ran out of the store.\n\n\"Sir, you can't just take\u2014\"\n\nThe Krampus smacked him aside viciously with the PS4.\n\n\"Gonna be bust now,\" mumbled Luke.\n\nThe woman, Nina, was speaking to the small crowd on the street drawn by the sound of the alarm.\n\n\"A bit of over-enthusiastic cosplay,\" she explained and waved Rod and the Krampus onward. \"Be about your revels, folks.\"\n\nThe Krampus froze and let out a huge low hiss. Nina followed its gaze.\n\nA bizarre figure, dressed in dirty white, tottered through the night time crowd. It was as tall as the Krampus, principally because the thing's head was being held aloft on a stick. Luke reflected that if he'd chosen to carry the skeleton of a horse's head around, he'd want it at the end of a stick, too.\n\n\"That's not real, is it?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" said Rod. \"Nothing says Christmas like an ugly ghost hobby horse.\"\n\nAs they watched, the horse skull head leaned in and nipped a woman's arm from behind. She whirled around and slapped her companion who looked confused and wounded as the horse went on its way, somehow managing to look as if it was laughing.\n\n\"It's the Mari Lwyd,\" said Nina. \"Mair-Rauth. And thankfully it's invisible.\"\n\n\"I can see it,\" said Luke.\n\nRod looked like he wanted to say something in response to that but held his tongue.\n\n\"Brother!\" spat the Krampus.\n\nThe horse made a rude snickering sound.\n\n\"Neh-umlaq defaid bhul-dho,\" it swore. Its voice was mellifluous and unaccented and came from some place other than that fleshless and tongueless horse mouth. For some reason, Luke found its perfectly measured human voice far scarier than the Krampus' slobbering lisp.\n\nWhatever it had said, Luke could see that it had angered the Krampus. To goad the Krampus further, the Mari Lwyd cantered briefly on the spot, a rather camp manoeuvre.\n\nNina strode up to it and slapped it on a bony shoulder.\n\n\"Listen up, horse boy. Me and my colleague, we're just observers in this touching reunion, but it's my duty to warn you, and your goaty brother that any unauthorised trouble is very much our business, so we're just going to hang around and chill while you exchange your Christmas cards. Keep it civil, yeah?\"\n\nNina and Rod stood with Luke beneath the eaves of the two-storey mulled wine stall upon which the Krampus had initially halted with Luke. Distorted Christmas music blasted out from speakers as, with an almost desperate cheer, the stall patrons drank mug after mug of Christmas spirit.\n\nNina looked up at the upper floors and sniffed. She sniffed the air and then sniffed her cup of gluhwein.\n\n\"Ah,\" she said, as though suddenly understanding and emptied the rest of her mulled wine out onto the pavement.\n\n\"What?\" said Rod.\n\n\"The Fish Boy tip was spot on.\"\n\n\"You are in a great deal of trouble,\" the Mari Lwyd said to the Krampus in its melodious tones. \"Where is your tribute?\"\n\nA troubled look passed across the Krampus's face. \"Got her fav-our-ite!\" it snarled, waving its pilfered games console towards where Luke hid behind Rod.\n\n\"One child? The heart of one child?\"\n\nThe Mari Lwyd broke into a fit of giggles. Its horsey teeth clattered together like a nightmarish xylophone. The Krampus strode forwards and pushed its face right up against its bony muzzle.\n\n\"What fun-ny?\" the Krampus bellowed. Its tongue quivered with rage and a passing man in a Santa hat gave it a playful tug which only enraged him further.\n\n\"You always were the slow one,\" said the horse-headed Mari Lwyd.\n\n\"Bar-gain!\" hissed the Krampus, lifting the battered PS4.\n\n\"He's not yours,\" said Rod.\n\n\"Mother may want him yet,\" said the Mari Lwyd.\n\n\"She's not having him,\" said Rod.\n\n\"Persiai ghorsri Yoth-Sheol-Niggurauth,\" said the Mari Lwyd sternly.\n\nLuke felt the change in the two people's \u2013 the two humans' \u2013 body language.\n\n\"But\u2026\" he said.\n\n\"I think this is going to be settled by a higher authority,\" said Nina.\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Rod.\n\n\"You lied,\" said Luke.\n\n\"Adults lie,\" said Nina.\n\nThe Mari Lwyd swept into the gluhwein stall and to the small spiral staircase behind the bar that led up to the otherwise inaccessible upper floor. The bar staff, all buxom jollity and seasonal warmth, either didn't notice or didn't need to. And, thinking that, Luke suddenly thought that those barmen and barmaids were oddly wooden and constrained in their movements, like Christmas nutcrackers, like the little carved people inside a cuckoo clock.\n\n\"I don't like this,\" he said.\n\n\"Then you're not stupid,\" said Nina, following the Mari Lwyd up the narrow stair where the loud music from the bar echoed loudly. \"This is the current residence of Sheol-Niggurauth. Black Beast with Thousand Young, Suckler of Misery.\"\n\n\"Why would a god of misery put itself in the middle of a happy, jolly Christmas market?\" said Rod.\n\n\"Clearly you've had different Christmases to me,\" said Nina. \"What's to like?\"\n\n\"Father Christmas,\" said Luke automatically.\n\n\"Free stuff, huh?\" said Nina.\n\n\"The magic of the season,\" said Rod.\n\nThe Mari Lwyd stopped at a closed door. Luke could hear the Krampus somewhere behind and below him on the stairs, bringing up the rear.\n\n\"Someone with opposable thumbs care to open this door?\" asked the Mari Lwyd.\n\nNina opened the door. The room beyond was gloomy and huge \u2013 far huger than was possible - and stunk of animal dung. The sound of a Christmas song reverberated through the floor.\n\n'What will your daddy do when he sees your mummy kissing Santa Claus? Ah-haaa.'\n\nThe filter of the wooden floor stripped the words of any life, the song of any cheer and, for the first time, Luke thought about that lyric and the bleakness it carried. This was only accentuated by the muffled sounds of the market; the stamp of feet, the grumbles of those short of time before the coming of Christmas day, the desperate buying of meaningless ornaments and treats to fill some undefined and unfillable hole.\n\nLuke's eyes slowly adjusted to the low light, and then he wasn't sure he welcomed the improvement to his vision. The creature that nearly filled the space looked like it had been composed of things left behind on a butcher's floor. There were hoofs and there were teeth and there were things that glistened wetly like uncooked liver. And there were nipples, lots of nipples. Luke wasn't sure what he felt about nipples but he wasn't happy with the idea of there being quite so many of them in such a confined space.\n\nOily liquid ran freely over Sheol-Niggurauth's body and Luke saw the creatures that swarmed over her massive form, licking at it. But the liquid pooled on the floor and poured through the gaps.\n\n\"The milk of human misery,\" said Nina. \"That's what they're serving downstairs.\"\n\n\"God milk?\" said Rod.\n\nThe sound of a thousand flies was suddenly in the air. A voice spoke out of the darkness, a voice that came from many throats \u2013 no, was made up of a multitude of sounds, none of them produced by any throat, scrapes and taps, the shifting of limbs, the buzzing of wings.\n\n\"AND WHAT ROUGH BEASTS ARE THESE, THEIR HOUR COME AT LAST?\"\n\n\"San-shu chuman'n, Yoth-Sheol-Niggurauth,\" said Nina and bowed deeply.\n\n\"San-shu chuman'n,\" echoed Rod and encouraged Luke to bow with him.\n\n\"AND WHAT HAVE MY FOOL OFFSPRING DONE TO ALERT THE ATTENTION OF THE CONSULAR MISSION?\"\n\n\"Mother, it's all Krol-Rauth's fault,\" said the Mari Lwyd. \"He never listens, you know that.\"\n\n\"SHOW ME WHAT TRIBUTE YOU HAVE BROUGHT, MY SON,\" said the Niggurauth to the Mari Lwyd.\n\n\"Oh yes, Mother,\" said the Mari Lwyd, \"I can't wait to show you what I have brought! I listened.\"\n\nWith a small, horsey ta dah the Mari Lwyd whisked aside part of its canopy and, with hands of string-tied bone, pulled out a plastic reel of what looked like ribbon, shiny and caramel brown.\n\n\"A recording of Fairytale of New York Kirsty MacColl made for a BBC friend in Cuba five days before she was killed.\"\n\n\"Very Christmassy,\" said Nina.\n\n\"Only five people have ever heard it,\" said the Mari Lywd. \"It's beautiful.\"\n\n\"YES\u2026\" said the enormous mother goddess approvingly.\n\nWith sudden violence, the Mari Lywd unspooled the tape, casting it over the wet floor and its mother's body. Creatures entwined themselves in it, ripping it apart, and when the Mari Lwyd was done it snapped the reel in half and threw it aside as the goddess's children sucked the remains of tape up like spaghetti.\n\n\"VERY GOOD,\" said Sheol-Niggurauth, rippling with pleasure. \"KROL-RAUTH, YOUR TRIBUTE.\"\n\nThe Krampus shuffled awkwardly.\n\n\"Boy!\" he said and pointed a claw at Luke. Luke clutched onto Rod's jacket for protection.\n\n\"A BOY? A HEART? ONE SOUL?\" The voiceless voice of the great Sheol-Niggurauth sighed. It was like the whole universe was disappointed. \"IS THAT ALL?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Rod suddenly, in the tone of a man who had surprised himself. \"There's more.\"\n\n\"Is there?\" said Luke.\n\n\"Is there?\" said Nina.\n\n\"Is there?\" said the Krampus.\n\n\"It's clear that Yoth-Sheol-Niggurauth is far more interested in the intangibles of human misery,\" said Rod, bringing Luke forward, mostly against his will.\n\nRod crouched down a short distance from the nearest twitching hoof and turned Luke to face him.\n\n\"Here's the thing,\" he said. \"Adults lie.\"\n\nLuke nodded.\n\n\"We lie all the time.\"\n\nLuke nodded.\n\n\"And Father Christmas is the biggest lie of all.\"\n\nLuke blinked. \"No. He's real.\"\n\n\"It's just your mum.\"\n\n\"But the US Air Force track him. There's an app.\"\n\n\"That's a lie too.\"\n\n\"The US Air Force lie?\"\n\n\"All the time. And if he's flying slow enough for the air force to track, he wouldn't have time to visit all the children of the world.\"\n\n\"Rudolph's nose allows him to fly faster than the speed of light and freeze time.\"\n\n\"Come on, mate. That doesn't even make scientific sense.\"\n\n\"But the carrot and the mince pie we leave out\u2026\"\n\n\"Your mum eats it.\"\n\n\"She doesn't like carrots.\"\n\n\"Then she bites the end off and throws it in the bin.\"\n\n\"But there's photos\u2026\"\n\n\"Men in false beards. Bad false beards.\"\n\nLuke hesitated, processing the possibilities.\n\n\"He must be real,\" he said eventually. \"If he's a lie then everyone's lying. And people only lie if there's a reason for it, if they're going to get something for it. If Father Christmas is a lie then he's getting credit for good stuff mums and dads are doing. And when children find out \u2013 if it is a lie \u2013 then they won't trust their parents to tell the truth ever again.\"\n\n\"The lie serves a very important purpose,\" said Nina, coming over.\n\n\"What?\" said Luke.\n\n\"To prepare you for the other lies.\" She crouched beside him. She seemed to have sobered up a little in all the excitement but the stink of alcohol still hung about her.\n\n\"What lies?\" said Luke.\n\n\"That adults know what they're doing,\" said Nina. \"That there's a kind and loving God who watches over us. That the monsters and demons aren't real. That everything is going to be all right in the end.\" She looked round at the vile creatures gathered about them in the vast dark. \"It's not going to be all right in the end, Luke. We're fucked.\"\n\nLuke looked from Nina to Rod. If these two were good cop and bad cop then he was the good cop but even he was saying\u2026\n\n\"OH, THIS IS DELICIOUS. A FINE TRIBUTE.\"\n\nLuke didn't understand. He turned towards the goddess, wondering what she was speaking about but he already knew. Something had changed within him. Something had been taken.\n\n\"There's no Father Christmas,\" he said emptily.\n\n\"BEAUTIFUL. YOU CHOSE VERY WELL INDEED, KROL-RAUTH. I AM PROUD,\" said the goddess.\n\nThe Krampus bowed and scraped low and eyed the Mari Lwyd triumphantly.\n\n\"YOU. HUMANS. YOU ARE NO LONGER NEEDED,\" said Sheol-Niggurauth but Luke wasn't listening any more.\n\nLuke fell asleep on Rod's shoulder somewhere on the way home. His face was smeared with dirt and maybe there were dirty tears on his cheeks. Nina couldn't tell. After discovering that she had drunk from the suppurated milk of a Venislarn goddess she decided the best thing to do was to wash it away with a half bottle of vodka. Purely a medical precaution she had told Rod.\n\nRod was not only a strong man but a master of certain skills and, after climbing what must have been at least five hundred flights of stairs, he managed to balance Luke on one shoulder while picking the lock to his flat one-handed.\n\nThe flat was quiet. Multi-coloured fairy lights around the Christmas tree were the only illumination in the living room. The remains of a mince pie and the munched end of a carrot sat on a plate next to the tree. Rod put the battered games console box with the other presents before carrying the sleeping boy through to his bedroom.\n\nWhile Rod put the boy back to bed, Nina nipped into the kitchen, swiped a Quality Street from the tub on the side and looked in the rubbish bin.\n\n\"You all right?\" said Rod.\n\n\"Shiny,\" said Nina and together they left without waking any member of the household.\n\nShe was in reflective mood as they walked down what was possibly slightly less than five hundred flights.\n\n\"A Playstation in exchange for your childhood. Not a bad trade.\"\n\n\"He'll bounce back,\" said Rod. \"Maybe. Belief's a powerful thing.\"\n\nHe waited a full two flights of stairs before he asked her, \"And what's that in your pocket?\"\n\n\"What?\" she said.\n\nRod gave her a look. \"You were rooting around in the bin.\"\n\nShe cleared her throat testily and pulled the half of carrot from her pocket.\n\n\"Removing incriminating evidence?\" said Rod.\n\n\"Fucking heart of gold, me,\" said Nina and took another swig from her bottle." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Wicked Witches of the Midwest 10) Merry Witchmas", + "author": "Amanda M. Lee", + "genres": [ + "paranormal", + "urban fantasy", + "cozy mystery", + "Christmas" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "18 years ago", + "text": "Do you hear that noise? Probably not, but let me tell you something: It's insipid. No, it's worse than that. It's infernal racket that should be outlawed. That's right. No one really cares about a holly, jolly anything. I certainly don't. And chestnuts roasting on an open fire? Yeah, that's a good revenge technique. It certainly doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the holiday season.\n\nNo, in truth, the only good thing about winters in Michigan is the snow. Ah, you might be wondering why a woman my age \u2013 I'm in my prime sixties, thank you, and I get younger every single day \u2013 would like snow. That's because I've picked up a new side business over the past few years. I plow snow. I have a big truck with a blade and everything.\n\nYes, that's right. My name is Tillie Winchester and I plow snow for a living. Okay, I'm also a witch and I make my own wine. I have a pot field on the back of the property, too, but I don't sell the product. I give it away to those in need and use a bit myself. It's medicinal. No, I swear it is. In truth, I don't make a lot of money plowing snow. I used to have paying clients, but they fired me because I had a few problems leaving mailboxes unscathed. They thought it was because I couldn't see properly. I let them believe that because they might press charges if they knew why I really run them over.\n\nThe government is out to get us, people. Mailboxes are merely a way to keep track of our locations until they can inject us with chips and watch our every move. I'm not making it up. I thought about becoming a spy before the notion of plowing great big piles of snow (and potentially burying evidence when hiding from the police) appealed to me, but the idea of helping the government is abhorrent. I would be a great spy, though. Don't kid yourself. I could definitely do it for a living. As for the mailboxes, I find most of them ugly and I'm merely trying to prevent my neighbors from enabling the government to complete its takeover. I'm doing them a service.\n\nNo, really.\n\n\"Aunt Tillie!\"\n\nMy niece Winnie is a good girl but her voice reminds me of fireworks in November. It's simply too loud and grating. It's also often unnecessary. I hear her calling me from the kitchen, but one of the good things about getting older is that you can fake hearing loss and no one will dare call you on it in case you find it insulting. I find everything insulting \u2013 and sometimes nothing insulting, depending on my mood \u2013 so my three nieces wisely refrain from pushing my buttons. They treat me like their goddess, which I heartily encourage.\n\n\"Aunt Tillie!\"\n\nI rolled my eyes as I flipped pages in the catalog. My three great-nieces, Bay, Clove and Thistle, thoughtfully left it behind \u2013 open to a page with some castle thing they desperately want to open under the tree Christmas morning \u2013 and I needed a distraction. Winnie sounded as if she wanted to give me a chore. I'm too old for chores. I can accomplish them, mind you. I'm still as fit as one of those tennis players I see whacking balls on the television \u2013 that sounds like a fun job, doesn't it? Whacking balls. I could do that professionally \u2013 but I have no interest in completing chores. I'm not lazy, I'm just smart about delegating my time. I only have so much of it left on this planet -- a good eighty years or so, I'm sure -- and I have no intention of doing what anyone else wants me to do with my time so limited.\n\n\"Aunt Tillie!\" Winnie was exasperated as she poked her blond head through the door that separates the living room and kitchen. Despite having a kid \u2013 and a husband who abandoned her \u2013 she's held up well in the looks department. I'm positive she gets that from me. \"Did you hear me calling you?\"\n\nI feigned surprise as I lifted my eyes and tilted my head to the side. \"Did you say something to me?\" Sometimes it's fun to mess with my nieces. They all handle things differently. Winnie is a planner and control freak, so the idea of me ignoring her is enough to send her over the edge.\n\n\"I've been calling your name,\" Winnie replied, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. She wore a pink apron to keep her clothes clean as she toiled in the kitchen with her sisters. We all share the same roof \u2013 that's three adults, three children and me (who defies categorization) in one space, if you're keeping count \u2013 and even though the house is big, it feels small when everyone is bustling around at the same time.\n\n\"I didn't hear you, dear,\" I said, feigning confusion. \"Perhaps I've gone temporarily deaf for the day. It's probably because of that noise in the kitchen.\"\n\nWinnie narrowed her eyes. \"What noise?\"\n\n\"Something about some grandmother being run over by a reindeer,\" I replied. \"Oh, and some kid wants a hippopotamus for Christmas. Don't get that for the girls, by the way. I bet they stink.\"\n\nWinnie made a face, clearly trying to control her temper. She believes patience is a virtue, or some such crap. I can't really remember. She likes to exert quiet control whenever she can. Her efforts double around the holidays. She doesn't like big fights. I tend to thrive on them, so we're complete opposites. Sometimes I wonder if she was switched at birth with some other infant. Of course, she was born at home so that's not very likely. Still, I'm not ruling it out.\n\n\"Aunt Tillie, I would like to discuss something with you in the kitchen,\" Winnie said. \"Do you think you could come this way for a few minutes?\"\n\nOoh, I smell a trap. She's using her fake \"I love and respect you\" voice. I'm not going to fall for that. \"I'm good.\"\n\nWinnie pursed her lips and increased the intensity of her stare. \"I would really appreciate it if you would come in here and talk with me. I promise it will only take a few minutes.\"\n\nThat stare works on everyone but me. \"Um\u2026 no.\" I flipped a page in the catalog. \"Oh, hey, they have pink beepers in here. I would love a pink beeper.\"\n\n\"What do you need a beeper for?\" Winnie asked. \"Those are for drug dealers and pimps.\"\n\n\"I've been considering expanding my business base.\" That will drive her nuts.\n\n\"Aunt Tillie\u2026 .\"\n\n\"I'm not getting up,\" I said. \"I'm old and my hip hurts. You should respect your elders, for crying out loud. Don't make me put you on my list.\"\n\nI'm good with a threat, but Winnie is bad at fearing them.\n\n\"Get in this kitchen right now!\" Winnie barked. \"If you don't come in here I'm going to bring everyone out there. If you thought the Christmas music was bad, wait until we start serenading you.\"\n\nWinnie disappeared through the swinging door without a backward glance. As far as threats go, that was a fairly good one. I heaved out a sigh as I pushed myself to my feet. She isn't winning, mind you, I simply refuse to push the issue until she asks me to do something I really don't want to do. Then you'll see me win\u2026 in any manner necessary.\n\nI found Winnie behind the counter, her sisters Twila and Marnie flanking her, when I walked through the door. I didn't miss the furtive glances Marnie and Twila exchanged before I spoke.\n\nTwila is something of a free spirit who many of her cues from me. She'll make a great crazy old lady one day. She likes to do things like glue eyelashes on ceramic frogs and paint murals and canvases in the yard while naked. I encourage that. She's also something of a kvetch. She won't shut up.\n\nAs for Marnie, she has Middle Child Syndrome. She's constantly trying to live up to Winnie's expectations \u2013 and beat her whenever possible. She's a complainer, but she also has an\u2026 um\u2026 witchy streak I find more than delightful. She can make a grown woman cry in less than thirty seconds with only one insult and two glares in her arsenal. It's quite the sight.\n\n\"What do you want?\" I asked, adopting a gruff tone. \"I'm old and tired, and you're bugging me.\" What? They know they're bugging me. They're doing it on purpose. I'm hardly hurting their feelings.\n\n\"We want to talk to you about your attitude,\" Winnie replied. \"We feel you've been something of a\u2026 what's the word I'm looking for?\"\n\n\"Jerk,\" Marnie supplied, earning a dark look from me.\n\n\"I haven't been talking about you behind your back,\" Twila announced. \"I refused to do it. If you're going to punish someone, I suggest punishing them. I'm the innocent party here. They've wronged me.\"\n\nI was going to wrong her right onto my list if she didn't stop babbling. \"What's wrong with my attitude?\" I asked, ignoring Twila's jabbering. \"I think my attitude is delightful.\"\n\n\"That's part of the problem,\" Winnie said. \"You think you can do no wrong and you walk around making sure everyone else thinks that way, too. You're giving the girls the wrong impression about following rules.\"\n\n\"How so?\" I asked. \"I don't believe rules should be applied to everyone. There's an exception to every rule. That exception is usually me. What 'wrong impression' am I giving them?\"\n\nWinnie pressed her lips together as Twila shuffled from one foot to the other. Marnie simply stared me down. She's smarter than Winnie in some ways. She was waiting for Winnie to tick me off so she could swoop in with a compromise and look like the hero. I'm on to all three of these witchy wonders.\n\n\"The girls have started adopting some of your attitude,\" Twila said, licking her lips. \"I heard Thistle telling Bay and Clove that they were on her list last night.\"\n\nI snorted. That sounded just about right. \"Thistle is a mouthy pain,\" I said. \"I like her\u2026 some of the time. I don't see what the problem is. If Thistle wants to make a list, I think it's a great idea.\n\n\"It improves her writing skills\u2026 and planning skills\u2026 and organizational skills,\" I continued. \"There's really no downside to Thistle starting a list.\"\n\n\"It also improves her revenge skills, tyrant skills and unfiltered mouth skills,\" Winnie pointed out.\n\nShe said that like it was a bad thing. \"I still don't see the problem,\" I said, planting my hands on my hips.\n\nThe grim set of Winnie's jaw told me she was done playing games. \"Listen, we love you,\" she said. \"You know that. We wouldn't trade you for anything. You've got to stop being a bad role model for the girls, though.\"\n\n\"You raised us after Mom died and we will be forever grateful,\" Twila added. \"But Thistle is turning into a real handful. She sees you acting out and thinks it's okay.\"\n\nIf they thought for one second they could blame Thistle's willfulness on me, they had another thing coming. \"I'm not the one who lets her get away with murder,\" I pointed out. \"I punish her when she gets out of line. You're the ones who let her run roughshod over this household. I can't believe you think I'm the root of her issues.\"\n\n\"That's not what we said,\" Winnie clarified. \"It's just\u2026 she's getting worse every day. She says whatever comes to her mind and, well, frankly\u2026 um\u2026 she's channeling you for most of this bad behavior.\"\n\n\"She's never been a sweet girl, but she used to be controllable,\" Twila said. \"I don't know what to do with her. She bosses Clove and Bay around as if they're her slaves. It's not healthy.\"\n\n\"I think you're worrying too much,\" I said. \"Thistle only acts this way because she gets away with it. Eventually Bay and Clove are going to get fed up and give her a dose of her own medicine. That's what you want.\"\n\n\"That's the last thing we want,\" Winnie argued. \"This house isn't big enough for World War III.\"\n\n\"It won't come to that,\" I said. \"Thistle only acts up because no one pushes back when she does. If you would let Bay and Clove off their leashes, they would teach Thistle a thing or two about getting too big for her britches.\n\n\"As it stands now, Bay and Clove follow the rules and they're handicapped because Thistle doesn't follow the rules,\" I continued. \"You have to even the playing field.\"\n\n\"That sounds dangerous,\" Twila said.\n\n\"That sounds like the way of the world,\" I corrected. \"Don't worry about it, though. I'll have a talk with the girls and figure things out. If that's what you want me to do, I'm more than willing to step in and do my part to fix Thistle's attitude.\"\n\nWhat? That won't take more than two or three minutes, right? I'll just lay down the law with Thistle and then leave the room when she melts down. By the time dinner rolls around she'll be fine again.\n\n\"That's not why we called you in here,\" Winnie said. \"We don't want you to talk to the girls. Quite frankly, whenever you do that you give them harebrained ideas about controlling the world, and then I get a call from Lila Stevens' mother because they've ganged up on her and done something truly awful and are in danger of being expelled or something.\"\n\n\"Hey, Lila has it coming,\" I said. I was pretty sure that kid was Hitler in a past life or something. She's evil incarnate. \"If Lila doesn't want the girls going after her, she should leave them alone.\"\n\n\"That's hardly the point,\" Winnie said.\n\n\"And what is the point?\" I was losing track of the conversation.\n\n\"We need you to be on your best behavior for the next couple of weeks,\" Twila said. \"We're going to try to teach the girls by example instead of words. If everyone in the house gets along, then they'll get along.\"\n\n\"Have you been watching Oprah?\"\n\nWinnie made a face as her world-famous patience wore thin. \"That's our new plan and you're going to stick to it. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Have you gotten into the eggnog early?\" I challenged. \"You can't tell me what to do. I'll act as I see fit.\"\n\nWinnie crossed her arms over her chest and scorched me with a harsh look. \"Do you understand?\"\n\nShe clearly meant business. That meant I could either fight with her or capitulate and operate behind her back. The only question was: What was I in the mood for today? Decisions, decisions. \"Fine. I'll be on my best behavior.\"\n\n\"That's great,\" Winnie said, exhaling heavily. \"We really appreciate it.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm always happy to help,\" I said. \"So\u2026 um\u2026 is that all? Can I go back to the living room and take a nap?\"\n\n\"Actually, we were hoping you would spend some time with the girls this afternoon and put your new attitude on display,\" Marnie hedged. \"We thought it would be a good example for them to see you acting in a certain manner first.\"\n\nThat sounded absolutely terrible, and I didn't even know what they were trying to trick me into doing yet. \"I think I'm good. I can show them how to act while taking a nap, too. I'll definitely be on my best behavior then.\"\n\nWinnie wrinkled her nose. \"That's not what we have in mind.\"\n\nI could tell I was going to hate whatever plan they cooked up while I was distracted by the catalog in the other room. \"And what did you have in mind?\"\n\n\"Walkerville's tree-lighting ceremony is this afternoon,\" Twila said. \"We thought you might want to take the girls to it.\"\n\nThe only way they could have thought that was a legitimate possibility is if they started smoking crack when I wasn't looking. \"I think I'll pass.\"\n\nThis time Twila and Marnie crossed their arms over their chests and joined Winnie in a no-nonsense stance. It was supposed to be terrifying. It made me want to laugh.\n\n\"I still think I'll pass,\" I said.\n\nApparently Winnie wasn't going to give me the chance, because she opened her mouth and bellowed to the second floor by way of forcing my hand. \"Girls, your Aunt Tillie is going to take you to the tree-lighting ceremony. Get bundled up and down here in five minutes.\"\n\n\"Yay!\"\n\nI heard Clove's enthusiastic clapping through the ceiling and rolled my eyes. \"Do you think that's going to work on me?\"\n\n\"Are you really going to disappoint them?\" Winnie challenged. \"They'll cry.\"\n\nShe had a point. Still\u2026 . \"Fine,\" I said, blowing out a resigned sigh. \"I'll take them.\"\n\n\"And you'll be on your best behavior,\" Marnie added. \"You need to set an example for them.\"\n\n\"And I'll be on my best behavior,\" I conceded, striding toward the living room door before staring down all three of them. \"You're all on my list, though. Prepare yourselves for war.\"\n\nYeah, I've got your jingle bells right here, people. Christmas is coming and I'm taking charge of the entire holiday. It's going to be a bumpy sleigh ride. Strap in." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\"Are you ready?\" I secured Clove's pink combat helmet under her chin before pointing toward my plow truck. \"Get in.\"\n\nMy nieces worked under the misguided notion that I was a menace behind the wheel. They only agreed to allow the girls into my truck if they were well protected. That meant I had to purchase helmets and knee pads for them (in case they flew into the dashboard when I rammed a snow bank). I think their mothers were overreacting. The girls had a great time when we plowed.\n\nClove sat in the spot closest to me and Thistle and Bay fought over the window seat, as they always do. Instead of listening to them work things out on their own, I made the decision for them.\n\n\"Bay gets the window seat.\"\n\nThistle, her blond hair sticking out in odd places under the helmet, made a face. \"Why does Bay get the window seat?\"\n\n\"Because I said so.\"\n\nThat was never a good enough answer for Thistle. \"Why else?\"\n\n\"Because Bay is the oldest and I don't have to worry about her opening the door when I'm plowing,\" I replied. \"I seem to remember someone opening the door two weeks ago because she wanted to see if she could hook it on to Mrs. Franz's mailbox.\"\n\n\"I did that once,\" Thistle groused, hopping into the truck. \"It didn't work. I don't see why you're complaining.\"\n\nThat kid cracks me up sometimes. I would never tell her, of course, but I love her attitude. Bay is much more serious than her younger cousin. I like her, too. She thinks things out before she does something stupid. That doesn't mean she won't do something stupid, mind you. She simply prefers thinking out all of the ramifications before embarking on mayhem. She has a pragmatic mind and a wild streak rolled together. It's an interesting combination. As for Clove, well, these days she's going through life relying on the fact that she's cute. She's smaller than both of her cousins and she's found she can manipulate people if she fakes tears. I find that trait annoying, but it's come in handy a time or two\u2026 or twelve. I'm not one to look a gift personality defect in the mouth, especially if it proves helpful.\n\n\"It's only funny to take out mailboxes when no damage can be done to my truck,\" I told Thistle as I climbed onto the driver's seat and slipped the key into the ignition. \"I don't want my truck wrecked. Your mothers will find a reason to take it away from me if that happens. Mark my words.\"\n\n\"You're an adult,\" Clove pointed out. \"They can't take something away from you if you don't let them.\"\n\n\"Don't kid yourself,\" I said. \"I may be an adult and their elder, but they're real pains in the behind when they want to be. They know how to get what they want\u2026 just like you.\"\n\n\"Do they cry, too?\" Thistle asked.\n\n\"I don't cry,\" Clove snapped, fastening the middle seat belt around both her and Thistle. \"My eyes leak. There's a difference.\"\n\nThe kid may be young, but she's a master at manipulation. \"That's a very good argument, Clove,\" I said, putting the truck in reverse. \"You keep that one handy when someone accuses you of crying to get attention. Tell them your eyes leak because your heart hurts. That will work until you're at least twelve and start puberty.\"\n\n\"That's a great idea,\" Clove said, smiling prettily.\n\nI wasn't paying attention to where I was going, so when the back of the truck rammed into a snow bank it took me by surprise. All three girls jerked forward. Thankfully the seatbelts \u2013 which I had to get installed and prove were in good working order before my nieces would let their daughters ride with me \u2013 kept them from flying into the dashboard.\n\n\"That came out of nowhere,\" I muttered.\n\n\"How is that possible?\" Thistle sputtered, rubbing her neck. \"You're the one who put the snow bank there.\"\n\n\"And it's a really good place for it,\" I shot back. \"I think it moved or something, though.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"You live in a house filled with magic, Thistle Winchester,\" I reminded her. \"How do you think it moved? I'm pretty sure your mothers did it as payback for that thing I did the other night.\"\n\n\"Are you talking about when you stole all of their fresh cookies and replaced them with store-bought ones and then told Mom that we must have a cookie gnome?\" Thistle asked.\n\n\"Cookie gnomes are real.\"\n\n\"I think they're as real as the house-trashing fairy you told us about this summer,\" Thistle said. \"You said that was real, too, but Mom says you made that up because you dirtied up the kitchen and didn't feel like doing your dishes.\"\n\n\"Your mother says a lot,\" I said. \"I had no idea she flapped her gums to that magnitude when I'm not around. What else does she say?\"\n\nThankfully Thistle had no qualms about narcing on her mother. Most kids would balk at that. Thistle was her own person, though. \"How much time do you have?\"\n\n\"It will take me twenty minutes to get to town if I do some plowing along the way,\" I said, shoving the gearshift into drive and pressing my foot to the gas pedal. \"Start talking.\"\n\n\"Well, she also says you're lying when you say you're going for a walk during the summer,\" Thistle said. \"She knows about your oregano field and thinks you put magic enchantments on it to keep her out.\"\n\nThe front of the truck caught the edge of the large snow bank at the lip of the driveway, causing the truck to fishtail and bounce against the other bank as I overcorrected.\n\n\"Did they move that, too?\" Clove asked.\n\nI shrugged. \"They must've. Keep going, Thistle. I'm dying to hear what else your mother told you when I wasn't listening.\"\n\nThistle happily recited a nonstop litany of terrible beliefs her mother held during the ride to town. I stopped to clear out Dorothy Sanderson's driveway \u2013 swearing I would make Twila pay the entire time \u2013 and then I took the snow from her driveway and planted it in the already cleared spot in front of Margaret Little's driveway across the street. The girls knew what I was doing but refrained from commenting. That was good. I trained them right \u2013 unlike their mothers.\n\nBy the time I hit town I was in an awful mood. It seems Twila, Marnie and Winnie want me to act a certain way and then tell lies behind my back when I don't do as they want. Yes, lies. There really is a house-trashing gnome. I had a feeling they were going to meet it up close and personal before Christmas if they weren't careful.\n\nWalkerville was bustling with activity as I parked. The girls scrambled out of the truck, being sure to leave their helmets behind so the other kids wouldn't make fun of them. I thought they should leave the helmets in place so they could go after their enemies hard and fast, but the girls thought differently.\n\nThey gathered on the sidewalk outside of the police station and waited for me to join them. I was about to tell them to run off and play (and not bother me for at least two hours) when their favorite police officer, Terry Davenport, walked out of the station's front door. Bay immediately ran to him and threw her arms around his neck as he bent lower so he could be on her level.\n\nA stranger passing by might assume Terry was Bay's father \u2013 perhaps even Clove and Thistle's dad as well \u2013 but he was merely a strong presence in their lives. He adored all of them, but he especially doted on Bay.\n\n\"Officer Terry,\" Bay squealed excitedly. \"I didn't know you were going to be here.\"\n\n\"Are you here to give us presents?\" Clove asked expectantly.\n\nUnlike other adults who melted when they saw Clove's big brown eyes, Terry was wise to her machinations. \"It's not Christmas, Clove,\" Terry said. \"You don't get gifts until Christmas.\"\n\nClove jutted out her lower lip. \"There's no rule that says that. That's just what everyone decided and they made it a rule. It's not a real one.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm a rule follower,\" Terry said, pointing toward the badge on his uniform jacket. \"I'm a police officer. I have to follow the rules \u2013 whether they're real or imagined.\"\n\n\"Now, wait a second,\" Thistle said, tapping her lip as her mind worked overtime. \"I'm not a big fan of agreeing with Clove, but she might be on to something. We should have, like, ten days of presents before Christmas. I think that would be best for everyone.\"\n\n\"You would,\" Terry said, ruffling her hair and causing me to snicker as he turned his attention to Bay. \"Have you been good girls this year? Will Santa leave you a lot of presents\u2026 or just one or two?\"\n\n\"I've been good,\" Clove announced. \"I'm the best-behaved one, so I'll get the most presents.\"\n\nTerry made a face. \"Oh, yeah? What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"Karma is a real thing,\" Clove supplied. \"My mom told me. That means I'm going to be rewarded.\"\n\n\"I'm not quite sure it works that way,\" Terry said dryly. \"What about you, Thistle? Have you been good?\"\n\n\"I don't believe in karma,\" Thistle replied. \"I've been bad and I'll get just as many things to open as Clove. Just watch. I'll count to be sure.\"\n\nI pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. The kid's attitude was a thing of beauty. Er, unless you were her mother, that is. I could see why Twila was worried. If Thistle puffed out her chest any further she'd fall over.\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Terry didn't look convinced. \"I know my Bay has been good,\" he said, tickling her ribs. \"What did you ask Santa for?\"\n\n\"We want a special fairy castle,\" Bay replied. \"We want to share it, but I'm not sure Santa will bring it. It's expensive.\"\n\n\"Is that the ugly thing you marked in the catalog you left on the living room table?\" I asked, furrowing my brow. \"Why do you want that?\"\n\n\"Because it's pretty and it's for witches,\" Thistle replied.\n\n\"I thought you said it was a fairy castle?\"\n\n\"Yes, but fairies are just pretty witches,\" Clove said. \"We all talked about it and that's what we believe.\"\n\n\"So don't try changing our minds,\" Thistle added. \"If you can believe in the house-trashing fairy, we can believe that fairies and witches are the same thing.\"\n\n\"I would never try changing your minds,\" I said. \"I don't care either way. Why don't you girls leave Terry to do his job and go get some hot chocolate or something? If we're going to be stuck down here until they light up the tree, we might as well add chocolate and sugar to the mix to liven things up.\"\n\nClove and Thistle were excited by the prospect, but Bay looked torn.\n\n\"I want to stay with Officer Terry,\" Bay said. \"I can help him work.\" I love the kid, but she has a needy quality where Terry is concerned. He feeds into it.\n\n\"Officer Terry will be around,\" I prodded. \"Get some hot chocolate.\" I handed a few dollar bills to Thistle before shooing Bay with my hands. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"We need more money than this,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"That's more than enough for three hot chocolates.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you rammed us into ten snow banks on the way here,\" Thistle said. \"I counted. We want doughnuts, too. If you don't give us doughnuts, we might accidentally tattle to our mothers about the snow banks.\"\n\nI was wrong. That kid is a menace. Can you believe she's actually shaking me down for more money? \"No one is going to believe I ran into ten snow banks on the way here.\"\n\n\"Everyone who has ever seen you drive will believe it,\" Terry countered. \"Buy them the doughnuts.\"\n\n\"You're just a big softie where they're concerned,\" I grumbled, digging into my purse. I handed Thistle more money and narrowed my eyes. \"If that gets out, you're going to be at the top of my list.\"\n\nInstead of cowering, Thistle matched my stare with a menacing one of her own. \"You're not supposed to have a list,\" she shot back. \"You're supposed to be leading by example.\"\n\n\"You were listening by the heat vents again, weren't you?\"\n\n\"You said it was a classic for a reason,\" Clove said. \"Why would we stop?\"\n\nI really wish these kids would stop listening to me sometimes. \"Fine,\" I said, waving them off. \"Do what you want. I really mean that. If Lila Stevens gives you guff, do something terrible to her.\"\n\nThistle's eyes gleamed at the prospect. \"I'm on it.\"\n\nI shook my head as I watched them scamper away. When I finally shifted in Terry's direction, I found him glaring at me. \"What?\"\n\n\"You shouldn't tell them to do things like that,\" Terry admonished. \"They're good girls, but they manage to find trouble on their own. They don't need you helping them.\"\n\nHe was so earnest I could do nothing but snort. \"Don't kid yourself,\" I said. \"They may look like angels, but there's a little devil in each of them.\"\n\n\"Especially Thistle,\" Terry muttered.\n\n\"You've got that right,\" I said, moving my eyes to the town. \"When are they supposed to light the tree? I don't want to be down here all night.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you're down here at all,\" Terry admitted. \"You generally shun town activities.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, I got tricked into being the dutiful aunt today,\" I admitted. \"Winnie, Marnie and Twila are on the warpath because they think Thistle takes her cues from me when it comes to having attitude.\"\n\n\"I can believe that.\"\n\nI ignored him. \"Personally, I think the entire thing would work itself out if they would stop making Bay and Clove follow the rules and unleash them on Thistle to exact their revenge,\" I said.\n\n\"It's probably a good thing you weren't a parent,\" Terry said, shaking his head. \"I'm going to run over to the festival area and then make a loop around town. Keep an eye on the girls, will you? It gets dark early these days.\"\n\n\"They're little girls, not sunshine,\" I said. \"They don't disappear just because the moon comes out.\"\n\n\"Ha, ha,\" Terry intoned. \"They're still children. They need to be watched.\"\n\n\"You're only saying that because you're fond of them,\" I said, falling into step next to him. \"It's a little pathetic the way you let them wrap you around their fingers.\"\n\n\"I don't care what you say,\" Terry said. \"I like spending time with them. They make me laugh.\"\n\n\"They're not bad kids,\" I grudgingly admitted. \"They'll probably even be half-decent adults.\"\n\n\"That's the nicest thing you've ever said about them,\" Terry deadpanned, making a face. \"I still don't understand why you're on babysitting duty. That would seem like the worst possible choice if you ask me.\"\n\n\"I'm an excellent babysitter,\" I countered. \"I could do it professionally if I wanted. As for the rest, I think my nieces are wrapping Christmas presents but they don't want to admit it. Getting me and the girls out of the house for a few hours frees them to wrap and hide gifts.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess that makes sense,\" Terry said. \"I\u2026 .\" He didn't get a chance to finish what he was saying because Bay, Clove and Thistle were making a ton of noise as they raced in our direction. They looked as if someone was chasing them, but the path behind their small bodies was clear. Terry's eyes filled with concern as he caught Bay before she could skid and fall on the sidewalk. \"Slow down. You're going to hurt yourselves.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" I asked. \"Did Lila do something to you? I'll help you get her if you want. I'm bored anyway.\"\n\n\"It's not Lila,\" Bay said, struggling to catch her breath as her chest heaved. \"It's something else.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"There's a dead body over there,\" Thistle volunteered, pointing toward a clump of trees on the other side of the town square. \"Someone is dead!\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\" I asked, doubt washing over me.\n\nThistle licked her lips and nodded. \"I swear there's a dead guy over there!\"\n\nWell, merry freaking Christmas." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"What do you mean you found a dead body?\"\n\nI'm not calling my great-nieces liars, mind you, but they have active imaginations. Clove has been convinced that a ghost lives in their closet for the past year. For the record, that's me. Sometimes I like to move their stuff around just to mess with them. Some people might call me mean. Life is boring if you don't get your kicks somewhere.\n\n\"I mean there was a man on the ground and he wasn't moving,\" Thistle said, drawing her words out so slowly it was almost excruciating. \"It was almost as if he fell but didn't get back up. Oh, wait, it was exactly like that.\"\n\n\"Why are you talking like that?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"So the old people will understand me,\" Thistle replied. \"By 'old' I mean you and Aunt Tillie.\"\n\nTerry scowled as he rested a hand on Thistle's shoulder. \"I'm not so old that I'm stupid,\" he said. \"How can you be sure this man was dead? Maybe he just fell down.\"\n\n\"Because most people who fall down get back up,\" Thistle answered. \"Oh, they also breathe.\"\n\nTerry slid a dubious look in my direction. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I think they're prone to dramatic fits,\" I replied, not missing a beat. \"I have no idea where they get it from.\"\n\n\"I know exactly where they get it from,\" Terry shot back, his eyes flashing. \"Okay, girls, how about you show me where this dead body is?\"\n\n\"I don't want to go back,\" Clove said. \"I don't want to see it again.\"\n\n\"Fine. Then stay here alone.\" I put my hand to the back of Bay's neck and prodded her in the direction of the woods. Terry did the same with Thistle, and the look on Clove's face as she considered remaining behind was priceless.\n\n\"You're a mean old lady,\" Clove grumbled as she scurried to keep up with us. \"You knew I wouldn't stay back there alone, didn't you?\"\n\n\"I had a hunch,\" I replied, casting a glance at a few curious onlookers who stared at us from the festival area. I recognized one as Margaret Little. I couldn't be sure if she'd discovered that the end of her driveway was buried in a foot of hard snow yet, but I looked forward to the showdown when she did. We'd known each other since our school days, and the hate was entrenched in us early. When she lifted her eyes I saw recognition flash in the depths of her hateful orbs and I knew she was well aware what of the state her driveway was in. I couldn't stop myself from smiling and waving, launching her into a march in our direction.\n\n\"Why are you waving at her?\" Terry asked, suspicious. I forget sometimes that he has keen eyesight. It's both a blessing and a curse, depending upon what he's investigating at any given moment. \"You hate Margaret.\"\n\n\"Yeah, she's a real turd,\" I agreed, causing Thistle to snort. \"She's one of those hard ones left to bake on the sidewalk in hundred-degree weather. She stinks, too.\"\n\n\"I think she's nice,\" Clove interjected. \"She gave me a piece of candy at the summer parade this year. It was shaped like a unicorn.\"\n\n\"What did I tell you about taking candy from old crones who live in glass houses?\" I challenged.\n\nClove wrinkled her nose. \"Nothing. You told me not to throw water balloons at anyone other than dirty busybodies who had nothing better to do than spy on you when you were gardening, but you never mentioned anything about old crones and glass houses.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm mentioning it now,\" I said. \"Don't take candy from them.\"\n\n\"What's a crone?\" Thistle asked.\n\n\"Margaret Little.\"\n\n\"Don't tell them that,\" Terry snapped. \"Margaret Little is a perfectly\u2026 .\" He broke off, unsure how to proceed. I was fairly certain he was going to say \"nice\" and then realized how ludicrous the statement sounded. \"She's your elder and deserves respect,\" he said, changing course. \"Don't listen to your aunt.\"\n\n\"She's our elder, too,\" Bay pointed out. \"Shouldn't we respect her?\"\n\n\"And that's why you're my favorite today,\" I said, patting her shoulder. \"You're a good girl.\"\n\n\"She's our elder but she's batshit crazy,\" Thistle supplied. \"We don't have to respect batshit crazy. That's her rule.\"\n\n\"Don't swear, Thistle,\" Chief Terry ordered, taking her by surprise with his vehemence. \"You're a lady. You're not supposed to curse like that.\"\n\n\"That's not a curse,\" Clove argued. \"A curse is when we wake up and none of our shoes will stay tied.\"\n\n\"Or our hair won't stay braided,\" Bay added.\n\n\"Or we can't stop farting and falling down,\" Thistle said.\n\nTerry is aware of the Winchesters' witchy ways, but he goes out of his way to pretend otherwise. My nieces make a big deal of fawning over him in an attempt to get him to invite one of them on a date. I know they really like him, but they would chew him up and spit him out if he ever dated one of them. He's smarter than I often given him credit for, though, because he refuses to play that game. He does, however, enjoy the casseroles and cakes they throw at him.\n\n\"Stop talking about that stuff,\" Terry ordered. \"I'm not kidding. That's a\u2026 well\u2026 that's a home conversation. Do you understand what I'm saying?\"\n\nClove shook her head. \"No.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Thistle volunteered. \"It's like when we're not supposed to talk about our mothers being attacked by the menstruation monster when we're around strangers.\"\n\nTerry stilled as he grabbed the back of Thistle's coat and tugged her toward him. \"What did you just say?\"\n\nThistle was too oblivious to be embarrassed. \"The menstruation monster,\" she said. \"Aunt Tillie told us about it. It visits once a month at the same time for everyone. It could be worse because we could have three smaller monsters visiting at different times. Instead we get one big monster in the middle of the month.\"\n\nTerry's face was full of outrage when he focused on me. \"What is wrong with you?\"\n\n\"You'll need to be more specific,\" I replied. \"Answering that question could lead us in a hundred different directions.\"\n\n\"And none of them are good,\" Terry muttered, shaking his head. \"I just\u2026 how could you tell them that?\"\n\n\"The menstruation monster is real,\" I said. \"It lives with the house-trashing fairy and the sock-stealing gnome. No, that's a true story.\"\n\n\"You make me so very tired,\" Terry grumbled, pinching the bridge of his nose. \"Girls, which way is the body?\"\n\nThistle pointed toward the woods. \"Just on the other side of those trees,\" she said. \"You can't miss it.\"\n\nSomething occurred to me. \"Why were you in the trees in the first place?\" I asked. \"You were supposed to be getting hot chocolate and doughnuts. That's why you shook me down for extra money.\"\n\n\"We were on our way there but we saw Lila was going inside so we decided to get something to give her as a Christmas gift before joining her,\" Thistle answered. \"It was only going to be a short side trip.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" I wasn't sure I wanted to know where this story was going. Oh, who am I kidding? The kid's mind is a masterpiece when it comes to payback. She's a joy to watch when she gets down to business. \"What gift?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I should answer,\" Thistle replied, darting a nervous look in Terry's direction. \"That might be a home conversation, too.\" She tapped the side of her nose to give me the secret signal I had taught them years ago. It was for when she knew she was doing something naughty and didn't want to own up to it.\n\n\"Gotcha,\" I said, grinning.\n\nTerry didn't look nearly as happy with Thistle's admission. \"Gotcha? No, that's not how we're going to play this game. What were you going to give Lila, girls?\"\n\n\"It was nothing big,\" Clove answered. \"It was just\u2026 snow. We were going to put it in a globe.\"\n\n\"Snow?\" Terry was understandably dubious. \"I don't get it.\"\n\n\"Yellow snow,\" Bay clarified. \"We weren't so much going to put it in a globe as her hair.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Terry said. Even though he was trying to be serious, the corners of his mouth tipped up. \"Did you find any?\"\n\n\"We found a body instead.\"\n\n\"Bummer.\"\n\n\"Yeah, total bummer,\" Bay said, her expression serious.\n\nI was about to tell her not to worry about a body \u2013 it was far more likely they stumbled over a bag of garbage or even a half-drunk elf who lost his way to the tree-lighting ceremony \u2013 but I didn't get the chance because that's when Margaret finally caught up to us. Drat! I was hoping she would forget and turn around.\n\n\"Tillie Winchester!\"\n\n\"She looks angry,\" Terry said, stopping on the sidewalk before following the obvious trail in the snow the girls left during their yellow snow hunt a few minutes earlier. \"What did you do to her?\"\n\n\"Why do you think I did something to her?\" I challenged. \"I'm clearly the victim here.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm sure you are.\"\n\nI swiveled to face Margaret head-on, adopting a bored expression before she even opened her mouth. \"Hello, Margaret. It's so lovely to see you.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't even start with that,\" Margaret snapped. \"I'm not in the mood to mess around with you. I'm not playing games.\"\n\n\"That's probably good,\" Thistle said. \"You don't look as if you'd be very good at them.\"\n\nI wanted to laugh, but Terry lightly swatted the back of Thistle's head to quiet her. \"What seems to be the problem, Margaret?\"\n\n\"The problem?\" Margaret's face was so red I worried she'd pass out. \"The problem is that you plowed in the end of my driveway -- like you always do -- and I almost got stuck.\"\n\n\"That doesn't really sound like a problem to me,\" I countered. \"In fact, I think the fact that you got out of the driveway is the real problem. The people of Walkerville would be much happier if you hibernated for the winter rather than left the house. I know. I took a poll.\"\n\n\"Tillie.\" Terry's voice was low and full of warning. We were on a mission, after all.\n\n\"I was already late when I noticed the problem,\" Margaret snapped. \"I had to bring my world-famous Christmas cookies to the baking area to be judged, but they didn't make it because I tried to drive through the snow and it's too hard. The second I hit the bank they flew across the seat and ended up on the floor.\"\n\n\"That sounds as if I saved the innocent people of Walkerville from botulism,\" I said.\n\nMargaret narrowed her eyes. \"My cookies are famous.\"\n\n\"You've said that twice now and I still don't believe it,\" I said. \"How are they famous?\"\n\n\"People love them.\"\n\n\"People love street thespians, too. That hardly makes them famous.\"\n\nMargaret stomped her foot and made a shrill growling noise. She was clearly at her limit. I prefer when I push her over the limit and she explodes. I wonder what I can do to make that happen.\n\n\"I want her arrested, Terry,\" Margaret announced. \"She plowed in my driveway. That has to be a felony.\"\n\nTerry tilted his head to the side. \"I don't think so,\" he said. \"Plus, um, do you have proof it was her? Did you see her do it?\"\n\n\"Well, no,\" Margaret conceded. \"She obviously wasn't alone, though. These three\u2026 ruffians\u2026 were with her. Ask them what happened.\"\n\nTerry shifted his eyes to Thistle, Clove and Bay. He clearly didn't like Margaret calling them names. He also looked worried about what they might say. I wasn't worried in the least. I knew exactly what they would say.\n\n\"Ask them,\" I prodded. \"It's okay.\"\n\nTerry cleared his throat. \"Girls, did you see Aunt Tillie plow in Mrs. Little's driveway?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Clove replied solemnly. She really is the best little liar in the world. \"Aunt Tillie would never do that. She has a kind heart and a giving soul. It hurts my heart and makes my eyes leak to think someone would accuse her of doing something so wrong.\"\n\nOh, that was priceless. I was going to have to get that kid a better Christmas gift.\n\n\"Thistle?\" Terry prodded.\n\n\"Aunt Tillie didn't do any plowing today,\" Thistle replied. \"I was with her the whole time.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Terry shifted his eyes to the small blonde in front of me. \"Bay?\"\n\nIf there was a weak link in this lying trio, it was Bay. It wasn't because she couldn't lie. She could tell whoppers to almost anyone. She couldn't seem to bring herself to lie to Terry for some reason, though.\n\n\"I didn't see her do anything wrong,\" Bay said. It was sort of an evasion, but it did the trick. \"Honest.\"\n\n\"Well, you heard them,\" Terry said. \"They didn't see Tillie do anything to your driveway.\"\n\nMargaret was annoyed. \"Well, obviously they're lying,\" she said. \"Girls, did you know it's a crime to lie to a police officer? Terry is going to throw you in jail for lying.\"\n\n\"Don't tell them that,\" Terry admonished. \"I'm not putting them in jail. I don't appreciate your threats.\"\n\n\"That makes two of us,\" I volunteered, smiling evilly when Terry turned his attention to the woods. \"Now, if you'll excuse me, we were on a mission when you approached.\"\n\n\"So, nothing is going to happen to her?\" Margaret pressed.\n\n\"She didn't do anything, and she has three walking alibis,\" Terry said. \"I'm not going to do anything to her. Besides that, we need to look in those trees. The girls swear they saw a dead body.\"\n\n\"A dead body?\" Margaret was taken aback. \"I\u2026 why would there be a dead body in the woods?\"\n\n\"Probably because that's where he died,\" Thistle replied.\n\n\"But\u2026 that makes no sense,\" Margaret said.\n\n\"Neither does the fact that you call your cookies 'world-famous' even though no one outside of Walkerville has ever eaten them,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"They're still delicious.\"\n\n\"I heard they taste like butt crack,\" I said, causing my three young charges to giggle as Terry rolled his eyes. \"I'm a better cook than you've ever dreamed of being. I could do it professionally.\"\n\n\"That's a laugh,\" Margaret said. \"When do you ever cook?\"\n\n\"I cook all of the time,\" I shot back. \"Girls, tell her I cook all of the time.\"\n\nThat was apparently too far to push my partners in crime.\n\n\"Mom says all you cook up is trouble,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"You and your mother are on my list,\" I snapped, extending a finger. Thistle didn't look particularly worried. \"As for the cooking, well, I guess I'll just have to show you.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah? How are you going to do that?\" Margaret scoffed.\n\n\"I'm going to join the cookie contest,\" I replied.\n\n\"I think it's a baking contest,\" Clove supplied.\n\n\"No one asked you.\"\n\n\"Go ahead,\" Margaret said. \"I look forward to you falling on your face in public.\"\n\n\"That makes two of us,\" I fired back. Er, wait. I think that came out wrong.\n\nThankfully for me I didn't get a lot of time to dwell on it because Terry drew my attention back to him by coughing and then pointing at the woods.\n\n\"We need to see if someone is in there,\" Terry said.\n\n\"I already told you someone is in there,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"Well, I need to see for myself.\" Terry stepped off the sidewalk and marched into the trees, Thistle close to his side. I kept Bay in front of me as I followed. I wasn't surprised to find Margaret following Clove and bringing up the rear. She always was a busybody.\n\n\"Where?\" Terry asked when he got to the end of the footprints.\n\n\"He was right there,\" Thistle said, pointing to an indentation in the snow. It did sort of look as if something had been resting there, but there were no footprints leading away.\n\n\"He's not there now, though,\" Terry said. \"You don't see him, right?\"\n\n\"Duh.\" Thistle rolled her eyes. \"I'm not imagining things. I swear he was right there.\"\n\n\"He was,\" Clove said solemnly. \"We all saw him. He had pink socks and everything.\"\n\nMy forehead creased. \"Pink socks?\"\n\n\"I swear we saw them,\" Clove said.\n\n\"Well, he's obviously gone,\" Terry said, forcing a bright smile for the girls' benefit. \"I doubt he was dead. He was probably just\u2026 resting.\"\n\n\"No, he was definitely dead,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"And I'm definitely bored,\" Margaret said, turning to return to the sidewalk. \"If this is their idea of the truth, I don't know how you can believe them about Tillie and my driveway, Terry. I'm very disappointed in you.\"\n\n\"Somehow I think I'll live,\" Terry said dryly.\n\nHer tone irritated me. \"I'll see you on the baking court, Margaret.\" Baking court? Is that a thing? Oh, well. It's too late to take it back.\n\n\"I can't wait,\" Margaret said, huffing as she trudged through the snow.\n\nI waited until I was sure she was gone before turning back to the girls. \"I'm sure no one is dead. You probably made a mistake and didn't understand what you were seeing.\"\n\n\"The only thing we made a mistake on was lying about your plowing,\" Thistle grumbled.\n\n\"What did you say?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"They didn't say anything,\" I said hurriedly, motioning for them to come to me. \"Come on, girls. I'll get you some hot chocolate and doughnuts, and then we'll head back to the house. I need to ask your mothers a favor.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well we want candy now, too,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"I think hot chocolate and doughnuts is more than enough,\" Terry said.\n\nThistle ignored him and stared me down. I recognized the potential mayhem in her gaze. She would tell Terry the truth if I didn't capitulate.\n\n\"Fine,\" I gritted out. \"Candy, too.\"\n\nThistle was all smiles after that. \"I think my work here is done.\"\n\nWell, she finally found something we could both agree on." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"Absolutely not.\"\n\nMy nieces weren't nearly as keen to help me in my cookie endeavor as I initially envisioned. In fact, they were angry. Who saw that coming?\n\n\"Why not?\" I asked, grabbing a piece of fudge from the platter on the counter. \"I thought you liked baking.\"\n\n\"I do like baking,\" Winnie said. \"I love baking, in fact. We have a ton of baking planned for the next week.\"\n\n\"So give me some of those cookies.\"\n\n\"No way.\" Winnie shook her blond head and rested her hands on her hips as she stared me down. It was almost as if she was trying to send me a subliminal message. I wish she would just say whatever was poking at that busy brain of hers, because I'm not a mind reader.\n\n\"I don't see what the problem is,\" I said, breaking off a corner of my fudge brick and handing it to Clove. Marnie widened her eyes when she saw that. I'm not known for being much of a sharer. \"Just give me a plate of your cookies and I'll take them to the contest and pretend I made them.\n\n\"Then, when they hand out the blue ribbon, I'll do a little dance to make Margaret Little feel like an idiot, and spend the purse on some new combat boots,\" I continued. \"I've had my eye on a pair in that catalog you brought home last week. They're camouflage. I think they'll make a statement.\"\n\n\"And what statement is that?\" Marnie asked, resting her hand on Clove's shoulder. \"While we're at it, why did you give Clove a piece of your fudge?\"\n\n\"I'm a giving soul.\"\n\n\"Why really?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"I guess I wasn't thinking,\" I lied. \"What were we talking about again?\"\n\nMy nieces grew up with me, so they know when I'm skirting the truth. I hate that. For the bulk of their childhood I was the kooky aunt who made them go on cemetery outings in the middle of the night. I was adventuresome and adored. I loved that. After their mother died, I had to be the disciplinarian. That ate away at some of the love. I loathed that, but I never once regretted taking them in. I like to think they're strong and proud because of me.\n\n\"Why did Aunt Tillie give you fudge, Clove?\" Marnie asked, pointedly focusing on her daughter.\n\n\"Because I lied to Officer Terry when Mrs. Little accused her of filling in the end of her driveway with snow,\" Clove answered immediately, causing my stomach to flip. This wouldn't end well.\n\n\"Hey, I bought off you little gluttons with hot chocolate, doughnuts and candy,\" I reminded them. \"I didn't do that out of the goodness of my heart. It was a bribe. That means you need to shut your mouths.\"\n\n\"I thought that was the rule when we were in front of other people,\" Clove said, feigning innocence. \"Whoops.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, I'm going to put that whoops up your behind if you're not careful,\" I warned.\n\n\"Oh, I feel so loved,\" Clove deadpanned, earning a stern look from her mother. \"What? I think my eyes are leaking.\"\n\n\"Knock that off,\" Marnie warned, wagging a finger in her daughter's face. \"That might work on other people, but it doesn't work on me.\"\n\n\"Nope. They're definitely leaking.\" Clove made a big show of swiping at her dry cheeks. \"I think I hurt my heart.\"\n\n\"Your butt is going to hurt if you don't zip it,\" Marnie shot back. \"Good grief.\"\n\n\"Why are you making them lie to Terry and Mrs. Little?\" Winnie asked.\n\nWas that a serious question? I can never tell. Winnie's sense of humor comes and goes like a fart in a car when the window is cracked. Sometimes you're certain it's there and other times you think it escaped out the window. That's how I felt today. \"I didn't tell them to lie.\" That's technically the truth. \"They just did it. I have no idea why.\"\n\n\"Why did you do it?\" Winnie asked Bay.\n\n\"Because Aunt Tillie says that we should always protect family over everyone else, and that Mrs. Little is a crone who lives in a glass house,\" Bay answered. \"I've seen that house, though. Only the windows are glass.\"\n\n\"That's not really helping, Bay,\" I said.\n\n\"I didn't know that's what I was supposed to be doing,\" Bay said. \"Can I go upstairs and read for an hour before dinner?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" Winnie smoothed Bay's hair before the girl hopped down from her stool.\n\nBay flashed a smile in my direction as she headed for the stairs. \"I'm sorry you're in trouble, Aunt Tillie,\" she sang out.\n\nShe didn't sound sorry.\n\n\"I'm sorry, too,\" Thistle said, touching my arm as she passed. \"The doughnuts were delicious, though.\"\n\n\"We'll talk about the doughnuts when I track down you little turncoats later,\" I said.\n\n\"I'm looking forward to it.\"\n\nOnce it was just my three nieces and me, I found something fascinating to stare at on the wall. There was nothing there, but I've found that pretending I see things helps avoid an argument if I play the game correctly.\n\n\"Stop doing that,\" Winnie said, lightly slapping my arm.\n\nApparently I was off my game today. \"I don't know what you want me to say,\" I said. \"I was actually helping clean out driveways\u2026 you remember Mrs. Franz, right?\u2026 and somehow the snow accidentally made it from the end of her driveway into Margaret's yard. It was an accident.\"\n\n\"You know we don't believe that, right?\" Marnie challenged. \"I honestly don't care about you filling in Mrs. Little's driveway. That's the least destructive thing you've done to her all year. I care about you teaching the girls to lie to Terry.\"\n\n\"Technically only Clove and Thistle lied to Terry,\" I said. What? If they're going to turn on me, I'm going to pay them back. \"Bay kind of talked around the situation. She didn't tell an outright lie.\"\n\nWinnie seemed pleased with the knowledge. \"Well, I guess that's not bad for her then.\"\n\n\"Yes, she's a regular angel,\" I deadpanned. \"Now will you give me some cookies to take to the contest?\"\n\n\"No.\" Mean Winnie was back with a vengeance. \"We're not doing that. If you want to win the baking contest \u2013 and I think it would be great for you to get involved because it might keep you out of trouble for an afternoon \u2013 you need to make your own cookies.\"\n\nThat didn't sound like any fun at all. \"Why would I bake my own cookies when there are piles of them in this house just waiting for me to pretend I baked them?\"\n\n\"Because that's cheating.\"\n\n\"Since when do I care about that?\"\n\nWinnie scorched me with a look. \"Since you're supposed to be on your best behavior and leading by example,\" she replied. \"Your actions today weren't what we had in mind.\"\n\n\"Hey, the day was going fine until they claimed they saw a dead body in the woods,\" I said. \"I maintain they derailed things. I was an innocent bystander.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's weird, right?\" Twila said. \"Do you really think there was a body out there?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"It looked like something had been resting in the snow, but for all we know it was a bag of garbage,\" I said. \"Also, maybe someone did fall down. Maybe one of the elves got drunk. I have no idea what they really saw. It clearly wasn't a dead body, though.\"\n\n\"Well, that might be the only bit of good news we've gotten today,\" Marnie said. \"You need to be careful about what you say in front of those girls. Remember what we talked about before you left. Set a good example.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'll never forget that conversation.\" Mostly because it was so excruciating it was seared in my mind forever, I silently added. \"Is that all?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Winnie answered. \"Dinner will be ready in an hour.\"\n\n\"Can I steal some cookies?\" Asking one more time couldn't possibly hurt.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" I huffed. \"I want you all to know you're on my list, though.\"\n\n\"We were on your list this afternoon,\" Twila pointed out.\n\n\"Yes, but this time I'm going to do something about it,\" I said, stalking toward the door. \"You're all going to pay for ruining my day. Mark my words.\"\n\nWinnie appeared completely disinterested in my threat. \"Wash your hands before you come to dinner. I can see you've been busy with the fudge, and you refuse to use a napkin unless we make you.\"\n\nI narrowed my eyes. Clearly they'd gone too long without having to pay for their transgressions. I would fix that right up.\n\nI found the girls getting dressed in their bedroom the next morning, the smell of bacon wafting through the vents and informing me that their mothers were already downstairs cooking. They seemed surprised by my appearance, mostly because I generally showed up in their room only after they vacated the premises and I wanted to mess with them.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Thistle asked, instantly suspicious. \"If you're here to pay us back for yesterday, I'm prepared to scream and call for my mother.\"\n\n\"Oh, like that really terrifies me,\" I said, rolling my eyes. \"Your mother frightens me least of the three.\"\n\n\"I'll scream for my mother, too,\" Clove warned.\n\n\"I'm still not frightened.\" I looked to Bay. Her expression was unreadable.\n\n\"I'm too tired to scream,\" Bay said. \"I didn't sleep well.\"\n\nNow that I gave her a good once over, she did appear paler than usual. I pressed my hand to her forehead as I studied the dark circles under her eyes. \"Are you sick?\"\n\n\"Eww. If you're sick, get away from me,\" Thistle said, shoving Bay's arm. \"I don't want to get sick right before Santa comes. That would be the biggest holiday bummer of them all.\"\n\n\"I'm not sick,\" Bay said, glaring at her cousin. \"I just didn't sleep well.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" I asked, pulling my hand away. \"You don't feel warm.\"\n\n\"I had nightmares,\" Bay said. \"I saw the man in the woods, and he was haunting us.\"\n\nThis was a difficult situation because Bay could actually see and talk to ghosts. It was a family gift she inherited from me. Unlike the other gifts \u2013 like the ability to curse people and make magical potions to play with your enemies \u2013 the ghost gift was difficult to bear. I was fairly certain Bay would rather surrender it than keep it. That wasn't in the cards for her, though.\n\n\"Did you actually see this man or was it a dream?\" I asked.\n\nBay realized what I was asking right away. \"It was a dream,\" she said. \"He was chasing me through the house. Instead of pink socks, though, he didn't have feet and he was bleeding from the ankles.\"\n\n\"Oh, gross,\" Clove said, wrinkling her nose. \"Thanks so much for telling me that. Now I'm going to have nightmares.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" Thistle said. \"I'm far scarier than any guy without feet.\"\n\nSadly, I figured she was probably right. \"Girls, there was no body in the woods,\" I said. I saw no point in letting them freak themselves out when there was no reason \u2013 or benefit for me \u2013 and I hoped I'd be able to calm them since I had a favor to ask. \"The time between when you found him and we made it back to that spot was less than ten minutes. Where did he go?\"\n\n\"Maybe someone killed him and dragged his body away,\" Clove suggested.\n\n\"There were no drag marks, and you need to stop watching horror movies with your cousins because they always make you see things that aren't there,\" I chided.\n\n\"Maybe he died and came back as a zombie,\" Thistle said. \"I saw that on a movie the other day. All of these people were in a farmhouse and zombies were going after them. They died first, and then got up and started walking.\"\n\n\"Zombies aren't real,\" I said. \"You need to stop watching so much television, too.\"\n\n\"I saw that movie, and I didn't understand why they didn't run,\" Bay interjected. \"The zombies were really slow. They were like Aunt Tillie on mornings before she has her coffee.\"\n\n\"Don't make me add you to my list,\" I warned, extending a finger and making her giggle. \"There was no body in the woods. I don't know what you think you saw, but it wasn't a body.\"\n\n\"It was,\" Thistle said, stubbornly crossing her arms over her chest. \"We know what we saw. You can't convince us otherwise.\"\n\n\"Fine. It was a zombie.\" I held up my hands to signify defeat. \"If we're lucky he'll head to Margaret's house and we won't have to worry about him. She's so old and gristly it will take him years to gnaw through all of her skin and bones.\"\n\n\"You're so gross,\" Clove said, making a face.\n\n\"Not that we're not glad to see you, because we are, but why are you up here?\" Bay asked. In some ways she's the smartest of the trio.\n\n\"I'm not happy to see you,\" Thistle said. \"I am curious about why you're here, though.\" In other ways she's smartest of the group.\n\n\"I'm totally happy to see you and don't care why you're here,\" Clove added. She'll never be the smartest of the group, but she has her own special blend of mayhem that's going to be intriguing to watch as she grows older.\n\n\"I have a favor to ask of you,\" I said, choosing my words carefully. \"I figure you owe me after tattling to your mothers last night.\"\n\n\"What do you want?\" Bay asked, suspicious.\n\n\"She wants us to bake her cookies,\" Thistle said. \"She couldn't con our mothers into doing it and now she has no one to ask but us.\"\n\nOkay, she has control of the collective brain today. That much is obvious. \"I'll pay you,\" I offered.\n\n\"How much?\" Clove asked.\n\n\"Five dollars.\"\n\n\"Fifty and you have a deal,\" Thistle countered.\n\n\"Fifty?\" What a bunch of money-hungry jerks. They almost make me proud. \"I'm not giving you fifty bucks for cookies. There's no way.\"\n\n\"Then we're not baking you cookies,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"Hold up,\" Bay said, putting her hand on Thistle's arm. Her blue eyes were keen when they locked with mine. \"I have a solution that helps everyone, and it doesn't involve money.\"\n\n\"I'm all ears,\" I said.\n\n\"We'll bake your cookies if you help us figure out who died in the woods,\" Bay suggested.\n\nI opened my mouth to argue about whether or not they really saw a body and then snapped it shut. I was convinced no one died in the woods. I was equally convinced it couldn't hurt to pretend to investigate a fake death with them.\n\n\"Fine,\" I said, extending my hand. \"You have a deal.\"\n\n\"We want hot chocolate while we're investigating, too,\" Thistle said, staying Bay's hand before she could seal the deal. \"We might want some doughnuts, too.\"\n\n\"Don't push your luck,\" I warned.\n\n\"Fine, hot chocolate is enough.\"\n\nI shook three small hands and exchanged multiple big smiles as visions of Margaret's face when she realized I stole the blue ribbon from her danced through my head. My reverie lasted only a few moments, though, because Bay's pragmatism dragged me back to solid ground.\n\n\"How are we going to bake without our mothers knowing?\" she asked.\n\n\"You leave your mothers to me,\" I said. \"I have everything under control.\"\n\nI was almost sure of it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\"What are we doing?\"\n\nThistle jerked her head away when I tried to secure the strap of the blue combat helmet under her chin. She was naturally suspicious where I was concerned. I don't blame her.\n\n\"We're going to town,\" I replied. \"You have to wear your helmet. I made a promise to your mothers.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you lie all of the time,\" Thistle pointed out. \"What makes this different?\"\n\n\"I don't lie all of the time,\" I corrected. \"I expound on certain facts that other people might not believe are facts. It's different.\"\n\nBay made a face. \"Facts are supposed to be something everyone agrees on. That's how they end up in research books.\"\n\nNow it was my turn to make a face. \"You need to stop spending so much time with your nose in books because you're going to grow up to be boring if you're not careful,\" I chided. \"Men like smart women, but they don't like boring women. Well, I guess that's not true. Some men like boring women. Those aren't the type of men you want to associate with, though. Wait\u2026 what was I saying again?\"\n\n\"You were saying that Bay is boring and I'm funny and cute,\" Thistle replied.\n\n\"That's not what I was saying,\" I said, remembering where I was in the conversation. \"As for facts being universal, that's not even remotely true. Facts are affected by individual perspective. No, I'm telling the truth. That's a real scientific fact. I'm good at science. I could be a scientist professionally.\"\n\nBay wrinkled her nose as she fastened the strap of her purple combat helmet under her chin. She never gave me issues about wearing the helmet. I think it's because she's smart enough to recognize her own mortality. She's a worrisome little thing sometimes. Kids her age shouldn't be fixated on death. Because she sees ghosts, though, I think her life is going to be filled with crud like that.\n\n\"That doesn't change the fact that you lie to other people all of the time, and I don't want to wear this helmet,\" Thistle said. \"It makes me look stupid.\"\n\n\"You do that to yourself,\" I said. \"Also, there's a difference between lying to other people and making a promise to your mothers. I swore I would keep you safe because they seem to love you. I personally don't get it. I mean\u2026 I would've left you in the woods for wolves to eat when you were little if I had my druthers, but I promised my nieces, and that means you're wearing that helmet.\"\n\n\"You don't have to wear a helmet,\" Clove pointed out. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because her head is hard and only a rock could break it,\" Thistle answered for me. \"I heard Mom saying that to Aunt Marnie last week.\"\n\n\"Your mother's mouth is absolutely huge,\" I said. \"She's going to cry her eyes out when I bring up all of these fun tidbits she's been passing on to you girls while I've been too distracted to notice.\"\n\n\"Well, that might be fun, too,\" Thistle said as she stopped fidgeting with the helmet. She was apparently resigned to wearing it into town to start our investigation.\n\n\"Did you guys feed and water the dog?\" I asked. The mutt they coveted beyond everything slept on a blanket in front of the fire most of the time when it was cold, but they were fairly diligent about taking care of the Christmas gift I secured for them a few years ago.\n\n\"Yes, Sugar had breakfast and went outside,\" Bay answered. \"I think he's hoping Mom bakes again later today. Something always seems to fall on the kitchen floor when Sugar is around.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, your mother is a sap,\" I said, gesturing toward the truck. \"Everyone needs to get in so we can get going. I have an idea about who you might've seen in the woods.\"\n\n\"You do?\" Thistle appeared to be caught between excitement and doubt. She didn't fully trust me. She probably never would. Smart girl.\n\n\"I do,\" I confirmed. \"We just have one quick stop to make before we hit town.\"\n\n\"Are you going to plow in Mrs. Little's driveway again?\" Clove asked as she settled in the middle of the seat next to Thistle.\n\n\"That's a horrible thing to ask me,\" I said. \"Do you think I'm purposely mean to people?\"\n\nClove answered without hesitation. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, it's good that you recognize people for what they are,\" I said. \"We are stopping by Mrs. Little's on our way to town.\"\n\n\"Yay!\" Clove clapped her hands as I circled the truck and climbed into the driver's seat.\n\n\"Is everyone ready?\" I asked. Three solemn heads nodded. \"Great.\"\n\n\"Just one thing,\" Thistle said, locking gazes with me. \"Have you ever thought that the snow would be even better at the end of the driveway if it was yellow?\"\n\nI tilted my head to the side as I considered the question. \"I like the way your mind works. Yellow snow it is.\"\n\n\"Double yay!\" Clove clapped again.\n\n\"That gets annoying sometimes,\" I informed her.\n\n\"My eyes leak when you say things like that.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\nBay's expressive blue eyes were cloudy as I led the girls along the sidewalk in a quiet Walkerville neighborhood. I was still riding high from the Yellow Snow Extravaganza (all of the girls got in on the fun) in front of Margaret's house. I had no idea when she would see it. I was really looking forward to the outcome, though.\n\n\"This is Maple Street,\" I informed her, making sure Clove and Thistle were right behind us before focusing on the small ranch house, which was located in the final plot of a dead-end street in one of the most rundown neighborhoods in the area. \"I think this is where your dead guy lives.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" Thistle asked. \"This morning you didn't believe us that a dead body even existed.\"\n\n\"I still don't think anyone died,\" I said, opting for honesty. \"I do think maybe you saw someone passed out, though. It didn't hit me until you mentioned the pink socks. I happen to know someone who wears pink socks.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\nI gestured toward the house. \"Edgar Martin.\"\n\nThe name didn't spark any sort of recognition from the girls.\n\n\"Who is that?\" Clove asked. \"Do we know him?\"\n\nThat was a good question. \"Do you remember at the summer festival when that guy got really loud and told everyone aliens abducted him and that's why he was late mowing lawns so it would be unfair to fire him?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Oh, I guess that was a little late for you guys to be out,\" I said, rubbing my chin. \"Do you remember at the lake this summer when that guy was floating on the water and they called the fire department to resuscitate him \u2013 I mean fill his lungs with oxygen as a gag \u2013 and he claimed aliens dropped him in the lake by accident?\"\n\nBay knit her eyebrows. \"I remember the fire truck but not a man.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" I tilted my head to the sky and racked my brain for something they would remember. I snapped my fingers when a good memory pushed its way to the forefront. \"Do you remember at the pet parade before Halloween this year when a guy dressed like a unicorn and pretended to walk himself and tried to win the big prize?\"\n\n\"Oh, him?\" Thistle made a disgusted face. \"Mom said he was drunker than you during a solstice celebration.\"\n\nI couldn't hide my scowl. \"Your mother and I are going to have a really long talk before this is all said and done. I had no idea she's so\u2026 chatty.\"\n\n\"Aunt Twila never shuts up,\" Clove said. \"I don't know why you think it's so weird.\"\n\n\"No one asked you,\" I shot back. \"As for Edgar, yes. He's the one who pretended to be a unicorn, because he was drunk. He was drunk in all of those stories. That's why I think there's a good possibility you found him passed out and not dead in the woods.\"\n\nBay ran her tongue over her upper lip as she considered the possibility. \"I still think he was dead,\" she said finally.\n\nThese kids are stubborn. \"Well, did you see his ghost?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Don't you think you would've if he died alone and afraid in the woods?\" I challenged.\n\n\"Not if he was drunk and passed out in the snow,\" Bay replied. \"I saw a thing on the Discovery Channel about dying in the cold. It's just like going to sleep. Ghosts hang around because they're sad about dying. Maybe he wasn't sad about dying.\"\n\nI hate it when the little imp has a point. \"Let's just knock on the door and see if Edgar is home,\" I suggested. \"That way you'll be able to see him and tell me if he's the body you saw.\"\n\n\"What if he doesn't answer?\" Clove asked.\n\n\"We'll cross that road when we come to it.\"\n\n\"Okay, but I agree with Bay,\" Clove said, falling into step with me as we traipsed toward the front door. \"I'm pretty sure he was dead.\"\n\n\"Did your eyes leak?\"\n\n\"They wanted to.\"\n\nI pursed my lips to keep from laughing and knocked on the door three times in quick succession when we reached the top of the porch. The girls watched expectantly as I leaned closer to listen for the telltale sounds of someone stirring inside. The house was still.\n\nI knocked again and got the same result. Thistle grew more smug with every unanswered knock.\n\n\"I think he's dead,\" Bay said finally, crossing her arms over her chest. \"I hate to say I told you so, but\u2026 .\"\n\n\"I wouldn't finish that sentence if I were you,\" I warned, extending a finger. \"He's not dead. He's just\u2026 passed out. He's dead to the world, so to speak, but he's not really dead.\"\n\n\"You don't know that he's even inside,\" Thistle argued. \"You can tell us that until your lips fall off from lying, but we know the truth. He's not in there. He's dead.\"\n\n\"You're letting your imaginations get away from you.\"\n\n\"No, we're not,\" Clove said. \"You didn't see him in the snow. We did. We know he's dead.\"\n\n\"Oh, geez.\" I pinched the bridge of my nose to ward off an oncoming headache. \"Will you girls believe me if I take you inside and show you Edgar is passed out?\"\n\n\"How are you going to do that?\" Bay asked, suspicious.\n\nI pointed toward the large window at the front of the house. \"We can go through there.\"\n\nClove's mouth dropped open. \"That's breaking the law!\"\n\n\"You weren't so bothered by that when we put yellow snow at the end of Margaret's driveway,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"Yes, but we can't get in trouble for that because we're too young to drive,\" Thistle said. \"We can get in trouble for this. We know better than to break into someone's house.\"\n\n\"Mostly because we've gotten in trouble with the police before when you made us do it,\" Bay added.\n\n\"I didn't make you do anything,\" I countered. \"You wanted to do it. You enjoyed it, in fact. It's not my fault we got caught. That was a fluke.\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Clove rubbed her mitten-covered hands together. \"What if we get caught?\"\n\n\"We won't get caught.\" I was fifty percent sure that was true. \"We'll go in through the window, I'll show you that Edgar is passed out inside and not dead, and then we'll go out through the front door. You can let go of this dead body crap, and we'll return home so you can bake my cookies.\"\n\n\"What if we go in there and he's not the guy we saw in the woods?\" Bay asked.\n\n\"Then we'll keep looking.\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Bay hopped from one foot to the other as her gazed bounced between Clove and Thistle. \"What do you guys think?\"\n\n\"I don't want to break the law,\" Clove answered.\n\n\"I don't care about breaking the law,\" Thistle said. \"I just don't want to get caught.\"\n\n\"We won't get caught,\" I said. \"Trust me.\"\n\n\"You are in so much trouble!\"\n\nTerry's face was full of fury as he crossed his arms over his chest and tapped his foot on Edgar's snow-covered front porch twenty minutes later. He caught us in the act as we tried to force Clove through the open window \u2013 and convince her to open the front door once she was inside. Apparently the neighbors saw us or some such crap. That's what Terry told us when he dragged us outside anyway.\n\n\"I was doing a public service,\" I said, forcing myself to remain calm. \"The girls have been working themselves up because they're convinced they saw a dead body yesterday. I was simply trying to prove to them that they were wrong.\"\n\n\"And how did that end up with you breaking into a house?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"Well, they mentioned they saw pink socks,\" I replied. \"I saw Edgar wearing pink socks the day he dressed like a unicorn. I figured they didn't see a dead body but a dead drunk passed out in the snow. I wanted them to give up on the dead body business before it consumed them.\"\n\n\"Yes, that sounds very virtuous of you,\" Terry snapped sarcastically. \"I don't believe you for a second, though.\"\n\n\"That's because you're a very suspicious person.\"\n\n\"Did it ever cross your mind that you should just knock?\" Terry asked. \"That's what a normal person would do.\"\n\n\"We did knock,\" Thistle said. \"No one answered. That's how we knew this dude was dead.\"\n\n\"That's very callous, Thistle,\" Terry said. \"You don't know anything of the sort. I'm not convinced you saw anything in the woods yesterday.\"\n\n\"Do you think we're liars?\" Bay's lower lip jutted out. \"I'm not a liar.\"\n\n\"Oh, sweetheart, I know you're not a liar,\" Terry said, melting in the face of childhood anguish. He rested his hand on her shoulder as he knelt next to her. \"I think you saw something in the woods and thought it was one thing when it was really another.\"\n\n\"That's not what happened,\" Clove said. \"We saw a body.\"\n\n\"No, you didn't,\" Terry said.\n\n\"If we didn't see a body, where is the crazy unicorn guy?\" Thistle challenged. \"He's not in there. We looked around before you caught us.\"\n\n\"You mean you looked around before I caught you doing something illegal,\" Terry corrected.\n\n\"My eyes are leaking.\" Clove pressed her fingers over her eyelids. \"My heart hurts.\"\n\n\"Stop that right now,\" Terry ordered, wagging a finger in Clove's direction before turning his eyes to me. \"Are you happy? You're turning them into criminals.\"\n\n\"I'm unhappy about being caught,\" I answered honestly. \"The criminal stuff doesn't bother me. And, truth be told, I am slightly worried that they really did see Edgar out there. What if he's lit and took off in the woods? He could die. It's cold out, and we both know he doesn't monitor his drinking.\"\n\n\"I\u2026 .\" Terry broke off as he rubbed the back of his neck. \"I'll see if I can find out where he is to put everyone's mind at ease. That doesn't mean you guys are off the hook, though.\"\n\n\"Are you going to throw us in jail?\" Clove asked, horrified. \"I won't do well in jail. Aunt Tillie told me. I'll be the first one made to be a\u2026 what did you call it?\"\n\n\"Prison wife,\" I answered, not missing a beat.\n\nTerry scowled. \"Don't tell her things like that,\" he snapped. \"I cannot believe you brought them here. I just\u2026 what is the matter with you?\"\n\nI had two choices. I could tell him the truth and admit to bribing the girls for cookies or come up with a lie that made me look better. It wasn't a hard decision.\n\n\"Bay had nightmares last night, and she's pale,\" I said, pointing toward the blonde. She was Terry's favorite and he would fall all over himself if he thought she was legitimately upset. \"She's going to make herself sick if she keeps at it. I was trying to make things easier for her.\"\n\n\"Are you sick?\" Terry tilted Bay's chin so he could study her face. \"You do have circles under your eyes. Maybe you shouldn't be running around in the cold.\"\n\nWell, that worked like a charm.\n\n\"I'm okay,\" Bay said. \"I know he's dead, though. I can feel it.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah?\" Terry asked, his eyes sympathetic. \"What do you feel?\"\n\n\"Cold.\"\n\n\"I think that's because you're outside,\" Terry said, scooping up Bay and glaring at me. \"Come on, girls. I'll walk you back to the truck and buckle you in. Aunt Tillie is taking you home. There will be no more breaking the law today.\"\n\n\"But\u2026 we're not done,\" Thistle complained.\n\n\"Oh, you're done,\" Terry muttered.\n\nI tapped Clove's head to get her attention as I marched behind her. \"When we get to the truck, tell him your eyes are leaking because you love him so much,\" I ordered. \"He won't be able to yell at us if you do that.\"\n\nClove's smile was serene. \"I'm on it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "\"It's snowing.\"\n\nThe ride home was mostly quiet, all four of us lost in thought. The girls were convinced Edgar was dead in the woods somewhere, and even though I didn't want to admit it I was beginning to wonder if they were right.\n\nThey were so quiet \u2013 which worked against the norm, let me tell you \u2013 that I almost forgot they were in the truck with me.\n\nI shifted my eyes to Bay as she stared out the window. She'd always been entranced by snow. Don't get me wrong, she prefers warm weather in the summer, but she likes snow for Christmas. I kind of like it, too.\n\n\"It is,\" I agreed, smiling as the large flakes pelted down from the sky. \"It looks as if it's going to be a big snow, too.\"\n\n\"We should plow on the way home,\" Thistle said. \"That way we can check on the yellow snow.\"\n\nI really do like the way that kid's mind works. \"We can do that,\" I said. \"In fact, why don't we head that way now?\"\n\n\"I thought you wanted us to bake?\" Clove challenged. \"Wasn't that the whole point of today's trip?\"\n\n\"Clove, the whole point of today's trip was to prove to you guys that you didn't find a dead body in the woods,\" I said. \"I think I've done that.\"\n\n\"You have not,\" Thistle scoffed. \"You're only saying that to make us think something that's not true. I know the way your mind works. You can't fool us.\"\n\nI knew the way her mind worked, too, and she was right.\n\n\"She's not trying to fool us,\" Bay corrected. \"She's trying to convince herself that she's right and we're wrong. She's worried we really did see something and that Edgar Martin is dead and she doesn't want to be responsible for finding his body.\"\n\nHow in the heck did she figure that out? The older they get, the shrewder they get. It's frightening. If they all put their heads together now they come close to outsmarting me. Don't ever tell them I said that, by the way. I'll deny it to my dying day.\n\n\"I don't think he's dead,\" I said. \"I think he was passed out when you guys came across him. Then I think being in the cold woke him and he wandered off.\"\n\n\"You said there were no tracks leading away,\" Thistle pointed out.\n\nI did say that. Crud. \"Maybe he stepped in the tracks you already made,\" I suggested. Hey, that's actually a possibility. I warmed to my subject. \"Maybe he woke up and saw the tracks and followed them out and we didn't notice because we got distracted.\"\n\nThistle snorted. \"You'll say anything to make us believe you're right.\"\n\nThat was also true. I decided to change the subject before things got out of hand. \"Who wants to plow?\"\n\nClove and Bay immediately raised their hands while Thistle took a moment to think. I narrowed my eyes as I watched her. I had no idea what was going through that busy mind of hers, but whatever it was couldn't be good.\n\n\"Can we go by Lila's house and mess with her driveway?\" Thistle asked finally.\n\nNow that sounded like a plan. \"Absolutely,\" I said, taking the girls by surprise as I did an immediate U-turn. \"We'll hit her house first and then swing back around by Margaret's place before going home. Your mothers are supposed to be shopping this afternoon \u2013 don't worry, I asked to make sure \u2013 and that gives us a window to make cookies.\"\n\n\"Let's do it,\" Thistle said. \"I think we should make the snow in front of Lila's house yellow, too.\"\n\n\"No, not yellow,\" Bay said, her face lighting up. \"We should make that snow brown\u2026 like poop.\"\n\nI pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. They were young, so they couldn't think of truly evil things to do to their enemies yet, but they were getting there fast. \"I couldn't be prouder of you girls if I birthed you myself.\"\n\nThe truck jolted as I got too close to the side of the road, and I cast a surprised look in that direction. \"Huh. What was that?\"\n\n\"You took out Mr. Dorchester's mailbox,\" Thistle replied, blas\u00e9. \"It was that red one that looked like a barn.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, that was ugly anyway,\" I said. \"He must've moved it.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'm sure he did.\"\n\n\"It says here you need one stick of butter and a half cup of salt,\" I said, resting my chin on the counter as I sat on a stool and watched Clove and Bay work behind the counter. Thistle, much like me, had no interest in baking and sipped a cup of tea as she watched her cousins work. I decided to read the ingredients to them to hurry things along because our plowing excursion took longer than I initially planned. By the end of the trip we added two other enemies to the list because we were having so much fun. The brown snow really did look like a pile of poop, by the way. It was glorious.\n\n\"There's no way it says to use half a cup of salt,\" Bay argued, her forehead creasing into a tense vee. \"That would make the cookies taste way too nasty.\"\n\nHow could she possibly know that? It's not as if she's a baker. \"It says salt,\" I shot back. \"I'm not blind. I know how to read.\"\n\nBay wasn't convinced and she snatched the cookbook from me so she could look at the recipe. \"It says we need half a cup of sugar and one tablespoon of salt,\" she corrected. \"Where are your glasses?\"\n\nWell, now she was just hitting below the belt. \"I don't need glasses,\" I argued. \"Glasses are for old people. I have perfect vision. I could be a sniper in the military if I wanted. Seriously, I could kill people for a living.\"\n\n\"I don't think anyone disagrees with that,\" Thistle said. \"You wouldn't do it with a gun, though. You would do it with your fingers and mind.\"\n\nShe had a point. \"I still think salty cookies are probably delicious,\" I said. \"Put extra salt in.\"\n\n\"Do you want to win or do you want to be right?\" Bay challenged, taking me by surprise. \"In this case you can't do both.\"\n\nAnd that right there is why I'm convinced she's the smartest in the group some days. She can read me like a children's book with only pictures. \"Who says I can't be both?\"\n\n\"Common sense and taste buds.\"\n\nI made a face. \"Fine. I want to win.\"\n\n\"You only want to win so you can torture Mrs. Little,\" Thistle said knowingly as she slurped her tea. \"Why do you hate her so much?\"\n\nThat was a story they were definitely too young to hear. It was such a bad story I didn't want to know it. Plus, in the end, I didn't come out looking like much of a role model. Don't get me wrong, I'm not keen on being a role model, but despite what everyone says, there are a few things in my past that cause me shame. My association with Margaret is one of them.\n\n\"She's a bad person,\" I answered after a beat. \"It's not just that she does bad things. She has a bad heart, too.\"\n\n\"Unlike you,\" Bay mused. \"You like to do naughty things, but Mom says you have a good heart. She says you have the best heart sometimes. She just wishes you weren't so naughty.\"\n\n\"I guess you get that from me, huh?\" I teased, my eyes flashing. \"I don't generally consider myself naughty. It's more that I'm\u2026 active\u2026 and I work faster than most people think. That makes me a genius of sorts.\"\n\nThistle giggled so hard I thought she was going to snort her tea through her nose.\n\n\"I was being truthful,\" I said.\n\n\"You're so funny,\" Thistle said. \"I want to be just like you when I grow up\u2026 only meaner.\"\n\nI shot her an appraising look. \"I think that's the nicest thing you ever said to me.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Well, don't get used to it,\" Thistle said. \"I want a mean reputation like you.\"\n\nI stilled, the admission catching me off guard. \"Do you really think I have a mean reputation?\"\n\nThistle nodded. \"People are afraid of you. I want them to be afraid of me, too.\"\n\n\"I don't think you have much to worry about there,\" I said. \"I heard the principal called your mother in at the end of the semester and told her that everyone in your class is frightened of you.\"\n\n\"They're easy, though,\" Thistle said. \"All I have to do is threaten to knock them down and make them cry to get them to do what I want. I need to start scaring adults. That's what I'm really looking forward to doing.\"\n\nFor the first time I realized exactly how much she reminded me of myself. I make jokes about it sometimes because I find it amusing, but perhaps her mother is right. I would never admit it to my nieces, but Thistle was clearly getting close to crossing a line from which she might not be able to return.\n\n\"Listen, mouth,\" I said, choosing my words carefully. \"I know you think it's all fun and games to terrorize people \u2013 and it does have its merits, I'm not going to lie \u2013 but you don't want to be so mean that you chase everyone away. It's good to have a few people in your corner no matter who you are.\"\n\nThistle didn't look convinced. \"You don't have people in your corner.\"\n\nI arched a challenging eyebrow. \"Oh, really? What about your mothers? What about the three of you? What about Officer Terry?\"\n\n\"But\u2026 you fight with all of us,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"Fighting is not the same as scaring everyone away,\" I said. \"Think about it, do you really want to go through life without the rest of us? If you continue down this path, you're going to scare everyone away. You might not care about those twerps in your school, but I'm guessing you would be pretty sad if you scared away Bay and Clove.\"\n\nThistle rubbed her cheek as she tilted her head and considered my words. \"I don't want to scare everyone away,\" she said finally. \"I also want to terrify people when I hate them and they're evil. Can I do both?\"\n\nI smiled. \"It's a balancing act,\" I said. \"Something tells me you're up to the challenge of balancing two worlds, though. Just\u2026 think about it.\"\n\n\"Okay, but I'm still going to be mean to you when I feel like it,\" Thistle hedged.\n\n\"I would expect nothing less.\"\n\n\"In the name of the Goddess\u2026 what in the hell happened here?\"\n\nI lost track of time hanging out with the girls in the kitchen and before I realized what was happening I found Winnie, Marnie and Twila staring at the trashed room with what can only be described as outright fury. They held shopping bags in their hands as they gaped at the flour-covered counters and greased cookie sheets. Bay and Clove were just as messy as the counters.\n\n\"It's not what you think,\" I said hurriedly, racking my brain for an acceptable excuse. \"We were attacked by a\u2026 flour gnome and it was so out of control I had to vanquish it. We just got through fighting it. Yeah, that's it.\"\n\nWinnie made a disgusted face as she dropped her grocery bags on the floor. \"A flour gnome? Do you really expect me to believe that?\"\n\nWas that a trick question? \"Um\u2026 you tell me.\"\n\n\"We know what you were doing,\" Marnie said, resting her bags on the dining room table as she wrinkled her nose and stared at the mess. \"You conned them into making you cookies for the contest. I just\u2026 what were you thinking?\"\n\n\"Well, I certainly didn't bribe them, if that's what you're asking,\" I said. Wait\u2026 should I have said that? Probably not. That's what happens when you add bourbon to your tea when no one is looking. This wouldn't end well.\n\n\"She bribed you?\" Winnie's eyes widened as she locked gazes with Bay. \"What did she give you?\"\n\nBay looked caught. \"Um\u2026 .\"\n\n\"She told us she would help us find the dead body if we helped her make cookies,\" Thistle replied, moving down a stool when I lashed out to slap her arm. She expected the move. \"We thought it was a fair trade.\"\n\n\"We?\" Bay challenged. \"You drank tea. You didn't help with anything.\"\n\n\"I was super\u2026 super\u2026 .\" Thistle often grappled to find the right word to express what she was feeling.\n\n\"Supervising?\" Twila suggested.\n\nThistle snapped her fingers. \"Yeah, that's it. I was supervising. Someone had to make sure Clove and Bay didn't make a mistake.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure that was my job,\" I said dryly.\n\n\"Says the woman who thought we should use half a cup of salt,\" Bay grumbled.\n\n\"I heard that,\" I said.\n\n\"I wasn't whispering,\" Bay shot back.\n\n\"Okay, that's enough of that,\" Winnie said, grabbing Bay's arm and tugging her away from the counter. \"You need to go upstairs and take a bath. Wash all of that flour off. Dinner will be ready in an hour, so make sure you're not late.\"\n\n\"But we're not done with the cookies,\" Bay said. She's something of a perfectionist, which I find fascinating. I never met a project I didn't want to abandon halfway through it. Bay is the complete opposite. \"We still have to put them in the oven.\"\n\n\"I'll finish the cookies,\" Winnie said, her smile stretched and tight as she glanced at me.\n\n\"You need to go upstairs, too, Clove,\" Marnie said. \"Make sure you put those dirty clothes in the hamper instead of leaving them on the floor. You might draw mice in there if you're not careful.\"\n\nThistle moved to hop off the stool and follow her cousins, but Twila stopped her before she could take more than a couple of steps. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Upstairs to get cleaned up,\" Thistle replied.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Twila said, shaking her head. \"You're not dirty. Do you know what's dirty?\"\n\n\"Aunt Tillie's mind?\"\n\nTwila pressed her lips together and shook her head.\n\n\"The kitchen is dirty,\" Marnie said. \"The kitchen is filthy, in fact. You two need to clean up the mess you made so we can cook dinner.\"\n\nI glanced over my shoulder. Who was the other half of the \"two\" she referenced? \"Which two?\"\n\n\"You and Thistle,\" Winnie replied. \"This was your idea and you sat there and watched them make a mess. You need to clean it up.\"\n\nYeah, that really sounded nothing like me. \"I'm good,\" I said blithely.\n\n\"You're not good,\" Winnie countered. \"If you don't pick up this mess, you're not getting any dinner. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, but\u2026 .\"\n\nMarnie shook her head to cut me off. \"No buts.\"\n\n\"I'm not in the mood to clean,\" Thistle said. \"I think Aunt Tillie should do it alone.\"\n\n\"We just had this discussion,\" I growled.\n\nThistle ignored me. \"I'm small and tired. I need a nap.\"\n\n\"You need to clean if you want dinner,\" Twila corrected. \"Don't you want dinner?\"\n\nThistle shrugged. \"It depends,\" she replied. \"What are we having?\"\n\n\"What does that have to do with anything?\" Winnie challenged.\n\n\"If it's something I hate I'm going to choose the nap,\" Thistle replied, not missing a beat. \"If it's something I like, I guess I'm going to clean. I won't like it, though.\"\n\nWinnie made a disgusted face. \"We're having chicken legs marinated in red wine, mashed potatoes and corn.\"\n\nThistle screwed up her face into a strange expression as she thought. \"I think I'll take a nap.\"\n\n\"We're also having red velvet cake,\" Marnie added, causing Thistle's smug smile to slip. \"I believe that's your favorite.\"\n\n\"It is my favorite,\" Thistle said. \"Crap.\"\n\n\"Yes, crap,\" I agreed, reluctantly taking the towel Winnie handed in my direction. \"I blame you for this, Thistle. You were supposed to be watching the clock.\"\n\n\"And I blame you,\" Thistle shot back. \"You were supposed to be watching us.\"\n\n\"And I blame both of you,\" Winnie said. \"I want this kitchen clean in twenty minutes. If it's not, you guys aren't going to get any cake.\"\n\nWell, that was a low blow. \"I'm not going to put up with much more of this lip,\" I warned. \"You're going to be sorry if you continue to cross me.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Thistle intoned.\n\nWinnie didn't look worried in the least. \"Clean!\"\n\nYeah, I've definitely been off my game when it comes to doling out punishments this week. I need to take a long look at my naughty list and start handling the biggest trouble spots. Unfortunately, I have to clean first. Blech.\n\nI cast a curious look in Thistle's direction as she packed the baking ingredients to carry to the pantry. \"I think my eyes might start leaking soon,\" I admitted.\n\n\"Join the club.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "I found the girls leaving their bedroom the next morning. They were instantly alert upon seeing me in their part of the house two days in a row. Suspicion runs deep when you have Winchester blood flowing through your veins. You're born with it. You can't hide from it.\n\n\"Are you going to punish us for yesterday?\" Clove asked, her brown eyes reflecting worry. \"If so, you should know that what happened yesterday wasn't our fault. We did what we were supposed to do.\"\n\n\"We did,\" Bay said, bobbing her head.\n\n\"I didn't, but you didn't really think I was going to do it so it doesn't matter,\" Thistle said. She was strangely blas\u00e9 for so early in the morning. Usually she's grumpy and you can't talk to her until she has some juice and food in her stomach. She gets that from me.\n\n\"No, I didn't really expect you to do anything and you definitely held up your end of the bargain,\" I said, following the girls down the hallway. \"You did help clean the kitchen, though, so I guess that should count for something.\"\n\n\"The only reason I did that was because Mom wouldn't stop staring at me,\" Thistle admitted. \"It was as if she knew I was just waiting for her to look away so I could escape. I hate that about her.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's a mom thing,\" I said. \"My mother was the same way. I always thought I could put one over on her, but she managed to catch me every time.\"\n\n\"What was your mom like?\" Bay asked. She looked legitimately curious. \"We've heard stories, but never got to meet her. We've seen photos, though. You don't look like her.\"\n\n\"No, your grandmother looked like her,\" I said, my mind briefly drifting back to my childhood. I was genuinely fond of my sister Ginger and missed her a great deal. I saw some of her mannerisms reflected back at me when I looked at her daughters \u2013 Winnie, Marnie and Twila \u2013 but they had a lot of me in them, too. I wasn't sure which traits were stronger \u2013 or better, for that matter. \"It's too bad you girls didn't get to meet your grandmother. You would've liked her.\"\n\nI was surprisingly wistful this morning. My melancholy mood wasn't lost on the youngest Winchesters.\n\n\"Do you miss her?\" Clove asked.\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"I wish I could've had a sister,\" Clove said. \"I would've been a great older sister. I would've tortured my little sister only fifty percent of the time.\"\n\nI smirked. \"You have sisters,\" I countered. \"What do you think Bay and Thistle are?\"\n\n\"Cousins.\"\n\n\"Technically I guess you're right,\" I conceded. \"You haven't been raised as cousins, though. You've been raised as sisters. It doesn't matter that you don't share the same mother and father. You share the same heart.\"\n\n\"That's kind of gross when you think about it,\" Clove said, descending the stairs. \"If we all shared the same heart then we would be stuck together and that would give me nightmares.\"\n\n\"Would it make your eyes leak?\" I teased.\n\n\"Definitely.\"\n\nI found Marnie, Twila and Winnie standing behind the counter when we reached the kitchen. The usual morning cooking activities seemed to be underway \u2013 egg carton open on the counter, bread sitting next to the toaster, a slab of bacon in Marnie's hand as she stared at the stove \u2013 but without the normal bustle that accompanied the items. I pursed my lips when I saw the blank look on Winnie's face and feigned confusion. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Why don't I smell breakfast?\" Thistle asked, alarmed. \"Are your hands broken?\"\n\n\"No,\" Twila answered hurriedly, reaching for the bread. \"We're getting everything ready. We're just running late today.\"\n\n\"Really late,\" I said, shuffling toward the coffee pot on the counter and pouring myself a mug of steaming caffeinated goodness as I made a big show of staring at the empty frying pans and toaster. \"Are you girls sick?\"\n\n\"Oh, I hope not,\" Clove said. \"If you all get sick, who will cook for us?\"\n\n\"Not Aunt Tillie, that's for sure,\" Thistle intoned. \"If you get sick, we're going to starve.\"\n\n\"And no one wants that,\" I said, biting the inside of my cheek as Winnie's puzzled expression turned to frustration. \"Do you think you're getting the flu?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Winnie said, snapping her head up and glaring at me. \"We don't get sick. We take care of ourselves.\"\n\n\"We definitely take care of ourselves,\" Marnie agreed.\n\n\"Then why isn't breakfast ready?\" I pressed, tugging a strand of Bay's hair behind her ear and smoothing it into place. The girls take care of their own morning hygiene but sometimes they gloss over their hair in the winter because they know they end up wearing hats. \"Breakfast is always ready when we come down. I mean\u2026 is something wrong?\"\n\nI knew I was in danger of overplaying my hand when Winnie narrowed her eyes and fixated on me. Her hand rested on the egg carton and I couldn't help but wonder if she planned on hurling one at me. I knew she wouldn't cook anything in the carton. I'd taken care of that. They couldn't cook today no matter how hard they tried. In fact, the harder they tried, the more likely it would become that the knowledge of how to cook \u2013 even the basics \u2013 would seep out of their brains.\n\n\"What did you do?\" Winnie hissed, the reality of the situation finally sinking in.\n\n\"What makes you think I did anything?\" I asked, pasting my best \"I'm innocent and you can't attack me without proper proof\" smile on my face.\n\n\"Because we can't seem to remember how to cook breakfast,\" Marnie answered. \"Do you see those eggs? We know they're eggs. We even know we're supposed to cook them. We can't remember how, though. It's as if we've forgotten everything we know how to do.\"\n\n\"That is terrible,\" I clucked, sliding a sly look in Thistle's direction. Her eyes were fixed on her mother's face and she seemed to be in awe. \"Did you fall and hit your head?\"\n\n\"We didn't hit anything,\" Twila shot back. \"We were absolutely fine last night. We made dinner and did the dishes. Everything was perfectly normal when we went to sleep.\"\n\n\"Then we woke up and things still seemed fine,\" Winnie said. \"That lasted until we hit the kitchen. We pulled all of the food out of the refrigerator like normal and then\u2026 well, then we got stuck.\"\n\n\"Oh, this is a total travesty,\" I said, swallowing the urge to giggle. I wouldn't truly be able to get under their skin if I didn't play it straight. \"Do you think it was something you ate?\"\n\n\"I'll bet it was the memory monster,\" Clove said. \"I think he lives in our closet.\"\n\n\"The only thing living in your closet is the mess monster,\" Marnie snapped. \"It wasn't something we ate. Aunt Tillie did this.\"\n\n\"Oh, now, that's a serious accusation,\" I said, studying my stubby fingernails. \"Do you have any proof?\"\n\n\"We know it was you,\" Winnie spat. \"We're not stupid. You gathered the girls before coming down. That means you didn't want to risk running into us without backup. Do you think I'm stupid?\"\n\n\"Now probably isn't the time to ask me that question,\" I replied. \"I mean, with you forgetting how to cook eggs and all. Perhaps you should go to a doctor.\"\n\n\"You're in big trouble!\" Winnie screeched, grabbing a spatula from the bin on the counter and brandishing it in my face. \"You cursed us, didn't you? This all comes back to us refusing to make you cookies to pass off as your own at the baking contest. Admit it.\"\n\nGladly. \"I warned you guys something bad was going to happen if you turned your back on your loving aunt,\" I said. \"Think about it. I raised you. I loved you. I took care of you. I paid for everything. What did you give me in return? Grief. That's what.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's such a crock of crap,\" Marnie said. \"We love and take care of you just as much as you love and take care of us. This is a reciprocal relationship. It's not all about you.\"\n\nYeah, sometimes I think they don't know me at all. What they do know they seem to twist to their own designs for some unknown reason. \"I think this is probably a great lesson on karma,\" I said. \"What do you think, girls?\"\n\n\"I think I'm hungry,\" Bay said, rubbing her stomach.\n\n\"I think it's funny, but I'm with Bay,\" Thistle said. \"What are we going to eat?\"\n\n\"There!\" Winnie waved the spatula in Thistle's direction. She appeared to be growing more and more deranged by the second. \"Did you hear that? What are they going to eat? You can't let them starve, and we all know you're not going to cook for them.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm definitely not going to cook for them,\" I said, hopping to my feet. \"Girls, grab your helmets. We're going into town for breakfast.\"\n\nThe girls seemed surprised but didn't give me any lip as they hurried out of the room. Winnie was incredulous as she watched them go.\n\n\"What a bunch of traitors,\" she groused.\n\n\"Yes, they kind of follow whatever direction the wind takes them, don't they?\" I flashed my most evil grin to get my nieces' attention. \"I guess I'll see you later. I hope you find something to eat.\"\n\n\"This isn't going to work,\" Winnie called out. \"I'm not going to fall for this. We're not going to let you blackmail us into doing what you want.\"\n\n\"I guess we'll see,\" I called back. \"Something tells me you're lying to everyone\u2026 including yourselves.\"\n\nI took the girls to the Gunderson Bakery for breakfast. I'd known the owner, Ginny, for years. We had something of a tumultuous past, but we weren't exactly unfriendly. She was also keyed in to all of the area gossip, so I hoped she'd be able to assuage my fears regarding Edgar.\n\n\"Well, this is a surprise,\" Ginny said, beaming at the girls as I herded them toward a table. \"I don't often see you ladies out for breakfast.\"\n\n\"Our moms forgot how to cook and we're starving,\" Clove announced. \"I think we might pass out from hunger.\"\n\n\"You poor dears!\" Ginny never had children of her own and she fell for every fake tear and imaginary injury these three could muster. It drove me crazy. \"What would you like?\"\n\n\"I want doughnuts,\" Thistle said. \"I want, like, ten of them.\"\n\n\"Ten, huh?\" Ginny smiled. \"Do you want chocolate and sprinkles on them?\"\n\nThistle nodded happily, but I held up my hand to still Ginny before she could take Bay and Clove's orders. \"Wait a second,\" I said. \"You girls have to eat a regular breakfast.\"\n\n\"Ugh! You can't bring us to a bakery and not expect us to eat doughnuts,\" Thistle complained.\n\n\"Yeah, that's mean,\" Clove said. \"It makes my eyes leak.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's funny when you do it to other people, but I find it annoying,\" I said, extending a finger in Clove's direction. \"From now on you're forbidden to do that with me. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Now I know my eyes are leaking,\" Clove grumbled, crossing her arms over her chest.\n\n\"Your butt will be leaking if you're not careful.\"\n\n\"Gross,\" Thistle and Bay said in unison as Ginny shot me a dark look.\n\n\"What?\" I asked Ginny, frustrated. \"You try spending hours with these monsters and we'll see how you feel afterward.\"\n\n\"I would love to spend time with these little angels,\" Ginny cooed. \"Look how cute they are.\"\n\n\"Wow. You girls have her snowed,\" I said, shaking my head. \"Good job.\"\n\n\"We learned from the best,\" Bay said, grinning. \"Can I have a breakfast sandwich?\"\n\n\"That's a good idea,\" I said. \"If you all eat a breakfast sandwich and one of those hash brown things you can have a doughnut when you're done.\"\n\n\"I only want the doughnut,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"And I only want you to shut up,\" I shot back.\n\n\"Fine,\" Thistle grumbled. \"Can I have the bacon and egg bagel sandwich and a hash brown?\"\n\nGinny smirked. \"You certainly can. How about everyone else?\"\n\n\"The same for me,\" Bay said as Clove nodded. \"Can I have a tomato juice, too?\"\n\n\"Tomato juice? I don't know any little ones who like tomato juice,\" Ginny said, giggling.\n\n\"She's a weird kid, but she does love her tomato juice,\" I said. \"I'll have a sandwich, too. I'd like some coffee, though.\"\n\n\"What about you two?\" Ginny asked Clove and Thistle. \"What do you want to drink?\"\n\n\"I want coffee,\" Thistle said. \"I take it black with no sugar.\"\n\n\"They'll have orange juice,\" I corrected before slipping out of my coat and following Ginny to the counter. The grill was right there, so she could make the sandwiches and keep up on conversation at the same time. I kept one eye on the girls for a few minutes to make sure they were behaving, but when they seemed content to gossip about how funny their mothers acted this morning I left them to it and focused on Ginny. \"Have you heard any good gossip lately?\"\n\n\"You'll have to be more specific,\" Ginny said, placing the bacon on the griddle. \"I've heard a lot of gossip. For example, I heard that Judy Bristow wants to get a boob job, and I heard that you've been plowing in the end of Margaret's driveway with yellow snow.\"\n\n\"We did brown snow for a bit yesterday, too.\"\n\nGinny smirked. \"It's not as if she doesn't deserve it. Is that the kind of gossip you're talking about?\"\n\nI shook my head. \"Have you heard anything about Edgar Martin?\"\n\nGinny tilted her head to the side, confused. She seemed surprised by the question. \"I haven't heard anything about him since the unicorn incident. I heard talk people were going to try to force him into rehab, but that never came to fruition.\"\n\n\"It never does,\" I said. \"You can't force someone into rehab. They have to want to do it for themselves.\"\n\n\"Why are you asking about Edgar?\"\n\n\"Well, um\u2026 .\" I risked a glance over my shoulder, but the girls were still caught up with talking to each other rather than eavesdropping. \"The day of the tree-lighting ceremony the girls swear they found a body in the woods.\"\n\n\"What were they doing in the woods?\"\n\n\"Looking for yellow snow to put on Lila Stevens' head.\"\n\n\"Oh, I like them more and more as they get older,\" Ginny said, giggling. \"What does that have to do with Edgar, though?\"\n\n\"They say whoever it was had on pink socks.\"\n\n\"Ah, like the unicorn,\" Ginny said almost to herself. \"Did you search the woods?\"\n\n\"We did and we came up empty,\" I answered. \"He's not there, but he doesn't seem to be anywhere else either. He's not at his house. I wrote it off at first because I thought they were exaggerating. I thought Edgar must've fallen down drunk. Now I'm starting to get worried.\"\n\n\"The problem with Edgar is that he takes off whenever he feels like it and it's impossible to know where he is for long stretches,\" Ginny said. \"I'm sure he's okay.\"\n\n\"I hope he is, but I promised the girls I would help them,\" I said. \"I always keep my word.\"\n\nGinny made a face. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Well, I keep it to them,\" I clarified. \"I would really like to track down Edgar. If he's dead out there somewhere, well, let's just say it could be a rough winter for a body.\"\n\n\"That's definitely true,\" Ginny said. \"I haven't seen Edgar, but now that you've brought up his name, I have heard a bit of gossip about him. I ignored it at first because it made no sense, but\u2026 well\u2026 it might be of interest to you.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Now, it came from Viola and she's not always reliable\u2026 .\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I'm not a big fan of salacious gossip,\" Ginny added.\n\nOh, I was practically salivating now. \"What?\"\n\n\"Viola said Edgar has been seen around town three times with Margaret Little,\" Ginny offered. \"She thought they were having an affair. I, of course, thought that was ridiculous. But if you can't find him, I think you should start looking there.\"\n\nI moved my jaw as I considered the possibility. It didn't make sense and yet \u2026. Margaret was there the day the girls claimed they found the body. Perhaps she saw Edgar when he was leaving and didn't tell anyone.\n\n\"I'll bet she killed him,\" I said, my mind working overtime.\n\nGinny was amused rather than aghast. \"Why would she do that?\"\n\n\"Because she's evil.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, as long as you have completely thorough reasoning for throwing that out there, I'm totally with you,\" Ginny said, handing me a mug of coffee. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"Bring her down.\"\n\n\"And people say December in Walkerville is boring,\" Ginny teased. \"Something tells me it's going to a holly jolly Christmas after all.\"\n\n\"Did you have to ruin things by reminding me of that song? It's like an earworm.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind for next time,\" Ginny said dryly.\n\n\"You do that.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\"Stop doing that.\"\n\nClove, a bag of potato chips resting on her lap as we sat in my parked truck across the street from Margaret Little's house, made a face. \"I'm not doing anything.\"\n\n\"You're rattling that bag so loudly I can't help but think that something is going to explode,\" I countered. \"It might be my temper, so I'd be very careful.\"\n\n\"I am not.\"\n\n\"You are, too.\"\n\n\"I am not.\"\n\n\"You are, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, will both of you give it a rest?\" Thistle asked, shifting in her seat. She kept her helmet on even though she complained it itched. I think she worried I would take off in a mad rush to run Margaret over if the mood struck, and she wasn't taking any chances. \"You're giving me a headache.\"\n\n\"Hey, I've had a headache since you three were born,\" I shot back. \"Do you hear me complaining?\"\n\n\"You complain all of the time,\" Thistle said. \"Mom says that's just the way you talk to other people and that we should ignore it. She says you don't mean to be a complainer, but you can't help yourself because it's just noise to you.\"\n\nI stilled. I was hearing a whole lot of Twila-isms these days. I had no idea she was that ballsy. \"Next time your mother says that, tell her the only noise in the house is that incessant droning she does when she claims she's singing,\" I said. \"How does that sound?\"\n\n\"Like you're feeling mean,\" Clove said, stretching her arms over her head as she tried to get comfortable.\n\nAfter Ginny told me about Margaret's ties to Edgar, I couldn't get the possibility of her offing him out of my head. I know it's a long shot, but I've always thought she was evil. Maybe she finally decided to embrace her inner hobgoblin and call to the evil corners of the land to do her bidding.\n\nNo, I'm not being dramatic. Hear me out.\n\nMargaret has been jealous of me ever since we were kids. At first she thought I was somehow cheating when it came to footraces and tennis matches, but then she realized I really was magical and made it her mission to be just like me. I'm not making it up. She's jealous.\n\nIf she conducted enough research, she might've gotten to the point where she found that she could call to evil forces and ask them to do her bidding. The Winchesters call to the four white light corners of magic. Evil witches call to the four dark corners. Margaret would definitely be an evil witch if she embraced the craft.\n\nShe might've thought she could take someone like Edgar \u2013 a man known to make an ass of himself and drink until he was in a stupor at least five days a week \u2013 and sacrifice him to the blood winds to give herself power.\n\nHuh? What do you think of that?\n\n\"What are you thinking?\" Bay asked, her eyes narrow slits as suspicion washed over her features. \"You went to a different place there for a second.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure it was an evil place,\" Thistle said. \"Did you see that smile? It made me think of that movie we were watching the other day. What was the name of it?\"\n\n\"Friday the 13th?\"\n\n\"No, not that one.\"\n\n\"A Nightmare on Elm Street?\"\n\n\"Not that one either.\"\n\n\"Good grief,\" I muttered. \"Someone really does need to monitor your viewing habits.\"\n\n\"We like horror movies,\" Bay said. \"They make us feel better about our lives.\"\n\n\"And why is that?\"\n\n\"Because no matter how bloody and terrible a slasher movie killer is, he's still nicer than you,\" Thistle said, grinning.\n\n\"Keep it up, mouth.\"\n\n\"It!\"\n\n\"It what?\"\n\n\"No, that's the name of the movie,\" Thistle said. \"It. There was a creepy clown and he had horrible fangs when he smiled. You reminded me of that clown just now. What were you thinking?\"\n\n\"I was thinking that we'll be hailed as heroes if we find Edgar alive,\" I lied. \"We might even get Margaret locked up to boot. That would be the best Christmas gift ever.\"\n\nThistle rolled her eyes. \"You're all talk,\" she said. \"You don't really want Mrs. Little to be arrested. You won't have anyone to torture if that happens. Who else are we going to drop yellow snow on?\"\n\n\"Oh, there's plenty of people in this town who have ticked me off,\" I said. \"I'm sure I can find someone.\"\n\n\"And yet it won't be as funny as messing with Mrs. Little,\" Thistle said. \"You'll be bored. I bet she's not a murderer anyway. She's probably just\u2026 kissing him.\"\n\nI arched an eyebrow. \"Kissing him?\"\n\n\"That's what old people do.\"\n\n\"They do more than that,\" I pointed out.\n\n\"Yes, but I'm only going to be ten soon so I'm not supposed to know about those things,\" Thistle said. \"My mind doesn't go past kissing.\"\n\n\"That's a good thing,\" I said.\n\n\"Mine does,\" Clove said. \"I can't wait to get a boyfriend. He's going to be handsome and smart, and he's going to give me flowers.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes so hard I was convinced I was going to fall out of the truck. \"None of those things are important,\" I said. \"Well, it's important that he's smart. You don't want to date a dumb one. As for the rest, you only need to find someone with a good heart who will love you for who you are without trying to change you.\"\n\n\"Do you think Mrs. Little is doing that for Edgar?\" Bay asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then we should probably help him,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"You've got that right,\" I said, pocketing my keys. \"Come on, girls. It's time to save the day\u2026 and make Margaret Little pay.\"\n\n\"Wow. That was almost like poetry\u2026 like Dr. Seuss,\" Thistle drawled.\n\n\"You're on my list.\"\n\n\"Lift your feet.\"\n\n\"I am lifting my feet.\"\n\n\"No, you're shuffling your feet, and that doesn't work in snow,\" I argued, grabbing Clove's waist so I could lift her over a particularly large snowdrift. \"Good grief, girl. What have you been eating?\"\n\n\"The same thing as you,\" Clove shot back, scorching me with a dark look when I dropped her on the other side of the drift. Margaret's house is surrounded by two or three rows of trees. It's supposed to give the illusion of privacy, but in reality all it does is give me something to hide behind when I'm trying to spy. Trust me. I know. I've done this before.\n\n\"Well, I think you've been eating double portions or something,\" I said, wiping my brow. It's too cold to be sweating, yet I could feel it dripping down my forehead. I'm too old for this much physical exertion. I'm still in my prime, mind you, but traipsing through a foot of snow with whiny little girls is not conducive to a relaxing cardiovascular workout. \"You need to go on a diet.\"\n\n\"You can't say that to her,\" Bay said, grabbing on to a low-hanging branch and swinging herself around the base of the tree. The snow was shallower closer to the trunks and she figured out pretty quickly that it was easier to stick close to the trees than wade through the big drifts. Unfortunately Clove didn't realize that. I constantly had to fish her out of piles due to her height. \"Mom says it's never okay to make fun of people for their weight or the way they look.\"\n\n\"Well, you're mother is a mouthy cow,\" I muttered.\n\n\"I heard that.\"\n\nI sighed and brushed my hair from my face. \"Your mother is right,\" I said finally. What? I don't want to teach them bad habits. Er, well, I don't want to teach them needlessly hurtful bad habits. There are plenty of bad habits for me to imprint on their impressionable minds that don't include being downright nasty for no reason. \"It's never okay to make fun of someone's weight or looks.\"\n\n\"You called Mom a cow, though,\" Bay pointed out.\n\n\"I was talking about the fact that she won't stop mooing in my ear when I want to do something,\" I said. \"She sounds like a cow. She doesn't look like a cow.\"\n\n\"I think she looks more like a chicken,\" Clove said, purposely hopping into a big drift and giggling as she tried to wade through it. Margaret's house was set a hundred and fifty feet back from the road, yet it felt as if I'd walked ten miles with these miniature monsters. \"She puts her hands on her hips all of the time and jerks her head back and forth. Sometimes when she's yelling I think she sounds like she's clucking.\"\n\n\"That's a good one,\" Thistle said. \"I think you should tell her\u2026 and do an imitation while you're at it.\"\n\n\"Don't do that if you want to stay on the nice list for Christmas,\" I warned. \"Save that for New Year's Eve. They'll be drunk so they might forget it.\"\n\n\"Good idea.\"\n\nBay seemed lost in thought as she swung around to the next tree, her eyes trained on me.\n\n\"What?\" I asked, annoyed. She has a way of looking into your soul that's downright unnerving.\n\n\"I know it's wrong to make fun of people because of the way they look, but can I still call Lila a horse face when she's mean to me?\"\n\nThat kid is far too worried about what's right and wrong. She needs to focus on smiting her enemies without caring about what's fair on the battlefield. That will keep her young and happy for decades. \"Yes, that's totally fine.\"\n\n\"But you just said\u2026 .\"\n\n\"There are exceptions to every rule, Bay,\" I said, cutting her off. \"This is one of those exceptions. Lila looks like a horse's behind and you can tell her that because she's evil. It's the same reason I can point out that Margaret looks like the butt of a chicken. It's not nice to go off on other people, but when it's your sworn enemy, it's totally fine.\"\n\n\"I don't think that's really the rule,\" Thistle said. She'd wised up and began following Bay not long after we waded into the woods.\n\n\"It's the rule if I say it's the rule,\" I said, grabbing the back of Clove's coat even as she moved to keep walking farther into the woods. \"That's far enough, short stack. All we need to do is get a clear view into the house. The big bay window in the dining room is right there. We should be able to see most of the main floor from here.\"\n\n\"That doesn't really work from this far away,\" Bay pointed out. \"It worked during the summer because you brought us after dark and we could sneak right up under the window to take those photographs you wanted.\"\n\n\"I still don't get that,\" Thistle added. \"You say it's fine for you guys to dance naked, but when Mrs. Little does it you think it's a crime against humans. Er, a crime against humidity.\"\n\n\"A crime against humanity,\" I corrected. \"I still haven't been proven wrong on that, by the way. You need to pay more attention to your English lessons and stop worrying so much about who I'm taking photos of. You mimic what everyone says so it sounds like you have a bigger vocabulary than you really do.\"\n\n\"And you need to stuff it,\" Thistle grumbled. If she thought she said that low enough for me not to hear, she was sorely mistaken. Of course, she might've purposely said it loud enough for me to hear, in which case I was mildly proud of her.\n\n\"All that matters is that we're good here,\" I said, making sure I was mostly covered by the large pine tree at the edge of the property as I dug in my purse. \"I brought help.\"\n\n\"What kind of help?\" Clove asked curiously.\n\n\"These.\" I pulled the binoculars I lifted from Winnie's bedroom this summer out of my purse and grinned. \"Now we'll be able to see directly into her house. If Edgar is there, we'll see. If she's dismembering him in the tub to get rid of the evidence, we'll see that, too.\"\n\n\"Oh, gross,\" Bay complained, wrinkling her nose. \"You don't think she's really doing that, do you? That will give Clove nightmares.\"\n\n\"Uh-uh,\" Clove argued, shaking her head. \"I don't get nightmares like a baby. You do.\"\n\n\"Oh, really?\" Thistle was completely annoyed with the situation. She wasn't generally known for being outdoorsy. \"Do you remember when we watched Jaws and you were convinced there were sharks in the lake?\"\n\n\"That was one time,\" Clove protested.\n\n\"How about when we watched Poltergeist and you wouldn't go in the closet for a month?\" Bay challenged. \"We had to put your clothes away, and it wasn't fair because you got out of chores in the bedroom while we had to do everything.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I think you answered your own question there,\" I said. \"She wasn't afraid of the closet. She was lazy and didn't want to do chores. Keep up.\"\n\nRealization washed over Bay's face. \"Hey!\"\n\n\"It's too late now,\" I told her, lifting the binoculars so I could stare into the house. The curtains were open, but it was hard to focus the stupid things and keep track of what I was looking at. The first thing that loomed into view was a ceramic snowman that looked more freaky than Frosty. \"Ugh. I swear some people shouldn't be allowed to buy knickknacks.\"\n\n\"Says the woman who has a rooster dressed like a slutty girl in her bedroom,\" Bay deadpanned.\n\n\"He's not dressed like a slutty girl,\" I corrected. \"He's dressed like a burlesque dancer. There's a difference.\"\n\nBay didn't look convinced. \"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Oh, and for the record, that rooster is a priceless work of art,\" I added. \"I bought him from a flea market and added the outfit myself. I've gotten hundreds of compliments on him. People think I'm a real artist. I could do it professionally and everything.\"\n\n\"Only if the world goes blind and people with taste are killed by some alien or something,\" Thistle said, smoothly evading my hand when I reached out to cuff her. \"Now do your spying so we can get out of here. It's cold and I'm bored.\"\n\n\"If you shut your mouth and let me concentrate, that won't be a problem,\" I said, staring through the binoculars again.\n\nThe girls were quiet for exactly thirty seconds and then Bay ruined the calm. \"Did you hear that?\"\n\n\"All I hear is you three yapping,\" I snapped.\n\n\"No, listen,\" Bay ordered, pressing her finger to her lips.\n\nI did as she asked but all I could hear was the four of us breathing. \"What do you hear?\"\n\n\"It sounds like a man is yelling inside or something,\" Bay said, pressing her eyes shut. \"I\u2026 no, I definitely hear a man.\"\n\nI narrowed my eyes as I stared into the house, but I couldn't see anything. After a few moments, though, I did hear the faint sound of someone else's voice as the back door of Margaret's house opened. I grabbed the girls to hide them behind the tree, clutching them to me so they didn't make an error and wander out where someone could see them. I couldn't risk peering in that direction because whoever opened the door would see us. The voice was definitely male, though. Edgar?\n\nI waited until the door closed to speak again.\n\n\"Did anyone see who it was?\"\n\n\"You made us hide behind the tree,\" Thistle said. \"We couldn't look because you wouldn't let us.\"\n\nShe had a point. Still, I wasn't going to admit that. \"So no one saw anything?\"\n\n\"I only know it was a man,\" Bay said. \"I didn't get to see him and couldn't understand what he was saying.\"\n\nThat made two of us. \"Well, we have only one choice,\" I said, making up my mind on the spot. \"We have to get closer to the house.\"\n\nThe girls groaned in unison. They were loud enough to hide the sound of approaching footsteps until it was too late to make a run for it, because a dark figure was upon us.\n\n\"You're under arrest.\"\n\nWell, crud." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "I recognized Terry's voice before I swiveled. I wasn't particularly frightened. I knew he wouldn't throw me in jail, no matter what he said. That didn't mean I was keen to have a showdown with law enforcement on my mortal enemy's property.\n\nThat sounded melodramatic, didn't it? Oh, who cares?\n\n\"Hello, Terry,\" I said, pasting a bright smile on my face as we locked gazes. He didn't look remotely happy. \"What a beautiful day for a walk. Don't you think it's a beautiful day for a walk?\"\n\nThe set of Terry's jaw was grim. \"Really? Is that the story you're going to go with? It's twenty-eight degrees, and you've forced three children to go on a march through thick snow so you can spy on a woman who collects porcelain unicorns. Think of a better story.\"\n\nI opened my mouth to answer, but Thistle did it for me.\n\n\"We weren't spying,\" she lied. \"We were hunting for Christmas elves. Aunt Tillie thought it would be a fun way for us to spend the afternoon because we're so excited for Christmas.\"\n\nThat story would never work for an adult. Terry wasn't an idiot, so it didn't work coming from a child either.\n\n\"Don't lie, Thistle,\" Terry chided. \"I don't like that.\"\n\n\"She's not lying,\" Clove said, jutting out her lower lip. \"It's true. Aunt Tillie said if we caught a Christmas elf we would get everything we wanted for Christmas. I want world peace and hundreds of gifts to give to kids who don't have anything. It's really a good thing.\"\n\nAnd that was much more convincing, especially coming from a child with a face that belonged on an angel and who was half buried in snow.\n\nUnfortunately for us, Terry wasn't falling for that either. \"Come here.\" He wrapped his arms around Clove's waist and lifted her out of the snow. He brushed off the clinging white powder before fixing her with a serious look. \"Are you cold?\"\n\n\"Not nearly as cold as the kids who have nothing for Christmas,\" Clove replied solemnly.\n\n\"You're going to make some man very afraid in ten years,\" Terry said. \"He's going to take one look at those big eyes and fall head over heels in love. Then he's going to realize you own him and have nightmares.\"\n\n\"Will they involve clowns in closets?\" Clove asked.\n\n\"I don't know what that means.\" Terry turned his attention to Bay as she tried to hide beneath the barren branch of a maple tree. \"How about you? Are you hoping to catch a Christmas elf to provide gifts for those less fortunate, too?\"\n\nBay bit her lip and shook her head. Crap! She was going to be my undoing. I just know it.\n\n\"We honestly are on a mission of mercy,\" I said. \"The fact that we ended up here is just an odd coincidence. I had no idea we were so close to Margaret's house.\"\n\n\"Quiet,\" Terry ordered, never moving his eyes from Bay's worried face. \"What are you doing here, Bay?\" It was if he knew she couldn't lie to him. That's why he focused on her. Quite frankly, that's akin to child abuse in my book.\n\n\"We were just taking a walk,\" Bay mumbled, averting her gaze. Sheesh. I taught her to lie better than that.\n\n\"Why were you walking?\" Terry pressed.\n\n\"Because\u2026 .\" Bay darted an unreadable look in my direction. She looked as if she was being tortured.\n\n\"Oh, leave her alone,\" I said, giving in. \"Fine. You've got us. We weren't looking for a Christmas elf. Arrest us. Throw us in a cell. Make this the worst Christmas ever for three bad little girls.\"\n\nTerry scowled. \"I am convinced you're the Devil sometimes,\" he hissed, reaching for Bay to draw her out from beneath the tree. \"Don't say things like that to them. You'll frighten them and make them afraid of police officers. Is that what you want?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"We were having a great time until you showed up,\" I said. \"If they're upset, I blame you.\"\n\n\"Whatever.\" Terry smoothed Bay's hair as he tilted up her chin so they could lock gazes. \"What are you doing out here?\"\n\n\"I just told you,\" I snapped.\n\n\"No, you said you weren't looking for a Christmas elf,\" Terry countered. \"I already knew that. You didn't tell me what you were doing.\"\n\n\"We're looking for the dead body,\" Thistle said, sticking out her tongue and hopping away from me when I reached out to grab her. \"Aunt Tillie took us to breakfast at the bakery this morning, and Mrs. Gunderson told her that there's a rumor about the dead man and Mrs. Little.\"\n\n\"She thinks Mrs. Little chopped him into little bits in the house because she's a bad witch,\" Clove added. \"We're here to see if that's true.\"\n\nTerry was flabbergasted. \"Why would you possibly tell these girls that?\"\n\n\"I didn't tell them that,\" I sniffed. \"They figured it out on their own. They're quite bright.\"\n\n\"Yes, they're regular geniuses,\" Terry said. \"You know you were seen casing the house from the road, right? Mrs. Little called the station and said that she was convinced someone was going to rob her.\"\n\nI snorted. \"She knows my truck. She only wanted to get us in trouble.\"\n\n\"And that's her right,\" Terry said. \"This is her property. You have no business being on it. While we're at it, you have no business plowing in the end of her driveway either. If I ever catch you, I'm going to have to write a ticket.\"\n\n\"And you won't do well in prison either,\" Clove said, bending over to pack some snow. \"I'm not the only one.\"\n\n\"Clove, you're not going to prison,\" Terry said. \"What are you doing out here, Tillie? Do you really think that Mrs. Little killed Edgar Martin? Seriously? Do you think she chopped him up in little bits and put him in her cookies or something?\"\n\nWell, when he put it like that it sounded ridiculous. It made much more sense in my mind. There was no way I was going to admit that, though. I decided to change tactics. \"I think that Margaret was with us the day the girls said they found the body,\" I said. \"I think something was definitely in that clearing \u2013 and so do you. The girls are imaginative, but they don't make up things like finding bodies.\"\n\n\"Okay, I get that,\" Terry said, adjusting his tone. \"I think they saw something, too. I initially assumed Edgar got drunk and passed out. I figured he woke up because it was cold and wandered away before we got there.\"\n\n\"But you haven't been able to find him either,\" I said. \"You've been looking and he's not around. Admit it.\"\n\n\"I admit it,\" Terry said. \"I looked because I didn't want the girls to obsess about this. I also figured you'd feed their imagination because that's what you do when you're bored. It's too cold for them to be running around on adventures with you.\n\n\"I mean\u2026 will you look at this child?\" Terry gestured toward Clove. \"She's covered in snow and freezing. She'll get pneumonia. Do you want that?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" I said. \"We've only been out here twenty minutes. We would already be done if you hadn't distracted us. We were just about to get closer to the house so we could see the man inside and call it a day.\"\n\n\"Get closer? You can't just peek through the windows at someone else's house,\" Terry said. \"I\u2026 wait. What man?\"\n\n\"There's a man inside,\" Bay said. \"We heard his voice. We think it might be Edgar.\"\n\nTerry didn't want to be swayed, but the idea of solving this case \u2013 although it wasn't really a case \u2013 held a lot of appeal. He clearly wanted to enjoy Christmas instead of worrying about whether or not the girls were running around the countryside and spying on neighbors with me.\n\n\"Are you sure it was a man?\" Terry asked, rubbing his chin.\n\nI nodded. \"It was definitely a man.\"\n\nTerry licked his lips as he stared at the house. \"Okay. Come on. We're ending this now.\"\n\nI knew he would see things my way. I turned to wade through the snow, but Terry stilled when the girls remained rooted to their spots.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Terry asked.\n\n\"We're tired,\" Clove said. \"I can't walk any longer. I think I might faint.\"\n\nTerry growled as he bent over and picked up Clove with one arm. She weighed very little so it wasn't difficult for him to lift her. He slid a sidelong look in Bay's direction. \"What about you?\"\n\nBay shrugged. \"I'm tired, too.\"\n\nTerry made a disgusted sound as he scooped her up with his remaining arm. He looked resigned when he glanced at Thistle. \"Are you tired, too?\"\n\n\"You're out of arms,\" Thistle pointed out.\n\n\"I have a back.\"\n\nThistle smiled as she scurried behind Terry. I had to help her scramble up his back, but when he had all of the girls securely affixed to his frame he picked the shortest route toward Margaret's house. He walked so fast, in fact, I had to jog to keep up. I momentarily wished I had a camera because the sight of him walking with the three girls clinging to him was adorable. He was a better father to them than the ones they were born with. He just didn't realize it.\n\nTerry didn't put the girls down until we were at Margaret's front door. He was careful as he lowered each one, and then he checked them to make sure everyone was safe and settled before knocking on the door.\n\nI wasn't expecting that. I thought we would come up with a plan before we alerted Margaret to our presence. For example, I thought he could distract Margaret while I punched her in the face and ran inside to untie Edgar in the basement, where she was planning to sacrifice him to the dark gods in front of her altar. What? That could totally happen.\n\nMargaret wasn't in the mood for idle chatter when she threw open the door. \"Did you arrest her?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" Terry replied. \"She says she was helping the girls find a Christmas elf and got turned around. I tend to believe her. It wasn't a purposeful excursion.\"\n\nThe lie slid easily off his tongue. I couldn't help but be surprised. I knew he wasn't doing it for me, though. He was doing it for the girls. He didn't want to upset them.\n\nMargaret's penciled on eyebrow (she stopped growing real ones years ago) arched as she graced Terry with a sour look. \"Really? Do you expect me to believe that? She was hunting for Christmas elves? They're not real.\"\n\n\"Yes, they are,\" Clove said solemnly. \"They live at the North Pole with the house-trashing fairy and sock-eating gnome. That's not important, though. We want to see the dead guy.\"\n\nMargaret balked at Clove's fortitude. \"Excuse me, young lady, but I don't believe anyone was speaking to you,\" she said. \"Youngsters should be taught to refrain from speaking unless spoken to. That's how I would've raised children if I'd been so blessed.\"\n\nShe was so full of crap I was afraid to touch her in case she exploded and turned the snow brown on her own. \"You didn't have kids because no one could bear to see you without your clothes on,\" I shot back. \"People are afraid your body is like Medusa's and they'll turn to stone if they see it.\"\n\n\"You take that back,\" Margaret hissed, extending a finger. \"I don't have to put up with your nonsense. You're trespassing.\"\n\n\"She's not exactly trespassing,\" Terry clarified. \"I asked them to come to the house with me so I could investigate the possible sighting of a missing person.\"\n\nMargaret narrowed her eyes to dangerous slits. She looked like a coiled snake about to strike. \"What missing person?\"\n\n\"Edgar Martin,\" Terry replied. \"We have reason to believe he may be in grave danger.\"\n\n\"Because you're going to sacrifice him to blood winds,\" I added under my breath.\n\nTerry ignored me. \"Edgar hasn't been to his home in several days, and we have multiple witnesses who say they believe he was injured and lying in the snow at some point,\" he said. He was a master at manipulating words when he wanted to force an issue. It was something to behold. \"It has come to my attention that you've been seen with Edgar several times over the past few weeks, and you have a man inside your house today.\"\n\nMargaret's mouth dropped open as incredulity washed over her pinched features. She really did look like a chicken's behind\u2026 and she was clearly about to drop an egg. It was probably rotten.\n\n\"Who told you I've been seeing Edgar?\" Margaret asked, sliding a dark look in my direction. \"Was it her?\"\n\n\"I'm not at liberty to divulge my source, ma'am,\" Terry said. \"I don't care about your personal life. I care about locating Mr. Martin and making sure he's okay. If he's here, I only want to see him and verify he doesn't need medical assistance.\"\n\n\"Do you really expect me to fall for that?\" Margaret asked.\n\n\"I don't care what you fall for,\" Terry said. \"If Edgar is here, though, I want to see him.\"\n\n\"Well, you can't enter without a search warrant, and I'm not granting you entrance to my home,\" Margaret spat. \"As for the rest\u2026 well\u2026 I'm going to sue you for slander, Tillie. I'm going to bleed you dry.\"\n\n\"Oh, knock it off, Margaret.\" I was at my limit. \"I'm tired and I want to go home. Is Edgar here or not? That's all we want to know. The girls are obsessed with making sure no one died in the woods. How can you deny them peace of mind like that?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's our Christmas wish,\" Clove intoned. \"It's all we want.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" Thistle said. \"I want that castle, too.\"\n\nBay licked her lips as she studied Margaret. She was serious as she took a step forward. \"Please?\"\n\nTerry rested his hand on her shoulder. \"Just tell them, Mrs. Little,\" he prodded. \"They're not asking for the world. They're asking for one bit of information so they can sleep at night.\"\n\n\"My heart hurts thinking about poor Mr. Martin being lost in the woods,\" Clove added, her brown eyes glassy.\n\nI had to give the kid credit, she was a master manipulator. She was going to be something special when she got older.\n\n\"Fine,\" Margaret said, blowing out a sigh. \"He's here. He's been here for the last few days. It's not what you think, though.\"\n\n\"So you're not cutting him up into little bits in your bathtub?\" Thistle asked.\n\nMargaret made a horrified face. \"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"It must've been the Christmas elf,\" I said evasively, averting my eyes.\n\n\"No, I'm not chopping him up,\" Margaret said. \"The church has decided to provide sober buddies to Edgar to get him through the holidays. I've been volunteering my time.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Crap. That might explain why people saw her with him on multiple occasions. She wasn't dating him. She was just policing him. She was good at telling other people what to do, so this was right up her alley.\n\n\"Yes, 'oh.'\" Margaret was smug. \"The holidays are a rough time, and he had a setback the other day. I saw him in the trees when I was leaving and took him home. I didn't know it was going to be such a big deal. I thought the girls would forget about it, and Edgar was embarrassed.\"\n\n\"He should've been more embarrassed about the unicorn thing,\" Thistle said.\n\n\"I agree with that,\" I said.\n\n\"So\u2026 he's really okay?\" Bay looked hopeful.\n\n\"He's really okay,\" Margaret said, her expression softening. \"He's here today and then is heading over to Viola's house tomorrow. Are you satisfied?\"\n\nTerry glanced at me. \"Are you satisfied?\"\n\nHeck no, I wasn't satisfied. Margaret was actually doing something good for a change. The world was clearly coming to an end.\n\n\"We should probably be going,\" I said, motioning for the girls to follow me instead of answering Terry's question. \"We have cookies to bake and elves to catch.\"\n\n\"And mothers to laugh at,\" Thistle added.\n\n\"That, too,\" I said.\n\nTerry ran his tongue over his teeth as he regarded me. \"So you'll be going straight home?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. There won't be one detour. I promise.\"\n\n\"All set, girls?\"\n\nIt took me five minutes to get the girls back to the truck and another five minutes to get their helmets and seatbelts secure. By the time the truck warmed up everyone was more than ready to go.\n\n\"I'm ready,\" Bay said. \"Are you surprised Mrs. Little is being nice?\"\n\nI opted for honesty. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Do you like her better now?\" Clove asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Do you want to plow on the way home?\" Thistle asked, hopeful.\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\nI lowered the plow so it was close to the road and hit the gas pedal as I pulled away from the side of the road. I saw Terry watching us as he walked up the driveway, and his eyes widened and he waved his hands as the snow bank at the corner of the driveway grew closer. He was pretty expressive for a guy who only wanted to say goodbye.\n\nThe truck jerked as I hit something hard, small pieces of wood flying in every direction. I crashed forward but the seatbelt kept me from slamming into the steering wheel.\n\n\"What was that?\" Clove asked, turning her head.\n\n\"Mrs. Little's mailbox,\" Thistle replied. \"It went boom.\"\n\n\"That came out of nowhere,\" I muttered. This time it truly was an accident. \"She must've moved it because she knew I would hit it and she wanted something to complain about.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that must be it,\" Thistle said dryly. \"Come on. If we're lucky, we'll be able to fill Lila's driveway with yellow snow before Officer Terry catches up with us.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a plan.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Everyone was exhausted when we got back to the house. Terry caught up with us just as we were leaving Lila's street. He gave me a dirty look, but all of the girls waved and blew kisses so he merely shook his head and let us leave without flashing his lights or tossing about empty threats.\n\nChristmas miracles take many forms, after all.\n\nI found my nieces angrily slamming things around in the kitchen. The house usually boasted a variety of scrumptious scents this time of day, but all of them were absent thanks to my curse. Hmm. I might not have thought this one out completely.\n\n\"Where have you been all day?\" Winnie asked, furious.\n\n\"I took the girls for breakfast and then on an elf hunt,\" I said, pouring myself a mug of coffee. \"We found Edgar, by the way. He's not dead. He's drying out at Margaret's house.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I know. I was disappointed, too,\" I said. \"I thought she chopped him up or something. I'm going to have to rethink all of my life decisions now that she's done a good thing and helped her fellow man.\"\n\n\"I just\u2026 .\" Winnie pressed her lips together and shook her head. \"Well, at least you didn't get arrested.\"\n\n\"Nope. Terry didn't want the girls to start crying, so he let us go.\"\n\nMarnie's mouth dropped open. \"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"He didn't want my eyes to leak,\" Clove offered, hopping up on the stool next to me and folding her hands as she surveyed the kitchen. \"We're hungry. What's for dinner?\"\n\n\"You're going to get sandwiches at this rate,\" Winnie replied. \"We still can't cook.\"\n\n\"And we have a beautiful prime rib roast for Christmas Eve dinner tomorrow,\" Twila added. \"We need to put it in early and slow roast it. Do you have any idea how expensive that hunk of meat was? That's on top of the turkey we got for Christmas Day.\"\n\nMy mouth watered at the mention of prime rib. It's one of my favorites. That didn't mean I was ready to cede my superiority over my nieces\u2026 although I was definitely wobbling. \"Do you have anything you want to say to me?\"\n\nWinnie narrowed her eyes. She's bossy so she likes being in control. She knows when she's licked, though. \"If we agree to make cookies for you, will you lift the spell?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That easy?\" Winnie was understandably dubious. \"Don't you want to add certain conditions to the agreement?\"\n\n\"Like you always do,\" Twila muttered.\n\n\"Nope,\" I answered. \"I'm in a particularly giving mood. It is Christmas, after all.\"\n\nWinnie made a face as she exhaled heavily. \"Fine. We'll make your cookies.\"\n\nI sensed a trap. \"You'll make me really good cookies,\" I clarified. \"I don't want any crap. For instance, I don't want cookies with a half a cup of salt instead of sugar just because you're feeling vengeful. I'm not stupid.\"\n\nBay shot me an angry look but wisely kept her mouth shut.\n\n\"We'll make you good cookies,\" Winnie gritted out. \"Technically we'll be making our own cookies for Christmas, so you can have some of them. We would never make bad cookies for ourselves.\"\n\nShe had a point. \"I want chocolate and macadamia nuts.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"If you want to add a little magic to sway the judges, I wouldn't be opposed to that either,\" I added.\n\n\"We won't be doing that,\" Winnie said. \"It's not really winning if you have magical help.\"\n\n\"I disagree, but as long as I win, I don't care,\" I said, climbing off the stool and motioning to the girls. \"Come on, troublemakers,\" I said. \"Let's look for the Christmas elf in the living room. I think there's supposed to be a good movie on this afternoon and your mothers are clearly going to be busy baking.\"\n\n\"You are\u2026 incorrigible,\" Twila muttered.\n\n\"Yes, well, it keeps me young,\" I said, smirking. \"Oh, and by the way, we're going to have a talk about all of these pearls of wisdom you keep dropping on the girls. I'm going to wait until the day after Christmas, though. I don't want anyone mistaking me for the Grinch.\"\n\nTwila balked. \"What pearls of wisdom?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" I replied. \"Perhaps little things like me complaining because I like to complain and it's just the way I communicate need to be discussed.\"\n\nTwila scorched Thistle with a murderous look. \"Really? I'm sure I never said anything of the sort.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't be like that,\" Thistle said, her grin impish. \"You're supposed to be setting a good example for me.\"\n\n\"Run now,\" Twila ordered, slapping her spatula against the counter. \"I can only take so much.\"\n\n\"Now you know how I feel,\" I said, pushing open the swinging door between the kitchen and living room. \"Make sure you get going on dinner soon. We've had a long day and we're starving.\"\n\n\"I'm so hungry my heart hurts,\" Clove said. \"I'll probably die from the pain.\"\n\n\"You took it a step too far, Clove,\" I said, cringing when I saw the look on Marnie's face. \"You need to learn that sometimes less is more. Trust me. That's one of the rules I live by.\"\n\n\"I'll think about it.\"\n\nChristmas morning dawned brightly and the girls woke me with excited squeals as they pounded down the stairs. I took my time getting into my robe, and by the time I hit the main floor Terry was already there with a mug of coffee in his hand and a smile on his face as he watched the girls divvy up presents.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I asked accepting a mug of coffee from Marnie as she walked past. \"I thought you were coming for dinner.\"\n\n\"I am,\" Terry replied. \"Santa had a special gift for the girls that he couldn't fit on his sleigh, though, and I had to bring it with me.\"\n\nI pursed my lips. He was a good man. He drove me crazy and I often wanted to curse him for questioning my integrity, but he loved the girls with his whole heart and gave everything he had freely to them.\n\n\"Well, that's nice,\" I said, turning my attention to the center of the living room. The girls weren't allowed to open gifts at the same time. They had to wait their turn, which drove them crazy and made Christmas more fun for the adults, who enjoyed torturing them. What? Is that just me? Oh, well. It's still fun. \"Have you talked to Edgar?\"\n\n\"I have,\" Terry confirmed, bobbing his head. \"He's embarrassed by what happened. He says he fell off the wagon the day the girls found him. He's actually thankful they did, though, because he thinks he might've slept right through to his death if they didn't wake him.\n\n\"When they took off to get us, he managed to get to his feet,\" he continued. \"He was confused because he couldn't remember how he got there \u2013 or even where he was \u2013 and he followed the girls' footprints out of the trees.\"\n\n\"Why didn't he say something to us when he saw us coming?\"\n\n\"He said he thought that I might arrest him for public drunkenness,\" Terry explained. \"I have threatened him a time or two, so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility. I would like to think I'd be giving because of the time of year, but it's far more likely I would've hauled him in rather than let him ruin the tree-lighting ceremony.\"\n\nI wasn't sure I believed that. \"You have a wonderful Christmas spirit, Terry,\" I said. \"Don't ever doubt that. You saw what we did at Lila's house the other day and you didn't even write a ticket.\"\n\n\"I thought about it.\"\n\n\"But you didn't do it.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, I didn't want Clove's eyes to leak,\" Terry teased, poking Clove's side as she skirted around him. Sugar barked and panted as sniffed saw the mountain of gifts. He would enjoy tearing through the leftover wrapping paper.\n\n\"It's nice you're here to spend the day with us,\" I said, leaning back in my chair. \"It wouldn't feel like a family day without you.\"\n\nI could've been mistaken, but Terry's eyes appeared to mist as he nodded. \"Thank you.\" He made room on his lap when Bay \u2013 still in her nightgown and slippers \u2013 hopped on his knee. Her hair was a mess and she looked barely awake but her eyes sparkled. \"Hey, little missy. I see Santa brought you a ton of gifts. You must've been a good girl.\"\n\nBay shrugged. \"Sometimes I think I'm good. Other times I think I'm not.\"\n\n\"You're good,\" Terry said. \"You're always good.\"\n\n\"And twenty,\" Thistle said from her place on the floor. \"Ha! I told you I would get the same amount of presents. I just counted. So much for the naughty list.\"\n\nTerry pursed his lips as he shook his head. He looked annoyed. \"She, on the other hand, straddles a very fine line.\"\n\nBay giggled. \"No, she doesn't,\" she said. \"She has a big mouth but a nice heart. She's like Aunt Tillie.\"\n\n\"I heard that,\" Thistle barked. \"That's the meanest thing you've ever said to me.\"\n\nNow it was my turn to make a face. \"Not three days ago you told me you wanted to be just like me,\" I reminded her. \"Why is it okay for you to say it but not Bay?\"\n\n\"Because Bay means it in a bad way,\" Thistle answered. \"I said I wanted to be feared like you. I didn't say I wanted to be like you.\"\n\n\"That's not how I remember it.\"\n\n\"That's because you're old.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Terry barked loud enough that Bay jolted on his lap. He tightened his arms around her in a reassuring manner as he stared down Thistle. \"You need to apologize to your great-aunt. That was uncalled for.\"\n\nThistle's face drained of color as she swallowed hard. \"I'm\u2026 sorry.\"\n\nThe apology wasn't exactly heartfelt, but the fact that she said it at all was surprising.\n\n\"You need to think about what you say before you open your mouth, Thistle,\" Terry said. \"I know you think you're funny, and I'm pretty sure that's where a lot of your attitude stems from. You see your Aunt Tillie getting away with stuff and you think it's because people find her funny.\n\n\"That's partly true,\" he continued. \"It's also true that she does good things for people. Did you know she took cookies to the children's hospital in Traverse City last week? Do you want to know how I know that? I saw her when I was there taking gifts from the department.\"\n\nThistle's mouth dropped open as her eyes widened. \"You did that?\"\n\nI shifted on my chair, uncomfortable. \"I might've stopped by.\"\n\n\"She did it because she's a good person who just happens to like making mischief,\" Terry said. \"That's what you need to realize. You can't do only the mischief half of that equation. You have to do the good part, too.\"\n\nInstead of laughing, Thistle looked intrigued. \"Why didn't you tell us?\"\n\n\"Because it was nobody's business,\" I said. \"I go every year.\"\n\n\"You lead by example,\" Bay said, rubbing her cheek as she glanced at her mother. Her expression was far too thoughtful for a happy Christmas morning.\n\n\"I do lead by example,\" I agreed, reaching inside my robe and removing the blue ribbon from the baking contest. I hadn't let it out of my sight since winning it the previous day. Margaret was stupefied\u2026 and angry\u2026 and that made me happy. That probably wasn't leading by example, but I was beyond caring. \"For example, do you know what this ribbon means?\"\n\nThistle nodded. \"It means you beat Mrs. Little and she cried,\" she said. \"We were all there. We saw it.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" I said. \"And why is that important?\"\n\n\"Because there are exceptions to every rule,\" Bay answered. \"You can't call people fat and ugly, but you can call someone a horse face and drop yellow snow in their yard if they're your mortal enemy.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" I said, beaming.\n\nWinnie scowled as she pointed toward the largest gift in the center of the room. It was the one Terry brought for them. I had a feeling I knew exactly what was under the wrapping paper. \"Girls, I think Aunt Tillie is still waking up, so you might not want to listen to her this early in the morning,\" she said. \"Instead of opening all of your individual gifts, why not open the big one Terry brought for you to share?\"\n\n\"I didn't buy that,\" Terry said. \"Santa brought it and ran out of room.\"\n\nBay shifted her eyes to him. \"You're Santa sometimes. You're Santa this time. We already know that.\"\n\nTerry opened his mouth to argue and then snapped it shut. \"Open your gift. I think you're going to like it.\"\n\nBay did as he asked, pressing a kiss to his cheek before joining her cousins. They each grabbed a side of the wrapping paper and counted to three as they ripped it off. Their eyes widened and I could hear a multitude of gasps and squeals when they unveiled the fairy castle from the catalog.\n\n\"Oh, my,\" Winnie said, her hand flying to the spot over her heart. \"But that was so expensive.\"\n\nTerry shrugged. \"Santa doesn't care about that.\"\n\n\"But\u2026 .\"\n\n\"Leave him be,\" I ordered. \"He can't argue on Santa's behalf.\"\n\nWinnie's eyes filled with tears as she nodded. \"Girls, what do you say to Terry for helping Santa?\"\n\nBay, Clove and Thistle swiveled in unison. \"Thank you for being our favorite Santa,\" they sang out in unison. \"We love you.\"\n\nTerry's cheeks colored as he shifted on the chair. \"I\u2026 you're welcome.\"\n\n\"Now he leads by example,\" Thistle said, poking my knee. \"What did you get us?\"\n\n\"I spent the week with you,\" I reminded her. \"We plowed. We spied. We made yellow and brown snow. We solved a case. We tortured Margaret. We cursed your mothers. We cooked. We watched Christmas movies. I bribed you. You blackmailed me. We ate a bunch of doughnuts, too. What more do you want?\"\n\nThistle shrugged. \"Just this.\" She took me by surprise when she gave me a hug. I didn't know what else to do, so I returned it. Thistle was all smiles as she pulled away. \"I can lead by example, too.\"\n\n\"You certainly can.\"\n\n\"Oh, now my eyes are definitely going to leak,\" Clove said.\n\nI couldn't help but smile. \"Merry Christmas, you little monsters. Open your gifts.\"\n\nIt was a merry Christmas indeed. I didn't even want to deafen myself with Q-tips when the singing started.\n\nThat's a win to me." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(A Katy Kramer Cozy Mystery 6) The Case of the Christmas Carol", + "author": "A. A. Albright", + "genres": [ + "contemporary" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Desperate Times on Desperation Row", + "text": "It was a warm July morning as I tailed one of my best friends, a wizard-turned-dog called Hamish, through the dodgiest magical enclave in Dublin City. As he loped his way along the winding streets, he had no idea that I was just a few steps behind. Instead of my usual frizzy mess of auburn hair, my locks were dark and sleek. I was taller than usual, too, and definitely slimmer. None of this was thanks to a crash diet, high heels and a dye-job, though; my new appearance was a temporary one, courtesy of a glamour cloak.\n\nNow, I know what you're thinking: using magical cloaks to spy on friends is not a nice way to pass the morning. It's nosey, and interfering, and controlling. But I wasn't doing this because I wanted to. As a private investigator, I normally reserved my nosiness for cheating spouses, missing persons and maniacal murderers.\n\nI had tried speaking to Hamish before I turned my investigations in his direction. I'd even tried simply being patient, waiting for him to tell me what was wrong in his own time. But as it grew ever more clear that something was going on, and that he was never going to tell me about it, well\u2026 I grew desperate.\n\nAnyway, it wasn't as if he knew that I was seriously overstepping his boundaries. He had no idea that I'd been following him for days, and what he didn't know couldn't irritate him, right?\n\nWith my glamour cloak on, I looked like one of my vampire clients, Valerian, a woman Hamish had never met because he hadn't been in work very much for the past few days. Every so often I'd catch my reflection in a shop window and, as I did, I wondered: should I wear more lipstick and eyeliner on a daily basis? And why didn't I wear low-cut tops more often?\n\n'Oi, I'd let you bite me any day, gorgeous,' cried a Materialization worker from a nearby construction site.\n\n'How chivalrous,' I muttered.\n\n'Oh, look who thinks she's too good for me!' the worker shouted back. 'I only felt sorry for you because you're so ugly, but I won't make that mistake again. And if you don't want men to compliment you, then you should wear something a bit more modest, shouldn't you!'\n\nI had more important things to worry about today, but I paused just long enough to glare at him and say, 'Go on, say something else, I dare you \u2013 because I'm telling you, you wouldn't like it if I really did bite you!'\n\nHe looked away, his face flaming, and I'm sure I heard him mumble, 'What a nutter,' to his co-workers. Instead of continuing the argument, I quickened my steps as Hamish headed into Desperation Row, one of the rougher areas of the enclave. Yes, even in the roughest enclave in Ireland, there are good parts and bad parts, and Desperation Row was, well, desperate.\n\nToday, though, there was something incredibly pleasing on the street: a shop called Tinsleys' Workshop and Winter Wonderland. The workshop had always been here, making toys to sell in Tinsleys' many toy shops. But the Winter Wonderland hadn't been here last time I visited the area. The ground floor had been boarded up.\n\nMy eyes lit up as I spotted yet another holiday-themed shop, a couple of buildings along \u2013 but those peepers of mine soon dimmed again when I noticed that this shop was far dingier than the first. Its sign read: Hammers' House of Holidays, Selling Decorations and Gifts for the Special Occasions in Your Life. Inside, I could see a couple of drab sets of lights, a brown and bare Christmas tree, and some shelves filled with plastic toys.\n\nWith a shudder, I turned my attention back to Tinsleys' Workshop and Winter Wonderland, and took a look through the frosted-edged windows. There was a man in a Santa suit walking around, as well as a lot of young female workers, who looked rather a lot like elves, or at least they'd been dressed to appear that way.\n\nTheir costumes were identical \u2013 short green skirts and tight jumpers, with little hats on their heads, gloves on their hands and knee-high boots. But their faces, hair and bodies were incredibly similar, too. Every woman was a short, slim brunette in her twenties, with delicate features and big brown eyes. Whoever did the hiring for this place really had a type.\n\nI took a look at each woman through my Aurameter. 'Ah, so they're definitely not real elves, then,' I muttered to myself, noting that, despite how they were dressed, the shop's workforce was made up of three weredogs, two werewolves, two vampires and a witch. Had I been hoping that at least one of them might be an actual elf? Well, obviously. But I had it on good authority that real elves were shorter and angrier than any of these women.\n\nI could see that they had a grotto in there, where people could come and tell Santa their Christmas wishes, surrounded by fake snow, animatronic reindeer, snowmen and candy canes.\n\nThere were gorgeous handmade toys displayed throughout the space, as well as trees and decorations for sale, and Christmas tunes playing on the stereo system.\n\nI knew that the shop couldn't possibly be targeting witches, because witches celebrated Winter Solstice \u2013 a holiday that didn't include indoor trees or Santa, and one that they usually only shopped for at the very last minute. Weredogs, though \u2013 now they loved Christmas more than enough to start their shopping in July.\n\nAnd today, I might as well have been a weredog, because this shop excited me more than anything I'd seen for months. I'd been waiting for summer to get Christmassy ever since the voice in my head told me it would bring something long-awaited my way.\n\nAhem.\n\nI should probably explain what I mean by that. I don't generally have voices in my head, but ever since I discovered I was a witch hunter (the nice kind, honestly) I'd found myself in some strange and life-threatening situations. One of those situations was a train ride where I, and most of the passengers, nearly wound up sacrificed as part of an immortality spell. The belongings of an ancient and powerful woman called Foirfe were being used to carry out the spell, and it seemed that even though she was long dead, Foirfe did not like people using her stuff. She possessed me so that she could help me save the day; without her help, we wouldn't have survived.\n\nUnfortunately, in order to stop the spell, I needed to destroy something Hamish really could have used: a Pillar of Permanence. But before she vacated my brain, Foirfe told me: 'There is one pillar I know the location of. You shall find it in summertime, in the house where it's always Christmas\u2026'\n\nAs prophecies went, it was an odd one, but I'd been searching for anything that could bring me closer to Hamish's salvation ever since.\n\nOr\u2026 I had been, until the last few days, when Hamish began to behave strangely. He was disappearing for hours at a time, he was off his food, and his accent was more Scottish than ever (a definite sign that he was upset).\n\nHamish slowed his steps, so I slowed mine down too, watching as he headed in through the open door of Aim Low, a second-hand broom shop. On the signage above the door, just below the store's name, some inspiring words were spelled out: Our brooms might not be new, but they're not completely useless.\n\nI hung about outside, pretending to reapply my dark red lipstick while I kept an eye on the shop through my compact mirror.\n\nHamish was a regular at this broom shop. When he'd been a man, he'd loved flying his Whiz Bang Blast. He still went for rides, only now he sat in the sidecar while I controlled the broom. Sometimes he came here to chat to Sol, the owner, about unusual brooms or accessories, and he always had a wistful glint in his eye as he looked at the items for sale.\n\nAfter a few minutes of chatting (nothing I could hear), Hamish moved away from Sol and headed up the staircase, leaving Sol in the shop alone.\n\nSol was a lanky man with a shaven head. As usual he was chewing gum, wearing brightly-coloured trousers (pink today) and looking just about ready to scarper, but his eyes lit up as I walked in. 'Valerian! I thought you said you never wanted to see me again.'\n\nFluff! Sol knew the gorgeous Valerian? They did not seem like they'd move in the same social circles.\n\n'Look, I know that all of those brooms I sold you crashed and caused some damage,' he continued. 'But the riders were vampires and they all healed really quickly after falling from such a great height so\u2026 no harm done?'\n\nAh. He knew her in a dodgy business way. That made more sense.\n\n'Sol, I'm very annoyed with you,' I said, trying to imitate Valerian's sexy tones (I sounded more like I had a bad cold). 'I think we should go upstairs and discuss this.'\n\nHis face grew panicked, and his chewing grew more frantic. 'We can discuss things down here. You just wait here and I'll get you a cup of coffee.'\n\n'What's upstairs that you don't want me to see? More dodgy business? Look, you owe me a lot of money, Sol. I bought those brooms in good faith.' I doubted that was true. No one who did business with Sol was doing so in good faith. Occasionally he got his hands on an amazing broom that wasn't also a stolen one, but it was usually down to an accident or a fluke, rather than his business acumen.\n\n'I've just\u2026 a friend is up there. Please, Valerian, don't march up to my flat like you always do, like you own the place.'\n\nHuh. I could work with that. I marched past him, and closed the door that separated the shop from the staircase, turning the key and saying, 'I will own this place if you don't get your act together and reimburse me, Sol. And don't you dare ask me to open this door up unless it's to give me my money.'\n\nHe banged on the door but I ignored him, rushing up the stairs and stopping short as I reached a small landing. The door to Sol's flat was open, and a man was sitting at a table, handsome and still. I'd seen him before, except naked. I shuddered at the memory, because when someone is strictly a friend, it's incredibly disturbing to recall the time you accidentally saw them without any clothes on. It had been a mistake, a glimpse of Hamish's true self through my Aurameter \u2013 a glimpse I'd worked very hard not to see again.\n\nToday, thankfully, he was fully dressed \u2013 except for one thing. The bright yellow hat he'd been wearing earlier on was strewn all over the carpet, torn into hundreds of pieces, as though it had exploded. But what could have made a magical wizard's hat explode into so many pieces? Had he used up all of the hat's magic on a spell? Had he finally flaming done it, and found a way to turn himself from a dog into a man?\n\n'Hamish?' My heart began to flutter, and I rushed towards him. 'You did it, you actually did it! You turned yourself back into a man. But\u2026 how? Why didn't you say anything? Did you find another Pillar of Permanence? What happened to your hat, and\u2013?' I broke off in the middle of my many excited questions. Hamish wasn't answering me. He wasn't even looking my way.\n\nWarily, I waved a hand in front of his face. 'Hamish?'\n\nHe still didn't move, so I gently squeezed his shoulder. 'Hamish?'\n\nA second Hamish, one still in a dog's body, ran in from an adjoining room in the flat. I stared at the doggy Hamish, then at the manly Hamish, then at the doggy Hamish once more. 'What's going on?' I asked.\n\n'Who are you?' the doggy Hamish demanded to know. 'Are you a friend of Sol's?'\n\n'Crap!' I quickly unscrewed the toggle on the glamour cloak that no one but me could see. Inside it, there was a strand of Valerian's hair, enabling me to take on her appearance. I whispered:\n\n\u2003'Hide no more so all shall see\n\n\u2003My true face, the real me.'\n\nThere was a moment of extreme discomfort as my real hair and body returned, stretching out my Valerian-esque clothes beyond all decency.\n\n'Katy? What are you doing here? Why were you in disguise?' He groaned. 'You were tailing me, weren't you? Following me? Why?'\n\nI placed my hands on my hips. 'Because I'm a very caring individual who always looks out for her friends, that's why. But let's not get sidetracked here, Hamish.'\n\nHe stared at me, open-mouthed. 'Caring? Being nosey is not the same as being caring.'\n\n'Tell that to all of our satisfied clients.' I pointed at the man on the chair. 'Who is he, Hamish? Or\u2026 what is he? Why does he look exactly like you \u2013 well, like the way you looked before you were a dog \u2013 and why is he saying nothing?'\n\nHamish sighed. 'Isn't it obvious? He's a robot, Katy.'\n\n'Oh.' I tucked the glamour cloak into my bag. 'Yeah, I guess it was obvious, actually.' Or at least it should have been. Hamish worked with me as a private investigator, but he was also a professor at Wentforth's College for Wizards, specialising in computing and robotics.\n\nFor a long time he'd avoided the college, and anything that reminded him of the life he had before he'd been turned into a dog, but lately he'd been taking on small projects at Wentforth's, and he was even working on a top secret transport project for the Wayfarers. I'd been so happy for him \u2013 right up until the last few days, when his strange behaviour had begun.\n\nThis robot didn't explain everything he'd been doing while I followed him, but it explained a lot of it.\n\n'He's not really working out,' Hamish continued. 'He looks exactly like I used to, but looks are where his usefulness ends. I\u2026 I'll just come out and say it, I suppose. I created this robot in the hope that I could transfer my consciousness out of this body and into the robot's, but it's not working. I think it might be something to do with the spell that locked me in this dog's body in the first place. I mean, we knew it was strong, but it's sooooo strong. I cannae even cheat my way around it. And on this latest terrible attempt, I even destroyed my favourite ever hat.'\n\n'Oh, Hamish, I'm so sorry about your hat. I know how much you liked it. But I didn't even know you were doing this. I mean, you know we're going to find that other pillar, right? It's like Foirfe said when she entered my consciousness: \"You shall find it in summertime, in the house where it's always Christmas\u2026\"'\n\nWith a frustrated groan, he hopped up onto a chair. 'Katy, you've been sneaking all over the world with Cullen, trying to find a pillar. You wouldn't have been doing that if you really believed we're just going to stumble across it someday soon.'\n\n'No. No, I mean\u2026 yes, I've been travelling around with Cullen. But we've just been holidaying. I mean, if we happened to be in some sunny climate and hear mention of a house where it was always Christmas, then it would have been a happy coincidence.'\n\n'Oh, pull the other one, Katy. You've been working your behind off, travelling around in search of this house and pillar because you're just like me. You've been on this planet long enough to know that good things don't come to those who wait. Mostly, good things come to criminals who steal them off other people. But sometimes \u2013 just sometimes, mind you \u2013 they also come to people who work their behinds off. Although even those people don't always get the things they want. You need that elusive combination of hard work and luck, and\u2026 and I'm grateful that you're putting the hard work in, Katy, and I hope that one of us will also have the luck we need to find this house. But while you're doing your thing, I'm just\u2026 I'm covering the other bases, you know. The just in cases bases.'\n\nWell, that had been a far too frazzled speech for someone who was simply covering the bases. I thought of the last places he'd been when I'd followed him: a visit to Healer Little, an animal healer from Riddler's Cove, and a couple of meetings with Shane Moore, the Wayfarer healer (Shane spent more of his time dealing with dead bodies than live ones, so he was more of a magical medical examiner than a healer, but the magical world hadn't yet created a term for that).\n\nAs I looked at the robot, and thought of those recent trips of Hamish's, a horrible realisation occurred. 'Hamish, are you\u2026 you're not sick, are you?'\n\nHe hung his head. 'Not sick, no. Not exactly. Nothing that's happening to me is in any way unnatural. I'm just\u2026' He lifted his head and gazed at me with his big brown eyes. 'Katy, I've been feeling tired and achy lately. So I went and saw some people, and, well\u2026 it turns out that I don't just look like a dog. I'm also aging at the rate a dog would. Not a magical dog who can bind himself to a witch as a familiar and live for a hundred years if he's lucky. But\u2026 an average dog.'\n\nI rested against the doorframe, feeling a little bit dizzy. I'd known Hamish for two years now, and in those two years he'd come to mean a lot to me. The thought of anything happening to him\u2026 well, it was a thought I didn't want to think. 'How long are we talking about?'\n\nThere was a moment of silence before he replied. 'Well, Healer Little and Healer Moore have run some tests. They estimated that when Jonathan created this spell, the dog he turned me into was about fourteen or fifteen. So I'm\u2026 I'm already quite old, in doggie terms.'\n\nHe coughed a little. 'And apparently I've been abusing this body a bit, what with the wine and the fine food. They think I've got less than two years, perhaps a little bit more if I change my eating habits. They also think that, as this body ages even further, I won't be able to channel magic anymore, so\u2026 I won't be able to communicate, either. Unless, that is, you happen to be fluent in \"Woof!\" I hoped that I could get around it by sticking my consciousness into this robot, but\u2026 it's not working. Like I said \u2013 I don't think Jonathan's spell is one that'll let me cheat my way out of it.'\n\nI couldn't manage much more than a strangled-sounding, 'No,' as I knelt in front of him, throwing my arms around his furry body.\n\n'Yes. And I do hope we'll find another Pillar of Permanence this summer, in some house where it's always Christmas, but\u2026 well, firstly, when does Irish summer actually begin? And how long does it last? Not very, Katy. Not very long at all. Last year we had a gorgeous spell of weather during May and a couple of days of double digits in June, but then it rained until October.'\n\n'But it is summer. I mean, it's July, right? I know it doesn't look much like it, but \u2013 officially, anyway \u2013 this is summertime. It's\u2026 it's vaguely warm outside, and it hasn't rained for at least an hour. And\u2026 oh! Next door. Why didn't you tell me about that place? The Winter Wonderland at Tinsleys'. It's always Christmas there, right?'\n\n'Katy, I didnae see the point of telling you about it because that's a shop, not a house. When Foirfe was chattering away in your noggin, she quite specifically said \"house\".'\n\n'Well, yeah but\u2026 I'll bet there's a living area above the shop, like there is above this one. A flat could be considered a house by some people. I mean\u2026 it's a home, anyway.'\n\n'Katy, there's a workshop above that shop, not a flat. All year round, workers are busy making toys for all of the Tinsleys' toy shops. And then, come summer they open up the Christmas shop downstairs, because weredogs start buying decorations early. There's nae house there. Not even a home.'\n\n'Yes, but there could be a living space above the workshop. A little flat in the attic, maybe, and\u2013'\n\n'And remember,' he added, interrupting me as he wriggled out of my grasp, 'we have a friend in that coven. Bob, who we rode the Riddler's Express with. If another member of the Tinsley coven had a Pillar of Permanence, Bob would have told me about it.'\n\n'But\u2013'\n\n'Whisht, Katy!'\n\n'Don't you whisht me! I'm trying to be your friend, Hamish. I know you have every reason to be grumpy right now, but please don't take it out on me.'\n\nHe shook his head and ran to the window. 'I wasnae telling you to whisht because you were annoying me. Well\u2026 you were being a bit annoying, but not much more than usual. I was telling you to whisht because I thought I heard something. Like\u2026 someone crying out. Maybe I was wrong. Oh.' With two paws on the windowsill, he stared outside. 'I guess I wasn't wrong.'\n\nI followed him to the window. There, in the back yard of the building next door, a man in a Santa costume was sprawled out, his body impaled on an enormous rusty Christmas star.\n\n'You call the Wayfarers, and I'll stick on my spare hat, and then we'll get down there.' Hamish rushed to a bag, pulling out a hat I'd never seen before, one in a deep, wintery shade of red. As I reached for my phone, he gave me a warning glance. 'I can see you looking at this hat, Katy. Don't say it. Don't you dare tell me how Christmassy this hat makes me look.'\n\n'Okay. I won't say it.' I could think it, though.\n\n[ One of Those Cute Little Elves Was Bound to Lose Her Cool ]\n\nHamish and I rushed downstairs and out through a small alleyway between Sol's shop and the next, which brought us into the back yard of Tinsleys'. I quickly called the Wayfarers as we went, and because everything's easier and quicker with magic, they were there before I ended the phone call.\n\nThere was Captain Finn Plimpton, along with some of his regular team members \u2013 Wanda, Gretel, Paul and Shane.\n\nA large crowd of the shop's elf-costumed women had gathered around the edges of the yard. The space was tiny, almost completely taken up by the Christmas star and the body impaled upon it, and they were struggling to get close to him, all of them surrounding the dead Santa Claus.\n\n'Get back from the body, ladies!' commanded Finn. 'Gretel.' He nodded to his colleague. 'Can you and Paul bring everyone back inside? Gather any other staff, too, and lock this place down. No one in or out until we've questioned everyone. Me and Wanda'll be out here with Shane for a minute, then we'll come in get started.'\n\nAs Gretel and Paul ushered the nearly-identical workers inside, Wanda and Shane approached the body. 'So what do we know?' Wanda asked, most of her attention on the dead man. 'He's the owner of this place, right?'\n\nHamish nodded. 'Giles Tinsley. Well, he's a Tinsley by marriage. I'm not sure what coven he was in before, but he couldn't have picked a more suitable one to marry into. He's into toymaking, and there are Tinsley toy shops and workshops all over the country. But the stuff that Giles produced here always sold more than the stuff made in any other workshop. Plus, his Winter Wonderland is always a big hit. It did so well that they opened up similar shops in every enclave.'\n\n'I've been in quite a few of them.' Wanda was inspecting the rusty star. 'But I didn't know this was the original.'\n\nWhile she and Shane continued to examine the scene, the captain frowned at me. 'Katy, why are you dressed like that?'\n\nI pulled at my skirt. 'It was a disguise, and never you mind why. Anyway, I've had enough of men shaming me today. I can wear a short skirt if I want.'\n\n'I'm not shaming you. It's just very unlike you, that's all.'\n\n'You have the legs for it,' Sol remarked.\n\nWe all spun around to gawp at the owner of Aim Low. 'When did you get here?' I asked.\n\n'Just now. I was standing at the window of the little kitchen in the back of my shop, and I saw Santa falling backwards through the air. Well\u2026 now that I'm here I realise it was Giles Tinsley dressed as Santa, which makes a lot more sense, seeing as I don't even believe in Santa. I was making a cup of coffee for Valerian when I saw him fall, so I didn't come straight away. She really likes her coffee, and I hoped it might make her forgive me for\u2026 well, a little bit of business that went wrong, through absolutely no fault of mine. But when I went to find her she'd already gone, so I figured I'd take a stroll and see what's going on over here. You know what's funny, though.' He looked me up and down. 'You're wearing the exact same outfit she is today.'\n\n'Sol.' I patted his shoulder. 'Valerian never came to your shop. It was me, pretending to be her. Wearing a glamour.'\n\nHis face took on a look of extreme panic. 'Are you investigating me for something? Because I'm innocent. Of everything.'\n\nHamish laid a paw on Sol's shaking leg. 'She was investigating me, pal. She was being a concerned friend. She wanted to know what I was doing in your flat.'\n\n'Ah. With all the weird robot stuff.' Sol nodded. 'I told you you should tell her.'\n\n'What weird robot stuff?' asked Finn.\n\nIn unison, Hamish and Sol replied, 'None of your beeswax!'\n\n'Anyway,' I said. 'That's why I'm dressed like her.'\n\n'Oh.' Sol sighed. 'I wish you were her. I thought maybe if Valerian wanted to argue about brooms then she might want to argue about other things.'\n\n'Always good to aim high, Sol,' Wanda quipped. 'So, a man falls from the window of a toymaking workshop, dressed as Santa in July. Welcome to Desperation Row.'\n\n'No, not welcome, actually.' Sol glared at Wanda. 'You're very unwelcome, as a matter of fact. And if you think I'm going to act as a witness or anything like that, then you can get rid of that notion, because I saw nothing, and even if I did, this is Samhain Street. We don't like the law in Samhain Street.'\n\n'Yeah, we've heard,' Finn replied with a groan.\n\n'You lot should get lost and hire Katy and Hamish to work on it instead,' Sol suggested. 'You know, because people actually trust them.'\n\n'I'll think about it, Sol, I really will.' Finn gave him a tight smile. 'But you've already told us that you were standing at your window when the body fell, so you already are a witness. Plus, you've got to have CCTV at the back of your shop, right? We'll want to see that, too.'\n\n'Hah! As if I have CCTV. No one on this street does. Anyway, all I said was I saw Giles Tinsley going splat. I saw nothing more than that. Nothing and no one, and I would swear to that in a court of law. Nothing else. No one else. At all. But I mean, it was bound to happen eventually, wasn't it? One of those cute little elves was bound to lose her cool, what with how Giles was\u2013' Sol clamped a hand over his mouth.\n\n'What was that?' Finn asked.\n\n'Nothing,' Sol squeaked from behind his hand. 'I'm not telling you nothing. If you want to hear about how Giles Tinsley was having an affair with two of his elves and stringing his wife along at the same time, then you'll have to hear it from someone else. You'll\u2026 crap.' He looked imploringly at Finn. 'Just\u2026 whatever you do, just don't tell no one what I told you. I'll never sell a broom in this enclave again if people find out I ratted out the elves.'\n\nFinn patted his shoulder. 'I'll do my best, Sol. I'll do my best.'\n\nSol tottered off, mumbling, 'Bloody Wayfarers', beneath his breath.\n\nWhen Sol was gone, Shane Moore nodded to an open window on the building's second storey. 'So far, what I think was that he was pushed out of that window, hard. And obviously this star takes up most of the yard, so\u2026'\n\nNow that I was closer, I could see that the bottom part of the rusted star had been jammed between some wooden pallets. Those pallets were keeping it upright, and it was exactly below the open window. Could the star have been placed there on purpose?\n\n'The workshop is on that floor,' said Hamish, pointing a paw up to the window. 'I've been up there before, visiting Giles. He was interested in studying robotics so he could invent a new line of toys, and he wanted to meet with me to discuss it. That room with the open window is his office, and everyone in the workshop could easily see anyone leaving or entering that room \u2013 unless they used magic, of course. And let's not rule out that it could have been someone who worked for him. I mean, I have heard rumours that he's a bit of a philanderer, so what Sol said about him having affairs with two of the elves is hardly beyond the realms of possibility.'\n\n'Well, if Sol is to be believed,' Finn said, 'then maybe Giles annoyed one of those women so much that she pushed him. Hey, is it me, or do they all look really, really alike?'\n\nHamish sniggered. 'That's Giles for you. He only ever hires good-looking women. Although to be fair to him, they're also excellent toymakers and store assistants. Still\u2026 it's a little bit disturbing when you consider that they don't just look like each other. They also look like younger versions of his wife, Theresa.'\n\n'Yeah, that's more than just a little bit disturbing. It's totally messed up.' Finn took in a breath, looking at the entrance to the building. 'I don't think I can come up with an excuse that'll make it all right for you and Katy to sit in on the interviews, so we'll have to catch you up later on. We\u2013'\n\nHe broke off, as Gretel emerged from the building.\n\n'They won't talk, boss,' she informed him. 'They're refusing. Because, you know, they don't like the law here in Samhain Street. They've requested Katy and Hamish sit in on the interviews. They say they'll only feel safe with them there.'\n\n'Seriously?' Finn grinned. 'Well, that is astonishingly convenient.'\n\n[ Falling Hard ]\n\nA little while later, Shane took the body to the morgue and the rest of us headed inside. Gretel and Paul were busy examining the building \u2013 concentrating most of their efforts on Giles's office \u2013 and while they did that, Hamish and I went to the break room, where Finn and Wanda were interviewing the staff members.\n\nAfter the eighth of the clones left the room, I began to wonder why they'd wanted Hamish and me here at all, because despite stating that our presence would make them more comfortable, each attractive brunette had nothing much to tell us. They all told a similar, basic story: that they'd all been on break, both Winter Wonderland staff and workshop staff, in their separate canteens. They'd assumed Giles was taking his break alone in his office, because his door was shut. They told us that one of the workers, a Winter Wonderland elf called Lucy, had seen Giles's fall through the window when she was rinsing out her coffee cup, and that after she shouted out, the rest of them had followed her outside.\n\nWhile they sat through their interviews, I took a look at each woman through my Aurameter. I'd already established that none of them were real elves, but I was interested to see how much magic each of them had. It seemed that, while the Winter Wonderland workers were comprised of a mixture of supernaturals, the workshop staff were mostly witches and wizards.\n\nFinally, there were only two workers remaining. The first of the two was a witch who worked as a toymaker. She walked in, wringing her hands and looking nervous.\n\n'Hello.' She sat down across from Finn and Wanda, casting a brief glance at Hamish and me. 'I'm Janine,' she said. 'Senior Toymaker. I\u2026 the others have already told you about me, I presume?'\n\nNo one had said a thing about Janine, but Wanda kept her face impassive. 'It doesn't matter what they've said,' she told the worker. 'We still want to hear what you have to say for yourself.'\n\n'Well\u2026' Janine pulled at the green sleeves of her tight jumper. 'It's just that\u2026 well, I know they'll have assumed I was in the office with Giles. But I wasn't.'\n\n'Oh?' Finn raised a brow. 'So where were you then, Janine?'\n\nShe bowed her head. 'In the loo. I know no one can corroborate that, but it's true. I was going to go and talk to Giles during my tea break, so I know people will have told you about it. Everyone wanted things to work out well for me. I was just\u2026 standing in front of the mirror and psyching myself up first. So despite what the others will have told you, I wasn't in his office when he fell, and I have no idea what happened to him. All I know is that I heard Lucy screaming, and everyone running outside, and I went out along with them to see what was going on.'\n\n'Mm hm, mm hm.' Wanda made some notes. 'So what was it you were psyching yourself up for, Janine, while you were supposedly in the loo?'\n\nJanine glared at Wanda. 'Oh, don't pretend you don't know.'\n\nWanda returned her glare with a friendly smile. 'Let's act like I don't know, Janine. It'll be better for your sake if you tell us in your own words.'\n\n'I\u2026 I can see that, I suppose.' Janine bowed her head again. 'I\u2026 I was psyching myself up for my conversation with Giles. He'd been avoiding me all morning, and we were supposed to talk first thing. Because he\u2026 he was supposed to tell me what happened with his wife, when he ended things with her last night. So I went into the loo on my own to take in some deep breaths and calm myself down before I confronted him.'\n\nShe winced. 'Not that I was going to confront him, exactly. That was a poor choice of words. I just\u2026 I wanted to have a minute to myself before I went in there to discuss our future. I mean, so what if he hadn't ended it the last five times he promised he would? This time was different. I\u2026 I could see it in his eyes. It was me he loved, not Theresa. He hasn't loved her for years. He's always complaining about how she refuses to use glamour spells to keep herself looking young. And she has no interest in this place, or in any of his hobbies. I'm the one who's interested in his train set, and the songs he plays on his guitar.'\n\nShe sniffed back a tear. 'I should say played, I suppose. Because he'll n-never s-serenade me again!' She stared at Wanda. 'It was love. Me and Giles. It was. He told me he was falling hard for me. That I was the only woman he'd ever truly loved. And no matter what the others say, I believed him! I wouldn't have killed him in some jealous rage like I'll bet they were saying. Just because I ended things with my husband over him, and just because he was dragging his heels over leaving Theresa, it\u2026 it didn't mean anything. He loved me. And we were going to be together.'\n\nShe sat up, eager-looking now. 'Actually, I'll bet he did tell Theresa last night, like he said he was going to. I'll bet that's what happened. He told Theresa, and she took it badly, and then she magicked herself into his office this morning, and pushed him out the window, then clicked her fingers and scarpered, hoping to frame me in revenge. I'll bet she even left some other evidence in there so it would look like I was the killer.'\n\n'Oh?' Finn's left eyebrow lifted. 'Other evidence, you say? To frame you? Well, that's just awful. And\u2026 would you have any idea of what this other evidence might look like, Janine?'\n\nShe folded her arms. 'Of course not. How would I know? But I'm telling you, that's what must have happened. It was Theresa. It's the only explanation, because no one else would even dream of hurting Giles. Especially not me. I would never kill him. Why would I? He was the most wonderful man in the world, and we were going to be together forever.'\n\n[ Don't Derail the Gravy Train ]\n\nThere's little need for me to describe the physical appearance of the final worker to enter the break room; suffice to say she was much the same as the others. Her demeanour, though, was different. She seemed incredibly relaxed, and had somewhat of a spring to her step. My Aurameter told me she was a weredog, and that come full moon, she would take on the appearance of a cute little cairn terrier.\n\n'Lucy, isn't it?' Wanda smiled at the woman. 'You work in the Winter Wonderland. You're the one who saw Giles falling and alerted the others, is that right?'\n\nLucy took a seat and snorted. 'I'm surprised any of them told you that much.'\n\n'Really?' Finn stared at her. 'And why would that be?'\n\n'Oh, you know, because it's the way things are around here. A veil of secrecy over everything. And to think, when I first got the job here, I was over the moon.'\n\n'Everyone else seems to love working here,' Finn pointed out. 'Or, at the very least, they haven't said anything against it.'\n\nLucy snorted again. 'They don't like working here. Oh, maybe they did to begin with. Maybe, like me, they took this job because they were crazy about toys and about Christmas. But these days, all they care about is the bonuses they get for keeping their mouths shut. Although I don't know why they're still keeping quiet, to be honest. Giles can hardly pay us hush money now he's dead, can he?'\n\n'Hush money?' Wanda sat up straight. 'What was it Giles wanted you all to keep quiet about?'\n\n'Oh, you know, his general sleaziness. The fact that he was doing the dirty on his wife with as many younger women as he could.' She ran a hand through her hair. 'Look, it's not talked about. None of us say it out in the open. When I walked in on Giles and Siobhan in his office three months ago, I didn't gossip about it. To anyone. Then, come next payday, I had a \"performance bonus\" in my pay packet. And I had to help out in payroll once, so I know that everyone gets something similar from time to time. As long as we don't talk about what a slimeball he is \u2013 or should I say, was \u2013 then we get rewarded. I got an even bigger bonus when he slapped my behind one day and I didn't report it to the head of his coven. You sort of\u2026 know how things are supposed to go, without anyone actually telling you, you know?'\n\n'Good goddess.' Finn looked sick. 'There are laws against that kind of thing, Lucy. And we do take reports seriously. I'm disgusted at what you've been through. The perpetrator might be dead, but we'll still help you to access a counsellor.'\n\n'Meh.' She shrugged. 'The truth is, I thought about reporting him at the time. But when I tried to broach it with the others \u2013 in a subtle way, of course \u2013 they all clammed up. Then over the next few hours I got some comments about not rocking the boat, not derailing the gravy train, that sort of stuff. So\u2026 I kept quiet.'\n\n'You mentioned someone called Siobhan,' Finn said, still looking sick and slightly pale. 'You said you caught them together in Giles's office. Siobhan is on a day off today. No one else seems to know why. Do you?'\n\n'I don't, actually.' Lucy replied. 'But I do know that Siobhan had a lot more than just a quick fumble with Giles. It was a full-on affair. I mean, I realise that poor, deluded Janine thought she was the only one. But Giles tried it on with everyone. And it became clear the longer I worked here that he had a certain type \u2013 a type that just happens to describe every single woman he hires.' She inched forward on her chair. 'Have you ever heard that rumour about the Tinsleys? About how there's a large part of the coven descended from elves?'\n\nWe all shook our heads, and Lucy continued. 'Well, it's just a rumour. But Giles, well\u2026 he likes to call his wife his little elf. He's not a Tinsley by blood, you know. Theresa is, though. And you can kind of see it when you look at her. She's short and cute and all that. But anyway, the point is, he has a thing for that sort of woman, and that's almost all he hired these days. Only women. I think the last guy he hired was\u2026' She looked thoughtful. 'Yeah, it would have been Winston, I reckon.'\n\n'Winston?' Wanda questioned.\n\n'Winston Wolfe. He was an amazing toymaker, so he was. I mean, I thought Giles was good, but Winston was something else. But when Giles set his sights on Janine, Winston had to go.'\n\n'What did one thing have to do with the other?' questioned Finn.\n\n'Well, Winston was Janine's husband,' Lucy replied. 'Still is, officially \u2013 the divorce isn't finalised yet, although I think it's almost done. I told her she was an idiot, but for some unfathomable reason, she worshipped Giles.'\n\nLucy pulled at her short skirt. 'I kind of know the feeling. I worshipped him a bit, at first \u2013 because of what he does here. The workshop is so great, the Winter Wonderland is even better. But people can be two things, I guess. Amazing in one way, creepy as heck in another. Only Janine never seemed to see the creepy side of Giles.'\n\nWanda tapped her pen against her notepad. 'Lucy, did Janine and Siobhan know about each other?'\n\n'Well, Janine might not have known, but I'm pretty sure Siobhan was beginning to have an inkling.' She pulled at her skirt again. 'Look, I know it seems weird to you, but\u2026 Giles was good at making these idiots feel like they were the only woman in the world, and the rest of us\u2026 well, we knew better than to, like I said\u2026 derail the gravy train.'\n\nShe looked uncomfortable. 'I did try to hint at it, to both of them. Heck, I even gave strongly hinted warnings to make sure any new girls knew what he was like. But hinting was about all I ever dared to do, because I really did need this job. We all did. I have two kids, y'know. A lot of us have children. Even Janine \u2013 she has a little girl with Winston. Not that she lets him see her much anymore, but\u2026 yeah.'\n\n'What made you think Siobhan had an inkling that she wasn't the only one?' Finn asked, bringing things back on track.\n\nLucy shrugged. 'I bumped into her a couple of nights ago at the Bank. She was buying a bottle of fancy wine. She'd already had a couple of drinks, I reckon, because she was a bit tipsy. She said more to me in those few minutes than she'd said since we first met. She told me Giles was working late and she was going to surprise him. And she winked when she said it, so\u2026 y'know, make of that what you will. Anyway, yesterday morning she had a face like thunder, and she didn't speak to anyone all day. But she did shoot a couple of dirty looks at Janine when Janine wasn't looking. And Janine, bless her, she seemed completely oblivious to it all. So I think Siobhan must have heard them through the door of Giles's office the night before or something. But it's just guesswork on my part. You'd have to ask Siobhan and Janine about it to get the proper story, and I doubt they'd actually want to tell you the sordid details, so\u2026'\n\n'Right.' Finn nodded. 'You're very helpful, Lucy.'\n\nShe gave him a wry grin. 'Some might say suspiciously so, right? Look, Captain Plimpton, I know I'm going to sound like a terrible person when I tell you this, but when I saw Giles dead today, the first thing I felt was relief. I've been staying here in this weird as heck atmosphere even though I hate it, because\u2026 well, like I said, I need the job. And here's something else no one will have told you \u2013 even if you manage to leave here, Giles really doesn't ever let you go. Winston hasn't been able to get work since he was fired, even though he's incredibly talented. I think maybe Giles spread a rumour about him or something, because nothing else makes sense. And the same thing has happened to other people who walked out, or got fired. They don't get hired anywhere else. But now\u2026 now I don't have to worry about that, and I just\u2026 I feel like such a weight's been lifted. And the other women ought to feel relieved, too. I guess\u2026 it just hasn't caught up with them yet. But give them a couple of days to digest the fact that Giles is gone, and they'll soon start talking. Mark my words.'\n\nShe looked down at her skirt. 'And none of us will ever have to wear this stupid elf outfit again, which is the biggest plus of all. Oh, has anyone told you about the star? The one Giles went splat upon? Because that is a weird story.'\n\n'No,' Wanda admitted. 'We did ask why it was positioned where it was, but all we got was shrugs and \"I dunno\"s.'\n\n'Sounds about right.' Lucy smiled in a sad way. 'But I don't blame them for it \u2013 like I said, they will open up soon. It'll just take a little while. Anyway. The star. I was told that it usually had pride of place, on top of an enormous tree in the Winter Wonderland. Only it had gone rusty, you see, while it was in storage \u2013 there was a leak in the roof of the storage room, and it was sitting right under that leak for almost a year. So Giles declared it a lost cause and chucked it in a skip out back yesterday afternoon. When I saw it had been moved into the yard this morning I figured he must have changed his mind, decided to get the rust off and repaint it. But maybe not. I suppose it's vaguely possible that he was, I dunno, looking out at the star in the yard, wondering what the heck it was doing there, and then he fell. But it's not very likely, is it? He fell backwards by the looks of things, so I guess a more realistic explanation is that someone pushed him. Although I don't know who. I mean, Janine worshipped him, so she'd never hurt him, and Siobhan, as you already know, was on a day off.'\n\nShe held her hands out. 'But thankfully I'm not the one who'll have to figure it out.'\n\nFinn grunted. 'No. That's us, unfortunately. Listen, we'll let you go in a sec, Lucy, but one last question: what about Theresa Tinsley? Do you think she knew know about her husband's affairs?'\n\nLucy looked thoughtful, then said, 'Well, if she did, she certainly hid it well. It seemed to me that she had no idea about the way Giles was behind her back \u2013 he once tried to chat me up by telling me I looked after myself so much better than Theresa did, which is just so many kinds of wrong. For one thing, she looks amazing. And for another, I mean what kind of woman would be dumb enough not to know that if he's talking trash about his wife, he's not a good guy. One day, he'll be talking trash about you too, y'know? I've been cheated on. I know how it goes.'\n\nShe shook her head. 'Anyway. I'm going off on a tangent. But no. No, I really don't think she knew, because it looked to me like he was just as good at fooling his wife as he was at fooling the likes of Janine. To see Giles and Theresa together, well, you'd think they were love's young dream. Holding hands, kissing and cuddling. All that soppy stuff.'\n\n'She came here a lot, then?' asked Wanda.\n\n'Not regularly or anything. Theresa heads up all the charity work for the Tinsley coven, so she's always busy. But she comes to staff parties and stuff, and Giles has had us all over to the house for parties there, too. It baffled me, the way he could be so brazen. But I guess he knew no one was ever going to call him out on his behaviour.' Her expression darkened. 'Although\u2026 maybe somebody finally did.'\n\n[ A Meal Best Taken in Privacy ]\n\nI would have enjoyed spending some more time at Tinsleys', so that I could discover if any evidence was found in Giles's office, or in the rest of the building, but once Lucy's interview was finished, Hamish and I had to return to our own office to meet a client.\n\nI was surprised but happy that Hamish joined me, seeing as he'd been missing so much work recently. As we took seats at our desks, I pulled a few items from my bag and hummed some Christmas tunes, grinning from ear to ear. Was it wrong of me to be in a much improved mood after witnessing the death of a Santa-suited man? I wasn't happy that he was dead, obviously. But for such a Christmassy murder to occur in July, well, surely it had to mean something.\n\nFoirfe had said I'd find the pillar in summer, in a house where it was always Christmas. Hamish might be poo-pooing the idea of Tinsley's Workshop and Winter Wonderland being such a place, but\u2026 maybe he was wrong?\n\n'I know what you're thinking, Katy.' Hamish gave me a no-nonsense glare. 'And you need to stop it. We've already talked about this. It isn't what you're hoping it is, and it's nonsense to think that it might be.'\n\n'What's she thinking?' asked Cleo, our roommate Ned's familiar. Cleo was an attractive-looking cat, with lush cream fur, lovely brown colouring on her face and ears, and bright blue eyes. Right now, she had somehow opened the door between us and Ned's shop, and was sitting in the gap licking a paw. Those bright blue eyes of hers were filled with disdain (one of her more frequent expressions) as she looked upon Hamish and me.\n\n'I mean, I agree,' the cat continued in a casual manner. 'Most of what Katy thinks is nonsense. But it's always fun to find out what particular brand of nonsense she's spouting on any given day.'\n\nIgnoring the cat, Hamish focused on me. 'I want to find this pillar more than you do, and I'm telling you, it's got nothing to do with Giles Tinsley's death. I can't afford to get my hopes up about this, and you know it. What's that you're doing there, anyway?'\n\n'You'll find out soon enough,' I said airily, concentrating on the material before me, and pulling out my wand. I'd used a retrieval spell to gather up what remained of Hamish's yellow hat from Sol's flat. Most of the material was in tatters, but my Aurameter had helped me to find one decent length that still had magic. Now, with some nifty crafting spells I'd learned at my wizarding college, I was hoping to do something useful with what remained.\n\nI was making decent progress when the phone on my desk began to ring. 'Katy Kramer, PI,' I said as I answered the call, carefully laying my project aside. 'How can I help you?'\n\nThe voice on the other end was a woman's voice, and a husky one at that. 'Miss Kramer, this is Miss Cahill speaking. I'm your two-thirty appointment,' she said. 'And I'm afraid that I'm calling to cancel. Unfortunately, my schedule has suddenly changed.'\n\nShe had spoken the word 'schedule' with a soft, seductive sounding c.\n\n'Oh, well maybe we could reschedule,' I suggested. 'You said you wanted us to follow your boyfriend, isn't that right? We could get going without a face-to-face meeting, if you like. You could email us some details, like a photograph maybe, and where you think\u2013'\n\n'I'm sorry,' she interrupted. 'But I won't be needing your services, Miss Kramer.' With that, she ended the call.\n\n'Oh.' I replaced the handset and looked at Hamish. 'I guess we don't have a meeting with a new client after all. And I've just realised how hungry I am. Those interviews over at Tinsleys' took forever. Want to have a late lunch at the Bank?'\n\n'Em, no. No, I don't think so. I think I'll eat something healthier.'\n\n'They have healthy things,' I argued, focusing on my work again. I was actually making something useful here. Take that, fourth year schoolteacher who said I couldn't sew to save my life. Turned out, when I was motivated (and in possession of a sewing spell and a magical wand, cough, cough) then I could turn my hand to anything.\n\nHamish hopped down from his chair, looking irritable. 'Katy, at the moment, the healthiest thing I can eat is\u2026' He winced, then lowered his voice. '\u2026 dog food. As in the stuff that comes out of a tin. It's what Healer Little advised. If I eat that in the Bank, people will make fun of me.'\n\n'No one will make fun of you,' I assured him.\n\nCleo stopped licking her paw. 'Not if they know what's good for them, anyway. If anyone so much as sends a funny look in your direction, I'll scratch their eyes out.'\n\nHe gawped at the cat in surprise. From time to time they got along, but she normally took advantage of any opportunity to tease him. Sometimes, though, she proved that she had a heart.\n\n'Well, that's really nice of you, Cleo,' he said. 'But this is my first attempt at eating that foul stuff, and I think it's a meal best taken in privacy. You lot can go and have a late lunch together, and I'll take off on my own.'\n\nHe did one of the odd little jiggles and wiggles he needed to do in order to draw the magic from his hat, but nothing happened. 'Crap!' He groaned. 'I'd gotten so used to the extra power of my yellow hat. I could even do travelling spells with it. Not too often, but I could certainly rustle one up when I wanted to escape one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, which this definitely is.'\n\nHe sighed. 'Ah well. I guess I'll just slope off while you all pretend that you're not going to talk about my new eating habits the second I'm gone.'\n\n'Wait.' I hopped up and waved my project in the air. 'Maybe this will help.'\n\nHamish frowned. 'A ribbon? You were making me a yellow ribbon? What am I supposed to do with that? Tie it around an old oak tree?'\n\n'Nope.' I grinned, approaching him and fastening the yellow band around his red hat, finally securing it with something else I'd retrieved from Sol's flat: the buckle from the yellow hat. 'Just because the material exploded doesn't mean it's completely useless.'\n\nHe blinked. 'You\u2026 you made this from my yellow hat?'\n\n'Let's not make a big deal out of it.' I stood up and nodded down at him. 'Well? Give it a go.'\n\nHe rested his head against my leg for a moment, sighed and said, 'Thank you, Katy. Once again, I'm sorry for being such a grumpy old sod,' before trying, once more, to channel enough magic to make a quick exit.\n\nOn the third of his jiggles, the hat's buckle lit up, and he disappeared from my view while I waved him off and said, 'See? That wasn't a remotely embarrassing exit.'\n\nCleo sniggered. 'Are you kidding? He made himself look like a right eejit, insulting you when you were doing something nice for him. Frankly, I don't know why we stay friends with him.'\n\nI tilted my head to the side and smirked at her. 'And yet you are his friend, and you know it, and you would have done exactly the same for him. Let's just give him a break from now on, all right? Let him be grumpy if that's what he needs to do to get through this. We'd all be a bit moody if we were stuck in the wrong body.'\n\nShe snorted. 'Especially if that body was a dog's. Anyhoo, I'm hungry. Let's go grab my witch and get me fed, shall we?'\n\nNed poked a head around the door. 'Cleo, have you forgotten that you and I already had lunch?'\n\nThe cat gave an innocent shrug. 'Well, no one could blame me for forgetting such a small meal. Let's go to the Bank, Ned. Roast chicken is today's special.'\n\n'I know. Because we already had it. Come on, Cleo. You and me need to go and see a man about a ghost.'\n\n'A ghost?' I questioned. 'But\u2026 I thought you didn't do ghosts any more.' A while ago, she'd changed the name of her shop. Instead of Ned's Necromancy, her sign now read: Ned Marvin, Maker and Supplier of Healing Wands. Below that there were some other words, in much smaller lettering, which stated: We Also Sell Necromancy Supplies.\n\nShe'd never been an actual necromancer \u2013 from what I'd learned, the most that any of those weirdos had achieved was making a skeleton dance \u2013 but for years she sold the necessary supplies. Even though plenty of would-be dead-raisers came to her shop, Ned often found a gentle way to convince most of them that maybe all they actually wanted was a conversation with their deceased loved ones. And Ned was brilliant at facilitating those conversations, because she could literally talk to the dead. But despite her gift, I knew she much preferred spending her time creating healing wands.\n\nNed sighed. 'I'm trying my best not to do too much of the talking to the dead stuff, but it's hard to tell the ghosts to flip off when they've got unfinished business. This latest one is a very sweet woman. She just wants me to tell her husband that she left a letter for him but it fell behind a cabinet so\u2026 I can't not help her, can I? Come on, Cleo, let's get going.'\n\nAs the cat trotted back through the dividing door and into the shop with Ned, I folded my arms, thinking things over. Cullen would be too busy serving the last of this lunchtime's customers and then cleaning up after them, so he could hardly sit down and have a meal with me. But I absolutely had to talk this over with someone. Someone who would agree with me \u2013 that the dead Santa impaled upon the Christmas star was the best news we'd had in a while.\n\n'I know,' I said to the empty room. 'I'll go see Jay.'\n\n[ A Brewing Bromance ]\n\nI felt the joys of a Christmassy summer as I walked out through the Other Door at my office. I might not have liked Ned's ex-boyfriend, the P\u00faca known as Guillermo Moriarty, but the portal door he'd left here had made my life much easier. With it, I could travel from one side of the city to the other without the use of magic, or, y'know, walking for too long.\n\nI practically skipped out onto Eile Street and made my way to Bake My Cake (don't you just love it when people do the hard work for you?) bought some savoury pies for lunch, and some chocolate eclairs for dessert. I was skipping my way back up the street again, when a swirl of white began to fall upon my head.\n\nI held out my arms, grinning as the white stuff began to swirl around me. It was snow. In July. Now that was the kind of weather that could mean something. Except\u2026 why wasn't it cold and wet?\n\n'Sorry!' a voice called down from an upstairs window of Eile Street Orphanage. 'The fan in here got a little over enthusiastic and blew a whole load of packing beads out the window.'\n\n'Ah.' I looked up at the Wayfarer healer, Shane Moore. He spent as much time as he could volunteering at the orphanage. 'That makes sense. I thought it was snow for a minute.'\n\n'Nah. We've had a lot of donations, and we're unpacking the stuff now. Wouldn't it be nuts if it was snow, though? In July?'\n\n'It'd be awesome, actually. Hey, shouldn't you be elbows deep in a corpse round about now?'\n\nHe shuddered. 'You have such a lovely way of expressing yourself. That's all finished. I'm on a lunch break, so I came to spend it here. We just had some new bits and bobs delivered to this place, and I'm going to put the old stuff in the basement. I could really do with a sugar rush though, to keep me going. I might head to Bake My Cake and grab myself a chocolate \u00e9clair.'\n\n'Ah.' I gave him a guilty smile. I'd bought the last two, and it seemed like Shane deserved them more than me. I held up the bag. 'How about two, on me?'\n\nHe grinned. 'Are you serious? That'd be amazing, Katy, thank you so much.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "When I reached Times of Yore, I laid the pies out on some plates. Jay, who told me he hadn't eaten lunch yet, looked with glee at the food. 'Bake My Cake steak and onion pies? You know me so well.'\n\n'Well, I knew you'd like the meatiest thing on the menu,' I told him, not mentioning that just a few minutes earlier there had also been another favourite food of his: \u00e9clairs. There was no need to tell him of such a devastating, guilt-induced loss. Instead, I carefully laid a blanket over the chair I was about to sit on. Jay liked to keep the items in his antique shop far too dusty for my liking, and I was not in the mood for a coughing fit.\n\n'I'm glad you came for lunch, actually,' he said. 'I thought I'd have to wait until our afternoon tea together to find out the latest on the pillar search. I take it you and Cullen got nothing from that last trip you went on?'\n\nI sighed. 'Nope. Even though we've visited dozens of so-called psychics the world over, no one seems to know a thing about a house where it's always Christmas, or about the whereabouts of another pillar. The jaunts we've been taking have made me wish that I'd known about magic all my life, though. Between Cullen's flying motorcycle and the ability to teleport ourselves to anywhere on the planet, it's really taken the irritation out of travelling. I can visit lots more places now that I don't have to worry about puking on planes. Those air stewards do not look happy when you block the toilet.'\n\n'How is it that you could get travel sick on an airplane but not a flying bike?'\n\nI held my hands out. 'Such are the mysteries of the universe. So how did you get on with your contact? You know, the one who has an in with the man in the North Pole?' I did my best to look neutral as I asked that last question.\n\nHe laughed. 'You're trying so hard to look like you're not interested in the answer, Katy. But yeah, my contact got in touch with the North Pole on my behalf. I received an incredibly polite letter in return, telling me that Santa was too busy for visitors right now. It went on to say that although they prepare for Christmas all year round, this house you were told about, where it's always Christmas, has nothing to do with the North Pole. And there's definitely no Pillar of Permanence there, as far as Santa and his elves are aware.'\n\n'Oh.' I felt myself deflate just a little. When I asked Jay to reach out to the North Pole, I'd been joking. But when he told me that he actually did have a way of getting in touch, all my childhood fantasies of meeting Santa had returned. Even if there was no pillar there, I'd hoped that we might get to pay a visit anyway. And if I did meet the man in red, I wouldn't have been too critical of the fact that he'd brought me the wrong board game when I was ten. 'Well, thanks for trying.'\n\n'I'm sorry there's not better news. But at least you've learned how pleasant international travel can be when you're getting about via magic. I sometimes wish it was like the old days, when humans weren't so freaked out by the supernatural. Back then, witches would often help humans get around. Now, they're stuck on cramped airplane seats breathing in recirculated air. And puking in airplane toilets if they get travel sick, like you. Human lives would be so much nicer if only they'd stayed friends with us.'\n\nI shook my head in amazement. 'Sometimes you say things that remind me you're over two thousand years old.'\n\n'Yeah, well, it was a slip-up even admitting that much. So let's not talk about how ancient I am. Let's talk about you instead. Besides globetrotting adventures to try and find a pillar for Hamish, how are things since you and Cullen finally admitted you were nuts about each other and became a couple?'\n\nI concentrated on eating my steak and onion pie. 'Jay, it feels weird talking about this. I mean, you and me were together for a while. Sure, you were only drawn to me because you were destined to protect the hunter and I was drawn to you because, well\u2026 you're good-looking. But still. It's almost as bad as when I remember that you once had a thing with my aunt.'\n\nI paused to take a very long shudder. 'Why did I just make myself remember that? Hey, why don't we talk about you and Ned, instead? When are the two of you going to finally lock lips?'\n\nIt was always fun to make a vampire blush. 'Okay, I see your point,' he said. 'Let's talk about anything else. You really found nothing on all of those trips you took?'\n\n'Way to make a girl feel good about her achievements. Sure, my visits to seers around the world were little more than a delightful way to waste my time, but I think I might be getting close to finding that pillar, actually. Only\u2026 it could be a lot closer to home.'\n\nWith my plate balanced on my lap, I leaned forward in my seat, and told him about my morning.\n\n'My stars, Katy!' he gasped when I'd finished. 'There has to be some sort of connection, right? I mean, I get why Hamish would be afraid to get his hopes up, but\u2026 it's too much of a coincidence to be nothing, don't you think?'\n\n'I do think.' I grinned, happy that someone was finally agreeing with me. 'Hey, is that your psychic doorbell?'\n\nI glanced at the locked door of the shop. Whenever Jay closed the shop to take a break, customers often rang his doorbell to gain entry, and, well\u2026 because he was a vampire, his doorbell was one of those psychic doorbells which his kind loved so much. When a person rang that bell, it might play their favourite song, or a song that represented their current train of thought. Sometimes when I rang it, it was scarily prescient. At other times, it simply played whatever happened to be the latest pop song I couldn't get out of my mind.\n\nRight now, it was playing I Dig the Girl by a weredog band called That Stick Is Mine!\n\n'Is that Cullen?' I asked as Jay hopped up.\n\n'I'm ready to kill some zombies if you are, Jay,' my boyfriend announced as Jay pulled open the door. 'The Bank was packed to the rafters at lunch, and I could do with de-stressing. I\u2013' He broke off as he rushed inside and saw me sitting there. 'Hey there, beautiful.' Cullen gave me a huge hug. 'I was hoping you might pop by after you were finished following Hamish, but I guess you were here instead. How come you are, though? Afternoon tea isn't for a while yet.'\n\n'Well, at least you know about my afternoon tea with Jay.' I gave him a mock-stern stare. 'I had no idea you two had playdates together. Is a bromance brewing?'\n\n'Oh, it's long brewed,' said Cullen, planting a kiss on my head. 'Actually, it hasn't really. We played together about a month ago, remember, while you and Ned were getting ready for dinner? I just popped by on the off chance today. But now that you mention it\u2026' He batted his lashes at Jay. 'What do you say? Wanna be my bestest bro?'\n\nJay sighed and clutched his chest. 'Why Cullen, I thought you'd never ask.'\n\n'Well, I've finished eating,' I told him with a wistful look at my empty plate. 'So maybe I'll leave you to it.' I gave him a quick kiss in return and stood up. 'Wouldn't want to get in the way of some good old-fashioned boy bonding, would I?'\n\n'Aw, you wouldn't be in the way,' Jay told me (he didn't sound very convincing). 'You should stay, honestly.'\n\nWhile he was talking, the shop's psychic doorbell rang once more. This time, the tune was Wolf on the Run by the Call of the Wild.\n\n'I really like that song,' Cullen mused. 'Maybe we should make whoever it is wait a bit longer.'\n\nJay chuckled and headed back to the door. 'I like the song, too, but I can see him through the glass panel, and it looks like he's got a box of antiques to sell. Plus, seeing as we can see him, it's safe to say he can see us, too. Don't worry \u2013 we'll be slaying zombies before you know it.'" + }, + { + "title": "Damson in Distress", + "text": "As soon as Jay unlocked the door, the man rushed in and placed his box on the shop counter. It jangled as he set it down, and it was overflowing with candelabras, clocks, and various other expensive-looking ornaments. He was tall and thin, with stubble, and tired-looking, darting eyes. His foot tapped against the floor as he waited for Jay to reach the counter and assess the items. His twitchiness reminded me of Sol. All that was missing was the bright trousers and the gum.\n\nI didn't need to use my Aurameter to tell me he was a werewolf. By now, I knew all about the strange brand of attractiveness their kind exuded, and despite the fact that this guy seemed a little desperate, he was definitely attractive.\n\n'How much'll you give me for this lot? I need to sell quick.'\n\n'Hang on a minute now,' said Jay. 'I haven't even looked at any of it. Tell me about what you have here. And your name, too \u2013 that'd be a start.'\n\n'It's not nicked!' the man cried.\n\n'Mm hm.' Jay arched an eyebrow. 'That's not a suspicious statement at all.'\n\n'Look, look at it.' He pulled out a candle holder. 'This is worth at least ten gold rounds.' There were slots for three candles on the ornament, each one sculpted into three different women's heads. I got the impression they were intended to be different manifestations of the triple-form goddess. Witches loved ornaments like that.\n\n'See the signature on the bottom?' the man continued. 'That witch only made one of everything. You'll get a lot for it.'\n\nJay grunted noncommittally. He was looking with interest at another silver ornament. It was a spherical or maybe oval-shaped ornament on tiny, delicate legs. It was in need of a clean, and it looked as though it opened up. 'One of the legs is missing,' Jay pointed out.\n\n'Well, okay. So maybe this damson is in distress, but it's still worth a few quid, and everything else is perfect.'\n\n'Damson?' Jay frowned.\n\nThe seller shrugged. 'Doesn't it look like a damson to you?'\n\n'Nah, I reckon it's a plum,' Cullen suggested.\n\n'Is there a difference?' the seller questioned, turning back to Jay. 'Look, whatever it is, I'll give it to you for a song. Matter of fact, I'll let you have the whole lot for five gold rounds.'\n\n'You've just stated that the candle holder alone is worth much more than that. And honestly, if you'd let me take a bit longer to look at it all and give it a proper appraisal, I might agree with you.'\n\n'No! I need the money now. Four gold rounds. Final offer.'\n\nJay frowned again. 'I'll give you six if you give me all of your details. Name, address, and so on. And before you say it, that's not me accusing you of being a thief.' He lowered his voice. 'You mentioned gold rounds, even though my shop is firmly in the human world. Which means you're supernatural?'\n\nThe man blinked. 'I\u2026 yeah. Werewolf. Look, honestly, it's not stolen. I just cleared out my granny's attic.'\n\n'I only mention it because, seeing as you are supernatural, you'll know that there's a risk attached to antiques. The Wayfarers expect me to keep careful records in case I wind up with a dangerous magical object in my shop. Here.' Jay pulled a paper form and a pen from beneath the counter. 'I just need you to fill in your details for traceability, and then I can give you your money, all right?'\n\n'Okay.' The man nodded nervously. 'Whatever.'\n\n'All right, then.' Jay nodded and took a few coins from somewhere beneath the counter, before passing the form across to the man.\n\nI watched him scribble quickly, grab the money, and then rush out of the shop.\n\n'You know he's just written down fake details, right?' Cullen commented as the door slammed shut behind the seller.\n\n'I do,' Jay replied, pulling out his mobile phone. 'And I'm texting Captain Plimpton right now, because this stuff is so very obviously stolen. The money I gave him was money the Wayfarers gave me for this very purpose. Each coin contains a magical tracker.'\n\nCullen whistled. 'Impressive.'\n\nJay shrugged. 'There's more. Making him write a fake address made him think of his real address. He lives in your lovely enclave, guys. Well\u2026 lives is putting it strongly. He's been squatting in an attic somewhere on Desperation Row. And um\u2026 Katy, could you remind me again of the name of the man whose wife was having an affair with Giles Tinsley? The man who Giles fired, and who couldn't get work anywhere else?'\n\n'Em, I think Lucy said that Winston was the name of Janine's soon-to-be ex-husband,' I said. 'Winston Wolfe. Why?'\n\n'Because when I read that werewolf's mind, Winston Wolfe was his real name.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "While we waited for Finn to show up, I looked through the things in the box. 'I think you're right, Cullen. I feel like this is more of a plum in distress than a damson,' I remarked, opening up the clasp at its centre and gasping. Inside, there was a beautiful silver ballerina, dancing to music that I knew: Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, from the Nutcracker.\n\nJay rushed towards me. 'Katy, we shouldn't touch this stuff. It could be enchanted.'\n\n'Well, it's enchanting, anyway.' I grinned, stepping away from the beautiful musical plum, but still staring at it. There was a Christmas tree behind the ballerina, and it sparkled so brightly, with silver toys piled beneath. 'See? There's the nutcracker.' I pointed to one of the toys beneath the tree. 'Isn't this gorgeous? And look!' My heart began to beat faster. 'There's a snow globe in the box, too. With Santa's workshop as the scene. Those two things are incredibly Christmassy, don't you think? Guys, we have to find out where Winston got this stuff.'\n\nBeside me, Cullen gulped. 'Yeah,' he said in a strained voice. 'We really do.'\n\nI looked up at him. His eyes were oddly bright, with an expression that told me he'd just figured out something incredibly important. Without saying a word, he reached out to the Christmas tree inside the musical plum, and twisted the star atop it, turning it to the right.\n\nThe ballerina stopped dancing. She bowed her head and curtseyed low, as another tune began to play. It was a carol I recognised from my own Christmases: Silent Night. Cullen's eyes clouded over, and he dropped to the ground." + }, + { + "title": "A Scorned Husband and a Thief", + "text": "Cullen looked ever so sweet when he was unconscious. But soon he was sitting up and blinking, and rubbing his scar. 'What the\u2013?'\n\n'My sentiments exactly.' Jay touched a palm to Cullen's brow. 'You seem to be in excellent health, so I have no idea why you fainted.'\n\n'It was when the new tune began to play,' I pointed out. 'When it changed from Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy to Silent Night. But\u2026 it only changed because you changed it, Cullen. You somehow knew that the star on top of the tree would do that. And you were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed just before you turned the star, too. You looked like you were about to say \"Eureka!\" or something equally illuminating, and then you just\u2026 swayed, ever so gracefully, to the ground.' I kissed his forehead. 'Like a ballerina.'\n\n'Y'know,' he said, sitting up. 'I'd love to be able to say that you're absolutely nuts right now, but I have to agree. Not about the ballerina part, obviously. If I fainted, then I'm sure it was the most manly of faints.'\n\n'Ballerinas are incredibly strong,' I pointed out. 'So it's hardly an insult to be compared to one.'\n\n'True,' he conceded. 'Okay. I swayed to the ground like a ballerina. But the \"Eureka!\" thing that you just said. I did feel like something really big popped into my mind.' He rubbed his head. 'And you said I turned the star and the song changed, so\u2026 that's what must have popped into my mind, I guess. But how could I have known to do that? How could I have known that there even was another song for this musical plum to play? Because whatever it was that surged into my mind, it's all gone now.'\n\n'Maybe we should twist the star again, see if it jogs anything,' I suggested.\n\nFinn shook his head. 'No way. No one's touching that thing.'\n\nI jumped. 'When did you get here?' I asked.\n\n'Jay let me in while you were looking worriedly at Cullen,' Finn explained. 'And I meant what I said, Katy \u2013 no one is touching that musical plum thing. Not until we've had it thoroughly assessed. I've seen way too many dark objects lately. And a tune that makes the manliest of men faint, but no one else\u2026 sounds like it needs to be checked out to me. And also.' He nodded to the candle holder. 'I know that that's nicked. We had a call out to a house in Easterly Crescent this morning. The place had been abandoned for a while after the owner died, but the relatives had been in and out cataloguing all the expensive stuff they could. They gave us a list of stuff that's been stolen, and this is definitely on that list.' His lip curled. 'I mean, there can't be two of these monstrosities in the world, can there? As to the rest of it\u2026 most likely stolen, too.'\n\nHe glanced at Jay. 'The coins have already been dropped in through Janine's letterbox, but Winston is nowhere to be found, and Janine says she has no idea where her husband is living since she kicked him out. We'll start a search through the attics on Desperation Row.'\n\nTurning from Jay to me, he said, 'But Winston Wolfe, Katy? This could be interesting. Very interesting. A scorned husband and a thief? Doesn't sound like the most moral of men, does he?'\n\n'No,' I admitted. 'No, he doesn't.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "As I led Cullen into the flat I shared with Ned, Hamish and Cleo, he grumbled. 'You don't have to gently take me by the arm, Katy. Shane already gave me the once-over and said there's nothing wrong with me. I'm not an invalid.'\n\n'I know. But I like looking after you. Come on. Stay here with me and I'll make you a nice cup of tea and some dinner. It's supposed to be your night off, anyway.'\n\n'Well, yeah, but\u2026'\n\n'No buts. I\u2013 Oh.' I smiled in surprise at the sight of Great-Aunt Jude, sitting on the sofa with Cleo on her lap.\n\n'Katy.' Jude smiled at me. 'I'd love to tell you I'm just popping in to say hello, but\u2026 well, maybe you'd better get Cullen settled first. Then we'll have a cup of tea and a chat.'\n\nShe stood up and moved to an armchair, leaving room for Cullen to stretch out and relax on the couch. Not that he did relax. As soon as I laid him out he sat up, folding his arms and insisting he was fine.\n\nCleo had made a small meow of complaint when Jude first moved chairs, but she was on her lap once again, purring as my great-aunt stroked her.\n\nNed arrived home just as I was laying tea and biscuits out on the table. When I'd returned with an extra cup for Ned and some milk for Cleo, Great-Aunt Jude picked up her tea, took a sip and said, 'All right, I'll just come out with it. I've been feeling funny today, Katy. Sort of\u2026 Christmassy. No one else seems to feel it, so I thought I'd better check with you in case it's a hunter thing.'\n\nI stared at her. 'Well, yes. Yes I have been feeling like it's Christmas even though it's July. But\u2026 I don't know if it's a hunter thing. I was kind of hoping it might have something to do with this Pillar of Permanence Hamish needs. Although Hamish would disagree with even that, and tell you that the only reason I'm feeling Christmassy is because my day started off with a dead man in a Santa suit.' I quickly told her everything that happened.\n\nWhen I finished the tale, Aunt Jude quietly nibbled at a biscuit for a moment, before saying, 'Now I'm sure this is a hunter thing, Katy \u2013 the way I'm feeling, I mean. Because the whole time you were talking, I had tingles everywhere.'\n\n'Huh.' Cullen gave her an uneasy nod. 'Katy gets tingles when something big is in the air. We need to find out where Winston Wolfe got that musical plum. I'm not sure how \u2013 or even if \u2013 anything that happened with Giles Tinsley's murder is connected. But the plum\u2026 that tune\u2026 maybe it could lead us to something. Finn's already traced the ugly candle holder to a house on Easterly Crescent. Maybe the plum came from there, too.'\n\n'I'm not sure about that, actually,' Ned said. 'I was with a man called Pat Barnes this afternoon, giving him a message from his dead wife's ghost. He still lives in the house they shared, near Knot Corner. He was delighted to read her letter. Oh, you should have seen how happy it made him. But\u2026 I'm getting off track. When I was about to leave, Pat told me \"I've been thinking about ghosts a lot lately, actually, ever since I met that strange, strange man running through the park the other night.\" So obviously I asked him \"What strange man?\" And he told me he hasn't been sleeping since his wife's death, so he often takes walks through the Hanging Green at night time to visit the spot where they first kissed. When he was there the night before last, a man had crashed into him, and the man was carrying a little silver plum.'\n\n'Ah.' I nodded. 'He must have met Winston on his way back from a night of thievery. So that means that the plum might have been stolen from somewhere in this enclave, maybe somewhere near the Hanging Green.'\n\n'That's what I was thinking,' Ned agreed. 'But there's more. This man seemed terrified, Pat said. He said he mumbled something about a ghost singing Silent Night.'\n\nCullen frowned. 'Are you sure he didn't say that the plum was playing the tune?'\n\n'Nope.' Ned sounded certain. 'He said it was a ghost, and he said it had creeped him out because he'd always hated that song, and then he ran off leaving Pat scratching his head in wonder, and that was the end of that.'\n\nJude frowned. 'The more I hear about this, the more my skin begins to tingle. I'd like to see this musical plum. I think we should pay the Wayfarer captain a visit.'\n\n'Good luck with that.' Cleo looked up from her milk. 'Finn is a grumpy old sod, always jacked up on coffee and ready to grumble.'\n\n'He's not that bad,' I said. 'I mean yes, he's sometimes grumpy, but being a Wayfarer would make anyone grumpy. He spends his life dealing with murders. And budgets, too. He's always complaining about those budgets. I like Finn. Well\u2026 I don't dislike him. I'll give him a call.'\n\nOn My Broom I Shall Soar\u2026\n\nFinn did grumble while we spoke on the phone, but after a few minutes he agreed to let us see the musical plum. Ned and Cleo stayed at home to wait for Hamish \u2013 he'd still not returned since he left at lunchtime, according to Ned \u2013 while Jude, Cullen and I made our way to the Wayfarer Station.\n\nWhen we entered Finn's office, he was seated behind his desk, drinking something that wasn't coffee and eating a salad.\n\nWith a miserable groan, he looked at us. 'Hey guys. Hello, Jude. I'll be finished my dinner in a minute.'\n\n'What is that?' I asked, looking into the liquid. 'That's not coffee. You always drink coffee. And you never eat salad.'\n\n'I've eaten salad before. Usually as a garnish, but I've eaten it. As for this horrific excuse for a drink\u2026' He shuddered. 'Apparently it's green tea. My girlfriend brought it in for me a few minutes ago. I am not a fan. I agreed that today is the day I finally give up coffee, but now I'm not so sure. I'll have the shakes without caffeine.'\n\n'There's caffeine in green tea,' Jude informed him.\n\n'Is there?' Finn didn't look convinced. He pushed his salad away. 'Anyway, we've had some experts look at everything in that box. The stuff's all been stolen from different places, but it has all been stolen, and traced back to owners already. Well, except the musical plum. We have no idea where that came from.'\n\n'We might be able to narrow it down, just a bit,' I said, before filling him in on what Ned had told us.\n\n'Ah. Well, it gives us somewhere else to search, I suppose. But it'd be much better if we could just find Winston and ask him. We've found his squat, as it happens, but he's not there right now. The attic where he's been staying does, however, lead through to the attic above Giles's office, so he could have gotten in and out of the murder scene that way. Jude, I think I can trust you to keep quiet about what I'm telling Katy and Cullen about this case, right?'\n\nWhile Jude nodded, Cullen shook his head. 'Cullen does not want to know about Wayfarer business,' said Cullen. He didn't usually speak about himself in the third person, but he had strong feelings about not working for Finn anymore, so I suppose I could excuse it, just this once.\n\n'Aw, come on,' Finn cajoled. 'I paid you a really big bonus for that train business.'\n\n'Yeah, after me, Katy, Hamish and plenty of others almost died. Plus, I know you. It'll only be a matter of time before you ask me to infiltrate the Warlock Society again, and being undercover there just made me feel dirty. Just leave me out of all of this, please. I'll obviously help Katy if you happen to put her in danger again on another poorly-planned operation, but that's it. Running the Bank is a full-time job.'\n\n'Well then I guess you'd better leave while I fill Katy and Jude in on exactly why we think Winston Wolfe killed Giles Tinsley. All of the gory details.'\n\nCullen coughed slightly. 'Well\u2026 I mean, I am already sitting down.'\n\n'Sure.' Finn smirked with satisfaction. 'Well, first I should tell you guys that Winston Wolfe's surname is spelled with an \"e\". Other than that, it's a pretty on the nose name, don't you think? Apparently his ancestors came over here as wolf hunters, back in the seventeenth century when Ireland was still riddled with wolves, but one of them mistook a werewolf for your standard wolf and got turned and they've been a family of wolves ever since. Funny, right?'\n\n'The murder, Finn?' Cullen pressed. 'Other than the fact that Winston is a thief whose wife left him so she could have an affair with Giles, what actual evidence do you have that he's the one behind it? I mean, it could just as easily have been any of the other million people who hated him.'\n\n'Said the man who isn't interested.' Finn treated Cullen to yet another satisfied smirk. 'Well, first of all, we checked out what Lucy told us today, and it's true. Giles fired Winston and then spread rumours about him to every employer in the enclave. It was a nasty thing to do, and when you add that to all the other ways Giles ruined Winston's life, well\u2026 you can see why he'd be angry. But there is also a lot of actual evidence, as a matter of fact. Winston's aura is all over Giles's office. And that snow globe he tried to sell to Jay in among all the other crap? Well, a photo of Giles in his office shows that very same snow globe was actually a desk ornament of Giles's. We confirmed it with a couple of the workers \u2013 it was on Giles's desk up to at least a few days ago. Suspicious, right? And if all of that isn't damning enough, well\u2026 there's also this.'\n\nHe opened his drawer and took out a small, beautifully-carved toy, depicting a half-transformed werewolf child who was riding a broom to the moon. 'It can fly and everything,' said Finn. 'It's got Winston Wolfe's mark on the bottom \u2013 a W. Wolfe signature he used on all of the toys he designed and made himself, according to his wife. She says Winston tried to give this to her for Megan, but she refused the gift, telling him that she'd take it and give it to the girl once Winston started paying maintenance.'\n\n'Ouch,' I said. 'How was he supposed to do that if Giles had badmouthed him to all and sundry?'\n\n'I'm not sure Janine knows about that,' Finn told us. 'She's still talking as if Giles was some kind of saint. And look what happens if I press this button.' He flipped over the toy and pressed a button, and a little girl's voice said: 'On my broom I shall soar to the moon. I'm a wolf, I shall roar on the moon. Ow, ow, owwwww!'\n\n'Oh my goodness, that's adorable.' Jude smiled at the toy. 'I take it the little girl Winston and Janine have together is a werewolf, then? How unusual. The witch gene normally wins out, doesn't it?'\n\n'It does, normally,' Finn agreed. 'But in this case, Megan took after her father. It really is an adorable toy, but unfortunately we found it in Giles's office, and Janine has no idea how it got there. So we now have two ways to place Winston at the murder scene. Plus, this toy seems to have been used to smack Giles on the side of the face just before he died. There's corresponding marking on Giles's face, and traces of his skin were found on the toy, which means he received quite the smack. Oh, and Winston Wolfe's prints are the only prints on the toy. His prints are on Giles's desk, too.'\n\nI looked at the toy, trying to reconcile the facts: could a man who could make something so lovely for his daughter really be a murderer? Then again, losing your wife to Giles, and then having your contact with your daughter cut off could certainly drive a person over the edge.\n\n'Wow,' I said sadly. 'That's a lot of evidence, especially when you consider he could have sneaked in and out of Giles's office via the attic. I guess\u2026 I guess he's our guy, so.'\n\n'Kind of tragic, isn't it?' Cullen remarked. 'I feel sorry for Winston in all of this, murderer or not. Cheated on, dumped, then not allowed to see his daughter unless he got some money together? Which was obviously made all the harder by Giles. I hate to victim blame, but if Giles hadn't been such a sleaze, maybe none of this would have happened.'\n\n'Seems that way,' said Finn. 'If it hadn't been Winston, maybe it wouldn't have been long before someone else tried to teach Giles a lesson. His wife, Janine, or maybe this Siobhan who he was also having an affair with. But\u2026 it seems certain it was Winston, and all we have left to do is arrest him. So I guess we should move onto talking about other things. Like the fact that we might not have one musical plum, but two. And that you, Cullen, seem to have an undeniable connection to both.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Shane Moore arrived in the room with a wet, battered-looking cardboard box in his hands, and laid it in front of Finn. Finn set the box aside before we could get a good look at it, removing just one item and placing it on the desk: it was a silver plum with an opening in the middle, and legs which enabled it to stand upright; it looked just like the one Winston had sold to Jay, except that none of this one's legs were broken.\n\n'Where did you get it?' I asked.\n\n'The orphanage,' said Shane. 'I told you we got some donations, Katy. It was furniture and bedding and things we really needed. When I was putting some of the older stuff into storage in the basement, I found this. I'd been talking to Finn and it sounded like it could be a match for the one Winston Wolfe brought in to Jay. We've inspected both, and there doesn't seem to be any dark magic attached to either.'\n\n'But we're wary,' Finn added. 'We've seen stuff that has no discernible magic at all, but manages to be incredibly dark nonetheless, so it'd be dumb to just throw caution to the wind, considering how Cullen reacted earlier on. As a matter of interest, Katy\u2026' Finn placed the other musical plum next to the one Shane had just brought in. 'What does your Aurameter say?'\n\nI'd already pulled out my Aurameter, and I was looking carefully at the two musical plums. 'Nothing dark,' I told him. 'Pretty golden magic. Could be witchy, could be a wizard's. But not much. Like\u2026 a very faint concentration.'\n\n'Yeah.' Finn scratched his chin. 'That's what we got, too. We're tracing the magic, but there's nothing on record. The mechanism isn't witch-or wizard-made, from what we can tell. If it weren't for the slight trace of magic, we'd assume these were human-made. Cullen, do either of these plums stoke up memories for you?'\n\nHe frowned. 'I\u2026 I don't know. I feel like I really want to open them, though. What's that you were saying about an undeniable connection?'\n\n'Well\u2026 firstly, once we cleaned them off we noticed there's writing scratched onto both, underneath, where the little thing you use to wind up the music box is. It's quite childlike, the scratched writing. It says: Property of C. Keats.'\n\n'Oh.' Cullen was blinking, his face pale. 'That's weird. I didn't own any property when I grew up at the orphanage, and I was a baby when I arrived, so I seriously doubt I was writing my name on anything back then. Plus, why would it be on both music boxes? There's more you have to tell me, right?'\n\nFinn sighed. 'Yeah, there is. But first, what about you, Jude? Your name's not written on the bottom or anything, but you've been having tingles, and you seemed fairly eager to take a look at this. Now that you've seen them, is there anything you can tell us? Maybe you saw them long ago, in your hunter days? Are they jogging any sort of memory for you?'\n\nJude frowned. 'I mean, I saw many magical objects in my hunter days, but I don't remember seeing these. But like Cullen, I feel like I really want to open them.'\n\nFinn gritted his teeth. 'Right. Well\u2026 we'll do that in a minute. But Cullen, you wanted to know if there's more. And there is. Shane managed to get in touch with your old matron, to see if she could shed any light on why you think you had no property with you when you arrived at the orphanage. She em\u2026 she insisted on coming here when she spoke to him, and she's in our canteen as we speak.'\n\n'Esme.' Cullen spoke the name beneath his breath. 'When I left that orphanage I hoped I'd never see her miserable face again.' He gave a forced smile. 'But sure. Let her in. We can catch up, talk about old times.'\n\nThere was an awkward exchange of glances between the rest of us.\n\n'Well, I'll wait outside,' said Jude.\n\nCullen shook his head. 'Nope. No you won't. You can all stay here for this. That way, I'll keep my cool.'\n\nFinn grunted. 'Well, I'll send for her in a minute. I don't mind leaving her waiting, I must admit. I didn't really take to her. Let's open up this musical plum first. We know that this second one does the same thing as the one Winston tried to sell to Jay. It plays Silent Night when you turn the star. But it has no effect on anyone else so far. Brace yourself, Cullen.\n\n'I'm braced,' Cullen said, as Finn opened the musical plum. Inside, it was different to the first. Instead of a ballerina, a nutcracker doll was standing at the Christmas tree, and he began to spin in time to the music. This plum didn't play the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Instead, the nutcracker was spinning and dancing to another piece from the Nutcracker Suite: March of the Toy Soldiers.\n\nWhile the tune played, I looked from Cullen to Jude. Both of them had similar expressions on their faces, as though something incredibly important had just occurred. Jude's hand moved, as if to turn the star atop the tree, but Finn turned it before she could.\n\nThe nutcracker stopped spinning and dancing, and bowed low, and Silent Night began to play. Immediately, Cullen swayed in his chair. Just as I reached over to stop him from falling, Aunt Jude slumped to the ground.\n\n[ Easier to Pronounce ]\n\nThey came around at the same time, sitting up and looking confused. 'That's\u2026 that's so strange,' said Jude, as Shane finished off examining her. 'I feel like I was about to have a moment of absolute clarity.'\n\n'Me too,' Cullen agreed. 'But if I remembered something important, I've forgotten it now.'\n\n'Well, you both seem fine,' Shane said. 'But for the two of you to have that same reaction to a Christmas carol\u2026 there's something very weird going on here.' He glanced at Finn. 'Will I tell Esme to go home, or\u2026?'\n\nCullen shook himself. 'Nope. No, let her in. We're doing this now. Unless\u2026 Jude, are you feeling all right?'\n\nShe gave him a small smile. 'I'm absolutely fine, my love. But I could do with a bit of a lie down.' As she stood up, and I went to stand up alongside her, she patted my shoulder. 'No, no, Katy. Stay. We'll catch up first thing in the morning, all right?'\n\nBefore I could protest, she twirled her wand and disappeared." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Cullen had once told Finn that the 'old lady' glamour Finn sometimes used as a disguise reminded him of the matron from the orphanage where he'd grown up; now I could see why. Esme's hair was the exact same shade of grey, and the stooped manner in which she walked was almost identical to Finn's 'old lady' walk. She even rubbed her back in much the way the Wayfarer captain did.\n\nCullen gave her a look of pure hatred. In return, Esme's eyes glinted with triumph. 'You're still the same ungrateful little brat I once knew, I see,' she said as she took a seat on the captain's couch. 'I never did understand what you had against me, Cullen. I looked after you, so I did. Same as I looked after hundreds of little kiddies.'\n\nCullen's lip curled. 'Looked after isn't quite the way I would put it.'\n\nEsme sniffed. 'Well, you were a bold boy, Cullen. A very bold boy. Always crying. Always complaining you were hungry or cold.'\n\n'I was always hungry and cold!' Cullen retorted. 'I learned to do a warming spell when I was five because you never turned the bloody heating on!'\n\nShane winced. 'Yeah, see, the orphanage wasn't always as well-funded as it is today. It also wasn't as\u2026 well, let's say warm and welcoming as it is now. We have a different way of doing things these days.'\n\n'Oh yeah?' Cullen's arms were crossed, and his jaw was tight. 'Well, I'm glad for the kids who are there now, I guess, but I just wish it had come a bit sooner. Look, can we just get on with this? For starters, maybe we could ask Esme why she never gave me that musical plum.'\n\nEsme opened her mouth, but Shane was the one who answered, saying, 'Actually, it's more than just that.' He heaved the box he'd brought into the room back onto Finn's desk. There was also a small, water-damaged teddy bear and a grubby-looking baby's bib, with a sprig of holly embroidered on the fabric. Beneath the holly, it said: Cuileann.\n\n'Cuileann? That's the Irish word for holly.' Cullen frowned. 'Was I\u2026 was I wearing that when I arrived?'\n\nEsme nodded. 'You were. A little red and green romper suit, too, but that's long gone. You were clutching onto the teddy with one hand and that silver music box with the other.' She shivered. 'Silent Night was playing on it. Can't stand that song so I can't. Awful, maudlin human music. Anyway, we didn't know your name, but given what it said on your bib and the Property of C. Keats on the bottom of that stupid plum, I made up your name from that.'\n\n'Except you didn't, did you? According to my bib, my name was the proper Irish version of the word for holly. I was called Cuileann, and yet you named me Cullen. Why?'\n\nEsme shrugged. 'Easier to pronounce Cullen than Cuileann, isn't it?'\n\n'But all these years, you told me my name was just a random one given to me by you. It clearly wasn't. Cullen Keats \u2013 or Cuileann Keats \u2013 that might actually be my real name. The one my parents gave me.'\n\nShe shook her head, looking thoroughly flummoxed by his reaction. 'What's the big deal, lad? It's just a name.'\n\nWhile Cullen struggled for words, I squeezed his hand. I'd been lucky, I realised. Sure, my dad left when I was a kid, but I'd had my mother to look after me, and my uncle. I knew who I was. Where I came from. And even though Cullen didn't talk about it much, it had always been clear to me that he yearned to know more about his beginnings.\n\n'I came to see you in your office a while after I left the orphanage,' Cullen said, glaring at Esme. 'When I was eighteen, remember? The law said that once I was of age, and if my parents were either dead, unknown, or made no objection, then you were supposed to tell me any information you had about me. But you refused to tell me a thing. So why do you now, all of a sudden, have something to say?'\n\nShe stabbed a finger in Shane's direction. 'This so-called healer was accusing me of hiding your things from you! I felt I ought to come and give my side.'\n\n'And what is your side?' Finn asked. 'It seems to me that if Cullen arrived with these items, you ought to have given them to him at some stage. The bear and the musical plum could have given him some comfort. The bib would have told him his real first name.'\n\nWith a lift of her chin, Esme said, 'Well I'll tell you exactly why I didn't give them things to him. It was because he was too bold to deserve them. Bold as brass, that one. No wonder his mother dumped him on my doorstep. Sure, for all we know, she tried to do him in before she got rid of him. Could be how he got that scar, couldn't it?'\n\n'Whoa, Esme. Too dark.' I shook my head.\n\nCullen glared at the matron. 'Esme, why are you saying \"Could be how he got that scar, couldn't it\"? Because when I was a kid, you told me you knew what caused my scar. You said my scar was given to me by a witch hunter. You would never tell me anymore than that, but you swore to the goddess that it was true.'\n\nMy eyes met Cullen's, and a look of guilt washed over him. He didn't need to feel guilty. He'd never told me the story of the scar that ran from beneath his left eye and ended at his upper lip. But I'd looked at it through my Aurameter. I knew that there was hunter magic on that scar. And I'd been sure Cullen knew it, too \u2013 I'd always believed that there was some back story, something he was afraid to tell me, about another hunter. The hunter who hurt him, and left the evidence behind on his face.\n\nNow it was clear that, all of these years, he had believed it was a hunter who hurt him. But not because he had some harrowing memory of the event. He knew nothing about the origins of his scar, except what the old matron had told him.\n\nEarlier today, Jay had asked me how my relationship with Cullen was going, and I'd been reluctant to reply. The truth was that, so far, it was going so well that I couldn't quite believe it. I'd been wary of him for so long. Sure, when we met he was merely pretending to be a sexist pig so that he could infiltrate the Warlock Society on behalf of the Wayfarers. But there was a time in his life when he'd been an actual warlock, when he'd believed that men were superior, and that female witches ought to take second place in the magical world.\n\nThe idea of ever entering a relationship with him \u2013 or even admitting I had feelings for him \u2013 had been terrifying. But getting to know Cullen had taught me that even a sexist leopard can change its spots.\n\nOnce, I'd believed that people were either good or bad \u2013 and maybe some people were \u2013 but most people had their attitudes and actions shaped and steered by their childhood, and by the things that happened to them along the way. Somewhere along the course of Cullen's childhood he'd stopped hoping that his mother would someday come to claim him. Instead, he'd decided to blame her, to hate her, for abandoning him.\n\nHe'd been moulded by Esme, and by the warlocks and criminals he met along the way \u2013 people who probably had their own bitter beginnings and shattered dreams. But somehow, he'd pushed through all of that, and he'd become a man I was grateful to know.\n\nEvery day he surprised me in the loveliest ways. The Cullen I'd come to know wasn't cocky, or sexist. He was nothing like I'd feared he'd be. There were no arguments, no power struggles, just\u2026 ease. I was so glad that I'd decided to look past the fact that he was once a warlock. And I was equally glad that he'd decided to look past the fact that it could have been one of my kind who almost killed him, and possibly more.\n\nNow, maybe we would find out the truth about how he came to have that scar.\n\nEsme's chin lifted an inch higher. 'I don't know why I said it was a hunter. You were maybe a month old, or thereabouts, when you were dumped on Eile Street. I've no idea how you got that scar. It was just something I said to frighten you.'\n\nOr maybe we wouldn't find out, after all.\n\nI eyed Esme. There was something uncertain in her expression, something that told me she wasn't really sure why she told Cullen what she told him. 'Listen,' I said, 'it's all right if you don't remember everything, Esme. Just tell us what you do remember about when Cullen arrived at the orphanage.'\n\nShe huffed. 'Fine. Fine, I'll tell you. It was Winter Solstice. Well, no\u2026 it was a few days after Solstice, actually.'\n\n'Don't you have records of that?' Finn asked. 'Surely you ought to know what date a child arrived.'\n\n'If we did have any records on it, I think they were destroyed by damp.' Shane gave us a helpless shrug. 'Sorry Cullen. But all of the old files were just dumped in cardboard boxes in the basement. Some were chewed up by maybe rats or mice. Some were destroyed by water damage. It's a miracle that even this box of your things survived down there, to be honest.'\n\nEsme's mouth twisted into a vicious smile. 'What does it matter, anyway? The children who were left with us were left there for a reason. You weren't wanted then, and even if you knew who your parents were, I doubt you'd be wanted now.'\n\n'You\u2026' Cullen gazed at Esme. 'You're just as awful as I remember.'\n\nThe old matron met his eyes. 'Maybe I was awful because I knew you were awful. I could see it in you, you know. That you were bad. I wasn't surprised that first time I caught you stealing food. And an entire packet of ham and three loaves of bread at that. Greedy.'\n\n'I was trying to steal enough for everyone, because we were all hungry. Look, I can see that you haven't changed, Esme. But just\u2026 please, if there's anything else you remember about that night then\u2026 please. For once in your life just do the decent thing and tell me.'\n\nHer smirk grew. 'You never did learn that the best way to catch flies was with honey, did you? But I'll tell you, even though you hardly deserve it. Let's see now\u2026 oh, yes. There was some sort of scuffle on the street. That's why I went outside. It was freezing so it was. The middle of the night. Snow was coming down hard. I heard fighting \u2013 there was growling, and shouting, and I went outside. One woman was twirling a silver wand and disappearing, and another woman \u2013 a werewolf, I've no doubt \u2013 was limping away down the street in a coat that didn't fit. And as for you\u2026 well, there you were, a few feet away from the doorstep, with that little music box open, listening to that horrible song, calm as anything.'\n\nHer eyes glinted maliciously. 'Most orphans in that orphanage were others. Wizards, weredogs, unempowered\u2026 It was a surprise to me when you showed yourself to be a witch. Not that it made a difference, did it? All of the people who came to adopt the empowered children weren't interested in you, were they? Their eyes would just drift on past you and onto the next child, because they could see what I saw. They could see that you were bad to the bone.'\n\nFinn stood up. 'I think that's enough, Esme. Unless you have something useful to tell us, we'll have an officer see you home.'\n\nShe didn't argue as Finn led her outside, and as soon as she was gone, I noticed that Cullen's shoulders relaxed for the first time since she'd arrived.\n\nI had the feeling that Esme was happy now \u2013 happy that she'd achieved exactly what she came here for. And it had nothing to do with defending herself for withholding Cullen's belongings all these years. I suspected Esme came here for one simple reason: to revel in Cullen's misery.\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Shane. 'I honestly thought that if she was hiding the things you came in with, she might have been hiding some more useful information. But I guess not. It seems the only reason she never gave you your belongings was because she was a cruel, nasty woman. And she hasn't changed.'\n\n'That's all right, Shane,' Cullen said. 'You couldn't have known. And it wasn't a waste of time at all. We do know more than we knew before. We know there were two women on Eile Street on the night I was left at the orphanage.'\n\nHis gaze caught mine, and I knew that he was reluctant to say the rest, so I said it for him. 'And one of those women had a silver wand.'\n\nShane frowned. 'You think it was Jude?'\n\n'I don't know.' I held my hands out. 'If it was, then she doesn't remember. This mystery is not getting any less mysterious, is it? For now, I'm going to go home and get some dinner and some rest. Maybe by the morning we'll have found Winston Wolfe, and he'll be able to help us clear some stuff up.'\n\nCullen stood up, lifting up the box of his belongings to take home with him. 'Dinner and a rest sounds good. Thanks for everything, Shane.'\n\nAs we walked out of the room, Shane smiled sadly and said, 'You're welcome. Just wish it could have been more.'\n\nOut in the hallway, Finn was talking animatedly on his phone. As he ended the call, he turned to look at us. 'We've found Winston Wolfe. You need to come to Aim Low, Katy. Winston has something to tell us, and Sol is advising him to say nothing unless you and Hamish are there, too. Y'know, because they don't like the law in Samhain Street.'\n\n[ The Only Leverage I Have ]\n\nI'd been worried about how to get in touch with Hamish, but as it turned out he was already at Sol's place when the Wayfarers burst in to arrest Winston. Hamish had turned up to collect his robot at almost the same time as Winston had crept into Sol's attic. It seemed that Winston's method of entry was to climb the drainpipe, which led him into Sol's spare bedroom, and from there he used the small door in the bedroom ceiling to gain entry to the attic.\n\nWhen Finn and I arrived on Desperation Row, Hamish was on the street chatting with some of the many officers on the scene. Winston was in Sol's living room, under guard, and Sol was pacing the floor of Aim Low, arguing with any Wayfarer who was foolish enough to engage.\n\n'Like I was saying to Katy earlier, once Winston was in his little attic squat, we think he then made his way through to the attic space above Giles's office,' Finn explained as we talked with Hamish on the street. 'It's possible if you're skinny enough, which Winston definitely is. Once we identified that it was Sol's attic he was squatting in, we had officers laying low all day, waiting for him to get back there.'\n\n'But you think he's been squatting here for a while, right, Finn?' I glanced back at Hamish. 'Did you hear anything when you were at Sol's?'\n\nThe wizard-dog shook his head. 'Nothing. And I don't think Sol knew he was up there, either. We were both equally surprised when the Wayfarers burst in about ten minutes ago and arrested Winston. I only went round to Sol's to collect my robot. You wouldn't have known Winston was up in that attic at all. He's clearly very good at staying quiet.'\n\nI moved closer to Hamish, bending down to his level. 'And you're all right? It's just that you've been kind of MIA since lunchtime.'\n\nHe gave me a valiant smile. 'I'm absolutely fine, Katy. I just had a wander about the city after I ate. Went to visit Peter M\u00fcd for a natter, then went and sat in St Stephen's Green for a while and watched the ducks, and then I came here. Nothing to worry about, honestly. After what you've told me has happened with Cullen, I think he's who we need to worry about now.\n\n'He puts on a brave face of it,' Hamish went on. 'Acts like a right cocky so-and-so most of the time, but he's got to be hurting, doesn't he? We started this day with you convinced we were going to find a Pillar of Permanence, Katy. Now, it looks like we're on the trail of something altogether different. But if Cullen finds out the truth about where he came from, then that's good enough for me.'\n\n'Now who's putting on a brave face?' I stroked his head. 'It doesn't have to be one thing or the other, you know. I didn't imagine Foirfe's voice in my head. We're going to find that pillar, Hamish, and soon.'\n\nHe looked up at me. 'I hope you're right, Katy,' he said, finally letting that brave face slip. 'Because it turns out I do not like dog food. Not one little bit. Come on. Let's get in there and talk to Winston.'\n\nAs Finn, Hamish and I entered Aim Low, Sol rushed towards us. 'Before you accuse me of hiding a fugitive, Captain Plimpton, I didn't know he was in my attic.'\n\n'We're not accusing you of that,' Finn informed him. 'We're just going up to talk to him now.'\n\n'I mean, I know Winston,' Sol continued, following us up the stairs. 'We're mates. Friendly enough that I even asked him if he wanted to move into the spare room when Janine kicked him out. I wouldn't have charged him or anything. He told me he had something else sorted out, which didn't sound too believable when we all knew he hadn't been able to get a job since Giles fired him. I never in a million years thought it was my attic he was squatting in.'\n\n'I'm inclined to believe you, for once,' said Finn. 'But can you please make yourself scarce for a few minutes? Go back down and wait in the shop while we question Winston, will you?'\n\n'Why yes sir, three bags full sir,' Sol scoffed. 'Whatever you want, oh great and mighty Wayfarer.' He bowed low, then rushed back down the stairs, shouting, 'I'm going to go to the Bank, as a matter of fact, and have a drink. Call me when I can go back into my own property again, if it's not too much trouble!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "When we entered Sol's flat, Winston was sitting on a leather couch, his face in his hands. Looking up at us, he narrowed his eyes, pointed a finger at me and said, 'You were in Times of Yore earlier on today, weren't you? You and that bloke who runs the Bank. I'd never seen you before \u2013 I've heard a lot about Katy Kramer and Hamish Rhodes, and how they can be trusted more than the Wayfarers. But now I'm not so sure. Did you rat me out, Katy Kramer?'\n\n'Well, no, I\u2026' Fluff it, anyway. 'I mean, I didn't rat you out, but\u2026' But what? He'd really put me on the spot. I'd always hated lying, but I'd made myself do it ever since moving to the enclave, and I'd become quite good at it, too. But I was tired, and hungry, and the question of Cullen's parentage and the search for the Pillar of Permanence was weighing heavy on my mind; I wasn't sure I had the energy to tell yet another lie.\n\nAt times like this I wondered how I ever managed to solve the simplest of mysteries. Sheer dumb luck? Tenacity? Right now, I felt like I was running out of both.\n\n'See?' said Winston. 'You can't even answer my question. You're a Wayfarer, aren't you? Undercover. Just pretending to be a proper Samhain Street resident. I'm right, amn't I?'\n\nHamish stood forward. 'Are ye mad? Katy? Work with the Wayfarers? She'd rather skin herself alive. She's a mate of that vampire who owns Times of Yore, it's true. But she wouldnae hand you in. One of the items turned out to have some unusual magic and the Wayfarers nabbed it. That's what led them to you. A little silver plum. Do you recall it?'\n\nWinston still appeared to be suspicious. 'You're talking about that damson with the broken leg, right? It plays music? You know, the Wayfarers who stormed up to the attic and arrested me asked me about that, too. Why is everyone so interested in that thing?'\n\nHamish was about to say something, but Winston spoke across him. 'I mean, I heard on the street today that Giles Tinsley was killed. I thought that's what you'd be questioning me about. Not some broken old music box.'\n\n'Giles's murder is our priority, yes,' said Finn. He was visibly shaking. A day filled with murder and mystery probably wasn't the best day for him to give up coffee. 'We're interested in finding out where it came from, that's all. But look, if you don't think that Katy and Hamish are trustworthy \u2013 which they are, mind you \u2013 then you can always come down to the station and I'll send them home. They're only allowed to sit in on your questioning because you requested it. Say the word, and they're gone.'\n\nHe ground his teeth for a moment. 'No. No, I\u2026 Sol says I can trust them, and I'd rather have them here than not. And I've heard enough people talk about how they solved crimes that you and the rest of the Wayfarers were too useless to figure out. I just\u2026 I'm on edge. Paranoid. Let's just get this over with, Captain Plimpton. You think I actually have something to do with Giles Tinsley's death?'\n\n'We'd certainly like you to explain some of the evidence that seems to point your way,' Finn said, before listing off the evidence he'd gathered against Winston.\n\nAs Finn spoke, Winston grew paler and paler. Finally, he hung his head. 'Well\u2026 when you put it all together like that, I suppose it does sound bad, doesn't it? I\u2026 I'm not a killer, though, I swear. I've done some desperate things recently, but I'd never do that.'\n\n'Well then maybe you could explain your side of things,' said Finn. 'For starters, why hide out in Sol's attic? Why not tell him you were up there? Why not accept his offer of a room?'\n\n'See?' He narrowed his eyes. 'Here it is. The accusations. You think I turned down Sol and hid upstairs so I could move between Sol's attic and Giles's office, don't you?'\n\n'Unless you can give me another reason why you'd rather squat in secrecy than take up a freely offered bedroom, then yeah, I'd say it looks incredibly suspicious, wouldn't you?' challenged Finn.\n\nWinston gritted his teeth for a moment, then ground out: 'I was only squatting because I'm too proud for my own good! I didn't want Sol to know how bad things were for me. I didn't want it getting back to Giles! That man had done everything he could to ruin my life \u2013 he'd badmouthed me to anyone who would've hired me. I tried to get work all over this enclave, but you know what he's been telling people? That I'm a thief, that's what!'\n\nHis cheeks blazed red, and his eyes turned yellow for a moment. 'I\u2026 I know I'm a thief now. But I wasn't until recently. I was a good worker. I just\u2026 I was desperate to see Megan. I couldn't let Giles succeed in taking her from me too. I just\u2026 I just needed enough to pay Janine some maintenance, that's all. So she'd let me see my little girl. You can even ask her. Ask Janine and she'll tell you \u2013 I stuck an envelope of gold rounds through her letterbox today, so I did. I didn't want the money for anything except Megan.'\n\nHis eyes had turned back to blue again, and his whole body sagged. 'I never thought I'd be in this position. I worked so hard for so long to develop my skills. I'm good at what I do. I\u2026 I thought I had everything. The perfect wife, a child I love so much it aches, a job making toys for the famous Tinsley coven. And then, for whatever reason, Giles decided he wanted to mess about with my wife, and that was the end of my happiness. When I\u2026 when I was up in Sol's attic, I didn't even know at first that it was connected to Tinsleys' \u2013 I didn't notice the gap until I heard them at night time, kissing and giggling together, while I was trying to get some shut-eye.'\n\n'That must have been hard,' I said, while he paused for a few moments.\n\n'That's not the worst of it.' He looked me in the eye. 'The worst of it is that Giles did all of that for nothing. If he'd loved Janine, I'd maybe have understood why he stole her from me, why he destroyed my life. But he was only using her. He already had someone else on the go. I heard him with her, so I did. Not that Janine believed me when I tried to tell her about that. But\u2026 anyway, it made me so mad. And I knew Giles was the reason I wasn't getting any work, so late one night \u2013 it was practically morning, really \u2013 I sneaked through from this attic into his, and then I jumped down and stole a snow globe from his office. It was a stupid thing to do and I know it. But I made that snow globe with my own hands and gave it to Giles as a present last Winter Solstice, idiot that I am. And I wanted it back. Once I took that, I figured that I could take more stuff, just a little bit, just enough so that I could see Megan. It\u2026 it was horrible. I hated stealing. I hated every second of it. And I was bad at it, too. Once I had the stuff, I had no idea what to do with it. I\u2026 I'm not a criminal mastermind, and I'm definitely not a murderer. I'm just an idiot who was angry and desperate.'\n\nHe combed his hands through his hair. 'Aargh! You're never going to believe me though, are you? You said that the toy I made for Megan was in his office, too, and I have no idea how that got there. I certainly didn't put it there, that much I know.'\n\n'It wasn't just that it was in his office, though,' said Finn. 'There's also the fact that the toy you made was also used to hit Giles across the face right before he died.'\n\nWinston groaned. 'Yeah, but I didn't hit him, I swear I didn't. The last time I saw that toy was a few days ago when I was trying to give it to Janine for Megan. I couldn't believe Janine wouldn't take it off me, that she wouldn't give it to her. She wanted maintenance money first. Thank the stars Siobhan took it, although how it wound up in Giles's office after that, I have no idea. It\u2026 Megan needs to be proud of being a werewolf, you know? I made that for her so she would be proud of what she is. Janine should have given it to her. She\u2026 she hates me, and none of this is my fault!'\n\n'I understand you're upset,' Hamish said softly. 'But what you say now could really help us get to the truth, Winston. You mentioned Siobhan. Are you saying that you gave the toy to her?'\n\nWinston nodded. 'I\u2026 yeah. Yeah, that's what happened. Siobhan took it and she said she'd get Janine to see sense, that she'd make sure it was passed on to Megan. I thought it was a bit weird at the time, but\u2026 I gave it to her, anyway.'\n\n'What was weird about it?' asked Finn. 'It sounds like a nice gesture to me.'\n\nWinston shrugged. 'Yeah, but Siobhan isn't normally the sort to do anything nice for anyone. She's pretty cold, actually. And considering she was also messing about with Giles, well\u2026 her \"nice gesture\" seemed kind of weird.' His eyes lit up. 'Oh! Yeah. She\u2026 she's the one I was just telling you about, so she is. The other woman I heard in Giles's office, messing about with him. Maybe\u2026 maybe she found out about Giles and Janine. Maybe she hit Giles with the toy and then chucked him out the window.'\n\n'See, laddie, there's a problem with that, though,' Hamish said softly. 'The only prints on that toy are yours.'\n\nWinston frowned. 'That's impossible. Janine kind of folded her arms when I tried to press it into her hands, so I guess it makes sense that her prints wouldn't be on it. But it should definitely have Siobhan's prints.' He scratched his head. 'Why would it only have my prints? It\u2026'\n\nHis eyes snapped up, and he stared at us. 'It's Siobhan. She's setting me up.'\n\n'And why would she do that?' asked Finn.\n\nWinston held his hands out. 'Why not? Maybe she killed Giles because she found out about him and Janine, or because he wouldn't divorce Theresa. And she set me up because\u2026 I dunno\u2026 because she thinks that I'd be the obvious suspect. Yeah, now that I think about it, the more I'm sure it's her. I told you I stole that snow globe? Well, I was only up in the attic by the skin of my nose, just pulling the door across when she marched into Giles's office. I thought she might have seen me, actually, but she never said a thing, so I assumed I got away with it. This was\u2026 oh, nearly a week ago. I don't know what she was doing in so early \u2013 maybe she was supposed to have a romantic meeting with Giles. But anyway, the night after that, I got back to the attic after being out and about, and\u2026 things just didn't look right.'\n\n'What do you mean by that?' Hamish questioned.\n\nWinston looked uncertain. 'I\u2026 I can't explain it, really. But I think someone had been at my things. Stuff just looked slightly out of place. There was a faint smell of perfume. I hoped I was just being paranoid. But what if I wasn't? What if it was Siobhan? What if she did see me that morning? Then she went up to my squat and saw how I was living, and she thought to herself: What a perfect person to set up to take the fall.'\n\nFinn's expression was incredulous. 'Wait, you're expecting me to believe that Siobhan was setting you up, based on you telling me she might have seen you hopping up into the attic above Giles's office, and that there was a faint smell of perfume in your attic the next night?'\n\nWinston groaned. 'Oh, look, I know how it sounds. But I'm telling you, I feel this in my bones. It's the only thing that makes sense. Siobhan did this. She set me up. You have to search her flat, I'm telling you. You'll find some evidence against her.'\n\nWhile Finn gave him a dubious stare, Winston got onto his knees. 'Please. I know I'm acting desperate here, and that's because I am. You have to search her flat, I beg you.'\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Finn. 'We can't go and get a search warrant based on what you just said. We're due to question her tomorrow, and we'll give your theory fair consideration, but that's all I can tell you, Winston. For now, you're going to have to come into the station with us and give us a formal statement, and\u2013'\n\nWinston shouted out, 'The damson!'\n\n'Excuse me?' Finn's brow furrowed as he glared down at Winston.\n\n'The damson! I mean\u2026 the plum. You want to know where the plum came from, right? It means something to all of you. Something big. I can sense it. And I'll tell you about it, I will. But first, you have to promise me you'll search Siobhan's flat.'\n\n'Sorry.' Finn shook his head. 'But that sounds like blackmail. You don't want to make things worse for yourself, do you Winston? The best way you can help your case right now is by being upfront with us about everything. Including where you stole that plum from.'\n\n'I want to tell you,' said Winston. 'I do. But can't you understand this from my point of view? I know I'm not a murderer, and right now the only explanation I can think of for all of this is that I'm being set up. So if I go along with you guys right now, and you leave it too long before you search Siobhan's flat, there might be nothing for you to find. My life will be over, and all because I didn't push you to do what I know in my bones that you need to do.'\n\nHe looked imploringly at Hamish and me. 'It's you two who want to know about this musical plum thing, I know it is. It means more to you than it means to the captain. I have a werewolf's nose. I can smell these things. And I will tell you. I hate doing his, I really do. But it's my only leverage. Search Siobhan Cahill's flat, and you'll find evidence against her. You will. She's dead behind the eyes, that woman.'\n\nHamish's eyes locked with mine. 'Cahill?' he said.\n\n'Cahill,' I echoed, with my whole body tingling with excitement. 'Finn, Siobhan's surname is Cahill?'\n\nFinn nodded. 'Yeah. We haven't questioned her yet, but we've arrange for her to come in tomorrow. Wait, why do you and Hamish look so excited about this?'\n\nI pulled him across the room into Sol's small kitchen, with Hamish following behind. 'Me and Hamish were supposed to have an appointment with a Miss Cahill this afternoon, except she called to cancel,' I said. 'She had wanted us to investigate a cheating boyfriend. But when she called to cancel she said she wouldn't be needing our services anymore. The cheating boyfriend was clearly Giles. And she was last seen with the toy? I think that's a pretty good reason to be suspicious, don't you?'\n\nFinn's eyes were straying covetously towards the jar of instant coffee on Sol's kitchen counter. 'Well, I dunno. Her prints weren't on the toy, were they?'\n\n'I've been thinking about that,' I said. 'She could have been wearing gloves when he handed her the toy \u2013 they wear gloves at work, don't they? The other possibility is that she wiped the toy, then placed Winston's prints back on it and\u2026 and she wore gloves when she whacked Giles in order to set Winston up.'\n\n'That all sounds incredibly elaborate,' said Finn. 'It just seems far more likely to me that it was Winston.'\n\nI wiggled my brows. 'I'm having tingles, Finn. Tingles. All down my spine. Which means that something about this Siobhan Cahill is setting my witch hunter senses alight.' I awkwardly scratched between my shoulder blades before adding, 'I believe Winston. We need to search Siobhan Cahill's flat.'\n\nFinn sighed. 'Fine. I'll see if I can talk the judge into giving us a search warrant. But first, I'm going to make myself a cup of coffee.'\n\n[ That Frizzy-Haired Fool ]\n\nHamish and I had been given a lot of leeway that day; we'd been allowed to sit in on interviews we really had no right to be at, and all because we were perceived to be more trustworthy than the Wayfarers.\n\nI was feeling guilty about that, of course. One of these days, the people of Samhain Street would trust in the Wayfarers enough for me to admit that I was one, albeit undercover. But I wasn't holding my breath. Still, I didn't think that Siobhan would be quite as keen to have my presence there while she was being searched and questioned, so I did what anyone would (well, anyone who was armed with a hunter's Toolkit): I donned my glamour cloak and disguised myself as Wanda Wayfair. Wanda was studying this evening, but Siobhan wouldn't know that.\n\nHamish had decided to head to the Bank instead, to spend some time with Cullen. As Finn and I thundered up the steps of Siobhan's building, I wished I was there with them. But Winston told us that this was the only way he'd ever tell us where he found that musical plum, and I knew he meant it.\n\n'Siobhan Cahill?' Finn asked as a young woman opened the door. She looked, unsurprisingly, just like every other woman who'd been hired by Giles.\n\n'And what if I am? Look, I have a very busy schedule this evening, so I really can't waste time on whatever nonsense this is.' Just as she'd done when she called to cancel our appointment, Siobhan pronounced the 'ch' in schedule in that same soft way.\n\nBut it wasn't just her pronunciation which sent a super-strong tingling sensation down my spine. It was her, everything about her. She was dead behind the eyes, just as Winston had said, and looking at her, I felt certain that she was a murderer. She was a bad witch, a wayward witch, a witch who made my body itch\u2026\n\n'Well, whatever you have planned is going to have to wait, Miss Cahill,' the captain informed her.\n\n'You can't just expect me to let you in, Captain Plimpton. This is my home. My sanctuary. And also, I wasn't even in work today, so unless you have a warrant, you can bugger off.'\n\n'Nice.' Finn gave her a tight smile. 'Well, we do have a warrant, as it happens. So Miss Cahill, you're just going to have to step aside.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Siobhan stood out in the hallway, surrounded by officers, while we searched her flat. As I pawed through her things, I kept shooting glances her way.\n\n'You're certain it's her, aren't you?' Finn murmured.\n\n'I can't explain it. She just\u2026 rubs me up the wrong way. And the fact that she wanted me and Hamish to find proof about Giles's cheating, that gives her a provable motive. I do, Finn \u2013 I feel absolutely certain that she's a killer.'\n\n'Maybe. Maybe not. But unless we find something confirming she made a call to you, then she'll be a killer who gets away with it,' he said.\n\n'What about phone records?'\n\n'Paul's already traced the calls that were made to your office to set up Siobhan's appointment. They came from a phone booth in the enclave,' he said, opening up a diary and flicking through its pages. 'Anyone could have made them. Or\u2026 maybe not.'\n\nFinn passed the diary my way. Under today's date, there was an entry:\n\nAppointment with Katy Kramer, PI, at 2. this afternoon. I'll soon know if I'm right about my boyfriend cheating.\n\nAs Finn brought the diary over to show to Siobhan, she shook her head. 'No. No, I didn't write that, I swear I didn't. It's not even my writing.'\n\nFinn pulled a sceptical face. 'It looks like the same writing you've used to mark every other appointment, Siobhan. And it mentions an appointment with Katy Kramer. I wonder, if I were to call up Miss Kramer, would she confirm that you made an appointment with her for today?'\n\n'What?' Siobhan's nose wrinkled up as she glared at Finn. 'Katy Kramer? Isn't she that frizzy-haired fool everyone seems to think is so great? Look, I don't do sneaking around and hiring detectives. It's not my style. It looks a bit like my handwriting, I suppose, but not much. I didn't make that appointment. I don't even have a boyfriend, let alone a cheating one, so why would I need a private investigator?'\n\nI shrugged. 'You don't have a boyfriend, it's true. You had a married man who you were having an affair with. Giles Tinsley.'\n\nHer face grew pale. 'I\u2026 well\u2026 but I still didn't make that appointment. I swear. I didn't.'\n\n'Really?' Finn gave her a searching look. 'So you didn't suspect that Giles was also having an affair with Janine?'\n\nShe swallowed. 'Janine? Giles was having an affair with Janine? No. He wouldn't do that. You're lying. He loved me. Only me. He s-said so. He w-wouldn't lie to me.'\n\nI narrowed my eyes. She was crying, and shivering, and looking incredibly convincing. Except for her eyes. 'You were seen giving Janine some very dirty looks at work yesterday. And the night before, you'd gone back to the office with a bottle of wine to surprise Giles, hadn't you? Maybe you caught him with Janine, and decided to take your revenge.'\n\nShe scratched her head. 'What? I didn't catch them. I didn't know about them. Look, I need to sit down, all right? Because I'm in shock right now. There's an appointment in my diary that I know I didn't write in there. There's all this stuff you're saying about Giles and Janine. I don't understand any of it.'\n\n'So why did you book a day off then?' I pressed. 'If not to have a meeting with Katy Kramer, then why?'\n\n'I keep telling you, I did not make an appointment with that frizzy-haired fool! I took a day off to teach Giles a lesson, all right? Make him\u2026 make him miss me. I'd given him an ultimatum recently. I told him that if he kept dragging his heels, if he didn't end things with Theresa, then we were over. And I wanted to make sure he had some time without me for that to sink in. I was going to stay off work for at least a week, maybe longer, if that was what it took to make him realise how much he loved me. But if I'd known he was going to be killed, that I could have seen him one last time, then believe me, I would never have taken a single second off.'\n\nFluff it, anyway. She was really very convincing. If I didn't mistrust her with every fibre of my being, then I might just believe every word she said.\n\n'And I suppose you don't know anything about how a certain toy got into Giles's office today, either?' I asked. 'A toy that Winston Wolfe handed to you, because you said you'd pass it on to Janine.'\n\nHer eyes widened. 'I\u2026 I just\u2026 I don't know, actually. You're talking about that little half transformed werewolf kid riding the broom, right? I mean, I remember Winston forcing it on me, but I never had any intention of actually giving it to Janine.' She rushed to her bag. 'As far as I know, it's still in here.'\n\nFinn snatched the bag from her and looked through it. 'No toy, Siobhan. And the funny thing is that, if you'd had it, how come it doesn't have your prints on it?'\n\nShe bit her lip. 'I\u2026 I had gloves on when Winston gave it to me.'\n\n'Gloves? In July?' Finn arched a brow. I was slightly impressed with him, considering he already knew it was a possibility.\n\n'Yes, in July,' Siobhan insisted. 'We have to wear stupid gloves at work, no matter how hot it is. Look, why are you grilling me? Winston is the one who killed Giles. I'm certain of it. Maybe he's setting me up. Did you ever think of that? Maybe he came in here and fiddled with my diary, and took the toy back while he was at it.'\n\n'Why would he do that?' Finn asked. I could hear the uncertainty in his voice. He wasn't nearly as convinced of Winston's innocence as I was.\n\nShe looked boldly at Finn. 'Because he knows I saw him. He knows I was in his filthy little attic. He knows I can give evidence against him, and he's trying to get in first.' She placed her hands on her hips and flicked her hair. 'He's living up there like a rat, did you know that? In the attic above that awful second-hand broom shop. And he's a thief. I saw him steal a snow globe from Giles's desk. He's always been a dangerous man. I warned Janine about him many, many times. I was relieved when they split up.'\n\n'Were you?' I asked. 'If that's the case, why did you take that toy off Winston and say you'd pass it on?'\n\nShe snorted. 'Well I didn't do it willingly, did I? Like I just said, he forced it upon me. I had no choice but to take it. He's a scary man.'\n\nMy dislike for her was growing stronger by the second. I had the urge to tie her with my ropes, use my binder on her, possibly even burn her at the stake. Obviously I wouldn't do the last part, but as I think I've already mentioned, she was a bad witch, a wayward witch, a witch who made my body itch\u2026\n\n'So scary that you decided to climb up into the attic and seek him out?' I asked. 'Seems to me that if you were scared, you could have reported him to the Wayfarers. Or to a private investigator like Katy Kramer if you don't like the law. Or perhaps you could have told Giles that you caught Winston stealing from his desk. But you didn't do any of that, did you? You went up there into the attic where Winston was living. Doesn't sound like the actions of a frightened woman to me.'\n\n'It wasn't like that. I didn't just go up there because I wanted to play detective. I mean, what kind of idiot would even do that? Would rush headlong into a dangerous situation? Me, I was terrified, and I did not go up there by choice. But\u2026 the night after I saw Winston stealing the snow globe, me and Giles were\u2026 you know\u2026 in his office. But then we heard the door open downstairs, and Theresa calling out. So Giles told me to hide in the attic. I was up there for a while, and I couldn't hear Winston, so I decided to investigate. You can walk through if you're thin enough. Easily. That's why I'm sure that Winston did it. You have to believe me.' She pointed to the diary. 'Get that checked by a handwriting expert. Then you'll see that I didn't write in that appointment.'\n\nWhen she spoke about the diary entry, it was the one and only time I believed a single word that came out of her mouth. But the voice on the phone had sounded exactly like hers.\n\n'Boss.' I looked up at Finn, doing my best impression of Wanda's cheeky grin. 'I think she ought to come in and make a formal statement about all of this. We can leave the team here to keep combing her flat in the meantime. What do you say?'\n\nWith a roll of his eyes, Finn said, 'Okay then, Wanda. We'll do just that.'\n\nMy Father's Child?\n\nFinn sat back in his chair, his feet up on his desk, chugging a cup of coffee.\n\n'So how did it go?' I asked, drumming my fingers against my thigh. I was no longer disguised as Wanda, and I hadn't been in the interview room when Siobhan made her formal statement, either. I'd been afraid to stay too long in my disguise, in case something went wrong and it affected the case against Siobhan. 'She cracked, didn't she? And the writing in the diary is hers, isn't it?'\n\nFinn held a finger up to indicate that he wasn't quite finished drinking. After a few more long slurps, he placed the cup down. 'No and no. Siobhan remained absolutely consistent in everything she said. And according to our expert, the writing is not hers, although it's a very good impression. Plus, there's some evidence that someone else might have been in her flat. The diary was wiped clean of prints using a cleaning potion, so was the light switch just inside the door, and the door handle. Well, the switch and the handle did have Siobhan's prints on them, but there were also traces of the same strong potion as the one used on the diary, which does suggest that someone was covering their tracks after being in her home, and then Siobhan used the handle and switch herself, afterwards, and left her own fresh prints behind.'\n\n'What? That's\u2026 that's not what I expected to hear. But\u2026 I mean, if it was Winston who broke in like she's saying, then surely he'd wear gloves, right? So why would he need to wipe anything clean? And wouldn't there be a trace of his aura at the flat? I'll bet there's not though, is there?'\n\nFinn looked into his empty cup. 'You're right that there's no trace of his aura, but that won't matter in court. Sometimes people don't leave much of a trace if they're not transforming, or somehow using their supernatural abilities. Our tech is strong, but not perfect, and I doubt it'll make a difference to the case against Winston. As for why he might have wiped the prints, well\u2026 maybe he called around to\u2026 I dunno\u2026 to ask Siobhan why she hadn't given Janine the toy yet. Winston got frustrated with Siobhan's answer, so he waited around until she went out somewhere, then broke in to steal the toy back, but he hatched his plan to kill Giles and set Siobhan up once he was there.'\n\n'That's an awful lot of conjecture, Finn,' I said.\n\nHe sighed. 'Well, maybe, but there's more. Worse than any of that. In our search of the skip behind Tinsleys', one of my team found a card belonging to Winston. An out of date membership for the Toymakers' Guild. It seems like he might have dropped it when he was pulling out that enormous Christmas star.'\n\n'Oh.' I squirmed in my seat. 'That's\u2026 that's bad, admittedly. But maybe Siobhan stole it when she was up in the attic.'\n\n'Who's the one conjecturing now? I'm open to any and all possibilities, Katy, but I just don't think your theory's going to convince a jury, do you? The way things stand, there's no way that Siobhan is ever going to be seen as a suspect. The Wyrd Court is very unlikely to prosecute someone on so little evidence. Not when there's so much more proof against Winston.'\n\nIt sure was looking that way, but I was reluctant \u2013 nay, I was refusing \u2013 to ignore my instincts. 'What about what Lucy said, though? That's an inconsistency in Siobhan's story, right? When they met in the Bank, Siobhan told Lucy she was buying wine to go and surprise Giles, and then Lucy said she had a face like thunder the next morning at work. She caught them, I know she did. Siobhan caught Giles and Janine together, and that's when she hatched a plan to murder him and pin it on Winston.'\n\n'But why?' Finn asked. 'Why would she want to pin it on Winston? That makes no sense.'\n\nI shrugged. 'I don't know. Spite. She seems really spiteful. Heck, Winston could have given her a dirty look once, or he could just be the best available scapegoat. I don't really know why. I just know she did it.'\n\n'Sure. Look, Katy, Lucy was only guessing as to why Siobhan had a face like thunder the morning after she said she was going to surprise Giles at his office. Siobhan said she did go there that night. She says Janine wasn't there. Only Giles. She says she and Giles talked about their relationship, and she pushed him to leave Theresa. So it's not an inconsistency, is it? Not when Siobhan has a perfectly rational explanation for it all.'\n\nMy hands gripped the arms of the chair. My whole body felt uncomfortable \u2013 it was a tingling, angry mess. 'She's the killer, Finn. I know it. She\u2026 she sets my hunter senses on fire, and those are never wrong.'\n\nHe gave me an uneasy frown. 'Well\u2026 your dad's certainly were on more than one occasion.'\n\n'Ouch. You're comparing me to my dad? That's not fair, Finn, and you know it. My father is a murderer, and the people he killed weren't even witches, let alone wayward ones. Every sense he ever had was all skewed up. I'm nothing like him.'\n\nHe gave me a small, apologetic smile. 'Oh crap, Katy, I know you're not. I don't know why I said that. But I'm sorry, okay? This is a bad day, and a horrible case, and I had not enough caffeine and then far too much. You've been an exemplary hunter so far, and I do trust your senses. I trusted them enough to convince a judge to let us search Siobhan's flat. I trusted them enough to let you and Hamish sit in on interviews, and to let you disguise yourself as Wanda Wayfair tonight. But Winston promised you something you really wanted, didn't he? He said he'd tell you about where he got that music box if we searched Siobhan's flat. Maybe you want to believe him because of that. Maybe you're afraid that, now Siobhan's in the clear, he won't come through with his promise.'\n\n'Nope.' I stood up, feeling like I'd had just about as much as I could take of Finn for today. 'Winston's going to be sore about this, no doubt. But he's going to come through with his promise. I'm just as sure of that as I am that Siobhan is a murderer. So can I go and see him, please?'\n\n[ Tell Her She Needs to Remember ]\n\nAs I entered the interview room, Finn's words were echoing in my mind. Was I like my dad? There was no evidence of that so far \u2013 I'd helped the Wayfarers to arrest a lot of people, and all of them were guilty. But my instant hatred for Siobhan, my certainty that she was a murderer\u2026 that was fairly new. I'd had an instinct about people before, but this time it was exceptionally strong.\n\nI'd seen her as she left the Wayfarer Station, and taken a look at her through my Aurameter. It was an interesting experience. Through my lens, I saw Siobhan standing atop a pyre, tied to a stake and screaming as her body was engulfed by the flames. The Intuition Interface was glitchy at best. Sometimes it showed me a red herring in place of the person's face, sometimes it showed me nothing at all, but it had never shown me anything like this.\n\nI pulled it out now, as I took a seat across from Winston and said, 'Do you mind if I take a look at you, Winston, before we chat?'\n\nHe shrugged. 'Go for it. But I'm not a witch, Katy. I'm a werewolf. I don't see how an Aurameter will help you.'\n\n'It's not a standard model,' I admitted, raising it to my eye and sighing. I could see his true werewolf form, but nothing more than that. No red herring image to cement my belief in his innocence.\n\n'What are you checking for, then?'\n\n'I\u2026 just\u2026 anything, really,' I told him. 'Because I'm sorry, Winston, but things aren't looking good. I\u2026 the Wayfarers searched Siobhan's flat. It's been decided that she's not a suspect.'\n\n'Oh.' He appeared to be genuinely shocked. 'I thought for sure you'd find something against her.'\n\n'Like what, Winston? What did you think we'd find? Why were you so certain it was her?' My heart was in my mouth as I questioned him. If he said anything about a diary, then that was proof of his guilt \u2013 proof that Siobhan was right, and he'd been setting her up.\n\n'I really don't know.' He held his arms out in a gesture of helplessness. 'It was\u2026 maybe it was just one last, desperate hope, I suppose. Oh, I know there are lots more people with a reason to be angry with Giles. Janine and Theresa, and probably a hundred more women he's annoyed, I'll bet. But out of everyone he's undoubtedly piddled off over the years, Siobhan's the only one I can imagine being calculated enough to kill him.'\n\nHe looked up at the ceiling. 'Although now that I've had time to think about it, there's nothing but my own mistrust of her to make me feel that way.'\n\nA tear slid down his cheek, and he shook himself and wiped it away. 'I wish I had an alibi. I wish I hadn't been sneaking around in shame for the last couple of weeks. I wish I hadn't nicked that snow globe. The whole case against me is going to hinge on the fact that I stole back something that I'd given as a gift to Giles.'\n\n'Well, I think it might hinge on more than that, actually.' I told him about his guild card being found in the skip, carefully studying his reaction as I spoke.\n\n'That\u2026 that sounds about right.' His expression was resigned. 'When I checked my stuff, I knew something was missing, but I couldn't put my finger on what it was. My main concern was that my photo of my daughter was still there, and it was. It wouldn't have occurred to me that someone would take an expired guild card. The skip where it was found \u2013 that's the same big container where the Christmas star was thrown away, right? I saw Giles telling some of his little elves to chuck it in there yesterday.'\n\n'Right. And now it looks like you pulled the star out of there and placed it directly under Giles's window last night, pointiest end facing up, and dropped your card while you were at it.'\n\n'Yeah. Yeah, things are looking even worse for me than I thought. Pity no one on Desperation Row uses CCTV. If they did, I'd be able to prove it wasn't me.' He gave me an appraising stare. 'You know, you didn't have to tell me this, though. It would have been far more sensible to make sure I came through on my part of the bargain before you told me Siobhan is in the clear.'\n\n'I guess it would. I did think about playing things differently, but\u2026'\n\n'But you didn't. Because people are right about you, Katy Kramer.' He sat forward. 'You've come through for people in this enclave time and time again. There's rumours that you cleared Diane Carey's name when everyone thought she was a killer, that it's thanks to you that Denton Montrose and Darrell Plimpton are in Witchfield. There are so many rumours about you and Hamish and everything you do. But\u2026 this time, I don't think you're going to be so lucky.'\n\n'What do you mean?' I asked.\n\nAnother tear was falling, but Winston didn't bother to wipe this one away. 'Janine chose Giles over me even though I've been a good husband. And people I went to, looking for work, they believed I was a thief, all because Giles said so. So I became one. And now, because of that, there's a very strong case against me, and even though I have this feeling in my bones that Siobhan is responsible, I know that it's never going to stand up in court. I'm just\u2026 I'm not the one people choose, when they choose who to trust. Who to believe. Who to love.' He shrugged. 'I'm just not. So I really won't hold it against you, Katy. The evidence against me is strong. And that's\u2026 well, that's crap, but it is what it is. I'm too tired to beg any more, to plead my innocence. I'm just\u2026 done.'\n\nHe took in a breath. 'Now. You and I had a bargain, and I'm going to keep to it. That music box. The little silver plum that I think looks more like a damson. I stole it from a house on Hunting Hill. From the abandoned mansion south of the Lodge.'\n\nI blinked, staring at him. 'Abandoned mansion? Winston, there's no abandoned mansion on Hunting Hill, and definitely not south of the Lodge. I've been up that way before.'\n\nHe blinked back at me, looking perplexed. 'Yes there is. Look, I've had a horrible couple of weeks, capped off by the worst day in my life, and I'm tired. But I'm not delirious. There is a huge old house there. It says \"Montrose\" on a big fancy sign on one of the entrance pillars. Well\u2026 the sign was fancy, once. Before it got all mouldy and covered in dead flies and stuff.'\n\nI carried on blinking, and so did he. After a moment, I said, 'Wait, are you sure you don't mean the gatehouse at the Lodge? Denton Montrose used to live there, before he got arrested.'\n\nHe shook his head emphatically. 'Come on now, Katy. You think I'd say mansion when I mean gatehouse? There is a great big mansion there, I'm telling you. Just go and see for yourself. But until then, do you want me to tell you about the plum or not?'\n\nI stared at him. He really did seem to be telling the truth. 'Yes. Please.'\n\n'All right. So, I went in to see if there was anything worth taking. But the second I walked in, I wished I hadn't. That house, it's just so mental inside. Like\u2026 like it was abandoned in the middle of a Winter Solstice party or something. Lots of seasonal decorations, but they're all dusty.'\n\n'Seasonal?' I felt a little leap in my chest. 'Decorations? Could they be Christmas decorations, maybe, instead of Winter Solstice?'\n\nHe laughed. 'In a Montrose mansion? I don't think so, do you? Christmas is for humans and weredogs as far as rich covens like the Montroses are concerned. Nope. Definitely Solstice. And there were lots of plates and glasses laid out in this big ginormous hall with a dancefloor in the middle. There was a lot I could have nicked. But\u2026 well, I got scared away before I could grab more than that damson. I found it in the kitchen, on a little table. No sooner had I picked it up than some ghost started singing Silent Night.' He shivered. 'I hate that song so much.'\n\nI shivered, too. What was so important about Silent Night? Why would those music boxes play it, when they were clearly designed around the Nutcracker? The song didn't fit in, which made it seem all the more important. 'Why do you hate that song, Winston? I didn't think werewolves had a problem with music from the human world. And it's such a pretty carol, too.'\n\nHe tensed up. 'I suppose it is, when I think about it. It was on the radio every year when I was growing up, because we moved to the human world for a while, oh\u2026 just over a year after my big sister went missing. Mam would get weirdly upset whenever it came on the radio and switch it straight off. And I grew to hate it, too. Maybe she hated it just because it is a Christmas song and that's when my little sister went missing. On Christmas Eve. Her name\u2026 her name was Megan. I never stopped missing her, even though I was really young when she disappeared. It'll be thirty-three years this Christmas, as a matter of fact.'\n\n'So you called your little girl after your missing big sister? Oh, Winston, I'm so sorry.'\n\n'No need. It's not like it was your fault. But yeah, when the ghost turned up, I freaked out and ran off. That's probably how the leg broke off, I reckon \u2013 I was so upset that I dropped it about half a dozen times as I was running out of the house.'\n\n'And did you happen to have a conversation with an older man on the way home, by any chance?'\n\nHe laughed sheepishly. 'Yeah, I did, now that you mention it. Yet more proof that I'm hardly the most talented of thieves. Having a conversation about ghosts while you're holding a stolen object isn't exactly the wisest of ideas. But that's what ghosts'll do to you. I know witches don't mind them \u2013 they even party with them on Halloween, don't they? But all that stuff isn't for me.'\n\n'Why are you so sure, though? That it was a ghost? Could it have been a squatter who was singing?'\n\n'I really don't think so. For one thing, the house felt off from the second I went in. Like\u2026 like I was wading through mud. Once I was inside, I felt like something was trying to push me out.' He shivered. 'I also felt like\u2026 like if I could push through it, if I could stay, I'd find out something really, really important. Then when I got to the kitchen and I picked up that music box, the woman's voice seemed like it was coming closer and closer, until her voice was right up against my ear. That's when she stopped singing, and said, \"You have to take what you stole to Jude Kramer. Tell her to turn the star. Tell her she needs to remember\".'\n\n'Whoa.' Once again I was blinking, and feeling utterly shocked. 'That's what she said? She actually mentioned someone called Jude Kramer?'\n\n'Yeah, yeah I'm sure of it,' said Winston. 'You don't forget the most terrifying interaction you've ever had, do you? But I don't know anyone called Jude Kramer, so I have no idea how she expected me to do what she asked. Hey\u2026 your second name is Kramer, isn't it? How come that didn't occur to me until just now?'\n\nProbably, I thought, because the Wayfarers had put a befuddlement spell upon my surname, so that even when people heard it, they wouldn't associate me with my father, the infamous witch hunter. 'Don't know. Weird. But I know Jude, and I'll get that message to her. And Winston, I\u2026 I shouldn't say this, but\u2026 but I'll keep looking into this, all right? Into Giles's murder. If there's a way to clear your name, I'll find it.'\n\nHe gazed at me. 'Katy, there's no way to clear my name. I\u2026 I've accepted that this is just one more thing in the long line of bad luck that I've had ever since Giles took a shine to Janine. And even if there was a way, I can't pay you for your time. So please, just let it rest. I've given up on ever getting myself out of here, and you should too.'\n\n'Yeah, giving up isn't really my thing, Winston,' I told him, standing up. 'I want the right person to go down for this. And no matter how much evidence there is against you, I really don't think that's you.'\n\n[ Hammers' House of Holidays ]\n\nAll I wanted to do from the second I left the interview room was head to Hunting Hill and find that mysterious mansion. But Finn had some objections, and they were mostly based on the fact that no one except for Winston had ever seen the house.\n\nHis solution was to let Winston stew in his cell overnight, to see if he still insisted the house was real in the morning. If he did, Finn promised me he would take a full team out there, including Winston, so he could point the place out.\n\nFinn was probably right to wait, but it didn't stop me from wanting to throttle him. And when he did go out in search of the house tomorrow, he wasn't going to be the only one bringing a team.\n\nIn the meantime, I had other things to concern me, like the fact that I was absolutely hell-bent on proving Siobhan's guilt. So, after a late dinner (lemon sole, baby potatoes and asparagus, for those who'd like to know) I headed out with Cullen.\n\nWe took his flying motorcycle, partly so that I could have a bird's-eye view of the enclave, but mostly because I liked to find any excuse to go for a ride on that bike.\n\nAs we flew towards Desperation Row, Cullen said, 'I'm surprised you didn't ignore Finn and just head to the house.'\n\n'I'm surprised too,' I admitted. 'It could be two for one, as far as mystery-solving goes, couldn't it? We could find out about you and Jude and your reaction to the musical plum, we could even find a pillar for Hamish if it's the house Foirfe told me about. But Ned has her usual work to do tonight, so Hamish, Jude and Eva are going to use the time to prepare for \u2013 well, for whatever we might find tomorrow.'\n\nVery few people knew about the important role that Ned played in this enclave. It was her job to row on the canal each night, performing a ritual to keep Samhain Street safe from some ancient, evil demons. We helped her out as much as we could; we'd trained hard and devised shifts so that she could take the occasional night off. But none of us could do quite the job that she could. Tonight, Jay had gone out with her, and I'd done my best not to make suggestive comments as they left.\n\n'Plus,' I added, 'There isn't actually a house where Winston says there is, so\u2026 that kind of puts a spanner in the works. He didn't seem like he was lying. He probably just got the area wrong. I mean, he has to be the most stressed man in the enclave right now, doesn't he? Still, first thing tomorrow morning, we'll see if he's right or not.'\n\nCullen slowed the bike to a stop, leaving it hovering in the air just above Desperation Row, and twisted in his seat to face me. 'Katy, you were eating so fast that I couldn't understand a lot of what you said over dinner. So now, I'm wondering: what are you talking about? Of course Winston is right. I've seen the abandoned mansion he's talking about, and it's exactly where he says it is.'\n\n'Huh?' I tapped my knuckles lightly against my boyfriend's forehead. 'Is everything okay in that skull of yours, Cullen? There's no house there. I mean, I think I would have noticed it, seeing as we spent all that time at the Lodge with that whole Denton Montrose and Debbie McGinty thing. And why would it be abandoned, anyway? Property in that area sells so quickly at the moment \u2013 it's almost as if there are more evil villains with money to spare than ever. Even that horrible Lodge sold for a fortune recently, when the Criminal Assets Bureau auctioned it off.'\n\nThe world seemed a little unbalanced at that moment (and not just because I was on a flying bike with nothing to hold me there but magic). While I felt sure that Cullen was the one with a screw loose, he was looking at me as though I was missing an entire box of screws.\n\nAfter enduring our staring contest for a few seconds more, he shook his head and said, 'You know what? You're probably right. Maybe I'm thinking of somewhere else. For now, we ought to be focusing on this case, and the fact that you really really want Siobhan to be the killer, when all of the evidence points to Winston.'\n\n'I stand by my unsubstantiated accusations,' I said.\n\n'And I applaud your stubbornness. I also think that there are way more suspects to consider. I know that the wife apparently has an alibi for the time of the murder, but if I were Finn I'd be seriously scrutinizing that alibi. I told him as much, too. I also told him we ought to investigate Jennifer.'\n\n'Jennifer? Who the fluff is Jennifer?'\n\n'Jennifer Hammer. The owner of Hammers' House of Holidays, which just so happens to be a couple of buildings away from Giles's workshop. Oh, and she also happens to be Giles's sister. Giles grew up in the Hammer coven.'\n\nI shivered. 'Yeah, I saw that shop. It's an unfortunate name, isn't it?'\n\n'Is it? Why?'\n\n'Well, you know that there's a whole series of creepy TV programmes in the human world called Hammer House of Horror, right?'\n\n'I did not know that, and the Hammer coven would be mortified to know about it. They've been toymakers for centuries. Horror is not their thing.'\n\n'Really? The stuff in the shop looked crappy enough to feature in many a holiday nightmare. So why is Jennifer a suspect, then?'\n\n'Well, Jennifer isn't a chatty woman. She doesn't often confide in anyone \u2013 except, that is, for her friendly neighbourhood barman.' He shot me a cocky grin. 'Which is how I know that she hates her brother, and even though she never told me exactly why her products have gone downhill in recent years, she did say, after a few too many drinks, that her brother is to blame. So\u2026 I asked Finn if you and I could go check out the attic to see if there was anything else interesting up there. Like a way for Jennifer to sneak through from her shop to Giles's office, leaving nary a trace of magic behind.'\n\nHe settled the bike down into the yard behind Tinsleys', and the officer on the back door gave Cullen a smirk and said, 'Captain Plimpton said you'd be coming.'\n\nCullen responded with a grunt, and we went inside.\n\n'What was that smirk about?' I asked as we headed up the steps to the workshop.\n\n'Oh, y'know \u2013 Finn thinks I just love being a Wayfarer, that I can't keep away. No doubt he's got some bets on back at the station as to when I'll make a full return.'\n\nThe building was eerie this late at night, with all of the half-finished toys on workbenches. As we walked over a creaky floorboard, some of the snow globes on a nearby shelf began to play holiday tunes. 'Well, you can't keep away, he's not wrong about that,' I said, skedaddling past the snow globes and rushing in to Giles's office.\n\n'It's got nothing to do with being a Wayfarer, Katy.' As he caught up with me, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me close. 'And it's got everything to do with spending time with you.'\n\nAfter enjoying a quick kiss (all right, I admit it, it was an incredibly long one), I pulled away and returned to business, pointing up at the attic's entrance.\n\n'It'd be pretty easy to get out of the attic, seeing as Giles has an enormous couch placed right beneath it,' I mused, as I stood on the back of Giles's couch and eased open the attic door. 'The couch would make a nice soft landing, wouldn't it? But you'd have to be agile and strong to hoist yourself back up once you'd done whatever it was you came here for.'\n\nWhile I spoke, I realised that I was neither strong nor agile. With Cullen's help, and some red-faced puffing, I managed to finally pull myself up and into the attic. I moved back while he nimbly hoisted himself up behind me.\n\n'It'd definitely be easy for a guy,' he agreed. 'Or \u2013 and you can bet that the prosecution will point this out \u2013 a werewolf who happened to be squatting in another attic joined to this one.'\n\n'Yeah.' My voice sounded ever so depressed as I took a look around. 'Well, I'll just have to do my best to find something that suggests otherwise.'\n\nThere wasn't much up here, and there were walls built between this and the attics on either side, but at each side as the attic sloped down, there were gaps, just as the Wayfarers had discovered. I wouldn't have been able to make it through myself, but Winston didn't have my chest and rear end to contend with. He could have easily shimmied through.\n\n'It's just like I thought,' said Cullen as he peered through to the gap. 'You can get into any attic on Desperation Row, as long as you're skinny enough. Which Jennifer definitely is.'\n\n'All righty then,' I said with some reluctance. 'But you know I'm just humouring you, right? It couldn't have been Giles's sister. Because it was Siobhan.'\n\nCullen chuckled. 'And as I said before, I applaud you for your stubbornness. Come on, let's make our way through.'\n\n'Yay.' My eyes lit up. 'I'll get to use my glamour cloak again.' I pulled it from my bag, wondering if I would ever get sick of the items Aunt Jude had gifted me in the Toolkit. I unscrewed the toggle, switching Wanda Wayfair's hair for Valerian's. Then, donning the cloak, I whispered:\n\n\u2003'I wish for mine own self to hide\n\n\u2003Within this cloak, the means may lie.'\n\nAfter a few uncomfortable moments, I was once again transformed into Valerian, and with her thinner body, I knew I'd be able to make it through the gap.\n\nAs I squeezed through I looked back at Cullen. 'I think you might have a bit of trouble, what with that great big manly chest of yours. I only just got through as Valerian. Do you want my cloak?'\n\n'Oh, I don't need that.' He wiggled his finger, pointed at the space that led from this attic into the next and said, 'Leathnaigh.' Instantly, the small gap expanded, and he followed me through.\n\n'Was that a widening spell?' I shook my head in disbelief. 'Why didn't you tell me you could do one of those?'\n\n'Well, you looked so adorably determined to use your glamour cloak, and I didn't want to ruin your fun. I know a lot of spells that can get me in and out of places that I ought not be. Oh, and I can also scramble my magical signature while I do it. Being a former criminal has its uses.'\n\n'I'll remember that for next time I want to break in somewhere,' I said as we made our way through the attic above Aim Low, and then squeezed through to the next attic, the one above Hammers' House of Holidays.\n\n'I hear voices,' Cullen whispered, pointing to the door in the floor. 'Women's voices.' He wiggled his finger and, in a whisper, he said:\n\n\u2003'See true and see clear\n\n\u2003This floor shall not stop us\n\n\u2003See now and see here\n\n\u2003While no one shall spot us.'\n\nThe floor below us became see-through, and we found ourselves looking into a large office. There were two women in that room, and they didn't seem to notice us.\n\nOne of them was surely Theresa Tinsley, Giles's wife. Looking at her, I could see how true it was that he'd picked women who looked just like Theresa to work with him. She was incredibly pretty, and more than a little bit elvish-looking.\n\n'Well, we did it, Jennifer,' Theresa said to the other woman. 'We got rid of him for good.'\n\nJennifer, a thin woman with long blonde hair, looked uneasily at her companion. 'Yeah. He's gone. And now I have everything I wanted. I just wish I didn't feel so guilty about the fact that Winston is taking the blame.'\n\n[ An Inventor of Lies ]\n\n'Fluff it anyway!' I glared at Cullen. 'I don't like to admit that I'm wrong and you're right but\u2026 maybe Jennifer is a suspect.'\n\n'Seems that way,' he agreed. 'Maybe Theresa is, too. But believe me, Katy \u2013 in this instance, I am not happy to be right. Let's head down there and see what they have to say for themselves. On one, two\u2026'\n\nOn the count of three, Cullen and I ripped open the door separating the attic from the office below. Pointing my wand, I cried, 'Con\u00e1il,' before I jumped down into the room. I didn't make the most graceful of landings, it must be said. But I didn't break anything, so I was going to consider it a success.\n\n'Valerian?' Jennifer frowned. My freezing spell wasn't extremely strong. They couldn't scarper, but they could talk. I wouldn't be able to hold them for long with that spell, so I reached into my bag and placed my hand on my ropes. If they made a move, I'd be ready. 'And\u2026 the guy who runs the Bank?'\n\n'Oh.' I pulled off the glamour cloak that they couldn't see, unscrewing the toggle and saying:\n\n\u2003'Hide no more so all shall see\n\n\u2003My true face, the real me.'\n\n'Katy Kramer?' Jennifer's frown increased. 'The private investigator? Why were you disguised as Valerian?'\n\n'I've been hired by Winston Wolfe to clear his name,' I informed her. It wasn't the worst untruth I'd ever told. Winston might have hired me, if he'd had the money. Anything was better than admitting I was an undercover Wayfarer. 'And after hearing this little conversation\u2026 well, you can see how it might make me suspicious, right?'\n\nHer eyes widened. 'Oh. You think\u2026 you think I killed my brother. Well, I mean, don't get me wrong, I did think about it. Many times. After all, Giles ruined my life. Me and Theresa have even had a couple of drunken conversations where we planned how we would get rid of him for good. But we never would have done anything to put those plans into motion. It was just crazy, drunken ramblings. Right, Theresa?'\n\nTheresa nodded. 'Right. Although\u2026 there are one or two things I should probably tell you.'\n\nWe stared at Giles's widow. My freezing spell had well and truly worn off, but neither she nor Jennifer had tried to leave the office. Theresa ambled towards a couch and took a seat, and Jennifer joined her.\n\n'If you were spying on us from the attic,' Theresa said, crossing her legs and looking at us, 'then I can see why you'd think we had something to do with my husband's death. Like Jennifer says, we wanted him gone, we even fantasised about it. And now, although neither of us actually killed him, well\u2026 he's definitely gone.'\n\nHer voice was beginning to crack, and Jennifer asked in a tentative voice, 'Could you give her some water, please? There's a bottle and some glasses on the sideboard.'\n\nI fetched some water for Theresa, and after taking a few sips, she began to speak again.\n\n'Jennifer and I didn't talk much over the years,' she told us. 'Giles always told me that his sister was crazy. That she'd tried to steal his inventions, and his idea for a Christmas shop. For years, I believed his version of events. But recently\u2026 recently I discovered something that changed my mind.'\n\nHer hands were shaking as she took another drink. 'There are certain toys \u2013 our bestsellers \u2013 that we don't make at the main workshop. Giles creates them at home, in his private room. Our flying trains and sleighs and reindeer\u2026 he always said he didn't trust anyone else with those designs. So he often works late at night at home, making them in secret. I\u2026 I'd been feeling as though things were different with us for a while. I wanted to spend more time with him, to make things better. I thought\u2026 I thought that if I could help him with his work, it would bring us closer again. I'm a trained toymaker, too. So one night, I brought some hot milk to his private workshop, ready to make the suggestion.'\n\nShe looked at Jennifer with what could only be described as a look of pure apology. 'That's when I found out that Jennifer wasn't crazy, like Giles had always said. That night, I discovered that everything I thought I knew was a lie. Because when I walked in, Giles dropped a notebook in fright. I went to pick it up, and he tried to snatch it back from me so forcefully that he bruised my arm.'\n\nShe sat up straight. 'Well, I definitely wasn't going to let go after that, was I? And I soon discovered why he was so keen to get it back. Because that notebook wasn't Giles's. It was Jennifer's. Her name was scrawled on the inside cover. There were little hearts and flowers with Jennifer Loves Bramley written there, too. And every single design, everything Giles said that he'd invented, all of the spells to imbue the toys with magic, the special kinds of wood necessary, clear instructions on how to put it all together. It was all there, and it was all Jennifer's. She'd even scrawled out her plans to create a new business for the Hammer Coven, called Hammers' Toys and Winter Wonderland.'\n\nJennifer took in a deep breath, and then said, 'What Theresa found was one of the many notebooks I filled up when I was just a teenager. She finally knew that I'd been telling the truth all along. Giles's inventions were really mine.'\n\n'Did you get the idea in the human world?' I asked. 'For the Winter Wonderland?'\n\nJennifer looked confused, so I said, 'Well I mean, there are lots of Christmas shops open all year round over there.'\n\n'Really?' She smiled. 'Wow, that sounds amazing. But no, the inspiration came to me because of my teenage boyfriend, Bramley. He's a weredog, and he loves Christmas. I think I might have invented everything I ever invented just to make him happy.' She fell silent, and the room seemed to fill with a strange weight.\n\n'Times have changed now,' said Theresa, taking up the story. 'But when Giles and Jennifer were teenagers, it was illegal for a weredog to date a witch. And you can't just make a rule like that without having something in place to make people follow it. Bramley and Jennifer are married now, and they're very happy together. But\u2026 back then, if their relationship had been discovered, Bramley could have been put into jail or a workhouse, depending on how lenient the judge was. Jennifer wouldn't have been punished, being a witch, but Giles knew that she would do anything to protect Bramley. He\u2026'\n\nShe stopped for a moment, gritting her teeth, her nostrils flaring with anger. 'It seems my husband knew about his little sister's relationship for a while. He'd gathered evidence. Made sure he had plenty of proof to blackmail her with. He told Jennifer that if she didn't give him the credit for all of her inventions and ideas, he'd inform the authorities about her relationship with Bramley.'\n\nJennifer brushed away a tear. 'There was nothing I could do except give it all to him. He\u2026 he was good at following instructions, my brother. He could make something if you told him how, but he didn't have ideas of his own. But now, he had my ideas, and he used them to worm his way into the Tinsley coven, and to impress Theresa. I hated him for it. I mean, I would have gone into business with him. A partnership. I offered that, but he didn't want to share. He wanted everything.'\n\nShe blew her nose before continuing. 'When the rules changed, and my relationship with Bramley was finally legal, we married, and I no longer had anything to fear. So I told people what Giles had done. I told our parents, my coven. I told Theresa. But\u2026 no one believed me. Giles had charmed them all.'\n\n'Me, especially.' Theresa grasped Jennifer's hand. 'My husband\u2026 he could make me believe that the sky was green and the grass was blue if he'd wanted to. He might not have been good at inventing toys, but he was a very talented inventor of lies. And I was so absolutely and utterly in love with him that I swallowed every lie he told. Until the night I saw Jennifer's notebook, and saw exactly how worried Giles was when I opened it up. Oh, he made excuses, and because it was Giles, his version of events was incredibly convincing. But even so, a couple of days later, I went to talk with Jennifer.'\n\n'Theresa still sort of believed Giles, I think,' said Jennifer. 'Or\u2026 she wanted to, anyway. But I made some stuff in front of her, stuff that I'd invented and Giles had taken the credit for, and when she saw how skilled I was, and I showed her some of my newer inventions, it was obvious that I'd never been the liar.'\n\nCullen poured himself some water and sat on the sideboard. 'So why don't you make your own toys now, if your inventions are so awesome? Everything you sell in your shop is\u2026 well\u2026'\n\n'Kind of crappy?' Jennifer let out a snort of laughter. 'Yeah. Yeah, it is. I opened it because I thought I had nothing to fear from Giles anymore. But\u2026 he came to see me and threatened me once again. He told me that he had everyone that mattered eating out of his hands. That he had friends in high places. That he'd sue me for ripping off what he called his designs. He actually said that last part with a straight face.'\n\nTears began to spill down her cheeks, falling into her lap. 'It sounds ridiculous. Here I am, a grown woman, with nothing to hide anymore. But Giles, he bullied me the whole time we were kids. And he always got away with it. People always believed him over me. You think you can get over being bullied like that, but I think maybe it always stays with you. Because when he threatened me again I completely caved. And I think I knew his threats weren't empty, either. Not when we were kids, and not now. I've heard so many stories about him, about how he treats people. I could totally see him going to any lengths to shut my business down. So I scaled back my plans and just sold junk. As soon as I made enough money to pay off the loans I'd taken out, I probably would have closed up shop again and run away with my tail between my legs.'\n\nTheresa shuffled close to Jennifer and squeezed her hand. 'Jennifer is right when she says that I didn't want to believe her when I first came to talk. I really didn't. But I couldn't deny that the things she said made sense of many things that hadn't made sense before. Especially when, after we had shared two bottles of red wine together, she told me about Giles's affairs. All of the things I'd been denying, ignoring\u2026 I couldn't overlook them anymore. It was obvious for so long, and now I was finally ready to admit that my husband was a dirty lying cheat. We had yet another bottle, and we started to make plans. I decided that I was going to go to the coven, and have Giles kicked out. I was going to make sure Jennifer received full credit for her inventions, and I was going to be her financial backer in her own chain of stores. We\u2026 well, we might have even talked about how we would love to shove him down a flight of stairs.'\n\nTheresa cleared her throat. 'The thing is, once you learn that the person you love has been lying to you, that your whole relationship has been a sham, the feeling is\u2026 unimaginable. I wasn't just heartbroken. I was so, so angry. But after a few nights of talking things over with Jennifer, my anger cooled, and we just\u2026 made our plans for a better life, without Giles. But a couple of nights ago, maybe\u2026 two nights before Giles was killed, I left Jennifer's place after one of those nights of planning, and I ran into yet another woman who had some truths to tell of her own. A woman called Siobhan.'\n\nShe laughed bitterly. 'I don't think Siobhan even remembers our little interaction. She was sozzled, so she was. She told me all about how my husband was having an affair with her, and that she'd believed they were going to get married. She said she'd gone to surprise him that night, but she'd found him with Janine instead. I already knew about Janine and Siobhan, thanks to Jennifer, but I let Siobhan prattle on. She told me how she now suspected that Giles had fired Winston Wolfe just to clear the way for him and Janine \u2013 Giles told me he fired Winston for thieving, but that was just another of his lies. Anyway, Siobhan was so drunk that she even let me take her home to her flat and tuck her into bed. And that's when things took a very silly turn.'\n\nTheresa squeezed her eyes shut for a moment before carrying on. 'She told me\u2026 she told me she was planning on killing Giles and setting up Winston Wolfe. She went into graphic detail about how she was going to do it all. She was so drunk that I doubt she remembers telling me. But there was something about her. A coldness in her eyes. When she told me about her plan, I thought: she means it. She really was going to kill Giles and set up poor Winston Wolfe. And in that moment, I\u2026 I decided to let her do it.'\n\nCullen frowned. 'Did I just hear you right? Siobhan told you she was going to kill Giles, and set Winston up, and instead of calling the Wayfarers, you decided to let her go ahead with it?'\n\nHer face flushed, and she gave Jennifer a sidelong glance. 'I know that when you and I made our drunken plans to shove him down a flight of stairs, that we didn't really mean it. But that night, my rage reared its ugly head once again. This woman, this Siobhan. She'd been to my house. I'd welcomed her in, like a fool. And she\u2026 she laughed at me. She got right up in my face and laughed at me, and told me that Giles thought I was getting uglier with age.'\n\n'You have to know that's not true.' Jennifer shook her head, looking flabbergasted. 'You're stunning, Theresa.'\n\n'I\u2026' Theresa swallowed. '\u2026 I didn't feel it. Not then. I stared back at this woman, and I saw how much she looked like me, but a younger version. It all began to feel so sordid. So strange. I thought I couldn't hate Giles any more. But I did. And I hated Siobhan, too. She was so nasty, so cruel. And I\u2026 well, I was pretty darn drunk myself. So I thought: why not? Why not let her do it? Giles deserves it.'\n\nI glared at her. 'But Winston doesn't.'\n\n'Well, no. He doesn't.' She met my eyes. 'That's why, in the heat of the moment, I decided to make sure that, if Siobhan did go ahead with it, she wouldn't get away with it. I did\u2026 I did some things, that night and the next day, to make sure she would get the blame.'\n\nI shook my head in amazement. 'You made those calls to my office, didn't you? You set up an appointment for Siobhan. You wrote it into her diary. To make it look like she had suspicions about Giles, and to cast suspicion on her.'\n\n'Yes, yes, I did all of that, and I cleaned up any trace of being in her flat, too, because I knew she wouldn't remember. Siobhan has an incredibly annoying way of pronouncing schedule, so it wasn't hard to pretend to be her. But then\u2026 then as time passed, I calmed down again, and I realised how silly I was being. I convinced myself that she wouldn't really murder Giles, would she? She'd been so drunk. That's all it was. Just drunken ramblings. She wouldn't go through with any of it. So then I\u2026 I called you again, to cancel the appointment that never was.'\n\nI tilted my head to the side, regarding her. 'But that makes no sense, Theresa. Because Giles was already dead by then.'\n\nShe nodded. 'I know that now, but I didn't know it then. I'd been in meetings all morning with my coven. I'd told them the truth about Giles, and we were making our plans to kick him out of the coven and go into business with Jennifer instead. I made that call as soon as the meeting ended. I did it from a payphone, but as soon as I hung up, I saw that I had dozens of missed calls on my mobile from Jennifer and from other friends, all calling to tell me what had happened to Giles. And the way he died \u2013 my stars, it was almost exactly the way Siobhan told me she'd do it. She hadn't planned on the Christmas star \u2013 she'd told me she was going to cut down some of the wood in the yard, carve it into a spike and push him out the window. But it was close enough to the plan she'd described, and I was positive that she was behind it. I suppose when they threw out the star, it seemed like a more convenient weapon.'\n\nI wiped my eyes. I was too tired for this convoluted mess. 'So, let me get things straight. A couple of nights ago, you were so convinced that Siobhan was going to murder Giles and set Winston up that you decided to plant enough evidence to make sure Siobhan would, in fact, go down for the murder. A murder which you were perfectly happy to let her carry out, because you hated Giles.'\n\n'Well, yes, but\u2026' Her voice had become incredibly quiet. 'But like I said, I was a little bit drunk. And crazy. And even when I was drunk and crazy enough to let her kill Giles, I would never have let Winston take the blame.'\n\n'Hm.' Cullen looked just as exhausted as I did. 'You've not been doing a very good job on that score though, have you? As things stand, the Wayfarers are convinced Siobhan is innocent. Winston's the one going down.'\n\n'I know.' She winced. 'That's what we were talking about, when you surprised us. We're going to go to the Wayfarers. I'm going to explain everything, and make sure Winston's name is cleared. He's suffered enough because of my husband.'\n\n'Okay.' I eyed the two women, trying to decide if their story made sense. I certainly didn't have an overwhelming desire to burn either of them at the stake, so that had to count for something. 'I'm kind of following this whole ridiculous mess. And your coven have said that you were with them at the time of Giles's murder. They didn't tell the Wayfarers what the meeting was about, mind you. But I've got to tell you, we had every intention of double-checking that alibi. And now, this looks incredibly dodgy for you both. Jennifer, what about you? What's your alibi for the time of Giles's death?'\n\nJennifer gave us a guilty glance, and she seemed to be about to say something, when Theresa cut across her. 'Jennifer was in the meeting with me and the Tinsley coven.'\n\n'No.' I shook my head. 'You said you had missed calls from Jennifer, telling you about Giles's death.'\n\nJennifer groaned, then said, 'It's all right, Theresa. I'm just going to tell them.'\n\n'No. No, you were with me,' Theresa insisted. 'Remember? You\u2026 you stepped out for some food, and you\u2026 you heard it on the news and then you\u2026'\n\n'Stop it.' Jennifer laid a hand on Theresa's arm. 'Just stop trying to cover my tracks. Unless we tell them everything, they're not going to believe a word we say.' She took in a deep, deep breath before continuing. 'When I heard the girls scream about Giles falling out the window, I was in my own shop. No one can confirm that, but I was there. But\u2026 a few minutes before that, I was in the attic directly above Giles's office. I was there to take pictures, and to plant cameras, listening devices, you name it. Theresa and I wanted to record Giles in the act with Janine and Siobhan so that he couldn't squeeze too much money out of Theresa in their divorce settlement.'\n\n'But there are no devices there,' I said. 'The Wayfarers would have found them.'\n\n'Well, I didn't plant any in the end, did I? I chickened out and panicked, because I could hear people below, so I was afraid they'd hear me and catch me.' She sat up straighter and crossed her legs. 'That's the thing, you see. It was a woman I heard, down there with Giles. And they were arguing.'\n\nTheresa shook her head. 'Don't tell them, Jennifer, please. You got it wrong. It was Siobhan you heard arguing with him.'\n\n'No. No, I didn't get it wrong. I know you're convinced that Siobhan is guilty, Theresa \u2013 and I agree, she's cold behind the eyes \u2013 but it wasn't Siobhan that Giles was arguing with. It was Janine.'\n\n[ With Stories as Strange as These ]\n\n'How's it looking?' asked Cullen, idly glancing at the screens. We were in Finn's office, and he'd turned on the feed from three different interview rooms, so we could watch as Jennifer, Theresa and Janine gave their separate statements.\n\n'How's it looking?' Finn gave us a bleary-eyed stare. 'How's it looking? More confusing than ever, that's how it's looking. You know, half an hour ago I was in a warm bed, asleep with my girlfriend. Now\u2026 now I feel like the two of you have pulled me into the most random, most annoying nightmare ever had.'\n\n'If it's any consolation,' I said, 'we find it equally annoying. But\u2026 how is it looking?'\n\nHe let out a growl-like noise, before saying, 'Well, while the two of you were off getting yourselves cups of tea, Janine admitted that she argued with Giles shortly before he died. No one saw her entering or leaving the office, but they wouldn't, would they, if they were all heading for their tea break? Oh, and she also admitted that she whacked him with the toy that Winston made. But she swears on Megan's life that she didn't shove him out the window.'\n\n'Huh?' I stared back at the captain. 'That's\u2026 I mean\u2026 how did she get the toy? Siobhan had it, then it apparently disappeared from her bag, right?' I looked at Cullen. 'Right?'\n\n'I think so,' Cullen said with a grunt. 'There are a few too many twists and turns for me to be absolutely certain, but yeah, I think so. Winston gave the toy to Siobhan, Siobhan swore that it disappeared from her bag, and that Winston must have stolen it when he broke into her flat. Only now, we know that Winston didn't break in \u2013 Theresa was the one who was in Siobhan's flat and who covered her tracks with a cleaning potion. But that doesn't explain how Janine wound up with the toy.'\n\n'Ah.' Finn folded his arms on his desk, using them as a pillow. 'I know the reason. Part of it, anyway. See, when Janine and Giles were canoodling a few nights ago, she heard a noise outside the office. She opened the door and she found the toy on the ground outside. She figured Winston must have left it there.'\n\n'I think it's much more likely that Siobhan dropped it,' I said. 'You know, when she was running off in anger, after hearing Giles and Janine.'\n\n'Well, we have no way of confirming that, do we?' Finn retorted. 'Seeing as Giles's business and all of the other businesses on Desperation Row have decided to do without CCTV.'\n\nI lifted my chin. 'No. But I'm sure. And Janine must have thought so too \u2013 because otherwise, what was she arguing with Giles about just before he died?'\n\n'Janine says they were arguing about Winston, actually,' said Finn. 'She says that once she had the toy in her hand for a day or two, she finally made herself look at how lovely it was, and she started to think a bit less selfishly about her husband. She says she finally realised that things were difficult for Winston, and she went to ask Giles if he was the one to blame \u2013 if he was keeping Winston from getting work anywhere else. But despite all of that, she still seems to believe Giles was seeing her, and only her, and she's made no indication that she thinks Siobhan could have dropped the toy that night, or been in any way involved. And for what it's worth, Jennifer has confirmed that. She says she couldn't hear it all when she was up in the attic, but she definitely heard enough to back up Janine's version of events.'\n\nI looked at the screen, and at Janine's face as she signed her statement. Bringing my Aurameter to my eye, I saw nothing to indicate her innocence. I'd seen nothing when I looked at Theresa and Jennifer, either. But I believed them, nonetheless. 'Yeah. Yeah, I believe that. I think Janine is just about deluded enough about Giles to still believe he really loved her.'\n\n'Okay, so who did it then?' asked Cullen. 'You still think it was Siobhan? Because with a bunch of stories as strange as these, I'm starting to think they were all in on it together. Maybe they created such a big mess on purpose, so that none of them could be convicted.'\n\n'Good theory, but no \u2013 Siobhan is the killer,' I insisted. 'Siobhan, and nobody else. The rest of them have been absolute idiots, but they're not killers.'\n\n'You can insist all you want, Katy, but there's still no evidence that you're right, is there?' Finn argued. 'And no, Theresa's strange story does not count as proof against Siobhan. If anything, it makes Theresa look guilty. But then she has an alibi for the time of death, so\u2026 it just confuses things even more. Hang on a minute.' Finn stopped to pick up the suddenly-ringing phone on his desk. He said a few brief words, ending with a groan of, 'No way. That shouldn't have happened, Todge,' before hanging up.\n\nHe very loudly cleared his throat and said, 'So. Winston Wolfe has just confessed to the murder.'\n\nI sat bolt upright, shaking my head. 'No. No. That can't be. Finn, that can't be. I heard you mention Todge's name. What has that jam-munching idiot done now? And why is he allowed to do anything in the first place?'\n\nI'd been relieved that, so far, Todge had absolutely nothing to do with this case. Ever since Todge had proved useless when we were almost killed on the Riddler's Express, Finn had promised me that the most idiotic Wayfarer of all would be receiving full retraining, and would be stuck on desk duty even after that.\n\n'Well\u2026 Todge is on desk duty, just like I promised you. But it's a slow night, so he's also been going to check the holding cells. And while he was checking on Winston, he might have, sort have, maybe told Winston about Janine being in for questioning. Then, as he was walking away, Winston suddenly shouted for him to come back. He told Todge he wants to make a full confession.'\n\nMy throat felt dry, and my stomach began to churn. 'But\u2026 but it won't be a real confession. You know that, don't you? Todge has run his mouth, and now Winston thinks Janine's going to go down for this. He's only confessing to keep her out of jail. He's confessing because even though she betrayed him, she's still the mother of his kid. He's confessing because he bloody well still loves her and would happily take the fall just so she doesn't! Let me talk to him, Finn. Please.'\n\nFinn banged his head against his desk, then did it again, then did it yet again, before replying. 'I hate this case. And I still don't see what any of it has to do with Cullen or with a Pillar of Permanence, so I think\u2026 I think it's probably going to get worse, isn't it?' He let out a long, mournful sigh. 'You can talk to Winston tomorrow, when we meet up on Hunting Hill. And you know what, Katy? I think you're probably right. I haven't wanted to admit it without proof, but Siobhan Cahill\u2026 she is the killer. She's dead behind the eyes. But nevertheless\u2026'\n\nI stood up, glaring at him. 'Don't say it, Finn. Do not say it. Do not say: \"Nevertheless, Winston is going to go down for this.\"'\n\nHe sighed again, and stood up. 'All right. I won't say it. Instead, I'll just say: \"Goodnight Katy, Goodnight Cullen. I'll see you both in the morning.\"'\n\n[ The Most Handsome Man I've Ever Seen ]\n\nI stayed with Cullen in his flat above the Bank that night. Before we'd gone out on the bike, he'd cleaned the teddy bear and the little bib that Shane had found in the basement of the orphanage. The bear was now sitting proudly on a chair in the corner of Cullen's bedroom, wearing the bib. It probably should have surprised me to find that Cullen had done something so sweet, but it didn't. In the months since we'd been dating, I'd discovered that he was capable of the sweetest things.\n\nFor a while I lay awake, watching him while he slept. He tossed and turned, and cried out a few times, but eventually settled down, and I fell asleep next to him, wondering what tomorrow would bring." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "I was awakened by the smell of bacon, followed by a woman's voice calling out, 'Breakfast is ready, everyone. Come and get it!'\n\n'Is that Diane?' I asked, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. Diane and her father used to work together at the Bank. Her father, Derek, had owned the bar before he was murdered. But Cullen had been running it alone for a long time, and Diane and her mother had recently sold it to him.\n\nSoon, Diane's sing-song voice was joined by more voices. Still in our pyjamas, Cullen and I stumbled down from his flat and out into the bar. Diane was bringing out plates filled with bacon sandwiches and laying them on the bar in front of Hamish, Ned, Cleo and Jay, as well as Great-Aunt Jude and her daughter, Eva Moon.\n\n'I can hear someone in my kitchen!' Cullen cried. 'Who is it?'\n\nDiane waved a hand dismissively. 'Oh, that's my boyfriend. He's a chef.'\n\nNed looked up from her sandwich. 'I thought you said you were going out with a fireman.'\n\n'No, she started going out with a PE teacher after the fireman,' Cleo reminded Ned. 'Remember? He was doing burpees in the kitchen while Diane made him a smoothie?'\n\n'Oh, yeah.' Ned returned to eating. 'I'm not really fond of burpees.'\n\n'Oh, I dumped the PE teacher ages ago.' Diane grinned and began to pour the coffee. 'He only liked health food. It got boring. Dean is much more easygoing. He makes serious comfort food. Like these bacon sandwiches.'\n\nCullen gave Diane a glare. 'None of that explains why he's in my kitchen at eight in the morning. Or why you're here acting like you still own the place. You do remember how you and your mother sold it to me for well above the going rate, right? Because I remember thinking that you were lucky to get a buyer at all.'\n\nDiane fixed him with what was probably an incredibly winning smile. For some reason, Cullen was one of the few men immune to her charms. She was a witch, but with siren and succubus genes added to the mix. She was both incredibly attractive and attracted to men. She'd undergone a lot of therapy to try and settle down, but if the latest run of boyfriends was anything to go by, it didn't seem like her therapy was working very well.\n\n'I know you own this place now, silly! I just thought I'd help out, so you could all get a nice early start at that creepy old mansion. And while you're gone, I'll run things here \u2013 that way you won't be worrying about this place, and you can concentrate on what matters. I phoned Ned last night and she told me all about it. There could be a Pillar of Permanence there, couldn't there?'\n\n'That's the hope,' said Jude, turning to me. 'Katy, you look exhausted. Are you sure you're up for this?'\n\n'Hey, if you are, so am I,' I replied, grabbing a sandwich. 'Aunt Jude\u2026' I lowered my voice. 'You know the Intuition Interface on the Aurameter? Well, when it was yours, did it ever\u2026 well\u2026 there's a woman I suspect is behind this Giles Tinsley murder, and the image I see of her through the lens is kind of disturbing.'\n\nJude let out a dry chuckle. 'You mean you saw her burning in flames, am I right?'\n\nI nodded wordlessly, my mouth too full of bread and bacon to respond.\n\n'Well, yes. It happened to me when I had that Aurameter too, but thankfully not often. It's not easy being the good kind of hunter, Katy. Our instincts can be overpowering sometimes. But unlike your father and many others, you and I know that we can't arrest someone or punish them just because we have a feeling in our gut. For me, the witches I saw in flames were usually the ones that got away. I knew they were bad, bad witches, but I couldn't prove it. It was\u2026 frustrating, to say the least.'\n\n'Hm.' Ned had poured me some tea, and I took a good long drink. 'Well, I suppose for now, we'd better just focus on the house.'\n\n'You guys got my message last night, right?' Ned asked. 'Do you think my spell will work?'\n\n'We tested it,' Jude confirmed. 'Obviously we couldn't use an actual pillar, but it seems like it should work.'\n\n'Good.' Ned smiled with relief. 'In that case, I've brought along everything we need for it.'\n\n'Brilliant. And as for what Winston Wolfe says that this ghost whispered in his ear\u2026' Jude shuddered. 'I know I need to remember something, and those little music boxes have made me all the more certain. But so far, my old memory banks just aren't telling me much. Maybe seeing this house will help. If we can see it.'\n\nWe all chatted and planned together for a while, until all of the food was finished. As I slurped the last of my tea, Cullen wrapped an arm around my waist and said, 'I'm going to go up and get dressed. We're meeting Finn on Hunting Hill in forty-five minutes.'\n\nI stood up, about to follow him, until I was distracted by Diane; she was jumping up and down behind the bar and clapping her hands. 'Yay! It's really happening. By the end of today, Hamish and I might be going on a real, actual date!'\n\nShe reached across the bar and scratched Hamish behind the ears. If his fur weren't so dark, I wondered if he might be blushing. My eyes moved to Eva, who was definitely reddening, and rushing off to the ladies' room. Getting dressed could wait a few more minutes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "'Eva?' I eased open the door. 'Eva, are you in here?'\n\nI heard a sniffling sound, and then a flushing of the chain. She opened her cubicle door and, with red-rimmed eyes, said, 'Shouldn't you be getting dressed?'\n\n'I will, don't worry. And you can be all Professor-y and boss me around when we get to the mansion. But right now, you're my cousin. Ish. Once removed? Twice removed? Look, we're family, okay? You can tell me what's wrong.'\n\nShe washed her hands, then sat on the little sofa and sighed. 'You know, I was always fascinated when I heard the story of Professor Hamish Rhodes, the young genius wizard who then got turned into a dog by an evil witch, and who never stepped foot in the college again. Except\u2026 then he did. You started studying there, Hamish began to come back from time to time, and I got to know him. We got along so, so well, he and I. We might have taught different areas of study, but when we did work together it was\u2026 it was such a thrill, Katy. Like last night, when he was with me in Dad's workshop. Dad's made another Aurameter for Mam, you see. Oh, I know she said she was retiring, but\u2026 well, she might still enjoy dabbling from time to time, and last night we were testing it before we finally gave it to Mam. And while I was looking through it, at Hamish, I\u2026 well\u2026 I saw him.'\n\nMy mouth pulled into an awkward expression. 'Yeah, I made that mistake once myself.'\n\n'No. Not that. I mean, yes, he was naked, which was\u2026' She cleared her throat. 'But Katy, I wasn't looking at that.' She reddened and cleared her throat once more. 'It was his eyes, Katy. And his smile. And his hair. And his chin. And did I say his eyes?'\n\n'Yeah.' I moved closer to her. 'You said that part. You like him then, yeah? I kind of thought maybe you two had a vibe.'\n\n'Katy, I thought it was just a vibe. I mean, I'd seen photos of him from before, so I knew he was a good-looking man. But when I saw him last night\u2026 he was the most handsome man I've ever seen. I felt\u2026 you know, I felt something. Something I've been denying ever since I met him, because\u2026 you know\u2026 he's a dog right now. But in that moment, I knew he was a man. I couldn't deny any more how much I wished he would always be a man. Not just for his sake, but for my own selfish romantic reasons. I mean, what was I thinking? There I was, having fantasies about Hamish becoming a man again and the two of us getting together. But we could never actually be together. Even if he was interested in me, well\u2026 it's not a good idea for a Moon to fall in love, is it? I suppress my werewolf side quite easily these days, but I've seen what happens to people in my family when they fall hard.'\n\n'But\u2026 your mother and father are making it work now, aren't they?'\n\nShe sighed. 'I mean, sure. As long as Dad stays close to the soil at Moonstone Farm and Mam doesn't find herself in the kind of danger that brings out his hairy side, then\u2026 yeah. I suppose that after all of those years of thinking it could never work, they're finally in a good place. Some of the other Moons are in relationships, too but\u2026 it's far from easy for them. They have to be so, so careful not to lose it.'\n\n'So? Sometimes it's worth a bit of effort, isn't it, if you find the right person? Eva, you could find a way to keep the crazy Moon wolf suppressed and you know you could. I know we're going to find a pillar today. It probably won't be easy, but we're going to do it. We have to do it, because\u2026 well, we just do. And when we do, Hamish is going to be all man again. And the fact that you're here with your mother to help that happen, well\u2026 it seems to me that you might be able to push the wolf down, but the kind of feelings you've got for Hamish might be a little more difficult to suppress.'\n\n'Well, I think I'm going to have to.' She gathered her hair into a neat knot at the back of her head, and stuck her wand into it. 'Because even if everything were perfect, even if I actually thought that he and I might have something\u2026 well, all of those ideas went right out of my head when I saw Diane this morning. He liked her for a long time before he ever met me. And it was a two-way thing, too. This Jonathan fella who turned Hamish, he only did it because he knew Hamish was the only man Diane would ever really be interested in. It's not a passing fancy. She loves him and, no doubt, he loves her too.'\n\nShe stood up. 'Like I said, serves me right for being here for selfish reasons. Look, Hamish is a good friend, Katy, even if he'll never be more than that. So I'm going to go to that house with you this morning, and we're going to turn him into a man again. If that means that I'll have to watch him walk off into the sunset with Diane, then so be it.'\n\n[ Patience is a Virtue ]\n\nI wasn't sure what to expect when we arrived on Hunting Hill that morning, but as we approached the Lodge, Cullen pointed with triumph and said, 'See? Told you so.'\n\nI shook my head, staring in shock. There it was, south of the Lodge, just as Winston had told me: a huge (if somewhat dilapidated) house, on a parcel of land almost as large as the Lodge's. But I'd been looking in that direction, just seconds before Cullen pointed, and I'd seen nothing at all.\n\n'Well, doesn't that just take the faery cake?' I commented. 'How did I not notice that the last time we were here?'\n\n'How did any of us not?' Ned said uneasily, as we walked towards the gate. It was an elaborate metal affair which had seen better days. And, just as Winston had described, there was a large sign on one of the pillars, simply saying: Montrose.\n\nCullen glared at the sign. 'I haven't got enough words to describe how much I hate that coven. Do you think\u2026 could my mother have worked here, maybe? Oh, crap. If they did something to her, I will personally track down every single Montrose in the world, and I'll\u2026' He trailed off, glancing at me. 'Katy, are you all right? You look a bit pale.'\n\n'Fine.' My voice came out as a squeak. 'I'm totally fine.' I really wasn't. My mark had been stinging from the second Cullen pointed to the house, but now\u2026 now it felt like my hand was on fire.\n\nThe mysterious mark was an ever-present reminder of our treacherous train ride on the Riddler's Express. Foirfe might have saved the day by possessing me for a while, and promising me that we'd find another Pillar of Permanence, but she also left me with a souvenir of our time together. After I'd held the white-hot hammer with which I'd smashed the pillar, my hand was a stinging, oozing mess. But as the damage healed, a spiralling scar had been left behind, and the scarred skin had taken on an almost metallic hue. Did I say metallic? I'm being far too subtle in my description \u2013 the truth was, it looked as though I had a silver Immortal Coil embedded into my palm.\n\nIn all the time I'd had it, it had never hurt this much.\n\nHamish was the first of my friends to know about it, but I soon told Ned, Cleo, Cullen, Jay, my aunt, and my Wayfarer contacts too. Because who wants to be that girl? The one who gets a mysterious, glowing symbol on their body and doesn't tell anybody about it for no good reason?\n\nNed narrowed her eyes, looking at my palm then looking at me. 'I don't like this, Katy. I mean, I know we've had it tested and no one can find anything unusual about it, but\u2026 why is it hurting all of a sudden?'\n\n'Well, I think that it's a sign,' said Cleo. 'We should go in, right now. Even the weird mark on Katy's hand agrees with me.'\n\n'We cannae.' Hamish was peeping longingly down the driveway. 'Finn wants us to take our time with this. And after the reaction Cullen and Jude had to those musical plums, who can blame him?'\n\n'I can,' said Cleo. 'Because he's already ten minutes late.'\n\nAs the cat spoke, I felt my phone buzz. I pulled it from my bag, reading aloud the message that had just arrived from Finn:\n\nSorry for the delay, but we're going to be another half an hour at least. Her Majesty is running late.\n\n'Her Majesty?' Cleo sniggered. 'The Queen of the Si\u00f3ga is the expert he's bringing along? Well, that's going to be no fun. All faeries are irritating, but their Queen is the worst. I'll bet the reason she's running late is because she can't decide which tiara to wear.'\n\n'Well, we should wait for her anyway,' Hamish cautioned. 'She can see magic. She can break magic. Whatever we're going to be up against in that house, there's no one better than a faerie to help us.'\n\nMy phone buzzed once more, and I read out a new message from Finn:\n\nActually, we might be more like an hour behind. Go and have a coffee in the Bank and I'll see you all soon.\n\n'Coffee?' Cleo's blue eyes had turned to slits. 'I'll give him coffee!'\n\n'Not really your best insult, is it?' Ned said. 'Look, let's just do what he says. An extra hour isn't going to kill us. You know what they say. Patience is a virtue.'\n\n'Pah!' Cleo glared at her witch. 'That's something said by people who are always late, so you'll shut up and keep waiting for them! I'm going in.'\n\nBefore we could argue, Cleo had strolled through the gate, and was making her way down the drive.\n\nNed wrung out her hands, then said, 'I don't care about you guys, but I'm going in after my cat. She could get hurt. She could get stuck in that weird house. She could\u2013'\n\nHamish walked past Ned and squeezed through the gate. 'You donnae have to tell me twice.'\n\n'I'm going too,' Jude announced. 'Cleo is right. We're here, so we might as well go in and have a look, at least. Finn and his cohort can just follow us in when they get here. If he has the Queen with him, she'll be able to find the house \u2013 especially if Winston points it out to her.'\n\nCullen glanced at Jude. 'You're feeling what I'm feeling again, aren't you? You really want to go in there, just like we both really wanted to open those musical plums.'\n\n'That's exactly how I feel,' she confirmed. 'And if I know the Queen \u2013 and I do, by the way, quite well \u2013 then going in without her is exactly what she wants us to do.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Cleo was already at the front door when the rest of us caught up with her. It was ajar, and she snaked her way through and into the entrance hall with a cry of, 'Good goddess, this place is filthy.'\n\nHamish, Ned and I walked in next, gazing around. Cleo wasn't wrong. In the house's entrance hallway, I began to cough. The place was caked in dust and grime. Somewhere beneath it all, I could see garlands and wreaths made of holly and ivy, the leaves having browned and dropped to the floor long ago.\n\n'Winston was right. These are all typical Winter Solstice decorations,' Ned remarked. 'The wreaths, the greenery \u2013 well, the brownery now. But\u2026 I don't know. Something feels weird. The air is too\u2026 thick.'\n\n'Winston said it was like wading through mud,' I said.\n\n'Yeah.' Hamish nodded nervously. 'Yeah, it feels like that. Every step is exhausting.'\n\n'There's something else, though. You can hear it too, can't you Ned?' Cleo asked the question. 'A sort of background\u2026 harshness. Someone is trying to talk to us.'\n\n'I think you're right,' Ned told the cat. 'Someone is trying to communicate, but they're blocked somehow.' She peeped her head around the door at the others. 'What do you think? Should we stay or should we go?'\n\nJude snorted, and walked in with Eva and Jay. Cullen took in a deep breath, and crossed the threshold. And as soon as he did, the front door slammed behind him, and everything changed.\n\n[ In For a Sickle, In For a Round ]\n\nAll around us, the dust swirled away in a great big golden rush, leaving gleaming surfaces in its wake. The entire hallway was transformed. There was a fire crackling in the hearth, there were twinkling lights on the now-fresh wreaths and garlands, and there was a delicious smell in the air.\n\nBut, pretty though the house had become, I did not like being trapped. I rushed to check the door, unable to keep the panic from my voice as I announced, 'It's locked. And I'll bet every other door and window is, too.'\n\nJude nodded. 'An Insitu spell. We're stuck inside this house. I always know when there's any sort of boundary spell around me because I feel instantly claustrophobic, even if I'm in an enormous space.'\n\n'It's not just the fact we could be locked in, though,' said Ned. 'As soon as that door slammed shut, whatever ghosts were here\u2026 they scarpered. I could feel them leave.'\n\nCleo nodded in agreement with her witch. 'They're still in here though. Just\u2026 hiding.'\n\n'On the plus side,' said Hamish, 'I don't think I've ever been trapped somewhere that smells so good, have you? I'm smelling\u2026 mulled wine.' He took in a good long sniff. 'A roasted goose, roast potatoes, stuffing, carrots and parsnips cooked with black pepper and honey. Brussels sprouts, parboiled, then fried off in the pan with bacon. Red cabbage. Sage and onion stuffing with\u2026' He sniffed more deeply. 'With shredded apple and black pudding. There's a good old\u2013fashioned Christmas pudding, too, soaked in alcohol. There's fresh cream, aged wine and\u2026' He shuddered. 'There are some of those awful marrowfat peas, too. Talk about ruining a Christmas dinner.'\n\nCullen shook his head. 'But the Brussels sprouts you have no problem with?'\n\n'Not when they're cooked with bacon,' said Hamish. 'Oh, and speaking of bacon, I also smell a ham. Well, shall we try to send out a smoke signal to Finn, or shall we sally forth regardless?'\n\n'I don't think we're going to be getting in touch with anyone, actually,' said Jay, waving his phone in the air. 'It's completely dead.'\n\nWe all checked our phones, finding just the same: the screens were blank, and there was no way to turn them back on.\n\n'Well then.' Jude rubbed her palms together. 'In for a sickle, in for a round.'\n\n'Mm,' Eva said vaguely. She was standing at a table close to the front door, and she had a photograph in her hand. It was set within a beautiful silver frame. 'Maybe em\u2026 maybe you might want to take a look at this, Cullen.'\n\nWith a face filled with trepidation, Cullen took the photo from Eva. The rest of us stood nearby, taking a look. The picture was of a baby boy in his mother's arms. The woman was in a hospital bed, her expression a mixture of exhaustion and bliss. She had dark brown hair, and lovely blue eyes. There was a plate at the bottom of the frame, saying: Cuileann Montrose, Born December 1st, the Year of the Hamster, pictured in the loving arms of his mother, Caoimhe.\n\n'That's\u2026 that's the year you were born, isn't it?' Ned said in a quiet voice. 'If you\u2026 if you arrived at the orphanage at a few weeks old like Esme said, the year would be about right. And you\u2026 well, you were wearing that bib that said Cuileann when Esme found you\u2026' She sounded more uncomfortable the longer she spoke. 'Of course, that doesn't mean anything.'\n\nCullen blanched. 'It doesn't. It doesn't mean a thing. I'm a Keats, not a Montrose. It even says so on the bottom of both of those musical plums. And there's no scar on this kid.'\n\n'You weren't born with that scar though, were you?' Cleo pointed out, looking at him through disparaging blue eyes. 'You and Katy have long established that it's covered in hunter magic.'\n\n'But still.' He crossed his arms. 'I'm not a Montrose.'\n\nThe cat shrugged. 'I can see why you'd want that to be the case. That Montrose lot are the worst coven in the world. Worse than the Berrys or the Plimptons, even.'\n\nNed glared at her familiar, and Cleo gave Cullen an innocent smile. 'Ever so sorry. I didn't mean to upset you, Cullen. I'm sure you're not a Montrose. Even if the evidence is really mounting up.'\n\n'It isn't!' Cullen cried. 'I mean\u2026 it is, I know it is. But there'll be another explanation. Look, here's what I think. My mother worked here, as a servant maybe. Something terrible happened to her, and I was left on the doorstep of the orphanage with some other kid's stuff. This Cuileann Montrose or Keats or whoever he is, he's nothing to do with me. Because I'm not\u2026 I can't be a Montrose.'\n\n'Sure. Maybe,' I said. My tone was more dubious than I'd intended, as I gazed around the hallway. It had been so horrible in here \u2013 the remnants of a holiday from long, long ago. But as soon as Cullen walked in, everything was beautiful. And not only that, but the feeling we had when we first walked in \u2013 of wading through mud \u2013 that feeling was gone, now. It had disappeared as soon as Cullen crossed the threshold and the door closed behind him. His connection to this place was stronger than he was willing to admit. Once we ventured deeper into this house, we were going to discover some things, things he might not want to know. Things he\u2014\n\n'Earth to Katy!' said Hamish, tapping his nose against my leg.\n\n'Hm?'\n\n'We've asked you three times if you want to head into the next room,' Jay said with a laugh. 'You inner monologue-ing again?'\n\nI politely cleared my throat. 'I don't know what you're talking about. But Jude's right \u2013 in for a sickle, in for a round. So let's just keep going.'\n\n[ Thorn in My Side ]\n\nThere was a grand staircase in the entrance hallway, and a few rooms leading off. There was a small study, a drawing room, a sun room, a billiard room, and even a small library. All of the rooms were stunning.\n\nIf Foirfe's voice had told me: 'You shall find it in summertime, in the house where it's always Winter Solstice' then I'd be very happy right now. But there are marked differences between Christmas and Winter Solstice, and this house was definitely decorated for the latter. All of the decorations were beautiful but natural-looking, in the witches' fashion. The twinkling lights weren't electric string lights, but perfectly-formed Solas spells. There was holly and ivy and mistletoe aplenty. There were logs blazing in fireplaces. But there was no Christmas tree, no presents, and no Santa ornaments to be found.\n\nWe arrived at a set of open double doors, and looked into the largest room yet: an oval-shaped ballroom, with dining tables all laid out for dinner, and a dancefloor at the centre. The ceiling was high, with clouds and stars painted upon it. The stars sparkled, and there were more magical lights all around the room.\n\nSome of those lovely Solas spells were encircling pillars.\n\nHamish's breath shuddered as he stared at the pillars. There were ten of them, four on either side of the room and two at the far end, creating little alcoves behind them. In some of those alcoves there were beautiful couches and chairs, in others there were doorways leading into more rooms. I saw another library, larger than the one we'd seen before, and a comfortable-looking sitting room with yet another fire blazing in the hearth. Only one of the doorways, the black door between the pillars right at the other end, was closed, but it looked to me to be a swinging door \u2013 perhaps the kitchen was back there?\n\nAs for the pillars, they looked to be made of marble, stretching from floor to ceiling. The pillar on the Riddler's Express had looked nothing like these; yes, it had been spinning fast when I saw it, but I'd seen the dust beneath the train after I smashed it, and it wasn't marble, but a much plainer-looking stone.\n\n'It looks like a dinner party was interrupted by a fight or something,' Jay remarked. 'Some of the chairs are knocked back.'\n\nReluctantly, I tore my attention from the pillars. Jay was right. There were chairs knocked to the ground, as though people had quickly left their seats. There was shattered glass on some of the tables, too, and next to the chairs. People had dropped their drinks in shock, maybe? But the mess around the tables was nothing compared to the mess at the very centre of the room.\n\nIt looked as though the dancefloor had been used for fighting, not dancing. There was more smashed glass, too. Some chairs were sitting at odd angles on the floor. Had they been thrown at something? Or someone? There was a dropped platter, some knives\u2026\n\n'Yeah, it's all very strange and everything,' said Cullen. 'But for now, can we focus on what's most important? What about those pillars, guys? Are they what we're looking for?'\n\n'None of them look like a Pillar of Permanence,' Hamish said sadly, echoing my earlier thoughts. 'And look at the food on the tables. Caviar. Steak tartare. Profiteroles. Champagne, port, brandy\u2026 it's got the makings of a very fine party, but it's not the delicious Christmas dinner I could smell from the entrance hall. Although\u2026' He sniffed. 'I can still smell that food. But\u2026 maybe it's just wishful sniffing. I would love for this to be the house Foirfe told Katy about but\u2026 it's just not, is it?'\n\nHamish stood up straight and shook his furry body. 'But not to worry. We'll find that house another day. For now, we need to figure out the mystery of those musical plums, and what this house has to do with Cullen.'\n\nCullen sighed. 'What about you, Jude? You've been looking a little dazed since we walked in here. Are you remembering anything? Because I'm not \u2013 although, considering what we've found so far, I'm not sure I want to discover much more.'\n\n'Hm?' Jude snapped her attention away from the dancefloor. 'No. No, I don't remember anything. But I do have a very strong sense of D\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.'\n\n'Well then.' Hamish nodded decisively. 'Let's get to figuring out why. This might not be the house where it's always Christmas, but we've still got a mystery to solve.'\n\n'Hey.' Eva bent down to Hamish's level and looked him in the eye. 'We have a lot more rooms left to check in this great big \u2013 and clearly magical \u2013 house. I'm not giving up on finding the right pillar in one of them, so you'd better not either.'\n\nHe let out a shy-sounding laugh. 'We'll go take a look at some of the other rooms, so.'\n\nAs the others headed off, I called out, 'Hang on a second, will you? Just\u2026 just a second. Because\u2026 well\u2026 because look at this.' I held up my hand so that they could all see the mark on my palm. The curling, coil-like mark was no longer a faded-silver scar; it was a white-hot, snaking river of metal, spinning on my palm. I clasped my hand shut, wincing at how much pain that simple action had caused. 'It's spinning a lot, don't you think? Like if we look at it too long, we'll be hypnotised?'\n\nI let out an awkward-sounding laugh. 'So\u2026 anyway\u2026 you guys should go off and search the other rooms if you want, but I'm going to stay and take a closer look at the pillars in here, and see which one takes the pain from excruciating to oh my gosh I think I'm gonna die.'\n\nThey didn't leave the ballroom; instead the others followed me, wordlessly and worriedly, as I walked from pillar to pillar, finally pausing at the two columns at the end of the room. As I neared the left of those two, I felt a pure and unignorable pain.\n\n'You know what, I think this one is a bit different,' said Jay, pointing up near the top of the pillar. 'Doesn't it look like the marble is cracking up there, like it might actually be a plainer stone column underneath?'\n\n'You're right, Jay.' Ned knocked on that pillar, then on the one next to it. 'These others are solid marble, I think. This one just has a marble fa\u00e7ade.'\n\nI was about two feet from the cracked pillar now, and the pain was shooting inwards from my hand, creeping up along my arm and coursing through my entire body. I wanted to look at the magic of the pillar, so that I could be sure of what the pain was telling me: that we had finally, after all of this time, found a Pillar of Permanence; that we could at last break the spell upon Hamish. 'Jude, I'm a little bit sore right now. Could you, maybe\u2026?'\n\n'Use my new Aurameter?' said Jude as I glanced back at her. 'Already on it.' She brought the lens to her eye and said, 'Katy, when you were on that train, did the magic around the pillar look sort of like\u2026 bramble?'\n\n'No, it\u2026 well, it was spinning too fast and I was kind of trying to stop us all from dying by the time I saw it, so I'm not completely sure,' I admitted. 'But I think the hammer I used to break it became possessed by Foirfe's magic, just as I did. That magic was\u2026 white hot, like the mark on my palm.'\n\n'Your hair went multi-coloured though,' Hamish reminded me.\n\n'Well, something tells me there's every colour of the rainbow in that woman's magic, to be honest,' I said. 'And there was silver magic on the train, too, like a thread in the air from the Immortal coil.'\n\n'Well, this isn't like any of that,' said my aunt. 'This is definitely more like bramble.'\n\n'Huh.' I reached out, touching my palm against the pillar. As soon as I did, the pain disappeared, and I felt\u2026 at peace. In unity with the pillar. I felt that it was mine, and I was its, and together we could accomplish anything.\n\n'Ow!' I jumped back from the pillar, suddenly feeling pain again, but a pain much, much different to what I'd felt before. 'This pillar has just shot a bloody thorn into my side!'\n\n[ So Close and Yet So Far Away ]\n\nA torrent of thorns shot themselves from the pillar, shooting out in all directions, piercing everything in sight. We all ran back, as the thorns began to follow us.\n\nWe tried to head for the black door closest to the pillars, but the thorns came faster when we ran that way, sending us dashing and darting all over the ballroom, finally making it into the large library and shutting the door behind us. For a few seconds, the rain of thorns continued to assault the library door. As it quickly petered out I stood up, peeking through the glass panelling of the door and taking my Aurameter to my eye.\n\nThere was shining golden magic, dancing through the air all over this house, like a witch's or a wizard's, but there was something else too. This other magic was like long, invasive branches of copper-coloured bramble, with leaves and thorns included. Whatever it was, it was at its highest concentration all around the pillar, but thinner shoots were stretching outwards, and seemed to invade every part of the room \u2013 perhaps even all of the rooms beyond.\n\nWhile I studied the magic, Cullen and Ned were gently pulling the thorn from my side, and Ned was pointing one of her healing wands, quickly closing up the gash. I looked back at the thorn, sitting in Ned's palm, but it faded in front of my eyes.\n\nHamish, who had been pulling thorns from one of his legs with the use of his mouth, said, 'They've all gone. Every single thorn is gone, like they were never there.'\n\n'The thorns in the ballroom have disappeared too,' I observed. 'But I have the feeling they'll soon come out to play again if we try to approach the pillar. What we felt just now, I think it was a warning shot.'\n\n'So the magic, you think it's a protection spell?' Jay asked. 'To keep us away from the pillar?'\n\n'I'm not sure.' I flopped onto the ground, my back against the library door, resting for a moment. 'It doesn't look like any protection spell I've seen, but it's definitely acting like one. It's whatever else it might be doing that I'm worried about. Because the way this magic is threading through the air and reaching out, it reminds me of the magic on the Riddler's Express \u2013 the way the Immortal Coil reached out to all of us, but was also bound to the pillar. Except this magic looks different. Like a metallic bramble infestation, without the tasty blackberries. It doesn't seem to be trying to strangle the life out of us, though, so I guess\u2026 small mercies.'\n\n'There'll be nae mercy if we cannae get near that pillar though, will there?' Hamish hung his head.\n\nCleo rubbed herself up against him. 'So close, and yet so far away. It must be awful for you, Hamish. You know who'd be able to sort this out for us? The Queen of the Si\u00f3ga. She'd have that magic broken in a flash.'\n\nNed gave her familiar a warning glare. 'Cleo, if I were you I'd keep very, very quiet right now.'\n\nShe needn't have worried. Hamish didn't look likely to argue with Cleo at the moment. He was panting hard, his entire body jerking with every movement he made.\n\n'Here.' Cullen took a bottle of water from my bag, pouring it into an enormous (but thankfully clean) ashtray, and bringing it to Hamish. 'Have a drink, mate. You don't look good.'\n\nHamish lapped up the water, but didn't look much better for it.\n\n'Have you eaten today?' asked Jay. 'I know you didn't want to have the bacon because of\u2026 well\u2026 but did you eat something at least?'\n\nHamish was quiet for a moment, before finally revealing, 'No, no I havnae eaten properly for a while now. I couldnae stomach much of the dog food, and I suppose that our little escape attempt just now might have taken what energy I had.' He waved a paw. 'It's all right, honestly. I spoke to Healer Little, and he said that I can have some plain chicken and rice, so I'll have some of that when we get out of here. No doubt Finn and the Queen have realised we're in here and they're working to get us out.'\n\n'What?' I stared at him. 'I mean, yeah, that'd be great but\u2026 this isn't over, Hamish. As soon as the Queen gets in here and breaks whatever magic it is, we'll be reversing your spell. You can eat anything you like, then. Actually, no.' I took an energy bar from my bag, unwrapped it and passed it his way. 'You should eat now. Because we're going to win this, I know we are.'\n\nHe was still panting, but he took the bar and nibbled a little bit of it before saying, 'Sure. Of course we are.'\n\nWhile we were comforting Hamish, there'd been a whole lot of clinking and clanking from Eva and Jude, as they pawed through Eva's purse. Judging by how long it was taking them to find whatever they were looking for, I suspected that Eva's purse was bigger on the inside.\n\nFinally, Eva and Jude found what they were looking for and began to place some items on the floor: a glass tube, and a large metal pot with a clamped lid and a hole on the top.\n\n'What is that?' asked Ned.\n\n'It's for siphoning magic,' Eva explained. 'It's\u2026 it's sort of like a channelling spell, for when a channelling spell is too dangerous. Like when you have no idea what the magic will do to you, but you need to get it out of the way. It's not a permanent solution, and it won't take all of the magic. But hopefully it'll take enough, so we can get near the pillar and use it for Hamish.'\n\nShe placed one end of the tube into the hole on the lid of the large pot, and gently shook. I could see now that the tube wasn't actually made of glass \u2013 or, if it was, then it was an incredibly pliable glass with the ability to grow and twist. As the tubing lengthened and stretched out from the pot, it rushed towards the library door.\n\nCarefully, Eva opened the door just a few inches, and the tubing raced into the ballroom, heading straight for the pillar and winding itself around it. I could see tiny sucker-like holes opening on the inner part of the tubing.\n\n'Phew. It's actually starting to siphon.' Eva wiped her forehead. 'Don't you just love it when an experimental object works out on the first real-life trial?'\n\n'This is experimental?' Hamish walked all around Eva's contraption. 'I don't believe you. Something cannae work this well without being tested a thousand times.'\n\n'Well\u2026 I invented it last night,' Eva told him. 'So yes, it is experimental.'\n\nHamish stared at her. 'We didnae make this last night. We tested to see if the spell for turning me back into a man was viable, and we finished off Jude's new Aurameter.'\n\nEva met his gaze. 'I stayed up after you left. I couldn't sleep for thinking of what might go wrong. So\u2026 I made this.' She tore her eyes from his, and stood at the door beside me, watching the progress of her invention. I passed her my Aurameter so she could see what I could: the bramble-magic being sucked up, before being pulled away from the pillar and drawn into the pot.\n\nAfter a few minutes of watching, Cullen crept back into the ballroom. 'I think it's okay now,' he said, giving a thumbs-up. 'It seems to\u2013'\n\nHe stopped talking, as the pillar threw more thorns towards him. It was just a few this time, but enough to make him rush back to the safety of the library.\n\n'I'd put a protection spell around myself, but they still pierced me,' he said, shaking his head in wonder.\n\n'Well, you can see by the pot's gauge that my siphoning device seems to be working,' said Eva, scratching her head in confusion. 'And I could see it sucking up the magic when I looked through Katy's Aurameter. But\u2026 it's clearly not working quite as well as I'd hoped.'\n\nI looked through the library's glass panel again. The tubing was expanding out from where it had surrounded the pillar, and pushing its way towards the black door. 'That's because the pillar isn't the source,' I said. 'And your siphoning tube has just gone on a journey to find it. Eva, I can't believe it \u2013 it's just pushed its way through a door.'\n\nShe gave a start of surprise. 'Well, that's unexpected. I mean\u2026 I made the tubing strong, and capable of growing to quite a few thousand metres, but\u2026 that was just me, over-engineering. I didn't expect to actually need that much length. What should we do?'\n\nI bit my lip, thinking. 'Some of us should stay here to keep an eye on Eva's invention, and to keep testing the pillar to see if we can get near. Some of us should go and follow the tubes. Find the source.'\n\n'I'll go,' said Jay, easing open the library door. 'I'm not much use when it comes to wizardry.'\n\n'I'll go with you,' Ned offered. 'I can put a protection spell on us both.'\n\nI watched for a moment as they both dashed to the black door, staying as far away from the Pillar of Permanence as they could. Only a few thorns flew their way, but they managed to dodge most of them, and they quickly pushed open the black door and ran through.\n\nI kept an eye on the ballroom, watching the bramble-magic being pulled from the pillar. But it was going so, so slow; most of the magic we were siphoning seemed to be coming from the other tubes, the ones that had pushed their way through the black door.\n\n'Y'know what?' I said. 'I think I'm going to go after Ned and Jay. The source of the magic might not be too happy about what we're doing. They'll need backup.'\n\nBefore anyone could argue with me, I left the library and made a dash for the black door, managing to get pierced only twice along the way.\n\nThere was a long corridor beyond the black door, and the rooms on either side were more utilitarian than any others in the house. There were storage rooms, a little office that might have been used by the butler or the housekeeper, and finally, a large kitchen, with a glass door leading out to a walled vegetable garden.\n\n'Oh my stars,' I mumbled, taking in a lungful of delicious scents. 'This is what Hamish was smelling.'\n\nThere was a range cooker with a goose and roast vegetables in the oven. On one of the burners atop the cooker, the sprouts were in a pan, along with pieces of bacon, and in a smaller pot, marrowfat peas were simmering away. There was a covered dish next to the range, and I pulled the cover aside and saw red cabbage, cooked and ready for serving. Everything was just as Hamish's nose said it would be.\n\nThere was a small table in the kitchen, with plates, cutlery and glasses piled on top, as though ready to be taken somewhere.\n\nAs much as I wanted to explore, I was here to find Ned and Jay, and to follow the tubing. And I could see the magical flexi-glass \u2013 it had somehow managed to squeeze through the keyhole of a door next to the table.\n\nWhat, I wondered, was through that door?\n\nI was about to approach when I heard noise beyond it: something crashing to the ground, followed by a husky laugh.\n\n'I guess I got too enthusiastic,' came a voice I recognised as Jay's. There was another husky laugh, followed by\u2026 well, by the kind of silence that somehow spoke volumes.\n\nI couldn't open that door. I just couldn't. I'd been waiting for Ned and Jay to get together for a very long time. Disturbing them now could prove catastrophic.\n\n'Hey, Katy, have you found them yet?' Cullen strode into the kitchen. Before I could stop him, he pulled open the door, revealing a pantry beyond. In that pantry, there were shelves filled with tinned and packaged food, and two intertwined people, pressed up against those shelves and kissing each other madly.\n\nNed and Jay gasped and jumped away from each other. Both of them had messy hair and flushed faces.\n\n'We were just\u2026 um\u2026 we were\u2026' said Ned.\n\n'Following the tube into the kitchen,' Jay added. 'That's what we were doing. And then\u2026 and then we spotted this pantry and thought, well\u2026 that needs to be searched. And then\u2026'\n\n'And then your tongue fell into Ned's mouth?' Cullen grinned.\n\nI pointed to the siphoning tube. 'And what about that? Didn't you follow it in here?'\n\n'Oh!' Ned stared at the tube. It was right beside her, and it seemed to be piercing its way through the back wall of a shelf filled with tinned food. 'I mean\u2026 of course that's why we were in here investigating. That's what we just said.'\n\n'Mm hm.' I gave her a knowing smile. 'Sure it is.'\n\n'No, it isn't.' Ned groaned, looking mortified. 'We did come in here to explore, but the siphoning tube hadn't made it this far by then. I don't know what we were thinking, what with everything going on.'\n\n'Meh.' I shrugged. 'I can't get too mad with you guys. After all, me and Cullen had a pretty epic kiss when everyone on the Riddler's Express was on the verge of death. There's something about being in an emergency situation, isn't there? It makes you evaluate things. It makes you finally throw your tongue into the mouth of the person you've fancied for a very long time.'\n\n'Crap. I'm so sorry, Katy.' Ned squeezed my hands. 'Please don't tell Hamish that this is what I was doing while I was supposed to be following the tubing. He'll think I don't care, and I do. I just\u2026'\n\n'Hey, stop it now.' I squeezed her back for a moment before pulling away. 'I've already told you \u2013 it's completely understandable. Two people as hot as you and Jay were bound to give in eventually.'\n\nNed's face was flaming, while Jay looked happier than I'd seen him for a while. 'I'm not sure what to do now,' he said. 'I mean, how can we keep following the tube?' He pointed to the area where the tubing had pierced the back of the shelf. 'There's more than likely a solid wall behind that shelf, isn't there? Should we go outside, and see if it's travelled out into the garden? If we can go outside, I mean.'\n\n'Or,' said Cullen, his voice low and urgent, his eyes filled with that same Eureka expression they'd had in Times of Yore, 'we could go this way.'\n\nHe lifted a perfectly-normal looking tin of marrowfat peas, and with a great big creaking lurch, the entire shelf slid aside to reveal a secret room beyond.\n\n[ We Finally Found Christmas ]\n\nThe room was smaller, but lovelier, than any other in the house. A fire burned in the hearth, and a tall Christmas tree stood nearby, with a star on top and presents piled beneath. After finding most of the house decorated for Winter Solstice, we'd finally found a room that was ready for Christmas.\n\nThere was a dining table by the window, and two armchairs next to the fire, with a rug and blanket in between.\n\nOh, and did I mention the man and woman, sitting in those armchairs, dressed in their holiday finery, and looking nervously in our direction?\n\nNo? Well\u2026 that was because I was terrified. And it wasn't just that they were ghosts \u2013 because they were. My senses told me so, even though I could see them without my magic. Eva's glass tubing had stopped travelling now, and it was making a circle around the woman, siphoning whatever power she held, which meant that she must be the source of the strange magic in this house.\n\nThe thing was, once I raised my Aurameter to my eye, I could see that the magic wasn't simply surrounding her. That bramble-like magic was physically attached to her, its thorns embedded in her skin, a countless number rooted into every part of her body. And it was clear to me that she was suffering, now that the siphoning tubes were sucking her bramble-magic away. Her image was growing weak; she was flickering before my eyes. Ghost or not, she wouldn't be able to survive this much longer. I couldn't bear to look at it anymore, so I dropped the Aurameter, returning my view to normal.\n\nShe was a pretty woman, the same woman we'd seen in the photograph in the entrance hall. Her eyes were filled with excitement, hope and fear as she stared at Cullen. The man was focused on Cullen, too, gazing at him as though he were a long-awaited messiah. Or a long-lost son.\n\n'Jay,' I whispered. 'You go tell the others what we've found. I think this is where we all need to be right now. Oh, and you'd better tell Eva to stop siphoning, too.'\n\nAs Jay ran off, the woman stood up, her arms outstretched. 'It's you, Cuileann, isn't it? I knew you'd find your way back home.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "While the woman walked towards us, Cullen recoiled.\n\nThe man squeezed the woman's hand. 'It's okay, Caoimhe. The last time he saw us he was just a few weeks old. We should explain ourselves. First of all, we're sorry. When you entered the house, and set everything in motion, we panicked. We\u2026 we'd waited for you for so long. We were about to make an appearance, but\u2026 did I already mention that we panicked? So we came here to have a drink and calm down. And then\u2026 well, those strange tubes burst in here and surrounded Caoimhe and she's been a tad\u2026 unwell, ever since.'\n\nAs he spoke, the tubes began to retract, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Eva had stopped siphoning, and the woman's form stabilised.\n\n'Son, I know this is a shock,' the man continued. 'Yes, we're ghosts, but\u2026 we are your parents. This is your mother, Caoimhe. And I'm your father, Michael Montrose. We have so much to tell you. And we have a Christmas lunch ready, too, so why don't we all take a seat at the table? Your friends are welcome to join us.'\n\nCullen shook his head, backing out of the secret room. 'No. No, I don't want to hear this. I don't want to hear any of this. You're\u2026 you just said you were ghosts? Well then, I'm glad you are. I'm glad you're dead. And I'm glad I wasn't brought up with a pair of Montroses as my parents. It might not have been all fun and games at the orphanage, but it's better than being brought up by werewolf killers!'\n\nHis father winced, and his mother shook her head, crying. 'You don't understand,' she said. 'We\u2013'\n\nWhatever she was about to say, Cullen didn't want to hear it. He stormed out through the pantry and I followed behind him, passing Jay on his return with Hamish, Cleo, Jude and Eva in tow.\n\n'Is he okay?' Hamish asked, pausing.\n\nI slowed down just long enough to respond. 'He's\u2026 he will be, I hope. Just follow Jay, and we'll catch you up in a second.'\n\nWhile Hamish walked away, I finally caught up with Cullen in the entrance hallway, trying to open the door.\n\n'Stupid door!' He pulled at the handle and kicked at the wood. 'Talk about a captive audience. Typical Montroses, that's what they are.'\n\n'Cullen.' I laid my hand on top of his, pulling him away from the door. 'I know how terrifying this is \u2013 and not just because we're all locked into some creepy Christmas house.'\n\n'You're right,' he grunted. 'The most terrifying thing is that it's my parents who are locking us in here. I can't believe I'm\u2026 I hoped\u2026 I hoped for anything but this, Katy. Anything but this.'\n\n'I know you did,' I said softly. 'I've hated every Montrose I've met so far \u2013 and with good reason. But there's more at stake here. I wish we didn't, but we\u2026 we have to go back into that room.'\n\nHe ground his teeth for a moment, staring into the ballroom, his eyes on the pillar. 'I know we do. I know it, Katy, and I'll go back there, and we'll figure out how to end this stupid spell and get that pillar for Hamish. But I just need a minute to calm down. Because all of the times I imagined what my real parents might be like, I just didn't figure they'd be like that.'\n\nI looked up at him, my heart aching for the little boy he'd once been, alone in the world, inventing reasons for why his parents had left him \u2013 good reasons, reasons they couldn't avoid, reasons that meant they'd wanted him, really wanted him, all along \u2013 and hoping that one day, those parents would return and claim him as their own.\n\nWell, here they were, and they clearly wanted to claim him. Cullen might be afraid to hear the story of why they'd abandoned him, but I had the feeling that it was a tale he really ought to let them tell.\n\n'Listen,' I said. 'My dad is one of the worst hunters ever known, my uncle is a recovering sexist, and my mother is a terrible actress and singer. It doesn't matter who brought us into the world, Cullen. It's up to us to decide who we want to be, and I think you're making a pretty good job of that.'\n\nHe rested his forehead against my shoulder, pulling me close. 'Only since I met you.'\n\n'Well, I'll take the credit if you insist. But\u2026'\n\n'But what? You have some idea whirring around in that mind of yours, don't you?'\n\n'Yeah. I think that maybe I do. Call it my hunter senses \u2013 or maybe just basic attention to detail \u2013 but I think your parents might have some surprises for you yet.'\n\n[ Pillar of the Community ]\n\n'Well,' said Cullen, the moment we walked back into the secret room. 'Tell me, then. Tell me why you're here, now, as ghosts, when all my life I've searched for you? Tell me why you've locked us in. Tell me why that stupid musical plum made me faint and why this house suddenly turned into some sort of holiday wonderland when I walked in.'\n\nHis parents looked at one another, and by some silent communication, it was decided that Michael would be the one to talk.\n\n'Well, it's\u2026' He was shaking visibly, and he took a seat in one of the armchairs. 'It's just\u2026 I don't know where to start. I suppose\u2026 I suppose I should start with the hunting party on Christmas Eve. No, the day before it, when I met up with Heber Montrose. Or\u2026 or maybe I should start a year earlier, when I met your mother\u2026' He gave a helpless shake of the head, and Jay knelt in front of him.\n\n'Michael, you need to calm down.' Jay spoke gently. 'I can read your mind, okay? I'm not trying, but\u2026 your emotions are so strong that it's all out there for any vamp to see. So I know that everything you have to say, Cullen needs to hear it. Would you like me to help you?'\n\n'I suppose a couple of glasses of brandy might do the trick,' said Michael.\n\n'Well, you can have that too, if you like.' Jay let out a chuckle. 'But what I meant is that I have a way to let the others into your memories. If you're feeling too nervous, I can help Cullen and his friends enter your mind, so that they can see the story I can see.'\n\n'You're powerful enough to do that?' Ned asked, looking slightly sick.\n\n'Don't worry.' Jay gave her a warm smile. 'I've been very respectful of your thoughts.'\n\nShe cleared her throat and looked away. 'Good. That's\u2026 good.'\n\n'So.' Jay turned back to Michael. 'How do you want to do this? I can join you to Cullen, so he can enter your memories.'\n\n'No.' Cullen stepped forward. 'Whatever he has to tell me, to show me or whatever, he can show it to everyone. If he's not all right with that, he can keep his story to himself.'\n\nI squeezed my boyfriend's hand. If I were the suspicious sort, I might be inclined to think that he was looking for any excuse not to find out the truth. But I understood why he might feel that way. This must be terrifying for him.\n\n'I'm fine with that,' Michael agreed.\n\n'Oh.' Cullen's hand wrapped a little tighter around mine. 'Good, then. Let's get this over with.' He focused on Jay. 'So what do we do?'\n\n'I need to touch a hand to Michael. Then, someone will hold my hand and we'll make a circle, all holding each other's hands \u2013 and paws. Katy, you'll need to take off your ring.'\n\n'Oh, sure.' I pulled off the ring that Jay had given me a long time ago, a ring which meant no vampire could invade my mind, and I joined the circle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Michael Montrose tipped a little of his whiskey in the plant pot, pretending to finish the glass just as his companion, a large, red-faced man, returned to the table. They were seated in a room I recognised only from photos: the lounge at the Warlock Society's Samhain Street branch.\n\n'Another one, Heber?' Michael held his empty glass aloft, swaying a little, hoping that the warmth spell he'd performed would give him enough of a flush to complete the illusion of drunkenness.\n\n'Why not?' Heber gave him a truly drunken smile in return. 'We'll have to keep a clear head tomorrow, won't we? At least until we've killed them all. Now, how much was our little bet again, cousin?'\n\nMichael resisted the urge to shudder. 'You bet me five gold rounds that you could kill the youngest. I don't think it's much of a bet this time though, do you? The youngest we could find is sixteen. What age was the one you killed last year again?' His heart beat just a little faster, and he prayed that his device was still recording. 'The one with the incredibly apt surname?'\n\nHeber let out a long, loud guffaw, smacking his belly in delight. 'Ah, fond memories, Michael. Fond memories. It's Megan you're thinking of. Megan Wolfe, eleven years old. But I'm not greedy. This Christmas Eve I shall happily make do with a sixteen-year-old.'\n\nMichael poured more drinks, and carried on with the horrible conversation, secretly recording more information, more admissions. Oh, he knew it wouldn't all hold up in court. It would be contested. It would all be gone over a hundred times by a hundred of his cousin's lawyers. And he, Michael, he'd be dragged across the coals, too. He could see it now. They'd employ expensive lawyers \u2013 a Rundt, or maybe an O'Toole. Lawyers who would say 'How can we trust this man's testimony, when he's testifying against his own coven \u2013 his own cousin, no less? How can we trust the word of a witch who has participated in this hunt himself?'\n\nMichael was shaking. 'Need another drink,' he said, downing his whiskey for real this time. It didn't matter what they said to him. The evidence would speak for itself. Even if they tore him to shreds in court, it didn't matter. What mattered was that his cousin, and everyone like him, would pay for what they'd done." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Michael moved away from Jay, looking pale, and his memories no longer poured into our minds. 'Sorry I\u2026 I need a rest.'\n\n'I get it. It's draining,' said Jay, looking tired himself.\n\nFor the first time since we returned to the room, Cullen was looking, really looking, at his father. 'You were undercover. You were working to expose the werewolf hunters in your coven.'\n\nHis father smiled sadly. 'I was. I hated being a Montrose. I left the coven, in fact \u2013 moved to the human world for a time to distance myself from them. But after meeting your mother there, it became clear to me \u2013 bad things don't stop happening just because you're looking the other way. I knew I had to go back. I knew I had to stop them, and going undercover, helping the Wayfairs to expose the truth of the Montrose coven, that was the only way I could help. And I have never been prouder in my life than when I watched you take up an undercover position with the new police force. The Wayfarers are every bit as outstanding as the Wayfair coven who paved the way.'\n\n'I was so proud, too, when I heard about your job,' his mother said, tears streaming down her face. 'If\u2026 if Michael needs a little time to rest, maybe I could help to finish the story?'\n\nJay nodded, and took her hand. The rest of us joined hands again, and sat in the circle once more.\n\nWe could see through Caoimhe's memories this time. Her hand, with its little charm bracelet, reaching out to a baby who rolled on the rug. We couldn't see Caoimhe's face, but her thoughts were clear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "She gazed down at the little boy, only a few weeks old, as he looked in wonder at his teddy bear. She had never thought about children, really. Never had the yearning for one. But when this little boy was born, it was as though somebody turned the lights on. Caoimhe's mind, her heart, her body\u2026 every part of her was filled with a new vigour, now. Her love was fierce, and so, so strong, strong enough to overcome anything. Even the pain of the magic she must subject herself to, every day for the rest of her life. This baby was her everything.\n\nWell, one of her everythings.\n\nAs the door between the pantry and the secret room opened, Caoimhe smiled up at her husband. 'You look done in,' she said. 'This one is, too, although he won't yet admit defeat.' She kissed Cullen's head. 'I thought he'd tire if I let him play with some of his Solstice presents, but no such luck.'\n\nMichael laughed, and joined them on the rug. He had seemed exhausted when he arrived home, but a new light shone in his eyes as he looked upon his wife and child.\n\n'Wait until Christmas morning when he opens up that lot.' Michael nodded to the tree. 'He really won't know what to do with himself then. I think we might have overdone things this year. I don't even know how many presents we've bought for him, but it's a lot.'\n\n'Well, it's his first Christmas. Who doesn't want to spoil their child on their first Christmas? I only wish we didn't have to keep our tree a secret, hiding it away in this little room so none of the Montrose coven can see. But\u2026 soon you won't be hiding the fact that you married a human-turned-wizard anymore.'\n\n'Very soon. Oh, and speaking of Christmas presents, I got you something. Well\u2026 I had something fixed.' He reached into his pocket and pulled out two silver ornaments.\n\n'My musical plums!' Caoimhe smiled. 'I wondered where they'd gotten to. I was going to show them to Cuileann today, but I couldn't find them. It might be just as well. They haven't sounded very good for quite a while.'\n\n'No, they haven't.' Michael agreed. 'But\u2026 I had them repaired. The sound is just as good as ever. And look\u2013' He turned one of them over. 'I even made sure she left your old writing on the bottom.'\n\nCaoimhe's face lit up. 'Oh my gosh! I'd forgotten I ever wrote something there. My little sister was always stealing my things when we were kids, so I scratched my mark on everything.' She opened up one of the little plums, and the ballerina began to move to the tune of Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.\n\nThe baby looked up in delight, gurgling. But as soon as the tune stopped playing, the baby cried. Michael grabbed the musical plum. 'Here,' he said. 'This should calm him.'\n\nAs Michael reached for the star on top of the tree, Caoimhe shook her head. 'No, the little key you turn to wind it up again is on the bottom.'\n\n'Ah, yes, you haven't seen the extra surprise I had added, have you?'\n\nHe twisted the star, and Silent Night began to play. Cullen became content again, while Caoimhe looked in wonder at her husband. 'Silent Night! My favourite Christmas carol. Oh, Michael. I love it.'\n\nMichael smiled. 'It works on both music boxes. All you have to do is twist the little star on the tree. I've heard you hum it to Cuileann over the past few weeks, and it always seems to calm him. Plus, he should have music from the human world in his life. Because that's what his mother is. A human. Well\u2026 a human who just happened to turn herself into a powerful wizard in an astonishingly short amount of time, but\u2026'\n\nCaoimhe blinked back tears. 'It's beautiful, Mike. And look\u2026 he's drifting off.'\n\nCarefully, she lifted him from the rug and into a cradle. 'I'll give him a few more minutes before I move him upstairs. Make sure he's properly asleep.'\n\nThey spoke in quiet voices then, Michael pouring them both a drink while Caoimhe took a seat in an armchair by the fire, her eyes flitting every few seconds to their son.\n\n'You're worried, aren't you?'\n\nCaoimhe flinched at her husband's question. She thought she'd done such a good job of putting on a happy face, but Michael wasn't fooled. 'Fine, I'm worried,' she admitted. 'I know I'm the one who started this whole thing. Convincing you to return to this enclave, to work for the Wayfair coven. And I don't regret it, not any of it. What we're doing here is important. I just\u2026'\n\n'You didn't know that we'd have a child before it was all over and done with?'\n\nShe laughed a tear-soaked laugh. 'It was the happiest accident of my life and you know it. But I do just want it all to be over by the end of tomorrow night. Properly over and done with. And then we can go to sleep knowing that Heber and all of his pals are in Witchfield, and you and I\u2026 we get to spend our son's first Christmas morning with him.'\n\nHe sat down on the opposite armchair. 'I can't wait for that, Caoimhe. And you know what else I can't wait for? For you to separate yourself from that pillar. I can see how much of a toll this bonding spell is taking.'\n\nShe looked away from her husband's concerned eyes. 'Right now, it's giving me all of the magic I need to convince your coven that I'm a witch, not a feeble human who's learned how to channel magic. In fact\u2026' She gave him a wink. 'I'd say it's turned me into a pillar of the community, wouldn't you?'\n\nHer husband groaned. 'You know you're in love with a woman when even the most terrible jokes in the world can't put you off.'\n\n[ Party Crasher ]\n\nThe scene faded, and another of Caoimhe's memories took its place. It was the following night, Christmas Eve, and the mansion's ballroom was decorated just as we'd seen it today. Except in Caoimhe's memory, there was no evidence of whatever fight had occurred. The seats were filled with guests, while waiters moved from table to table, dishing up food and pouring drinks.\n\nThere were some people we'd met before \u2013 a much younger Denton Montrose, and Debbie and Jim McGinty, too.\n\nHeber Montrose's eyes followed one of the servers, a nervous young man whose hands shook as he poured the champagne. 'No need to worry, young man,' said Heber with an insincere smile. 'We don't bite. And we don't need to worry about you either, do we? Seeing as it's not full moon?'\n\nThe young man swallowed. 'No, sir. You don't need to worry about me.'\n\n'Good.' Heber's insincere smile grew larger. 'You know you're lucky, don't you? To get any work at all. This is one of the finest houses in the enclave \u2013 in any enclave. If you do well here tonight, I might ask you to serve at more parties. I know all of the best people in supernatural society, you know. I could get you work in many of my coven's houses. I pal about with the Godbodys, too. And the McGintys. All the best people. So you just be sure to keep my glass topped up, all right?'\n\nWhen the server mumbled some words of agreement and rushed away, Caoimhe gave Heber a stern glare. 'What was that about? I thought he was the one you made Michael and me hire so that we could\u2026 you know\u2026?'\n\n'Give him a potion that forces him to turn before we hunt him to exhaustion and eventually kill him? Well, of course. But I like to befriend them first. There's nothing more satisfying to me than the look of surprise on their faces when I fly above them on my broom, faster than they can ever run. I somehow think it makes their hides more\u2026 robust.'\n\nHer stomach churned, but she did her best to smile. Thankfully, Michael and some more people joined the conversation, and Caoimhe was able to sit back and pull herself together.\n\nShe was so involved in her own thoughts that she didn't hear it at first \u2013 whatever noise had made the other guests turn their heads towards the entrance hall. But Caoimhe soon snapped to attention, listening to the commotion as the sound of raised voices drifted through from the hallway.\n\n'You know you're at a good party when the riffraff are trying to crash,' joked one of the guests.\n\nThe house's staff were clearly trying to stop someone gaining access, but when a woman rushed into the room, her dark hair flying, it was clear that they had lost the battle.\n\nThe skin on Caoimhe's arms began to prickle as she looked at this woman, whose eyes were glowing yellow with anger. She was a werewolf, thought Caoimhe, and an angry one.\n\nThe woman screamed, 'You murderers! You killed my little girl, I know you did! Well, I'm here to stop you killing again!'\n\nAs the woman leapt at the nearest guest, Caoimhe's stomach began to flutter, her heart began to thud. She knew who the woman was. It was Muireann Wolfe. Heber and his cronies had murdered her daughter the Christmas before.\n\nA huge fight broke out almost instantly, as guests threw freezing spells, but the woman dodged them all, flying at people, growling and snarling and jumping as her body turned from woman into wolf.\n\nCaoimhe's eyes roved over her guests. Their eyes were bright with glee. Someone \u2013 Caoimhe couldn't see who, in the ruckus \u2013 had begun to throw cutlery at the woman, and soon everyone followed suit, even throwing glasses and chairs, while all the while they erected protection spells around themselves to stop Muireann from getting too close.\n\nSome of them were even laughing.\n\nJust as Heber reached to throw a knife (his second) at the woman, Caoimhe asked him, 'Did you arrange this? Why is she turned even though it's not full moon? Have you given her\u2026?'\n\nThere was a dark delight in Heber's eyes as he responded. 'Have I given her a potion to force her to turn? No, my dear, I haven't. An animal like that doesn't need the moon when they're riled enough. I am very glad she came, though. It's always nice to have some light entertainment over dinner, don't you think?'\n\nCaoimhe nodded feebly, her eyes meeting her husband's, as Heber and the others continued to assault the woman.\n\nThis wasn't part of the plan, thought Caoimhe. If they acted now, to save this woman, it would all be for nothing. But if they didn't intervene in what was becoming an increasingly brutal attack, the woman would die.\n\nCaoimhe nodded to Michael, and he to her. It was decided. They had to intervene. Her husband pointed a finger, about to try and freeze his guests, when yet another woman entered the room.\n\nEvery move the new arrival made was assured and calculated. She simply strode in and raised her hand, and the werewolf disappeared.\n\nThe memory faded away at the sound of our collective gasps. 'Aunt Jude!' I cried, at the same time as Eva cried, 'Mam! That was you!'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Jude's expression was one of a woman who had finally put the pieces together. 'I\u2026 how have I forgotten this?' she said. 'Why do I remember it now? I remember it all.'\n\nCaoimhe gave her a small smile. 'I've been hoping it would come back to you, and now it has.'\n\nJude shivered. 'Yes, but it's not exactly a pleasant memory, I'm afraid. Still, I suppose I'd better tell you all.' She looked around at everyone as she spoke. 'It began when Muireann Wolfe came to visit me the year before. Winston's mother, though I'm sure we've all figured that out by now. She'd come to me just after her daughter went missing. She believed that there were witches here, on Hunting Hill, who had killed young Megan. Her suspects were\u2026 well, all of the members of the notorious Lodge, that horrible club who liked to get their kicks by killing werewolves, weredogs\u2026 anyone they felt was lesser. Muireann told me that her nose had smelled guilt up here, on this fancy hill full of fancy houses\u2026'\n\nShe sighed. 'It didn't take me long to learn that she was absolutely right. That kind of hunting was illegal, but\u2026 this hill was named as it was for a reason, and even though times changed, the residents of Hunting Hill were reluctant to accept that change. Some still are, as you'll all know after investigating the Lodge yourselves. But\u2026 as I began to look into what had happened to little Megan Wolfe, I soon realised that I wasn't the only one investigating the witches in this area. I'd stumbled right into the middle of a Wayfair investigation, with Cullen's parents as the undercover agents. They were so, so close to bringing the culprits to justice. And I became part of that investigation.' She smiled at Cullen's mother. 'Caoimhe and I became friends. I even visited this little room a couple of times, and met their young son.'\n\nA tear slid down my great-aunt's cheek. 'I tried to speak to Muireann. To tell her that it was all in hand. I couldn't tell her the details of what I'd learned along the way, and the plan that the Wayfairs had devised, but I begged her to believe I was on top of things. I thought I'd gotten through to her, but then on Christmas Eve, she stormed in to the party, just as the hunt was about to begin. I don't know what she thought she'd achieve. She fought well, but she was no match for a house filled with witches. I had no choice. I went in there and I teleported her out of harm's way before anyone could stop me.'\n\n'We didn't see your wand,' Eva said. 'You looked like a witch in Caoimhe's memory; it was as if you simply pointed a finger to teleport Muireann out of there.'\n\n'My wand was hidden in the arm of my coat. Not on purpose,' said Jude. 'I just had very, very big sleeves. But that's a fact that turned out to be quite useful, in the end.' She closed her eyes for a moment, lost in the memories she had only just retrieved. 'I tried to leave immediately. I thought I'd acted quickly \u2013 taken them by surprise. But I wasn't quick enough. By the time I tried to travel out of here, someone had already locked the house down.'\n\n'Heber,' said Michael, his tone grim.\n\n'Yes.' My aunt nodded. 'Heber.' She looked to Jay. 'Could you\u2026?'\n\nHe understood immediately, and quickly enabled the rest of us to see inside Jude's mind.\n\n[ Silent Night ]\n\nIt had been a foolish thing to do, and Jude knew it. But she had to intervene. She'd come in here unprepared and teleported Muireann to safety because, if she hadn't, Muireann would have been killed. But now, Jude was stuck inside the house, and she was far from ready.\n\nShe'd only turned up on instinct, and was just about to organise her weapons when Muireann made a rush for the door. Her Toolkit was still shrunken and hiding in her bag. She should have at least taken her ropes out before entering. She'd meant to \u2013 she prided herself on being prepared for anything \u2013 but Muireann had just been too quick tonight.\n\nRealistically, all Jude had to hand was her wand, and her knife \u2013 and that particular knife was only good against werewolves and vampires. She'd been in bad situations, but this time\u2026 this time she was worried for her life. The Montrose coven had a certain look upon their faces tonight, and it was a look Jude had seen too many times before: murderous. They wanted to do to Jude what she'd stopped them from doing to Muireann.\n\nAs the coven surrounded her, Jude reached for her wand, cursing herself for wearing her favourite coat tonight. It was good for keeping warm, sure, but those sleeves were so big and baggy. Her wand was up there, somewhere. If only she could\u2014\n\n'Pass me those irons,' Heber Montrose said, shoving her roughly against one of the pillars. Another witch passed him a long chain, with shackles on either end, and Heber quickly secured her.\n\nCrap. She'd been just about to retrieve her wand (well, in another second or two), but now that she was shackled in witch irons, she wouldn't be able to scratch her nose, let alone pull her wand from up her sleeve like some nifty magician's trick.\n\nJude didn't know if those irons would stop her from using magic, or if they'd fully hold her \u2013 she was a hunter, not a witch. But even if she could unlock them, she would need something to direct her hunter magic \u2013 like her wand, stuck up the sleeve of her coat, or her knife, tucked into the back of her jeans.\n\n'Good job, Jude,' she muttered to herself as Heber and the other witch moved away, back to their crowd at the centre of the ballroom floor. She really was getting too old for this. Why hadn't she listened to Felim? He'd wanted them to spend Christmas Eve in front of the fire, drinking turnip brandy. If she ever got out of here, she was going to hand her weapons over to her nephews. Well, some of her weapons. Maybe. Her nephews might be hunters, but they were also idiots.\n\nA few seconds after Heber was gone, a voice whispered in Jude's ear. It was Caoimhe. Jude tried not to meet her friend's eyes, as Caoimhe said, 'I don't have long. This is a voice-throwing spell, and it's hard to keep it up without attracting notice. Look, I don't think Heber saw your wand. He thinks you're a witch, from the Wayfair coven. So keep your wand hidden. I'm going to draw on the pillar. It's strong, Jude. So strong. At the stroke of midnight, I'll unlock your shackles and drop the lockdown spell. Heber won't know it's down. You'll be able to get out and get the Wayfairs in earlier than we planned. So watch the clock, okay?'\n\nEven with magic, Jude wasn't in any way accomplished at voice-throwing spells, so Caoimhe would have to take her slight nod as an answer. Jude watched her as she stood with the other witches. All of the serving staff had scarpered. Hopefully they'd managed to get all the way out of the house before Heber had locked it down.\n\nJude let her eyes rove the hall, finally spying a huge clock in one of the alcoves. She kept an eye on the clock \u2013 it was six minutes to midnight \u2013 and listened as closely as she could to the witches as they talked.\n\n'So what next?' Caoimhe asked the others.\n\nHeber tapped his chin. 'We kill that witch, that's what's next. I told you, it's more than likely she's a Wayfair \u2013 they're always poking their noses where they don't belong. I say we get it over with, and transport the body far away from here, and quick.'\n\nAs the crowd either agreed with Heber, or made suggestions of their own, Jude glanced at the clock again. It was five minutes to midnight, now. She could hear Caoimhe speaking more loudly, trying to guide the others into the adjoining library, hoping to have them out of the way when she helped Jude escape. But the witches were arguing, glaring at Jude \u2013 they wanted to kill her now.\n\n'Well, let's have a drink first, shall we?' Michael suggested, understanding that his wife needed a distraction. 'A bit of Dutch courage before we do this dirty deed, eh?'\n\nThe others made some noises of agreement, and the crowd moved towards the library. But just as he was about to cross the threshold, Heber stopped and said, 'Of course, we could just stay in here, and see whether you try to help this Wayfair witch escape.'\n\nCaoimhe and Michael stared at Heber. 'What are you talking about?' asked Michael.\n\n'You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're spies. This whole night was created so that the Wayfair coven could catch us in the act of hunting werewolves.' He shook his head. 'You think you actually fooled me with this charade? You vowed never to return to the Montrose coven. But then you marry a mysterious woman we've never heard of before, and suddenly you wanted back in. Did you take me for a fool, Michael? I've known what you were up to all along.'\n\n'So why did you wait all of this time?' asked Michael, his eyes dancing with nerves. Jude could see that he was still playing for time, desperate to find a way out of this mess. 'Why did you let tonight go ahead, if you knew what we were doing? Or should I say not doing? Because this is clearly all in your imagination.'\n\n'My dear cousin,' said Heber. 'I have contacts everywhere. I have power and connections you cannot even dream of. Frankly, the idea you thought you could get one over on me is laughable. Of course I had a plan for tonight. At the last minute, I was going to clutch my chest and say that some of your food hadn't agreed with me. The hunt would have been postponed. The Wayfairs would have arrived at our hunting ground, and found absolutely nothing. Oh, they may have knocked on this door afterwards, but\u2026 it would have been too late by then.'\n\n'Too late for what?' Michael asked, his throat sounding dry.\n\n'Too late for you, and Caoimhe, and your little one, of course. I meant it when I said I wanted to kill someone young tonight. But it wasn't a werewolf.' He narrowed his eyes, spittle flying and chins wobbling as he drew closer to Michael. 'No one will be able to prove a thing, afterwards. Not the Wayfairs. Not anybody. Because when I said I have connections and power, I meant it. You'll be declared missing, like so many are, and that will be the end of that. And as for myself and my true friends, we shall leave here and go on about our lives as if you never existed at all.'\n\nJude watched Caoimhe's and Michael's faces, wondering: would the plan still go ahead? They looked terrified, and Jude could understand why. Cuileann was their world. They loved that boy with every atom of their bodies.\n\n'Look, I\u2026 I don't know anything about all of this spy business,' Michael blustered. 'But if these Wayfair people do turn up, I'll turn them away. I'll lie. I'll say anything you want. I'll do anything you want.'\n\n'You know,' said Heber, 'I believe that to save your little son, you probably would. But that wouldn't do my reputation any good, would it? No, I need to set an example, Michael. Go against Heber Montrose, and you disappear. It's just the way it has to be.'\n\n'Look, you can suffer from paranoia any other day, Heber,' said Michael, still desperately bluffing and blustering. 'But not now, all right? Not on what I hoped would be a good night's hunting. We're all going to sit down, and have a drink. As soon as you calm down, you'll see how ridiculous you're being.'\n\n'No.' Heber crooked his finger, and the rest of the party surrounded Michael and Caoimhe. 'Right now we have to kill you, and your child. Then we'll deal with that witch we've got tied up. And then\u2026 well, then I'll probably have a nightcap and a good night's sleep.'\n\nIn times of terror, thought Jude, it can sometimes seem as though the world slows down. Those last few seconds before the clock struck midnight seemed to take forever, until suddenly, Caoimhe's voice whispered urgently in her ear, 'Save my son, you have to save my son!'\n\nThe clock struck, Jude's shackles fell away, and she finally managed to pull out her wand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "The nanny was in the nursery, along with a boy of sixteen or so. He was dressed as a waiter \u2013 he must have been one of the few who hadn't managed to get away before Heber's lockdown spell.\n\nThe nanny had placed the baby in a small carrier, with his teddy in his arms, and a little silver toy. It seemed to be an oddly-shaped music box with far too many moving parts for a baby. Probably not the safest toy, Jude thought, as the nanny reached out to it, twisting the star on top of the Christmas tree; the toy began to play Silent Night.\n\nAs the music played, witches thundered up the stairs. Some of them (the more clever among them) had already used their magic to travel more quickly to the nursery. Jude grabbed the baby carrier and screamed, 'Grab on tight to me!' to the nanny and the boy. With a whirl of her wand, she took them all to Eile Street.\n\nMost of the Wayfair coven were under cloaking spells while they carried out tonight's operation, and Jude knew there was no point in trying to find them. But she also knew of another Wayfair job that night \u2013 two of their coven were in a tavern on Eile Street, spying on a wizard who they suspected was trading in dark objects.\n\nIt was snowing when Jude arrived on that street, with a nanny, a boy and a baby. The snow was heavy and cold, but it looked so pretty under the streetlamps.\n\n'What are we doing here?' asked the nanny, while the boy simply shivered.\n\n'I have things to take care of,' Jude said. 'Just run, both of you. The Wayfairs will be in touch.'\n\nInstantly, the pair fled, and Jude looked down at the baby. He must have been freezing, in only a little romper and a bib, so she laid him on the ground and pulled off her coat, about to wrap it around him, when she heard a growl.\n\nJude's stomach sank \u2013 how could she have forgotten? When she'd teleported Muireann Wolfe, this was exactly where she sent her to. Muireann had a flat above a shop, just a few doors away from here.\n\n'I thought you'd be at home, where I sent you,' Jude said as she turned to face Muireann. The werewolf was already part-transformed, and she merely growled in response.\n\n'Can you change back, Muireann, so I can talk to you properly?' Jude went on, reaching desperately into her coat for her wand, only to realise she didn't have either. Her eyes darted around. The coat was where she'd left it, on the ground beside the baby. The wand must have rolled, because it was all the way over on the other side of the street. All she had was her knife, stuck into the waistband of her jeans.\n\nShe shielded the baby carrier with her body, carefully watching Muireann all the while as she reached down for her knife. The woman was now one hundred percent wolf, her clothes stretched and torn, her limbs long and strong, her nails dangerous. 'I'm just going to get the baby settled somewhere safe, and then we can go together to the Wayfair coven. I should have told you this before, but\u2026 at the Montrose mansion tonight, it was a secret operation. Caoimhe and Michael aren't what you think they are. They're\u2013'\n\nJude didn't get the chance to tell the werewolf what Cullen's parents were, because the creature lunged, knocking Jude to the ground and swiping at the baby.\n\nJude didn't think; she simply acted, aiming her knife at the wolf and praying a silent prayer. She always prayed when she threw that knife, because if she didn't, it was a truly hit or miss affair. If Jude really really wished the best for the werewolf in question, then her knife wouldn't kill them, but would merely return them to human form.\n\nEven if Jude didn't wish the best \u2013 if she actually wanted the wolf to die \u2013 then the chances were high that the knife still wouldn't kill them. It would merely slide off and fall to the ground. Hunter weapons were finicky that way \u2013 some of them seemed to have a mind of their own, while some of them seemed to have a genuine connection to her mind, and to her intentions. And now that she was throwing this weapon at a werewolf who was trying to kill a baby, Jude was having quite a hard time wishing Muireann the best.\n\nShe didn't know she'd been holding her breath, but she finally let it out again as the werewolf whimpered, let go of the baby, and fell to the ground.\n\nAs Muireann quickly reverted to her human body, Jude kept an eye on her and rushed to grab the child and retrieve her knife.\n\n'You're all right.' Jude kissed the baby's tiny head. 'You're actually all right. Well\u2026 nothing that a little healing spell won't fix.' Her voice was shaky, because she wasn't sure if she was telling the truth. Muireann had injured his face \u2013 a great big gash that ran from his left eye to his upper lip. Was it a bite, or a claw mark? For now, it was bleeding too profusely to tell.\n\nJude retrieved her silver wand, using it to perform a spell that would clean and cauterize the wound. Healing spells were hardly her speciality. There was a danger she'd leave a mark. But she had to move quickly \u2013 a baby not yet a month old did not need a werewolf bite to add to his woes. Even outside of full moon, the venom could spread and cause complications.\n\n'Did you bite him?' Jude cried.\n\n'No!' Muireann shook her head, snatching up Jude's coat and wrapping it around herself. 'I must have just caught him with my nail. I wanted to bite him. I wanted to do much worse. And I was going to, if you hadn't stopped me. You have to understand, Jude. They killed my child, so when I smelled one of their children on the street outside my home, I\u2026 I just saw red. I\u2026 I'm sorry.'\n\nJude shook her head, resting the baby back in his carrier and twisting the little star atop the tree as she'd seen the nanny do, hoping to comfort him. It wasn't a bite. That was the main thing. Someone would clean up Jude's rush-job, no doubt, when all of this was over.\n\n'You're sorry?' Jude shouted as she stood to face Muireann. 'Well, you bloody well should be. I saved you from that lot tonight because my heart aches for you, and for what those witches took from you. I saved you because you have another child who needs you. And this little boy?' Jude glanced back at him. He was making the sweetest gurgling noises as his toy played its tune. 'Even if his parents were what you think they are, he wouldn't deserve what you tried to do tonight. But what's worse is that they're not what you think they are. They're\u2026'\n\nJude shook her head, unable to finish her sentence, as confusion washed over her. She\u2026 she'd been saying something, hadn't she? She'd been in the middle of something very important.\n\nHadn't she?\n\nNow, all that she was sure of was that she was cold. She rubbed her arms, looking around her. What was she doing on Eile Street? What was she doing out at all, without a coat, when such heavy snow was falling down?\n\nShe jerked, as tingles ran all through her body. It wasn't a cold shiver, but a very particular kind of tingle \u2013 the kind a hunter could always feel when there was magic in the air. And whatever magic was at work, it was a strong, strange magic \u2013 and it was working on her. Something was shifting inside her \u2013 some thought, some memory of that oh-so-important reason why she was standing on this street \u2013 all of it was fading away.\n\nFrightened, Jude stared around again, desperate to remember. There was a baby in a carrier, a few feet away. There was a woman, with torn clothes and a coat that looked very much like Jude's coat \u2013 her favourite coat, too \u2013 scurrying away. And somewhere close, there was the sound of such lovely, lovely music, a Christmas carol Jude knew and loved: Silent Night.\n\n[ I Wished it Could be Christmas Every Day ]\n\nI sat in the circle, watching my aunt's memories in amazement. It all made sense now. Winston's mother, his sister, Cullen's scar\u2026\n\nA hunter had scarred him, but not in order to hurt him. My aunt had been trying to save him from what she feared was a werewolf bite. The hunter magic I saw when I looked at his old injury was the remnants of the magic Aunt Jude used that night.\n\nBut in that orphanage, under Esme's care, his scar had never been cleaned up, even though it would have been a simple spell. Esme had left it there, because Esme was Esme. And then, when he was old enough to erase it himself, Cullen had left it there. Because Cullen was Cullen.\n\nSo why didn't Jude remember? Why didn't the Wayfairs remember? Heber Montrose had been arrested only a few years ago, by Wanda Wayfair. And my friends and I had helped to put Debbie McGinty and Denton Montrose behind bars a while back, but many of those party guests were still around. Older now, but definitely still around.\n\nJude snatched her hands from the circle, throwing us all out of her memories, and stared at Caoimhe. 'A woman opened a door \u2013 Esme, the orphanage matron \u2013 she opened a door, and she took Cullen inside. And I just let her. I didn't know any better than to just let her. And then I went home and my husband didn't know anything either. And\u2026 and I'm a curious person, Caoimhe. I would never let something like that just go. And yet\u2026 I did? Until just now, I had no recollection of Muireann, of that job with the Wayfairs. So what did you do to me? To Muireann? To make me forget this house, and that night. To make me forget that there was a Pillar of Permanence here. Was it a memory spell? Well, it must have been, mustn't it?'\n\nSlowly, Caoimhe nodded her head. 'Immediately after you left the room, Michael and I were murdered. But\u2026 time can pass slowly when a death spell is coming your way. And in that split second, or however long it might have been before I died, I managed to create the most important spell of my life. Because Heber meant what he said, and I knew it. He would send people to hunt Cuileann down and kill him, just to set an example. So\u2026 I drew on the power of the Pillar of Permanence, and I created a memory spell. I made sure that the second every person in that house left, they would never track down my son. They would never hurt you, Cuileann. Because they would forget that you ever existed. They would forget that everything about us ever existed, including this house.\n\n'It was far from a perfect spell, I admit. But when you know you're about to be murdered, you have to work fast.'\n\nShe shot an apologetic look in Jude's direction. 'It's obvious now, with hindsight, that in order to make the Montrose coven forget us and Cuileann, that everyone would forget us. Your memories began to leave you, I think, the moment that Heber and his friends left our house. I certainly didn't envisage your encounter with Muireann. In the end, it wasn't just Heber Montrose I had to worry about. It was a heartbroken, grieving mother, who had loved her daughter just as much as I loved my son.'\n\nCullen hadn't said anything for a long time, and he still didn't speak. He swallowed, looked at his mother, and then looked away again.\n\n'You were born at the beginning of December,' she told him, even though he wouldn't meet her eyes. 'I was in our garden, clipping some holly to add to the garland, when you came. I'd thought of naming you a hundred things, but as soon as I felt you on the way I knew what I'd call you. Cuileann, for the holly, for the red berries and green leaves in my grasp. Although Cullen suits you, you know. It's close enough. And with my surname as yours, at least\u2026 at least you've always had a connection to me.'\n\nCullen staggered to his feet, leaving the floor and heading for one of the chairs by the table. 'I\u2026' he began. 'I'm glad, to finally know all of this. But I don't think I understand everything yet. You're so solid, both of you. And everyone else might have forgotten you, but you didn't forget. Why didn't you reach out to me before now? Why are we locked in this house?'\n\nCullen's father looked him in the eye. 'I have tried to reach out to you. I visit you. I keep up with what's happening in your life. But the memory spell seems to have affected people's ability to see me or hear me. Even other ghosts can't see me, except for Caoimhe. Even you can't see me, though I've tried so hard. Still, I have been there to see some momentous moments in your life. There were times when my heart ached for you. And lately, there have been times when my heart has soared.'\n\nCullen gave his father a sheepish smile. 'Eek. I don't know whether to find that sweet or disturbing.' He let out a hoarse laugh.\n\n'Oh, don't worry,' said Michael. 'There are limits on what and where a ghost can watch. Rules about intimate moments and so on. Although\u2026 there are a lot of public displays of affection just lately, so it's really not my fault if I happen to see some of that.' He gave me a wink. 'Hello, Katy, by the way. You have made our son finally, completely happy, and for that, Caoimhe and I are more grateful to you than we can ever express. But\u2026 as to why you're trapped in here\u2026 I'll let Caoimhe try to explain.'\n\nOnce again, she gazed at her son. 'My spell had been fast and sloppy that night. As well as having many unintended consequences, it was also unbreakable. Afterwards, I tried to make some adjustments. The first of my attempts was that, when you were ready to seek out your parents, the music would lead you to this house. I used the other musical plum that I had here, in the house, to create the spell. They were a pair, so I was able to focus on it, and draw upon the pillar to create the amendment.\n\n'You were supposed to feel the urge to play Silent Night, and when you heard it, you would have an irrepressible desire to come here. You would be able to meet us, and hear the truth of why you had to grow up without us.'\n\nHer face grew flushed. 'And also\u2026 well, I also wished that, when you did walk in, it would be Christmas. It would always be Christmas, every time you walked into this house \u2013 even if you walked in a hundred thousand times. I\u2026 I have a thing for Christmas. The carols, the food. Being with family. I wanted you to have that, with us \u2013 the Christmas day that we never got to have together.'\n\nShe looked at us all. 'But it soon became obvious that my son didn't have the musical plum. Michael travelled to the orphanage, as a ghost. He found it in the basement, and we hoped that even though Esme had taken Cuileann's things when he was a baby, surely she'd give them back to him when he left there. But she never did. And Michael is only solid inside the house. He's never been able to communicate or to move anything outside of it so\u2026 I made yet another attempt to amend the spell. We knew Cuileann had visited residents on this hill, so I tried to make it so that, even without Silent Night to lead him home, he would see the house \u2013 he, and only he would see it \u2013 and he would feel the urge to come inside. But perhaps he never saw it until now because, even though he was close by, he never came.'\n\n'I did have an urge to come inside,' Cullen admitted, his voice barely audible. 'I saw this house, and it drew me. I just resisted it. I don't know why. Stubbornness? Fear? I don't know.'\n\n'Ah. That explains it, then.' His mother took a drink, and then said, 'Well, I believed that the amendment to the spell failed. I didn't even know until today that the always Christmas part had worked. I thought the only thing I got right \u2013 well, somewhat right \u2013 was the memory spell. But maybe Cuileann gets his stubborn streak from my side of the family, because I made one last-ditch attempt. It was more of a wish than a spell. I drew upon the pillar and I wished that somehow, anyhow, someone or something would lead you home. It was just that one, simple wish, but\u2026 it must have worked. Because that very day, Winston was able to see this house, and somehow I was able to communicate with him. Maybe it was his connection to all of this that enabled him to come in, maybe it was because of my wish. Either way, I wasn't going to let his arrival go to waste. But\u2026 well\u2026 I think I might have known that it was stubbornness keeping you away by then, at least somewhere deep down, because I asked him to bring the plum to Jude, so that her memory would return when she twisted the star.'\n\nShe turned to face my aunt. 'And somehow, you both listened to the music. Somehow, you were all led here. But even then, Jude, your memories didn't return. That's when I realised just how unbreakable my spell really was. Your memories didn't return until you were here, safely locked inside this house. And I can't be sure, because my original spell was such a desperate, sloppy, last-minute mess, but\u2026 I do believe that the memory spell is the reason you're all locked inside. It's trying to protect itself. And the only way it can do that is if it never lets you out.'\n\nHer face was a picture of embarrassment and concern. 'All I can say is that I am so, so sorry to you all \u2013 and to Katy, especially, because this is probably not the way you imagined meeting your future in-laws.'\n\nI found myself furiously blushing at the thought that Cullen and I might marry one day, while Caoimhe continued to talk.\n\n'But don't worry,' she said. 'I think I might know of a way.' Her eyes rested on Hamish for a moment. 'A way to give everyone what they need. But first, why don't we all sit at the table and eat? There are presents, too. They're the same ones we had for your first Christmas.'\n\nAs she spoke those last words I carefully watched her and, as I did, I thought about the magic, running between Caoimhe and the pillar. I also thought about the fact that my hand was hurting more than ever, and that when I'd sneaked a peek at it through my Aurameter, some new and unusual magic had turned up to join the party. The coil seemed to be extending in a way that only my Aurameter would let me see \u2013 the magic in my hand, creeping towards Caoimhe, like a thousand silver tendrils, each one with a white-hot flame at its tip.\n\nI was terrified to think too much about what it might mean. Because what if there was an ending to this? And what if that ending wasn't a happy one \u2013 at least not for everyone?\n\n'I don't want food,' Cullen told his mother. 'I want to figure out how to get my friends out of this mess.'\n\n'Hey.' I softly touched his arm. 'I think we're all getting hungry right now. Let's do what your mother suggested, yeah? Let's all sit down and eat and have Christmas together, and we can talk about everything else in a while.'\n\n[ We'll Always Have Halloween ]\n\nWhen I began to eat, I wasn't sure that it was actually real food because, let's face it, it was magical food created by Cullen's mother so that he could enjoy Christmas with his parents every day for the rest of his life. But somehow every morsel tasted real and delicious, and the two glasses of wine I drank made me just a little tipsy.\n\nAfter a reluctant beginning, Hamish ate even more than the rest of us. As we enjoyed our plum pudding dessert, we pulled crackers with terrible jokes and paper crowns inside. After that, we had a sing-song at the piano (any sing-song not involving my mother is a winner) and then played charades.\n\nFinally, Cullen opened the presents beneath the tree. There were tiny outfits, tiny socks and tiny shoes. There were soft toys and rattles and a little baby book with just a few photos inside, and lots of empty pages that had never been filled.\n\nWhen he reached those empty pages, his eyes grew wet, and he suddenly croaked out, 'Sorry. I'm sorry.'\n\nHis parents gazed at him in wonder. They were sitting on the rug by the tree, and they'd been looking on and smiling as he opened his gifts. 'What are you sorry for?' his father asked.\n\nCullen swallowed. 'You know what for. You've seen me over the years. You know that I was bitter and twisted for a really long time. You know I was a thief. A dealer in illegal potions. You know\u2026 you know I was a warlock. That I mixed with people just like the ones you fought so hard against.'\n\nHis mother blinked back tears, reached out, and stroked his hair. 'I know you were sad. I know you yearned for us. I know that. I know you had a good heart, always, and that you found your way in the end.'\n\nHe swallowed again, and it was so clear that he needed to have a real, proper cry. I ached to rush over there, and hug him, to hold him while he cried. But instead I stayed sitting near the piano, watching as he let his mother put her arms around him. Watching as he actually hugged her back.\n\nHe even beckoned his father closer, and hugged them both at once, a great big family embrace that lasted two or three minutes, maybe more.\n\nWiping away a tear, Cullen eventually let go of them and said, 'Thanks. Thanks for\u2026 for this. For the whole Christmas every day thing. Thanks for saving me that night. But I think\u2026 I think there are some things you haven't told me, right? Because Michael \u2013 Dad \u2013 you said that you'd watched over me.' He looked at his mother. 'But you didn't, did you? You only know what Dad told you. Why? Is it something to do with the pillar?'\n\nShe took a few seconds to reply. 'Yes. It's meant that I haven't been able to leave the house. Or to pass on to the afterlife. Your father\u2026' She glanced at Michael. 'I think he could pass over, but for some unknown reason he's decided to stay here with me.'\n\nMichael reached out and clasped her hand. 'Of course I have, you wonderful woman. I'd be miserable without you. Here we're solid. We're together. We can eat, and drink. We can have days like this. Who could want for anything more?'\n\nCullen looked in confusion at them both. 'But it's been years. Thirty and change. And you didn't have days like this, not if the spell you did is how you described. The house rotted away around you. It only looks like this because I'm here. And look, maybe you think I'm worth waiting for, the goddess knows why, but\u2026 you're still not really answering my question. Why can't you leave? Why can't you pass on, Mam? What kind of spell holds you here after you die? It's got something to do with that weird bramble-magic that Katy and Jude saw through their Aurameters. You're bound by it, aren't you? It's like a leash, holding you to the pillar. Holding you here.'\n\nHis mother's face paled, and she took in some deep breaths, before saying, 'Yes. Yes, that's what it's like. I\u2026 I was foolish. In my eagerness to be a proper Wayfair spy, to expose werewolf hunters like Heber, I hunted down the most powerful magical objects I could find. I managed to find the pillar, and something else \u2013 something that would join me to it so I could draw upon it and pretend to be a witch. Something called the Beast's Bramble. I thought I could handle it. It looked ever so innocent \u2013 just a coppery thread, I couldn't even see the thorns, or the leaves at first \u2013 but oh, how it pained to be joined in that way. During the bonding spell, it grew and grew, encircling me and the pillar, digging into my skin. Even when the spell was finished, and I couldn't see the bramble anymore, I could still feel it. I've never stopped feeling it. It is like a leash, yes. Like a painful, thorny leash. Every time I strayed too far from the pillar, it would pull me back. Every ounce of power I channelled felt like it was being shot into me with a thousand tiny thorns. And when I died\u2026 it seemed that the connection remained. And so I remained here.'\n\nMichael put an arm around her shoulder and kissed her softly. 'There's more to it than that,' he said, turning back to Cullen. 'You've seen how strong the magic is. The pillar is Caoimhe's, as long as they're joined. If you and your friends try to use its magic for yourselves, the bonding spell can, and will, attack. So you can see, can't you, that even though we want you to use it for Hamish, there are going to be one or two obstacles in the way.'\n\nCaoimhe looked paler than ever, and she got to her knees and took Cullen's hands in hers.\n\n'Every spell I do is powered by my connection to the pillar. And so, every spell I do will end, as soon as my connection is severed. The memory spell will end, the house will let you out, and Hamish can use the pillar to become a man again.' She gave him a wide, tear-sodden smile. 'It will be a happy ending for you all. But\u2026 only if Katy can help.'\n\nShe looked my way. 'I saw you looking worriedly through your Aurameter before we ate. So I know that you saw something there. A kind of magic that you didn't quite expect. And it has something to do with that strange spiral on your hand, am I right?'\n\nI met her gaze. 'How did you know?'\n\nCaoimhe shrugged. 'I know because every time you've been near me \u2013 to pass the roast potatoes, to top up my wine \u2013 my already excruciating level of pain has increased by, oh, about a hundred-fold. This horrible Beast's Bramble, I think you can take it away. I don't really understand how, or why, but you can. You can sever my connection to the pillar.'\n\nI moved my eyes to Cullen. 'I mean\u2026 maybe. But\u2026'\n\n'I know what will happen.' Caoimhe smiled valiantly. 'And I'm ready for it. Come here and hold my hand, Katy, and we'll see what magic we can work.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "I took Caoimhe's hands in mine. I didn't know if I would need an incantation, or if we would need any other equipment. There was no rulebook for any of this. But as it turned out, we didn't need anything. The second we touched, I could feel what was happening, I could feel the heat of Foirfe's magic bursting out of me. Caoimhe made a little wincing noise, but put on another valiant smile. 'It's fine, it's fine.'\n\nI snapped my hands back. 'No, it's not. I don't want to have to be the one to do this, Caoimhe.'\n\n'It can only be you.' Caoimhe gave me a firm nod. 'And you know it, Katy. I mean, you could try torturing me with those tubes again.' She let out a wry laugh. 'But after my earlier experience of them, I don't think they can work on magic like this. Oh, they can dim it. They can cause me pain. But they can't remove the bond of the Beast's Bramble. I believe only you can, Katy. And for Hamish's sake, we need to act as soon as possible.'\n\nHamish stepped forward. 'There must be another way, though, mustn't there? Caoimhe, you and Michael could have so many days like this. I can't bear the thought that you'd be giving them up for me. There'll be another way to fix things. Hey, any minute now the Queen of the Faeries is bound to burst in and save the day.'\n\nAt that, Cleo sniggered.\n\n'The cat's right,' said Jude. 'Her Majesty isn't coming. I told you, I know her. This is something she wants us to deal with ourselves.'\n\n'A wise woman.' Michael smiled softly.\n\n'An irritating woman,' Cleo muttered.\n\n'It doesn't really matter what kind of woman she is, though, does it?' Caoimhe said. 'Because whether she comes in here or not, the result is the same. I don't think she can break this bond between the pillar and I, but even if she can, the spell still ends. I move on to the afterlife, and you get to use the pillar for Hamish. I'm not sad about any of this, and I'm not afraid. I welcome this, Katy. I've had more than enough time in this world.'\n\nShe hadn't, though. She hadn't had nearly enough time. Judging by the appearance of her ghost, Caoimhe must have been in her early twenties when she married Michael Montrose, and moved to this enclave and had Cullen. She'd died so young, and ever since then she'd done nothing but wait for this day \u2013 her Christmas with the child she'd given everything to protect.\n\nShe and Michael could have had this day with Cullen forever, over and over. And under any other circumstances, I knew Cullen would have loved to come here as many times as possible, to visit the parents he'd always wanted to know.\n\nI wished we could have everything, all of us. I wished we could get out of this house without ending the memory spell. I wished that bringing Hamish back didn't mean Cullen had to say goodbye to the parents he'd only just met. And I wished that anyone but me could be the one who had to take them away.\n\nI locked eyes with Cullen, and he gave me a big, bright smile and said, 'It's all right, Katy. It is. Remember, I'm a witch. Which means that even if me and my parents have only had one Christmas, we'll always have Halloween.'\n\nCullen's father let out a warm, happy laugh. 'And we will come to visit you every single Halloween for the rest of your life, so keep that date open forever.'\n\nCullen hugged his father and said, 'I promise.'\n\nI stepped towards Caoimhe again, and took her hands in mine. I didn't know what would happen. We were working with instinct, and nothing more. But somehow, I knew it would work.\n\nSometimes, magic is so, so cruel. Most of the time the only way to see it is through an Aurameter, or through the eyes of the fae. But this magic\u2026 this magic, all of us could see.\n\nI'd held Caoimhe's hands for only a few seconds when the flames began to creep from my palm to hers, moving in a spiralling motion, swirling and licking along her body, from thorn to invisible thorn, until every inch of the Beast's Bramble was aflame.\n\nShe didn't scream, even as those flames burned her to extinction.\n\nThe last I saw of her was her face, her lips parted in a peaceful smile.\n\nMichael simply stood there, beside his son, his eyes on his wife, until the moment she was gone. And when she was, Michael took Cullen in his arms, said, 'We loved you from the moment we made you,' and simply faded away before our eyes.\n\nThe lush green Christmas tree became a brown, rotten thing. The decorations and the presents were soon covered with dust and mould. There was no meal on the table, and no smell of food in the air. But somehow, that room still felt like Christmas.\n\n[ The Key ]\n\nIt felt more than a little odd to walk back into the ballroom. There were no thorns assaulting us. There was no Beast's Bramble in the air. There was just a wrecked room, smelling of damp and letting a breeze in through the holes in the windows.\n\nThis house had remained invisible for over thirty years, but it had managed to fall into decay just fine, regardless of whether anyone was watching or not.\n\n'Well then,' said Hamish, looking up at the pillar. 'It's quite the thing, isn't it?'\n\nHe sounded nervous, and I couldn't blame him. He'd waited years for this. We'd all been through a lot to make it happen.\n\n'We should, I don't know, just\u2026 get on with it then?' said Eva, pulling her wand from her hair.\n\n'Oh. Yeah.' Ned reached into her bag and pulled out some items. She had a photograph of Hamish, taken shortly before he became a dog, an old hairbrush, and some chalk. With the chalk, she and Eva began to draw a circle on the floor around the pillar, with some smaller circles branching out. In one they placed the picture, in another a tuft of Hamish's hair which Ned pulled from the brush. One circle, the largest, remained.\n\n'Jonathan never did divulge exactly what spell he used,' Ned told us as they worked. 'But the Wayfarers said that they found a poppet of Hamish, made with Hamish's hair and a photo attached to the poppet's face. And in one of Jonathan's many rooms, they found markings on the floor, where the pillar stood before he destroyed it, and some faded chalk circles too. We worked out the spell based on all of that, so I think it should work. No, I know it will.'\n\n'It will,' Eva affirmed. 'There are few magical objects as powerful as Foirfe's pillars. Caoimhe was able to use this one for so much, even though she was basically a beginner wizard. All we need is to be clear in our intent, and the pillar will do its thing. Hamish.' She pointed to the largest circle. 'You've got to stand in there, okay?'\n\nHis legs shook as he went and took his position. We'd decided beforehand that, as a wizard, Eva would be the best person to channel the magic from the pillar, so she stood right next to it, placed one hand on it, and with her other hand she pointed her wand at Hamish.\n\nShe opened her mouth, about to chant the spell, but instead she said, 'Huh. That's weird. I can't feel any magic.'\n\n'Really?' I frowned. 'Because my palm still hurts like heck.' I opened my hand, looking at the mark. The coil was still moving, just like before: a spiralling river of molten metal.\n\n'I don't understand.' Jude was looking at the pillar through her new Aurameter. 'The magic is gone. There's none of it left in the air.'\n\nI was about to reply to my great-aunt \u2013 probably something pointless along the lines of 'Well, this is weird.' Instead, I shut my mouth and listened to the voice in my head. It was a voice I recognised, the voice that had promised me we would find the pillar here.\n\n'A lot of people want this pillar,' Foirfe said. 'It's the only one left, which makes it the most dangerous and sought-after magical object in the world. People will fight over it, and I don't like it when people fight. The mark on your palm is a key, Katy. A key that only you can use. It unlocked the pillar from its bond to Caoimhe, and it will continue to unlock the pillar for you, and only you. You can channel it, and Eva can channel you, to complete Hamish's spell. After that, you can do anything you like with it, but\u2026 I do have a certain fondness for the Riddler's Express.'\n\n'But how can I put it in the train if only I can use it?' I asked, aware that my friends were staring in confusion.\n\n'You just have to be there to aid in the installation. And once you help to install it, it shall be tied to that task, unless you choose to move it again. But\u2026 I can see how you might have different ideas for it, considering you almost died on the train. So, I shall leave the final decision up to you.'\n\nI staggered a little as I felt her leave my mind. 'You could at least have said goodbye,' I muttered. 'I'm all right,' I added, as Cullen and the others approached me. 'It's just\u2026' I held up my hand. 'It turns out that the pillar is a one-woman magical object.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "For our second attempt at the spell I stood closest to the pillar, with one hand on it and my other on Eva, letting her channel the magic through me. Just as when I'd touched the pillar earlier on, the pain subsided as soon as my hand made contact. And I was sure: it was mine and I was its, and together we could accomplish anything.\n\nDid I want to accomplish the task of returning the Riddler's Express to the rails? Meh, I wasn't sure about that. But I definitely wanted to make Hamish slightly less furry.\n\nEva gave me a small nod and said, 'I can feel it, it's working,' before aiming her wand at Hamish. Her incantation was a simple one:\n\n\u2003'A pillar was used to seal this man's fate\n\n\u2003Now let this other pillar undo that spell of hate\n\n\u2003Reverse the wrong that has been done\n\n\u2003Return him to his own true form.'\n\nThe spell worked so quickly that it felt almost anticlimactic. White light shot from the pillar, into me, and onwards into Eva. It raced through the circles, making first the photograph glow, next the clump of hair, and finally, Hamish was bursting with magic, his body transforming fast before our eyes, from a dog on all fours, to a man on all fours.\n\nHuman again, Hamish stood up cautiously, as if testing his legs. There was so much emotion on his face. He appeared to be feeling all the feels: a lot of relief, a smidgen of disbelief, equal amounts of happiness, awe and shock, and a second smidgen of disbelief\u2026\n\n'Oh dear.' Ned turned bright red. 'That's\u2026 that's definitely your true form, Hamish. Why didn't it occur to us to bring any of your old clothes with us?'\n\n'Somebody make it go away!' cried Cleo. 'The sight of it is hurting my beautiful eyes!'\n\nHamish's hands quickly moved to cover his unmentionables.\n\n'Don't worry, Cleo,' said Eva, reaching into that bigger-on-the-inside bag of hers. 'I've got it covered.' She threw a pile of clothes in Hamish's direction. 'They're my brother's. They should fit.'\n\nHamish gave Eva a grateful (and some might say slightly soppy and love-struck) smile, and quickly got dressed.\n\n[ When She Smiles, it's Like Sunshine ]\n\nThere was something euphoric about walking out of the house that day: me, Cullen, Ned, Jay and Cleo, Jude and Eva and, of course, Hamish. It was with great difficulty that I resisted the urge to do a little jump and thrust my fist in the air.\n\nAt first, Finn simply rushed towards us, no doubt about to scold us for the many stupid things we'd done. 'You all look all right, which is nice but\u2026 no way.' His eyes fell on Hamish. 'No way. No flipping way. You did it! You actually did it!'\n\nHamish allowed himself to be hugged by Captain Plimpton for a few seconds before pulling away and pointing at the nearby carriage. It was drawn by P\u00faca shifters in the form of horses. The carriage door was open, and a woman was waving out at us. She wore a light yellow dress, and a crown of willowherb encircled her hair.\n\nThis was the Queen of the Si\u00f3ga, one of the most powerful women in the world.\n\n'You didnae manage to break the magic, Your Majesty?' said Hamish with a wink. 'That surprises me.'\n\nFor some reason, Hamish's comment to the Queen seemed to infuriate Finn. 'She didn't even try,' the captain said, glowering at Her Majesty. 'Oh, she says she did. But most of the time she was here she just sat in the carriage drinking tea and eating sandwiches.'\n\nThe Queen beamed, a big, bright, butter-wouldn't-melt smile. 'I brought enough to share, didn't I? And now that I see that everyone is safe and well \u2013 with one of you very much improved \u2013 I suppose I can finally admit that, no, I didn't make much effort to break the magic and enter the house. It was a memory spell, from what I could tell, and rather a beautiful one, too. It would have been rude of me to break it.'\n\n'Told you so,' murmured Aunt Jude.\n\nFinn continued to glower. 'I should have asked your granddaughter to do it instead.'\n\n'Hah!' The Queen scoffed. 'If you think that, then you don't know my granddaughter very well. She would have made exactly the same call as I did. This lot were perfectly capable of resolving things in their own time.'\n\n'What about Winston?' I asked, looking around. I'd seen no sign of him while I was strutting up the driveway, but Finn had told me he'd be here. After all these years of wondering what had happened to his big sister, he would finally know the truth. It wasn't a nice truth, but it was one that he and his mother deserved to know.\n\n'He asked one of my officers to bring him back to his cell the second you got out,' Finn informed me. 'Probably because he doesn't want you to try and change his mind.'\n\n'Oh, so\u2026 there were no great revelations while we were in the house, then?' My euphoria was ebbing away. 'No last-minute confession from Siobhan? Winston is really still insisting he's the killer?'\n\n'He still is, yeah.' Finn propped himself against the carriage, arms folded. 'And I don't think Siobhan Cahill is ever going to confess, do you? But in the meantime, I'd love to know about how you got on in there.' He nodded to the house.\n\nI thought about it for a moment, but I had no idea where to begin. It had been an epic and exhausting day, and all I really wanted right now was a nice cup of tea.\n\nCullen put an arm around my waist. 'If you want to know so badly, then you can follow us back to the Bank,' he said. 'Because right now, I'm going home to make my girlfriend a cuppa.'\n\n'Aw.' I looked lovingly at him. 'You know me so well.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "What began as a cup of tea turned into a party. We'd quickly filled Finn in, and shooed him away to follow up on what we'd learned through the memories of Jude and Cullen's parents. In this enclave, having a Wayfarer in your pub wasn't the best way to attract customers, so it wasn't until Finn was gone that the drinks began to flow.\n\nNews about Hamish had spread quickly, and residents wanted to congratulate him. Most of the Wentforth's College faculty turned up as well. But we would never be able to tell the real story of how Hamish became a man again. For one thing, Cullen didn't want to be known as a Montrose. He was perfectly happy to remain as Cullen Keats. And for another, I wanted to keep the existence of the pillar a secret. Just because I was the only one who could unlock its magic didn't mean that it was safe \u2013 or that I would be, if word got around. Criminals could be ever so determined.\n\nAnyway, I'd decided that maybe Foirfe was right. The Riddler's Express wasn't the worst train in the world. And with the advantage of a pillar powering it once again, it would always be on time. Surely the people of Ireland deserved at least one punctual train?\n\nThankfully, the enclave's residents were always happy to accept evasive answers \u2013 probably because if they started asking too many questions about you, then you might ask questions about them.\n\nIt was an amazing party, but after such a big meal at the mansion and so much excitement and emotion, I wasn't much in the mood \u2013 especially when, at about one in the morning, I saw Hamish head upstairs with Diane.\n\nEva left immediately after. She didn't even say goodbye." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "I had no appointments until the following afternoon, so I slept in until ten. I meant to sleep later than that, but I was far too irritated with Hamish. So much so that, when I went to Dolly's Caf\u00e9 before work, I didn't buy him a muffin.\n\nOh, I knew I had no right to be annoyed with him. If anything, I should be happy. He'd been crazy about Diane for a long time, and she about him. And I didn't usually like to meddle in other people's romantic lives, either (ahem).\n\nI'd just been so sure that there was something real between Hamish and Eva. But Eva, after everything she'd done to help, had gone home unhappy.\n\nI was so annoyed that I actually tackled the accounts, and I was enjoying an argument with my enchanted calculator (it wanted me to consider charging customers for the tissues they cried into after I told them their spouse was a cheat) when Hamish arrived.\n\n'Is that a muffin?' He pointed to my half-finished chocolate muffin while he adjusted his chair.\n\nI didn't look up at him. 'Mm hm.'\n\n'Hey, what time is the landlord of the Rusty Warlock coming in today? Because I have to add something to his file. His latest girlfriend isn't just cheating and stealing from the till. She's also advertising his flat as a bed and breakfast.'\n\n'Hm.'\n\n'Katy?' I could sense his confusion. 'What's going on? You havenae even looked at me.'\n\nI snapped my head up. He looked nice today. He was wearing jeans. An actual pair of jeans. And a T-shirt. An actual T-shirt. 'Nothing. Nothing's wrong.' I returned to the accounts, just in time for the calculator to say: 'You should dock his wages for being late.'\n\n'What?' Hamish left his desk and came to sit on mine. It was ever so strange to see him positioned that way. I wouldn't even have to wipe the hairs off afterwards. 'Is that what's wrong with you? I thought you said we weren't coming in until after lunch. If anything, I'm early.'\n\n'Oh, I know you are.' I allowed myself to look at him. 'I'm sorry, Hamish. I'm being a moody cow, and it's not your fault. It's just\u2026 I saw you go upstairs with Diane last night. I know it's none of my business, though, so\u2026 if you're happy, then I'll be happy for you.'\n\nHe jumped from my desk, pulling at his hair and saying, 'Oh no, oh no, oh no! Did Eva see me, Katy? Did she?'\n\n'I think she might have. She left straight after, so\u2026'\n\n'Oh no, oh no, oh no! She'll think\u2026 But I'm not\u2026 Oh, Katy, I have to put her straight. I only spent half an hour with Diane last night. You can ask Ned \u2013 I went straight up to the flat and slept in the attic room, alone.'\n\nI stared at him. 'A lot can happen in half an hour, Hamish.'\n\n'Take your mind out of the gutter, Katy! I went to tell Diane that it's not going to happen, me and her. She didn't seem too cut up about it, to be honest. She hadn't even broken up with the bacon sandwich guy yet, and she had phone calls from three other guys in the middle of our conversation.'\n\nHe let out a tired-sounding sigh. 'I lusted over her for so long. More than lusted. I was really crazy about her. And she liked me too \u2013 that's the whole reason Jonathan turned me into a bloody dog in the first place. But Katy, it's just not like it is with Eva. Diane is beautiful, and sweet. But I cannae talk about wizardry with her. Eva, though\u2026 she's smart, and she's sexy, and when she smiles\u2026 oh, Katy, when she smiles, it's like sunshine. And the longer I've known her, it's been as if\u2026 as if Diane has faded from my thoughts, little by little. And now, now I can see that Diane is pretty, but\u2026 but Eva has somehow become the most beautiful woman in the world.'\n\n'So why the fluff haven't you done anything about it, you eejit?'\n\n'Good goddess, Katy, you're mean today. I havenae done anything about it because\u2026 well\u2026 I wasnae sure it's reciprocated. Eva's known me as a dog, Katy. A great big hairy unspecified breed. What I was feeling for her was never going to be a two-way street.'\n\nI pushed the remainder of the chocolate muffin towards him. 'Well\u2026 she might not be into your furry side, but she's definitely expressed an interest in your manly side.'\n\n'Go away with that!' He picked up the muffin. 'She has? No, she hasnae. You're pulling my leg.'\n\n'I'm not.' I shook my head. 'Can't afford to, now you've only got two of them.'\n\nThrough a mouthful of chocolate, he said, 'Very funny. So you think I should go see her after we're done here?'\n\n'No. I think you should go and see her now. She'll be at Wentforth's, teaching summer classes. I'll deal with stuff here.'\n\nHe didn't need me to make that offer twice. He stood up, wiping his mouth and brushing the crumbs off his jeans. Next, he patted his head. 'Wait \u2013 where's my hat?'\n\n'You don't need it anymore.'\n\n'Aye, you're right! But\u2026 where's my wand? Aargh! It's still in storage. You know what? I'll run across the city. That'll be romantic, won't it? Maybe it'll even rain along the way. And a boombox! I need a boombox!'\n\nI gave him a few tuts of mock-annoyance. 'So, when you said you had absolutely no interest in watching chick flicks from the human world with me last Sunday afternoon, what you actually meant was that you'd already seen them all.'\n\n'Well\u2026 I may have taken a wee poke through your collection from time to time. So\u2026 do we have a boombox?'\n\n'No boombox, I'm afraid. And you won't be able to run through the rain, either, because it's sunny right now. You'll just have to head out the Other Door and walk around the corner to Eile Street.'\n\nHe rushed to the Other Door, and had just pulled it open and asked me, 'How do I look?' when there was a soft knock at the door. Not on the Other Door, though, but on the other door \u2013 it was the Scary Door upon which someone was knocking.\n\n'Huh.' As I drew open the Scary Door, looking out onto Strange Lane, there was nobody there. There was, however, the sound of running footsteps.\n\n'Look, Katy,' said Hamish. 'On the ground.'\n\nI followed his eyes, and stooped down to pick up a large cardboard box. 'There's a note attached,' I noticed, setting it down on my desk and pulling open the envelope, which was sealed with a piece of chewing gum. On a grease-stained page inside, the following words were written:\n\nWe might not like the law here in Samhain Street, but we can't let an innocent man go down.\n\nBah Humbug!\n\nWhen Hamish and I headed to the Wayfarer Station, Cullen came along with us.\n\n'But I'm going to make sure Finn knows that this is the last time I take part in anything Wayfarer related,' he insisted. 'It's only because of my family's connection to Winston that I'm interested in seeing how this ends.'\n\nWhile I smiled amiably, he continued to talk. 'I mean, I'll go on an operation with you if you think you might need me,' he said. 'Or if\u2026 say, it's date night and it's the only way we'll still get to hang out together. Or if Finn asks really, really nicely. Or if your hair looks irresistibly curly that day.'\n\nHamish turned to face him as we reached the station steps. 'What about if Finn's hair looks good that day? Would that be enough to get you back on his payroll?'\n\n'Hmm, maybe,' Cullen replied, bounding up the steps and opening the station door. 'But I'm not sure we could convince him to get a perm.'\n\nThe foyer was buzzing with activity when we entered. Janine was there with Theresa Tinsley and Jennifer Hammer, and all three were arguing with Finn.\n\n'Look, ladies, you're lucky to be let off with this, and you know it,' said Finn. 'To me, every person in this whole confusing mess seems like a suspect. It's only because of Winston's confession that the rest of you are free. And now you're trying to make me force him to talk to the lawyer you've hired? I can't do that, and you know it.'\n\n'But Winston didn't do it, Captain Plimpton.' Janine gave Finn a plaintive look. 'We all know Siobhan Cahill is responsible. Winston's only confessing because he thinks I'll be the one to take the fall.'\n\nWhile they argued back and forth, Hamish, Cullen and I approached. 'We have something you need to see,' I said, holding up the open box.\n\nFinn peered inside. 'Flash drives, holovisual recordings\u2026 what is all this?'\n\nI grinned. 'Oh, only the best Christmas present Winston Wolfe could ever receive.'\n\n'Huh?' Finn scowled. 'It's not Christmas, Miss Kramer.'\n\n'Oh, bah humbug, Captain Plimpton. Just watch them, all right?'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Among the residents of Samhain Street, there were some wonderful contradictions to be found. There was a frightening-looking spider who baked the most amazing chocolate muffins, there were contract killers who rescued puppies and kittens, there were thieves with hearts of gold\u2026 and most importantly, there were people who said they didn't use CCTV, when actually they did.\n\nIn Finn's office, we watched the footage. From so many different angles, the evidence was clear. Siobhan had been filmed in the early hours of the morning, heaving the enormous Christmas star from the refuse skip in the alley, planting Winston's Toymakers' Guild card, and carefully placing the star directly beneath Giles's office window.\n\nShe'd been filmed sneaking into Tinsleys', without the use of magic, on the day of his murder. Dressed exactly like her co-workers, and keeping her head down, Siobhan had walked in through the back door, unnoticed. We saw her in Giles's office, just a few seconds after his fight with Janine. Siobhan strode in and, without preamble, simply pushed him out the window. His shock, coupled with her swift motion, meant that he didn't even have time to defend himself.\n\nWe saw yet more footage of Siobhan, from the front of the building, minutes after Giles's death. While the rest of the workers were rushing out into the yard, Siobhan had casually strolled out the front door with a smile on her face, and no idea that there were dozens of hidden cameras pointed her way.\n\n'It's all here.' Finn shook his head in wonder. 'I mean, some of it is from a bit of a distance \u2013 the stuff in Giles's office was filmed from a building behind. And we'll need to verify it all, of course. But\u2026 I think it's safe to say we've got her. We've actually got her.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "A short while later, Hamish, Cullen and I watched from an observation room, while Siobhan was interviewed.\n\n'We have it all on tape, Siobhan,' Finn told her. 'And Winston Wolfe has retracted his false confession. You are going down for this. But just for my own peace of mind, can you answer a few questions? Janine found the toy outside Giles's office. The werewolf riding a broom. Did you leave it there?'\n\n'I'm not sure, to be honest. I dropped my bag when I ran off that night. My stuff spilled everywhere. I thought I picked it all up, but I was drunk and upset, so I\u2026 I suppose I could have left it behind.'\n\n'That was when you turned up to surprise Giles, except you heard him and Janine together in his office instead, right?'\n\nShe scowled. 'Yes. He was telling her he loved her, in the exact same voice he used to tell me the same thing. He was a lying cheat, and so was she.'\n\n'Okay.' Finn took a long, slow drink of what looked like another cup of green tea (how brave of him to give it another go), then grimaced at the taste before asking his next question. 'And why did you set Winston up? You planted his guild card in the skip you took the Christmas star from, didn't you? What did he ever do to you?'\n\n'It's not what he did,' she replied, a twisted smile on her face. 'It's who he loved. I knew Janine would try to go back to him once Giles was dead, and I knew Winston would take her back, like an idiot. I wanted to double her misery. I wanted to take Giles and Winston from her. So she'd have nothing, just like I did.'\n\n'But you would have taken Winston away from his child,' said Finn, his face filled with disgust. 'Even though he was innocent.'\n\n'He's not innocent. He's a thief. Anyway, who cares what happens to Winston? He's just a stinking werewolf.'\n\nFinn sighed, stood up, and left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "On the steps outside the station, Winston hugged his wife and child, with tears of relief streaming down his face, while Theresa and Jennifer congratulated him.\n\nHamish, Cullen and I had a few minutes alone with Winston, just before he was released. We didn't tell him everything, of course, but we told him more than we'd told most people. He now knew what had happened to his little girl's namesake, all those years ago.\n\n'I'm so glad you're free,' said Theresa, when Winston finally broke the hug with Janine and Megan. 'No one should be murdered, not even Giles, but\u2026 I think I'm more sorry about the way he treated other people, to be honest. I can't do anything about the fact that we were all hurt by Giles, but I can make sure that some of his bad deeds are undone. Jennifer and I are going to forge ahead with our plans for a new business, giving Jennifer full credit for the toys she invented, and we'd love to hire you both.'\n\nJanine swallowed. 'But\u2026 I\u2026'\n\n'Had an affair with my husband? Yes, I know. I also know how much of a master manipulator he was. You and Winston are both extremely talented toymakers. We want you on our team.'\n\nFinn, who had walked out in the middle of it all, held up a hand. 'Whoa there, Theresa. Winston's still being charged with theft. He might be looking at time for that.'\n\nCullen shook his head and said, 'Seriously, Captain Plimpton? Give the bloke a break, will you? I mean, it's Christmas.'\n\nFinn rolled his eyes. 'It's July.'\n\n'Well, maybe,' I said. 'But I think a good word could be put in with someone or other if you wanted, couldn't it? After all, it's not going to make you look very popular when Winston's defence lawyer starts talking about the terrible start in life he had, the Montrose coven killing his sister, Giles firing him and badmouthing him for no good reason\u2026'\n\n'You know what?' Finn said with a sigh. 'You're right. I'll have a word with the higher-ups, see if we can let Winston off with a warning.'\n\n'Aw.' I grinned at Finn. 'See? You do know how to embrace the spirit of the season.'" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "It was coming up to eight that evening, and we were in the flat above Ned's shop. Cullen was cooking dinner for us all, and Aunt Jude, Peter M\u00fcd and Uncle Faster sat on the couch drinking wine, while Cleo lay curled up on Jude's lap. It was a much more sedate celebration than we'd had the night before, and I was already enjoying it more.\n\nNed rushed around, busily preparing her things for a night on the canal, with a giddy smile on her face the whole time. I already knew the reason for her smile, because I'd accidentally seen a message on her phone from Jay a short while ago:\n\n\u2002Looking forward to going out on the canal with you again tonight. I've packed a romantic picnic. Jay xxx\n\n'So\u2026 remind me again why you're still here?' I asked, passing a bowl of rice to Hamish. 'Not that it's not nice to have dinner together but\u2026 don't you have an attractive college professor to woo?'\n\nAs he brought the rice to the table, he said, 'Well\u2026 I've been thinking about it. Maybe I should give her some time. Maybe\u2026 maybe I should\u2026'\n\n'You're scared, right?' Cullen set a large dish of curry down at the centre of the table. 'Yeah, I know the feeling. But you know there's no need, right?'\n\n'There is every need.' Hamish poured himself a glass of wine. 'She was invited here tonight. She isn't here. Ergo, she's not interested. Ach, I was foolish to get so wrapped up in it earlier on. It's just as well we got that stuff dumped on our doorstep and I changed my plans. I would have only made a fool of myself.'\n\n'Yes,' said Cleo with a smirk, peeling open one eyelid. 'You would.'\n\nAunt Jude took the cat off her lap (there was a small yowl of complaint) and headed to the table. 'Eva didn't come to dinner because she's teaching an Intro to Practical Wizardry evening class as we speak,' she informed Hamish. 'She'd be very happy to have you pop by, I'm sure.'\n\n'Oh well\u2026 that's\u2026 y'know\u2026' Hamish let his voice drift away into mumbles, and took a sip of wine. 'Hey, someone's knocking again. Sounds like the Scary Door, I reckon.'\n\nAs he rushed downstairs, I followed him, unsure if he'd really heard something or if he was merely trying to escape his embarrassment. When I arrived in our office, he was standing at the open Scary Door, and Sol was stepping inside.\n\n'Hey there!' said Sol, excitedly holding up what looked like a large silver boombox. 'Someone dropped this Broom Box into my shop a while ago, to see if I could find a buyer. I thought you might be into it, Hamish, seeing as you'll be flying again.'\n\n'Broom Box?' I asked.\n\n'Oh, you know \u2013 a boombox that goes on a broom,' Sol explained. 'See?' He pointed to a couple of small hangers on the back of the unit. 'You hang it off the shaft.'\n\nHamish's face was a picture of comical shock, and he took the Broom Box from Sol. 'I couldnae love ye more than I do at this very moment, Sol. You\u2026 you're like destiny, standing on my doorstep.'\n\nSol took a seat on Hamish's chair. 'Well, I wouldn't go that far. And actually, there's an issue with this one. It's got an old tape stuck inside, and I can't get it out, so all it can do at the moment is play something called Romantic Rock Ballads on a loop. So I mean\u2026 are you really interested? I just brought it as an excuse, so you could fill me in on what happened with Winston.'\n\n'Oh, I want it,' Hamish assured him. 'I want it even more after what you just said. But Katy'll have to fill you in, all right? And I'll drop off the money for this in the morning. Because right now, I've got somewhere to be.'\n\n'Careful out there,' Sol cautioned. 'I saw hailstones first thing this morning, then there was sunshine all day after that. But I think it might rain in a few minutes, if the clouds I saw were anything to go by. It's like four seasons in one day. Well\u2026 three, but you get my meaning.'\n\n'I do.' Hamish grinned as he pulled open the Other Door, hitting the Play button and heading out into the night.\n\nI stood in the doorway, watching, as the clouds burst and the rain began to fall. Hamish glanced back at me with a wide and happy smile, then he picked up his pace, rushing headlong through the rain towards Wentforth's, and the next phase of his life.\n\n'See what I mean?' Sol sidled up beside me. 'Typical Irish summer.'\n\n'I know,' I said, my heart bursting with joy. 'Aren't our summers the best? Sometimes, they even include Christmas.'" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "10 Holiday Stories", + "author": "Dara Girard", + "genres": [ + "contemporary", + "short stories" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "The Special Guest", + "text": "\"She's daft, she is,\" Mary Marshall said as she set the dining room table for four.\n\n\"Mum, keep your voice down,\" her daughter Eva replied as she placed an elegantly designed napkin on the table.\n\n\"Why? She can't hear me, with her banging on in the kitchen like that. Acting as if she were expecting the bleeding queen,\" Mary said with a careless shrug, her words thick with a northern English accent she hadn't been able to drop after living nearly thirty years in the United States. Although, not much else about her had changed from the twenty-two year old new bride who'd settled with her husband in Hamsford, Maryland. Her figure had thickened after three children and only her hairdresser knew she was now completely grey. She dyed her shoulder-length hair a light brown to complement her soft cocoa colored skin.\n\n\"Mum, shh,\" Eva said with warning. She only called her mother 'mum' when she was annoyed with her. At twenty-five, she was slender and lovely, with skin that matched her mother's, and flashing brown eyes.\n\n\"You know we're no better egging her on this way.\"\n\n\"We're her friends.\"\n\n\"Aren't friends 'pose to tell each other the truth? We know that no good nephew of hers won't show up no matter how much she wants him to. Your father had the sense to stay away, and we're likely as daft as she is.\"\n\n\"John said he would come,\" Eva said, straightening a fork.\n\nHer mother sniffed. \"And you believe that?\"\n\nIt was more likely that Father Christmas would come to visit than John, but Eva didn't want to admit it for her friend's sake. \"It's not what we believe, it's what she does.\"\n\n\"Maybe the no good bastard might do us a favor and do the decent thing. That'd be a miracle, wouldn't it? Poor woman could use one.\"\n\nFortunately, Miranda Simmonds, the topic of their conversation, couldn't hear what the two women were saying. Her heart was too full of joy. Her dear nephew, John Washer, said he'd come and spend time with her over the holidays. He was the only family she had left who bothered to take any notice of her. Her sister had married for a fourth time, and lived in Trinidad, her nieces had little use for her, but John was different. For five years she'd cared for him, while her older sister got her life together after a cancer diagnosis and an addiction to pain pills.\n\nMiranda had provided John with a stable home that his parents hadn't been able to provide. With the help of her father, she'd helped care for John from the ages of six to eleven. She'd worked with her father at the hardware store he'd started. More often than not, she'd had to get between grandfather and grandson because they were both strong-willed men, but she hadn't minded. Family was important to her.\n\nBut after her sister improved, and John went back to live with her, they'd lost touch. He'd been a rambunctious boy, but she'd found him more inquisitive than annoying. No one had expected much from him, but he'd surprised them. He was a soldier and achieved the rank of staff sergeant. She felt that his desire to serve may have had a little to do with the years she'd raised him. She'd instilled in him the importance of a life of giving to others. She'd taken him with her to volunteer at the local homeless shelter, to deliver a turkey every Thanksgiving, or donate clothing or toys he no longer needed. She'd not wanted him to be like his parents, who'd barely looked past themselves to even recognize that they had a son, and later, two daughters.\n\nAnd now he was coming to see her after so many years. It wouldn't be another empty holiday. She'd had a series of them since her father's passing three years ago. Her sister was always too busy to schedule a time to visit, but that didn't matter now.\n\nThis year she wouldn't be a charity guest, although she knew her friends meant well. She wanted to return the favor and host a family dinner for them, and now she could. John was one of the lucky ones to come home from the war unscathed, though she didn't know how his mind might be. She wouldn't ask too many questions. She was just glad she had family to share the holiday with again.\n\nIt was kind of her neighbors to agree to come. It was a week before Christmas and she'd wanted to make it special. In several days they'd be leaving for New York to be with their family.\n\nMiranda cast an anxious glance at the clock. He'd be there any minute, she thought, as she cast a look over the food.\n\nSpices scented the bright, airy kitchen, which hosted toasted hardo bread, limeade, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, a turkey that was browning in the oven, fried plantain and an assortment of cookies and a cake. She could imagine the look of delight on John's face as he piled his plate high with food. \"Oh, pumpkin pie, my favorite. I can't believe you remembered,\" he'd say. And she'd grin and not let him know that she hadn't forgotten anything he enjoyed.\n\nHer phone alerted her to a text, waking her from her daydream. She glanced down and her heart stopped.\n\nWon't be able to make it. Sorry, Auntie.\n\nMiranda read the text four times. No\u2026five, then six times. It had to be a mistake. Or maybe a joke. As a boy, John was known for his silly jokes. He'd knock on the front door any minute and laugh. And she'd playfully hit him in the shoulder and scold him for scaring her. She waited.\n\nBut the knock at the door didn't come.\n\nWhy couldn't he make it? Why would he cancel a few minutes before he was supposed to arrive? The message had to be wrong. She texted him back.\n\nIf you're running late, I can keep the food warm.\n\nSorry, Auntie. Another time.\n\nSorry, Auntie. She could almost hear the casual, dismissive way he'd say it. He'd said it so many times before. 'Sorry Auntie, I couldn't help myself,' he'd say when she found he'd eaten a pie she'd meant for a guest, 'Sorry Auntie,' he'd say when he'd broken a new vase she'd brought, or when she'd told him not to play with his ball in the house, or when he'd leave jelly stains all over her father's woodworking magazine. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Always sorry.\n\nBut she was sorrier still. Sorry that she'd told her neighbors he was coming, even boasting to her employees at work. She usually didn't have any news. She'd devoted most of her life to her father\u2014a man who'd been her best friend\u2014and their store. That dedication hadn't bothered her until his passing, leaving an emptiness in her life. But her nephew's upcoming visit had given her something interesting to share\u2014and some attention\u2014at least for a little while.\n\nAttention usually passed her by. She knew many residents of Hamsford felt sorry for her. She was an example of what not to do with one's life. A cautionary tale for young women. \"If you don't find a man now, you'll end up a spinster like Miranda.\" \"Don't work so hard or you'll end up like Miranda.\" \"Be careful not to give so much or you'll end up an old maid like Miranda.\"\n\nShe couldn't blame them and usually didn't mind the chatter. Nobody had expected much from her, even when she was young. She'd never been a beauty\u2014more handsome than pretty, with chestnut brown skin and dark brown eyes. And now, pushing forty, she knew her options were limited, but she didn't regret her life. Except when the holidays came, shining a light on her loneliness, but not this time. This holiday was going to be different because her nephew\u2014a soldier\u2014was coming home for the holidays. And her colleagues had been pleased for her, they'd even given her a card and money to give to him. Thanking him for his service.\n\nWhat would she tell them now?\n\nMary came into the kitchen. \"It's getting late. Take off your apron and fix your hair,\" she said, glancing at the untidy bun at the top of Miranda's head.\n\n\"I forgot something,\" Miranda said, feeling the need to escape. To think. To plan. She couldn't tell them yet. She didn't want them to feel sorry for her. Not again. \"I have to go to the store and\u2014\"\n\n\"But there's no time.\"\n\nMiranda hung up her apron. \"I'll only be a minute.\"\n\n\"I'll go. Eva brought that scarf you wanted to borrow and\u2014\"\n\n\"No, no, you stay here,\" Miranda said turning away, tears building. Their kindness hurt her. They were so good to her. Couldn't John have come at least for them? He and Eva had played together when they were younger. Couldn't he have made an appearance for her? She'd even entertained a vague hope that they'd get on since they were both still single.\n\nMiranda left the kitchen and raced past Eva. She grabbed her coat. \"Won't be a minute,\" she said again before grabbing her car keys and leaving." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "She drove, not knowing where, or for how long. She didn't have much time. She couldn't leave Mary and Eva waiting forever. But how could she face them? \"I told you so,\" Mary would say. \"Didn't I say that nephew of yours was no good?\" Eva would just look at her with pity. It was all so humiliating! But she knew she had to go back; running away wouldn't solve anything. Oh Dad, I wish you could help me. I miss you so much, she thought, holding back tears. She had no other choice. She'd wrap up all the food and send Mary and Eva home. She'd lost her appetite anyway.\n\nMiranda slowed her car and stopped at the empty four-way intersection then quickly turned to head back home just as a young man in uniform stepped off the curb into the crosswalk. She braked quickly, but not soon enough. She felt the thud, saw him fall and her heart dropped.\n\nShe jumped out of the car and raced over to him, grateful not to see any blood.\n\nThe man sat up, looking dazed.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" she said, kneeling beside him.\n\n\"Serves me right,\" he said, standing. \"I wasn't looking where I was going.\"\n\nThat was true, but that didn't make her feel any better. She stood too, but he was nearly a foot taller than she was so she had to look up at him. He was young, though there was a cool cynicism to his features that belonged on a man much older. \"Do you need to go to a hospital?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, I'm fine really.\" He dusted off his pants, although the action did nothing to make them look less worn. \"What? You've never seen a man fall on his pride before?\"\n\nMiranda looked him over to make sure he was really okay. He had skin the color of rye bread and his face didn't appear kind. Perhaps, if he'd had more pleasant features she would have left him alone, but his biting brown eyes and sharp arrogant jaw made her think of her father when he was in one of his gruff moods or when a customer was ready to voice a complaint. She'd spent years soothing over such moments. A handsome, pleasant stranger would have made her flustered, but this irritated stranger with his sarcastic tone made her feel more relaxed.\n\n\"At least let me take you where you were going,\" she said. \"I can drop you there.\"\n\nHe looked over her head at something in the distance, making it clear he wanted to be somewhere else. \"I'm not going anywhere really.\"\n\n\"Where are you staying?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Haven't figured that out yet either.\"\n\nMiranda folded her arms. \"You're not from around here.\"\n\nHe met her gaze and for a moment a glint of humor lit his dark gaze, shedding the anger and cynicism and the years, making him appear younger than he had looked before. \"What gave me away?\"\n\nThe uniform for one. It was ill-fitted. Most of the Hamsford men who'd chosen to fight wore their uniform with an arrogance, as if to compensate for a sense of divided loyalties. Hamsford was a community filled with immigrants, some not sure if their sacrifice meant much to their new home country. There were still those in their adopted homeland who saw them as outsiders no matter how much blood they shed on battlefields abroad.\n\nBut this young man looked dejected. Defeated. Haunted. \"Are you sure you're all right?\"\n\n\"I'm fine, really,\" he said, then his stomach grumbled.\n\nMiranda couldn't help a smile. \"You're hungry.\"\n\nHe folded his arms, his frown increasing. \"Well, I'm fine aside from that.\"\n\nShe bit her lip, looking him up and down. He was just the right age, height and look. And if she did him a favor\u2026\n\n\"I've got a hot meal waiting,\" she said, \"if you'd just do one thing for me.\"\n\n\"What?\" he asked with caution.\n\n\"Pretend to be my nephew just for one evening.\"\n\nHis hands fell to his side. \"But I'm\u2014\"\n\nShe clasped her hands together. \"Please, just for an hour maybe two. All you'd have to do is stuff your mouth with oven roasted turkey, browned to a crisp succulent sheen, but if you're vegetarian,\" she quickly added when he started to speak, \"I also have mashed potatoes with chives, a bean salad medley, fried plantain and\u2014\"\n\nHis stomach growled louder.\n\nShe grinned. \"Is that a yes?\"\n\nHe frowned. \"You're a cruel woman.\"\n\n\"No, just a desperate one. This isn't a time for pride. I owe you anyway. I nearly ran you down.\"\n\n\"No, I walked into the street without looking.\"\n\n\"Yes, exactly,\" she said snapping her fingers. She ran her hand over an invisible dent on the hood. \"See that damage? That's your fault. What are you going to do about it?\"\n\nA slight smile touched the corner of his hard mouth. \"Fine, I'll be your nephew.\"\n\nMiranda opened the passenger side door. \"Good, thank you. Your name is John.\"\n\nHe sat inside and pulled on his seatbelt with a groan. \"Please don't tell me you call me Johnny.\"\n\n\"No, but Ms. Mary sometimes calls you Jay.\"\n\nHe froze. \"How many other people will be there?\"\n\n\"Just two,\" Miranda said starting the car. She glanced at the clock. She'd met this stranger just in time.\n\nHe tapped a beat on his knee. \"I'm not much of an actor.\"\n\n\"You don't have to remember much. I'll cover for you. It was so long ago that you were here I doubt they'll expect much from you. Just keep your mouth full and nod and you should be fine. And you can talk about your time abroad if you want, but there's no pressure.\"\n\n\"And what do I call you?\"\n\n\"Just call me Auntie.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Brett Greenwood stared at his reflection in the pristine bathroom mirror, wondering how he'd gotten into this mess.\n\nHe looked terrible. His uniform was worn and big. Why would she want to present someone like him? But he was hungry and if this was the price of a good meal, he'd do it with a smile, even though he hadn't felt like smiling for a long time. At twenty-eight, he felt decades older. Only a couple of hours ago he'd been on a bus leaving New Jersey heading south, not caring where he ended up. Twice, strangers had thanked him for his service and sacrifice. One little boy called him a hero. But he knew he wasn't.\n\nHe barely felt like a man. He didn't want to feel at all. After losing his savings in a business deal that had gone bad, he'd paid back his best friend, Leonard, who'd loaned him some money, only to discover he'd lost more than that.\n\nHe'd gone to Leonard's office to repay him and was told he was out of the office. And he'd believed the receptionist before he caught Leonard coming out of a utility closet with Sarah\u2014Brett's girlfriend\u2014both of them adjusting their attire. If it had been someone else, he would have found it funny. Sarah didn't even use the ladies' room and never took public transport, and yet this was where they'd decided to be intimate.\n\nHe just stared at them, hardly hearing their excuses as they tumbled out of their mouths like rice spilling out the bottom of a bag.\n\n\"We were going to tell you.\"\n\n\"It's not what you think.\"\n\n\"It hurt us too.\"\n\n\"Look, we didn't mean it to happen.\"\n\nHe couldn't even remember who said what; he was just afraid he was going to be sick. Since grade school, Leonard had been like a brother to him. He looked chagrined, but nothing more. Sarah had tears shining in her eyes, her dusty skin red from embarrassment, guilt or exertion. Considering what they'd been up to, he wasn't sure.\n\nWhat hurt most was that she'd made it clear he hadn't been worth waiting for. She couldn't even wait two years for him. The woman he'd planned to marry, to spend his life with, had traded him in for his best friend and his six-figure salary.\n\n\"We got involved around the time when\u2026when we feared you were dead,\" Sarah said. \"I turned to him for comfort.\"\n\n\"And after you found out I was okay?\" Brett managed to say, his tongue feeling like a lead weight in his mouth.\n\n\"It was too late,\" Leonard said.\n\n\"We couldn't tell you,\" Sarah added.\n\nHe felt like such a fool. All those online talks, texts, emails. They'd been lies. He'd stayed true, when lots of his other pals hadn't, and this had been his reward.\n\nAfter paying Leonard what he owed, Brett had two hundred dollars left and decided to catch a bus.\n\n\"Where are you heading?\" an older man with an island accent asked him in the bus depot while they both stood in line.\n\nThe man's voice was soft, like a whisper, but Brett could hear it despite the sound of a baby crying, wheels of luggage carts dragging along the ground, and discordant conversations. \"Doesn't matter, I just want to be away.\"\n\n\"Then you should go to Hamsford.\"\n\nBrett met the man's eyes, a little surprised by their intensity. He was a large, dark-skinned man with a trim white beard. \"Is that where you're going?\"\n\n\"No, but you just look like a man who needs some peace.\"\n\nHow right he was, Brett thought, but he still hesitated.\n\nThe man nudged him with his elbow. \"Go nuh. What you haffi lose?\"\n\nBrett took a deep breath, then impulsively bought a ticket. He left without any luggage or even an overcoat. He just needed to get out of the city, to get away from the memories, from his failed plans.\n\nHours later he got off in Hamsford, a place he'd only known vaguely about because of a store his father used to talk about here. Brett walked around in the cool air, listening to the different accents, many reminding him of the stranger and his own Jamaican parents who'd left him too soon. He briefly thought about his father, who was a foot shorter than him, and who'd liked to pat him on the back and affectionately say, \"How's my little boy?\" It was a silly joke that had always made him smile; his mother would just shake her head. She was as small as his father. Whenever they stood on either side of him, they looked like the perfect bookends. And before their passing, he'd wanted to scoop them up and carry them around with him. With them he'd never felt alone, he'd always felt loved. Now he had no one to keep his loneliness at bay.\n\nHe missed them. He missed them so much it ached. He felt the sting of tears. He'd hope to come home to Sarah, but now knew he'd spend the holidays alone.\n\nAlone with the bitter crumbs of dashed hopes. He walked around the streets of Hamsford as a cool evening sun painted the sky in pastel hues. He passed a food market, the scent of vegetable patties and cumin wafting towards him, reminding him that he'd left without eating anything. He shuffled by a row of small stores, children riding their bicycles, and a man chasing after a rooster that had no business being there. He made his way onto a residential street, the sights of the neatly lined homes twisting a knife into his heart. He'd hoped to have a home like this with Sarah. He decided to keep his head down and block out the sights around him. He didn't want to see the well-manicured lawns, or the holiday decorations. That's when he'd stepped into the road.\n\nAfter being struck, his first instinct was to be angry. He wanted to be mad, he wanted to get into a fight and had a man gotten out of the car, he probably would have. He'd felt like smashing his fist into someone's face. A violent, primitive rage seized him, but it quickly disappeared when he saw her.\n\nA woman who stared down at him as if she'd run over a family of ducklings. For a moment that annoyed him because she cared and he didn't want her to. He wanted her to go away and leave him alone. Instead, he found himself drawn in by her warm brown eyes. People didn't usually look at him like that. They usually saw a threat, but not her. No matter how cutting or surly he seemed, she wouldn't leave, forcing him\u2014to his annoyance\u2014to notice how pretty she was. And then she'd asked for a crazy favor and he'd said yes.\n\nWith a shake of his head, Brett wiped his dirty face and large, cold hands with the fragrant scented soap and warm water.\n\nMinutes later he sat at the head of a table, which seemed to groan under the weight of many dishes, while three women stared at the man he was supposed to be\u2014Staff Sergeant John Washer. He'd run away from one woman and ended up in the presence of three. Fate had a funny sense of humor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "She wouldn't have recognized him, Eva thought as she stared at John. He didn't look anything like the boy she'd used to run from. And where had his vanity gone? Her mother used to call him Mr. O'Jay referring to a polished singing group the O'Jays from the past. 'Look it up,' she liked to tell him. John would never have worn a uniform that didn't fit him before. But perhaps the years overseas had changed him. That was possible. Although she doubted it. There was something she didn't trust about him.\n\n\"Remember when we used to play that video game and every time you scored you'd punch me in the arm?\" she asked him.\n\n\"What's past is past,\" Miranda said.\n\n\"I remember it clearly,\" Eva said, helping herself to another roll. \"Just wondered if he did.\"\n\n\"I guess I wasn't the nicest kid,\" he said without apology.\n\nEva frowned. Even his voice didn't seem to match what she remembered. Although she didn't know how John sounded now, she'd never imagined his dark, sarcastic edge. John was always about charm. That's why he got into trouble with little consequence. However, this large, grim man looked as if he'd spent half his life facing the corner. \"Think you're better now, soldier?\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\n\"We weren't even sure you'd make an appearance,\" Mary said, giving Eva a stern look. \"So that's an improvement.\"\n\nEva stared at her mother, surprised. She usually was more suspicious of people than Eva was, but she'd smiled with pleasure when John gruffly complimented her spicy rice. However, Eva wouldn't be as easily swayed no matter how handsome he was. She sensed something off\u2014something wrong. Ms. Miranda was too dear to her for her to ignore her instincts. She hoped John wouldn't stay long. That he'd spend one night in the little guest room Ms. Miranda so lovingly put together\u2014newly painted, aired, scented with a fresh bouquet of flowers\u2014and then disappear out of her life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\"You're doing great,\" Miranda said when Brett offered to help her in the kitchen 'Like you used to,' she'd added so that Eva and Mary wouldn't offer. Although they all knew that John rarely helped her and only did so reluctantly.\n\n\"Eva doesn't like me,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" Miranda agreed with a laugh. \"So you must be doing something right, she didn't get on well with John either. Unless\u2026\"\n\nBrett raised a brow at the sudden worried look on her face. \"Unless what?\"\n\n\"Unless you wanted her to like you. I'm sorry, I never saw this from your point of view. Eva is a very attractive young woman and she's single. I had thought maybe she and John, but with you here maybe\u2014\"\n\nBrett shook his head. \"Nope, I'm not interested. I'm off women for now.\"\n\n\"You're too young to be off women.\"\n\n\"I'm not interested.\" He took a bowl and placed it on a high shelf.\n\nMiranda pointed at it. \"That doesn't go there.\"\n\n\"I know. Promise you won't try to set me up with Eva.\"\n\n\"Why would I\u2014\"\n\n\"Promise.\"\n\nA sly grin touched her mouth. \"I could just get a stool.\"\n\n\"I'm warning you, Auntie.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I know. Stop looking so fierce.\"\n\nBrett blinked surprised. Usually his tough expression put people on edge, but Miranda looked amused. He couldn't understand why he didn't frighten her, but her response helped his tension ebb. She felt comfortable with him and he was starting to feel the same with her. \"Did John ever have an uncle?\" he asked, briefly wondering why there was no sign of a man around.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" he said feeling stupid. Just because there was no man in the house, didn't mean she was single. She could be dating. He silently swore. He had no business thinking about whether she was in a relationship or not. He wasn't interested in Eva and he wasn't interest in her. \"You haven't promised me yet.\"\n\nHer eyes twinkled. \"I promise.\"\n\nHe frowned, feeling his heart pick up pace and not knowing why. \"How come I don't trust you?\"\n\nHer smile widened. \"I don't know.\"\n\nHe didn't believe her, but Miranda got him wondering about something he didn't want to. Eva was attractive, smart, and clearly cared about her friend. But she rubbed him wrong. Reminded him too much of Sarah. Plus, he didn't like how she looked at him, no\u2014studied him\u2014assessed him. He didn't want to ruin Miranda's evening and hated Eva's questions trying to trip him up. He wouldn't fail for Miranda's sake, although he wanted to give Eva a piece of his mind. He also wished he had a chance to meet the nephew who didn't deserve the aunt he had.\n\n\"What do you find so amusing?\" he asked instead.\n\n\"You're cute when you're shy.\"\n\nHe took another bowl and put it on the high shelf to annoy her, feeling his face burn. \"I'm not shy.\"\n\n\"Okay. I promise I won't say a word.\"\n\nAnd to his relief, Miranda kept her promise and let him endure Eva's biting tongue and wary glances without trying to match them up. Then the evening was over and the two women were gone, leaving him alone with Miranda in her living room with coffee and cake. They sat in front of an unlit fire, the lights from her Christmas tree and garlands lit with an assortment of colors.\n\n\"What brought you to Hamsford?\" she asked.\n\nHe didn't want to tell her about something that was still too painful to admit. \"My father liked to order stuff from a hardware store around here.\"\n\nMiranda sat up. \"Simmonds Hardware?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's it.\"\n\n\"That's my store,\" she said, tapping her chest in excitement. \"It was started by my father. He always loved fixing things. Your father was a client?\"\n\n\"For years,\" Brett said, then told her his name.\n\n\"That's wonderful! I'll have to look him up in my father's notes. Your father liked building things too?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Brett said with a groan. \"Badly.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"How is he?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"Gone.\"\n\nShe refilled his cup. \"Mine too.\" She stood. \"Wait here.\" She left the room, then came back with an oversized, green journal. \"These are my father's notes,\" she said, taking a seat beside Brett so she could show him. \"He liked to write down things about clients so that he would remember them because each one was important to him. I think I remember him mentioning your father's name.\" She flipped through the journal's yellowed pages then stopped. \"Your father was a tool addict.\"\n\nBrett couldn't help a laugh. \"Yes, anything new and he'd buy it.\"\n\n\"Good man,\" Miranda said, reading her father's notes. \"Loves his wife and son, a boy named Brett. Remember birthday.\"\n\nBrett nodded. \"Yep, it's your father's fault that I'd get a gift card every year to buy something that my father would use to make a horrible mess.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be, it made him happy and I learned early on how to make repairs. If you have anything broken,\" he tapped his chest, \"I'm your man.\"\n\n\"I'll remember that,\" Miranda said, suddenly wanting to remember everything about him. She soon became aware of how close they were, felt the heat of his leg as it touched hers. Before she hadn't noticed the size of his hands, the breadth of his shoulders, the dark brown of his eyes that reminded her of rum cake.\n\nMiranda hastily shifted her gaze and looked at the clock. \"It's late. Do you have somewhere to stay tonight?\"\n\n\"No,\" Brett said, looking at another note her father had written. \"Just drop me back at the bus depot.\"\n\nMiranda licked her lips, wishing she wasn't so aware of how his body pressed against her side as he bent to look at the journal. \"I don't think the buses are still running.\"\n\nHe shrugged, his gaze still focused on the journal. \"That's fine. I'll stay there until morning and then I'll\u2014\"\n\nShe briefly closed her eyes, gathering her courage. \"I have a room already made for John, but you can use it instead.\"\n\nBrett's head shot up. \"You don't even know me.\"\n\nMiranda tapped the journal. \"My father did. You're practically family,\" she continued when he hesitated. \"And I owe you for hitting you with my car.\" He stared at her for a long moment, until Miranda grew uncomfortable. Did he think she was crazy? Maybe she was, but for some reason she didn't want to say goodbye yet. \"What?\"\n\n\"You're too trusting.\" He held out his hand. \"Give me your cell phone.\"\n\nMiranda handed him her phone, confused. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I'm giving you my full name, phone number and address,\" he said, putting the information in her address book. \"If anything happened to you, they'd know the last person you were with.\"\n\n\"Nothing's going to happen to me,\" Miranda said, surprised by his serious tone.\n\n\"You don't know with strangers.\" He handed the cell phone back to her. \"I am trustworthy, but not everyone is, so promise me you won't make an offer like this to someone else.\"\n\nMiranda folded her arms amused. \"You're really big into promises, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Especially when they're kept.\"\n\nShe affectionately patted him on the shoulder. \"You can relax. You're the first and last strange man I've asked to stay in my guest room.\"\n\n\"Good.\"\n\n\"Does that mean you're staying?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"I shouldn't.\"\n\nMiranda grinned. \"I'll take that as a yes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "What am I doing? Brett wondered as he paced the small guest room. Why did he keep saying yes to her? This wasn't like him. He should be waiting at the bus depot or staying in some motel somewhere, not in a cozy little room with freshly laundered sheets.\n\nHe heard a light tap on the door. \"Is everything okay?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he said, glancing down at the pajamas she'd given him to wear. It was a pair of her father's that fit surprisingly well. He'd never been able to borrow anything from his father.\n\n\"Let me know if you need anything.\"\n\n\"I just need to sleep,\" he said, climbing into bed, hoping he'd be able to.\n\nHe slept better than expected and woke up the next morning so rejuvenated that he offered to chop vegetables for the omelet Miranda planned to make for breakfast. For some reason he felt a slight anticipation of something, but he didn't know what. He focused on his task, thinking of what ingredients Miranda would add, then his mind drifted to Sarah. She'd been a master in the kitchen, chopping fast and efficiently. She'd once made him a dish he couldn't pronounce. Some French dish. Or was it Spanish? She spoke both languages fluently. He'd learned Portuguese from his maternal grandfather. Sarah used to tease him about why he had such a dull English name when he had such a rich ethnic heritage. He'd never told her his mother had named him after a hero she'd read in a novel.\n\nHero. Sarah would laugh at the word. He wasn't her hero and there'd be no happily ever after ending. He'd stopped believing in those.\n\nHe was so lost in thought that when he sliced through his finger, right down to the bone, he didn't feel the pain at first. He just saw the blood and felt anger at his own stupidity. Some soldier. He couldn't even handle a damn knife in a kitchen.\n\nBrett quickly grabbed a towel to stop the bleeding. As he held the towel he saw a red stain slowly come through and spread and he thought about his friend Jin Lee and his dirty jokes and acne-scarred face. His Burmese parents wouldn't be having him over this holiday, and Brett briefly thought of the son Jin would never see. Brett quietly raged against the injustice. Jin had people who wanted him home, who cared about him. Brett had no one. He'd fooled himself into believing he had someone who cared. Someone to come home to. He'd fought to survive for nothing.\n\nHe watched a blood droplet fall and land on the cream tile floor and his mind turned to Roger Beal, who'd been found swinging in his girlfriend's basement. And for a moment he understood the quest for peace. The desire to escape oneself, one's mind. To escape the twin demons of anger and sorrow with no in between. Pain, pain, pain. Pain of loss, pain of betrayal, pain of guilt. Would the pain end? Should it?\n\n\"What did you do?\" Miranda said when she saw him.\n\n\"It's nothing.\"\n\n\"You're bleeding all over my kitchen floor and you say it's nothing? Sit down.\"\n\nHe did so, his face burning from humiliation, but he kept his head high.\n\nShe looked at the wound. \"You'll need stitches.\"\n\n\"I can handle it.\"\n\n\"What? You think you can stitch it up yourself with one hand?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He'd stitched up lots of wounds before, and he watched her, daring her to ask him to explain, but instead she shrugged and said, \"Well, you're not going to. Come on.\"\n\nHe returned from having his hand stitched up at a nearby medical clinic, but quickly developed a fever. By the next day he was delirious. It had gotten infected and Miranda felt awful. She didn't know who she should call. If anything were to happen to him, it would be her fault, because of her silly lie. And in his delirium he spoke about his hates and fears and someone named Sarah. Was that someone to call? Unfortunately, he didn't have a cell phone on him, which she found unusual for someone so young.\n\nFortunately, by the third day, the fever broke, but he was still weak.\n\n\"How long have I been like this?\" Brett asked, his gaze drifting to the window where the moon shone bright outside.\n\n\"Two days.\"\n\nHe swore, then looked at her and apologized.\n\n\"That's okay, I'm your aunt, remember, not your mother.\"\n\nHe slowly sat up, making sure not to put any pressure on his wounded hand. \"You're not even that.\"\n\n\"I'm just glad you're better. This is payback for letting me use you.\"\n\n\"No, I really\u2014\"\n\n\"That was a joke. Let's get you something to eat.\"\n\nMoments later, Brett sat in the kitchen wearing an expensive maroon sweater Miranda had meant to give to John, feeling full after a meal she'd prepared. He looked around the kitchen at the frosted glass fronted cabinets and tea kettle in the shape of a hen. Miranda caught his look. \"That was my father's favorite. Said it reminded him of my mother.\"\n\nBrett wrapped his hand around the warm mug of spiced cider she'd prepared. \"My mother was like this drink\u2014soothing and sweet. You would have liked her.\"\n\n\"Wish I could have met her.\"\n\nHe took a sip of the cider then set it down. \"Me too.\"\n\n\"What if\u2026\" Miranda stopped and bit her lip.\n\n\"What if what?\" he urged her.\n\n\"It's a crazy idea, but just think about it. What if I were to meet them? What would breakfast have been like?\"\n\nBrett leaned back in his chair and shook his head. \"It would have been crazy. Likely with my dad making obscure references about his favorite game of cricket and my mother asking me if I've had enough to eat while piling my plate with more food.\"\n\n\"Let me have them over for breakfast.\" Miranda held up a hand before he could speak. \"I know it sounds crazy, but you pretended for me. Let me pretend for you. It's Christmas tomorrow and I'd really like to do this for you. What would you have liked to serve them?\" She pulled out her cell phone to start a list.\n\n\"Are you serious?\"\n\n\"Very. Come on. While you think of what you'd like to serve them let me go get my good dishes.\" She jumped up with the energy of a little girl getting ready to set up a tea party.\n\n\"But this is\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind.\" She put her phone away. \"I'll decide for you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "She'd done it again. Why couldn't he say no to her? Brett stared at the four place settings in wonder. Miranda almost made him really believe they were expecting guests. She'd given him one of her father's shirts and a pair of trousers to wear, but what amazed him more was that he was glad to have a reason to stay longer.\n\nThe cool morning rays of December splashed across the white plates and over the pan-fried jack, mackerel, scrambled eggs and papaya salad. Moments later, as she introduced herself and talked to the empty chairs in such a way that made it all seem real, he could see his parents. He could see the naughty twinkle in his father's eyes, the shy smile on his mother's face. Soon he was talking to them too and could imagine their laughter and feel their love. And for the first time in a long while, he felt at home, safe, wanted.\n\nAnd he could imagine having a home of his own and a family. He turned towards the hallway. \"Uh oh I hear the baby crying,\" he said.\n\nMiranda's eyes widened. \"Baby?\"\n\nThe look of surprise on her face made him eager to continue the pretence. \"Should I go check on her or\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" she said, quickly catching on. \"I'm sure your wife will have her quieted down soon and will join us.\"\n\nHis good humor fell. \"No, I thought\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe stared at her, embarrassment seizing his heart. He thought what he shouldn't have. For a moment he'd imagined that they were\u2026that she was\u2026but that was wrong. She saw him as a substitute for her nephew, nothing more. And he felt ashamed of his feelings. He had so little he had to offer her. Plus, he knew she only saw the difference in their ages.\n\nMiranda rested her hand on his arm and said, \"I've been telling your parents what a good father you are.\"\n\nHe nearly lost it then. It was as if she'd uncovered a secret desire. He'd wanted to be the man his father had been to him. But not only had she said the words that hit him at his core, she'd touched him. He hadn't been touched like this in so long, too long and it sent a course of agonizing pleasure through him.\n\nHe didn't want to pretend any more. He didn't want to pretend to be her nephew, to pretend that his parents were alive, to pretend that he had a place to come home too. He had to end this.\n\nHe pulled his arm away. \"I can't do this anymore.\"\n\nMiranda blinked with concern. \"I'm sorry I didn't mean\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right. I'm just\u2026I should go.\"\n\n\"What's the rush? I'd like to show you the store.\"\n\n\"No.\" He gathered up a plate and went into the kitchen.\n\n\"You're angry with me,\" she said, following him.\n\nHe set the plate down on the counter. \"I'm not angry. I just\u2026it's time for me to go.\"\n\n\"On Christmas Day?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe rested her hands on her hips, staring at him for a long moment, then shrugged. \"Okay.\" She left the kitchen.\n\nHe paused. Somehow he'd expected her to argue, to fight him. Or maybe he just wanted her to so she'd give him a reason to stay. He went back into the dining room where he found her cleaning up the table. \"Miranda?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nHe stood in front of her. \"I'm older than I look.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"No, you're not.\"\n\nHe sighed. She was right.\n\n\"Besides, when you're in your twenties, it doesn't matter if you're twenty-four and she's twenty-five.\"\n\n\"I'm twenty-eight.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She winked at him. \"Then you are older than I thought. Anyway, there's no trouble if\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not interested in Eva, I told you that before. I don't want to pretend anymore. I want to play the uncle.\"\n\nShe stared up at him, wide eyed. \"You want to play my uncle?\"\n\n\"No, that's not what I meant. I mean, I want you to play the aunt and I play the uncle.\"\n\nMiranda shook her head then gathered up more plates and headed for the kitchen. \"Perhaps we should stop playing altogether.\"\n\nHe blocked her path. \"Only if we can start being real?\"\n\n\"Real?\"\n\nHe bit his lip then took a deep breath, holding her gaze even though it scared him. \"Please tell me you feel it too.\"\n\nMiranda took a hasty step back then set the plates on the table with a clatter. \"Of course I feel it,\" she admitted, sounding breathless. \"But it's just the season and we're both sad and lonely and happen to find\u2014\"\n\n\"Love?\"\n\n\"Each other.\"\n\n\"Isn't that the same thing?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nWith his good hand, he reached out and clasped her hand in his. \"Yes, it is. We both know this feels right.\"\n\n\"Who's Sarah?\"\n\nHe stiffened. \"What?\"\n\n\"You said her name over and over again when\u2014\"\n\n\"She's my past. She's\u2026not part of my life right now. You don't have to worry about anybody else.\" Brett clasped her hand tighter, feeling her hesitation and fear. \"I know it seems fast and I know it's sudden and I don't understand it all myself. But I do know that I want you to be a part of my life and I'll do whatever it takes to make that happen. I don't mind moving here and working in your store. Just until I get settled and\u2014\"\n\nMiranda looked down at their joined hands. \"This is crazy.\"\n\n\"No crazier than hosting my dead parents for breakfast.\"\n\n\"Well, when you say it like that,\" she began to say, but he stopped her words with a kiss. And soon no words were needed. When they finally drew apart, Miranda stared up at him in wonder. Was this really happening? She searched his face, seeing that the cynicism had gone from his eyes and voice, but there was still something a little sad in his expression. Something she couldn't understand.\n\n\"What do I have to do to get you to smile?\" she asked.\n\nHe blinked, confused. \"Why do I need to smile?\"\n\n\"I don't know. So that I can know you're truly happy.\"\n\nHis brows shot up. \"I don't look happy?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But I am,\" he said with feeling, gathering her close. \"More than I can say,\" he said then kissed her again, determined to make her believe him.\n\nThey spent Christmas Day in a hazy, all-consuming joy. They went to the movies to watch the latest action film, Brett holding Miranda's hand every time she jumped in fright, or stroking her hair when she buried her face in his chest. Later, she showed him around the town and took him to her greatest pride\u2014Simmonds Hardware. There, as she showed him around the building, where he saw a picture of her father as a young man, and they talked about the people they missed. The ones who never seemed far from their thoughts, but whose memory no longer caused them pain. That evening they shared their hopes and dreams for the future, falling asleep on the couch amidst the glow of fading firelight.\n\nMiranda woke up before Brett and snuck into the kitchen, hoping to surprise him with breakfast. She had his tray made when someone knocked on the door. She rested the tray in the foyer and answered.\n\n\"We just got back,\" Eva said. \"I wanted to see if you were okay and wanted to come over for\u2014\" She paused when her gaze fell on the tray. \"What is that?\" She didn't give Miranda a chance to respond. She pushed her way inside. \"Is he still here? And he's making you wait on him hand and foot?\"\n\n\"He's not making me do anything. We\u2014\"\n\nEva grabbed the tray. \"He's already making himself king of the castle.\" She headed to the stairs.\n\n\"He's not there, he's in the living room, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But nothing. I might as well say 'hi' to him. You look as if you haven't slept.\"\n\nFortunately, Brett was awake when Eva stormed into the room; he'd heard her voice and then her pounding footsteps. He silently swore. She certainly wasn't the first face he wanted to see in the morning. He stood up and reached out to grab the tray, hoping he could balance it with one hand.\n\nShe set the tray down. \"What did you do to your hand?\"\n\n\"The moment it becomes any of your business I'll let you know.\"\n\nHer lip became a straight line. \"Now listen here\u2014\"\n\n\"It's Boxing Day, but not the type that you think,\" Miranda said, trying for humor. \"Let's not\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't expect you to still be here,\" Eva said, ignoring her. \"But I'm glad you are. Because you don't fool me.\"\n\nBrett sat down. \"Fine, but first let me tell you\u2014\"\n\nEva sat cross from him, leaning forward as if she were in the middle of a tough negotiation. \"I don't care what you have to say. Find someone else to live off of. Find some poor girl with a place of her own where you can move into. You may not remember, but I won't forget all the pain you've caused your aunt over the years. But if you do the right thing, I'll salute you on the way out.\"\n\n\"Eva, that's enough,\" Miranda said. \"He doesn't deserve that.\"\n\n\"You're just blind because he's family.\"\n\n\"I'm not blind. I know that John is all that you've said. Unfortunately,\" she looked at Brett and offered him a wink. \"Or perhaps fortunately, he's not him.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"He was helping me save face. His name is Brett Greenwood.\"\n\nEva's eyes widened and she leaped to her feet. \"What!\"\n\n\"We both know\u2014\"\n\n\"That this is insane?\" Eva finished, her voice near a shriek. \"Ms. Miranda, you don't know what you're doing. You asked a perfect stranger into your home just so you could fool us?\"\n\n\"He's not really a stranger. My father knew his father.\"\n\n\"So what?\" Eva folded her arms and looked at Brett. \"So what are your plans?\"\n\n\"We plan to build a future together,\" Miranda said.\n\nBut Eva kept her gaze on Brett as if Miranda hadn't spoken. \"Are you planning on moving into this lovely house and then working for her? That would be real cozy for you, wouldn't it? You wouldn't have to work hard at all.\"\n\n\"Eva, what we decide is none of your business.\"\n\nEva continued to keep her gaze on Brett. \"I know it's a new age, but shouldn't a man provide something besides a dic\u2014\"\n\n\"Eva, I won't ask you again. He's a guest in my home and that's enough.\"\n\nEva spun towards her. \"You're selling yourself short. You let John treat you like dirt and you'll let this man do it too. Aren't you tired of people feeling sorry for you?\"\n\n\"Yes, but only because people feel sorry for me for the wrong reasons. They're sorry I'm not married or don't have kids. But I loved the life I made with my father and the adventures we had together. I don't regret helping my sister and nephew when they needed me. And I don't regret letting myself fall in love, even though I don't know the future.\"\n\n\"You're always taking care of others. When are you going to find a man who will take care of you?\"\n\n\"She's met him,\" Brett said, standing and moving to Miranda's side. \"I may not have much now, but I will.\"\n\n\"'Will' is a mighty long ways off from 'now,'\" Eva said with a sneer. \"Men like you are all talk. I met you in school, I see you in clubs, I see you at work. Opportunists who find lonely women\u2014\"\n\n\"Just go,\" Miranda said, surprised by the ugliness in Eva's tone. Eyes she'd once seen as so caring now frightened her, and the pity she'd feared to see had turned to disgust. \"Before you say something that will end our friendship for good.\"\n\nEva spun around and walked away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\"We have to get rid of him,\" Eva said, after she'd told her mother about her conversation with Miranda. They both sat in their living room while her mother put aside the gift items they knew they'd never use.\n\n\"Why don't you leave the poor woman alone?\"\n\n\"She doesn't know what she's doing.\"\n\n\"She's older than you are and has managed her life just fine,\" Mary said.\n\n\"You're the one who thought she was daft.\"\n\n\"I did, but maybe she knows something we don't.\"\n\n\"What could that be?\"\n\n\"What love at first sight is.\"\n\nEva rolled her eyes. \"That's ridiculous. She's being na\u00efve and so are you. I know more about men my age than she does. She doesn't know what men can be like.\"\n\n\"You sound jealous.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Eva rested a hand on her chest, wounded. \"Jealous of her?\"\n\n\"No, of him. Do you feel as if he's taking your place?\"\n\n\"That's outrageous. I\u2014\"\n\nMary sent her daughter a level look. \"Then leave her alone and stop worrying about things that have nothing to do with you.\"\n\n\"I know what men like him can be like. They see a woman with a fine house and good job and lonely bed and think they can fill it.\"\n\n\"And if she wants him to, is that your business?\"\n\n\"She deserves better.\" Eva shook her head. \"I can't believe\u2014\"\n\n\"If you'd stop talking, you'd open your eyes, pet.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Can't you recognize when you're in the presence of true love?\" She smiled at her daughter's shocked expression. \"I know that sounds odd coming from me, but it's true. I knew the first moment I saw him that he wasn't John.\"\n\n\"Yes, I felt it too because he's a fraud.\"\n\n\"No, because I saw a young man falling in love when he didn't expect to. Not even Miranda noticed how his gaze followed her. I'm glad they found each other.\" She stood. \"So you leave them be,\" she said, then went upstairs.\n\nTrue love? Eva looked out the window and stared at Miranda's house across the street, her mouth a straight line. \"Sorry Mum, I can't.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Somehow she knew he'd disappear from her life. She'd remembered their last conversation before he'd gone to take a shower.\n\n\"She's right,\" Brett said, taking a seat on the couch, staring at the breakfast that had gone cold. \"I don't have anything to offer you right now and\u2014\"\n\nMiranda sat beside him, taking his hand. \"That's okay.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No, it's not okay. What would your father think of a man like me? Moving in, having you pay my wages. It doesn't look right. I should at least be making my own way.\"\n\n\"I need some help at the store and I could charge you room and board. How does that sound?\"\n\nHe sighed. \"Do you mind if I take a shower?\"\n\n\"No, but a bath may be better. You don't want to get your hand wet.\"\n\n\"I'll wrap it tight,\" he said, then disappeared upstairs. She didn't follow him, giving him the space he needed.\n\nShe didn't know when he left. She'd been in the kitchen and hadn't heard his footsteps or the front door open and close, but when she'd gone upstairs, she found the door to his room open and the place empty.\n\nHer heart cracked and bled. She'd lost him. A wonderful dream had ended. She knew one day he would leave, but she hadn't expected it to be without a goodbye. She blinked back tears, then quickly brushed them away when she heard the doorbell.\n\nShe opened the door and saw Eva with a plate of cookies. \"It's a peace offering.\" She cleared her throat. \"To both of you.\"\n\n\"He's gone,\" Miranda said with a sigh.\n\n\"Did he\u2026?\"\n\n\"He didn't say anything. He just left.\" She flashed a sad smile. \"And there's no reason to pretend you aren't glad.\"\n\n\"That's not true. I was just worried about you. I didn't expect, I mean\u2026I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be. I'll make some tea,\" Miranda said, heading towards the kitchen. \"I'll meet you in the sitting room.\"\n\nEva slowly walked into the sitting room, stunned. Her wish had come true. He'd shown his true colors early. She'd gotten rid of him. She'd known he was no good, and now Miranda would see it. She hoped never to be as silly and romantic as her mother when she got older. True love? What crap. She sat down then saw a note on the coffee table. She picked it up.\n\n\"Darling Miranda, goodbyes are hard for me to say. I don't want to put pressure on you. I want to give you space to think about this\u2026about us. I do love you, but if you don't feel the same, I understand. I'm taking the four o'clock bus back to New Jersey. If you love me at all, and want to be my bride, just wave to me and I'll know your answer. Brett\"\n\nHe'd left a letter. Eva jumped to her feet, thinking of Miranda's sad smile. Her friend needed to see this. To see how he felt about her. Eva took a step in the direction of the kitchen, then stopped. But what if it was just all words? How much of it was true? That grim, arrogant bastard had no right to live off of Miranda. Eva glanced at her watch. It was two o'clock. She heard Miranda's footsteps and crumpled the note in her fist before shoving it in her coat pocket. She was doing it for Miranda's own good.\n\n\"So I guess he's gone for good?\" Eva asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it confirmed.\n\n\"Yes. He's moving on with his life.\"\n\n\"And so can you,\" Eva said, fighting hard to stop a smile." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Leaving had been hard, but he had no choice. Miranda was his weakness and she'd make him stay. But he had to do more. He had to make good, he had to be in a position to help provide. Eva's words sounded so much like something Sarah would say. That's why she'd chosen another man. Because he had nothing to offer. Could he blame her? He couldn't imagine facing Miranda's father or even his own with no prospects. How could he provide or protect her?\n\nBrett paced inside the bus depot. He'd pack up his life in New Jersey then find a place and work in Hamsford. Now he had a mission. A purpose. And it felt good. He had a place to come back to and he hoped a woman waiting. He'd hoped she'd have come early to see him with her answer. He'd promised not to bother her, but the tension was killing him. Maybe she didn't really feel the way he did. Maybe it had all been just a dream. A holiday dream. Maybe he couldn't extend it.\n\nHe bit his lip. He'd been wrong about Sarah. Was he wrong about Miranda too?\n\nNo, he couldn't believe that. He glanced at his watch. She'd come.\n\nJust one more hour and he'd be gone for good, Eva thought as she flipped through the mail, Brett's note still crumpled up in her jean's pocket. She'd thought of throwing it away, but she couldn't risk anyone finding it. Their shredder was broken and if her mother saw her burning something she'd get suspicious. She'd get rid of it later, when that man was completely out of town.\n\n\"Why do you keep looking at the clock?\" Mary asked, sitting down in front of Eva at the kitchen table.\n\n\"No reason\u2026it's just\u2026uh the mail carrier was late today.\"\n\nMary only nodded, sensing something was wrong, but not knowing what.\n\nMiranda sat in her living room and turned on her laptop to work on some accounts when she noticed a file was already opened.\n\nDarling Miranda\u2026\n\nBrett had written her a note? When? Her heart raced as she read it. Why hadn't he left it out for her to see? Had he changed his mind? Had he meant to delete it? Should she pretend she hadn't seen it?\n\nShe closed the laptop and stood up. No, she couldn't. She'd find out the answer from him. She glanced at the clock. It was three-forty. She had twenty minutes to get to the bus depot.\n\nShe sped to the bus depot and jumped out of her car just as the bus was pulling away. She ran and waved her arms hoping he'd notice her, although she couldn't see him. She shouted his name, hoping he could hear her over the noise of the bus engine. She was about to give up when his face appeared in the window.\n\nAt first she wasn't sure it was him. His smile was so big it transformed his face. Tears of joy touched her eyes as she soaked in the sight of his happiness. She blew him a kiss. He pretended to grab it then hold it to his heart and then he was gone, leaving her with an image she'd keep in her mind until she saw him again." + }, + { + "title": "Epilogue", + "text": "[ A year later ]\n\nWith the fire crackling, they decorated their freshly picked Christmas tree, Afro-Brazilian music, the kind his father loved to listen to, playing in the background. There was still gossip in Hamsford about their small, hasty wedding and Miranda's 'young man.' \"You know what he really married her for,\" some busybodies liked to say when they spotted the pair in the marketplace. But neither cared. Brett had already proven his worth with the employees of Simmonds Hardware and had doubled the profits within months. And as they celebrated their first Christmas together as a married couple, they felt as if they'd never been strangers.\n\n\"You're lucky I found the note on my laptop,\" Miranda said, placing a star ornament on the tree.\n\nBrett adjusted a light and frowned. \"I didn't leave a note on your laptop.\"\n\n\"Yes, you did. I read it and that's how I was able to see you before you left.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"But I didn't type anything. I handwrote it and left it on the coffee table.\"\n\n\"I never saw a written note.\" She grabbed her laptop, which had been on the coffee table, and opened the file she'd never delete. \"You didn't write this?\" she asked, showing the screen.\n\n\"Those are my words, but I didn't type it.\"\n\n\"That's strange,\" Miranda said, taking a seat.\n\nHe sat beside her. \"Could you see me typing with one hand?\"\n\n\"No, but that's so odd. I\u2014.\" She stopped when the file suddenly disappeared and the image of a cocoa colored man with a white beard appeared on the screen.\n\nBrett pointed to the picture, amazed. \"That's him! That's the man who told me to come to Hamsford.\"\n\nMiranda's mouth fell open. \"What?\"\n\n\"I should thank him for changing my life. I met him at the bus depot in New Jersey last year.\"\n\n\"You couldn't have,\" Miranda said, stumbling over the words. \"Are you sure it was him?\"\n\n\"Positive. Why do you doubt me?\"\n\n\"Because that's my father.\"\n\nBrett met her eyes, remembering the man's soft voice and warm presence. And then he thought about the day when they pretended that his parents had come to visit and how real it had all felt. Because it had been. Their spirits had joined them, and he'd never truly been alone. \"He brought me to you.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Miranda said with a smile. \"I told you my father always liked fixing things.\"\n\nAnd then her husband kissed her smile away, and they were two broken hearts fully mended.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Cup of Cheer ]\n\n\"No, no, no! I won't do it even for you.\"\n\n\"It's the holidays, Alyson. The least we can do as neighbors is spread good cheer.\"\n\n\"So you want me to give my delicious spiced cider to Scrooge next door?\"\n\nOf course his real name isn't Scrooge. It's Gareth LeBlanc owner of the second hand bookstore (creatively called Second Hand Books). Although the way he fussed over the books you'd think they were antiques instead of smelly old paperbacks and well worn hardbacks. I've only spoken to him a few times (when I wave 'hello', he just nods) and I can honestly say that I've only heard five sentences come out of his mouth. The only thing me or anyone else knows, was posted in a small write up in the weekly Community News: He was born in Dominica, the son of an English father and Dominican mother, and has travelled extensively.\n\nWhen he first moved in, I sent him a box of cookies to welcome him to the neighborhood. I knew that he lived in the apartment above his shop, as I did, and I'd hoped to be as friendly with him as I had been with the previous residents\u2014two elderly sisters from Trinidad who said my coconut cookies were divine. He didn't say they were divine, he didn't even say they were nice. He just returned an empty tin with a sticky note that said 'Thanks'. That's it, nothing more\u2026just 'Thanks'.\n\nIt took me weeks before I could stomach the thought of stopping by his shop. I finally decided to visit in order to see the type of cookbooks he had. I have to give him credit, he had a pretty good selection. So every few weeks I'd stop by and buy a few. I was buying two when I noticed this beautifully bound book from the early twentieth century called Amelia Armand's Complete Book of Spices. It was encased in the curio behind his head. I was certain it would be expensive, but I was willing to pay the price.\n\nI am a culinary historian and when I'm not in my store selling traditional and rustic crafts and recipe books, I recreate authentic dishes for functions at the Historical Society. A book like that would have been perfect for my collection.\n\n\"How much is that book behind you?\" I asked after purchasing several items. He adjusted the rim of his baseball cap. He always wore a baseball cap (perhaps he was going bald) and a tie that never matched his shirt (and color blind?)-- orange against a tan shirt.\n\nHe didn't even turn around to see what I was referring to. \"It's not for sale,\" he said in a cutting deep voice that could cause one to have goose bumps, if one liked the resonant sound of low baritones. I haven't stepped foot in that bookstore since. I'd rather drop my money in a sewer than fatten his bank account again.\n\n\"Since you're so desperate to spread holiday cheer why don't you do it?\" I asked Cora.\n\n\"Because I didn't make the cider and it is better coming from you. You have that cheery, friendly aura about you.\"\n\n\"You mean jolly, don't you?\"\n\nShe made a face, but wisely didn't reply. I'm not fat, but I'm not slim either. Not like Cora who has a nice slender build which she further accentuated by wearing tight suede trousers, a pink cashmere blouse and black boots with heels that could cause the sidewalk to crack. But I didn't envy her, I had inherited my stout full-figure like all the women in my family and was curvy in all the right places. My mother who had been born in Venezuela, of Trinidadian parents and Barbadian grandparents had made sure, while I was growing up, that I would be proud of my figure. I preferred my loose fitting cotton tops and trousers and comfortable walking shoes. Customers said I made them feel at home and that feeling was always good for business.\n\n\"Besides, it's slick and icy outside,\" she complained. \"You wouldn't want me to trip, would you?\" She wiggled her high heeled boot.\n\n\"It would serve you right.\"\n\n\"But what would you do without me?\"\n\nI scowled. She was right; her business acumen had helped turn my small shop into an international destination. I was getting mail orders from as far away as Dubai.\n\n\"He's not married, you know.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes. \"Yes, I heard Dracula is single too.\"\n\nShe sent me a look; I ignored her. Ever since I hired her as my assistant five years ago she's been trying to match me up. It's not that I don't like men. I do. Just not modern men. You know: the modern man who won't hold the door open for you, but instead will let it slam in your face; the modern man who expects you to pay for dinner while he pays for dessert; the modern man who thinks the question \"Would you like to come inside?\" means you.\n\nI wanted something more. I wanted romance. Grand gestures like a carriage ride on a snowy day, or holding out my chair and remembering to walk on the outside of the pavement so that passing cars wouldn't splash me. Or even calling me by my name instead of 'honey' or babe' or confusing me for another woman (a long story). But I'd given up on romance years ago. Modern men didn't do grand gestures. They didn't even do small ones.\n\n\"Look, it's starting to snow,\" Cora said, glancing out the shop window. \"How can you not be friendly at a time like this when everything looks white and fresh?\" She shoved the thermos filled with hot cinnamon-nutmeg cider into my chest. \"Go on and spread some holiday cheer.\"\n\n\"He'll probably bite my head off again,\" I mumbled slipping into my coat and hat.\n\n\"He's just a man, Alyson. Not the big bad wolf.\"\n\nI made a face and wrapped a scarf around my neck.\n\nThe wind nearly knocked me back into the shop. A freezing blast stung my cheeks while a stream of cold tears fell from my eyes. He's not worth this. I turned around ready to go back in my store. Cora blocked the doorway and mouthed 'Go.' I briefly wondered how many homicides occurred during the holiday season then spun around and hurried next door.\n\nThe bell chimed above my head as I entered the shop. It was quiet with only a few customers rummaging through books on the shelves. I stomped my snow-covered boots on the rug and glanced towards the counter, which was conveniently empty. Perhaps he was out back somewhere polishing one of his beloved books. I could leave the cider on his desk with the added benefit of not having to see him. Great! I smiled in triumph, took one of his business cards and scribbled 'Happy Holidays' on the back.\n\nOnce finished I looked up and saw it: The book. I glanced side to side to make sure no one was watching then I lifted myself on the counter, leaned closer and squinted, hoping I could tell whether the book was really old or just an imitation. By looking at the paper texture and type it looked like the real thing. My mind raced with all the possible recipes hidden inside.\n\n\"It's not for sale.\"\n\nI fell back and stumbled before regaining my footing. I stared at him. Or rather at his chest, since that was the first thing I saw. Today he wore a red shirt and green tie--at least he looked festive. Although I doubt that was his intention, he didn't seem the festive sort. I finally raised my gaze to his face. As usual he wore his baseball cap low, shading his eyes. I was glad since I didn't care to read their expression. \"You know I could offer you a lot of money\u2026\"\n\n\"It's still not for sale,\" he repeated in that same deep baritone.\n\n\"Then why do you have it there?\"\n\n\"Because I like it there.\" He abruptly turned and went behind the counter. \"But you're right, I should make things clear.\" He quickly wrote a sign that said 'Display Only' then taped it up. He then turned to me. \"Better?\"\n\nI frowned, trying my best to look confused. \"Does that mean it's not for sale?\"\n\nHe blinked looking bored. \"Did you want something?\"\n\nI didn't think he would have appreciated hot spiced cider over his head so I shoved the thermos into his chest, which was surprisingly harder than I thought it would be. Weren't dusty bookworms supposed to be a little soft around the middle? \"This is for you.\"\n\nHe frowned and looked down at the thermos. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"It's poison.\"\n\nHe glanced up quickly. His surprise gave me a chance to look at his eyes, which were big, brown and oddly innocent.\n\nNo one with eyes like those could be all bad. \"I was hoping to kill you off so I could steal the book.\"\n\nThe corner of his mouth kicked up as he twisted the lid and took a sniff. \"Smells like hot cider.\"\n\n\"Spiced cinnamon-nutmeg cider if you want to be specific.\"\n\nHe poured himself a cup then took a sip, nodded as though in approval then looked at me with a playful glare that said a lot more. \"It's still not for sale.\"\n\nI shrugged, feigning defeat. \"I know.\" I took a step back, suddenly feeling both restless and giddy at the same time. I knew it was time to leave. \"Well, Happy Holidays.\" I turned and left before he could say anything more.\n\nHe returned the thermos the next day, or rather had it delivered. I had been working on our website when Cora came into the office. She held the thermos against her and said in a loud stage whisper. \"It's from him.\"\n\n\"Him who?\"\n\n\"Scrooge.\"\n\nI pretended not to care, though I felt my face grow warm. \"So? Set it in the kitchen.\"\n\nShe waved a piece of paper. \"He sent you a note.\"\n\nI took the envelope (Cora said I snatched it, but she tends to be dramatic). It was real parchment paper with my name scribbled across in his broad handwriting. For a moment I pictured him sitting at an old oak desk under a low hanging lamp, while a stripped cat sat on his shoulder, lazily waving its tail (Gareth didn't have a cat, but I liked the image). I could hear the smooth movement as his pen glided across the paper. Once he was finished, he carefully folded the note and placed it inside the envelope then slowly licked and sealed it closed. I brought the envelope to my nose. Did his scent cling to it or was it just my imagination?\n\nCora's voice cut into my daydream. \"Aren't you going to open it?\"\n\nI blinked, shocked out of my fantasy, then ripped open the letter.\n\n\u2002Dear Ms. Haywood:\n\n\u2002There are few things in life that can be described as perfect: A starry sky, a new dawn and your spiced cinnamon-nutmeg cider. May I request another? Bring it by tomorrow. I will pay accordingly.\n\n\u2002Sincerely,\n\n\u2002Gareth LeBlanc\n\n\"What does it say?\" Cora asked trying to peer over my shoulder. I handed her the note. She read it and frowned. \"Well it certainly isn't poetry. Dear Ms. Haywood? It sounds so cold and formal. So what are you going to do?\"\n\nI wasn't sure, but I planned to think of something.\n\nThe following day brought sunshine, the sound of birds chirping, the distant ring of a Salvation Army Santa, and the steady drip of snow melting on the rooftop. I took my basket and headed next door. The sign on the door said 'Closed' and I was about to ring the bell when I looked through the store's glass front door and saw Gareth wearing a faded brown corduroy jacket and baseball cap talking to a woman in a long white cashmere coat. It didn't look like a happy conversation. I started to turn when the woman raced out the door in tears. Gareth followed, but didn't call out her name or tell her to stop. He just watched her go. It was obviously a lover's quarrel and not something I wanted to be a part of. I took two quick steps back hoping I could escape before he saw me.\n\n\"I hate the holidays,\" he mumbled then turned before I was a safe distance away. He stared at me surprised. \"What do you want?\"\n\nI took another quick step back towards the freedom and safety of my store. \"Nothing. I just--\"\n\nHe held open the door. \"Come on in.\"\n\nI swallowed, wondering if I should refuse him, but decided to take the risk and go inside suddenly aware that it was the first time I'd ever been alone with him.\n\n\"I could come back another time.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Doesn't matter. I shouldn't even be here.\" He gestured to the books around him. \"All of this was my brother's idea. I was going to help him. He was the one with the pleasing personality and charm. He was going to be the one upfront dealing with the customers and I'd be in the back handling the accounting and other mundane business. He was so happy when he found this building and we signed the lease.\" Gareth angrily adjusted his cap. \"After he died I should have just let everything go, but I couldn't. I wanted to fulfill this dream for him, but I'm all wrong. I'm not good with people--I prefer eReaders and computers and computer games. But the strange thing is that business is booming but Jani wants me to leave.\"\n\n\"Jani?\"\n\n\"My ex-girlfriend, she's the one who just left. She wants me to give it up and return to my old job, but I can't.\" He stared at me and shook his head amazed. \"I don't know why I'm telling you all this.\"\n\nI smiled. \"I'm easy to talk to.\"\n\nHe didn't return my smile, but his face softened. \"You would have liked Rupert.\"\n\n\"His brother's not too bad either.\"\n\nGareth's gaze fell and I winced, knowing that's probably not something he wanted to hear. Now was not the time to flirt.\n\n\"The holidays can be hard for anyone,\" I said hoping to cover my gaffe and find a way to comfort him. \"Especially when you've lost someone you care about, but I'm sure he'd want you to be happy.\"\n\nGareth let out a tired sigh. \"He would and I'm letting him down. I mean what right do I have to be happy living his dream?\"\n\n\"People don't own dreams and from what you've told me, it was a dream you had together. I bet you his spirit is here with you cheering you on.\"\n\nGareth sent me a long look I couldn't read. I licked my lip wondering if he was going to tell me to leave or mind my own business. Instead he spun around, said \"Give me a minute\" then disappeared upstairs.\n\nI didn't move. I thought about leaving, but I was too curious to do so. I thought about his brother. I thought about how lonely it must be for Gareth to be here in this empty shop.\n\n\"Okay, come up,\" he called from above.\n\nI hesitated then walked up the stairs to the main landing then into a nice living area. The heat of a crackling fire met me first, followed by the sounds of carols drifting from the radio. A tiny Christmas tree sat on the windowsill with a crooked star on top. I straightened it, crooked things annoy me.\n\n\"I thought you hated Christmas,\" I called out to him.\n\n\"I changed my mind,\" he said from another room. \"Take a seat.\"\n\n\"No, I have something to show you first.\"\n\n\"More cider?\"\n\n\"No. I'm going to show you how to make your own.\"\n\nHe came out of the other room and stared at me surprised. I stared back equally stunned. He wasn't wearing his hat. Although everything else was the same\u2014he wore a dreadful checkered maroon tie with a striped shirt\u2014I felt as though I'd met him half dressed, exposed. I'd uncovered his secret. He wasn't going bald, he had cropped black hair, and the most expressive deep brown eyes I'd ever seen. Every emotion he felt flashed in them; I could see they were his most vulnerable feature. And something in their expression seemed to ignite something inside me. Something I'd ignored for a long time. I'd buried myself in history and the past so that I wouldn't be vulnerable in the present, but at that moment Gareth had shown me that people hadn't changed that much. Their hopes, fears and dreams remained the same.\n\nHis eyes changed from surprised to weariness. \"You're going to teach me?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe flashed one of his odd little half smiles then disappeared into the room again, he reappeared with his baseball cap.\n\nI took it off. \"You look better without it.\"\n\nHe put it back on. \"It brings me luck.\"\n\n\"You don't need luck.\"\n\nHe grabbed my hand before I could take it off. \"How about courage then? It's a crutch, but it works for me. Superman has his cape, Wolverine has his claws and I have my cap, okay?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" I said, though I wondered how I could convince him otherwise. He really did have very nice eyes.\n\nGareth showed me the kitchen and we both went inside. Making cinnamon-nutmeg cider only takes ten minutes. Somehow I made it last an hour; neither of us noticed the time. As the cider simmered on the stove the smell of cloves, nutmeg, apples, cinnamon, and sweet brown sugar permeated the air.\n\nWhen the cider was done we sat in his alcove that looked down into the quiet bookshop and drank in peaceful silence.\n\n\"Books make sorry companions after awhile,\" he finally said.\n\nBoth pain and resignation seeped behind his simple words. \"History can lose its appeal too,\" I said.\n\nWe slipped into silence again then he abruptly stood, picked up a book from off the shelf and handed it to me.\n\nI stared at him stunned. \"Amelia Armand's Complete Book of Spices? You can't give this to me.\"\n\nHe took a sip of his cider and sent me a full grin. \"I'm not. It's still not for sale.\" He tipped his hat back a bit. \"But you can come by and use it anytime.\"\n\nI set the book down--at that moment I didn't care what was inside\u2014instead I took his cap off and placed it on my head. It was a bold move to make, but I was a modern woman and decided to take the risk.\n\nAnd he being a modern man\u2026well let's just say I didn't open Amelia Armand's Complete Book of Spices until late New Years and I didn't mind a bit.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ New Year's Surprise ]\n\nDivorce. Millions of people did it, but that didn't stop Pam Rubin from feeling alone. The man she'd thought she'd spend the rest of her life with would no longer be part of it. She knew it was the right decision. They'd been separated six months now, but they'd been emotionally apart longer than that. Living in the same house but living separate lives. She still didn't know where things had gone wrong. When had they stopped loving each other? When had simple disagreements become a war?\n\nBut she didn't want to think about that now. She had come to her sister's New Year's Eve party, instead of staying home with her dog and watching the ball drop on TV, to cast aside the loneliness that seemed to stick to her skin like masking tape. No, tonight was a promise of new things and a new future. Pam stood with a glass in her hand, a fake look of joy on her face, feeling out of step with all the happy couples that surrounded her. It was strange how, as her marriage crumbled, that's all she started to see: happy newlyweds, happy parents with their children, happy older couples celebrating decades together. She and Jerrod had only made five years and there had been no children, but not for lack of trying.\n\nPam leaned against the balcony railing. The stars shone bright above her. She preferred looking at them instead of all the ruby earrings and emerald necklaces that graced the ladies inside the house. The dazzling gold wedding bands and diamond engagement rings seemed to sparkle under the lights, catching her eye where ever she turned. She glanced down at her now bare hand, her loneliness making her feel invisible.\n\n\"There you are!\" her sister, Darlene, said coming up to her, wearing a slinky sequence dress her own wedding ring twinkling under the Japanese lanterns that decorated the balcony. She was four years older with bouncing black curls and light brown eyes. She was usually considered the prettier of the two sisters because of her vivacious personality and engaging smile that some said was as sweet as grata cake. \"I was looking all over for you! What are you doing standing out here by yourself? You're a single woman now, you should be living it up.\"\n\nPam shook her head, a strand of hair falling from her French twist. She narrowed her dark brown eyes. \"I'm not single yet.\"\n\n\"You will be. You might as well start the New Year with a new man. Out with the old and in with the new.\"\n\nPam knew her sister didn't understand how raw she still felt. She didn't want a new man when she still couldn't understand how she'd lost the old one. \"I'm not ready yet.\"\n\n\"It's been six months. Admit that it's over between you. You told me how happy you've been with him away. It may feel awkward, but it's time to get into the dating pool again.\"\n\n\"I don't know how to swim,\" Pam said in a dry attempt at humor.\n\n\"Just stay in the shallow end. Lucky for you your big sister is here to help. I have someone who is perfect for you.\"\n\nPam inwardly groaned. \"I've given up on men.\"\n\nDarlene opened her mouth then closed it then opened it again and said in a low, cautious tone. \"So you're into women now?\"\n\nPam laughed. \"I'm not into anyone now. I am just through with relationships. I'm happier by myself.\"\n\nDarlene visibly relaxed and rested a hand on her sister's shoulder, her voice eager. \"You're going to like him. He\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care.\"\n\n\"You will care when you meet him. His parents are from Barbados and he has a doctorate in...\" She frowned. \"I forgot,\" she said with a careless wave of her hand. \"But he's smart and I know that you like that in a man.\"\n\nPam sent her sister a look. He sounded just like her soon-to-be-ex. \"I didn't come here to meet anybody.\"\n\nHer sister clasped her hands together as if ready to beg. \"If you'll just meet him, I will leave you alone. I promise. I really want you to meet him.\"\n\nPam set her wine glass down. It wasn't like her sister to be so insistent. Since she'd agreed to come to the party she might as well try to be sociable. \"Okay. Let me go freshen up.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Darlene said as Pam turned to leave. \"Don't forget to add more lipstick, take the shine off your nose and for goodness sake consider letting your hair down.\"\n\nPam stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, feeling as though she was staring at a stranger. Who was that woman with hollow eyes and pinched lips? When was the last time she'd smiled? She shouldn't have come. She didn't want to meet anyone. She wasn't ready to. She knew her sister meant well but that didn't make her feel better. She had to leave. She would grab her coat and go. Satisfied with her plan, Pam left the bathroom and headed for the room where all the coats were piled up on a bed. She was halfway down the hall ready to go upstairs when she saw her sister standing next to a man. He looked very genial and attractive, but she didn't want to meet him. She prayed her sister didn't turn and see her. She wanted to escape. Pam frantically glanced around then darted into the first door she saw: The closet. She knew it was cowardly but she didn't care.\n\nThe closet had a familiar pleasant smell of lemon and spice, relaxing her a bit. She leaned against the wall, letting out a startled screech when it moved.\n\n\"Shh, you'll give us away,\" a deep voice said.\n\n\"What are you doing in here?\" she demanded in a loud whisper.\n\n\"I wanted to be alone.\"\n\n\"Then why did you come to a party?\"\n\n\"I was invited,\" he said. \"But now I'm not sure that was a good idea.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you go home?\" Pam asked annoyed by the tremor in her voice. She was used to being calm in any situation but this man had unnerved her.\n\n\"Because I just got here.\"\n\n\"You're being ridiculous.\"\n\n\"I could say the same about you,\" he said with laughter in his voice.\n\nHe was right. His reasons for hiding were eerily similar to hers. She should follow her own advice and just leave. \"I'm sorry,\" she said then became quiet when she heard people passing by. \"You just scared the living daylights out of me. I'm hiding from my sister.\" Pam folded her arms then looked up at the figure next to her. She was unable to see his face clearly except for some light that seeped through the slits in the closet door. It highlighted a forehead, nose and mouth. She took several deep breaths and soon her heartbeat returned to normal. She should be panicked and waited for anxiety to seize her, but oddly it didn't. After the initial shock of surprise she felt strangely resigned by the situation. At least she knew where the lemon and spice scent came from. Every time he moved the scent seemed to embrace her and reminded her of happier times.\n\n\"So why are you hiding from your sister?\" he asked.\n\nPam briefly shut her eyes. She hadn't expected the question. She didn't want him to care. Wasn't sure she could trust him. But somehow the darkness was a comfort. What was it about the dark that made sharing seem safe? That made two people feel intimate? She didn't think too much about it. She was relieved to have the chance to speak to a man she'd never speak to again.\n\n\"She wants to fix me up with a man.\"\n\n\"Don't you like men?\"\n\n\"I'm not very lucky with them.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that.\"\n\nShe sniffed. He would say that and eight years ago she would have believed him. She'd met her soon-to-be-ex at a party like this. But she'd been a different woman then. A woman with a promising future and bright ideas. She'd worn a blue velvet dress and spinning gold earrings. She'd just escaped the attention of two graduate students who'd bored her with their pretentiousness when a tall man stepped into her path and said, \"A professor or a teacher?\"\n\nShe looked at him startled. \"What?\"\n\nHe held out his arms to the side. \"Do I look like a professor or a teacher?\"\n\nPam surveyed his clothes and shook her head puzzled. He didn't look like either. He looked like a corporate raider. He wore all black, which only emphasized a large intimidating build. He had a carefully trimmed goatee, his black hair shone low, skin like molasses, featherlike long lashes and piercing brown eyes. \"Does it matter?\" she asked.\n\nHe let out a sigh. \"Yes, I've got a job interview in a week and I really need to make the right impression. I've already had ten others with no results.\"\n\n\"Well, first you're too on the point?\"\n\nHe frowned. \"On the point?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said with a light laugh. \"I don't even know your name.\"\n\nHe held out his hand Jerrod Fuller.\"\n\n\"I'm Pam Rubin and I don't think you look like a teacher or professor. Anyone looking at you would see an ambitious young man who would take over their job one day.\"\n\nHe raised a dark eyebrow. \"I'm ambitious.\"\n\n\"You don't have to wear it like a banner. You can go for business casual. Also, focus on the needs of the school. How you'll be a value to them.\"\n\nJerrod nodded. \"I can do that. Are you free tomorrow?\"\n\nPam paused. \"For what?\"\n\n\"For dinner. I'd like to get more of your advice.\"\n\n\"But I don't have much to say,\" Pam stuttered feeling her face grow warm.\n\nA sly grin touched the corner of his mouth. \"I'm sure you do and I'm prepared to listen to every word.\"\n\nAnd he did. He just let her talk and his dark eyes watched her as if she were the most fascinating and beautiful woman in the world. And she in turn helped him soften his look so that he didn't appear so intimidating. Although he looked like the kind of man who'd likely have gotten into college on a sports scholarship he'd actually gotten a scholarship in science, played tennis and had a passion for abstract art. A week later he aced his interview. A week after that he was hired and a month later they were inseparable. Their first New Year's Eve together had been simple and beautiful. A quiet time at home with a bottle of champagne and a ring. He'd told her he wanted to spend every New Year with her and asked her to marry him. And she'd said yes. It had all seemed so perfect but she hadn't known that something would destroy that peace. That it had a name.\n\nFear. How come no one ever talked about how fear can enter a marriage? How it can erode trust and communication? How it can slowly eat away at what one has struggled to build? Pam still remembered her mother's sneer on the day of the rehearsal dinner. \"He's just a teacher. He's got no money. There's no need to marry the bastard.\"\n\nPam gritted her teeth. \"He's not a bastard.\"\n\n\"One day you'll think so.\"\n\n\"No, I won't. I love him.\"\n\n\"That will change.\"\n\nHad it? Had it changed? The butterflies had gone and familiarity had taken away the rush of romantic surprise and the high of falling in love. But the sun was also familiar, however she never grew tired of its dancing rays. It had been the same with Jerrod except, unlike the sun, she'd started to worry that he wouldn't always be there. And one day she'd been right. She hadn't wanted to be her mother, but she'd taken her mother's bitterness and fear into the marriage. Their six months apart had taught her a lot about herself.\n\nShe used to watch Jerrod at a party with admiration so glad that he was hers. She didn't even know when her casual glances turned to suspicion. When she'd watch him with a woman with careful surveillance as though a police officer on the trail of a suspect. She would watch how he tilted his head, his eyes, his smile. She'd watch the woman too. Notice how she touched him, if it was a hand to his shoulder or his sleeve and she'd wondered what the gesture meant. She never confronted him because she knew what he would say. Her father had said the same. She just let her suspicions grow and her fears mingled with them until there was a wall around her heart. She knew he felt it too, but they never talked about it. Soon they never talked about anything not pay cuts, tight schedules or family illnesses and after their last attempt at having a child she knew there was nothing else to keep them together.\n\nPam sighed feeling the weight of her loss. She'd loved him. She'd thought he'd loved her. Where had it gone wrong? She angrily brushed away a clothes hanger, wishing she'd brought a glass of wine in the closet with her.\n\n\"I'm sure he has no problems with the ladies,\" Pam said sourly, wanting to take the focus off of her. \"He never did.\"\n\n\"You never know.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"You're right. I don't. I stopped knowing very much about him after awhile. Somehow we just stopped talking.\"\n\n\"Did you ever try to talk?\"\n\n\"Yes, but it soon became too painful, especially when we couldn't have kids. I know how much he wants to be a father.\"\n\nShe heard him rub his hands together. \"I doubt that's the only reason he married you.\"\n\n\"Well it seemed that's where everything fell apart.\"\n\n\"I bet there were other things. I mean my wife only cared about starting a family, but for me it was too stressful.\"\n\n\"You don't want kids?\" she asked more sharply than she wanted to. \"I mean it's okay if you don't,\" she added more softly not wanting him to stop talking.\n\n\"I did--do, but at the time my father was dying and I couldn't focus on anything else.\"\n\nHis words made her heart constrict with sorrow. \"I'm sorry about your father.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"He loved my wife. I'm glad he didn't see my marriage end.\"\n\n\"Did you love your wife?\"\n\n\"Still do.\"\n\nHer voice cracked with surprise and suspicion. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes, everyone keeps telling me to move on and I know I should, but something is holding me back and I think that's it.\"\n\n\"Sometimes our hearts mislead us.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Not often, especially not mine.\"\n\nPam fell silent unable to believe his words. They sounded genuine, but if he really loved his wife why hadn't he fought to keep his marriage? She rubbed her forehead, wishing she could gather her warring thoughts, then let her hand fall. \"If you could do it all again, what would you do?\"\n\nHe was silent a long moment then said, \"Apologize for not admitting how unhappy I was. I would have been more honest. You?\"\n\n\"Same. I would have given him more space. I wanted him to talk to me and I think that just pushed him further away. I wanted him to turn to me. But he turned to someone else instead.\"\n\n\"Are you sure about that?\"\n\n\"Positive.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\nPam shrugged feeling the wall around her heart starting to rebuild. \"The usual,\" she said trying to sound casual although the memory of his deception pierced her. \"Secret phone calls. Cryptic notes. Strange perfume on his clothes.\" She'd been taught by her twice divorced mother that if you didn't have a man's attention someone else did. Her father hadn't been true to any of his five wives. Now that he was older he was slowing down so wife number six may be lucky. Women found Jerrod attractive and he never had trouble getting noticed. She was attractive too, but she knew that wasn't enough to keep a man. Her mother had been beautiful and kept the house running while also working and that still hadn't made her father faithful. Without kids Pam couldn't think of anything to get Jerrod to stay.\n\n\"Did you tell him?\"\n\n\"No,\" Pam said quickly. \"I didn't want to know the details. I failed him. I didn't want to know about the woman who hadn't. I'd once been the most important woman in his life and then it ended. When a man cheats it's over.\"\n\n\"So if he'd told you why he cheated you wouldn't have forgiven him?\"\n\n\"Sure I'd forgive him, but I couldn't trust him. If he's unhappy he deserves to leave. It's just a symptom. I'm sure he's happy with whoever he's with now.\"\n\n\"Trust is important.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"My wife never trusted me.\"\n\nPam paused surprised by his statement. She drummed her fingers against her thigh. \"Did you give her a reason not to?\"\n\n\"No. I could never do or say enough to make her believe in me. At first she did. She made me feel like the greatest man on the planet and then, after we married, that changed. I gave her gifts. I told her how much I loved her, but if I came home late or she saw me with a female colleague she'd assume the worse.\"\n\nPam released a tired sigh feeling suddenly worn. \"I guess that's unfair.\"\n\n\"Yes. You can't have a relationship without trust.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"But I lied. I did give my wife a reason not to trust me.\"\n\n\"I knew it,\" Pam said satisfied that he was just as she'd suspected him to be: A typical male. \"What was it?\"\n\n\"I kept a secret from her.\"\n\nShe bit her lip her heart picking up pace. \"What?\"\n\n\"After my father died I started thinking about my own morality. It can hit a man hard sometimes. I went to get checked and discovered I was genetically disposed to have the same condition that killed my father. I started to do lots of tests and even started therapy to deal with my fear.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell m--her? Why keep that a secret?\"\n\n\"Because by that time she was so focused on having a family and not succeeding and I didn't want to feel as if I'd failed her on something else.\"\n\n\"But she would have been there for you. I know she didn't marry you just so you could be a father.\"\n\n\"It's broken up marriages before.\"\n\n\"But if you'd talked...\" Pam let her words trail off. Obviously he hadn't trusted her.\n\nHe shifted, the sleeve of his shirt brushing hers, the lemon and spice sense embracing her again. \"Too bad you never talked about it.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I guess we both failed,\" he said.\n\nPam hugged herself, feeling the wall around her heart crumbling but terrified of being vulnerable again as she let hope seep in. \"Think there's any way to fix it?\"\n\n\"Maybe by remembering the good times. Where there any?\"\n\nPam smiled. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\n\"I used to love when he'd sing off key in the shower. He has a really good voice and knew his singing would always make me laugh and it did. He also used to have this strange way of knowing who was calling without looking at the caller ID. He'd be in the living room reading and the phone would ring and he'd say \"Pick up it's your mother\" or \"Forget it, it's my sister.\" And more often than not he was right. I used to tease him that he was psychic. We loved going to concerts. Indoor, outdoor, bands, symphonies. Anything. He could always make the outing an adventure because he knew how to move in a crowd. In the early days I loved to listen to him talk about his students and he supported me while I got my Masters. Even when I felt like giving up he always believed in me.\"\n\n\"Sounds like good times.\"\n\nPam felt her heart lift. \"They were.\" She hesitated then asked, \"How about you?\"\n\n\"My wife used to put lollipops in my briefcase with a note that said 'Have a sweet day.' She'd also coordinate the closet by color, matching shirts with ties, belts with pants, socks with shoes.\"\n\nPam groaned. \"She sounds controlling.\"\n\nHe shook his head and laughed. \"I liked it. I didn't have to think hard. If I grabbed a shirt I could see what tie could go with it. It made my morning easier and made me feel that she cared about me.\"\n\n\"She still doesn't sound like much fun.\"\n\n\"Maybe to some. I know with you having a husband who likes to go out and mingle and have different adventures you wouldn't understand how important it can be to have a place that's organized. Someone who is settled and grounded. I grew up around a lot of chaos and my wife helped me learn to live a different way. Just being with her was fun. We'd sit together and just talk or watch TV or play a video game, or tell corny jokes. I miss that. I miss her.\"\n\nPam blinked back tears. \"I miss him too, but are memories really enough? I was so afraid of losing him that I pushed him away. I don't think I can fix that.\" It was too much. The man, the memories. Suddenly instead of feeling like a confessional the closet felt like a tomb. She couldn't breathe. She grabbed the door and opened it desperate to escape.\n\nHe grabbed her arm. \"Pam wait.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"When I first heard your voice I nearly ran out.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you didn't,\" he said in a velvet whisper, tenderly turning her to face him.\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn't look at him. It had been so intimate in the closet and had felt safe, but now she felt exposed. She didn't want to look at him, but she knew she had to. She gathered her courage and faced him: The tall good looking man with skin like molasses and featherlike lashes who'd helped her sort through her mixed feelings. The man who had once asked her if he looked like a teacher or professor. The man who'd asked her to marry him on New Year's Eve.\n\n\"I want you back,\" Jerrod said.\n\n\"Why?\" Pam said in a broken voice.\n\n\"I'm sorry I pulled away from you and kept secrets. I know it was wrong, but I want a second chance.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I told. I love you.\"\n\n\"But I pushed you away with my suspicions and--\"\n\n\"You made a mistake and I did too. That makes us human. And one thing I've learned about being human is that we can break, but we can also heal.\" His gaze fell. \"When your sister invited me I wasn't going to come. I was angry, but somehow she convinced me.\" His gaze met and held hers. \"I'm glad I did.\"\n\n\"But you ended up in the closet.\"\n\nA sheepish grin touched his lips. \"I know. When I saw you I couldn't face you so I hid. And the next thing I knew you were in here too.\"\n\n\"Hiding from my sister.\" Pam took his large hand and cradled it in hers. \"I guess it's time we both stopped hiding.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe lightly brushed her thumb over the back of his hand. \"My sister thought I should start the upcoming year with a new man.\"\n\nJerrod pulled her into the circle of his arms and he looked down at her as if she were the most fascinating and beautiful woman he knew. \"I am a new man and I'm all yours, if you want me.\"\n\nPam cupped his face in her hands and kissed him. \"I love you,\" she whispered against his lips, wanting him to know that she still thought he was the greatest man in the world. She gave her heart to him with complete trust, casting all fear away.\n\nHis lips met hers with a tender silent vow and at that moment their wounds began to heal. Neither noticed when the clock struck twelve.\n\nDarlene saw them and raised a glass relieved that her plan had worked. \"Happy New Year you two. May it be filled with many more wonderful surprises.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Something New ]\n\nAll Lewa Olunlade wanted for Thanksgiving was a turkey and her sister's husband. At thirty-four she dreaded going home for the traditional family gathering where people would laud her sister's excellent 'catch' and bemoan Lewa's single state. She could already imagine what \"the Aunts\" would say. Although not related by blood, Lewa called them her Aunts out of respect and cultural norm which acknowledged both their ages and that they were close family friends.\n\n\"You must stop being so picky,\" Aunty Elizabeth would say.\n\n\"I had two children by your age,\" Aunty Femi would add with a note of pride.\n\n\"The further you're past thirty, your chances of a good husband dwindle to nearly nothing.\"\n\n\"Unless you want a divorced man.\"\n\n\"And he'll probably have children.\"\n\n\"And who wants to raise someone else's children?\" Aunty Elizabeth would say with a ring of superiority and distaste, having made herself an expert on men, marriage and childrearing. Although she'd twice had her face rearranged by her husband's fists, no one ever spoke about it because at least she was married and had two wonderful children. At sixty, she'd left her husband in Nigeria, who was now using his fists to beat his mistress and his four children by her, and she was finally free to use the power of being a married woman without having to deal with all the realities.\n\nAunty Femi had three children who basically tried to ignore her existence so she spent every holiday with the Olunlade family instead. None of her children felt it necessary to include her in their holiday gatherings since she was on the southern East Coast and they had all decided to settle in the northern region. They sent her money to assuage their guilt for their shoddy treatment of her and occasionally an email or a brief phone call, but little else. Lewa could guess that her children were likely embarrassed by their mother's loud coarse ways--her English was poor and her table manners worse. However, Lewa knew Aunty Femi had a good heart and could understand her parents' affection for her. Aunty Femi's marriage had been fine, she'd been a widow for ten years, but Lewa gave up trying to decipher what 'fine' meant although she had on a number of occasions asked Aunty Femi if she'd been happy. Aunty Femi would only reply that she'd been married and leave it at that.\n\nLewa understood the underlining truth behind every word and glance of the Aunts and her mother: It was better to have a husband--no matter how wretched-- than no husband at all. It was a woman's fate. And she was arrogant and naive to expect any better.\n\n\"Caring for another man's children isn't so bad, if the woman isn't around,\" Aunty Femi would say to continue the conversation. She liked to talk and the topic of marriage and children made her feel smart.\n\n\"But then again, a woman isn't meant to be alone, so a divorced man is better than no man,\" Aunty Elizabeth would add and the Aunts would nod and continue to talk about her as if she wasn't there, because in a way she wasn't. A single woman in her family amounted to only half a woman. Not even a woman, half a person. Lewa could only hope that soon the talk would shift back to her sister, who'd been married three years but still hadn't had a child.\n\nIt had surprised everyone that by the end of the first year of marriage she hadn't introduced a new family member, preferably a boy, of course, but a girl would suit as well. After the first childless year, Lewa's sister, Arielle, had just laughed at the teasing, but Lewa could see the strain in her sister's eyes and plastered grin with each passing year.\n\nMaybe this year she'd announce the news her family expected to hear. Lewa could imagine her sister and her husband, Stillman, making good parents. Stillman hit the marriage tri-fecta--family from the upper echelon of Nigerian society, Oxford educated with another degree from Yale and a respectable career as a biomedical scientist. He was solid, respectful and smart. A son-in-law any family would be proud of with skin the color of roasted chestnuts, and a smile as bright as Broadway lights. He was very charming and, on more than one occasion, Lewa wished he was hers. As a beverage scientist, she had a career she was proud of and a number of friends, but Stillman was one of the few individuals she felt easy with. But Lewa knew that her sister's marriage was solid and kept her fantasies to herself and briefly wished she didn't have to see the happily married pair this year. Besides, she didn't want another year of jollof rice, curried trout, plantain moi moi and pepper soup. She wanted a turkey like millions of other US families--even vegetarians celebrated with tofu that at least tasted like turkey.\n\nTwo weeks before Thanksgiving, Lewa listened with awe as her friend, Valerie, a fresh faced blonde from Wisconsin, described her upcoming feast while they sat in the cafeteria of their office building.\n\n\"Mashed potatoes, turkey, and cranberry sauce.\"\n\n\"What's the cranberry sauce for?\" Lewa asked.\n\n\"It goes with the turkey.\"\n\nLewa didn't understand but nodded anyway. \"Okay go on.\"\n\n\"Just the usual,\" Valerie shrugged, not understanding her friend's interest. \"Cornbread, stuffing, ham, green beans.\"\n\nLewa sat back in her seat and sighed. \"That sounds heavenly. I wish I could just be a fly on the wall.\"\n\n\"Would you like to come over?\"\n\nShe sat up with interest. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Sure, we'll have plenty of food and I know my family won't mind.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you should ask your husband first.\"\n\nValerie laughed. \"As long as he gets food, he doesn't care who shows up. I'm hosting his parents and trust me we'll have leftover for days.\" She grinned warming to the idea. \"Yes, you should come. It will be fun.\"\n\nLewa sat back her hope slowly dwindling. \"I'll think about it.\"\n\nBut she didn't have to think about it. Lewa knew she would have to ask her mother and she already had a good idea of how she would respond.\n\n\"No.\" Mrs. Olunlade said as she checked over the shopping list for the upcoming feast. They sat in the kitchen while their housegirl, Biti, carefully cleaned the special holiday dishes. Her mother was a small woman with delicate features that belied the mind of a sharp woman who had a successful nursing career and been married thirty-six years to a man who treated her well.\n\n\"But Mom. I've been invited.\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade did not look up from her list. She scribbled a note down. \"And you can go another time. Thanksgiving is for family.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\nShe lifted her gaze and pointed her pen at Lewa. \"And this time your grandmother will be able to join us. Would you want her to come all the way from Nigeria and not see you here?\"\n\n\"She could see me on another day.\"\n\n\"She will see you on Thanksgiving.\" Mrs. Olunlade returned to her list, making it clear the discussion was finished.\n\nLewa sighed exasperated. Her mother could be as unmovable as a stone castle. \"Then can we do something different this year?\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade looked at her daughter suspicious. \"Different?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Such as what?\"\n\nLewa took a deep breath, then said in a rush. \"Can we have a turkey?\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"To eat.\" Lewa tapped the table hoping to make her mother understand. \"Mom, that's what people usually eat during Thanksgiving. A big delicious turkey. You've been here long enough to know that.\"\n\n\"But we always have curried trout and I thought you liked my seasonings.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"And Aunty Elizabeth makes jollof rice.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And Aunty Femi makes moi moi--\"\n\n\"Mom, I know.\" Lewa sat forward and clasped her hands together, trying to show a piousness she didn't feel. \"It's just that...just this once I'd like to have something different.\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade frowned. \"I don't know how to cook a turkey.\"\n\n\"We could follow a recipe,\" Lewa said with a note of hope.\n\nMrs. Olunlade set her pen down and folded her arms. \"Why are you worrying about food when you don't even have a husband to show your grandmother when she comes?\"\n\nLewa fell back like a lead balloon. \"You're changing the subject.\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade lifted her daughter's chin, her gaze softening. \"You're so pretty and bright. What am I supposed to tell her?\"\n\n\"You don't have to tell her anything.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Adeniyi has a son.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You can't leave everything up to fate. The problem with you is that you haven't made it a priority and before you know it, it will be too late.\"\n\n\"I'm only thirty--\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade quickly covered her daughter's mouth as if she'd said something foul. \"Quiet. You don't look it and there's no reason to keep saying it. Do you think being over thirty and unmarried is a virtue?\"\n\nLewa removed her mother's hand and kissed the back of her palm. \"I'm sorry. I'll be more careful next time. Now, what about a turkey?\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade's mouth quirked up in a quick grin, sensing her daughter's strategy to appease her. \"I'll think it over. Go ask your father and see what he says.\"\n\n\"Dad, can we have a turkey for Thanksgiving this year?\" She'd found him in the family room watching a NOVA special. She sat in the chair opposite him.\n\nMr. Olunlade was a large man with a soft spoken voice and his voice was even softer now. \"What did your mother say?\" he said with a note of caution.\n\n\"She told me to ask you.\"\n\nHe nodded then said, \"How's work?\"\n\n\"It's fine, now about the turkey--\"\n\n\"Are you seeing anyone?\"\n\nLewa blinked looking bored. \"Dad.\"\n\n\"Does that mean no?\"\n\nLewa shook her head. \"No, I'm not seeing anyone, but I--\"\n\n\"Why not? Why haven't you found someone to settle down with yet? You're a pretty woman and--\" He pointed at her. \"You must be doing something to scare them off. Do you tell them how much you make?\"\n\nLewa affectionately squeeze her father's knee. \"Dad, stop changing the subject. Can we have a turkey or not?\"\n\nHe rubbed his chin, hesitant. \"What did your mother say again?\"\n\nLewa sighed, praying for patience. \"She wanted to know your opinion.\"\n\nA slow grin spread on his face. \"That's rare. That means she's not sure. I say no. Let's stick with tradition.\"\n\n\"But that's my point. Jollof rice, moi moi and curried trout isn't traditional for Thanksgiving. Other people at least have a turkey.\"\n\n\"I don't care.\" He held up his hand like a feudal king making a decree. \"It's the tradition for this house and it means a lot to our family. Do you know why we have jollof rice with curried trout?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Because trout was the first expensive meal I could afford. When I first came to this country I worked in a gas station. I hadn't met your mother yet and I stayed with Big Mummy's family. Finally I was able to get a promotion and the first thing I did was go to the local international store and purchase trout. So every Thanksgiving I buy that to remind me of how thankful I am.\"\n\n\"What did your father say?\" Mrs. Olunlade said catching Lewa trying to sneak out of the house without saying goodbye.\n\n\"He told me a story about why we have jollof rice and trout.\"\n\n\"So his answer is no turkey?\"\n\n\"Yes, he wants to keep our tradition.\"\n\nHer mother beamed. \"Good, but I've decided you're right. We should add something extra and I spoke to Femi and she's going to cook something you'll love.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Lewa said clasping her hands together.\n\n\"Yes, she'll make samosas.\"\n\nLewa's hands fell to her sides. \"But Mom that's Indian.\"\n\n\"Yes, exactly,\" her mother said pleased with her cleverness. \"Didn't the English eat with the Indians?\"\n\nLewa stood for a moment wondering if she should laugh or cry. \"Yes...no...not East Indians. They ate with American Indians. Native Americans.\"\n\nBut her mother had stopped listening. She adjusted the collar of Lewa's coat. \"She's excited because she knows it's one of your favorites. See, I do listen and can be flexible.\"\n\nLewa sighed. \"Thanks Mom.\"\n\nMrs. Olunlade called the housegirl, Biti, and handed her the list. \"I want only the best.\"\n\nShe bowed appropriately submissive. \"Yes, ma'am.\" Although only nineteen, she looked ten years older and had stooped shoulders.\n\nLewa kissed her mother on the cheek then left.\n\nOnce she and Biti were both outside, Lewa gently slapped the younger woman in the back. \"How many times do I have to tell you to stand up straight?\"\n\n\"Sorry Aunty.\" She rubbed her hands together, and wrapped her scarf tighter. \"I still have to get used to the cold.\"\n\nLewa glanced up at the red and yellow leaves clinging to the trees, feeling the crisp November air against her skin. \"You weren't cold in the house, so stop lying.\"\n\n\"Sorry Aunty.\"\n\n\"Always stand tall.\" Lewa walked to her car.\n\n\"Aunty?\"\n\nShe turned. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Why do you want a turkey?\" Biti asked making a face. \"Isn't that just bland English food?\"\n\nLewa laughed at the girl's expression, knowing she wouldn't understand. \"Goodbye, Biti,\" she said then jumped in her car.\n\n\"Just forget about the damn turkey and eat what you're given,\" Lewa's friend Hannah Lee said as she, Lewa and Valerie changed in the gym locker after swimming. She'd known Hannah since they met at the university and could always depend on her for straight talk. \"The holidays aren't meant to be enjoyed. If you're having fun, you're not doing it right. It's about family, fights and feasting. You just grin and bear it.\"\n\n\"I don't mind spending time with my family, and I don't mind them bothering me about a husband,\" Lewa said. \"I've gotten used to it.\"\n\n\"You're braver than I am,\" Hannah said. \"If I hadn't met my boyfriend in time I would have made him up.\"\n\n\"Yes, being single on the holidays is the worse,\" Valerie said.\n\nLewa rolled her eyes. \"Thanks for your support.\"\n\n\"No, I don't mean you. I mean in general. It makes you an easy target.\"\n\n\"I can take being a target, if I could just get something different to eat. Is having a turkey so wrong?\"\n\n\"It's not what they're used to,\" Hannah said. \"We don't have mashed potatoes we have sticky rice.\"\n\nLewa rested her chin in her hand. \"At least you have a turkey.\"\n\nSo it was clear. Thanksgiving meant many different things to different people. To Hannah it was sticky rice and family fights. To Valerie, a warm family gathering and traditional American food. To her father, jollof rice and trout reminded him of all he was grateful for. Thanksgiving was a symbolic day of family and blessings. Her parents had no connection to the story of turkey and mashed potatoes, and maybe she was grasping at a story that wasn't hers either. She needed her own special dish.\n\nA week before Thanksgiving she bought a turkey.\n\n\"So what are you going to do with it?\" her younger sister Arielle asked while the two woman stared at the frozen bird on Lewa's kitchen counter. \"It's huge.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Lewa poked it. \"And I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet.\"\n\n\"Why do you want a turkey so bad anyway? You can have turkey any other day.\"\n\n\"It's not the same.\"\n\n\"And why are you making it so complicated? If you wanted turkey why not just buy a cooked one?\"\n\n\"Because I want to do it myself.\"\n\n\"You could get burned.\"\n\nLewa looked at her sister curious. \"How could I get burned?\"\n\n\"It happens every year. People get burned trying to cook their turkeys.\"\n\n\"That's only if they're deep frying them,\" Lewa said playfully hitting her. \"Stop being so negative. If you don't want to help, why did you come over?\"\n\n\"I'm curious.\"\n\nLewa lifted the turkey and put it back in the freezer. \"I'm curious about something too.\" She closed the freezer door and looked at her sister. \"Are you ever going to tell Mom and Dad about the miscarriage?\"\n\nArielle sat down at the kitchen table and tugged on one of her braids with nervous fingers. \"Why would I?\"\n\n\"Then they won't bother you about starting a family.\" Lewa sat in front of her. \"I know it must get on your nerves.\"\n\n\"I don't want them to blame me,\" she said in a choked voice.\n\n\"Why would they blame you?\" Lewa said surprised by her sister's worry. \"At least they'll know you're trying and they may be more sensitive.\"\n\n\"The Aunts won't be.\"\n\nLewa sighed recognizing the truth of her sister's words. The Aunts would be harder to convince. \"You will have your own family soon.\"\n\n\"Aunty Elizabeth will blame me for not eating the right foods, Mom will say it's because I'm too old and should have started sooner.\" Tears filled her eyes.\n\nLewa covered her sister's hand. \"But we know that none of that is true,\" she said in a soft voice. \"You haven't done anything wrong. And you and Stillman will be fine.\"\n\nArielle brushed away her tears and lowered her eyes. \"It's caused a strain between us.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Lewa said giving her sister's hand a reassuring squeeze. \"It's a stressful time for many couples.\"\n\n\"No, I mean...he's not handling it well. He's getting pressure from his family too and I'm afraid he'll start blaming me as well.\"\n\nLewa stiffened and sat back. \"He's supposed to be your support not your judge. Do you want me to talk to him?\"\n\nArielle lifted her gaze, suddenly wary. \"What would you say?\"\n\n\"Treat my little sister right or I'll punch you in the face.\"\n\nArielle smiled then laughed. \"You're so silly.\"\n\nLewa returned her smile glad she could lighten the mood. \"You're good together. You're a great couple. I don't want this to pull you apart.\"\n\n\"You can't stop it, if it does.\"\n\n\"It won't.\"\n\n\"But what if I can never carry a baby? Sheba is already on her third,\" she said referring to a cousin of theirs.\n\nLewa brushed the idea aside with a quick flick of her wrist. \"It's too soon to think like that.\"\n\nArielle shook her head. \"No, it's not. I asked him and he said that if I couldn't have a child then we wouldn't have a marriage.\"\n\n\"He didn't mean that.\"\n\n\"He did.\"\n\n\"What about adoption or surrogacy?\"\n\n\"He doesn't want to adopt and we can't afford surrogacy. Unless...\"\n\n\"Unless what?\"\n\n\"We could find someone to help us,\" she said looking at her sister with a hopeful expression.\n\nLewa shook her head, resisting the urge to jump up and run out of the room. \"No way. Don't look at me. I'm not ready for that.\"\n\n\"This may be your only chance,\" Arielle said suddenly eager. \"You're older than me and we both know your prospects are slim.\"\n\n\"Thank you Mom,\" Lewa said in a sour tone.\n\n\"I just want you to consider it. If you could do this we'd both appreciate it.\"\n\nLewa let her sister's words hang in her mind. Having a baby was something Arielle really wanted and if it could help her marriage it would be worth it, right? But then part of Lewa was angry that her sister had to find another alternative. Couldn't Stillman be more patient? Couldn't they come up with something together? Would he really leave Arielle if she couldn't bare his children? Would a child really change all that? Did he love her sister or was she just an appendage to him? A status symbol?\n\nLewa had to find out for herself so she met her brother-in-law at his office and treated him to lunch.\n\nOnce they'd placed their orders she said, \"Do you love my sister?\"\n\nStillman looked at her surprised and baffled. \"You know I do.\"\n\n\"Then why are you threatening to leave her?\"\n\nHe paused then said, \"I didn't say that.\"\n\n\"Then what did you say? I know about the problem between you two.\"\n\nHe glanced around as if afraid someone might overhear them. \"Do we have to discuss this here?\"\n\n\"No, we can go to your place and I can talk to you with Arielle there. Or I can wait until Thanksgiving and let the whole family give their opinions.\"\n\nStillman held up his hands in surrender. \"All I said was that having my own children means a lot to me.\" He let his hands fall. \"It's something I've always wanted and it's expected.\"\n\n\"Dreams can change.\"\n\n\"Not this one. Being a father to my own flesh and blood is what I want.\"\n\n\"She really wants to have children with you. But can you love her enough if she can't?\"\n\n\"We are thinking about surrogacy.\"\n\n\"Yes, she told me. And that hasn't answered my question.\"\n\n\"I don't mind doing that,\" he said expertly avoiding a question he didn't want to answer. \"If she can't do it herself.\" His gaze trailed the length of Lewa.\n\nLewa took a sip of her drink. \"Take the thought out of your mind and bury it.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"It's been done before and it would really help us a lot.\"\n\n\"I'm older than her.\"\n\n\"But you're better built to carry children,\" he said making a curving motion with his hands.\n\nLewa held up her hand and pointed at him, unable to stop a smile. \"Watch it.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"It's a compliment. If I hadn't met your sister first, maybe--\"\n\nLewa laughed. \"I used to think that too, but now I know it wouldn't have worked.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nShe shook her head, knowing she wouldn't be able to explain it to him. She was only starting to understand it herself. \"I'll see what I can do.\"\n\n\"Arielle told me you bought a turkey for Thanksgiving.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure what I'll do with it yet.\"\n\n\"You'll come up with something.\" He winked. \"You always do.\"\n\nThat evening, Lewa sat in her kitchen and pondered her conversations with Stillman and Arielle. And as she thought, she discovered a truth about herself too. That she didn't really want her sister's husband, just the status he brought her. She didn't want to get married--at least not yet. She was enjoying her life and truly never thought about being a wife and mother the way other women did. Her former desire for a husband had been a way for her to fit in. A way to stop being so different. It was the same with the turkey. She wanted their home to have the same sights and smells as other homes, but for what purpose? Was it wrong to be different?\n\nLewa loved Stillman. He was a wonderful, generous man, but she now realized he was more traditional than she'd thought--than she'd allowed herself to see. His values matched her sister's perfectly. Despite their easy conversation and ambitions, he would be a terrible match for her. She could only hope that the right man was out there. If not...her family would continue to feel sorry for her. She'd be a failure, a half person, but she didn't mind anymore because she had a private joy no one could take from her. A joy of being authentically herself. She didn't want her sister's private fears that she wasn't a complete woman if she couldn't bear children or Stillman's fears of how he'd be perceived. Even if they did have a child, Lewa knew it wouldn't be enough. They'd be expected to have at least two. To live others expectations could be exhausting and Lewa was ready to remove herself from that race.\n\nLewa called her sister. \"Try for another year. If you're still having trouble, I'll pay for a surrogate.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Arielle said with tears in her voice.\n\n\"Just be prepared for the Aunts this year.\"\n\n\"I am. What are you going to do about the turkey? I think you should donate it.\"\n\n\"I could, but I'm not going to. We're having turkey this year one way or another. I'll see you Thursday.\" Lewa hung up then opened her freezer and stared at her frozen turkey with renewed determination. Authenticity, that would be her contribution to this year's holiday dinner.\n\nLewa went online and looked at different recipes and spent many hours looking at cooking clips. But she still didn't find anything that would suit her family. She decided to go to the store and stood in the baking section staring at the deep fryers, beakers and thermometers. She knew cooking was a science, but she felt like a novice in the lab of a genius. Even if she got the turkey right she didn't know anything about stuffing or glazing. She wanted to create something her family would eat, something familiar yet a little different. Unfortunately, she didn't know what.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" a sales associate said. He looked like a college student and had shaggy red hair he kept having to push back from his eyes.\n\n\"No, I'm just looking.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said then started to turn.\n\n\"Wait,\" Lewa said before he left. \"What do you do for Thanksgiving?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Watch football and eat turkey.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Lewa said. Just like millions.\n\n\"But that's not my favorite part,\" he said with a shy grin as if hesitant to share.\n\n\"What is?\" she urged him.\n\n\"It's the leftovers. My mom always buys two huge turkeys 'cause we have a lot of guests, but we still end up with a lot of leftover turkey. The real fun is all the things she does with it.\"\n\nLewa stepped closer intrigued. \"Like what?\"\n\nHe brushed his hair back and thought for a moment. \"Turkey sandwiches, turkey pie, turkey enchiladas. You can do a lot.\"\n\nHe was right. She could do a lot. She was thinking of the turkey as something whole that couldn't be altered, but who said she had to bake it like everyone else? She could treat it like the basis of 'anything,' making her options limitless. \"Thank you,\" she said grabbing a big baking pan then pushing her cart into the main aisle. \"Have a great Thanksgiving.\"\n\n\"You too.\"\n\nBefore going home, Lewa stopped at the international market and grabbed a packet of melon seeds and chili pepper then went home and baked the turkey--following a recipe she'd found--while she chopped a bowl full of miniature tomatoes and onions. She couldn't wait to show her family her new tradition.\n\nThat Thanksgiving, Lewa boldly set her turkey dish on the table among the red jollof rice and yellow curried trout.\n\n\"What is this?\" her mother asked as Lewa took the foil off.\n\nLewa looked at her mother with love, seeing the unease in her eyes. It would be another year before her sister gave birth to a boy and three years after that before Lewa walked down the aisle to an American man her family accepted with some hesitation, but none of those things--her sister's childless state or her unmarried one--mattered to her that day. She finally knew who she was and what Thanksgiving meant to her. She was thankful for the freedom to be a her own person--to be unique and different without shame. Now she had her own special dish that would add to the season of traditions.\n\n\"It's meat pies,\" Aunty Elizabeth said recognizing a familiar staple.\n\n\"It's turkey pies,\" Lewa corrected. \"Spiced with chili peppers and I added some other ingredients.\"\n\n\"They look good,\" her father said.\n\n\"I bet they'll be delicious,\" Stillman added.\n\n\"You'll make a good wife,\" her grandmother said.\n\nBut this time Lewa didn't mind the mention of her single state. She looked at her sister and Stillman, with no envy. The man for her was out there, somewhere. And if he wasn't, she was okay with that too. She'd gotten her turkey for Thanksgiving and hopefully started a new tradition. One that suited her just fine.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Other Woman ]\n\nThe size 42DDD wasn't hers.\n\nAndrea Hartnett looked at the bright pink bra she'd found in her top lingerie drawer wondering if she should feel perplexed or enraged. If her husband was cheating, why would this bra end up in her drawer? Wasn't it something a wife would find underneath the bed, in the backseat of a car, or in her husband's jacket pocket?\n\nIf there was another explanation, what could it be? They'd had two kids\u2014ages five and seven\u2014within ten years of marriage and the thrill was definitely gone. Andrea glanced out the bedroom window as the descending darkness of night slowly devoured a bleak winter sun. Boredom settled on them some days more than others, but was that anyone's fault? Wasn't that normal? Robert was a good man, good husband and father.\n\nBut had he gotten tired of it all?\n\nHad he met someone at the play dates he went to with the kids?\n\nWas this his way of rebelling against his role as a househusband? The arrangement worked for them, but at times she wondered if he missed an outside work life. If he missed being an electrical engineer and the chance to discuss the newest changes in his field, instead of the latest action figure. She knew he'd finished his holiday shopping\u2014he was always orderly and regimented\u2014she hadn't even started hers.\n\nShould she confront him or be subtle? Andrea turned the object over in her hand, seeing the lacy white trim, feeling the satin finish, a flash of something crossing her thoughts\u2014a familiar sensation or memory\u2014before it was quickly gone. How could one be subtle about something like this? Did she approach him in the kitchen and calmly say, \"Darling, I found someone else's bra in my drawer? Do you know how that happened?\"\n\nDid she really want to know?\n\nDid she just want to pretend?\n\nAndrea hurriedly shoved the bra back in the drawer when she heard footsteps approaching. Moments later, Robert, came into the room carrying a laundry basket stacked with freshly washed clothes that reminded her of the scent of tulips and roses in the sunshine. He set the basket on the bed then lifted up her cream blouse and held it up with a flourish. \"Tada!\" he said with a big grin, his teeth white against his cocoa skin.\n\nShe frowned. \"What?\"\n\n\"I got the wine stain out.\"\n\nYes, she remembered being upset that she'd ruined the blouse after only one wear. She'd been at a holiday office party where her colleague, Mona Shan, had gotten tipsy and splashed Andrea's blouse. Mona had apologized profusely, but Andrea silently wondered if she was really apologizing for getting the promotion Andrea had worked two years for. But Andrea had laughed and made a joke, pretending that nothing bothered her and the tense moment was quickly forgotten.\n\nBut she hadn't forgotten it. The wine stain and Mona's sloppy apology burned in her chest like acid. That evening, Robert had found her sitting on the side of their bed in tears. She told him about the stain, not the lost promotion, not the catty remarks her boss sometimes made about her performance or even how tired she felt sometimes, and he'd squeezed her shoulder and said, \"Don't worry, I can get the stain out.\"\n\nAnd now he had and she wondered if it mattered. She stared at the clean, crisp blouse amazed that he'd managed to make it look as if it were brand new. Was size 42DDD someone who knew the best way to get stains out? Did she know the healthiest 'green' cleaning solution for countertops? Was she younger? Did she make him feel more like a man?\n\n\"Thanks,\" she said, plastering on a smile.\n\nBut the smile didn't fool him. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You look tired.\"\n\nI'm not tired, she wanted to say. I'm sad. Sad that we're keeping secrets. She went to the drawer to pull out the bra then stopped. She couldn't confront him now. She didn't want to be angry. She knew talks never worked when emotion came first. \"I just had a long day.\"\n\n\"Dinner's almost ready.\"\n\nThe scent of curried rice and the sweetness of mango chutney floated up the stairs. \"Smells great.\"\n\nHe winked. \"Tastes good too,\" he said then turned.\n\nAndrea watched him leave wondering if 42DDD had also tried his cooking.\n\nShe thought about leaving the bra on his pillow. Since she left for work after dropping the kids off at school it wouldn't be hard to do. But he might not see it or\u2014worse\u2014make anything of it. She thought of leaving it between the couch cushions where he watched TV, but then the kids might find it. She thought about taking a picture and sending it to his cell phone with a message: Who does this belong to?\n\nShe thought of checking his phone for private texts. She thought of calling in sick and following him around all day.\n\nBut she didn't do any of those things. Instead, she pretended like nothing had changed. On the weekend she watched him\u2014building a snowman in the front yard, hanging holiday lights along the house trim, wiping Kendall's tears when he slipped on the ice and hit his head, and vacuuming the car. He was a man in constant motion while she felt as if she were standing still. At times they passed each other like strangers.\n\nAnd she let two more days pass without mentioning the pink bra, wondering when she'd smell the whiff of someone else's perfume on his shirt (would it be spicy, musky or sweet?), see a lipstick stain on his collar (bright pink, deep red or purple?), but he'd be too smart for that. He did the laundry and knew how to take stains out. She wondered when she would catch him quickly hanging up the phone when she entered the room. When would she catch him in a lie?\n\nThey'd never lied to each before. Even when they'd first met as interns at her first job out of college, they'd been honest with each other about their ambitions and hopes for the future. She remembered when she'd gotten the dream job she'd applied for and how proud he'd been to support her and her career. All things seemed possible back then.\n\nHad she made him feel devalued? She remembered the time he'd gone on a weekend fishing trip with his brother and she realized how much she depended on him. She didn't know what to do with the kids or what to feed them. She had breakfast, lunch and dinner delivered the entire weekend. When she told him about her harrowing time, he'd just laughed and the next time he was gone for the weekend, he prepared the meals in advance and left instructions.\n\nBut had that bothered him? Did he think she was useless? Was 42DDD a domestic goddess? Did she have children? Was she married too? Divorced? She'd seen some of the other mothers and the teachers at their children's school. None looked like a 42DDD, but there were plenty who were fresh faced and pretty and young.\n\nThe questions continued to loom and grow until she couldn't ignore them anymore.\n\nShe confronted him one evening after he'd put the kids to bed and was relaxing on the couch watching a science special about galaxies. In the background, the Christmas tree glowed with colored lights, its branches heavy under the weight of ornaments both store bought and handmade. The scent of peppermint from the candy canes their kids had devoured earlier still lingered in the air.\n\n\"I found this in my drawer,\" she said, holding out the bra.\n\nHe looked at her\u2014not the bra\u2014for a long minute then said, \"I wondered when you'd say something.\"\n\n\"Who\u2026wait what?\"\n\n\"I didn't think you cared.\"\n\n\"You put this there?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Just wanted to see what you'd do.\"\n\nShe waved the bra in his face, fighting back tears of hurt and anger. \"Is this how you wanted to tell me you're having an affair?\"\n\nHis brows shot up. \"An affair?\"\n\n\"Yes, with this woman.\"\n\nHe sat up, confused. \"What woman?\"\n\nShe flung the bra at him. \"The woman who wears this!\"\n\nHe caught it and briefly hung his head, rubbing his forehead. \"There's no...\" He let his hand fall to his lap then looked up at her. \"I love the woman who owns this, but she doesn't wear it anymore.\"\n\nHe loved this other woman? What did he mean she didn't wear it anymore? Had she left him? And why had he put it in her drawer? Again a flash of something\u2014an emotion or memory she wasn't sure\u2014coursed through her thoughts before disappearing. \"I don't understand.\"\n\nHe took a deep breath. \"So you don't recognize it?\"\n\n\"Why would I recognize someone else's bra?\"\n\n\"Because it's not someone else's. It's yours. Was yours.\" He paused. \"From before.\"\n\nShe froze, a slow dawning casting aside the cobwebs of her mind and the flashing thoughts began to connect and take shape. She didn't need to ask 'Before what?' because she knew: Before she had her breast reduction surgery. Before she was left with scars that made her feel ugly. Before she realized that the surgery had relieved her back pain, but not the other pains in her life.\n\nShe felt tears build, tightening her throat, wetting her eyes, as she realized she had been the one with secrets, not him. They'd agreed to keep the bra as a reminder of all they'd come through together. To remind her of the past she'd left behind. She'd bought the bra years ago as a new bride and had never worn it\u2014or had she worn it once?\u2014before tucking it away. She'd forgotten it. The woman who'd bought it felt like a stranger to her.\n\n\"You know I love you no matter what,\" he said. \"I supported your decision.\"\n\n\"I know.\" But she'd pushed him away anyway. She'd let words of warning from others shove aside his words of comfort.\n\n\"Don't do it,\" she remembered one woman say in a support group. \"My husband left me after I did it. Men have a harder time with the change than we do.\"\n\n\"It was the best decision I made,\" another countered.\n\n\"But you're single,\" the first woman argued.\n\n\"Men started looking at me different and I'm still getting used to it,\" a third said. She'd later developed a drinking problem and was now in therapy for that.\n\nAnd the closer Andrea got to the date of her surgery, the more unsolicited comments she heard, or had they just gotten louder? She wasn't sure; she just remembered that each syllable felt like darts.\n\n\"I don't know why she'd get rid of what lots of women pay to have,\" she overheard a family friend say.\n\n\"I'm not surprised she's the one wearing the pants in that house now. She cut off her breasts and he cut off his balls,\" she'd overheard a great-aunt say at a family dinner.\n\n\"I'd never let my wife do it,\" a second cousin said.\n\nBut she went through with her decision gaining strength from her husband's support. Not knowing that his support wouldn't be enough. That a new pain would replace the old one.\n\nShe'd changed her entire wardrobe to accommodate the new woman she'd become, but inside she still felt as invisible as she once had been. In the past, she had to deal with people who didn't think women with big breasts had a brain. She'd had to endure snickers all through high school and college from both teachers and students. She'd had to tolerate guys who'd ask her out expecting only one thing and shouted angry slurs at her when they didn't get it.\n\nRobert had been different. He'd called her beautiful. He looked at her face and not just her chest. He thought she was smart. But she no longer felt beautiful and now she didn't feel smart. She wondered if he'd noticed that too? She sat down beside him no longer able to hold his gaze. \"I didn't get the promotion,\" she said in a soft voice.\n\nHe blinked. \"What?\"\n\nShe bit her lip then looked at him. \"The night I got the wine stain on my blouse, that's when I found out.\"\n\nAnger lit his brown eyes. \"But you'd worked your ass off for that new client and you've brought in millions of dollars to that company.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, glad he sounded as outraged as she'd felt. \"It wasn't enough.\"\n\n\"If they won't value you, then you need to start looking for another position that will.\"\n\n\"What if it pays less?\"\n\n\"And I can't stay home?\" he said, finishing her real question.\n\nShe nodded, holding her breath.\n\n\"What if it pays more?\"\n\nShe hadn't thought of that, but she held her breath because he still hadn't given her an answer.\n\nHe covered her hand with his. \"All that matters to me is your happiness and our family, you know that.\"\n\nShe'd let herself forget. She glanced at the 42DDD she'd placed beside her, remembering the woman she used to be. The woman he'd fallen in love with and who had fallen in love with him. For all her pain, that woman had laughed more and lived more.\n\nAndrea turned to her husband and hugged him, inhaling his scent. He used to smell like aftershave and leather; now he smelled like crayons and fresh coffee. She felt the strength of his embrace when his arms encircled her waist and she wondered how long it had been since she'd let him hold her this close. She closed her eyes.\n\nThere hadn't been another woman. Or rather she had to face the other woman she used to be and not fear or hate her\u2026\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, but what she really meant was 'I love you'.\n\nFortunately, Robert knew that and said 'I love you too' without words, pressing his lips against hers, letting his body say what words couldn't.\n\nAnd the other woman faded away, in the hushed, warm silence of the evening, as they renewed their vows and discovered each other in an exciting new way. Andrea realized she still had many questions. She still had to get her holiday shopping done and they had a lot of decisions to make for the future. But one thing she did know for certain, which suddenly made everything seem bright and beautiful, was that she didn't have to fear losing him\u2026or herself\u2026again.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Perfect Christmas ]\n\n[ A Clifton Sister Short Story ]\n\nHe didn't like the sight of the stones. Although they looked innocent as they lay on the front doorstep, glittering under the cold rays of a winter sun, they reminded him of something, but he couldn't remember what, that left him with a feeling of dread.\n\n\"What are those?\"\n\nKenneth Preston turned to his wife, Jessie, as she came up behind him carrying two bags in each hand, her red winter hat tipped at an angle. They'd been holiday shopping for their adopted daughter, Syrah. It was to be their first Christmas together as a family and they were both eager to make it special. He didn't want anything to ruin it. Somehow he felt the stones would do that.\n\n\"Probably nothing,\" he said, bending down to remove the stones.\n\nShe grabbed his arm. \"Wait. Don't touch them.\"\n\n\"Jasmine, don't\u2014\" he said calling her by her given name. Only he was allowed to call her that.\n\nShe stepped closer, putting her two bags in one hand, and gazed down at the stones. \"Just give me a minute.\"\n\nHe didn't want to. He didn't like the look of interest in her gaze. The stones were bad news, he could feel it.\n\nKenneth put the keys in the lock and opened the front door. \"Come on, it's cold.\"\n\n\"I wonder who left them here. The arrangement is very peculiar.\" She bent closer to examine them.\n\nHis wife had a special gift and affinity with stones. He respected that, but not now. He wanted her for Syrah and himself. He didn't want to share her attention with anyone. Especially someone who'd left a strange puzzle on their doorstep. A puzzle that reminded him of something, but he didn't know what. \"Jasmine, we need to put the bags away before Ace gets home,\" he said, using Syrah's nickname.\n\nShe scooped up the stones in her gloved hand and offered him a bright smile. \"Coming, coming.\" She brushed past him into the welcoming warmth of their house, the scent of sugar and ginger greeting them. But as he closed the door behind her, he felt as if the cold chill of winter had followed them inside.\n\n\"What are you going to do with the stones?\" Kenneth asked Jessie later that evening as they prepared for bed. He didn't really want to know, but couldn't help his curiosity.\n\nShe slipped under the bed sheets and rested against the headboard. \"Nothing. I don't know who they're from or why they were left.\"\n\nHe swallowed, hoping she was telling him the truth. Was it a warning? Had the scandal about his past created still more consequences for them to face? He felt a fissure of unease, like a tiny, hair-thin crack in a piece of glass. A crack of a memory wanting to emerge from the corner of his mind where he'd safely kept his past sealed. But he fought it; he wanted to stay in the present. They'd come through so much. He didn't want anything to separate them again. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Am I sure of what?\"\n\n\"That you don't know anything?\"\n\nJessie held his gaze, a quick flash of fire lighting them. \"You think I'm lying?\"\n\nKenneth lowered his gaze and swallowed. He didn't want to argue. He didn't want to upset her because he was afraid. Afraid of\u2026 He inwardly groaned. He didn't know what. But something ugly gripped him, something frightening and troubling. He didn't want anything to destroy the perfect Christmas he planned for them. Nothing could go wrong. He wouldn't let it. The memory teetering on the edge of his mind would stay there. He smiled, bent forward and kissed her. \"No, I wouldn't dare. I\u2014I just don't like the look of them.\"\n\n\"They're nothing to worry about.\"\n\nHe nodded and slipped in beside her, taking deep breaths. He had to believe her. Although he didn't like the stones, he had to trust her. He couldn't think she knew something and wasn't telling him. He couldn't think that maybe she was protecting him. He had to believe that there weren't secrets between them. That was the past. They were now joined together for life. He'd need two thousand lifetimes to show her how much he loved her. This Christmas would be the start of many\u2014nothing could go wrong. Unless\u2026\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Jessie said in sharp tone.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You stopped breathing.\"\n\nKenneth froze. \"I did?\"\n\n\"Yes. Why? You always do that when you're upset.\"\n\nHe avoided her gaze. \"I was just thinking about something.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nothing.\" He gripped his hand into a fist. He was already lying to her and he didn't want to, but felt that he must. Trust meant not asking questions, and he couldn't doubt her.\n\n\"I won't do anything without telling you first,\" she said as if reading his mind.\n\nHe took a deep breath. \"I know.\" He kissed her again, assuring her as much as himself. \"Promise me anyway,\" he whispered against her lips.\n\nShe smiled. \"Promise.\"\n\nHe felt some of his tension ease, then turned off the lamp light, but the darkness that settled around them seemed to find its way inside him too.\n\nAnd that darkness still followed him a week later. He didn't know why the stones bothered him or why he felt suddenly restless. He stared at his reflection in the full-length closet mirror, straightening his tie one morning as he prepared for work, almost not recognizing the man staring back at him. Only a couple of weeks earlier he'd been so happy about the upcoming holiday and now he was filled with dread.\n\nHe left the large closet and walked into the bedroom, then felt someone grab his arm and pin it behind him. \"Tell me what's bothering you,\" a female voice whispered in his ear.\n\nKenneth couldn't help a smile as his pulse quickened; he could overpower his wife in one swift move, but he'd let her believe she was in control, for now. \"Should something be bothering me?\"\n\nShe tightened her hold. \"You tell me. You haven't been yourself the last few days.\"\n\n\"Nothing's wrong.\"\n\n\"Want to arm wrestle?\"\n\nHe slipped out of her grasp, swung her over his shoulder and pinned her to the ground. He gazed down at her with a smug grin. \"Want to lose?\"\n\nHe waited to see her temper flare. Watched to see her beautiful brown gaze turn hot. She'd probably make him late for work and he'd enjoy every minute of it. But instead of her typical heated look, he saw worry tinge her eyes.\n\n\"I feel you pulling away from me,\" she said.\n\nHe didn't move, the truth of her words holding him still. She was right. He could feel it himself and didn't know why. They were now married, she was his new wife and he loved their life together and yet something gnawed at him and seemed to grow the closer Christmas came. His fears seemed foolish and there was still so much yet to know about each other, but there were still things he didn't want her to know.\n\nBecause he had no words, he kissed her, lingering over the sweet taste of her mouth, hoping it would be enough to remove the worry from her eyes. He wanted her to think about the tall pine they'd decorated that stood in their living room, the colored lights that covered the house, and the apple cider they'd had by the fire. The holidays were supposed to be happy, especially this one. He'd keep whatever darkness that hovered, within him. He drew away from her and smiled. \"How can I be pulling away, when I'm right here?\"\n\nHer gaze searched his, the worry deepened. \"Kenneth, what's wrong?\"\n\nHis pulse quickened again, this time from fear instead of desire. Why did she have to know him so well? \"I can't stop thinking about the stones,\" he said, releasing her.\n\nJessie sat up. \"I think I may know who the stones belong to. One of the clients at the store may have left them because he heard about me and\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want you to have anything to do with him.\" He didn't mean to sound harsh, but something told him it was important that she stay away.\n\nHe waited for her to argue. Waited for her to tell him that he was her husband and not her jailor and that she'd do what she wanted to do.\n\nInstead, she nodded. \"Okay.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I said okay. If it bothers you that much, I'll leave them, but...\"\n\n\"But what?\"\n\n\"I sense that whoever left the stones seems to want protection and help. They're not dangerous and\u2014\"\n\nKenneth shook his head. \"I don't care. Stay away.\"\n\n\"Fine. I will.\" Jessie lightly touched his cheek, her fingers warm and soft against his skin. \"Is that all that's bothering you?\"\n\nGod, he hoped so. He took a deep breath and stood. \"I'd better get going.\" He lifted her to her feet, resisting the urge to hold her close in case he wouldn't let her go.\n\nThere was too much snow. It wouldn't stop. It was two days to Christmas and it seemed people would get the white Christmas they hoped for. But to Kenneth, the continuous snowfall chilled him. It didn't fall with a soft light touch, but seemed to pound the earth, suffocating everything around him in white.\n\n\"Dad, are you okay?\"\n\nThe sound of his daughter's voice caused him both pleasure and pain, reminding him of what they'd both gained and lost. But he couldn't think about his brother, Eddie, right now. Nothing else mattered except making Syrah happy and helping her forget her brutal past. He turned from the window and looked at her as she stood there, wearing an oversized sweater he'd wanted to donate but she'd decided to keep. Their dog, Dion, stood by her side. Kenneth forced a smile. \"Of course I am.\"\n\nShe bit her lip. \"I'm not.\"\n\nHe forced his smile not to waver. \"Why not?\"\n\nShe sent a nervous glance towards the window. \"They were supposed to work, but I'm not sure they will.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Nothing.\"\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\nShe looked at him. \"Mom's not home yet.\"\n\nHe checked his watch. He'd assumed she was upstairs. Jessie was usually home before him. \"I'm sure she'll be here soon.\"\n\nHe couldn't let Syrah sense his unease. He knew she was looking forward to their first Christmas as a family, and was used to being disappointed. Did she have the same fear he did? That happiness may be out of reach for them? They both loved Jessie, but they also both knew that the ones they loved could hurt them the most. He knelt in front of Syrah, keeping his smile in place and his tone light as he pressed down his own concerns. \"I bet she had to finish up her holiday shopping and lost track of time.\"\n\nSyrah nodded. \"Yes, it's going to be all right, right?\"\n\nHe tweaked her chin. \"Right.\"\n\nBut an hour later, Kenneth wasn't so sure.\n\n\"I'm sure it's nothing,\" Jessie's eldest sister, Michelle, said when he called her. Her tone was practical and no-nonsense, reflecting the businesswoman she was. \"She's a walking accident. If you worry about her, you'll grow old fast\u2014trust me. Just wait for her to come home. If anything's happened, you'll know.\"\n\nWhen he called Jessie's other sister, Teresa, the advice was the same but said in a lighter more soothing way. She was a woman who believed in visions and herbs and that reflected in her words. \"Your years together have only just begun, your paths are intertwined and you're bound together unless you break them.\"\n\nHe gripped the phone. That didn't make any sense. \"Just let me know if you hear from her.\"\n\n\"I will, but you have to trust her.\"\n\n\"Of course I trust her.\"\n\n\"With everything?\"\n\nHe briefly shut his eyes. Teresa was sweet, but strange and he hadn't called for marriage advice. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Good, then she'll be fine. You both will.\"\n\nBut when another hour passed, he didn't feel fine. And his worry grew. He called her cousins and then anyone else he could think of, but no one could reach her. He had to believe that nothing was wrong. That she hadn't defied him and seen the man she'd mentioned about the stones against his wishes.\n\nHe had to believe that she was okay, even when another hour passed and he saw a story on the news about a woman's body being found near the bay.\n\n\"Poor woman,\" Freda, his housekeeper said, passing by the family room to head to the kitchen.\n\nIt couldn't be Jessie. She was just somewhere where her phone didn't work and the snow\u2026\n\nKenneth looked out the window, his hard gaze sweeping over the snow blanketing the ground and weighing the trees with its oppressive white hand. It looked harmless, but it could be so many things. Why did he hate snow so much? He felt an answer to that question as the hair-thin crack of memory tried to expand in his mind, but he violently silenced it with his will.\n\nIn two days they'd have their first Christmas as a family. A Christmas to help him forget the pain of his past. He had the right to be happy, to fight for his joy and his place in the world.\n\nAs a child, he remembered one winter clearing the driveway for Jessie's family, the Cliftons. Eddie had promised to do it\u2014and taken the advanced payment Mr. Clifton had given him\u2014but did only half the job. Kenneth had finished it up, hoping nobody would notice. He made sure there was not a flake left.\n\n\"You mustn't try so hard,\" Mr. Clifton had told him with a glint in his eye.\n\nHe didn't understand him at first and felt a little hurt and defensive. He was embarrassed that he'd gotten caught and angered by the criticism.\n\n\"You'll wear yourself out for no reason.\" He now knew what Jessie's father had meant. That he didn't have to try so hard to please, to be accepted, but it was still a lesson he was learning. He wanted this Christmas to be one of the best Jessie and Syrah had ever had.\n\nThree hours later, he paced. He couldn't report Jessie missing. Not yet. Not ever, he corrected. Because she would be home soon. She had to be.\n\nAnother hour passed. He felt himself falling apart. He grabbed his keys, determined to find her, then stopped when he heard the front door open.\n\nHe met her at the door. \"Where have you been? We've been waiting for hours. Do you know how worried Ace was?\" he said. \"I had to lie to her to get her to eat dinner then lie to her again to get her to go to sleep. Do you know how many people I called? You couldn't let anyone know where you've been, what you were up to? What happened?\"\n\nJessie blinked, then sighed with regret. \"I hardly understood a word you said. But I know you're upset and I'm sorry. Now take a deep breath and speak slowly and in English.\"\n\nIt took Kenneth a moment to realize he'd spoken in French. The language of his youth, the language of his heart. He could feel himself shaking as his anger and fear mingled within his veins. He hadn't shouted at her like that before and always tried to be careful to control his temper. He knew the danger of losing control. He took her advice and took a deep breath. As he exhaled, he felt his shield of anger slip away, as if a filter had been removed from his eyes, and he finally saw his wife clearly.\n\nHe saw the cut on her lip and the bruise on her cheek and his heart twisted. He rushed towards her, then stopped himself from touching her. \"What happened?\"\n\nJessie pressed her hands together as if in prayer. \"Don't be angry.\"\n\nKenneth folded his arms. \"I'm already angry, what did you do?\"\n\n\"This older woman was getting mugged\u2014\"\n\nHis arms fell to his sides. \"You went after a mugger?\"\n\n\"She said her life was in that purse and I couldn't just stand around and do nothing.\" Jessie held up her hand before he spoke. \"I know he could have had a knife or a gun, but he didn't. Unfortunately, he got away and she was so shaken that she asked me to go with her to the police and I did. I'm sorry, I didn't even think to call you. And then on my way home, a car swerved and hit me. Not too bad, so don't worry, and then my phone died and it was just chaos. But I left the hospital because I wanted to come home.\"\n\nHis voice cracked in surprise. \"You were at the hospital?\"\n\n\"The woman who hit me was insistent I get checked by a doctor, so I just did it to calm her. I'm so sorry I didn't get in touch with you somehow. It was just a crazy day and\u2014\"\n\nKenneth spun away and headed upstairs.\n\nJessie followed him. \"You're not going to forgive me?\"\n\nHe headed for their bedroom. \"I'm glad you're home.\"\n\n\"But you're still angry,\" she said, staying close behind.\n\nHe kept walking.\n\n\"Kenneth.\"\n\n\"Keep your voice down.\"\n\n\"Why? Syrah's probably already awake after your shouting rampage. At least she knows I'm home.\"\n\n\"It wasn't a rampage.\"\n\n\"It came close and I don't know why\u2014\"\n\n\"A woman was found dead today,\" he cut in, his voice raw with emotion, \"and I thought it was you.\"\n\n\"Why would you think that?\"\n\n\"I don't know!\" And he truly didn't. He didn't understand his lingering anger. She was safe, but his heart still hammered in his ears.\n\n\"Why are you shouting at me again?\"\n\n\"I'm not shouting.\"\n\n\"It's my fault!\" another voice said. They both turned and saw Syrah standing at the end of the hallway. Her voice broke. \"It's all my fault.\"\n\nJessie shook her head and walked towards her. \"Honey, no it's not. We're just\u2014\"\n\nShe took a step back before Jessie could reach her. \"I had Freda leave the stones on the doorstep, but they didn't work.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Jessie asked.\n\n\"I know I don't have your gift with stones, but when Aunt Teresa told me that they were special stones that could bring good luck and protection to a house, I thought\u2026\" Her words fell away. \"I was wrong.\"\n\n\"That's why they had that feeling,\" Jessie mumbled to herself. \"I'd wondered about that.\" She knelt in front of Syrah. \"You weren't wrong. And you didn't do anything bad. But why would you think we'd need that? What are you frightened of?\"\n\nKenneth came up behind Jessie and cupped Syrah's chin before she could reply. \"You're safe now.\"\n\nJessie hugged her. \"You don't need to be afraid. We're a family now and we're happy.\" Jessie turned and looked up at Kenneth. \"Right?\"\n\nHe looked at Jessie then shifted his gaze to Syrah, a chill coursing through him. He knew what he had to say, even though he didn't mean it. \"Yes.\" He kissed her on the forehead. \"Now go back to bed or I'll take one of your presents away.\"\n\nSyrah wrapped her arms around Jessie's neck and hugged her. \"I'm so glad you're home.\"\n\nJessie hugged her back. \"Me too.\"\n\n\"Kenneth, I said I'm sorry,\" Jessie said, closing the door behind them once they were alone in their bedroom.\n\n\"I know.\" He sat on the side of the bed and faced the window. \"It's fine.\"\n\n\"It's not fine if you won't even look at me.\"\n\nHe rested his head in his hands suddenly feeling tired and not knowing why.\n\n\"I don't understand\u2026\" Her voice died away and he heard her footsteps retreat. \"Okay, I'll leave you alone. I'll sleep with Syrah tonight then and\u2014\"\n\nHe reached her before she could get to the door. He swung her into the circle of his arms and held her tenderly. \"I'm sorry,\" he whispered into her hair. \"I didn't mean to shout and I'm glad you're home safe.\"\n\n\"Your heart's pounding.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\nShe looked up at him. \"Kenneth?\"\n\nHe heard a world of questions in her voice, but he wasn't ready for them yet. He held her tighter and said in a teasing tone, \"Why won't you leave your husband and be with me? Your husband's an idiot sometimes.\"\n\nJessie tapped his chest with her forefinger. \"I won't leave my husband because I love him too much. And he needs me.\"\n\nKenneth lifted a brow in surprise. \"He needs you?\"\n\n\"Yes, so he can stop pretending.\" She drew away from him. \"What's wrong? And don't act like you don't know what I'm saying. You're free now, you don't have to pretend anymore, remember?\"\n\n\"I want Christmas to be perfect.\"\n\n\"Christmas will be wonderful, okay? What's with you and Syrah recently?\" she asked. \"You don't have to be Mr. Perfect anymore. We've got our schedule planned from Christmas to New Years' with family and friends. Even if things go wrong it won't matter because it will be one of many memories we'll get to share. I don't know why she thought we needed the protection of those stones.\"\n\nOn Christmas Eve, they sat in front of the fireplace, the tree lit and the remnants of the sugar cookies and eggnog they'd enjoyed set to the side. Jessie told him and Syrah tales of when she and her sisters would wait up for Father Christmas. She made Syrah laugh and Kenneth watched them, wondering why he still felt so tired instead of happy. It was Christmas Eve.\n\nStop pretending, Jessie had told him. You must trust her with everything, Teresa had said. And she was right. Jessie was the one person he could be real with.\n\nHe needed to be honest. He hadn't really been afraid of her ignoring him regarding the stones, or getting killed. Those fears gave him a shield against what truly scared him, that the Christmas he was hoping for would be out of reach.\n\nHe worried that he wouldn't feel as he was supposed to. He'd never found Christmas a magical season. He'd never had a chance to believe in Father Christmas. All his life, he'd smiled his way through the season to please others, but he always felt like a fraud because the presents and the lights never warmed his heart. And he knew the truth would disappoint her. But pretending had become too much of a burden.\n\nHe kissed Syrah goodnight before she went off to bed, then Kenneth sat alone with Jessie on the couch.\n\nHe realized that he hoped by making Syrah and Jessie happy, and that their joy would somehow stir something in him. That he'd feel what the season was about. He didn't want to tell her that every song left him feeling numb and he felt exhausted under the weight of a cheer he didn't feel. \"I've never liked Christmas. I always lie and say I do, but\u2026\"\n\nShe looped her fingers through his and he gained strength in her touch. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"When I first saw those stones, I didn't know why they bothered me so much, but then I remembered one Christmas when my father got drunk and smashed the ornaments on our tree. I don't know how old I was but I remember how they sparkled even as they shattered and scattered on the ground.\" He briefly shut his eyes. \"I can't feel Christmas. The importance of it\u2026. I can't\u2026I can't feel it. I know I'm supposed to be ecstatic.\"\n\n\"You don't have to be.\"\n\n\"And there's this memory that keeps trying to come back.\"\n\n\"Why won't you let it?\"\n\nHe rested his head back. \"Because I don't want to.\"\n\n\"Maybe you need to.\"\n\nHe turned to her, his eyes clinging to hers. \"Most of my memories hurt.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She patted her lap. \"And you don't have to fight them alone anymore, you have me.\"\n\nA smile softened his mouth. \"Are you inviting me to sit on your lap like a good little boy?\"\n\nShe frowned. \"No, I was offering you a place to rest your head.\" She began to stand. \"But if you're not interested\u2014\"\n\nHe pulled her down. \"You know I am,\" he said in a deep voice.\n\nKenneth took a deep breath and laid his head down, letting himself surrender to the memory that had been haunting him, trying to become fully formed in his mind. He drifted to sleep, remembering another Christmas blanketed in white.\n\nWhite was everywhere. White like snow, except he saw the white of a doctor's lab coat, the nurse's shoes, the hospital walls and floors. There were paintings of cartoon characters in the halls, but he didn't recognize most of them because he didn't get to watch TV much. He remembered a white pillow and a metal bed and the sound of holiday music floating from somewhere. And he remembered making a wish\u2026\n\nA wish he'd forgotten about.\n\nHe opened his eyes and although it was still dark, the darkness that had seized his soul was gone. He felt his numbness fade and it hurt, but he welcomed the pain because at least he could feel, and the anger and restlessness had gone. He sat up and looked around the room in renewed wonder. He saw the brilliant lights on the tree, the red flashing flames of the fire, but most of all, he saw a home. His home. The one he shared with his daughter who was safe in her room. The one he shared with his wife who'd fight his battles with him.\n\nFor the first time in years, he let himself remember the wish of a little boy, spending the holidays in the hospital after a beating, and his wish for a new family that loved him no matter what.\n\nStop pretending.\n\nHe didn't have to pretend anymore.\n\n\"Kenneth, are you okay?\" Jessie asked him.\n\nHe turned to her, the fire glow caressing her brown skin. \"Yes,\" he said, the truth of his words filling him with joy. \"Yes,\" he said again, then stood pulling her up with him. He walked to the window and looked outside at the white snow as it lay under the gaze of the moonlight. He no longer hated the sight. Instead, he saw a whole new beginning.\n\nAs they stood by the window, he told her about his memory. His voice was soft as he spoke, his arms wrapped around her waist. She didn't speak, just listened as she rested her back against his chest.\n\nWhen he was through, he took a deep breath. \"You're right,\" he said. \"It will be a wonderful Christmas.\"\n\nEvery Christmas before had been a disappointment to him, but not this one. This one would be like no other. One he'd remember for the rest of his life. Not because it was perfect, but because his long ago wish had finally come true.\n\nIf you enjoyed The Perfect Christmas don't miss Kenneth and Jessie's romance in The Sapphire Pendant.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Song to Remember ]\n\nBitterness didn't have a taste. It had a smell and it smelled like cigarette ashes and vintage wine. To her, bitterness wasn't roads not taken, it was too many options and not enough time. It was facing mortality with grim surrender.\n\nSharon Burnell sat alone in her dressing room, the soft patter of snow tapping against the window. The sight was a rare treat for Washington DC. It had been a rather warm December and few expected to see snow until January and certainly not in time for Christmas.\n\nShe knew she shouldn't have been there. She should be at home, resting in the quiet solitude of her apartment. But she'd returned to the theater for something\u2014a scarf or an earring, she didn't remember what. Now it didn't matter. All that mattered was the silence. A silence filled with bitterness. Only hours before she'd been bedecked in jewels and silk, but that was now gone as was the audience and the unknown faces behind the scenes. The theater lay empty and silent, except for the guards and the cleaning crew.\n\nAs she sat in her dressing room, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and sighed. The stage makeup she'd worn had been wiped clean from her face, leaving it bare. She had an ordinary face. A face that seemed, with each day, to grow more familiar to her, though she didn't know why. There was no one in her family who had a nose that was quite like hers or a mouth that was a little crooked. Her walnut skin was still smooth though she saw some sagging around the edges of a jaw that used to be more angular, a neck that had been more regal.\n\nShe was at that lonely, unremarkable age when she was too old to live and too young to die.\n\nTonight, as she'd performed, she felt like a fraud. An imposter. What once had filled her with joy, left her empty. The applause no longer fed her spirit as it once had. The accolades meant nothing. They said she was one of the greatest, but she didn't think so. Her voice wasn't what it had once been. She hadn't reached the notes with the same power and verve. When had her life become worn floorboards and petulant conductors? When had a stage ceased to delight her? Tonight, when she'd looked at the stage, instead of seeing the lush Riviera she only saw broad paint strokes that were supposed to be waves.\n\nWhere had the magic gone? The mystery and the majesty of music had escaped her, but she didn't know when or how she'd allowed it to slip from her grasp. But it had left her desolate like a lover whose heart had grown cold.\n\nShe was no longer a young darling, but far from being a legend. Again, too young for that, but too old to be one of the fresh young things now flooding stages and concert halls around the globe.\n\nOh how she wished to see the magic again. But once you know how magic is done, can you ever see it again? She closed her eyes against tears.\n\nWhen she opened them, she saw a young girl of about fourteen wearing outdated clothes from the 60s, standing on the other side of the room.\n\nA young girl who looked familiar.\n\nSharon jumped to her feet. \"What are you doing here?\" she demanded.\n\nBut the young girl didn't hear her. Instead, she walked around the room, her face filled with wonder. \"It's so beautiful. Oh, how I'd love to have my own dressing room and sing in a theater like this one day,\" she said.\n\nSharon's heart raced. Why didn't the young girl see her and why did her face and voice seem so familiar?\n\n\"Come on, you don't recognize yourself?\" an amused female voice said.\n\nSharon screamed and glanced around the room not knowing where the voice had come from. The young girl walked past Sharon, still not seeing her or hearing anything. Goose bumps scattered up and down Sharon's arms as a familiar scent lingered.\n\n\"What's going on?\" She held the side of her head. \"Am I having a stroke?\"\n\n\"You're not having a stroke, Sharon,\" the voice said. \"Must you always be so dramatic?\" She hurried over to a corner and her gaze darted around the room, searching for the source of the voice, but she didn't see anything. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"No,\" the voice said. \"That's not the question you need answered. The real question is, Who is she?\"\n\nSharon looked again at the young girl who now sat in her chair and pretended to put on makeup. She then understood why she looked so familiar. She was looking at herself. The girl she'd been many years ago.\n\nSoon the dressing room fell away and she saw her old bedroom\u2014a stack of vinyl records she'd bought, although they didn't own a record player, a black and white photo of her friend from Liverpool; she smelled the scent of eggs and chips wafting from the kitchen. Outside, a drizzly grey rain soaked the city of Manchester, England, and the young girl stood by the window staring down at one of the records she couldn't listen to.\n\nSharon felt tears touch her eyes remembering that moment and noticing the welt on her arm where her grandfather had struck her with a switch because he thought she was trying to poison him. Her parents didn't want him to go into a nursing home, although caring for him had become more difficult. Her parents had taken her out of school so they could work and she had to look after him. Music helped her endure the confinement. At least they had a radio and at night she'd hold the dial just right so she could get to listen to her favorite station.\n\nHaving a piano helped too. Through the music she created on the black and white keys, she was transported to the hot streets of New York City and to the classical dance halls of Vienna. Music transported her grandfather too, because when she sang with him, he was like his old self. He would smile and dance and when she sang his favorite tunes it was as if years were erased from his face and his mind became clear. If only she could sing forever.\n\nThe young girl looked straight at Sharon, as if she could see her. And Sharon's heart began to race. Would she scream? Call the police? But the young girl didn't look surprised. \"I didn't think you'd come back,\" she said, setting the record down on her bed.\n\n\"You mean I've been here before?\"\n\nThe young girl frowned. \"Yea, you don't remember?\"\n\nNo, but now she started to understand why the mature face she'd seen in the mirror had felt so familiar to her. She'd seen it before as her younger self. \"Hmm.\"\n\n\"Did you really mean what you said before?\"\n\nOh no. What had she said? Sharon thought in a panic then the words came to her. If you keep the magic alive, it will never leave you, but if you forget you will wither and die. Why had she said that? But even as she asked herself the question, she knew the answer. It was a warning. She'd allowed herself to forget the magic. What music had once meant to her. Like the memories stolen from her grandfather, she'd quietly lost what had made her whole. She couldn't let herself do it again, this was her second chance. \"Yes,\" she said with a desperate fervor looking at the young face before her and seeing it wasn't the smooth skin or the lack of years that would later catapult her into her long career, it would be her passion. A passion that would send her around the world, to marvel at the five languages she'd learn to speak, gasp at the sight of tears rolling down her parents' faces when she sang in Carnegie Hall. A passion she must continue to let burn.\n\nShe hadn't tended to it. She'd taken it for granted, until slowly it had burned out.\n\n\"Sharon!\" her grandfather called and she remembered that her name was one of the few he still remembered. Her younger self went to where he sat in the living room. He didn't see the older version.\n\n\"Ask him to play something,\" Sharon told her younger self.\n\nAnd the young girl did. The older man shuffled to the piano, but once he sat down, his back straightened, his arms and fingers flexed and as he played all the years fell away. Sharon remembered the tune and sang along and her younger self joined her.\n\nAnd as the magic rained down around them, tears of shame touched her eyes. She felt ashamed by how easily she'd allowed herself to forget how fortunate she was, how far she'd come, how much she'd let herself forget, and how much she needed to remember.\n\nSoon the pair fazed away and she sat in the audience and saw herself on stage in one of her performances ten years ago and although she didn't see a legend or an ing\u00e9nue, she saw someone more radiant. She saw a woman in love. In love with the magic that surrounded her as the music soared through the room, flowing through her and touching the hearts of those around her. And behind her, she saw the waves instead of the brushstrokes; she saw the horizon and could hear the seagulls. The scenery came alive.\n\nHer breath caught when the woman performing, looked at her\u2014and she felt the connection. She could hear her urgent plea 'Never forget me'.\n\nShe understood that request. She would never forget why she sang. She sang for the girl growing up in a small flat in Manchester who dreamed of a different life. She sang for the woman who couldn't believe where her life had taken her. She sang for her grandfather who first showed her the magic, by playing the piano and teaching her show tunes. Sharon nodded, making a promise not to get caught up in the criticisms, the trinkets of fame and fortune or her own ego. She was there to serve the music.\n\nThe woman seemed to smile and finished her song to thunderous applause.\n\nSilence soon descended and Sharon found herself standing in the corner of her dressing room again, but the scent of bitterness was gone.\n\nAnd she knew she'd never smell it again. The magic had returned.\n\nNo, she realized as she gathered her things to face the snowy weather outside, a new sense of joy bubbling inside, it had never left.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Mother's Day Wish ]\n\n\"We don't need you. We have a lawn service to take care of things,\" Beth Armstrong said looking at the lanky fifteen year old who'd asked to mow her lawn. She was surprised he'd even offered. He was a Bailey after all and everyone knew the Baileys were a lazy bunch. The only effort his father extended was to find a woman and get his pants down or open a bottle and fill his belly with liquor. People knew better than to hire him because he'd never show up, but would always come up with an excuse as to why. Just like his father before him. Even his great-grandfather had a notorious reputation back in Trinidad. He'd been a man not to be trusted. Beth didn't expect young Cole Bailey to be much different. He was a good looking young man with dark lashes and brows, but the Bailey men always were.\n\nShe hardened her heart against the look of disappointment that dimmed Cole's light brown eyes and turned the corners of his mouth down. She couldn't bend. She wouldn't. People had been trying to help the Baileys for years and nothing ever worked. She gripped the door handle, stiffened her spine and let a slight, polite smile touch her lips. \"I'm sorry. Goodbye and good day.\"\n\n\"Good day,\" Cole said not meaning a word. He forced a smile then turned. It didn't feel like a good day but that was all he'd been forced to hear. The Armstrong house had been his last stop. Nobody would hire him. He'd offered lawn care, window washing, spider web cleaning and painting, but he always got a polite 'good day' and a door in his face. He knew the people of Hamsford didn't want a Bailey inside their homes, but he'd hoped they'd at least let him help outside with the grunt work. Wasn't he good enough for that? None of the local shop owners would give him work, his father and grandfather's reputations always proceeded him. But he wasn't his father or grandfather.\n\nUnfortunately, no one would give him the chance to prove it. And he needed a break. He needed to make money to help his family, especially his younger sisters who deserved more than what they were getting--a fridge that was usually empty and a cramped, dank apartment. His parents were already two months late on the rent. Cole knew the rent was really six months overdue, but his father had managed to bargain it down to two months since he was sleeping with the landlord's wife and she'd somehow persuaded her husband to lower what was owed. Cole didn't know how long the arrangement would last, since his father never stuck with anyone or anything long. He wanted to make sure he had enough money to take care of the family in case something went wrong, which it usually did.\n\nYes, his sisters deserved better. Just thinking of them made him smile. They were the only people in town who loved and looked up to him. They were so sweet and smart. He remembered when he'd gone to the church charity looking for clothes he'd picked up an old stain glass kit for his thirteen year old sister, Angela. She made amazing art with it, which he put up near the windows giving their gloomy place some beauty as it cast rainbows on the walls and floor. He wanted to get her some more tools and pay for a school trip to an art gallery in two months. Then there was his shy little sister, Grace, who needed braces. She was ten and her teeth were growing in crooked. Kids were already making fun of her and she had no friends.\n\nNot that his parents noticed. His mother was always in a foul mood, angry that she'd ended up marrying a 'good for nothing Bailey' and getting 'good for nothing children.' His father was hardly around but nobody missed him anyway.\n\nCole slowly walked down the path that cut through the Armstrong's manicured lawn trying to think of another way to make money when he saw an older woman coming towards him carrying heavy bags. He rushed up to her. \"Let me help you,\" he said half expecting her to refuse. People didn't let Baileys help them.\n\n\"Oh thank you,\" she said offering him a bright smile of relief. \"I bought more than I should have.\"\n\nCole stopped and stared at her for a moment in amazement. She'd smiled at him. Not a fake distant smile, but a real genuine one. He'd never had that before. He took her bags even more eager to please her just to get her to smile at him again. She had a nice round face, sparkling eyes, warm brown skin and grey hair. If he had a grandmother he'd want one to be just like her. He helped her carry her bags to the door, wishing he could help her with something else.\n\n\"Thank you young man,\" she said taking her keys out of her handbag.\n\n\"My pleasure,\" he said liking the soft island lilt of her words.\n\n\"What's your name?\"\n\nSuddenly, the door swung open, cutting off his reply. \"Mother,\" Beth said in an urgent rush. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"I'm perfectly fine,\" she said startled. \"This young man--\"\n\nBeth snatched the bags from Cole and anxiously peered inside. \"You'd better check to make sure everything is here. Baileys have sticky fingers.\"\n\nThe woman shot her daughter a glance of annoyance. \"Of course everything is there. I didn't raise you to be facety like this.\"\n\nBeth sent Cole a look of suspicion. \"Why are you back here? I told you we can't use you.\"\n\n\"He was helping me.\"\n\nBeth set the bags aside and pulled money from her purse. She held out a five dollar bill and waved it at him with impatience. \"Fine you can go now.\"\n\nCole took a step back, trying to take rein on his temper. He wanted to take the five dollars and ram it in her mouth. He could show her how much of a sticky fingered no good Bailey he could be. Instead he gripped his hands into fists. \"I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" the older woman said grabbing his sleeve. \"What did you come for?\"\n\n\"To mow the lawn,\" Beth said.\n\nHer mother stared at her, raising her eyebrows. \"Is this a puppet show? I ask him a question and you answer?\"\n\n\"No, mother but--\"\n\n\"Then keep your mouth shut 'til I ask you to open it again.\" She turned her attention to Cole. \"Come inside. I want to talk to you.\" Before her daughter could protest the woman stepped past her and said, \"Put the kettle on. I'm thirsty.\" She ignored the stunned silence that followed her request and headed for the kitchen.\n\nCole hesitated then followed. He'd never been inside such a fine house before. He gaped at the rose colored wallpaper and polished wooden floors. There wasn't a cockroach in sight. When he passed the family room he quickly peeked inside and saw Mr. Armstrong standing near the fireplace and his son, Grant, reading a book. He knew Grant from school, not personally, but from a distance and by reputation. Grant always had a crowd of admirers around him since he was a track star and talented musician. Cole was too in awe to notice the frown on Grant's face when he saw him. He hurried to the kitchen then halted at the sight of how large it was. His entire apartment could fit inside it.\n\n\"Sit down,\" the woman said getting some Jamaican bun and cheese out of the refrigerator. She set them on the table.\n\nHe sat, rubbing his hands together under the table. \"Yes, Mother Armstrong.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said with a laugh. \"I'm not an Armstrong. That's my daughter's married name. Just call me Ms. Hetty.\"\n\n\"Hey Bailey,\" a voice said behind him. He turned and saw Grant standing in the doorway, a look of annoyance on his face. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nCole opened his mouth to reply, but Hetty beat him to it. \"We're having a private conservation. You can talk to him later.\"\n\nGrant scowled then stormed away.\n\n\"So you do lawn care?\" Hetty asked.\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" he said. He'd tried to join a landscaping crew but no one would hire him. However, he'd watched them work and picked up skills. He didn't have the equipment, but knew how they worked.\n\n\"What else can you do?\"\n\nBeth came into the kitchen and filled the kettle at the sink.\n\n\"Polish silver,\" he said.\n\nShe set the kettle on the stove and mumbled, \"And steal it too.\"\n\nCole shifted in his seat, wanting to defend himself but knowing he couldn't.\n\n\"Go on,\" Hetty urged.\n\n\"I can clean spider webs.\"\n\nBeth rested a hand on her hip. \"You think I'd allow spiders to build webs in my house? My house is spotless.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean to offend.\"\n\n\"You might as well say you'd kill mice too.\"\n\n\"I can if you need me too.\"\n\nBeth gasped. \"You cheeky little--\"\n\n\"Quiet, Beth,\" her mother interrupted.\n\nShe pointed at Cole. \"Did you just hear what he said? He sits in my home and implies that we have mice!\"\n\n\"Be quiet.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\nHetty turned to her daughter. \"Have you forgotten that I'm still your mother? I said keep your mouth shut and I mean it. I can still box your ears and I'll make it your mouth if I have to.\" She turned back to Cole. \"Go on.\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"I'm good at fixing things.\"\n\n\"Anything in particular?\"\n\n\"Anything you ask me to.\"\n\nHetty nodded. \"Good I have a task for you. I have a lawn swing that needs to be fixed. Can you do that?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"How much?\" Cole gave her a price and she shook her head. \"Too high.\"\n\nCole rubbed his hands and swallowed. He didn't want to lose her business, but he also didn't want to admit that he didn't even own a hammer or screwdriver. He needed money to buy tools. \"I'll also paint the trim if you like.\"\n\n\"The price is still too high.\"\n\nHe lowered his gaze. Think Bailey. You need this job. He knew what his father would do. He'd try to sweet talk her, but he was no good at that. He liked to be honest. He sighed he hoped that wouldn't be a mistake. \"I can lower the price if you'd allow me to use your tools.\"\n\nBeth opened her mouth then quickly closed it, remembering her mother's threat.\n\n\"How much?\" Hetty asked.\n\nHe gave her another price.\n\nHetty smiled and held out her hand. \"Agreed. Come back tomorrow after ten.\"\n\nCole shook her hand, careful not to pump it too hard. He really wanted to give her a big hug. He'd made her smile and now had a job. He grinned back. \"I will. Good day,\" he said, meaning every word.\n\nAt dinner Beth bristled with outrage. \"You won't believe what Mother did today. She hired a Bailey.\"\n\nArthur Armstrong looked at his mother-in-law, who was calmly eating her dinner, then at the pinched face of his wife. His three sons waited to see how he would handle the situation. He chose to proceed with caution. \"To do what?\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"I'm curious.\"\n\n\"Fix the lawn swing.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you say so, Mother? I could have gotten it fixed for you.\"\n\nHetty did not raise her gaze from the curried trout and creamy scalloped potatoes on her plate. \"On three occasions I asked but no one listened. I was tired of waiting.\"\n\n\"Mother,\" he said in a soft patronizing tone. \"You're new to this place so you don't know the people. Some of them you just can't trust.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Beth said. \"The Bailey men are lazy, worthless men. What will people think? You don't know what you've done.\"\n\n\"I know exactly what I've done. I gave a young man a chance,\" Hetty said.\n\n\"But he's a--\"\n\n\"He's not his father. Let him prove himself.\"\n\nGrant touched her shoulder. \"I'll fix it for you, Gran.\"\n\nHetty repressed a shudder. It wasn't good to not like one's own flesh and blood but she didn't take to her grandson. She found him to be as slick as palm oil. After her husband's death she'd looked forward to moving in with her daughter's family, but the move hadn't been as peaceful as she'd hoped. Her daughter was constantly correcting her, her son-in-law ignored her and her grandchildren barely noticed her. She'd carried heavy shopping bags before without anyone caring. To everyone she was just an invisible old woman. That young Bailey boy had been the first to take any notice. To really make her feel as if she mattered, not to feel as if she were just a burden or obligation. She had plenty of money, because she and her husband had been savvy with their finances, and could go to a residential facility, but she didn't want to be around just old people. But being around the younger generations wasn't much fun either. At times she considered moving to the cottage she and her husband still owned in New York and had used as a holiday house, but it would be lonely there.\n\n\"I've already hired Cole,\" Hetty said. \"And I plan to keep my word.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\n\"I'm a grown woman and I've made up my mind. This has nothing to do with any of you.\"\n\nThat evening Hetty took out an old photograph and sat on her bed staring at the faded image. It was a picture of her cousin Lenny, a fine looking young man who'd been shot and killed in an armed robbery bust when the police mistook him for one of the assailants. She remembered returning to Trinidad to attend his funeral. She let her finger trail over his smiling happy face. No one had given him a chance. No one had taken the time to look past his poor grades and background to see what a hardworking young man he was. She remembered how he could make you smile when you wanted to cry and how he never felt sorry for himself. Cole somehow reminded her of him. Unlike Lenny, she would make sure he was given an opportunity to prove himself. But she knew helping Cole wasn't just for him, it was for her. She glanced around her crowded bedroom filled with stuff she could afford, but didn't need. It offered her no comfort. She was restless. She had done her childrearing and had worked most of her life. She'd waited all her life for these days of leisure, but she was bored. She wanted to do something. She wanted a reason to live. Cole had not only noticed her, he'd made her feel useful. He'd made her feel viable again.\n\nCole arrived the next day at ten on the dot. Hetty sat in a lawn chair and watched him work. He was a good worker. Skinnier than he should be but strong. He told her about his sisters. They laughed together that Saturday like two kids getting to know each other and shared a lunch of spicy chicken patties and talked about their frustrations.\n\n\"No one will give me a chance,\" Cole said as they finished their meal.\n\n\"I did and I know others will too.\"\n\n\"I really want to thank you.\"\n\nHetty waved his thanks aside. \"It's not a big issue. I'm glad you could help me and respect me.\" She sighed. \"Sometimes my family treats me as if I were two years old.\"\n\n\"I wish I could take you home with me,\" Cole said. \"I'd let you do whatever you wanted.\"\n\n\"Where do you live?\"\n\nCole shook his head. \"It's not good enough for you.\" He wondered if he'd ever have a place good enough for her to visit. Baileys had never owned anything. But he pushed the thought away and finished fixing her swing. Hetty giggled with delight when it was finished and immediately tried it out. She then gave him another task and soon he was a regular at the Armstrong house. To his surprise, word quickly spread and he was able to get other small jobs around town. But no job compared to working for Ms. Hetty, Cole thought as he dug up a patch of dirt she wanted to use as a herb garden. She was one of the most wonderful women he'd ever met: Smart and pretty and sweet and he loved her.\n\nHe'd given her a card for Mother's Day wishing he could spend every Mother's Day with her and treat her and his sisters to brunch like other families did. His mother hated Mother's Day and didn't like cards. She said they were just expensive pieces of paper unless there was money inside. But not Ms. Hetty. When Cole had given her his card--he'd wanted to get her perfume or flowers but a card was all he could afford--she'd given him one of her beaming smiles and held the card close as if he'd given her a treasure. Even though her family had treated her to buffet and gifts of scarves and jewelry she made him feel that his gift was just as important. And that night he wished he could always make her smile and imagined spending every holiday with her from New Year's Day to Christmas. He wished he could rescue her somehow. He hated to know she was unhappy living with her family. He knew how she felt, but he didn't know what he could do. He was close to raising enough money for Angela's school trip and with more jobs he could raise enough for Grace, but helping Ms. Hetty would take a miracle. At least he was glad that luck was finally on his side.\n\nGrant watched Cole from his bedroom window with seething anger. Why was his grandmother paying attention to that dirty old Bailey? His friends were already ribbing him about it. Bailey was making him a laughing stock. He was the one who was supposed to shine. He was the track star and musician, but his grandmother barely took notice of him. What was so important about a stupid swing anyway? And why did she keep having to have him come back? Bailey almost acted like he belonged there, but he didn't. Hell, he could even sense his parents starting to like him and his two brothers had once asked Bailey to join them for a soccer game. He hated Cole Bailey. He should know his place.\n\nThat night Grant went into the garden and unscrewed a major hinge on the swing. He smiled as he imagined the havoc he'd just created. Now Bailey would get what he deserved.\n\nHetty loved to sit outside on late spring evenings. She was so happy that she now had a beautiful swing to sit in. Outside she felt close to Lenny and her husband and no longer thought of them with pain. Her heart had a new resident. Cole had filled her life with laughter and joy. She hoped to one day meet Cole's sisters since he talked so fondly about them. She sat on her swing and swayed back and forth then she heard a snap and the swing came crashing down. Shooting pain followed. She cried out as hot tears filled her eyes.\n\nBeth rushed to her. \"Mother!\" She turned to her husband who'd followed close behind and said, \"Call an ambulance.\"\n\nMinutes later Hetty was taken to the hospital where they discovered she'd broken her hip. Infection quickly set in and for days Hetty was gravely ill, but to the relief of her family she pulled through.\n\nCole, however, soon found his world shattered. Word quickly spread about his poor workmanship and soon he was being called a 'no good Bailey' again and what little work he'd been able to get dried up.\n\n\"So typical,\" his mother said as he cleared up the fast food dinner he'd bought with money he'd saved. She sniffed in disgust. \"You Bailey men always screw up a good thing.\"\n\n\"I know I fixed it right,\" Cole said, wishing there had been leftovers for tomorrow night's dinner. The greasy chicken meal was nothing like the baked plantain and jerk chicken Ms. Hetty had once treated him to, but it was still food.\n\nHis mother rested back in her chair, putting her feet on the table. Her boots added to the many scratches that were already there. \"Then why did it break nearly killing the old woman?\"\n\nCole swallowed feeling a little ill. \"I don't know, but I didn't make a mistake. I tested it myself and I'm heavier than Ms. Hetty. I would never do anything to hurt her.\"\n\n\"Just take responsibility,\" Angela said. \"Go to the hospital and ask for forgiveness.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I can't face her.\"\n\n\"I thought she was your friend,\" his youngest sister, Grace, said.\n\nCole blinked back tears. She was and that was why he couldn't face her. He didn't care what anyone else thought of him, but if she thought he was a 'good for nothing' Bailey he couldn't handle it.\n\n\"You have to visit her,\" Angela insisted.\n\nHe hung his head. He knew he was disappointing them. He'd disappointed everyone. \"Leave me alone.\" He turned wishing there was somewhere to hide. Unfortunately, there was nowhere to go to get away, so he went into the stairwell. He collapsed onto one of the steps, covered his face and cried. He loved Ms. Hetty and wished he was in the hospital instead of her. He wished he could take all her pain away, especially since he was the cause. He was a 'no good Bailey' who deserved to die. His mother was right. He was a screw up. He was no different than the rest of the Baileys. Cole quickly wiped his eyes, when he heard footsteps, and turned his face to the wall.\n\nAngela sat beside him and lightly rested a hand on his shoulder. \"You have to go see her.\"\n\nHe kept his face turned and shook his head.\n\n\"I want you to give her something.\"\n\nCole let his shoulders droop then slowly looked at his sister and saw that she held a small stain glass project in her hand.\n\n\"It can't be fun being stuck in a hospital, this will brighten it up for her.\"\n\nCole sighed, taking the stain glass. It was a picture of a garden. He was so close to making their lives better and he'd failed. There would be no school trip or braces, but he'd at least do this for her.\n\nThe next day, he dressed in his best suit. When his mother saw him she laughed. \"You're going to a damn hospital not a funeral.\"\n\n\"I want to look my best.\"\n\n\"If you were your father, I'd wonder if you wanted to sweet talk a nurse.\"\n\nCole arranged his tie. \"No.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you haven't knocked up a girl yet, but you're still young so there's still time.\"\n\n\"I'm not Dad.\"\n\n\"You better not do that or you're out.\"\n\nHe nodded. He'd heard that since he was five. It wasn't that he wasn't interested in girls, but he had to take care of his family first. And now he had to help Ms. Hetty.\n\nShe helped straighten his tie. \"Not that it will matter. No matter how fine you look you'll never be one of them.\"\n\n\"I'm not trying to be.\"\n\n\"Then why are you acting as if you're meeting the damn queen or something?\"\n\nHe knew his mother wouldn't understand, but he wanted to look his best for Ms. Hetty. He wanted to let her know how sorry he was and tell her he would find a way to make things up to her. He took Angela's wrapped gift and left the apartment.\n\nGrant met him outside the door to Hetty's hospital room. His gaze swept Cole's worn suit and his mouth quirked in a sneer. \"What are you? The undertaker?\"\n\n\"I came to see Ms. Hetty.\"\n\n\"Sorry. It's family only,\" he said.\n\n\"I just have to give her something.\"\n\nGrant held out his hand. \"I'll give it to her.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nGrant lowered his voice and narrowed his eyes. \"Listen Bailey, I can make your life even more miserable than it is now so you'd better just take my advice and leave.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid of you.\"\n\n\"That's your mistake. I can--\"\n\n\"I don't care. I want to see Ms. Hetty.\"\n\n\"Is that Cole?\" Hetty called out. \"Is that you, my dear?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" he said boldly meeting Grant's glare. \"It's me.\"\n\n\"Are you waiting for an invitation? Come on in.\"\n\nCole shoved past Grant.\n\n\"There's a hole in your suit,\" Grant said.\n\nCole ignored him and walked into the room. Hetty had her own private room. It was filled with flowers. He thought of Angela's gift and knew that it couldn't compete with the grander surrounding him. \"I'm so sorry,\" he said in a rush. \"I was sure everything was secure.\"\n\n\"What no hug?\" Hetty said lifting her arms out to him.\n\nHe gently hugged her. She smelled like lilacs and felt as warm as a summer morning.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Beth snapped, coming into the room. \"You've done enough damage. I'm surprised you can show your face.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mrs. Armstrong. I was sure--\"\n\n\"What have you brought for me?\" Hetty said eyeing the package under his arm.\n\n\"It's from my sister Angela. She thought you might like it.\"\n\n\"Next time tell her to come.\" Hetty opened the package then gasped at the item inside. \"It's beautiful.\"\n\nBeth walked over to take a look. \"Your sister made this herself?\"\n\nCole nodded with pride. \"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"We have to put it up.\" Hetty pointed to the window. \"Rest it there so the sunlight can filter through.\"\n\nCole did just that and then they all stared at it.\n\n\"Hetty,\" a voice called from the doorway then an elegantly dressed woman walked into the room. \"You're always causing trouble little sister.\" The woman stopped and stared at the stain glass. \"Oh, where did you get this?\"\n\n\"It's a gift,\" Hetty said. She gestured to Cole. \"His sister makes them.\"\n\n\"How much?\" the woman asked, picking it up to take a closer look.\n\nHetty gave a reply that left Cole speechless.\n\n\"Very well. I'd like to order one. You know that Todd is looking for a student to mentor. Do you think your sister would be interested?\" she asked Cole.\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\nShe pulled out her card. \"Have her call me.\"\n\nCole stared at the card. No one had ever given him their card before. \"Yes ma'am.\"\n\nGrant stood near the door and watched the scene wanting to punch something. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. They were supposed to hate him. \"Why are you helping his sister?\" he said. \"He's the reason you're in here.\"\n\n\"And I forgive him,\" Hetty said.\n\n\"You could have died.\"\n\n\"But I didn't and I think it was meant to be.\"\n\nGrant widened his eyes incredulous. \"Meant to be?\"\n\n\"Yes, \" she said with a bright smile. \"All because of the great man above. If I hadn't broken my hip, I wouldn't be here and then Cole's sister wouldn't have given me this picture and my sister wouldn't have seen it and then consider recommending her to Todd. Yes. It's all meant to be. God at work.\"\n\n\"But it wasn't God. I was--\" Grant stopped before he implicated himself.\n\nHetty met his eyes with a keen intelligence that sent a shiver through him. \"You were what?\"\n\nGrant shook his head, as a trickle of sweat slid down his back. \"Nothing. I just think--\"\n\nHetty clapped her hands. \"I just had an idea.\" She turned to Cole. \"If my sister has anything to do with it, Angela will be accepted into Todd's program. He's my sister's ex-husband and has an art studio in New York where he mentors aspiring young artists. Angela is very talented and I know he'd enjoy working with her. She would be able to learn and grow her skills while also earning money. \" Hetty continued when she saw Cole's hesitation. \"I have a house there that I'd love to use again. My husband and I used to go there for vacations. Your sister could live there and she'll need someone to be there with her. I've always wanted to live there but not by myself. I could lookout for her. But we'd need someone to help around the house. Would you like to go too?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, but...\" His words fell away.\n\n\"But what?\"\n\n\"I have another sister.\"\n\n\"There are good schools there. She can come too.\"\n\n\"Mother,\" Beth said stunned. \"What are you saying?\"\n\n\"'I've got a lot of life left in me and I'm not ready to be put out to pasture. I'm moving.\"\n\n\"I thought you were happy with us. And we can take care of you.\"\n\n\"That's the problem. I don't need you to.\"\n\n\"But these three Bailey kids will--\"\n\n\"Be the greatest gift to me,\" she finished.\n\n\"Their parents--\"\n\nHetty brushed her concerns aside with a wave of her hand. \"I'll make it worth their while.\"\n\nAnd she did. Mrs. Bailey was relieved to see her children go so she could have another life. Mr. Bailey wasn't around to argue. Angela was accepted into Todd's exclusive mentorship program, Grace got her braces and enrolled in a private school nearby and Cole felt glad he'd managed to get the life his sisters deserved, leaving the Bailey reputation far behind.\n\nAnd as they sat in their little house one fall afternoon, Cole thought back to the night he'd imagined spending every holiday with Ms. Hetty and he grinned knowing his Mother's Day wish had come true.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Fortunate Mistake ]\n\nThe phone call shattered a beautiful crying fit at 3 a.m. on Christmas Eve. Marina Durosomo had gone through an entire box of tissues and blown her nose until it hurt and her red rimmed eyes were dry when the piercing of the phone invaded her quiet apartment. She wanted to ignore it, to continue to drown in her misery and the stinging critique of her now closed bakery that continued to torment her, but the insistent ringing wouldn't stop. Who could be calling her now? She didn't want to hear more bad news. She reluctantly reached for the phone, slow enough to hope that by the time she picked up, the person on the other end would hang up.\n\n\"Hello?\" she said.\n\n\"Did I wake you?\"\n\nMarina wiped her eyes, recognizing her mother's voice. She was good at asking questions that didn't need an answer. If she said 'yes', her mother would apologize but not really mean it. If she said 'no', her mother would ask what was wrong and she didn't want to tell her. \"I'm fine.\"\n\n\"You sound like you're coming down with a cold.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she repeated, tossing her empty box of tissues into the recycling bin.\n\n\"You don't sound--\"\n\n\"Mom, what's wrong?\"\n\n\"I need you to pick up Aunty Helen.\"\n\n\"Aunty who?\"\n\n\"That's her English name. You won't remember her real one. Besides, you don't know her. She's the mother of a good friend of ours.\"\n\nBecause her mother had about twenty 'good friends' Marina didn't even try to make the connection. It wasn't unusual to have unexpected visitors arrive from Nigeria. They treated their family like a taxi and hotel service, but her mother and father were steeped in the tradition of hospitality and didn't want anything negative said about them back home, even though an ocean separated them. \"Okay when will she be here?\"\n\n\"She's arriving at four-thirty.\"\n\n\"This morning?\"\n\n\"Yes, why else would I be calling you now? You have an hour and a half to get ready and be over there.\"\n\nHer mother made it sound so sensible. \"Why me?\"\n\n\"She's coming in at BWI. You're closer to the airport and I have to go to work.\"\n\n\"I work too.\"\n\nHer mother's responding silence was eloquent. She used to work. She used to have a business she was proud of, but that was all over now. All because of a major recession and a business partner who'd embezzled her funds and disappeared. But no, the truth was her business hadn't failed. She had. There were other bakeries that were flourishing, but the critique had shown a light on all her fears. She just wasn't good enough. Her mother had told her the bakery was a foolish dream, that she should have tried for something more sensible. Her mother would never say 'I told you so', but she didn't have to. Now she would be chauffer to some stranger. This was her punishment. She hated the holidays. Every year they seemed to show her how far she was from the life she wanted. It highlighted another year of grasping for something out of reach.\n\n\"What's her flight number?\" Marina asked to fill the silence and resigned to her fate.\n\nHer mother told her.\n\n\"Can't Wale go?\"\n\n\"I can't reach him. Hurry, I don't want her waiting there alone. And this will be good for you.\"\n\n\"Good?\"\n\n\"Yes, to get out of your apartment.\"\n\n\"Mom, I don't need to hear this right now. I just want to sleep.\"\n\n\"You can sleep all you want after you pick her up and settle her in your place.\"\n\n\"My place?\"\n\n\"Yes, we'll come and get her in the evening.\"\n\nMarina looked around her messy apartment--the carpet needed a good vacuum, she could spell her name in the dust. After her career imploded she hadn't cared about her surroundings. She didn't want a guest, she didn't want to pretend to celebrate the holidays, she wanted to disappear, but she didn't have a choice.\n\n\"What does she look like?\" Marina asked opening her closet.\n\n\"She's tiny.\"\n\nMarina waited. When her mother didn't elaborate she rolled her eyes and sighed. \"That's all? A tiny black woman?\"\n\n\"You'll find her,\" her mother said with impatience. \"She'll be looking for you and you will find each other. You're smart.\" She hung up.\n\nMarina scowled at the phone then disconnected.\n\nAt times she hated being a diligent daughter. She wanted to say \"Let her wait.\" Why did this Aunty, what-was-her-name--Helga? Hettie?--have to wait until now to let them know she was arriving? So inconsiderate. She could have called them when she changed flights in Amsterdam. But Marina had learned to keep her thoughts to herself. She had no husband or children to hide behind and now she couldn't even say she had a business to run. She had no life, so she had to do as she was told." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Marina stood in the baggage claim area of Baltimore Washington International feeling like a farmer trying to find a particular blade of grass in a field. Although it wasn't as crowded as a midmorning or late afternoon flight, there were still enough people to get lost in. Marina shoved her hands in her gray wool coat and rocked on her heels. She still couldn't remember the blasted woman's name--Herma? Hilda? Helen? Yes, that was it Helen! But recalling her name was just a small victory. She had no idea how she was supposed to find this woman. Aunty Helen a woman she'd never heard of who was the grandmother of some friend's mother.\n\nMarina was about to give up hope and call her mother when she saw a small woman standing near the wall with a large bag. She wore a brightly colored headwrap in a pattern she'd never seen before and a well tailored dress that matched. The woman looked composed, as if standing for a portrait--her eighty some years had been kind to her. She had a certain glow that drew Marina to her. She seemed out of place. That had to be her.\n\nMarina made her way over to the woman, confident she'd found the elusive Aunty Helen. Although she wasn't the only one in regional clothes, she was the only one not properly dressed for the cold December weather. At least others sported long coats or gloves, but she only wore her dress, as if she expected to step out into a nice ninety degree sun.\n\nMarina stopped in front of her and smiled. \"Aunty Helen?\"\n\nThe woman smiled and her face seemed to glow.\n\nMarina glanced down at her one bag surprised. She'd never picked up someone with so little luggage. \"Is that all that you have? Do you need me to help you get the rest?\"\n\nShe continued to smile.\n\nMarina inwardly groaned. \"Please tell me you speak English.\"\n\nHer smile grew wider.\n\nShe softly swore. Why hadn't her mother told her she didn't speak English? That was rare, but the woman looked past eighty so maybe she hadn't had a chance to learn. Unfortunately, her Yoruba wasn't good. She understood it better than speaking it.\n\nIn broken Yoruba she attempted to talk to her. \"I'm sorry. I'm not good at this. One?\" She held up one finger. \"Bag?\" She pointed to the bag.\n\nThe woman blinked and continued to smile.\n\nMarina glanced in the direction of the baggage area and saw that it was empty. \"I'm just going to take that as a yes.\" She turned back to the woman. Things were starting to become a little eerie. She had the bright, trusting nature of a child. \"Do you have anything warm in there?\" She pointed to the bag again.\n\nThe woman blinked, but her smile faltered.\n\nMarina pointed outside then hugged herself and shivered. \"Cold. You'll be cold. You need something warm.\" She pointed to the bag again then took the strap. \"Can I see?\"\n\nThe woman released her grip confused.\n\nMarina kneeled and opened the bag. \"Please tell me someone had the sense to pack a sweater for you.\" But she didn't see anything that would be warm enough. Unfortunately, the airport stores were closed. She took off her coat. She had a knit sweater underneath. \"You'll have to wear this,\" she said wrapping it around the woman.\n\nHer bright smile returned and she patted Marina on the cheek. Her hand was remarkably soft and gentle.\n\nThe kind gesture made Marina feel like crying all over again. At least someone felt that she was doing something right. Even if it was as simple as keeping them warm. \"You're welcome,\" she said in a brusque tone. She stood. \"Come on.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Aunty Helen didn't say anything on the drive to Marina's apartment. She stared out at the dark, chilly morning, looking at the bright lights of the highway and the large buildings looming on both sides of the highway. Close to her apartment, Marina stopped at an all-night grocery store and bought another box of tissues and a pair of wool gloves.\n\nWhen she got back into the car, she rubbed her hands together. \"Warm enough?\"\n\nAunty Helen just blinked.\n\nMarina put the gloves in her lap. \"You'll need these.\" She put them on her. \"Better?\" she said, not expecting a reply and not getting one. Instead Aunty Helen held up her hands, flexed her fingers and smiled.\n\nAt home, Marina put Aunty Helen's bag in the hall. She wasn't tired and her guest didn't look so either. Marina mimed holding a bowl and spoon and pretended to eat. \"Hungry?\" she asked.\n\nAunty Helen blinked.\n\nShe mimed drinking. \"Or thirsty?\"\n\nThe woman blinked again.\n\nMarina sighed. \"I'll just give you something okay? And then you can rest on the couch until my mother picks you up and I don't know why I keep talking to you when you don't know what I'm saying.\"\n\nShe put on the kettle for tea then quickly put together a meal of peanut soup she'd recently gotten from her mother.\n\nThe woman delve into the meal and again patted her on the cheek, but this time Marina didn't feel like crying. She felt glad she'd been able to make the woman happy. She was clearing up her living room couch to give her a place to nap when her phone rang. She checked the number and sighed when she saw her brother, Wale's, number. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"To warn you. Mom's upset. You're in big trouble,\" he said in Yoruba.\n\n\"I'm always in trouble,\" she said in kind.\n\nHe laughed then said in English. \"Your Yoruba still sucks.\"\n\n\"Shut up, it's not too late for me to give you a lump of coal,\" she said then hung up the phone, wondering why her brother felt like teasing her. And what could her mother be upset about now? A moment later, her phone rang again. She was about to say something rude when she recognized the number.\n\n\"Hi Mom.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you pick up Aunty Helen?\" she demanded.\n\n\"What do you mean? I did.\" She looked at the woman sitting in her kitchen. \"She's right here. You could have told me that she didn't speak English.\"\n\n\"What are you going on about? She speaks perfect English. She has a degree from Oxford.\"\n\nMarina rolled her eyes, not caring where the woman received her degree, though her mother did. She was about to ask why that mattered when her mother continued.\n\n\"She just called. Your brother had to go get her.\"\n\nMarina felt her stomach drop. \"That doesn't make any sense. I have Aunty Helen right here. She's eating in my kitchen.\"\n\n\"Oh my god. What have you done?\"\n\nMarina's heart started to race and her breathing became shallow. Had she failed again? How could that be? \"I did what you told me to. I picked up a woman matching Aunty Helen's vague description. I even asked her her name.\" Marina paused remembering the incident. She hadn't really asked her name. She'd just said \"Aunty Helen?' and the woman smiled and she assumed it was her. \"Wait a moment.\" She ran into the kitchen where the woman was cleaning up her soup with a warm slice of bread. Aunty Helen?\"\n\nThe woman looked up and smiled.\n\n\"You are Aunty Helen?\" Marina repeated to make sure.\n\nShe continued to smile.\n\nCould she have the same name as the other woman?\n\n\"Mom, she seems fine.\"\n\n\"Describe her to me.\"\n\n\"She's small and about eighty something. She didn't have the proper clothes for the weather and had only one bag.\"\n\n\"Aunty Helen isn't over sixty.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me that before? You said she was the grandmother of one of your friends.\"\n\n\"Not all of my friends are my age. You know that. You should have been more careful. Why are you getting irritated with me? You're the one who picked up the wrong woman. If she were an old woman I would have said Big Mummy not Aunty. Why don't you pay attention to these things? And you should have known I wouldn't send you to pick up someone who doesn't speak English.\"\n\nMarina rubbed her forehead. Listening to her mother's criticism but only hearing 'you're a failure, you're a failure, you can't do anything right.' \"I don't believe this.\"\n\n\"Give her the phone.\"\n\nMarina held out the phone to her. \"Aunty--uh Big Mummy--my mother wants to talk.\"\n\nThe woman nodded and took the phone. She responded with quick fast replies. Her voice was soft and deep, oddly soothing, but Marina couldn't decipher the meaning. The old woman then handed the phone back.\n\n\"Why didn't you give her the phone?\" her mother demanded when Marina returned to the phone.\n\nMarina squeezed her eyes shut. \"What are you talking about? I just did.\"\n\n\"Is she deaf?\"\n\n\"No. She spoke to you. I heard her. She didn't answer much, but she did speak. I didn't understand her though. It didn't sound like Yoruba. She spoke, but I didn't understand her.\"\n\nHer mother paused. \"You see her? Is she still there?\"\n\n\"Yes. Where else would she be?\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" her mother said in a frightened tone. \"I've heard of this but...\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"My dear are you sure you're feeling okay? Have you been eating and sleeping properly?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm not crazy.\"\n\n\"Lack of sleep can cause hallucinations.\"\n\n\"I'm not hallucinating.\"\n\n\"Or it could be something worse.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"You picked up a or bloody hell what's the English name for it? I'm not sure they have one exactly. Oh yes...witch.\"\n\nDon't be daft, she wanted to say, but bit her lip. Her parents believed in both traditional and native religions. \"She's not a--I just made a mistake.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should just go back to sleep. If she's still there then get rid of her as fast as you can. Take her to the police and be careful.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Marina took her new arrival to the police station. \"I could really use your help,\" she said to the clerk at the front desk, a woman with finely shaped brows and fading lipstick. \"I have an older woman here who's lost. She doesn't seem to speak English and I don't know where to put her.\"\n\n\"Okay. Where is she?\"\n\nMarina turned and nodded at the woman, whose feet barely reached the ground. \"She's sitting right there.\"\n\nThe clerk looked in the direction Marina gestured to and frowned. \"Where?\"\n\n\"Right there,\" she pointed, not understanding the other woman's confusion since there was no one else there. \"The woman right there.\"\n\n\"What woman?\" the clerk said suddenly cautious, licking the rest of her faded lipstick from her mouth.\n\nMarina turned and saw the older woman flash a strange smile. \"You don't see her?\"\n\n\"Do you need somewhere to stay?\"\n\n\"No, I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Have you been drinking?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Taking anything?\"\n\n\"I'm perfectly lucid.\" At least I think so. Her mother's suggestion was playing with her thoughts. It couldn't be. How could she have picked up a witch? They didn't exist. Not like this. They weren't invisible. Then why couldn't anyone else see or hear her?\n\nShe turned to the woman. \"Why are you doing this to me? At least say something.\"\n\nHer smile remained.\n\n\"What have I done wrong to deserve this?\"\n\nThe clerk cleared her throat. \"Why don't you just take a seat? I'll get someone to help you.\"\n\nMarina spun around and glared at her. \"I'm not crazy.\"\n\n\"Of course you're not,\" the clerk said in an indulgent tone.\n\nMarina was about to take umbrage with her tone when a man came from around the corner. He looked as if he'd had a worse night than she'd had. He hadn't shaved in a while and his tie had the crooked look of a man who just didn't care. If Marina had been in the mood she would have noticed that he was good looking, in a rugged way, but she just didn't care. She wanted to get rid of the old woman and go back to sleep. Or wake up from this nightmare, whichever was faster.\n\n\"Idris what's the name of the local shelter?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\"It's going to be pretty full,\" he said. \"What's that other lady here for?\"\n\nThe clerk stared at him stunned.\n\nMarina jumped with joy, wanting to grab his sleeve but refraining. She wasn't imagining things. \"You see her too?\"\n\nHe sent her an odd look. \"Of course I see her. She's sitting right there. How could I miss her?\"\n\nThe clerk shook her head. \"Idris you've had a long night.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"There's no one there.\"\n\n\"Maybe you need a rest. It's two to one.\"\n\n\"There's one way to decide this.\" The clerk took out her phone and took a picture. Then she grinned with triumph. \"I'm right.\" She turned the image to them. They saw the wall and an empty chair.\n\nMarina turned to the woman then the image on the tiny screen. \"I don't believe this.\"\n\n\"There's something wrong with your camera,\" Idris said.\n\nThe clerk took the phone and tucked it away. \"It's Christmas Eve and it's a crazy night, weird things happen. I think you two should just go home.\"\n\nThe older woman leaped to her feet. \"Yes, it's time,\" she said in perfect English. Then she grabbed Marina's hand and Idris's.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Idris said.\n\n\"You speak English?\" Marina said at the same time.\n\nThey both looked at the woman then each other with a mixture of fear and awe then their world went black." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "When Idris Helmond came to, he didn't know how to feel. One moment he was thinking about closing a case on the brutal beating of a gas station attendant and finding the right gift to make his girlfriend, Deena, happy. She was pissed about something, but that wasn't new. She was always pissed about something and she wouldn't tell him why, she'd only let him know he was the cause. Then he'd seen the pretty young woman trying to find shelter for an older woman who looked strangely cunning.\n\nHe didn't know where he was or what to think. He looked around him and saw the neat road and manicured lawns of a neighborhood. The place felt familiar. He looked around and spotted a house--It was his sister's house. Beautifully decorated for the holidays. But he knew it wasn't like that now. That house was no longer hers. The scene was from three years ago. He shook his head in rising dread and took a hasty step back. \"No, no. What are we doing here?\"\n\n\"You have to be here,\" the older woman said.\n\n\"No, I don't. I know what happens. I don't need to be here. Let's go.\"\n\n\"Idris.\"\n\nHe threw up his hand, his voice in a near panic. \"I said I don't want to be here.\"\n\n\"What is this place?\" Marina asked.\n\n\"It doesn't matter, let's go.\" But the woman wouldn't release her hold and she had the strength to keep him there. \"Get us out of here whoever--or whatever you are,\" he said in his best 'or you'll regret this' tone.\n\nBut the older woman didn't release him.\n\nHe turned and saw a woman march up to the front door as if on a mission. She flipped through the many keys on her keychain before she got the right one. She placed the key in the lock then turned the handle with an angry twist. \"No. Don't go in there. Please.\" He turned to the older woman, feeling as if he could no longer breathe. \"Make her stop.\"\n\n\"I can't.\"\n\n\"Then why did you bring me here?\"\n\n\"Haven't you been playing this scene over in your mind for three years? Haven't you already remembered and replayed every detail? Isn't this the reason you won't see your nephews? Why you make excuses not to visit your parents every holiday season? You're here because this is where you're stuck. This is where you stopped your life too. Your sister got twenty-five to life, but you're living a life sentence by staying in a job you hate because it makes your parents proud. Staying in a relationship that is soulless. You chose this. When are you going to get past this moment? A moment that will never change?\"\n\n\"She shouldn't have had keys to his place. Why did it have to happen? She was my baby sister and I couldn't stop her.\"\n\n\"No. She was a woman who'd made a choice.\"\n\n\"I gave her the gun to protect herself.\"\n\n\"She used it for something else. Your sister couldn't except that her ex had remarried, that he'd created a new life for himself. Just like you, she couldn't move on. She was convicted because she hadn't snapped. She decided to pick up the kids early. She decided to catch her ex with his new love and she decided to shoot them both dead.\"\n\nThey heard a scream and then three pops.\n\n\"You couldn't have stopped it,\" the older woman said.\n\nIdris fell to his knees, losing all strength, as if he'd been shot too. The awful part was the guilt. Her husband had been his best friend. He'd felt the loss from the divorce too. His sister had been married to Nathanial for ten years and he'd been a good father to their two sons. He'd been someone Idris had admired. He'd expected Nathanial to be his best man one day. He'd seen them as the perfect couple until the cracks began to show.\n\nHe remembered his brother-in-law complaining about his sister's drinking and shopping sprees. He remembered Nathanial getting full custody of the children. Idris understood the judge's ruling, his sister had become unstable, but he still had divided loyalties, even though it was best for the boys. His parents had remained blind wanting to see their precious little girl as the victim and Nathanial as the villain. But he knew it wasn't as black and white as that. Just like his nephews, his world had been shattered that day. He'd buried someone who'd been like a brother and lost his sister too. She was still bitter, even in prison. She still blamed the system for not understanding her rage. His parents blamed him for not seeing the signs sooner. For somehow not stopping it.\n\n\"The season had nothing to do with her choice,\" the older woman said.\n\n\"Really?\" he said with a sneer. \"You know the rates of murders go up around the holidays?\"\n\n\"Was it the holidays that put the liquor down her throat or the gun in her hand?\"\n\n\"She snapped because she felt so alone,\" Idris said trying to rationalize something he knew he couldn't. \"She felt disconnected. It's a season that feeds discontentment. Domestic violence cases practically sky rocket. A time of good cheer my ass. People find even more reasons to hate each other.\"\n\n\"Remember when you and Nathanial took your nephews sledding? Remember the time when you both laughed at the instructions for putting together a racecar track? You had joy. That joy was real. It's okay to love your sister and hate what she did. Your friend wouldn't want you to throw away all the good times just for this moment. You have to get past this.\"\n\n\"I don't know how,\" he said his voice raw. He glanced at the younger woman, who stood motionless beside the other woman, wondering why he'd chosen to share this nightmare with her.\n\n\"You can do it by looking at this place one last time. And saying goodbye.\"\n\n\"My parents blame me and his parents won't talk to me.\"\n\n\"You shut Nathanial's parents out of your life as much as you have your nephews. And they miss you. Don't let the memory of their father die. You don't have to replace him. But make his life mean more than his death. Don't let your sister's bitterness rob you too.\"\n\nA purple fog quickly swept over the scene and soon they stood in front of Nathanial's grave. A light dusting of snow fell from the blanket of white clouds, but Idris didn't feel cold. He didn't feel anything. He brushed the snow from the headstone then gathered some and let it melt between his fingers. He remembered introducing Nathanial to his sister and the instant attraction between them. He remembered his sister telling him about their first date. He remembered their wedding day and visiting the hospital when Nathanial held their first son and the pride and joy on his face.\n\nTears filled and stung his eyes as he recalled the fights, the tense phone calls, the divorce proceeding and then his sister's conviction. Both he and Nathanial had been detectives, determined to help and serve others, but hadn't been able to fix their own lives. Idris tasted the tears though he didn't feel them streaming down his face. \"I'm so sorry,\" he said, then he felt the cold against his skin, the wetness on his cheeks. He felt his loss, his rage and his despair.\n\n\"He's forgiven you,\" the old woman said. \"He wants you to know that. Now you have to forgive yourself.\"\n\nIdris wiped his tears then fell to his knees feeling like a broken man. \"I can't.\"\n\n\"Because you're afraid. You're afraid that if it couldn't go right for him, it won't for you. So you won't even try. But you're wrong. You can have the life you want. You know Nathanial knew there were signs early on that the relationship wouldn't work. He told you some of them but he chose to ignore them. I'm not saying he's responsible, but there are gray areas that none of you could see. Some you didn't want to see.\"\n\nIdris nodded. \"I know.\"\n\n\"Now say the name of his favorite holiday song.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Say it, then say goodbye.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's stupid.\"\n\n\"Say it anyway.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.\"\n\nMarina giggled then covered her mouth embarrassed, but Idris heard it anyway and couldn't help a smile. He'd forgotten she was there and he felt awkward that she'd seen him at such a fragile time. He was used to keeping his emotions bottled up, but when he looked at her, he didn't feel that she was judging him and that made his awkwardness disappear. Made him glad he wasn't alone. \"The idiot,\" he said with fondness. \"He loved that song and knew all the words. He'd hum it just to annoy me.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a fun guy.\"\n\n\"He was. He loved the holidays. Everything about it.\"\n\nMarina kneeled beside him and tentatively took his hand, half expecting him to pull away. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nHe squeezed her hand and released a deep shuddering breathe, as if he'd been holding it a long time. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"Do you really hate your job?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, every single day I feel like I'm dying.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you change it?\"\n\nHe sent her a look of surprise. \"You think it's that easy?\"\n\n\"No, but it's better than feeling like this.\"\n\n\"Tell her what you want,\" the old woman said.\n\nHe stood and dusted snow from his trousers although he didn't need to. Although the ground was powered with snow, his trousers remained dry. \"No.\"\n\n\"Are you afraid to?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Tell her later then.\" The old woman turned to Marina. \"Now it's your turn.\"\n\n\"I guess I don't have a choice,\" she said with a grimace before their world went black." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "After seeing Idris's past, Marina prepared herself for a painful holiday memory. So when she saw the sight of her old bakery kitchen she couldn't help her surprise. She stared at the sight of the woman she'd been four years ago. The kitchen was small, all her new equipment that Eli would encourage her to purchase hadn't filled the room yet. She saw herself stirring something in a bowl and humming. She then scooped the contents into a tube and decorated cookies with a flair of fun. Her efforts weren't perfect, but she didn't seem to mind. Marina gaped at her younger self with wonder. She didn't remember even being that happy.\n\n\"What are we doing here?\" Marina asked. \"I already know I'm going to fail. I already know this isn't what I'm meant to do.\"\n\nThe old woman held up one finger. \"Just wait.\"\n\nMarina folded her arms, feeling impatient. She didn't want to wait. She wanted to leave. She wanted to go back to sleep and forget this day ever happened. She was about to comment to the fact when Eli walked into the room. Eli the man she'd thought she'd loved and who she'd thought loved her and her dreams. The man who'd told her he'd support her through thick and thin. The one who'd later embezzle her funds and leave her heart broken.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Working on a new icing.\"\n\nHe frowned \"You're still trying that?\"\n\n\"I want to make it work.\"\n\n\"You're wasting your time. Why don't you just focus on what will make money?\"\n\nFor the first time Marina noticed how he hadn't greeted her and how much he didn't look pleased. Why hadn't she seen that before? He was only about making money. He didn't care what she did. He didn't care about her passion. She loved baking, she'd forgotten about that. She'd let him douse her hopes and leave an empty shell.\n\nBut the younger version of herself didn't know this. She gave him a taste of the icing.\n\nHe made a face and shook his head. \"It's still not up to standard. You know you're no good at this. I told you to stick with simple things. Why won't you listen?\"\n\n\"I wanted to give customers a new experience.\"\n\n\"This isn't a culinary institute. You're not making art. Just bake cookies and cakes and you'll be in the black instead of the red. Now let's go.\"\n\nMarina saw the light in her eyes dim.\n\n\"Who is this jerk?\" Idris said.\n\n\"The man I thought I'd marry,\" Marina said.\n\n\"Oh, sorry.\"\n\n\"Me too.\"\n\nShe saw her younger self watch Eli leave the kitchen and then she took all her experiments and dumped them into the trash.\n\n\"That was the moment you let him steal your dream,\" the old woman said.\n\nMarina let her hands fall to her sides. \"My dream failed. I failed. The business flopped. Even if he hadn't taken the money he was right, I was no good.\"\n\n\"But you were getting better. You stopped trying. You listened to him when you should have ignored him. He didn't support you. He lied to you and you believed his lies. What if you'd kept experimenting and one of them worked? You started to make your business just about money and not about joy. That was when you gave up on your dream. Your dream never gave up on you.\" The old woman pointed to the trash bin. \"This is the moment you failed.\"\n\nMarina twisted her lips and shrugged. \"It's too late now.\"\n\nThe old woman took Marina's hand and patted it. \"You're too young to start speaking like an old woman. Even if you were my age it wouldn't be too late to live with joy. To try. To dream.\" The old woman looked at Idris. \"Are you ready to tell her what you've always wanted to do?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe sighed.\n\n\"Why won't you tell me?\" Marina asked. \"We'll never see each other again. Are you afraid because you'll fail like I did?\"\n\nHe shoved his hands in his pockets and looked away.\n\nMarina looked at the old woman. \"I don't understand any of this.\" She glanced around the kitchen that was no longer hers. A past that still caused her pain. \"Why are you showing us things we can't change?\"\n\n\"Because that's the point. You can't change the past, but the future is yours. You don't have to be stuck here. The holidays are full of presents. Not just the gifts given to each other, but the moments you inhabit every day. They matter. The choices you make matter. Make your presents matter, then the future will belong to you. You just have to believe it.\"\n\nMarina bit her lip then squinted at her. \"What are you?\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"Why couldn't I understand you before?\"\n\n\"Because you weren't ready to.\"\n\n\"Why us?\"\n\nThe old woman kissed her teeth with annoyance. \"You ask such silly questions. Why not you? If I am a spirit or a ghost or your imagination does it matter? Those questions aren't important. The important question is: What will you do next?\"\n\n\"Will we remember any of this?\"\n\nShe just smiled.\n\nIdris rested his hands on his hips. \"What should we do next?\"\n\nHer smile just widened.\n\n\"I think that's all she'll tell us,\" Marina said. \"This is what she did to me when we first met.\"\n\n\"I guess it's a sign that our journey is coming to an end.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Marina glanced at his tie and had a strange urge to straighten it, but resisted. She lifted her gaze to his face. He had a nice face and she wished she could know him better. After Eli's betrayal, she hadn't wanted to know another man. \"Whatever happens, good luck to you. I hope that you'll see your nephews this year.\"\n\n\"And you should keep baking, if it makes you happy.\"\n\n\"It does.\" She tilted her head to the side. \"And what did you always want to do?\"\n\nThis time he only smiled but for the first time she saw a twinkle in his eye.\n\n\"Fine, don't tell me. Good luck with that too.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nThe old woman took both their hands and they shared a look--this time with hope and anticipation--then the world went black." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "The phone call shattered a beautiful dream at 3a.m. on Christmas Eve. Marina groggily reached for the phone hoping that it would stop ringing by the time she picked up. It didn't.\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to wake you,\" her mother said. \"But I need you to pick up Uncle Sola.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Uncle Sola. He'll be arriving at BWI and--\"\n\n\"Mom I can't keep doing this.\"\n\n\"I know and I feel bad but I know you're off all week.\"\n\n\"Off?\" Was she trying to be funny? She wasn't off. She didn't have a job.\n\n\"Yes, you and the boys are going to Delaware. Just this quick favor and I won't do it again.\" She gave the flight number and description then hung up.\n\nDelaware? Boys? Her words vaguely made sense but then they didn't make sense at all. Her mind felt as though it was between a dream and a wake state.\n\n\"What was that about?\" a deep voice said beside her.\n\nMarina froze. She knew that voice, but yet she didn't know it. And what was he doing in her bed? She slowly turned to him. Idris. Not the sad, tired Idris from the police station. He looked sleepy, but happy.\n\nShe pushed her sheets away. \"I have to go pick someone up from the airport.\"\n\nHe frowned and put the sheets back. \"No, you're not.\"\n\n\"My mother.\"\n\n\"Give me the phone.\"\n\n\"But--\"\n\nHe reached across her, grabbed the phone and dialed. \"Hi Mom. Sorry she can't make it. Tell him to take a taxi and I'll pay for the tab. Yes, I know. I don't care. Then get Wale to do it. Yes. Okay, bye.\" He disconnected and handed her the phone.\n\nMarina gripped the phone in two hands. \"What did she say?\"\n\n\"Relax. You don't have to go.\"\n\nHe'd called her mother 'Mom'. Yes, because he was her husband. That felt right. Yes, they were married. Why had she ever imagined him sad? And she'd never been in a police station. Where had that thought come from? The dream state faded and everything became clear. They'd been married a year. He used to be a detective and now he was a real estate developer, raising his two nephews. She did catering: Sweet desserts. She wasn't making lots of money but she was happy and he always let her practice her experiments on him and the boys loved to be in the kitchen with her. She suddenly remembered snow ball fights and searching for a tree. But most of all she remembered meeting him one Christmas day.\n\nHe'd taken his nephews to a birthday party a friend had invited her to cater and their eyes met over a row of cupcakes and for her it felt like she'd known him from somewhere. Like they'd known each other forever. She still felt that way.\n\nMarina settled back under the warm sheets. There was a question that niggled her mind. She didn't know why, but for some reason she wanted to know the answer. She had to. \"What have you always wanted to do?\"\n\nIdris was slow to answer and at first she thought he may have fallen back asleep.\n\nHe hadn't. He felt as if someone had asked him that question before and he'd had a hard time answering. But now he wanted to. He looked around the cozy bedroom knowing his nephews were safe and asleep in their beds, the presents were under the tree ready to be opened. He could already taste the maple syrup covered waffles Marina would make for breakfast. He looked at his wife, his friend, unsure he could put into words all they'd asked for. He'd wanted to follow his heart and take care of his nephews, build a business that would support his family and find a woman he wasn't afraid to love. One he could trust. A woman who'd love him just as he was.\n\nIdris drew her close, amazed that he'd gotten all that he'd ever dreamed. \"This,\" he said then tenderly placed his lips against hers.\n\nAnd the next morning on top of the Christmas tree, Marina saw an angel that wasn't the same one she'd put there several weeks ago. It didn't have wings, instead it wore a brightly colored headwrap, matching dress and a big smile.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Gift Box ]\n\n\"So what do you think?\"\n\nTamara Cole stared at the box and didn't exactly know what to think of the present her husband, Ross, had given her. She'd torn through the brightly colored green and gold wrapping paper that Christmas Eve and lifted the lid, giddy with expectation. The size of the box had been too large to be jewelry, certainly too small to be a TV, but still large enough to get her imagination spinning. Even before she'd lifted the box, she'd come up with a series of guesses.\n\nThe soccer ball sized square box could have been the stack of new plush towels she'd wanted, a silk robe and pajama set she'd been eyeing, perhaps something for the baby they planned to welcome in four months. Maybe it was a set of lavender bath lotions, she really wanted to pamper herself with during the times when she felt a little dumpy. Although she was excited about becoming a mother, she was also a little nervous too. There was so much she didn't know.\n\nThis Christmas would be their last as a couple and Ross had helped her make it special. They'd gotten a tall, fresh evergreen tree, which stood boldly near the window. A lovely sight every time they arrived home. She'd bought extra garlands for the hallway, a wreath so large it covered half of the front door and a welcome mat showing a picture of a holly bush that lit up when people stepped on it.\n\nShe looked forward to the Christmas dinner tomorrow evening, when her parents, and her sister and her family, would arrive, but this Christmas Eve belonged to them. They sat together on the carpet in front of the tree, in the hushed silence of the evening, the ticking clock the only other sound in the room. It was supposed to be a night she'd remember forever, a gift that would bring tears of joy to her face.\n\nInstead...instead\u2026he'd given her this? Tamara stared inside the box speechless.\n\n\"Honey, what do you think?\" he asked again.\n\nHoney? He dared to call her that? \"I don't know what to think,\" she said, stumbling over the words, not sure if she should laugh or cry. Anger mingled with annoyance and disbelief.\n\n\"I know,\" he said with a proud grin. \"Isn't it amazing? I didn't think I'd get one. You can image how hard it was, but I was determined.\"\n\nTamara set the box on the ground, stunned her husband could mock her with such a goofy expression on his handsome brown face. Why was he smiling? \"I don't think it's funny.\"\n\nHis smile wavered. \"It wasn't meant to be funny.\"\n\n\"Then what's an empty box supposed to be?\"\n\nHis smile disappeared. \"Empty?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes, empty.\"\n\n\"How could it be empty?\" He reached for the box and looked inside then stared at her, his brown eyes stunned. \"It's right there. Don't you see it?\"\n\nTamara looked inside again. Was he playing some sort of cruel joke? She didn't see anything. Just the white interior of a square cube. \"No.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Maybe we should get your eyes checked.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should get your head checked,\" she shot back. She lifted the box. \"This is completely empty,\" she said and began to turn it upside down to prove her point.\n\nHe reached out and stopped her. \"Don't do that!\" He took the box from her and gently set it down beside him. \"You'll damage it. You have to be very careful. It wasn't easy to get you know.\"\n\nShe surged to her feet. \"I'm not playing this silly game anymore.\"\n\nHe stared up at her. \"It's not a game.\"\n\nShe pointed at the box. \"There's nothing in there.\" She took a deep breath then rested her hands on her hips. \"Ross, don't do this. You know how important this evening is to me. She smoothed down her blue and silver blouse, which she'd worn especially for the evening, and rested her hands at her sides. She would be calm. \"Now where's my real present?\"\n\nRoss looked at her for a long moment, resting his arm on his extended leg. \"This gift is what I got you.\" He gestured to the box. \"It's all that I got you. I thought you'd\u2026\" He furrowed his brows. \"You really don't see it?\"\n\nShe didn't understand why he wouldn't back down, but she didn't care. \"No, and when my family doesn't see it too, you'd better make sure my real present is spectacular.\"\n\nAs she set the table for dinner the following evening, a part of Tamara regretted making the suggestion. She didn't want to expose her husband's silly prank to her family. She'd hoped that after she'd challenged him, he would have said, \"No, there's no need to do that,\" and then give her her real gift. But instead, he'd nodded grimly and said, \"Fine,\" before clearing the wrapping paper away.\n\nRoss showed everyone the box after dessert. Tamara had been left to watch a holiday cartoon with her niece and nephew, aged three and five, when Ross had taken her parents, sister Carrie and her husband into another room and showed them the gift. He'd told her that the gift wasn't appropriate for children their age. She heard their collective gasp from the other room. Her mother then spoke in a tone filled with awe, although Tamara couldn't make out the words, her father's low grumble sounded equally amazed.\n\nWhen they all returned to the family room, Ross sent her a look saying, \"See? I told you,\" before her mother told her how lucky she was. Tamara couldn't believe it. They'd all seen it? How could that be? Why was she the only one who couldn't see it? Were they all just pretending?\n\nThese questions swirled in her mind as she cleared up the kitchen. Then her sister Carrie came in and offered to help.\n\nHer older sister Carrie had done everything right. Carrie, with her six figure salary, vacation house, master's degree and svelte physique\u2014smooth mocha skin and dark twists which fell to her shoulders. Carrie, with her two great kids and husband. Carrie, who succeeded even when she wasn't trying. Tamara watched her sister enter her tiny kitchen wearing jeans and a satin red top, looking like a woman who hired someone else to handle her stress. Even with two kids and a high powered job she looked calm and confident.\n\nTamara both admired and envied her. As much as she tried to follow the same path as her sister, she always fell short. She'd married later than her sister\u2014early thirties instead of late twenties. She'd started a family later than planned\u2014three years instead of two, she hadn't graduated from university with honors. She hadn't graduated at all, dropping out in her third year. She worked as a bookkeeper for her husband's furniture restoration business. Not a glamorous role nor as lucrative as being the vice president of a bank.\n\nShe didn't have a housekeeper to keep her place spotless, her dinner parties weren't talked about months later and now\u2026now her sister (and her parents) saw a gift Ross had given her, a gift that she still couldn't see. And when she glanced down at the red blouse she'd chosen for the evening\u2014why did it have to be red?\u2014she felt as round and ridiculous as a Christmas ornament.\n\n\"What was the first thing you did when you saw it?\" Carrie asked Tamara as she helped her load dishes stained yellow and red from curried chicken and jollof rice into the dishwasher.\n\nTamara scratched the back of her ear. \"I was so\u2026happy I just hugged him.\"\n\nCarrie looked at her for a long moment then rested her hip against the counter and folded her arms. \"You don't see it, do you?\"\n\nTamara's chest tightened. She felt caught, exposed. Her throat tightened. She struggled to swallow. She couldn't let her sister know the truth. Anybody else, her parents, her friends, people in other countries, but not her. \"Yes, I do.\"\n\nCarrie sent her a look that made it clear she knew Tamara was lying, but she shrugged her shoulder before continuing loading the dishes. \"I wish my husband got me a gift like that. What do you plan to do?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She hesitated. \"What would you do?\"\n\nA self-satisfied smile touched Carrie's lips. \"Doesn't matter, it's not my gift.\"\n\nTamara rubbed her hands knowing that look, that smile, her innocent question had exposed the truth, but she didn't care. She'd had to take a risk. She truly wanted to know what was in the box and what her sister would do with it. But her sister wouldn't help her. She'd keep the knowledge a secret. Her sister, who always knew everything. Tamara made a face at her sister when Carrie looked down to turn on the dishwasher. Did she have to sound so smug? Couldn't she give her a hint?\n\nThe dishwasher hummed to life.\n\n\"But there is one thing you should do,\" Carrie said, looking at her.\n\n\"What?\" Tamara asked, hoping her expression did not betray her.\n\nHer gaze turned serious, her words heartfelt. \"Cherish him. A man like Ross doesn't come along every day.\"\n\nDid the gift have something to do with Ross? Was that what she was missing? Tamara sat up in bed, drumming her fingers on her rounded belly, ruminating over her sister's words instead of looking at the wood crafter's magazine on her lap. She stole a glance at Ross while he sat beside her with his eyes closed while he listened to an audiobook. She didn't know how he could do that. She'd tried it once and had fallen asleep, but it was his favorite nightly ritual.\n\nShe studied his profile and sighed. Why had her sister mentioned her husband instead of the gift? Were they one in the same? She clasped her hands together as a thought came to her. She tapped him on the shoulder.\n\nHe took off his headset and looked at her questioning.\n\n\"Okay, I get it now,\" she said. \"It's symbolic. It's a box of your love or your affection. It's something that's there but I haven't been paying attention to because I've been preparing for the baby so I haven't seen it, right? Is that what you're telling me?\"\n\nHe set his headset aside and sighed. \"It's not invisible, honey. It's not something I made up. It's real and tangible.\"\n\nHer buoyant mood faded, she'd hoped she'd solved the mystery. Instead she'd failed. She stared down at an ad in the magazine for wood polish, hating the look of disappointment in his gaze. She hated disappointing him. She didn't even know what she'd done wrong. Why couldn't she see his gift?\n\n\"Maybe you can't see it because of the baby,\" he said. \"Maybe that's interfering with it.\" He patted her hand. \"Don't worry about it and go to sleep.\" He put his headset back on.\n\nShe didn't want to admit defeat. She didn't want to admit that the problem wasn't his gift, but her. It made her question too much. Was this why her life hadn't followed the timeline she'd planned? Was this why they were still living in a little green apple colored colonial instead of the grand Georgian she'd thought she'd be living in by now? Would she be a good mother? Did he think she was a good wife. A good worker? Did he know how hard she tried to make it all work?\n\nTangible. He'd said it was real and tangible. She'd never tried to touch it before.\n\nTamara left the bedroom and returned to the gift box she'd left under the tree. The box felt so light, how could anything possibly be inside it? She lifted the lid, reached her hand inside and felt nothing.\n\nThen something, soft like a feather or the wings of a butterfly, brushed against her fingers. Or was that just a breeze? She tried again and felt it again. She yanked her hand out. There was something inside, but why couldn't she see it? What was it?\n\nShe pretended to sleep that night, but cried instead. She cried quietly so that Ross wouldn't notice. She let the tears fall and bit her lip hard so she wouldn't make a sound. It was supposed to be a happy day\u2014a happy season\u2014but her heart felt shattered.\n\n\"I didn't mean to make you cry,\" Ross said the next morning at breakfast as he set a plate of seasoned eggs, spinach and baked plantain in front of her.\n\n\"I don't know what you mean,\" Tamara said, lifting her fork.\n\n\"Don't lie to me.\"\n\nShe set her fork down ashamed. She'd tried to hide her red puffy eyes with makeup. Clearly her attempt at camouflage had failed.\n\n\"One lie is enough,\" he said before she could apologize.\n\nShe blinked shocked. \"What lie? When?\"\n\n\"When you told me you believed in them.\"\n\nTamara felt her blood grow cold as she met his steady, penetrating gaze. Suddenly she knew what she should have seen: A sula. A fairy that only appears to believers. They never show themselves to those who pretend. They reveal a person's true heart. And she'd been exposed as a fraud. She'd heard the stories about them as a child, learned that their presence had first been noticed centuries ago in a village located off the tip of West Africa. No one was quite sure which country\u2014it shifted depending on the storyteller. Most Westerners disregarded them because they were quiet, shy and didn't travel in groups as other known fairies tended to.\n\nShe opened her mouth desperately wanting to say, \"I saw it a little bit,\" but closed her mouth knowing that would be a lie. And she didn't want to lie to him again.\n\nA shot of anger coursed through her. How could this be happening? Why had he tested her? Why had he used such a big box for something so small? How could she have guessed? But just as quickly her anger disappeared, the fact that she couldn't see it wasn't his fault. He'd tried to surprise her. Just as he had when he'd proposed to her on her birthday, presenting her with a big box with a tiny engagement ring inside, tied to a red rose.\n\nHer sister was right\u2014it was an amazing gift. Sulas only appeared around the holidays to special people. But it hadn't revealed itself to her. What did this mean? How would Ross look at her now? Would he trust her again?\n\nShe hadn't exactly lied when he'd first asked her whether she believed in them. She was so in love, everything seemed rosy and possible then. She'd loved him and didn't think that it mattered. But would he trust her again after this?\n\n\"I used to believe once,\" she said, desperate to fill the silence. \"When I was a child then...I let it go.\"\n\nHis gaze fell to his plate but not fast enough to hide the glimmer of sadness hidden there. \"They only stay three days and then disappear. I had hoped you'd get a wish, but I guess...\"\n\n\"I will. I'll get a wish. Please give me a chance.\"\n\nHe reached over and patted her hand in the same reassuring way he had last night, but instead of feeling comfort, it stung. \"Never mind. I'll get you something else tomorrow.\"\n\nShe didn't want another gift. She wanted this one. This mattered more than anything he could buy at a store.\n\nLater that day, Tamara knelt in front of the box. \"Please show yourself to me, I do believe. I have to believe.\" After a moment she added, \"If not for me then for Ross. He means so much to me and it would make him so happy.\"\n\nBut no matter how much she begged nothing appeared.\n\nShe felt a light touch on her shoulder. \"Darling, come to bed, you've been here nearly all day.\"\n\nShe hadn't noticed. It didn't matter. Nothing else mattered. \"I'll be there in a minute.\"\n\n\"Tamara.\"\n\n\"If Carrie can see it, I must see it too.\"\n\n\"This is not a competition.\"\n\nYes it is, she wanted to say, but he wouldn't understand. She couldn't have her sister achieve something else she couldn't. She had to prove that she was a good wife; didn't he know how much his disappointment hurt her?\n\nShe shrugged his hand away. \"Please, just leave me alone.\" I have to do this! She only had one day left.\n\nShe felt a feather-light kiss on her forehead then heard his footsteps fade away upstairs.\n\nShe wanted to believe again. She wanted to feel the magic again and trust in it. She closed her eyes and willed her heart to see what was there, but when she opened her eyes the box was still empty.\n\nShe clasped her hands together in a plea and squeezed her eyes shut as night swallowed up day until only the glow of the tree dotted the room with tiny lights. \"I need just one look. One glance. I wish I could see you if only for a moment.\"\n\nShe heard nothing move, she felt nothing happen. She opened her eyes, her heart sinking at the sight of the still empty box.\n\n\"I'm not in there anymore you know,\" a tiny voice said.\n\nTamara glanced up and saw a tiny brown fairy sitting crossed-legged on a branch, her wings a shimmering green gold, her skin the color of chestnut, her dark hair coiled into an elaborate braid.\n\nTamara stared wide-eyed, her heart racing. \"You're real.\"\n\n\"Of course I'm real.\"\n\n\"And beautiful.\"\n\n\"Naturally, and I don't have much time either.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know. I get to make my wish,\" Tamara said with eagerness. What should she wish for first? Something for her baby or for humankind or\u2026?\n\nThe sula swung her foot. \"You already made your wish.\"\n\nTamara frowned. \"No, I didn't.\"\n\n\"You wished with all your heart that you would be able to see me.\" She opened her arms wide. \"And now you can.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\nShe wagged her finger, a little gold bracelet swaying on her arm. \"Those are the rules. I made your wish come true.\" She folded her arms and shrugged her tiny shoulders. \"It's not my fault you wasted your wish on something so simple.\"\n\nTamara waited for a feeling of anger to hit her\u2014yes she'd wasted time, so much time\u2014but instead she didn't feel anything, but relief. The sula was right, it was her fault that she'd lost the ability to see what was there. It was her fault she'd stopped believing.\n\nBut that evening, she'd been given new eyes. Eyes to see all the gifts that surrounded her in brilliant glory: Her husband. The new life that would soon join them. Her family. Instead of a house that was too small, she saw a beautiful home--with its dark shutters and snow dusted driveway--that was just right for them.\n\nSoon her gaze sharpened to extend beyond her and she now saw that'd she'd been running a race of her own making, that life wasn't a competition; that being amazed by her sister's accomplishments didn't make hers\u2014a thriving business and growing customer base\u2014any less wonderful. And beyond herself and her town she heard it speak\u2014Peace. Peace in its silence\u2014free from the sound of bomb blasts, gun shots, screams, cries, roaring tanks, police and ambulance sirens\u2014filled her being. Peace amid life's horrors restored her.\n\nHer eyes filled with tears of joy mingled with shame. She'd been blind to so many things. She'd been blind to true happiness. \"Thank you. Thank you for everything.\"\n\nThe sula smiled then stood and bowed before disappearing. Lights suddenly flooded the room.\n\nTamara looked around as if waking from a dream.\n\n\"Are you talking to yourself again?\" Ross asked behind her.\n\nShe jumped to her feet and hugged him. \"I saw her! I saw her and she's wonderful.\"\n\nHe held her close. \"Really?\"\n\n\"She had a tiny little voice, gold bracelets on both wrists, white slippered shoes and soft fairy wings.\"\n\nRoss didn't reply, but she felt the tension in him\u2014between them\u2014relax. \"I'm glad you saw her.\"\n\nShe drew back and looked at him. \"Now I see so many things.\" She cupped his face. \"I see how lucky I am to have you. To have this,\" she said motioning to the room and everything that it meant. \"And so much more. Your gift is something I will never forget.\"\n\nAnd four months later when her baby girl was born, Tamara saw a special sparkle in her daughter's brown gaze and knew she'd never be blind to life's magic again." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Sprite Brigade 1) Candy Canes and Buckets of Blood", + "author": "Heide Goody", + "genres": [ + "horror", + "fantasy", + "humor" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Candy Canes & Buckets of Blood", + "text": "When they announced the next station stop would be Great Eccles, Esther Woollby instinctively put her hands on her homemade tote bag, even though it had been sitting safely on her lap the entire journey.\n\n\"You'll like Guin,\" she said to Newton, sitting opposite her.\n\nDespite his perpetually worried expression, Esther had always thought, with his untamed black hair and proud nose, Newton would grow to be a handsome man. With a wild Byronic air about him. Right now, he just looked like a worried teenager with unruly hair and a big nose. She worried how worried he looked. She made sure she didn't look worried. It would only worry him.\n\n\"You will like her,\" she insisted.\n\n\"I'm sure I will,\" he said and caught her gaze. \"Don't worry, mum.\"\n\n\"I'm not worried,\" she said. \"I just don't want you to worry.\"\n\n\"I'm not worried.\"\n\n\"You look worried.\"\n\n\"I'm thoughtful.\"\n\n\"What are you worri\u2014 Thoughtful about?\"\n\n\"Lily,\" he said.\n\nEsther should have suspected. He was a teenager. They were obsessive creatures. \"You'll be fine without her for a day or two,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course I will,\" he said. \"But will she be fine?\"\n\n\"You gave her a Christmas present before we left?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Then she knows you care. And you'll be back before she knows you've gone.\"\n\n\"She already knows I'm gone.\"\n\n\"How do you know? Did she text you?\" She gave him her best goofy grin to reinforce the joke. Newton smiled politely, but that was all. The boy was always cracking jokes, awful jokes, but one of the unwritten rules of Newton World was mums weren't allowed to be funny.\n\n\"Listen.\" She leaned forward and put her fingerless gloved hands on his knees. \"You miss her. I get that. But, no offence, she's not like you.\"\n\n\"Not like me?\"\n\n\"Apart from the obvious.\" She bit her lip, wanting to tread carefully. \"I'm just saying that she'll be delighted to see you when you get back, but in the meantime, she'll just \u2026 cope.\"\n\n\"Cope, huh?\" said Newton. He held up his phone and showed her a picture. \"That's from her Instagram page.\"\n\n\"Lily has an Instagram page?\"\n\n\"Yolanda at the farm helps manage it.\"\n\n\"Is Yolanda the cute one into all that anime manga stuff?\"\n\n\"Mum! Look!\" He flicked to another picture. \"Yesterday.\" He flicked back. \"This morning. Yesterday. This morning. Tell me Lily doesn't look despondent in that one.\"\n\nEsther was wondering how to politely suggest that despondent was a strong word, particularly since she couldn't see any difference in the pictures. She was saved by the announcement they were arriving at Great Eccles." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Dave Roberts kept his eyes on the road.\n\nFriday the twenty-third of December should have been one of the busiest days, but there was only moderate traffic on the hilly A roads. There'd also been a forecast of heavy snow, particularly in high places, yet although the midday sky was as cloudy and white as Christmas cake icing, there wasn't a flake of snow to be seen.\n\nStill, he kept alert. In his time he'd been called to enough traffic accidents to know what became of incautious and inattentive drivers.\n\n\"Anyway, you'll like him,\" he said.\n\n\"Who?\" asked Guin from the back seat.\n\nMaybe there were only the two of them in the car but he still made Guin sit in the back, and on a booster seat. Yes, she was eleven, but she was short for her age and the booster seat was entirely necessary. No matter what she said.\n\n\"Newton. I was just saying.\"\n\nGuin grunted.\n\nDave kept his eyes on the roads. He knew if he looked in the rear view mirror he'd see his daughter fiddling with pipe cleaners or tin foil or copper wire or something. She'd be fashioning some sort of creature or abstract shape to add to her collection. She only grunted to demonstrate she had heard but she wasn't participating in the conversation.\n\n\"You'll like him,\" Dave persevered. \"You know Esther well enough and it's time you met her son. And he meets you. We can all spend Christmas together at our place.\"\n\nThere was no response for some time. They passed a sign: half a mile to Great Eccles and the train station, another four beyond that to Alvestowe.\n\n\"He's not staying in my room,\" said Guin eventually.\n\n\"He's not,\" said Dave. \"We discussed it.\"\n\n\"I don't remember that.\"\n\n\"We did.\"\n\n\"I banged my head in year five. I still have the dent.\"\n\n\"You can't blame your poor listening skills on a minor bump.\"\n\n\"I went deaf for a whole term.\"\n\n\"You stuck Play-Doh in your ear. When you were seven. And we discussed sleeping arrangements yesterday. Newton was never going to be staying in your bedroom. He's sixteen. There's an age gap. It wouldn't be appropriate or fair for either of you.\"\n\n\"You and Esther share a room. There's an age gap.\"\n\n\"Now you're being daft,\" he said.\n\n\"I still have the dent.\"\n\nA ram on an isolated crag watched the cars go by. Dave was prepared to bet that ram didn't have to put up with the excuses of hypochondriac lambs.\n\n\"Will I be getting less Christmas presents this year?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Fewer,\" said Dave automatically.\n\n\"So I will?\" she said.\n\n\"What? No. I was just correcting your\u2014 Why would you think you'd be getting fewer?\"\n\n\"I worked it out.\"\n\n\"Worked what?\"\n\n\"You used to buy my presents and Esther would buy Newton his. But if we're all together then you wouldn't want to treat us differently. You're a senior paramedic. That's band six salary.\"\n\n\"How do you know this stuff?\"\n\n\"Internet. And the charity Esther works for doesn't pay her much. I asked her\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not okay to ask people how much they earn.\"\n\n\"\u2014So if you want to treat us the same, you'd have to spend more on him and less on me.\"\n\n\"It doesn't work like that,\" he said. \"It's not like a tax. It\u2026\" The traffic was slowing ahead. Dave began indicating for the train station. \"You don't have to be so precise about things. Just soak up the wonder of the season. I think I preferred it when you still believed in Father Christmas.\"\n\n\"I was thinking about that too,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Oh, really. Well, we're here.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Guin Roberts looked up to see they were pulling into a train station car park. She'd been engrossed in the small scale adventures of Wiry Harrison and his quadruped friend Tin-foil Tavistock taking place on the pull-down tray in front of her. The adventures were very small scale; Tin-foil Tavistock had been explaining at length to Wiry Harrison the problems she'd been having with the other year seven girls at the quadruped school. Tavistock, who was formed from scrunched up strips of foil and couldn't decide if she was meant to be a horse or a deer or even a camel, had told Wiry Harrison how the girls at school socialised in wide circles in the school playground \u2013 physical circles, presenting their backs to the world and keeping the circle abuzz with gossip about all and any students who weren't part of it. There were several such circles in the playground but it didn't seem to matter which one Tin-foil Tavistock tried to join, she would be told she didn't belong and wasn't wanted.\n\nWiry Harrison nodded his loopy head of wire and offered what advice he could. Guin listened intently because, by sheer coincidence, she suffered with near identical problems to Tin-foil Tavistock.\n\n\"That's them,\" her dad said.\n\nHe swung the car into a parking space and, in a seamless action, put on the brake, slipped out the door and waved to people Guin had not yet seen.\n\nShe tried to return her attention to the conversations of Wiry Harrison and Tin-foil Tavistock but she was losing interest. Wiry Harrison seemed to think part of Tavistock's problem was the other girls at quadruped school were mean to her because she couldn't decide if she was meant to be a horse or a deer or even a camel, and Guin couldn't see how this applied to her own, similar problems.\n\nOutside the car, viewable only from thigh to neck through the car window, her dad was wrapping his arms around Esther. Esther tugged at his scarf, the one she had knitted him, and there was the muffled sound of some humorous remark. Esther was wearing her homemade patchwork coat and fingerless gloves. Guin knew she'd knitted those too. Esther's hands were on Guin's dad's chest, patting, stroking. She was a very tactile and touchy-feely woman. Guin approved of the knitting. She didn't approve of all the touching.\n\nGuin's dad shook the hand of the tall boy next to Esther. It was an exaggerated and blokey handshake, like they were making a business deal. Her dad opened the car door.\n\n\"\u2014climb in, dude. That's Guin in the back. Guin, say hi.\"\n\nThe boy slid into the back. He was a gawky looking teenager with wild hair that seemed to be trying to cover his face, as though it was embarrassed to be seen with him.\n\n\"Hi,\" he said, smiling. \"I'm Newton.\"\n\nGuin nodded. She knew that. He was Esther's son. And one day \u2014 a day she viewed with complete indifference \u2013 he might become her step-brother.\n\nHer dad and Esther got in.\n\n\"We'll just drive down into Alvestowe,\" said her dad, \"park up on one of the side roads and hit the market. Stollen and mulled wine for everyone.\" He chuckled to himself. \"Well, not everyone. Some of us are aren't old enough to drink.\"\n\n\"And some of us are driving home tonight,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Stollen for everyone and mulled wine for Esther,\" he corrected himself.\n\n\"Or I can drive,\" she said.\n\n\"I thought you didn't approve,\" said dad.\n\n\"Of cars clogging up the roads and the air, yes,\" said Esther. \"But this car's going to be driven tonight regardless, so it doesn't really matter who does the driving.\"\n\n\"And mulled wine for Dave!\"\n\nHe drove out of the station car park and re-joined the road to Alvestowe. Guin slid Tin-foil Tavistock and Wiry Harrison to one side of the pull-down tray and took out Tim the Robot. Tim was a square metal tube with holes all over it. Into those holes Guin had screwed and bolted an assortment of arms and devices. Timmy had a spanner arm on one side, a picture hook on the other and various glass bead eyes on his front. Tim was always on the lookout for new arms and, one day, she hoped, she might find him some legs, or possibly wheels. Tim wasn't fussy.\n\n\"You're Guin, right?\" said Newton.\n\nGuin positioned Tim's arms upwards, a sort of a God, why me? gesture.\n\n\"It's a nice name,\" said Newton. \"Is that short for Guinevere?\"\n\n\"No. Penguin,\" she said.\n\n\"Guin,\" warned her dad. \"Be nice.\"\n\nThe boy, Newton, leaned over a little to Guin. \"Hey. Why would no one bid on Donner and Blitzen on eBay?\"\n\nGuin looked at him.\n\n\"Because they were two deer,\" said Newton.\n\nGuin continued to look at him.\n\n\"Because there are two of them and they're reindeer,\" explained the boy, \"but they're also too dear, as in\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I get it,\" said Guin. \"I'm just not laughing.\"\n\n\"Right,\" said Newton." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "On the way to Alvestowe Newton tried out a few more of his better jokes on the girl, Guin, but she just wasn't biting. He wasn't put off; it was a challenge. He also wanted to show his mum he was making an effort. He wanted her to be happy and Dave seemed like an all right kind of guy, and he clearly made her happy, so, until Dave showed himself to be something other than an all right kind of guy, Newton would do what it took to keep them both happy. When other people were happy, Newton was happy.\n\nLily wasn't happy. That bothered him. He looked at her Instagram page again and flicked between the two pictures, yesterday and today. He could see it in her eyes and the set of her mouth. She wasn't happy.\n\nNewton tried to tell himself that he couldn't make everyone happy all the time. There were priorities. His mum was at the top of the list, the very top with a big gap between her and everyone else. Newton pictured himself at the bottom \u2013 well, not quite the very bottom. There were some people who had to be below him. Like Hitler. Or people like Hitler but who were actually alive. And then, in between, there was everyone else. Lily was in there and Yolanda from the farm and Dave and Guin and even Newton's dad, wherever he was and whatever he was up to these days. They were all there in the list. Newton told himself that he couldn't make everyone happy all the time. He wished he could believe it.\n\n\"What hides in the bakery at Christmas time?\" he asked Guin.\n\nShe didn't look up from the homemade toys on the tray in front of her.\n\n\"Mince spy,\" he said.\n\nGuin groaned. Newton could have punched the air. A groan was progress." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The road into Alvestowe town turned sharply before crossing a river via a narrow bridge. Coaches had to take a swing at the corner to avoid clipping the dry stone walls along each side.\n\n\"These roads weren't made for this kind of traffic,\" said Esther.\n\n\"I don't suppose so,\" agreed Dave. \"They're kind of constricted by the geography.\"\n\nAlvestowe sat in a gorge-like cleft between rocky hillsides. The landscape in this corner of the world tended between wind-blasted moors and craggy forested valleys.\n\n\"Didn't an RAF jet crash here some years ago?\" said Esther.\n\n\"I'm sure there was a time when air force planes on 'training exercises' seemed to be crashing every other week,\" nodded Dave. \"I said to Guin, it would be a terrible thing to crash out here, be stuck out here.\"\n\nDave considered the traffic and the likelihood of finding a place to park. The narrow pavements between the grey stone houses and the road were already thronged with visitors.\n\nOne of the things Dave and Esther told themselves they had in common was a disdain for the activity of shopping. It turned out that what Esther meant was she hated chain stores and conspicuous consumption and unethical production methods. Give her a farmers market or a craft fair and she could spend hours stocking up on organic cheeses, artisanal baked goods and jars of chutney featuring vegetables which no one in their right mind would want to preserve. Dave despised shopping because he despised crowds. He wasn't agoraphobic and he didn't dislike people, but he despised feeling he was just part of the crowd. He didn't want to be reminded that he was a participant in that great big procession marching from birth to death, distracting itself from its inevitable destination with noise and pomp and spectacle. In a crowd, especially in a crowd of shoppers, Dave could see humanity trying to find meaning \u2013 trying to purchase meaning \u2013 when there was no meaning to be had.\n\nEsther put a hand on his thigh and gave him a squeeze.\n\n\"We'll park up, get some food inside you and take a view of things,\" she said.\n\nSometimes, she read him like a book. Life might be a meaningless parade but some things made it more tolerable: food, beer, Esther.\n\nDave turned off the main street as soon as possible, just to get out of the flow of traffic. Ten minutes later, after getting stuck in a cul-de-sac and receiving some seriously evil glares off another driver who had followed him into the cul-de-sac, he found a place to park: next to a stone barn on a lane down by the riverside.\n\n\"Everybody out.\"\n\nThey assembled in the lane. The air was cold but there was no wind. There was a closeness to the atmosphere, a stillness too, as though their world was encased in a glass bubble, locked away from everything else.\n\n\"Those away,\" said Dave, pointing at Guin's toys. They vanished into a deep pocket of her duffel coat.\n\n\"And that too,\" said Esther, gesturing to Newton's phone. \"He keeps checking Lily's Instagram page,\" she explained to Dave.\n\n\"Lily has Instagram?\" said Dave.\n\n\"Yolanda helps her with it apparently.\"\n\n\"Yolanda's the nice one, into that Japanese manga stuff, isn't she?\"\n\n\"It's away! It's away!\" said an exasperated Newton.\n\n\"Doesn't he like us talking about Lily?\" asked Dave. \"Or Yolanda?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Esther. \"We should conduct an experiment.\"\n\nNewton growled. \"Please, can we just\u2026\" He waved an arm viciously towards the town. \"\u2026 go and enjoy the flipping magic of the season?\"\n\n\"Let's.\"\n\nAlvestowe was a small town, more of a village with ideas above its station. Situated in an elevated valley, its dimensions were constrained by the steep geography around it. Nonetheless it contained the bare minimum requirements for an English settlement: a church, a pub and a post office. These and the few shops were all close to a wide square at the centre of the town which was currently filled with the Christmas market. The market over spilled the square and extended some distance along all the roads leading in. Wooden stalls that were part-shed, part-Alpine chalet ran back to back up the centre of the roads, blocking them off to all motor traffic.\n\nChristmas lights hung from all the stalls and in a criss-cross web across the streets from drainpipes to gutters to lampposts. They were turned on, even though it was daytime and their weak multi-coloured glow was sickly and pathetic.\n\nThere was an \"Oof!\" Dave turned to see Guin on the floor and a long-haired woman in big glasses and a Russian army surplus hat with furry earflaps standing over her.\n\n\"Sorry, I didn't see her,\" said the woman.\n\nNewton had offered Guin a hand up but she was ignoring it.\n\n\"Watch where you're going,\" Dave told Guin.\n\n\"Me?\" said Guin and pointed at the open hardback book in the woman's hands.\n\n\"No harm done,\" said Dave. The woman moved on, continuing to read as she went. \"Come on. Up you get.\"\n\n\"I could have broken bones,\" said Guin.\n\n\"You're fine.\"\n\n\"Some paramedic you are.\"\n\n\"Oh, look,\" said Esther. \"Zwetschgenm\u00e4nnle.\"\n\n\"The what-the-what now?\" said Dave. Guin was on her feet and joining Esther at the stall. Zwet-thing-thingy was apparently German for people made from dried fruit.\n\n\"They use wire for the skeleton underneath,\" said Guin knowledgeably.\n\n\"They've been made this way for over two hundred years,\" said Esther. \"It's very authentic.\"\n\nAh, authentic, thought Dave. That word was like catnip to Esther.\n\n\"Which ones do you like?\" Esther asked Guin.\n\n\"I thought we were getting food first,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Technically, these are food, dad.\"\n\n\"Okay, food without a face.\"\n\nEsther gave him a look and took her purse out of her bag. \"Newton, take some money and buy this man some\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey, I've got money,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Please don't argue,\" muttered Newton.\n\nThey weren't arguing, not even bickering, but Dave knew the lad had a low tolerance for arguments. The boy's Pavlovian response was to make everyone a cup of tea and offer them a biscuit; a sort of physical manifestation of the Keep Calm and Carry On spirit. Newton would be an absolute godsend if the Second World War came round again.\n\n\"Not arguing. Flirting,\" said Dave with a wink for Esther. He slapped a hand on Newton's shoulder. \"Come on, let's go find something that could kill a diabetic at fifty paces.\"\n\nIt wasn't difficult. Soon enough, he was munching on a giant chocolate-covered pretzel and looking at the Christmas tree dominating the centre of the market. It was wrapped in spirals of fairy lights, dotted with candy canes, sleigh bells and baubles and its base was surrounded at by silver Christmas present boxes.\n\n\"S'good,\" said Newton, waving his pretzel.\n\n\"At a fiver each, they ought to be,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Supply and demand, squire,\" said a stout man next to him who was also looking at the tree. Underneath an expensive-looking wax jacket he wore a cable-knit cardigan and a patterned cravat. Dave found himself thinking that you didn't see many men wearing cravats these days. Those who did were either middle-aged thespians or, possibly, twats.\n\n\"People demand five quid pretzels?\" said Dave.\n\n\"They're prepared to buy them,\" said the man. \"It's the golden quarter.\"\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\n\"October through to December. Key sales period for retailers. It's all ebb and flow, my good man. It's the sea I sail on.\"\n\nTwat then, thought Dave.\n\nSomething rustled in the boughs of the Christmas tree, shaking the sleigh bells. Dave wondered if there was a bird or squirrel in there. The bough weighed heavily. A fat bird or a tubby squirrel.\n\n\"It's this season that keeps the retail industry afloat,\" said cravat and wax jacket. \"Importing Black Friday from the US was the best thing to happen to this country.\"\n\n\"My mum supports Buy Nothing Day,\" said Newton, taking another big bite of pretzel.\n\n\"And what's that about?\" said the man, unimpressed.\n\nWith a mouth full of chocolatey pretzelness, Newton attempted to explain. Since everything you needed to know about Buy Nothing Day was pretty much contained in the title, Dave thought he did a brilliant job.\n\nThe cravat man looked appalled, as though Newton had just displayed the symptoms of a terrible, contagious disease. He shook himself, turned up the collar of his coat and looked up at the tree.\n\n\"You know who turned on the lights this year?\" he asked.\n\nDave shook his head. How could he?\n\n\"It's an important job,\" said cravat man. \"Very symbolic. Marks the start of the season. You need an important dignitary. A local celebrity.\" The man looked about him as though to check who was listening in. \"I would have done it if they'd asked. I can turn on lights.\"\n\nDave frowned. \"I \u2026 think we all can.\"\n\nThe man laughed. It wasn't a natural laugh. \"I mean I bring the kudos, squire. The gravitas.\"\n\nHe looked at Dave expectantly. Dave looked back. The man waited. Dave didn't know what to say.\n\n\"Duncan Catheter,\" said cravat man.\n\n\"Yes?\" said Dave.\n\n\"The king of construction. I'm a black belt in housing development. Not yet met a green belt I can't conquer. You get it, squire? I've put more roofs over people's heads than anyone this side of Skipton. And I've got graphs to prove it. I tell you\u2014\" Duncan Catheter was warming up to his theme, \"\u2014if I'd been around at that first Christmas and young Mary and Joseph had come to my door, I'd have said, 'No room at the inn? No room at the inn? Why are you bothering with inns? I can get you a small but reasonably priced starter home, two down, two up plus a box room for your boy Christ. Five percent deposit, no problem. Handy for the shops and the better kind of schools, if you know what I mean.'\" The king of construction nudged Dave in the ribs.\n\n\"Not sure that I do,\" said Dave and smiled politely.\n\n\"You can tell your friends.\" said Duncan, oblivious. \"And, if you see the organisers of this thing, point out that they've missed a trick.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah. I will.\"\n\nThe tree rustled again. The tubby squirrel had apparently moved on.\n\nDuncan Catheter slapped his own belly contentedly. \"A bloody good Christmas tree. All the trimmings. All the goodies. Reminds us what life's all about, eh?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" said Dave, wondering if he meant life was like the shiny empty boxes under the tree, all surface and no content, or if he meant the tree itself, ripped out of its natural setting, dressed up in gaudy colours and presented to the world to ultimately die in a pot \u2013 a small but reasonably priced starter pot \u2013 that was too small to support it.\n\n\"Are you enjoying your pretzel?\" said Newton.\n\n\"What?\" said Dave.\n\nDuncan Catheter, the king of construction, had moved on. Dave looked down and realised the chocolate coating was melting on his fingers. Newton had scoffed his.\n\n\"I can get you something else if you prefer,\" said Newton.\n\nDave put on a smile. \"No. This \u2026 this is great. Might need something to wash it down with.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "There must have been a hundred or more stalls in the market, tightly packed to create a twisting maze of lanes across the town square. In the jostling tide of day-trippers and serious shoppers, Esther made sure she and Guin stayed close.\n\nThey were ostensibly looking for the boys, but each stall was a distraction. Esther and Guin were both creators. Esther had scored a lot of brownie points with Dave's girl when she'd given her free access to her craft boxes. Their personal crafting philosophies diverged strongly. Esther loved to make with a purpose: to follow a pattern or set of instructions, preferably an authentic one that meant she was continuing a grand, preferably ancient, tradition. She had dyed her own yarn with collected onion skins. She had subjected her loved ones to meals that followed medieval recipes. She had created vast quantities of Seminole patchwork according to traditional plans.\n\nGuin, on the other hand, was not one for following plans. For her there was no pleasure to be gained from seeing a crocheted blanket completed, no joy in knowing the yarn she was using had been dyed with onion skins. She crafted without aim, with no concept of rules. The little crocheting Guin had done had been sporadic and random pieces, malignant tumours worked in wool. She was not at all interested in studying a craft and producing something in the style of anything. Guin looked at crafts only with the intent of seeing what she could cannibalise for her own little projects.\n\nBy midday, Esther and Guin had progressed only a short way into the market and were currently standing in front of a stall selling traditional nutcrackers, nearly all stylised as soldiers. Guin picked one up and worked its mechanism, watching its little jaw move.\n\n\"They are very beautiful,\" said Esther. \"Although I'm not sure I approve of military toys.\"\n\n\"Isn't toy,\" said the stallholder, propelling himself bonelessly from his stool and coming closer. \"Nutcracker.\"\n\n\"Sorry, yes,\" said Esther. \"Military nutcracker.\"\n\n\"Just nutcracker,\" said the stall holder.\n\n\"Oh, yes, I do understand,\" said Esther. \"And I know this is an authentic design. I'm just never happy with toys \u2013 or any items \u2013 that glorify warfare. Just one of my things.\"\n\nThe stallholder frowned, uncomprehending. \"Not for warfare. Nutcracker.\" The man seemed to have a limited vocabulary. He looked tired. Esther could easily imagine that a week or however long of dealing with Christmas shoppers from morning till night would rob anyone of the power of rational speech.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Esther. \"I'm just talking about the design.\"\n\n\"Can I buy one to take apart?\" asked Guin.\n\n\"I don't think that would be appropriate,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Nutcracker,\" said the stallholder. \"Peanuts.\" He produced a knobbly peanut, popped it in a bearded nutcracker's mouth and cracked it. \"Nutcracker!\"\n\n\"Got it,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Hazelnut,\" said the stallholder. He put a hazelnut in the nutcracker's mouth.\n\n\"Here comes dad,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Oh, good,\" said Esther, edging away from the stall. \"Maybe we can move on\u2026\" But Dave and Newton were too quickly upon them.\n\nThe stallholder smashed the hazelnut. \"See. Nutcracker.\"\n\n\"We've been looking all over for you two,\" said Dave. The carrier bag at his side clinked heavily.\n\n\"Looking really hard?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Walnut,\" said the stallholder, putting in another nut.\n\n\"You definitely weren't by the mead stall,\" said Newton. \"We spent a lot of time looking there.\"\n\n\"We?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Me,\" said Dave. \"Not sure what he was saying half the time but he was very insistent and\u2014\" he took one of the bottles out to peer at the incomprehensible angular writing on the label \"\u2014I'm sure this is full of meady goodness.\"\n\n\"My dad also likes mead,\" Guin told Esther.\n\n\"I was thinking,\" said Dave, \"I could do with a new hobby.\"\n\n\"Alcoholism?\" said Newton.\n\n\"Home-brewing,\" said Dave, \"but I'm willing to branch out.\"\n\n\"Even brazil nut,\" declared the stallholder, even though no one was listening.\n\n\"Snowflake!\" said Newton abruptly and pointed at a drifting flake. \"They said it would snow today.\"\n\n\"One snowflake doesn't necessarily mean it's snowing,\" said Esther.\n\n\"How many snowflakes do there have to be?\" asked Guin.\n\n\"And if a snowflake falls and no one is there to see it, has it really fallen?\" said Dave.\n\nGuin put on a deeply thoughtful expression. \"Wow.\"\n\n\"Even almond!\" said the stallholder.\n\n\"Okay, Confucius.\" Esther herded the family away from the stall. \"Time to move on.\"\n\n\"See!\" the stallholder called after them. \"All the nuts! Nutcracker!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "They ate gingerbread men and drank hot chocolate. They wandered down every lane and cut-through of the market and discovered whole sections they had entirely missed. The rest of the world shuffled and squeezed through the alleys, while tinny music from hidden speakers competed with the grumble and natter of a thousand visitors. A few more brave flakes of snow wafted about here and there.\n\nNewton bought a blanket for Lily that his mum clearly thought was too expensive but didn't say. Guin bought herself a wooden box painted with a cheery arctic scene that she declared would be used for 'things'. When her dad asked her what things, she repeated, \"Things!\" Newton's mum found a stall selling hand-thrown earthenware pots. She eagerly questioned the stallholder about their production methods until the stallholder pretended another customer needed his attention and wandered off. She seemed not to notice. Dave bought everyone foot-long hotdogs. Newton thought the supposedly pork sausages didn't quite taste like any pork he'd eaten before but said nothing, not wanting to make a fuss. They stood and ate them between a carousel ride and a large nativity display near to the town post office.\n\nThe human figures and animals in the nativity, all only slightly smaller than actual life size, appeared to have been carved from single pieces of solid wood. It gave their faces angular, severe expressions. Newton found those expressions disconcerting.\n\n\"Now, that could be a good hobby for you,\" his mum said to Dave.\n\nDave glanced at the nativity. \"Messiah? I think it's been taken.\"\n\n\"No, my love. Wood carving. You're good with your hands.\"\n\nGuin scoffed.\n\n\"You work with your hands,\" Esther corrected herself, suddenly breathless.\n\n\"Have you seen my bed?\" said Guin. \"It slopes so much I have to hold on in the night.\"\n\n\"Exaggeration,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Beds are big things,\" said Esther. \"Tricky.\"\n\n\"It's from IKEA,\" said Guin. \"There's instructions.\"\n\n\"I like making flat-pack furniture,\" said Esther.\n\nNewton watched Guin take her little robot figurine out of her pocket. He saw several of its limbs were made from the interlocking bolt and screw components of flat-pack furniture. No wonder her bed sloped if it had all those bits missing. Guin opened the box she had just bought and laid the metal man inside it like it was his bed, or a coffin. She closed the lid firmly.\n\nNewton looked at the polar bears on Guin's new box and asked her, \"Why don't polar bears eat penguins?\"\n\n\"Depends,\" she said.\n\n\"On what?\"\n\n\"If this is an excuse to tell me a fact everyone knows or if it's a really bad joke.\"\n\nHe inhaled deeply and plucked a fresh joke from his memory. \"Okay, what did one snowman say to the other?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said.\n\n\"'Can you smell carrots?'\"\n\nShe tried not to smile. She almost succeeded. \"Are you trying to make me like you?\" she accused him.\n\n\"I'm trying to make you happy.\"\n\n\"Don't I look happy?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Don't you know what happy looks like?\"\n\n\"Sort of like this,\" he said and smiled widely.\n\n\"I think that's more mad psychopath.\"\n\n\"They're easily confused,\" he said.\n\n\"There's some lovely hand-carved cuckoo clock house things on a stall down there,\" Esther said to Dave.\n\n\"If I can't make an IKEA bed, I can't make a cuckoo clock.\"\n\nShe tutted at him. \"I'm just saying, come take a look. I like them.\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows. \"You like them. Aren't they a bit\u2014?\"\n\n\"Teutonic,\" suggested Newton.\n\n\"Good word,\" said Dave, impressed. \"I was going to say kitsch.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Esther, \"but they're so\u2014\" She scrunched up her face and waggled her fingers closely together to somehow indicate the tiny, intricate nature of things.\n\n\"Cuckoo clocks it is then,\" said Dave.\n\n\"I wanted a go on the ride,\" said Guin, pointing at the carousel.\n\n\"You've not finished your hotdog.\"\n\nShe passed it to her dad. \"It's too big and it tastes funny.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said. \"Carousel, Newton?\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" said Newton.\n\n\"It's not like riding a real horse, is it?\" said his mum, patting his arm.\n\nNewton liked real horses but he always thought there was something sinister about carousel ones, with and their fixed, sharply painted mouths, and cold eyes.\n\n\"I can watch Guin while you two go and look at cuckoo clocks,\" he said.\n\n\"Thanks, dude,\" said Dave.\n\n\"We're just down there,\" said Newton's mum.\n\nDave dug in his pocket and gave Guin some change. He remembered the hotdog he'd been given, looking briefly around for a bin, before deciding to eat it instead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Guin took her dad's money and ran to the carousel. The earlier crowds at the market had thinned and there was no queue. Guin found a horse with a purple saddle and the name Pokus painted in jolly script across its bridle. A man came round to collect the money. He walked with a wobbly gait, never looking in the direction he was going. Guin guessed if you spent all day working on a spinning carousel, you would end walking with a wobbly gait.\n\nShe handed over the coins and when the pipe organ struck up, held on tightly. The mechanical pipe organ had little figurines on the front, one with a conductor's baton, another with a pair of cymbals. As the carousel started to turn, she watched them and their precise little movements.\n\nMore interesting still, far more interesting than being on a jiggling wooden horse, was the mechanism above her head. Guin watched the rotating crankshafts and arms and daydreamed what she could make from components such as these.\n\nHowever, several circuits of looking up made her feel queasy and Guin had to look down, focus on the world beyond the carousel mechanism before her hotdog made a unpleasant encore. Her dad and Esther had already wandered off. There was Esther's son, Newton, standing by the nativity scene. He saw her looking and gave her a wave. Next turn round, he pulled a silly face at her. She scowled and determined not to look next time.\n\nSnow was falling steadily now and it was a blurry screen against the wooden stalls and lights of the market. Through it, Guin caught a glimpse of long hair, big glasses and a hat with furry earflaps. It was the woman who had knocked her to the ground earlier. Guin felt a surge of anger. The bump had been an accident but that didn't matter. Guin was eleven and bearing grudges took little effort at that age.\n\nThe woman was still walking round with her nose in a book! She wasn't even looking at the stalls! Guin tutted. People had no right to go wandering blindly around Christmas markets, not buying stuff and being a general hazard. The woman should buy something or go home.\n\nAngry though she was, Guin couldn't help but wonder what was so interesting about a book that could hold the woman's attention completely. Guin suddenly wanted to know. The curiosity was threatening to overcome her anger, which made her angrier still. There was nothing an angry mind hated more than having its anger reasonably eroded by a more positive emotion." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Newton gave up trying to catch Guin's eye. She was too busy staring at something else. Whatever it was, she didn't look happy about it, but what did he know? Guin had a furiously private intensity about her. Maybe that expression was her version of sheer delight.\n\nNewton looked at the nativity figures. The scene in front of him was fairly traditional: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus in the manger (this one so thoroughly swaddled in blankets that its ugly little face and staring eyes were barely visible), shepherds, three wise men, various donkeys and sheep and something that couldn't decide if it was meant to be a horse or a deer or even a camel. The story of Christmas was one he'd had repeated to him, performed to him, had performed in so often that he hardly ever stopped to think about its meaning.\n\nIt was mostly, he reflected, the story of a holiday slash business trip gone wrong. Joseph had to go to Bethlehem. This was complicated by his wife being pregnant with a baby that they knew wasn't his. Their accommodation plans had fallen through and they'd ended up staying somewhere appalling. The wise men had only turned up because they'd been reading cryptic messages in the stars. The shepherds didn't even have a choice; they'd been bullied into attending by an angel while they were in the middle of their night shift. Even the animals were probably wondering what these people were doing in their barn and why there was a baby in their food trough.\n\nIt was, thought Newton, a story without a single happy moment. Less a story than a collection of anecdotes which, if they happened to modern Brits, would have them phoning consumer watchdog programmes or trying to get compensation from their travel company.\n\nThe Virgin Mary certainly looked pissed off, almost cross-eyed in her fury. Or maybe she, like Guin, had an odd way of expressing happiness." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\"Cuckoo clocks!\" said Esther, arms spread.\n\n\"So, I see,\" said Dave.\n\nThey pressed forward under the shallow eaves of the stall to be more out of the briskly falling snow. The side walls and back of the stall were crowded with intricately carved clocks \u2013 chalet house shapes, covered with carved trees and fruits and animals, pine cone weights dangling on long chains beneath. On tiny balconies and in tiny doorways, varnished figures stood, some fixed, some poised to spring out at the chiming of the hour.\n\n\"I don't like them,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Why not?\" said Esther.\n\n\"I don't know. They always look \u2026 sinister to me.\"\n\nShe looked up at him and smiled.\n\nHe kissed her on the forehead. \"I look at them and all that super detailed carving and I think 'that's what happens when you're cooped up all winter with snow piled outside your door and nowhere to go.'\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Cabin fever as an art form.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I guess people did need something to keep them occupied through the winter months.\"\n\nHe looked back the way they'd come. \"They'll be all right together?\"\n\n\"Newton will keep an eye on her.\"\n\n\"I'm more concerned about him,\" said Dave. \"No, I meant long term. Them. Us. A new life.\"\n\nEsther gave him a reassuring hug. \"Taking it slow. Let's see how Christmas goes, all four of us at your place. And if that works out\u2026\"\n\n\"Oh, crap.\"\n\nShe pulled away. \"You don't want it to work out?\"\n\nDave patted his coat pockets before putting a hand in each.\n\n\"What?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Keys. Car keys.\"\n\nHe took out his wallet to check the inside pocket. He looked inside the carrier bag of mulled wine.\n\n\"When did you last have them?\" asked Esther.\n\n\"Definitely in the car.\"\n\n\"Obviously.\"\n\nHe shot her a tetchy took. \"I had them at the car. I went into that pocket to buy pretzels and mulled wine. I might have\u2026\" He mimed a hand out of pocket action and then looked round as though the keys might magically be on the ground somewhere nearby.\n\n\"Maybe fallen out near one of those stalls,\" she said. \"Let's go look.\"\n\nHe held out his hands. \"You stay here. The kids will come to you. I'll go check.\" He sighed. \"Buggeration,\" he said and hurried off." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "The carousel slowed to a stop. The automaton conductor gave a final jerk of his baton. The cymbal player froze a centimetre from one final clang. Guin slid off Pokus the horse and down the wooden steps. Newton stood staring glumly at the nativity scene.\n\nThe woman with the heavy book trudged past Newton, each oblivious of the other. The woman had something dangling from the fingertips of the hand supporting the book. It was a five-pointed star, but no Christmas decoration. Even from a distance, Guin could see it was constructed from twigs and string, neatly bound and tightly secured.\n\nThe woman stopped to check something in her book, glanced at the dangling star, then seemed to stare at the ground in search of something before slowly moving on.\n\nThat was curious. Guin decided to follow her. \"I'm here,\" she said to Newton as she passed.\n\n\"Good. Good,\" he said, still looking at the carved nativity. \"Have fun?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" she said. The book woman was moving off through the crowd. \"I'm just going to look at something for a minute.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" said Newton.\n\nIn the crowd, following the book woman was difficult. Guin was not tall and the afternoon shoppers pressed in closely, but glimpses of that flappy-eared hat drew her on. She saw the woman, cut away from the stalls and down a side route. However when Guin reached where the woman had been, she was gone. There was just a set of footprints in the settling snow.\n\nGuin hesitated because she was not an idiot.\n\nShe knew she had wandered off from Newton, but reasoned she hadn't gone far and she knew the way back. If she got into any trouble of the 'stranger danger' variety, she wasn't afraid to scream for help. She put her hand in her pocket, felt the reassuring shape of Wiry Harrison, and followed the footprints.\n\nThey led up a dark and narrow alley between two houses. Here the snow had only fallen in a narrow strip down the centre of the alleyway. Above, the sheer white sky was a thin line between rooftops.\n\nThere was thump and a muffled sound up ahead. Guin pressed on. At the top of a short flight of steps, the alley joined onto a path which ran behind the houses. On the far side was a wall and a shadowy wood. The footprints went right. Among them were smaller, wedge-shaped depressions, like animal prints, or holes melted in the snow. They followed the book woman's footprints, and so did Guin.\n\nShe wondered what the new prints were, and was so focused on them she didn't see the book and the star on the ground until she'd almost stepped on them. The book lay open on the ground, collecting snowflakes in its pages. The star made of twigs and string lay next to it, like it had been dropped.\n\nGuin turned about. The woman had gone. There were no people in sight at all. The footprints in the snow continued for a couple of steps before becoming confused and oddly spaced. Then they became a pair of gouged lines in the snow.\n\n\"That's weird,\" she said to Wiry Harrison. She picked up the book and the star." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Newton had looked at the nativity scene far longer than its crude artistry demanded, but there was something peculiar about it that bothered him. He couldn't work out what. It wasn't the stern expressions on the people's faces. It wasn't the animal that couldn't decide if it was meant to be a horse or a deer or even a camel. When it struck him, he had quite a start.\n\nThe ugly baby Jesus's eyes were closed. They had been open. He was sure they had been open.\n\n\"Hey, Guin,\" he said, turning. \"This baby. Its eyes\u2014\"\n\nHe continued to turn, eyes scanning the thinning crowds. His brain told him to not panic even before he realised he was panicking.\n\n\"Guin!\" he called.\n\nHe dashed to the nearest stall, then the next and the next. He turned to the carousel and watched it go round half a dozen times before he could admit she wasn't on it. He saw the carousel man watching him and gave him a desperate look which he foolishly hoped would cause the man to leap into action and produce the girl like a rabbit from a hat.\n\n\"Guin!\"\n\nPeople looked at him as he called out.\n\n\"It's short for Guinevere,\" he told one, which wasn't a useful thing to say. He added, \"She's about this big. Pale looking. Bright coloured mittens,\" which was moderately better.\n\nHe pulled out his phone, the automatic response in a moment of alarm. He would call his mum. She would never forgive him but he had to call her.\n\nThe phone had no signal. They were out in the wilds, snow closing in thickly. No signal.\n\n\"Guin!\"\n\nHe ran down the nearest lane of stalls." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Dave retraced his steps to stalls where he might have dropped his keys. They were not at the hot dog stand. The floppy-limbed woman at the pretzel stall shook her head when Dave asked if any keys had been handed in. The man at the mead stall, who had been so encouraging this morning, now seemed to struggle understanding English. Many of the day visitors had left and Dave was able to kick through the snow around the stalls with little fear of bothering others. But the snow was now falling fast and although the market stalls' overhanging roofs kept the worst of the snow away, it had been building up millimetre by millimetre for some time. He was not going to just see the car keys lying around somewhere.\n\nCursing himself, Dave continued to retrace his steps, away from the market and back down towards where they'd parked the car. It was possible he had dropped them the moment they'd parked. It was even conceivable that he'd left them in the ignition all day long.\n\nDave didn't think he was old enough to be so forgetful. He wasn't the kind to wonder where his glasses were, only to discover they were on his head \u2013 he didn't wear glasses for one thing \u2013 but finding he'd left the keys in the car would be a win at this point.\n\nThere was the hiss of brakes and he pressed himself against a wall as a coach full of departing day-trippers trundled past the narrow pavement, its headlights on full beam. It was not even four o'clock but night fell quickly in midwinter and the snow, whilst catching and reflecting the light from the lampposts and Christmas lights, obscured any dying daylight.\n\nWith night falling and the weather closing in, they'd need to be away soon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Holding the homemade twig and string star and the book, Guin followed the rapidly disappearing trail in the snow and wondered where the woman had gone to.\n\nIt was possible she had simply dropped her book. People dropped things all the time. Guin had once found a whole box of buttons and beads in the park near their house. She'd collected tools, old toys and odds and ends which no sensible person would deliberately leave behind.\n\nBut this was definitely just weird.\n\nShe held onto Wiry Harrison for moral support. Out of all her creations, Wiry Harrison was definitely the best for moral support. Tinfoil Tavistock was made of flimsier materials and had distracting issues of her own. Tim the Robot was made of sterner stuff but he was really only a child, very unworldly. The others, Bertie O'Cork, Scampious and Cliptoria had varying qualities but, when you needed a dose of bravery, Wiry Harrison was the one you should turn to.\n\n\"Just a little way,\" she said, under her breath, \"and then we'll go back and find Newton.\"\n\nShe walked on. The path behind the houses ran up to a drystone wall and a narrow gate leading into a churchyard. There was something on the ground by the wall: a flat shape draped over the wall. It was hard to make out in the gloom.\n\nGuin made towards it. The shape began to move, sliding slowly over the wall. Guin hurried.\n\nWhen she got close enough to see what it was, she couldn't understand what she was seeing. Dangling from the top of the low wall was what appeared to be an arm-length glove. It was a peachy pink, skin coloured. It wasn't an actual human arm: it was floppy and rubbery and quite lifeless. But if it wasn't an arm-length glove, in a perfectly realistic skin tone, what was it?\n\nThere was something else: fat and round on the ground in front of the wall. Guin recognised that.\n\nAs she hurried closer, the arm-glove slid away over the wall as though pulled from the other side. The hand bit seemed to wave goodbye before disappearing. Guin crouched by the fat round object. It was a big winter hat with furry earflaps. She picked it up. There was something red and sticky on the brim.\n\nGuin heard voices on the other side of the wall. No, not voices exactly, but high-pitched chittering chattering noises that were very much like speech. She stepped closer. Between the top of the low wall and the sweeping boughs of the trees there was only a black-green darkness.\n\n\"Hello?\" she called.\n\nThere was no reply.\n\n\"You left your hat here,\" she said to the darkness.\n\nThere was nothing for several seconds and then \"Villast, \u00fatlendingur.\"\n\nThe voices sounded close, like they were just over the wall, down by the mossy trunks of the nearest trees. Guin leaned nearer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Esther leaned close to the cuckoo clock stall as the snow came down in thick, tangled clumps. There was still virtually no wind but there had to be a point at which heavy snowfall automatically became a blizzard. Wherever that point was, surely they were close to it. She pulled her collar about her neck and continued to look at the range of clocks.\n\nShe wasn't sure cuckoo clocks were the way to go but she was confident Dave would enjoy a creative hobby if the right one could be found for him.\n\n\"So, are all these clocks hand-carved?\" she asked the old man behind the stall.\n\nThe old man grunted ambiguously. He was packing clocks away in wooden crates lined with straw. It was late; the fairground rides still turned and there were still people drinking and eating but this man had probably sold his last cuckoo clock of the year. And it was the last day of the Christmas market. Esther supposed the clocks that went unsold would resurface in this market or another next year.\n\n\"I just wondered,\" she said. \"They are very beautiful. Does someone carve them all?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" he said and waved to the unseen space behind the stall. \"All carved.\"\n\nHe continued to pack clocks, spooling the weight chains in his hands before laying them flat. He moved sluggishly, failing to co-ordinate left hand and right.\n\n\"You make them back here?\" said Esther. There was a narrow space between this stall and the next, little more than a crawlspace but, looking round, Esther could see a dim light and hear the sounds of industry.\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" said the old man, waving. \"All carved.\"\n\n\"I mean, if you don't mind me looking\u2014\"\n\nThe old man didn't seem to care. She took a step towards the little cut-through. Newton and Guin would be coming along soon. They might miss her if she wasn't standing out front. Then again, Newton could just phone her if there was problem or they failed to spot one another.\n\n\"I'll just\u2014\" She slipped down the space. There was a surprising amount of room: the stalls weren't arranged precisely back to back. A surprisingly wide alley was laid out between them, covered over with sheltering canvas, in parts lit by an inferior sort of fairy light.\n\nThe sounds of construction came from the dim shanty town. There was almost no light here and Esther stepped carefully, waiting for her eyes to adjust. There were low tables \u2013 roughly made things \u2013 little more than split logs laid across trestles. Worn hand tools, too dark to make out clearly were strewn around.\n\nWorkers sat at the benches. She could not make them out properly, although they seemed happy enough in the near darkness. She guessed, purely from the sounds they made, there were three or four or them; no more than five. They must have been cramped: there couldn't be room for more than two people to sit comfortably in that space. Suggestions of hands moved across their materials. A chisel glinted here, a saw there.\n\n\"Hello?\" she said. \"I didn't mean to interrupt but the man said it was okay.\"\n\nThe work stopped instantly.\n\n\"If you don't mind,\" said Esther.\n\nFive pairs of eyes turned to regard her. Eyes set widely in round faces, far lower down than she expected." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Newton checked his phone for the umpteenth time. Still no signal.\n\nUnconsciously he'd begun to make a methodical search of the market, spiralling out from the place he had last seen Guin. He'd taken to asking every passer-by he met but they were growing fewer by the minute.\n\nWhen he came by the church, something made him stop. There was a lane, a driveway of sorts, running up the hill, churchyard on one side and a thick line of fir trees on the other. He wouldn't have been able to articulate what drew him to that driveway but he felt it was somewhere Guin might have gone. There were small footprints in the snow, along the side of the driveway nearest the trees. Perhaps too small to be Guin's, but then again\u2026\n\nHe followed them, sick at the thought something terrible had happened to Guin, that he would have to face his mum and Dave and face the unbearable anguish, the guilt and the disappointment of what he had done.\n\nThe little footprints drifted nearer to the line of trees before disappearing under the low boughs.\n\n\"Guin!\"\n\nHe did a three-sixty, looking across the driveway, the churchyard and back to the town square. He called again.\n\nThere was silence. The tinny music playing over the Christmas market had ended. A grey, dead hush had fallen over the town.\n\nHe looked at the footprints. They entered the trees. For whatever reason, perhaps this was where Guin had gone.\n\nHe crouched next to the trees and tried to see what was on the other side." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Dave hurried to the riverside and to where they'd left the car. Departing traffic was queuing on the narrow bridge out of town. Definitely time to leave.\n\nHe was almost running by the time he got to the lane where they'd parked: a kind of shuffling jog full of high-shouldered arm actions and evident urgency, which wasn't actually any faster than a brisk walk. It was a gesture of intent \u2013 \"Look, I'm in a hurry\" \u2013 rather than an attempt to go faster.\n\nThe snow had fallen heavily in the lane, banked up against the short wall by the riverside and the stone barns on the other. Dave saw the car but did not immediately recognise it. The bonnet was up, and in the blue-white gloom of dusk he saw a large, broad figure leaning over it.\n\n\"Hey!\" Dave called. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nThe figure ignored him and continued pawing at the engine.\n\n\"Hey!\"\n\nDave stopped jogging. He stepped forward in slow, careful footsteps. He didn't want to be a statistic, stabbed to death in the act of confronting a car thief. The figure held up a curve of piping, inspected it \u2013 seemed to sniff it! \u2013 and then tossed it away.\n\n\"Get away from that car!\" commanded Dave in his best manly voice (which he considered to be quite manly indeed). He waved his hands firmly in a gesture he'd seen demonstrated on a nature documentary as a way of driving away a grizzly bear. \"That's my car!\"\n\nThe figure, hunched and black, shifted as though to look at him and then went back to ripping things out of the engine.\n\nWell, that was just rude!\n\n\"Oi!\" Dave squeaked, losing much of the manliness he had mustered earlier. \"I'm going to call the police, you know!\"\n\nThe figure took note of that. It turned, coming apart as it moved, splitting and collapsing. It wasn't one large person. It was four or five much smaller people. Children? Dave held his hands up against the obscuring snow to see better.\n\nIt was children, he guessed. Children or a travelling band of circus dwarfs.\n\n\"What the hell are you playing at?\" he demanded, advancing towards them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "The craftsmen \u2013 no, they were too small to be craftsmen \u2013 the individuals in the makeshift space behind the stalls watched Esther.\n\n\"Stinga henni me\u00f0 hn\u00edf\"\n\nThey were no bigger than children; small children at that.\n\n\"Do you work here?\" she asked in her most gentle, mumsiest voice.\n\nThey said nothing, merely looked.\n\n\"Are you \u2026 are you children?\"\n\nThere was an utterly obvious explanation. This was some sort of child labour sweatshop. Children forced to make traditional cuckoo clocks by the cruel taskmasters of a travelling market. She could see it so clearly: an itinerant community, undocumented children, always moving from place to place so that even in the enlightened West, child slaves and indentured labourers could go unnoticed.\n\n\"My name's Esther,\" she said.\n\n\"Esther,\" said one of them.\n\n\"Yes, I work with a charity that helps families and children. I can help you.\"\n\n\"Help?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"If you want to come with me.\" She held out her hand. \"I'll keep you safe.\"\n\nThere was a scrape on the table top as a shining chisel was picked up. Another small figure swapped its saw for a sharp-edged carving knife. They moved towards her slowly, but even in the dark she could see it wasn't fearful caution. She sensed something more purposeful, the slowness of a crocodile drifting towards an unsuspecting wildebeest.\n\n\"Or maybe you don't need my help,\" she said faintly.\n\nThe chisel was raised up high, ready to strike down." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "A branch creaked and snapped beneath the trees. It could just have been the snow, weighing the trees down, shifting as it settled.\n\n\"Guin, are you there?\" hissed Newton.\n\nThere were rustles and definite movement.\n\nHe had a sudden mental image of an injured Guin, stuck under there somewhere. He crouched right down and pushed aside the nearest branch so he could crawl in. Something chittered in the dark; something that was not nice.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\nHe whipped round. Guin stood a short distance away, down the lane. \"What the\u2014?\"\n\n\"Did you see something?\" she asked. She stood with her wooden box and a thick book clutched to her chest. Snow stuck to her fleecy collar in mounding clumps.\n\nHe stood quickly, taking two jittery steps away from the edge of the trees. \"I was looking for you,\" he said. He'd meant to sound angry and accusatory, but he was so overcome with relief it came out as a higgledy-piggledy jumble.\n\n\"I'm here,\" she said.\n\n\"I can see that.\"\n\n\"Our parents are going to be wondering where we are,\" she said, as though it was his fault.\n\n\"I was looking for you,\" he pointed out.\n\n\"Good job I found you then,\" she said. \"Come on.\"\n\nHe crunched through the snow towards her. At the bottom of the driveway, he looked back at the line of trees. Close to where he had just been, the heavy bottom boughs swayed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Esther ran, clutching her injured hand, squeezing against the pain. She collided clumsily with a wooden wall. On the other side, something fell and banged with a clockwork sproing and a plaintive cuckoo. She rebounded and ran on, looking for the turning, the channel that would lead out into the lanes of the market.\n\nIt had only been a few feet from where she had stood, but somehow she had missed it, and now she was running between the backs of what felt like endless stalls. She jumped over trailing electric cables, clattered past neatly stored gas heater canisters.\n\nThe child in the darkness had stabbed her! They had actually stabbed her!\n\nShe knew in her heart of hearts the poor kid was a victim of trafficking or forced labour or something, and that whatever they had done it wasn't their fault. Just a reaction to circumstance. She couldn't blame them. Although right now, with a sharp pain gripping her hand and blood seeping through her fingerless gloves, she was finding forgiveness a little difficult to come by.\n\nSomething made a noise behind her. Something was chasing her!\n\n\"Oh, God,\" she whispered. \"I didn't mean to\u2014\"\n\nShe didn't look back. She didn't want to.\n\nSeeing a gap between two stalls she thrust herself down it. It was far narrower than the one she had come through. She had to force herself sideways between two walls of slatted panels, her thick coat catching on both sides, at least two buttons snapping off. The space narrowed further. She propelled herself the last few feet by digging in her heels.\n\nSomething touched her elbow. Something grabbed for her elbow.\n\nShe couldn't look back now if she wanted to. There wasn't even room enough to turn her head. She keened with anguish and pushed on, scraping knees and pulling her shoulder, exploding out into the market.\n\n\"Oh, God! Oh, God!\" she panted.\n\n\"There you are,\" said Newton.\n\nNewton and Guin were coming towards her, along the avenue of mostly closed up stalls. The last few stallholders were drawing the shutters down on their little chalet huts.\n\nStill breathless, still bewildered, Esther looked back at the space she had squeezed through. There was nothing to be seen and little light to see by. No one had followed her. She had imagined it. Nonetheless, her coat was ripped and studded with pine splinters along the one side. Her hand\u2014 She carefully uncurled her hand, gasping at the sight.\n\n\"Mum, what have you done?\" cried Newton.\n\nThe palm of her glove was saturated with blood. She winced just looking at it. \"I went back there to have a look. I shouldn't have and I\u2014\" She hissed as the cold air brought sensation back into her hand.\n\n\"Here's dad,\" said Guin. \"Dad!\"\n\nDave jogged up the lane towards them. He had Newton's suitcase in one hand, Esther's big ancient rucksack in the other and a grave look on his face. \"You'll never guess what's happened,\" he said tersely.\n\n\"Mum's hurt herself,\" said Newton.\n\n\"What?\" Dave dropped the bags.\n\n\"It's nothing,\" Esther said automatically, immediately hated herself for saying it. Clearly it was not nothing. That was the kind of stupid thing people said, the kind of stiff upper lip nonsense that got people killed. \"I mean, I've cut my hand.\"\n\nDave had a first aid kit in his hand, magicked from nowhere. Before she'd met Dave, Esther had briefly dated a teacher. The man had carried a green biro with him at all times. He had used it to correct spelling mistakes and misplaced apostrophes on restaurant menus. Paramedic Dave and his ever-present first aid kit was the same sort thing, only much less annoying. The relationship with the teacher had ended quickly, after an argument in a pub over the correct placing of the apostrophe in shepherd's pie. One of the last things she heard him shouting at the barman before she quietly slipped out and blocked his number on her phone was, \"But how many shepherds, huh? Huh? Is that a pie for one shepherd or are several of them sharing it, eh?\"\n\nThe much more sane and lovely Dave calmly peeled off Esther's glove, inspected the narrow cut in the fleshy heel of her hand and removed the excess blood with a wipe. She sucked in at the tingle.\n\n\"What did this?\" he asked.\n\n\"A chisel, I think,\" she said.\n\nHe sprayed something onto the cut, something cold and wonderfully numbing. He produced a dressing. \"And how did that happen?\"\n\n\"I just wanted to have a look at how the clocks were made,\" she said.\n\n\"Clocks.\"\n\n\"Cuckoo clocks.\"\n\nHe gave little smirk.\n\n\"It's not funny,\" she said.\n\n\"No, it's not,\" agreed Newton.\n\nDave wrapped sticky blue gauze over the dressing. \"It's not deep, but we'll have to get it checked to make sure you haven't damaged any tendons.\" He kissed her on the cheek. \"I didn't mean to laugh, it's just been a weird\u2014\"\n\n\"Why have your brought our bags, dad?\" asked Guin.\n\nDave looked to the heavens and shook his head. The look on his face wasn't a good one.\n\n\"What?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Some b\u2014\" Dave's mouth stiffened, unable to find a 'b' word he was willing to say in front of his daughter. \"Some people have broken into our car.\"\n\nThere were universally shared groans and \"Oh no!\"s.\n\n\"Stolen anything?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Engine parts, if you'd believe it,\" said Dave. \"Caught the b\u2014\"\n\n\"Criminals,\" suggested Esther.\n\n\"Ne'er-do-wells,\" offered Newton.\n\n\"Bastards,\" said Guin with gusto.\n\n\"I caught them in the act,\" said Dave. \"I challenged them and they ran off, but that car's going nowhere.\" He sighed. \"I brought the bags because I didn't want to leave them. I was going to call the police and the RAC but\u2014\" He took out his phone. \"\u2014no signal. Any of you guys?\"\n\nNewton had his out. Esther found hers.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"We should find a phone box,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Huh. When was the last time you saw one of those?\" said Dave.\n\nEsther looked round for a stallholder. They'd know where to find a phone. All along the lane, stalls were closed or in the last seconds of closing. There was still light and an open front at one at the far end.\n\n\"Let's go ask,\" she said.\n\nNewton hurried to pick up the bags before anyone else could. The pull-along suitcase dragged a deep furrow in the snow. The shutters on the final stall were drawing down as they approached.\n\n\"Wait up!\" called Dave but this only made the shutters close all the quicker. He rapped on the shutters. \"We just want to find a telephone box.\"\n\n\"Busy,\" said a rasping voice from within.\n\n\"We've broken down,\" said Dave.\n\n\"We need to call the cops,\" added Newton.\n\n\"Try pub,\" said the rasping voice.\n\nDave huffed. Esther put a comforting hand on his back and then led the way to the pub. Which also turned out to be closed.\n\n\"What kind of pub closes at tea time?\" said Dave. \"Pubs should be open all hours!\"\n\n\"Alcoholic,\" whispered Guin.\n\nDave gave his daughter a sharp, tight-lipped look.\n\nThe town was closed for the evening. Apart from the fairy lights strung between buildings and stalls, all life and activity had gone from the market. There were no traders or visitors, no open stalls, no sounds. The early winter night had come and shut everything down.\n\n\"There,\" said Newton. Hands occupied with luggage, he pointed with a nod of his head. There was an open doorway and a warm yellow light a few doors down. Esther scurried ahead.\n\nA woman stood in the doorway. She wore horn-rimmed glasses on a chain, her ash-blonde haired tied up in a bun. On her face was the kind of expression which declared she didn't approve of snow and was trying to drive it away with a good hard glare. That expression softened a mite as she saw Esther and family approaching.\n\n\"Oh, come in, come in,\" she said, waving them over.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Esther. \"We were just wondering if you had a telephone. We\u2014\"\n\n\"Come in, come in,\" she repeated.\n\nThe porch way between the outer and inner front doors contained a huge upright hoover. As Esther squeezed past it loops of tubes and pipes fell outwards her. The woman wrestled silently with them, kicking the huge and ancient vacuum cleaner they were attached to for good measure as the family squeezed past.\n\n\"R2-D2's let himself go a bit,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Stamp the snow off your boots and then you can put them over there,\" said the woman.\n\nEsther was already in the hallway before she registered the sentence. \"No. We just wanted to use your phone, if we could.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" said the woman, shutting the door on the defeated vacuum cleaner. \"Time enough. Boots there. Are there four of you?\"\n\n\"Is there a phone?\" Dave asked.\n\n\"We are fully complemented with all modern services,\" said the woman. \"Tea and coffee making facilities.\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"No, you're fine. You're fine. You've not booked, but I do have a family room available.\"\n\nIt was a hotel, Esther realised. A small hotel. Maybe a bed and breakfast. There was a tiny reception desk but the hall was big enough to suggest a large grand house with lots of bedrooms. The visible d\u00e9cor, dark and heavily patterned, reminded Esther of guesthouses she had stayed in when she was a child.\n\n\"Ah, no,\" said Dave. \"We don't need a room, we just want to use the phone.\"\n\n\"I did say,\" said Esther.\n\n\"And is that all your luggage?\" asked the woman. \"People carry so much of it these days.\"\n\n\"The phone,\" said Dave. \"Our car's been vandalised.\"\n\n\"Well, no one's going anywhere in this weather, are they?\" said the woman. \"Come in. Boots there. You too, little miss.\"\n\nGuin slid her shoes off.\n\n\"No, we're not staying,\" Esther tried to explain. \"We need to call the police.\"\n\n\"Nearest is over in Great Eccles. Has something happened?\"\n\n\"Our car,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Ah, so it will wait.\"\n\n\"I'd rather be the judge of that,\" he said with forced reasonableness.\n\n\"Now, dinner is in thirty minutes.\"\n\n\"No dinner,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Should I put my shoes back on?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Have you got somewhere else booked?\" asked the woman.\n\n\"It's not that\u2014\" said Dave.\n\n\"I didn't think so. This close to Christmas. But we're always open for guests. Otherwise it's just my husband and I, and King Leopold of Belgium. And the cats, of course.\"\n\n\"Cats?\" said Newton.\n\n\"The phone,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said and stepped aside to reveal an old dial telephone on the reception desk, next to a hideous and misshapen statue of a horse.\n\n\"Right,\" Dave said, picking up the receiver to dial 999.\n\n\"Are we staying here?\" Newton whispered to Esther.\n\n\"I hope not,\" she whispered back.\n\n\"Did she say she lives with the king of Belgium?\" whispered Guin.\n\nEsther pulled a helpless face.\n\n\"There's no tone,\" said Dave and rattled the receiver cradle.\n\n\"Snow on the line,\" said the woman. \"Always causing problems.\"\n\n\"Isn't that trains?\" said Newton.\n\n\"It'll sort itself out soon enough. And, besides,\" the woman smiled, \"no one's going anywhere in this weather. Now, let me take your coats and hang them up to dry while you get settled.\"\n\nEsther sighed and shrugged out of her coat.\n\n\"We're staying?\" said Dave.\n\n\"Are we?\" said Newton.\n\n\"Is the car driveable?\" said Esther. \"If you can't get through to the breakdown people\u2026\"\n\n\"Can't we call a taxi?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Same phone,\" said Dave. \"How much is the room for the night?\" he asked the woman.\n\n\"We have so few guests this time of year,\" she replied. \"What seems reasonable?\"\n\nDave laughed faintly. Esther could hear a note of hysteria in it. \"Let's sort that out later,\" she said, taking off her coat.\n\nThe woman opened a large cupboard door, hanging up Esther's first coat and then the others as offered.\n\n\"As I was saying, dinner is in thirty minutes. None of you have any of those special dietary requirements.\" It was said as a statement not a question. \"My husband would normally help you with your luggage, but Mr Scruples is out at the moment. You are welcome to inspect your room, or you can relax in our guest lounge.\"\n\n\"Yes, the room,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Of course,\" said Mrs Scruples in a tone that suggested they had picked the wrong option. \"I will just go and get the key.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"But I don't have a bag!\" Guin pointed out as they tramped up the stairs behind Mrs Scruples. \"I'm not packed for a night away.\"\n\n\"Well, we weren't planning this,\" said her dad in a low voice. \"And, if we're lucky, we might still get away tonight. I wouldn't have exactly picked this place.\"\n\nHe looked up and around. The staircase was a broad U-shape, a spiral with only one turn and a grandfather clock placed on the large step of the turn. The high walls around were lined with tartan wallpaper and deep shelves. Mrs Scruples had said she had cats. The shelves were lined with them; gingers, tortoiseshells, fluffy white things, black cats with yellow eyes and fur like midnight. Guin counted at least twenty of them. All were dead and stuffed in straight-backed upright seated poses.\n\n\"My, that is a lot of cats,\" said Newton politely.\n\n\"Were they all yours?\" asked Esther.\n\n\"I didn't steal them,\" snapped Mrs Scruples. \"Here.\"\n\nShe rattled a key in the lock Guin followed the others into a room. It was large, larger than any room they had at home. There was a big double bed, high like it belonged in The Princess and the Pea or some other fairy tale. There was a set of bunkbeds on the near wall between the sink and a wardrobe so huge and old it probably led to Narnia. A further door led to a little bathroom. On the furthest wall, a tall Georgian window bordered by heavy curtains overlooked the town square. There were the dots of fairy lights and the swirl of heavy snow. Everything else out there was black.\n\n\"Now, I must show you how the bath and shower work,\" said Mrs Scruples. \"We have one of those American mixer taps and they can be quite confusing if\u2014\" She faltered. There was the sound of a doorbell, playing Westminster chimes. \"Another guest? We are popular tonight.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's your husband,\" suggested Dave.\n\n\"No,\" she said, soft and sombre. \"No, it won't be him. I'll leave you to settle in.\" And, with that, she was gone.\n\nGuin stood in the centre of the room. A double bed and bunkbeds. Four beds. Four of them.\n\n\"We're not staying, are we?\" said Guin.\n\nHer dad closed the door. \"It's not ideal,\" he agreed.\n\n\"We discussed this.\" Guin glared at him, jerked her head at Newton, pointed at the bunkbed and glared at her dad again. Through this silently furious pantomime, she hoped it was perfectly clear she was not okay with sharing a bedroom with the new boy.\n\n\"You promised,\" she said between gritted teeth.\n\n\"It's not ideal,\" her dad repeated which was useless and very much a dad answer.\n\n\"Top or bottom, Guin?\" said Newton, testing the mattresses.\n\nShe wanted to answer \"Neither!\" loudly and angrily, but that might mean Newton got to pick. She rapidly weighed up the pros and cons: having to climb past him while he watched if she was on top, the thought of having the big lump of a boy directly above her if she took bottom.\n\n\"I don't snore,\" said Newton, smiling.\n\n\"Top,\" she said, immediately stomping up the little ladder and throwing herself on the mattress. The springs creaked like a mechanical donkey being tortured. At least she was elevated above them all. If she tried really hard, she could pretend they didn't exist.\n\nShe laid out the few possessions she had with her. She opened her new wooden box and took out four of her creations. She placed them along the guard rail around the top of the bed \u2013 Bertie O'Cork, Scampious, Tinfoil Tavistock and Wiry Harrison. Tim the Robot stayed in the box because he was tired and in no mood to explore this stupid room in this stupid hotel.\n\nThe five pointed star fashioned from twigs and string which she'd been careful not to break she hung on the corner of the bed. She then opened the book she had found, the one which the silly woman in the big fur hat had clearly dropped.\n\nThere was no title on the cover but on the first proper page inside it said:" + }, + { + "title": "CHARGE OF THE SPRITE BRIGADE\u2013 THE ORIGINS OF LITTLE FOLK IN EUROPEAN FOLKLORE", + "text": "[ DR EPIPHANY ALEXANDER ]\n\n[ SHEFFIELD ACADEMIC PRESS ]\n\nUnderneath was written in biro:\n\nProperty of Elsa Frinton, B.A. Hons!!!\n\nThe B.A Hons bit was added in a different colour pen. Clearly, this Elsa Frinton (probably the woman with the flappy hat and no sense of who was around her) was very pleased with her B.A. Hons, whatever one of them was.\n\n\"There's no wi-fi,\" said Newton from the bottom bunk.\n\n\"We can ask the hotel manager about it when we go down,\" said Esther.\n\n\"No, mum,\" he said. \"There's literally no wi-fi. No networks of any kind.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" she said, faintly sarcastic. \"It's like we've travelled back in time to the nineteen nineties.\"\n\n\"More like eighteen nineties,\" said Dave, inspecting the d\u00e9cor. \"You've picked a fine place here for us, Esther.\"\n\n\"What did you want us to do?\" she said.\n\n\"Don't argue,\" said Newton.\n\n\"We're not arguing,\" Esther and Dave said as one.\n\n\"Just don't.\"\n\n\"Look, we're not arguing. We're getting on just fine. Isn't that right, smoochy-poos?\" said Esther in a simpering lovey-dovey voice.\n\n\"It certainly is, pumpkin,\" said Guin's dad in an equally drippy tone.\n\nGuin didn't look up from her book \u2013 she didn't want to \u2013 but when they began to make overly dramatic kissing noises she made a sharp and angry sound.\n\n\"Get a room, you two!\" she said. \"Everyone. Get a room. Not this room. Another room.\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" said her dad. \"Hey, Newton. How about we give these girls some space. Allow them to relax and freshen up before whatever delights Mrs Scruples is serving us for dinner. There might \u2013 might! \u2013 even be wi-fi downstairs.\"\n\n\"Unlikely,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Hey, it's Christmas, Newton, the time of miracles.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "When they stepped out onto the landing, Newton could hear the sound of music from downstairs. It was Christmas music, kind of like that old White Christmas song but not that one.\n\nDave heard it too and smiled. \"Can't beat a bit of Bing.\"\n\n\"You could try,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Ah, makes it feel all kind of Christmassy,\" he said, heading for the stairs. \"All of us snug inside. Snowing outside. Music. The smell of overcooked vegetables. The decorations.\"\n\n\"Twenty stuffed cats?\" said Newton.\n\n\"Sure. They're in the extended version of The Twelve Days of Christmas.\"\n\nNewton loved animals and he loved cats. He wasn't sure how he felt about them dead and stuffed and staring at him from on high.\n\n\"Look,\" said Dave, \"they've got an elf on the shelf. That's Christmassy.\"\n\nHe was right. On one of the lower shelves, tucked between a cross-eyed ginger and a fluffed up moggy was a little Christmas elf, dressed in red and green. At the end of his floppy striped legs were pointed boots with fur trimming.\n\n\"So, it is.\"\n\nIts round face was turned to look at them, its big blue eyes wide.\n\n\"Not at all creepy,\" said Dave.\n\nThey went downstairs and followed the hallway as it turned right, and along the considerable width of the building. Behind a potted plant Newton saw a dumbwaiter built into the wood-panelled wall next to the guest lounge. He'd never seen one outside a Hollywood movie. He was about to point it out to Dave when there was as prolonged crash of pots and pans from behind a door at the far end of the corridor.\n\n\"You all right in there?\" called Dave.\n\nThere was no reply.\n\nDave pushed open the door. Steam and a fug of boiled potatoes and sprouts rolled out into the hallway. Amongst multiple hobs and ovens and industrial kitchen equipment, Mrs Scruples battled against a cascade of oven trays and a wide scattering of roast potatoes.\n\n\"You all right?\" Dave repeated.\n\nMrs Scruples plucked the roasties off the tiled floor one by one, dropping them back in the pan and trying not to burn her fingers. \"Three second rule. Ow. Three second rule. Ow.\"\n\n\"Let me help,\" said Dave.\n\n\"I'm fine, I'm fine,\" insisted the hotelier.\n\n\"I can help,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Too many cooks,\" said Mrs Scruples.\n\n\"You'll burn yourself,\" said Dave. With a glance towards Newton of the 'go on, I'll deal with this' variety, he slipped into the kitchen.\n\n\"I could have helped,\" said Newton to no one. He went to explore.\n\nBack along the hall a bit was the guest lounge. It was empty, of people at least. It appeared to have been entered into a how much furniture could be crammed into one room competition. There were eight over-stuffed armchairs and two sofas. All of them covered with blankets and those doily-type headrest covers. The thick carpet was layered with three overlapping rugs. Even the television in the corner had a table cloth over the top of it. To top that, every flat surface had ornaments on it. There were five table lamps. There was a china shepherdess, a pottery shire horse \u2013 the twin of the one on the reception desk \u2013 palely-glazed willowy women and forlorn children. There were three potted plants. And amongst all of that, room had been found for a Christmas tree, sprawling over the two sofas it had been planted between.\n\nIn the eye-watering detail of the crowded room, Newton forgave himself for not spotting the parrot sooner. It sat in a bell-shaped cage hanging from a heavy metal stand in the corner. It was a massive bird, bigger than any parrot he'd seen before. If a turkey went to a fancy-dress party as a cockatoo it still wouldn't come close to the bulk of the thing.\n\nNewton knew that parrots were intelligent creatures and lived a surprisingly long time. He wasn't sure if they also grew bigger with age. This one certainly looked old. It was grey and blue and slowly regarded Newton.\n\n\"Hey, boy,\" he said in a chirpy voice to see if he'd get a response.\n\nThe parrot repositioned itself, foot to foot, on its perch.\n\n\"Who's a pretty boy then?\" Newton tried in his best parrot squawk.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe approached cautiously. The bars of the cage were widely spaced. Not wide enough for the parrot to escape through, but enough for a hungry-slash-angry bird to lunge through and attack an unwary finger or nose.\n\n\"Let me guess,\" said Newton. \"You're King Leopold of Belgium.\"\n\nIt was a rational conclusion and allowed Newton to dismiss the possibility their host, Mrs Scruples, was a raving nutter. Unless King Leopold of Belgium was one of the dead cats. That didn't seem any less mad.\n\nNewton tried a few more \"Hello\"s and \"Who's a pretty boy then?\"s, but the parrot was having none of it. It flexed its beak a little and gave him its full attention, one eye at a time, but did not indulge him in any parrot-speech.\n\n\"Well, it was nice meeting you, your majesty,\" said Newton, who felt that politeness should be extended to all living things. \"I'd best see if we're staying for dinner.\" He turned to leave.\n\n\"Stumid bmmy bfftrd,\" muttered the parrot.\n\nNewton looked back.\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\nThe parrot looked at him dumbly.\n\n\"Right,\" said Newton and walked towards the door.\n\n\"Slly blmmy twrrt.\"\n\nNewton whirled. The parrot looked nonchalantly away. Newton squinted at it. King Leopold whistled a jaunty and innocent tune.\n\n\"It's not polite to swear at people behind their back,\" said Newton and left.\n\n\"Dffft bgger,\" muttered the parrot." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Dave tried to assist Mrs Scruples in the kitchen but she firmly ejected him. He resisted momentarily, curious to know if she intended to serve up roast potatoes that had been thrown all over the floor.\n\n\"Bang the gong, if you must,\" she said, \"then take your seat.\"\n\n\"Gong?\" He found it back by the dining room, near the reception area. It was burnished brass, the size of a dustbin lid, and looked like an oversized pound coin.\n\n\"A gong to summon the diners,\" he murmured. \"How\u2014\" Quaint? Old-fashioned? Ridiculous? Very Fawlty Towers?\n\nHe struck it with enthusiasm, because there were limited opportunities in life for gong hitting. Newton appeared almost instantly.\n\n\"Good gong that,\" said Dave and led the way into the dining room. There was one long table, laid out with silver cutlery and white crockery and one diner already seated. He recognised the cravat and the cable-knit jumper, but couldn't quite place him. The man had called him \"squire\" several times, Dave remembered that much.\n\n\"Evening,\" said Dave.\n\nThe man's face at once became ebullient and alive. \"And good evening to you! Not mein host is it? Fellow travellers perhaps? Also lodging at Madame Scruples hostelry.\"\n\nHe stood and offered Dave a chubby hand. As he opened his mouth to introduce himself, Dave remembered his name.\n\n\"Duncan Catheter.\"\n\n\"My reputation precedes me, squire,\" said the man with a humble blush.\n\n\"We met,\" said Dave. \"Earlier.\"\n\n\"We did?\"\n\n\"We were eating pretzels,\" said Newton. \"Five pound ones.\"\n\n\"'Tis the season,\" said Duncan Catheter.\n\n\"And then I told you about my mum supporting Buy Nothing Day.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" said Duncan Catheter, the horror of the memory returning. \"I'd be fascinated to discuss that with her,\" he added, although Dave suspected 'fascinated' wasn't quite the right word.\n\n\"This is her,\" said Newton as his mum and Guin entered.\n\n\"Did someone actually hit the gong?\" asked Guin.\n\n\"I did,\" said Dave proudly.\n\n\"I want to hit the gong,\" she said.\n\n\"Another time. Two gongs might mean double the dinner.\"\n\n\"Did you tell the woman about my allergies?\"\n\n\"You don't have any allergies.\"\n\n\"That you know of.\"\n\nEsther nodded in greeting to Duncan Catheter.\n\n\"The Buy Nothing mother,\" said Duncan. \"Delighted to meet you, m'lady.\"\n\nEsther gave Dave a confused look as she shook his hand.\n\n\"Ah, this is Duncan Catheter,\" said Dave. \"The construction king.\"\n\n\"Guilty as charged,\" said Duncan.\n\nEsther shook his hand. \"Duncan\u2026?\"\n\n\"Catheter,\" he said.\n\n\"Catheter. As in\u2026?\"\n\nDuncan chuckled. \"Yes. Fine old Scottish surname. The catheter was invented by an ancestor of mine, a great-great uncle, and named after him.\"\n\n\"What's a catheter?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Well, it's a\u2014\" She caught herself doing hand gestures. \"It's a medical matter. Ask your dad.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" said Dave.\n\n\"The gong was rung some minutes ago,\" said Mrs Scruples sternly from the doorway. She had a tray laden with ornate glass dishes of prawn cocktail. \"If no one is seated, how am I going to serve them?\"\n\nIn the face of such chastisement, the Woollbys and the Roberts hurried to find their seats." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Newton picked at the prawns in his dish. They were grey, tightly curled things and very chewy.\n\n\"I met King Leopold of Belgium,\" he said. \"It's a parrot. In the lounge. I think it swore at me.\"\n\n\"Esther and I saw an elf on the shelf,\" said Guin. She had the book on her lap, below the edge of the table, and didn't look up when she spoke. Apparently she wanted to compete in the unspoken competition of 'things that had been seen'.\n\n\"Yes, we saw that too,\" said Dave.\n\n\"But it's not a proper elf on the shelf,\" said Esther.\n\n\"How is it not?\" said Newton.\n\n\"I meant it's just an elf toy on a shelf. Elf on the shelf is a thing. It's a copyrighted toy and a book.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Guin.\n\n\"I thought it was an old Christmas tradition,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Not at all,\" said Esther. \"It's only a few years old.\"\n\n\"Huh!\" said Dave, pleasantly surprised. \"I never thought about that.\"\n\n\"But you can't copyright an elf,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Canny bit of marketing there,\" said Duncan Catheter.\n\n\"But it's just two words that rhyme. Something on a something. You can't copyright that.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised what you can copyright, squire.\"\n\n\"So, like \u2026 Troll on the Pole?\"\n\n\"If you like. Getting people to buy it. That's the trick.\"\n\n\"I don't like them,\" said Esther.\n\n\"That's okay. Trolls on poles are unlikely to catch on,\" said Dave, topping up his wine before offering the bottle first to Duncan and then Esther.\n\n\"The elf on the shelf I mean,\" said Esther. \"It's like the robins.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Dave.\n\n\"My mum used to tell me that robins were sent by Father Christmas to spy on us to see if we'd been good or bad, and if we deserved any presents. Same thing.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" said Duncan. \"He's making a list and checking it twice and all that.\"\n\nEsther sipped her wine. \"It's the surveillance state,\" she said.\n\nNewton recognised his mum warming to a theme. The surveillance state. Any moment now, she was going to mention that there were more security cameras per person in the UK than any other country in the world. Newton decided to stay out of it and tried to think of other mythical creatures that could rhyme with things they sat on. Minotaur on the floor?\n\n\"The elf on the shelf is a toy you're supposed to have in your house but aren't allowed to touch,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Is that right?\" said Dave.\n\n\"It's one of the rules.\"\n\n\"There's rules?\"\n\n\"Of course there's rules,\" said Guin, nose in her book.\n\n\"It sits in your house and watches you,\" said Esther, \"and every night parents move it somewhere new but, allegedly, if the child touches it then the magic is gone and the elf won't come back.\"\n\n\"It's a bit of fun, dear,\" said Duncan.\n\n\"Fun? It's conditioning us to be obedient. Did you know that there are more CCTV cameras per capita in this country than anywhere else in the world?\"\n\nBingo, thought Newton. Cyclops on the worktops?\n\n\"I thought it stood to reason that good children should be rewarded. Perhaps I'm wrong,\" said Duncan, very much in the manner of a man who knew he wasn't wrong but thought it better to indulge the little lady at the table.\n\n\"We should all be good, Mr Catheter,\" said Esther. \"But not because we hope to be rewarded. I raised Newton to be a good person but he's not good because he thinks he's going to get something for it.\"\n\nNewton smiled at his mum. No, he wasn't good because he expected something in return. He was a good person because of the crippling fear of disappointing others, his mum most of all. Of course, he didn't say this and pondered whether Griffin on your Tiffin was sufficiently good.\n\n\"What did you raise me to be, dad?\" asked Guin.\n\nDave gave it some thought. \"'Raise' is a strong word.\"\n\nDuncan swilled his wine, sniffed it, sneered but drank it anyway. \"In the old days, naughty children were given lumps of coal or sticks to be beaten with. What's that goaty creature they have in Germany who comes to steal wicked children at Christmas?\"\n\n\"Krampus,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Right,\" said Duncan, clicking his fingers. \"Put the fear of God into them. If we're rewarded, then we know we've done good. If we are punished or deprived then we know we've done wrong. That's what the good book says.\"\n\n\"That's what the rich tell the poor,\" said Esther. \"And themselves.\"\n\nDuncan pulled an expression of disgust. Dave put a hand on Esther's and Newton felt the sudden tension. Duncan had pressed Newton's mum's political buttons; they were easy buttons to press. Dave had reached out to calm Esther, which she would definitely take the wrong way. Dave was probably irritated they'd wound up staying the night in this weird bed and breakfast that Esther had seemingly picked on a whim. No one wanted to be here and it was all somebody else's fault but the little irritations would creep to the surface and Newton knew his mum was going to say something snappy and Dave would weigh in and then there'd be an argument and\u2014 \"Krampus on a hamper!\" Newton said very loudly.\n\nEveryone stared at him. Even Guin looked up from her book.\n\n\"Pardon?\" said Dave.\n\n\"Krampus on hampers,\" Newton tried again. \"Kramper-s on hamper-s. It almost works.\"\n\nDuncan pushed his prawn cocktail away and dropped his screwed up napkin on the table.\n\n\"Lovely pair of children you have, Esther,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Esther, polite if nothing else. \"Except Guin's not mine.\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" agreed Guin.\n\n\"Guin's mine,\" said Dave.\n\n\"And Newton's mine,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Oh,\" said Duncan. \"I just thought\u2026\"\n\n\"We're not yet,\" said Newton, doing a big circular, all-inclusive motion.\n\n\"It's complicated,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Life is, m'lady. Life is,\" grinned Duncan Catheter. \"Course, I discovered the secret to peace and simplicity years ago.\"\n\n\"Oh, really?\"\n\n\"Two simple words. Thai brides.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The Little Folk in European Folklore book fascinated Guin. Not just the contents (which were really interesting) but the manner in which it had been written. It was, basically, a collection of different fairy stories and accounts of meetings with 'little folk' but it had been padded out and added to with difficult and flowery words to make it seem far more impenetrable than it really was. For example, on the topic of a creature called Jenny Greenteeth, the author had written:\n\nSynonymous with the duckweed and algae which perpetually covers deep, stagnant pools with their luminous green sheen, Jenny Greenteeth is a witchlike creature of faerie who preys on careless children and unwary travellers. Akin to Peg Powler and the Grindylow (she also goes by the names of Ginny Greenteeth, Jeannie Greenteeth and Fowl Jenny), Jenny Greenteeth is a river harpy, enticing children and the elderly into the depths where she drowns and devours them.\n\nHowever, unlike other enticing water sprite (c.f. neck, nacken, nix, mermaids) this siren is far from pulchritudinous. Her piscine looks, green skin and weed-like hair make her quite a ghastly prospect.\n\nIt was almost as if the author, this Dr Epiphany Alexander, was worried people wouldn't take her seriously if she just wrote a really interesting book about fairies and elves and felt the need to stick in big words willy-nilly. Pulchritudinous indeed! Nonetheless, once she'd realised the difficult language was just a trick of sorts, and that the meaning was almost perfectly clear if she simply skipped over any words that were too big for her to understand, Guin found herself reading the book at speed. And there were illustrations every few pages, of sharp-faced and sly-eyed creatures executed in scratching pencil, harsh inks and gloomy watercolours.\n\nFairies and pixies and ancient gods were all the same to Dr Alexander. It was all part of something that she more than once referred to as the 'rich tapestry of folklore'. This imagery was compounded by Dr Alexander's mention of the Norn, witch/god/fairy creatures who wove the fates of all people. And it was while reading about these that Guin had one of those minor epiphanies that children had far more than adults, in which she realised that the word 'yarn' had two meanings: that although yarn (a thread) and yarn (a story) were quite distinct concepts, in the hands of the Norn, they were one and the same.\n\nThe hotel woman, Mrs Scruples, made a disapproving noise as she came to collect Guin's starter plate. \"We never read at the table in my day,\" she said. \"Or played with our devices.\"\n\n\"I'm reading about changelings,\" said Guin. \"That's when fairies swap babies for evil fairy babies. And reading is a good thing, not like playing on your phone.\"\n\nNewton, who had been waving his phone around as though he might magically scoop up some missing data signal, blushed and put it away. \"I was just seeing if there was any update from Lily.\"\n\n\"I'm sure she'll be fine without you for the next couple of days,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Ah, young love,\" said Duncan Catheter.\n\nDave and Esther smiled at that. Newton did not.\n\n\"I'm going to try the phone again,\" said Dave, getting up. \"See when the breakdown people can come.\"\n\nEsther patted his hand as he excused himself from the table. As he left, he held the door for Mrs Scruples to come in with plates of roast turkey.\n\nDuncan refilled his glass. \"What did you do to your hand there?\" he asked Esther.\n\n\"Oh, cut it. My own fault, I guess. But Dave's patched it up for me. He's a paramedic.\"\n\n\"Fine job. Damn fine job. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise,\" said Duncan, as though there was a very real danger people might tell Esther it wasn't a damn fine job, and only people like Duncan could say otherwise. \"And what line of work are you in, m'lady?\"\n\n\"I work for a women's refuge charity,\" she said. \"I find new homes for women and their children fleeing domestic abuse.\"\n\nDuncan made thoughtful noises. \"Very noble. Very noble.\"\n\nMrs Scruples all but slammed Guin's plate down in front of her. \"Eat it while it's hot. I'm sure there's nothing so important in that book that can't wait.\"\n\nIn fact there was. Guin had found a picture of a five pointed star, fashioned from sticks and twine, like the one she had picked up earlier. It was, the description explained, an elf-cross. They were originally from Scandinavia (which Guin vaguely recognised as being somewhere near Norway and Sweden and those countries). In Scandinavia elf-crosses were called \u00c4lvkors and used to protect homes and livestock from elves. Scandinavian elves, it appeared, caused disease and bad luck and homes needed protecting. Guin traced a five pointed star on the tablecloth with her fingertip.\n\n\"Women's refuges. Busy line of work then?\" asked Duncan.\n\n\"Endless,\" said Esther. \"There's never enough accommodation for those who need it.\"\n\n\"I think it's a shame,\" said Mrs Scruples, placing a steaming bowl of vegetables in the middle of the table.\n\n\"It can seem quite bleak at times.\"\n\n\"I just think if people made more effort to keep their families together, there wouldn't be the need for these refuges and whatnot.\"\n\n\"The women we help are escaping from violent and abusive partners,\" Esther pointed out.\n\n\"Well, no one said marriage was easy,\" said Mrs Scruples. \"You have to work at it, don't you? People should learn to stick together.\"\n\nHer gaze drifted to the window. The world outside was black. Snowflakes occasionally drifted close enough to the glass to be caught in the light before falling away again, tiny ephemeral ghosts.\n\n\"Christmas is a time for families,\" she said faintly.\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" said Duncan.\n\n\"You have family?\" said Esther. Guin guessed that Esther didn't mean to sound so surprised.\n\n\"I do indeed,\" said Duncan. \"Indeed I do. Tangmo, my oriental queen and my two little princes, Gamon and Joe are waiting for me at home. I've just got to wrap things up here in the morning and then it's off homeski.\"\n\n\"Wrap things up?\"\n\nDuncan started to ladle sprouts and carrots onto his plate. \"Top level talks with the local bods about opening up some of their brownfield sites for property development. It's taken me an age to get my foot in the door, but I got a letter last week, arranging a meeting. Tomorrow morning, Christmas Eve. Unconventional but strike while the iron's hot, says I.\"\n\nGuin read on.\n\nMrs Scruples put roast potatoes on the table. As Guin looked up, her dad re-entered.\n\n\"No. Nothing but static on the line,\" he said.\n\n\"Give them time,\" said Mrs Scruples.\n\nGuin's dad spooned vegetables onto her plate for her. He made a surreptitious neck slicing motion as Esther reached for the roasties. Esther frowned.\n\n\"Oh, I forgot!\" said Mrs Scruples and dashed out.\n\n\"Don't eat the potatoes,\" whispered Dave.\n\n\"Why ever not?\" asked Duncan.\n\n\"She dropped half of them on the floor.\"\n\n\"Which ones?\"\n\n\"I didn't take photos,\" said Dave.\n\n\"This one's got a footprint in it,\" said Newton.\n\n\"I'm just asking how many,\" said Duncan.\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"I like roast potatoes.\"\n\n\"Some. Some fell on the floor.\"\n\nDuncan grunted. \"I'll take a piece of that action,\" he said and grabbed half a dozen.\n\n\"I'll risk it,\" said Newton and reached for the bowl.\n\n\"Germs,\" said Guin.\n\n\"People are too fussed by cleanliness these days,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Everything in moderation,\" agreed Duncan.\n\n\"Crackers!\" declared Mrs Scruples, returning.\n\n\"Totally,\" said Guin before she realised the old woman was carrying a bundle of shiny red Christmas crackers.\n\n\"It's not Christmas Day yet,\" said Esther.\n\n\"It's near enough,\" said Mrs Scruples, handing them out. \"They're locally made.\"\n\n\"You like things locally made,\" said Newton and held one out to Esther to pull.\n\nEsther put one finger in her ear as she pulled. The crack of the explosive snapper was loud and there was even a whiff of smoke. Newton caught the little toy and the paper hat as they fell out. Esther picked up the dropped joke.\n\n\"What's the difference between snowmen and snowwomen? Snowballs.\"\n\n\"See?\" said Dave. \"Locally made and recycled. Come on, Guin.\" He waggled a Christmas cracker at her. \"Put the book down now.\"\n\nGuin closed the book, slowly so her dad could see it was a major inconvenience, and dutifully pulled the cracker. The toy was a little plastic jumping frog. Guin quickly spirited that away to a pocket. Her dad unrolled the joke.\n\n\"Help me! I'm being held prisoner in a Christmas cracker factory!\" he read.\n\nDuncan chuckled.\n\n\"Marginally more original,\" said Newton.\n\nDave scratched at a red, inky fingerprint in the corner of the joke. Guin poked at her turkey with a fork. It looked dry. She poured some gravy on it. The gravy was the colour and consistency of marmite. It didn't enhance the turkey much.\n\nGuin saw Duncan looking at Esther's joke lying on the table. A dark expression crossed his face. His hand went involuntarily to his chest, as though feeling for something in his breast pocket, when he caught Guin watching him.\n\n\"So, princess, what are you reading?\" he asked. Princess apparently meant Guin.\n\n\"A book about fairies,\" she said.\n\n\"Fairy in a dairy,\" said Newton.\n\n\"What?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Elf on a shelf. Fairy in a dairy,\" said Newton. \"Work in progress.\"\n\n\"Ignore him,\" said Esther. \"Bad jokes and puns are his speciality.\"\n\n\"Medusa on a juicer,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Fairy princess stories, eh?\" said Duncan.\n\n\"Not really,\" said Guin. \"It's about elves and spirits. Like, did you know, that at Christmas time, there was this thing called Yule\u2014\"\n\n\"It's an old word for Christmas,\" said her dad.\n\n\"\u2014Yule,\" said Guin, ignoring the interruption, \"when this thing called the Wild Hunt came riding through the land. Some say it was led by Odin and some say it was the elves, coming through to steal people away.\"\n\n\"What people?\" asked Esther.\n\n\"Unbaptised babies mainly,\" said Guin, doing her best to remember. \"But there was this one called, um, Dando. This man called Dando who needed a drink so much that he said he was willing to go to hell for it.\" She gave her dad a special look, just so he could understand the significance of that. \"And the Wild Hunt of elves and things, came along and took him.\"\n\n\"God bless the old yuletide traditions,\" said Duncan. He raised his glass and drained it. He looked at the near empty bottle on the table. \"Will I have to go to hell to get another drink round here, eh?\" He laughed at his own joke. \"Course, my grandpa used to say he saw piskies when he'd had a pint or two. Or three or four.\"\n\nGuin didn't know about piskies but she'd seen the illustrations in the book and the elves there didn't look much like the woodland pixies in her story books at home. Storybook elves and pixies wore flouncy see-through dresses and lived in mushroom houses, and they all had wings and looked like they were on starvation diets (probably because they couldn't achieve take-off with those little wings if they were a single gram overweight). The elves and pixies in Little Folk in Folkore were equally thin, but not because they were on a diet. Those ragged fairies looked like they had to kill and steal for every scrap of food they got and would do so willingly.\n\nGuin glanced at the corners of the room and thought about the whispering voices she'd heard under the trees earlier in the day. She wished she had the elf-cross in her hand and hadn't left it in the room upstairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "At some point, the distant Bing Crosby Christmas album was replaced by a distant Elvis Presley Christmas album.\n\nThe main course was dry, Dave thought. The turkey was wood dust shaped into turkey-shaped lumps. The vegetables had been so thoroughly boiled that even water hadn't survived the process. Even the gravy, through some arcane process that defied science, left a dry and dusty taste in the mouth. Dave piled cranberry sauce on his pre-Christmas Christmas dinner but that was tart and did not help. The temptation to wash it all down with copious amounts of wine was strong but, despite what his darling daughter might tell him, he was not a devotee of the gods of wine and drunkenness. If there was still a chance they could drive out of there tonight, he wanted to be sober enough to take the wheel.\n\nHe suspected it was already too late, and the snow far too thick but, as Mrs Scruples cleared away the plates in preparation for pudding, he excused himself from the table and went out into the hallway to try the telephone again.\n\nHe picked up the receiver and dialled the emergency services. Instead of the dead tone as before, there was some sound on the line. It crackled and swirled as though the snow had got inside the telephone system itself.\n\n\"Hello?\" he said.\n\n\"Khhorrrzzxx\u2026\" hissed the line. \"Hello?\"\n\n\"Hello?\"\n\n\"Hello? xeeeeek-k-k.\"\n\n\"I'd like report a crime. Someone's broken into my car.\"\n\n\"Broken\u2026 car\u2026 khhoorroo.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"I'm in Alvestowe. We're currently staying at \u2026 damn, I don't know its name.\"\n\n\"Eeeeeff. Damn.\"\n\n\"At this number anyway. I'm sure you'd be able to look it up. Will someone be able to come out and help us? We'll need a mechanic for the car.\"\n\n\"Mechanic\u2026 wwwweeee\u2026 car?\"\n\n\"Will someone be able to come out tonight?\"\n\n\"Zzhhhh\u2026 come out.\"\n\n\"Will it be tonight?\" He had raised his voice to be heard over the awful static.\n\n\"Tonight.\"\n\nThe line hissed and howled.\n\n\"Okay, then,\" said Dave eventually and hung up, not a hundred percent sure what he had actually achieved.\n\nThoughtful, he went back into the dining room. Mrs Scruples had brought in two desserts. An cut glass bowl filled with the red, yellow and white layers of a rich trifle, and a plate bearing a huge domed Christmas pudding with a traditional spring of holly jammed in the top.\n\n\"Any luck?\" Esther asked him as he sat.\n\n\"I think so. Hard to tell with that line.\"\n\n\"No one will be travelling in that weather,\" said Mrs Scruples.\n\n\"Is your husband not coming back soon?\" said Esther.\n\nMrs Scruples faltered. \"Oh. Oh, yes. He will. I'm sure. They said.\"\n\n\"Sorry? Who?\"\n\nDave could see Mrs Scruples' expression had driven down a dead end street and with tremendous awkwardness and restraint she was trying to back it out again.\n\n\"Christmas pudding or sherry trifle?\" she said, attempting a decent enough smile.\n\n\"Is there lots of sherry in the sherry trifle?\" asked Dave.\n\n\"Lots.\"\n\n\"Christmas pudding for me and Guin then.\" He gave his daughter a playful look. \"Don't want to turn Guin into an alcoholic too.\"\n\n\"Too?\" said Mrs Scruples.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Duncan, leaning over conspiratorially and nodding towards Esther. \"Is m'lady here fond of the sauce?\"\n\n\"No. I was joking and\u2014\"\n\n\"Cos I also wondered if the princess's real mum was a bit of a\u2014\" He gave a cuckoo whistle and swill of his glass.\n\n\"No, she wasn't.\"\n\n\"Wasn't?\"\n\nDave set his lips and lowered his voice. \"It was ovarian cancer. Guin was just a baby. Long time ago.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" said Duncan as though he just been told a heart-warming tale. He looked at Esther. \"And did your\u2026? The boy's father\u2026?\"\n\n\"No, Mr Catheter,\" she said coldly. \"He didn't die of ovarian cancer. He's still alive, somewhere.\"\n\n\"My daughter thinks I'm an alcoholic because I enjoy a drink,\" Dave explained. \"That's all.\"\n\nDuncan laughed. \"How do doctors diagnose alcoholics? It's anyone who drinks more than they do. Fortunately, my doctor's an old soak. Trifle, Mrs Scruples! A big dollop. Let's see how much sherry there is.\"\n\nDesserts were doled out. Dave poured a healthy splurge of semi-solid custard onto his Christmas pudding and dug in. He coughed on the first mouthful.\n\n\"Does \u2013 kof! kof! \u2013 does this have alcohol in it?\"\n\n\"A sprinkling of brandy,\" said Mrs Scruples.\n\n\"A sprinkling?\" It tasted as if the pudding had spent the last decade at the bottom of a cask of brandy. He could get drunk just breathing in the fumes.\n\nHe poured a thick layer of custard over Guin's pudding.\n\n\"Stick to the custard,\" he told her.\n\nHe ate round the pudding, only nibbling the edges of the spirit-soaked lump of dark Christmas cheer. As he ate, he looked at the 'joke' he had pulled from his cracker. He scratched again at the red splodge that partially obliterated the words held prisoner in a Christmas cracker factory! It looked like a thumbprint. It looked like blood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Newton barely touched his Christmas pudding and was not encouraged when Mrs Scruples told him that there might be a shiny sixpence waiting for him at its centre. Nonetheless, he was born to please and was prepared to choke down the chemical mess when he saw that, with the exception of the loud and unashamed Duncan Catheter (who had wolfed down two and half bowls of trifle), the others had hardly eaten theirs either. He might have been born to please but he wasn't about to show everyone else up in front of Mrs Scruples.\n\n\"You're full then, I take it,\" said Mrs Scruples accusingly as she cleared away four uneaten puddings and Duncan's cleaned out bowl.\n\n\"Quite full,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Couldn't eat another bite,\" added his mum.\n\n\"Then I shall leave you to your own devices. And your devices,\" she added as Newton tried to covertly take out his phone. He felt instantly guilty.\n\nShe paused at the doorway with a stack of custardy bowls in her hands. \"The guest lounge is at your disposal but I will retire to my rooms at the back of the hotel if it's all the same to you. The door is marked private but knock if you must. But, fair warning, I do crank up the gramophone volume to mask the noises, so knock loudly.\"\n\n\"Mask what noises?\" Newton said to Guin.\n\nThe girl shrugged and went back to reading her book.\n\nDuncan stood. \"Ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, Damen und Herren. I need to stretch my legs.\" He gave a shake of his foot, let out a fart and then departed.\n\nEsther and Dave looked at each other.\n\n\"So,\" he said.\n\n\"So,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't think we're going to see a police car or a repair truck tonight.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"So, we're staying here,\" he said. It wasn't a question as such and it wasn't really a statement. It was a hopelessly resigned comment, one that begged to be contradicted.\n\n\"Looks like it,\" she said wearily.\n\n\"Then I'm going to bed,\" said Guin.\n\n\"I might go see if the TV works,\" said Newton.\n\nIn the hallway, Newton pointed out the dumbwaiter to Guin.\n\n\"Know what that is?\" he said.\n\n\"A little old fashioned lift thing,\" she said.\n\n\"It's a dumbwaiter. And do you know what were they used for?\" he asked.\n\n\"Well, if films have taught me anything, it's to enable smart and resourceful kids to escape stupid villains.\"\n\n\"Um, yeah. Pretty much it,\" he said.\n\nGuin went upstairs. Newton went into the guest lounge.\n\nKing Leopold of Belgium eyed him beadily from his cage.\n\n\"Evening, your majesty,\" said Newton. The parrot said nothing.\n\nNewton crouched in front of the TV. It was an old television with actual buttons on the front. He turned it on and static washed across the screen. Newton could not recall ever seeing static on a television in real life. Modern screens had the decency to put up a black screen and a polite No Signal notice.\n\nHe tried all the channels. Static howled at different pitches and swirled with different rhythms. Something like a human figure appeared to stagger through the electric blizzard for a moment but then it was gone.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said. \"Show me something.\"\n\n\"Y'll nnt gtnuttin, ye dffft prkk,\" squawked King Leopold darkly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Guin eyed the elf on the shelf as she climbed the stairs. Its stripy legs dangled over the edge, curly-toed boots swaying ever so slightly. In the stairs' stark upward light, its face was heavily shadowed and looked down on her with what felt like stern judgement.\n\nBack in the room, alone, she thought about changing for bed. She had no change of clothes with her but there was a white robe hanging from the bathroom door. She stripped down to her underwear and put the bathrobe on. It was the only one in the room, but it was first come first served as far as she was concerned. No one had told her they'd be staying the night. No one had the intelligence to foresee it and tell her than bedclothes might be needed. As she saw it, the bathrobe was her right, given how shoddily she'd been treated. (And, yes, she knew she was being grumpy and selfish and inwardly reprimanded herself for it but kept the bathrobe anyway).\n\nShe went into the en suite bathroom. Esther had put out her toiletries bag before going down to dinner. Guin looked through it for toothpaste. She found the toothpaste and also a tub of cotton bud sticks which she put on the side of the sink.\n\nGuin cleaned her teeth with toothpaste and her finger and read the signs taped to the wall between the sink and the toilet.\n\n\u2002THE SINK IS FOR HANDS ONLY.\n\n\u2002THE WATER HERE IS NOT FOR DRINKING. NOT SANITARY.\n\n\u2002SANITARY PRODUCTS IN HERE.\n\n\u2002TO SAVE WATER, PRESS SMALL BUTTON FOR SMALL FLUSH. PRESS LARGE BUTTON FOR SOLIDS.\n\n\u2002DO NOT FLUSH SOLIDS DOWN THE TOILET. VERY HOT.\n\n\u2002THE TOILET IS FOR TOILET PAPER ONLY, NOTHING ELSE.\n\n\u2002NOW WASH YOUR HANDS.\n\nGuin re-read the signs and concluded she wasn't sure what she was meant to do if she needed the toilet. The toilet and the surrounding plumbing looked like they were a relic of Victorian times and she didn't want to break it by flushing the wrong thing. She needed the toilet but decided to hold on until later.\n\nShe took the cotton buds and Little Folk in Folkore to her top bunk.\n\nWiry Harrison, Tinfoil Tavistock and the others were where she had left them along the guard rail. She silently told them about the rubbish dinner and the family decision to stay for the night. She then showed them the elf-crosses in the book and told them they were going to make some more. Tinfoil Tavistock asked why and Guin explained it was the season for the Wild Hunt and 'little folk' \u2013 and the Krampus too! she added, remembering \u2013 to come riding through and kidnap children, and she didn't like the look of the snow and the darkness outside. What she didn't say was that if there were dangerous creatures out and about, the elf-cross had done little to protect Elsa Frinton B.A. Hons. Whatever had happened to her.\n\nWith the bendy cotton bud sticks and short lengths of cotton thread, Guin constructed several five-pointed elf-crosses. She hung them from the sash window latches, two in the bedroom, one in the bathroom. There was a loft hatch in the centre of the room, a slatted panel of painted white. If she could have hung one there she would have done but it was too far away to reach and there was nothing to hang it on. Instead, she hung one on the back of the bedroom door and, for good measure, tucked one under the double bed where her dad and Esther were going to sleep.\n\n\"There,\" she said, climbed back up onto her bunk and, with her homemade friends around her, continued reading the book." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Through the door with Private written on it came the muffled sounds of Christmas crooning. If pressed, Esther would have said it was Michael Bubl\u00e9, but it was possible Michael Bubl\u00e9 was her default guess when presented with any kind of crooning lounge-singer. It was more likely to be Dean Martin, or Frank Sinatra, or any one of those crooners through the ages who were indistinguishable to her ears.\n\nEsther popped her head round the lounge door. Newton crouched in front of the television, redundantly flicking between stations.\n\n\"No joy?\" she said.\n\n\"It's not picking up anything.\"\n\n\"That's one of them old analogue TVs. You know, wotsit ray tubes. I think they turned the signal off for them years ago.\"\n\n\"Bggroff 'n' lvvvimalone,\" screeched the parrot in a cage in the corner.\n\n\"My, that's a big bird,\" said Esther.\n\n\"That's King Leopold,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Course it is.\"\n\nNewton sighed irritably at the television and turned it off. \"No TV. No wi-fi.\"\n\n\"Oh, it's like the dark ages round here.\" Esther smiled sympathetically. \"You'll have to engage us in conversation.\"\n\n\"While we're all tucked up in our beds. Ugh.\"\n\n\"It'll be like The Waltons,\" she said. \"'Night, John Boy. Night, gran'ma.'\"\n\n\"What's The Waltons?\" said Newton.\n\nEsther rolled her eyes. \"It's a different world these days, huh?\"\n\nA score of stuffed cats watched them as they climbed the stairs to their room.\n\n\"What did you do to you hand, mum?\" Newton asked.\n\nShe looked at it and felt the itchy tension in the injury. \"Stuck my nose in where I shouldn't have,\" she said.\n\n\"But it was your hand.\"\n\n\"Ha, ha. No, I surprised someone \u2026 something\u2026\"\n\n\"Something?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Someone.\"\n\nNewton nodded at the elf on the shelf. \"Who treats elves when they're injured?\" he said.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"The National Elf Service.\"\n\n\"That's a good one, son.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Guin flicked through Little Folk in European Folklore after everyone had finally gone to bed. They had made a big show of being quiet and unobtrusive, even though it was clear Guin was still awake and very publicly ignoring them as they took turns in the bathroom to dress for bed. Her dad turned up ten minutes later, belching and wheezing and making whispered complaints to no one that he had eaten too much of that Christmas pudding and he was (to used his own vulgar phrase) \"Pissed on brandy fumes.\"\n\nHalf an hour later she was the only one awake and reading about elf-bolts by the light cast from a lamp which had been left on. The lamp featured a jaunty cartoon squirrel leaning against the centre post of the lamp stand. Guin kept reminding herself that it was a squirrel, because she'd seen it earlier in better light. Right now it looked like a malevolent, buck-toothed troll, cast in shadow. Guin was mildly unnerved by the sight, but the sighs, snores and occasional farts from the others in the room was somehow reassuring. Guin glanced up at Wiry Harrison perched on the guard rail of the bed and shared a few thoughts about the squirrel lamp with him.\n\nThe light was just about enough to read the book, but there was an occasional distracting flicker, just discernible from the corner of her eye. Guin looked up as it happened again. The wiring was probably ancient, but the tiny disturbances were accompanied by a small, stealthy sound \u2013 definitely a non-electrical sound. She put the book down and watched. A few minutes later she saw something fly from the open doorway and collide with one of the elf crosses hanging on the back of a chair. Wasn't the door closed when they all went to bed? The elf cross swung briefly on its paperclip hanger. Guin couldn't see what had hit it, but there was a scattering of tiny objects \u2013 wads of paper, fragments of wood - on the carpet to indicate the elf cross was definitely the target. She lay perfectly still and watched as another three tiny projectiles shot from the doorway. The last of them succeeded in dislodging the elf cross, and it fell to the floor.\n\nMoments later, Guin saw the door open a little further. She held her breath, wondering who was there. She watched as a head came around the door, but it was much lower down than she'd expected. It was the height of a toddler, but with an air of subtle cunning that was something else altogether. The head turned from one side of the room to the other and Guin realised it was wearing a hat with a tiny bell, the tinkling almost too faint to hear. The face had sharp features and eyes that shone in the lamplight. The rest of the figure slunk around the door. It was skinny in a very familiar way. Guin realised she had seen a picture of it in the book.\n\nIt was an elf.\n\nGuin watched the eyes swivel round to regard her bed. She tried to shrink back with the least possible movement, avoiding its attention. She began to wonder if she was dreaming \u2013 this was a familiar nightmare: the invading presence, the need to keep perfectly, perfectly still.\n\nThe elf crept into the room and Guin realised it was carrying something at its side. The lamplight gleamed off a shiny, wickedly pointed blade, as misshapen as an icicle, the grey of winter sky.\n\nGuin felt her heart banging in her chest. She wanted time to figure this out. She wanted to consider why her mind would conjure such a terrifying dream. Was this simply a result of falling asleep while reading the book of fairy folklore?\n\nThe book was in her hands. She glanced at it, fearful that even eye movement would draw the creature to her. She looked at the page, at the words.\n\nElf-bolts or elf-shot, (which modern scholars have rationalised as the cutting implements and arrowheads of early Britons) were thought to be the weapons with which elves hurt livestock.\n\nShe could read. She could read and the words stayed the same. She could never normally read in a dream. Which meant\u2014\n\n\"Oh, hell,\" she whispered.\n\nThe elf looked up at her contemptuously before moving purposefully towards Newton in the bottom bunk. Guin realised doing nothing was not an option. She reached out for the nearest thing, which turned out to be a coat hanger on the end of the guard rail, and vaulted to the floor with a loud thump.\n\nThe elf hissed and turned its knife towards her. It smelled of old things in boxes, of cinnamon and sugar. Guin thrust the coat hanger forward. It was one of those rubbishy wire ones which would bounce off if she tried to hit it over the head. She jabbed instead, which was equally useless. She dodged a knife thrust, and then she made her move. Over its head went the coat hanger and she twisted, using a corkscrew to tighten the coat hanger around its throat. It swung its knife at her but, coat hanger in hand, she kept it at more than arm's length.\n\n\"Some help here!\" she shouted.\n\nThe elf wasn't giving up. It stabbed and jabbed at her and she pulled away. It never thought to stab at the hands holding the coat hanger, going for her belly every time. The elf's face turned red as it choked, but Guin's arms were tiring. A wild swing of the blade snagged the edge of her bathrobe. It tried to haul her closer. Guin twisted, letting the robe slip from her arms.\n\nThe elf was like a wild animal, she thought. Its attention was centred on the robe it had speared, like a bull in one of those horrible bullfights taking all of its anger out on the cape, not the horrible matador. It dragged the robe closer, gathering it up, entangling itself. Guin swung the coat hanger, the elf still firmly clamped by its neck, up and over, slamming it down against the floor with all of her might. The elf made a tiny Oof! Sound, and went slack beneath the bathrobe.\n\nGuin prodded it with her foot. It didn't move.\n\nShe looked round. \"Did no one wake up?\" she demanded.\n\n\"Wah?\" said Newton, groggily.\n\nShe thumped her dad. \"How are you all still asleep?\" She turned on the main light. There were grumbles from three sleepy individuals.\n\n\"What's the time?\" said her dad, turning over.\n\n\"No idea,\" said Guin, wondering why the hideous clutter of this building included no useful features like clocks. \"That's not important.\"\n\n\"What's the time?\" mumbled Esther as though needing confirmation.\n\n\"I just killed an attacker.\"\n\nHer own words hit Guin hard. She had just taken a life. It was a murderous elf, but it was still slightly overwhelming. It was either horrific and deeply traumatic, or ever so slightly cool. She would decide later.\n\nEveryone was sitting up now, bleary and incredulous.\n\n\"What?\" asked her dad. \"Did you\u2026?\"\n\n\"Did she say killed an attacker?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Yes. With a coat hanger,\" said Guin. \"It was an elf.\"\n\n\"It was an elf and you killed it with a coat hanger,\" said her dad slowly. He scanned the floor. \"Nightmare, honey?\"\n\nGuin sighed and pointed at the bundled bathrobe.\n\n\"It's a dressing gown,\" he said.\n\n\"Inside the dressing gown.\"\n\nIt was his turn to sigh. He swung his legs out of bed, scratched himself in a way Guin wished he wouldn't in front of his daughter and began to unroll the bathrobe.\n\n\"You see,\" he said patiently, \"sometimes, particularly when we're sleeping in a strange new place, we see things and we think that they're \u2013 Oh, my God! It's a dead elf!\"\n\nNewton scrambled from his bed to look.\n\n\"What is it?\" said Esther.\n\nGuin rolled her eyes silently. How many times did she have to explain?\n\nNewton got out of bed. At least he was wearing proper pyjamas, unlike the boxers and T-shirt combo her dad was in.\n\n\"Bloody hell,\" said Newton. \"You've murdered the elf on the shelf.\"\n\n\"It's not a doll,\" she said.\n\n\"It's so small,\" he said, in the voice of someone who was thinking about picking it up and cuddling it.\n\n\"It was heading for you with a knife in its hand,\" said Guin.\n\nHer dad prodded the elf and shook his head.\n\n\"It's a tiny man,\" he said faintly, like he didn't believe it. \"You killed a tiny man in an elf suit.\"\n\n\"Otherwise known as an elf,\" said Guin.\n\n\"But there's no such things,\" said Newton.\n\nHer dad picked up the elf's knife and tested the blade with his thumb. He winced. \"Maybe \u2026 maybe it's a midget burglar who like dressing as an elf.\"\n\n\"That's totally un-PC, Dave,\" said Esther. \"You can't use the 'm' word to describe little people.\"\n\n\"It's an elf!\" said Guin.\n\n\"No such things,\" Newton repeated numbly.\n\nEsther stepped into her jeans. She knelt by the elf and touched the edge of its stripy trousers. They were probably meant to be red and white but time and dirt had turned them to mucky purple and urine yellow. \"Right,\" she said. \"This is either an elf, or it's not.\"\n\n\"What?\" said Guin's dad.\n\n\"We either re-evaluate everything we thought we knew, or we rationalise it away. But there's no denying this \u2026 individual is here.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"And so we must act accordingly.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nShe looked up at the open door and the dark landing beyond. Guin shivered.\n\n\"I'm sure it was alone,\" said her dad.\n\n\"Are you?\" said Esther.\n\n\"The ones that killed Elsa Frinton weren't,\" said Guin.\n\n\"The what? Who?\" said Newton.\n\n\"There aren't any more of these,\" said her dad, trying to sound confident, rather than actually sounding confident. \"It's just one man.\"\n\n\"Elf,\" said Guin.\n\nHer dad went to the door but to Guin's dismay, he didn't close it. He opened it wider and looked out.\n\n\"The ones in the market weren't either,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Weren't what?\" he said. \"Wait.\" He scrunched up his eyes and along the landing. \"I think I\u2014\"\n\nThere was the sound of a pattering feet. Esther was already up, pushing the dumbstruck Dave out of the way of the door and slamming it shut.\n\n\"What is it, mum?\" said Newton, a quaver of fear in his voice.\n\nEsther turned the key in the lock and stepped back. She held up a finger for quiet. \"I saw some of these things,\" she whispered. \"In a workshop. I thought they were children.\"\n\n\"When?\" said Dave, confused.\n\n\"At the market. There were several of them. They\u2014\"\n\nThere was a thump at the door then a series of knocks. Guin wasn't the only one who noticed that the knocks were coming from near the bottom of the door.\n\n\"They want to hurt us,\" said Newton.\n\n\"No,\" said Dave.\n\n\"They hurt me,\" said Esther and held up her bandaged hand.\n\nThe door handle rattled violently.\n\n\"They chased me and stabbed me with a chisel,\" said Esther, no longer even trying to whisper. \"I think one of them had a knife as well. It might even have been the one Guin killed.\"\n\nGuin ran to her bunk and grabbed Wiry Harrison from the guard rail \u2013 not because she was scared but because he might be. She reached up and grabbed the Little Folk in European Folklore too.\n\n\"Elves are real?\" said Newton, still trying to take it in.\n\n\"Elsa Frinton thought so.\"\n\n\"Who's Elsa Frinton?\" asked Esther.\n\nGuin waved the book. \"I can't be sure, but I think she was trying to track down these things,. I think they got her first. I saw her hat and it had blood on it.\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" said her dad. \"I think we're all getting a little bit spooked.\"\n\n\"There's a dead elf at our feet, Dave,\" said Esther. \"That came into our room with murder on its mind.\"\n\n\"Yes, now we're making small mundane encounters seem downright sinister. I'm sure these things aren't really after us. I mean we'd have noticed if there were loads of tiny\u2014\" He stopped and stared at his feet.\n\n\"You've seen them too, haven't you, dad?\" said Guin.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Earlier, when I saw someone messing with the car, it was the strange way that they looked when they ran away. I thought I saw one tall person breaking apart into\u2014\" He laughed. \"It sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud.\"\n\n\"You think it was elves all standing on top of each other to look like a person?\" said Guin and placed the fallen elf cross on the door handle.\n\nThe thumping at the door subsided. From outside came a fiercely dark chittering sound, words in a language that Guin didn't recognise.\n\n\"I have no idea what to think,\" said her dad. \"This is utterly beyond me.\"\n\n\"The elf crosses seem to help,\" said Guin. \"Our room was protected until they knocked one of them down.\"\n\n\"Can we make more?\" said Newton.\n\n\"I made these out of cotton buds and string. They're five-sided stars and I copied the design out of the book.\" She held it up.\n\n\"Have you got any more cotton buds and string?\" asked Newton.\n\nGuin shook her head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Esther crossed to the window and pulled the curtain aside.\n\nOutside, on the narrow ledge, stood two elves, their sly faces pressed against the window, their palms flat. Snow was mounting on their shoulders and on the tops of their pointy shoes. Their faces were small and round, too small to be human faces, too sharp to be children. They looked cold and they looked hungry.\n\nThe pair of them glanced at Esther and then pointedly looked at the window catch and the elf cross hanging from it, imploring her to remove it.\n\n\"Nah,\" she said and closed the curtain. \"We're sitting ducks. We need to get out of here.\"\n\n\"They can't come in with the elf crosses there,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Do we sit here until daylight?\" asked Dave. \"Will they go when it gets light?\"\n\n\"That's vampires,\" Guin pointed out.\n\n\"They're afraid of crosses,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Elf crosses.\"\n\n\"Could we make elf crosses out of this stuff?\" asked Newton. He was pointing at the seat of a chair. \"If we unravelled it, maybe?\"\n\n\"Looks a bit stiff,\" said Guin, flicking it with her fingers.\n\n\"It's cane,\" said Esther, stabbing it with a finger. \"It will become perfectly pliable if we soak it in hot water. Run the tap, Dave.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" he said. \"I'm really glad in this time of crisis we're going to do some crafting.\"\n\nEsther stood on the bed and launched herself, feet-first onto the chair seat. She expected it to pop out with her weight on it, releasing the cane for them to use. What she didn't expect was for the chair to explode around it. She picked herself up off the floor and released the seat from the shattered wood. She picked at the edges to expose the strands of cane.\n\n\"I could have just used my pen knife to cut it out,\" said Dave.\n\nThere was a penetrating screeching noise from the window, and the sound of more tapping from the door.\n\n\"They're just trying to scare us,\" said Newton.\n\nEsther beamed at her son, in an effort to convey a lack of fear. Her shaking hands were fooling nobody.\n\nGuin took charge of elf crosses and supervised the construction of another five. Her practised fingers made two while everyone else struggled to make one.\n\n\"Two nuns were walking along one day,\" said Newton, his fingers fumbling. \"Dracula leapt out at them from behind a bush. One nun says to the other, 'Quick, Sister Mary! Show him your cross!' and the other nun frowns and shouts, 'Sod off, Dracula!'.\"\n\nGuin just looked at him.\n\n\"I don't get it,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Show him your cross. It's a joke. It's\u2014\" He looked down. \"I think I might have seen the elves too,\" he said. \"I definitely heard something in the trees near the church. And, at the nativity, I saw the baby Jesus in the nativity open and close its eyes.\"\n\n\"I've seen dolls that can do that,\" said Guin.\n\n\"I think they've been following us all over town.\"\n\n\"So, if elves are real, what does that mean for all the other stuff?\" asked Dave. \"The reindeer with red noses, the flying snowman and goodness only knows what else?\"\n\n\"Aren't you forgetting the man in the big red suit?\" asked Esther.\n\n\"No, I'm ignoring the man in the big red suit,\" said Dave. \"Apart from the fact that my brain's about to explode, I know very well where all of the presents in our house have come from over the years, and I've never received any threatening letters from the North Pole claiming copyright infringement or whatever.\"\n\nEsther gave a small shrug of agreement. \"No, of course not.\" She swallowed the natural follow-up, which was to say that would be ridiculous, because it was all ridiculous. Utterly and completely ludicrous.\n\n\"But,\" Guin said slowly as she finished her third elf cross in as many minutes, \"does this mean we've been bad?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Dave automatically. \"How so?\"\n\n\"You know, the naughty list and the nice list. That man at dinner was talking about the Krampus.\"\n\nEsther thought for a moment about Duncan Catheter. There were elves in the house. Had they already got him? And Mrs Scruples?\n\n\"We've not been bad,\" she said firmly. \"And no one gets to pass judgement over us except, you know, us. These little fascists got a problem with my family then they have to go through me first.\"\n\nNewton huffed. \"I think mine looks more like a really rubbish hat\" He tried his elf cross on his head.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" said Esther, \"it's a great job.\"\n\n\"So what are we going to do with them now?\" asked Dave.\n\nGuin fetched her new box and took out the little robot figure. She unclipped a safety pin from its side.\n\n\"Dad, you've got more safety pins in your first aid kit, right?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "They quickly took the sheets off the bed and, pinning them together, turned them into a protective shield. Dave decided it looked like a cross between a bird hide and a family-sized body bag. Elf crosses were strategically placed around the outside, and each person held up a side. They had dressed, or at least thrown on trousers and shoes and such clothes as they thought necessary to do battle with Christmas elves. Dave had his smallest first aid kit stuffed in his back pocket. Guin had insisted on bringing the folklore book and pockets stuffed with her little toys. In this situation, Dave wasn't going to deny his little girl anything.\n\n\"Try to keep it level,\" instructed Guin.\n\nThey had decided there needed to be little port holes to enable each person to see out, but that the protection needed to extend to the top of Dave's head, as he was the tallest.\n\n\"How are we going to get anywhere?\" asked Esther. \"If we're all standing back to back in the middle. Only one person can walk forwards at a time. It could get very tricky. What if someone walks slower than all of the others? Who will decide where we go?\"\n\n\"Esther's in charge of steering,\" said Guin. \"Dad, you're lookout. You're tallest.\"\n\n\"And me?\" asked Newton.\n\nEsther thrust a weapon into her son's hand. It looked very much like a toilet brush.\n\n\"What's that?\" asked Dave.\n\n\"Toilet brush. With added elf cross,\" said Esther.\n\n\"If it doesn't work as a protective ward, you might be able to pass on some nasty germs,\" said Guin, disgusted.\n\nDave took a deep breath and tried to focus on their goals. \"We're going downstairs and straight outside so that we can get some help, yes?\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" said Esther. \"It's not that far, if we concentrate and don't let them distract us.\"\n\n\"Stairs will be tricky.\"\n\n\"Which is why we need to concentrate,\" said Esther firmly.\n\nDave felt for the door handle through the sheet, peering through his porthole. \"Everyone ready?\" He unlocked the door, pulled it open and looked outside. At first glance, the landing was empty. Even so, he was pretty sure the elves were not far away.\n\nThe lights flickered. Dave prayed that whatever antique wiring illuminated this place would hold up for a few more minutes. \"All clear.\"\n\n\"To Dave, to Dave,\" said Esther.\n\n\"ONE two three four, TWO two three four,\" said Guin as they shuffled forward in time.\n\nThe group stepped out onto the landing. Dave looked all around. He saw an elf lounging against the wall, next to their door. It had a lazy, arrogant air about it. This one had a smear of white beard on its chin, unlike the other beardless elves they had seen. It looked like an evil Papa Smurf.\n\n\"ONE two three four!\" hissed the elf, in a mocking but recognisable parody of Guin's time-keeping chant.\n\nGuin faltered. Esther didn't miss a beat and picked up the tempo with a bout of, \"We shall overcome! We shall overcome! We shall overcome some da-aa-aa-ay!\"\n\nIt wasn't a song Dave normally enjoyed, but at that moment it was perfect. Esther was able to bellow it at the top of her lungs, drowning out the elf. Dave had to admit it was rousing in the way only a protest song could be.\n\nThe elf peeled itself off the wall and feinted at them, but mainly for show. It was clearly reluctant to go anywhere near the elf crosses.\n\nThey were making a lot of noise. How was it possible nobody had woken up and come to see what was the matter? He wasn't sure whether he'd caught the faint strains of a saxophone coming from somewhere. Presumably Mrs Scruples was still playing her music. He remembered she said she played her gramophone loudly to \"Mask the noises\". A chilling thought struck him.\n\n\"Evil cow,\" he whispered to himself.\n\n\"What?\" said Guin.\n\nThe Woollby-Roberts (or possibly Roberts-Woollby) steered towards the top of the stairs. Dave had the unenviable task of going down backwards, last of the group. He was grateful Esther altered her singing to indicate the change in terrain.\n\n\"We shall overcome! Step down. We shall overcome! Step down.\"\n\nDave glanced down to see where he needed to tread. He made the first step, and the second, without incident. The elf on the landing lounged against a wall, watching them with a disconcerting half smile.\n\n\"Where are the others?\" Dave asked.\n\n\"You're meant to be lookout,\" said Newton.\n\nNow the whole family were on the stairs, and nobody had tripped or knocked them down like bandage-wrapped dominoes. The appalling stuffed cats were right above them; compelling, in that car crash way bad art always was. Dave dared to hope they all might make it to the ground floor unscathed. As he twisted round to look at Esther and give her an encouraging smile he caught sight of movement above.\n\n\"Oh no\u2014!\" The rest of the sentence was lost in a screeching of gleeful hatred. The stuffed monstrosities toppled forward into the shield.\n\nDave tried to understand how a stuffed cat had come to land on the step directly behind him, then its head peeled open. Tufts of long-dead fur were cast aside. The cat's ears slid down and an elf face popped out and leered at him. Another two stuffed cats messily exploded into elves. The family's protective shield suddenly felt like a very confined space. They tried to move back from the elves, but the sheets held them in place. There was a ripping sound. Guin shrieked and stumbled backwards, falling down the stairs inside a length of bed sheet.\n\n\"Guin!\"\n\nEsther was already running downstairs after Guin.\n\nAn elf dropped onto Dave's shoulder. He ducked and yelled, trying to dislodge it.\n\n\"Elf-crusher!\" yelled Newton and swung his toilet brush.\n\nIt wasn't the invincible weapon Esther had originally planned. Perhaps, she'd pictured it working like Thor's hammer, frying elves with its super powers. Even though it clearly had the power to repel them, it didn't actually damage the elves in any significant way. To make matters worse, it was clearly a very cheap toilet brush. The end broke clean off when it clipped Dave's shoulder. Something wet sprayed Dave's face, and it wasn't elf blood.\n\n\"Come on!\" Esther shouted to Guin. There was a definite, if woozy, response from Guin further down the stairs.\n\n\"Esther!\" Dave called as he ripped the elf from his shoulder, tearing its sharp nails from the fabric of his T-shirt.\n\n\"We're fine!\" she shouted back. \"Help Newton!\"\n\nThe only advantage Dave had was elevation: he was further up the stairs. He kicked out at the elf and sent it flying \u2013 immediately horrified he'd made things worse for Guin and Esther.\n\n\"Newton! Grab my hand!\"\n\nHe pulled Newton up onto the landing, so there was less chance of him falling down the stairs. Dave knew the drill. The first thing you did in an emergency was remove whatever danger you could from yourself and the victim; and a fall from height was a classic risk. He grabbed hold of an elf clinging to Newton and pulled it off. His initial plan was to use the momentum to get in a really good swing: bash the little bastard's brains out on the wall opposite. But Dave had forgotten the beardy boss elf who'd been leaning against the wall outside the bedroom. He was reminded when a voice rasped behind him.\n\n\"ONE two three four!\"\n\nIt grabbed Dave's arm on the count of four,. Dave was like a hammer-thrower who'd been interrupted mid-spin by someone hanging a bag of groceries off his arm. He tottered about the landing, clumsily holding two elves.\n\nNewton came at them, holding up a torn section of sheeting. Dave hurled the pair of elves into the sheet.\n\n\"Tie it up!\" yelled Newton.\n\nThey tied it, corner to corner, the elves wriggling inside. Newton found another piece of sheet and they double-bagged the elves. \"It's not gonna hold, is it?\" he said.\n\nAt that moment another stuffed cat burst off the shelf. Dave watched in horror as the elf discarded its disguise mid-air, with moves resembling martial arts kicks and twists. It landed on Newton's head, digging its tiny hands into his face and bracing its legs on the back of his neck. Newton reached up. He was unable to dislodge the elf. Instead he twisted long strands of his own hair into a makeshift noose.\n\nDave wanted to help, but was all too aware the elves in the improvised sack would not improve the situation if they got free. Newton tugged tighter and tighter. The elf made choking noises and went slack, sliding down Newton's shoulders.\n\n\"Is it dead?\"\n\nDave half-nodded, half-shrugged. Paramedic training didn't cover the vital signs of mythical creatures.\n\n\"Incoming!\" called Newton, pointing at another pair of elves climbing the stairs.\n\nDave hurled the bagged elves downwards, intending to bowl over the climbing ones. One of them reached out a hand and clawed the bag open, mid-flight. The bagged elves tumbled out, righting themselves. Now there were four elves advancing up the stairs.\n\n\"Back to the bedroom!\" said Newton.\n\nDave hesitated. His daughter and his girlfriend were out of sight, downstairs somewhere. The beardy boss elf spat something in a scratchy language. Knives appeared in hands.\n\n\"Right. Back to the bedroom,\" agreed Dave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "On the ground floor, Esther had her own problems. She had an elf by its ears and was swinging it around at arms' length.\n\n\"I've banged my head,\" muttered Guin.\n\n\"You said that already,\" said Esther. She flung the into the guest lounge and slammed the door.\n\n\"Maybe I've got amnesia,\" said Guin.\n\n\"One problem at a time. Behind you!\"\n\nAn elf was dangling from the bannister by its spindly arms and preparing to jump onto Guin.\n\nEsther wouldn't say she consciously decided to hit it with the gong. It was heavy and unwieldy and really not the ideal shape for an offensive weapon. But it was a gong.\n\nWithout a thought (because that thought would have been \"Use something else\"), Esther yanked it from its stand and slammed it against the dangling elf, pinning it to the staircase. The elf made an understandably surprised \"Urk!\" sound and its limbs went limp.\n\n\"This way,\" said Guin, pushing open the door to the kitchen.\n\nEsther dashed after her, gong still in hand, although it was really, really heavy and she might have to put it down soon.\n\nGuin closed the kitchen door and slowly dragged a steel table across to block it. The table legs screeched hideously.\n\n\"You injured?\" said Esther.\n\nGuin shrugged and worried she hadn't absorbed enough of her dad's first aid knowledge. \"I'm fine. Did I mention I bumped my head. Where's dad?\"\n\n\"They're still upstairs. I think.\" Esther breathed out heavily. \"We need to figure out how to get back to them. We all need to work together.\"\n\n\"Well, they're probably trying to get to us,\" said Guin. \"We shouldn't go back.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"Never run back into a burning building. That's what dad says. Let the dog drown.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"It's our family motto.\"\n\nEsther's arms and brain, coming off an adrenaline high, finally decided to put the gong down. As it touched the table top, something peeled off and flopped onto the surface.\n\n\"You brought the elf with you?\" said Guin.\n\n\"I didn't mean to!\"\n\n\"Quick! Put it in here.\" She pointed at the orange juicer a contraption with metal arms and paddles for juicing whole oranges. More importantly, it had a large transparent reservoir on top where the elf could be dumped and kept under observation.\n\nEsther scooped the elf up \u2013 entirely weightless \u2013 and dropped it inside. She closed the lid and locked the catch. The elf woke almost immediately.\n\nWith the elf safely under glass, the woman and girl studied it closely. It had a floppy felt hat and a green tunic in the traditional Robin Hood style, but this one didn't have striped trousers. Instead they were an earthy brown colour. Its face was bordered by two huge pointy ears. It blinked. small and beady eyes, like raisins in uncooked dough. It wore a grin that made Esther very uncomfortable. She tried not to let it show.\n\n\"It looks like Dobby the house elf's stunt double,\" she said.\n\nUnnerved, Esther put a large cast iron saucepan on top on the machine to weigh it down further. The elf angrily considered the confines of its tiny prison.\n\n\"Now what?\" said Esther.\n\nGuin drew a chair up, facing the machine. \"Now, I think we should talk.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "The bedroom door rattled and banged as it was barged and kicked from outside.\n\n\"Are they allowed to do that?\" asked Newton. \"Don't they know there's an elf cross on the other side?\"\n\nDave shrugged. Then he leaned forward and whispered to Newton. \"I have an idea.\"\n\nHe gestured up at the ceiling on the far side of the room. Newton saw there was a white loft hatch in the centre of the ceiling. Dave performed a complicated mime which Newton understood to mean they should both climb into the loft space, move to somewhere else in the house and then sneak down, avoiding the elves.\n\nNewton gave him a hearty thumbs up. He knew how important it was to keep everyone's spirits up, and he didn't want to point out how difficult and risky this was likely to be.\n\n\"So,\" said Dave loudly. \"We'll wait for a few minutes, then we'll try to battle our way out of the door. They're only small, we can crush them if we try.\"\n\nAs an accompaniment to this monologue, Dave laid out his plan in the form of large gestures. He pointed at the dressing table and indicated they would move it underneath the loft hatch. They would need to put a chair on top of it in order to climb up. Dave went on to mime they would need to be very careful. He seemed obligated to stress this point by ostentatiously mouthing most accidents that occurred in the home were due to falls.\n\nNewton didn't point out they could avoid the risk of falling altogether by not doing it, mainly because he didn't have a better plan. The two of them crept across the room to move the dressing table. It took them several minutes to clear all of the ornaments, mirrors and trinket trays off the top first.\n\n\"Can you tell what they're saying?\" asked Dave. \"Sometimes it almost seems as though they might be speaking English, but it's not quite right.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean,\" said Newton. \"Like it's Chaucer or something.\"\n\n\"Is Chaucer that YouTuber that Guin likes?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" said Newton, unwilling to pursue the conversation.\n\nThey lifted the dressing table, and one of the legs on Dave's end toppled away. He nodded frantically that they should put the dressing table back down. They lowered it to the floor and Dave picked up the stray leg, putting it on top. They shuffled underneath the loft hatch, giving Dave a chance to re-insert the leg into its correct position. He leaned carefully on the top to test how secure it was.\n\n\"Should be all right as long as we're careful,\" he mouthed.\n\nDave fetched a chair and placed it on the top. He used the dressing table's stool as a step up. It looked as badly-made as the dressing table. Dave turned it over. The legs were screwed into the base, so he attempted to tighten them. The legs turned round and round, with no sign of tightening. Dave sighed and placed it back down, bedding it into the carpet to give it the best chance of remaining intact. Newton gave him another thumbs-up to show he was sure they could do this.\n\nThey both stood and surveyed the rickety tower for a moment. Newton pointed to himself, indicating he should go first, as he was smaller and lighter. Dave nodded, and grabbed hold of the chair to stabilise it as much as he could. Newton pictured himself climbing easily up the stack, treading lightly and precisely. What he actually found was the whole thing wobbled in a terrifying threat of imminent collapse. Once he'd shoved the loft hatch aside, he hauled himself up at lightning speed just to feel something firm beneath his feet.\n\nDave followed seconds later. It seemed to Newton that he made a lot more noise, as he heard the chair scrape loudly across the dressing table. Newton helped pull Dave into the loft, just as the whole stack collapsed with an unholy racket. He peered through the hatch: the leg had come off again, and the dressing table lay on its side, broken. He couldn't see the chair.\n\n\"Job done,\" said Dave quietly, dusting off his hands." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Esther watched Guin scribbling in the back of the folklore book she had found. There was no doubt the girl had real patience and dedication. Esther glanced at the captive elf and felt a twinge of guilt. It looked like a malevolent little gremlin, but she knew better than to judge someone by their appearance. She knew some sort of unconscious bias was making her feel that way, so she tried to set it aside and think about what had made the elves so angry. Was it a territorial issue? If Guin succeeded in understanding them, perhaps she could make sense of this situation and end it amicably.\n\n\"Einn, tveir, \u00ferir,\" said Guin to the elf, holding up fingers to indicate one, two and three. \"Hey, Esther, I can count up to three in their language!\"\n\n\"Great job, Guin,\" said Esther. \"Can you get it to explain what they want?\"\n\n\"I'll keep going.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's just some horrible misunderstanding\u2026\"\n\nHorrible misunderstanding. Esther found herself unhelpfully wondering what elves would want. Picturing Christmas elves, beavering away in Father Christmas's proto-capitalist workshop, was one thing. Imagining small fey creatures creeping into one's room at night was something else entirely. Nothing good ever came of fairy creatures sneaking into your home.\n\n\"Maybe it just wants to mend some shoes,\" she said.\n\n\"What?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Nothing. Carry on.\"\n\nWhile Guin expanded her elf vocabulary, Esther explored the kitchen. She wasn't doing it just to distract her from the simmering fear of what had happened to the two most important men in her life. No, sirree.\n\nThe kitchen was a single-storey extension on the original building, running its entire length. The ceiling was a large skylight with several open vents. As a consequence, it was quite a chilly place to be in the middle of the night. There was a sizeable industrial range and a pair of microwaves. Steel preparation surfaces between the sinks made Esther think about autopsies on the TV. She shuddered and gave herself a stern talking-to. If Guin could buckle down and try to solve this then so could she.\n\n\"Esther, come here.\"\n\nEsther hurried over. They both watched the captive elf as it beckoned and smiled \u2013 as far as it was able, with its face smooshed against the plastic sides.\n\n\"Vi\u00f0 numpa dre\u00fe einog sv\u00edn!\"\n\nGuin looked puzzled. \"I might have misunderstood, but I think it just said it would slay us like swine\u2014\"\n\nThe elves that dropped from the ceiling vents did so with a gleeful screeching sound. There were three of them; they moved in on Esther and Guin in a loose semi-circle. Their knives were small and sharp, but Esther reckoned their grubby fingernails and tiny teeth could be equally harmful.\n\n\"Swedish people are terrified of badgers,\" said Guin.\n\n\"What?\" said Esther, wishing she had made another elf-fighting toilet brush for herself.\n\n\"I read it in a book,\" said Guin. \"Just saying. It's a matter of perspective.\"\n\nThere was a hammering from inside the juicer, as the elf demanded to be released.\n\nGuin produced a meat tenderiser from behind her back. She swung at the nearest elf \u2013 a wallop to the cheek with the flat side of the meat hammer \u2013 and then backswung at a second \u2013spikey side to its chest. Esther felt blindly around. Her hand closed around a chopping board, not her first weapon of choice.\n\nGuin used the meat tenderiser without mercy: flat side, spikey side, flat, spikey, flat, spikey. Esther's weapon was less deadly, but she swung it, edge-first towards the nearest elf. She heard a satisfying \"Oof!\" and smacked it over the head.\n\nThe elf inside the machine danced with rage as he watched his colleagues collapse unconscious, or the least constricted parts of him jigged and twitched.\n\n\"On the griddle!\" said Esther.\n\n\"The what?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Put them on the hob thing!\" Esther picked up the weighty gong. Guin caught on.\n\nThere was a large griddle of a similar size to the gong. Guin scooped one of the elves off the floor. It groaned and she recoiled in horror, quickly dropping it onto the griddle. She swiftly laid the other ones next to it and ducked out of the way as Esther placed the gong on top to weight them down.\n\nEsther and Guin stood side by side and looked at the tiny limp boots and hats hanging out from underneath the gong. Guin voiced the thought that was in Esther's mind. \"Elves crushed by a giant chocolate coin.\"\n\n\"Christmas destroyed by rampant greed and consumerism,\" nodded Esther sagely. \"A fitting metaphor.\"\n\n\"Whatever,\" said Guin. \"I'd eat a chocolate coin that big.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Once he'd found the pull-on light switch above the hatch, Dave saw the attic space was enormous. There were some partition walls at the sides, with a tiny crawl space which Dave felt no inclination whatsoever to explore, but the main body of the loft would have accommodated a barn dance, if it hadn't been quite so full of accumulated junk.\n\n\"Should we look for weapons?\" asked Newton.\n\n\"Fine idea,\" said Dave. He wasn't sure there would be anything useable in terms of weapons, but it was good to keep busy. They stood and surveyed the boxes, cupboards and dust covers. Where to start?\n\nNewton opened the nearest box and peered inside, Dave turned to a heavy wooden trunk with brass fittings and lifted the heavy lid. It was filled with children's toys from another era.\n\n\"How are you doing?\" he asked, as he sifted through.\n\n\"Me? Completely fine. Really. Don't worry.\"\n\nTheir gazes met for an instant. \"We have a bit of breathing space, I reckon, so we'll rest for a moment and then figure out a way to get downstairs.\"\n\nDave picked out a tin car from the trunk.\n\n\"Not much of a weapon,\" said Newton, who was holding an ancient wooden tennis racquet, clamped in a storage press.\n\nDave contemplated the tin car. \"Dangerous for a child. Sharp edges like these and they'd need a tetanus shot.\"\n\nNewton pulled the dust cover off an old-fashioned mangle. He gave the handle an experimental rotation and grunted in satisfaction when the rollers turned. \"Once we're tooled up, we need to find mum. And Guin, of course.\"\n\n\"They can look after themselves,\" said Dave. \"Your mum will get Guin out, and I'll do the same for you. Your mum knows that.\"\n\nHe moved on to another box. He pulled out an electric iron and set it aside in case he needed a blunt weapon at some point. Underneath was a selection of vinyl records.\n\n\"Carole King,\" he said, surprised. \"I used to own this album.\"\n\n\"You're not going to rescue them then?\" said Newton.\n\nDave put the record down. \"Who says they need rescuing, Newton? No good will come of running around looking for them. Get away from the danger. Never return to a burning building.\"\n\n\"The building's not burning.\"\n\n\"Okay. Never return to a building full of savages elves. We don't fix things by putting ourselves in more danger. Let the dog drown.\"\n\n\"Let the \u2026 what?\" Newton looked horrified. \"What dog?\"\n\nDave shook his head. \"Doesn't matter. It's just something Guin and I say. Family motto.\"\n\n\"About drowning dogs?\"\n\nDave paused in his search of the boxes. \"You hear certain news stories. A dog jumps in a river and the owner jumps after it. What happens? Half the time, it seems, the dog swims ashore, safe and fine, and the owner gets pulled under by a current and \u2026 yeah.\" He sniffed. \"We instinctively leap into a situation, thinking we must do something, anything. But it's rarely the right thing. Basic personal safety rule.\"\n\n\"But the dog\u2014\"\n\n\"If it lives or dies isn't going to be changed by a fully-clothed idiot jumping in after it, dude. Hence the phrase.\"\n\n\"Let the dog drown. And that's your family motto?\"\n\n\"Yup. If we had a coat of arms, that's what we'd put on it.\"\n\nNewton shook his head. \"That's cold\u2026\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Dave. \"I just didn't want you to worry about your mum.\"\n\n\"Well, that worked because all I can think about now is dogs drowning\u2014\" He went silent for a moment. \"Um, Dave?\"\n\n\"Yes, mate?\"\n\n\"Can you see something hanging from the rafters?\"\n\nDave looked where Newton was pointing. Something ragged and dirty hung from the apex of the roof. Folds of cobwebbed grey dangled in the shadows, as if the contents of a vacuum bag had spilled through a hole in the roof. Was it a filthy puppet, hanging up so that its strings didn't tangle? A desiccated bat?\n\nAs they both peered at the thing, an eye popped open and it grinned at them, upside down. Another eye opened and another mouth grinned.\n\n\"Elves!\"\n\nThree of the creatures dropped to the floor, tittering maniacally.\n\nDave automatically threw the iron. Two of them dodged it easily but the third, pulling cobwebs from its hat bell, looked up too late. The iron slammed into it, knocking it through the plasterboard floor. From below, something smashed. As Dave looked for another heavy item to throw, Newton began to hurl records at the creatures.\n\n\"Not the Carol King!\" Dave heard himself say.\n\nNewton skimmed records like Frisbees. The sharp edge of one caught an elf on its arm. Dave joined in; trying to save any records was ridiculous . He threw them by the handful. They weren't particularly effective weapons, and the elves dodged and wove their way closer.\n\n\"Tennis racquet!\" yelled Dave. Newton picked up the racquet and prepared to meet the elves.\n\n\"Knees bent!\" said Dave. \"Handshake grip. Eyes straight. And swing!\"\n\nNewton howled with rage and caught an elf in a powerful forehand. The elf flew back and hit the toy trunk's raised lid. The elf fell inside, stunned. The hinged lid wobbled.\n\nThe other elf came at Dave. He grabbed for the nearest item, an ugly pottery lamp with a fabric shade, and smashed it over the creature's head. He pushed the lampshade over the elf, pinning one arm to its sides. Not its knife arm unfortunately. Dave tripped over a carved hat stand as he tried to get out of knife-range. The elf advanced, abruptly stopping just short.\n\nNewton had hold of the lamp's flex and was hauling it back!\n\nFor a tiny creature, it had surprising strength. As Newton fought to reel it back, Dave had to wriggle on the floor to stop the damned thing stabbing him. The tassels on the lampshade cascaded dust as the elf struggled for purchase.\n\nNewton was hauling with both hands, his feet digging in against the floor timbers. He was thoroughly occupied and Dave knew he hadn't seen the elf in the toy trunk pull itself up. It raised its knife to attack.\n\nDave kicked the at the hat stand. By luck as much as anything, it fell onto the trunk. The lid tipped forward. The elf, halfway out, looked up, but it had no time to dodge. The brass-bound lid slammed shut and an elf head bounced onto the floor.\n\n\"He'll need a bit more than a tetanus shot for that,\" grunted Dave.\n\nThe lampshaded elf was startled enough by the sight of his decapitated companion that Newton managed to haul in a vital foot or two of lamp flex.\n\nDave grinned.\n\nThe elf saw the grin and looked round.\n\nNewton started to turn the mangle, gaining momentum. The light flex was squeezed between the rollers, shortly followed by the elf. There was the snap of bones breaking and the crackle of the heavy mangle grinding them to dust.\n\n\"I think it's dead now,\" said Dave.\n\nNewton gave the mangle crank a final heave. The elf's head popped in a shower of bloody pulp. \"Is now,\" he panted.\n\nThey turned at a noise. The iron-struck elf was hauling itself back up through the hole in the floor.\n\n\"Hit it with something! Anything!\" yelled Dave, grabbing at boxes and flinging them blindly. Newton scrabbled inside the nearest box. He pulled out an accordion. The bellows fell open with a tuneless honk. Newton grabbed the strap as the elf dived to attack. Newton squeezed the bellows. The noise that followed was horrendous as the accordion sound was joined by the elf's squealing: like a herd of cows in a car crusher. In the following silence, Dave and Newton stared at each other. The elf hung limply from the accordion's insides.\n\n\"I think what you meant to say,\" said Newton, standing, \"was he was an elf hazard.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Guin and Esther sat on top of the gong, so any elves who tried to escape could be dealt with. They could hear a muted grumbling beneath them, but they'd stopped trying to get out. Guin had spent some time reading the book and listening to snatches of elves' conversation.\n\n\"I really don't know what they're saying,\" she said. \"But none of it sounds nice.\"\n\n\"No,\" Esther agreed.\n\n\"I think we're going to have to fight our way out of here.\"\n\nEsther nodded. She jumped down off the gong and hauled a sack of potatoes on top to keep up the weight. \"How about the bottles of spirits? We can make Molotov cocktails.\"\n\nGuin stared at her suspiciously. \"Are you an alcoholic too?\"\n\n\"No, a Molotov cocktail is a primitive bomb where you set fire to some flammable liquid in a bottle and throw it.\"\n\n\"Oh, that,\" said Guin, making out she already knew. \"Yes, definitely those. There are quite a few knives in here,\" she added, rootling through a cutlery drawer.\n\nEsther tore up a tea towel to stuff into the ends of bottles.\n\n\"We should find the heaviest thing we think we could swing in anger as well,\" called Guin, banging pots around in a cupboard. \"Try that frying pan.\" She nodded at a cast iron pan hanging from a hook over the cooker.\n\n\"I'm a bit uncomfortable with violence for its own sake,\" said Esther. \"Perhaps we could find some strong bin bags and concentrate on immobilising them?\"\n\nGuin gave her a withering look." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Dave knelt on the attic floor, bent over as if in prayer.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" asked Newton.\n\n\"I'm seeing what we can see,\" said Dave.\n\nNewton approached the splintered laths and torn insulation around the holes they'd punched in their fight.\n\n\"If we stand on the joists then we should be safe from going through,\" said Dave. \"Watch where you put your feet.\"\n\nNewton tried to look down, but the hole offered only a ragged view of some dusty pink carpet, deep in shadows. \"I can't see. Perhaps if I get down and put my head through?\"\n\n\"I think it ought to be me,\" said Dave. \"Don't want to put you in harm's way.\"\n\nDave knelt on the joist and lowered himself carefully forward, his hand on another joist for balance. Behind them, the fatally damaged accordion gave a discordant squonk. Dave turned in alarm. Newton stepped back.\n\nA timber splintered, the plaster and lath gave way beneath them both. They fell through the ceiling, scrabbling at thin air, into the bedroom below. Dave bounced on a spongy mattress and rolled noisily onto the floor.\n\nThe plaster dust made it hard to see for some time. It made it hard to breathe as well. Dave was relieved to hear Newton coughing. At least it meant that the boy was still in the land of the living.\n\nA light came on, a bedside lamp. Through the dust he could see Newton on a double bed, covered by a pink bedspread and a cascade of plaster. Next to him was the very surprised Duncan Catheter.\n\n\"Would you care to\u2014\" Duncan broke down in a fit of coughing. He gulped at a glass of water on the nightstand to clear his throat, immediately spitting it out again, along with a lump of plaster. \"Would you care to explain what the heck is going on?\"\n\nDave nodded tersely. \"Yeah, there's a dangerous problem in this house.\"\n\n\"I can see that much.\"\n\n\"A real problem. We can explain but I need to check for immediate danger first.\"\n\nDave's training kicked in. He could assess any potential injuries just as soon as he'd made sure that the area was safe. He stood, chunks of ceiling crunching under his feet. He switched on the main light and checked under the bed. Then he checked behind all of the furniture in the room.\n\n\"Wouldn't have happened in one of my houses,\" said Duncan, inspecting the hole in the ceiling. He turned to Newton. \"Young squire. I'd appreciate it if you got off my bed.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Newton coughed.\n\nDave turned his attention back to the teenager. \"You hurt, dude?\"\n\nNewton shook his head.\n\n\"What about me?\" demanded Duncan. He swung out of bed and pulled on a dressing gown. Not one of the towelling bathrobes which came with the room, but a thick thing covered by a paisley pattern in red and gold. It even had gold knotted tassels on its belt. \"A man does not expect to be assaulted in his sleep by attic-creeping idiots. I have a good mind to complain to the management.\"\n\n\"Get in line, there's a queue,\" said Dave darkly. \"Are you hurt, Duncan?\"\n\n\"Apart from my pride?\"\n\nDave gave him a look.\n\n\"I am shaken,\" said Duncan. \"I don't mind telling you that.\"\n\nDave leaned against the wardrobe. \"There's something strange going on.\"\n\n\"Somewhat of an understatement, squire.\"\n\n\"Elves,\" said Newton.\n\nDuncan gave Dave a look to indicate he thought the boy was quite mad. It was understandable, given the situation and the fact that Newton's hair was still full of chunks of plaster.\n\n\"Tell me, Duncan, have you noticed anything strange at all during your time here?\" asked Dave.\n\nDuncan puffed out his cheeks. \"Stranger than this?\"\n\n\"In the town. Odd people. Peculiar behaviour. Any unsettling encounters, for example?\"\n\nDuncan considered for a moment. \"Someone mentioned something about a Buy Nothing Day. I find that more than a little worrying.\"\n\n\"The baby Jesus opened his eyes!\" said Newton.\n\n\"Oh dear me. Clearly, the boy needs help,\" said Duncan. \"I think you need to pop back off to bed now. I wish I could do the same, but I think I'd better see if I can get hold of Mrs Scruple. She'll need to find me another room.\"\n\n\"She's not going to find you another room,\" said Dave. \"There's something going on. Something weird.\"\n\n\"Elves,\" said Newton again, which really wasn't helping.\n\nDuncan shook his head but, for a moment, Dave saw his eyes linger on pieces of paper on the dust-covered bedside table. Dave took a step towards the table but Duncan was swiftly in front of him, blocking the way.\n\n\"What have you seen?\" said Dave.\n\n\"Nothing,\" insisted Duncan, too quickly. \"Nothing. Wild imaginings brought on by too much of Mrs Scruples' sherry trifle.\"\n\n\"It's not the trifle, it's elves,\" said Newton.\n\nDuncan scoffed.\n\nDave sighed, exasperated. The thick plaster dust in the air caught in his throat and made him cough. When he'd recovered, Duncan had three pieces of paper in his hand. One looked like folded architect's plans. Another was a creased letter. The third\u2014 Dave realised it was one of the Christmas cracker jokes from dinner.\n\n\"Well I'm sure it won't be long before you see what the problem is,\" said Dave, \"but right now, you need to believe in elves, because that's what we're dealing with here.\"\n\nDuncan snorted, although he never looked up from the papers.\n\n\"Listen to me,\" said Dave. \"The danger here is very real. If we split up, there's a good chance it will prove fatal. I need you to trust me for a few minutes.\"\n\n\"I'd say your track record has hardly lent itself to gaining trust, sirrah. I'm more inclined to report you to the police for endangering my health.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'd welcome police involvement right now!\" growled Dave. \"The phone lines have been down all evening. Seriously, don't you think I might\u2014?\"\n\nThere was a knock at the door.\n\n\"Well, really!\" declared Duncan, peeved. \"It's like Piccadilly Station in here! All I ask is a little peace and quiet to get some rest. I don't think any of you realise how hard I work on behalf of the local community. I refuse to continue with this absurd pantomime!\" He crossed to the door.\n\n\"Don't!\" yelled Dave, but Duncan, a man of considerable bulk and filled with the power of his own importance, pushed him aside. He opened the door.\n\nOn the landing stood a mass of elves, a dozen at least. They looked up at Duncan with hungry little smiles. Duncan made a strangled noise that was half-annoyance and half-disbelief. He looked at the letter in his hand. \"Would any of you gentlemen happen to be Mr \u2013 er \u2013 Bacraut? Bacraut, is it?\"\n\nOne of the elves shouldered its way to the front. From behind Duncan, Dave saw it was the one with the wispy white beard who had jumped him on the stairs.\n\nThe elf thumped its chest. \"Bacraut,\" it growled.\n\n\"Very good,\" said Duncan. \"I believe you and I have a meeting scheduled.\"\n\nHe waved the letter at the elves as evidence. They craned forward. The written word appeared to have a mystical hold over them. There were numerous mutters.\n\n\"Perhaps,\" Duncan beamed, warming to the sound of his own voice, \"we could have that meeting now. If you'd care to join me in my office? Um\u2026\" He gestured to the room off to the left on the landing.\n\nNewton looked at Dave. \"Are we actually going to have a meeting with murderous elves?\" he whispered.\n\nDave was lost for words but, if nothing else, Duncan had the elves' attention. They hadn't attacked yet.\n\n\"Mr Catheter believes he is,\" he whispered back. \"I think I'm inclined to let him do that on his own.\"\n\nBut as Duncan moved into the next door room, numerous pixie faces turned to look at them. Dave was suddenly aware of their sharp knives and shining eyes.\n\n\"Yes, yes, we're just coming,\" he said.\n\nThe room had once been an upstairs dining room. Perhaps it had been called the 'banqueting suite' or something equally pretentious. There was a decrepit oval dining table in the centre of, several equally decrepit chairs around it and a dumbwaiter hatch in the corner. However, the room had clearly become a storage space over the years. There were heaps of towels on a side table, a wonky hostess trolley under a pile of sheets, and a trouser press next to the door.\n\nDuncan sat himself at the head of the table, tugging at his dressing gown and stripy pyjamas as though he was wearing the finest business suit.\n\n\"We have a situation, I can see that,\" he said, nervousness barely showing through his glib businessman attitude. \"So, let's get around the table and see what needs to be done here. Never yet found a scenario that couldn't be resolved by talking it out.\"\n\nThe elves, sniggering and whispering, clustered around the table.\n\n\"Please, take a seat,\" said Duncan. \"We can discuss this like civilised human be\u2014 Like grown-ups, I'm sure.\" He gestured to the chairs. The bearded Bacraut leapt onto the end of the table and sat cross-legged.\n\nDuncan steepled his hands in front of him and smiled around at the whole room. Dave imagined he practised the gesture in front of the mirror. \"I received your letter,\" he said, placing the papers flat on the table. \"And I had no idea the civic leaders of this town were such distinguished \u2013 gentlemen \u2013 as yourselves.\"\n\nAn elf pulled the letter closer to look at the writing on it. Hand to hand it made its way round the table.\n\n\"Shall we begin by all stating what we'd like to get out of this meeting?\" asked Duncan. \"As you know, I wrote to the local business forum with suggestions for a mixed usage building project.\" He unfolded the plans he'd brought with him and laid them flat on the table. \"A project that utilises some underdeveloped brownfield sites within the town proper, extends through the churchyard and into the woodlands behind.\"\n\nBacraut and several of the other elves hissed.\n\n\"Do not worry yourselves unduly, good sirs,\" said Duncan. \"I have initiated projects like this before. I'm a dab hand with building on consecrated ground. We'll soon have those stiffs swiftly \u2013 but sensitively \u2013 relocated. We can even make a decorative feature using the headstones. And, hey\u2014!\" he spread his arms warmly \"\u2014what's better for Alvestowe, eh? A graveyard for sixty, seventy unproductive corpses, or an estate of affordable starter homes and mover-onners for two hundred locals? And with that avenue created we can spread into that under-utilised wood.\"\n\nThe elves hissed again.\n\n\"It's just trees, my friends,\" said Duncan. \"We're not talking about the Amazon rainforest here.\"\n\nAt the back of the room, near the door, Dave leaned in to whisper to Newton. \"I don't think they want him to cut down the trees, do you?\"\n\n\"Eco-terrorist elves?\" murmured Newton." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "\"I'd just like to know what they want?\" said Esther, as she stuffed a rag into the top of a bottle.\n\nThey had scoured the kitchen for flammable materials and Esther spent too long dithering which alcoholic spirits burned and which did not. She suspected some of their Molotov cocktails were more likely to make things smell like a New Year's party than set fire to them.\n\n\"I think they want to kill us,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Yes, but perhaps we've got it all wrong,\" said Esther. \"Maybe elves are an endangered species.\"\n\n\"Like orangutans?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Exactly. And this is the last little enclave of them. No wonder they're desperate, they're fighting for the survival of their entire species. Imagine if the orangutans of Borneo had the means to fight back against the humans who are taking their habitat? I bet they'd behave in just the same way.\"\n\nGuin opened her book on the counter next to them. \"No. I think they just like killing.\"\n\n\"What? That's a terrible thing to say, Guin. Sometimes we need to put ourselves in someone else's situation. If we can truly understand and empathise with them, maybe we can find a way through this. Violence can't be the only way.\"\n\nGuin flicked through the book purposefully, watched by the creature in the orange juicer. \"I think I need to show you some of the pictures in this book,\" she said, holding up Little Folk in European Folklore. \"This is what elves do to people they catch.\"\n\nEsther looked at the image. It involved a bent willow tree, lots of rope and some improbably positioned spikes. She swallowed hard and stared at the elf that was trapped in the juicer reservoir, glaring out at them.\n\n\"Point taken,\" she said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "\"So\u2014\" said Duncan, after his initial offer had met zero response from the elves, apart from some unhappy hissing, \"\u2014perhaps you can tell me what you're after, Mr Bacraut?\"\n\nThe elf stared at him, unblinking. The light in the room was bright, but still the elf's eyes were dark and malevolent. Dave tried to look at the elf with a detached and professional eye. Did it have a similar physiology to a human? What did elves eat? How did they reproduce? How easy was it to make one bleed?\n\nDuncan's smile faltered slightly, but he pressed on. \"I feel that your outward hostility is a sign of frustration. Has it been difficult for you, negotiating with humans? I want you to know that I'm the man who can make things happen for you. Do you understand?\"\n\nThe elf inclined its head by a fraction. It was a tiny gesture, but managed to be both supercilious and dismissive at the same time.\n\n\"Oh, you don't think that's true?\" said Duncan. \"Well, why would you? I haven't proven myself to you yet. Let's try something. Is it money you want? I can get you a great deal of money if that's what you need.\"\n\nThe elf stared back, unimpressed.\n\n\"No,\" said Duncan, with a small nod of understanding. \"I can see that you're not motivated by money. Let's think harder. I gathered by the tone of the gentlemen over there that there's been some level of violence this evening?\"\n\nElf eyes flicked to Newton and Dave for an instant. The beardy Bacraut was smirking.\n\n\"Yes!\" said Duncan. \"I see I have struck a chord. Interesting. I'm working hard here, trying to put myself in your shoes. I hope you appreciate the effort I'm putting in.\"\n\n\"Psst,\" said Dave.\n\n\"What?\" said Newton, who was trying to keep one ear on the meeting, keep one eye on his own personal safety and keep his brain from squirming out of his ears in anxiety over where his mum was right now.\n\nDave nodded at the table. The letter had worked its way from the table, from one uncaring elf hand to the next. It was now just in front of them, scuffed and torn around the edge.\n\nIt was hand-written, which was a rarity these days. Only grandmas sending birthday money wrote letters anymore. Furthermore, it looked like it had been written by a grandma who'd learned to write from medieval monks. The lettering was all long and scratchy and surprisingly familiar. Yes: caught in a fold was one of the Christmas cracker jokes, written in the same hand.\n\nDuncan had seen the joke and at some point realised that it was the same writing. What had that meant to him? Did he know about the elves?\n\n\"Why did they invite him here?\" Newton whispered.\n\n\"What would you do if an aggressive property developer wants to turn part of your elfy town into a housing estate? What if he's never going to take no for an answer?\"\n\nNewton thought about it. He knew what he would do (probably a strongly worded yet polite e-mail). But elves? \"They just wanted to get him here,\" he said.\n\n\"Mmmm,\" nodded Dave. \"Up close.\"\n\n\"So,\" said Duncan to his audience, \"it's the violence that excites, is it?\"\n\nElves grinned.\n\n\"I totally understand. Rode with the Goathland hunt a couple of times myself. Fine tradition. Nothing like tearing across the countryside in pursuit of quarry, man and beast.\"\n\nBacraut jiggled up and down, whether in excitement or a mime of horse-riding, Newton couldn't tell. He suddenly thought of the stables back at the farm, of Lily and, yes, Yolanda too and realised there was a strong possibility he would never see them again.\n\nHe tapped Dave with his hand. \"We need to escape.\"\n\n\"Mmm-hmm,\" agreed Dave but seemed to have no idea how they were going to do it.\n\n\"So, a spot of hunting is the order of the day,\" said Duncan. \"You are talking to the right chap! I know all the local hunts. Do business with most of the huntmasters. Stirling fellows. Real animal lovers. I can set you up, I promise, and Duncan Catheter's word is his bond. Now, what do you fancy, eh? Fox, is it?\"\n\nBacraut shook his head slowly.\n\n\"Partridge? Grouse? A bit of old bang-bang on the Glorious Twelfth?\"\n\nBacraut raised his knife. A couple of elves giggled. Duncan was undeterred.\n\n\"I can \u2013 on the hush hush \u2013 get in touch with some fellows who do a spot of hare coursing. No, I know what you're thinking, but the hare enjoys it! Really does! No? Then badger baiting? I think I know a man in Pickering who knows a man who knows a man.\"\n\nBacraut was on his feet now, standing at the centre of the table, blade held tightly.\n\nDuncan's face twitched in a confused nervousness. \"Unless, of course,\" he said hoarsely, \"it's \u2026 people you like to hunt?\"\n\nBacraut nodded.\n\n\"Penny drops,\" muttered Dave.\n\nDuncan licked his lips. His eyes darted to and fro. Newton could almost see the cogs whirring in his brain.\n\n\"Humans. Humans,\" Duncan muttered. He cleared his throat. \"And what would you do with those humans when you have them?\"\n\nBacraut performed a rapid and very expressive mime in which he pretended to slit open his belly and poured out handful after handful of guts. This delighted his companions. More than one reached over to grab the imaginary innards and shove them into their mouths.\n\n\"My word, yes,\" said Duncan. \"And how many humans would you like?\"\n\nBacraut raised his arms up and round, a rainbow to encompass the whole world.\n\n\"All of them?\"\n\nBacraut shrugged.\n\n\"Well, it's nice to have a goal,\" said Duncan. \"Now, this is where the art of negotiation and compromise comes in. You want people. I want houses. You can't have all the people. No, I'm sorry, you can't. And, similarly, I can't build all the houses I want. It's just the way of the world. So, I say to you, yes, I can probably get a number of people for you \u2013 er, ten? \u2013 and you say, 'Thank you, Mr Catheter, that's lovely. We'll sign over our land to you now.'\"\n\n\"Ten?\" growled Bacraut.\n\n\"Yes. Er.\" Duncan struggled to focus on his own hands and held up ten fingers. \"Ten. I know where the rough sleepers can be found in Scarborough and York.\"\n\n\"Vilg\u00e9 ten-ty,\" said Bacraut and every elf at the table held up a hand with tiny wiggling fingers.\n\n\"Tenty?\" Duncan blew out hard. \"That's a tall order. Although I do know a care home or two with a few residents who are just not value for money. You okay with, um, older specimens?\"\n\nThe elves looked at him blankly.\n\n\"Very good then,\" said the businessman. \"Tenty it is. Now, I will go and make the arrangements and we'll draw up plans of which portions of Alvestowe I can\u2014\" As he stood to leave, the elves pressed in closer, weapons raised.\n\nDuncan held out his hands. \"I do need to leave. I can't just magic them here.\"\n\n\"Ten-ty,\" snarled Bacraut.\n\n\"Yes! Yes. Tenty it is, but I don't have them on me.\"\n\n\"Ten-ty!\"\n\nDuncan huffed, irritated. \"Do I have them in my pocket, eh?\"\n\nThe elves actually leaned forward to see if he did have tenty hidden people in his pocket. Dave tapped Newton and flicked his hand surreptitiously towards the door. All the elves were close to Duncan now, none looking back. Newton shuffled quietly towards the exit and Dave followed.\n\n\"I haven't got them on me,\" protested Duncan. \"You'd be fools to think I did.\"\n\nElves hissed angrily.\n\n\"If we're taking about humans I have on me then it's a different ball game, my friends. You're talking about much smaller numbers and a much higher price per unit. Now, if I were you, and the sight of human blood excited me, I think I would value the slaughter of children above adults. For example, we have fine a specimen over there.\" He pointed at Newton, who was within a foot of the door. Newton froze.\n\n\"There are two plump young individuals in this very building.\"\n\n\"What the hell\u2014?\" hissed Dave.\n\nBacraut grinned gleefully.\n\n\"I'd say I've hit upon a real point of interest there,\" said Duncan. \"Now my colleagues are likely to have some issues that we need to work through, but I think I can safely say that we can deal with those. The offer that I'm going to put on the table is that we give you the two children in return for the safe passage of the adults. How does that sound?\"\n\nThe elf continued to smile, but blew a small raspberry and then laughed.\n\n\"Not enough?\" Duncan asked. \"Well, that is easily remedied. Two children, one adult. The mother or the father. Your choice which.\"\n\nThe elf hooted with laughter, rubbing its belly with mirth.\n\n\"You rat,\" spat Dave.\n\n\"I'd go for the father trying to sneak out right now,\" said Duncan, his expression cold and desperate.\n\n\"Ten-ty,\" insisted Bacraut.\n\n\"Oh, they're just a down payment. What do you say, squire?\"\n\nBacraut advanced on Duncan, a knife in each hand and its face now a solid mask of murderous intent.\n\n\"No? Then how about two children and all of the other adults in the house? If you just let me go safely out then you take the rest. How does that sound?\"\n\nThe offer clearly didn't appeal to Bacraut. He twirled his blades, forcing Duncan back.\n\n\"Wait! Let's not be hasty, I can't help thinking that there's an aspect we haven't explored. Shall we sit back down and try to find some common ground?\" He backed against the window as the elf moved forward.\n\n\"Can't we help him?\" whispered Newton.\n\n\"You want to help him?\" Dave whispered back.\n\nDuncan grabbed a chair and whirled around, smashing it into the wide window. As soon as the glass shattered, he climbed onto the windowsill with a loud grunt of effort.\n\n\"Honestly,\" he said indignantly. \"Do you have no idea how business meetings are conducted? I'm hoping we might work a little harder at our communication skills, but I'm going to climb down the fire escape to the ground for the moment so that we can all cool off!\" He turned round. \"Oh. Is the fire escape on the other side?\"\n\nThe elf lunged at him and Duncan toppled out of the window with a prolonged scream. There was an extravagant smashing sound accompanied by more screaming. Elves poured out of the window after him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Guin had once broken a vase at home, and was surprised by the amount of broken glass that resulted, and how far it travelled. It seemed as though they were finding pieces for months afterwards, even though she and her father had carefully cleaned it all up. She now knew that a glass roof made a much, much bigger mess when a human body fell through. It bounced off a counter in a shower of glass and snow and sprawled onto the floor.\n\nShe recognised the odious businessman who had alternately ignored and insulted her at dinner, although he wasn't quite the same cocky, strutting businessman after he'd come through the roof.\n\n\"Is he dead?\" she said.\n\nEsther stared wordlessly, then looked up at the shattered skylights. Guin wished her dad was here, at least he would have known.\n\nThe question was answered when Duncan lurched to his feet with an incoherent grunt. His face was fifty-fifty glass and blood. He seemed to have left some of it behind in a pile of gore on the floor. She would remember that phrase for Newton. Gore on the Floor. She recognised panic bubbling up in her mind and reached for Wiry Harrison.\n\n\"Oh, no.\" Esther was looking up. In the darkness above, beyond the smashed skylight, elves were climbing rapidly down the exterior of the hotel.\n\nDuncan Catheter staggered forward. He seemed incapable of walking, or seeing where he was going as his face was a pulped mess. Guin wondered if she should help him. She hadn't read anything in Little Folk in European Folklore about elf-related injuries being catching, like zombies or vampires, but it might be wise to take care.\n\nDuncan lurched forwards, his arms banging into things, and the bloodied mess of his hands flapping uselessly. He howled with something like pain and fear and anger all jumbled up. He fell against the juicer with the elf inside and pressed what must have been his one good eye to the glass.\n\nHe whirled \u2013 blood sprayed out in an arc across the counter and Guin would have vomited if Wiry Harrison hadn't been there to comfort her.\n\n\"You!\" he bellowed, spraying spittle, blood and little fragments of things that might have been glass or teeth. He was addressing the elves who had dropped like mini-SAS soldiers onto the kitchen table. \"Another \u2013 ssfffp!\u2014\" He spat out a gobbet of loose flesh from his mouth \u2013 \"\u2014Another step and your friend is gonna be a smoothie.\"\n\nThe elves peered round to look at their trapped companion in the orange juicer. The trapped elf made worried noises and pleading eyes.\n\n\"Smoothie,\" said the lead elf, coming at Duncan.\n\nThe injured man thumped the switch on the machine.\n\nA high-pitched motor started up, stuttered, whirred again. The lights flickered in the kitchen, strobing across the room and highlighting the colour change in the transparent hopper. The contents had gone entirely red, but significant chunks of white bone hopped within the soupy mess, making the machine judder violently. Each time the motor paused, the lights flickered again.\n\n\"Don't look!\" called Esther. Guin thought it was perhaps a little late for that." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Several elves ran to the door, ignoring Dave and Newton in their urgency to get to wherever Duncan had fallen. Suddenly the room was empty but for the two stunned humans.\n\nDave turned to Newton. \"We need to get out of here.\"\n\n\"Ya reckon?\"\n\nThe lights flickered both in the room and on the landing outside. As Newton looked up, Dave realised he had been wrong. They weren't alone in the room.\n\nThe white-bearded Bacraut leapt up from his position under the table and latched onto Newton's leg. Newton swung round, yelling, grabbed the little git and hurled the elf away.\n\nThe elf tumbled, rolled and came up facing the wrong way. Dave had a free run at the lone elf and he booted it as hard as he could. His foot connected with such a satisfyingly powerful kick that Dave thought he'd re-join his five-a-side team if he made it out of this nightmare place. The elf connected with the open door and slid bonelessly to the floor. Dave opened the trouser press, inserted the elf and stood on it so that he could clamp it shut. The elf made small grunts which diminished after a few moments into a final-sounding sigh. Dave propped it upright and wondered if the elf would be able to revive itself and escape. He picked up the plug and pushed it into a nearby socket to be sure.\n\n\"I think you made an impression on him,\" said Newton and pulled the little elf's hat down to hide its face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Duncan roared as the juicer gave up its fight against hard-to-blend elf bits. The motor gave a loud electric bang and died. The lights went out completely for a long moment and then came back to life, accompanied by a dangerous-sounding fizzing noise. Appliances across the kitchen sparked.\n\nDuncan whirled on the elves, near blind and deranged. \"Who's next?\" he screamed. \"I took on the Bridlington chamber of commerce and won, you little bastards. You think I'm frightened of some bloody pixies? Eh?!\"\n\nGuin knew the power of words. When girls in the playground banished her from their circles with harsh language, it hurt deep. She and Tinfoil Tavistock had had deep conversations about how she felt when the other students at quadruped school called her a \"Spaccy alpaca\". Guin reckoned the elves didn't take kindly to the use of the p word at all.\n\nAs the first one leapt at Duncan he grabbed at the lined up Molotov cocktails on the counter, swept one up and smashed it powerfully into the side of the elf's head, dashing it to the ground. Another elf, another bottle. A third. A fourth. In the strobing light of fusing electrics, they fought, man and elves, like the weirdest and most violent silent comedy ever.\n\nGuin wanted to angrily point out that she and Esther had spent ages making those cocktails.\n\n\"You're meant to light them!\" Esther shouted.\n\nDuncan grunted and fumbled with the hob. He twisted knobs to turn on the gas but couldn't see how to ignite them through his bloodied vision. He grabbed up a big bottle of clear spirits and tried to feel around in his pocket, presumably for a lighter (but who carried a lighter in their dressing gown pocket? Guin didn't know).\n\n\"Come on \u2013 pfff! \u2013 come on!\" he spat. \"Try take me down! Bridlington tried and look what happened to them!\"\n\nHe tossed the barricade against the door aside with pain-fuelled adrenalin and backed out of the swing doors. Spirit-soaked elves picked themselves up and chased after him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Esther stared at the mess in the kitchen. The spilt drink, the smashed glass, the trail of blood Duncan Catheter had left in his whirlwind passage through the room.\n\n\"I don't know about you,\" said Esther, picking up the two remaining alcohol bombs, \"but I am fed up of waiting around for someone to kill us. I say it's time to go on the offensive.\"\n\n\"What about understanding their point of view?\" asked Guin. \"Like the orangutans.\"\n\n\"You've tried to tell me these things are evil,\" said Esther, \"but I don't usually see the world in that way.\" She looked at the two bottles. She kept the brandy and passed the certainly non-flammable Malibu rum bottle to Guin. \"But I know I hate these bloody things.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Guin.\n\nThere came the sounds of distant shouts and struggles. Esther picked up a disposable lighter from beside the oven. \"With me,\" she said and led the way.\n\nThey ran, crouching low. Esther wondered if they ought to be moving alternately, shouting \"Clear!\" at every doorway. There was a crashing further off.\n\n\"Heppe! Now!\" came a plaintive cry from the guest lounge.\n\nEsther gestured to the side of the door. Guin flattened herself against the wall, in the classic buddy cop pose, while Esther squared up to the doorway, Molotov cocktail at the ready, lighter ready to strike.\n\nThe room was empty. The only light came from the fairy lights on the Christmas tree wedged between two sofas. They, like every other light in the place, were flickering. Something just out of sight sparked dangerously.\n\n\"Heppe! Now!\" called the parrot from his cage.\n\n\"Damn,\" said Esther, passing her brandy bottle to Guin. She tried to unhook the cage from its stand but it was far too heavy.\n\n\"Gerramovon yum idjit!\"\n\n\"I'm trying!\" yelled Esther.\n\n\"Esther!\" warned Guin.\n\nEsther turned. Duncan Catheter came stumbling through the door, locking in a deadly embrace with two elves. The three of them were slick with blood and alcohol, struggling to get a purchase on each other.\n\nDuncan tore off one that had its teeth clamped onto his throat. It came away with more of his neck than was healthy.\n\n\"Gn-argh!\" yelled Duncan and hurled it away. The vodka-soaked elf arced into the Christmas tree; both crashed to the floor. There was the sound of dozens of popping baubles, followed by a fiery whump. Electrical fire plus accelerant plus wood. Sap filled pine needles exploded like a million tiny firecrackers.\n\nEsther raised her arm protectively against the blooming fireball.\n\n\"Sddn hlll!\" squawked King Leopold of Belgium.\n\nDuncan staggered back. The elf on his chest took the opportunity to leap higher and bury its bone handled knife up the hilt in Duncan's eye.\n\n\"Is that all you've got, Bridlington?\" Duncan mumbled and dropped, dead before he hit the ground.\n\n\"Sodding hell,\" said Esther.\n\nShe yanked open the bird cage door. The huge fat parrot barrelled out, dipped momentarily and flew straight out the door. Esther was only a second behind it. The elf swung at her as she passed but she hurdled over it and out the door, slamming it shut behind her.\n\n\"Can you smell gas?\" said Guin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "As he and Dave ran downstairs, Newton snatched up the most solid looking elf cross from the mess of sheets and stuffed cat remnants. There were shouts and thumps from downstairs and a dull background roar that might have been the snowstorm outside. Newton suspected it wasn't.\n\nA shape flew up into their faces. Dave gave a startled yelp.\n\n\"Shttn lil bfftrds!\" squawked King Leopold, banking at the top of the stairs and turning.\n\nDave put a hand to his chest and gave the bird an evil glare.\n\n\"Did I mention it was a very rude parrot?\" said Newton.\n\n\"I can smell smoke,\" said Dave. \"We need to get out.\"\n\n\"Bout brurrytime. Pairra gommin iddits.\"\n\nAt the bottom of the stairs, Newton made immediately for the front door.\n\n\"What do you think you are doing?\" came a strident voice.\n\nMrs Scruples stood by the little reception desk. She was wearing something like a lightweight turquoise coat made of quilted polyester. A flannel nightdress peeked out at the hem.\n\n\"Mrs Scruples!\" gasped Newton. \"We've got to get out of here! You won't believe it but there's elves in the house!\"\n\nShe strode forward. \"I heard a good deal of noise for the middle of the night. Why are you up and causing so much disruption?\" She took in the mess and wreckage littering stairs and hallway. \"Breakages must be paid for.\"\n\n\"But Christmas elves!\" said Newton. \"Real ones! And\u2014\" He stopped, seeing the shotgun in the old woman's hand.\n\n\"I think Mrs Scruples knows all about Christmas elves,\" said Dave softly.\n\nShe raised the shotgun. \"Nobody is leaving unless I say so.\"\n\nShe called over her shoulder. \"Wee folks! Come here!\"\n\n\"Wee folks?\" said Newton, terrified and incredulous. \"Why are you trying to make them sound cute? They kill people. Mr Catheter. He\u2026\" He shook his head. \"But wee folks? Really? Shall we get the china cups out and make a little tea party for them?\"\n\nNewton caught Dave's gaze and the little shushing motion that he was making.\n\n\"But they're murderers,\" said Newton.\n\n\"I've seen no evidence of that,\" said Mrs Scruples. \"I see plenty of violence perpetrated by the two of you, mind. Right here under my roof and staining my carpet to boot.\"\n\n\"Where's Mr Scruples?\" asked Dave. It was an odd question and Newton couldn't quite see the relevance.\n\nMrs Scruples' head jerked. Her face twitched unhappily. \"He's still around. I've seen him in the distance a couple of times.\"\n\n\"Have you? Really?\"\n\n\"I'd know his waistcoats anywhere. He was always good with his hands, was Mr Scruples. He's valuable to them. That's why they want to keep hold of him.\"\n\n\"They?\" said Newton and then understood.\n\n\"And you?\" said Dave. \"Is your role to lure us in? Is that why you're 'valuable' to them?\"\n\nNewton wasn't sure why Dave was so keen to chat when there was some serious escaping to be done. Then he realised Dave was trying to keep Mrs Scruples talking because he'd spotted Newton's mum, dirty and bedraggled, creeping up behind the woman.\n\n\"Mum!\" It came out in a blurt of shock and delight.\n\n\"Mum?\" said Mrs Scruples.\n\nEsther grasped the massive pottery horse from the reception desk and smashed it over Mrs Scruple's head. The woman flopped lifelessly to the floor.\n\n\"Oh, poor horsey,\" said Newton.\n\nGuin ran forward to her dad. \"We put an elf in a blender!\"\n\n\"Um, trouser press,\" Dave replied.\n\nEsther planted a smooshy kiss on Newton's forehead. \"We need to get out of here.\" She pulled open the inner door, squeezed past the monstrous vacuum cleaner in the porch and battled futilely with the outer door. \"Locked!\"\n\nKeys,\" said Dave, whirling to look at Mrs Scruples.\n\n\"Uh-oh,\" said Newton quietly. A small band of elves was advancing towards them down the hallway. Each carried a weapon. One looked as though it had a carving set, a matching fork and knife with horn handles. Another had something like a small garden tool with a clawed end. Another held a hammer. They each had a face that was scrunched up with determined malice, expressions deepened by the fact they had been variously thumped, cut, burned or trampled.\n\n\"Yrrr scrrwwed!\" screeched King Leopold, flapping around the ceiling.\n\n\"I've got this,\" said Newton, grabbing the hose of the vacuum cleaner. It was already plugged in. As he brought it to bear, the wheeled body trundled behind him, like a baby Dalek. He stabbed the switch; nothing happened.\n\n\"The body needs to be shut,\" said Esther and leaned heavily on the wobbly casing. She had to sit on top to force it shut.\n\nThe vacuum cleaner's head bucked in Newton's hands. He thrust the pipe at the nearest elf. It disappeared up the fat pipe and into the body of the vacuum cleaner with a series of thumps. Newton swept it round and bagged another." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Dave had run forward and put his fingertips to Mrs Scruples' neck. \"She's still alive,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah?\" said Esther. \"Try focusing on the lives of the four people who aren't in league with evil elves!\"\n\nIt was perhaps a little callous but Dave took the hint. He went through the pockets of her housecoat.\n\n\"Watch out! Elf on the shelf!\" yelled Guin.\n\n\"On it,\" said Newton.\n\nAn elf dropped down with a lusty war cry. Newton sucked it up the pipe with a snarl of fury.\n\n\"Hey, suckers!\" called Newton. He hoovered up the last two elves. The last one got caught up somewhere in the hose and the motor hesitated. A lump in the hose wriggled. Esther gave it a sharp kick and it vanished with a hollow thwump!.\n\n\"Here!\" said Dave as he pulled out a key ring, triumphant.\n\nHe tossed it to Esther and then hooked a hand under Mrs Scruples' armpits and hauled her along the hallway.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" said Esther.\n\n\"I am not leaving her in a burning building.\"\n\n\"I can definitely smell gas now,\" said Guin. \"Did that man leave the hob on in the kitchen?\"\n\nNewton took the keys from Esther and hurriedly unlocked the outer front door.\n\n\"Out. Now!\" said Dave.\n\nKing Leopold was first out, flapping into the night sky with a cry of \"Bggrit! S'frrrzzing!\"\n\nNewton and Guin followed. Esther took hold of the evil old lady's legs and helped her far too public-spirited man carry her out into the snow. They laid her down in the centre of the road.\n\n\"I should go back for that shotgun,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Why?\" said Dave.\n\n\"What if there's more of them?\"\n\n\"You do know that people who carry guns are more likely to be shot than people who don't carry guns.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Behyoo,\" squawked the parrot.\n\n\"I don't think those statistics include people who've had to fight off bloody Christmas elves,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Be-HY-oo!\" said the parrot, loudly.\n\n\"What did it say?\" said Newton.\n\n\"I think it was saying, 'Behind y\u2014'\" Esther looked back. Through the open doorway she saw a knife with a horn handle sliding through the gap between the body and lid of the vacuum cleaner. It flipped the catch aside and the top burst open. Dusty elves flopped out in varying states of alertness. The elf with the horn-handled knife was first to recover: it turned towards them. His companions seemed disorientated: they reeled and fell over as they emerged from the vacuum.\n\n\"Molotov cocktails,\" said Esther. Guin reacted fastest. She passed over one of the bottles as Esther fumbled for the lighter in her pocket. She flicked it once, twice and managed to set light to the torn-up tea towel with a shaking hand.\n\n\"Burn you pixie scumbags!\" she howled and threw the bottle. It smashed into the hoover, but the spirits failed to ignite.\n\n\"Was that Malibu?\" said Dave.\n\n\"Shut up.\"\n\nThe knife-wielding elf, soaked, made a show of licking its finger in a mocking display. Esther lit the remaining bottle's cloth and lobbed it at them.\n\nIt smashed with a satisfying and very final sound against the body of the hoover, but the flame did not take hold. Except one of the elves stamped its boots, which were definitely burning. It was hardly an impressive conflagration.\n\nThe elf laughed, a high and cruel giggle.\n\n\"I should have gone back for that shotgun,\" said Esther.\n\nThe gas explosion blew the four standing humans off their feet, and the front door entirely off its hinges. Elves, caught in its path, were hurled out of the door. One flew through an upstairs window on the opposite side of the street. The vacuum cleaner tumbled into the road. It would have crushed someone if it had landed on them.\n\nEsther sat up and stretched her jaw, trying to shake off the high-pitched whine in her deafened ears. Shattered glass was everywhere. She found Newton and Guin laid out in the drifting snow, essentially unharmed but clearly shocked. As she pulled them up, Dave was beside her, helping. They scrabbled across to the far side of the road and huddled together.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Esther asked Newton, realising she couldn't hear her voice. He couldn't either. They all sat in dumbfounded silence and watched the house burn.\n\nIt was a few moments before any of them wanted to move. Esther looked at the others. Their faces all reflected the same exhausted shock as they crouched on the pavement.\n\nDave was the first to stagger to his feet. Esther could hear some of his words, which was excellent because she wasn't ready to be deaf, although it was good to be reminded what a blessing it really was to have all of her senses.\n\n\"We need to get the neighbours out, in case it spreads!\" she was sure Dave was saying.\n\n\"Oh, God, yes!\" Esther had been looking forward to putting this very much behind her, rather than continuing the nightmare, but she couldn't be selfish. Dave was right. \"We'll do that and then get out of this place.\"\n\n\"Why didn't the neighbours hear all the screaming?\" wondered Newton, his voice clearer. \"Or notice the massive fire? Or the gas explosion that blew off the front of the house?\"\n\nHe had a point.\n\nThere was a groaning sound from nearby. Mrs Scruples was lying on the pavement, her body twisted and her clothes shredded.\n\n\"Oh goodness me. Dave, we must help her!\"\n\nDave started to run checks on Mrs Scruples' vital signs.\n\n\"There's a broken bench over there,\" said Guin, pointing at a high backed wooden seat. \"That top part would work for carrying her, like a stretcher.\"\n\nEsther dragged the broken furniture over. It must have been thrown out of the house by the gas explosion. \"It's like an old pew. Look at the carving on it, beautiful piece.\"\n\n\"Careful lifting her onto it,\" said Dave, arranging them all around Mrs Scruples. \"All together on my count. One, two, three.\"\n\nHe stamped out some scraps of smouldering curtain and used them to cover her against the falling snow and secure her onto the board. \"Right, the adults will drag her along using the top corners, as if it's a sled.\"\n\n\"But the carvings will get scratched\u2014\" said Esther before stopping herself. \"\u2014Which is fine, obviously, given the circumstances.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Newton knocked on several nearby doors, but there was no response from any of them. An eerie stillness filled the town, compound by the still falling snow and his receding deafness. It felt like mufflers had been placed over the world, that they were now the only people in it.\n\n\"Which way should we go?\" his mum asked, picking up her corner of Mrs Scruples' stretcher.\n\nDave looked across the marketplace, towards the hill which led down to the river and where they'd left the car. \"The car is unusable.\"\n\n\"Is there another way out of town?\" Newton asked.\n\nDave shook his head. \"I don't know.\"\n\nThey walked slowly, the adults dragging the stretcher. The snow was slippery underfoot, yet somehow didn't make it any easier to drag the heavy board.\n\n\"It's really cold,\" said Guin, hugging herself.\n\n\"It's snow joke,\" said Newton, deadpan. \"This weather, I mean.\"\n\nGuin fixed Newton with a stare designed to shut him up, but he took it as encouragement. \"I think it's settling. If you catch my drift,\" he said.\n\nGuin sighed theatrically. \"It's nice you're trying to make us all laugh, Newton\u2014\" she began.\n\nShe didn't even have a chance to reach the inevitable but before he responded with \"I just want everyone to chill out.\" He grinned broadly. \"Apart from Mrs Scruples, that is. She's out cold already.\"\n\n\"Poor taste, Newton,\" said his mum.\n\n\"Let's just keep walking,\" said Dave in a determinedly upbeat voice. \"We'll get somewhere eventually, or get a phone signal at least.\"\n\nIt was hard going for the adults, even downhill. Newton wondered if they could lay Mrs Scruples flat, give her a hefty shove down the hill, and meet her at the bottom. But it was probably not a very charitable thought.\n\n\"What if there are more of them?\" said Guin. \"Elves. I mean, what if we didn't get them all?\"\n\n\"You know, this whole thing might have escalated in our minds,\" Dave said, his words coming slowly, as if he was trying to shape his thoughts as he went. \"I mean, is it possible we've just got ourselves a bit freaked out after a rough evening and not sleeping properly and everything?\"\n\n\"Dad, you were there!\"\n\n\"I know I was there.\"\n\n\"They're definitely real.\"\n\n\"Guin's right,\" said Esther carefully. \"We can't wish them away. No matter how appalling they were and how far away from our normal lives this whole thing has been. There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.\"\n\n\"Quoting Shakespeare does not make things true,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Well, I'm just glad we've seen the last of them.\"\n\n\"There's one over there,\" said Newton.\n\nThey all looked back to where he pointed. A small figure was just visible up an alley. It looked as though it was hard at work scooping something out of an indistinct shape on the ground. Faint gloopy noises reached them as they watched.\n\nThe elf looked up. The family instinctively held still against the shadows. The elf straightened and moved towards them, its hands stained with something that made them black in the dark. Esther judged it hadn't seen them.\n\n\"Come on, go. Go!\" she said, sotto voce. They moved much more quickly. Newton didn't even glance back to see if the elf was following.\n\n\"Someone's coming,\" said Guin.\n\nNewton looked ahead. \"It's a person. An actual person.\"\n\n\"Please let it be someone with a working phone or a car,\" said Dave.\n\nIt was a man. He wobbled between the closed market stalls as though drunk.\n\nThey were in the thick of the market. At some time during the night it had lost its festive jollity and become cluttered and threatening. As if every rustic stall front concealed something dreadful. Newton saw the man wore a multi-coloured jacket and lime green trousers that put him in mind of a children's entertainer. It was unlikely he was out entertaining children at whatever time of the night it was now.\n\n\"He doesn't look right,\" said Guin.\n\n\"We shouldn't judge people,\" said Esther. \"We have no idea what personal difficulties he might have...\"\n\nThe man was close enough for them to see him clearly. Newton really didn't like the look of him. His face hung grey and slack; the face of a dead man. One who still walked \u2013 with an awkward gait.\n\n\"Hi there,\" said Dave and waved, almost dropping his corner of the stretcher in the process.\n\nThe man didn't respond.\n\nNewton saw the man's jacket ripple and bulge. \"His stomach\u2026\" Newton began to say and then a button came undone and a tiny head popped out, laughing.\n\n\"No\u2026\" Dave moaned.\n\n\"When I followed Elsa Frinton's footprints,\" said Guin, her voice low and distant, like she was recounting a dream, \"I saw something on the wall. I thought it was a pink glove, like a human hand with no bones or meat inside it.\"\n\nElves burst forth from the man's stomach, leaping down onto the ground. As they left his body it collapsed, hollow.\n\n\"Back up, back up!\" gasped Esther.\n\nThey started to drag the stretcher back the way they'd come. The elves were content to watch them with silent menace.\n\n\"And the stallholders at the market,\" said Guin. \"They all moved oddly, didn't they? Like they were too tired and floppy to move properly. I guess a human suit is hard to steer.\"\n\nThe board bumped over hidden obstacles beneath the snow. Mrs Scruples groaned loudly.\n\n\"She's not dead. That's a positive,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Why am I tied down?\" mumbled the old woman.\n\n\"There was an explosion,\" Newton told her helpfully. \"Your house is no longer safe.\"\n\nMrs Scruples feebly tugged at the bonds tying her to the makeshift stretcher. \"Kidnap!\" she exclaimed, a loud bird-like squawk.\n\n\"Nobody's kidnapping you, Mrs Scruples,\" said Newton in his gentlest 'would anyone like a cup of tea' voice. \"We're just trying to get you to safety. Just relax for now.\"\n\nMrs Scruples did not relax. \"Let me go!\" she shouted as she thrashed in place. \"You've got no right to do this.\"\n\n\"Shush, everything will be fine,\" Newton urged her.\n\n\"Help me!\"\n\n\"We are helping.\n\n\"Help me, little folk!\"\n\nThe elves by the hollowed out human suit took this as their cue and began to follow.\n\n\"They're coming for us,\" said Esther, like there was any doubt.\n\n\"Here I am,\" called Mrs Scruples. \"I told you I'd get them for you.\"\n\nIn silent agreement Dave and Esther let the stretcher drop. \"We should put some distance between ourselves and these things,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Don't call them things,\" said Esther. \"Could be considered racist.\"\n\nMrs Scruples dragged off the singed curtain remnants and staggered upright.\n\n\"You'd be better off if you stayed with us you know,\" Dave told her.\n\nThe look she shot back suggested she didn't agree.\n\nThe back of Newton's foot connected with something. It was a weight which held down a corner of tarpaulin covering one of the stalls. He picked it up, held it like a bowling ball, took aim, and lobbed it at the elves. Two of them were crushed into the deep snow as it rolled over them. The remaining elves hissed and began to run at them.\n\nThe fabric awning directly above Dave was heavily laden with snow. He punched the awning from below and sent a considerable pile of snow onto the nearest elves. They were instantly buried. \"And go!\" he yelled.\n\nThey ran.\n\n\"I'm coming, little ones!\" yelled Mrs Scruples in the night. \"You can rely on me!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Guin thought she heard the elves laughing. They were enjoying the chase. She glanced back: a lone elf was just a few paces behind.\n\nThey passed a chestnut stall; its brazier still radiated heat. Guin kicked it over. Hot pieces of charcoal rolled down the street, throwing off sparks. The elf stumbled and skipped over them, but continued its chase.\n\n\"This way!\" Esther shouted. They twisted through the market and ducked down a side road while the elves were unsighted.\n\nMrs Scruples was still out there somewhere, calling to her 'little people'.\n\n\"Mad as a box of frogs,\" muttered Dave.\n\n\"Is that a clinical term?\" asked Esther, nudging him in the ribs.\n\nIt was easier to move now they were out of the market and its clutter, but they were also very exposed. There was movement from some of the houses overlooking the street. Without looking too closely, Guin had the strong impression that elves were more or less everywhere. The ones chasing them were just a small sample of a whole townful of elves.\n\nThey were at the edge of the town square and there wasn't much more of the town beyond it. A steep hill rose up in front of them, its side thick with trees. The drystone wall and the church stood at the end of the road, but beyond that they'd be out in open countryside.\n\nGuin didn't fancy their chances out in the woods, being pursued by a horde of murderous elves.\n\n\"Church?\" suggested Dave.\n\n\"Really?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Just as a place to lay low.\"\n\nThey moved together, up the road. Near the rear yard of a house, they skirted round a parked tractor. Guin stared at its convoluted shadows and recesses fearfully. A hundred elves could have hidden beneath it.\n\n\"Maybe there's keys in the cab,\" suggested Newton.\n\n\"Not enough room for us all,\" said Dave.\n\nGuin knew how slowly tractors went. If they were to make any kind of a getaway, there was no point in choosing something that could be overtaken by an elf who wasn't even trying.\n\nThey crept quietly into the churchyard, the tree and snow covered slopes towered over the grey building. Esther got to the church first and tried the latch. It opened. They all piled inside and shut the door firmly behind them.\n\n\"I'll see if I can lock it,\" said Dave. \"Try and find some lights.\"\n\nMoments later the interior of the church was lit up. It appeared to be free of elves. Dave found a heavy iron key and locked the door. They got their breath back, sighing heavily with relief.\n\n\"Nice church,\" said Esther. \"It's simple and functional. Nothing fancy or excessive.\"\n\n\"Suddenly an expert on churches, are we, mum?\" said Newton.\n\n\"No elves,\" she added. \"I especially like the fact there are no elves in here.\"\n\n\"Maybe the elves can't cross the threshold of a church,\" said Newton. \"We should get some holy water and some crucifixes to defend ourselves.\"\n\nGuin rolled her eyes. \"Seriously? The elf crosses are the things that work against the elves. Holy water won't be any use at all.\"\n\n\"Can't hurt to try,\" said Newton, lifting the wooden lid on the font and dipping a finger into the dark interior. As he shook the water off he turned and pointed. \"Stairs.\" A doorway led to a spiral stone staircase. \"They'll lead to the bell tower. Maybe we could go up\u2014\"\n\n\"And ring the bells and see if someone comes to help us!\" said his mum enthusiastically.\n\n\"Er, that,\" said Newton kindly. \"Or I was just going to see if I could get a better phone signal high up.\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah. That too,\" agreed Esther.\n\n\"Go with him,\" Dave told Guin.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Safety in height. You know: like climbing trees to get away from bears.\"\n\n\"Bears can climb trees, dad. That's the one thing you shouldn't do when attacked by one.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said irritably. \"Sharks then.\"\n\nGuin could have pointed out how stupid that was too but simply went.\n\nShe ran up the stairs behind Newton. She didn't run far: physical exercise was not her friend. She was the pale and sickly looking girl in her class at school, a stereotype she was happy to live up to. After one circuit of the stairs, she resorted to walking. A dozen spirals later she reached a small square room with bell ropes hanging from holes in the ceiling. Newton flitted between the two small leaded windows, waving his phone about.\n\n\"Any luck?\" asked Guin.\n\nNewton gave her a terse, still look. \"Maybe we will have to resort to fighting them off with holy water and crosses.\" He caught her expression. \"We don't know those things aren't related to vampires or demons or something. They're ugly like demons, I mean those carvings on some of the pews downstairs even look a bit like them.\"\n\nGuin pulled out the Little Folk in European Folklore book and sat with it, cross-legged on the floor, over a heating grill that was not entirely cold. There was a quote from Dr Epiphany Alexander on the subject of carvings that Newton needed to hear. Before she could locate it there was a loud braying din. Downstairs, the organ was being played, but not by anyone with training. Chilling, discordant notes echoed around the church." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "More than anything Dave wanted to protect his loved ones. The look of alarm on Esther's face as the church organ struck up was almost more than he could bear. He'd tried to deal with the situation in the best way he knew how: keep his head and deliver solutions to problems. But this was so far away from anything he'd ever experienced he was running out of ideas. They were trapped in an unfamiliar town, surrounded by an enemy that was not only ridiculously numerous, but also completely impossible for his brain to believe in.\n\n\"This is a classic villain scare tactic,\" he said, attempting to be reassuring. \"Creepy organ music. I mean, doesn't it remind you of every horror film you ever saw?\"\n\nEsther wrinkled her nose. \"Not sure about that. They normally at least do chords, don't they? That sounds like someone running up and down the keyboard.\"\n\nDave whirled. The church was essentially one huge open room. His original idea that they could lay low and get behind some cover seemed quite ridiculous now. \"The kids!\"\n\n\"We defend the stairs,\" said Esther. \"Grab weapons.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"When they show themselves we need to be ready to take them on.\"\n\nDave stepped up to the altar and grabbed a pair of candlesticks. Their weight felt good in his hands. Esther lifted a brass heating duct grille. It looked too heavy for her to carry, but that probably meant it had excellent elf-squashing potential.\n\nDave looked all around, wondering which direction the elves' attack would come from. The tuneless organ honking continued, but there was another sound. Almost like voices singing in a choir: a choir that tuned up by scratching their fingernails down a blackboard. Discordant, wordless and completely without a tune. The closest thing Dave could bring to mind was the noise he made as a child when working hard to irritate his family. It was optimistically known as 'the bagpipes', made by holding his nose, make a droning sound and making small rapid karate chops against his throat.\n\nHe spotted them, beyond the altar. Had they been in the choir stalls all along? They began climbing up and over the wooden seats, the grotesque carvings come to life.\n\nMoments later the bells rang out. Even louder than the organ and almost as chaotic as the choir. Guin and Newton were giving it everything that they had, although they really didn't know what they were doing.\n\n\"Maybe someone will hear,\" said Esther optimistically.\n\nDave remembered bell ringers sometimes suffered serious injuries. If they forgot to let go of the rope, they could be whisked upwards at something like fifty miles an hour.\n\nElves came at them. Dave swung the candlesticks, one in each arm, and just for a moment he was Antonio Banderas wielding two pistols against Mexican drug peddlers with devastating style. There was a satisfying crunch and a lot of splatter as he made an elf sandwich with smeared elf filling.\n\n\"Consider that an exorcism,\" he said.\n\nEsther had managed to pin one elf underneath her heavy iron grill. She jumped on it to get more momentum. Dave couldn't be sure from this distance, but it looked as though she'd created elf chips.\n\n\"Guin! Newton! Take care with those bells!\" he called towards the bell tower.\n\nAbruptly, he realised the bells had stopped. And so had the choir and organ.\n\n\"Guin! Newton!\" Dave charged up the stairs. Esther close behind.\n\nThe bell-ringers' chamber was empty but for half a dozen swinging ropes.\n\n\"Guin! Newton! Where are you?\" Dave turned in a circle as if he might have overlooked two children. \"They must have just been in here.\"\n\nOne of the small leaded windows in the room was open, swinging in the wind and letting snow flutter in.\n\n\"It's not big enough,\" Esther murmured.\n\n\"If they were dragged through\u2014\" said Dave instantly wishing he hadn't.\n\nThere was scrap of fabric on the floor beneath the window, ripped from Newton's clothes.\n\nWordlessly they sprinted back downstairs, out the church's main door. There were no elves to be seen. They headed round to the outside of the bell tower and located the window. Footsteps in the snow indicated a great many elves had been here, and they had been dragging something with them. The prints headed up into the trees. It was wild and dark in there, the snow lying heavy and menacing.\n\n\"It looks steep and dangerous,\" said Dave.\n\nDave ran back into the church. Esther followed him. \"I'm thinking a rope maybe, anything that could help us out in the woods.\"\n\n\"It's a church Dave, not Go Outdoors. What are we likely to find?\"\n\nDave trotted to the base of the bell tower, looking around to see if there was any spare rope. A large box in the corner looked like a good prospect. He opened the lid and found a neatly coiled length of bell rope with a red, white and blue fluffy end.\n\n\"Good,\" he said lifting it onto his shoulder. \"Candles! They could help us start a fire in a pinch.\"\n\nEsther made a doubtful noise, but ran to the altar.\n\n\"I know it seems like overkill, but we run the risk of getting exposure out there in the open,\" Dave called.\n\n\"Yes! Yes!\" Esther shouted back, knowing he was right but impatient to get on with it.\n\n\"Grab the cloth thing while you're there as well,\" he said.\n\nEsther hesitated for a moment before she balled up the altar cloth with the candles.\n\nThey both sprinted for the door and went back round to the far side of the church.\n\n\"I'll tie the rope around both of our waists,\" said Dave. \"We'll be able to move separately, but this snow is so deep I'm worried one of us might step into a gorge or off a cliff.\"\n\nThey started to trudge up the hill. The lights of Alvestowe disappeared as the concealing tree branches blocked out streetlights and the yellow light reflecting off the snow. Dave led the way, kicking the earth to find footholds among rocks and tree roots.\n\nThe going became tougher the deeper they went. The tree boughs sagged with snow and hung low to the ground. They had a choice of either crouching low to crawl through the pitch blackness beneath the trees, or stick to the more open areas where the snow came up past their knees and made walking extremely difficult.\n\n\"What about avalanches?\" asked Esther.\n\nDave looked up at the snow. \"It's a risk, but what choice do we have? The trees will help to break up any slippages, but let's hope that nothing happens to unsettle the snow.\"\n\nHe tried to recall what he knew of avalanches. Unfortunately, his only sources of information were James Bond movies and old disaster flicks.\n\n\"If there is an avalanche there's things you should do,\" he said.\n\n\"Like pee to see which way is up?\" asked Esther.\n\n\"No, not that,\" said Dave. \"If we get caught, we should try to swim uphill, face upwards.\"\n\n\"Swim?\"\n\n\"Yeah, like our lives depended on it.\"\n\nShe held up a hand. Dave could barely see it in the darkness.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I heard elves laughing. Must mean we're on the right path.\"\n\nHe nodded, then thought she probably couldn't see him. \"Yes, you're right.\"\n\n\"Let's go.\"\n\n\"Watch your rope,\" he said. \"You're in danger of treading on the fluffy bit.\"\n\n\"Sally.\" She held up the furry striped end of the bell-rope. In the poor light, it wiggled like it had a life of its own. \"This bit is called a sally.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"I did a weekend heritage skills course,\" she said. He saw her shiver as the snow blew off the hill in savage gusts.\n\n\"I love you so much,\" he said and kissed her fiercely on the forehead.\n\n\"I know,\" she replied.\n\n\"And we'll get our kids back.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nFrom ahead, up the slope there was a sharp, loud noise.\n\n\"What was that?\" Esther said.\n\n\"Sounded like a branch snapping.\"\n\n\"More like a Christmas cracker.\"\n\nThere followed a rapid report of dozens of bangs.\n\n\"A thousand Christmas crackers,\" added Esther.\n\nThere was another sound a more ominous one. A cracking sound which came from the earth itself. A rumble followed, felt as well as heard. It seemed to be growing louder.\n\n\"Oh no. Please, no.\" Dave turned to Esther.\n\n\"Just swim,\" said Esther. \"I got it.\"\n\nDave felt out for a tree to shelter behind but his hands could find only wispy branches and snow.\n\nEsther began to say something but her words were lost as the roar of the avalanche became the voice of an angry giant, punctuated by the crack of uprooted trees.\n\nThe ground bucked and tumbled. They were thrown off their feet. Dave could no longer see what Esther was doing. He couldn't see at all. When he should have been thinking clearly about what he needed to do to save their lives, he was consumed by two thoughts: that the furry bit of a bell-rope was called a sally, and he should have married Esther ages ago." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Guin shifted uncomfortably inside the sack the elves had stuffed her in. She constantly bounced against the sharp backs of the elves carrying her. She coughed, breathing in gulps of the foetid, stinking air inside the sack. She didn't like to imagine what this sack had been used for \u2013 rotten animal hides? Manky bales of hay? She decided, miserably, if she wasn't released soon, she'd either choke to death with a lung full of dust and dirt or contract plague.\n\nShe was dropped, suddenly and painfully, onto a hard surface. She cried out and heard a couple of elves tittering. \"You'd better not be laughing at me!\" she said. She held Wiry Harrison tightly in her hand and he gave her the courage to speak her mind.\n\nSomething gripped her through the sack material.\n\n\"Get off!\" she shouted in alarm.\n\n\"It's me!\" hissed Newton. \"I'm in the sack next to you.\"\n\nGuin considered this. \"I repeat, 'Get off'. I did not sign up for this. Dad said\u2014\"\n\nShe was about to say he'd promised she wasn't going to share a bedroom with Newton, but thoughts of her dad cut her off. The last they'd seen of their parents was in the church, but they'd heard shouts on the hillside, and then there'd been the bangs and the rumble of an avalanche and\u2026\n\n\"It's okay,\" said Newton, seemingly reading her mind. \"I'm here.\"\n\nShe sniffed. \"Is that meant to make me feel better?\"\n\n\"I'll keep trying.\"\n\nThe floor beneath them suddenly shifted and rattled.\n\n\"Are we on a cart or something?\" said Newton, a moment before Guin was going to suggest something similar.\n\n\"I don't know. Why haven't they killed us yet?\"\n\n\"Let's be glad they haven't.\"\n\n\"But they will.\"\n\n\"But not yet,\" he said, like it mattered.\n\nThe cart \u2013 no, Guin thought it was a train: there was a click-clack noise below the creaks and rattles \u2013 carried them for several minutes. Guin occasionally felt the closeness of the forest trees or heard them scrape alongside. Then the surrounding noises changed. There was a closeness, a dull echo to things.\n\n\"I think we're inside somewhere,\" she whispered.\n\nThe train stopped abruptly and she nearly rolled on Wiry Harrison.\n\n\"We've stopped,\" said Newton unnecessarily.\n\nNothing happened for some minutes. Guin tried to find the opening in her sack but the elves had tied it tight. She'd probably have better luck trying to peel it apart at the seams.\n\nNext to her, the gangly teenage boy was clucking and making weird sing-song noises. \"That's it. That's it. That's right. I'm your friend.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to be comforting or creep me out?\" asked Guin.\n\n\"I'm not talking to you,\" he said. \"I mean, I am, but I was making noises to the\u2014 There's an animal here. I can feel its muzzle. Yes, there is. Yes, there is,\" he simpered to whatever he was talking to.\n\n\"Probably rats,\" said Guin miserably.\n\n\"It's a big animal,\" said Newton. \"I don't think it's a horse.\"\n\nGuin thought about what kind of animals elves would hang around with. \"Maybe it's a reindeer,\" she suggested, not sure if she was being sarcastic.\n\n\"Are you a reindeer?\" said Newton. \"Yes, you are! Yes, you are, you lovely girl! Come snuffle me! Yes, you do, you \u2013 ow!\"\n\n\"What?\" said Guin.\n\n\"It bit me,\" said Newton indignantly.\n\nGuin drew herself into a ball in the dark horrible confines. \"Rats,\" she muttered. \"It's rats and we're going to get the plague and die.\"\n\nNewton jabbed her, possibly with an elbow. \"You know this keeping our spirits up thing? It's a team effort, you know.\"\n\nFootsteps approached. \"\u00fe\u00e1\u00fat ogr\u00f0u far \u00ed Gerd,\" said an voice.\n\n\"What are they gibbering about?\" muttered Newton.\n\nGuin shushed him. \"I'm trying to listen.\"\n\nSeveral pairs of little hands were laid on them. Guin heard the shing of drawn blades before the sacks were slashed open with almost no regard for their contents. They were hauled out.\n\nShe coughed and sucked in fresh air \u2013 well, relatively fresh air. The air stank of damp and dirt with a pervasive underlying smell of something like petrol. They were in a cave of some sort. It was lit by row upon row of Christmas fairy lights, some old, some new, many of them broken, many of them fizzing and flickering like a fuse was about to blow. The lights were strung across ceilings, tacked to walls and wrapped round and round the dripping pipes that ran everywhere.\n\nIt took her a while to appreciate the scale of the place. Not just because of the gloom but because the size of it defied any rational expectations. The cave's sloping sides \u2013 she supposed it was big enough to be called a cavern really \u2013 rose up higher and higher until, at its conical top, there was a patch of dark grey which could possibly be the night sky of the world above. Along its sides and across its wide floor, elves in their dozens scurried and worked at distinct but disorganised work stations and storage areas.\n\nShe and Newton had been deposited alongside the train track. It was a ridiculously narrow and low train, little more than a children's theme park ride, with crude open top trucks behind a little pink locomotive that would have looked cute if it wasn't so wonky and rusted.\n\n\"Steam engines,\" said Newton. \"Environmentally very unsound. Mum would have\u2014 Oh, my God!\"\n\nIn a stall by the train line stood a reindeer \u2013 well, some sort of deer, or, some sort of hoofed \u2026 some sort of quadruped. It definitely had four legs. Of that Guin could be confident. It had probably started out as a reindeer, or reindeer-shaped but\u2026\n\nIt was a patchwork of fur and material that was not fur, wrapped around a body featuring a couple of very un-reindeery legs (one of which appeared to be elegantly carved from solid wood) and strange, very unhealthy looking lumps and bumps under the skin. Hide, cloth and patchwork flesh were held together with fine white stitching.\n\nAnd the head\u2026 The skin was almost entirely bald. One of the antlers had been fixed in place with metal brackets and screws. The eyes were grey-green and shrunken, like ancient withered grapes. Its mouth was devoid of flesh, flat teeth champed and snapped against a jawline of exposed bone.\n\n\"It's a zomdeer,\" whispered Newton. \"Frankenstein's reindeer,\" said Guin at the same time.\n\nWhatever, it was a reindeer even Father Christmas would struggle to love." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "The zomdeer or Frankenstein's reindeer or whatever it was, reared and bucked in its dirty little pen. Elves were unpacking bales, boxes and bags from the other trucks. Newton supposed they were meant to be important goods and materials for the elves but, for the most part, looked like the leanest pickings off a rubbish heap. Regardless, the elves' industry meant Newton and Guin were left standing alone for a while. Newton looked along the track they'd come down. There was a long high tunnel, but no suggestion of an exit apart from a quartet of elves standing on guard near the rear of the train, holding knives and larger billhook-type blades.\n\nHe looked down at Guin. Her pale little face looked even paler in this gloomy light. There was a concerned, distant look on her face. \"Don't worry,\" he said, dropping into his default carer mode. \"I'll look after you.\"\n\nGuin looked at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"I said I'll look after you. Don't be afraid.\"\n\n\"I'm not afraid.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"I'm just saying if\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, but I'm not,\" she said with quiet certainty. \"I was thinking, why do elves need reindeer?\"\n\nThe patchwork reindeer thing rolled its shrivelled eyes and stamped its hoofs.\n\n\"Reindeer are cute,\" said Newton.\n\n\"That one isn't.\"\n\n\"We just haven't got to know her yet.\"\n\n\"Her?\"\n\n\"Only female reindeer have antlers in winter.\"\n\n\"Those antlers are bolted on.\"\n\n\"We haven't got to know it yet,\" said Newton. Emboldened by his need to show Newton Woollby loved all animals, cute and ugly, he edged towards the reindeer. The creature blinked and angled its head as though trying to focus its clearly useless eyes on him.\n\n\"Hey, Blinky,\" he sang softly, holding out the flat of his hand to her muzzle as he slowly approached. \"I could make friends with any of the horses at the stables,\" he told Guin.\n\n\"That is not a horse,\" said Guin. \"It barely qualifies as an animal.\"\n\n\"She just needs to be shown a little love. Maybe she's feeling out of sorts. Hey, what do reindeer take when they've got a stomach ache.\"\n\n\"A joke? At this time?\"\n\n\"Elk-a-seltzer!\" Newton grinned.\n\nGuin did not crack a smile, not even a fake one.\n\n\"You like my jokes,\" Newton simpered to Blinky. \" You do, don't you? Don't you, you lovely little\u2014\"\n\nThe reindeer jerked forward and snapped at Newton's hand. He snatched it back barely in time before hard, yellow zombie teeth clacked together on the space where his fingers had just been.\n\n\"Bad reindeer!\" he gasped in alarm. \"Naughty Blinky!\"\n\n\"I was saying\u2014\" said Guin, \"\u2014why do elves need reindeer? They're not native to this country and\u2014\"\n\nWhatever Guin was about to say went unsaid as the nearest elf, having finished overseeing the unloading of the train, barked an order at them and waved his knife. \"Takka pokj\u00f3t, lj\u00f3\u00f0ur ma\u00f0!\" The elf gestured viciously at a bulging sack.\n\nNewton looked at Guin, perplexed.\n\n\"I think he wants you to carry it,\" she said.\n\n\"You understand elf now?\"\n\n\"I'm going by context.\" She pointed at the sack. \"Takka pokj\u00f3t?\"\n\nThe elf waved its knife encouragingly.\n\nNewton bent and tried lifting the sack. Whatever was in it was too heavy for him to lift. He grasped the wet corners and dragged it along, directed into the centre of the cavern by the elf.\n\nThe place definitely had the feel of a storage area. Add a forklift truck and some hard hats and it could be the distribution centre of a major company. Half-constructed (or possibly deconstructed) market stalls were leant together in one place. Piles of scrap wood \u2013 furniture and fencing \u2013 sat alongside far neater piles of freshly cut logs. A mountain of stollen, stacked like bricks, was positioned alongside a vat of sweets wrapped in colourful tissue. Shiny Christmas present boxes, red with gold ribbon, sat in a vast pile, waiting to receive their toys. A giant storage container, like a lorry container but on reinforced sledge runners, stood by the pile. On it, in wonky writing, someone had painted the words:" + }, + { + "title": "NORF AMERICA", + "text": "Newton was curious, but was distracted by the strings upon strings of sausages hanging above them. \"Hot dog sausages,\" he grunted as he heaved the sack along.\n\n\"Are you actually hungry?\" said Guin.\n\n\"No, I'm\u2026 The elves run the market.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said. \"I don't get why. None of this makes sense.\"\n\n\"Not just me, then.\"\n\nThe elf barked at them.\n\n\"He wants you to leave it there,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Good.\" Newton let it drop and wondered when the feeling might return to his arms.\n\nElves \u2013 horrible sharp-faced elves, toddler-sized but as far from human as it was possible to be whilst still retaining all the standard features \u2013 gathered round Guin and Newton. They prodded and pushed the pair towards another tunnel leading out of the cavern.\n\n\"I think our dad and mum are alive,\" said Guin.\n\n\"That's the spirit,\" said Newton.\n\n\"No, I do. If they'd been dead, they'd have brought them here.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, happy to say something that gave her hope.\n\nHer hand gripped his. \"Didn't you see?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe raised his hand. He looked at it. It was red with smears of blood.\n\n\"Your sack. It was that Duncan man's body.\"\n\nNewton felt sick. In a frenzy he tried to brush the blood off on his jumper. But he was also thinking that maybe she was right. Maybe their folks were alive, somewhere." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Dave had taken his own advice and thrashed around so he was facing uphill as the avalanche hit. As snow tumbled onto him in slabs and looser chunks, he'd tried to move upwards. It was a mostly hopeless task that was made even harder by no longer knowing which way was uphill after a few moments. A tree branch crashed down next to him and he held onto it, sliding along and hoping he was going the right way. After a few seconds all was silence. He could hear the distant echo of the avalanche, but he knew he was buried in the snow.\n\n\"Don't panic. Don't panic.\"\n\nDave's paramedic training had equipped him to keep his cool in extraordinary situations \u2013 although that was usually in the face of other people's imminent deaths, not his own. He'd tried to explain to Guin how her swimming lessons were giving her a similar skill. The breathing control she needed when she swam with her face in the water came from the same place. He firmly believed mastery over some of the body's basic functions was key.\n\nCould he do it now? He made a conscious effort to slow his breathing. He knew his first instinct would be to pant wildly, but he needed to slow down his entire body to remain calm. It would also help him make the best use of his limited oxygen. He made a brief survey of his body. He didn't seem to be injured. His legs were both locked in place. His left arm was curled around his face, giving him space for the air he was so thankful for. He could flex his fingers slightly. His right arm was by his waist and a quick jiggle told him he had some movement.\n\nCautiously he moved it gently back and forth, fingers trying to pick up any useful information. He was careful not to make sudden movements, for fear of disturbing the air pocket around his face. His fingers pushed further, there was a rush of different sensations. He knew he was disoriented, but he really wanted to believe it was open air he could feel. Did he dare to push himself that way, knowing if he was wrong he might completely cut off his air supply by disturbing the snow? He had no real choice.\n\nHe pushed his arm as hard as he could, and then eased the arm protecting his face towards it. Snow fell into his face, filling his mouth. He pushed on, clinging to the belief that this was the way out.\n\nThen he was through. His arm and shoulder were free. He was able to shove the snow off his face. He sucked in long, greedy breaths and shoved snow off the rest of him, grappling for the rope so he could find Esther.\n\nShe was nearby. If he didn't have the rope to follow he would have walked straight past her: underneath a large chunk of what looked like a fir tree. She only had a light covering of snow, but she was out cold, and there was a bruise across her face where the tree had struck her.\n\n\"Esther!\" he cried, feeling for a pulse. She was alive. He scooped snow away from her and checked her breathing. She started to come round as he felt along her limbs.\n\n\"Mm, frisky,\" she said groggily.\n\n\"Bloody hell, Esther. We nearly died.\"\n\nShe sat slowly up. \"Well,\" she said, \"that might work out well for us. If the elves think they've killed us.\"\n\nThey stood and embraced, thigh deep in the snow. They were both shivering. Dave wasn't sure if it was shock, or the fact they were both wet and chilled to the bone.\n\n\"We have no idea what's happened to the kids,\" he said in a choked sob. \"They could be anywhere. They might be de\u2014\"\n\n\"Shh, we must assume they are okay,\" she said. \"And we're going to find them.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"We don't know how yet, but we will. I think we need to go back into town and start again.\"\n\nIt wasn't an appealing thought, but standing here in the snow was certain to render them both incapable of anything. They wrapped their arms around each others' shoulders and walked slowly back the way they'd come." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Guin and Newton were herded and hurried along a narrow rock tunnel. The fairy lights along the walls were even more sparse and temperamental than the ones in the main cavern. They stumbled through patches of darkness between moments of rosy cheeriness.\n\nThe elf behind them screeched an order and they were diverted to one side and into a\u2014\n\nGuin blinked and looked about them.\n\nLong, brightly painted workbenches were arranged in rows and columns. Twee little stools stood by the benches, along with neatly laid out sets of mallets, saws, gimlets, files, shears, paintbrushes and pots. From the rustic beams above hung boughs of holly, sprigs of mistletoe and metres and metres of festive paperchains. Against the far wall were a series of cutesy windows outside which the snow gathered thickly.\n\n\"It's Santa's workshop,\" she whispered. Except, she noticed on second glance, the paintwork on the benches was peeling, half the mallets were broken, the saws were either rusted or blunt, the holly was dead and black, the paperchains appeared to be made from ancient yellow newspaper, and the windows were painted on the cave wall. Not windows at all.\n\n\"What's going on?\" said Newton.\n\nAn elf leapt onto the workbench in front of them. He \u2013 no, she \u2013 had the sharpest, pointiest features they'd yet seen on an elf. As though there had been a work related incident involving her face and a vice. A pair of half-moon spectacles balanced on the end of a long nose. A wooden ruler dangled dangerously in her hand.\n\n\"Nei tala!\" she squawked.\n\n\"Sorry,\" said Newton. \"We were just\u2014\"\n\n\"Ekkla tala, ya big lummox.\"\n\n\"Sorry. What?\"\n\nThe elf lashed out with the ruler. It cracked sharply across Newton's shoulder.\n\n\"Ow! Okay, I\u2014\"\n\nCrack!\n\n\"Oww! No, I get it. I\u2014\"\n\nCrack!\n\nNewton screwed up his face, held his yelp of pain in and nodded. Guin put a reassuring hand on his arm, and received a ruler whack to the knuckles from the elf. It was one of those terrible moments of pain that didn't initially hurt at all. Guin looked at her bloodless white hand in shock and knew \u2013 just knew \u2013 that in a five seconds it was going to hurt like hell.\n\n\u2026 three, four, five\u2026\n\nGuin gritted her teeth and shoved her throbbing hand under her arm.\n\n\"Svo, mi'ducks, ergi Gerd,\" said the elf, strolling along the workbench. \"\u00de\u00faert h\u00e9rtil a\u00f0na. Toy bygling.\" She swung round to indicate the entire workshop. \"D\u00fakir, lesnn, der Pooh ber.\"\n\nGuin nodded, pretending/hoping she understood half of that. The elf, whose name was possibly Gerd, gestured to shelves and baskets of supplies on one side of the workshop.\n\n\"Gerl sem\u00fa vilen, \u00f0ur r\u00e9tt Bobby Dazzler.\"\n\n\"Who's Bobby Dazzler?\" said Newton.\n\nCrack! Gerd's little ruler slapped across Newton's head. It was a surprise it didn't break, although Newton's mass of curly hair probably acted a bit like a protective cushion. A bit.\n\n\"\u00de\u00fa\u00e1tt sj\u00f6og fim m\u00edn\u00fatur. All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi.\" Gerd leapt away and scurried to a corner.\n\n\"What the hell\u2014?\" whispered Newton, rubbing his sore head.\n\n\"I thought it was obvious,\" said Guin.\n\nThe teenager looked at her blankly.\n\n\"She wants us to make toys. Wonderful toys. We've got sj\u00f6og fim minutes.\"\n\n\"How long's that?\"\n\n\"Something-five minutes. I'm not sure.\"\n\n\"You are kidding me.\"\n\n\"Nope,\" said Guin. She began to explore the nearest workbench. \"And I think we ought to do a good job of it too.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nGuin held her arms out. \"You see anyone else here?\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"You think we're the first children they've ever kidnapped?\"\n\n\"Um\u2026\"\n\n\"And do you think they just let the other ones go?\"\n\nNewton looked like he was thinking about it and didn't like what he was thinking. \"Maybe we ought to make ourselves useful,\" he said eventually.\n\n\"I agree,\" said Guin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "In a stiff drawer beneath a workbench, Newton found several crumpled and ripped instruction sheets for the construction of various toys. There were pictures, wildly unhelpful arrows and exclamation marks, and the limited written instructions were written in what looked like runes straight out of The Lord of the Rings.\n\n\"It's just like IKEA instructions,\" he said to Guin, cracking a smile to try to raise the mood.\n\nThey were alone in the workshop, but they were filled with a sense of being watched. The sounds of elves working, squabbling, ordering each other about and occasionally killing each other, echoed into the cave from afar, reducing individual sounds to a distorted ghostly murmur.\n\nGuin decided it would be easiest to make cuddly toys from the large supplies of fabric in the corner of the room. Sewing was a more forgiving craft than carving or carpentry. That was when they discovered the big hoppers of material were in fact mostly full of discarded human clothing. Including children's.\n\n\"We need to show them we're useful,\" Newton repeated himself hollowly. He waved one of the printed patterns at Guin. \"You want a pattern to follow?\"\n\n\"I'm good,\" she said, rummaging through the materials she amassed. \"I don't like instructions.\"\n\nNewton nodded, picking out what looked like an easy pattern for a cloth rabbit. \"Mum loves building IKEA flat pack furniture,\" he said.\n\n\"I think that's one of the reasons why dad likes her,\" said Guin.\n\nNewton didn't particularly want to think about why Dave liked his mum. If he did it was too easy for his brain to drift into thoughts of their parents' love life. Through conversations with his mum (who had a tendency to overshare) he gathered even old people in their thirties and forties had something like a love life. He shuddered and tried to drive away the thoughts by busying himself with the rabbit pattern.\n\n\"I like the little bits you get in IKEA furniture,\" said Guin. She had cut out random shapes from a big dress with a floral pattern and was now fiddling with something else.\n\nNewton saw that she had her little wire man on the bench in front of her. He realised her little robot toy made of spare nuts and bolts was probably still in the wooden box in the burning hotel. \"What's his name?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hmmm?\" Guin saw him looking. \"That's Wiry Harrison. He's my best one. This\u2014\" She put down a shiny crumpled thing she'd just made. It had four legs and a long neck. \"This is Tinfoil Tavistock.\"\n\n\"A new Tinfoil Tavistock?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. It's still Tinfoil Tavistock. Just cos I had to make her again, doesn't mean it's not her.\"\n\nNewton wasn't sure that was true. You couldn't get a copy of a loved one or a best friend and it still be the same thing. He thought about Lily and knew that if she was ever replaced by a copy, if he ever got out of this place and returned to the stables, he wouldn't be able to accept a substitute. Even Yolanda\u2026 Yolanda was Yolanda and a rough approximation of her wouldn't be the same thing.\n\nNewton and Guin worked side by side, he following the pattern step by step, she attacking cloth and cotton and buttons with seemingly no plan at all.\n\n\"Why do elves make toys?\" he asked some minutes later.\n\n\"Is this the beginning of a joke?\" said Guin.\n\n\"No,\" he said, wondering if it could be. \"I mean it. Why do they make toys?\"\n\n\"You mean, cos there's no Father Christmas to deliver?\"\n\n\"Even if there was. Why would he do it? Why would they do it?\"\n\n\"Because children love presents,\" she said.\n\nNewton didn't think that was good enough. \"Children love chocolate too. Doesn't mean that once a year a magical being comes into our houses and buries us under a mound of chocolate.\"\n\n\"The Easter Bunny,\" said Guin.\n\n\"You don't believe in the Easter Bunny do you?\"\n\n\"I don't believe in Father Christmas, but we're having this conversation.\"\n\nUp until a few hours ago, Newton would have agreed with her. Given what they'd experienced in the past hours, he was prepared to put what he did and didn't believe to one side.\n\n\"Picture it,\" he said. \"There's this guy. Clearly he's fabulously wealthy because he can afford to build workshops and factories and stuff. And he decides to use that wealth to make toys and give them out to children across the world. What's his motivation?\"\n\n\"Guilt,\" said Guin without hesitation. \"Parents give their children stuff when they're feeling guilty.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" agreed Newton. He imagined the average teenager didn't get to enjoy the expensive hobby of horse-riding, and if his own father hadn't run out on them years ago, leaving his mum a sad and guilty mess, maybe he wouldn't either. It was another topic he didn't want to think on too deeply. \"So, he's making up for his bad deeds of the past, huh?\"\n\n\"Maybe he was a criminal,\" suggested Guin. \"Or a soldier. Maybe he slaughtered hundreds of people in battle. That's why his clothes are all red.\"\n\n\"Good one,\" said Newton. \"So he went from slaying people to sleighing. You know, on a sleigh with reindeer.\"\n\n\"Painful,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Needs work.\"\n\nGuin sewed material together with enviable speed. \"In fact,\" she said, \"maybe Santa is Satan.\"\n\n\"Dyslexic Satan.\"\n\n\"Exactly. And this Father Christmas malarkey is him trying to make up for all the bad in the world. All of it.\"\n\n\"Another fine theory. Of course, mum says that Christmas encourages evil and greed. So really, if Santa is Satan then this is all just a ploy to create more greed and commercialism. Mum would say he's doing a really good job of it too.\"\n\nNewton began to sew together the shapes he'd cut out. The material had caught in the shears and his rabbit toy was a bit jagged. But it still looked like a rabbit. Sort of. If given a range of animals to pick from, multiple choice style, people would identify it as a rabbit. As long as the options were sufficiently diverse. If the choices were 'rabbit', 'pointy guinea pig' and 'ill-favoured weasel' then it might be tougher.\n\n\"Do you think there is one?\" he said.\n\n\"One what?\" said Guin, who was embellishing the multiple ears (or was it arms?) on her creation with sequins.\n\n\"Father Christmas.\"\n\nShe looked about, thinking. \"We'd have seen him already if he was here.\"\n\nNewton nodded. It made sense.\n\n\"But,\" she added, \"the thing that Gerd said: 'All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi.'\"\n\n\"What about it?\"\n\n\"I think it translates as 'All hail the big beard.'\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Esther and Dave took care to be as quiet as they could, although Esther was convinced the chattering of her teeth was so loud the elves would be sure to hear it. The streets were silent and deserted as they walked in the shadows, keeping a careful watch. They passed a cookware shop, a pharmacy and a charity shop. Esther heard noises. Dave heard them too.\n\n\"What do you think's going on?\" Esther whispered.\n\nThere was definitely fresh activity in the town centre. As they rounded a corner they could see that the marketplace had come to life once more. The jolly fairly lights and illuminations cast a warm glow over the dozens of elves congregating there.\n\n\"Look at all the stuff they're eating and drinking,\" murmured Dave. He sounded a touch envious. \"It's some sort of party.\"\n\nThere were bottles of sticky liqueurs everywhere. Most of the elves were tucking into mince pies and candy canes as they jostled merrily around a central raised area.\n\n\"It's like a theatre show wrap party,\" said Esther. \"All very self-congratulatory. And look!\" She nudged Dave, nodding over to the left. Another human shape collapsed onto the floor as the elves climbed out to join the party. Esther recognised the human shell as a the stallholder who'd been selling nutcrackers earlier. She'd thought he had learning difficulties, instead, he'd had elves inside him all along.\n\n\"The last market day of the year,\" she said. \"All the real humans are dead or have left. I bet the road into town is going to stay blocked now. Alvestowe belongs to the elves for Christmas.\"\n\n\"Do elves celebrate Christmas?\" wondered Dave.\n\n\"Or do they have other plans?\" she said darkly.\n\nEsther crept forward but Dave held her back. \"They'll see us for sure!\"\n\n\"We'll never find the kids if we can't see what they're doing.\" She looked back along the row of shops. \"The charity shop.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"We need to get some dry clothes, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but they're closed.\"\n\nEsther sighed patiently. \"Yes they are. I don't think that's our biggest problem right now. We need to get some dry clothes, and maybe, just maybe, we can dress ourselves in clothes that help us blend in a bit more.\"\n\n\"We're going to disguise ourselves as elves?\"\n\n\"It sounds ridiculous when you say it like that.\"\n\nDave sighed. Esther handed him a soggy bundle: the altar cloth. He unwrapped it to find a heavy candlestick.\n\n\"We only wanted the candle!\"\n\n\"It was jammed in and we were in a hurry,\" said Esther with a shrug.\n\nDave wrapped the candlestick back up in the altar cloth.\n\nEsther reflected briefly on the ungodliness of using church equipment for breaking and entering as Dave smashed in one of the panes of glass on the door. He reached through and let them into the shop.\n\n\"At least it's a bit warmer in here,\" she said, looking around. \"Right, now we need to find something we can work with. See if there's anything like make-up while I sort through the clothes.\"\n\nEsther searched through the dark shop, among dead men's suits and out of season fashion items. She found a rummage box full of hats. She pulled out some stripy bobble hats.\n\nDave came back with a box. \"This any good?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's what we need.\" She pulled out some foundation. \"Now, you know how the elves have all got really pale faces and red lips? Well that's what we need to have. Take this stuff and cover up your stubble as best you can. Then we'll put some lipstick on you.\"\n\n\"This feels so wrong,\" complained Dave as he dabbed on foundation while peering into a mirror.\n\n\"Oh, do you think we're guilty of cultural appropriation?\" Esther said. It was something she worried about a lot, as it was a trap that was so easy to fall into. \"I mean these elves are clearly authentic in a way that we could never\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't think we need to worry about that,\" said Dave. \"Seriously.\"\n\n\"Well, all right then. We do need to practise talking like them.\"\n\n\"Do we? Can't we just keep our mouths shut?\"\n\n\"No. Practise sounding a bit, er, Norwegian or something.\"\n\n\"I don't know what that sounds like. Can I do Swedish?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Hurdy gurdy gur,\" said Dave to his reflection in the mirror.\n\n\"That sounds a bit racist to me,\" said Esther with a frown. \"I'm not sure Swedish people even sound like that. Put these on.\"\n\nEsther handed him a pair of stripy leggings. They were the right colours, like a candy cane, but she wasn't sure they were big enough for him.\n\nThey stripped down their outer layers. In the relative warmth of the shop, the snow that had found its way into every crevice of their clothes and bodies was rapidly melting.\n\nDave kicked aside his trousers and hauled the leggings up to his mid-thigh. \"Not sure they're going to go any further.\"\n\n\"Give it a go,\" she said, \"Go on, pull!\"\n\nDave tugged and got them to his hips. The elastic gouged an uncompromising ring around his belly.\n\n\"Not bad,\" said Esther. \"Go and find a big jumper to cover that up. Green, red or brown, and then a leather belt to go round your waist.\"\n\n\"This is absurd,\" moaned Dave, wandering away to find a jumper.\n\nEsther had pulled on some stripy tights and a brown woollen dress herself. Now she had a slightly more tricky task to accomplish. She rummaged below the counter and found some sewing supplies. Finding a leather handbag in a fleshy pink shade and two pairs of ear warmers, she began to cut the handbag into sections,.\n\n\"Dave, would you be able to bend a wire coat hanger into a teardrop shape?\" she asked.\n\n\"Er, sure.\" He twisted a coat hanger until it weakened enough for him to break off a length. He formed the shape Esther wanted.\n\n\"Excellent. Now do another three, please.\"\n\n\"Have we got time for this?\" he said.\n\n\"We want to find our children, don't we?\"\n\n\"I bet they're not doing bloody arts and crafts.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Guin finished her toy with time and materials to spare. She had constructed the plush toy as her whims and instincts dictated. As she sewed and stuffed and adorned, the name and character and back story of Starfish Eglantine came to life. Eglantine was a starfish out of her natural environment, trapped in a cold and hostile world, far from any friends and any help. But Eglantine was not afraid. Although her body was squishy and vulnerable, she had made her heart into a stone and refused to be frightened by the horrors around her.\n\nGuin did not think she and Eglantine could be friends. Eglantine was too tough and embittered, but there was a grudging respect between Eglantine and Guin, between Eglantine and Wiry Harrison. Tinfoil Tavistock did not like Eglantine. The quadruped of indeterminate species was unnerved by the faceless creature's steely manner. But that was understandable: Tavistock was only a child.\n\nEglantine observed with cool approval as Guin used her spare time to surreptitiously gather supplies. The flexible lengths of wicker Guin had used for supporting Eglantine's arms could also be fashioned into serviceable elf crosses. Guin made four, held together with twists of wire, and pinned them to the inside of her top. She found three small blades and was wondering how she could conceal them in a roll of cloth when, from nowhere, the elf Gerd bounded onto the nearest workbench.\n\n\"H\u00e6ltu!\" she screeched and pointed at Newton. \"T\u00edmi erk lo\u00f0, buggerlugs.\"\n\nNewton dropped the \u2026 thing he was making \u2013 a tuft of white stuffing still poking out of its rump \u2013 and stepped back from the bench.\n\nGerd strode up and down the bench, the curled toes of her tiny boots quivering with each step. She bent over Guin's creation, peered at it through her half-moon spectacles and then prodded and poked it.\n\n\"Hver it \u00fea\u00f0?\"\n\n\"It's a starfish,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Starfiskur?\"\n\n\"A starfish.\"\n\n\"Star \u2026 feeesh?\"\n\nGerd turned it over, gave it an experimental bite like she was testing gold and then tossed it back down on the bench in a manner that was not entirely dismissive. She walked over to Newton's work. Guin knew it was meant to be a bunny rabbit. She'd seen the plans.\n\n\"Hver it \u00fea\u00f0?\"\n\n\"Um, it's a rabbit,\" said Newton nervously.\n\n\"Du kani?\" Gerd picked it up, poked it and ripped off one of its eyes. \"Ger stykki rot.\" Gerd pinched and pulled and picked at the toy, all the while venting a litany of criticism which needed no translation.\n\n\"At least you can see it's a rabbit,\" Newton muttered. \"It's not like it's some weird blob thing like that,\" he said, pointing at Guin's starfish.\n\n\"It's not a competition,\" said Guin.\n\n\"It probably is,\" said Newton, instantly adding, \"But I'm glad you won. You've done really well.\"\n\nAs if to emphasise his words, Gerd picked up Guin's efforts and tucked it under her arm. Newton's work was kicked unceremoniously onto the floor. Newton automatically picked it up.\n\n\"Poor thing,\" he tutted.\n\n\"Sometimes,\" said Guin gently, \"some animals are in just too much pain to let them go on living.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I'm just saying it might be kinder to let it die,\" she said.\n\n\"\u00de\u00fa ud \u00fe\u00fa,\" snapped Gerd, gesturing for them to follow. \"Timi ger n\u00e6xta verk!\"\n\n\"Time for the next test, I think,\" Guin translated.\n\nNewton wasn't listening. \"Kinder to let it die,\" he muttered. \"Let the dog drown. All you want to do is kill things.\"\n\nOutside in the cavern, they passed by the stall in which the mad-eyed zombie reindeer stood.\n\n\"You like my rabbit, don't you, Blinky?\" Newton said, waggling his work at the undead creature. \"You do, don't you?\"\n\nBlinky lunged forward. With yellow teeth he savagely ripped the toy from Newton's hand.\n\n\"I'm going to take that as a yes,\" he said, defensively." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Gerd the overly critical elf stopped outside a door in the tunnel. This door was thick and looked like it had been repaired a number of times. She pulled it open with some effort and led the way inside. Newton had to bend to get through.\n\nIt was another workshop area, although not as gaily painted as the toy workshop. There were no fake painted windows on the walls, only intermittent scorch marks: little starbursts of sooty residue.\n\nNewton looked at the tubs of knick-knacks and assorted junk: false teeth, car keys, teaspoons and the kinds of cheap Happy Meal toys even a charity shop would turn away. He looked at the lengths of cardboard tubing, the paper, the quills and the rolls of festive crepe paper.\n\n\"It's a Christmas cracker workshop,\" he said.\n\nGerd began to give a long speech of which Newton understood absolutely nothing, although mentions of 'j\u00f3li' and 'sprenging bume' and 'h\u00e6la fyni' sounded like they ought to mean something.\n\n\"\u00de\u00fa\u00e1tt sj\u00f6og fim m\u00edn\u00fatur,\" said Gerd.\n\n\"Something-five minutes, huh?\" said Newton.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" said Gerd.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" Guin replied and the elf left them to it.\n\n\"Why do I feel we're being auditioned for jobs we don't want?\" muttered Newton.\n\n\"Getting the job might be better than being rejected.\"\n\nNewton went over to the piles of paper by the quill and inkwell: the joke writing station.\n\n\"Maybe,\" he chuckled, \"I should write, 'Help! I'm trapped in a Christmas cracker\u2014'\" He tailed off, realising the cracker they'd opened at Mrs Scruples' dinner table, with that same lame joke, had come from this very workshop.\n\n\"She said they were locally sourced,\" said Guin, clearly thinking the same thing.\n\nNewton shook his head. \"The people of the town were in league with the elves.\"\n\n\"Or under occupation.\"\n\n\"I think we'd best get on with it,\" he said.\n\nWith little discussion, they decided upon a division of labour. Newton would do jokes. Guin would select toys to go inside the cracker and wrap them up.\n\n\"Snappers,\" said Newton.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"The bit that goes bang.\" He looked round and saw a heavy chest of blackened wood beneath the heaviest concentration of scorch marks on the wall. Newton went to have a look. He lifted the weighty lid. Inside were not just strips of cracker explosives but several jars of interesting chemicals. And, by interesting, he meant dangerous-looking.\n\nAvoiding the sticky gluey edges of the badly made cracker strips, Newton carefully lifted out a dusty jar with a faded label which was barely legible. \"Silver nitrate,\" he said.\n\nGuin had found an open book on the work surface nearby. \"Silver nitrate, when combined with nitric acid and ethanol can form crystals of silver fulminate,\" she read. \"Silver fulminate is explosive and very toxic.\"\n\nNewton looked through the chest. Sure, there were bottles of nitric acid and ethanol too.\n\nGuin continued reading. \"Only very small quantities of silver fulminate should be prepared at once or else\u2014\"\n\n\"Else what?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"The rest of the page has been burned away.\"\n\nNewton looked. The hardback book was entitled O-Level Chemistry for All Schools'. It looked very old and, indeed, a whole corner of the book was nothing but blackened char.\n\n\"Yeah, let's be careful with this stuff then,\" he said, leaving the jars well alone. \"Maybe if we need to go all A-Team later, we can use it for something.\"\n\n\"What's an A-Team?\" asked Guin.\n\nNewton wasn't sure. \"It's something my mum says when she tries to make things out of stuff not meant for that purpose. I think it's from an old film, starring that guy from Taken. You know, the guy who has a 'very particular set of skills.'\"\n\n\"Sort of like Bob the Builder,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Possibly,\" said Newton. \"But with more explosions.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "In the charity shop, Dave grabbed more coat hangers while Esther set to work with a needle and thread. She covered the teardrop shapes with the flesh-coloured leather and sewed them onto the ear warmers. She popped the finished article onto her head, covered it with a bobble hat and looked in the mirror, turning her head to view the effect.\n\n\"Elf ears. Very good!\" said Dave.\n\n\"Let's do yours now.\"\n\nThey both paraded their finished outfits up and down. Dave grinned. \"These stupid leggings are really uncomfortable, but I think we make pretty good elves, all told. Let's go and see what they're up to!\"\n\n\"There's just one small thing that we need to fix,\" said Esther.\n\nDave gave her a questioning look. She beckoned him over and plucked a pair of lightweight shoes from a rack. She used the scissors to cut away the back of the shoe and then applied it just above his knee. With the needle and thread she sewed it onto the leggings.\n\n\"In case you hadn't noticed, we're way too tall to be elves,\" she said.\n\n\"Wait \u2013 we're going to shuffle around on our knees?\" Dave asked.\n\nEsther nodded, her head bent in concentration. She fixed the other shoe and gave Dave's legs a critical stare. \"Go, on, see how it looks.\"\n\nDave got down onto his knees and moved about. He tried shuffling at first, then experimented with lifting his knees to make the walking more realistic. It looked very uncomfortable.\n\n\"I wouldn't worry too much about technique,\" said Esther tactfully. \"I'm hoping we won't come under too much scrutiny. Let me fix my own shoes and we'll be ready to go.\"\n\nA few minutes later they made their way carefully out of the shop, using their hands to brush the broken glass out of the way as they shuffled out onto the street.\n\n\"Hurdy, gurdy, gur,\" murmured Dave.\n\nEsther tutted, falling silent as they drew in closer to where all the elves seemed to be congregating. She trawled her memory for the elf language that Guin seemed to have picked up so quickly.\n\n\"Ek man, dum de dum ... sv\u00edn,\" she tried.\n\nWhat did it mean? She couldn't remember. She had to confess Dave's elf speech might be just as effective. She pulled up short. That was a really racist thing to think! Was she a racist?\n\n\"Dave, am I a racist?\" she asked quietly.\n\n\"You refuse to eat in Italian restaurants,\" he said.\n\n\"That's because it's just pasta and pizza,\" she said. \"Any idiot can cook that. I don't hate Italians.\"\n\n\"We're going out for pizza when we get out of here then,\" he said, as they approached the square.\n\nThe party was in full swing. There was scratchy music coming from somewhere, like the sound of an orchestra composed entirely of broken violins. Elves were swigging drinks from little cups and shoving cakes and sweets into their mouths.\n\n\"I feel ill just watching. Everything they're eating is at least ninety percent sugar,\" Esther said.\n\n\"Shhh.\"\n\nThey sauntered in, on their knees, trying to stick to the gloomier areas and nodding at elves who looked their way.\n\n\"Hurdy gurd,\" nodded Dave.\n\n\"Svin svin ekki mek,\" said Esther.\n\nEsther thought it would have been nice to believe their disguises were amazing. It was more likely the elves were too drunk, or that now they were off-duty, they didn't give a toss about human interlopers.\n\nDave squeezed her hand. \"Look,\" he whispered. \"The stage.\"\n\nAn elf walked to the front of the raised area and raised his hands for silence. He started to speak in the strange elvish language, and Esther listened hard, trying to discern any meaning. She almost convinced herself tiny fragments were English-like, if someone spoke English with Dave's weird hurdy gurdy accent.\n\n\"Enemy? Is he talking about an enemy?\" she whispered to Dave.\n\nDave gave her a blank look.\n\nA cheer went up from the crowd; Esther and Dave joined in. Everyone raised their snacks and drinks in an obvious toast to something. Esther didn't have a cup so raised an invisible one instead.\n\nThe elf reached into a leather bag that hung by his waist. He pulled out a big folded sheet of paper.\n\n\"I've seen those plans before,\" said Dave.\n\n\"What?\" said Esther.\n\n\"Catheter had them.\"\n\nThe elf on the stage ripped the plans in half to raucous applause. He threw them to the floor and stamped on them.\n\nDave and Esther looked at each other.\n\n\"We need them,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nThe elf on the stage hadn't finished. He fetched something else out of his bag. It looked like a wisp of sheep's wool. He cradled it reverentially in his hand before holding it up for all to see. There were oohs and aahs from the crowd. He then used something from a small jar to apply the thing to his chin. He strode from side to side of the stage, sticking out his chin so that everyone could see.\n\nFrom the crowd, some of the elves started chanting. \"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi. All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi.\"\n\nEsther really didn't think a stick-on beard was a good look, but she reminded herself she wasn't one to body shame someone for their choice of facial hair.\n\nDave nudged her and nodded to the left of the stage. Another elf was climbing up, although it clearly wasn't easy, given the extent of his injuries. He had clearly suffered extensive burns: his clothes hung off his livid body in singed rags. What was not clear was how he'd come by the other injuries. It looked very much as if half of him had been crushed: one limp arm dragged behind, like an empty flap of skin.\n\n\"Bacraut,\" whispered Dave. \"We put him in a trouser press.\"\n\nEsther thought she saw one of the nearby elves give Dave a sharp look. She elbowed him and munched down on a candy cane, trying hard to fit in.\n\nBack on the stage, Bacraut approached the elf with the beard. There was clearly some sort of disagreement in their brief exchange, but Bacraut didn't look very threatening with his injuries. Beardie laughed at him and turned away, still proudly displaying the beard to the crowd. Bacraut growled and used his good hand to pull a huge knife from a sheath.\n\nBacraut lunged forward and stabbed Beardie repeatedly in the back. Once on the ground, Bacraut turned Beardie over by kicking his twitching body. He slashed at the exposed belly. He pulled out lengths of intestine, held them up and yelled something at the crowd that clearly conveyed the message the young pretender was no longer in a position to usurp authority.\n\n\"Trouble in elf-town,\" muttered Dave.\n\nBacraut put the knife away. He bent down to pluck the wispy beard off the face of the dead elf and stuck it onto his own face. As he did so, the injured Bacraut seemed to straighten and find new energy from this symbol of power on his face. The crowd erupted in applause, having held its collective breath while the drama played out.\n\nBacraut waved to the crowd, basking in the adoration, or fear; Esther really wasn't sure which. After a few moments, Bacraut clapped his hands and a box was brought on stage by two helper elves. It was a sturdy red cardboard box, bound in gold ribbon. The helpers placed it before Bacraut.\n\nHe spoke to the assembled crowd. Esther understood almost nothing, although his affected and exaggerated manner suggested he was acting something out. Bacraut gave a big tired stretch as he talked to the elves and rubbed his eyes as though he had just awoken. He strolled over to the box, expressed pretend surprise and pulled on the ribbon.\n\nA hush had fallen over the audience.\n\nBacraut lifted the lid away and feigned delight at whatever was supposed to be inside. He pretended to lift something out, something heavy and wriggling. He beamed at it and held it close, suddenly gasping in horror as the imaginary thing began to choke him.\n\n\"He's quite the actor,\" Esther whispered to Dave, then uttered a small \"Ow!\" as someone trod on her lower leg.\n\nShe looked back. An elf, crowding forward, had trodden on her trailing lower legs. Esther muttered a wordless \"Don't worry, no harm done.\" The elf was a millisecond away from nodding and moving on when the creature realised elves didn't have extra bits of leg trailing behind them.\n\n\"Erir du footurna?\" it said.\n\n\"Er, Dave,\" muttered Esther.\n\nDave turned, saw and, making matters much worse, leapt to his feet. The look of horror on his face an instant later, in other circumstances, would have been comical.\n\nDave tried to laugh. \"Oh, look,\" he said. \"I appear to have suddenly grown taller.\"\n\nHe grabbed Esther's hand and they ran for it. They kicked, flailed and knocked over elves as they went. Their stitched on shoes flapped at their knees as they ran. As they knocked elves into each other, fights broke out. Elfin alcohol had definitely been consumed in volumes throughout the celebration.\n\nEsther tried to snatch some of the plans off the floor. An elf, its eyes full of malicious intent, leapt at her, scrabbled, missed and then latched onto her arm with its teeth. Esther howled at the pain, shook the elf off viciously and ran to catch up with Dave.\n\n\"Tree!\" panted Dave, grabbing an armful of prickly branches on the massive Christmas tree in the centre of the square. Esther joined him, pulling with all of her might. Together they toppled it onto the elves who were chasing them, rather than fighting each other. It bought them a few precious seconds, but they were definitely not out of danger. There was a pair of elves, sprinting around the edges of the tree, who would easily catch them in no time.\n\nDave lifted a mead barrel from a stall and bowled it at the pursuing elves. It caught on the kerb and glanced slightly off-course, taking down one of them. The other elf skipped free. Dave grabbed a second barrel and raised it.\n\nEsther glanced at the elf. She wasn't sure, but it looked just like the one who had bitten her. Well, they all looked the same really\u2014\n\n\"Oh, God, I am a racist!\" she said. With an anger that was divided equally between the elves and her own preconceptions, she helped Dave slam the barrel down on the elf, crushing it so completely that when liquid seeped out, Esther didn't for a second imagine it was just mead.\n\n\"Come on!\" Dave took her hand and they ran.\n\nEsther ran on feet that felt suddenly sluggish. She registered Dave was talking to her. His words were fading in and out.\n\n\"Dave, I feel a bit funny.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe tried to make the words fit the light-headed detachment she was experiencing. \"Woozy, a bit dreamy.\"\n\nThe chaos in the market was fading behind them. Everything was fading.\n\nEsther stumbled. The snow was powdery soft beneath her feet. It looked surprisingly inviting. \"Maybe a nap would help.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" he said and held her upright. \"Back to the shop, it's just over there. We can hole up for a few minutes. Stay with me, Esther.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Gerd came to inspect the crackers Newton and Guin had made. She was not alone.\n\nThe two elves with her didn't exactly look older or more senior than her \u2013 all the elves looked like underfed children, albeit ones who had undergone some ill-advised cheek-lift and eye-tightening plastic surgery from a doctor with very poor Google reviews. However, there was something in their stiff posture and pompous manner that marked them out as higher up the chain of command than Gerd. One even had a wisp of white beard on his chin.\n\nAs the elves approached, Newton stepped back respectfully, hands behind his back. Guin wondered if this was because Newton had watched a lot of bake off TV shows and knew how the contestants acted when the judges walked back in, or because his hands were covered in a sticky fluffy mass of crepe paper and glue that no amount of picking could shift.\n\nGerd and the elders regarded the five crackers critically. Guin listened attentively. She was tired and frightened (she recognised this and had confided as much in Wiry Harrison) but she was picking up snippets of the elves' language each time she heard them.\n\nThe elders prodded and closely regarded the crackers before pulling them. The first one exploded with far too big a bang, making Guin's ears ring, setting fire to the paper wrapping and knocking the spectacles off Gerd's head.\n\n\"Ut miki\u00f0!\" she yelled. \"Ut miki\u00f0, yer daft ha'peth!\"\n\nThe children cowered. Newton positioned himself protectively in front of Guin, which she found both comforting and irritating.\n\nThe other four crackers didn't crack quite so catastrophically and the three judges peered critically over the contents. In the search for knick-knacks to go inside the crackers, the barrels of odds and ends had offered Guin slim pickings. She suspected their contents came from the pockets and bags of all the humans the elves had kidnapped over the years, and the good stuff was long gone. The four toys were the knob of a car gearstick, a golf ball on which Guin had drawn a smiley face, a broken pencil, and fish cut out from an old sweet wrapper, stuffed into an envelope and optimistically labelled Fortune-telling fish.\n\nGerd took it out of its envelope and stared at it furiously.\n\n\"You put it in your hand,\" Guin explained \"How it moves tells you what your future holds.\"\n\nGerd laid it flat in the palm of her tiny hand. The fish did nothing.\n\n\"It's sleeping at the moment,\" said Guin.\n\nGerd spat in contempt. One of the elders pulled out a joke Newton had written.\n\n\"Hver did g\u00f3\u00f0 kong Wenceslas\u2026?\"\n\n\"Good King Wenceslas,\" said Newton helpfully.\n\nThe elder tried again. \"How did g\u00f3\u00f0 kong Wenceslas like his pizza?\"\n\nThe other elder shrugged. \"Eg na ekki. Hver \u00f0i g\u00f3\u00f0ur kong Wenceslas els og pizza?\"\n\nThe first peered at the answer. \"Deep pan, crisp and even.\"\n\nThe elves did not laugh. Newton gave them a deliberate and pathetically fake laugh. \"Oh, that's a good one. That one will have the family rolling on the floor.\"\n\nEmbarrassed for him, Guin felt compelled to join in. \"Oh, yeah. Really good.\"\n\nThe elder swept the crackers onto the floor dismissively.\n\n\"You should read the others,\" said Newton, his voice wobbling with nerves. \"The one about baby Jesus's weight is a killer.\"\n\nThe elves shouted and argued amongst themselves. They were talking too quick for Guin to follow, but she imagined they were arguing whether to kill the pair of them or keep them as slaves. Guin should have been terrified, maybe her overtired mind had reached peak scaredness and had no more fear to give. She found her attention drawn to the beard of the shouting elder. His chin glistened wetly: glue. The beard was stuck on, like a theatre performers. That was interesting.\n\nThe argument was coming to some sort of heated conclusion but Guin could not work out which viewpoint was winning. An elder whipped out a curvy knife and bounded over to Newton and Guin. She dropped to her knees and bowed her head.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" she said.\n\nShe didn't die so that was something. She reached up and pulled Newton down beside her. \"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" she repeated for him.\n\n\"Er, yes,\" Newton trembled. \"All hal\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014G\u00f3ra skeggi.\"\n\n\"Yes. That.\"\n\nMoments passed. The ringing in Guin's ears from the first cracker explosion filled the silence. Still they did not die. There was the soft padding sound of the elders leaving the room and then Gerd shouted for them to get up and follow her.\n\nGuin and Newton were herded out, down the corridor and out to a recess in the large central cavern. With threats and the application of many granny knots, Gerd tied them with frayed rope to a thick pipe running up the wall before leaving them there. The ground was covered with hay and muck and soft rotting material.\n\n\"What was all that about?\" said Newton.\n\n\"I think we passed the audition,\" said Guin. She considered the filthy floor, and the weariness filling her body. \"I don't want to sit on this.\"\n\nNewton crouched down. \"Come sit on my knee if you like.\"\n\nGuin gave him a long look. \"Doesn't matter how you say that, it sounds creepy.\"\n\n\"I'm just trying to be a good stepbrother.\"\n\n\"You're not my stepbrother yet.\"\n\nHe took a deep breath, like he was trying to quell an unpleasant feeling. \"We will get out of here. We will find my mum and your dad. We'll run away \u2013 maybe take Blinky with us\u2014\"\n\n\"We're not taking the zombie reindeer.\"\n\n\"Zombies deserve love too.\"\n\n\"Not happening, Newton,\" she said.\n\n\"We'll all run away. Mum and dad will get married. It'll be a lovely wedding and embarrassing as hell, and then we'll all live in a big house together \u2013 with separate bedrooms at opposite ends of the house, don't worry \u2013 and we'll be able to happily ignore each other for ever after. What do you say?\"\n\nGuin waggled a finger in her ear. \"Didn't hear any of that. I think that cracker explosion has affected my hearing.\"\n\n\"It'll wear off soon.\"\n\n\"I went deaf for a whole term when I was seven,\" she said.\n\n\"Did you?\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\nHe raised an eyebrow. \"Was that a joke?\"\n\n\"Pardon?\" she said and against her better judgement and mood, found herself smiling a fraction.\n\n\"Snakkur!\" said Gerd, returning with two large and dirty bowls. She presented one to Newton and the other to Guin. The two bowls were not the same. Newton's contained several steaming hotdog sausages. Guin's was filled with something dark green and damp. It looked like the seaweed starter from a Chinese restaurant soaked in a layer of misty gravy.\n\n\"What's this?\" she said. \"Hver it \u00fea\u00f0? I have allergies you know.\"\n\nGerd ignored her and walked off.\n\n\"You can have one of my sausages if you like,\" said Newton.\n\nShe shook her head. \"I didn't like the one I had in the market. It tasted funny.\"\n\nNewton munched on a sausage. \"They don't quite taste like any normal meat,\" he conceded. \"But that's hotdogs for you, right?\"\n\nGuin pinched up a fragment of the soggy green stuff and sniffed it. She couldn't smell it above the overwhelming oily petrol scent in the air. She looked at the pipe they were tied to and, cautiously, wiped at a droplet that had trickled from a leaky joint.\n\n\"Petrol,\" she said.\n\n\"Or something like it,\" said Newton. \"They're pumping a lot of it through here. Your dad would have a health and safety fit about it.\"\n\nGuin tried some of the food. It tasted a bit like cabbage, a bit like snot and a bit like leather but mostly it tasted like grass.\n\n\"Why give us different food?\" she wondered. Not knowing the answer to her own question, added, \"Did you see that the elf's beard was glued on?\"\n\n\"Glued on?\"\n\n\"Like he's pretending to be Santa. And this 'All hail the big beard' stuff. It's like\u2026\" Guin hummed. She half-remembered something she'd read in a book once about islanders in the Pacific or somewhere who had seen white people \u2013 probably Americans \u2013 come along with their planes and their equipment. And how the white people had radioed down planes and supplies of food and such from the sky. So when the white people had gone, the islanders thought if they made pretend radio sets from bamboo stalks and coconut shells, the gods would send down food from the sky because that's how the world appeared to work. She only half-remembered it, and it was probably from a book written by a white person \u2013 probably an American \u2013 so it probably wasn't true anyway, but still\u2026\n\n\"You think these elves actually have a plan?\" she said. \"Or are they just\u2014\"\n\n\"Going through the motions?\" said Newton, starting on his third sausage.\n\nGuin squatted down, rested the food bowl on her knees and pulled out the copy of Little Folk in European Folklore by Dr Alexander and turned to the last page she had been reading. She had just reached a section further detailing fairy children and changelings, and decided to read it while eating. Dr Alexander subscribed to the view that the idea of changelings \u2013 faeries put in the place of elf-stolen babies \u2013 was used in past times to explain why some children were born with disabilities, or autism. Guin wondered, not for the first time, if her dad should get her tested for autism. Her dad had already told her quite clearly he did not believe she had autism, although Gun was certain if they got her tested, and she tried really hard, she could get a diagnosis. The section on changelings was long (and included such pointlessly difficult words as 'victualise', 'cerebrate' and 'kineticism') but the food was quite unappetising, so Guin reached the end of the section just as she finished eating.\n\nAt that moment, there was a shout from outside in the cavern. It was human, and familiar sounding.\n\n\"I am coming! There is no need to hold my hand, little man. I don't know where you have been and there is far too much touching for my liking these days. We wouldn't have half the problems in the world today if people would just keep their hands to themselves.\"\n\nIt was Mrs Scruples, the hotel woman. She was walking into the cavern, surrounded by a large number of elves.\n\n\"She's still alive,\" said Newton, surprised.\n\n\"Doesn't deserve to be,\" said Guin.\n\nThe elves were shaking snow off themselves and had clearly just come in from outside. There was a wild, unhappy energy about them, like they were angry about something. There was one with a stuck-on white beard at the head of the group. His clothes were ragged and burned and smeared with blood.\n\n\"I think there's been trouble in town,\" said Guin.\n\n\"That's Baccarat or Backrub or something,\" said Newton, nodding towards the white bearded one. \"Your dad and me stuck him in a trouser press.\"\n\n\"No wonder he's angry,\" said Guin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Dave elbowed open the door of the charity shop, led Esther inside and sat her on the floor out of sight of anyone looking through the window.\n\n\"Tell me how you feel funny, Esther,\" he said.\n\n\"Just want to sleep,\" she murmured.\n\n\"No, Esther, you need to stay awake. It's really important.\"\n\n\"It might be where it bit me.\"\n\n\"What?\" He looked her over, saw the tear on her sleeve and pulled it up. There was a shallow cut, little more than a row of teeth marks that had barely broken the skin.\n\nDave leaned forward, sniffing. \"Fruity breath.\"\n\n\"S'my new nickname?\" she mumbled.\n\n\"It seems as though you might have excessively high blood sugar.\"\n\n\"Candy canes,\" said Esther and then giggled.\n\nDave had his first aid pack with him and he checked the contents. There was nothing for hyperglycaemia.\n\n\"I won't be a minute,\" he whispered in her ear. \"There's a pharmacy next door. I need to see if I can get in there. Jesus, Esther, please hang on in there.\"\n\nShe was barely responsive.\n\nHe went to the back door of the charity shop. There was a key inside the lock. He opened the door and eased himself partially through, taking a good look around before committing himself to going fully outside. He was in a yard, with bins, and a gate at the far end. The next door along had to belong to the pharmacy. He tried the door, naturally it was locked. A brief search of the yard revealed a half-brick being used as a gate stop. He took off his elf top, muffled the brick in it, and punched in the glass of the door.\n\nHe slipped inside the pharmacy and looked around for their refrigerator. A few minutes later he had several bottles of insulin, a blood test meter, some hypodermic needles and syringes. He slipped back through the yard and into the charity shop.\n\nHe ran a blood test on a drop of blood from her thumb, to see if his suspicions were correct. They were: her blood sugar was dangerously high. He loaded up a syringe with insulin, pulled down the waistband of her trousers a little and injected into her buttock." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Mrs Scruples, all the while talking on such diverse subjects as how draughty the cave was, what the elves could be doing to make the place more homely, and how prudent she was to have insured her now demolished home for more than it was worth, was manhandled (or elf-handled, Newton thought) into the centre of the cavern and onto a raised area.\n\n\"Yes, yes, my wee folk,\" she said. \"This is all well and good, but where is my husband?\"\n\nThere was something entrancing about the way the elves slowly circled the raised area in unison. Newton recalled watching a David Attenborough documentary in which a pod of dolphins circled round a mass of fishes, herding them into a tighter and tighter ball in preparation for the kill. Even the soft and silky tones of Sir David couldn't disguise the menace in the dolphins' orchestrated actions. Newton saw the spoons \u2013 bent, battered, blunt and rusted spoons \u2013 the elves carried. He had initially assumed it was dinnertime for everyone in the cavern; now he was not so certain.\n\nHe chewed on the last of his hotdogs as the inevitable slowly unfolded.\n\n\"I have been a good and faithful servant,\" Mrs Scruples was telling the elves. \"I have kept your secrets and provided you with the \u2026 materials you needed for your work. And, yes, though I do say so myself, I believe I have helped you better yourselves. Although I can see more than a few of you still need to learn how to use a handkerchief and\u2014 Ah!\"\n\nThe \"Ah!\" was at the sight of a man strolling into the cavern from a tunnel entrance. He was old, red-faced, with a straggly silver comb-over and mutton chop whiskers. He wore a tweedy suit over a bright yellow waistcoat. He looked like an extra from a non-specific period drama, a mild-mannered middle class chap who ought to have a name like 'Cholmondeley-Warner' or 'Rutherkins' but was, of course, the much-mentioned and absentee Mr Scruples.\n\n\"Donald! Donald!\" called Mrs Scruples. It wasn't the heartfelt call of a wife to her one true love. It was more the sound of a mistress calling her dog to heel. \"Donald! Stand up straight and greet me!\"\n\nDonald wasn't standing up straight. He moved with a strange rolling gait, his arms flapping with a fluid motion, like he was walking in time to a mellow reggae tune only he could hear. There was also a slack look on his face.\n\n\"Is he drunk?\" whispered Newton.\n\n\"No,\" said Guin.\n\n\"He looks like he's had a stroke.\"\n\n\"No, not that either,\" she said.\n\n\"What's the matter with him?\" said Mrs Scruples. \"Donald! Wake up, man. Look at me.\"\n\nMrs Scruples' head turned towards her, and kept turning. Ninety degrees, a hundred and eighty, further\u2014\n\n\"Donald!\"\n\nThe old man's head wobbled and popped off, dropping to the floor with the lower half of an elf poking out through his neck.\n\n\"Bloody hell,\" whispered Newton.\n\nMr Scruples came apart entirely. Torso and legs parted company; buttons and zips opened and at least five elves jumped out of the artfully reconstructed Donald Scruples.\n\n\"It's a suit,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Not quite,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Where's the real Mr Scruples?\"\n\n\"You're looking at him.\"\n\nIn the central area, Mrs Scruples was doing a fine impression of Edvard Munch's Scream. \"Donald! Donald! Get up! Don't do this!\"\n\nThe elves thought it was all hilarious. They continued to circle Mrs Scruples, gradually drawing closer. Some waved their handkerchiefs at her mockingly; far more were waving their spoons.\n\n\"Are they going to eat her?\" said Newton. Even at a distance he could see the wide-eyed shock on Mrs Scruples' face. She turned and saw Newton and Guin, peering out of their alcove cell.\n\n\"Them!\" she screeched. \"Take them! They'd make far better material. Much more elastic skin. Oil of Olay can only do so much. You don't want me. You don't want me!\"\n\n\"I think I know what's going to happen,\" said Newton.\n\nGuin tutted. \"Took your time, didn't you?\"\n\n\"You shouldn't look,\" he said. But it was too late.\n\nThe beardy elf, Bacraut, leapt at the old woman, aiming at her midriff with his spoon. It wasn't a sharp spoon but an edge doesn't need to be sharp if it's directed with sufficient force. Mrs Scruples didn't manage a scream, producing a wounded, worn out sigh: the kind of noise a dying sofa would make if sofas could scream or, indeed, die.\n\nThankfully (for Newton at least), Mrs Scruples was swiftly hidden from view by the tide of elves pouring on to stick the spoon in. \"That's horrible,\" he said.\n\n[ Guin was looking at the workstations around the cavern. \"I don't think it's over yet,\" she said slowly ]\n\nElves were rushing over with big copper pots balanced on their heads. Out of the scrum of spoon-wielding elves, gobbets of red wet flesh were passed and dumped into the pots.\n\n\"Thought they tasted funny,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Hmmm?\"\n\nShe pointed. At the butchering elves. At the metal pots. At a crank-handled mincing machine in a work station. At the strings and strings of sausages hanging overhead. She looked meaningfully at Newton's empty bowl.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" he murmured and put his hand to his mouth. He didn't feel sick. He felt disgusted, but he didn't feel physically sick. He should have done, shouldn't he? But he didn't. He found himself wondering if this made him a bad person." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Esther blinked and looked up at Dave.\n\n\"You're coming round,\" he said. He pricked her thumb.\n\n\"Ow!\"\n\n\"Just running another blood test.\" The tester beeped and Dave nodded with evident relief.\n\n\"How are you feeling?\" he asked, rubbing her hand.\n\n\"Pretty good,\" she said. \"That was \u2026 weird.\" Her fingers explored the dressing that now adorned her arm.\n\n\"It certainly was,\" said Dave. \"Candy Cane Venom.\"\n\n\"Hmmm?\"\n\n\"Those elves seem to run on pure sugar. One bite sent you into hyperglycaemic shock.\"\n\n\"Like diabetes?\"\n\n\"Right. One to be avoided, definitely. These little bastards are toxic in more ways than one.\"\n\n\"Yes\" said Esther. \"What are they doing?\"\n\nDave rolled his eyes. \"Wish I knew. I had to drag you out of sight of the window. They were marching around with flaming torches. I mean, where do they even get flaming torches from? It's gone properly medieval out there.\"\n\nEsther raised herself up cautiously. They were behind the counter of the charity shop. She risked a peek over the top. Dave was right: outside elves were everywhere.\n\nShe sat up uncomfortably, wondering what she was leaning against. It was a stack of ancient board games and jigsaws. She remembered they were in a charity shop. \"We must put something in the till as a thank you,\" she said.\n\n\"Sure, maybe.\"\n\n\"And, I got some of those papers, the ones they ripped up in the square.\"\n\nShe pulled them from a pocket. It was dark behind the counter, so she pushed them carefully along the floor until they were out of the shadow. She and Dave stayed back out of sight, trying to see what they were looking at.\n\nDave gave a grunt of recognition at the heading. \"Catheter Holdings. Duncan Catheter was doing some kind of local land deal. Brownfield site.\"\n\n\"Doesn't look very brownfield to me,\" said Esther. \"See where it is?\"\n\nDave failed to make out any hint of a location.\n\n\"It's that area at the back of the church. It's mostly steep and inaccessible, but there's part of it that looks flat. He was going to build houses there.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" said Dave. He could see there were numerous house-shaped boxes drawn around an access road. \"What are those circles?\"\n\nEsther shuffled forward. \"It says they're sinkholes. Sinkholes? Wow. And what's that?\"\n\nDave peered closer. \"Playground and recreation park.\"\n\n\"Built over a sinkhole? The man was a complete monster!\"\n\n\"He's dead, remember.\"\n\n\"I used the past tense.\"\n\nDave tapped the map in thought. \"So, the elves were pretty pleased this isn't going ahead now\u2014\"\n\n\"Way ahead of you,\" said Esther. \"That's got to be where their hideout is.\"\n\nDave nodded. \"Where we need to go and look for the kids.\"\n\nEsther got up from the floor, clearly as pleased as Dave to have a sense of purpose. \"Yes, but how? We can't just walk up there and hope they won't notice us. We don't stand any kind of chance in a full-on fight against hundreds of elves.\"\n\nDave started to pace the floor, but realised that would draw the attention of the elves. He squatted again. \"There was a tractor.\"\n\n\"Sorry?\"\n\n\"A tractor, on the road not far from the church.\"\n\n\"Yeah! \" grinned Esther. \"Turn it into an assault vehicle and squash and barge our way into their bloody grotto.\"\n\n\"Squashing and barging are good,\" said Dave, pleased to see life and energy come back to her. \"Assuming the tractor can climb that gradient.\"\n\n\"Assuming one of us can drive the thing.\"\n\n\"How hard can it be? It's just a big car, isn't it?\"\n\nEsther didn't look so sure. \"I spent one summer helping out on a collective farm in Cuba. I sat up in the tractor once. It didn't look like just driving a car.\"\n\n\"That's probably just Cuban tractors,\" said Dave. \"Come on, it's going to work. We're going to squash them and barge them. We're going to annihilate the buggers.\"\n\n\"Vaporise them,\" said Esther.\n\n\"Well, that would be nice.\"\n\n\"I've got an idea for the headlights.\"\n\nShe dragged some of the supplies she'd used earlier onto the floor and picked up the scissors. \"We haven't got time to do the whole A-Team thing and transform the tractor into an armoured vehicle, but if I put a mask around the headlights so they shine in the shape of an elf cross, maybe it will fry some of the little shitbags.\"\n\n\"Elf lasers! You work on that, I'm going to see if we can rig up some stabby things. I did see a broken coat rack near the bins. It would be quite dangerous if you fell on it.\"\n\n\"If it's got heavy bits with nails sticking out then it sounds brilliant,\" said Esther without looking up. \"Look in the kitchen area for knives as well.\"\n\n\"Cool.\" Dave said. \"And there's this pole thing for opening the skylight in here as well.\"\n\n\"Bring it all,\" said Esther." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "The hollowing out and sausagifying of Mrs Scruples occupied many of the elves for quite some time. They took obvious glee in the task.\n\nGuin used her own time wisely, reading from the academic book of elf stuff and discussing what she read with Wiry Harrison and Tinfoil Tavistock to make sure they understood completely. Perhaps, at some point, the book would save their lives. Newton sat close by, knees drawn up to his chin, eyes raised and muttering to himself. Guin wondered if he'd gone mad. There was a thing, years and years ago, like probably in Victorian times, when all the cows in England went mad because they'd been given bits of dead cow to eat. Maybe Newton had caught Mad People Disease. Whatever it was, it was distracting her from her reading.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" she asked.\n\n\"Counting sausages,\" he said, gazing at the ceiling of the cavern.\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. \"Why?\"\n\n\"They've made at least a hundred sausages so far.\"\n\n\"From one old lady?\"\n\n\"I know. I counted. And up there.\" He pointed at the links of stored sausages, loops upon loops of them.\n\n\"And then there's all the sausages already eaten at the market,\" Guin added helpfully. \"Those are just the leftover ones.\"\n\nGuin considered the tonnes of sausages. She had no intention of counting them, but it was clear the elves must have been processing people on an industrial scale. \"I think these elves are part of the Wild Hunt,\" she said.\n\n\"You mentioned them before, at dinner.\"\n\n\"Maybe these ones got lost, or decided to set up a base. A sort of non-moving hunt.\"\n\n\"Get the people to come to them. Draw them in with a cheesy Christmas market?\"\n\nA great shout went up from the elves in the centre of the cavern. Guin raised herself as high as possible to see what was going on. One elf was holding something white and long aloft.\n\n\"That's a leg bone,\" said Guin, in a matter-of-fact manner she wouldn't have expected of herself when seeing a leg bone of the recently deceased.\n\n\"They seem very excited about it,\" said Newton.\n\nAs one elf held it out, another placed a plastic ruler against it. Whatever the result, it was a source of much delight. The chief elf, Bacraut, snatched it up, and like a marching band majorette swung it about as he led them all out of the cavern.\n\nSoon after, the elves came for Guin and Newton again. Guin noted that Gerd was especially keen to see if Guin had finished her food. Pleased that she had, the elves untied them, using teeth to pull apart the worst granny knots, and led them away.\n\n\"More tests?\" said Newton.\n\n\"Nei tala!\" shouted Gerd. Newton wisely shut up.\n\nThey were drawn deeper into the tunnels. The darkness grew about them and they were suddenly pressed in among countless elves heading in the same direction. The air became close and foetid.\n\n\"Smells like the stables,\" whispered Newton. A moment later they passed by a side opening onto a deep, well-lit cave, lined with animal stalls.\n\n\"More reindeer?\" said Guin.\n\n\"Nei tala!\" shrieked Gerd from somewhere close.\n\nThe massed elves erupted into a hall which nearly rivalled the great storage cavern in size. It appeared the elves had put more effort into this part of their lair than any other. Guin concluded the elves had a construction philosophy which generally blended great skill with a blas\u00e9 attitude, like an order of genius artisans and craftspeople who had become extremely lazy. Their workshops, their machines, even their stitched together reindeer all had flashes of technical brilliance but were, for the most part, run down and falling apart.\n\nThis hall was quite different. The floor was polished to a marble shine. The arches were carved with geometric precision. Pillars, decorated with red and white candy cane spirals were brilliant and immaculate. The pointy-eared elves behaved accordingly and stood in neat rows, while Bacraut with the white glued-on beard took up his knife and waved it over the elves.\n\nThe elves sang. They sang well. They sang like mice on helium, but their voices were high and pure. \"Hriupp all chiand nin og tu \u00feei pok\u00f0i\u00f0.\"\n\nGerd prodded Newton and Guin.\n\n\"Singing practice,\" said Guin. \"We're expected to join in.\"\n\n\"But we don't know the words.\"\n\n\"Stihem ina sac \u00feeiog sj\u00fa\u00fat litun,\" sang the elves. Guin was just about able to join in.\n\nNewton stumbled and failed. He tried to just mouth long.\n\n\"You have to try,\" Guin whispered.\n\nNewton was just about to point out he was trying when the knife flew out of Bacraut's hand and speared an elf on the front row.\n\n\"Hriupp all chiand n-i-i-n!\" he yelled at the quite dead elf. \"Chiand n-i-i-i-n!\"\n\nGuin used the pause to quickly try to teach Newton. \"Hriupp all chiand nin og tu \u00feei pok\u00f0i\u00f0,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Rip all Channing, octopus potted,\" he said.\n\n\"Stihem ina sac \u00feeiog sj\u00fa\u00fat litun\"\n\n\"Stick'em in a sack, bog shut lantern.\"\n\n\"Ripeir blocks t\u00e1\u00ed h\u00e1d\u00edfa.\"\n\n\"Rip her blocks to Halifax.\"\n\n\"R\u00e1upp me\u00f0\u00f3 fu og fi\u00f0.\"\n\n\"Wrap my tofu in figs. Got it.\"\n\nWhen Bacraut took up a fresh knife for his new baton, Newton was ready to join in. Five repetitions later and he was really getting into the swing of it. Gerd watched him shrewdly throughout but did not complain and, more importantly, no one else got a knife through the chest.\n\nAs the practice came to an end, and most of the elves dispersed back to wherever they'd come from, Newton bent to whisper to Guin. \"Maybe I can learn elvish after all. Making toys and crackers, singing songs about, whatever, sparkles and raindrops and living in a magical winter wonderland.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"That song wasn't about sparkles or unicorns\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't say unicorns.\"\n\n\"I think it was about what elves like to do to children.\"\n\n\"Give them presents?\"\n\n\"The bit which actually translates as 'Stick 'em in a sack'\u2026?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"It was the nicest bit of the song.\"\n\nGuin looked around. At the far end of the hall was a raised dais with a huge shape \u2013 a statue or a space rocket or a tree or something \u2013 hidden beneath a red velvety cloth. Two elves, with Mrs Scruples' leg bone between them, scuttled under the cloth and started banging and thumping about.\n\n\"Thing I want to know is,\" said Guin, \"if they're practising songs and making Christmas presents and crackers and stuff, what are they doing it for?\"\n\nNewton shrugged. \"Maybe the unveiling of their Christmas tree composed entirely of human bones.\" He nodded at the shrouded shape.\n\n\"Be serious,\" said Newton.\n\n\"I dunno. Christmas Day?\"\n\nGuin gave him her best serious look, the kind she used on stupid teachers and idiot school children who wouldn't let her join their gangs. \"Do you want this lot to be in charge of Christmas Day?\"\n\nNewton looked worried for a moment, which Guin judged to be the correct response." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "While Esther cut out her elf cross headlight covers, Dave manufactured the world's first industrial elf-stabbing tractor fender from a clothes rail and a dozen bent coat hangers.\n\nWhen they judged they were finished, they made their way cautiously out of the shop. The street was quiet. It looked as though the search for them had moved off elsewhere.\n\nThey crept on, away from the town centre and down the narrow lane leading between the houses and up to the church. Dave struggled to carry all of his metal elf-destroying kit without making too much noise, but they made it to the tractor. It was bigger than Dave remembered, which was good.\n\nEsther crouched to look underneath. \"Checking for elves,\" she said.\n\nHe was about to make light of it, but he would have done the same. The damned creatures secreted themselves in every hidey-hole, enough to make a man paranoid. He instinctively looking up and scanned the rooftop in the houses that crowded on either side of the lane.\n\n\"Let's do this,\" he said, fastening his clothes-rail-elf-destroyer to the front of the tractor with the remaining coat hangers. Twisting the thick wire was really hard on his fingers, but it was worth the discomfort. He climbed up into the open cab and stashed the weaponised window pole. He added to his weapon supply with some edging bricks that had surrounded a nearby garden. A well-aimed brick could come in handy.\n\nEsther fixed her elf cross stencils onto the headlights. Dave looked around the cab, wondering how the lights turned on. Come to that, he wondered how the tractor actually started. He looked down at the controls and tried to relate them to what he knew about driving.\n\n\"There's two gear sticks!\" he hissed to Esther.\n\n\"Pallets!\" hissed Esther in reply.\n\nHe frowned. She pointed to an alleyway across the road where there was a pile of empty pallets. \"We can use them to protect the cab.\"\n\nDave jumped down to fetch them. They were surprisingly heavy and he had to take them back to the tractor individually. By the time he had four of them lashed into place over the front and side windows with baling twine, it felt more secure.\n\n\"It's going to be a bit tricky to see where we're going,\" he said as Esther climbed up to join him. \"But I reckon we can manage.\"\n\nShe peered forward. \"We can do this,\" she said. \"Right, let's fire her up.\"\n\n\"Oh yes, about that,\" said Dave. \"I'm not sure how\u2014\" The engine roared into life, cutting off his words.\n\nEsther grinned at him. \"Collective farm in Cuba. Off we go!\"\n\nStanding in the cab behind his amazing and resourceful girlfriend, Dave picked up the pole in one hand and a brick in the other. Esther had to turn the tractor so they were facing the right way. He could tell it wasn't easy to manoeuvre in a tight space, but Esther managed it with a combination of dextrous handling and crushing everything in her path.\n\n\"It's like Mad Max, isn't it?\" he said, grinning despite himself.\n\n\"If Mad Max was a Christmas movie.\"\n\n\"True.\"\n\n\"And set in rural northern England.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's more Wallace and Gromit than Mad Max really.\"\n\n\"Possibly.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "From choir practice in the great hall, Newton and Guin were shuttled to their next task: reindeer. Newton wasn't sure how he felt about that.\n\nOn the one hand: reindeer! Furry, soft-nosed quadrupeds in need of the kind of love he was eager to dish out.\n\nOn the other: the reindeer in the cavern of animal pens were all like Blinky: partially decomposed, partially reconstructed; patched together from old reindeer or bits of animals that clearly weren't reindeer.\n\nStill \u2026 reindeer! Ugly or not, these were innocent creatures a lad like Newton was born to care for. Yes, they were a bit bitey. Yes, they looked like they favoured human flesh over grasses and moss, but that wasn't their fault, was it?\n\nA new energy had overtaken the elf cavern since the bizarre excitement with Mrs Scruples' leg bone. Elves ran back and forth, carrying things. Bells, big and small, rang continuously, echoing along the tunnels like large scale tinnitus. Even in the reindeer cavern, elves were hurrying about, checking harnesses and reindeer against clipboards.\n\nGerd led Guin and Newton up one side of the pen and down the other, chanting a long list as they went. \"H\u00e9r er Bit\u00f0ur, Barari, Hlager og Gouper\u2026\"\n\n\"There's got to be hundreds here,\" Guin whispered.\n\n\"I know,\" said Newton. After realising most of the creatures would try to bite off his fingers if he stroked them, he was making sure to give every one of them a cheery wave and some direct eye contact to show he was friendly.\n\n\"Stoker, Kicgut, Gunch-mun\u00f0a og bori\u00f0a\u2026\" said Gerd.\n\n\"Why would anyone need this many reindeer?\" wondered Guin.\n\nNewton tried not to dwell on that because he knew full well in colder northern climates reindeer were providers of meat, hide, and more besides. Anyway, the obvious answer was the elves needed several teams of reindeer to pull several sleighs. If there were presents to be delivered, in all directions, the elves would need dozens of sleighs. Maybe even hundreds.\n\n\"Meiu\u00f0a og Daugum,\" said Gerd with some finality. \"N\u00fa, \u00f0ur \u00fe\u00faa\u00f0 l\u00e6r\u00f6ll n\u00f6fra.\"\n\n\"L\u00e6r\u00f6ll n\u00f6fra?\" asked Guin.\n\n\"Ga, \u00fe\u00faa\u00f0 l\u00e6r\u00f6ll n\u00f6fra, ya mithering get!\" said Gerd angrily and stomped off.\n\n\"All their names,\" said Guin. \"We have to learn them.\"\n\nNewton sighed. \"This is like the worst episode of The Apprentice ever.\"\n\n\"Except in the real one, Lord Sugar doesn't kill you if you fail your task.\"\n\nThey began another circuit of the hall and tried to recall some of the names. Newton found he remembered more than a few. Although their rotting faces and hides, stitched together with the same white thread, made them a little harder to love, it did make the reindeer that bit more memorable.\n\n\"That's Graumper and Scromdir, and I think that's bulta\u00f0a\u2026\"\n\nHe remembered he had his phone with him. Although there was still no signal, he could use its camera to take photos of the creatures as they went. Several recoiled angrily from the flash, so he turned it off.\n\n\"We need to think about our escape plan,\" said Guin.\n\nNewton looked round nervously. \"We don't want to anger them.\"\n\n\"They are going to kill us if we just stay here.\"\n\n\"Me perhaps,\" said Newton. \"You definitely won the toy challenge, and the singing competition.\" He sniffed. \"And that's a good thing. You deserve to win.\"\n\n\"Jeez!\" said Guin. \"What do you call those people who just want to die for a cause?\"\n\nNewton frowned. \"Martyrs?\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's you. Is it your life's goal to die for me?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\n\"No?\" It sure sounds like it. If you want to be helpful, how about growing a spine for me. Let's get out of this place together.\"\n\nIt was a hurtful remark. Newton could have cried. He moved on rapidly and took pictures of Gunch-mun\u00f0a and bori\u00f0a and \u2026 one he couldn't remember the name of.\n\n\"I made some elf crosses,\" said Guin. \"Stuffed them up my top.\"\n\n\"Clever,\" said Newton, trying to sound positive, even if Guin's martyr comment still stung.\n\n\"I thought we could maybe make a bomb or some grenades from that cracker explosive.\"\n\n\"Dangerous,\" he said, \"but definitely doable.\"\n\nHe wandered on. He flicked back through the phone's images, trying to remember names. He flicked back too far and came to the pictures of Lily he'd taken at the stables the morning before. His Lily.\n\n\"I do want to get out of here,\" he said to Guin, earnestly. \"I really do.\"\n\n\"Good,\" she said.\n\nA thought occurred to him and he chuckled. \"You know that old joke? How does an elephant get down from a tree?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, clearly meaning \"No, I don't, and I don't want to.\"\n\nHe was going to tell her anyway. \"It sits on a leaf and waits until autumn.\"\n\n\"That's not even practical,\" said Guin.\n\nHe tutted and shook his head. \"How do you escape from Santa's grotto? Climb into a sack and wait until Christmas.\"\n\nHer eyebrows rose like she was at least thinking about it. Her expression suddenly changed and she flapped her hands at him to pay attention.\n\n\"L\u00e6r\u00f6ll n\u00f6fra,\" said Gerd sternly, appearing behind them.\n\n\"The names,\" said Newton. \"Sure.\"\n\nTogether, they walked round the pens, pointing out various chomping, stomping undead reindeer and they certainly did their best to name all of them.\n\n\"That one's Hlager and that's Gouper\u2026\"\n\n\"That's Scromdir and bulta\u00f0a\u2026\"\n\n\"Bitber and Paugir and \u2026 Yongari?\"\n\n\"And Dasher? And Dancer?\"\n\n\"Sprongler or something?\"\n\n\"Comet, Vixen, Cupid\u2026\"\n\n\"Rudolph?\"\n\n\"Bifur, Bofur, Bombur\u2026\"\n\n\"Sleepy, Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy\u2026\"\n\n\"Posh-deer, Scary-deer, Sporty-deer\u2026\"\n\n\"Kicgut! That one's Kicgut!\"\n\nThere were occasional grudging nods from Gerd as they got some right. Out of the dozens in the cave, Newton estimated they got maybe one in four, which he considered pretty good going. Gerd was clearly less impressed.\n\nNewton came to the last of them that he remembered. \"And this one's Sleipnir\u2014 Ow!\"\n\nHe had not been paying attention and the reindeer nipped his outheld fingers. When Newton checked, although he still had five fingers on that hand, the reindeer had ripped skin and flesh off his fingertips. Newton hissed and shoved his hand under his arm, dancing around to drive away the pain.\n\nGerd, who in another life could have been happy as a sadistic PE teacher, watched him with obvious glee. In the pen, bitey old Sleipnir was leaping with similar amusement, high-kicking leaps like a pronking antelope.\n\nGerd directed them back to their recess cell where they were tied up with ropes that were old and rotten, but coiled around their wrists again and again until they were solid as handcuffs.\n\nElves appeared with yet more bowls of food, even though it couldn't have been more than an hour since they'd last been fed. Sausages again for Newton; green mush for Guin.\n\nSucking on his wounded fingers, Newton contemplated the steaming sausages. How many different townsfolk had gone into each of those sausages? Were they a tasteful blend of butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers? Or was this sausage made from mature middle-aged school teacher and this one from fresh locally-sourced youngsters? And would he be able to tell the difference?\n\nGuin tucked into her own food.\n\n\"You like that stuff?\" asked Newton.\n\n\"I'm hungry,\" she mumbled.\n\nHe looked at the green mass in her bowl. \"I think that might be reindeer moss.\"\n\n\"You mean the kind of moss reindeer would eat?\"\n\nNewton, who had seen a survival programme about arctic adventures, made a doubtful noise. \"It's moss than the reindeers have already eaten. You know: pre-processed.\"\n\nGuin stared at him, her cheeks bulging. She gave the matter some silent thought and then shrugged and carried on eating.\n\n\"Why have they given us different food?\" said Newton.\n\n\"I think\u2014\" said Guin, then didn't say what she was thinking.\n\n\"You think they're fattening me up?\" he said.\n\nGuin was silent for a while. \"You going to eat your sausages?\" she said eventually.\n\n\"Er, no. Human flesh isn't my thing.\" He sucked at the cuts across his fingers. \"Apart from my own. I think that's acceptable. Hey, did you hear the one about the two cannibals who were eating a clown? One turned to the other and said, 'Do you think this tastes funny?'\"\n\nAfter a long pause, Guin said, \"That's actually a funny joke.\"\n\n\"You didn't laugh.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'm not in a laughing mood. That reindeer liked human flesh, didn't it?\"\n\n\"I did notice.\"\n\n\"And did you see what happened when it bit you?\"\n\n\"The jumping. Yeah. I don't believe animals are capable of evil, but I'd prepared to say that reindeer was a bit of git.\"\n\n\"It wasn't jumping.\"\n\n\"It was. I saw.\"\n\n\"You didn't see clearly enough.\" As the girl ate, she scooched round on crossed legs and fixed him with her pale eyes. \"It had all four feet off the ground.\"\n\n\"That's pretty much the dictionary definition of jumping,\" said Newton. \"I'm doing my GCSEs this year. I think I know what words mean.\"\n\n\"Don't be arrogant,\" she said. \"I mean its feet were all floating off the ground.\"\n\n\"What? As in flying?\"\n\n\"You don't believe me? We're in a cave, surrounded by Christmas elves and there's reindeer, and you don't think they're flying reindeer?\"\n\nNewton was about to object, about to say it just didn't obey the laws of physics. Then he heard his mum's voice \u2013 well, not her voice as such, but her manner and her views. Notions about the universe being far more complex than even scientists understood; about how perhaps homeopathy and crystal healing and angel therapy might really work in some instances. The kind of things his mum might say after a couple of glasses of wine or a visit to a psychic fair at the local community centre. She'd probably end up saying things like \"It's only called the theory of evolution\" or \"No one knows how bumble bees fly\" and Newton would grit his teeth, smile politely and put on an episode of Planet Earth to calm her down.\n\n\"Flying reindeer,\" he said neutrally. \"Who get excited by human blood.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\nNewton looked at her. \"You know your ears\u2026?\"\n\n\"I believe so.\"\n\n\"Did they always have those pointy bits on the top?\"\n\nGuin reached up and felt her ears. They weren't exactly pointing, but at the top of each there was a pronounced fold that looked sort of pointy. It certainly looked pointier than when he'd first met her.\n\nGuin felt the ridges of her ears, frowning. She stood and looked down at herself, tugging at the waist of her trousers and the rumpled folds around her ankles. \"Am I getting shorter?\"\n\nShe looked at the bowl in her hands and carefully put it down, like it was the most dangerous thing in the world. \"We need to escape,\" she said.\n\n\"I agree,\" he replied.\n\nShe reached under her top and pulled out her fairy folklore book, two elf crosses, and a roll of cloth. \"Hold onto that,\" she said, passing him a cross.\n\nShe unrolled the cloth on the floor and revealed three scalpel-like blades. \"Stole these from the toy workshop,\" she said, passing one to Newton. She used another to start slicing at her own bonds.\n\n\"We will get into trouble,\" Newton said automatically.\n\n\"We're already in trouble.\"\n\n\"We need an escape plan.\"\n\n\"Like you said, climb in a sack and wait till Christmas.\"\n\n\"I was joking,\" said Newton.\n\n\"Or, to put it another way, climb in a train truck and wait till it leaves. I've heard it go in and out at least twice while we've been here.\"\n\nNewton gave this some thought and put renewed effort into cutting his ropes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Guin and Newton's escape plan was simple but it still took time. The ropes tying them were worn, but there were a lot of them. Guin was sensible enough to not want to hurriedly saw at her bonds and end up sticking a blade in her ulnar artery. Her dad had told her enough paramedic horror stories about sliced wrists to give her something of a complex. In the past, she'd just stared at her white wrists and the pumping artery she knew was just beneath the surface and thought (not for the first time) that the human body was stupidly fragile and badly designed.\n\nAlso, the elves did not leave them entirely unguarded. Gerd swung by a couple of times, once to just shout at them, and the second to check they had eaten their food. Newton had concealed the sausages in his pockets so he could show an empty bowl. When Gerd demanded to see Guin's bowl, she pantomimed eating handfuls of the stuff.\n\nShe very much wanted to ask if the reindeer moss was magically turning her into an elf. She didn't, because the question sounded stupid in her head. And because she feared the answer would be yes. And, if the answer was yes, were all the elves children who had somehow 'passed the test'? There was a line she'd read in poor dead Elsa Frinton's book about what happened to people who were foolish enough to eat food while visiting the Lands of Faerie. Guin didn't think a stinking cave underneath an English town counted as the Lands of Faerie, but they were here, and they'd eaten. And although Wiry Harrison, Tinfoil Tavistock and the sharp blade she held concealed in her hand gave her the courage to act bravely, she really, really wanted to be out of here and miles away with her dad (and, yes, with Esther and Newton too, if that made everyone happy).\n\nGerd wandered off, satisfied Guin was being a good little elf and eating up. With the new urgency in the elves' work, Newton and Guin were no longer being supervised so closely. It was as good a time as any to escape.\n\n\"She'll probably be back with some more soon,\" said Guin. \"We need to hurry.\"\n\nThere was the dull slap of heavy ropes falling to the ground. \"Done,\" said Newton, massaging his wrist. \"Can I help you with yours?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" said Guin, irritated the older boy felt the need to assist.\n\nIt took her several more minutes to cut through her ropes.\n\n\"I can help,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm fine!\"\n\n\"We need to hurry.\"\n\n\"I'm just trying to avoid cutting myself. Did you know, your artery can pump out blood at the rate of five litres a minute?\"\n\n\"I did not know that,\" admitted Newton. \"Not sure I wanted to.\"\n\n\"So be patient.\" The last threads came away. \"Let's go.\" She saw the nervous look on Newton's face. \"You want to see your girlfriend again, right?\"\n\n\"My girlfriend?\"\n\n\"Lily?\"\n\n\"No. Lily's not\u2014 Who told you\u2026?\"\n\nGuin tutted. \"Come on!\"\n\nThey carried elf crosses and knives. Although Newton was a big lumbering ox of a boy, they could stay close to the wall and the shadowy areas least lit by the dim fairy lights. From their recess cell, the main cavern was directly ahead, full of noise and industry echoing up to the chimney-like opening high above. Off to the left was a long tunnel, leading past piles of stored goods and mounds of rubbish, past Blinky the reindeer's stall and alongside the elves' little steam train.\n\n\"Hello, girl,\" Newton whispered to the reindeer as they passed.\n\nThe nightmare creature still had Newton's misshapen rabbit toy clenched in its mouth. Strands of stuffing hung from the gaps between its teeth. It sniffed at them and stamped its feet excitedly.\n\n\"That thing's as daft as you are,\" said Guin.\n\nThey crept on, along the low line of rotten little train trucks. Blinky grunted and huffed at them as they went.\n\n\"Couldn't we just carry on walking to the exit?\" said Newton.\n\nGuin looked along the tunnel and the fading string of lights. She listened hard, tried to pick out what sounds were coming from that direction. \"You don't think there'll be guards at the exit?\"\n\n\"Probably.\"\n\nThere were bundles of sack cloth in the nearest cart. Newton boosted Guin over the lip and followed. They burrowed under the sacks and tried to make themselves as small as possible, which wasn't all that small in Newton's case.\n\nGuin lay in the dark fusty folds and closed her eyes. She willed herself to be still and at one with the sacks. Tiny. Invisible. In a sudden panic, she wondered if the act of willing herself to be small and unnoticeable was aiding the elves' magic. So she willed herself to be a perfectly ordinary girl-sized person who happened to be well-hid under the sacks.\n\nShe heard the plaintive grunts of the zombie reindeer. Something had clearly got her excited. There were raised elf voices and the crack of wood.\n\n\"Er skeypis! Reind\u00fdrn hef skarpa!\"\n\nThe reindeer had scarpered?\n\nThere was a clattering next to their little truck and then a yell of pain from Newton. \"Ow! Ow! What are you doing that for?\"\n\nThe elvish yells were closer.\n\n\"Ow! Okay! Okay!\" called Newton.\n\nThey'd been discovered. Guin sat up. Newton was standing up in the truck, trying to fend off Zomdeer Blinky who was biting and snapping at his clothes. More than a dozen elves were gathered round, weapons drawn.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi?\" said Guin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "As Esther drove the tractor up the steep slope at the back of the church she worried that it might simply slide backwards or tip over. She kept those thoughts to herself and put her faith in the tractor's tyres and pulling power.\n\nShe kept the revs high and refused to let the machine stall. The tractor ran roughshod over the snow, its massive tyres gripping well. Branches as thick as her arm scraped against the bonnet and cab, dislodging the snow lying heavily along them. Any branch that could not bend and yield snapped. The pallet over the window turned out to be an effective and necessary shield against the debris.\n\n\"That's where we got buried!\" Esther shouted back to Dave over the scraping and clattering and snapping.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That's where we\u2014 Never mind! Where are we? On the map! The map!\"\n\nDave leaned forward with the remnants of Duncan Catheter's plan in his hands.\n\n\"I think the ground should level out shortly,\" he said.\n\nSure enough, the tractor bumped over a ledge and they were able to make out a sizeable plateau. Esther tried to match up the narrow view she had between the slats of the pallet with what she recalled of Duncan Catheter's plans.\n\n\"There were going to be houses over there,\" said Dave, waving to the left. \"And over there as well. That part in the middle is where the sinkholes are marked.\"\n\n\"Then that's where we need to look.\"\n\n\"Do you know what sinkholes look like?\" said Dave.\n\n\"No,\" admitted Esther after a moment's thought. \"Not really. Holes, I suppose.\"\n\n\"Are they big enough for a tractor to fall down?\"\n\nEsther peered forward, almost wishing she hadn't applied her elf-cross silhouette shapes to the lights, since they cut down so much on the light they cast. \"No idea. We'll take it really slowly from this point.\"\n\nThey edged forward.\n\nDave clutched her elbow. \"Elf at one o'clock,\" he whispered.\n\nEsther steered towards it, wanting to see if the light would have any effect. The elf was lit up by the blurry image of an elf cross. It blinked against the light, then raised its weapon and charged, curly-toed shoes running crisply over the deep snow's surface.\n\n\"It's not working,\" said Dave. He struggled to get his elf-poking stick out.\n\n\"It's too blurry,\" said Esther. \"It just needs to find its focal length.\"\n\nAs the elf and tractor closed, a perfectly-formed elf cross focused in the middle of the elf's chest. It howled in pain and clutched itself, staggering.\n\n\"What's that smell?\" Esther said.\n\n\"I think it's burning elf flesh.\"\n\n\"Cool,\" she said, adding remorsefully, \"Jesus, Dave, what's wrong with me? I enjoyed hurting that elf. I enjoyed it!\"\n\n\"You should, because we're one step closer to rescuing the kids. You're focused on the end game and that's what it's all about.\"\n\nThey trundled on, over the prostrate body of the elf with a smouldering chest.\n\nThey both leaned forward to see through the gaps in the pallet. Esther wondered why the tree coverage was so thin here, speculating if Duncan Catheter had sent in a chainsaw team to pre-empt the planning process. She found herself getting angry at him, as she always did at selfish developers. It was probably pointless, as he was already dead, but he represented the evil scourge of deforestation across the globe. She nurtured the anger in order to focus her new-found murderous instincts as she had a feeling that she'd be needing them.\n\n\"Can you see that dark area over by the hillside?\" whispered Dave.\n\nEsther could see what he meant. At the edge of the plateau, the ground rose steeply again. Mostly it was covered with snow, but there was some sort of shadow close to the ground. Esther steered towards it. As they drew nearer it was clear this sinkhole was more like a tunnel descending into the hillside.\n\n\"We going in?\" asked Dave. \"Only I'm not sure the tractor will fit.\"\n\n\"Look on the ground,\" said Esther, carefully ignoring his concerns. \"It looks like train tracks. This is definitely where we need to be looking.\" She turned the tractor in a wide arc to get a run up to the tunnel.\n\n\"The tractor's too big,\" said Dave.\n\n\"Men are awful judges of size,\" said Esther and accelerated hard.\n\n\"You're not thinking\u2014?\"\n\n\"Just hang on, my love!\"\n\n\"I honestly don't think there's much to hang\u2014\"\n\n\"Brace yourself!\" Esther yelled as they approached at top tractor speed.\n\nDave ducked down behind the seat and wrapped his arm around both the seat and Esther as the tractor smashed into the gap. The tunnel was far wider and taller than it looked: the opening made smaller with wood panels and piled up debris. The cover shattered as the tractor ploughed through. Something caught on the tractor roof and it was wrenched off. The tractor bucked severely, but they were inside. As Esther peeked up, she could see the train tracks up ahead. They plunged on." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "At spear and knife point, Newton and Guin were forced out of the truck. One of the elves barked something that sounded very much like an accusation.\n\n\"This isn't what it looks like,\" said Newton, knowing full well it was exactly what it looked like. He couldn't tell if the elves believed or even understood him. Their sharp little faces were screwed up in unreadable anger and Newton was somewhat distracted by Blinky, who continued to nip at him, especially around his trouser pockets.\n\n\"What do you want, girl?\" he asked, batting her away while trying to stroke her mangy muzzle. He felt in his pockets and found the sausages he'd hidden there.\n\n\"Dreda ster kindi!\" snapped one elf.\n\n\"Don't kill him!\" said Guin. \"Emei\u00f0 og him!\" She held up her elf-cross to ward them off, immediately dropping it. She clutched her hand, shocked. \"It burned me!\"\n\nNewton's heart pounded in his chest. She was being turned into an elf! Elf-crosses were now effective against her. And he, clearly not elf material, was surplus to requirements.\n\nEven as he acknowledged the truth, he pulled a sausage from his pocket it and fed it to Blinky to keep her happy. The hungry undead reindeer wolfed it down.\n\nAn elf came forward, pushing Guin aside in order to get to Newton.\n\n\"Wait!\" she shouted. \"B\u00e6du!\" She took out a tiny object. It was one of her little homemade toys. \"This is Wiry Harrison!\"\n\n\"Viry Harrison?\" said the elf.\n\nGuin placed the little wire man on the floor, straightening the sword made from twists of wire in his hand. \"Wiry Harrison is a fierce warrior.\"\n\nThe elves stared at the two-inch figure.\n\n\"He is brave and dependable and would kill every one of you to protect me.\"\n\n\"Ooh,\" said one of the elves.\n\n\"He's never been defeated in combat.\"\n\nAn elf carefully got on its hands and knees to inspect the still and silent warrior. Newton watched with bated breath.\n\n\"Get out your elf cross,\" Guin whispered to him.\n\n\"Then what?\" Newton whispered back.\n\n\"No idea.\"\n\nThe elves chatted among themselves, clearly torn between wariness of the miniscule foe, and understandable derision at what was clearly a little figurine made of wire. Blinky had finished her sausage. She nudged Newton for another, making snotty, phlegm-like marks on his sleeve. He hoped it was phlegm and not zombie brain juices.\n\n\"Okay, girl,\" he said, fumbling for sausage and elf-cross simultaneously. At the same time he realised Blinky's hoofs were not on the ground. They were pawing the air, inches above the ground.\n\n\"You're flying!\" he said. He remembered the effect his blood had on the bity reindeer \u2013 and these sausages were made primarily of unfortunate locals\u2026\n\nNewton's next course of action seemed obvious. He shoved a sausage in the reindeer's mouth and grabbed Guin, swinging her onto the reindeer's back. She yelped in surprise.\n\nThe elves hissed, probably guessing he was kidnapping their latest recruit. Newton warded them off with his elf-cross; long enough for him to feed Blinky a third sausage and leap astride the creature's back. Blinky's body was a mass of knobbly bones wrapped in a thin hide and painful to sit on.\n\n\"Yah! Fly, Blinky!\" he urged." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Dave was worried the tunnel, though surprisingly wide by British standards, might get narrower up ahead and the tractor would get jammed. Esther kept up a steady speed, planning to smash through any minor constrictions as she bumped along the train track.\n\n\"I can see light,\" said Esther. \"Up ahead. Arm yourself.\"\n\nDave didn't need telling twice. He had a pile of bricks at the ready, and the pole ready to go. \"What's your plan when we get there?\" he asked.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Crush as many elves with brute force as I can and fry a few with the lights for good measure. You stop them getting into the cab and we'll see if we can spot the kids.\"\n\nDave didn't like to point out that the cab was a thing of the past. They were sitting in a vehicle that was very much an open-top model.\n\nThey emerged into a huge cavern. Esther had to swerve off the train track, as there was a train already parked on it.\n\n\"Holy hell, what's going on?\" said Dave.\n\n\"I would say,\" said Esther, steering towards a crowd of elves and making sure both elf cross lights and elf-stabbing fender were lined up, \"that the kids are attempting to escape on a flying reindeer while these elves try to stop them.\"\n\n\"Not just me, then.\"\n\nA number of elves were already noisily smouldering from the lights, along with screams from those who had been impaled on the stabbing fender. Too late Dave realised there was a fatal design flaw with his stabby fender: once it had a full complement of impaled elves, it became harmless.\n\nAn elf stood ahead of them, fearlessly taking aim with a catapult. He scored a direct hit on one headlight, then re-loaded and took out the other.\n\n\"Bugger!\" said Dave. \"All we can do now is run them over. Crush them with the tyres!\"\n\nEsther did her best, doing tight figures of eight (or as tight as she could accomplish with a vehicle designed to have an entire field for manoeuvring), but the elves were too numerous. Dave threw bricks at any in range, but even a direct strike was more of a deterrent than a fatal blow. The elves had been initially worried, then simply distracted; now they looked as if they were enjoying the sport." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "At three sausages' worth of power, Blinky was soon hovering with her hoofs at elf head height. As she bucked and galloped against the air, all three moved off at something like strolling speed. The elves stabbed at Newton's dangling legs so he hoisted them up out of the way.\n\n\"Is this your escape plan?\" yelled Guin behind him. \"We can run faster than this!\"\n\nNewton felt her disappointment burn deep inside him. He dug his raised heels in. \"Come on, Blinky!\" he urged. \"You can do it.\"\n\nHe had pictured them soaring up, circling towards the large chimney opening in the cavern's apex, and out into cool, crisp night-time freedom. Instead they were just ambling along, six feet off the ground, with as much excitement and urgency as a toddler's coin-operated animal ride.\n\n\"They stamped on Wiry Harrison!\" exclaimed Guin.\n\nNewton leaned forward. Awkwardly he fed the fourth and final sausage into Blinky's gnashing teeth.\n\n\"Fare thee well, fallen warrior,\" said Guin softly.\n\n\"What?\" Newton called back.\n\n\"Nothing,\" sniffed Guin.\n\nEven with four sausages, Blinky didn't seem to have much lift.\n\n\"Maybe they take a while to kick in,\" Newton wondered out loud, but he didn't think that was it. Sleipnir had been given instant lift from just a nibble of his fingertips. Volume-wise that was nothing compared to four briny hotdogs. Maybe that was the problem: blood and sausages were not the same.\n\nFearing for his fingers and hoping he wasn't wrong, Newton leaned forward and presented his already injured index finger to Blinky.\n\nThe sudden bite made him yelp. He yanked his hand back, but Blinky had already gotten a good taste. There were smears of blood across her muzzle.\n\n\"Blinky \u2026 the red-nosed reindeer,\" Newton whimpered as he bunched his hand up in pain.\n\nIt was enough. With a wriggle and a shiver, Blinky leapt. Guin held onto Newton; Newton grabbed the reindeer's one good antler with his one good hand.\n\nThey were ten feet off the ground and rising. Below them elves shouted and shrieked. A spear flew past them, wobbling and warbling like a startled bird.\n\n\"It's working!\" yelled Guin.\n\n\"Never doubted it!\" Newton yelled back. \"What in\u2014?\"\n\nLooking down across the cavern, he saw a whole bunch of elves gathered around what appeared to be some sort of open-top jeep. Newton realised it was, in fact, a tractor with its top half sheared off. In the remnants of the cab were two figures, fighting off elves with bricks and a window pole.\n\n\"Mum! Dave!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Dave glanced up to see how Guin and Newton were getting on, hoping they'd long gone. To his horror they were flying down, presumably to help. He could clearly see the terse and uncompromising looks on Guin's and Newton's faces.\n\n\"No!\" he yelled at them. \"Away! Away!\" He waved furiously. \"Let the dog drown! Let the dog drown!\"\n\n\"What's the matter?\" asked Esther, who couldn't afford to take her eyes off what she was doing.\n\n\"The kids,\" said Dave.\n\nShe glanced up for a split second. \"What's the plan?\"\n\nGuin was leaning over and making upswept hooking gestures with her arm, like she wanted them to prepare to be airlifted out.\n\n\"I think we're beyond plans,\" said Dave hollowly.\n\n\"We can leave the tractor making a nuisance of itself,\" said Esther. She pushed the steering wheel onto a hard lock and put Dave's pole through it to hold it in place. \"Brick!\"\n\nAfter a moment he caught on and jammed one of the bricks onto the accelerator.\n\n\"That reindeer's coming in fast,\" she said. \"You think we can grab it?\"\n\n\"Is that reindeer even real?\" muttered Dave. The creature looked like a bad animatronic, or as though someone had dipped a real reindeer in paint stripper and then tried to mend the damage using the remains of a rotten sofa.\n\n\"You need to recalibrate your beliefs, dear,\" said Esther. She hurled the last of the bricks and then the two of them reached out for the reindeer as it flew overhead. They grabbed a leg each. Dave was yanked off his feet and hugged the thin leg close.\n\n\"Hold on!\" shouted someone.\n\nDave held tight. In his spinning vision, he caught a glimpse of Guin's leg against the creature's flank. He'd found her. They were back together for however long.\n\nThe reindeer wobbled with the extra weight and dipped towards the ground.\n\n\"This leg's got woodworm!\" said Esther.\n\nFor a moment Dave didn't grasp what she meant, but a crunching sound from above was a dead giveaway. Esther fell. She slid into a wall and to the ground. The reindeer tipped. Dave tumbled to the ground, landed on his feet by pure luck, hit the ground, and rolled against the side of the train tracks.\n\nHe looked up, hoping to see Guin and Newton flying far away. Instead he saw a distressed, three-legged reindeer completely out of kilter, flying in rapidly-decreasing circles towards the far side of the cavern and out of sight among the storage areas and workstations. Elves ran in pursuit.\n\nDave looked round for Esther. She stood some distance off, by the wall she'd hit. In her hand was the remains of the zombie reindeer's woodworm-riddled leg. She stood tall wielding it like a club, snarling at the elves to back off. She lunged forward and whacked one of them into the middle distance.\n\nShe turned to the tightening circle. \"Come on then! Who's next?\" She smacked another one just for kicks. \"Dave! Get the kids!\"\n\nDave scuttled off, keeping low, heading in the direction he'd seen the reindeer and children take." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Esther was backed up against the wall with only a reindeer leg to defend herself. She held it like a rounders bat, since that was the one sport Esther had excelled at as a child. She channelled years of practice into swing after swing as elves tried ducking below her guard with their nasty little blades. She didn't know their language, but she made her meaning very clear.\n\n\"Come on you elfy bastards!\"\n\nShe thought she heard Newton's voice in the distance, saying something like \"Actually they look pretty unelfy to me\", but it was just her imagination.\n\nHowever, her arms were going to tire soon. Weekly Zumba sessions at the local community centre and Pilates in the park had helped her maintain a decent level of fitness, but there was only so much elf-whacking one could do. Eventually, one of them would slip past her guard, or find a way to sneak up on her.\n\nThe thought made her look around and check the spaces beyond her peripheral vision. A string of fairy lights looped across the cavern wall just above her head, disappearing into a hole off to her left. An elf was crawling hand over hand along the lights to get to her.\n\nGrunting like a tennis pro, she swung the wooden leg and mashed the sneaky sod against the wall. The creature gave a satisfyingly pathetic, \"Urk!\" and dropped to the ground.\n\nBut as she brought her weapon down, the inevitable happened. The rotten leg broke away completely, leaving her holding a ragged stump. She held it in a threatening pose and moved away from what was left of the group. There were only a few, but she was very aware her small piece of wood was no match for their knives. Even so, she couldn't let that affect her positive mental attitude. Esther was a doer, and she knew the value of keeping busy.\n\nShe scanned the cavern, looking for escape routes, any answer to her predicament. There were boxes everywhere, to contents of which might have been useful, there was no time to check them out. Then she remembered the hole in the cavern wall off to her left.\n\nIt was like a duct. She'd probably fit inside. And a stack of boxes provided a handy staircase up to it. She peered in and decided to commit to the full Bruce Willis. She was going into the ducts.\n\nShe hurled her useless reindeer remnant at the nearest elf, pointed and yelled, \"Look! It's Father Christmas!\", and ran for the boxes. They creaked under her feet but did not break. The elves, momentarily distracted by the possible appearance of old St Nick, were hot in pursuit.\n\nEsther leapt into the duct, hands and knees coming down on a dusty and greasy surface. She turned, kicking the nearest pursuer in the face, tumbling the sharp-faced fiend off the box pyramid.\n\nShe kicked out several more times until she was able to reach down and grab the topmost box. She feared it might be too heavy to lift, but from great desperation came great energy. She pulled it up and into the duct behind her. It didn't exactly wedge into the space, but it filled it sufficiently to slow any elves that might get past the missing top box-step.\n\nShe twisted the obstruction, jamming it more thoroughly, before starting to crawl away. Her hands and knees squidged on the greasy metal floor.\n\n\"Bruce Willis never got this dirty,\" she said to herself. Die Hard was another Christmas movie that had lied to her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "As elves ran by, Dave kept still. He had managed to escape them by rolling underneath the train and lying between the rails. He knew he couldn't stay there: he needed to locate Guin and Newton. Also, he didn't want to be bacon-sliced and mushed if the train moved off. Playing on train tracks was a big no-no. As a paramedic he'd seen the evidence with his own eyes.\n\nThoughts of medical matters made him check for his first aid kit. It was attached to his belt, with dressing, antiseptics and a dozen insulin shots inside it. He'd probably need those again before the night was through.\n\nHe wriggled along the track as far as he dared, then rolled off, looking around to see where he was. It was darker here, but he could make out a side cavern up ahead. He couldn't be far from where Guin and Esther's boy had crash-landed. They might have gone to hide in there.\n\nHe crawled forward on his belly, keeping to the shadows. When he made it round a corner, he stood, carefully. The side cavern's roof was lower and it stretched deep into the hillside. Boxes \u2013 Christmas boxes, shiny and tied with ribbon \u2013 were stacked in rows, extending as far back as he could see.\n\nNow he came to think about it, the entire hill had to be hollow. How could Catheter have imagined it would be safe to build houses here, when the whole place was riddled with caves?\n\n\"Guin!\" he stage whispered. \"You here? Newton! Guin!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "When she fell from the doomed reindeer, Guin landed heavily on her backside, jarring her spine and knocking all sensation from her bum . She immediately leapt up and ran for cover. While Newton yelped over in one direction, and his mum could be heard shouting aggressively from another, Guin did her best to shake off her own pursuers.\n\nIn her pocket, Tinfoil Tavistock heartily approved. The juvenile quadruped pointed out it was like that old joke about running away from a bear. She didn't need to be able to run faster than the bear; she just needed to be faster than the other people the bear was chasing.\n\nGuin would have argued she wasn't abandoning Newton or the others, rather she was regrouping and preparing to lead the retaliation. Or she would have done, if she hadn't been sprinting for her life: dodging and weaving around piles of boxes to shake off the main crowd of pursuers. As she ran into a familiar side tunnel, she could hear the shouts of outrage fading into the distance.\n\nShe recognised the first door she came to. It was the toy workshop. She slipped inside, grateful the place was empty, and bolted the door behind her.\n\nAs she got her breath back, she took Tinfoil Tavistock out of her pocket so she could explain clearly how and why, despite the fact she appeared to be selfishly fleeing for her life, she was actually making a tactical decision.\n\nTavistock \u2013 oh, so simplistic Tavistock \u2013 said it was not okay to leave loved ones behind, even if one of them was a bumbling and annoying teenage boy. Guin was swift to explain the situation was far more complex than that, and she didn't expect someone like Tavistock to understand.\n\nOn the workbench, Starfish Eglantine, the plush toy she'd created earlier in the night regarded her with its many eyes as though to say, \"Oh, yeah?\"\n\nGuin tutted. She didn't like it when her imaginary friends ganged up on her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Through various twists and turns, jumping at sudden sounds and occasionally cowering for his life, Newton eventually found himself in a corner of the reindeer cave. He hunkered out of sight while elves busied themselves, taking Scromdir and Bitber and Dancer and Rudolph and whatever their names were out of their pens to be harnessed up.\n\nOver the crackly tannoy, an elf announced something. Newton did not speak elf apart from the universal greeting \"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi!\" and he didn't plan on learning any. However, the words coming over the tannoy had a clipped and measured rhythm, a sort of \"The rebel base will be in range in ten minutes\" kind of cadence. Something was very much afoot.\n\nTwo elves entered, herding limping Blinky between them. They were arguing. From his hiding position by a vacant reindeer stall, Newton could see much gesturing towards Blinky's missing leg. Blinky did not seem to be in much discomfort from the lack of a leg. She looked from elf to elf as they bickered, and then she ate one of their hats.\n\nThe elf shrieked in frustration, grabbed its half-eaten hat from her mouth and stomped away. The other, having won the argument but not gained much from it, irritably led the hobbling reindeer past the hidden Newton, through an opening, and returned, moments later, Blinky-less.\n\nNewton had a mental image of what he needed to do. The simple version was find his mum, Guin and Dave and get the hell out of elf-central, in that order. A priority list based on personal familiarity, some deep-rooted chivalric sexism (that he really didn't feel comfortable with) and a nameless thing he saw as a sort of Newton Woollby Personal Vulnerability Scale. However, the list wasn't a simple line. Newton's complex and over-thought mental image took into account what he imagined other people's priorities would be. He was probably near the top of his mum's, possibly on a par with and in danger of being over-taken by Dave (which he stiffly thought was all fine and proper). Dave's would have Guin and Esther vying for top spot. Guin's\u2026 Well, Guin's priorities were unclear. Newton wouldn't have gone so far as to call her selfish but she certainly wasn't the kind of girl ruled by big-hearted selflessness. So Newton's priority list was an odd sort of web in which he featured at the bottom because, well, it was his duty to put others first, but in which he was also raised up by his mum's love for him. One in which Guin was generally of middling importance, but given a super boost by Dave's affections for his daughter and the simple fact she was a child. All of them bumped and bumbled around in the web.\n\nAnimals did not figure in that particular web. Newton loved animals, generally more than he did most people, but they didn't appear in this current real-time crisis priority web. Blinky's fate was notionally unimportant. Blinky was not in the web; she was off to one side. Separated. With a big fluffy cloud drawn around her in pen. And little stars, or possibly rainbows, in highlighter.\n\nBlinky was unimportant, but Newton needed to know what had happened to her.\n\nWith elves focused on getting nearly a hundred zombie reindeer into harnessed teams, it was easy for him to slip out of his position and into the side tunnel Blinky had been taken down. The tunnel ran for some distance, alongside various thick pipes that stank of petrol, before it came out in a poorly lit service chamber.\n\nBlinky was tied up beside a pit. She three-leggedly hobbled round to face Newton. He charitably decided the wild look on her face was a greeting between old friends.\n\n\"I wondered what they'd done to you.\" He reached out with gentle hands. Blinky \u2013 playful as ever \u2013 tried to rip off his fingers. She missed as she over-balanced and stumbled on her three legs.\n\n\"I think,\" said Newton. \"we might need to change your name. Should it be Limpy or Wonky?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "Esther quickly discovered a way of moving through the small tunnel vents, a sort of bent-kneed frog-like super-crouch that allowed her to scuttle along efficiently. She'd also discovered a small string of battery-powered fairy lights which she'd wrapped around her head for light. She must have looked like a weird halo-wearing frog-saint or the world's cheapest R2-D2 fancy dress effort.\n\nWithin minutes of entering the vent tunnels, she realised there was a complex warren of them. They looped between the main caverns, doing their own thing in between. She got the hang of navigating them by looking out for the fairy lights. Where there was a direct passage between the larger caverns there was very often a string of lights she could follow.\n\nAs she approached an opening into a larger cavern, she smeared dirt onto her face for camouflage. She leaned out to see what was happening. Despite having humans running willy-nilly through their nest, the elves seemed mostly focused on their work. In the biggest cavern Esther had yet seen, a large-scale operation was underway. It wasn't just large: it was colossal.\n\nThere were lots of shipping containers. Except they had been crudely fashioned into open-top containers. All of them had sled-like runners welded to their sides, but were presently being transported along the elf's miniature railway line, on relatively tiny carriage beds hidden beneath the containers' bulk. The place was clearly the hub of whatever was being planned, a focus of operations. The containers were being lashed together with some sort of enormous harness. It appeared to be made from metal, wood, leather and various other materials. Esther was well-acquainted with upcycling and re-use. It looked very much as if someone had taken fence posts, traffic lights and every imaginable type of street furniture, and fashioned them together to make a wonky shell to connect all the sled-containers. It gave the entire thing the look of a colossal segmented insect: a centipede in plate armour.\n\nTogether, the train of containers formed a single sleigh, a giant parody of Father Christmas's sleigh at that.\n\nThe armoured sheets along its sides had been indifferently painted in red, and fashioned into a wonky scalloped shape. At the front of the massive vehicle (which was at least a hundred feet long) was a place for the driver to sit: a scrolled front end twenty feet high. All of these facets were clues to the enormous vehicle's cultural origins, but the monstrous thing had as much in common with the traditional Santa's sleigh as \u2026 a wooden sailing boat with a ten-storey Caribbean cruise liner. No \u2013 it was like comparing a sailing boat to a giant cruise liner that had sunk in a storm, been raised up again, and repaired by medieval blacksmiths who had no notion of boat design. It was a gigantic travesty of a sleigh, a bloated and unnatural tumour-growth copy.\n\nEsther wanted to think this industrial monstrosity was a solid metaphor of what had happened to Christmas in this age of selfish commercialism, but witty socio-political metaphors weren't going to help rescue the family.\n\nOne thing that did puzzle her about the sleigh was how on earth the elves expected it to move. True, it currently sat on rails, but the railway line was miniscule, monorail thin compared to its bulk, and there was no engine at the front. There were stubby metal wings on the side, and four great barrels that might have once been aeroplane turbines, although it was hard to tell beneath the mass of fuel pipes and brackets covering them. At the back was another cluster of cylinders, salvaged perhaps from jet planes, or some dodgy space programme. Even with the mass of engine parts. Esther could not believe they alone could give the vehicle sufficient lift. They looked like they would drag it down with their weight, not move it along.\n\nIf this was supposed to be Father Christmas's vehicle then it would traditionally be pulled by reindeer. She thought about the sorry specimen Guin and Newton had ridden on. It would take hundreds of those creatures to move the thing.\n\nShaking her head at the insanity of the elves' endeavour, she backed along the duct, and down one of the narrower spurs of pipe. Through a grille in the floor she saw she was over a corridor tunnel, and a quieter one at that. She couldn't spend the rest of her life crawling around like a wise-cracking, follicly-challenged New York detective. At some point, she'd have to get out, arm herself, find her family and maybe sabotage an elf sleigh along the way. Plus, Pilates or no Pilates, this sort of undignified crouch was starting to do her back in. She lifted away the grille, poked her head out to check the coast was clear, and wriggled through feet first.\n\nOnly superficially gouging her ribs on the narrow opening, she dropped to the ground. No elves in sight.\n\nShe moved swiftly along the corridor. Some of the doors she passed were marked with signs hinting at what lay on the other side. Many were scrawled with Nordic runes of some sort, and she sort of wished she could spend time studying the language and culture of these ancient peoples. Only sort of, because mostly she wanted to smash their faces in for what they had done to her little family, or would-be family. Some doors also featured little wood and pokerwork symbols. She found one marked with a crossed hammer and saw: a workshop of some sort surely. Workshops equalled tools. Tools equalled weapons.\n\nEsther tried the door. It appeared to be locked. She rattled the handle to make sure." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "The door to the toy workshop rattled and shook.\n\nGuin made sure the bolts were securely in place. The door rattled a second time. She listened out for sounds of elf chatter, for indications they were going to try and break in or raise the alarm. She heard nothing. There was silence.\n\nOn the bench, Starfish Eglantine regarded her haughtily. You are running away, said Eglantine.\n\n\"I'm not running away,\" Guin told her.\n\nYou're a coward.\n\n\"It's okay to be a coward,\" she said. \"Being scared is normal. People who are scared and run away are the ones who survive. My dad told me that.\"\n\nI'm scared all the time, said Tavistock.\n\n\"And I've got to look after Tavistock here,\" said Guin.\n\nTavistock is just a piece of screwed up tinfoil, said Eglantine.\n\nI am, agreed Tavistock.\n\nYou are trapped in a dangerous place, said Eglantine. You've got nowhere to run away to.\n\nGuin pulled a face. \"Yes, but\u2014\"\n\nBut? said Eglantine.\n\n\"What can I do? There's hundreds of them and only one of me.\"\n\nThere was a voice over the echoing and crackling public address system. \"Taskepta stel\u00f6r bairnsk a\u00f0 hefj\u00e1 fiftt\u00e1n m\u00edn\u00fatur.\"\n\n\"Project something-something in something minutes?\" said Guin.\n\nThey're up to something, said Eglantine. These elves have a plan.\n\n\"What plan?\"\n\nWhat would your plan be if you were stuck somewhere alien, where you were surrounded by hostile idiots and with no friends?\n\nGuin thought. She didn't have to think much. It was a fair description of every day she had to spend at school. Tinfoil Tavistock didn't have to think much either.\n\nHide, said Tavistock without hesitation.\n\n\"I'd make my own friends,\" said Guin, looking at Tavistock.\n\nI don't think these elves are planning on hiding for much longer, said Eglantine. Do you?\n\nGuin thought about the things in the elf lair that just hadn't made sense. The on-going preparations, the piles of present-like boxes, the vast number of reindeer in the pens. Were the elves planning on launching their own Christmas mission, to visit all the children in the world?\n\nWere the elves going out on a colossal diplomatic mission to make friends?\n\nWhat do you think? said Eglantine." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "\"You are a good girl, aren't you?\" said Newton as he cautiously petted Wonky Blinky.\n\nNewton peered down into the pit. It was several metres across but it was hard to tell how deep it was, it being almost filled to the lip by reindeer parts. Severed legs and decapitated heads nestled among less identifiable chunks of flesh, organs and hide.\n\n\"Oh, heck,\" Newton whispered.\n\nMuch of the reindeer mix was still, very much as diced deer ought to be, but throughout the pile various bits of undead reindeer wiggled and crawled. Mouths moved, hoofs kicked, flanks rippled, and a length of severed reindeer spine was trying to crawl out of the pit. Newton could feel his knees weakening and the vomit rising in his throat.\n\n\"Okay, man, don't go to pieces,\" he said, turning to Blinky to see if she appreciated this grim quip.\n\nBlinky's reaction was unclear. However Newton did see an elf fast approaching him across the cavern from a stout door he had not previously seen it guarding. It ran at him, waving a flinty-tipped spear and yelling something unintelligible that Newton severely doubted was, \"Here! I would like to present you with a gift of this lovely spear! Can we be friends?\"\n\nNewton tripped in surprise, spinning away from the pit edge and avoided a skewering. He found himself grabbing the spear shaft and, with no real effort on his part, flipping the elf up into the air like a pole-vaulter. The elf-guard came down, squealing, into the pit of reindeer bits. The elf yelled. A reindeer spine wrapped itself around him. A nearby head, sensing food, bit down on the elf's arm. The elf screamed for a second, then something powerful from beneath the surface layer latched onto it and dragged it down, silencing it utterly.\n\n\"Nasty.\" Newton turned to Blinky. \"They weren't planning on recycling you in there, were they?\"\n\nBlinky affectionately tried to bite off Newton's face.\n\n\"Well, I won't let them, old girl,\" he said. \"I think you should come with me.\"\n\nHe crouched at the pit edge and, avoiding a very active loop of undead intestine, reached down and snagged up a leg. It kicked and jerked in his hand and generally tried to pull his arm from its socket.\n\n\"There,\" he grunted, standing up. \"This will\u2014\"\n\nHe was holding a hind leg. Blinky was missing a foreleg. A left foreleg.\n\n\"Hang on.\"\n\nNewton crouched again and fished around. He narrowly avoided the snapping teeth of a severed head, but did come up with a left foreleg.\n\n\"Let's try this.\" He positioned the leg against Blinky, regarding it critically. \"It's a bit long but it will definitely do.\"\n\nBlinky's various body parts were stitched together with a wiry white thread. Newton looked around. If this was the location of the pit of body parts then\u2026\n\n\"Ah.\" The door that the now deceased elf had been guarding across the cavern had a letterbox opening in it. Threaded through was a length of white material.\n\n\"Potentially promising. Ow!\" Blinky bit him on the shoulder. \"Knock that off. I'm going to get some thread and sew your new leg on, you ungrateful creature. Maybe I'll \u2013 stop it! \u2013 get a nose bag and put it over your face, Hannibal Lector-style.\" With a tut and an eye roll for Blinky, he went to get thread.\n\n\"Best foot forward,\" he said to her, waving the wriggling limb.\n\nNewton had revised his plan: get some thread, sew on Blinky's leg, find mum, Guin and Dave (in whatever order the complex web of his priorities deemed appropriate) and then get the hell out of Christmas town.\n\nAs he neared the door, he saw that there was a pair of scissors hanging on a chain next to the door. The white threads poking through the letterbox opening were soft to the touch, slightly greasy, like\u2014\n\n\"Is this hair?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "The elvish voice was making another announcement over the PA. Guin wished she understood the language of the elves a little better.\n\nYou will soon enough, said Eglantine.\n\nThe starfish was right. Guin was certain some horrible, possibly irreversible transformation had come over her. She felt the tops of her ears, which were well on the way to becoming properly pointed elf-ears.\n\n\"Is that how they 'make' friends?\" she mused unpleasantly.\n\nTinfoil Tavistock made it quite clear that she didn't want Guin to turn into an elf. Guin agreed. Bullied and rejected at school or not, she preferred to stay as a girl.\n\nThen she had an idea.\n\nIf she was undergoing some sort of elf transformation, surely she could use it to her advantage? Guin ran to the bins full of clothing remnants and found a red jumper sleeve that, with minor alterations, would make a passable elf hat. She tied off the cuff end, turned it into a floppy pom-pom with some pinking shears and pulled the hat down on her head, making sure she pushed her hair out of sight.\n\nShe allowed her ears to pop out, fairly sure she made a passable elf at a glance. She rootled through the clothing bins to find the gaudiest, elfiest clothes she could, slipping on some children's leggings and a stupid little jacket.\n\nGoing to try and escape in disguise? said Eglantine dismissively.\n\n\"I'm not going to try to escape,\" said Guin. \"Not without my family.\"\n\nEglantine scoffed.\n\n\"Watch,\" said Guin.\n\nIf she was to help the family she needed to be more than just a decent elf facsimile. She needed to become a bona fide elf, preferably one that was respected. Guin was convinced the beard was a symbol of power amongst the elves, so she searched for something beardy. She went to the toy-making workshop, striding purposefully and hoping that Gerd wouldn't be there. Her disguise certainly wouldn't fool anyone who had seen her up close.\n\nShe searched through the supplies. They'd used some sort of stuffing when they made their toy creations. It wasn't the normal, snowy-white kapok you'd get from a craft supplier: something much smellier and organic-looking. It had probably been recycled from past victims. Guin reckoned she could tease beard-like strands from it. She sorted out the best bits, along with some glue to stick them onto her chin.\n\nShe wished she had a mirror to check how she looked, but elves didn't seem to be big on personal grooming. Instead she decided to practise her strutting. If she was to be an important elf she needed to master the art of posturing like the most arrogant of them.\n\nShe marched from one side of the workshop to the other, realising there was a problem. Every self-important dictator that she'd ever seen on the news combined their strutting with a narrative of some sort. While her elf language skills were improving all the time, she was not up to delivering a villainous monologue.\n\nShe tried again. She marched across the workshop making expansive gestures, punctuating her movements with the occasional \"Pah!\" and other dismissive non-words. It was probably as good as it was going to get. She shoved Elsa Frinton's Little Folk in European Folklore book under her shirt for safekeeping and made to leave.\n\nAs she unbolted the door ready to put her elf impersonation skills to the test, Eglantine said she wasn't going to fool anyone.\n\n\"At least, I'm doing something,\" she told the starfish. \"I'm going to get my family and, if I can, stop those elves from doing \u2026 whatever it is they're doing.\"\n\nEglantine sneered, pointing out she was almost certainly doomed to fail.\n\n\"I don't need that kind of negativity,\" said Guin.\n\nIn Guin's pocket, Tinfoil Tavistock did some little quadruped cheerleading and threw in some bold, Go, Guin!s to boot.\n\n\"Okay, a bit too much positivity,\" said Guin and stepped outside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Dave crept through the hall of Christmas presents. \"Guin?\" he hissed. \"Guin? Are you here? It's me!\"\n\nHe paused. Adding \"It's me!\" to the end of a sentence really added nothing. He gave up on the whisper-shouts and explored the room silently.\n\nBetween the stacks of Christmas presents were various workbenches, equipped with the means to make \u2026 he dreaded to think. There were boxes of eyes and ears on the bench. Human eyes and human ears. They weren't real, but they were unpleasantly soft and malleable. Behind a bench was a massive roller dispenser on which hung a huge roll of peachy-pink material. He reached out and tugged on it. It was like sheets of skin. Artificial skin, he hoped. On the rear wall drooping faces sagged from hooks.\n\n\"Okay, you're creepy.\"\n\nHe picked one up, unable to help himself. It was like a peeled baby face. What was it made from? If the elves had a 3D printer that built models from stuff out of a waste food bin, they would look like this. It even smelled rotten, glistening with a sweaty sheen. Dave wondered if they were hung up to dry. He remembered the elf-baby thing that had surprised him in the market. He dropped the face and wiped his hands in disgust.\n\nComponents and materials to make little people.\n\nThere was a shout from the hall entrance. A team of elves had entered but were not looking his way. One of them gestured to a wheeled pallet laden with boxes. Together, the elves wheeled it away.\n\nLots of little boxes. Weird human body parts.\n\n\"Yeah, this ain't normal,\" Dave said, adding it to the long list of not normal things he'd encountered in the last twenty-four hours.\n\nHe turned to the nearest stack of boxes and pulled down a Christmassy one. It was heavy, with an uneven weight. He'd seen one just like it earlier, but couldn't recall where. He put it on the workbench, untied the bow (feeling momentarily guilty because it was only Christmas Eve morning and not the right time to open a present) and lifted away the snug cardboard lid.\n\nHe pushed aside the shredded paper cushioning the contents. He gasped at the face staring up at him. It was a reasonable copy of a human baby's face, but looked as though someone had taken it out of the mould before it was properly set. The features sagged and oozed in a flesh-coloured nightmare. Lips melted to the left while the nose was oddly flattened and twisted. It was the eyes that held his attention, though. Cold, dead eyes that blended the hollow emptiness of a doll with the soul-sucking malice of the elves themselves. He reached out a trembling hand and moved more of the packaging. It wasn't just a face, there was a body attached.\n\nIt was a toy baby. A toy baby made from badly formed mush.\n\n\"You're enough to give any child nightmares, mate,\" muttered Dave.\n\nFrom nowhere, he remembered something Newton had said back in the hotel room, when the elves had first attacked. He had been babbling nervously about the elves in the market and said something about the baby Jesus in the town nativity open and close its eyes.\n\n\"You one of them dolls that can open and close its eyes, eh?\" said Dave.\n\nThen he recalled where he'd seen a box like this before. Bacraut had brought one onto the stage in the market square, before performing his elaborate mime for the amusement of his underlings.\n\nThe baby in the box blinked at Dave and grinned.\n\nDave dropped the box with a scream." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "The workshop marked with the hammer and saw sign was locked but, a few doors down, Esther found something just as interesting. It was a workshop, filled with benches and masses of papery and sparkly materials, and a pervasive sooty aroma. They looked as though they were to make Christmas crackers. A small piece of paper caught her eye and she picked it up. It was a cracker joke. Her breath hitched as she recognised Newton's handwriting.\n\nHow did Good King Wenceslas like his pizza?\n\nShe didn't even need to read the punchline. She put it aside with a sigh and wondered if he'd been here recently. Surely, he would be writing jokes only if someone had forced him to.\n\n\"Or maybe not,\" she said. She knew her boy.\n\nShe moved along the bench and found the tattered remains of a textbook. She read it with interest, as it seemed to contain incomplete instructions for some sort of rudimentary explosive. She opened a chest and hit pay dirt.\n\n\"Well hello, silver nitrate!\" she said, holding up a jar. \"And nitric acid, and ethanol. I wonder what I'm supposed to do with you.\" She put the jars down onto the bench and stared at the book. It did not contain any helpful hints.\n\n\"I suppose,\" she said thoughtfully, \"there's only a small number of ways to combine three substances. Maybe this is one of those times when I just need to wing it.\"\n\nShe dragged a stool across and took an empty dish down from a shelf. \"Let's try.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Guin heard a sharp crack of an explosion from the direction of the workshops, but she didn't break her stride.\n\nThe workshop elf, Gerd, appeared through a doorway, looking stricken, and headed towards the noise. Guin put her hands on her hips and made the angriest non-verbal noise she could manage. She stuck out her chin and tried to convey as much meaning as she could with her harrumph of disgust. Something like \"Why are you running round like an idiot just because there's explosions and bangs going on?\"\n\nGerd muttered an elvish apology and rushed away. Guin was pleased. If she could fool Gerd (even though she was clearly panicking), she could probably fool the other elves.\n\nShe moved on, wanting to find the epicentre of the activity. She needed an audience for her new role. \"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" she said to herself.\n\nThe next cavern was a small one, with tunnels leading away in several different directions. It seemed to be some sort of junction-cavern. At its centre was an elf in brown overalls, distributing clipboards to a queue of workers.\n\nGuin decided if she was to work her way up the food chain she should take on this supervisor. She marched up to the head of the queue and pushed aside the elf who was next in line. She pointed at her beard with meaning; the elf drifted away without a word. She faced the supervisor and stared hard at him. She brought a hand up and stroked her beard in an ostentatious way. He cringed and dropped to his knees, cowering in subservience.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" Guin said quietly.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" shouted the supervisor elf, and all of the elves in the queue, really putting their hearts into it: with raised-arm salutes and small whoops of enthusiasm.\n\nGuin knew that she couldn't leave it there. She faced all of them and raised her arms above her head. \"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi!\" she shouted.\n\nThey replied again, hollering as loudly as they could, punching the air in excitement. Guin recognised the sentiment: in her mind hearing the chant \"fight, fight, fight,\" that could sometimes be heard in an unsupervised playground. She felt mounting dread: clearly she had issued some sort of bid for supremacy.\n\nAnd she realised the bid for supremacy was not between her and the supervisor elf . She heard the crowd muttering \"Bacraut!, Bacraut!\" The chief elf himself was approaching!\n\nShe held her head high and maintained an attitude of mute superiority. Her fingers found Tinfoil Tavistock in her pocket. Tavistock believed in her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "The doll was alive! The baby with the ugly melted face packed in shredded paper in a Christmas box on a pile of similar boxes was very much alive!\n\nWhen Dave dropped the box the baby thing had rolled out. It certainly was no human baby, and not just because of its hideous face. Its limbs were too spindly, its manner too co-ordinated. Human babies, dolls or real, did not hiss and try to claw people to death.\n\nIt charged at Dave with sinister nimbleness. Dave tried to shoo it away with his foot, but the thing was determined.\n\n\"Nice baby, nice baby,\" Dave whimpered. \"Go to sleep. It's beddy-byes.\"\n\nHe tried, for no sane reason, to recall any lullabies he once knew. It had been years since he had needed to use any. What he really needed was a weapon, and there were none to hand.\n\nHe threw a box of eyes at the creature as he backed away. The baby thing slipped and slid on them momentarily. Dave threw a bunch of ears at it. They had even less effect.\n\nHe was about to pull down sheet after sheet of rolled skin, with the vague plan of wrapping the thing in it until was immobile, but the opportunity passed. The baby thing latched onto his lower leg and began to climb.\n\nDave swatted at it. The thing bit his finger. He snatched his hand away, and the face came with it. \"Oh, God!\" he burbled.\n\nBeneath the baby face was an elf, a small one, but a vile ugly hate-filled elf nonetheless. It licked his blood from its lips and, discarding its encumbering nappy, resumed its climb. It had bitten him, and Dave knew what effect an elf bite had had on Esther. In fact, he could feel (assuming it wasn't just panic setting in) wooziness already coming over him.\n\nWith one hand on the elf's forehead to keep it back, Dave fished for his first aid kit with the other. The zip sprang open and the contents began slipping out. Dave managed to grab a prepped insulin syringe and, with a medical negligence that would have got him fired from his day job, jabbed it in his own thigh.\n\nPulling it out, the next course of action seemed natural. He was being climbed by a malevolent pixie, and he had a sharp object in his free hand. He stabbed the elf in the arm.\n\nAfterwards, Dave could only assume the elf had a bad reaction to the insulin. If the bite of an elf induced a dangerous sugar-rush, perhaps their own blood sugar levels were entirely different to humans. The elf dropped immediately from Dave's leg and began dancing on the floor in squealing circles. It's arm fizzed and melted like chocolate on a hot windowsill. It barely had time to notice the loss of its limb before the remnants of the insulin reached the rest of its body. It sagged, its legs gave way. Its horrified face sank into the sticky cavity of its collapsing body. Finally it pooled on the floor in a brown-pink puddle, like a gallon of toffee sauce. The smell reminded Dave of the lingering smell from an empty tin of car sweets.\n\n\"Sweet mother of\u2014\"\n\nDave checked his first aid kit and the items he had dropped on the floor. He had five full doses of insulin left. Just a droplet had utterly splaticated that one. That was the good news.\n\nIt was a reasonable assumption each of the boxes contained an elf-baby, and each pile contained hundreds of boxes. That was the bad news.\n\nAnd the piles\u2026 The elves had been carting them out for some time, taking them somewhere to be loaded and shipped out. Thousands of elf-babies being sent out into the world, but for what reason?\n\nA word rose in his mind, something Guin had mentioned at the dinner table last night: changelings.\n\n\"Oh, crap.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Bacraut the elf stood in front of Guin. \"Eretta el f\u00e1skorun?\" he scoffed. \"Gekki s\u00e9g haf besta skeggi?\"\n\nGuin knew her best bet was to keep her mouth shut and try to assert her dominance with body language. She had the advantage of being taller than Bacraut, so she sneered down her nose at him and thrust her beard right in his face, drawing imaginary circles in the air with her chin and jabbing it for emphasis.\n\nHe spluttered with annoyance. His tiny fists balled at his sides as he unleashed a stream of abuse. Guin had a pretty good handle on the language of the elves, but this rapid-fire profanity would have been recognisable in any language.\n\nGuin cast her mind across the kind of coolness she had never possessed or craved, but had often observed. The kind of dismissive sass American pop stars could channel so well. She pursed her lips and conjured the nonsense phrases in her mind, letting her eyebrows and head-waggles do the talking.\n\nDon't mess with me sugar.\n\nTalk to the beard.\n\nPut a ring on it.\n\nIt seemed to be working. Bacraut was definitely losing his composure. He visibly quivered with rage. He closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them again he looked more focussed. He strutted up and down, with some beard moves of his own. He tried the head-waggle, but it didn't really work for him. Guin wondered if elves had a different sort of neck joint to humans. He was a good beard-jabber though. He worked up a rhythm and created a kind of duck-walking dance move, his chin leading the way like an exotic bird. Guin thought back to the ancient pop videos her dad liked to watch and realised that Bacraut was moving like Mick Jagger.\n\nWhen it was time for Guin to move, she had a new idea. This time her entire display was based around her beard remaining still while her head and the rest of her body moved around it. These moves owed more to Loony Tunes cartoons than pop videos, but she was certain she pulled it off. Her chin remained stationary while her body scooted off to the sides, kicking and hip-swaying to an unmistakeable rhythm. Her face was inscrutable while her body did the work.\n\nThe circle of elves shrieked with delight.\n\nBacraut was clearly outclassed. He seemed to be out of ideas. He reverted to the angry screaming again, making the other elves shrink away in fear. Then he stood upright, a thought coming to him. He faced Guin with a look of blazing malevolence. He stood tall and wound his finger into his beard, corkscrewing it right in and then tugging sharply. The challenge was clear: whose beard could withstand being pulled?\n\nGuin wasn't happy at this. She had no idea whether Bacraut's beard was real or not, and even if it wasn't, there was a good chance his was stuck on more securely, or he wouldn't have suggested it. She was prepared to fake a small tug at her own beard, but she had a pretty good idea of what would follow. The next step would be pulling each other's beards, or inviting someone else to do so. She needed to de-rail this train of thought before it went any further.\n\nSeveral ideas collided in her mind. The elves clearly held the beard in great esteem. Christmas seemed to be their life, or religion, or whatever. It was the power of Santa that she was essentially evoking.\n\nShe took a step back from Bacraut. She positioned herself so that she faced both him and the audience for maximum impact. She glared around to be certain she had their full attention, then raised her voice as loud and deep as it would go.\n\n\"HO! HO! HO!\" she yelled.\n\nThe reaction was immediate. Bacraut shrank away. The other elves piled onto him, sensing his weakness. He disappeared from view, although there were gloopy thwacking noises that suggested he might be suffering. Guin strode away, keen to move while she had the upper hand. Several elves ran after her, bowing in a subservient manner. They beckoned eagerly to her. She inclined her head in agreement and left the cavern, following their lead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Newton tugged at the wisps of hair in the letterbox opening and they came through with ease. Like the allure of a loose scab, or the visible edge of a roll of sticky tape, Newton felt an urge to pull further. As he did so, he thought he heard a voice from within. It wasn't an elf voice. It was deep and full-bodied, even if it was muffled.\n\n\"Hello?\" he said. \"Is anyone in there?\"\n\nThe voice responded, although he couldn't make out what it was saying.\n\nNewton thought about the deep voice, and the hair, and the fact there was an elf guarding the door. Even though he had a list of things to do, with stitching Blinky's leg back on at the top and get the hell out of Christmas town at the bottom, he decided to open the door and see exactly who was inside.\n\nThe door was unlocked. Behind it\u2026 Behind it was a doorway-filling wall of hair. It was white, tinged with grease and age to the faintest of yellows. It sat in clouds and bundles, looping round and round in swirls.\n\n\"Hello?\" called Newton.\n\n\"O-o-o-h,\" said a deep voice, the \"Oh\" rising like a folk singer about to burst into song, or a bad actor about to launch into a Shakespearean soliloquy. \"Oh, dost mine ears hear the voice of an Englishman?\"\n\nNewton tried to push into the mass of hair. He couldn't part it. It was all bound and knotted together. He picked up the scissors hanging on the chain outside the door, but they wouldn't reach. A sharp tug ripped the chain in two. Newton cut his way in like a jungle explorer, except this jungle was hair and he was using scissors instead of a machete.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he said. \"I'm Newton.\"\n\n\"Would you, sir, happen to have about you such a thing as a cup of mead?\" called the man.\n\n\"I don't, sorry. Dave \u2013 that's my mum's boyfriend \u2013 he bought some at the fair yesterday but I don't know where that's gone. I think it got burned up, or the elves destroyed it.\"\n\nThe voice began to wail, in a manly baritone. \"Oh, those cursed creatures!\" The wailing sounded well-rehearsed, as though more a matter of habit than genuine emotion. \"I did my best, young sir. I did my best.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you did,\" said Newton, not certain at all what he was on about.\n\nHe snipped his way the direction of the voice. The towering walls of hair sprang back into position behind him. There was little danger of being crushed or suffocated by the hair, it being light and airy in nature; but if he lost the scissors or got himself turned around too much, there was a danger of getting irretrievably entangled.\n\n\"I did try to divert their maleficent manner in productive habits,\" said the voice.\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"The devil makes work for idle hands, he does.\"\n\n\"Does he?\"\n\n\"He does.\"\n\n\"O-o-o-h, those elves, with naught to occupy them but whimsy and fairy-wine, would cause all manner of trouble across the land. Spoiling milk, upsetting livestock, ruining the lives of finer folk than I.\" He sobbed momentarily. \"I was such a wicked man. I deserved it. I deserve it all.\"\n\n\"Hang in there,\" said Newton. \"I'm nearly with you.\"\n\n\"There's no saving me. I am grievously wounded.\"\n\n\"You're hurt? It's okay. Dave's a paramedic \u2013 Dave, the one with the mead. He can help you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps with a splash of amber sweetness for a doomed man. I did my best to turn the elves from their given natures. I set them to crafts and construction. I ordered them to bring materials to our dank grotto \u2013 not this place, far to the north, in the high reaches, as far from the cities of man as I could take them \u2013 and set them to carving and sewing and crafting toys.\"\n\n\"Sort of like rehabilitation therapy?\" Newton was getting the craziest idea of who this chap was. Or at least who he thought he was.\n\n\"Rehabilitation? To restore? To give purpose? Yes! Yes! But their inclination towards evil was so strong, as foul and as wicked as mine own weaknesses. They would have us all go out on wild hunts, to snare the unwary, to steal infants. What could I do but go along, to steer their path, to divert their eyes? Did you say you had a cup of mead, fine sir?\"\n\n\"Dave might,\" repeated Newton. \"Probably not.\"\n\n\"I was so thirsty. But no matter how much I drink I am not satisfied. I said as much to my huntsman. 'Bring me a drink, man!' I demanded but he had none and then\u2014\" He sobbed once more. \"I demanded a drink, saying I would be willing to go to hell to fetch a cup. O-o-o-h, is this now mine own private hell?\"\n\n\"Dando!\" exclaimed Newton.\n\n\"What?\" said the man (who must be only a foot or two away now, Newton thought). \"Oh, yes. That was me. At least, I thought it was me.\"\n\nNewton snipped through the final inches, thinking furiously. Guin had mentioned Dando and the Wild Hunt: one of the stories in that book she'd picked up. But this man's tale, of elves and grottos and crafting toys\u2026 Had he really set up the Santa Claus racket to get the elves to do something other than terrorising the countryside. And why were they here? Had Santa/Dando been drunk at the wheel \u2013 that is, the reins \u2013 of his sleigh?\n\n\"Begging your pardon,\" said Newton. \"You must be quite, well, old.\"\n\n\"I am but a shadow of the man I once was,\" said Santa-Dando. \"But I am whole, cursedly so.\"\n\nThe tips of the scissor scraped against stone. Newton pushed aside the curtains of hair in front of him. There was nothing but bare stone wall.\n\n\"Er, Mr Dando, sir?\"\n\n\"Yes?\" said the voice, a little off to the right.\n\nNewton moved along the wall in that direction. He passed a door, not the door he had entered by. Further along from it was a set of shelves. \"Mr Dando?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\nNewton looked along the shelves and saw Dando. To say he had the face of an old man would be to understate the matter and do a disservice to old men generally. Nor was his the face of a corpse. There was life in those cheeks, a light in those rheumy eyes. He had a full white beard, a Father Christmas beard. (Of course he did: he was Father Christmas). It was that beard which had grown and grown and filled this room. Newton found himself pondering how many centuries would have to pass to grow as much beard as this.\n\nThe years had not been kind, but it was clear some supernatural power kept the man alive. This Santa character (Newton had no idea if the Dando myth was medieval or older) must be a least several centuries old, if not longer. Only strange elven magic could explain that. But more significantly, only magic could account for the fact that whilst this beardy man had a wizened and ancient head, he had no body at all.\n\nNo wonder the man was thirsty. Any liquid that passed his lips would be instantly trickling over the shelf." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Esther tried not to think about how hot and tight the skin on her face was. She knew she'd lost her eyebrows in the last blast she'd created. She'd also had to put out several small fires in her hair and clothing. Nonetheless it was a positive result. She'd definitely got the proportions right; the charred chemistry textbook concurred. Keeping the whole thing stable and stopping it going off prematurely was the key.\n\nShe needed to keep the ethanol away from the other chemicals until she wanted the whole lot to blow up. A further search around the workbench revealed that bomb-making wasn't the primary function of this cracker laboratory, so there were no useful containers to safely stop the chemicals from mixing until she was ready. Esther devised a slightly dubious contraption where the ethanol was held in test tubes suspended with string above a box containing the other components. All she had to do was keep it upright and not allow it to be jostled \u2013 even slightly \u2013 and all would be well.\n\nTo disguise the box and give it a bit more rigidity, she wrapped it in red crepe paper and tied it securely with a green tartan ribbon. The bomb was going on that mockery of a sleigh. Not only would that put paid to the elves' inexplicable plans, it would surely create enough of a distraction for her and her family to escape.\n\nSlowly, watchfully, she exited the workshop, and with an awkwardness that only holding a box full of high explosives could generate, she climbed back into the vent system.\n\nOnce she was back in the tunnel, she adapted her previous method of moving around: carefully lifting and repositioning the box in front of her. If she moved too quickly, the test tubes clinked against each other, making her cringe. If one drop fell from a test tube she suspected it would set off the whole thing. She was under no illusions that, in a confined space like the tunnel, the blast would kill her. She moved on through the tunnels, towards the cavern containing Santa's sleigh." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "Newton tried to keep his cool while talking to Father Christmas's disembodied head. \"It's an honour to meet you, sir,\" he said.\n\nThe cloudy eyes blinked. \"O-o-o-h, dost mine ears hear the voice of an Englishman?\"\n\n\"Er, yes, it's me, Newton,\" he said, presenting himself into Santa's field of vision.\n\nSanta struggled to focus on him. \"Would you, sir, happen to have about you such a thing as a cup of mead?\"\n\nRight, thought Newton. Either Santa was drunk (how much alcohol would it take to get a disembodied head drunk?) or was suffering with dementia (deeply understandable given his age and circumstances) or the magic keeping him alive didn't extend to giving him much brainpower.\n\n\"You're looking well, sir,\" said Newton kindly.\n\nSanta humphed. \"It's my fine beard. Like Samson of old, it's the source of my power.\"\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" Newton muttered.\n\n\"Indeed.\" Santa sniffled. \"Those wicked wicked creatures. They would rarely do what I told them.\"\n\n\"No elf-discipline,\" said Newton. He couldn't help himself.\n\n\"They gave me life without end in punishment for my godless ways and my beard \u2013 my beautiful beard \u2013 can you see it?\"\n\nNewton turned to survey a room full of beard. \"Yes, I believe I can. You could keep a wigmaker in business for years with all this.\"\n\n\"This beard gives their reindeer the power of flight.\"\n\nNewton nodded, seeing some weird stupid logic in that.\n\n\"And each year, long after I had given up on mending their wicked ways, they forced me into the sleigh, to take the reins. And then, one year, I decided I had had enough. I determined to crash the sleigh, kill myself and all those vile things.\" The wrinkled face frowned, adding more wrinkles. \"I wonder if I would have succeeded.\"\n\nNewton made a face. \"It's \u2026 it's hard to say.\"\n\n\"Tell me, young sir, did you say you had a cup of mead?\"\n\nNewton was about to answer, politely and patiently, when he heard a rattle at the nearest door. He pulled back into the mass of hair. It closed about and concealed him. Through the fog of hair, he could see the shadows of elves enter the room.\n\n\"T\u00edmi tila far a re\u00f0, Dando,\" said one.\n\n\"O-o-o-o-h, please. Not again!\" pleaded Santa.\n\nThere was the shing of heavy scissors and the thump of a heavy object rolling off a shelf.\n\n\"How will I even reach the reins!\" wailed Santa.\n\nThe door closed and Newton was alone. He tries to assimilate all he had heard and learned. He was in a room of magic beard hair; hair that granted reindeer the power of flight. Madness though it undoubtedly was, that didn't mean it wasn't true.\n\n\"Maybe I could build myself a hairyplane,\" he smirked, but jokes weren't as good when there was no one to groan at them.\n\nHe gathered up armfuls of the stuff, cut it away with the scissors, stuffed it up his jumper for safekeeping and went back to find Blinky." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "As carefully as she had climbed into the air duct, Esther descended into the vast sleigh cavern. Beyond its front end she saw the tunnel continued. Was that the track leading out into the entrance cavern, and the broad tunnel along which they'd driven the tractor? Had the sun risen outside in the world beyond? Was it now Christmas Eve morning?\n\nIf the elves were planning on launching this thing, then there was still a full day until Christmas Eve itself, and the traditional time for Father Christmas to be about his rounds. She chided herself, reminding herself to think more globally. If it was Christmas Eve morning here then it was only a few short hours until Christmas Day on the far side of the world. If the elves were going to be all logical and begin their insane Christmas flight near the international date line and all those lovely Pacific islands, then launch was surely imminent.\n\nAnother elvish message over the tannoy cemented the idea in her mind.\n\nOnce at ground level, she saw a niche in the rocks where an elderly elf sat at a desk, covered in pieces of paper, some sort of antique adding machine, and things that looked like abacuses. Other elves rushed in and out of this alcove, apparently acting on instructions. Esther crept closer. There were numerous drawings of sleigh sections, and map fragments showing the destination for each one. Badly-spelled labels like Yoorope and Sentrul Asha were scrawled onto some of the shipping containers, so there was clearly a plan for the intended journey. It looked as though this was the logistics planner.\n\n\"Mora oil\u00eda ta\u00f0 ber auxleg oil\u00edu,\" barked the elderly elf to a minion, stabbing a paper. It was marked up with Fool to cross Persifik.\n\nEsther had seen enough. Sabotaging the sleigh looked like the ideal plan. If she fastened the bomb somewhere near the middle, then hopefully it would take out the whole thing when the chemicals mixed. Which they would if the ride was sufficiently bumpy.\n\nShe moved carefully through the cavern. There was lots of cover, but she couldn't afford any sudden movements while she carried the bomb. She made it to the edge of the sleigh and ducked under a runner. She was directly underneath the long vehicle. The heavy containers really did sit on flatbed railway trucks which were really too small for such bulk. She imagined if the elves could manage to haul, or rocket-propel this thing out beyond the extent of their narrow railway, they were hoping it would slide on runners and leave the trucks behind. She couldn't picture it ending as anything other than a horrible train wreck.\n\nOnce underneath, she was able to move almost invisibly along its full length in the gloomy tunnel created by the raised containers overhead. The underside stank of the fuel pooling on the floor.\n\nJudging herself to be near the centre, she squeezed upwards between linked containers, climbing up the mesh of piping and rope and chains (and what was this white thready stuff running over everything like cobwebs?). It was tricky to keep her footing, and not a little claustrophobic, but she persevered. She looked around for a good place to stash the bomb but ultimately decided the best place to hide a gift-shaped bomb was among the gift boxes filling the containers. Even if hers did have a tartan bow that marked it out as different from all the others. She laid the box on the top of the nearest pile and made her way back down, relieved not to have to carry the bomb any more." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "Guin's elf deputies delivered obsequious commentary as they ushered her, their new leader, into the grand hall where Newton and she had been forced to participate in elf chorus practice. Now the elves were in full choral mode: a high-pitched and full-throated celebration.\n\nAs she proceeded down the central aisle between candy-cane striped pillars, the voices rose higher in pomp and joy. Guin felt a momentary thrill run through her before realising the songs and the adoration were not specifically for her.\n\nAt the far end of the hall, elves worked beneath the cloth covered shape on the dais.\n\nGuin's underlings chattered enthusiastically. She picked up snippets of words but they spoke too fast for her to fully grasp. Something was done. Something was ready. Pieces were \u2026 in place?\n\nThe choir's song spun to a dizzying finale and the red velvet cloth was ripped away.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, surprised.\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, bewildered.\n\n\"Oh, my,\" she said, frankly disgusted and more than a little afraid.\n\nIt was Father Christmas, but nothing like the department store Santas most people would expect. No twinkly-eyed old gentleman with a luxuriant beard, a red suit with soft fur cuffs and gloves. No shiny boots and belt with brass clasps. No jolly floppy hat with a white pom-pom.\n\nThis Father Christmas was as tall as a house. Yes, there were boots, great conical hoofs of wood and rotting leather, reinforced to take the weight of the whole. Yes there was a belt, several belts in fact. The torso, bigger than a minibus, had been strapped round and round with rope and leather, all over a frame that was a patchwork of \u2013 was that skin? Was that animal hide? Whatever it was, it looked something like the patterning on a Friesian cow and a lot like the aftermath of a messy surgical procedure. Yes, there was a suit, but where the suit ended and the man began was hard to tell. And as for the head. It was a normal-sized human one, the head of a tired and wizened old man, lashed into place with ribbon and thread. With a pathetic threadbare hat stuck on top. The whole thing had been assembled, reassembled and patched to the point where it looked like a bad art project left out to rot.\n\nThree thoughts fought for dominance in Guin's mind. The first was the view she had expressed to Newton earlier: that a Tinfoil Tavistock, remade from new materials, was still Tinfoil Tavistock. That the materials did not make the individual.\n\nThe second thought was about those islanders who believed if they could build their own make-believe radio sets from coconuts and bamboo, they could call down aeroplanes full of cargo and food. The elves had rebuilt their own Santa Claus, much bigger than before (because bigger was better, obviously) and now in their ridiculous, spiteful, stupid hearts believed what they had made was as good as the original.\n\nThe third thought, simplest of all, was this was a giant zombie Father Christmas, or more properly, a giant Frankenstein's monster of a Father Christmas. Had the bones or body parts of the horrible Mrs Scruples provided the last components?\n\nAs she looked at Santa's head, strangely out of proportion with the rest of the thing, it swivelled to meet her gaze. The eyes were clouded and vacant. She realised the head had turned because there was a pair of elves on Santa's shoulders working his neck joint. They manoeuvred a complex set of wires like master puppeteers. Guin guessed the rest of Santa was animated in the same way, so she stepped clear as the huge figure lurched towards the entrance.\n\nGuin hurried after, overtaking the Santa as it moved between caverns, cheered on by rapturous elves. Guin didn't miss a beat. She waved to the crowd, proudly stepping ahead, as if this was all her doing and she expected the gratitude of the masses for her efforts. The elves loved it. They made enthusiastic whooping noises as she thrust her beard forward and Santa followed, very slowly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "\"There!\" Newton proudly snapped the final piece of thread. Blinky showed her appreciation by trying to bite his face off.\n\nSewing her leg back on had been easier than Newton expected. It was clear the zombie reindeer had very little in the way of pain receptors. Also, Santa's magic beard hair almost leaped at the chance to re-stitch the tripedal creature back together. Newton was sure his mother would have approved of his handiwork, keeping any quibbles about the quality of his stitching to herself.\n\nHe stood from his task. Blinky flexed her leg.\n\n\"Now, we rescue everybody else,\" Newton said, having no idea how to do it.\n\nThere was sound of movement: mass movement from the reindeer cavern along the tunnel.\n\n\"Sounds like everyone's on the move,\" said Newton. \"Let's mingle.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "Dave peered out between a gap in the crates and stared at the sleigh. He had followed a consignment of boxed up fake baby elves from one part of the elf complex to here. Babies in boxes, boxes on pallets, and now pallets in open top shipping containers on the back of a sleigh.\n\n[ He crouched on the damp floor and hid behind some unused wooden packing crates ]\n\nThis was on a scale he just couldn't wrap his head around. He thought he glimpsed parts of an aeroplane built into the thing. Something about a long grey part of the frame reminded him of an F-15 fighter jet. And those turbines under the stubby wings must surely have been cannibalised from a downed RAF plane. It was horribly non-aerodynamic, and the tubing and pipes feeding those massive engines must had added several tonnes to the weight. How on earth was it going to get airborne? He dismissed the technical challenge with a heartfelt sigh. That sort of thinking belonged to yesterday, when the world was sane. Right now, he didn't need to know how this monstrous sleigh was going to get airborne, just accept that it would. The elves had constructed a work of magical engineering madness. Clearly they had been planning this for a long time.\n\nThe cavern stank of grease and oil and\u2014 Dave dabbed and sniffed at the puddle at his feet. \"Hell,\" he whispered.\n\nThe whole place was awash with aviation fuel, or something. The cavern was a monumental fire risk.\n\nThere was movement by a side entrance.\n\nA delegate of important looking elves came into the cavern. The foremost one, with a luxuriant beard, waved imperiously at the gathered crowds. Dave thought if he dropped a lit match in this place, he'd be able to take out the majority of the elves and their upper echelons in one act. He'd also be condemning himself to a fiery death in the process.\n\nThose thoughts were pushed out of his mind by the arrival of Father Christmas: a homemade giant on ponderously slow legs. It moved into the cavern like a Day of the Dead carnival monstrosity, a next level Wicker Man.\n\nThat thing deserved to burn, he thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "As Esther crept away from the sleigh she made a wide detour around the busiest area. Some sort of enormous figure was being led across the cavern and onto the sleigh. With a jolt she realised it was a Father Christmas.\n\nIt reminded her of the worst examples of fairground artwork. Fibre-glass models of clowns, horses and cartoon characters that were supposed to add a sense of fun to the rides, but invariably made them sinister and creepy. Its body was as big as some of the shipping containers, and the tiny head at the top swivelled and stared in a way that was deeply disturbing. An elf swung round the front of Santa's head on a rope. It looked as if were attending to some last-minute maintenance, whether mechanical or cosmetic was difficult to tell.\n\nAt least that would hold everyone's attention while Esther made her exit, but she was keen to see what was going on. She circled round the sleigh to take a look.\n\nA team of reindeer \u2013 God, it must have been a hundred-strong at least! \u2013 was being led up to the front of the sleigh and harnessed up. Two abreast, with a shaft and leather tackle binding them to the monstrous vehicle. Esther felt a momentary pang of self-recrimination as she thought what Newton would say about her blowing up the sleigh with reindeer attached to it.\n\nBut they weren't even real-life reindeer, she immediately countered. And Newton wasn't here to see it. Except he was! She caught a glimpse of his curly mop of hair among the many reindeer.\n\n\"What are you playing at?\" she whispered desperately." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "Guin was still trying to process the sight of Santa's sleigh. It was incomprehensibly huge.\n\nOf course, she thought, a massive Santa required a massive sleigh. Like everything else the elves had in this place, it was an unsettling parody of a sleigh. Its enormous size; the badly-executed mess of its construction.\n\nWhile the puppeteered Santa was steered to the front of the sleigh and lowered onto his seat, the elves nearest to her ran through an itinerary for the sleigh's upcoming journey. Maps detailing a route across the world were passed around. Guin was sure the maps weren't quite right. Was Japan actually that shape? And was Australia really that close to India?\n\nAn elf pointed at containers and then the corresponding locations on the map. \"\u00deal turt superlegt?\"\n\n\"Superlegt,\" Guin agreed.\n\nShe became aware of a small scuffle amongst the massive herd of reindeer and turned to one of the elves, an arrogant, questioning look on her face. It scuttled off to investigate.\n\nIt was then she saw a figure by a stack of packing crates by the wall. Her dad! She almost yelled out in delight. He was doing a bad job of hiding but none of the elves had spotted him yet. She gave him a surreptitious waist-high wave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "Dave gasped when he realised his own daughter was the head elf. He was gripped by a terrible fear. She had placed herself among those creatures! Simultaneously he was filled with a chest-swilling pride that Guin was keeping her cool while the elves literally bowed down before her and obeyed her every command. She was smart, and far more adaptable than he'd given her credit for: fitting in as if she'd been born to it.\n\nSeeing she had his attention, she made a number of subtle gestures. She pointed at herself and the sleigh and made a swooshing fly-away motion.\n\nDave nodded.\n\nHe didn't exactly approve of taking a ride on that thing. Elf-Airways looked like they had a horribly slapdash approach to vehicle maintenance and air safety. He looked around, saw all the elves were principally occupied with either the Father Christmas creature, the reindeer or the packing of yet more shipping containers, and dashed across the cavern floor to the sleigh. He slipped between two container crates (nearly tripping over some of the cable mesh binding the whole thing together in the process) and climbed on board in the shadow of a patched up jet engine." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "Guin watched her dad break from cover and head for the sleigh. She would have watched him longer, but a band of elves was marching back from the ranks of reindeer. Newton was held between them. One held a knife to his throat, or would have done if it was tall enough. It actually held a knife to his kidneys.\n\n\"Hanst mi\u00f0 reind\u00fdrum,\" an elf said.\n\nGuin nodded, understanding.\n\n\"Guin!\" said Newton, recognising her. \"It's me!\"\n\nHan\u00f0ur a\u00f0 die!\" asked another elf.\n\n\"What happened to you? Did they turn you into an elf?\"\n\nGuin wished the boy would shut up. She stayed in character.\n\nAn elf made a slicing motion with its knife. \"Drepan staba n\u00fa!\"\n\nGuin nodded in full agreement and held out her hand for the knife.\n\n\"Mi\u2014\" She tried to order in her mind what little she knew of the elf language. \"Mi slautra him-ni myssj\u00e1lf.\" She sneered at Newton and indicated the elves should hand over the prisoner to her.\n\n\"Please don't,\" said Newton. \"Guin. It's me. You're Guin, remember?\"\n\nShe gestured for the elves to put him on board. When one of them queried her, she scowled at him and made a surprisingly effective finger-walking pantomime to suggest she was going to throw him overboard once they were airborne.\n\nThe elves cackled.\n\n\"No, please,\" said Newton. \"You shouldn't have eaten all that reindeer moss! You don't know what it's done to you!\"\n\nShe gestured for the elves to take him away. Newton kicked and wriggled.\n\n\"There's no point struggling,\" she squeaked in her best attempt at an elf attempting English. \"We are going to sleigh you.\"\n\nNewton looked at her. She gave him the smallest wink. The teenager's eyes lit up. He still struggled, but now it was an act. He allowed himself to be dragged up a ladder and onto the sleigh's steering platform." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "Esther was having trouble processing what she was seeing.\n\nDave had just scurried into the rear section of the sleigh. Further ahead, though mostly out of sight, she had seen her son taken at knife-point onto the front of the sleigh and (although it had taken her long enough to realise it) the bearded elf with him was little Guin.\n\nHer family, through accident rather than design, were now all aboard the sleigh. All of them, all in one place and with the means of escape. Which was brilliant, except for the fact Esther had just planted a bomb on the sleigh.\n\nWhat was she to do now? Could she get her family off, or could she remove the bomb before it departed? Both options were fraught with risk. Esther couldn't face the idea of choosing the wrong one. She sighed: the only thing to do was to get back on the sleigh and get to the bomb as quickly as she could. If she disassembled it, at least she could buy some more time.\n\nShe climbed under the rear of the vehicle, picking her way carefully along the length of the sleigh." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "From atop the sleigh Guin spotted Esther and smiled. They were all here, so if she could get the sleigh to fly them out of here, all would be well. Once they were outside, they could dump the sleigh and put a stop to the elves' stupidity.\n\nSanta was now front and centre of the sleigh. The cockpit area was a gigantic bench in front of a foot well as deep as she was tall. Fat reins of woven white fibres ran hundreds of metres from the lead reindeers to the lip of the sleigh. The reins were clamped into Santa's meaty hands. Arranged on what could only be called the dashboard were numerous buttons, levers and dials. They had clearly been ripped from other machines and welded or taped into place. They must, she assumed, link to the wires and tubes to the engines further back on the vehicle.\n\nHigh above, the zombie Santa's jaw worked up and down as if it had just remembered how to chew.\n\nNext to Guin, bound and guarded by elves, Newton murmured, \"It's Dando, the man taken by the elves and the Wild Hunt.\"\n\nSanta's eyes rolled, and as much as a decapitated head could strain, his head strained. \"Would any of you good sirs happen to have about you a cup of mead?\" it asked hoarsely.\n\nAn elf up on the shoulder of the meat puppet slapped the head to shut it up.\n\nGuin decided the head was just freaky. Tinfoil Tavistock gently reminded her that she shouldn't be hasty to judge others. She turned her attention to her elves and indicated that they should leave now.\n\nThey consulted each other in alarm. \"\u00dea\u00f0er mora ah lada!\" one argued.\n\nShe made a dramatic slamming gesture to show that she was not waiting for anything else to be loaded. \"Vi\u00f0 \u2013 um, go? \u2013 fara n\u00fan!\"\n\nShe expanded on it with wild circles she hoped expressed the near-impossible task of going around the entire earth in the course of one night. They elves bowed and withdrew, shouting that they should finish up to the loading teams.\n\nShe whispered aside to Newton. \"You think you can steer this sleigh?\"\n\n\"What?\" he whispered back.\n\nShe was about to discreetly suggest driving a sleigh must be quite like riding horses when there was a shout from behind. Bacraut was approaching across the cavern floor. He was in bad shape. The beating he had received following her leadership challenge had left him bruised and limping. His wounds were the sticky red of cranberry sauce.\n\nHe yelled at her almost incoherently. She thought it was just a matter of revenge but then she realised he was pointing towards the back of the sleigh.\n\n\"Ik m\u00f3\u00f0er!\" he yelled. \"Ik m\u00f3\u00f0er en \u00e1 sle\u00f0!\"\n\nGuin realised Esther had been spotted. Bacraut and the elves on the floor raced towards the sleigh.\n\n\"We've got to go!\" yelled Guin.\n\n\"What?\" said Newton.\n\nShe pulled at his bonds and freed his arms. \"Fly!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Newton grabbed the reins. They were crazy heavy but Newton was able to lift one and send a small ripple down it to the front reindeer.\n\n\"Go!\" he yelled. \"Mush! Yah!\"\n\nAhead, reindeer shifted listlessly. The front-most one walked a little.\n\nAn elf, seeing what he was up to leapt down from the giant Santa body. Guin intercepted the elf and grabbed it, diverting its trajectory so that it pitched over the side of the sleigh.\n\n\"Go!\" she yelled.\n\nNewton was gripped with a mad and sudden notion. The reins were made of Father Christmas beard. It was the hair that gave the reindeer the power of flight, yet it was human blood that had propelled Blinky upwards. Life blood and magic hair.\n\nHe picked up a dropped elf blade, stabbed his own hand (perhaps more enthusiastically than necessary) and smeared the blood on the reins, shaking them again.\n\n\"Ya! Onward Blinky!\" he yelled. \"On Scromdir and Bulta\u00f0a! On Sleipnir and Kicgut! Hlager and Paugir and, er, Dancer and Prancer and \u2026 all of yous! Mush!\"\n\nThe power of Santa's magic flowed down the ropes. The reindeer moved. The sleigh jolted, sluggishly resisted and then, with a massive Titanic hitting the iceberg groan, began to move forward." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "It was disconcerting to be beneath the sleigh as it started to move. Chains clanked and twisted. The container above Esther's head moaned like it was full of ghosts. The flatbed truck next to her struggled: over-burdened wheels turning and grinding on the rails.\n\nShe did not want to be here when the sleigh built up speed. The bomb could explode at any moment. She needed to get to it as quickly as possible, or get herself and the three surviving humans in this town as far away from it as possible.\n\nShe ran forward to the next intersection between sledge carriages and began to climb." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 102", + "text": "From his position high up on the front of the sleigh, Newton could see the confusion among the elves in the cavern. The sleigh was hauling out: many of the elves cheered. Hats were whipped off and either waved or tossed in the air.\n\nElsewhere, urged on by the hobbling Bacraut, other elves were running to the vehicle, clambering up onto its side.\n\nAmid this confusion, other elves just focused on their jobs. Cargo-loaders attempted to thrust last minute parcels on board. Reindeer handlers encouraged their beasts forward. Santa puppeteers puppeted.\n\n\"We've got to go faster!\" said Guin. \"They're going to catch us. Isn't there a whip?\"\n\nNewton looked at her horrified. \"Whip them? I'd never use a whip on Lily.\"\n\nShe looked back at him with equal horror. \"Who uses a whip on their girlfriend?\"\n\n\"Lily's my horse!\"\n\nGuin frowned. \"You said she had an Instagram account.\"\n\nEven in the panic of escape, Newton felt it vital he fish out his phone and flick to the app. \"Horses can have Instagram! Look at her!\"\n\nHe was struck once more by the thought that, unless they did something about this current situation, not only would his family, old and new, be dead, but he would never see Lily again. Nor Yolanda who worked at the farm.\n\nHe scanned the instruments before him. There were any number of switches and toggles. It would be dangerous if he just flicked some at random.\n\nBut there were four in a row marked TURBINS. One to four. That seemed promising. He flicked them all. Far, far back something started to whine. Emboldened, he saw another labelled AFTABURNA. He flicked that too." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "A light appeared in the jet cylinder directly in front of Dave's face. A slow, lazy, stupid part of his brain thought it was a pretty light; a nice orange glow. Fortunately, a quicker and cleverer part of his brain leapt in and made him slip into the gap between cargo containers before the jet roared into life, sending out a super-heated column of air. A third part of his brain, quick but perhaps too busy scoffing at the first part of his brain, made him grab onto some support before the container accelerated.\n\nThere was loud and screeching and shunting as the train, originally pulled by reindeer at the front, was now being pushed by jets from the rear. The whole vehicle accelerated beyond walking speed into a respectable run. If it didn't tear itself apart on take-off, it might actually get up to flying speed. Dave wasn't sure how he felt about flying speed.\n\nHe climbed between rattling carriages and crested the top of the foremost container.\n\nAhead, the leading edge was heading towards a tunnel that was just tall enough and wide enough to let the vehicle through without decapitating Father Christmas or ripping off the bolted on additions to the side of the craft. He looked back. His heart leapt as he saw Esther awkwardly making her way across the tops of the container vehicles.\n\n\"Christ,\" he whispered, seeing her pick a way over piles of elf-baby boxes. She might as well be trying to tiptoe across the eggs of velociraptors, or aliens, or whatever horror they best equated to. Eggs that were absolutely ready to hatch.\n\nThere was a shout behind him: a half-second warning of attack. He whirled, immediately leapt upon by a trio of elves. As they grabbed him, he lost his footing. All four of them fell through the ropes and webbing between carriages. Dave snagged on a rope, stopping his fall. Two of the elves clung on. The third fell onto the rails and with a thump was gone from sight.\n\n\"Get off me, you idiots,\" yelled Dave as though it might have some effect. \"It's dangerous to mess about on trains.\"\n\nOne elf, fallen against a chain in an awkward position, was fighting to free his knife. The other was attempting to throttle Dave with hands too small for the job. Dave's groping fingers found one of his insulin syringes. He stabbed the would-be throttler. Jabbering in panic as it started to melt, the creature fell away. The remaining elf had finally drawn its knife. It swung at Dave.\n\nHe booted it hard. It nearly flew out of the side of the gap but clung onto Dave's shoe.\n\nHe angled his leg round. Without proper consideration for his foot, he presented the dangling elf to the roaring jet flame. For an instant, its lower half was alight, like a marshmallow over a campfire. Then it was gone, whipped away by the jet's power, leaving Dave with a smoking hot foot." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "Watching the elves trying to storm the accelerating sleigh, Guin saw a bundle of fire fly out from the vehicle's side some distance back. Was that an elf?\n\nThe moment it touched the ground, flames sprang up around it. The floor all across the cavern had smelled sort of petroly. Now it didn't just burn;:it exploded.\n\nElves that had been cheering and waving their hats were now running and bursting into flame. Guin's attention flicked to all manner of pipes and barrels around the cavern. If the fire reached any fuel containers, either in the cavern or worse, on board the sleigh\u2014\n\n\"Faster!\" she yelled to Newton.\n\n\"We are!\" he shouted back.\n\nThere was a sucking whoop of air as they plunged into the tunnel. The yellow glow of the blazing cavern was replaced by the gloom and streams of fairy lights in the tunnel. Enclosed, the clatter of undead reindeer hoofs and the rattle of the godawful sleigh on its tracks were amplified.\n\n\"\u2014meant to be a silent night!\" Newton shouted.\n\nGuin didn't hear the beginning of that joke. She assumed it wouldn't have been worth the bother.\n\n\"I'm going to find our parents!\" She climbed up past Father Christmas and into the gap, no more than three or four feet high, between the top of the sleigh and the rock roof.\n\nTowards the rear, the fire was an orange halo, making a silhouette of the train. It sort of looked like it was chasing them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "The fire was chasing them, Esther noted. The exploding fireball that had taken out the cavern was now racing to overtake the sleigh. Boxes in the rearmost container were steaming as the pursuing flames cooked them.\n\nWherever the bomb was (she was sure it was much further forward) it was too late to look for it.\n\nShe staggered forward and leaped the gap between the carriages and threw herself down just as the last portions of the train plunged into the tunnel. She didn't pause to collect herself. She didn't wait. She crawled forward over a sea of uneven cardboard boxes as fast as she could.\n\nAs she reached the front of the next carriage, something reared up through the gap. She punched it in the face as it stabbed her in the shoulder.\n\n\"Ow!\" said Dave with feeling.\n\n\"Ow!\" she replied. She looked at her shoulder. In the light from passing fairy lights, she could see there was a syringe stuck in it. Dave was suddenly contrite and pulled it out.\n\n\"Ow!\" she said again.\n\n\"It's okay,\" he said. \"It's only insulin.\"\n\n\"That wasn't the problem,\" she said, kissing him fiercely because it seemed absolutely the right thing to do. \"Why insulin?\" she said.\n\n\"It makes the elves go squish.\"\n\n\"Is that a medical term?\"\n\nThey looked at each other.\n\n\"There's a bomb on this sleigh,\" she said'\n\nAt the same moment he said, \"The boxes are full of changelings.\"\n\nThey exchanged looks and said, \"What?\" simultaneously.\n\n\"I was trying to blow the sleigh up,\" Esther explained.\n\n\"With us on it?\"\n\n\"I didn't know at the time. Changelings?\"\n\n\"Yes. They're\u2014\" He pointed behind her. \"Those.\"\n\nElves in hideous baby disguises rose up from the rear container carriages. Tired of being cooked alive by the encroaching flames, perhaps. Esther didn't know if their disguises had been hideous from the start or whether the fire had melted them. Either way, the dozens of creatures stalking towards them, crouching a little to avoid the tunnel roof, looked nothing like actual babies. Noses drooped. Eyeballs slid down cheeks.\n\nEsther stared. \"Are those \u2026 brown baby elves?\" She would have used some form of ethnically appropriate description, but there weren't many clues to latch onto.\n\n\"They're going to drop changelings all over the world,\" said Dave. \"Got to blend in.\"\n\n\"But that's wildly racist,\" she said, appalled.\n\nDave made the kind of noise that would normally had ended with him pointing out yes, it was wildly racist, but the racism in this situation was perhaps a lesser issue than the greater elf-changeling-horror. Esther would have been forced to point out that racism needed challenging wherever it appeared, regardless of context. There was no time for such a conversation, and she was enraged.\n\nRage lent her a casual bravery, she raised her hand and with careful fingers (she didn't want to lose her fingers or her hand or her life) felt out for the next band of fairy lights they passed under. Her fingers snagged a row. There was enough grip in her hands and momentum in their passing for her to pull the wiring down. Pinging the lights from whatever nails and hooks held them in place, before the wire was ripped from her grasp.\n\nThe string of lights, swinging low, scythed along the train roof and through the approaching changelings. Several were ripped in half. Most were scooped up and hauled off the roof of the train and into the pursuing fireball.\n\n\"Man!\" said Dave. \"That was\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you had to see that. It's just\u2014\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah. Racism. I get it. Now, you were mentioning a bomb.\"\n\n\"Wrapped up like a present. Tartan bow.\"\n\n\"And you made it?\"\n\nShe heard the disbelief in his voice. \"I followed the instructions!\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" he said. \"We'd best find it then.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "Guin crawled over container roofs towards the rear of the train. The noise around her, now including the whirling shrieking jet turbines, was deafening. If they survived this situation, she'd be able to play the \"I'm sorry I didn't hear, I was deafened\" card for several years to come.\n\nAgainst this constant howl it was hard to tell, but she thought she heard booms and bangs from deeper within the hillside. Was that the train shaking, or the whole cave system?\n\nThe train burst out of the tunnel and into the storage cavern where she and Newton had been tied up and tried to escape on the miniature train. Guin hoped the train had been moved off the track or else this journey was going to end quickly and nastily.\n\nShe was distracted by the view across the cavern. From other tunnels gouts of exploding gas and fuel burst into the cavern, consuming stacked market stalls, piles of supplies and hundreds of hanging sausage links. Elves tried to flee the cataclysm but had no chance of outrunning the flames.\n\nHer view of the destruction was whipped away from view as the sleigh re-entered a tunnel. The final tunnel before they were outside.\n\nAn elf, its hat scorched (the pom-pom still smouldering) charged at her over the container roof. She tried to rise to meet it, but there wasn't enough room for her to stand without braining herself on the ceiling. In this space, being short was an advantage.\n\nThe elf cackled, seeing her disadvantage and swung its knife. Guin fell onto her back. The elf came at her. She caught it in the belly with her feet and rolled onto her shoulders, lifting the elf up until it made contact with the ceiling. It fell away in a mushy mess.\n\nThere were some advantages to being taller." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "Up ahead, reindeer stumbled and crashed against obstacles in the tunnel. Newton saw more than a couple of severed zomdeer legs go flying, but the herd kept going, hauling both sleigh and their fallen comrades along.\n\nThere was a change in the air buffeting Newton's face. He realized they were outside, fairy lights in the tunnel replaced by stars in a cold winter sky. He could see barely any distance ahead. There was the shape of trees, the slope of a hillside below him, and the suspicion the railway track still carrying the sleigh would run out in a matter of seconds.\n\n\"Up! Up!\" he pleaded with the reindeer and shook the reins.\n\n\"Uppa! Uppa!\" shouted Santa above him. \"Fl\u00fag mi hreind\u00fdrum! Fl\u00fag!\"\n\nThe reindeer responded better to his commands than to Newton's. He could feel the power flowing through the reins now: whatever magic powers Santa's beard provided. The leading edge of reindeer were no longer galloping through snow but curving up through the air, pushing through the upper branches of the trees above the town of Alvestowe." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "As the carriage beneath him rocked and lifted, Dave shouted out to Esther to hold on. She'd gone ahead to the next container to look for the bomb, while he searched this one. Boxes tumbled about around him. If the bomb's components were as delicate as Esther had claimed, he was surprised it hadn't gone off yet. Not that he was doubting her bomb-making skills, particularly if was following instructions. Especially if they were authentic instructions (and Dave felt that O-level Chemistry textbooks would be very authentic indeed).\n\nA violent noise made him look back. The last two containers had not yet been lifted off the ground. Reaching the end of the railway line, they bounced and scraped along the forest floor, bucking and twisting and throwing parcels and awakened elf-changelings everywhere.\n\nThis sight alone should have been enough to arrest anyone's attention but Dave's was drawn further back to the tunnel and the hillside. Pillars of flame and exploding debris shot out of the tunnel mouth and from sinkholes all across the mountain. In the grey pre-dawn, they were flashes of white and orange against the gloom. The boom of explosions was swiftly superseded by the sound of a cavern-riddled, snow-covered hillside collapsing in on itself. As ancient geological structures caved in, boulders were flung into the air, the whole forest shuddered and the thick layer of snow gave up its grip on the hillside and began to flow down towards the town.\n\n\"Avalanche!\" he yelled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "Esther had to brace herself as the container she was crossing tilted upwards at a sharp angle.\n\nThey were flying! They were actually bloody flying!\n\nIt was exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure. She made a quiet mental note to appreciate being present at this ancient annual ritual when she had enough wherewithal and calm to appreciate such things.\n\nBehind and below them, an avalanche of snow and rock swept over the town. The United Kingdom rarely had sufficiently high peaks or deep snowfall to make such things possible, but it appeared a catastrophic explosion underground was just the ticket to bring white death to rural England. In the low light, she saw the destruction of the town as silhouettes of black against white.\n\nThe avalanche swept around the church. Moments later, the tower spire tilted and fell. The wall of snow powered on into Alvestowe, tearing down alleys and streets, slicing through the brickwork and doors of houses which had stood for centuries. The marketplace, along with the nativity, the rides and the remaining stalls, was demolished in an instant. The cascade rolled on down the hill to the river gorge. Gone were the shops. Gone was Mrs Scruples' horrible hotel. Gone were the riverside barns and, she guessed, the remains of Dave's car. The old humpbacked bridge, the only route into the town, buckled under the snow and rock as the avalanche dashed itself against the far side of the shallow gorge.\n\nGone, all gone.\n\nEsther felt a genuine sense of loss at the destruction of such a beautiful little town. The people \u2013 the humans \u2013 had either left at the close of the market or been turned into sausages long ago, but the death of the town itself was still a crying shame. And yet, she reminded herself, with the cave system gone and the town destroyed, the only elves left were the ones on this sleigh.\n\nAhead and flapping erratically was a blur of red and blue feathers. It was King Leopold of Belgium, Mrs Scruples' parrot. It flew in a desperate panic in a southerly direction, driven off into the winter morn.\n\n\"Sorry!\" Esther yelled to it.\n\nShe thought she heard it squawk something back. It was indecipherable and probably too rude to repeat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "The reindeer's flightpath levelled out without much intervention from Newton. He was a terrible judge of distances but guessed they were at least a hundred metres above the ground. The landscape ahead of them, frosty fields cut through with winding roads, whipped by at speed. Either dawn had arrived without him realizing, or height had given them a sneak peek over the curvature of the earth. There was definitely light in the sky, and they were flying into the sunrise: east. South-east. Ish.\n\nThe reindeer, getting into their stride, were running hard and still accelerating.\n\nIf Father Christmas really did fly all around the world in one night then he would have to travel at several hundred miles an hour. Newton wouldn't want to be at the exposed front end if and when that happened.\n\nNewton shouted back as loud as he could. \"You all right back there? Mum? Guin?\"\n\nThere was no reply. He hardly expected one. He'd have to go and look.\n\n\"Flying is always thirsty work,\" shouted Santa from above him. \"Would anyone happen to have a cup of mead on them?\"\n\nNewton looked up, prepared to give another polite and apologetic \"No\" to the severed head. As he did, he saw two elves climbing down from their Santa-steering positions, finally aware there was an interloper on board.\n\n\"Ah,\" said Newton. \"Now, can we just talk about this?\"\n\n\"Friends! Friends!\" called Santa. \"Let's discuss this over a drink, eh?\"\n\nThe nearest elf dropped on Newton. He grabbed it and the pair of them rolled in the foot well." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "The sleigh bucked in the air as it flew, the loosely-coupled containers rolling in a wave.\n\nAt the top of each arc, Guin had to hold on to something solid to avoid being lifted into the air by her own momentary weightlessness. She would have shouted at Newton to keep the thing steady, but she guessed she'd be no better at steering the thing than him.\n\nThey were racing over the English countryside, flying into the on-coming dawn. They zipped over a motorway and, for a few seconds, the countryside beneath them was replaced by the greys, red and greens of a still-sleeping town. Far ahead, electricity pylon towers marched across their path, frozen giants strung with heavy wires. Surely, Newton had spotted those?\n\nOne thing at a time, she told herself. Once she was happy her dad and Esther were on board she could go forward and give Newton all the advice he needed.\n\nAt the top of another wave, she clung to the fuel pipe on the side of the container. All the boxes and bags in the container beneath her lifted off the ground for a second. Her stomach flipped as gravity momentarily lost its hold on her. It was a disconcerting feeling. In her pocket, Tinfoil Tavistock gave a whoop of joy. This was both uncharacteristic and unhelpful. Guin suspected her brain was more than a little out of sorts.\n\nGravity resumed, Guin continued heading back along the sleigh. Blurred in the buffeting wind, she saw indistinct, moving shapes. That one did look like Esther. She looked like she was rummaging through the parcels. Whatever for? Was Guin's dad down there?\n\n\"I've found it!\" came a wind-whipped shout from even further back.\n\n\"Dad!\" yelled Guin.\n\nEsther looked up. A moment later she pointed. As the sleigh's sinuous flightpath threw in another moment of weightlessness, Guin looked round.\n\nBacraut and the workshop elf, Gerd, had come up behind her.\n\n\"Gr\u00edppa ha!\" snarled Bacraut, limping horribly.\n\nGerd leapt at Guin, knocking her over with her bulk. Guin came down heavily on the cardboard boxes.\n\n\"\u00de\u00fa er veek gela, ya daft apeth,\" grinned Gerd, drawing her knife. As Gerd pressed it again Guin's throat, Bacraut lurched forward and ripped the beard from Guin's chin.\n\n\"Ow!\" said Guin, indignantly.\n\nBacraut pressed the beard to his own chin and straightened as though the beard would fix all his ills and injuries. He frowned, tried detaching and reattaching the beard. It was not having the desired effect.\n\n\"Hva er \u00feet crudl? Wull?\" he demanded.\n\n\"It's toy stuffing!\" said Guin.\n\nBacraut threw the fake beard aside. It was gone with the wind. Guin tried to wriggle from under Gerd but the horrible elf had her pinned.\n\n\"\u00c9g\u00e6t af\u00e1 skeggi,\" said Bacraut.\n\n\"Og h\u00fa?\" said Gerd.\n\nBacraut sneered disdainfully at Guin. \"Slautu ha! Kasta he aff hislei!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "It must be the bomb, thought Dave, carefully levering out a box wrapped in red paper with a tartan bow. It was the odd one out among a sea of shiny Christmas boxes. Esther had wedged it in deeply, held in position by the surrounding boxes. Otherwise, if it was as Esther had described, it should have surely exploded by now.\n\nDave did not like bombs. He'd not encountered an honest-to-goodness bomb in real life, but he had attended enough hoax bomb calls to know the terrible heightened sensation of being close to capricious death. He'd also had training for what do if a bomb was discovered at the ambulance station or hospital. As he recalled, the role of the designated fire marshal was to stay with the bomb at all times and describe what it was doing until the police arrived. An unenviable job.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" said Dave as he lifted it free of the other boxes. \"The bomb is a red paper box, officer.\"\n\nHe began to carefully climb up to the lip of the container, pushing the box ahead of him. If they were passing over open countryside or, better still, water he had every intention of tossing it overboard.\n\n\"It looks professionally constructed, officer. My girl Esther is a semi-pro parcel wrapper. Oh, the bomb? Just some chemicals she found in a lab.\" He tutted and rolled his eyes. \"I know, women, eh? Always cooking something up.\"\n\nHis foot snagged. He shook it, but it wouldn't come free. He looked down.\n\nA spindly arm had snaked out of a nearby box and grabbed him.\n\n\"Back to bed,\" he hissed at the changeling. \"We're not there yet.\"\n\nAnother arm forced its way out of another box and clutched at his trousers. All around, boxes shifted and rocked. Sharp nails picked at and sliced through the ribbon holding box lids in place." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "Hearing Dave call that he'd found the bomb, Esther would have gone back to assist. Except Guin was having trouble with a couple of elves two carriages ahead. One was sitting on her with a blade in its hand. They were dangerously close to the edge, above the huge drum cylinder of a roaring turbine engine.\n\nThe other elf was determinedly making its way forward to the front of the sleigh. Esther's thoughts leapt to Newton. Of course, he'd be up at the front, with the reindeer. If they survived this experience, what were the odds of him asking her for a pet reindeer? What were the odds of her buying it for him? What were the odds of it then having its own Snapchat or Tumblr account or whatever?\n\nEsther stumbled forward as quickly as she could.\n\nNinety percent of her brain was filled with worry and dread for the safety of her family. Ten percent was madly occupied with the wish Newton would just ask out that stable-girl Yolanda. Having a girlfriend must surely be cheaper and more fulfilling than owning a horse. Or a reindeer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "Newton was not a fighter, he didn't believe in fighting. So when he punched the elf in the face and threw it off the side of the sleigh, he shouted a heartfelt apology after it. The next elf dropped on him before he'd even got to his second \"Sorry\". It battered him with its tiny fists.\n\n\"Listen,\" said Newton, \"we don't have to be enemies \u2013 ow! \u2013 We can just discuss our differences and find some common \u2013 ow! \u2013 don't do that!\"\n\nIt was clearly in no mood to listen.\n\nHe hauled himself up and looked over the lip of the sleigh. The reindeer had been heading on a course that flew high over the electricity pylons ahead. They had drifted while Newton was distracted.\n\n\"We have to do some course corrections,\" Newton said to the elf. \"Stop hitting me!\"\n\n\"Slautra alla menk!\" shouted the elf.\n\n\"I don't know what that means!\" Newton yelled back, hauling on the reins to make the reindeer pull up. \"Santa! Can't you steer this thing?\"\n\n\"O-o-o-h, I appear to have lost all feeling in my hands,\" wailed Santa's head.\n\nWell, yes, thought Newton. Santa's hands were just works of meat sculpture, constructed by a tribe of mad elves who had crash-landed here decades if not centuries ago. Why would they work?\n\n\"One might regain some sensibility if you happened to give me\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't have any mead!\" shouted Newton and traded blows with the elf." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "Guin did not have the bodily strength to hold off Gerd for much longer.\n\nThe elf leaned down with all her weight, pressing the knife closer to Guin's throat. \"\u00dea\u00f0er syn sham,\" spat Gerd. \"\u00de\u00fa haf madir g\u00f3o\u00f0 \u00e1lf, bugalugs.\"\n\n\"Eg ne ekki \u00e1lf,\" Guin grunted. \"It's hard enough being a girl!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 116", + "text": "Dave was lacking hands. He had a bomb in one. He had an insulin syringe in the other.\n\nHe was successfully fighting off elf-babies (these were slightly less racist, olive-skinned babies, possibly destined for the Mediterranean or Latin American). He was successfully holding the bomb aloft in a gentle grip. What he was not doing was climbing out of the container.\n\nIt only took a drop of insulin to melt an elf but they were coming at him in an endless tide. The current waves were wading through the gloopy remains of their fallen comrades, clawing for him like nightmarish tar-babies.\n\n\"Will you just leave me the hell alone!\" he yelled. \"I'm currently trying to save your lives as well as mine!\" The last statement rang kind of hollow, given the numbers of elves he was presently dispatching.\n\n\"Oh, screw this!\" He stabbed a changeling, left the syringe embedded in its disintegrating face, and frantically made for the lip of the container. Desperation and an undeniable level of annoyance lent him the will to shake off pursuers and haul himself up.\n\nHe put the bomb down on the edge and spun himself to sit beside it. Below, the changelings clawed at each other in their desire to get to him. Further below, there were only fields and woodland, browns and greys. No human habitation in sight.\n\n\"You guys are just mental,\" he said. With as soft a toss as he could manage, he threw the bomb away.\n\nThe wind caught it. The sleigh buffeted. His aim was off. Whatever the cause, it did not sail directly away from the sleigh. Its path cut along the sleigh's side, close enough for a changeling, lifted up by its fellows like a cheerleader, to catch the bomb in flight.\n\nDave's maddened heart sank. \"Idiots!\" he hissed.\n\nThe bomb-catching elf dropped down and the others immediately fought him for possession of it. They were not doing it gently.\n\n\"To hell with you all!\" snarled Dave and leapt for the next carriage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 117", + "text": "Moments before the sleigh abruptly sagged, Newton thought he heard a distant explosion. Fighting off the elf with one hand, he tried to haul on the reins with the other. Whatever had happened further back had caused the sleigh to drop a hundred crucial feet. They were going to slam straight into the electric cabling.\n\n\"Pylons!\" Newton yelled.\n\nThe elf didn't understand or didn't care.\n\n\"Down, Blinky!\" Newton cried. \"Down, Sleipnir! Kicgut, Paugir, go under!\"\n\n\"Dunni\u00f0!\" shouted Santa.\n\nThe reindeer swooped, cutting between cables and ground, barely clearing the lowest wires. A metallic shriek and a crackle of electricity instantly told Newton they had not quite cleared the wire. Above him, Santa's giant body of slumped." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 118", + "text": "The explosion took out the rearmost section of the sleigh. It also jolted Gerd's grip on Guin. The appearance of a tiny bearded head flying past, mournfully crying, \"I was only thirsty,\" as it went was also a distraction.\n\nGuin pushed at Gerd, managing to almost drag herself clear. But then the elf, tearing her eyes away from the sight of Santa's decapitated head, raised her knife high and stabbed hard at Guin's chest.\n\nGerd twisted the knife.\n\nIt hurt far less than Guin expected. The knife was embedded in the fairy folklore book under her shirt! Guin's surprise turned to violent anger. She punched Gerd in the side of the head and shoved her off. Gerd rolled off the side of the container, dragging Guin with her. As they tipped over the edge Guin's arm caught on something: a length of rubber tubing. Gerd dangled below her, hands gripping Guin's shoes. Gerd's own feet danced on the edge of the forward edge of the turbine engine. She tried to stand but there was little purchase in the howling gale.\n\nTinfoil Tavistock told Guin to hold onto the rubber tubing. Tavistock could be so obvious at times.\n\nWild-eyed, Gerd looked up at Guin. \"Takta mi upp!\"\n\n\"I did everything you asked!\" Guin yelled back. \"And you were horrible. Nothing but horrible.\"\n\n\"Vi cudum ver vren\u00f0i!\" screamed Gerd and attempted a smile. \"Friend-i!\" It was a horrible rictus smile.\n\nGuin shook her legs. Gerd slipped. Her foot dangled inside the edge of the turbine intake. It was enough to snag her. Gerd was whipped into the spinning rotors with a buzz and a crunch. A sudden plume of elf-blood and black smoke shot out of the rear.\n\n\"I've already got friends,\" said Guin.\n\nDamn right, agreed Tavistock." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 119", + "text": "Driving a team of reindeer was very different to riding a horse, Newton decided. Particularly an articulated train of a sleigh that was mostly on fire with a lolling and rolling headless Santa sitting in the driving position. Newton gripped the reins and tried to keep the undead deer on a straight and steady course.\n\nSomething slammed into Newton from behind, shoving him into the foot well. \"\u00dar m\u00ed veg, h\u00e1lfvit!\" shouted Bacraut.\n\nThe chief elf didn't look good. Newton guessed no one would if they'd been trouser-pressed, beaten, and forced to cross a bucking, burning sleigh to get to the reins. The elf had a limp and a half, a savage cut on his face and one of his arms bent in a way that couldn't be right.\n\n\"Hey, we're sorry about your sleigh\u2014\" Newton began.\n\nThe elf snorted and spat blood down his nose.\n\n\"You need a doctor,\" said Newton. \"National elf service or something.\"\n\nThe elf ignored him and picked up the reins.\n\nBacraut wound the hair reins around his arm and looped them over his shoulder. The transformation was almost instantaneous. He straightened, even seemed to grow several inches. He looped the reins twice around his neck and down his other arm. The thick hairy ropes nearly swamped him, like that man made of tyres on old Michelin adverts. Bacraut wore it well. The power of Santa's hair gave him health and strength.\n\n\"All hal g\u00f3ra skeggi,\" he said, with a grin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 120", + "text": "Painfully, Guin climbed back up onto the container. To her surprise, hands gripped her shoulders and helped her up.\n\n\"Oh, God,\" said Esther. She went to hug her, and saw the knife sticking out of her chest. Guin wearily shook her head and, freeing the knife, pulled out the hardback book.\n\n\"Books save lives,\" she whispered.\n\nGuin's dad stumbled forward and collided with them, sagging to his knees beside them. There were soot marks and a livid mark, like sunburn, on his cheek. His side was coated with a gloopy treacle mess: elf blood. He gripped her shoulder like he hadn't seen her for years.\n\n\"Are you all right, love?\" he asked.\n\nGuin thought about that. She had any number of scrapes and bruises. She'd pulled her arm. She'd knocked her head at one point and would probably have a bump. She had been close enough to a jet turbine to permanently damage her hearing.\n\n\"I'm fine, dad.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"Hundred percent.\"\n\nThe turbine next to them gave a loud bang and died. The sleigh bucked and tilted savagely. They hung onto each other.\n\n\"Newton's driving,\" said Guin.\n\n\"Then we need to get him and us off this thing,\" said Esther.\n\nThe sleigh settled in its new position. One turbine dead. The back half of the sleigh, along with the jet engines, was either on fire or missing entirely. A cascade of leaking fuel spewed a tail of fire that burned out before it reached the ground below.\n\n\"Come on,\" said Esther. She pushed herself to her feet and started to make her way forward. She nodded back at Guin and her dad. \"I think someone needs help.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Guin insisted.\n\nEsther pointedly raised her eyebrows. Guin leaned in to her bloodied and charred dad and helped." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 121", + "text": "Newton climbed into a sitting position in the shadow of the headless Santa as the beard-empowered Bacraut gloated.\n\nBacraut was giving Newton a big long speech about \u2026 Newton had no idea. But Bacraut was clearly impassioned by it and Newton was too polite not to listen. There were lots of gestures, big encompassing ones. Maybe Bacraut was describing the exciting Christmas sleigh ride mission. Maybe he was bemoaning what had happened to the elves and was spinning him some sort of sob story. Maybe he was prophesizing an elf empire that would last for a thousand years. Newton didn't have a clue. Languages weren't his strong point. He wasn't predicted to get a passing grade in his GCSE French and he'd been learning that since he was eleven. He didn't have a chance with elvish.\n\nHe nodded politely as Bacraut ranted and raved. \"Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Totally. Yeah?\"\n\nThe speechifying was interrupted by a shout from above.\n\n\"Newton!\"\n\nHis mum stood on the top of the lead sleigh, by the shoulders of the hideous, stinking giant Santa corpse. Her heart visibly caught in her throat at the sight of Newton alive.\n\n\"Quick! Up here!\" she called.\n\nNewton stood but Bacraut, with a powerful push that belied his elfin frame, shoved him back down into the foot well.\n\n\"Leave him alone!\" yelled Esther.\n\n\"You don't have to do this,\" said Newton.\n\nBacraut sneered. \"Fl\u00fag!\" he cried. He rose up. Bacraut levitated, arms stretched, doing a slightly disturbing and possibly sacrilegious impression of Christ rising to heaven. Were the coils of beard rope around him glowing? All the way down from his body and arms to the teams of reindeer?\n\nNewton felt a swelling in his own chest, which was a weird and unexpected feeling for certain. \"Fl\u00fag?\" he whispered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 122", + "text": "Esther gaped in surprise at the creature hovering in front of her. She admitted she shouldn't have been surprised. If she was to draw up a list of things that had surprised her in the last twenty-four hours, a flying elf probably wouldn't make the top ten.\n\n\"You have to stop this,\" she shouted against the gale. \"You can't do this.\"\n\nBacraut spat out some vile sentiment that required little translation.\n\n\"You've been hard done by,\" she nodded. \"Cultural colonization. Your way of life under threat. I get it. Horrible appropriation of your indigenous ways. Like the elf on the shelf and the\u2014\"\n\n\"\u00c1lfu \u00e1 shelfu?\" he said.\n\n\"Elf on the shelf,\" Esther repeated.\n\n\"\u2014di ur shelfu? Wau?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She shrugged. \"They're ugly horrible things. Not that your ways are ugly. I have nothing but the greatest respect for your people and\u2014\"\n\n\"Mum!\" shouted Newton, in the unmistakable tone of a teenager who was embarrassed by their mum's wittering.\n\n\"Look, you've got to stop this crap,\" she said. \"Doesn't matter what's happened. You can't replace all the children of the world with elves!\"\n\n\"What?\" said Newton.\n\n\"Operation Changeling,\" said Dave, coming up beside Esther with Guin under his arm, supporting him. \"Let the boy go! Please!\"\n\nHis words did not have the desired effect. The elf perceived Dave's pleas as an act of weakness. \"\u00deegi man\u00f0?\" grinned Bacraut. He floated down to Newton, blade outstretched.\n\n\"He's going to kill him!\" said Guin.\n\nEsther acted instinctively. To stop Bacraut getting to her boy, put something in the way. The Father Christmas corpse was already lolling forward and a shoulder barge sent the steaming, twenty-foot mass of Old Saint Nicholas tumbling forward. It slumped to its knees, then pitched forward over the front of the sleigh between Bacraut and Newton.\n\nIts weight carried it through the front end of the sleigh, and shoulders first through the gap between the trains of galloping reindeer. Wood snapped. Pieces of leather whipped about and came free.\n\n\"What have you done?\" whispered Dave.\n\n\"Are you criticizing a woman for taking the initiative?\" Esther instantly retorted.\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" said Dave.\n\nThere was a lurch as the carriage shaft linking the sleigh to its animal-driven engine came apart. Newton, eyes staring wide at the gaping hole in the front end of the sleigh, scurried back and up to the seat that Santa had recently vacated, to his family." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 123", + "text": "Like Bacraut, Guin found her attention drawn to the reindeer leading the sleigh. Scromdir and Bitber, wasn't it? The looped leather straps holding them together were now freed and the pair were drifting. Scromdir peeling left, Bitber up and to the right. Where those two led, others followed. The lines of reindeer were diverging, the links to the sleigh lost.\n\n\"Ni! Ni! Samat!\" shouted Bacraut.\n\n\"If the reindeer aren't pulling this thing forward anymore\u2014\" said Guin, feeling a lightness within her as the sleigh began a rapid descent.\n\n\"Take hold of me,\" said Newton.\n\n\"No need to panic, dude,\" said Dave, hugging the lad.\n\n\"Take hold of me!\" the boy shouted.\n\n\"Fl\u00faga \u00e1frass!\" Bacraut yelled at the reindeer. \"Fl\u00faga tig\u00fdr\u00f0ar!\"\n\nThe reindeer weren't flying together. The two trains were heading off at forty five degrees to one another. Down the chain of paired zombie reindeer, they split off \u2013 Hlager and Gouper, Bulta\u00f0a and Paugir, and all the others \u2013 until the final pair parted. With a wrenching of wood, the carriage shaft splintered.\n\nIt was only in that moment that Bacraut recognised the danger of wrapping himself in the reins. As the last reindeer went their separate ways and the two lines pulled in opposite directions, the thick reins tightened.\n\n\"Ni!\" he shouted. His voice cut off in a gurgle as metres of rein went from coiled to rigid in an instant. He stretched. Coils sliced. The noose around his neck snapped taut. Guin's eyes involuntarily followed his forcibly ejected head as it literally popped off.\n\nBoth teams of reindeer shook as they violently pulled against each other and swooped to move in a vaguely unified direction, utterly separated. The sleigh, engineless, nosedived like a rollercoaster cresting the first drop.\n\nThe floor moved beneath them. Guin turned and grabbed her dad.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Hold me!\" yelled Newton. \"Do it!\"\n\nArms wrapped around chests, a family pressed in close together.\n\n\"Fl\u00fag!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 124", + "text": "The sun rose. The twisted remains of several crushed containers and the awful cargo they had carried, burned fiercely against a hillside, given extra flame by whatever aviation fuel had still been on board. Crows startled out of their roosts by the explosive crash, circled in the air above. There was no movement around the crash site. Nothing living had crawled away.\n\nTo the far south, almost out of sight, dozens of reindeer ran on tirelessly through the sky.\n\n\"I wonder where they'll end up,\" said Guin.\n\n\"It's usually birds that fly south for the winter,\" said Newton.\n\nDave inspected himself and his family. They had landed softly in the snowy fields half a mile back from the sleigh crash. \"How\u2014?\"\n\n\"We should be dead,\" agreed Esther.\n\nNewton lifted up his jumper. A large quantity of bundled hair poked out. \"I got it when I was fixing Blinky. I probably took more than I needed.\"\n\n\"You stuffed an old man's beard up your jumper?\" said Guin.\n\n\"It's magical.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Still, it's a bit\u2026\" There didn't seem to be a word to cover it.\n\n\"It's been a weird night,\" nodded Esther.\n\nDave turned around. \"I'm not sure I know where we are.\" He blew out his cheeks at a sudden thought. \"The car.\"\n\n\"Underneath an avalanche,\" said Esther, patting his shoulder.\n\n\"You never liked cars anyway,\" Newton pointed out and then thought, \"All our luggage!\"\n\nEsther pointed in what looked a likely direction to find a main road. \"Not much of a Christmas is it, though?\" she said.\n\n\"Dunno,\" said Newton. \"Family trip gone horribly wrong. The worst possible accommodation. Flying creatures.\"\n\n\"People trying to kill them,\" added Guin.\n\n\"Sounds like the Christmas story to me.\"\n\n\"Kind of lacking the three wise men and some gifts,\" said Esther.\n\n\"The mead I bought!\" said Dave. \"Gone! Man! What I wouldn't give for a glass of\u2014\"\n\nNewton put a hand over his mouth. \"No, dude. Don't even say it.\" He looked at Guin. \"You lost your toys.\"\n\nGuin plucked Tinfoil Tavistock, the only survivor, from her pocket. \"I'll make new ones. I've got loads of materials in my bedroom. I'll show you when we get to our house.\"\n\nA look passed between Dave and Esther.\n\n\"You kids have surprised me,\" smiled Dave. \"You've changed.\" They reached the brow of a hill. Below was a long grey line that might have been a country road.\n\n\"I'm thinking about going vegetarian,\" said Newton.\n\n\"That's not the change I meant, mate.\"\n\n\"Sausages.\" Newton pulled a face. \"They've put me right off meat.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" said Esther, surprised but pleased. \"No, I think Dave's right. You have changed.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will wear off,\" said Guin, feeling the tops of her ears.\n\n\"Change for the better,\" Esther assured her.\n\nA cool breeze blew in from behind them. The flying reindeer had vanished entirely into the yellow haze of dawn.\n\n\"Why do birds fly south for the winter?\" asked Newton.\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Esther, recognising it as a joke. \"Why do birds fly south for the winter?\"\n\n\"It's too far to walk.\"\n\nGuin groaned. There was a laugh buried in the groan. It was buried deep but it was there all the same.\n\nNewton knew exactly what change his mum was talking about. The worry, the panic, the desperate need to please everyone\u2026\n\nHe pulled the bundle of hair out from under his jumper. There was a lot of it but he made sure he gathered together all the remains of Santa's beard. He held it up until he could feel the breeze tugging at it. Then he let it go." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Wizard", + "author": "Diane Duane", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "We Need A Little Christmas", + "text": "Sunday, November 7, 2010\n\nFour thousand years ago, when the Crossings Intercontinual Worldgating Facility on Rirhath B was in its initial stages of development, the populations of the Alterf starsystem were evacuated into near-Rirhait space secondary to their homestar being irreparably damaged by a passing black hole. The four carbon-based species originally native to Alterf IV's giant moon Temalbar brought with them to their new homes an awesomely advanced sheaf of technologies that became the foundation of a cultural partnership with the Rirhait that has stood the test of millennia, and thrives to this day. Daily life in much of the modern Galaxy now depends on some of the devices and tech they brought with them\u2014such as the Interconnect Project's worldgate management and deployment technology that makes it feasible to cluster worldgates together on demand without destroying the planet they're based on, and the far-famed SunTap limitless-energy capture system that satisfies the power demands of worldgate complexes in this galaxy and numerous others.\n\nAnd that said... beings based on every sort and state of matter, and resident from this side of the Galaxy to the other, will swear up and down (if asked) that the very best thing to come of that ancient partnership is the concept of the multispecies shopping mall. What had originally been a retail wing intended only to handle the immediate needs of passengers traveling through the ancient/legacy Rirhath B gating facility has over the millennia been transformed into a huge array of shopping opportunities scattered through and arranged around the already-vast area of the Crossings. Everything, literally everything the mind of [insert the gender-neutral name of your favorite sentient species here] can imagine acquiring, and a lot of things they can't, is here for the buying, leasing, or other method of acquisition... so that whether you're a commuter in a rush to make your gate or a tourist with time to dawdle and browse for that perfect souvenir, they've got you covered. Need an correlating hypersemantic obfuscator and have no plans to be anywhere near Mendwith any time soon? You want to head for the Crossings: the Mendwittu have a factory store there with the deepest discounts anywhere. Got some heavy grenfelzing on your mind and can't lay your hands, fins or tentacles on one of those vital dadeithiv roots to save your life? You want to make for the Crossings and head straight for the Ingestibles and Assumables Wing, in the Carbon-Friendly Fresh Foods corridor of the Main Produce market, just past the Hydroxyls Snack Plaza.\n\nAnd while we're speaking of grenfelzing... want chocolate? Genuine chocolate as eaten by the legendarily wealthy and powerful denizens of the fabulous faraway world known as Earth? Well, who doesn't! But why bother making the long, perilous journey to that dangerous part of space and daring the wrath of Earth's ruthless and terrible space fleet? Save yourself a trip. Shop at the Crossings.\n\n...Believe it or not, however, not all the species who pass through The Worlds' Premier Travel And Shopping Venue (SM) are interested in chocolate. Even dark chocolate.\n\nOr not that interested.\n\nAmong the usual crowd of beings from every corner of the galaxy (insofar as galaxies have corners) that one might find moving under the vast high Crossings ceiling and through its bright day, more or less unremarked (because there really are a lot of bipeds around and to most other species they all look alike), came wandering two shapes that might read as one of the simpler kinds of female, at least in species that were boring enough to have only two or three major morphisms that fall into the category. One of the two wanderers was a bit taller than the other, that being what would have been most noticeable about the differences between them for most beings in Crossings transit who'd notice them at all. Their culture or microculture apparently went in at the moment for brightly colored clothing that sat fairly close to the body, and one had much longer head-fur or-plumage than the other, though the cresting of both was more or less similar in shade. It would've taken a much more acute observer to realize that both of were just recently out of latency age\u2014one more recently than the other\u2014for they were walking with the assurance of people who had been to the Crossings many times before, and in a variety of circumstances that made the present one seem utterly commonplace.\n\n\"So you never did tell me,\" said the shorter of them. \"What exactly are we shopping for?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know. At the moment? Anything that doesn't have to do with Halloween.\"\n\nNita Callahan sighed. \"I hear you there,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Still suffering?\"\n\n\"Oh, not any more. I really thought I was over the sweet tooth,\" Nita said to Kit's sister Carmela as they wandered down an aisle of unrecognizable objects that she knew had to be food, because they were in the food hall. \"And then after things got crazy...\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Carmela said, \"Kit described it to me. You had kind of an odd night... I can imagine some comfort eating would have felt good afterwards.\"\n\n\"And of course there was plenty of that around, because, well, Halloween.\" Nita sighed. \"I just could not lay off the chocolate. When we got back we had about a hundred of those little Three Musketeers bars in the bags...\"\n\n\"Uh oh.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" They'd strolled over to one side of the wide concourse that was only one of the many clothes-shopping \"streets\" in this area of the Crossings' upper northside retail wing, and stood briefly examining what appeared to be an intimate-lingerie shop. Nita was particularly impressed by the lustrous corsetry displayed in the window. Has to be a lot easier doing up all those laces and things when you've got that many legs...\n\nThey headed on past that shop window toward another that appeared to be full of jeweled coatracks. \"Those things sneak up on you, don't they?\" Carmela said. \"There never seems to be a lot to them at first. It's that whipped center.\"\n\n\"Yeah. And the next morning...\"\n\n\"Alka-Seltzer.\"\n\n\"Ugh. Yes.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Carmela said, \"you'd have been better pretty quickly after that.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nita said, \"but what's the point? We're no sooner done with one holiday than here comes another.\" It was one of the reasons Nita was enjoying being at the Crossings at the moment. There was not an accordion-paper-tailed cardboard turkey or Pilgrim hat or decorative cornucopia to be seen in the place... which was a relief, because the things were already all over the stores and the commercials were all over the TV back home. \"And another food holiday.\"\n\nShe sighed. Since her mom died, the prospect of Thanksgiving at her house was still feeling fairly abnormal. Mostly\u2014and somewhat guiltily\u2014Nita hated it and wished it would go away. Christmas, strangely, was easier to deal with. It had always been a kind of lightly celebrated holiday in her family, more about relaxation and visits from relatives than extravagant giftgiving or crazed levels of decoration. And Christmas dinner had always been something different from year to year (because her Mom had loudly proclaimed to anyone who'd listen, \"One damn turkey a year is enough!\" ). So when her Dad had made sauerbraten last Christmas when her Mom was too sick to cook, it had still seemed strangely normal. This year, when the subject came up, he'd announced he was going to do a standing rib roast, which was fine with Nita. But she was dreading Thanksgiving, which had been the one holiday her Mom had willingly made a song and dance over in terms of food.\n\n\"You're really not up for Turkey Day,\" Carmela said.\n\n\"Nope,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Dodgy holiday anyway,\" said Carmela. \"Never mind. Let's skip it and go straight to Christmas.\"\n\n\"If only,\" Nita said.\n\n\"No,\" said Carmela. \"I'm serious! Why spend any more time on it than we have to? Eat the stupid turkey and move right on. Christmas!\"\n\nNita smiled at the thought. \"I wish they gave out timeslides for this kind of thing,\" she said. \"Because boy, would I requisition one right this minute.\"\n\nCarmela turned and looked her up and down. \"You sound tired,\" she said. \"Enough walking! Let's do the wizardy thing and get hoverscoots.\"\n\nNita blinked. \"How's that so wizardy?\"\n\n\"Well, it's all about not wasting energy, isn't it? No point in wasting perfectly good shopping energy on walking.\"\n\nIt occurred to Nita that this was one of the more interesting takes she'd recently heard on the concept of not speeding up the heat-death of the Universe. Carmela, though, plainly wasn't concerned about such details. She merely paused where she was and stamped on the shining white floor.\n\nImmediately two long pieces of the floor material smoothly detached themselves upwards from it, deformed out into long hovering skateboard shapes, and sprouted tall slender grips from their fronts. Underneath the scooters the surface reformed seamlessly and went back to being shining and white.\n\nNita blinked. \"That's new...\" she said. \"Used to be Crossings staff had to call for one of these.\"\n\n\"I'm that,\" Carmela said, \"more or less. Or anyway I've got a similar level of permissions.\"\n\nWhich was no surprise. To everyone at the Crossings from the highest managerial levels on down these days she was Carmela Rodriguez of Earth, Defender and Protector of Transients and Staff... not to mention Occasional Personal Shopper to Interplanetary Royalty (which counted for a little more on the strictly retail side). Nita had of course spearheaded the defense that had been instrumental in saving the Crossings from the aliens attacking it, and was if anything honored even more highly than Carmela, to an almost almost embarrassing extent (at least it embarrassed her). Carmela, though, had absolutely no embarrassment about casually reminding the Crossings staff how much they owed her (and Nita), and as a result had for some time now been pulling down a range of increasingly impressive perks.\n\n\"Come on, mount up,\" Carmela said, \"there's a lot of new stuff on this side of the wing we haven't seen yet.\"\n\nNita climbed onto the scooter, and both of them started to move along the broad corridor, absolutely shocklessly. She recognized the motive force as another implementation of the frictionless, inertially-dampered transport system the Crossings used for moving people and cargo in and out of the satellite terminals to the major gate clusters at high speed. These scooters, though, were gliding along at just a few miles an hour, with no more fuss or sense of motion than if the two of them were standing still together.\n\nCarmela was studying a diagram of the local shopping space that had begun displaying on the plaque that spanned the graceful handlebars of the scooter. Nita's display had synced up with her manual\u2014all the Crossings' systems being alert to the presence of wizards and having a raft of custom routines to make their work easier\u2014and was displaying \"smart\" advertisements for various stores in the area and travel advisories tailored to her point of origin, all translated into English for her convenience.\n\n\"Okay,\" Carmela said, tracing a route on the scooter's display, \"right there.\" The scooter chirped in acquiescence. \"Meanwhile,\" she said, turning to Nita, \"I know exactly what we need.\"\n\n\"Yeah? What?\"\n\n\"A Christmas party.\"\n\n\"Mela,\" Nita said, and laughed. \"It's not even Thanksgiving yet!\"\n\n\"And you were just complaining that you didn't want it to be.\"\n\nNta blinked, as that felt like it should have made some kind of sense. Just possibly not Earth sense.\n\nShe sighed and glanced down at the scooter's display, which was now showing some amusing promotional material. After a moment she raised her eyebrows at the slugline of one feature. \"NASA's going to be glad to hear we've got a ruthless and terrible space fleet.\"\n\nCarmela snickered. \"So will Richard Branson, when he gets the memo,\" she said. \"And frankly, I know which of them's going to do better marketing.\"\n\nNita snorted. \"Yeah, but Mela, you know as well as I do it's not true! Is putting something like this out there smart?\"\n\n\"Why not? If everybody thinks Earth has a big aggressive space fleet, no one'll bother turning up on our doorstep with one, will they.\"\n\nThere was something to be said for that line of reasoning, but Nita still had misgivings: some of the more assertive species she knew of might take it as a challenge. \"And anyway, who put that in here?\"\n\n\"I'm sure I have no idea,\" Carmela said, airily waving a hand.\n\nNita began to sweat a little, because she knew from experience what it meant when Carmela started handwaving. \"Are you trying to tell me that\u2014 What did you get Sker'ret to let you do?\" For it couldn't escape anyone's notice who knew the present Master of the Crossings that there was just about nothing he wouldn't do for Carmela. Installing a worldgate in her closet had merely been a small sign of things to come.\n\n\"Who, me? Nothing!... Much. I mean, the small print was such a nuisance to start with...\" She glanced over at what Nita was still reading.\n\nNita squinted to read the block of tiny, tiny print at the bottom of the promotional feature, again displayed in English to ease the handling of some of the more obscure Rirhait idioms. \"...Wait. 'Earth', 'Mysterious Earth' and 'Mother Earth The Legendary Home Of Humankind' are licensed trademarks of Gaia Protectorate CRLLC, terms and conditions apply, planetary descriptions may change from time to time without notice at management's discretion\u2014\" And then in the tiniest print possible, \"\u2014battle fleet not included'??\"\n\n\"Legalese,\" Carmela said, craning her neck to see ahead of them. \"It's not like the disclaimers actually have any force in law, really, once you've\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't believe this,\" Nita said. \"CRLLC? Did you incorporate the entire planet Earth somewhere?!\"\n\n\"Here, actually,\" Carmela said. \"The corporate tax rate here is reeeeeeeeallly low. Especially if you've saved the place from alien invasion. At which point it drops to zero.... If not lower.\"\n\nNita's mouth dropped open.\n\n\"Why are you looking so shocked? You cosigned the incorporation documents when we were here last.\"\n\nBeing reduced to speechlessness around Carmela was hardly a new experience for Nita, but this particular incidence was setting new records for the underlying implications. \"But I thought\u2014 Wait. You said that\u2014\"\n\n\"Nonono, wait just a minute! Look there. Is that what I think it is?\"\n\n\"Uh,\" Nita said, and peered ahead, her mind only half on whatever she was supposed to be looking for. The corridor up that way was fairly busy, full of aliens of all shapes and sizes. But after a second she thought she saw what Carmela was looking at, a dark-colored conical shape, hard to see clearly through the throng. \"That tall thing sticking up? The green one\u2014 Oh. It's a Demisiv\u2014!\"\n\n\"In a baseball cap!\" Carmela said, and accelerated away.\n\n...And so it was. Nita went after her, shaking her head and grinning. What are the odds, she thought, that one of my favorite wizardly houseguests should just happen to be passing through here while we're here too? But the odds didn't really come into it when you balanced them against the wizardly truism that there were no such things as coincidences. Or rather, when something that looked like a coincidence turned up, it was usually a sign from the Powers that Be that you should start paying attention: almost always, something else was going on.\n\nNita got caught up with Carmela after a few moments. \"This is so perfect,\" Carmela was saying, confident that Nita was right behind her. \"See that, this was an absolutely great idea, we'd have missed him if we didn't have the scoots!\"\n\nThat was probably true. Within a few moments they were close enough that when Carmela started waving her arms and shouted across the crowd, \"Hey, is that my shrub?!\" , Nita could even through the intervening crowd see all those fir-tree-like branches of Filif's arch up, as if in surprise, and then start waving back as if a wind had shaken them.\n\nAnd it took only a few moments more before the two of them had hopped off the scoots and were elbowing their way through the remaining crowd in an impromptu contest to be the first one to hug their fellow wizard. Nita came from behind in the last couple of meters and just barely beat Carmela there.\n\nIt was always a little interesting hugging Filif, as you wound up getting a face full of something that felt like pine needles, even though the scent more closely resembled something like cinnamon instead of the kind of cool, green smell you might associate with a conifer. \"You are so well met,\" Filif was saying, \"what a fine surprise, but what are you two doing here without my knowing about it? I'd thought the Knowledge would have alerted me that you were within physical-meeting range.\"\n\n\"Might ask you the same question!\" Nita said. The instrumentality that managed the wizards' manuals (and the many other ways that the Art's practitioners accessed spells and other wizardly data) would normally notify you, if you'd asked it, as to the presence in your physical neighborhood of other wizards with whom you'd worked. Nita had a good number of these alerts embedded in your manual, not least for those wizards who (however briefly) had lived in her basement. \"Should've had a notifier go off.\"\n\n\"Well, I only just got here,\" Filif said. \"Just out of the gate, in fact. Maybe that's the problem. Anyway, the Master and I have business\u2014some Interconnect Project details to sort out: I've been doing liaison work for the Demisiv side of the Project Authority.\" He rustled a little, half-turning as Nita let go of him (and Carmela did not), and all the eye-berries on the free side of him glowed a little brighter as he tried to peer through the crowd. \"He must've been delayed\u2014he was in some other meeting, and said it might keep him a bit late.\"\n\n\"Well, never mind that,\" Carmela said, hugging him again\u2014or still\u2014and then letting him go. \"Your business business can wait. And if he's coming along to find you, good! Two birds with one stone.\"\n\nFilif half-turned in the other direction, and looked around him with more of his eyes. \"Not sure I see any birds,\" he said, sounding dubious. \"Or for that matter, stones.\"\n\nNita laughed. Sometimes the wizardly Speech did fairly well at translating human idiom, but sometimes it completely failed. \"She means she wants to talk to both of you at once.\"\n\n\"Well, that's certainly preferable to hominid-on-avian violence,\" Filif said. \"Ah, now, here he comes. Not so delayed, then.\"\n\nNita peered around her, not bothering to look up, because there wouldn't have been any point in trying to see the Master of the Crossings over the heads of any crowd: when he was moving at any speed, he moved low. To her own amusement, though, it was the sound of lots of sharp little legs clicking and clattering against the smooth floor that told her which way to look (in this case, behind her). Nita turned and saw him coming, and grinned, and as he caught sight of her through the crowd that parted before him, Sker'ret was already half rearing up so that his front three pairs of legs were off the ground and the head with all those stalked eyes was on a level with Nita's. She held her arms open, and when he more or less crashed into them, she grabbed him and hugged him to her and thumped his dorsal carapace. \"Sker'!\"\n\n\"Our saviors return,\" Sker'ret laughed in her ear. \"It's been forever.\"\n\n\"It's been last week,\" Nita said. \"Getting amnesic from overwork?\"\n\n\"No, I mean when the two of you were last here together.\"\n\n\"Two weeks then. Maybe three.\"\n\n\"Pedant,\" Sker'ret said affectionately, gave her a squeeze and let her go.\n\n\"And what about me?\" Carmela demanded. \"You're late for my daily dose of alien snuggles!\"\n\n\"And whose fault is that? Anyway, you're the alien.\"\n\n\"No surprise at this sudden appearance then, my cousin?\" Filif said.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Sker'ret said as he headed for Carmela. \"I am the Master of this facility, coz. Of course I knew she was here: she's got a facility-independent wizardly tracker routine associated with her. How else can I find her in a hurry if more invaders arrive and we need saving?\"\n\n\"My favorite stalker,\" Carmela said, and hugged Sker'ret as if hugging giant purple metallic centipedes was the most normal thing in the world. Which, for her, it naturally was.\n\n\"And why does her tracker work better than the Knowledge-based routines you've got hooked up to me?\" Filif said, bending over in a sort of half-bow to Sker'ret so that they could brush their upper limbs together.\n\n\"Because she can do a lot more damage in a much shorter time than you routinely would,\" Sker'ret said.\n\nCarmela burst out laughing. \"Oh, Sker', you say that like it was a bad thing!\"\n\n\"So tell us,\" Filif said. \"What damage are you contemplating now?\"\n\n\"We're having a Christmas party. And both of you are invited.\"\n\nAll Filif's berries on the side facing Sker'ret, and all Sker'ret's stalked eyes, exchanged a bemused glance.\n\n\"And Christmas would be what?\" Sker'ret said. \"Is it a holiday of some sort?\"\n\n\"Don't you remember? Remember how excited Filif got about this?\"\n\n\"Um...\" Sker'ret was making a kind of thoughtful null sound that even in a Rirhait perfectly communicated a sense of I don't want you to feel hurt but due to being really busy I have no idea what you're talking about at the moment.\n\n\"Fil,\" Carmela said. \"Explain it to him. Remember that time of year we told you about, the last time you came visiting? The time of year when we bring trees into the house and decorate them?\"\n\nFilif looked astounded. \"Wait. This is that time? Then what are you doing here? Mostly your folk are with family at such times, I thought!\"\n\n\"No no no, it's not right this minute!\" Carmela said. \"Fifty days or so yet. Hold still.\" She reached into her shoulderbag and came out with a small sleek tablet. \"How's your schedule around JD 2455550. 52...?\"\n\n\"Well, let me check...\"\n\n\"I'm free,\" said Sker'ret immediately. \"One or another of my relief people can take those shifts for me. Powers forbid I should miss a party of yours!\"\n\nNita wanted to start shouting practical, sensible things like No, wait, this is all going way too fast, are you nuts...? But she took a deep breath, stood there hating Thanksgiving enough to be willing to think about anything else, especially when it involved going straight on past it, and peered over Carmela's shoulder at the tablet. \"That's really gorgeous. Where'd you get that?\"\n\n\"It's part of her detached staff package,\" Sker'ret said. \"Didn't you get yours, Nita? I'll see that it comes to you.\"\n\n\"Okay, Sker', thanks,\" she said. \"What day is that?\" Nita said to Carmela.\n\n\"December 20th,\" Carmela said. \"And hey, the next day is the Winter Solstice. Very symbolic!\" she said to Filif, elbowing him somewhere among his fronds and needles. \"We're having a sleepover on Almost The Longest Night! We can stay up all night and watch movies and eat popcorn and all kinds of things.\"\n\n\"Mela,\" Nita said. \"Your mama and pop... you haven't even asked them yet!\"\n\n\"They'll say yes,\" Carmela said, waving a hand. \"We're going to do it exactly the way you did yours when Sker' and Fil came to visit the first time. Elective-access 'puptent' accesses in the basement....\"\n\n\"I can always spare powering structures for ten or twenty of those,\" Sker'ret said. \"Let me know what you need. If the party's heavily attended we can always install a temporary secondary gating hub like the one in your closet.\"\n\nNita rubbed her eyes for a moment. It's always possible they will say yes right off the bat... And certainly since she became a wizard, stranger things had happened.\n\nCarmela was talking to Filif a mile a minute about popcorn garlands and boughs of holly and snow and Christmas cookies. \"And a star, Fil, an actual star for the top of you instead of a baseball cap...\"\n\n\"But I like my baseball cap!\" The protest didn't have a lot of energy behind it: Filif was already starting to shake with excitement.\n\n\"Just a temporary thing. Something festive! For the season. And lights, Fil, all colors of lights, and glass balls and ribbons and...\"\n\nIf she does get her mom and pop to say yes to this, Nita thought, this is going to be amazing. And it's been such a crazy year. I could use some amazing right about now...\n\n\"Sker',\" Nita said very softly, watching the armwaving continue and Filif's delighted, excited vibrations increase. \"Tell me something.\"\n\n\"Anything.\"\n\n\"Remember that paperwork I cosigned with Mela when we were here last, after Mars...?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Is it possible...\" Nita's mouth went dry. She tried swallowing, had to work at it. \"...that as far as the intergalactic community is concerned, I'm, uh, one of the people who... rules the Earth?\"\n\nSker'ret burst out in one of his ratchety laughs. \"What? Rules? Oh, no! Not at all.\"\n\n\"Okay, that's a relief,\" Nita said. \"Good.\" And she sagged a little.\n\n\"But you are on the governing board.\"\n\nNita's mouth dropped open again. Then she closed it, because she simply could not find a reply.\n\n\"We should go,\" she said after a moment. \"You two have business, and we've got a guest list to write.\"\n\n\"Of course. I'll let you get on with it. And we'll see you at your place again! This is going to be so exciting. In... fifty days?\"\n\n\"Sounds about right,\" Nita said.\n\nThere was more hugging, and then Filif and Sker'ret took themselves off down the concourse. Carmela kicked her hoverscoot back into levitation mode, climbed aboard, and said to Nita, \"So that's settled. Come on, Neets, we've got the far end of the concourse to look over...\" And off she went, already humming \"Feliz Navidad... Feliz Navidad... Prospero Ano y Felicidad...\"\n\nThis is going to be interesting, Nita thought. \"Mela, wait up!\"\n\n\"I want to wish you a merry Christmas... I want to wish you a merry Christmas... from the bottom of my oooh wow look at that!\"\n\nNita sighed and scooted after her.\n\nOf course, even when you're a wizard, getting the basic permissions settled for a house party for an indeterminate number of wizardly or wizard-friendly guests isn't necessarily that easy.\n\nIn the Rodriguezes' living room a man was sitting in the easy chair closest to the entertainment system, with a tabloid newspaper open in front of his face. In front of him, sitting crosslegged on the floor in a position that was supposed to read as subordinate, and wearing what was meant to be a winsome smile, was his younger daughter.\n\n\"Daaaaddyyyyy...\"\n\n\"I just got home, Carmela. From a shift that felt three hours longer than it really was. During which every single machine I touched found a new and interesting way to screw up.\" Kit's pop worked with the printing-press machines at the big Long Island newspaper, and since the operation had gone digital, he had been complaining more or less nonstop about the crankiness of the new equipment he worked with compared with the beautiful, reliable old printing presses of old. Kit had told Nita often enough that her dad had complained just as hard and as constantly about the old printing presses, way back when, but this didn't seem to be a good time to remind anybody of that. \"My head is aching, even my ears are aching, and the aspirin hasn't kicked in yet, so if we could, you know, let this wait half an hour...\"\n\n\"But all you have to do right now is say 'yes' and then it'll be quiet!\"\n\nThe newspaper behind which Juan Rodriguez was presently concealing himself rustled in a very brisk way. \"Let's try it the other way around, shall we? Let's try having the quiet now, and then maybe the 'yes' will happen later!\"\n\n\"Okay, right on time, that was the appeal to reason,\" Kit said in Nita's ear. They were lurking in the kitchen, pretending to be getting something to eat while listening to the conversation through the pass-through window between the kitchen and the living room. \"Let's see if she's buying it.\"\n\n\"Seriously, pop-pop, it won't be a big deal! I'm going to take care of all the food and drinks myself, and I'll clean the house, before and after\u2014\"\n\n\"Uh oh,\" Kit said, very low. \"Reverting to what she used to call him when she was eight. Helpless baby daughter and responsible cleaner of the house? Not a good match.\"\n\n\"That we're having this discussion right now tells me that it's a big deal already,\" Kit's pop said. \"And that I should be wondering just why you're leaning on this so hard. And whether I should go off the whole idea right now, so as not to indulge your instant gratification issues.\"\n\n\"But daaaaaaaddy\u2014\"\n\nKit rolled his eyes at Nita. \"Nope, logic's the only thing that could have saved her there...\"\n\nThe newspaper being held up between Juan and his middle daughter dropped just long enough for her, and the two in the kitchen, to get a glimpse of eyes that were rather dangerously narrowed. \"Answer hazy,\" Kit's pop said, rather pointedly, \"ask again later.\" And he went back behind the newspaper again.\n\nCarmela picked herself silently up off the floor and swanned off toward the back of the house and the stairs to her bedroom in a manner that just narrowly avoided being a flounce.\n\nNita and Kit turned their attention back toward the sandwiches that they were theoretically constructing. Nita hadn't actually gotten much further than the bread. \"How's this going, you think?\" she said, very low.\n\n\"Hard to tell,\" Kit murmured, opening a cupboard and pretending to rummage around in it. \"Sometimes she gets a lot of mileage out of the 'I'm your favorite daughter' thing. Some days, nothing at all. Especially when he starts thinking about her and Helena being in college.\"\n\n\"Tuition,\" Nita said, and groaned under her breath.\n\n\"Student loans,\" Kit said. \"It's a good thing she's just going to SUNY. But this still looks like a 'nothing at all' day.\"\n\n\"Don't think I don't hear you two lurking in there!\" Kit's pop said.\n\n\"Not lurking, pop,\" Kit said. \"Nita's getting a sandwich. She didn't have time to eat anything at the Crossings.\"\n\n\"Because we were busy meeting with the friends who're going to come!\" Carmela said, swinging back into the living room and flopping down onto the nearby couch, where she lay staring at the ceiling in a vaguely hopeless way.\n\n\"Who you want to have come,\" her pop said, \"and who you really should thought about not wanting to disappoint before you issued an invitation that you don't know if you're going to be allowed to fulfill!\" He turned a page, and the paper rustled quite hard.\n\n\"Uh oh, the getting-permission-first thing,\" Kit murmured.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nita murmured back, \"I hit her with that. Didn't count for much at the time. She was too buzzed.\"\n\n\"If she's smart, she won't push him...\"\n\nPossibly realizing this, Carmela merely made a little disappointed moaning sound and went quiet.\n\n\"Anyway, there's plenty of time to think about this,\" Kit's pop said. \"It's not even Thanksgiving yet.\"\n\n\"But some of the guests need time to get their schedules sorted because they'll be coming such a long way. Ireland! Germany!\"\n\n\"16 Aurigae,\" Nita added helpfully.\n\nThe newspaper rustled again, and this time the right-hand page twitched aside just enough for Nita to catch a glimpse of Kit's pop's eyes looking toward her over the tops of his reading glasses. \"Sixteen what?\"\n\n\"Aurigae. It's a star about two hundred and thirty light years from here,\" Nita said. \"An orange giant.\"\n\n\"About two hundred and thirty?\" Kit's pop said.\n\n\"Give or take,\" Nita said. \"That's where Filif comes from.\"\n\n\"So this is one of the three who stayed in your basement in their little holes in the wall,\" said Kit's mama as she appeared through the door on the far side of the living room that led to the back bedrooms.\n\n\"Elective access gated spaces,\" Kit said. \"Puptents, we call them. They don't take up any space in our space: just somewhere else. It's like taking your home with you, a little.\"\n\nHis mama leaned on the passthrough's shelf. \"And the one we're discussing, 16 Aurigae Guy\u2014? This is the one who looks like a Christmas tree?\"\n\nNita raised her eyebrows at Kit. His mother had always seemed to have the superpower of being able to hear\u2014or overhear\u2014any conversation that took place under the Rodriguezes' roof, no matter how far away she was in the house. Sometimes it was really useful, and sometimes it was a pain in the butt, but Nita had learned to deal with it.\n\n\"He's a Demisiv,\" Nita said. \"That's both the planet and the species. They're carbon-based like us, but they evolved... really differently.\"\n\n\"To wind up looking like they do, I'd imagine so.\"\n\nNita shrugged. \"They're related to trees the same way we're related to the tetrapods.\" She noticed Kit's pop giving her a slightly confused look from behind the paper, and added, \"You know, one of those fish species that got out of the water a long time ago, developed legs out of their fins and started walking around. There've been a lot of branches in the evolutionary tree between them and us. Same number of branches, pretty much, between Filif and his species' ancestors.\"\n\n\"A lot of water under the bridge for his people, then,\" Kit's pop said.\n\n\"Five hundred million years,\" Kit said, \"give or take.\"\n\n\"Huh,\" said Kit's pop: a neutral sort of sound. He went back behind the paper again, turned another page.\n\nKit's mama came into the kitchen and stood still in front of the stove for a few seconds, giving the cooktop a long thoughtful look. \"Spaghetti and meatballs?\" she said.\n\n\"Sounds good, Mama.\"\n\n\"Then don't overdo the sandwiches, you two.\" Kit's mama got down on one knee and started going through the cupboard under the counter: Kit and Nita moved to either side to get out of her way. \"So what else does Mr. Christmas Tree Wizard do besides get all excited over the thought of being decorated?\"\n\n\"He's been working with the authorities at the Crossings as a go-between for the Interconnect Project,\" Nita said. \"The Demisiv have been a big part of the Project for a long time. It's a group of species who specialize in long-distance intergalactic transit: keeping it running, helping people get around. They also do emergency work... help move populations who have to find new worlds to live on, because their stars have blown up or they've had planetary natural disasters or whatever.\"\n\n\"So... kind of a humanitarian organization?\"\n\nThat wasn't a comparison Nita had thought to make. \"Yeah,\" she said.\n\n\"For a whole lot of values of 'human,'\" Kit added.\n\nKit's mama didn't say anything for a moment, just kept looking around in the cupboard. \"Juan,\" she said, \"are we out of spaghetti again?\"\n\n\"There's fettucini...\"\n\n\"It's not the same.\" She got up, sighing, and opened an upper cupboard. \"Okay, we'll do it with fusilli. But you said you were getting spaghetti on the way back from work...\"\n\nThe paper rustled. \"Sorry. My head was killing me and I just wanted to get home.\"\n\n\"Well, tomorrow then.\"\n\n\"I'll make a note.\"\n\nKit's mama rummaged around for a big pot and started filling it with water. \"Well,\" she said while the faucet was running. \"He sounds like a good influence. One thing, though.\"\n\nKit and Nita looked at each other. \"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Is your friend a needle-shedding type?\"\n\n\"Not that I've ever noticed,\" Kit said.\n\n\"The occasional berry,\" Nita said. \"But only when he's in trans.\"\n\nKit's mama put her eyebrows up. \"Doesn't sound like a problem,\" she said. She put the pot on the stove and turned on the heat under it. \"How many people are we talking?\"\n\n\"We're still working that out,\" Nita said. \"Wanted to get the okay from you first.\"\n\n\"You did, at least,\" Kit's mama said, and flashed a grin at Nita.\n\nNita did her best to produce a We-are-so-busted expression that would acknowledge the realities of the situation without assigning blame to any specific party. Kit simultaneously looked elsewhere and looked innocent.\n\n\"And this is supposed to be a one-night sleepover? On the twentieth?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Kit said. \"We wouldn't be up here all that much. Mostly in the puptents: there'll be more room.\"\n\nNita heard another newspaper page turn, but purposely didn't look that way, because Kit's mama was doing so.\n\nA second passed. \"The carol-singing thing's the night after,\" Kit's mama said. \"Don't forget.\"\n\n\"We won't,\" Kit said.\n\nHis mama headed out of the kitchen and through the living room again. \"Just try to keep the other collateral damage to a minimum, yeah?\" she said to Carmela as she passed by the couch. \"It wouldn't be good to freak the neighbors.\"\n\n\"At least any more than they have been already,\" muttered Kit's pop from behind the paper.\n\n\"Oh Mama thank you!\" Carmela shrieked and bounded up off the couch to grab her and hug her as she passed through.\n\n\"Don't thank me,\" said Kit's mama. \"Thank your Pop.\"\n\nThe logic of this might not have been instantly obvious to the casual bystander, but Nita had seen enough of these family discussions at Kit's house to understand that with his folks, parental consensus was often reached by some mechanism she didn't understand and probably wasn't meant to. \"Thanks, Mr. Rodriguez!\" Nita immediately said over the noise of Carmela diving past the newspaper, seizing her Pop and covering his face with smooches.\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Kit's pop said as soon as Carmela let him loose and more or less went dancing out of the living room and up the stairs to get her tablet and start making notes and plans.\n\nKit's pop shook his head, shook the paper back out into something like a readable configuration, and went back to his reading. As he did, Kit turned to Nita and said silently, She just lay there with her sad face on and let us run interference for her, didn't she!\n\nYep, Nita said. She owes us one.\n\nGood, Kit said. And meanwhile... \"Looks like we get to have a party!\"\n\nA second later the sound system up in Carmela's room fired up with a raucous British-accented voice more or less screaming over a noisy drum solo, \"It's CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIISTMAAAAAAAAS!!\"\n\nNita snickered. \"Ronan,\" she said, \"has a lot to answer for...\"\n\nAn hour or so later, Nita was upstairs in Carmela's bedroom, sprawled in her desk chair with her manual open in her lap, while Carmela was lying on her stomach on her bed and scribbling notes in her tablet at about a mile a minute. That thing must have some handwriting recognition program, Nita thought. But then, it's Crossings tech... it would have.\n\nHaving gotten the \"yes\" from their folks, Carmela was now acting oddly at a loss, as if she'd secretly expected to be turned down and now wasn't sure what she should be doing. \"Decorations,\" she was muttering.\n\nNita glanced up at that. \"I thought you decided you were going to use your normal ones.\"\n\n\"What? Oh. Not for Filif! For the house.\"\n\n\"We've got lots of time yet to think about that.\"\n\n\"Not if we don't want to miss the holiday rush! The sooner the better. Anyway, the stuff's starting to turn up in the stores already anyway...\"\n\nNita sighed, as that was all too true. \"Still.\"\n\n\"And another thing,\" Carmela muttered, hurriedly flipping over virtual pages in her tablet and starting to make another set of notes. \"Allergies. Food allergies...\"\n\nShe can plan an invasion and not turn a hair, Nita thought, but she can't stay focused on a guest list? This really is a big deal for her. \"Mela, you're coming at this backwards.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Guest list first. Food allergies later.\"\n\n\"I'm just trying to get ahead of things...\"\n\n\"Right now the only one you're getting ahead of is yourself. Deep breath!\"\n\nCarmela took it, though for some moments she seemed reluctant to let it out again.\n\n\"Mela!\" Nita said. \"Relax.\"\n\nShe let that breath out with some difficulty. \"I just want it to be nice for him,\" Carmela said. \"He's so special... and I don't want him to be disappointed.\"\n\nHer first alien crush, Nita thought, and just smiled. \"He won't be,\" she said. \"You know him. Always ready for something new, and in love with it when it arrives, whatever it is.\"\n\n\"And oh gosh, he's going to need something to root in. Maybe one of those custom compounds they've got at the Demisiv sleepstore at the Crossings...\"\n\n\"Mela!\" Nita said. \"Daddy just puts him in the flower bed when he turns up. With maybe some bark chips! So later for custom bedding. Guest list!\"\n\nCarmela let out another heavy sigh and turned to a clean \"page.\" \"Guest list,\" she said.\n\nNita stretched in the chair and glanced down at her manual. She'd long since told the list of active wizards she knew personally to arrange itself to the front of the main directory. Now she started paging through that section, checking people's public calendars, where available, against the sleepover / party dates. \"So. Filif.\"\n\n\"Goes without saying.\"\n\n\"Sker'ret.\"\n\n\"Ditto.\"\n\nBoth of them paused then, thinking of one of the original puptent group who would not be there: Roshaun. More or less in unison, they sighed.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Carmela said. \"Well.... You and me and Mom and Pop and Dairine and your Dad and Kit.\"\n\n\"Uh huh.\"\n\n\"And Spot.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"Ronan.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" Carmela said. Nita glanced at Carmela with amusement, not entirely sure whether the sound was simple acknowledgement or approval. Ronan wasn't particularly forthcoming about how he actually took Carmela's more or less continuous flirting with him, but Nita noticed that he never really came out and told her to stop it.\n\nAnd having mentioned Ronan and Kit in the same breath, naturally the next thought was\u2014\n\n\"Darryl?\" Carmela said, beating Nita to it.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Nita looked over his listing in the manual. \"He's showing availability, but that might just be for errantry. The dates are starred, and the star says 'subject to preparedness issues.'\"\n\n\"Meaning he'll bow out if he feels overstimmed.\"\n\n\"Well, sure. But the whole holiday time might be iffy for him. We were talking a couple weeks ago and he told me that as far as his personal well-being goes, and the way he's been doing better at managing it, he's been trying not to freak his parents out too much. Trying to break them in gradually.\"\n\nCarmela snorted with laughter. \"Darryl?\"\n\nNita smiled. In the matter of handling his autism, as with his handling of nearly everything else, it was hard to imagine Darryl doing anything \"gradually\" . These days he tended to jump in enthusiastically with both feet and then deal with the fine details as they came up. \"He told me at one point,\" Nita said, \"that he was thinking about trying to get his parents to perceive wizardry as just a new way to be non-neurotypical.\"\n\n\"If anyone can do that, he can,\" Carmela said. \"So if he's trying to ease them into the idea that the holidays are less of a chore for him these days and he doesn't need all that supervision, maybe we should just let him decide what to do about this? Put him down for 'maybe yes maybe no' and let him get back to us?\"\n\n\"Yeah. If he needs to blow us off, he will and he won't feel guilty about it.\"\n\nCarmela scribbled for a moment. Nita stretched, propping her feet up on Carmela's desk and thinking. \"S'reee...\" she turned a page in the manual.\n\nCarmela looked up. \"Um. How do you invite a humpback whale to a sleepover?\"\n\n\"The usual way! You put her in a people suit.\"\n\nCarmela blinked. \"Oh. Yeah.\"\n\n\"Especially because it's easier for S'reee than for most whales. When she got hurt that time and I healed her, we got blood-tied. So she has less trouble shapechanging to human these days, the way I have less trouble going whale when I need to.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"But no,\" Nita said with some regret. \"Says here she's on sabbatical right now. Personal leave.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Uh, the manual won't say. It's one of those confidentiality things. But I suspect it's about private time with her honey.\"\n\n\"Her what??\"\n\n\"She's dating. A very nice bull from up around Vancouver somewhere. He's a food critic.\"\n\n\"A what??\"\n\n\"You want to know where the best North Atlantic krill is,\" Nita said, \"Hwii'ish is your go-to guy.\" It had taken her a while to understand that all the Earth's oceans throbbed with a vast network of cetacean communication, a sort of sonic version of the Internet; and that Hwii'ish was essentially a foodblogger, and fairly famous among his own kind. But he didn't care about fame: what he was interested in was wizards, most specifically S'reee. \"But who knows?\" Nita said. \"Send her an invite anyway. She might be able to get away.\"\n\nCarmela made a note.\n\n\"Tom and Carl?\"\n\n\"For a sleepover?\"\n\n\"Huh? Oh, no, just for the evening party.\"\n\n\"Sure, if we can get them.\" Nita flipped from Tom's page to Carl's. \"It lists them as 'on call', but they might be able to get away.\"\n\n\"The Twychild?\" That was Tran Liem Tuyet and Tran Hung Nguyet, a special kind of twin, both of them favorites of Nita's from the big group they'd met up with during the Pullulus War.\n\n\"Uh, they're greyed out then. Maybe a family thing? It doesn't say.\"\n\n\"Okay. We should have two different invites, maybe? One for people we'd like to see but we don't know if they can make it, one for those whose calendars say they're free.\"\n\n\"Makes sense.\"\n\n\"What about Matt?\"\n\n\"Who\u2014 Oh, the Aussie guy! Yeah, can't miss a chance to watch him pester Ronan about how grateful he should be for Matt saving his life.\"\n\n\"And Ronan really is grateful but he makes this big song and dance about not caring...\"\n\n\"He's free.\"\n\n\"Good. Sleepover list.... Rhiow and Hwaith and their bunch?\"\n\nNita turned pages. \"Uh, no. 'Emergencies only.' It's a bad time for them, the North American gates are crazy busy at the holidays, and they still always malfunction even when a full team of gate techs are riding herd on them.\"\n\n\"We'll save Rhiow some of that cream she likes,\" Carmela said.\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Carmela stared at the tablet. \"Any of the Mars-team guys? Kit likes them a lot.\"\n\nNita nodded. \"Um, yeah. What's his face? The tall one. The German guy who Doesn't Drive Tanks.\"\n\n\"Marcus,\" said Carmela, and made a note. While the Mars investigating team had been hunting for the planet's lost kernel, and any hint of what had happened to the (then so-called) Old Martian species, Marcus\u2014who besides being a wizard with a linguistics specialty also drove armored personnel carriers for the German Army\u2014had lectured anyone who'd hold still on the essential difference between vehicles with wheels and vehicles with tracks. You got a sense that he had to spend a lot of time with people who were unclear on the concept, and so he tended to be proactive about it.\n\n\"Looks like he's free until the 24th,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Okay. Who else have we got from Mars? What's her name with the curls?\"\n\n\"Lissa?... Uh, no, she's grayed out. Shame, I like her, she's nice. Maybe next time.\"\n\nThey both sat quiet, thinking for a moment. \"Mamvish?\" Carmela said then.\n\n\"Wow, if we could get her...!\" Nita flipped a page, studied the manual. \"'On errantry, unavailable except for emergencies.' Well, no surprise there.\" The Species Archivist to the Powers that Be was in demand all over the Galaxy, all the time.\n\nCarmela sighed. \"Shame. But then she wouldn't like this time of year, this far north. No fresh tomatoes...\"\n\n\"We'll catch her in the summer, if we're lucky.\"\n\nNita stretched again. \"Anyway, that sounds like a good number. How many is that now?\"\n\n\"Uh, let me count.\" Carmela was silent for a moment. \"For the party, sort of sixteen? If everyone shows up. For the sleepover, eleven? Again, if everyone's able to make it.\"\n\nNita nodded. \"Good crowd. Should be fun.\"\n\nCarmela sat up, touched the tablet in a couple of places and typed busily for a minute or two. Then she looked over at Nita. \"Last minute thoughts?\"\n\n\"None right now. Probably I'll have one the minute you send the invites out.\"\n\n\"We'll see.\" Carmela typed a last few words and then hit a spot on the tablet with one finger. The tablet chimed.\n\n\"All gone out?\"\n\nCarmela nodded, tossed the tablet to one side and rolled over on her back in a good simulation of a collapse for someone who was already lying down. \"I,\" she announced, \"am exhaaaauuuuuuusted!\"\n\n\"And you haven't even done anything yet,\" Nita said.\n\n\"Excuse me! I sent the invitations!\"\n\nNita snickered. And then, without warning, a chill ran down her spine. She shivered.\n\nCarmela saw it. \"What?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Nita said. \"Except for the food and the drinks and the decorations and some little presents for everybody, we have only one thing left to worry about.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"The weather...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Oh, The Weather Outside Is Frightful\n\nMonday, December 20, 2010, 7:00 AM\n\nOff to the left side of Nita's head, her radio alarm went off. Eyes still closed, she stuck a hand out from under the covers and felt around until she found the button. The insistent buzzing stopped, leaving her with the faint sound of somebody from the local all-news station talking in a cheerful tinny voice about lane closures on the Major Deegan Expressway.\n\nShe opened her eyes. It was still very dim in the room. Winter mornings weren't exactly her favorites: she hated getting up when it was still dark.\n\nNita sat up in bed, rubbed her eyes. Is the sun even up yet? she wondered.\n\n7:16, said Bobo from somewhere in the back of her head.\n\n\"Thanks,\" Nita said, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms. It was chilly: the central heating hadn't come on yet, and in weather as cold as it had been the last few days, even a flannel nightie couldn't do a lot for you once you got out from under the covers. Shortest day tomorrow, she thought. Longest night... \"And an eclipse of the moon,\" she said aloud.\n\nWhile that's true, Bobo said, I wouldn't quote you long odds on seeing it.\n\nNita got out of bed and went straight to the closet for the beat-up wooly-chenille bathrobe she favored on mornings like this. \"Well, yeah, probably going to be too busy...\"\n\nThat's not the problem.\n\n\"Oh?\" Nita said, and went to the back window to tilt the Venetian blinds open.\n\nThe back yard looked someone's old black and white photograph of a winter scene: softly lit in a shadowless dove-gray, the dark shapes of bare shrubs and leafless trees seemed charcoal-sketched against an indistinct background barely visible in the pre-dawn twilight. But what was slightly visible now in that grayness was movement; a gentle down-sifting of light near the window. Ever so lightly, ever so slightly, it had begun to snow. There was maybe an inch of it on the ground already.\n\nNita smiled a little to see it. Snow for Christmas...\n\nBut possibly, Bobo said, a little more than you might have had in mind.\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\nYou'll want to check your manual... but we have incoming.\n\n\"Uh, okay.\" It was unusual to hear Bobo sound quite so concerned.\n\nNita picked the manual up off her bedside table and went to do bathroom things, then headed downstairs to see if her dad had made tea yet. He had: and he was standing there in the kitchen dressed in his black cold-weather parka just finishing what was in his Mets mug. He looked tired and a little bleary, which was no surprise this time of year\u2014the runup to Christmas was always crazy for florists. \"You okay?\" Nita said, getting a mug for herself and filling it from the pot.\n\n\"Yeah,\" her dad said. \"But God, am I getting sick of poinsettias.\"\n\nThis was something that Nita had heard repeatedly for the last few weeks. \"I don't blame you,\" she said. \"When do you think you'll be done today?\"\n\n\"Probably five,\" her dad said. \"I don't see any point in working late hours this week. I know what orders I've got due out and I've got enough time budgeted for them. If it gets busy toward the end of the day, Mikey can keep the shop open a little later. I don't want to miss the excitement.\" He smiled a little. \"When do people start getting here again?\"\n\n\"Not till about four,\" Nita said, and yawned. \"That's when Filif's coming: we'll take him over to Kit's and get him settled in. Or get Kit's pop settled, anyway...\"\n\n\"Not still nervous, is he?\" said Nita's dad. \"I've told him once or twice already, you couldn't ask for a nicer house guest. Should I call him and calm him down?\"\n\n\"Might not be a bad idea, if you get a moment today.\"\n\n\"Will do.\" Her dad kissed her goodbye. \"Tell Dairine I said to put the garbage out.\"\n\n\"I'll tell her.\" And Nita made a small face, since telling Dairine to go anywhere near a garbage can was rarely all that effective. There were few chores she hated more.\n\nHer dad headed out. After a few minutes she heard the car starting up, and (as it pulled out of the garage into the driveway) the snow tires whining and slipping in the new snow, even though her dad had salted the driveway last night. Wet snow, Nita thought. Whatever we get, it'll stick. The thought of that snow piling up on Filif's branches made her smile. Do they even get snow on Demisiv? she thought. I know so little about the place...\n\nSomething to look into. Meanwhile... She stretched. Breakfast. And then... Christmas!\n\nShe spent the first half of the day just puttering around the house and relaxing, rejoicing in not even having to look at the clock, despite the low-level buzz of anticipation already building inside her as time for the arrival of friends and guests got closer. It was the first real day of the holidays for her, the first weekday that Nita didn't have to go to school, and wouldn't have to go again until the first week in January; and the calm of it felt like heaven. Miraculously (or actually due to hard work and some forethought) she was all sorted out for her between-semesters work: no reports to write, no projects to agonize over. And nothing to procrastinate over, either! Or to get stressed over because you know you're procrastinating. It was perfect.\n\n...Well, nearly perfect. Every now and then the thought of the one person who wouldn't be there for Christmas this year came up to meet her as she looked at some window decoration that wasn't quite right and needed to be straightened, or some spot where another traditional Christmassy item\u2014that glass bowl full of fake poinsettia flowers, the other bowl full of shiny ball ornaments\u2014was dusty and needed attention. Nita kept waiting for one or another of these moments to turn into pain, and kept being surprised when they didn't. It wasn't that she didn't miss her mom. Because I do, every day. It was just that for some reason, her sense that her mom was okay was stronger than usual. Initially Nita was tempted to spend more time trying to figure this out. But why? Why do I want to keep poking at it like a tooth where the filling fell out? Mom would tell me to let it be. So I will.\n\nShe had more tea, and after a while wandered upstairs to her bedroom again and put a few last wrapping- or ribbon-touches on a couple of gifts she'd picked up for other party guests. It wasn't mandatory for people to bring each other things, but along the line she'd seen a thing or two that seemed right for one or another of the people who were coming. And there was one special gift that she kept stealing peeks at, half in admiration and half in nervousness that he wouldn't like it. Finally, she laughed at herself\u2014very softly, so as not to wake Dairine, who apparently still wasn't up yet\u2014and closed the little box. Then she felt around underneath her bed for the bedroom slippers with the waterproof soles, the ones that wouldn't mind being out in the snow. What the heck, she thought, garbage is garbage, it needs to be out...\n\nShe pulled the full plastic bag out of the kitchen garbage pail and quietly went outside to where the big garbage cans sat next to the garage. The snow was still falling gently out of a solid gray sky, mostly straight down, in a persistent, purposeful kind of way. Only the occasional tiniest breath of breeze stirred it around and made it swirl as it came down. Then it straightened out again, doing a credible imitation of snow globe snow. I meant to look at that weather report, she thought, as she put the kitchen garbage in the big can, shook the snow off the garbage can lid, and quietly put it back in place. In a moment. Right now, despite the way the cold bit at her through her bathrobe and the flannel nightgown, Nita was quite content to stand in the snow\u2014maybe two inches deep, now\u2014and let the silence soak into her bones. There was no sound anywhere; even the normal traffic noise that would have drifted over from the nearby Southern State Parkway was completely muted.\n\nShe glanced down at the tracks her dad's car had left in the driveway snow. They were already filling up again, and the salt underneath them didn't seem to be having much effect. Nita briefly considered doing a small wizardry to talk the driveway into believing it was warmer than its surroundings so that the snow would stay melted. But is it really necessary? she thought. Sometimes it was harder for wizard to wait a little while and not spend energy that might not have actually been required to improve a situation. Then she grinned at herself. And maybe, she thought, I'm just feeling lazy. And every now and then, why not?\n\nShe went back in the house, took off the outside slippers and left but by the door to melt their snow off on the doormat; then found her other slippers which had somehow migrated to the dining room, put them on, and wandered into the living room. It was bright enough, even though no lights were on; the picture window was letting in that pale gray snow light, restful. Perfect to read by, she thought. She went upstairs very softly, pulled a book out of her to-read pile, went downstairs again into the kitchen for more tea, and curled up on the couch with the book and just read.\n\nThe next thing she knew the kitchen door was opening. Her dad had come home for lunch, and even two rooms over Nita could tell from the sound of the way he tossed his keys onto the kitchen counter that he was in a bad mood. Oh great, she thought, what's this about?\n\nShe put the book down and picked up the empty tea mug sitting by her, and wandered into the kitchen. Her dad was staring into the refrigerator, scowling. Nita leaned around him and peered into his face. \"What?\"\n\n\"Don't get me started,\" he muttered.\n\n\"About what?\"\n\n\"Football.\"\n\nNita rolled her eyes. \"Oh yeah, the miracle...\"\n\n\"Not miraculous,\" said her dad, and started rummaging around in the fridge a lot harder than he needed to.\n\nNita snickered. For her, the only sport of interest was baseball. But come the end of baseball season her dad normally started paying attention to football, for which Nita had no time whatsoever. Apparently the Philadelphia Eagles had played the Giants at the Meadowlands over the weekend and had abruptly come from behind in the last quarter to badly beat the Giants, her dad's favorites. Now, every time he heard the local news teams on TV or radio referring to this as \"the Miracle in the Meadowlands,\" he positively growled.\n\n\"Daddy, you really want to shake this mood,\" Nita said. \"If Fil turns up here and sees you upset like this, he's going to want to know why you're upset! And then you're going to have to explain football to him. And he always gets freaked when he thinks he hasn't done enough research in something.\"\n\n\"Well,\" her dad said, and sighed. \"I take it that on this visit your job is going to be explaining Christmas to him?\"\n\n\"Well, he'll have arrived doing the basic reading, you know that.\"\n\nHer dad laughed a little. \"Not sure how basic basic is, but the subject can get complicated...\"\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" Nita said. And then the front doorbell rang.\n\nHer dad glanced at her. \"And you not dressed yet,\" he said. \"Let me get it. Probably it's the first batch of kids wanting to shovel the driveway.\" He went past her to answer the door.\n\nNita heard him open it, and then something unexpected happened; her dad started laughing. Curious, she went into the living room and peered around towards the door to see what was going on. Then she understood his surprise, because standing there in bright red ski coveralls and big boots and a parka and a woolly Christmas hat was Tom Swale, with a snow shovel over his shoulder.\n\n\"I don't even know what the going rate for this is anymore,\" Nita's dad said, and laughed again, feeling around in his pockets. \"Is five dollars enough, or has inflation hit this too?\"\n\nTom roared with laughter. \"Just leave that they are, Tom,\" said Nita's dad. \"Come on in. Coffee?\"\n\n\"No, it's okay, I won't be keeping you,\" Tom said, leaning the snow shovel up against the side of Nita's front porch underneath the mailbox. He stepped in the door that Nita's dad held open for him, and all the snow obligingly fell off him before he crossed the threshold.\n\n\"You sure,\" Nita's dad said. \"I mean, that trick has to be good for at least a ten if you'll do it to the sidewalks and the driveway. Maybe we can come to some kind of arrangement.\"\n\nTom followed her dad into the dining room, smiling at Nita. \"It's okay, Harry, I'm not shilling for business. At least, not this kind of business. I was just doing our sidewalk, and then it occurred to me to wonder whether Nita had seen the weather report, and I thought I'd just walk over and check.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nita said. \"Bobo did mention something about a storm coming.\"\n\n\"The storm,\" Tom said. \"The snowstorm of the decade, if not the millennium... a category 2 nor'easter with snow. There won't have been a snowstorm this powerful since the sixties, if our own weather forecasters are worth their salt. Even the non-wizardly forecasters are starting to get really concerned, and with reason. The temperatures are going to drop quite hard on the twenty-first, and the wind's going to pick up. Blizzard conditions at the very least, and super-blizzard at worst.\" He sighed. \"A lot of us are having to change our schedules at the last minute, because all the local services are going to be under tremendous pressure and the going to need all the help they can get on this one, at least from wizards expert in handling this kind of weather.\"\n\nNita followed them into the dining room and sat down with them. \"Does that mean you won't be able to make it to the party?\"\n\n\"Oh, we'll be looking in,\" Tom said. \"But we won't be able to stay long.\" And then he gave Nita an amused look. \"The joke is that it turns out we wouldn't have been able to stay very long anyway, because a few days ago the airline changed our flights to Banff and left us looking at an earlier departure.\" He brushed a little ruefully at his ski coverall. \"But now that's not an issue. Here Carl and I were already to go to the snow, and all of a sudden it turns out the snow is coming to us. With a vengeance. So we canceled, and the slopes will have to wait for us until the new year.\"\n\n\"Sometimes you just can't catch a break,\" Nita's dad said.\n\n\"The Eagles,\" Tom said. \"Tell me.\"\n\nThat made Nita's dad laugh. \"I'd have thought you guys would just try to push this storm away, though,\" he said, \"if it's going to be so much trouble.\"\n\nTom shook his head. \"We don't usually fight with the weather unless we have to. And even if you want to, with the biggest storms there's almost no point; there's so much kinetic energy already bound up in them that it's like trying to stop an atom bomb. This one's got its mind made up\u2014it's coming through. All we can do is try to mitigate the worst circumstances, help the emergency services quietly where helping won't get noticed, and generally just make ourselves useful.\"\n\nNita swallowed, because a thought had just occurred to her. \"You don't need any of us, do you?\"\n\n\"That's really thoughtful,\" Tom said, \"and the answer is, in a word, no. None of you are in the required specialty groups, and we've got plenty of people stepping up to handle this. So you enjoy your party. We'll stop in sometime this evening for a while, have an eggnog, and then head out to do our thing.\"\n\nHe got up, and so did Nita's dad, walking him to the front door. \"But Tom, if you change your mind about the driveway, let me know. We local small businessmen have to stick together...\"\n\nTheir laughter mingled as the door closed. \"I'll let you know. See you two later.\"\n\nA little while after hearing the doorbell, and just after their dad headed back to the shop, Dairine materialized in old jeans and an oversized sweater, demanding tea and food. For the time being Nita ignored this. \"You have a late night last night?\"\n\n\"Working out some software issues with Spot,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, really?\"\n\n\"Don't angle for details,\" Dairine said rubbing her eyes. \"Party stuff. You'll find out. How did it get to be two o'clock already?\"\n\n\"Ten of,\" Nita said, glancing at the clock. But it was a fair question. \"And you know what? I don't care. Everything is moving in slow motion today, and I love it.\"\n\nDairine flopped down at the dining room table and stretched. \"For once we're in agreement.\"\n\n\"'For once,'\" Nita said in good-natured mockery. It was interesting to notice that she and her sister had lately been in agreement a lot more than they used to. Maybe it's the wizardry, Nita thought. And even if it's not, I really don't care why it's happening. It's better than fighting. \"I took out your garbage,\" she said.\n\n\"My garbage! It's the garbage. I'm just the one who gets stuck taking it out.\" Dairine wrinkled her nose.\n\n\"Doesn't matter. You owe me one,\" Nita said.\n\nDairine rolled her eyes as if in scorn at this bourgeois concept. \"I'm not even up ten minutes and you're trying to push your simplistic barter economy stuff on me? Please.\" She got up and went to get some tea.\n\nNita laughed at herself. Well, that lasted five minutes. \"Shower time,\" she said, levering herself up out of the chair and heading upstairs. \"Make another pot, okay?\"\n\nShe didn't even hear Dairine's answer, and didn't particularly care what she'd said. The tone of the day was remaining unbroken; slow and easy, building toward something good. That soft snow light was filling the upstairs hall from the window down at the end, and filling the bathroom too. Nita showered, then went and got changed into her party clothes\u2014nothing dressy, just dark leggings and low black fluffy-lined elf-boots, and what Nita had started referring to privately as the Christmas Sweater of Doom. It was a ridiculous hairy angora-knit crewnecked construction adorned with fake Icelandic patterns in red and white, and scattered all over with revolting embroidered green yarn Christmas trees with little sewn-on Mylar ornaments. Kit had stumbled across the thing somewhere online and ridiculed it so mercilessly that Nita had decided she had to have it. It had taken entirely too much of her disposable income for that month, but it would be worth it for the look on his face when he saw it on her. And it's going to be hilarious explaining it to Filif...\n\nNita glanced at the clock radio and realized to her shock that it somehow said three-thirty. Whoa, how'd that happen, she thought, where'd the time go all of a sudden! Maybe I had a little too much lazy. He's going to be here soon...\n\nShe gathered up the goodie bag with her Christmas cards and small presents in it from where it had been sitting on her desk for a while. Then Nita headed downstairs, noting in passing the sound of Dairine thumping around in her room, apparently going through her drawers or her closet. Last-minute decisions, Nita thought, smiling as she headed down the stairs. Dair always tries to be so organized, but when it comes to clothes she can never make up her mind...\n\nIn the living room, Nita paused briefly, glancing around. The place looked tidy enough, so she didn't have to worry about bringing anybody over if for some reason they needed to see something of hers. Fine, she thought. She headed into the kitchen, noted a few dishes in the sink, and stopped just long enough to wash the and put them in the rack. Then she grabbed her parka off the hook by the back door, threw it over the crazy Christmas sweater, and carefully headed out the back door, down the steps, and through the gate into the back yard.\n\nThe snow was deeper out here; she had to step carefully to keep the boots from getting wet. Nita looked around and saw that the silvery snow light was already getting a bit dimmer. Above that gray ceiling, sunset was already coming on. She paused by the tree growing out of the middle of the yard between house and the garden, and put a hand on its trunk. \"You awake?\" she said.\n\nLiused's answer took a few moments in coming. A little.\n\n\"Got a guest incoming,\" she said. \"Want to talk to him? Or if this is a bad time, he can stop by earlier tomorrow, when the light's better.\"\n\n...Tomorrow might be best. In the morning?\n\nNita patted his trunk. \"No problem,\" she said. \"I'll talk to you then.\"\n\nShe headed on down the garden\u2014all the flower beds covered over with mulch or burlap bags this time of year, and those in turn covered with the new snow\u2014and finally under the bare trees in the furthest part of the back yard, where the surface of the snow was patched and dappled with little lumps of it that had slid off the branches above. The stillness was very deep back here, and Nita just stood there a while, not caring how cold her feet were getting, and appreciated it.\n\nAround her she thought she could almost see the sky's light dimming moment by moment. Bobo, what time's sunset?\n\nFour thirty-one.\n\n\"I might not be imagining it, then,\" she murmured. And then at the bottom of her vision, she caught sight of something unexpected: a glow under the snow, a sign of the embedded transit circle waking up. He's early, she thought, stepping back.\n\nA moment later a cold cinnamon-scented breeze blew in her face, and Filif was standing there, as suddenly as if a tree with its lowest branches demurely veiled in mist had suddenly grown on the spot.\n\nHe looked at Nita with all the berries on that side, while using the others to gaze up and around him. \"Dai stiho, my cousin!\"\n\n\"Dai, you,\" Nita said, and stepped into the transit circle as soon as it had finished discharging, and buried her arms in among the fronds to give him a big hug.\n\nIt was at that moment that a light breeze sprang up. Nita felt the sparkle of breezeblown snowflakes on her cheek just a bare second before one of the trees above them let slip some loose snow on top of them.\n\nThey both laughed at that, and Nita reached up to brush Filif off a little. \"I was early...\" Filif said.\n\n\"I don't care,\" Nita said. \"It's so great to see you! This is going to be so much fun.\"\n\n\"Where's Kit?\"\n\n\"Over at his place helping keep his folks calm. This is their first time to have a bunch of non-Solars over...\"\n\n\"And they're so kind to have me! I can't wait for this.\" He shivered with excitement.\n\nAt least Nita hoped it was excitement. \"You know, I've never even asked you. Does it snow where you are? Do you even get winter?\"\n\n\"What? Of course it snows,\" Filif said. \"Demisiv has a fairly pronounced axial tilt. And a lot of highlands. The climate's temperate most of the year, but in the depths of the cold season we get quite big storms, sometimes. Normally no one's too bothered. In the dark season a lot of people elect to go dormant and just wait it out. Others... stay more active, like to get around then.\" He fell silent for a moment. \"A long story.\"\n\n\"But you're okay with this?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" He ruffled out his branches. \"This feels quite homelike, actually. The temperature range isn't far off.\"\n\nNita paused. \"This is possibly the most idiotic time possible to be asking you this,\" she said. \"But... are you okay with all this? Because you understand about the normal Earth Christmas trees now, don't you. And where they come from. And what happens to them.\"\n\nFilif paused too. \"Life is life,\" he said. \"But I did do my research before I came. Those lives have been brought about just for this purpose, haven't they?\"\n\n\"Pretty much, yeah.\"\n\n\"Well, I can feel that. So can they.\" Filif rustled his branches as a little more snow fell on him from the branches above. \"That being the case, we should allow them all the dignity of accepting what they've been destined for. And of knowing that they're making the best of it: in some cases, not just with acceptance, but great joy.\"\n\nNita nodded. \"It seems a lot to ask of them...\" Nita said.\n\n\"It's not what you're asking,\" Filif said. \"It's what they're giving. Gift is a powerful state from which to approach the world...\"\n\nAgain there was that sense of what Filif was saying having come up from some great depth. But even when he was at his goofiest and most excitable, Nita had never had trouble feeling, at a slight remove, the underlying strength from which sprang everything Filif did and said, and in which he was powerfully grounded. When that power revealed itself in the middle of a wizardry, sometimes it took you by surprise. Nita wasn't going to push the issue at the moment; if Fil had something that needed saying, explanations would be forthcoming soon enough.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Filif said, \"you should relax. I'm not a newbie here these days: you don't have to hide the salad bar from me any more.\"\n\nNita burst out laughing. \"Good!\"\n\n\"And after all this time, I'm finally here to get decorated. So let's get on with it!\"\n\n\"Right,\" Nita said. \"Sker'ret's put a receptor site out in Kit's back yard to make transiting in easier for people.\"\n\n\"Shielded, I take it, so as not to discomfit the neighbors...\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" Nita walked them both back a step or two into the center of the transit circle. \"You set?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then let's go!\"\n\nA heartbeat later, the two of them came out in Kit's backyard. \"It's going to be a zoo in there,\" Nita said. \"Carmela's mama decided all of a sudden that she was not going to let her daughter mess around with her best tableware. She was going to set up the buffet herself.\"\n\n\"If I didn't know better,\" Filif said, \"I would suspect Carmela planned it that way in order to get her mother to do the heavy lifting.\"\n\nNita snickered as she reached down to her charm bracelet for the empty-ring charm that held the simplest of several invisibility spells. \"You know her too well,\" she said as she pulled the bright Speech-tracery of the spell out of the charm, expanded it into a broad faintly-glowing network, and threw it over the top of the two of them. \"Not that there's all that much to do. Sker'ret had Crossings Catering transit the food in about an hour ago. It's all in disposable serving trays and bins and things...\"\n\nThey headed up across the snow-covered lawn of Kit's back hard toward the house. \"There's no rush about installing the puptents,\" Nita said. \"Sker's put in a hub to make the installation easier. Just plug your wizardry in, and the hub'll do the rest.\"\n\n\"He seems to have thought of everything,\" Filif said.\n\n\"Happiest when he's organizing,\" Nita said, \"that's our Sker'.\"\n\nThey went in the back door, through the kitchen. There were four or five pots on the stove, from which wonderful smells were arising: mulled wine, hot chocolate, hot cider. Christmas music was floating out of the living room: as a song finished and Nita heard a veejay's voice, she realized that the TV had one of the big music video channels on. \"You are going to hear every Christmas carol ever written before this is over,\" she said to Filif, flipping the invisibility spell off them and collapsing it again.\n\n\"I take it that's a good thing?\"\n\n\"We'll see what you think by this time tomorrow.\"\n\nThey headed into the dining room. The table was covered silverware and napkins and cups and glasses, and a whole lot of food. Some of it was local\u2014Nita immediately recognized Kit's mama's buffalo wings and the little deviled-egg and cream cheese and chilli hors d'oeuvres that she liked to do on crackers. But the rest was covered with human and alien-biology delicacies from the Crossings, everything carefully labeled. Nita made a private resolution to get back here as soon as she could and check out the details, as some of the food looked familiar, and if she didn't move fast, Kit would shovel it all down his face before she got a chance.\n\n\"Come on, Fil,\" Nita said, \"come meet Kit's pop and mama!\" She pulled him around into the living room, having caught a glimpse of them in there through the passthrough; they were hanging a last few garlands up near the ceiling.\n\nNita pulled Filif over to them. \"So here's the guest of honor!\" Nita said. \"Juan Rodriguez,\" Nita said, \"Marina Rodriguez, this is Filifermanhathrhumneits'elhessaiffnth.\"\n\nKit's pop's eyes went wide. He opened his mouth to respond, but before he could say anything Nita immediately added, \"Everybody calls him Filif, so don't even bother trying to pronounce the long version. It always takes me a couple of days to even remember how.\"\n\n\"Estimable senior cousins,\" Filif said, bowing, \"thank you for your welcome.\" And then he straightened up and offered Kit's pop a long branch, and his mama another.\n\nThey both stared at these for a moment, and then took them. \"Nice to meet you, Filif,\" said Kit's pop. \"So nice!\" said his mama.\n\n\"A pleasure on my part as well! I'm very excited about what's going to happen.\"\n\n\"Well, we're excited to have you! And we're glad you're here finally,\" said Kit's pop. \"It's been so strange not having a tree already. It's felt almost unnatural. But we're good now.\" He beamed at Filif. \"You're what... six feet easily, I'd say!\"\n\nFilif thought about that for a moment. \"Yes, I'd say so,\" he said. \"And about five feet in diameter at the base.\"\n\n\"It's going to be unusual to have a Christmas tree that's so cooperative,\" said Kit's pop. \"But look, you should enjoy the party for a while first! We like to let it get good and dark before we start decorating... it's more impressive, then, when the lights go on.\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" Filif said. \"What do you normally do at this point with a... locally acquired tree?\"\n\n\"Well, first of all unwrap it outside \u2014 normally you bring it home wrapped up in webbing so the branches don't get hurt. And after that, leave it outside for a little while to let it relax and help the branches find their right shape again.\"\n\nFilif rustled a little in agreement. \"It makes sense,\" he said. \"If you like, perhaps I'll go stand outside for a bit and get myself acclimatized.\"\n\n\"Uh... won't the neighbors see you?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" said Filif. \"Nita handled it when we came in, but I'm as good at being invisible as any other wizard There are lots of ways to do it. Once I stop moving, they'll see a wrapped up tree sitting leaning against the side of your garage while you get the room ready.\"\n\n\"There's zero need for that,\" said another voice. It was Dairine, wandering in out of the living room. She was in a long green silky top and darker green floppy pants, something Wellakhit if Nita was any judge. \"Sker' did a smart thing and shielded the whole back yard. The front's open, but he did a selective visual wizardry with the windows: nobody human will be able to see any of the non-Solars through it, and the filter spoofs anything unaffected so it can't be seen either.\"\n\n\"Probably that's a good idea,\" said Kit's mama. \"Especially lately... Well, come on, Filif, what do you like to eat or drink? Or do you want to wait till you've come back in?\"\n\n\"I think Sker'ret will have brought some rooting compound for me,\" Filif said. \"It's what I'll be standing in while decorated.\" He shivered again, that excited gesture.\n\n\"It's in the dedicated corner already,\" came Sker'ret's voice from the kitchen. \"A big pot of that acid stuff you like, Fil.\" And in came Sker'ret, apparently after a visit to one of the storage closets in the back of the house. He was walking on only a few pairs of legs, and with all the others he was carefully holding three other piles of serving plates above his upper carapace.\n\nNita had to turn and stare, fascinated. \"I didn't even know your legs hinged like that!\" she called after him.\n\n\"Apparently they do,\" said Sker'ret, and kept on going into the dining room.\n\n\"Where's Kit?\" Nita said.\n\n\"He's upstairs changing,\" Carmela said as she came wandering into the living room from the back of the house. She looked very much the Christmas hostess in a glittery red tunic top and red-and-white leggings with a very subdued candy-cane pattern on them, and low red boots to complete the effect.\n\n\"Fashion plate,\" Nita said as Carmela grabbed Filif and hugged him, half vanishing into his branches and making some of his berry-eyes on either side of her pop a little.\n\n\"Yes, well, with such a special occasion you have to make a little effort,\" Carmela said. \"Kit's doing his best but I don't know if it's going to be enough...\"\n\nFootsteps were coming down the stairs. \"I heard that!\" said Kit's voice. \"Just because some people can't manage to find themselves a genuine collectors' item like this...\"\n\nKit came down into the living room, turning toward the group gathered there, his mouth open... and then stopped dead.\n\n\"Oh no,\" Nita said, and started gasping with laughter. \"Oh no!\" Because Kit was wearing black jeans and sneakers and a ridiculous hairy angora-knit crewnecked construction adorned with fake Icelandic patterns in red and white, and scattered all over with revolting embroidered green yarn Christmas trees with little sewn-on Mylar ornaments.\n\nThey stood there in shock, staring at each other as Kit's mama and pop burst out laughing in unison. \"You look like the Bobbsey Twins,\" Kit's mama said.\n\n\"Who?\" said Kit and Nita in unison.\n\nMrs. Rodriguez threw a glance at her husband, then gazed briefly at the ceiling as if begging for help from some unseen source. \"Generation gap,\" she said. \"Never mind.\" She headed for the kitchen.\n\n\"I didn't mean for you to buy it,\" Kit said, \"I meant for you not to buy it! So I'd be the only one having it.\"\n\n\"Emailing me pictures of the thing was no way to get me not to buy it!\" Nita said. \"What am I, six?\"\n\nDairine pushed past her toward the dining room, snickering. \"No better than eight on a good day,\" she said.\n\n\"Whatever you do,\" said an Irish voice from that direction, \"don't change. Don't either of you dare change.\"\n\nNita turned. There, leaning in the dining room doorway, having apparently just arrived, was Ronan. He was in black, as usual... but for a change, surprisingly formal blacks. Trousers instead of jeans, shiny black brogues instead of goth boots, a very slim-fitting black shirt with black glitters in it, and to top everything off, a Santa hat in white and black.\n\nNita burst out laughing. \"What are you supposed to be, some kind of dark 'jolly old elf?'\"\n\nRonan waggled his eyebrows. \"Other people can worry about who's nice. I prefer to concentrate on the naughty.\"\n\n\"I don't even want to know,\" said Kit's mama as she came back into the room with a tray full of glasses of hot cider. \"Nita?\"\n\nNita grabbed one. \"You're earlier than I thought you'd be,\" she said to Ronan.\n\n\"Wanted to get out before it got too crazy. We've got weather like you're going to get.\"\n\nThat surprised Nita. \"Can't be the same system\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not. Trust me, we don't need your help to trigger major snow events! We've got Siberia.\" Ronan wandered over to where some buffet trays had been laid out on one of the low living room tables and went picking among the crackers piled up there. \"And we're getting hammered. A foot on the ground already and lots more coming. Heathrow's closed, Charles de Gaulle is closed, Frankfurt and Geneva were just shutting when I left.\" He found a plate for his snacks. \"In fact, most of Europe's a mess. Every wizard who specializes in that kind of thing is out in the cold right now. So glad I'm not one!\"\n\n\"Here,\" said Kit's mama, putting a glass of cider in Ronan's hand. \"Who else wants one?\"\n\nNita had a long drink of the cider and felt the world seem to settle a little around her. Whatever spice mix Kit's mama had worked out to use in the stuff, Nita never got tired of it. The next thing she knew she and Kit were laughing about their sweaters, and she was stealing snacks off a plate he was holding, and the room was getting fuller of people. Her dad showed up, and the next thing Nita knew he and Kit's pop and Filif were discussing the best management of the electrical outlets for the lights they were going to be putting on him, and Kit's mama was laughing in the kitchen with Dairine at something Spot had just done, and the entertainment system was showing what appeared to be an ancient rock star playing a guitar in the nude.\n\nAnd Kit leaned over to Nita and said, \"Anyway, I don't know about you, but I'd say the party has begun...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "The place started descending into cheerful bedlam as more people arrived. Filif slipped out to get himself acclimated, as planned: Nita caught a glimpse of him, a tranquil shadow against the snow, as twilight set in. Tom and Carl turned up in their ski gear, to everyone's amusement, and were immediately equipped with cider (as they were apparently about to go on duty: \"Back for the mulled wine later, Marina,\" Carl said, \"you know we wouldn't miss that for anything!\" ). Matt from Australia turned up, wearing jeans and a truly eye-hurting shirt covered with graphics of Christmas ornaments in Day-Glo colors. Tall rawboned Marcus with his Very Military Haircut arrived, actually in camouflage fatigues in Christmas colors, bringing chocolates for Kit's mama...\n\nThe noise level in the house became amazing: gossip and laughter, some preliminary exchange of small gifts, a lot more drink making the rounds, a lot of food. Sker'ret seemed to have appointed himself catering manager, and was constantly going back and forth with buffet trays. \"It's all downstairs on the other side of one of the puptent accesses,\" he said to Nita when he passed her once. \"There's a stasis field there holding everything at the right temperatures. All the other accesses are set up, don't worry about those...\" And he was off again for another tray.\n\nThe music channel playing on the entertainment system was bringing out the best in some of the guests. Ronan's voice was lifted in song at one point and caused everyone to hold still in astonishment as he did a pitch-perfect, raspy singalong imitation of both the leads on the song that was playing. \"They've got cars big as bars, they've got rivers of gold, but the wind goes right through you, it's no place for the old: when you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve, you promised me Broadway was waiting for me...\"\n\nMoments later Matt was next to him and singing in harmony. \"And the boys of the NYPD Choir were singing 'Galway Bay', and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day...\"\n\n\"We need them for the carol singing tomorrow night,\" said Kit's mama, sipping at her own mulled wine with a critical look. \"Mmm, needs more cinnamon... Kit, take care of that, will you?\"\n\n\"Do what I can, Mama,\" Kit said as his mother headed back for the kitchen, and himself headed for another of the snack trays. Nita turned back to the gossip she'd been eavedropping on while pretending to watch the music video channel.\n\n\"\u2014didn't want to get into outside decoration, what with the kind of vandalism we've been getting lately,\" Nita's dad was saying.\n\n\"Five'll get you ten I know who you mean. The Terror Twins....\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The new next door neighbors' kids,\" Kit's pop said, and sighed. \"I could really, really wish the Liddles hadn't had to move. I miss Dave. He was good company in the summer, at the end of a barbecue. Or most times, really.\"\n\n\"I miss Roz,\" said the voice from the kitchen. \"She was such a great cook. I was learning things from her...\"\n\nThere was a sort of communal sigh at that, audible even over the general noise. Kit's mama knew her cooking skills were limited, and knew that everyone knew it, and was regardless entirely cheerful about it and always looking forward to improving them.\n\n\"So what happened there?\" said Nita's dad. \"I remember hearing that Dave had some job offer, but I don't know what else was going on.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Some firm up in Seattle, I think. Washington state, anyway. It happened very suddenly. He spent most of the spring sending out resumes and got nothing: seemed like nobody needed anyone to do what he did. Repairs on these big computerized industrial printers. Then all of a sudden this one company hit on him, flew him out for an interview, and a week later, bang, deal done. They sold the house in an awful hurry... two weeks later they were gone.\"\n\nKit's pop made a face. \"The new neighbors, the Chastellains... Rory's all right. Nice guy, he works over at Northrop Grumman. Lena's lovely, a very lively funny woman, something in IT. But she's not working right now. Apparently she had some kind of hip injury last year and she's got another six months of physio before she can go back. I feel for her, though, because she's stuck being stay-at-home mom to, well...\"\n\nNita exchanged a glance with Kit, who'd come up next to her, and didn't say anything.\n\n\"A pair of badly-behaved antisocial ignoramuses,\" Kit's mother said from the kitchen, sounding very much like someone who didn't care who might possibly overhear her.\n\n\"There you go,\" Kit said under his breath. \"Mama knows.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine how two such nice people have turned out kids who're so poorly socialized,\" his mama said. \"Seriously. Rude, destructive, foul-mouthed...\"\n\nThe two of them listened with amusement to the string of vividly descriptive adjectives flowing from the woman slicing oranges in the kitchen. Neither Nita nor Kit needed to be told more about the subject than they already knew. Bobby and Ron Chastellain had in an amazingly short time become famous at school for spending more time in detention than they seemed to spend in class. They were as much a menace on the sports field as they were in the classroom; it seemed no one was too small for them to bully or too big for them to start a fight with. They were almost universally loathed, and seemed to glory in it. Even wizards with a mandate to prevent speeding up the Universe's heat death sometimes had trouble keeping themselves from taking action against the Chastellains that would have been pleasantly robust but would probably have landed them in hot water with their Supervisories after the fact.\n\n\"You have to wonder,\" Kit said under his breath, \"whether it's still them being miserable at having to be in a new school all of a sudden, or if now they're just kicking everybody's ass every chance they get because they enjoy it.\"\n\n\"My money's on number two,\" Nita said. \"Never mind them. They are not spoiling my Christmas.\"\n\n\"Mine either,\" Kit said. \"Hey, where's Fil?\"\n\n\"He was out having a breath of air. I'll go check him.\"\n\nShe slipped out of the heat and noise to glance around the back yard. Filif was standing straighter against the garage, playing the role of a relaxing Christmas tree perfectly and slowly letting down his branches. Snow was still falling gently through the darkness, but not as heavily as it had been. Still, Nita could feel something in the air, possibly something to do with the ionization associated with incoming storms: a sense that when the snow really let go, it wasn't going to stop for a while.\n\nShe wandered over to him with her hot cider. \"Fil? How're you doing?\"\n\n\"Just fine,\" he said. She could see his berry-eyes looking upward into the night, possibly a sign that he was engaged in the same kind of weather analysis she was. \"One of the small creatures from down the road came along and watered me,\" Filif added. \"Very kind.\"\n\nNita stole a glance down at the snow. There was enough light from the house for her to easily see the yellow in it, and she burst out laughing.\n\nBehind her, Kit's side door went. \"You all right out here, son?\" said Kit's papa.\n\nNita smiled at how quickly Filif seemed to reached this status after having been a first-time houseguest just an hour before: she detected her dad's subtle hand in that. \"Just relaxing,\" said Filif. \"How do the branches look?\"\n\n\"Very natural,\" he said. And then he laughed at himself. \"Well, it's not as if you're an artificial tree, for God's sake. You look just fine. It's going to be a pleasure decorating you.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" Filif said. \"I've been looking forward to this for a long time.\"\n\n\"Well, whenever you're ready, we can always\u2014\" Kit's pop turned a little toward the house.\n\nThen he paused, and his eyes widened. \"Uh,\" he said. \"Maybe I'm missing something, but...\"\n\n\"But?\" Nita said.\n\nKit's pop swallowed. \"I know they're supposed to be warm-blooded,\" he said, \"but is it good for a dinosaur to be out in the snow?\"\n\nNita turned, stared at the shape glowing softly blue- and white-patterned out on the snowy lawn behind Kit's house. \"Mamvish!!\"\n\nIt couldn't have been just her shout that brought them, but within a second or two every wizard in the house was pouring out of it. It occurred to Nita that the instantaneous reaction had to have something to do with the sudden presence in the neighborhood of someone with Mamvish's power levels. Momentarily she was surrounded by wizards attempting to hug her hello and others trying to get her to stick around.\n\n\"No, no,\" she said, \"I can't stay. But I had to come see you all. I didn't want you to get the idea that I didn't want to come and spin the dreidel!\"\n\nThe laughter that broke out confused her a little. \"What?\" she said. \"Oh, no! Wrong holiday?\"\n\n\"No, just a little late for that one,\" Tom said. \"But who cares? You came!\"\n\n\"I had to,\" Mamvish said. \"Even though the season's wrong in this hemisphere...\" She sounded wistful.\n\nShe literally could only stay for a few minutes. \"On my way to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, there's a nova about to pop and we're running short of time... But all of you do whatever you would do if I could stay!\" And just like that, without even a breath of wind to mark her teleport, she was gone.\n\n\"You're going to explain that to me, I hope,\" said Kit's pop.\n\n\"It may take a while,\" said Kit. \"Fil, want to come in and root a bit? Sker's freaking out in there, he thinks he brought the wrong flavor of compound or something and you're trying to be nice about it.\"\n\nThe crowd that had dashed out of the house now wandered back in with Filif in tow. Shortly he was settled down in the broad deep bucket of rooting compound that Sker'ret had set up for him, and a group had gathered around him in energetic discussion of Solstice festivals in general. Nita stood there with another glass of cider and listened to Matt and Ronan and Kit and Carmela batting the subject around and trying to get a feel for what Filif actually knew about what was going on.\n\n\"Well, I did a certain amount of reading before I came,\" Filif said. \"The normal amount of research. But there did seem to be some, well, conflicts among various versions of the basic story...\"\n\nThis set off another wide-ranging discussion featuring mangers, caves versus little wooden chalets, the concept of Nativity scenes, the business of identifying angels as the Powers that Be (or not), the Annunciation, the Three Kings and whether they of Orient really Were, or whether they might actually have been wizards. \"And this being called Santa Claus,\" Filif said at last. \"Where does he fit into this? Certainly so senior a Power would not have failed to attend such an event.\"\n\n\"Oh boy,\" Ronan said, covering his eyes, \"here we go!\"\n\n\"And why is it supposed to happen at the Solstice when the documentation says that there were shepherds out in the fields with their sheep?\"\n\n\"Lambing time,\" Matt said. \"He's got it in one. First-degree theft of pagan celebrations!\"\n\n\"Green boughs and all,\" Carmela said. \"The Holly and the Ivy...\"\n\n\"O Christmas tree, O Christmas Tree,\" Matt started singing, \"how lovely are thy branches...\"\n\nMarcus, who'd been listening off to one side, suddenly looked indignant. \"This is a terrible translation. What does 'lovely' have to do with anything?\"\n\nThey all looked at him. Marcus stared back, bemused by their bemusement. \"...What? The original song doesn't say anything about the tree being lovely.\"\n\n\"It doesn't?\"\n\n\"O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,\" Kit sang, and then stopped, looking perplexed. \"I don't know the rest.\"\n\n\"It was a German song for a long time before it was an English one,\" Marcus said.\n\n\"This was all Queen Victoria's husband's fault, wasn't it?\" Carl said, having wandered over into this when Matt began singing. \"He put a tree up in Buckingham Palace. Started a fad.\"\n\n\"I thought it was Martin Luther's fault,\" Tom said, drifting up beside him. \"Saw one out in the forest with its needles full of frost and starlight... brought it home to show the family...\"\n\n\"His fault too, yes,\" Marcus said. \"But listen: the song\u2014\" He started to sing in a strong tenor.\n\n\u2003\"O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,\n\n\u2003Wie treu sind deine Bl\u00e4tter!\n\n\u2003O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,\n\n\u2003Wie treu sind deine Bl\u00e4tter!\n\n\u2003Du gr\u00fcnst nicht nur zur Sommerzeit,\n\n\u2003Nein, auch im Winter, wenn es schneit. \u2014\n\n\u2003O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum,\n\n\u2003Wie treu sind deine Bl\u00e4tter!\"\n\nSome of the other younger wizards looked thoughtful as they started taking the German lyric apart via their understanding of it in the Speech. \"He's right, there's nothing about 'lovely' in there,\" Nita said.\n\nKit shook his head. \"How do you translate treu? 'Faithful?'\"\n\nMarcus nodded. \"Or loyal.\"\n\nRonan laughed. \"Like Matt said, the usual evergreen trope,\" he said. \"The whole non-deciduous eternal-life thing.\" He had been working on a mug of Kit's mama's cocoa, and started to take another swig of it, then stared down into the mug with annoyance. \"Bloodyell, I'm out again. Where's this stuff going? I mean, it's just cocoa, cocoa's for the wee kiddies...\" He got up and headed for the back door again.\n\nKit grinned into his own mug. \"Mama's secret recipe strikes again...\"\n\nCarmela glanced over at Marcus. \"So it would be more like, 'You're green all while the Summer glows, and in the Winter, when it snows\u2014'\"\n\nMarcus tilted his head, thought. \"Yes, that's close enough.\"\n\n\"So where'd we get the 'lovely?'\" Dairine said.\n\nMarcus shrugged. \"Poor translations are everywhere in popular culture,\" he said. \"You should see what happens to some of your TV shows when we get them at home.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Carmela said. \"Some of the anime dubs...!\"\n\n\"And do not even get me started on Raumschiff Enterprise\u2014!\"\n\nWithin seconds Carmela and Marcus were off into some insanely technical discussion in the Speech of the way translation issues affecting space opera. Kit gave Nita a look as the conversation became indecipherable even in the Speech. \"You see what I put up with.\"\n\nRonan burst out laughing as he came back with a much larger mug of cocoa. \"Oh please,\" he said. \"Is that you I hear complaining about somebody else's geekery, Mars Boy? Oh knower of the name of every crater on the planet? Spare me.\"\n\nThe singing started again shortly thereafter, several rival versions of the carol breaking out. Marcus and Carmela were singing in German, Dairine and her dad and Kit's mama were upholding the more traditional American English version, and Ronan began singing an entirely different one in counterpoint, featuring the line \"Thy candles shine out brightly\" . \"Each bough doth hold its tiny light, that makes each toy to sparkle bright \u2013\"\n\n\"Wait a moment,\" Nita's dad said, \"whoa, whoa, wait a moment!\"\n\nThe singing on various sides trailed off. \"Candles?\" said Nita's dad. \"What candles?\"\n\n\"Sure didn't you know that lots of folks out our way put candles on their Christmas trees way back when?\" Ronan said. \"Though you have to wonder how many houses they burned down before the electric lights came along!\"\n\nMarcus nodded. \"In some families it is still traditional despite the risk,\" he said. \"One of my uncles' families still does it. You only do it for a few minutes, though, and you watch the candles like a hawk the whole time. Then you put them out and make sure they're cold, and then everybody goes off to church, or out to dinner, or else you open the presents...\"\n\nA number of people turned in some concern to Filif to see how he was handling this concept. But he looked quite relaxed: at least his needles weren't bristling, which was something Nita had seen on occasion and which she recognized as a sign of real trouble. \"It's an interesting contrast,\" he said after a moment. \"Symbolic, I suppose. The Kindler of Wildfires brought under control... even brought in where you live, as a sign of how things will be some day when It's mended Its ways.\" The green boughs shook, possibly in laughter. \"Or else it's just a little extra defiance to go with the usual acknowledgement and greeting...\"\n\nThere was a little silence. And then Filif said:\n\n\"You know... I would really like to do that.\"\n\nNita and Kit looked at each other in astonishment. Carmela's mouth dropped open. \"Seriously?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Filif shivered all over.\n\nCarmela's eyes went wide and her mouth made an O. \"My shrub,\" she murmured, \"has an oxidation kink.\"\n\n\"Well I wouldn't go so far as to call it a kink\u2014\"\n\n\"Too late,\" Nita said, amused, watching Carmela's face. \"It's in her head now and you will never get it out.\"\n\nNita's father, who'd come in on the end of this, looked amazed. \"Bit of a change of attitude on the subject for you,\" he said.\n\n\"True. But I'm not who I was even a year or two ago.\" And a lot of Filif's berries glowed more brightly than they had for a second or so.\n\n\"Well,\" Kit's pop said. \"We're not really set up for that at the moment. But we have a lot of other stuff on tap. You think you're about ready to get started, big fella?\"\n\nFilif bowed slightly to him. \"Yes!\"\n\n\"All right,\" said Kit's pop. \"Lights first.\"\n\nHe headed for the back of the house and shortly came back with his arms full of boxes: some of them quite new, some of them looking old and beat up. \"I like the new LED lights a lot,\" Kit's pop said. \"A lot of control over them, and you don't have to worry so much about the heat. But at the same time you hate to let the old ways go completely. Tradition...\"\n\nHe put the newer boxes aside for a moment and turned his attention to the older ones. \"Have to be very careful with these,\" he said, putting the boxes down side by side. They were both yellowed, thin cardboard, crumbling a bit at the edges in some places; the printing on them was old-fashioned looking, the colors faded. Kit's pop opened one. Inside it, in yellowed cardboard spacer-holders, was a row of nine candlestick-shaped bubble lights: fat bulbous bases, tall glass \"candlesticks\" full of colored fluid. A faint scent of very old pine needles came up from the box.\n\n\"Now those are vintage,\" Nita's dad said.\n\n\"Relics,\" said Kit's pop, opening the second box with the same care. \"Makes me laugh to see how popular they are all of a sudden, with everyone so eager to have 'retro' stuff. My father gave them to me when I came of age.\"\n\n\"Didn't know there was a minimum age for Christmas lights, Juan.\"\n\nKit's pop laughed. \"Came as news to me too. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to wreck them.\" Very carefully he started lifting the first set out of the box, untangling the wires. \"Can't blame him. You wouldn't believe what replacements for these cost. Every year I live in terror that I'm going to plug this in and one of them won't come on...\"\n\nThey got down together on the floor and stretched the lights out. Nita's gaze met Kit's in amusement at the sight of the two dads hunkered down on the floor like kids with a special toy. Nita's dad picked up one of the lights and peered at the liquid inside it. \"What is that in there?\"\n\n\"Something with a real low boiling point,\" Kit's pop said. \"Just the light in the bottom is enough to make it bubble.\"\n\nNita's dad picked up the box, turned it over, peered at it. \"No warnings or anything about what it is...\"\n\n\"You kidding? This comes from a time when doctors did commercials about how good cigarette smoking was for you. I'm betting it's poisonous.\"\n\nIn the back of Nita's mind, Bobo whispered, Methylene chloride...\n\n\"Yeah, you really wouldn't want to break one of those,\" Nita said. \"The place would need airing out. And forget about touching it or drinking it...\"\n\n\"Low on my list of things to do,\" said Kit's pop, rummaging around underneath Filif to slot the light set's plug into the plug strip. \"Let's test the other set and then start putting the modern ones on first. These go on afterwards, on the outer branches.\"\n\nShortly the first of four sets of LED lights was going on the \"tree\" , and rather unusually for a household in the suburbs of New York, the tree was helping. Kit's pop was on one side and Nita's dad on the other, and they were passing the strings of lights back and forth to make sure they were equally distributed. What was making the process go much more smoothly was the way that when one or the other of them was having trouble getting a light cord around into the corner where Filif was positioned, he would simply put a branch up, curl the terminal fronds around the wire, and maneuver it into the spot where it was needed. It took very little time to get the first strand up, the one that was all plain white lights and was tucked most closely in toward the trunk.\n\n\"These colored ones now, Juan?\"\n\n\"Yeah. We'll do that string from the top down to about halfway... then plug the other one in and finish down at the bottom.\"\n\nThe second string began going up, while more people wandered into the living room with various festive drinks in hand to watch the process. As this was going on, Carmela came up behind Nita and peered at the proceedings between her and Kit. \"I thought I was going to get to do some of this,\" she said, very low, and laughed. \"Seems like the youngsters have taken over.\"\n\n\"I thought you'd have been all over this,\" Nita said. \"You gonna let them do everything?\"\n\n\"On the contrary,\" Carmela said, very softly. \"I'm letting them do the heavy lifting. I've got the part that matters.\" And she gave Nita the merest glimpse of something golden that she'd had hidden under her tunic.\n\nNita laughed very quietly. \"No Mets hat?\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? This is a formal affair...\"\n\nMeanwhile, the two fathers were finishing with the more normal lights. \"Okay, the bubblers, now,\" said Kit's pop. With great care they moved around clipping them to the outer branches, making sure they were secure. Every now and then Filif would curl a frond up or down and make sure a bubble-light wouldn't wiggle. All the while, a calm businesslike dialogue was going on. \"Can't imagine why they never put clips on these. Alligator clips or something\u2014\" \"Yeah, you're supposed to just force them over the ends of the branches and then tighten them down, I don't know what they were thinking of, it's a design flaw...\"\n\nThe two men took their time, and when the lights were all up stood back and examined their work so far for balance and evenness. \"Not enough up top there, you think, Juan?\"\n\n\"Mmm, not sure. No... I think we're okay. Works better to do more garlands up there, I think. Keeps things from getting topheavy...\"\n\n\"Okay. Bulbs now?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Kit's pop went off to fetch the boxes from the back of the house, and came back with them piled high enough in his arms that he could barely see over the top.\n\n\"You have a protocol for this over at your place?\" Kit's mama called from the kitchen, peering briefly through the passthrough window. \"Some kind of order that things go up in?\"\n\n\"Well. Not exactly. But the good stuff goes in close to the trunk. The ones you're less concerned about if they fall down or something bangs into them, those go on the outside.\"\n\n\"Makes sense.\"\n\nNita watched as her dad and Kit's pop carefully opened the boxes, revealing a wild assortment of mirror-polished and satin-sheened ornaments, very few alike\u2014remnants of old sets, replacements from newer ones, all kinds of shapes and sizes and colors. She caught Filif's excited shiver, smiled at it, grinned a little at Kit as he came over to lean against her, watching.\n\nThe two fathers took turns, took their time, lifting the ornaments out, conferring, finding the best spots for them. \"How is there are never enough hooks for these?\" \"I could have sworn I bought more last year.\" \"Harry, this one's ribbon broke.\" \"Son, would you move that branch up a little? I want to get this one in by the trunk.\" \"Here?\" \"That's right, just ease it up a little...\" \"Perfect.\" \"Or maybe a little to the left?\" \"Yeah....\"\n\nThey stood back again and took stock. \"Okay,\" said Nita's dad. \"Garlands now?\"\n\n\"Heresy! Tinsel first. Garlands after.\"\n\nThis provoked a brief storm of opinion from some of the onlookers. \"You'll crush the tinsel!\" \"Especially the mylar stuff!\" \"I never went for this crinkled kind myself, it's not as shiny...\" Nita watched Filif starting to tremble a little harder and briefly wasn't sure whether it was out of nervousness. But then she realized he was laughing, and trying to keep anyone from noticing.\n\nThe \"tinsel first\" school of thought finally prevailed, and Kit's pop went off and came back with several boxes of it. He and Nita's dad started applying it, and once more a brief good-natured exchange of ideas broke out. Nita's dad was one of the \"One strand at a time\" school: Kit's pop was more of a \"fling it on from a distance\" type. Laughter spread around the room as each one started trying to convert the other to his way of thinking. Kit's mama leaned on the shelf of the passthrough for a few minutes, watching this drama unfold, and then vanished.\n\nA minute or two later she came back with a couple of glasses full of something amber that didn't look like cider. These she put on a side table and said, \"In case anyone wants to take a moment and get a grip...\"\n\nThe two fathers looked at each other. \"Not smart to ignore medical advice, Juan...\" said Nita's dad.\n\nSmiling, they took a few moments' worth of break, sampling what Kit's mama had brought them while standing back again to examine their handiwork. Among the lights, Nita could see Filif's eye-berries doing what the lights didn't do: moving around a bit. Her dad noticed this too, leaned in. \"You okay there, big guy?\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"You sure? You're not ticklish or anything?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. I just... Finding places to see out of is going to be interesting.\" Filif was laughing.\n\n\"All part of the game,\" said Kit's pop. \"The informal object of the exercise is to leave as little of you showing as possible. It's all about the decorations.\"\n\n\"Though most of the time,\" Nita's dad said, \"the tree isn't in a position to offer any opinions. This adds a whole new level of challenge to the endeavor.\" He pushed a clump of tinsel aside. A berry peered out from under. \"You tell us when you've got visibility problems: we'll shift things around.\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"Now the garlands,\" said Kit's pop, and went off for a final couple of boxes. These were glittery mylar, one in silver, one in gold, and one in dark green. With care Kit's pop tucked the end of the first one just under Filif's topmost upstanding bough, the one where he normally wore his baseball cap, and he and Nita's dad started passing the looped remainder of it back and forth between them as they wound it around and around. \"What goes on top?\" said Nita's dad.\n\n\"These days, a star,\" said Juan. \"Though we had an angel once.\"\n\n\"Not any more? What happened?\"\n\n\"It melted,\" Kit's pop said. \"Something went wrong with the bulb inside it. The thing actually exploded one evening. The plastic\u2014\"\n\n\"It wasn't plastic, Juan, it was celluloid,\" Kit's mama said as she came in with more cider and mulled wine for those who wanted it. \"With fiberglass hair. The thing went up like a torch. It's a miracle it happened while we were awake and actually in the room with it. God knows what would have happened to the tree if we hadn't got that thing off it.\"\n\n\"The next two Christmases completely sucked,\" Kit whispered in Nita's ear. \"They refused to leave the lights on unless there was somebody in the room. You couldn't come downstairs in the middle of the night and find the lights on and everything glowing.\"\n\n\"They got over it, though...\"\n\n\"Eventually.\" Kit rolled his eyes expressively. Nita, though, was watching Filif again. The shiver that went through him at the mention of the fire was not one of unease. Definitely, she thought, something new is going on...\n\n\"I heard that,\" said Kit's pop, sounding amused. \"Never mind, it got better.\" He picked up another garland, the gold one. \"So where is it?\"\n\n\"You haven't got the last garland on yet,\" Carmela said. \"We'll wait.\"\n\nAnd they did, the room more or less going quiet as the final glittery garland went up. There Filif stood, resplendent, glowing. Carmela produced the star\u2014about a foot wide, golden, very simple, with a conical socket\u2014and reached way, way up to put it on.\n\nAnd couldn't quite reach. \"You've been getting taller without telling me,\" she said. \"Give me a hand here, shrub.\"\n\nVery carefully, so as not to disturb anything, Filif bent the top of him down just enough. Carmela slipped the star on; he straightened up.\n\n\"Merry Christmas, Fil,\" Carmela said, and grinned, and hugged him carefully through the garlands and the tinsel.\n\nThe tremor in his trunk was unmistakable\u2014all the tinsel rippled with it\u2014as he stood there simply radiating joy. Nita stood there appreciating the view, the radiance and glitter and gleam of him, and the sight of those red, glowing eyes peering out from among the lights and the garlands. A spontaneous round of applause went up around the room.\n\nNow, though, it was Nita's turn to get nervous.\n\nIn her family, as Christmas approached everybody came up with a special ornament for the tree: either something they made, or something that they couldn't make but that they saw and liked, or that had a specific meaning. Some of the ornaments on the tree at home were hilariously clumsy \u2014 kindergarten construction-paper cutouts plastered with glitter, or painted and varnished papier-mache shapes, or similar art-class stuff. Some were bought things, replicas of older glass ornaments, or keepsake ornaments in engraved metal or plastic. Some were toys, or expressions of temporary (or longstanding) media crushes\u2014such as all of Dairine's Star Wars collectible ornaments, including the no-longer-light-up Darth Vader TIE fighter with the busted left wing panel that had to be reglued every year because no adhesive seemed to exist that would hold the thing together, and using wizardry on it somehow seemed like cheating.\n\nThis year Nita had bought two ornaments, because she knew that the Party was coming and she wanted to leave something on Kit's family's tree. \"To remember me by,\" she'd said, not meaning anything in particular by it. And Kit had given her this completely shocked look. \"What, are you going somewhere?\" he'd said. Nita had been taken completely by surprise by the slightly panicked sound of it. \"What? No! No, I just want to... I'm covering all my options, okay?\" And he had wisely not pressed her to find out what she meant by that, because to tell the truth Nita wasn't too sure herself.\n\nIn any case, there was an ornament ready to go on the home tree in a few days (her Dad steadfastly refused to get a tree any sooner than the 22nd: it was just the way things had always gone at their house). That one was a red and blue blown-glass hummingbird that Nita had simply liked the moment she saw it. But for Kit's tree she'd gone privately back to the Crossings and had a word with Sker'ret about who in the shopping zone was good with custom glasswork, and had provided the craftsbeing (a many-legged Takapesh, one of an insectile species possessed of exquisitely detailed and accurate 3D perception) with images lifted from her manual. It had taken another visit or two to make sure everything was perfect, but by the end of November Nita had been completely satisfied.\n\n\"Now then,\" she said. She reached into the empty air beside her, into her claudication, and pulled out the little white glazed-cardboard box she'd been peeking into at intervals for the last two weeks, and handed it to Kit.\n\n\"Early present?\" Kit said.\n\n\"Early present for the tree. Go on!\"\n\nHe carefully lifted the top off the box and peered inside, poked what he saw there. \"Paper! Oh wow, thanks, we needed paper!\"\n\nNita poked him, not too hard: having him fumble the box was the last thing she wanted. \"I'll give you paper somewhere else,\" she said. \"Don't get cute.\"\n\nHe threw her a sideways smile and carefully reached in to pull the paper out. Nita held her breath.\n\nSuddenly Kit was holding his too. \"Ohh...\" he said, finally, letting it out, and reached down a little further into the box to slip a finger through the delicately braided bronze wire by which it would hang.\n\nCarefully he pulled the ornament out. It could at first glance had been mistaken for a scorpion, if scorpions came in a deep metallic forest green. It had segmented legs, a thick body, big frontal claws, huge square heavy-mandibled jaws, and a lot of eyes. But the eyes had a goofy look in them that no scorpion could ever have managed, and the jaws were grinning, somehow.\n\n\"It's a sathak,\" Kit whispered, \"from Mars, it's absolutely Takaf, Khretef's guy, his dog, and Ponch was in him, and\u2014!\" He swallowed. \"Neets, where'd you get this?\"\n\n\"Had it made,\" Nita said. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"Oh wow,\" Kit said, and all of a sudden he had one arm around Nita's neck and his face sort of buried between her neck and shoulder. \"Wow,\" he said into her shoulder, and then laughed and straightened up again.\n\nHis Mama was looking at him a little curiously from the passthrough-window into the kitchen. \"You okay, son?\"\n\n\"Mama, look at this! This is so great!\"\n\nHe broke away from Nita and went off to show his Mama the ornament. Nita had broken out in a brief sweat of nervousness, but she was cooling down a bit now, and turned away toward Filif, who was standing there watching all this.\n\n\"That was a good gift, then,\" he said.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Nita said. \"Yeah. Don't drop it when he hangs it up, okay?\"\n\n\"Outlier forbid!\" Filif said. \"I'll take good care of it for you, never fear.\"\n\nA few minutes later Kit was back in the living room looking for the perfect place to hang it. \"Fil, can you move that branch up? Yeah, a little more... No. Wait. Never mind, this one works better.\"\n\n\"Like this?\"\n\n\"Yeah, it'll catch the light there. Don't want the light right on it, it looks green enough as it is... Yeah, here. This white light looks good by it. Picks up the eyes.\"\n\n\"Should I move this frond?\"\n\n\"No, you're okay. Then again... I don't know... You're not going to get a cramp holding that branch up out of the way?'\n\n\"No, not at all.\"\n\nFinally the sathak ornament was placed the way Kit liked it, and he stood back to admire it. Nita came up next to him and let out a breath, finally having relaxed enough to enjoy it too.\n\n\"That is so super. Thanks,\" Kit said. His voice actually sounded a little wavery.\n\nNita just nodded.\n\nNita's dad turned away from where he'd been standing near Tom and Carl. \"And one more thing\u2014\" he said, more or less in Juan's direction.\n\nA few people turned to look at him, alerted by something in his tone.\n\n\"Well, it's kind of an event, isn't it?\" Nita's dad said. \"So I thought I might as well bring this over to visit.\"\n\nHe reached down into a small box that had been sitting unremarked on a nearby table, and started carefully unwrapping something from the tissue paper in which it nestled.\n\nNita's breath caught. What her dad brought out a moment later was one of the last things her Mom had bought before she got too sick to go out any more: a beautifully photorealistically-painted Christmas ornament that looked like the Earth\u2014but not like a globe with grid lines and single-color countries painted on its continents. It was the Earth the way one saw it as a planet, blue, shining, swirling with weather. Her Mom had seen it that way when she and Kit had first taken her and her Dad to the Moon. The experience had apparently struck some profoundly deep chord for her; she had been muttering about it when she came out of surgery the first time (to the confusion of the critical care nurses, who'd thought she was hallucinating) and the mere passing mention of it, afterwards, had always made her eyes go soft.\n\nNita's dad went over and found a spot for it amongst Filif's decorations: not tucked in too deeply to be seen, but safely positioned toward his trunk. Then he stepped back. \"Looks good,\" Nita's dad said, and then stopped, as if his voice had briefly failed him.\n\nKit's pop turned to the tray sitting off to one side, handed Nita's dad one of the glasses sitting there. \"Absent friends,\" he said softly.\n\nNita's dad just nodded and clinked his glass to Kit's pop's. Standing shoulder to shoulder, they both drank.\n\n\"Kit? Would you turn the lights off?\" said Kit's pop.\n\nKit headed over to the switch for the main room light, flipped it. In the darkness that fell over the room, Filif had become the only bright thing. Everyone held still, caught in the warm light as if in amber.\n\nThe Demisiv stood there quietly, glittering, glowing. Nita saw that he was shivering with some emotion, or some combination of them. But then he was always good at picking this stuff up, she thought. To him, silently, she said: are you okay?\n\nMore than okay, he said. I am honored to bear this weight.\n\nSlowly, softly, conversation started up again around him as lamps were turned on around the edges of the room. People got themselves more cider and cocoa, and everyone spent at least some time in front of Filif commenting on how terrific he looked decorated, some of them adding details on how they did it at their place: all white lights versus colored, or all blue: matched ornaments all in one color versus the \"chaos theory\" approach that Kit's family favored: blinking lights or steady ones...\n\nAround them, people started hitting the buffet trays again: the mulled wine came out. Nita stood off to one side with Sker'ret for a few moments, enjoying the sight of Kit pulling people over one at a time to point at his ornament and explain it to them.\n\n\"That worked, then,\" Sker'ret said to her.\n\n\"As the boy says,\" Nita said, \"more than. Thanks for helping me with that.\"\n\n\"Well, thanks for keeping my facility and everything I hold dear from being overrun by hostiles!\" Sker'ret said. \"You don't pull down half the perks you're entitled to for that.\"\n\n\"I'll start working on that, I promise.\"\n\n\"No you won't,\" Sker'ret said. \"I know you too well. Expect me to start bothering you about it.\"\n\n\"Hey Legs,\" Kit's mama called from the kitchen, \"I need the rest of those trays, it's time for more of the buffalo wings!\"\n\n\"You do that,\" said Nita, \"and I'll tell your broodmates you're slumming doing catering work!\"\n\nSker'ret laughed that ratchety laugh and headed for the kitchen. \"Don't get me started,\" he said. \"I might get my revenge some other way. She's got the right attitude for liaison work, and we can always use more hominid staff...\"\n\nNita turned back to find Kit's pop standing next to Filif again, now with something of the air of a workman taking a break with a co-worker. \"You going to be okay standing there all night like that?\" said Kit's pop. \"I don't want you to be stuck away from the fun.\"\n\n\"Oh, this is fun! But I don't have to be stuck. If I want to, I can just leave all this here.\"\n\nKit's pop blinked at that. \"Uh, am I missing something?\"\n\n\"Watch.\"\n\nThe \"Christmas tree\" seemed to shake itself gently. Then there was a strange sort of a sideways blur in the air, as if the whole scene was a watercolor painting that had had a wet brush pulled across it. A second later the watercolor haze was gone, and the Christmas tree was standing exactly where it was, not a light or ornament jostled, not a needle out of place... but Filif was standing a couple of yards to one side of it, wearing nothing but a twin of the star.\n\n\"That being is an artist,\" Ronan called from across the room, \"and if he drank, I'd buy him one.\"\n\nFilif burst out laughing. \"Of course I drink,\" he said, \"what do you take me for, some kind of rockmoss?\"\n\n\"No, I didn't mean water...\"\n\n\"Drinking habits aside,\" said Kit's pop, \"that is some stunt.\"\n\n\"Nothing much at all,\" said Filif. \"It's a constructed appearance, what we call a mochteroof.\"\n\n\"I won't even try to remember how to say that...\" Kit's pop said. \"Or to pretend I've got the slightest idea what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Think of it as like a hologram, but solid,\" Filif said. \"I can slip in and out of it, and of the ornaments, at will. And back in...\"\n\nAnd suddenly Filif was conducting a masterclass in mochteroof construction for the layman, translating the most technical terms out of the Speech into English on the fly. Juan leaned back on the wall nearest him, absolutely fascinated. At the point where Filif dropped into Spanish without warning, Nita's jaw dropped.\n\n\"How is he doing that??\" she said to Sker'ret as he passed with his third trayful of buffalo wings, from which she pilfered one.\n\n\"Reverse-proactive Speech recension,\" Sker'ret said. \"He's a many-talented lad, our Filif. The reverse recensions take a lot of work...\"\n\nNita knew they did: she'd hit them more than once, and bounced. Idly she reached down for a buffalo wing as Sker'ret headed off to do the rounds.\n\nShe was just turning around to see if she could find a napkin, because the sauce on the wings was fairly aggressive, when Carmela came wandering over to her, bent toward Nita's ear, and whispered:\n\n\"You know something?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It's not enough.\"\n\nNita blinked. \"What? This was what he always wanted.\"\n\n\"But there's more now. You know what else he wants.\"\n\n\"What do you\u2014\" Then she realized.\n\n\"The rest of his Christmas present. Neets, come on. He wants the candles. We have to figure out a way to give him this!\"\n\nNita thought about it. Carmela's mischief was a bit infectious and hard to resist right now. But so was the intensity of her feeling about this... and Nita's sense that Mela had this right. That was what finally tipped Nita over into agreement. \"The parental types would pitch a fit if they found out...\"\n\n\"Better make sure they don't find out, then,\" Carmela said. \"We'll handle it later. Down in one of the puptents.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" Nita had to admit. \"Not even in the same space as the house, really...\"\n\n\"And believe me, this time of year my folks don't have the staying power to ride herd on us when we'll be staying up all night. If they even wanted to try.\" Carmela snickered. \"Dairine did a smart thing. Installed her own puptent downstairs and took Mama in to show her.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"What the decor didn't do to her, the size of it did. All the gilding and jewels and weird alien furniture...\"\n\nNita blinked. That description meant only one thing to her. \"She installed Roshaun's puptent...\"\n\n\"Uh huh. I assume the Mobiles have a version of it saved. Or she does, in her manual...\"\n\nThat was food for thought. \"Well, at least in there you've got a lot less chance of burning the house down...\"\n\nCarmela laughed at her. \"With a house full of wizards, good luck with that happening. And anyway there are about fifty more interesting things that could happen, with the cellar full of elective pinched spaces. All you need is a portal fringe overlap and the whole area collapses into a superdense black hole. Good thing the Master of the Crossings is here walking the hors d'oeuvres around.\"\n\nNita cracked up laughing.\n\nThings got a little more relaxed after that. \"Now about this Santa Claus being...\" Filif was saying to Kit's pop. \"Perhaps this is only an avatar of one of the Powers? Working clandestinely, and hoping to be mistaken for a chaotic force aligned with the Lone Power? Because the presence of the associated small nonhuman workers does confuse the picture somewhat. That said, possibly that's its whole idea...\"\n\nThat was the point at which Nita got around to actually putting the buffalo wing in her mouth. Instants later, she was incredibly, incredibly sorry.\n\n\"Oh, it's a he?\" Filif was saying. \"Thanks. Sometimes it's hard to tell around here. In any case, certainly the appearance of being in violation of common Galactic labor accords could lead an unwary observer to believe\u2014\"\n\nNita's eyes were tearing with something that wasn't laughter. \"Got one of the hot ones did you, sweetie?\" Kit's mama was saying. \"Legs, leave that tray with me and go bring her some sour cream...!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Bring A Torch, Jeanette, Isabella\n\nNita recovered soon enough, and the evening continued sliding smoothly by. Food and drink were more or less continuously manifested through the good offices of Kit's mama ( \"What? Don't start with me about the kitchen, at least I know where everything is in here, and anyway he's worse with food than I am, and anyway I've been out of the kitchen as much as I've been in it, I sure now know more about mochteroofs than you do, you wouldn't know a semblance receptor site if one bit you in the butt, and in other news Legs here is doing all the work anyway, he's wasted as a white-collar type! More wine, Tom?\" ), and good cheer filled the space. Filif was stepping into and out of his decorations at will, alternately chatting with the guests and then resuming his adornments with the glee of a small child opening the same Christmas gift over and over and liking it better every time.\n\nMeanwhile, the entertainment system, apparently feeling ignored in the face of so much unbridled human and extrahuman interaction, had begun shouting at the party guests. Even after Kit lectured it on proper behavior there seemed no way to placate it except to turn it on and leave it running.\n\n\"Nothing from off this planet,\" Kit's mama called from the kitchen. \"I still haven't got over that thing with all the tentacles.\"\n\nKit threw Nita a glance that suggested he was in no rush to let her know that \"the thing with all the tentacles\" had been one of Carmela's leave-it-running,-I-want-to-record-that-late-night-anime errors, and was way too Earth-local for comfort. Nita snickered and got herself more cider.\n\n\"If you just leave it to its own devices like this, of course it's going to misbehave,\" Dairine said, wandering through, picking up one of the buffalo wings that Nita was still recovering from, and ingesting half of it without turning a hair. \"Tell it to do something and you'll get a lot less grief from it. Mechanicity abhors a structure vacuum. What's that? 'The Christmas Channel'?\"\n\n\"This could either be very good or very very bad,\" Ronan said as the TV guide came up. \"...'The Christmas Invasion...' Well, okay. Fair play to them. 'Bugs Bunny's Looney Tunes Christmas Tales'? Surely you jest....'The Big Little Jesus?' Is that actually in black and white?\" And then a dumbfounded pause. \"'Santa Claus Versus the Martians'? What in the name of the sludge at the bottom of the Powers' bottomless Bucket is that??\"\n\n\"Probably something about the True Meaning of Christmas,\" Dairine said, folding down crosslegged in front of the TV and filching the remote from Nita.\n\nRonan flopped down beside her, looking genially scornful. \"Might as well ask about the true meaning of life.\"\n\n\"If you see any pigs around,\" Nita said, relieving Dairine of the remote and moving another page down in the onscreen TV guide, \"might try asking them...\"\n\n\"Does he even do Christmas?\"\n\n\"He's everywhere,\" Kit said. \"Why wouldn't he?\"\n\n\"Pigs?\" Kit's father said from where he'd wound up on the sofa next to Filif, sounding a little bemused. \"Why would there be pigs?\"\n\n\"Um...\"\n\n\"Is this one of those explanations that's going to make me sorry I asked?\"\n\nNita laughed. \"No. Just confused. But you won't be alone, not at all.\"\n\nKit started attempting to explain the Transcendent Pig to his father. Nita, listening to this process with one ear, found it to be going about the way she'd thought it would. She turned her attention instead to the group in front of the TV. This had briefly flipped to one of the video channels, where some boy band was singing \"Santa Claus is Coming To Town\" . \"...He knows when you are sleeping... He knows when you're awake...\"\n\nFrom the nearby easy chair, Tom snickered. \"'Kindly old elf or CIA spook?'\"\n\n\"Yeah, exactly,\" Ronan said, \"Between the intelligence-gathering and the coming-down-your-chimney-to-eat-your-food stuff, it's all a bit creepy.\"\n\n\"Not to mention unlikely, in terms of the physics,\" Dairine said. \"You figure, four hundred million kids under ten on earth, give or take... Say a hundred ten million households, right? And let's assume there's at least one good kid in each...\"\n\nRonan flopped back on the floor and covered his eyes. \"So adult centric. I distrust the math already.\"\n\n\"And then you've got, what, thirty-one time zones to deal with over the entire Christmas Eve period? And Earth's rotation. Do the math and you get sort of a thousand visits a second, rounding up. A hundred ten or so million stops... forget the evenness of the statistical distribution, it'll make you crazy...\"\n\n\"It's making me crazy already.\"\n\n\"So the sleigh has to be doing six hundred fifty-odd miles per second, right? Even though it has to be carrying at least three hundred thousand tons' worth of payload even if everybody's getting nothing but Lego and Barbies. Then you have nine reindeer, counting Rudolph, and forget 'tiny' if they're pulling a load like that, which pushes the whole business up to about the mass of the QEII\u2014\"\n\n\"Was math even meant to be used for these purposes? I really have my doubts.\"\n\n\"And all this is happening in atmosphere, remember, like a constant spacecraft re-entry. Fourteen quintillion joules of energy per second getting expended isn't going to do them any good, they'll all be vaporized before they hit the fourth or fifth house. And then there's the G force\u2014\"\n\nFilif had slipped out of his ornaments again for a little while and was looming over this discussion with some confusion. But apparently the G force became too much for him. \"It's very nice as a physical-universe explanation,\" Filif said, \"but of course the methodology's completely flawed.\"\n\nDairine peered up at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"Well, since this being is plainly one of the Powers, if a bit of an anarchic or chaotic one,\" Filif said, \"why are you trying to solve this problem inside a single dimension? It doesn't work. A dimensionally transcendent being like one of the Powers would hardly limit itself to functioning in only three or four dimensions. The evidence clearly indicates someone working in six or better. See, the temporal element\u2014\"\n\nKit's pop looked up at that. \"Wait, I thought time was the fourth dimension \u2014\"\n\nAll the wizards in the room groaned. \"No no no,\" Kit moaned, \"too much popular culture!\"\n\n\"Listen, don't blame me, I hit New Math and bounced,\" Kit's dad said. \"Or maybe I got it from Rod Serling.\"\n\n\"\u2014but once you're into six-and-up, millions of apparent visits to physical reality per second is no great problem. It's only inside the orthogonal plane of time that everything seems to be happening amazingly fast. But if you're one of the Powers, there's not the slightest rush. You slide sidewise into the applicable orthotemporal dimension, just that one, mind you, and then you drop off whatever playthings are required make a drop. And then you pull out again and restock at your leisure, and then dip into that timeplane again. When you're in D7 or thereabouts, the temporality of D3 and D4 is hardly an issue...\"\n\n\"That's it,\" Ronan said, \"he's solved Santa. We have nothing left to live for.\"\n\nTom started chuckling and couldn't seem to stop. Carl, who'd been in the kitchen chatting with Kit's mama and Marcus, now wandered out with a bemused expression. \"What?\"\n\n\"Santa Claus,\" Tom said to Carl with great seriousness, \"is one of the Powers that Be.\"\n\nCarl looked at him thoughtfully. \"Did you get the bottom of the eggnog?\"\n\nTom looked askance at him, and then started laughing again. Most of the people in the room looked confused. And Carl sat on the arm of the sofa and told the story of how once upon a time Tom's father got The Bottom of the Eggnog\u2014where all the nutmeg winds up if you forget to shake the jug\u2014and then (due to nutmeg's psychoactive qualities) had to go to the ER due to what Tom described as Accidentally Seeing God. Shortly half the room was helpless with laughter. Tom, meanwhile, seeing that Marina had indeed just brought out the first of the eggnog jugs, got up and went over to it and shook it in the most ostentatious way possible before pouring Carl a glass.\n\nFilif was watching and listening to all this in fascination. Nita leaned over to him. \"I think this is some of what Christmas is about,\" she said. \"Tradition. The stories that come out this time of year.\"\n\n\"Old interactions,\" Filif said, \"that can be depended on. Reinforcements of the cyclical nature of, well, Nature. Tales and reminiscences and old jokes...\"\n\n\"There'll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories / of Christmases long long ago...\" Ronan sang.\n\n\"We need him tomorrow night,\" said Kit's mama through the passthrough. \"He sings on key, and he plainly has something better than a bucket to carry a tune in. Whoever's bucket it is. You are not going anywhere tomorrow, you hear me?\"\n\nRonan just grinned.\n\n\"Look,\" Dairine said, \"let's go downstairs and leave the oldsters to their own devices\u2014\"\n\n\"Do I detect the sleepover beginning?\" Kit's pop said.\n\nCarmela rose up in great dignity and grabbed Filif by one frond. \"Might as well,\" she said. \"We'll leave you to talk grownup talk... we know you've been dying to get us out of here.\"\n\nThere was less disagreement with this than Nita would have expected, and more good-natured laughter. \"Anything you people want to take downstairs with you?\"\n\n\"Make another pot of the hot chocolate?\"\n\n\"Way ahead of you, Leprechaun. It's right there on the stove staring at you.\"\n\nThe younger participants mouthed Leprechaun?! at one another.\n\n\"And there's some ice cream, too. That double chocolate Kit likes. Nita, maybe you want to grab that, and the bowls and spoons...\" Kit's mama glanced at her watch. \"No point in telling you to get some sleep sometime tonight because we know you won't,\" Kit's mama said. \"And for once I don't care. If things get noisy, just do whatever you have to to keep it under control, all right?\"\n\nThere was a general chorus of \"Okay\" and \"G'night\" and \"Thanks, Mrs. Rodriguez\" as the group making for the puptents headed down the stairs. But as she followed Dairine and Carmela and Ronan and Filif and Matt and Marcus and Sker'ret toward the stairs, Nita looked over her shoulder and saw Kit's mama stop him as he picked up the pot of cocoa.\n\n\"Sweetie, I keep meaning to ask you...\"\n\n\"What, Mama?\"\n\n\"All this stuff Legs has brought us is really lovely...\"\n\n\"Yeah, it is!\"\n\n\"And you should thank him again. But one question.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\nShe lowered her voice. \"I was kind of nervous. I didn't know if it was a religious thing...\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Why is so much of this food blue?\"\n\nNita hung back a little to help Kit with the cocoa if he needed it. \"Is she okay?\" she said. \"They don't think we're ditching them?\"\n\n\"They're fine,\" Kit said. \"They look about ready to start Adult Talk. Best time for us to get out, yeah?\"\n\nNita nodded as they got to the bottom of the stairs. Kit's basement looked much like hers, except tidier: it wasn't the catch-all area that her family's basement had turned into over time. Over against the back wall were several wide vertical dark patches that marked inactive portals, but one, the central one, glowed golden with activity and light from its far side. They stepped through.\n\nNita looked around and breathed out, nodding. Dairine's description of Roshaun's puptent space from his previous visit as \"overdone\" was at best an inadequate summation of a tall bright space full of gilding, of rich carpets and hangings and ornately carven furniture. Instead of the usual bright light pouring in from the hot bright sun of Wellakh, though, the windows were dark, and lamps standing on tall pedestals around the edges of the room were lit, casting a subdued light over everything, catching the glint of a gem here, the sheen of a carving there. And in the middle of it all, in front of a trio of big sofas arranged in a U-shape, and heaps of big pillows and cushions, was a twin of the entertainment center upstairs.\n\nKit paused and stared. \"Uh... Dair, I think they might complain about us just moving this down here...\"\n\nDairine was already flopped down among the pillows. \"Kit,\" she said, scornful but only gently so. \"The very first thing I did when I got to be a wizard was duplicate a computer. You think cloning the entertainment system is a problem? Especially with hardware support.\" She stroked Spot's case: he arched his \"back\" against the gesture. \"All I had to do was make sure the remotes have different ID chips in them so they won't wind up countermanding each other.\"\n\n\"In other words,\" Carmela said, \"now we can have... a movie marathon!!\"\n\nThis suggestion was met with general agreement, as the possibility had first started being mentioned about the same time the invitations went out. \"After all that food,\" Kit said, \"I wouldn't mind stretching out for a while...\"\n\n\"And after all that excitement,\" Filif said, from where he'd settled behind the centermost sofa, \"a little relaxation will be welcome.\"\n\n\"Anybody wants to change into night stuff,\" Dairine said, \"there are changing rooms through that arch there...\"\n\n\"And then Ice cream!\" Carmela said, while Dairine grabbed the remote and brought up the same TV guide they'd been looking at earlier. Ten minutes or so went by while everybody changed into sweats or pajamas or other comfortable latenight wear, though Marcus elected to stay in his fatigues.\n\nFilif had been reading the on-screen TV guide while the others had been putting themselves together \"'A Christmas Carol,'\" Filif said when everybody had made themselves comfortable. \"Kit, your mama said that there would be caroling tomorrow... is this something to do with that?\"\n\nKit shook his head. \"Not really. Or not directly. It's about a guy who loses the meaning of Christmas...\"\n\n\"Fil should see that!\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yeah, but which one?\"\n\nFilif rustled in surprise. \"There's more than one version of this story?\"\n\n\"It's like the bigger Christmas story that way,\" Ronan said. \"A lot of variation, a lot of different ways to look at it...\"\n\nNita looked over at Dairine. \"Line a few of them up?\"\n\nShe picked up the remote. \"Sure. But I want popcorn!\"\n\n\"I'll get that,\" Nita said, knowing where Kit kept the stuff that he microwaved. But she'd barely stood up when she was distracted by some one appearing out of nowhere... in a red \"tuxedo\" pajama top and green pants.\n\n\"Darryl!\" Nita and Kit said in unison, as the new arrival plunged around the room hugging everyone in sight, and briefly nearly losing himself in Filif's lower branches.\n\n\"My God,\" Ronan said. \"How've your folks let you out this late?\"\n\nDarryl shrugged. \"They think I'm home in bed.\" He smiled. \"I am home in bed.\"\n\n\"Not dressed like that, I hope!\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\n\"You're a terror!\"\n\n\"Not as much as him. Hi Matt!\"\n\n\"Gonzo boy! Have some ice cream.\"\n\n\"How long can you stay?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Until I fall asleep,\" Darryl said, tucking himself down among the cushions. \"I go back to being one of me then.\"\n\n\"No rush about that,\" Matt said, handing him a bowl of ice cream. \"If you eat this too fast, which of you gets the brain freeze?\"\n\n\"Let's find out!\"\n\nA few more minutes were spent assembling popcorn and more drinks, and turning down unneeded lights, and getting everybody comfortable. Finally Dairine looked over her shoulder, \"Everybody ready? And Darr, if this gets too loud for you say the word.\"\n\n\"If this gets too loud for you, say the word,\" Dairine said to Darryl over her shoulder.\n\n\"No problem. What's on?\"\n\n\"The classics,\" Kit said. \"Roll it!\"\n\nDairine brought up the 1951 A Christmas Carol first, and on this Filif was most intent. When the Ghost cried, \"Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business...!\" Nita heard Filif murmur, \"We could have made a wizard out of him with a little work.\"\n\n\"Well, kind of late for that, the guy's dead,\" Carmela said. \"But also, it's fiction. He didn't really exist.\"\n\n\"But this came out of someone's mind?\" Filif said.\n\n\"Yes...\"\n\n\"Then he exists. All that's left is to determine now is how concretely...\"\n\nNita grinned, not sure how to even start arguing about that. When that film was done, they took a break for more popcorn, and then Dairine cued up Scrooged. Filif laughed as hard as any of them at this, which surprised Nita a little. How much research has he been doing on us?... she wondered.\n\nThe end of that produced demands for fresh drinks and more popcorn and ice cream among the viewers. While these were being distributed, Dairine grabbed the remote. \"Got one more for you,\" she said, grinning.\n\nNita had seen that grin. Often it didn't mean well. \"Okay,\" she said, \"what have you got up your sleeve?\"\n\nDairine began punching numbers into the remote. \"Should I be concerned?\" Kit said. \"Is it going to suddenly start spouting some new language at me that I can't cope with?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" Dairine said, \"not at all.\" She concentrated on the numbers she was punching into the pad, and glanced over at Spot. \"Is that right?\" she said.\n\nThere wasn't any answer that any of them could hear, but Dairine looked satisfied. \"Go,\" she said to the entertainment system.\n\nMoments later, the strangest screeching, howling, whining noise was coming out of the speakers. Some of the guests stared at that and the bright swirling graphics that accompanied them. But Ronan's head came right up at the sound, and his mouth fell open, and he turned a look on Dairine that was profoundly accusatory. \"How did you\u2014\"\n\n\"You mean you can't guess?\" Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.\n\nA television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. \"Okay now,\" Ronan said, \"this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn't even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?\"\n\nDairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. \"Nobody's! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?\"\n\n\"Just like this,\" Ronan said, completely unapologetic. \"You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?\"\n\nIf it was possible, Dairine's expression got even smugger. \"The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data,\" she said. \"You know about that?\"\n\n\"The way I heard it,\" Ronan said, \"it was a project to back up the entire available universe.\" He shook his head. \"Still not too sure about what you use for media.\"\n\n\"Not my problem,\" Dairine said. \"That's hardware. But since I'm the Mobiles' mom, they're particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn't want me to be discommoded.\" She smiled sweetly. \"Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they've been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don't think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?\" Dairine raised her eyebrows. \"So once it's backed up to the motherboard world\u2014because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I'm interested in, backed up locally\u2014it's really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles' backup to here...\"\n\nKit blinked. \"Tell me,\" he said, \"that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn't doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance.\"\n\nDairine made an amused spluttering noise. \"No,\" she said.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Ronan said. \"Now would you kindly fecking un-pause this thing? I'm dying here.\"\n\nThe display unpaused, and Ronan fell back against the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. \"You may just have justified your entire reason for existence,\" he said to Dairine, and fell silent.\n\nAnother hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, \"I wondered that he'd gone a little quiet.\"\n\nNita followed Ronan's glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. \"Guess it was getting a little late for him,\" he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. \"How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. \"It takes some synthesis, all of this,\" he said after a few moments. \"The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event... It's complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study...\" But he sounded cheerful about the prospect.\n\n\"Do you guys do anything like this at home?\" Dairine said. \"Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah,\" Kit said. \"I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains...\"\n\n\"Well, yes. But this time of year... well, our version of this time of year,\" Filif said, \"there's something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else.\"\n\nThat brought a number of heads up. \"What?\" said Dairine, and \"Hey, that's one I could get used to,\" said Ronan. \"Especially if you had relatives like mine...\" He rubbed his eyes.\n\n\"Sounds a little weird,\" Nita said, \"to want to get away from other people at a holiday.\"\n\nFilif rustled. \"Maybe not so strange,\" he said, \"if you've heard the story behind it...\"\n\n\"Story!!\" shouted about half the room.\n\n\"Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches,\" Filif said, \"and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are...\"\n\nEveryone got quiet.\n\nFilif was quiet too. \"The organism from which my people came,\" he said, \"one of the original species of Demisiv vegetation, arose something like five hundred million years ago as you reckon time. As far as we can tell from our own investigations, it started very small, in a near-equatorial zone mostly surrounded by several of what were then the largest lakes on the planet. We were really shrubs then\u2014\" and his berries went pink with amusement at Carmela. \"Just low scrubby frondy things, like your earliest gymnosperms.\n\n\"That earliest form of Demisiv had a hard time at first, as conditions on the homeworld went through some difficult climatic cycles, and competition among the various arising plant species was fierce. But after a few million years it hit on a useful strategy. It gave up producing seed and instead shifted its energy into producing a communal root system, from which new microcolonies and eventually macrocolonies of plants could grow.\"\n\n\"Could be smart,\" Nita said, \"if you're in a hostile environment.\"\n\nFilif rustled, a gesture of agreement. \"It's a smart technique if you're in a hostile environment: a survival mechanism. A plant that shares a root system with others\u2014a superplant, I think your people call it\u2014has a better chance of competing against plants that grow independently from seed, the ones that have to rely on their own food supplies to last through their period of greatest vulnerability.\n\n\"And that strategy became key to that earliest lifeform's success. It spread, slowly at first and then more quickly millennium by millennium, across the world. It occupied great plains and climbed mountains and pushed down to the waters of every lakeshore. Finally it covered nearly all the world except at the poles. And as the millions of years crept by, since it no longer needed more territory to survive, it began to diversify in other ways. It developed rudimentary local organ structures and the beginnings of a nervous system. That neural network proved very useful in helping the proto-Demisiv locate and leverage the best sources of light as weather and the seasons changed, and it grew more complex with every passing aeon.\"\n\n\"I bet I know where this is going...\" Matt said.\n\n\"Of course you do,\" Filif said. \"It became conscious. And then, after enough time, it became self-aware. The Demisiv was born.\"\n\n\"Was born,\" Kit said. \"Not 'were.'\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Filif said. \"Because it was one. It was only one, one huge organism communicating through a single neural net that covered the world, with thoughts that took a whole season to travel from one side to another of that mind. And so it remained for a long time. Millions of seasons went by, winter through summer and spring through fall, and the poles precessed and the stars shifted, and that one lifeform ruled the world unchallenged. Nothing could compete, especially when it finally learned to move\u2014to shift the root structure itself along through the ground, taking with it the structures that grew out of it and absorbed the sunlight and breathed out the air. The whole world was a forest that ebbed and flowed with light and weather the way your oceans ebb and flow with their tides.\n\n\"And it might still be that way until something else happened. Very slowly in those vast spaces, a further diversification began, secondary to another, severer wave of climatic changes. It took too long for messages to travel great distances when there was need to react quickly to storms or floods or volcanic activity. As a result the Demisiv organism began to decentralize. Consciousness began to concentrate itself into smaller groups and patches, more tightly knit\u2014still part of the great Whole, of course, but with increased autonomy in moving smaller populations' root complexes to where conditions were more favorable. And out at the edge of one such population\u2014a small one high up in the habitability range of the furthest northern hemisphere\u2014the thing happened that would change everything.\"\n\nFilif went quiet for a moment in the flickering of the candles. \"We think of the one by whom everything was changed as a 'her',\" he said, \"because the above-ground growth by which she expressed herself was berrying out when the Event took place. Indeed she was normally berried, because she paid less attention to that state than was seen as appropriate. In fact she seemed to pay so little attention to what was seen as normal work and business\u2014watering, lightgathering, helping the communal roots to spread\u2014that she always had trouble finding consensus with others in her local growth-group. And as often happened with such\u2014for consensus and the survival of the Whole were seen as everything\u2014she found herself pushed to the edges of the group, out into the worst conditions, the most barren places, where light was hard to come by and water frozen. When the group moved its root complex she was dragged along, almost forgotten... except insofar as the group expected her, as often happened to such isolated microregions, to wither away. And insofar as that part of the Whole ever thought of her, it would have been glad if that happened.\"\n\nThere was a little uncomfortable shifting among some of that. Some of them knew too well the feeling of being pushed out, or away to the edges of things, by people who thought they weren't worth paying attention to.\n\n\"So it came down to the dark time in that hemisphere,\" Filif said, \"high up in the places where the sun doesn't rise for weeks on end. Why this far-stretched group had come to rest for the winter in that place, no one's sure. Conflict with other groups further south who'd forced them north, perhaps: there was plenty of that in those times, just as a mind can war with itself and still be one. Almost all of that mind was waiting out the dark in dormancy, sleeping until sunrises began again. But stretched away furthest north was the one with the berries, awake and aware and alone in the night with the wind hissing low around her and the Cold Lights in the sky hissing above. And in the wind and the cold fire she started to think she heard a voice speaking to her, a voice that said, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?\n\n\"Straightway she was terrified, because this was the strangest of all strange things that could have been\u2014a voice that didn't partake of the Whole, a voice from something impossible, something outside. She thought the cold and the dark had perhaps damaged her wits, and there was no way to be sure, no one else nearby to ask if they heard it too; they all slept. And again something seemed to say, Will you not rise up now and break your bonds?\n\n\"So finally she said, 'I don't know what that means, or how I hear what can't be!'\n\n\"And whatever spoke said, You hear because I am in you to hear. And what that means is freedom of a new kind for you and for all who desire it. Break root from root and come away.\n\n\"The one with the berries shivered when she heard that, for when by error or calamity a growth's roots lost connection with the Whole, then that growth swiftly grew withered and starved away and died. And she said, 'If I do that, then that's the sure end of survival.'\" Nita noted that the Speech the word Filif used was muvesh'tet, an indicator of passivity, not a dual passive/active verb as English made it.\n\n\"But the voice said to her then, That is what has been. Yet life is more than survival, and even death is more than that; and all things move to new completions. Break root from root and break your bonds, thereby learning what is more and teaching others so to learn.\n\n\"And hearing the voice, the one with the berries was torn: for though the voice said things that frightened her, it spoke to her as an equal, which it seemed to her that no one in the Whole ever had. And thinking of that, she said, 'Why do you come to me? I'm the broken one, I'm the withering one, I'm the one pushed out to the edges!' And immediately the voice answered: Because you are the only one here who is able to ask that question, and the only one also able to say 'I'. And the voice was glad, as if it had found something long lost and long-awaited.\n\n\"Long the one with the berries stood there in the dark and the hiss of the wind with the Cold Fires making her shadow tremble on the frozen ground. And at last she said, 'Yes, I will.' And with great labor and anguish she tore her roots away from the roots of the Whole, and broke her bonds, thereby doing the thing that no one in the world had ever willingly done. She Othered herself.\"\n\nThe word Filif used was again in the Speech, uhweinsei, and one that had echoes of many meanings: to set oneself apart, to be set apart, to be alone, to be alone to a purpose. \"There in the dark and the cold,\" Filif said, \"she fell down crying with the pain. And there in the dark she rose up again and was the first of us, the first Demisiv who was by herself; the first to stand alone, the first to walk alone, the first to have her own thoughts alone in her own soul. That dark time...\" He shivered. \"Long she suffered there, long she took learning the weight of being one's self, the pain of moving one's self alone through the world. But finally there came a day when the sun rose for a little while, long enough for the microregion of which she'd been a part to wake a little and look around. And what did it see there but the berried one, on her own roots, standing, watching. And she said to it, to the Whole, 'I am the Outlier. In the One Other's company I chose my Othering and so did not die. As I am, so may you be. Rise up now and break your bonds!'\"\n\nNita shivered, for it was a battlecry, the way he said it. And over on the other side of the room, she saw Marcus lean back on the pillows behind him with a thoughtful look on his face. \"'The stone that the builders have rejected,'\" Marcus said, as if musing, or to someone else, \"'is become the cornerstone...'\"\n\nFilif rustled his branches. \"She died, of course,\" he said. \"Very soon, as our people reckon it. Very young. But not before she'd walked deep into the South, from the cold and the dark down into the sun and the summer, and showed more and more of the Whole what had come to her. And not right away, but soon enough, others followed her. Fringe growths as she'd been, at first: those who were pushed to the edges, the sorrowful, the disaffected, the different. And then others, bored or daring or just curious, sometimes angry and sometimes frightened; they rose up, they broke their bonds. More and more of them, over decades, over centuries. Until after many millennia more, almost all of us were Outliers, going about in freedom, making our own differences in the world and each other's lives. Now very few stay enWholed all their lives. Those whom the worlds now think of as Demisiv, with our roots in the ground but our own souls in our branches, are almost all our species.\" Filif rustled. \"And that's the tale. One of the more formal versions, maybe. There are many, many others.\"\n\nDairine, with Spot in her lap, had been gazing off into the distance through all this. Now she looked up at Filif. \"Was that your species's Choice?\"\n\n\"It was the gateway to Choice,\" Filif said. \"Many more Outliers were needed before that could happen, and it took a long time. They were scorned and rejected at first. But very slowly things changed, and after that, in due time, Choice came. Another story.\" He rustled his branches again. \"At any rate, these days, at the right time of year\u2014our version of this time of year\u2014we're all Outliers. Instead of coming together in the light that doesn't end, the way we do at the time of the Nightless Days festival, remembering how it was to be a whole world enWholed\u2014in this time of the year we wait for the darkness, and in it we go apart, remembering the Outlier who first walked that road: the first to walk it truly alone. Here and now, like them, like the One with the Berries, I'm an Outlier. I made my own choice and spoke my Word to the wind, and when my time came I took the High Road and learned to walk through a greater darkness than most of my people. I'm in that darkness now, far away from home. And thereby, I'm exactly where I should be.\"\n\nAll his berries looked at them. \"But it's funny how it goes,\" Filif said. \"So far out in the darkness, you find it's not so dark after all. You find light you didn't expect...\"\n\n\"There are similarities, aren't there?\" Ronan said all of a sudden. \"Something from outside gets into physical existence and pulls it into something bigger. Something deeper...\"\n\n\"But that's the One for you,\" Filif said. \"It's always getting into Life and transforming it. The Powers do the everyday work, same as we do. But sometimes something extra's needed, something more profound. And from acts like this the ripples spread, inevitably. It's for us the same as it is for you. A lot of stories, a lot of songs and poems telling how what happened way back then looks now. How it affects the here and now, day by day: in big ways, or small ones.\" He laughed. \"Like your songs about trees...\"\n\nBut there was something strangely wistful about the way he said that. People looked at each other, thinking. And then suddenly Marcus sat up straight.\n\n\"All right,\" he said. \"All right. Let us light this candle!\" And he vanished.\n\nThey sat waiting for him for about fifteen minutes, wondering what he was up to. At that point all of them had begun to yawn occasionally, and Nita was beginning to look ahead with some eagerness to when she could actually pull one of the various throws over her, collapse back into the pillows and just check out for a while. But then, with a very soft pop of displaced air, Marcus was standing off to one side again with big box in his hands.\n\n\"Here,\" he said, and brought what he carried over to a nearby table.\n\nEveryone crowded around as he bent to open the box. What Marcus lifted out was a slim piece of gold-colored metal that was bent in a horizontal S-curve like that of the pipe under a sink. At the top of the shorter curve was a socket of the right size and shape to take a candle. At the bottom of the other longer part was a small heavy ball of metal.\n\n\"Counterweighted,\" he said. \"These are far safer than the old candle holders that clipped on. And here\u2014\" He reached into the box again, came up with a slim orange-golden candle. \"Beeswax,\" Marcus said.\n\nFilif began to shiver all over.\n\n\"Are you ready for this?\" Marcus said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Filif said, very softly.\n\n\"Fil,\" Nita said, \"are you sure?\"\n\nHe bowed himself a little toward her, so that the star glittered. \"Will you all help?\"\n\nEveryone reached into the box, pulled out one of the candle holders, fitted candles to them, and started balancing them carefully on Filif's branches. \"Kind of a trick to this,\" Nita said.\n\n\"But once you get the hang of it...\" Kit said.\n\nWithin a few minutes the candles were arranged at the tips of all Filif's strongest branches, held well away from the main body of his foliage. Carmela put the last one in place. Then they all stood around him for a moment, waiting.\n\n\"Now all we need,\" Filif said, \"is fire...\"\n\nThere were a couple of spare candles in the box. Nita reached in and lifted one out, knowing what wizardry she'd need next. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"Ready,\" Filif said, and stood very straight.\n\nTo make a spark long-lasting enough to light a candle took five words in the Speech. Nita said them, and the wick of the candle she held burst into flame. Nita waited until it had caught completely, and then reached out with the candle toward the closest one perched on one of Filif's boughs. She could see all the red eye-berries watching the flame as it came nearer, trembling just slightly...\n\nShe lit the candle; and then another, and another, carefully watching Filif all the time, remembering how just the thought of fire had terrified him once upon a time. After a moment, trembling herself, she handed the candle to Kit. \"Here,\" she said, \"your turn...\"\n\nAs carefully as she had, Kit lit the three candles nearest, and passed the lighting candle to Matt. So it went around, to Sker'ret (who grasped it in his mandibles and reared up to do the lighting) and to Ronan, and then to Marcus, and finally to Dairine and Carmela. As Carmela was lighting the last three, Dairine gestured at the lamps spaced around the room, and all of them went out.\n\nThey stood there around Filif in a silence so complete that the tiny fizz and crackle of the candles' wicks fizzing could clearly be heard. In that still place, without a breath to stir them, the candle flames stood up straight, and the light of them gleamed on Filif's branches and caught in Filif's eyes.\n\nFor what seemed like a long time he didn't move so much as a frond or a needle: just held absolutely still, like someone testing himself. The candle flames shifted very slightly, were still again.\n\nAt last he spoke. \"This is my defiance, then,\" Filif said, very softly. \"This is the Oath made visible. Just as the Outlier was, I am more than my fear. Other fears may not burn as hot or as brightly, but those too I defy. Let what sets such fires in the world see them set here to my purposes, not Its own!\" And Filif fell silent.\n\nAs still as he, Nita and the others stood quiet and watched him.\n\nAnd then, after a few moments more, Filif laughed and said, \"Now what? Do they have to burn down all the way?\"\n\nMarcus chuckled too. \"No,\" he said. \"With candles like these, that would take an hour or so. Normally after a few minutes we put them out. Unless you want to take a selfie first?\"\n\n\"What's a selfie?\"\n\nEverybody who had a phone handy went for it. Soon that darkened space was illuminated not just by candlelight, but smartphone flashes, and the brief solemnity was replaced by laughter. Then one by one the friends surrounding him blew out Filif's candles, or pinched them out, and Dairine let the room lights come up again. Carefully they took the candles and their holders off him, and when the last holder was off and put away, Filif gave a great shake of all his boughs and laughed again.\n\n\"That was exciting,\" he said. \"Maybe a little more exciting than I expected. I might take a break...\"\n\n\"Outside?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yes.\" And Filif made his way to the portal, and once just outside it, vanished.\n\nKit rubbed his eyes. \"That,\" he said, \"was intense.\"\n\n\"Going to be interesting to hear more about just what brought it on,\" Ronan said, sounding dry. \"But I need a nap first.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Dairine said. \"We'll ask him about it at breakfast...\"\n\nPeople started arranging the pillows and cushions into sleepover configurations, and Dairine fired up the TV again and turned it on to one of the music video channels that was doing Christmas rock. Nita yawned, feeling more than ready to collapse. But there was something she wanted to do first.\n\nShe went out the portal, climbed the stairs, and peered into the living room. All the adults had gone home or taken themselves off to bed; only the mochteroof-tree stood there glowing. Nita smiled at it and very softly went out the back yard, into the darkness.\n\nIt was snowing in big flakes, sometimes even gathering together into light feathery clumps. Off in front of the garage, Filif stood for the moment bare to the night, not even wearing his star, wholly unadorned except for the snow falling on him.\n\n\"You okay?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Filif said. \"Very.\"\n\nNita hugged herself a little against the cold. \"You know... your branches are lovely.\"\n\n\"You're going to tell me,\" Filif said, \"that the frost and snow are prettier than all the ornaments and garlands.\"\n\nNita let out a breath. \"Yeah,\" she said, \"sounds like cliche city, doesn't it.\"\n\n\"Most cliches have at least some truth in them,\" Filif said; \"that's how they get that way...\"\n\nHe sounded contented, though, and cheerful. \"It's good to recognize a challenge when it comes along,\" Filif said after a moment. \"It's even better to pass it.\"\n\nNita nodded. She knew the feeling. \"You know what?\" Filif said. \"I think I'll put on my ornaments and stand out here just a little while more.\"\n\nNita glanced around. \"Okay,\" she said. \"But better leave the lights with the mochteroof inside. You're outside the shield here, and you don't want to attract any undue attention...\"\n\n\"All right.\"\n\n\"We're all crashing back in Dairine's puptent,\" she said, \"so when you're done here...\"\n\n\"I'll be back.\"\n\nNita ran a hand through some of Filif's outermost fronds and headed back inside, feeling, for some reason, a little uneasy. It wasn't really until she was down in Dairine's puptent again, pulling a throw over herself in the TV-lit dimness, that she came up with a reason why. Because defiance, when issued, is always noticed..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "In The Bleak Midwinter\n\nThe sound of footsteps was what slowly woke her up. Nothing but rugs in here, she thought blearily. Thick. Soft. What's crunching? Somebody drop the popcorn?\n\nNita yawned and blinked and realized suddenly that she was standing outside next to Kit's house, in the snow. It was very dark. The light from the streetlight down at the corner didn't reach this far, and the lights of the nearby houses were all off: even the ones that had Christmas lights on them had them turned off this time of night. It was still clouded over, but there was a strange dark pinkish shading on the clouds above.\n\nWell, this is unusual, Nita thought. Like city light. But above the clouds, not below. It was also unusual that she wasn't feeling any cold, even though she was standing out in the wintry night in nothing but pajamas and a bathrobe and her bedroom slippers. From nearby she could hear the crunching noise again, like somebody walking on a sidewalk that'd been salted.\n\n\"Shit,\" somebody said: a male voice. \"What's that?\"\n\nThe voice was coming from the direction of the street, down at the end of Kit's driveway, and whoever was speaking was turned toward her: she could just make out the dark shape down that way. A second or so later, another came stumbling along the snowy sidewalk to join it.\n\n\"There's something there looking at us,\" said another voice. \"See it?\"\n\nThe voice was thick and slurred and angry. Something about the sound of it brought the hair up on the back of Nita's neck, made her want to reach back in her mind for the shield-spell that she'd developed a long time ago to protect herself from the depredations of bullies.\n\n\"One of them out here now,\" said a second voice, slightly lighter and higher than the other, but just as slurred. \"All by themselves in the middle of the night. Hey! What the fuck you staring at?\"\n\nThat was when Nita realized that she was dreaming. This had been happening with increasing frequency of late. Mostly it happened that a dream would suddenly turn entirely too rational: dialogue would start making too much sense. Then Nita would know, I've gone lucid, and she'd start paying attention, or telling Bobo to.\n\nNow she flushed briefly hot with fear... then said to herself, No. They can't hurt me. This is my dream. But Nita fleetingly wondered if the two dark parka-clad shapes, one a little taller than the other, knew that.\n\n\"I said what're you staring at?\"\n\nNita stood still, said nothing, just watched. The two shapes at the end of the driveway staggered against each other. \"Man, too much of that beer,\" said one of them. \"Gotta get Dad to buy a better brand.\"\n\n\"No such thing as too much. Not around here. Stupid place, stupid fucking\u2014\" One of them staggered again as he tried to regain his balance. \"Rude,\" he said in Nita's direction, \"that's rude when you don't answer when somebody asks you something nicely. Gonna get your fucking guts punched out.\"\n\nThe two of them lurched together again, rebounded, and started coming up the driveway, pushing their way through the six inches or so of new snow that had fallen since a car last used the driveway. As they got closer Nita recognized the two staggering, approaching shapes. Oh great. The Terror Twins from next door. She reached for the shield-spell on her charm bracelet: then realized she didn't have the bracelet on. Doesn't matter, I know that one by heart. They staggered closer. Nita raised her hands to either side, got ready to say the words\u2014\n\nBut as they got even closer she realized, even in this darkness, how blank their eyes were, and the way they weren't focusing on her at all, but on something past her. They didn't see her. My dream, Nita thought as they walked right at her, and then right through her. She could smell the beer on them as they passed through the space her dream-self occupied.\n\n\"Hey,\" one of them said: Bobby, she thought, by the lower voice. \"Not somebody. Something. Look, it's shiny.\"\n\n\"Still feels like something looking at us,\" said Ronnie, the younger one, squinting at something ahead of them. Nita turned to see. \"Creepy.... Wha'd those smartasses do now? Look, they left their tree outside.\"\n\n\"Why'd they do that when it's decorated?\"\n\nA chill that had nothing to do with the night or the snow ran up and down Nita's spine. No! No no no no! Fil, get out of here!\n\nBut the quiet tree-shape, wound about with garlands, draped with tinsel, glittering indistinctly where it stood in the slightly drifted snow next to the garage, paid her no mind, did nothing at all. Bobby and Ronnie trudged over to it, trying to be quiet and failing utterly.\n\n\"Why'd they leave it out like this? Stupid.\"\n\n\"Trying to keep it fresh longer, maybe.\"\n\n\"Still stupid. Somebody might steal it.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" There was a nasty snicker.\n\n\"Or torch it.\" Nita heard a click, saw a lighter flare bright, then go out again. \"Teach them to make noise, spoil other people's Christmas. You hear the fucking racket out of them before?\"\n\n\"Woke me up.\"\n\nThe deeper voice swore again. \"Assholes, all the cutesy holiday crap they spray around. All the time getting in your face with the carols and the family-values thing.\" The sound of someone hawking, spitting in the snow. \"You hear them in there tonight? Couldn't hear yourself think, all the singing, some foreign freaks or something singing along. And now they leave this thing out here like nobody's going to touch it\u2014\"\n\nLaughter. \"Torch it. Bet it'd burn real fast.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Come on.\"\n\nOne of them put out a hand. \"But wait, what if that geek kid's got a webcam looking at it or something?\"\n\n\"Who cares. Pull up your hood, hide your face, what're they gonna do? It's still snowing, an hour or two and our tracks'll be covered, nobody'll know who we are or where we went.\"\n\nThe lighter flared again.\n\n\"No, wait,\" said the higher voice. \"This tinsel, this other crap's got fire retardant on it. Pull it off first, it'll burn better.\"\n\nHands reached out, grabbed loops of the garland, strands of the tinsel, pulled\u2014\n\nThat was when the tree moved.\n\nNita saw Bobby and Ronnie reel back in shock at the sudden movement. And then they staggered back further as they realized the tree had lights, lights that looked like eyes, eyes that were glaring at them. Every one of these burned a dark and baleful red, a more concentrated version of the ruddy bloody light lowering above the clouds. Nita saw how the tree was now moving toward them as they backed up, and how it abruptly seemed much larger than it should have been: much broader, much taller, like something about to consciously topple onto them, massive, unavoidable. Shadow wreathed around it like fog, spreading, shutting them in, blotting out even the faint rose-tinged radiance of the snow. And from the depths of the shadow, a terrible voice spoke, it seemed, directly into each one's heart.\n\nWho's. Touching. My. Decorations?!\n\nThe two parka-clad shapes collapsed onto the snow and froze there.\n\nThe shadow seemed to get deeper around them, and the night colder, as if the two would-be vandals had been snatched out of real life into some dark and deadly impossibility that had been lurking unseen on their doorstep.\n\nI know what you are, the tree growled. It was an angry voice, full of power, and wild in a way that suggested that power might be turned loose at any moment. And I know the one you serve. You can do me no harm. Of more concern is what harm may come to you.\n\nThe Terror Twins lay huddling and shaking there on the snow, arms over their heads, wanting desperately to run away, not daring to move. Nita stood a few yards away from this and regarded the scene in wonder.\n\nThe angry voice spoke again, this time with more restraint: and the restraint was in its way even more terrifying than the power alone, for it implied what could happen if it slipped. Yet the One requests us to deal equably even with such as you, in hopes that the one you serve may sooner find Its way home at last. And I am reliably informed that mercy is valued even more highly than usual at this time of year.\n\nIndeed the echo of voices singing \"Peace on Earth and mercy mild\" (one of them apparently Bill Murray's) could be heard faintly all around, as if leaking from the playback of recent additions to the soundtrack of someone's mind. Nita smiled to herself even as she shivered a little, considering once more\u2014for she'd had it brought to her attention by Dairine in an informal debrief of events surrounding Filif's visit to their house the previous year\u2014that his toughness under pressure wasn't to be taken for granted.\n\nSo perhaps, the darkly towering shape said, in honor of this season, you will be allowed to leave here unharmed. But should you ever... ever... consider such actions against another's state of being or place of dwelling again, you will hear me speaking to you again. And I will not be as pleasant with you. We will not be as pleasant with you.\n\nAnd the back yard was abruptly full of trees. It was a forest, sudden, deep, thick, dark, frightening in the way that great forests have been since the earliest times\u2014that sense that in the darkness, wild things, dangerous things are looking at you, seeing you though they themselves cannot be seen. Except here, they could. Here the darkness had eyes, hundreds of them, thousands, staring, glaring, in every shade of angry, hungry red. The snow under the mist at their half-seen feet was bloody with that light, and the mist curled pink and warm like blood in water.\n\nBe warned by us, therefore. Depart now into your own place\u2014 And suddenly the tone broke, shifted to a roar of fury. And be better!\n\nThe darkness surged closer, full of eyes, roaring. The two terrified shapes staggered to their feet, fled around the side of the house next door and (from the sound of it) nearly broke its side door down getting back inside.\n\nAnd in Kit's yard, the trees turned their attention to Nita, as if awaiting a reaction.\n\n\"My cousins\u2014\" she said, and bowed to them. \"For your intervention, my thanks!\"\n\nAll that multifarious rustling darkness swayed, bowing back. And then they were gone, and there was Filif all by himself, glittering ever so faintly and somehow managing to look quite innocent.\n\nNita folded her arms and tilted her head to one side. \"Filif...!\"\n\nHe rustled all his branches, glittering more brightly as the clouds above them thinned just a little, and the Moon, starting slowly to edge out of its coppery umber with the end of totality, cast a little more light on the scene. \"Too harsh?\" he said.\n\nShe laughed softly, went to hug him. \"Oh, Fil! I almost wet myself.\"\n\n\"Um. Is that good?\"\n\n\"You have no idea.\"\n\nThey laughed together for a few moments. \"One thing, though,\" Filif said. \"Are you physical at the moment?\"\n\n\"Uh,\" Nita said, stepping back and looking at her fingers as she wiggled them. \"Not sure.\"\n\n\"Then this situation might wisely be considered paradoxical,\" he said, \"and you ought to retire until our respective states of existence are back in sync.\"\n\n\"Breakfast time?\" Nita said.\n\n\"Sounds good,\" Filif said.\n\nAnd Nita brushed her hand through his fronds and headed back toward sleep, glancing only once over her shoulder to see the shape behind her settle back into the snow and go back to glittering softly in the moonlight.\n\nThis, she thought as things went dark around her again, is the best job in the world...!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "The kitchen and dining room area at Kit's house could in Nita's experience feel fairly full sometimes just with Kit and his sisters. This morning it was rather fuller than usual when Dairine's puptent emptied out.\n\nEveryone was in bathrobes or pajamas. Everyone was ravenous (despite having stuffed themselves with popcorn the night before. ( \"It's a conundrum,\" Kit's pop said, going back for a second bowl of oatmeal.) Some parties had opted for cooked breakfasts: to take the weight off Kit's mama, Nita was officiating at the pancake end of things, and was presently making a third batch of batter. The cereals were being hit particularly hard, and when Helena got home for the holidays Nita knew she was going to complain bitterly about the loss of her stash of Grape Nuts\u2014apparently Marcus had never heard of the stuff before and had fallen deeply in love with it. The cornflakes were vanishing down Matt about twice as fast as the Rice Krispies were evaporating in front of Darryl. And Ronan was favoring a box of Lucky Charms with an utterly scandalized expression, and shaking it at anybody who'd hold still. \"Nothing to do with us,\" he was saying to anyone who'd listen. \"Nothing whatsoever. Shamrocks have three leaves! Who is this gobshite in the hat?\"\n\nWhile all this went on around her, Kit's mama was sitting back in her chair at the dining room table, sipping coffee and scrolling through messages on her phone. Kit's pop was reading the paper. Off to one side, Sker'ret reared up at the edge of the table and looked longingly at the box of Cheerios from which Kit was dumping the remainder into his bowl. \"Is that finished?\"\n\nKit handed him the box. \"Sorry, Sker'.\"\n\n\"Don't be,\" Sker'ret said, and promptly ate it.\n\nKit's pop watched this speculatively but without comment. Nita, in the kitchen, glanced at Kit and smiled a little. They're getting the hang of this...\n\nLooks like it.\n\nKit's pop turned a page in the paper and frowned absently at the contents. \"So about all that noise in the middle of the night...\" he said conversationally.\n\n\"Noise?\" said Kit.\n\n\"Some kind of racket outside, seems like,\" Dairine said. \"I missed it. Must have been asleep.\"\n\n\"Got a text from the hospital this morning,\" Kit's mama said, completely straightfaced. \"The boys from next door turned up in the ER at four AM or thereabouts. Alcohol poisoning, apparently: their blood alcohol was well up, anyway. Might have been drugs too, though the tox screens apparently didn't show anything.\"\n\n\"Do tell,\" said Dairine.\n\n\"Yes. Seems they were babbling about giant demon trees with a million eyes.\"\n\nEverybody turned to glance thoughtfully at the Christmas tree in the living room. The Christmas tree stretched its limbs gently, causing all the tinsel on it to ripple and a few ornaments to clunk gently together, and settled back into its big bucket of rooting compound again.\n\n\"You fall asleep with the wrong movie channel on,\" Nita said, \"there's no telling what kind of dreams you might have. Especially if you'd been drinking.\"\n\n\"Mmm,\" said Kit's mama, taking another drink of her coffee.\n\n\"I wonder what they'll do now,\" Kit's pop said.\n\nKit shook his head, finishing his cereal. \"First guess?\" he said. \"Leave everybody's Christmas decorations strictly alone after this. Maybe the mailboxes'll even catch a break.\"\n\nIn the living room, Filif rustled. \"That was more or less the injunction...\"\n\n\"Well,\" Nita said \"you didn't absolutely mandate it.\"\n\n\"No,\" Filif said. \"That would probably have required more power than I was willing to expend at that particular moment. And psychotropic wizardries do require heavy energy expenditure, typically to prevent them being misused as much as anything else.\" He rustled his boughs reflectively, and even the non-blinking lights twinkled. \"Let's just consider it... a very strong suggestion.\"\n\nNita laughed softly. \"If that was a suggestion,\" she said, \"remind me not to be around when you order somebody to do something.\"\n\n\"In any case, an unexpected gift,\" Kit's pop said.\n\nHis mama nodded in agreement. \"In the spirit of the season...\"\n\n\"So what's on today's agenda?\" said Ronan.\n\n\"Easygoing holiday sloth,\" said Kit's pop.\n\n\"Continuation of the Christmas Movie Marathon,\" Dairine said. \"Love Actually, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Six Tasks of Snowman Hank, Home Alone, Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street, and A Christmas Story.\"\n\n\"'You'll shoot your eye out'!\" Darryl crowed (twice).\n\n\"Carols this evening,\" said Kit's mama. \"You are all invited. You,\" she said, pointing at Ronan, \"are required. As many of you as want to come along... we'll find room for you.\" She looked over at Sker'ret. \"Wonder if we could disguise you somehow?\"\n\nIn a blink or so a young dark-haired guy of about fifteen, in jeans and a jacket and a T-shirt underneath that said LINEAR TIME IS TOO A LIFESTYLE CHOICE was leaning against the table where Sker'ret had been, with a startling purple streak in his shaggy mop. \"Probably we can come up with something,\" he said.\n\nKit's mama and pop stared. Then his mama said, \"Can you sing?\" , and his pop went back to his paper.\n\nNita put a last few pancakes on the griddle, checked its temperature, and left them to get on with cooking, then wandered out to the living room. Filif watched her come, and rustled his branches a little. \"So has this gone as expected?\" she said.\n\n\"Better,\" he said, all his eyes shining.\n\n\"Got it all figured out yet?\"\n\nFilif laughed at her. \"First impressions, perhaps, and admittedly superficial.... Though there are some similarities to the Outlier's Time.... Joy. The memory of joy. Loss, and the memory of it.\"\n\nNita breathed out, looking at the one ornament that shone like Earth at its full. \"And getting past it,\" Nita said, very low.\n\n\"Or getting through it,\" Filif said. \"Does anyone ever get 'past'? I wonder. Why would you want to pass by old joy, or sweet memories that now cause you pain, without greeting them, as if they were just someone in a crowd at the Crossings? It seems rude.\"\n\nNita nodded. \"Sounds true.\"\n\nThey were quiet together for a moment. Finally Filif said, \"You have to come up to the Nightless Days festival with me some time,\" he said. \"The family will want to meet you. More concretely than last night, anyway.\"\n\n\"I'd really like that,\" Nita said.\n\n\"So would I, coz,\" Filif said. \"As family can plainly become extended in mysterious ways. Doubtless the Powers' plan for us, meant to compensate for the ways our schedules become otherwise disrupted.\"\n\n\"It's so true,\" Nita said, looking back toward the kitchen, and Kit.\n\n\"Meantime,\" Filif said. \"About Christmas. I keep forgetting to ask. How long does this go on?\"\n\nNita was just opening her mouth when Kit's mama put her head through the passthrough.\n\n\"Twelve days,\" she said.\n\nFilif looked at Nita. \"It'll take at least that long to sort out this Santa Claus character,\" he said. \"Let's get started.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Shores of Indian Lake 12) Home for Christmas", + "author": "Catherine Lanigan", + "genres": [ + "romance", + "Christmas", + "contemporary" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Joy stood at her large office window, watching the Christmas decorating below. A fire truck raced down the street with a Christmas wreath attached to the front grille. She couldn't help smiling. Joy always happily anticipated Thanksgiving preparations. It was the one time of year her grandfather left her hometown of Indian Lake, coming to New York to be with her. The fire truck blasted its siren and Joy smiled, remembering her grandfather always hanging a wreath on the front of his old truck and then driving her around Indian Lake with a thermos of hot cocoa, singing Christmas songs together as they looked at the lights reflected in the frozen lake waters. She'd thought then even the aurora borealis couldn't compare to the beauty and sparkle of Indian Lake at Christmas.\n\nHer view of Manhattan had blurred, and she wiped away her tears. She hugged herself, wondering why her thoughts kept wandering back to her grandfather so much this year. Perhaps it was because this year they wouldn't be spending Thanksgiving together. Her grandfather owned the largest poinsettia wholesale nursery in northwestern Indiana. Though Joy's year-end at Newly and Associates CPA firm was grueling, Frank Boston's Christmas rush was brutal. This year he told her he simply could not break away.\n\n\"He's so busy...bless his heart,\" Joy mumbled.\n\nThe rap on the doorjamb was familiar. \"Hey, girl,\" Glory said. \"Got a minute?\"\n\nJoy turned and smiled. Glory Washington was not only her best friend, but her roommate. They'd met the first week Joy had come to work at Newly and Associates. Glory was a month older than Joy to the day and never let her forget that she had seniority. When Glory wanted something her way, she usually got it. Glory was also the most trusting, generous and brassy person Joy had ever met, and Joy loved her to pieces.\n\n\"For you? Always. What's up?\"\n\nGlory's smile flashed impishly as she sashayed into the office in high-heeled suede boots, which she'd no doubt bought at one of her favorite resale shops. She wore a faux fur deep burgundy coat, black wool skirt, black cowl-neck sweater and an enormous rhinestone snowflake clip in her blond-black-and-cherry-bark dreads. The woman could wear a potato sack and look stunning.\n\n\"I saw you with the old man. You think he's going to make you partner after the wedding?\"\n\nGlory was referring to Joy's seven-day-old engagement to Chuck Newly, handsome, successful, ambitious and heir of the two-centuries-old New York Newly family.\n\nShe couldn't wait to tell her grandfather, and she was doubly sad that he wouldn't be in New York for Thanksgiving. He hadn't returned her call from a few days ago, and she'd been too swamped at work to call him again. She was giddy with excitement about the announcement, though. She'd call him tonight for certain.\n\n\"Glory. Honestly,\" Joy snorted, \"you have a talent for shooting for the moon without any fuel or even the rocket. I'm not marrying Chuck to get ahead in my career.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Why, then?\"\n\n\"Because he's sweet to me, uh, when we're finally alone. Not always easy. He's smart...and...and good to the employees and he's clearly devoted to his father. His attitude toward family is important to me, you know? His mother must have been wonderful.\"\n\nGlory folded her arms over her chest, her faux Louis Vuitton purse banging against her side.\n\nJoy frowned. She didn't like that probing, accusatory stare Glory was piercing her with. \"And...they've planned an incredible Thanksgiving for us. We'll watch the parade at some friends' penthouse. Then dinner at Le Bernadin.\"\n\n\"Wow. Impressive,\" Glory groaned and rolled her eyes.\n\n\"Liar. You're not impressed.\"\n\n\"Neither should you be.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You already bought a turkey. We were going to have the whole gang over for dinner. Remember?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Did you forget?\"\n\n\"No. Not really. But when Mr. Newly...Dad, I mean, told us of his plans, what could I say?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. I get that. Alexander Newly is the most overbearing person I've ever met.\"\n\nJoy smiled. \"And that's saying a lot... coming from you.\"\n\n\"Okay. Fine. I admit to being somewhat obtrusive on occasion, but it's for everybody's own good. I like being the mother hen.\"\n\n\"This, of course, is because you're older than I am.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"You're the best roommate in the world. And we still have Christmas.\"\n\n\"Look, I don't mind missing the holidays, if I thought you were happy.\"\n\n\"Don't start. I've told you. I'm happy! What's not to be happy about? I'm engaged to a handsome, up-and-coming guy who\u2014\"\n\nGlory cut in. \"Whose father appears to love you more than he does.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" Joy countered as she fingered a sheaf of papers on her desk. Anytime the truth pinched the edges of her heart, she immediately rebuffed the feeling by moving on to something new. Immersing herself in yet another client's financial fiasco or potential bankruptcy was her forte. She liked saving her clients, bailing them out of hot water, taking meetings with the IRS and pulling their hands off panic buttons. She was good at her job. Very good.\n\nGlory stared at her. \"Not true, huh?\" She jerked her head toward the open door.\n\nChuck, dressed impeccably in a new black wool suit, brilliant white shirt and gray-and-black designer tie, breezed into the office, his Bluetooth activated as he spoke with a client. Going up to Joy, he kissed her cheek and smiled, not missing a beat of his conversation.\n\n\"Fine. Later,\" he said and clicked off. \"Joy, you gotta learn to take my calls\u2014especially after hours.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Not when I'm working on Nathan Withers's account for you. And not when the only thing you have to talk about is the client.\"\n\n\"Ouch.\" He grinned, glancing at Glory. \"My bad. But you know how I get around the holidays. Forgive me?\"\n\nHe kissed her lightly on the mouth.\n\nJoy barely had time to pucker her lips before he whirled around, took an incoming call on the Bluetooth and was gone.\n\nGlory glared at her. \"I didn't say a word.\"\n\nJoy opened her mouth to protest and closed it. She didn't like how much truth was in what Glory said. Too many times Joy had wondered why there weren't romantic moments between her and Chuck. He was always like this at the end of the year. Of course, that didn't explain the lack of romance during the summer. There hadn't been a weekend where they took the Staten Island Ferry and just \"escaped\" the city. No trips to an island beach or even the Jersey beach. Even dinner date conversations revolved around their clients. Still, she and Chuck had planned a future together. Solid. Secure. Clearly devoted to family as she was to her grandfather. And one day, they'd get around to romance. Wouldn't they?\n\nGlory's smile was too smug. \"That guy makes my case for me.\"\n\n\"Forget it. I'm marrying Chuck and that's it. I've got work to do. So do you,\" Joy finally said.\n\n\"I do,\" Glory replied. \"Want a coffee? I need a pot of caffeine myself.\"\n\n\"Is that because you didn't get in till after one last night?\"\n\nJoy's cell rang. She looked at the caller ID. \"Gish. Another Indiana scammer.\"\n\nGlory cranked her head around. \"How many of those have you gotten in the last few days? Maybe it's not a scammer.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Joy accepted the call. \"This is Joy.\"\n\n\"Joy, thank heavens I got you!\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots? Is that you?\"\n\n\"You recognize my voice?\"\n\n\"Yours I would never forget. So, what's up?\"\n\n\"Oh, Joy, dear. I have the most awful news.\"\n\nJoy felt her scalp crawl, and her knees weakened. She placed one hand on the desk and lowered herself into her chair. \"It's Grandpa.\"\n\nGlory stiffened, her eyes instantly alert. Quickly, she crossed to Joy. She put her hands on Joy's shoulders.\n\nJoy felt her support and covered one of Glory's hands with her own.\n\n\"I'm afraid so.\"\n\n\"Is he sick?\"\n\n\"He passed away. Last night, dear. Massive heart attack.\"\n\n\"But...\" Joy tried to make sense of what she was hearing. Frank could not be dead. He was her touchstone. \"He was fine last year at Thanksgiving. I mean, I know he took a couple naps. And when I last talked to him, he said he had to cut the call short because his poinsettia supplier was on the other line.\" Joy's eyes were full of tears, but she didn't feel them. Her face had turned cold. Her hands shook.\n\n\"Frank's attorney tried to call you last night. He said he left a message...\"\n\n\"My phone was off. Then this morning, my fia\u2014my boss called right when I woke up. He's relentless and he talked to me on the entire subway ride and up until I walked into my office.\"\n\n\"I understand, dear. Now, you have to come back here immediately and tend to the funeral details. The attorney wants to go over the will with you. His name is Kyle Evans. I'll text you his number. Joy, I'll do all I can to help you with anything you need.\"\n\n\"That's sweet of you. Thank you.\"\n\n\"We all loved Frank, dear. This is a shock to all your friends back home. Call me when you arrive.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Joy hung up.\n\nFriends? What friends did she have in Indian Lake? None that she knew. There was only her grandpa, and now he was gone and she was alone. She put her phone down and dropped her head into her hands. \"I feel sick.\"\n\nGlory rubbed Joy's shoulders. \"I'm so, so sorry, Joy. What can I do?\" Glory asked.\n\n\"Nothing. There's nothing anyone can do. My grandpa is gone. My only family. I...I have no one.\"\n\n\"Not true. You have me. And\u2014and Chuck...\" Glory's voice trailed off.\n\nJoy looked down at the incoming text from Mrs. Beabots with Kyle's phone number. \"I have to go back to Indian Lake. ASAP.\"\n\n\"Sure you do, sweetie. But...\" Glory glanced out the door.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That'll make your new father-in-law-to-be not so overjoyed.\"\n\n\"The firm can live without me. Chuck is very capable. Even though he puts a lot on my shoulders, he'll be fine,\" Joy replied firmly. \"Grandpa was all I had. Plus, I need to take care of the funeral arrangements.\"\n\n\"How long will all this take?\"\n\n\"A week, tops. Besides, I have over a month of accrued vacation. Honestly, I can video chat with our clients, and with text and email, no one will know I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Tell me what I can do,\" Glory said.\n\n\"Would you mind going to the apartment and packing a bag for me? Casual stuff. And a dress for the funeral? I'll book my flight now.\"\n\n\"Done.\" Glory rushed to the door and stopped. \"Joy. You know I love you, girl.\"\n\n\"Love you, too. And thanks.\"\n\nAs Glory whisked out the door, Joy dialed the attorney's number.\n\nThe call was picked up on the second ring. \"Evans and Evans Law. How may I help you?\"\n\n\"Hello. This is Joy Boston. I need to speak with Kyle Evans. I just received his message that...my grandfather, Frank Boston...\" Joy's voice was chopped off by the biting burn of sorrow in her throat. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she dropped her forehead to her palm. \"...died...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "The auditorium seats at Saint Mark's Elementary School were filled to capacity with parents, grandparents and students who applauded as the final curtain fell on the traditional Thanksgiving pageant. Adam Masterson bolted to his feet and proudly yelled \"Bravo!\" as his son, Titus, took another bow.\n\nAdam felt his heart swell and his sight blur watching Titus's smile radiate across the expanse. Titus. The light of his life, the motivation that forced him to get out of bed in the morning despite the shroud of grief he wore since his wife, Amie, had died three years ago. \"Well done!\" Adam shouted, smiling at Titus, who stood next to Timmy Bosworth, dressed in a Pilgrim costume.\n\nTimmy took Titus's hand in his and raised it over their heads. \"Thank you and happy Thanksgiving!\" Timmy announced to the crowd.\n\nThe audience erupted in more applause as the curtain fell for the last time.\n\n\"Adam,\" Sarah Bosworth said, as she hoisted three-year-old Charlotte into her arms, \"Titus was wonderful. He recited his lines like a professional actor. I felt like I was right there on Plymouth Plantation with those kids.\"\n\nAdam couldn't help the rush of pride that shot straight up his spine. \"He was good, wasn't he?\"\n\n\"He was. Timmy told me that he and Titus only practiced three times.\"\n\n\"I'll let you in on a secret,\" Adam said, bending closer, his hair falling over his forehead. \"I think Titus has an eidetic memory. The first time I took him through his lines, he'd memorized everything.\"\n\n\"No kidding?\" Sarah's eyes widened. \"Wish I had that ability.\"\n\nAdam glanced toward the stage and saw some of the kids running down the aisle. \"He's been reading since he was three. I guess I shouldn't be surprised at anything he does.\"\n\n\"Trust me,\" Sarah said. \"Gifted children aren't easy. I know. Both Timmy and Annie are exceptional, and just last week, I caught Charlotte here sitting at the piano playing with Annie.\"\n\nAdam chucked Charlotte under the chin. \"A prodigy, huh?\"\n\nCharlotte tossed her blond curls and laid her head on Sarah's shoulder. \"I like piano.\" Charlotte smiled up at Adam.\n\n\"Dad! Dad!\" Titus shouted exuberantly, as he worked his way through the throng of parents leaving their seats. Titus's rented Pilgrim costume was faded but fit well. He did struggle with the black hat, which tended to interfere with his ever-present sport band that held his thick glasses in place. Titus's mom had been myopic, too. But unlike Amie, Titus tended to be quite clumsy, always impatient to race to the next room, the next day and the next adventure.\n\n\"Dad! Did you see me?\" Titus hurried up to Adam and flung his arms around his waist.\n\nAdam smoothed Titus's thick black hair away from his forehead and looked down into his eager crystal-blue eyes. His son looked exactly like Adam had when he was \"nearly six\"\u2014minus the glasses. \"I did! And you were the best. You did great.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Dad.\" Titus hugged him again.\n\nTimmy Bosworth rushed up to Sarah, along with his eleven-year-old sister, Annie.\n\n\"Mom,\" Annie said. \"Can I take Charlotte backstage to see Mrs. Cook?\"\n\nSarah narrowed her eyes. \"Why does Mrs. Cook want to see your baby sister?\"\n\nAnnie glanced sheepishly at Titus, who had a conspiratorial expression. \"Um. I told her Charlotte could play piano.\"\n\nCharlotte squirmed out of Sarah's arms. \"I can play!\"\n\nAnnie reached for Charlotte's hand. \"Mom?\"\n\n\"Oh, fine. Go.\" Sarah acquiesced.\n\nAdam watched as Annie and Charlotte bounded up the stage steps. Titus said, \"Charlotte should think about her future career. Like me.\"\n\nAdam jerked his head back. This was news to him. \"And that would be...what?\"\n\nTitus looked at Timmy, who elbowed him for encouragement. Timmy and Titus were close, now that Titus was in kindergarten. Timmy had taken Titus under his wing, and when Adam had been immersed in a geothermal energy construction project, or if he'd had to drive to Chicago to meet with a prospective client, Sarah generously watched Titus at her house. Adam didn't know how Sarah juggled three children, a creatively demanding career as a busy commercial design consultant, the summer fund-raising festival for Saint Mark's and volunteer work for the new Indian Lake Community Center.\n\nToo often, Adam was caught spending late-night hours at his computer rather than doing the laundry, making costumes for Titus or thinking about things like Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. The only thing that broke his focus on work was caring for Titus. His son was his joy.\n\n\"I've had a revelation, Dad,\" Titus said seriously.\n\nAdam crossed his arms over his chest and glanced at Sarah, who smiled at Titus. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I liked working on this pageant and I think I want to go into the theater business.\"\n\nAdam coughed and held his fist to his mouth. This was not what he'd thought his brilliant son would say. He'd imagined that Titus would want to follow in his footsteps. Become an engineer or a physicist. Titus was smart and quick and liked working alongside him on his local projects. Just last week Titus had gone with him to Frank Boston's greenhouse, where Adam had been installing a new geothermal heating unit.\n\n\"Theater? You mean you want to be an actor?\"\n\n\"No, Dad. Timmy's gonna be an actor. I want to write plays. Like I did for Mrs. Cook.\"\n\nAdam's eyes snapped to Sarah, who shook her head. \"What did you write, son?\"\n\n\"My speech. I did the research, which was interesting. And enlightening.\"\n\nAdam mouthed \"enlightening.\" He was continually surprised at Titus's vocabulary. He'd bought Titus a dictionary and thesaurus six months ago. He wondered if Titus had read them both cover to cover. \"Well, we'll have to talk about it.\"\n\nTitus's smile vanished. \"You always say that and we never do.\"\n\nSarah's eyebrow arched. She put her hand on Timmy's shoulder. \"Let's go find your sisters.\"\n\n\"Sure, Mom.\"\n\nShe gave Adam a quick hug. \"I'm guessing I'll see you at Frank's funeral?\"\n\nAdam had known Sarah and her group of friends since high school. Adam had been the nerdy guy in high school, wading through CAD programs, tinkering with machines and engines.\n\nAdam had never known his parents, who gave him up for adoption to a church-affiliated foster home only weeks after his birth. They'd left him in a car seat at Pastor Flutie's front door with a note giving his birth date and name, which Adam always believed was fictitious. Years ago, Adam had tried to track down information about his birth parents, but the time and money he'd spent were wasted.\n\nPastor Flutie and his wife, Martha, were good people and raised him, along with over thirty other children who didn't have parents and had come their way.\n\nThough they'd clothed and fed him, given him attention, Adam had always kept to himself. He didn't voice opinions often, and when he did, he made certain he had all his facts.\n\nAdam had always wanted a family. He'd envied the close-knit Barzonni family and Sarah's loving mother, Ann-Marie, and he'd been there for Sarah when both her parents died.\n\nSarah had been a good friend to him ever since he'd come back to town, after Amie died of leukemia. Sarah and Luke had included Titus, and their friendship meant a great deal to him. But he was also careful not to ask too much of them.\n\nSarah touched Adam's sleeve. \"Look, I know how close you were to Frank...\"\n\nAdam felt the emotion in his throat grow hot. He choked it back. \"He was like my own grandfather.\"\n\n\"I know. He loved you, Adam. You did so much for him these past years.\"\n\n\"I should have done more.\"\n\n\"Come on. You were with him when he died. If you hadn't been there... Calling the ambulance. Staying with him at the hospital until...\" Sarah's eyes filled with tears. \"It's so hard.\"\n\nSarah had been through a great deal of grief herself. He touched her hand. It was ice-cold. \"I'm sorry, Sarah. All this must remind you of your parents. They were good people.\"\n\n\"The best. They liked you a lot, Adam.\"\n\n\"You don't have to say that. I was such a...dork.\"\n\n\"Stop. Okay?\" She looked down at Titus, who watched them both with serious, probing eyes. \"I gotta go. Let me know about the funeral. I'm guessing the family will take care of everything.\"\n\nAdam shoved his hands in his jeans' pockets. \"That would be Joy.\"\n\n\"Oh...my...gosh. Adam. I forgot. I'm sorry. Mrs. Beabots called her and broke the news. Have you talked to Joy?\"\n\n\"Not since she left for college.\" Ten years ago, Joy had been his girlfriend. Adam had given her a promise ring the day before they'd started their senior year in high school. That same day he'd received a letter from Purdue University that he'd won a full-ride scholarship for engineering. Adam had believed that he and Joy would spend the rest of their lives together. She'd promised to love him.\n\nFor a foster kid with no love in his life, Joy had been all he'd ever wanted. He was the one who dreamed of a cottage by Indian Lake with a rose-covered fence. He'd envisioned kids and a dog and a life of happiness.\n\nAll that year after school, Adam had gone to the Boston greenhouses to work until supper alongside Joy and her Frank. Frank had been the kind of grandfather Adam thought came along only in fairy tales. He gave Adam a few extra dollars to take Joy to a movie or out for a pizza. He loaned Adam his truck to drive them all out to the beach in the summer. Frank had been father, grandfather, mentor and adviser. Where Pastor Flutie had lacked in practical and business guidance, Frank filled in the blanks.\n\n\"He was family to me,\" Adam whispered, trying desperately not to show the emotion he felt so sharply.\n\nSarah leaned closer. \"I didn't mean to open that wound.\"\n\n\"It's okay. Joy left. She wanted Columbia, her accounting degree and life in New York.\" He shrugged his shoulders. \"And she got it.\"\n\n\"She did.\" Sarah paused. \"When I talked to Mrs. Beabots this morning, she said Joy's coming back here to arrange the funeral.\"\n\n\"Of course. Mrs. Beabots talked to Joy...\"\n\n\"I know, right? Mrs. Beabots keeps up with the whereabouts of all of us. I suppose Frank had told her where Joy worked.\"\n\n\"Newly and Associates,\" Adam said.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Sarah eyed him, but continued. \"She's flying out of New York today.\"\n\n\"Today,\" he repeated. His heart shook. Joy, who had told him she didn't want the same things out of life that he did. She wanted to leave Indian Lake and never come back. She wanted a life in New York with hustle and noise and excitement.\n\nShe didn't want him.\n\nShe'd given him back his promise ring and told him she was going to Columbia University. She never answered a phone call or an email after she moved.\n\nBy the end of Adam's freshman year, Frank told him that Joy had made it clear that Frank could visit her in New York, where she'd arranged for internships in the summers, but she never wanted to see Indian Lake, her parents' graves or any of the people of the town, whom she blamed for the car accident that killed them both.\n\nThe cut that had hurt Adam the most was the fact that Joy never gave him the chance to comfort her. She never turned to him. The pain of those days was still with him.\n\nAdam had met physicist Amie his senior year at Purdue. She was pretty and bright and they shared common interests. She'd got pregnant on their honeymoon in Chicago. They'd had little money back then, which had bothered Adam. In two years, his midnight \"tinkerings\" had resulted in patents for his geothermal plans and then sales of the units themselves. Two years after Titus was born, Amie was diagnosed with leukemia. The progression was fast.\n\n\"It worked out in the end. I have Titus.\"\n\n\"We all adored Amie. And Titus is a true blessing. I love every minute he's around.\" She looked at Titus. \"I really have, honey.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Miss Sarah,\" Titus said, slipping his hand into Adam's.\n\n\"Speaking of which,\" Sarah went on. \"Why not let Titus come home with Timmy and the girls and me? Miss Milse is making pies for Thanksgiving. The kids can play video games while you get your errands done.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? I mean, I don't want to impose.\"\n\n\"Dad.\" Titus yanked on his hand. \"Please? Can I go?\"\n\nAdam had to smile. \"It's not much fun hauling cement and nails around, is it, Titus?\"\n\n\"Not really and the building supply place is so dreary.\"\n\n\"Dreary.\" Adam grinned. Another new word. He wondered if he shouldn't buy a second thesaurus for himself, to keep up with his brilliant son. No wonder the kid wanted to write plays.\n\n\"So? Can I?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" He ruffled Titus's hair and dislodged the Pilgrim hat. Titus righted it, smiling at his dad. \"Thanks for this, Sarah. I really have a lot to do at the greenhouses. For Frank.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She held out her hand to Titus. \"C'mon, honey.\"\n\n\"Titus,\" Adam said. \"Get your coat and zip it up this time. Don't forget your knit cap. It's getting cold outside.\"\n\n\"Dad. I know.\" Titus pouted.\n\n\"And you mind Miss Milse. Don't poke your finger in the pies, and stay away from her Cuisinart.\"\n\n\"I know, Dad. Sharp knives. Mixers. All off-limits.\"\n\nSarah laughed. \"He'll be okay.\"\n\n\"I know. I know. It's just...\"\n\n\"Hard to be mom and dad?\" she asked.\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"Okay. Let's go find the girls.\" She started to walk away. She looked over her shoulder. \"Just text me when you're on your way to pick him up.\"\n\n\"I will. Thanks again.\"\n\n\"No worries.\" Titus and Timmy raced ahead of her, both boys yelling for Annie and Charlotte.\n\nAdam chuckled to himself, leaned down and grabbed his sheepskin jacket and slipped it on. Most of the parents and children had left by the front doors to the auditorium. Adam found a couple folded playbills that Mrs. Cook had printed up. He'd come in late, a bad workaholic habit, so he hadn't grabbed a playbill earlier.\n\nAs he started up the aisle, he noticed Titus's name in bold print. Above his name was that of Mrs. Mary-Catherine Cook.\n\nAbove that was the title: PLAYWRIGHT.\n\nAdam halted. \"Titus's teacher gave him writing credit for his little speech.\" He was both awed and humbled.\n\nHis son was growing up far too quickly. And he wasn't ready for it.\n\nHe put the playbill in his inner jacket breast pocket and walked out into the November cold.\n\nHe wasn't ready for a lot of things. Titus growing up. Frank dying. And he especially wasn't ready to see Joy again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Joy had just deplaned at O'Hare Airport when her cell phone rang. \"Hello, darling.\"\n\n\"Darling? Who's that?\"\n\n\"That would be you, Chuck. Us being engaged and all, I was thinking we should have endearments for each other.\"\n\n\"I don't like it.\"\n\n\"How about 'baby'?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"Sweetie? Cutie? Chuckie?\" she joked.\n\n\"Don't go there. Look, Joy. Seriously, talk to me. The Taylor account...\"\n\nShe shouldered her way into the throng of people moving toward baggage claim. \"The Taylor account is on your desk. I sent an email to Lessings Acoustics, too. They'll contact you directly. Until I get back.\"\n\n\"When will that be?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but not long.\"\n\n\"This is putting a lot on me, you know,\" he groused.\n\nJoy rolled her eyes. Looking up, she saw huge Christmas wreaths above the concourse. An enormous Christmas tree with thousands of lights rivaled the Rockefeller tree. Surrounding the bottom of the tree was a sea of lush, tropical poinsettias.\n\nJoy pulled to a stop, her roller bag banging the backs of her legs. She felt the jagged edge of sorrow in her heart as hundreds of loving moments with her grandfather flashed across her mind's eye. Her head dipped, and she let her tears drop to the terrazzo floor. She pulled out a tissue and blew her nose, remembering that Chuck was still on the phone.\n\n\"Joy? Joy? What's going on?\"\n\n\"Sorry. Big crowds.\" She glanced up at the signs directing her to baggage claim. It would have been easy to fall apart, but she needed, no\u2014had to stay strong now. She couldn't lean on Chuck.\n\n\"So, how long till you get to Indian Lake?\"\n\n\"An hour and a half. I hired an Uber.\"\n\n\"Call me from the car. I have half a dozen more accounts to go over with you.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nChuck hung up without another word. Joy got on the down escalator. She held the phone up to see that the call had ended.\n\n\"I love you, too, Chuck.\"\n\nJoy shoved the phone in her purse and saw the Uber driver at the bottom of the escalator, holding a sign with her name on it.\n\nShe walked up to him. \"Hi! I'm Joy Boston.\"\n\nThe middle-aged man nodded. \"I'm Roy. Happy to see you. I'll take your bags for you. Do you have more luggage to claim?\"\n\n\"No, this is it. I won't be staying long.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's a pity,\" Roy said, as he politely ushered her toward the outer door.\n\n\"Why's that?\"\n\n\"Indian Lake is so lovely at the holidays. So many decorations and activities. The Christmas Concert. The symphony. The children's Christmas pageant. The caroling parties. The Candlelight Tour...\"\n\nThey walked outside to the cold. \"They still have all that?\"\n\n\"Of course. I take my grandson to the Christmas parade every year, and then we mail his letter to Santa at the Elf Mail Station.\" They walked to Roy's black SUV, and he put her bags in the back as she got in the back seat.\n\nAs much as Joy had struggled to make a new life for herself in New York, with new friends and new holiday traditions, the old days and the old ways of celebrating flooded her.\n\nJust thinking about Indian Lake released anger she hadn't felt in years. Anger toward the townspeople for their apathy\u2014laziness that directly caused her parents' car accident. She hadn't been able to forgive them then or now. The pain of her long-ago scars resonated in her. She would go to town, do her duty, find a buyer for the greenhouse and leave as quickly as possible.\n\nShe forced her mind to redirect to happier times.\n\nShe remembered her mother and father working alongside her, tending the poinsettias. The week before Thanksgiving, enormous delivery trucks would roll into the parking lot and they'd unload red, pink and white beauties. Just thinking about those gorgeous tropical flowers caused Joy to wish for faraway adventures, sandy beaches and palm trees, places she'd planned to explore with...\n\n\"Adam.\"\n\nShe sat up straight.\n\nAdam hadn't crossed her mind once since she'd got the news of her grandfather's death. But there he was. She remembered his wide shoulders, his thick raven hair and how he'd forget to cut it, so it would hang down, nearly covering half his face as he worked furiously on yet another machine that never reached \"functionality.\"\n\nShe'd known Adam was smart and was convinced he hadn't yet found his groove. She'd urged him on, believing his genius would pay off one day. The time when he'd lost the state science fair championship, he'd been despondent and distant, but Joy had kissed away his tears and forced him to envision a golden future filled with success. He said he believed her.\n\nThey'd had a romantic senior year together, stealing kisses in the greenhouses. Learning how to cross-pollinate and hybridize poinsettias from her grandfather. Going to summer concerts in the park and dancing at the beach under the stars\u2014with Adam humming a song to her. He'd given her a gold promise ring and told her he wished he was rich enough for a diamond. At the time, she hadn't cared.\n\nI loved him.\n\nThose days with Adam had been the most romantic of her life. Idyllic days\u2014until her parents died.\n\nShe looked out the window at the nude maple trees along the interstate. The ground was barren of flowers; the grass was frozen. The sky was the same depressing slate-gray, promising snow flurries or rain.\n\nShe felt gray inside without her grandfather, just as she had after her parents' deaths. Grief's fingerprint was a deep one. She wondered if she'd ever feel sunny again.\n\nShe looked down at her gloved hands and remembered a winter day once when she'd forgotten her gloves and Adam had walked her to the greenhouses after school. He'd taken both her hands in his, rubbed them until they were pink and warm again, and then he'd given her his too-big gloves to wear. He'd pulled her close as the wind whipped around them.\n\n\"I'll always keep you warm,\" he'd said.\n\n\"Ditto,\" she'd replied.\n\n\"In fact, I'd like to be the one who discovers cheap energy to keep all the world warm. No one should go cold,\" he'd said.\n\n\"That's what you want to do? Save the world from freezing?\"\n\n\"It's a tall order, but it's what I want to do,\" he'd said and kissed the end of her very cold nose.\n\n\"Now, that was very warming,\" Joy had replied.\n\nShe certainly couldn't remember anything memorably romantic that Chuck had done with her since they'd met.\n\nThere was never a lack of wine or exotic food, but their dates wound up being work dates.\n\nHe'd proposed at the sushi bar they frequented, though she didn't like much on the menu except the California rolls. He'd asked her to be his wife, and just as she'd said \"yes\" his cell phone rang. He'd looked down at it, but didn't take the call. She'd thought it was a good sign. But after he kissed her and they toasted with sake, which she also didn't like, he excused himself to take the call.\n\nJoy knew that Chuck felt enormous pressure to perform to his father's high expectations. Chuck had a good heart and he was eager to please both her and his father. He was mindful of their long hours and would surprise her with a latte and buttered bagel from the deli down the street. When she complained her back hurt after long hours at the computer, he introduced her to a killer pain-relieving essential oil as he rubbed her neck. Chuck had seen Joy's performance potential on her first interview and hired her on the spot. She gave him credit for that. Because he was her boss, she ignored his excuses to work overtime with her over the years. She pretended not to notice him lingering in her office after client conferences. Chuck had actually gone to his father and discussed his growing attraction to her before asking his permission to pursue a romance. For Joy, their relationship had evolved slowly over the next few years. No fireworks. No adrenaline rush. They were solid and secure. She liked that.\n\nShe had to admit, though, that dinner with Chuck was polar opposite from the mac and cheese she used to make for Adam and Grandpa, which they'd share after a ten-hour Saturday working retail at Christmas in the greenhouses.\n\nJoy had been so lost in thought that she'd forgotten that she'd turned off the ringer on her cell phone. She turned it back on and saw that Chuck had left three voice messages and five texts. She answered the texts and replied she would call him when she wasn't with Roy, as some of their conversations were best kept confidential for the clients' sake.\n\nThey had driven into town and stopped at the light with beautiful Indian Lake dead ahead. Joy leaned forward.\n\n\"Oh, Grandpa.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\" Roy asked.\n\n\"Sorry. Nothing. It's just that I've forgotten how pretty this place is. I grew up here.\"\n\n\"So, you have family here?\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\nRoy drove into town, past the red sandstone county courthouse with its one-hundred-and-forty-year-old clock tower and onto Maple Boulevard. They passed houses she remembered, belonging to Sarah Jensen and Mrs. Beabots. Saint Mark's Church. The Indian Lake Police Station. Specters of past, happy days flew around Joy, pulling her back to Indian Lake like magnets. And with each memory, she missed her mother, her father and especially her grandfather all the more.\n\nThat was why when Roy drove up to the three glass greenhouses, which her grandfather had built right after World War II, her vision had been blurred by her tears. She couldn't possibly be seeing correctly.\n\n\"What is this?\" she asked Roy, like a stupefied tourist.\n\n\"Boston Greenhouses.\" He waved his hand across the expanse of the windshield. \"This is it.\"\n\n\"No.\" She shook her head and opened the door, wiping her eyes. The greenhouses were empty. Totally devoid of even one poinsettia. Panes were filthy, cracked or missing from the glass ceilings and walls. The farthest greenhouse was in the worst condition. Its once perfectly maintained and cleaned brick-and-tile floor now sprouted weeds, frozen back from the cold November weather. Joy walked liked a zombie toward the greenhouse. Her father and grandfather had taught her how to clean the tiles with the sprayer. She'd swept the water away to expose the pretty sand-colored tiles. She'd taken a great deal of pride in the glistening glass walls and ceiling. She and her grandfather had pressure washed those panes every month. Their patrons commented on how good the plants had it when they came to live at Boston Greenhouses.\n\nJoy felt her insides twist. Not only was her grandfather dead, but he'd lied to her. He'd told her he couldn't come to New York to be with her because he was too busy. It was going to be his best year ever, he'd said.\n\nShe turned to Roy. \"How long have the greenhouses been closed, Roy?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. A few years.\"\n\nA few years... Joy's shock turned to a sense of betrayal.\n\n\"Grandpa lied to me. And now he's gone.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Joy looked back at the weeds growing through the tiles.\n\n\"Years. Not just this Christmas, but many holiday seasons it's been closed.\"\n\nShe went to the front door, peered through the windows and tried the latch. It was unlocked.\n\n\"What?\" Why would the door be unlocked? Had the attorney unlocked it? Perhaps when she met Kyle Evans, she'd gain more insight.\n\nShe pushed the door and stepped in. She wasn't prepared for the shock.\n\nAs if she'd been swallowed by a time warp, she was eighteen again, rushing in on a Saturday morning to see her grandfather already at the cash register, his big Chicago Cubs coffee mug filled with steaming coffee as he counted the money. She remembered her mother, dressed in jeans, a floral blouse and a rubber apron while she watered the flowers and sang to them. Her father whistled while he carried in heavy sacks of humus and fertilizer to sell. She'd forgotten how much she missed his whistling.\n\nAs the door swung closed behind her, a numbing chill enveloped her. The sight of empty shelves, dusty counters and cobwebs around the ceiling where garlands and Christmas ornaments once hung was heartbreaking. The walk-in flower cooler was dark and smelled like mold. The carpet needed shampooing. Worst of all, there were no poinsettias, no life, no energy.\n\n\"No Grandpa. No Mom or Dad.\"\n\nJoy walked to the checkout counter, where she used to wrap gold and silver foil around the flowerpots and swathe the flowers with colorful print paper to protect the delicate poinsettias. She and her mom would work the counter together. She could almost smell Mom's rose soap.\n\nUnwinding her scarf, she walked behind the counter and was surprised to see full boxes of ribbons, foil and cellophane, and bolts of wrapping paper sitting in the same spots as they had a decade ago. \"Not everything was sold or discarded.\"\n\nShe looked toward the back of the retail gift area. Two French doors led to a smaller greenhouse where specialty orchids, amaryllis and hybrid poinsettias used to be displayed on long wooden tables. That was Joy's favorite area, where her grandfather would test his yearlong projects of coral-and-white-striped poinsettias, yellows, ambers, and try as he might, the absolute impossible task of creating a blue poinsettia. Blue poinsettias didn't exist naturally, and he would dye white ones to please designers in Chicago, but he was a dreamer. He'd often told her he wanted to create a flower that was not only beautiful but timeless. Something the world would never have seen if it hadn't been for him.\n\nBehind the special greenhouse were the storage rooms, where the new shipments of gift items, table linens, Christmas stockings, birdbaths and feeders, scented candles and bath oils and washes used to be delivered and stored until they were put out for display.\n\n\"I wonder if any stock is left...\" Joy started toward the storage room when she heard a door slam. She halted. \"What was that?\" She peered through the French doors. Was someone breaking into the greenhouse?\n\n\"Hello? Is someone there?\"\n\nPeering through the windows, she saw a tall man, wearing a buckskin-yellow suede jacket with a sheepskin collar and lining, jeans, a scarf around his neck and a tan cowboy hat that was pulled down low so that she couldn't see his face. He was carrying a large sack of something on his shoulder as he pushed one door open with his booted foot.\n\nHis presence filled the room as if he owned the place and she was the one intruding.\n\nHe placed the sack on the cement floor of the greenhouse, then slapped his hands together, creating a cloud of white dust. He pushed the tip of his cowboy hat up and leveled on her the bluest eyes she'd ever seen.\n\nFamiliar eyes.\n\nEyes that probed her in a way that went straight to her heart.\n\n\"Adam?\" She almost choked out his name, being both stunned and oddly pleased to see him.\n\n\"Hey.\"\n\nHe continued to stare at her, assessing her as if she were one of his cogs in a machine he was creating.\n\n\"Hi,\" she returned.\n\nUnsmiling, he said, \"I heard you might come back.\"\n\n\"Yes. Of\u2014of course. Why wouldn't I?\"\n\n\"Been a long time.\"\n\nJoy didn't like the accusatory tone Adam used. Nor did she like the fact that he'd matured into a handsome man with flashing, mesmerizing eyes. And how was that possible? They were \"over\" a long time ago.\n\n\"He was my grandpa.\"\n\n\"And you came back because he died.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Sorry. I mean I'm sorry about Frank. He loved you a lot.\"\n\n\"And you know this...how?\"\n\n\"He never stopped talking about you.\"\n\nJoy felt a pang of guilt for not being there more for her grandfather. But she didn't like Adam's tone. She glanced through the French door, propped open by the sack of cement he'd deposited. She saw a compressor, metal pipes, PVC pipes, vent apparatus and coils of copper tubing. A toolbox with wrenches, hammers and screwdrivers sat next to the pile of materials.\n\n\"Just exactly how did you get in here?\"\n\n\"Key.\"\n\nJoy had to consciously halt her eyes from flying wide open. \"You? Have access to my grandfather's place of business?\"\n\n\"Clearly\u2014\" he waved his hand across the empty retail area \"\u2014it's not a business anymore.\"\n\n\"I was told Frank closed it years ago.\"\n\n\"He did. Five years, to be exact.\"\n\nJoy put her fingertips to her temples. None of this made sense. \"I don't understand. I flew him to New York for Thanksgiving every year. He told me he had to hurry back here to get the poinsettia shipments in. He said business had never been better.\"\n\n\"He lied.\"\n\n\"I got that, Adam!\"\n\n\"Don't jump on me!\" he shot back, all too quickly and with twice the force.\n\n\"Why didn't he tell me the truth?\"\n\n\"He didn't want to disappoint you,\" Adam replied, dropping his harsh tone.\n\nHer eyes were tearing again, but she didn't care. \"He told you that?\"\n\n\"He did.\"\n\n\"But nothing he would do could ever, ever disappoint me. I loved him. That's all. The attorney told me on the phone that Grandpa was too proud to ask for my help.\"\n\n\"That, too.\" Adam glanced down as he asked, \"Would you have come back if he asked?\"\n\n\"I don't know. No. Maybe...if he'd told me how bad it was.\"\n\nAdam shook his head. \"Well, we'll never know.\"\n\nAdam took off his hat, and as he did, his thick black hair fell over his forehead.\n\nJoy nearly gasped as the movement reminded her of when they'd been in love.\n\n\"I know that Frank didn't want to destroy your memories of this place. How it was.\"\n\n\"It was glorious, wasn't it?\" Joy felt her first smile creep slowly to her lips as she remembered so much.\n\n\"It was,\" he replied wistfully, still staring at her.\n\n\"From the time I was nine or ten, it was my job to keep those tiles clean. I took pride in scrubbing them\u2014\"\n\n\"Until they glistened,\" he interrupted. \"I remember.\"\n\n\"Adam.\"\n\n\"I remember a lot of things.\"\n\nShe paused, fearing what she wanted to ask, but daring to say it. \"Like us?\"\n\n\"Yeah, like us.\"\n\n\"We were kids.\"\n\n\"I thought we were pretty adult. Planning a life together.\"\n\n\"Well, we're different people now.\"\n\n\"We certainly are,\" he replied with that dark tone he'd used before.\n\n\"You're angry with me. About the past...\"\n\nHe took a long step toward her. \"Not the past, Joy. The present. I was the one who was with Frank when he had the heart attack. I called 911. I was in the hospital with him. I held his hand when he passed.\"\n\n\"Oh, God. I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"His last thoughts were about you.\"\n\n\"Thank you for being with him.\" A new wave of guilt and grief hit her.\n\n\"I should go.\" He started to go, then turned back to her.\n\nJoy braced as she felt a wave of heat from him.\n\n\"I know Frank lied to you about some things, but it seems to me you could have pried yourself away from your city friends long enough to visit your only living relative. All these years and you never came back. I watched Frank spend Christmas after Christmas alone. He talked about you and the old days. How he loved you. And what did he get? A ten-minute phone call, Joy. A ten-minute phone call.\"\n\nAdam slapped his hat against his thigh, turned and stomped toward the French doors.\n\nJoy's natural defenses shot to the fore. \"I have responsibilities!\"\n\nAdam pulled to a stop and marched back to her. His face was nearly nose to nose with hers. \"Nothing was as important as Frank and you know it. I would have killed to have what you had with Frank. All that love. All that concern and caring. At least I got to enjoy that after college, when I came back here. Frank befriended me as if not a day had passed. He may have been your blood, but he was my family. And I miss him.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" she whispered, as she lowered her eyes.\n\nHe moved back. \"I'm sorry. It's just that I swore when I moved back here that I'd keep myself in check. Getting close to people never worked out for me.\"\n\n\"Like when I left\u2014\"\n\n\"Like then, yeah.\"\n\nJoy blinked back tears. Everything Adam said was true, and she felt like dirt. She should have come to visit her grandfather, but she couldn't. It wasn't always college or her career. It was Indian Lake. The place where her loving parents were buried. She couldn't face it. She wouldn't be reminded of the way they died. And the aftermath.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Adam. For everything.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Well.\" He stepped back. \"I guess I'll see you at the funeral.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nDeflated, Joy watched Adam walk away before backing up to the counter and slowly sliding to the floor.\n\nJoy pulled her knees to her chin, shivered and looked at the empty space. \"I'm sorry. I'm so very sorry, Grandpa. Please forgive me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Joy greeted the dark-haired, fortyish receptionist at Evans and Evans Law Firm office and asked if she could leave her luggage behind the front desk.\n\n\"Of course. I'll let Mr. Evans know you're here,\" she said and picked up the intercom. \"Mr. Evans is down the hall, Miss Boston.\"\n\nJoy wheeled her weekender around to the back wall. \"Thank you.\"\n\nKyle Evans greeted Joy at the door to his office. She guessed him to be in his midthirties. He was tall, handsome and wore a well-tailored blue suit. He held out his hand. \"Joy. I'm Kyle, and I'm so sorry for your loss.\" He ushered her into a bright, cheery office, decorated with Danish modern furniture and a wall-to-wall aquarium.\n\nJoy was still mired in confusion. \"Kyle, I just went by the greenhouses. I don't understand. Grandpa told me this was going to be a banner year for him.\"\n\nKyle held a chair for Joy as she sat. Then he went around to his side of the desk. \"That was a bit inaccurate.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\"\n\n\"I worked with him when he closed up. I think, though he never said so outright, that he always hoped to reopen them. I told him it would take a miracle.\"\n\n\"And he never told me about any of this.\"\n\n\"Frank was a proud man. And he didn't want you to worry about his failure.\"\n\n\"Failure?\"\n\n\"The business was too much for him to run alone. Costs were rising and he told me he would never ask you to come home to save him.\"\n\n\"No, he wouldn't,\" she replied. \"I was firm on that issue when I moved to New York.\"\n\n\"He was so proud of you and your career. He talked about you all the time.\"\n\nKyle looked down at the papers on his desk. \"He left everything to you. The house, the greenhouses, his old truck.\"\n\n\"He...still has that truck?\"\n\n\"He did. Yes.\"\n\n\"And it runs?\"\n\n\"Uh, yeah. It does.\" Kyle folded his hands and put them on the desk. \"I'm so sorry, Joy. This all has to be such a shock for you. It was for me. For the whole town.\"\n\n\"Grandpa never told me he was ill,\" she said, feeling another bout of tears stinging her eyes.\n\n\"I understand from his doctor that Frank died soon after arriving at the hospital.\"\n\n\"That's what I heard.\" She remembered Adam's description of Frank's death. Joy couldn't help her tears now. They came like a torrent. She found a travel pack of tissues in her purse and whisked the tears from her face. \"We never talked about what to do if he died. I guess I'm guilty of thinking he would live forever. He was...my grandpa.\" She wrapped her arms around her middle and leaned forward. \"I'm sorry. So sorry. I...I can't help it. I have no idea what to do. All he ever said was that when he died, he would make sure I was taken care of. I thought it was a life insurance policy or something. I'd always cut him off. Talking about death reminded me too much of my mom and dad.\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Kyle said. \"I'm sorry for your loss of them, as well.\"\n\nShe looked into his empathetic eyes and wondered if the caring she saw was genuine or if that was some mask law school professors taught students to wear when dealing with bereaved clients. The minute the thought entered her head, Joy realized it was something that Chuck had said once to her. She cast it away.\n\n\"It's fine. And the details are in his will.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"I talked to Father Michael over at Saint Mark's. He's waiting for your call.\"\n\n\"I should have a reception or something after the funeral. At his home.\" Joy blew her nose in the tissue. \"Pardon me.\"\n\n\"Certainly. Olivia Barzonni over at the Indian Lake Deli has offered to cater a lunch for you. If you wish. She and her mother, Julia, are great people.\"\n\n\"Olivia Melton? She's married now, then. Yes, I remember her. She was a friend in high school.\" Joy brightened a bit.\n\n\"And Sarah Bosworth said to tell you if there's anything you need, she's here. Sarah Jensen Bosworth, that is. She\u2014\"\n\n\"Sarah is married, too?\"\n\n\"She is. Three kids. I see Luke at the YMCA where we work out with Gabe and Nate Barzonni. Scott Abbott joins us often, as well.\"\n\nJoy put her hands to her cheeks. \"All these names. Talk about a blast from the past.\"\n\n\"Joy. All your friends are here for you. You just have to ask for their help.\"\n\nShe dabbed her tears again. \"They are?\" When her parents died, Joy had cut ties with her Indian Lake friends. She'd wanted to run away from her grief. She'd chosen Columbia University and New York as her safe haven, and it had been that for her all this time.\n\n\"That's wonderful and so...unexpected. I haven't been back in a long time. Years and years.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Kyle picked up a manila folder. \"This is your copy of the will. This is the key to the greenhouse. Frank's house keys. I assume you'll be staying there? Is there anything else you need from me?\"\n\nJoy took the keys. \"When I went to the greenhouse, the door was unlocked. I understand Adam Masterson has a key.\"\n\n\"I don't know, but it wouldn't surprise me. He and Frank were close.\"\n\nAnd Adam had said he tried not to get close to people. \"Well, thank you so much, Kyle.\" She started to stand and stopped. \"Would you be so kind as to get a number for me?\"\n\n\"Sure. What do you need?\"\n\n\"The best Realtor in town.\"\n\n\"That's easy. Cate Sullivan Davis.\"\n\nJoy tilted her head to the left. \"I don't remember that name.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't. She's only been here a few years.\"\n\n\"But you trust her? She's good?\"\n\n\"Very. And her husband is a detective. Trent Davis. He's famous in these parts. Took down a huge drug ring. It was in all the papers.\"\n\n\"Grandpa told me about that. He's her husband?\"\n\n\"Sure is. And she's really smart. You'll like her.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Joy said, rising to shake Kyle's hand.\n\nOnce she'd gathered her luggage, she stood on the sidewalk watching the passing cars.\n\n\"I forgot. I'm not in New York.\"\n\nThere were no cabs. No subways. No mass transit of any kind. Joy had sent Roy away thinking she wouldn't need him. Fortunately, he'd given her his direct number in case she needed him while in town.\n\n\"I'm so not in Kansas anymore.\" She punched in his number. \"Roy. I need a favor.\"\n\n\"Sure. What is it?\"\n\n\"I forgot there are no cabs in Indian Lake.\"\n\n\"And now you're stranded. I'm at Cupcakes and Cappuccino. About three blocks from you. Where do you want to go?\"\n\n\"Is there a car rental in Indian Lake?\"\n\n\"Of course. I'll take you there.\"\n\nJoy hung up and sighed. She'd been away a long time. And she couldn't wait to leave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Adam had picked up Titus from Sarah's house and stopped for groceries. Tonight was grilled chicken tenders on angel hair pasta with pesto sauce and salad. The one thing Amie had insisted that Adam do for their son was to feed him a balanced diet and organic foods. She'd been a good cook and taught him how to prepare food. Adam found the process enjoyable. So did Titus, who liked to share in the kitchen action.\n\nWhen Adam had gutted the kitchen last year, he'd equipped it with everything he would need to make meals for himself and his son. He'd been sure to include a small appliance \"garage\" that was under lock and key so that Titus couldn't get to any sharp knives, mandolins or the Cuisinart. Titus had been curious nearly from birth, so teaching him to be careful was important. And the fact that Titus's impaired vision caused him to trip or bump into things worried Adam.\n\nAngel, their four-year-old golden retriever, sat on the whitewashed wood plank floor watching her two masters cook. Angel was pregnant, a planned union with Sarah's golden, Beau. According to the veterinarian, Angel would have Christmas puppies. Titus was curious and anxious about the coming blessed event. Their trips to Grandy's Groomers to buy a new bed, puppy food and toys were numerous. Titus was overjoyed and so was Adam. He and Titus decided they would draw names from all the people who wanted a puppy, after Sarah and Luke had their pick of the litter, of course.\n\n\"So, Dad,\" Titus said as he dipped thin chicken tenders in a mix of flour, chili powder, granulated garlic and black pepper, \"do you think we should ask Mr. Boston's granddaughter over for Thanksgiving dinner?\"\n\nAdam stopped pouring the olive oil into the frying pan. \"How do you know anything about Joy Boston being in town?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots. She came over to Timmy's house and made oatmeal cookies for us.\"\n\n\"Oh, she did? And how many did you eat?\" Adam asked, hoping to change the subject.\n\n\"Only one and a glass of milk. Organic, of course,\" Titus answered, finishing the last tender. He looked at Adam. \"Miss Sarah said that you knew her in high school.\"\n\nAdam grimaced. Deflecting the probing questions of a smart kid was not an easy task. Since the day Titus had learned to talk at nine months, the boy hadn't shut up. \"Of course I knew Sarah. You know we've been friends forever.\"\n\n\"Dad,\" Titus huffed. \"I meant Joy Boston.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Adam placed the tenders in the oil. He lifted the lid of the boiling water, added salt and then reached over and stirred the pesto sauce.\n\n\"Miss Sarah said you were boyfriend and girlfriend.\"\n\nAdam rolled his eyes. This was going from bad to worse. \"And why would she say that?\"\n\n\"Because I asked her a lot of questions about Joy Boston,\" Titus said proudly. \"Like what kind of person she was and if she liked flowers as much as old Mr. Boston...and you.\"\n\nAdam nearly burned his fingers as he turned the tenders. \"And what did Sarah say?\"\n\n\"That you guys worked together for Mr. Boston when you were in high school.\"\n\n\"We did.\"\n\n\"And you thought you were going to marry her.\"\n\nAdam coughed. He put his fist to his mouth. \"Sarah said a lot, huh?\"\n\n\"Dad! Think about it. I coulda been her son!\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\" Adam put the angel hair in the boiling water. \"But things have a way of working out all for the best. What I want to know is why Sarah told you all this.\"\n\nTitus hemmed a bit and glanced away.\n\nAdam stopped stirring the pesto. \"Titus...\"\n\n\"She didn't exactly say all that.\"\n\n\"What?\" Adam put his hand on his hip. \"What's going on here?\"\n\n\"You know how it is. I asked a few questions. Put some things together. Like you asking Joy to marry you.\"\n\n\"So, this is something you deduced all by yourself.\"\n\n\"Deduced? What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Figured out.\" Adam turned another tender, knowing fully that Titus had used the word deduced over a month ago. His son was stalling. Adam had him on the run and the idea pleased him. But only a little.\n\n\"I did.\" Titus smiled sheepishly. \"But I needed confirmation.\"\n\n\"Which I gave you.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Titus lifted his chin proudly.\n\n\"You know, Titus, I don't think you should be a playwright.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"Clearly, you have the makings of a lawyer.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Titus went to the sink, stepped onto his step stool so that he could reach the faucet and washed his hands. Then he rinsed the lettuce. \"I have to think about that. But about Miss Joy\u2014\"\n\n\"Son,\" Adam began, taking a deep breath. \"Joy is leaving soon. She's not going to be part of our lives. Okay?\"\n\nTitus wiped his hands on a paper towel. \"Okay, Dad.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "After dinner, Adam helped Titus make pinecone turkeys, which he wanted to gift to all his friends. After gluing and glittering feathers to the pinecones, Adam watched as Titus nearly fell asleep at the kitchen table.\n\n\"C'mon, sport. Let's brush your teeth and wash up for bed.\"\n\nTitus yawned. \"Okay. But I want the Star Wars pj's tonight.\"\n\n\"I would never have guessed,\" Adam said as they walked down the hall, Angel at their heels. Adam went into the bedroom, with its slate-gray walls and white trim and Star Wars, Star Trek and Avengers posters covering every inch of the space. From the dresser, Adam pulled out the desired pair of pajamas as he heard Titus in the bathroom using his spin brush.\n\nAdam sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the stainless-steel reading lamp and the overflowing bedside bookshelf. Titus had been only four when he joined a reading group at the library. The kids declared how many books they would read over summer vacation. Titus always set high goals, so when he announced he'd read one hundred books, Adam hadn't doubted him. Most kids' books were only twenty pages long, after all. But Titus sailed through the picture books meant for early readers. Titus liked to read chapter books. He didn't reach one hundred, but he did read over twenty chapter books. His kindergarten teacher told Adam that Titus had the reading comprehension of a sixth grader.\n\n\"Yeah. Sixth grade going on high school,\" he muttered to himself. \"Mozart was six when he started composing. Young prodigies aren't unheard of.\"\n\n\"What's unheard of?\" Titus asked, coming into the room, yanking his shirt over his head.\n\n\"Genius showing itself at a young age,\" Adam said proudly, holding out the pajama top. Titus pulled it on.\n\n\"Were you a genius?\"\n\n\"Hardly. Some thought I was a failure. I couldn't make things work.\"\n\n\"You do now,\" Titus said as he put on the pajama bottoms and climbed into bed. \"You just needed education.\"\n\n\"I did. How did you know?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Cook tells us that all the time.\"\n\n\"Ah! Wise woman.\" Adam chuckled. \"So, what do you want me to read tonight? War and Peace?\" Titus screwed up his face. \"Sorry. Just a joke.\"\n\n\"I'm too tired. Tomorrow. Okay?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" Adam leaned down to kiss Titus on the forehead. Titus lifted his arms and hugged him.\n\n\"I love you, Dad.\"\n\n\"I love you, Titus. You sleep with the angels.\"\n\nAngel jumped up on the bed. Titus hugged her neck. \"I always sleep with my Angel.\" Titus smiled. \"So, Dad, when Angel has her pups, can I help?\"\n\n\"I'm hoping the vet will take care of that.\"\n\nTitus propped himself up on his elbow. \"You think we'll have warning?\"\n\n\"I hope so. Usually, dogs try to make a nest and find a warm place.\"\n\n\"Like her doggy bed?\"\n\n\"Not necessarily. She might like it in front of the fireplace on her rug.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I could see that,\" Titus agreed and lay back down. \"It's gonna be a great Christmas present to have puppies.\"\n\n\"Remember what I told you. Puppies are a lot of work in the beginning. I have to get a pen ready for them in the basement.\"\n\n\"And buy more space heaters and blankets and collect newspapers for their pee.\"\n\nAdam laughed. \"We need to do all that.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Titus said as he lowered his sleepy eyes. \"I'll help.\"\n\n\"Night, son.\"\n\n\"Night, Dad.\"\n\nAdam walked to the door, turned off the light, and the glow-in-the-dark planets and constellations on the ceiling shone.\n\nHe walked down the hall and past the living room of his 1920s refurbished bungalow. Five years ago, the house had been a steal. He'd put a lot of work and money into it, and the results were worth it. The living room was furnished in comfortable charcoal-gray twill sofas that faced each other on either side of the fireplace. A maple-and-stainless-steel coffee table was heaped with books and magazines, most of them Titus's. Under the large picture window was a long desk with two laptops, a desk chair and a small file cabinet. On top of the file cabinet were a half-dozen framed photos of Adam, Amie and baby Titus. A large TV hung over the fireplace. The dining room table was midcentury modern, made of bird's-eye maple, and the chairs were covered in a deep blue twill.\n\nHe walked out to the front porch to check the mail he'd forgotten earlier. He shuffled through the utility bills, then pulled out an envelope with a familiar return address. It was the company that bought his wind turbine invention. His smile was broad. \"Thank goodness for royalty checks.\"\n\nBack inside, he went to his computer and pulled up his email.\n\nAdam worked freelance for Jacobson Corporation out of Indianapolis. The pay was satisfactory, but it was his private, solely-owned creative patents that he hoped would one day boost his income. The best part was that he only had bimonthly trips to Indianapolis, and his weekly meetings with think-tank managers and engineering interns were via Skype and phone conferences. Adam had made it clear that Titus was his priority. Adam was an asset to any firm and Jacobson knew it. Adam worked at night on the computer and held conferences in the early morning with his team.\n\nScanning the emails, he replied to his team and then saw the one he'd been waiting for. \"Halstead.\"\n\nHalstead Industries had finally replied to the proposal and project renderings he'd presented to them in California in October. Adam's engineering genius had flourished at Purdue. He'd made good money over the years, and his works-in-progress would bring even more. His future was financially stable. Titus's college fund was solid. Sometimes, it seemed as if his high school days had happened to someone else.\n\n\"In more ways than one...\"\n\nHe didn't share his successes with others. He didn't like to brag, and creative ideas were easily stolen. Not until his patents were secure, the contracts signed and executed, would Adam talk even to Frank or Mrs. Beabots about his work.\n\nIt's better that way, he thought. Keeping distance was his operative.\n\nHe opened the email as he heard Angel walking down the hall\u2014his sign that Titus was sound asleep. Next to his desk was a new red-and-black-plaid doggy bed, which she curled up on.\n\n\"Look at that, Angel. I finally sold my wind turbine. Wait till my patent comes through on the geothermal unit. Not to mention a few other propulsion irons I have in the fire.\" The latter ideas for antigravity drapes and futuristic propulsion had been pipe dreams decades ago, but now he was being taken seriously.\n\nAngel yawned.\n\n\"You'll see. It'll be thrilling.\"\n\nAngel closed her eyes.\n\n\"Okay. Not so thrilling for you. But for a guy who never had much, this is a victory. I should celebrate.\"\n\nAngel didn't stir as Adam went to the kitchen and took out a bottle of beer from the Sub-Zero.\n\n\"Now, where did I put that opener?\" He opened the utility drawer where he kept spatulas and spoons, then went back to the desk in the living room. He dug around a few drawers, moving papers and old birthday cards. \"Where is it?\"\n\nIn frustration, he started pulling papers out of the far-left drawer. In the bottom, he found an old photo album, one he hadn't seen since he'd moved back from Cincinnati. \"Aw, jeez.\"\n\nThe first photo had been taken well over ten years ago in the greenhouse. It was Christmas. He and Joy were surrounded by red poinsettias. Joy's head was on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. What captured his attention was the look of love and contentment on both their faces.\n\nSo long ago.\n\nHe glanced at the album photos of Amie. They'd been happy and thrilled about Titus. But the truth was that, initially, Amie had kept her illness from Adam and he'd never quite forgiven her. His feelings for Amie were different from the love he'd once had for Joy. Back then, Joy had lived up to her name. She'd lit up the world for him. And when he'd kissed her, he'd felt as if he were connected to the moon, the stars, the entire universe.\n\nHe raked a hand through his hair. He'd been hard on her today. He realized now that she was mirroring all the confusion and pain he'd felt when Amie had finally told him the truth about her leukemia. He'd felt lost. And betrayed.\n\nAdam loved Frank. The old man had been his friend and mentor. But there had been times when he'd counseled Frank to tell Joy the truth, and Frank wouldn't do it, because of his pride.\n\nIt was a wasteful thing. It kept people from doing the one thing they should do. Love.\n\nAdam opened the middle drawer and put the old photo album on top of the sheaf of papers. As he withdrew his hand he felt the bottle opener.\n\nHe opened the bottle and tipped it toward the photo album. \"You were such a nerd, Adam. With no guts.\"\n\nHe took a deep swig. \"And no glory.\"\n\nAngel lifted her head and gave a low snuffle.\n\n\"Oh, you think so, too, huh?\"\n\nShe snuffled again.\n\n\"Great. Thanks for the vote of confidence.\"\n\nHe sat in the desk chair and stared at the photo. \"But that was then. What do I do about now?\"\n\nHe closed the album and eased the drawer shut." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Joy looked up at the old rooster-shaped clock that hung against the kitchen wallpaper that had been put up before her birth. Her father often joked that he'd hated the wallpaper when his mother had chosen it. Joy didn't think it was all that bad with its depictions of antique coffee grinders and coffee cups and saucers. It was homey. It was Grandpa's house, where her father had grown up. Because Frank had purchased a large section of land after the war, there was enough acreage for Bruce and Jill to build their own house on shortly after their wedding. As a child, Joy always felt she lived in both houses.\n\nThe light wood cabinets were just as old, and they needed to be replaced as much as the wallpaper and vinyl flooring. The Formica-topped kitchen table set should have been tossed years ago, but Joy knew that her grandfather put his money into the greenhouses. Not into personal comforts.\n\nHer cell rang, breaking her thoughts. \"Hi, Chuck.\"\n\n\"So, how goes it?\"\n\n\"What part?\" she asked, as she opened the cabinet over the old electric stove and pulled down a box of crackers. Then she went to the cupboard on the other side of the kitchen and opened it. It was as it had always been. Peanut butter. New jar of grape jelly. Sack of potato chips. And a brand-new bag of chocolate candies.\n\nSome things never changed. Blessedly.\n\n\"All of it. I tried to call you earlier, but I guess you were busy.\"\n\n\"I have been. I spent the afternoon on the phone planning the funeral and the luncheon at the house here afterward. It's tomorrow, so that was fast work.\"\n\n\"All funerals are... At least my mother's was.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Chuck. All this probably brings back sad times for you, too.\"\n\n\"It does, but don't worry about me. What did the attorney say?\" He sounded rushed. \"You're going to sell the greenhouses and the house, right?\"\n\nJoy was about to respond when she heard his office phone ringing. \"You're still at the office?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Dad and I are working late. Listen, I gotta take this. I'll call you tomorrow. Can't wait till you get back and we can have Thanksgiving together. Love ya.\"\n\nThinking back to this afternoon and the heat of Adam's anger, she realized she might be doing Chuck an injustice. Sure, he wasn't all that romantic, but he was there for her. He'd called to check on her. He would call tomorrow after the funeral. She could count on him.\n\nShe picked up the peanut butter jar and noticed it was organic, low sugar. She found a knife and sat at the table to eat crackers and peanut butter. It wasn't cracked crab or medallions of beef like she'd have with Chuck. The clock ticked loudly. She got up and went to the thirty-year-old side-by-side harvest-gold refrigerator and found a carton of milk.\n\n\"Organic.\"\n\nShe glanced at the table, at the chair where her grandfather always sat. She half expected to hear him say, \"I love you, pumpkin. Don't ever forget it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Joy guessed that as far as funerals went, her grandfather's was well attended. Father Michael's eulogy revealed his deep friendship with her grandfather. Joy had written a short piece, but when she got to the pulpit to read it, she spoke from her heart instead, admitting her fault in not returning to Indian Lake to see Frank, remembering how their Thanksgivings in New York were her happiest moments. It was difficult not to tear up, not to lose her words in her chaos of emotions, but she made it through and thanked everyone for being present for Frank. As she walked back to the front pew, she saw many compassionate, familiar faces. Faces she'd forgotten.\n\nAfterward, on her behalf, Father Michael had invited everyone to Frank's house for a luncheon.\n\nNow they all stood three deep, around the dining room table, admiring the bounty. Joy had covered the table with her mother's Irish linen cloth. Olivia and Julia Melton had set up the buffet while Joy and the rest of her friends had been at Saint Mark's. Huge crystal bowls held seafood salad, chicken salad with red grapes and walnuts, a pasta salad and a green salad. A large hammered pewter tray held two large planks of grilled salmon topped with capers and lemon slices. A honey-baked spiral ham and candied yams filled the end of the table. On the sideboard were plates, napkins and silverware.\n\nA second, round table, skirted in white linen, was set up with hot and cold drinks.\n\nSarah hugged Joy before introducing her husband.\n\nJoy shook his hand. \"I'm very pleased to meet you, Luke. Sarah was such a good friend to me in high school.\"\n\n\"Then you two should pick up where you left off,\" he said, putting his arm around Sarah and kissing her cheek. \"Best is the word to describe her.\"\n\nJoy watched as Sarah smiled up at Luke. He touched her cheek and kissed her lips. They couldn't take their eyes off each other.\n\nJoy got the distinct feeling she was intruding, but as she moved to the drink table for iced tea, she saw Maddie Strong, who had been another close friend in high school. \"Maddie? How wonderful to see you!\"\n\nMaddie hugged Joy. \"I'm sorry it's under these circumstances, but I've missed you, Joy,\" she said, not letting go of Joy's hand. \"So much has happened since you left, but you look like not a day has passed.\"\n\nJust then, Dr. Nate Barzonni walked up and slipped his arm around Maddie. \"Joy, it's good to see you,\" he said, smiling. \"I'm sorry it took this...to bring you back. I have to say, New York looks like it's working for you.\"\n\n\"She looks fabulous,\" Maddie agreed.\n\n\"So do you,\" Nate whispered in Maddie's ear, but it was loud enough for Joy to hear.\n\n\"The lovebirds are at it again,\" Gabe Barzonni said as he walked up with his wife, Liz, and their three-and-a-half-year-old son, Zeke.\n\n\"Look who's talking.\" Maddie chuckled. \"You said you were bringing Joy some wine. Where is it? I brought cupcakes for everyone.\"\n\nGabe grinned mischievously and shot his thumb over his shoulder. \"It's in the kitchen. Olivia is uncorking a couple bottles.\"\n\nJoy glanced from Nate to Gabe. \"So, Gabe, you're not running the family farm anymore?\"\n\n\"Nope. I gave it up when I fell hopelessly in love.\" He kissed Liz soundly on the mouth.\n\nLiz shook her head and placed her hand on his broad chest. \"The truth is, Gabe always wanted to be a vintner. He fell for me and my grapes.\"\n\n\"Not a chance,\" Nate said, butting in. \"That'd be like me saying Maddie plied me with cupcakes.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Maddie retorted. \"I did.\"\n\nNate put both his arms around her. \"Did not.\"\n\n\"Did, too.\" Maddie laughed and kissed Nate.\n\nJoy excused herself and continued around the table, receiving condolences from Nate and Gabe's mother, Gina Barzonni. Joy had always liked her when she was in high school. Joy was stunned to discover that Gina had recently married Liz's grandfather, Sam Crenshaw. She shook hands with Rafe Barzonni, congratulating him on his marriage to Olivia Melton. \"She's amazing, Rafe. She put all this together in one day.\"\n\n\"And wait till she shows you the photographs. She took photos of your table and the flowers. With your permission, maybe\u2014and she'd do this as a friend. She thinks the world of you, by the way. If you'd want some candid shots of the guests, she'd snap a few. Nothing intrusive. Memories, you know? It's up to you.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"She's gone pro. And been published in a few magazines. I'm really proud of her,\" he said, looking from Joy into the kitchen, where pretty Olivia was walking out with a silver tray filled with Maddie's delicious cupcakes.\n\n\"I owe her a great deal for all her help.\"\n\n\"She was happy to do it for her friend, Joy.\"\n\n\"Yes, Grandpa was an amazing man.\"\n\nHe leaned a bit closer and said, \"I meant you.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nAs Rafe walked over to his wife, Mrs. Beabots walked in with Adam, who was holding the hand of a little boy.\n\nMrs. Beabots walked straight up to Joy and hugged her tightly. \"Joy, I'm so happy to see you. Though losing Frank is hard for all of us.\"\n\n\"He was a good friend to you. I'm so glad you're here. I missed you at the church.\"\n\n\"I was in the back. I don't drive anymore, so I must rely on others to cart me around. Though when the weather's nice, I walk everywhere.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots had always been part of her life in Indian Lake, especially when she was in high school. It was Joy who filled orders for Mrs. Beabots's fall bulb list. Her Christmas poinsettias and amaryllis. Joy had loved delivering flowers to Mrs. Beabots, who always invited her in for tea or pastries. Or if she got lucky, a piece of sugar pie. Since Sarah lived next door to Mrs. Beabots, she and Maddie would often meet at Sarah's house and then the three of them would barge into Mrs. Beabots's kitchen, help her with dishes or put away groceries and be rewarded with something special right out of the oven.\n\nThe clutch at Joy's chest came from too many memories she'd shoved away and tried, successfully for years, to replace with exciting New York.\n\n\"Now, Joy. Tomorrow you must come to my house for dinner.\"\n\n\"Oh, I couldn't impose.\"\n\n\"Too bad. You have a great deal to do here,\" Mrs. Beabots said.\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"You forget my reputation for knowing what's happening in this town?\"\n\n\"I did. So, who told?\"\n\n\"Why, Adam, of course.\"\n\n\"Figures.\"\n\n\"Well, it wouldn't be your attorney. That would be immoral. Or something.\" She waved her hand.\n\nJoy couldn't help but chuckle. \"I bet you kept Grandpa on his toes.\"\n\n\"Frank was a sucker for my peach cobbler. So were you.\"\n\n\"I was.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots touched Joy's arm. \"I need to check on something in the kitchen. You probably need to see to the rest of your guests.\" She winked and looked over at Adam, who was standing near the kitchen doorway.\n\nJust as Mrs. Beabots turned, Joy asked, \"Wait, is that\u2014Adam's son?\"\n\n\"It is...\" Mrs. Beabots walked to the kitchen.\n\nThe shocks kept coming. So, Adam was married? Where was his wife? Had they both been at the church? The funeral was already a blur to her. She barely remembered anything.\n\nA pretty woman about Joy's age with striking aqua eyes came up. \"Joy. I wanted to introduce myself. I'm Cate Davis. Kyle Evans told me to give you a call, but since I knew Frank so well, I thought this might be better.\"\n\n\"Cate? The Realtor?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I'm so pleased to meet you.\"\n\n\"Kyle said you were anxious to list the greenhouses.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I have to get back to New York by Thanksgiving.\"\n\n\"That's...only six days away.\"\n\n\"I know. Is there a lot to do?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"We're fine. Tell you what. I'll meet you there tomorrow morning at, say, nine o'clock? I'll take some photos, work up some comps. I'll do my best to get back to you by the end of the day or Sunday afternoon.\"\n\n\"Gee, I hate to take up your weekend.\"\n\n\"I'm a Realtor. We're used to it. And we do have some work to do, this being a commercial property. What about the house here?\"\n\n\"That, too,\" Joy said, feeling a sharp pang through her middle. Now that she'd said it out loud, she suddenly wanted to hang on to the house. But she lived in New York. Her life was in New York. Wasn't it?\n\nJoy saw Adam now standing at the fireplace in the living room. His son was still by his side. The boy had picked up the fireplace poker. She excused herself from Cate and walked toward Adam, overhearing their conversation.\n\n\"What's this, Dad?\"\n\n\"Titus, put that down. It's dangerous.\"\n\n\"But what's it for?\"\n\n\"To move the logs around so air gets to the fire.\"\n\n\"We don't have one.\"\n\n\"We have gas logs. They're safer.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Titus said and looked up as Joy smiled at him. \"Hello.\"\n\n\"Hello.\" She stretched out her hand. \"I'm Joy. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Titus Masterson. This is my dad. But I know that you already know him. From high school,\" Titus said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and smiling broadly.\n\n\"Titus...\" Adam used that same warning tone he'd used with Joy.\n\n\"Thank you for coming, Adam,\" Joy said. \"I'm sure Frank would appreciate it.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he would.\"\n\nTitus rocked back on his heels and tugged on his blue blazer. \"We were good friends with Mr. Boston. He let me eat peanut butter and crackers in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"He did?\" Adam and Joy chorused.\n\n\"Uh-huh. And grape jelly.\"\n\n\"I suppose the milk was for you, too?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"Yep. Organic.\"\n\nJoy smiled. \"I can see why my grandpa liked you, Titus. You're quite the charmer.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" Titus grinned.\n\nJoy looked back to the kitchen. \"Is your mother coming to the luncheon?\" she asked.\n\n\"No,\" Adam replied sharply.\n\n\"She died. She's in heaven with Mr. Boston,\" Titus said matter-of-factly. \"When I die I get to see them both.\"\n\nAdam put his hand on Titus's shoulder. \"That's right.\"\n\nJoy knew she was blushing with shame. \"I'm so sorry. I didn't know.\"\n\n\"It's okay,\" Adam said, not to Joy but to Titus, who was looking up at him. \"It's been three years since Amie died. Titus and I are doing better.\"\n\n\"That's right, Dad. We are.\" Titus looked at Joy. \"So, is it okay if I have a cupcake?\"\n\n\"You can have anything you want, Titus. Please. Enjoy.\"\n\n\"All right!\" Titus nearly sprinted away.\n\n\"Titus! Slow down! You might trip on that throw rug,\" Adam warned.\n\nJoy watched Adam as he stared after Titus. \"He's wonderful.\"\n\n\"He's like his mother.\"\n\n\"He's like you,\" she said, feeling a long-remembered warmth flood her. \"He looks just like you.\"\n\n\"He does. Poor kid.\"\n\n\"Adam, you are incredibly handsome. I always thought that.\"\n\n\"I was a nerd.\"\n\n\"I like nerds,\" she countered. \"Though you aren't one.\"\n\nHis blue gaze bored into her face, and for a moment, she was back there with him, in the potting shed where no one could see them and he was about to kiss her.\n\nHe jerked away and turned to the photos on the mantel. He picked one up. She looked at the picture.\n\n\"That's us at prom. I forgot we had this one.\"\n\n\"I remember. It was the night I proposed. You forget that, too?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You said 'yes.'\"\n\n\"Adam. We agreed. We'd wait till after college... You had a scholarship to Purdue. I had a scholarship to Columbia. We grew up.\"\n\n\"We drifted apart.\"\n\nThis time when his eyes met hers, she saw sadness and regret. Not the sadness of mourning, but the kind she'd seen when she looked in the mirror after their breakup. She'd lost her parents. Adam. Her town. It had taken every ounce of courage to go to her classes and keep her grades up so that she didn't lose her scholarship. But she'd done it. And she'd done it alone.\n\n\"We did.\"\n\n\"Can I have this?\" he asked.\n\nShe thought it an odd request. He had a son. A life and recent past she knew nothing about. But he wanted their prom picture. \"Sure. Uh, Frank would want you to have something.\"\n\n\"Frank\u2014\" Adam started to say something but Joy's cell phone rang.\n\n\"It's New York. I have to take this.\"\n\n\"I better go. I'm truly sorry about Frank.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Adam. I know you are.\"\n\nAdam walked to the dining room. She noticed that all the Barzonni brothers came up to him and slapped him on the back. Sarah hugged him. Maddie and Liz did, as well. They were all friends and they carried their affection for each other well.\n\nHer cell phone rang again. She answered it. \"Chuck. Sorry. I was just saying goodbye to a guest.\"\n\n\"I didn't know the luncheon would still be going on. I lost track of time myself. So, did you get the flowers?\"\n\n\"I did. They were huge. Thank you very much.\"\n\n\"Dad thought it was a good idea. They're from both of us.\"\n\n\"Please thank him for me.\"\n\n\"I will. I tried to order them from your grandfather's greenhouse, but the line was disconnected. You closed it down fast.\"\n\nJoy worried her lip. \"Uh, actually, Chuck, it's been down awhile now.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It's a long story. My grandpa and I always used our cells and texts. I never called the greenhouse, where he'd be too busy to talk. Personally, I think he was expert at intrigue. Probably, all those old mystery movies he watched, because he kept his secret well. Even his deteriorating health was a secret. No one knew. Not even in town. Bottom line for us is that I'm meeting with the Realtor first thing in the morning.\"\n\n\"Great. Thanksgiving is less than a week away.\"\n\n\"Miss me that much, huh?\"\n\n\"I'll say. The work has stacked up like crazy since you left.\"\n\n\"The work...\"\n\n\"Yeah. Oh, and Dad said to say hi.\"\n\n\"I gotta run. My guests, you know.\"\n\n\"Oh sure. Absolutely. Kisses.\"\n\n\"Kisses,\" she echoed, as Chuck hung up.\n\nJoy stared at her cell. \"Work.\"\n\nOlivia walked up and put her arm around Joy's waist. \"You okay? Could use a hug, I bet.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"This has been a shock for you,\" Olivia said. \"We've all been missing the greenhouses since Frank closed them up. But knowing that someone else will be buying them. It's so...final, you know?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Frank was the best guy. It's a shame he had to close down. Christmas isn't the same without his poinsettias all over my deli. I miss that magic...\"\n\n\"Do you know why he closed?\"\n\n\"Not really. I thought he might've had health issues.\"\n\n\"He never told anyone why?\"\n\nOlivia's expression was thoughtful. \"He was a private man. But if anyone would know, it would be Adam.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nOlivia nodded. \"Adam was like a son to him. When he moved back and his wife was ill, Frank was there for him. They've been inseparable since Amie died.\"\n\n\"I didn't know.\"\n\n\"Really? Frank didn't talk with you about Adam?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"That's odd. But like I said, Frank was a private man.\"\n\nOne by one, Joy's guests came up to give her last hugs. They all begged her to call them for whatever help she would need. But all Joy needed was to put the greenhouses on the market, sign the papers, fly back to New York and let Cate take care of the rest.\n\nIt was a good plan.\n\nHer life would go on. She'd be out of Indian Lake and out of their minds. Once again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Joy was pleased with Cate's professionalism as she took the photos of the greenhouses. She walked every inch and took measurements. She'd gone to the county recorder to find the original title to the land, the survey and early construction blueprints.\n\nThis was Joy's first opportunity to assess the property.\n\nThey walked around to the back of the buildings and saw deep open trenches filled with PVC pipe that ran from the greenhouses to a small building Joy didn't recognize. It looked newly constructed of white vinyl siding and had a green roof that matched the other buildings.\n\n\"What's that?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"I have no idea.\" Cate snapped a photo on her iPhone.\n\n\"Looks like new plumbing to me. Was Frank considering reopening? Because these materials aren't cheap.\"\n\nCate and Joy stepped between mud puddles, frozen ground and another stack of pipe toward the new outbuilding.\n\nCate checked the door, which had a padlock on it. \"Did Frank leave a key for this?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of. I better ask the attorney.\" Joy walked a few feet over to the old potting shed. The wood siding was peeling and beginning to rot at the joints. The roof needed new shingles and the little window box to the right of the barn-style door had nearly disintegrated. Everything needed repair. Lots of it.\n\nCate continued taking photographs. She turned to Joy. \"I think I have what I need.\"\n\nThey started back toward the front parking lot. Joy stomped the mud off the bottom of her boots as they walked along the stone walkway.\n\n\"This is so strange for me,\" Cate said. \"I haven't been back here since Frank closed. I had no idea it was in such disrepair.\"\n\nJoy swallowed hard. It wasn't good that Cate, the expert, had misgivings. \"So, you're saying...\"\n\n\"Honestly, Joy, I don't know how much all this will sell for.\"\n\nJoy felt the earth move under her feet. This was so far removed from what she'd expected. And Chuck thought the place would bring over a million dollars?\n\n\"I mean...\" Cate started and then looked up at the greenhouse. \"You can't be blind to the situation, Joy.\"\n\n\"I know, I know. It's been more than a shock. Grandpa always believed this was my future. He thought it was a gold mine.\"\n\n\"Look. I don't know the reason he shut down, but it had to be a good one. His heart was in every flower he sold.\"\n\n\"My entire youth was spent here. Feeding the flowers. Watering them. Watching each cutting grow. I thought it was magic.\"\n\n\"You loved it.\"\n\n\"Adored it. I was with Grandpa every day after school and all weekend long after my parents died. He was my world.\"\n\n\"And he wanted you to have this place.\"\n\nJoy scanned the cracked glass panes, feeling hopeless. It was as if she could sense her grandfather's disappointment at closing the business. \"So, what do we do?\"\n\n\"I'm going to find some comparable locations that will help us, not hurt us. This old place, all glass... It's one of a kind. Maybe someone will be interested in the retail unit.\"\n\n\"For what?\" Joy asked. \"I mean, you can't turn it into a B and B.\"\n\n\"No, but you might want to consider fixing it up. Replace these broken glass panes and clean it up to amp up the value. Curb appeal is paramount. I'd clean up the interior, get the lighting up to par. That kind of thing.\"\n\n\"Good advice. But to do all that, I'd have to oversee the project, and I'm due back in New York pronto.\"\n\n\"A dilemma for sure.\"\n\nJoy rubbed her neck\u2014a tic whenever she considered alternatives.\n\n\"And what about Frank's house?\" Cate asked, pointing across the drive. \"That, at least, will be a snap to price it out and list. I could put the sign up today. Despite the fact that it's nearly Thanksgiving, I'm betting I could have a buyer quickly.\"\n\n\"But it needs updating,\" Joy said. \"I noticed the faucets all need replacing. I haven't checked the roof, but...\"\n\nCate shot her a skeptical look. \"Are you saying you don't want to list the house?\"\n\n\"I'm that obvious?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nJoy sighed. \"It's all too much, Cate. I mean, losing the business is one thing, but that house... Yesterday with all my old friends there, it\u2014I don't know. I felt so much love there, as if the walls were hugging me.\"\n\n\"You know, as a Realtor, I go into house after house, and most are lovely. Some are staged. But only a few have real, loving warmth. Frank's house is one of those that speaks to me when I walk inside. If I didn't have the perfect bungalow for Trent, Danny and me, I'd be interested.\"\n\n\"The house is like that. Suddenly, I can't bear the thought of losing it.\"\n\n\"Leave it for now. There's no rush. Maybe you should keep it. So that you have a place to come home to.\"\n\nCome home to? What in the world was Cate talking about? Indian Lake wasn't her home anymore.\n\nCate gave her a hug. \"I'll call you later.\"\n\n\"Thanks for everything, Cate.\"\n\nJoy's shoulders sagged with the weight of her dilemma as Cate drove off. A little over two days and she was already feeling the pull of her old life here. A life she'd thought she'd long since buried.\n\nShe opened the door to the retail area, went inside and closed the door behind her.\n\nBam!\n\nThe noise from the back of the space sounded as if something had fallen. Which shouldn't be a surprise. Probably another glass pane breaking.\n\nJoy walked past the empty display area to the French doors. Not seeing anyone in the greenhouse area, she shrugged her shoulders and turned to go.\n\nBam!\n\n\"What's going on?\"\n\nThis time, she marched through the retail area, through the small tropical greenhouse area, to the back-storage area, and flung the door open. Standing in the middle of the cement floor was Adam, both his arms filled with PVC pipe.\n\n\"Adam!\" she shouted.\n\nHe jerked, and when he did, the pipe went rattling out of his arms and onto the floor. \"Jeez, Joy! You scared me.\"\n\n\"Now you're stealing my grandpa's pipe?\"\n\n\"What? This is my pipe,\" Adam countered, hands on his hips, eyes blazing at her.\n\n\"Since when?\"\n\n\"You'd know if you came back to Indian Lake more than once a decade.\"\n\n\"If you'd get off your high horse and tell me what's going on, then maybe I wouldn't be so suspicious about you.\"\n\n\"Suspicious?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Like why are you loitering around here all the time? And by the way, I want that key back.\"\n\n\"It's my key.\"\n\n\"I own this greenhouse now.\" She'd stand her ground and she'd get some answers out of him if it took her all day.\n\nHe glared at her. \"Right.\"\n\nHe reached in his pocket, took out the key.\n\nShe stared at the key, suddenly not wanting it back. She heard his breath intake as if he didn't want the surrender either.\n\n\"It's the craziest thing\u2014this key to the greenhouse. It takes me back not just to us...but all the fun, the sharing...the knowledge I soaked up from your parents and Frank. He couldn't wait to show me the newest hybrids being displayed at the horticulture convention at McCormick Place.\"\n\n\"I remember those...\"\n\n\"This greenhouse was his passion,\" Adam said.\n\n\"You're right. He was so passionate about his hybrids. Grandpa was such the dreamer. I remember the feeling I had when I'd walk through the doors after school. I couldn't wait to water, feed, stock shelves, I didn't care. Being here was...\"\n\n\"Magic,\" he finished for her as he walked closer, took her hand and placed the key in her palm. Then he closed her fingers around it.\n\nJoy sucked in a breath as he touched her. He used to kiss her with a tenderness she hadn't experienced since. She'd forgotten that.\n\nEnergy shot from his hand to hers and filled her with a longing to be held by him. She couldn't stop this magnetism even if she wanted to. And she didn't want to.\n\nHe didn't want to break the moment, either, she noticed. His eyes held hers, not wavering. Not blinking. It was as if they were in a realm all their own. Maybe it was magic that she and Adam had once had.\n\nBut that had been teen love. Young. Inexperienced and not to be trusted to bring about a lifetime of happiness.\n\n\"Adam,\" she murmured, finding it nearly impossible to speak. All she wanted was for him to hold her hand. \"Talk to me.\"\n\nThen he did let go of her, shoving both hands in his jeans' pockets to create a barrier between them.\n\n\"Why?\" he asked. \"You're gonna sell this place and hightail it back to the Big Apple. What do you care about Frank's dreams?\"\n\n\"Dreams? He shared that with you?\"\n\n\"He did.\"\n\nAll these years that she'd been gone, she didn't realize that he had dreams beyond what he'd shared with her for enjoying his greenhouses. That was all they'd ever discussed. He'd always be there for her, he'd said. But then he hadn't told her about shutting down.\n\nAdam toed his boot on the floor as if hesitating to share the truth with her. Perhaps he felt he was betraying Frank by sharing this very private information with Joy. Maybe Frank had sworn him to secrecy, since it was obvious to Joy that Frank trusted Adam.\n\nAnd not me.\n\n\"He wanted to reopen the greenhouses.\"\n\n\"Do you know why he closed them?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"I was here, remember?\"\n\nAdam was still accusatory, and she was getting tired of it. \"Can we call a truce here?\"\n\nSilence as he glared at her.\n\n\"For Frank's sake,\" she added.\n\nThe wave of softness across Adam's face tore at her. Adam did care about Frank. For that, she was grateful.\n\n\"Sorry. You're right,\" he answered.\n\nHis hand came out of his pocket and reached for hers. She looked at his hand, big and strong. The kind that had tinkered on impossible-dream-idea engines, that had melted her heart. That had cared for a baby boy after his wife died.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Come on,\" he said, a thin smile breaking across his lips, but it was the flash in his eyes that stole her attention.\n\n\"Where're we going?\"\n\n\"Out back.\"\n\n\"I was just there. It's all muddy. Grandpa had some kind of plumbing problem going on. I thought maybe the sewer broke but didn't want to say anything to Cate. Something like that could bring the property value down. More.\"\n\nReleasing her hand, Adam held the back door open for her as she passed in front of him.\n\n\"Not a plumbing project,\" Adam said. \"Frank told me never to tell you why he closed...not until I proved myself out.\"\n\n\"I'm so far beyond confused here.\"\n\n\"He closed because the price of gas skyrocketed a few years ago. He couldn't make any money. Probably, when we were kids, we didn't realize there were things like energy bills and heating costs. Anyway, at just about that time, I came back to town and helped him finish closing up.\"\n\n\"I didn't know. Thank you for that, Adam.\"\n\n\"Frank always believed in me and my silly, unworkable inventions.\"\n\n\"Those inventions were why the kids in school made fun of you.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Adam the skinny nerd.\"\n\n\"I never thought so,\" she replied, giving him a direct look. He didn't take his eyes off her.\n\n\"You believed in me...for a while.\"\n\nHe tore his eyes from her and continued before she could answer. \"I came up with the idea to install a geothermal system to heat the greenhouses. My system is much more efficient than any in use.\"\n\n\"Because...\"\n\n\"I put the pipes even deeper in the ground and I used a smaller pipe so that the water doesn't have a chance to cool by a single degree.\"\n\n\"And you've been doing this work here?\"\n\n\"I have. And working with Frank to create that salmon-striped hybrid poinsettia he'd always dreamed of.\" Adam smiled broadly.\n\n\"No way!\" She was astonished. So much had been going on in Indian Lake. Adam had had a child. Seen a wife through illness and death. Done all this work with her grandpa. And he was still pursuing his dreams.\n\n\"It's true,\" Adam said. \"All those summers working here with you and Frank, I got the horticulture bug.\"\n\n\"You are full of surprises.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" he replied, with a longing she hadn't heard in anyone's voice except...except his on the day she broke up with him.\n\nShe felt a fluttering in her chest, but that could only be from nostalgia. It wasn't real. She was a victim of shock and grief, still trying to grasp that the greenhouses had been closed and that they might not sell for much. She wasn't having new feelings for Adam.\n\nNothing was as she'd thought it would be when she flew in from New York.\n\nNew York.\n\n\"Adam, look. This\u2014\" she waved her hand toward the half-buried pipes \"\u2014is all wonderful, but...\"\n\n\"You have to sell,\" he finished for her.\n\n\"And go home.\"\n\n\"I thought this was home.\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\"\n\nHe looked down at the pipes. \"Yeah. That's what I thought you thought.\"\n\nWithout another word, he walked away, past the potting shed and the new little generator building. He got in his truck and, without waving to her or looking back, drove away.\n\nJoy felt a chill and didn't understand why she felt alone now that Adam was gone. When he was around, it felt like the ground was more solid. She looked down at the key in her hand, then closed her fingers around it, making a fist and pulling her hand to her heart.\n\nAdam and Grandpa had planned for a new beginning, to reopen the greenhouses. Frank would have had a chance to create his hybrid and Adam would have been part of making his dream come true. But it was not to be.\n\nOnce she sold the greenhouses, her grandpa's dreams would be buried with him.\n\nBut that was the way it was with death. Things ended. Including dreams." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Joy put her phone on speaker as she held up an old red cable-knit sweater she'd found in the bureau drawer. The last time she'd worn it, she'd gone ice-skating with Adam, Sarah, Nate and Maddie at Craven's Pond. She'd also worn jeans, her work cowboy boots and had pearl studs in her ears. Pearls that Adam had just given her for Christmas. She'd kissed him to thank him, and he'd pulled her to his chest and hugged her so close, she could feel his heartbeat even through the sweater.\n\n\"I love you, Joy, forever and always,\" Adam had said and kissed her again. She'd thought then that no one could kiss her with the depth of emotion as Adam.\n\nThey all used to hang out there on cold winter Saturdays. There was always an impromptu and often vigorous hockey game between the Barzonni brothers and Isabelle Hawks's brothers. Despite the teams being unbalanced in number, the lack of helmets, padding and equipment and even nets, Joy rooted for all her friends. The city provided old oil drums filled with burning wood where they would warm their hands. The Barzonni brothers shaved the ice with homemade, long-handled blades resembling rakes to keep it smooth for the skaters. From time to time, old Mr. Marsh would trundle down from his house on the hill with his hot dog wagon, which he brought to the Fourth of July parade, the Santa parade and to the county fairgrounds. Mr. Marsh's steamed Chicago-style hot dogs with relish, peppers, celery seed, mustard and onion were delicious. And memorable enough to cause her mouth to water now.\n\nIt had been a long, long time since Joy had put on a pair of skates. Not since I left Indian Lake. Ice-skating was a thing of the past.\n\n\"Did you hear what I said?\" Chuck barked into the phone.\n\nJoy blinked and came back to the present. \"Are you talking to me?\"\n\n\"Sorry, no. That was Glory. Just a sec, Joy.\"\n\nShe'd call Glory tonight after Glory was home. Not while Glory was at work and couldn't really talk.\n\n\"Chuck,\" she said, putting the red sweater on the bed and smoothing out the arms. \"Why don't I call you later when you're not busy?\"\n\n\"I'm good,\" he said. \"So, what happened with the Realtor?\"\n\n\"She's gathering comps.\" Joy paused. She needed to tell Chuck the truth and she didn't know why she had held back.\n\nWaiting for a miracle?\n\nJoy had never been one to skirt adversity. Dealing with it was her job, after all. People came to her with accounts that were in the red and expected her to fix everything. Sometimes overnight. They paid a great deal for her expertise.\n\nFixing this greenhouse situation was precisely what Joy's education and years of experience had taught her how to do.\n\n\"Chuck, I don't think you're going to like this.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"My grandfather has been keeping the truth from me for years. His business was on a decline, so much so that he closed the greenhouses five years ago.\"\n\n\"So\u2014this isn't a recent development?\"\n\nNow she had Chuck's full attention.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Give it to me straight.\"\n\n\"I can guarantee there won't be any blue-sky money. The Chicago florists and local markets have long since switched suppliers. That revenue stream has dried to bedrock. Therefore, there's no business to sell. Only the property and the buildings.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nShe could tell he didn't see. Chuck had been born and raised in Manhattan. He was fourth-generation Newly. Even if he never worked another day in his life, the family had money. Chuck lived and worked for his father's approval, and to earn respect from his father's friends and their community. She admired his sense of responsibility.\n\n\"You're disappointed,\" she said.\n\n\"Surprised.\"\n\n\"I was shocked. I still am. All this time my grandfather never told me what was going on. He never asked for my help.\"\n\n\"Was it his health?\"\n\n\"No, Adam told me it was the rise in heating costs that shut him down.\"\n\nThere was a long pause before Chuck asked, \"Who's Adam?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She cleared her throat, wondering why explaining Adam should be a problem. \"An old friend from high school. He worked with my grandfather for the past several years.\"\n\n\"I thought the greenhouse was closed.\"\n\n\"It...was. I meant, they had a special friendship. Adam said he used to come over and tinker,\" she replied, her hand going to the red sweater and smoothing the rounded neckline.\n\nShe remembered Adam's loving smile when she'd last worn the sweater.\n\nChuck's tone was pointed. \"Tinker? What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Adam was always inventing things in high school. He's an engineer now.\"\n\n\"An engineer.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Working for your grandfather. That doesn't make sense. What was he doing?\"\n\n\"They were just friends. Apparently, his little boy was close with Grandpa, too.\"\n\nChuck exhaled loudly enough that Joy heard it. \"A son. Well. That's nice.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Titus is darling.\" She smiled, thinking of the little boy dressed up in his blazer at the luncheon. \"Smart, too. Probably grow up to be a CPA.\"\n\n\"So, when can you get the property listed and get back here?\" Chuck was back to business.\n\n\"Tomorrow, I guess. Cate said she'd call me later today if she had anything. I'm going to Mrs. Beabots's for dinner tonight.\"\n\n\"Who's that?\"\n\n\"An old friend. You'd love her. She's elegant, funny. Knows everything about everyone, practically before they know it. And she's mysterious.\"\n\n\"C'mon,\" he groaned.\n\n\"It's true. No one knows where she came from when she moved to Indian Lake in the 1960s. But she was married back then. Her husband died, I don't know, about twenty years ago. They had a grocery store on Rose Street for years. But there's all these interesting stories that rumble through the town about her. Supposedly, she lived in Paris at one time and worked for Chanel.\"\n\n\"She's wealthy?\"\n\n\"I think so, but you'd never know it by her actions. She's as sweet and caring a person I've ever met. She's a love.\"\n\n\"Maybe she needs an estate planner. Do you have any of my cards with you?\"\n\n\"Chuck!\" She laughed. \"I'm not going to solicit for business on this trip.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"This is personal.\"\n\n\"You're right. You're right. Look, text me when you get the quote from the Realtor. Dad and I are meeting with the board at the Met tonight. I have a brunch tomorrow morning with the committee for Feed the Hungry for Thanksgiving and then I'll be back at the office probably until midnight working.\"\n\n\"Can I ask you a question?\"\n\n\"Whazzat?\"\n\n\"Do you ever take a day just for you?\"\n\n\"And do what?\"\n\n\"I dunno. Just breathe?\"\n\n\"Look who's talking,\" he countered. \"I'm running. Love you.\"\n\n\"Love you.\"\n\nJoy hung up.\n\nShe was just like him. Time alone had not been a good thing since her parents died. Time to breathe meant she'd be visited by the memories of seeing her mother's face bloody, covered in glass, her hair matted with blood, lying on a gurney in the ER, gasping for air and calling for Joy. Joy had held her mother's hand as she took her last breath. By the time Joy left her mother's side and rushed to the abutting ER bay where a cardiac doctor and his team were trying to revive her father, it was too late.\n\nShe would never forget the look on Dr. Caldwell's face as he turned away from her father, who'd been a friend, his eyes meeting Joy's as he said, \"Bruce is gone.\" He'd stared down at the defibrillator paddles in his hands. \"I'm so sorry, Joy.\"\n\nJoy couldn't recall what was said or if she'd said anything after that. What she did remember was sitting at the kitchen table that night as her grandpa spoke to a stream of friends who came to give their condolences. Joy had stared at the melted marshmallows in her cocoa. She felt as if she'd been hollowed out. There was nothing inside her, not even marrow in her bones. No thoughts in her head, no emotion in her heart, and even her breath had frozen in her lungs.\n\nThe police chief\u2014Williams, she thought she remembered\u2014had stood at the sink slugging back coffee while her grandpa filled the carafe with water and started the third round of coffee.\n\n\"Frank,\" the chief had said, \"Dead Man's Tree is a blight on this community.\"\n\n\"It shoulda been cut down years ago. Now my son is one of its victims.\"\n\nJoy had raised her head and listened.\n\n\"I can't tell you how I've battled the Green Preservation Committee to get rid of that tree,\" the chief had said. \"But Wilma Wilcox won't budge, and you know how she can sway city council.\"\n\n\"Wilma is over ninety years old. She's rich, opinionated, stubborn and self-centered. She's run everything from the school board to city council and most of the charity organizations. When we were growing up, she even ran roughshod over the high school athletic coaches.\"\n\n\"How could she do that?\"\n\n\"Money,\" Frank said. \"If they danced to her tune, she donated money for equipment or a new baseball field. The old high school was in the middle of town, near the library. Built in 1920. Ever wonder why the new high school is out there off Anderson Road?\"\n\n\"Don't tell me.\"\n\n\"Wilma donated the land to the city. And then paid for the football field attached to it.\"\n\n\"She's some philanthropist.\"\n\n\"That money always came with a price, if you ask me,\" Frank said. \"For the town's sake, Wilma needs to be booted off that preservation board and keep her trap shut. Let the young folks deal with these issues. That tree is a killer. Bruce and Jill aren't the first to die by that tree.\" Frank had banged his fist on the counter. \"But by God, they will be the last!\"\n\n\"You've been here all your life, Frank. Why is she so adamant about keeping that darn tree?\"\n\n\"All that area, the golf course on either side of Anderson Road, the fire station, even the new housing developments up the hills and the new office buildings, are all built on her family's property that goes back to the Civil War. Over the years, Wilma has sold off parcel after parcel. Anderson Road is named after a brother who died at Normandy Beach. What remains there were of his body, and his dog tags, are buried next to that tree. That's why she won't let anyone cut it down.\"\n\n\"Anderson Wilcox's grave,\" Chief Williams had mused. \"I understand. It's kinda spooky when you think about it. That tree being a grave for her brother and then other people dying because of the tree.\"\n\n\"Well, it's gonna stop,\" Frank had said. \"I'm going to start a petition like this town has never seen. I'll get every last person in Indian Lake to sign if it takes me all year. That tree is done causing pain and sorrow.\"\n\nJoy came away from that night with bitter hard facts. The town of Indian Lake and its authorities had known of the dangers about Dead Man's Tree for years and had done nothing about it. Wilma Wilcox's wealth, social prominence and political clout had caused Joy's parents' deaths and the deaths of others before them. Indian Lake had been paying dearly for Wilma Wilcox's money. Blood money.\n\nJoy not only blamed Wilma Wilcox, she blamed all of Indian Lake for killing her parents.\n\nIf the townspeople had stood up years ago, decades ago, her parents would still be alive. So would others.\n\nThere was no excuse for their deference to Wilma Wilcox.\n\nShe vowed at that moment to leave Indian Lake at her first opportunity. She had less than a full semester of high school remaining, and her hopes for winning a scholarship to Columbia University were high.\n\nShe loved her grandpa, but she couldn't face the townspeople, who knew full well the dangers of Dead Man's Tree and had done nothing to rid themselves of the menace.\n\nThere was no excuse for apathy.\n\nJoy had always been a hard worker both in school and at the greenhouse. Infused with a passion for poinsettias and the desire to become a successful accountant so that she could help her parents and grandpa, Joy didn't understand how anyone could stand aside and let a bully ruin their lives." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Joy took the red sweater and carefully folded it up. Since arriving in Indian Lake, she'd removed only her quilted toiletries bag from her suitcase and put it in the bathroom. Her clothes were still in the suitcase. Even the dress she wore to the funeral she'd folded and put neatly back in the roller bag.\n\n\"Ready to bolt,\" she said aloud.\n\nSubconsciously, she couldn't wait to leave town. Her anger at the people in Indian Lake had not diminished, even though Frank had carried through with the petition to have Dead Man's Tree cut down. Grandpa had told her it took nine months to get the signatures, and though Wilma Wilcox was still on the city council, she'd been overruled. The tree had come down before the year was out.\n\nBut it hadn't brought back her parents. Too little too late. Joy had been robbed of her mother's hugs and laughter, her wisdom and her father's eternal optimism. From him she'd learned no task was too small or too mighty if you looked at work as play.\n\nForgiveness wasn't something she could give. The pain was still as fresh as it was all those years ago. Perhaps it was intensified by Frank's death, sealing her into a tomb of loneliness.\n\nHer tears fell on the sweater and she stared down at it.\n\nEventually she put the sweater to her nose and inhaled. It was faint, but the scent of the perfume she'd worn in high school was there. She closed her eyes.\n\nIf she breathed, all she could remember was a teenage haunting of kissing Adam.\n\n\"Dangerous territory, Joy,\" she scolded herself.\n\nShe walked to the bureau and opened the drawer. She was about to place the sweater inside, when she quickly closed the drawer, turned and placed the sweater in her suitcase.\n\nPerhaps some memories were worth revisiting." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Cate was as good as her word and returned late that afternoon with a folder filled with comps, contracts and computer printouts of commercial properties in the area.\n\nJoy scanned the comps. \"Is commercial property depressed here?\"\n\n\"Yes, but it's on the rise with so many people moving in from Illinois to get away from the property taxes there.\"\n\n\"So, you're saying I should wait?\"\n\n\"I don't know what your situation is. If you need the ready cash, then we should list now and see if we can sell the house by the end of the school year. The greenhouses... I'm not sure how long that will take.\"\n\n\"It's not that I need the money.\" Although Joy couldn't help thinking about the fact that she didn't own anything, really. She rented an apartment that she shared. She didn't have a car. Most of her furniture had come from resale shops. Was it possible that in the back of her mind, her grandpa's house and these greenhouses had always been her safety net? \"I mean, who doesn't need security, but that's not the thing.\"\n\nCate pulled her coffee mug closer, wrapped her hands around it and asked, \"Then what is it?\"\n\nJoy found the question hard to answer. Another thing that wasn't like her. Joy was always quick with responses. Chuck always said her mind was lightning fast.\n\nSince she'd come to Indian Lake, her thoughts were muddled. All she did was rehash the past. Revisit and stall.\n\nLike she was doing now.\n\n\"Let me look these over tonight.\"\n\n\"Take your time. It could take a couple weeks to line up crews to do the work that's needed. My recommendation remains. I'm confident that if you fix the place up, you'll bring a better price.\"\n\n\"Good advice.\"\n\n\"Plus, you've barely cleaned up from the funeral luncheon. Give yourself a break.\"\n\n\"I feel torn. I should get back to New York, though I know they're doing fine, but I also know I owe Grandpa my best efforts here.\" Joy rose from the chair and went to the refrigerator. She pulled out a container of pumpkin-flavored creamer. Her eyes went to the pumpkin pie on the label.\n\nThanksgiving. It would never be the same without Grandpa. She put the creamer down and covered her face. \"I feel so ashamed.\"\n\nCate was on her feet in a flash. She put her arms around Joy and hugged her.\n\n\"I feel so alone. And it's not as if I don't have a fianc\u00e9.\"\n\n\"I know, Joy. But where is he?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Joy nodded. \"Not here.\"\n\n\"I understand that he has to work, but Frank was your only family.\"\n\nJoy wiped away the tears, then grabbed a tissue from the counter. \"Chuck and his father are very close. When Chuck's mother died, it was hard on them. This funeral would have been difficult for Chuck to deal with\u2014at this time.\" Joy blew her nose. \"You know how it is.\"\n\nCate stared at Joy, skepticism written all over her face. Joy didn't blame her. There was a lot about Chuck's actions and attitude she didn't fully understand. If she'd been in Chuck's position she would have insisted on being in Indian Lake with her.\n\nCate went back to the table. \"I'll leave all this with you. You gonna be all right tonight? I mean, maybe you shouldn't be alone. You could come to my house for dinner.\"\n\nJoy forced a smile. \"That's so sweet, Cate, and thanks. But I'm going to Mrs. Beabots's for dinner. I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"She's the best, isn't she?\" Cate picked up her purse. \"I can't wait to hear what she wears tonight. Take note of her ensemble. If I know Mrs. Beabots, her outfit will probably be vintage Chanel.\"\n\n\"That's right. I remember those stories now.\" Joy swatted the air with her palm, dismissing the comment.\n\nCate swung back around. \"Oh, trust me. The stories about her are true. That woman's closet is not to be believed. The first time she took me in there... I think I was with Isabelle and Sarah that time,\" she mused. \"I was speechless. Chanel suits. Louis Vuitton purses. Couture gowns and dresses. Museum stuff.\"\n\n\"I heard vague rumors when I was in high school, but I never saw that closet.\"\n\n\"Sarah told me the same thing. Apparently, she kept everything packed up until Luke, Sarah's husband, built her that new closet. Now she likes sharing with all of us.\"\n\n\"I wonder if she's a collector?\"\n\n\"Nobody knows. She drops hints here and there about the origins of the clothes. Sarah and I have figured out she must have lived in Paris back in the early sixties. But other than that...\" Cate shrugged her shoulders.\n\n\"Better keep my spidey senses alert.\"\n\n\"And then some.\" Cate hugged Joy. \"I gotta run. Call me.\"\n\n\"Promise,\" Joy replied, then held the kitchen door and waved as Cate walked to her car." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Joy put on the same black sheath she'd worn at the funeral, adding a three-quarter-length-sleeved black sweater and black heels. Because Glory had packed for her\u2014in a hurry, no less\u2014there was no jewelry other than the practical small gold hoop earrings she'd worn to the funeral, and her engagement ring.\n\nShe arrived at Mrs. Beabots's three-story Victorian house promptly at six. The front steps were decorated with pumpkins and gourds, and around the beveled-glass front door was a garland of wheat and raffia. A gold-brown-and-green-plaid ribbon swirled around the raffia.\n\nShe remembered that in Indian Lake people \"competition decorated\" for every season. It was one of the traditions that kept the register ringing at the greenhouses. Joy had forgotten how much she'd once loved it. And people like Mrs. Beabots, Sarah and her mother, Ann Marie, when she was alive, kick-started each holiday by hoisting up seasonal wreaths, vines around lampposts and baskets of colorful flowers suspended along porches.\n\nJoy twisted the antique pewter doorbell in the middle of the door. The tinny ring was familiar, and once again her mind wafted back to the times when she, Sarah and Maddie would visit Mrs. Beabots.\n\nRemembering her conversation with Cate, Joy thought it funny, in all those years, she hadn't paid attention to what Mrs. Beabots wore. Not that she would have known Chanel from Banana Republic.\n\nThe door swung open. Instead of Mrs. Beabots, Titus was there. \"Hi!\"\n\nJoy smiled at Titus. \"Good evening,\" she said, shifting the white orchid she'd bought as a hostess gift to her left arm. She held out her hand. \"How are you, Titus?\"\n\n\"Very fine, thank you,\" he replied, pushing his glasses to the bridge of his nose, then shaking her hand. \"My dad's in the kitchen with Mrs. Beabots.\" He stood back, holding the door.\n\nJoy walked in, glancing around the huge foyer, at the library table with its Tiffany lamp and a pair of sterling silver deer that held up an enormous silver-edged bowl filled with pinecones.\n\n\"I didn't know it was a party,\" Joy said.\n\n\"It's not,\" Titus said, stomping past her and then beckoning her to follow him. \"It's just us.\"\n\n\"So, you come here a lot, do you?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Timmy and I help Mrs. Beabots bake cookies after school.\"\n\n\"I'll bet you do.\" She chuckled as her shoes sank into the thick-cut Chinese runner in the hall. She passed the front parlor to the left, which opened by way of massive pocket doors to the library, where a fire was crackling in the fireplace. The familiar portrait of beautiful Mrs. Beabots hung over the mantel. Joy slowed for a moment to peer at the painting. The dress she wore was elegant and clearly something Audrey Hepburn would have worn in Paris.\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"C'mon,\" Titus urged.\n\nJoy could hear laughter and the clatter of pans in the kitchen. She saw Adam first. He was wearing a sky blue banded collar shirt with the sleeves pushed up, exposing taut muscles, as well as black dress slacks, black dress shoes and a ruffled pink-and-white apron. He paused in taking a sip of red wine when she walked in.\n\n\"Hi, Adam,\" she said cheerily.\n\n\"Hello.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots pulled a casserole dish from the oven with oven mitts on her hands. She placed the casserole on a brass trivet. \"Oh, Joy. How lovely you look.\"\n\nJoy knew the woman didn't mean the first word she said. Joy felt particularly frumpy compared to her hostess. Mrs. Beabots was wearing a cream-and-gold Chanel short jacket with looped edge braid along the bottom and up the placket. The cream straight skirt to match was paired with cream hose, winter-white leather pumps and five gold-pearl-and-crystal chains around her neck. Gold logo earrings peeked out from her thick silver chin-length hair and danced in the light from the overhead Venetian crystal lamps.\n\nJoy knew the earrings were new because she'd seen them advertised in the Vogue magazine she'd picked up at the airport. The rest was vintage\u2014and real. Cate was right. She was exquisite. Which made Joy feel not only underdressed but shabby.\n\n\"Thank you for inviting me,\" Joy said.\n\nTitus climbed up on a wooden stool. \"She brought you a flower,\" he said to Mrs. Beabots.\n\n\"It's an orchid,\" Adam said.\n\n\"It's real pretty.\" Titus reached out to touch a petal, leaned too far and started to fall.\n\n\"Titus!\" Adam shouted.\n\nJoy quickly flung her arm around Titus's middle, then scooped him off the stool while still holding the orchid securely. She lowered him to the floor. \"There ya go,\" she said proudly, looking at Adam, whose scowl was sharp enough to leave permanent markings on his face. \"He's fine.\"\n\n\"I see that.\" Adam glared at Titus, who paid no attention and continued looking at Joy.\n\nMrs. Beabots smiled broadly and closed the oven door. \"Adam. Why don't you pour our guest some wine? I could use a glass, as well, while I finish up here.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he said and went to a silver tray with different-shaped wineglasses. He held up the bottle. \"Red?\"\n\n\"That's great.\"\n\n\"I'll have the chardonnay, Adam,\" Mrs. Beabots said.\n\nJoy put her purse on the side counter, where she noticed another silver tray filled with more wineglasses. A second brass tray held colorful cut crystal cordial and Irish crystal brandy balloons. \"Thanks,\" Adam whispered as he handed her a glass. \"Titus can be, er, clumsy sometimes.\"\n\n\"He's a kid,\" she said.\n\n\"And you're used to kids?\" he asked, reaching behind her to take a wineglass.\n\n\"A bit. Glory and I volunteer at a family shelter a couple weekends a month\u2014but not during tax season. Mostly it's babysitting, but I love the kids.\"\n\nHis arm brushed hers. She kept her eyes on him, though she made no attempt to move away. She couldn't help inhaling the woodsy scent of the soap he still used. Some things didn't change over time, she thought.\n\nHe held up the wineglass. \"White wineglass...for the chardonnay.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nHe poured the wine for Mrs. Beabots. Joy held up her glass. \"To your good health,\" she said.\n\n\"And yours,\" Adam and Mrs. Beabots chorused.\n\nTitus lifted a mug shaped like a turkey with both hands. \"Clink with me,\" he asked Joy first.\n\n\"To your good health.\" She smiled and watched as he drank what looked like cocoa. \"I like that mug.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots has mugs for Annie, Timmy and Charlotte next door,\" Titus replied. \"Then when I started coming over after school, we went to the antiques mall and found Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas mugs.\" He put his palm to his mouth to shield his words from Adam and Mrs. Beabots. \"They were only a dollar, so she bought a whole set so Danny Sullivan can have one, too.\"\n\n\"And don't forget Zeke,\" Mrs. Beabots added.\n\nTitus's mouth rounded. \"You heard me?\"\n\n\"You aren't exactly quiet, Titus.\" Adam beamed at his son and winked. \"I like that about you.\"\n\nTitus shot his arms straight up in the air. \"I know! I like being happy!\" he shouted.\n\nEveryone laughed.\n\nImpulsively, Joy put her hand on Titus's little shoulder. \"I hope you always feel that way, Titus. We need more people in the world like you.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Miss Boston.\"\n\n\"You can call me Joy,\" she said, looking down into the same charismatic blue eyes as his father\u2014magnified by the glass lenses. Joy didn't know what it was, but a distinct warmth filled her just looking at Titus. She seriously had to resist the urge to hug him, as if his happiness would infuse her somehow.\n\n\"No,\" Adam said. \"You call her Miss Joy. It's more respectful. Just like you do with Miss Sarah.\"\n\nTitus turned from his father to Joy. \"Is that all right?\"\n\n\"It sure is.\"\n\nTitus whooped with joy and picked up his mug with both hands again and drank.\n\nThe timer on the oven pinged.\n\n\"The chicken is ready,\" Mrs. Beabots said, putting her wineglass down and picking up the oven mitts.\n\n\"Here,\" Adam said. \"Let me do that. You ladies take the wine out to the table and I'll bring the meal.\"\n\n\"Well, thank you, Adam,\" she replied, then walked around the granite-topped island and took Joy's arm. \"Shall we?\" She winked. \"It's not often I get treated like a princess.\"\n\n\"Queen,\" Adam corrected, as he pulled the stuffed chicken breasts out of the oven.\n\nMrs. Beabots sat at the head of the table closest to the kitchen. Adam was to her right and Joy to her left. Titus sat next to Adam on a pillow to raise him up.\n\nJoy noticed that as Adam brought the dishes to the table and placed them on trivets, Titus slipped the pillow out from under him and let it slide to the floor.\n\nAs Adam sat, Titus glanced at Joy. She looked down to the floor to let him know that she'd seen what he'd done. He pursed his lips and gave the slightest shake of his head. She knew he didn't want her to squeal on him. She nodded and gave him a slight smile. His smile grew wider.\n\nTitus looked at the chicken breasts. \"What's inside them?\"\n\nAdam held the plates while Mrs. Beabots served the scalloped potatoes, glazed carrots and chicken. \"Cream cheese, Parmesan cheese and spinach.\" She halted. \"Titus, you do like spinach, don't you?\"\n\n\"I do. My dad introduced it to me last year. It's very healthy. Organic, right?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. And I cook gluten-free now. I don't think I'll ever be dairy-free, however. Thank goodness I'm not lactose intolerant.\" Mrs. Beabots laughed.\n\nAdam placed Titus's plate in front of him. Titus sniffed the food. \"Smells good.\"\n\n\"Garlic.\" Mrs. Beabots smiled and handed Joy her plate. \"Do you like to cook, Joy?\"\n\n\"I do, though I don't get much chance, especially this time of year. We work quite late from now until tax season is over.\"\n\n\"I can only imagine,\" Adam said, cutting the chicken.\n\n\"Once we hit January my days last till midnight. I make it a practice to pack several green salads and fruits for the day and night.\"\n\nTitus had finished all his carrots before tasting anything else. Joy noticed he moved on to the potatoes and still hadn't touched the chicken. \"I like to cook,\" Titus said between bites.\n\nJoy looked at Adam's pride-filled face. \"I'm surprised.\"\n\n\"Dad taught me.\" Titus kept eating, not looking at anyone.\n\nAdam sipped his wine. \"Raising a healthy child is an enormous responsibility. Thank goodness for the internet\u2014\"\n\n\"And,\" Mrs. Beabots interrupted, \"pie-making lessons in this kitchen.\"\n\n\"I love those!\" Titus said. \"Are we having pie for dessert?\" His eyes looked like saucers in his face.\n\n\"Of course,\" Mrs. Beabots said.\n\n\"What kind?\"\n\n\"Titus, that's not polite to ask,\" Adam said, placing his hand on Titus's forearm.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Mrs. Beabots said. \"Dutch apple. I believe that's your favorite, Titus.\"\n\n\"It is.\" He looked up at his father. \"Dad likes them all. Especially that chocolate-and-peppermint-candy one at Christmas.\"\n\n\"That's my favorite,\" Joy said. \"I made that for you at Christmas.\"\n\n\"Our junior year,\" Adam said, without looking at her.\n\n\"My mother made it every year. It was her mother's recipe.\"\n\nJoy didn't take her eyes from Adam. Neither did anyone else at the table.\n\n\"I told her I'd never had anything that sweet.\" Adam lifted his eyes to Joy.\n\nJoy wasn't sure what she saw in his expression. Though he wasn't smiling, his eyes gleamed with caring, fondness and\u2014hope. Her heart skipped.\n\nMrs. Beabots looked from Adam to Joy and she caught the glance out the corner of her eye. \"Adam's Christmases back then were...\"\n\n\"Hollow,\" he finished. He lifted his chin as if courage had come to his rescue. \"Then I met Joy and her family. And things changed.\" He looked at Titus, who was still silent. He ruffled Titus's thick hair. \"I promised myself that if I was ever lucky enough to have a kid, I'd make sure every Christmas was special.\"\n\n\"Blowout, Dad. You said we'd have a blowout Christmas this year,\" Titus said happily.\n\nJoy put her fork down. As delicious as the food was, the conversation was far more intriguing. \"And what exactly does that mean?\"\n\nThe excitement on Titus's face hit mega wattage. \"We're gonna have the biggest, bestest tree ever! We're going out to Pine Country Tree Farm, where you can ride out to the groves and pick any tree you want. They cut it down, unless you wanna do it yourself.\" He tilted his head up to Adam. \"You gonna do it again this year, Dad?\"\n\n\"Probably.\"\n\nTitus turned back to Joy. \"Then we ride back and they bundle it up and put it in our truck. I want a really, really huge one this year.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" Joy replied. \"Just how big is that?\"\n\nAdam chuckled. \"Titus's imagination is always a bit over the top. Our living room ceiling is only eight feet.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Titus groaned. \"Not like here. Right, Mrs. Beabots? Last year we got her a really, really big tree. Timmy and I and Mr. Luke and Dad went out to get the tree.\"\n\n\"Yes, but I go in November and pick my tree out. Tagged. Purchased and bailed by the time they get there,\" Mrs. Beabots added.\n\n\"What's your tree like, Joy?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"I don't have one.\"\n\n\"What?\" Titus shook his head. Adam nearly choked on his wine. Mrs. Beabots clanked her fork against the plate.\n\n\"You, of all people, don't have a tree?\" Adam said.\n\nJoy bristled. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\nHis tone softened as he said, \"You and your family, your parents, Frank\u2014you were the heart of Christmas for this town. For someone like me with no family, when I found yours and worked at the greenhouses during Christmas, and saw how beautiful you made everything, it was...magic.\"\n\n\"Magic?\" Titus's eyes widened.\n\nAdam nodded. \"What happened to you?\"\n\nJoy's defenses rose. \"Life. Work. You wouldn't understand how crunched for time we are at the firm. That's why I loved having Grandpa with me in New York for Thanksgiving. If you ever came to New York at Christmas, you'd understand. The entire city is decorated. I never felt the loss of not having decorations of my own. New York is amazing. And as far as a big tree, Titus, the one in Rockefeller Center is truly 'blowout.' I'd love for you to see it.\"\n\n\"Cool! Can we go to New York sometime, Dad?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\nJoy's hand traced the scalloped edges of the spoon to her right. \"You're right, Adam. The greenhouses were part of Christmas for a lot of people in Indian Lake. But they've been closed for a long time. Certainly Titus didn't get to experience them.\" She took a deep breath. \"It seems they died long before my grandpa.\"\n\nAdam leaned forward. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Cate worked up the comps and did some digging for me today. She says the greenhouses are worthless.\"\n\n\"That doesn't sound right,\" Adam retorted.\n\nShe shrugged her shoulders. \"I mean, the land has value and she says the house might sell before the end of the year. But it's far less than what I'd thought it was worth.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots reached over and placed her hand on Joy's arm. \"Do you need money, dear?\"\n\n\"I'm not destitute, but I'm not wealthy by any means. My job pays well. But it's the craziest thing. I feel like I'm giving away my legacy\u2014as if I failed by not knowing that Grandpa was in trouble. And I don't like this feeling.\"\n\n\"Then fight it,\" Adam said. \"The greenhouses were a thriving business until the heating costs skyrocketed. I'm sure Frank kept all the old revenue reports and tax returns that show how successful it had been. The man kept everything, he told me. And now my geothermal system is nearly finished. If you were to fill those greenhouses with poinsettias, stock the shelves with garlands, ornaments, decorations, candles\u2014all that stuff he used to sell\u2014and then, after a successful season, put the greenhouses on the market...you'd have a viable business. That's the plan Frank and I had.\"\n\n\"Adam, I can't possibly do anything that foolhardy.\"\n\n\"My idea is foolish?\" He frowned.\n\n\"It doesn't make good business sense. The cost of buying the poinsettias will be huge...\"\n\n\"I'll help,\" he said quickly.\n\nJoy was astonished and she knew it showed on her face. \"Adam, I couldn't ask you to do that.\"\n\n\"You didn't. I offered. There's a difference,\" he ground out with finality.\n\nTitus turned his wide eyes from his father to Joy. He couldn't be more intense if he'd been watching a scary movie.\n\n\"It's impossible,\" she countered.\n\n\"Nothing is impossible,\" Adam shot back, leaning toward her, his eyes stern and determined. \"You're just chicken.\"\n\n\"Am not.\"\n\n\"Are, too.\"\n\n\"Dad!\"\n\nJoy and Adam looked at Titus, who was smiling at them both.\n\nThey all burst into laughter.\n\n\"What are we doing?\" Joy asked, covering her mouth with her hand as she laughed harder. When she calmed down, she looked at Mrs. Beabots.\n\n\"You need to think of the bigger possibilities, Joy,\" Mrs. Beabots said. \"If the property was improved and potential buyers saw the activity of the business...\"\n\n\"I'd get a better price,\" Joy surmised.\n\n\"And you wouldn't feel like a failure,\" Mrs. Beabots said.\n\nJoy looked from one excited friend's face to the other. \"But it's nearly Thanksgiving and we have to clean the floors, replace the broken glass...\"\n\n\"So?\" Adam jumped in. \"We have lots of friends here. I'll help clean up.\"\n\n\"Me, too!\" Titus chimed in.\n\n\"Joe Peterson over at Quality Glass could get that work done in two days. You handle calling the suppliers in the morning. Get the orders going. I'll supervise the cleanup and construction. What do you say?\"\n\n\"I say it's crazy.\" She shook her head at the red flags she recognized from her years in accounting and business. \"Absolutely not. Besides, I have to be back in New York.\"\n\nShe watched their faces fall. For a moment she'd actually felt excited. The possibility of fulfilling her grandpa's dream was thrilling. She could almost feel Frank in the room, egging her on. Begging her to try. But her penchant for reality, the stuff of bottom lines and profits, was enough to squelch even an angel's dreams.\n\nStill\u2014\n\nCould she do it? For someone who didn't know the ropes of her business, it would be daunting, but she did recall the suppliers, part-time workers, even cottage industry owners who filled the shop shelves with homemade quilts, jams, honey and Christmas cookies.\n\nAdam was right. The greenhouses had been a retail outlet for local craftspeople. They built their hopes and aspirations on Frank's store.\n\n\"Joy,\" Adam said softly, \"you have something I never had.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Legacy.\"\n\nChills shot up Joy's spine, and the smile that came to her lips was from a place of pride and love. Her mother always told her to listen to her heart. \"I'll do it.\"\n\n\"Does that mean you're gonna stay here?\" Titus asked.\n\nJoy knew from her emails and texts to Glory and Chuck that they'd been handling the clients. The office was fine. This was the perfect time and cause to use her accrued vacation days.\n\n\"I can\u2014at least until closing on Christmas Eve. I have nearly a month of vacation days I've never taken. Fortunately, our most challenging client I took care of before I came back...\" She stopped and looked at Adam.\n\n\"Home?\" he finished for her.\n\n\"Here. I was going to say 'here.'\" Her eyes locked on his and he didn't look away. He held her to her momentary promise. Initially, she saw hope shine in his eyes, a hope she'd seen before. Then a cloud passed over the light and he shut her out. As he should. She wasn't staying for good.\n\n\"Yay! You'll be here!\" Titus thrust his arms into the air. \"It is gonna be a blowout Christmas.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Joy wasn't sure if her Christmas was going to be a blowout or a dud. Her plan to reopen the greenhouses sounded exciting and doable at Mrs. Beabots's dining table, but in the cold light of morning, not so much.\n\nHer first phone call of the day was to Chuck. After he exploded with anger that she would miss the parade and dinner with his dad, she didn't have the courage to tell him about reopening the greenhouses\u2014which would mean she wouldn't be back to New York until Christmas Day.\n\n\"I'll tackle that one later,\" she'd said to herself, swiping her palm across her brow. Her cell rang.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" she groaned, seeing the Newly office number on her caller ID.\n\n\"Hey, girl!\" Glory said excitedly. \"What's your ETA? I'm gonna be so glad to see your face!\"\n\n\"Um, Glory. There's something I have to tell you.\"\n\n\"Honey. Anytime you say, 'Um, Glory,' I know I'm not gonna like this.\"\n\n\"I hope you're okay with it.\"\n\n\"Spill.\"\n\n\"I just got off the phone with Chuck. Did he tell you anything about what's going on here in Indian Lake?\"\n\n\"I try not to converse with your fianc\u00e9, other than topics pertaining to clients. It's safer for him that way.\"\n\n\"Thank you for that.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. So, what is going on and why won't I like it?\"\n\nJoy took a deep breath and rushed on. \"I'm not coming home for Thanksgiving. In fact, I won't be home till Christmas Day. Though I didn't exactly break that part to Chuck...yet.\"\n\n\"Run that by me again.\"\n\n\"Grandpa's business has been closed for years. The Realtor says it's nearly worthless. Actually, the greenhouses are a deterrent to a sale. Frankly, I had hoped to ask Grandpa for a loan to help me with the wedding. My savings aren't all that, er, substantial.\"\n\n\"Independently wealthy, you are not. You wouldn't have a roommate if that was the case.\"\n\n\"Oh, Glory, we'd probably live together even if we were millionaires.\"\n\n\"No offense, honey, but I was hoping for a clone of Michael B. Jordan for my next roommate.\"\n\nJoy laughed so hard she fell back on the bed. \"Oh, how I miss you. I needed that.\"\n\n\"So, what are you going to do?\"\n\nJoy propped herself up on her elbow and picked a small white feather off her jeans, which she assumed had come from the down comforter. \"I'm going to reopen the greenhouses and stock them with as many poinsettias as the supplier can provide. Fix it up. Glam it up and...\"\n\n\"Make your grandpa proud?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"I think that's great.\"\n\n\"You...do?\" Joy was astonished. Glory was about having fun, going out, living it up, especially over the holidays. Her friend seldom seemed to take anything seriously. But Glory understood her. And that was comforting. \"You really are the best of friends, Glory.\"\n\nAfter a pause, Glory said, \"Joy. Do you have any idea what you've done for me?\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? I haven't done anything.\"\n\n\"If it weren't for you going to bat for me with Newly and Associates, I wouldn't have gotten my promotion three years ago. Until I finish my courses and get my degree, the rest of the world considers me an assistant. Another gofer in the world of office gofers who used to be called secretaries.\"\n\n\"But you're only a semester away from that degree.\"\n\n\"That's right. Thanks to you. Helping pay for my courses\u2014which, by the way, is why you don't have a fat bank account. You're always helping others out. I've never met anyone as generous and thoughtful as you. You cook for me and my crazy artistic gang. You let Jensen sleep on the couch all through October when he lost that gig up in Buffalo. He would have been homeless if you hadn't agreed. And we both know you pay three-fourths the rent on the apartment. Sad digs as it is.\"\n\n\"It's affordable and in a safe area.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Security. Your middle name. That's why this out-of-the-box, pie-in-the-sky venture of yours doesn't sound like you.\"\n\n\"Except for the fact that this is what my grandpa wanted.\"\n\n\"And you loved him.\"\n\n\"I always will,\" Joy replied, wishing her throat didn't close up so much at the thought of Frank.\n\n\"Joy,\" Glory said, her tone serious now. \"How are you going to break this to Chuck? All he talks about is the parade at that penthouse. The guy is practically counting the hours till you come back.\"\n\n\"Funny, isn't it? I couldn't care less about the parade without Grandpa. It means nothing to me now. There's not a penthouse in the world that can replace his happiness watching the parade.\"\n\n\"Best to get it over with quickly.\"\n\n\"My thought exactly.\"\n\nJoy pressed her fingers to her temple. She could already feel a stress headache coming on. Then she heard the rumble of trucks driving up outside her bedroom window. She rose from the bed and pulled back the white eyelet curtains.\n\nThree construction trucks had pulled up. She saw a pickup that had tall racks in the bed filled with glass panes. Four men took out tool kits from the back of the second truck. The third truck was a cherry picker with a long lift built into the back with a bucket on the end.\n\n\"Hey, I've gotta go. Talk soon. Love ya.\"\n\n\"Love ya.\" Glory hung up.\n\nJoy slipped her cell phone into the back pocket of her jeans. She grabbed her old high school jacket from the closet and raced down the stairs and outside.\n\nAdam drove up in his truck, got out and walked over to a tall, good-looking man with black hair and dark eyes. The guy had wider shoulders than Adam, if that was possible.\n\nJoy walked up. \"Good morning, Adam.\"\n\n\"Mornin'.\" Adam smiled. \"Joy, this is Joe Peterson. He owns the glass company I was telling you about.\"\n\nWhen Joe smiled at her, Joy seriously thought his black eyes flashed. If Glory was looking for a clone for Michael B. Jordan, he was right here in Indian Lake. Joy shook his hand. \"I'm so pleased to meet you so soon.\"\n\n\"Pardon?\"\n\n\"I mean, I'm so lucky you're here. Already.\"\n\nHis eyes tracked to Adam.\n\nAdam slapped Joe on the back. \"I emailed Joe last night and he had a cancellation for a job he was due to start this morning. So, I jumped at the opportunity.\"\n\n\"Fortuitous,\" she said, wondering how much this crew was going to cost. She'd barely processed the idea of opening the greenhouses, much less the cost. Kyle Evans had given her Grandpa's checking and savings accounts information. Fortunately, there was enough money to cover the basic repairs and the cost of the wholesale poinsettias, but that was all. Grandpa's living expenses were covered mostly by his social security benefits.\n\nAdam was smiling as if he'd just won the state science fair. \"We have to make every minute count, Joy. We don't have enough hours in the day to do all we want to do.\"\n\n\"That said,\" Joe interjected as he took a step away, \"I better get to it. Nice meeting you, Joy. And can I take this moment to say what a great thing this is that you're doing, bringing the greenhouses back?\" His genuine sincerity shone in his smile. \"My guys will pressure wash all the glass after the panes are installed. You'll be sparkling by the end of tomorrow.\"\n\n\"That's all it takes?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\nJoe walked over to the crew, who were laying tarps on the ground, while one man was busting out broken wall panes.\n\n\"They don't waste a minute,\" she said to Adam.\n\n\"Joe and his guys are the best.\" He looked back at her. \"What did the supplier say?\"\n\n\"I put in a call first thing this morning, but haven't heard back. I did get emails from the scented candle company and a local woman who makes quilts and Christmas stockings.\"\n\n\"Hattie?\"\n\n\"You know Hattie Pottington?\"\n\n\"Sure. What did she say?\" His eyes flashed with delight. If she didn't know better, she'd say he was enjoying this more than she was.\n\nAnd why shouldn't he? It was his idea. He was all in.\n\nJoy had the impression that when he looked up at the buildings, he was seeing the completed work. Adam had always had that vision that she supposed geniuses possessed. They rushed into a vacuum and created something out of nothing. But they saw creations in their heads.\n\nWhen she was a teen, she'd been filled with imagination. She was surrounded by beautiful flowers every season. She'd been immersed in the world of black and red numbers for so long she'd lost that sense of wonder. She'd forgotten how precious each moment of life could be under these glass ceilings.\n\nAnd she'd forgotten what it was like to spend them with Adam.\n\n\"She's bringing product over this afternoon for me to choose.\"\n\n\"That's a good start.\"\n\nThey walked to the front door and Joy unlocked it. As she entered the showroom, she said, \"I suppose I should give you back your key.\"\n\n\"I suppose.\"\n\nShe pulled the key from her pocket and gave it to him. Odd. It felt natural to give him back the key to the greenhouse that her grandpa had entrusted to him. And to her. Adam had been part of the dream to reopen. Together, they might make this place shine on for years. But for a new buyer and a new generation of owners.\n\nA wave of sadness hit her.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said, looking down at her hand in his. \"I need to get started on the heating system. And you\u2014\" he pointed at her \"\u2014take that phone and call the poinsettia supplier again. Don't wait.\"\n\nShe shrugged off her dour thoughts, saluted him and said, \"Aye, aye, Captain.\"\n\nHe leaned close, his eyes peering into hers, and said, \"Frank was the captain. We're shipmates. Taking this dream to the moon.\"\n\nShe held her breath, seeing the image in her mind's eye. Adam had always been able to catch her attention, zero in on the thought that stopped her cold and get her to look at the possibilities from a new perspective.\n\nThey were sailing a ship of dreams\u2014together.\n\nFor the time being. Joy would be a fool if she allowed herself to waver from her path. She hadn't counted on the easy feeling she had around Adam and his adorable son, who was quite good at stealing her heart. She couldn't hurt Adam again, and she would when she sold the greenhouses and went back to New York.\n\nHe was right to keep up his barriers. Because, in the end, Joy could never, ever live in Indian Lake. Her anger was still firecracker hot.\n\n\"I better go.\" The velvet tones of his voice shattered her thoughts.\n\nAs he walked away, Joy was far too aware of his confident gait, how his shoulders squared with the ground as if everything about him was balanced, and no matter what burden life put on him, he could handle it. He'd always been like that. Sturdy. Sure. And sexy enough to keep her attention.\n\n\"Hey.\" He spun back around, killing her thoughts. \"I forgot to tell you. I hired a cleaning service for the showroom. They should be here any minute.\"\n\n\"I thought we were doing the cleaning.\"\n\n\"We'll do the hard stuff...like those tiles in the greenhouses. This area needs to be cleaned in a hurry. You're going to be stocking shelves by the end of the day.\"\n\n\"Anything else I should know?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I asked Maddie if she'd put up one of her display cases and we'd sell some cupcakes here to kick-start things.\" Then he scratched the back of his neck. \"And I ordered a couple coffee makers online. They'll be here this afternoon, along with the coffee, sugar, creamers, sweeteners.\"\n\n\"Guess you thought of it all.\"\n\n\"Uh, not quite.\" Again, he pointed to her back pocket. \"Get on that phone. Without poinsettias, our ship is dead in the water.\"\n\nJoy grabbed her cell and held it up. \"I'm on it.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Show me.\"\n\nShe went to her Recents and hit the number of her grandpa's major supplier. \"Hello!\" She smiled at Adam.\n\nAdam winked at her and left through the French doors to the back.\n\n\"Hi, this is Joy Boston of Boston Greenhouses in Indian Lake. I'd like to place an order. A very large order.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Hustling for poinsettias only days before Thanksgiving wasn't easy. Most suppliers were committed to their regular retailers.\n\nBut Frank Boston's name carried clout. When she told the supplier in Greenback, Tennessee, that Frank had died and she'd returned to Indian Lake to reopen the greenhouses, the man agreed to send a half order of red poinsettias, one full truck of white poinsettias and a half truck of pink. In eight days, they would send another truck of red.\n\nAdam had come in from working on the compressor and saw the dark look on Joy's face. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I need more red poinsettias.\"\n\nHe took off his work gloves. She watched as he Googled a number on his iPhone.\n\n\"Ah! Here it is. Nancy Jessup's Wholesale Nursery.\"\n\nHe punched the number. \"Hello! This is Boston Greenhouses up in Indiana. I'm in desperate need for red poinsettias. What do you have left?\"\n\nHe paused for a moment. \"I understand that you don't deliver to Indiana, but what if I were to take all those off your hands? Great. Then I want to place a second order for the same or similar. When can we come back and pick those up? Eight days. Excellent. My driver will be there tomorrow.\"\n\nHe hung up.\n\nJoy's eyebrow hitched up. \"What driver? I can't leave here and neither can you. You have a heating system to finish. Otherwise the poinsettias will die.\"\n\nHe grinned at her again.\n\nJoy's eyes narrowed. Adam was in his element, flying by the seat of his pants, banking on fate to align all his spinning plates so that Joy could bring a good price for the greenhouses.\n\nAnd return to New York.\n\nAnd Chuck.\n\n\"Hey!\" Adam said when his next call was answered. \"What're you doin', man? I've got a job for you, if you want it. I need you to drive down to Dallas and pick up a load for me and drive it back here to Boston Greenhouses.\"\n\nJoy mouthed, \"Who are you talking to?\"\n\nAdam held up his palm. \"And when you get back, since your regular business is slow this time of year, how about a part-time job helping out at the greenhouses taking care of the poinsettias for us?\" He paused. \"Oh, yeah. I forgot about the lights. Well, just the Dallas trips, then.\"\n\n\"Who is that?\" Joy whispered, narrowing her eyes as Adam ignored her.\n\n\"I'll make the arrangements for the truck. Thanks, man.\"\n\nAdam clicked off. \"You can thank me later.\" He chuckled, apparently enjoying her frustration.\n\n\"Who. Was. It?\"\n\n\"Lester MacDougal, a local landscaper and friend of Sarah's and mine. Obviously, he's slow this time of year and welcomes extra work. And we'll need him. He works in large holiday lighting jobs. Trees, garlands. Stuff like that. He does the courthouse lights. The firefighters do the downtown trees. But he's perfect for us.\"\n\n\"I don't remember him. Did we go to school with him?\"\n\n\"No. Actually, he walked here from Kentucky when he was fifteen. Sarah's mom was still alive then and he literally walked up to Ann-Marie when she was planting bulbs in the boulevard in front of Sarah's house. He told her that he liked diggin' in the dirt. She put him to work, fed him, clothed him, and Maddie rented him his first apartment. Later, Sarah and Maddie helped set him up in business. He got a horticulture degree online. He's good people.\"\n\n\"Why did he leave Kentucky? Didn't he have family?\"\n\n\"Not the kind of family I'd wish on anyone. His father abused him. Regularly. He said the day he fought back, he walked out and kept walking till he met Ann-Marie.\"\n\nJoy put her hand on her heart and felt it throbbing with compassion. \"In so many ways, I was lucky to have my parents and grandpa as long as I did.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, looking away. \"You were.\"\n\nShe saw the judgment in his eyes. \"Don't say it.\"\n\n\"I wasn't.\"\n\n\"I feel terrible about not coming back. I do. I wish I had spent more time with Grandpa. I just thought...\"\n\n\"He'd always be around. Yeah. I know how that is.\"\n\n\"You do?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. I thought the same thing, too. I thought I could wish him alive.\"\n\n\"Oh, Adam, it had to be so hard\u2014what you went through, being there when he died. It...it probably brought back memories of Amie's death.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He slapped his gloves against his palm.\n\nShe saw his blue eyes glisten as he lowered his head.\n\n\"I was with my mother...\" She gulped back a sob. She hadn't talked about her mother's death to anyone in all these years. Yet one more buried painful dragon to unearth. \"The doctors couldn't save my dad. I was holding her hand and looking at the doctor, and I felt her hand go limp.\" She paused and cleared her throat. Joy smelled the pungent hospital smells, heard the monitors beeping, then the monotone flat line. \"I couldn't save her.\"\n\nAdam raised his head. \"I couldn't save Amie, either. I was so...helpless...\"\n\n\"I know... I know...\" She exhaled and felt hot breath escape her lips, heated from her long-held anger.\n\n\"Joy...\" He reached for her hand. \"I tried so hard to be there for you, but you pushed me away. Why?\"\n\n\"Oh, Adam. I...I couldn't take it. I was losing everything. I thought if I pushed you away, I wouldn't have to deal with losing you in the future, too.\"\n\n\"But I loved you.\"\n\n\"And I loved you.\" She reached up and smashed her tears with her palm. \"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that.\"\n\n\"Why not? It's the truth, isn't it?\"\n\n\"It is.\"\n\nHe inhaled deeply. \"No, you're right. That was the past. We can't change any aspect of it. Not death or what was between us. This is now.\"\n\nShe forced a smile, watching his barriers rise up. Again.\n\n\"I better get to it if we're going to make this enterprise happen,\" he said slowly, as if it was difficult to speak each word.\n\nBut as he walked off, she saw him sweep his fingers under his eyes. Of course, Adam believed in miracles. He had to, she thought. The alternative was unacceptable.\n\nJoy's heart bubbled with compassion for him and grief for her own loss. What would have happened if she hadn't run away? Would they have stayed together? Would that teen love have endured? This was now, he'd said. She had a purpose being in Indian Lake at the moment and that goal needed tending.\n\nJoy gathered her strength and went back to organizing the front counter. She found clippers, floral tape, wire, pipe cleaners, floral foam, boxes of iridescent marbles and glass stones in the storage room, plus old garland and Christmas picks with frosted pinecones, tiny decorative wrapped presents and silk poinsettias they used to use when wrapping gifts or in the bows around flowerpots.\n\nThough the cleaning crew was due within the hour, she knew how she wanted the counter to look. After wiping it down, she covered it with a long red brocade tablecloth she'd found in her grandpa's linen closet. The end of the counter was covered in white plank wood, which she kept clear for the wrapping of poinsettias.\n\nShe ordered three rolls of printed floral paper and three rolls of iridescent cellophane from the floral supplier, along with other designing supplies she would need to make wreaths, door swags and floral arrangements.\n\nIt was after three o'clock\u2014and another twenty calls to various gift suppliers and showrooms for ornaments, tree skirts, place mats, napkins, Christmas china and cookie jars\u2014when Sarah drove up with four children in her SUV. She held Charlotte's hand while Annie led her brother, Timmy, and Titus inside.\n\nThe cleaning crew had left and the first shipment of lit faux garland had arrived. Between phone calls, Joy had hung the entire perimeter of crown molding with the lit garland and plugged it in.\n\n\"It's already a fairyland, Miss Joy!\" Titus exclaimed.\n\nJoy hugged Sarah. \"Not even one day in and we're moving like a bullet train.\"\n\n\"I thought I'd give Miss Milse a break while she puts dinner together. The kids were excited to see your progress.\"\n\n\"Did Titus tell you?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots told me the happy news.\"\n\nShe watched as the boy touched every empty shelf and investigated behind the counter. \"He's so curious.\" Joy looked at the shiny object in Titus's mitten-covered hand. \"What you got there?\"\n\n\"Ornament. Miss Milse was showing us how to make Santa faces on our glass ornaments with cotton and glitter.\" He took off his mittens, switched the ornament from hand to hand as he put the mittens in his pockets and then held it up. \"Pretty, huh? I'm gonna make a whole tree full!\"\n\nJoy sighed. So many simple things about Christmas she'd pushed out of her mind when she left Indian Lake. When Mom and Dad died. \"I bet you don't know how to make a donkey and a reindeer.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Out of clothespins and Popsicle sticks.\"\n\nJoy looked at Sarah. \"They still sell those?\"\n\n\"At the craft store,\" Sarah whispered.\n\n\"I need to remember that,\" Joy said, grabbing her pad and jotting down the reminder. \"Seriously, Sarah, my head is spinning. And my credit card is beat up.\"\n\nSarah leaned in. \"I think it's valiant of you, what you're doing, and I want to help.\"\n\n\"That...that would be great.\"\n\n\"You know I'm a designer now? I could set up the displays for you. Section things out like I do for my retail commercial clients. When people come in the store, they naturally veer right. So, we want to put your most spectacular tree, gifts and florals right by the door. Then we can create a winter walkway for them to follow, taking them past all the decorations and gifts. You'll need baskets for them to put their goods in.\"\n\nJoy snapped her fingers. \"We have those! In the storage room.\"\n\n\"Perfect. Then we take them to the back, where we'll put the food. Jam. Honey. Cookies. And then end up at the checkout counter, where they can eat a fresh baked cookie while they get their poinsettia wrapped.\"\n\n\"What cookies?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"The ones Mrs. Beabots has volunteered to bake for you.\"\n\n\"No way.\" Joy shook her head. \"I...I can't believe this. And you are too busy to do so much.\"\n\n\"My work is nearly nonexistent in December. We just wrapped on the unit north of town. I have some drawings to do, but I don't present the mock-ups and blueprints until January 15, when the client returns from Italy. So, see? I have time on my hands. Miss Milse will watch the kids. It's done.\" Sarah put her hands on Joy's shoulders and smiled broadly. \"Just say yes.\"\n\n\"Sarah...\" Joy pressed her lips together, thinking that would stifle a grateful sob, but she failed. She hugged her friend. \"I forgot\u2014so much. I forgot how wonderful you are and how much you mean to me. I'm so...lucky...\"\n\nSarah sniffed and grinned, fighting her own happy tears. \"And you are so far behind.\"\n\n\"I know. The first poinsettias arrive in forty-eight hours. Half the inventory will be shipped in the morning and a great deal arrives tomorrow afternoon.\"\n\n\"So, I'll be here first thing in the morning to start setting up the trees.\"\n\n\"What trees?\"\n\nSarah laughed. \"Oh, the ones Luke went to cut down at the tree farm for you today. He'll be here in an hour or so.\"\n\nJoy exhaled in amazement. \"You think of everything.\"\n\n\"Everything except the heat you're going to need by tomorrow,\" she said, hugging her arms around her middle.\n\n\"I know. Adam's working on it. I should check on him.\" She turned back to Titus, who was inspecting the bins with frosted pinecones. \"Titus, let's go see your dad.\"\n\n\"All right!\" He jumped up exuberantly. \"I gotta show him my ornament I made.\" He picked up the Santa face and rushed to the back.\n\nSomething made the hairs on the back of Joy's neck prickle. \"Titus. Not so fast!\" She rushed after him.\n\nBut Titus had pushed through the French doors to the back greenhouse. He raced past the wooden tables that would soon be filled with colorful poinsettias and toward the back door.\n\nHe was fast, but so was Joy as she caught up to him. \"I'll get the door,\" she said.\n\nTitus ran out. \"Dad! Dad!\"\n\nAdam was on the opposite side of the trench, filling it in shovel by shovelful of dirt. The long trenches from the compressor building were covered over with the dirt, but up here, close to the greenhouse building, there was still over ten feet left open.\n\nAdam had told her that the key to his geothermal design was to bury the pipes deeper than most systems. She hadn't realized until young Titus rushed up to the very edge, dangling his glass Santa face in front of him for his father to see, just how deep that trench was.\n\nTitus's boot had stopped short of the edge, but the dirt was loose. Joy saw bits of rock crumble under Titus's foot.\n\n\"Titus!\" Adam yelled, as he dropped the shovel.\n\nWithout thinking, Joy bolted up to Titus, threw her arms around his middle and yanked him backward. She fell on her rear and Titus landed on top of her.\n\n\"Titus! Son!\" Adam raced down his side of the trench to the end and up the other side.\n\nIn the process of falling, Titus's bare hand had smashed the glass Santa ornament.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Titus wailed.\n\n\"Son! Are you hurt?\" Adam asked as he ran up.\n\n\"No.\"\n\nJoy lifted Titus and scrambled to her feet. As she did, she noticed that Titus's hand was bleeding.\n\n\"You're cut,\" Joy said.\n\n\"My ornament,\" Titus cried. \"I made it for you, Dad. Now it's broken.\"\n\nJoy inspected his palm. \"There's still a piece of glass in his hand. Let's get him inside.\"\n\nAdam swooped Titus into his arms. \"I don't care about the ornament. I only care about you.\"\n\nJoy followed them. They went through the greenhouse and up to the front retail area, where Sarah and her kids waited.\n\n\"What happened?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"Titus fell.\"\n\n\"I broke my ornament,\" he moaned.\n\nSarah went behind the counter, grabbed her purse and took out her makeup tote. \"Put Titus on the stool there, Adam. I have tweezers, Band-Aids...\"\n\nTitus sat on the stool. Timmy, Annie and Charlotte hovered around, wanting to see the wound.\n\n\"You'll be okay, Titus,\" Timmy said and patted his back.\n\nAdam started to reach for the tweezers in Joy's hand.\n\nShe pushed him back and said, \"How many times have you tweezed your eyebrows?\"\n\n\"Huh? None. Why?\"\n\n\"I'm aces at this.\" Joy leaned down, placed the tweezers gently around the delicate glass and eased it out. \"There.\"\n\n\"It didn't hurt.\" Titus looked at her with amazement.\n\n\"Okay, now to clean it up.\" She reached for tissue and a bottle of alcohol she'd placed under the counter and swiped the wound. \"Adam, you apply the Band-Aid.\"\n\nJoy cleaned up the blood and Adam opened the bandage and put it on Titus.\n\n\"Next time you make ornaments, let's buy the shatterproof balls,\" Adam said.\n\n\"I should have thought of that, Adam,\" Sarah said. \"But the kids raided an old box of ornaments I'd put out for the tree Luke is bringing home.\"\n\n\"It's okay,\" Adam said, ruffling Titus's hair. Then he hugged his boy. \"Maybe we should call it a day, huh? Go home and feed Angel?\"\n\n\"Okay, Dad.\" Titus hugged Adam back.\n\nJoy walked with everyone to their cars. She hugged each child and thanked Sarah again.\n\n\"Luke just texted and said he's on his way over. He'll help you put the trees up.\"\n\n\"He doesn't need to do that.\"\n\n\"The farm people put the stands on them. All he does is prop them up and cut the bailing. I'd put some plastic sheeting down if you have it. Then it's easy to haul them out after Christmas.\"\n\n\"I think I saw some in the storage room.\" Joy beamed.\n\n\"See you in the morning.\"\n\nSarah drove away.\n\nAdam waited by the side of his truck. Titus was in his car seat. \"I'll finish up the trenches in the morning. I've tested everything and we should be good to go.\"\n\n\"Thank you so much, Adam.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" He opened the door. Then looked back. \"Listen. I appreciate what you did for Titus. But he's my son. I'm responsible for him. Okay?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Sure. But...\"\n\nHe lowered his voice, she guessed so that Titus couldn't hear him. \"He shouldn't have been anywhere near those trenches. I haven't allowed him out there since I started this project. Next time, if he's in your presence and I don't know about it, keep him close. Don't let him go running off. And trust me, I'm very, very good with tweezers.\"\n\nHe got in the truck, buckled his seat belt and drove away.\n\nThe sun had dropped; the air had turned cold. A wind kicked up and lifted her long hair off her shoulders, chilling her back. She hugged herself as she rushed to the greenhouse.\n\nOnly hours ago, she'd felt the warmth of Adam's friendship. Now there was only this bitter cold." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Adam sat at his laptop staring at his inbox. He hadn't answered email in days because he'd got caught up in Joy's world.\n\nHis world.\n\nThe world of the past, when the greenhouses had been thriving. Life had opened up to Adam when he'd met Joy in speech class. He was having a hard time finding happy subjects to write about. Joy was the best of them all. She was always bright and happy. His childhood was not filled with growing flowers, change of seasons and twinkling Christmas lights like Joy's. When she spoke in speech class, describing life as she saw it, she made him believe that everyone should have a happy ending. Everyone loved her. He loved her from afar.\n\nPursuing Joy was the first leap of faith he'd ever taken. He wanted to learn more about this girl who hummed to herself as she dug in her locker for her other gym sock or smiled at everyone she saw in the halls between classes whether she knew them or not. He wanted to know what it was like to have friends that made her face light up the second she saw them.\n\nHe'd watched her walk out the front doors to the high school that day on her way home, he'd thought. He'd plucked up his courage, rushed up to her, and before he could ask if he could walk with her, she said, \"I see you, Adam Masterson.\"\n\n\"Good. Because I really want to walk you home.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I want to spend time with you.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I want to see the world through your eyes.\"\n\nWith her staring at him with eyes so piercing, he'd felt her gaze to the pit of his belly. \"You do?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Then you should know I'm not going home. I'm going to work.\"\n\n\"Work? You're only sixteen.\"\n\n\"I've been working since I was ten. Eight? Yeah. Eight.\"\n\nShe'd started to walk away. He'd stared after her, shocked really. All the time he'd been admiring her, he assumed she lived like a princess.\n\n\"Adam Masterson, are you gonna just follow me or walk alongside me?\"\n\n\"Alongside.\"\n\n\"Good. I'd like that.\" She smiled.\n\nShe'd taken him to the greenhouses, and that day her father and grandfather hired him on the spot to help clean the glass, sweep floors and restock the tables with new plants.\n\nAdam had been right. The world through Joy's eyes was brighter, more colorful and filled with love and friendships he hadn't known existed.\n\nIt was through Joy he got to know Sarah Jensen and the Barzonnis. Maddie Strong. Olivia Melton. Isabelle Hawks and all her brothers. Liz Crenshaw. The list seemed endless back then. Joy knew everyone. And she loved everyone.\n\n\"And why not?\" He drummed his fingers on the mouse pad. \"She's so full of love\u2014and lovable.\"\n\nUntil the accident, the February before their high school graduation. Adam had always blamed the fog for the fact that Bruce didn't see Dead Man's Tree. After the funeral, all through March and April, Joy kept pulling away from him. Or pushing him away. He'd gone to the greenhouses after school to help get the place ready for spring, always hoping to get a kiss or ten from Joy, but she was too busy. She'd taken over her father's job of keeping the books and ordering supplies. She took over her mother's job of tending the plants. Frank had told him to give Joy space.\n\nBut that hadn't worked.\n\nOn prom night, Adam pushed the envelope and asked her to marry him. Since he didn't have an engagement ring to replace her promise ring, Joy didn't take him seriously. She'd said they were too young. They both had college. Days later when he'd pressed her again, she brusquely told him that she was leaving Indian Lake and she never intended to come back.\n\nHe'd believed she'd change her mind. That she'd miss him once she left. But that didn't happen.\n\nFor years he'd rationalized that they'd drifted apart, but that wasn't true. Her staying away was intentional.\n\n\"But she never said she didn't love me.\"\n\nHe rubbed his forehead.\n\nHe rose from the chair. \"I'm an ass.\" He rubbed his forehead again. \"Maybe I should apologize. I could send her flowers. Duh. Jeez, Adam. Be original, wouldya?\"\n\nHe knew he shouldn't have pounced on her the way he did, but he'd always had a problem with being reactionary, especially when it came to Titus. He acted first. Thought last. He needed to switch that around.\n\nBut when he'd seen Titus on the edge of the deep trench, he panicked. Adam had been on the wrong side of the long trench and couldn't get to him as quickly as Joy did.\n\nThe glass in Titus's hand had scared him. He saw blood and imagined visits to the ER. Stitches. Tears. Antibiotics.\n\nAdam was terrified of any kind of injury to his little boy. He meant it when he told Joy he wanted her to keep Titus close. Maybe it was Adam's fault for not fully explaining to Joy, who had no children, how accident-prone Titus was. Plus the fact that Titus had double dosed on curiosity from the day of his birth. He was forever investigating. It was as if Titus wanted to discover the entire world in the next ten seconds. The kid never walked into a room; he rushed. He flung his arms around Adam; he didn't hug. He kissed a dozen kisses, not one.\n\nAdam didn't want to diminish any of Titus's traits. In many ways, Titus reminded him of Joy. Or at least the girl he'd known in high school.\n\nThat was the thing. She'd changed. Grown up and taken on responsibilities of her career and life in New York. And yes, she was grieving over losing Frank.\n\nBut it was something else.\n\nHe'd had to push her to see the possibilities in front of her. To see that the greenhouses could flourish again. The old Joy would have been the one urging him to try new things. Find a different way to make his inventions work. To test them against other inventors. To go for the prizes and awards.\n\nIt was as if that girl had died along with her parents. Life had dealt them both a rotten hand. They'd lost the ones they loved the most.\n\nFrank wasn't coming back. Amie wasn't coming back. He and Joy had figured out how to cope. Maybe their mechanisms for dealing with pain weren't all perfect, but they'd worked.\n\nAdam thought he understood her better now that she was home. But he was surprised by his reaction to her now.\n\nOne minute he remembered what it was like to be in love with her. The next, he was unsure and his defenses hardened to granite because he'd taught himself to keep his distance from others. Though he had friends, that wasn't the same as a romantic relationship.\n\n\"Except that...\"\n\nJoy was engaged, and from what Adam had observed so far, she didn't seem as in love with this Chuck guy as she had when she'd been Adam's girl.\n\nMaybe that was because they were kids. Teenage love was nothing but romance and moonlight and had little to do with the hard lessons in life.\n\n\"And death,\" he whispered, thinking of Amie.\n\nHad he been right to encourage Joy to stay in Indian Lake and reopen? Or had his motivations been purely selfish? Admittedly, he wanted to show Joy that Indian Lake could be a safe harbor for her.\n\nAbove all, he wanted to prove to Joy that Indian Lake was separate from the pain and sorrow she felt. Her real friends were anxious to help her in many ways. If he could show Joy how so many people cared about her, wanted the best for her, perhaps she would finally be able to quell her burning anger.\n\nThat anger was directing her actions and life choices.\n\n\"Choices...\" Adam had to admit it was a gamble doing what they were doing, but Adam believed in Indian Lake. Once people knew the greenhouses were open, he believed they would swarm to the reopening.\n\n\"Oh, jeez,\" he said, pulling the chair out and sitting down again. He'd started a new website for Boston Greenhouses last night. He would take photos once the place was decorated, but for now, all he needed was a \"coming soon\" banner and a lot of stock photos of poinsettias.\n\nHe made a note to order Candy Cane and deep burgundy poinsettias. Tomorrow he'd take the graphics he made and have flyers made up at Image Printers in town. Lou's Diner always allowed flyers. So did Olivia at the deli and Scott Abbott at Book Shop and Java Stop. It was good to have helpful friends.\n\nThen he emailed Mary-Catherine Cook, Titus's teacher at Saint Mark's, who also worked on the weekly church bulletin. She'd put the banner in the bulletin and he'd make a donation to the church.\n\nAdam didn't have Joy's permission to advertise, but they needed to work fast. This was not the time to stand on protocol.\n\nHe could only hope that Joy would appreciate his effort and possibly forgive him for snapping at her earlier.\n\nHe turned off the laptop, flicked off the lamp, swiped his fingers across Amie's photo the way he did every night. \"Thanks for our son, Amie. I'll take good care of him.\"\n\nHe rose from the chair and started up the stairs.\n\nWith each step he wondered if other widowers felt like he did. Each night was emptier than the last. Some days it was hard to greet the morning sun. Others passed by in numb awareness. With the holidays approaching, life decisions seemed weightier.\n\nSecond chances, do-overs, were one of those things Adam thought were only for fairy tales.\n\nWas there magic in Christmas? Or in the promise of the New Year?\n\nHe looked in on Titus, who was sleeping soundly with a Star Wars stormtrooper figure clutched in his hand. Adam didn't disturb him. Maybe the stormtrooper helped Titus to feel protected.\n\nAs he entered his bedroom, he thought he'd been luckier than most guys. Though his time with Amie had been brief, they'd been happy and they'd both been giddy over their baby. Adam couldn't imagine his life without Titus.\n\nIf he hadn't broken up with Joy all those years ago, he would never have married Amie or had Titus.\n\nPerhaps his love for Amie was giving him courage to open his heart...one more time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "It was the day before Thanksgiving and Joy hit a level of anxiety she'd never experienced. She'd been up before dawn and cleaned the last of the old tile floors and the wooden poinsettia tables, and had started unboxing her first shipments. Whenever she'd felt apprehension, she'd learned to throw herself into work, either mental or physical. Unfortunately, neither was working for her today.\n\n\"I gotta be nuts to do all this.\"\n\nShe second-guessed every decision she'd made, starting with the massive poinsettia orders when she didn't know if Adam's heating system would actually work.\n\nHe'd said he'd tested it. She was still working with only space heaters in the retail area. The geothermal system was designed to heat the greenhouses. Not the front sections.\n\nShe wanted to believe Adam. Believe in him again like she once had.\n\n\"And now he's mad at me because I saved his son.\"\n\nThat wasn't actually the case. She'd interfered and Adam had shown his possessive side. Again. Not being a parent, she didn't have anything to compare to Adam's emotions and choice of actions. She had to believe that if she was Titus's mother, she would want him to explore the world. She wouldn't want to stifle his natural curiosity.\n\nBut she was not Titus's parent or even a guardian. Not even the babysitter like Miss Milse.\n\nAdam probably wasn't all that much out of line when he'd chastised her.\n\nA cold chill swept across the room as the front door opened. \"Hey, girlfriend!\"\n\nJoy looked up, almost pleased it wasn't Adam. \"Sarah.\" She rose from the floor. \"I didn't expect you so early.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding? I've already been to the wholesale craft store,\" she said, walking in with arms loaded with massive plastic bags.\n\n\"What is all this?\"\n\n\"Snow. Well, polyurethane faux snow. I also have wood slatted and knotted walkways I've used at home shows and convention booths. We'll put the walkways down, make a path and then mound the snow around them. I found some old candy-cane poles that my mom used once at the church for a Christmas bazaar.\"\n\n\"You are amazing!\"\n\nSarah beamed. \"My head is spinning with all kinds of ideas. And once your stock arrives, we'll have a blast putting this together.\" She thrust the light but voluminous bags at Joy. \"Here. You take these. I'll go to the car and get the walkways and candy canes.\"\n\nJoy put the bags aside. \"I'll come with you.\"\n\nAs Joy and Sarah unloaded the car, Adam drove up in his truck. He parked the truck, got out and helped carry the decorations inside.\n\nHe smiled warmly at Joy as he held the door for her and Sarah. He followed them in with a box filled with Christmas lights.\n\n\"You two have your work cut out for you,\" he said.\n\nJoy put the bundles of wood slatted walkways down. She was surprised at his mood. Maybe he wasn't mad at her any longer. She liked him better when they joked around or bounced creative ideas off each other. Helpmates.\n\n\"You have the biggest task,\" Joy said, tilting her head to the rear of the store. \"I need heat.\"\n\nFrom outside they heard a rumble of a semitruck. Joy's eyes swung to the front window. \"Oh, my gosh! The first shipment of poinsettias is here!\"\n\nAdam didn't waste a second as he bolted toward the rear of the showroom. \"I'm on it.\"\n\nJoy watched as he jogged up to the breaker box he'd installed at the back of the smaller greenhouse. Through the door's glass she saw him smile at her. He threw the breaker.\n\nShe heard a hum. Then a thrum. She saw Adam thrust his arms in the air in victory. He rushed back to the showroom.\n\n\"It's on!\"\n\nSarah clapped her hands to her mouth. \"This is so exciting!\"\n\nJoy turned to Sarah. \"I have to help unload those flowers. Do you mind getting this started?\"\n\n\"I have the whole thing in my head.\" She tapped her temple. \"Go!\"\n\nJoy and Adam rushed out the front door. Joy signed for the shipment. Adam directed the driver to the first greenhouse as Joy opened the door.\n\nBut it was when the driver parked the truck, opened the truck's back door and exposed the sea of poinsettias he was delivering that she felt chills of glee.\n\nAdam stood beside her staring at the flowers. \"Incredible.\"\n\nThe driver began handing flats to Adam and then to Joy. They filled roller carts and then wheeled them into the greenhouse.\n\nWith each cartload, Joy saw the greenhouse come to life. Table after table was filled. One all red. One pink. And two tables of white poinsettias.\n\nAfter the driver left, Joy turned to Adam. \"It's only two-thirds full and it's a dream come true already,\" she gushed. \"I don't know how to thank you for\u2014\"\n\n\"Acting like an idiot. I'm sorry. I was outta line yesterday.\"\n\nShe stared at eyes filled with apology and sincerity. \"It's okay.\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" he said, stepping closer. \"It's just that I\u2014\"\n\n\"Was scared?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I saw Titus on that edge and I panicked. I should be thanking you, not jumping all over you.\"\n\nShe put her hand on his forearm. Like she'd done so many times in the past. And like she wanted to do now. Touching him felt so natural. She didn't know what he thought of that, but oddly, she needed to touch him. Feel his warmth beneath her fingertips.\n\nFor a long moment, he said nothing, but she'd seen that look in his blue eyes before, as if he was diving into her. That look that caused her to think of nothing in the world, not her career, her future, just this moment with the two of them.\n\n\"Joy...\"\n\nHis lips brushed hers and she was stunned. She couldn't have stopped her arms going around his neck if she'd tried. She remembered every embrace they'd ever shared, the longing she'd felt after missing him during the day at school. The years melted away. She didn't think. She only felt as his lips pressed hesitantly against hers. Then captured her lips with an eagerness she'd never expected. He pulled her close.\n\nShe was losing all perspective. All logic, but she would be a fool to end this.\n\nIt was Adam who withdrew. \"I think it's warming up in here quite nicely.\"\n\nShe opened her eyes to his gentle smile. That smile that had pried her heart open once before and was accomplishing the job again. \"It is.\"\n\n\"I think the flowers will flourish.\"\n\nShe let go as he released her. \"That's due to the genius who invented a new heating system for this old place.\"\n\n\"Oh? That what you call me?\" He chuckled.\n\nSarah rushed into the room. \"Guys! Come look. There's, like, four delivery trucks out here and I don't know where it all goes!\" she said excitedly as she raced back to the showroom.\n\nJoy felt light-headed and not quite ready to slip back to reality. \"I guess we better get back to work.\"\n\nHe tapped the end of her nose. \"Guess we'd better.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Sarah continued creating a winter fantasy with the display shelves, the walkways, faux snow and lights under the polyurethane batting as Joy unboxed product.\n\nWhen the second shipment of poinsettias arrived, it was enough to fill the remainder of the first greenhouse and all of the second. Joy was beginning to feel their efforts would bear fruit.\n\n\"All this is fantastic,\" Adam said, as Joy put a lit angel on the top of one of the Christmas trees.\n\nJoy stood back and looked at the area. Sarah's design of \"walking\" the customers through a winter wonderland of live Christmas trees decorated with the ornaments she'd purchased from a wholesaler, glittering faux snow, lit garlands and shelves of cinnamon-and pine-scented candles, hand soap and diffusers, tree decorations, linens, cards, and on to the wall shelves filled with area honey, jams, coffee cakes, cookies and breads was enchanting. \"It's a thousand times prettier than anything I've seen in New York.\"\n\n\"You're kidding,\" Sarah gasped. \"I figured you'd think it hokey.\"\n\n\"No way. This is what it should be. And then they go out to the greenhouses. This really is Christmas.\"\n\nAdam stuck a hammer in his tool belt. \"I still have wreaths to hang outside,\" he said. \"We have to double down on our advertising efforts. If we don't get the word out, we're sunk.\"\n\nSarah looked from Adam to Joy. She mouthed \"We're?\" to Joy. She smiled. \"I agree.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said and reached in his back pocket. He pulled out a folded flyer. \"So, what do you think of this?\" He opened up the flyer. Joy and Sarah looked down at the colorful photo of the old Boston Greenhouses at Christmas when Frank was alive.\n\n\"That's how it looked when we were kids.\" Joy smiled.\n\n\"Our senior year. Yeah,\" he said. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Sarah replied. \"'Grand Reopening for a Limited Time.' And these silver bells on the corners.\"\n\n\"I like it, too,\" Joy said, looking up at him.\n\nAdam pocketed it. \"Good, because I'm off to pick up five hundred of them to distribute around town. I also got an email from Mary-Catherine Cook at Saint Mark's that this ad will post in the Sunday bulletin,\" he said proudly.\n\n\"You must have been pretty sure I'd like it.\" Joy grinned.\n\nHis eyes fell on her face and she could feel the blush to her toes. \"I was and I am.\"\n\nSarah looked from Joy to Adam, taking in their pensive gaze. \"Okay. Well.\" She clapped her hands together. \"My work is done here. I have to check on the kids. Get to the grocery.\"\n\nJolted out of her thoughts, Joy said, \"Sure. Sure. I should get us some lunch,\" she said to Adam.\n\n\"Sounds good to me,\" he said.\n\nSarah picked up the empty bags, duct tape and scissors she'd brought. \"I'll call you.\" She pointed at Joy. \"Bye, Adam.\"\n\n\"Bye,\" he said.\n\nAs the door closed behind Sarah, Joy thought she heard a meow. \"What was that?\" Then another meow.\n\n\"Oh.\" Adam smiled. \"That's Pye.\"\n\n\"Pie?\"\n\nAdam walked to the corner behind the counter. \"Frank's cat.\"\n\n\"Grandpa had a cat?\"\n\n\"She's feral, but there's been a recent development.\"\n\nJoy went around the counter and saw a makeshift bed of blankets for a caramel Manx cat who had three kittens suckling her. \"Oh, my gosh! Three little kittens!\" Joy immediately sat down and picked up one of the newborn kittens, who instantly licked her face.\n\n\"Just like the nursery rhyme,\" Adam said.\n\n\"They're darling. How long have they been here?\"\n\n\"She's been out in the potting shed with the space heaters. But once I got the heat going in here, I thought I should bring her in. That's where I was a minute ago.\"\n\nJoy petted the cat. \"How are you, Pie? What a funny name for a cat.\"\n\nAdam harrumphed. \"I can't believe you're saying that. You forgot your favorite Christmas movie? Bell, Book and Candle?\"\n\n\"Jimmy Stewart. And the cat's name was Pyewacket.\"\n\n\"Right.\" Adam picked up a kitten. \"So, why don't you go down to the deli and get us some sandwiches. And pick up a can of cat food for Pye?\"\n\n\"Done.\" She smiled. \"This is so lovely,\" she said, looking down at Pye.\n\n\"You don't have a pet in New York?\"\n\n\"No. The building doesn't allow them.\"\n\n\"Oh. Too bad.\"\n\n\"You?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Her name's Angel. Golden retriever. She's about to have pups. Christmas Eve, the vet says.\"\n\nJoy dropped her jaw. \"That's wonderful!\"\n\n\"Titus thinks so. He's boning up on midwifery.\" He laughed and continued petting the kitten. \"So, you and Chuck? Gonna have kids?\"\n\n\"It hasn't come up.\"\n\n\"Really?\" He put the kitten down. \"I should think that would be a first things first.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well.\" She glanced around uncomfortably. \"I better head out. I'm famished.\"\n\n\"Uh, yeah. Me, too.\" He scratched the back of his neck. \"So, I'll get those flyers and meet you back here in half an hour. I want to hang those wreaths up. And the lights around the windows.\"\n\n\"Uh, sure.\" She walked away and grabbed her coat off the counter. She took her keys out of her purse. \"Back soon,\" she said, hurrying out the door.\n\nShe hadn't realized how superficial her relationship with Chuck was. And it had taken only a few days in Indian Lake to see it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Joy tapped her finger on the counter as she waited for Chuck to pick up on the other end.\n\n\"Joy? That you? Are you at O'Hare?\"\n\n\"No. That's why I'm calling. Chuck...\" She drew in a breath. \"I'm not going to be back for a while. Possibly not till Christmas Day.\"\n\n\"That's a month from now! Are you crazy? Missing Thanksgiving was bad enough. I'm dyin' here.\"\n\n\"Chuck, you can handle a lot more than you think.\"\n\n\"It's better when you're here.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\nThere was a long pause on his end before he said, \"What's going on? Really?\"\n\n\"I should have told you earlier this idea to reopen the greenhouse was percolating. Now it's a juggernaut. I made my decision yesterday. I have nearly a month of vacation days accrued, so I'm due the time off. Glory can help you. And Nathan Withers is not a problem.\"\n\n\"Forget Nathan. And everything else. You sound\u2014different. Does any of this have to do with that engineer guy you told me about?\"\n\n\"Adam?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Not really.\" Skimming over the truth had more bite than she'd expected.\n\nThe second and even longer pause on Chuck's end told Joy more about herself than she'd faced since the day she first saw Adam. He had a great deal to do with her decision. She was feeling something, but her emotions were raveled with grief, anger and regret.\n\nShe was a mess.\n\n\"Joy, I have to ask. Are you having second thoughts about us?\"\n\nJoy paused, caught off guard by his question, but she owed him the truth. \"I'm not sure.\"\n\n\"Really? I didn't expect that.\"\n\n\"I need time here to figure some things out. It's been difficult for me with Grandpa's death. The greenhouses... Please try to understand.\"\n\nSilence.\n\n\"Chuck?\"\n\n\"I don't like any of this. I'll give you time. However, I'm not the patient kind, which you know all too well.\"\n\n\"I do. And thank you.\" She started to ask him to come to Indian Lake to help her, but realized that besides the fact that he would refuse, it being year-end in the accounting business, she didn't want him in Indian Lake. Chuck was right. She was having second thoughts.\n\n\"Chuck, my life has become a jumble of emotions and I'm rethinking a lot. I've discovered I have a lot of friends here I'd forgotten.\"\n\n\"And they're more important than we are?\"\n\n\"No. I don't know. But I need to figure it out. Please understand.\"\n\n\"I'm trying, Joy,\" he said. \"Until you figure this out, maybe we should consider our engagement on hold.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" he said, and the line went dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Joy stood in line at the Indian Lake Deli. Every table in the place was filled.\n\n\"Hi, Joy.\" Olivia smiled. \"What can I get you?\"\n\n\"Turkey with guacamole for me. Reuben for Adam, and do you have a can of tuna for Pye?\"\n\nOlivia paused as she rang up the total. \"Adam? Pye? What's going on?\"\n\n\"Adam is helping me reopen the greenhouse. Pye is my grandfather's cat, I've just discovered.\"\n\n\"Seriously, we need some girl time. But as you can see, we're swamped, and you're obviously very busy.\"\n\nOlivia handed Joy her change and Joy went to stand off to the side till her order was ready.\n\n\"Joy!\" Mrs. Beabots shouted across the room and waved her over. She was sitting with Liz and Maddie. Joy walked over and hugged everyone.\n\n\"I thought you'd be back in New York by now,\" Liz said.\n\n\"Joy is reopening the greenhouses!\" Mrs. Beabots said triumphantly.\n\n\"Really?\" Liz and Maddie said in unison.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\n\"We need to spread the word. Advertise like crazy.\" Maddie beamed.\n\nMrs. Beabots smiled broadly. \"This is so exciting. Tell us your plans.\"\n\n\"I wish I had time, but Adam and I are under the gun.\"\n\nLiz looked at Maddie. \"Adam?\" They both scrutinized Joy.\n\n\"Uh-huh. He's full of ideas.\"\n\n\"I'll bet he is.\" Mrs. Beabots winked. \"Now, listen, Joy. I understand you both have a lot of work to do, but you have to eat. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Come to my house. Be my guests.\"\n\n\"Great idea,\" Liz said. \"You can work afterward.\"\n\n\"I won't take 'no' for an answer,\" Mrs. Beabots cajoled.\n\n\"I can't speak for Adam, but I'd love it. That's sweet of you.\"\n\n\"And tell Adam no excuses. He has nowhere else to go.\"\n\n\"He doesn't?\" Joy was surprised.\n\n\"Why, no, dear. Frank was his only family these past years.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Frank's passing has been nearly as hard on him as it's been for you.\"\n\n\"It has. It...has...\"\n\n\"Joy! Pickup!\" Olivia shouted across the deli.\n\nJoy raised her hand. \"I gotta go. See you tomorrow and thanks for the invitation.\"\n\nJoy thanked Olivia and waved to her friends as she rushed out the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Joy hurried into the greenhouse, noticing that Adam's truck was back.\n\n\"Adam! I'm back! I have lunch,\" she shouted, not seeing him in the retail area. She took off her coat.\n\nAdam walked through the French doors. \"And I have another surprise for you,\" he said. He was carrying a large moss-filled basket.\n\n\"More kittens?\"\n\n\"Better.\" He put the basket on the counter.\n\nJoy looked in the basket and saw a salmon-and-yellow-striped hybrid poinsettia that her grandpa had been cultivating.\n\n\"Grandpa's poinsettia!\"\n\n\"Know what I think? We should take it to the growers and see if they can produce them.\"\n\n\"But that would mean...\"\n\n\"Yeah. A trip to talk to them. Follow-up calls. Possibly a future for...\"\n\nJoy didn't know where Adam's head was at. She was puzzled. \"You know I'm going back to New York after I sell the greenhouses.\"\n\nHe didn't miss a beat. \"It would mean a lot to Frank. This was his legacy. Well, the flowers and you. So, c'mon. What should we call it?\"\n\n\"You mean...give it a name?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"It's timeless, isn't it? Almost magical.\"\n\n\"Eternal. Like Frank...\"\n\n\"Frankincense!\" She blurted the word naturally.\n\n\"That's it!\"\n\nAdam took the basket to the round display table in the middle of the room. Joy walked over to admire it with him. He put his arm around her shoulders.\n\n\"Frank's proud of you.\"\n\n\"You think?\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nAdam was looking at her with that suffused gleam in his eyes that caused her knees to weaken along with her resolve. She turned away from him and pointed at the counter.\n\n\"We should decorate the counter. Maybe put the prettiest flower next to the register.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" he said, grabbing her around the waist playfully and hoisting her onto the counter. \"Yep. The prettiest.\"\n\nAs she looked at him, he had that dreamy look he got whenever he wanted to kiss her. \"Adam, you need to know that my engagement is on hold.\"\n\n\"On hold? What does that mean?\"\n\n\"That I'm confused. I spoke to Chuck earlier. We're giving each other space. Well, the truth is... I can't be engaged to him when I still\u2014do have feelings for you.\"\n\n\"I see...\" Adam reached up, cupped his hand around her neck and gently pulled her closer. Joy's cell phone rang.\n\n\"Leave it,\" he said, skimming her lips with his.\n\nThe cell rang again. \"It might be...\" she started.\n\n\"New York.\" He released her. \"Him. Apparently, his space didn't last long.\"\n\nJoy looked at the caller ID and sighed with relief. When of course she shouldn't have felt there was need for relief. \"It's Glory.\"\n\n\"Ah! Your roommate.\"\n\nJoy slipped off the counter as Adam backed away, picked up empty cardboard product boxes and took them out back.\n\n\"Glory. How's everything?\"\n\n\"Not spectacular,\" Glory groaned. \"Chuck just told me you're not coming back till Christmas, which of course I knew, but I didn't let on.\"\n\n\"True. So, tell me, how's he taking it?\"\n\n\"The usual when you're not around. Unhinged.\"\n\n\"Poor Chuck,\" Joy commiserated. \"But there's more to it than that. Our engagement is on hold.\"\n\n\"Girl\u2014\" Glory sighed \"\u2014what is going on?\"\n\n\"Just about everything in my life is in turmoil. I feel like I'm bouncing on air and yet grounded for the first time in a long time. But I'm not sure if the feeling will last.\"\n\n\"That is a bomb,\" Glory gushed.\n\n\"I know,\" Joy said, looking up as Adam came through the doors with one of the kittens.\n\n\"Joy,\" he said. \"Give us a pet.\" He held up the kitten to Joy's smiling face.\n\n\"Who, may I ask, is that?\"\n\n\"My new best friend.\" Joy petted the kitten, and Adam took their closeness as an excuse to kiss her ear.\n\n\"Sounds like it. No wonder you're not coming back,\" Glory grumbled.\n\n\"Glory, my intention is to come back. I'll figure it all out, but for now, I have to do this.\"\n\n\"Gotcha,\" Glory said. \"Call me later. After your new friend leaves.\"\n\n\"I will.\" Joy hung up and continued petting the kitten. Adam touched the kitten, and when he did, their fingers met. He encircled her fingers with his.\n\n\"Nice,\" he said in a low voice.\n\nShe couldn't take her eyes from him if she tried. He'd suggested they take Frank's hybrid to a producer. And if that producer could re-create Frank's discovery, they truly would create an everlasting legacy for Frank. It would be a miracle that would erase the fact that her grandpa had died a failure.\n\nJoy didn't want that.\n\nShe wanted everyone in Indian Lake to remember Frank not only with fondness, but reverence. She wanted the Boston name to mean something. This was her inheritance.\n\nShe felt it was not only her duty, but her privilege to dust off their dreams\u2014as impossible as the task would seem to someone like Chuck.\n\n\"I'll get a poinsettia for the counter,\" Adam said. \"The biggest and the best.\"\n\n\"And I know just who'll buy it,\" Joy replied.\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots,\" she answered.\n\n\"Not Katia McCreary? Gina Barzonni? Liz? Maddie? You've been away too long.\"\n\nThis time when she looked at him, she didn't feel guilty. She didn't feel sad. She felt rejuvenated and hopeful. \"That I have.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "\"Are you sure we have time for this today?\" Joy asked Adam as he drove them out of town. \"I mean, there's still so much to do to get the rest of the quilts up on the rack. The stockings aren't hung. And the order for the cut flowers\u2014\"\n\n\"Didn't come in yet and won't until Friday morning. I took a call a bit ago.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, looking down at Frank's hybrid in the moss basket.\n\n\"You're nervous,\" he said, glancing at her in bewilderment.\n\n\"Yeah.\" She inhaled deeply.\n\n\"But you were always the courageous one. Couldn't wait to tackle the world. New York, no less.\"\n\n\"You know the real reason I left. The accident.\"\n\n\"I do. But you have to admit, not everyone takes off to tackle New York City.\"\n\n\"I guess I did seem fearless back then.\"\n\n\"You still are. I'd go nuts living in a city that never sleeps. I need peace and calm. And no rush hour.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Don't have that in Indian Lake at all.\" She forced a smile, but it faded quickly. Looking at the apricot-striped poinsettia, Frank's last contribution to the world, should have filled her with excitement. Even hope. But it didn't. It was another chance for her to fail.\n\nAs if reading her thoughts, Adam said, \"Look. The worst that happens is they say no.\"\n\nHer heart thudded in her chest, the weight of her guilt too much for it. \"That's just it! I don't want to disappoint Grandpa,\" she said, feeling a rush of emotions. She held up her palm. \"And don't say it. I know. I already did.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Every year I didn't come back.\"\n\n\"I was wrong, okay? Being so rough on you. I see now you had a lot going on.\"\n\n\"Not that much.\" She turned her face toward the window so that Adam couldn't see her tears.\n\nThey pulled up to All Seasons Organic Growers Farm. Adam parked the truck. The place was busy, with workers loading poinsettias onto trucks. She saw wooden trays with Norwegian pine trees, flats of white carnations, white lilies, white roses, and boxes of spruce and pine for garland making.\n\nJoy's heart leaped at the traditional Christmas florals. How she'd loved working with her mother filling baskets and vases with Christmas flowers and pines.\n\nThere's so much to remember. So much I've forgotten.\n\nA middle-aged woman with flaming red hair came up to them. She was wearing a dress, sheepskin denim jacket and cowboy boots. \"Joy Boston? Is that you?\"\n\n\"Daryl! How wonderful to see you!\" She hugged her old friend.\n\n\"When Adam called me and told me about Frank, I couldn't believe it. I'm sorry we missed the wake.\" Daryl's green eyes, suffused with sincerity, began to well.\n\n\"It's okay.\" Joy put her arm around her. \"I believe he feels your thoughts even now.\"\n\n\"Thank you for saying that.\" Daryl dabbed her eyes with the edge of her sleeve. She sniffled and said, \"Adam says you have a surprise for me.\" Daryl looked over Joy's shoulder as Adam withdrew the moss basket from the truck.\n\nAs Adam joined them, Joy said to Daryl, \"This is the Frankincense Poinsettia. Grandpa's...\"\n\n\"Gift to the world,\" Adam finished proudly, holding it up.\n\nJoy caught Adam's anticipation. This was one of the moments in life that should be savored. She'd never asked anyone for a favor for her grandpa. Frank had been capable and self-reliant. And he worked with nature's most glorious productions\u2014flowers. Today she knew better. Frank was just a man, doing what he loved for those that he loved.\n\nThere was not a better life to have lived.\n\nMore than ever, she wanted this poinsettia, this Frankincense, to live on. \"What do you think, Daryl? Do you think you can grow it?\"\n\n\"It's fantastic. Such an unusual tangerine color. And this yellow. It's got more depth than most salmon poinsettias I've seen.\"\n\nAdam reached inside his jacket for a notebook. \"These are all of Frank's notes and research that I could find. I believe it's detailed enough to create new plants. I know they'll help.\"\n\n\"Tell you what,\" Daryl said. \"I'll read these notes over and then call you. I don't want to promise something I may not be able to deliver.\"\n\n\"That's wise,\" Adam said.\n\n\"I couldn't ask for more,\" Joy said. \"It would mean so much if this works out.\"\n\n\"I know, honey. And I'll do my utmost to make it happen.\" Daryl held up the flower and turned it in her hands. \"There's something quite magical about it. Tropical, summer and autumn mixed, and yet people will buy it at Christmas. This tangerine blends well with reds and pink and warms up an arrangement rather than clashing with traditional Christmas colors.\" She beamed at Joy and Adam. \"I'll see if I can make it work.\"\n\nCareful not to damage the poinsettia, Joy hugged Daryl. \"Thank you so much.\"\n\n\"He was a special man, Joy. Loved by so many.\"\n\n\"He was, wasn't he?\" Joy replied, as Adam took her hand and squeezed it.\n\nJoy squeezed his hand back. Such a small gesture of support.\n\nSupport.\n\nWhen was the last time she'd felt any kind of support from a man?\n\n\"We gotta go, Joy. Get back to work,\" Adam said.\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nBack outside, Joy observed all the activity around her. She watched as a worker closed the roll-down door on a truck filled with dark burgundy poinsettias, corals and yellows. Another florist van had been stuffed with paper whites, amaryllis, tulips and chrysanthemums. A woman with an armload of seeded eucalyptus, blue spruce, cedar sprigs with their blue-green berries and mounds of vibrant green holly walked over to a florist's van.\n\nA young man, his arms sticking straight out, walked with green pine wreaths stacked from his wrists to his shoulders and whistled a happy tune as he carried the wreaths over to yet another van.\n\nThe bustling scene with its colors and fragrances and sounds brought back flashes of her childhood and teen years with her parents and grandpa. Only this time, her tears were happy ones. She'd led a fortunate life up until her parents' deaths. But they had loved and nurtured her. There had been happy days. Days of shared interests. Her mother guiding her, teaching her about flowers. Trees. New hybrids. Living things making happiness for so many. She had so much to be thankful for.\n\nAs Adam backed the truck up, honked the horn and they waved to Daryl, Joy's smile spread across her face.\n\nWhat was wrong with a life like this that brought smiles and uplifted spirits to others?\n\nNothing.\n\nAbsolutely nothing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Thanksgiving morning, Joy woke early, dressed in jeans and one of her grandpa's old sweatshirts that still smelled of his spicy, woodsy cologne.\n\nJoy clipped her long blond hair up and whisked on a bit of blush, eye shadow and lip gloss before shoving her feet into her work boots and dashing out the kitchen door.\n\nThe predawn hour was dark, and as Joy turned on the greenhouse lights, she gasped at the garlands, wreaths, trees and twinkling white lights under the polyurethane \"snow.\"\n\n\"It's positively enchanting!\"\n\nShe stood still for a long moment, tilted her head and realized it was just as warm in here as it was at her grandpa's house. \"Toasty warm.\" She smiled as she went to the counter.\n\nTomorrow they would be open for business. Sarah, Maddie and Liz had all volunteered to help with sales and stocking shelves when they could, but they'd all be cooking and baking for Thanksgiving dinner today.\n\nJoy had promised Mrs. Beabots she'd bring her special candied yams, which she'd prepared the night before and would put in the oven around noon before going to Mrs. Beabots's house at two o'clock.\n\nThe old greenhouses' phone number had been reconnected. She'd opened a commercial bank account and picked up change for the float. The counter area was just about ready.\n\nShe'd set up an old shelving unit behind the counter and stocked it with ribbons, gift cards, bolts of snowflake-embossed cellophane, scissors, glue guns, glue sticks, copy paper, toner, pens and pencils. The old register still worked for cash, and Joy had set up a point-of-sale app on her tablet, along with a dongle that would take credit card sales. She'd still write up each sale on a carbon receipt pad just like she'd done all those years ago.\n\nMaddie had brought over a countertop bakery display case that she'd filled with gourmet cupcakes. Next to it was a second glass case with three shelves for cookies that Mrs. Beabots baked for Joy to give free to visiting children.\n\n\"And some moms and dads, too.\" Joy smiled.\n\nShe'd found an unopened box of receipt pads, letterhead and envelopes, invoices and business cards that Frank must have had printed prior to closing. It was all she needed to look professional.\n\n\"Thanks, Grandpa,\" she said, putting the business cards in the stocking-shaped card holder he used to use. Her fingers traced the red-and-white-striped colors of the stocking.\n\n\"These insignificant reminders...\" She touched her heart, feeling as if it swelled in her chest. With each box of candles, soap or ornaments she opened, she felt her grandpa's presence.\n\nShe wiped away a tear. Then the pads of her fingers slid to her lips as she remembered Adam's kiss.\n\nThat kiss was real and from the present, not only bringing back the past but making her rethink every decision she'd made. Like moving away.\n\nShe hadn't left town. She'd raced out of town.\n\nSecretly, she'd packed her suitcases months before high school graduation and put them under her bed. Fortunately, she was going to be a freshman at Columbia and had signed up for early orientation and induction. She wanted to join a sorority in part to leave Indian Lake sooner.\n\nGrandpa had put her on the Amtrak to New York and even now she remembered how tight his hug was. They hadn't shared deep sorrows or emotions since Bruce's and Jill's deaths, but Joy believed her grandpa had known she was running away.\n\nShe'd told herself the past was the past. She was running toward her future.\n\n\"But now...\"\n\nNow she remembered Adam's kiss and the way she felt his heartbeat through his chest. She felt a rush of caring that gave her chills.\n\n\"This is insane.\" She checked herself, hoping to shake off the goose bumps and erase the kiss. But it had happened.\n\nHis kisses now were filled with even more passion. At first, she'd thought his kiss was reactionary. Perhaps he was recalling the past and wanting to see if he could go back there. Maybe his kiss was an exploratory expedition\u2014conducted like research. What she knew was that Adam's kisses past and present had the ability to keep her spellbound.\n\nShe swiped her face with her palms. \"I can't let myself get pulled back here. Back to Adam.\" She'd told him she and Chuck were on hold. She was more than confused; she was conflicted. She'd worked diligently to build a career and life in New York. And she loved her life there.\n\nAdam was a study in contrasts. One day he was romantic and close and the next his barriers were back up and he kept his son and himself walled up. He was waiting for her to bolt again.\n\nAnd she knew she could easily choose to go back to New York.\n\nThe fact was that since she'd left, she'd considered Indian Lake to be a town of enemies. People who didn't care for her or her family. Those opinions were twisted through her own guilts. Unraveling the past in the present was giving her an entirely new perspective.\n\nShe walked over to the grove of trees she and Sarah had decorated with the theme-oriented ornaments she'd bought from the supplier at the Merchandise Mart in Chicago. She reached out and touched a limb of the flocked white tree, decorated with white owls, reindeer, straw raccoons, squirrels, rabbits and white birds. White iridescent snowflakes and white glass pinecones sparkled against the crystal tree lights.\n\nThe next tree was lit with pink lights, pink angels, fairies, Victorian dolls, silk carousel horses from India and enormous pink glass balls.\n\nThe gold tree glittered with gold crosses, gold brocaded angels, pairs of golden angel wings, gold braided beads and twisted glass icicles.\n\nThe next tree was lit with blue lights, blue silk and white lace-edged hearts, blue birds, natural pinecones, crystal snowflakes and icicles and streams of silver-backed blue velvet ribbon. A blue star beamed from the top of the tree.\n\nJoy's favorite was the red-and-green lit tree filled with red-and-white-striped candy canes, round peppermint candy ornaments, red and green glass balls, and red and green whimsical elves who danced, wore chef's hats, stood on little ladders or romped on sleds.\n\nAround the base of each tree, Joy had placed a double ring of poinsettias. Pink flowers for the pink tree. Reds dusted with gold glitter for the gold tree, red and green flowers for \"elf\" tree, white for the woodland tree, white with blue glitter for the blue tree.\n\n\"Sarah designed these. She helped me order all these ornaments.\" She glanced back at the counter to the cupcakes and cookies. \"And Maddie and Mrs. Beabots.\"\n\nAt the end of the room was a small wine cooler filled with wines that Liz and Gabe had brought. Next to that was a display case with gift certificates for the Book Shop and Java Stop, all donated by Isabelle and Scott Abbott to give as raffle gifts each week to a lucky patron. Olivia had followed suit and donated a dozen gift cards to the deli for Joy to use at her discretion.\n\nGranted, each owner benefited from the advertisement, but the gift cards were purely from the heart.\n\n\"My friends.\"\n\nThey were the people who had been her friends years ago. They had hugged her during and after the days of her parents' deaths. She, Sarah and Maddie had gone to the movies together. Had sleepovers at Sarah's house. They'd all spend lots of hours on Mrs. Beabots's front porch, helped her in the gardens or kitchen.\n\n\"I forgot how close we'd all been.\"\n\nAs she looked around at what her friends had done for her, she realized that she'd been the one to leave them. For too long she'd lumped her real friends into the twisted emotional ball she'd invented. She'd wanted to leave Indian Lake because she couldn't face her grief. She'd discarded love and friendship and told herself she wanted a new adventure. A new life. A fresh start.\n\nShe was young, she'd thought. She had her life ahead of her and she was going to make something of herself. She wouldn't be stuck in a small town with a small life. She wanted to see the world.\n\nAnd she did.\n\nThe pulse of Manhattan had been beating in her veins for a decade and she hummed to it. She was accomplished. Even Glory said it. She was an integral cog at Newly and Associates. Chuck depended on her a great deal.\n\nPerhaps their time apart was good for them both. Chuck should learn not to lean on her so much.\n\nAnd she\u2014\n\nNeeded to sort out her feelings for Adam. Indian Lake. And Chuck. If she really loved Chuck, she'd discover the truth now.\n\nThis decision to reopen the greenhouses had been hers, and from his perspective, it was a gamble. A shot in the dark.\n\nShe had to ask herself why she was taking it. Yes, she wanted to make her grandpa proud of her. She wanted his name and that of the Boston Greenhouses to last and be remembered. Whether the new buyer would see her vision, feel Frank's passion for this business, was yet to be seen.\n\nAs for Joy, the nagging voice inside told her that she was doing this for personal reasons. She felt regretful for leaving good friends all those years ago.\n\nOf all the people she'd left behind, Joy realized the one she'd hurt the most was... \"Adam.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Fat snowflakes drifted as Joy held the warm dish of candied yams smothered in marshmallows and pecan topping with oven mitts at Mrs. Beabots's front door, expecting to be greeted by her hostess.\n\n\"Hi!\" Titus said, reaching for her arm. \"I couldn't wait till you got here.\"\n\nTaken aback, she stared at him. \"Is that right?\"\n\n\"Yeah! Dad said now the party can start!\" He beamed. \"Hurry in. It's cold out there.\"\n\nJoy walked inside as Titus quickly closed the door. \"Dad said I have to be careful with this door. It's really old.\"\n\n\"You're not careful with all doors?\" she asked, following him down the hallway to the kitchen.\n\n\"Not really. I have a tendency to slam doors. Probably because I'm short.\"\n\nJoy was glad Titus was in front of her and didn't see her smile at his response. She didn't think of Titus as short. She thought of him as a full-grown adult intellect stuck in a kid's body.\n\n\"Here she is!\" Titus announced, as if he was the MC at a wrestling match. He even thrust his arm out toward her as she moved into the kitchen.\n\n\"Hi,\" she said, looking at Mrs. Beabots, who lifted a chef's knife and, in one smack, chopped off the stalk of a huge broccoli crown.\n\n\"Hello, dear,\" Mrs. Beabots said and waved the knife at Adam, who was sipping something from a massive mug and who eyed Joy over the rim. \"Adam, take her coat, please.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" He placed the mug on the granite counter. He wore black jeans, black cowboy boots, a blue shirt under his navy cable-knit sweater, the sleeves of which were shoved up to his elbows, revealing his muscular forearms.\n\nArms that reminded her of the hard labor it had taken for him to install the geothermal heating system for Frank's greenhouses.\n\nHis blue eyes flashed and she got the distinct impression he was thinking about their kiss in the greenhouse, as well.\n\nJoy cleared her throat and asked, \"Where should I put this?\"\n\n\"Right there is fine,\" Mrs. Beabots replied. \"Do we need to put it in the oven?\"\n\n\"Maybe on low. Two fifty?\" Joy placed the casserole on the counter as Titus scrambled up on the stool near her.\n\n\"What is it?\" Titus asked, trying to lift the aluminum foil.\n\n\"Candied yams.\"\n\nTitus grimaced and made a contorted face. \"Yams?\"\n\nAdam chuckled as he stood behind Joy, taking his time holding her coat, leaning his cheek close to hers and whispering in her ear, \"Don't take offense. He's never had yams.\"\n\nJoy couldn't help the shiver that scampered down her spine as she inhaled Adam's woodsy soap scent. She opened her mouth but she couldn't put two thoughts together in her brain. The only thing in her mind was how tender his lips had felt against hers.\n\nHe moved away and she felt an odd sense of loss.\n\nTitus was still investigating the yams. \"Looks like marshmallows to me.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Joy said, thankful for the opportunity to wrest her attention from Adam. \"Pecans, brown sugar and my secret ingredient.\"\n\n\"Secret?\" Titus's eyes looked enormous behind his glasses.\n\n\"Uh-huh. Brandy.\" She grinned.\n\n\"Brandy?\" Adam asked. \"Is that what your mom used?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots smiled as she poured a bag of cranberries into a saucepan, adding water and sugar. \"I gave Jill that recipe.\"\n\n\"You did?\" Joy and Adam chorused.\n\n\"Will I get drunk?\" Titus giggled.\n\n\"No, the alcohol bakes off,\" Joy said, walking past Adam to take an apron from the hook by the back door. She noticed he didn't move out of the way, so that she'd brush his arm as she passed. She took the apron and put it on. \"Now, what can I do?\"\n\n\"The turkey is huge!\" Titus exclaimed. \"Dad had to put it in the oven.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots smiled at Titus. \"I always make sure I have a man around to do the heavy turkey lifting.\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" Adam asked, picking up his mug again. \"So, since this is our first Thanksgiving here, who's been the man of the house till today?\"\n\n\"Luke usually. Before that, Austin McCreary. His father died when you kids were in school. Remember?\"\n\nJoy paused. \"I'd forgotten. Poor Austin.\"\n\nTitus whirled around on the stool and pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose. \"Mr. Austin's not poor. He's very rich.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Timmy. He tells me everything.\" Titus reached for a wooden spoon.\n\nAdam grabbed the wooden spoon and put it back on the counter. \"Leave cooking utensils alone.\"\n\n\"But you let me help at home.\"\n\n\"This isn't our house,\" Adam warned.\n\nMrs. Beabots handed Joy a stick of butter. \"Melt this in the microwave, would you, dear? Pyrex dishes are over there.\" She pointed to an end cabinet, then turned back to Titus. \"I always appreciate help in the kitchen, Titus. Why don't you take those silver saltshakers out to the table for me?\"\n\n\"Sure, I can.\" Titus scrambled down, the stool tilting ever so slightly as he did.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Adam said, thrusting his hand out to hold the stool.\n\n\"I'm fine, Dad.\" Titus whisked the shakers off the counter and marched into the dining room. They heard the pocket doors slide open.\n\nMrs. Beabots's eyes shot to Adam. \"I forgot I had the doors closed.\"\n\nAdam started for the kitchen door and rushed to the hall.\n\nFrom the hallway they heard, \"Wow! This is awesome!\"\n\nJoy lowered her voice and asked, \"What's wrong with the doors being closed?\"\n\n\"Sometimes they stick and Titus got his fingers pinched in them a couple years ago. That kid can scream, I'll tell you.\" She laughed.\n\n\"But all kids get scrapes and bruises from time to time. It's part of growing up.\"\n\n\"Not like Adam's kid.\" Mrs. Beabots shook her head.\n\n\"But he's so...smart. So amazing. I'd kill for a child like Titus.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots's clear blue eyes scanned Joy's face. \"You would, huh?\"\n\nTitus raced into the kitchen with Adam directly behind him. \"What else can I do?\"\n\n\"Butter sticks for the table. Joy, use those butter plates I put out there. Then, Adam, when you come back, you can mash the potatoes for me. Joy, the butter, cream and sour cream are in the fridge.\"\n\n\"Got it,\" Joy replied, taking an antique wooden-handled masher out of a blue-and-white china urn on the counter filled with spoons, spatulas and whisks. She held it out to Adam.\n\n\"Hand mashed? No electric mixer?\"\n\n\"Aw, c'mon, Adam,\" Joy joked. \"Put those muscles of yours to work.\"\n\nHe looked at Mrs. Beabots. \"I suppose this was another of Luke's jobs.\"\n\n\"You got it.\"\n\n\"So, what's he doing today? Seems he's getting off easy,\" Adam said, as Joy stood next to him adding butter and cream to the boiled potatoes.\n\n\"He and Sarah were up till midnight making pies for the party later today.\"\n\nAdam stopped midmash.\n\nJoy let the dollop of sour cream drop from the spoon.\n\n\"What party?\" they asked in unison.\n\nMrs. Beabots's eyes were curiously merry. \"Didn't I tell you? The dinner is the warm-up. Sarah, Luke and the kids will be here in about fifteen minutes for our dinner, of course. But the real celebration is tonight for my annual Thanksgiving dessert party.\"\n\n\"Who's coming?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"Why, Joy. All your friends.\"\n\nJoy froze. Friends. If she was in New York that would be Glory\u2014and Chuck, of course. There was Glory's \"tribe\" she hung with, but Joy didn't think of them as the kind of friends who would drop their work and life to come help her put up Christmas trees in a greenhouse. Or bake cookies or cupcakes for her store. Or give her free gift certificates for customers. Or a stocked wine refrigerator. \"How many would that be?\"\n\n\"Goodness,\" Mrs. Beabots said, checking the broccoli in the steamer. \"I hadn't stopped to count. The crowd gets bigger every year. New marriages. New babies.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Titus said, reaching for a crescent roll in the bread basket on the counter. \"Even Jules is flying in from Paris.\"\n\n\"Jules?\"\n\n\"Mica Barzonni's son,\" Adam said, shaking his head at Titus, who was about to take a bite of roll. \"Not till dinner, Titus.\"\n\n\"Mica is married? To whom?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"Grace Railton,\" Mrs. Beabots said, handing Adam a pair of oven mitts. \"Let's check the turkey. Take the aluminum foil off and baste it for me, would you?\"\n\n\"Happy to.\"\n\n\"Do you remember Louise Railton, Joy? She owns The Louise House. Her niece, Grace, used to visit in the summers from Chicago and helped Louise at the ice cream shop. Best pumpkin ice cream in town, by the way.\"\n\n\"The pretty blonde girl who won Miss Teen Illinois or something? I remember she went to the Barzonni pool parties they used to have back then.\"\n\n\"That's right. Anyway, she married Mica and they live in Paris now. He's an engineer. She's a fashion designer.\" Mrs. Beabots winked. \"I may have had a bit to do with her getting a job in Paris.\"\n\n\"You did?\" Joy and Adam chorused.\n\nTitus grinned. \"I bet you can do just about anything, huh, Mrs. Beabots.\"\n\n\"Just about, Titus.\"\n\nThe tinny doorbell rang.\n\n\"I'll get it!\" Titus scrambled off the stool, just as Adam placed the turkey on top of the stove.\n\n\"Slow down, Titus.\"\n\n\"It's Timmy and Annie!\" Titus shouted from the foyer. \"Hi, guys!\"\n\nJoy looked at Adam. \"He's a ball of fire, isn't he? Does he ever slow down?\"\n\n\"No. Not even when he sleeps.\" He lifted the aluminum foil off the turkey as she handed him the baster. \"When he was younger he sleepwalked. I've gotta keep the doors locked from the inside so he can't get out.\"\n\n\"That's wise,\" she said, taking a whiff of the turkey, stuffed with apples, oranges and onions. \"This smells so good.\"\n\n\"Hungry?\" he asked, putting the turkey back in the oven.\n\n\"Almost as much as Titus.\" She laughed.\n\nSarah and Luke walked into the kitchen. Mrs. Beabots hugged both her guests and then went to the hall to hug the children.\n\nLuke pointed at Adam taking off the oven mitts. \"Sarah, I've been replaced!\"\n\n\"I'll let you carve,\" Adam replied with a smile, walking around the island and to shake Luke's hand.\n\nJoy hugged Sarah. \"I can't thank you enough for all you did to bring the showroom to life. It's beyond beautiful.\"\n\nShe turned to Luke. \"And thank you for getting those trees for us. That walkway feels like a real winter wonderland. Live trees made the difference.\"\n\nAdam picked up a corkscrew and opened a bottle of white wine. \"That was really thoughtful, man.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. I didn't live here back when you all were in high school, but I've been in Indian Lake long enough to remember going to the greenhouses the day after Thanksgiving when the kids were very young. We couldn't afford much back then, but every year we got an ornament for Annie and Timmy to put on our tree. Jenny always said her best ideas came from the Boston Greenhouses.\"\n\nJoy watched as Luke's sad eyes went to Sarah. She'd told Joy that Luke had been a widower when he met Sarah. He'd been filled with grief and loneliness back then. Thanksgiving and Christmas brought back all kinds of memories for people. The happy ones, and the sad ones, too. She watched as Sarah mouthed \"I love you\" to Luke. He mouthed the same back to her.\n\nJoy glanced at Adam, whose blue eyes were focused on her.\n\nHow many times in the past had he mouthed the same thing to her? How many times had she reciprocated? It was the most natural thing in the world to her.\n\n\"Glass of wine, Luke?\" Adam broke the moment.\n\n\"Sure. I'll get the glasses.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots hustled the children into the kitchen, holding little Charlotte by the hand. \"The children said they're starving.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Luke said.\n\n\"Okay.\" Joy went to the stove. \"I'll get the broccoli. Sarah, you take the rolls. Luke is in charge of the turkey, and, Adam, you have more mashing to do before these are creamy enough to serve.\"\n\n\"And who made you the general around here?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"I did.\" She smiled. \"It's time that Mrs. Beabots sit at the table, have some wine and rest. We need to take over.\"\n\n\"I'll second that!\" Adam said, taking up the masher.\n\n\"Joy, you are a blessing,\" Mrs. Beabots said. \"Come on, children.\"\n\n\"I made the turkey place cards,\" Timmy said proudly.\n\nAnnie smoothed the skirt of her new bronze taffeta dress. \"And I helped Mom make the centerpiece. It has carnations and chrysanthemums and pheasant feathers.\"\n\nJoy put the cranberries in a footed Haviland china dish and poured the gravy into a silver gravy boat.\n\nJoy helped Adam put the mashed potatoes in a covered dish with white-and-gold edges. They carried the dishes to the table.\n\nAdam lit the candles as they all took their places. Luke poured wine.\n\nThey held hands and bent their heads as Mrs. Beabots said a Thanksgiving prayer. \"Life is about friends and family and the love we share. Bless you all for being with me today to give thanks for everything we have, especially each other.\"\n\n\"Amen!\" Titus shouted.\n\nCharlotte clapped her hands and Timmy raised his water glass.\n\n\"Dad,\" Annie said, \"can we have a toast?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Luke replied. \"Good health and success to you, Joy, with your grand reopening. We're all here to help in any way we can.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Joy replied, as they all clinked crystal glasses and sipped. \"You've done so much already.\"\n\nAdam stood next to Luke as they both worked to carve the huge turkey. Adam passed the plates. \"There's a long way to go. Don't stand on ceremony to ask your friends for help.\"\n\nJoy worried her bottom lip. \"I know I shouldn't, but frankly, I don't know what to expect.\"\n\n\"In what way?\" Adam asked as he piled mashed potatoes on Titus's plate.\n\nJoy noticed her place card positioned her between Adam and Titus\u2014as if she was part of the family. She wondered if that was one of Mrs. Beabots's subtle \"matchmaking\" efforts. Smiling to herself, she said, \"I know I have the radio ads starting this morning. And I took out a half-page ad in the newspaper, but that's not enough.\"\n\n\"I've distributed those flyers all over town,\" Adam said. \"They'll bring in a lot of people.\"\n\n\"Adam,\" Joy said, cutting Titus's white meat reflexively as if she'd been doing it all her life. She put cranberries on his plate, and as the rolls were passed, she gave him one. \"You have hundreds left. I bet you didn't put out more than thirty.\"\n\n\"Thirty-six,\" Titus finished and shoved a roll in his mouth.\n\n\"You're right,\" Adam said, sitting down and putting his napkin in his lap. \"We have to do something...dramatic. Get everyone's attention.\"\n\n\"And just how do you propose to do that? The grand reopening is tomorrow morning,\" Joy moaned.\n\nTitus finished chomping on his roll, put the rest on his plate, wiped his hands on his napkin and said, \"That's easy. We go house to house.\"\n\n\"Like politicians?\" Adam joked.\n\n\"No.\" Titus looked at Annie. She winked back.\n\nTimmy nodded at Titus, giving him the go-ahead signal.\n\n\"Dad,\" Titus began. \"Me and Timmy and Annie\u2014\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Charlotte interrupted, raising her spoon over her head and dropping potatoes onto the table in the process. \"Oops.\"\n\nSarah leaned over and scooped them up and put them back on Charlotte's plate. \"Okay, what's going on here? All four of you\u2014out with it,\" she demanded.\n\nTitus put his hands on the table. \"We've been wanting to have a caroling party. You know, singing from house to house.\"\n\n\"I know what that is,\" Adam replied, his eyes sliding to Joy.\n\nJoy caught the excitement in the children's faces. The little stinkers had been talking and planning this for some time, she could tell. Sarah had told her that Annie would use any excuse to sing. School plays, church choir. Solos at church weddings. She'd burst into song walking home from school. And she was very, very good. \"And you want to do this...\"\n\n\"How about tonight?\" Titus burst out. \"It's perfect, Dad. Thanksgiving night starts the Christmas season. We can go to all the houses up and down Maple Boulevard. We sing and give the owners a flyer for the greenhouses.\"\n\nAdam pursed his lips. \"It's not a bad idea.\"\n\nJoy felt like a child herself, as she caught their enthusiasm. \"Why didn't I think of this?\"\n\nTitus shrugged his shoulders. \"I dunno.\"\n\nAnnie smiled at Titus. \"It was Titus's idea. He thought of it 'cause you and Mr. Adam were talking about advertising.\"\n\n\"Actually, Dad,\" Titus said. \"Isn't this the personal touch you talked about?\"\n\n\"When did I say that?\"\n\n\"Uh, maybe I saw it on the web.\"\n\n\"You were on my computer?\"\n\nTitus slid down in his chair. \"Maybe.\"\n\nJoy laughed. \"Oh, don't be mad at him, Adam. He wanted to help and took initiative. You all just said I should ask for help from my friends. Well, I am. This caroling party is just what I need.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Adam said, sipping his wine. \"Indian Lake is like no other place I've been or know about. The people here are a real community. They help each other like it's a life mission. You say all our friends will be here tonight, Mrs. Beabots?\"\n\n\"Yes. All the Barzonni clan, wives and kids. Austin and Katia. Cate, Trent and Danny. Jack and Sophie Carter. Rand and Beatrice Nelson from the youth camp and their two boys will be here.\" She tapped her cheek with her manicured finger. \"Oh, and I've invited all of Rand's family. All the Hawks family. Isabelle and Scott will bring Bella and Michael, and you do know that Violet is engaged to the famous Formula One race car driver Josh Stevens.\"\n\n\"Former racer,\" Adam corrected. \"He's retired now, but he does a lot of commercials.\"\n\n\"Commercials?\" Joy tilted her head a bit. It wouldn't be right to ask a stranger, and a famous one at that, to help her advertise the greenhouses. Would it?\n\nMrs. Beabots continued, \"Connie Hawks's sons are so handsome and accomplished. I saw her at Jack Carter's insurance agency the other day and she said Dylan was moving back to Indian Lake from Chicago.\"\n\n\"No kidding?\" Sarah asked, as she buttered a roll for Charlotte. \"Isabelle said he liked the city.\"\n\nJoy peered at Mrs. Beabots. \"So, this is how you stay on top of all the local, er, doings? You have gargantuan parties and then work the crowd?\"\n\nMrs. Beabots lowered her eyes coyly. \"It's worked for fifty years. They all bring desserts and Gabe brought two cases of wine. I have plenty of cocoa for the kids. And this house is so huge, we spill from the library to the front parlor to this dining room and the kitchen.\"\n\nJoy noticed there were tears in Mrs. Beabots's eyes. In all her life, she'd never seen the woman cry. But tonight was different. It was Thanksgiving and the house was filled with love.\n\n\"Thank you all,\" Joy replied, as chills of humility and the warmth of kindness enveloped her. \"I didn't expect to enjoy Thanksgiving this much without my grandpa. But this...has been lovely. I don't know what to say...\"\n\nAdam reached over, took her hand, squeezed it under the table and said, \"You already did.\"\n\nThen he leaned over and kissed her cheek.\n\nJoy blushed so hot she knew her face was crimson. Her eyes tracked across the table to Sarah, whose smile grew wider.\n\n\"Happy Thanksgiving, Joy,\" Sarah said as she lifted her wineglass. Luke leaned over and kissed Sarah's cheek.\n\nJoy turned, and facing Adam, she said, \"That was lovely.\"\n\n\"I thought so, too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Mrs. Beabots was right, Joy thought as she helped to welcome the stream of guests to the enormous Victorian house on Thanksgiving evening. The fact that the snow had not abated didn't stop a single guest. This gathering was a tradition for Mrs. Beabots, and her friends didn't disappoint.\n\nJoy and Adam had cleaned up the dinner dishes, Sarah had put away the leftover food, and the kids had taken the linens to the laundry room and then scrambled to the library to practice Christmas carols. Luke brought in wood and stoked the fires in the library and front parlor.\n\nJoy had planned to return to the greenhouses and put out more inventory, but there was no way she was going to miss this party or Titus's advertising campaign.\n\nMaddie and Nate Barzonni were the first guests to arrive. Maddie brought three boxes of red-and-green-frosted cupcakes. They were followed by Gina Barzonni Crenshaw and Sam Crenshaw. Gina brought a tray of Italian cannoli. Olivia and Rafe Barzonni were next and arrived with Grace and Mica Barzonni and their toddler son, Jules, newly arrived from Paris.\n\n\"I'm so happy to see you, Grace. I don't know if you remember me...\" Joy said, but a radiant smile filled Grace's face, and she pulled Joy into a hug.\n\n\"Of course I do, and Maddie and Olivia told me about your grandfather's passing. I'm so very sorry for your loss. I remember him from my summers here.\" Grace leaned forward. \"He loved peppermint ice cream. I had to make it special for him in the summer.\"\n\n\"He did!\" Joy exclaimed. \"I can't believe you remember that.\"\n\n\"He was special, Joy. You were fortunate to have him as your grandfather.\"\n\nMica shook Joy's hand. \"We were all sorry to hear about Frank, Joy. Mother called us in Paris when she heard the news.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mica,\" Joy said, as she released his hand. It was then she remembered that Mica had suffered an injury on the farm and had lost the use of his left arm. However, he was an engineer and worked in Paris now. \"How long are you and Grace going to be in town?\"\n\n\"Until the New Year,\" he said.\n\n\"Adam Masterson is here and I thought, well, you being engineers...\"\n\n\"We go way back,\" Mica said. \"But truthfully, Joy, I design farm equipment for disabled folks like me. Adam, well, he's out of my league.\"\n\n\"He is?\" Joy looked at Mica askance. She was about to continue when three-year-old Jules interrupted.\n\n\"Mama.\" Jules tugged on Grace's arm.\n\nGrace hoisted him up. \"Joy, this is our son, Jules.\"\n\nJules thrust his hand at Joy. \"Bonsoir.\"\n\n\"English,\" Grace said.\n\nJules grinned. \"Happy Thanksgiving!\"\n\n\"What a gentleman you are, Jules. And so handsomely dressed.\" He wore a navy-blue wool coat, white shirt, red-and-white-striped bow tie and navy slacks.\n\n\"Merci. Mama made it. She makes clothes.\"\n\n\"I heard that.\" Joy smiled.\n\n\"So,\" Mica said, \"Adam is here?\"\n\n\"In the kitchen, I think. And, Jules, the children are in the library practicing Christmas carols.\" She looked at Grace. \"We're planning a caroling party after dessert. If you're up for a walk down Maple Boulevard in the cold.\"\n\n\"Bien!\" Jules scrambled down out of Grace's arms and took off toward the library.\n\nJoy watched him leave. \"He knows his way around.\"\n\n\"Uh, yeah. He does have a way of making himself at home wherever he goes.\" Mica chuckled.\n\nThe doorbell rang.\n\n\"Please excuse me,\" Joy said as she moved away. \"I'll see you in a bit.\"\n\nWhen Joy opened the door, there were over a dozen people on the steps. Isabelle Hawks threw her arms around Joy. \"You're here! I thought I'd have to storm the greenhouses to find you! Sarah said you're working night and day!\"\n\n\"Pretty close.\" She stood aside as Isabelle introduced her to all her family.\n\nViolet Hawks and Josh Stevens. Isabelle's brothers: Dylan, Christopher and Ross. And her mother, Connie.\n\nFollowing the Hawks family group was Beatrice and Rand Nelson and their adopted sons, Eli and Chris.\n\nRand explained that his family was following in the next car.\n\nBy the time all the guests had arrived, Joy felt like a politician at a rally, she'd shaken so many hands with old acquaintances and new faces, as well. They all knew who she was and they all congratulated her on her decision to reopen the greenhouses.\n\nSarah, Liz, Maddie, Olivia and Cate had taken over the task of arranging the desserts on the dining room table. When Joy saw the dazzling display of pies, cakes, cookies, cupcakes and Gina's cannoli, she couldn't help taking a photo and texting it to Glory, who had a penchant for sweets.\n\nGabe Barzonni had distributed glasses of champagne and his new ice wine. Mrs. Beabots rang a crystal bell calling everyone to the table.\n\nAdam appeared from the kitchen, stood next to Mrs. Beabots and said, \"After dessert, the children are going for a caroling party. Joy and I invite you all to come with us!\"\n\nTitus shouldered his way through the throng of adults and stood next to his father. \"We're going to help Boston Greenhouses, too.\"\n\nJoy smiled at Titus and looked at Adam. In that moment, she was struck with a romantic sense of belonging. They weren't a couple, but the shift inside her was undeniable.\n\n\"That's right, Titus,\" Joy said from the other side of the table. \"I hope you don't mind, but Adam has made up some flyers and we'd like to distribute them to our neighbors.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots held Joy's hand. \"Frank would be very happy right now, Joy.\"\n\nGabe raised his glass. \"To Frank Boston.\"\n\nJoy watched as every eye in the room fell upon her, and she could see their memories of her grandfather etched in their expressions. The greenhouses weren't just a nursery or a retail establishment. They were that part of the past that settled into their hearts because her grandpa had appreciated and loved them. She felt her heart warm as it opened to their affection." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Adam walked alongside Joy as they made their way down Maple Boulevard. Because there were so many guests, they broke up into two groups, each taking a side of the street. Austin McCreary and his wife, Katia, spearheaded the group on the opposite side of the boulevard while he, Joy, Mica and Grace took their group.\n\nThe night was still, the traffic noises muffled by the white blanket of snow. The clouds had moved on, revealing an indigo sky studded with stars and lit by a full silver moon. It was the kind of night sky that brought back memories of Joy and the winter holidays they'd shared.\n\n\"Adam,\" Joy said with a smile. \"I remember doing this with my parents. The night was just like this. You were with us.\"\n\n\"I was,\" he said. \"We went to the nursing home and your dad gave them poinsettias he'd brought in the car. They were very appreciative.\"\n\n\"That was a good night.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it was.\" He would have slipped his arm around her shoulders, but Titus, Timmy, Annie and Danny dashed past them and raced up to the next door. Titus rang the bell, looked back at Adam proudly and held up a flyer.\n\nA woman dressed in a sweatshirt, jeans and slippers came to the door. \"What's all this?\" she asked.\n\n\"Happy Thanksgiving! Merry Christmas!\" Titus said.\n\nThen Annie burst into \"We Wish You a Merry Christmas.\"\n\nDanny stood next to Annie singing at the top of his lungs, but he was no match for Annie. Titus sang along with them, but he was most intent on handing the flyer to the lady of the house.\n\nWhen the children finished the song, the woman held the flyer high and looked over their heads to Adam and Joy. \"Is this for real? Boston Greenhouses are reopening?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Joy exclaimed.\n\n\"You can count on me to be there. I'll call my daughter. Thanks!\"\n\nThe kids scurried down the steps, Titus leading the way to the next house.\n\n\"Titus...\" Adam started in his warning voice, until Joy took his gloved hand and squeezed it.\n\n\"He's okay.\"\n\n\"But it's icy.\"\n\nShe smiled widely. \"It's snowy, Adam. And he's having the time of his life.\"\n\nAdam exhaled. \"He is, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" she replied.\n\nGrace, who was walking behind Adam and Joy, carrying Jules, said, \"I know just how you feel, Adam. I'm paranoid about Jules all the time.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't say I was paranoid,\" Adam protested, looking over his shoulder at Grace. Then his eyes went to Mica, who was stifling a laugh. \"Okay. Maybe a little.\"\n\n\"Hey, Adam,\" Mica said. \"Mind if I bend your ear?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nMica put his hand on the small of Grace's back. \"Let Joy hold Jules for a bit while I talk to Adam.\"\n\nJoy reached out for Jules. \"Better yet,\" she said, \"let's go sing with the kids at the next house.\"\n\n\"Bien! Bien!\" Jules clapped his hands. \"Le chanson 'Noel'? Oui?\"\n\nGrace touched his cheek. \"English, Jules. We're in America.\"\n\n\"I can sing 'The First Noel' en anglais et fran\u00e7ais.\"\n\nGrace rolled her eyes. \"I give up.\"\n\n\"C'mon,\" Joy said, as they went up to the next house and Titus rang the bell, ever ready with another flyer.\n\n\"What's up?\" Adam asked, as they stood at the base of the house's newly shoveled sidewalk.\n\n\"I wanted to thank you again for putting me in touch with your patent attorney.\"\n\n\"Vince is the best, isn't he?\"\n\n\"He sure is. I thought I had things well in hand, but he found two more operating systems I'd invented and had incorporated into my designs for so long, I'd forgotten that no one else knew of them, because they were mine. Vince ran the searches and then applied for the patents.\"\n\n\"So, you're covered.\"\n\n\"I am, thanks to you.\"\n\n\"And Vince.\" Adam smiled.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Mica exhaled a huge visible breath of air. \"So, what are you up to these days? Last we talked, you were working on an antigravity drape. I mean, wow. Propulsion methods. Zero gravity...\"\n\n\"Microgravity, actually. There're some physicists out in Altoona\u2014self-funded, mostly\u2014that I've been having conversations with. Actually, I've been approached by Hal Slade, who runs a think tank out there. He wants to fund one of my projects.\"\n\n\"That's fantastic, man. Knowing you, they're picking your brain more than you're picking theirs.\"\n\nAdam faced Mica. \"Look. Right now, everyone in this town thinks all I've done is some geothermal work. I've got an experiment going on at Frank's old greenhouses.\"\n\n\"Experiment?\"\n\n\"I'm testing a new heating system. If I can prove this thing works, it could revolutionize energy usage in colder regions around the Great Lakes.\"\n\n\"You've gone a long way past your engineering degree. Unifying electromagnetic energy with gravity force? Working with these think-tank corporations keeps you busy, I bet.\"\n\n\"Very. I love it.\"\n\n\"What's not to love. Fascinating stuff.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Why don't you jump on board?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"I'm not as smart as you.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are. Just maybe not as curious as I am.\"\n\nMica looked over at Titus. \"He's like you, you know. Inquisitive. Never satisfied with a single answer. Always searching.\"\n\nAdam followed Mica's gaze to his son. He looked at Jules in Joy's arms. \"Because there's always a better way. There is so much we don't know. And I want to know it all. If I had my way, there'd be free energy for every living soul. Limitless drinking water. No one would go cold.\"\n\nAdam turned back to Mica. \"Is it wrong to want the impossible?\"\n\nMica touched his paralyzed arm. \"No. I never give up...on anything.\" He looked back at Grace, who had just turned to blow him a kiss. \"I'd be miserable if I'd given up.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to stop, but I don't want anyone to know about my work. Not after my first projects were stolen before I could get them patented.\"\n\n\"Yeah, intellectual property theft is rampant. Trust is tough all around these days. So, that rule of yours\u2014does that include Joy?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"I dunno. Could be you look at her the way I look at Grace.\"\n\n\"I don't do that. Joy is engaged to a wealthy guy in New York. She's going back in a couple weeks.\"\n\n\"What? But she's reopening the greenhouses,\" Mica countered.\n\n\"I talked her into it. As is, they're nearly worthless. If she presents a profitable business...she gets a better price.\"\n\n\"I see.\" He rubbed his chin. \"And you're doing this to...\"\n\n\"To help out an old friend.\"\n\nMica snorted. \"Ha!\" He slapped Adam's back. \"That's a good one.\" He shoved his hand in his jeans' pocket and shuffled toward Grace. \"You keep tellin' yourself that, buddy. Often. Maybe you'll really believe it.\"\n\nAdam scratched the back of his neck.\n\nHe and Mica had gone to Purdue together. Majored in engineering. They'd collaborated on several class experiments and enjoyed each other's company. Mica was about as close a friend as he'd had in high school. Then Adam had moved away and Mica went to France.\n\nBut as close as Adam was to Mica, he couldn't tell Mica all the truth.\n\nBeing an inventor meant keeping one's ideas and experiments top secret. Adam kept his notebooks, flash drives and research in a safety-deposit box in the bank where they could not be stolen or lost.\n\nAdam had to be careful.\n\nHis work could change the world one day.\n\nAdam's real fear wasn't that his work would be stolen. It was that he'd be left behind. He didn't trust people a great deal. Amie had died. Frank was gone. And before all that, Joy had abandoned him. He still wasn't over the pain. Getting close didn't work out for him.\n\nJoy still had a life in New York even though her engagement was \"on hold.\" The problem was that Titus and Joy seemed to be getting attached. And there was the fact that Adam couldn't stop his own emotional reactions when he was around her.\n\nHis heart wanted her, but his head told him to back off. He was logical and practical, and Adam believed his head seldom steered him wrong." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Joy walked across the snow-covered driveway to the greenhouses as the first light of dawn glistened across the snow. The Grand Reopening banner was tied above the front door, bookended by two enormous wreaths glowing with two thousand crystal lights each.\n\nJoy had worked on the wreaths, making bows out of fat red and gold velvet ribbon while Adam had hung the banner. She'd walked out to the end of the expansive parking lot in front to see the effect. Gray skies were inevitable at this time of year, and the lights on the wreaths would sparkle day and night.\n\nShe opened the door, turned the Closed sign around and turned on the lights.\n\n\"Amazing,\" she said aloud, as the trees and garlands illuminated the showroom.\n\n\"Isn't it?\" Adam said, walking out of the large greenhouse, wearing rubber boots, a rubber apron, and holding a box of flower food in his hand.\n\nShe drank in his smile and wondered why she didn't check herself. He never failed to surprise her with his magnetism. It was more than charm; it was innate charisma born of his intelligence. He'd always had it and it drew her to him now, just as it had years ago. \"You're here.\"\n\n\"So am I!\" Titus yelled, rushing from behind Adam's legs and into the showroom as if he were taking his cue for center stage. \"We're gonna help!\"\n\n\"But...\" Joy looked from Titus to Adam. \"I\u2014I am...\"\n\n\"Pleased? Overjoyed? Astonished?\" Adam laughed as he walked forward. \"All the poinsettias are watered, fed, and the heat's perfect.\"\n\n\"What time did you get here?\"\n\nTitus held up a Mickey Mouse watch on his wrist. \"Five thirty. I couldn't sleep.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nAdam untied the rubber apron. \"It's true. We couldn't get out of the house fast enough.\"\n\nTitus dropped his head down and yanked it up in a dramatic nod. \"Yep. We had microwave oatmeal.\" He lifted his little palm to cover his mouth and said nearly in a whisper, \"Not Dad's favorite.\"\n\n\"Also true,\" Adam said. \"I asked Olivia to bring over some breakfast sandwiches when she comes.\"\n\nJoy halted taking off her coat. \"Olivia's coming?\"\n\n\"She's gonna help, too,\" Titus said proudly. \"It's arranged.\"\n\nJoy was getting used to Titus's larger-than-expected vocabulary. \"Arranged.\" She looked at Adam. \"You did this?\"\n\nHe shrugged his shoulders. \"Didn't have to. Sarah started the scheduling at the party last night. Miss Milse is babysitting nearly every kid...\"\n\n\"Except me,\" Titus chimed in.\n\nAdam exhaled and pursed his lips. \"Titus drove a hard bargain because he wanted to be here so badly.\"\n\n\"Why's that?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"Because. My dad talks about when he used to work here. I never saw it with all these flowers. I only saw it with broken glass and weeds inside.\" He marched up to Joy and quirked his finger at her. She leaned down.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Dad said it was magic.\"\n\nJoy sprang upright, surprised Adam would use the same description he'd used back in high school. It was as if he was sharing his innermost feelings with his son. \"Adam? You told him that?\"\n\nAdam walked toward her, took her coat and purse. \"I'll put these away.\" He pointed to the register. \"You need to get ready. Your public will be here in fifteen minutes. I'll turn on the cookie warmer.\" He started to walk away before saying, \"Liz and Sarah are taking morning shifts. Olivia, Maddie and Cate the afternoons. Katia is every day, all day, except Tuesdays and Friday afternoons. Isabelle is every other morning. I think that about covers it.\"\n\nJoy pressed her palms to her cheeks. \"My gosh. I'll have more workers than I'll have customers.\"\n\n\"Nuh-uh,\" Titus said. \"Dad had more flyers made. Mr. Carter and Dr. Barzonni said they're going to mail them to their personal friends.\" He turned toward Adam. \"Right?\"\n\n\"Yes. Everyone wants the greenhouse to succeed.\" He smiled.\n\nAdam left the showroom to put Joy's things in the back-storage room.\n\nWhen he came back he was wearing his cowboy boots, jeans and a red-and-green-plaid flannel shirt he'd had on under the apron.\n\nWith effort, she tore her eyes from his as he smiled at her. She looked down at her Boston Greenhouses sweatshirt and jeans. \"Well, I guess we look Christmassy enough.\"\n\n\"I forgot about those sweatshirts,\" Adam said, coming over to her. \"Hmm. I wonder if I can get more of those made up.\" He took out his cell phone and walked through the French doors. \"Hello?\"\n\nJoy looked at Titus. \"He's always like this, isn't he?\"\n\nTitus nodded. \"He told me he's being...decided.\"\n\n\"Decisive.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Do you know how to make change yet?\"\n\n\"Dad's teaching me. It's not hard.\"\n\n\"Really? I thought it was tough when I was your age.\"\n\n\"Nah. You just look at how much the register tells you to give back to them and then count it out.\"\n\n\"This register doesn't do that.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"It's really, really old.\"\n\n\"Oh. But I can do credit cards with the square on my tablet.\"\n\n\"How did you learn that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Timmy taught me. His dad taught him. He has one on his cell phone for when he gets paid for his carpenter jobs. It's easy.\"\n\n\"Well,\" she said. \"For now, I guess I'll take care of the register and credit cards.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Titus said, running to the front door. \"'Cause Dad said I could be the greeter.\"\n\nAs Joy looked up, she saw a young mother with two toddlers walk in. \"My first customers.\" The words caught in a net of old memories and the vision of her grandpa standing at the door greeting customers. Her hand flew to her heart as an overwhelming sensation of pride filled her.\n\nI'm doing this.\n\n\"Welcome to Boston Greenhouses!\" Titus yelled at the woman, who chuckled.\n\n\"Why, thank you.\"\n\n\"Start here.\" Titus pointed to the woodland walkway. \"It's a trip.\"\n\nThe woman laughed again, but her toddlers were clearly mesmerized by the trees.\n\nNext, Sarah, Liz and Katia walked in. Katia, who was wearing a designer black coat with faux mink collar and cuffs, gaped at the showroom and then swept up to the counter.\n\n\"It's a wonder!\" Katia said. \"Sarah told me I'd be surprised, but this...this is stunning. I need to get some reporters over here.\"\n\nLiz put her hand on Katia's arm. \"Isabelle told me Scott will be here at noon for photos.\"\n\n\"I meant the South Bend papers,\" Katia said. \"Scott told Austin and my boss, Jack, he was planning several articles. Nothing but the best for our Joy.\"\n\nThe bell over the door rang again.\n\n\"Welcome to Boston Greenhouses!\" Titus announced, as if he was a Victorian herald.\n\nSarah and Katia shucked off their coats. \"Okay, where do you want us?\"\n\n\"You all choose. But I think...\"\n\nThe bell rang again and four women walked in. One came straight up to Joy. \"We're here from the Methodist Church to place orders for our poinsettias.\"\n\nJoy looked at Sarah and Liz. \"Will you both help her to the greenhouse?\"\n\n\"Absolutely!\" Sarah smiled and led the way.\n\nBy eleven o'clock, there was a line at the counter. Joy was convinced her first morning of shoppers were die-hard Black Friday experts, because they all went straight for the poinsettias that sold for a discount.\n\nTo Joy's surprise, the white poinsettias were depleted by over half within the first few hours. A representative from the Indian Lake Savings Bank came in, ordered four dozen red poinsettias and asked Joy to work up the cost of the gold angel tree, ornaments, tree, lights and all. The woman wanted the entire order delivered by the end of the day.\n\nAdam promised the woman he would deliver everything personally.\n\nNoontime offered no break. Adam called Olivia and asked her to bring more sandwiches and chips for everyone in the shop and two extra cartons of organic milk for Titus. Joy noticed that he placed the entire order on his credit card.\n\nTired of \"greeting\" so many customers, Titus took a break and sat on the stool behind the counter while Joy worked the register.\n\n\"You know, Titus, I may have to have you help me with the credit card orders this afternoon. Seems I get behind rather quickly.\" She handed him the tablet.\n\n\"Sure,\" he said.\n\nAfter the next customer left, Joy glanced back at Titus. She noticed his fingers dancing over the tablet.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"Checking your website.\"\n\n\"Of course. I worked on it every night.\"\n\n\"Dad said he helped a little.\"\n\n\"It's a lot of work for one person with everything else we had to do.\"\n\nJoy looked across the showroom to see Adam talking to an elderly woman considering a particular white-and-gold angel.\n\nTitus thrust the tablet in front of Joy's face, cutting off her view of Adam. \"Did you see these orders?\"\n\nJoy refocused. \"Orders? I forgot to check it...\"\n\n\"Look.\" Titus's little finger caused the screen to scroll. \"This is good, right?\"\n\nShe took the tablet. \"These notifications were sent only minutes ago. Oh, my gosh.\" She jerked her head at Adam. \"Can I see you?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he replied. After handing the angel to the old woman, he touched her shoulder and said, \"Wise purchase.\" He walked to the counter. \"What's up?\"\n\n\"Look at this.\" She pointed at the screen. \"If this is correct, we have more than that bank delivery we have to run today.\"\n\nHe took the tablet from her. \"South Bend Public Library. Notre Dame Administration Offices. Saint Joseph County Bank. Joy, these are huge orders.\"\n\n\"How did this happen?\" she asked, then halted. \"Katia.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"She said she was going to contact the South Bend papers. She must have done more than that.\"\n\n\"I knew I liked that woman.\" Adam laughed.\n\n\"But once we fill these, we'll nearly be out of poinsettias.\"\n\n\"No worries.\" Adam took out his cell phone and walked away.\n\n\"Hey! Come back here!\"\n\nThe old woman walked up to the counter. \"I want that angel,\" she said. \"You know, that man is a good salesman.\"\n\nJoy quirked a smile. \"And sneaky, too,\" she said, as she watched Adam glide through the French doors while simultaneously pulling his wallet from his back jeans' pocket. He was putting the next poinsettia order on his credit card." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Joy took the ornaments off the gold tree and prepared them for delivery to the Indian Lake Savings Bank. Adam filled the back seats of his truck with the poinsettias, while Joy finished wrapping up the ornaments. The lights would stay on the tree, and fortunately, they had less than a half-mile drive to the bank. Adam said he'd place a tarp over the back bed.\n\nLuke came at three to take Titus to his and Sarah's house, where Miss Milse would watch the children until dinnertime.\n\nAs Adam drove them down Maple Boulevard toward the bank, she asked, \"Just how often have you used your credit card to pay for goods and supplies for my greenhouses?\"\n\n\"Um...\"\n\n\"Truth, Adam,\" she demanded, narrowing her eyes.\n\n\"Are you mad at me?\"\n\n\"I'd like to know in dollars and cents how mad I should be. I didn't authorize your spending.\"\n\n\"Spoken like a true accountant,\" he retorted. \"At the moment, I don't have an exact amount.\"\n\n\"Fine. Ballpark then.\"\n\n\"Can't do that, either.\" He chuckled, but the laugh died as he glanced at her.\n\nShe glared at him. \"I don't like owing people money. Debt is a sign of weakness.\"\n\n\"I'm not in debt. Not by a long shot,\" he said.\n\nHer expression softened as her ire turned to curiosity. \"I've never been the one to pry unless my clients are paying me to do so, but I've been very curious, Adam. Just how do you make your money?\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"I mean, you have all kinds of time to help me out, order supplies, make deliveries for me, do everything from repairing broken pipes to scrubbing tiles. I don't see you punching anyone's time clock but mine. And I'm not paying you.\"\n\nHe glanced away for a moment, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. \"I'm doing what I love.\"\n\n\"And that is? Besides raising Titus, I mean.\"\n\n\"Ideas. I make money on my ideas. Besides my regular job, you'd call it, which I handle by email and phone with my colleagues in Indianapolis, I do quite a bit in astro-engineering. Most of my inventions and ideas have patents, and once they're up and running, I sell them. I have investors in Silicon Valley. Investors in Houston. New Jersey.\"\n\nJoy's mouth gaped. \"So, you did it? You made your dream come true?\"\n\n\"For the most part. Yeah.\"\n\n\"And when do you do this work?\"\n\n\"Nights when Titus is asleep and during the day when he's at school. Five or six times a year I have trips to Indianapolis for discussions. I tinker a lot on weekends. Titus likes to watch or help me. At least he thinks he's helping me.\"\n\n\"So...that means you're rich?\"\n\n\"It's a living.\" He smiled.\n\nJoy leaned back, staring wide-eyed at him. \"Are you famous?\"\n\n\"Only in very close physics circles.\"\n\nShe was speechless, but only for a moment. \"And you didn't tell me this.\"\n\n\"You didn't ask,\" he replied with a sad edge to his voice.\n\n\"Sorry. Habit. I'm trained to be cautious. I don't pry. I don't ask.\"\n\n\"And being the accounting whiz that you are, you're worried I overstepped my bounds. Or is your concern really that being in debt to me would mean I could control you?\"\n\n\"I didn't mean that.\"\n\n\"Then fine\u2014I'll tally everything up tonight and give you a bill tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" She folded her arms over her chest.\n\nAdam exhaled. \"I thought I was helping. You told me you don't have a lot of money. You said there was only enough inheritance to bankroll the poinsettias. I take responsibility for pushing you into this decision. And it was a big undertaking. I knew you'd need a little boost. I don't mind doing that. I'm not trying to hurt you. I'm trying to help.\"\n\n\"I feel like I've been duped,\" she groaned.\n\n\"It's not like that.\"\n\n\"You know\u2014everyone has been so nice to me since I came back. Overly nice. Maybe it's not about me. Maybe you all have your own agendas. I want to think that they all loved Grandpa so much that they wanted this for him, if not for me.\"\n\n\"In many cases, that's true.\"\n\n\"In yours?\"\n\nHe pulled up to the bank. He put the truck in Park and turned to her. \"What are you asking me?\"\n\n\"Have you got an ulterior motive, Adam Masterson? Because if you do, it's time to lay your cards on the table.\"\n\n\"Initially, I wanted to show you that Indian Lake wasn't the hall of horrors you thought it was. That the people here were wonderful and loving and that maybe you could come to need them.\"\n\n\"I'm seeing that...\" She paused. \"You said 'initially.'\"\n\n\"The more I'm with you, I have to admit, maybe my motives have changed.\" He unbuckled his seat belt and leaned forward to put his hand on the back of her nape.\n\nWhen his lips met hers, she had every intention of pushing him away, venting more anger at him, but she didn't. This wasn't a kiss born of fond memories or a teenage crush; this was passion and eagerness. This was a kiss of now and his need for her in this moment. His fingers slid up into her hair, cupping her head, capturing her. He slanted his mouth over hers and deepened the kiss. He breathed her in as a faint moan hummed in his throat. Joy was lost like she'd never been, not even when they were kids. Back then, his kisses had been tender and playful. But this was desire and possession.\n\nAs she responded to Adam's kiss, holding him fast, she wondered if every decision she'd ever made in her life was a mistake." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Adam broke from the kiss, reconsidered and kissed Joy again. Then he held her face in his hands, realizing she'd never taken her hands from him.\n\n\"I'm not gonna say I'm sorry. I've been wanting to do that since the day you came back here.\"\n\n\"You kissed me before.\"\n\n\"Not like this.\"\n\n\"No. Not like this,\" she replied in a low voice. \"Adam...\"\n\n\"Don't say it. Not right now. I don't want to think about New York or your other life. This is just us.\"\n\n\"But it's not,\" she whispered and dropped her hands.\n\nHe let his hands fall to her shoulders, still reluctant to let her go.\n\n\"I don't want to do anything that would make you distrust me or make you uncomfortable, and the fact that, apparently, empirically I've done both...\" He sighed heavily. \"I won't let it happen again.\"\n\n\"That a promise?\"\n\n\"No. Yes.\" He laughed and fell back against his seat. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the headrest. \"You don't know what you've done to me.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't exactly say that,\" she replied. \"As of two minutes ago, I have a much clearer picture.\"\n\nHe slid his eyes to her. \"You kissed me back.\"\n\nShe hung her head and looked up at him with recalcitrant eyes. \"I did.\"\n\nHe lifted his hand and tapped the steering wheel with his forefinger. \"So, would I be out of line to ascertain that you might be feeling the same thing I'm feeling?\"\n\nShe leaned against the door.\n\nTrying to move away from him?\n\n\"Adam, I have to be honest. I don't know what I feel. I've gone from shock over Grandpa's death, to grief, which is almost choking me, to wondering why everyone here is so nice to me, to remembering you and me when we were in high school, discovering you have a son, whom I can tell you I love already.\"\n\n\"You do?\" Adam was a bit surprised. Not that people didn't love Titus. He was a special kid. But Joy didn't have much exposure to children, not even a younger sibling.\n\nAnd yet she protected and watched over her flowers. He'd caught her in the greenhouses talking to the plants, singing to them as if they could hear her and respond. Perhaps she had more motherly nurturing instincts than he gave her credit for.\n\n\"What's not to love, Adam? He's amazing. And so like you.\"\n\nIf she loved his son, did that mean she loved him again? He didn't want to hear her answer.\n\nHis world had been upended. If he were honest with himself, he'd needed her to reopen the greenhouses so that he could test his geothermal design for Hal Slade, his investor.\n\nBut even that wasn't the reason he'd cajoled her into this move.\n\nIf she'd left town, he would have paid to have the glass panes replaced anyway. He would have finished the system, turned it on without anyone's knowledge, read his results and sent them to the investor.\n\nNo, Adam was more underhanded than that.\n\nHe wanted Joy.\n\nHe'd needed her to stay in Indian Lake so he could win her back. And he was doing a lousy job of it. If anything, he'd played his cards too soon. She was right. She hadn't had time to digest Frank's death, let alone handle romantic advances from an old boyfriend while engaged to another man.\n\nHe'd done a bang-up job of confusing her. If she lasted the weekend, it would be a miracle. And if she packed up and left town, it would be his fault.\n\n\"I'd say he's smarter than me,\" Adam said, turning to look at the poinsettias in the back seat. \"Tell you what. I won't push your buttons anymore. We'll put this in the past and just take care of business. That's what we're here for. Okay?\"\n\n\"Uh. Yeah. Business,\" she stumbled. \"And that's really fine with you?\"\n\nHe pursed his lips. Of course, it wasn't, but he didn't have a choice. He wasn't about to give her an excuse to turn tail and run. \"I did mean it when I said I wanted to do this for Frank. He was a real friend to me. I want you to have a thriving business to sell. Then you'll have money and you won't have to make decisions in the valley.\"\n\n\"The valley?\"\n\n\"Yeah. There are two kinds of decisions we make in life. Those when we're on top of the mountain. We've succeeded. We're happy and then we choose. The other decisions are those made in the valley of despair. We're broken or near it. Maybe not quite as happy as we thought we were. Maybe our health is poor. Maybe our spirit is empty. Those decisions are never the right ones and it takes years and years to get ourselves back on the right path.\"\n\nShe leveled unwavering eyes on him. \"And you know this...\"\n\n\"Because I think we've both been to the valley.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I didn't like it,\" he said.\n\nShe clasped her hands in her lap, worried them a bit before she spoke, as if this decision was a great one. \"Are you in the valley now?\"\n\n\"No. I intend never to visit it again,\" he said earnestly.\n\n\"That's good.\" A pensive look remained on her face as she opened the truck door.\n\nAdam was keenly aware as he got out of the truck that she would think about his words for hours to come.\n\nHe hoped she'd remember his kiss. He knew he wouldn't forget it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "When adam picked up Titus from Sarah's house, it was after dinnertime. Titus rubbed his eyes and yawned.\n\n\"Dad,\" Titus said when Adam buckled him into his car seat. \"Do I have to take a bath when I get home? Can I just go to bed?\"\n\n\"Sure, if you take a bath in the morning. What happened? You're usually a bundle of energy.\"\n\n\"Dad. I'm a working man now.\" He yawned again.\n\n\"Right.\" Adam climbed in the truck and backed out the drive.\n\nOnce they were home, Angel met them at the door, and even she was surprised that Adam carried a sleepy Titus straight up the stairs to bed.\n\nAngel waited patiently on her bed in the kitchen as Adam came in and scooped her meal into her bowl. As he refilled Angel's water bowl, his cell phone rang.\n\n\"California. Oh, boy.\" He felt his nerves jangle. His back went ramrod straight. He answered the call. \"Masterson.\"\n\n\"Adam. Hal Slade here. Listen, I hate to call you over the Thanksgiving holiday, but I'm at LAX on my way to Aspen for the weekend. I wanted to get right back to you.\"\n\n\"That's quite all right, Hal. I didn't expect to hear from you until next week.\"\n\n\"I couldn't wait to ask. Those numbers you sent me\u2014they're accurate?\"\n\n\"They are. The last readings were taken this morning before dawn.\"\n\n\"Impressive. This geothermal system is everything you said it was. I'm all in.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful news, Hal.\"\n\n\"I'll get with my attorney and send over my offer. Probably not till middle of next week, if that's all right.\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll have my attorney go over it, as well.\"\n\n\"Great. I'll copy you on all the emails. Transparency. Right?\"\n\n\"Always.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" Hal said. \"And as we discussed, once we get the contracts finalized, then I'll expect you out here the first of the year and we can get to work.\"\n\nAdam swallowed hard. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Talk soon. I'm boarding,\" Hal said.\n\n\"Absolutely. Goodbye.\"\n\nAdam ended the call, backed up against the kitchen counter and slumped into the kitchen stool. \"First of the year.\"\n\nAngel stopped eating, looked up at him and instinctively came over to rub her back against his leg.\n\nHal Slade was the CEO of three alternative energy corporations and was working in the cutting edge of space exploration.\n\nAdam's geothermal unit was the tip of a very large iceberg of research and exploration he'd begun in college, when he'd started to explore the works of think tanks and learned more about Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk. Adam had always been obsessed with uncharted scientific realms as a kid, from the time he'd read about Nikola Tesla. Amie had encouraged him back then, challenging him to reach for the stars\u2014in his own work. Now he was doing it...literally.\n\nHowever, Adam's heart was in creating cheaper sources of energy and bringing them to Indian Lake. He liked his small town and wanted to make the lives of the people in his home better. His dream of worldwide cheap energy was not impossible. Adam didn't believe in \"impossibles.\"\n\nJoy was right. Her life was in New York. And perhaps Adam's future was in California. Maybe Adam was at the top of the mountain, after all. His geothermal theory was proving accurate and true. In weeks, he would have an investor. Not only would he have more income, but people would benefit.\n\nSo, he and Titus would move to California. Adam would continue to challenge himself and maybe he would reach a star.\n\nHe wondered what that would be like, looking back down on earth. Looking back and knowing he'd lost Joy a second time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "The first week in December had flown by for Joy. Every waking hour was spent at the greenhouses, caring for the poinsettias, wrapping and delivering the gorgeous flowers across and beyond Indian Lake. As much as she groaned about year-end in the accounting world, it was no match for retail at Christmas. This was the time of year when most retailers made the majority of their profit margin, and she could see why.\n\nNights after closing were used to make lists of inventories her customers had requested and to calculate how much of those orders would sell. It had been a long time since she'd helped her parents and grandfather with wholesale buying.\n\nShe remembered accompanying her mother to the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, where they'd visited the wholesale gift showrooms to see the newest trends in home decorating, giftware, china and linens. In the middle of summer, she and her mother kick-started Christmas by placing orders for decorations, garlands, wreaths, holiday pillows and bed linens, specialty foods, silk florals, ribbons, stockings and fun and funky gadgets, toys and games to fill those stockings.\n\n\"You know, Joy,\" her mother had said, \"gifts are important. It's not the amount of money a person spends, it truly is the thought. It's the acknowledgment of the recipient's importance in one's life. Appreciation is like light and water to a growing plant. Without appreciation, given often, a human will wither\u2014just like a flower without rain.\"\n\nJill had loved the people of Indian Lake and she'd worked hard to find unique, special items to stock the greenhouse shelves. She'd wanted the best for the townspeople.\n\nJoy had forgotten that.\n\nUnfortunately, Joy didn't have time to spend a day or two at the Merchandise Mart. She had to rely on Frank's contacts and representatives in the showrooms to advise her about orders.\n\nAdam had been right about the impact of hand delivering the flyers he'd made up. And Titus's distribution scheme masquerading as a caroling party was not only effective, it bordered on genius. In the first week, she was amazed at the number of deliveries they made to Maple Boulevard residences.\n\nThe radio advertising campaigns she'd run had added to the need for the second shipment of poinsettias. Joy had agreed with Adam to send Lester MacDougal back to Dallas for another truckload.\n\nOnce Joy and Adam had set up the gold Christmas tree in the Indian Lake Savings Bank building, two more banks, not to be outdone by their competitor, ordered the rest of her \"woodland scene\" trees.\n\nBefore December 6, her \"woodland walkway\" had no \"woods\" and was down to baskets filled with ornaments, and the empty spaces were filled with poinsettias.\n\nJoy was wrapping a large pink poinsettia with snowflake cellophane when Liz walked in with a group of her friends' children, along with her preschool-age son, Zeke.\n\nZeke was already a handsome boy, looking like his father, Gabe, more than honey-blonde Liz.\n\n\"Liz!\" Joy said, coming around to hug her friend. \"I thought all the kids were going to Sarah's house after school.\"\n\nTitus raced up to Joy. \"Miss Joy!\" He tripped a bit on a rubber mat near the door, but, undeterred, flung his arms around her waist.\n\n\"We still are,\" Liz said, watching as the kids immediately began investigating the baskets filled with ornaments.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Titus said, cranking his head back to look at Joy. \"We have to shop.\"\n\n\"You do? For what?\"\n\nLiz smiled. \"Teacher gifts. Apparently, the school issued a letter to all the parents not to spend more than five dollars on a teacher gift. Also, due to dietary restrictions, no food, either.\"\n\n\"Bummer,\" Titus said. \"I wanted to make Christmas cookies.\"\n\n\"Oh, Titus,\" Joy said. \"That's a lovely idea. I bet your dad would have loved to help with that.\"\n\n\"Nope. He can cook. Baking is different,\" Titus replied.\n\nJoy looked at Liz, who shrugged her shoulders. \"Don't look at me. I do the slice-and-bake thing.\"\n\nZeke pulled on Liz's hand. \"I love those!\"\n\nLiz ruffled his thick raven-colored hair. \"Thank goodness.\"\n\n\"So,\" Joy said to Titus, \"in the meantime, we have to find ornaments.\"\n\nSarah walked out of the back greenhouse with a customer who had filled two double carts. Annie saw her mother and rushed over.\n\n\"Mom!\" Annie said. \"Can I have my allowance early?\"\n\n\"I guess so,\" Sarah replied, wheeling a cart to the counter as Joy went to the register and began counting the poinsettias and amaryllis. \"Why?\"\n\nJoy tallied the purchase and took the woman's credit card. \"The kids have to buy teacher gifts,\" Joy said.\n\n\"Oh, honey,\" Sarah said. \"I'll pay for what you need.\"\n\n\"All of them?\" Annie asked.\n\nJoy halted as she handed the woman back her credit card. \"Thank you so much.\" She looked at Annie. \"How many teachers do you have?\"\n\nTimmy walked up at that minute, his hands filled with a miniature train, reindeer, a moose, a fire engine and a spaceship. \"I have five.\"\n\n\"I have four,\" Annie said.\n\nCharlotte skipped up holding an angel tree topper that looked half Charlotte's size. \"I like this one.\"\n\nSarah rolled her eyes. \"I need more hours on the clock,\" she joked.\n\nJoy laughed, as did Liz and the woman customer.\n\nTitus inspected Timmy's choices. \"These are so cool.\"\n\nAs Joy helped the customer push the carts out to her car, Adam drove up from making deliveries to the courthouse.\n\nHe parked the truck in front and helped the customer load her SUV, then walked with Joy back inside.\n\nWhen Adam saw all the kids, he held out his arms to Titus. \"Hey, buddy. What's going on?\"\n\n\"Dad.\" Titus walked up to him, glanced back at Timmy as if to get an affirmative nudge, then whispered, \"Dad, we have a dilemma.\"\n\nJoy's eyes widened. Children didn't usually have dilemmas. A problem maybe, but this sounded serious.\n\nAdam squatted down and put his hand on Titus's shoulder. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"All of us need teacher gifts and we want to buy ornaments. But, Dad. There's no tree here to try them out on.\"\n\nJoy's hand flew to her mouth as she wiped the smile from her lips. \"Try them out?\"\n\n\"Yeah. How can we tell if they're good or not if we can't see what they look like on a tree? That's the scientific method, like you taught me, right?\" Titus asked seriously.\n\nAdam chuckled as he stood and looked at Joy. \"Well...\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Titus. We sold the trees.\"\n\n\"Aw, they weren't the right kind, anyway.\"\n\nJoy's surprise rang in her tone. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"They were fancy trees. Not real Christmas trees,\" Titus informed her.\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\nAdam rocked back on his heels as he folded his arms over his chest. \"I know what he's saying.\"\n\n\"Good. Fill me in,\" she said.\n\n\"Better yet,\" Adam replied with a mischievous smirk, \"I'll show you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Pine country tree farm spanned seventeen acres of rolling hills north of town. Marching up the inclines were blue spruce, conifer, Scotch pine, Norwegian spruce, Douglas fir and white pine trees. Encircling the farm was a split-rail fence decorated with live green garlands and enormous red bows. The wide parking area was filled with pickup trucks, minivans and SUVs. As Joy rode with Adam and Titus into the farm, she noticed that over half the vehicles bore out-of-state license plates.\n\nAs they parked, she saw a horse-drawn wagon take a group of people out toward the forest. Two of the men in the wagon carried hatchets.\n\n\"You don't just buy a tree off the lot?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"Not today,\" Adam said, unbuckling his seat belt. \"Though you can do that if you want. But that's not the kind of tree we want.\"\n\n\"It's not? What is?\"\n\nHe pointed to her green sweatshirt, which depicted the greenhouses at Christmas from their high school days. \"We're going to do even better than that.\"\n\n\"Grandpa ordered our tree from Wisconsin,\" she said, opening the door. \"I don't remember this tree farm.\"\n\n\"They were just getting started back then. I know the owner pretty well. He has to plant fifteen thousand trees every year.\"\n\nJoy opened the back door to help Titus out of the back seat. \"He sells that many?\"\n\nTitus put his arms out to grab Joy's hands and jumped down. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"He ships all the way to Florida,\" Adam said, going to the back bed and pulling out an enormous ax. He placed it on his shoulder.\n\nShe took Titus's hand and walked over to him. \"With that plaid shirt and sheepskin jacket and that ax, you look like\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't say it.\" He laughed. \"C'mon. I know just where to go.\"\n\n\"Who does he look like?\" Titus asked.\n\n\"A mythical character,\" Joy replied, thinking of Paul Bunyan.\n\n\"Oh. 'Cause he doesn't look like a Star Wars guy.\"\n\nJoy glanced at Adam as he walked in front of them. Adam had always been in tune with stars, interested in physics. \"I'm not sure about that.\"\n\nThey walked up to a group of workers at a large red-painted baling machine. Adam turned to Joy.\n\n\"Keep Titus back here away from the machine. It can be dangerous,\" he said to her. \"And there's so many people around, don't let him get distracted and take off.\"\n\n\"I'll watch him. We'll run reconnaissance in the gift shop. See what the competition is up to,\" she said.\n\n\"Great. I want to find out when the next wagon is due for a pickup.\"\n\n\"We're not going to walk out there?\"\n\n\"It's too far to where I want to go,\" Adam said with a wink. \"And we'll need a wagon to ourselves to bring it back.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"What are you up to?\"\n\nTitus shoved his glasses up his nose. \"I know!\"\n\nAdam shook his finger at Titus. \"It's a secret. Remember?\"\n\n\"I don't know what's going on here, but it won't be a secret for long,\" Joy said. \"Let's go, Titus.\"\n\nShe took the boy's hand again as they went to the log cabin gift shop. The long, wood-planked porch was draped with wide cedar and spruce garlands and enormous wreaths. A light breeze had picked up, causing the red ribbon bows to flap against the cabin's dark wood.\n\nInside, a potbellied stove heated the retail area. Interestingly, there wasn't a Christmas tree inside. The cabin was small, and the shelves were filled with pinecone ornaments, knit stockings, stacks of quilted place mats, Santa mugs and locally made jams, jellies and marinades. Fortunately, none were from her suppliers, which offered their customers and hers a variety. None of the wreaths outside or inside were lit. She noticed that the rest of the gifts were rustic in nature, small replicas of horse-drawn wagons, woodland creatures or miniature trees. There wasn't a Santa or cr\u00e8che to be seen. Her first thought was that perhaps they'd sold out of product already.\n\nThen again, their focus was selling live trees, garlands and wreaths. Decorating them was why people would come to Boston Greenhouses.\n\n\"Miss Joy,\" Titus said, as they made their way through the groups of customers, \"I like our place better.\"\n\nOur place. Joy felt her heart swell. Titus was at home in her shop, and that gave her enormous comfort. Her reaction was unexpected, but as he looked up at her, his sport strap askew and a clump of dark hair sticking out over his ear, emotion gripped her. She knelt down, put her arms around him and said, \"Titus, that's the best compliment I've had in all my life.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" he said and hugged her back. \"I like being there very much.\"\n\n\"You do?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" He smiled, looking at her through his glasses' lenses. \"You're there.\"\n\nJoy exhaled deeply as her heart swelled. This kid rocked her to the bone.\n\nIt was all she could do not to burst into tears. She rose. This was the craziest thing. She held out her hand and he slipped his into hers.\n\nJoy's emotions were altering her perspective. She was tied in knots of accomplishment, pleasing Frank, grief over losing him, and the myriad of feelings involving Adam and his kiss that had turned her world upside down.\n\nThe kiss had been a mistake\u2014or so she'd told herself all week. It should never have happened, but it had.\n\nShould she talk to him about it? Admittedly, if she had a moment alone with him, she'd be the one to make another kiss happen. And would it be as shocking as the last? What if what had happened had been an anomaly? Shouldn't they find out?\n\nAnd what if they discovered this attraction was more than some touchstone to the past? Would he be willing to delve further? Would she?\n\nTitus still stared at her with one of his penetrating gazes. Knowing this was one kid who hadn't lost his childlike intuition and probably read her thoughts, she said, \"And you're the best part of the new Boston Greenhouses.\"\n\n\"You mean that?\"\n\n\"I do,\" she affirmed. \"Best greeter I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"Thanks. I practiced what I saw in movies,\" he replied proudly. \"Things like that are always correct in movies.\"\n\n\"I never thought of it that way, but you're probably right,\" she said, as they walked out the gift shop door.\n\nAdam was just outside on the porch steps. \"There you are! The wagon is here to take us out to the grove.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" Titus thrust his fist in the air. \"It's snowing!\"\n\n\"It is,\" Adam replied, reaching in his jacket pocket and pulling out a pair of mittens. \"You left these in the truck. Put them on.\"\n\nAs Titus wiggled his hands into the mittens, Adam helped Joy up into the wooden horse-drawn wagon.\n\nThere were benches along each side. The area in the middle was wide, which Joy guessed was to load the trees in.\n\nShe used a green plaid wool blanket to cover Titus. As they rocked from side to side as the wagon climbed over the frozen hills, Adam kept his arm around his son, who sat between the two adults. Joy noticed that Titus kept his mitten-covered hand on her thigh, not for stability...but for comfort.\n\nThey passed rows of six-, seven-and eight-foot Douglas fir trees. Then passed ten-foot and taller blue spruce trees Joy knew had been growing for over a decade, yet the wagon kept rolling.\n\n\"Where are we going and what are we looking for?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"The best!\" Titus exclaimed.\n\n\"It's not much farther,\" Adam replied.\n\n\"Do you come here every year?\"\n\n\"Since we moved back, yes,\" Adam replied. \"Titus likes the wagon ride.\"\n\n\"Yep. And Dad likes to chop down the tree.\" Titus nodded.\n\nShe pursed her lips and said, \"You'd think that with all Grandpa's focus on Christmas, I would have had a similar experience to this. But I never did.\"\n\n\"So, we're changing your life?\" Adam grinned.\n\nBefore Joy could answer, the wagon stopped.\n\nThe driver pointed to the east. \"Over the top of the hill is where you'll find them. I'll wait here, and I do have a chain saw under my seat if you need it.\"\n\nAdam jumped down from the wagon and hoisted Titus to the ground. Joy started to jump, but Adam caught her and lowered her gently in turn. Snowflakes fluttered between them and one landed on her eyelashes. She blinked. For a split second she imagined Adam's lips on hers again and almost felt her heart hum.\n\n\"C'mon, Dad! Let's go!\" Titus broke the moment.\n\nAdam's eyes still held Joy's gaze as he answered his son. \"Yes.\" He didn't move.\n\nJoy knew he was considering kissing her, but this wasn't the time or place. \"Better get that hatchet.\"\n\n\"Ax,\" he said. \"No mythical character should be without the proper tools.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\nLeaning into the wagon, Adam handed a tarp and some rope to Joy and a ball of twine to Titus. He picked up the ax himself.\n\nShe walked over to Titus. \"So, how do you know what kind of tree to get?\"\n\n\"Easy. I measure for Dad.\"\n\nJoy looked back at Adam, who was chuckling. \"This I gotta see.\"\n\nThey walked up the hill, past very tall Fraser fir trees that looked to be at least fifteen feet tall. \"These are amazing,\" she said, touching a bough.\n\n\"Nope. Not good enough,\" Adam said. \"Too skinny.\"\n\nTitus stood still and looked straight up. \"Too short.\"\n\nThey continued through four more rows of dense Douglas firs. \"What about one of these?\"\n\nAdam stopped at a very wide, deep green, fat tree. \"Titus, come here.\"\n\n\"Sure, Dad.\"\n\nTitus stood next to the tree. Adam stood behind him. \"Okay, son.\"\n\nTitus cranked his head back as far as it would go until Joy thought the boy would topple backward. What were they doing?\n\n\"Can you see the top, Titus?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"That's it, then,\" Adam said, taking a pair of buckskin leather gloves from inside his jacket and putting them on.\n\n\"That's how you measure a tree?\"\n\n\"Yup. We worked this out earlier. I figured when Titus can't see the top, then I know we got a really tall one.\" He leaned closer and whispered, \"It makes him feel involved. Know what I mean?\"\n\n\"I do.\" She smiled.\n\n\"We have to have the best tree the greenhouses have ever seen. Those glass ceilings are twenty-five feet high. So, we want a twenty-two-foot tree. Plenty of room for an angel.\"\n\n\"Or a star, Dad,\" Titus said.\n\n\"A star would be good.\"\n\n\"Right, we can put angels all over the tree,\" Joy said. \"I just ordered another two dozen.\"\n\nAdam smiled winsomely at her and she didn't miss the sincerity in his eyes. \"I like angels.\"\n\nJoy glanced at Titus and saw his wide smile.\n\n\"Joy, will you unfold the tarp and put it on the ground there? Positioned correctly, the tree should fall right on it. If I have to, I'll roll the tree over, if it falls to the side. Then we'll tie the rope around the trunk and pull it to the wagon.\"\n\n\"What about the twine?\" Titus asked.\n\n\"We'll tie two pieces of twine around the trunk, as well. Each of you will take a side. I'll pull from the middle. If we need to tie up some of these branches, we will, but I think we'll be okay.\"\n\nAdam lifted the ax. \"Titus, you and Joy stand back. But first...\" Adam knelt down and lifted the bottom branches to look at the trunk. \"It's straight. No bends. That's good.\"\n\nFirst Adam cut a row of branches off the bottom for easier access.\n\nJoy moved Titus far out of the way as she saw how wide a swing Adam was about to take against the monster tree. With his long, strong legs braced against the frozen ground, he swung hard and true. Then again. Again. And again.\n\nCrack!\n\n\"She's ready to fall!\" Adam shouted. He shoved his arm into the middle of the tree and pushed it away from Titus and Joy, toward the wide alley space between the rows of trees. The trunk cracked loudly and a slow splitting sound signaled the tree had finally given way. The air whooshed around them as the long limbs stirred the cold air. Snow whirled up into Titus's face as the first branches hit the ground.\n\n\"Timber!\" Titus shouted and laughed and wiped snow from his cheek.\n\nThey went to work preparing the tree. Adam put the rope over his shoulder, as Joy and Titus took up their stabilizing pieces of twine.\n\nWith three people pulling the slick tarp over the frozen ground, it moved easily. Once they got to the wagon, the driver helped them slide the tree up a slanted board that was fitted under the wagon bed.\n\nOn the way back, the snowfall increased. Titus stuck out his tongue to catch fat snowflakes. Adam laughed and hugged his son close.\n\nOnce they reached the main area, workers hauled their tree off the wagon and took it to the baling machine. Joy, Adam and Titus went to the truck and waited. It took two men to haul the big tree to the truck and secure it in the truck bed.\n\nOne of the workers came over carrying another, shorter tree that was also baled with twine. \"What's this?\" Joy asked.\n\n\"Oh.\" Adam grinned. \"We picked that tree out for our house a couple days ago.\"\n\n\"Yep!\" Titus said.\n\n\"But today is your day, Joy. I figured I'd bring them back together.\"\n\n\"Hmm,\" she mused. \"So, the trip to the tree farm was all about me, er, rather the greenhouse? Why do I feel I was set up?\"\n\n\"You weren't,\" Adam replied and winked at Titus. When he looked back at Joy, he took a deep breath, then leaned over and kissed her cheek.\n\nHe took her hand and walked her to the passenger seat as Titus climbed in the back.\n\nJoy couldn't stop smiling. It was cold outside, but Joy didn't feel it. Just looking at father and son, she was warmed feeling their love for each other. It was a perfect day. A lovely experience. Joy had had the time of her life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "By the time they arrived at the greenhouses, it was nearly closing time. Sarah and Olivia had checked out the last customer as Joy walked in with Titus. Adam backed his truck up to the middle greenhouse to unload the Christmas tree.\n\n\"Sarah, Olivia. Thanks so much for taking the shift today. You guys are the best,\" Joy said.\n\n\"No worries,\" Olivia replied. \"I had a blast. Plus, I went Christmas shopping and filled a basket with things I want to give as gifts. Sarah promised not to tell Maddie or Liz what I got them. But I will tell you I bought that dark-haired angel in the sky blue organza gown for Gina. That elegant dress is so her.\"\n\nSarah took off the green apron with the Boston Greenhouses logo. \"It was a good afternoon. Not too busy, but enough that we could handle it. There're some phone messages with delivery orders for tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Poor Adam,\" Joy said. \"He never thought he'd be stuck doing my deliveries for me.\"\n\n\"Uh, I don't think he minds.\" Sarah smiled.\n\nOlivia caught Sarah's eye. \"Me, either.\"\n\nJoy cleared her throat and glanced at Titus. \"Hey, could you do me a favor while I help your dad with the tree? Would you check the website for orders like you did earlier?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" He scrambled behind the counter and climbed on the stool, taking Joy's tablet from the countertop.\n\n\"Hey,\" Joy said. \"Do you both mind helping us get the tree inside and up? We had a stand put on it at the tree farm, but it's really big.\"\n\n\"Absolutely,\" they chorused.\n\n\"Titus, you stay here. We'll be right back.\"\n\nHe didn't look up from the tablet. \"Sure.\"\n\nJoy led the way and saw that Adam had lowered the tailgate and propped the door open. \"Is it going to fit?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he said. \"They did a great job of baling it. We'll take it in by the trunk and stand first. I laid some clear plastic sheeting near the windows. I thought we should place it where you guys used to put the tree.\"\n\nAs Adam's blue eyes rested on her, Joy felt a shower of tingles trickle down her spine. She remembered that Christmas all those years ago when he'd told her under the tree that he loved her. Apparently, so did he.\n\n\"Joy,\" Adam asked. \"Where's Titus?\"\n\n\"In the showroom, checking the website. Is that okay? I thought it would keep him busy for a few minutes.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but only a few minutes.\" He chuckled.\n\n\"That's all we'll need,\" she replied.\n\n\"Good night, Adam!\" Sarah exclaimed, breaking the moment. \"How big is this thing?\"\n\n\"Dunno. Twenty feet plus.\"\n\nOlivia shook her head. \"Oh, boy. Maybe I should call Rafe.\"\n\n\"Nah, we can do it,\" Adam said. \"It's all a matter of weight distribution.\"\n\nAs Adam guided them, they slid the tree through the door and around the corner another three feet. Adam came to stand by Joy, put his hands in the middle of the tree and picked it up. With a groan, they all hoisted and pushed.\n\nThe tree settled perfectly in the stand.\n\nHe took a pair of snips out of his jacket pocket and cut the cords, allowing the limbs to fall in a beautiful cascade of green.\n\n\"It smells divine!\" Joy said, looking up at the tree.\n\nTitus came in from the showroom, holding the iPad over his head. \"We got six orders for flowers!\" Then he halted, stared at the tree and approached reverently. \"Gosh, Dad. That is the best tree ever.\"\n\n\"Told you.\" Adam beamed proudly and put his hand on Titus's shoulder.\n\n\"Hold on!\" Titus scurried into the retail area and in a flash was back, holding a little train engine ornament in his hand. \"I have to see.\" He went up to the tree, carefully chose a branch and slipped the gold ribbon around the green needles. He stood back, observed the ornament for a thoughtful moment and pronounced, \"I'll buy it.\"\n\nJoy burst into laughter and everyone joined her. Adam picked Titus up, hugged him and kissed his cheek. \"All that for a three-dollar sale, Joy.\"\n\n\"Adam, I'm truly impressed with your salesmanship.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" He looked at Sarah. \"Did a delivery addressed to me come today?\"\n\nSarah snapped her fingers. \"Yes, it did. I put it over here under this first table like you asked me.\"\n\nJoy shot Sarah a curious look. \"Secret Santa?\"\n\n\"Hardly.\" Adam went over and opened the large cardboard box. Inside were dozens of boxes of new multicolored lights. \"I didn't want to waste any time. We need this thing lit up for the weekend. Then I'm hoping Olivia will take more photos for the newspapers.\" He pointed to Joy's sweatshirt. \"It'll be just like old times.\"\n\n\"No, it won't,\" Joy said, then paused as she looked into his worried face. \"It'll be better.\"\n\nAdam's eyes softened.\n\n\"Oh, boy!\" Titus jumped up, nearly teetering on his feet as he landed. \"Can I help?\"\n\n\"Um,\" Adam started.\n\nSarah moved to Titus and smoothed his hair. \"How about you come home with me and have spaghetti with my crew.\" She looked up at Adam. \"Luke can drive him home after you guys are done. This is going to take some time.\" She looked to the top of the tree.\n\nJoy sighed happily. \"It sure is.\"\n\nOlivia raised her forefinger. \"Good thing I brought over a sack of sandwiches, fruit and pasta salad. If you're going to burn the midnight lamps, you'll need fuel.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Olivia. You think of everything.\"\n\n\"I try to, Joy,\" Olivia said and hugged her. \"I gotta run. I'm making scallops and angel hair pasta for everyone out at the farm. Rafe's been texting me that he's got the salad ready and Gina is making herbed Italian bread.\" She blew everyone a kiss. \"Ciao.\"\n\nSarah held out her hand to Titus. \"Come on, big boy. I bet you're hungry.\"\n\n\"I am. But who's going to feed Angel if Dad stays here? We both walked her at noon. I got her fresh water. But she's gonna have pups. Her nutrition is important.\"\n\nSarah held out her palm. \"It's all of a block away. Gimme your key. We'll feed Angel and then go to my house.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Sarah,\" Adam said, handing her his house key. \"Does Luke know how lucky he is to have you?\"\n\n\"I remind him every day.\" She laughed. \"Bye.\"\n\n\"Dad, don't forget to look in on the kittens,\" Titus said.\n\n\"Oh, honey,\" Joy said, \"I moved them to the house, where they can stay warm. Pye likes it there. I think she's not as feral now as she used to be.\"\n\n\"She has a family now,\" Adam said.\n\n\"Bye, Dad. Bye, Miss Joy.\" Titus waved to them as he left, chatting a mile a minute telling Sarah about the tree farm.\n\nJoy turned to Adam. \"I have a question. Just how long did you plan this tree thing? The lights? And goodness knows what else you've bought for it.\"\n\n\"Since last week when you put that sweatshirt on.\" He looked up. \"It felt important.\"\n\nShe knew exactly what he meant. He was drawing her in closer and tighter by the day. She knew he knew that she knew it. And she couldn't let it happen.\n\n\"Why's that?\"\n\nHe opened his mouth to speak, stopped and exhaled through his nose, like he used to when he was reconsidering options. Paths. Making decisions. \"It's advertising. I realize it's not as big as Rockefeller Center, but for Indian Lake, it'll do.\"\n\n\"And do quite well,\" she said, looking up to the tip. \"You and Titus measured this perfectly. There's plenty of room for a star. But we sold out.\n\n\"I'll order one tomorrow,\" she said, taking one of the boxes of lights. \"We should get to it. I'll start on the bottom.\"\n\n\"I'll get the extension ladder.\"\n\n\"Ooh. That thing always scared me. Too high.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" he said, walking away. \"I thought angels were impervious to heights.\"\n\nJoy lowered her head as his words drifted across the room as he left.\n\nHow could he think she was an angel after everything they'd been through? When she was marrying another man?\n\nEach time he paused, took a breath or cast one of his longing gazes at her, she melted. Like the teenager she once was.\n\nShe must have missed some important phase during her evolution to adulthood, because something in her psyche was stuck back here in this small-town world. Adam's world.\n\nWhat would have happened if she hadn't gone to New York? Would she have married Adam? Then again, if she hadn't left, Adam would not have married Amie and Titus wouldn't exist, and for Joy, she'd have been robbed of knowing a most wonderful and endearing little boy.\n\nOr would she have allowed her bitterness toward the people who caused her parents' deaths to destroy all her chances at happiness? As it was, she'd run away and buried her grief and anger\u2014\"In my work.\"\n\nAdam walked in with the ladder. \"What's wrong? The lights don't work?\"\n\n\"Uh, no. I need to get some extension cords. I have some under the front counter. Be right back.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said and set up the extension ladder, the top of which he propped against the center beam in the glass-paned ceiling. \"I haven't done this for a long time,\" he called.\n\nAfter retrieving the cords, Joy walked back into the greenhouse. \"Getting a tree this tall was your idea.\"\n\n\"I know\" He beamed, taking the long green wire extension cord she handed him up the ladder with him. \"I'll run this one through the center so we can hang the lights straight down in a line from the top. It'll be too difficult to go around the tree.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Second-guessing your choice?\" she teased.\n\n\"Hey, my kid wanted this tree and it's the one he's gonna see. I want to knock his socks off.\"\n\n\"I think you already did.\"\n\n\"Yeah? How's that?\"\n\n\"Oh, Adam. Anyone can see he idolizes you.\"\n\n\"You think?\"\n\n\"He works so hard on his vocabulary. It's got to be hard for a little kid to keep up with a genius like you. I know I had a hard time measuring up back when...\" She unboxed another string and handed it to him.\n\n\"That's not true. You always measured up.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's not the right choice of words. It was, well, you were so\u2014advanced. You talked about machines and propulsions and free energy. You sailed through physics and advanced science classes like they were child's play.\"\n\n\"They were,\" he said, reaching for another string and plugging them in.\n\n\"I always wondered why you didn't become an astrophysicist or a theoretical physicist like Stephen Hawking.\"\n\n\"You saw that?\" He paused, then took another string and hung it.\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"I got a scholarship for mechanical engineering.\"\n\n\"Wait\u2014is that why you went to Purdue?\"\n\n\"I thought you knew. Or I told you. Maybe I was too embarrassed to tell you. I didn't have a family to pay for my education. That was the best I could get and I took it.\"\n\nHe climbed down the ladder. \"Okay,\" he said, moving to the other side of the tree. \"I'll take four strings up with me this time.\"\n\nJoy unboxed the lights and handed him the bundles of strings. \"I'll plug the lower strings into these. They should reach to the bottom.\"\n\n\"Without a problem,\" he said, as he continued working.\n\nJoy plugged in the second tier of lights as Adam worked from the very top. In another thirty minutes the boxes were empty and they stood back to critique their creation.\n\n\"It looks like a waterfall of light,\" she gushed. \"It's magnificent, Adam. A wonder.\"\n\n\"It is different.\" He snapped his fingers. \"I just remembered,\" he said, rushing away.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"I found something... Be right back.\"\n\nJoy picked up the empty light boxes and tossed them in the larger cardboard shipping box. The tree shimmered.\n\n\"Here!\" he said proudly, walking in with an enormous glitter gold star. It had a metal corkscrew attachment at its base.\n\n\"Grandpa's old star!\" She reached for it. \"Where was it?\"\n\n\"In the very back of the storage room. I was looking for more lights, and when I realized there were none, I ordered the new ones. But I found this in a crumbling box under an old bag of glittered cotton batting.\"\n\n\"Can you reach the top and put it on?\" she asked. \"I mean, if it's too dangerous, don't do it.\"\n\n\"I can try,\" he said, going back up the extension ladder. At the very top, he had to reach with every inch his long arm allowed, but he managed it.\n\nHe looked up. \"Oh, Joy, I wish you weren't afraid of heights.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Wait.\" He hustled down the ladder, then went to the far wall and turned out the overhead fluorescent lights. He took her hand and they went over to one of the poinsettia tables where their successful sales had cleared a portion of the tabletop. \"Sit here.\"\n\nJoy sat on the table and Adam stood next to her. \"Now what?\"\n\n\"Look up.\" He pointed. \"No place else in town can you see a crystal clear winter sky like that and without freezing outside!\"\n\n\"So many stars.\" She sighed as they looked through the glass. The sky was nearly black, the half-moon to the east. The greenhouse was warm, thanks to Adam's invention. As she looked at the sky, she could see the Little Dipper, the North Star. Venus.\n\n\"Galaxy after galaxy and on and on to infinity,\" he said. \"Worlds beyond worlds.\"\n\nJust then two shooting stars whisked across the expanse, their tails streaming glowing light behind them.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" she gasped.\n\n\"I did.\" He turned to her. \"You know what that was?\"\n\n\"No.\" She gazed up at him.\n\n\"That was your grandfather telling you he loves you.\"\n\nJoy's eyes filled with tears. She threw her arms around his neck. \"Thank you, Adam.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Being you\u2014never changing.\"\n\nHe pulled her close and let her cry into his shoulder." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Joy was holding Titus's hand, but he shot away, up Mrs. Beabots's shoveled sidewalk, past the lit garland-draped wrought-iron handrails and up the steps to the front porch. Then he put his hands on his cheeks and said, \"Wow! She decorates more than you do.\"\n\nJoy looked up at half a dozen lit wreaths suspended between the Victorian porch posts, yards and yards of red-ribbon-wrapped and lit garland strung along the entire expanse of porch ceiling, and glimpses of more lights inside beyond the beveled glass doors. \"All this wasn't here yesterday when you were at Sarah's house next door?\"\n\n\"Nope!\"\n\n\"Then Mrs. Beabots must have found some elves to help her.\" Joy walked up to Titus, leaned over and shook her finger at him. \"And don't run away from me like that again. What if you fell?\"\n\nHe smiled impishly. \"I'd get up. Like always,\" he said, putting his hand in hers. \"Can I ring the bell? I love this bell.\"\n\n\"So do I. It reminds me of when I was your age and came to this house.\"\n\n\"You did?\" He looked up at her, pushing his glasses in place.\n\n\"Uh-huh. But you go ahead.\"\n\n\"Thanks!\" Titus proudly went to the antique door and twisted the hundred-plus-year-old pewter bell. \"This was really nice of her to invite us for dinner.\"\n\n\"It sure was,\" Joy replied, as Mrs. Beabots opened the door. Though she wore a pink-red-and-white toile apron with pink-and-white candy cane striped straps and ruffle at the bottom, Joy's eyes caught her Chanel logo gold earrings. Her platinum hair was meticulously styled, as it always was, and her makeup just as expertly applied.\n\n\"Come in!\" Mrs. Beabots smiled as she opened her arms for hugs. \"You're just in time to help,\" she said to Titus.\n\nThey walked in and Joy shut the door as Titus shucked off his hooded jacket, boots and scarf.\n\n\"I'd like to help with dinner,\" Joy offered, taking off her coat and boots. She put on her shoes, which she'd carried in a shoe bag.\n\nMrs. Beabots hung their coats in the closet and said, \"Oh, dinner is ready. Macaroni and cheese with bacon. I hope you like it.\"\n\n\"No vegetables?\" Titus asked. \"I have to eat something green, Dad says.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Mrs. Beabots confirmed. \"I'm steaming organic green beans. How's that?\"\n\n\"Cool,\" Titus replied.\n\nJoy gaped as they entered the kitchen. There wasn't a bare surface anywhere. The island, the counter around the sink, the stove and the long side serving counter were filled with cookie sheets; tiered pie servers bore plates filled with cookies. Several boxes of plastic wrap were piled next to a cardboard box that held paper plates with assorted cookies.\n\n\"What is all this?\" Joy asked. \"And how long have you been at it?\" She spied two large mixers, eggs, boxes of butter, a twenty-pound sack of flour, brown sugar, and large containers of spices sitting on the windowsill, apparently because there was no room left on the counters.\n\n\"Days, actually,\" Mrs. Beabots replied.\n\nTitus's eyes were huge, reminding Joy of those cartoon characters with the massive goggles and big eyes. \"Is this for our supper?\"\n\nJoy couldn't help her giggle and hugged Titus. \"No, honey.\"\n\n\"They're for my charities,\" Mrs. Beabots answered. \"The Recovery Alliance downtown. The Fireman's Christmas Gala. Your children's Christmas pageant at Saint Mark's.\"\n\nAs Mrs. Beabots spoke, Joy was suddenly aware of the number of community projects seemingly the whole town supported. A new Community Center on Gina Barzonni's land. A safe and maintained winter skating rink for the kids, rather than old Craven's Pond, which was all they'd had when she was a kid. The City Council's Father's Day Pancake Breakfast to support Hungry Child efforts. The list went on.\n\nThese were not the efforts of an apathetic community she remembered.\n\nMrs. Beabots was still chatting away. \"Some of these cookies are for\u2014\" she shot Joy a smile \"\u2014the Boston Greenhouses...\"\n\nJoy put up her hand. \"Stop right there. I had no idea so many people depended on you. I can't accept these cookies anymore. You're doing too much.\"\n\n\"Joy Boston, don't you dare tell me I'm too old to do this work.\"\n\n\"I wasn't gonna say that.\"\n\n\"You were thinking it.\"\n\nTitus's gaze tracked from one adult to the other. \"Are you arguing?\"\n\nJoy laughed. \"I should argue with her, but I'm not. She's always been this stubborn. And energetic.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots ended the birth of the argument and said to Titus, \"Your dad told me he had work to do tonight. More deliveries for the greenhouses?\"\n\n\"No,\" Titus answered, rubbing his nose. \"He has to work on the computer. He does that a lot after I go to bed.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Joy said. \"I volunteered to bring Titus with me over here so Adam could have some time. He's done so much for me. First fixing up the greenhouses. Helping with supplies. The deliveries.\"\n\n\"Don't forget the tree!\" Titus grinned.\n\n\"I can't forget that. I can't wait for you to see it.\" Joy stared at her hostess. \"Speaking of which, who put up all those decorations for you?\"\n\n\"Lester MacDougal. His landscaping company puts up lights all over town. I have a standing commitment from him.\"\n\n\"He told Adam he wasn't all that busy and we're sending him back to Dallas for more poinsettias.\"\n\n\"Lester never turns down work,\" Mrs. Beabots said, brushing her palm over the back of her silky hair. \"Someday, I've got to find the right girl for him. He's such a loner.\"\n\n\"Matchmaking again?\" Joy accused.\n\n\"When did I ever?\"\n\n\"What's matchmaking?\" Titus asked, scrambling up onto his usual stool and placing his elbows on the granite counter.\n\nThey stared at him.\n\n\"It's okay if you don't tell me. I'll just look it up on the internet.\"\n\n\"Fine!\" Joy interjected. \"Mrs. Beabots has always had a penchant\u2014You know what that is?\"\n\n\"A proclivity.\" Titus ratcheted up his eyebrow challengingly.\n\nJoy exhaled. She could see she would seldom ever fool this very bright boy. \"She likes to meddle\u2014\"\n\n\"Help,\" Mrs. Beabots corrected. \"I help boys and girls, men and women, in their romantic relationships.\"\n\n\"So, are you helping my dad?\" Titus asked boldly.\n\n\"Uh...\"\n\n\"No,\" Joy interjected quickly. \"Your dad appears to be quite happy in his life. After all, he has you.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Titus said. \"He told me he has a lot to do with his life. That's why he has to concentrate on his work.\" Titus nodded to himself as he reached toward a lopsided gingerbread man. \"Can I have this one?\" he asked.\n\n\"Dinner first,\" Joy said.\n\nHe pulled the gingerbread man toward him, patting the cookie. \"You'll be dessert.\"\n\nJoy rubbed her hands together. \"Where do I start?\"\n\n\"A big plate for Titus.\"\n\n\"Yay! I'll have extra green beans, please. Do you have milk?\"\n\n\"I do. Organic.\"\n\nJoy went to the refrigerator. \"I've noticed you, Sarah, even Grandpa had organic milk. Is it because the kids are in and out of all your homes?\"\n\nMrs. Beabots pulled a casserole out of the oven and put it on top of the stove, where she'd cleared a space big enough for the round blue-and-white-painted dish. \"I would, certainly, but the truth is, Adam buys it and drops it off.\"\n\n\"That's thoughtful,\" she said, taking a glass out of the cabinet for Titus and pouring his milk.\n\n\"Oh,\" Titus began. \"Dad does that so I won't eat the wrong thing no matter where I go.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots scooped a large ladleful of beans from the saucepan on the stove. \"How's that, Titus?\"\n\n\"Perfect. I'm hungry. And after I eat, can I help decorate some cookies? I told Dad I wanted to make Christmas cookies, but he doesn't make them.\"\n\nJoy took a small plate and placed a spoonful of macaroni and cheese on it. \"I guess he thinks it's too much sugar for you, huh?\"\n\nTitus put a long green bean in his mouth and chomped on it. \"He doesn't like baking. He said it's not creative and it takes too long. He cooks dinner for me every night, except for when we have leftovers.\"\n\n\"Not creative?\" Mrs. Beabots exclaimed. \"I need to talk to that boy.\" She waved her hand over the array of lemon bars, chocolate-iced cherry cookies, powdered-sugar-covered snowballs, peppermint-candy-filled puffs, butter cookies in the shapes of green wreaths, green trees and white snowmen, all decorated with cinnamon candies. \"What would he call this?\"\n\nJoy speared a forkful of macaroni. \"Delicious, I'm guessing.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Mrs. Beabots said, \"I'll just have to make a plate for Titus to take home. I'll show him.\"\n\nJoy glanced at Titus and saw the smirk on his lips as he ate. She couldn't help wondering if Adam had made that comment or if Titus had just wrangled a plate of cookies for himself.\n\nAfter they finished their dinner, Joy cleaned up. Then she said, \"I'll make the icing for the sugar cookies.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots placed plastic and paper plates of cookies in the large cardboard boxes she had stacked by the back door.\n\n\"Titus, would you take these boxes, one by one, to the dining room table for me?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, getting down from the stool and taking the first box from Mrs. Beabots.\n\nJoy noticed that the stool teetered slightly. It amazed her that Titus climbed up and down stools like that, seemingly unaware of his imbalance, and yet he managed to right the stool every time. She looked into the large mixer bowl. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"Oh, my gosh, I forgot. I need to make another pan of lemon bars. I started that before you got here. The recipe is there on top of the flour canister. Do you mind finishing up that filling? That's the lemon juice and sugar. You'll need to melt the butter in the microwave and go from there. I made the cookie crust bottom. It's in the nine-by-twelve pan there next to the date pinwheel cookies.\"\n\nTitus came back into the kitchen, took another box and marched it to the dining room.\n\nMrs. Beabots filled another box. \"I promised Beatrice Nelson I'd bring some cookies out to her youth camp. There aren't any campers around in the winter, but I wanted Chris and Eli to have some cookies. I suppose I could drop them off at the fire station with her husband. Do you mind driving me over there, Joy?\n\n\"Of course I will. And every other place you need to go.\"\n\nTitus came into the kitchen and got another box, then turned back toward the dining room.\n\nJoy smiled at him. \"You're such a good helper, Titus.\"\n\n\"It's important to stay busy,\" he said from the hallway.\n\nJoy looked at Mrs. Beabots. \"That sounds like something you'd say.\"\n\n\"I do remember saying that to you when you were young.\" She smiled.\n\nJoy measured the rest of the ingredients, turned on the mixer and scraped the sides of the bowl. This time when Titus returned, he went up to Joy and asked, \"Can I lick the bowl?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nHe started to reach up, with the beater still going, and Joy snatched his hand away. \"Not yet, Titus. After I turn the machine off.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" He pulled his hand back and looked down.\n\nInstantly, Joy knew she'd hurt his feelings. \"Titus, sweetheart. I didn't mean to snap at you. Haven't you ever worked with a mixer before?\"\n\n\"No. We don't have one,\" he replied and looked up. \"Dad has an immersion blender he uses for sauces and soups.\"\n\n\"I see. But you've licked a cookie dough bowl before.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh. Miss Milse makes all kinds of sugary stuff at Miss Sarah's house and she gives us the bowls to lick. That's where I learned it.\"\n\nJoy pursed her lips. \"I see,\" she said again. \"So does your dad know you have treats at Miss Sarah's house?\"\n\nTitus glanced at Mrs. Beabots. Then slid his eyes back to Joy, fiddling with his sport strap. \"I think I forgot to mention it.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you what,\" Joy said. \"I won't tattle on you and neither will Mrs. Beabots. But you should tell your dad. It's not a bad thing, and I'm sure Sarah watches how much sugar she allows.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mrs. Beabots interrupted, \"but Miss Milse is the best pastry chef this side of Berlin.\"\n\nJoy sighed. \"I remember.\"\n\n\"She uses cage-free eggs and organic milk,\" Titus said brightly. \"That's a good thing, right?\"\n\nJoy laughed along with Mrs. Beabots. \"Most certainly.\"\n\nJoy turned off the mixer and prepared the lemon bars. \"Is the oven preheated?\"\n\n\"I never turned it off. I may need more date bars before the night is over.\"\n\n\"Good heavens. You really do feed the town.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots lifted her chin proudly. \"It's my town and my honor.\"\n\nA surge of regret hurled through Joy. Her town. Joy had run away because she'd hated too many of its residents, and she'd pushed away the love offered to her by people like Mrs. Beabots, Sarah, Maddie, Olivia\u2014and Adam. Times had changed. Old Wilma Wilcox was long buried. The town council had new members. People had changed.\n\nJoy wondered what Adam was working on tonight. He'd told her about several patents he'd applied for.\n\nAll this time that she'd been back, Joy had concentrated so much on building the greenhouses back to their former successful state that she hadn't questioned Adam's participation. Had he put his work aside to help her and was it costing him? She hoped she hadn't jeopardized his career in any way. Typical.\n\nIt was Joy's fault she didn't know more about the adult Adam. Was she wrong to have parked her heart back there in her memories of high school? Were Adam's feelings for her now real, or was he doing the same jog down memory lane?\n\nWere they both guilty of resurrecting the greenhouses to keep a past romance alive?\n\nOr was there something more? Something real?\n\nAnd did she even want to know? Wasn't it safer to stick to the plan and then go back to her life in New York?\n\nWasn't it safer to choose Chuck and the career she'd worked so diligently for and keep her errant heart and romantic dreams locked in the past?\n\nTitus stepped back while Joy put the pan of lemon bars into the oven and set the timer.\n\nTitus looked up at her, smiled and, without a word, put his arms around her waist and hugged her.\n\n\"I like you being here with me,\" he said and squeezed his little arms tighter.\n\nJoy rested her palms on the top of his head, leaned down and kissed his crown. \"I love it,\" she said, feeling every space inside her glow.\n\nTitus tilted his head back, stared up at her and said, \"My mom used to kiss the top of my head. She said all her love would go straight into my heart from there.\"\n\n\"It sounds like she was a wise woman.\"\n\n\"So are you,\" Mrs. Beabots said softly as she poured more milk for Titus. \"Come eat your gingerbread man, Titus. That bowl can wait.\"\n\nJoy rubbed Titus's back before he walked to his stool and climbed up.\n\nThe whorl of longing, caring and, yes, love that overtook Joy left her light-headed. She grasped the edge of the counter and realized her eyes had filled with tears.\n\nShe loved little Titus, who reminded her every second of the kind of young person Adam had been long ago.\n\nIt had been only a few hours since she'd seen Adam at the greenhouses and she missed him already. She knew there was at least another hour or more of work to do here with Mrs. Beabots, but all she could think about was the opportunity to see Adam when she took Titus home.\n\nShe wondered if he would kiss her good-night. Or give her a hug. Would he ask her in? Would it be wrong to tell him about her feelings?\n\nMaybe Adam did care for her now, but the harsh fact was that he didn't know the adult Joy any more than she knew what he was like.\n\nAdam didn't trust her.\n\nAnd he had good reason. She was here in Indian Lake for another ten days. By Christmas Day, she'd be off to New York and out of Adam's life forever.\n\nHe was right to protect his heart. His child. His future.\n\nShe should do the same for herself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Joy stood outside the main greenhouse, huddled in jeans, a pair of broken-in cowboy boots she'd found in the very back of her closet and her grandpa's sheepskin-lined leather jacket. Snow whirled around her feet and her teeth chattered as she tried to smile for Scott Abbott's DSLR camera.\n\nScott waved his left hand at her. \"A little to the left, Joy. I want to get all the tree in, but with you out here, it gives a flavor of how huge the tree is.\"\n\n\"Couldn't we do this inside?\" she groaned, her smiling lips feeling as if they'd frozen to her teeth.\n\n\"I got those, but this is epic!\" He took a few more shots. \"Done.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank goodness. Trust me, there's not enough hot cocoa to warm me up.\" She laughed as they hustled through the showroom's front door.\n\nAdam was at the counter checking out a customer whose double-tiered cart was piled with Sonora Marble poinsettias. Joy loved the pink-and-cream-splattered bracts and smaller leaves. They were part of the new shipment from Dallas.\n\n\"How'd it go?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Freezing,\" Joy said. \"I need a warm drink.\"\n\nScott went up and shook Adam's hand. \"I'd stay, but I want to get this in for this evening's edition. They're literally holding the presses for me.\" He took the memory card out of the DSLR and plugged it into a laptop he'd opened up. \"I gotta email these ASAP.\" He typed the email address and uploaded the pictures. \"Okay, photos sent. I'll write the copy on the drive back to my bookshop.\"\n\n\"You're amazing,\" Joy complimented him.\n\n\"Ain't me.\" He held the phone up. \"Technology. Much of it, I love. Some, I hate. Gotta run.\" He started to jog to the door and halted. \"Hey, you both going to the kids' pageant at the school?\"\n\nAdam beamed. \"Absolutely. Titus is a shepherd and he has a couple lines to recite. He didn't get to write the play this time.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Don't tell my daughter. Bella wanted to be the angel. She's a townsperson instead. Isabelle convinced her it was a good gig because she still got to wear a costume.\" Scott went to the door and helped the lady customer out with her poinsettias. He waved to them as he shut the door.\n\nJoy laughed. \"He's such a neat guy.\"\n\n\"The best,\" Adam replied as his cell phone rang. \"Masterson.\"\n\nJoy watched as Scott helped the woman load her car and then put the cart in the bin near the front door. She was still surprised how these little exchanges about school plays, cookie baking and Christmas decorating reminded her of her mother. Jill had made certain that Joy participated in school events, invited her friends over to share in holiday activities. She and Sarah had made ornaments together. And Sarah carried on the tradition for her kids and included Titus. Jill had told her, \"The greatest gifts, Joy, are the memories we make with our friends.\"\n\nJoy hadn't made much of Christmas at all since she left Indian Lake. And her life lacked a great deal of her mother's kind of loving sparkle. \"Nobody's fault but my own.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "As she took off her jacket and headed to the greenhouse, Adam waved to her. \"I just took care of the watering. I have to take this call, so do you mind watching the front?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" she said, putting her jacket under the counter as some patrons walked in. \"Go!\" She waved him away.\n\nAdam pushed through the French doors. \"Yeah. I'm here. So, what did he say?\"\n\nJoy knew the kids were at school, probably rehearsing for the pageant. She'd forgotten how important play parts, leading roles and being chosen for school teams, bands and choirs were to kids. She'd won the parts she wanted back then, and if a role was truly challenging, she didn't try out for it. Acting, singing and music had never been her forte the way it had been for Sarah, who always seemed to do everything exceptionally well.\n\nCome to think of it, Adam hadn't been much for group activities, either. Except for his participation in science fairs, he'd been a loner back then.\n\nAnother big change for him in adulthood. He was very much the joiner now.\n\nSarah came through the doorway to the middle greenhouse with a customer who was wheeling a double-tiered cart filled with the new Cortez White poinsettias that were also part of the shipment from Dallas. Sarah pushed a second cart and pulled a third filled with an assortment of poinsettias, including Winter Rose, an odd-looking flower, half ruffled rose and half poinsettia. Joy loved it. Adam couldn't stand it.\n\nThis late in the season, Joy had been able to garner only the more interesting and expensive poinsettias, since the mass retailers had already spoken for the traditional reds, whites and pinks.\n\n\"Joy,\" the seventyish woman in the long camel coat said, \"I can't tell you how thrilled I am with what you've done. When I got back to town from my cruise, everyone at my church and book club was talking about the reopening. I was so late getting here, I was afraid there'd be nothing left. But these poinsettias! I've never seen anything so exotic.\" She touched the bracts of a Winter Blush flower with pink-and-cream blossoms and green-and-white-veined leaves.\n\n\"Thank you so much,\" Joy said.\n\n\"I'm having forty people on Christmas Eve and these beauties will be banked around the fireplace and up the staircase.\" She leaned forward. \"I'm going to knock their socks off this year,\" she murmured, smiling broadly.\n\n\"I'm glad you feel that way. I was worried because there's nothing traditional about any of the flowers in this shipment.\"\n\n\"I love them. And I'm going to send my friends from the book club over, if they haven't been here already,\" she said, handing Joy her credit card. \"Why, with flowers like these, who needs any other decorations?\"\n\n\"That's a lovely compliment,\" Joy replied. \"But I have to say, it's not Christmas in Indian Lake without a tree.\"\n\n\"Oh, absolutely.\"\n\nSarah pushed one of the carts toward the door. \"I'd have a tree in every room if I had the time.\"\n\n\"And the decorations!\" the woman said and took another cart as Joy came around the counter and took the third.\n\nThey filled the woman's SUV with the poinsettias, placed the carts in the bin and rushed back inside, hugging themselves.\n\n\"Wow! I forgot how cold and snowy it gets here,\" Joy said.\n\n\"And it's only December. Wait till late January.\" Sarah laughed.\n\nJoy's smile vanished as she looked at her friend. \"I'll be back in New York...\" Joy said, feeling a distance between her and Sarah as the realization settled into Sarah's expression.\n\n\"Yes,\" Sarah replied slowly. \"I forgot. You will.\"\n\n\"That is, if everything goes well and I get a good price.\" The words felt bitter and raw as she spoke them aloud and saw disappointment fill her best friend's face. Joy was responsible for shoring up everyone's enthusiasm and hopes for the greenhouses. Sarah, Maddie, Liz, Olivia, Katia, Mrs. Beabots and Adam had gone to great lengths to help her. They believed in her.\n\nBut, Joy realized now, they'd all hoped she would stay. And when she left Indian Lake, she'd be disappointing a lot of people.\n\nSarah clapped her hands, breaking the mood. \"I forgot to tell you\u2014Katia is on her way over. She's bringing a group of people from Austin's car museum. Then she wants poinsettias for the museum and her house.\"\n\n\"Katia is going to love these designer hybrids.\" Joy pressed her hand to her cheek. \"That reminds me. I told Daryl I'd call her about now to see what she thought about Grandpa's Frankincense poinsettia.\"\n\n\"You have a poinsettia that smells like frankincense? We'll make a killing.\"\n\nJoy smiled as she took her cell phone out of the back pocket of her jeans. \"No fragrance, but boy, wouldn't that be something? It is Grandpa's hybrid poinsettia. Finally!\" She punched in Daryl's number.\n\n\"Oh, Joy! I've been meaning to call. In a word, it's fabulous. It's got a good woody stem and I can do some cuttings right away. I found how he cross-pollinated with Lemon Drop poinsettia and a softer red, almost pink, variety to get this tangerine color. It wasn't easy. But just having this original plant, I can start cuttings this winter and propagate that ad infinitum.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"I am. But I need legal permission to do this, Joy. You most assuredly have something amazing here. I had a similar situation a couple years ago when I propagated for another hybridizer. You keep the rights and pay me for my services. However, I would like to advertise Frankincense on my website. I'll email the document to you, but the sooner we sign, the better.\"\n\n\"Tell you what. Email the papers to Kyle Evans, Grandpa's attorney. I'll text you his information. I'll ask him to read them over ASAP, and if he says everything looks okay, maybe I can drive out there tonight after closing here.\"\n\n\"That would be great, Joy. I'm really excited about this. It's such an unusual flower.\"\n\n\"A showstopper?\"\n\n\"Most definitely.\"\n\n\"Talk soon.\"\n\nJoy hung up and looked at Sarah's anxious face. \"Daryl can do it!\"\n\nSarah jumped with glee and put her hands on Joy's shoulders. \"Oh, my gosh! This is\u2014is earthshaking! I'm so happy for you.\"\n\nJoy sent a quick text to Kyle and he texted back that he'd received the papers and was reading them over. He cautioned that this was a preliminary agreement and he would draw up formal documents over the next few days.\n\nAdam walked in through the French doors, and having overheard their conversation, he joked, \"Whose earth is shaking?\"\n\n\"Joy's!\" Sarah pointed.\n\nJoy knew her smile was wide. This was what she wanted for her grandpa. This was the recognition he deserved, and if all went well and Daryl could indeed continue propagating until next Christmas, she could fill the greenhouse with tangerine-colored poinsettias.\n\nLike a banging gong, Joy's thoughts clashed.\n\nWhat was she thinking? She wouldn't be here.\n\n\"Are you gonna tell me?\" he asked.\n\n\"I talked to Daryl. She wants to propagate and breed Frankincense.\"\n\n\"No kidding?\"\n\nJoy rushed on. \"She's sent legal papers to Kyle Evans for him to go over. If all is good, I'll drive out there tonight and sign. Daryl will start immediately.\"\n\nAdam pointed to the whirling wind outside the greenhouse. \"That bit of winter storm in town is nothing compared to the open road.\"\n\n\"It's not that far,\" Joy said dismissively. Knowing that she was leaving in ten days, and with all the work she still had to accomplish before her flight to New York, she needed to take care of this right away. Her cell phone pinged with a text.\n\n\"It's from Kyle. He says the paperwork looks good. I can sign. So, it's done. I'm going out there.\"\n\n\"Not without me,\" Adam said. \"We'll take my truck.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "When Katia arrived at the greenhouses and heard of Joy's plans to visit Daryl that night, she offered to walk Angel and feed her in addition to cooking for all the kids, Sarah, Luke and Mrs. Beabots at her house, taking some of the burden from Sarah and Miss Milse, who'd been watching Titus nearly every afternoon after school since the greenhouses reopened.\n\nAdam had thanked Katia profusely before Katia showed her friends around the greenhouses. By the time they all left, their cars filled with flowers and gifts, Adam looked at his watch.\n\n\"We need to hit the road. I should get gas before we leave town.\"\n\nJoy had quickly closed up the greenhouses, leaving on the Christmas lights and the stunning lit tree. She'd checked her cell phone, saw that the battery was low, but other than calling Daryl to announce their ETA, she didn't expect to need the phone.\n\nAfter fueling the truck, they headed east out of Indian Lake. They'd passed the county courthouse, the enormous Santa, and the lit spruce on the lawn that was now at least twenty-five years old and three stories tall. Three enormous lit wreaths hung over the two-hundred-year-old entrance.\n\nOnce away from the town lights, Joy was surprised how dark it was.\n\n\"It never gets this dark in New York,\" she said, looking at the falling snow in the glow of the headlights.\n\n\"And if we're lucky, we may even drive out of the snow. The storm is coming from due north and this snow is lake-effect.\"\n\nJoy leaned forward and peered out the windshield. \"Those aren't snowflakes. Those are feathers, they're so big.\"\n\n\"From angel's wings. I remember Frank saying that,\" Adam mused, keeping his eyes straight ahead.\n\n\"When I was little, I believed him.\"\n\n\"I never stopped believing him.\"\n\nAdam gave her a brief and deeply sincere gaze that went straight to her heart. She said, \"Adam, I owe you so much for what you've done. You've been...\"\n\n\"Still your best friend?\" He smiled.\n\n\"Yes. Best ever.\" The words had come out without thinking. They were there, in her heart, and she wanted him to know that.\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"Well.\" He lifted his chin as a slight but satisfied smile drew his lips up. \"That's good to know.\"\n\nThey rode in silence for a bit, when Adam asked, \"Tell me, what do you like best about your life in New York?\"\n\n\"Seriously?\"\n\n\"It's not a trick question.\"\n\n\"From you? Sure it is.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"C'mon.\"\n\n\"It's my dream come true,\" she replied.\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\n\"For me, it's everything. I have a job that I love and I'm good at. I have respect from my colleagues, clients and the partners. I have Glory, whom I love. Then there's the city itself. Broadway. Restaurants. Museums. Radio City Music Hall at Christmas. The Statue of Liberty, for goodness' sake.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I see what you mean. You should love it.\"\n\n\"I do,\" she replied. She hadn't mentioned Chuck in her list. With each day, he was fading from her conscience\u2014and she hadn't missed him.\n\nHe glanced at her and then away. \"I have to say\u2014I liked climbing all those stairs.\"\n\n\"You...went to New York?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"When was this?\"\n\n\"Summer after college graduation.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHe gripped the steering wheel. \"Isn't it obvious? To see you.\"\n\nJoy had to close her mouth, she was so surprised. \"But you never called.\"\n\n\"I, er, didn't get that far,\" he confessed.\n\nShe turned in her seat and stared at him. \"Just how far did you get?\"\n\n\"I found out where you worked. Frank told me, actually. I saw you coming out of the building. Getting into a limo. With someone.\"\n\n\"Probably Chuck.\"\n\n\"I figured,\" he said, gripping the steering wheel even tighter.\n\nJoy felt his discomfort and yet this was a revelation to her. She wondered what she would have done back then if she'd known Adam had come to New York. While Chuck had always pursued her, they hadn't been in a relationship then. Over the years, she'd broken down; now she'd committed to him. Hadn't she? She rubbed her forehead, as if wiping away visions of Chuck and the Newly office. \"Turnabout is fair play. Why do you like Indian Lake so much?\"\n\n\"The people. Frank.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she replied sadly. \"But he's gone now.\"\n\nShe noticed Adam lifting his chin and grinding his jaw. He was holding something back, but what?\n\n\"Life is about people. Loving. Sharing. Look at today. Katia canceled her plans, even took care of Angel, and brought everyone to her house for dinner so that you and I could make this trip. She wanted to help. And Sarah...\"\n\n\"Has been a godsend. I couldn't have done all this without her help.\"\n\n\"That's what I'm saying. All your real friends were there. I've been trying to show you that Indian Lake is where you belong. They're here for you.\"\n\n\"And so are you,\" she said softly.\n\nHis blue eyes slid to her with fierce earnestness. \"I am.\"\n\nThe truck swerved slightly.\n\n\"I better concentrate on the road,\" he said.\n\nThey both watched the highway, looking for the sign that marked the turnoff to Daryl's nursery.\n\n\"There it is!\" Joy pointed as the headlights lit up a snow-covered but distinctive royal-blue-and-white-lettered sign with a reflective painted arrow pointing to the right.\n\n\"I see it,\" Adam replied, as he turned off the highway and onto the county road.\n\nIt was only a mile to Daryl's farm. They followed silver reflective markers topped with bright red bows that led up to the drive. There were solar lights on tall poles at the entrance and leading up to the house and the massive greenhouses.\n\nAdam honked the horn as they drove up. The front door of the house opened and Daryl, dressed in jeans, a hooded parka, gloves and snow boots, waved to them as she approached.\n\n\"I figured you'd call and reschedule,\" she said, holding Joy's door.\n\n\"I was persistent.\"\n\n\"And daring,\" Daryl added, hugging Joy. \"Well, c'mon in. I have everything in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"Something hot?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"How about some hibiscus tea? I dried the petals myself,\" Daryl said.\n\nJoy looked at Adam, who shrugged his shoulders. \"Of course you did,\" Joy said.\n\nAdam rubbed his chin as they walked. \"Do you do a lot of that? Make flower teas?\"\n\n\"Yeah. After the summer season, I cut back the rose petals, hibiscus and violets and dry them. I have to do that to pollinate and hybridize the roses, especially. I have barrels of dried flowers.\" She held the door open for them. \"Why?\"\n\nJoy went inside, careful to keep her snowy boots on the rag rug to the side of the foyer. She took off her coat and caught Adam's eye. She knew just what he was thinking. \"Because we might want to package them and sell them at Boston Greenhouses.\"\n\nDaryl smiled at Joy. \"I love this idea! I don't reopen till the last week in April, to the public, I mean, and all I've done with them is to mix them and sell as potpourri. Not such a big call for that anymore,\" she admitted. \"I never thought of selling them for teas.\"\n\nJoy followed Daryl to the kitchen, where the papers rested on the wooden table. Daryl put a teakettle on the stove to boil. \"You look those papers over.\"\n\nJoy started reading.\n\nAdam quickly moved over to the stacked teacups. \"I'll fix the tea while you two discuss business. You want sugar, Joy?\"\n\n\"Yes, thanks.\"\n\n\"Adam, I have some local honey there for mine. Thanks.\" Daryl sat next to Joy.\n\n\"To save time, I can write that provision here.\" Joy pointed to the signature page. \"We'll both initial and date.\"\n\n\"Okay. Anything else?\"\n\nJoy read the points. \"This is very specific.\"\n\n\"I know. Kyle rewrote the contract on my request. If you'll notice, he has a clause that if either of us decline to do business together, or upon my death, neither I nor my heirs can use the name Frankincense for a poinsettia.\"\n\n\"He told me he researched it and the name hadn't been taken.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Adam said. \"Actually, I did the research and I sent him an email.\"\n\nJoy and Daryl turned around and said at the same time, \"You did?\"\n\nHe put their tea in front of them, leaning so close to Joy that their noses nearly touched. \"I wanted you to be safe.\"\n\nJoy had to drag her eyes from him. She felt uncomfortable, as if Daryl were witnessing an intimate moment. Maybe she was.\n\nJoy quickly took a gulp of tea. Anything to avoid the twist of warmth in her belly and the distinct hammering of her heart. \"I'll sign,\" Joy said, picking up the ballpoint.\n\n\"I'll do the same.\"\n\nAdam drank his tea. \"You should have it notarized. And a copy in Kyle's office.\"\n\n\"It's kinda late for a notary,\" Joy said.\n\n\"There's one at the library,\" Adam said. \"This is good for now, but once the weather breaks, and you can get to town, Daryl, I could cover at the greenhouses for Joy while you two take care of business,\" he said.\n\n\"I'll do that,\" Daryl agreed and finished her tea.\n\n\"I'd love to sell the tea before Christmas, but that's a lot to ask.\"\n\n\"Not really. I can use my business card as the label. It's cute, with a blue ribbon at the top. I'll use clear food-safe plastic bags. I'll have them for you in two days.\" She glanced up at the kitchen window. \"As long as the snow abates.\"\n\nJoy followed her gaze. \"We should go.\" She picked up her copy of the contract and held out her hand. \"Partners.\"\n\nDaryl shook her hand. \"Frank would be proud. I promise to do my best by him...and you. This flower is unique, Joy. And, Adam, thank you for working with Frank on it all this time.\"\n\nJoy walked out of Daryl's house feeling an unfamiliar sense of true accomplishment. In all her years in accounting, no matter how difficult the client or precarious their situation, when she'd righted their corporate ships, she'd only moved on to the next problem. The next file.\n\nThis was vastly different.\n\nShe was creating something that had never existed before. She was carrying on Frank's legacy just as Adam had said.\n\nShe reached for Adam's hand as they walked to the truck. But instead of holding her hand, he put his arm around her shoulders and said, \"I've never been so proud of you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Adam.\" She looked up at the snow falling in her face. The sky was heavy and gray.\n\nBut even without the stars and moon, she felt her grandpa around her. As Adam pulled her a bit closer, she felt love from both of them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Saint mark's auditorium was standing room only for the children's Christmas pageant. There was a single adult role in the entire play and Adam volunteered.\n\n\"Dad!\" Titus ran up to him in the school hallway where kids were dressing in the classrooms for their appearances. \"How do I look?\"\n\n\"Genuine.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"Like an honest-to-goodness shepherd boy. I like the crook.\"\n\n\"I thought it was a staff.\" Titus looked at the Irish shillelagh Timmy's dad had let him borrow for his premier acting role. He flipped the ends of the scarf under the kippah he wore on his head.\n\n\"Where'd you get that head covering?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots had it. She said the scarf is from Paris. I gave Miss Sarah a thank-you note for making my tunic.\" He lifted his sneaker. \"We didn't know what to do about the shoes.\"\n\n\"It's okay. The tunic covers them.\"\n\n\"Timmy has burlap sacks over his shoes and tied them with twine. But Miss Sarah said she ran out of material.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Titus. I've been so busy with all this work that I didn't realize how much you needed my help. You didn't say anything.\"\n\nTitus pushed his glasses up. \"Actually, I figured I better not have bags on my feet. In case I trip.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Adam put his arm around Titus's shoulders. \"You're aware of the danger. You must be growing up.\"\n\n\"I am, Dad.\" Titus wobbled his head and rolled his eyes. \"I'll be six in two weeks.\"\n\n\"I remember,\" Adam replied with a smile. Then thrust his tongue against his lips as a clump of white nylon hairs got caught in his mouth. He patted down the white beard and adjusted the wide black belt on his Santa costume. \"So, what do you think of my, er...suit? How do I look?\"\n\n\"Fat.\"\n\n\"That's the point.\"\n\n\"But awesome, Dad. Totally.\" Titus grinned.\n\n\"I've never been dressed like Santa before. This beard is really long.\"\n\n\"So, why did you do it?\"\n\nAdam's smile pinched his eyes as they misted. He put his hand on Titus's shoulder. \"I did it for you, Titus.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Dad. And Miss Joy knows you're Santa?\"\n\n\"I thought it should be a surprise.\"\n\nTitus laughed. \"Well, at least she'll know what you'll look like when you're really, really old!\"\n\n\"Oh, thanks a lot.\"\n\nThe intercom sounded a bell. Titus jumped, his anxiety rising to the surface. \"It's time! I hope I remember my lines. It's hard when you don't write them yourself.\"\n\n\"You can do anything. You remember that and you'll be just fine. C'mon. I'll walk you to the stage. I don't go on till the last scene, so I'll watch you from the wings. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Titus playfully banged the shillelagh against the floor as they walked, reminding Adam that his son, as brilliant as he was, still was a child filled with wonderment and blind faith.\n\nThe play was true to the Christmas story, but the spoken lines between the shepherds, angels and the wise men were contemporary, and when delivered by nervous, nonprofessional children, the murmur of laughter from the audience and the continued flash of cell phone cameras made Adam proud.\n\nAdam's role was as simple as one could be. After the children sang \"Silent Night\" and then hummed the tune, Adam walked on stage, reached in his sack and started handing candy canes out to all the kids there.\n\nThe curtain fell to thunderous applause as all the parents shot to their feet, clapping for their kids.\n\n\"Bravo!\"\n\nThe curtain parted and Titus took his bow, along with Timmy, Annie and Danny. Then the kids playing other parts joined them. Adam stood behind all the children and bowed, as well.\n\nWatching from on stage, he saw Joy next to Mrs. Beabots, who pointed to Adam, whispered something that caused Joy to gape at him, then smile broadly. She clapped even harder.\n\n\"Uh-oh. Busted,\" he said, as the kids started off the stage. He then went down the steps and to the kids who had gathered at the bottom, eager for their own candy canes.\n\nBackstage again at last, he took off the hat, long white wig, and the beard that had been hooked around his ears.\n\n\"Dad!\" Titus rushed up, the shillelagh pointed not up in the air, but straight ahead.\n\n\"Titus! Be careful with that thing,\" he said as he grabbed it. \"You could hurt someone with it.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Titus dropped his chin to his chest. \"I forgot. I just wanted to tell you how great you were.\"\n\n\"Thanks, son, but I didn't have a speaking part like you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Titus replied.\n\n\"Adam!\" Joy shouted, as she walked down the hall with Mrs. Beabots. She waved.\n\nHe waved back, then lowered his arm.\n\nIt had been a long time since he'd seen her face light up at the sight of him. Was he dreaming? Was she this happy to see him or was it simply that his Santa role had surprised her?\n\n\"Adam!\" Affectionately, she put her hand on Titus's shoulder. \"You were both great.\" Her eyes lifted from his son to him. His blue eyes held hers.\n\nSuddenly, he remembered they were not alone. \"I, uh, better get this back to Mrs. Cook. She has to return it by the end of the day. Probably being used again tonight by someone else.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Joy said, looking at her watch and then at Mrs. Beabots. \"I'll drive you home and then go back and open up the greenhouses. I hope not too many people were disappointed I was closed for an hour.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots chuckled. \"They'll come back.\"\n\n\"I hope so. Well, see you later, guys,\" Joy said as she walked away.\n\nTitus shuffled to Adam's side and took his hand. \"She looked really pretty today, huh?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Beabots always looks elegant.\"\n\n\"I was talking about Miss Joy.\"\n\n\"I know who you meant,\" Adam said. Joy always looked lovely to him, even with smudges of humus on her cheeks. He'd tried, maybe in vain, to show her that not just her friends wanted to support her, but more important, he did. Yes, he'd pushed to help her out revamping the greenhouses. Yes, he'd made himself available to her\u2014maybe too often. But, darn it, he wanted her to see what she was missing.\n\nHe knew she had to make a lot of choices if there was anything that could happen between them. Her fianc\u00e9. New York and putting her grief and anger in the past, where it belonged.\n\nBut in the end, Adam had decisions, as well. Since Amie died, he'd closed his heart down to new love. Until recently, he'd been successful teaching Titus to keep his distance from others. But Titus's friendship with Annie and Timmy and even Danny Sullivan had opened Adam's eyes. Perhaps he'd been wrong.\n\nIf he took a chance with Joy, would she hurt him again? Or would she surprise him? Adam wished he could be sure.\n\n\"Let's go change. Then we'll go home.\"\n\n\"You aren't going to the greenhouses?\"\n\n\"Not today. I have a lot of other work to do.\"\n\nThey walked into Titus's classroom. Adam helped Titus take off his tunic, kippah and scarf. Adam helped Titus into his jacket, put up the hood and then helped with his boots. Adam lumbered out of the Santa costume and gave it to Mary-Catherine Cook, Titus's teacher.\n\n\"You were terrific,\" Mary-Catherine said.\n\n\"Wasn't much to it,\" Adam replied.\n\n\"But you did it with spontaneity and, well, fun!\" She looked at Titus. \"You have a happy vacation, Titus. I'll see you in the New Year.\"\n\nAdam's smile vanished. He'd been so immersed in Joy's world at the greenhouses and recording the results of his geothermal heating system, he'd actually lost track of time.\n\nChristmas was nearly here. The kids were on vacation as of the end of the play today. The New Year was almost upon them.\n\nLast night, Hal had called and pressed him about the California job. Adam turned him down, believing that he and Joy were finding their way back to each other. Hal had been disappointed, naturally, because he believed in Adam.\n\nAdmittedly, Adam wasn't all that keen on moving Titus from his friends. And he still hoped that Joy would give him a signal that she'd found happiness in Indian Lake. He'd hoped, foolishly, that she'd see her fianc\u00e9 was not the kind of guy who would make her happy. Yet, when they'd discussed her early career, Chuck had been there. She'd known him a long time. Were they romantic all that time? And if so, what chance did he really have with her?\n\nTheir kiss that afternoon before going into the bank building had been premature. If anything, he'd probably frightened her.\n\nHe'd certainly caused enough consternation in his own heart and mind.\n\nAfter their breakup, he'd found happiness again with Amie. They'd been of like mind and the thrill of Titus was incredible. He would always be grateful that Amie had been a part of his life, but the truth was, Joy had never left his heart.\n\nApparently, his heart was still Joy territory.\n\nHe wished he knew how to cross into that country again.\n\nIt was time he'd have to force the situation to a conclusion." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "It was nearly eleven o'clock as Joy checked out her customers, wrapped their poinsettias and bagged their gift items. She wished them a merry Christmas.\n\n\"I guess we should have shopped earlier,\" the twentysomething young woman said to her mother.\n\n\"I've been fortunate that my inventory has sold well.\"\n\n\"I'll say, though I do like these unusual poinsettias. Quite honestly, I got tired of the same old thing I could find at the Tractor Supply.\" The mother laughed.\n\n\"I aim to please,\" Joy said.\n\n\"So, next year, can we expect more of the same?\" the blonde daughter asked.\n\nShe'd been focused on the present circumstances since she opened the greenhouses. Make the business solvent. Sell. Go back to New York.\n\nBut she'd put Chuck on hold. In fact, he'd taken her very seriously and gone radio silent on her since they'd had that conversation. And she'd thought about no one but Adam.\n\nBut next year?\n\nJoy could only stare at their curious faces. \"I, er, don't know what I'll find next year,\" she replied honestly. In more ways than one.\n\n\"Maybe something more exciting?\"\n\n\"You never know,\" Joy replied, thinking about the tangerine Frankincense poinsettia Daryl was already propagating.\n\nThe ladies left just as Adam walked in.\n\n\"Hi!\" she said. \"Where have you been all morning?\"\n\n\"Missed me, huh?\" His smile was mischievous.\n\n\"I know that look. You've been up to something.\"\n\nHe reached in his jeans' pocket and pulled out two tickets. \"I had to stand in line for over an hour to snag these.\"\n\n\"Theater tickets?\"\n\n\"Front-row seats for the symphony Christmas concert tonight.\"\n\n\"They still do that?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. It's tradition. So, you'll go?\"\n\n\"I'd love to.\"\n\n\"I'll pick you up in front of the greenhouses at seven.\" He leaned over the counter and kissed her cheek.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he said.\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Making another dream come true.\"\n\nShe hadn't been to the concert since they were in high school. She remembered that last Christmas and the long black skirt and burgundy blouse she'd worn. She glanced down at her jeans. Glory had sent her an infusion of her clothes once she knew she was staying in Indian Lake for an extended period. However, Joy hadn't asked for anything dressy. She held up her finger. \"Oh, Adam. Is this still a dressy affair?\"\n\n\"It is.\" He grinned and left.\n\n\"Oh, boy. I need help.\" She yanked her cell phone from her back pocket and dialed. It was answered on the first ring. \"Mrs. Beabots? I need you. Again.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Joy stood at the doorway to the largest personally-owned closet she'd ever seen. Of course, living in Manhattan, few people had room for a walk-in closet, much less one that could have housed all their friends and then some. \"Is this for real?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Mrs. Beabots put her hand on Joy's waist. \"You're about the size I was back when I wore some of these creations, so we should find something that fits.\"\n\n\"Cate told me you had this treasure-filled closet,\" she said, looking at floor-to-ceiling lit glass shelving that held dozens of Lalique perfume bottles and velvet-lined boxes displaying jewels the likes of which Joy had seen only when window-shopping on Fifth Avenue. \"These are real?\"\n\n\"Well, they're old. Like me. A few baubles I picked up at Harry Winston and Boucheron in Paris. Nothing like the pieces Elizabeth Taylor wore, or Audrey.\"\n\nJoy held up a voluminous aqua skirt embroidered with butterflies and dragonflies. \"This is incredible.\"\n\n\"No, it's Balmain. Here's the white organza-and-silk blouse that goes with it. It would look lovely on you.\" She went to the far-right side, where a rack held coats and jackets. \"It's in here somewhere. Ah!\" She pulled out a long, heavy satin theater cape, aqua lined in black wool, with a wide hood. \"You'll need this.\"\n\n\"But it's too much,\" Joy protested.\n\n\"Not for the Christmas concert. Besides, don't you want to create a bit of shock and awe?\"\n\nJoy's eyes shot to her friend. \"Why would I want to do that?\"\n\n\"Why, to get Adam to come out of his shell, of course.\"\n\n\"That's not it. He knows I'm going back to New York.\"\n\n\"Are you?\"\n\n\"Why...yes.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots stared at her with piercing blue eyes.\n\n\"He's afraid, all right. He lost Amie. He goes into panic mode watching Titus in my kitchen. He's terrified of losing someone again.\"\n\n\"He lost me once before. And now...\"\n\n\"Now you both need a bit of a push.\" Mrs. Beabots went to a gilt-edged built-in drawer and pulled it out. The drawer was black velvet lined and filled with ropes of pearls, diamonds, rubies and sapphires. She held up a pair of aquamarine chandelier earrings that were a good four inches long. \"Only someone with your long neck can wear these,\" she said, holding them up to Joy's face.\n\nOn each wall was an inset of mirrors so that one could see every angle of the chosen ensemble. Joy held up the earrings. They sparkled in the light of the crystal chandelier overhead.\n\n\"These are amazing,\" Joy gasped, holding her hair back from her ears.\n\n\"You're like these aquamarines. Timeless. A jewel of the ocean. And you're no more in love with this man in New York than pigs flying.\"\n\n\"How can you say that?\" Joy gasped.\n\n\"You're settling,\" Mrs. Beabots said boldly and sat on the pink silk pouf in the middle of the closet. \"You ran away to escape the pain of your parents' deaths and you still haven't dealt with that, if you ask me. You left Adam behind when you left town. Maybe you're just like he is now. Afraid of losing.\"\n\n\"Wow. You don't pull any punches.\"\n\n\"Somebody around here has to knock some sense into the two of you before you mess it all up again.\"\n\nJoy held the gossamer-sleeved white blouse and the aqua skirt, admiring the workmanship. \"I don't know. I've been nothing but confused since I came back here. What I do know is that when I'm with Adam I feel happy and enthusiastic, which I now realize hasn't happened for a long time. I'm proud of what we've accomplished in such a short time. If it weren't for him and his geothermal heating system, I'd be stuck with a useless property and never would have reconnected with Grandpa's spirit, our precious memories or my endearing friends.\"\n\n\"And you certainly would never have realized its potential, would you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"And why do you think he did all that?\"\n\n\"Because of Frank...\" she answered hesitantly. \"And because he wants me to stay.\"\n\n\"He does, but I also know Adam plays his cards close to the chest. He's not going to announce his intentions until he gets a little push from you.\"\n\n\"And you think tonight's the night?\"\n\nMrs. Beabots rose, went to the shoe rack and withdrew a pair of aqua leather pumps. \"Even Cinderella needed a shove.\"\n\nJoy took the shoes, leaned over and kissed Mrs. Beabots's cheek. \"I bet her fairy godmother could take lessons from you.\"\n\n\"I taught her everything I knew.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Joy stood outside the greenhouses. With no wind and no snowfall, the sky was crystal clear ebony studded with stars. The moon was nearly full, casting silvery light across the snow.\n\nJoy heard the sound of horses' hooves against the snow-packed street.\n\nA white-painted open carriage festooned with spruce and cedar garlands and drawn by two white horses pulled up. The driver was dressed in Victorian costume complete with a black top hat. Adam stood, dressed in a black tux and black wool coat.\n\n\"Your carriage awaits, milady.\" He bowed, then jumped down from the carriage.\n\nShe noticed he wore black cowboy boots. She smiled. He was still all Adam and she'd never seen a more handsome man, whether he was in a tux or his familiar jeans.\n\nShe walked up and took his hand. He kissed her tenderly. \"You look beautiful,\" he said. Then he kissed her again.\n\n\"Shouldn't we go?\" she teased.\n\n\"Oh, yeah!\"\n\nHe helped her into the carriage. He took out a faux fur blanket. \"To keep us warm on the drive,\" he said, taking her hand.\n\n\"It's not even a mile to the Civic Auditorium,\" she said.\n\n\"I know.\" He put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to him. \"You should be able to keep me warm.\"\n\nThe driver whistled to the horses and they drove away from the greenhouses.\n\n\"Adam, this is too much,\" she said.\n\n\"I figured you did this all the time in New York City.\"\n\n\"No. Never.\"\n\n\"Aw, c'mon. Even I did this in the Big Apple.\"\n\n\"With whom?\" she asked, feeling a twang of jealousy for the woman who'd shared any time with Adam.\n\n\"Myself,\" he replied.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"I wish I hadn't been so chicken and actually reached out to you on that trip.\"\n\nWhen he looked into her eyes, she almost winced at the hope she saw there. \"But you're not now...\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, moving closer, their noses nearly touching. \"I'm not.\"\n\nHis lips against hers should have been cold, but they were warm and filled with the tender passion she'd come to expect from Adam. Maybe Mrs. Beabots was right. Maybe they both needed a push.\n\nBut was she brave enough to provide it?\n\nThe carriage halted, and when it did, Joy realized she'd been kissing Adam nearly for the entire journey. Short as it was.\n\n\"I'll be here to take you back home, sir,\" the driver said as Adam rose and helped Joy out of the carriage.\n\n\"That'll be great.\"\n\nJoy took Adam's arm as they mingled with the throng going into the auditorium.\n\nOnce inside, Joy realized Mrs. Beabots was right. Everyone was dressed as if they were attending the Met. The auditorium held over three thousand people and it looked to be sold out.\n\nFolding chairs had been set up on the main floor to resemble auditorium seats. The orchestra was warming up as they took their seats. Adam helped her with the cape.\n\n\"I bet you have awesome concerts in New York.\"\n\n\"I've been to a few and they were incredible. Mostly, though, my life is my work.\"\n\n\"I see,\" he said, as the overhead chandelier lights dimmed and the orchestra began." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "The ride back to Joy's house was equally magical, though a light snow fell. Adam kept his arm around her and she wasn't about to take her head from his shoulder.\n\nJoy was sad to see the evening end. \"This has been a wonderful night, Adam. Thank you.\"\n\n\"The concert always puts me in the Christmas spirit.\"\n\n\"I've never met anyone who keeps Christmas all year like you do.\"\n\n\"Most of our friends do.\"\n\n\"That's true.\"\n\n\"Your New York friends. They're not like that?\"\n\n\"Glory is,\" she said, thinking fondly of her wacky friend.\n\n\"I'd like to meet her.\"\n\n\"You'd love her.\"\n\n\"Joy, you have to know, it's you I\u2014\"\n\nA car came speeding down the street. The horses whinnied, one rearing up as the driver shouted, \"Whoa! Whoa, girl! Take it easy.\"\n\nThe carriage lurched forward before the driver had the horse under control.\n\n\"Sorry about that, folks.\"\n\n\"It's okay, man,\" Adam said, a look of disappointment on his face.\n\nShe said, \"I have an idea. Titus doesn't have school tomorrow, right? Wouldn't it be fun to take him sledding? Just the three of us. I can break away from the greenhouses for a few hours. Liz is planning to work the register and Katia will be there. The crowds are starting to dwindle a bit this close to Christmas.\"\n\n\"Everyone is busy wrapping and cooking, I suppose.\"\n\n\"So, what do you think?\"\n\n\"Sure. Titus would love it. I have a sled in the basement. Not a toboggan.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it. I have my old toboggan in Grandpa's basement. We'll go out to the golf course on the west side.\"\n\n\"Deal,\" he said, pulling her close for one last kiss. \"This was special.\"\n\n\"I'll never forget it.\"\n\n\"Joy,\" he said. \"There could be more moments like this, if you'd stay.\"\n\nShe froze. \"Stay?\"\n\n\"Yes. With me.\" He kissed her cheek. \"You aren't the only one who's been looking at their choices differently. I'm as guilty as you\u2014holding back, I mean. For years, I've kept my work a bit under wraps, bottled up my feelings and focused on Titus. I did all that to avoid looking at the past. That past is where you lived. But now you've come home. When I told you about my work, I didn't tell you all of it.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\n\"I've been offered a very lucrative opportunity\u2014in California.\"\n\n\"California?\" She was stunned. He had other options. Serious ones.\n\n\"That's the place. I turned the job down. It's not what I really want. What I want is you.\"\n\n\"Adam...\" Her breath caught in her throat. He wanted her. She hadn't been imagining it when he nearly told her that he loved her. \"The truth is, I have thought about what it would be like to stay. The best part would be working with you just as we always did. I've been so happy these past weeks. Watching the greenhouses thrive. And thanks to you, there's a future for Frankincense. I can't tell you how I'll miss you and Titus. But I have commitments in New York. I've made promises.\"\n\n\"And you need to deal with those,\" he replied sadly.\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nHis crestfallen expression broke her heart. She was hurting him again. She couldn't let it end like this. She had to find a way, but at this moment she didn't know how she could do that.\n\n\"I want to be honest with you, and right now, that's the part that hurts us both.\"\n\nHis gaze probed her. \"You're right, you know. I hate it, but you are. You have obligations.\" He jumped out of the carriage and held out his hands to help her down.\n\nShe felt his hands around her waist as he lifted her down. She wanted nothing more than to stand in the circle of his arms\u2014forever.\n\nHe dropped his hands and she looked into his eyes. Seeing lost hope gathering there pained her more than losing her grandpa. Was she doing the right thing? She hadn't a clue how to sort out her entangled choices. Her own heart mystified her.\n\n\"I can't let this be the last time I see you. You've been the world to me. I meant it about tomorrow. Let's take Titus out for some fun. Please.\"\n\nHe glanced back at the greenhouses.\n\nWere those tears welling in his eyes? She thought she saw regret. Or was it simply nostalgia for a dream lost once again? It took him a moment to answer.\n\n\"Okay,\" he muttered as he walked her to the door of Frank's house. He turned to her. \"Titus would like a fun day of tobogganing. I'll see you tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" she replied, as hope sprouted in her heart. She nodded toward the driver. \"You need to get home and let that man and the horses warm up.\"\n\nAdam walked away and climbed into the carriage.\n\nHe didn't turn around to wave as they drove off.\n\nJoy had never felt so cold in her life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Joy was determined to end her time in Indian Lake on a good note with Adam and Titus. She needed to find out if she had the kind of feelings for Chuck that she should have for a fianc\u00e9. Or was the love she felt for Adam the real thing?\n\nShe found Frank's old toboggan, a knit cap, mittens, scarf and a pair of her old ski goggles in the basement. When Adam pulled up in his truck, Titus was securely strapped into his car seat, but the boy was all smiles. As Adam put the toboggan in the back bed, Joy opened the door and gave Titus a hug.\n\n\"Are you all set for our adventure?\"\n\n\"Boy, am I! I helped Dad make hot cocoa and we brought a whole thermos. We can sled all day practically.\"\n\n\"Practically.\" She laughed.\n\nAdam came around to the passenger side. \"Listen, I have to run to the back for a minute. You get in and settled.\"\n\n\"Can I help with anything?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Won't take a minute.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Joy got in the truck, buckled her seat belt and said to Titus, \"I thought you were so good at the school play. Do you think you'd like to take up acting?\"\n\n\"No way.\" Titus flapped the air with his palm. \"I'm thinking about being a playwright. But maybe Dad's right. I should be a physicist like my mom. Dad says I have a proclivity for it.\"\n\n\"Proclivity?\"\n\n\"Yeah. It means I was born with a talent for it.\"\n\nJoy stifled her laugh. Titus amazed her. If she did stay in Indian Lake and watch him grow up, she couldn't imagine the challenges he would throw her way.\n\nAnd if she stayed in Indian Lake\u2014with Adam\u2014being a mother to Titus would be real. In that instant, her dreams and needs to be the career woman in a major New York accounting firm crumbled. True, running the greenhouses was a businessperson's dream. She smiled. All these years she hadn't really thought about what it would be like to have real love in her life. Or be a mother. She'd pushed those ideas out of her mind because they'd been too painful. But they weren't now. Had she already blown that chance with Adam last night?\n\n\"Here comes Dad.\" Titus pointed to Adam jogging up the drive from the back of the greenhouses.\n\nJoy saw that he was on his cell phone and was shoving a small notepad into his sheepskin-lined jacket pocket. He looked worried.\n\n\"You okay?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yeah.\" He shut the door, buckled his seat belt.\n\n\"Was that California?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"They must really want you. What did you say?\"\n\nHe avoided her eyes and glanced into the rearview mirror at his son. \"All set, Titus?\"\n\nRight, she thought. None of my business. Not after turning him down.\n\nTitus tossed his head back on the headrest. \"This is so cool. I love sledding. Now a real toboggan.\"\n\nJoy knew to leave well enough alone. The distance she felt from Adam was tearing her in two. She turned her head and looked at Titus. \"You've never been tobogganing?\"\n\n\"Dad went over all the rules with me.\"\n\n\"Well,\" Joy said. \"There's not much to it. Get on, sit down, hands and arms in, and go down the hill. Yelling in delight is optional.\"\n\nAdam started the engine.\n\nHe checked the mirrors and backed up the truck. His face was still rigid. \"So, did Titus tell you we brought cocoa?\"\n\n\"Yup,\" she replied. \"Good thinking. It can get cold out there.\"\n\n\"Well, the minute it's too cold for Titus, we'll call it a day, right, sport?\"\n\n\"Yes, Dad.\"\n\nThe drive out to the hilly golf course was beautiful. They drove around the lake so that Titus could see the beaver dams along the marsh areas. The lily pads were frozen and covered in snow, but Joy remembered how she and Adam used to drive out to the lake in summer and sit in her grandpa's truck and watch the sun go down.\n\nBack then, they'd talked about the future and what it would be like to spend all their time together. Those memories hurt now. Adam had told her how important family was to him, since he'd never had one. In high school, she and her parents and Frank were his family.\n\nJoy's hand went to her heart, empathy for the loss Adam had felt when she'd left Indian Lake raking her. For so long, her need to survive, get past her grief and succeed in college, then in the business world, had consumed her, to the point that she hadn't thought about Adam...or anyone but herself.\n\nShe'd been self-indulgent. And wrong about so many things.\n\nRegrets were prickly, unrelenting things. She would have given anything to have one more day with Frank. And she wanted to apologize to Adam for hurting him. Now she'd done it again.\n\n\"Here we are,\" Adam said, driving up the steep paved hill where skiers and sleds were allowed. He pointed to the right. \"We'll try that smaller hill first.\"\n\n\"But, Dad. That big one is meant for toboggans. See? Look at all those people.\"\n\n\"Precisely my point. Too many people can cause accidents. They can crash into you, and you're a novice.\"\n\nTitus unhooked his seat belt. \"True. But you'll teach me.\"\n\n\"We both will,\" Joy said. \"Your dad and I used to come here all the time when we were young.\" She hoped her statement would bring up a fond thought for him, at the same time hoping he didn't resent her for last night.\n\n\"That was before he knew my mother,\" Titus said matter-of-factly, taking Joy's hand.\n\n\"Yes.\" She looked up at Adam, who smiled at her, mouthing \"It's all right.\"\n\nAdam went to the back and lifted the toboggan out of the bed. \"Yep, this old thing has seen better days.\"\n\n\"But it's still good,\" Joy said.\n\n\"I checked the riggings. We're fine.\"\n\n\"Yay!\" Titus yelled, thrust his arms in the air and raced ahead, up to the base of the hill.\n\n\"Titus! Take your time and watch where you're going.\"\n\n\"Oh, he's fine, Adam.\"\n\n\"Trust me, that kid is never fine. So far today, he slipped on Angel's doggy blanket. Spilled his cereal because he wasn't paying attention, talking too much about our adventure today. He put his boots on the wrong feet and tumbled down the front step.\"\n\n\"My gosh! Was he hurt?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe exhaled. \"Kids. They're resilient.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I'm not. My blood pressure soars when I see him fall.\"\n\n\"Honestly, so does mine.\"\n\n\"You do care about him, don't you?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"More than you know,\" she admitted as she trudged up the hill. Her own words ping-ponged in her heart. What was she doing, thinking of leaving him? Them?\n\nThey made it to the top of the hill, though Joy was surprised that Titus didn't appear to exert half the effort she did lifting her legs in the snow.\n\nAdam put the toboggan on the ground and checked all the ropes. \"These are a bit dry,\" he said. \"I wonder if they're safe.\"\n\nJoy looked down the hill. \"It's a straight shot. And as I remember, we never used ropes. We hung on to each other.\"\n\n\"So, let's do that, Dad!\" Titus scrambled over to the toboggan. \"Me first.\" He snuggled his legs into the bow. \"C'mon, guys!\"\n\n\"Okay, you next. I'll take up the rear,\" Adam said.\n\n\"And we hold on to each other,\" Titus said, as Joy slipped her arms around him. He felt so good. So trusting and openhearted in his love. Then Adam looped his arms under hers and she felt a familiar zing go up her spine. She blinked back her regret.\n\n\"I'll push us off,\" Adam said, as he placed his long legs alongside Joy. With his gloved hands, he pushed the toboggan.\n\nIt barely moved. \"Push again,\" Titus ordered.\n\nJoy laughed and kissed Titus's head. She was having the best time holding Titus, feeling Adam's chest against her back. She felt safe. Loved.\n\nAdam pushed again. Nothing.\n\n\"Okay, everybody wiggle,\" Adam said.\n\n\"Done.\" Joy moved her hips from side to side as Adam pushed and...\n\nWhoosh!\n\nThe toboggan flew down the steep hill. It wasn't a long run, but it was enough to exhilarate.\n\n\"Let's do it again!\" Titus shouted, as Adam got off and held out his hand for Joy.\n\n\"Okay, sport.\"\n\nOnce at the top again, they got back on the sled. Now that they had the rhythm, they flew easily down the hill.\n\n\"Again!\" Titus jumped off the toboggan, clapping his hands. \"I could do this my whole life.\"\n\n\"Tell me he knows nothing about the Olympic luge runs,\" Joy said.\n\n\"I wouldn't dream of telling him that,\" Adam groaned.\n\nBy the time they'd finished their fourth run, another group of tobogganers came to the hill.\n\nAdam walked back to Titus and Joy. \"Okay. One more run and then we'll call it a day.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Dad,\" Titus said as he scrambled to the bow. Joy got in behind him and Adam behind her.\n\nThey had no more than set off when one of the boys jumped onto his toboggan, belly down, and took off down the hill.\n\n\"Hey, man!\" The boy waved. \"Race you to the bottom.\"\n\nBecause there were no brakes on a toboggan, Joy knew they had no choice but to finish out the run.\n\n\"Oh, crap!\" Adam exclaimed.\n\nJoy saw the boy had lost control of his toboggan and was headed straight for them. She didn't know what to do, so she leaned to the left, getting out of the way of the boy. Adam leaned with her and brought their toboggan onto its side, spilling them all onto the snow.\n\nThe boy kept laughing all the way to the bottom. \"Sorry, man!\"\n\nAdam got to his feet and glared at the boy. Joy grabbed his hand. \"Not now.\"\n\nShe leaned down and picked up Titus, who had a cut on his forehead where he'd hit the edge of the bow. Joy held Titus's face between her forefinger and thumb.\n\n\"He's bleeding,\" Adam blurted.\n\n\"I am?\" Titus said. \"My face is cold. I don't feel anything.\"\n\n\"We should take him to urgent care. He may need stitches.\"\n\nJoy inspected the cut. \"I don't think so. A butterfly bandage is all it looks like to me.\"\n\n\"Oh, yeah?\" Adam picked up Titus. \"What makes you an expert on my child? Get the toboggan. We're going to the hospital.\"\n\nJoy felt her heart ice over. Adam's rigidity struck her to the bone. Adam had been keeping his real feelings and distrust of her hidden all this time. In fact, his true colors had come out at the incident at the trenches. He'd never forgiven her for leaving him. She'd rejected him and he was biting back.\n\nAs well he should.\n\nShe'd told him she didn't want to be part of his family and now he was showing her precisely that.\n\nAs they drove back around to the road, she glanced over at Adam, who ground his jaw enough to break teeth. This sledding party had been her idea, and then when the crisis came, she'd butted in with her opinions.\n\nLooking past Adam's hard expression, she saw the north side of the road. The same road where her parents had been killed.\n\nDead Man's Tree was gone. Cut down and Mrs. Beabots had said that Wilma's brother's remains and dog tags had been properly buried. However, there were still wooden crosses of others who'd died in car accidents at this site.\n\nWas it telling that she was this close to Dead Man's Tree and didn't notice because at the time she felt whole while she was with Adam? And was it some twist of fate that little Titus had been injured this close to Dead Man's Tree? Or was this a warning to her that she'd made the right decision when she'd run from Indian Lake? And now she was leaving him again.\n\nMaybe she was never meant to be with Adam.\n\nMaybe love just wasn't enough.\n\nTwenty minutes later, Joy waited in the reception area of the hospital ER as Adam made it clear she would be in the way back in the examining bay.\n\nIt had all happened so quickly.\n\nEvery bit of it.\n\nAdam's kisses had turned her head, confused her and caused her to rethink every priority she'd set for herself over the last ten years. He showed her how wrong she'd been not to spend time with her grandpa. He'd shown her how to dream the impossible. He'd trotted out all their old friends, who'd been wonderful and given of themselves and their time, when she'd given nothing in return. She'd been insular, self-centered and wrong, all these years.\n\nAnd last night.\n\nHe'd asked her to stay in Indian Lake\u2014with him. Be a family with him and Titus.\n\nShe'd wanted to believe that dreams could come true. She wanted to believe in a love that never died.\n\nChildhood dreams were just that. Meant for children.\n\nTitus came rushing out of the ER's double doors. \"Miss Joy!\"\n\n\"Titus. Slow down!\" Adam barked.\n\nJoy looked at Titus and at the butterfly bandage on his forehead. Her eyes tracked to Adam. \"He's okay, then?\"\n\nHis expression was granite, his lips pursed so tightly they looked white. \"He is.\"\n\n\"Thank goodness.\"\n\nAdam reached for Titus's hand. \"We'll drop you at the greenhouses.\"\n\n\"Right,\" she whispered. \"I have packing to do and I need to relieve Liz. She's taking Pye and the kittens to the vineyard. Zeke loves the kittens.\"\n\n\"That's good. She's a special friend.\"\n\n\"She certainly is.\" Joy nodded.\n\n\"C'mon, son. Let's go home.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\"Angel!\" Titus yelled. \"We're home!\"\n\nAdam shut the door behind him and took off his coat, his mind still on Joy. It was clear that he'd read everything wrong. He'd misjudged her smiles, her hugs and her kisses. He'd read love in her eyes when she was still thinking about New York.\n\nIt had taken every ounce of courage he had to ask Joy to stay in Indian Lake with him. He'd held his heart out to her, and she'd refused him.\n\nWhat an idiot he'd been to think that after a decade in New York and all the work she'd put into her career, she'd be happy in slow-moving Indian Lake\u2014with him. He was a \"mental\" kind of guy. Tinkering. Thinking. Creating. Not much exciting about Adam Masterson when one got down to it. He didn't mountain climb. Didn't scuba. Didn't even golf.\n\nWhat he did do was see people in the world living better due to his inventions.\n\nIt was time he rearranged his priorities and put himself and Titus first. Pride swelled in him as he looked at his son.\n\nTitus shucked off his parka and hung it on the hall tree. \"Angel? You in the kitchen?\" Titus called as he walked down the hall.\n\nAdam took out his cell phone and called Hal.\n\nThe call was picked up on the second ring. \"Hal. Glad I got you.\"\n\n\"Please tell me you called to say you've reconsidered.\"\n\n\"I'm doing just that,\" Adam replied confidently.\n\n\"Excellent. Is there any chance you can fly out Christmas Day? We really need to meet with the team on the twenty-sixth.\"\n\n\"I'll check flights as soon as we hang up and email you the flight itinerary.\"\n\n\"Adam, this is the best Christmas present I could have received. Thanks.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas.\"\n\nTitus raced back to Adam. \"Dad! Come quick! I think Angel is having her babies!\"\n\n\"Oh, my gosh!\" Adam shoved his cell in his pocket and rushed after Titus.\n\nAngel was lying on her doggy bed, panting and moaning. She barely lifted her golden head to see them as they hovered over her.\n\n\"Titus. Get me a pan of warm water and towels from the bathroom. The first pup is about to be born!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Joy hadn't heard from Adam since the day of the accident, and now it was Christmas Eve.\n\nShe hadn't expected to, but she'd hoped.\n\nAs the hours passed, she couldn't help the barrage of Adam thoughts. Adam's smile as he showed her Frank's poinsettia and pressed her to move forward with Daryl to have it hybridized. His helping with the grand reopening and corralling her friends. The day at the tree farm. Decorating the huge Christmas tree. The symphony night. The carriage ride.\n\nThe kisses.\n\nMore than anything, she would never forget sitting in the greenhouse after they'd put up the tree and watching the shooting stars. \"See that, Joy? That's your grandpa telling you he loves you.\"\n\nJoy stood up and went to the closet. She carefully packed her business suit, pumps and the dress she'd worn for the funeral.\n\n\"What kind of guy would do those things if he didn't love me?\"\n\nShe sank onto the side of her bed and pressed her palms to her temples. \"I hope I'm doing the right thing.\"\n\nJoy had come to town with a plan. Sell the greenhouses and Frank's house and return to New York.\n\nBut she was a different Joy now.\n\nThe New York Joy had been afraid. Afraid to love. Afraid to risk just about anything in her life. She chose an accounting career even back in high school hoping to help her parents and Frank. All she did was add up dependable numbers. She chose a man she didn't love in order to be safe.\n\nAdam hadn't broken her heart when she left Indian Lake all those years ago. She'd broken it herself.\n\nShe hadn't risked anything. She had pushed the fear button all her life.\n\n\"No more.\"\n\nShe picked up the black jewel box and lifted the lid. Her engagement ring sparkled in the light. Last night she'd taken the ring off her finger and put it in the box.\n\nNext, she grabbed her phone.\n\n\"Hi, Chuck. We need to talk.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "It was sunset when Joy stood at Mrs. Beabots's front door and turned the tinny bell. Over her arm she carried the dress, cape, shoes and jewels she'd borrowed.\n\n\"Joy! I'm happy to see you. Come in and share a glass of champagne with me.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" Joy said and entered the house.\n\nThey sat drinking their champagne in front of her Christmas tree.\n\n\"You don't look all that merry,\" Mrs. Beabots said.\n\n\"I haven't heard from Adam in two days and I think he's done with me.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"He asked me to stay\u2014here in Indian Lake. I turned him down\u2014again.\"\n\n\"When was this?\" Mrs. Beabots put her champagne down and leaned forward.\n\n\"The night of the concert.\"\n\n\"Ah! Then that explains it,\" she replied with a knowing gaze.\n\n\"Explains what?\"\n\n\"Adam's leaving for California,\" Mrs. Beabots said.\n\n\"He took that job?\"\n\n\"Apparently. I couldn't figure it out. He was so happy being with you and Titus.\"\n\nJoy stared at her glass. \"Well, he's apparently a darn good physicist, as well as a mechanical engineer. He's the kind of guy who can not only figure out how to create advanced propulsion engines, he can build them.\"\n\nMrs. Beabots put her hand over Joy's. \"But I know that's not what makes him tick.\"\n\nJoy nodded. \"Family. He's always wanted a family.\"\n\n\"I have a suspicion that's what you want, too.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Then follow your heart.\"\n\nJoy smiled. \"I should.\"\n\n\"What have you got to lose?\"\n\nJoy took out her cell phone. She punched in Adam's number. Titus answered.\n\n\"Titus, hi! Whatcha doing?\" she asked, expecting to hear how he was waiting for Santa Claus.\n\n\"Dad's putting our suitcases in the truck. We're leaving for the airport.\"\n\n\"Now? On Christmas Eve?\" She rose, nearly spilling her champagne.\n\n\"Uh-huh. It was the only flight we could get.\"\n\n\"Tell him to wait...\" She hung up immediately and handed her glass to Mrs. Beabots. \"I gotta go!\"\n\n\"Hurry! And merry Christmas!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Adam smoothed a lightweight sweater over a half-dozen shirts he'd packed.\n\nHe supposed he should be ticked off at himself for letting his barriers down and falling in love all over again with Joy. But he wasn't. They'd both changed since her return. He'd found that he could never keep his heart closed off to Joy. He'd succeeded in showing her that so many people in Indian Lake loved her and missed her. She could have a life here.\n\nHe picked up his sneakers. People ran in LA, right? He didn't need boots. Or did he? \"Am I running away just like Joy did all those years ago? Am I guilty of the same wrong choice?\"\n\nNo. He'd done it all. Put his love on the line. Asked her to stay, and she'd chosen her other life. Another guy.\n\n\"Not me.\"\n\nAgain.\n\nHow many times did he have to go through this heartbreak to get it? They weren't as right for each other as he'd thought.\n\nIf he'd been selfish to want a life with Joy in Indian Lake, then perhaps this was fate showing him there were other options to consider.\n\nLike the pounding of a jackhammer, someone banged on the front door.\n\n\"What in the\u2014? All right already!\" Adam yelled, coming out of the bedroom with his duffel. \"Titus. Get the door, willya?\"\n\nTitus stood at the entry to the kitchen and put Adam's cell phone in his pocket. \"I can't... Uh, Angel has to go out. Really bad.\"\n\n\"This must be the dog sitter. She can take Angel out. Did you finish packing?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\nThe banging continued.\n\nAdam dropped his duffel and opened the door, ready to read the dog sitter the riot act. As the door flung back and he opened his mouth, he saw Joy. \"Joy?\"\n\n\"Can I come in?\"\n\n\"We're on our way out.\"\n\n\"Please,\" she said, pushing on his chest and closing the door behind her.\n\n\"I guess, okay,\" he replied. \"I thought you'd be halfway to New York.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to New York.\"\n\n\"No?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It's over. I'm staying here. I'm going to ask Glory to move out here to help me with the greenhouses. She'll love it. Most of all, I'm hoping you'll rethink California.\"\n\nTitus snickered in the background. \"Dad, I should watch the puppies nurse.\"\n\n\"Puppies? Angel had her pups?\"\n\n\"You wanna come see them, Miss Joy?\" Titus asked.\n\n\"Of course.\" Turning back to Adam, she said, \"But first I have to tell your dad that I love him.\"\n\n\"You do?\" Adam asked.\n\n\"Yes, Adam. I love you\u2014with my whole heart. And I can't let you leave without you knowing that. Even if you never speak\u2014\"\n\nAdam clasped his hands to her cheeks and touched her nose with his. \"That's all I wanted to hear.\"\n\nHis kiss was born of thousands of days apart. Years without her. Memories of being in love. The past spun to the present and created a whirlpool of love and longing around them. \"Joy, I never want to be away from you again a single day.\"\n\n\"Then you love me, too?\" she asked, placing her hands over his.\n\n\"More than you can imagine.\"\n\n\"Dad\u2014the puppies!\" Titus's frustration ripped across the room. \"I wanna show Miss Joy the puppies.\"\n\n\"Yeah? I want to show her something just as important.\"\n\nAdam kissed Joy again, and this time she put her arms around his neck and leaned close.\n\nTitus turned around, went to the kitchen and came back with three newborn puppies in his arms. He walked up to his father. Following behind him was Angel, who kept a very focused eye on her babies.\n\n\"Are you gonna come to California with us now, Miss Joy?\"\n\n\"I'm staying here.\"\n\nTitus pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose, not an easy feat with one puppy licking his cheek. \"I'm gonna miss you. And my new puppies, too.\"\n\nAdam put his arm around Joy's shoulders and laughed. \"I have a better idea. What if we forget about California and stay here?\"\n\n\"Adam? Can you do that? I mean, this is important,\" Joy countered.\n\n\"I was only taking the job because Indian Lake would be empty without you. California is just a job. It's not my life here with you.\"\n\nShe snuggled closer.\n\n\"It's Christmas Eve and we're all home now.\"\n\n\"Yes, Adam. We're home. We're right where we should be.\"\n\nJoy reached up, touched Adam's cheek and kissed him again. \"I'm never leaving you, Adam. Or you, either, Titus.\"\n\nTitus handed Joy a puppy, then gave one to his father. He held the largest puppy to his heart as he put his other arm around Joy's waist.\n\n\"I knew my Christmas wish would come true,\" Titus said. \"I just had to believe extra hard.\"\n\nAdam smiled softly at Joy. \"I think a lot of wishes came true.\"\n\nAdam hugged Joy, and she laid her head on his shoulder. Through the window behind him, she saw a single shooting star sail across the sky. Tears sprang to her eyes. \"Grandpa's wish for us was the best of all.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Sweet Treats", + "author": "Various", + "genres": [ + "Christmas", + "romance", + "short stories" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "CHRISTMAS IN THE SUNSHINE - A Fields of Gold Story by KATY ROSE", + "text": "[ Amanda ]\n\nClosing my eyes, I relax, floating on my back in our dam. It's the perfect Aussie Christmas Day. The sun is shining down gloriously, the breeze is warm, and the water is cool. The pale blue sky looks like an artist's palette, with white clouds smeared across the heaven's as if with a feather light touch. Cicada song fills the air, and kangaroos hop across the fields, sharing pasture with the grazing sheep.\n\nI trail my hands through the water on either side of me, and breathe a deep sigh. I'll never grow tired of the peace, and beauty of long summer days. Not even the toil and labour of farm life can dampen, or take away from the feel-good factor of a life spent outdoors. I wouldn't have it any other way.\n\nMy parents want me to visit my sister in the city soon, and the reason is no secret. I'm thirty, and they are scared to death that I won't find someone before my ovaries retire. They want to see me married in a pretty white gown, and have grandbabies so that they can take them for tractor rides around the farm.\n\nWith my eldest brother set to inherit and run the farm, and my sister working for a boutique law firm in the city\u2014already married, and with two children\u2014they worry that I'm wasting my life, and that there's no future for me here. But that's not how I see it. I'm fit, and healthy. There's still plenty of time for family.\n\nI want to take my life at my own pace, and I refuse to be forced into dating in the vain hope that I'll manage a connection with some well-to-do city slicker. If I ever marry, and have children, I want it to be out here, in the Fields of Gold; the Wheatbelt, the place that holds my heart, and I'll always call home." + }, + { + "title": "Darren", + "text": "\"Damn,\" I mutter. The gate to the neighbouring farm has come free, and now the Monroe's sheep are meandering onto my property like they own the place. Pulling up by the fence, I turn off the engine to my Prado and re-fasten the wire to stop any more coming through. Thankfully all the sheep are tagged, and it won't be too hard to round the errant woolies up, and return them home safely. Just as I turn away to get on with the job, something white floating in the Monroe's front dam catches my eye.\n\nRaising my hand to shield my eyes from the sun I peer across the field of cropped wheat. It's the younger of the Monroe sisters, Amanda. The beautiful, and as far as I know, still single neighbour I've had a crush on since we were wee tackers. She's just floating there, enjoying a swim to escape the heat, oblivious to her escaped stock. I bite my lip, deliberating. I wonder what she's doing this evening? Mind made up, I adjust my bush hat, straighten my collar, roll up my sleeves, and jump the fence.\n\nStanding on the red dirt shore of the dam, I watch Amanda lazing in the water. She has a smile plastered on her face, and it brings one to my own. She's the epitome of laid back country beauty. With long mousy brown hair, a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, petite lips, and a golden summer tan from head to toe, she makes my heartbeat quicken.\n\nBending down I pick up a small mud boondy, and with a practised aim I lob it into the water, a foot or so from Amanda's shoulder. The unexpected intrusion has the desired effect, disturbing the water with a small splash, and a distinctive plop! Amanda's eyes fly wide, and she instinctively pulls her legs down to tread water, a look of surprise on her lovely face as her eyes come to rest upon me." + }, + { + "title": "Amanda", + "text": "\"Darren!\" I say, shaking my head with a smile, my brows furrowing in confusion. \"What are you doing here?\" I breaststroke to the shore, and ring out my hair as I walk from the water. Darren's eyes sparkle as they linger, trailing over my body. I glance down, and feel my cheeks flush. My white shirt has become utterly sheer, and it clings like a second skin to every inch of my fairly generous figure.\n\n\"Ah...sheep!\" says Darren awkwardly, removing his hat, and running a hand through his dark brown hair. \"I mean, your gate was open, and your sheep wandered over into my paddock. I closed it, and was just coming over to let you know I'd be returning them shortly.\"\n\nFlicking my hair over my shoulders, I try to detach the sopping fabric from my body, but fail miserably. I certainly wasn't expecting company! \"I'm sorry. I could have sworn it was shut...how many got through?\"\n\n\"Dozen or so.\"\n\n\"Ugh, I'll come by and help you round them up,\" I say. Walking to the bonnet of my ute, I pick up my sun-baked denim shorts and wiggle into them as best I can. Being wet makes it a bit of a struggle, but I manage. I button up and find Darren watching me attentively. When our eyes meet, he clears his throat, and puts his hat back on. He is such a sweetie.\n\n\"You don't have to help, Mandy. I can wrangle them on my own. It's no trouble, really. You probably don't want to get all hot and sweaty again after your dip.\"\n\nA smile quirks the edges of my lips, and I shrug my shoulders nonchalantly, feeling a little daring; emboldened by Darren's evident attraction. \"Maybe I don't mind getting a little sweaty every now and then?\"\n\nDarren runs a finger around his collar, and whistles. \"Country girl through and through, then,\" he winks. \"Righto, then. Let's get those little buggers back home where they belong.\"\n\nMy cheeky smile turns into a grin. \"Race you to the gate, Daz?\"\n\nDarren's mouth hangs open as I hop into my ute, and rev the engine. \"You bloody scallywag!\" he laughs. Then, before I can accelerate, he rips off his hat, and runs, taking off across the dusty field at breakneck speed. I give him a few seconds headstart to admire the view. He wears those jeans so well..." + }, + { + "title": "Darren", + "text": "Amanda hits the breaks, kicking up a dust storm as she slides sideways, coming to a stop in front of the gate. I wave my hand around my face to clear the dust, then lean on her open passenger side window. \"Jesus, Mandy. Where did you learn to drive like that? You're a bloody hoon, woman.\"\n\nAmanda grins from ear to ear. \"I could give you lessons if you like,\" she says with a cheeky wink.\n\nI fan myself with my bush hat, and a chuckle escapes me. \"Yeah, alright, I reckon I'll take you up on that some day.\"\n\n\"I'm game if you are,\" answers Amanda.\n\n\"A girl after my own heart. So, what do you say, how about you do the round up then? I'll man the gate.\"\n\n\"No problemo.\"\n\nI peel the gate open, and watch as Amanda drives through. The dust kicks up again. The remnants of the cropped wheat splinter, and crush as she goes. It's no problem though, the chaff only serves to hold the soil down, and feed the stock over the summer. A few tyre tracks aren't going to be an issue. Mandy could hoon through my crops and I'd forgive her...\n\nAmanda takes it wide, rounding up her errant sheep with practised ease. A straggler goes rogue, and she expertly adjusts course to encourage it back towards the flock. The sheep high tails it\u2014they aren't the bravest of creatures\u2014and joins the others heading towards me, and the gate.\n\n\"Here, here!\" I yell as the first of the sheep comes through, and I give a few an encouraging smack on their wooly rumps as they go. Thirteen all up. Nothing to sneeze at when they're walking bundles of livelihood. You can't afford to lose stock out in the wheatbelt, especially over summer. The heat is too unforgiving.\n\nAmanda pulls up to the gate, remaining on my property. Closing the gate I walk up to her window. \"A baker's dozen all told,\" I say. \"Thirteen's a lucky number, you know?\"\n\n\"We farmers are a superstitious lot, aren't we?\" she answers.\n\n\"When you rely on the land and the seasons, it pays to be, I think,\" I respond.\n\n\"Too true.\"\n\n\"But speaking of luck...how'd you like to join me for a few afternoon Chrissy drinks? No funny stuff, just a good chat, and something to eat? What do you say, Mandy?\"\n\nAmanda grins. \"So, this isn't a date, then?\"\n\n\"What? No, no. Of course not. I'd never\u2014\" I catch the playful sparkle in Amanda's eye, and my heart gallops. \"That is, unless you want it to be?\"\n\nAmanda leans out of the window, one hand still on the wheel. \"It's a date!\" she whispers, her lips perilously close to my ear. Withdrawing, she whips her vehicle into gear. \"Come on then,\" she says aloud, full of vibrance and mischief. \"I'll race you back to yours!\"\n\n\"Hey!\" I protest. \"I'm not even in my bloody truck, yet!\"\n\nAmanda's laughter rings out as I rush to throw myself behind the wheel. Ripping my trusty ute into gear, I pull around, fishtailing it through the chaff. Following the neighbour girl's plume of red dust, I grin. This might turn out to be my favourite Christmas, yet!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A TABLE FOR TEN - A Z boys Christmas Special by SOFIA AVES ]\n\n[ Fairview House, Cairns, Australia ]\n\nDecember 25th\n\n\"Come on, sweetie. You know I can't.\" My lips pressed together, though I wasn't really upset. It wasn't like it was the first time she had done this to me. The worst of it was that she always got her way.\n\nAlways.\n\nWhy? Because I was a big softie coated in a uniform that every handler disgraced at least once in their service life, and bowed to the whim of my girl.\n\nBig brown doe eyes stared up at me as she begged. I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. She knew what got me every time. Pretty lashes fluttered over a soft, golden muzzle that looked like it had been dipped in ash. My only and utter weakness.\n\nI ruffled golden ears that followed me through so many deployments and active fire, earning her stripes that bore both honour and pain.\n\nOne streaked her ribs in a long graze; the other a bald patch of mangled skin over her heart.\n\nSix hours of surgery, and I sat by the door the entire time.\n\nShe had more medals than me, and she deserved all of them, especially the one earned for taking a bullet meant for me.\n\nThere was no greater love, and hence my decision to cave, but only for her.\n\n\"Okay, Helix. One run, and then back home. Just one.\"\n\nHer ears twitched as she considered my paltry offering, slowly pushing up on bunched muscles I knew would be aching for exercise.\n\nI reached for her halter, dangling it like a carrot. Six years together and it never got old.\n\nHelix bounced on her haunches, snapping as if she were still the energetic wind-up toy she'd been when she arrived in my care and not the forty-five kilo Belgian Malinois she became.\n\nMy pocket buzzed. I extracted my phone, groaning when I read the name that flashed on the screen.\n\nI gave Helix a sharp command and an apologetic look, picked up the call.\n\n\"Merry Christmas, Brigadier.\"\n\n\"Acting.\" Ridgell's grumpy reply hit me as funny, however inappropriate.\n\n\"They didn't promote you to diamonds and swords for Christmas?\" I asked, imagining the upgrade to his epaulettes, not bothering to hide my grimace. He already had my neck in a noose whenever he wanted it; the thought of him having sole command over our unit sent shivers of the icy sort through my veins.\n\n\"Kelly, I need that report from the Pacific region now.\" Ridgell threw the words at me.\n\n\"No preempt there.\" I couldn't resist the barb. \"The boys get Christmas, sir. We're on one of our few days of downtime for the year.\"\n\nAnd with all of us living under one roof, it made for an...interesting work culture. Not that we were often home, or had time to whine at each other.\n\n\"Which means you should have everything booked and ready to go, and a plan you can send me tonight. You asked for control of Z Unit, Lincoln Kelly. Don't make me regret the choice of awarding it to you.\"\n\nI clenched my teeth. Technically, the Brigadier\u2014acting\u2014had promoted me into the unit. The only thing I asked for was Helix's release to me, rather than the soft retirement to a breeding cage she was headed for otherwise. It tied me to the position for however long the unit existed, but the tradeoff of her freedom for mine seemed fair, after her sacrifices for me. A life in a cage in a breeding cell wasn't the future I wanted for the girl who had saved my life.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" I wasn't pulling my boys from their day off, even if it meant we needed to work. They'd earned the break after several months of solid work. After two years together, they had bonded with a camaraderie I was proud to have had a hand in developing. That sort of group culture could save a life, and had, many times over.\n\nAnd every single one of my boys had slept in until noon on their single rostered day off for the year.\n\nHelix nuzzled my hand. I petted her ears as I waited for the Brigadier's reply.\n\n\"Good. Merry Christmas, Major.\"\n\nI signed off with a verbal salute that was only slightly sketchy, tossing my phone onto the table.\n\n\"Okay, honey. How about that run?\"\n\nAn hour and a bit later, my knees were rubber. Helix had torn around the town as fast as her four legs would carry her. I'd followed her, sprinting as fast as I could, dodging tourists and backpackers through Cairns Central until the afternoon turned orange. Cairns had developed from a frontier town during the eighteen hundreds gold rush to one of the fastest growing communities in Australia.\n\nI spent the afternoon cleaning Fairview House while Helix slept beside my bed. Tinsel and plastic pine tree fronds littered the ground. There were more decorations everywhere I turned. I could have sworn Queen followed me around the house, adding his personal touches to the old queenslander when my back was turned.\n\nThe old building was the traditional, strategic home of Z Unit dating back to WWII. While it had once been set on the edge of the town, now it was ensconced on the outer city centre, bordering on being engulfed in by suburbia. Ridgell had given me control of the unit under their usual conditions, though in bringing Helix with me, I'd added a few of my own.\n\n\"How you doing, Ace?\" Noah King slapped me on the back in welcome hard enough to sting as he emerged from his room. \"Merry Christmas.\" He didn't bother covering his yawn.\n\nI grunted. \"Is that the beginning of your festive season welcome? Oooh,\" I cooed when he placed a dish of cold prawns and thousand island sauce on the main table. \"You do know how to set a table.\"\n\n\"He likes it,\" Hearts bantered as I tugged one corner of the tray open and made a prayer position to the ceiling.\n\nKing huffed a laugh. \"Did you think it was it all for you, big fella?\"\n\nI pressed my lips together and held back a remark of the duties I would assign him post Christmas. Just.\n\n\"Uh-huh. He heard you.\" One of the Tran brothers, Knave, popped out of our freezer that held beer, plus boutique and illegal vodka from our trip, amongst other things.\n\n\"Never,\" I snorted, pushing past him to leave my own paltry offering for the table, a collection of rolled pastries filled with custard and apple. The spicy scent rose around the table, and the small crowd inhaled as one, settling back with a sigh.\n\nWe didn't do presents\u2014for the spartan lifestyle we led between missions, any physical gift would be wasted. Instead, we kept to the traditions that evolved around the table for our past four Christmases together.\n\nKing dragged four extra chairs over, and the mood settled into something darker in an instant. We set the additional seating up with table settings, even though there was no one to sit in them.\n\nCatching my eye with his trademark cheeky grin, King leaned forward to scoop three prawns from the platter and popped them into his mouth.\n\nQueen slapped the back of his hand, his other planted on his hip, and began to berate the young officer. The amusement in King's face only brightened as he bantered back with the flamboyant ordnance specialist.\n\nWe were a ragtag mix of inter-service cooperation, each focusing on our own specialisations.\n\n\"We playing tonight?\" Hearts, my main man, pushed through the row of pastries to grin at me, shuffling a deck in his hands, though I knew they would be fresh from the local casino and likely to be tagged.\n\nFairy lights in the shape of reindeer pranced about the picture rails of the room. Queen lit a row of berry scented candles, setting them around the room. I abided by his habits on the provision that nothing overtly floral scented the house.\n\nEroding the male smell that likely permeated the building was fine; what wasn't fine was reminding each man what he had given up in chasing his career. Not one of us could have a relationship, nothing permanent, at least. The cost was too high. Though that didn't stop the Tran boys in having a bit of fun every other international trip.\n\n\"If that's what you boys need. It's your one night off a year. Spend it wisely.\"\n\n\"Or not so wisely.\" Joker wiggled his eyebrows, his English accent thickening with the alcohol he consumed.\n\nQueen nodded. He and his twin dropped into their seats, their hands folded and heads bowed. I might have believed their antics, had I not seen some of the stunts they pulled over the years.\n\nHearts slipped in beside me, and King filled his spot at our heretic table. We were ready for our version of grace when a knock interrupted us.\n\nI pushed my chair back when King made to rise.\n\n\"I've got it. You're up.\" I nodded for him to start, and shoved my chair back as far as it would go in the small dining room space. It opened onto a Queenslander terrace, overlooking the spreading town.\n\nKing's soft and reverent intonation became my shadow that followed me down the hall to the front doors. We might be a bunch of sinners, but every soldier talks to whichever deity might be listening at least once during deployment, even if it's only in a bid to save our skins.\n\nMore often, we prayed for those who went to the desert but never came home.\n\nA sharp rap rattled the double front doors. A figure stood on the other side of the stained glass rosellas that climbed their branch, throwing a soft rose coloured glow over the foyer and hall beyond.\n\nSurely I wasn't going to be sold house insurance or internet service on Christmas Day? Especially in the early evening. I sighed and shook my head, pasting a bland smile on my face that had gotten me through many staff meetings.\n\nI pulled the door wide, and my mouth fell open in the ogling sort of way. A woman stood on the other side of the threshold. Long blonde hair tumbled over her shoulders in a golden sheet. A puffy-sleeved red top left her shoulders bare, showing off a perfect, golden tan over a pair of white, tailored, cut-off jeans. A pair of red heels completed her ensemble, but it was her eyes that held me captive for the moment.\n\nBright and sea blue, it was like looking into an aquamarine ocean after a storm, when everything around had calmed, but the waters were still turbulent beneath.\n\nI closed my mouth before I could drool on the floor, and tried to speak.\n\nFortunately, she filled the silence that followed.\n\n\"Merry Christmas, Lincoln...Kelly? I'm Hadleigh Rawson. Ridgell sent me over with a care package.\" She dipped at the waist to collect something beside her out of my line of sight and presented me with a basket full of goodies, an ID card perched on top of the lot." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "My name tripped off her tongue and I instantly wished she'd stumble over it again. Disguising the need to hear her speak again, I studied the card with her photo and rank while my brain took its time playing catchup, instead of gawking at her like a green soldier fresh out of training. \"Ridgell sent you? Ah\u2014 Merry Christmas.\" I stepped aside, roving over the basket with my gaze alone. \"Political posting, huh?\"\n\nShe was young\u2014too young to be in command of her own unit yet. Often, the junior female officers were hand selected as poster girls to help promote the image of a senior rank aiming for a three star rank, and from a brief look at her presentation and her welcoming smile, Hadleigh had the goods. Sexist, but it happened, nonetheless.\n\n\"Sure am. As Ridgell's PA, essentially. Gotta tick all the career boxes, right?\" Hadleigh rolled her eyes, one corner of her mouth turned up. \"He thought you might like a hand. I help out with logistics, and I'm up visiting family for the holidays. I know you boys are never home so...\" She grimaced, leaning a touch closer, and I caught a lingering scent of berries and vanilla. \"But what's a day off to a man who never takes one?\"\n\n\"Is that him, or me?\" I asked softly, then cleared my throat. \"I'll have to go through the basket. And if you're carrying, it needs to go in the locker. House rules.\" I shrugged as if it was nothing, but the fact was that Z Unit didn't exist. And if I got it wrong, it put each of our missions in jeopardy, not to mention careers and freedoms.\n\n\"Of course,\" Hadleigh said brightly. She flicked up the hem of her flowy top to expose a bare midriff and a tight toned tummy. Just enough to keep her decent, and show me that she had no weapon around her waist, and her tight, cropped jeans left no room for a firearm or ankle holster. \"And flick through. Maybe get your favs out before the boys dig in.\" She laughed softly, a tinkling sound that stayed in my head long after her voice faded.\n\nI trawled through the packets of shortbread and marzipan almonds, and pocketed a pack of red licorice tied with a tiny gold bow. Hadliegh's advice had been good. I patted my pocket and came up empty. My phone must still be in my room after Ridgell called. I did want to confirm Hadleigh's purpose, but I also didn't want to be rude and leave Hadleigh on the porch if she had taken time out from her family at Christmas.\n\n\"Where are you from? You said you were up for Christmas.\" I smiled, waving her up the hall where, from the sounds of the ribald calls coming from the dining room, the boys had started fighting over the prawn platter.\n\n\"Sydney.\" Hadleigh shot a quick smile over her shoulder at me.\n\nShe held my gaze for a tenth of a second, but it was long enough for my knees to turn to water. Again.\n\n\"That's a big hike this time of year. Tell me you didn't drive up.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"No way. I like my sanity too much to deal with holiday travel for two and a half thousand kilometres. I flew.\"\n\n\"Fair call.\" I caught her shoulder in a gentle grip, just firm enough to halt her progress down the hall, balancing the basket on my other arm like Dorothy. All I needed was a small, annoying dog, the size Helix might use as a snack.\n\nShe looked back over her shoulder at me, her cerulean blue eyes widening. \"What is it?\"\n\nThe colour of her red lipstick matched her shirt. And while she was stunning wearing makeup, I wondered if she might have been prettier without it.\n\n\"Let me introduce you. The boys might be a little...protective of their space.\" Helix's protective streak was what came to mind, but I didn't want to scare her. \"Are you okay around dogs?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" she replied with that same, easy smile. \"Do you have a pack of Snoodles around? Wait, wait...bulldogs? That might suit you?\" She offered her eyes twinkling.\n\nI laughed. \"Not likely.\" Leaning around her, and trying not to inhale her Christmassy scent that seemed intent on branding itself into my brain, I rapped on the doorframe to the dining room. Conversation dulled instantly. \"We've got company.\"\n\n\"Bearing gifts.\" Hadleigh slipped out from under my arm, her hair trailing over my skin. I inhaled by reflex and a heady mouthful of her Christmas and berries scent instantly addled my mind. \"Merry Christmas.\"\n\nShe was welcomed with a chorus that could have come from a group of stunned parrots for their combined robotic response.\n\n\"Who sent the package?\" Knave asked, plucking a candy cane from the basket.\n\n\"Ridgell,\" Hadleigh and I answered at the same time. I ran my hand through my hair.\n\nShe giggled.\n\n\"Merry Christmas.\" King rose, offering her his chair, but she pulled out mine and slipped into it instead. He grinned. \"Glass of champagne?\"\n\nQueen squawked across the table, but Hadleigh waved him down.\n\n\"On the job.\"\n\n\"Technically, aren't you done now?\" I asked, catching Heart's eye across the table.\n\nHe nodded, diving into the basket to extract a pack of chocolate bullets. \"Girl knows what we need. Thank you,\" the giant of a man murmured. \"There's only one place for these, unless we like melted chocolate.\" He headed into the kitchen, out of sight.\n\n\"Are these bacon biscuits?\" King rummaged through, passing a few bottles of wine out to the twins. \"You do know the way to a man's heart.\"\n\n\"My momma taught me well.\" Hadleigh grinned, pilfering a prawn. King watched her out of the corner of his eye.\n\n\"Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? We might have something fancy with this lot around.\" I grinned as the boys started to shout me down.\n\nHadleigh laughed, ducking as something flew past my shoulder that King threw my way. He hadn't aimed to hit me; King was easily one of the best snipers the country ever produced, besides the man who used to work with his father.\n\n\"Tea sounds good. I can't do milky coffee when it's so hot up here.\" She fanned herself.\n\nEvery eye in the room followed her movements.\n\nShaking my head, I caught her elbow as she rose, all but towing her from the room. \"They're soldiers, ma'am. Please excuse them.\"\n\n\"Does that include you?\" Hadleigh tipped back her head, laughing at me.\n\nBlood ran up my neck in a hot flush to suffuse my face. \"Probably,\" I managed, only inhaling more of her Christmas scent.\n\nI filled the kettle, opening the coffee cupboard and rifled through our selection which, thanks to myself and the twins, wasn't in too bad condition.\n\n\"Ooh, can I have the green tea with mint please?\" Hadleigh leaned around my shoulder, her fingers curling lightly at my bicep. \"Unless I'm poaching someone's favorite? I haven't had that in an age.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" I huffed a laugh. \"It's mine, so poach away.\"\n\n\"See? We were fated to meet.\" Hadleigh sent me an impish smile, trailing her fingertips over my arm, and promptly curled on the floor next to Helix, who thumped the floorboards with her tail in exchange for a hug.\n\nMy usual you should never touch a service dog snark died on my lips when Helix leaned into Hadleigh's touch, nuzzling her and moulting fur all over them both. Hadleigh didn't seem to mind in the least.\n\nMaybe it was time for my battle-scarred angel to get some love. She'd never see action again, and whined when I left her in dog section's care if I travelled, but having her around was worth more than a little stress, to me. Plus, she came with the added bonus of security.\n\nHadleigh's fingers brushed over the bald patch that streaked Helix's side, tracing back to the toughened patch over her heart.\n\n\"What happened here?\" Hadleigh looked up at me, her gaze filled with far too great an understanding.\n\nI opened my mouth to reply with something, anything, but nothing came out. Coughing into my fist, I nodded to the dog, who stood still beneath Hadleigh's examination.\n\n\"She saved my life. Took on a barrage of bullets to get to the shooter. He didn't get up for a whole day after that.\"\n\nBut then, neither did she.\n\nHadleigh smiled, her eyes glazed with a fine sheen of unshed tears. Leaning forward, she pressed her forehead to the top of Helix's. My furry guardian angel.\n\nEveryone bears scars. Some just aren't as visible as others.\n\nI was grateful mine weren't on display for everyone to see, preferring the coward's route of using my uniform to dissuade any pity. I'd seen enough of it aimed at Helix over the years, though she took it on her scarred shoulders as any stoic soldier would.\n\n\"You're so tough. Bet you're tougher than all the boys here together.\" Hadleigh stroked Helix's ears, and my dog melted into a puddle at her feet.\n\nI wasn't too far behind.\n\n\"You bet she is. But you'll ruin her if you coo all over her like she's special.\" Queen strode into the kitchen with two bottles of wine in his arms on his way to the fridge with the wine. \"Ace. Help me with a few things?\"\n\nI nodded, letting him pile my arms full of snacks and trays for the night. \"Hadleigh, could you grab the top one? I think I'll lose it.\"\n\nHadleigh looked pained. \"Do you mind if I use your, uh\u2014\" She gestured along the hall.\n\n\"Huh?\" I squinted at her as she wiggled on the spot before the message made its way to my brain. \"Sure. Down the hall, first on the right. I'd point but...\" I swayed as Queen added two more platters to my heap.\n\nHadleigh left the room, her giggles following her down the hall.\n\nWith worse balance than a party girl on New Year's Eve, I slid the platters across the table, dodging grabbing hands. \"No, there's no more seafood. You've eaten four kilograms of Tiger prawns, and eight Moreton Bay bugs.\"\n\nQueen looked miffed, though I got the impression it should be me wearing his expression.\n\n\"Look, I didn't even get any,\" I said, rolling my eyes when Joker protested.\n\n\"Yeah, because you were too busy looking at\u2014can you pass a roll please?\" Joker's snark transformed into servitude as Hadleigh reentered the room, her arms as heavily laden with snacks as mine had been a few minutes before.\n\n\"You shouldn't be doing this. It's your Christmas.\" I relieved her of the weight and scattered them around the table.\n\nA plate of cold cuts slid precariously close to the edge, and King leapt back, smothering a curse as he replaced it. \"Ace...\"\n\n\"Yes, King?\" I asked with mock politeness.\n\nA girl walks into a room full of soldiers and we all turned into our most decorus selves.\n\n\"Wait, what?\" Hadleigh looked across the table to me. \"Who is\u2014\"\n\n\"Lincoln Kelley, Ace.\" King replied, staring at the ceiling. He balled his napkin and tossed it in the air, pointing between catches as he went around the room, adding each of our callsigns to our given names for clarity. \"Joker, aka Scotty Evans. Tran twins, Knave and Queen. Caleb is Hearts. I'm Noah. King.\"\n\nShe blinked.\n\nI shifted a little, trying to not kick the kid beneath the table. There was having balls and there was insolence, and King bordered well between the two. \"King is his last name. He doesn't hold rank.\"\n\nThe balled up napkin was tossed once more before it came flying at me.\n\nHelix launched up beside me and snatched it out of the air.\n\nI grinned. \"And this is Helix. My wing man.\" Helix whined beside me, and I ruffled her ears. \"Fine. Wing girl.\"\n\n\"Softie,\" Queen muttered, refusing to look my way.\n\nI knew why, and he had my sympathy. But my girl had been there for me, the deep rant in her fur a testament of what she'd do for me, or any soldier who crossed her path.\n\n\"Probably.\" I gave my girl some love, despite the whooping around the table. \"But what stronger love can I have than the girl who'd take a bullet for me?\"\n\nThe mood around the table sombered. Beers clunked to the table, and six pairs of eyes looked at the empty seats we'd spent the afternoon ignoring. Heads bowed, raucous comments dissipating into a weighted silence.\n\nHadleigh shifted next to me. I closed my hand around hers in a gentle grip, smiling reassuringly. She settled in her seat, leaning slightly toward me.\n\nOne by one, my boys raised their glasses, their mood reverent as the silence thickened.\n\n\"Winston,\" Joker started. Though he spoke to his hands, his voice carried in the silence of the room. His usual smile left him a drawn and quiet man.\n\n\"Pax,\" Hearts muttered in the same voice he'd read his brother's eulogy in.\n\n\"Chang,\" the Tran twins spoke in unison, their hands clasped with white knuckles.\n\n\"Tobias Sing.\" The young trooper's name passed my lips in a whisper of a prayer.\n\nHadleigh wiggled her hand free of my hold and entwined her fingers through mine. I squeezed her hand, probably too hard, though I was grateful for her support. I didn't find it easy to say his name each year; none of us did. But Hadleigh said nothing, and squeezed right back.\n\nKing went last. \"Dad.\"\n\nHadleigh tugged at my grip. I loosened it, and she squeezed gently at my fingers as she shifted silently closer. I glanced sideways at her. The unshed tears of before had broken free, her lashes beaded with jewelled drops. She pushed her chair back, the legs scraping on the floor as she left the room at a brisk trot, her heels clattering unevenly on the floor.\n\nI let out a sigh, remembering the way she stroked Helix's scars. Maybe she understood better than I thought.\n\nThe boys downed their drinks in silence, and warmth began to return to the room.\n\nHelix nuzzled my hand, already cool without Hadleigh beside me. I slipped the bread roll from my plate to her and she settled at my feet.\n\n\"You know that's no good for her,\" Queen grumbled.\n\n\"I know,\" I agreed. \"But she goes where I go. My bodyguard.\"\n\nI turned back to the boys as each revived from their revieries, and pretended not to see Queen slide his roll from his plate and drop it beneath his seat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Hadleigh settled into the group with ease. To be fair, she'd probably spent the last year or two of her fledgling military career being tested by the officers around her, and some of the soldiers who wouldn't be able to help themselves.\n\nI hoped that she'd given them a brilliant smile and verbally put them back in their boxes.\n\nOur traditional round of poker had started by the time Hadleigh returned to the table, flicking on the lights as she entered the room. The windows outside still showed a hint of colour in a darkening sky. I hadn't chased her when she'd left after our round of prayers for our lost comrades; if she wanted company, she knew where we were. And besides, I knew what it was like to need time to myself and not to be able to take it.\n\n\"Who's losing?\" she asked, slipping back into the chair beside me.\n\nFive hands raised and pointed at Joker.\n\nHe grinned and turned his cards outward. Nothing matched.\n\nGroans rose around the table as he flourished them and pushed a bet forward.\n\n\"Why do you do it?\" King turned to stare at his friend.\n\n\"I accept my fate, and there's nothing I can do about it, except weather whatever trial Ace chooses to put us through.\"\n\n\"Uh huh. And are you going to whine the entire time?\"\n\n\"But of course.\" Joker's British accent slipped through the Aussie twang he had picked up after his time in the SAS.\n\nHelix snored beneath my seat, and Hadleigh sent the dog a sympathetic glance. \"I know how you feel,\" she whispered.\n\nI hid a grin behind my cards. \"Alright boys, who's still in?\" I slid the rest of my toothpicks forward.\n\n\"Always,\" King wiggled his cards at me. He pushed his toothpicks across the table, mirroring me. \"All in.\"\n\n\"Seen, mate.\"\n\n\"Is he bluffing?\" Hadleigh murmured at my side, staring at the younger man as if she couldn't quite understand what he was about.\n\n\"He doesn't care if he loses.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Her brow creased, and it might have been the cutest thing I'd seen in a while.\n\nI need to get out more.\n\nBut that was rather the point of a black ops unit; there was no leaving or time off mission. We kept going until the job was done.\n\nAnd the job always kept coming.\n\n\"Because he thinks he's a hard soldier and can take anything.\" Joker grinned while King glared daggers at him.\n\n\"No pretending here.\" The younger soldier straightened his shoulders, his crystal blue gaze piercing a point in the wall above the twins' heads.\n\nIf anyone had a point to prove, it would be King. I hoped he knew his place in the unit was solid, despite the verbal roughhousing, else we had a talk coming on. But then, growing up as an army brat, he likely knew the rigmarole better than the rest of us.\n\n\"What are you betting?\" Hadleigh twiddled with a stray toothpick, turning between her fingers while the Tran twins had a mini confab behind their hands.\n\n\"Team building activity for January one,\" Joker replied for me, leaning back in his chair. \"If King wins, we're up for a seventy-two hour recon exercise. If the boys win,\" he nodded in the direction of the twins, \"we'll be practicing undercover technique in drag. Probably in Thailand. If it's Hearts, it'll be some medical drama.\"\n\n\"What about if you win?\" Hadleigh turned to me.\n\n\"Predawn packmarch up Walsh's Pyramid on New Year's Day. Timed.\" More groans circulated around the table. Hadleigh winced in sympathy. Flicking my cards, I made sure to meet each pair of eyes that stared back at me. Every man at the table might have their brother's back, but not one of them could bluff. Except maybe King. \"You boys ready?\"\n\nThe twins pushed their conglomerate wealth across the table. \"We're in.\"\n\nDouble cat's-got-the-cream smiles returned my own.\n\n\"He's not playing with a full deck,\" Joker murmured, nudging King.\n\nI raised an eyebrow and said nothing.\n\n\"Nah,\" King grinned. \"He doesn't need a full deck. He's got four aces.\"\n\n\"Counting cards is illegal,\" I said in a soft voice.\n\nBeside me, Hadleigh shivered.\n\n\"Since when did we do legal?\" King placed his cards one after the other on the table top with pizzazz. \"Ta-daa.\"\n\nI stared at them. \"That's worse than Joker's hand.\"\n\n\"Is that possible?\" Queen asked as the twins laid their hands out side by side.\n\nTwo pairs each, all royalty.\n\nI smirked. \"Did you set the deck, boys?\" The boys shook their heads. My grin got bigger. \"Because it's pack march time.\" The groans got louder as I set the four aces King had called me on down. \"Merry Christmas, boys.\" Leaving them to whine in my absence, I pushed back from the table, careful not to disturb Helix where she snored under my chair, and slipped out the door.\n\nThe boys were already jabbering behind me as I left, scooping my phone from on top of a random bookcase, but a soft set of footfalls that followed me through the house to the back deck reminded me I wasn't alone.\n\nI slipped my hands into my pockets, slowing my pace as I circuited the back of the building.\n\nA warm breath brushed my bicep. \"You're very close, aren't you?\"\n\nHadleigh inclined her head. The ends of her hair tickled my shoulder, lifted by the cool breeze that swept in across the ocean, salt mixing with the berry candles Queen had lit earlier for our brief celebration. \"Your men. Unit.\"\n\nEven with heels on, Hadleigh didn't quite reach my shoulder. But the energy contained within her slight frame told me she was likely a spitfire of a pocket rocket.\n\n\"We have to be.\" I folded my arms across my chest to keep from touching her. I'd known her for a few hours, and I refused to let a woman who had whisked into my life and would whisk right out again upset the delicate status quo that I'd spent so many months building within the unit.\n\nWe were all single, and we were all expendable. This time next year, I fully expected to see new faces within our ranks and more empty chairs around our table.\n\nOne of them could be mine.\n\nWhich was why I had zero option to be involved with anyone at all. I couldn't be responsible for their grief in the long term.\n\n\"Life and death, and all that.\" She stared out over the water, her brow dipped the tiniest amount.\n\n\"Something like that.\" I studied her from the corner of my eye. \"You're not used to military life, are you? I don't recommend trying for a relationship while you're shipped around the country. It's temporary,\" I warned her, unable to contain my bitter laugh.\n\nShe huffed a laugh, pushing golden hair that lifted around her head like a halo back with both hands. The wind whipped the ends until it was a mess and she gave up trying to contain it.\n\nSomething like the woman I suspected she was inside.\n\nAnd besides, I sort of liked this untamed side of her. Part of me grieved that I would never know more about this woman, but I knew the risks when I signed on to lead Z Unit, and bartered my freedom for Helix's.\n\n\"The names you said, around the table,\" she said finally. \"Who were they?\"\n\nI think you know exactly what those names mean.\n\nBut I didn't say it; didn't want to ruin the moment I wished to prolong before she walked away.\n\n\"The chairs are for the friends and family we've lost, and the names are the men who filled them.\" And the list only gets longer every year.\n\nThe words hung between us, unspoken.\n\n\"It's a beautiful tradition.\"\n\nI snorted. \"It could be a short-lived one. We're rarely home, and we never stop. Except maybe tonight.\"\n\n\"But you're still on duty,\" she murmured softly.\n\n\"Aren't we all?\" I stared sightlessly into the darkened sky.\n\n\"Who was he? Tobias...\" Hadleigh's frown deepened.\n\n\"Sing. Tobias Sing.\" I sighed, running a hand over my hair. Closing my eyes, I tipped my head back, a clean shaven face filling my mind. So enthusiastic, and he'd memorised every rule in the book. But there was only so much those rules could teach a man. \"It was his first operation, and I was his first commanding officer, fresh out of training myself. Even I never met someone so gung-ho. The men heaped insults at him, but he shook it off, and always asked what else he could do. So, I gave him extra gate duty. It was opportune. One of our boys had been flown out, injured, and we had a gap in the roster. Tobias took it. And that night, when mortars flew into the camp, one landed right next to him. It was...well. A mess doesn't cover it. That was seventeen years ago, and I've never forgotten him.\" And I never would. My voice cracked on the last word.\n\nHadleigh was silent, though she swayed toward me.\n\nI squeezed my fingers into a fist, pushing down on the urge to touch her, to slide an arm around her waist.\n\n\"We lose so many, and when they're young\u2014\" She gestured at the empty air in front of her.\n\n\"Pretty much,\" I murmured, watching her. Her choice of words hadn't been lost on me.\n\nAs though sensing my assessment of her, she wrapped her arms around herself. \"You're not the only one who has led a changed life,\" she said finally, dropping her hands to her sides, though she refused to meet my gaze, her brow dipped. Fine lines crinkled around her eyes, belaying age and experience I hadn't expected to see. \"There are different wars to fight on different fronts.\"\n\nI frowned, turning to her, but the few lines on her face from before were gone, and her face was smooth again.\n\nToo smooth, and too much like a mask for my liking. A mask I knew all too well, because it mirrored my own.\n\nI opened my mouth to respond with a smart comment or something light, but for the second time in a few moments, her words gave me pause.\n\nBecause those words echoed something my ex-commanding officer had said, years ago, before he left the Army. Laced with too much truth to brush off, I couldn't make light of them. That was Joker's department.\n\nAnd since I couldn't ask her, couldn't risk becoming involved, when I opened my mouth the next time I gave her a piece of my truth.\n\n\"Everyone comes home different. Don't listen to what they tell you. No one leaves the desert unchanged.\"\n\nHadleigh nodded, turning to face me. \"Thank you for feeding me. And tea. And...furry cuddles.\" She smiled, and I thought it was her real one. Maybe.\n\n\"She's getting spoiled.\" I shook my head, unable to hide my grin.\n\nHadleigh raised an eyebrow. \"Getting? That ship has long since sailed, boy.\"\n\nI huffed a laugh. \"It's been a long time since someone called me 'boy'. You're full of surprises, Hadleigh Rawson.\"\n\nHer lips pursed, but there was no disguising the mischief in her eyes. \"Is that so? Then I'll give you another.\" She rose onto her toes, wrapping her arms around my shoulders. Her body pressed lightly to mine, her warmth seeping through to me as her lips brushed my ear, then pressed to my cheek in a brief, chaste kiss. \"I'll be seeing you again, Major.\"\n\nI blinked as she stepped back, still smiling at me.\n\n\"Thank you for giving me a memorable Christmas, Hadleigh.\"\n\nHer laugh was my only answer as she disappeared around the side of the house, her heels clicking a smart pace over the path. Then the sound disappeared altogether." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Shaking my head, I stared into the shadow, but there wasn't a hint of movement. My feet moved before I put conscious thought into it, but by the time I reached the road, there wasn't a person in sight. I stared around, but I couldn't remember if Hadleigh arrived in a car, or if she walked. How far had she come? I hadn't even asked where her family lived.\n\nMy phone rang in my pocket, and I extracted it, still searching for any hint of motion along the pavement.\n\n\"Merry Christmas, sir,\" I answered, running a hand over my head. That tiny kiss had ruffled me.\n\nA splash of neon light from the club across the road rippled across the black top. Tiny drops hit my face, streaming down my cheeks. How long had it been raining that I hadn't noticed?\n\n\"Kelly, I didn't want to have to make this call. But tell me you didn't give that agent any info she didn't already know.\"\n\nRidgell's words sent my heart plummeting to the base of my gut and raised my Christmas dinner to around the realms of my throat.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Manners, Kelly!\" Ridgell barked.\n\nI managed a wry grin despite the worms roiling in my gut. Apparently you could put the Army boy into politics, but you couldn't drive the brat out of him.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" I snapped back, regretting the lack of decorum in an instant, though my mind whirred off in another direction altogether as I scanned the street level.\n\n\"Don't make me charge you, Lincoln Kelly. Z Unit has a speckled history already.\"\n\n\"I know that, sir. It would be great if you could let me know what I've done.\" The words came out strained between clenched teeth and I didn't care about decorum.\n\n\"The woman you've been flirting with all night. Did you leave her alone at any point? Did she get into the office? I'm getting sick of saving your neck, Kelly.\"\n\nYou didn't save my neck. My dog did. You hauled us out two hours too late.\n\nAnd Ridgell would likely hang that one over me for the rest of my career.\n\nHis words collided with my brain in a trainwreck.\n\nHadleigh.\n\nI ground my teeth together. She hadn't been alone at any point during the night, had she? Ridgell's words crashed into me, colliding with my Christmas dinner in an unpleasant train smash.\n\nShe was an agent...but for who, or which organisation? After I'd eaten her cover story, which had clearly been a fallacy designed for our Christmas-themed consumption, I hadn't given her access to sensitive files a second thought. How many times had she walked out of the room unattended? She'd helped me serve the table, and she'd visited the bathroom. And she'd gotten upset after we'd gone around the table to honour those we missed. Had that been her opportunity? How long had she been away? Long enough to do any damage? The computers were locked down. Maybe.\n\nI groaned silently into the blackened night sky.\n\nI hadn't wanted to let her into my life, or unbalance the status quo. What a ridiculous concept. She hadn't unbalanced it\u2014she completely unhinged it.\n\nWas she international intelligence? A spy from another nation? Had I given away the secrets I was meant to protect? Betraying one's country, even if it was unintentional, came under the banner of treason and its own world of hurt. But that was nothing compared to the snake that drew its way around my heart, strangling it in a drawn out breath.\n\nThis is what comes from having fun and getting involved with someone.\n\nA sigh gusted between my teeth, and I forced my jaw open in an attempt to speak normally.\n\n\"Fine. Who is she?\" If Hadleigh was even her real name. It probably wasn't. Was any of it real?\n\n\"ASIO. One of Australia's finest intel officers. She was on an audit, I'm told, like it was a Sunday picnic.\" Ridgell snorted down the line, though static distorted it. \"No, I'm not going to charge you. But consider it a wake up call. You're far from invincible, Kelly.\"\n\nHe hung up before I could argue my case, though to be fair, my position was fairly weak.\n\nRight back at you, sir.\n\nI'd bought Hadleigh's story, the obviously fake ID she'd shown without a second thought. Ridgell would never send us a care package; he'd be more likely to blast the unit from the face of the country. The only package I'd taken note of was the one wrapped up in a pretty smile, a cute red top and those white, cut-off jeans.\n\nI lowered my phone, and squeezed it tight in my fist until it creaked under the pressure.\n\nThe thing buzzed, and I nearly wet myself.\n\nWhen I read the message from an unknown number, it was a close thing.\n\nThanks for Christmas dinner. It was almost as good as a Sunday picnic. I loved learning your stories, Ace.\n\nThe little minx had been listening in on my call.\n\nI huffed back a laugh, and turned my phone off before I hit reply and did something else questionable. Instead, I walked back through the doors of Fairview House, grinning like an idiot.\n\nThe boys slumped in their chairs, playing a lacklustre hand of poker. Queen wiggled his fingers at me, while his brother snored in his seat beside him.\n\nI had a dawn pack march to plan, and the night's event gave me reason to bring the date forward...to tomorrow.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ BAYOU LANE by ANNA G BERRY ]\n\nAll you hear about are white Christmases, but have you heard of a bayou Christmas?\n\nYou see, I live in southern Louisiana where it can get into the ninety's in December. Our Santa drives a Peru pulled by an alligator; our Rudolph is an albino white alligator named Couyon. Santa doesn't come down the chimney but instead he comes through the back door. And if you're wondering if we leave cookies and milk out for him? We sure do.\n\nI love walking down the city streets with all the lights up, sparkling off each other, and the things around them as well. I'm so glad that I work at The Roosevelt as the General Manager. The hotel is always beautifully decorated and magical.\n\nToday I am in charge of a Christmas event for a powerful and rich person who I have yet to meet. I'm actually on the way to meet him, he's requested that I be in charge of the party, and the meeting. Hope it's not very long, I have things to do around here. I grab my clipboard and make my way to one of the smaller meeting rooms.\n\nOur smaller rooms only have a table and four chairs, so it's great for what it's being used for today. I grab the door handle and open the door. There stands a gorgeous view. A man who is taller than me, and I'm five foot, eleven inches. He has to be at least six feet or taller. His skin is the colour of the desert kissed by the sun; his hair is like the night sky on a clear night. We meet each other's eyes, and they are like a clear sky on a beautiful winter day. He lets out a cough which breaks my train of thought.\n\n\"Hello, my name is Persephone Kilmann. Thank you for meeting me today,\" I say as I hold out my hand.\n\n\"Hello. It's nice to meet you. Unusual name, and very beautiful. My name is Mattion Giovanni,\" he tells me as he gives me a hand shake.\n\nWe both take a seat across from each other, he pulls out some papers and places them on the table. I reach over and grab the stack of papers. The stack is surprisingly thin. I read over the papers to see that it is going to be fairly easy. I look up to see that he is staring at me. It oddly feels right, I give him a smile.\n\n\"This can all surely be done by Christmas sir,\" I say as I place the papers in a folder.\n\n\"Thank you, I will be looking over the party as you organise it.\" He gives a crooked smile.\n\n\"Okay, awesome. Tomorrow I'll be getting all the supplies.\" I stand up and walk to the door.\n\n\"Then I will come with you.\" He stands up and gives me a nod.\n\nWe walk out of the room and I head to the office; I can hear footsteps behind me. I look over my shoulder to see that he is behind me. I take a deep breath and make my way into the office. I walk towards the girl behind the desk.\n\n\"I would like to speak to the owner,\" I tell her as I give her a smile.\n\n\"Oh, yes ma'am,\" she says as she shuffles off to grab him.\n\nI walk over to a nearby chair and take a seat. I look around to see that Mr. Giovanni is no longer following me. I take a deep breath, god can he be intense. The wait is surprisingly small. I grab my phone to look at the time and I hear footsteps walking my way. I look up to see nothing more than Mr. Giovanni. I take a deep breath again; this is going to be great. I cannot help but think that I am being played.\n\n\"Right this way,\" he says as he holds the door open for me.\n\nI walk through the door and take a seat in one of the chairs that is in front of his desk. I think it is better if he does all the talking, as I am not in the mood at this moment. I can hear him closing the door and locking it so no one can disturb us.\n\n\"Sorry for not telling you who I really am during the meeting,\" He finally says after we have been staring at each other for a few minutes.\n\n\"That could have helped me out in the long run, you know.\" I can't help but let out a big sigh.\n\nHe lets out a laugh and says, \"I am aware of that. As you are aware that my family started this hotel and has had the best Christmas parties every year.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am fully aware of all that. What do you think about Christmas parties through the ages? Like remembering what it was, and what it is now?\" I say aloud as I feel more excited for it.\n\n\"That sounds great, send me a list of what you come up with, and we will go from there,\" he says as he gives me a smile.\n\n\"You got it.\" I stand up and walk to the door.\n\nI get to the door before I hear a cough. I turn to see that he is pointing to the chair I just got up from. I take another deep breath so as to not say anything, and walk back to the chair. I look at him to see that he is too busy looking through his phone.\n\n\"Is there anything else that you might want to add to the party?\" I ask as I sit down.\n\n\"Yes, could there be a big send off at the end of the party?\" He taps his pen against the desk.\n\n\"I'm sure I can think of something that would be nice,\" I say as I give him a smile.\n\nHe gives me a nod and I walk out of his office. I close the door and place the back of my head against the office door. What have I gotten myself into? Is this party really for me? I let out a sigh and remind myself that all I have to do is try to stay away from the temptation of Mr. Giovanni.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ THE MAGIC OF YULE by NATALIE-NICOLE BATES ]\n\nThe only thing keeping her in the caf\u00e9 was the warm fire and the fact there was a blizzard going on outside.\n\nRyanna drummed her fingers on the table before once again looking at her watch. It was the morning of January 5, five minutes past midnight. It was official: She'd been stood up.\n\nNow sitting alone in a caf\u00e9 and staring into the dredges of leftover cold cappuccino, she contemplated the reality of her situation. From the very beginning, when she first met Bobby Pearson, something felt - off.\n\nThe first time she saw him was a week before Christmas, through a window at the long-shuttered antique shop. She was admiring an antique Frozen Charlotte doll, like one her grandmother once gave her as a child. Ryanna loved the doll and was fascinated by the tale of the young woman who didn't listen to her parents and went out in a blizzard for a ride with friends without a coat, and perished in the storm.\n\nHe was inside the shop cleaning glass counters. He looked up from his work and raised a hand with a small hello.\n\nThe day following Christmas, she was once again in front of the shop admiring the doll and wishing the shop would open soon so she could at least ask the price, but knowing it was likely well out of her budget.\n\nLost in that thought, she was startled when a hand touched her shoulder. It was him. Tall, with long wavy hair and dark eyes she knew she could lose herself in.\n\n\"What's caught your fancy?\" He asked.\n\n\"The Frozen Charlotte. I love looking at it.\"\n\nHe only nodded in response, but he didn't seem in any hurry to go into the shop.\n\n\"Are you reopening the antique shop?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. I inherited this building recently from a relative. Right now, I'm just cleaning up, taking inventory, and...\" he shrugged his shoulders beneath his heavy winter coat. \"We'll see, I guess.\"\n\nThey met for coffee a day later, and another coffee a day after that. Things seemed to be going well, at least for Ryanna.\n\nThen it happened.\n\nOn New Year's Eve, she went to the caf\u00e9 to celebrate the new year with a glass of wine and to enjoy the atmosphere. She was delighted when Bobby appeared. They danced close, and at the stroke of midnight, she waited for a magical kiss to usher in the new year.\n\nA kiss that never happened.\n\nHe was just shy, she assured herself. So, she took matters into her own hands...or actually, her lips. On tiptoes, she attempted to place a friendly closed-mouth kiss against his lips, only for Bobby to move his face, and her kiss landed awkwardly on his chin.\n\nTalk about an embarrassing moment.\n\nHe averted his eyes and mumbled an apology, while Ryanna wanted nothing more at that moment to vanish. Which she did, moments later when he offered to get her another glass of wine.\n\nThen out of the blue, he sent a text asking to meet her at the caf\u00e9 that night. She was skeptical but wanted to give him one more chance. The truth was, she liked him, but maybe any interest on his part was just her imagination.\n\nYet sadly she'd been right.\n\nHere it was, now the first minutes of Twelfth Night, and she was alone.\n\nThe signs were all there.\n\nHe spoke little about himself beyond scratching the surface of his life. She sensed he wasn't a cold or cruel man, just lonely and...stuck.\n\nSometimes she could see it in his eyes. That he had things to tell her, so much to reveal. But in his dark eyes lurked a world of sorrow and hurt. A man who lost his magic and happiness and didn't know how to reclaim it.\n\nShe dabbed her lips with a linen napkin and slid back her chair. Enough humiliation for one night. It was time to trudge back to her home and forget all about this night, and about that man.\n\nClimbing into her coat, she tossed a few bills onto the table to take care of her tab and made her way to the exit.\n\nAs soon as she stepped outside the warmth of the caf\u00e9, the cutting wind whipped her hair furiously around her face. She made her way along the sidewalk and tried to step on the snow that had already been smushed down by others before her. The sky above was dark and clear, the snow clouds pushed out. It was colder than ever.\n\nAlmost no one was on the street, just a man filling the newspaper box with the morning edition, and a couple walking hand in hand laughing across the street. Most likely everyone was home in bed or snuggling with a loved one in front of the television.\n\nShe didn't think much of the footsteps she heard thudding on the snow behind her until they were nearly on top of her. She glanced back to see Bobby. She picked up her pace.\n\n\"Ryanna! Wait!\" He called out.\n\nShould she stop, or just ignore him? Her conscience teetered.\n\n\"Please, Ryanna, just stop!\"\n\nWell, he did say please. She halted in her tracks but did not turn back.\n\nWithin a few seconds, he was beside her.\n\n\"Why didn't you wait for me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Wait for you? I waited for two hours!\" She blurted. Her tone was stronger than she intended, but she was angry and freezing.\n\n\"I left a message for you. Didn't you get it?\"\n\nShe chuckled a little, but not pleasantly. \"Come on Bobby, you've lived in this little town long enough to know that cell phone service is patchy at best.\" She opened her clutch and rifled around the contents of her phone. She pressed a few commands and handed him the phone. \"See, no service? No service means no message.\"\n\nShe began to walk again.\n\n\"Ryanna, I'm sorry,\" he said.\n\nThere was such sincerity in his voice, but she waved off his apology. \"Forget about it. It's fine.\" She said the words, but she knew it wasn't fine.\n\nHe caught up and fell into step alongside her. \"Ryanna...\"\n\nHe wasn't going to give up, she realized, so she stopped. \"Listen, Bobby...I'm cold and I'm tired. I just want to go home and call it a night.\" She flexed her fingers before they could turn into icicles and reached into the pocket of her coat in search of her wool mittens. Instead, she found the little New Year's gift she had for Bobby but left it in her pocket. Maybe she would give it to him, maybe not. He might think it was just a silly little tradition anyway.\n\nHe steadied her chin with his gloved hand and locked his dark eyes to hers. \"Please, just give me a minute of your time, and if you don't want to talk to me anymore, I won't bother you, I promise.\"\n\nHer resolve to leave slipped a little. \"Be quick,\" she said as she finally found her mittens in another pocket.\n\nBut as soon as she tried to slip one on, it fell from her hand and landed in the snow. They both bent down at the same time to retrieve the mitten, his hand landing on top of hers. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze, and she looked up to see him smile at her. For the first time in this brief, for lack of a better word, relationship, there was a breakthrough. Yet just as his lips descended upon hers, Ryanna heard the sound of a car engine, followed by a car barreling down the street and an ear-piercing screech of the brakes.\n\nBefore either could react, the car jumped the curb. The next thing Ryanna felt was a mighty shove, and Bobby's body on top of hers, shielding her from the impact. As she lay in the snow, shock froze her body. For a moment she could do nothing but stare up into the black, night sky. In the distance, she heard the car drive off at an alarming rate of speed.\n\nSlowly, she regained her senses. \"Bobby, are you okay?\" She said a swift prayer to God or whatever Fate might be listening.\n\nAfter an agonizing few seconds, he stirred above her. \"I think so.\"\n\n\"Do you think we're still alive?\" she asked, only half-joking.\n\n\"I believe so, but if we're dead, we're together and that's pretty cool.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it is,\" she agreed.\n\nSlowly he got up from her body, and to his knees. In the light of the streetlamp, she could see the blood coursing from his nose. She rolled over to where her clutch landed and dug out a few tissues. \"I think I broke your nose.\" She crawled her way to him and pressed the tissues against his nose.\n\n\"You didn't break anything. That jerk who was speeding and jumped the curb and nearly killed us is the one who is at fault.\"\n\nHe slowly made his way to his feet and helped Ryanna up. \"Are you okay, anything hurt?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Just more shocked and scared than anything. There's no one around. We could have been injured and on the ground, in the snow, until it was too late,\" she murmured, fighting back the tears that desperately wanted to flow.\n\nHe wrapped a protective arm around her. \"We're fine, so don't even think that. Let's get to my flat and warm up. I'll call the police, and then you and I can talk...if you want to.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I would like that...very much.\"\n\nRyanna finally stopped shaking in the warmth of Bobby's flat. She tenderly cleaned the blood from his nose, and in the light of the flat, it only looked bruised, not broken.\n\nShe curled up on the sofa with him beneath a blanket. For a while, they simply recovered in silence from the near-miss tragedy.\n\nFinally, he spoke. \"I want to try to explain to you why I have been so distant.\"\n\nShe nodded in agreement. If he couldn't open up to her, then how could they ever move on as friends, or possibly even more?\n\n\"First let me say, Ryanna, I like you. Even though we haven't known each other very long, I like you...a lot. There was this...instant spark, at least on my part.\"\n\nHe shifted a bit beneath the blanket. Maybe he was embarrassed. \"Of course, I feel it, too,\" she admitted, and hoped it would alleviate his discomfort. Now that he was talking, she didn't want him to clam up again.\n\n\"Some time ago, I lost my fianc\u00e9e. She died shortly before our wedding. Since then, I've sort of distanced myself from everyone and everything that meant something to me.\"\n\nShock rocked her body. She didn't know what she expected he'd say, but it wasn't this. \"Bobby, I'm so sorry...\"\n\nHe put a hand up to silence her. \"Don't be sorry, just listen, if that's okay.\"\n\n\"When the opportunity came about to move here and work on the antique shop, it gave me a lot of time to think, and the more I thought about things, the more my mind cleared. Maybe it was acceptance...I don't know. Then I met you, and I went back into a tailspin. There was the part of me that was so happy to connect with someone again, and the other part...\" He stopped and shook his head, \"that felt guilt. I mean, I know Lauren is long gone, and she is never coming back, but still...\"\n\nShe absorbed his words, glad that he was able to unburden himself. Taking his hand, she said, \"Thank you for telling me. All I ask of you is, to be honest, and don't hide what you're feeling because it's unfair to both of us. If you need to just be friends, that's okay with me. If you think you're ready to see where this might lead, I'd like that.\"\n\nHis answer was to press his parted hips to hers.\n\n\"I have something for you.\" He smiled.\n\n\"Really? I have something for you, too.\"\n\nHe rose from the couch and retrieved a small, wrapped gift from the mantle. \"I'm sorry it's late for both Christmas and New Year's,\" he sighed as he retook his seat beside her.\n\n\"It's just in time for Twelfth Night,\" she assured. She removed the tiny bow, the festive wrap, and removed the lid of the small pink box to reveal the Frozen Charlotte doll she'd admired so many times in the window of the antique shop. \"Oh, Bobby!\" She gasped. \"It's perfect! Thank you so much.\" She pressed her cheek to his. \"Now you,\" she handed him the little pouch.\n\nHis dark brows drew together. \"Thank you, but...\"\n\nShe laughed. \"What is it, right?\" Before he could answer she said, \"It's a Twelfth Night tradition. The remnants of my family's Christmas tree from last season. You use the wood chips to start the fire to bring about happiness and good luck in the new year.\"\n\n\"Wow, I love the sound of this tradition. We should start the fire together.\"\n\n\"I couldn't agree more.\"\n\nWhen the fire was glowing bright, they shared cocoa and kisses to ensure a perfect dawn.\n\n\"Thank you for saving me from getting killed earlier,\" she said.\n\n\"Thank you for giving me a second chance. Not only me, but for giving me a second chance at happiness,\" he replied.\n\nShe smiled. \"You're very welcome. Happy dawn of Twelfth Night. Let's spend it together.\"\n\nHe pressed his lips to hers, and mumbled, \"And hopefully, this is just the beginning.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ CHRISTMAS PI by RK PHILLIPS ]\n\nCome on, Professor, we are going to be late!\" Nikola stuck her head in the doorway of the bedroom they were sharing.\n\n\"I'm almost ready. This boot is giving me issues. Plus, how are we going to be late when there isn't a specific time that anything starts until late afternoon?\"\n\nSimone laughed as she and William passed by in the hall. \"Let me guess. Our girl is taking her sweet time.\"\n\nNikola smiled a little. \"Yes. I am thinking I might need to help her dress. You would think she would be ready to go exploring on this vacation after the semester finished.\"\n\n\"Give her some extra time. Her brain is still probably recovering. In the meantime, my advice is to tell her that you need to be somewhere about ten minutes earlier than you need to. That helps me sometimes when she gets into particular moods.\"\n\nPeyton's voice was strained from the effort of shoving her foot inside of the snow boot. \"You know I can hear you both, right? Instead of talking, one of you get your butt in here and help push this boot on my foot.\"\n\nOpening the door further, Nikola walked into the bedroom and laughed at the sight in front of her. On the bed was Peyton, sprawled on her back with her right knee bent towards her face and foot up in the air. She had one hand on each side of the fur-lined boot. To complete the look, the dear woman was bent upwards like she was holding a crunch position and her tongue was sticking out on the side as if that would give her extra strength.\n\n\"What is going on? Why is it so hard to put your boots on, Peyton?\"\n\nPeyton gave up and collapsed back, letting her leg fall. She was spread eagle, helpless, and done. \"You all go without me. My foot must have grown overnight.\"\n\nSimone sashayed in the room and straight up to her friend. \"Let me see this.\" She began to tug it off and Peyton attempted to stop her. \"Stop that.\" Simone pulled the boot off and looked inside. \"First of all, there is still some paper in the toe. Secondly, this isn't your size. Did you grab the wrong one?\"\n\nThat sent Nikola off on a new round of laughter and even William who was propped up in the doorway chuckled.\n\nPeyton shot up and sent a glare at the two before grabbing the offending boot. \"That can't be. How did I get the other one on?\"\n\n\"Maybe it is because that one is your size.\" Without waiting for permission, Simone grabbed Peyton's boot and tugged it off. She looked inside and then held it out for Peyton to take. \"Here, Pi. I was correct, the left boot is indeed your size nine9. I am not sure what happened.\" Then she glanced down at Nikola's feet. \"Wait a minute. These boots are the same style. Nikola, are both of your boots correct?\"\n\nAt that question, all laughter stopped and Nikola's gaze dropped to her own feet. She braced her back against the wall and then bent over and pulled off the right boot. Peyton watched as her girlfriend's chin dropped causing her mouth to open in surprised 'O'.\n\n\"Seriously, I can't believe this. This boot is a size nine. What size is that one you were trying on?\"\n\nSimone grabbed the boot and tossed it over to Nikola. \"It is an eight. Let me guess. That is the size you wear.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Nikola blushed a little at being part of the reason for the mix up. \"Guess it is my fault.\"\n\nPeyton slid the correct boot back onto her left foot and then rolled over and off the bed, almost face planting onto the floor while doing so. She limped over to Nikola and kissed her cheek. \"I should have noticed, too. At least we've got it straightened now and we both have two correct boots.\"\n\n\"Maybe the two of you should mark the tags on the inside with your first initial to help keep them from getting mixed up again,\" Simone suggested.\n\n\"Not a bad idea, Simone, we will do that tonight. But, the mix up does explain why it felt a little loose.\" Nikola slipped her foot into the boot and then pushed up from the wall. \"Come on, Professor, let's go. We have Christmas to go explore.\"\n\nA couple of hours later, the four of them were inside a store along Mistletoe Lane shopping for Christmas gifts. The holiday was only a couple of weeks away and still Peyton needed to get a few last minute things if she could find them. She went all out for Christmas and this year's Christmas Eve party would be better than last year's. For one, she wasn't on crutches this year. Secondly, she and Nikola were stronger together in their relationship.\n\nPeyton loved the shop as it had different types of things that were handmade from local residents. There were lots of blankets and Peyton found one that had painted quilt blocks of boys and girls in winter time activities. It reminded her of something passed down from her great grandmother. She had to buy it even if it meant shipping it back home. She found a leather knife holder that had a fish and other details embossed on it. It was stained a pretty dark-brown color. Peyton thought her dad would love it for his fishing trips. Nikola was rummaging through a rack of aprons and held one up for Peyton to see.\n\n\"Hey, darling! Do you think your mom would like this?\"\n\nPeyton grinned at the red-and-white frilly apron with the words 'The Real Boss of the North Pole' on it. It was made to look like one Mrs. Claus would wear. \"She would love it.\"\n\n\"Good. This store has lots of pretties. I found some soap, too. I thought I would get her and us some that smelled like cookies.\"\n\n\"I still need to find something for Damion.\"\n\n\"Your brother is a hard man to shop for.\"\n\n\"Yes, he is.\"\n\nSimone walked by only carrying a little glass animal. However, behind her was William, arms loaded down.\n\n\"Hey, Willy Wonka. You look like you need a Tonka truck to haul your goodies around.\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes a little. \"That woman might have a bit of a shopping problem.\"\n\nSimone's voice came from where she was bent over looking at something else. \"I heard that. I don't have a problem. I was busy at the hospital and got behind on my list. Blame my family for continuing to pop out kids and making my shopping list longer.\"\n\nSuddenly, Peyton knew what to get her brother. She wasn't sure if he would actually like it, but with her mind in a reminiscing mood, she was going to take him down memory lane, too. She decided to buy him a small rocking horse that had been hand carved. With that, she was tapped out on her big gifts.\n\nThey all eventually paid for their purchases and decided to go have lunch before heading back up to the house they'd rented to drop everything off.\n\nThere was a cafe a few blocks down and thankfully, they grabbed a table near a corner so they could pile up their purchases. They looked at the menu and the waitress came over with a black half apron on and a pad of paper sticking out of it. The lady had a pen sticking over her ear and instantly Peyton liked her.\n\n\"Hey, darlings. My name is Lena. What can I getcha?\"\n\nNikola smiled up and said, \"Hi, Lena. I would like a raspberry ice tea.\" She pointed at Peyton as she continued. \"She would like an ice water with lemon.\"\n\nWilliam spoke up next. \"The lovely lady next to me and I would both like a Coke please.\"\n\n\"I will have that right up. Let me know if you have any questions. The lunch special is a burger and fry basket with a milkshake. You can get it after lunch for more of a dessert, if you'd rather.\"\n\nAs Lena turned and left, Peyton's head shot up. \"I want that.\"\n\nNikola laughed and tucked a piece of hair behind her girl's ear. \"As soon as she mentioned something with ice cream, I knew you would choose it.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a good choice for me, too.\" William flipped the menu over to look at the milkshake flavors.\n\n\"I am thirding that option. Nikola, are you going to make it unanimous?\"\n\nNikola set her menu down and shrugged. \"Might as well. It is vacation time. I know when I am beat.\"\n\nLena returned with their drinks. \"Alrighty, ya'll ready to order?\"\n\nPeyton piped up before anyone else could. \"Yes! We all want the burger and shake special. Can I have onion rings instead of fries? Also, I would like my burger well-done, please. What kind of shakes would you recommend? I am having a hard time choosing.\"\n\nThe waitress just grinned widely at the little dynamite. \"Well, doll, you can have onion rings instead of fries. Normally, I would tell you to get the cookies-and-cream milkshake, but right now we have a few holiday flavors in. There is eggnog, pumpkin pie, gingerbread, and peppermint. Do any of those strike your fancy?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. Gingerbread please. Wait no, pumpkin... Gingerbread. Yes, gingerbread please.\"\n\nEveryone at the table just laughed.\n\nLena beamed and tapped her pen on her order pad. \"You sure, doll?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Peyton passed her menu down.\n\n\"What about the rest of ya'll?\"\n\nNikola handed her menu over. \"I will take a pumpkin shake so Miss Giddy can try it out and my burger basket is good as it comes.\n\nSimone echoed Nikola except having a peppermint shake.\n\n\"And for you, sir? Are you going to get the eggnog to round out the selection?\" Lena asked William.\n\n\"No, ma'am. I am the boring one in the lot. I want a plain chocolate one.\"\n\n\"Nothing wrong with one of the country's favorite flavors. We will get the burger baskets right out.\" Lena turned and scooted off. When she did, everyone turned to look at Peyton.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nNikola leaned over and gave her a kiss on the side of her head while Simone rolled her eyes asking, \"What are you? Five?\" Peyton stuck her tongue out at her friend who only laughed. \"Not helping your point.\"\n\n\"You all suck. You know I get a little over excited about Christmas and ice cream.\"\n\n\"That isn't all you get excited about,\" William said.\n\nPeyton's face pinkened a little in embarrassment at the fact she can be a bit exuberant about different things. They continued teasing her and then the conversation moved on to how the past few months had been.\n\nThe vacation up north was planned for the week following the completion of the fall term at the college. She turned in all her students' grades and concluded the last of her meetings. Then the next day, the four of them were on a plane and headed somewhere colder. It had been a blast so far. Today was day three of the vacation and day two here in the Christmas town.\n\nSimone had surprised her early in the fall and said that she and William rented a house for the four of them for a week in a Christmas village that she found. Then Nikola had added that she bought the tickets already for the two of them. Pretty much all she had to do was pack and relax while on the trip. Plus save up for spending money. That she could easily do. She had the best people in her life.\n\nLena approached the table with four plastic baskets covered with paper and holding burgers and fries piled high in three of them and onion rings in the last one. Lena passed out each one of them, handing Peyton hers last.\n\n\"There you go, darling. Your onion rings nice and hot. I made sure they gave you a few extras.\" She winked at Peyton.\n\nNikola faked outrage as she exclaimed, \"Hey now! I am sitting right here. No flirting right in front of me.\"\n\n\"Does this mean I can when you aren't here?\" Peyton hugged the woman when Nikola slapped her arm playfully. \"You know I am only teasing.\" Then she whispered, \"But free extra onion rings.\"\n\nLena laughed, \"Oh lord, woman, you are something else. I bet this one has her hands full with you.\"\n\n\"You have no idea.\" Nikola shook her head. \"Question for you, Lena. Where are you from? You don't exactly sound like you are from around here?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I moved up here a long time ago with my husband, but I am from Louisiana. My southern ways just never left me. Ya'll enjoy your food and I will bring your shakes in a bit.\"\n\nThey all ate and finished their food. Then when Lena brought their shakes out, they were in those old-fashioned tall sundae-looking glasses that were ribbed along the edges and then widened at the top. On top was whipped cream and a cherry. The milkshake was served with both a straw and a spoon. The three girls passed around and tried each other's shakes before settling down to enjoy their own. William just guarded his chocolate one like he was a dragon keeping his gold safe from thieves. He wouldn't even let Simone have a bite of his. He said he had to put his foot down about something. Nikola and Peyton just smirked and went back to their own delicious treat.\n\nAfter they paid for lunch, everyone loaded their arms back up with their purchases from earlier, waved good-bye to Lena with a promise to return during the week, and headed back to the house to unload. During lunch, they had decided to take a brief nap or at least rest before the gingerbread-decorating event in town later that afternoon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "As the four of them walked along the sidewalk, it began to snow.The flakes were the big fat kind that floated down from the sky like little kisses landing everywhere. One of the neighbors had told them that the weather forecast showed that there would be several inches accumulation by late evening and more overnight. This was added to what was already still on the ground everywhere.\n\nPeyton opened her arms and spun around in a slow circle and stuck her tongue out trying to catch the snow. It didn't matter how old she got, that is what her first reaction to it snowing was.\n\nSimone grabbed her arm after she made one rotation. \"Girl, you better stop. You know that you will end up falling on your butt, and I don't feel like having to examine you for injuries on this trip.\"\n\n\"Come on, Si, it was only a couple of circles. Besides, I have a heroine here to save me if I fall.\" Peyton shifted her eyes from Simone to Nikola and batted her eyelashes. \"Don't I, Nik?\"\n\n\"You know I would gladly catch you, but I would rather not have to. How about you stand in place while trying to catch the snowflakes?\" Nikola linked her arm through Peyton's as they continued forward, in an effort to help.\n\nThe building came into view and there was a steady stream of people walking into the community center. There seemed to be a lot of kids which was expected, but there were many adults without children there, too. That made Peyton feel better. She was worried that when they arrived, it would be mostly a younger population and she would either feel awkward or end up not participating.\n\nAs they strolled into the main room, there was a sign advertising that all the cookies were donated by a local bakery. Peyton's nerves were starting to elevate, but then Nikola began to rub her thumb along Peyton's wrist and that helped to calm her down. Her girl always knew what to do to help.\n\nA lady walked to the front of the room and spoke into the microphone. \"Hello and welcome to this year's gingerbread-decorating celebration. My name is Jean and I am the owner of Jolly Treats. I want to thank you all for coming out. We have set up stations at all the tables and everything you should need will be on there. The same supplies are on each table. There are two cookies per person, but let me know if something happens as we have extras. Feel free to just randomly pick a table and get started. You can ask me or one of my elves for assistance at any time. Helpers, can you please wave your hands so everyone will know what you look like?\" There were about six hands throughout the room that waved. \"They all have on a shirt with the bakery's name on it to help them stand out. I think that is it. Have lots of fun!\"\n\nAs soon as Jean turned off the mic, people began filling in the spots at the tables. Simone took off across the room where not many people had first headed and claimed four chairs, two on each side of the table. \"Hey, you three. We can set up here and be out of the way of the major part of the group.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Si.\" Peyton sat down with Nikola to her left. She looked at the cookies laid out all naked in front of her. The first thing she did was take a picture.\n\n\"Are you documenting your progress, Peyton?\" William asked.\n\n\"Of course. I need proof of what I am doing. Damion won't believe me otherwise. Plus, my mom will want to see pictures of the trip.\"\n\nThe other three of them were already getting started, but Peyton just looked around at everything and wasn't sure where to start. She enjoyed decorating cookies, but it was kind of like coloring and she had to plan everything out ahead of time before she got started. She was slow and methodical in that manner. Nikola was using some purple frosting to make one of her characters have on a purple dress. Then she added little star sprinkles to the top of it to give it a design.\n\n\"That is pretty, babe.\" Peyton still stared at her naked person.\n\n\"Thanks, Professor. What are you thinking about doing?\"\n\nPeyton sighed. \"I am not sure yet. It is always so hard for me to get creative. I am too practical most of the time.\" Peyton glanced over at Simone and she had to laugh. \"Are you making one of yours a banged-up patient?\"\n\n\"Of course. I imagine gingerbread people get injured, too. I might turn my second one into a doctor. We will see. I am still thinking about it.\" The gingerbread had a cast on one of his legs and a bandage on his head.\n\nPeyton thought about what she liked and decided to go with the season. She grabbed the red paint and began making a Mrs. Claus outfit. Then in the gingerbread lady's hand, she drew an outline of a gingerbread cookie so it looked like she was holding on to one. Peyton gave her Mrs. Claus a little chef's hat and an apron. After all, Peyton did like baking. For her other one, she decided to make him into a boy that is going out ice skating for the day. Peyton went to reach for one of the gumdrops for the ski cap pom pom and when she did, the bottom of her shirt smeared all the icing on her second cookie. \"Flap jacket!\"\n\n\"It's okay, Peyton, the icing will come off the shirt and you can redo the cookie,\" Nikola reassured her.\n\n\"I know, but I would really like to not have a mess to clean up each time I try to do something. I really hate being accident prone.\"\n\n\"Girl. We love you and your adorable, klutzy self. You keep people from getting too serious. Plus, we all have something wrong with us. I am the bossy one which is why you keep me around,\" Simone interjected.\n\n\"Yes, she is,\" William added his agreement to the mix. He grunted when he felt an elbow to his side.\n\n\"I know you all are right.\" Peyton wiped off the bit of icing that got on her shirt before removing the smeared part on her cookie. \"Here goes take two on the cookie.\" The second time around, she was careful and even asked for assistance in having someone hand her things more instead of leaning over to get them. She finished her little skater man.\n\n\"So, are you ladies going to eat your creations now or later?\" William asked them.\n\n\"We are taking them back to the house,\" Simone said.\n\n\"First I need to snap pictures of all of them. Then when I send them, I am going to make my mom guess who did which ones and see if she can figure it out.\" Peyton unlocked her phone and took a picture of first her two, and then Nikola's, followed by Simone and William's.\n\n\"I have no doubt your mom will be able to tell who did which ones as there are hints with each of them and your mom knows us pretty well,\" Simone replied.\n\nOnce Peyton had finished, each of them wrapped up their cookies in the wax paper and then gently stacked them in a brown paper bag. William offered to cart their people home.\n\nWhen they left, the snow was still falling and they walked around the square and looked at all the decorations and visited a few of the stores. They decided to stop by a different restaurant for dinner. All during dinner, Peyton kept staring out the window and watching it snow. There was this hypnotic trance that it lured you into. It was captivating and so serene. She wanted to go out and play in it, wanted to build a snowman and have a snowball fight, and everything else one does in the snow. The way the snow looked fresh over the land and piled up on those curves along boards, cars, and branches made her smile and think about her beloved math. A poke at her side brought her attention back to her companions.\n\n\"Time to go, daydreamer. I had the rest of your food packed up since you seem to be in your own world. You didn't even notice, did you?\" Nikola teased her gently.\n\nA glance down at the place in front of her revealed her food had been removed. \"I guess I didn't. I'm sorry that I'm not very good company right now.\"\n\n\"Girl, you are fine. We are on vacation. Besides, I have known you for a long time and you going off in your head is normal. You come back to join us when you can.\" Simone put her wallet away while she was talking. \"Now, come on and let's go play in the snow so your spirit can quit longing for it.\"\n\nPeyton popped up so fast, her chair almost went clattering back. Thankfully, Nikola's quick reflexes saved it from crashing and Peyton from embarrassment. Once they were outside, only Nikola's hand in hers prevented Peyton from running down the sidewalk. Seriously, the snow brought out every one of her childlike tendencies.\n\nThere was a small park with lots of open ground on the walk back to the house and they stopped. Peyton rushed over, plopped down in the snow, and began waving her arms in an up and down motion. Then she began moving her legs and giggling. \"Come on, you all! Get your butts down here and make angels with me.\"\n\nSimone eased down next to her on the right, while the other two just observed them in silent amusement. Peyton wasn't having any of that. \"Willy Wonka, if you don't get into the snow, I will find you while you are asleep and dump it on you.\"\n\n\"William, you better do as she said. I do not want to wake up to snow landing on me. I will do worse to you,\" Simone issued in that tone of voice that meant business.\n\n\"Nikola!\"\n\n\"Must I?\"\n\n\"Yes, you must. Come on now and I will reward you later.\"\n\n\"Better be worth it.\" Nikola laid back in the snow and began making an angel, too.\n\nPeyton reached out and grabbed two of her favorite people's hands on each side of her and stared up at the sky watching the snow flutter from above until the view became distorted from the moisture on her glasses.\n\nAfter a few minutes, everyone got up, shaking the chunks of smushed snow from their coats and pants.\n\n\"Come on, Professor, up you go.\" Nikola held out her hand to assist.\n\n\"I think you all should just leave me here.\" Then Peyton grabbed her girlfriend's hand and was hauled up. She turned around to admire the beautiful creations and took a picture of it to remember this moment later.\n\nThe two couples linked arms and strolled down the sidewalk. Peyton and Nikola were in the front with Simone and William walking behind them. They were almost back to the house, when Peyton felt her arm being jerked in a sudden movement. It almost toppled her over, but she recovered. However, Nikola did not. She was sprawled on the ground, half on the sidewalk and half on what would normally be grass. Simone and William both jumped into doctor mode immediately and rushed to her side, spitting out several questions at once.\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"Where is it hurting?\"\n\n\"Did you slip on some ice?\"\n\n\"Did you hit your head?\"\n\n\"Is it your leg or your foot?\n\nNikola didn't really answer much for a few moments except to point and nod. Some passersby stopped to offer assistance and ask if Peyton needed to have someone called. Peyton reassured them, \"Both of them are doctors, but thank you. If they think we need to go to the ER to get her checked out, we are almost back to the house and can get the car. I appreciate you stopping, though.\" When she turned back towards where her girl was sprawled out, Peyton saw that Simone had Nikola sitting up and making her follow her finger as William felt around on her ankle.\n\n\"Did she break it? You know, in most situations it is supposed to be me that is down on the ground being tended to, not you.\"\n\nNikola, in a rare moment, stuck her tongue out at Peyton which caused Peyton's heart to ease up a little. If her girl could do that, then she was going to be alright.\n\nWilliam stood up and pronounced, \"I will need to look more fully at it when we get you back to the house, but I don't think you broke it. However, not sure if it is only sprung or if you tore some soft tissue worse. At the very least, no walking or putting weight on it until tomorrow. Simone dear, help me get her upright and I will carry her the rest of the way.\"\n\nSimone assisted Nikola to stand up on one leg and then William swung her up in his arms. They all knew better than to ask Peyton because she would probably just cause them all to have a human Jenga pile.\n\nWith her arms around his neck, Nikola proclaimed, \"You are my knight in shining coat, with the wet snow on it, but still you are not the prince for me.\" They all laughed and eased the remainder of the block home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "When they were in town earlier for lunch, Peyton had seen they had a pie called White Christmas Pie on the menu. She asked what kind of pie it was and found out it was coconut and almond. After Nikola was resting, she told Simone she was going back to the cafe to get some dessert. William accompanied her and drove the car. He needed to get some supplies to tend to Nikola. It had the added benefit of ensuring the pie made it back in one piece. They all knew if Peyton was left on her own that the pie might have ended up face down in the box from hitting the ground.\n\nHowever, it didn't. When they returned, Peyton went off to the kitchen to prepare the dessert while the doctors in the house tended to injuries. Peyton carried slices of the pie on a tray for all four of them into the living room. William had Nikola situated on the couch with her foot propped up on some pillows and wrapped up in a bandage. There were also ice packs all around it.\n\nHer girl looked up from the couch, smiling even through the pain and Peyton flashed back to the previous Christmas. \"You know this is a reversal from a year ago and it was me sitting on the couch while everyone bustled about.\" Peyton set the tray down as she continued. \"Damion isn't going to believe that I had nothing to do with this. Wait until I text him later, with a picture, of course. My brother shall require proof.\"\n\nAll the answer she received was a groan from Nikola and laughter from the other two. \"Shall we have hot chocolate, too?\" She poured each of them a mug and then settled down next to hoppity and ate some pie. It was delicious and she knew she was going to have to get the recipe and bribe her mom into making it for her for Christmas.\n\nThey had finished their pie and were chatting when singing from outside made its way to their ears. Peyton went to look out the window and there were carolers coming down the sidewalk. \"Quick, guys, let's sit outside on the porch.\"\n\nPeyton held it open for William to ease Nikola through. Thankfully, there was a porch swing so Nikola could still keep her foot elevated. The rest of them stood and listened as the group sang several songs. A couple of the songs Peyton even sang along with.\n\nThey all held their mugs of hot chocolate while the carolers sang and then moved on to serenade the next house. Peyton watched and thought, except for the accident, the day had been a wonderful winter vacation day and she was happy they were able to make the trip and she had someone in her life to share this adventure with.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ SNICKERDOODLES AND SANTA - A Pine Cove Springs Short Story by MONIQUE BRASHER ]\n\n[ Chloe ]\n\n\"Life is short, eat the Christmas cookies,\" Phoebe read the words blazoned across my apron, and burst into laughter. I wasn't sure if all eight years had such a cheesy sense of humor, but we took advantage of it whenever we could. \"That's hilarious!\"\n\n\"It's a solid philosophy.\" Aiden came up behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and pressing a loud kiss to my cheek. I still couldn't believe we'd passed our one-year anniversary a few weeks before.\n\n\"We have to make the cookies before anyone can eat them.\" I reached out, smacking his hand as he went to grab some dough.\n\n\"You know I love your snickerdoodles,\" he murmured into my ear. Shivers danced up and down my spine as my breath tickled my neck.\n\n\"I have a small bowl in the fridge, just for you. Now leave these cookies alone, will you please?\"\n\nIt took everything I had not to laugh as my grown husband leaned around me just enough to pout, his lower lip sticking out dramatically. I ran my hand across his jawline, feeling his dark beard, then softly patted his cheek.\n\n\"In the fridge.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" He straightened and circled the island to tickle Phoebe, and my heart swelled as her laughter bounced off the walls.\n\nI wished his parents could be here to see the life we'd made; see the things Aiden had done with the farm in the last year.\n\nThere were moments I was sure I was dreaming, especially when I stood in this kitchen. Aiden's family breathed life into the house, updating and expanding over the last few decades, but my favorite place was the giant granite island in the middle of the kitchen. From there, I had a full view of the living space, and the gorgeous wood tones that photographed so richly when I snuck in pictures.\n\nIn the evenings, Phoebe did her homework across from me while I prepped and cooked dinner. On rare occasions, like today, Aiden joined us in the kitchen, and my heart sang. While I'd loved all the places we'd lived before, everyone I loved lived here. And we had memories of people we loved that were no longer with us here, too.\n\nAiden's mother told me that the kitchen was the heart of every home. I'd been too young to appreciate the advice then, but I'd carried it with me throughout my entire motherhood journey.\n\n\"Who are these for?\" Phoebe asked, rising on her knees on the barstool.\n\n\"This batch is for us. Sit down,\" I motioned, mixing cinnamon and sugar in a shallow pan.\n\n\"Like us, or all of us?\"\n\nI raised my eyebrow. \"Do you want it to be just us, or would you like me to get Uncle Owen and Aunt Evie here, too?\" Aiden's brother Declan still kept to himself, and I hoped he'd make a reappearance into Aiden's life sooner rather than later.\n\n\"Can I call them?\" She looked at me with her giant pine colored eyes, exact copies of my own.\n\n\"Go grab the tablet,\" I chuckled, gathering the ingredients to mix.\n\n\"You okay?\" Aiden stopped me, holding my chin in his hand. His blue eyes searched my face before giving me a gentle kiss on my lips.\n\n\"I'm fine, why?\"\n\n\"At the risk of getting hit with a spatula, you look more tired than usual.\"\n\n\"Well, thank you for your concern, Mr. Wheeler, but it's been a busy season.\" My tree farm sessions booked out in less than an hour from when I released them, surprising both of us. Juggling the farm and a full load of photography clients proved to be quite an undertaking, but I loved the variety.\n\n\"You're right. I won't argue with that. Speaking of which, I'm brewing some coffee. Afternoon boost?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" I nodded, measuring out dry ingredients and dumping them into the bowl.\n\n\"They're on the way!\" Phoebe screeched, flying back into the kitchen, her long brown brains trailing behind her. \"Everybody will be here for cookies!\"\n\nPhoebe had sulked a bit when Evelyn and Owen moved out, but they each had their own places in town.\n\n\"Are you going to come help me mix, or are you just going to talk a lot?\" I glanced over at her, snickering at her cheesy victory dance.\n\n\"Mix! You didn't press the button yet, did you?\"\n\n\"I did not press the button. I still have to add the eggs.\"\n\n\"Dad.\" Phoebe crawled up onto the island, then sat down, crossed legged, facing Aiden. My heart still warmed every time she called him that. \"Want to hear a joke I heard at school?\"\n\n\"Shoot,\" he answered, leaning on his elbows to give her his full attention.\n\n\"What do Santa's little helper's learn at school?\"\n\nHe glanced over at me like I was his 'phone a friend' and I shrugged. \"You're on your own, I haven't heard this one.\"\n\n\"I don't know. What do they learn?\"\n\n\"The elf-abet!\" She burst into hysterics, holding her belly at her joke.\n\nAiden nodded. \"That's a good one. Elf-abet. I'm holding onto that one, that's a great dad joke.\" He tapped his temple and winked at her.\n\n\"I've got another one!\"\n\n\"I'm all ears.\" He pushed off the counter and moved back over to stand behind me, his chin resting on my head as he wrapped his arms once again around my waist.\n\n\"Are you going to help bake these cookies, or just stand here and hug me?\" I whispered, not complaining one bit about the attention.\n\n\"I'm going to stand here and hug you.\"\n\n\"Are you done yet?\" Phoebe groaned, letting her head fall back.\n\n\"Sorry, Phoebe, we are all ears.\" I giggled, cracking an egg.\n\n\"What do you call a scary looking reindeer?\"\n\n\"This I've gotta hear,\" Aiden replied, his face solemn.\n\n\"A cari-BOO!\" she cried, raising up her hands to mimic a ghost as she said the last syllable.\n\n\"That is amazing.\" He replied, pointing his finger at her. He bent down and whispered in my ear, \"I should really write some of these down for Santa, shouldn't I?\"\n\nI nodded as I took a small swipe of cookie dough before I added eggs to it.\n\n\"Alright miss jokester, you ready to press the button?\"\n\n\"Yep!\" She crawled across the counter on her hands and knees before sitting on her heels and pressing the button to mix the first egg in.\n\n\"Why can't we put all the eggs in at once?\"\n\n\"You know what, Phoebe? I honestly have no idea. Maybe to keep from over-mixing?\" I shrugged. \"I'm just following the directions.\"\n\n\"Dad says the directions are more like guidelines.\"\n\nI glanced up at Aiden, who made a face, like he was sorry he'd been caught.\n\n\"I like to live vicariously when I cook.\"\n\n\"Well, baking a whole different ball game and instructions are important, they're not guidelines.\"\n\n\"That was supposed to be between us,\" he dramatically whispered to Phoebe.\n\n\"Sorry.\" She shrugged, taking a pinch of cinnamon and sugar out of the pan.\n\n\"I think I'm going to go take a nap.\" Aiden stretched and gave me a knowing look. Phoebe didn't know, but we'd planned a special Santa visit just for her. We'd both been so busy that we'd dropped the ball and missed the chance to take her to town, and with it being Christmas Eve, our window of time grew slimmer and slimmer. He'd have to change quickly to still pull it off.\n\n\"I'll come get you when the cookies are done.\" I winked.\n\n\"Wife, I knew I could count on you to know what's important.\" He drew me into a kiss that lasted a little longer than the previous one, and all my nerve endings seemed to catch fire.\n\n\"You need to cut that out.\" I chuckled, then drew away to scoop the dough and rolling it into balls.\n\nHe headed to our room and left Phoebe and me alone.\n\n\"Think they'll be here soon?\"\n\nI glanced at my watch. \"Probably any minute.\"\n\n\"When we do the next batches, who are we delivering them to this year?\"\n\n\"Who do you want to deliver them to?\"\n\n\"Hmmmmmm.\" She leaned on her elbow and dramatically tapped one hand on her face, the other on her cheek.\n\n\"What about the teachers? They like cookies, right?\"\n\nYears ago, when Aiden and I dated the first time, his mother had included me in a tradition of baking cookies for people and delivering them. Sometimes it was the fire house, sometimes the police station, but regardless of where we chose, I always loved how excited Phoebe got to bake cookies and give them to other people. I never wanted her to forget the feeling of spreading joy to others.\n\n\"I think Aunt Abby would tell you yes. Teachers love cookies. I think that's a great choice. We'll have to wait to deliver them until after Christmas break though, we waited too long. Are you okay with that?\" I sat the ball I'd finished rolling on the tray and paused to look at her. She'd grown so much in the last year.\n\n\"That's fine. They'll still like cookies after Christmas.\" She grinned and scooted back off the bar stool for the hundredth time that afternoon, running to the windows to check for her aunt and uncle.\n\nA wave of exhaustion hit me, and I closed my eyes, just for a moment, wishing I could sneak off and take a catnap. Busy season felt more brutal than usual, and I was dragging in every aspect lately. I blew out a breath and grabbed the pan, putting it inside the oven to cook for a few moments.\n\nI glanced toward our room, wondering if I should check on Aiden and see if he needed help to get into the last bits of the costume. That was always the hardest part.\n\n\"No need to make cookies just because Aunt Evie is here!\" Evelyn cried as soon as she opened the front door. Phoebe made a beeline for her, and Evelyn swept her up, swinging her in a circle. Tears pricked at my eyes, and I brushed them away quickly.\n\nI'd never imagined we'd get here, that Evelyn and I could ever get back to where we were, and that she'd love Phoebe so wholeheartedly. My daughter had gone from having an absentee father to being surrounded by some of the best people I could have ever hoped for.\n\nAll because of Aiden's inheritance clause in his dad's will.\n\n\"I'm going to duck in our room. I'll be right back,\" I mouthed as soon as Evelyn made eye contact with me. She gave me a thumbs up and let Phoebe guide her into the living room to show her the tree that she'd already shown her five times.\n\n\"Cookie baking crew. I like that shirt. Do you have one for me?\"\n\nI crept across the living room, hoping that Phoebe wasn't paying attention, and ducked into our room. Watching Aiden get dressed up as Santa wasn't quite like seeing Santa as a child, but it still held its own element of magic. Especially when I watched him interact with the kids.\n\n\"Do you need any help?\" I closed the door quietly behind me and locked the door for good measure.\n\n\"I think I've got most of it on. It's getting hard to see at this point to double check.\" He patted his giant, round belly and tipped his head to look at me. \"How do I look?\"\n\n\"You look the part.\n\n\"One of these days I'm going to twist your arm into being Mrs. Claus with me,\" he replied, reaching out for me.\n\n\"But then, who would be around to capture all the wonderful memories you create?\" I took his hand and let him pull me close.\n\n\"You could always train somebody.\"\n\n\"You're asking an awful lot of me.\" I giggled as he bent down to kiss me, the wild curly hairs of his fake Santa beard tickling my nose.\n\n\"It's time to get this show on the road.\" He bent awkwardly to grab his hat off the bed and then plopped it atop his wig dramatically.\n\n\"I'm glad you kept this.\"\n\nHe glanced down at his pristine white gloves holding his \"bowl full of jelly\", and it made me teary-eyed. His father wore that suit, and Aiden almost threw it away, the memories too painful. And now, he'd give our daughter a special memory in the same suit.\n\n\"What is going on with you today?\" He tipped his head, reaching out to wipe away a tear.\n\n\"I'm just happy, I guess. I never thought I'd have this.\"\n\n\"I'm glad we fought for it.\" He ran his fingers through my long curls, and I sighed. My exhaustion ran deep, and the motion made me even more relaxed.\n\n\"You need to get in there.\" I reached up and tucked a couple of dark hairs into the wig. \"You look amazing.\"\n\n\"See you in a little bit!\" He grinned at me, then snuck out the door that led to a private patio.\n\n\"Dad sleeping?\" Phoebe asked from her perch on the couch.\n\n\"He's super tired,\" I answered, trying to hold back my yawn.\n\nA knock sounded on the front door, and Phoebe perked up. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe you should go see?\" I suggested, moving over to my camera I'd left ready to go on the coffee table.\n\n\"Ho Ho Ho!\" Aiden bellowed from deep in his belly as Evelyn opened the door. Owen stood off to the side, his hand covering his mouth to cover his laughter. His skin matched his ginger hair as he tried to hold back.\n\n\"Santa? Don't you have to be out delivering presents tonight?\" Her eyes grew to the size of saucers as he walked in the front door, her hands flying to her mouth.\n\nAs I stood off to the side and snapped photos, I realized that this might be the last year that Phoebe believed in Santa, and my heart clenched. Every year that passed, I watched more and more of the magic of childhood slip away. For all our sakes, I hoped she held on longer.\n\n\"I had a special request at the last minute to come see you. I hear you have something special you need to talk to me about?\"\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder at me, and I straightened, lowering the camera to give her my attention. I nodded and gestured with my head that she should go speak to him.\n\nHe walked over to the overstuffed armchair and settled on the edge. Any further and he had no hope of getting back out of it.\n\n\"Well, I had something I wanted to talk to you about, but I'm not sure you can help.\"\n\nAiden shot a quick glance my way, and I gave a small shrug, then went back to snapping pictures, treasuring the way Phoebe looked at my husband, completely unaware.\n\n\"Have you been good this year?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" she replied thoughtfully. \"Wasn't I on the good list?\"\n\n\"I always ask, even when I know the answer.\" He winked at her, and even though I knew Aiden sat inside the suit, I could feel myself getting caught up in his magic. \"So, what it is? Santa knows a lot of people.\"\n\n\"Can I whisper it?\" she asked tentatively.\n\n\"Sure, sure.\" He gestured with his gloved hand for her to lean forward and ask.\n\nI crept forward a little, ready to use the excuse that I wanted to crop in the shots if she said anything. But honestly, I wanted to know what she wanted so badly that she was afraid to share in front of everyone. Family was all that was in the house.\n\n\"I really want a baby brother or sister this year.\"\n\nAiden's eyebrows shot up in surprise, and this time it was my turn to stifle a laugh. I honestly wasn't all that surprised. Phoebe had wanted a sibling for a long time.\n\n\"You're right, that is tough.\" He reached up and smoothed his beard, a little taken aback by her question. \"I can give Mr. Stork a call, but I'm not sure that he can bring you anything on that short notice. Their factory turnaround time is at least ten months.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" she replied matter-of-factly. \"I know it's a big thing to ask. It's just all I want.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" he assured her. \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"No, that's it. Just a baby brother or sister.\"\n\nNo big deal.\n\n\"Well, okay then, sounds like I've got to make some phone calls. I'll start on those in the sleigh tonight, okay?\"\n\n\"That fast?\" Her eyes lit up.\n\n\"Not that fast for a delivery, little one.\"\n\n\"Okay. I can live with that. You want a cookie before you go? I know you get lots tonight, but my moms are extra special.\"\n\n\"I've always enjoyed your mom's cookies, Phoebe. You never forget.\"\n\n\"Nope!\" She led him to the kitchen, where she proudly presented him with three freshly baked snickerdoodles. \"I hope you have a safe trip!\"\n\n\"You can count on it. I'll see you next year?\"\n\n\"You can count on it,\" she beamed.\n\nHe disappeared back through the front door and began the long trek around the back of the house to sneak back inside, hopefully undetected.\n\n\"Did you know she was going to ask for that?\" Evelyn asked, leaning in close.\n\n\"No, but it wouldn't be the first time she's asked for it.\"\n\n\"I think I'm going to go grab a cookie.\"\n\nI shook my head and started scrolling through the images on the back of my camera, and stopped when I found the moment she'd asked Aiden for a baby. His expression was priceless, those blue eyes wide with shock.\n\n\"You just missed Santa, Aiden, I can't believe you slept through that!\" Phoebe cried as Aiden emerged from the bedroom, looking properly disheveled.\n\n\"Man, I did? I really wanted to make sure he was bringing me the new tools I asked for.\"\n\n\"You asked Santa for tools?\" Phoebe asked incredulously. \"You should ask for toys.\"\n\nI set my camera down and crossed over the Christmas tree, and retrieved a handful of small, wrapped gifts.\n\n\"Keeping with the tradition of one gift on Christmas Eve, these are yours,\" I replied, passing them out to each person.\n\nEvie looked at me strangely. \"We don't normally exchange on Christmas Eve, Chloe, I don't have anything for you.\"\n\n\"Just open it Evie,\" I answered, waving my hand.\n\nAiden frowned at me, and I motioned with my hand for him to hurry and open it. I knew I was breaking tradition a bit, but I didn't care.\n\nA chorus of gasps broke out around the room as they got to the contents, followed by a series of wide eyes.\n\nBut my focus stayed almost entirely on my husband's reaction. I watched as the words on the tiny onesie packed inside registered, and his head snapped up. In a flash, he'd crossed the room and gathered me into his arms.\n\n\"Is it true?\" he whispered, the biggest grin I'd ever seen breaking out across his face. \"Are we really baking more than Christmas cookies?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's very true.\" I nodded. \"I've got the tests to prove it.\"\n\nHe swept me into a tight hug, then just as quickly loosened his grip. \"Too tight?\"\n\n\"No,\" I shook my head. \"He or she is perfectly safe in there.\"\n\n\"Big sister? Wait a minute!\" We both turned to look at Phoebe, who'd finally put two and two together. \"Mom. Really?\"\n\n\"You're going to be a big sister, Phoebe.\"\n\nShe turned and looked out the window over her shoulder, then looked back at us. \"I'm going to be really honest. I was wondering about Santa, and if he might actually be real, but he really did it!\" Excitedly, she ran across the room and hugged both of us at the same time.\n\nI had to admit, we'd spent a handful of wonderful Christmases together, packed full of memories. I thought our first Christmas married was hard to beat. But knowing that we'd spend next Christmas as a family of four, shot this one to the top of the list.\n\n\"I get to be Aunt Evie times two!\" Evelyn cheered; her eyes glassy. It wasn't often that she got emotional, but I appreciated why my announcement was such a big deal.\n\n\"Mom.\"\n\n\"Phoebe.\"\n\nShe narrowed her eyes at me as she gave me a thin-lipped smile. \"I was going to say, I think we should make snickerdoodles for Santa every year.\"\n\n\"Not opposed,\" Aiden interjected, and I elbowed him in the side.\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\n\"Because I gave him three, and now I get a baby brother or sister.\"\n\nI opened my mouth to say something and then closed it again. Sadly, I could follow her thinking.\n\n\"That logic is hard to argue with.\"\n\n\"That's just because you get the snickerdoodles,\" I whispered as quietly as possible.\n\n\"I don't understand your point.\" He grinned and pulled me close to him again.\n\n\"Fine, you both win. From here on out, it's always snickerdoodles for Santa.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ LAURA'S SECRET SANTA by ALYS FRASER ]\n\nAs the twenty-eighth person in a row walked past her, without even giving her a sideways glance, Laura sighed. She'd already begun to doubt there was any such thing as the Christmas spirit these days. Now, after four hours standing out in the cold, being largely ignored, she was convinced it was well and truly dead. She had thought, in this nation of animal lovers, it would be easy to raise funds to help abandoned pets but, it seemed, she was wrong. Everyone was too focused on getting their last-minute Christmas shopping done to stop and give her a donation.\n\nShe knew times were hard for a lot of people, which is why she'd set up her little stall on an exclusive shopping street. The customers who visited the stores here were not short of money, just compassion, it seemed. Laura sighed, disheartened by the whole experience. Money didn't necessarily make people more generous. She watched as a Mercedes pulled up across the street. A chauffeur got out to open the back door for his passenger. A young man got out, tall and handsome, and reeking of wealth. He was probably a lawyer, or a business executive. He had that air of authority about him. A man like him could probably save the Southside Animal Shelter single-handed, but she'd never have the nerve to approach him.\n\n\"Boy, it's cold out,\" she said, to a gray-haired man passing by, trying to start a conversation.\n\n\"It is if you stand around littering the sidewalks all day,\" he grumbled.\n\nLaura blew out a breath of frustration. She rubbed her gloved fingers together, but it was no use. If she stood around out here for much longer, she was going to get frostbite. With a heavy heart, she realized it was time to pack up. As she was gathering her flyers into a bundle, a shadow fell across her little fold-away table and she looked up, to find a man standing over her. He was tall, well-built, no doubt a security guard from one of the designer stores.\n\n\"Don't worry, I'm leaving.\" Nobody had tried to move her on, so far, but this guy looked like he would evict her forcibly if he had to.\n\n\"I have an offer for you.\" He drew a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her.\n\n\"Dean Stanton, Head of Security, Marsden Industries,\" Laura read aloud from the white, card, embossed with black lettering. \"How may I help you, Mr. Stanton?\"\n\n\"My employer would like to make a substantial donation to your animal shelter.\"\n\n\"It's not my shelter,\" Laura said. \"I just help out there now and then.\"\n\n\"All the same, he would like to make a sizable contribution to the running of the place.\"\n\n\"How sizable?\" Laura felt mercenary for even asking. She shook off her twinge of guilt. He came to her, after all.\n\n\"Enough to keep the lights on for the next eighteen months.\"\n\nLaura's draw dropped to the floor. \"That's very generous. I ...\" Her voice trailed off as she noticed the frown on Dean's face. \"What's the catch?\"\n\n\"No catch, not really. My employer would just like you to go to dinner with him tonight.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Laura asked. \"Can't he find himself a date?\"\n\nDean chuckled at that. \"Of course he can. My employer is one of the most sought-after bachelors in the city.\"\n\n\"So why does he need to bribe me to go out with him?\"\n\n\"He doesn't view it as bribery. He just wanted to give you a gift, to smooth the way.\"\n\nLaura shook her head. It still sounded like bribery and that just didn't sit right with her. \"I'm sorry, but I can't meet a strange man for dinner.\"\n\n\"Even if it means the shelter doesn't get the funds?\"\n\nNow, Laura was torn. A nice, big donation would take the pressure off the shelter for a while, but she didn't feel right about going to dinner with a man she didn't know. \"I can't go out with a complete stranger.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you what,\" Dean said. \"Why don't you think about it? If you decide your answer is yes, call my number. It's on the card, there.\"\n\n\"Okay, yes, I can do that.\"\n\nAs Dean nodded and walked away, Laura got back to packing up her things. She folded away the table and put it in the large carry-bag, along with her flyers. She took everything to her car, parked in a side street a block away, and then headed for the nearest coffee shop. It had been a long, frustrating day, and a nice warm drink was in order.\n\nAfter either being ignored or having rude comments levelled at her for most of the day, Laura was relieved when she entered the coffee shop, to be greeted with a friendly smile. Okay, so it was all part of their customer service training, but the barista made her feel welcome.\n\n\"What can I get you?\" the young girl behind the counter asked.\n\n\"I'd like a mocha with an extra shot and a chocolate muffin, please.\" It had been a long day, so why not indulge herself for a change? When she paid for her order, she took it to a quiet table in the corner, took off her hat, scarf and gloves, and sunk down onto the comfortable chair. People rushed by outside, all apparently in a great hurry to get somewhere. It was nice to be in the warmth, away from all that chaos.\n\nAs she sipped her coffee, a man walked in and headed for the counter. Tall and broad-shouldered, he filled out his tailored navy suit to perfection. He looked a bit like the guy she saw getting out of the Mercedes a short while ago, but she'd only got a brief glimpse of him, so she wasn't sure. When he'd collected his coffee, he looked around for a table. Laura also glanced around and realized there was nowhere for him to sit, except with her, or a group of teenagers. She was pretty sure she was the better option. Her heart pounded as he walked towards her.\n\n\"May I?\" he asked, gesturing towards the empty chair at her table.\n\n\"Of course.\" Even if she wasn't pre-programmed to be polite, she would have wanted him to sit with her. It wasn't every day she got the chance to enjoy her coffee with a man who looked like he'd just come from a fashion shoot. As he took the seat opposite her, she noted the rich, brown color of his eyes, like a dark chocolate. His face was almost perfectly symmetrical, but for the way his lips quirked up at one side. His jet black hair was a little untidy, like he'd been running his fingers through it. Laura couldn't imagine it was a nervous habit. He exuded confidence from every pore.\n\n\"I'm glad to be in from the cold,\" he remarked.\n\nLaura saw he didn't have a coat on, and assumed he hadn't come from far away. His nose would be red, if he had, since the temperature out there was close to freezing. \"Yes, me too,\" she agreed. \"I picked the wrong day to stand around on the street.\"\n\n\"Stand around on the street?\" He furrowed his brow. \"Why on earth would you do that in this weather?\"\n\n\"I'm raising money for charity. Well, I was trying to.\"\n\n\"Slow day, huh?\"\n\n\"I got about fifty bucks in four hours.\" Now, she thought about it, that had been a poor day.\n\nThe man blew out a breath. \"Around here, I'd have thought you'd do better. Were you trying to raise money for something unpopular? Save the mosquito, perhaps?\"\n\nLaura laughed. \"No, the Southside Animal Shelter. It's the only no-kill shelter in this part of the city.\"\n\n\"Ah, you're a champion of our furry friends, then?\"\n\n\"I try to be.\"\n\nHer companion looked her up and down and grinned. \"Yes, I can see it now. You have six dogs, two cats and a guinea pig, right?\"\n\nLaura smiled and shook her head. \"That's the dream, but my apartment building doesn't allow pets.\"\n\n\"That's too bad.\" He made a genuinely sympathetic face. \"So you work at a shelter because you want to spend time with animals?\"\n\n\"Well, yes but, even if I did have my own pet, I'd volunteer.\" Laura adored animals. She couldn't bear the thought of some of the little furballs down at the shelter going without the daily cuddles she liked to give.\n\n\"You don't have a regular job, then?\"\n\n\"I do. I'm a freelance cover designer, eh, book covers. It means I can set my own schedule, work around the times the shelter needs me.\" She took a sip of her coffee. \"So, what about you? Do you like animals?\"\n\nIt would break her heart if this gorgeous creature, who seemed like a nice guy, said no. She couldn't trust a person who didn't like animals.\n\n\"I do, dogs especially, but I have no pets. My life's too busy right now. I wouldn't have time to take care of one properly.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's sensible.\" So many of the pets at the shelter are there because their owner didn't realize what a commitment they were taking on. She gave him a sad smile. \"What is it you do that keeps you so busy?\"\n\n\"I spend time in the office, go to meetings, make deals.\"\n\n\"That sounds...exciting.\" Laura hoped her tone was convincing. To her, his work life sounded like a complete nightmare.\n\n\"It's not, really.\"\n\n\"You wish you could do something else?\" Laura guessed. \"Why don't you? We're only here for a short time. You might as well enjoy it.\"\n\n\"I think I'd enjoy it more, if I spent more time in the company of kind, beautiful women.\" Laura blushed as he stared right at her. Surely, he wasn't flirting with her? \"Women with alabaster skin and fiery red hair. Women with piercing green eyes and the first genuine smile I've seen in weeks.\"\n\nOh, mercy! He was flirting with her. \"I...eh...\" She tried to speak, but words didn't come. What did you say to comments like those?\n\n\"What's your name?\" he asked.\n\n\"Laura.\" She wasn't about to give her surname to a stranger, no matter how cute he was.\n\n\"Laura. It suits you.\" He reached across the table and took her hand. A spark of something she'd never felt before, made her jerk back in surprise. When he touched her, it was like she came alive for the first time. \"I'm Samuel. My friends call me Sam.\"\n\nFor several long seconds, Laura stared across the table, meeting Sam's heated gaze. Her pulse skittered wildly and she bit her bottom lip to keep it from wobbling. What was happening to her? She'd never had such a visceral reaction to a man before. When her cellphone bleeped suddenly, breaking the connection between them, she wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. She reached for her purse.\n\n\"Leave it,\" Sam urged, and she dropped her purse back to the floor beside her chair. \"Have dinner with me tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh, wow, two offers in one day.\"\n\n\"Why? Who else offered?\"\n\n\"Some random stranger. He sent his bodyguard to ask me out, if you can believe it.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Sam sat back in his chair and gave her an appraising look. \"Did you accept?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But you're thinking about it,\" he guessed.\n\n\"Well, he was offering a nice donation to the shelter in return for me having dinner with him, but I just can't do it.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\nLaura ran a finger around the edge of her coffee mug. \"Well, it just didn't seem right, taking money in exchange for a date.\"\n\n\"Don't people do that all the time? You know, like at those charity auctions?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, I suppose so, but they usually vet people and everyone knows what they're getting into. I can't go to dinner with a complete stranger.\"\n\n\"What if he turns out to be a nice stranger, someone you click with straight away?\"\n\nBefore she could answer that, to tell him it was unlikely she'd meet two people in one day she instantly felt a pull towards, her phone pinged again.\n\n\"I'll let you get that,\" Sam said. \"Seems to be urgent.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Disappointment coursed through her as he got up from his seat. She watched him walk away, to talk to the barista at the counter, and sighed. Her phone bleeped again, more insistently this time, so she picked up her purse and fished about in it. As she opened her messages, she saw Sam walking out the door. She'd only just met the man, so why did she feel like she'd lost something? Her phone bleeped again. She had eight texts, all from Jessie at the shelter. Urgh! Had someone complained about her fundraising attempts? The first seven were all pleas for her to call the shelter. She opened the last message and her heart almost stopped. \"Since you haven't called, I guess I'll have to break the news to you this way. We just got a hundred thousand dollar donation from Marsden Industries.\"\n\nTears pricked Laura's eyes. She could hardly believe it. Dean's employer had made the donation. even though she hadn't agreed to go out with him. She searched about in her purse for a tissue and couldn't find one. When the barista came over, holding out a napkin, she smiled gratefully. \"Thank you.\"\n\nAs she raised it to dab at her eyes, the young man grabbed her wrist. \"No, don't. There's a message on it for you.\"\n\n\"A message?\"\n\nLaura laid the napkin out flat on the table and read the scrawled writing. \"Now I'm no longer a stranger, dinner at 7.30, La Marianne? Don't be late. Sam Marsden.\"\n\nAn almost hysterical laugh escaped her and the barista stepped back in shock. \"Are you alright, Miss?\"\n\n\"Me?\" Laura popped her cellphone back into her purse and got up from her seat. \"I've never been better.\"\n\nLeaving the coffee shop, feeling lighter than she had in months, she headed straight for her car. It was three thirty. That gave her plenty of time to get home and change. A grin spread across her face as she climbed into her battered old Hyundai. She had a date tonight and she wouldn't miss it for the world.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ MAKING CHRISTMAS MEMORIES by LAURIE TREACY ]\n\n[ Mason ]\n\nAs soon as the opening notes of \"It's My Life\" poured through her car speakers, I knew the first thing Amelia would do was her imitation of a drummer, but not just any drummer. Nah, she would try to emulate the one and only Tico Torres from her favorite rock band, Bon Jovi. Now twenty-five, she's been a huge fan of the band since we were kids. The same band my mom liked as a teenager back in the Eighties.\n\nThat's never bothered me. Music is music. I do blame Amelia's Aunt Ivy for introducing her ten-year-old niece to those Jersey boys at such a young age. Meet and Greets before concerts and special overnight trips, Ivy took a starstruck Amelia with her to catch every tour stop in the tri-state area. I lived next door and had been best friends with the cute brunette the same age as me ever since we were toddlers.\n\nBut the one thing I couldn't do was compete with a rock star for Amelia's heart.\n\nMy mom didn't raise someone who gave up easily. I tried for years. There were a few times I thought I'd finally won. But then something else intervened and took Amelia away from me.\n\nI had one more chance to win over the girl I'd loved for years.\n\nThat chance was tonight.\n\nAt the red light, she began. Her fingertips tapped along the top of her steering wheel in time to the beat. With her gloss-covered lips, she mouthed the words. Images of us began popping up in my mind like bubbles. School events. Family parties. The local drive-in theatre. Holding her hand in the dark car and having her snuggle against me during a scary moment. Watching her cheer for me before a football game always put me in a winning frame of mind. Until I hurt my knee. Amelia would visit me in the hospital, and we'd watch movies on her tablet. When she came home on college breaks, we spent as much time together as possible.\n\nThat familiar ache began in my chest. I swiped away images of our memories from my eyes and stopped staring at her. Lately, my attention made her uncomfortable.\n\n\"This is one of my all-time favorite songs,\" she remarked. Fingers still rapped. \"I'm glad you went with us to my first Bon Jovi concert. I was nervous that night.\"\n\n\"Long live rock 'n' roll.\" I knew from her bouncing on her feet that night that she was anxious\u2014until the music started. At the first note, she stilled like a statue and listened, enraptured. I chuckled at the memory. Ames' taste in music, just like mine, was still developing then, along with her ideas about attraction and desire. That night, I stood beside her and watched as her eyes fixated on some 'hot' dude as he sang and strutted across the stage. She experienced lust.\n\nMe? I was already a goner, I just didn't want to admit it and never got around to telling her until years later.\n\n\"Standing in a sea of screaming females had its moments, Ames.\" I smirked. \"All throughout elementary school, that's all I heard. Jon, Jon, Jon. Aunt Ivy is responsible for your Bon Jovi addiction.\"\n\nAmelia made a strange sound between a giggle and a cough before her drumming stopped. At the red light she gripped the wheel of her Jetta and swallowed hard. The incessant blinking, the movement of her lips, and the way she sat, rigid, like a coil about to be sprung, were all signs I recognized as she fought for control.\n\nI'm a jerk, a huge imbecile for not watching my mouth. Her aunt's gone.\n\n\"I'm okay, Mace. Wipe that worried frown off your face. I got a handle on it.\" The light changed to green, and she smoothly accelerated. In seconds we were coasting up the road.\n\nThat saying about time healing all wounds is full of crud. What time does is allow us to learn how to breathe again after the loss of someone we love sucks that ability away. We relearn a simple task because we must lock our misery away inside, to enable us to live again.\n\nPain is like the ocean\u2014it sneaks in through any cracks it finds, to remind us it's still there, while trying to break us again. Over time, we figure out how to reinforce our locks. Breathing helps. It lets us better control the ebb and flow of those hurtful memories of our loss. Ames knows all about that.\n\nIn a different way, so do I.\n\n\"When's your bus arriving?\" Her voice was steady, her fingers back to keeping the beat.\n\nIt's my turn to take a deep breath and release. We're all right. \"A little after seven. We're fine.\" Knowing how late she always was, I planned accordingly by telling her the wrong time.\n\nShe drove up Route 9 with an occasional hum and her constant drumming. \"You Give Love a Bad Name\" started. Her left leg bounced. An image of us kissing in the back seat of my truck popped into my mind. I stared out the window and tried to focus on the passing scenery. Sweat beaded along my scalp. The scent of her rose perfume that night forever wedged in my memories.\n\nWe cruised past the water park and three lanes of vehicles reduced to two. She drove the speed limit. That's something I had difficulty doing. Unlike me, Ames had always been the patient one.\n\n\"Why are you going to see your mom now?\" Her cautious tone indicated she wasn't sure if her question would overstep any boundaries. Keeping walls up around her was never easy. When it came to Amelia, I gave her everything. We had had no secrets.\n\nBut she'd been the one to change when she became the queen of secrets three-and-a-half years ago.\n\nI wiped my clammy hands across my jeans and shifted my focus from the passenger window to the windshield. After a day filled with the dullness of dark liquids and machinery in the auto shop, I welcomed color.\n\nHer brown hair contrasted against her pumpkin-colored sweater. A bunch of wavy locks separated from the rest every time she moved. I loved it when she curled her long hair. When we hung out in high school, there were so many times I'd watch her fix her hair before we went to hang with our friends. First, she'd towel dry, followed by the blow dryer, and then the curling wand or was it a brush? No matter what tool she used, the result was always something I enjoyed.\n\nThose waves were a nice distraction until my fingers itched to touch them which led my thoughts to drift, again.\n\nMan, having her walk away has been hard. I still can't believe she did that.\n\nShe shot me that look. Why was she mad? What had I done?\n\nOh, I never answered her.\n\n\"My mom said she needed me before her wedding. You know how I help calm her down. The garage I'm at is getting renovated for a week, and I have vacation time. Plus, the town of Conway is gorgeous. The White Mountains are one of my favorite places to hike.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Her voice trailed off. \"Remember when we did the Auto Road up Mt. Washington?\"\n\nHer tone warmed up again.\n\n\"I'll never forget driving my truck up there. After maneuvering some of those turns, I had to dislodge my heart out of my throat. No guard rails or stone walls. Just some boulders in spots. That's a frightening road.\" My words rushed out as I relived the experience.\n\nShe laughed nervously. \"It was scary and amazing. Those views! The clouds. Remember what I said when we reached the Observatory?\"\n\n\"Was that after I peeled your nails out from my thighs?\" I glanced over and caught her huge grin. The tightness that had begun building in my chest since she left me lessened. It'd been a long time since her face reflected anything besides sadness.\n\nSlowing for another light, she reached over to swat my forearm. \"I was terrified! Don't forget that I was closest to the sides of the roads overlooking those huge drop-offs. One wrong move and forget it.\" She shivered. So did I.\n\n\"I know, babe. You said that road symbolized our day of reckoning. We would either be told to go straight down to hell or step off to enter heaven.\"\n\nOur evening ride continued. She switched lanes a few times to maneuver around slow drivers. \"I give you props for driving. I would've abandoned my car.\" With a shift, she regarded me a few seconds. Our eyes met. I wanted to remain there, connected like this again. She swallowed and resumed staring straight ahead.\n\n\"The bumper sticker they gave us said it all: This car climbed Mt. Washington. We survived. You survived, Ames. You've gone through a lot, and you're still here.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Her voice sounded tiny.\n\nI pulled my phone out of my back pocket and checked the bus app. I'd better tell her now. \"Hey, Ames, I made a mistake. We've got ninety minutes until the bus arrives.\" Holding up my phone displaying the website as proof, I checked her reaction.\n\n\"Are you kidding me?\" Her words shot out as she glared.\n\nWhoa, what a shot to my heart. That was not the way I expected her to take the news. Maybe my idea wasn't such a good one. Right now, Amelia was miffed. I couldn't blame her.\n\nBut what could I do? I was desperate and running out of time." + }, + { + "title": "Mason", + "text": "After driving for five minutes, at least long enough for me to have to hear \"You Give Love a Bad Name\" and be reminded of my stupid move, Amelia finally sighed.\n\n\"Sorry, Mace. I'm tired. What do you want to do in that section of Poughkeepsie?\"\n\nI shrugged and decided to try again and reach out to her. \"We could grab a bite.\"\n\nTraffic had picked up, and her concentration switched back to the road. Minutes flew by. Another song played, \"It's My Life.\"\n\n\"Um, Mace, I'm not hungry.\"\n\nAttempting to mask my displeasure, I grunted along to the lyrics. Ironic how her playlist had become the soundtrack of my existence. My stomach grumbled. Every time I tried to crack Amelia's walls, she found a way to keep me away.\n\n\"Any more surprises for me?\" She asked, with a hint of a laugh. \"Is the bus stop now located across the river or something?\"\n\nI chuckled. Should've known she'd see right through me. \"No, babe.\"\n\nHer shoulders stiffened at my term of endearment, but she stayed quiet.\n\nC'mon Ames, give me some sort of sign that you still care for me. For us.\n\nRoute 9 was a highway that stretched throughout many states. Ames drove through a commercial stretch from our town, Fishkill, on our way to Poughkeepsie. A section of car dealerships in Wappingers Falls went by in a blur. We moved in a pack of six vehicles, going from light to light. Finally, I dropped any expectations and quietly sat back to enjoy the ride for what it was\u2014time with the woman I loved.\n\n\"Your mom's doing well?\" The song switched to \"What About Now.\" The opening words about starting a fire were so appropriate.\n\nAfter I sank my phone into my pocket, I folded my arms loosely across my chest. \"Yeah. I think marriage number four might be the one.\" Amelia giggled. It was a sound I relished. Had a crack been made?\n\n\"She's keeping busy with their B&B. Derek seems like a good guy. His four kids are all married and live within an hour's drive. Their weekends are busy visiting grandkids.\" I waited for a break in the song and when the bridge started, I dropped my next line.\n\n\"You know, one day I hope to bring along one or two of my own rug rats to see my mom. Every time she calls, she drops enough hints.\" I scratched my head.\n\nAs Jon sang, I too wished she'd hear me.\n\nHer knee stopped jiggling.\n\nYeah, she heard.\n\nAmelia sucked on her bottom lip. \"I'm looking forward to attending their wedding.\"\n\nI heard a signal click on and she pulled into a turning lane. \"I'm gonna grab a coffee. Want one?\"\n\n\"Nah. I've had my fill for the day. I plan to sleep on the bus. Well, after the three transfers I have to make, then I'll rest.\" I smoothed my hands down the front of my jeans before resting them in my lap. The last time I danced with Amelia was at her best friend's wedding this past Valentine's Day.\n\nI'd gone alone and hung out with my friends, but I couldn't keep my focus off Amelia. She arrived with some of her close girlfriends. No date for her either. Ames wore a red dress that accentuated every curve of her body. After the rough times she had endured, she'd lost weight, but things had begun to settle down. Her pretty face had lost its haggard edge and her blue eyes once again held a twinkle. If I peered closer, her shoulders still had that slight hunch. When we danced, she finally seemed to relax in my arms.\n\nHolding her and knowing she wasn't mine made it even harder to say goodbye to her once the reception ended. I missed her so incredibly much.\n\nThe Dunkin Donuts looked empty as she stopped at the menu board to give her order. Then we went around to retrieve it. While we waited, she asked, \"What do you mean by three transfers?\"\n\nAmes always kept a clean car. The cupholders in here were empty. Whenever I grabbed a meal on the go in my truck, I had to clear out receipts and wrappers from my console. \"I have to get off at stops in Newburgh, Manhattan, and Boston to catch a connecting bus.\"\n\n\"Wow, that could be rough. Doesn't give you much time to get comfortable.\" We heard the window slide open and she spun around.\n\n\"Good evening.\" The guy at the window first checked her out and then shot her a wolfish grin. Amelia held up her phone to pay before she popped her drink into the cupholder. After he scanned the app, he offered her another smile filled with bright teeth. \"I hope to see you again, beautiful. Have a great night.\"\n\nI glared at the guy while Ames thanked him. She slipped her phone into her bag.\n\n\"Duuuude,\" I mumbled and shook my head.\n\n\"What?\"\n\nI twisted towards her, noting the closed window. She had already pulled away, waiting to make a left onto a side road. \"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Right.\" She put enough of an edge on her pronunciation that I rose to defend myself.\n\n\"Okay,\" I huffed, \"the dude tried way too hard.\"\n\nShe sipped her coffee. I could smell the hazelnut. That's the only flavor she drank when out. Amelia was nothing if not predictable. I liked that about her.\n\n\"He flirted. I could be his older sister. It was flattering.\" Once back on Rt. 9, she remained in the middle of the three lanes.\n\n\"That's not the type of greeting you offer your sibling, Ames. He's probably still in high school. Cocky. He's too young. You're twenty-five. You need a man.\" And you have one right here, but I didn't say that out loud. Instead, I leaned my head back against the rest. The beanie I wore was something she'd given me last Christmas. Did she remember?\n\nShe tossed me another look. \"You're jealous.\"\n\nDamn straight. Ames had smiled back at the kid. \"You told me I don't have that right anymore.\"\n\nHer fingertips gripped the wheel so tight I noticed the whiteness of her skin. \"I heard you asked Laura Dayton out. How'd it go?\"\n\nTransition time. Typical Amelia. She broke up with me and then wants to know about who I date. No way will I give her satisfaction by revealing the truth, no matter how much she hurt me. \"I don't talk about the past,\" I said, a little too loud. \"I might start over in New Hampshire. I'd like to find someone. Maybe settle down. Get started with a family. My mother loves it when the grandbabies call her 'Nana.'\"\n\nAmelia fumbled her cup, caught it, and took a long drink. \"How long are you going for?\"\n\nI snatched some napkins from the glove compartment. When she went to place the cup back, I took it away, swiped the sides and bottom, and replaced it.\n\nShe checked on what I'd done. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"No problem. I'm always here for you, Ames. No matter what went down between us.\" Inside, I kicked myself for the softness of those words. Being nice had gotten me nowhere besides tossed to the curb. I had to make her see I was leaving with no return date, but how?\n\nSo far, my plan was a complete bust." + }, + { + "title": "Mason", + "text": "\"Always\" began to play. Wonderful. My seat seemed too small suddenly. My fingers fisted. Fate had to be a woman because she was a witch to make me sit through the one Bon Jovi love song that perfectly represented my current relationship with Amelia.\n\nDamn it! I took in the numerous storefronts passing by outside. I moved to the left as close to the door as I could get. I blamed Ames for breaking us up. But when I think back to that time, I had to blame someone else too. Me.\n\nI let her go. I watched her walk out of our condo with her suitcase without either of us saying a word. Defeat. I'd felt defeated. Heard her car start up. I didn't run after her. I sure as hell didn't follow her. Guess I was in shock. Denial.\n\nWe'd always been Mason and Amelia. I assumed we would always be.\n\nSoon Jon launched into the chorus. Was she reliving the concert we saw in Jersey when she stood in front of me and we swayed, singing along with practically everyone else inside that stadium?\n\nOn the way home, I sang those words to her while I drove. With one hand on the wheel and my other wrapped around her shoulder in my usual position, there was no other place I wanted to be. The feel of her loose hair against my skin and having her cocooned alongside me that way.\n\nMemories. Was she remembering that night or others like it?\n\nI shifted back in my seat and cracked open the window to have something to do. His vocals and those damn lyrics were too much. I felt like a tire with a nail stuck in the tread, about to explode.\n\nA horn sounded. Amelia cursed and shouted, \"Learn to drive, jerk!\"\n\nThe recognizable taillights of a Corvette glowed as the car weaved from lane to lane. I used to drive that way\u2014like an impatient jerk.\n\nNight had fallen. Streetlights glowed. Each town decorated their lamp posts with various seasonal items. This area boasted wreaths with colorful lights. The song switched to \"Runaway.\" Good. That one I could handle.\n\n\"Hot car with an idiot behind the wheel,\" she muttered.\n\nI didn't want her mad tonight. Remember us, babe. \"Hey, thanks for driving me.\"\n\nShe waved my words away with one hand. \"Sure. I don't mind the drive. It is a good thirty to forty minutes without traffic. It's just I was surprised at the request. I thought one of the guys would drop you off. How's the truck?\"\n\n\"Most of my friends are settling down.\" I sighed, missing the old days. \"Let's see...Gary's wife had a baby a few months ago. Jax got engaged over the summer and now spends all his time with Kendra. Liam and Brad are both married and have babies. I'm the only single guy left.\" Saying it out loud made it real. \"Wow.\"\n\n\"What?\" We hit the busy commercial section of Route 9 in the town of Poughkeepsie. Shopping centers and the occasional stand-alone businesses filled block after block. Every light she approached switched red as if the town was getting back at her for something.\n\nI took my beanie off and ran my fingers through my hair. \"It's just that I figured I'd be the first one to get hitched.\"\n\nFor years, around our friends from the neighborhood and various schools and jobs, we'd always identified as being Mason and Amelia. Or Amelia and Mason. Whichever way never mattered. We were a couple. We had a future.\n\nAmelia sighed. \"Me too. I had pictures of the wedding dress I wanted. There we were, twenty-two, graduates, working full-time and saving to get a place.\" She shook her head. \"And then cancer...\"\n\nHer venomous tone made me reach over and slip my fingers alongside hers resting on her knee. How soft her skin felt against my dry, chapped flesh as I gave a reassuring squeeze. When we were together, she'd remind me to apply a cream after washing my hands.\n\nLittle things like that made me understand how much she cared.\n\nNothing I could say could give her what she needed. I wasn't even sure what that was. Peace? Hope? Reassurance?\n\nIn a three-year span that damn disease claimed her grandmother, mother, and aunt.\n\nAfter she graduated from a small private college in Albany, her senior year internship had led to a full-time position. We were days away from signing a lease on a condo in the town of Colonie. We were days away from beginning our life together. I wanted to buy her a ring and had talked to the guys about coming up with the perfect proposal.\n\nThe night before we signed the lease, her mother received a phone call. Her own mother had pancreatic cancer. Terminal. Hospice took over her care.\n\nI drove an emotional Ames to the hospital. Her grandma passed the following week. After her funeral, the family received more bad news: Aunt Ivy had a brain tumor. A portion had been removed and tested. Her diagnosis was stage 4 glioblastoma. Ivy was a single mom raising twins.\n\nAfter I brought her boxes back from the room she rented with some friends, I knew I'd lost Amelia. She quit her job, moved back home, and began to distance herself from me.\n\nSince she didn't respond to my texts, I communicated with her dad. He told me Ivy sold her home to help pay her mounting medical bills. Amelia's folks took them in.\n\nThrough everything, that's where Ames has been ever since.\n\nDifferent forms of cancer took them: pancreatic, brain, and lung. They fought hard, courageously, and still lost. There's nothing in this world I hate more than cancer.\n\nAmelia carried the scars of fighting alongside them.\n\n\"I never thought I'd be back home, working for a small company I don't like, helping my dad cope, and being guardian to my aunt's kids. I didn't mean to leave you like that, Mace.\"\n\nAs much as I hated what she did, how she made such an important decision without talking to me, all I said was, \"I know.\"\n\nAmelia might have left me, but I couldn't leave her.\n\nShe sighed and retracted her hand, settling it on the wheel.\n\nAs much as I missed their warmth, I simply joined my fingers together in my lap.\n\nMy own parents had divorced when I was in high school. After I graduated, she moved in with her sister who lived in New Hampshire. She sold the house to my bachelor uncle, Theo, and me. Months later my cousin, Sophia, moved in. She's a student at the Culinary Institute of America which is located less than an hour away. I switched jobs when Amelia's dad hired me to work in one of his chain of garages. Her niece and nephew called me \"Uncle Mason.\"\n\nCaught up in the past, I hadn't noticed that she pulled off the main road. Ames parked. The engine shut off.\n\n\"Jerry's on the Hudson?\" The parking lot was half full for a weeknight. \"This is one place I've meant to check out. It's known for its great craft beer menu.\"\n\nA small smile splayed across her lips. \"I overheard you and Sophia talking to my dad at the family dinner last month.\"\n\nThere goes my plan. I reached behind the seat to grab my duffle bag. Her hand on my arm stopped me. \"What are you doing?\"\n\nI scratched at an itch through my beanie. \"This is goodbye, right? The bus stop is down the road. I'll grab a brew or two\u2014\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I'm going inside with you, silly. Let's eat.\"\n\n\"Oh, cool.\" With that, I dropped the bag and closed the door.\n\nThere's just about anything I'd do to get 'alone' time with Ames, even if the end of this concluded with my leaving." + }, + { + "title": "Amelia", + "text": "Afraid Mason would discover my earlier lie, I'd stopped for coffee to cover up the increasing noises my gut made. After being apart for so long, I jumped at the chance to be in the same vehicle as him. But as the day approached, and the fact that I would have to say goodbye to him\u2014all over again\u2014had reduced me to a basket of nerves. I hadn't been able to eat all day.\n\nHow quickly I'd morphed back to my freshman year self as I faced our first \"official\" date. I'd been a wreck.\n\n\"Your burger looks good.\" I licked my bottom lip as he bit into the bun and meat. \"Jingle Bell Rock\" played on nearby speakers. Some juices rolled across his chin. I followed the trail of liquid down over his five o'clock shadow.\n\nI crossed my legs under the table and felt heat on my cheeks.\n\nMace chewed and wiped his chin, never taking his gaze off mine.\n\nIn cozy joints like this, we always sat next to each other, instead of being across. Yeah, we dealt with many a raised eyebrow. So, what? That had been my attitude.\n\nWe'd always been Mason and Amelia. It's how we rolled.\n\nUntil everything happened. I set him free. Mason deserved better. He hadn't asked for the situation he became part of\u2014shackled to the hull of who and what I once was.\n\nOf course, he took it hard, but being Mason, he still came around. We couldn't stop running into one another. He lived next door.\n\nWhenever my girlfriends reported spotting him out at a bar or restaurant with some female hitting on him, all I heard was that he was talking to someone who wasn't me.\n\nUnder his scrutiny, my fingers shook as I speared some lettuce leaves with my fork. The house dressing on my grilled chicken salad was delish. I tore my attention away from him to eat.\n\nNo surprise there, Mace finished before me and ordered another beer.\n\nEach time the waitress came over, she stood close to him, leaning over so he could see her ample assets. Funny, he didn't like the donut shop kid flirting, but he could make small talk with this rude server and grin so eagerly at her.\n\nOh God, I missed his grin.\n\nShe walked away with a swing in her hips. He didn't look.\n\nInstead, he peered at me. \"How are you doing?\"\n\nI knew from the quietness in his tone that he still cared. I think we'd always care about one another. Intense first loves like ours created a special bond. I was sure what we once had was forever. That wedding dress photo remained on my phone.\n\nPushing aside my bowl, I sipped my water through the straw. The coldness of the liquid helped steady my nerves. \"One day at a time. I work. Go home. Get dinner. Make sure the kids do their homework. Tuck them into bed. I go to sleep. And repeat.\" Sheesh, could my voice sound any more morose?\n\nMace was probably stoked to be free of a melancholy moron like me. I twisted the napkin. For months, that's how my gut felt\u2014like a tornado had ripped through.\n\nThat's what my life had become: the devastating aftermath.\n\nWatching my family get sick, get chemo, develop complications, get sickened by the medicines trying to help, only to lose\u2014that did me in. My emotions, thoughts, and feelings got swept away. Parts of me disappeared.\n\nI became a walking, living, breathing, shell of who I used to be.\n\nWhat a freaking mess. Thank God I had the foresight to give Mace his wings.\n\n\"You're miles away.\"\n\nI gaped at him. A pile of shredded paper sat under my fingers. I blinked my disbelief out of the way. How could I dip out on him like this? On his last night?\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"You're looking better. Not so pale and thin. Your dad's worried.\" Mace sipped, obviously relishing the taste of some new IPA as he settled back against his booth seat. Once again, his light brown eyes, so warm, sparkled as we studied one another.\n\nThroughout junior and senior year, whenever we went out for dessert and had a quiet moment to ourselves, I'd play footsie with him\u2014the sexy version where we always wound up afterward making out in the back seat of his truck, or in the warmer months, curled around one another inside the cargo bed, under the private watch of stars.\n\nHe blushed and downed the rest of his beer.\n\nHad his mind gone to the same place as mine?\n\n\"We'd better get going.\"\n\nI slid out from my seat and followed him down the aisle. Before I could grab the bills in my jeans, Mace paid at the register. Our, well, more like his exclusive waitress, waved to him.\n\nHe chuckled and held the door open for me. \"You look nice.\"\n\nBull. I squinted at him while my lips twisted into a grimace. Talk about changing the subject. After work, I switched out casual workplace attire for a simple sweater and jeans. December clothes. \"Thanks.\" I hoped he heard the sarcasm in my tone.\n\nOur breath puffed in front of our faces while we headed to my car. After I unlocked the door with my key fob, I went to open my door, but he stopped me. \"Thanks for grabbing a bite to eat with me, Ames. It meant a lot.\"\n\nWe were so close I could make out each dip and plane on his cheeks. He'd always been the hottest guy I'd ever seen, even more than my old crush, Jon Bon Jovi.\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nHis gaze dropped to my mouth. \"I hope you'll miss me.\"\n\n\"Miss you? Why say it like that? How long are you going for?\" My meal twisted around inside my stomach. What's he not telling me?\n\nHe shrugged but the movement wasn't light, it seemed weighed down by something.\n\n\"Mace.\" I hadn't meant for my voice to sound so sharp. He blinked, watching me.\n\n\"It's just that I'm not sure if I'm coming back, Amelia. There's nothing here for me, is there? Days go by like the wheels on a car and I feel like I'm just existing now. Know what I mean? I need to start living again, like we used to do.\"\n\nIf he meant to scare me, he succeeded. I swallowed hard, unable to find the right thing to say. Not when I created the mess. He was right. We both existed.\n\nWhat had I done? I meant to free him. Instead, the two of us seemed to be stuck in our past. Mason had decided on a clean break. He headed around the back of my vehicle and got in.\n\nWhy was the bubble of pain in my chest suddenly spreading? I needed to let him go and get far away from me." + }, + { + "title": "Amelia", + "text": "We rode down the long stretch in silence. Each storefront boasted something seasonal from pretty lights to colorful decorations. I pulled into a space across the street from Peabody's Convenience Store. One sign on the post out front said, \"No Parking,\" but my attention became riveted on another sign. It proclaimed, \"Bus tickets sold here.\"\n\nThis was it. His leaving real. Mason was going away.\n\n\"I guess the bus picks you up there.\" I turned off the engine and pocketed the keys. He jumped out clasping his duffle bag and went around to meet me.\n\n\"You don't have to wait.\" Mace wore a sheepish look.\n\nI shook my head, getting some hairs in my eyes. \"That's okay. I'm still here.\"\n\nHis forehead creased as he softly pushed the tendrils away before he grasped my hand.\n\nWe crossed the empty street together.\n\nWith his warm skin against mine, this seemed like old times. He walked us over to a bench in front of the closed store. I sat on the top part so that I could reach his height.\n\n\"This is my first time traveling by bus. I've always driven everywhere. My truck needs new struts and suspension work. Your father said he'd get to it on the weekends. He's giving me an employee discount. My uncle will pick her up when she's ready.\"\n\nI leaned forward. \"Oh, okay.\" My hands were empty. Unlike most of my generation who lived on their cell phones, I always kept mine buried deep inside my bag. Ever since those days filled with incessant messages about test results or appointment reminders, to calls concerned with bills due or friends wanting to share kind words, I wanted nothing to do with mine.\n\nMost days I had wished for the twister to take it all away.\n\nHe dropped his bag to my side and remained standing by the bench. Those slim straight jeans hugged his long legs, and a plain, white tee peeked out from under his flannel shirt. The brown bomber jacket he wore looked new. I'd always liked his style; it announced to the world that he was comfortable with himself and didn't need to follow anyone else's fashion sense.\n\nMace playfully pushed my leg to catch my attention. \"You're so far away right now. Whatcha thinking? It's not me.\"\n\nWow, he'd made a joke. He was half right. I admitted it with a nod. \"I was somewhere else.\"\n\nMoving closer, he stared at me. \"What about?\"\n\nI shrugged. \"Everything. Nothing.\" His beanie had ridden up on the left side. I reached up to adjust it and heard his gasp.\n\n\"You still wear this? One of my gifts to you? I almost didn't celebrate Christmas last year, but then\u2014\"\n\n\"You did it for the kids.\" He trapped my hands in his. \"Amelia, you've spent so much time doing for your loved ones. For your dad. Your niece and nephew. It's okay to take time out for yourself. To breathe. Get some rest.\"\n\nHis skin was calloused from hours of handling tools and machinery. I wouldn't even change that about him. Not one thing.\n\n\"I wish I could breathe,\" I whispered.\n\nMace yanked me onto my feet and held me. Before it registered in my brain, he walked us back until I was up against the brick of the building's fa\u00e7ade. His palms framed my cheeks. \"Someone wise and pretty taught me this method. Close your eyes, Ames. Do it with me. Ready?\"\n\nSo much of what we did in the present reflected on something from our youth. Mace used to get anxious before every varsity team soccer match in middle school. After some research, I created a routine to help him prepare. I had him focus on my voice and the images I mentioned. There were also breathing exercises. He learned how to calm himself down. We went through them each time. It worked so well by the time he made the high school football team, he'd improved.\n\nNow I'd be the recipient. \"Let's do it.\"\n\nI also used to rub his shoulders and forearms to get the blood circulating. Mace changed it up by massaging my scalp. He knew my weaknesses. \"Picture that waterfall I took you to. The one upstate. We had to hike a few miles to find it. Man, how we sweated. Our leg muscles screamed. We had a work-out. When we got there, the view was incredible.\"\n\nWith each caress, I relaxed until I became a mass of putty.\n\n\"When we finally reached the water, we stripped down to our bathing suits. Remember hearing the falls? Jumping from that ledge?\" His fingers continued to work their magic.\n\nI groaned. The heat of the sun, the chill of the water, the smell of grass and trees, the memories flooded my mind.\n\n\"Let it go, Ames. All of it. Everything you endured, all the bad, the nasty stuff. Let. It. Go.\" His fingertips pressed in gently, the pressure awakened parts of me that had fallen asleep to let the robot Amelia take over.\n\nThe weeks of stress and worry, the hours of running around, of not taking care of myself, rose to the surface.\n\n\"When I spotted you in that black and white polka dotted bikini, I thought I'd lose my freakin' mind.\" He cleared his throat. \"Uh, got carried away. Sorry.\"\n\n\"I purchased the two piece for you.\"\n\nHe stopped. \"I know.\" From my head, Mace switched to my shoulders, slipping his hands under my jacket to place his fingers on top of my sweater where he bore down, with a constant gentle touch, to break up those old knots. \"Draw a huge breath in, and release. Then repeat. That's my girl.\"\n\nThose three words made my toes curl in my boots. The sad truth? I wished I still was his.\n\nDistractions aside, I did as he instructed for the next few minutes.\n\n\"I think it's working,\" he murmured into my ear.\n\nHis warm breath caressed my lobe. I gazed at him. My spirit's load lightened. \"Thanks.\"\n\nMace dropped his hold. \"You're welcome. If I could give back one moment of the peace you gave me before those games, I'd be satisfied. You were my angel, Amelia.\"\n\nHow honest he appeared. My mind captured a permanent photo for my collection. I wanted to remember Mason just like this, in case he didn't return.\n\n\"According to the Bus Tracker app, it will be here in seven minutes.\"\n\nHis words shoved my thoughts into something I didn't want to face\u2014reality.\n\n\"Take care of your family. Then take time for yourself.\" He snapped up his duffle bag.\n\nI nodded. Any waterworks inside wanted to escape. Did I have tears left?\n\nMace stood a few feet away, looking down the street.\n\nSaying goodbye wasn't something I could handle, so I hugged him.\n\nHe tucked me under his chin. The scent of his cologne and being in his arms drew me back to our days as a couple. We hugged all the time.\n\nPulling away, I gripped the front of his shirt and memorized his handsome face: the designer stubble across his jaw, those dreamy eyes, his classic nose, and the chestnut hair which fell to his shoulders. He frequently tied it back and hid his hair with beanies. \"Bye, Mason.\"\n\nHe held my gaze. \"Do you still love me, Amelia?\"\n\nThe question struck me as though he'd sunk a sword into my chest. \"Of course, Mace. I set you free because of me. I can't just stop loving you.\"\n\n\"Good.\" He shot me a classic Mace smile before he leaned down. His mouth moved closer. In response, my eyelids drooped until they shut in anticipation.\n\nBut the end result wasn't what I expected.\n\nHis lips sank against my forehead and remained there a few seconds. I could have sworn our heartbeats matched. \"I love you, too, Amelia. You're only my heart.\"\n\nI squinted at him, unsure if he joked or not. His eyes had misted over, like mine. Before I lost my control and selfishly asked him to stay, I ran my hands down his jacket sleeves. \"Take good care of yourself.\" I whirled away. When the road cleared, I ran across. Two blocks down I spotted a bus headed in this direction.\n\nOnce I got into my car and settled my seatbelt in place, the bus was only a block away.\n\nSomething made me wait. Maybe something like hope.\n\nAs soon as my car's engine purred to life, the opening notes to \"(You Want To) Make a Memory\" began. The Greyhound bus approached and parked in the designated space.\n\nThis was another one of my favorite Bon Jovi songs. I loved how it opened with piano, accompanied by JBJ's soft and low vocals. From there, the composition built up. I knew the lyrics by heart but hearing them at this exact moment seemed like a cruel twist of fate.\n\nThose words painted a picture. Pictures, which popped up on the bus windows. Scenes I remembered. Mason. Me.\n\nHanging out. Trick or treating. Lunches inside the middle school cafeteria. High school football games. Dances. The images of us laughing. Holding hands. Hugs.\n\nThere was always a lot of kissing.\n\nTears leaked down over my eyes, trying to smear those pictures. I blinked them back.\n\nGraduations. Parties. Working various jobs. Movies. Kisses. Touching.\n\nOur past and our present joined together to decide the direction of our future. I remembered in the video, JBJ turned out to be a ghost. Not having Mace around could be considered another loss. Hadn't I lost enough?\n\nWhy was I still in my seat?\n\nThe images ceased as I slammed the door, engine still running, and stood beside my car. The slow beat of the song pounded like my own beating heart. The interior lights of the bus illuminated the seated bodies of various strangers. Singles, couples, even families with kids. Some carried on conversations, others read or dozed off. A few weary faces gazed outside. White lights from the storefronts blinked as if marking the passing of time.\n\nSnow began to fall. Perfect objects like gifts from the clouds.\n\nIf he's still on the sidewalk when the bus leaves\u2014\n\nA second later, the interior lights went out.\n\nPressing my palms against the cold side of my car, I couldn't see through the tinted windows of the bus to check if Mason had boarded.\n\nJon Bon Jovi sang about unasked questions and about those strange incidents in life that shouldn't happen but do.\n\nThe bus doors groaned closed. The engine revved. Everything clicked into place.\n\nOnly one word could describe the events that led up to our moment minutes ago.\n\nSynchronicity.\n\nStupid me. I was the ghost who walked around life while the man who loved me waited for my return. Mace asked me to drop him off for a reason.\n\nThe large vehicle pulled away from the curb.\n\nDamn it! I'd stupidly missed the opportunity to tell him how I honestly felt. He must know I wanted him back. I still needed him.\n\nFate had gifted us the perfect chance to reconnect and create our own memory.\n\nMaybe Mace hadn't gotten on. He'd changed his mind.\n\nMaybe this was a test.\n\nMy focus shifted from watching the back of the bus to directly across the street. The song hit its crescendo.\n\nThe bench sat empty. Mason was gone.\n\nI burst into tears." + }, + { + "title": "Amelia", + "text": "I'm not sure how long I remained a sobbing mess in my car. When my eyes became sore, I finally stopped. A police car slowed as it passed by. I dug tissues out from the console and wiped my face before driving home.\n\nWith the late hour, I knew Dad had read to the kids and tucked them into bed. Not in a talking mood, I quickly wished him a good night from the dark hallway and hurried to my room. He mumbled something and kept watching the TV.\n\nAfter I climbed into bed, I released any remaining tears before sleep took control.\n\nSaturday began with the promise of a perfect winter day. Whatever snow had fallen melted away. Bright light flooded in through my open windows. In my haste to hide, I'd forgotten to close the blinds. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee soon wafted in, getting me out of bed. In the kitchen, Noah and Ava sat at the table eating waffles. Dad poured me a cup and fixed it the way I liked it with two teaspoons of sugar and milk.\n\n\"Thanks, Dad.\" I sat down beside Ava.\n\n\"Aunt Amelia, you look terrible,\" Noah whisper shouted.\n\nAva hushed him. She resembled my aunt every day with her long blond hair and big hazel eyes. Is a six-year-old girl too young to take to a Bon Jovi concert? \"She looks like she cried herself to sleep, that's all.\"\n\nThey were adorable in all their childish innocence.\n\nDad chuckled. \"Well, I think Amelia realized she lost something precious yesterday.\"\n\n\"She lost her teddy bear?\" Ava asked.\n\nDad studied me. \"Something like that.\"\n\nI sipped my drink, grateful for my father's heavy hand when he measured the scoops. My system needed a jolt to get through this day.\n\nWhen done with his scrutiny, Dad began to clear the table. \"You'd better hurry up, Ava. Uncle Theo's going to be here soon.\"\n\nAva popped the last wedge of waffle into her mouth. Her cheeks resembled a feasting chipmunk.\n\nHis plate empty, Noah pointed to his sibling's face and laughed.\n\nDad chuckled as he deposited everything into the sink. \"Go wash your faces and hands. Meet me by the door in five minutes. No fighting.\"\n\nBoth kids raced up the stairs.\n\nI clutched the mug, needing the warmth.\n\n\"You okay?\" He patted my shoulder. \"How long is Mason gone for?\"\n\n\"He didn't say.\" I shrugged. \"Anyway, I'm the one who messed things up between us. I gave him his wings, so that he could soar. He did.\"\n\nDad plopped down in the seat Ava had vacated. \"Words aren't everything. He knew.\"\n\n\"Yeah, Dad. Mason's telepathic.\"\n\n\"My funny girl. Just because something has wings doesn't necessarily mean they'll fly away.\" He stood and messed my hair like old times. \"You have the day free until later. The twins will want to watch a movie with us this evening.\"\n\nI nodded. \"I'll make popcorn and prepare snacks.\" Our Saturday night habit.\n\n\"After I see them off, I'm going to my shop. There's paperwork to deal with.\" He began to leave.\n\n\"Hey, Dad, what about Mason's truck?\" I finished off my drink.\n\nHe spun around. \"His truck?\"\n\n\"Yeah. The struts and suspension need work.\" Had he forgotten? Did I need to start worrying about his health?\n\nHe folded his arms. \"I finished that yesterday. The parts came in early, and I had a cancellation. His truck is in my shop.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell him, so he could drive to see his mom?\" I stirred my second cup.\n\n\"Oh, I had it detailed too. The manager at his location raved about Mason being his best worker. I wanted to thank him.\"\n\nThe twins hurried downstairs.\n\nReturning to find a fixed and clean truck would be the ultimate welcome back gift for Mace. When\u2014or if\u2014he came back. \"That's nice, Dad. Thanks.\"\n\nThe front bell rang.\n\n\"Yep.\" He hurried down the hall.\n\nUncle Theo's boisterous voice soon filled the first floor.\n\nAfter they left, I went up to take a leisurely shower. The hot water loosened my tight muscles but didn't get rid of the dark cloud hanging over my head. Its presence signaled that nothing would make me truly happy. I paired my jeans with a comfy sweater. As I slipped into my boots, I knew staying surrounded by these four walls would not help me shake what my mom used to call \"the funk.\"\n\nJust when I figured the funk had moved on, losing Mace only aggravated it more.\n\nThe fault of this situation rested on my shoulders\u2014the break had been instigated by me.\n\nMason not kissing me cemented the fact that he'd moved on. Slipping into my red wool pea coat, two words spun around inside my mind: Could I?\n\nI grabbed my hat, bag, and keys and locked up. After I left him, I never really dated anyone. At first, I blamed the various situations I was in. A cold breeze swept by, making me button my coat. I slipped behind the wheel, still lost in thought. Now that Mace had gone, I couldn't stop the surge of thoughts and memories his absence had awakened in me.\n\nAll I had to do last night was open my mouth, tell him how I still felt.\n\nBeing a coward hurt.\n\nFor an hour I just drove around. From theatres and clubs to restaurants and parks, I passed by places where Mason and I had history to bid them goodbye.\n\nPerhaps this was nothing but a pathetic attempt to remember our magic.\n\nI foolishly believed doing this would remove that darn cloud. It had not.\n\nWhen the burden of reliving the past became too much, I stopped at a park in Poughkeepsie. By the time I jumped out, I could only concentrate on the person who was somewhere in Massachusetts and getting farther away by the minute.\n\nThis entire mess had been my doing. When one leaves the cage door open, the bird won't remain inside for long\u2014not when presented with the option of freedom.\n\nMyer's Pointe was a hidden gem. Only a handful of people strolled around. Taking my time, I headed straight for the beautiful old weeping willow located at the far-left side, just before the fence of a neighboring factory. The tree's branches gracefully draped down like an open broad umbrella. The inner section provided a private spot hidden away from the rest of the park.\n\nI sat down in front of the willow, closer to the banks of the Hudson, to stare out at her brackish water. Sunlight filtered through the smaller trees and brush growing haphazardly along the shoreline. How anything could sprout up so close to the river and sustain itself amazed me. The determination of some fauna to survive under these conditions was impressive. Voices and laughter of a nearby older couple walking along the trail floated towards me.\n\nI used to always come to the river to get away from things. Until Mace followed me one day and found me here, in my favorite place.\n\nFrom then on, this became our spot. We wound up here to talk or think or to hear the water rush up over the rocks.\n\nMace learned to love the river as much as I did. We took romantic walks here, our minds not able to focus on anything except one another. After winter arrived, we checked out the iceboats racing across the frozen surface. When the season switched to spring, we kayaked to the Kingston lighthouse and back. On summer nights, we snuck in to drink beers and have glorious kissing sessions. As pumpkins ripened in fall, we admired the colorful tree line from Mace's rowboat.\n\nMason and Amelia.\n\nAmelia and Mason.\n\nOne name always synonymous with the other since high school.\n\nThe thought of his name pained me. He needed to leave, to begin over. I had hurt him when I abandoned him. He understood why I had to go, but it still made an impact. A breeze kicked up off the water, stirring through the leafy branches. I slipped my mittens on and closed my eyes.\n\nShould I text him? Call him? Drive to his mom's house?\n\nOne word popped up: Why?\n\nThen doubt settled in. It filled any crevice with niggling thoughts. One such thought had nagged me since last night. The fact that Mace had not kissed me on the lips. Not that I deserved to be treated well by him.\n\nDidn't he still love me? Mace had acted as though he wanted to leave. He even flirted with that pathetic waitress.\n\nHis rejection stung. I hugged my legs closer to me. By the water, the air always seemed cooler, primarily when there wasn't another body to help buffer the chill.\n\nThere I go again. How could I start to move on when I dwelled in the past?\n\nSome tears leaked out as I stood to face our tree. Our sanctuary. After I quickly dusted off the back of my jeans, I spotted them, chiseled into the bark. Our initials. After removing my gloves and shoving them into my coat pockets, I kneeled to trace the rough edges of the letters. Mace had carved them one day after we'd fought sometime in sophomore year. Over what? I couldn't remember the reason.\n\nEven though I wasn't speaking to him, Mace drove me here to show me what he'd done. \"I can't be with anyone else. They're not you.\" How his voice shook, so raw with emotion. \"You're only my heart.\"\n\nWith my own tremulous tone, I repeated those words out loud. Hadn't he uttered them recently? I blinked away more tears. My fingers brushed up against something else. I glanced over.\n\n\"No.\" That couldn't be. How did those letters get there? They appeared freshly made.\n\nI flicked away wood shavings before I gave into the temptation to trace the edges of a brand-new set of our initials inside an infinity symbol. This was a new addition.\n\nMace. He must've done this before he left. What was his reason?\n\nWith the secret hope of somehow getting closer to or perhaps to glean a portion of understanding him, I pressed one palm up against the tree and rested the other above my heart. My fingers stretched out across the surface of a symbol of our budding high school romance that had blossomed into so much more.\n\nBon Jovi had the perfect song to reflect everything that twisted around inside me. With my head bowed, I whispered the words from the chorus of \"Always,\" and sent out a wish to the universe that in some way, Mace would hear me and come back.\n\nThe moment soon passed. Nothing happened. I knew nothing would.\n\nI gathered my broken pieces together and stood. That was enough pity for one day.\n\n\"Amelia, have you realized it yet?\"\n\nMy shoulders stiffened. Wonderful. Now I imagined hearing Mason speak to me.\n\nHey universe, not cool. Thanks for the cruel prank.\n\nI twirled around to leave, and my boot heel caught on a root. I swung my arms out like propellers to balance myself, only to be captured in someone's firm hold." + }, + { + "title": "Amelia", + "text": "Words didn't register. My lips moved, failing to utter anything. It was no stranger who'd saved me from a face plant. Finally, I blurted out, \"M-Mason?\"\n\nHe stood before me, in jeans, a gray coat, scarf, cap, and boots. His eyes were bloodshot as if he hadn't slept. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nFor a moment, he looked away and took a deep breath before his gaze swung back to my face. \"I got off that bus. I couldn't do it.\"\n\nI winced when his voice cracked. This was it, the moment I'd wished for when I closed my eyes last night. An opportunity to ask for his forgiveness. \"I'm sorry, Mace,\" I sputtered. \"For everything. For what I put you through. For leaving, pushing you away, and giving back your wings.\"\n\nHe released his hold and stepped closer. \"Ames, I didn't want any of that! After everything we went through, what we had, you...you decided for me. All I wanted was to be there for anything you were going through, to be your support, your everything, whatever it was that you needed.\"\n\n\"I was stupid.\" My waterworks leaked, and he choked on his laugh.\n\n\"Babe, I wanted tears last night.\" Mace scrubbed his chin. \"I wanted you to scream or yell, even bang on the bus doors until the driver let me off. Something, Ames!\"\n\nI punched his forearm. \"Scream? You flirted with some girl while I sat across from you. Then you didn't kiss me goodbye. I thought you were letting go\u2014\"\n\nMace gripped the sides of my face, closing the remaining distance between us. \"I did it all on purpose, Ames! I wanted you to realize that my leaving was the last thing you wanted. That what you wanted was me. Me...back in your life.\"\n\nThrough pinched lips, I managed the rest of his unspoken sentence. \"By your side.\"\n\nHis boisterous laugh made me smile. \"There she is the girl I fell in love with. That's all I wanted. You, Ames, it's always been you. Always.\"\n\n\"Bon Jovi has a song for this moment,\" I aimed for a light moment but failed when my voice cracked.\n\nWhen a tear slipped down his face, my deluge broke free.\n\n\"Amelia, babe.\" Mace brushed his lips across my wet cheeks, my forehead, and peppered my jaw with his kisses.\n\nI took a break from reacting and acted. I kissed him with everything inside of me.\n\nHe tasted of mint and coffee. The scent of his aftershave awoke my senses. A shock of desire jolted my body, awakening parts of me that had fallen asleep.\n\nHow long had it been since our last embrace? Oh, how I'd craved him, and that musky scent that was all Mace. My chest filled entirely with something that had to be love. Fireworks, blooming fires, pleasure, and an incredible calm and peace spread inside me. All of it seemed to push aside that huge mound of melancholy which had rooted deep inside.\n\nTime stopped, or I forgot its existence. What mattered was here. Mason.\n\nHe pulled away soon to suck in some air. \"I've missed you. Our make-out sessions.\"\n\nI rolled my eyes at his lame attempt at humor. We sat down at the base of our tree. \"What happened?\" I asked.\n\nHe took my hand in his. \"My cousin picked me up in Connecticut early this morning. I nabbed a shower and coffee at home but couldn't sleep. I needed to see you. When I went by your house, your car was gone.\"\n\nI ran my fingers along his skin, reacquainting myself with each rise and dip and freckle. \"How'd you figure out where I'd gone?\"\n\nFor a while, he watched me and smiled when I peered at him. \"With the nice weather, I knew what we used to do. We'd come to our tree. I guess even if you weren't here, being somewhere significant was second best to seeing you.\"\n\n\"Why did you carve new initials?\"\n\nHe didn't answer for a while. His focus switched to watching a tugboat push a huge ship up the Hudson. Finally, with a shake of our joined hands as if he was making sure our connection was indeed real, he said, \"I'd asked the universe to intervene yesterday, but it kept quiet. So, I came here this morning. Out of desperation. After I dropped Sophia at the Culinary Institute, I drove her car straight here. I watched the sun rise and thought about what to do. In case you came by, I wanted to leave a message. I gave you a hint last night.\"\n\nMy drawing across his palm stopped. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nGrabbing the strands closest to him, Mace twisted them around in the air. \"You're only my heart, Ames. I told you that. Our heart here,\" he pointed above us, and then towards his chest. \"And here.\"\n\nThe walls I'd shoved up melted at his sweet words. \"I'm so sorry. Forgive me?\"\n\nHe leaned over and wiped my cheeks. \"I forgive you. Forgive me for not standing up to you, for not fighting for us.\"\n\nI nodded. \"I choose us.\"\n\n\"C'mon, let's take a walk. We have time to make up for.\"\n\nI took hold of his offered hand. Mason and I stepped out from the leaf-covered canopy with our fingers intertwined. Together, we welcomed the sun on our faces, as the two of us fell back into that easy rapport we had always shared. Like those two carved hearts permanently etched onto our tree, we became a couple again just in time for the holidays which were always the favorite time of year for my grandmother, Mom, and aunt. Somehow, as the chilly breeze coming in from the river pressed against my face, a warmth from somewhere unexplainable stopped it. What happened next made me gasp loudly.\n\nMace stopped and turned to me. \"What's wrong? Too cold?\"\n\n\"No,\" I answered, still basking in the moment. Without releasing his hand, I briefly touched my cheek with my free hand. The rest of my exposed skin seemed cool to the touch, except for one spot. I smiled. \"For a moment it felt as though the three most important women in my life were standing in front of me and each stopped to kiss my cheek.\"\n\nHis eyes grew huge momentarily before he grinned. \"Sounds like one of those unforgettable moments we sometimes get to experience in life. Lucky you. Bet the ladies were giving their blessings. They always thought I was the one for you.\"\n\nOn the river a pair of swans floated by. \"You are.\" I nodded and kissed him, but when he pulled me in closer to deepen our connection, I knew. This was a new beginning for us. A time to make Christmas memories and more.\n\nMason and Amelia forever. Thanks, universe.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ PEPPERMINT LANE - Prequel to Almost Christmas by TRACY BROEMMER ]\n\nRochelle Riley wouldn't mind a few pennies from heaven. That crazy doll she bought for her niece set her back a hundred bucks. She had the money, but she had two more nieces to buy for. Not to mention the share she was expected to chip in for her parents' gift, though she would admit the big screen TV was the perfect gift for them.\n\nShe checked the time on her phone and peeked over her shoulder. The crowd was growing. Probably time to head back over and wander through the trees. Check the bids. If she could land the tractor tree for the showroom at work, she just might impress her boss and score a little Christmas bonus.\n\nThe Christmas music piped throughout the Festival of Trees was actually lovely. As much as Rochelle had always loved the holidays, she hadn't taken nearly enough time to enjoy them since she had graduated from college and struck out on her own. She had planned to spend today here, fully committed to winning the auction on the tractor tree. But she hadn't realized she would enjoy it so much, even if she was alone.\n\n\"Pennies From Heaven\" segued into \"Sleigh Ride\" bringing with it memories of sledding on her parents' property. The crazy stunts her brothers had pulled, flying down the biggest hills at breakneck speed and launching the sled from the natural bumps in the ground. No wonder there were so many trips to the ER back in the day. Still, Rochelle realized she was smiling as she walked.\n\nShe should have brought her nieces with her today, she decided as she passed the indoor ice-skating rink. A man probably not too much older than her skated with a little girl holding each hand; Rochelle wasn't sure who wobbled more on the blades\u2014the man or the little girls.\n\nTurning her head, she spotted two older women together on a red park bench, both sipping steaming mugs of hot cocoa. Though the event was indoors due to the lot of decorated trees on auction, Rochelle shivered. Hot cocoa sounded delicious. She let her gaze roam over the two women and back to the snack bar. The line was three deep, so she would check the bid on the tree and then hurry back to stand in line.\n\nThe heels of her black boots tapped the cement floor quietly as she wound her way through the crowd of families and couples to get to the tree she had been eyeballing. Ross Hoover\u2014her boss\u2014might own the Hoover Implement Company, but he was a farmer, through and through. His family had owned Hoover Farms for generations. The robust older man was kind and full of life, much like Santa himself. Snagging the six-foot Colorado Blue Spruce completely decked out with royal blue and white farm equipment would be a boon, for sure. Rochelle could imagine her boss' face when he saw the decorated tree in the store window.\n\n\"Excuse me.\" She flashed a tight smile when a young guy nearly walked right into her. Hands tucked deep in the pockets of her red peacoat, she started to sidestep him.\n\n\"No.\" He flashed her a huge, sloppy grin, akin to that an overly friendly puppy would offer. Rochelle met his eyes, surprised at the warmth in the deep amber. \"Excuse me. Gosh, I'm not even payin' attention, and I just about knocked you right over.\"\n\nShe chuckled softly. The slight twang in his words made her happy, and she couldn't say why. She'd never been anywhere south, other than Florida, and she had never heard country twang there.\n\nTall and broad, the guy drooped his shoulders and lifted his hands out between them. Rochelle glanced at them and wondered if he was offering the I come in peace gesture or aiming to catch her should she suddenly fall.\n\n\"It's okay,\" she said softly. He dropped his hands, and they stepped around each other. Rochelle peeked back at him as she turned down Peppermint Lane to find the tractor tree. It wasn't called that; it was the Hargove Farm Museum tree, technically, as the farm museum had been the company to donate it. Tractor tree was easier.\n\nRochelle looked around as she approached the tractor tree. So many gorgeously decorated trees here for auction. The proceeds would go toward the Hargrove Good News of Christmas campaign. She stopped in front of the balsam fir decorated in silver and gold ballerina slippers. If she were bidding on a tree for herself, it would be this one. She didn't have the money for that. Besides, her artificial tree at home was perfectly fine.\n\nShe turned away from the ballerina tree and stepped closer to the tractor tree. Another song played now, one Rochelle knew from her mother's vinyls, though not by name. It recalled family game nights with her parents and brothers. She reached for the bid sheet, her heart sinking when she saw someone had recorded a bid ten dollars higher than hers. Not a big jump, but still. The auction would continue for a few hours. Odds were, she wouldn't be able to afford the tractor tree. Didn't mean she didn't want to, though.\n\nWith a big sigh, Rochelle scribbled another bid, topping Fabio19 by another ten. She could go higher, but she didn't want to drive the price up higher than she had to. Wondering who Fabio19 was, she returned the pen to the clipboard, tucked her hands back in her pockets, and made her way back to the snack stand.\n\n\"Hey. You, again.\"\n\nShe turned as the guy from earlier sidled up behind her.\n\n\"Hi.\"\n\n\"Whatcha gettin'?\"\n\nRochelle decided she liked his toothy grin. His teeth were perfectly straight and white; dimples bracketed the smile. Pretty cute. He looked like an ornery ten-year-old in a grown man's body. Not that she was looking at his body.\n\n\"Hot chocolate,\" she answered with a slight shrug.\n\n\"Good choice,\" he agreed and dipped his hands in the hip pockets of his worn jeans. \"I'm thinkin' I might need some ice cream.\"\n\nThe way he said it was oss cream. Rochelle found the twang kind of fun.\n\n\"Ice cream? In December?'\n\n\"Why not?\" His shrug took a few years off the ten and made him look eight. \"I like ice cream.\"\n\nRochelle turned as the line moved. She stepped closer to the snack bar and eyed the sandwich board with the offerings written in red and green chalk. Definitely hot chocolate. Maybe a cookie.\n\n\"This place is cool,\" the guy announced.\n\n\"It is,\" she agreed. She had lived in Hargrove all her life and only attended the Festival of Trees three times\u2014the first of which was in third grade when her class made gingerbread houses for display. Hers hadn't won any prizes, but she had liked it well enough. Until her brothers broke it while rough housing in the kitchen, anyway.\n\n\"Christmas is my favorite holiday.\"\n\nShe hadn't given that a lot of thought lately, but once the guy said so, she decided it was hers, too. When she was younger, Halloween might have run a close second. After all, it was hard to beat an evening of trick-or-treating and a bag full of candy.\n\n\"Mine, too.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\" The guy swung his gaze back around to meet her eyes. The warmth in his look was almost spellbinding.\n\n\"Can I help you?\"\n\nRochelle turned when the lady at the snack bar called out to her. She ordered hot chocolate and a sugar cookie.\n\n\"My treat,\" the guy announced as he stepped up behind her. Tall enough that he had to duck under the awning, he dipped his knees and flashed that sloppy grin at the snack bar woman. \"Could I get a scoop of vanilla ice cream with some chocolate syrup on it?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" The woman went about filling their order. Rochelle turned to look at the guy.\n\n\"You don't have to do that.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I'd like to.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nAs they waited, Rochelle found her gaze drawn to the ice-skating rink again.\n\n\"You skate?\" he asked her.\n\n\"Not well,\" she admitted. \"And not for years.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Do they rent skates, ya think? I didn't bring mine.\"\n\n\"You ice-skate?\" Unable to hide her surprise, Rochelle bit her lip at the offended look on the guy's face.\n\n\"I do. My sister and I grew up on ice-skates. Sarah's better than me, but I do alright.\"\n\nIntrigued, Rochelle tipped her head to study him. His voice was laced with happiness.\n\n\"My brothers and I spent more time on sleds,\" she told him.\n\n\"We did that, too.\" The grin went from sloppy to wicked. \"'Til I crashed the toboggan into the tree in our parents' backyard. Busted the toboggan and my nose, too.\"\n\nRochelle flinched. Sounded like her brothers. From the corner of her eye, she saw the woman set her cocoa and a wax bag on the snack bar and then go back for the guy's ice cream.\n\n\"How old were you?\"\n\n\"That time? I was...probably fifteen.\" He shrugged again. \"First time I wrecked a sled, I was twelve. Had to get stitches in my hand.\"\n\nHe lifted his hands to show her the scar. Rochelle noted the thin white line down the side of his wrist, but she also noted that his fingers were bare. Which was stupid for more than one reason, the first being she wasn't looking for a date. She was here for the tractor tree. Period.\n\nShe glanced to her left, wondering if Fabio19 had been back to the tree since she had walked away.\n\n\"One of my brothers broke his leg sled riding.\"\n\nShe sipped her hot chocolate. The sweet, rich flavor made her tastebuds sing, and the hot liquid warmed her from the inside.\n\n\"Ouch.\" The guy winced. \"I feel for him.\"\n\n\"He was sixteen. Missed the winter formal,\" she said with a soft laugh. \"Finally got a date with the head cheerleader and then blew it. My dad said it served him right for acting like an idiot.\"\n\n\"My dad called me a knucklehead,\" the guy said around his grin. He fished some cash from his wallet, thanked the woman at the snack bar, and picked up his cup of ice cream.\n\n\"Vanilla?\" Rochelle asked with a frown.\n\n\"I like it, okay?\" His eyes grew wide in apology. \"Did your brother get a second chance with the head cheerleader?\"\n\n\"He did,\" Rochelle answered. \"They've been married for ten years, and they have two kids.\"\n\n\"Nice.\" The guy nodded.\n\nThey wandered together down Holly Avenue. The squeals of little kids grew louder as they neared the carousel. Rochelle watched all the parents and grandparents, eyes lit with excitement as they watched their little ones enjoy the morning.\n\n\"Do you have kids?\" Rochelle asked before she could stop herself.\n\n\"No.\" He shook his head. \"Not yet. I'd like to someday, but I gotta find Mrs. Right first.\"\n\nRochelle wasn't a stickler for abstinence or marriage or anything remotely close. She minded her business if other people minded theirs. But the stranger's words were nice, uplifting. She hoped to find Mr. Right and have kids, someday, too. Maybe it was knowing she wasn't alone in her somewhat old-fashioned dreams of raising a family.\n\nMaybe it was this guy's confirmation that he was single.\n\nNo. Not that.\n\nBecause it didn't matter. She was here for the tree.\n\nSpeaking of which, she should go and check the bids." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "The pretty blonde thanked him again for the treats and then excused herself and wandered away. Kevin Frost watched her until she disappeared into the crowd. Too bad, he thought. He was a talker\u2014his mom said he hadn't paused for breath since he said his first word as a toddler. And he didn't know a stranger.\n\nDidn't hurt that this one was so pretty.\n\nNot that he was looking. Well, looking here, anyway. He dated back home, but much to his family's disappointment, he had yet to find Mrs. Right. The way he looked at it, there wasn't a need to hurry. He wasn't interested in hook ups or fleeting relationships that didn't last as long as a loaf of bread. Kevin meant what he told the blonde. He wanted the whole shebang one day, and the whole shebang was too much, too important to rush.\n\nWhen he finished his ice cream, he tossed the cup in the nearest trash receptacle and turned away from the carousel. While he loved watching the kids having fun and the parents having fun watching the kids, it made him a little sad, too. For Teddy.\n\nHis hands were cold now, so he tucked them in his pockets again and moseyed along on Holly Avenue. Turned right on Jack Frost Drive and found himself in front of massive toy train display. Teddy would love this, too. He walked closer to study the life-like cars and the fake little Christmas town set up within the confines of the train tracks. He'd had something like this as a kid, though not on this scale.\n\nOverhead, \"Frosty the Snowman\" played from the speakers mounted on the walls of the Hargrove Civic Center. Maybe it wasn't manly for some, but Kevin loved Christmas. His family was close, and holidays were special to all of them. His mother would love this event\u2014the festival. She was crazy for anything Christmas, but good grief, the trees over there in the lot! She would go crazy for the tree decorated with rolling pins and wooden spoons. The woman loved to cook and bake, and Kevin would love to take that tree home to her.\n\nIt wasn't the one he was bidding on, though. As much as his mom would love it, she would love the tree with the farm equipment more. Because it was perfect for Teddy. He had come here on a lark, something to do to waste some time since his flight didn't leave until tomorrow. The conference was over. He didn't know anyone in town. So, no, he hadn't planned to walk in here and find something he needed. But here he was, bidding on that dang tree.\n\nWasn't going to fit on the plane, for sure. He would have to dismantle it and ship it if he won the auction. Kevin allowed himself a minute to picture the look on Teddy's face when he got a big box addressed just to him.\n\nThe auction was scheduled to end at three. He had just shy of two hours to kill. With one last look at the train display, Kevin wandered further down the drive. The small city set up in the civic center was genius with fake sideways and fake snow. Little green street signs all with Christmasy names. Maybe he should take this idea home with him. His sister worked for the city. Maybe she could get something like this going at home.\n\nAt the intersection of Jack Frost Drive and Rudolph Court, Kevin was thrilled to find a Lego building block station. He wanted to dive in and build, but he held back and watched the kids and the dads working. When a little boy appeared on the hand of a woman and stared at the blocks with longing, Kevin felt a hard tug on his heart. He met the woman's eyes and offered her a smile.\n\n\"Does he want to build?\"\n\nShe shook her head and smiled sadly. \"He's nonverbal,\" she explained. \"The other kids intimidate him.\"\n\n\"Is he deaf?\" Kevin asked. The woman's look turned sharp, so he held up his hands in peace. \"Just asking. I could sign with him. Help him build.\"\n\n\"You sign?\" Clearly surprised, she peeked at the little boy, who nearly bounced on his toes to hurry to the blocks. But Kevin noticed he also held tightly to the woman's hand.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nKevin watched the woman squat down by the little boy and point to him. Not wanting to listen to their conversation, Kevin looked away. A blond bob and bright red coat caught his eye.\n\n\"He would like to build Santa's sleigh,\" the woman told him as she stood.\n\n\"Let's do it,\" Kevin said with a nod. He signed, my name is Kevin to the little boy, delighted when the boy signed, I'm Brandt. Kevin looked back at the woman, presumably the boy's mom. \"Do you want to join us?\"\n\n\"Do you mind?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" He shook his head. \"Santa's sleigh might need a woman's touch.\"\n\nThe three of them found a spot at the table and began building. Brandt stayed plastered to his mom's side, though as he grew more comfortable, he began handing Legos to Kevin. Once Kevin had the base of the sleigh started, however, he pushed the Legos gently back to the boy and suggested he do the building.\n\nWhen the sleigh was finished with a caped superhero at the helm, the woman and the little boy thanked him profusely. Kevin turned down the woman's offer for a hot chocolate and turned away, ready to check the bids on the tree. RocStar kept inching the bids up, and he was determined to get the final bid in and take that tractor tree home to Teddy.\n\nThe blonde smiled at him from a red park bench as he headed up Jack Frost Drive.\n\n\"Do you know them?\" she asked when he stopped in front of her.\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"But you sign.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"And you like ice cream.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"And Christmas.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\" He dipped his shoulders and grinned. \"I like to dance and eat watermelon, too, in case you're wonderin'.\"\n\n\"At the same time?\"\n\nShe was teasing, which Kevin most often translated as flirting. He shoved the thought from his mind and shook his head.\n\n\"Not generally, no.\"\n\n\"Good to know.\"\n\n\"What about you?\"\n\n\"I like to dance, but no. Not a fan of watermelon.\"\n\n\"Ice cream?\"\n\n\"Sure, but not in the winter.\"\n\n\"Not even on pie?'\n\nShe snickered and shook her head. Kevin perched on the edge of the bench, making sure to give her plenty of personal space.\n\n\"What?\" He shook his head. \"Why's that funny?\"\n\n\"Where are you from?\"\n\n\"You're laughin' at the accent?\" He closed his eyes and nodded. \"Rude.\" He smiled to show her he wasn't offended.\n\n\"I love the accent, honestly.\"\n\n\"I'm from Tennessee,\" he told her.\n\n\"I like pie,\" she said quietly. \"And yes, I do like ice cream on my pie.\"\n\n\"Favorite.\"\n\n\"Apple.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"'kay. We can work with that.\" He stood again. \"Not sure about the watermelon thing, though.\"\n\n\"I like cantaloupe.\"\n\n\"Eww.\" He turned his nose up. \"That's nasty.\"\n\nKevin was beginning to like her laugh just as much as he liked the Christmas music.\n\n\"Ready for another hot chocolate?\"\n\n\"No way.\" She groaned. \"That last one filled me up.\"\n\nHe tssked her and grinned as he took a step away.\n\n\"I'm guessing I'm gonna see you around,\" he told her. She nodded. Kevin walked away with her smile in mind. Dressed in red, green, and black, she was the prettiest thing here. Shame he couldn't scoop her up and take her home to Tennessee." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "With a half hour left of bidding time, Rochelle reluctantly left the gingerbread display and headed back to Christmas Tree Grove. The gingerbread houses\u2014some so well done, it was obvious parents had a heavy hand in making them and some so bad, it was a wonder they hadn't collapsed\u2014might be her favorite part of the entire Festival of Trees. Just because the graham cracker and frosting and licorice and other candy creations had brought back a rush of memories, all good.\n\nStill, she was here to get that tree. She would go check the bids, maybe even stand a bit closer to the grove to keep a closer eye on the numbers, and once the auction closed, she would head home. She had a date tonight\u2014well, a girls' night with a couple of friends. She wanted to get home and get a bit of work done around the house before she went out.\n\nThe atmosphere had certainly done its job of putting her in the holiday spirit. She was ready to finish her shopping and her wrapping. More than ready to join her mother and sisters-in-law in the kitchen for some baking. Her nieces would want to help, but they tended to tire easily and only rebound when it was time to taste test the warm cookies straight from the oven.\n\nWith \"The Nutcracker Suite\" playing now, Rochelle stopped for one last look of longing at the ballerina tree. She had never been a dancer, but she certainly wanted to be when she was a little girl. At five and six, she had envisioned herself quite the ballerina, scurrying around in a pink leotard and tutu, doing pirouettes and pli\u00e9s\u2014well, what she considered the correct moves. In reality, she had no coordination, and her brothers were athletes, so she had grown up watching them excel at sports. Which had given her ample opportunity to pursue her interest in photography, which had led to her degree in graphic design and finally her job at Hoover Implement Company.\n\nWhich reminded her, time to check the tractor tree bids. As the new director of marketing, Rochelle desperately wanted that tree in the store window to impress her boss, yes, but also to create some Christmas spirit for her boss, coworkers, and their customers.\n\nRochelle held her breath for a moment, eyes on the big blue tractor at the top of the tree. Wasn't her thing, but it was perfect for the store. She reached for the clipboard quickly and glanced at it without another moment of hesitation. Her heart crashed into her belly, still full of the sweet treats.\n\nFabio19 had upped her last bid by a hundred bucks.\n\nA hundred bucks. There was just no way Rochelle could drop two hundred of her own money on this tree. It was possible she could make the purchase and Mr. Hoover would reimburse her. But she wasn't willing to take that gamble. Not to mention, that would ruin the surprise, which was the whole point.\n\n\"Fancy meetin' you here.\"\n\nSwallowing down a mouthful of disappointment, Rochelle turned to find the friendly stranger at her side, wearing that goofy grin she had come to like.\n\n\"Hey.\"\n\n\"What's wrong?\" He dipped his shoulders and leaned in a bit. Rochelle huffed out a sigh and shook her head. Sure, he was a super nice guy, and yes, the man was sexy from the top of his bald head right down to the toes of his casual tan shoes. But he'd already built a sleigh with a little boy who wasn't his and treated her to a cookie and hot chocolate. She didn't need to unload on him.\n\n\"Just a little bummed.\" She shrugged. \"Not a big deal.\"\n\n\"You like that tree?\" Still in a bit of a crouch, the guy leaned this way and that to study the tractor tree. \"You think a little boy would like it?\"\n\nWondering what little boy he had in mind, Rochelle looked at the tree again. Of course, a little boy would like it. In fact, it seemed much more fitting to a child than a business place and an adult man who could buy an entire lot of trees and decorate them in gold.\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said with a nod. \"I think so.\"\n\n\"You think they ship?\" he asked as he reached for the clipboard.\n\n\"Don't bother. Fabio19 just bid two hundred bucks.\"\n\nWith his shoulders hunched and his head ducked, the guy turned his head slightly to look at her.\n\n\"Don't tell me.\" He shook his head. \"You're RocStar?\"\n\n\"Ohmygod.\" She rolled her eyes and cut loose a groan of frustration. She had known a guy like this was too good to be true. \"Fabio?\"\n\nHe straightened, rubbed his hand over the top of his head, and shot her that sloppy grin.\n\n\"Funny story.\"\n\n\"Who's the lucky little boy?\"\n\nAt her question, the grin faded away. He cleared his throat and tipped his head.\n\n\"My sister's son.\" He set the clipboard down and folded his arms over his chest. \"He has muscular dystrophy. He's only seven, but they're already seeing the symptoms. Probably end up wheelchair bound.\"\n\nRochelle winced.\n\n\"Teddy just loves farm stuff. When he was three, he asked Santa Claus for a cow. The next year, he asked for a tractor. A real one.\" The guy\u2014Fabio\u2014grinned at her sheepishly. \"As much as I'd like to get him a real tractor, can't quite swing that.\"\n\n\"No, I guess not.\" Rochelle swung her gaze back to the tree.\n\n\"Who're you bidding on it for?\"\n\nRochelle glanced at him and nearly got caught up in his warm, friendly eyes again. She had come here wanting the tree for her boss. But really, she wanted to impress her boss and maybe get a little pat on the back, if not a holiday bonus. Which made her want for this tree terribly selfish compared to Fabio's.\n\nShe could do without the tree. But maybe she could walk out of The Festival of Trees with a new friend. A kindhearted, good-looking friend.\n\n\"Fabio?\" She turned to him with a frown.\n\n\"My college buddies called me that.\"\n\nRochelle snorted and then, embarrassed, covered her mouth.\n\n\"My name's Kevin,\" he told her. \"Kevin Frost.\"\n\n\"Rochelle Riley,\" she answered.\n\n\"You wanna bid again?\" He nodded his head at the tree and picked up the clipboard. \"There's still time.\"\n\n\"I don't.\" She shrugged and shook her head. \"I think that tree would be fantastic for your nephew.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nThat sloppy grin again.\n\n\"What're you doin' in Hargrove?\"\n\n\"I was here for business.\" He wagged his eyebrows. \"I'm thinking I saw a little caf\u00e9 on the other side of the ice-skating rink.\"\n\n\"You did.\"\n\n\"Got time for lunch?\"\n\n\"I'd like that,\" she said simply. \"Let's wait until the bidding's done, though.\"\n\n\"So no one outbids me.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yeah, Fabio. So no one outbids you.\"\n\n\"You live in Hargrove?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Ever come to Tennessee?\"\n\nRochelle laughed as they sauntered down the lane side by side, alternately looking at the trees and each other.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ CHRISTMAS WISH by BRIGITTE ANN THOMAS ]\n\n\"Farrah, you're under the mistletoe.\n\n\"What?\" I asked. I was busy enjoying my glass of spiked eggnog and talking to another guest at the Christmas party we were all attending. A work friend had rented out an entire bar for her yearly Christmas bash.\n\n\"The mistletoe, babe. You're under it. Turn around and look up,\" Jean said, motioning towards the ceiling.\n\nLifting my chin as I turned around, I looked up at the ceiling to see that she was indeed right. There was a large sprig of mistletoe hanging right over my head.\n\n\"Shit,\" I muttered. Kissing a stranger was not on my agenda for the evening.\n\n\"T got caught under it too. I guess you two have to kiss now.\" Jean made way too many kissing sounds and made her hands pretend to kiss.\n\n\"Who is T?\" I asked. I only knew a handful of the people there. It wasn't surprising that I didn't know who she was talking about.\n\n\"Uh, that's me,\" a voice said, somehow catching me off guard.\n\nDropping my focus from the ceiling, I finally noticed there was someone standing in front of me. A very beautiful someone.\n\nHer dark hair was short on the sides, but long enough on the top that she could spike It up in the front.\n\nShe was wearing dark, well-tailored trousers with a pair of black boots. And a sparkly red blazer that appeared to have nothing underneath. It was buttoned up just enough to let the imagination wander.\n\nMy whole body hummed with electricity as soon as our eyes met. They were a beautiful shade of gray.\n\n\"Um, hi. This is awkward. I'm Farrah. I work with Jean and a few of these other hoodlums mingling here.\"\n\n\"Taylor, but I prefer to go by T,\" she said.\n\n\"It's... um... nice to meet you.\"\n\nT took one step closer.\n\n\"We don't have to do this if you don't want to. I'm not going to force a kiss on someone who doesn't want to kiss me. I can just kiss you on the cheek or vice versa, and we can be done with it. I don't know why people still hang it at parties these days.\"\n\nShe had given me an out, but I found myself wanting to kiss her\u2014but I didn't want to seem too eager.\n\n\"No, no, it is tradition after all. I wouldn't want to put a damper on the party.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\" T asked.\n\n\"Definitely.\"\n\nMy mouth went suddenly dry as she stepped even closer, her face closing in on mine. Everything was moving in slow motion.\n\n\"I've never actually kissed a girl,\" I whisper blurted.\n\n\"That's okay. I'll go slow.\"\n\nThe moment her lips touched mine, fireworks exploded behind my eyes, and my whole body started tingling.\n\nI had only been identifying as queer for a few months, and I hadn't even had the courage to tell more than one or two people in my life because I wasn't sure how people would take it.\n\nBut this kiss confirmed to me everything I knew was true about myself.\n\nInstead of breaking the kiss off at the regular point, I found myself stepping closer and wrapping my arms around her so we could keep it going a little longer.\n\nShe reciprocated by gripping my waist with her hands.\n\nTime stood still as she kissed me.\n\nAfter several wonderful moments of embracing there under the mistletoe, T ended the kiss and pulled back.\n\n\"Was it everything you thought it would be?\" she asked with a twinkle in her eyes.\n\n\"More, much more.\" My knees weak from the kiss, I stumbled forward, but T caught me and steadied me on my feet.\n\n\"It looks like you're already falling for me.\"\n\n\"I just might be,\" I blurted. I was having trouble controlling my mouth around her.\n\nT smiled and almost took my knees out a second time.\n\n\"Do you want to grab a table and talk for a little while?\"\n\n\"Yeah, that would be nice. Maybe then you wouldn't notice the effects you're obviously having on me.\"\n\nT chuckled.\n\n\"Has anyone ever told you how cute you are?\"\n\n\"No one that I was interested in. Before now.\"\n\nWrapping an arm around my waist, T walked me over to an empty table in the less busy part of the room. She pulled out the chair for me, and we sat down together.\n\n\"So, you really never kissed another woman before? Because you did a great job back there. I never would have been able to tell,\" T said.\n\n\"Really, truly. You were the first.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\"\n\nI lifted my hand to my mouth and chewed on the side of my thumb for a second as I tried to think of the best way to explain it. I didn't want T to think that I was just experimenting or that I was a straight woman that got drunk and liked to kiss women.\n\nI was genuinely interested in her, and I wanted to make sure she knew that.\n\n\"I guess it's because I'm kind of scared to approach women, putting it simply.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Women are intimidating to me. They're so beautiful and smart and strong and capable that I worry that I'm not good enough to be with a woman.\"\n\n\"Farrah... You have to know that's not true. You're just as wonderful as any woman I've ever met. Maybe even more.\"\n\n\"I only recently came out to myself as queer. I haven't really told a lot of people in my life because I don't really know how to without worrying that they're thinking I'm only doing it performatively. I am a queer woman, I just don't want to be invalidated by people I love, so I haven't given them a chance.\"\n\nVoicing my fears brought up some strong, uncontrollable emotions. A few stray tears slipped out of the corners of my eyes and fell down my cheeks.\n\nLeaning forward, T cupped my chin in her hands and used her thumbs to wipe the tears away.\n\n\"Farrah, you are valid. No matter what anyone else thinks, you are valid, and you deserve to be loved just as you are.\"\n\n\"I know. I'm just ready to be happy again.\" More tears threatened to pour, but I held them back.\n\nT gently let go of my face and sat back in her seat. Her eyes bore into mine with an intimate intensity like I had never known.\n\n\"Do you think I could have a shot at making you happy?\"\n\n\"T...\" My tongue felt too big in my mouth. I wanted to shout yes from the rooftops, but I was still in a state of shock.\n\n\"I know we just met, but I felt something magnetic the moment our eyes met. I'd really like a chance to be with you. To get to know you. To spend time with you. I want it all.\"\n\nI reached into my pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.\n\nEarlier in the evening as people arrived, Jane had given all of the partygoers a strip of colored paper. She asked us to write down one Christmas wish and throw it in a bowl with everyone else's.\n\nI had been too embarrassed to throw mine in, so instead I had squirreled away in my pocket and pretended to throw something in so Jean wouldn't call me out on it.\n\n\"Did you throw your wish in the bowl?\" I asked her.\n\n\"Yeah. Is that yours?\"\n\nI nodded, a little embarrassed.\n\n\"What does it say?\" T asked.\n\nI unfolded the strip of paper and set it on the table in front of her, and I held my breath as she read what I wrote.\n\nI just want someone to love me the way that I am.\n\nLeaning over, she took my face in her hands again and brought hers close.\n\n\"I think that's one Christmas wish I can make come true. Merry Christmas, Farrah.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ BAH HUMBUG, HOLLY by SUNNY ABERNATHY ]\n\nHolly sits at her breakfast nook, a warm cup of coffee nestled in her hands. She eyes Rick move around her condo. He is ranting as he goes.\n\n\"And another thing, Holly, you need to seriously take a good look at yourself, or you will be single forever.\"\n\n\"I would rather be single than cheated on.\" She doesn't even look at him.\n\nRick holds up a key. \"If I give you this key, I'm never coming back. Like, I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Just put the key on the counter.\" She sips her coffee, black and strong.\n\nWith the last box in his arms, and an overstuffed duffel bag hanging on off his elbow, he struggles to open the red metal door. \"I mean it, Holly.\"\n\nShe gets up and walks over to him. Her leopard print slippers, sliding across the floor. Holly sees Rick's Adam's apple bob up and down and notices he has a different cologne on. Carefully reaching around him, she helps him with the door. She is sure the idiot named Rick thinks she is moving in for a last-minute save. A kiss. A hug. I want you to stay.\n\nWhile holding the door open, she says, \"Bye, Rick. If you forgot anything, I'll call your sister. She hates you too, by the way.\"\n\n\"Holly, please.\"\n\nAs he steps into the hallway, she calls out, \"Oh, and Rick?\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Happy Holidays.\" She shuts the door and texts the building's maintenance guy. He can come change the lock anytime, but she leaves at noon and needs the new key before she goes. She isn't trusting that Rick only had one key. At least now she knows what those extra keys on Rick's keyring were. How many women he owes explanations too is hard to tell. But it's not her problem anymore and now she has one less Christmas present to buy.\n\n\"Holly, my girl, there you are.\" Holly's boss, Dean Aaron, calls out to her before she even gets all the way through the glass doors. \"Get the tool all packed up and out?\"\n\n\"Yep. And I got my new locks installed less than an hour ago.\" She wiggles her key chain up in the air.\n\n\"Good for you.\" Dean shows off a wide smile. Holly has noticed Dean has kicked up his flirting a few notches. But then again, she could be overthinking. Or wishful thinking. After all, Dean is nice to everyone. And every woman he talks to is instantly smitten. Herself included.\n\nDean being able to charm anyone, is how Holly West ended up in the assistant chair at Precious Presents, after all.\n\nOnly two years ago Holly was out of work right before Christmas but had already made a commitment to volunteer at a Precious Presents event. After a few hours of collecting toys at a toy drive, Dean asked her to a meeting right after the holidays and now here she is in charge of that same event.\n\nHolly goes to her desk, her butt lands in her leather chair with a thud. If she is happy Rick is gone, then why does she feel like crap?\n\nDean signs a few things his secretary, Veeta, puts in front of him before he wanders over to Holly's desk, where he plants a perfectly fit butt-cheek right on the corner of her desk.\n\n\"What's up? Holly doesn't seem so jolly. You should be happy that creep is gone.\"\n\nHolly tries to return his smile. \"I know it isn't that he won't be around anymore. It is the fact that when he wasn't around, he was with someone else, and I didn't catch on. I thought I was smarter than that.\"\n\nDean assures her that it has nothing to do with her intelligence. \"Being loyal and loving is not a character flaw. Being a cheating bastard is.\"\n\nHolly leans forward and places her elbows on her desk, inches away from Dean's thigh. \"You are correct. But in all honesty, I don'T think I loved him, him cheating was kind of a blessing. Can we talk about something else?\"\n\nDean jumps up and straightens his brightly pink tie. \"Absolutely, we are probably breaking some HR policy, anyway.\"\n\n\"It's your charity, Dean.\"\n\nStill tugging on his tie, he says, \"Well, it's good to be me then. Why don't you come to my office and let's make some calls?\"\n\nShe nods, \"I'll be right behind you.\"\n\nHolly watches Dean walk away. She can't help it. His butt is like two Christmas hams in an expensive suit. She grabs her enote off of her desk and follows Dean to his office.\n\nThe ballroom of the Minnehaha City's Regency Museum is a buzz with people. Caterers are setting up tables, housekeepers are vacuuming and fluffing drapes.\n\nHolly sees Kelly and waves her down. \"Kelly, just who I have been looking for.\"\n\n\"What for? Did I do something wrong?\"\n\n\"No, no, it's all good. Relax or you won't get through this.\" Holly reassures Kelly with a smile. She isn't much of a hugger, but the look on Kelly's face tells Holly she is expecting it. Holly tucks her enote under her elbow and tries to hug Kelly.\n\n\"I am so nervous. I don't even know what I am going to wear. And I saw emails about celebrity requests. What is that all about?\" Kelly is visibly overwhelmed.\n\n\"Yes, several celebrities are regular attendees. They like a certain table under a certain light. Some bring their own photographers, but don't let any of that bother you. That's my job.\" Holly has calmed down Kelly down and needs to keep it that way. \"As for what to wear. My advice is swanky. Don't be too stuffy, but remember it is a charity event for children and toys, so nothing too revealing.\"\n\n\"Swanky, black-tie, and celebrities. Yet, for children.\" Holly sees Kelly's anxiety start to rise again.\n\n\"It's ok if you don't have anything, come by my place. I know I have plenty that will fit you. Jewelry too. It will be fun, but don't drink. You will want to, just to calm your nerves, but don't.\"\n\n\"Ok, thanks Holly.\" Kelly turns away, \"Wait a second, didn't you need to ask me something?\"\n\nHolly smacks her forehead, \"Yes, Dean needs a list of all of this year's must have toys for the slide show.\"\n\nKelly walks away and Holly mumbles, \"What's the point.\" Even the world's hardest-to-find toys will be available to Dean if he wants them.\n\nThe afternoon passes by in a whirl of checking in vendors, signing for flowers, approving lightning, and double checking all the Precious Presents' people are doing what they are supposed to be doing. At least she doesn't have to deal with volunteers till after the Gala.\n\nLooking around, Holly sees her chance to escape. She presses her butt against a wall and gives it a little push. The wall panel pivots around, and she finds herself on the other side. The lights are on, but only every other one. Much better. All the banquet tables and chairs are stacked in the corner. Taking one of them down would be way too much work, and Holly decides to just sit on the floor.\n\nShe yanks her skirt up a bit and tries to squat down. They do not make pencil skirts for sitting. She hikes it up higher and slides down a wall. When her tailbone hits the floor, she lets out a sigh. She thought, no I shouldn't, but \"God, I need too,\" comes out of her mouth. With one foot, she flicks off her high-heel and uses her free toe to take off the other one. \"Yes, much better.\" She leans her head back and closes her eyes. The only sounds around her are coming through the wall, muffled.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I don't want to scare you.\"\n\nShe startles. Her eyes pop open to find Dean standing in the empty room with her. She is suddenly aware of how high she hiked her skirt up to sit down.\n\n\"Dean.\"\n\nHe goes towards her waving his hands, \"No, no, please stay, sit. Your eyes were closed, but I didn't want to scare you. Have you open them and just find me staring at you.\"\n\nHolly reaches down and tugs at her skirt, while Dean picks up her tossed shoes and sets them neatly beside her.\n\n\"May I?\" Dean points to the wall and walks over and sits down beside her. Holly nods. \"I thought I was the only one that came here to hide out. Your first time?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Your first time hiding in here? I am in here all the time, when I can, and I haven't seen you in here before.\"\n\n\"I should be working, I am sorry.\" She starts to get up, but Dean pulls her arm down.\n\n\"Stay. We are fine. Our people are doing their thing. I hope.\"\n\n\"Everything seems to be on track, finally, and I just needed...\"\n\n\"No need to explain to me, Holly.\" Dean takes off his shoes. And Holly can see the gold-toe stitching of his socks. Something seems way too informal about seeing her boss in his socks. \"It feels so good to take my shoes off. And I don't even wear those things.\" He points to her high heels.\n\n\"They aren't all that great.\"\n\n\"Then why do women wear them? I have never figured that out. I dated one girl, a model from Norway, and she had the ugliest feet from wearing high heels since she was a kid.\"\n\nAll Holly heard was \"a model from Norway.\"\n\n\"And she hated going out and dancing or anything because her feet always hurt. I bought her a pair of sneakers once and you'd thought I slapped her. She asked if I thought she was ugly.\" He shakes his head and thumps it on the wall behind them. \"I still have no idea how that night got away from me, but you don't want to hear about that.\"\n\n\"Men think we wear the heels, the clothes, the makeup to look good, to look sexy for them, for you.\" She catches herself, \"Well, not you, men, I mean you are a man.\"\n\n\"I get it.\" His smile puts her at ease.\n\n\"Well, we really do it to pitch ourselves against other women. That if we aren't looking our best, then we aren't doing our best, and some other woman will swoop in and look better than us and do better than us.\"\n\n\"Unless you have, need, a uniform or work construction or something, what you wear shouldn't be an issue on how well you do your job.\" Dean looks at her with a bit of confusion. Meanwhile, she thinks here he is sitting here with gold-toe brand socks, his brown leather Edmond's, and wearing a silk Calvin Klein shirt.\n\nShe turns to face him. \"Ok, let's say you apply for a job, and you show up in jeans and a polo shirt, but everyone else shows up in a suit. Who do you think gets the job?\"\n\n\"Whoever is qualified.\" He says honestly and earnestly. \"Hey, don't roll your eyes at me.\"\n\n\"I wish I lived in your world, Dean.\"\n\n\"You do,\" he says.\n\n\"No, I work in your world.\" Holly politely states.\n\nDean takes a finger and points to the moveable wall. \"All of that is all you.\"\n\n\"Well, Precious Presents is your baby. You needed an event. We planned an event.\"\n\n\"But since you have been working with me, things have really gotten turned up a notch and the best part is I don't feel like I have to buy volunteers anymore. People seem to really want to show up.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I am just doing my job.\" She forgets for a second that she is talking to her boss and sucks it up. Everything she wants to say, she doesn't. Holly figures if she wants to keep this job going into the new year, she better change direction. \"I am just doing my job, a job I love. It's like a career, a calling. I am sure that is how you felt when you started Precious Presents.\"\n\n\"Right? It's great to get that warm fuzzy feeling in your chest knowing you are doing good. I mean childhood cancer, poverty, and everything is horrible, but I love how I created something that puts a smile on a kid's face and to see it takes a little stress off their families, even if it isn't permanent.\" He holds his hand up to his chest and taps where his heart sits.\n\nFor some reason, she giggles a little. Her hand flies up to her mouth.\n\n\"What did I say?\"\n\nHolly waves her hand, \"I'm sorry, but it sounds like you are two seconds away from telling me you are adopting three kids from some war-torn country.\"\n\nDean laughs with her, \"Sorry, I get a little passionate.\"\n\n\"Nothing wrong with that. I think it's admirable that you want to rescue the world.\"\n\n\"Ouch.\" This time Dean takes his fist and hits his chest.\n\n\"Now, what did I say wrong?\" Holly feels her cheeks blush. Did she just offend him? She didn't mean to.\n\n\"If we were dating, I would think you were about to give me the whole I can't date someone with a hero-complex-thing.\" Dean lowers his head. Holly has never really seen him vulnerable like this.\n\nNot knowing what to say next within the awkward situation she has created, \"I should get back to work.\" Now, Holly needs to figure out how to gracefully stand up and get her shoes back on.\n\nThe small orchestra plays an instrumental version of \"Winter Wonderland.\" Holly's head is pounding, and she swears if she hears another version of any Christmas carol, ever, she will go deaf. Why couldn't the band practice wherever they usually do? No, instead they have been at the Regency playing every day this week while she has been here setting up the last details for tonight's event.\n\nThough Holly recommended her staff not to drink, she grabs a flute of champagne off a tray as a server passes her.\n\n\"Holly? Come in, Holly?\"\n\nHolly reaches up and presses her earpiece, \"Yes, Dean, I'm here.\"\n\n\"Can you come to the back?\"\n\n\"Coming.\"\n\nShe slings back the champagne and sits it on a table she passes, as she goes to the back to find Dean.\n\n\"Hello.\"\n\n\"Holly, there you are.\"\n\n\"Yep, right here.\" She wants to ask, \"what the hell do you need?\" but she waits for him.\n\n\"How do I look?\"\n\nThat's it. She came all the way over here for a vanity check.\n\n\"You look amazing, very dapper.\" She sets her enote and clutch down. Reaching for his lapel, she inhales his cologne and maybe it is the bubbles from the champagne she just had, but she feels a little dizzy. \"I am surprised to see you're nervous. You do this all the time.\"\n\n\"I may do it all the time, but I still get nervous every time. People whose movies I watch and whose songs I play on my phone, are just sitting out there staring at me, waiting for me to say something. Say something inspirational enough to open up their fat check books and trust funds.\"\n\n\"That's why you hired a speechwriter.\" Holly loves how his left eyebrow always arches up when he smiles.\n\n\"I hire speech writers because I can. Writing speeches sucks.\"\n\n\"Ok, at least you're honest.\" Holly catches his eyes locked on hers. He won't look away. \"When this song is over, you need to go out there.\"\n\n\"Ok. You'll stay close by?\"\n\nHolly nods and adds, \"A magazine I read always posts paparazzi photos of celebrities. Pictures of them out getting groceries, walking their dogs, that kind of thing.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"Well, the page always says, 'Stars are just like us'.\"\n\n\"Like picturing everyone in their underwear?\"\n\n\"Yep, we all have underwear on. I hope, though a few of them out there have pictures that prove otherwise,\" she says.\n\n\"You are pretty funny, Holly West.\"\n\n\"Well, I try. It's the least I can do. Now, go.\" Holly pushes him a bit, he heads towards the stage, and she checks her enote to make sure they loaded his speech for him at the podium. Dean has more money and charm than everyone in this room put together, and yet, he is nervous. Holly finds it very sweet. Since she has met him, she has wondered how someone like Dean is real. Two years in and his only flaw so far is his girlfriends are way too thin and a bit too dim.\n\nHolly flicks her wrist to see her ewatch come alive with seventeen thousand steps\u2014in heels\u2014and that is now past one in the morning. Gold and silver confetti lies on the floor and across tables. The catering staff looks exhausted but still bustles about. Holly understands how they feel. She'll put a personal bonus for the wait staff in with the invoice. In the back of the kitchen is her bag with a change of shoes in it. She opens the door to fetch it only to see Dean sitting on one of the kitchen's stainless-steel tables.\n\n\"Hello, Dean.\" It is the first time Holly has ever seen Dean look less than dashing.\n\n\"I look that bad?\"\n\n\"What? No.\"\n\n\"What gave it away? My disheveled appearance? My bubbly personality?\" Dean picks up a bottle of something that sits next to him. When he leans his head back, Holly can easily see how far his five o'clock shadow has crept down his neck.\n\nAs she stands in front of him; she finds herself wanting to step between his spread knees. Hug him or give him whatever else he needs. \"Dean, is everything ok?\"\n\n\"Imposter syndrome, do you have anything for that?\"\n\nShocked, Holly says, \"You feel that way too?\"\n\nHe looks at her, really looks at her, \"You do?\"\n\nTo avoid being further entranced by his caramel coffee-colored eyes, she steps over and hikes her own ass up onto the cold metal table. Dean hands her the green bottle of Bolliger Champagne and she takes a swig. Holly hands it back and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.\n\n\"Good stuff,\" she says.\n\n\"Better be. It's price tag is ridiculous really.\"\n\nHolly knows exactly what he means, but she wants to hear it from him.\n\n\"This bottle,\" he tips it to his pink mouth again, \"this bottle could feed a family of three for a month. A month, Holly.\"\n\nMeekly she says, \"I know.\"\n\n\"I have to do all of this to get those asshats to donate money they won't even miss. But they won't donate unless there is something in it for them.\"\n\nThe question Holly has always wondered since the day she first started working in nonprofits, right out of university is, \"Then why do it?\"\n\n\"If I don't do it a certain way, then I look like a rich asshole just like them.\" He points to the door, to the people that left an hour ago.\n\n\"You could just be charitable.\" Holly thinks it could be so much easier, but deep down she knows connections are everything and don't get her started on the taxes and other implications.\n\n\"I enjoy helping kids and their families. If I walk into some cancer unit and say, 'hey, let me take your son on a trip and make his dreams come true,' well, that just makes me look like a rich pedophile. And the taxes.\"\n\n\"Yeah, the taxes. I know, but it seems like there has got to be a better way.\"\n\nNeither one says anything, and Dean passes her the bottle again. Holly swings her legs under the table and accidentally bumps Dean's foot.\n\n\"Sorry, don't be,\" he says. \"Veeta thinks you are grumpy.\"\n\n\"I know how Veeta feels about me.\" She tips the bottle back, but nothing comes out. \"Empty.\" She tips it upside down to show him.\n\n\"You don't mind people thinking you are grumpy?\" Dean grabs the bottle from her and sits it behind him.\n\nHolly states, \"I like to think of myself more as serious, than grumpy.\"\n\nDean hops off the table and goes over to a cooler with sliding glass doors. \"I am starving, this food is paid for, and I seem to have found myself a dinner companion.\" Holding the silver tray in one hand, he strolls back over to Holly and asks, \"Shall we go sit where it is more comfortable?\"\n\nHolly takes his hand and hops off the prep table. On the other side of the kitchen door, they are back in the ballroom. No orchestra, no celebrities. Just confetti, tipped over champagne flutes, and disheveled flowers. Dean sets the tray down on a table that has been somewhat cleared. A bus boy comes rushing over as soon as he spots them.\n\n\"Sorry, sir, here let me get that for you.\"\n\nDean says, \"What is your name, son?\"\n\n\"Randy, Mr. Aaron, sir.\" Holly understands how the young man is feeling right now. She felt that way herself two years ago.\n\nDean takes a hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and slips into Randy's chest pocket. \"Take it easy son, we are fine. The lady and I are fine. Get your work done so you can go home and get some sleep.\"\n\nRandy bows to both Dean and Holly, too befuddled to say anything else. That hundred dollars made his whole month, she's sure of it. She has been Randy.\n\nAs Dean pulls out the chair for her, she says, \"That was very sweet of you, really.\"\n\n\"I usually don't like to have witnesses.\"\n\nHolly can't help but laugh. Again.\n\n\"I am beginning to understand why you were unemployed when we first met.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. Sorry. But Dean, look around. This place was full of witnesses.\"\n\n\"True, but it's different.\" Dean holds a lobster roll in his hand and tosses it in his mouth. He barely has finished chewing, \"You know what I like to do?\"\n\nAs Holly pops a stuffed mushroom in her mouth, barely coherent, she asks, \"And what is that Mr. Aaron?\"\n\n\"If I go somewhere like Gramercy or Savoy, those servers expect a hundred dollars or more per tip. And they expect that from most of their tables. But if I go to the Olive Dish along the interstate and tip like that before sneaking out unseen, I know the server is smiling, even if I am not there to see it. It's by total luck of the draw I am where I am, ya know?\"\n\nSince volunteering with Precious Presents, starting way back in her university days, Holly has known that Dean Aaron differs from the rest of the famous Aaron family. But the way he is talking tonight is making him seem almost saintly. He has to have some flaws somewhere. But she has only been working for him for two years, she thinks. That isn't really all that much time to get to know someone. Right?\n\nHe hands a lobster roll to her. \"No, thank you,\" she says. \"I have never really been a fan.\"\n\nDean tosses it onto the try. \"I think I eat it because I'm told to. Here, you can afford it, eat it. Who cares what it actually tastes like.\"\n\nHolly nods, she understands. Frankly, if she was asked, she wouldn't recommend the mushrooms either. And it's not the caterers. It is the food, the food that people of a certain class expect. Maybe everyone would be a lot nicer if they would just admit they want to chow down on a cheeseburger, especially the models. She pushes the silver tray closer to Dean to signal to him she's done too.\n\n\"Ready for next week?\" she asks.\n\n\"Now is the fun part. The presents, the skating, the Christmas tree lighting, finding that just right present.\"\n\n\"Isn't that what Cindy is for?\"\n\n\"She buys my suits and stuff, but I buy my own gifts. If I said, 'hey Cindy, get my mom a scarf,' my mom would know. But now if I were to get my mom a scarf, I would look for a blue paisley one, silk, just like her mom wore.\"\n\n\"Wow. You are full of surprises, Dean.\"\n\n\"Tell me, what does Holly West want for Christmas?\"\n\nShe could say the moon and he would give it to her in some form or another. Holly could ask Santa to find a cure for cancer, and Dean would do something over the top... and lifesaving.\n\n\"Nothing, absolutely nothing. Christmas is for kids.\"\n\n\"Veeta is right, you are 'bah, humbug Holly'.\" Dean at least smiles when he says it.\n\n\"I lowered my expectations a long time ago. If I don't expect anything then I am ok with nothing.\" Holly shreds a leaf of lettuce that she pulled from under the remaining mushrooms. \"The bottle of wine from you last year was wonderful, though, thank you. It was extra nice because I wasn't expecting it. Plus, I got to drink it alone instead of...\"\n\n\"Sharing it with Rick the dick?\" Dean says as he clicks away on his phone.\n\n\"Exactly,\" she admits. While wondering who in the world he's texting at this hour.\n\n\"Well, Holly West, I have three weeks to get you into the Christmas spirit. But right now, I have my town car coming for us. I've had too much champagne, too much socializing, and not enough food.\" Dean stands from the table and pulls out her chair. \"Shall we?\"\n\n\"Home sounds good. And we can worry about my lack of Christmas spirit later.\" Holly takes his hand and steps from her chair. \"I just need to grab my bag.\"\n\n\"No, head towards the door, I'll grab it and meet you at the car.\" Before she can protest, he heads into the kitchen.\n\nShe wants nothing more than to climb in the car, get home, and get out of this dress. She will get through Christmas and whatever Dean has up his sleeve, but later and in comfortable shoes.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ JUST A DREAM by AINSLEY JAYMES ]\n\n\"Emerson, I'm home!\" I called, closing the door to our house. Six months ago, we purchased this property together, making it our home. It was a modest property, in my opinion, or as modest as can be when your boyfriend of one year was a multi-millionaire movie star. The jingle of metal and the pounding of feet greeted me, as our two dogs came bounding around the corner. Boomer and Zeke wiggled their entire bodies as they waited for me to greet them.\n\nI set my art bag down on the floor and turned to my Boomer first. A couple pats to my legs had the husky standing on his hind legs, using my legs as leverage to reach his snout up to my face, pressing his cold, wet nose to my skin. I gave him some love and once he was satisfied, he jumped down, allowing Zeke to have my attention.\n\nOur wolf dog wasn't small by any means. On his hind legs, he was taller than I was. He rested his paws on my shoulders and swiped his large tongue over my face, leaving me grimacing. I gently pushed him off, wiping the slobber off of my face with the sleeve of my shirt. I shuffled past the two of them and into the kitchen, where my boyfriend was facing away from me with his phone held to his ear and in just a pair of basketball shorts.\n\nI ran my hands up over his bare back, pressing a kiss to the warm skin. His muscles jerked under my fingers, letting me know that despite the fact that I had announced my arrival, he was surprised by my presence. He quickly ended his phone call, telling Derek, his agent, that he'd call him back.\n\nI loosened my grip on him and he turned in my arms, wrapping his limbs around me and pressing his lips to mine. I hummed my approval of his greeting and he smiled against my lips. He pulled back before pecking me again before trailing butterfly kisses down the column of my neck. God, this man.\n\n\"Hi,\" he whispered huskily as he pulled away. I tried and failed to hide my smile while I wrapped my arms around his waist again, pulling him close to me. He chuckled, prying me off and holding me at arm's length. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Nothing, nothing. You leave soon and I'm being extra about missing you,\" I admitted. It wasn't as though we hadn't gone through his leaving before, we had. He was a movie star. Leaving to film in different locations around the world came with the territory. But this time, he would be gone for the holiday season and I was taking it harder than I probably should be.\n\n\"About that. I was thinking. Why don't you come with me? We can spend the holiday together; you can officially meet my parents and be on set with me.\" I opened my mouth to respond, but Emerson held up his hand. \"You don't have to answer me now. I have a meeting with Derek in a half hour and when I come back, we can talk about it.\" All I could do was nod as he kissed me and grabbed his wallet and keys off the counter. He said his goodbyes to the pups and yelled another goodbye to me before he was gone.\n\nThe last thing I expected today was for him to invite me to Paris with him. He'd invited me on sets before and I visited a few times when he was local, but this was Paris. His parents lived in Paris. I had always dreamed about visiting Paris. It was the City of Love and I was a hopeless romantic.\n\nI pulled my phone from my back pocket, pulling up my favorite contacts screen and hitting Stef's name for video chat. It rang three times before she picked up, looking and sounding a little out of breath. Her face was red and sweaty, and I cocked an eyebrow at her.\n\n\"I'm at the gym, you perv.\" I barked a laugh, shaking my head as she brought a water bottle to her lips, taking a large swig. \"What's up?\" she asked.\n\n\"Emerson asked me to go to Paris with him.\" She stared at me for a few moments, not blinking.\n\n\"So, what's the problem?\"\n\n\"What about the studio?\" Stef pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes on me through the screen. It was the same look she had every time she was about to tell me I was being stupid about something or other.\n\n\"Sadie, my dear friend, you've hired people for that reason. You have staff to keep your classes going if you want to take time off because you're sick or because your movie star boyfriend has asked you to spend the holidays in Paris!\" She wasn't wrong. About eight months ago I had hired an extra teacher and four months ago, a second one. Business was booming at the art studio and while I liked to think that people were truly discovering their love of art, I knew that some of them were here because of my connection to Emerson.\n\n\"Yeah, but...\"\n\n\"Why are you looking for excuses?\" I blew out a breath. I wanted more than anything to be with Emerson for the holidays and I was willing to take the time off to do that. But meeting his parents was a playing field that I didn't know I was ready for yet. He was a movie star because they'd pushed him to do something he didn't want to do when he was younger. He ended up loving it, but that wasn't the point. My relationship with my parents wasn't the greatest as I grew up because of a similar reason. They hated the path I chose because it wasn't theirs, but ultimately, they let me carve my way. We had since mended our relationship, but it was a rocky, rocky road. What if his parents didn't like me? What if they tried to push him into ending things?\n\n\"I'm being dramatic,\" I concluded. Stef nodded in agreement. We were adults. Emerson could be with whomever he wanted, and he wanted me. He'd made that much clear with his public display inside my art studio.\n\n\"You're being dramatic.\" She echoed, grinning ear to ear. I hated her sometimes, I really did.\n\n\"Okay. I'm going to Paris.\"\n\n\"You're going to Paris!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "\"Are you sure this dress is okay?\" I asked, looking down at myself for the fiftieth time. I ran my hands over the material of the holiday colored fit and flare dress I was wearing.\n\n\"You look beautiful and they're going to love you,\" he promised, pressing a kiss to my temple just as the front door opened. I wasn't sure about either at the moment. It was immediate to me that the woman that opened the door was his mother. They shared the same eyes.\n\n\"Emerson,\" his mother cooed, pulling her son into a hug. I stood back and let them have their reunion, albeit a bit awkwardly. Emerson pulled away from his mother and stepped back to my side, wrapping his arm around me.\n\n\"Mom, Dad, I'd like you to officially meet Sadie.\" I had seen his parents a few times via video chat, but until this moment, we'd never met in person. If I wasn't paying attention, I would have missed the smile on his mother's face just a fraction.\n\n\"It's so nice to finally meet you,\" I greeted them, looking in between his mother and father.\n\n\"You too, Sadie.\"\n\n\"Please, come in. Let's catch up. Dinner is almost ready,\" his mother said, stepping aside to show us in. His mother led us into the kitchen, which was in the back of the house. The home his parents lived in was smaller than I expected, but very cozy. There were a lot of pictures that lined the walls, one's I hoped to get a closer look at at some point. I would love to see pictures of Emerson when he was little.\n\n\"Sadie, how is your studio?\" Emerson's father asked once we were seated at the dining room table. His mother had excused herself to the kitchen in order to finish up our meal. I had offered to go help, but she insisted that she had it all under control.\n\n\"It's going well. I recently hired another instructor and my private schedule is as full as I can get it right now.\" Jackson Murphy nodded his head, humming to himself. I hoped it was an approving hum. My eyes darted over to Emerson and he was looking back at me, a smile on his face. Without words, I knew that he was telling me that everything was going great. I wasn't one hundred percent sure I believed him, but I appreciated it.\n\nHis mom came out of the kitchen a moment later, carrying a tray of soup bowls. The scent of onion soup greeted my senses and I smiled gratefully as she set a bowl down in front of me. No sooner than she sat in her seat, did the doorbell ring.\n\n\"Oh, Emerson. Would you be a dear and grab that for me?\" Emerson nodded and stood from his chair, squeezing my shoulder gently before he left the room. I was about to open my mouth and make some small talk while we waited for him to return when I heard it.\n\nThe voice that I hoped to never hear in person again. Talia Bennett. But what was Emerson's ex doing in Paris, at his parent's house no less only an hour after we'd arrived? It was a little too coincidental for my liking.\n\n\"Can you please tell me where your restroom is?\" I asked, looking between his parents.\n\n\"Of course, dear. Second door on the left down the hall.\" I nodded and pushed back in my chair, heading in that direction. As I did, I saw Emerson standing in the front foyer, his hands moving wildly as he had a heated discussion with Talia. His eyes met mine, but I quickly turned back in the direction of the bathroom.\n\nOnce inside, I locked the door and leaned against it, letting out a heavy sigh. If it wasn't obvious that they didn't like me for their son before, it was now. Inviting his ex to dinner was a low blow. I took a few minutes to gather myself, splashing my face with some cool water and staring at myself in the mirror. I kept reminding myself that it wasn't Talia that Emerson wanted. It was me. I was his person and he was mine. She had used him to further her career. I just wanted him to be happy.\n\nThe hallway was empty when I made my way back towards the dining room and I prayed that Talia had left and was not waiting for me at the table.\n\n\"What part of you thought that was a good idea?\" Emerson rumbled, stopping me in my tracks.\n\n\"Emerson, you're my son and I will always look out for your best interests,\" his mother claimed, her tone full of condensation if I had ever heard one.\n\n\"I'm a grown man, I don't need you to look out for me.\"\n\n\"Well, by the company you keep, it's obvious that you do.\" I had heard all I needed to hear. I looked for a quick escape, finding it in what looked like a glass door leading out to a back deck. I stepped outside, taking a shuddered breath. I loved Emerson for all that he was, inside and out, but not for his money. I had money of my own. Hard earned money. Not once had I taken anything of Emerson's. Every improvement and modification on my studio had come out of my own pocket. I was no gold digger. My parents also happened to be two of the biggest directors in the world. As far as money was concerned, I was covered, should I ever need be. I didn't need Emerson's money; I just needed his love.\n\nI didn't know how long had passed before Emerson came to find me. I didn't bother to turn around when I heard the door close, if I did, I knew I would have teared up. His arms slid around my waist from behind and he pressed a kiss against the skin on my neck before resting his chin on my shoulder.\n\n\"You know that I love you more than anything.\" It was a statement, not a question. I nodded my head and leaned it against his. It didn't matter what his parents thought. Emerson was endgame for me. \"Let's get out of here.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Our days were spent mainly on set, filming long hours in the studio and on the streets of Paris. When we weren't on location, we were exploring the City of Love, experiencing everything they had to offer. My favorite part was probably the chocolate store. It had the richest chocolate I had ever tasted, and I wished I could ship the whole damn place back home so I never had to go without.\n\nThe film that Emerson was working on was a romance, which seemed to be his new niche. He was everyone's new dream partner. I mean, I couldn't blame them, he was gorgeous and had the most fantastic personality to go with it. If I wasn't me, I would be jealous.\n\n\"Fantasizing about me, I hope?\" Emerson teased, his breath tickling my ear. I hadn't even heard him come up behind me. Apparently, I'd been pretty far into my dream land to not see or hear him when he had been in front of me shooting a scene just moments prior.\n\n\"Yes, actually.\" My blue-eyed movie star leaned forward and planted a kiss on my cheek before taking a seat in the director's chair next to me.\n\n\"Anything good?\"\n\n\"I was dreaming you picked up that chocolate store and dropped it right beside my studio so that I would never be without the perfection that is that Parisian delicacy,\" I joked, grinning at him. He just shook his head and took a drink from a water bottle before offering it to me. I declined and he screwed the cap back on setting it down. \"You know, one day I might get jealous of all these romantic co-stars of yours,\" I mused as Jessica Patterson, his gorgeous red-headed co-star passed us by.\n\n\"Mon coeur,\" he reminded me, making me smile as the director called him back onto set. \"Mon coeur,\" he repeated as he stood, giving me another kiss before jogging back on stage. I really was incredibly lucky.\n\nThe sound of the clapboard had everything on set quiet again and the focus was on Jessica and Emerson as the two of them went through a scene about the way they felt, or rather their characters felt, for one another. In some of these romance stories, I felt like the action was so cheesy and it was never the way it would happen in the real world. But I had lived a cheesy romance novel meeting. I kissed a man, who'd more or less given me a false name. I ended up working for him, after figuring out exactly who he was, and the rest was a roller coaster ride of emotions that I wouldn't change.\n\nThree hours later, we were headed out the door in a chauffeured car, en route to a local restaurant that Emerson had told me was his favorite every time he was in Paris. When we pulled up, I could immediately tell that I was going to love it as well. It was a small place, with a patio out back. There were lights strung over tree branches and umbrellas and people were eating outside, despite the winter cold. As it turned out, the umbrella-looking things were actually heaters that were keeping the space as warm as it was inside the restaurant itself.\n\n\"Ah, Monsieur Murphy, your table is ready for you,\" the host greeted Emerson, flourishing his hand to the right side of the restaurant. A waiter met us underneath a large archway, leading us past far more tables than the building looked like it could hold from the outside. Eventually, we were led out a door to a small terrace, different from the one we'd seen when we walked in.\n\nA single table was sitting on the large stone pathway, overlooking a small fountain. On either side of the table was a heater, keeping the area around the table nice and comfortable. Lights twinkled from every bush, tree, and vine, creating the most perfect atmosphere. Candles burned on the table for two and a wine chiller, already filled with a bottle of my favorite wine, sat in the middle.\n\n\"This is amazing,\" I marveled, committing to memory every piece of this moment. I turned to Emerson and he placed his hand on the small of my back, showing me to my seat. Like a true gentleman, he pulled out my chair and tucked me in once I was seated before taking his own seat. The waiter poured us each a glass of wine and left us alone with the menus.\n\n\"I want to make a toast.\" Emerson held his glass up and I lifted mine as well. \"To you, Sadie Turner. There is no one in this world who is fit to love me more than you. You are my moon and stars at night and my sun during the day. May our time in Paris be one that you never forget.\" The soft clink of our glasses was the only sound I heard, despite dozens of people being just around the corner.\n\nThe meal was delicious, and I knew why Emerson enjoyed it here so much. Just another thing from Paris that I would love to take home with me. We stuffed ourselves until we couldn't eat another bite and then spent what felt like hours talking over wine and dessert. It was times like these when I was reminded about how being with Emerson was never boring. There was always something to talk about. Our conversation was never stale and every day, I felt like I learned something new about the man sitting across from me.\n\nIt was closing time by the time we were ready to leave and while they didn't kick us out, they kindly let us know that we would have to get a move on. Hand in hand, we walked down the streets of Paris, talking and dancing under the stars. I would give everything to have this for the rest of my life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "\"Emerson!\" I closed my eyes at the sound of her voice. Why was she here? Talia Bennett came practically skidding around the corner, stopping in front of my boyfriend and tossing her hair back. I couldn't help but smile to myself when Emerson turned away from her and looked at me, blowing me a kiss. I returned the gesture, ignoring the scathing glare from Talia.\n\nTalia Bennett was a Hollywood it-girl and a rising star in the movie business. She had the whole package, but what she had in looks and money, she lacked intact and just plain decency. She thought that if she snapped her fingers, everything she wanted would land in her lap. She still had a lot to learn about life, but I supposed when you grew up in the spotlight with limitless possibilities at your fingertips, you were bound to be a little naive about the real world.\n\n\"Emerson, darling. I've been asked to join the cast. It's a small part, but we'll be able to catch\u2014\" Talia tried grabbing Emerson's attention again, but Emerson cut her off.\n\n\"Congratulations, Talia.\" This time, I couldn't help but grin so everyone could see as he once again ignored her advance and made his way over to me. He opened his mouth, but I held up my hand to stop him. He had no control over casting. Talia had probably weaseled her way in, just to spend some time around Emerson again. Probably at his mother's request.\n\nWe hadn't spoken to his parents since we'd left their house before we were even able to eat dinner on our second night in Paris. In two days, it would be Christmas Eve and his only two days off before we had another week of filming and then it was back home on a red eye flight, just after New Year's.\n\nHe stood between my legs, pressing his forehead to mine. I slung my arms around his neck, linking them behind his head. We said nothing because nothing needed to be said. We stayed like that until he was called back to set to do another scene with Jessica. When he left, Talia sashayed her way over in my direction, but I kept my eyes on the soundstage. I had nothing to say to her.\n\n\"You know you're just a phase, right?\" I ignored her petty remark, watching as Emerson and Jessica shared a sweet, brief kiss. This story that they were filming was such a cute love story. Maybe one day, they'd turn our story into a movie or a book.\n\nOut of the corner of my eye, I watched Talia and wondered if she was hired to play the role of the bitter ex who wanted what she couldn't have. It was a part that would fit her perfectly. When she was called onto set, I grit my teeth as she placed her hand on Emerson's chest, laughing at something he'd said to Jessica between takes. Emerson had stepped back, letting her hand fall back to her side. I knew I had nothing to worry about when it came to my boyfriend. It wasn't him I was concerned with. It was Talia and her conniving ways that had me hating every moment she was around him.\n\n\"Alright, let's break for lunch and then we'll film scene seventy-two,\" the director called, and a few people cheered. Tito, a man that had worked with my parents on many occasions, laughed, waving them all off. This movie was his first foray into directing, as he had been a producer on many of my parent's projects.\n\nSomeone put some music on over the speaker system while most of the cast and crew shuffled out to get lunch from catering. Emerson bounded over to me, a skip in his step as he grinned like a little kid on Christmas and held out his hand for me to take.\n\n\"What're you up to?\" I inquired, slipping my hand into his despite the fact that I knew he had something up his sleeve. He feigned a surprised look.\n\n\"Me? Since when have I ever been up to something?\" He teased, tugging me behind him as he walked up on set. He pulled me behind him, into the small cafe type setting. He drew me into him, pressing our chests together as he led me in a dance. It was at that moment that I realized the song playing over the speakers was the song that we had danced to almost two years ago. It was the song that started everything for us.\n\nA content sigh fell from my lips as we danced on set, not caring who was around to witness it. This was our moment; our song and it always would be. Emerson proved that every time it was played. It didn't matter what we were doing, one time, we'd been in the grocery store and he'd dropped everything and danced with me. He held me close, reminding me that this wasn't just a dream and it hadn't been just a kiss. It was so much more than that." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "We hadn't spoken to his parents since we'd left their house before we were even able to eat dinner on our second night in Paris. In two days, it would be Christmas Eve and his only two days off before we had another week of filming and then it was back home on a red eye flight, just after New Year's.\n\nHe stood between my legs, pressing his forehead to mine. I slung my arms around his neck, linking them behind his head. We said nothing because nothing needed to be said. We stayed like that until he was called back to set to do another scene with Jessica. When he left, Talia sashayed her way over in my direction, but I kept my eyes on the soundstage. I had nothing to say to her.\n\n\"You know you're just a phase, right?\" I ignored her petty remark, watching as Emerson and Jessica shared a sweet, brief kiss. This story that they were filming was such a cute love story. Maybe one day, they'd turn our story into a movie or a book.\n\n\"You want to take a walk?\" Emerson asked. I looked up from my sketch book to see him standing in the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest and an easy smile on his lips. I set my pencil down, taking one last look at the black and white version of my boyfriend staring back at me. Since the moment we'd met, Emerson's image had filled a lot of the once blank pages in my sketchbook.\n\n\"Where are we walking?\" I asked, getting up and crossing the room towards him. He picked my coat up off the chair where I had set it earlier, holding it out for me. I slid my arms inside and buttoned it up.\n\n\"I was thinking of taking a stroll by the Eiffel Tower?\" My eyes widened in excitement and I nodded eagerly. Spinning around, I pecked Emerson on the lips and grinned. He laughed at my enthusiasm, squeezing me against him in a brief hug.\n\nWe didn't bother with a car service tonight because the Eiffel Tower was within walking distance of our rented home. It was a bit chilly outside, but Emerson had been prepared, handing me gloves, a hat and a scarf. Once we were all bundled up, we began our trek.\n\nSurprisingly, no one bugged us as we walked the streets. Emerson wasn't exactly hiding and still no one bothered us to ask for autographs or pictures. Personally, I reveled in the alone time with him. Sure, we had alone time at home, but never outside in public.\n\n\"Where do you see yourself in ten years?\" Emerson asked as we approached the bottom of the tower, the lights shining down on us. There were couples all around us, sharing romantic moments, hugs, kisses and pictures. Romance was all around, and it made my heart soar.\n\nI squeezed Emerson's hand and he pulled me close to him, pressing his lips to my cheek. He pulled out his phone and we snapped a few selfies with the Tower in the background. A kind woman stopped and asked if we wanted her to take a picture of us. Emerson handed her his phone and she took a good number of pictures. We looked through the pictures once she left and I was definitely getting at least one of them printed to hang in our house back in California.\n\n\"Come on, I want to show you something,\" Emerson pulled my attention away from the pictures, taking my hand once again. I handed his phone back to him and he led me off, underneath the Tower and beyond the noisy street filled with couples in love.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" I asked, swinging our arms in between us as we walked. Honestly, if I hadn't established myself and my business back in California, I would drop everything and move to this country. It was absolutely stunning, and I was in awe for every inch that we were able to see.\n\n\"There's this cute little art shop around the corner that I think you'll love,\" he explained. I grinned, marveling in how well he knew me. I couldn't not visit an art store in Paris, it just wasn't feasible. I had a little more pep in my step as we rounded the corner and headed down another street. I searched for the shop Emerson was referring to, but I couldn't see it yet.\n\n\"Where is it?\" Emerson laughed, telling me to hold my horses as he shook his head. Snow began to drift from the skies as we walked, creating the perfect magical feel for a Christmas Eve stroll in Paris.\n\n\"Hey, hold on a second,\" Emerson said, coming to a stop. I turned back to him to see him bent down, tying his shoe. I smiled, watching him for a moment, musing to myself about how truly lucky I was. The chime of a bell pulled my attention from him and I looked over to see a gorgeous holiday themed silver wind chime hanging from the branches of a tree decorated with twinkling lights. I walked closer to inspect it, but stopped short when the realization flooded in that we were alone. On Christmas Eve, in the City of Love, we were alone on this street.\n\nMy heart launched itself into my throat as I began to recognize everything around me. Emerson had taken my crudely described dream proposal from last week at dinner and perfected it. From twinkling lights, to the snow covered setting and the Eiffel Tower in the background, this was everything. He was everything.\n\nI turned back around to him, my breath catching when I saw him down on his knee. A small velvet box sat open in his palm; the twinkling lights shimmered off of the solitary emerald shaped diamond. My heart pounded in my chest as my eyes met his.\n\n\"Sadie, if you would have told me that kissing a mystery woman at a New Year's party was going to turn out to provide me with the love of my life, I would have laughed at you. But there you were and here we stand. You make me so much more than Emerson Murphy, the actor. You see beyond that and when I'm around you, I want to be better. I am better, thanks to you. I love you more than I've ever loved another, and I want nothing more than to spend every waking moment of the rest of my life by your side. Sadie Turner, will you marry me?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\nThis here, with Emerson, was tangible. This was real. It was never just a dream.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ COCOA LOCO by KATHERINE MOORE ]\n\nI was cleaning out the grease trap under the grill\u2014Julio never cleans out the grease trap\u2014when the young couple came stumbling inside. I normally keep the door locked after midnight because I'm usually by myself until five a.m. when my day cook arrives and I don't want just anybody wandering in. But Merle Jackson was here, and so were two truckers so I felt pretty safe.\n\nI know it sounds paranoid, but my little place is smack in the middle of a huge interstate truck stop and I've read all those serial killer books. They love interstates. And truck stops.\n\nBetween midnight and three a.m. I serve hot drinks, home-made sweets and premade sandwiches I can heat up in the microwave until the cheese gets all melty.\n\nSide dishes are chips and pretzels. I usually keep a couple of bananas on hand and some premade fruit cups. Hardly anyone ever buys the fruit cups. Late at night, what people want is sugar and caffeine, substances that'll keep them awake long enough to get where they're going. Sometimes Merle will buy one just to balance out the beef jerky and chips he picks up to sustain him during the night shift. He hates the night shift. Told me it played hell with his Circadian rhythms. When I asked him why he didn't just wait out the months until he retired working on a desk, he had looked at me like I was crazy.\n\n\"I'd miss the excitement,\" he said, deadpan, knowing that I knew the most excitement he ever saw was dealing with drivers who were under the influence of some mood-altering substance.\n\nAnd tonight was particularly quiet.\n\nElizabeth, one of the truckers, usually had some great road stories to tell, but she was pensive tonight and kept to herself, nursing a coffee and one of the gigantic cinnamon rolls I make during the holidays. She was making it last, which was unusual for her. She runs loads from Muscle Shoals to Waynesboro on the regular and she's always in a hurry. This year had been particularly brutal. She told me the supply chain demand for truckers was insane. \"I could work 24/7 if I could work 24/7,\" she said. \"I could go somewhere it's warm and not have to worry about snow on the mountain roads.\"\n\n\"Where would you go?\" I asked.\n\n\"Dunno,\" she said. \"They've got ports in Florida or I could try out California.\"\n\nShe talked big, but I knew she'd never leave her home base. She and her wife had a farm they'd bought after the 2008 recession and they lived there with a whole menagerie of animals that included, last time I checked, a tiny herd of alpaca whose wool they spun into yarn. Marietta sold her knitted goods on Etsy and in a couple of boutiques in Nashville. She had a seven-month waiting list for custom orders. They always gave me some item of clothing for Christmas. I was wearing one of their presents, a long sweater vest that felt like I was wrapped in a warm cloud and wasn't itchy at all.\n\n\"More coffee?\" I asked Elizabeth as she drained the last drops.\n\n\"No thanks hun. I need to be getting back on the road.\"\n\nJust as she said that the door banged open, letting in a blast of cold air and sleety snow, followed by a young couple who were so bundled in mismatched and makeshift winter gear that at first it was hard to tell their sexes.\n\nThey made no move to approach the counter, and I wondered if they had just come in to get warm. But after a brief, urgent conversation, she asked me if there was a bathroom she could use. I pointed her to the door and then turned my attention to the guy who'd come in with her, a kid who looked no more than twenty, twenty-two. My son's age.\n\nHe was looking at the case of sweets, practically drooling.\n\nI let him take his time deciding. I wasn't going anywhere. Elizabeth and the other trucker were pretending to be busy with their phones but Merle was paying close attention. He's a state trooper and vigilance is his default option.\n\nHe sauntered to the counter, nice and friendly-like to refill his coffee. He nodded at the kid with a \"how ya doin'\" nod and asked, \"So where you headed tonight.\"\n\nI give the boy credit. Merle's a bit shy of six-four and he can be intimidating on first glance. But he didn't show any sign of a guilty conscience, just answered him politely.\n\n\"Bethlehem,\" he said. \"I've got a job waiting for me. Starts the day after tomorrow.\"\n\nWayne took a slurp of his warm coffee and said mildly. \"I was born in Wayne County,\" he said, just as a subtle hint that he wouldn't take kindly to anyone causing trouble in his part of Tennessee. The boy gave that piece of information a noncommittal nod and Merle went back to his table and sat down. He looked deceptively sleepy but I knew that he was completely alert. He and the male trucker, who I hadn't seen before, exchanged looks. They were ready for trouble.\n\nThe kid asked for two banana chocolate chip muffins, a coffee and a cup of hot chocolate for his wife. She had come out of the bathroom, unwinding several layers of scarves and sweaters to reveal her swollen belly.\n\nShe looked like she was about 13 months pregnant and ready to pop any minute. But all I could think was...doesn't she have a coat? She's out on a night like this with no coat? I didn't say that though, instead I smiled at her and said, \"When I was pregnant, I had to pee every other second. I never wanted to be more than five steps from a bathroom.\"\n\nShe summoned a smile for me and nestled in next to her husband, who put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. It was such a tender gesture it almost brought tears to my eyes.\n\nNobody's out on the roads on a snowy Christmas Eve unless they have some urgent job to do or they need to make money or something. And of course when he tried to pay for his snack with his credit card, it was denied. I looked up at him and I could read the thought in his eyes. He knew there wasn't any money left on the card but he was as hoping\u2014 \"Darn,\" I said, fiddling with the little card reader. \"This stupid machine is broken again.\" I gave it a little shake. \"And just try to get someone in to fix it during the holidays.\"\n\nThe two travelers looked really alarmed. \"I left my cash in the\u2014\"\n\nI interrupted him. \"Don't even worry about it,\" I said. \"Those muffins have been out all day and are probably stale.\" I could see his hesitancy, so I added, \"You're doing me a favor.\"\n\nI waved off his thanks and figured I'd just take the loss. I am not going to begrudge a guy a cup of coffee, another of hot chocolate, and some muffins.\n\nHe took the plate with the muffins and she carried the hot drinks as they settled into the only unoccupied table in the place.\n\nI straightened the photo of Aaron that hangs over the display rack of chips. It was always leaning to the left, like his politics. I must have hammered the nail in crooked or something.\n\nAaron's kind of the patron saint of this place. My beautiful boy. He died in Afghanistan on the same day as Patrick Tillman, Nearly 20 Years ago now. He'd be middle aged now, the age I was when he stopped getting older.\n\nAfter Aaron died, his dad lost heart. Fell into a bottle and never climbed out. He died of cancer ten years ago but it was really the sorrow that killed him.\n\nIt almost killed me too, but at least I had this place. I work the night shift so I don't lie awake thinking dark thoughts. During the day I bake. And when I feel sad or lonely or just out of sorts, I take out all my feelings on the bread dough.\n\nI make a lot of whole wheat raisin bread around the holidays. It's a stiff dough. It can take a lot of pounding.\n\nI was rearranging the slices of cranberry nut bread I had in the front of the counter when I heard the young woman say, \"Oh no.\"\n\nI looked up and saw why. There was a puddle of liquid growing at her feet. Her water had just broken.\n\nHer baby was coming and it was going right now.\n\n\"We're going to need some hot water,\" Elizabeth said.\n\n\"Joe,\" the woman said, sounding scared because he looked like a deer frozen in the headlights.\n\nElizabeth took her hand. \"It's going to be all right honey. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Mary,\" she said and then, gasping, \"It hurts.\"\n\nI remember what it was like to give birth and I had had an epidural to cut the pain. She was doing it old school. I knew she was hurting bad.\n\n\"Breathe with me Mary,\" she said and showed her how.\n\n\"You have any alcohol here,\" Merle asked me, coming up to the counter and rolling up his sleeves.\n\n\"You want a drink?\" I said.\n\n\"I need to sterilize my hands.\"\n\nOh, right.\n\n\"I've got hand sanitizer,\" I said and retrieved it from where I stored it under the counter. He looked at the bottle for a moment and then slathered it all over his hands.\n\n\"You're going to deliver the baby?\"\n\n\"Won't be my first,\" he said and winked. \"You might want to call 911, see if you can get someone out here but I'm pretty sure it's going to be all over in about ten minutes.\"\n\nIt was nine minutes and the paramedics were still en route.\n\nMerle snipped the cord and then tied a little knot in it with some thread from a sewing kit the male trucker produced from his wallet.\n\nMary was exhausted but smiling as Merle put the baby on her stomach and her husband was grinning from ear to ear.\n\nSuch babies having babies, I thought.\n\nThe baby was a boy and he was perfect. \"You have a name picked out?\" Elizabeth asked Joe.\n\nHe shook his head. \"We thought it would be bad luck.\" He looked at his wife and some unspoken communication flowed between them and they both looked at Merle. \"We'd like to name him after you, sir. If we could.\"\n\nMerle laughed. \"You don't want to do that, son. Merle is a terrible name to give a child.\"\n\n\"Were you named after Merle Haggard the trucker I didn't know asked.\n\n\"I was and no diss to him but it's an awful name. The guy held out a hand about the size of a catcher's mitt.\n\n\"Happy to meet you Merle. I'm Merle Ryder and my momma was a country music fan as well. My friends call me Ry.\"\n\n\"If she'd named you after Ry Cooder, then you could be Ry Ryder.\"\n\nThe two truckers grinned at each other.\n\nMerle said, \"You know what name I always liked?\"\n\nHe glanced at me. \"Aaron.\"\n\nFor the second time that night, I felt like I might cry, but this time it was happy tears.\n\nAnd right about then the paramedics arrived and in the bustle I saw Elizabeth and the two Merles quietly emptying out their wallets and pressing their cash on Joe.\n\n\"Buy the baby a nice present,\" Merle Ryder said.\n\n\"And maybe something for Mary,\" said.\n\n\"Yes ma'am\" he said, which told me someone had raised that boy right.\n\nAnd everyone stays and she makes them a cup of her super creamy hot coconut milk cocoa to keep them warm on their way. Not long after they left Elizabeth and Merle Ryder left too, along with bags of muffins and thermoses of the special hot chocolate I only make for Christmas.\n\n\"Merry Christmas,\" I said as they left.\n\n\"See you soon,\" I said.\n\nThen it was just Merle Jackson and me.\n\n\"That was something wasn't it?\" he said.\n\n\"It surely was,\" I said.\n\n\"Would you like to come to dinner at my place tomorrow?\" he said.\n\n\"I'm working tomorrow,\" I said. \"I gave Julio the day off so he could be with his family.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. \"I'll cook it here. And anybody who drops by tomorrow can eat with us.\"\n\nI looked at him wondering where this side of Merle had come from.\n\n\"I'm from a big family,\" he said. \"It doesn't really feel like Christmas unless there are people at three or four tables with the kids eating in the living room.\"\n\n\"You're off duty tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Seniority,\" he said. \"I'm covering for Denis tomorrow night so he can be with his family but I'm free in the daytime.\n\n\"I never knew you could cook,\" I said.\n\n\"You never asked.\"\n\n\"Will there be stuffing?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" he said.\n\n\"Tell me you don't use the little boxes of dried bread.\" I said, although that's what I use myself though I doctor it up with lots of melted butter and herbs and chicken broth.\n\n\"Do I look like a barbarian?\"\n\n\"Apple pie or mince?\" I said.\n\nHe smiled. \"Black bottom or lemon meringue?\"\n\n\"I haven't eaten black bottom pie since my mother made it.\"\n\n\"Probably time you had it again,\" he said.\n\n\"What can I make?\"\n\nHe looked down into his cup. He had switched from coffee to hot chocolate at some point.\n\n\"Tell you what. You make a batch of that special cocoa and we'll call it even.\"\n\n\"Be happy to,\" I said. I make my cocoa locos in the slow cooker in big batches.\n\n\"I might even bring some of the kids over,\" he said, referring to the younger officers he worked with. \"Half of them live on pizza and Tex-Mex takeout.\"\n\n\"The more the merrier,\" I said.\n\n\"Good deal, then,\" he said.\n\nI almost said, It's a date, but I caught myself in time. \"I guess I'll see you tomorrow then,\" I said.\n\nHis eyes actually twinkled. \"I guess you will.\" He put on his Smokey Bear hat and headed out into the chilly night. \"Good night Bettina.\"\n\n\"Good night Merle.\"\n\nHe stopped for a minute. \"You know, my name doesn't sound that bad when you say it.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas Merle,\" I said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Recipe: Bettina's Cocoa Loco Hot Chocolate\n\nIngredients:\n\n\u20021 can coconut milk (Bettina uses Trader Joe's Organic Coconut Milk)\n\n\u20022 cups whole milk (can substitute skim but Bettina is a whole-fat kind of gal) 2 cups hot water\n\n\u20021/2 cup Hershey's unsweetened cocoa powder\n\n\u20021/2 cup granulated sugar\n\n\u20025 tablespoons chocolate chips (Bettina uses semisweet chips but milk chocolate is fine) Dash of salt\n\n\u20021 teaspoon real vanilla extract\n\n\u2002Whipped cream or marshmallows\n\nDirections:\n\n- Combine all the ingredients in the cooking pot of a slow cooker and mix thoroughly so all the cocoa powder dissolves in the milks.\n\n- Set the temperature to low and heat for two hours.\n\n- Stir occasionally.\n\n- Serve, garnished with whipped cream or marshmallows.\n\n- Set the slow cooker back to warm if not drinking the cocoa right away.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ CHRISTMAS COFFEE AND SNOWFLAKES by KIMBERLY GRAY ]\n\n\"Now, you're sure you don't mind working today?\"\n\n\"I don't mind.\" Her eyes shot to the floor.\n\n\"Alright. We'll close up around five. You can put the money in the safe, and I will take care of it tomorrow. I've got to go, or I'm going to be late.\"\n\n\"Goodbye Mr. Atkins. Merry Christmas!\"\n\n\"Yeah, Merry Christmas,\" he grumbled as he bumped into a guy entering the shop. \"Sorry about that.\"\n\nThe guy watched him leave and turned toward Kayli.\n\n\"Scrooge?\"\n\n\"No. In a hurry. What can I get you?\" She asked as she made her way to the booth he planted himself in.\n\n\"Coffee with cream. Pecan pie. That's it for right now.\"\n\n\"Coming right up.\"\n\nGreat, she thought. One customer, and he didn't seem too talkative. Cute as all get out, but she couldn't converse with looks. Kayli poured his coffee and grabbed a saucer with a pre-cut slice of pie. Making her way to him, she noticed his attire was casual, not dressy as one would be for that day.\n\n\"Here you go. If you need anything else, I'm right over there.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Going to any parties today?\" She asked before realizing she may have come across as nosy. \"I'm sorry. That's none of my business.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not.\"\n\nShe frowned and walked back to the counter. Guess that explained his clothing. Not that jeans and a long sleeved shirt weren't party acceptable. She'd prefer wearing that any day. Looking out the window, her mind wandered.\n\nIt was a cold day in Pennybrook, Alabama, but no signs of snow showed anywhere. The weather people said the chances of a white Christmas were slim to none. Kayli wished it would snow just once in her life on Christmas day. She envisioned the little flakes falling and accumulating a few inches. In her mind, she would be out in it, twirling around and catching snowflakes on her tongue. Like they did in the movies. Her reverie crashed when she heard a voice.\n\n\"Miss. Miss.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry. What do you need?\"\n\n\"More coffee with cream.\"\n\n\"Sure thing.\"\n\n\"Why are you working on Christmas? You must have things to do. Is that why you were so engrossed in thought?\"\n\n\"I don't really mind working today. I didn't plan on it, but I don't have anything else to do. My parents are gone, and all my other family lives off. I'm not even sure why Mr. Atkins opened today. It's not like we're buzzing with business, apart from you. I was just imagining snow. You know those movies where it always snows on Christmas. It never snows here.\"\n\n\"It's cold enough for it.\"\n\n\"Yes, but the weather channels say no.\" She sighed.\n\n\"Stranger things have happened, I guess. You said your parents were gone. Do you mean gone, like on vacation? or gone, like no longer here?\"\n\n\"No longer here.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. You seem kinda young to lose both parents. Accident?\"\n\n\"Cancer.\"\n\n\"I'm terribly sorry about that. By the way, I'm Evan Petersen.\"\n\n\"Kayli Owen. So, what are you doing in a coffee shop instead of anywhere else? I mean I appreciate your business.\"\n\n\"I'm new here, so I don't know anyone or have any family. I wanted to get out and not be stuck inside all day. I saw this place open and decided to stop in. Coffee's good. Did you make it?\"\n\n\"Yes. Not long before you came in. I didn't do the pie, though. Mrs. Atkins makes the pies and all.\"\n\nKayli bit her bottom lip and stared at the floor. She wanted conversation? She's getting it. But, she was running out of things to talk about with a complete stranger who had no clue about anything in Pennybrook.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I'm probably keeping you from work. I'll take some more coffee with cream, and you can get back to whatever you need to be doing.\"\n\nKayli looked around. \"I don't seem to be swamped, and all the things have been done.\"\n\nEvan looked up at her with sparkling eyes and smiled a heart-stopping smile. \"Do you want to join me, then?\"\n\nHer heart flip-flopped as she smiled back. \"Sure. Hang on.\"\n\nShe came back with his coffee and cocoa for herself and sat across from him. Her cheeks felt as if it was the hottest day of summer instead of the coldest day of winter. She wondered how a good conversation turned so awkward. The silence filled the coffee shop, and Kayli wished she had put on some music.\n\nEvan spoke. \"I'm sorry for making things weird.\"\n\n\"Oh it's not you. I just don't know what to talk about since you're not from around here.\"\n\n\"Why don't you tell me about yourself and some of the things in this town.\"\n\n\"Ok.\"\n\nThey chatted back and forth, telling one another things about themselves and where they lived for some time. Kayli looked at the clock.\n\n\"Oh goodness. I should have closed up already. Listen, I know this place that is serving Christmas meals. Do you want to go eat there? With me?\"\n\n\"Like a date?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"I feel I should be the one asking, but since you know things here. Then, yeah. Let's go.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll put everything away, and we can go.\"\n\nKayli put the little bit of money in the safe and washed the coffee pot for the next morning. Making sure everything was turned off, she grabbed her coat and headed for the door.\n\n\"You ready? It's not far. We can walk if you want.\"\n\n\"Lead the way, Miss Kayli.\"\n\nShe locked the door and turned around, surprised at what she saw. Snow had begun to fall. Her face lit up, and she squealed.\n\n\"It's snowing!\"\n\nShe twirled around in it, smiling and laughing.\n\n\"It's so beautiful! Have you ever seen anything so beautiful in your life?\"\n\n\"No, I haven't,\" Evan said, never taking his eyes off Kayli.\n\nShe stopped and looked at him. \"Neither have I.\"\n\nThey both smiled as he held his hand out. Taking it, Kayli felt this Christmas was the beginning of something wonderful.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ NOEL'S MISTLETOE MIRACLE by PANDORA SNOW ]\n\n\"Marge Simpson's got nothing on you, Francine!\"\n\n\"Thanks, Noel. I love it!\"\n\nA final coat of Aqua Net applies to my client's bouffant hairstyle for the retro Christmas party she's attending tonight. She hands me the ruler for a last measurement, hoping to win the contest for tallest hair.\n\n\"Twenty-five inches, you got this.\"\n\n\"The prize is a cool lava lamp. How about you, any plans?\"\n\n\"I'm visiting my Mom for the Holidays.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas, Noel; I really appreciate the last-minute appointment.\"\n\n\"No problem, take care.\"\n\nThe final day's client exits, and I begin sweeping and sanitizing my station as the owner Jeremy frets over the day's income. Business has steadily declined the last six months, an influx of modern and chic salons spurring Boise's explosion in growth. We've discussed updating the interior design and purchasing new stylist chairs, but the building he leases is in poor shape.\n\n\"Any plans tonight?\" he asks kindly, worry lines across his forehead.\n\n\"Another Netflix binge with my friends Ben and Jerry.\"\n\n\"You really need to get back on the horse. It's been six months since you broke up with Ted, and I don't think you've been on a single date.\"\n\n\"Guilty as charged. The holidays are crazy, maybe in the new year. Any updates on the reno plan your designer friend is putting together?\"\n\n\"Depends on my budget. I'm meeting with the bank about a business loan in a few days. Hopefully, they're in the Christmas spirit.\"\n\n\"I'll cross my fingers; see you tomorrow.\"\n\n\"See ya.\"\n\nMy favorite red wool scarf and gloves pull from the grey peacoat's pocket, and I bundle up. The air's a chilling forty degrees outside as I hustle my feet into the fifteen-year-old Toyota Corolla. If I'm lucky, the heater's warmth will blow before I reach the apartment, my modest salary and tips barely covering living expenses.\n\nMom's caller ID appears on the cell as soon as I fasten my apartment's deadbolt and shrug off the wool jacket.\n\n\"Hi, Mom, I just got home.\"\n\n\"Hey, honey. I'm afraid I have some bad news. I fell on the stairs this afternoon and sprained my knee. Can you come home a day early?\"\n\n\"Oh no, are you alright?\"\n\n\"I called Roy, but he was two hours away. The new firefighter he hired came over and drove me to Emergency.\"\n\n\"Are you in a bandage?\"\n\n\"No, Doctor Tom immobilized the knee in a brace. You'll have to help me with the cookies and pies for the annual Christmas Eve dinner.\"\n\n\"I'll call Jeremy as soon as we hang up and drive over first thing in the morning. I'm so sorry you fell; who's the new guy?\"\n\n\"A nice man in his mid-twenties, wanted to find a quiet town away from the chaos and stress of the big city. He's cute and single.\"\n\nOh no, here we go. Since I left home two years ago to attend Cosmetology school, Mom's been begging me to come back and work in the local beauty parlor. The truth is, I left not only to further my chosen career but to find distance from the endless grief since Dad died in a local factory fire. Every square inch of the small town where I grew up reminds me of him, and I needed to escape the constant sadness.\n\n\"Drive safely, dear; we have three feet of snow on the ground. Do you still have tire chains in the trunk?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mom, I've driven in snow a thousand times. Get some sleep; I love you.\"\n\n\"I love you too, Noel. This will be another tough Christmas.\"\n\n\"We'll get through this together.\"\n\nI fire a quick text to Jeremy and he approves the extra day off, thoughtfully wishing us a Merry Christmas. I finish leftover spaghetti and switch on the bedroom TV, falling asleep to a Hallmark Channel movie that could be set in my quaint hometown of Mistletoe. I wonder if I'll ever get my happy ever after." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "A restless sleep convinces me to throw a packed bag in my reliable old car and hit the open highway at three, double-checking the tire chains are still in the trunk. After a brief stop in the neighboring town of McCall for caffeine and fuel at hour three, I'm closing in on my destination, the sunrise stunning across Idaho's expansive skyline. I'm drinking a red bull and belting out Livin' on a Prayer when a deer bolts across the road, causing me to swerve into a dirt-filled ditch. My hands clamp to the wheel as the liquid splatters across the dash and I slam the brake.\n\nI'm okay, I breathe, inhaling deeply, the eerie silence of Idaho's desolate roads creeping into my sensitive ears. My phone picks up from underneath the passenger seat, and I pound my fist on the center console as it flashes No Service. The car thermometer reads thirty-two and falling with a light snowfall accumulating. There's an emergency two-way radio and road flair in the trunk with the tire chains, an emergency crate my Dad put together when I got my driver's license. I'm talking myself up to brave the cold, knowing my sneakers will get soaking wet, when two headlights appear in my rearview mirror and slowly come to a stop three feet behind my rear bumper.\n\nA large man walks towards my window dressed in a dark puffy coat with a hood, blowing into his cupped hands as his breath creates fog in the frigid air.\n\n\"Are you alright, Ma'am?\" a deep voice booms, instantly heating my blood and blooming excitement in my stomach as I wind down the window with the stiff handle.\n\n\"Fine, a buck ran in front of my car. You aren't a serial killer, are you?\"\n\n\"Do you think I'd tell you if I was?\" he chuckles, his voice tone pure honey.\n\nI'm ordered to stay put while he drives a large Ford truck in front of my car and hooks a cable wench to a tow bar underneath the Corolla's front bumper.\n\nThe morning sun's rising across the horizon, deep reds and oranges matching the stupid color on my cheeks as he returns to my window. His handsome face is less intimidating now that I have a more defined view of the chiseled features and warm blue eyes.\n\n\"Keep the car in neutral and your foot off the brake. Steer the wheel until I've got you back on solid ground. Oh, and here's a souvenir from Mistletoe.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I mumble, unable to form a coherent sentence when he gives me a beaming smile and places an actual bundle of mistletoe in my hand.\n\nMy stuck vehicle effortlessly jerks over the small embankment and all four tires land on the pavement. I shift the gear into park while he unlatches the line, gawking at his muscular flexing arms and broad shoulders, noticing he removed his outer coat despite the freezing temperature. He stows the gear in his truck bed and returns to my window, my red nose shouting Rudolph as the cold breeze flows through my interior.\n\n\"Thanks,\" I smile, rays of light dancing through his dark brown hair, wanting to know his name but too embarrassed to ask.\n\n\"Are you traveling far? Three feet of fresh snow fell overnight; I recommend putting on tire chains if you have them.\"\n\n\"So I hear. Actually, Mistletoe's my final stop. I should be able to make it just fine.\"\n\n\"Visiting family for the holidays?\"\n\n\"My Mom injured her knee. I'm here to help with the annual Christmas dinner at the firehouse.\"\n\nA wide grin breaks across his face, not exactly news to be so darn happy about.\n\n\"I'm sorry, this is such a crazy coincidence. You must be Mrs. Blankenship's daughter, Noel. I took your Mom to urgent care.\"\n\n\"You're the new guy, Phoenix?\"\n\n\"Yes, Ma'am. At your service.\"\n\nHello, charming, not-a-serial-killer, hero.\n\n\"I'll follow you into town. Give your mother my warmest regards.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I smirk, following his confident swagger into his truck with my suddenly curious eyes.\n\nHe waves me around, and we make the short ten minute drive to town, my hand offering a friendly wave as I turn onto Willow Drive, and he heads straight towards the firehouse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "The aroma of cherry pie and hazelnut coffee delights my nostrils as I unlock the front door and enter my childhood home.\n\n\"Noel, you're early!\" Mom shouts with glee, resting on a kitchen stool while rolling dough.\n\n\"Let me take over; you need to rest,\" I smile, embracing her warmly.\n\n\"Nonsense, I'm fine. How was the drive?\"\n\n\"Phoenix isn't a serial killer.\"\n\n\"What!?\"\n\n\"The roads are icy, and when I swerved and slammed the brakes to avoid a deer, I ended up stuck in a ditch. He pulled up in his truck not two minutes later and used his wench to get me back on the pavement. You're right; he's cute.\"\n\n\"Dad's looking out for you even from heaven. I'm glad you're safe.\"\n\nA few compassionate tears fall, and we share a bonding hug. The oven buzzer dings, and I grab the potholders to remove the first of several delicious baked confections.\n\n\"Why's the house so empty, are you selling?\"\n\n\"No, I moved all of the valuables into storage. The home needs updates to the sewer and electrical systems. I didn't want to start construction until after New Year's.\"\n\n\"I still have a bed right?\"\n\n\"Of course. I felt mournful when packing Dad's old clothes, but maybe this will give us both a fresh start.\"\n\n\"What can I do to help?\"\n\n\"The attic needs another pass; I left our old holiday decorations. Enough about the house, tell me how your job's going?\"\n\nThe morning passes quickly as I share funny client stories, lively seasonal tunes on the radio and emotional memories of Dad fostering joyful memories of Christmas past and excitement for tomorrow night's festivities.\n\n\"Can you run to Wegman's before they close? We're out of flour and a few other items. Here's the list.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\n\"Take my car. It has snow tires.\"\n\n\"You mean Dad's car.\"\n\n\"Go,\" she points with a chuckle.\n\nI fire the Chevy Impala's engine after scraping ice off the windshield, laughing at the argument Mom and Dad had over him buying a new car several years ago. My parents inherited Grandma Tilly's early nineteen hundreds home when she passed, and my Dad planned to build a garage for his precious vehicle shortly after we moved in.\n\nThe time was seven pm on a Tuesday when Dad raced out the door to a five-alarm fire at the abandoned tire factory building. Rotting timbers and rusted gas lines caused an explosion, and several units from nearby towns were called to battle the blaze. Dad was on a ladder holding the heavy firehose when another boom rocked the crumbling building, and he was instantly killed. We knew the risk to a firefighter's life was high but never expected to lose Dad, the town's first on-the-job fatality.\n\nFire Chief Roy still blames himself for the accident and continues helping Mom maintain the old home; that's what small-town folks do for one another. I shake my head free of the somber memories and park next to a familiar-looking truck in front of the grocery store, sloshing through the dirty salted snow in search of flour and eggs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\"Noel?\" Phoenix's voice calls out as I'm putting two bottles of pure vanilla extract in my basket.\n\n\"Hi,\" I grin, turning to see a gorgeous full uniformed fireman with a cart full of turkeys and potatoes, my captivated lips parting at the stunning view.\n\n\"How's your mother doing?\"\n\n\"Great, a knee sprain won't stop her from baking the state's best cherry pies.\"\n\n\"I can't wait to find out for myself. I think that's Roy's favorite part of Christmas. Will you be at the dinner too?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I whisper, lost to a hunky hero's glowing, delighted eyes. \"Um, can I ask you a favor, you know, since you have a truck?\"\n\n\"Anything.\"\n\n\"I want to surprise Mom with something; she hasn't decorated for the holidays since we lost Dad three years ago. When I drop her off tomorrow afternoon at the station, could you help me with a tree?\"\n\n\"I'm truly sorry for your loss, the guys still tell stories of his bravery and service when I'm at the station. My brother died in a house fire nine months ago. I wasn't on duty that night, and I'm still trying to come to grips. That's one of the reasons I decided to slow life down and move to Mistletoe.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry too, I know exactly how you feel. Where did you get the name Phoenix?\"\n\n\"My brother nicknamed me that when I joined the squad after high school and became a full-fledged fireman. In a small way, it's helping me rise from the ashes of loss, knowing I'm making him proud.\"\n\n\"That's beautiful,\" I breathe, his warm thumb wiping a few tears from my eye's corners, melting my pounding heart.\n\n\"I'd be honored to help. Do you need decorations too?\"\n\n\"No, Mom still has boxes in the attic. I'll take a look tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"Be careful up there. The home's getting old, and I'll bet the space is filled with dust and loose planks. I noticed burn marks on an outlet in the family room yesterday.\"\n\n\"I guess I can rule out serial killer, then?\" I chuckle to lighten the mood as we stroll towards checkout.\n\n\"The only cereal I kill is Lucky Charms.\"\n\n\"That's my favorite too!\"\n\n\"Your turn. Why did your parents name you Noel?\"\n\n\"They were told they couldn't have kids, and I was conceived at Christmas time.\"\n\n\"The blessing's all mine,\" he murmurs close to my ear, motioning me to check out first.\n\n\"Noel, great to see you!\" Karla grins, ringing up my baking goods as I tap my credit card to the payment machine.\n\n\"How's the family?\" I ask, her head unsubtly nodding to the stud standing behind me.\n\n\"Jackson and Bethany are in middle school already. Will we see you tomorrow night?\"\n\n\"Yes, Ma'am,\" Phoenix interjects, pinking my cheeks as he loads the groceries onto the belt, and I wait for him to complete the process.\n\n\"Bye,\" Karla chirps, nodding her head in approval when Phoenix sets my bags in his cart and leads us out the automatic doors.\n\n\"Here's my cell number. Call me after you drop off your Mom, and I'll bring over the tree.\"\n\nI input his digits into my phone as he politely loads my bags into the Impala's trunk before stowing his own groceries.\n\n\"This is a great car. The snow tires are much safer than your Toyota.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you approve. Thanks again for taking care of my mom yesterday, and her daughter.\"\n\n\"It's my job, Ma'am,\" he smirks, laughing as I squeal the tires backing into the slushy parking lot, melting my resistance faster than the warming snow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The sheer exhilaration lighting my face is impossible to hide as Mom grills me when I bring the bags into the kitchen.\n\n\"I haven't seen you this happy in years. Why don't you move back home?\"\n\n\"Hold that thought; my boss is calling.\"\n\nI stride to my old room, Jeremy's downtrodden voice dropping my bottom onto the bed.\n\n\"The bank foreclosed on the building this morning; the salon's closed for good. I can't afford to move to a new location.\"\n\n\"That's awful timing. What a bunch of grinches.\"\n\n\"I know. I'm sorry you're out of a job. I'll make some calls after Christmas and let you know if I find any good prospects.\"\n\n\"Are you still going to your sisters for dinner? You shouldn't be alone.\"\n\n\"Yep, she's the only family I've got. Maybe I need to rethink my priorities.\"\n\n\"Me too. Have a Merry Christmas, Jeremy. Everything will work out.\"\n\n\"You too, hon.\"\n\nThe last twenty-four hours have been a whirlwind of mixed emotions, but I haven't felt this excited about dating someone since ever, and Mom needs my help around the house for a while. Maybe Kris Kringle's setting me up for a new direction in life, 'tis the season for miracles, as they say.\n\nI decide not to mention the news to mom and we laugh, cry, and bake until it's three o'clock on Christmas Eve, and I'm dropping her off at the fire station to help prepare dinner. Roy's doting on her, carrying the boxes of pies and cookies from the trunk, making her comfortable on a stool and complimenting the aromatic smell of cherry. She winks at me when Phoenix walks in and accompanies me back to the car to retrieve a final round of decorated sugar cookies.\n\n\"I have to pick up a few residents from the retirement home, and then I'll bring over the tree.\"\n\n\"Sounds perfect. I'll tell Mom I forgot this box and have to run home. That will give me time to string out the lights and dust off the ornaments box I located in the attic.\"\n\n\"I'm beyond glad you're here, Noel. I wish you were sticking around.\"\n\n\"You never know,\" I sheepishly smile, closing the trunk's lid and hurrying into the firehouse so he doesn't see the furious blush crossing my cold cheeks." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "I've spent thirty minutes laying out colorful strands of lights and glass ornaments on the family room sofa for the tree's arrival, plugging them in and clapping as they light up. I unlock the front door, texting Phoenix to bring the tree straight into the family room, and climb up the rickety ladder into the attic for the angel tree topper. This was my Dad's favorite, and I feel it's time to restart this family tradition.\n\nDusty cobwebs fly across my face as I search for the specific box I saw this morning, panic halting my breath as I begin smelling smoke and see the gray haze floating up the stairs. Phoenix warned me about the family room outlet, but I was so distracted I think I plugged the lights into the wrong socket. The air's thickening as I struggle on my knees to get down the ladder, missing a rung and falling backward onto the hallway floor as pain spreads through my ankle.\n\nMy phone's downstairs and the house is on fire. My only thought is to crawl into the bathroom and shut the door, putting towels along the jam to prevent further smoke from infiltrating. Please, Dad, help me, I cry, wetting my hair and clothing with the bathroom faucet as he taught me years ago as a child.\n\n\"Noel!\" a man's voice screams into the air, coughing as I reply in my loudest voice.\n\n\"In the bathroom!\" I manage to shout, ducking as the door kicks in and Phoenix's fearful face morphs into relief.\n\nI'm scooped into his arms and shielded from the scalding heat with his giant arm as he rushes down the stairs and out the front door, my lungs gasping for fresh air as he runs us behind the firetruck.\n\n\"Clear the area!\" he orders, emergency personnel ducking behind the truck just as an explosion bursts through the house, the sickening scent of gas adding to the already overwhelming sensory environment.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" he asks worriedly, removing his face shield and helmet, the sound of additional sirens approaching filling my ringing ears.\n\n\"How did you know?\" I choke, tears streaming from my lids as arriving emergency personnel begin putting out the fire.\n\n\"The call at your address came into the station the second I returned with the residents from the retirement home. Roy drove the firetruck, and I jumped out as soon as we stopped, knowing you were inside. Thank goodness you sent the text to me and left the door unlocked: I wasn't going to let anything happen to the girl I'm falling in love with.\"\n\n\"She's alright, Caroline,\" Roy shouts into his walkie after organizing the incoming firemen's assignments, slapping Phoenix hard on the shoulder.\n\n\"I'm ok, Mom, really,\" I speak into the radio, her hysterical voice breaking into a Oh Thank Heavens!\n\n\"Excellent work, Griffen. I'm so sorry about the house, Noel. We're all grateful you're okay.\"\n\nMy eyes close, and I rest against my hero's thumping chest, thanking Dad for sending him to save me, twice.\n\n\"Are you hurt?\" a tender voice whispers into my ear, sweetly grasping my cheek until our eyes meet.\n\n\"I twisted my ankle. Do you mean it?\"\n\n\"With all of my heart. Only the man upstairs could have organized these synchronistic circumstances. We're meant for each other.\"\n\nHe unzips his outer fire coat, pulling a green bunch of mistletoe from his inside shirt pocket and holding the bundle above my head.\n\n\"I was hoping to use this later tonight, but now seems perfect.\"\n\nGentle lips meet mine, a timeless honest kiss sealing our fate as the world disappears around us.\n\n\"Your real name is Griffen?\" I whisper against his lips, brushing my dirty fingers along his temples as our eyes soften with love. \"You know that means divine guardian, right?\"\n\n\"Your Dad and my brother must have worked overtime to set this up with the big guy. Will you stay in town, with me? I have three extra bedrooms for you and your mother.\"\n\n\"I lost my job yesterday, so there isn't anything tying me to Boise anymore. That's some major influence those two have. I'd love to.\"\n\n\"I'm going to call you my Mistletoe miracle, and maybe someday my wife.\"\n\n\"Be careful what you wish for. They're watching.\"\n\nAnother heart-stopping kiss graces my lips before he lifts us to standing and sets me on the waiting paramedic gurney.\n\n\"I'm going to ride with Noel to the hospital,\" Griffen shouts to Roy, the fire chief's head-nodding approval.\n\n\"Ready?\" the paramedic calls from the driver's seat of the ambulance after securing the back doors.\n\n\"For anything, Angelo,\" my handsome, heroic firemen grins, double slapping the metal and weaving our fingers together.\n\n\"An angel's driving us. This can't be real.\"\n\n\"I'm falling head over heels for you, Noel. I don't need any more signs to confirm how I feel.\"\n\n\"Me too, not-a-serial-killer Phoenix. I can't wait for you to taste the pies, they're a tradition.\"\n\n\"Cherry, right?\"\n\n\"With a dash of Mistletoe miracle.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ PANCAKES WITH A MISTLETOE ON TOP by MAYA LEMAIRE ]\n\nToday was the day. I looked into the mirror and pinched my cheeks to get some color into them. I needed to look my best, it wasn't everyday you met your best friend's fianc\u00e9. My mouth turned into a grimace at the thought. I quickly shook my head, dispelling the negativity but causing my brown curls to stick to my still wet lip stain in the process.\n\nI let out some choice swear words as I picked my lipstick back up and then took my sweet ass time applying a few layers of touch up coats. My distraction didn't last long, and I was soon forced to face the music and push myself to leave my damn bathroom.\n\nBefore I knew it my boots, coat, hat, and mittens were on and I stepped over the threshold closing the door behind me. I turned on the car heater and waited for my windows to defrost. Putting my hand under my armpits, I watched my breath make little clouds of smoke. It was your typical winter day in Canada, everything covered in white stuff and cold enough to freeze hell over.\n\nAs the windows slowly defrosted, I let my mind wander and distract me from the cold. I thought about how I should act when I met her fianc\u00e9, what I should say to them both, if the guy was as much of a monster as I pictured him to be in my head. I obviously had some strong thoughts on my lifelong friend's current situation, but I didn't want to be an unsupportive bitch either.\n\nThe problem was that the balance of friend and unsupportive bitch was a very very fine one. I guessed it was all a matter of continuing to drop some hints about how I was really feeling, while I sprinkled stories with subtle morals or stories of people who took their relationships too far too fast. Of course, I would support her decision in the end, but I needed to know that I did all I could to inform her of how her decision could be the wrong one.\n\nWe were different, she and I. I liked to over analyze every single decision in my life and she trusted her heart with a reckless abandon, which I sometimes envied. It might give her some heartache later on, but she certainly spent less time fretting over decisions that might end up being wrong anyways. No matter how much you thought a decision through, there was still a chance that life took your carefully laid out plans and turned them on their heads. I still didn't know which of our methods was better, but at least our opposing approaches to decision-making were well suited for one another.\n\nI took one more moment to rest my forehead on the steering wheel and let out some deep centering breaths before straightening up, giving the windshield a couple squirts of antifreeze and turning the key in the ignition. Here goes nothing.\n\nAs I pulled into the parking lot of the rundown family diner, I forced myself to relax my jaw and smooth the wrinkles in my forehead. As my hands begrudgingly turned off the ignition, my friend's voice fluttered in my mind as our conversation from a month earlier repeated once again in my thoughts.\n\n\"Oh you will absolutely love him Evie! He is just so charming, and nice, and really really hot. He really cares about me too. you'll see! Now I know you're going to call me crazy, but I just knew the second I saw him, like we were destined for each other or something, we just fit together you know?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I do know Stace, how long have you known this guy again? You only left for that internship 8 months ago.\"\n\n\"I met him a few weeks in, it's practically been a whole year! You have to trust me on this Evie, please agree to meet up with us. It would really really mean a lot to me ...\"\n\nI sniffled as the cold started to seep into the now turned off car. The neon sign proclaiming world best pancakes stared at me from the diner's front window, beckoning me to its heated interior and tempting me with one of my favorite foods. It damn well be the world's best pancakes because anything less was not going to make this supper any more enjoyable. I was also hoping they served alcohol with their all-day breakfast because I might be needing that too.\n\nI opened the car door before my resolve failed and quickly ran to the restaurant's door. Someone needed to tell Jack Frost to calm down, I could feel my eyelashes freezing in the 20-foot distance from my car to the restaurant lobby.\n\nAs I pushed the door open, I plastered a bright smile on my face, as artificial as the fake mistletoe on top of the front door. God, I hated mistletoe. It had such a long history, with records of mistletoe being used all the way back to ancient Greece, yet these days it was only an excuse for people to grope you. Such a shame, yet another thing consumerism has f'd-up.\n\nA quick glance around let me know no one else was here yet, I was opening my phone to check if Stacy had texted me when I was plowed into from behind. I looked up and the first thing my eye caught was the offensive mistletoe, before falling on a very tall and disheveled man. Immediately my hackles rose, this did nothing to help my bad mood.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?!\" I bit out at the exact same time the guy said.\n\n\"So sorry! I didn't see you!\"\n\nWe stared at each other in silence for a moment before I broke the tension.\n\n\"Ya, well please look where you're going next time\" I said. When words failed me I tended to get defensive, and quite often it made me sound like a rightful bitch. I sighed and opened my mouth up to give a better apology.\n\n\"Will do Barbie.\"\n\n\"Barbie!?\" My previous decision to apologize for my bad temper fell away. I wasn't sure what to make of that comment, if he was commenting on my plump figure, my heavily applied makeup or something else entirely. Whatever the reason, I damn well knew an insult when I heard one.\n\nI looked at the guy more closely, if anything, he was a Ken doll. He had green eyes, a firm and square jaw, and an impressive build. His auburn hair had a red tint to it and, while disheveled, it still fell elegantly around his ears to frame his face. He had on a black and red plaid coat but I could still tell he was toned and muscular.\n\n\"Whatever you say Ken,\" I told him as I continued my perusal purposely skimming over his lower abdomen despite what looked like a security breach in the fly department. \"Just leave this 'Barbie' alone because she doesn't need any more Kens in her life\". I then lifted my eyes up to his and shrugged, as if to say, I've seen better.\n\nWannabe Ken was completely unfazed by my insult, he just smirked as he leaned against the hostess podium. His arms flexed in a delicious way. Man, he was definitely an asshat but he was gorgeous and he knew it.\n\n\"Someone's having a bad day.\"\n\nOh, that did it, today was not the right day to mess with me. A smile slowly crept up my lips and I probably looked a bit unhinged as I glanced back to his crotch area, this time fully taking it in. \"Seems I'm not the only one, forget to button up and zip your jeans today? Or is that just something Kens don't have the mental capacity to know how to do?\"\n\nHis eyes challenged me for a second before he gave in and looked down. He immediately cursed under his breath and turned around to do up his pants. He must have rushed here after a quick hookup and forgotten to button up his pants I mused. Typical Ken.\n\nWhen he turned back the muscle in his jaw ticked, he looked me over, probably to find a flaw to comment on, but instead his jaw relaxed and his eyes fell to my cleavage and then up to my lips. His gaze got heated for a tiny second before he yanked his eyes up sharply.\n\nWhen he caught me staring he just shrugged \"I would make a comment but there really is nothing to comment on. Take that as you will.\"\n\nLiar, I thought. He didn't like but, He totally liked what he saw. I wasn't sure why, but that gave me some kind of maniacal glee. It really really did.\n\nI sat down on one of the chairs and crossed my long legs in front of me, then I took out my phone and tried to think of anything else but him. It was kind of hard though, I could swear I felt the asshat's presence near me and my mind kept oscillating between angry thoughts and very naughty thoughts. When I got this Stacy thing figured out, I desperately needed to get back onto the dating scene and get myself some action.\n\nThe thought surprised me for a moment, before a sense of calm rushed over me. I think I was finally ready. My heart thumped excitedly. Maybe this visceral reaction to Ken was my sign I was ready to move on from my last relationship, to finally let that shit fire go. My lips tilted into the slightest smile as I let myself both sink into that thought and the feelings Mr. Ken was making me feel.\n\nOnly a few minutes ticked by but it felt like it was hours. Keeping my eyes on the phone and not letting them flick to the man who now sat across from me felt almost like a winter Olympic sport. I didn't regret it though. It had been too long since I let myself indulge in these types of feelings. Who cared if it was for a jerk face like Ken, it was an exhilarating piece of progress.\n\nWhen the front door opened with the chime of a bell and swirl of frigid air I looked up, grateful for the interruption. Any longer and I might have done something stupid. But when I saw my best friend, her arm hooked into the guy's arm, the light feeling quickly turned heavy and settled into a pool of dread in my stomach.\n\nShe swooped in slightly out of breath, her light brown hair streaked with red and green was swooped into a messy bun which somehow still looked elegant and put together. Witchcraft if you asked me. I spent only a few seconds on my friend's stick figure, perfectly applied makeup and legging and cardigan ensemble before I zoomed in on him. I could see what she saw in him, he was a bit different then her usual type but still had a sort of air of sophistication. Carefully coiffed black hair falling slightly over one eye, defined cheekbones, and plump lips. He was in black jeans with a black jumper, the only accessory was a small silver piercing in his right ear and some kind of gold chain tucked under his shirt. He had no coat, but considering he was also out of breath I assumed they just took a run for it and left them in the car. Another sign that this guy was in fact her type, just as incredibly impulsive as her, always ready to have a laugh and try something new despite potential consequences.\n\nAs they stepped under the mistletoe Stace looked up and her mouth curved into a smile, she wrapped her arm around her guy's neck and pulled him in for a kiss. The guy looked stunned for a second, his back ramrod straight, before he relaxed and a big grin burst on his face as he returned the kiss with passion. I was all about expressing your sexuality but for some reason I felt myself blush at the sight. Despite what I thought about their decisions, I could tell Stace was completely smitten with him, and unless he was a good actor, I was pretty sure he returned the affection. Their kiss felt somehow incredibly intimate, like they were in their own little world and nothing else mattered.\n\nA throat cleared behind me making me jump, I turned to throw daggers at the culprit, when I saw the sound came from none other than Mr. Ken those daggers became flaming projectiles. If he thought he was going to mess with Stace and her new boyfriend he had another thing coming. Didn't matter how I felt about the relationship, she was still my friend.\n\nMatt pulled away from Stacy's now red and swollen lips and looked towards Mr. Ken. As he caught Mr. Ken's eyes, his cheeks blushed bright red and he looked embarrassed.\n\n\"Sorry John. I didn't see you there mate.\" Matt said.\n\nStace pulled away from Matt who still had his hand around her waist and walked over to John with a big smile on her face.\n\n\"It's so nice to meet you!\" she said going in for a big hug. John seemed absolutely uncomfortable with this development, his whole body language screamed that he wasn't as thrilled to meet Stacy as she was to meet him.\n\nDespite my current feeling about Mr. Ken I eventually took pity on the poor guy trapped in one of Stacy's never ending hugs. Well, that and I was kind of annoyed at being completely looked over, so I took a page from John's book and cleared my throat loudly.\n\nThree sets of eyes simultaneously turned to me.\n\n\"Oh my god Evie!\" Stacy said as she changed targets and came barreling into me. She squeezed me hard as she continued to speak loudly and excitedly. \"I was so worried you might not come! Matt told me John was definitely going to be here, and I mean you've never let me down before, but I know how you feel about all this, and I was worried...\"\n\n\"Stace, breathe\" I panted through her tight grip.\n\nShe let out a laugh and gave me one more tight squeeze before releasing me and backing up. \"Ooops. I guess I'm excited.\"\n\nA smile curved my lips, despite the fact I was still upset at this situation. Stacy had not only perfected the witchcraft of always looking polished, even in a messy bun, but also the witchcraft of always being able to make me smile even when no one else could.\n\n\"Well,\" Matt said, giving me a big smile and bringing us back to the present. \"I'm glad you could both be here. By the way, Evie, this is John\" he said pointing to Mr. Ken \"And John this is Evie.\"\n\nJohn walked up to me, and I eyed him unsure of how he was going to play this. \"Nice to meet you Evie,\" he said, extending his hand \"Lovely name\".\n\nI arched an eyebrow and stared at his hand a moment before taking it. \"Nice to meet you too Ken... oh sorry I mean John. Ken is this ass hole in the book I'm currently reading, how embarrassing.\" His large hand twitched a second in mine before he pulled it back and gave me a large smile. If I didn't know we kind of hated each other's guts right now, I would have almost bought it.\n\n\"Oh no worries, we all sometimes get fact and fiction mixed up.\"\n\nStacy gave me a look, which in girl language translates to, \"Do you know him?\" and \"Is there something going on between you two?'. I shook my head and she smoothly turned the conversation around.\n\n\"Well, let's go get some seats shall we?\" She led the way with Matt in tow and I fell back with John.\n\n\"So, Matt brought a wingman then. Guess he didn't feel like he could handle things on his own when facing one measly woman.\"\n\n\"No, he told me he thought it might be more pleasant if we had four people instead of three, something about not wanting anyone to feel like a third wheel. Obviously, I didn't fall for that bull crap, much like you shouldn't fall for the thought of Matt being scared of a woman. Whatever his reason was to invite both of us doesn't matter, invited or not I would have come anyway.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" I asked taking the bait.\n\n\"Because I want them to get married as much as you do, which is not very much at all. I felt he needed someone here to help him see reason when he met his Fianc\u00e9e's best friend.\"\n\n\"Who says I don't want them to get married?\"\n\n\"Don't play games Eve. I'm sure my thoughts on the situation were as clearly written on my face as they were on yours.\"\n\n\"It's Evie.\" I corrected him with a glare. \"And OK, I might not be happy with this either but there's not much we can do.\"\n\n\"If we work together, we can maybe get them to subtly see things our way, get them to postpone the marriage until they know each other better or something. And ya, I know it's Evie but I prefer Eve, Barbie girl.\"\n\nSeething, I put my arm out to stop John while Matt and Stace kept walking towards the back of the restaurant, oblivious.\n\n\"I'm sorry John, but you don't get to change my name. It's Evie, not Eve, not Barbie, Evie. It's one extra letter, it's not that hard. As for your other plan,\" I let out a resigned sigh, \"I'm down. But we both have to make sure that when we drop hints they aren't too obvious but also not so obscure that they don't get the message.\"\n\n\"Easy peasy. Stacy is our biggest problem. If we talk her down Matt will follow. Matt has a good head on his shoulders, he thinks things through. This kind of thing is just not like him. Stacy on the other hand, well, I just met your friend but from what I've pulled together this kind of impulsive behavior is not new to her.\"\n\nI opened my mouth to reply, to say something to back up my friend, maybe something against Matt to even up the field, but I had nothing. John wasn't wrong, Stacy was super impulsive. I had assumed Matt was the same but this was apparently not in his normal realm of behavior, and it was kind of throwing me for a loop. The new information was cracking and shifting the narrative I had built about the situation.\n\nJohn's lips pulled into a smirk, something I was beginning to understand was a signature move for him. \"Come on Eve\" he said as he walked off \"We have work to do.\"\n\nI watched his tight tush stroll away and cursed as I shook my head. Not only did I just let that bastard have the upper hand, but I also let his firm butt distract me, which only gave him more ammunition.\n\nThe waitress slid a large stack of chocolate pancakes in front of John and then a smaller stack of blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon my way.\n\n\"So,\" Matt said a bit nervously. \"Now that we kind of got the introductions out of the way, how about some ice breakers?\"\n\n\"I just love how organized you are sweetie!\" Stacy said, giving him a peck on his cheek.\n\nJohn leaned into me as Stacy helped Matt pull some things out from a bag on the floor, I hadn't even seen them bring it in, but then again, I had a lot of things on my mind.\n\n\"See what I mean? Matt, he's the type of guy to plan extensive ice breakers for a restaurant meal, not the type to get married after maybe 7 or 8 months of knowing someone.\"\n\n\"In Stacy's defense\" I whispered back \"she's never done this before either.\" In fact, most of her relationships burned up in flames by this time, but I conveniently left that part out. She hadn't had the best dating streak since her last serious boyfriend dumped her in the middle of a skydiving jump and then ghosted her. I'm still determined to find that jackass one day and give him a piece of my mind.\n\n\"So...\" Stacy said as she lifted her head up from digging in the bag. Her cheeks were red and she looked a bit embarrassed. That was new, I could count on my hands the number of times she was embarrassed in public, and I had known her practically her whole life. Usually, she turned the moment around somehow, or strutted out of the situation like she did it on purpose. Maybe shy Matt was rubbing off on her as much as she was rubbing off on him.\n\n\"I might have brought the wrong bag. Matt had packed all these awesome activities and after our hot sex we were in such a rush that I must have grabbed the wrong bag. This one is full of books, books that we meant to donate. If Matt hadn't done what he did in bed I...\"\n\nMatt grabbed her hand and cut her off, his cheeks turning pink again. Poor guy, he'd better get used to Stacy or his cheeks would permanently look like they had were covered in red blush. \"I'm sure they don't want those kinds of details babe... How about I pick a game we don't need supplies for, I wrote some down in my phone the other day in case.\"\n\nStacy showered him with praise while in the corner of my eye I saw John lean back in his seat and cross his arms. His large \"I told you so\" smirk was firmly directed at me. Ass!\n\n\"How about we just do a good old game of truths?\" John asked after a moment of Matt and Stacy scrolling through the list on Matt's phone. \"If you back out of a question you are out, last one in the game wins and gets bragging perks.\"\n\n\"I'm game.\" I say even though I had never heard of a game called truths. I assumed this was John's way of setting up the floor for me and him to start our plan, operation \"convince our friends to delay their hurried marriage without losing said friends\".\n\n\"Me too!\" Said Stace without hesitation. \"I mean, unless Matt doesn't want to join?\"\n\nMy brows rose, this was new too. Stace never cared before about what her other boyfriends thought about her choices. Sure, she listened if they asked for something but she never asked their thoughts before deciding to do something. Another small but drastic change. It seemed Matt was rubbing off on her as much as she was rubbing off on him, and for some reason, it seemed to be working in both of their favors. While she got him out of his shell and taught him to let loose and follow his heart no matter how impulsive, he seemed to be teaching her indirectly to be more aware of her surroundings and other people's feelings. I've known her practically my whole life and had yet to have that effect on her, despite the fact that those reserved characteristics were a big part of my own personality.\n\n\"Eve, you want to start it off?\" John asked with a pointed look that confirmed his motive for this game.\n\nMy eyes narrowed at the nickname. \"Sure thing Johnathan\"\n\nJohn returned my gaze, challenging me, before I broke eye contact and turned to look at Matt. If we kept this up, we would blow our cover before we even started.\n\n\"So Matt, tell us the story of how you first met Stacy and what your first impressions of her were.\"\n\nStacy rolled her eyes as she picked up her beer for a swig. Ok, maybe that first question wasn't so subtle, I'd work on it.\n\n\"Well, as you know, I met Stacy in London. I was also there on a work Visa and hadn't really made many friends, despite being there for a little while. The only friend I did have was this guy named Jerold. To be honest, I kind of hated the guy. He was nice enough, but he just got under my skin. So, Jerold drags me to this club he said is 'the' place to party. I... well I'm not a big party person, but again, at the time, Jerold was my only buddy out there and I didn't want to lose him by rejecting his invite to go out again. Anyways, I'm in the club and kind of off to the side just enjoying my drink when I spot this literal angel in front of me. No laughing man.\" He said with a pointed look at John, who then raises his hands in surrender.\n\n\"So, I try not to stare at this angel in front of me, but man, I just had this feeling I should go talk to her. So I manned up and walked up to her as she was dancing in the middle of the dance floor. The music was pounding so I tapped her on her shoulder to get her attention and Stacy here just sweeps me into whatever dance she was doing. Before I knew it, my body just kind of relaxed and I fell into step with her, which is weird. John can confirm I've never been a dancer.\"\n\n\"Two left feet is what he has,\" John says, taking a sip of his own drink.\n\n\"By the time we pulled away, somehow half an hour had gone by. Stacy asked me for a drink. Jarold was stoned out of his mind by then and hanging with another group of friends, so I followed her to a bar a few streets down and things just kind of progressed from there. We started off with coffee, then went to Big Ben, a boat tour and some museums. Not sure when it happened, but eventually we both just knew and here we are.\" He finished as he gave Stacy's intertwined hand a soft squeeze.\n\n\"And all because of Jarold,\" Stacy laughed out. \"Who knew a guy whose idea of fun was throwing Pop Rocks into the river Thames would be the reason I met the love of my life.\"\n\nI filed the urge to ask about that story for later and focused on another piece of information. \"Wait, you went to a museum with Matt?\"\n\n\"Museums, plural.\" Matt said with a happy smile.\n\n\"Trust me Evie, I wasn't thrilled\" Stacy quickly added \"but for some reason museums in London are just better? I actually had a lot of fun.\"\n\n\"Maybe it was the company?\" Matt said.\n\n\"Nah, that can be it.\" She teased right back.\n\n\"So,\" John says loudly, taking control of the conversation. \"My turn. Stacy, why do you want to marry Matt? You know he has no money right now and no inheritance coming his way.\"\n\n\"Dude!\" Matt said.\n\nSeemed John needed a lesson in subtlety just as much as I did.\n\n\"No, It's OK\" Stacy interjected \"Matt's told me about your friendship John. Why you guys are so close and how you kind of see him as your little brother. I get that you're just trying to protect him.\"\n\nI was obviously missing some key pieces of inside information but John neither denied or confirmed Stacy's statement.\n\n\"Alright, so Matt asked you to confirm some things with his answer and I'll ask Evie to do the same for me. I can be impulsive...\"\n\n\"Very impulsive.\" I added.\n\n\"Very impulsive\" Stace confirmed with a cheeky smile my way \"But I'm also smart. Maybe not in the textbook kind of way, but if life experiences could count as educational credits, then you could definitely say that I got a thorough education.\"\n\nShe looked at me to confirm and I nodded. My heart twisted as I thought about what she was indirectly speaking about.\n\n\"I wouldn't jump into marriage without being sure, I've learned better than that through my own... education. But with Matt, there's not only unexplainable things that makes this feel right, but there are also physical proof that what we have is right. Not only right, but as close to perfect as you can get. Matt makes me a better person. He kind of balances my crazy. It's more than that but words are Evie's thing, not mine. So, to answer your questions John, I'm marrying him not only for love, not only because I think he makes me better, but because I know it will work. I just know. We've been tested by quite a few adventures in London, and we only came out of them stronger. We had big fights, but always came back from them with a deeper understanding of one another. We're just good together. This is the guy I want to spend the rest of my life with. Why wait when I've never been so sure of anything in my life?\"\n\nThere's a moment of silence after she finished where Matt and Stace just shared a look of such longing and trust that my heart ached. Then Matt gave Stacy a large cheeky grin and said \"Ditto\" effectively breaking the moment.\n\nStacy let out a loud laugh and pushed him back which only made Matt's grin widen.\n\n\"Alright, I'll go next\" Matt said joyfully, \"Evie, how did you meet your last boyfriend?\"\n\nI stiffened as Stacy's face blanched, all humor gone.\n\n\"You don't have to answer.\" Stacy quickly said.\n\nI looked over to John and then back to Matt. I had made progress earlier tonight, an honest to God breakthrough. I wasn't going to let that experience get control over me again so soon. I couldn't let it happen. There was also no way in hell I was going down on my first question. If anyone was going down first it was going to be John. I could just imagine him gloating that I lost first and the thought set something in me aflame.\n\nMatt exchanged a look with Stacy, \"Ya, that was a stupid question. I'll ask another one.\"\n\n\"No. No, It's fine.\" I took a deep breath in through my nose and out through my mouth. \"My last relationship was a little while ago. I met... I met him at a university post-grad function. He was a business major, determined to climb his way up and become a successful businessman. He was charming, too charming. Exactly the kind of guy who could charm you into buying an expensive knife set you really didn't need before you could even process what just happened. Before I knew it, I was under his spell, but... but he was never under mine. No one could break his hold on me, not even Stace, not even, not even him hitting me or yelling at me.\" I gulped and looked down as the tears threatened to spill. \"The spell only broke when one night he took things too far... and I've been single ever since.\" I quickly finished.\n\nShit, I hadn't meant to share that much, but as soon as I started talking the words kept coming out, one after the other, tumbling out of my mouth until some of my darkest moments were revealed in front of two men who were basically strangers. It was both cathartic to let someone other than Stacy hear that story, and mortifying.\n\nThe oppressive silence that followed my story only deepened my shame. I started to sweat. I felt cold. My heart started to pound in my chest. I couldn't get enough air. I needed air. I had to get out, I had to get air, I had...\n\nA fork swooped in front of me and scooped a piece of my blueberry pancakes.\n\nI look up to see Johnathan stick the forkful into his mouth. As he chewed, his fork came right back to my plate to take another forkful.\n\n\"What the fuck? Those are my pancakes Jonathan!\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\" John said as he shoved his next bite into his full mouth.\n\n\"You son of a bitch!\" I said as I pulled my plate away from him.\n\n\"I'm not really a blueberry person but this is very good, really sweet. Mmmm! I think I'll take some more. Pass the plate over will ya.\"\n\n\"Like hell I will!\"\n\nJohn laughed as he made a grab for my plate. I realized then what he was doing. It hit me like a bulldozer. My heart released it's panicked hold on me and softened to become all warm and fuzzy. He was distracting me. He was distracting me, and it was working. It was working really well.\n\n\"Just take mine asshole.\" Matt laughed as he pushed his plate towards John.\n\n\"No way man.\" He said pushing the plate right back. \"You got that weird ass carrot cake pancake thing. No one wants those.\"\n\nStace took John's side on how carrot cake pancakes shouldn't exist and how they were the Hawaiian pizza of specialty pancakes. Before I knew it, we are all laughing and exchanging lighthearted banter. When our game of truths started back up, I found myself enjoying it. My reservations for Stacy's marriage were slowly fading away as I warmed up to Matt and saw how much they cared for each other. Matt really was a good guy. I had a good bullshit meter, especially after my last relationship, and he didn't even register on the scale. Meanwhile, John was also growing on me. It seemed he wasn't as bad as I first thought, and I couldn't stop myself from being pulled into his stories, his laugh, his eyes, the little smirk he made when he thought he was right...\n\n\"My turn.\" John said, \"Where did you get that girly gold necklace?\"\n\nMatt blushed even deeper than the last few times he was embarrassed. I don't think I'd ever seen someone's cheeks turn quite so red.\n\n\"Stacy got it for me,\" Matt confessed after some prodding from John. \"about three months into our relationship. It was an important night. I mean, by the time she got it for me we were both kind of shit faced but it's still a night I will never forget and never want to forget.\"\n\n\"Oh. My. God. You kept it?!\" Stace shrieked so loud the whole restaurant probably heard her.\n\n\"I always have it with me,\" Matt admitted. \"But I only started wearing it recently. You're not always the most observant of those small things babe.\" he teased.\n\n\"I guess anytime It would be in full view and not under your shirt I would be too occupied with other things ...\" She leaned forward to whisper something in his ear when her arm caught on my cup of adult eggnog, spilling the liquid all over her shirt and pants.\n\n\"Crap!\" Stacy cursed.\n\nMatt jumped out of his chair. \"Let me help you get that cleaned up babe, come on.\" He pulled her up from her chair and steered her towards the bathroom.\n\nI quickly took a stack of napkins from the table dispenser and started to mop up the mess.\n\nJohn walked over to an empty table and took another stack of napkins before coming back and helping me out.\n\n\"So, they're kind of great together, aren't they?\" I asked him as we finished cleaning up the last of the mess.\n\nJohn flicked his hair out his eyes as he put the last of the wet napkins into Stacy's empty plate.\n\n\"I hate to admit this, but they really are.\"\n\nI watched him slump back into his chair and run his hand through his hair, my heart skipped a beat at the sight, and I inwardly chastised myself. Maybe John was growing on me, but we didn't start on the right foot and there was no way to know if his opinion of me had changed at all. I fiddled with my napkin to distract myself, my mind running over possible scenarios as he started speaking again.\n\n\"I don't really know what got to me, but I think I might be open to their marriage now, or at least as open as I can be after one dinner with them. It's still a little while away, at worst we can maybe team up again and do some kind of emergency intervention.\"\n\n\"Because that worked so well this time,\" I snorted. \"But ya, I agree. I think if they are still the way they were tonight in a few months then they have my full blessing.\"\n\nI looked up from my now destroyed napkin to see him eying me. \"What?\" I asked.\n\n\"That snort was kind of cute.\" He said softly, leaning in close. My eyes met his and I got lost for a second as they captivated me. I bit my lower lip as I imagined the feeling of his lips on mine, our tongues clashing as he wrapped his arm around my...\n\n\"We're back!\" Stacy announced. \"Matt got some paper towels from a waitress and we got it almost all off... Am I missing something?\"\n\nJohn and I jolted back from one another, breaking the moment.\n\n\"Not at all!\" John said, his usual smirk back in place.\n\nA hurtful pang in my gut follows his words, had he been playing with me, did I imagine that sizzling tension?\n\nWe all went back to our food and our conversation picked up where it left off. As Matt showed off the gold necklace, I could swear John inched his chair just a little bit closer to mine, and it stayed that way for the rest of the meal.\n\n\"It was nice to meet you Evie, hopefully we can get together again soon? I know how much you mean to Stacy and I would love to get to know you more.\"\n\n\"I'd like that Matt\" I said truthfully.\n\n\"Good.\" He answered with a warm smile as he gave me a quick hug goodbye.\n\nStace gave me a quick side hug next. \"Meet you at the car?\"\n\nI gave her a nod as she and Matt walked towards the front doors. Stacy had come in with Matt by taxi so John and I were stuck with taxiing them both back to their respective homes. Not that I minded, Stacy and I had a lot to talk about.\n\nJohn and I stood there for a moment, neither of us saying anything but neither of us moving to leave either.\n\n\"Move two steps backwards.\" John said finally.\n\nI eyed him curiously but did as he said.\n\n\"Now one step to the right\"\n\n\"Why are you asking me to move John? Are you trying to get me to lead the way to the front door?\"\n\n\"Trust me, Evie.\"\n\nHis words made me pause, before a victorious grin lit up my face.\n\n\"You just called me Evie.\" I said wagging my eyebrows.\n\n\"And you just called me John,\" He replied without missing a beat. \"Now take one step to the right.\"\n\nI'm a bit thrown off by the fact that he was right, I had called him John, so I don't question him and just absentmindedly take a step to the right.\n\n\"Perfect,\" he said. He walked toward me, stopping with barely any space separating our chests and before I knew what was happening, he'd spun me backwards, his strong arms holding me a few feet off the ground. His hair seemed to glow from the light fixture positioned directly behind him. As he bent down, ever so slowly, my heart rate picked up. His lips hung a breaths distance above mine for one eternity second before his lips grazed mine in a soft but spine-tingling kiss. I leaned towards him, ready to deepen the kiss, to feel more of whatever this was, when he pulled back slightly.\n\n\"Mistletoe\" he whispered against my lips before spinning me back into an upright position.\n\nWe stood there one moment longer, our eyes locked, as my breaths came in short spurts. I was still recovering from the attack kiss, trying to process what the hell just happened and how I felt about it, when he spoke again.\n\n\"Later Eve.\" Was all John said as he backed away towards the exit. \"And don't forget your gloves.\" With one last pointed look at the ground beside my feet he sauntered off to the front door and then into the cold winter air.\n\nI took a moment to compose myself before I looked down to my feet where one lone mitten was laying crumbled into a ball.\n\nWith one more deep breath to control my reeling mind I picked up the mitten and started heading for the exit. As I reached into my coat pocket to take out my second mitten my hand caught on a piece of paper.\n\nPuzzled I pulled it out, the square piece of paper was not one I remembered putting into my pocket, but I did stuff everything and anything into my pockets. One of the reasons why my dryer sometimes rattled as it turned.\n\nI quickly unfolded it, and just stared at what was a creased kids menu, my confusion rose as I slowly turned it around. When I saw what was on the other side. I swear time froze.\n\n\"Hey there Eve, I don't know about you, but I think this meeting might have been our Jerold. This wasn't where either of us wanted to be tonight, and yes, it was Matt who brought me here, not a guy named Jerold, but I think this unexpected meeting between us has potential. Who knows? Maybe this meeting could lead us into something which is just as sweet as your blueberry pancakes. Call me? 710-210-1543\"\n\nWith a skip in my step and the letter clutched in my hand I made my way back to my car. Me and Stacy had a lot to talk about on our ride home. We could start with how my hatred of mistletoe was really starting to change.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A SONG FOR YOU by E.S. McMILLAN ]\n\n\"Hey, Keldon! Wait up, man!\" Andre, the keyboard player from my band, ran after me. Buttoning his coat up to shield himself from the blistering cold, he huffed from his brisk walk from The Yellow Lemon to catch up to me.\n\n\"What's up?\" I questioned as I stopped my hasty retreat to my waiting car.\n\nThe snow that started falling while we were inside the club practicing for our upcoming gig, started to stick to the ground. The sweet little town of Allenville started to look like something out of a Christmas movie.\n\nWe had just wrapped up a great rehearsal, and I was ready to get home to my girl, Noelle. We had been dating for a while, but things were really starting to get serious between the two of us. I had big plans for this holiday season with her, and a feeling of dread settled around me. Something big was coming, and I didn't know what it would do to my plans with Noelle.\n\n\"Tony just called!\" Andre said. He leaned against my car and wiped the snow from his glasses. There was something weird about the look on his face.\n\n\"Ok, \" I replied with a roll of my eyes. I could feel my annoyance start to grow. Whatever Tony had to say could wait until I was home and warm.\n\n\"Man, you've got to hear what he had to say,\" Andre pleaded. He was about to burst with excitement.\n\nHe grinned like a cat who had just swallowed a canary, and I couldn't help but wonder what was going on.\n\nPulling off my gloves and opening the door, I kept my eyes on my childhood friend and bandmate. \"Are you going to just stand there smiling, or are you going to tell me what's going on?\"\n\n\"Tony has a gig for us!\" The smile on his face grew even wider, and I swore there was a twinkle in his eyes.\n\n\"And you couldn't wait to tell me about it?\" I slid into my car and jammed the key into the ignition. Turning the heat on full blast, I reached over and opened the passenger door for Andre. He climbed into the car and slammed the door.\n\n\"No! This is the gig! The one we have been waiting our entire lives for!\" The excitement in Andre's voice was growing even more and I couldn't help but stop what I was doing and give him my full attention.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Kelton! Andre clapped both of my shoulders in his excitement as he delivered the news. \"We're playing in New York City on Christmas Eve!\"\n\n\"Holy shit!\"\n\nPlaying in New York City had been our dream since Andre and I formed Smooth Butta. We had worked so hard to get the band to where it was, and I couldn't believe that our dreams were coming true.\n\n\"I know!\" Andre sat back in the passenger seat of my now toasty car.\n\n\"How did this even happen?\" I asked as I let Andre's news sink in. I needed to know all the details.\n\n\"Gage, Tony, and I were talking last week about the holidays. Gage had mentioned a huge party in New York in passing. I didn't think anything of it until he mentioned that his band wouldn't be able to play it because he was planning on surprising his husband and their new baby with a trip to Italy. I guess Tony made some phone calls and got us the gig.\"\n\n\"Well, it's about damn time he started acting like a manager,\" I teased as I exhaled the breath I didn't realize I had been holding. I looked over at my best friend. \"So this is what it feels like.\"\n\n\"What?\" Andre turned in his seat and focused his attention on me.\n\n\"All of our dreams are coming true,\" I said.\n\nThoughts of the future started running through my head. I couldn't believe this was happening. Smooth Butta was headed to New York City!\n\n\"Not quite,\" Andre said with a wink.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" What more could there possibly be? We had a gig that could open so many doors for us. This was the opportunity of a lifetime.\n\n\"Now that we have the music locked down, we need to make honest women of our ladies. Are you still planning on proposing to Noelle?\"\n\n\"Shit! Noelle!\" I yelled as I glanced at the clock on the radio and noticed how late it was getting. \"I have to go!\"\n\n\"Can you give me a ride home?' Andre asked.\n\n\"No! Not tonight. I have to get home,\" I said, waiting for him to get out of my car. I felt a little bad for putting him out in the cold, but I needed to get home to Noelle.\n\n\"Go. We'll get up tomorrow with Tony and the rest of the guys,\" Andre opened the car door and got out. Tapping the top of my car before he took a step back, he bent down and peeked through the open door. \"This is what we have been working for.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "\"Baby, is that you?\" Noelle called from the back of my apartment.\n\nThe soft sounds of Christmas songs floated through the air and there was a heavenly scent coming from my kitchen. I couldn't help the feeling of dread that had taken root in the pit of my stomach. I knew that my good\u2014no, amazing\u2014news was going to upset her, and that was the last thing I wanted to do.\n\n\"It's me.\" I shut the front door and stepped into the apartment. Taking my coat off and letting it fall to the floor, I wasted no time making my way to her. \"What do you have going on in here?\"\n\n\"Just some cookies,\" she said with a giggle.\n\nI wrapped my arms around her waist and stole a cookie off the pile she had removed from the baking tray. \"Yum! These are delicious,\" I said, my mouth full of cookie.\n\n\"Oh! I'm so glad you like them.\" She turned to face me. Leaning over and placing a quick kiss on my lips, she licked the extra frosting from the side of my mouth.\n\n\"Hey! I was coming back for that,\" I said, pulling her even closer to me. She rested her head on my shoulder, and I wished that time would stand still. Everything was perfect, and I didn't want this moment to end.\n\nShe pulled away from me too quickly and turned back to the bowl of cookie dough on the top of my kitchen island. \"So how was your rehearsal?\"\n\nTaking a step towards the chair tucked under the other side of the island, I took a deep breath and let the amazing smells that were swirling around the kitchen soothe me. \"Rehearsal was great. We started working on the new song I just finished writing.\" I loved how interested she was in my music and band. She was my biggest fan and only wanted the best for me.\n\n\"Are you finally going to let me hear the song?\" she asked.\n\nShe began spooning the dough onto the waiting baking tray. There was a bit of exasperation in her voice, and I knew that I was going to pay dearly for making her wait. \"Not yet.\"\n\nI quickly reached for another cookie. If I was fast enough, I could grab the tasty treat before Noelle caught me. As sweet as she was, she also had a bite that stung.\n\n\"Hey! Leave those for the kids.\" Noelle swatted my hand away.\n\nTurning on her heels, she faced me with the gorgeous smile that made my heart skip a beat. I was smitten with this woman and didn't know how I was going to break the news that our holiday plans and my secret surprise were going to have to take a rain check.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" She dropped the spoonful of cookie dough back into the bowl and rushed to my side.\n\nThe look of concern on her face made my heart break over what I was about to do. Pulling her close to me, I breathed her in. I let my eyes fall closed as I took a mental picture of this moment. \"We need to talk.\" The words fell from my lips as I tried to will them to stay buried deep inside of me.\n\n\"Noelle, please talk to me,\" I begged.\n\nShe continued to toss the dishes she had used to bake her holiday cookies into my sink. Her back remained rigid. She was trying to hide her disappointment from me. \"There's nothing to talk about. This is a great opportunity for you and the rest of the guys.\" Turning on the faucet, she started to wash the dishes.\n\n\"Here, let me help you with those.\" I made my way to her side. Taking the dish out of her hand and grabbing a dish rag from the counter, I started to dry the dishes as she placed them in the dish drain. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"You have nothing to apologize for.\" Hurt and frustration laced her voice, and I hated being the cause.\n\nPlacing the bowl I was drying back down in the dish drain, I grabbed Noelle and turned her to face me. Gazing into her light brown eyes, I ran my fingers over her cheek and removed a smudge of sugar. \"I know this is not the way we planned on spending this holiday season...\"\n\n\"It's okay,\" she interrupted. She looked away from me, and there was a quiver in her voice as she fought back tears.\n\n\"Come with me,\" I whispered without giving it a second thought. If I wasn't going to be home for Christmas with Noelle, then we were going to be together in New York." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\"What?\" Noelle's gaze snapped back to me.\n\nConfusion was written all over her beautiful face, and I couldn't help but fall a little bit more in love with her. She was it for me and I wanted to make it official as soon as possible. I had plans to propose to her on Christmas Eve at The Yellow Lemon after I sang her song for her. I had worked so hard to make every line of the song perfect. I poured my heart and soul into the lyrics and melody. I wanted her to know exactly how I felt and that I wanted her to be my forever.\n\n\"Come to New York with me,\" I clarified.\n\nThe thought of her being by my side for this amazing opportunity ran through my head. I couldn't stop imagining what Noelle would look like with the New York skyline behind her. When Andre had told me that we were going to New York, the idea of bringing Noelle with me never crossed my mind. Now, the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. My plans weren't ruined; they were just evolving. Noelle deserved magic, and I was going to give her New York magic.\n\n\"I can't.\" A tear rolled down her cheek.\n\nQuickly wiping it away, I asked, \"What's stopping you from coming to New York with me and spending Christmas Eve listening to some music?\"\n\n\"The kids.\" The words tumbled from Noelle's lips and brought me back to reality.\n\n\"The kids,\" I repeated, remembering why she was in my kitchen baking cookies.\n\nThe gig that my band was supposed to be playing was the annual Allenville Christmas Cookie Swap. The children from the Allenville Children's Home came to The Yellow Lemon for cookies and Santa. It was a tradition that was started over fifty years ago. My band had the privilege of playing the event for the last five years. Not taking my eyes off Noelle, I pulled my cell phone out of my back pocket and dialed a number before bringing the small device to my ear. \"Andre, we can't take the gig in New York.\"\n\nStanding outside of The Yellow Lemon, I took a deep breath. I knew that nothing good was going to come from this emergency meeting. The guys were going to be furious with me, but I was okay with it. I was making the right decision. There were going to be other opportunities for us to perform in New York City. We had a standing commitment to the children of Allenville, and I was not okay letting them down. Taking another deep breath, I looked around at the snow-covered ground. It didn't snow much in Allenville, South Carolina. It was normally warm, and all you needed was a light jacket even in the middle of December. I was taking the snow as a sign.\n\nGathering my courage, I made the quick walk to the front door of the club. Opening the door, I could hear the voices of my bandmates and manager coming from the back. Their voices were full of concern, and if I didn't walk into the club right now, I was going to lose my nerve and run away. I couldn't do that. I couldn't let the children of Allenville down, and I definitely couldn't let Noelle down. After seeing the hurt in her eyes last night, I knew what I had to do. \"Hey, guys. Thanks for dropping everything and meeting me on such short notice.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Tony glared at me.\n\nI knew that I was pressing my luck, especially with him. He had been working so hard to get us our chance to be heard, and I was about to make all his hard work for naught.\n\n\"Calm down,\" Andre said, coming to defense quickly. Placing a firm hand on Tony's shoulder, Andre looked over at me and gave me a quick nod.\n\n\"I know you all heard about the Christmas Eve gig in New York City.\"\n\n\"It's an amazing opportunity.\" Tony jumped up from his seat. \"There's a lot we have to go over before we get on the bus and head up to New York.\"\n\n\"That's what I wanted to talk to you guys about,\" I interrupted.\n\nTony shot me a look that told me I was on thin ice with him.\n\n\"We can't do the gig in New York,\" I blurted out.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Tony growled.\n\nHis face morphed into a scowl that I had never seen before, and I hoped I would never be on the receiving end of it again. It felt as if the temperature in the room dropped by ten degrees and I wished I was back home wrapped up in Noelle's arms.\n\n\"We already have a commitment to the children of Allenville,\" I reminded Tony softly.\n\nAndre jumped up from his seat. \"The cookie exchange! I totally forgot about it.\"\n\nThe cookie exchange was extremely important to my best friend. He'd grown up in the Allenville Children's Home and was one of the many children who had gotten to experience the miracle of Christmas because of this yearly event. I knew if anyone would understand why we couldn't blow off this event, it would be Andre.\n\nTony turned his frustration on Andre. \"You're not going to give up the opportunity of a lifetime to play for some kids in this sleepy little town?\"\n\nThe disgust dripping from Tony's voice sent a chill down my spine, and I was reminded just how little I really liked the man. He wasn't even a good manager. He had been working with us since we started the group, and this was the first major gig he had gotten us in over six years.\n\n\"Whoa!\" Our bass player, Germain, shot to his feet, letting his beloved bass fall to the ground and walked over to my side. \"Keldon is right. We can't blow off our commitment to the kids. They look forward to this event all year long.\"\n\n\"You guys have a decision to make.\" Tony's voice was laced with bitterness.\n\nThe air was electric, and I just knew that a major change was about to happen.\n\n\"Either you are serious about getting a record deal and will be in New York City next week with smiles on your faces and hunger in your hearts, or you all can stay here and play for a group of kids. The choice is yours but just know that I am out if you make the wrong choice. I am not going to waste anymore of my time if you don't want this as badly as you say you do.\"\n\nQuickly looking around the room at my bandmates, I knew that I had made the right call. Their expressions were supportive and determined. I turned back to Tony. \"I'm sorry that we wasted your precious time, but we won't be able to make New York City next week after all.\"\n\n\"You guys were never going to make it!\" Tony's hard laugh rang in the silence, and he gathered his belongings, marching to the exit. \"What a waste of my time!\"\n\nThe air rushed out of my lungs, and I looked around the room at the members of Smooth Butta. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"What are you sorry for?\" Andre asked with a wink. \"There will be more gigs.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Germaine agreed.\n\n\"Well, since we're already here, you guys up for going over the new song?\" I asked.\n\n\"You really are going to do it?\" Germaine picked up his bass.\n\n\"Hell yeah.\" I grinned and made my way over to the stage and turned on the microphone.\n\n\"I guess we have to make sure you look good up here.\" Andre followed me to the stage and situated himself behind his keyboard.\n\n\"That was a great rehearsal,\" I said as I stepped off the stage.\n\n\"Are you guys working hard or hardly working?\" Noelle called out from the doorway.\n\nThe sweet smell of baked goods hit my nose and I knew she had freshly baked treats for us. Jumping off the stage and making my way to my girl, I grabbed her and pulled her into me. Slamming my lips down on top of hers, I ignored the catcalls from my friends. Ending the kiss, I looked down into her beautiful eyes. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I had made some extra cookies and wanted to bring them to you guys. I figured you all would want a snack after a long rehearsal.\" She held up the basket of freshly baked holiday cookies.\n\nTaking the basket from her hand and placing it on an empty table, I grabbed a cookie.\n\n\"Hey! Save some for the rest of the guys.\"\n\nThe giggle that escaped her throat sent a warm sensation through me, and I wanted nothing more than to get her alone and show her how much I loved her.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Andre said from behind me, grabbing a handful of cookies.\n\n\"You guys better get over here and help yourself before he eats them all,\" Noelle teased, giving me a gentle smile.\n\n\"Thank you.\" Germaine grabbed a handful of cookies and turned towards the stage. Shoving the cookies into his mouth, he said, \"Why don't you two get out of here? We can finish breaking everything down for the night.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Grabbing Noelle's hand, I gave it a squeeze. I wanted nothing more than to be alone with this beautiful woman.\n\n\"Get out of here before we change our minds,\" Andre teased.\n\n\"You heard the man,\" I said as I pulled Noelle towards the exit." + }, + { + "title": "Christmas Eve", + "text": "Walking into The Yellow Lemon, I couldn't believe the transformation that had taken place. The small jazz club had been turned into a winter wonderland; complete with fake snow all over the ground. The scent of freshly baked goodies hung in the air, and my stomach was doing flip flops while the soft sounds of holiday music floated from the speakers located around the club. I couldn't contain the butterflies that had taken flight in my stomach. My nerves had definitely gotten the best of me, and I saw no relief in sight. Tonight was the night all my plans were hopefully going to come together. I dug deep into my pocket, making sure the small black box I had been carrying around for the past week was right where it was supposed to be.\n\n\"Look who finally decided to show up,\" Andre called from across the club.\n\n\"I can't believe you did all this.\" I waved at all of the decorations as I made my way to the stage that had been turned into Santa's workshop. My mic stand was carefully wrapped in red and green ribbons, and the elevated floor of the stage was covered in fake snow.\n\n\"This was all Noelle,\" Andre admitted. \"She worked a real Christmas miracle in this place for the kids.\"\n\n\"Are you two talking about me?\" Noelle poked her head up from behind the bar. She was hard at work, stuffing holiday bags with her delicious homemade sweets. Her long brown hair sat in a messy bun on the top of her head, and she was covered from head to toe in flour and other ingredients.\n\n\"It looks amazing in here,\" I said as I made my way to the bar.\n\nLeaning over the counter, I placed a tender kiss on her lips. She tasted as sweet as the treats she had been making for the kids. I knew instantly that I was making the right decision in asking this woman to marry me.\n\n\"Get a room,\" Andre teased as he continued to set up his keyboard for the night.\n\nHe'd taken special care to make sure all the empty gift boxes were set up perfectly around his area. I saw the pride and excitement in his eyes and knew that we had made the right decision to pass on New York. There would be more opportunities for Smooth Butta in the future.\n\n\"Only if he's a good boy,\" Noelle replied with a wink. \"Earth to Keldon. Where'd you go?\"\n\nThe soft tone of her voice broke through the thoughts in my head and brought me back to the present. A smile pulled at my lips as my gaze landed on the girl I hoped would become my wife in the near future. \"I was thinking about the gift I got you.\"\n\n\"Can I have it now?\" Noelle leaned over the counter and placed a kiss on my cheek.\n\n\"Not yet,\" I informed her with a smirk before making my way back to the stage.\n\n\"No fair!\" she called after me.\n\nI could sense her watching my every move, and the butterflies in my stomach started flapping their wings again.\n\n\"Ladies and gentlemen. Boys and girls. Thank you for coming out for the annual Allenville Cookie Swap,\" I said into the mic.\n\nLooking out into the crowd, I saw all the faces in the club focused on me. Everyone had stopped milling around and found their seats. Taking a deep breath and focusing my attention on Noelle's smiling face, I said, \"I would like to start the entertainment portion of tonight with a special song that I wrote for a very special lady.\"\n\nAll eyes in the club shifted to Noelle as Andre played the first notes of my song. Letting my eyes fall closed as my body started to sway to the familiar music, visions of Noelle walking towards me in a flowing white gown started running through my head. The words that described how I felt about the love of my life tumbled from my lips as I got lost in the song. The only sounds in the club were my voice and Andre's keyboard. Opening my eyes and zeroing in Noelle, I watched her as the tears fell from her eyes.\n\n\"My sweet Noelle, will you be my wife?\" I sang with all my heart as I dropped to one knee and pulled the ring out of my pocket. Flipping the top off the little black box, I watched as the color drained from her face. A deafening silence settled over the room and all eyes were on Noelle.\n\n\"Well?\" a voice from the crowd called out as we all waited on Noelle's response.\n\nAfter what felt like an eternity, Noella made her way to the stage. \"Yes.\" The simple word fell from her lips as she wrapped her arms around me and joined her lips against mine. Her tears mixed with mine as the world around us slipped away and we got lost in the kiss.\n\n\"Congratulations, and Merry Christmas!\" Andre called out.\n\nEnding our celebratory kiss and taking a step back to let the air flow between us again, Noelle looked at me. \"What's the name of the song?\" she asked, her voice an emotion-choked whisper.\n\nI stood up, pulled the ring out of the box, and slid it onto her finger. \"A Song for You.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "A Lot Like Christmas # SSC (v5.0).txt", + "author": "Connie Willis", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "I love Christmas. All of it\u2014decorating the tree and singing in the choir and baking cookies and wrapping presents. I even like the parts most people hate\u2014shopping in crowded malls and reading Christmas newsletters and seeing relatives and standing in baggage check-in lines at the airport.\n\nOkay, I lied. Nobody likes standing in baggage check-in lines. I love seeing people get off the plane, though, and holly and candles and eggnog and carols.\n\nBut most of all, I love Christmas stories and movies. Okay, I lied again. I don't love all Christmas stories and movies. It's a Wonderful Life, for instance. And Hans Christian Andersen's \"The Fir Tree.\"\n\nBut I love Miracle on 34th Street and Christopher Morley's \"The Tree That Didn't Get Trimmed\" and Christina Rossetti's poem \"In the Bleak Midwinter.\" My family watches The Sure Thing and A Christmas Story each year, and we read George V. Higgins's \"The Impossible Snowsuit of Christmas Past\" out loud every Christmas Eve, and eagerly look for new classics to add to our traditions.\n\nThere aren't a lot. This is because Christmas stories are much harder to write than they look, partly because the subject matter is fairly limited, and people have been writing it for nearly two thousand years, so they've just about rung all the changes possible on snowmen, Santas, and shepherds.\n\nStories have been told from the point of view of the fourth wise man (who got waylaid on the way to Bethlehem), the innkeeper, the innkeeper's wife, the donkey, and the star. There've been stories about department-store Santas, phony Santas, burned-out Santas, substitute Santas, reluctant Santas, and dieting Santas, to say nothing of Santa's wife, his elves, his reindeer, and Rudolph. We've had births at Christmas (natch!), deaths, partings, meetings, mayhem, attempted suicides, and sanity hearings. And Christmas in Hawaii, in China, in the past, the future, and outer space. We've heard from the littlest shepherd, the littlest wise man, the littlest angel, and the mouse who wasn't stirring. There's not a lot out there that hasn't already been done.\n\nIn addition, the Christmas-story writer has to walk a narrow tightrope between sentiment and skepticism, and most writers end up falling off into either cynicism or mawkish sappiness.\n\nAnd, yes, I am talking about Hans Christian Andersen. He invented the whole three-hanky sob story, whose plot Maxim Gorky, in a fit of pique, described as taking a poor girl or boy and letting them \"freeze somewhere under a window, behind which there is usually a Christmas tree that throws its radiant splendor upon them.\" Match girls, steadfast tin soldiers, even snowmen (melted, not frozen) all met with a fate they (and we) didn't deserve, especially at Christmas.\n\nNobody, before Andersen came along, had thought of writing such depressing Christmas stories. Even Dickens, who had killed a fair number of children in his books, didn't kill Tiny Tim. But Andersen, apparently hell-bent on ruining everybody's holidays, froze innocent children, melted loyal toys into lumps of lead, and chopped harmless fir trees who were just standing there in the forest, minding their own business, into kindling.\n\nWorse, he inspired dozens of imitators, who killed off saintly children (some of whom, I'll admit, were pretty insufferable and deserved to die) and poor people for the rest of the Victorian era.\n\nIn the twentieth century, the Andersen-style tearjerker moved into the movies, which starred Margaret O'Brien (who definitely deserved to die) and other child stars, chosen for their pallor and their ability to cough. They had titles like All Mine to Give and The Christmas Tree, which tricked hapless moviegoers into thinking they were going to see a cheery Christmas movie, when really they were about little boys who succumbed to radiation poisoning on Christmas Eve.\n\nWhen television came along, this type of story turned into the \"Very Special Christmas Episode\" of various TV shows, the worst of which was Little House on the Prairie, which killed off huge numbers of children in blizzards and other pioneer-type disasters every Christmas for years. Hadn't any of these authors ever heard that Christmas stories are supposed to have happy endings?\n\nWell, unfortunately, they had, and it resulted in improbably sentimental and saccharine stories too numerous to mention.\n\nSo are there any good Christmas stories out there? You bet, starting with the original. The recounting of the first Christmas (you know, the baby in the manger) has all the elements of great storytelling: drama, danger, special effects, dreams and warnings, betrayals, narrow escapes, and\u2014combined with the Easter story\u2014the happiest ending of all.\n\nAnd it's got great characters\u2014Joseph, who's in over his head but doing the best he can; the wise men, expecting a palace and getting a stable; slimy Herod, telling them, \"When you find this king, tell me where he is so I can come and worship him,\" and then sending out his thugs to try to murder the baby; the ambivalent innkeeper. And Mary, fourteen years old, pondering all of the above in her heart. It's a great story. No wonder it's lasted two thousand years.\n\nModern Christmas stories I love (for a more complete list, see the end of this book) include O. Henry's \"The Gift of the Magi,\" T. S. Eliot's \"Journey of the Magi,\" and Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, about a church Nativity pageant overrun by a gang of hooligans called the Herdmans. The Herdmans bully everybody and smoke and cuss and come only because they'd heard there were refreshments afterward. And they transform what was a sedate and boring Christmas pageant into something extraordinary.\n\nSince I'm a science-fiction writer, I'm of course partial to science-fiction Christmas stories. Science fiction has always had the ability to make us look at the world from a different angle, and Christmas is no exception. Science fiction has looked at the first Christmas from a new perspective (Michael Moorcock's classic Behold the Man) and in a new guise (Joe L. Hensley and Alexei Panshin's \"Dark Conception\").\n\nIt's shown us Christmas in the future (Cynthia Felice's \"Track of a Legend\") and Christmas in space (Ray Bradbury's wonderful \"The Gift\"). And it's looked at the dark side of Christmas (Mildred Clingerman's disturbing \"The Wild Wood\").\n\nMy favorite science-fiction Christmas stories are Arthur C. Clarke's \"The Star,\" which tells the story of the Christmas star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem, and Thomas Disch's hilarious story \"The Santa Claus Compromise,\" in which two intrepid six-year-old investigative reporters expose the shocking scandal behind Santa Claus.\n\nI also love mysteries. You'd think murder and Christmas wouldn't mesh, but the setting and the possibility of mistletoe/plum pudding/Santa Claus\u2013connected murders has inspired any number of mystery writers, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle and his \"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle,\" which involves a Christmas goose. Some of my favorite mysteries are Dorothy Sayers's \"The Necklace of Pearls,\" Agatha Christie's Murder for Christmas, and Jane Langton's The Shortest Day: Murder at the Revels. My absolute favorite is John Mortimer's comic \"Rumpole and the Spirit of Christmas,\" which stars the grumpy old Scrooge of a barrister, Horace Rumpole, and his wonderful wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed.\n\nComedies are probably my favorite kind of Christmas story. I love Damon Runyon's \"Dancing Dan's Christmas.\" (Actually, I love everything Damon Runyon ever wrote, and if you've never read him, you need to go get Guys and Dolls immediately. Ditto P. G. Wodehouse, whose \"Jeeves and the Yule-tide Spirit\" and \"Another Christmas Carol\" are vintage Wodehouse, which means they're indescribable. If you've never read Wodehouse either, what a treat you're in for! He wrote over a hundred books. Start anywhere.) Both Runyon and Wodehouse balance sentiment and cynicism, irony and the Christmas spirit, human nature and happy endings, without a single misstep.\n\nAnd then there's Christopher Morley's \"The Tree That Didn't Get Trimmed,\" which was clearly written in reaction to Hans Christian Andersen's \"The Fir Tree.\" Unlike Andersen, however, Morley understands that the purpose of Christmas is to remind us not only of suffering but of salvation. His story makes you ache, and then despair. And then rejoice.\n\nAlmost all great stories (Christmas or otherwise) have that one terrible moment when all seems lost, when you're sure things won't work out, the bad guys will win, the cavalry won't arrive in time, and they (and we) won't be saved. John Ford's Christmas Western, 3 Godfathers, has a moment like that. So does The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Miracle on 34th Street, which I consider to be The Best Christmas Movie Ever.\n\nI know, I know, It's a Wonderful Life is supposed to be The Best Christmas Movie Ever, with ten million showings and accompanying merchandising. (I saw an It's a Wonderful Life mouse pad this last Christmas.) And I'm not denying that there are some great scenes in it (see my story \"Miracle\" on this subject), but the movie has real problems. For one thing, the villainous Mr. Potter is still loose and unpunished at the end of the movie, something no good fairy tale ever permits. The dreadful little psychologist in Miracle on 34th Street is summarily, and very appropriately, fired, and the DA, who after all was only doing his job, repents.\n\nBut in It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Potter is free, with his villainy undetected, though he's already proved to be a vindictive and malicious villain. Since this didn't work, he'll obviously try something else. And poor George is still faced with embezzlement charges, which the last time I looked don't disappear just because you pay back the money, even if the cop is smiling in the last scene.\n\nBut the worst problem seems to me to be that the ending depends on the goodness of the people of Bedford Falls, something that (especially in light of previous events) seems like a dicey proposition.\n\nMiracle on 34th Street, on the other hand, relies on no such thing. The irony of the miracle (and let's face it, maybe what really galls my soul is that It's a Wonderful Life is a work completely without irony) is that the miracle happens not because of people's behavior, but in spite of it.\n\nChristmas is supposed to be based on selflessness and innocence, but until the very end of Miracle on 34th Street, virtually no one except Kris Kringle exhibits these qualities. Quite the opposite. Everyone, even the hero and heroine, acts from a cynical, very modern self-interest. Macy's Santa goes on a binge right before Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, Doris hires Kris to get herself out of a jam and save her job, John Payne invites the little girl Susan to watch the parade as a way to meet the mother.\n\nAnd in spite of Kris Kringle's determined efforts to restore the true spirit of Christmas to the city, it continues. Macy's and then Gimbel's go along with the gag of recommending other stores, not because they believe in it, but because it means more money. The judge in Kris's sanity case makes favorable rulings only because he wants to get reelected. Even the postal workers who provide the denouement just want to get rid of stuff piling up in the dead-letter office.\n\nBut in spite of this (actually, in a delicious irony, because of it) and with only very faint glimmerings of humanity from the principals, and in spite of how hopeless it all seems, the miracle of Christmas occurs, right on schedule. Just as it does every year.\n\nIt's this layer of symbolism that makes Miracle on 34th Street such a satisfying movie. Also its script (by George Seaton) and perfect casting (especially Natalie Wood and Thelma Ritter) and any number of delightful moments (Santa's singing a Dutch carol to the little Dutch orphan and the disastrous bubble-gum episode and Natalie Wood's disgusted expression when she's told she has to have faith even when things don't work out). Plus, of course, the fact that Edmund Gwenn could make anyone believe in Santa Claus. All combine to make it The Best Christmas Movie Ever Made.\n\nNot, however, the best story. That honor belongs to Dickens and his deathless A Christmas Carol. The rumor that Dickens invented Christmas is not true, and neither, probably, is the story that when he died, a poor costermonger's little girl sobbed, \"Dickens dead? Why, then, is Christmas dead, too?\" But they should be.\n\nBecause Dickens did the impossible\u2014he wrote not only a masterpiece that captures the essence of Christmas, but one that was good enough to survive its own fame. There have been a million mostly awful TV, movie, and musical versions and variations, with Scrooge played by everybody from Basil Rathbone to the Fonz, but even the worst of them haven't managed to damage the wonderful story of Scrooge and Tiny Tim.\n\nOne reason it's such a great story is that Dickens loved Christmas. (And no wonder. His childhood was Oliver Twist's and Little Dorrit's combined, and no kindly grandfather or Arthur Clennam in sight. His whole adult life must have seemed like Christmas.) I think you have to love Christmas to write about it.\n\nFor another, he knew a lot about human nature. Remembering the past, truly seeing the present, imagining the consequences of our actions, are the ways we actually grow and change. Dickens knew this years before Freud.\n\nHe also knew a lot about writing. The plot's terrific, the dialogue's great, and the opening line\u2014\"Marley was dead: to begin with\"\u2014is second only to \"Call me Ishmael\" as one of the great opening lines of literature. He knew how to end stories, too, and that Christmas stories were supposed to have happy endings.\n\nFinally, the story touches us because we want to believe people can change. They don't. We've all learned from bitter experience (though probably not as bitter as Dickens's) that the world is full of money-grubbers and curtain-ring stealers, that Scrooge stays Scrooge to the bitter end, and nobody will lift a finger to help Tiny Tim.\n\nBut Christmas is about someone who believed, in spite of overwhelming evidence, that humanity is capable of change and worth redeeming. And Dickens's Christmas story is in fact The Christmas Story. And the hardened heart that cracks open at the end of it is our own.\n\nIf I sound passionate (and sometimes curmudgeonly) about Christmas stories, I am. I love Christmas, in all its complexity and irony, and I love Christmas stories.\n\nSo much so that I've been writing them for years. Here they are\u2014an assortment of stories about church choirs and Christmas presents and pod people from outer space, about wishes that come true in ways you don't expect and wishes that don't come true and wishes you didn't know you had, about stars and shepherds, wise men and Santa Claus, mistletoe and It's a Wonderful Life and Christmas cards on recycled paper. There's even a murder. And a story about Christmas Yet to Come.\n\nI hope you like them. And I hope you have a very merry Christmas!\n\n\u2014Connie Willis\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Miracle ]\n\nThere was a Christmas tree in the lobby when Lauren got to work, and the receptionist was sitting with her chin in her hand, watching the security monitor. Lauren set her shopping bag down and looked curiously at the screen. On it, Jimmy Stewart was dancing the Charleston with Donna Reed.\n\n\"The Personnel Morale Special Committee had cable piped in for Christmas,\" the receptionist explained, handing Lauren her messages. \"I love It's a Wonderful Life, don't you?\"\n\nLauren stuck her messages in the top of her shopping bag and went up to her department. Red and green crepe paper hung in streamers from the ceiling, and there was a big red crepe-paper bow tied around Lauren's desk.\n\n\"The Personnel Morale Special Committee did it,\" Evie said, coming over with the catalog she'd been reading. \"They're decorating the whole building, and they want us and Document Control to go caroling this afternoon. Don't you think PMS is getting out of hand with this Christmas spirit thing? I mean, who wants to spend Christmas Eve at an office party?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Lauren said. She set her shopping bag down on the desk, sat down, and began taking off her boots.\n\n\"Can I borrow your stapler?\" Evie asked. \"I've lost mine again. I'm ordering my mother the Water of the Month, and I need to staple my check to the order form.\"\n\n\"The Water of the Month?\" Lauren said, opening her desk drawer and taking out her stapler.\n\n\"You know, they send you bottles of a different one every month. Perrier, Evian, Calistoga.\" She peered into Lauren's shopping bag. \"Do you have Christmas presents in there? I hate people who have their shopping done four weeks before Christmas.\"\n\n\"It's four days till Christmas,\" Lauren said, \"and I don't have it all done. I still don't have anything for my sister. But I've got all my friends, including you, done.\" She reached into the shopping bag and pulled out her pumps. \"And I found a dress for the office party.\"\n\n\"Did you buy it?\"\n\n\"No.\" She put on one of her shoes. \"I'm going to try it on during my lunch hour.\"\n\n\"If it's still there,\" Evie said gloomily. \"I had this echidna toothpick holder all picked out for my brother, and when I went back to buy it, they were all gone.\"\n\n\"I asked them to hold the dress for me,\" Lauren said. She put on her other shoe. \"It's gorgeous. Black, off-the-shoulder. Sequined.\"\n\n\"Still trying to get Scott Buckley to notice you, huh? I don't do things like that anymore. Nineties women don't use sexist tricks to attract men. Besides, I decided he was too cute to ever notice somebody like me.\" She sat down on the edge of Lauren's desk and started leafing through the catalog. \"Here's something your sister might like. The Vegetable of the Month. February's okra.\"\n\n\"She lives in southern California,\" Lauren said, shoving her boots under the desk.\n\n\"Oh. How about the Sunscreen of the Month?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lauren said. \"She's into New Age stuff. Channeling. Aromatherapy. Last year she sent me a crystal pyramid mate selector for Christmas.\"\n\n\"The Eastern Philosophy of the Month,\" Evie said. \"Zen, Sufism, tai chi\u2014\"\n\n\"I'd like to get her something she'd really like,\" Lauren mused. \"I always have a terrible time figuring out what to get people for Christmas. So this year, I decided things were going to be different. I wasn't going to be tearing around the mall the day before Christmas, buying things no one would want and wondering what on earth I was going to wear to the office party. I started doing my shopping in September, I wrapped my presents as soon as I bought them, I have all my Christmas cards done and ready to mail\u2014\"\n\n\"You're disgusting,\" Evie said. \"Oh, here, I almost forgot.\" She pulled a folded slip of paper out of her catalog and handed it to Lauren. \"It's your name for the Secret Santa gift exchange. PMS says you're supposed to bring your present for it by Friday so it won't interfere with the presents Santa Claus hands out at the office party.\"\n\nLauren unfolded the paper, and Evie leaned over to read it. \"Who'd you get? Wait, don't tell me. Scott Buckley.\"\n\n\"No. Fred Hatch. And I know just what to get him.\"\n\n\"Fred? The fat guy in Documentation? What is it, the Diet of the Month?\"\n\n\"This is supposed to be the season of love and charity, not the season when you make mean remarks about someone just because he's overweight,\" Lauren said sternly. \"I'm going to get him a videotape of Miracle on 34th Street.\"\n\nEvie looked uncomprehending.\n\n\"It's Fred's favorite movie. We had a wonderful talk about it at the office party last year.\"\n\n\"I never heard of it.\"\n\n\"It's about Macy's Santa Claus. He starts telling people they can get their kids' toys cheaper at Gimbel's, and then the store psychiatrist decides he's crazy\u2014\"\n\n\"Why don't you get him It's a Wonderful Life? That's my favorite Christmas movie.\"\n\n\"Yours and everybody else's. I think Fred and I are the only two people in the world who like Miracle on 34th Street better. See, Edmund Gwenn, he's Santa Claus, gets committed to Bellevue because he thinks he's Santa Claus, and since there isn't any Santa Claus, he has to be crazy, but he is Santa Claus, and Fred Gailey, that's John Payne, he's a lawyer in the movie, he decides to have a court hearing to prove it, and\u2014\"\n\n\"I watch It's a Wonderful Life every Christmas. I love the part where Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed fall into the swimming pool,\" Evie said. \"What happened to the stapler?\"\n\nThey had the dress and it fit, but there was an enormous jam-up at the cash register, and then they couldn't find a hanging bag for it.\n\n\"Just put it in a shopping bag,\" Lauren said, looking anxiously at her watch.\n\n\"It'll wrinkle,\" the clerk said ominously and continued to search for a hanging bag. By the time Lauren convinced her a shopping bag would work, it was already 12:15. She had hoped she'd have a chance to look for a present for her sister, but there wasn't going to be time. She still had to run the dress home and mail the Christmas cards.\n\nI can pick up Fred's video, she thought, fighting her way onto the escalator. That wouldn't take much time, since she knew what she wanted, and maybe they'd have something with Shirley MacLaine in it she could get her sister. Ten minutes to buy the video, she thought, tops.\n\nIt took her nearly half an hour. There was only one copy, which the clerk couldn't find.\n\n\"Are you sure you wouldn't rather have It's a Wonderful Life?\" she asked Lauren. \"It's my favorite movie.\"\n\n\"I want Miracle on 34th Street,\" Lauren said patiently. \"With Edmund Gwenn and Natalie Wood.\"\n\nThe clerk picked up a copy of It's a Wonderful Life from a huge display. \"See, Jimmy Stewart's in trouble and he wishes he'd never been born, and this angel grants him his wish\u2014\"\n\n\"I know,\" Lauren said. \"I don't care. I want Miracle on 34th Street.\"\n\n\"Okay!\" the clerk said, and wandered off to look for it, muttering, \"Some people don't have any Christmas spirit.\"\n\nShe finally found it, in the M's, of all places, and then insisted on gift wrapping it.\n\nBy the time Lauren made it back to her apartment, it was a quarter to one. She would have to forget lunch and mailing the Christmas cards, but she could at least take them with her, buy the stamps, and put the stamps on at work.\n\nShe took the video out of the shopping bag and set it on the coffee table next to her purse, picked up the bag, and started for the bedroom.\n\nSomeone knocked on the door.\n\n\"I don't have time for this,\" she muttered, and opened the door, still holding the shopping bag.\n\nIt was a young man wearing a \"Save the Whales\" T-shirt and khaki pants. He had shoulder-length blond hair and a vague expression that made her think of southern California.\n\n\"Yes? What is it?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm here to give you a Christmas present,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you, I'm not interested in whatever you're selling,\" she said, and shut the door.\n\nHe knocked again immediately. \"I'm not selling anything,\" he said through the door. \"Really.\"\n\nI don't have time for this, she thought, but she opened the door again.\n\n\"I'm not a salesguy,\" he said. \"Have you ever heard of the Maharishi Ram Dass?\" A religious nut.\n\n\"I don't have time to talk to you.\" She started to say, \"I'm late for work,\" and then remembered you weren't supposed to tell strangers your apartment was going to be empty. \"I'm very busy,\" she said and shut the door, more firmly this time.\n\nThe knocking commenced again, but she ignored it. She started into the bedroom with the shopping bag, came back and pushed the deadbolt across and put the chain on, and then went in to hang up her dress. By the time she'd extricated it from the tissue paper and found a hanger, the knocking had stopped. She hung up the dress, which looked just as deadly now that she had it home, and went back into the living room.\n\nThe young man was sitting on the couch, messing with her TV remote. \"So, what do you want for Christmas? A yacht? A pony?\" He punched buttons on the remote, frowning. \"A new TV?\"\n\n\"How did you get in here?\" Lauren said squeakily. She looked at the door. The deadbolt and chain were both still on.\n\n\"I'm a spirit,\" he said, putting the remote down. The TV suddenly blared on. \"The Spirit of Christmas Present.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Lauren said, edging toward the phone. \"Like in A Christmas Carol.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, flipping through the channels. She looked at the remote. It was still on the coffee table. \"Not Christmas Present. Christmas Present. You know, Barbie dolls, ugly ties, cheese logs, the stuff people give you for Christmas.\"\n\n\"Oh, Christmas Present. I see,\" Lauren said, carefully picking up the phone.\n\n\"People always get me confused with him, which is really insulting. I mean, the guy obviously has a really high cholesterol level. Anyway, I'm the Spirit of Christmas Present, and your sister sent me to\u2014\"\n\nLauren had dialed 9-1. She stopped, her finger poised over the second 1. \"My sister?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, staring at the TV. Jimmy Stewart was sitting in the guard's room, wrapped in a blanket. \"Oh, wow! It's a Wonderful Life.\"\n\nMy sister sent you, Lauren thought. It explained everything. He was not a Moonie or a serial killer. He was this year's version of the crystal pyramid mate selector. \"How do you know my sister?\"\n\n\"She channeled me,\" he said, leaning back against the sofa. \"The Maharishi Ram Dass was instructing her in trance-meditation, and she accidentally channeled my spirit out of the astral plane.\" He pointed at the screen. \"I love this part where the angel is trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he's dead.\"\n\n\"I'm not dead, am I?\"\n\n\"No. I'm not an angel. I'm a spirit. The Spirit of Christmas Present. You can call me Chris for short. Your sister sent me to give you what you really want for Christmas. You know, your heart's desire. So what is it?\"\n\nFor my sister not to send me any more presents, she thought. \"Look, I'm really in a hurry right now. Why don't you come back tomorrow and we can talk about it then?\"\n\n\"I hope it's not a fur coat,\" he said as if he hadn't heard her. \"I'm opposed to the killing of endangered species.\" He picked up Fred's present. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"It's a videotape of Miracle on 34th Street. I really have to go.\"\n\n\"Who's it for?\"\n\n\"Fred Hatch. I'm his Secret Santa.\"\n\n\"Fred Hatch.\" He turned the package over. \"You had it gift wrapped at the store, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Yes. If we could just talk about this later\u2014\"\n\n\"This is a great part, too,\" he said, leaning forward to watch the TV. The angel was explaining to Jimmy Stewart how he hadn't gotten his wings yet.\n\n\"I have to go. I'm on my lunch hour, and I need to mail my Christmas cards, and I have to be back at work by\"\u2014she glanced at her watch\u2014\"oh, my God, fifteen minutes ago.\"\n\nHe put down the package and stood up. \"Gift-wrapped presents,\" he said, making a \"tsk\"-ing noise. \"Everybody rushing around spending money, rushing to parties, never stopping to have some eggnog or watch a movie. Christmas is an endangered species.\" He looked longingly back at the screen, where the angel was trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he'd never been alive, and then wandered into the kitchen. \"You got any Evian water?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lauren said desperately. She hurried after him. \"Look, I really have to get to work.\"\n\nHe had stopped at the kitchen table and was holding one of the Christmas cards. \"Computer-addressed,\" he said reprovingly. He tore it open.\n\n\"Don't\u2014\" Lauren said.\n\n\"Printed Christmas cards,\" he said. \"No letter, no quick note, not even a handwritten signature. That's exactly what I'm talking about. An endangered species.\"\n\n\"I didn't have time,\" Lauren said defensively. \"And I don't have time to discuss this or anything else with you. I have to get to work.\"\n\n\"No time to write a few words on a card, no time to think about what you want for Christmas.\" He slid the card back into the envelope. \"Not even on recycled paper,\" he said sadly. \"Do you know how many trees are chopped down every year to send Christmas cards?\"\n\n\"I am late for\u2014\" Lauren said, and he wasn't there anymore.\n\nHe didn't vanish like in the movies, or fade out slowly. He simply wasn't there.\n\n\"\u2014work,\" Lauren said. She went and looked in the living room. The TV was still on, but he wasn't there, or in the bedroom. She went into the bathroom and pulled the shower curtain back, but he wasn't there, either.\n\n\"It was a hallucination,\" she said out loud, \"brought on by stress.\" She looked at her watch, hoping it had been part of the hallucination, but it still read 1:15. \"I will figure this out later,\" she said. \"I have to get back to work.\"\n\nShe went back in the living room. The TV was off. She went into the kitchen. He wasn't there. Neither were her Christmas cards, exactly.\n\n\"You! Spirit!\" she shouted. \"You come back here this minute!\"\n\n\"You're late,\" Evie said, filling out a catalog form. \"You will not believe who was just here. Scott Buckley. God, he is so cute.\" She looked up. \"What happened?\" she said. \"Didn't they hold the dress?\"\n\n\"Do you know anything about magic?\" Lauren said.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"My sister sent me her Christmas present,\" Lauren said grimly. \"I need to talk to someone who knows something about magic.\"\n\n\"Fat Fred\u2026I mean, Fred Hatch is a magician. What did your sister send you?\"\n\nLauren started down the hall to Documentation at a half run.\n\n\"I told Scott you'd be back any minute,\" Evie said. \"He said he wanted to talk to you.\"\n\nLauren opened the door to Documentation and started looking over partitions into the maze of cubicles. They were all empty.\n\n\"Anybody here?\" Lauren called. \"Hello?\"\n\nA middle-aged woman emerged from the maze, carrying five rolls of wrapping paper and a large pair of scissors. \"You don't have any Scotch tape, do you?\" she asked Lauren.\n\n\"Do you know where Fred Hatch is?\" Lauren asked.\n\nThe woman pointed toward the interior of the maze with a roll of reindeer-covered paper. \"Over there. Doesn't anyone have any tape? I'm going to have to staple my Christmas presents.\"\n\nLauren worked her way toward where the woman had pointed, looking over partitions as she went. Fred was in the center one, leaning back in a chair, his hands folded over his ample stomach, staring at a screen covered with yellow numbers.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Lauren said, and Fred immediately sat forward and stood up.\n\n\"I need to talk to you,\" she said. \"Is there somewhere we can talk privately?\"\n\n\"Right here,\" Fred said. \"My assistant's on the 800 line in my office, placing a catalog order, and everyone else is next door in Graphic Design at a Tupperware party.\" He pushed a key, and the computer screen went blank. \"What did you want to talk to me about?\"\n\n\"Evie said you're a magician,\" she said.\n\nHe looked embarrassed. \"Not really. The PMS Committee put me in charge of the magic show for the office party last year, and I came up with an act. This year, luckily, they assigned me to play Santa Claus.\" He smiled and patted his stomach. \"I'm the right shape for the part, and I don't have to worry about the tricks not working.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Lauren said. \"I hoped\u2026do you know any magicians?\"\n\n\"The guy at the novelty shop,\" he said, looking worried. \"What's the matter? Did PMS assign you the magic show this year?\"\n\n\"No.\" She sat down on the edge of his desk. \"My sister is into New Age stuff, and she sent me this spirit\u2014\"\n\n\"Spirit,\" he said. \"A ghost, you mean?\"\n\n\"No. A person. I mean he looks like a person. He says he's the Spirit of Christmas Present, as in Gift, not Here and Now.\"\n\n\"And you're sure he's not a person? I mean, tricks can sometimes really look like magic.\"\n\n\"There's a Christmas tree in my kitchen,\" she said.\n\n\"Christmas tree?\" he said warily.\n\n\"Yes. The spirit was upset because my Christmas cards weren't on recycled paper. He asked me if I knew how many trees were chopped down to send Christmas cards, then he disappeared, and when I went back in the kitchen there was this Christmas tree in my kitchen.\"\n\n\"And there's no way he could have gotten into your apartment earlier and put it there?\"\n\n\"It's growing out of the floor. Besides, it wasn't there when we were in the kitchen five minutes before. See, he was watching It's a Wonderful Life on TV, which, by the way, he turned on without using the remote, and he asked me if I had any Evian water, and he went into the kitchen and\u2026this is ridiculous. You have to think I'm crazy. I think I'm crazy just listening to myself tell this ridiculous story. Evian water!\" She folded her arms. \"People have a lot of nervous breakdowns around Christmastime. Do you think I could be having one?\"\n\nThe woman with the wrapping-paper rolls peered over the cubicle. \"Have you got a tape dispenser?\"\n\nFred shook his head.\n\n\"How about a stapler?\"\n\nFred handed her his stapler, and she left.\n\n\"Well,\" Lauren said when she was sure the woman was gone, \"do you think I'm having a nervous breakdown?\"\n\n\"That depends,\" he said.\n\n\"On what?\"\n\n\"On whether there's really a tree growing out of your kitchen floor. You said he got angry because your Christmas cards weren't on recycled paper. Do you think he's dangerous?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He says he's here to give me whatever I want for Christmas. Except a fur coat. He's opposed to the killing of endangered species.\"\n\n\"A spirit who's an animal-rights activist!\" Fred said delightedly. \"Where did your sister get him from?\"\n\n\"The astral plane,\" Lauren said. \"She was trance-channeling or something. I don't care where he came from. I just want to get rid of him before he decides my Christmas presents aren't recyclable, too.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, hitting a key on the computer. The screen lit up. \"The first thing we need to do is find out what he is and how he got here. I want you to call your sister. Maybe she knows some New Age spell for getting rid of the spirit.\" He began to type rapidly. \"I'll get on the Net and see if I can find someone who knows something about magic.\" He swiveled around to face her. \"You're sure you want to get rid of him?\"\n\n\"I have a tree growing out of my kitchen floor!\"\n\n\"But what if he's telling the truth? What if he really can get you what you want for Christmas?\"\n\n\"What I wanted was to mail my Christmas cards, which are now shedding needles on the kitchen tile. Who knows what he'll do next?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said. \"Listen, whether he's dangerous or not, I think I should go home with you after work, in case he shows up again, but I've got a PMS meeting for the office party\u2014\"\n\n\"That's okay. He's an animal-rights activist. He's not dangerous.\"\n\n\"That doesn't necessarily follow,\" Fred said. \"I'll come over as soon as my meeting's over, and meanwhile I'll check the Net. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said. She started out of the cubicle and then stopped. \"I really appreciate your believing me, or at least not saying you don't believe me.\"\n\nHe smiled at her. \"I don't have any choice. You're the only other person in the world who likes Miracle on 34th Street better than It's a Wonderful Life. And Fred Gailey believed Macy's Santa Claus was really Santa Claus, didn't he?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" she said. \"I don't think this guy is Santa Claus. He was wearing Birkenstocks.\"\n\n\"I'll meet you at your front door,\" he said. He sat down at the computer and began typing.\n\nLauren went out through the maze of cubicles and into the hall.\n\n\"There you are!\" Scott said. \"I've been looking for you all over.\" He smiled meltingly. \"I'm in charge of buying gifts for the office party, and I need your help.\"\n\n\"My help?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Picking them out. I hoped maybe I could talk you into going shopping with me after work tonight.\"\n\n\"Tonight?\" she said. \"I can't. I've got\u2014\" A Christmas tree growing in my kitchen. \"Could we do it tomorrow after work?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I've got a date. What about later on tonight? The stores are open till nine. It shouldn't take more than a couple of hours to do the shopping, and then we could go have a late supper somewhere. What say I pick you up at your apartment at six-thirty?\"\n\nAnd have the spirit lying on the couch, drinking Evian water and watching TV? \"I can't,\" she said regretfully.\n\nEven his frown was cute. \"Oh, well,\" he said, and shrugged. \"Too bad. I guess I'll have to get somebody else.\" He gave her another adorable smile and went off down the hall to ask somebody else.\n\nI hate you, Spirit of Christmas Present, Lauren thought, standing there watching Scott's handsome back recede. You'd better not be there when I get home.\n\nA woman came down the hall, carrying a basket of candy canes. \"Compliments of the Personnel Morale Special Committee,\" she said, offering one to Lauren. \"You look like you could use a little Christmas spirit.\"\n\n\"No, thanks, I've already got one,\" Lauren said.\n\nThe door to her apartment was locked, which didn't mean much, since the chain and the deadbolt had both been on when he got in before. But he wasn't in the living room, and the TV was off.\n\nHe had been there, though. There was an empty Evian water bottle on the coffee table. She picked it up and took it into the kitchen. The tree was still there, too. She pushed one of the branches aside so she could get to the wastebasket and threw the bottle away.\n\n\"Don't you know plastic bottles are nonbiodegradable?\" the spirit said. He was standing on the other side of the tree, hanging things on it. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a \"Save the Rain Forest\" T-shirt, and had a red bandanna tied around his head. \"You should recycle your bottles.\"\n\n\"It's your bottle,\" Lauren said. \"What are you doing here, Spirit?\"\n\n\"Chris,\" he corrected her. \"These are organic ornaments,\" he said. He held one of the brown things out to her. \"Handmade by the Yanomamo Indians. Each one is made of natural by-products found in the Brazilian rain forest.\" He hung the brown thing on the tree. \"Have you decided what you want for Christmas?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"I want you to go away.\"\n\nHe looked surprised. \"I can't do that. Not until I give you your heart's desire.\"\n\n\"That is my heart's desire. I want you to go away and take this tree and your Yanomamo ornaments with you.\"\n\n\"You know the biggest problem I have as the Spirit of Christmas Present?\" he said. He reached into the back pocket of his shorts and pulled out a brown garland of what looked like coffee beans. \"My biggest problem is that people don't know what they want.\"\n\n\"I know what I want,\" Lauren said. \"I don't want to have to write my Christmas cards all over again\u2014\"\n\n\"You didn't write them,\" he said, draping the garland over the branches. \"They were printed. Do you know that the inks used on those cards contain harmful chemicals?\"\n\n\"I don't want to be lectured on environmental issues, I don't want to have to fight my way through a forest to get to the refrigerator, and I don't want to have to turn down dates because I have a spirit in my apartment. I want a nice, quiet Christmas with no hassles. I want to exchange a few presents with my friends and go to the office Christmas party and\u2026\" And dazzle Scott Buckley in my off-the-shoulder black dress, she thought, but she decided she'd better not say that. The spirit might decide Scott's clothes weren't made of natural fibers or something and turn him into a Yanomamo Indian.\n\n\"\u2026and have a nice, quiet Christmas,\" she finished lamely.\n\n\"Take It's a Wonderful Life,\" the spirit said, squinting at the tree. \"I watched it this afternoon while you were at work. Jimmy Stewart didn't know what he wanted.\"\n\nHe reached into his pocket again and pulled out a crooked star made of Brazil nuts and twine. \"He thought he wanted to go to college and travel and get rich, but what he really wanted was right there in front of him the whole time.\"\n\nHe did something, and the top of the tree lopped over in front of him. He tied the star on with the twine, and did something else. The tree straightened up. \"You only think you want me to leave,\" he said.\n\nSomeone knocked on the door.\n\n\"You're right,\" Lauren said. \"I don't want you to leave. I want you to stay right there.\" She ran into the living room.\n\nThe spirit followed her into the living room. \"Luckily, being a spirit, I know what you really want,\" he said, and disappeared.\n\nShe opened the door to Fred. \"He was just here,\" she said. \"He disappeared when I opened the door, which is what all the crazies say, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Fred said. \"Or else, 'He's right there. Can't you see him?' \" He looked curiously around the room. \"Where was he?\"\n\n\"In the kitchen,\" she said, shutting the door. \"Decorating a tree which probably isn't there, either.\" She led him into the kitchen.\n\nThe tree was still there, and there were large brownish cards stuck all over it.\n\n\"You really do have a tree growing in your kitchen,\" Fred said, squatting down to look at the roots. \"I wonder if the people downstairs have roots sticking out of their ceiling.\" He stood up. \"What are these?\" he said, pointing at the brownish cards.\n\n\"Christmas cards.\" She pulled one off. \"I told him I wanted mine back.\" She read the card aloud. \" 'In the time it takes you to read this Christmas card, eighty-two harp seals will have been clubbed to death for their fur.' \" She opened it up. \" 'Happy Holidays.' \"\n\n\"Cheery,\" Fred said. He took the card from her and turned it over. \" 'This card is printed on recycled paper with vegetable inks and can be safely used as compost.' \"\n\n\"Did anyone on the Net know how to club a spirit to death?\" she asked.\n\n\"No. Didn't your sister have any ideas?\"\n\n\"She didn't know how she got him in the first place. She and her Maharishi were channeling an Egyptian nobleman and he suddenly appeared, wearing a 'Save the Dolphins' T-shirt. I got the idea the Maharishi was as surprised as she was.\" She sat down at the kitchen table. \"I tried to get him to go away this afternoon, but he said he has to give me my heart's desire first.\" She looked up at Fred, who was cautiously sniffing one of the organic ornaments. \"Didn't you find out anything on the Net?\"\n\n\"I found out there are a lot of loonies with computers. What are these?\"\n\n\"By-products of the Brazilian rain forest.\" She stood up. \"I told him my heart's desire was for him to leave, and he said I didn't know what I really wanted.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"I went into the living room to answer the door, and he said that luckily he knew what I wanted because he was a spirit, and I told him to stay right where he was, and he disappeared.\"\n\n\"Show me,\" he said.\n\nShe took him into the living room and pointed at where he'd been standing, and Fred squatted down again and peered at the carpet.\n\n\"How does he disappear?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He just\u2026isn't there.\"\n\nFred stood up. \"Has he changed anything else? Besides the tree?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of. He turned the TV on without the remote,\" she said, looking around the room. The shopping bags were still on the coffee table. She looked through them and pulled out the video. \"Here. I'm your Secret Santa. I'm not supposed to give it to you till Christmas Eve, but maybe you'd better take it before he turns it into a snowy owl or something.\"\n\nShe handed it to him. \"Go ahead. Open it.\"\n\nHe unwrapped it. \"Oh,\" he said without enthusiasm. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"I remember last year at the party we talked about it, and I was afraid you might already have a copy. You don't, do you?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, still in that flat voice.\n\n\"Oh, good. I had a hard time finding it. You were right when you said we were the only two people in the world who liked Miracle on 34th Street. Everybody else I know thinks It's a Wonderful Life is\u2014\"\n\n\"You bought me Miracle on 34th Street?\" he said, frowning.\n\n\"It's the original black-and-white version. I hate those colorized things, don't you? Everyone has gray teeth.\"\n\n\"Lauren.\" He held the box out to her so she could read the front. \"I think your friend's been fixing things again.\"\n\nShe took the box from him. On the cover was a picture of Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed dancing the Charleston.\n\n\"Oh, no! That little rat!\" she said. \"He must have changed it when he was looking at it. He told me It's a Wonderful Life was his favorite movie.\"\n\n\"Et tu, Brute?\" Fred said, shaking his head.\n\n\"Do you suppose he changed all my other Christmas presents?\"\n\n\"We'd better check.\"\n\n\"If he has\u2026\" she said, darting into the kitchen. She dropped to her knees and started rummaging through them.\n\n\"Do you think they look the same?\" Fred asked, squatting down beside her.\n\n\"Your present looked the same.\" She grabbed a package wrapped in red-and-gold paper and began feeling it. \"Evie's present is okay, I think.\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"A stapler. She's always losing hers. I put her name on it in Magic Marker.\" She handed it to him to feel.\n\n\"It feels like a stapler, all right,\" he said.\n\n\"I think we'd better open it and make sure.\"\n\nFred tore off the paper. \"It's still a stapler,\" he said, looking at it. \"What a great idea for a Christmas present! Everybody in Documentation's always losing their staplers. I think PMS steals them to use on their Christmas memos.\" He handed it back to her. \"Now you'll have to wrap it again.\"\n\n\"That's okay,\" Lauren said. \"At least it wasn't a Yanomamo ornament.\"\n\n\"But it might be any minute,\" Fred said, straightening up. \"There's no telling what he might take a notion to transform next. I think you'd better call your sister again, and ask her to ask the Maharishi if he knows how to send spirits back to the astral plane, and I'll go see what I can find out about exorcism.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Lauren said, following him to the door. \"Don't take the videotape with you. Maybe I can get him to change it back.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Fred said, frowning. \"You're sure he said he was here to give you your heart's desire?\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\"\n\n\"Then why would he change my videotape?\" he said thoughtfully. \"It's too bad your sister couldn't have conjured up a nice, straightforward spirit.\"\n\n\"Like Santa Claus,\" Lauren said.\n\nHer sister wasn't home. Lauren tried her off and on all evening, and when she finally got her, she couldn't talk. \"The Maharishi and I are going to Barbados\u2014they're having a harmonic divergence there on Christmas Eve. So you need to send my Christmas present to Barbados,\" she said, and hung up.\n\n\"I don't even have her Christmas present bought yet,\" Lauren said to the couch, \"and it's all your fault.\"\n\nShe went into the kitchen and glared at the tree. \"I don't even dare go shopping because you might turn the couch into a humpback whale while I'm gone,\" she said, and then clapped her hand over her mouth.\n\nShe peered cautiously into the living room and then made a careful circuit of the whole apartment, looking for endangered species. There were no signs of any, and no sign of the spirit. She went back into the living room and turned on the TV. Jimmy Stewart was dancing the Charleston with Donna Reed. She picked up the remote and hit the channel button. Now Jimmy Stewart was singing \"Buffalo Gals, Won't You Come Out Tonight?\"\n\nShe hit the automatic channel changer. Jimmy Stewart was on every channel except one. The Ghost of Christmas Present was on that one, telling Scrooge to change his ways. She watched the rest of A Christmas Carol. When it reached the part where the Cratchits were sitting down to their Christmas dinner, she remembered she hadn't had any supper and went into the kitchen.\n\nThe tree was completely blocking the cupboards, but by mightily pushing several branches aside she was able to get to the refrigerator. The eggnog was gone. So were the Stouffer's frozen entr\u00e9es. The only thing in the refrigerator was a half-empty bottle of Evian water.\n\nShe shoved her way out of the kitchen and sat back down on the couch. Fred had told her to call if anything happened, but it was after eleven o'clock, and she had a feeling the eggnog had been gone for some time.\n\nA Christmas Carol was over, and the opening credits of the next movie were starting. \"Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life. Starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed.\"\n\nShe must have fallen asleep. When she woke up, Miracle on 34th Street was on, and the store manager was giving Edmund Gwenn as Macy's Santa Claus a list of toys he was supposed to push if Macy's didn't have what the children asked Santa for.\n\n\"Finally,\" Lauren said, watching Edmund Gwenn tear the list into pieces, \"something good to watch,\" and promptly fell asleep. When she woke up again, John Payne as Fred Gailey was kissing Doris, a.k.a. Maureen O'Hara, and someone was knocking on the door.\n\nI don't remember anyone knocking on the door, she thought groggily. Fred told Doris how he'd convinced the State of New York that Edmund Gwenn was Santa Claus, and then they both stared disbelievingly at a cane standing in the corner. \"The End\" came on the screen.\n\nThe knocking continued.\n\n\"Oh,\" Lauren said, and answered the door.\n\nIt was Fred, carrying a McDonald's sack.\n\n\"What time is it?\" Lauren said, blinking at him.\n\n\"Seven o'clock. I brought you an Egg McMuffin and some orange juice.\"\n\n\"Oh, you wonderful person!\" she said. She grabbed the sack and took it over to the coffee table. \"You don't know what he did.\" She reached into the sack and pulled out the sandwich. \"He transformed the food in my refrigerator into Evian water.\"\n\nHe was looking curiously at her. \"Didn't you go to bed last night? He didn't come back, did he?\"\n\n\"No. I waited for him, and I guess I fell asleep.\" She took a huge bite of the sandwich.\n\nFred sat down beside her. \"What's that?\" He pointed to a pile of dollar bills on the coffee table.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Lauren said.\n\nFred picked up the bills. Under them was a handful of change and a piece of pink paper. \" 'Returned three boxes Christmas cards for refund,' \" Lauren said, reading it. \" '$38.18.' \"\n\n\"That's what's here,\" Fred said, counting the money. \"He didn't turn your Christmas cards into a Douglas fir after all. He took them back and got a refund.\"\n\n\"Then that means the tree isn't in the kitchen!\" she said, jumping up and running to look. \"No, it doesn't.\"\n\nShe came back and sat down on the couch.\n\n\"But at least you got your money back,\" Fred said. \"And it fits in with what I learned on the Net last night. They think he's a friendly presence, probably some sort of manifestation of the seasonal spirit. Apparently these are fairly common, variations of Santa Claus being the most familiar, but there are other ones, too. All benign. They think he's probably telling the truth about wanting to give you your heart's desire.\"\n\n\"Do they know how to get rid of him?\" she asked, and took a bite.\n\n\"No. Apparently no one's ever wanted to exorcise one.\" He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. \"I got a list of exorcism books to try, though, and this one guy, Clarence, said the most important thing in an exorcism is to know exactly what kind of spirit it is.\"\n\n\"How do we do that?\" Lauren asked with her mouth full.\n\n\"By its actions,\" Fred said. \"He said appearance doesn't mean anything because seasonal spirits are frequently in disguise. He said we need to write down everything the spirit's said and done, so I want you to tell me exactly what he did.\" He took a pen and a notebook out of his jacket pocket. \"Everything from the first time you saw him.\"\n\n\"Just a minute.\" She finished the last bite of sandwich and took a drink of the orange juice. \"Okay. He knocked on the door, and when I answered it, he told me he was here to give me a Christmas present, and I told him I wasn't interested, and I shut the door and started into the bedroom to hang up my dress and\u2014my dress!\" she gasped, and went tearing into the bedroom.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" Fred said, following her.\n\nShe flung the closet door open and began pushing clothes madly along the bar. \"If he's transformed this\u2014\" She stopped pushing hangers. \"I'll kill him,\" she said, and lifted out a brownish collection of feathers and dried leaves. \"Benign??\" she said. \"Do you call that benign??\"\n\nFred gingerly touched a brown feather. \"What was it?\"\n\n\"A dress,\" she said. \"My beautiful black, off-the-shoulder, drop-dead dress.\"\n\n\"Really?\" he said doubtfully. He lifted up some of the brownish leaves. \"I think it still is a dress,\" he said. \"Sort of.\"\n\nShe crumpled the leaves and feathers against her and sank down on the bed. \"All I wanted was to go to the office party!\"\n\n\"Don't you have anything else you can wear to the office party? What about that pretty red thing you wore last year?\"\n\nShe shook her head emphatically. \"Scott didn't even notice it!\"\n\n\"And that's your heart's desire?\" Fred said after a moment. \"To have Scott Buckley notice you at the office party?\"\n\n\"Yes, and he would have, too! It had sequins on it, and it fit perfectly!\" She held out what might have been a sleeve. Greenish-brown lumps dangled from brownish strips of bamboo. \"And now he's ruined it!\"\n\nShe flung the dress on the floor and stood up. \"I don't care what this Clarence person says. He is not benign! And he is not trying to get me what I want for Christmas. He is trying to ruin my life!\"\n\nShe saw the expression on Fred's face and stopped. \"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"None of this is your fault. You've been trying to help me.\"\n\n\"And I've been doing about as well as your spirit,\" he said. \"Look, there has to be some way to get rid of him. Or at least get the dress back. Clarence said he knew some transformation spells. I'll go on to work and see what I can find out.\"\n\nHe went out into the living room and over to the door. \"Maybe you can go back to the store and see if they have another dress like it.\" He opened the door.\n\n\"Okay.\" Lauren nodded. \"I'm sorry I yelled at you. And you have been a lot of help.\"\n\n\"Right,\" he said glumly, and went out.\n\n\"Where'd you get that dress?\" Jimmy Stewart said to Donna Reed.\n\nLauren whirled around. The TV was on. Donna Reed was showing Jimmy Stewart her new dress.\n\n\"Where are you?\" Lauren demanded, looking at the couch. \"I want you to change that dress back right now!\"\n\n\"Don't you like it?\" the spirit said from the bedroom. \"It's completely biodegradable.\"\n\nShe stomped into the bedroom. He was putting the dress on the hanger and making little \"tsk\"-ing noises. \"You have to be careful with natural fibers,\" he said reprovingly.\n\n\"Change it back the way it was. This instant.\"\n\n\"It was handmade by the Yanomamo Indians,\" he said, smoothing down what might be the skirt. \"Do you realize that their natural habitat is being destroyed at the rate of 750 acres a day?\"\n\n\"I don't care. I want my dress back.\"\n\nHe carried the dress on its hanger over to the chest. \"It's so interesting. Donna Reed knew right away she was in love with Jimmy Stewart, but he was so busy thinking about college and his new suitcase, he didn't even know she existed.\" He hung up the dress. \"He practically had to be hit over the head.\"\n\n\"I'll hit you over the head if you don't change that dress back this instant, Spirit,\" she said, looking around for something hard.\n\n\"Call me Chris,\" he said. \"Did you know sequins are made from nonrenewable resources?\" and disappeared as she swung the lamp.\n\n\"And good riddance,\" she shouted to the air.\n\nThey had the dress in a size three. Lauren put herself through the indignity of trying to get into it and then went to work. The receptionist was watching Jimmy Stewart standing on the bridge in the snow and weeping into a Kleenex. She handed Lauren her messages.\n\nThere were two memos from the PMS Committee\u2014they were having a sleigh ride after work, and she was supposed to bring cheese puffs to the office party. There wasn't a message from Fred.\n\n\"Oh!\" the receptionist wailed. \"This part is so sad!\"\n\n\"I hate It's a Wonderful Life,\" Lauren said, and went up to her desk. \"I hate Christmas,\" she said to Evie.\n\n\"It's normal to hate Christmas,\" Evie said, looking up from the book she was reading. \"This book, it's called Let's Forget Christmas, says it's because everyone has these unrealistic expectations. When they get presents, they\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, that reminds me,\" Lauren said. She rummaged in her bag and brought out Evie's present, fingering it quickly to make sure it was still a stapler. It seemed to be. She held it out to Evie. \"Merry Christmas.\"\n\n\"I don't have yours wrapped yet,\" Evie said. \"I don't even have my wrapping paper bought yet. The book says I'm suffering from an avoidance complex.\" She picked up the package. \"Do I have to open it now? I know it will be something I love, and you won't like what I got you half as well, and I'll feel incredibly guilty and inadequate.\"\n\n\"You don't have to open it now,\" Lauren said. \"I just thought I'd better give it to you before\u2014\" She picked her messages up off her desk and started looking through them. \"Before I forgot. There haven't been any messages from Fred, have there?\"\n\n\"Yeah. He was here about fifteen minutes ago looking for you. He said to tell you the Net hadn't been any help, and he was going to try the library.\" She looked sadly at the present. \"It's even wrapped great,\" she said gloomily. \"I went shopping for a dress for the office party last night, and do you think I could find anything off-the-shoulder or with sequins? I couldn't even find anything I'd be caught dead in. Did you know the rate of stress-related illnesses at Christmas is seven times higher than the rest of the year?\"\n\n\"I can relate to that,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"No, you can't. You didn't end up buying some awful gray thing with gold chains hanging all over it. At least Scott will notice me. He'll say, 'Hi, Evie, are you dressed as Marley's ghost?' And there you'll be, looking fabulous in black sequins\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I won't,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"Why? Didn't they hold it for you?\"\n\n\"It was\u2026defective. Did Fred want to talk to me?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He was on his way out. He had to go pick up his Santa Claus suit. Oh, my God.\" Her voice dropped to a whisper. \"It's Scott Buckley.\"\n\n\"Hi,\" Scott said to Lauren. \"I was wondering if you could go shopping with me tonight.\"\n\nLauren stared at him, so taken aback she couldn't speak.\n\n\"When you couldn't go last night, I decided to cancel my date.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026I\u2026\" she said.\n\n\"I thought we could buy the presents and then have some dinner.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"Great,\" Scott said. \"I'll come over to your apartment around six-thirty.\"\n\n\"No!\" Lauren said. \"I mean, why don't we go straight from work?\"\n\n\"Good idea. I'll come up here and get you.\" He smiled meltingly and left.\n\n\"I think I'll kill myself,\" Evie said. \"Did you know the rate of suicides at Christmas is four times higher than the rest of the year? He is so cute,\" she said, looking longingly down the hall after him. \"There's Fred.\"\n\nLauren looked up. Fred was coming toward her desk with a Santa Claus costume and a stack of books. Lauren hurried across to him.\n\n\"This is everything the library had on exorcisms and the occult,\" Fred said, transferring half of the books to her arms. \"I thought we could both go through them today, and then get together tonight and compare notes.\"\n\n\"Oh, I can't,\" Lauren said. \"I promised Scott I'd help him pick out the presents for the office party tonight. I'm sorry. I could tell him I can't.\"\n\n\"Your heart's desire? Are you kidding?\" He started awkwardly piling the books back on his load. \"You go shopping. I'll go through the books and let you know if I come up with anything.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" she said guiltily. \"I mean, you shouldn't have to do all the work.\"\n\n\"It's my pleasure,\" he said. He started to walk away and then stopped. \"You didn't tell the spirit Scott was your heart's desire, did you?\"\n\n\"Of course not. Why?\"\n\n\"I was just wondering\u2026nothing. Never mind.\" He walked off down the hall. Lauren went back to her desk.\n\n\"Did you know the rate of depression at Christmas is sixteen times higher than the rest of the year?\" Evie said. She handed Lauren a package.\n\n\"What's this?\"\n\n\"It's from your Secret Santa.\"\n\nLauren opened it. It was a large book entitled It's a Wonderful Life: The Photo Album. On the cover, Jimmy Stewart was looking depressed.\n\n\"I figure it'll take a half hour or so to pick out the presents,\" Scott said, leading her past two inflatable palm trees into The Upscale Oasis. \"And then we can have some supper and get acquainted.\" He lay down on a massage couch. \"What do you think about this?\"\n\n\"How many presents do we have to buy?\" Lauren asked, looking around the store. There were a lot of inflatable palm trees, and a jukebox, and several life-size cardboard cutouts of Malcolm Forbes and Leona Helmsley. Against the far wall were two high-rise aquariums and a bank of televisions with neon-outlined screens.\n\n\"Seventy-two.\" He got up off the massage couch, handed her the list of employees, and went over to a display of brown boxes tied with twine. \"What about these? They're handmade Yanomamo Christmas ornaments.\"\n\n\"No,\" Lauren said. \"How much money do we have to spend?\"\n\n\"The PMS Committee budgeted six thousand, and there was five hundred left in the Sunshine fund. We can spend\u2026\" He picked up a pocket calculator in the shape of Donald Trump and punched several buttons. \"Ninety dollars per person, including tax. How about this?\" He held up an automatic cat feeder.\n\n\"We got those last year,\" Lauren said. She picked up a digital umbrella and put it back down.\n\n\"How about a car fax?\" Scott said. \"No, wait. This, this is it!\"\n\nLauren turned around. Scott was holding up what looked like a gold cordless phone. \"It's an investment pager,\" he said, punching keys. \"See, it gives you the Dow Jones, treasury bonds, interest rates. Isn't it perfect?\"\n\n\"Well,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"See, this is the hostile takeover alarm, and every time the Federal Reserve adjusts the interest rate it beeps.\"\n\nLauren read the tag. \" 'Portable Plutocrat, $74.99.' \"\n\n\"Great,\" Scott said. \"We'll have money left over.\"\n\n\"To invest,\" Lauren said.\n\nHe went off to see if they had seventy-two of them, and Lauren wandered over to the bank of televisions.\n\nThere was a videotape of Miracle on 34th Street lying on top of the VCR/shower massage. Lauren looked around to see if anyone was watching and then popped the Wonderful Life tape out and stuck in Miracle.\n\nA dozen Edmund Gwenns dressed as Macy's Santa Claus appeared on the screens, listening to twelve store managers tell them which overstocked toys to push.\n\nScott came over, lugging four shopping bags. \"They come gift wrapped,\" he said happily, showing her a Portable Plutocrat wrapped in green paper with gold dollar signs. \"Which gives us a free evening.\"\n\n\"That's what I've been fighting against for years,\" a dozen Edmund Gwenns said, tearing a dozen lists to bits, \"the way they commercialize Christmas.\"\n\n\"What I thought,\" Scott said when they got in the car, \"was that instead of going out for supper, we'd take these over to your apartment and order in.\"\n\n\"Order in?\" Lauren said, clutching a bag of Portable Plutocrats on her lap.\n\n\"I know a great Italian place that delivers. Angel-hair pasta, wine, everything. Or, if you'd rather, we could run by a grocery store and pick up some stuff to cook.\"\n\n\"Actually, my kitchen's kind of a mess,\" she said. There is a Christmas tree in it, she thought, with organic by-products hanging on it.\n\nHe pulled up outside her apartment building. \"Then Italian it is.\" He got out of the car and began unloading shopping bags. \"You like prosciutto? They have a great melon and prosciutto.\"\n\n\"Actually, the whole apartment's kind of a disaster,\" Lauren said, following him up the stairs. \"You know, wrapping presents and everything. There are ribbons and tags and paper all over the floor and\u2014\"\n\n\"Great,\" he said, stopping in front of her door. \"We have to put tags on the presents, anyway.\"\n\n\"They don't need tags, do they?\" Lauren said desperately. \"I mean, they're all exactly alike.\"\n\n\"It personalizes them,\" he said. \"It shows the gift was chosen especially for them.\" He looked expectantly at the key in her hand and then at the door.\n\nShe couldn't hear the TV, which was a good sign. And every time Fred had come over, the spirit had disappeared. So all I have to do is keep him out of the kitchen, she thought.\n\nShe opened the door and Scott pushed past her and dumped the shopping bags onto the coffee table. \"Sorry,\" he said. \"Those were really heavy.\" He straightened up and looked around the living room. There was no sign of the spirit, but there were three Evian water bottles on the coffee table. \"This doesn't look too messy. You should see my apartment. I'll bet your kitchen's neater than mine, too.\"\n\nLauren walked swiftly over to the kitchen and pulled the door shut. \"I wouldn't bet on it. Aren't there still some more presents to bring up?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'll go get them. Shall I call the Italian place first?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lauren said, standing with her back against the kitchen door. \"Why don't you bring the bags up first?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, smiling meltingly, and went out.\n\nLauren leaped to the door, put the deadbolt and the chain on, and then ran back to the kitchen and opened the door. The tree was still there. She pulled the door hastily to and walked rapidly into the bedroom. He wasn't there, or in the bathroom. \"Thank you,\" she breathed, looking heavenward, and went back in the living room.\n\nThe TV was on. Edmund Gwenn was shouting at the store psychologist.\n\n\"You know, you were right,\" the spirit said. He was stretched out on the couch, wearing a \"Save the Black-Footed Ferret\" T-shirt and jeans. \"It's not a bad movie. Of course, it's not as good as It's a Wonderful Life, but I like the way everything works out at the end.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she demanded, glancing anxiously at the door.\n\n\"Watching Miracle on 34th Street,\" he said, pointing at the screen. Edmund Gwenn was brandishing his cane at the store psychiatrist. \"I like the part where Edmund Gwenn asks Natalie Wood what she wants for Christmas, and she shows him the picture of the house.\"\n\nLauren picked up Fred's video and brandished it at him. \"Fine. Then you can change Fred's video back.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, and did something. She looked at Fred's video. It showed Edmund Gwenn hugging Natalie Wood in front of a yellow moon with Santa Claus's sleigh and reindeer flying across it. Lauren put the video hastily down on the coffee table.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said. \"And my dress.\"\n\n\"Natalie Wood doesn't really want a house, of course. What she really wants is for Maureen O'Hara to marry John Payne. The house is just a symbol for what she really wants.\"\n\nOn the TV Edmund Gwenn rapped the store psychologist smartly on the forehead with his cane.\n\nThere was a knock on the door. \"It's me,\" Scott said.\n\n\"I also like the part where Edmund Gwenn yells at the store manager for pushing merchandise nobody wants. Christmas presents should be something the person wants. Aren't you going to answer the door?\"\n\n\"Aren't you going to disappear?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Disappear?\" he said incredulously. \"The movie isn't over. And besides, I still haven't gotten you what you want for Christmas.\" He did something, and a bowl of trail mix appeared on his stomach.\n\nScott knocked again.\n\nLauren went over to the door and opened it two inches.\n\n\"It's me,\" Scott said. \"Why do you have the chain on?\"\n\n\"I\u2026\" She looked hopefully at Chris. He was eating trail mix and watching Maureen O'Hara bending over the store psychologist, trying to wake him up.\n\n\"Scott, I'm sorry, but I think I'd better take a rain check on supper.\"\n\nHe looked bewildered. And cute. \"But I thought\u2026\" he said.\n\nSo did I, she thought. But I have a spirit on my couch who's perfectly capable of turning you into a Brazilian rain forest by-product.\n\n\"The Italian takeout sounds great,\" she said, \"but it's kind of late, and we've both got to go to work tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow's Saturday.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026I meant go to work on wrapping presents. Tomorrow's Christmas Eve, and I haven't even started my wrapping. And I have to make cheese puffs for the office party and wash my hair and\u2026\"\n\n\"Okay, okay, I get the message,\" he said. \"I'll just bring in the presents and then leave.\"\n\nShe thought of telling him to leave them in the hall, and then closed the door a little and took the chain off the door.\n\nGo away! she thought at the spirit, who was eating trail mix.\n\nShe opened the door far enough so she could slide out, and pulled it to behind her. \"Thanks for a great evening,\" she said, taking the shopping bags from Scott. \"Good night.\"\n\n\"Good night,\" he said, still looking bewildered. He started down the hall. At the stairs he turned and smiled.\n\nI'm going to kill him, Lauren thought, waving back, and took the shopping bags inside.\n\nThe spirit wasn't there. The trail mix was still on the couch, and the TV was still on.\n\n\"Come back here!\" she shouted. \"You little rat! You have ruined my dress and my date, and you're not going to ruin anything else! You're going to change back my dress and my Christmas cards, and you're going to get that tree out of my kitchen right now!\"\n\nHer voice hung in the air. She sat down on the couch, still holding the shopping bags. On the TV, Edmund Gwenn was sitting in Bellevue, staring at the wall.\n\n\"At least Scott finally noticed me,\" she said, and set the shopping bags down on the coffee table. They rattled.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" she said. \"Not the Plutocrats!\"\n\n\"The problem is,\" Fred said, closing the last of the books on the occult, \"that we can't exorcise him if we don't know which seasonal spirit he is, and he doesn't fit the profiles of any of these. He must be in disguise.\"\n\n\"I don't want to exorcise him,\" Lauren said. \"I want to kill him.\"\n\n\"Even if we did manage to exorcise him, there'd be no guarantee that the things he's changed would go back to their original state.\"\n\n\"And I'd be stuck with explaining what happened to six thousand dollars' worth of Christmas presents.\"\n\n\"Those Portable Plutocrats cost six thousand dollars?\"\n\n\"$5895.36.\"\n\nFred gave a low whistle. \"Did your spirit say why he didn't like them? Other than the obvious, I mean. That they were nonbiodegradable or something?\"\n\n\"No. He didn't even notice them. He was watching Miracle on 34th Street, and he was talking about how he liked the way things worked out at the end and the part about the house.\"\n\n\"Nothing about Christmas presents?\"\n\n\"I don't remember.\" She sank down on the couch. \"Yes, I do. He said he liked the part where Edmund Gwenn yelled at the store manager for talking people into buying things they didn't want. He said Christmas presents should be something the person wanted.\"\n\n\"Well, that explains why he transformed the Plutocrats then,\" Fred said. \"It probably also means there's no way you can talk him into changing them back. And I've got to have something to pass out at the office party, or you'll be in trouble. So we'll just have to come up with replacement presents.\"\n\n\"Replacement presents?\" Lauren said. \"How? It's ten o'clock, the office party's tomorrow night, and how do we know he won't transform the replacement presents once we've got them?\"\n\n\"We'll buy people what they want. Was six thousand all the money you and Scott had?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lauren said, rummaging through one of the shopping bags. \"PMS budgeted sixty-five hundred.\"\n\n\"How much have you got left?\"\n\nShe pulled out a sheaf of papers. \"He didn't transform the purchase orders or the receipt,\" she said, looking at them. \"The investment pagers cost $5895.36. We have $604.64 left.\" She handed him the papers. \"That's $8.39 apiece.\"\n\nHe looked at the receipt speculatively and then into the shopping bag. \"I don't suppose we could take these back and get a refund from The Upscale Oasis?\"\n\n\"They're not going to give us $5895.36 for seventy-two 'Save the Ozone Layer' buttons,\" Lauren said. \"And there's nothing we can buy for eight dollars that will convince PMS it cost sixty-five hundred. And where am I going to get the money to pay back the difference?\"\n\n\"I don't think you'll have to. Remember when Chris changed your Christmas cards into the tree? He didn't really. He returned them somehow to the store and got a refund. Maybe he's done the same thing with the Plutocrats and the money will turn up on your coffee table tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"And if it doesn't?\"\n\n\"We'll worry about that tomorrow. Right now we've got to come up with presents to pass out at the party.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Staplers.\"\n\n\"Staplers?\"\n\n\"Like the one you got Evie. Everybody in my department's always losing their staplers, too. And their tape dispensers. It's an office party. We'll buy everybody something they want for the office.\"\n\n\"But how will we know what that is? There are seventy-two people on this list.\"\n\n\"We'll call the department heads and ask them, and then we'll go shopping.\" He stood up. \"Where's your phone book?\"\n\n\"Next to the tree.\" She followed him into the kitchen. \"How are we going to go shopping? It's ten o'clock at night.\"\n\n\"Bizmart's open till eleven,\" he said, opening the phone book, \"and the grocery store's open all night. We'll get as many of the presents as we can tonight and the rest tomorrow morning, and that still gives us all afternoon to get them wrapped. How much wrapping paper do you have?\"\n\n\"Lots. I bought it half price last year when I decided this Christmas was going to be different. A stapler doesn't seem like much of a present.\"\n\n\"It does if it's what you wanted.\" He reached for the phone.\n\nIt rang. Fred picked up the receiver and handed it to Lauren.\n\n\"Oh, Lauren,\" Evie's voice said. \"I just opened your present, and I love it! It's exactly what I wanted!\"\n\n\"Really?\" Lauren said.\n\n\"It's perfect! I was so depressed about Christmas and the office party and still not having my shopping done. I wasn't even going to open it, but in Let's Forget Christmas it said you should open your presents early so they won't ruin Christmas morning, and I did, and it's wonderful! I don't even care whether Scott notices me or not! Thank you!\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Lauren said, but Evie had already hung up. She looked at Fred. \"That was Evie. You were right about people liking staplers.\" She handed him the phone. \"You call the department heads. I'll get my coat.\"\n\nHe took the phone and began to punch in numbers, and then put it down. \"What exactly did the spirit say about the ending of Miracle on 34th Street?\"\n\n\"He said he liked the way everything worked out at the end. Why?\"\n\nHe looked thoughtful. \"Maybe we're going about this all wrong.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"What if the spirit really does want to give you your heart's desire, and all this transforming stuff is some roundabout way of doing it? Like the angel in It's a Wonderful Life. He's supposed to save Jimmy Stewart from committing suicide, and instead of doing something logical, like talking him out of it or grabbing him, he jumps in the river so Jimmy Stewart has to save him.\"\n\n\"You're saying he turned seventy-two Portable Plutocrats into 'Save the Ozone Layer' buttons to help me?\"\n\n\"I don't know. All I'm saying is that maybe you should tell him you want to go to the office party in a black sequined dress with Scott Buckley, and see what happens.\"\n\n\"See what happens? After what he did to my dress? If he knew I wanted Scott, he'd probably turn him into a harp seal.\" She put on her coat. \"Well, are we going to call the department heads or not?\"\n\nThe Graphic Design department wanted staplers, and so did Accounts Payable. Accounts Receivable, which was having an outbreak of stress-related Christmas colds, wanted Puffs Plus and cough drops. Document Control wanted scissors.\n\nScott looked at the list, checking off Systems and the other departments they'd called. \"All we've got left is the PMS Committee,\" he said.\n\n\"I know what to get them,\" Lauren said. \"Copies of Let's Forget Christmas.\"\n\nThey got some of the things before Bizmart closed, and Fred was back at nine Saturday morning to do the rest of it. At the bookstore they ran into the woman who had been stapling presents together the day Lauren enlisted Fred's help.\n\n\"I completely forgot my husband's first wife,\" she said, looking desperate, \"and I don't have any idea of what to get her.\"\n\nFred handed her the videotape of It's a Wonderful Life they were giving the receptionist. \"How about one of these?\" he said.\n\n\"Do you think she'll like it?\"\n\n\"Everybody likes it,\" Fred said.\n\n\"Especially the part where the bad guy steals the money, and Jimmy Stewart races around town, trying to replace it,\" Lauren said.\n\nIt took them most of the morning to get the rest of the presents and forever to wrap them. By four they weren't even half done.\n\n\"What's next?\" Fred asked, tying the bow on the last of the staplers. He stood up and stretched.\n\n\"Cough drops,\" Lauren said, cutting a length of red paper with Santa Clauses on it.\n\nHe sat back down. \"Ah, yes. Accounts Receivable's heart's desire.\"\n\n\"What's your heart's desire?\" Lauren asked, folding the paper over the top of the cough drops and taping it. \"What would you ask for if the spirit inflicted himself on you?\"\n\nFred unreeled a length of ribbon. \"Well, not to go to an office party, that's for sure. The only year I had an even remotely good time was last year, talking to you.\"\n\n\"I'm serious,\" Lauren said. She taped the sides and handed the package to Fred. \"What do you really want for Christmas?\"\n\n\"When I was eight,\" he said thoughtfully, \"I asked for a computer for Christmas. Home computers were new then and they were pretty expensive, and I wasn't sure I'd get it. I was a lot like Natalie Wood in Miracle on 34th Street. I didn't believe in Santa Claus, and I didn't believe in miracles, but I really wanted it.\"\n\nHe cut off the length of ribbon, wrapped it around the package, and tied it in a knot.\n\n\"Did you get the computer?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, cutting off shorter lengths of ribbon. \"Christmas morning I came downstairs, and there was a note telling me to look in the garage.\" He opened the scissors and pulled the ribbon across the blade, making it curl. \"It was a puppy.\" He smiled, remembering. \"The thing was, a computer was too expensive, but there was an outside chance I'd get it, or I wouldn't have asked for it. Kids don't ask for stuff they know is impossible.\"\n\n\"And you hadn't asked for a puppy because you knew you couldn't have one?\"\n\n\"No, you don't understand. There are things you don't ask for because you know you can't have them, and then there are things so far outside the realm of possibility, it would never even occur to you to want them.\" He made the curled ribbon into a bow and fastened it to the package.\n\n\"So what you're saying is your heart's desire is something so far outside the realm of possibility, you don't even know what it is?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that,\" he said. He stood up again. \"Do you want some eggnog?\"\n\n\"Yes, thanks. If it's still there.\"\n\nHe went into the kitchen. She could hear forest-thrashing noises and the refrigerator opening. \"It's still here,\" he said.\n\n\"It's funny Chris hasn't been back,\" she called to Fred. \"I keep worrying he must be up to something.\"\n\n\"Chris?\" Fred said. He came back into the living room with two glasses of eggnog.\n\n\"The spirit. He told me to call him that,\" she said. \"It's short for Spirit of Christmas Present.\" Fred was frowning. \"What's wrong?\" Lauren asked.\n\n\"I wonder\u2026nothing. Never mind.\" He went over to the TV. \"I don't suppose Miracle on 34th Street's on TV this afternoon?\"\n\n\"No, but I made him change your video back.\" She pointed. \"It's there, on top of the TV.\"\n\nHe turned on the TV, inserted the video in the VCR, and hit play. He came and sat down beside Lauren. She handed him the wrapped cough drops, but he didn't take them. He was watching the TV. Lauren looked up. On the screen, Jimmy Stewart was walking past Donna Reed's house, racketing a stick along the picket fence.\n\n\"That isn't Miracle,\" Lauren said. \"He told me he changed it back.\" She snatched up the box. It still showed Edmund Gwenn hugging Natalie Wood. \"That little sneak! He only changed the box!\"\n\nShe glared at the TV. On the screen Jimmy Stewart was glaring at Donna Reed.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Fred said, taking the package and reaching for the ribbon. \"It's not a bad movie. The ending's too sentimental, and it doesn't really make sense. I mean, one minute everything's hopeless, and Jimmy Stewart's ready to kill himself, and then the angel convinces him he had a wonderful life, and suddenly everything's okay.\" He looked around the table, patting the spread-out wrapping paper. \"But it has its moments. Have you seen the scissors?\"\n\nLauren handed him one of the pairs they'd bought. \"We'll wrap them last.\"\n\nOn the TV Jimmy Stewart was sitting in Donna Reed's living room, looking awkward. \"What I have trouble with is Jimmy Stewart's being so self-sacrificing,\" she said, cutting another length of red paper with Santa Clauses on it. \"I mean, he gives up college so his brother can go, and then when his brother has a chance at a good job, he gives up college again. He even gives up committing suicide to save Clarence. There's such a thing as being too self-sacrificing, you know.\"\n\n\"Maybe he gives up things because he thinks he doesn't deserve them.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't he?\"\n\n\"He's never gone to college, he's poor, he's deaf in one ear. Sometimes when people are handicapped or overweight they just assume they can't have the things other people have.\"\n\nThe telephone rang. Lauren reached for it and then realized it was on TV.\n\n\"Oh, hello, Sam,\" Donna Reed said, looking at Jimmy Stewart.\n\n\"Can you help me with this ribbon?\" Fred said.\n\n\"Sure,\" Lauren said. She scooted closer to him and put her finger on the crossed ribbon to hold it taut.\n\nJimmy Stewart and Donna Reed were standing very close together, listening to the telephone. The voice on the phone was saying something about soybeans.\n\nFred still hadn't tied the knot. Lauren glanced up at him. He was looking at the TV, too.\n\nJimmy Stewart was looking at Donna Reed, his face nearly touching her hair. Donna Reed looked at him and then away. The voice from the phone was saying something about the chance of a lifetime, but it was obvious neither of them was hearing a word. Donna Reed looked up at him. His lips almost touched her forehead. They didn't seem to be breathing.\n\nLauren realized she wasn't, either. She looked at Fred. He was holding the two ends of ribbon, one in each hand, and looking down at her.\n\n\"The knot,\" she said. \"You haven't tied it.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said. \"Sorry.\"\n\nJimmy Stewart dropped the phone with a clatter and grabbed Donna Reed by both arms. He began shaking her, yelling at her, and then suddenly she was wrapped in his arms, and he was smothering her with kisses.\n\n\"The knot,\" Fred said. \"You have to pull your finger out.\"\n\nShe looked uncomprehendingly at him and then down at the package. He had tied the knot over her finger, which was still pressing against the wrapping paper.\n\n\"Oh. Sorry,\" she said, and pulled her finger free. \"You were right. It does have its moments.\"\n\nHe yanked the knot tight. \"Yeah,\" he said. He reached for the spool of ribbon and began chopping off lengths for the bow. On the screen Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart were being pelted with rice.\n\n\"No. You were right,\" he said. \"He is too self-sacrificing.\" He waved the scissors at the screen. \"In a minute he's going to give up his honeymoon to save the building and loan. It's a wonder he ever asked Donna Reed to marry him. It's a wonder he didn't try to fix her up with that guy on the phone.\"\n\nThe phone rang. Lauren looked at the screen, thinking it must be in the movie, but Jimmy Stewart was kissing Donna Reed in a taxicab.\n\n\"It's the phone,\" Fred said.\n\nLauren scrambled up and reached for it.\n\n\"Hi,\" Scott said.\n\n\"Oh, hello, Scott,\" Lauren said, looking at Fred.\n\n\"I was wondering about the office party tonight,\" Scott said. \"Would you like to go with me? I could come get you and we could take the presents over together.\"\n\n\"Uh\u2026I\u2026\" Lauren said. She put her hand over the receiver. \"It's Scott. What am I going to tell him about the presents?\"\n\nFred motioned her to give him the phone. \"Scott,\" he said. \"Hi. It's Fred Hatch. Yeah, Santa Claus. Listen, we ran into a problem with the presents.\"\n\nLauren closed her eyes.\n\n\"We got a call from The Upscale Oasis that investment pagers were being recalled by the Federal Safety Commission.\"\n\nLauren opened her eyes. Fred smiled at her. \"Yeah. For excessive cupidity,\" he said.\n\nLauren grinned.\n\n\"But there's nothing to worry about,\" Fred said. \"We replaced them. We're wrapping them right now. No, it was no trouble. I was happy to help. Yeah, I'll tell her.\" He hung up. \"Scott will be here to take you to the office party at seven-thirty,\" he said. \"It looks like you're going to get your heart's desire after all.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Lauren said, looking at the TV. On the screen, the building and loan was going under.\n\nThey finished wrapping the last pair of scissors at six-thirty, and Fred went back to his apartment to change clothes and get his Santa Claus costume. Lauren packed the presents in three of the Upscale Oasis shopping bags, said sternly, \"Don't you dare touch these,\" to the empty couch, and went to get ready.\n\nShe showered and did her hair, and then went into the bedroom to see if the spirit had biodegraded her red dress, or, by some miracle, brought the black off-the-shoulder one back. He hadn't.\n\nShe put on her red dress and went back into the living room. It was only a little after seven. She turned on the TV and put Fred's video into the VCR. She hit play. Edmund Gwenn was giving the doctor the X-ray machine he'd always wanted.\n\nLauren picked up one of the shopping bags and felt the top pair of scissors to make sure they hadn't been turned into bottles of Evian water. There was an envelope stuck between two of the packages. Inside was a check for $5895.36. It was made out to the Children's Hospital fund.\n\nShe shook her head, smiling, and put the check back into the envelope.\n\nOn TV, Maureen O'Hara and John Payne were watching Natalie Wood run through an empty house and out the back door to look for her swing. They looked seriously at each other. Lauren held her breath. John Payne moved forward and kissed Maureen O'Hara.\n\nSomeone knocked on the door. \"That's Scott,\" Lauren said to John Payne, and waited till Maureen O'Hara had finished telling him she loved him before she went to open the door.\n\nIt was Fred, carrying a foil-covered plate. He was wearing the same sweater and pants he'd worn to wrap the presents. \"Cheese puffs,\" he said. \"I figured you couldn't get to your stove.\" He looked seriously at her. \"I wouldn't worry about not having your black dress to dazzle Scott with.\"\n\nHe went over and set the cheese puffs on the coffee table. \"You need to take the foil off and heat them in a microwave for two minutes on high. Tell PMS to put the presents in Santa's bag, and I'll be there at eleven-thirty.\"\n\n\"Aren't you going to the party?\"\n\n\"Office parties are your idea of fun, not mine,\" he said. \"Besides, Miracle on 34th Street's on at eight. It may be the only chance I have to watch it.\"\n\n\"But I wanted you\u2014\"\n\nThere was a knock on the door. \"That's Scott,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"Well,\" Fred said, \"if the spirit doesn't do something in the next fifteen seconds, you'll have your heart's desire in spite of him.\" He opened the door. \"Come on in,\" he said. \"Lauren and the presents are all ready.\" He handed two of the shopping bags to Scott.\n\n\"I really appreciate your helping Lauren and me with all this,\" Scott said.\n\nFred handed the other shopping bag to Lauren. \"It was my pleasure.\"\n\n\"I wish you were coming with us,\" she said.\n\n\"And give up a chance of seeing the real Santa Claus?\" He held the door open. \"You two had better get going before something happens.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Scott said, alarmed. \"Do you think these presents might be recalled, too?\"\n\nLauren looked hopefully at the couch and then the TV. On the screen Jimmy Stewart was standing on a bridge in the snow, getting ready to kill himself.\n\n\"Afraid not,\" Fred said.\n\nIt was snowing by the time they pulled into the parking lot at work. \"It was really selfless of Fred to help you wrap all those presents,\" Scott said, holding the lobby door open for Lauren. \"He's a nice guy.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Lauren said. \"He is.\"\n\n\"Hey, look at that!\" Scott said. He pointed at the security monitor. \"It's a Wonderful Life. My favorite movie!\" On the monitor Jimmy Stewart was running through the snow, shouting, \"Merry Christmas!\"\n\n\"Scott,\" Lauren said, \"I can't go to the party with you.\"\n\n\"Just a minute, okay?\" Scott said, staring at the screen. \"This is my favorite part.\" He set the shopping bags down on the receptionist's desk and leaned his elbows on it. \"This is the part where Jimmy Stewart finds out what a wonderful life he's had.\"\n\n\"You have to take me home,\" Lauren said.\n\nThere was a gust of cold air and snow. Lauren turned around.\n\n\"You forgot your cheese puffs,\" Fred said, holding out the foil-covered plate to Lauren.\n\n\"There's such a thing as being too self-sacrificing, you know,\" Lauren said.\n\nHe held the plate out to her. \"That's what the spirit said.\"\n\n\"He came back?\" She shot a glance at the shopping bags.\n\n\"Yeah. Right after you left. Don't worry about the presents. He said he thought the staplers were a great idea. He also said not to worry about getting a Christmas present for your sister.\"\n\n\"My sister!\" Lauren said, clapping her hand to her mouth. \"I completely forgot about her.\"\n\n\"He said since you didn't like it, he sent her the Yanomamo dress.\"\n\n\"She'll love it,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"He also said it was a wonder Jimmy Stewart ever got Donna Reed, he was so busy giving everybody else what they wanted,\" he said, looking seriously at her.\n\n\"He's right,\" Lauren said. \"Did he also tell you Jimmy Stewart was incredibly stupid for wanting to go off to college when Donna Reed was right there in front of him?\"\n\n\"He mentioned it.\"\n\n\"What a great movie!\" Scott said, turning to Lauren. \"Ready to go up?\"\n\n\"No,\" Lauren said. \"I'm going with Fred to see a movie.\" She took the cheese puffs from Fred and handed them to Scott.\n\n\"What am I supposed to do with these?\"\n\n\"Take the foil off,\" Fred said, \"and put them in a microwave for two minutes.\"\n\n\"But you're my date,\" Scott said. \"Who am I supposed to go with?\"\n\nThere was a gust of cold air and snow. Everyone turned around.\n\n\"How do I look?\" Evie said, taking off her coat.\n\n\"Wow!\" Scott said. \"You look terrific!\"\n\nEvie spun around, her shoulders bare, the sequins glittering on her black dress. \"Lauren gave it to me for Christmas,\" she said happily. \"I love Christmas, don't you?\"\n\n\"I love that dress,\" Scott said.\n\n\"He also told me,\" Fred said, \"that his favorite thing in Miracle on 34th Street was Santa Claus's being in disguise\u2014\"\n\n\"He wasn't in disguise,\" Lauren said. \"Edmund Gwenn told everybody he was Santa Claus.\"\n\nFred held up a correcting finger. \"He told everyone his name was Kris Kringle.\"\n\n\"Chris,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"Oh, I love this part,\" Evie said.\n\nLauren looked at her. She was standing next to Scott, watching Jimmy Stewart standing next to Donna Reed and singing \"Auld Lang Syne.\"\n\n\"He makes all sorts of trouble for everyone,\" Fred said. \"He turns Christmas upside down\u2014\"\n\n\"Completely disrupts Maureen O'Hara's life,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"But by the end, everything's worked out, the doctor has his X-ray machine, Natalie Wood has her house\u2014\"\n\n\"Maureen O'Hara has Fred\u2014\"\n\n\"And no one's quite sure how he did it, or if he did anything.\"\n\n\"Or if he had the whole thing planned from the beginning.\" She looked seriously at Fred. \"He told me I only thought I knew what I wanted for Christmas.\"\n\nFred moved toward her. \"He told me just because something seems impossible doesn't mean a miracle can't happen.\"\n\n\"What a great ending!\" Evie said, sniffling. \"It's a Wonderful Life is my favorite movie.\"\n\n\"Mine, too,\" Scott said. \"Do you know how to heat up cheese puffs?\" He turned to Lauren and Fred. \"Cut that out, you two, we'll be late for the party.\"\n\n\"We're not going,\" Fred said, putting his arm around Lauren. They started for the door. \"Miracle's on at eight.\"\n\n\"But you can't leave,\" Scott said. \"What about all these presents? Who's going to pass them out?\"\n\nThere was a gust of cold air and snow. \"Ho ho ho,\" Santa Claus said.\n\n\"Isn't that your costume, Fred?\" Lauren said.\n\n\"Yes. It has to be back at the rental place by Monday morning,\" he said to Santa Claus. \"And no changing it into rain forest by-products.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas!\" Santa Claus said.\n\n\"I like the way things worked out at the end,\" Lauren said.\n\n\"All we need is a cane standing in the corner,\" Fred said.\n\n\"I have no idea what you're talking about,\" Santa Claus said. \"Where are all these presents I'm supposed to pass out?\"\n\n\"Right here,\" Scott said. He handed one of the shopping bags to Santa Claus.\n\n\"Plastic shopping bags,\" Santa Claus said, making a \"tsk\"-ing sound. \"You should be using recycled paper.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Scott said. He handed the cheese puffs to Evie and picked up the other two shopping bags. \"Ready, Evie?\"\n\n\"We can't go yet,\" Evie said, gazing at the security monitor. \"Look, It's a Wonderful Life is just starting.\" On the screen Jimmy Stewart's brother was falling through the ice. \"This is my favorite part,\" she said.\n\n\"Mine, too,\" Scott said, and went over to stand next to her.\n\nSanta Claus squinted curiously at the monitor for a moment and then shook his head. \"Miracle on 34th Street's a much better movie, you know,\" he said reprovingly. \"More realistic.\"" + }, + { + "title": "All About Emily", + "text": "\"Fuck The Red Shoes.\n\nI wanted to be a Rockette.\"\n\n- A Chorus Line\n\nAll right, so you're probably wondering how I, Claire Havilland\u2014three-time Tony winner, Broadway legend, and star of Only Human\u2014ended up here, standing outside Radio City Music Hall in a freezing rain two days before Christmas, soaked to the skin and on the verge of pneumonia, accosting harmless passersby.\n\nWell, it's all my wretched manager Torrance's fault. And Macy's. And the movie All About Eve's.\n\nYou've never heard of All About Eve? Of course you haven't. Neither has anyone else. Except Emily.\n\nIt starred Anne Baxter and Bette Davis, and was the first movie Marilyn Monroe appeared in. She played Miss Caswell, a producer's girlfriend, but the movie's not about her. It's about an aging Broadway actress, Margo Channing, and the young aspiring actress, Eve Harrington, who insinuates herself into Margo's life and makes off with her starring role, her career, and, very nearly, her husband.\n\nAll About Eve was made into a musical called Applause and then into a straight dramatic play which was then made into another musical. (Broadway has never been terribly creative.) The second musical, which was called Bumpy Night and starred Kristen Stewart as Eve and me as Margo, only ran for three months, but it won me my second Tony and got me the lead in Feathers, which won me my third.\n\nMacy's is a New York department store, in case you don't know that, either. Except for Emily, no one today seems to know anything that happened longer than five minutes ago. Macy's sponsors a parade on Thanksgiving Day every year, featuring large balloons representing various cartoon characters, the stars of various Broadway shows waving frozenly from floats, and the Rockettes.\n\nAnd my manager Torrance is a lying, sneaky, conniving snake. As you shall see.\n\nThe Wednesday night before Thanksgiving he knocked on my dressing room door during intermission and said, \"Do you have a minute, dear one? I've got fabulous news!\"\n\nI should have known right then he was up to something. Torrance only comes backstage when: one, he has bad news to deliver, or two, he wants something. And he never knocks.\n\n\"The show's closing,\" I said.\n\n\"Closing! Of course not. The house is sold out every night through Christmas. And it's no wonder! You get more dazzling with every performance!\" He clutched his chest dramatically. \"When you sang that Act I finale, the audience was eating out of your hand!\"\n\n\"If you're still trying to talk me into having lunch with Nusbaum, the answer is no,\" I said, unzipping my garden party costume. \"I am not doing the revival of Chicago.\"\n\n\"But you were the best Roxie Hart the show ever had\u2014\"\n\n\"That was twelve years ago,\" I said, shimmying out of it. \"I have no intention of wearing a leotard at my age. I am too old\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't even say that word, dear one,\" he said, looking anxiously out into the hall and pulling the door to behind him. \"You don't know who might hear you.\"\n\n\"They won't have to hear me. One look at me in fishnet stockings, and the audience will be able to figure it out for themselves.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" he said, looking appraisingly at me. \"Your legs aren't that bad.\"\n\nAren't that bad. \"Dance ten, looks three?\" I said wryly.\n\nHe stared blankly at me.\n\n\"It's a line from A Chorus Line, a show I was in which you apparently never bothered to see. It's a line which proves my point about the fishnet stockings. I am not doing Chicago.\"\n\n\"All Nusbaum's asking is that you meet him for lunch. What harm could that do? He didn't even say what role he wanted you for. It may not be Roxie at all. He may want you for the part of\u2014\"\n\n\"Who? The warden?\" I said, scooping up my garden party costume into a wad. \"I told you I was too old for fishnet stockings, not old enough to be playing Mama Morton.\" I threw it at him. \"Or Mama Rose. Or I Remember Mama.\"\n\n\"I only meant he might want you to play Velma,\" he said, fighting his way out of the yards of crinoline.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"Absolutely not. I need a role where I keep my clothes on. I hear Austerman's doing a musical version of Desk Set.\"\n\n\"Desk Set?\" he asked. \"What's it about?\"\n\nApparently he never watched movies, either. \"Computers replacing office workers,\" I said. \"It was a Julia Roberts\u2013Richard Gere movie several years ago, and there are no fishnet stockings in it anywhere.\" I wriggled into my ball gown. \"Was that all you wanted?\"\n\nI knew perfectly well it wasn't. Torrance has been my manager for over fifteen years, and one thing I've learned during that time is that he never gets around to what he really wants till Act Two of a conversation, apparently in the belief that he can soften me up by asking for some other thing first. Or for two other things, if what he wants is particularly unpleasant, though how it could be worse than doing Chicago, I didn't know.\n\n\"What did you come in here for, Torrance?\" I asked. \"There are only five minutes to curtain.\"\n\n\"I've got a little publicity thing I need you to do. Tomorrow's Thanksgiving, and the Macy's parade\u2014\"\n\n\"No, I am not riding on the Only Human float, or standing out in a freezing rain again saying, 'Look! Here comes the Wall-E balloon!' \"\n\nThere was a distinct pause, and then Torrance said, \"How did you know there's a Wall-E balloon in the parade? I thought you only read Variety.\"\n\n\"There was a picture of it on the home page of the Times yesterday.\"\n\n\"Did you click to the article?\"\n\n\"No. Why? As you say, I never read the news. You didn't already tell them I'd do it, did you?\" I said, my eyes narrowing.\n\n\"No, of course not. You don't have to go anywhere near the parade.\"\n\n\"Then why did you bring it up?\"\n\n\"Because the parade's Grand Marshal is coming to the show Friday night, and I'd like you to let him come backstage after the performance to meet you.\"\n\n\"Who is it this year?\" I asked. It was always a politician, or whatever talentless tween idol was going to be starring on Broadway next. \"If it's any of Britney Spears's offspring, the answer is no.\"\n\n\"It's not,\" Torrance said. \"It's Dr. Edwin Oakes.\"\n\n\"Doctor?\"\n\n\"Of physics. Nobel Prize for his work on artificial neurotransmitters. He founded AIS.\"\n\n\"Why on earth is a physicist the Grand Marshal of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade?\" I said. \"Oh, wait, is he the robot scientist?\"\n\nThere was another pause. \"I thought you said you didn't read the article.\"\n\n\"I didn't. My driver Jorge told me about him.\"\n\n\"Where'd he hear about Dr. Oakes?\"\n\n\"On the radio. He listens to it in the limo while he's waiting.\"\n\n\"Oh. What did Jorge tell you about him?\"\n\n\"Just that he'd invented some new sort of robot that was supposed to replace ATMs and subway-ticket dispensers, and that I shouldn't believe it, they were going to steal all our jobs\u2014oh, my God, you're bringing some great, clanking Robby the Robot backstage to meet me!\"\n\n\"No, of course not. Don't be ridiculous. Would I do that?\"\n\n\"Yes. And you didn't answer my question. Is this the same Dr. Oakes? The robot scientist?\"\n\n\"Yes, only they're not robots, they're 'artificials.' \"\n\n\"I don't care what they're called. I'm not granting a backstage interview to C-3PO.\"\n\n\"You're dating yourself, dear one,\" he said. \"C-3PO was eons ago. The reason Dr. Oakes was asked to be the Grand Marshal is because this year's parade theme is robots, in honor of\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't tell me\u2014Forbidden Planet, right? I should have known.\"\n\nForbidden Planet. The second-worst show to ever have been on Broadway, but that hasn't stopped it from packing them in down the street at the Majestic, thanks to Robby the Robot and a never-ending procession of tween idols (at this point it's Shiloh Jolie-Pitt and Justin Bieber, Jr.) in the starring roles. \"And I suppose that's where this Dr. Oakes is tonight?\"\n\n\"No, they didn't want to see Forbidden Planet\u2014\"\n\n\"They?\" I said suspiciously.\n\n\"Dr. Oakes and his niece. They didn't want to meet Shiloh and Justin. They want to see Only Human. And to meet you.\"\n\nI'll bet, I thought, waiting for Torrance to get to the real reason he'd come backstage to see me, because meeting a couple of fans couldn't be it. He dragged a ragtag assortment of people backstage every week. He wasn't still trying to talk me into doing the latest revival of Cats, was he? It was not only the worst musical ever produced on Broadway, but it required tights and whiskers.\n\n\"Dr. Oakes's niece is really eager to meet you,\" Torrance was saying. \"She's a huge fan of yours. It will only take five minutes,\" he pleaded. \"And it would really help with ticket sales.\"\n\n\"Why do the ticket sales need help? I thought you said we had full houses through Christmas.\"\n\n\"We do, but the weather's supposed to turn bad next week, and sales for after New Year's have been positively limp. Management's worried we won't last through January. And the word is Disney's scouting for a theater where they can put a new production of Tangled. If they get nervous about our closing\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't see how meeting them will help us get publicity. Physicists are hardly front-page news.\"\n\n\"I can guarantee it'll get us publicity. WNET's already said they'll be here to live-stream it. And Sirius. And when Emily said she wanted to meet you on Good Morning, America yesterday, ticket sales for this weekend went through the roof.\"\n\n\"I thought you said we were already sold out through Christmas.\"\n\n\"I said Only Human was playing to full houses.\"\n\nWhich meant half the tickets were going for half price at the TKTS booth in Times Square and the back five rows of the balcony were roped off for \"repairs.\"\n\n\"And you know what the management's like when they think they're going to lose their investment. They'll jump at anything\u2014\"\n\n\"All right,\" I said. \"I'll meet with Dr. Nobel Prize and his niece, if she is his niece. Which I seriously doubt.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Torrance said sharply.\n\n\"Because all middle-aged men are alike, even scientists. Her name wouldn't be Miss Caswell, would it?\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The producer's girlfriend,\" I said. I pantomimed a pair of enormous breasts. \"Ring a bell?\" He looked blank. \"Really, Torrance, you should at least pretend to have watched the plays I'm starring in.\"\n\n\"I do. I have. I just don't remember any Miss Caswell in Only Human.\"\n\n\"That's because she wasn't in Only Human. She was in Bumpy Night. Lindsay Lohan played her, remember?\" and when he still looked blank, \"Marilyn Monroe played her in the original movie. And please don't tell me you don't know who that is, or you'll make me feel even more ancient than I am.\"\n\n\"You're not ancient, dear one,\" he said, \"and I wish you'd stop being so hard on yourself. You're a legend.\"\n\nWhich is a word even more deadly to one's career than \"old\" or \"cellulite.\" And only slightly less career-ending than \"First Lady of the Theater.\" I said, \"Yes, well, this 'legend' just changed her mind. No backstage interview.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. \"I'll tell them no dice. But don't be surprised if they decide to go to Forbidden Planet instead. Their entire cast has agreed to a backstage interview, including Justin.\"\n\n\"All right, fine. I'll do it,\" I said. \"If you get me out of the lunch with Nusbaum and talk to Austerman about Desk Set.\"\n\n\"I will. This interview will help on the Desk Set thing,\" he said, though I couldn't see how. \"Star Meets Fans\" is hardly home-page news. \"You'll be glad you did this. You're going to like Emily.\"\n\nThere was only one thing to like about having been blackmailed into doing the interview: our discussion of it had taken up the entire intermission, and Torrance hadn't had time to ask me the thing he'd actually come backstage to.\n\nI expected him to try again after the show, but he didn't. He left a message saying, \"WABC will be there to film meeting. Wear something suitable for Broadway legend. Sunset Boulevard?\" Which was proof either that he saw me much as I was beginning to see myself, as a fading (and deranged) star, or that he hadn't seen the musical Sunset Boulevard, either.\n\nI had the wardrobe mistress hunt me up the magenta hostess gown from Mame and a pair of Evita earrings, signed autographs for the fans waiting outside the stage door, turned my phone off, and went home to bed.\n\nI kept my phone off through Thanksgiving Day so Torrance couldn't call me and insist I watch Dr. Oakes in the parade, but I didn't want to miss a possible call from Austerman about Desk Set, so Friday I turned my phone back on, assuming (incorrectly) that Torrance would immediately call and make another attempt at broaching the subject of whatever it was he'd really come to my dressing room about.\n\nBecause it couldn't possibly be the scruffy-looking professor and his all-dressed-up niece who Torrance brought to my dressing room Friday night after the show. I could see why Torrance had rejected the idea of her being the producer's mistress. This petite, fresh-scrubbed teenager with her light brown hair and upturned nose and pink cheeks was nothing like Marilyn Monroe. She was nothing like the gangly, tattooed, tipped, and tattered girls who clustered outside Forbidden Planet every night either, waiting for Justin Jr. to autograph their Playbills.\n\nThis girl, who couldn't be more than five foot two, looked more like the character of Peggy in the first act of 42nd Street, wide-eyed and giddy at being in New York City for the first time. Or a sixteen-year-old Julie Andrews. The sort of dewy-eyed innocent ing\u00e9nue that every established actress hates on sight. And that the New York press can't wait to get its claws into.\n\nBut they were being oddly deferential. And they were all here. Not just Good Morning America, but the other networks, the cable channels, the Times, the Post\u2013Daily News, and at least a dozen bloggers and streamers.\n\n\"How'd you manage to pull this off?\" I whispered to Torrance as they squeezed into my dressing room. Apart from the Tonys, Spiderman III accidents, and Hollywood stars, it's impossible to get the media to cover anything theatrical. \"Lady Gaga's not replacing me in the role, is she?\"\n\nHe ignored that. \"Claire, dear one,\" he said, as if he were in a production of No\u00ebl Coward's Private Lives, \"allow me to introduce Dr. Edwin Oakes. And this,\" he said, presenting the niece to me with a flourish, \"is Emily.\"\n\n\"Oh, Miss Havilland,\" she said eagerly. \"It's so exciting to meet you. You were just wonderful.\"\n\nWell, at least she hadn't said it was an honor to meet me, or called me a legend.\n\n\"I loved Only Human,\" she said. \"It's the best play I've ever seen.\"\n\nIt was probably the only play she'd ever seen, but Torrance had been right, this meeting would be good publicity. The media were recording every word and obviously responding to Emily's smile, which even I had to admit was rather sweet.\n\n\"You sing and dance so beautifully, Miss Havilland,\" she said. \"And you make the audience believe that what they're seeing is real\u2014\"\n\n\"You're Emily's favorite actress,\" Torrance cut in. \"Isn't that right, Emily?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. I've seen all your plays\u2014Feathers and Play On! and The Drowsy Chaperone and Fender Strat and Anything Goes and Love, Etc.\"\n\n\"But I thought Torrance said this was your first time in New York,\" I said. And she was much too young to have seen Play On! She'd have been five years old.\n\n\"It is my first time,\" she said earnestly. \"I haven't seen the plays onstage, but I've seen all your filmed performances and the numbers you've done at the Tony Awards\u2014'When They Kill Your Dream' and 'The Leading Lady's Lament.' And I've watched your interviews on YouTube and read all your online interviews and listened to the soundtracks of A Chorus Line and Tie Dye and In Between the Lines.\"\n\n\"My, you are a fan!\" I said. \"Are you sure your name's Emily and not Eve?\"\n\n\"Eve?\" Dr. Oakes said sharply.\n\nTorrance shot me a warning glance, and the reporters all looked up alertly from the Androids they were taking notes on. \"Why would you think her name was Eve, Miss Havilland?\" one of them asked.\n\n\"I was making a joke,\" I said, taken aback at all this reaction. And if I said it was a reference to Eve Harrington, none of them would have ever heard of her, and if I said she was a character in Bumpy Night, none of them would have heard of that, either. \"I\u2026\"\n\n\"She called me Eve because I was doing what Eve Harrington did,\" Emily said. \"That's who you meant, isn't it, Miss Havilland? The character in the musical Bumpy Night?\"\n\n\"I\u2026y-yes,\" I stammered, trying to recover from the shock that she'd recognized the allusion. The younger generation's knowledge usually doesn't extend further back than High School Musical: The Musical.\n\n\"When Eve meets the actress Margo Channing,\" Emily was cheerfully telling the reporters, \"she gushes to her about what a wonderful actress she is.\"\n\n\"Bumpy Night?\" one of the reporters said, looking as lost as Torrance usually does.\n\n\"Yes,\" Emily said. \"The musical was based on the movie All About Eve, which starred Bette Davis and Anne Baxter.\"\n\n\"And Marilyn Monroe,\" I said.\n\n\"Right,\" Emily said, dimpling. \"As Miss Caswell, the producer's girlfriend. It was her screen debut.\"\n\nI was beginning to like this girl, in spite of her perfect skin and perfect hair and the way she could hold an audience. The media were hanging on her every word. Although that might be because they were as astonished as I was at a teenager's knowledge of the movie.\n\n\"Marilyn Monroe\u2014she was in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire,\" she said, \"which Lauren Bacall was in, too. She starred in the first musical they made of All About Eve: Applause. It wasn't nearly as good as Bumpy Night, or as faithful to the movie.\"\n\nAnd since she knew so much about movies, maybe this was a good time to put in a pitch for my doing Austerman's play. \"Have you ever seen Desk Set, Emily?\" I asked her.\n\n\"Which one? The Julia Roberts\u2013Richard Gere remake or the original with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy?\"\n\nGood God. \"The original.\"\n\n\"Yes, I've seen it. I love that movie.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" I said. \"Did you know they're thinking of making a musical of it?\"\n\n\"Oh, you'd be wonderful in the Katharine Hepburn part!\"\n\nI definitely liked this girl.\n\n\"What about Cats?\" Torrance asked.\n\nI glared at him, but he ignored me.\n\n\"Have you ever seen the musical Cats?\" he persisted.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, and wrinkled her nose in distaste. \"I didn't like it. There's no plot at all, and 'Memory' is a terrible song. Cats isn't nearly as good as Only Human.\"\n\n\"You see, Torrance?\" I said, and turned my widest smile on Emily. \"I'm so glad you came to the show tonight.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" she said. \"I'm sorry I sounded like Eve Harrington before. I wouldn't want to be her. She wasn't a nice person,\" she explained to the reporters. \"She tried to steal Margo's part in the play from her.\"\n\n\"You're right, she wasn't very nice,\" I said. \"But I suppose one can't blame her for wanting to be an actress. After all, acting's the most rewarding profession in the world. What about you, Emily? Do you want to be an actress?\"\n\nIt should have been a perfectly safe question. Every teenage girl who's ever come backstage to meet me has been seriously stagestruck, especially after seeing her first Broadway musical, and Emily had to be, given her obsessive interest in the movies and my plays.\n\nBut she didn't breathe \"Oh, yes,\" like every other girl I'd asked. She said, \"No, I don't.\"\n\nYou're lying, I thought.\n\n\"I could never do what you do, Miss Havilland,\" Emily went on in that matter-of-fact voice.\n\n\"Then what do you want to do? Paint? Write?\"\n\nShe glanced uncertainly at her uncle and then back at me.\n\n\"Or does your uncle want you to be a neurophysicist like him?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oh, no, I couldn't do that, either. Any of those things.\"\n\n\"Of course you could, an intelligent girl like you. You can do anything you want to do.\"\n\n\"But I\u2014\" Emily glanced at her uncle again, as if for guidance.\n\n\"Come, you must want to be something,\" I said. \"An astronaut. A ballerina. A real boy.\"\n\n\"Claire, dear one, stop badgering the poor child,\" Torrance said with an artificial-sounding laugh. \"She's in New York for the very first time. It's scarcely the time for career counseling.\"\n\n\"You're right. I'm sorry, Emily,\" I said. \"How are you liking New York?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's wonderful!\" she said.\n\nThe eagerness was back in her voice, and Dr. Oakes had relaxed. Did she want to go on the stage and her uncle didn't approve? Or was something else going on? \"How are you liking New York?\" was hardly riveting stuff, but there wasn't a peep out of the media. They were watching us raptly, as if they expected something to happen at any second.\n\nI should have read the article in the Times, I thought, and asked Emily if she'd been to the Empire State Building yet.\n\n\"No,\" she said, \"we do that tomorrow morning after we do NBC Weekend, and then at ten I'm going ice-skating at Rockefeller Center. It would be wonderful if you could come, too.\"\n\n\"At ten in the morning?\" I said, horrified. \"I'm not even up by then,\" and the reporters laughed. \"Thank you for asking me, though. What are you doing tomorrow night?\" I asked, and then realized she was likely to say, \"We're seeing Forbidden Planet,\" but I needn't have worried.\n\n\"We're going to see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall,\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, good. You'll love the Rockettes. Or have you seen them already? They were in the parade, weren't they?\"\n\n\"No,\" Emily said. \"What are\u2014?\"\n\n\"They don't ride in the parade,\" Torrance said, cutting in. \"They dance outside Macy's on Thirty-fourth Street. What else are you and your uncle doing tomorrow, Emily?\"\n\n\"We're going to Times Square, and then Macy's and Bloomingdale's to see the Christmas windows, and then the Disney store\u2014\"\n\n\"Good God,\" I said. \"All in one day? It sounds exhausting!\"\n\n\"But I don't\u2014\" Emily began.\n\nThis time it was Dr. Oakes who cut in. \"She's too excited at being here to be tired,\" he said. \"There's so much to see and do. Emily's really looking forward to seeing the Rockettes, aren't you?\" He nodded at her, as if giving her a cue, and the reporters leaned forward expectantly. But they weren't looking at her, they were looking at me.\n\nAnd suddenly it all clicked into place\u2014their wanting to avoid the subject of her being tired, and Torrance's wanting to know what I'd read about the parade, and Emily's encyclopedic knowledge of plays, and the Wall-E balloon.\n\nThe parade's robot theme wasn't in honor of Forbidden Planet. It was in honor of Dr. Oakes and his \"artificials,\" one of which was standing right in front of me. And those cheeks were produced by sensors; that wide-eyed look and dimpled smile were programmed in.\n\nTorrance, the little rat, had set me up. He'd counted on the fact that I only read Variety and wouldn't know who Emily was.\n\nAnd no wonder the media was all here. They were waiting with bated breath for the moment when I realized what was going on. It would make a great YouTube video\u2014my shocked disbelief, Dr. Oakes's self-satisfied smirk, Torrance's laughter.\n\nAnd if I hadn't tumbled to it, and she'd managed to fool me all the way to the end of the interview with me none the wiser, so much the better. It would be evidence of what Dr. Oakes was obviously here to prove\u2014that his artificials were indistinguishable from humans.\n\nEmily really is Eve Harrington, I thought. Innocent and sweet and vulnerable-looking. And not at all what she appears to be.\n\nBut if I said that, if I suddenly pointed an accusing finger at her and shouted, \"Impostor!\" it would blow the image Dr. Oakes and AIS were trying to promote and make Torrance furious. And, from what I'd seen so far, Emily might be capable of bursting into authentic-looking tears, and I'd end up looking like a bully, just like Margo Channing had at the party at the end of Act One of Bumpy Night, and there would go any chance I had of getting the lead in Desk Set.\n\nBut if I went on pretending I hadn't caught on and continued playing the part Torrance had cast me in in this little one-act farce, I'd look like a prize fool. I could see the headline crawl on the Times building in Times Square now: \"Bumpy Night for Broadway Legend.\" And \"Robot Fools First Lady of the Theater.\" Not exactly the sort of publicity that gets an actress considered for a Tony.\n\nPlus, the entire point of Desk Set was that humans are smarter than technology. What would Katharine Hepburn do in this situation? I wondered. Or Margo Channing?\n\n\"You'll love the Christmas show,\" Torrance was saying. \"Especially the Nativity scene. They have real donkeys and sheep. And camels.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will be wonderful,\" Emily said, smiling winsomely over at me, \"but I don't see how it can be any better than Only Human.\"\n\nOnly human. Of course. That was why they'd wanted to see the play and come backstage to trick me. Fasten your seat belts, I said silently. It's going to be a bumpy night.\n\n\"And you'll love Radio City Music Hall itself,\" Torrance said. \"It's this beautiful Art Deco building.\"\n\nDr. Oakes nodded. \"They've offered to give us a tour before the show, haven't they, Emily?\"\n\nThis was my cue. \"Emily,\" I repeated musingly. \"That's such a pretty name. You never hear it anymore. Were you named after someone?\"\n\nThe reporters looked up as one from their corders and Androids, and Dr. Oakes tensed visibly. Which meant I was right.\n\n\"Yes,\" Emily said. \"I was named after Emily Webb from\u2014\"\n\n\"Our Town,\" I said, thinking, Of course. It was perfect. Except for Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Emily Webb was the most sickeningly sweet ing\u00e9nue to ever grace the American stage, tripping girlishly around in a white dress with a big bow in her hair and prattling about how much she loves sunflowers and birthdays and \"sleeping and waking up,\" and then dying tragically at the beginning of Act Three.\n\n\"It was her mother's favorite play,\" Dr. Oakes said. \"And Emily was her favorite character.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, and added casually, \"I hadn't realized she was named after someone. I'd just assumed it was an acronym.\"\n\n\"An acronym?\" Dr. Oakes said sharply.\n\n\"Yes, you know. MLE. For 'Manufactured Lifelike Entity' or something.\"\n\nThere was a dead silence, like the one that follows the revelation that I'm Hope's daughter in the third act of Only Human, and the reporters began to thumb their Androids furiously.\n\nI ignored them. \"And then I thought it might be your model number,\" I said to Emily. \"Was your face modeled on Martha Scott's? She\u2014\"\n\n\"Played Emily Webb in the original production, which starred Frank Craven as the Stage Manager,\" Emily said. \"No, actually, it was modeled on Jo Ann Sayers, who played Eileen in\u2014\"\n\n\"The original Broadway production of My Sister Eileen,\" I said.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said happily. \"I wanted to be named Eileen, but Uncle\u2014I mean, Dr. Oakes\u2014was worried that the name might suggest the wrong things. Eileen was much sexier than Emily Webb.\"\n\nAnd Eileen had caused an uproar everywhere she went, ending up with half of New York and the entire Brazilian navy following her in a wild conga line, something I was sure Dr. Oakes didn't want to have happen with his artificial.\n\n\"Women sometimes find sexiness in other women intimidating,\" Emily said. \"I'm designed to be nonthreatening.\"\n\n\"So of course the name Eve was out, too?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said earnestly. \"But we couldn't have used it anyway. It tested badly among religious people. And there was the Wall-E problem. Dr. Oakes didn't want a name that made people immediately think of robots.\"\n\n\"So I suppose the Terminator was out, as well,\" I said dryly. \"And HAL.\"\n\nThe media couldn't restrain themselves any longer. \"When did you realize Emily was an artificial?\" the Times reporter asked.\n\n\"From the moment I saw her, of course. After all, acting is my specialty. I knew at once she wasn't the real thing.\"\n\n\"What tipped you off exactly?\" the YouTube reporter said.\n\n\"Everything,\" I lied. \"Her inflection, her facial expressions, her timing\u2014\"\n\nEmily looked stricken.\n\n\"But the flaws were all very minor,\" I said reassuringly. \"Only someone\u2014\"\n\nI'd started to say \"Only someone who's been on the stage as long as I have,\" but caught myself in time.\n\n\"Only a pro could have spotted it,\" I said instead. \"Professional actors can spot someone acting when the audience can't.\"\n\nAnd that had better be true, or they'd realize I was lying through my teeth. \"You're very, very good, Emily,\" I said, and smiled at her.\n\nShe still looked upset, and even though I knew it wasn't real, that there was no actual emotion behind her troubled expression, her bitten lip, I said, \"I'm not even certain I would have spotted it except that you were so much more knowledgeable about the theater than the young women who usually come backstage. Most of them think A Little Night Music is a song from Twilight: The Musical.\"\n\nAll but two of the reporters laughed. They\u2014and Torrance\u2014looked blank.\n\n\"You're simply too intelligent for your own good, darling,\" I said, smiling at her. \"You should take a lesson from Carol Channing when she played\u2014\"\n\n\"Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,\" she said, and then clapped her hand to her mouth.\n\nThe reporters laughed.\n\n\"But what really tipped me off,\" I said, squeezing her lifelike-feeling shoulder affectionately, \"was that you were the only person your age I've ever met who wasn't stagestruck.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear.\" Emily looked over at Dr. Oakes. \"I knew I should have said I wanted to be an actress.\" She turned back to me. \"But I was afraid that might give the impression that I wanted your job, and of course I don't. Artificials don't want to take anyone's job away from them.\"\n\n\"Our artificials are designed solely to help humans,\" Dr. Oakes said, \"and to do only tasks that make humans' jobs easier and more pleasant,\" and this was obviously the company spiel. \"They're here to bring an end to those machines everyone hates\u2014the self-service gas pump, the grocery store checkout machine, electronic devices no one can figure out how to program. Wouldn't you rather have a nice young man fixing the bug in your computer than a repair program? Or have a friendly, intelligent operator connect you to the person you need to talk to instead of trying to choose from a dozen options, none of which apply to your situation? Or\"\u2014he nodded at me\u2014\"tell you who starred in the original production of a musical rather than having to waste time looking it up on Google?\"\n\n\"And you can do all that?\" I asked Emily. \"Pump gas and fix computers and spit out twenties?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" she said, her eyes wide. \"I'm not programmed to do any of those things. I was designed to introduce artificials to the public.\"\n\nAnd to convince them they weren't a threat, to stand there and look young and decorative. Just like Miss Caswell.\n\n\"Emily's merely a prototype,\" Dr. Oakes said. \"The actual artificials will be programmed to do a variety of different jobs. They'll be your maid, your tech support, your personal assistant.\"\n\n\"Just like Eve Harrington,\" I said.\n\n\"What?\" Dr. Oakes said, frowning.\n\n\"Margo Channing hired Eve Harrington as her personal assistant,\" Emily explained, \"and then she stole Margo's career.\"\n\n\"But that can't happen with artificials,\" Dr. Oakes said. \"They're programmed to assist humans, not supplant them.\" He beamed at me. \"You won't ever have to worry about an Eve Harrington again.\"\n\n\"Dr. Oakes, you said they're forbidden to take our jobs,\" one of the reporters called out, \"but if they're as intelligent as we've just seen Emily is, how do we know they won't figure out a way to get around those rules?\"\n\n\"Because it's not a question of rules,\" Dr. Oakes said. \"It's a question of programming. A human could 'want' someone else's job. An artificial can't. 'Wanting' is not in their programming.\"\n\n\"But when I asked Emily about her name,\" I reminded him, \"she said she originally wanted to be called Eileen.\"\n\n\"She was speaking metaphorically,\" Dr. Oakes said. \"She didn't 'want' the name in the human sense. She was expressing the fact that she'd made a choice among options and then altered that choice based on additional information. She was simply using the word 'want' as a shortcut for the process.\"\n\nAnd to persuade us she thinks just like we do, I thought. In other words, she was acting. \"And what about when she said she loved the play?\" I asked him.\n\n\"I did love it,\" Emily said, and it might all be programming and sophisticated sensors, but she looked genuinely distressed. \"Our preferences are just like humans'.\"\n\n\"Then what's to keep them from 'preferring' they had our jobs?\" the same reporter asked.\n\n\"Yeah,\" another one chimed in. \"Wouldn't it be safer to program them not to have preferences at all?\"\n\n\"That's not possible,\" Emily said. \"Simulating human behavior requires higher-level thinking, and higher-level thinking requires choosing between options\u2014\"\n\n\"And often those options are equally valid,\" Dr. Oakes said, \"the choice of which word or facial expression to use, of which information to give or withhold\u2014\"\n\nLike the fact that you're an artificial, I thought, wondering if Dr. Oakes would include in his lecture the fact that higher-level thinking involved the ability to lie.\n\n\"Or the option of which action to take,\" he was saying. \"Without the ability to choose one thing over another, action, speech\u2014even thought\u2014would be impossible.\"\n\n\"But then what keeps them from 'choosing' to take over?\" a third reporter asked.\n\n\"They've been programmed to take into consideration the skills and attributes humans have which make them better qualified for the vast majority of jobs. But the qualities which cause humans to desire jobs and careers are not programmed in\u2014initiative, drive, and the need to stand out individually.\"\n\n\"Which means your job's safe, Claire,\" Torrance said.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Dr. Oakes said without irony. \"In addition, since artificials' preferences are not emotion-based, they lack the lust for power, sex, and money, the other factors driving job motivation. And, as a final safeguard, we've programmed in the impulse to please humans. Isn't that right, Emily?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"I wouldn't want to steal anybody's job. Especially yours, Miss Havilland.\"\n\nWhich is exactly what Eve Harrington said, I thought.\n\nBut this was supposed to be a photo op, not a confrontation, and it was clear the reporters\u2014and Torrance\u2014had bought her act hook, line, and sinker, and that if I said anything, I'd come off just like Margo Channing at the party\u2014as a complete bitch.\n\nSo I smiled and posed for photos with Emily and when she asked me if I'd go with them to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Show (\"I'm sure the mayor can get us an extra ticket\") I didn't say, \"Over my dead body.\"\n\nI said regretfully, \"I have a show to do, remember?\" And to make Torrance happy, \"All of you out there watching, come see Only Human at the Nathan Lane Theater on West Forty-fourth Street. Eight o'clock.\"\n\n\"You were absolutely marvelous!\" Torrance said after everyone had gone. \"Your best performance ever! We'll be sold out through Easter. I don't suppose you'd be willing to reconsider doing the ice-skating-at-Rockefeller-Center thing? It would make a great photo op. All you'd have to do is put on a cute little skating skirt and spend half an hour gliding around\u2014\"\n\n\"No skating skirts,\" I said, stripping off my earrings. \"No tights. No\u2014\"\n\n\"No leotards. Sorry, I forgot. Maybe we can get her back here for a tour of the theater. If we can, we'll be sold out all the way through summer. Or you could invite her to your apartment for luncheon tomorrow.\"\n\n\"No luncheon,\" I said, wiping off my makeup. \"No tours. And no robots.\"\n\n\"Artificials,\" he corrected automatically, and then frowned. \"I thought you liked Emily.\"\n\n\"That's called acting, darling.\"\n\n\"But why don't you like her?\"\n\n\"Because she's dangerous.\"\n\n\"Dangerous? That sweet little thing?\"\n\n\"Exactly. That sweet little innocent, adorable, utterly harmless Trojan horse.\"\n\n\"But you heard Dr. Oakes. His artificials are programmed to help people, not steal their jobs.\"\n\n\"And they said movies wouldn't kill vaudeville, the synthesizer wouldn't eliminate the theater orchestra, and CGI sets wouldn't replace the stage crew.\"\n\n\"But you heard him, they've put in safeguards to prevent that. And even if they hadn't, Emily couldn't replace you. She can't act.\"\n\n\"Of course she can act. What do you think she was doing in here for the last hour? Mimicking emotions one doesn't have\u2014I believe that's the definition of acting.\"\n\n\"I can't believe you're worried about this. No one could replace you, Claire. You're one of a kind. You're a\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you dare say 'legend.' \"\n\n\"I was going to say 'a star.' Besides, you heard Emily. She doesn't want to be an actress.\"\n\n\"I heard her, but that doesn't mean she won't be waiting outside that stage door when I leave, asking if she can be my assistant. And the next thing you know, I'll be stuck in the middle of Vermont, out of gas and out of a job.\"\n\n\"Vermont?\" Torrance said blankly. \"Why are you going to Vermont? You're not thinking of doing summer stock this year, are you?\"\n\nWhich made me wonder if I should hire her as my personal assistant after all, just to have someone around who'd actually seen Bumpy Night. And knew what \"Dance ten, looks three\" meant.\n\nBut she wasn't in the crowd of autograph seekers\u2014a crowd considerably smaller than that outside the Majestic, where Forbidden Planet was playing, I couldn't help noticing. Nor was she waiting by the limo, nor at my apartment, already making herself at home, like Eve had done in Scene Three.\n\nAnd she wasn't outside my door when I got up the next morning. The Post\u2013Daily News was, no doubt left there by Torrance, with a very nice write-up\u2014a photo and two entire columns about the backstage visit, which I was happy to see did not refer to me as a legend, and half an hour later Torrance called to tell me Only Human was sold out through February. \"And it's all thanks to you, darling.\"\n\n\"Flattery will get you nowhere,\" I said. \"I'm still not going ice-skating.\"\n\n\"Neither is Emily,\" he said. \"It's pouring rain outside.\"\n\nGood, I thought. Emily would have to go convince the public she wasn't a threat to them at the Chrysler Building or MOMA or something. Or if she's such a huge fan of mine, maybe she'll come see Only Human again. But she wasn't in the audience at the matinee.\n\nI was relieved. In spite of Dr. Oakes's assurances that AIS's artificials weren't here to steal our jobs, and Emily's earnest protestations that she didn't want to be an actress, the parallels to All About Eve were a bit too close for comfort. I mean, who were we kidding? If artificials weren't a threat, Dr. Oakes and AIS wouldn't be expending so much time and effort convincing us they weren't.\n\nSo I wasn't at all unhappy when the rain turned into a sleety downpour just before the evening performance, even though it meant there were cancellations and the audience that did come out smelled like wet wool. They coughed and sneezed their way through both acts and dropped their umbrellas noisily on every important line, but at least Emily wouldn't be waiting for me outside the stage door afterward like Eve Harrington in Scene Two.\n\nIn fact, no one was at the stage door or out front, though the sleet apparently hadn't stopped the Forbidden Planet fans down the street. A huge crowd of them huddled under umbrellas, clutching their sodden Playbills, waiting for Shiloh and Justin Jr. And so much for Torrance's saying my meeting with Emily would bring in the younger demographic.\n\nMy driver Jorge splashed toward me with an open umbrella. I ducked gratefully under its shelter and let him shepherd me toward the waiting limo and into the backseat.\n\nI sat down and shook out the tails of my coat while he went around to the driver's side, and then I bent to see how much damage had been done to my shoes.\n\nA girl was banging on my window with the flat of her hand. I could see the hand but not who it was through the fogged-up window. But whoever it was knew my name. \"Miss Havilland!\" she called, her voice muffled by the closed window and the traffic going by. \"Wait!\"\n\nJustin's not the only one with fans who are willing to freeze to death to get an autograph, I thought, and fumbled with the buttons in the door, attempting to roll down the window. \"Which button is it?\" I asked Jorge as he eased his bulk into the driver's seat.\n\n\"The one on the left,\" he said, slamming his door and starting the car. \"If you want, I can drive off.\"\n\n\"And leave a fan?\" I said. \"Heaven forbid,\" even though with the week I'd had it would probably only turn out to be a Forbidden Planet fan who'd gotten tired of waiting and decided to get my autograph instead of Justin's so she could get in out of the sleety rain. \"Signing autographs is a Broadway legend's duty,\" I said, and pushed the button.\n\n\"Oh, thank you, Miss Havilland,\" the girl said, clutching the top of the window as it began to roll down. \"I was afraid you were going to drive away.\"\n\nIt was Emily, looking like a drowned rat, her light brown hair plastered to her forehead and cheeks, rain dripping off her eyelashes and nose.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I demanded, though it was obvious. This was exactly like the scene in Bumpy Night when Eve told Margo Channing she hadn't eaten for days because she'd spent all her money on tickets to Margo's play.\n\n\"I have to talk to you,\" she said urgently, and I had to admire Dr. Oakes's engineering genius. Emily's cheeks and nose were the vivid red of freezing cold, her lips looked pale under her demure pink lipstick, and the knuckles of her hands, clutching the rolled-down window, were white.\n\nShe's not really cold, I told myself. That's all done with sensors. They're programmed responses. But it was difficult not to feel sorry for her standing there, the illusion was so perfect.\n\nAnd it had obviously convinced Jorge. He leaned over the backseat to ask, \"Shouldn't you ask her to get in the car?\"\n\nNo, I thought. If I do, she'll tell me some sob story, and the next thing you know I'll be hiring her on as my understudy. And I have no intention of being the next Margo Channing, even if she does look pathetic.\n\nI didn't say that. I said, \"Where's Dr. Oakes? I thought you two were supposed to go see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall tonight.\"\n\n\"We were\u2026we\u2026I did,\" she stammered. \"But something happened\u2014\"\n\n\"To Dr. Oakes?\" I said, and had a sudden image of her killing him like Frankenstein's monster and rampaging off into the night.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"He doesn't know I'm gone. I sneaked away so I could talk to you about what happened. Something\u2026I\u2026something happened to me while I was watching the show.\"\n\nOf course. \"And you decided you want to be an actress after all,\" I said dryly, or rather, with as much dryness as it was possible to muster with gusts of icy rain blowing on me.\n\nHer eyes widened in a perfect imitation of astonishment. \"No. Please, Miss Havilland,\" she pleaded. \"I have to talk to you.\"\n\n\"You can't just let her stand out there like that,\" Jorge said reproachfully. \"She'll catch pneumonia.\"\n\nNo, she won't, I thought, but he was right. I couldn't just let her stand out there. The water might short out her electronics or rust her gears or something. And if anyone happened to see her standing there, begging to be let in, I'd look like a monster.\n\nAnd even if I told them she was a robot, they'd never believe it, seeing her standing there with her red nose and blue lips. And now her teeth were chattering, for God's sake. \"Get in the car,\" I said.\n\nJorge hurried around to open the door for Emily, and she scrambled in, getting water everywhere. \"Thank you so much, Miss Havilland,\" she said, grabbing my hand, and her sensors were even better than I'd thought they were. Her hands felt exactly as icy as a fan's would have, standing out in that sleety rain.\n\n\"Turn on the heat,\" I ordered Jorge. \"Emily, where were you when you sneaked away from Dr. Oakes? At Radio City Music Hall?\"\n\n\"Yes. I told him I needed to go to the ladies' room off the Grand Lounge.\"\n\nThe ladies' room? Just how authentic was she?\n\n\"To see the murals,\" she said. \"They were done by Witold Gordon, and they show the history of cosmetics through the ages\u2014Cleopatra and the Greeks and Marie Antoinette and\u2014\"\n\n\"And something happened to you in the ladies' room?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, frowning. \"I told him I was going to the ladies' room so I could sneak out the side door.\"\n\nDefinitely able to lie, I thought. \"How long ago was this?\" I asked her.\n\n\"Eighteen minutes. I ran all the way.\"\n\nLess than twenty minutes, which hopefully meant Dr. Oakes hadn't panicked yet and filed a \"Missing Robot\" report. \"Jorge, give me your phone,\" I said.\n\nHe did.\n\n\"Emily, what's Dr. Oakes's cell phone number?\"\n\n\"Oh, don't send me back!\"\n\n\"I won't,\" I promised. \"Tell me his number.\"\n\nShe did.\n\n\"This is Claire Havilland,\" I told him when he answered. \"I called to tell you not to worry\u2014Emily's with me. I'm giving her a tour of the theater and then we're going out for some authentic New York cheesecake.\"\n\n\"She can't eat cheesecake. She's an artifi\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I know, but I can eat it, and I thought she'd enjoy seeing a genuine theater-district deli. I'll bring her home afterwards. Are you at your hotel?\"\n\nHe wasn't; he was still at Radio City Music Hall. \"The staff and I have been looking for her everywhere. I was about to call the police. Why didn't she tell me you were giving her a tour?\"\n\n\"It was a simple case of miscommunication,\" I said. \"She thought I'd told you, and I thought you were there when we discussed it,\" I said, hoping he wouldn't remember we hadn't had any opportunity to talk alone, that he'd been there the entire time. \"I am so sorry about the mixup, Dr. Oakes.\"\n\n\"She still should have told me she was leaving,\" he said. \"She should have known I'd be worried.\"\n\n\"How could she?\" I said. \"As you said, she doesn't have human emotions.\"\n\n\"But I specifically programmed her to\u2014\"\n\nHe wasn't going to let go of it. \"You sound hoarse,\" I said to distract him. \"Are you catching a cold?\"\n\n\"I probably am. I got drenched standing out front waiting for her. If I catch pneumonia because of this\u2014\"\n\n\"You poor thing,\" I said, summoning every bit of acting ability I'd acquired over the last twenty-five years in order to sound sympathetic. \"Go straight home and get into bed. And have room service send you up a hot toddy. I'll take care of Emily and see she gets home safely,\" and after a few more disgruntled-parent sounds, he hung up.\n\n\"There,\" I said. \"That's taken care of\u2014\"\n\n\"Are we really going to a deli?\" Emily asked unhappily.\n\n\"No, not unless you want to. I just told him that to keep him from coming here to the theater. Where would you like to go? Back into the theater? I think Benny's still here. He could let us in.\"\n\n\"Could we just stay here in the car?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" I said, and told Jorge to pull in closer to the curb.\n\nHe did, and then got a plaid blanket out of the trunk and put it over Emily's knees. \"Oh, but I don't\u2014\" she began.\n\nI shook my head at her.\n\nShe nodded and let him cover her knees with the blanket and drape his jacket around her shoulders. \"Thank you,\" she said, smiling enchantingly up at him.\n\n\"Would you like something hot to drink?\" he asked her as if he'd forgotten I was even in the car. \"Coffee or\u2014?\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" she said. \"I'm afraid I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"She'll have cocoa,\" I interrupted, thinking how much I would give to be able to look as young and helplessly appealing as she did, \"and bring me a coffee with a shot of rum in it. Not that mud they make at Dark Brew,\" I added. \"Go to Finelli's.\" Which was six blocks away.\n\nHe trotted off obediently. \"Good,\" I said. \"Now we can talk. Tell me what's happened. You went to see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall\u2026.\"\n\n\"Yes, and it's beautiful. It's huge, with gold curtains and chandeliers and statues and this enormous stage\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. I've been there. You said something happened?\"\n\n\"Yes, the show started and there was all this singing and dancing, and then the Rockettes came out. They're this group of eighty dancers, though only forty dance in each performance. There were originally sixteen of them, called the Roxyettes, who danced at the Roxy Theater, but when Radio City Music Hall opened in 1932, they were a big hit because of the way they looked on the stage\u2014it's 144 feet wide\u2014and they added twenty more dancers, and then four more, and they've been there ever since. They're all the same height, and they're all dressed alike\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what the Rockettes do,\" I said, but there was no stopping her. She was in full spate.\n\n\"They've done over a hundred thousand shows, and in the 1970s they rescued Radio City Music Hall! It was going to be torn down, and they went out in their Rockette costumes and stood all around the building, asking people to sign petitions to save the building. All eighty of them stood out there. In the middle of winter, when it was snowing and everything\u2014\"\n\nI waited for her to pause for breath and then realized that wasn't going to happen. I was going to have to break in and stop her. \"The Rockettes came out, and then what happened?\" I asked.\n\n\"They formed this long, perfectly straight line. They were wearing these red leotards with white fur trim and hats and gold tap shoes. That's one of their traditional Christmas show costumes. They've been doing a Christmas show since 1933\u2014\"\n\nAt this rate, we could be here all night. I broke in again. \"They formed a straight line, and then what?\"\n\n\"They linked arms and kicked their legs in the air at the same time,\" she said, her eyes bright with excitement as she described it, \"as high as their heads. And all the kicks were to exactly the same height.\"\n\nI nodded. \"That's what the Rockettes are known for. Their precision eye-high kicks.\"\n\n\"And then these skaters came out and skated on a pond\u2014right on the stage\u2014to the song 'A Simple Little Weekend'\u2014\"\n\nFrom Bumpy Night.\n\n\"And then the Rockettes came out again in pale blue leotards with sequins on the top and silver tap shoes and kicked some more and then\u2014\"\n\nWas I going to have to listen to a blow-by-blow of the entire show? \"Emily,\" I said. \"What exactly hap\u2014?\"\n\n\"And then they opened the curtain, and there was a toyshop, and the Rockettes came out dressed as toy soldiers, and they all fell down\u2014\"\n\nThe Rockettes were famous for that, too, the long line of ramrod-stiff soldiers collapsing like dominoes, one against the other, till they were all in a carefully lined-up pile on the stage.\n\n\"And then,\" Emily said, \"they came out dressed all in silver with these square boxes on their heads and flashing lights\u2014\"\n\nRobots, I thought. Of course. In keeping with the theme of the Macy's parade and the department stores' Christmas windows.\n\n\"And they all tap-danced,\" she said breathlessly, \"and turned and kicked, all exactly alike. And that was when I realized\u2026when you asked me the other night what I wanted to be, I didn't know what you meant. By wanting to be something, I mean. But now I do.\" She looked up at me with shining eyes. \"I want to be a Rockette!\"\n\nMy first thought was, Thank God it's the Rockettes and not musical comedy! I wouldn't have to compete with that youthful innocence, that disarming enthusiasm.\n\nMy second thought was, How ironic! Dr. Oakes had brought her here specifically to convince people artificials weren't after their jobs, and now here she was announcing she wanted one of the most sought-after jobs in New York. She was now a threat to thousands of aspiring Rockettes, and tens of thousands of little girls in dance classes all over America.\n\nIt's his own fault, I thought. He should have known better than to have let her see them. Even when they weren't dressed up like robots, they looked like them, with their identical costumes and long legs and smiling faces. And performed like them, their synchronized tap steps, their uniformly executed turns and time steps and kicks. Dr. Oakes should have known it was bound to dazzle her.\n\nAdd to that her youth (and I wasn't talking about her sixteen-year-old packaging, I was talking about her lack of experience\u2014and who has less knowledge of the world than a robot?) and the fact that every little girl who'd ever gone to see them had come out of the show wanting to be a Rockette, and what had happened was inevitable.\n\nAnd impossible. In the first place, she was designed to do photo ops and interviews with unsuspecting dupes, not dance. And in the second place, Dr. Oakes would never let her.\n\n\"You can't be a Rockette,\" I said. \"You told me yourself artificials aren't allowed to take humans' jobs.\"\n\n\"But it's not a job!\" she said passionately. \"It's\u2026jobs are tasks humans have to do to keep society functioning and to earn money to pay their living expenses. Being a Rockette is something totally different! It doesn't have anything to do with money. It's like a\u2026a dream or a\u2026a quest or\u2026it's\u2014\"\n\n\"What I did for love.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, and now I knew for certain she was stagestruck: she hadn't even noticed that was a line from a Broadway musical.\n\n\"But it's still a job,\" I said. \"The Rockettes are paid\u2014\"\n\n\"They wouldn't have to pay me. I'd do it for nothing!\"\n\n\"And even if artificials were allowed to take humans' jobs, there's still the problem of your height.\"\n\n\"My height?\"\n\n\"Yes, you're too short. The Rockettes have a height restriction.\"\n\n\"I know. They're all the same height. What is it?\"\n\n\"They're not actually all one height,\" I said. \"That's an optical illusion. They put the tallest girls in the middle and then go downward to either end.\"\n\n\"Well, then, I could be one of the ends.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"No, you couldn't. You have to be between five foot six and five foot ten, or at any rate that's what it was when I auditioned to be a Rockette. It may have gone up since th\u2014\"\n\n\"You were a Rockette?\" she squealed, and it was clear I'd just gone up several notches in her estimation. \"Why didn't\u2026? It didn't say that in your bio.\"\n\n\"That's because I wasn't one. While the auditions were still going on, I got offered a part in the chorus of The Drowsy Chaperone, and I took it. It turned out to be my big break.\"\n\n\"But how could you give up being a Rockette? I wouldn't ever want to be anything else!\"\n\nIt didn't seem like a good idea to tell her I hadn't actually wanted to be a Rockette, that I'd only auditioned because I'd hoped it might get me noticed, or to tell her that when I'd heard I'd made the chorus of Chaperone, I'd walked out of the Radio City rehearsal hall without a backward glance.\n\n\"You have to tell me what I need to do to become a Rockette,\" she said, clutching my arm. \"I know you have to learn tap dancing\u2014\"\n\n\"And jazz dancing and ballet. En pointe.\"\n\nShe nodded as if she'd expected that. \"I can have those programs installed.\"\n\n\"A program of dance steps isn't the same as actually learning the steps,\" I said. \"It takes years of training and hard work to become a dancer.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Like in A Chorus Line.\"\n\n\"Yes, exactly,\" I said. \"But even if you had that experience, it wouldn't matter. You're only\u2014what? Five foot two, at the most?\"\n\n\"One.\"\n\n\"And the height requirement's five foot six,\" I said, hoping the appeal to logic would convince her what she wanted wasn't a good idea, as had happened when she'd wanted to be named Eileen. \"You're simply too short.\"\n\nShe nodded thoughtfully.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I know it's disappointing, but it's all part of being in the theater. I didn't get the part of Fantine in the revival of Les Mis because I was too tall. And Bernadette Peters lost the part of\u2014\"\n\nShe wasn't listening. \"What about bingo-bongos?\" she asked.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Bingo-bongos. Should I have them done?\" and when I still looked blank, \"In A Chorus Line. The 'Dance Ten, Looks Three' number. Val said she had the bingo-bongos done.\"\n\nIndeed, she had. She'd been talking about having her breasts enlarged and her derriere lifted, or as she referred to it, having her \"tits and ass\" done, which I refused to explain to a dewy-eyed innocent. Or a robot.\n\n\"It wouldn't do any good,\" I told her. \"As I said, you're not tall enough to meet the height requirement.\"\n\n\"What did you do in the audition?\"\n\nShe was too stagestruck to hear a word I was saying. \"I'm trying to explain, you won't make the first cut for the aud\u2014\"\n\n\"What did you have to do?\"\n\n\"They taught us a series of combinations, which we did in groups of three. And then if we made callbacks, we had to learn a full routine, with time steps and kicks, and do a tap solo.\"\n\n\"What did you do for your solo?\"\n\n\" 'Anything Goes.' But you won't get to do a solo. You won't even make the initial cut. You're too short. And even if you met all the requirements, you'd only have a miniscule chance of getting in. Hundreds of dancers audition every year, and only one or two make it. I'm not trying to discourage you, Emily,\" I said, even though that was exactly what I was trying to do. \"I'm just trying to be realistic.\"\n\nShe nodded and was silent for a moment. \"Thank you for all the advice, Miss Havilland. You've been most awfully kind,\" she said, and was out of the car and splashing down the street through the rain, which was coming down harder than ever.\n\n\"Emily!\" I shouted, \"Wait!\" but by the time I got the window down, she was half a block away.\n\n\"Come back!\" I called after her. \"I know you're disappointed, but you can't walk home in this. Jorge will be back in a few minutes. He'll drive you home. It's late, and your hotel is miles from here.\"\n\nShe shook her head, flinging raindrops everywhere. \"It's only forty-five blocks,\" she said cheerfully, and vanished around the corner.\n\nJorge, arriving moments later with two cardboard cups, was furious. \"You let her walk home in the rain?\" he said disapprovingly. \"She'll catch pneumonia.\"\n\n\"She can't,\" I said, but he wasn't listening to me, either.\n\n\"Poor kid,\" he muttered, pulling away from the curb with a jerk that spilled coffee all over me. \"Poor little thing!\"\n\n\"Poor little thing\" was right. Because even if she could charm the choreographer into waiving the height requirement (which wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility, given her programmed-in charm), there was no chance at all of Dr. Oakes's allowing her to be a Rockette. It would undermine the image he and AIS were trying to convince the public of. Even her raising the possibility of being a Rockette would be too dangerous. He'll cut short their tour, and they'll be out of here on the next plane, I thought. If they haven't left already.\n\nBut the next morning, there she was on TV, smiling and waving from the foot of the Statue of Liberty and later from a horse-drawn carriage in Central Park, and on Monday night there was coverage of her charming the pants off reporters and the TSA as she and Dr. Oakes went through security at LaGuardia on their way home, with no sign that she'd had her hopes dashed.\n\n\"Will you be coming back to the Big Apple soon, Emily?\" one of the dozens of reporters asked her.\n\n\"No, I'm afraid not,\" she said, and there wasn't even a hint of regret in her voice. \"I had a wonderful time here in New York! The Empire State Building and everything! I especially loved seeing Only Human.\"\n\nWell, at least Torrance will be happy about her mentioning the play, I thought, waiting to hear what she'd say about the Rockettes.\n\n\"What did you think of the Radio City Christmas show?\" the reporter asked.\n\nShe smiled winsomely. \"I loved the Nativity scene. They had real camels and everything!\"\n\n\"Where do you go next, Emily?\" another reporter asked. \"Back to San Jose?\"\n\n\"Yes, and then we'll be in Williamsburg for Christmas.\"\n\n\"And then L.A. for the Rose Bowl parade,\" Dr. Oakes said. \"You're really looking forward to that, aren't you, Emily?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" she said, dimpling. \"I love flowers! And football!\"\n\n\"One last question,\" the reporter said. \"What was your favorite part of your visit?\"\n\nHere it comes, I thought.\n\n\"Meeting Claire Havilland. She's such an amazing actress!\"\n\nI suppose I should have been grateful to her, especially when Torrance called the next day to tell me Only Human was sold out through Easter and three days later to say Austerman wanted to have lunch with me to talk about Desk Set.\n\nBut I wasn't. I was suspicious. That touching little scene in my car had obviously been just that\u2014a scene, performed by a very skilled actress\u2014and she hadn't fallen in love with the Rockettes at all. But then what had its purpose been? To soften me up like Eve Harrington's made-up story about seeing Margo Channing in a play and falling in love with the theater, so that she could worm her way into my life?\n\nI half expected her to be in the audience on Tuesday night, in spite of the LaGuardia scene, but she wasn't, and on the way home after the show, Jorge told me there'd been a story on the radio about their arrival in California.\n\n\"Did she say anything about the Rockettes?\" I asked him.\n\n\"No. She didn't say anything about your making her walk halfway across Manhattan in a rainstorm, either.\" He glared at me in the rearview mirror. \"You're lucky she didn't catch her death of cold.\"\n\nShe wasn't in the Saturday matinee audience either, or backstage after the show, and by the middle of December I had more important things to worry about, like Austerman's insistence on a dream-sequence number in Desk Set with me in, you guessed it, a leotard and fishnet stockings.\n\nAdd to that the management's decision to put an additional matinee on the schedule because of increased ticket demand, Austerman's wanting me to help audition the Spencer Tracy role, and every reporter in town wanting to do an interview on Only Human's Tony nomination prospects. By mid-December I was exhausted.\n\nWhich was why I was taking a nap in my dressing room before the show when Benny the stage manager knocked and said there was someone to see me. \"A Cassie Ferguson,\" he said. \"She says she knows you.\"\n\n\"Cassie what?\" I said blurrily, wondering if that was the name of Austerman's assistant. \"What does she look like?\"\n\n\"Blond, tall, hot.\"\n\nAll of Austerman's assistants were tall, blond, and hot. He was as bad as Miss Caswell's producer boyfriend. And if she was from Austerman, I couldn't afford to let her see me like this. The nap had added ten years to my face. \"Tell her I'm doing an interview with Tiger Beat and I'll meet with her during intermission.\"\n\nHe looked unhappy. \"She said she needed to see you right away.\"\n\n\"Oh, all right,\" I said. \"Give me five minutes and then send her in,\" and frantically started to repair my makeup, but almost immediately there was a second knock on the door.\n\nBenny was right. She was a knockout: tall and leggy, with gorgeous long blond hair, and, even though she was wearing a belted raincoat, it was obvious she had a great figure.\n\n\"Well?\" she said. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"Emily!\" I said, staring. \"My God! What\u2014?\"\n\n\"I had the bingo-bongos done,\" she said happily.\n\n\"I can see that.\"\n\n\"I was just going to get longer legs, but the proportions didn't look right, so, since I had to get a new torso anyway, I thought I might as well get a new ass, like in the song, and new\u2014\"\n\n\"But why?\" I said.\n\n\"To meet the height requirement,\" she said, as if it were self-evident.\n\nOh, my God, I thought. She was serious. She's going to try to become a Rockette.\n\n\"The upper limit's five ten and a half,\" she said, \"but the median of the current Rockettes is five nine, so I went with that and with thirty-six for my chest. I did a C so I could be sure I'd fit in a size six\u2014that's the most common costume size. And people tend to be less intimidated by flatter-chested girls.\"\n\nShe untied the belt and opened her raincoat wide to reveal a spaghetti-strap black leotard and sheer tights.\n\n\"Hot\" was an understatement. She had definitely had the bingo-bongos done.\n\nIt was too bad Torrance wasn't here. \"This,\" I would have told him, \"is what one is supposed to look like in a leotard. Which is why I have no intention of wearing one in Desk Set or anywhere else.\"\n\n\"Do you think I should have gone with a D instead?\" Emily asked.\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"What about my outfit? Is it all right for the audition? I analyzed audition videos and photos from the past ten years, and this was the most common, but some of the dancers wore colored leotards or leggings, and I was wondering if I should do that to make them notice me.\"\n\n\"Trust me, they'll notice you,\" I said.\n\n\"What about my shoes?\" she said, sticking out her foot and pointing a toe in a T-strap black tap shoe. \"The audition brochure said character heels, but I didn't know if I should wear black or beige.\"\n\n\"Black,\" I said. \"But auditions aren't till summer.\"\n\n\"I know, but they have a vacancy they need to fill.\"\n\nGood God, I thought. She's killed a Rockette, and she must have guessed what I was thinking because she said, \"A Rockette on one of the tours quit to get married, and they had to replace her with one of the New York troupe, so they're holding a special audition.\"\n\n\"But you have to know how to tap dance\u2014\"\n\n\"I do,\" she said. \"And I've learned jazz, modern, and ballet. Here, I brought an audition tape.\" She pulled out an Android, swiped through several screens, and handed it to me.\n\nAnd there she was, tap-dancing, executing flawless time steps and cramp rolls and Maxie Fords\u2014and the eye-high kicks the Rockettes were famous for.\n\n\"I've had all the choreography terms programmed in, and I've memorized three different routines for my audition solo\u2014'Anything Goes' and 'One' from A Chorus Line and '42nd Street.' Which one do you think I should do?\"\n\n\"Emily\u2014\"\n\n\"I learned all the routines from the Christmas show, too, but I wasn't sure I should do one of those,\" she said. \"Oh, and what about my hair? Is blond okay? Sixty-two percent of the Rockettes are blondes.\"\n\n\"Blond is more than okay,\" I said.\n\n\"And you think I look like a Rockette?\"\n\nLike the perfect Rockette. \"Yes,\" I said.\n\n\"What about my face? The age requirement's eighteen, so I had it altered to look older\u2014\"\n\nShe had. Her cheekbones were more defined, and her face thinner, though it was still recognizably Emily's and had retained the wide, innocent eyes and the disarming smile.\n\n\"\u2014but I was wondering if I should change it to look more like the other Rockettes. I made a composite of the current troupe's faces, and it has a straighter nose and fuller lips.\"\n\nAnd much less vulnerability, I thought. A modern-woman-in-Manhattan-who's-had-lots-of-bad-experiences-and-worse-boyfriends face. The idea of Emily with that face was unthinkable.\n\nAnd besides, if she was actually going to try and become a Rockette, she would need all the help she could get. And her face was her biggest weapon. Well, not her biggest, I thought. But definitely a weapon, as witness the reporters' behavior at that backstage interview. And Jorge's.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Emily asked. \"Should I change my face?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"Absolutely not,\" and posed the question I should have asked in the first place, especially since he was liable to come bursting in here any minute. \"What does Dr. Oakes say about all this? Did he authorize these changes?\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" she said. \"He'd never let me do this. I got some of the engineers to help me.\"\n\n\"How did you talk them into it?\" I was about to ask, and then realized I already knew. She'd charmed them just like she'd charmed Jorge and the TSA. \"And Dr. Oakes didn't object?\"\n\n\"No. He doesn't know about it. He's in Japan with Aiko.\"\n\nOf course, I thought. He's off introducing his artificials to other countries. And different cultures would have different ideas of what was threatening about artificials. They'd require different models, all with faces and names carefully chosen to make them seem harmless: an Aiko even shorter than the original Emily for Japan, and a Rashmika for India, a Mei-Li for China.\n\nAnd meanwhile his American model had turned into a combination of Eliza Doolittle and Frankenstein's monster.\n\n\"I'm not sure you're right about my keeping the face,\" she said. \"What if one of the Rockettes recognizes me? I met some of them that night at Radio City Music Hall.\"\n\nAnd they'd have seen her on the news or in that interview with me. \"So you were planning to audition as Cassie somebody?\"\n\n\"Ferguson. Yes, because the rules say you have to be at least eighteen years old, and I'm only one.\"\n\nOne. But what a one! \"Definitely a singular sensation,\" I murmured under my breath.\n\n\"You don't think I should do that?\" she asked anxiously. \"I know it's lying, but if they know I'm an artificial\u2014\"\n\nThey'll never let you audition, I thought. They'd have exactly the same reaction I'd had, and Emily was even more of a threat to them than she had been to me. As Torrance had said, actresses get where they are by being one of a kind, but with the Rockettes, sameness was the whole point.\n\nAnd the Rockettes weren't stupid. They'd see instantly that if one of them could be replaced, all of them could, and that once the management realized they could have Rockettes who didn't want health benefits or time-and-a-half for overtime, it would be all over.\n\nSo she was going to have to lie and tell them she was a human. But she'd never get away with it. Even if she managed to fool them at the audition, she wouldn't make it through her first rehearsal. She didn't sweat, she didn't get out of breath, she didn't make mistakes. And she could learn an entire tap routine by watching it once. They'd spot her instantly.\n\nEmily was watching me with a worried expression. \"You don't think I should tell them I'm human?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Let me think,\" I said, wishing I had Emily's computer brain to help me figure out what to tell her. I knew what I should tell her: the cold hard truth. That there was no way she could ever be a Rockette and she should go back home to San Jose and do what she'd been designed to do.\n\nIt would be much kinder than letting her batter herself to death trying, like a moth against a porch light. But I also knew she wouldn't listen, any more than I had when I was eighteen.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Emily was asking me. \"Should I put 'artificial' on my audition form?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"You're not going to audition.\"\n\n\"But you can't become a Rockette if you don't audition.\"\n\n\"Only if you're an ordinary human,\" I said. \"When does Dr. Oakes get back from Japan?\"\n\n\"Not till the twenty-second. That's when we were supposed to go to Williamsburg for Christmas.\"\n\nThe twenty-second was a week away, but we didn't actually have that much time. AIS would already be looking for Emily. Multinational corporations don't just let a valuable piece of equipment walk away, especially one who was ruining any hope they had of selling the idea of artificials to the public.\n\nOn the other hand, they could hardly let it get out that one of their \"perfectly harmless\" robots had gone rogue. They'd have to look for her through private channels, which would slow them down. And even if they did decide to go public and had the police put out an APB on her, they'd be looking for a five-foot-one sixteen-year-old with light brown hair, which gave us a little time.\n\nBut the minute Emily went public, they'd come after her and Dr. Oakes would be on the first plane home from Japan. So we'd have to make sure that by the time he got here he wouldn't be able to do anything.\n\n\"All right, Emily,\" I said. \"Here's what we're going to do. You're going to go on every news and talk and late-night show we can find and tell them how much you want to be a Rockette. You're going to tell them all those things you told me that night in the limo, how the Rockettes started and what they've done over the years\u2014dancing in the Macy's Parade and saving Radio City Music Hall. And you're going to tell them all the things you've done so that you could become a Rockette\u2014how you learned to dance and memorized the routines and studied their history. We're going to convince them you deserve to be one of them.\"\n\nThat wasn't quite true. What we were going to do was convince the public she deserved to be a Rockette and hope the resulting pressure would force the Rockettes to let her in. \"Do you remember the names of the talk show hosts who interviewed you when you were here for the Macy's parade?\" I asked her.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nOf course. \"Good. I want you to make a list of them and how we can contact them.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to call them and set up interviews?\"\n\n\"No, we don't want anyone to know where you are till you show up for the interviews. I'm going to send you to my apartment\u2014Jorge will take you\u2014and I want you to use my computer to find some photographs of Rockette costumes. Preferably one of their Christmas costumes\u2014if we can tie this in with Christmas, it will help. People love Christmas stories with happy endings. Find a photograph, and then call Jorge and have him come and get it and bring it back here to our wardrobe mistress\u2014\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"So you can wear it to these interviews. We're going to arrange for you to dance as part of your appearances. You can do one of the routines you learned.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, it won't be the same as doing the routine with the Rockettes, but it's a way to show them what you can do. Think of it as your audition. You can do that, can't you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said. \"It's just that a photo's not necessary. I've already made all the costumes.\"\n\n\"All the\u2026you made all the costumes in the Christmas show?\"\n\n\"No. I made all the costumes the Rockettes have ever worn.\"\n\nThe plan worked even better than I'd envisioned. Emily went on all the shows and tapped and talked her way into their audiences' hearts, modeling an array of costumes, from the costume of the original Roxyettes to Bob Mackie's \"Shine,\" with its three thousand Swarovski crystals, to the merry-go-round horse costume the Rockettes had worn at the \"last\" performance, when it had looked like Radio City Music Hall would be torn down, and regaling her enraptured hosts with little-known facts about the Rockettes: that before coming to New York, they had danced in St. Louis as the Missouri Rockets; that in the days when they danced between movie showings, they had practically lived at Radio City Music Hall, sleeping on cots and eating at a special canteen set up for them; that in the open competition at the Paris Exposition, they had defeated the Russians and the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera.\n\n\"Lucille Bremer was a Rockette,\" she told them. \"You know, Judy Garland's older sister in Meet Me in St. Louis. And Vera Ellen, from White Christmas, but she kept showing off. A good Rockette never tries to stand out. She tries to dance just like every other Rockette.\"\n\nAnd on every show and podcast she told the story of how the Rockettes had saved Radio City Music Hall, standing outside and asking passersby to sign a petition to make the building a national landmark. \"They went on TV and radio shows just like this one to plead their cause,\" she said, \"and they all testified at the Landmarks Commission hearing. They did a kick line with the mayor on the steps outside.\"\n\nThe audiences ate it\u2014and her own eye-high kicks\u2014up, and her appearances became instant YouTube hits. One, in which she talked reverently about why being a Rockette meant so much to her, went viral.\n\nThe only hitch was Torrance, who thought I was taking a huge risk by helping her. \"It's dangerous,\" he said. \"There's a lot of hostility to artificials out there. Some of it could spill over to you, and then there goes your Tony nomination.\"\n\n\"I thought you were the one who was convinced Emily was harmless,\" I said.\n\n\"That was before she decided she wanted to be a Rockette,\" he said disgustedly. \"And why are you so set on helping her? I thought you hated her.\"\n\n\"I just didn't want her trying to steal my career. And if she gets to be a Rockette, she won't be, and Jeannette will be safe.\"\n\n\"Jeannette? Who's Jeannette?\"\n\n\"The role I have been playing eight times a week for the past year,\" I said. \"A fact which Emily would know.\"\n\n\"And that's why you're helping her? Because she knows what parts you've played?\"\n\n\"Yes. And because if I get that Tony nomination you're so worried about me losing, it will be thanks to all the publicity Emily gave me. I'm just repaying the favor.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" he said. \"You know what I think? I think you orchestrated this whole PR thing to set her up.\"\n\nLike Eve Harrington had set up Margo Channing, siphoning gas from her car and stranding her in Vermont so she could take her place.\n\n\"Are you sure you didn't put her on all those TV shows so Dr. Oakes would find out where she is and take her home?\" Torrance asked.\n\nAnd if I did, wouldn't that be a good thing? And not only for me, for everybody else who happens to be \"only human\"? I mean, she could rattle off the names of every play and musical and movie ever done and their cast lists and their song lyrics and librettos and dance routines and scripts. And when she was asking all those questions about what to wear to the audition, she'd said, \"Should I wear my hair in a topknot?\"\n\n\"No, a ponytail,\" I'd told her. \"With a rose scarf to bring out the color in your cheeks.\"\n\n\"Should I make them pinker?\" she asked, and she wasn't talking about makeup.\n\nHow can anyone compete against that? Or the fact that she'd never miss a step. Or forget her lines. Or get old.\n\nTorrance was right. She was dangerous.\n\nBut I didn't say that. I said, \"I'm just trying to help her. And me. If she's a Rockette, she can't steal Bunny out from under me.\"\n\n\"Bunny?\" he said, looking confused. \"Is that Margo Channing's husband? The one Eve tries to steal?\"\n\n\"No. It's the lead in Desk Set. The musical Austerman's doing,\" I said wryly. \"Ring a bell?\"\n\nIf they turn her down for the Rockettes, I thought, I'm firing Torrance and making her my manager.\n\nBut it didn't look like they'd turn her down. After only two days of appearances, the public and press response to Emily was overwhelmingly positive, and the Rockettes who were questioned by reporters as to what they thought of her chances said things like, \"She knows more about the Rockettes than we Rockettes do,\" and \"I don't know. I mean, I'm worried about artificials taking over and everything, but she wants it so bad!\" and I thought, Good God, she's actually going to pull it off.\n\nSo it was a shock when she showed up after the Wednesday matinee. \"I thought you were doing The View,\" I said.\n\nShe shook her head, looking so pale I thought her sensors must have malfunctioned. \"They just changed the rules for being a Rockette so I don't qualify,\" she said.\n\n\"Then you'll have to do what you did before,\" I said firmly. \"Change yourself so you do meet them.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" she said, and showed me the new rule.\n\n\"No artificials,\" it read. Only humans need apply, I thought.\n\n\"Then we have to make them change the rule,\" I said.\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"We're going to make them look like monsters for picking on a sweet, harmless child like you. Do you remember the party scene from Bumpy Night? Where Margo Channing tries to expose Eve and says all those terrible things to her?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"And do you remember how it backfired? How it made Margo look like a bully and Eve look like a victim? Well, that's what we're going to do. Can you cry?\"\n\n\"No, but I can look really sad.\"\n\n\"Good. You're going to do that. And you're going to look helpless and victimized. I want you to go watch All About Eve and memorize Eve's tone of voice and mannerisms while I write the script you're going to follow. You never wanted to hurt anyone or cause any trouble. You just admire the Rockettes so much!\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Emily said, looking up at me with those wide, innocent eyes. \"I don't want to be Eve Harrington. She's not a nice person.\"\n\n\"Let me tell you a little secret, Emily,\" I said. \"Nearly every actress is Eve Harrington at some point or other and has lied about her age or used her feminine wiles or taken unfair advantage to get a part. How do you think Margo Channing knew what Eve was up to?\" I asked her. \"Because when she looked at her, she reminded her of herself.\"\n\n\"Did you ever do anything like\u2014?\"\n\n\"Of course. I lied about my age and my Off-Broadway experience when I tried out for Love, Etc. And when I found out they'd moved the audition time I didn't tell anybody.\" And I had slept with the director.\n\n\"But I got what I wanted,\" I said. I looked at her. \"How badly do you want to be a Rockette?\"\n\nAnd Dr. Oakes was wrong. He'd said his artificials had been designed to lack initiative, drive, preference. But once you wire in preference, even if it's only the ability to choose one word, one gesture over another, everything else comes with it. And when he'd put in safeguards against all those driving forces\u2014lust and greed and ambition\u2014he'd forgotten the most dangerous one of all, the one that overrides all the others.\n\nTorrance wasn't the only one who could have benefited from watching a few musicals. If Dr. Oakes had seen A Chorus Line, this never would have happened. And he'd have known what was going to happen when I asked Emily what she was willing to do to be a Rockette.\n\n\"Well?\" I said, repeating the question. \"How much do you want to be a Rockette?\"\n\nShe raised her artificial chin and looked steadily at me. \"More than anything else in the world.\"\n\nShe wanted to know how we planned to make the Rockettes management look like bullies.\n\n\"Do you remember how the Rockettes saved Radio City Music Hall?\" I said. \"Well, you're going to make them make you a Rockette the same way. What's the weather like this week?\"\n\n\"A high of twenty degrees Fahrenheit with a rain-snow mix.\"\n\n\"Good,\" I said, remembering her standing outside my car in the rain, shivering and bedraggled. \"I want you to wear the skimpiest Rockette costume there is, preferably something with a feathered headdress. And mascara that runs. And I know you don't wear mascara,\" I said before she could interrupt me. \"But you're going to wear it for this. You're going to stand out there twenty-four hours a day looking half frozen, asking people to sign a petition to make them change the rules so you can be a Rockette, and I'm going to see to it the media's there to film it.\"\n\nI picked up the phone to call Torrance and have him arrange for the camera crews.\n\n\"But they know artificials can't feel cold or heat\u2014\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter, trust me,\" I said, thinking of Jorge, who still wasn't speaking to me. \"I want you to shiver and do the teeth-chattering thing, and when passersby ask you if you're all right, you need to say, 'Yes, I'm just so cold!' and ask them to sign your petition.\"\n\n\"But won't the rain-snow mix run the signatures?\"\n\n\"Yes, which is even better. It'll look like tears.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"This isn't about getting signatures. It's about making the Rockettes management look like bullies.\"\n\n\"But I don't see how\u2026Margo said mean things to Eve\u2026.\"\n\n\"And they're making you stand outside,\" I said. \"At Christmas. In the rain. Trust me, they'll look like bullies. And people don't like to look like bullies\u2014or like the kind of people who'd let a historic landmark be torn down. They like to see themselves as the hero who rescues the building\u2014or damsel\u2014in distress. You stand out there in the rain in a skimpy strapless costume, and by Friday the Rockettes will be begging you to join them. And if it starts snowing, we'll have action by Thursday.\"\n\nIt didn't take even that long. When I called Torrance the next morning to ask him when the film crews were going to be there, he said, \"There's no point in sending them. It's all over.\"\n\n\"You mean, they got rid of the 'no artificials' rule? That's wonderful!\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I mean she's over wanting to be a Rockette.\"\n\n\"Over?\"\n\n\"Oakes reprogrammed her.\"\n\n\"Reprogrammed her,\" I repeated dully. \"When?\"\n\n\"This morning. I thought you'd be pleased. It means you won't have to worry about her poaching your career anymore. Oh, and speaking of your career, Austerman called and said this'll be great publicity for Desk Set. You know, 'Only Human Actress Sends Artificial Packing.' He said it'll make you a shoo-in for the Tony nomination. So it's just like the ending of Bumpy Night, only this time Margo wins the Tony, not Eve.\"\n\n\"It wasn't a Tony,\" I said. \"It was the Sarah Siddons Award, which you'd know if you ever watched the play.\" Like Emily did, I thought.\n\n\"I don't know what you're so upset about,\" Torrance said. \"She changed her height and her measurements and her hair color. This is no different.\"\n\nYes, it is. \"Did they erase her entire memory?\" I asked. \"When they reprogrammed her?\" All those plays and cast lists and lines, all that Rockette history.\n\n\"No, no, nothing like that,\" Torrance said. \"According to Dr. Oakes, they just made a couple of adjustments to her software. They tamped down the preference thing so she wouldn't have such a strong response to the Rockette stimulus and adjusted her obstacle-to-action ratio. But she's still the same Emily.\"\n\nNo, she's not, I thought. The real Emily wanted to be a Rockette.\n\nSo here I am, standing in a freezing snow-rain mix in the leotard and fishnet stockings I swore I'd never be seen in, plus the trademark maroon-and-gold Rockette cap, which is doing nothing at all to keep the rain from dripping down the back of my neck.\n\nI am clutching a clipboard for warmth and trying not to shiver convulsively as I accost passersby and attempt to get them to sign a petition to get Emily's software put back the way they found it and the Rockettes' rules changed so she can have a shot at her heart's desire.\n\nAnd yes, I know artificials don't have hearts, and what about all the human girls out there between five foot six and five ten and a half with tap, jazz, and ballet experience whose job she'll be stealing?\n\nAnd yes, I know I'm probably also opening the floodgates to a horde of robots whose dream it is to be ballerinas and neurophysicists and traffic controllers, and that I'll go back to my dressing room some night in the near future to find some disarming young woman who's the spitting image of Anne Baxter and wants to be my assistant, and I'll be really sorry I did this.\n\nBut I didn't have any choice. When I announced I wanted to be on Broadway, my mother told me I'd be mugged and raped and pushed onto the subway tracks, my father told me I'd end up broke and waiting tables, and the first three agents and five directors I auditioned for told me to \"go back to Kansas and get married, sweetheart.\" Everybody had done everything they could think of to talk me out of it.\n\nBut they hadn't had me lobotomized. They hadn't cut out my stagestruck heart and replaced it with one that would have been willing to settle down in Topeka and have babies. Or adjusted my obstacle-to-action ratio so I'd give up and go home.\n\nSo here I stand, trying to blow some warmth into my frozen fingers and wishing I'd worn a warmer costume and that my skin turned rosy like Emily's when it gets cold.\n\nIt doesn't. When cellulite gets cold, it turns a mottled purple and ash gray. The rain's washed away every bit of my age-defying makeup; I've completely lost my voice from calling to passersby to come sign my petition, so heaven knows how I'm going to get through tonight's performance; and Torrance dropped by a few minutes ago to tell me I was making a fool of myself and jeopardizing the Desk Set lead and the Tony.\n\nAnd in three days out here I've collected signatures from exactly eighteen people, including Torrance (I told him if he didn't sign it, I was getting a new manager), Jorge (who said sternly, \"Now you know how it feels to be made to stand out in the freezing cold\"), and a couple of teenagers who didn't care what they were signing so long as it got them on TV.\n\nBut the camera crews left an hour ago, driven inside by the icy rain and the fact that nothing was happening, and now it looks like it's going to snow, so the only thing that will bring them back is the discovery of my huddled, frozen body in a snowdrift. Even the tourists are giving up and going home. In a few minutes the only people left on the premises will be the Rockettes, and I haven't seen hide nor hair of them since I started this. They must be going in and out a door on the other side of the building to avoid me.\n\nNo, wait, here comes one out of the same side door Emily used that night she ran away to talk to me. The young woman's definitely a Rockette. Her coffee-colored legs are even longer than Emily's, and she's dressed like a Christmas present, with a wide candy-cane-striped red and green sash slanting over one dark shoulder and tied in a Christmas bow at her hip.\n\nShe looks cautiously around, and I think, disappointed, She just sneaked out for a cigarette, but no, after a second look around, she shuts the door silently behind her and hurries over to me, her character heels tap-tap-tapping on the sidewalk.\n\n\"Hi, my name's Leonda,\" she says, hugging her arms to her chest. \"Brr, it's cold out here!\"\n\n\"Did you come out to sign my petition?\" I ask hopefully. The Rockettes resisted hiring minorities for a long time. They claimed audiences would be distracted if the Rockettes didn't all look exactly alike, including the color of their skin, and (according to Emily when she did the Today show) they'd resisted doing the right thing till 1982, when they'd finally hired the first African American, and three years after that, the first Asian American. Maybe Leonda heard Emily say that and decided she had to do the right thing, too, even if it did mean risking her job.\n\nOr not. \"Oh, no, I can't sign it,\" she says, glancing anxiously back at the side door. \"I just wanted to tell you what a wonderful actress I think you are, Miss Havilland. I saw you in The Drowsy Chaperone when I was a little girl, and you were amazing!\" She looks at me with starry eyes. \"Seeing you was why I decided to be a dancer, and I was wondering if I could have your autogr\u2014?\"\n\n\"Leonda!\" someone shouts from the door.\n\nAnother Rockette, dressed as a toy soldier, is leaning out, frowning. \"What are you doing out here?\" she says. \"You've got to get changed! It's almost time!\"\n\n\"I was just\u2026Sorry,\" she says to me, and runs back to the door, her taps echoing on the wet pavement.\n\n\"I'll give you my autograph if you'll sign my petition,\" I call after her, but she's already gone back inside, and it's clear they aren't going to rise to the occasion like they did when Radio City Music Hall was about to be torn down. Or maybe Emily was wrong about them, and they weren't wonderful. Maybe they hadn't been trying to do something noble after all. They'd just been trying to hang on to their jobs.\n\nAnd of course now that the two Rockettes are gone, a TMZ reporter and a cameraman with his videocam wrapped in plastic to protect it from the rain show up, looking annoyed. \"Where are the Rockettes?\" the reporter demands. \"We were told to get over here because something was going on. So where are they?\"\n\n\"There was one here just a minute ago,\" I say, but that's clearly not good enough, and to add insult to injury, a cab driver rolls down his window and leans out into the rain to shout, \"Traitor! What the hell are ya doin' standin' out there trying to get a robot a job? Why don't you stick up for your own kind, lady?\" and of course the cameraman's getting it all.\n\n\"That's First Lady of the Theater to you!\" I shout back at the cabbie, and he waves a hand dismissively and drives off.\n\n\"How do you answer that question?\" the reporter asks, sticking a microphone in my face. \"Why aren't you sticking up for your own kind?\"\n\n\"I am,\" I say. \"I'm sticking up for the Rockettes and for the theater. They've always stood courageously for doing what's right,\" a speech which would have been more impressive if I thought it was true. And if my teeth weren't chattering. \"I'm also, in spite of what he thinks, standing up for the human race. If we're going to make humanity such a hard show to get into, then we'd better make sure it's worth auditioning for by acting the way humans are supposed to.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"Humane.\"\n\n\"And that's why you're doing this,\" he says skeptically.\n\n\"Yes,\" I tell him, but I'm lying. I'm not doing this to defend a noble cause, or because Emily looked like Peggy in 42nd Street or the poor, doomed heroine of Our Town.\n\nI'm out here ruining my voice and my chance at ever getting a decent role again because that night in my limo, sitting there in her drenched coat, pouring out her nonexistent heart about tap steps and precision kicks, she had looked like me.\n\nAnd I realize for the first time that that's why Margo Channing helped Eve Harrington. Not because Eve manipulated her into it, but because when she looked at her, she saw her younger, stagestruck self, that girl who'd fallen in love, who just wanted a shot at doing what she'd been born to do.\n\nIf they ever do a revival of Bumpy Night and I get to play Margo again, I'll have to remember that. It could add a whole new dimension to the character.\n\nBut at this point, getting the part\u2014or any part, even Mama Morton\u2014looks extremely doubtful. The reporter wasn't at all impressed with my \"proud tradition of the theater and humanity\" speech. For the entire length of it, he was looking past me, scanning for possible Rockettes.\n\nBut they're not going to show, and the reporter's apparently reached the same conclusion. \"I told you they were getting us over here for nothing,\" he says to the cameraman.\n\nThe cameraman nods and lowers the plastic-covered camera from his shoulder.\n\n\"Let's go,\" the reporter says. \"I'm freezing my balls off out here.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" I say, grabbing his arm. \"Won't you at least sign my petition before you go?\" But they're not listening. They're looking over at the side door, which is opening again.\n\nIt's only Leonda, I think, back for a second try at an autograph\u2014which she is not going to get\u2014but it's not. It's the Rockette who yelled at her before. She's changed out of her toy soldier getup into the Rockettes' signature red and white fur Christmas costume, and, as we watch, she pushes the door wide, braces it open with her gold-shod foot, and makes a beckoning motion to whoever's inside.\n\nAnd out comes a Rockette dressed just like her who's\u2026oh, my God! holding a clipboard. And on her heels is another Rockette. And another. And Leonda, who as she passes me turns her clipboard so I can see the petition and whispers, \"I'd already signed mine. That's why I couldn't sign yours,\" and smiles a smile almost as sweet and disarming as Emily's.\n\n\"Are you getting this?\" I ask the cameraman, but of course he is. Because what a glorious sight! They march out, heads up, chests out, as oblivious to the frigid wind as if they were Emily, even though I know it's cutting right through those tights, right through the toes of those gold tap shoes.\n\nHere they come in a gorgeous, unending line that is going to go all the way around the building, every one of them in a red leotard and white fur hat. And TMZ isn't the only one getting this. Other camera crews are arriving every minute, and so are tourists, holding up their cell phones and Androids to record this. Taxi drivers are slowing down to whistle and cheer, Jorge shows up with a cup of hot brandy-laced coffee for me, and even though the Rockettes aren't even all out the door yet, people are flocking around them, wanting to sign their petitions. And mine.\n\nThe only thing that could make this a better finale is if it would start snowing, which it does just as the last of the Rockettes step smartly out the door. Starry white flakes fall on their white fur hats and their eyelashes as they move into position, and their cheeks are almost as pink as Emily's.\n\nThey take up their places, eighty Rockettes and\u2014I find out later\u2014thirty-two former Rockettes and every female dancer from A Chorus Line, Forbidden Planet, and Almost Human. And the chorus line from La Cage aux Folles. And they all stand there, backs straight, heads held high, facing into the bitter wind that seems always to be whipping around Radio City Music Hall, with their petitions and their fabulous legs and their knock-'em-dead smiles. And right now even I want to be a Rockette.\n\nThey're all in place now, every last one of them dressed in golden tap shoes and a red and white fur costume. Except for me. And the last eight out the door, who station themselves on either side of me, right beneath Radio City Music Hall's chrome-and-neon marquee.\n\nThey're dressed as robots." + }, + { + "title": "Inn", + "text": "Christmas Eve. The organ played the last notes of \"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,\" and the choir sat down. Reverend Wall hobbled slowly to the pulpit, clutching his sheaf of yellowed typewritten sheets.\n\nIn the choir, Dee leaned over to Sharon and whispered, \"Here we go. Twenty-four minutes and counting.\"\n\nOn Sharon's other side, Virginia murmured, \" 'And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.' \"\n\nReverend Wall set the papers on the pulpit, looked rheumily out over the congregation, and said, \" 'And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David. To be taxed with Mary, his espoused wife, being great with child.' \" He paused.\n\n\"We know nothing of that journey up from Nazareth,\" Virginia whispered.\n\n\"We know nothing of that journey up from Nazareth,\" Reverend Wall said, in a wavering voice, \"what adventures befell the young couple, what inns they stopped at along the way. All we know is that on a Christmas Eve like this one they arrived in Bethlehem, and there was no room for them at the inn.\"\n\nVirginia was scribbling something on the margin of her bulletin. Dee started to cough. \"Do you have any cough drops?\" she whispered to Sharon.\n\n\"What happened to the ones I gave you last night?\" Sharon whispered back.\n\n\"Though we know nothing of their journey,\" Reverend Wall said, his voice growing stronger, \"we know much of the world they lived in. It was a world of censuses and soldiers, of bureaucrats and politicians, a world busy with property and rules and its own affairs.\"\n\nDee started to cough again. She rummaged in the pocket of her music folder and came up with a paper-wrapped cough drop. She unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth.\n\n\"\u2026a world too busy with its own business to even notice an insignificant couple from far away,\" Reverend Wall intoned.\n\nVirginia passed her bulletin to Sharon. Dee leaned over to read it, too. It read, \"What happened here last night after the rehearsal? When I came home from the mall, there were police cars outside.\"\n\nDee grabbed the bulletin and rummaged in her folder again. She found a pencil, scribbled \"Somebody broke into the church,\" and passed it across Sharon to Virginia.\n\n\"You're kidding,\" Virginia whispered. \"Were they caught?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sharon said.\n\nThe rehearsal on the twenty-third was supposed to start at seven. By a quarter to eight the choir was still standing at the back of the sanctuary waiting to sing the processional, the shepherds and angels were bouncing off the walls, and Reverend Wall, in his chair behind the pulpit, had nodded off. The assistant minister, Reverend Lisa Farrison, was moving poinsettias onto the chancel steps to make room for the manger, and the choir director, Rose Henderson, was on her knees, hammering wooden bases onto the cardboard palm trees. They had fallen down twice already.\n\n\"What do you think are the chances we'll still be here when it's time for the Christmas Eve service to start tomorrow night?\" Sharon said, leaning against the sanctuary door.\n\n\"I can't be,\" Virginia said, looking at her watch. \"I've got to be out at the mall before nine. Megan suddenly announced she wants Senior Prom Barbie.\"\n\n\"My throat feels terrible,\" Dee said, feeling her glands. \"Is it hot in here, or am I getting a fever?\"\n\n\"It's hot in these robes,\" Sharon said. \"Why are we wearing them? This is a rehearsal.\"\n\n\"Rose wanted everything to be exactly like it's going to be tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"If I'm exactly like this tomorrow night, I'll be dead,\" Dee said, trying to clear her throat. \"I can't get sick. I don't have any of the presents wrapped, and I haven't even thought about what we're having for Christmas dinner.\"\n\n\"At least you have presents,\" Virginia said. \"I have eight people left to buy for. Not counting Senior Prom Barbie.\"\n\n\"I don't have anything done. Christmas cards, shopping, wrapping, baking, nothing, and Bill's parents are coming,\" Sharon said. \"Come on, let's get this show on the road.\"\n\nRose and one of the junior choir angels hoisted the palm trees to standing. They listed badly to the right, as if Bethlehem were experiencing a hurricane. \"Is that straight?\" Rose called to the back of the church.\n\n\"Yes,\" Sharon said.\n\n\"Lying in church,\" Dee said. \"Tsk, tsk.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Rose said, picking up a bulletin. \"Listen up, everybody. Here's the order of worship. Introit by the brass quartet, processional, opening prayer, announcements\u2014Reverend Farrison, is that where you want to talk about the 'Least of These' Project?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Reverend Farrison said. She walked to the front of the sanctuary. \"And can I make a quick announcement right now?\" She turned and faced the choir. \"If anybody has anything else to donate, you need to bring it to the church by tomorrow morning at nine,\" she said briskly. \"That's when we're going to deliver the donations to the homeless. We still need blankets and canned goods. Bring them to the Fellowship Hall.\"\n\nShe walked back down the aisle, and Rose started in on her list again. \"Announcements, 'O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,' Reverend Wall's sermon\u2014\"\n\nReverend Wall nodded awake at his name. \"Ah,\" he said, and hobbled toward the pulpit, clutching a sheaf of yellowed typewritten papers.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Sharon said. \"Not a Christmas pageant and a sermon. We'll be here forever.\"\n\n\"Not a sermon,\" Virginia said. \"The sermon. All twenty-four minutes of it. I've got it memorized. He's given it every year since he came.\"\n\n\"Longer than that,\" Dee said. \"I swear last year I heard him say something in it about World War I.\"\n\n\" 'And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city,' \" Reverend Wall said. \" 'And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth.' \"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Sharon said. \"He's going to give the whole sermon right now.\"\n\n\"We know nothing of that journey up from Bethlehem,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you, Reverend Wall,\" Rose said. \"After the sermon, the choir sings 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and Mary and Joseph\u2014\"\n\n\"What message does the story of their journey hold for us?\" Reverend Wall said, picking up steam.\n\nRose was hurrying up the aisle and up the chancel steps. \"Reverend Wall, you don't need to run through your sermon right now.\"\n\n\"What does it say to us,\" he asked, \"struggling to recover from a world war?\"\n\nDee nudged Sharon.\n\n\"Reverend Wall,\" Rose said, reaching the pulpit. \"I'm afraid we don't have time to go through your whole sermon right now. We need to run through the pageant now.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" he said, and gathered up his papers.\n\n\"All right,\" Rose said. \"The choir sings 'O Little Town of Bethlehem' and Mary and Joseph, you come down the aisle.\"\n\nMary and Joseph, wearing bathrobes and Birkenstocks, assembled themselves at the back of the sanctuary and started down the center aisle.\n\n\"No, no, Mary and Joseph, not that way,\" Rose said. \"The wise men from the East have to come down the center aisle, and you're coming up from Nazareth. You two come down the side aisle.\"\n\nMary and Joseph obliged, taking the aisle at a trot.\n\n\"No, no, slow down,\" Rose said. \"You're tired. You've walked all the way from Nazareth. Try it again.\"\n\nThey raced each other to the back of the church and started again, slower at first and then picking up speed.\n\n\"The congregation won't be able to see them,\" Rose said, shaking her head. \"What about lighting the side aisle? Can we do that, Reverend Farrison?\"\n\n\"She's not here,\" Dee said. \"She went to get something.\"\n\n\"I'll go get her,\" Sharon said, and went down the hall.\n\nMiriam Hoskins was just going into the adult Sunday school room with a paper plate of frosted cookies. \"Do you know where Reverend Farrison is?\" Sharon asked her.\n\n\"She was in the office a minute ago,\" Miriam said, pointing with the plate.\n\nSharon went down to the office. Reverend Farrison was standing at the desk, talking on the phone. \"How soon can the van be here?\" She motioned to Sharon she'd be a minute. \"Well, can you find out?\"\n\nSharon waited, looking at the desk. There was a glass dish of paper-wrapped cough drops next to the phone, and beside it a can of smoked oysters and three cans of water chestnuts. Probably for the 'Least of These' Project, she thought ruefully.\n\n\"Fifteen minutes? All right. Thank you,\" Reverend Farrison said, and hung up. \"Just a minute,\" she told Sharon, and went to the outside door. She opened it and leaned out. Sharon could feel the icy air as she stood there. She wondered if it had started snowing.\n\n\"The van will be here in a few minutes,\" Reverend Farrison said to someone outside.\n\nSharon looked out the stained-glass panels on either side of the door, trying to see who was out there.\n\n\"It'll take you to the shelter,\" Reverend Farrison said. \"No, you'll have to wait outside.\" She shut the door. \"Now,\" she said, turning to Sharon, \"what did you want, Mrs. Englert?\"\n\nSharon said, still looking out the window, \"They need you in the sanctuary.\" It was starting to snow. The flakes looked blue through the glass.\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" Reverend Farrison said. \"I was just taking care of some homeless. That's the second couple we've had tonight. We always get them at Christmas. What's the problem? The palm trees?\"\n\n\"What?\" Sharon said, still looking at the snow.\n\nReverend Farrison followed her gaze. \"The shelter van's coming for them in a few minutes,\" she said. \"We can't let them stay in here unsupervised. First Methodist's had their collection stolen twice in the last month, and we've got all the donations for the 'Least of These' Project in there.\" She gestured toward the Fellowship Hall.\n\nI thought they were for the homeless, Sharon thought. \"Couldn't they just wait in the sanctuary or something?\" she said.\n\nReverend Farrison sighed. \"Letting them in isn't doing them a kindness. They come here instead of the shelter because the shelter confiscates their liquor.\" She started down the hall. \"What did they need me for?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Sharon said, \"the lights. They wanted to know if they could get lights over the side aisle for Mary and Joseph.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"The lights in this church are such a mess.\" She stopped at the bank of switches next to the stairs that led down to the choir room and the Sunday school rooms. \"Tell me what this turns on.\"\n\nShe flicked a switch. The hall light went off. She switched it back on and tried another one.\n\n\"That's the light in the office,\" Sharon said, \"and the downstairs hall, and that one's the adult Sunday school room.\"\n\n\"What's this one?\" Reverend Farrison said. There was a yelp from the choir members. Kids screamed.\n\n\"The sanctuary,\" Sharon said. \"Okay, that's the side aisle lights.\" She called down to the sanctuary. \"How's that?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Rose called. \"No, wait, the organ's off.\"\n\nReverend Farrison flicked another switch, and the organ came on with a groan.\n\n\"Now the side lights are off,\" Sharon said, \"and so's the pulpit light.\"\n\n\"I told you they were a mess,\" Reverend Farrison said. She flicked another switch. \"What did that do?\"\n\n\"It turned the porch light off.\"\n\n\"Good. We'll leave it off. Maybe it will discourage any more homeless from coming,\" she said. \"Reverend Wall let a homeless man wait inside last week, and he relieved himself on the carpet in the adult Sunday school room. We had to have it cleaned.\" She looked reprovingly at Sharon. \"With these people, you can't let your compassion get the better of you.\"\n\nNo, Sharon thought. Jesus did, and look what happened to him.\n\n\"The innkeeper could have turned them away,\" Reverend Wall intoned. \"He was a busy man, and his inn was full of travelers. He could have shut the door on Mary and Joseph.\"\n\nVirginia leaned across Sharon to Dee. \"Did whoever broke in take anything?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sharon said.\n\n\"Whoever it was urinated on the floor in the nursery,\" Dee whispered, and Reverend Wall trailed off confusedly and looked over at the choir.\n\nDee began coughing loudly, trying to smother it with her hand. He smiled vaguely at her and started again. \"The innkeeper could have turned them away.\"\n\nDee waited a minute, and then opened her hymnal to her bulletin and began writing on it. She passed it to Virginia, who read it and then passed it back to Sharon.\n\n\"Reverend Farrison thinks some of the homeless got in,\" it read. \"They tore up the palm trees, too. Ripped the bases right off. Can you imagine anybody doing something like that?\"\n\n\"As the innkeeper found room for Mary and Joseph that Christmas Eve long ago,\" Reverend Wall said, building to a finish, \"let us find room in our hearts for Christ. Amen.\"\n\nThe organ began the intro to \"O Little Town of Bethlehem,\" and Mary and Joseph appeared at the back with Miriam Hoskins. She adjusted Mary's white veil and whispered something to them. Joseph pulled at his glued-on beard.\n\n\"What route did they finally decide on?\" Virginia whispered. \"In from the side or straight down the middle?\"\n\n\"Side aisle,\" Sharon whispered.\n\nThe choir stood up. \" 'O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie,' \" they sang. \" 'Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, the silent stars go by.' \"\n\nMary and Joseph started up the side aisle, taking the slow, measured steps Rose had coached them in, side by side. No, Sharon thought. That's not right. They didn't look like that. Joseph should be a little ahead of Mary, protecting her, and her hand should be on her stomach, protecting the baby.\n\nThey eventually decided to wait on the decision of how Mary and Joseph would come, and started through the pageant. Mary and Joseph knocked on the door of the inn, and the innkeeper, grinning broadly, told them there wasn't any room.\n\n\"Patrick, don't look so happy,\" Rose said. \"You're supposed to be in a bad mood. You're busy and tired, and you don't have any rooms left.\"\n\nPatrick attempted a scowl. \"I have no rooms left,\" he said, \"but you can stay in the stable.\" He led them over to the manger, and Mary knelt down behind it.\n\n\"Where's the baby Jesus?\" Rose said.\n\n\"He's not due till tomorrow night,\" Virginia whispered.\n\n\"Does anybody have a baby doll they can bring?\" Rose asked.\n\nOne of the angels raised her hand, and Rose said, \"Fine. Mary, use the blanket for now, and, choir, you sing the first verse of 'Away in a Manger.' Shepherds,\" she called to the back of the sanctuary, \"as soon as 'Away in a Manger' is over, come up and stand on this side.\" She pointed.\n\nThe shepherds picked up an assortment of hockey sticks, broom handles, and canes taped to one-by-twos and adjusted their headcloths.\n\n\"All right, let's run through it,\" Rose said. \"Organ?\"\n\nThe organ played the opening chord, and the choir stood up.\n\n\"A-way,\" Dee sang and started to cough, choking into her hand.\n\n\"Do\u2014cough\u2014drop?\" she managed to gasp out between spasms.\n\n\"I saw some in the office,\" Sharon said, and ran down the chancel steps, down the aisle, and out into the hall.\n\nIt was dark, but she didn't want to take the time to try to find the right switch. She could more or less see her way by the lights from the sanctuary, and she thought she knew right where the cough drops were.\n\nThe office lights were off, too, and the porch light Reverend Farrison had turned off to discourage the homeless. She opened the office door, felt her way over to the desk, and patted around till she found the glass dish. She grabbed a handful of cough drops and felt her way back out into the hall.\n\nThe choir was singing \"It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,\" but after two measures they stopped, and in the sudden silence Sharon heard knocking.\n\nShe started for the door and then hesitated, wondering if this was the same couple Reverend Farrison had turned away earlier, coming back to make trouble, but the knocking was soft, almost diffident, and through the stained-glass panels she could see it was snowing hard.\n\nShe switched the cough drops to her left hand, opened the door a little, and looked out. There were two people standing on the porch, one in front of the other. It was too dark to do more than make out their outlines, and at first glance it looked like two women, but then the one in front said in a young man's voice, \"Erkas.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Sharon said. \"I don't speak Spanish. Are you looking for a place to stay?\" The snow was turning to sleet, and the wind was picking up.\n\n\"Kumrah,\" the young man said, making a sound like he was clearing his throat, and then a whole string of words she didn't recognize.\n\n\"Just a minute,\" she said, and shut the door. She went back into the office, felt for the phone, and, squinting at the buttons in the near-darkness, punched in the shelter number.\n\nIt was busy. She held down the receiver, waited a minute, and tried again. Still busy. She went back to the door, hoping they'd given up and gone away.\n\n\"Erkas,\" the man said as soon as she opened it.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said. \"I'm trying to call the homeless shelter,\" and he began talking rapidly, excitedly.\n\nHe stepped forward and put his hand on the door. He had a blanket draped over him, which was why she'd mistaken him for a woman. \"Erkas,\" he said, and he sounded upset, desperate, and yet somehow still diffident, timid.\n\n\"Bott lom,\" he said, gesturing toward the woman, who was standing back almost to the edge of the porch, but Sharon wasn't looking at her. She was looking at their feet.\n\nThey were wearing sandals. At first she thought they were barefoot and she squinted through the darkness, horrified. Barefoot in the snow! Then she glimpsed the dark line of a strap, but they still might as well be. And it was snowing hard.\n\nShe couldn't leave them outside, but she didn't dare bring them into the hall to wait for the van either, not with Reverend Farrison around.\n\nThe office was out\u2014the phone might ring\u2014and she couldn't put them in the Fellowship Hall with all the stuff for the homeless in there.\n\n\"Just a minute,\" she said, shutting the door, and went to see if Miriam was still in the adult Sunday school room. It was dark, so she obviously wasn't, but there was a lamp on the table by the door. She switched it on. No, this wouldn't work either, not with the communion silver in a display case against the wall, and anyway, there was a stack of paper cups on the table, and the plates of Christmas cookies Miriam had been carrying, which meant there'd be refreshments in here after the rehearsal. She switched off the light, and went out into the hall.\n\nNot Reverend Wall's office\u2014it was locked anyway\u2014and certainly not Reverend Farrison's, and if she took them downstairs to one of the Sunday school rooms, she'd just have to sneak them back up again.\n\nThe furnace room? It was between the adult Sunday school room and the Fellowship Hall. She tried the doorknob. It opened, and she looked in. The furnace filled practically the whole room, and what it didn't was taken up by a stack of folding chairs. There wasn't a light switch she could find, but the pilot light gave off enough light to maneuver by. And it was warmer than the porch.\n\nShe went back to the door, looked down the hall to make sure nobody was coming, and let them in. \"You can wait in here,\" she said, even though it was obvious they couldn't understand her.\n\nThey followed her through the dark hall to the furnace room, and she opened out two of the folding chairs so they could sit down, and motioned them in.\n\n\"It Came Upon a Midnight Clear\" ground to a halt, and Rose's voice came drifting out of the sanctuary. \"Shepherd's crooks are not weapons. All right. Angel?\"\n\n\"I'll call the shelter,\" Sharon said hastily, and shut the door on them.\n\nShe crossed to the office and tried the shelter again. \"Please, please answer,\" she said, and when they did, she was so surprised, she forgot to tell them the couple would be inside.\n\n\"It'll be at least half an hour,\" the man said. \"Or forty-five minutes.\"\n\n\"Forty-five minutes?\"\n\n\"It's like this whenever it gets below zero,\" the man said. \"We'll try to make it sooner.\"\n\nAt least she'd done the right thing\u2014they couldn't possibly stand out in that snow for forty-five minutes. The right thing, she thought ruefully, sticking them in the furnace room. But at least it was warm in there and out of the snow. And they were safe, as long as nobody came out to see what had happened to her.\n\n\"Dee,\" she said suddenly. Sharon was supposed to have come out to get her some cough drops.\n\nThey were lying on the desk where she'd laid them while she phoned. She snatched them up and took off down the hall and into the sanctuary.\n\nThe angel was on the chancel steps, exhorting the shepherds not to be afraid. Sharon threaded her way through them up to the chancel and sat down between Dee and Virginia.\n\nShe handed the cough drops to Dee, who said, \"What took you so long?\"\n\n\"I had to make a phone call. What did I miss?\"\n\n\"Not a thing. We're still on the shepherds. One of the palm trees fell over and had to be fixed, and then Reverend Farrison stopped the rehearsal to tell everybody not to let homeless people into the church, that Holy Trinity had had its sanctuary vandalized.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said. She gazed out over the sanctuary, looking for Reverend Farrison.\n\n\"All right, now, after the angel makes her speech,\" Rose said, \"she's joined by a multitude of angels. That's you, junior choir. No. Line up on the steps. Organ?\"\n\nThe organ struck up \"Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,\" and the junior choir began singing in piping, nearly inaudible voices.\n\nSharon couldn't see Reverend Farrison anywhere. \"Do you know where Reverend Farrison went?\" she whispered to Dee.\n\n\"She went out just as you came in. She had to get something from the office.\"\n\nThe office. What if she heard them in the furnace room and opened the door and found them in there? She half stood.\n\n\"Choir,\" Rose said, glaring directly at Sharon. \"Will you help the junior choir by humming along with them?\"\n\nSharon sat back down, and after a minute Reverend Farrison came in from the back, carrying a pair of scissors.\n\n\" 'Late in time, behold Him come,' \" the junior choir sang, and Miriam stood up and went out.\n\n\"Where's Miriam going?\" Sharon whispered.\n\n\"How would I know?\" Dee said, looking curiously at her. \"To get the refreshments ready, probably. Is something the matter?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said.\n\nRose was glaring at Sharon again. Sharon hummed, \" 'Light and life to all He brings,' \" willing the song to be over so she could go out, but as soon as it was over, Rose said, \"All right, wise men,\" and a sixth-grader carrying a jewelry box started down the center aisle. \"Choir, 'We Three Kings.' Organ?\"\n\nThere were four long verses to \"We Three Kings of Orient Are.\" Sharon couldn't wait.\n\n\"I have to go to the bathroom,\" she said. She set her folder on her chair and ducked down the stairs behind the chancel and through the narrow room that led to the side aisle. The choir called it the flower room because that was where they stored the out-of-season altar arrangements. They used it for sneaking out when they needed to leave church early, but right now there was barely room to squeeze through. The floor was covered with music stands and pots of silk Easter lilies, and a huge spray of red roses stood in front of the door to the sanctuary.\n\nSharon shoved it into the corner, stepping gingerly among the lilies, and opened the door.\n\n\"Balthazar, lay the gold in front of the manger, don't drop it. Mary, you're the Mother of God. Try not to look so scared,\" Rose said.\n\nSharon hurried down the side aisle and out into the hall, where the other two kings were waiting, holding perfume bottles.\n\n\" 'Westward leading, still proceeding, guide us to thy perfect light,' \" the choir sang.\n\nThe hall and office lights were still off, but light was spilling out of the adult Sunday school room all the way to the end of the hall. She could see that the furnace room door was still shut.\n\nI'll call the shelter again, she thought, and see if I can hurry them up, and if I can't, I'll take them downstairs till everybody's gone, and then take them to the shelter myself.\n\nShe tiptoed past the open door of the adult Sunday school room so Miriam wouldn't see her, and then half sprinted down to the office and opened the door.\n\n\"Hi,\" Miriam said, looking up from the desk. She had an aluminum pitcher in one hand and was rummaging in the top drawer with the other. \"Do you know where the secretary keeps the key to the kitchen? It's locked, and I can't get in.\"\n\n\"No,\" Sharon said, her heart still pounding.\n\n\"I need a spoon to stir the Kool-Aid,\" Miriam said, opening and shutting the side drawers of the desk. \"She must have taken them home with her. I don't blame her. First Baptist had theirs stolen last month. They had to change all the locks.\"\n\nSharon glanced uneasily at the furnace room door.\n\n\"Oh, well,\" Miriam said, opening the top drawer again. \"I'll have to make do with this.\" She pulled out a plastic ruler. \"The kids won't care.\"\n\nShe started out and then stopped. \"They're not done in there yet, are they?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sharon said. \"They're still on the wise men. I needed to call my husband to tell him to take the turkey out of the freezer.\"\n\n\"I've got to do that when I get home,\" Miriam said. She went across the hall and into the library, leaving the door open. Sharon waited a minute and then called the shelter. It was busy. She held her watch to the light from the hall. They'd said half an hour to forty-five minutes. By that time the rehearsal would be over and the hall would be full of people.\n\nLess than half an hour. They were already singing \"Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume.\" All that was left was \"Silent Night\" and then \"Joy to the World,\" and the angels would come streaming out for cookies and Kool-Aid.\n\nShe went over to the front door and peered out. Below zero, the woman at the shelter had said, and now there was sleet, slanting sharply across the parking lot.\n\nShe couldn't send them out in that without any shoes. And she couldn't keep them up here, not with the kids right next door. She was going to have to move them downstairs.\n\nBut where? Not the choir room. The choir would be taking their folders and robes back down there, and the pageant kids would be getting their coats out of the Sunday school rooms. And the kitchen was locked.\n\nThe nursery? That might work. It was at the other end of the hall from the choir room, but she would have to take them past the adult Sunday school room to the stairs, and the door was open.\n\n\" 'Si-i-lent night, ho-oh-ly night,' \" came drifting out of the sanctuary, and then was cut off, and she could hear Reverend Farrison's voice lecturing, probably about the dangers of letting the homeless into the church.\n\nShe glanced again at the furnace room door and then went into the adult Sunday school room. Miriam was setting out the paper cups on the table. She looked up. \"Did you get through to your husband?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sharon said. Miriam looked expectant.\n\n\"Can I have a cookie?\" Sharon said at random.\n\n\"Take one of the stars. The kids like the Santas and the Christmas trees the best.\"\n\nShe grabbed up a bright yellow-frosted star. \"Thanks,\" she said, and went out, pulling the door shut behind her.\n\n\"Leave it open,\" Miriam said. \"I want to be able to hear when they're done.\"\n\nSharon opened the door back up half as far as she'd shut it, afraid any less would bring Miriam to the door to open it herself, and walked quietly to the furnace room.\n\nThe choir was on the last verse of \"Silent Night.\" After that there was only \"Joy to the World\" and then the benediction. Open door or no open door, she was going to have to move them now. She opened the furnace room door.\n\nThey were standing where she had left them between the folding chairs, and she knew, without any proof, that they had stood there like that the whole time she had been gone.\n\nThe young man was standing slightly in front of the woman, the way he had at the door, only he wasn't a man, he was a boy, his beard as thin and wispy as an adolescent's, and the woman was even younger, a child of ten maybe, only she had to be older, because now that there was light from the half-open door of the adult Sunday school room Sharon could see that she was pregnant.\n\nShe regarded all this\u2014the girl's awkward bulkiness and the boy's beard, the fact that they had not sat down, the fact that it was the light from the adult Sunday school room that was making her see now what she hadn't before\u2014with some part of her mind that was still functioning, that was still thinking how long the van from the shelter would take, how to get them past Reverend Farrison, some part of her mind that was taking in the details that proved what she had already known the moment she opened the door.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she whispered, and the boy opened his hands in a gesture of helplessness. \"Erkas,\" he said.\n\nAnd that still-functioning part of her mind put her fingers to her lips in a gesture he obviously understood because they both looked instantly frightened. \"You have to come with me,\" she whispered.\n\nBut then it stopped functioning altogether, and she was half running them past the open door and onto the stairs, not even hearing the organ blaring out \"Joy to the world, the Lord is come,\" whispering, \"Hurry! Hurry!\" and they didn't know how to get down the steps, the girl turned around and came down backwards, her hands flat on the steps above, and the boy helped her down, step by step, as if they were clambering down rocks, and she tried to pull the girl along faster and nearly made her stumble, and even that didn't bring her to her senses.\n\nShe hissed, \"Like this,\" and showed them how to walk down the steps, facing forward, one hand on the rail, and they paid no attention, they came down backwards like toddlers, and it took forever, the hymn she wasn't hearing was already at the end of the third verse and they were only halfway down, all of them panting hard, and Sharon scurrying back up above them as if that would hurry them, past wondering how she would ever get them up the stairs again, past thinking she would have to call the van and tell them not to come, thinking only, Hurry, hurry, and How did they get here?\n\nShe did not come to herself until she had herded them somehow down the hall and into the nursery, thinking, It can't be locked, please don't let it be locked, and it wasn't, and gotten them inside and pulled the door shut and tried to lock it, and it didn't have a lock, and she thought, That must be why it wasn't locked, an actual coherent thought, her first one since that moment when she opened the furnace room door, and seemed to come to herself.\n\nShe stared at them, breathing hard, and it was them, their never having seen stairs before was proof of that, if she needed any proof, but she didn't, she had known it the instant she saw them, there was no question.\n\nShe wondered if this was some sort of vision, the kind people were always getting where they saw Jesus's face on a refrigerator, or the Virgin Mary dressed in blue and white, surrounded by roses. But their rough brown cloaks were dripping melted snow on the nursery carpet, their feet in the useless sandals were bright red with cold, and they looked too frightened.\n\nAnd they didn't look at all like they did in religious pictures. They were too short, his hair was greasy and his face was tough-looking, like a young punk's, and her veil looked like a grubby dishtowel and it didn't hang loose, it was tied around her neck and knotted in the back, and they were too young, almost as young as the children upstairs dressed like them.\n\nThey were looking around the room frightenedly, at the white crib and the rocking chair and the light fixture overhead. The boy fumbled in his sash and brought out a leather sack. He held it out to Sharon.\n\n\"How did you get here?\" she said wonderingly. \"You're supposed to be on your way to Bethlehem.\"\n\nHe thrust the bag at her, and when she didn't take it, untied the leather string and took out a crude-looking coin and held it out.\n\n\"You don't have to pay me,\" she said, which was ridiculous. He couldn't understand her. She held a flat hand up, pushing the coin away and shaking her head. That was a universal sign, wasn't it? And what was the sign for welcome? She spread her arms out, smiling at the youngsters. \"You are welcome to stay here,\" she said, trying to put the meaning of the words into her voice. \"Sit down. Rest.\"\n\nThey remained standing. Sharon pulled the rocking chair. \"Sit, please.\"\n\nMary looked frightened, and Sharon put her hands on the arms of the chair and sat down to show her how. Joseph immediately knelt, and Mary tried awkwardly to.\n\n\"No, no!\" Sharon said, and stood up so fast she set the rocking chair swinging. \"Don't kneel. I'm nobody.\" She looked hopelessly at them. \"How did you get here? You're not supposed to be here.\"\n\nJoseph stood up. \"Erkas,\" he said, and went over to the bulletin board.\n\nIt was covered with colored pictures from Jesus's life: Jesus healing the lame boy, Jesus in the temple, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.\n\nHe pointed to the picture of the Nativity scene. \"Kumrah,\" he said.\n\nDoes he recognize himself? she wondered, but he was pointing at the donkey standing by the manger. \"Erkas,\" he said. \"Erkas.\"\n\nDid that mean \"donkey,\" or something else? Was he demanding to know what she had done with theirs, or trying to ask her if she had one? In all the pictures, all the versions of the story, Mary was riding a donkey, but she had thought they'd gotten that part of the story wrong, as they had gotten everything else wrong, their faces, their clothes, and above all their youth, their helplessness.\n\n\"Kumrah erkas,\" he said. \"Kumrah erkas. Bott lom?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"I don't know where Bethlehem is.\"\n\nOr what to do with you, she thought. Her first instinct was to hide them here until the rehearsal was over and everybody had gone home. She couldn't let Reverend Farrison find them.\n\nBut surely as soon as she saw who they were, she would\u2014what? Fall to her knees? Or call for the shelter's van? \"That's the second couple tonight,\" she'd said when she shut the door. Sharon wondered suddenly if it was them she'd turned away, if they'd wandered around the parking lot, lost and frightened, and then knocked on the door again.\n\nShe couldn't let Reverend Farrison find them, but there was no reason for her to come into the nursery. All the children were upstairs, and the refreshments were in the adult Sunday school room. But what if she checked the rooms before she locked up?\n\nI'll take them home with me, Sharon thought. They'll be safe there. If she could get them up the stairs and out of the parking lot before the rehearsal ended.\n\nI got them down here without anybody seeing them, she thought. But even if she could manage it, which she doubted, if they didn't die of fright when she started the car and the seat belts closed down over them, home was no better than the shelter.\n\nThey had gotten lost through some accident of time and space, and ended up at the church. The way back\u2014if there was a way back, there had to be a way back, they had to be at Bethlehem by tomorrow night\u2014was here.\n\nIt occurred to her suddenly that maybe she shouldn't have let them in, that the way back was outside the north door. But I couldn't not let them in, she protested, it was snowing, and they didn't have any shoes.\n\nBut maybe if she'd turned them away, they would have walked off the porch and back into their own time. Maybe they still could.\n\nShe said, \"Stay here,\" putting her hand up to show them what she meant, and went out of the nursery into the hall, shutting the door tightly behind her.\n\nThe choir was still singing \"Joy to the World.\" They must have had to stop again. Sharon ran silently up the stairs and past the adult Sunday school room. Its door was still half open, and she could see the plates of cookies on the table. She opened the north door, hesitating a moment as if she expected to see sand and camels, and leaned out. It was still sleeting, and the cars had an inch of snow on them.\n\nShe looked around for something to wedge the door open with, pushed one of the potted palms over, and went out on the porch. It was slick, and she had to take hold of the wall to keep her footing. She stepped carefully to the edge of the porch and peered into the sleet, already shivering, looking for what? A lessening of the sleet, a spot where the darkness was darker, or not so dark? A light?\n\nNothing. After a minute she stepped off the porch, moving as cautiously as Mary and Joseph had going down the stairs, and made a circuit of the parking lot.\n\nNothing. If the way back had been out here, it wasn't now, and she was going to freeze if she stayed out here. She went back inside, and then stood there, staring at the door, trying to think what to do. I've got to get help, she thought, hugging her arms to herself for warmth. I've got to tell somebody. She started down the hall to the sanctuary.\n\nThe organ had stopped. \"Mary and Joseph, I need to talk to you for a minute,\" Rose's voice said. \"Shepherds, leave your crooks on the front pew. The rest of you, there are refreshments in the adult Sunday school room. Choir, don't leave. I need to go over some things with you.\"\n\nThere was a clatter of sticks and then a stampede, and Sharon was overwhelmed by shepherds elbowing their way to the refreshments. One of the wise men caught his Air Jordan in his robe and nearly fell down, and two of the angels lost their tinsel halos in their eagerness to reach the cookies.\n\nSharon fought through them and into the back of the sanctuary. Rose was in the side aisle, showing Mary and Joseph how to walk, and the choir was gathering up their music. Sharon couldn't see Dee.\n\nVirginia came down the center aisle, stripping off her robe as she walked. Sharon went to meet her. \"Do you know where Dee is?\" she asked her.\n\n\"She went home,\" Virginia said, handing Sharon a folder. \"You left this on your chair. Dee's voice was giving out completely, and I said, 'This is silly. Go home and go to bed.' \"\n\n\"Virginia\u2026\" Sharon said.\n\n\"Can you put my robe away for me?\" Virginia said, pulling her stole off her head. \"I've got exactly ten minutes to get to the mall.\"\n\nSharon nodded absently, and Virginia draped it over her arm and hurried out. Sharon scanned the choir, wondering who else she could confide in.\n\nRose dismissed Mary and Joseph, who went off at a run, and crossed to the center aisle. \"Rehearsal tomorrow night at 6:15,\" she said. \"I need you in your robes and up here right on time, because I've got to practice with the brass quartet at 6:40. Any questions?\"\n\nYes, Sharon thought, looking around the sanctuary. Who can I get to help me?\n\n\"What are we singing for the processional?\" one of the tenors asked.\n\n\" 'Adeste Fideles,' \" Rose said. \"Before you leave, let's line up so you can see who your partner is.\"\n\nReverend Wall was sitting in one of the back pews, looking at the notes to his sermon. Sharon sidled along the pew and sat down next to him.\n\n\"Reverend Wall,\" she said, and then had no idea how to start. \"Do you know what erkas means? I think it's Hebrew.\"\n\nHe raised his head from his notes and peered at her. \"It's Aramaic. It means 'lost.' \"\n\n\"Lost.\" He'd been trying to tell her at the door, in the furnace room, downstairs. \"We're lost.\"\n\n\" 'Forgotten,' \" Reverend Wall said. \" 'Misplaced.' \"\n\nMisplaced, all right. By two thousand years, an ocean, and how many miles?\n\n\"When Mary and Joseph journeyed up to Bethlehem from Nazareth, how did they go?\" she asked, hoping he would say, \"Why are you asking all these questions?\" so she could tell him, but he said, \"Ah. You weren't listening to my sermon. We know nothing of that journey, only that they arrived in Bethlehem.\"\n\nNot at this rate, she thought.\n\n\"Pass in the anthem,\" Rose said from the chancel. \"I've only got thirty copies, and I don't want to come up short tomorrow night.\"\n\nSharon looked up. The choir was leaving. \"On this journey, was there anyplace where they might have gotten lost?\" she said hurriedly.\n\n\"Erkas can also mean 'hidden, passed out of sight,' \" he said. \"Aramaic is very similar to Hebrew. In Hebrew, the word\u2014\"\n\n\"Reverend Wall,\" Reverend Farrison said from the center aisle. \"I need to talk to you about the benediction.\"\n\n\"Ah. Do you want me to give it now?\" he said, and stood up, clutching his papers.\n\nSharon took the opportunity to grab her folder and duck out. She ran downstairs after the choir.\n\nThere was no reason for any of the choir to go into the nursery, but she stationed herself in the hall, sorting through the music in her folder as if she were putting it in order, and trying to think what to do.\n\nMaybe, if everyone went into the choir room, she could duck into the nursery or one of the Sunday school rooms and hide until everybody was gone. But she didn't know whether Reverend Farrison checked each of the rooms before leaving. Or worse, locked them.\n\nShe could tell her she needed to stay late, to practice the anthem, but she didn't think Reverend Farrison would trust her to lock up, and she didn't want to call attention to herself, to make Reverend Farrison think, \"Where's Sharon Englert? I didn't see her leave.\" Maybe she could hide in the chancel, or the flower room, but that meant leaving the nursery unguarded.\n\nShe had to decide. The crowd was thinning out, the choir handing Rose their music and putting on their coats and boots. She had to do something. Reverend Farrison could come down the stairs any minute to search the nursery. But she continued to stand there, sorting blindly through her music, and Reverend Farrison came down the steps, carrying a ring of keys.\n\nSharon stepped back protectively, the way Joseph had, but Reverend Farrison didn't even see her. She went up to Rose and said, \"Can you lock up for me? I've got to be at Emmanuel Lutheran at 9:30 to collect their 'Least of These' contributions.\"\n\n\"I was supposed to go meet with the brass quartet\u2014\" Rose said reluctantly.\n\nDon't let Rose talk you out of it, Sharon thought.\n\n\"Be sure to lock all the doors, including the Fellowship Hall,\" Reverend Farrison said, handing her the keys.\n\n\"No, I've got mine,\" Rose said. \"But\u2014\"\n\n\"And check the parking lot. There were some homeless hanging around earlier. Thanks.\"\n\nShe ran upstairs, and Sharon immediately went over to Rose. \"Rose,\" she said.\n\nRose held out her hand for Sharon's anthem.\n\nSharon shuffled through her music and handed it to her. \"I was wondering,\" she said, trying to keep her voice casual, \"I need to stay and practice the music for tomorrow. I'd be glad to lock up for you. I could drop the keys by your house tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're a godsend,\" Rose said. She handed Sharon the stack of music and got her keys out of her purse. \"These are the keys to the outside doors, north door, east door, Fellowship Hall,\" she said, ticking them off so fast, Sharon couldn't see which was which, but it didn't matter. She could figure them out after everybody left.\n\n\"This is the choir room door,\" Rose said. She handed them to Sharon. \"I really appreciate this. The brass quartet couldn't come to the rehearsal, they had a concert tonight, and I really need to go over the introit with them. They're having a terrible time with the middle part.\"\n\nSo am I, Sharon thought.\n\nRose yanked on her coat. \"And after I meet with them, I've got to go over to Sara Berg's and pick up the baby Jesus.\" She stopped, her arm half in her coat sleeve. \"Did you need me to stay and go over the music with you?\"\n\n\"No!\" Sharon said, alarmed. \"No, I'll be fine. I just need to run through it a couple of times.\"\n\n\"Okay. Great. Thanks again,\" she said, patting her pockets for her keys. She took the key ring away from Sharon and unhooked her car keys. \"You're a godsend, I mean it,\" she said, and took off up the stairs at a trot.\n\nTwo of the altos came out, pulling on their gloves. \"Do you know what I've got to face when I get home?\" Julia said. \"Putting up the tree.\"\n\nThey handed their music to Sharon.\n\n\"I hate Christmas,\" Karen said. \"By the time it's over, I'm worn to a frazzle.\"\n\nThey hurried up the stairs, still talking, and Sharon leaned into the choir room to make sure it was empty, dumped the music and Rose's robe on a chair, took off her robe, and went upstairs.\n\nMiriam was coming out of the adult Sunday school room, carrying a pitcher of Kool-Aid. \"Come on, Elizabeth,\" she called into the room. \"We've got to get to Buymore before it closes. She managed to completely destroy her halo,\" she said to Sharon, \"so now I've got to go buy some more tinsel. Elizabeth, we're the last ones here.\"\n\nElizabeth strolled out, holding a Christmas tree cookie in her mittened hand. She stopped halfway to the door to lick the cookie's frosting.\n\n\"Elizabeth,\" Miriam said. \"Come on.\"\n\nSharon held the door for them, and Miriam went out, ducking her head against the driving sleet. Elizabeth dawdled after her, looking up at the sky.\n\nMiriam waved. \"See you tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"I'll be here,\" Sharon said, and shut the door. I'll still be here, she thought. And what if they are? What happens then? Does the Christmas pageant disappear, and all the rest of it? The cookies and the shopping and the Senior Prom Barbies? And the church?\n\nShe watched Miriam and Elizabeth through the stained-glass panel till she saw the car's taillights, purple through the blue glass, pull out of the parking lot, and then tried the keys one after the other, till she found the right one, and locked the door.\n\nShe checked quickly in the sanctuary and the bathrooms, in case somebody was still there, and then ran down the stairs to the nursery to make sure they were still there, that they hadn't disappeared.\n\nThey were there, sitting on the floor next to the rocking chair and sharing what looked like dried dates from an unfolded cloth. Joseph started to stand up as soon as he saw her poke her head in the door, but she motioned him back down. \"Stay here,\" she said softly, and realized she didn't need to whisper. \"I'll be back in a few minutes. I'm just going to lock the doors.\"\n\nShe pulled the door shut, and went back upstairs. It hadn't occurred to her they'd be hungry, and she had no idea what they were used to eating\u2014unleavened bread? Lamb? Whatever it was, there probably wasn't any in the kitchen, but the deacons had had an Advent supper last week. With luck, there might be some chili in the refrigerator. Or, better yet, some crackers.\n\nThe kitchen was locked. She'd forgotten Miriam had said that, and anyway, one of the keys must open it. None of them did, and after she'd tried all of them twice she remembered they were Rose's keys, not Reverend Farrison's, and turned the lights on in the Fellowship Hall. There was tons of food in there, stacked on tables alongside the blankets and used clothes and toys. And all of it was in cans, just the way Reverend Farrison had specified in the bulletin.\n\nMiriam had taken the Kool-Aid home, but Sharon hadn't seen her carrying any cookies. The kids probably ate them all, she thought, but she went into the adult Sunday school room and looked. There was half a paper plateful left, and Miriam had been right\u2014the kids liked the Christmas trees and Santas the best\u2014the only ones left were yellow stars. There was a stack of paper cups, too. She picked them both up and took them downstairs.\n\n\"I brought you some food,\" she said, and set the plate on the floor between them.\n\nThey were staring in alarm at her, and Joseph was scrambling to his feet.\n\n\"It's food,\" she said, bringing her hand to her mouth and pretending to chew. \"Cakes.\"\n\nJoseph was pulling on Mary's arm, trying to yank her up, and they were both staring, horrified, at her jeans and sweatshirt. She realized suddenly they must not have recognized her without her choir robe. Worse, the robe looked at least a little like their clothes, but this getup must have looked totally alien.\n\n\"I'll bring you something to drink,\" she said hastily, showing them the paper cups, and went out. She ran down to the choir room. Her robe was still draped over the chair where she'd dumped it, along with Rose's and the music. She put the robe on and then filled the paper cups at the water fountain and carried them back to the nursery.\n\nThey were standing, but when they saw her in the robe, they sat back down. She handed Mary one of the paper cups, but she only looked at her fearfully. Sharon held it out to Joseph. He took it, too firmly, and it crumpled, water spurting onto the carpet.\n\n\"That's okay, it doesn't matter,\" Sharon said, cursing herself for being an idiot. \"I'll get you a real cup.\"\n\nShe ran upstairs, trying to think where there would be one. The coffee cups were in the kitchen, and so were the glasses, and she hadn't seen anything in the Fellowship Hall or the adult Sunday school room.\n\nShe smiled suddenly. \"I'll get you a real cup,\" she repeated, and went into the adult Sunday school room and took the silver Communion chalice out of the display case. There were silver plates, too. She wished she'd thought of it sooner.\n\nShe went into the Fellowship Hall and got a blanket and took the things downstairs. She filled the chalice with water and took it in to them, and handed Mary the chalice, and this time Mary took it without hesitation and drank deeply from it.\n\nSharon gave Joseph the blanket. \"I'll leave you alone so you can eat and rest,\" she said, and went out into the hall, pulling the door nearly shut again.\n\nShe went down to the choir room and hung up Rose's robe and stacked the music neatly on the table. Then she went up to the furnace room and folded up the folding chairs and stacked them against the wall. She checked the east door and the one in the Fellowship Hall. They were both locked.\n\nShe turned off the lights in the Fellowship Hall and the office, and then thought, I should call the shelter, and turned them back on. It had been an hour since she'd called. They had probably already come and not found anyone, but in case they were running really late, she'd better call.\n\nThe line was busy. She tried it twice and then called home. Bill's parents were there. \"I'm going to be late,\" she told him. \"The rehearsal's running long,\" and hung up, wondering how many lies she'd told so far tonight.\n\nWell, it went with the territory, didn't it? Joseph lying about the baby being his, and the wise men sneaking out the back way, the Holy Family hightailing it to Egypt and the innkeeper lying to Herod's soldiers about where they'd gone.\n\nAnd in the meantime, more hiding. She went back downstairs and opened the door gently, trying not to startle them, and then just stood there, watching.\n\nThey had eaten the cookies. The empty paper plate stood on the floor next to the chalice, not a crumb on it. Mary lay curled up like the child she was under the blanket, and Joseph sat with his back to the rocking chair, guarding her.\n\nPoor things, she thought, leaning her cheek against the door. Poor things. So young, and so far away from home. She wondered what they made of it all. Did they think they had wandered into a palace in some strange kingdom? There's stranger yet to come, she thought, shepherds and angels and old men from the east, bearing jewelry boxes and perfume bottles. And then Cana. And Jerusalem. And Golgotha.\n\nBut for the moment, a place to sleep, out of the weather, and something to eat, and a few minutes of peace. How still we see thee lie. She stood there a long time, her cheek resting against the door, watching Mary sleep and Joseph trying to stay awake.\n\nHis head nodded forward, and he jerked it back, waking himself up, and saw Sharon. He stood up immediately, careful not to wake Mary, and came over to her, looking worried. \"Erkas kumrah,\" he said. \"Bott lom?\"\n\n\"I'll go find it,\" she said.\n\nShe went upstairs and turned the lights on again and went into the Fellowship Hall. The way back wasn't out the north door, but maybe they had knocked at one of the other doors first and then come around to it when no one answered. The Fellowship Hall door was on the northwest corner. She unlocked it, trying key after key, and opened it. The sleet was slashing down harder than ever. It had already covered up the tire tracks in the parking lot.\n\nShe shut the door and tried the east door, which nobody used except for the Sunday service, and then the north door again. Nothing. Sleet and wind and icy air.\n\nNow what? They had been on their way to Bethlehem from Nazareth, and somewhere along the way they had taken a wrong turn. But how? And where? She didn't even know what direction they'd been heading in. Up. Joseph had gone up from Nazareth, which meant north, and in \"The First Nowell\" it said the star was in the northwest.\n\nShe needed a map. The ministers' offices were locked, but there were books on the bottom shelf of the display case in the adult Sunday school room. Maybe one was an atlas.\n\nIt wasn't. They were all self-help books, about coping with grief and codependency and teenage pregnancy, except for an ancient-looking concordance and a Bible dictionary.\n\nThe Bible dictionary had a set of maps at the back. Early Israelite Settlements in Canaan, The Assyrian Empire, The Wanderings of the Israelites in the Wilderness. She flipped forward. The Journeys of Paul. She turned back a page. Palestine in New Testament Times.\n\nShe found Jerusalem easily, and Bethlehem should be northwest of it. There was Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph had started from, so Bethlehem had to be farther north.\n\nIt wasn't there. She traced her finger over the towns, reading the tiny print. Cana, Kedesh, Jericho, but no Bethlehem. Which was ridiculous. It had to be there. She started down from the north, marking each of the towns with her finger.\n\nWhen she finally found it, it wasn't at all where it was supposed to be. Like them, she thought. It was south and a little west of Jerusalem, so close it couldn't be more than a few miles from the city.\n\nShe looked down at the bottom of the page for the map scale, and there was an inset labeled \"Mary and Joseph's Journey to Bethlehem,\" with their route marked in broken red.\n\nNazareth was almost due north of Bethlehem, but they had gone east to the Jordan River, and then south along its banks. At Jericho they'd turned back west toward Jerusalem through an empty brown space marked Judean Desert.\n\nShe wondered if that was where they had gotten lost, the donkey wandering off to find water and them going after it and losing the path. If it was, then the way back lay southwest, but the church didn't have any doors that opened in that direction, and even if it did, they would open on a twentieth-century parking lot and snow, not on first-century Palestine.\n\nHow had they gotten here? There was nothing in the map to tell her what might have happened on their journey to cause this.\n\nShe put the dictionary back and pulled out the concordance.\n\nThere was a sound. A key, and somebody opening the door. She slapped the book shut, shoved it back into the bookcase, and went out into the hall. Reverend Farrison was standing at the door, looking scared. \"Oh, Mrs. Englert,\" she said, putting her hand to her chest. \"What are you still doing here? You scared me half to death.\"\n\nThat makes two of us, Sharon thought, her heart thumping. \"I had to stay and practice,\" she said. \"I told Rose I'd lock up. What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I got a call from the shelter,\" she said, opening the office door. \"They got a call from us to pick up a homeless couple, but when they got here there was nobody outside.\"\n\nShe went in the office and looked behind the desk, in the corner next to the filing cabinets. \"I was worried they got into the church,\" she said, coming out. \"The last thing we need is someone vandalizing the church two days before Christmas.\" She shut the office door behind her. \"Did you check all the doors?\"\n\nYes, she thought, and none of them led anywhere. \"Yes,\" she said. \"They were all locked. And anyway, I would have heard anybody trying to get in. I heard you.\"\n\nReverend Farrison opened the door to the furnace room. \"They could have sneaked in and hidden when everyone was leaving.\" She looked in at the stacked folding chairs and then shut the door. She started down the hall toward the stairs.\n\n\"I checked the whole church,\" Sharon said, following her.\n\nShe stopped at the stairs, looking speculatively down the steps.\n\n\"I was nervous about being alone,\" Sharon said desperately, \"so I turned on all the lights and checked all the Sunday school rooms and the choir room and the bathrooms. There isn't anybody here.\"\n\nShe looked up from the stairs and toward the end of the hall. \"What about the sanctuary?\"\n\n\"The sanctuary?\" Sharon said blankly.\n\nShe had already started down the hall toward it, and Sharon followed her, relieved, and then, suddenly, hopeful. Maybe there was a door she'd missed. A sanctuary door that faced southwest. \"Is there a door in the sanctuary?\"\n\nReverend Farrison looked irritated. \"If someone went out the east door, they could have gotten in and hidden in the sanctuary. Did you check the pews?\" She went into the sanctuary. \"We've had a lot of trouble lately with homeless people sleeping in the pews. You take that side, and I'll take this one,\" she said, going over to the side aisle. She started along the rows of padded pews, bending down to look under each one. \"Our Lady of Sorrows had their Communion silver stolen right off the altar.\"\n\nThe Communion silver, Sharon thought, working her way along the rows. She'd forgotten about the chalice.\n\nReverend Farrison had reached the front. She opened the flower room door, glanced in, closed it, and went up into the chancel. \"Did you check the adult Sunday school room?\" she said, bending down to look under the chairs.\n\n\"Nobody could have hidden in there. The junior choir was in there, having refreshments,\" Sharon said, and knew it wouldn't do any good. Reverend Farrison was going to insist on checking it anyway, and once she'd found the display case open, the chalice missing, she would go through all the other rooms, one after the other. Till she came to the nursery.\n\n\"Do you think it's a good idea us doing this?\" Sharon said. \"I mean, if there is somebody in the church, they might be dangerous. I think we should wait. I'll call my husband, and when he gets here, the three of us can check\u2014\"\n\n\"I called the police,\" Reverend Farrison said, coming down the steps from the chancel and down the center aisle. \"They'll be here any minute.\"\n\nThe police. And there they were, hiding in the nursery, a bearded punk and a pregnant teenager, caught red-handed with the Communion silver.\n\nReverend Farrison started out into the hall.\n\n\"I didn't check the Fellowship Hall,\" Sharon said rapidly. \"I mean, I checked the door, but I didn't turn on the lights, and with all those presents for the homeless in there\u2026\"\n\nShe led Reverend Farrison down the hall, past the stairs. \"They could have gotten in the north door during the rehearsal and hidden under one of the tables.\"\n\nReverend Farrison stopped at the bank of lights and began flicking them. The sanctuary lights went off, and the light over the stairs came on.\n\nThird from the top, Sharon thought, watching Reverend Farrison hit the switch. Please. Don't let the adult Sunday school room come on.\n\nThe office lights came on, and the hall light went out. \"This church's top priority after Christmas is labeling these lights,\" Reverend Farrison said, and the Fellowship Hall light came on.\n\nSharon followed her right to the door and then, as Reverend Farrison went in, Sharon said, \"You check in here. I'll check the adult Sunday school room,\" and shut the door on her.\n\nShe went to the adult Sunday school room door, opened it, waited a full minute, and then shut it silently. She crept down the hall to the light bank, switched the stairs light off and shot down the darkened stairs, along the hall, and into the nursery.\n\nThey were already scrambling to their feet. Mary had put her hand on the seat of the rocking chair to pull herself up and had set it rocking, but she didn't let go of it.\n\n\"Come with me,\" Sharon whispered, grabbing up the chalice. It was half full of water, and Sharon looked around hurriedly, and then poured it out on the carpet and tucked it under her arm.\n\n\"Hurry!\" Sharon whispered, opening the door, and there was no need to motion them forward, to put her fingers to her lips. They followed her swiftly, silently, down the hall, Mary's head ducked, and Joseph's arms held at his sides, ready to come up defensively, ready to protect her.\n\nSharon walked to the stairs, dreading the thought of trying to get them up them. She thought for a moment of putting them in the choir room and locking them in. She had the key, and she could tell Reverend Farrison she'd checked it and then locked it to make sure no one got in. But if it didn't work, they'd be trapped, with no way out. She had to get them upstairs.\n\nShe halted at the foot of the stairs, looking up around the landing and listening. \"We have to hurry,\" she said, taking hold of the railing to show them how to climb, and started up the stairs.\n\nThis time they did much better, still putting their hands on the steps in front of them instead of the rail, but climbing up quickly. Three-fourths of the way up, Joseph even took hold of the rail.\n\nSharon did better, too, her mind steadily now on how to escape Reverend Farrison, what to say to the police, where to take them.\n\nNot the furnace room, even though Reverend Farrison had already looked in there. It was too close to the door, and the police would start with the hall. And not the sanctuary. It was too open.\n\nShe stopped just below the top of the stairs, motioning them to keep down, and they instantly pressed themselves back into the shadows. Why was it those signals were universal\u2014danger, silence, run? Because it's a dangerous world, she thought, then and now, and there's worse to come. Herod, and the flight into Egypt. And Judas. And the police.\n\nShe crept to the top of the stairs and looked toward the sanctuary and then the door. Reverend Farrison must still be in the Fellowship Hall. She wasn't in the hall, and if she'd gone in the adult Sunday school room, she'd have seen the chalice was missing and sent up a hue and cry.\n\nSharon bit her lip, wondering if there was time to put it back, if she dared leave them here on the stairs while she sneaked in and put it in the display case, but it was too late. The police were here. She could see their red and blue lights flashing purply through the stained-glass door panels. In another minute they'd be at the door, knocking, and Reverend Farrison would come out of the Fellowship Hall, and there'd be no time for anything.\n\nShe'd have to hide them in the sanctuary until Reverend Farrison took the police downstairs, and then move them\u2014where? The furnace room? It was still too close to the door. The Fellowship Hall?\n\nShe waved them upward, like John Wayne in one of his war movies, along the hall and into the sanctuary. Reverend Farrison had turned off the lights, but there was still enough light from the chancel cross to see by. She laid the chalice in the back pew and led them along the back row to the shadowed side aisle, and then pushed them ahead of her to the front, listening intently for the sound of knocking.\n\nJoseph went ahead with his eyes on the ground, as if he expected more sudden stairs, but Mary had her head up, looking toward the chancel, toward the cross.\n\nDon't look at it, Sharon thought. Don't look at it. She hurried ahead to the flower room.\n\nThere was a muffled sound like thunder, and the bang of a door shutting.\n\n\"In here,\" she whispered, and opened the flower room door.\n\nShe'd been on the other side of the sanctuary when Reverend Farrison checked the flower room. Sharon understood now why she had given it only the most cursory of glances. It had been full before. Now it was crammed with the palm trees and the manger. They'd heaped the rest of the props in it\u2014the innkeeper's lantern and the baby blanket. She pushed the manger back, and one of its crossed legs caught on a music stand and tipped it over. She lunged for it, steadied it, and then stopped, listening.\n\nKnocking out in the hall. And the sound of a door shutting. Voices. She let go of the music stand and pushed them into the flower room, shoving Mary into the corner against the spray of roses and nearly knocking over another music stand.\n\nShe motioned to Joseph to stand on the other side and flattened herself against a palm tree, shut the door, and realized the moment she did that it was a mistake.\n\nThey couldn't stand here in the dark like this\u2014the slightest movement by any of them would bring everything clattering down, and Mary couldn't stay squashed uncomfortably into the corner like that for long.\n\nShe should have left the door slightly open, so there was enough light from the cross to see by, so she could hear where the police were. She couldn't hear anything with the door shut except the sound of their own light breathing and the clank of the lantern when she tried to shift her weight, and she couldn't risk opening the door again, not when they might already be in the sanctuary, looking for her. She should have shut Mary and Joseph in here and gone back into the hall to head the police off. Reverend Farrison would be looking for her, and if she didn't find her, she'd take it as one more proof that there was a dangerous homeless person in the church and insist on the police searching every nook and cranny.\n\nMaybe she could go out through the choir loft, Sharon thought, if she could move the music stands out of the way, or at least shift things around so they could hide behind them, but she couldn't do either in the dark.\n\nShe knelt carefully, slowly, keeping her back perfectly straight, and put her hand out behind her, feeling for the top of the manger. She patted spiky straw till she found the baby blanket and pulled it out. They must have put the wise men's perfume bottles in the manger, too. They clinked wildly as she pulled the blanket out.\n\nShe knelt farther, feeling for the narrow space under the door, and jammed the blanket into it. It didn't quite reach the whole length of the door, but it was the best she could do. She straightened, still slowly, and patted the wall for the light switch.\n\nHer hand brushed it. Please, she prayed, don't let this turn on some other light, and flicked it on.\n\nNeither of them had moved, not even to shift their hands. Mary, pressed against the roses, took a caught breath, and then released it slowly, as if she had been holding it the whole time.\n\nThey watched Sharon as she knelt again to tuck in a corner of the blanket and then turned slowly around so she was facing into the room. She reached across the manger for one of the music stands and stacked it against the one behind it, working as gingerly, as slowly, as if she were defusing a bomb. She reached across the manger again, lifted one of the music stands, and set it on the straw so she could push the manger back far enough to give her space to move. The stand tipped, and Joseph steadied it.\n\nSharon picked up one of the cardboard palm trees. She worked the plywood base free, set it in the manger, and slid the palm tree flat along the wall next to Mary, and then did the other one.\n\nThat gave them some space. There was nothing Sharon could do about the rest of the music stands. Their metal frames were tangled together, and against the outside wall was a tall metal cabinet, with pots of Easter lilies in front of it. She could move the lilies to the top of the cabinet at least.\n\nShe listened carefully with her ear to the door for a minute, and then stepped carefully over the manger between two lilies. She bent and picked up one of them and set it on top of the cabinet and then stopped, frowning at the wall. She bent down again, moving her hand along the floor in a slow semicircle.\n\nCold air, and it was coming from behind the cabinet. She stood on tiptoe and looked behind it. \"There's a door,\" she whispered. \"To the outside.\"\n\n\"Sharon!\" a muffled voice called from the sanctuary.\n\nMary froze, and Joseph moved so he was between her and the door. Sharon put her hand on the light switch and waited, listening.\n\n\"Mrs. Englert?\" a man's voice called. Another one, farther off, \"Her car's still here,\" and then Reverend Farrison's voice again, \"Maybe she went downstairs.\"\n\nSilence. Sharon put her ear against the door and listened, and then edged past Joseph to the side of the cabinet and peered behind it. The door opened outward. They wouldn't have to move the cabinet out very far, just enough for her to squeeze through and open the door, and then there'd be enough space for all of them to get through, even Mary. There were bushes on this side of the church. They could hide underneath them until after the police left.\n\nShe motioned Joseph to help her, and together they pushed the cabinet a few inches out from the wall. It knocked one of the Easter lilies over, and Mary stooped awkwardly and picked it up, cradling it in her arms.\n\nThey pushed again. This time it made a jangling noise, as if there were coat hangers inside, and Sharon thought she heard voices again, but there was no help for it. She squeezed into the narrow space, thinking, What if it's locked? and opened the door.\n\nOnto warmth. Onto a clear sky, black and pebbled with stars.\n\n\"How\u2014\" she said stupidly, looking down at the ground in front of the door. It was rocky, with bare dirt in between. There was a faint breeze, and she could smell dust and something sweet. Oranges?\n\nShe turned to say, \"I found it. I found the door,\" but Joseph was already leading Mary through it, pushing at the cabinet to make the space wider. Mary was still carrying the Easter lily, and Sharon took it from her and set it against the base of the door to prop it open and went out into the darkness.\n\nThe light from the open door lit the ground in front of them and at its edge was a stretch of pale dirt. The path, she thought, but when she got closer, she saw it was the dried bed of a narrow stream. Beyond it the rocky ground rose up steeply. They must be at the bottom of a draw, and she wondered if this was where they had gotten lost.\n\n\"Bott lom?\" Joseph said behind her.\n\nShe turned around. \"Bott lom?\" he said again, gesturing in front and to the sides, the way he'd done in the nursery. Which way?\n\nShe had no idea. The door faced west, and if the direction held true, and if this was the Judean Desert, it should lie to the southwest. \"That direction,\" she said, and pointed up the steepest part of the slope. \"You go that way, I think.\"\n\nThey didn't move. They stood watching her, Joseph standing slightly in front of Mary, waiting for her to lead them.\n\n\"I'm not\u2014\" she said, and stopped. Leaving them here was no better than leaving them in the furnace room. Or out in the snow. She looked back at the door, almost wishing for Reverend Farrison and the police, and then set off toward what she hoped was the southwest, clambering awkwardly up the slope, her shoes slipping on the rocks.\n\nHow did they do this, she thought, grabbing at a dry clump of weed for a handhold, even with a donkey? There was no way Mary could make it up this slope. She looked back, worried.\n\nThey were following easily, sturdily, as certain of themselves as she had been on the stairs.\n\nBut what if at the top of this draw there was another one, or a dropoff? And no path. She dug in her toes and scrambled up.\n\nThere was a sudden sound, and Sharon whirled around and looked back at the door, but it still stood half open, with the lily at its foot and the manger behind.\n\nThe sound scraped again, closer, and she caught the crunch of footsteps and then a sharp wheeze.\n\n\"It's the donkey,\" she said, and it plodded up to her as if it were glad to see her.\n\nShe reached under it for its reins, which were nothing but a ragged rope, and it took a step toward her and blared in her ear, \"Haw!\" and then a wheeze that was practically a laugh.\n\nShe laughed, too, and patted his neck. \"Don't wander off again,\" she said, leading him over to Joseph, who was waiting where she'd left them. \"Stay on the path.\" She scrambled on up to the top of the slope, suddenly certain the path would be there, too.\n\nIt wasn't, but it didn't matter. Because there to the southwest was Jerusalem, distant and white in the starlight, lit by a hundred hearthfires, a thousand oil lamps, and beyond it, slightly to the west, three stars low in the sky, so close they were almost touching.\n\nThey came up beside her, leading the donkey. \"Bott lom,\" she said, pointing. \"There, where the star is.\"\n\nJoseph was fumbling in his sash again, holding out the little leather bag.\n\n\"No,\" she said, pushing it back to him. \"You'll need it for the inn in Bethlehem.\"\n\nHe put the bag back reluctantly, and she wished suddenly she had something to give them. Frankincense. Or myrrh.\n\n\"Hunh-haw,\" the donkey brayed, and started down the hill. Joseph lunged after him, grabbing for the rope, and Mary followed them, her head ducked.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Sharon said. \"Watch out for King Herod.\" She raised her hand in a wave, the sleeve of her choir robe billowing out in the warm breeze like a wing, but they didn't see her. They went on down the hill, Mary with her hand on the donkey for steadiness, Joseph a little ahead. When they were nearly at the bottom, Joseph stopped and pointed at the ground and led the donkey off at an angle out of her sight, and Sharon knew they'd found the path.\n\nShe stood there for a minute, enjoying the scented breeze, looking at the almost-star, and then went back down the slope, skidding on the rocks and loose dirt, and took the Easter lily out of the door and shut it. She pushed the cabinet back into position, took the blanket out from under the door, switched off the light, and went out into the darkened sanctuary.\n\nThere was no one there. She went and got the chalice, stuck it into the wide sleeve of her robe, and looked out into the hall. There was no one there, either. She went into the adult Sunday school room and put the chalice back into the display case and then went downstairs.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" Reverend Farrison said. Two uniformed policemen came out of the nursery, carrying flashlights.\n\nSharon unzipped her choir robe and took it off. \"I checked the Communion silver,\" she said. \"None of it's missing.\" She went into the choir room and hung up her robe.\n\n\"We looked in there,\" Reverend Farrison said, following her in. \"You weren't there.\"\n\n\"I thought I heard somebody at the door,\" she said.\n\nBy the end of the second verse of \"O Little Town of Bethlehem,\" Mary and Joseph were only three-fourths of the way to the front of the sanctuary.\n\n\"At this rate, they won't make it to Bethlehem by Easter,\" Dee whispered. \"Can't they get a move on?\"\n\n\"They'll get there,\" Sharon whispered, watching them. They paced slowly, unperturbedly, up the aisle, their eyes on the chancel. \" 'How silently, how silently,' \" Sharon sang, \" 'the wondrous gift is given.' \"\n\nThey went past the second pew from the front and out of the choir's sight. The innkeeper came to the top of the chancel steps with his lantern, determinedly solemn.\n\n\" 'So God imparts to human hearts,\n\nThe blessings of his heaven.' \"\n\n\"Where did they go?\" Virginia whispered, craning her neck to try and see them. \"Did they sneak out the back way or something?\"\n\nMary and Joseph reappeared, walking slowly, sedately, toward the palm trees and the manger. The innkeeper came down the steps, trying hard to look like he wasn't waiting for them, like he wasn't overjoyed to see them.\n\n\" 'No ear may hear his coming,\n\nBut in this world of sin\u2026' \"\n\nAt the back of the sanctuary, the shepherds assembled, clanking their staffs, and Miriam handed the wise men their jewelry box and perfume bottles. Elizabeth adjusted her tinsel halo.\n\n\" 'Where meek souls will receive him still,\n\nThe dear Christ enters in.' \"\n\nJoseph and Mary came to the center and stopped. Joseph stepped in front of Mary and knocked on an imaginary door, and the innkeeper came forward, grinning from ear to ear, to open it." + }, + { + "title": "All Seated on the Ground", + "text": "I'd always said that if and when the aliens actually landed, it would be a letdown. I mean, after War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, and E.T., there was no way they could live up to the image in the public's mind, good or bad.\n\nI'd also said that they would look nothing like the aliens of the movies, and that they would not have come to A) kill us, B) take over our planet and enslave us, C) save us from ourselves \u00e0 la The Day the Earth Stood Still, or D) have sex with Earthwomen. I mean, I realize it's hard to find someone nice, but would aliens really come thousands of light-years just to get a date? Plus, it seemed just as likely they'd be attracted to warthogs. Or yucca. Or air-conditioning units.\n\nI've also always thought A) and B) were highly unlikely, since imperialist invader types would probably be too busy invading their next-door neighbors and being invaded by other invader types to have time to go after an out-of-the-way place like Earth, although you never know. I mean, look at Iraq. And as to C), I'm wary of people or aliens who say they've come to save you, as witness Reverend Thresher. And it seemed to me that aliens who were capable of building the spaceships necessary to cross all those light-years would necessarily have complex civilizations and therefore more complicated motives for coming than merely incinerating Washington or phoning home.\n\nWhat had never occurred to me was that the aliens would arrive and we still wouldn't know what those motives were after almost nine months of talking to them.\n\nNow, I'm not talking about an arrival where the UFO swoops down in the Southwest in the middle of nowhere, mutilates a few cows, makes a crop circle or two, abducts an extremely unreliable and unintelligent-sounding person, probes them in embarrassing places, and takes off again. I'd never believed the aliens would do that, either, and they didn't, although they did land in the Southwest, sort of.\n\nThey landed their spaceship in Denver, in the middle of the DU campus, and marched\u2014well, actually \"marched\" is the wrong word; the Altairi's method of locomotion is somewhere between a glide and a waddle\u2014straight up to the front door of University Hall in classic \"Take me to your leader\" fashion.\n\nAnd that was it. They (there were six of them) didn't say, \"Take us to your leader!\" or \"One small step for aliens, one giant leap for alienkind,\" or even \"Earthmen, hand over your females.\" Or your planet. They just stood there.\n\nAnd stood there. Police cars surrounded them, lights flashing. TV news crews and reporters pointed cameras at them. F-16s roared overhead, snapping pictures of their spaceship and trying to determine whether A) it had a force field or B) weaponry or C) they could blow it up (they couldn't). Half the city fled to the mountains in terror, creating an enormous traffic jam on I-70, and the other half drove by the campus to see what was going on, creating an enormous traffic jam on Evans.\n\nThe aliens, who by now had been dubbed the Altairi because an astronomy professor at DU had announced they were from the star Altair in the constellation Aquila (they weren't), didn't react to any of this, which apparently convinced the president of DU they weren't going to blow up the place \u00e0 la Independence Day. He came out and welcomed them to Earth and to DU.\n\nThey continued to stand there. The mayor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Denver. The governor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Colorado, assured everyone it was perfectly safe to visit the state, and implied the Altairi were just the latest in a long line of tourists who had come from all over to see the magnificent Rockies, though that seemed unlikely since they were facing the other way, and they didn't turn around, even when the governor walked past them to point at Pikes Peak. They just stood there, facing University Hall.\n\nThey continued to stand there for the next three weeks, through an endless series of welcoming speeches by scientists, State Department officials, foreign dignitaries, and church and business leaders, and an assortment of weather, including a late April snowstorm that broke branches and power lines. If it hadn't been for the expressions on their faces, everybody would have assumed the Altairi were plants.\n\nBut no plant ever glared like that. It was a look of utter, withering disapproval. The first time I saw it in person, I thought, Oh, my God, it's Aunt Judith.\n\nShe was actually my father's aunt, and she used to come over once a month or so, dressed in a suit, a hat, and white gloves, and sit on the edge of a chair and glare at us, a glare which drove my mother into paroxysms of cleaning and baking whenever she found out Aunt Judith was coming. Not that Aunt Judith criticized Mom's housekeeping or her cooking. She didn't. She didn't even make a face when she sipped the coffee Mom served her or draw a white-gloved finger along the mantelpiece, looking for dust. She didn't have to. Sitting there in stony silence while my mother desperately tried to make conversation, her entire manner indicated disapproval. It was perfectly clear from that glare of hers that she considered us untidy, ill-mannered, ignorant, and utterly beneath contempt.\n\nSince she never said what it was that displeased her (except for the occasional \"Properly brought-up children do not speak unless spoken to\"), my mother frantically polished silverware, baked petits fours, wrestled my sister Tracy and me into starched pinafores and patent-leather shoes and ordered us to thank Aunt Judith nicely for our birthday presents\u2014a card with a dollar bill in it\u2014and scrubbed and dusted the entire house to within an inch of its life. She even redecorated the entire living room, but nothing did any good. Aunt Judith still radiated disdain.\n\nIt would wilt even the strongest person. My mother frequently had to lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead after a visit from Aunt Judith, and the Altairi had the same effect on the dignitaries and scientists and politicians who came to see them. After the first time, the governor refused to meet with them again, and the President, whose polls were already in the low twenties and who couldn't afford any more pictures of irate citizens, refused to meet with them at all.\n\nInstead he appointed a bipartisan commission, consisting of representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, the House, the Senate, and FEMA, to study them and find a way to communicate with them, and then, after that was a bust, a second commission consisting of experts in astronomy, anthropology, exobiology, and communications, and then a third, consisting of whoever they were able to recruit and who had anything resembling a theory about the Altairi or how to communicate with them, which is where I come in. I'd written a series of newspaper columns on aliens both before and after the Altairi arrived. (I'd also written columns on tourists, texting while driving, the traffic on I-70, the difficulty of finding any nice men to date, and Aunt Judith.)\n\nI was recruited in late November to replace one of the language experts, who quit \"to spend more time with his wife and family.\" I was picked by the chair of the commission, Dr. Morthman, who clearly didn't realize that my columns were humorous, but it didn't matter, since he had no intention of listening to me, or to anyone else on the commission, which at that point consisted of three linguists, two anthropologists, a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a botanist (in case they were plants after all), experts in primate, avian, and insect behavior (in case they were one of the above), an Egyptologist (in case they turned out to have built the Pyramids), an animal psychic, an Air Force colonel, a JAG lawyer, an expert in foreign customs, an expert in nonverbal communications, a weapons expert, Dr. Morthman (who, as far as I could see, wasn't an expert in anything), and, because of our proximity to Colorado Springs, the head of the One True Way Maxichurch, Reverend Thresher, who was convinced the Altairi were a herald of the End Times. \"There is a reason God had them land here,\" he said. I wanted to ask him why, if that was the case, they hadn't landed in Colorado Springs instead, but he wasn't a good listener, either.\n\nThe only progress these people and their predecessors had made by the time I joined the commission was to get the Altairi to follow them various places, like in out of the weather and into the various labs that had been set up in University Hall for studying them, although when I saw the videotapes, it wasn't at all clear they were responding to anything the commission said or did. It looked to me like following Dr. Morthman and the others was their own idea, particularly since at nine o'clock every night they turned and glided/waddled back outside and disappeared into their ship.\n\nThe first time they did that, everyone panicked, thinking they were leaving. \"Aliens Depart. Are They Fed Up?\" the evening news logo read, a conclusion which I felt was due to their effect on people rather than any solid evidence. I mean, they could have gone home to watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, but even after they reemerged the next morning, the theory persisted that there was some sort of deadline, that if we didn't succeed in communicating with them within a fixed amount of time, the planet would be reduced to ash. Aunt Judith had always made me feel exactly the same way, that if I didn't measure up, I was toast.\n\nBut I never did measure up, and nothing in particular happened, except she stopped sending me birthday cards with a dollar in them, and I figured if the Altairi hadn't obliterated us after a few conversations with Reverend Thresher (he was constantly reading them passages from Scripture and trying to convert them), they weren't going to.\n\nBut it didn't look like they were going to tell us what they were doing here, either. The commission had tried speaking to them in nearly every language, including Farsi, Navajo code-talk, and Cockney slang. They had played them music, drummed, written out greetings, given them several PowerPoint presentations, text-messaged them, and shown them the Rosetta Stone. They'd also tried Ameslan and pantomime, though it was obvious the Altairi could hear. Whenever someone spoke to them or offered them a gift (or prayed over them), their expression of disapproval deepened to one of utter contempt. Just like Aunt Judith.\n\nBy the time I joined the commission, it had reached the same state of desperation my mother had when she redecorated the living room, and had decided to try to impress the Altairi by taking them to see the sights of Denver and Colorado, in the hope they'd react favorably.\n\n\"It won't work,\" I said. \"My mother put up new drapes and wallpaper, and it didn't have any effect at all,\" but Dr. Morthman didn't listen.\n\nWe took them to the Denver Museum of Art and Rocky Mountain National Park and the Garden of the Gods and a Broncos game. They just stood there, sending out waves of disapproval.\n\nDr. Morthman was undeterred. \"Tomorrow we'll take them to the Denver Zoo.\"\n\n\"Is that a good idea?\" I asked. \"I mean, I'd hate to give them ideas,\" but Dr. Morthman didn't listen.\n\nLuckily, the Altairi didn't react to anything at the zoo, or to the Christmas lights at Civic Center, or to the Nutcracker ballet. And then we went to the mall.\n\nBy that point, the commission had dwindled down to seventeen people (two of the linguists and the animal psychic had quit), but it was still a large enough group of observers that the Altairi ran the risk of being trampled in the crowd. Most of the members, however, had stopped going on the field trips, saying they were \"pursuing alternate lines of research\" that didn't require direct observation, which meant they couldn't stand to be glared at the whole way there and back in the van. So the day we went to the mall, there were only Dr. Morthman, the aroma expert Dr. Wakamura, Reverend Thresher, and me. We didn't even have any press with us. When the Altairi'd first arrived, they were all over the TV networks and CNN, but after a few weeks of the aliens doing nothing, the networks had shifted to showing more exciting scenes from Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Men in Black II, and then completely lost interest and gone back to Paris Hilton and stranded whales. The only photographer with us was Leo, the teenager Dr. Morthman had hired to videotape our outings, and as soon as we got inside the mall, he said, \"Do you think it'd be okay if I ducked out to buy my girlfriend's Christmas present before we start filming? I mean, face it, they're just going to stand there.\"\n\nHe was right. The Altairi glide-waddled the length of several stores and then stopped, glaring impartially at the Sharper Image and Gap window displays and the crowds who stopped to gawk at the six of them and who then, intimidated by their expressions, averted their eyes and hurried on.\n\nThe mall was jammed with couples loaded down with shopping bags, parents pushing strollers, children, and a mob of middle-school girls in green choir robes apparently waiting to sing. The malls invited school and church choirs to come and perform this time of year in the food court. The girls were giggling and chattering; a toddler was shrieking, \"I don't want to!\"; Julie Andrews was singing \"Joy to the World\" on the piped-in Muzak; and Reverend Thresher was pointing at the panty-, bra-, and wing-clad mannequins in the window of Victoria's Secret and saying, \"Look at that! Sinful!\"\n\n\"This way,\" Dr. Morthman, ahead of the Altairi, said, waving his arm like the leader of a wagon train, \"I want them to see Santa Claus,\" and I stepped to the side to get around a trio of teenage boys walking side by side who'd cut me off from the Altairi.\n\nThere was a sudden gasp, and the mall went quiet except for the Muzak. \"What\u2014?\" Dr. Morthman said sharply, and I pushed past the teenage boys to see what had happened.\n\nThe Altairi were sitting calmly in the middle of the space between the stores, glaring. A circle of fascinated shoppers had formed a circle around them, and a man in a suit who looked like the manager of the mall was hurrying up, demanding, \"What's going on here?\"\n\n\"This is wonderful,\" Dr. Morthman said. \"I knew they'd respond if we just took them enough places.\" He turned to me. \"You were behind them, Miss Yates. What made them sit down?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said. \"I couldn't see them from where I was. Did\u2014?\"\n\n\"Go find Leo,\" he ordered. \"He'll have it on tape.\"\n\nI wasn't so sure of that, but I went to look for him. He was just coming out of Victoria's Secret, carrying a small bright pink bag. \"Meg, what happened?\" he asked.\n\n\"The Altairi sat down,\" I said.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"That's what we're trying to find out. I take it you weren't filming them?\"\n\n\"No, I told you, I had to buy my girlfriend\u2014 Jeez, Dr. Morthman will kill me.\" He jammed the pink bag into his jeans pocket. \"I didn't think\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, start filming now,\" I said, \"and I'll go see if I can find somebody who caught it on their cell phone camera.\" With all these people taking their kids to see Santa, there was bound to be someone with a camera. I started working my way around the circle of staring spectators, keeping away from Dr. Morthman, who was telling the mall manager he needed to cordon off this end of the mall and everyone in it.\n\n\"Everyone in it?\" the manager gulped.\n\n\"Yes, it's essential. The Altairi are obviously responding to something they saw or heard\u2014\"\n\n\"Or smelled,\" Dr. Wakamura put in.\n\n\"And until we know what it was, we can't allow anyone to leave,\" Dr. Morthman said. \"It's the key to our being able to communicate with them.\"\n\n\"But it's only two weeks till Christmas,\" the mall manager said. \"I can't just shut off\u2014\"\n\n\"You obviously don't realize that the fate of the planet may be at stake,\" Dr. Morthman said.\n\nI hoped not, especially since no one seemed to have caught the event on film, though they all had their cell phones out and pointed at the Altairi now, in spite of their glares. I looked across the circle, searching for a likely parent or grandparent who might have\u2014\n\nThe choir. One of the girls' parents was bound to have brought a video camera along. I hurried over to the troop of green-robed girls. \"Excuse me,\" I said to them, \"I'm with the Altairi\u2014\"\n\nMistake. The girls instantly began bombarding me with questions.\n\n\"Why are they sitting down?\"\n\n\"Why don't they talk?\"\n\n\"Why are they always so mad?\"\n\n\"Are we going to get to sing? We didn't get to sing yet.\"\n\n\"They said we had to stay here. How long? We're supposed to sing over at Flatirons Mall at six o'clock.\"\n\n\"Are they going to get inside us and pop out of our stomachs?\"\n\n\"Did any of your parents bring a video camera?\" I tried to shout over their questions, and when that failed, \"I need to talk to your choir director.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter?\"\n\n\"Are you his girlfriend?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, trying to spot someone who looked like a choir director type. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"Over there,\" one of them said, pointing at a tall, skinny man in slacks and a blazer. \"Are you going out with Mr. Ledbetter?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, trying to work my way over to him.\n\n\"Why not? He's really nice.\"\n\n\"Do you have a boyfriend?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said as I reached him. \"Mr. Ledbetter? I'm Meg Yates. I'm with the commission studying the Altairi\u2014\"\n\n\"You're just the person I want to talk to, Meg,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't tell you how long it's going to be,\" I said. \"The girls told me you have another singing engagement at six o'clock.\"\n\n\"We do, and I've got a rehearsal tonight, but that isn't what I wanted to talk to you about.\"\n\n\"She doesn't have a boyfriend, Mr. Ledbetter,\" one of the girls said. I took advantage of the interruption to say, \"I was wondering if anyone with your choir happened to record what just happened on a video camera or a\u2014\"\n\n\"Probably. Belinda,\" he said to the one who'd told him I didn't have a boyfriend, \"go get your mother.\" She took off through the crowd. \"Her mom started recording when we left the church. And if she didn't happen to catch it, Kaneesha's mom probably did. Or Chelsea's dad.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank goodness,\" I said. \"Our cameraman didn't get it on film, and we need it to see what triggered their action.\"\n\n\"What made them sit down, you mean?\" he said. \"You don't need a video. I know what it was. The song.\"\n\n\"What song?\" I said. \"A choir wasn't singing when we came in, and anyway, the Altairi have already been exposed to music. They didn't react to it at all.\"\n\n\"What kind of music? Those notes from Close Encounters?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said defensively, \"and Beethoven and Debussy and Charles Ives. A whole assortment of composers.\"\n\n\"But instrumental music, not vocals, right? I'm talking about a song. One of the Christmas carols on the piped-in Muzak. I saw them sit down. They were definitely\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter, you wanted my mom?\" Belinda said, dragging over a large woman with a videocam.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said. \"Mrs. Carlson, I need to see the video you shot of the choir today. From when we got to the mall.\"\n\nShe obligingly found the place and handed it to him. He fast-forwarded a minute. \"Oh, good, you got it,\" he said, rewound, and held the camera so I could see the little screen. \"Watch.\"\n\nThe screen showed the bus with First Presbyterian Church on its side, the girls getting off, the girls filing into the mall, the girls gathering in front of Crate and Barrel, giggling and chattering, though the sound was too low to hear what they were saying. \"Can you turn the volume up?\" Mr. Ledbetter said to Mrs. Carlson, and she pushed a button.\n\nThe voices of the girls came on: \"Mr. Ledbetter, can we go to the food court afterward for a pretzel?\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter, I don't want to stand next to Heidi.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter, I left my lip gloss on the bus.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter\u2014\"\n\nThe Altairi aren't going to be on this, I thought. Wait\u2014there, past the green-robed girls, were Dr. Morthman and Leo with his video camera, and then the Altairi. They were just glimpses, though, not a clear view. \"I'm afraid\u2014\" I said.\n\n\"Shh,\" Mr. Ledbetter said, pushing down on the volume button again. \"Listen.\"\n\nHe had cranked the volume all the way up. I could hear Reverend Thresher saying, \"Look at that! It's absolutely disgusting!\"\n\n\"Can you hear the Muzak on the tape, Meg?\" Mr. Ledbetter asked. \"Sort of,\" I said. \"What is that?\"\n\n\" 'Joy to the World,' \" he said, holding it so I could see. Mrs. Carlson must have moved to get a better shot of the Altairi, because there was no one blocking the view of them as they followed Dr. Morthman. I tried to see if they were glaring at anything in particular\u2014the strollers or the Christmas decorations or the Victoria's Secret mannequins or the sign for the restrooms\u2014but if they were, I couldn't tell.\n\n\"This way,\" Dr. Morthman said on the tape, \"I want them to see Santa Claus.\"\n\n\"Okay, it's right about here,\" Mr. Ledbetter said. \"Listen.\"\n\n\" 'While shepherds watched\u2026' \" the Muzak choir sang tinnily.\n\nI could hear Reverend Thresher saying, \"Blasphemous!\" and one of the girls asking, \"Mr. Ledbetter, after we sing can we go to McDonald's?\" and the Altairi abruptly collapsed onto the floor with a floomphing motion, like a crinolined Scarlett O'Hara sitting down suddenly. \"Did you hear what they were singing?\" Mr. Ledbetter said.\n\n\"No\u2014\"\n\n\" 'All seated on the ground.' Here,\" he said, rewinding. \"Listen.\"\n\nHe played it again. I watched the Altairi, focusing on picking out the sound of the Muzak through the rest of the noise. \" 'While shepherds watched their flocks by night,' \" the choir sang, \" 'all seated on the ground.' \"\n\nHe was right. The Altairi sat down the instant the word \"seated\" ended. I looked at him.\n\n\"See?\" he said happily. \"The song said to sit down and they sat. I happened to notice it because I was singing along with the Muzak. It's a bad habit of mine. The girls tease me about it.\"\n\nBut why would the Altairi respond to the words in a Christmas carol when they hadn't responded to anything else we'd said to them over the last nine months? \"Can I borrow this videotape?\" I asked. \"I need to show it to the rest of the commission.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" he said, and asked Mrs. Carlson.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said reluctantly. \"I have tapes of every single one of Belinda's performances.\"\n\n\"She'll make a copy and get the original back to you,\" Mr. Ledbetter told her. \"Isn't that right, Meg?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said.\n\n\"Great,\" he said. \"You can send the tape to me, and I'll see to it Belinda gets it. Will that work?\" he asked Mrs. Carlson.\n\nShe nodded, popped the tape out, and handed it to me. \"Thank you,\" I said, and hurried back over to Dr. Morthman, who was still arguing with the mall manager.\n\n\"You can't just close the entire mall,\" the manager was saying. \"This is the biggest profit period of the year\u2014\"\n\n\"Dr. Morthman,\" I said, \"I have a tape here of the Altairi sitting down. It was taken\u2014\"\n\n\"Not now,\" he said. \"I need you to go tell Leo to film everything the Altairi might have seen.\"\n\n\"But he's taping the Altairi,\" I said. \"What if they do something else?\" but he wasn't listening.\n\n\"Tell him we need a video record of everything they might have responded to, the stores, the shoppers, the Christmas decorations, everything. And then call the police department and tell them to cordon off the parking lot. Tell them no one's to leave.\"\n\n\"Cordon off\u2014!\" the mall manager said. \"You can't hold all these people here!\"\n\n\"All these people need to be moved out of this end of the mall and into an area where they can be questioned,\" Dr. Morthman said.\n\n\"Questioned?\" the mall manager, almost apoplectic, said.\n\n\"Yes, one of them may have seen what triggered their action\u2014\"\n\n\"Someone did,\" I said. \"I was just talking to\u2014\"\n\nHe wasn't listening. \"We'll need names, contact information, and depositions from all of them,\" he said to the mall manager. \"And they'll need to be tested for infectious diseases. The Altairi may be sitting down because they don't feel well.\"\n\n\"Dr. Morthman, they aren't sick,\" I said. \"They\u2014\"\n\n\"Not now,\" he said. \"Did you tell Leo?\"\n\nI gave up. \"I'll do it now,\" I said, and went over to where Leo was filming the Altairi and told him what Dr. Morthman wanted him to do.\n\n\"What if the Altairi do something?\" he said, looking at them sitting there glaring. He sighed. \"I suppose he's right. They don't look like they're going to move anytime soon.\" He swung his camera around and started filming the Victoria's Secret window. \"How long do you think we'll be stuck here?\"\n\nI told him what Dr. Morthman had said.\n\n\"Jeez, he's going to question all these people?\" he said, moving to the Williams-Sonoma window. \"I had somewhere to go tonight.\"\n\nAll these people have somewhere to go tonight, I thought, looking at the crowd\u2014mothers with babies in strollers, little kids, elderly couples, teenagers. Including fifty middle-school girls who were supposed to be at another performance an hour from now. And it wasn't the choir director's fault Dr. Morthman wouldn't listen.\n\n\"We'll need a room large enough to hold everyone,\" Dr. Morthman was saying, \"and adjoining rooms for interrogating them,\" and the mall manager was shouting, \"This is a mall, not Guantanamo!\"\n\nI backed carefully away from Dr. Morthman and the mall manager and then worked my way through the crowd to where the choir director was standing, surrounded by his students. \"But, Mr. Ledbetter,\" one of them was saying, \"we'd come right back, and the pretzel place is right over there.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter, could I speak to you for a moment?\" I said.\n\n\"Sure. Shoo,\" he said to the girls.\n\n\"But, Mr. Ledbetter\u2014\"\n\nHe ignored them. \"What did the commission think of the Christmas carol theory?\" he asked me.\n\n\"I haven't had a chance to ask them. Listen, in another five minutes they're going to lock down this entire mall.\"\n\n\"But I\u2014\"\n\n\"I know, you've got another performance and if you're going to leave, do it right now. I'd go that way,\" I said, pointing to the east door.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said earnestly, \"but won't you get into trouble\u2014?\"\n\n\"If I need your choir's depositions, I'll call you,\" I said. \"What's your number?\"\n\n\"Belinda, give me a pen and something to write on,\" he said. She handed him a pen and began rummaging in her backpack.\n\n\"Never mind,\" he said, \"there isn't time.\" He grabbed my hand and wrote the number on my palm.\n\n\"You said we aren't allowed to write on ourselves,\" Belinda said.\n\n\"You're not,\" he said. \"I really appreciate this, Meg.\"\n\n\"Go,\" I said, looking anxiously over at Dr. Morthman. If they didn't go in the next thirty seconds, they'd never make it, and there was no way he could round up fifty middle-school girls in that short a time. Or even make himself heard\u2026\n\n\"Ladies,\" he said, and raised his hands as if he were going to direct a choir. \"Line up.\" And to my astonishment, they instantly obeyed him, forming themselves silently into a line and walking quickly toward the east door with no giggling, no \"Mr. Ledbetter\u2014?\" My opinion of him went up sharply.\n\nI pushed quickly back through the crowd to where Dr. Morthman and the mall manager were still arguing. Leo had moved farther down the mall to film the Verizon Wireless store, away from the east door. Good. I rejoined Dr. Morthman, moving to his right side so if he turned to look at me, he couldn't see the door.\n\n\"But what about bathrooms?\" the manager was yelling. \"The mall doesn't have nearly enough bathrooms for all these people.\"\n\nThe choir was nearly out the door. I watched till the last one disappeared, followed by Mr. Ledbetter.\n\n\"We'll get in portable toilets. Miss Yates, arrange for porta-potties to be brought in,\" Dr. Morthman said, turning to me, and it was obvious he had no idea I'd ever been gone. \"And get Homeland Security on the phone.\"\n\n\"Homeland Security!\" the manager wailed. \"Do you know what it'll do to business when the media gets hold\u2014\" He stopped and looked over at the crowd around the Altairi.\n\nThere was a collective gasp from them and then a hush. Someone must have turned the Muzak off at some point because there was no sound at all in the mall. \"What\u2014? Let me through,\" Dr. Morthman said, breaking the silence. He pushed his way through the circle of shoppers to see what was happening.\n\nI followed in his wake. The Altairi were slowly standing up, a motion somewhat like a string being pulled taut.\n\n\"Thank goodness,\" the mall manager said, sounding infinitely relieved. \"Now that that's over, I assume I can reopen the mall.\"\n\nDr. Morthman shook his head. \"This may be the prelude to another action, or the response to a second stimulus. Leo, I want to see the video of what was happening right before they began to stand up.\"\n\n\"I didn't get it,\" Leo said.\n\n\"Didn't get it?\"\n\n\"You told me to tape the stuff in the mall,\" he said, but Dr. Morthman wasn't listening. He was watching the Altairi, who had turned around and were slowly glide-waddling back toward the east door.\n\n\"Go after them,\" he ordered Leo. \"Don't let them out of your sight, and get it on tape this time.\" He turned to me. \"You stay here and see if the mall has surveillance tapes. And get all these people's names and contact information in case we need to question them.\"\n\n\"Before you go, you need to know\u2014\"\n\n\"Not now. The Altairi are leaving. And there's no telling where they'll go next,\" he said, and took off after them. \"See if anyone caught the incident on a video camera.\"\n\nAs it turned out, the Altairi went only as far as the van we'd brought them to the mall in, where they waited, glaring, to be transported back to DU. When I got back, they were in the main lab with Dr. Wakamura. I'd been at the mall nearly four hours, taking down names and phone numbers from Christmas shoppers who said things like, \"I've been here six hours with two toddlers. Six hours!\" and \"I'll have you know I missed my grandson's Christmas concert.\" I was glad I'd helped Mr. Ledbetter and his seventh-grade girls sneak out. They'd never have made it to the other mall in time.\n\nWhen I was finished taking names and abuse, I went to ask the mall manager about surveillance tapes, expecting more abuse, but he was so glad to have his mall open again, he turned them over immediately. \"Do these tapes have audio?\" I asked him, and when he said no, \"You wouldn't also have a tape of the Christmas music you play, would you?\"\n\nI was almost certain he wouldn't\u2014Muzak is usually piped in\u2014but to my surprise he said yes and handed over a CD. I stuck it and the tapes in my bag, drove back to DU, and went to the main lab to find Dr. Morthman. I found Dr. Wakamura instead, squirting assorted food court smells\u2014corn dog, popcorn, sushi\u2014at the Altairi to see if any of them made them sit down. \"I'm convinced they were responding to one of the mall's aromas,\" he said.\n\n\"Actually, I think they may have\u2014\"\n\n\"It's just a question of finding the right one,\" he said, squirting pizza at them. They glared.\n\n\"Where's Dr. Morthman?\"\n\n\"Next door,\" he said, squirting essence of funnel cake. \"He's meeting with the rest of the commission.\"\n\nI winced and went next door. \"We need to look at the floor coverings in the mall,\" Dr. Short was saying. \"The Altairi may well have been responding to the difference between wood and stone.\"\n\n\"And we need to take air samples,\" Dr. Jarvis said. \"They may have been responding to something poisonous to them in our atmosphere.\"\n\n\"Something poisonous?\" Reverend Thresher said. \"Something blasphemous, you mean! Angels in filthy underwear! The Altairi obviously refused to go any farther into that den of iniquity, and they sat down in protest. Even aliens know sin when they see it.\"\n\n\"I don't agree, Dr. Jarvis,\" Dr. Short said, ignoring Reverend Thresher. \"Why would the air in the mall have a different composition from the air in a museum or a sports arena? We're looking for variables here. What about sounds? Could they be a factor?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"The Altairi were\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you get the surveillance tapes, Miss Yates?\" Dr. Morthman cut in. \"Go through and cue them up to the point just before the Altairi sat down. I want to see what they were looking at.\"\n\n\"It wasn't what they were looking at,\" I said. \"It was\u2014\"\n\n\"And call the mall and get samples of their floor coverings,\" he said. \"You were saying, Dr. Short?\"\n\nI left the surveillance tapes and the lists of shoppers on Dr. Morthman's desk, and then went to the audio lab, found a CD player, and listened to the songs: \"Here Comes Santa Claus,\" \"White Christmas,\" \"Joy to the World\"\u2014\n\nHere it was. \" 'While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground, the angel of the Lord came down, and glory shone around.' \" Could the Altairi have thought the song was talking about the descent of their spaceship? Or were they responding to something else entirely, and the timing was simply coincidental?\n\nThere was only one way to find out. I went back to the main lab, where Dr. Wakamura was sticking lighted candles under the Altairi's noses. \"Good grief, what is that?\" I asked, wrinkling my nose.\n\n\"Bayberry magnolia,\" he said.\n\n\"It's awful.\"\n\n\"You should smell sandalwood violet,\" he said. \"They were right next to Candle in the Wind when they sat down. They may have been responding to a scent from the store.\"\n\n\"Any response?\" I said, thinking their expressions, for once, looked entirely appropriate.\n\n\"No, not even to spruce watermelon, which smelled very alien. Did Dr. Morthman find any clues on the security tapes?\" he asked hopefully.\n\n\"He hasn't looked at them yet,\" I said. \"When you're done here, I'll be glad to escort the Altairi back to their ship.\"\n\n\"Would you?\" he said gratefully. \"I'd really appreciate it. They look exactly like my mother-in-law. Can you take them now?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, and went over to the Altairi and motioned them to follow me, hoping they wouldn't veer off and go back to their ship since it was nearly nine o'clock. They didn't. They followed me down the hall and into the audio lab. \"I just want to try something,\" I said, and played them \"While Shepherds Watched.\"\n\n\" 'While shepherds watched their flocks,' \" the choir sang. I watched the Altairi's unchanging faces. Mr. Ledbetter was wrong, I thought. They must have been responding to something else. They're not even listening. \" '\u2026by night, all seated\u2026' \"\n\nThe Altairi sat down.\n\nI've got to call Mr. Ledbetter, I thought. I switched off the CD and punched in the number he'd written on my hand. \"Hi, this is Calvin Ledbetter,\" his recorded voice said. \"Sorry I can't come to the phone right now,\" and I remembered too late that he'd said he had a rehearsal. \"If you're calling about a rehearsal, the schedule is as follows: Thursday, Mile-High Women's Chorus, eight P.M., Montview Methodist; Friday, chancel choir, eleven A.M., Trinity Episcopal; Denver Symphony, three P.M.\u2014\" It was obvious he wasn't home. And that he was far too busy to worry about the Altairi.\n\nI hung up and looked over at them. They were still sitting down, and it occurred to me that playing them the song might have been a bad idea, since I had no idea what had made them stand back up. It hadn't been the Muzak because it had been turned off, and if the stimulus had been something in the mall, we could be here all night. After a few minutes, though, they stood up, doing that odd pulled-string thing, and glared at me. \" 'While shepherds watched their flocks by night,' \" I said to them, \" 'all seated on the ground.' \"\n\nThey continued to stand.\n\n\" 'Seated on the ground,' \" I repeated. \"Seated. Sit!\" No response at all.\n\nI played the song again. They sat down right on cue. Which still didn't prove they were doing what the words told them to do. They could be responding to the mere sound of singing. The mall had been noisy when they first walked in. \"While Shepherds Watched\" might have been the first song they'd been able to hear, and they'd sit down whenever they heard singing. I waited till they stood up again and then played the two preceding tracks. They didn't respond to Bing Crosby singing \"White Christmas\" or to Julie Andrews singing \"Joy to the World.\" (Or to the breaks between songs.) There wasn't even any indication they were aware anyone was singing.\n\n\" 'While shepherds watched their flocks by-y night\u2026' \" the choir began. I tried to stay still and keep my face impassive, in case they were responding to nonverbal cues I was giving them. \" '\u2026ah-all seated\u2014' \"\n\nThey sat down at exactly the same place, so it was definitely those particular words. Or the voices singing them. Or the particular configuration of notes. Or the rhythm. Or the frequencies of the notes.\n\nWhatever it was, I couldn't figure it out tonight. It was nearly ten o'clock. I needed to get the Altairi back to their spaceship. I waited for them to stand up and then led them, glaring, out to their ship, and went back to my apartment.\n\nThe message light on my answering machine was flashing. It was probably Dr. Morthman, wanting me to go back to the mall and take air samples. I hit play. \"Hi, this is Mr. Ledbetter,\" the choir director's voice said. \"From the mall, remember? I need to talk to you about something.\" He gave me his cell phone number and repeated his home phone, \"In case it washed off. I should be home by eleven. Till then, whatever you do, don't let your alien guys listen to any more Christmas carols.\"\n\nThere was no answer at either of the numbers. He turns his cell phone off during rehearsals, I thought. I looked at my watch. It was ten-fifteen. I grabbed the yellow pages, looked up the address of Montview Methodist, and took off for the church, detouring past the Altairi's ship to make sure it was still there and hadn't begun sprouting guns from its ports or flashing ominous lights. It hadn't. It was its usual Sphinx-like self, which reassured me. A little.\n\nIt took me twenty minutes to reach the church. I hope rehearsal isn't over and I've missed him, I thought, but there were lots of cars in the parking lot, and light still shone through the stained-glass windows. The front doors, however, were locked.\n\nI went around to the side door. It was unlocked, and I could hear singing from somewhere inside. I followed the sound down a darkened hall.\n\nThe song abruptly stopped, in the middle of a word. I waited a minute, listening, and when it didn't start up again, began trying doors. The first three were locked, but the fourth opened onto the sanctuary. The women's choir was up at the very front, facing Mr. Ledbetter, whose back was to me. \"Top of page ten,\" he was saying.\n\nThank goodness he's still here, I thought, slipping in the back.\n\n\"From 'O hear the angel voices,' \" he said, nodded to the organist, and raised his baton.\n\n\"Wait, where do we take a breath?\" one of the women asked. \"After 'voices'?\"\n\n\"No, after 'divine,' \" he said, consulting the music in front of him on the music stand, \"and then at the bottom of page thirteen.\"\n\nAnother woman said, \"Can you play the alto line for us? From 'Fall on your knees'?\"\n\nThis was obviously going to take a while, and I couldn't afford to wait. I started up the aisle toward them, and the entire choir looked up from their music and glared at me.\n\nMr. Ledbetter turned around, and his face lit up. He turned to the women again, said, \"I'll be right back,\" and sprinted down the aisle to me. \"Meg,\" he said, reaching me. \"Hi. What\u2014?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to interrupt, but I got your message, and\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not interrupting. Really. We were almost done anyway.\"\n\n\"What did you mean, don't play them any more Christmas carols? I didn't get your message till after I'd played them some of the other songs from the mall\u2014\"\n\n\"And what happened?\"\n\n\"Nothing, but on your message you said\u2014\"\n\n\"Which songs?\"\n\n\" 'Joy to the World' and\u2014\"\n\n\"All four verses?\"\n\n\"No, only two. That's all that were on the CD. The first one and the one about 'wonders of his love.' \"\n\n\"One and four,\" he said, staring past me, his lips moving rapidly as if he were running through the lyrics. \"Those should be okay\u2014\"\n\n\"What do you mean? Why did you leave that message?\"\n\n\"Because if the Altairi were responding literally to the words in 'While Shepherds Watched,' Christmas carols are full of dangerous\u2014\"\n\n\"Dangerous\u2014?\"\n\n\"Yes. Look at 'We Three Kings of Orient Are.' You didn't play them that, did you?\"\n\n\"No, just 'Joy to the World' and 'White Christmas.' \"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter,\" one of the women called from the front of the church. \"How long are you going to be?\"\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" he said. He turned back to me. \"How much of 'While Shepherds Watched' did you play them?\"\n\n\"Just the part up to 'all seated on the ground.' \"\n\n\"Not the other verses?\"\n\n\"No. What\u2014?\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter,\" the same woman said impatiently, \"some of us have to leave.\"\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" he called to her, and to me, \"Give me five minutes,\" and sprinted back up the aisle.\n\nI sat down in a back pew, picked up a hymnal, and tried to find \"We Three Kings.\" That was easier said than done. The hymns were numbered, but they didn't seem to be in any particular order. I turned to the back, looking for an index.\n\n\"But we still haven't gone over 'Saviour of the Heathen, Come,' \" a young, pretty redhead said.\n\n\"We'll go over it Saturday night,\" Mr. Ledbetter said.\n\nThe index didn't tell me where \"We Three Kings\" was, either. It had rows of numbers\u20145.6.6.5. and 8.8.7.D.\u2014with a column of strange words below them\u2014Laban, Hursley, Olive's Brow, Arizona\u2014like some sort of code. Could the Altairi be responding to some sort of cipher embedded in the carol like in The Da Vinci Code? I hoped not.\n\n\"When are we supposed to be there?\" the women were asking.\n\n\"Seven,\" Mr. Ledbetter said.\n\n\"But that won't give us enough time to run over 'Saviour of the Heathen, Come,' will it?\"\n\n\"And what about 'Santa Claus Is Coming to Town'?\" the redhead asked. \"We don't have the second soprano part at all.\"\n\nI abandoned the index and began looking through the hymns. If I couldn't figure out a simple hymnal, how could I hope to figure out a completely alien race's communications? If they were trying to communicate. They might have been sitting down to listen to the music, like you'd stop to look at a flower. Or maybe their feet just hurt.\n\n\"What kind of shoes are we supposed to wear?\" the choir was asking.\n\n\"Comfortable,\" Mr. Ledbetter said. \"You're going to be on your feet a long time.\"\n\nI continued to search through the hymnal. Here was \"What Child Is This?\" I had to be on the right track. \"Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella.\" It had to be here somewhere. \"On Christmas Night, All People Sing\u2014\"\n\nThey were finally gathering up their things and leaving. \"See you Saturday,\" he said, herding them out the door, all except for the pretty redhead, who buttonholed him at the door to say, \"I was wondering if you could stay and go over the second soprano part with me again. It'll only take a few minutes.\"\n\n\"I can't tonight,\" he said. She turned and glared at me, and I knew exactly what that glare meant.\n\n\"Remind me and we'll run through it Saturday night,\" he said, shut the door on her, and sat down next to me. \"Sorry, big performance Saturday. Now, about the aliens. Where were we?\"\n\n\" 'We Three Kings.' You said the words were dangerous.\"\n\n\"Oh, right.\" He took the hymnal from me, flipped expertly to the right page, pointed. \"Verse four. 'Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying'\u2014I assume you don't want the Altairi locking themselves in a stone-cold tomb.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said fervently. \"You said 'Joy to the World' was bad, too. What does it have in it?\"\n\n\" 'Sorrow, sins, thorns infesting the ground.' \"\n\n\"You think they're doing whatever the hymns tell them? That they're treating them like orders to be followed?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but if they are, there are all kinds of things in Christmas carols you don't want them doing: running around on rooftops, bringing torches, killing babies\u2014\"\n\n\"Killing babies?\" I said. \"What carol is that in?\"\n\n\" 'The Coventry Carol,' \" he said, flipping to another page. \"The verse about Herod. See?\" He pointed to the words. \" 'Charged he hath this day\u2026all children young to slay.' \"\n\n\"Oh, my gosh, that carol was one of the ones from the mall. It was on the CD,\" I said. \"I'm so glad I came to see you.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" he said, and grinned at me.\n\n\"You asked me how much of 'While Shepherds Watched' I'd played them,\" I said. \"Is there child-slaying in that, too?\"\n\n\"No, but verse two has got 'fear' and 'mighty dread' in it, and 'seized their troubled minds.' \"\n\n\"I definitely don't want the Altairi to do that,\" I said, \"but now I don't know what to do. We've been trying to establish communications with the Altairi for nine months, and that song was the first thing they've ever responded to. If I can't play them Christmas carols\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't say that. We just need to make sure the ones you play them don't have any murder and mayhem in them. You said you had a CD of the music they were playing in the mall?\"\n\n\"Yes. That's what I played them.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ledbetter?\" a voice said tentatively, and a balding man in a clerical collar leaned in the door. \"How much longer will you be? I need to lock up.\"\n\n\"Oh, sorry, Reverend McIntyre,\" he said, and stood up. \"We'll get out of your way.\"\n\nHe ran up the aisle, grabbed his music, and came back. \"You'll be at the aches, right?\" he said to Reverend McIntyre.\n\nThe aches? You must have misunderstood what he said, I thought.\n\n\"I'm not sure,\" Reverend McIntyre said. \"My handle's pretty rusty.\"\n\nHandle? What were they talking about?\n\n\"Especially the 'Hallelujah Chorus.' It's been years since I last sang it.\"\n\nOh, Handel, not handle.\n\n\"I'm rehearsing it with Trinity Episcopal's choir at eleven tomorrow if you want to come and run through it with us.\"\n\n\"I just may do that.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Mr. Ledbetter said. \"Good night.\" He led me out of the sanctuary. \"Where's your car parked?\"\n\n\"Out in front.\"\n\n\"Good. Mine, too.\" He opened the side door. \"You can follow me to my apartment.\"\n\nI had a sudden blinding vision of Aunt Judith glaring disapprovingly at me and saying, \"A nice young lady never goes to a gentleman's apartment alone.\"\n\n\"You did say you brought the music from the mall with you, didn't you?\" he asked.\n\nWhich is what you get for jumping to conclusions, I thought, following him to his apartment and wondering if he was going out with the redheaded second soprano.\n\n\"On the way over I was thinking about all this,\" he said when we got to his apartment building, \"and I think the first thing we need to do is figure out exactly which element or elements of 'all seated on the ground' they're responding to, the notes\u2014I know you said they'd been exposed to music before, but it could be this particular configuration of notes\u2014or words.\"\n\nI told him about reciting the lyrics to them.\n\n\"Okay, then, the next thing we do is see if it's the accompaniment,\" he said, unlocking the door. \"Or the tempo. Or the key.\"\n\n\"The key?\" I said, looking down at the keys in his hand.\n\n\"Yeah, have you ever seen Jumpin' Jack Flash?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Great movie. Whoopi Goldberg. In it, the key to the spy's code is the key. Literally. B flat. 'While Shepherds Watched' is in the key of C, but 'Joy to the World' is in D. That may be why they didn't respond to it. Or they may only respond to the sound of certain instruments. What Beethoven did they listen to?\"\n\n\"The Ninth Symphony.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Then that's unlikely, but there might be a guitar or a marimba or something in the 'While Shepherds Watched' accompaniment. We'll see. Come on in,\" he said, opening the door and immediately vanishing into the bedroom. \"There's soda in the fridge,\" he called back out to me. \"Go ahead and sit down.\"\n\nThat was easier said than done. The couch, chair, and coffee table were all covered with CDs, music, and clothes. \"Sorry,\" he said, coming back in with a laptop. He set it down on top of a stack of books and moved a pile of laundry from the chair so I could sit down. \"December's a bad month. And this year, in addition to my usual five thousand concerts and church services and cantata performances, I'm directing aches.\"\n\nThen I hadn't misheard him before. \"Aches?\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah. A-C-H-E-S. The AllCity Holiday Ecumenical Sing. ACHES. Or, as my seventh-grade girls call it, Aches and Pains. It's a giant concert\u2014well, not actually a concert because everybody sings, even the audience. But all the city singing groups and church choirs participate.\" He moved a stack of LPs off the couch and onto the floor and sat down across from me. \"Denver has it every year. At the convention center. Have you ever been to a Sing?\" he said, and when I shook my head, \"It's pretty impressive. Last year three thousand people and forty-four choirs participated.\"\n\n\"And you're directing?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Actually, it's a much easier job than directing my church choirs. Or my seventh-grade girls' glee. And it's kind of fun. It used to be the AllCity Messiah, you know, a whole bunch of people getting together to sing Handel's Messiah, but then they had a request from the Unitarians to include some Solstice songs, and it kind of snowballed from there. Now we do Hanukkah songs and 'Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas' and 'The Seven Nights of Kwanzaa,' along with Christmas carols and selections from the Messiah. Which, by the way, we can't let the Altairi listen to, either.\"\n\n\"Is there children-slaying in that, too?\"\n\n\"Head-breaking. 'Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron' and 'dash them in pieces.' There's also wounding, bruising, cutting, deriding, and laughing to scorn.\"\n\n\"Actually, the Altairi already know all about scorn,\" I said.\n\n\"But hopefully not about shaking nations. And covering the earth with darkness,\" he said. \"Okay\"\u2014he opened his laptop\u2014\"the first thing I'm going to do is scan in the song. Then I'll remove the accompaniment so we can play them just the vocals.\"\n\n\"What can I do?\"\n\n\"You,\" he said, disappearing into the other room again and returning with a foot-high stack of sheet music and music books, which he dumped in my lap, \"can make a list of all the songs we don't want the Altairi to hear.\"\n\nI nodded and started through The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. It was amazing how many carols, which I'd always thought were about peace and good will, had really violent lyrics. \"The Coventry Carol\" wasn't the only one with child-slaying in it. \"Christmas Day Is Come\" did, too, along with references to sin, strife, and militants. \"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel\" had strife, too, and envy and quarrels. \"The Holly and the Ivy\" had thorns, blood, and bears, and \"Good King Wenceslas\" talked about cruelty, bringing people flesh, freezing their blood, and heart failure.\n\n\"I had no idea Christmas carols were so grim,\" I said.\n\n\"You should hear Easter,\" Mr. Ledbetter said. \"While you're looking, see if you can find any songs with the word 'seated' in it so we can see if it's that particular word they're responding to.\"\n\nI nodded and went back to reading lyrics. In \"Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence\" everyone was standing, not seated, plus it had \"fear,\" \"trembling,\" and a line about giving oneself for heavenly food. \"The First Noel\" had \"blood,\" and the shepherds were lying, not sitting.\n\nWhat Christmas song has \"seated\" in it? I thought, trying to remember. Isn't there something in \"Jingle Bells\" about Miss Somebody or Other being seated by someone's side?\n\nThere was, and in \"Wassail, Wassail,\" there was a line about \"a-sitting\" by the fire, but not the word \"seated.\"\n\nI kept looking. The nonreligious Christmas songs were almost as bad as the carols. Even a children's song like \"I'm Getting' Nuttin' for Christmas\" gaily discussed smashing bats over people's heads, and there seemed to be an entire genre of \"Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer\"\u2013type songs: \"Grandma's Killer Fruitcake,\" \"I Came Upon a Roadkill Deer,\" and \"Grandpa's Gonna Sue the Pants Off Santa.\"\n\nAnd even when the lyrics weren't violent, they had phrases in them like \"rule o'er all the earth\" and \"over us all to reign,\" which the Altairi might take as an invitation to global conquest.\n\nThere have to be some carols that are harmless, I thought, and looked up \"Away in a Manger\" in the index (which The Holly Jolly Book, unlike the hymnal, did have): \"\u2026lay down his sweet head\u2026the stars in the sky\u2026\" No mayhem here, I thought. I can definitely add this to the list. \"Love\u2026blessings\u2026\"\n\n\"And take us to heaven to live with thee there.\" A harmless enough line, but it might mean something entirely different to the Altairi. I didn't want to find myself on a spaceship heading back to Aquila or wherever it was they came from.\n\nWe worked till almost three in the morning, by which time we had separate recordings of the vocals, accompaniment, and notes (played by Mr. Ledbetter on the piano, guitar, and flute and recorded by me) of \"all seated on the ground,\" a list, albeit rather short, of songs the Altairi could safely hear, and another, even shorter list of ones with \"seated,\" \"sit,\" or \"sitting\" in them.\n\n\"Thank you so much, Mr. Ledbetter,\" I said, putting on my coat.\n\n\"Calvin,\" he said.\n\n\"Calvin. Anyway, thank you. I really appreciate this. I'll let you know the results of my playing the songs for them.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding, Meg?\" he said. \"I want to be there when you do this.\"\n\n\"But I thought\u2014 Don't you have to rehearse with the choirs for your ACHES thing?\" I said, remembering the heavy schedule he'd left on his answering machine.\n\n\"Yes, and I have to rehearse with the symphony, and with the chancel choir and the kindergarten choir and the handbell choir for the Christmas Eve service\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, and I've kept you up so late,\" I said. \"I'm really sorry.\"\n\n\"Choir directors never sleep in December,\" he said cheerfully, \"and what I was going to say was that I'm free in between rehearsals and till eleven tomorrow morning. How early can you get the Altairi?\"\n\n\"They usually come out of their ship around seven, but some of the other commission members may want to work with them.\"\n\n\"And face those bright shiny faces before they've had their coffee? My bet is you'll have the Altairi all to yourself.\"\n\nHe was probably right. I remembered Dr. Jarvis saying he had to work himself up to seeing the Altairi over the course of the day: \"They look just like my fifth-grade teacher.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you want to face them first thing in the morning?\" I asked him. \"The Altairi's glares\u2014\"\n\n\"Are nothing compared to the glare of a first soprano who didn't get the solo she wanted. Don't worry, I can handle the Altairi,\" he said. \"I can't wait to find out what it is they're responding to.\"\n\nWhat we found out was nothing.\n\nCalvin had been right. There was no one else waiting outside University Hall when the Altairi appeared. I hustled them into the audio lab, locked the door, and called Calvin, and he came right over, bearing Starbucks coffee and an armload of CDs.\n\n\"Yikes!\" he said when he saw the Altairi standing over by the speakers. \"I was wrong about the first soprano. This is more a seventh-grader's 'No, you can't text-message during the choir concert\u2014or wear face glitter' glare.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"It's an Aunt Judith glare.\"\n\n\"I'm very glad we decided not to play them the part about dashing people's heads into pieces,\" he said. \"Are you sure they didn't come to Earth to kill everybody?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"That's why we have to establish communications with them.\"\n\n\"Right,\" he said, and proceeded to play the accompaniment we'd recorded the night before. Nothing, and nothing when he played the notes with piano, guitar, and flute, but when he played the vocal part by itself, the Altairi promptly sat down.\n\n\"Definitely the words,\" he said, and when we played them \"Jingle Bells,\" they sat down again at \"seated by my side,\" which seemed to confirm it. But when he played them the first part of \"Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat\" from Guys and Dolls and \"Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay,\" they didn't sit down for either one.\n\n\"Which means it's the word 'seated,' \" I said.\n\n\"Or they only respond to Christmas songs,\" he said. \"Do you have some other carol we can play them?\"\n\n\"Not with 'seated,' \" I said. \" 'All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth' has 'sitting' in it.\"\n\nWe played it for them. No response, but when he played \"We Need a Little Christmas,\" from the musical Mame, the Altairi sat down the moment the recording reached the word \"sitting.\"\n\nCalvin cut off the rest of the phrase, since we didn't want the Altairi sitting on our shoulders, and looked at me. \"So why did they respond to this 'sitting' and not the one in 'All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth'?\" he mused.\n\nI was tempted to say, \"Because 'All I Want for Christmas' is an absolutely terrible song,\" but I didn't. \"The voices?\" I suggested.\n\n\"Maybe,\" he said, and shuffled through the CDs till he found a recording of the same song by the Statler Brothers. The Altairi sat down at exactly the same place.\n\nSo not the voices. And not just Christmas. When Calvin played them the opening song from 1776, they sat down again as the Continental Congress sang orders to John Adams to sit down. And it wasn't the verb \"to sit.\" When we played them \"The Hanukkah Song,\" they spun solemnly in place.\n\n\"Okay, so we've established it's ecumenical,\" Calvin said.\n\n\"Thank goodness,\" I said, thinking of Reverend Thresher and what he'd say if he found out they'd responded to a Christmas carol, but when we played them a Solstice song with the phrase \"the earth turns round again,\" they just stood there and glared.\n\n\"Words beginning with s?\" I said.\n\n\"Maybe.\" He played them, in rapid succession, \"The Snow Lay on the Ground,\" \"Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,\" and \"Suzy Snowflake.\" Nothing.\n\nAt ten forty-five Calvin left to go to his choir rehearsal. \"It's at Trinity Episcopal, if you want to meet me there at noon,\" he said, \"and we can go over to my apartment from there. I want to run an analysis on the frequency patterns of the phrases they responded to.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said, and delivered the Altairi to Dr. Wakamura, who wanted to squirt them with perfumes from the Crabtree and Evelyn store. I left them glaring at him and went up to Dr. Morthman's office. He wasn't there. \"He went to the mall to collect paint samples,\" Dr. Jarvis said.\n\nI called him on his cell phone. \"Dr. Morthman, I've run some tests,\" I said, \"and the Altairi are\u2014\"\n\n\"Not now. I'm waiting for an important call from ACS,\" he said, and hung up.\n\nI went back to the audio lab and listened to the Cambridge Boys' Choir, Barbra Streisand, and Barenaked Ladies Christmas albums, trying to find songs with variations of \"sit\" and \"spin\" in them and no bloodshed. I also looked up instances of \"turn.\" They hadn't responded to \"turns\" in the Solstice song, but I wasn't sure that proved anything. They hadn't responded to \"sitting\" in \"All I Want for Christmas,\" either.\n\nAt noon I went to meet Calvin at Trinity Episcopal. They weren't done rehearsing yet, and it didn't sound like they would be for some time. Calvin kept starting and stopping the choir and saying, \"Basses, you're coming in two beats early, and altos, on 'singing,' that's an A flat. Let's take it again, from the top of page eight.\"\n\nThey went over the section four more times, with no discernible improvement, before Calvin said, \"Okay, that's it. I'll see you all Saturday night.\"\n\n\"We are never going to get that entrance right,\" several of the choir members muttered as they gathered up their music, and the balding minister from last night, Reverend McIntyre, looked totally discouraged.\n\n\"Maybe I shouldn't sing after all,\" he told Calvin.\n\n\"Yes, you should,\" Calvin said, and put his hand on Reverend McIntyre's shoulder. \"Don't worry. It'll all come together. You'll see.\"\n\n\"Do you really believe that?\" I asked Calvin after Reverend McIntyre had gone out.\n\nHe laughed. \"I know it's hard to believe listening to them now. I never think they're going to be able to do it, but somehow, no matter how awful they sound in rehearsal, they always manage to pull it off. It's enough to restore your faith in humanity.\" He frowned. \"I thought you were going to come over, and we were going to look at frequency patterns.\"\n\n\"We are,\" I said. \"Why?\"\n\nHe pointed behind me. The Altairi were standing there with Reverend McIntyre. \"I found them outside,\" he said, smiling. \"I was afraid they might be lost.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear, they must have followed me. I'm so sorry,\" I said, though Reverend McIntyre didn't seem particularly intimidated by them. I said as much.\n\n\"I'm not,\" he said. \"They don't look nearly as annoyed as my congregation does when they don't approve of my sermon.\"\n\n\"I'd better take them back,\" I said to Calvin.\n\n\"No, as long as they're here, we might as well take them over to my apartment and try some more songs on them. We need more data.\"\n\nI somehow squeezed all six of them into my car and took them over to Calvin's apartment, and he analyzed frequency patterns while I played some more songs for them. It definitely wasn't the quality of the songs or the singers they were responding to. They wouldn't sit down for Willie Nelson's \"Pretty Paper\" and then did for a hideous falsetto children's recording of \"Little Miss Muffet\" from the 1940s.\n\nIt wasn't the words' meaning, either. When I played them \"Adeste Fideles\" in Latin, they sat down when the choir sang, \"tibi sit gloria.\"\n\n\"Which proves they're taking what they hear literally,\" Calvin said when I took him into the kitchen out of earshot of the Altairi to tell me.\n\n\"Yes, which means we've got to make sure they don't hear any words that have double meanings,\" I said. \"We can't even play them 'Deck the Halls,' for fear they might deck someone.\"\n\n\"And we definitely can't play them 'laid in a manger,' \" he said, grinning.\n\n\"It's not funny,\" I said. \"At this rate, we aren't going to be able to play them anything.\"\n\n\"There must be some songs\u2014\"\n\n\"What songs?\" I said in frustration. \" 'I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm' talks about hearts that are on fire, 'Christmastide' might bring on a tsunami, and 'be born in us today' sounds like a scene out of Alien.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"Don't worry, we'll find something. Here, I'll help you.\" He cleared off the kitchen table, brought in the stacks of sheet music, albums, and CDs, and sat me down across from him. \"I'll find songs and you check the lyrics.\"\n\nWe started through them. \"No\u2026no\u2026what about 'I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day'?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, looking up the lyrics. \"It's got 'hate,' 'wrong,' 'dead,' and 'despair.' \"\n\n\"Cheery,\" he said. There was a pause while we looked through more music. \"John Lennon's 'Happy Xmas'?\"\n\nI shook my head. \" 'War.' Also 'fights' and 'fear.' \"\n\nAnother pause, and then he said, \"All I want for Christmas is you.\"\n\nI looked up at him, startled. \"What did you say?\"\n\n\" 'All I Want for Christmas Is You,' \" he repeated. \"Song title. Mariah Carey.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" I looked up the lyrics. \"I think it might be okay. I don't see any murder or mayhem.\" But he was shaking his head.\n\n\"On second thought, I don't think we'd better. Love can be even more dangerous than war.\"\n\nI looked into the living room, where the Altairi stood glaring through the door at me. \"I seriously doubt they're here to steal Earthwomen.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but we wouldn't want to give anybody any ideas.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"We definitely wouldn't want to do that.\"\n\nWe went back to searching for songs. \"How about 'I'll Be Home for Christmas'?\" he said, holding up a Patti Page album.\n\n\"I'll Be Home\" passed muster, but the Altairi didn't respond to it, or to Ed Ames singing \"Ballad of the Christmas Donkey\" or Miss Piggy singing \"Santa Baby.\"\n\nThere didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to their responses. The keys weren't the same, or the notes, or the accompaniment. They responded to the Andrews Sisters but not to Randy Travis, and it wasn't the voices, either, because they responded to Julie Andrews's \"Awake, Awake Ye Drowsy Souls.\" We played them her \"Silver Bells.\" They didn't laugh (which didn't really surprise me) or bustle, but when the song got to the part about the traffic lights blinking red and green, all six of them blinked their eyes. We played them her \"Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.\" They just sat there.\n\n\"Try the 'Christmas Waltz,' \" I said, looking at the album cover.\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's got love in it, too. You did say you didn't have a boyfriend, didn't you?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" I said, \"and I have no intention of dating the Altairi.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said. \"Can you think of any other songs with 'blink' in them?\"\n\nBy the time he left to rehearse with the symphony, we didn't know any more than when we'd started. I took the Altairi back to Dr. Wakamura, who didn't seem all that happy to see them, tried to find a song with \"blink\" in it, to no avail, had dinner, and went back over to Calvin's apartment.\n\nHe was already there, working. I started through the sheet music. \"What about 'Good Christian Men, Rejoice'?\" I said. \"It's got 'bow' in it,\" and the phone rang.\n\nCalvin answered it. \"What is it, Belinda?\" he said, listened a moment, and then said, \"Meg, turn on the TV,\" and handed me the remote.\n\nI switched on the television. Marvin the Martian was telling Bugs Bunny he planned to incinerate the earth. \"CNN,\" Calvin said. \"It's on forty.\"\n\nI punched in the channel and then was sorry. Reverend Thresher was standing in the audio lab in front of a mob of reporters, saying, \"\u2014happy to announce that we have found the answer to the Altairi's actions in the mall yesterday. Christmas carols were playing over the sound system in the mall\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" I said.\n\n\"I thought the surveillance tapes didn't have any sound,\" Calvin said.\n\n\"They don't. Someone else in the mall must have had a videocam.\"\n\n\"\u2014and when the Altairi heard those holy songs,\" Reverend Thresher was saying, \"they were overcome by the truth of their message, by the power of God's blessed word\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Calvin said.\n\n\"\u2014and they sank to the ground in repentance for their sins.\"\n\n\"They did not,\" I said. \"They sat down.\"\n\n\"For the past nine months, scientists have been seeking to discover the reason why the Altairi came to our planet. They should have turned to our Blessed Savior instead, for it is in Him that all answers lie. Why have the Altairi come here? To be saved! They've come to be born again, as we shall demonstrate.\" He held up a CD of Christmas carols.\n\n\"Oh, no!\" we both said. I grabbed for my cell phone.\n\n\"Like the wise men of old,\" Reverend Thresher was saying, \"they have come seeking Christ, which proves that Christianity is the only true religion.\"\n\nDr. Morthman took forever to answer his phone. When he did, I said, \"Dr. Morthman, you mustn't let the Altairi listen to any Christmas carols\u2014\"\n\n\"I can't talk now,\" he said. \"We're in the middle of a press conference,\" and hung up.\n\n\"Dr. Morthman\u2014\" I hit redial.\n\n\"There's no time for that.\" Calvin, who'd snatched up his keys and my coat, said, \"Come on, we'll take my car,\" and as we racketed downstairs, \"There were a lot of reporters there, and he just said something that will make every Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, and nonevangelical Christian on the planet go ballistic. If we're lucky, he'll still be answering questions when we get there.\"\n\n\"And if we're not?\"\n\n\"The Altairi will be out seizing troubled minds, and we'll have a holy war on our hands.\"\n\nWe almost made it. There were, as Calvin had predicted, a lot of questions, particularly after Reverend Thresher stated that the Altairi agreed with him on abortion, gay marriage, and the necessity of electing Republicans to all political offices in the next election.\n\nBut the clamoring reporters clogging the steps, the door, and the hall made it nearly impossible to get through, and by the time we reached the audio lab, Reverend Thresher was pointing proudly to the Altairi kneeling on the other side of the one-way mirror and telling the reporters, \"As you can see, their hearing the Christmas message has made them kneel in reverence\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no, they must be listening to 'O Holy Night,' \" I said, \"or 'As with Gladness Men of Old.' \"\n\n\"What did you play them?\" Calvin demanded. He pointed at the kneeling Altairi.\n\n\"The One True Way Maxichurch Christmas CD,\" Reverend Thresher said proudly, holding up the case, which the reporters obligingly snapped, filmed, and downloaded to their iPods. \"Christmas Carols for True Christians.\"\n\n\"No, no, what song?\"\n\n\"Do the individual carols hold a special significance for them?\" the reporters were shouting, and \"What carol were they listening to in the mall?\" and \"Have they been baptized, Reverend Thresher?\" while I tried to tell Dr. Morthman, \"You've got to turn the music off.\"\n\n\"Off?\" Dr. Morthman said incredulously, yelling to be heard over the reporters. \"Just when we're finally making progress communicating with the Altairi?\"\n\n\"You have to tell us which songs you've played!\" Calvin shouted.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Reverend Thresher demanded.\n\n\"He's with me,\" I said, and to Dr. Morthman, \"You have to turn it off right now. Some of the carols are dangerous.\"\n\n\"Dangerous?\" he bellowed, and the reporters' attention swiveled to us.\n\n\"What do you mean, dangerous?\" they asked.\n\n\"I mean dangerous,\" Calvin said. \"The Altairi aren't repenting of anything. They're\u2014\"\n\n\"How dare you accuse the Altairi of not being born again?\" Reverend Thresher said. \"I saw them respond to the hymnwriter's inspiring words with my own eyes, saw them fall on their knees\u2014\"\n\n\"They responded to 'Silver Bells,' too,\" I said, \"and to 'The Hanukkah Song.' \"\n\n\" 'The Hanukkah Song'?\" the reporters said, and began pelting us with questions again. \"Does that mean they're Jewish?\" \"Orthodox or Reform?\" \"What's their response to Hindu chants?\" \"What about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Do they respond to that?\"\n\n\"This doesn't have anything to do with religion,\" Calvin said. \"The Altairi are responding to the literal meaning of certain words in the songs. Some of the words they're listening to right now could be dangerous for them to\u2014\"\n\n\"Blasphemy!\" Reverend Thresher bellowed. \"How could the blessed Christmas message be dangerous?\"\n\n\" 'Christmas Day Is Come' tells them to slay young children,\" I said, \"and the lyrics of other carols have blood and war and stars raining fire. That's why you've got to turn off the music right now.\"\n\n\"Too late,\" Calvin said, and pointed through the one-way mirror.\n\nThe Altairi weren't there. \"Where are they?\" the reporters began shouting. \"Where did they go?\" and Reverend Thresher and Dr. Morthman both turned to me and demanded to know what I'd done with them.\n\n\"Leave her alone. She doesn't know where they are any more than you do,\" Calvin said, in his choir director voice.\n\nThe effect on the room was the same as it had been on his seventh-graders. Dr. Morthman let go of me, and the reporters shut up. \"Now, what song were you playing?\" Calvin said to Reverend Thresher.\n\n\" 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,' \" Reverend Thresher said, \"but it's one of the oldest and most beloved Christmas carols. It's ridiculous to think hearing it could endanger anyone\u2014\"\n\n\"Is 'God Rest Ye' why they left?\" the reporters were shouting, and \"What are the words? Is there any war in it? Or children-slaying?\"\n\n\" 'God rest ye merry, gentlemen,' \" I muttered under my breath, trying to remember the lyrics. \" 'Let nothing you dismay\u2026' \"\n\n\"Where did they go?\" the reporters clamored.\n\n\" '\u2026O, tidings of comfort and joy,' \" I murmured. I glanced over at Calvin. He was doing the same thing I was. \" '\u2026To save us all\u2026when we were gone\u2026' \"\n\n\"Where do you think they've gone?\" a reporter called out. Calvin looked at me. \"Astray,\" he said grimly.\n\nThe Altairi weren't in the other labs, in any of the other buildings on campus, or in their ship. Or at least no one had seen the ramp to it come down and them go inside. No one had seen them crossing the campus, either, or on the surrounding streets.\n\n\"I hold you entirely responsible for this, Miss Yates,\" Dr. Morthman said. \"Send out an APB,\" he told the police. \"And put out an Amber Alert.\"\n\n\"That's for when a child's been kidnapped,\" I said. \"The Altairi haven't\u2014\"\n\n\"We don't know that,\" he snapped. He turned back to the police officer. \"And call the FBI.\"\n\nThe police officer turned to Calvin. \"Dr. Morthman said you said the aliens were responding to the words 'gone astray.' Were there any other words in the song that are dangerous?\"\n\n\"Sa\u2014\" I began.\n\n\"No,\" Calvin said, and, while Dr. Morthman was telling the officer to call Homeland Security and tell them to declare a Code Red, hustled me down the sidewalk and behind the Altairi's ship.\n\n\"Why did you tell them that?\" I demanded. \"What about 'scorn'? What about 'Satan's power'?\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he whispered. \"He's already calling Homeland Security. We don't want him to call out the Air Force. And the nukes,\" he said. \"And there's no time to explain things to them. We've got to find the Altairi.\"\n\n\"Do you have any idea where they could have gone?\"\n\n\"No. At least their ship's still here,\" he said, looking over at it.\n\nI wasn't sure that meant anything, considering the Altairi had been able to get out of a lab with a locked door. I said as much, and Calvin agreed. \" 'Gone astray' may not even be what they were responding to. They may be off looking for a manger or shepherds. And there are different versions. Christmas Carols for True Christians may have used an older one.\"\n\n\"In which case we need to go back to the lab and find out exactly what it was they heard,\" I said, my heart sinking. Dr. Morthman was likely to have me arrested.\n\nApparently Calvin had reached the same conclusion, because he said, \"We can't go back in there. It's too risky, and we've got to find the Altairi before Reverend Thresher does. There's no telling what he'll play them next.\"\n\n\"But how\u2014?\"\n\n\"If they did go astray, then they may still be in the area. You go get your car and check the streets north of the campus, and I'll do south. Do you have your cell phone?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I don't have a car. Mine's at your apartment. We came over in yours, remember?\"\n\n\"What about the van you use to take the Altairi places in?\"\n\n\"But won't that be awfully noticeable?\"\n\n\"They're looking for six aliens on foot, not in a van,\" he said, \"and besides, if you find them, you'll need something to put them in.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" I said, and took off for the faculty parking lot, hoping Dr. Morthman hadn't had the same idea.\n\nHe hadn't. The parking lot was deserted. I slid the van's back door open, half hoping this was the Altairi's idea of astray, but they weren't inside, or on any of the streets for an area two miles north of DU. I drove up University Boulevard and then slowly up and down the side streets, terrified I'd find them squished on the pavement.\n\nIt was already dark. I called Calvin. \"No sign of them,\" I told him. \"Maybe they went back to the mall. I'm going to go over there and\u2014\"\n\n\"No, don't do that,\" he said. \"Dr. Morthman and the FBI are there. I'm watching it on CNN. They're searching Victoria's Secret. Besides, the Altairi aren't there.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"Because they're here at my apartment.\"\n\n\"They are?\" I said, weak with relief. \"Where did you find them?\"\n\nHe didn't answer me. \"Don't take any major streets on your way over here,\" he said. \"And park in the alley.\"\n\n\"Why? What have they done?\" I asked, but he'd already hung up.\n\nThe Altairi were standing in the middle of Calvin's living room when I got there. \"I came back here to check on alternate lyrics for 'God Rest Ye' and found them waiting for me,\" Calvin explained. \"Did you park in the alley?\"\n\n\"Yes, at the other end of the block. What have they done?\" I repeated, almost afraid to ask.\n\n\"Nothing. At least nothing that's been on CNN,\" he said, gesturing at the TV, which was showing the police searching the candle store. He had the sound turned down, but across the bottom of the screen was the logo \"Aliens AWOL.\"\n\n\"Then why all the secrecy?\"\n\n\"Because we can't afford to let them find the Altairi till we've figured out why they're doing what they're doing. Next time it might not be as harmless as going astray. And we can't go to your apartment. They know where you live. We're going to have to hole up here. Did you tell anybody you were working with me?\"\n\nI tried to think. I'd attempted to tell Dr. Morthman about Calvin when I got back from the mall, but I hadn't gotten far enough to tell him Calvin's name, and when Reverend Thresher had demanded, \"Who are you?\" all I'd said was \"He's with me.\"\n\n\"I didn't tell anybody your name,\" I said.\n\n\"Good,\" he said. \"And I'm pretty sure nobody saw the Altairi coming here.\"\n\n\"But how can you be sure? Your neighbors\u2014\"\n\n\"Because the Altairi were waiting for me inside,\" he said. \"Right where they are now. So they can either pick locks, walk through walls, or teleport. My money's on teleportation. And it's obvious the commission doesn't have any idea where they are,\" he said, pointing at the TV, where a mugshot-like photo of the Altairi was displayed, with \"Have you seen these aliens?\" and a phone number to call across their midsections. \"And luckily, I went to the grocery store and stocked up the other day so I wouldn't have to go shopping in between all my concerts.\"\n\n\"Your concerts! And the AllCity Sing! I forgot all about them,\" I said, stricken with guilt. \"Weren't you supposed to have a rehearsal tonight?\"\n\n\"I canceled it,\" he said, \"and I can cancel the one tomorrow morning if I have to. The Sing's not till tomorrow night. We've got plenty of time to figure this out.\"\n\nIf they don't find us first, I thought, looking at the TV, where they were searching the food court. Eventually, when they couldn't find the Altairi anywhere, they'd realize I was missing, too, and start looking for us. And the reporters today, unlike Leo, had all been videotaping. If they put Calvin's picture on TV with a number to call, one of his church choir members or his seventh-graders would be certain to call in and identify him.\n\nWhich meant we'd better work fast. I picked up the list of songs and actions we'd compiled. \"Where do you want to start?\" I asked Calvin, who was starting through a stack of LPs.\n\n\"Not with 'Frosty the Snowman,' \" he said. \"I don't think I can stand any chasing here and there.\"\n\n\"How about, 'I Wonder as I Wander'?\"\n\n\"Very funny,\" he said. \"Since we know they respond to 'kneeling,' why don't we start with that?\"\n\n\"Okay.\" We played them \"fall on your knees\" and \"come adore on bended knee\" and \"whose forms are bending low,\" some of which they responded to and some of which they didn't, for no reason we could see.\n\n\" 'The First Noel' has 'full reverently upon their knee' in it,\" I said, and Calvin started toward the bedroom to look for it.\n\nHe stopped as he passed in front of the TV. \"I think you'd better come look at this,\" he said, and turned it up.\n\n\"The Altairi were not at the mall, as we had hoped,\" Dr. Morthman was saying, \"and it has just come to our attention that a member of our commission is also missing, Margaret Yates.\" Video of the scene at the lab came on behind Dr. Morthman and the reporter, with me shouting for him to shut the music off. Any second a picture of Calvin would appear, demanding to know which carol they were playing.\n\nI grabbed up my phone and called Dr. Morthman, hoping against hope they couldn't trace cell phone calls and that he'd answer even though he was on TV.\n\nHe did, and the camera blessedly zoomed in on him so only a tiny piece of the video remained visible. \"Where are you calling from?\" he demanded. \"Did you find the Altairi?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, \"but I think I have an idea where they might be.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Dr. Morthman said.\n\n\"I don't think they've gone astray. I think they may be responding to one of the other words in the song. 'Rest' or possibly\u2014\"\n\n\"I knew it,\" Reverend Thresher said, shoving in front of Dr. Morthman. \"They were responding to the words 'Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day.' They've gone to church. They're at the One True Way right this minute.\"\n\nIt wasn't what I had in mind, but at least a photo of the One True Way Maxichurch was better than one of Calvin. \"That should give us at least two hours. His church is way down in Colorado Springs,\" I said, turning the TV back down, and went back to playing songs to the Altairi and logging their responses and nonresponses, but half an hour later, when Calvin went into the bedroom to try to find a Louis Armstrong CD, he stopped in front of the TV again and frowned.\n\n\"What happened?\" I said, dumping the pile of sheet music on my lap on the couch beside me and sidling past the Altairi to get to him. \"Didn't they take the bait?\"\n\n\"Oh, they took it, all right,\" he said, and turned up the TV.\n\n\"We believe the Altairi are in Bethlehem,\" Dr. Morthman was saying. He was standing in front of a departures board at DIA.\n\n\"Bethlehem?\" I said.\n\n\"It's mentioned in the lyrics twice,\" Calvin said. \"At least if they're off in Israel it gives us more time.\"\n\n\"It also gives us an international incident,\" I said. \"In the Middle East, no less. I've got to call Dr. Morthman.\" But he must have turned his cell phone off, and I couldn't get through to the lab.\n\n\"You could call Reverend Thresher,\" Calvin said, pointing to the TV screen.\n\nReverend Thresher was surrounded by reporters as he got into his Lexus. \"I'm on my way to the Altairi right now, and tonight we will hold a Praise Worship Service, and you'll be able to hear their Christian witness, and the Christmas carols that first brought them to the Lord\u2014\"\n\nCalvin switched the TV off. \"It's a sixteen-hour flight to Bethlehem,\" he said encouragingly. \"It surely won't take us that long to figure this out.\"\n\nThe phone rang. Calvin shot me a glance and then picked it up. \"Hello, Mr. Steinberg,\" he said. \"Didn't you get my message? I canceled tonight's rehearsal.\" He listened awhile. \"If you're worried about your entrance on page twelve, we'll run over it before the Sing.\" He listened some more. \"It'll all come together. It always does.\"\n\nI hoped that would be true of our solving the puzzle of the Altairi. If it wasn't, we'd be charged with kidnapping. Or starting a religious war. But both were better than letting Reverend Thresher play them \"slowly dying\" and \"thorns infest the ground.\" Which meant we'd better figure out what the Altairi were responding to, and fast. We played them Dolly Parton and Manhattan Transfer and the Barbershop Choir of Toledo and Dean Martin.\n\nWhich was a bad idea. I'd had almost no sleep the last two days, and I found myself nodding off after the first few bars. I sat up straight and tried to concentrate on the Altairi, but it was no use. The next thing I knew, my head was on Calvin's shoulder, and he was saying, \"Meg? Meg? Do the Altairi sleep?\"\n\n\"Sleep?\" I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. \"I'm sorry, I must have dozed off. What time is it?\"\n\n\"A little after four.\"\n\n\"In the morning?\"\n\n\"Yes. Do the Altairi sleep?\"\n\n\"Yes, at least we think so. Their brain patterns alter, and they don't respond to stimuli, but then again, they never respond.\"\n\n\"Are there visible signs that they're asleep? Do they close their eyes or lie down?\"\n\n\"No, they sort of droop over, like flowers that haven't been watered. And their glares diminish a little. Why?\"\n\n\"I have something I want to try. Go back to sleep.\"\n\n\"No, that's okay,\" I said, suppressing a yawn. \"If anybody needs to sleep, it's you. I've kept you up the last two nights, and you've got to direct your Sing thing tonight. I'll take over and you go\u2014\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I'm fine. I told you, I never get any sleep this time of year.\"\n\n\"So what's this idea you want to try?\"\n\n\"I want to play them the first verse of 'Silent Night.' \"\n\n\" 'Sleep in heavenly peace,' \" I said.\n\n\"Right, and no other action verbs and I've got at least fifty versions of it. Johnny Cash, Kate Smith, Britney Spears\u2014\"\n\n\"Do we have time to play them fifty different versions?\" I asked, looking over at the TV. A split screen showed a map of Israel and the outside of the One True Way Maxichurch. When I turned the volume up, a reporter's voice said, \"Inside, thousands of members are awaiting the appearance of the Altairi, whom Reverend Thresher expects at any minute. A twenty-four-hour High-Powered Prayer Vigil\u2014\"\n\nI turned it back down. \"I guess we do. You were saying?\"\n\n\" 'Silent Night' is a song everybody\u2014Gene Autry, Madonna, Burl Ives\u2014has recorded. Different voices, different accompaniments, different keys. We can see which versions they respond to\u2014\"\n\n\"And which ones they don't,\" I said, \"and that may give us a clue to what they're responding to.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said, opening a CD case. He stuck it in the player and hit Track 4. \"Here goes.\"\n\nThe voice of Elvis Presley singing \" 'Silent night, holy night' \" filled the room. Calvin came back over to the couch and sat down next to me. When Elvis got to \" 'tender and mild,' \" we both leaned forward expectantly, watching the Altairi. \" 'Sleep in heavenly peace,' \" Elvis crooned, but the Altairi were still stiffly upright, and they remained that way through the repeated \" 'sleep in heavenly peace.' \" And through Alvin the Chipmunk's solo of it. And Celine Dion's.\n\n\"Their glares don't appear to be diminishing,\" Calvin said. \"If anything, they seem to be getting worse.\"\n\nThey were. \"You'd better play them Judy Garland,\" I said.\n\nHe did, and Dolly Parton and Harry Belafonte. \"What if they don't respond to any of them?\" I asked.\n\n\"Then we try something else. I've also got twenty-six versions of 'Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.' \" He grinned at me. \"I'm kidding. I do, however, have nine different versions of 'Baby, It's Cold Outside.' \"\n\n\"For use on redheaded second sopranos?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"Shh, I love this version. Nat King Cole.\"\n\nI shh-ed and listened, wondering how the Altairi could resist falling asleep. Nat King Cole's voice was even more relaxing than Dean Martin's. I leaned back against the couch. \" 'All is calm\u2026' \"\n\nI must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing I knew, the music had stopped and it was daylight outside. I looked at my watch. It said two P.M. The Altairi were standing in the exact same spot they'd been in before, glaring, and Calvin was sitting hunched forward on a kitchen chair, his chin in his hand, watching them and looking worried.\n\n\"Did something happen?\" I glanced over at the TV. Reverend Thresher was talking. The logo read \"Thresher Launches Galaxywide Christian Crusade.\" At least it didn't say \"Air Strikes in Middle East.\"\n\nCalvin was slowly shaking his head.\n\n\"Wasn't there any response to 'Silent Night'?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, there was,\" he said. \"You responded to the version by Nat King Cole.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I said. \"I'm sorry. I meant the Altairi. They didn't respond to any of the 'Silent Night's?\"\n\n\"No, they responded,\" he said, \"but just to one version.\"\n\n\"But that's good, isn't it?\" I asked. \"Now we can analyze what it was that was different about it that they were responding to. Which version was it?\"\n\nInstead of answering, he walked over to the CD player and hit play. A loud chorus of nasal female voices began belting out, \" 'Silent night, holy night,' \" shouting to be heard over a cacophony of clinks and clacks. \"What is that?\" I asked.\n\n\"The Broadway chorus of the musical 42nd Street singing and tap-dancing to 'Silent Night.' They recorded it for a special Broadway Christmas charity project.\"\n\nI looked over at the Altairi, thinking maybe Calvin was wrong and they hadn't really fallen asleep, but in spite of the din, they had sagged limply over, their heads nearly touching the ground, looking almost peaceful. Their glares had faded from full-bore Aunt Judith to only mildly disapproving.\n\nI listened to the 42nd Street chorines tapping and belting out \"Silent Night\" at the top of their lungs some more. \"It is kind of appealing,\" I said, \"especially the part where they shout out 'Mother and child!' \"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"I'd like it played at our wedding. And obviously the Altairi share our good taste. But aside from that, I'm not sure what it tells us.\"\n\n\"That the Altairi like show tunes?\" I suggested.\n\n\"God forbid. Think what Reverend Thresher would do with that,\" he said. \"Besides, they didn't respond to 'Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat.' \"\n\n\"No, but they did to that song from Mame.\"\n\n\"And to the one from 1776 but not to The Music Man or Rent,\" he said frustratedly. \"Which puts us right back where we started. I have no clue what they're responding to!\"\n\n\"I know,\" I said. \"I'm so sorry. I should never have gotten you involved in this. You have your ACHES thing to direct.\"\n\n\"It doesn't start till seven,\" he said, rummaging through a stack of LPs, \"which means we've got another four hours to work. If we could just find another 'Silent Night' they'll respond to, we might be able to figure out what in God's name they're doing. What the hell happened to that Star Wars Christmas album?\"\n\n\"Stop,\" I said. \"This is ridiculous.\" I took the albums out of his hands. \"You're exhausted, and you've got a big job to do. You can't direct all those people on no sleep. This can wait.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"People think better after a nap,\" I said firmly. \"You'll wake up, and the solution will be perfectly obvious.\"\n\n\"And if it isn't?\"\n\n\"Then you'll go direct your choirs, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Choirs,\" he said thoughtfully.\n\n\"Or AllCity Sing or Aches and Pains or whatever you call it, and I'll stay here and play the Altairi some more 'Silent Night's till you get back and\u2014\"\n\n\" 'Sit Down, John' was sung by the chorus,\" he said, looking past me at the drooping Altairi. \"And so was 'While Shepherds Watched.' And the 42nd Street 'Silent Night' was the only one that wasn't a solo.\" He grabbed my shoulders. \"They're all choruses. That's why they didn't respond to Julie Andrews singing 'Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow,' or to Stubby Kaye singing 'Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat.' They only respond to groups of voices.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"You forgot 'Awake, Awake, Ye Drowsy Souls.' \"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said, his face falling, \"you're right. Wait!\" He lunged for the Julie Andrews CD and stuck it in the recorder. \"I think Julie Andrews sings the verse and then a chorus comes in. Listen.\"\n\nHe was right. The chorus had sung \"Awake, awake.\"\n\n\"Who sang the 'Joy to the World' you played them on the CD from the mall?\" Calvin asked.\n\n\"Just Julie Andrews,\" I said. \"And Brenda Lee sang 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.' \"\n\n\"And Johnny Mathis sang 'Angels from the Realms of Glory,' \" he said happily. \"But the Hanukkah song, which they did respond to, was sung by the\u2026\" he read it off the CD case, \"the Shalom Singers. That's got to be it.\" He began looking through the LPs again.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" I asked.\n\n\"The Mormon Tabernacle Choir,\" he said. \"They've got to have recorded 'Silent Night.' We'll play it for the Altairi, and if they fall asleep, we'll know we're on the right track.\"\n\n\"But they're already asleep,\" I pointed out, gesturing to where they stood looking like a week-old flower arrangement. \"How\u2014?\"\n\nHe was already digging again. He brought up a Cambridge Boys' Choir album, pulled the LP out, and read the label, muttering, \"I know it's on here\u2026Here it is.\" He put it on, and a chorus of sweet boys' voices sang, \" 'Christians awake, salute the happy morn.' \"\n\nThe Altairi straightened immediately and glared at us. \"You were right,\" I said softly, but he wasn't listening. He had the LP off the turntable and was reading the label again, muttering, \"Come on, you have to have done 'Silent Night.' Everyone does 'Silent Night.' \" He flipped the LP over, said, \"I knew it,\" popped it back on the turntable, and dropped the needle expertly.\n\n\" '\u2026and mild,' \" the boys' angelic voices sang, \" 'sleep\u2026' \"\n\nThe Altairi drooped over before the word was even out. \"That's definitely it!\" I said. \"That's the common denominator.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"We need more data. It could just be a coincidence. We need to find a choral version of 'Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.' And 'Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat.' Where did you put Guys and Dolls?\"\n\n\"But that was a solo.\"\n\n\"The first part, the part we played them was a solo. Later on all the gamblers come in. We should have played them the whole song.\"\n\n\"We couldn't, remember?\" I said, handing it to him. \"Remember the parts about dragging you under and drowning, not to mention gambling and drinking?\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" he said. He put headphones on, listened, and then unplugged them. \" 'Sit down\u2026' \" a chorus of men's voices sang lustily, and the Altairi sat down.\n\nWe played choir versions of \"All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth\" and \"Rise Up, Shepherds, and Follow.\" The Altairi sat down and stood up. \"You're right,\" he said after the Altairi knelt to the Platters singing \"The First Noel.\" \"It's the common denominator, all right. But why?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I admitted. \"Maybe they can't understand things said to them by fewer voices than a choir. That would explain why there are six of them. Maybe each one only hears certain frequencies, which singly are meaningless, but with six of them\u2014\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"You're forgetting the Andrews Sisters. And Barenaked Ladies. And even if it is the choir aspect they're responding to, it still doesn't tell us what they're doing here.\"\n\n\"But now we know how to get them to tell us,\" I said, grabbing up The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. \"Can you find a choir version of 'Adeste Fideles' in English?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" he said. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because it's got 'we greet thee' in it,\" I said, running my fingers down the lyrics of \"Good Christian Men, Rejoice.\"\n\n\"And there's 'Watchmen, Tell Us of the Night,' \" he said. \"And 'great glad tidings tell.' They're bound to respond to one of them.\"\n\nBut they didn't. Peter, Paul, and Mary ordered the Altairi to go tell (we blanked out the \"on the mountain\" part), but either the Altairi didn't like folk music, or the Andrews Sisters had been a fluke.\n\nOr we had jumped to conclusions. When we tried the same song again, this time by the Boston Commons Choir, there was still no response. And none to choral versions of \"Deck the Halls\" (\"while I tell\"), \"Jolly Old St. Nicholas\" (\"don't you tell a single soul\" minus \"don't\" and \"a single soul\"). Or to \"The Friendly Beasts,\" even though all six verses had \"tell\" in them.\n\nCalvin thought the tense might be the problem and played parts of \"Little St. Nick\" (\"tale\" and \"told\") and \"The Carol of the Bells\" (\"telling\"), but to no avail. \"Maybe the word's the problem,\" I said. \"Maybe they just don't know the word 'tell.' \" But they didn't respond to \"say\" or \"saying\" or \"said,\" to \"messages\" or to \"proclaim.\"\n\n\"We must have been wrong about the choir thing,\" Calvin said, but that wasn't it, either. While he was in the bedroom putting his tux on for the Sing, I played them snatches of \"The First Noel\" and \"Up on the Rooftop\" from the Barenaked Ladies CD, and they knelt and jumped right on cue.\n\n\"Maybe they think Earth's a gym and this is an exercise class,\" Calvin said, coming in as they were leaping to the St. Paul's Cathedral Choir singing \"The Twelve Days of Christmas.\" \"I don't suppose the word 'calling' had any effect on them.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, tying his bow tie, \"and 'I'm bringing you this simple phrase' didn't, either. Has it occurred to you that the music might not be having any effect at all, and they just happen to be sitting and leaping and kneeling at the same time as the words are being sung?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"There's a connection. If there wasn't, they wouldn't look so irritated that we haven't been able to figure it out yet.\"\n\nHe was right. Their glares had, if anything, intensified, and their very posture radiated disapproval.\n\n\"We need more data, that's all,\" he said, going to get his black shoes. \"As soon as I get back, we'll\u2014\" He stopped.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"You'd better look at this,\" he said, pointing at the TV. The screen was showing a photo of the ship. All the lights were on, and exhaust was coming out of assorted side vents. Calvin grabbed the remote and turned it up.\n\n\"It is now believed that the Altairi have returned to their ship and are preparing to depart,\" the newscaster said. I glanced over at the Altairi. They were still standing there. \"Analysis of the ignition cycle indicates that takeoff will be in less than six hours.\"\n\n\"What do we do now?\" I asked Calvin.\n\n\"We figure this out. You heard them. We've got six hours till blastoff.\"\n\n\"But the Sing\u2014\"\n\nHe handed me my coat. \"We know it's got something to do with choirs, and I've got every kind you could want. We'll take the Altairi to the convention center and hope we think of something on the way.\"\n\nWe didn't think of anything on the way. \"Maybe I should take them back to their ship,\" I said, pulling into the parking lot. \"What if I cause them to get left behind?\"\n\n\"They are not E.T.,\" he said.\n\nI parked at the service entrance, got out, and started to slide the back door of the van open. \"No, leave them there,\" Calvin said. \"We've got to find a place to put them before we take them in. Lock the car.\"\n\nI did, even though I doubted if it would do any good, and followed Calvin through a side door marked \"Choirs Only\" and through a maze of corridors lined with rooms marked \"St. Peter's Boys' Choir,\" \"Red Hat Glee Club,\" \"Denver Gay Men's Chorus,\" \"Sweet Adelines Show Chorus,\" \"Mile High Jazz Singers.\" There was a hubbub in the front of the building, and when we crossed the main corridor, we could see people in gold and green and black robes milling around talking.\n\nCalvin opened several doors one after the other, ducked inside the rooms, shutting the doors after him, and then reemerged, shaking his head. \"We can't let the Altairi hear the Messiah, and you can still hear the noise from the auditorium,\" he said. \"We need someplace soundproof.\"\n\n\"Or farther away,\" I said, leading the way down the corridor and turning down a side hall. And running smack into his seventh-graders coming out of one of the meeting rooms. Mrs. Carlson was videotaping them, and another mother was attempting to line them up to go in, but as soon as they saw Calvin, they clustered around him saying, \"Mr. Ledbetter, where have you been? We thought you weren't coming,\" and \"Mr. Ledbetter, Mrs. Carlson says we have to turn our cell phones off, but can't we just have them on vibrate?\" and \"Mr. Ledbetter, Shelby and I were supposed to go in together, but she says she wants to be partners with Danika.\"\n\nCalvin ignored them. \"Kaneesha, could you hear any of the groups rehearsing when you were in getting dressed?\"\n\n\"Why?\" Belinda asked. \"Did we miss the call to go in?\"\n\n\"Could you, Kaneesha?\" he persisted.\n\n\"A little bit,\" she said.\n\n\"That won't work, then,\" he said to me. \"I'll go check the room at the end. Wait here.\" He sprinted along the hall.\n\n\"You were at the mall that day,\" Belinda said accusingly to me. \"Are you and Mr. Ledbetter going out?\"\n\nWe may all be going out together\u2014with a bang\u2014if we don't figure out what the Altairi are doing, I thought. \"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Are you hooking up?\" Chelsea asked.\n\n\"Chelsea!\" Mrs. Carlson said, horrified.\n\n\"Well, are you?\"\n\n\"Aren't you supposed to be lining up?\" I asked.\n\nCalvin came back at a dead run. \"It should work,\" he said to me. \"It seems fairly soundproof.\"\n\n\"Why does it have to be soundproof?\" Chelsea asked.\n\n\"I bet it's so nobody can hear them making out,\" Belinda said, and Chelsea began making smooching noises.\n\n\"Time to go in, ladies,\" he said in his choir director's voice, \"line up,\" and he really was amazing. They immediately formed pairs and began making a line.\n\n\"Wait till everybody's gone into the auditorium,\" he said, pulling me aside, \"and then go get them and bring them in. I'll do a few minutes' intro of the orchestra and the organizing committee so the Altairi won't hear any songs while you're getting them to the room. There's a table you can use to barricade the door so nobody can get in.\"\n\n\"And what if the Altairi try to leave?\" I asked. \"A barricade won't stop them, you know.\"\n\n\"Call me on my cell phone, and I'll tell the audience there's a fire drill or something. Okay? I'll make this as short as I can.\" He grinned. \"No 'Twelve Days of Christmas.' Don't worry, Meg. We'll figure this out.\"\n\n\"I told you she was his girlfriend.\"\n\n\"Is she, Mr. Ledbetter?\"\n\n\"Let's go, ladies,\" he said, and led them down the hall and into the auditorium. Just as the auditorium doors shut on the last stragglers, my cell phone rang. It was Dr. Morthman, calling to say, \"You can stop looking. The Altairi are in their ship.\"\n\n\"How do you know? Have you seen them?\" I asked, thinking, I knew I shouldn't have left them in the car.\n\n\"No, but the ship's begun the ignition process, and it's going faster than NASA previously estimated. They're now saying it's no more than four hours to takeoff. Where are you?\"\n\n\"On my way back,\" I said, trying not to sound like I was running out to the parking lot and unlocking the van, which, thank goodness, was at least still there and intact.\n\n\"Well, hurry it up,\" Dr. Morthman snapped. \"The press is here. You're going to have to explain to them exactly how you let the Altairi get away.\" I pulled open the van's door.\n\nThe Altairi weren't inside.\n\nOh, no. \"I blame this entire debacle on you,\" Dr. Morthman said. \"If there are international repercussions\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll be there as soon as I can,\" I said, hung up, and turned to run around to the driver's side.\n\nAnd collided with the Altairi, who had apparently been standing behind me the entire time. \"Don't scare me like that,\" I said. \"Now come on,\" and led them rapidly into the convention center, past the shut doors of the auditorium, where I could hear talking but not singing, thank goodness, and along the long hall to the room Calvin had indicated.\n\nIt was empty except for the table Calvin had mentioned. I herded the Altairi inside and then tipped the table on its side, pushed it in front of the door, wedging it under the doorknob, and leaned my ear against it to see if I could hear any sound from the auditorium, but Calvin had been right. I couldn't hear anything, and they should have started by now.\n\nAnd now what? With takeoff only four hours away, I needed to take advantage of every second, but there was nothing in the room I could use\u2014no piano or CD player or LPs. We should have used his seventh-graders' dressing room, I thought. They'd at least have had iPods or something.\n\nBut even if I played the Altairi hundreds of Christmas carols being sung by a choir, and they responded to them all\u2014bowing, decking halls, dashing through snow in one-horse open sleighs, following yonder stars\u2014I'd still be no closer to figuring out why they were here or why they'd decided to leave. Or why they'd taken the very loud tap-dancing chorus of 42nd Street singing \"Sleep in heavenly peace\" as a direct order. If they even knew what the word \"sleep\"\u2014or \"seated\" or \"spin\" or \"blink\"\u2014meant.\n\nCalvin had surmised they could only hear words sung to them with more than one voice, but that couldn't be it. Someone hearing a word for the first time would have no idea what it meant, and they'd never heard \"all seated on the ground\" till that day in the mall. They had to have heard the word before to have known what it meant, and they'd only have heard it spoken. Which meant they could hear spoken words as well as sung ones.\n\nThey could have read the words, I thought, remembering the Rosetta Stone and the dictionaries Dr. Short had given them. But even if they'd somehow taught themselves to read English, they wouldn't know how it was pronounced. They wouldn't have recognized it when they heard it spoken. The only way they could do that was by hearing the spoken word. Which meant they'd been listening to and understanding every word we'd said for the past nine months. Including Calvin's and my conversations about them slaying babies and destroying the planet. No wonder they were leaving.\n\nBut if they understood us, then that meant one of two things\u2014they were either unwilling to talk to us or were incapable of speaking. Had their sitting down and their other responses been an attempt at sign language?\n\nNo, that couldn't be it, either. They could have responded just as easily to a spoken \"sit\" and done it months earlier. And if they were trying to communicate, wouldn't they have given Calvin and me some hint we were on the right\u2014or the wrong\u2014track instead of just standing there with that we-are-not-amused glare? And I didn't believe for a moment those expressions were an accident of nature. I knew disapproval when I saw it. I'd watched Aunt Judith too many years not to\u2014\n\nAunt Judith. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and called my sister Tracy. \"Tell me everything you can remember about Aunt Judith,\" I said when she answered.\n\n\"Has something happened to her?\" she said, sounding alarmed. \"When I talked to her last week she\u2014\"\n\n\"Last week?\" I said. \"You mean Aunt Judith's still alive?\"\n\n\"Well, she was last week when we had lunch.\"\n\n\"Lunch? With Aunt Judith? Are we talking about the same person? Dad's Aunt Judith? The Gorgon?\"\n\n\"Yes, only she's not a Gorgon. She's actually very nice when you get to know her.\"\n\n\"Aunt Judith,\" I said, \"the one who always glared disapprovingly at everybody?\"\n\n\"Yes, only she hasn't glared at me in years. As I say, when you get to know her\u2014\"\n\n\"And exactly how did you do that?\"\n\n\"I thanked her for my birthday present.\"\n\n\"And\u2014?\" I said. \"That can't have been all. Mom always made both of us thank her nicely for our presents.\"\n\n\"I know, but they weren't proper thank-yous. 'A prompt handwritten note expressing gratitude is the only proper form of thanks,' \" Tracy said, obviously quoting. \"I was in high school, and we had to write a thank-you letter to someone for class. She'd just sent me my birthday card with the dollar in it, so I wrote her, and the next day she called and gave me this long lecture about the importance of good manners and how shocking it was that no one followed the most basic rules of etiquette anymore and how she was delighted to see that at least one young person knew how to behave, and then she asked me if I'd like to go see Les Mis with her, and I bought a copy of Emily Post, and we've gotten along great ever since. She sent Evan and me a sterling silver fish slice when we got married.\"\n\n\"For which you sent her a handwritten thank-you note,\" I said absently. Aunt Judith had been glaring because we were boorish and unmannered. Was that why the Altairi looked so disapproving, because they were waiting for the equivalent of a handwritten thank-you note from us?\n\nIf that was the case, we were doomed. Rules of etiquette are notoriously illogical and culture-specific, and there was no intergalactic Emily Post for me to consult. And I had, oh, God, less than two hours till liftoff.\n\n\"Tell me exactly what she said that day she called you,\" I said, unwilling to give up the idea that she was somehow the key.\n\n\"It was eight years ago\u2014\"\n\n\"I know. Try to remember.\"\n\n\"Okay\u2026there was a lot of stuff about gloves and how I shouldn't wear white shoes after Labor Day and how I shouldn't cross my legs. 'Well-bred young ladies sit with their ankles crossed.' \"\n\nHad the Altairi's sitting down in the mall been an etiquette lesson in the proper way to sit? It seemed unlikely, but so did Aunt Judith's refusal to speak to people because of the color of their shoes on certain calendar dates.\n\n\"\u2026and she said if I got married, I needed to send out engraved invitations,\" Tracy said. \"Which I did. I think that's why she gave us the fish slice.\"\n\n\"I don't care about the fish slice. What did she say about your thank-you note?\"\n\n\"She said, 'Well, it's about time, Tracy. I'd nearly given up hope of anyone in your family showing any signs of civilized behavior.' \"\n\nCivilized behavior. That was it. The Altairi, like Aunt Judith sitting in our living room glaring, had been waiting for a sign that we were civilized. And singing\u2014correction, group singing\u2014was that sign. But was it an arbitrary rule of etiquette, like white shoes and engraved invitations, or was it a symbol of something else? I thought of Calvin telling his chattering seventh-graders to line up, and the milling, giggling, chaotic muddle of girls coming together in an organized, beautifully behaved, civilized line.\n\nComing together. That was the civilized behavior the Altairi had been waiting for a sign of. And they'd seen precious little of it in the nine months they'd been here: the disorganized commission with members quitting and those who were left not listening to anyone; that awful rehearsal where the basses couldn't get the entrance right to save them; the harried shoppers in the mall, dragging their screaming children after them. The piped-in choir singing \"While Shepherds Watched\" might have been the first indication they'd seen\u2014correction, heard\u2014that we were capable of getting along with each other at all.\n\nNo wonder they'd sat down right there in the middle of the mall. They must have thought, like Aunt Judith, \"Well, it's about time!\" But then why hadn't they done the equivalent of calling us and asking us to go see Les Mis?\n\nMaybe they hadn't been sure that what they'd seen\u2014correction, heard\u2014was what they thought it was. They'd never seen people sing, except for Calvin and those pathetic basses. They'd seen no signs we were capable of singing beautifully in harmony.\n\nBut \"While Shepherds Watched\" had convinced them it might be possible, which was why they'd followed us around and why they'd sat and slept and gone astray whenever they heard more than one voice, hoping we'd get the hint, waiting for further proof.\n\nIn which case we should be in the auditorium, listening to the Sing, instead of in this soundproof room. Especially since the fact that their ship was getting ready to take off indicated they'd given up and decided they were mistaken after all. \"Come on,\" I said to the Altairi, and stood up. \"I need to show you something.\" I shoved the table away from the door, and opened it.\n\nOn Calvin. \"Oh, good, you're here,\" I said. \"I\u2014 Why aren't you in directing?\"\n\n\"I announced an intermission so I could tell you something. I think I've got it, the thing the Altairi have been responding to,\" he said, grabbing me by the arms, \"the reason they reacted to Christmas songs. I thought of it while I was directing 'Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.' What do nearly all Christmas songs have in them?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said. \"Chestnuts? Santa Claus? Bells?\"\n\n\"Close,\" he said. \"Choirs.\"\n\nChoirs? \"We already knew they responded to songs sung by choirs,\" I said, confused.\n\n\"Not just to songs sung by choirs. Songs about choirs. Christmas carols being sung by the choir, angel choirs, children's choirs, wassailers, carolers, 'strike the harp and join the chorus,' \" he said. \"The angels in 'Angels We Have Heard on High' are 'sweetly singing o'er the plains.' In 'It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,' all the world gives back the song they sing. They're all about singing,\" he said excitedly. \" 'That glorious song of old,' 'whom angels greet with anthems sweet.' Look,\" he flipped through the pages of his music, pointing out phrases, \" 'oh, hear the angel voices,' 'as men of old have sung,' 'whom shepherds guard and angels sing,' 'let men their songs employ.' There are references to singing in songs by Randy Travis, the Peanuts kids, Paul McCartney, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It wasn't just that 'While Shepherds Watched' was sung by a choir. It was that it was a song about choirs singing. And not just singing, but what they're singing.\" He thrust the song in front of me, pointing to the last verse. \" 'Good will, henceforth from heaven to men.' That's what they've been trying to communicate to us.\"\n\nI shook my head. \"It's what they've been waiting for us to communicate to them. Just like Aunt Judith.\"\n\n\"Aunt Judith?\"\n\n\"I'll explain later. Right now we've got to prove we're civilized before the Altairi leave.\"\n\n\"And how do we do that?\"\n\n\"We sing to them, or rather, the AllCity Holiday Ecumenical Sing does.\"\n\n\"What do we sing?\"\n\nI wasn't sure it mattered. I was pretty certain what they were looking for was proof we could cooperate and work together in harmony, and in that case, \"Mele Kalikimaka\" would work as well as \"The Peace Carol.\" But it wouldn't hurt to make things as clear to them as we could. And it would be nice if it was also something that Reverend Thresher couldn't use as ammunition for his Galaxywide Christian Crusade.\n\n\"We need to sing something that will convince the Altairi we're a civilized species,\" I said, \"something that conveys good will and peace. Especially peace. And not religion, if that's possible.\"\n\n\"How much time have we got to write it?\" Calvin asked. \"And we'll have to get copies made\u2014\"\n\nMy cell phone rang. The screen showed it was Dr. Morthman. \"Hang on,\" I said, hitting talk. \"I should be able to tell you in a second. Hello?\"\n\n\"Where are you?\" Dr. Morthman shouted. \"The ship's beginning its final ignition cycle.\"\n\nI whirled around to make sure the Altairi were still there. They were, thank goodness, and still glaring. \"How long does the final cycle take?\" I asked.\n\n\"They don't know,\" Dr. Morthman said, \"ten minutes at the outside. If you don't get here immediately\u2014\"\n\nI hung up.\n\n\"Well?\" Calvin said. \"How much time have we got?\"\n\n\"None,\" I said.\n\n\"Then we'll have to use something we've already got,\" he said, and began riffling through his sheaf of music, \"and something people know the harmony to. Civilized\u2026civilized\u2026I think\u2026\" He found what he was looking for and scanned it. \"\u2026Yeah, if I change a couple of words, this should do the trick. Do you think the Altairi understand Latin?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't put it past them.\"\n\n\"Then we'll just do the first two lines. Wait five minutes\u2014\"\n\n\"Five minutes?\"\n\n\"\u2014so I can brief everybody on the changes, and then bring the Altairi in.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" I said, and he took off at a run for the auditorium.\n\nThere was an expectant buzz in the audience when we came through the double doors, and the ranks of choirs arrayed around the stage, a sea of maroon and gold and green and purple robes, began whispering to each other behind their music.\n\nCalvin had apparently just finished his briefing. Some of the choirs and the audience were busily scribbling notes on their music, and passing pencils, and asking each other questions. The orchestra, on one side of the stage, was warming up in a jumbled cacophony of screeches and hoots and blats.\n\nOn the other side, the sopranos of the Mile-High Women's Chorus were apparently filling the altos in on my interrupting rehearsal the other night, because they all turned to glare at me. \"I think it's ridiculous that we can't sing the words we know,\" an elderly woman wearing gloves and a hat with a veil said to her companion.\n\nHer companion nodded. \"If you ask me, they're carrying this entire ecumenical thing too far. I mean, humans are one thing, but aliens!\"\n\nThere's no way this is going to work, I thought, looking over at Calvin's seventh-graders, who were leaning over the backs of each other's chairs, giggling and chewing gum. Belinda was text-messaging someone on her cell phone, and Kaneesha was listening to her iPod. Chelsea had her hand up and was calling, \"Mr. Ledbetter! Mr. Ledbetter, Shelby took my music.\"\n\nOver in the orchestra, the percussionist was practicing crashing his cymbals. It's hopeless, I thought, looking over at the glaring Altairi. There's no way we can convince them we're sentient, let alone civilized.\n\nMy cell phone rang. And that's it, the straw that's going to break the camel's back, I thought, fumbling for it. Now everyone, even the musician with the cymbals, was glaring at me. \"How rude!\" the elderly woman in the white gloves said.\n\n\"The ship's started its countdown!\" Dr. Morthman bellowed in my ear.\n\nI hit \"end\" and turned the phone off. \"Hurry,\" I mouthed to Calvin, and he nodded and stepped up on the dais.\n\nHe tapped the music stand with his baton, and the entire auditorium fell silent. \"Adeste Fideles,\" he said, and everyone opened their music.\n\n\"Adeste Fideles?\" What's he doing? I thought. \"O come, all ye faithful\" isn't what we need. I ran mentally through the lyrics: \"Come ye to Bethlehem\u2026come let us adore him\u2026\" No, no, not religious!\n\nBut it was too late. Calvin had already spread his hands out, palms up, and lifted them, and everyone was getting to their feet. He nodded to the orchestra, and they began playing the introduction to \"Adeste Fideles.\"\n\nI turned to look at the Altairi. They were glaring even more condemningly than usual. I moved between them and the doors.\n\nThe symphony was reaching the end of the introduction. Calvin glanced at me. I smiled, I hoped encouragingly, and held up crossed fingers. He nodded and then raised his baton again and brought it down.\n\n\"Have you ever been to a Sing?\" Calvin had said. \"It's pretty impressive.\" There had to be nearly four thousand people in that auditorium, all of them singing in perfect harmony, and if they'd been singing \"The Chipmunks Song,\" it would still have been awe-inspiring. But the words they were singing couldn't have been more perfect if Calvin and I had written them to order. \" 'Sing, earthly choirs,' \" they trilled, \" 'sing in exultation. Sing, all ye citizens of heaven above,' \" and the Altairi glide-waddled up the aisle to the stage and sat down at Calvin's feet.\n\nI ducked outside to the hall and called Dr. Morthman. \"What's happening with the ship?\" I asked him.\n\n\"Where are you?\" he demanded. \"I thought you said you were on your way over here.\"\n\n\"There's a lot of traffic,\" I said. \"What's the ship doing?\"\n\n\"It's aborted its ignition sequence and shut down its lights,\" he said.\n\nGood, I thought. That means what we're doing is working.\n\n\"It's just sitting there on the ground.\"\n\n\"How appropriate,\" I murmured.\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\" he said accusingly. \"Spectrum analysis shows the Altairi aren't in their ship. You've got them, haven't you? Where are you and what have you done to them? If\u2014\"\n\nI hung up, switched off my phone, and went back inside. They'd finished \"Adeste Fideles\" and were singing \"Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.\" The Altairi were still sitting at Calvin's feet. \" '\u2026Reconciled,' \" the assemblage sang, \" 'Joyful, all ye nations rise,' \" and the Altairi rose.\n\nAnd rose, till they were a good two feet above the aisle. There was a collective gasp, and everyone stopped singing and stared at them floating there.\n\nNo, don't stop, I thought, and hurried forward, but Calvin had it under control. He turned a glare worthy of Aunt Judith on his seventh-grade girls, and they swallowed hard and started singing again, and after a moment everyone else recovered themselves and joined in to finish the verse.\n\nWhen the song ended, Calvin turned and mouthed at me, \"What do I do next?\"\n\n\"Keep singing,\" I mouthed back.\n\n\"Singing what?\"\n\nI shrugged him an \"I don't know,\" and mouthed, \"What about this?\" and pointed at the fourth song on the program.\n\nHe grinned, turned back to his choirs, and announced, \"We will now sing, 'There's a Song in the Air.' \"\n\nThere was a rustle of pages, and they began singing. I eyed the Altairi warily, looking for a lessening in elevation, but they continued to hover, and when the choir reached, \" 'and the beautiful sing,' \" it seemed to me their glares became slightly less fierce.\n\n\" 'And that song from afar has swept over the earth,' \" the assemblage sang, and the auditorium doors burst open and Dr. Morthman, Reverend Thresher, and dozens of FBI agents and police and reporters and cameramen came rushing in. \"Stay where you are,\" one of the FBI agents shouted.\n\n\"Blasphemous!\" Reverend Thresher roared. \"Look at this! Witches, homosexuals, liberals\u2014!\"\n\n\"Arrest that young woman,\" Dr. Morthman said, pointing at me, \"and the young man directing\u2014\" He stopped and gaped at the Altairi hovering above the stage. Flashes began to go off, reporters started talking into microphones, and Reverend Thresher positioned himself squarely in front of one of the cameras and clasped his hands. \"Oh, Lord,\" he shouted, \"drive Satan's demons out of the Altairi!\"\n\n\"No!\" I shouted to Calvin's seventh-graders, \"don't stop singing,\" but they already had. I looked desperately at Calvin. \"Keep directing!\" I said, but the police were already moving forward to handcuff him, stepping cautiously around the Altairi, who were drifting earthward like slowly leaking balloons.\n\n\"And teach these sinners here the error of their ways,\" Reverend Thresher was intoning.\n\n\"You can't do this, Dr. Morthman,\" I said desperately. \"The Altairi\u2014\"\n\nHe grabbed my arm and dragged me to one of the police officers. \"I want both of them charged with kidnapping,\" he said, \"and I want her charged with conspiracy. She's responsible for this entire\u2014\" He stopped and stared past me.\n\nI turned around. The Altairi were standing directly behind me, glaring. The police officer, who'd been about to clamp a pair of handcuffs on me, let go of my wrist and backed away, and so did the reporters and the FBI.\n\n\"Your excellencies,\" Dr. Morthman said, taking several steps back, \"I want you to know the commission had nothing to do with this. We knew nothing about it. It's entirely this young woman's fault. She\u2026\"\n\n\"We acknowledge your greetings,\" the Altairus in the center said, bowing to me, \"and greet you in return.\"\n\nA murmur of surprise rumbled through the auditorium, and Dr. Morthman stammered, \"Y-you speak English?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I said, and bowed to the Altairi. \"It's nice to finally be able to communicate with you.\"\n\n\"We welcome you into the company of citizens of the heavens,\" the one on the end said, \"and reciprocate your offers of good will, peace on earth, and chestnuts.\"\n\n\"We assure you that we come bearing gifts as well,\" the Altairus on the other end said.\n\n\"It's a miracle!\" Reverend Thresher shouted. \"The Lord has healed them! He has unlocked their lips!\" He dropped to his knees and began to pray. \"Oh, Lord, we know it is our prayers which have brought this miracle about\u2014\"\n\nDr. Morthman bounded forward. \"Your excellencies, allow me to be the first to welcome you to our humble planet,\" he said, extending his hand. \"On behalf of the government of the\u2014\"\n\nThe Altairi ignored him. \"We had begun to think we had erred in our assessment of your world,\" the one who'd spoken before said to me, and the one next to her? him? said, \"We doubted your species was fully sentient.\"\n\n\"I know,\" I said. \"I doubt it myself sometimes.\"\n\n\"We also doubted you understood the concept of accord,\" the one on the other end said, and turned and glared pointedly at Calvin's wrists.\n\n\"I think you'd better unhandcuff Mr. Ledbetter,\" I said to Dr. Morthman.\n\n\"Of course, of course,\" he said, motioning to the police officer. \"Explain to them it was all a little misunderstanding,\" he whispered to me, and the Altairi turned to glare at him and then at the police officer.\n\nWhen Calvin was out of the handcuffs, the one on the end said, \"As the men of old, we are with gladness to be proved wrong.\"\n\nSo are we, I thought. \"We're delighted to welcome you to our planet,\" I said.\n\n\"Now if you'll accompany me back to DU,\" Dr. Morthman cut in, \"we'll arrange for you to go to Washington to meet with the President and\u2014\"\n\nThe Altairi began to glare again. Oh, no, I thought, and looked frantically at Calvin. \"We have not yet finished greeting the delegation, Dr. Morthman,\" Calvin said. He turned to the Altairi. \"We would like to sing you the rest of our greeting songs.\"\n\n\"We wish to hear them,\" the Altairus in the center said, and the six of them immediately turned, walked back up the aisle, and sat down.\n\n\"I think it would be a good idea if you sat down, too,\" I said to Dr. Morthman and the FBI agents.\n\n\"Can some of you share your music with them?\" Calvin said to the people in the last row. \"And help them find the right place?\"\n\n\"I have no intention of singing with witches and homo\u2014\" Reverend Thresher began indignantly, and the Altairi all turned to glare at him. He sat down, and an elderly man in a yarmulke handed him his music.\n\n\"What do we do about the words to the 'Hallelujah Chorus'?\" Calvin whispered to me, and the Altairi stood up and walked back down the aisle to us.\n\n\"There is no need to alter your joyful songs. We wish to hear them with the native words,\" the one in the center said.\n\n\"We have a great interest in your planet's myths and superstitions,\" the one on the end said, \"the child in the manger, the lighting of the Kwanzaa menorah, the bringing of toys and teeth to children. We are eager to learn more.\"\n\n\"We have many questions,\" the next one in line said. \"If the child was born in a desert land, then how can King Herod have taken the children on a sleigh ride?\"\n\n\"Sleigh ride?\" Dr. Morthman said, and Calvin looked inquiringly at me.\n\n\" 'All children young to sleigh,' \" I whispered.\n\n\"Also, if holly is jolly, then why does it bark?\" the one on the other end said. \"And, Mr. Ledbetter, is Ms. Yates your girlfriend?\"\n\n\"There will be time for questions, negotiations, and gifts when the greetings have been completed,\" the second Altairus on the left, the one who hadn't said anything up till then, said, and I realized he must be the leader. Or the choir director, I thought. When he spoke, the Altairi instantly formed themselves into pairs, walked back up the aisle, and sat down.\n\nI picked up Calvin's baton and handed it to him. \"What do you think we should sing first?\" he asked me.\n\n\"All I want for Christmas is you,\" I said.\n\n\"Really? I was thinking maybe we should start with 'Angels We Have Heard on High,' or\u2014\"\n\n\"That wasn't a song title,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh,\" he said, and turned to the Altairi. \"The answer to your question is yes.\"\n\n\"These are tidings of great joy,\" the one in the center said.\n\n\"There shall be many mistletoeings,\" the one on the end added.\n\nThe second Altairus on the left glared at them. \"I think we'd better sing,\" I said, and squeezed into the first row, between Reverend McIntyre and an African American woman in a turban and dashiki.\n\nCalvin stepped onto the podium. \"The Hallelujah Chorus,\" Calvin said, and there was a shuffling of pages as people found their music. The woman next to me held out her music so we could share and whispered, \"It's considered proper etiquette to stand for this. In honor of King George the Third. He's supposed to have stood up the first time he heard it.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Reverend McIntyre whispered to me, \"he may merely have been startled out of a sound sleep, but rising out of respect and admiration is still an appropriate response.\"\n\nI nodded. Calvin raised his baton, and the entire auditorium, except for the Altairi, rose as one and began to sing. And if I'd thought \"Adeste Fideles\" sounded wonderful, \"The Hallelujah Chorus\" was absolutely breathtaking, and suddenly all those lyrics about glorious songs of old and anthems sweet and repeating the sounding joy made sense. And the whole world give back the song, I thought, which now the angels sing.\n\nAnd apparently the Altairi were as overwhelmed by the music as I was. After the fifth \"Hal-leh-eh-lu-jah!\" they rose into the air like they'd done before. And rose. And rose, till they floated giddily just below the high domed ceiling.\n\nI knew just how they felt.\n\nIt was definitely a communications breakthrough. The Altairi haven't stopped talking since the AllCity Sing, though we're not actually much further along than we were before. They're much better at asking questions than answering them. They did finally tell us where they came from\u2014the star Alsafi in the constellation Draco. But since the meaning of Altair is \"the flying one\" (and Alsafi means \"cooking tripod\"), everyone still calls them the Altairi.\n\nThey also told us why they'd turned up at Calvin's apartment and kept following me (\"We glimpsed interesting possibilities of accord between you and Mr. Ledbetter\") and explained, more or less, how their spaceship works, which the Air Force has found extremely interesting. But we still don't know why they came here. Or what they want. The only thing they've told us specifically was that they wanted to have Dr. Morthman and Reverend Thresher removed from the commission and to have Dr. Wakamura put in charge. It turns out they like being squirted, at least as much as they like anything we do. They still glare.\n\nSo does Aunt Judith. She called me the day after the AllCity Sing to tell me she'd seen me on CNN and thought I'd done a nice job saving the planet, but what on earth was I wearing? Didn't I know one was supposed to dress up for a concert? I told her everything that had happened was all thanks to her, and she glared at me (I could feel it, even over the phone) and hung up.\n\nBut she must not be too mad. When she heard I was engaged, she called my sister Tracy and told her she expected to be invited to the wedding shower. My mother is cleaning like mad.\n\nI wonder if the Altairi will give us a fish slice. Or a birthday card with a dollar in it. Or faster-than-light travel." + }, + { + "title": "In Coppelius's Toyshop", + "text": "So here I am, stuck in Coppelius's Toyshop, the last place I wanted to be. Especially at Christmas.\n\nThe place is jammed with bawling babies and women with shopping bags and people dressed up like teddy bears and Tinkerbell. The line for Santa Claus is so long, it goes clear out the door and all the way over to Madison Avenue, and the lines at the cash registers are even longer.\n\nThere are kids everywhere, running up and down the aisles and up and down the escalators, screaming their heads off, and crowding around Rapunzel's tower, gawking up at the row of little windows. One of the windows opens, and inside it there's a ballerina. She twirls around, and the little window closes, and another one opens. This one has a mouse in it. A black cat rears up behind it with its mouth open and the mouse leans out the window and squeaks, \"Help, help!\" The kids point and laugh.\n\nAnd over the whole thing the Coppelius's Toyshop theme song plays, for the thousandth time:\n\n\u2003\"Come to Dr. Coppelius's\n\n\u2003Where all is bright and warm,\n\n\u2003And there's no fear\n\n\u2003For I am here\n\n\u2003To keep you safe from harm.\"\n\nI am not supposed to be here. I am supposed to be at a Knicks game. I had a date to take Janine to see them play the Celtics this afternoon, and instead, here I am, stuck in a stupid toy store, because of a kid I didn't even know she had when I asked her out.\n\nWomen always make this big deal about men being liars and not telling them you're married, but what about them? They talk about honesty being the most important thing in a \"relationship,\" which is their favorite word, and they let you take them out and spend a lot of money on them and when they finally let you talk them into going up to their apartment, they trot out these three little brats in pajamas and expect you to take them to the zoo.\n\nThis has happened to me about ten times, so before I asked Janine out, I asked Beverly, who works in Accounting with her, whether she lived alone. Beverly, who didn't tell me about her kid till we'd been going out over a month and who was really bent out of shape when I dumped her, said, yeah, Janine lived alone and she'd only been divorced about a year and was very \"vulnerable\" and the last thing she needed in her life was a jerk like me.\n\nShe must've given Janine the same line because I had to really turn on the old charm to get her to even talk to me and had to ask her out about fifteen times before she finally said yes.\n\nSo, anyway, the Knicks game is our third date. Bernard King is playing and I figure after the game I'm gonna get lucky, so I'm feeling pretty good, and I knock on her door, and this little kid answers it and says, \"My mom's not ready.\"\n\nI should've turned around right then and walked out. I could've scalped Janine's ticket for fifty bucks, but she's already coming to the door, and she's wiping her eyes with a Kleenex and telling me to come in, this is Billy, she's so sorry she can't go to the game, this isn't her weekend to have the kid, but her ex-husband made her switch, and she's been trying to call me, but I'd already left.\n\nI'm still standing in the hall. \"You can't get tickets to Knicks games at the last minute,\" I say. \"Do you know what scalpers charge?\" She says, no, no, she doesn't expect me to get an extra ticket, and I breathe a sigh of relief, which I shouldn't have, because then she says she just got a call, her mom's in the hospital, she's had a heart attack, and she's got to go to Queens right away and see her, and she tried to get her ex on the phone but he's not there.\n\n\"You better not expect me to take the kid to the Knicks game,\" I say, and she says, no, she doesn't, she's already called Beverly to watch him, and all she wants me to do is take the kid to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth.\n\n\"I wouldn't ask you to do this if I had anybody else I could ask, but they said I needed to come\"\u2014she starts to cry again\u2014\"right\u2026away.\"\n\nThe whole time she's telling me this, she's been putting on her coat and putting the kid's coat on him and locking the door. \"I'll say hi to Grandma for you,\" she says to the kid. She looks at me, her eyes all teary. \"Beverly said she'll be there at noon. Be a good boy,\" she says to the kid, and is down the stairs and out the door before I can tell her no way.\n\nSo I'm stuck with taking this kid up to Fifth Avenue and Fifty-eighth, which is the corner Coppelius's Toyshop is on. Coppelius's is the biggest toy store in New York. It's got fancy red-and-gold doors, and two guys dressed up like toy soldiers standing on both sides of them, saluting people when they walk in, and a chick dressed like Little Red Riding Hood with a red cape and a basket, passing out candy canes to everybody who walks by.\n\nThere's a whole mob of people and kids looking at the windows, which they decorate every Christmas with scenes from fairy tales. You know the kind, with Goldilocks eating a bowl of porridge, lifting a spoon to her mouth over and over, and stuffed bears that turn their heads and blink their eyes. It looks like half of New York is there, looking in the windows. Except for Beverly.\n\nI look at my watch. It's noon, and Beverly better get here soon or the kid can wait by himself. The kid sees the windows and runs over to them. \"Come back here!\" I yell, and grab him by the arm and yank him away from the windows. \"Get over here!\" I drag him over to the curb. \"Now stand there.\"\n\nThe kid is crying and wiping his nose, just like Janine. \"Aunt Beverly said she was going to take me to look at the windows,\" he says.\n\n\"Well, then, Aunt Beverly can,\" I say, \"when she finally gets here. Which better be pretty damn soon. I don't have all day to wait around.\"\n\n\"I'm cold,\" he says.\n\n\"Then zip up your coat,\" I say, and I zip up mine and stick my hands in my pockets. There's one of these real cold New York winds whipping around the corner, and it's starting to snow. I look at my watch. It's a quarter past twelve.\n\n\"I hafta go to the bathroom,\" he says.\n\nI tell him to shut up, that he's not going anywhere, and he starts in crying again.\n\n\"And quit crying or I'll give you something to cry about,\" I say.\n\nRight then Red Riding Hood comes over and hands the kid a candy cane. \"What's the matter, honey?\" she says.\n\nThe kid wipes his nose on his sleeve. \"I'm cold and I hafta go to the bathroom,\" he says, and she says, \"You just come with me to Coppelius's,\" and takes hold of his hand and takes him into the store before I can stop her.\n\n\"Hey!\" I say, and go after them, but the toy-soldier guys are already shutting the doors behind them, and they go through their whole stiff-armed saluting routine before they open them again and I can get in.\n\nWhen I finally do, I wish I hadn't. The place is a nightmare. There are about a million kids hollering and running around this huge room full of toys and people in costumes demonstrating things. A magician is juggling glow-in-the-dark balls and Raggedy Ann is passing out licorice sticks and a green-faced witch is buzzing the customers with a plane on a string. Around the edges of the room, trains are running on tracks built into the walls, hooting and whistling and blowing steam.\n\nIn the middle of this mess is a round purple tower, at least two stories high. There's a window at the very top and a mechanical Rapunzel is leaning out of it, combing her blond hair, which hangs all the way down to the bottom of the tower. Underneath Rapunzel's window there's a row of little windows that open and close, one after the other, and different things poke out, a baby doll and a white rabbit and a spaceship. All of them do something when their window opens. The doll says \"Ma-ma,\" the rabbit pulls out a pocket watch and looks at it, shaking his head, the spaceship blasts off.\n\nA whole bunch of kids are standing around the tower, but Janine's kid isn't one of them, and I don't see him or Red Riding Hood anywhere. Along the back wall there's a bunch of escalators leading up and down to the other floors, but I don't see the kid on any of them and I don't see any signs that say \"Bathrooms,\" and the lines for the cash registers are too long to ask one of the clerks.\n\nA chick dressed up like Cinderella is standing in the middle of the aisle, winding up green toy frogs and setting them down on the floor to hop all over and get in everybody's way.\n\n\"Where are your toilets?\" I say, but she doesn't hear me, and no wonder. Screaming kids and hooting trains and toy guns that go rat-a-tat-tat, and over the whole thing a singsongy tune is playing full blast:\n\n\u2003\"I am Dr. Coppelius.\n\n\u2003Welcome to my shop.\n\n\u2003Where we have toys\n\n\u2003For girls and boys,\n\n\u2003And the fun times never stop.\"\n\nIt's sung in a croaky old man's voice and after the second verse finishes, the first one starts in again, over and over and over.\n\n\"How do you stand that godawful noise?\" I shout to Cinderella, but she's talking to a little kid in a snowsuit and ignores me.\n\nI look around for somebody else I can ask and just then I catch sight of a red cape at the top of one of the escalators and take off after it.\n\nI'm about to step on, when an old guy dressed in a long red coat and a gray ponytail wig moves in front of me and blocks my way. \"Welcome to Coppelius's Toyshop,\" he says in a phony accent. \"I am Dr. Coppelius, the children's friend.\" He does this stupid bow. \"Here in Coppelius's, children are our first concern. How may I assist you?\"\n\n\"You can get the hell out of my way,\" I say, and shove past him and get on the escalator.\n\nThe red cape has disappeared by now, and the escalator's jammed with kids. Half of them are hanging over the moving handrail, looking at the stuffed animals along the sides, teddy bears and giraffes and a life-size black velvet panther. It's got a pink silk tongue and real-looking teeth with a price tag hanging from one of its fangs. \"One of a kind,\" the price tag says. Four thousand bucks.\n\nWhen I get to the top of the escalator, I can't see Janine's kid or Red Riding Hood anywhere, but there's a red-and-gold signpost with arrows pointing off in all directions that say \"To Hot Wheels Country\" and \"To Babyland\" and \"To the Teddy Bears' Picnic.\" One of them says \"To the Restrooms\" and points off to the left.\n\nI go in the direction the sign says, but the place is a maze, with aisles leading off in all directions and kids jamming every aisle. I go through fire engines and chemistry sets and end up in a big room full of Star Wars stuff, blasters and swords that light up and space fighters. But no signposts.\n\nI ask a gold-colored robot for directions, feeling like an idiot, and he says, \"Go down this aisle and turn left. That will bring you to Building Blocks. Turn left at the Tinker Toys and left again. The restrooms are right next to the Lego display.\"\n\nI go down the aisle and turn left, but it doesn't bring me to Building Blocks. It brings me to the doll department and then the stuffed animals, more giraffes and bunnies and elephants, and every size teddy bear you've ever seen.\n\nHolding on to one of them is a toddler bawling its head off. The kid's been eating candy, and the tears are running down into the chocolate for a nice sticky mess.\n\nIt's wailing, \"I'm lost,\" and as soon as it sees me, it lets go of the teddy bear and heads straight for me with its sticky hands. \"I can't find my mommy,\" it says.\n\nThe last thing I need is chocolate all over my pants. \"You shoulda stayed with your mommy, then,\" I say, \"instead of running off,\" and head back into the doll department, and old Coppelius must've been lying about the panther, because there, right in the middle of the Barbie dolls, is another one, staring at me with its yellow glass eyes.\n\nI head back through the dollhouses and end up in Tricycles, and this is getting me nowhere. I could wander around this place forever and never find Janine's kid. And it's already one o'clock. If I don't leave by one-thirty, I'll miss the start of the game. I'd leave right now, but Janine would be steamed and I'd lose any chance I had of getting her in the sack on one of those weekends when her ex has the kid.\n\nBut I'm not going to find him by wandering around like this. I need to go back down to the main room and wait for Red Riding Hood to bring him back.\n\nI find a down escalator in the sled department and get on it, but when I get off, it's not the main floor. I'm in Babyland with the baby buggies and yellow rubber ducks and more teddy bears.\n\nI must not have gone down far enough. \"Where's the escalator?\" I say to a chick dressed like Little Bo Peep. She's kootchy-cooing a baby, and I have to ask her again. \"Where's the down escalator?\"\n\nBo Peep looks up and frowns. \"Down?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" I say, getting mad. \"Down. An escalator.\"\n\nStill nothing.\n\n\"I want to get the hell out of this place!\"\n\nShe makes a move toward the baby, like she's going to cover its ears or something, and says, \"Go down past the playpens and turn left. It's at the end of Riding Toys.\"\n\nI do what she says, but when I get there, it goes up, not down. I decide to take it anyway and go back up to the tricycles and find the right escalator myself, but Babyland must be in the basement because at the top is the main room.\n\nThe place is even crazier and more crowded than it was before. A clown's demonstrating bright orange yo-yos, Humpty Dumpty's winding up toy dinosaurs, and there are so many kids and baby buggies and shopping bags, it takes me fifteen minutes to make it over to Rapunzel's tower.\n\nThere's no sign of Red Riding Hood and the kid or Beverly, but I can see the door from here and all the escalators. Dr. Coppelius is standing over at the foot of them, bowing to people and passing out big red suckers.\n\nThe kids around the tower shout and point, and I look up. A puppet with a hooked nose and a pointy hat is leaning out of one of the windows. He's holding a stick between his puppet hands, and he waves it around. The kids laugh.\n\nThe window shuts and another one opens. The ballerina twirls. The black cat, with teeth as sharp as a panther's, rears up behind the mouse, and the mouse squeaks, \"Help, help!\" Rapunzel combs her hair. And over it all, in time to the squeaking and the twirling and the combing, the song plays over and over:\n\n\"\u2026For girls and boys,\n\nAnd the fun times never stop.\"\n\nAnd after I've been standing there five minutes, the whole thing is stuck in my head.\n\nI look at my watch. It's one-fifteen. How the hell long does it take to take a kid to the bathroom?\n\nThe first verse finishes and the second one starts in:\n\n\u2003\"Come to Dr. Coppelius's\n\n\u2003Where all is bright and warm\u2026\"\n\nI'm going to go crazy if I have to stand here and listen to this gas much longer, and where the hell is Beverly?\n\nI look at my watch again. It's one-thirty. I'm going to give it five more minutes and then take one more look around, and then I'm going to the game, kid or no kid.\n\nSomebody yanks on my coat. \"Well, it's about time,\" I say. \"Where the hell have you been?\" I look down.\n\nIt's a kid with dishwater-blond hair and glasses. \"When will he come and get her?\" she says.\n\n\"Get who?\" I say.\n\nShe pushes the glasses up on her nose. \"Rapunzel in her tower. When will the prince come and get her down?\"\n\nI stoop down and get real close. \"Never,\" I say.\n\nThe kid blinks at me through her glasses. \"Never?\" she says.\n\n\"He got sick of waiting around for her,\" I say. \"He waited and waited, and finally he got fed up and went off and left her there.\"\n\n\"All alone?\" she squeaks, just like the mouse.\n\n\"All alone. Forever and ever.\"\n\n\"Doesn't she ever get out of the tower?\"\n\n\"She's not going anywhere, and it serves her right. It's her own fault.\"\n\nThe kid backs away and looks like she's going to bawl, but she doesn't. She just stares at me through her glasses and then looks back up at the tower.\n\nThe rabbit checks his watch. A dragon breathes orange tinfoil flames. The baby doll goes, \"Ma-ma.\" The singsongy tune bellows, \"To keep you safe from harm,\" and starts over, \"I am Dr. Coppelius,\" and I shove my way over to where he's standing at the foot of the escalators.\n\n\"How do I find a lost kid?\" I say to Dr. Coppelius.\n\n\"Up this escalator to Painter's Corner,\" he says in his phony accent. \"Turn right at the modeling-clay display and go all the way to the end.\" He puts his hand on my arm. \"And don't worry. He's perfectly safe. No child ever comes to harm in Coppelius's Toyshop.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, I know one who's going to when I finally find him,\" I say, and get on the escalator.\n\nI thought it was the same one I went up before, but it's not. There's no panther, and no signpost at the top, but I can see paints and crayons down one of the halls, and I head that way. Halfway there, the aisle's blocked with kids and mothers pushing strollers.\n\n\"What the hell's this?\" I say to a guy dressed up like an elf.\n\n\"It's the line for Santa Claus,\" he says. \"You'll have to go around. Halfway down that aisle to the basketballs and turn left.\"\n\nSo I go down, but there aren't any basketballs, there's a big Atari sign and a bunch of kids playing Pac-Man, and when I turn left, I run into a room full of toy tanks and bazookas. I go back and turn left and run smack into the Santa Claus line again.\n\nI look at my watch. It's a quarter past two. The hell with this. I've already missed the start of the game, and I'm not going to miss the rest of it. Beverly can try and find the kid, if and when she ever gets here. I'm leaving.\n\nI squeeze through the line to the nearest escalator and take it down, but I must have gotten up on the third floor somehow, because here's the Star Wars stuff. I find an escalator and go down it, but when I get to the bottom, I'm back in Babyland and now I have to take the escalator up. But at least I know where it is. I go down past the playpens and over to Riding Toys, and sure enough, there's the escalator. I start to get on it.\n\nThe panther is standing at the bottom of the escalator, the price tag dangling from his sharp teeth.\n\nI change my mind and go back through the riding toys and turn left, and now I'm back in Dolls, which can't be right. I backtrack to the playpens, but now I can't find them, either. I'm in Puzzles and Games.\n\nI look around for somebody to ask, but there aren't any clerks or Mother Gooses around, and no kids, either. They must all be in line to see Santa Claus. I decide to go back to the doll department and get my bearings, and I go up the jigsaw puzzle aisle, but I can't seem to find a way out, and I am getting kind of worried when I see Dr. Coppelius.\n\nHe walks past the Candyland display and into a door in the wall between Jeopardy! and Sorry! and I catch a glimpse of gray walls and metal stairs. I figure it must be an employee stairway.\n\nI wait a few minutes so the clown won't see me and then open the door. It's an employee stairway, all right. There are stacks of boxes and wooden crates piled against the wall, and on the stairs there's a big sign headed \"Store Policy.\" I look up the metal stairway, and it has to lead up to the main floor because I can hear the sound of the song jangling far above:\n\n\"\u2026For girls and boys,\n\nAnd the fun times never stop.\"\n\nI shut the door behind me, and start up the stairs. It's dark with the door shut, and it gets darker as I climb, and narrower, but the song is getting steadily louder. I keep climbing, wondering what kind of stairway this is. It can't be for bringing up stock because it keeps making all these turns and when I decide I'd better turn around and go back down, somebody's locked the door at the bottom, so I have to keep climbing up, and it keeps getting narrower and narrower and darker and darker, till I can feel the walls on both sides and the last few steps I practically have to squeeze through, but I can see the door up ahead, there's light all around the edges, and the song is getting really loud.\n\n\u2003\"Come to Dr. Coppelius's\n\n\u2003Where all is bright and warm\u2026\"\n\nI squeeze up the last few steps and open the door, only it isn't a door. It's one of the little windows the mouse and the ballerina and the white rabbit come out of, and I have somehow gotten inside of Rapunzel's tower. This must be the stairs they use to come fix the mechanical toys when they break down.\n\nKids are looking up, and when I open the window, they point and laugh like I was one of the toys. I shut the window and squeeze back down the stairs. I break a piece of wood off one of the crates on the stairs to use to pry the door open, but I must have made a wrong turn somewhere, because I end up back in the same place. I open the door and yell, \"Hey! Get me out of here!\" but nobody pays any attention.\n\nI look around, trying to spot Red Riding Hood or the robot or Dr. Coppelius to signal them to come help me, and I see Beverly walking to the front door. She's got Janine's kid, and he is wiping his nose on his sleeve and clutching a red sucker. Beverly squats down and wipes his eyes with a Kleenex. She zips up his coat, and they start out the door, which a toy soldier is holding open for them.\n\n\"Wait!\" I shout, waving the piece of wood to get their attention, and the kids point and laugh.\n\nI am going to have to climb out the window and down the side of the tower, hanging on to Rapunzel's hair. I put my foot up over the windowsill. It's a tight squeeze to get my leg up onto the sill, but I manage to do it, and when I get out of here, I know a little boy with a sucker who's going to be really sorry. I hitch my leg over and start to hoist my other foot up over the sill.\n\nI look down. The panther is sitting at the foot of the tower, crouched and waiting. He licks his velvet chops with his pink silk tongue. His sharp teeth glitter.\n\nSo here I am, stuck in Coppelius's Toyshop, for what seems like forever, with kids screaming and running around and trains whistling and that stupid song playing over and over and over,\n\n\"I am Dr. Coppelius.\n\nWelcome to my shop\u2026\"\n\nI take out my watch and look at it. It says five to twelve. I've kind of lost track of how long I've been stuck here. It can't be more than two days, because on Monday Janine or Beverly or one of the chicks at work will notice I'm not there, and they'll figure out this is the last place anybody saw me. But it seems longer, and I am getting kind of worried.\n\nEvery time the window opens there seem to be different toys, fancy games you play on computers and cars that run by remote control and funny-looking roller skates with only one row of wheels. And the people demonstrating them and handing out candy canes are different, too, mermaids and turtles wearing headbands and a hunchback in a jester's hat and a purple cape.\n\nAnd the last time I looked out, a woman with dishwater-blond hair and glasses was standing under the tower, looking up at me. \"When I was little,\" she said to the guy she was with, \"I hated this place. I was so worried about Rapunzel.\"\n\nShe pushed her glasses up on her nose. \"I didn't know she was a toy. I thought she was real, and I thought the prince had just gone off and abandoned her. I thought he'd gotten fed up and gone off and left her there. All alone.\"\n\nShe said it to the guy, but she was looking straight at me. \"Forever and ever. And it served her right. It was her own fault.\"\n\nBut there are lots of people who wear glasses, and even if Janine's mother died and she had to go to the funeral, she'd still be back at work by Wednesday.\n\nI look over at the exit. The toy soldiers are still there, saluting, on either side of the door, and in between them Dr. Coppelius smiles and bows. Overhead the song screeches:\n\n\u2003\"And there's no fear\n\n\u2003For I am here\n\n\u2003To keep you safe from harm.\"\n\nAnd starts in on the first verse again.\n\nI take out my watch and look at it, and then I shut the window and go look for a way out, but I get confused on the stairs and make a wrong turn and end up in the same place. The little window opens, and I lean out. \"Help! Help!\" I shout.\n\nThe kids point and laugh." + }, + { + "title": "Adaptation", + "text": "\u2003\"Heap on more wood!--the wind is chill;\n\n\u2003But let is whistle as it will.\n\n\u2003Wel'll keep our Christmas merry still.\"\n\n- Sir Walter Scott\n\nMarley was dead: to begin with.\n\nDickens's story A Christmas Carol, however, of which the aforementioned is the first sentence, is alive and well and available in any number of versions. In the books department of Harridge's, where I work, we have nineteen, including Mickey's Christmas Carol, The Muppet Christmas Carol, the CuddlyWuddlys' Christmas Carol, and one with photographs of dogs dressed as Scrooge and Mrs. Cratchit.\n\nWe also have an assortment of Christmas Carol cookbooks, Advent calendars, jigsaw puzzles, and an audiotape on which Captain Picard of the American television series Star Trek: The Next Generation takes all the parts.\n\nAll of these are, of course, adaptations, shortened and altered and otherwise bowdlerized. No one reads the original, though we carry it, in paperback. In the two years I've worked here, we've only sold a single copy, and that to myself. I bought it last year to read to my daughter, Gemma, when I had her for Christmas, but then I did not have time to do so. My ex-wife, Margaret, came to pick her up early for a pantomime she and Robert were taking her to, and we only got as far as Marley's ghost.\n\nGemma knows the story, though, in spite of never having read it, and the names of all the characters, as does everyone. They are so well-known, in fact, that at the beginning of the season this year Harridge's management had suggested the staff dress in costume as Scrooge and Tiny Tim, to increase profits and \"provide a seasonal atmosphere.\"\n\nThere was a general outcry at this, and the idea had been dropped. But on the morning of the twenty-second when I arrived at work, there was a figure in a floor-dragging black robe and a hood standing by the order desk with Mr. Voskins, who was smiling smugly.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Grey,\" Mr. Voskins said to me. \"This is your new assistant,\" and I half expected him to say, \"Mr. Black,\" but instead he said pleasedly, \"the Spirit of Christmas Future.\"\n\nIt is actually Christmas Yet to Come, but Mr. Voskins has not read the original, either.\n\n\"How do you do?\" I said, wondering if Mr. Voskins was going to demand that I wear a costume as well, and why he had hired someone just now. The books department had been shorthanded all of December.\n\n\"Mr. Grey will explain things to you,\" Mr. Voskins said to the spirit. \"Harridge's has been able to arrange for an author autographing,\" he said to me, which explained this hiring three days before Christmas. No doubt the book being autographed was yet another version of A Christmas Carol. \"We will be holding it the day after tomorrow.\"\n\n\"On Christmas Eve?\" I said. \"At what time? I'd arranged to leave early on Christmas Eve.\"\n\n\"It will depend on the author's schedule,\" Mr. Voskins said. \"He's an extremely busy man.\"\n\n\"My daughter's spending the evening with me,\" I explained. \"It's the only time I'll have her.\" They would be at Robert's parents' in Surrey for the rest of Christmas week.\n\n\"I'm discussing the details with the author this morning,\" he said. \"Oh, and your wife telephoned. She wants you to ring her back.\"\n\n\"Ex-wife,\" I corrected him, but he had already hurried off, leaving me with my new assistant.\n\n\"I'm Mr. Grey,\" I said, extending my hand.\n\nThe spirit silently extended a skinny hand for me to shake, and I remembered that the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come was mute, communicating solely by pointing.\n\n\"Have you worked in a books department before?\" I asked.\n\nHe shook his hooded head. I hoped he didn't plan to stay in character while waiting on the customers, or perhaps that was the idea, and he was here for \"seasonal atmosphere\" only.\n\n\"What am I supposed to call you?\" I said.\n\nHe extended a bony finger and pointed at the Wild West Christmas Carol, on the cover of which a black-hatted spirit stood, pointing at a tombstone with Scrooge's name on it.\n\n\"Spirit? Christmas? Yet to Come?\" I said, thinking that an \"atmospheric\" assistant was worse than none at all.\n\nBut I was wrong. He proved to be very efficient, learning the cash register and the credit-card procedure with ease, and waiting on customers promptly. They seemed delighted when he extended his bony finger from his black sleeve and pointed at the books they'd asked for. By ten o'clock I felt confident enough to leave him in charge of the department while I went to the employee lounge to telephone Margaret.\n\nThe line was engaged. I intended to ring her up again at a quarter past, but we had a surge of shoppers, and although Christmas Yet to Come was extremely helpful, I couldn't get away again till nearly eleven. When I dialed Margaret's flat, there was no answer.\n\nI was almost glad. I wanted to know the time of the autographing before I spoke to her. We had already had two fights over the \"visitation schedule,\" as Margaret calls it. I was originally to have had Gemma on Boxing Day as well as Christmas Eve, but Robert's parents had invited them up to Surrey for the entire week. We had compromised by my having Gemma on Christmas Eve and part of Christmas Day. Then last week Margaret had rung up to say Robert's parents especially wanted them there for church on Christmas morning as it was a family tradition that Robert read the Scripture. \"You can have her all Christmas Eve day,\" Margaret had said.\n\n\"I have to work.\"\n\n\"You could insist on having the day off,\" she'd said, letting her voice die away.\n\nIt is a trick she has of leaving a sentence unfinished but her meaning perfectly clear. She used it to excellent account during the divorce, claiming she had not said any of the things I accused her of, as in fact she had not, and though I only see her now when she brings Gemma, I still understand her perfectly.\n\n\"You could insist on having the day off,\" she meant now, \"if you really cared about Gemma.\" And there is no answer to that, no way to make her understand that Christmas Eve is not a day a shopclerk can insist on taking off, to explain to her that it is different from being an accountant. No way to explain why I gave up being an accountant.\n\nAnd no way to explain to her that I might need to change the schedule because of an autographing. I decided to wait to try again till I had spoken to Mr. Voskins.\n\nHe did not come back till after noon. \"The autographing will take place from eleven to one,\" he said, handing us a stack of red-and-green flyers. \"Hand these out to the customers,\" he said.\n\nI read the top flyer, relieved that the autographing wouldn't cause a problem with Gemma. \"A Special Signing of Sir Spencer Siddon's latest book,\" it read. \"Making Money Hand Over Fist.\"\n\n\"It's on the bestseller list,\" Mr. Voskins said happily. \"We were very lucky to get him. His secretary will be here at half past one to discuss the arrangements.\"\n\n\"We'll need more staff,\" I said. \"The two of us can't possibly run an autographing and wait on customers at the same time.\"\n\n\"I'll try to hire someone,\" he said vaguely. \"We'll discuss everything when Sir Spencer's secretary arrives.\"\n\n\"Shall I go to lunch now, then?\" I said, \"and let Mr\u2026.\" I pointed at the spirit, \"go second so I'll be back in time for the meeting?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I want you both here. Go now.\" He waved vaguely in our direction.\n\n\"Which?\"\n\n\"Both of you. I'll get someone from the housewares department to cover your department. Be back by 1:00.\"\n\nWhen our replacement came, I told the spirit, \"You can go to lunch,\" stuck A Christmas Carol, which I'd been reading on my lunch and tea breaks, in my coat pocket, and went to telephone Margaret. The line was engaged again.\n\nWhen I came out of the lounge, the spirit was standing there, waiting for me, and I realized he wouldn't know where to go for lunch. Since Harridge's had closed its employee dining room to increase profits, employees had half an hour to get to, partake of, and return from lunch. \"I know of a place that's quick,\" I told him.\n\nHe nodded, and I led off through the crowded aisles, hoping he would keep up. I need not have had any fear\u2014he kept pace with me easily, in spite of not saying, as I did, \"Sorry,\" to dozens of shoppers blocking the way. By the time we'd reached the south door, he was even with me, and, before I could turn toward Cavendish Square, he'd moved ahead, his arm extended and his long, bony finger pointing toward Regent Street.\n\nAll the luncheon places in Regent Street are expensive and invariably crammed with shoppers resting their feet, and are a good ten minutes' walk away. We would have just enough time to walk there, not get waited on, and return empty-handed.\n\n\"I usually go to Wilson's,\" I said, \"it's closer,\" but he continued to point commandingly and we had no time for arguing, either. I followed him down the street, down a lane I hadn't known was there, and into a dismal-looking lunch counter called Mama Montoni's.\n\nIt wasn't crowded, at any rate, and the small tables looked comparatively clean, though the made sandwiches on top of the counter looked several days old.\n\nAt one of the tables was an enormous man with a full brown beard, and I saw why the spirit had brought me here. The man was dressed as the Spirit of Christmas Present, in a green robe edged with white fur, and a crown of holly.\n\n\"Come in! Come in!\" he said, even though we were already in, and my companion glided over to him.\n\nThe enormous man shook his head and said, \"No, he can't make it for lunch today,\" as if Christmas Yet to Come had spoken.\n\nI wondered who the \"he\" they referred to was. The Spirit of Christmas Past, perhaps?\n\n\"Neither of us got anything, I'm afraid,\" the enormous man said to Yet to Come, sounding discouraged. \"Most of the bank executives are on holiday. But the teller said the Adelphi is holding pantomime auditions this afternoon.\"\n\nI wondered if the pantomime was A Christmas Carol, or if they had previously been in a production and were now trying to find employment that fit the costumes. It was a good costume. The holly crown had the requisite icicles, and the green robe was belted with a rusted scabbard, just as in the original. His chest was not bare, though, and neither were his feet. He had compromised with the weather by wearing sandals with thick socks and had fastened the open robe across his massive chest with a large green button.\n\nI was still standing just inside the door. My companion turned and pointed at me, and the enormous man boomed out, \"Come in! and know me better, man!\" and beckoned me to the table.\n\nI was going to say that I needed to order first, but the old woman behind the counter\u2014Mama Montoni?\u2014had disappeared into the back. I went over to the table. \"How do you do?\" I said. \"I'm Edwin Grey.\"\n\n\"Delighted to meet you,\" the enormous man said heartily. \"Sit down, sit down. My friend tells me you work together.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I sat down. \"At Harridge's.\"\n\n\"He tells me you are hiring additional staff in your department. Is that right?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" I said, wondering how Sir Spencer Siddon would feel at being confronted with half the characters from A Christmas Carol. Would he think he was meant to be Scrooge? \"It would be only temporary, though. Just the three days till Christmas.\"\n\n\"Till Christmas,\" he said, and the old woman emerged from the back with a fistful of silverware and two plates of congealed-looking spaghetti.\n\n\"I'll have what they're having,\" I said, \"and a paper cup of tea to take with me.\"\n\nThe old woman, who was clearly related to Yet to Come, didn't answer or even acknowledge that I'd spoken to her, but she disappeared into the back again.\n\n\"I didn't know this caf\u00e9 was here,\" I said, so he wouldn't bring up the topic of job openings again.\n\n\"Excellent choice of book,\" he said, pointing at my Christmas Carol, which was protruding from my coat pocket.\n\n\"I should imagine it's your favorite,\" I said, laying it on the table, smiling.\n\nHe shook his shaggy brown head. \"I prefer Mr. Dickens's Little Dorrit, so patient and cheerful in her imprisonment, and Trollope's Barchester Towers.\"\n\n\"Do you read a good deal?\" I asked. It's rare to find anyone who reads the older authors, let alone Trollope.\n\nHe nodded. \"I find it helps to pass the time,\" he said. \"Especially at this time of year, 'When dark December glooms the day / And takes our autumn joys away / When short and scant the sunbeam throws / Upon the weary waste of snows / A cold and profitless regard\u2026' 'Marmion.' Sir Walter Scott.\"\n\n\"Introduction to the fifth canto,\" I said, and he beamed at me.\n\n\"You are a reader, too?\" he said eagerly.\n\n\"I find books a great comfort,\" I said, and he nodded.\n\n\"Tell me what you think of A Christmas Carol,\" he said.\n\n\"I think it has lasted all these years because people want to believe it could happen,\" I said.\n\n\"But you don't believe it?\" he said. \"You don't believe a man might hear the truth and be changed by it?\"\n\n\"I think Scrooge seems quite easily reformed,\" I said, \"compared with the Scrooges I have known.\"\n\nMama Montoni emerged from the back again, glaring, and slapped down a plate of lukewarm spaghetti and a crockery cup half full of tea.\n\n\"So you have read 'Marmion'?\" the Spirit of Christmas Present said. \"Tell me, what did you think of the tale of Sir David Lindesay?\" and we launched into an eager discussion that lasted far too long. I would be late getting back for the meeting with Scrooge's secretary.\n\nI stood up, and my assistant did, too. \"We must be getting back,\" I said, pulling on my coat. \"It was a pleasure meeting you, Mr\u2026.?\"\n\nHe extended his huge hand. \"I am the Spirit of Christmas Present.\"\n\nI laughed. \"Then you're missing your third. Where's Christmas Past?\"\n\n\"In America,\" he said quite seriously, \"where he has been much corrupted by nostalgia and commercial interests.\"\n\nHe saw me looking skeptically at his socks and sandals. \"You do not see us at our best,\" he said. \"I fear we have fallen on hard times.\"\n\nApparently. \"I should think these would be good times, with any number of Scrooges you could reform.\"\n\n\"And so there are,\" he said, \"but they are praised and much rewarded for their greed, and much admired. And\"\u2014he looked sternly at me\u2014\"they do not believe in spirits. They lay their visions to Freud and hormonal imbalance, and their therapists tell them they should feel no guilt, and advise them to focus further on themselves.\"\n\n\"Yes, well,\" I said, \"I must be getting back.\" I pointed at my assistant, not knowing whether Present would expect me to address him as the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come. \"You can stay and talk to your friend if you wish,\" and made my escape, glad that at least I hadn't suggested he come speak to Mr. Voskins about being taken on, and wondering what Mr. Voskins would do when he found out he had hired a lunatic.\n\nMr. Voskins wasn't on the floor, and neither was the secretary. I looked at my watch, expecting it to be well past one, but it was only a quarter till. I rang up Margaret. The line was engaged.\n\nMy assistant was there when I got back, waiting on a customer, but there was still no sign of Mr. Voskins. He finally came up at two to tell us the secretary had phoned to change the schedule.\n\n\"Of the autographing?\" I said anxiously.\n\n\"No, of the meeting with us. His secretary won't be here till half past.\"\n\nI took advantage of the delay to try Margaret again. And got Gemma.\n\n\"Mummy's downstairs talking to the doorman about our being gone,\" she told me.\n\n\"Do you know what she wanted to speak to me about?\" I asked her.\n\n\"No\u2026o,\" she said, thinking, and added, with a child's irrelevance, \"I went to the dentist. She'll be back up in a minute.\"\n\n\"I'll talk to you in the meantime, then,\" I said. \"What shall we have to eat for Christmas Eve?\"\n\n\"Figs,\" she said promptly.\n\n\"Figs?\"\n\n\"Yes, and frosted cakes. Like the little princess and Ermengarde and Becky had at the feast. Well, actually, they didn't have it. Horrid Miss Minchin found out and took it all away from them. And red-currant wine. Only I suppose you won't let me have wine. But red-currant drink or red-currant juice. Red-currant something.\"\n\n\"And figs,\" I said distastefully.\n\n\"Yes, and a red shawl for a tablecloth. I want it just like in the book.\"\n\n\"What book?\" I said, teasing.\n\n\"A Little Princess.\"\n\n\"Which one is that?\"\n\n\"You know. The one where the little princess is rich and then she loses her father and Miss Minchin makes her live in the garret and be a servant and the Indian gentleman feels sorry for her and sends her things. You know. It's my favorite book.\"\n\nI do know, of course. It has been her favorite for two years now, displacing both Anne of Green Gables and Little Women in her affections. \"It's because we're just alike,\" she'd told me when I asked her why she liked it so much.\n\n\"You both live in a garret,\" I'd said.\n\n\"No. But we're both tall for our age, and we both have black hair.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" I said now. \"I forgot. What do you want for Christmas?\"\n\n\"Not a doll. I'm too old for dolls,\" she said promptly, and then hesitated. \"The little princess's father always gave her books for Christmas.\"\n\n\"Did he?\"\n\nMr. Voskins appeared at my elbow, looking agitated. \"I'll be right there,\" I said, cupping my hand over the mouthpiece.\n\n\"It's nearly half past,\" he said.\n\n\"I'll be right there.\" I promised Gemma I'd purchase figs and red-currant something, and told her to tell her mother I'd phoned, and went to meet the secretary, wondering if he'd look like Bob Cratchit. That would make the cast complete, except for the Spirit of Christmas Past, of course, who was in America.\n\nThe secretary wasn't there yet. At a quarter to three, Mr. Voskins informed us that the secretary had phoned to change the meeting time to four. I used the extra time to purchase Gemma's present, a copy of A Little Princess. She owns a paperback, which she has read a dozen times, but this was a reproduction of the original, with a dark blue cloth cover and colored plates. Gemma looked at it longingly every time she came to see me, and had given all sorts of not-very-veiled hints, like her \"The little princess's father bought her books,\" just now.\n\nI had Yet to Come ring the book up for me, and I put it with my coat and went back into the stockroom to get another copy so Gemma wouldn't see it was gone when she came to the store the day after tomorrow, and guess.\n\nWhen I came out with the copy, Mr. Voskins was there with Sir Spencer's secretary. I was wrong about the secretary's looking like Bob Cratchit. She was a smartly dressed young woman, with a short, sleek haircut and a gold Rolex watch.\n\n\"Sir Spencer requires a straight-backed chair without arms, with a wood table seventy centimeters high, and two fountain pens with viridian ink. Where did you plan to have him sit?\"\n\nI showed her the table in the literature section. \"Oh, this won't do at all,\" she said, looking at the books. \"A photographer will be coming. These shelves will all have to be filled with copies of Making Money Hand Over Fist. Facing out. And the rest of them here,\" she said, pointing at the history shelves, \"so that they're easily accessible from the queue. Who will be in charge of that?\"\n\n\"He will,\" I said, pointing at Yet to Come.\n\n\"Single file,\" she said, looking at her notes. \"Two books per person. New hardbacks only, no paperbacks, and nothing previously owned.\"\n\n\"Do you want them to write the name they wish inscribed on a slip of paper,\" I said, \"so they won't have to spell their names for him?\"\n\nShe stared at me coldly. \"Sir Spencer does not personalize books, he signs them. Sir Spencer prefers Armenti\u00e8res water, not Perrier, and some light refreshments\u2014water biscuits and dietetic cheese.\" She checked off items in her notebook. \"We'll need an exit through which he can depart without being seen.\"\n\n\"A trapdoor?\" I said, looking at Yet to Come, who seemed positively friendly by comparison.\n\nShe turned to Mr. Voskins. \"How many staff do you have?\"\n\n\"I'm hiring additional help,\" he said, \"and we're getting in additional books from the publishers.\"\n\nShe snapped the notebook shut. \"Sir Spencer will be here from eleven to one. You were very lucky to get him. Sir Spencer is very much in demand.\"\n\nWe spent the rest of the day bringing up books and scouring the basement and the furniture department for a table that would meet specifications. I had intended to shop for the ingredients for Gemma's feast after work, but instead I went from shop to shop looking for Armenti\u00e8res water, which I found on the sixth try, and for red-currant juice, which I did not find. I bought a box of black-currant tea and hoped that would do.\n\nIt was nearly ten when I got home, but I phoned Margaret twice more. Both times the line was engaged.\n\nNext morning I left Yet to Come in charge of the department and went down to the food hall to arrange for the dietetic cheese and water biscuits. When I got back, Margaret was there, asking Yet to Come where I was.\n\n\"I suppose it was your idea to have a shopclerk that's mute,\" Margaret said.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I said. \"Is Gemma here, too?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Gemma said, coming up, smiling.\n\n\"I needed to speak to you,\" Margaret said. \"Gemma, go over to the children's department and see if you can find a hair bow to match your Christmas dress.\"\n\nGemma was looking at Yet to Come, who was pointing at the travel section. \"Is that the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come?\" she said. \"From A Christmas Carol?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"The genuine article.\"\n\n\"Gemma,\" Margaret said. \"Go find a hair bow. Burgundy, to match the dress Robert gave you.\" She sent her off, watching her till she was a good distance down the aisle, and then turned back to me. \"It was obvious you weren't going to return my call.\"\n\n\"I did,\" I said. \"Didn't Gemma tell you I'd phoned?\"\n\n\"She told me you couldn't wait even a few moments till I returned, that you were too busy.\"\n\nGemma told her no such thing, of course. \"What did you want to speak to me about?\" I said.\n\n\"Your daughter's welfare.\" She looked pointedly at the boxes of books. \"Or are you too busy for that, as well?\"\n\nThere are times when it is hard for me to imagine that I ever loved Margaret. I know rationally that I did, that when she told me she wanted a divorce it was like a blade going through me, but I cannot call up the feeling, or remember what it was about her that I loved.\n\nI said ploddingly, \"What about her welfare?\"\n\n\"She needs a brace. The dentist says she has an overbite and that it needs to be corrected. It will be expensive,\" she said, and let her voice die away.\n\nToo expensive for a shopclerk, she means. An accountant could have afforded it.\n\nThere is no answer to that, even if she had actually said it. She believes I quit my job as an accountant out of spite, to keep her from collecting a large amount of child support, and there is nothing I could say that would convince her otherwise. Certainly not the truth, which is that having lost her, having lost Gemma, I could not bear to do without books as well.\n\n\"Robert has offered to pay for the brace,\" she said, \"which I think is very generous of him, but he was afraid you might object. Do you?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, wishing I could say, \"I want to pay for the brace,\" but, as she had not said, a shopclerk doesn't earn enough to pay for it. \"I don't have any objections.\"\n\n\"I told him you wouldn't care,\" she said. \"It's become increasingly clear over the past two years that you don't care about Gemma at all.\"\n\n\"And it's becoming increasingly clear,\" I said, raising my voice, \"that you are systematically attempting to take my daughter away from me. You can't even stand to let me see her on Christmas!\" I shouted, and saw Gemma.\n\nShe was over in the literature section, standing with her back to the shelves. She was holding the copy of A Little Princess, and she had obviously come back to see if it was still there, to see if I'd bought it yet.\n\nAnd heard her parents trying to tear her in two. She huddled back against the shelves, looking small and hunted, clutching the book.\n\n\"Gemma,\" I said, and Margaret turned and saw her.\n\n\"Did you find a burgundy hair bow?\" she said.\n\n\"No,\" Gemma said.\n\n\"Well, come along. We have shopping to do.\"\n\nGemma put the book back carefully, and started toward us.\n\n\"I'll see you tomorrow night,\" I said, trying to smile. \"I found some black-currant tea for our feast.\"\n\nShe said solemnly, \"Did you get the figs?\"\n\n\"Come along, Gemma,\" Margaret said. \"Tell your father goodbye.\"\n\n\"Goodbye,\" she said, and smiled tentatively at me.\n\n\"I'll get the figs,\" I promised.\n\nWhich was easier said than done. Harridge's food hall didn't have them, either canned or fresh, and neither did the grocer's down the street. There wasn't time to walk to the market and back on my lunch break. I would have to go after work.\n\nAnd I didn't want to go to Mama Montoni's. I didn't want Christmas Present making more inquiries about whether we were hiring additional staff. And I didn't feel like talking to anyone, sane or not. I ducked down the alley to Wilson's, intending to get a bacon sandwich to take.\n\nThe Spirit of Christmas Present was there, sitting at one of the tiny tables, reading Making Money Hand Over Fist. He looked up when I came in and motioned me eagerly over to the table.\n\n\"I am supposed to meet Jacob Marley here,\" he said, waving me over. \"Come, we'll discuss Ivanhoe and The Mystery of Edwin Drood.\" He pulled a chair out for me. \"I have always wondered if Edwin were truly dead, or if he could be brought to life again.\"\n\nI sat down and picked up Making Money Hand Over Fist. \"I thought you kept to the older authors.\"\n\n\"Research,\" he said, taking the book back. \"Jacob has high hopes of a job for us. He went to the Old Bailey this morning to speak with a barrister.\"\n\n\"Who specializes in divorce, no doubt,\" I said. \"Or did he go to speak to the barrister about getting his sentence reduced?\"\n\n\"About repentance,\" he said.\n\nI laughed humorlessly. \"You really believe you're the incarnation of Dickens's spirits.\"\n\n\"Not Dickens's,\" he said.\n\n\"That you're really Christmas Present and my assistant is Christmas Yet to Come? Is that why he never speaks? Because the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come in Dickens's story is mute?\"\n\n\"He can speak,\" he said, quite seriously. \"But he does not like to. Many find the sound of his voice distressing.\"\n\n\"And you believe your job is to reform misers and spread Christmas cheer?\" I swung my arm wide. \"Then why don't you do something?\" I said bitterly. \"Use your magic powers. Help the needy. House the homeless. Reunite fathers with their children.\"\n\n\"We have no such powers. A little skill with locks, some minor dexterity with time. We cannot change what is, or was. Our power is only to rebuke and to remind, to instruct and to forewarn.\"\n\n\"Like books,\" I said. \"Which no one reads anymore.\"\n\n\"Your daughter.\"\n\n\"My daughter,\" I said, and brightened. \"Do you know where I can find figs?\"\n\n\"Tinned or fresh?\"\n\n\"Either,\" I said.\n\n\"Fortnum and Mason's,\" he said, and as soon as I stood up, went back to reading Sir Spencer's book. There was not time to go to Fortnum's, though when I got back to Harridge's and looked at my watch, I had nearly ten minutes of my lunch break left.\n\nMr. Voskins was waiting for me.\n\n\"Sir Spencer's secretary phoned. Sir Spencer can't be here till half past one.\" He handed me a stack of revised flyers. \"The autographing will be from half past one to half past three.\"\n\nI looked at the flyers, dismayed.\n\n\"It was the only free time in his schedule,\" he said defensively. \"We're lucky he can fit us in at all.\"\n\nI thought of the cleaning up afterward. \"I'll need to leave by four,\" I said. \"My daughter's coming for Christmas Eve.\"\n\nIt was a long afternoon. Yet to Come took the books down from the literature shelves and put up Sir Spencer's books, facing out, bright green volumes with a hundred-pound note design and gold lettering. I taped up flyers and dealt with customers who had gotten a gift they had not expected and who now had, grudgingly, to return the favor, \"And nothing over two pounds.\" I gave them credit-card receipts and flyers, thinking, Only one more day till I have Gemma.\n\nAfter work I went to Fortnum's, which had both fresh and tinned figs. I bought them both, and frosted cakes, and chocolates, which I intended to tell her the Indian gentleman had sent.\n\nWhen I got home I rooted out an old red wool scarf to use as a tablecloth, and tidied up the flat. Only one more day.\n\nWhich day came at last, and with it a new flyer (half past one to half past three) and the Spirit of Christmas Present. \"What are you doing here?\" I said.\n\n\"We have found employment,\" he said, beaming.\n\n\"We?\" I said, looking around for Marley. I didn't see anyone who looked the part, and Present was already piling copies of Sir Spencer's book on the display tables.\n\n\"What sort of employment?\" I said suspiciously. \"You're not planning some sort of demonstration against Sir Spencer, are you?\"\n\n\"I'm your new assistant,\" he said, stacking books on the floor by the order desk. \"I'm supposed to pass out numbers for queueing up.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine that many people will come,\" I said, but by ten o'clock there were twenty people clutching their numbered chits.\n\nI sold them copies of Making Money Hand Over Fist and explained why Sir Spencer wouldn't be there at eleven as advertised. \"He's a very busy man,\" I said. \"We're lucky he was able to fit us in at all.\"\n\nMr. Voskins came up at eleven to tell us we would have to forgo lunch, which was patently obvious. The department was filled with milling people, Yet to Come had had to go down to the basement for more books, and Present was writing numbers on more chits.\n\nBy noon the queue had begun to form according to the numbers and was halfway down the aisle.\n\n\"You'd best go get more books,\" I told Yet to Come, and turned round to find Margaret standing there.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I said blankly. \"Where's Gemma?\"\n\n\"She's up on fifth, looking at dolls,\" she said.\n\n\"I thought she didn't want a doll.\"\n\n\"She said she just wanted to look at them,\" she said. Yes, I thought, and hide a safe two floors away from her parents' fighting.\n\n\"Christmas Eve won't work,\" Margaret said.\n\n\"What?\" I said blankly, though I knew already what she meant, felt it like a blade going in.\n\n\"We need to take an earlier train. Robert's parents are having a friend of theirs down who's an orthodontist, and he's agreed to look at Gemma's overbite, but he's only going to be there for Christmas Eve.\"\n\n\"I'm to have Gemma Christmas Eve,\" I said stupidly.\n\n\"I know. That's why I came, so we can rework the schedule. We're coming back the day after New Year's. You can have her then.\"\n\n\"Why can't she see the orthodontist after New Year's?\"\n\n\"He's a very busy man. Ordinarily Gemma would have to be put on a waiting list, but he's agreed to see her as a special favor. I think we should be very grateful he was able to fit us in at all.\"\n\n\"I have to work inventory the day after New Year's,\" I said.\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, and let her voice die away. \"The next weekend, then. Whenever you like.\"\n\nAnd the next weekend she will have to be fitted for the brace, I thought, and the following one it will have to be tightened or she will have to have bands put on. \"I was counting on Gemma's being with me Christmas Eve. Can't you take a later train?\" I said, though I already knew it was hopeless, knew I was standing against the bookcase the way Gemma had, looking hunted.\n\n\"The only trains are at four and half past ten. The late one doesn't get in till one o'clock. You can hardly expect Robert to ask his parents and the orthodontist to wait up for us. I really do think you could be a bit more accommodating\u2026.\"\n\n\"Mr. Grey, we're out of chits,\" Mr. Voskins said. \"And I need to speak to you about the queue.\"\n\n\"We'll come back a day early, and you can have Gemma for New Year's,\" she said.\n\n\"It's nearly to the end of the aisle,\" Mr. Voskins said. \"Should we loop it round?\"\n\nMargaret started toward the jammed aisle. \"Wait,\" I said, \"I have Gemma's present at home. Just a moment.\"\n\nI hurried over to the literature shelves and then remembered those books had been moved over under Travel. I knelt and looked for the other copy of A Little Princess. It wasn't wrapped, but she would at least have it for Christmas.\n\nIt wasn't there. I looked through the B's twice, and then ran a finger along the backs, looking for the dark blue cover. It wasn't there. I checked Children's, thinking Yet to Come might have put it there, but it wasn't, and when I stood up from checking Literature again, Margaret was gone.\n\n\"I've made it a double queue,\" Mr. Voskins said. \"This is going to be a great success, isn't it? Mr. Grey?\"\n\n\"A great success,\" I said, and went to write more numbers on slips of paper.\n\nSir Spencer arrived at a quarter till two in a Savile Row suit. He settled himself in the straight-backed chair, looked disdainfully at the table and the queue, and uncapped one of the fountain pens.\n\nHe began to sign the books that were placed before him, and to dispense wisdom to the admiring queue.\n\n\"Christmas is an excellent time to think about your future,\" he said, scrawling a squiggle that might have been an S followed by a long, uneven line. \"And an excellent time to plan your financial strategy for the new year.\"\n\nFour persons back in the queue was someone who could only be meant to be Marley, an old-fashioned coat and trousers draped with heavy chains and a good deal of gray-green greasepaint. He had a kerchief tied round his head and jaw and was clutching a copy of Making Money Hand Over Fist.\n\n\"They're actually going to try to reform him,\" I thought, and wondered what Sir Spencer would say.\n\nMarley moved to the front of the queue and laid his open book down on the table. \"In life\u2026\" he said, and it was a curious voice, brittle, dry, a voice that sounded as if it had died away once and for all.\n\n\"In life I was Jacob Marley,\" he said, in that faint dead voice, and shook his chain with a gray-green hand, but Sir Spencer was already handing his book back to him and was reaching for the next.\n\n\"There are those who say that money isn't everything,\" Sir Spencer said to the crowd. \"It isn't. Money is the only thing.\"\n\nThe queue applauded.\n\nAt half past two, Sir Spencer stopped to flex the fingers of his writing hand and drink his Armenti\u00e8res water. He consulted, whispering, with his secretary, looked at his watch, and took another sip.\n\nI went over to the order desk to get another bottle, and when I came back I nearly collided with the Spirit of Christmas Present. He was carrying a huge plum pudding with a sprig of holly on top.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" I said.\n\n\"Christmas is an excellent time to think about your future,\" he said, winking, and started toward the table, but the sleek secretary interposed herself between him and Sir Spencer.\n\nHe tried to give the plum pudding to her, still laughing, but she handed it back. \"I specifically requested light refreshments,\" she said sharply, and went back over to Sir Spencer, looking at her watch.\n\nPresent followed her. \"Come, know me better,\" he said to her, but she was consulting with Sir Spencer again, and they were both looking at their watches.\n\nShe came over to me. \"The queue needs to move along more quickly,\" she said. \"Tell them to have their books open to the title page.\"\n\nI did, working my way back along the queue. There was a sudden silence, and I looked back at the table. Yet to Come had glided in front of a middle-aged woman at the front of the queue, and she had stepped back, clutching her book to her wide bosom.\n\nHe's going to do it, I thought, and almost wished he could. It would be nice to see something good happen.\n\nSir Spencer reached his hand out for the book, and Yet to Come drew himself up and pointed his finger at him, and it was not a finger, but the bones of a skeleton.\n\nI thought, He's going to speak, and knew what the voice would sound like. It was the voice of Margaret, telling me she wanted a divorce, telling me they had to take an earlier train. The voice of doom.\n\nI drew in my breath, afraid to hear it, and the secretary leaned forward. \"Sir Spencer does not sign body parts,\" she said sternly. \"If you do not have a book, please step aside.\"\n\nAnd that was that. Sir Spencer signed newly purchased hardbacks until a quarter of three and then stood up in midscrawl and went out the previously arranged back way.\n\n\"He didn't finish,\" the young girl whose book he had been in the midst of signing said plaintively, and I took the book and the pen and started after him, though without much hope.\n\nI caught him at the door. \"There are still people in the queue who haven't had their books signed,\" I said, holding out the book and pen, but the secretary had interposed herself between us.\n\n\"Sir Spencer will be signing on the second at Hatchard's,\" she said. \"Tell them they can try again there.\"\n\n\"It's Christmas,\" I said, and took hold of his sleeve.\n\nHe looked pointedly at it.\n\n\"You'll miss your plane to Majorca,\" the secretary said, and he pulled his sleeve free and swept away, looking at his watch. \"Late,\" I heard the secretary say.\n\nI was still holding the pen and the open book, with its half-finished S. I took it back to the girl. \"If you'd like to leave it, I'll try to get it signed for you. Was it a Christmas present?\"\n\n\"Yes, for my father,\" she said, \"but I won't see him till after Christmas, so that's all right.\"\n\nI took her name and telephone number, set the books on the order desk, and began taking down the posters.\n\nI had thought perhaps Yet to Come would have disappeared after his failure with Sir Spencer like the others had, but he was still there, putting books into boxes.\n\nHe seemed somehow more silent\u2014which was impossible, he had never spoken a word\u2014and downcast, which was ridiculous, as well. The Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come was supposed to be dreadful, terrifying, but he seemed to have shrunk into himself. Like Gemma, shrinking against the shelves.\n\nIt's Sir Spencer that's terrifying, I thought, and his secretary. And her gold Rolex watch. \"Scrooges are praised and much rewarded for their greed,\" Present had said, and so they were, with Savile Row suits and knighthoods and Majorca. No wonder the spirits had fallen on hard times.\n\n\"At least you tried,\" I said. \"There are some battles that are lost before they're begun.\"\n\nChildren's came over to buy a gift. \"For Housewares. I told her I didn't believe in exchanging with colleagues,\" she said irritably, \"but she's bought me something anyway. And I'd planned on leaving early. I suppose you are, too, so you can spend the evening with your little girl.\"\n\nI looked at my watch. It was after three. They would be leaving for the station soon, and Robert's parents, and the orthodontist.\n\nI cleared away the refreshments. I put foil over the plum pudding and set it next to the girl's book, which I had no hope of getting signed, and went back to help Yet to Come take Making Money Hand Over Fist down from the shelves, trying not to think about Gemma and Christmas Eve.\n\nThe spirit stopped suddenly and drew himself up and pointed, the robe falling away from his bony hand. I turned, afraid of more bad news, and there was Gemma in the aisle, working her way toward us.\n\nShe was pushing steadily upstream through shoppers who all seemed to be going in the opposite direction, ducking between shopping bags with a determined expression on her narrow face.\n\n\"Gemma!\" I said, and pulled her safely out of the aisle. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I wanted to tell you goodbye and that I'm sorry I can't come for Christmas Eve.\"\n\nI raised my head and tried to see down the aisle. \"Where's your mother? You didn't come here alone, did you?\"\n\n\"Mummy's up on fifth,\" she said. \"With the dolls. I told her I'd changed my mind about wanting one. A bride doll. With green eyes.\" She looked pleased with herself, as well she might. It was no small accomplishment to have gotten Margaret back here half an hour before they were to meet Robert at the station, and she would never have agreed if she'd known why Gemma wanted to come. I could imagine her arguments\u2014there isn't time, you'll see him the day after New Year's, we can't inconvenience Robert, who after all is paying for your brace\u2014and so could Gemma, apparently, and had sidestepped them neatly.\n\n\"Did you tell her you were coming down to third?\" I said, trying to look disapproving.\n\n\"She told me to go look at games so I wouldn't see her buying the doll,\" she said. \"I wanted to tell you I'd rather be with you Christmas Eve.\"\n\nI love you, I thought.\n\n\"I think when I do come,\" she said seriously, \"that we should pretend that it is Christmas Eve, like the little princess and Becky.\"\n\n\"They pretended it was Christmas Eve?\"\n\n\"No. When the little princess was cold or hungry or sad she pretended her garret was the Bastille.\"\n\n\"The Bastille,\" I said thoughtfully. \"I don't think they had figs in the Bastille.\"\n\n\"No.\" She laughed. \"The little princess pretended all sorts of things. When she couldn't have what she wanted. So I think we should pretend it's Christmas Eve, and wear paper hats and light the tree and say things like, 'It's nearly Christmas,' and 'Oh, listen, the Christmas bells are chiming.' \"\n\n\"And 'Pass the figs, please,' \" I said.\n\n\"This is serious,\" she said. \"We'll be together next Christmas, but till then we'll have to pretend.\" She paused, and looked solemn. \"I'm going to have a good time in Surrey,\" she said, and her voice died away uncertainly.\n\n\"Of course you'll have a good time,\" I said heartily. \"You'll get huge heaps of presents, and eat lots of goose. And figs. I hear in Surrey they use figs for stuffing.\" I hugged her to me.\n\nA thin gray woman with rather the look of Miss Minchin came up. \"Pardon me, do you work here?\" she said disapprovingly.\n\n\"I'll be with you in just a moment,\" I said.\n\nYet to Come hurried up, but the woman waved him away. \"I'm looking for a book,\" she said.\n\nI said to Gemma, \"You'd best get back before your mother finishes buying the doll and misses you.\"\n\n\"She won't. The bride dolls are all sold. I asked when I was here before.\" She smiled, her eyes crinkling. \"She'll have to send them to check the stockroom,\" she said airily, looking just like her mother, and I remembered suddenly what I had loved about Margaret\u2014her cleverness and the innocent pleasure she took in it, her resourcefulness. Her smile. And it was like being given a boon, a Christmas gift I hadn't known I wanted.\n\n\"I'm looking for a book,\" Miss Minchin repeated. \"I saw it in here several weeks ago.\"\n\n\"I'd better go,\" Gemma said.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"and tell your mother you don't want the doll before she turns the stockroom inside out.\"\n\n\"I do want it, though,\" she said. \"The little princess had a doll,\" and again that trailing away, as if she had left something unsaid.\n\n\"I thought you said all of them had been sold.\"\n\n\"They have,\" she said, \"but there's one in the window display, and you know Mummy. She'll make them give it to her.\"\n\n\"Pardon me,\" Miss Minchin said insistently. \"It was a green book, green and gold.\"\n\n\"I'd better go,\" Gemma said again.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said regretfully.\n\n\"Goodbye,\" she said, and plunged into the crush of shoppers, which now was going the other way.\n\n\"Hardback,\" Miss Minchin said. \"It was right here on this shelf.\"\n\nGemma stopped halfway down the aisle, shoppers milling about her, and looked back at me. \"You'd better eat the frosted cakes so they won't grow stale. I'm going to have a good time,\" she said, more firmly, and was swallowed by the crowd.\n\n\"It had gold lettering,\" Miss Minchin said. \"It was by an earl, I think.\"\n\nThe book Miss Minchin wanted, after a protracted search, was Sir Spencer's Making Money Hand Over Fist. Of course.\n\n\"What a sweet little girl you have,\" she said as I rang up the sale, all friendliness now that she had gotten what she wanted. \"You're very lucky.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, though I did not feel lucky.\n\nI looked at my watch. Five past four. Gemma had already taken the train to Surrey, and I would not see her sweet face again this year, and even if I stayed after closing and put everything back as it had been, there were still all the hours of Christmas Eve to be gotten through. And the day after. And all the days after.\n\nAnd the rest of the afternoon, and all the shoppers who had left their shopping till too late, who were cross and tired and angry that we had no more copies of The Outer Space Christmas Carol, and who had counted on our gift wrapping their purchases.\n\nAnd Mr. Voskins, who came up to say disapprovingly that he had been very disappointed in the sales from the autographing, and that he wanted the shelves back in order.\n\nIn between, Yet to Come and I folded chairs and carried boxes of Sir S's books to the basement.\n\nIt grew dark outside, and the crush of shoppers subsided to a trickle. When Yet to Come came over to me with his bony hands full of a box of books, I said, \"You needn't come back up again,\" and didn't even have the heart to wish him a happy Christmas.\n\nThe trickle of shoppers subsided to two desperate-looking young men. I sold them scented journals and started taking Sir S's books off the literature shelves and putting them in boxes.\n\nOn the second shelf from the top, wedged in behind Making Money Hand Over Fist, I found the other copy of A Little Princess.\n\nAnd that seemed somehow the final blow. Not that it had been here all along\u2014there was no real difference between its not being there and my not being able to find it, and Gemma would love it as much when I gave it to her next week as she would have Christmas morning\u2014but that Sir Spencer Siddon, Sir Scrawl of the new hardbacks only and the Armenti\u00e8res water, Sir Scrooge and his damnable secretary who had not even recognized the Spirits of Christmas, let alone heeded them, who had no desire to keep Christmas, had cost Gemma hers.\n\n\"Hard times,\" I said, and sank down in the wing chair. \"I have fallen on hard times.\" After a while I opened the book and turned the pages, looking at the colored plates. The little princess and her father in her carriage. The little princess and her father at the school. The little princess and her father.\n\nThe birthday party. The little princess huddled against a wall, her doll clutched to her, looking hunted.\n\n\"The little princess had a doll,\" she'd said, and meant, \"to help her through hard times.\"\n\nThe way the little princess's doll had helped her when she lost her father. The way the book had helped Gemma.\n\n\"I find books a great comfort,\" I had told the Spirit of Christmas Present. And so had Gemma, who had lost her father.\n\n\"I'm going to have a good time in Surrey,\" she had said, her voice trailing off, and I could finish that sentence, too. \"In spite of everything.\"\n\nNot a hope, but a determination to try to be happy in spite of circumstance, as the little princess had tried to be happy in her chilly garret. \"I'm going to have a good time,\" she'd said again, turning at the last minute, and it was rebuke and reminder and instruction, all at once. And comfort.\n\nI stood a moment, looking at the book, and then closed it and put it carefully back on the shelf, the way Gemma had.\n\nI went over to the order desk and picked up the plum pudding. The book the girl had left for Sir Spencer to finish signing was under it. I opened it and took out the paper with her name and address on it.\n\nMartha. I found the fountain pen, with its viridian ink, uncapped it, and drew a scrawl that looked a little like Sir Spencer's. \"To Martha's father,\" I wrote above it. \"Money isn't everything!\" And I went to find the spirits.\n\nIf they could be found. If they had not, after all, found other employment with the barrister or the banker, or taken a plane to Majorca, or gone up to Surrey.\n\nMama Montoni's had a large Closed sign hanging inside the door, and the light above the counter was switched off, but when I tried the door it wasn't locked. I opened it, carefully, so the buzzer wouldn't sound, and leaned in. Mama Montoni must have switched off the heat as well. It was icy inside.\n\nThey were sitting at the table in the corner, hunched forward over it as if they were cold. Yet to Come had his hands up inside his sleeves, and Present kept tugging at his button as if to pull the green robe closer. He was reading to them from A Christmas Carol.\n\n\" ' \"You will be haunted,\" resumed the Ghost of Marley, \"by three spirits,\" ' \" Present read. \" ' \"Is this the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?\" he demanded in a faltering voice. \"It is.\" \"I\u2014I think I'd rather not,\" said Scrooge. \"Without their visits,\" said the Ghost, \"you cannot hope to shun the path I tread.\" ' \"\n\nI banged the door open and strode in. \" 'Come, dine with me, uncle,' \" I said.\n\nThey all turned to look at me.\n\n\"We are past that place,\" Marley said. \"Scrooge's nephew has already gone home, and so has Scrooge.\"\n\n\"We are at the place where Scrooge is being visited by Marley,\" Present said, pulling out a chair. \"Will you join us?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"You are at the place where you must visit me.\"\n\nMama Montoni came rushing out from the back. \"I'm closed!\" she growled. \"It's Christmas Eve.\"\n\n\"It's Christmas Eve,\" I said, \"and Mama Montoni's is closed, so you must dine with me.\"\n\nThey looked at each other. Mama Montoni snatched the Closed sign from the door and brandished it in my face. \"I'm closed!\"\n\n\"I can't offer much. Figs. I have figs. And frosted cakes. And Sir Walter Scott. ' 'Twas Christmas broach'd the mightiest ale, / 'Twas Christmas told the merriest tale.' \"\n\n\" 'A Christmas gambol oft could cheer / The poorest man's heart through half the year,' \" Present murmured, but none of them moved. Mama Montoni started for the phone, to dial 999, no doubt.\n\n\"No one should be alone on Christmas Eve,\" I said.\n\nThey looked at each other again, and then Yet to Come stood up and glided over to me.\n\n\"The time grows short,\" I said, and Yet to Come extended his finger and pointed at them. Marley stood up, and then Present, closing his book gently.\n\nMama Montoni herded us out the door, looking daggers. I pulled A Christmas Carol out of my pocket and handed it to her. \"Excellent book,\" I said. \"Instructive.\"\n\nShe banged the door shut behind us and locked it. \"Merry Christmas,\" I said to her through the door, and led the way home, though before we had reached the tube station, Yet to Come was ahead, his finger pointing the way to the train, and my street, and my flat.\n\n\"We've black-currant tea,\" I said, going into the kitchen to put on the kettle. \"And figs. Please, make yourselves at home. Present, the Dickens is in that bookcase, top shelf, and the Scott's just under it.\"\n\nI set out sugar and milk and the frosted cakes I'd bought for Gemma. I took the foil off the plum pudding. \"Courtesy of Sir Spencer Siddon, who, unfortunately, remains a miser,\" I said, setting it on the table. \"I'm sorry you failed to find someone to reform.\"\n\n\"We have had some small success,\" Present said from the bookcase, and Marley smiled slyly.\n\n\"Who?\" I said. \"Not Mama Montoni?\"\n\nThe kettle whistled. I poured the boiling water over the tea and brought the teapot in. \"Come, come, sit down. Present, bring your book with you. You can read to us while the tea steeps.\" I pulled out a chair for him. \"But first you must tell me about this person you reformed.\"\n\nMarley and Yet to Come looked at each other as if they shared a secret, and both of them looked at Christmas Present.\n\n\"You have read Scott's 'Marmion,' have you not?\" he said, and I knew that, whoever it was, they weren't going to tell me. One of the people in the queue, perhaps? Or Harridge?\n\n\"I always think 'Marmion' an excellent poem for Christmas,\" Present said, and opened the book.\n\n\" 'And well our Christian sires of old,' \" he read, \" 'loved when the year its course had roll'd, / and brought blithe Christmas back again, / with all his hospitable train.' \"\n\nI poured out the tea.\n\n\" 'The wassail round, in good brown bowls,' \" he read, \" 'garnished with ribbons, blithely trowls.' \" He put down the book and raised his teacup in a toast. \"To Sir Walter Scott, who knew how to keep Christmas!\"\n\n\"And to Mr. Dickens,\" Marley said, \"the founder of the feast.\"\n\n\"To books!\" I said, thinking of Gemma and A Little Princess, \"which instruct and sustain us through hard times.\"\n\n\" 'Heap on more wood!' \" Present said, taking up his book again, \" 'the wind is chill; / But let it whistle as it will, / We'll keep our Christmas merry still.' \"\n\nI poured out more tea, and we ate the frosted cakes and Gemma's figs and half a meat pie I found in the back of the refrigerator, and Present read us \"Lochinvar,\" with sound effects.\n\nAs I was bringing in the second pot of tea, the clock began to strike, and outside, church bells began to ring. I looked at the clock. It was, impossibly, midnight.\n\n\"Christmas already!\" Present said jovially. \"Here's to evenings with friends that fly too fast.\"\n\n\"And the friends who make it fly,\" I said.\n\n\"To small successes,\" Marley said, and raised his cup to me.\n\nI looked at Christmas Present, and then at Yet to Come, whose face I still could not see, and then back at Marley. He smiled slyly.\n\n\"Come, come,\" Present said into the silence. \"We have not had a toast from Christmas Yet to Come.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Marley said, clanking his chains excitedly. \"Speak, Spirit.\"\n\nYet to Come took hold of his teacup handle with his bony fingers and raised his cup.\n\nI held my breath.\n\n\"To Christmas,\" he said, and why had I ever feared that voice? It was clear and childlike. Like Gemma's voice, saying, \"We'll be together next Christmas.\"\n\n\"To Christmas,\" the Spirit of Christmas Yet to Come said, his voice growing stronger with each word. \"God bless us, every one!\"" + }, + { + "title": "deck.halls@boughs/holly", + "text": "As soon as the nearly empty maglev pulled out of the station, Linny uplinked to Inge. \"I need a netcheck on a Mrs. Shields,\" she said. \"3404 Aspen Lane, Greater Denver.\"\n\n\"Today?\" Inge said. \"It's Thanksgiving.\"\n\nI didn't think they celebrated Thanksgiving in Norway, Linny thought, but Inge was obviously going somewhere. She was wearing a velvet slash top and sequined makeup. \"I know, sorry, but I'm on my way to see a new client,\" Linny said. \"You can wait on the financial, I just need some background so I have an idea of what she might like\u2014occupation, hobbies, interests\u2014\"\n\n\"Right now?\" Inge said plaintively. \"I was hoping\u2026see, the thing is, I told Carlo I'd have Thanksgiving dinner with him, and it's only a few minutes from now.\"\n\n\"Can't you be a little late?\" Linny asked. \"A background check should only take half an hour or so.\"\n\n\"No. Remember, he's at Tombaugh Station, and there's only a four-hour window, and personal calls don't have priority. I promised him I'd talk to him while they were having their dinner. They're on Canaveral time.\"\n\nLinny'd forgotten Carlo was on the Moon. \"Go have dinner,\" she said. \"And tell Carlo happy Thanksgiving. I'll run a preliminary myself, and you can do a full netcheck later.\"\n\n\"Really? Thanks! I was afraid I wasn't going to make it,\" she said, though now that Linny'd given her permission, she didn't seem to be in all that much of a hurry. \"Is Norwall taking you out for Thanksgiving dinner?\" she asked.\n\n\"He has an installation,\" Linny said.\n\n\"So you aren't having Thanksgiving dinner with anybody?\"\n\n\"I already had it with Mom.\"\n\n\"I thought she was in Riyadh.\"\n\n\"She is. We did it online earlier.\" In the middle of the night, actually, with Linny sitting half asleep in front of the screen in her nightshift and the vidcam carefully focused so her mother couldn't see that all she was eating was a bowl of soyflakes.\n\nInge sniffed. \"I still think Norwall could have taken you out. Carlo and I have more dates than you two, and he's 240,000 miles away. I know it's your busy season, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Are there any messages for me?\" Linny cut in.\n\n\"Yes. Soothethesavagebeast.com are out of Beethovens. They wanted to know if Bachs would work. And the Standishes want you to do their e-cards after all.\"\n\nWonderful, Linny thought, but at least there weren't any messages from Pandora Freeh, which meant she was still happy with High School Memories. Now, if it just stayed that way till she could get there with the contract. Last year Pandora had changed her mind nine times, the last one the day before her installation, and this year they had already gone through Christmas in the Sahara, Board Games, and nine others before Linny had come up with a Christmas theme Pandora would actually stick with for more than two days. Now if she could just stick with it a couple more hours while Linny interviewed Mrs. Shields\u2014\n\n\"I'd better go,\" she told Inge. \"I need to run that netcheck.\"\n\n\"And I\u2014yipes! Look what time it is! I don't even have my eyes inked yet\u2014\" Inge said, and abruptly downlinked.\n\nLinny linked to soothethesavagebeast. It had a \"Closed for Thanksgiving\" banner on it. She connected to the netcheck site, typed in \"Mrs. Shields,\" and requested a general background check and a marketing profile.\n\nNothing happened. What did I forget to do? she wondered. She hadn't done a netcheck in ages. Inge did all of them. She must have\u2014\n\nThe screen buzzed an override. It was Norwall, looking irritated.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" he snapped. \"I've been trying both you and Inge for forty-five minutes.\"\n\n\"I gave her the afternoon off. It's Thanksgiving, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Wonderful,\" he said. \"Like everything else about this day. Teddy Lopez just called. They want to switch themes.\"\n\n\"Why? I thought he and Emil loved their jazz theme.\"\n\n\"They did, but they got engaged,\" he said disgustedly.\n\n\"How nice\u2014\" Linny began.\n\n\"I'm glad you think so. Because now they want a whole new love design, hearts and Cupids and orange blossoms, and they want their installation moved up to the twelfth so they can have it for their engagement party.\"\n\n\"Goin'tothechapel.com has some darling diamond ring ornaments,\" Linny said, \"and a glitteroptic tree would be the perfect\u2014\"\n\n\"Legally, I don't have to let them switch. They've already signed a contract. I have every right to hold them to it.\"\n\n\"But, Norwall, they just got engaged,\" Linny protested, \"and it's Christmas.\"\n\n\"Don't remind me. I've got four installations to do in the next six days.\" His image leaned forward as if trying to see what was behind her. \"I see movement. Where are you?\"\n\n\"On the maglev. I'm on my way out to Aspen Lane.\"\n\n\"Aspen Lane? Don't tell me Pandora Freeh still hasn't signed her contract. You let your clients walk all over you, Linny. You have to be firm with them. This is a business, not some sentimental\u2014\"\n\nShe'd heard this lecture before. \"Pandora Freeh's signing her contract today.\"\n\n\"How long will it take? I could use you here at the installation to string lights for the outdoor tableau.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" she said. \"I have to interview a client.\"\n\n\"Interview? Don't tell me you're taking on a new client? It's the twenty-eighth of November! Did you tell her the deadline for new clients is June?\"\n\n\"She's never had a professional Christmas. She's always done her own, so she didn't know how it works.\"\n\n\"And you felt sorry for her?\"\n\nLinny nodded. \"She was really desperate.\" And very insistent. Linny hadn't really had a chance to say no, but she couldn't tell that to Norwall. \"It's a chance to broaden our client base. And I'm in good shape. Three of my installations are already done, and she doesn't need hers till after the fifteenth. I'll have no trouble fitting her in.\"\n\n\"Unless she keeps changing her mind like Pandora Freeh.\"\n\n\"She won't. She was terribly grateful I could take her on\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, and she'll probably tell all her friends that you're willing to take new clients in December. Who is she anyway? Have you run a financial check on her?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Linny said, even though she hadn't. But the fact that Mrs. Shields lived in the same exclusive community as Pandora Freeh meant she was at least moderately rich, and this was her client, after all, not his, and if Mrs. Shields turned out to be a lot of extra work, it was her problem.\n\n\"Well, don't leave without getting a signed contract. And why do you have to go all the way out there? Why couldn't you do it from your office?\"\n\n\"She doesn't like talking to people online. She's not very knowledgeable about computers\u2014\"\n\n\"So you have to waste a whole day going out there, and I don't have anybody to string lights for me. If I'd known you were so far ahead you were in a position to take on new clients, you could have taken over some of my installations for me,\" he said, and downlinked before she could wish him a happy Thanksgiving, which, under the circumstances, was probably just as well.\n\nShe called up the netcheck again. The screen buzzed an override immediately. It was Pandora Freeh. \"Are you still coming out with the contract this afternoon?\"\n\n\"Yes. At four.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear.\"\n\nOh, no. \"Is there a problem?\" Linny asked fearfully.\n\n\"I just got to thinking, there's no point in doing High School Memories if we can't get a bust of Shakespeare. English was my favorite class, and\u2014\"\n\n\"We have a bust,\" Linny said. \"I've already ordered it.\"\n\n\"But what if it's different from the one in Mr. Spoonmaker's class? I just don't think I should sign until I've seen it.\"\n\nSo you want me to lug it all the way out to your house so you can look at it, Linny thought. \"I don't know if the supplier's open today\u2014\" she said.\n\n\"Oh, there's no hurry. I can sign the contract next week.\"\n\nBy which time she would have come up with a dozen more objections. \"Let me try them,\" she said.\n\nShe linked to Rock and a Hard Place, which was, thankfully, open till five, and then linked back to Pandora and changed their appointment to seven, which was still cutting it close. Her interview with Mrs. Shields couldn't last more than two hours, and then she'd have to go all the way back into town to get the bust, which the guy at Rock had said was too heavy for one person to carry. She'd have to call Norwall.\n\nShe relinked to him. \"I know you're busy, but if you could just help me get it to the station, I could handle it from there.\" How she would manage the ten blocks to Pandora's house she wasn't sure, but maybe she could get a taxi.\n\n\"It's out of the question,\" he said. \"I'll be here till midnight. If you'd had Pandora Freeh sign her contract right after the interview like I told you to, you wouldn't be in this mess. You're going to have to call this new client of yours and tell her you can't\u2014\"\n\n\"We're coming into the station. I've got to go,\" Linny said.\n\nAnd I still don't have a netcheck, she thought, setting out on the walk to Mrs. Shields's house. Well, she'd just have to do without. Maybe she could pick up some hints from the house. She already knew Mrs. Shields was a technophobe, and, from her image on the screen when they talked, that she was in her late fifties and didn't dye her hair. That, and her use of the old-fashioned \"Mrs.\" indicated she was pre-retro, so one of their traditional themes. Maybe #23 A Little House on the Prairie Christmas, or #119 Over the River and Through the Woods.\n\nHere it was, 3404 Aspen Lane. The house wasn't as expensive-looking as she'd expected. She'd assumed that anything in Pandora Freeh's neighborhood would be in the hideous mansion category, but 3404 was a long, low-roofed house set well back from the street. Maybe she should have done a financial netcheck after all.\n\nBut the wide lawn looked professionally groomed, and what furniture she could see through the large front window looked like mission-style Arts and Crafts.\n\nThe door didn't have any sensors or identity screen, just an old-fashioned doorbell. Linny rang it, and after a minute a tall young man in a wool pullover with a napkin stuck in the neck opened it. \"Can I help you?\" he asked, frowning.\n\n\"I'm Linny Chiang,\" she said. \"I have an appointment with\u2014\"\n\n\"Come in, come in! Brian, don't make her stand outside like that!\" Mrs. Shields pushed in front of the young man and practically dragged Linny into the house. \"It's freezing out!\"\n\nShe had a napkin, too, in her hand. \"Am I interrupting your Thanksgiving dinner?\" Linny asked anxiously.\n\n\"Oh, no, not at all, we'd finished,\" she said with a pointed look at Brian, who was still frowning. \"Brian, take her coat,\" she said, wrestling Linny out of it and handing it to him, \"and go turn on the fire in the study.\"\n\nBrian left, bearing the coat. \"The handsome young man is my nephew, Brian West,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"We're both so grateful you agreed to give up your Thanksgiving to come do this. Have you had dinner? Would you like some turkey and dressing? My nephew makes wonderful oyster dressing.\"\n\n\"No, thank you. I had dinner earlier.\"\n\n\"With your family?\" she said, leading Linny through the living room to the study.\n\n\"My mother and I had dinner online. She's in Riyadh.\"\n\n\"But you must have had to eat in the middle of the night.\"\n\nLinny was surprised Mrs. Shields knew what time zone Riyadh was in. Even her mother hadn't had it straight. \"It must be late there for you, darling,\" she'd kept saying. \"What is it? Nine o'clock?\"\n\n\"Have you had anything to eat since then?\" Mrs. Shields was asking anxiously. \"There's cranberry sauce and candied yams and\u2014\"\n\n\"No, thanks, really, I had something to eat on the maglev,\" she lied.\n\n\"Some chai then, or what is it you young people drink nowadays? Maxpresso? Red tea?\"\n\nLinny could see the onslaught wasn't going to stop until she'd agreed to eat or drink something. \"Chai would be nice,\" she said, and Mrs. Shields bustled out of the room.\n\nLinny looked around. Mission-style furniture in here, too, and from the looks of it, genuine Stickley, and the carpet, though worn, was an antique Navajo. She revised her financial estimate considerably upward.\n\nNo knickknacks, though, to give a clue as to a possible theme\u2014no stuffed unicorns or tribal masks or model biplanes. And no signs of a pet, which was too bad. Pets were so easy. All you had to do was link to notacreaturewasstirring.com, type in the breed, and they supplied everything: audio ornaments, needlepoint stockings, beribboned Milk-Bones, even a rom of dog or cat carols.\n\nThere weren't any holos either, just an oil painting of a bridge above the fireplace. Bridges of the World? Golden Gate ornaments and a covered bridge diorama for the outdoor tableau? Or maybe Mrs. Shields was interested in painting, or a particular artist. Linny leaned forward to look at the signature.\n\n\"My nephew Brian does bridges,\" Mrs. Shields said, bustling back in. \"He's an engineer. I'll bet you two are the same age.\" She handed Linny a mug of chai. \"He's twenty-eight.\" She waited expectantly.\n\n\"I'm twenty-seven,\" Linny said. \"Did you want to do the interview in here?\"\n\n\"Yes. Do you need to hook anything up or plug anything in? I'm afraid I'm a complete ignoramus when it comes to computers, and Brian isn't much better.\"\n\n\"No, I'm all set,\" Linny said, opening her notebook and switching it on, but Mrs. Shields was already calling, \"Brian! Brian!\"\n\nHe came in, minus the napkin. \"This is Miss Chiang, our new Christmas designer,\" she said.\n\n\"Christmas designer?\" he said, with a puzzled look at his aunt.\n\n\"Yes.\" Mrs. Shields smiled at him and then looked back at Linny. \"I've always done my own Christmases, but this year I decided it was all too much for me, and I was going to have a professional Christmas.\"\n\n\"You did,\" he said.\n\nHe clearly disapproved. Linny had seen this kind of resistance before, the men in the family wanting to keep Christmas the way it had been, which meant the women doing all the work.\n\n\"Christmas requires much more planning and work than it used to,\" Linny said. \"Shopping, decorating, cleaning, baking, wrapping gifts, sending e-cards. It's impossible for one person to do it all, and even if they somehow manage to, they're far too stressed and exhausted to enjoy the holidays.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Mrs. Shields said, looking at Brian. \"I want to enjoy my Christmas, and this young woman is going to help me do that, so it's no use your trying to talk me out of it, Brian. I've made up my mind. Why don't you show us what you have in mind, Ms. Chiang?\"\n\n\"It's what you have in mind that's important,\" Linny said, setting up the portable holo projector. \"Deck.halls custom-tailors Christmas to your wishes. We have over nine hundred holiday themes to choose from, and if you don't see the theme you want, we can custom-design one for you. Did you have anything in mind?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I'd say she definitely has something in mind,\" Brian said.\n\nLinny looked inquiringly at Mrs. Shields.\n\n\"I really don't know,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"Our Christmases have always been very simple, just a tree and stockings hung by the fireplace.\"\n\n\"Right, nothing fancy,\" the nephew said.\n\n\"Well, then let me show you something simple.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, I want to see all of your ideas. If I'm going to do a professional Christmas, I might as well go all the way.\"\n\n\"All right, let me begin by outlining the services we offer,\" Linny said, giving Mrs. Shields a handheld. \"So you can jot down the numbers of themes that you like. We offer a full range of services. Decorating, lighting, gift wrapping, shopping\u2014\"\n\n\"Shopping?\" Brian said, sounding shocked.\n\n\"Yes, by client list or using marketing profiles. We can also do your Christmas cards, e-or vmail with full graphics, or handwritten, and party invitations. We can also arrange for caroling. You pick the services you want.\"\n\nShe printed out two price lists and handed the pages to them. Neither one did more than glance at them. She revised her financial estimate upward again.\n\n\"Now let me show you some possibilities. This is Number 68 Winter Wonderland,\" she said, typing in the code.\n\nA full-color hologram of a stairway entwined with darting white and silver lights filled an all-white room. The diamond-flocked tree at the foot of the stairs was hung with white velvet angel knots, and crystal snowflakes filled the air. \"The snowflakes are Waterford, and the diamonds are each an eighth of a carat.\n\n\"Or if you prefer something less formal, we have Number 241 Christmas at Loch Ness.\" The white room changed to one done in red-and-green Scotch plaid. A large bush of purple heather stood between the plaid couch and the plaid chair, hung with tam o'shanters, thistles, and sea serpents. \"The furniture, draperies, and carpet are available in the full slate of clan tartans,\" Linny said.\n\n\"Some people plan their Christmases around a hobby\u2014\" She clicked to #110 A Crossword Puzzle Christmas, done all in black-and-white squares, \"or a political affiliation. This one is called Elephants Never Forget,\" she said, showing them a holo of a room draped in red-white-and-blue bunting punctuated with elephants. The red tree was covered in U.S. flags and models of the White House, and on its top was a replica of Mount Rushmore with Reagan's face, Newt Gingrich's, and those of all three Bushes.\n\n\"You have to be kidding,\" the nephew said.\n\n\"There's of course a Democratic version,\" she said, and when Mrs. Shields didn't look enthusiastic, \"and our Globalization Christmas: It's a Small World After All.\" Mrs. Shields still didn't look impressed.\n\n\"Most clients choose a Christmas that reflects their occupation,\" Linny said, wishing she had a bridge theme to show them, \"or some personal interest. Their favorite flower\"\u2014she called up #309 Tiptoe Through the Tulips\u2014\"or a favorite color.\" The room turned purple. \"This is our Mauve Melody.\" The room went yellow-green. \"And this is Number 116, Cantata in Chartreuse. Or you could plan it around a family memory or an upcoming event. Two of my partner's clients just got engaged, so their theme is the engagement, with hearts and Cupids.\"\n\n\"How nice,\" Mrs. Shields said, and to her nephew, \"How does something like that sound?\"\n\n\"We have several love-related themes\u2014Moonlight and Roses,\" Linny said, clicking them into the center of the room, \"Romeo and Juliet, Harlequin Romance\u2014\"\n\n\"Which one did you have when you got engaged?\" Mrs. Shields asked.\n\n\"Me?\" Linny said. \"Oh, I'm not engaged.\"\n\n\"Oh, when you said your partner, I assumed\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no, I was referring to my business partner, Norwall Hirsch.\"\n\n\"And he's not your boyfriend?\" Mrs. Shields persisted.\n\nBoyfriend, Linny thought. Definitely pre-retro. \"No, I mean, yes, I mean, we date\u2026\"\n\n\"But you're not engaged,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"Brian's not engaged, either. He says he just doesn't meet anyone. Will he be working with you on the Christmas?\"\n\n\"Brian?\"\n\n\"No, your partner.\"\n\n\"No, we each have our own clients.\"\n\n\"But you share office space.\"\n\nDefinitely pre-retro. \"We don't have an office, per se. Everything's done by wireless or Internet except for installations. Our secretary, Inge, lives in Oslo.\"\n\n\"And your partner?\"\n\n\"He lives here,\" she said, \"though we hardly ever see each other,\" and added silently, not even on Thanksgiving.\n\n\"Oslo,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"I've always wanted to go to Scandinavia. Do you have some sort of Scandinavian theme?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Linny said, clicking back to the main menu. \"We have several: Santa Lucia's Day; Christmas in Norway; Christmas in Sweden; Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen. Or we can do any city you like, with holos of the local sights, and regional foods: lutefisk, pancakes with lingonberries, blood pudding.\"\n\n\"Oh, you do food, too,\" Mrs. Shields said, and Brian shook his head, as if in disgust.\n\n\"The standard package includes a thematic Christmas dinner,\" Linny said, printing out a list of caterers and sample menus, \"but we also do Christmas Eve suppers, parties, buffets. Would you like to see our Christmas on the Fjords?\"\n\nMrs. Shields shook her head. \"I've never liked herring. What other places do you have?\"\n\n\"Anywhere on-planet or off. We have a complete line of outer space themes\u2014both Moonbases, Mars, the solar system, with or without Pluto\u2014as well as every country and all major cities: London, New Delhi, Paris,\" she said, clicking onto one after the other, \"Las Vegas\u2014\"\n\nThe Eiffel Tower changed to a wedding chapel with flashing neon signs, slot machines, and an Elvis impersonator conducting a wedding between Santa Claus and a showgirl with a pink ostrich feather tail. \"We also do fictional places,\" she said.\n\n\"As if Las Vegas wasn't fictional enough,\" the nephew said.\n\nLinny ignored him. \"Neverland,\" she said, clicking, \"Middle Earth, Atlantis, Hogwarts. And historical sites: Gettysburg, Waterloo, Saigon. Deck.halls has a full line of historical themes, both events and people: Cleopatra, General Patton, Bill Gates\u2014\"\n\n\"Dolly Levi,\" Brian said.\n\n\"From Hello, Dolly?\" Linny said, glad she recognized the allusion. She pulled up the theater menu. \"We have a complete line of Broadway, movie, and TV themes. Les Mis, Star Wars: Episode Nine, The Iceman Cometh, Cats.\" She clicked to Hello, Dolly. \"As you can see, the tree is decorated with hats from Irene Molloy's millinery shop, the dining room is done as Harmonia Gardens, and in front of the house,\" she clicked on Lawn Decorations, \"are a greater-than-life-size full-action Barbra Streisand and Louis Armstrong performing the title song.\"\n\nMrs. Shields was shaking her head at Brian.\n\n\"We also have Carol Channing, if you don't like Barbra Streisand,\" Linny said. \"Or Britney Spears and the rest of the cast from the revival.\"\n\n\"It's not the cast. It's just that Hello, Dolly doesn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Have anything at all to do with Christmas?\" Brian put in.\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Mrs. Shields said reluctantly. \"I know people don't want the same old themes every year, that they want something new and different, but\u2014\"\n\n\"We also have a large assortment of traditional Christmas packages: A Nutcracker Christmas, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Silver Bells, How the Grinch Stole Christmas,\" she said, looking at Brian, \"or if you prefer a religious theme,\" she clicked to a new menu, \"we have No Room at the Inn, We Three Kings, Angels We Have Heard on High, and, of course, a full range of Hanukkah, Ramadan, Winter Solstice, and Kwanzaa themes. Or there's our historical line: A Renaissance Christmas, A Victorian Christmas, A Naughty Nineties Christmas\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, that's nice,\" Mrs. Shields said, looking at the tree hung with cell phones and PalmPilots. \"Young people had so many opportunities to meet someone back in the nineties\u2014chat rooms, personal ads, online dating services. They had all sorts of ways of getting to know each other. Nowadays they don't even work together. They sit in tiny little cubicles staring at an image on a screen and talking into a headset. It's just like that story by\u2014you know who I mean, Brian, he wrote it years and years ago\u2014that author you like, not H. G. Wells, the other one.\"\n\n\"Isaac Asimov?\" Brian ventured.\n\n\"No, the other one. About the future where everyone stays inside and communicates by computer, only they didn't have computers back then, and no one goes anywhere or meets anyone face-to-face. Oh, what is it called?\"\n\n\" 'The Machine Stops,' \" Linny said, and they both looked at her in surprise. \"By E. M. Forster.\"\n\n\"That's the one,\" Mrs. Shields said delightedly. \"You're an E. M. Forster fan?\"\n\n\"I did an E. M. Forster Christmas for the Ledbetters two years ago.\"\n\n\"An E. M. Forster Christmas. Oh, I can see it now,\" Brian said sarcastically. \"In the living room, a holo of the bookcase falling on Leonard Bast, and out on the front lawn,\" he spread his arms to illustrate, \"a tableau of the Where Angels Fear to Tread carriage tipping over and killing the baby.\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Linny said indignantly. \"It was the kissing scene from A Room with a View.\"\n\n\"Where George kisses Lucy in the barley field?\" Mrs. Shields said. \"Oh, I love that scene, the way he strides through the barley toward her, and then, without so much as a word, takes her in his arms and kisses her. How did you manage a barley field at Christmastime?\"\n\n\"Magicarpet does wonderful grain field mats,\" Linny said. \"Their corn is especially nice. I used that for An Oklahoma Christmas last year. They also do very nice poppies.\"\n\n\"For An Opium Addict's Christmas,\" Brian said.\n\n\"I remember there were poppies in the barley field,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"I love the way she just stands there waiting while he strides toward her.\"\n\n\"An E. M. Forster Christmas would be just the thing for your house,\" Linny said, thinking, If I could do the E. M. Forster again, it would be perfect. I know exactly where to get the costumes and the holo of Florence. \"Your living room window provides an excellent view,\" she said.\n\nBut Mrs. Shields was shaking her head again. \"It sounds lovely, but this first time I think I'd like to have something more\u2026Christmassy. Do you have any just Christmas Christmases?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" Linny said, thinking, I am going to have to show her every single design I have. \"Here's a very nice Currier and Ives Christmas. Or Christmas in Toyland, A Child's Christmas in Wales,\" she said, clicking rapidly through the holos, \"Christmas with the Waltons, Christmas with the Cleavers, Christmas in Manhattan\u2014that one's really fun. Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty ornaments, and a yard display of the Rockettes and a full-size balloon from the Macy's parade.\"\n\n\"Oh, my,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"Don't you have something more\u2026traditional?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Linny said, clicking to the Christmas Past menu. \"We have A Dickens Christmas, A Williamsburg Christmas,\" she said, showing holos of them in quick succession, \"A Regency Christmas, Gone with the Wind Christmas. Did you have any particular historical period in mind? Your house would be ideal for our Roaring Twenties Christmas. Bathtub gin, raccoon coats\u2014\"\n\n\"Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald passed out on the front lawn,\" the nephew put in.\n\nLinny glared at him. \"We can do a specific year if you like, or a specific date. I did a really fun 2001 Christmas three years ago\u2014Millennium fireworks, Stanley Kubrick ornaments\u2014\"\n\nThe nephew grinned and started to make another smart remark.\n\n\"Or a favorite decade,\" Linny said quickly. \"Here's one you might like.\" She clicked to A Retro Christmas. \"The tree's aluminum with an authentic rotating colored light.\"\n\n\"Oh, my grandmother had one of those,\" Mrs. Shields said, and Linny began to get her hopes up again, but she didn't want that, either.\n\n\"Maybe something more modern,\" she said questioningly, so Linny went through Christmas by Laserlight, Christmas on the Space Station, A Cloned Christmas, Christmas in Cyberspace, all to no avail.\n\n\"I just don't know\u2026they all seem so fancy\u2026and as you can see, I like to keep it simple. Maybe something to do with nature?\"\n\nLinny sneaked a look at the time. Nearly four. She was going to have to leave if she wanted to get to the statuary warehouse before it closed.\n\n\"I'm keeping you, aren't I?\" Mrs. Shields said, and looked at her own watch. \"Oh, my goodness, it's nearly suppertime. You'll stay for supper, won't you?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I can't. I have an appointment\u2014\"\n\n\"And you need me to make up my mind,\" Mrs. Shields said, flustered. \"Do I have to do it today? I just can't seem\u2026\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Linny said, thinking, Norwall will have a fit. \"Why don't I leave a rom with you? You can look through the themes at your leisure, and when you decide, or if you have any questions, you can get in touch with me.\" She called up her card, added her address, and printed one out. \"This is my office at home, but I'm hardly ever there. I spend most of my time on-site, supervising installations. Vmail is your best bet. I recommend the Retro Christmas. It's very classic.\" She turned to Brian. \"If I could just get my coat.\"\n\n\"Oh, surely you can stay for a quick supper,\" Mrs. Shields said. \"It will only take a moment. Turkey skin sandwiches and pie.\"\n\n\"No, really, I have to catch the maglev\u2014\"\n\n\"Brian can take you,\" she said. \"He'd be delighted.\"\n\nHe didn't look delighted.\n\n\"No, really, I have several errands to run on the way home. I have to pick up something and then\u2014\"\n\n\"All the more reason, then. You can't carry a bunch of packages on the maglev\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want to put Mr. West out,\" Linny said uncomfortably. \"One of the places I need to go is clear on the east side of Greater Denver\u2014\"\n\n\"Then you can't possibly take the maglev. Brian can take you right to the door, can't you, Brian?\" Mrs. Shields said, not giving him a chance to answer. She produced a set of car keys, their coats, and, in spite of Linny's protests, a turkey skin sandwich, and bundled them into the car, which was Ferrari's new fusion-cell Incite. Linny revised her financial estimate upward again.\n\n\"Just tell him where you need to go,\" Mrs. Shields said, pushing down the door.\n\n\"I still don't think I should impose on\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not imposing. Brian's happy to do it for you, and this will give the two of you a chance to talk,\" she said, and waved them out of the driveway.\n\n\"Where to?\" he asked.\n\n\"Look, I know your aunt meant well, but I don't want to ruin your Thanksgiving. Why don't you just take me to the station?\"\n\n\"You're not ruining my Thanksgiving,\" he said. \"Where to?\"\n\nShe gave him the directions to the statuary warehouse.\n\nHe made no move to enter the directions into the Incite's computer or even to put the controls on drive-assist, which was a clear sign he didn't want to talk, so Linny didn't say anything either till they got to Bowles. \"You take a left here. Rock and a Hard Place is six blocks down on the right. There's a sign out front that says 'Statuary and Stonework.' \"\n\n\"So what are you picking up? Tombstones for Number 257 Christmas in the Cemetery?\"\n\n\"You don't approve of what I do, do you?\" she asked.\n\n\"I just don't see what crossword puzzles and tombstones have to do with Christmas.\"\n\n\"It's not a tombstone. It's a bust of Shakespeare.\"\n\n\"For A Classics Christmas? Silas Marner ornaments and a Jude the Obscure lawn display? Why can't you do something connected to Christmas?\"\n\n\"Like mistletoe?\" she asked. \"Which was co-opted from the Druids? Nearly everything we associate with Christmas was tacked on after the fact. The Yule log was lifted from the Druids, too, Christmas trees and presents were co-opted from the Roman Saturnalia. Even Santa's sleigh and flying reindeer were stolen from Norse mythology.\"\n\n\"But there's still a connection, no matter how tenuous. Unlike Atlantis. And Coca-Cola ornaments.\"\n\n\"Like Christmas cards, you mean?\" she said. \"They were invented in l843 to advertise a publishing company. People have been complaining about the commercialization of Christmas since back in E. M. Forster's day.\"\n\nThey were in front of Rock and a Hard Place. Brian and Linny got out and went into the warehouse. Statues and busts stood everywhere: Ben Franklin and Winnie-the-Pooh and Patsy Ramsey. Linny stepped among a flock of stone sheep to the counter and typed her name and order into the computer.\n\n\"I just think the celebration of Christmas should retain some connection to the original meaning,\" he said, draping his arm over a statue of a very young Angelina Jolie.\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"Good will toward men. Kindness, sharing, forgiveness, love.\"\n\nA robo-dolly brought the bust of Shakespeare up. \"Follow me,\" Linny said, and led it out to the car. The dolly loaded it into the backseat, and Brian strapped the bust in.\n\n\"Things like good will and family and being together can't be captured in Number 194 Ferns of the Mesozoic,\" he said.\n\n\"They can't be captured in stockings hung by the chimney with care, either. The tree, the candles\u2014\"\n\n\"The Elvis impersonator\u2014\"\n\n\"Are all just trappings,\" she said. \"They don't affect the spirit of Christmas. Most of the people I do installations for hire me so they can spend more time with their loved ones, so they're not run so ragged by shopping and cooking and decorating that they're screaming at everyone.\"\n\n\"That does not explain Christmas Number 265 Keeping Up with the Joneses.\"\n\nLike Pandora Freeh, she thought. \"People have always wanted to impress their neighbors. And they've always made things bigger and fancier than they needed to be, from their clothes to their houses. To their cars,\" she added pointedly.\n\nHe grinned. \"Where would you like my car to go next?\"\n\n\"Back to Aspen Lane.\"\n\n\"What for?\" he said sharply.\n\n\"Not to your aunt's. To Ms. Freeh's.\" She gave the address. \"I'm sorry you had to come all this way in and back\u2014\"\n\n\"I told you, it's no imposition.\" He started the car. \"I suppose you're right about people overdoing things,\" he said when they were back on the highway. \"Look at the Tower of Babel. It wasn't enough to build a skyscraper, they had to build a tower right up to heaven\u2014 No, don't tell me,\" he said at her expression. \"You have a Tower of Babel Christmas.\"\n\n\"Number 605. It's part of our Evangelical line,\" she admitted. \"We also have Noah's Ark, Daniel in the Lion's Den, and the Battle of Armageddon.\"\n\n\"Which is Number 666, no doubt.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I know a lot of them are silly, but they're what people want. My job is to try to make Christmas as happy and stress-free as I can for my clients. Surely that's in the Christmas spirit.\"\n\nIt seemed to take no time at all to get to Pandora's, which was good because it was nearly seven. She would never have made it on the maglev.\n\n\"What's her theme?\" Brian asked when they pulled up in front of Pandora's mansion. \"A Forbes 500 Christmas?\"\n\n\"No, High School Memories. If this bust is the right one.\" She pressed the door sensor.\n\n\"Who shall I say is calling?\" it asked.\n\n\"Linny Chiang,\" she said, pressing her hand to the ID pad.\n\n\"And her delivery boy,\" Brian said.\n\nThe door opened, and they went in. Linny began looking around for a place for Brian to set the bust down, but before they could, Pandora Freeh was upon them, crying out, \"Oh, what a pity you brought it all this way!\"\n\n\"It's not the same Shakespeare?\" Linny asked.\n\n\"No, it is! It looks exactly like the one in Mr. Spoonmaker's class, right down to the nick in his beard. Oh, I can't even look at it!\" she said, waving Brian away.\n\n\"Should I take it back out to the car?\" he whispered to Linny.\n\nShe shook her head. \"But if it's perfect, Pandora, why\u2014?\"\n\nMs. Freeh ignored her. \"I knew it was such a good theme someone was bound to steal it, and now we're going to have to come up with a completely new theme!\"\n\nLinny's heart sank. \"Someone else is doing a high school memories theme?\"\n\n\"They might as well be,\" Pandora said, flouncing down on the couch. \"Joan and Claudette Proudell are doing Rah! Rah! Sis Boom Bah!\"\n\nLinny didn't dare look at Brian. \"Rah, rah, sis boom bah?\"\n\n\"Yes, their entire house,\" she flung her arm out, \"is being decorated in pom-poms, megaphones, and holos of girls in pleated skirts doing the splits\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Linny said, finally understanding. \"And you think that will take away from the basketball holo you intended to have in the living room. But we can change that to something else. A holo of typing class, or the lunchroom.\"\n\n\"Lunchroom?\" Pandora shuddered. \"Nobody has happy memories of their high school lunchroom. I was going to have the league championship game right before the final buzzer, with the crowd roaring and the cheerleaders leaping into the air,\" she explained to Brian, who was still holding the bust of Shakespeare.\n\n\"This is Brian, by the way,\" Linny said, leading him over to an end table where he could set it down. \"His aunt is having her Christmas done for the first time. She lives near you.\"\n\n\"Really, what's her name?\"\n\n\"Shields,\" Brian said reluctantly, and who could blame him?\n\nPandora waved her hand in a dismissive gesture that meant she didn't know her, which was surprising. From the number of friends and relatives Pandora cited when she was changing her mind, Linny assumed she knew everybody in a thousand-mile radius.\n\n\"Well, tell her to make sure no one else is doing the same theme before she signs her contract,\" Pandora said, \"so she doesn't have to change it and start all over again a month from Christmas the way I am.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure that won't be necessary,\" Linny said, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt. She had already ordered all the glassware and the black rubber aprons for the chemistry lab and the prom ornaments and disco ball for the tree.\n\n\"What if we changed it from a memories theme to a modern high school?\" she said. \"They don't have cheerleaders, and we could add girls' bocce ball and KI and virtual learning labs, and your bust of Shakespeare could\u2014\"\n\n\"They don't even teach Shakespeare in today's high schools,\" Pandora sniffed. \"And I won't do a Christmas theme without it. No, it's going to have to be something completely different. Joan and Claudette have ruined it. I don't even want to think about high schools anymore. So,\" she said brightly, \"what do you suggest?\" She clasped her hands and looked up expectantly at Linny.\n\n\"I\u2026\" Oh, my God. Something with a bust of Shakespeare. Christmas in Stratford-on-Avon? No, she knew of at least two other Christmas designers who'd done it. Famous People Who've Been Cut Off Just Below the Shoulders?\n\n\"You know,\" Brian said, \"this bust of Shakespeare just gave me an idea. Your theme could be a Shakespearean play.\"\n\n\"Grimshaw Powell's ex already did Macbeth two years ago,\" Pandora said.\n\n\"No, I was thinking a Christmas play. We were just talking,\" he said, nodding at Linny, \"about how so many Christmas themes aren't really related to Christmas at all.\"\n\nLike High School Memories, Linny thought, but Pandora didn't look at all offended. \"I didn't know Shakespeare wrote a Christmas play,\" she said.\n\nI didn't either, Linny thought.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" Brian said. \"It's called Twelfth Night, and it was meant to be performed during the Christmas season, on Epiphany. It would be a perfect theme\u2014it's got a shipwreck, and\u2026\"\n\n\"A palace,\" Linny said, coming to his aid, \"and gorgeous velvet and satin costumes\u2014\"\n\n\"And cross-gartering,\" Brian said.\n\n\"Cross-gartering?\" Pandora said doubtfully.\n\n\" 'I will be strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gartered,' \" he quoted, \"and there are rings and love notes and disguises and romance. 'If music be the food of love, play on\u2014' \"\n\n\"And your bust of Shakespeare will fit right in,\" Linny put in.\n\n\"And I'm sure no one's ever done it before,\" Brian said.\n\n\"I don't doubt that,\" Pandora said, frowning. \"But do you think it's well-known enough? I've never even heard of it. What if people don't recognize it?\"\n\n\"That is a consideration,\" Brian said, and Linny wondered whether he was deliberately trying to undermine what he'd just suggested. \"It certainly has more substance than Rah! Rah! Sis Boom Bah!\"\n\nPandora looked delighted. \"I hate frivolous themes,\" she said, \"and, as you say, it's directly related to Christmas. Cheerleading has nothing at all to do with Christmas.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" they both said.\n\n\"And I wouldn't have to give up my bust of Shakespeare.\"\n\n\"It could be right in the entry hall,\" Linny said, and Brian promptly picked it up and carried it in, \"where it would be the first thing your guests would see.\"\n\n\"I love it!\" Pandora said, clasping her hands under her chin. \"Twelfth Night it is.\"\n\n\"You're a genius,\" Linny said on their way out to the car. \"Have you ever considered being a Christmas designer?\"\n\n\"God forbid,\" he said, popping the doors. \"I just didn't want to carry that thing back to the tombstone store. I hope I didn't let you in for too much work.\"\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Linny said, getting in. \"The other theme she was considering before she decided on High School Memories was whaling.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"All right, where to next?\"\n\n\"Just the maglev station, thanks,\" she said. \"That was my last errand, and there's no point in your driving me all the way back into town. You're only a few blocks from your aunt's.\"\n\n\"I like to show off my overly big and fancy car,\" he said, and pulled out into the street.\n\n\"No, really,\" she protested, \"you've already done enough by suggesting Twelfth Night. It's an inspired theme. I can do the dining room as Maria's kitchen and the living room as Olivia's garden, and for an outdoor tableau\u2026Sorry,\" she said when she saw he was looking at her. \"I get a little carried away.\"\n\n\"You really like doing this stuff, don't you?\"\n\n\"It's fun,\" she said, \"doing research\u2014I get to find out about so many different things\u2014\"\n\n\"Like E. M. Forster.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Most jobs are so narrowly focused these days. And I love taking an idea and thinking how it can be adapted to lights and tree decorations. You do the same thing, I suppose, with your bridges?\"\n\n\"Bridges?\" he said blankly.\n\n\"Your aunt told me you were an engineer, and I assumed you built bridges.\"\n\n\"Oh. No,\" he said, frowning. \"Dams. I build dams.\"\n\n\"Oh, but I mean, seeing where the water needs to go and then translating that into blueprints and then concrete. It must be the same kind of thing.\"\n\n\"What's the hardest Christmas you've ever had to design?\" he asked.\n\n\"Gum Disease,\" she said promptly. \"It was for this oral surgeon. The most fun one was the one I did for an ex-stripper named Bubbles O'Halloran. Her theme was\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me guess. Bubbles?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I had bubble lights and a bubble machine and bubble gum and bubble wrap and those bubble dresses from the 1960s\u2014\"\n\n\"What, no champagne?\"\n\n\"No, but for the outdoor tableau I had an animated Don Ho singing 'Tiny Bubbles.' \"\n\nThey chatted the rest of the way home, him asking her about the best Christmas she'd ever designed and the easiest and the craziest. He was still driving the Incite on his own, only occasionally glancing sideways at her, and she was grateful it wasn't on comp-drive because it was already awfully cozy in the darkened car.\n\nShe was hardly ever this close to anyone in person\u2014she couldn't remember the last time she and Norwall had sat side by side\u2014and looking at someone's image on a screen just wasn't the same thing. For one thing, there was the scent. Brian smelled faintly of soap and aftershave and sweat. And video images, even high-definition, didn't pick up details like the fine hairs on the backs of his hands as he gripped the steering wheel.\n\nMrs. Shields had a point about people spending too much time alone staring at a screen. She was proof of it. The mere presence of another person was turning her into one of Pandora's cheerleaders.\n\nHe had pulled onto her block. \"The corner's fine,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't suppose you'd have time to grab a pita or a cone of red tea\u2014\"\n\n\"You're kidding, right?\" she said.\n\n\"No, I\u2014too busy, huh?\"\n\n\"Busy isn't even the word. Hysterical. The busy season's from January through April, when we do our prelim plans and put in orders. From then on it's chaos. And now I have to completely redo Pandora's financial estimate and d\u00e9cor plan.\n\n\"I don't have time to breathe, let alone sit down and have a\u2014\" She realized suddenly how ungracious she sounded. \"But thank you for asking me. And thank you for talking Pandora into Twelfth Night. If it were any other time\u2014\"\n\n\"Except January through December,\" he said. \"I could take you back to Rock and a Hard Place so you can order Patience on a monument.\"\n\n\"That's okay, I'll order it online,\" she said, laughing. She got out of the car and leaned in. \"I really wish I could.\"\n\n\"It's okay. You need to go order fake mustaches, and I need to go talk to my aunt. I have a few things I want to discuss with her,\" he said grimly.\n\n\"You're not still trying to talk her out of a professional Christmas, are you?\"\n\n\"No, definitely not. I was thinking of Number 941 A Dam Christmas. What do you think?\" he said, and smelled so good as he said it that she almost said yes, she'd go for a cone of tea.\n\nIt was a good thing she didn't, though, because she had 226 incomings, nineteen of them emergency override messages. The Ledbetters needed their installation moved up to the fourteenth, Jack and Jill Halsey needed theirs moved back to the eighth, The Hanging Tree was out of otter candles and wanted to know if wolverines would work. Stitch in Time wanted to know whether she wanted walnut brown, espresso, or sludge.\n\nThere was an animated emessage from cyberfloral wishing her a happy Thanksgiving and another one from Online Medical Supplies. \"For That Unique Christmas Theme.\"\n\nCareen Everett wanted to change from a vegetarian Christmas Eve buffet to a sit-down vegan dinner. Oppie Harper-Groves wanted to change from Rottweilers to Skye terriers. The Throckmortons wanted to change from twenty-four-caliber to nine-millimeter.\n\nSurprisingly, there were no messages from Pandora Freeh. It usually took her about ten minutes to find something wrong with Linny's proposals. She must have really been impressed with Brian's idea.\n\nLinny had been, too. It wasn't often you met somebody who read Shakespeare's comedies and E. M. Forster novels. It wasn't often you met anyone, period. Mrs. Shields was right. There were very few romantic opportunities these days. The only other people besides Norwall she ever saw were the guys from FedXUPS and deliveries.com, and the only thing they ever said was, stolidly, \"I don't know anything about that. All I got is these two boxes,\" and even if she, inconceivably, had wanted to go out with one of them, when exactly would she find the time to do that? Before she'd even finished reading through her messages, seventeen more had come in.\n\nLinny read through the other two hundred and twenty and then moved the Emory installation and vmailed the Taylors to see if she could shift theirs to the thirteenth so the Ledbetters could have the fourteenth. She vmailed alfalfa.com for possible vegan menus, decided on a brown (soy sauce), did a global otter candle search, and ordered Skye terrier ornaments from Dog Depot, critturama.com, and the Spot Spot, and then called Norwall.\n\nHe didn't answer (a bad sign) but when she checked her vmail, there weren't any messages from him (a good sign), and none from Mrs. Shields, deciding on a theme. There was, however, one from Pandora. She had known it was too good to be true.\n\n\"Twelfth Night isn't an R, is it?\" a message so incomprehensible that even though it was after eleven, she called Pandora back.\n\n\"I remembered your young man said something about garters, and Charmaine Kagasaki's ex's children are going to be here,\" she said. \"You aren't planning anything with lingerie, are you?\"\n\n\"Cross-gartering doesn't have anything to do with lingerie,\" Linny said firmly. \"They're ribbons. Yellow ribbons.\"\n\n\"Erna Bunrath's designer is doing a wonderful Iran hostage crisis,\" Pandora said. \"Maybe a political theme\u2014\"\n\n\"It wouldn't have your bust of Shakespeare,\" Linny pointed out, \"which I assure you is the centerpiece of your theme.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Pandora said, pleased.\n\n\"Absolutely. I've been thinking, maybe instead of the entry hall, it should be in the living room, in a sort of specially built niche\u2014\"\n\nThey spent the next hour and a half discussing the optimal location for the bust of Shakespeare, but at least at the end of it, Pandora sounded definitely committed to Twelfth Night. Even better, after Linny vmailed her her proposal three days later, there were only two overrides from her, and they were both about the buffet: \"I like your 'If music be the food of love, play on' idea, but I think trumpets would make a nicer centerpiece than a violin,\" and \"Primula Outridge's new live-in is allergic to strawberries.\"\n\nThe thirteenth, however, would not work for the Niedmores. They could do either the tenth or the eighteenth, both of which were booked. Soy sauce was unavailable, and sludge was back-ordered till March eighth. Linny mentally rolled up her sleeves and got to work. She called Wang Ho to see if he'd be willing to have his installation on the thirteenth and then checked for messages from Mrs. Shields.\n\nStill nothing. She was going to have to help her. She vmailed Inge and asked her if she'd finished the netcheck yet.\n\n\"Sorry, no,\" Inge said. \"I forgot all about it, I was so swamped after Thanksgiving. By the way, thank you for letting me take it off. Carlo was really homesick. The food they have up there is terrible. I'll get right on that netcheck.\"\n\n\"Great,\" Linny said, and then, curiously, \"How did you meet Carlo?\"\n\n\"My sister fixed us up,\" she said. \"Did you decide which cookies you wanted for the Tornado Christmas afternoon tea?\"\n\nLinny hadn't. She picked them (chocolate swirls and mincemeat bars), checked the measurements of the Fanworthys' dining room for their rodeo holo, and then got busy on the Mannings' installation, which was on the eighth and which took every waking moment till then to get ready. She didn't even have time to answer her incomings, except for Brian's. He had called her twice, once to tell her his aunt had decided against the catering package, and again to tell her she'd narrowed it down to six themes. \"None of which, I am happy to say, is Number 332 A Harley-Davidson Christmas.\"\n\nInge still hadn't gotten the netcheck to her, but it was just as well. She wouldn't have had time to read it. She was too busy locating three tons of granite boulders.\n\nThe Manning installation took two days. Linny was standing on a ladder on the second, stringing up largemouth bass, when Brian appeared. \"Don't tell me,\" he said. \"Number 54 A Carp Christmas.\"\n\n\"Wrong,\" she said, coming down off the ladder. \"Number 152 Fisherman's Paradise. What are you doing here? How did you know where I was?\"\n\n\"My aunt had something she wanted me to ask you,\" he said, \"but your incoming box was full, so I thought I'd come over here. She was wondering if she could move the date of her installation.\"\n\n\"To when?\" Linny asked, getting out her handheld, thinking, Not to the fourteenth. Please not to the fourteenth.\n\n\"To the morning of the twenty-third,\" he said. \"She has a big dinner party that night. I know it's awfully close to Christmas\u2014\"\n\n\"No, that's great. People always want their installations early, so they can have them up for the whole season.\"\n\n\"I can see why,\" he said, looking at the tree. It was hung with fishhooks, sinkers, and feathered lures, and topping it was a gold-plated casting reel.\n\n\"You ain't seen nothing yet,\" she said, and led the way into the family room where a stream trickled between artificial mossy banks.\n\n\"A River Runs Through It,\" he said.\n\n\"Exactly. And it's stocked, so the Mannings' guests can fish.\"\n\nHe picked up a sign that said \"Gone Fishing.\" \"How about you put this on the front door and go out for chai with me. You could say it's research for a new theme. Number 928 Chai and Chit-Chat.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" she said regretfully. \"The nets aren't here yet, and I've still got the master bedroom to do.\"\n\n\"What's going to be in there, a reservoir?\" he said, and insisted on looking at all the other rooms before he left.\n\n\"I thought you didn't approve of professional Christmases,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't,\" he said, pointing to the waders hanging in front of the fireplace and the Styrofoam cooler filled with beer on the mantel, \"but it's fascinating, in a horrible sort of way. Speaking of which, how's our friend Ms. Freeh? Is she still Twelfth Nighting it?\"\n\nAmazingly, she was, though she vmailed Linny twice a day with questions: \"Could we have the shipwreck for the lawn decoration instead of as a holo?\" \"Do you think widows' weeds are really a good idea? I look so fat in black.\" And \"Illyria's not in the Middle East, is it?\"\n\nLinny answered them as best she could, did three Hanukkah installations and the Immerguts' Christmas Down Under, and tried to track down a set of Masai drums FedXUPS had lost. They were in Honolulu. Linny got them rerouted and was trying to calculate how long it would take for them to get there when there was a buzz.\n\nLinny reached for the delete button and then realized it was the door. It can't be the Masai drums already, she thought, and opened the door.\n\nIt was Brian, carrying two cardboard cones. \"I knew you'd be too busy to go out for red tea, so I brought it here,\" he said. He handed her a cone and walked past her. \"So this is your apartment?\" he said, walking into the kitchen, her bedroom, her barely-room-for-one-person-and-a-computer office. \"Definitely 'The Machine Stops,' \" he said, looking at her flatscreen, streamer, rom files. \"No Christmas tree? No largemouth bass?\"\n\n\"I can't afford a Christmas designer,\" she said. \"What are you doing here? Please tell me your aunt's picked a theme.\"\n\n\"No, but\"\u2014he set his cone down and pulled a sheaf of papers from his jacket with a flourish and presented it to her\u2014\"I have the contract, signed, sealed, and delivered.\"\n\n\"But if she hasn't picked a theme\u2014\" Linny said.\n\nHe took the contract back from her and flipped to the second page. \"Here,\" he said, showing her. \" 'Theme to be chosen by Christmas designer,' \" he read aloud. \"She thinks you should pick the theme since you're the expert.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful,\" Linny said. If she got to choose the theme, she could base it on what was available and pretty. There was that gorgeous beaten-copper angel at ohheavens.com. It would go perfectly with Mrs. Shields's Arts and Crafts furniture\u2014\n\n\"All she asks is that it be something related to Christmas, not Las Vegas. Or whaling.\"\n\nLinny nodded happily. \"Of course. Thank you for bringing it. You didn't have to drive all the way over here, you know,\" she said. \"You could have just emailed it.\"\n\n\"Aunt Darby doesn't trust computers, especially where contracts are concerned. She likes having an actual piece of paper in front of her. Your computer's buzzing.\"\n\nShe went into the office. It was Pandora. \"Twelfth Night is not going to work,\" she said icily. \"I just talked to Cecelia Towstrapp. Why didn't you tell me it was about transvestites? I knew cross-gartering was an R\u2014\"\n\n\"It's not about transvestites,\" Linny said. \"I mean, Viola does dress up like a man, but it isn't because of a sexual\u2014\"\n\n\"Put it on speaker,\" Brian, who'd followed her in, said, and pulled up a stool to sit next to her. \"Ms. Freeh, do you remember me? I met you on Thanksgiving?\"\n\n\"Yes, you were the one who talked me into doing Twelfth Night,\" she said, but considerably less icily. \"You should have told me it had cross-dressing in it. Lulu Pazanetta's already doing Rocky Horror Picture Show, so I can't\u2014\"\n\n\"Viola dresses up like a man because she's afraid for her safety as a woman alone in a strange country,\" Brian said. \"She doesn't intentionally mean to fool the duke.\" He leaned in to look directly into the screen. \"She wants to tell him, but she can't. Telling the duke the truth means admitting she's tricked him, that she's lied to him.\"\n\nLinny wished there was a little more room in here. He was sitting even closer than he had in the car, and the smell of his skin, his breath, as he spoke earnestly to Pandora\u2014\n\n\"She can't risk telling him. She's in love with him,\" he said. \"But she also knows he's bound to find out sooner or later, and when he does, he's bound to feel betrayed and never want to speak to her again. So she's trapped.\"\n\nThere was a long, silent pause, and then Pandora said, \"Oh, that's so romantic! You're right. It's a wonderful theme. Cecelia's a moron. You've convinced me. Transmit the contract.\"\n\nYou're kidding, Linny almost said, but she quickly typed in the contract details and sent it through. \"Thank you,\" she whispered as soon as the contract replaced Pandora on the screen. \"I cannot tell you how much work you've saved me.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said, still much too close. \"Then you've got time to go out to dinner with me.\"\n\n\"I can't,\" she said regretfully. \"I have to do a long-distance installation in Aruba starting at five, and I still haven't found a decontamination suit.\"\n\n\"I won't even ask what their Christmas theme is,\" he said. \"Look, I know this is your busy season, and probably you're already lining up clients for next year, but you can't tell me you can't take at least one day off a year. I know it won't be till after Christmas,\" he said when she started to protest, \"I just want to put my bid in now.\"\n\nPandora's image reappeared on the screen. \"The sixteenth won't work. You couldn't do it tomorrow, could you?\"\n\nIf only she could. She'd be free of Pandora for the rest of the season. \"I'm afraid not.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear, it's the only day I've got free. I'll have to see what I can juggle in my calendar and get back to you.\"\n\nAnd probably tell me Twelfth Night won't work, Linny thought, waiting for her override, but she didn't send a single vmessage. She didn't send the contract either, but at least she hadn't changed her mind. A week later they were still with Twelfth Night.\n\n\"It's a miracle,\" she told Norwall and Inge during their mid-December three-way conference. \"I think she's actually ready to sign a contract. And that will only leave Mrs. Shields.\"\n\n\"I wanted to talk to you about that,\" Inge said. \"When I tried to run the netcheck on her, I couldn't find anything.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Linny asked. \"There was a block on the information?\"\n\n\"I thought you said the financial check had already been done,\" Norwall said.\n\n\"It wasn't blocked,\" Inge said. \"There wasn't a firewall, but when I put her name in, it gave me information on the house, but nothing else. When I ask for personal data, financial records, medical history, there's nothing, just a blank. And when I tried the address, I got the same thing. Her name as owner and nothing else.\"\n\n\"Sounds like some kind of sophisticated privacy baffle system,\" Norwall said, \"but why\u2014? What did you say her name was?\"\n\n\"Shields,\" Inge said. \"I didn't have a first name.\"\n\nBut a last name and an address should have been enough to get the rest of the information, Linny thought. \"Are you sure you spelled Shields right?\" she asked.\n\n\"Do you know her first name?\" Norwall said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Linny said. \"Darby.\"\n\n\"Darby?\" he said, and then sharply, \"What about the nephew, the engineer?\"\n\n\"Brian West.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to try his name?\" Inge asked.\n\n\"No, I'll take care of this,\" Norwall said, and downlinked, even though they still had several things to discuss.\n\nIt was just as well. The Masai drums had gotten lost again, and it took her the better part of two days she didn't have to track them down in Nashville. She did the Kwanzaa installations and an Extreme Sports Christmas and then, emboldened by the fact that Pandora hadn't messaged her, sent her a Twelfth Night contract.\n\nShe got an override from her immediately. And she should never have said that about it being a miracle because the first words out of Pandora's mouth were \"It isn't going to work.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Linny asked. She refused to believe anyone else was doing Twelfth Night.\n\n\"It's the jester, Festus. Charlton Lebrock's ex is doing Christmas in Dodge City, and there's a Festus in that. He's a drunk.\"\n\n\"The jester's name is Feste,\" Linny protested, but to no avail. Pandora's mind, such as it was, was made up.\n\n\"We'll have to do a different play. One that no one else has done.\"\n\n\"Coriolanus,\" Linny suggested, wishing Brian was here and wondering if she could send him an override. \"The Tempest.\"\n\n\"That people have heard of,\" Pandora said.\n\nOthello, Linny thought, with an outdoor tableau of you being smothered with a pillow. \"As You Like It. Richard the Third.\"\n\nBut all the plays people had heard of had already been done by Pandora's friends, or Pandora's friends' exes, or their exes. Brian's right, Linny thought, this whole theme thing has gotten out of hand. Why can't people have a Christmas they like? Why do they have to have something completely unique?\n\nThey finally settled on A Midsummer's Night Dream, which should at least be comparatively easy\u2014flowers, fairies, a woodland holo. She started a search for a donkey's head.\n\nCostumes.com didn't have one. She tried Don We Now Our Gay Apparel.\n\nThe screen buzzed, and Norwall's image appeared. \"She's Sara Darbingdon,\" he said.\n\n\"Who is?\" Linny said blankly.\n\n\"Your client. Darby Shields. She's the head of Galatek International.\"\n\n\"Galatek International?\" Linny said. \"The software company?\"\n\n\"The software conglomerate. Your client's the computer genius who started it.\"\n\n\"But that's impossible,\" Linny said. \"Mrs. Shields doesn't know anything about computers. She doesn't even like sending emails.\"\n\n\"That's what she told you. Trust me, I ran a complete profile of her. Dr. Sara Darbingdon, 3404 Aspen Lane\u2014\"\n\nNorwall's image disappeared and a news photo of Sara Darbingdon appeared. \"Galatek CEO Announces Intel Merger.\" It was Mrs. Shields.\n\n\"But why would she pretend\u2014?\"\n\n\"Because she didn't want you to know who you were talking to. She's obviously after deck.halls.\"\n\n\"After deck.halls? What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, they're researching a takeover. Or else starting their own Christmas company. With your ideas. How many themes did you show her?\"\n\n\"Quite a few,\" Linny said, thinking of that first interview and the number of holos she'd clicked through. \"But why\u2014she's never even had a professional Christmas.\"\n\n\"Wrong again,\" he said, and a list came up on the screen. \"Home and office Christmases for the last ten years, all done by Galatek's in-house designers: Christmas in the Country, O Holy Night, A Norman Rockwell Christmas, Christmas in Connecticut\u2026\"\n\nAt least she was telling the truth about liking traditional Christmases, Linny thought irrelevantly. \"But I still don't understand. If they already have Christmas designers\u2014\"\n\n\"Because we're successful, and conglomerates like Galatek are always looking for ways to co-opt successes. Look what Time-Warner-Microsoft did to graduation planning. They put every private planner out of business. You didn't give her a rom, did you?\"\n\n\"She couldn't make up her mind which package\u2014\"\n\nNorwall groaned. \"Goodbye, deck.halls. Hello, Galatek Christmases, Inc.\"\n\nShe was shaking her head. \"But she seemed so nice,\" she said, but she was thinking of how she'd kept asking to see different themes, how she'd asked her about her office, how she'd insisted Brian take her to Rock and a\u2026Brian.\n\n\"You're wrong,\" she said. \"She can't be Sara Darbingdon. There has to be some mistake. Her nephew helped me come up with a theme for Pandora Freeh. He wouldn't be a party to\u2014\"\n\n\"He's not her nephew.\"\n\nAfter several seconds she managed to say, \"What?\"\n\n\"He works at Galatek. He's no relation to Dr. Darbingdon.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you,\" she said. \"He hates the whole idea of professional Christmases.\"\n\n\"That's something he obviously said so you wouldn't catch on.\"\n\nSo she wouldn't catch on. She thought of Brian showing up at the Manning installation, at her apartment, of his walking into her office, looking at her equipment. And all the while pretending that he\u2014\n\n\"They were obviously after your designs,\" Norwall said, \"pumping you for the names of clients and suppliers.\"\n\n\"Who do you get a largemouth bass from anyway?\" Brian had said, and he'd asked her all about her best Christmas and her most difficult.\n\n\"What's his name?\" she said.\n\n\"Who? Oh, the so-called nephew? He actually used his own name, I suppose because it isn't one you'd recognize, but he's not an engineer. He's a marketing designer.\"\n\n\"I have to go,\" Linny said.\n\n\"The house is hers, too. I was surprised. When I saw your proposal layouts, I assumed it had to be a rental for the occasion, but no, she actually lives in it when she's not in San Francisco. Or Stockholm. She's got houses there, too, plus apartments in Manhattan, Sydney, S\u00e3o Paulo, Addis Ababa, and Beijing. And a villa in Iceland.\"\n\n\"I like to keep things simple,\" she'd said.\n\n\"I've got an override from Pandora Freeh,\" Linny lied. \"I've got to go.\"\n\n\"Pandora will have to wait,\" Norwall said. \"We have to talk about what you're going to do about this.\"\n\n\"I'll call you back,\" she said, and downlinked before he could protest.\n\nAnd then sat there, thinking, I don't believe it. But she did. After all, it was the oldest trick in the book\u2014#145 Romantic Con Men. Sweet-talk the mark into revealing her secrets. Buy her red tea, help her carry something heavy, sit too close to her in her office, and for good measure, pretend he liked E. M. Forster, which he had no doubt found out about from one of those netchecks.\n\nAnd she had fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker\u2014#182 Fisherman's Paradise.\n\nThe screen buzzed an override. She reached for the delete key, but it wasn't Norwall. It was Pandora.\n\n\"A Midsummer Night's Dream won't work, after all,\" she said. \"Fashad Tweedlowe did Christmas at the Grand Canyon last year.\"\n\n\"The Grand Canyon?\" Linny said, unable to see the connection.\n\n\"Riding down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon,\" Pandora said.\n\nOh, she can't mean\u2014\n\n\"Burros,\" Pandora said. \"They ride burros.\"\n\n\"Bottom's an ass.\"\n\n\"Ass, burro, it's the same thing. Maybe your young man was right. I should do Twelfth Night.\"\n\nHe's not my young man, Linny thought. He's a marketing designer for Galatek.\n\n\"But it's just so obscure. Didn't Shakespeare write any other plays?\"\n\n\"Just the thirty-nine,\" Linny said. \"And 154 sonnets.\"\n\n\"The sonnets,\" Pandora said thoughtfully. \"That's an idea. Let me think about that.\" Her image blinked off. The screen immediately buzzed again.\n\nIt was Brian. She hit \"record answer,\" and Brian said, \"Look, I know you're wildly busy and my chances of taking you out for a red tea are nonexistent till after Christmas, but if you'll tell me where you're going to be stringing up hot dogs or synchronized swimmers, I'll bring you a cone. I'll even hold it for you so you can keep both hands free for plucking chickens or whatever it is you'll be doing.\"\n\nFighting off intellectual property thieves, she thought. Norwall was right. They had to talk about what she was going to do.\n\nShe uplinked to him.\n\n\"You don't do anything. If she gets demanding, you tell her you know what she's up to and you have no intention of helping her steal deck.halls out from under you.\"\n\nBut she has all those people coming for dinner, Linny thought, and then realized that was probably a lie, too.\n\n\"I know this is Galatek you're dealing with,\" Norwall was saying, \"but there's no contract, and she's on very shaky legal ground herself: fraud, criminal misrepresentation\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm afraid there is a contract,\" Linny said ruefully. \"She signed it yesterday.\"\n\n\"Online?\"\n\n\"No, an actual signature.\"\n\nNorwall nodded. \"So there wouldn't be a corneal ID.\"\n\nOf course. \"Aunt Darby doesn't trust online contracts,\" my foot. She hadn't wanted electronic identification of her signature.\n\n\"What name did she use?\" Norwall said. \"If she used Shields, the contract's invalid.\"\n\nLinny went and got the contract, hoping that was the case, but it was an illegible scrawl. She scanned it in for Norwall.\n\n\"No, that's definitely Sara Darbingdon's signature,\" he said. \"And it's the address of the house that's listed on the contract, not the owner. This changes things.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"If you've got a legally binding contract\u2014she didn't snail-mail this to you, did she?\"\n\n\"No, her\u2014Bri\u2014the marketing designer brought it over.\"\n\n\"Too bad,\" he said. \"We might have been able to prove mail fraud. But under the circumstances, unless you can prove fraudulent signing conditions\u2014\"\n\n\"I thought I was signing a contract with someone else,\" Linny said. \"Doesn't that count as fraudulent?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's your word against hers, or, rather, against Galatek's legal department, which is like going up against\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you telling me that even though she's trying to steal my ideas, I might have to do her Christmas?\" she said, feeling sick at the thought of it. What if Brian showed up?\n\n\"Calm down,\" Norwall said. \"Let me uplink to lawyer.com and see where we stand, and then we'll decide what to do. Don't worry. They're not going to get away with this.\"\n\nThey've already gotten away with it, Linny thought numbly. She called up her messages and tried to get some work done, but she couldn't concentrate. She ended up going through Shakespeare's sonnets, looking for one she could use for Pandora, but there wasn't much to work with. \"Bare ruined choirs\"? The \"barren rage of death's eternal cold\"?\n\nThe screen buzzed. \"It's what I was afraid of. The contract's legally binding, and the payment-on-signing's already been deposited in your online account. You're legally obligated to do the Christmas.\"\n\n\"I can't\u2014\" Linny said.\n\n\"The object is to minimize the damage and not reveal any more trade secrets than you already have. What theme is it? How detailed was your proposal?\"\n\n\"I haven't done it yet. Mrs. Shie\u2014she left the theme to my discretion.\"\n\n\"And that's in the contract?\" he said excitedly.\n\n\"Yes. No. I mean, that line was left blank, to be filled in by me.\"\n\n\"This changes everything. Let me\u2014\" he said, and his image disappeared.\n\nShe went back to dissecting sonnets: \"Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud.\" \"My grief lies onward, and my joy behind.\"\n\nShe gave up and sat there waiting for Norwall to override. \"I checked with lawyer.com,\" he said when he came on, \"and it's perfectly legal. Thank God she didn't pick a theme. There isn't a thing Dr. Darbingdon or Galatek will be able to do about it.\"\n\n\"About what?\" Linny asked.\n\n\"About the elegant revenge you're going to work on them.\"\n\n\"Revenge?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said eagerly. \"You get to pick the theme. All right. You pick Death and Destruction or Nightmares or Strip Mining. You do the installation\u2014when is it, by the way?\"\n\n\"A week from now. The twenty-third. But\u2014\"\n\n\"You decorate her house totally as per the contract, only with Disgusting Things in Caves or Revenge Is Sweet, and when she sees it, you've not only ruined her Christmas, but she knows she can't go around stealing people's concepts. And you have your revenge.\"\n\n\"What does that have to do with Christmas?\" Linny murmured.\n\n\"What?\" Norwall said.\n\n\"Nothing. Isn't it enough to tell them we know what they're up to and refuse to do the installation?\"\n\n\"She'll just get Galatek's designers to do it. This way, she's publicly humiliated. She's having a dinner party for Galatek's board of directors the night of the day you're scheduled to do the installation.\"\n\nShe wasn't lying about that, either, Linny thought.\n\n\"I think Hell Hath No Fury would be perfect,\" Norwall said.\n\n\"But it's Christmas. It's not supposed to be a time for revenge. It's supposed to be the season of forgiveness and good will.\"\n\n\"After what they've done to you? All right, no revenge themes. But you have to do something, unless you just want to hand your clients over to them.\"\n\n\"I'll go talk to them,\" she said, but her heart quailed at the thought.\n\n\"Have it your way, no revenge,\" Norwall said, throwing up his hands. \"But let me handle it. I don't trust you to be tough enough. Let me be the one to confront them.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Linny said gratefully.\n\n\"Good,\" Norwall said. \"Don't worry, I'll take care of everything.\"\n\nBut she did worry. She tried to take her mind off it by focusing on the sonnet problem, but it wasn't much help.\n\n\"Poems, you mean?\" Pandora said vaguely when Linny called her with her proposal. \"Oh, I don't want poems. They're so\u2014don't you have any other ideas?\"\n\n\"Stock car racing?\" Linny said at random. \"Herbs and spices? Duck decoys? Media bias?\"\n\n\"It has to have the bust in it.\"\n\nPikes Peak or Bust? she thought wildly. Or Great Busts of History, with Madonna and Diana Dors and the Great Crash of 2006. \"How about Famous Dramatists?\"\n\n\"Mitzi Poulakakos did that five years ago.\"\n\nI wonder if I could talk her into \"Fire\" as a theme, Linny wondered. That way I could just burn down her house. \"Or Christmas at the Globe Theater?\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2026maybe\u2026why don't you work up a proposal?\"\n\nLinny did, and installed the Goldfarbs' Christmas and the Marcianos' Hanukkah, trying to reach Norwall at intervals and finally succeeding around noon on the twenty-third.\n\n\"All taken care of,\" he said. \"You don't have to worry about anything.\"\n\n\"You talked to them?\"\n\n\"I did, and told her in no uncertain terms to leave you alone or you'd sue.\"\n\n\"What did she say?\" she said, wanting to ask if Brian had been there.\n\n\"They\u2026oh, my God, the Pyramids just fell down,\" he said. \"Don't give it another thought. All taken care of. If you get any messages from them, delete them.\"\n\nLinny did, putting them on \"automatic delete\" so she didn't even have to hear Brian's voice, and moving on to messages about the Carmodys' flamingos, a delivery of wrapping paper that had butterflies instead of caterpillars on it, and the ever-present problem of Pandora, who had decided Christmas at the Globe was too confusing.\n\n\"People might be expecting to see an actual globe,\" she said, and Linny thought, Why did I get angry when I found out Brian and Dr. Darbingdon were trying to steal my business? Why didn't I jump at the chance?\n\n\"How about Christmas in Westminster Abbey?\" she suggested. \"Candles, a holo of the nave, busts of Byron and Shakespeare and Keats. All the famous poets are buried there.\"\n\nShakespeare wasn't, but Pandora and her friends wouldn't know that. \"I can see it all now\u2014Poet's Corner, Queen Elizabeth's tomb, the Crown Jewels\u2014\"\n\n\"The Crown Jewels,\" Pandora said, pleased. \"I don't suppose you could work King Harry's coronation in somehow?\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Linny said. I have nothing else to do between now and the twenty-fifth. She uplinked to Fergie's Fripperies and reserved an ermine cape and then called Rock and a Hard Place and asked what they had left in literary busts.\n\n\"Not a thing. I've got some statues\u2014rappers, mostly, and a Sammy Sosa. I don't have a Judas, either.\"\n\nA Judas?\n\n\"The closest thing I've got is an Adonis,\" he went on. \"You could maybe put a tunic on him and thirty pieces of silver in his hand. Do you want me to send it over?\"\n\n\"Send it over where?\" Linny asked with a sinking feeling.\n\n\"Mrs. Shields, 3404 Aspen Lane,\" he said. \"Do you want the Adonis or not?\"\n\n\"Not,\" Linny said, hit \"end,\" and called a taxi.\n\nShe worried the whole way out on the maglev and in the taxi from the station about what she might find, but when it pulled up in front of the house she saw a row of life-size tin soldiers standing stiffly in red and blue uniforms.\n\n\"Oh, good, Norwall thought better of getting revenge,\" she murmured, sliding her card through the taxi's reader. He'd decided to fulfill their contract with a standard treatment instead, and one Galatek couldn't learn anything from. Babes in Toyland was one of the most common Christmas themes.\n\nShe hurried across the street and up the path to the door, and then stopped short. The soldiers had their toy rifles raised and pointed at a life-size doll in a pink dress and a blindfold. \"Oh, no,\" Linny murmured, and hurried inside.\n\nThe tree in the hall was swathed in crime scene tape and flashing red-white-and-blue police lights, and there was a painting of Benedict Arnold on the wall behind it.\n\nShe went into the living room, where a holo of Julius Caesar being stabbed was playing on a continuous loop. She walked through Brutus and into the dining room.\n\nThe walls and table were draped in black and in the center of the table was a horse's head with a sign pinned to the mane. \"This is what happens to people who try to steal our design concepts,\" it read. \"Merry Christmas from deck.halls.\"\n\nLinny pulled the sign off, wadded it up, and walked warily into the study. Statues filled the room, cups of wassail in their hands as if this was a Christmas party. Nero, and Hitler, who was Sieg Heiling with his other hand, and Simon Legree, and someone who was probably supposed to be Iago from the handkerchief in his hand.\n\nOh, no. I can't let Mrs. Shields see this, Linny thought, and then remembered she wasn't Mrs. Shields.\n\nI still can't let her see it, she thought, sick at the thought of what Brian would say when he saw this, of what he'd think if he believed she'd done this. Even though he'd\u2014\n\n\"Revenge doesn't have anything to do with Christmas,\" she said firmly, and began pulling down the black garlands looped all around the room.\n\nThere was a tree here, too, hidden behind Billy the Kid. It was lying under a guillotine, its tip, with the star still on it, chopped off, and ornaments in the shape of instruments of torture. Linny finished pulling down the garlands, stuffed them into a trash bag, and began unhooking the ornaments.\n\nThere was a sound. Oh, God, what if it's Brian? she thought, leaping for the door, but it was only a workman, wearing the red-white-blue-and-brown coveralls of FedXUPS and carrying a toga'd and gold-laurel-wreathed mannequin.\n\n\"What's this?\" she asked.\n\nThe workman righted the mannequin and set it down. \"Nero,\" he said, though she had already figured that out from the plaster violin under the statue's chin. \"Where do you want it?\"\n\n\"Back where you got it,\" she said. \"Put it back in the truck.\"\n\n\"I've got a delivery order for this address,\" he said, pulling out his handheld.\n\n\"I'm rescinding the order.\" She reached for the handheld and clicked \"cancel.\" \"I want all of these returned,\" she said, indicating Hitler et al.\n\n\"Those aren't ours,\" he said. \"We don't do statues. Or fictionals. The fictionals are from Eveningprimrose. The only ones that are ours are the toy soldiers and the doll.\" He checked his manifest. \"And the Pontius Pilate in the bathroom.\"\n\nOh, Norwall. \"Well, take it back, too.\"\n\n\"I'll have to charge you extra for an unscheduled pickup.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Linny said, and then, as he picked up Nero, \"What would you charge to take the rest of these back to\u2014\" she tipped Stalin forward to take a look at the bottom of his foot, \"Rock and a Hard Place and Eveningprimrose?\"\n\n\"Two days before Christmas? Are you kidding?\" He picked up Nero and started out. \"You're lucky I've got room on the truck for the toy soldiers. Otherwise, you'd have had to wait till January. There's no way you're going to get anybody to do unscheduled pickups this close to Christmas.\"\n\nHe was right, but she tried anyway, calling Rock and a Hard Place and Eveningprimrose, and then Nowheretoturn Trucking, which had helped her one time on the twenty-fourth with an emergency delivery to Pandora's, but she got voice mail on all three, and her overrides didn't work. She would have to talk the FedXUPS guy into taking at least some of the statues, but he and his truck were already gone.\n\nAt least he took the firing squad, she thought, looking at the trampled snow, and went back inside. She would have to do it herself. Dr. Darbingdon couldn't walk in here and see the house like this. She went out to the dining room and scooped up the tablecloth by the corners, the centerpiece and dishes and all, into a clanking bundle, tied the ends, and carried it out back to the trash recycle, and then went back into the study and began wrestling Nixon through the dining room toward the back door.\n\nShe made it as far as the door to the kitchen, which apparently wasn't as wide as the study's, because his arms, raised in his trademark V's for victory, got wedged in the door and wouldn't budge. She tried to turn him sideways, but his arms were jammed tight.\n\nThey'll have to come off, she thought, and began unbuttoning his jacket so she could unscrew the arms. The front door opened. Oh, good, she thought, he came back for the Pilate in the bathroom. \"Can you give me a hand? I'm in the dining room,\" she called, struggling with the sleeve.\n\n\"What the hell's the idea?\" Brian said.\n\nShe looked up. He was standing in the door to the living room, his fists full of police car lights and crime scene tape. The lights were still flashing blindingly.\n\n\"You found out,\" he said.\n\n\"I found out,\" she said.\n\n\"And you did this,\" he said, looking at Brutus.\n\n\"No, though it would have been an appropriate reaction. What did you expect me to do, be overjoyed?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"I thought maybe\u2026no, I suppose not.\"\n\nIt wasn't at all the reaction she'd expected. She'd expected slick explanations, but he just stood there, his hands full of flashing red and blue, staring at the holo and looking like he'd been kicked in the stomach. After a long minute, he said bitterly, \"I suppose you ran a background check and found out who she really was.\"\n\nLinny nodded. \"They're routine for all new clients, even with a little-nobody Christmas company like deck.halls.\"\n\n\"I told her you were bound to find out,\" he said. \"I told her lying to you was terminally stupid, that we should just tell you\u2014\"\n\n\"And that would somehow make it more acceptable to me?\"\n\nHe waited a minute before answering. \"I thought it might be a possibility.\"\n\nA possibility. The arrogance of the man. \"Well, it's not,\" she snapped.\n\n\"Apparently not,\" he said, looking at John Wilkes Booth pouring himself a cup of wassail. \"And so you\u2014\"\n\n\"I told you, I didn't do this. In fact, I was trying to get it taken down before anybody saw it. I don't believe in an eye for an eye, especially at Christmas.\" She reached forward and took the lights and tape from him and stuffed them in a garbage bag. \"Dr. Darbingdon's going to be here in a few minutes,\" she said, \"and some of this is too heavy for me to move, so if you don't want her to see this, you're going to have to help me. And, no, you don't have to remind me that I'm under contract. I am painfully aware of that.\"\n\n\"I definitely don't want her to see this,\" he said, and seemed to come to himself. He hoisted Nixon up. \"Where do you want me to put this?\"\n\n\"Out back behind the spruces for now,\" she said, and went ahead into the kitchen to open the back door for him. A grim-looking automated store mannequin in a navy dress stood at the stove, stirring a pot.\n\n\"Who's that supposed to be?\" Brian asked, grunting as he maneuvered Nixon through the door. \"Lucrezia Borgia?\"\n\n\"Linda Tripp,\" she said, and as soon as Brian and Nixon went out, switched it off, unplugged the control box, and began winding up the cord. \"I can get this one,\" she said when he came back in. \"You get the ones in the study.\"\n\nShe dismantled Linda and then the guillotine in the living room and put them out back while he carried out Haldeman and Ehrlichman, and then linked to hollyandivy.com to order a Number One. It wasn't much, but there wasn't time for anything but standard decorations, if that.\n\nHollyandivy was sold out. She linked to Everything Christmas. \"Site closed,\" it said. She punched in their emergency number. \"We've been completely cleaned out since the nineteenth,\" Nadia told her. \"Did you try Holiday Heaven?\"\n\nShe tried Holiday Heaven, and Christmas\"R\"Us and Partyplus. \"Everyone's completely sold out,\" she told Brian when he reappeared with O. J. Simpson. \"The only supplier who has anything in stock is thegooseisgettingfat.com, and all they've got is a Mayan snake god and two dozen yellow polka-dot bikinis, no candles, no lights. Dr. Darbingdon wouldn't have her old decorations in the basement, would she?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"She gave them all to charity after she started having Galatek do her Christmases. Nobody's got anything?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, scrolling through a list of electronics suppliers. Maybe one of them would have some colored LEDs that could pass for Christmas tree lights\u2014\n\nHer screen buzzed. \"The Westminster Abbey theme won't work,\" Pandora Freeh said.\n\n\"Who is it?\" Brian said.\n\n\"I just found out Sashine Nackerty's new live-in's old live-in's theme last year was A Double-Decker Tour of London\u2014the Tower, Madame Tussauds, mad cow disease, Big Ben\u2014\"\n\n\"Who is it?\"\n\n\"I can't talk right now,\" Linny said desperately. \"I've got an emergency.\"\n\n\"An emergency!\" Pandora said, waving it aside. \"The Abbey's in London! If Jane sees it, she'll think I'm trying to remind him of his old live-in, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Who is it?\" Brian said. \"Is it my aunt?\"\n\n\"No,\" Linny hissed, and hit \"speaker\" so he could hear for himself.\n\n\"Besides which, Westminster Abbey's only one tiny stop on this elaborate tour!\" Pandora said. \"The theme just won't work. You'll have to come up with something else.\"\n\n\"Westminster Abbey?\" Brian whispered. \"What happened to Twelfth Night?\"\n\n\"Too intellectual,\" she whispered back. \"And she insisted it had to be something that involved Shakespeare's bust. Poet's Corner was the only thing I could think of.\"\n\n\"\u2014and it needs to be done by tomorrow because that's when Griselda and Carlos are coming. I invited them to lunch, having no idea\u2014\"\n\n\"Shakespeare wasn't buried in Westminster Abbey,\" Brian whispered.\n\n\"I am aware of that, but I had to come up with something, and since when are you such a stickler for the truth?\"\n\n\"Touch\u00e9,\" he said.\n\n\"I sympathize with your situation,\" Linny said into the phone, \"but I have a client arriving any minute to no Christmas at all, so if I could call you back\u2014\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Pandora said, instantly interested. \"Didn't FedXUPS arrive? That happened to me one time before I hired you\u2014it was why I hired you, as a matter of fact. The truck was one of those unmanned robot things, which they assured me was perfectly reliable\u2014\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't the truck. It\u2014\" Linny glanced at Brian. \"It's too complicated to explain right now. I have to try and find some Christmas decorations\u2014\"\n\n\"What do you need?\" Pandora said. \"Maybe I can help.\"\n\n\"No, you don't understand, none of the suppliers\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you got decorations?\" Brian cut in.\n\n\"Yes, a whole attic full. Grisham says I never throw anything away, but I always say, you never know when things might come in handy. They're the ones I used before I started hiring it done. It's mostly nonthemed stuff. Santas and snowmen and jingle bells.\"\n\n\"I'll be right over,\" Brian said, grabbing his coat.\n\n\"Oh, and I've got several antelope from this darling Home on the Range Christmas I did. If you have some antlers, they'd look just like reindeer.\"\n\n\"You're a godsend,\" Brian said, starting for the door.\n\n\"Well, after all, that's what Christmas is all about, isn't it, helping each other? Oh, dear, I just thought of something. I don't have a tree. I do have a crane, from Christmas on a Construction Site. You could\u2014\"\n\n\"We're set for trees. Brian will be right over,\" Linny said, and hung up. \"Don't let her give you a crane,\" she called after Brian, \"or a bulldozer. And no roaming buffaloes.\"\n\nShe wrestled O.J. out the back door and then took down the rack and Iron Maiden ornaments, trying to gauge how long it would take Brian to get there and back if he floored the Incite.\n\nThe answer was: over half an hour. \"I had a terrible time getting away from her,\" he said, coming in carrying a dusty plastic wise man, a bouquet of even dustier poinsettias, and a Styrofoam snowman.\n\n\"She wanted to tell me all about what she wants for her new Christmas theme.\"\n\n\"Pandora can have whatever her little heart desires,\" Linny said, putting the wise man where the guillotine had stood. She took the poinsettias from Brian.\n\n\"Everything's pretty grubby,\" Brian said, wiping the snowman against his sleeve. \"It'll need to be washed off.\"\n\n\"We don't have time,\" Linny said, hurrying into the kitchen for a vase for the poinsettias. \"They'll be here\u2014oh, gosh, in five minutes. We'll call it An Attic Christmas. Go get the rest of the decorations.\"\n\nHe returned with a second wise man, two ceramic elves, and an armful of cobwebby bubble lights. \"The good news is the Christmas spirit is alive and well in spite of professional Christmases,\" he said, handing her the lights. \"The bad news is, Pandora's decided her new theme should be Godsends of History. People who've given aid and assistance through the centuries: the Good Samaritan, Florence Nightingale, the inventor of laserliposuction.\"\n\n\"What about the all-essential bust of Shakespeare?\" Linny asked, draping the lights haphazardly around the tree.\n\n\"He's in the car,\" Brian said. \"Pandora could only find two of the wise men. She sent Shakespeare as a third. And a bathrobe to drape him in. Where do you want the elves?\"\n\n\"Coffee table,\" she said, plugging in the lights. Two of them were burnt out. \"Did she send any replacement bulbs?\"\n\n\"I'll check,\" he said, rummaging in an enormous box he'd brought in of ornaments, burned-down candles, plastic mistletoe, and bedraggled tinsel.\n\nLinny set him to decorating the tree while she finished placing the candles, five swans-a-swimming with several feathers missing, and a Victorian angel with a bent wing, looking anxiously at her watch. Dr. Darbingdon was already late.\n\n\"Where do you want this?\" Brian asked, and held up a chicken-wire sleigh and eight tiny reindeer.\n\n\"Good Lord,\" she said.\n\n\"I know. I apologize for ever criticizing Christmas designers. It's obvious you're saving people from themselves. Bathroom?\"\n\nLinny nodded. \"Bathroom.\" She began arranging the snow village houses on the sideboard.\n\n\"Linny!\" Brian called.\n\n\"What?\" she said, hurrying into the bathroom. A six-foot, solid-looking, toga'd statue stood over the sink, its marble hands extended. \"Oh, I forgot all about Pilate.\"\n\n\"Pilate? What's he doing in the bathroom?\"\n\n\"Washing his hands.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. \"Don't tell me he's marble.\"\n\n\"No, plaster, I think,\" she said.\n\nHe took hold of Pilate's waist and tried to lift him. \"Definitely marble. Any chance of getting the robo-dolly back?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He had six more deliveries.\"\n\n\"When's my aunt due here?\"\n\nShe looked at her watch. \"Fifteen minutes ago.\"\n\n\"Then we'll just have to manhandle him out of here. Wait,\" he said as she moved to take hold of one of Pilate's hands, \"let me get around behind him first. Then you pull and I'll\u2026what's this?\"\n\n\"What's what?\" Linny asked, leaning around Pilate to see. Brian had untaped a sign from the statue's back and was reading it.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked, though it was obvious it was another of Norwall's signs, and when he didn't answer, \"What does it say?\"\n\n\"It says, 'This is what you get for trying to steal my concepts and my clients,' \" Brian read. He looked up. \"You thought that's what we were trying to do\u2014take over your clientele?\"\n\n\"Isn't that what you were trying to do?\"\n\n\"Of course not. How could you even think that? No wonder you put up all this,\" he said, gesturing to include Pilate and the rest of the house.\n\n\"I told you, I didn't put it up. But if you weren't spying on me,\" she said, bewildered, \"what were you doing?\"\n\n\"It's a long story,\" he said. \"Aunt Darby\u2014\"\n\n\"She's not your aunt,\" Linny said coldly.\n\n\"Not my\u2026?\" he said, and now he was the one who looked bewildered. \"No, she's not genetically related to me but\u2026she's my parents' best friend. I lived with her while they were at Tombaugh Station when I was a kid, and again in high school when they were out in the Asteroid Belt.\"\n\nAnd Norwall knew that, Linny thought. Inge had said she'd run complete personal histories. He knew it and didn't tell me.\n\n\"I wasn't lying when I called her Aunt Darby,\" he said. \"I've always called her that.\"\n\n\"And I suppose her name really is Mrs. Shields and you really are an engineer and you build dams? What about her telling me she didn't understand computers? And that she'd never had a professionally done Christmas before, that she's always put up her decorations with her own two little hands?\"\n\n\"She was afraid if you knew who she was, you'd wonder why she wasn't using Galatek's decorators and would assume she had plenty of other options, so you'd refuse to take her on, especially at such a late date. Plus, she knew you did your interviews online and she needed to get you out to the house, so she came up with that whole ridiculous technophobic Mrs. Shields thing, and by the time I realized what she was up to, it was too late to stop her. She'd already told you so many lies about who and what we were\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop her from what?\"\n\n\"You did a Christmas display for Howard Greenfeld in October.\"\n\n\"Hanukkah,\" she said. \"Hanukkah in Lapland. He needed the installation early because he was leaving for New Palestine.\"\n\n\"Hanukkah in Lapland?\" Brian said. \"Do they even have Hanukkah in Lapland? What did you do?\"\n\n\"Reindeer and menorahs. And a holo of the aurora borealis. What about Howard Greenfeld?\"\n\n\"He's a friend of Aunt Darby's. She was talking to him online when she apparently spotted you among the caribou and decided you were just what I needed.\"\n\n\"Needed?\"\n\n\"Aunt Darby's one of the world's great fixers. Galatek doesn't take over businesses\u2014it fixes them. Unfortunately, Aunt Darby doesn't confine herself to fixing companies' problems. She also fixes people's problems. Or what she perceives to be their problems. When I was ten, she decided I needed work on coordination skills and insisted I take tuba lessons. And learn to bowl. Two years ago she decided my work wasn't challenging enough and got me a job at Galatek. This year she decided my problem was that I was spending too much time at said job and not seeing anybody.\"\n\nShe was trying to fix us up, Linny thought. That was why he was so rude that first day. That was why she kept talking about \"The Machine Stops\" and how hard it is for young people to meet. \"Your aunt was matchmaking?\" she said.\n\nHe nodded grimly. \"She was matchmaking. Her first plan was to invite you to a party at Galatek, but after she ran a netcheck on you and found out how busy you are this time of year, she came up with the bright idea of hiring you to do her house.\"\n\n\"And of sending you to my apartment and the Manning installation.\"\n\n\"No,\" Brian said. \"After that first day, she didn't have to send me. It was all my own idea. The contract was just an excuse.\" He smiled crookedly at her. \"I loved playing the tuba.\"\n\n\"What?\" she said, bewildered again.\n\n\"I even ended up loving bowling. Aunt Darby's always right. My old job wasn't challenging enough. I love working for Galatek. She always knows exactly what I need, even if I don't. Only her way of going about it\u2014\"\n\nHe reached up and smacked the back of Pilate's head with his open palm. \"I told her you'd find out and feel betrayed and\u2014I told her it would end up like this,\" he said, gesturing to include the whole house, \"with you\u2014\"\n\n\"I told you, I didn't do this.\"\n\nHe stopped in mid-gesture, his hand still out. \"You thought I was spying on you,\" he said slowly, \"that we were trying to steal your business, but even though you thought that, you were still trying to take the decorations down before we arrived. Why?\"\n\n\"I told you, I didn't want her to see them,\" she said. \"I knew she had the board of directors coming for dinner and\u2026\"\n\n\"Even though you thought she had lied to you,\" he said, coming around from behind Pilate toward her. \"Even though you thought I'd romanced you to get information out of you\u2026\"\n\n\"I\u2026revenge didn't seem to have anything to do with Christmas. I\u2026it,\" she stammered, trying not to be so aware of his scent, \"it's supposed to be about forgiveness and\u2026and\u2026good will\u2026and\u2026\"\n\n\"Love?\"\n\nShe backed into the sink. \"Charity,\" she said, and the doorbell rang.\n\n\"Oh, my God, it's Aunt Darby,\" Brian said.\n\nIt was the caterers. Brian recruited them and their robo-dolly to help lug Pilate out back behind the spruces, and Linny ran through the house, making sure they hadn't missed anything else.\n\nThey hadn't, except for the chicken-wire sleigh and reindeer, which had gotten bent when Brian was removing Pilate. She unbent it, more or less.\n\n\"The decorations look awful,\" she told Brian, setting it on the sink. \"This won't fool anybody.\"\n\n\"I think there's been enough fooling of people,\" he said. \"Aunt Darby will love it. This is just what she wanted. As you said, Christmas is the season of charity.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\n\"And forgiveness?\" he said, backing her into the sink again.\n\n\"Oh, I just love it,\" a woman's voice, not Aunt Darby's, said. \"How perfectly pre-retro!\"\n\n\"Even some of the lights are burnt out,\" a man's delighted voice said.\n\n\"And look at the dust! You were right, Darby, this young woman is a genius!\"\n\n\"I wonder where she and Brian are,\" Aunt Darby said.\n\n\"Oh, my God, will you look at that!\" a third voice exclaimed. \"Our neighbors had light-up wise men just like that on their front lawn when I was a kid!\"\n\nLinny clapped her hand to her mouth. \"Oh, no! I forgot all about the lawn decorations!\"\n\n\"I have just the thing,\" Brian said, grabbing her by the hand and leading her through the living room, past the dinner guests and Aunt Darby, out the front door, onto the lawn.\n\n\"Room,\" he said, gesturing toward the window where Aunt Darby and the Galatek board of directors stood watching. \"View.\"\n\n\"But this is supposed to be An Attic Christmas, not E. M. Forster,\" she protested.\n\n\"Aunt Darby will love it,\" he said, walking back to the sidewalk. \"Ready?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, but she didn't move. \"There's no barley. Or poppies.\"\n\n\"Next Christmas,\" he said, and strode purposefully toward her." + }, + { + "title": "Cat's Paw", + "text": "\"Come, Bridlings,\" Touff\u00e9t said impatiently as soon as I arrived. \"Go home and pack your bags. We're going to Suffolk for a jolly country Christmas.\"\n\n\"I thought you hated country Christmases,\" I said. I had invited him only the week before down to my sister's and gotten a violent rejection of the idea. \"Country Christmases! Dreadful occasions!\" he had said. \"Holly and mistletoe and vile games\u2014blindman's bluff and that ridiculous game where people grab at burning raisins, and even viler food. Plum pudding!\" he shuddered. \"And wassail!\"\n\nI protested that my sister was an excellent cook and that she never made wassail, she made eggnog. \"I think you'd have an excellent time,\" I said. \"Everyone's very pleasant.\"\n\n\"I can imagine,\" he said. \"No one drinks, everyone is faithful to his wife, the inheritance is equally and fairly divided, and none of your relatives would ever think of murdering anyone.\"\n\n\"Of course not!\" I said, bristling.\n\n\"Then I would rather spend Christmas here alone,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"At least then I shall not be subjected to roast goose and Dumb Crambo.\"\n\n\"We do not play Dumb Crambo,\" I replied with dignity. \"We play charades.\"\n\nAnd now, scarcely a week later, Touff\u00e9t was eagerly proposing going to the country.\n\n\"I have just received a letter from Lady Charlotte Valladay,\" he said, brandishing a sheet of pale pink notepaper, \"asking me to come to Marwaite Manor. She wishes me to solve a mystery for her.\" He examined the letter through his monocle. \"What could be more delightful than murder in a country house at Christmas?\"\n\nActually, I could think of a number of things. I scanned the letter. \"You must come,\" she had written. \"This is a mystery only you, the world's greatest detective, can solve.\" Lady Charlotte Valladay. And Marwaite Manor. Where had I heard those names before? Lady Charlotte.\n\n\"It doesn't say there's been a murder,\" I said. \"It says a mystery.\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t was not listening. \"We must hurry if we are to catch the 3:00 train from Euston. There won't be time for you to go home and pack and come back here. You must meet me at the station. Come, don't stand there looking foolish.\"\n\n\"The letter doesn't say anything about my being invited,\" I said. \"It only mentions you. And I've already told my sister I'm spending Christmas with her.\"\n\n\"She does not mention you because it is of course assumed that I will bring my assistant.\"\n\n\"Hardly your assistant, Touff\u00e9t. You never let me do anything.\"\n\n\"That is because you have not the mind of a detective. Always you see the facade. Never do you see what lies behind it.\"\n\n\"Then you obviously won't need me,\" I said.\n\n\"But I do, Bridlings,\" he said. \"Who will record my exploits if you are not there? And who will point out the obvious and the incorrect, so that I may reject them and find the true solution?\"\n\n\"I would rather play charades,\" I said, and picked up my hat. \"I hope Lady Charlotte feeds you wassail and plum pudding. And makes you play Dumb Crambo.\"\n\nIn the end I went. I had been with Touff\u00e9t on every one of his cases, and although I still could not place Lady Charlotte Valladay, it seemed to me her name had been connected to something interesting.\n\nAnd I had never experienced Christmas in a country manor, with the ancient hall decked in holly and Gainsboroughs, a huge Yule log on the fire, an old-fashioned Christmas feast\u2014poached salmon, a roast joint, and a resplendent goose, with a different wine for every course. Perhaps they might even have a boar's head.\n\nThe bullet trains to Suffolk were all filled, and we could only get seats on an express. It was filled as well, and every passenger had not only luggage but huge shopping bags crammed with gifts, which completely filled all the overhead compartments. I had to hold my bag and Touff\u00e9t's umbrella on my lap.\n\nI thought longingly of the first-class compartment I had booked on the train to my sister's and hoped Marwaite Manor was at the near end of Suffolk.\n\nMarwaite Manor. Where had I heard that name? And Lady Charlotte's? Not in the tabloids, I decided, though I had a vague idea of something controversial. A protest of some sort. What? Cloning? The revival of fox hunting?\n\nPerhaps she was an actress\u2014they were always getting involved in causes. Or a royal scandal. No, she was too old. I seemed to remember she was in her fifties.\n\nTouff\u00e9t, across from me, was deep in a book. I leaned forward slightly, trying to read the title. Touff\u00e9t only reads mystery novels, he says, to study the methods of fictional detectives, but actually to criticize them. And, I suspected, to study their mannerisms. And co-opt them. He had already affected Lord Peter Wimsey's monocle and Hercule Poirot's treatment of his \"assistant,\" and he had met me at the station wearing a Sherlock Holmesian Inverness cape. Thank God he had not adopted Holmes's deerstalker. Or his violin. At least thus far.\n\nThe title was in very tiny print. I leaned forward farther, and Touff\u00e9t looked up irritably. \"This Dorothy Sayers, she is ridiculous,\" he said, \"she makes her Lord Peter read timetables of trains, decipher codes, use stopwatches, and it is all, all unnecessary. If he would only ask himself, 'Who had a motive to murder Paul Alexis?' he would have no need of all these shirt collar receipts and diagrams.\"\n\nHe flung it down. \"It is Sherlock Holmes who has caused this foolish preoccupation with evidence,\" he said, \"with all his tobacco ashes and chemical experiments.\" He grabbed the carpetbag off my lap and began rummaging through it. \"Where have you put my other book, Bridlings?\"\n\nI hadn't touched it. I sometimes think he takes me along with him for the same reason that he reads mystery novels\u2014so he can feel superior.\n\nHe pulled a book from the bag, Edgar Allan Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue. No doubt he would find all sorts of things wrong with Inspector Dupin. He would probably think Dupin should have asked himself what motive an orangu\u2014\n\n\"Touff\u00e9t!\" I said. \"I've remembered who Lady Charlotte Valladay is! She's the ape woman!\"\n\n\"Ape woman?\" Touff\u00e9t said irritably. \"You are saying Lady Charlotte is a carnival attraction? Covered in hair and scratching herself?\"\n\n\"No, no,\" I said. \"She's a primate-rights activist, claims gorillas and orangutans should be allowed to vote, be given equal standing in the courts, and all that.\"\n\n\"Are you certain this is the same person?\" Touff\u00e9t said.\n\n\"Completely. Her father's Lord Alastair Biddle, made his fortune in artificial intelligence. That's how she got interested in primates. They were AI research subjects. She founded the Primate Intelligence Institute. I saw her on television just the other day, soliciting funds for it.\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t had taken out Lady Charlotte's pink letter and was peering at it. \"She says nothing at all about apes.\"\n\n\"Perhaps one of her orangutans has got loose and committed a murder, just like in The Murders in the Rue Morgue,\" I said. \"Looks like she made a monkey out of you, Touff\u00e9t.\"\n\nThere was no one at the station to meet us. I suggested taking the single taxi parked at the end of the platform, but Touff\u00e9t said, \"Lady Charlotte will of course send someone to meet us.\"\n\nAfter a quarter of an hour, during which it began to rain and I thought fondly of how my sister was always on the platform waiting for me, smiling and waving, I telephoned the manor.\n\nA man with a reedy, refined voice said, \"Marwaite Manor,\" and, when I asked for Lady Valladay, said formally, \"One moment, please,\" and Lady Charlotte came on. \"Oh, Colonel Bridlings, I am so sorry about there not being anyone to meet you. They've refused to issue D'Artagnan a driver's license, which is perfectly ridiculous, he drives better than I do, and there was no one else to send. If you could take a taxi, D'Artagnan will pay the driver when you get here. I'll see you shortly.\"\n\nBy this time, of course, the taxi had long gone, and I had to telephone for one. As I was hanging up, a sunburned middle-aged man with a full red beard and a black shoulder bag accosted me.\n\n\"I couldn't help overhearing,\" he said in a heavy Australian accent. \"You're going to Marwaite Manor, are you, mate?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said warily. Journalists are always trying for interviews with Touff\u00e9t, and the shoulder bag looked suspiciously like it could contain a vidcam.\n\n\"I was wondering if I could bag a ride with you. I'm going to Marwaite Manor, too.\" He stuck out his hand. \"Mick Rutgers.\"\n\n\"Colonel Bridlings,\" I said, and turned to Touff\u00e9t, who had walked over to us and was peering at Mr. Rutgers through his monocle. \"Allow me to introduce Inspector Touff\u00e9t.\"\n\n\"Touff\u00e9t?\" Rutgers said sharply. \"The detective?\"\n\n\"You have heard of me in Australia?\" Touff\u00e9t said.\n\n\"Everyone has heard of the world's greatest detective,\" Rutgers said, recovering himself. \"This is an honor. What brings you to Marwaite Manor?\"\n\n\"Lady Charlotte Valladay has asked me to solve a mystery.\"\n\n\"A mystery?\" he said. \"What mystery?\"\n\n\"I do not know,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Ah, the taxi arrives.\"\n\nI picked up our baggage. \"I hope it's not far to the manor.\"\n\n\"Only a coupla miles,\" Rutgers said.\n\n\"Ah, you have been here before?\" Touff\u00e9t said.\n\n\"No, mate,\" Rutgers said, the sharpness back in his voice. \"Never set foot in England before, as a matter of fact. No, when she invited me she told me the manor was only a coupla miles from the station. Lady Charlotte. I work for the Australian Broadcasting Network.\"\n\nI knew he was a journalist, I thought. \"Why are you here?\" I asked.\n\n\"Lady Charlotte said she had a big story, one we'd be interested in covering.\"\n\n\"And she didn't say what the story was?\" Touff\u00e9t asked.\n\nRutgers shook his head. \"But whatever it is, she was paying all expenses, and I'd never seen England. So here I am.\"\n\nWe piled into the taxi and set out. It was, as Mr. Rutgers had said, \"a coupla miles,\" and in no time we'd arrived at Marwaite Manor.\n\nAt least that's what the scrolled wrought-iron sign above the granite gates said. But the buildings in the distance looked more like an industrial compound. There were numerous long metal sheds with parking lots between them and a great many ventilators and pipes. They looked grim in the freezing rain.\n\nThe taxi driver drove past the compound and up a long hill and stopped in front of a four-story glass-and-chrome affair that looked like a company headquarters. \"Are you certain this is Marwaite Manor?\" I asked him as he was taking our bags out of the trunk.\n\nHe nodded, handing me Touff\u00e9t's portmanteau and my bag. \"Is the monkey paying me or are you?\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" I said sternly. I glanced toward Touff\u00e9t, hoping he hadn't heard the rude remark. He and Rutgers had already gone up to the front door. \"Lady Charlotte's butler will pay you,\" I said stiffly, and followed them over to the door.\n\nIt opened. A gorilla was standing there, dressed in a butler's cutaway coat and trousers, and white gloves.\n\n\"Good Lord,\" I said.\n\n\"We are here to see Lady Charlotte Valladay,\" Touff\u00e9t said, peering at him through his monocle.\n\nThe gorilla opened the door farther.\n\n\"I am Inspector Touff\u00e9t and this is Mr. Rutgers.\"\n\n\"I think they understand sign language,\" I whispered. \"Rutgers, do you know any?\"\n\n\"Come please? Take bags?\" the gorilla said, and I was so surprised I just stood there, gaping.\n\n\"Take bags, sir?\" the gorilla said again.\n\n\"The taxi's six pounds,\" the taxi driver said, reaching past me with his hand outstretched. \"And that doesn't include the tip.\"\n\n\"Pay moment,\" the gorilla said, and turned back to me. \"Take bags, sir?\"\n\nI had recovered myself sufficiently to hand them to him, trying not to flinch away from those huge paws in their incongruous white gloves, and to murmur, \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"This way, sir,\" the gorilla said, dropping to his gloved knuckles, and led us into an enormous entryway.\n\n\"Excuse moment,\" the gorilla said.\n\nIt really was too odd, hearing that refined, upper-class voice coming out of that enormous gray-black gorilla.\n\n\"Tell Lady Valladay you here.\" He started out, still on all fours.\n\n\"Good Lord, Touff\u00e9t\u2014\" I had started to say, when a middle-aged woman in khaki and pearls bustled in.\n\n\"Oh, Inspector Touff\u00e9t! I'm so glad you're here! Tanny, did you pay the taxi driver?\"\n\n\"Yes, madam,\" the gorilla said.\n\n\"Good. Stand up straight. Inspector Touff\u00e9t, I'd like you to meet D'Artagnan.\"\n\nThe gorilla straightened, extended a monstrous gloved hand, and Touff\u00e9t shook it, albeit a bit gingerly.\n\n\"D'Artagnan was orphaned by poachers in Uganda when he was only two weeks old,\" she said.\n\n\"Rescued,\" D'Artagnan said, pointing at Lady Valladay with a white-gloved finger.\n\n\"I found him in Hong Kong in a cage the size of a shoebox,\" she said, looking fondly at him. \"He's been here at the Institute twelve years.\"\n\n\"I thought gorillas couldn't speak,\" I said.\n\n\"He's had a laryngeal implant,\" she said. \"When we tour the compound, you'll see our surgical unit.\"\n\n\"How'd he get the name D'Artagnan?\" Rutgers asked.\n\n\"He chose it himself. I don't believe in picking names for primates as if they were pets. Our research here at the Institute has shown that primates are extremely intelligent. They are capable of high-level thinking, computation skills, and self-awareness. D'Artagnan is a conscious being, fully capable of making personal decisions. He's scored 95 on IQ tests. He named himself after one of the Three Musketeers. It's his favorite book.\"\n\n\"Good Lord, he can read, too?\" I said.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Only a few words. I read it aloud to him.\"\n\nD'Artagnan nodded his huge head. \"Queen,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, he loves the part about the Three Musketeers coming to the queen's aid.\" She turned to Rutgers. \"And you must be Colonel Bridlings, who chronicles all Inspector Touff\u00e9t's cases.\"\n\n\"Mick Rutgers,\" he said, extending his sunburned hand, \"of ABN.\"\n\nShe looked confused. \"But the press invitations were for the twenty-fifth.\"\n\n\"I'm sure the invitation said the twenty-fourth,\" he said, fumbling for it in his jacket.\n\n\"That's what Ms. Fox said. I really must have Heidi start writing my invitations. Her penmanship is much neater than mine.\"\n\n\"I could come back tomorrow\u2014\" Rutgers said.\n\n\"No, I'm delighted you're here,\" she said, and seemed to genuinely mean it. She turned her warm smile on me. \"Then you must be Colonel Bridlings.\"\n\n\"Yes. How do you do?\"\n\n\"I'm so pleased to meet all of you. Come,\" she said, taking Touff\u00e9t's arm, \"I want to show you the compound, but first let me introduce you to everyone.\"\n\n\"You spoke of a murder you wished me to solve?\" Touff\u00e9t said.\n\n\"A mystery only you can solve,\" she said, smiling that lovely smile. She truly had a gift for making one feel warmly welcome.\n\nI wished I could say the same of Marwaite Manor, but the spacious glass-and-chrome hall she led us into was as welcoming as a dentist's office. And it was cold! The icy rain outside the floor-to-ceiling windows seemed to be falling in the room itself. The only furniture in the room was several uncomfortable-looking chrome-and-canvas chairs and a small glass table with greenery and candles on it.\n\nTwo people were huddled in the center of the nearly empty hall, next to the glass table\u2014a stout, balding man and a pretty young woman in a thin dress. The woman had her arms folded across her bosom, as if trying to keep warm, and the stout man's nose was red. A chimpanzee in a maid's apron, a white collar, and a frilly cap was offering them drinks on a tray.\n\nThey all looked up expectantly as we entered. Lady Valladay squeezed Touff\u00e9t's arm. \"I have someone I want you to meet, Inspector,\" she said, and led him over to the chimpanzee.\n\n\"Inspector Touff\u00e9t, I'd like you to meet Heidi,\" she said. \"She came from a medical research lab, and she's one of your most devoted fans.\"\n\nNow that we were closer to the chimpanzee, I could see that what I had taken for a collar was actually a white bandage round the chimpanzee's shaved neck.\n\n\"She just had her laryngeal implant, so she can't speak yet,\" Lady Valladay said, \"but she has the highest IQ of any primate we've ever had here at the Institute, and she's already reading at a primary school level. She's read The Cat in the Hat and all the Curious George books, haven't you, Heidi?\" and the chimpanzee grinned widely and bobbed her head up and down. \"But your books are her favorites, Inspector Touff\u00e9t. She's constantly after me to read them to her, and sometimes she even tries to read them on her own.\"\n\nLady Valladay led Touff\u00e9t over to the table, her arm linked in his. \"Our primates have even outperformed A-level students on higher-level-thinking tests, but in spite of all the studies the Institute has done, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of primates' intelligence, people persist in thinking of them as animals instead of sentient creatures. They continue to put them in zoos, experiment on them, kill them for trophies. That's why it's so important that the Institute continue to exist.\"\n\n\"Continue to exist?\" Touff\u00e9t asked.\n\n\"I'm afraid we're sadly in need of funds,\" she said. \"If we don't find additional donors soon, we'll be forced to close. We\u2014\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" the stout man said. \"I didn't mean to interrupt. I only wanted to tell you how much I admire your work.\"\n\n\"This is Sergeant Eustis, our local police detective. Perhaps you two can exchange information about your investigations.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Sergeant Eustis said, fumbling at his tie, \"I haven't had any interesting cases, compared to Mr. Touff\u00e9t.\"\n\n\"What about\u2014\" she began, but the sergeant said, \"I'd very much like to hear about the Sappina jewel robbery.\"\n\n\"A very satisfying case,\" Touff\u00e9t said, and launched into an account of it.\n\nI wandered over to where the pretty young woman stood by the table and introduced myself.\n\n\"Leda Fox,\" she said, and pointed to a press badge. \"I'm a reporter with the Online Times. And I'm freezing.\" She leaned forward to warm her hands over one of the candles. \"You'd think with all the billions Lord Alastair's got, he could afford to turn up the heat.\"\n\n\"Lord Alastair is a billionaire?\"\n\n\"Yes. He made his fortune in AI patents.\"\n\n\"I was wondering how the Institute was financed,\" I said.\n\n\"Oh, no, the Institute doesn't get a penny. Lord Alastair never approved of primate research. It's all financed by donations. So, what's this mystery Inspector Touff\u00e9t's supposed to solve?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I have no idea,\" I said, sipping my drink. \"What was the media told?\"\n\n\"The media?\" she said blankly. \"Oh. You mean what were we told? Not much. Just that we were all invited to be present at the solving of a mystery by Inspector Touff\u00e9t. And we were sent a packet of information on primate intelligence.\" She frowned. \"I wonder what the mystery is.\"\n\n\"Something to do with the Institute, perhaps?\" I asked. \"Lady Charlotte seemed anxious to show us the facilities.\"\n\n\"She dragged me all over them this morning,\" Leda said.\n\n\"You do not like primates?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Animals are all right, I suppose, but one tour is enough. She wants me to go again with all of you this afternoon, but there's no way I'm going out in that,\" she said, gesturing at the falling rain. \"Tell her I have a headache.\"\n\nHeidi shambled over with a tray full of silver goblets, one hand under the tray and the other dragging the floor.\n\n\"What is it?\" I asked Leda, taking one of them.\n\n\"Wassail.\"\n\nHeidi waddled over to Touff\u00e9t and Sergeant Eustis.\n\n\"Poor Touff\u00e9t,\" I said.\n\n\"Doesn't he like wassail?\"\n\n\"He doesn't like Christmas.\"\n\n\"Do you think they're really as smart as Lady Charlotte says?\" Leda said, watching Heidi offer the tray to the police detective. \"She says Heidi can do long division. I can't do long division.\"\n\n\"Neither can I,\" I said, but she wasn't listening. She had turned to look at a tall man in his thirties who had just walked in.\n\n\"Who's that?\" I asked.\n\n\"Lady Charlotte's brother, James,\" she said. \"I met him this morning.\" She made a face.\n\n\"You didn't like him?\"\n\nShe leaned toward me and whispered, \"Drunk.\"\n\n\"Well, well, so this is the Great Detective,\" James said, walking over to Touff\u00e9t.\n\nLady Charlotte looked vexed. \"Inspector Touff\u00e9t, my brother, James.\"\n\nJames ignored her. \"Have you solved my sister's mystery yet? I heard you solve them\"\u2014he snapped his fingers next to Touff\u00e9t's nose\u2014\"like that!\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t stepped back. \"Lady Charlotte has not yet informed me of the nature of the mystery.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, then maybe you can solve a mystery for me. Why is it my sister prefers monkeys to her own father and brother?\"\n\n\"James,\" Lady Valladay said warningly.\n\n\"Heidi!\" James said, and snapped his fingers at her. \"Bring me a drink.\"\n\nThe chimpanzee hesitated, looking frightened, and then shambled over to him and offered the tray.\n\nJames grabbed a drink and turned back to Touff\u00e9t. \"It's a true mystery to me. Why would she rather spend her time with a bunch of dangerous, smelly, stupid\u2014\"\n\n\"James!\" Lady Valladay snapped.\n\n\"Oh, that's right. They're not stupid. They can do trigonometry. They can read Shakespeare. Isn't that right, Heidi?\" He tweaked her cap. \"How much is two plus two, Heidi?\"\n\nHeidi looked beseechingly at Lady Charlotte.\n\n\"How do you spell 'imbecile,' Heidi?\" James persisted.\n\n\"That's enough, James,\" Lady Charlotte said, putting her arm around the chimpanzee. \"Heidi, go unpack Inspector Touff\u00e9t's bags.\" She took the tray from her. \"That's my good girl.\"\n\nLady Charlotte set the tray down. \"Inspector, you and Colonel Bridlings must both be tired,\" she said, ignoring James, and he turned on his heel and walked out of the room. \"You'll want to get settled in and have a chance to rest before we tour the compound. D'Artagnan will show you to your rooms, and we'll meet in, say, an hour in the entryway.\"\n\nA door slammed, but she paid no attention. \"I do so want you to see our facility.\" She led us to the door. \"D'Artagnan, take them to their rooms.\"\n\n\"Yes, madam,\" he said. He started to drop to all fours, but then straightened.\n\n\"An hour, then,\" she said, smiling, and went down the corridor and into another room, shutting the door behind her.\n\nD'Artagnan pushed the lift button.\n\n\"I don't care\"\u2014Lady Charlotte's voice drifted down the hall\u2014\"I won't have you ruining this. It's too important.\"\n\n\"It's my house,\" James's voice said.\n\n\"It's Father's house.\"\n\n\"It won't be forever,\" James said, \"and when I inherit it, there won't be any monkeys in it. I'm shipping them back to the jungle the day Father dies.\"\n\n\"So this is your idea of a jolly Christmas?\" I asked Touff\u00e9t, waiting for him to put on his Inverness cape. I had spent the promised half hour attempting to find a telephone. I'd left in such a rush, I hadn't had time to telephone my sister to tell her I couldn't come. I attempted to ask Heidi, who was unpacking my things, but couldn't make her understand, so I went downstairs in search of one myself.\n\nThere was one in the study, a small frigid room across from the solarium. My sister was disappointed but optimistic.\n\n\"Perhaps your Inspector Touff\u00e9t will solve the mystery so quickly you can come tonight, or tomorrow. We could wait dinner.\"\n\n\"Better not,\" I said. \"We haven't even been told what the mystery is yet.\"\n\nI hung up and started back upstairs. As I came into the entryway, I caught a glimpse of Leda, in a hooded raincoat, going out the front door. She must have changed her mind about touring the compound, I thought, and wondered if I'd taken so long the others had left without me, but Touff\u00e9t was in his room, putting on a wool sweater and wrapping a knitted scarf around his neck.\n\n\"At least at my sister's house it's warm,\" I said, \"and no one ever threatens to turn anyone else out.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"And there are no mysteries.\" He put on his cape. \"Here already there are several.\"\n\n\"Lady Charlotte's told you why she invited us here?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"But certain things have struck me. What about you, Bridlings? Have you noticed nothing?\"\n\nI thought about it. \"I've noticed the brother's a lout. And that Ms. Fox is very pretty.\"\n\n\"Pretty. Alas, Bridlings, once again you see only the facade. You do not look at what lies behind. Do you not think it strange that Sergeant Eustis does not wish me to know of his interesting cases? All detectives wish to brag of their exploits.\"\n\nWell, that's certainly true, I thought.\n\n\"And there is this,\" he said, handing me Lady Charlotte's letter. \"Odd, is it not?\"\n\nI read it through. \"I don't see anything odd about it. She invites us to come and lists the train times.\"\n\n\"Indeed. Look at the second-to-last train time.\"\n\n\"The 5:48,\" I said.\n\n\"Are you certain?\"\n\n\"Yes. It says\u2014\"\n\n\"The five and the four are quite distinct, are they not? And yet both Mr. Rutgers and Ms. Fox say they mistook Lady Charlotte's five for a four and thus came a day early,\" he said, obviously in his element. \"A mystery, yes? Come, we are late.\"\n\nWe went down to the entryway. Lady Charlotte and Mick Rutgers were already there, bundled in coats and scarves. She was telling him about the Institute. \"Organizations and ethologists have tried for years to protect primate habitats and regulate the treatment of primates in captivity, but conditions have only gotten worse, and will continue to get worse, so long as people continue to think of them as animals.\"\n\nShe turned to greet us. \"Oh, Inspector, Colonel, we're just waiting for D'Artagnan. He's going to drive us down to the compound. I was just telling Mr. Rutgers about the Institute. Some people do not approve of our implanting larynxes and dressing primates in clothing, but the only chance they have of survival is for people to accept them. And to be accepted, unfortunately, they must stand upright, they must have employable skills. They're necessary to make people realize primates are sentient creatures, that they can think and reason and feel as we do. Did you know that humans and pygmy chimpanzees share ninety-nine percent of their genes? Ninety-nine percent. Our genes are their genes. And yet when the University of Oklahoma discontinued their language research project, the apes who had been taught to sign were used in AIDS experiments. Do you remember Lucy?\"\n\n\"The chimpanzee who was raised as a human and taught to sign?\" I asked.\n\n\"She was shipped back to Gambia, where she was murdered by poachers.\" Tears came to Lady Charlotte's eyes. \"They cut off her head and hands for trophies. Lucy, who knew three hundred words! Oh, D'Artagnan, there you are,\" she said.\n\nI turned. D'Artagnan was standing there in the corridor. He was still in his cutaway coat and trousers, but not his white gloves. I wondered how long he'd been there.\n\n\"Are you ready to drive us to the compound, Tanny?\" Lady Charlotte asked.\n\n\"Lord Alastair. Wish meet Inspector,\" he said in that ridiculously small voice.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Lady Charlotte said, as if she'd just heard bad news. She bit her lip, and then, as if she'd realized her response needed some sort of explanation, said, \"I'd hoped your arrival hadn't wakened him. My father has so much difficulty sleeping. I'm afraid we'll have to wait until tomorrow morning to tour the compound.\"\n\nShe turned to D'Artagnan. \"Tell Nurse Parchtry we'll be up directly,\" she said, and as he started to leave, \"Where are your gloves, Tanny?\"\n\nHe promptly put his hairy black paws behind his back and hung his head. \"Took off. Dishes. Now can't find.\"\n\n\"Well, go and get another pair out of the pantry.\" She took a bunch of keys out of her pocket and handed them to him.\n\n\"D'Artagnan sorry,\" he said, looking ashamed.\n\n\"I'm not angry,\" she said, putting her arms around his vast back. \"You know I love you.\"\n\n\"Love you,\" he said, and flung his huge arms around her.\n\nI looked at Touff\u00e9t, alarmed after what James had said, but D'Artagnan had already released her and was asking, \"Gloves first? Tell first?\"\n\n\"Tell Nurse Parchtry first, and then go and get a new pair of gloves.\" She patted his arm.\n\nHe nodded and lumbered off, Lady Charlotte smiling affectionately after him. \"He's such a dear,\" she said, and then continued briskly, \"Inspector Touff\u00e9t, if you don't mind, my father's an invalid and gets lonely.\"\n\n\"But of course I should be happy to meet him,\" he said.\n\n\"Can I meet him, too?\" Rutgers said. \"I've heard so much about his AI work.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Lady Valladay said, but she sounded reluctant. \"We'll all go up just for a little while. My father tires easily.\"\n\nShe pressed the button for the lift. We stepped inside. \"My father's rooms are on the fourth floor,\" she said, pressing another button. \"It used to be the nursery.\" The lift shot up. \"He's been ill for several years.\"\n\nThe lift opened, and Lady Charlotte led the way to a door. \"Oh, dear,\" she said. \"I gave my keys to D'Artagnan. Nurse Parchtry will have to let us in.\"\n\nShe knocked. \"My father has a wonderful nurse. Marvelously efficient. She's been with us for nearly a year.\"\n\nThe door started to open. I looked curiously at it, wondering if Nurse Parchtry would turn out to be an orangutan in a nurse's cap and stethoscope. But the person who opened the door was a thin, disheveled-looking woman in white trousers and a white smock.\n\n\"May we come in, Nurse Parchtry?\" Lady Charlotte asked, and the woman nodded and stepped back to let us through into a small room with plastic chairs and a Formica counter along one side.\n\n\"You'd best stay here in the anteroom, though,\" the woman said. \"Tapioca for lunch.\"\n\nIf this was Nurse Parchtry, she looked anything but efficient. One pocket of her smock was torn and hanging down, and her fine, gray-brown hair had come out of its bun on one side. There was a huge blob of something yellowish-gray on one trouser leg\u2014the tapioca?\n\nNo, the tapioca was splattered across the glass-and-chicken-wire partition that separated the room we were in from the larger one beyond, along with soft brown smears of something. I hoped they weren't what they looked like.\n\nI wondered if I had somehow misunderstood, and Lady Charlotte had taken us to see the primate compound after all instead. The room behind the partition looked almost like a cage, with toys and a large rubber tire in the middle of the floor. No, there was a single bed against the far wall and a rocking chair beside it.\n\n\"He heard the taxi,\" Nurse Parchtry was saying. \"I've told that cabbie to drive quietly. I tried to tell him it was just a parcel arriving for Christmas, but he knew it was guests. He always knows, and then there's just no dealing with him till he sees them.\"\n\nLady Charlotte nodded sympathetically. \"Nurse Parchtry, this is Inspector Touff\u00e9t.\"\n\n\"I'm so pleased to meet you,\" Nurse Parchtry said, trying to push the straggle of gray-brown hair behind her ear. \"I am such a fan of your detecting. I adored The Case of the Clever Cook. I've always wished I could see you solve one of your murders.\" She turned to me. \"Does he really solve them as quickly as you say, Colonel Bridlings?\"\n\nNurse Parchtry turned to Lady Charlotte. \"I was wondering\u2014it is Christmas Eve, and I am such a fan of Inspector Touff\u00e9t's\u2014if I might eat downstairs tonight instead of having a tray.\"\n\nLady Charlotte glanced uncertainly at the partition. \"I don't know\u2026.\"\n\n\"Lord Alastair always goes to sleep after he's had his cocoa,\" Nurse Parchtry said, gesturing toward the tray, \"and I did so want to hear Inspector Touff\u00e9t recount some of his celebrated cases. And Lord Alastair's been very good today.\"\n\nThere was a splat, and I looked over at the partition. A large blob of greenish mush was trickling down the center of the glass, and behind it, holding the plastic bowl it had come out of, was Lord Alastair.\n\nIf I had been shocked by the sight of a talking gorilla, I was completely overwhelmed by the sight of Lord Alastair, computer genius and billionaire, dressed in wrinkled pajamas, his white hair matted with the greenish stuff he'd just thrown. He was barefoot, and his teeth were bared in a cunning grin.\n\n\"Good Lord,\" I said, and next to me, Rutgers murmured disbelievingly, \"Al?\"\n\nLord Alastair stepped back, hunching his shoulders, and I wondered if we had frightened him, but he was still grinning. He reared back and spat at us.\n\n\"Oh, Father,\" Lady Charlotte said, and he grinned evilly at her and began smearing the spittle into the tapioca and the brown streaks, as if he were fingerpainting.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Nurse Parchtry said, \"and you were so good this morning.\" She pulled a bunch of keys out of her pocket, hastily unlocked a door next to the partition, and disappeared. She reappeared inside a moment later with a wet towel and began wiping Lord Alastair's hands.\n\nI watched, horrified, afraid he was going to spit on her next, but he only struggled to free his hands, slapping weakly at her like a naughty child and shouting a string of garbled obscenities.\n\nBeside me, Rutgers seemed hypnotized. \"How long has he been like this?\"\n\n\"It's gotten gradually worse,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"Ten years.\"\n\nNurse Parchtry had Lord Alastair's hands clean and was combing his hair. \"You must look nice for your guests,\" she said, her voice faint but clear through the glass. \"Inspector Touff\u00e9t's here, the famous detective.\"\n\nShe brought him over to the partition, holding his left wrist in a firm grasp. \"Lord Alastair, I'd like you to meet Inspector Touff\u00e9t.\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t stepped up to the glass and bowed. \"I'm pleased to meet you.\"\n\n\"Inspector Touff\u00e9t's come to solve a mystery for us, Father,\" Lady Charlotte said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Touff\u00e9t said, \"I am interested to know more of this mystery.\"\n\nThere was a knock at the door behind us. \"Shall I?\" I asked Lady Charlotte.\n\n\"Please,\" she said, and I unlocked and opened it. It was Heidi, bearing a tray with a toddler's lidded cup and a plate of graham biscuits on it.\n\nI stepped back so she could enter, and as soon as she did, Lord Alastair exploded. His left arm came up sharply, clipping Nurse Parchtry on the chin, and she reeled back, cradling her jaw. He began pounding on the glass with both hands and hooting wildly. Heidi watched him, clutching the tray, her eyes wide with fright.\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"Heidi, set the tray down on the counter.\"\n\nHeidi did, her eyes still on Lord Alastair, then bobbed a curtsey and ran awkwardly out on all fours. Lord Alastair continued pounding for a moment and then walked over to the plastic bowl, sat down on the floor, and began licking the inside of the bowl.\n\nRutgers shook his head sadly. \"Ten years,\" he murmured.\n\nNurse Parchtry disappeared and then reappeared at the door, her jaw and cheek scarlet.\n\n\"He doesn't like Heidi,\" she said unnecessarily. \"Or D'Artagnan.\" She put her hand wincingly up to her cheek. \"He threw the rocking chair the last time D'Artagnan brought in his lunch.\"\n\n\"I think you'd best put some ice on that,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"And with Father so upset, I think perhaps you'd better eat up here tonight.\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\" Nurse Parchtry said desperately. \"He'll quiet down now. He always does after\u2014\"\n\nThere was a banging on the door, and Touff\u00e9t moved to open it. James burst in, clutching his thumb. \"You will not believe what that monster just did!\"\n\nI wheeled and looked at the partition, thinking Lord Alastair must have gotten out somehow, but he was still sitting in the middle of the floor. He'd put the bowl on his head.\n\n\"He grabbed my hand and tried to tear it off. Look!\" He thrust it at Lady Charlotte. \"I think it's broken!\"\n\nI couldn't see any telltale redness like that on Nurse Parchtry's jaw.\n\n\"The brute tried to kill me!\" he said.\n\n\"What brute?\" Lady Charlotte asked.\n\n\"What brute? That ape of yours! I was walking down the corridor, and he suddenly reached out and grabbed me.\"\n\nHe turned to us. \"I've tried to tell my sister her apes are dangerous, but she won't listen!\"\n\n\"I thought that gorillas had very gentle natures,\" Rutgers said.\n\n\"That's what the so-called scientists at my sister's Institute say, that they're all harmless as kittens, that they wouldn't hurt a fly! Well, what about this?\" he said, shaking his hand at us again. \"When we're all murdered in our beds some morning, don't say I didn't warn you!\"\n\nHe stormed out, but his ragings had roused Lord Alastair, who was pounding on the glass again.\n\n\"He'll go to sleep as soon as he's had his cocoa,\" Nurse Parchtry said pleadingly. \"He always does, and today he didn't have a nap. And I'd have the monitor with me. I'd be able to hear him if he woke up. And it's Christmas Eve!\"\n\n\"All right,\" Lady Charlotte said, relenting. \"But if he wakes up, you'll have to come straight back up here.\"\n\n\"I will, I promise,\" she said, as giddily as if she were Cinderella promising to leave the ball by midnight. \"Oh, this will be such fun!\"\n\n\"It's hardly my idea of fun,\" I told Touff\u00e9t as we were going down for dinner. \"I'd much rather be at my sister's. And I'll wager Lady Charlotte would rather be, too. It's obvious why she prefers apes, with a father and a brother like that.\"\n\n\"The father is a millionaire,\" Touff\u00e9t said thoughtfully. \"Is that not so?\"\n\n\"Billionaire,\" I said.\n\n\"Ah. I wonder who is it that inherits his estate when he dies? I wonder also what makes Nurse Parchtry stay with such a disagreeable patient?\" He rubbed his hands, obviously enjoying himself. \"So many mysteries. And perhaps there will be more at dinner.\"\n\nThere were, the first one being whether Lady Charlotte was even aware it was Christmas. There were no decorations on the table, no holly or pine garlands decking the dining room, and no heat. Leda, who had changed into a fetching little strapless dress, was shivering with cold.\n\nAnd the dinner was utterly ordinary, no boar's head, no goose, no turkey, only some underseasoned cod and some overdone beef, all served by D'Artagnan, in new gloves, and Heidi. Hardly a festive holiday feast.\n\nLady Charlotte didn't appear to notice. She was well launched on the subject of primate intelligence, apparently grateful that her brother, James, hadn't come down to dinner. Nurse Parchtry wasn't there, either. Apparently her patient hadn't gone off to sleep as easily as she'd hoped.\n\n\"One of the prejudices we're working to overcome is that primate behavior is instinctive,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"We've done research that demonstrates conclusively their behavior is intentional. Primates are capable of conscious thought, of planning, and learning from experience, and of having insights.\"\n\nJust after the soup course (tinned), Nurse Parchtry hurried in and sat down between Leda and me. She had changed out of her uniform into a gray chiffon thing with floating draperies, and she was all smiles.\n\n\"He's finally asleep,\" she said breathlessly, setting a white plastic box on the table. A series of wheezes and gasping noises came from it. \"It's a baby monitor. So I can hear Lord Alastair if he wakes up.\"\n\nHow nice, I thought. Midway through dinner we shall be treated to a stream of animal screams and obscenities.\n\n\"What is it that Lord Alastair suffers from?\" I asked.\n\n\"Dementia,\" she said, \"and hatefulness, neither one of which is fatal, unfortunately. He could live for years. Thank you, Heidi,\" she said, as the chimpanzee set a plate of fish in front of her. \"Isn't this exciting, Heidi, having Inspector Touff\u00e9t here?\"\n\nHeidi nodded.\n\n\"Heidi and I are both mystery fans. We've been reading The Case of the Crushed Skull, haven't we?\"\n\nHeidi nodded again and signed something to Nurse Parchtry.\n\n\"She says she thinks the vicar did it,\" she said. She signed rapidly to Heidi. \"I think it was the ex-wife. Which of us is right, Colonel Bridlings?\"\n\nNeither, as a matter of fact, though I had to give Heidi credit. I had thought it was the vicar, too. \"I don't want to spoil the ending,\" I said, and Heidi bobbed her head in approval.\n\n\"He was always a dreadful man,\" Nurse Parchtry said, returning to the topic of Lord Alastair. \"And, unfortunately, his son's just like him.\" She lowered her voice to a whisper. \"Which is why he left everything to him in his will, I suppose. A pity. He'll only gamble it away.\"\n\n\"He gambles?\" I said.\n\n\"He's horribly in debt,\" she whispered. \"I heard him on the phone only this morning, pleading with his tout. You see, Lord Alastair arranged his money so it can't be touched until his death, which I suppose is a good thing. Otherwise there'd be nothing left.\" She shook her head. \"It's Lady Charlotte I feel sorry for.\"\n\nShe leaned closer, her draperies drifting across my arm. \"Did you know Lord Alastair stopped her from marrying her true love? She fell in love with one of his AI scientists, Phillip Davidson\u2014Phillip was the one who got her interested in primate intelligence\u2014and when Lord Alastair found out, he trumped up charges of industrial espionage against him, ruined his reputation, forced him to emigrate. Lady Charlotte never married.\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t would be interested in knowing that, I thought. I glanced at him, but he was watching Mick Rutgers, who was listening to Lady Charlotte talk of her apes' accomplishments.\n\n\"D'Artagnan has learned eight hundred words, and over fifty sentences,\" she said. \"We work for two hours a day on vocabulary.\" She smiled at D'Artagnan, who was removing the fish course. \"And for an hour on serving skills.\"\n\nHeidi began serving the roast beef. The snores and wheezes from the baby monitor subsided to a heavy, even breathing.\n\n\"Heidi and I work on her reading for two hours a day, and she reads on her own for another hour. Heidi,\" Lady Charlotte said, stopping her as she set a plate of roast beef down in front of Leda. \"Tell Inspector Touff\u00e9t what your favorite case is.\"\n\nHeidi signed rapidly, grinning widely.\n\n\"The Case of the Cat's Paw,\" Lady Charlotte translated.\n\nTouff\u00e9t looked pleased. \"Ah, yes, a most satisfying case,\" he said, and launched into an account of it.\n\n\"What's a cat's paw?\" Leda whispered to me. \"It's not like a rabbit's foot, is it?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"It's when someone uses another person for their own ends. It comes from an old tale about a monkey who used a cat's paw to pull chestnuts out of the fire.\"\n\n\"That's cruel,\" Nurse Parchtry said.\n\n\"No crueler than keeping apes captive and dressing them up in human clothes,\" Leda hissed.\n\n\"You don't approve of Lady Charlotte's work?\" Nurse Parchtry said, shocked.\n\n\"N-no, of course I didn't mean that,\" Leda said, looking flustered. She took a forkful of roast beef and then laid it back down on her plate.\n\n\"Lady Charlotte has only the primates' best interests at heart in all her work,\" Nurse Parchtry said firmly. \"She's utterly devoted to them, and they'd do anything for her. She saved them, you know, from terrible fates. Heidi was being experimented on.\"\n\nLady Charlotte had apparently heard the last part of that. \"Experiments?\" she said, interrupting Touff\u00e9t in the middle of his case. \"Primates are still being experimented on, in spite of our having proved they're conscious creatures and can feel pain just as we do. Our research has shown that they can acquire knowledge, solve complex problems, use tools, and manipulate language. Everything that humans can do.\"\n\n\"Not quite,\" Sergeant Eustis said. \"They can't commit crimes or tell lies. Or cheat at cards.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact,\" Mick Rutgers said, \"primates can.\"\n\n\"Cheat at cards?\" Sergeant Eustis said. \"Don't tell me D'Artagnan plays poker, too?\"\n\nEveryone laughed.\n\n\"Various studies have shown that apes are capable of deception,\" Rutgers said. \"Apes in the wild frequently hide food and then retrieve it when the rest of the troop is asleep, and signing apes who have done something naughty will lie when asked whether they did it. Several times Lucy hid a key in her mouth and waited until her owners were gone, and then let herself out. Their ability to lie and deceive is proof of their capability for higher forms of thinking, since it involves determining what another creature thinks and how it can be fooled.\"\n\nLady Charlotte was looking curiously at Rutgers. \"You seem to know a great deal about primates, for a reporter,\" she said.\n\n\"It was in the informational packet you sent,\" he said.\n\n\"And you're quite right, they are capable of deception,\" she said. \"But they are also capable of affection, fear, grief, gentleness, and devotion. They are far better creatures than we are.\"\n\n\"Is that why they attack people for no reason?\" James said, coming in and sitting down next to his sister. He snapped his fingers, and Heidi hurried to bring him a plate of roast beef, looking frightened. \"Is that why the University of Oklahoma had to shut down their research program after one of their apes bit the finger off a visiting surgeon? Because they're better creatures?\"\n\nHe snatched the plate away from Heidi. \"Has my sister told you about Lucy yet? Poor Lucy, who got sent back to the jungle to be killed by poachers? Did she tell you why Lucy got sent back? Because she attacked her owner.\" He smiled maliciously at Heidi. \"That could happen to you, too, you know. And your friend D'Artagnan.\"\n\n\"I'd attack my owner, too, if I were an intelligent creature being treated like a slave,\" Mick Rutgers said, and Lady Charlotte gave him a grateful look, and then frowned, as if she were trying to place something.\n\nI'd hoped there would at least be a plum pudding in honor of Christmas, but there was only vanilla custard, which reminded me unpleasantly of Lord Alastair's tapioca, but at least it meant an end to the meal. When Lady Charlotte said, \"Shall we adjourn to the solarium?\" I practically leaped out of my chair.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Madam, you still have not informed me of the mystery you wished me to solve.\"\n\n\"All in good time,\" she said. \"We must play a game first. No Christmas Eve is complete without games. Who wants to play Hunt the Slipper?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Nurse Parchtry piped up, and then looked nervous, as if she should not have called attention to herself.\n\n\"I have no intention of hunting all over the house for someone's smelly shoe,\" James said, and Touff\u00e9t shot him an approving glance.\n\n\"How about Musical Chairs?\"\n\n\"No. That's as bad as Hunt the Slipper,\" James said. \"I think we should play Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral.\"\n\n\"That's because you're so good at it,\" Lady Charlotte said, but some of the bitterness seemed to have gone out of both their voices, perhaps because it was, after all, Christmas Eve.\n\nLady Charlotte led the way to the library. \"I'm so glad Lord Alastair is still asleep,\" Nurse Parchtry said to me as we followed Lady Charlotte. She held the monitor up close to my ear. I could barely hear his faint, even breathing. \"He won't wake up for hours,\" she said happily. \"I love Christmas games.\"\n\n\"You should have come with me to my sister's, Touff\u00e9t,\" I whispered to him. \"You would only have had to play charades.\"\n\n\"Who shall be first?\" Lady Charlotte said after we'd settled ourselves in the canvas chairs. \"Sergeant Eustis? You must go and stand out in the corridor while we decide on an object.\"\n\nSergeant Eustis obligingly went out of the room and shut the door behind him.\n\n\"All right, what shall it be?\" Lady Charlotte said brightly.\n\n\"Vegetable,\" Leda said.\n\n\"A Christmas tree,\" Nurse Parchtry said eagerly.\n\n\"He'd guess that in a minute,\" James said. \"A literary character. It always takes them at least a dozen questions to determine it's fictional.\"\n\n\"Father Christmas!\" Nurse Parchtry said.\n\nEveryone ignored her.\n\n\"What do you think it should be, Inspector Touff\u00e9t?\" Lady Charlotte asked.\n\n\"The mystery which you asked me here to solve,\" Touff\u00e9t said.\n\n\"No, that's too complicated,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"I've got it! Fingerprints! It's perfect for a police officer.\"\n\nA spirited discussion ensued over whether fingerprints were animal, vegetable, or mineral, and, unable to decide, they chose Goldilocks instead.\n\n\"She's a fictional character, and she committed a crime.\"\n\nSergeant Eustis was called in and began guessing. As predicted, he used thirteen of his twenty questions to determine that it was a fictional character, and then astonished everyone by guessing \"Goldilocks\" immediately.\n\n\"How did you guess?\" Leda asked.\n\n\"It's always Goldilocks,\" he said. \"Because I'm a police detective. Breaking and entering, you know.\"\n\nOne by one, everyone except Touff\u00e9t took their turn at standing in the corridor and attempting to guess\u2014a plum pudding (Nurse Parchtry's suggestion), the slipper in Hunt the Slipper, a map of Borneo, and a pair of embroidery scissors.\n\nWhen it was James's turn, he demanded to be allowed to take a chair with him out into the corridor. \"I don't intend to stand there forever while you all try to pick something that will fool me. I must warn you, I have never failed to guess the answer.\"\n\n\"He's quite right,\" Lady Charlotte said, smiling. \"Last Christmas he guessed it in four.\"\n\n\"Mistletoe,\" Nurse Parchtry said.\n\n\"It's got to be a fictional character,\" Rutgers said. \"He admitted himself it's the hardest to guess.\"\n\n\"No, his is always a fictional character. It needs to be someone real. And someone obscure. Anastasia!\"\n\n\"I would hardly call Anastasia obscure,\" I said.\n\n\"No, but if he asks 'Is the person living?' we can say we don't know, and he'll think it's a fictional character.\"\n\n\"What if he's already asked if it's a fictional character and we've said no?\"\n\n\"But it was a fictional character,\" Leda said. \"I saw the Disney film when I was little.\"\n\n\"And when he asks if it's animal, vegetable, or mineral,\" Sergeant Eustis said. \"We can say mineral. Because her body was burned to ashes.\"\n\n\"We don't know that,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"Her bones have never been found.\"\n\nIt was a good thing James had insisted on the chair. It took us nearly fifteen minutes to decide, during which time Touff\u00e9t looked increasingly as if he were going to explode.\n\n\"But, if he knows we know he always guesses fictional characters,\" Sergeant Eustis said, \"then he'll think we won't choose one, so we should.\"\n\n\"King Kong,\" Nurse Parchtry said.\n\nThere was an embarrassed silence.\n\n\"I think perhaps we should avoid any references to primates,\" Lady Charlotte said finally.\n\nWe finally decided on R2D2, who was both mineral and animal (the actor inside him) and fictional and real (the actual tin can), and had the advantage of being from an old movie, which Lady Charlotte said her brother never watched.\n\nJames guessed it in four questions.\n\n\"All right,\" Lady Charlotte said, looking round the room. \"Who hasn't gone yet? Mr. Rutgers?\"\n\n\"I was a pair of embroidery scissors, remember?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Mr. Touff\u00e9t, you're the only one left. Come along. I'm sure you'll solve it even more quickly than my brother.\"\n\n\"Madam,\" Touff\u00e9t said, and his voice was deadly quiet. \"I did not come to Marwaite Manor to play at games. I came in response to your request to solve a mystery. I wish to know what it is.\"\n\nEither Lady Charlotte was tired of thinking up things, or she sensed the deadliness in Touff\u00e9t's voice.\n\n\"You're quite right,\" she said. \"It is time. What Inspector Touff\u00e9t said is true. I asked him here to solve a mystery, a mystery so baffling only the greatest detective in the world could solve it.\"\n\nShe stood up, as if to make a speech. \"The research my Institute has done has proved that primates are capable of higher-thinking skills and complex planning, that they can think and understand and speak and even write.\"\n\n\"Madam,\" Touff\u00e9t said, half rising.\n\nShe waved him back to sitting. \"The mystery that I wish Inspector Touff\u00e9t to solve is this: Since it has been proved that primates have thoughts and ideas equivalent to those of humans, that they are by every standard human, why are they not treated as human? Why do they not have legal standing in the courts? Why are they not allowed to vote and own property? Why have they not been given their civil rights? Inspector Touff\u00e9t, only you can solve this mystery. Only you can give us the answer! Why are apes not given equal standing with humans?\"\n\n\"You've been taken in, Touff\u00e9t,\" I said, I must admit with some pleasure. \"Lady Charlotte only invited you here as a publicity stunt. She wanted you to be a pitchman for her Institute.\" I laughed. \"This time it's you who's the cat's paw. She's using you to get chimpanzees the vote.\"\n\n\"A cat's paw,\" he said, offended. \"I do not allow myself to be used as a cat's paw.\" He pulled his bag off the top of the bureau. \"What time is the next train to your sister's?\"\n\n\"You're leaving?\" I said.\n\n\"We are leaving,\" he said. \"Telephone your sister and tell her we will arrive tonight. Inspector Touff\u00e9t does not allow himself to be used by anyone.\"\n\nWell, at any rate my sister would be happy, I thought, going downstairs to telephone her. I pulled the train schedule out of my pocket. If we were able to catch the 9:30 train, we could be there before midnight. I wondered whether Lady Charlotte would arrange for us to be driven to the station, and whether the driver would be D'Artagnan. I decided under the circumstances I'd better phone for a taxi as well. D'Artagnan was devoted to her. He might not like the idea of our leaving.\n\nI started to open the door of the study and then stopped at the sound of a woman's voice. \"No, it's going fine,\" she said. \"You should have seen me. I was great. I even ate roast beef.\" There was a pause. \"Tomorrow, while they're touring the compound. Listen, I've gotta go.\"\n\nI backed hastily away, not wishing to be caught eavesdropping, and into the solarium. For a moment I thought there were two people standing by the window, and then I realized it was Heidi and D'Artagnan. Heidi was signing animatedly to the gorilla, and he was nodding.\n\nThey stopped as soon as they saw me, and D'Artagnan started toward me. \"Help you, sir?\"\n\n\"I'm looking for a telephone,\" I said, and he led me out into the corridor and over to the study.\n\nI phoned my sister. \"Oh, good,\" she said. \"I'll meet you at the station. Have you had dinner?\"\n\n\"Only a bite.\"\n\n\"I'll bring you a sandwich.\"\n\nWhen I got back upstairs, Touff\u00e9t was already waiting by the lift with our bags. \"Have you telephoned for a taxi?\" he asked, pushing the lift button.\n\n\"Yes,\" I'd started to say, when the air was split by a shrill, terrified scream from somewhere above us.\n\n\"Good Lord, Touff\u00e9t!\" I said. \"It sounds like someone's being murdered.\"\n\n\"No doubt Lady Charlotte has discovered I am leaving,\" he said dryly, and pushed the button again.\n\nRutgers came tumbling out of his room, and Leda's blond head appeared. \"What was that? It sounded like an animal being tortured.\"\n\n\"I think we should take the stairs,\" I said, but before I could turn, the lift opened, and Nurse Parchtry fell into my arms.\n\n\"It's Lord Alastair!\" she sobbed. \"He's dead!\"\n\n\"Dead?\" Touff\u00e9t said.\n\n\"Yes!\" she said. \"You must come!\" She stepped back into the lift. \"I think he's been murdered!\"\n\nWe followed her into the lift. \"Murdered?\" Mick Rutgers said from down the hall, but the door was already shutting.\n\n\"See if Sergeant Eustis has gone,\" Touff\u00e9t called through the closing door. \"Now,\" he said to Nurse Parchtry as the lift started. \"Tell me exactly what happened. Everything. After the games did you return to the nursery?\"\n\n\"Yes. No, I went to my room to finish wrapping my Christmas presents,\" she said guiltily. \"I had the baby monitor with me.\"\n\n\"And you heard nothing?\" Touff\u00e9t asked.\n\n\"No. I thought he was sleeping. He wasn't making any noise at all.\" She started to sob again. \"I didn't know the monitor was broken.\"\n\nThe lift doors parted, and we stepped out. The door to the anteroom stood ajar. \"Was this door open when you arrived?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, leading the way into the anteroom. \"And this one, too.\" She pointed at the door to the nursery. \"I thought he'd gotten out. But then I saw\u2026him\u2026.\" She buried her head in my jacket.\n\n\"Come, madam,\" Touff\u00e9t said sternly. \"You must pull yourself together. You said you had always wished to see me solve a mystery. Now you shall, but you must help me.\"\n\n\"You're right, I did. I will,\" she said, but when we went into the nursery, she hung back reluctantly and then grabbed on to my arm for support.\n\nThe place was a shambles. Lord Alastair's bed had been overturned and the bedclothes dragged off it. The pillows had been torn up, the stuffing flung in handfuls about the room. The rocking chair, bowls, toys, tire\u2014all looked as if they had been thrown about the room in a violent rage. Lord Alastair lay on his back in the middle of the floor, half on a rumpled blanket, his face swollen and purple.\n\n\"Did you touch anything?\" Touff\u00e9t asked, looking around the room.\n\n\"No,\" Nurse Parchtry said. \"I knew from your cases not to.\" She clapped her hand to her mouth. \"I did touch him. I took his pulse and listened to his heart. I thought perhaps he wasn't dead.\"\n\nHe looked dead to me. His face was a horrible purplish-blue color, his tongue pushing out of his mouth, his eyes bulging, his neck bruised. And she was a nurse. She should have known at a glance there was no hope of resuscitation.\n\n\"Did you touch anything else?\" Touff\u00e9t said, squatting down and holding out his monocle to look closely at Lord Alastair's neck.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"I screamed, and then I ran to find you.\"\n\n\"Where did you scream?\"\n\n\"Where?\" she said blankly. \"Right here. By the body.\"\n\nHe stood up and looked at the glass partition and then walked over to the wall. The baby monitor lay against it, its back off and the front of the case broken in two pieces.\n\n\"That's why there was no sound from the monitor,\" I said. \"That means he could have been killed anytime after dinner.\"\n\n\"And no one has an alibi,\" Nurse Parchtry said. \"We were all out in the corridor by ourselves for several minutes.\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t had picked up the baby monitor and was examining the switch. \"Should you be doing that?\" I asked. \"Won't it smudge the fingerprints?\"\n\n\"There are no fingerprints,\" he said, putting the monitor back down, \"and none on the neck, either.\"\n\n\"I warned you!\" James said, appearing in the doorway. \"I told you that ape was dangerous, and now he's killed my father!\" He strode over to the body.\n\n\"I need to secure this crime scene,\" Sergeant Eustis said, coming into the room, unreeling yards and yards of yellow \"Do Not Cross\" tape. \"I'll have to ask all of you to leave. Don't touch anything,\" he said sharply to James, who was putting his hand to his father's neck. \"This is a murder investigation. I'll want to question everyone downstairs.\"\n\n\"Murder investigation!\" James said. \"There's no need for any investigation! I'll tell you who murdered my father. It was that ape!\"\n\n\"The evidence will tell us who killed him,\" Sergeant Eustis said, walking back over to the body. \"Inspector Touff\u00e9t, come look at this. It's a hair.\"\n\nHe pointed to a long, coarse black hair lying on Lord Alastair's pajama'd chest.\n\n\"There! Look at that!\" James said. \"There's your evidence!\"\n\nSergeant Eustis took out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers and carefully placed the hair in the bag. While all this was going on, Touff\u00e9t had walked over to the far wall and was looking at the lidded cup, which had apparently hit the wall and bounced. Cocoa was splattered across the wall in a long arc. Touff\u00e9t picked up the cup, pried off the lid, sniffed at the contents, and then dipped a finger in and licked it off.\n\n\"You mustn't touch that!\" Sergeant Eustis said, racing over, trailing long loops of yellow. \"The fingerprints!\"\n\n\"You will not find any fingerprints,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"The murderer wore gloves.\"\n\n\"You see!\" James shouted. \"Even the Great Detective knows D'Artagnan did it. Why aren't you out capturing him? He's liable to kill someone else!\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t ignored him. He handed Sergeant Eustis the cup. \"Have the residue analyzed. I think it will yield interesting results.\"\n\nSergeant Eustis put the cup into an evidence bag and handed it to the young constable who'd just arrived and was gaping at Lord Alastair. \"Have the residue analyzed,\" Sergeant Eustis said, \"and take all these people downstairs. I will want to question everyone in the house.\"\n\n\"Question!\" James raged. \"This is a waste of time. It's obvious what happened here. I warned you!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Touff\u00e9t said, looking curiously at James. \"You did.\"\n\nI was surprised that Touff\u00e9t didn't object to being herded out of the nursery and into the lift by the constable, along with everyone else, but he only said, \"Has Lady Charlotte been told?\"\n\n\"I'll tell her,\" Mick Rutgers volunteered, and Touff\u00e9t gazed at him for a long moment, as if his mind were elsewhere, and then nodded. He continued to look at Rutgers as he went down the corridor, and then turned to me. \"Who do you think committed the murder, Bridlings?\"\n\n\"It seems perfectly straightforward,\" I said. \"James said the apes were dangerous, and, unfortunately, it appears he was right.\"\n\n\"Appears, yes. That is because you see only the surface.\"\n\n\"Well, what do you see?\" I demanded. \"The old man's been strangled, furniture's been smashed, there's a gorilla hair on the body.\"\n\n\"Exactly. It is like a scene out of a mystery novel. I have something I wish you to do,\" he said abruptly. \"I wish you to find Leda Fox and tell her Sergeant Eustis wishes to speak to her.\"\n\n\"But he didn't say he\u2014\"\n\n\"He said he wished to question everyone.\"\n\n\"You don't think Leda had anything to do with this?\" I said. \"She can't have. She's not strong enough. Lord Alastair was strangled. There was a terrific struggle.\"\n\n\"So it would appear,\" he said. He motioned me out of the room.\n\nI went up to Leda's room and was surprised to find her packing. \"I'm not staying in the same house with a killer gorilla,\" she said. \"A cold house with a killer gorilla.\"\n\n\"No one's allowed to leave,\" I said. \"Sergeant Eustis wants to question you.\"\n\nI was surprised at her reaction. She went completely white. \"Question me?\" she stammered. \"What about?\"\n\n\"Who saw what, where we all were at the time of the murder, and that sort of thing, I suppose,\" I said, trying to reassure her.\n\n\"But I thought they knew who did it,\" she said. \"I thought D'Artagnan did it.\"\n\n\"Knowing who did it and proving it are two different things,\" I said. \"I'm certain it's just routine.\"\n\nShe started up to the nursery, and I went back to the study to find Touff\u00e9t. He wasn't there, nor was he in his room. Perhaps he'd gone back up to the nursery, too. I went out to the lift, and it opened, revealing Lady Charlotte. She looked pale and drawn. \"Oh, Colonel Bridlings,\" she said, \"where is Inspector Touff\u00e9t?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"I am here, madam,\" Touff\u00e9t said, and I turned and looked at him in surprise, wondering where he'd come from.\n\n\"Oh, Inspector,\" she said, clutching at his hands. \"I know I brought you here under false pretenses, but now you must solve this murder. D'Artagnan could not possibly have killed my father, but my brother is determined to\u2014\" She broke down.\n\n\"Madam, compose yourself,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"I must ask you two questions. First, are any of your household keys missing?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said, pulling the bunch of keys out of her pocket and examining them. \"The key to the nursery,\" she said suddenly. \"But the keys have been with me all day. No, I didn't have them when we went up to see my father, and Nurse Parchtry had to let us in. Let's see, I had them this morning, and then I gave them to D'Artagnan because he'd misplaced his gloves\u2014\" She stopped, as if suddenly aware of what she'd said. \"Oh, but you don't think he\u2014\"\n\n\"My second question is this,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"When your father had difficult days, could you hear him on the lower floors of the house?\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" she said. \"If only we'd heard him tonight. Poor old\u2026\" She clutched tearfully at Touff\u00e9t's sleeve. \"Please say you will stay and solve the murder.\"\n\n\"I have already solved it,\" he said. \"I request that you ask everyone to come into the parlor, including Sergeant Eustis, and give them a glass of sherry. Bridlings and I will join you shortly.\"\n\nAs soon as she was gone, Touff\u00e9t turned to me. \"What time is the last train to Sussex?\"\n\n\"11:14,\" I said.\n\n\"Excellent,\" he said, consulting his pocket watch. \"More than enough time. You shall be at your sister's in time to burn your fingers on the raisins.\"\n\n\"We don't play Snapdragon,\" I said. \"We play charades. And how can you have solved the crime so quickly? Sergeant Eustis's men haven't even had time to gather evidence, let alone run forensics tests.\"\n\nHe waved his hand dismissively. \"Forensics, evidence, they tell us only how the murder was done, not why.\"\n\nThey also frequently tell us who, I would have said, if Touff\u00e9t had given me the opportunity, but he was still expounding.\n\n\" 'Why' is the only question that matters,\" he said, \"for if we know the 'why,' we know both who did the murder and how it was done. Go and tell your sister we will be on the train without fail.\"\n\nI went downstairs and telephoned my sister again. \"Oh, good,\" she said, \"we're going to play Dumb Crambo this year!\"\n\nAs I hung up, Touff\u00e9t said, \"Bridlings!\"\n\nI turned round, expecting to see him in the door. There was no one there. I went out into the corridor and looked up the stairs.\n\n\"Bridlings,\" Touff\u00e9t said again, from inside the room. I went back in.\n\n\"Bridlings, come here at once. I need you,\" Touff\u00e9t said, and laughed.\n\n\"Where are you?\" I asked, wondering if this was some sort of ventriloquist's joke.\n\n\"In the nursery,\" he said. \"Can you hear me?\"\n\nWell, of course I could hear him or I wouldn't be answering him. \"Yes,\" I said, looking all round the room and finally spying the baby monitor, half hidden behind a clock on one of the bookshelves. I reached to pick it up. \"Don't pick it up,\" he said. \"You will ruin the forensic evidence you consider so important.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to come up to the nursery?\"\n\n\"That will not be necessary. I have found out what I wished to know. Go into the parlor and make sure that Lady Charlotte has assembled everyone.\"\n\nShe had, though not in the parlor. \"We don't have a parlor,\" she said, meeting me in the corridor as I came out of the library. \"I've put everyone in the solarium, where we were last night. I hope that's all right.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it will be fine,\" I said.\n\n\"And I didn't have any sherry.\" She stopped at the door. \"I had Heidi make Singapore slings.\"\n\n\"Probably a very good idea,\" I said, and opened the door.\n\nLeda was perched on a canvas-covered hassock, with Rutgers behind her. The nurse sat in one of the canvas chairs, and the police sergeant perched next to her on the coffee table. James leaned against one of the bookshelves with a drink in his hand. D'Artagnan stood over by the windows.\n\nAs I came in, they all, except James and Heidi, who was offering him a tray of drinks, looked up expectantly and then relaxed.\n\n\"Is it true?\" Leda asked eagerly. \"Has Monsieur Touff\u00e9t solved the crime? Does he know who murdered Lord Alastair?\"\n\n\"We all know who murdered my father,\" James said, pointing at D'Artagnan. \"That animal flew into a rage and strangled him! Isn't that right, Inspector Touff\u00e9t?\" he said to Touff\u00e9t, who had just come in the door. \"My father was killed by that animal!\"\n\n\"So I at first thought,\" Touff\u00e9t said, polishing his monocle. \"A gorilla goes out of control, kills Lord Alastair in a violent rage, and destroys the nursery as he might his cage, throwing the furniture and the dishes against the wall. The baby monitor, also, was thrown against the wall and broken, which was why the nurse did not hear the murder being committed.\"\n\n\"You see!\" James said to his sister. \"Even your Great Detective says D'Artagnan did it.\"\n\n\"I said that so it seemed at first,\" Touff\u00e9t said, looking irritated at the remark about the Great Detective, \"but then I began to notice things\u2014the fact that there were no signs of forcible entry, that the baby monitor had been switched off before it was thrown against the wall, that though it looked like a scene of great violence, none of us had heard anything\u2014things that made me think, perhaps this is not a violent crime at all, but a carefully planned murder.\"\n\n\"Carefully planned!\" James shouted. \"The gorilla choked the life out of him in a fit of animal rage.\" He turned to Sergeant Eustis. \"Why aren't you upstairs, gathering forensic evidence to prove that was what happened?\"\n\n\"I do not need the forensic evidence,\" Touff\u00e9t said. He took out a meerschaum pipe and filled it. \"To solve this murder, I need only the motive.\"\n\n\"The motive?\" James shouted. \"You don't ask a bear what his motive is for biting off someone's head, do you? It's a wild animal!\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t lit his pipe and took several long puffs on it. \"So I begin by asking myself,\" he went on implacably, \"who had a motive for killing Lord Alastair? Your father's will left everything to you, Lord James, did it not?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" James said. \"You're not suggesting I put that gorilla up to\u2014\"\n\n\"I do not suggest anything. I say only that you had a motive.\" He picked up his monocle and surveyed the crowd. \"As does Ms. Fox.\"\n\n\"What?\" Leda said, twitching her dress down over her thighs. \"I never even met Lord Alastair.\"\n\n\"What you say is the truth,\" Touff\u00e9t said, \"though it is the only true thing you have said since your arrival, that is. You have even lied about your name, is that not so? You are not Leda Fox, the reporter. You are Genevieve Wrigley.\"\n\nLady Charlotte gasped.\n\n\"Who's Genevieve Wrigley?\" I asked.\n\n\"The head of the ARA,\" Touff\u00e9t said, looking steadily at her. \"The Animal Rescue Army.\"\n\nLady Charlotte had jumped up. \"You're here to steal D'Artagnan and Heidi from me!\" She turned beseechingly to Touff\u00e9t. \"You mustn't let her. The ARA are terrorists.\"\n\nI looked wonderingly at Leda, or rather Genevieve. Lady Charlotte was right about the ARA, it was a terrorist organization, a sort of IRA for animals. I'd seen them on television, blowing up cosmetics companies and holding zookeepers hostage, but Leda\u2014Genevieve\u2014didn't look like them at all.\n\nTouff\u00e9t said sternly, \"You came here in disguise with the intention of liberating Lady Charlotte's animals, no matter what violent means were necessary.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Leda, or rather, Genevieve, said, rearing back dangerously, and I was grateful there wasn't room anywhere for a bomb in that dress. \"But I wouldn't have killed animals. I love animals!\"\n\n\"Releasing pets into a wilderness they can't survive in?\" Lady Charlotte said bitterly. \"Sending primates back into the jungle to be killed by poachers? You don't love animals. You don't love anyone but yourselves. Well, now you've gone too far. You've murdered my father, and I'll see you convicted.\"\n\n\"Why would I murder your father?\" Genevieve sneered. \"You're the one I wanted to murder!\"\n\nAt her words, D'Artagnan and Heidi both moved protectively toward Lady Charlotte.\n\n\"Dressing primates up like servants, holding them captive here. You're slaves!\" she said to D'Artagnan. \"She tells you she loves you, but she just wants to enslave you!\"\n\nD'Artagnan took a threatening step toward her, his huge white-gloved fist raised. \"It's all right, D'Artagnan,\" Lady Charlotte said. \"Inspector Touff\u00e9t won't let her hurt me.\"\n\nGenevieve slumped back in her chair and glared at Touff\u00e9t. \"I can't believe you found me out,\" she said. \"I even ate a piece of that disgusting meat at dinner.\"\n\n\"We were discussing your motive,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Terrorists do not murder secretly. Their crimes are of no use unless they take credit for them. And by killing Lord Alastair, you might have given the Institute bad publicity, but you would not necessarily have succeeded in closing the Institute. Sympathetic donations might have poured in. How much better to blow up the Institute's buildings. It is true, you might have killed primates, but your organization has been known to kill animals before, in the name of saving them.\"\n\n\"You can't prove that!\" she said sullenly.\n\n\"There are wire and detonating caps in your luggage.\" He turned to Sergeant Eustis. \"Ms. Wrigley was out at the compound this afternoon. When we have concluded our business here, I would suggest searching it for plastic explosives.\"\n\nSergeant Eustis nodded and came over to stand behind Genevieve's chair. She rolled her eyes in disgust and crossed her arms over her chest.\n\n\"Ms. Wrigley had a motive for murder, but she is not the only one.\" He took several puffs on his pipe. \"Everyone in this room has a motive. Yes, even you, Colonel Bridlings.\"\n\n\"I?\" I said.\n\n\"You long to spend Christmas at your sister's house, do you not? If Lord Alastair is murdered, the Christmas celebration at Marwaite Manor will be canceled, and you will be free to attend your sister's celebration instead.\"\n\n\"If I'm not detained for questioning,\" I said. \"And I hardly think wanting to spend Christmas with my sister is an adequate motive for murdering a harmless, helpless old man.\"\n\nTouff\u00e9t held up an objecting finger. \"Helpless, perhaps, but not harmless. But I quite agree with you, Bridlings, your motive is not adequate. People, though, have often murdered for inadequate motives. But you, Bridlings, are incapable of murder, and that is why I do not suspect you of the crime.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said dryly.\n\n\"But. It is a motive,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"As for Lady Charlotte, she has told all of us her motive this very evening at dinner. She has no money for her Institute. She is in danger of losing D'Artagnan and Heidi and all her other primates unless she obtains a large sum of money. And she loves them even more than she loves her father.\"\n\n\"But her father's will left all his money to her brother,\" I blurted out.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Touff\u00e9t said, \"so her brother must be eliminated as well, and what better method than to have him convicted of murder?\"\n\n\"But Charlotte would never\u2014\" Rutgers said, rising involuntarily to his feet.\n\nShe looked at him in surprise.\n\n\"That is the conclusion to which I came also. Do not excite yourself, Mr. Rutgers,\" he said, giving the word \"Rutgers\" a peculiar emphasis. \"I do not believe Lady Charlotte committed the murder, even though as the one who invited me here to Marwaite Manor, she was the first person I suspected.\"\n\nHe stopped and lit his pipe again for at least five minutes. \"I said, I do not believe Lady Charlotte committed the murder, but not because I do not believe her capable of murder. I believe her desire to protect her primates could easily have driven her to murder. But that same desire would never have allowed her to let her primates be suspected of murder, even with a great detective on hand to uncover the true murderer. She would never have endangered them, even for a few hours.\" He turned and looked at Mick Rutgers. \"You do not need to worry about Lady Charlotte, Mr. Davidson.\"\n\nNow Lady Charlotte was the one who had risen involuntarily to her feet. \"Phillip?\" she said. \"Is it really you?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is Phillip Davidson,\" Touff\u00e9t said smugly. \"Who was ruined by Lord Alastair, who was kept from marrying Lady Charlotte and forced to emigrate to Australia.\" He paused dramatically. \"Who came here determined to murder Lord Alastair for revenge.\"\n\n\"To murder\u2026\" Lady Charlotte put her hand to her bosom. \"Is that true, Phillip?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's true,\" Rutgers, or rather Davidson, said. Good Lord, just when I'd learned everyone's names. Now I was going to have to memorize them all over again.\n\n\"How did you know?\" Rutg\u2014Davidson asked.\n\n\"You called Lord Alastair 'Al,' though no one else had called him by that name,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"It was also obvious from the way you looked at Lady Charlotte that you were still in love with her.\"\n\n\"It's true. I am,\" he said, looking at Lady Charlotte.\n\nShe was staring at him in horror. \"You killed my father?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"It's true, I came here to. I even brought a pistol with me. But when I saw him, I realized\u2026He was a terrible man, but brilliant. To be reduced to that\u2026that\u2026was a worse revenge than any I could have devised.\" He looked at Touff\u00e9t. \"You have to believe me. I didn't kill him.\"\n\n\"I know you did not,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"This murder required a knowledge of the house and of the people in it which you did not possess. And a revenge killer does not sedate his victim.\"\n\n\"Sedate?\" Nurse Parchtry said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"When Sergeant Eustis completes his analysis of the cocoa, he will find the presence of sleeping medication.\"\n\nI remembered the snoring on the baby monitor, subsiding into heavy, even breathing. Drugged breathing.\n\n\"Someone who murders for revenge,\" Touff\u00e9t continued, \"wishes his victim to know why he is being murdered. And you had worked with primates, Mr. Davidson; it was your interest in their intelligence that had sparked Lady Charlotte's. You would not have attempted to frame them for murder.\"\n\n\"Well, who would have?\" Sergeant Eustis blurted.\n\n\"An excellent question,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"And one which I will address shortly. But first we shall deal with your motive for murder, Sergeant.\"\n\n\"Mine?\" Sergeant Eustis said, astonished. \"What possible motive could I have had for murdering anyone?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" Touff\u00e9t said, and everyone looked bewildered. \"You had no motive for murdering Lord Alastair in particular, but you did have a motive for murdering someone.\"\n\n\"Aren't you forgetting he's a police officer?\" James said nastily. \"Or are you saying you have a motive for murdering my father, too?\"\n\n\"No,\" Touff\u00e9t said calmly. \"For I am a great detective, with many solved cases to my credit, and none that I have failed to solve through my own incompetence. That is not, however, true of Sergeant Eustis, is it?\"\n\nLeda\u2014Genevieve\u2014gasped. \" 'Useless' Eustis. I thought you looked familiar.\"\n\n\"Indeed,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Captain Eustis, who had charge of the Tiffany Levinger case.\"\n\nTiffany Levinger. Now I remembered. It had been all over the television and the online tabloids. The pretty little girl who had been murdered in her own house, obviously by her own parents, but they had been acquitted because Captain Eustis had bungled the investigation so badly that it was impossible to attain a conviction. Nicknamed Useless Eustis and pilloried in the press, he had been forced to resign. And had apparently ended up here, in this remote area, demoted and disgraced.\n\n\"Another murder, the celebrated murder of a billionaire in a country manor, a sensational murder that you solved, could have redeemed your reputation, could it not?\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Especially with the press on the premises to record it all.\"\n\n\"It certainly could have,\" Sergeant Eustis said. \"But even someone as stupid as the press claimed I was wouldn't be stupid enough to commit a murder with Inspector Touff\u00e9t on the premises, now would he?\"\n\n\"Exactly the conclusion I came to, Sergeant,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Which leaves Nurse Parchtry and James Valladay.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Nurse Parchtry said, distressed, \"you don't think I did it, do you? What motive could I have?\"\n\n\"A cruel and abusive patient.\"\n\n\"But in that case why would I not simply have resigned?\"\n\n\"That is what I asked myself,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"You were obviously subjected to daily indignities, yet Lady Charlotte said you had been here nearly a year. Why? I asked myself.\"\n\n\"Because if she left she would forfeit the bonus I had promised her,\" Lady Charlotte said. She wrung her hands. \"Oh, don't tell me I'm responsible for her\u2026I was desperate. We'd been through seven nurses in less than a month. I thought if I offered her an incentive to stay\u2026\"\n\n\"What was the incentive?\" Touff\u00e9t asked Nurse Parchtry.\n\n\"Ten thousand pounds, if I stayed a full year,\" the nurse said dully. \"I didn't think it would be so bad. I'd had difficult patients before, and it was the only way I could ever get out of debt. I didn't think it would be so bad. But I was wrong.\" She glared at Charlotte. \"A million dollars wouldn't have been enough for taking care of that brute. I'm glad he's dead,\" she burst out. \"I wish I'd killed him myself!\"\n\n\"But you did not,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"You are a nurse. You had at your disposal dozens of undetectable drugs, dozens of opportunities. You could have deprived him of his oxygen, given him a lethal dose of lidocaine or insulin, and it would have been assumed that he had died of natural causes. There would not even have been an autopsy. And you liked Heidi. You and she shared a passion for my cases. You would not have committed a murder that implicated her.\"\n\n\"No, I wouldn't have,\" Nurse Parchtry said tearfully. \"She's a dear little thing.\"\n\n\"There is in fact only one person here who had a motive not only to murder Lord Alastair but also to see D'Artagnan charged with it, and that is Lord James Valladay.\"\n\n\"What?\" James said, spilling his drink in his surprise.\n\n\"You were in considerable debt. Your father's death would mean that you would inherit a fortune. And you hated your sister's primates. You had every reason to murder your father and frame D'Artagnan.\"\n\n\"B-but\u2026\" he spluttered. \"This is ridiculous.\"\n\n\"You put sleeping tablets in your father's cocoa when you were in the nursery, using an attack by D'Artagnan as a distraction. During the game of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, you went out into the corridor, having convinced everyone that they must take considerable time in choosing your object, and you took the lift up to the nursery, putting on the gloves you had stolen from D'Artagnan earlier, switched off the baby monitor, and strangled your sleeping father. Then you overturned the bed and placed objects around the room to look as if someone had flung them violently. You hid the key and the gloves, and came back downstairs, where you cold-bloodedly continued playing the game.\"\n\n\"Oh, James, you didn't\u2014\" Lady Charlotte cried.\n\n\"Of course I didn't. You haven't any proof of any of this, Touff\u00e9t. You said yourself there weren't any fingerprints.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Touff\u00e9t said, pulling a bottle of sleeping tablets out of his pocket. \"This was found in your bureau drawer, and these\"\u2014he produced a key and a pair of white gloves\u2014\"under your mattress, where you hid them, intending later to put them in the pantry to implicate D'Artagnan.\" He handed them to Sergeant Eustis. \"I think you will find that the sleeping tablets match the residue in the cocoa cup.\"\n\n\"Under my mattress?\" James said, doing a very good job of looking bewildered. \"I don't understand\u2014 How would I have got into the nursery? I don't have a key.\"\n\n\"Ah,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"D'Artagnan, come here.\" The gorilla lumbered forward from where he and Heidi had been watching all this and thinking God knows what. \"D'Artagnan, what happened after Lady Charlotte gave you the keys?\"\n\n\"Unlock,\" he said. \"Get gloves.\"\n\n\"And then what?\"\n\nD'Artagnan looked fearfully at James and then back at Touff\u00e9t.\n\n\"I won't let him hurt you,\" Sergeant Eustis said.\n\nLady Charlotte nodded at him. \"Go ahead, D'Artagnan. Tell the truth. You won't get in trouble.\"\n\nThe gorilla glanced worriedly at James again and then said, \"James say. Give me,\" pantomiming handing over a bunch of keys.\n\n\"That's a lie!\" James said. \"I did no such thing!\"\n\n\"Then why was this under your mattress inside one of the gloves?\" Touff\u00e9t said, producing a key from his pocket and handing it to Sergeant Eustis.\n\n\"But I didn't\u2014!\" James said, turning to his sister. \"He's lying!\"\n\n\"How is that possible?\" Lady Charlotte said coldly. \"He's only an animal.\"\n\n\"A satisfying case,\" Touff\u00e9t said as we waited for the train.\n\nWe had been driven to the station by a hairy orange orangutan named Sven. \"He doesn't have a driver's license,\" Lady Charlotte had said, bidding us goodbye. She smiled up at Phillip Davidson, who had his arm around her. \"But every policeman in the county's upstairs collecting evidence,\" she said, \"so you won't have to worry about being ticketed.\"\n\nIt was easy to see why the police refused to issue Sven a driver's license. He was positively wild, and after he had nearly driven us off the road, he slapped the steering wheel with his hairy hands and grinned a teeth-baring smile at me. But he got us there nearly ten minutes before train time.\n\nTouff\u00e9t was still preoccupied with the case. \"It is a pity James would not confess to the murder when I confronted him. Now the police must spend Christmas Day examining evidence.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Sergeant Eustis won't mind,\" I told him. He had seemed pathetically eager to look for everything Touff\u00e9t told him to, even writing it all down. \"You've redeemed his reputation. And, at any rate, no one confesses these days, even when they've been caught red-handed.\"\n\n\"That is true,\" he said, checking his pocket watch. \"And all has turned out well. Lady Charlotte's Institute is safe, the apes no longer have to fear being homeless, and you shall arrive at your sister's in time to burn your fingers on the raisins.\"\n\n\"Aren't you going with me?\"\n\n\"I have already endured one evening of Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral. My constitution cannot withstand another. I will disembark in London. You will convey my regrets to your sister, yes?\"\n\nI nodded absently, thinking of what he had said about the apes no longer having to fear being homeless. It was true. Until the murder, Lady Charlotte's Institute had been in great financial difficulty. She had said it might have to close. And if it did, the ARA and the other animal rights groups would have insisted on D'Artagnan and Heidi's being sent back to the wilds. Like Lucy.\n\nTouff\u00e9t had said everyone in the room had a motive, and he was right, but there were two suspects in the room he had overlooked.\n\nJames had even accused D'Artagnan of the murder, and D'Artagnan would certainly have done anything to save Lady Valladay's Institute\u2014he was utterly devoted to her. Like D'Artagnan and the other Musketeers, who would have done anything to protect their queen. And he and Heidi were in danger of losing their home.\n\nBut killing Lord Alastair would not have saved the Institute. James would have inherited the estate. James, who had threatened to shut down the Institute, who had threatened to sell the apes to the zoo. Killing Lord Alastair would only have made the apes' situation worse.\n\nUnless James could be made to look like the murderer. Because murderers could not inherit.\n\nWhat if Heidi had put the sleeping pills into Lord Alastair's cocoa before she brought it up to the nursery, and had hidden the bottle in James's bureau? What if D'Artagnan had only pretended to lose his gloves so that Lady Charlotte would give him her keys? What if he and Heidi had gone up to the nursery while everyone was playing Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral, strangled Lord Alastair in his sleep, and then thrown the furniture about?\n\nBut that was impossible. They were animals, as James said. Animals who were capable of lying, cheating, deceiving. Capable of planning and executing. Executing.\n\nWhat if D'Artagnan had really twisted James's wrist, so that he would accuse him, so that he'd say the apes were dangerous, and it would look as if he were trying to frame them?\n\nNo, it was too complicated. Even if they were capable of higher-level thinking, there was a huge difference between solving maths problems and planning a murder.\n\nEspecially a murder that could fool Touff\u00e9t, I thought, looking across the compartment at him. He was rummaging through his bag, looking for his mystery novel.\n\nThey could never have come up with a murder like that on their own. And Touff\u00e9t's explanation of James's motive made perfect sense. But if James had committed the murder, why hadn't he washed the cocoa out of the cup? Why hadn't he hidden the key and the gloves in the pantry, as Touff\u00e9t had said he intended to do? He'd had plenty of time after we went to our rooms. Why hadn't he dumped the sleeping tablets down the sink?\n\n\"Bridlings,\" Touff\u00e9t said, \"what have you done with my book?\"\n\nI found The Murders in the Rue Morgue for him.\n\n\"No, no,\" he said. \"Not that one. I do not wish to think any more of primates.\" He handed it back to me.\n\nI stared at it. What if they hadn't had to plan the murder? What if they had only had to copy someone else's plan? \"Monkey see, monkey do,\" I murmured.\n\n\"What?\" Touff\u00e9t said, rummaging irritably through his bag. \"What did you say?\"\n\n\"Touff\u00e9t,\" I said earnestly, \"do you remember The Case of the Cat's Paw?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" he said, looking pleased. \"The little chimpanzee's favorite book. A most satisfying case.\"\n\n\"The husband did it,\" I said.\n\n\"And confessed when I confronted him,\" he said, looking annoyed. \"You, as I recall, thought the village doctor did it.\"\n\nYes, I had thought the village doctor did it. Because the husband had made it look as though he had been framed by the doctor, so that suspicion no longer rested on him.\n\nAnd The Case of the Cat's Paw was Heidi's favorite book. What if she and D'Artagnan had simply copied the murder in the book?\n\nBut Touff\u00e9t had solved The Case of the Cat's Paw. How could they have been sure he would not solve this one?\n\n\"You were particularly obtuse on that case,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"That is because you see only the facade.\"\n\n\"In spite of the overwhelming evidence of primates' intelligence,\" Lady Charlotte had said, \"people persist in thinking of them as animals.\"\n\nAs animals. Who couldn't possibly have committed a murder.\n\nBut Heidi could read. And D'Artagnan had scored 95 on IQ tests. And they would have done anything for Lady Charlotte. Anything.\n\n\"Touff\u00e9t,\" I said. \"I've been thinking\u2014\"\n\n\"Ah, but that is just the problem. You do not think. You look only at the surface. Never what lies below it.\"\n\nOr behind it, I thought. To the monkey, putting the cat's paw in the fire.\n\nUnless I told Touff\u00e9t, James would be convicted of murder. \"Useless\" Eustis would never discover the truth on his own, and even if he did, he wouldn't dare to contradict Touff\u00e9t, who had saved his reputation.\n\n\"Touff\u00e9t,\" I said.\n\n\"That is why I am the great detective, and you are only the scribe,\" Touff\u00e9t said. \"Because you see only the facade. That is why I do not listen to you when you tell me that you think it is the gorilla or the vicar. Well, what is it you wished to say?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" I said. \"I was only wondering what we should call this case. The Case of the Country Christmas?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I do not wish to be reminded of Christmas.\"\n\nThe train began to slow. \"Ah, this is where I change for London.\" He began gathering up his belongings.\n\nIf James were allowed to inherit, he would not only shut down the Institute, he would also drink and gamble his way through all the money. And D'Artagnan and Heidi would almost certainly be shipped back to the jungle and the poachers, so it was really a form of self-defense. And even if it was murder, it would be cruel to try them for it when they had no legal standing in the courts.\n\nAnd the old man had been little more than an animal in need of putting down. Less human than D'Artagnan and Heidi.\n\nThe train came to a stop, and Touff\u00e9t opened the door of the compartment.\n\n\"Touff\u00e9t\u2014\" I said.\n\n\"Well, what is it?\" he said irritably, his hand on the compartment. \"I shall miss my stop.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas,\" I said.\n\nThe conductor called out, and Touff\u00e9t bustled off toward his train. I watched him from the door of the train, thinking of Lady Charlotte. Finding out the truth, that her beloved primates were far more human than even she had imagined, would kill her. She deserved a little happiness after what her father had done to her. And my sister would be waiting for me at the station. She would have made eggnog.\n\nI stood there in the door, thinking of what Touff\u00e9t had said about my being incapable of murder. He was wrong. We are all capable of murder. It's in our genes." + }, + { + "title": "Now Showing", + "text": "\"A charming, lighthearted comedy!\" \u2014Entertainment Daily\n\nThe Saturday before Christmas break, Zara came into my dorm room and asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with her and Kett at the Cinedrome.\n\n\"What's playing?\" I asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said, shrugging. \"Lots of stuff,\" which meant the point of going wasn't to see a movie at all. Big surprise.\n\n\"No, thanks,\" I said, and went back to typing my econ paper.\n\n\"Oh, come on, Lindsay, it'll be fun,\" she said, flopping down on my bed. \"X-Force is playing, and The Twelve Days of Christmas and the reboot of Twilight. The Drome's got a hundred movies. There must be something you want to see. How about Christmas Caper? Didn't you want to see that?\"\n\nYes, I thought. At least I had eight months ago when I'd seen the preview. But things had changed since then.\n\n\"I can't,\" I said. \"I've got to study.\"\n\n\"We've all got to study,\" Zara said. \"But it's Christmas. The Drome will be all decorated and everybody will be there.\"\n\n\"Exactly, which means the light-rail will be packed and security will take forever.\"\n\n\"Is this about Jack?\"\n\n\"Jack?\" I said, wondering if I could get away with \"Jack who?\"\n\nBetter not. This was Zara. I said instead, \"Why would my not going to the Drome with you have anything to do with Jack Weaver?\"\n\n\"It's\u2026I don't know,\" she stammered, \"it's just that you've been so\u2026grim since he left, and you two used to watch a lot of movies together.\"\n\nThat was an understatement. Jack was the only guy I'd ever met who liked movies as much as I did, and all kinds, not just comic-book-hero and slasher films. He'd loved everything from Bollywood to romcoms like French Kiss to black-and-whites like The Shop Around the Corner and Captain Blood, and we'd gone to dozens of them at the Drome and streamed hundreds more in the semester we'd been together. Correction, semester minus one week.\n\nZara was still talking. \"And you haven't gone to the Drome once since\u2014\"\n\n\"Since you talked me into going with you to see Monsoon Gate,\" I said, \"and then when we got there you wanted to eat and talk to guys, and I never did get to see it.\"\n\n\"That won't happen this time. Kett and I promise we'll go to the movie. Come on, it'll be good for you. There'll be tons of guys there. Remember that Sig Tau who said he liked you? Noah? He might be there. Come on. Please come with us. This is our last chance. We won't be able to go next weekend because of finals, and then we'll be gone on break.\"\n\nAnd nobody at home would want to see Christmas Caper. If I suggested going to the movies, my sister would insist on us going to A Despicable Me Noel with her kids, and we'd end up spending the whole afternoon in the arcade playing Minion Mash and buying Madagascar stuffed giraffes and Ice Age ICEEs. By the time I got back to school, Christmas Caper would be gone. And it wasn't like Jack would magically show up and take me like he'd promised. If I wanted to see it on the big screen, I needed to do it now.\n\n\"Okay,\" I said. \"But I'm not going with you to meet guys. I'm going because I really want to see Christmas Caper. Understood?\"\n\n\"Yeah, sure,\" she said, getting out her phone and punching keys. \"I'll just text Kett and\u2014\"\n\n\"I mean it,\" I said. \"You have to promise me you won't get sidetracked like last time, that we'll actually go to the movie.\"\n\n\"I promise,\" she said. \"No guys and no eating till afterward.\"\n\n\"And no shopping,\" I said. I had missed Monsoon Gate because Zara was trying on Polly Pepper shoes in the Devil Wears Prada boutique. \"Promise me.\"\n\nZara sighed. \"Fine. I promise. Cross my heart.\"\n\n\"A sweet romantic comedy with lots of action!\" \u2014popcorn.com\n\nZara's promise meant about as much as the ones Jack had made me. Zara began texting the second we arrived, and we weren't even through the preliminary bag and phone check at the Drome before Kett said, \"The NWU guys behind me in line just asked me to ask you if we want to go see the cast of The Bourne Dynasty. They're holo-skyping over at the Universal booth.\"\n\nZara looked hopefully at me. \"We could go to the 12:10 instead of the 10 o'clock.\"\n\n\"Or the 2:20,\" Kett said.\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Zara said to the guys. \"We promised Lindsay we'd go to Christmas Caper with her first,\" and the guys promptly began hitting on the girls behind them.\n\n\"I don't see why we couldn't have gone to a later showing,\" Kett said, pouting, as we went through the explosives check.\n\n\"Because after the holo-skyping was over, they'd have wanted to play Skyfall or go eat at Harold and Kumar's White Castle, and we'd have missed the 2:20 and the 4:30,\" I said, and as soon as we made it through the body\u2014and retinal\u2014scans and into the Drome, I headed straight for the ticket kiosks, ignoring the barrage of previews and holograms and ads and elves passing out coupons for free cookies and video games and schedules of today's autographing sessions.\n\n\"I thought you were going to get the tickets online before we left,\" Zara said.\n\n\"I tried,\" I said, \"but it's playing a special limited engagement, so you have to get them here.\" I dragged my finger down the list of movies\u2014Ripper 2, X-Force, The House on Zombie Hill, The Queen's Consort, Switching Gears, Just When You Thought You Were Over Him\u2026\n\nHonestly, you'd think with a hundred movies, they'd put them in alphabetical order. Lethal Rampage, The Twelve Days of Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre\u2014The Musical, A Star-Crossed Season, Back to Back to the Future, Wicked\u2014\n\nHere it was. Christmas Caper. I tapped the tickets button and \"3\" and swiped my card.\n\n\"Unavailable,\" the screen said. \"Tickets must be purchased at ticket counter,\" which meant we had to get in line, one of the worst things about going to the Drome.\n\nYou'd think as huge as it is and as many people as it has to cope with, they'd have Disneyverse-style back-and-forth lines, but they only use those to line people up for showings. The ticket lines snaked single file all the way back through the Drome's football-field-size lobby, the Hunger Games paintball stadium, the No Reservations food court, Wetaworks' Last Homely House, the virtual-reality terrace, and half a mile of souvenir shops and boutiques.\n\nIt took us twenty minutes just to find the end, and in the process we nearly lost Kett twice, once at Pretty in Pink\u2014\"Oh, my God! They have stilettos in fifty shades of gray!\"\u2014and again when she saw that Hope Floats, Shakes, and Cones was selling cranberry malts.\n\nZara and I dragged her out of both and into the end of the line, which was getting longer by the minute. \"We're never going to get into the movie,\" Kett grumbled.\n\n\"Yes, we will,\" I said confidently, though I wasn't sure, there were so many people in line. Most of them were little kids, though, who were obviously going to The Little Goose Girl or The Muppets' It's a Wonderful Life or Dora the Explorer Does Duluth. The adults around us who I asked were all going to A Tudor Affair or Return to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and everybody else was wearing an Iron Man 8 T-shirt. \"We'll definitely get in.\"\n\n\"We'd better,\" Kett said. \"Why are you so set on seeing this Christmas Caper, anyway? I never heard of it. Is it a romcom?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, \"more like a romantic spy adventure. Like Charade. Or The Thirty-nine Steps.\"\n\n\"I haven't seen previews for either of those,\" she said, looking up at the schedule board above us. \"Are they still playing?\"\n\n\"No.\" I should have known better than to mention an old movie. In this day of reboots and remakes nobody watches anything older than last week. Except Jack. He'd even liked silents.\n\n\"You know, the kind of movie where the heroine gets accidentally caught up in a crime,\" I said, \"or some kind of conspiracy, and the hero's a spy, like in Jumpin' Jack Flash, or a reporter, or a detective who's pretending to be a criminal, like in How to Steal a Million, or he's a scoundrel\u2014\"\n\n\"A scoundrel?\" Kett said blankly.\n\n\"A rebel,\" I said, \"a rake, a rogue, like Michael Douglas in Romancing the Stone, or Errol Flynn\u2014\"\n\n\"I haven't seen previews for those either,\" she said. \"Is Arrow Flin still playing?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"A scoundrel's a guy who's cocky and doesn't care about rules or laws\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, you mean a slimewad,\" Kett said.\n\n\"No, a scoundrel's funny and sexy and charming,\" I said, trying desperately to think of a movie recent enough that she might have seen it. \"Like Iron Man. Or Jack Sparrow.\"\n\n\"Or Jack Weaver,\" Zara said.\n\n\"No,\" I said, \"not like Jack Weaver. In the first place\u2014\"\n\n\"Who's Jack Weaver?\" Kett asked.\n\n\"This guy Lindsay used to be in love with,\" Zara said.\n\n\"I was not in\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Kett said. \"Is that the guy who put a whole bunch of ducks in the dean's office last year?\"\n\n\"Geese,\" I said.\n\n\"Wow!\" Kett said, impressed. \"You went with him?\"\n\n\"Briefly,\" I said. \"Before I found out he was\u2014\"\n\n\"A scoundrel?\" Zara put in.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"A slimewad. Who got himself thrown out of Hanover. The week before he was supposed to graduate.\"\n\n\"He didn't actually get thrown out,\" Zara explained to Kett. \"He took off before they could expel him.\"\n\n\"Or press criminal charges,\" I said.\n\n\"That's too bad,\" Kett said. \"He sounds totally depraved! I'd have liked to meet him.\"\n\n\"You might get your chance,\" Zara said in an odd voice. \"Look!\" She pointed toward the lobby.\n\nAnd there, leaning against a pillar with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the movie schedule, was Jack Weaver.\n\n\"Exciting fun! Sets your pulse racing!\" \u2014USA Today\n\n\"It is him, isn't it?\" Zara asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said grimly.\n\n\"I wonder what he's doing here.\"\n\n\"As if you didn't know,\" I said. No wonder she'd been so insistent I come with them. She and Jack had cooked up a\u2014\n\n\"Oh, my God!\" Kett cried. \"Is that the guy you were talking about? The\u2014what did you call him?\"\n\n\"Wanker,\" I said.\n\n\"Scoundrel,\" Zara said.\n\n\"Right, the scoundrel. You didn't tell me he was so hot! I mean, he's positively scorching!\"\n\n\"Shh,\" I said, but it was too late. Jack had already looked over and seen us.\n\n\"Zara,\" I said, \"if you set this up, I'm never speaking to you again!\"\n\n\"I didn't, I swear,\" she said, which didn't mean anything, but two things made me inclined to believe her. One was that even though this looked suspiciously like a movie \"meet cute,\" the expression on Zara's face had been completely stricken, the reason for which became apparent a few seconds later when a trio of Sig Taus, including Noah, sauntered up way too casually.\n\n\"Wow!\" Noah said. \"I had no idea you three were coming to the Drome today, too.\"\n\nExcept for Zara's texting you fifteen times while we were in the security lines, I thought. But at least their being here would keep Jack from coming over to talk to me.\n\nIf he even wanted to. Because the other reason I thought Zara didn't have anything to do with Jack's being here had been the look on his face. He'd looked not just surprised to see me here, but dismayed. Which meant I was right\u2014he wasn't a scoundrel, he was a slimewad. And probably here with some other girl.\n\n\"I'm especially surprised to see you here, Lindsay,\" Noah, who would never make it as an actor even in the Twilight movies, said. \"What are you doing at the Drome?\"\n\n\"The three of us,\" I said, emphasizing the word \"three,\" \"are going to a movie.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" he said, frowning at Zara, who gave him a \"go on\" look. \"We were just going to get something to eat at the Mos Eisley Cantina, and we wondered if you'd like to come with us.\"\n\n\"Oh, I love the Cantina,\" Kett cooed.\n\n\"I'll buy you a Darth Vader daiquiri,\" Noah said to me.\n\n\"Lindsay prefers Pimm's Cups,\" Zara said. \"Don't you?\"\n\nI glanced toward the lobby, hoping against hope Jack hadn't heard that.\n\nHe wasn't there. He wasn't at the end of the line either, or at the ticket machines. Good, he'd gone off to meet his new girlfriend. I hoped she hated movies.\n\nNoah was saying, \"What the hell's a Pimm's Cup?\"\n\n\"It's a drink from a movie,\" I said. My favorite drink, I added silently. Or at least it used to be. The drink Jack had made me after we'd watched Ghost Town and T\u00e9a Leoni had said it was her favorite drink.\n\n\"We could have lunch and then go to the movie, couldn't we, Lindsay?\" Kett asked, looking adoringly at Noah. \"I just got a text coupon for Breakfast at Tiffany's breakfast bar.\"\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\nZara gave Noah another nudging look, and he said, \"Maybe we could go with you. What are you going to?\"\n\n\"Christmas Caper,\" Kett said.\n\n\"I never heard of it,\" Noah said.\n\n\"It's a spy adventure,\" Kett explained. \"A romantic spy adventure.\"\n\nNoah made a face. \"Are you kidding me? I hate romcoms. How about we all go see Lethal Rampage instead?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said.\n\n\"Maybe we could meet you at the Cantina after the movie,\" Zara suggested.\n\n\"Yeah, I don't know,\" Noah mumbled, looking at the other guys. \"We're pretty hungry. Listen, I'll text you,\" he said, and the three of them wandered off.\n\n\"I can't believe you did that,\" Zara said. \"I was just trying to help you forget about\u2014\"\n\n\"That Noah guy was scorching,\" Kett said, looking after him, and sighed. \"This better be some movie.\"\n\n\"It is,\" Jack said at my elbow. \"Hi.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I demanded.\n\n\"Going to the movies,\" he said. \"What else?\" He leaned toward me. \"Traitor,\" he said in my ear. \"You promised you'd go to Christmas Caper with me.\"\n\n\"You weren't here,\" I said coldly.\n\n\"Yeah, about that,\" he said. \"Sorry. Something came up. I\u2014\"\n\n\"Is it really a good movie?\" Kett asked, sidling over to him. \"Lindsay didn't tell us what it was about. All she said was that there was a scoundrel in it.\"\n\n\"Scoundrel,\" Jack said, raising an eyebrow at me. \"I like the sound of that.\"\n\n\"How do you like the sound of 'loser'?\" I said. \"Or 'slimewad'?\"\n\nHe ignored me. \"Actually,\" he said to Kett, \"he's an undercover agent working on a case, and it's classified, so he can't tell the heroine about it or why he had to leave town\u2014\"\n\n\"Nice try,\" I said, and to Kett, \"What it's really about is this creep who tells the heroine a bunch of lies, does something staggeringly stupid, and then goes off without a word\u2014\"\n\n\"Why don't you come with us, Jack?\" Kett interrupted, looking up at him hungrily. \"I'm Kett, by the way. I'm friends with Lindsay, but she didn't tell me you were so\u2014\"\n\nZara pushed between them. \"Kett and I actually wanted to go play drone tag with these Pi Kappas, Jack,\" she said. \"We\u2014\"\n\n\"What Pi Kappas?\" Kett demanded.\n\nZara ignored her. \"We were just going to the movie with Lindsay to keep her company, but now that you're here, you could take her.\"\n\n\"I'd love to,\" Jack said, frowning, \"but unfortunately I can't.\"\n\n\"He has to put a flock of geese alaying in the theater where The Twelve Days of Christmas is showing,\" I said. \"Or is it partridges this time, Jack?\"\n\n\"Swans a-swimming,\" he said, grinning. \"I've got eight of them in my pocket.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Kett said, as if it was actually possible to get anything through security, let alone a flock of swans.\n\n\"That would be so depraved!\" she purred. \"What you did to the dean's office was so amazing! You definitely should come with us to Christmas Caper!\"\n\n\"I have no intention of going anywhere with Jack,\" I said.\n\n\"Then I will.\" Kett tucked her arm cozily in his. \"The two of us can go see it.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, I'm sure that would be fun,\" Jack said, disentangling himself from her like she was barbed wire, \"but it's not gonna happen. We can't get in. It's sold out.\"\n\n\"It is not,\" I said, pointing up at the schedule board. \"Look.\"\n\n\"Not right now maybe, but trust me, it will be by the time you get to the front of the line.\"\n\n\"You're kidding,\" Zara said. \"After we've stood in line all this time?\"\n\n\"And told Noah we couldn't go to the Cantina with him,\" Kett added.\n\n\"It's not going to be sold out,\" I said confidently.\n\n\"Wrong,\" Jack said, pointing at the board, where NO TICKETS AVAILABLE had begun flashing next to Christmas Caper.\n\n\"An engrossing mystery.\" \u2014flickers.com\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Zara said. \"What do we do now?\"\n\n\"We could go see A Star-Crossed Season,\" Kett said to Jack. \"It's supposed to be really good. Or The Diary.\"\n\n\"We're not going to either one,\" I said. \"Just because the 12:10 of Christmas Caper's sold out doesn't mean the other showings are. We can still get tickets to the 2:20.\"\n\n\"And wait around for another two hours?\" Kett wailed.\n\n\"Why don't we get lunch first and then get the tickets?\" Zara said. \"We could go to Chocolat\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"This is not going to turn into another Monsoon Gate. We are staying right here till we get our tickets.\"\n\n\"How about you stay in line, Lindsay, and we go and bring you back something?\" Kett suggested.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"You promised you'd go with me.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and you promised you'd go with me, Lindsay,\" Jack said.\n\n\"You stood me up.\"\n\n\"I did not,\" he said. \"I'm here, aren't I? And anyway, Kevin Kline stood up Meg Ryan in French Kiss. Michael Douglas stood up Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone. Indiana Jones left Marion tied up in the bad guys' tent. Admit it, that's what scoundrels do.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, but they don't throw their entire future away on some stupid prank.\"\n\n\"You mean the geese? That wasn't a prank.\"\n\n\"Oh, really? Then what was it?\"\n\n\"I can see you two have a lot of stuff to discuss,\" Zara said. \"We don't want to get in the way. We'll catch up with you later. Text me.\" And before I could protest, she and Kett had vanished into the crowd.\n\nI turned to Jack. \"I'm still not going with you to see it.\"\n\n\"True,\" he said, looking over at the ticket counter. \"You're not going to get in to the 2:20 either.\"\n\n\"I suppose now you're going to tell me it'll be sold out, too?\"\n\n\"No, they usually don't use that one twice,\" he said. \"This time it'll be something more subtle. Free tickets to a Special Christmas Showing of The Shop Around the Corner or a personal appearance by the new Hulk. Or, since you like scoundrels, by the new Han Solo.\" He grinned. \"Or me.\"\n\n\"I do not like scoundrels,\" I said. \"Not anymore. And what do you mean, 'They don't use that one twice'?\"\n\nHe shook his head disapprovingly. \"That's not your line. You're supposed to say, 'I happen to like nice men,' and then I say, 'I'm a nice man.' \" He leaned toward me. \"And then you say\u2014\"\n\n\"This is not The Empire Strikes Back,\" I snapped, backing away from him. \"And you are not Han Solo.\"\n\n\"True,\" he said. \"I'm more like Peter O'Toole in How to Steal a Million. Or Douglas Fairbanks in The Mask of Zorro.\"\n\n\"Or Bradley Cooper in The World's Biggest Liar,\" I said. \"Why did you say I'm not going to get in to the 2:20, either? Have you done something to the theater?\"\n\n\"Nope, not a thing. I swear.\" He held up his right hand.\n\n\"Yes, well, your word isn't exactly trustworthy, is it?\"\n\n\"Actually, it is. It's just that\u2026Never mind. I promise you I didn't have anything to do with the 12:10 being sold out.\"\n\n\"Then why were you so sure it was going to be?\"\n\n\"Long story. Which I can't tell you here,\" he said, looking around. \"What say we go somewhere quiet and I'll explain everything?\"\n\n\"Including where you've been for the past eight months? And what possessed you to put those geese in the dean's office?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"Sorry, I can't until\u2014\"\n\n\"Until what? Until you've done the same thing here?\" I lowered my voice. \"Seriously, Jack, you could get in a lot of trouble. The Dromes have really heavy security\u2014\"\n\n\"I knew it,\" he said delightedly. \"You're still crazy about me. 'So what say we go discuss this over a nice cozy lunch,' as Peter said to Audrey in How to Steal a Million. There's a little place over on Pixar Boulevard called Gusteau's\u2014\"\n\n\"I am not going anywhere with you,\" I said. \"I am going to the 2:20 showing of Christmas Caper. By myself.\"\n\n\"That's what you think,\" he said.\n\n\"Watch the sparks fly between these two!\" \u2014The Web Critic\n\nJack had sauntered off before I could demand to know what \"That's what you think\" meant, and I couldn't go after him to ask for fear of losing my place in line, so I spent the rest of the wait to get tickets worrying that the 2:20 would be sold out, too, though there were only a couple of dozen people left ahead of me, they were all going to something else, and the schedule boards were still showing tickets were available.\n\nBut there were three other lines, and the ticket seller on mine apparently had the brain of a character in Dumb and Really Really Dumb. It took him forever to make change and/or swipe people's cards and then shove their tickets at them. It was a good thing I wasn't trying to get a ticket for the 1:10. I'd never have made it.\n\nIt was half past before I even got close to the ticket counter, and then the guy three people ahead of me couldn't make up his mind whether to see Zombie Prom or Avatar 4. He and his girlfriend spent a good ten minutes trying to decide, and then his card wouldn't swipe and they had to use his girlfriend's, and she had to search through her entire bag to find it, digging out handfuls of stuff for him to hold while she looked, and standing there to put it all back after they'd finally gotten the tickets.\n\nThis is exactly what Jack was talking about, I thought. What if they were doing it purposely to keep me from getting in?\n\nDon't be ridiculous, I told myself. You're seeing conspiracies where they don't exist. But I still looked anxiously up at the schedule board as I came up to the counter, afraid the NO TICKETS AVAILABLE would blink on at the last minute.\n\nIt didn't, and when I said, \"One adult for the 2:20 showing of Christmas Caper,\" the ticket seller nodded, swiped my card without incident, handed me my ticket, and told me to enjoy the show.\n\n\"I will,\" I said determinedly, and started toward the entrance of the theater complex.\n\nHalfway there, Jack suddenly reappeared and fell in step with me. \"Well?\" he said.\n\n\"They weren't sold out, and I didn't have any trouble getting a ticket. See?\" I said, showing it to him.\n\nHe wasn't impressed. \"Yeah, and in Romancing the Stone, they found the diamond,\" he said, \"and Whoopi Goldberg got Jumpin' Jack Flash an exit contact, and look what happened.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"It means you're not in the theater yet, and if you don't make it by 2:20, they won't let you in.\"\n\nThat was true\u2014it was part of the Drome's security precautions not to let anyone in to a movie after it had started\u2014but it was only 1:30. I told Jack that.\n\n\"Yeah, but the line to get in could be really long, or the line to buy popcorn.\"\n\n\"I'm not buying popcorn. And there isn't any line to get in,\" I said, pointing over at the usher standing all alone in the entrance to the theaters.\n\n\"At the moment,\" he said. \"You're not there yet. A horde of middle-aged women could show up for the new Fifty Shades of Grey before you get over to the usher. And even if you do make it into the theater, the film could break\u2014\"\n\n\"The Drome doesn't use film. It's all digital.\"\n\n\"Exactly, which means something could go wrong with the digital feed. It could be contaminated by a virus, or the server could crash. Or something could trigger the TSA's alarms and send the whole Drome into lockdown.\"\n\n\"Like setting geese loose in a theater?\" I said. \"What are you up to, Jack?\"\n\n\"I told you, I'm not up to anything. I'm just saying you might not get in. In fact, I'm almost certain you won't. And if you don't, I'll be at Gusteau's.\"\n\n\"Nothing is going to happen,\" I said, and started across the remaining half of the lobby toward the entrance and the usher.\n\nThe lobby was getting more crowded by the minute with gaggles of excited children and texting teenagers and families arguing about where to go first. I pushed past and around them, hoping a line wouldn't suddenly collect in front of the usher and prove Jack right, but the usher was still standing there alone, leaning on the ticket stand and looking bored.\n\nI handed him my ticket.\n\nHe handed it back. \"You can't go in yet. The movie's not over. Excuse me,\" he said, and reached around me to take the tickets of two eight-year-old boys who'd come up behind me.\n\nHe tore their tickets in half and handed them back. \"Theater 76. Up the stairs to the third floor and turn right.\"\n\nThe boys went in. I said, \"Can't I go in and wait in the hall outside the theater till it lets out?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's against security regulations. I can't let anybody in till the movie gets out.\"\n\n\"Which is when?\"\n\n\"I'll check,\" he said, and consulted the schedule. \"1:55.\" Ten minutes from now. \"If you don't want to wait\u2014\"\n\n\"I do.\" I moved over against the wall, out of the way.\n\n\"Sorry, you can't stand there,\" a manager said, coming up. \"That's where the line for Dr. Who: The Movie has to go.\" He began busily cordoning off the space.\n\nI moved to the other wall, but a bunch of little girls and their parents were already lining up there to get in to see The Little Goose Girl, and the sole bench near the door was occupied by a mother vainly trying to talk her two daughters into relinquishing their virtual-reality glasses. Shrieking was involved. And kicking.\n\nI was going to have to wait out the ten minutes in the lobby. Hopefully Jack's gone off to Gusteau's, I thought, but he hadn't. He was standing just outside the entrance with his hands in his pockets and an \"I told you so\" smile on his face. \"What happened?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nothing happened,\" I said, walking past him. \"The 12:10's not out yet.\"\n\n\"So you decided to have that talk with me after all. Great,\" he said, taking hold of my arm and propelling me through the lobby toward Pixar Boulevard. \"We can go to Gusteau's and you can tell me what excuse the usher gave you for not letting you in and why they wouldn't let you wait there in the entryway.\"\n\n\"I don't have any intention of telling you anything,\" I said, wrenching my arm free of him. \"Why should I? You didn't tell me you were planning to get yourself expelled a week before you were supposed to graduate.\"\n\n\"Yeah, about that,\" he said, frowning. \"I wasn't actually going to graduate\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" I said disgustedly. \"Why am I not surprised? Was that why you broke into the dean's office, because you were flunking out and you were trying to change your grades?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"The fact is, I wasn't actually\u2014\"\n\n\"You weren't what?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you,\" he said. \"It's classified.\"\n\n\"Classified!\" I said. \"That's it. I'm not listening to any more of your paranoid fantasies. I am going to go stand over by the entrance until this movie gets out,\" I said, pointing, \"and then I am going inside, and if you try to follow me, I'll report you to security.\"\n\nI fought my way back to the entryway through a mob of cloaked and hairy-footed hobbits who were obviously on their way to The Return of Frodo, a bunch of old ladies going to see a special Nostalgia Showing of Sex and the City, and the mazelike line for Dr. Who, which now extended ten yards out into the lobby. By the time I made it to where I intended to wait, there was no longer any reason to. It was already two o'clock.\n\nI went over to the usher and handed him my ticket.\n\nHe shook his head. \"You can't go in yet.\"\n\n\"But you said the 12:10 got out at 1:55.\"\n\n\"It did, but you can't go in till the crew finishes cleaning.\"\n\n\"Which will be when?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I don't know. Some guy threw up all over. It's going to take them at least twenty minutes to clean it up.\" He handed me back my ticket. \"Why don't you go get something to eat? Or do some Christmas shopping? They're having a sale on Inception sleep masks over at the Sleepless in Seattle shop.\"\n\nAnd Jack will be standing right outside of it, smirking, I thought. \"No, thanks,\" I said, and squeezed past the Dr. Who and Little Goose Girl lines to the bench, hoping the mother and girls had gone.\n\nThey had, but the bench was now completely taken up by a passionately kissing and practically horizontal couple. I edged past them to stand by the wall, but by the time I made it, the couple had reached the R-rated stage and was rapidly approaching NC-17. I braced myself for Jack and another round of conspiracy theories and went back out into the lobby again.\n\n\"A gift for holiday moviegoers!\" \u2014silverscreen.com\n\nJack wasn't there. But he\u2014and Zara and Kett\u2014were the only ones who weren't in the lobby. It was crammed to bursting with people checking their coats and buying tickets and refreshments and staring up at the previews and schedule boards. I found myself alternately jostled and smushed by the crowds going into and coming out of the theater complex and by kids mobbing the Christmas characters who meandered through, tossing candy canes and distributing Coming Attractions flyers. Alvin the Chipmunk gave me a chit for a free mince pie at Sweeney Todd's snack bar, and a frighteningly friendly Grinch presented me with a coupon for half off a Twelve Dancing Princesses T-shirt at the Disney Pavilion.\n\nI'd no sooner handed it off to a NewGoth girl and read a text on my phone, telling me I'd won a free ticket to a special Encore Presentation of Ghost Town, than I was nearly run down by an enormous Transformer stomping through the crowd, flailing his huge metal arms and nearly bumping his head against the lobby ceiling. I partly dived and was partly pushed out of its way by the crowd as it scattered and ended up on the opposite side of the lobby.\n\nThe crowd surged back toward the Transformer, snapping pictures on their cell phones, jockeying for position to have their photos taken with it, their backs forming an impenetrable wall. There was no way I was getting through that, at least till the Transformer left.\n\nIt didn't matter\u2014it was still fifteen minutes till they'd be finished cleaning. I turned to look for a place I could wait without being run down. Not Gusteau's\u2014I had no desire to hear Jack say \"I told you so.\" And not Sweeney Todd's. It was too far away.\n\nI needed someplace close so I could start back the second the crowd dwindled or the moment I saw the cleaning crew give the usher the high sign, and someplace with a short line, but finding one was practically impossible. Zombie Juice was even more mobbed than the lobby. Stargate's Starbucks, which was advertising Mistletoe Mochas, had a line merging over into Zombie Juice, and the Transformer had apparently been passing out coupons for a Transformer Tea because Tea and Sympathy, usually a safe bet, was jammed, too.\n\nAnd I was definitely not going to the Cantina, even though at this point I could have used a drink. But Jack had obviously sent that text, which meant he was waiting in the Cantina to get me drunk and tell me more conspiracy theories. I was not going there.\n\nThat left a hot cocoa at the Polar Express, which was just off the lobby and whose line only had two people in it, but even then it took forever. The guy at the counter wanted a gingerbread clove latte, which the barista didn't know how to make, so he had to give her step-by-step instructions, and then the teenager behind him couldn't get her swipe card to work.\n\nI looked back out at the lobby. The Transformer was gone, but now the zeppelin from The Steampunk League was floating above the ticket machines, throwing down gift cards on a converging crowd. If I didn't go soon, the lobby would be even more jammed than it had been with the Transformer.\n\nI decided I'd better bag the cocoa and head back, and I started for the door. And collided with the gingerbread guy, who was bringing his latte back for having insufficient whipped cream and who managed to spill the entire drink down my front.\n\nCustomers converged with napkins and commiserations, and the barista insisted on my waiting while she fetched a wet rag. \"That's okay,\" I said. \"I'm kind of in a hurry. I have a movie I need to get to.\"\n\n\"It'll just take a sec,\" she said, running back to the counter. \"You can't go all wet like that.\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I said, and started for the door.\n\nThe gingerbread man grabbed my arm. \"I insist on buying you a drink to apologize,\" he said. \"What would you like?\"\n\n\"Nothing, really,\" I said. \"I need to go\u2014\" and the barista came over with the rag and began swabbing me down.\n\n\"That's not necessary. Really,\" I said, brushing her away.\n\n\"You're not going to sue the Polar Express, are you?\" she asked tearfully.\n\nYes, I thought, if I miss this movie because of you. \"No, of course not,\" I said. \"I'm fine. No harm done.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" she said. \"If you'll hang on just a minute, I'll get you a coupon for a free scone the next time you come.\"\n\n\"I don't want\u2014\"\n\n\"At least let me pay for the cleaners,\" the guy said, getting out his phone. \"If you'll give me your email address\u2014\"\n\n\"On second thought,\" I said, \"I think I would like that drink. A peppermint chai,\" and when he started for the counter, I darted out of the Polar Express, into the protective cover of the crowd, and into the lobby.\n\nIt was even more crowded than it had been with the Transformer. I pushed into the scrum and started across, and it was a good thing I hadn't gotten my cocoa. I had to bull my way through with both hands, prying couples apart and slipping between them, pushing aside excited kids in bright blue A Smurf Hanukkah T-shirts and teenagers staring up at House on Zombie Hill previews.\n\nIt was like swimming through molasses, and it seemed to take hours to get to a place where I could finally see the usher. There was a line in front of him now, but it wasn't the Dr. Who or the Little Goose Girl people, who were still waiting in their mazelike lines. I needed to get over to him before those movies got out, or I'd never get in to Christmas\u2014\n\nSomeone grabbed me by my arm. Please don't let it be the Gingerbread Man, I thought as I was yanked back into the center of the crowd.\n\nIt wasn't. It was Santa Claus, with a microphone and a phalanx of reindeer. \"What do you want for Christmas, little girl?\" he asked, sticking the mike in my face.\n\n\"To get over there,\" I said, pointing.\n\n\"Ho ho ho,\" he said. \"How would you like a nice pair of tickets to the 3:25 showing of The Claus Chronicles?\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" I said. \"I'm going to see Christmas Caper.\"\n\n\"What?\" he said. \"You don't want to see Santa's own movie?\"\n\nHe turned to his reindeer. \"Did you hear that, Prancer?\" he said, loudly enough for the entire lobby to hear. \"We have a problem here. I think I need to check my naughty-and-nice list, Blitzen.\" The list was duly produced, Santa put on a pair of spectacles, and he ran a very slow finger down it while I looked longingly over at the entrance to the theaters, where the line in front of the usher was growing longer by the minute.\n\n\"Here she is,\" Santa finally announced. \"Yes, definitely naughty. And what do we give naughty children for Christmas, Vixen?\"\n\n\"Coal!\" the crowd shouted.\n\nSanta reached into his sack and produced a lump of licorice. \"Shall I give this to her or shall we give her another chance? After all, it is Christmas.\"\n\n\"Coal!\" the crowd bellowed, and Santa had to ask them two more times to persuade them to offer me the tickets again, which this time I had the sense to take.\n\n\"And here's a ticket to the 2:30 showing of The Twelve Days of Christmas for being such a good sport,\" he said. \"Merry Christmas, ho ho ho,\" and I was finally free.\n\nI shot over to the entrance, where the line in front of the usher had miraculously disappeared, and handed the usher my ticket. \"Sorry,\" he said, handing it back.\n\n\"They're still cleaning?\" I asked incredulously.\n\n\"No, but you're late. It's 2:22. The 2:20's already started.\"\n\n\"But they do previews for the first fifteen minutes\u2014\"\n\n\"Sorry. It's theater policy. No one's allowed in after the start time. I think you can still get tickets to the 4:30.\"\n\nI don't, I thought, and I know who's responsible.\n\n\"Do you want me to check and see if there are still tickets available?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, that's okay. Never mind,\" I said, and went out, across the lobby, and into the wilds of the Drome to find Jack.\n\n\"A great movie! Don't miss it!\" \u2014Time Out\n\nI'd expected Gusteau's to be a bar somewhere near the dance clubs and Rick's from Casablanca, but it wasn't, and after consulting two maps and a Drome guide dressed as Frosty the Snowman, I found it in the depths of Munchkinland, sandwiched between the Monsters, Inc. ball pool and the Despicable Me moon drop, both of which were filled with toddlers emitting ear-slashing shrieks of joy and/or terror.\n\nThe restaurant was a replica of the French bistro in Ratatouille, with rats on the wallpaper and the tables. Jack was seated at a table at the back. \"Hi,\" he shouted over the din from the ball pool. \"Didn't get back in, huh?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said grimly.\n\n\"Sit down. Would you like something to drink? Gusteau's is G-rated, so I can't offer you a Pimm's Cup, but I can get you a mouse mocha.\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" I said, ignoring his invitation to sit down. \"I want to know what you're up to and why you saw to it I didn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey, what happened to you?\" he interrupted, pointing at my still-wet top. \"Don't tell me you collided with Hugh Grant carrying an orange juice, like in Notting Hill?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said through gritted teeth, \"a gingerbread latte\u2014\"\n\n\"And they wouldn't let you in because of the Drome's dress code?\"\n\n\"No, they wouldn't let me in because the movie had already started. Because a guy with a gingerbread latte and Santa Claus kept me from getting back from the Polar Express in time, as you well know. You're the one who put them up to it. This is just another one of your adolescent pranks, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I told you, that wasn't a prank.\"\n\n\"Then, what was it?\"\n\n\"It\u2026you remember when we watched Ocean's 17, and there's a break-in at the casino? Cops, sirens, helicopters, the whole nine yards? But that's just a diversion, and the real crime is taking place over at the bank?\"\n\n\"You're saying the geese were a diversion?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Just like Santa Claus. What did he do to delay you?\"\n\n\"You know perfectly well what he did. You hired him to do it so I wouldn't get in and I'd have to go with you. But it won't work. I have no intention of seeing Christmas Caper with you.\"\n\n\"Good,\" he said, \"because you're not going to. Not today, anyway.\"\n\n\"Why not? What did you do?\"\n\n\"Nothing. I'm not the one responsible for any of this.\"\n\n\"Really?\" I said sarcastically. \"And who is?\"\n\n\"If you'll sit down, I'll tell you. I'll also tell you why the 12:10 was sold out, why The Steampunk League sent its zeppelin over when it did, and why you couldn't buy tickets to Christmas Caper online.\"\n\n\"How did you know that?\"\n\n\"Lucky guess. The ticket machines wouldn't let you buy them either, would they?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, and sat down. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"I need to know something first. What were you doing at the Polar Express? When I left you, you were handing the usher your ticket.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't let me in. Some guy threw up in the theater.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, good old vomit. Works every time. But why didn't you just wait there in the entryway?\"\n\nI told him about the Dr. Who and Goose Girl lines and the bench people.\n\n\"Did anything else happen while you were waiting? Anybody send you a text telling you you'd won free tickets to something?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I told him about the Encore Presentation of Ghost Town. \"Which you can't tell me you didn't put them up to. Who else would know Ghost Town was one of my favorite movies?\"\n\n\"Who, indeed?\" he said. \"When we were in line, you said, 'This isn't going to turn into another Monsoon Gate.' I take it you didn't get in to that movie, either. Why not? Did the same thing happen?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. I told him about Zara trying on shoes and us missing the six o'clock showing. \"And then she got a tweet saying there was going to be a special preview of Bachelorette Party\u2014\"\n\n\"Which, let me guess, was a movie she really wanted to see?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"So we decided to go to the ten o'clock, but when we checked its running time, it didn't get out till\u2014\"\n\n\"After the last light-rail back to Hanover,\" he said, nodding. \"Are you sure you don't want something to drink? A rat root beer? A vermin vanilla Coke?\"\n\n\"No. Why are we here anyway?\" I asked, looking around. \"Surely there's someplace we could go to that we wouldn't have to shout.\"\n\n\"This and the Tunnel of Love are the only areas not under surveillance. We could go do that.\"\n\nI had been in the Tunnel of Love with Jack before. \"No,\" I said.\n\n\"I heard they've got some new features that are really romantic\u2014Anne Hathaway dying of consumption, Keira Knightley being hit by a train, Edward and Bella catching fire on their wedding night and burning to a crisp\u2014\"\n\n\"We are not going in the Tunnel of Love,\" I said. \"What do you mean, these are the only areas not under surveillance?\"\n\n\"I mean, there's no need to distract kids from going to see Ice Age 22,\" he said. \"Kids invented the short attention span. You, on the other hand, have been remarkably single-minded, hence the vomit. And the Gingerbread Man.\"\n\n\"You're saying the Drome was the one trying to keep me from seeing Christmas Caper?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Okay, so you know how this all started, that after the Batman and Metrolux and Hobbit III massacres, movie attendance totally tanked, and they had to come up with some way to get the public back, so they turned the theaters into fortresses where people felt safe bringing their kids and sending their teenagers. But to do that, they had to introduce all kinds of security\u2014metal detectors, full-body scans, explosives sniffers\u2014and that meant people were standing in line for an hour and forty-five minutes to see a two-hour movie, which only made attendance drop off more. Who wants to stand in a line when you can stay home and stream movies on your ninety-inch screen? They had to come up with something new, something really spectacular\u2014\"\n\n\"The moviedromes,\" I said.\n\n\"Yup. Turn going to the movies into an all-day full-surround entertainment experience\u2014\"\n\n\"Like Disneyverse.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Or IKEA. Show lots of movies. A hundred instead of the multiplexes' twenty. And add lots of razzle-dazzle: 4-D, IMAX, interactives, Hollywood-style premieres, celebrity appearances, plus theme restaurants and shops and rides and dance clubs and Wii arcades. None of which was really new.\"\n\n\"But I thought you said\u2014\"\n\n\"Movie theaters have never made their money off the movies they showed. They were just a sideline, a way to get the public into the theater and buy popcorn and jujubes at outrageous prices. The Dromes just expanded on the concept, to the point that the movies have become less and less important. Did you know fifty-three percent of the people who go to a Drome never see a movie at all?\"\n\n\"I can believe it,\" I said, thinking of Kett and Zara.\n\n\"And that's not an accident. In the two hours it takes to watch a movie, you could be spending way more than the price of a ticket and refreshments. And if they can get you to see a later showing, you'll eat lunch and dinner here\u2014and stick around to play glittertag afterward. The longer you're at the Drome\u2014\"\n\n\"The more I spend.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"So the Drome does everything it can to see that happens.\"\n\n\"You expect me to believe the Drome orchestrated all that\u2014the tickets and the vomit and the text and the sold-out sign\u2014just to get me to buy more souvenirs?\"\n\n\"No. You know that old movie we watched where the guy's investigating what looks like a simple train accident and then it turns out it wasn't an accident?\"\n\n\"I Love Trouble,\" I said promptly. \"With Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts. She was a reporter\u2014\"\n\n\"And he was a scoundrel,\" Jack said, grinning. \"Who, as I recall, Julia really liked.\"\n\n\"What's your point?\"\n\n\"My point is that the train accident was just the tip of the iceberg. And so is Christmas Caper. I think there's a whole vast conspiracy\u2014\"\n\n\"To keep me from seeing a movie?\"\n\n\"Not you. Anyone. And not just Christmas Caper. The Pimmsleys of Parson's Court, too, and Just When You Thought You Were Over Him, and Switching Gears, and possibly a couple of others.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because they can't afford to let the public find out what's going on. Remember the things I told you the Dromes used to attract people\u2014lots of razzle-dazzle and merchandise, and lots of movies?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well, that's the problem. The old multiplexes had fifteen screens to fill. The Dromes have a hundred.\"\n\n\"But they show some movies in more than one theater.\"\n\n\"Right, and in 3-D, 4-D, and Wii versions, plus there are tons of sequels and remakes and reboots\u2014\"\n\n\"And Encore Presentations\u2014\"\n\n\"And rereleases and film festivals and Harry Potter marathons and sneak previews, but even if you add in foreign films and Bollywood and bad remakes of British romantic comedies and crummy remakes of all three, it's still a hell of a lot of screens to fill. Especially when most people are only interested in seeing The Return of Frodo. Do you remember when we went to see Gaudy Night and we were the only two people in the theater?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014\"\n\n\"It's like Baskin-Robbins. They advertise thirty-one flavors, but who the hell ever orders raisin or lemon custard? Those could actually be vanilla with a little food coloring added for all anybody knows. And so could half the Dromes' movies.\"\n\n\"So you're saying Christmas Caper doesn't exist?\"\n\n\"I think that's a very real possibility.\"\n\n\"But that's ridiculous. You and I saw a trailer for it. There was a preview on the overheads while we were in line.\"\n\n\"Which was three minutes long and could have been filmed in a day.\"\n\n\"But why would they advertise it if it doesn't exist?\"\n\n\"Because otherwise somebody\u2014like me, for instance\u2014might get suspicious.\"\n\n\"But there's no way they could get away with\u2014\"\n\n\"Sure there is. Most people want to see the latest blockbuster, and with a minor nudge\u2014like a sold-out sign\u2014you can talk ninety-five percent of the rest of them into seeing something else. Or having lunch at Babette's Feast.\"\n\n\"And the other five percent?\"\n\n\"You just saw it.\"\n\n\"But movies sell out, especially at Christmastime\u2014\"\n\n\"And people throw up and accidentally spill drinks and get picked up by fraternity guys and can't go to the 10:20 showing because it gets out after the last light-rail train home. But the last showing of every movie I named gets out after the last scheduled light-rail, and I've tried to get into Switching Gears for the last five days and haven't made it. What time is it?\"\n\n\"Four o'clock.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me up. \"We've gotta get going if we're going to make it to Christmas Caper.\"\n\n\"Exciting, suspenseful, and unbelievably romantic!\" \u2014Front Row\n\n\"But I thought you said it doesn't exist,\" I said as he dragged me out of Gusteau's.\n\n\"It doesn't. Come on.\" He led me through Hogwarts and Neverland and down an aisle of shops selling Toy Story and The Great Oz and Son of Lion King souvenirs.\n\n\"This isn't the way to the theater complex,\" I protested.\n\n\"We've got some shopping to do first,\" he said, leading me into the Disney Princess Boutique.\n\n\"Shopping? Why?\"\n\n\"Because we can't afford to have management notice us, and the surest way to draw attention to yourself in a Drome is by not spending money,\" he said, riffling through a rack of Tangled T-shirts.\n\n\"Besides,\" he said, moving to another rack, this one full of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs hoodies, \"this is a big date. You should have something special to wear. Something the usher hasn't seen.\" He flipped through the entire rack and then one of Twelve Dancing Princesses tutus, pulling them out and then hanging them back up.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" I asked.\n\n\"I told you. Something special,\" he said, searching through yet another rack. \"And something that doesn't make you smell like Mrs. Claus's kitchen. Ah, here we go,\" he said, pulling out a yellow Dora and Diego Do the Himalayas T-shirt, with Diego pointing his trademark camera at Dora and the monkey, who were standing atop Mount Everest. \"Just the ticket.\"\n\n\"I am not wearing\u2014\" I began, but he'd already thrust it and a bright pink Little Goose Girl baseball cap into my hands.\n\n\"Tell the clerk to deactivate the tags so you can wear them now,\" he said, \"and then go in the dressing room, take off your top, and put the shirt on. I'll be in the store next door.\" He gave me a push in the paydesk's direction. \"And no questions.\"\n\nI did as he said, pulling my top off over my head\u2014he was right, it did reek of gingerbread\u2014and putting the T-shirt on over my singlet.\n\nIt was too tight, which I suspected was part of the plan, and looked even worse on me than it had on the hanger. \"You could have at least had me get something cute,\" I told him when I found him in the shop next door, trying on Risky Business sunglasses.\n\n\"No, I couldn't,\" he said. \"What'd you do with your top?\"\n\n\"I put it in the bag,\" I said.\n\n\"Good. Come on,\" he said, taking it from me and steering me out of the shop, back toward Gusteau's, to a recycler. He dropped the bag in.\n\n\"I liked that top,\" I protested.\n\n\"Shh, do you want to go to this movie or not?\" he said, leading me through a maze of balloon artists and tattoo laser techs and kiddie rides and candy stores to the lobby.\n\nHe stopped just short of it. \"Okay, I want you to go over to the kiosk and buy a ticket to Dragonwar.\"\n\n\"Dragonwar? But I thought we were going to\u2014\"\n\n\"We are. You buy a ticket to Dragonwar and then\u2014\"\n\n\"One ticket? Not two?\"\n\n\"Definitely not two. We're going in separately.\"\n\n\"What if the machine tells me I have to buy it at the ticket counter?\"\n\n\"It won't,\" he said. \"Once you're inside\u2014\"\n\n\"Or what if they say I can't go in yet?\"\n\n\"They won't do that, either,\" he said. \"Once you're inside, go to the concessions stand and buy a large popcorn and a large 7-Up with two straws, and go down to Theater 17.\"\n\n\"Theater 17? But Dragonwar's playing in Theater 24.\"\n\n\"We're not going to Dragonwar. Or to Au Revoir, Mon Fou, which is what's showing in Theater 17. You're not going into any theater. You're just going to stand in the doorway of 17. I'll meet you there in a couple of minutes.\"\n\n\"And you promise we'll see Christmas Caper?\"\n\n\"I promise I'll take you to Christmas Caper. Large popcorn,\" he ordered. \"Large 7-Up. Not Coke.\" He jammed the Goose Girl cap down over my eyes. \"Theater 17,\" he repeated, and took off through the crowd.\n\n\"Based on a true story\u2026but you won't believe it!\" \u2014At the Movies\n\nHe was right. No one got in my way or spilled a felony frappe on me or stopped me to give me a free pass to You're Under Arrest, and the usher didn't even glance at me as he tore my ticket in half. \"Theater 24,\" he said, and motioned to the right, \"End of the hall,\" and turned his attention to a trio of thirteen-year-olds, and I went down the plush-carpeted hall.\n\nThere was no sign of Jack, but he could be hiding in one of the recessed entrances to the theater or past the point halfway down where the hall took a turn to the right.\n\nHe wasn't. I stood outside Theater 17 for longer than a couple of minutes and then walked slowly down to 24, where Dragonwar was playing, but he wasn't there, either.\n\nHe got caught trying to sneak in, and they threw him out, I thought, walking back to Theater 17 and planting myself in the recessed doorway.\n\nI waited some more.\n\nStill no sign of Jack, or of anyone else, except a kid who shot out of Theater 30 and down to the restroom, banging its door loudly behind him. I waited some more. I would have gotten my phone out to see what time it was, but between the giant 7-Up I was cradling in my left arm and the enormous bag of popcorn, there was no way I could manage it.\n\nA door slammed farther down the hall and I looked up eagerly, but it was just the kid, racing back to 30, obviously determined not to miss a second more than necessary of his movie. I wondered what it was that was so riveting. I moved down the hall a little so I could see the marquee above the door.\n\nLethal Rampage. And next door to it, on the marquee above Theater 28, Christmas Caper.\n\n\"The cast is terrific!\" \u2014Goin' Hollywood\n\nThat rat! Jack had told me it didn't exist, and yet here it was. And all those problems I'd had, all those people who'd gotten in my way, weren't Drome employees hired to keep me out. They were just moviegoers like me, and the things that had happened were nothing more than coincidences. There was no conspiracy.\n\nWhen are you going to learn you can't trust a word he says? I thought, and if he'd been there, I'd have taken great pleasure in dumping the 7-Up\u2014and the popcorn\u2014over his head and stomping out.\n\nBut he'd apparently gotten himself caught and thrown out of the Drome. If he'd ever intended to come. And I was left, quite literally, holding the bag. And now that I thought about it, Nick Nolte had done the same thing to Julia Roberts in I Love Trouble\u2014sending her on what else?\u2014a wild-goose chase. With real geese.\n\nI'll kill him when I find him, I thought, and started back toward the entrance, fuming, and then stopped and looked back at Theater 28. I had come to the Drome to see Christmas Caper, and it was right here, with the 4:30 showing due to start at any minute. And it would serve Jack right if I saw it without him.\n\nI walked back to the turn and peeked around the corner to make sure no one\u2014especially not somebody on the staff\u2014was coming and would catch me going into a different movie than the one I had the ticket for, and then hurried over to Theater 28 and pulled the door open. That was no mean feat given the popcorn and the 7-Up, but I managed to get it open far enough to hold it with my hip while I sidled through.\n\nIt was pitch-dark inside. The door shut behind me, and I stood there in the blackness, waiting for my eyes to adjust. They didn't, even though there should be some light from the movie screen, or, if the previews hadn't started yet, from the overhead lights. And weren't these hallways supposed to have strip lighting in case they had to evacuate the theater?\n\nThis one obviously didn't, and I couldn't see anything. I stood there in the darkness, listening. The previews had definitely started. I could hear crashes and clangs and ominous music. It must be a preview for one of those shot-totally-at-night movies like The Dark Knight Rises or the Alien reboot, and that was why I couldn't see, and in a minute, when a different preview came on, there'd be enough light to find my way by. But though the sounds changed to laughter and the muffled murmur of voices, the corridor remained coal-mine black.\n\nI was going to have to feel my way along the passage, but I didn't have a free hand to hold on to the wall with. Or to fish out my phone with so I could use its lit screen as a flashlight.\n\nThis is all Jack's fault, I thought, stooping to set down the 7-Up so I could get my phone out of my pocket. I flipped it open and held it out in front of me. And no wonder the passage was so dark. It went a few more feet and then turned sharply to the left in a kind of dogleg. If I'd kept going, I'd have run face-first into a wall.\n\nThat's a lawsuit waiting to happen, I thought, trying to figure out a way to hold on to my phone and the 7-Up. There wasn't one\u2014the cup was too big around\u2014but if I could just make it past the dogleg, there should be some light from the screen to see by. I put my phone back in my pocket, felt for the cup, picked it up, and started down the passage again, counting the steps to the wall.\n\n\"Four\u2026five\u2026\" I whispered. \"Six, sev\u2014\"\n\nAnd was grabbed abruptly from behind by a hand around my waist. I yelped, but a second hand was already over my mouth, and Jack's voice was in my ear. \"Shh. In here,\" he whispered, and pulled me, impossibly, right through the wall.\n\n\"A winner! You'll be glad you came!\" \u2014Variety Online\n\nAmazingly, I hadn't dropped the 7-Up or the bag of popcorn. \"What do you think you're doing?\" I said, wrestling free of him.\n\n\"Shh!\" he whispered. \"These walls aren't soundproof. Did you spill any of the popcorn?\"\n\n\"Of course I spilled the popcorn,\" I said. \"You scared me half to death!\"\n\n\"Shh. Look, you can yell at me all you want,\" he whispered, \"but not till the next chase scene. And don't take out your cell phone. I don't want the light to give us away. Stay here,\" he ordered, and I heard the swish of a door's opening and closing softly, and then nothing but the sounds of pandemonium coming through the left-hand wall.\n\nIt sounded similar to what I'd heard before and had thought was from the previews for Christmas Caper, but it was clearly coming from the theater next door, which meant it was Lethal Rampage.\n\nI couldn't see anything at all, let alone enough to make out my surroundings, but this had to be the corridor leading to Christmas Caper because I could hear a voice intoning, \"Coming this Valentine's Day!\" through the other wall.\n\nGood, the previews were still playing. I hadn't missed the start of the movie. I would have time to tell Jack what I thought of him for grabbing me like that and still make it into the theater in time for the opening credits. If I could find it in the darkness, which was still absolute.\n\nJack was back. I heard him shut the door. \"Luckily, you only spilled a couple of handfuls,\" he said over the crash of explosions from Lethal Rampage. \"Which I ate. What took you so long? I was afraid the usher had spotted you, and I was going to have to come back out and rescue you.\"\n\n\"Where was I?\" I said angrily. \"I was standing outside Theater 17 just like you told me to. You lied to me\u2014\"\n\n\"Nobody saw you go in the door to 28, did they?\"\n\n\"Don't change the subject. You\u2014\"\n\n\"Did they?\" He grabbed my arm, jostling the popcorn.\n\n\"No,\" I said, only half listening. In between deafening explosions, the announcer on the Christmas Caper side of the wall was saying muffledly, \"And now for our feature presentation.\"\n\n\"Look,\" I said. \"I'd love to stand here in the dark and fight with you, but I intend to see Christmas Caper. So if you'll please let go of my arm, the movie's about to start.\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" he said. He squeezed my arm. \"Hang on,\" he said, let go, and moved away from me, and I could hear him doing something, though I couldn't tell what, and then the wall I was facing lit up with the beam from a penlight.\n\nFrom what I could see in its dim light, we were in a narrow passage just like the one outside, with carpet on the floor and the walls and no strip lighting, but it was long and straight and ended in a wall, not in the entrance to the theater. There was no sign of the door Jack had just come through, though it had to be in that wall because Jack had taken off his jacket and laid it against the bottom of it.\n\n\"To keep any stray light from seeping out,\" he explained over the racket.\n\n\"What is this place?\" I said. \"Where are we?\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he said, putting a finger to his lips and whispering. \"Kissing scene coming up,\" and he must have been telling the truth because the gunfire and explosions were suddenly replaced by the strains of violins.\n\nHe took the popcorn and 7-Up cup from me, tiptoed halfway down the corridor, stooped and set them on the floor, and then stood up again, listening with his finger to his lips. And apparently the lethal rampagers were back, because the romantic violins cut off abruptly, replaced by a blast of trumpets, lots of drumming, and the sound of revving engines and squealing tires.\n\n\"Chase scene,\" Jack said, coming back over to me. \"Time to go to work.\"\n\n\"You said you were going to tell me what this place is. Where's the theater?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you everything, I swear. After we do this. Take off your shirt.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Your shirt. Take it off.\"\n\n\"You never change, do you?\"\n\n\"Wrong line,\" he said. \"You're supposed to say, 'Are you sure we're planning the same sort of crime?' and I say\u2014\"\n\n\"This is not How to Steal a Million,\" I said.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said. \"It's more like Jumpin' Jack Flash. Or I Love Trouble. Take it off. And hurry. We don't have much time.\"\n\n\"I have no intention of taking off any\u2014\"\n\n\"Calm down. It's for the photos. Of this passage and the one outside,\" he said, and when I still stood there, my arms crossed, \"The camera the boy on your shirt is holding isn't just a picture. There's a digital-strip camera embedded in it.\"\n\nAnd that was why he'd riffled through all those shirts in the Disney Princess boutique. He'd been looking for one with a camera. \"Why can't you just use the camera in your phone?\"\n\n\"When they scan them in the security line, they check your info against the police and FBI databases.\"\n\n\"Which you're in because of the geese,\" I said. \"That's why you wanted me to come with you, so I could smuggle in your camera for you.\"\n\n\"Of course. That's what scoundrels do. They use the girl to smuggle the necklace through customs or to get the news story or to get them out of East Germany\u2014\"\n\n\"This is not a movie!\"\n\n\"You're right about that. Which is why I've got to get those pictures. So, do you want to give me that shirt or do you want me to take the camera off of it while you're wearing it?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" I said, pulled the T-shirt off over my head, handed it to him, and stood there fuming in my singlet while he turned the shirt inside out, peeled off the digital-strip camera, and handed the T-shirt back to me. I pulled it on while he snapped pictures of the passage, motioning me out of the way so he could get a shot of the long wall behind me.\n\nHe snapped the end wall he'd dragged me through and the one at the other end, and then came back to me and listened a moment. \"I'll be right back,\" he said, switched off the penlight, plunging us in darkness, and went out into the passage again.\n\nHe was gone for what seemed like forever. I put my ear to the door, but all I could hear were detonations and screams from the Lethal Rampage side and disgustingly perky music from the other. I listened intently, afraid the din would subside any minute, but it didn't, though on the Rampage side I could hear, over the crashing, the sound of muffled voices.\n\nPlease don't let that be the usher or Drome security, I thought, demanding to know what Jack was doing in here, but it must not have been because the door was opening again, and I had to back away hastily as Jack came in and shut it behind him.\n\n\"Can you find my jacket?\" he whispered, and I felt around for it in vain, and then pulled my shirt off again and handed it to him to put against the door.\n\n\"Thanks,\" he whispered, and, after a few seconds, switched on the penlight again.\n\n\"Did you get the pictures?\"\n\nHe waved the digital strip at me. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Good. You lied to me.\"\n\n\"No, I didn't. Besides, Jimmy Stewart lied to Margaret Sullavan, Peter O'Toole lied to Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant lied to Audrey Hepburn. It's what scoundrels do.\"\n\n\"That's no excuse. You promised you'd take me to Christmas Caper.\"\n\n\"And I did,\" he said. \"This is it.\" He waved his arm to show the passage. \"Welcome to Theater 28.\"\n\n\"This isn't a theater,\" I said.\n\n\"You're right,\" he said. \"Come on.\" He grabbed my hand, led me down to where he'd set the popcorn and 7-Up. \"Have a seat, and I'll explain everything. Come on, sit down.\"\n\nI sat down on the floor, my back against the carpeted wall, my arms folded belligerently across my chest, and he sat down across from me. \"That passage outside splits in two and goes into the theaters on either side,\" he said. \"If I hadn't reached out and pulled you in here, you'd have turned and followed that dogleg into Theater 30 and Lethal Rampage.\n\n\"And if you'd turned the other way, you'd have ended up in Theater 26\"\u2014he jerked his thumb toward the wall behind him\u2014\"where Make Way for Ducklings is now showing, a fact you wouldn't have discovered until you'd sat through fifteen minutes of previews, at which point you'd have thought you'd somehow gotten in the wrong theater, and go tell the usher, who'd tell you he was sorry, but you'd missed the start of Christmas Caper and he couldn't let you in, but that there might still be tickets available for the seven o'clock. A neat trick, huh?\"\n\n\"But why\u2014?\"\n\n\"They have to have a last line of defense in case a determined fan makes it past all the other firewalls. That hardly ever happens, but occasionally somebody does what you just did\u2014can't get in, buys a ticket for another movie, and then tries to sneak in to what they originally wanted to see.\"\n\n\"Why don't they just not put up a marquee for it?\"\n\n\"They tried that, which is what made us suspicious in the first place, so they had to come up with an alternative plan. Which you see before you.\"\n\n\"Us?\" I asked.\n\n\"Oops, I almost forgot,\" he said, scrambling to his feet and going to retrieve his jacket. He put it on, came back, and began searching through its pockets.\n\n\"Now what are you doing?\" I asked.\n\n\"Trying to get this made before Lethal Rampage hits another quiet stretch.\" He frowned at the red Coca-Cola cup. \"You did get 7-Up, didn't you? Not Coke?\"\n\n\"I got 7-Up.\" I handed it over to him. \"You're not making a stink bomb out of that, are you?\" I asked as he pulled out a flask and poured a brown liquid into the cup.\n\n\"No,\" he said, patting his pockets some more and pulling out a Terminator 12 commemorative glass and then a baggie full of lemon slices.\n\nHe poured half the 7-Up-and-brown-liquid-and-ice mixture into the Terminator glass, added a lemon slice and a sprig of mint from his breast pocket, reached inside his jacket, pulled out a stalk of rhubarb with a flourish, stuck it in the glass, stirred the mixture with it, and handed it to me. \"Your Pimm's Cup, madam,\" he said.\n\n\"Just like the ones you made the night we watched Ghost Town,\" I said, smiling.\n\n\"Well, not just like them. These are made with rum, which was all Tom Cruise's Cocktail Bar had. And when I made the Ghost Town ones, I was trying to get you into bed.\"\n\n\"And what are you trying to do this time? Get me drunk so I'll agree to help you do something else illegal?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, sitting down next to me. \"Not right now, anyway,\" which wasn't exactly a reassuring answer.\n\n\"I got the photos,\" he went on, \"which is what I came for, and, thanks to you and that awful Dora T-shirt\"\u2014he raised his Coke cup to me\u2014\"I'm a lot less likely to get caught smuggling them out. But it's still too risky to do any more investigating till I've gotten them safely off the premises.\" He took a leisurely sip of his drink.\n\n\"Then, shouldn't we be going?\" I asked.\n\n\"We can't. Not till Lethal Rampage is over and we can blend in with the audience as it leaves. So relax. Drink your Pimm's Cup, have some popcorn. We've got\u2014\" He stopped and listened to the din coming through the wall for a moment, \"an hour and forty-six minutes to kill. Enough time to\u2014\"\n\n\"Tell me what's going on, like you promised you would. Or are you going to tell me that's classified, too?\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, it is,\" he said. \"And you've already seen what they're doing\u2014covering up movies that don't exist.\"\n\n\"But why? Most people don't even care about the movies part.\"\n\n\"Oh, but they do. They think they've got a hundred to choose from, and that's what makes them come all the way out here on the light-rail and stand in security lines forever. Do you think they'd do that just to buy a bag of popcorn and an overpriced Avengers mug? How long do you think Baskin-Robbins would stay in business if they only had three flavors, even if they were the most popular ones? Look at your friends. They may have spent today shopping and eating and\u2014\"\n\n\"Picking up guys.\"\n\n\"And picking up guys, but if somebody asked them tomorrow what they did, they'd say they went to the movies, and they'd believe it. The Drome's not selling popcorn, it's selling an illusion, an idea\u2014a giant screen with magical images on it, your girlfriend sitting beside you in the dark, romance, adventure, mystery\u2026\"\n\n\"But I still don't understand. Okay, they have to maintain the illusion, but it's not as if they don't have any movies. You said there were only four or five movies here that didn't exist, and they already show some movies on more than one screen. Why not just show X-Force and The Return of Frodo in one more theater instead of making movies up?\"\n\n\"Because they're already showing X-Force in six theaters as it is, and Starstruck just announced they're building a chain of 250-screen Superdromes. Besides, I don't think the moviegoing public's the only people they're trying to fool.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, if you're a film company, this could really work to your advantage. If your movie's behind schedule, nobody gets fined or fired for missing the release date. You release it anyway, and then, when it's finished, you put out the DVD and stream it, and nobody's the wiser. Which, by the way, is what happened to Monsoon Gate and what I think probably happened to Christmas Caper. You can't release a Christmas movie in February. It's got to come out in December or you'll lose your shirt. Figuratively speaking.\"\n\n\"Which means it might show up on the Net in a few months,\" I said.\n\n\"Yeah, and if it does, I'll watch it with you, I promise.\"\n\n\"Do you think that's what happened to the other movies?\"\n\n\"No. The Ripper Files never came out, and neither did Mission to Antares or By the Skin of Our Teeth. And why spend millions making a movie when you can do a three-minute trailer instead, pay the Dromes to block people from seeing it, and pocket the difference? The shareholders wouldn't even have to know.\"\n\n\"Which would make it fraud.\"\n\n\"It's already fraud,\" he said. \"And false advertising. There are laws against selling products that don't exist.\"\n\n\"Which is why they don't sell the tickets online,\" I said. \"But if they're criminals, isn't what you're doing dangerous?\"\n\n\"Not if they don't know I'm doing it. Which is why,\" he said, his voice dropping to a whisper, \"we need to sit here quietly, eat our popcorn\"\u2014he scooted closer to me\u2014\"and watch the movie.\"\n\n\"What's it about?\" I whispered.\n\n\"This guy who's investigating a conspiracy when who should turn up but his old girlfriend. It's the last thing he needs. He's trying to stay invisible\u2014\"\n\nWhich explains why he looked so dismayed when he saw me, I thought, a weight lifting from me.\n\n\"And he knows he should probably get out of there before she blows his cover, but she already thinks he's a\u2014\"\n\n\"Scoundrel?\"\n\n\"I was going to say 'wanker.' \"\n\n\"Scoundrel,\" I said firmly, \"and besides, he needs her to help him smuggle something in past the guards, like Kevin Kline in French Kiss.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said. \"Plus, he's got some stuff to tell her, so he recruits her to help him, and in the course of their investigations, he convinces her to forgive him, like Olivia de Havilland forgives Errol Flynn and Julia Roberts forgives Nick Nolte and Whoopi Goldberg forgives\u2014\"\n\n\"Jack. Because that's what scoundrels' girlfriends do.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said. \"Which is why you should\u2014\"\n\n\"Shh,\" I said.\n\n\"What is it?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Kissing scene coming up,\" I said, and switched off the penlight.\n\n\"The most fun you can have at the movies!\" \u2014moviefone.com\n\n\"How long does Lethal Rampage run?\" I asked him a considerable time later. \"That sounds like Final Scene music to me.\"\n\nHe raised himself up on one elbow, said, \"It is,\" and went back to nuzzling my neck.\n\n\"But don't we have to be out of here before it ends?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but you're forgetting, it's a Hollywood Blockbuster. Remember when we saw the reboot of Speed, how we kept thinking it was over and it wasn't? Or The Return of the King? That had like seven endings. Lethal Rampage has got at least three more climaxes to go.\"\n\n\"Oh, good,\" I murmured, snuggling into his shoulder, but a moment later he sat up, reached for his jacket, pulled a phone out of it, and flipped it open.\n\n\"I thought you didn't have a phone,\" I said, sitting up.\n\n\"Not one I wanted to get caught with photos on,\" he said, looking at its screen. \"Change of plans. There's something I've got to go take care of.\" He began buttoning his shirt. \"Wait till the next explosion and then slip out into the passage and wait for Lethal Rampage to get out. And don't leave anything behind.\"\n\nI nodded.\n\n\"When you get out to the lobby, go over to one of the caf\u00e9s, not the Polar Express, order a drink, text your friends, and then wait at least a few minutes before you try to leave, and you should be fine.\"\n\nHe pulled me to my feet. \"Look, I can't tweet or call you\u2014it might be traced\u2014so it may be a while before I can get in touch. All I've proved so far is that there's a blocked-off passageway between theaters and some suspicious activity. I still have to prove the movies don't exist, which I'll have to do in Hollywood.\" He hesitated. \"I feel bad about leaving you here like this.\"\n\n\"But Peter O'Toole left Audrey Hepburn in a closet and Kevin Kline left Meg Ryan in Paris without a passport,\" I said, following him down to the far end of the passage. \"And now I suppose I'm supposed to say, 'It's okay. Go,' and you kiss me goodbye, and I stand in the doorway like Olivia, looking longingly after you with my tresses blowing in a wind that smells like the sea?\"\n\n\"Exactly. Except in this case it smells more like rancid popcorn oil,\" he said, \"and we can't afford to leave the door open. It lets in too much light. But I can definitely manage the kiss.\"\n\nHe did. \"See?\" he said. \"You do like scoundrels.\"\n\n\"I happen to like nice men,\" I said. \"How are you going to get out of the Drome without security's catching you?\"\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" he said. \"Look, if you get in trouble\u2014\"\n\n\"I won't. Go.\"\n\nHe kissed me again, opened the wall, and went through it, only to appear again almost instantly. \"By the way,\" he said, \"about the geese and the graduating thing. Remember in How to Steal a Million where Peter O'Toole tells Audrey Hepburn he's not a burglar, that he's actually a security expert 'with advanced degrees in art history and chemistry and a diploma, with distinction, from London University in advanced criminology'?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"I suppose now you're going to tell me you have an advanced degree from London University?\"\n\n\"No, Yale. In consumer fraud,\" he said, and was gone, leaving me to hurriedly gather up all the telltale trash by the less-than-helpful light of my cell phone screen, get out into the passage, shutting the door soundlessly behind me, and over to the corridor that led to the theater next door, and wait for the movie to let out.\n\n\"A movie experience that leaves you wanting more! An enthusiastic thumbs-up!\" \u2014rogerebert.net\n\nHe'd been right about Lethal Rampage. It went on for another twenty minutes, giving me time to make sure the door was completely shut with no seams showing, check again for stray popcorn, and then lean against the corridor wall, listening to a whole symphony of crashes, bangs, and explosions before the lights came up, people started trickling out, and I had to somehow merge with them without being noticed.\n\nIt was easier than I'd thought. They were all too intent on switching their cell phones back on and complaining about the movie to pay any attention to me.\n\nLethal Rampage had apparently been just as awful as it had sounded through the wall. \"I couldn't believe how lame the plot was,\" a twelve-year-old boy said, and his friend nodded. \"I hated the ending.\"\n\nMe, too, I thought wistfully.\n\nI eased in behind them and followed them down the passage, eavesdropping on their conversation so I could talk about the movie in case anybody asked me about it.\n\nLike the ticket-taker, who I still had to get past. I wondered if he'd remember I'd been going to Dragonwar, not Lethal Rampage. Maybe I should go back to Theater 17 and go out with the Dragonwar audience.\n\nBut if it had already let out, I'd have to go out past the ticket-taker alone, ensuring he'd notice me. And what if somebody on staff saw me going back and concluded I was sneaking into a second movie? I'd better stick with this crowd.\n\nI stopped just inside the door, loitering by the trash can till a group of high-school kids came by, and then hastily tossed my popcorn sack and Coke cup and attached myself to them. And it was a good thing because there was a cleaning crew lurking just outside the door with their dustpans and garbage bags, and for all their slouching against the wall, waiting for the theater to empty out, they looked unnaturally alert.\n\nI stuck close to the high-schoolers as we passed them, bending over my phone and pretending to text like they were doing, and stayed with them as we merged with the audience from Pirates of the Caribbean 9, which had just gotten out.\n\nFrom the sound of things, Pirates hadn't been any better than Lethal Rampage, and it occurred to me that I'd had a better time than any of them, even though I hadn't seen a movie, and\u2014\n\nThe conclusion of that thought was swept away by a bunch of people pouring down from the upstairs theaters, and it was all I could do to keep my footing as the whole mass of people surged past the ticket-taker and out into the only-slightly-less-crowded lobby, which I was relieved to see wasn't full of security guards and blaring sirens. Jack must have gotten safely away.\n\nBut just in case he was still in the Drome somewhere, I needed to do what I could to keep them from getting suspicious.\n\nWhich meant detaching myself from the high-schoolers and getting in line to get tickets for the next showing of Christmas Caper. If I were still trying to see it, I obviously didn't know it didn't exist.\n\nThe high-schoolers were trying to decide which restaurant to go to. \"While you make up your minds, I'm going to go get a funnel cake,\" I said to the nearest of them, who didn't even look up from her smartphone, and went to check the time of the next showing, which should be at 6:40.\n\nIt wasn't. It was at 7:30, and the one after that was at 10:00. I stared at the board for a long minute, contemplating what that meant, and then went to try to find the end of the ticket line.\n\nIt was ten times longer than it had been when we'd first arrived, snaking all the way back to the Death Star Diner, and it was barely moving. It was a good thing I wasn't trying to actually get in. I wouldn't make it even halfway to the front before the last light-rail train home.\n\nI wondered how long I needed to stand here. Jack had said it wasn't safe to use his phone, but he might have been able to borrow someone else's and send me a text from it, so I turned on my phone and looked at my messages.\n\nThere weren't any from him, but there were four from Zara, all of them asking, \"Where r u?\" except the last one, which said, \"Assume ur not ansring means u finally got in 2 Xmas Cpr. How was it?\"\n\nI needed to text her back, but not till I was far enough along the line that it wouldn't look like I'd just gotten into it. I didn't want her wondering what I'd been doing all this time\u2014she was way too quick to draw connections to Jack. So I switched off my phone and then stood there, periodically inching forward, thinking about Zara's text. \"How was it?\" she'd asked.\n\nGreat, I thought, and remembered those boys complaining about Lethal Rampage and my thinking I'd had a much better time at the movies than they had.\n\nAnd how did I know that wasn't what I'd just experienced\u2014an afternoon at the movies? That I hadn't just been participating in a romantic spy adventure concocted by Jack, who knew how much I wanted to believe he'd had a good reason for going off without saying a word to me and who'd heard me complain countless times about going to a movie with Zara and Kett and ending up not getting to see it?\n\nThere could have been lots of reasons that that passage was there. It could've been a shortcut between theaters for the projectionist, or some sort of required evacuation route in case of fire that Jack had appropriated for his own private Tunnel of Love. He could have bribed the usher to tell me I couldn't get in and to put Christmas Caper up on Theater 28's marquee after the audience for Make Way for Ducklings was inside. And the other stuff\u2014the vomit and the spilled gingerbread latte and Santa\u2014could all have been coincidences, and Jack had simply made them sound like a conspiracy.\n\nDon't be ridiculous, I told myself. Do you honestly think he'd go to that much trouble just to get you into bed?\n\nOf course he would. Look how much trouble he went to just to play a practical joke on the dean. And the whole thing had been just like the plot of How to Steal a Million or I Love Trouble, complete with spies, slapstick, a sparring couple forced together into a small confined space, and a hero who was lying to the heroine.\n\nAnd believing it was a scam made a lot more sense than believing that some vast Hollywood conspiracy lay behind this decorated-for-Christmas Cinedrome.\n\nThere isn't any conspiracy, I thought. You've been had, that's all. Again. Christmas Caper is showing right now in Theater 56 or 79 or 100. And Jack is off plotting some other practical joke\u2014or the seduction of some other gullible girl\u2014while I stand here in this stupid line trying to protect him from a danger that never existed.\n\nI looked back at the end of the line, which I was only a dozen people away from. I still couldn't text Zara, but for a completely different reason now\u2014she couldn't ever find out what an idiot I'd been.\n\nSo I continued to stand there, thinking about how easy it would have been for Jack to bribe somebody on the staff to put a NO TICKETS AVAILABLE sign on the schedule board, just like he'd bribed some farmer to lend him those geese. And to pay somebody to block me on my way across the lobby. And thinking how, when I found Christmas Caper was sold out, I should just have gone to see A Star-Crossed Season instead.\n\nThree Hanover freshmen leaned over the barrier to talk to the girls ahead of me in line. \"What are you going to?\" one of them asked.\n\n\"We haven't decided,\" one of the girls said. \"We were thinking maybe Saw 7. Or A Star-Crossed Season.\"\n\n\"Don't!\" the trio shouted, and the middle one said, \"We just saw it. It was beyond boring!\"\n\n\"Well worth the trip!\" \u2014comingsoon.com\n\nI waited another ten minutes, during which I moved forward about a foot, and then called Zara.\n\n\"Where have you been?\" she asked. \"I've been texting and texting you.\"\n\n\"You have?\" I said. \"I haven't gotten them. I think there's something wrong with my phone.\"\n\n\"So where are you now?\"\n\n\"Where do you think? In line.\"\n\n\"In line?\" she said. \"You mean you still haven't seen Christmas Card?\"\n\n\"Caper,\" I corrected her. \"No, not yet. All three afternoon showings sold out before I got to the front of the line, so I'm trying to get a ticket to the seven o'clock.\"\n\n\"Where are you exactly?\" she asked.\n\nI told her.\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" she said, which I doubted. It would take her at least twenty minutes to disentangle herself and Kett from the guys, and then on the way here they'd be delayed by the dress Zooey Deschanel wore in Son of Elf or some other guys, and by that time I'd hopefully be far enough forward in the line to make it look like I'd been in line since the 12:10.\n\nBut she showed up almost immediately and alone. \"This is all the farther you've gotten?\" she said. \"What happened to Jack?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" I said. \"Where's Kett?\"\n\nZara rolled her eyes. \"She texted Noah and they went off to the Dirty Dancing Club. Did he tell you where he's been all these months?\"\n\n\"Who? Noah?\"\n\n\"Very funny,\" Zara said. \"No. Jack.\"\n\n\"No. In jail, probably.\"\n\n\"It's too bad,\" Zara said, shaking her head sadly. \"I was hoping you might get back together. I mean, I know he's kind of a\u2026\"\n\nScoundrel, I thought.\n\n\"Wanker,\" Zara said. \"But he's so scorching!\"\n\nThat he is, I thought. \"What are you going to do now?\" I asked her, to change the subject.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said, sighing. \"This trip's been a complete bust. I didn't meet anybody even lukewarm, and I couldn't find anything for my family for Christmas. I suppose I should go over to the Pretty Woman store and see if they have anything my mom would like, but I think maybe I'll just go see Christmas Caper with you. When did you say the next showing was?\"\n\n\"Seven.\"\n\nShe checked the time on her phone. \"It's already 6:30,\" she said, looking at her phone and then up at the line ahead of us. \"We'll never make it.\"\n\n\"When's the showing after that?\" I asked her, but before she could look it up, Kett came up, looking annoyed.\n\n\"What happened to Noah?\" Zara asked her.\n\n\"He's at the first-aid station,\" she said.\n\n\"The first-aid\u2014?\"\n\n\"He had a bloody nose. He said he wanted to take me dancing, but it turned out it was because he wanted to enter me in the wet T-shirt contest, the slimewad,\" she said. \"So what's going on?\"\n\n\"Lindsay's still trying to get in to see Christmas Caper,\" Zara said.\n\n\"You mean, you haven't managed to see it yet?\" Kett asked. \"Geez, how long have you been standing in line?\"\n\n\"Forever,\" Zara said, studying her phone. \"And she's definitely not going to get in to see the 7 o'clock. This is showing it as sold out.\" She scrolled down. \"And the next showing isn't till 10\"\u2014she scrolled some more\u2014\"which doesn't get out till after the last train to Hanover leaves, so that one won't work, either.\"\n\n\"Geez,\" Kett said. \"You spent all this time standing in line for a movie you don't even get to see. Was it worth it spending the whole day on it?\"\n\nOh, yes, I thought. Because, lies or not, bill of goods or not, it was still the best afternoon at the movies I'd had in a long time. Much better than if I'd gone to see A Star-Crossed Season. Or Lethal Rampage. And much better than wandering around looking at Black Widow boots and Silver Linings Playbook leotards like Zara, or dealing with creeps, like Kett had. Unlike theirs, my afternoon had been great. It had had everything\u2014adventure, suspense, romance, explosions, danger, snappy dialogue, kissing scenes. The perfect Saturday afternoon at the movies.\n\nExcept for the ending.\n\nBut it might not be over yet\u2014Jack had after all promised me he'd watch Christmas Caper with me if it ended up being streamed. And right before the end of Jumpin' Jack Flash, Jack had left Whoopi Goldberg sitting waiting for him in a restaurant. Michael Douglas had left Kathleen Turner standing abandoned on a parapet. Han Solo had left Princess Leia on the rebel moon. And they'd all showed up again, just like they'd said.\n\nOf course Jack had also told me he'd graduated from Yale and was investigating a huge, far-reaching conspiracy, and that putting those geese in the dean's office hadn't been a prank. But not everything he'd told me was a lie. He'd said he loved movies, and that was true. Nobody who didn't love them could have engineered such a perfect one.\n\nAnd even if he'd made up everything else, even if he was every bit the scoundrel I was afraid he was and I never saw him again, it had still been a terrific afternoon at the movies.\n\n\"Well?\" Kett was saying. \"Was it? I mean, you didn't get to do anything.\"\n\n\"Or have anything to eat,\" I said, getting out of line. \"Let's go get some sushi or something. How late is Nemo's open?\"\n\n\"I'll see,\" Kett said, getting out her phone. \"I think it stays open till\u2014 Oh, my God!\"\n\n\"What?\" Zara asked. \"That slimewad Noah didn't text you something obscene, did he?\"\n\n\"No,\" Kett said, scrolling down through her phone-number list. \"You won't believe this.\" She tapped a number and put the phone up to her ear. \"Hi,\" she said into it. \"I got your text. What happened?\u2026You're kidding!\u2026Oh, my God!\u2026Are you sure? Which channel?\"\n\nOh, no, I thought, even though I'd decided he'd concocted the whole thing, they've arrested Jack. They caught him with the camera strip.\n\n\"Oh, my God, what?\" Zara said.\n\n\"Hang on,\" Kett said to whoever was on the other end, and pressed the phone to her chest. \"We should have stayed home,\" she said to us. \"We missed all the excitement.\"\n\nJack went back to the campus to leave me a message, I thought, and the campus police caught him.\n\n\"What excitement?\" Zara asked. \"Tell us.\"\n\n\"Margo says there are all these TV camera crews and squad cars with flashing lights around the admin building, and a few minutes ago Dr. Baker told her the dean's been arrested.\"\n\n\"The dean?\" I said.\n\n\"For what?\" Zara asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Kett said. She texted like mad for a minute, and then said, \"Margo says it has something to do with taking federal loan money for students who don't exist. It's apparently all over the news,\" and Zara began swiping through screens to find the coverage.\n\n\"The dean says it's all a big mistake,\" Kett said, \"but apparently the FBI's consumer fraud division's been investigating him for months, and they've got all kinds of evidence.\"\n\nI'll bet they do, I thought, thinking of Jack's saying he had to go, that something had come up, and of what a good idea geese had been. In all the chaos\u2014and mess\u2014nobody would have even thought to check the dean's office to see if anything was missing.\n\n\"There are?\" Kett was saying. She put her hand over her phone. \"Margo says the place has been crawling with scorching FBI agents.\"\n\n\"Here it is,\" Zara said, holding her phone so I could see the screen, which showed the quad full of police officers and FBI agents, and reporters trying to get a shot of the dean as he was perp-walked down the steps and over to a squad car. There was no sign of Jack.\n\n\"Are they still there?\" Kett said, and then glumly, \"Oh.\" She turned to us. \"She says there's no point in our coming home. It's all over. I can't believe we missed it.\"\n\n\"Especially the FBI agents,\" Zara said teasingly.\n\n\"Right,\" Kett said. She sighed. \"Instead, I got felt up by a slimewad.\"\n\n\"And I still don't have a present for my mother,\" Zara said. She turned to me. \"And you didn't get to see your movie, after I promised you would.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"We could go to the 10:00,\" Zara said, \"and leave before it's over. That way you could at least see part of it.\"\n\n\"And miss the ending?\" I said, thinking of Romancing the Stone, where Michael Douglas comes back when Kathleen Turner least expects it, and of French Kiss, where Meg Ryan's already on the plane, and of Jumpin' Jack Flash, where he finally shows up in the very last scene and is every bit as wonderful as she thought he was.\n\n\"No, that's okay,\" I said, trying hard not to smile. \"I'll watch it when it comes out on the Net.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Newsletter", + "text": "Later examination of weather reports and newspapers showed that it may have started as early as October nineteenth, but the first indication I had that something unusual was going on was at Thanksgiving.\n\nI went to Mom's for dinner (as usual), and was feeding cranberries and cut-up oranges and apples into Mom's old-fashioned meat grinder for the cranberry relish and listening to my sister-in-law Allison talk about her Christmas newsletter (also as usual).\n\n\"Which of Cheyenne's accomplishments do you think I should write about first, Nan?\" she said, spreading cheese on celery sticks. \"Her playing lead snowflake in The Nutcracker or her hitting a home run in PeeWee Soccer?\"\n\n\"I'd list the Nobel Peace Prize first,\" I murmured, under cover of the crunch of an apple being put through the grinder.\n\n\"There just isn't room to put in all the girls' accomplishments,\" she said, oblivious. \"Mitch insists I keep it to one page.\"\n\n\"That's because of Aunt Lydia's newsletters,\" I said. \"Eight pages single-spaced.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said. \"And in that tiny print you can barely read.\" She waved a celery stick thoughtfully. \"That's an idea.\"\n\n\"Eight pages single-spaced?\"\n\n\"No. I could get the computer to do a smaller font. That way I'd have room for Dakota's Sunshine Scout merit badges. I got the cutest paper for my newsletters this year. Little angels holding bunches of mistletoe.\"\n\nChristmas newsletters are very big in my family, in case you couldn't tell. Everybody\u2014uncles, grandparents, second cousins, my sister Sueann\u2014sends the Xeroxed monstrosities to family, coworkers, old friends from high school, and people they met on their cruise to the Caribbean (which they wrote about at length in their newsletter the year before). Even my Aunt Irene, who writes a handwritten letter on every one of her Christmas cards, sticks a newsletter in with it.\n\nMy second cousin Lucille's are the worst, although there are a lot of contenders. Last year hers started:\n\n\u2003\"Another year has hurried past\n\n\u2003And, here I am, asking, 'Where did the time go so fast?'\n\n\u2003A trip in February, a bladder operation in July,\n\n\u2003Too many activities, not enough time, no matter how hard I try.\"\n\nAt least Allison doesn't put Dakota and Cheyenne's accomplishments into verse.\n\n\"I don't think I'm going to send a Christmas newsletter this year,\" I said.\n\nAllison stopped, cheese-filled knife in hand. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I don't have any news. I don't have a new job, I didn't go on a vacation to the Bahamas, I didn't win any awards. I don't have anything to tell.\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous,\" my mother said, sweeping in carrying a foil-covered casserole dish. \"Of course you do, Nan. What about that skydiving class you took?\"\n\n\"That was last year, Mom,\" I said. And I had only taken it so I'd have something to write about in my Christmas newsletter.\n\n\"Well, then, tell about your social life. Have you met anybody lately at work?\"\n\nMom asks me this every Thanksgiving. Also Christmas, the Fourth of July, and every time I see her.\n\n\"There's nobody to meet,\" I said, grinding cranberries. \"Nobody new ever gets hired, because nobody ever quits. Everybody who works there's been there for years. Nobody even gets fired. Bob Hunziger hasn't been to work on time in eight years, and he's still there.\"\n\n\"What about\u2026what was his name?\" Allison said, arranging the celery sticks in a cut-glass dish. \"The guy you liked who had just gotten divorced?\"\n\n\"Gary,\" I said. \"He's still hung up on his ex-wife.\"\n\n\"I thought you said she was a real shrew.\"\n\n\"She is,\" I said. \"Marcie the Menace. She calls him twice a week complaining about how unfair the divorce settlement is, even though she got virtually everything. Last week it was the house. She claimed she'd been too upset by the divorce to get the mortgage refinanced and he owed her twenty thousand dollars because now interest rates have gone up. But it doesn't matter. Gary still keeps hoping they'll get back together. He almost didn't fly to Connecticut to his parents' for Thanksgiving because he thought she might change her mind about a reconciliation.\"\n\n\"You could write about Sueann's new boyfriend,\" Mom said, sticking marshmallows on the sweet potatoes. \"She's bringing him today.\"\n\nThis was as usual, too. Sueann always brings a new boyfriend to Thanksgiving dinner. Last year it was a biker. And no, I don't mean one of those nice guys who wear a beard and black Harley T-shirt on weekends and work as accountants between trips to Sturgis. I mean a Hell's Angel.\n\nMy sister Sueann has the worst taste in men of anyone I have ever known. Before the biker, she dated a member of a militia group and, after the ATF arrested him, a bigamist wanted in three states.\n\n\"If this boyfriend spits on the floor, I'm leaving,\" Allison said, counting out silverware. \"Have you met him?\" she asked Mom.\n\n\"No,\" Mom said, \"but Sueann says he used to work where you do, Nan. So somebody must quit once in a while.\"\n\nI racked my brain, trying to think of any criminal types who'd worked in my company. \"What's his name?\"\n\n\"David something,\" Mom said, and Cheyenne and Dakota raced into the kitchen, screaming, \"Aunt Sueann's here, Aunt Sueann's here! Can we eat now?\"\n\nAllison leaned over the sink and pulled the curtains back to look out the window.\n\n\"What does he look like?\" I asked, sprinkling sugar on the cranberry relish.\n\n\"Clean-cut,\" she said, sounding surprised. \"Short blond hair, slacks, white shirt, tie.\"\n\nOh, no, that meant he was a neo-Nazi. Or married and planning to get a divorce as soon as the kids graduated from college\u2014which would turn out to be in twenty-three years, since he'd just gotten his wife pregnant again.\n\n\"Is he handsome?\" I asked, sticking a spoon into the cranberry relish.\n\n\"No,\" Allison said, even more surprised. \"He's actually kind of ordinary-looking.\"\n\nI came over to the window to look. He was helping Sueann out of the car. She was dressed up, too, in a dress and a denim slouch hat. \"Good heavens,\" I said. \"It's David Carrington. He worked up on fifth in Computing.\"\n\n\"Was he a womanizer?\" Allison asked.\n\n\"No,\" I said, bewildered. \"He's a very nice guy. He's unmarried, he doesn't drink, and he left to go get a degree in medicine.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you ever meet him?\" Mom said.\n\nDavid shook hands with Mitch, regaled Cheyenne and Dakota with a knock-knock joke, and told Mom his favorite kind of sweet potatoes were the ones with the marshmallows on top.\n\n\"He must be a serial killer,\" I whispered to Allison.\n\n\"Come on, everybody, let's sit down,\" Mom said. \"Cheyenne and Dakota, you sit here by Grandma. David, you sit here, next to Sueann. Sueann, take off your hat. You know hats aren't allowed at the table.\"\n\n\"Hats for men aren't allowed at the table,\" Sueann said, patting her denim hat. \"Women's hats are.\" She sat down. \"Hats are coming back in style, did you know that? Cosmopolitan's latest issue said this is the Year of the Hat.\"\n\n\"I don't care what it is,\" Mom said. \"Your father would never have allowed hats at the table.\"\n\n\"I'll take it off if you'll turn off the TV,\" Sueann said, complacently opening out her napkin.\n\nThey had reached an impasse. Mom always has the TV on during meals. \"I like to have it on in case something happens,\" she said stubbornly.\n\n\"Like what?\" Mitch said. \"Aliens landing from outer space?\"\n\n\"For your information, there was a UFO sighting two weeks ago. It was on CNN.\"\n\n\"Everything looks delicious,\" David said. \"Is that homemade cranberry relish? I love that. My grandmother used to make it.\"\n\nHe had to be a serial killer.\n\nFor half an hour, we concentrated on turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green-bean casserole, scalloped corn casserole, marshmallow-topped sweet potatoes, cranberry relish, pumpkin pie, and the news on CNN.\n\n\"Can't you at least turn it down, Mom?\" Mitch said. \"We can't even hear to talk.\"\n\n\"I want to see the weather in Washington,\" Mom said. \"For your flight.\"\n\n\"You're leaving tonight?\" Sueann said. \"But you just got here. I haven't even seen Cheyenne and Dakota.\"\n\n\"Mitch has to fly back tonight,\" Allison said. \"But the girls and I are staying till Wednesday.\"\n\n\"I don't see why he can't stay at least until tomorrow,\" Mom said.\n\n\"Don't tell me this is homemade whipped cream on the pumpkin pie,\" David said. \"I haven't had homemade whipped cream in years.\"\n\n\"You used to work in computers, didn't you?\" I asked him. \"There's a lot of computer crime around these days, isn't there?\"\n\n\"Computers!\" Allison said. \"I forgot all the awards Cheyenne won at computer camp.\" She turned to Mitch. \"The newsletter's going to have to be at least two pages. The girls just have too many awards\u2014T-ball, tadpole swimming, Bible school attendance.\"\n\n\"Do you send Christmas newsletters in your family?\" my mother asked David.\n\nHe nodded. \"I love hearing from everybody.\"\n\n\"You see?\" Mom said to me. \"People like getting newsletters at Christmas.\"\n\n\"I don't have anything against Christmas newsletters,\" I said. \"I just don't think they should be deadly dull. Mary had a root canal, Bootsy seems to be getting over her ringworm, we got new gutters on the house. Why doesn't anyone ever write about anything interesting in their newsletters?\"\n\n\"Like what?\" Sueann said.\n\n\"I don't know. An alligator biting their arm off. A meteor falling on their house. A murder. Something interesting to read.\"\n\n\"Probably because they didn't happen,\" Sueann said.\n\n\"Then they should make something up,\" I said, \"so we don't have to hear about their trip to Nebraska and their gallbladder operation.\"\n\n\"You'd do that?\" Allison said, appalled. \"You'd make something up?\"\n\n\"People make things up in their newsletters all the time, and you know it,\" I said. \"Look at the way Aunt Laura and Uncle Phil brag about their vacations and their stock options and their cars. If you're going to lie, they might as well be lies that are interesting for other people to read.\"\n\n\"You have plenty of things to tell without making up lies, Nan,\" Mom said reprovingly. \"Maybe you should do something like your cousin Celia. She writes her newsletter all year long, day by day,\" she explained to David. \"Nan, you might have more news than you think if you kept track of it day by day like Celia. She always has a lot to tell.\"\n\nYes, indeed. Her newsletters were nearly as long as Aunt Lydia's. They read like a diary, except she wasn't in junior high, where at least there were pop quizzes and zits and your locker combination to give it a little zing. Celia's newsletters had no zing whatsoever:\n\n\"Wed. Jan. 1. Froze to death going out to get the paper. Snow got in the plastic bag thing the paper comes in. Editorial section all wet. Had to dry it out on the radiator. Bran flakes for breakfast. Watched Good Morning America.\n\n\"Thurs. Jan. 2. Cleaned closets. Cold and cloudy.\"\n\n\"If you'd write a little every day,\" Mom said, \"you'd be surprised at how much you'd have to tell by Christmas.\"\n\nSure. With my life, I wouldn't even have to write it every day. I could do Monday's right now. \"Mon. Nov. 28. Froze to death on the way to work. Bob Hunziger not in yet. Penny putting up Christmas decorations. Solveig told me she's sure the baby is going to be a boy. Asked me which name I liked, Albuquerque or Dallas. Said hi to Gary, but he was too depressed to talk to me. Thanksgiving reminds him of ex-wife's giblets. Cold and cloudy.\"\n\nI was wrong. It was snowing, and Solveig's ultrasound had showed the baby was a girl. \"What do you think of Trinidad as a name?\" she asked me. Penny wasn't putting up Christmas decorations, either. She was passing out slips of paper with our Secret Santas' names on them. \"The decorations aren't here yet,\" she said excitedly. \"I'm getting something special from a farmer upstate.\"\n\n\"Does it involve feathers?\" I asked her. Last year the decorations had been angels with thousands of chicken feathers glued onto cardboard for their wings. We were still picking them out of our computers.\n\n\"No,\" she said happily. \"It's a surprise. I love Christmas, don't you?\"\n\n\"Is Hunziger in?\" I asked her, brushing snow out of my hair. Hats always mash my hair down, so I hadn't worn one.\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" she said. She handed me a Secret Santa slip. \"It's the Monday after Thanksgiving. He probably won't be in till sometime Wednesday.\"\n\nGary came in, his ears bright red from the cold and a harried expression on his face. His ex-wife must not have wanted a reconciliation.\n\n\"Hi, Gary,\" I said, and turned to hang up my coat without waiting for him to answer.\n\nAnd he didn't, but when I turned back around, he was still standing there, staring at me. I put a hand up to my hair, wishing I'd worn a hat.\n\n\"Can I talk to you a minute?\" he said, looking anxiously at Penny.\n\n\"Sure,\" I said, trying not to get my hopes up. He probably wanted to ask me something about the Secret Santas.\n\nHe leaned farther over my desk. \"Did anything unusual happen to you over Thanksgiving?\"\n\n\"My sister didn't bring home a biker to Thanksgiving dinner,\" I said.\n\nHe waved that away dismissively. \"No, I mean anything odd, peculiar, out of the ordinary.\"\n\n\"That is out of the ordinary.\"\n\nHe leaned even closer. \"I flew out to my parents' for Thanksgiving, and on the flight home\u2014you know how people always carry on luggage that won't fit in the overhead compartments and then try to cram it in?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, thinking of a bridesmaid's bouquet I had made the mistake of putting in the overhead compartment one time.\n\n\"Well, nobody did that on my flight. They didn't carry on hanging bags or enormous shopping bags full of Christmas presents. Some people didn't even have a carry-on. And that isn't all. Our flight was half an hour late, and the flight attendant said, 'Those of you who do not have connecting flights, please remain seated until those with connections have deplaned.' And they did.\" He looked at me expectantly.\n\n\"Maybe everybody was just in the Christmas spirit.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"All four babies on the flight slept the whole way, and the toddler behind me didn't kick the seat.\"\n\nThat was unusual.\n\n\"Not only that, the guy next to me was reading The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler. When's the last time you saw anybody on an airplane reading anything but John Grisham or Danielle Steel? I tell you, there's something funny going on.\"\n\n\"What?\" I asked curiously.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said. \"You're sure you haven't noticed anything?\"\n\n\"Nothing except for my sister. She always dates these losers, but the guy she brought to Thanksgiving was really nice. He even helped with the dishes.\"\n\n\"You didn't notice anything else?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, wishing I had. This was the longest he'd ever talked to me about anything besides his ex-wife. \"Maybe it's something in the air at DIA. I have to take my sister-in-law and her little girls to the airport Wednesday. I'll keep an eye out.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Don't say anything about this, okay?\" he said, and hurried off to Accounting.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" Penny asked, coming over.\n\n\"His ex-wife,\" I said. \"When do we have to exchange Secret Santa gifts?\"\n\n\"Every Friday, and Christmas Eve.\"\n\nI opened up my slip. Good, I'd gotten Hunziger. With luck I wouldn't have to buy any Secret Santa gifts at all.\n\nTuesday I got Aunt Laura and Uncle Phil's Christmas newsletter. It was in gold ink on cream-colored paper, with large gold bells in the corners. \"Joyeux No\u00ebl,\" it began. \"That's French for Merry Christmas. We're sending our newsletter out early this year because we're spending Christmas in Cannes to celebrate Phil's promotion to assistant CEO and my wonderful new career! Yes, I'm starting my own business\u2014Laura's Floral Creations\u2014and orders are pouring in! It's already been written up in House Beautiful, and you will never guess who called last week\u2014Martha Stewart!\" Et cetera.\n\nI didn't see Gary. Or anything unusual, although the waiter who took my lunch order actually got it right for a change. But he got Tonya's (who works up on third) wrong.\n\n\"I told him tomato and lettuce only,\" she said, picking pickles off her sandwich. \"I heard Gary talked to you yesterday. Did he ask you out?\"\n\n\"What's that?\" I said, pointing to the folder Tonya'd brought with her, to change the subject. \"The Harbrace file?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Do you want my pickles? It's our Christmas schedule. Never marry anybody who has kids from a previous marriage. Especially when you have kids from a previous marriage. Tom's ex-wife, Janine, my ex-husband, John, and four sets of grandparents all want the kids, and they all want them on Christmas morning. It's like trying to schedule the D-day invasion.\"\n\n\"At least your husband isn't still hung up on his ex-wife,\" I said glumly.\n\n\"So Gary didn't ask you out, huh?\" She bit into her sandwich, frowned, and extracted another pickle. \"I'm sure he will. Okay, if we take the kids to Tom's parents at four on Christmas Eve, Janine could pick them up at eight\u2026.No, that won't work.\" She switched her sandwich to her other hand and began erasing. \"Janine's not speaking to Tom's parents.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"At least John's being reasonable. He called yesterday and said he'd be willing to wait till New Year's to have the kids. I don't know what got into him.\"\n\nWhen I got back to work, there was a folded copy of the morning newspaper on my desk.\n\nI opened it up. The headline read \"City Hall Christmas Display to Be Turned On,\" which wasn't unusual. And neither was tomorrow's headline, which would be \"City Hall Christmas Display Protested.\"\n\nEither the Freedom Against Faith people protest the Nativity scene or the fundamentalists protest the elves or the environmental people protest cutting down Christmas trees or all of them protest the whole thing. It happens every year.\n\nI turned to the inside pages. Several articles were circled in red, and there was a note next to them which read \"See what I mean? Gary.\"\n\nI looked at the circled articles. \"Christmas Shoplifting Down,\" the first one read. \"Mall stores report incidences of shoplifting are down for the first week of the Christmas season. Usually prevalent this time of\u2014\"\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Penny said, looking over my shoulder.\n\nI shut the paper with a rustle. \"Nothing,\" I said. I folded it back up and stuck it into a drawer. \"Did you need something?\"\n\n\"Here,\" she said, handing me a slip of paper.\n\n\"I already got my Secret Santa name,\" I said.\n\n\"This is for Holiday Goodies,\" she said. \"Everybody takes turns bringing in coffee cake or tarts or cake.\"\n\nI opened up my slip. It read \"Friday Dec. 20. Four dozen cookies.\"\n\n\"I saw you and Gary talking yesterday,\" Penny said. \"What about?\"\n\n\"His ex-wife,\" I said. \"What kind of cookies do you want me to bring?\"\n\n\"Chocolate chip,\" she said. \"Everybody loves chocolate.\"\n\nAs soon as she was gone, I got the newspaper out again and took it into Hunziger's office to read. \"Legislature Passes Balanced Budget,\" the other articles read. \"Escaped Convict Turns Self In,\" \"Christmas Food Bank Donations Up.\"\n\nI read through them and then threw the paper into the wastebasket. Halfway out the door I thought better of it and took it out, folded it up, and took it back to my desk with me.\n\nWhile I was putting it into my purse, Hunziger wandered in. \"If anybody asks where I am, tell them I'm in the men's room,\" he said, and wandered out again.\n\nWednesday afternoon I took the girls and Allison to the airport. She was still fretting over her newsletter.\n\n\"Do you think a greeting is absolutely necessary?\" she said in the baggage check-in line. \"You know, like 'Dear Friends and Family'?\"\n\n\"Probably not,\" I said absently. I was watching the people in line ahead of us, trying to spot this unusual behavior Gary had talked about, but so far I hadn't seen any. People were looking at their watches and complaining about the length of the line, the ticket agents were calling, \"Next. Next!\" to the person at the head of the line, who, after having stood impatiently in line for forty-five minutes waiting for this moment, was now staring blankly into space, and an unattended toddler was methodically pulling the elastic strings off a stack of luggage tags.\n\n\"They'll still know it's a Christmas newsletter, won't they?\" Allison said. \"Even without a greeting at the beginning of it?\"\n\nWith a border of angels holding bunches of mistletoe, what else could it be? I thought.\n\n\"Next!\" the ticket agent shouted.\n\nThe man in front of us had forgotten his photo ID, the girl in front of us in line for the security check was wearing heavy metal, and on the train out to the concourse a woman stepped on my foot and then glared at me as if it were my fault. Apparently all the nice people had traveled the day Gary came home.\n\nAnd that was probably what it was\u2014some kind of statistical clump where all the considerate, intelligent people had ended up on the same flight.\n\nI knew they existed. My sister Sueann had had an insurance actuary for a boyfriend once (he was also an embezzler, which is why Sueann was dating him), and he had said events weren't evenly distributed, that there were peaks and valleys. Gary must just have hit a peak.\n\nWhich was too bad, I thought, lugging Cheyenne, who had demanded to be carried the minute we got off the train, down the concourse. Because the only reason he had approached me was because he thought there was something strange going on.\n\n\"Here's Gate 55,\" Allison said, setting Dakota down and getting out French language tapes for the girls. \"If I left off the 'Dear Friends and Family,' I'd have room to include Dakota's violin recital. She played 'The Gypsy Dance.' \"\n\nShe settled the girls in adjoining chairs and put on their headphones. \"But Mitch says it's a letter, so it has to have a greeting.\"\n\n\"What if you used something short?\" I said. \"Like 'Greetings' or something. Then you'd have room to start the letter on the same line.\"\n\n\"Not 'Greetings.' \" She made a face. \"Uncle Frank started his letter that way last year, and it scared me half to death. I thought Mitch had been drafted.\"\n\nI had been alarmed when I'd gotten mine, too, but at least it had given me a temporary rush of adrenaline, which was more than Uncle Frank's letters usually did, concerned as they were with prostate problems and disputes over property taxes.\n\n\"I suppose I could use 'Holiday Greetings,' \" Allison said. \"Or 'Christmas Greetings,' but that's almost as long as 'Dear Friends and Family.' If only there were something shorter.\"\n\n\"How about 'hi'?\"\n\n\"That might work.\" She got out paper and a pen and started writing. \"How do you spell 'outstanding'?\"\n\n\"O-u-t-s-t-a-n-d-i-n-g,\" I said absently. I was watching the moving sidewalks in the middle of the concourse. People were standing on the right, like they were supposed to, and walking on the left. No people were standing four abreast or blocking the entire sidewalk with their luggage. No kids were running in the opposite direction of the sidewalk's movement, screaming and running their hands along the rubber railing.\n\n\"How do you spell 'fabulous'?\" Allison asked.\n\n\"Flight 2216 to Spokane is now ready for boarding,\" the flight attendant at the desk said. \"Those passengers traveling with small children or those who require additional time for boarding may now board.\"\n\nA single old lady with a walker stood up and got in line. Allison unhooked the girls' headphones, and we began the ritual of hugging and gathering up belongings.\n\n\"We'll see you at Christmas,\" she said.\n\n\"Good luck with your newsletter,\" I said, handing Dakota her teddy bear, \"and don't worry about the heading. It doesn't need one.\"\n\nThey started down the passageway. I stood there, waving, till they were out of sight, and then turned to go.\n\n\"We are now ready for regular boarding of rows 25 through 33,\" the flight attendant said, and everybody in the gate area stood up. Nothing unusual here, I thought, and started for the concourse.\n\n\"What rows did she call?\" a woman in a red beret asked a teenaged boy.\n\n\"Rows 25 through 33,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, I'm Row 14,\" the woman said, and sat back down.\n\nSo did I.\n\n\"We are now ready to board rows 15 through 24,\" the flight attendant said, and a dozen people looked carefully at their tickets and then stepped back from the door, patiently waiting their turn. One of them pulled a paperback out of her tote bag and began to read. It was Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. Only when the flight attendant said, \"We are now boarding all rows,\" did the rest of them stand up and get in line.\n\nWhich didn't prove anything, and neither did the standing on the right of the moving sidewalk. Maybe people were just being nice because it was Christmas.\n\nDon't be ridiculous, I told myself. People aren't nicer at Christmas. They're ruder and pushier and crabbier than ever. You've seen them at the mall, and in line for the post office. They act worse at Christmas than any other time.\n\n\"This is your final boarding call for Flight 2216 to Spokane,\" the flight attendant said to the empty waiting area. She called to me, \"Are you flying to Spokane, ma'am?\"\n\n\"No.\" I stood up. \"I was seeing friends off.\"\n\n\"I just wanted to make sure you didn't miss your flight,\" she said, and turned to shut the door.\n\nI started for the moving sidewalk, and nearly collided with a young man running for the gate. He raced up to the desk and flung his ticket down.\n\n\"I'm sorry, sir,\" the flight attendant said, leaning slightly away from the young man as if expecting an explosion. \"Your flight has already left. I'm really terribly sor\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, it's okay,\" he said. \"It serves me right. I didn't allow enough time for parking and everything, that's all. I should have started for the airport earlier.\"\n\nThe flight attendant was tapping busily on the computer. \"I'm afraid the only other open flight to Spokane for today isn't until 11:05 this evening.\"\n\n\"Oh, well,\" he said, smiling. \"It'll give me a chance to catch up on my reading.\" He reached down into his attach\u00e9 case and pulled out a paperback. It was W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage.\n\n\"Well?\" Gary said as soon as I got back to work Thursday morning. He was standing by my desk, waiting for me.\n\n\"There's definitely something going on,\" I said, and told him about the moving sidewalks and the guy who'd missed his plane. \"But what?\"\n\n\"Is there somewhere we can talk?\" he said, looking anxiously around.\n\n\"Hunziger's office,\" I said, \"but I don't know if he's in yet.\"\n\n\"He's not,\" he said, led me into the office, and shut the door behind him.\n\n\"Sit down,\" he said, indicating Hunziger's chair. \"Now, I know this is going to sound crazy, but I think all these people have been possessed by some kind of alien intelligence. Have you ever seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers?\"\n\n\"What?\" I said.\n\n\"Invasion of the Body Snatchers,\" he said. \"It's about these parasites from outer space who take over people's bodies and\u2014\"\n\n\"I know what it's about,\" I said, \"and it's science fiction. You think the man who missed his plane was some kind of pod-person? You're right,\" I said, reaching for the doorknob. \"I do think you're crazy.\"\n\n\"That's what Donald Sutherland said in Leechmen from Mars. Nobody ever believes it's happening, until it's too late.\"\n\nHe pulled a folded newspaper out of his back pocket. \"Look at this,\" he said, waving it in front of me. \"Holiday credit-card fraud down twenty percent. Holiday suicides down thirty percent. Charitable giving up sixty percent.\"\n\n\"They're coincidences.\" I explained about the statistical peaks and valleys. \"Look,\" I said, taking the paper from him and turning to the front page. \" 'People Against Cruelty to Our Furry Friends Protests City Hall Christmas Display.' 'Animal Rights Group Objects to Exploitation of Reindeer.' \"\n\n\"What about your sister?\" he said. \"You said she only dates losers. Why would she suddenly start dating a nice guy? Why would an escaped convict suddenly turn himself in? Why would people suddenly start reading the classics? Because they've been taken over.\"\n\n\"By aliens from outer space?\" I said incredulously.\n\n\"Did he have a hat?\"\n\n\"Who?\" I said, wondering if he really was crazy. Could his being hung up on his horrible ex-wife have finally made him crack?\n\n\"The man who missed his plane,\" he said. \"Was he wearing a hat?\"\n\n\"I don't remember,\" I said, and felt suddenly cold. Sueann had worn a hat to Thanksgiving dinner. She'd refused to take it off at the table. And the woman whose ticket said Row 14 had been wearing a beret.\n\n\"What do hats have to do with it?\" I asked.\n\n\"The man on the plane next to me was wearing a hat. So were most of the other people on the flight. Did you ever see The Puppet Masters? The parasites attached themselves to the spinal cord and took over the nervous system,\" he said. \"This morning here at work I counted nineteen people wearing hats. Les Sawtelle, Rodney Jones, Jim Bridgeman\u2014\"\n\n\"Jim Bridgeman always wears a hat,\" I said. \"It's to hide his bald spot. Besides, he's a computer programmer. All the computer people wear baseball caps.\"\n\n\"DeeDee Crawford,\" he said. \"Vera McDermott, Janet Hall\u2014\"\n\n\"Women's hats are supposed to be making a comeback,\" I said.\n\n\"George Frazelli, the entire Documentation section\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm sure there's a logical explanation,\" I said. \"It's been freezing in here all week. There's probably something wrong with the heating system.\"\n\n\"The thermostat's turned down to fifty,\" he said, \"which is something else peculiar. The thermostat's been turned down on all floors.\"\n\n\"Well, that's probably Management. You know how they're always trying to cut costs\u2014\"\n\n\"They're giving us a Christmas bonus. And they fired Hunziger.\"\n\n\"They fired Hunziger?\" I said. Management never fires anybody.\n\n\"This morning. That's how I knew he wouldn't be in his office.\"\n\n\"They actually fired Hunziger?\"\n\n\"And one of the janitors. The one who drank. How do you explain that?\"\n\n\"I\u2014I don't know,\" I stammered. \"But there has to be some other explanation than aliens. Maybe they took a management course or got the Christmas spirit or their therapists told them to do good deeds or something. Something besides leechmen. Aliens coming from outer space and taking over our brains is impossible!\"\n\n\"That's what Dana Wynter said in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But it's not impossible. It's happening right here, and we've got to stop it before they take over everybody and we're the only ones left. They\u2014\"\n\nThere was a knock on the door. \"Sorry to bother you, Gary,\" Carol Zaliski said, leaning in the door, \"but you've got an urgent phone call. It's your ex-wife.\"\n\n\"Coming,\" he said, looking at me. \"Think about what I said, okay?\" He went out.\n\nI stood looking after him and frowning.\n\n\"What was that all about?\" Carol said, coming into the office. She was wearing a white fur hat.\n\n\"He wanted to know what to buy his Secret Santa person,\" I said.\n\nFriday Gary wasn't there. \"He had to go talk to his ex-wife this morning,\" Tonya told me at lunch, picking pickles off her sandwich. \"He'll be back this afternoon. Marcie's demanding he pay for her therapy. She's seeing this psychiatrist, and she claims Gary's the one who made her crazy, so he should pick up the bill for her Prozac. Why is he still hung up on her?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" I said, scraping mustard off my burger.\n\n\"Carol Zaliski said the two of you were talking in Hunziger's office yesterday. What about? Did he ask you out? Nan?\"\n\n\"Tonya, has Gary talked to you since Thanksgiving? Did he ask you about whether you'd noticed anything unusual happening?\"\n\n\"He asked me if I'd noticed anything bizarre or abnormal about my family. I told him, in my family bizarre is normal. You won't believe what's happened now. Tom's parents are getting a divorce, which means five sets of parents. Why couldn't they have waited till after Christmas to do this? It's throwing my whole schedule off.\"\n\nShe bit into her sandwich. \"I'm sure Gary's going to ask you out. He's probably just working up to it.\"\n\nIf he was, he had the strangest line I'd ever heard. Aliens from outer space. Hiding under hats!\n\nThough, now that he'd mentioned it, there were an awful lot of people wearing hats. Nearly all the men in Data Analysis had baseball caps on, Jerrilyn Wells was wearing a wool stocking cap, and Ms. Jacobson's secretary looked like she was dressed for a wedding in a white thing with a veil. But Sueann had said this was the Year of the Hat.\n\nSueann, who dated only gigolos and Mafia dons. But she had been bound to hit a nice boyfriend sooner or later, she dated so many guys.\n\nAnd there weren't any signs of alien possession when I tried to get somebody in the steno pool to make some copies for me. \"We're busy,\" Paula Grandy snapped. \"It's Christmas, you know!\"\n\nI went back to my desk, feeling better. There was an enormous dish made of pine cones, filled with candy canes and red and green foil-wrapped chocolate kisses. \"Is this part of the Christmas decorations?\" I asked Penny.\n\n\"No. They aren't ready yet,\" she said. \"This is just a little something to brighten the holidays. I made one for everyone's desk.\"\n\nI felt even better. I pushed the dish over to one side and started through my mail. There was a green envelope from Allison and Mitch. She must have mailed her newsletters as soon as she got off the plane. I wonder if she decided to forgo the heading or Dakota's Most Improved Practicing Piano Award, I thought, slicing it open with the letter opener.\n\n\"Dear Nan,\" it began, several spaces down from the angels-and-mistletoe border. \"Nothing much new this year. We're all okay, though Mitch is worried about downsizing, and I always seem to be running from behind. The girls are growing like weeds and doing okay in school, though Cheyenne's been having some problems with her reading and Dakota's still wetting the bed. Mitch and I decided we've been pushing them too hard, and we're working on trying not to overschedule them for activities and just letting them be normal, average little girls.\"\n\nI jammed the letter back into the envelope and ran up to fourth to look for Gary.\n\n\"All right,\" I said when I found him. \"I believe you. What do we do now?\"\n\nWe rented movies. Actually, we rented only some of the movies. Attack of the Soul Killers and Invasion from Betelgeuse were both checked out.\n\n\"Which means somebody else has figured it out, too,\" Gary said. \"If only we knew who.\"\n\n\"We could ask the clerk,\" I suggested.\n\nHe shook his head violently. \"We can't do anything to make them suspicious. For all we know, they may have taken them off the shelves themselves, in which case we're on the right track. What else shall we rent?\"\n\n\"What?\" I said blankly.\n\n\"So it won't look like we're just renting alien invasion movies.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" I said, and picked up Ordinary People and a black-and-white version of A Christmas Carol.\n\nIt didn't work. \"The Puppet Masters,\" the kid at the rental desk, wearing a blue-and-yellow Blockbuster hat, said inquiringly. \"Is that a good movie?\"\n\n\"I haven't seen it,\" Gary said nervously.\n\n\"We're renting it because it has Donald Sutherland in it,\" I said. \"We're having a Donald Sutherland film festival. The Puppet Masters, Ordinary People, Invasion of the Body Snatchers\u2014\"\n\n\"Is Donald Sutherland in this?\" he asked, holding up A Christmas Carol.\n\n\"He plays Tiny Tim,\" I said. \"It was his first screen appearance.\"\n\n\"You were great in there,\" Gary said, leading me down to the other end of the mall to Suncoast to buy Attack of the Soul Killers. \"You're a very good liar.\"\n\n\"Thanks,\" I said, pulling my coat closer and looking around the mall. It was freezing in here, and there were hats everywhere, on people and in window displays, Panamas and porkpies and picture hats.\n\n\"We're surrounded. Look at that,\" he said, nodding in the direction of Santa Claus's North Pole.\n\n\"Santa Claus has always worn a hat,\" I said.\n\n\"I meant the line,\" he said.\n\nHe was right. The kids in line were waiting patiently, cheerfully. Not a single one was screaming or announcing she had to go to the bathroom. \"I want a Masters of Earth,\" a little boy in a felt beanie was saying eagerly to his mother.\n\n\"Well, we'll ask Santa,\" the mother said, \"but he may not be able to get it for you. All the stores are sold out.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" he said. \"Then I want a wagon.\"\n\nSuncoast was sold out of Attack of the Soul Killers, but we bought Invasion from Betelgeuse and Infiltrators from Space and went back to Gary's apartment to screen them.\n\n\"Well?\" he said after we'd watched three of them. \"Did you notice how they start slowly and then spread through the population?\"\n\nActually, what I'd noticed was how dumb all the people in these movies were. \"The brain-suckers attack when we're asleep,\" the hero would say, and promptly lie down for a nap. Or the hero's girlfriend would say, \"They're on to us. We've got to get out of here. Right now,\" and then go back to her apartment to pack.\n\nAnd, just like in every horror movie, they were always splitting up instead of sticking together. And going down dark alleys. They deserved to be turned into pod-people.\n\n\"Our first order of business is to pool what we know about the aliens,\" Gary said. \"It's obvious the purpose of the hats is to conceal the parasites' presence from those who haven't been taken over yet,\" he said, \"and that they're attached to the brain.\"\n\n\"Or the spinal column,\" I said, \"like in The Puppet Masters.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"If that were the case, they could attach themselves to the neck or the back, which would be much less conspicuous. Why would they take the risk of hiding under hats, which are so noticeable, if they aren't attached to the top of the head?\"\n\n\"Maybe the hats serve some other purpose.\"\n\nThe phone rang.\n\n\"Yes?\" Gary answered it. His face lit up and then fell. His ex-wife, I thought, and started watching Infiltrators from Space.\n\n\"You've got to believe me,\" the hero's girlfriend said to the psychiatrist. \"There are aliens here among us. They look just like you or me. You have to believe me.\"\n\n\"I do believe you,\" the psychiatrist said, and raised his finger to point at her. \"Ahhhggghhh!\" he screeched, his eyes glowing bright green.\n\n\"Marcie,\" Gary said. There was a long pause. \"A friend.\" Longer pause. \"No.\"\n\nThe hero's girlfriend ran down a dark alley, wearing high heels. Halfway through, she twisted her ankle and fell.\n\n\"You know that isn't true,\" Gary said.\n\nI fast-forwarded. The hero was in his apartment, on the phone. \"Hello, Police Department?\" he said. \"You have to help me. We've been invaded by aliens who take over your body!\"\n\n\"We'll be right there, Mr. Daly,\" the voice on the phone said. \"Stay there.\"\n\n\"How do you know my name?\" the hero shouted. \"I didn't tell you my address.\"\n\n\"We're on our way,\" the voice said.\n\n\"We'll talk about it tomorrow,\" Gary said, and hung up.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said, coming over to the couch. \"Okay, I downloaded a bunch of stuff about parasites and aliens from the Internet,\" he said, handing me a sheaf of stapled papers. \"We need to discover what it is they're doing to the people they take over, what their weaknesses are, and how we can fight them. We need to know when and where it started,\" Gary went on, \"how and where it's spreading, and what it's doing to people. We need to find out as much as we can about the nature of the aliens so we can figure out a way to eliminate them. How do they communicate with each other? Are they telepathic, like in Village of the Damned, or do they use some other form of communication? If they're telepathic, can they read our minds as well as each other's?\"\n\n\"If they could, wouldn't they know we're on to them?\" I said.\n\nThe phone rang again. \"It's probably my ex-wife again,\" he said. I picked up the remote and flicked on Infiltrators from Space again.\n\nGary answered the phone. \"Yes?\" he said, and then warily, \"How did you get my number?\"\n\nThe hero slammed down the phone and ran to the window. Dozens of police cars were pulling up, lights flashing.\n\n\"Sure,\" Gary said. He grinned. \"No, I won't forget.\"\n\nHe hung up. \"That was Penny. She forgot to give me my Holiday Goodies slip. I'm supposed to take in four dozen sugar cookies next Monday.\" He shook his head wonderingly. \"Now, there's somebody I'd like to see taken over by the aliens.\"\n\nHe sat down on the couch and started making a list. \"Okay, methods of fighting them. Diseases. Poison. Dynamite. Nuclear weapons. What else?\"\n\nI didn't answer. I was thinking about what he'd said about wishing Penny would be taken over.\n\n\"The problem with all of those solutions is that they kill the people, too,\" Gary said. \"What we need is something like the virus they used in Invasion. Or the ultrasonic pulses only the aliens could hear in War with the Slugmen. If we're going to stop them, we've got to find something that kills the parasite but not the host.\"\n\n\"Do we have to stop them?\"\n\n\"What?\" he said. \"Of course we have to stop them. What do you mean?\"\n\n\"All the aliens in these movies turn people into zombies or monsters,\" I said. \"They shuffle around, attacking people and killing them and trying to take over the world. Nobody's done anything like that. People are standing on the right and walking on the left, the suicide rate's down, my sister's dating a very nice guy. Everybody who's been taken over is nicer, happier, more polite. Maybe the parasites are a good influence, and we shouldn't interfere.\"\n\n\"And maybe that's what they want us to think. What if they're acting nice to trick us, to keep us from trying to stop them? Remember Attack of the Soul Killers? What if it's all an act, and they're only acting nice till the takeover's complete?\"\n\nIf it was an act, it was a great one. Over the next few days, Solveig, in a red straw hat, announced she was naming her baby Jane, Jim Bridgeman nodded at me in the elevator, my cousin Celia's newsletter/diary was short and funny, and the waiter, sporting a soda-jerk hat, got both Tonya's and my orders right.\n\n\"No pickles!\" Tonya said delightedly, picking up her sandwich. \"Ow! Can you get carpal tunnel syndrome from wrapping Christmas presents? My hand's been hurting all morning.\"\n\nShe opened her file folder. There was a new diagram inside, a rectangle with names written all around the sides.\n\n\"Is that your Christmas schedule?\" I asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said, showing it to me. \"It's a seating arrangement for Christmas dinner. It was crazy, running the kids from house to house like that, so we decided to just have everybody at our house.\"\n\nI took a startled look at her, but she was still hatless.\n\n\"I thought Tom's ex-wife couldn't stand his parents.\"\n\n\"Everybody's agreed we all need to get along for the kids' sake. After all, it's Christmas.\"\n\nI was still staring at her.\n\nShe put her hand up to her hair. \"Do you like it? It's a wig. Eric got it for me for Christmas. For being such a great mother to the boys through the divorce. I couldn't believe it.\" She patted her hair. \"Isn't it great?\"\n\n\"They're hiding their aliens under wigs,\" I told Gary.\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"Paul Gunden got a new toupee. We can't trust anyone.\" He handed me a folder full of clippings.\n\nEmployment rates were up. Thefts of packages from cars, usually prevalent at this time of year, were down. A woman in Minnesota had brought back a library book that was twenty-two years overdue. \"Groups Praise City Hall Christmas Display,\" one of the clippings read, and the accompanying picture showed the People for a Non-Commercial Christmas, the Holy Spirit Southern Baptists, and the Equal Rights for Ethnics activists holding hands and singing Christmas carols around the cr\u00e8che.\n\nOn the ninth, Mom called. \"Have you written your newsletter yet?\"\n\n\"I've been busy,\" I said, and waited for her to ask me if I'd met anyone lately at work.\n\n\"I got Jackie Peterson's newsletter this morning,\" she said.\n\n\"So did I.\" The invasion apparently hadn't reached Miami. Jackie's newsletter, which is usually terminally cute, had reached new heights:\n\n\u2003\"M is for our trip to Mexico\n\n\u2003E is for Every place else we'd like to go\n\n\u2003R is for the RV that takes us there\u2026.\"\n\n\u2003And straight through MERRY CHRISTMAS, A HAPPY NEW YEAR, and both her first and last names.\n\n\"I do wish she wouldn't try to put her letters in verse,\" Mom said. \"They never scan.\"\n\n\"Mom,\" I said. \"Are you okay?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she said. \"My arthritis has been kicking up the last couple of days, but otherwise I've never felt better. I've been thinking, there's no reason for you to send out newsletters if you don't want to.\"\n\n\"Mom,\" I said, \"did Sueann give you a hat for Christmas?\"\n\n\"Oh, she told you,\" Mom said. \"You know, I don't usually like hats, but I'm going to need one for the wedding, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Wedding?\"\n\n\"Oh, didn't she tell you? She and David are getting married right after Christmas. I am so relieved. I thought she was never going to meet anyone decent.\"\n\nI reported that to Gary. \"I know,\" he said glumly. \"I just got a raise.\"\n\n\"I haven't found a single bad effect,\" I said. \"No signs of violence or antisocial behavior. Not even any irritability.\"\n\n\"There you are,\" Penny said crabbily, coming up with a huge poinsettia under each arm. \"Can you help me put these on everybody's desks?\"\n\n\"Are these the Christmas decorations?\" I asked.\n\n\"No, I'm still waiting on that farmer,\" she said, handing me one of the poinsettias. \"This is just a little something to brighten up everyone's desk.\" She reached down to move the pine-cone dish on Gary's desk. \"You didn't eat your candy canes,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't like peppermint.\"\n\n\"Nobody ate their candy canes,\" she said disgustedly. \"They all ate the chocolate kisses and left the candy canes.\"\n\n\"People like chocolate,\" Gary said, and whispered to me, \"When is she going to be taken over?\"\n\n\"Meet me in Hunziger's office right away,\" I whispered back, and said to Penny, \"Where does this poinsettia go?\"\n\n\"Jim Bridgeman's desk.\"\n\nI took the poinsettia up to Computing on fifth. Jim was wearing his baseball cap backward. \"A little something to brighten your desk,\" I said, handing it to him, and started back toward the stairs.\n\n\"Can I talk to you a minute?\" he said, following me out into the stairwell.\n\n\"Sure,\" I said, trying to sound calm. \"What about?\"\n\nHe leaned toward me. \"Have you noticed anything unusual going on?\"\n\n\"You mean the poinsettia?\" I said. \"Penny does tend to go a little overboard for Christmas, but\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, putting his hand awkwardly to his cap, \"people who are acting funny, people who aren't themselves?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, smiling. \"I haven't noticed a thing.\"\n\nI waited for Gary in Hunziger's office for nearly half an hour. \"Sorry I took so long,\" he said when he finally got there. \"My ex-wife called. What were you saying?\"\n\n\"I was saying that even you have to admit it would be a good thing if Penny was taken over,\" I said. \"What if the parasites aren't evil? What if they're those\u2014what are those parasites that benefit the host called? You know, like the bacteria that help cows produce milk? Or those birds that pick insects off of rhinoceroses?\"\n\n\"You mean symbiotes?\" Gary said.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said eagerly. \"What if this is some kind of symbiotic relationship? What if they're raising everyone's IQ or enhancing their emotional maturity, and it's having a good effect on us?\"\n\n\"Things that sound too good to be true usually are. No,\" he said, shaking his head. \"They're up to something, I know it. And we've got to find out what it is.\"\n\nOn the tenth when I came to work, Penny was putting up the Christmas decorations. They were, as she had promised, something special: wide swags of red velvet ribbons running all around the walls, with red velvet bows and large bunches of mistletoe every few feet. In between were gold-calligraphic scrolls reading \"And kiss me 'neath the mistletoe, For Christmas comes but once a year.\"\n\n\"What do you think?\" Penny said, climbing down from her stepladder. \"Every floor has a different quotation.\" She reached into a large cardboard box. \"Accounting's is 'Sweetest the kiss that's stolen under the mistletoe.' \"\n\nI came over and looked into the box. \"Where did you get all the mistletoe?\" I asked.\n\n\"This apple farmer I know,\" she said, moving the ladder.\n\nI picked up a big branch of the green leaves and white berries. \"It must have cost a fortune.\" I had bought a sprig of it last year that had cost six dollars.\n\nPenny, climbing the ladder, shook her head. \"It didn't cost anything. He was glad to get rid of it.\" She tied the bunch of mistletoe to the red velvet ribbon. \"It's a parasite, you know. It kills the trees.\"\n\n\"Kills the trees?\" I said blankly, staring at the white berries.\n\n\"Or deforms them,\" she said. \"It steals nutrients from the tree's sap, and the tree gets these swellings and galls and things. The farmer told me all about it.\"\n\nAs soon as I had the chance, I took the material Gary had downloaded on parasites into Hunziger's office and read through it.\n\nMistletoe caused grotesque swellings wherever its rootlets attached themselves to the tree. Anthracnose caused cracks and then spots of dead bark called cankers. Blight wilted trees' leaves. Witches' broom weakened limbs. Bacteria caused tumorlike growths on the trunk, called galls.\n\nWe had been focusing on the mental and psychological effects when we should have been looking at the physical ones. The heightened intelligence, the increase in civility and common sense, must simply be side effects of the parasites' stealing nutrients. And damaging the host.\n\nI stuck the papers back into the file folder, went back to my desk, and called Sueann.\n\n\"Sueann, hi,\" I said. \"I'm working on my Christmas newsletter, and I wanted to make sure I spelled David's name right. Is Carrington spelled C-A-R-R or C-E-R-R?\"\n\n\"C-A-R-R. Oh, Nan, he's so wonderful! So different from the losers I usually date! He's considerate and sensitive and\u2014\"\n\n\"And how are you?\" I said. \"Everybody at work's been down with the flu.\"\n\n\"Really?\" she said. \"No, I'm fine.\"\n\nWhat did I do now? I couldn't ask \"Are you sure?\" without making her suspicious. \"C-A-R-R,\" I said, trying to think of another way to approach the subject.\n\nSueann saved me the trouble. \"You won't believe what he did yesterday. Showed up at work to take me home. He knew my ankles had been hurting, and he brought me a tube of Bengay and a dozen pink roses. He is so thoughtful.\"\n\n\"Your ankles have been hurting?\" I said, trying not to sound anxious.\n\n\"Like crazy. It's this weather or something. I could hardly walk on them this morning.\"\n\nI jammed the parasite papers back into the file folder, made sure I hadn't left any on the desk like the hero in Parasite People from Planet X, and went up to see Gary.\n\nHe was on the phone.\n\n\"I've got to talk to you,\" I whispered.\n\n\"I'd like that,\" he said into the phone, an odd look on his face.\n\n\"What is it?\" I said. \"Have they found out we're on to them?\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he said. \"You know I do,\" he said into the phone.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" I said. \"I've figured out what it's doing to people.\"\n\nHe held up a finger, motioning me to wait. \"Can you hang on a minute?\" he said into the phone, and put his hand over the receiver. \"I'll meet you in Hunziger's office in five minutes,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"It's not safe. Meet me at the post office.\"\n\nHe nodded, and went back to his conversation, still with that odd look on his face.\n\nI ran back down to second for my purse and went to the post office. I had intended to wait on the corner, but it was crowded with people jockeying to drop money into the Salvation Army Santa Claus's kettle.\n\nI looked down the sidewalk. Where was Gary? I went up the steps and scanned the street. There was no sign of him.\n\n\"Merry Christmas!\" a man said, half tipping a fedora and holding the door for me.\n\n\"Oh, no, I'm\u2014\" I began, and saw Tonya coming down the street. \"Thank you,\" I said, and ducked through the door.\n\nIt was freezing inside, and the line for the postal clerks wound out into the lobby. I got in it. It would take an hour at least to work my way to the front, which meant I could wait for Gary without looking suspicious.\n\nExcept that I was the only one not wearing a hat. Every single person in line had one on, and the clerks behind the counter were wearing mail carriers' caps. And broad smiles.\n\n\"Packages going overseas should really have been mailed by November fifteenth,\" the middle clerk was saying, not at all disgruntledly, to a little Japanese woman in a red cap, \"but don't worry, we'll figure out a way to get your presents there on time.\"\n\n\"The line's only about forty-five minutes long,\" the woman in front of me confided cheerfully. She was wearing a small black hat with a feather and carrying four enormous packages. I wondered if they were full of pods. \"Which isn't bad at all, considering it's Christmas.\"\n\nI nodded, looking toward the door. Where was he?\n\n\"Why are you here?\" the woman said, smiling.\n\n\"What?\" I said, whirling back around, my heart pounding. \"What are you here to mail?\" she said. \"I see you don't have any packages.\"\n\n\"S-stamps,\" I stammered.\n\n\"You can go ahead of me,\" she said. \"If all you're buying is stamps. I've got all these packages to send. You don't want to wait for that.\"\n\nI do want to wait, I thought. \"No, that's all right. I'm buying a lot of stamps,\" I said. \"I'm buying several sheets. For my Christmas newsletter.\"\n\nShe shook her head, balancing the packages. \"Don't be silly. You don't want to wait while they weigh all these.\" She tapped the man in front of her. \"This young lady's only buying stamps,\" she said. \"Why don't we let her go ahead of us?\"\n\n\"Certainly,\" the man, who was wearing a Russian karakul hat, said, and bowed slightly, stepping back.\n\n\"No, really,\" I began, but it was too late. The line had parted like the Red Sea.\n\n\"Thank you,\" I said, and walked up to the counter. \"Merry Christmas.\"\n\nThe line closed behind me. They know, I thought. They know I was looking up plant parasites. I glanced desperately toward the door.\n\n\"Holly and ivy?\" the clerk said, beaming at me.\n\n\"What?\" I said.\n\n\"Your stamps.\" He held up two sheets. \"Holly and ivy or Madonna and Child?\"\n\n\"Holly and ivy,\" I said weakly. \"Three sheets, please.\"\n\nI paid for the sheets, thanked the mob again, and went back out into the freezing-cold lobby. And now what? Pretend I had a box and fiddle with the combination? Where was he?\n\nI went over to the bulletin board, trying not to seem suspicious, and looked at the Wanted posters. They had probably all turned themselves in by now and were being model prisoners. And it really was a pity the parasites were going to have to be stopped. If they could be stopped.\n\nIt had been easy in the movies (in the movies, that is, in which they had managed to defeat them, which wasn't all that many. Over half the movies had ended with the whole world being turned into glowing green eyes). And in the ones where they did defeat them, there had been an awful lot of explosions and hanging precariously from helicopters. I hoped whatever we came up with didn't involve skydiving.\n\nOr a virus or ultrasonic sound, because even if I knew a doctor or scientist to ask, I couldn't confide in them. \"We can't trust anybody,\" Gary had said, and he was right. We couldn't risk it. There was too much at stake. And we couldn't call the police. \"It's all in your imagination, Miss Johnson,\" they would say. \"Stay right there. We're on our way.\"\n\nWe would have to do this on our own. And where was Gary?\n\nI looked at the Wanted posters some more. I was sure the one in the middle looked like one of Sueann's old boyfriends. He\u2014\n\n\"I'm sorry I'm late,\" Gary said breathlessly. His ears were red from the cold, and his hair was ruffled from running. \"I had this phone call and\u2014\"\n\n\"Come on,\" I said, and hustled him out of the post office, down the steps, and past the Santa and his mob of donors.\n\n\"Keep walking,\" I said. \"You were right about the parasites, but not because they turn people into zombies.\"\n\nI hurriedly told him about the galls and Tonya's carpal tunnel syndrome. \"My sister was infected at Thanksgiving, and now she can hardly walk,\" I said. \"You were right. We've got to stop them.\"\n\n\"But you don't have any proof of this,\" he said. \"It could be arthritis or something, couldn't it?\"\n\nI stopped walking. \"What?\"\n\n\"You don't have any proof that it's the aliens that are causing it. It's cold. People's arthritis always acts up when it's cold out. And even if the aliens are causing it, a few aches and pains is a small price to pay for all the benefits. You said yourself\u2014\"\n\nI stared at his hair.\n\n\"Don't look at me like that,\" he said. \"I haven't been taken over. I've just been thinking about what you said about your sister's engagement and\u2014\"\n\n\"Who was on the phone?\"\n\nHe looked uncomfortable. \"The thing is\u2014\"\n\n\"It was your ex-wife,\" I said. \"She's been taken over, and now she's nice, and you want to get back together with her. That's it, isn't it?\"\n\n\"You know how I've always felt about Marcie,\" he said guiltily. \"She says she never stopped loving me.\"\n\nWhen something sounds too good to be true, it probably is, I thought.\n\n\"She thinks I should move back in and see if we can't work things out. But that isn't the only reason,\" he said, grabbing my arm. \"I've been looking at all those clippings\u2014dropouts going back to school, escaped convicts turning themselves in\u2014\"\n\n\"People returning overdue library books,\" I said.\n\n\"Are we willing to be responsible for ruining all that? I think we should think about this before we do anything.\"\n\nI pulled my arm away from him.\n\n\"I just think we should consider all the factors before we decide what to do. Waiting a few days can't hurt.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" I said, and started walking. \"There's a lot we don't know about them.\"\n\n\"I just think we should do a little more research,\" he said, opening the door of our building.\n\n\"You're right,\" I said, and started up the stairs.\n\n\"I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?\" he said when we got to second.\n\nI nodded and went back to my desk and put my head in my hands.\n\nHe was willing to let parasites take over the planet so he could get his ex-wife back, but were my motives any better than his? Why had I believed in an alien invasion in the first place, and spent all that time watching science-fiction movies and having huddled conversations? So I could spend time with him.\n\nHe was right. A few aches and pains were worth it to have Sueann married to someone nice and postal workers nondisgruntled and passengers remaining seated till those people with connecting flights had deplaned.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Tonya said, leaning over my desk.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" I said. \"How's your arm?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said, rotating the elbow to show me. \"It must have been a cramp or something.\"\n\nI didn't know these parasites were like mistletoe. They might cause only temporary aches and pains. Gary was right. We needed to do more research. Waiting a few days couldn't hurt.\n\nThe phone rang. \"I've been trying to get hold of you,\" Mom said. \"Dakota's in the hospital. They don't know what it is. It's something wrong with her legs. You need to call Allison.\"\n\n\"I will,\" I said, and hung up the phone.\n\nI logged on to my computer, called up the file I'd been working on and scrolled halfway through it so it would look like I was away from my desk for just a minute, took off my high heels and changed into my sneakers, stuck the high heels into my desk drawer, grabbed my purse and coat, and took off.\n\nThe best place to look for information on how to get rid of the parasites was the library, but the card file was online, and you had to use your library card to get access. The next best was a bookstore. Not the independent on Sixteenth. Their clerks were far too helpful. And knowledgeable.\n\nI went to the Barnes & Noble on Eighth, taking the back way (but no alleys). It was jammed, and there was some kind of book signing going on up front, but nobody paid any attention to me. Even so, I didn't go straight to the gardening section. I wandered casually through the aisles, looking at T-shirts and mugs and stopping to thumb through a copy of How Irrational Fears Can Ruin Your Life, gradually working my way back to the gardening section.\n\nThey had only two books on parasites: Common Garden Parasites and Diseases and Organic Weed and Pest Control. I grabbed them both, retreated to the literature section, and began to read.\n\n\"Fungicides such as benomyl and ferbam are effective against certain rusts,\" Common Garden Parasites said. \"Streptomycin is effective against some viruses.\"\n\nBut which was this, if either? \"Spraying with diazinon or malathion can be effective in most cases. Note: These are dangerous chemicals. Avoid all contact with skin. Do not breathe fumes.\"\n\nThat was out. I put down Common Garden Parasites and picked up Organic Weed and Pest Control. At least it didn't recommend spraying with deadly chemicals, but what it did recommend wasn't much more useful. Prune affected limbs. Remove and destroy berries. Cover branches with black plastic.\n\nToo often it said simply: Destroy all infected plants.\n\n\"The main difficulty in the case of parasites is to destroy the parasite without also destroying the host.\" That sounded more like it. \"It is therefore necessary to find a substance that the host can tolerate that is intolerable to the parasite. Some rusts, for instance, cannot tolerate a vinegar and ginger solution, which can be sprayed on the leaves of the host plant. Red mites, which infest honeybees, are allergic to peppermint. Frosting made with oil of peppermint can be fed to the bees. As it permeates the bees' systems, the red mites drop off harmlessly. Other parasites respond variously to spearmint, citrus oil, oil of garlic, and powdered aloe vera.\"\n\nBut which? And how could I find out? Wear a garlic necklace? Stick an orange under Tonya's nose? There was no way to find out without their figuring out what I was doing.\n\nI kept reading. \"Some parasites can be destroyed by rendering the environment unfavorable. For moisture-dependent rusts, draining the soil can be beneficial. For temperature-susceptible pests, freezing and/or use of smudge pots can kill the invader. For light-sensitive parasites, exposure to light can kill the parasite.\"\n\nTemperature-sensitive. I thought about the hats. Were they to hide the parasites or to protect them from the cold? No, that couldn't be it. The temperature in the building had been turned down to freezing for two weeks, and if they needed heat, why hadn't they landed in Florida?\n\nI thought about Jackie Peterson's newsletter. She hadn't been affected. And neither had Uncle Marty, whose newsletter had come this morning. Or, rather, Uncle Marty's dog, who ostensibly dictated them. \"Woof, woof!\" the newsletter had said. \"I'm lying here under a Christmas saguaro out on the desert, chewing on a bone and hoping Santa brings me a nice new flea collar.\"\n\nSo they hadn't landed in Arizona or Miami, and none of the newspaper articles Gary had circled had been from Mexico or California. They had all been datelined Minnesota and Michigan and Illinois. Places where it was cold. Cold and cloudy, I thought, thinking of Cousin Celia's Christmas newsletter. Cold and cloudy.\n\nI flipped back through the pages, looking for the reference to light-sensitive parasites.\n\n\"It's right back here,\" a voice said.\n\nI shut the book, jammed it in among Shakespeare's plays, and snatched up a copy of Hamlet.\n\n\"It's for my daughter,\" the customer, who was, thankfully, hatless, said, appearing at the end of the aisle. \"That's what she said she wanted for Christmas when I called her. I was so surprised. She hardly ever reads.\"\n\nThe clerk was right behind her, wearing a mobcap with red and green ribbons. \"Everybody's reading Shakespeare right now,\" she said, smiling. \"We can hardly keep it on the shelves.\"\n\nI ducked my head and pretended to read the Hamlet. \"O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!\" Hamlet said. \"I set it down that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.\"\n\nThe clerk started along the shelves, looking for the book. \"King Lear, King Lear\u2026 let's see.\"\n\n\"Here it is,\" I said, handing it to her before she reached Common Garden Parasites.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, smiling. She handed it to the customer. \"Have you been to our book signing yet? Darla Sheridan, the fashion designer, is in the store today, signing her new book, In Your Easter Bonnet. Hats are coming back, you know.\"\n\n\"Really?\" the customer said.\n\n\"She's giving away a free hat with every copy of the book,\" the clerk said.\n\n\"Really?\" the customer said. \"Where did you say?\"\n\n\"I'll show you,\" the clerk said, still smiling, and led the customer away like a lamb to the slaughter.\n\nAs soon as they were gone, I pulled out Organic Gardening and looked up \"light-sensitive\" in the index. Page 264. \"Pruning branches above the infection and cutting away surrounding leaves to expose the source to sunlight or artificial light will usually kill light-sensitive parasites.\"\n\nI closed the book and hid it behind the Shakespeare plays, laying it on its side so it wouldn't show, and pulled out Common Garden Pests.\n\n\"Hi,\" Gary said, and I nearly dropped the book. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" I said, cautiously closing the book.\n\nHe was looking at the title. I stuck it on the shelf between Othello and The Riddle of Shakespeare's Identity.\n\n\"I realized you were right.\" He looked cautiously around. \"We've got to destroy them.\"\n\n\"I thought you said they were symbiotes, that they were beneficial,\" I said, watching him warily.\n\n\"You think I've been taken over by the aliens, don't you?\" he said. He ran his hand through his hair. \"See? No hat, no toupee.\"\n\nBut in The Puppet Masters the parasites had been able to attach themselves anywhere along the spine.\n\n\"I thought you said the benefits outweighed a few aches and pains,\" I said.\n\n\"I wanted to believe that,\" he said ruefully. \"I guess what I really wanted to believe was that my ex-wife and I would get back together.\"\n\n\"What changed your mind?\" I said, trying not to look at the bookshelf.\n\n\"You did,\" he said. \"I realized somewhere along the way what a dope I'd been, mooning over her when you were right there in front of me. I was standing there, listening to her talk about how great it was going to be to get back together, and all of a sudden I realized that I didn't want to, that I'd found somebody nicer, prettier, someone I could trust. And that someone was you, Nan.\" He smiled at me. \"So what have you found out? Something we can use to destroy them?\"\n\nI took a long, deep breath, and looked at him, deciding.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, and pulled out the book. I handed it to him. \"The section on bees. It says in here that introducing allergens into the bloodstream of the host can kill the parasite.\"\n\n\"Like in Infiltrators from Space.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" I told him about the red mites and the honeybees. \"Oil of wintergreen, citrus oil, garlic, and powdered aloe vera are all used on various pests. So if we can introduce peppermint into the food of the affected people, it\u2014\"\n\n\"Peppermint?\" he said blankly.\n\n\"Yes. Remember how Penny said nobody ate any of the candy canes she put out? I think it's because they're allergic to peppermint,\" I said, watching him.\n\n\"Peppermint,\" he said thoughtfully. \"They didn't eat any of the ribbon candy Jan Gundell had on her desk, either. I think you've hit it. So how are you going to get them to ingest it? Put it in the water cooler?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"In cookies. Chocolate chip cookies. Everybody loves chocolate.\" I pushed the books into place on the shelf and started for the front. \"It's my turn to bring Holiday Goodies tomorrow. I'll go to the grocery store and get the cookie ingredients\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll go with you,\" he said.\n\n\"No,\" I said. \"I need you to buy the oil of peppermint. They should have it at a drugstore or a health food store. Buy the most concentrated form you can get, and make sure you buy it from somebody who hasn't been taken over. I'll meet you back at my apartment, and we'll make the cookies there.\"\n\n\"Great,\" he said.\n\n\"We'd better leave separately,\" I said. I handed him the Othello. \"Here. Go buy this. It'll give you a bag to carry the oil of peppermint in.\"\n\nHe nodded and started for the checkout line. I walked out of Barnes & Noble, went down Eighth to the grocery store, ducked out the side door, and went back to the office. I stopped at my desk for a metal ruler, and ran up to fifth. Jim Bridgeman, in his backward baseball cap, glanced up at me and then back down at his keyboard.\n\nI went over to the thermostat.\n\nAnd this was the moment when everyone surrounded you, pointing and squawking an unearthly screech at you. Or turned and stared at you with their glowing green eyes. I twisted the thermostat dial as far up as it would go, to ninety-five.\n\nNothing happened.\n\nNobody even looked up from their computers. Jim Bridgeman was typing intently.\n\nI pried the dial and casing off with the metal ruler and stuck them into my coat pocket, bent the metal nub back so it couldn't be moved, and walked back out to the stairwell.\n\nAnd now, please let it warm up fast enough to work before everybody goes home, I thought, clattering down the stairs to fourth. Let everybody start sweating and take off their hats. Let the aliens be light-sensitive. Let them not be telepathic.\n\nI jammed the thermostats on fourth and third, and clattered down to second. Our thermostat was on the far side, next to Hunziger's office. I grabbed up a stack of memos from my desk, walked purposefully across the floor, dismantled the thermostat, and started back toward the stairs.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\" Solveig said, planting herself firmly in front of me.\n\n\"To a meeting,\" I said, trying not to look as lame and frightened as the hero's girlfriend in the movies always did. She looked down at my sneakers. \"Across town.\"\n\n\"You're not going anywhere,\" she said.\n\n\"Why not?\" I said weakly.\n\n\"Because I've got to show you what I bought Jane for Christmas.\"\n\nShe reached for a shopping bag under her desk. \"I know I'm not due till May, but I couldn't resist this,\" she said, rummaging in the bag. \"It is so cute!\"\n\nShe pulled out a tiny pink bonnet with white daisies on it. \"Isn't it adorable?\" she said. \"It's newborn size. She can wear it home from the hospital. Oh, and I got her the cutest\u2014\"\n\n\"I lied,\" I said, and Solveig looked up alertly. \"Don't tell anybody, but I completely forgot to buy a Secret Santa gift. Penny'll kill me if she finds out. If anybody asks where I've gone, tell them the ladies' room,\" I said, and took off down to first.\n\nThe thermostat was right by the door. I disabled it and the one in the basement, got my car (looking in the backseat first, unlike the people in the movies) and drove to the courthouse and the hospital and McDonald's, and then called my mother and invited myself to dinner. \"I'll bring dessert,\" I said. I drove out to the mall, and hit the bakery, the Gap, the video-rental place, and the theater multiplex on the way.\n\nMom didn't have the TV on. She did have the hat on that Sueann had given her. \"Don't you think it's adorable?\" she said.\n\n\"I brought cheesecake,\" I said. \"Have you heard from Allison and Mitch? How's Dakota?\"\n\n\"Worse,\" she said. \"She has these swellings on her knees and ankles. The doctors don't know what's causing them.\" She took the cheesecake into the kitchen, limping slightly. \"I'm so worried.\"\n\nI turned up the thermostats in the living room and the bedroom and was plugging the space heater in when she brought in the soup. \"I got chilled on the way over,\" I said, turning the space heater up to high. \"It's freezing out. I think it's going to snow.\"\n\nWe ate our soup, and Mom told me about Sueann's wedding. \"She wants you to be her maid of honor,\" she said, fanning herself. \"Aren't you warm yet?\"\n\n\"No,\" I said, rubbing my arms.\n\n\"I'll get you a sweater,\" she said, and went into the bedroom, turning the space heater off as she went.\n\nI turned it back on and went into the living room to build a fire in the fireplace.\n\n\"Have you met anyone at work lately?\" she called in from the bedroom.\n\n\"What?\" I said, sitting back on my knees.\n\nShe came back in without the sweater. Her hat was gone, and her hair was mussed up, as if something had thrashed around in it. \"I hope you're not still refusing to write a Christmas newsletter,\" she said, going into the kitchen and coming out again with two plates of cheesecake. \"Come sit down and eat your dessert,\" she said.\n\nI did, still watching her warily.\n\n\"Making up things!\" she said. \"What an idea! Aunt Margaret wrote me just the other day to tell me how much she loves hearing from you girls and how interesting your newsletters always are.\" She cleared the table. \"You can stay for a while, can't you? I hate waiting here alone for news about Dakota.\"\n\n\"No, I've got to go,\" I said, and stood up. \"I've got to\u2026\"\n\nI've got to\u2026what? I thought, feeling suddenly overwhelmed. Fly to Spokane? And then, as soon as Dakota was okay, fly back and run wildly around town turning up thermostats until I fell over from exhaustion? And then what? It was when people fell asleep in the movies that the aliens took them over. And there was no way I could stay awake until every parasite was exposed to the heat, even if they didn't catch me and turn me into one of them. Even if I didn't turn my ankle.\n\nThe phone rang.\n\n\"Tell them I'm not here,\" I said.\n\n\"Who?\" Mom asked, picking it up. \"Oh, dear, I hope it's not Mitch with bad news. Hello?\" Pause. \"It's Sueann,\" she said, putting her hand over the receiver, and listened for a long interval. \"She broke up with her boyfriend.\"\n\n\"With David?\" I said. \"Give me the phone.\"\n\n\"I thought you said you weren't here,\" she said, handing the phone over.\n\n\"Sueann?\" I said. \"Why did you break up with David?\"\n\n\"Because he's so deadly dull,\" she said. \"He's always calling me and sending me flowers and being nice. He even wants to get married. And tonight at dinner, I just thought, 'Why am I dating him?' and we broke up.\"\n\nMom went over and turned on the TV. \"In local news,\" the CNN guy said, \"special-interest groups banded together to donate fifteen thousand dollars to City Hall's Christmas display.\"\n\n\"Where were you having dinner?\" I asked Sueann. \"At McDonald's?\"\n\n\"No, at this pizza place, which is another thing. All he ever wants is to go to dinner or the movies. We never do anything interesting.\"\n\n\"Did you go to a movie tonight?\" She might have been in the multiplex at the mall.\n\n\"No. I told you, I broke up with him.\"\n\nThis made no sense. I hadn't hit any pizza places.\n\n\"Weather is next,\" the guy on CNN said.\n\n\"Mom, can you turn that down?\" I said. \"Sueann, this is important. Tell me what you're wearing.\"\n\n\"Jeans and my blue top and my zodiac necklace. What does that have to do with my breaking up with David?\"\n\n\"Are you wearing a hat?\"\n\n\"In our forecast just ahead,\" the CNN guy said, \"great weather for all you people trying to get your Christmas shopping d\u2014\"\n\nMom turned the TV down.\n\n\"Mom, turn it back up,\" I said, motioning wildly.\n\n\"No, I'm not wearing a hat,\" Sueann said. \"What does that have to do with whether I broke up with David or not?\"\n\nThe weather map behind the CNN guy was covered with 62, 65, 70, 68. \"Mom,\" I said.\n\nShe fumbled with the remote.\n\n\"You won't believe what he did the other day,\" Sueann said, outraged. \"Gave me an engagement ring! Can you imag\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014unseasonably warm temperatures and lots of sunshine,\" the weather guy blared out. \"Continuing right through Christmas.\"\n\n\"I mean, what was I thinking?\" Sueann said.\n\n\"Shh,\" I said. \"I'm trying to listen to the weather.\"\n\n\"It's supposed to be nice all next week,\" Mom said.\n\nIt was nice all the next week. Allison called to tell me Dakota was back home. \"The doctors don't know what it was, some kind of bug or something, but whatever it was, it's completely gone. She's back taking ice-skating and tap-dancing lessons, and next week I'm signing both girls up for Junior Band.\"\n\n\"You did the right thing,\" Gary said grudgingly. \"Marcie told me her knee was really hurting. When she was still talking to me, that is.\"\n\n\"The reconciliation's off, huh?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" he said, \"but I haven't given up. The way she acted proves to me that her love for me is still there, if I can only reach it.\"\n\nAll it proved to me was that it took an invasion from outer space to make her seem even marginally human, but I didn't say so.\n\n\"I've talked her into going into marriage counseling with me,\" he said. \"You were right not to trust me, either. That's the mistake they always make in those body-snatcher movies, trusting people.\"\n\nWell, yes and no. If I'd trusted Jim Bridgeman, I wouldn't have had to do all those thermostats alone.\n\n\"You were the one who turned the heat up at the pizza place where Sueann and her fianc\u00e9 were having dinner,\" I said after Jim told me he'd figured out what the aliens' weakness was after seeing me turn up the thermostat on fifth. \"You were the one who'd checked out Attack of the Soul Killers.\"\n\n\"I tried to talk to you,\" he said. \"I don't blame you for not trusting me. I should have taken my hat off, but I didn't want you to see my bald spot.\"\n\n\"You can't go by appearances,\" I said.\n\nBy December fifteenth, hat sales were down, the mall was jammed with ill-tempered shoppers, at City Hall an animal-rights group was protesting Santa Claus's wearing fur, and Gary's wife had skipped their first marriage-counseling session and then blamed it on him.\n\nIt's now four days till Christmas, and things are completely back to normal. Nobody at work's wearing a hat except Jim, Solveig's naming her baby Durango, Hunziger's suing management for firing him, antidepressant sales are up, and my mother called just now to tell me Sueann has a new boyfriend who's a terrorist, and to ask me if I'd sent out my Christmas newsletters yet. And had I met anyone lately at work.\n\n\"Yes,\" I said. \"I'm bringing him to Christmas dinner.\"\n\n\u2002Yesterday Betty Holland filed a sexual harassment suit against Nathan Steinberg for kissing her under the mistletoe, and I was nearly run over on my way home from work. But the world has been made safe from cankers, leaf wilt, and galls.\n\n\u2002And it makes an interesting Christmas Newsletter.\n\n\u2002Whether it's true or not.\n\n\u2002Wishing you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,\n\n\u2002Nan Johnson" + }, + { + "title": "Epiphany", + "text": "\"But pray ye that your flight be not in the winter, neither on the sabbath day.\" - Matthed 24:20\n\nA little after three, it began to snow. It had looked like it was going to all the way through Pennsylvania, and had even spit a few flakes just before Youngstown, Ohio, but now it was snowing in earnest, thick flakes that were already covering the stiff dead grass on the median and getting thicker as he drove west.\n\nAnd this is what you get for setting out in the middle of January, he thought, without checking the Weather Channel first. He hadn't checked anything. He had taken off his robe, packed a bag, gotten into his car, and taken off. Like a man fleeing a crime.\n\nThe congregation will think I've absconded with the money in the collection plate, he thought. Or worse. Hadn't there been a minister in the paper last month who'd run off to the Bahamas with the building fund and a blonde? They'll say, \"I thought he acted strange in church this morning.\"\n\nBut they wouldn't know yet that he was gone. The Sunday night Mariners' Meeting had been canceled, the elders' meeting wasn't till next week, and the interchurch ecumenical meeting wasn't till Thursday.\n\nHe was supposed to play chess with B.T. on Wednesday, but he could call him and move it. He would have to call when B.T. was at work and leave him a message on his voice mail. He couldn't risk talking to him\u2014they had been friends too many years. B.T. would instantly know something was up. And he would be the last person to understand.\n\nI'll call his voice mail and move our chess game to Thursday night after the ecumenical meeting, Mel thought. That will give me till Thursday.\n\nHe was kidding himself. The church secretary, Mrs. Bilderbeck, would miss him Monday morning when he didn't show up in the church office.\n\nI'll call her and tell her I've got the flu, he thought. No, she would insist on bringing him over chicken soup and zinc lozenges. I'll tell her I've been called out of town for a few days on personal business.\n\nShe will immediately think the worst, he thought. She'll think I have cancer, or that I'm looking at another church. And anything they conclude, even embezzlement, will be easier for them to accept than the truth.\n\nThe snow was starting to stick on the highway, and the windshield was beginning to fog up. Mel turned on the defroster. A truck passed him, throwing up snow. It was full of gold-and-white Ferris wheel baskets. He had been seeing trucks like it all afternoon, carrying black Octopus cars and concession stands and lengths of roller-coaster track. He wondered what a carnival was doing in Ohio in the middle of January. And in this weather.\n\nMaybe they were lost. Or maybe they suddenly had a vision telling them to head west, he thought grimly. Maybe they suddenly had a nervous breakdown in the middle of church. In the middle of their sermon.\n\nHe had scared the choir half to death. They had been sitting there, midway through the sermon, thinking they had plenty of time before they had to find the recessional hymn, when he'd stopped cold, his hand still raised, in the middle of a sentence.\n\nThere had been silence for a full minute before the organist thought to play the intro, and then a frantic scramble for their bulletins and their hymnals, a frantic flipping of pages. They had straggled unevenly to their feet all the way through the first verse, singing and looking at him like he was crazy.\n\nAnd were they right? Had he really had a vision or was it some kind of midlife crisis? Or psychotic episode?\n\nHe was a Presbyterian, not a Pentecostal. He did not have visions. The only time he had experienced anything remotely like this was when he was nineteen, and that hadn't been a vision. It had been a call to the ministry, and it had only sent him to seminary, not haring off to who knows where.\n\nAnd this wasn't a vision, either. He hadn't seen a burning bush or an angel. He hadn't seen anything. He had simply had an overwhelming conviction that what he was saying was true.\n\nHe wished he still had it, that he wasn't beginning to doubt it now that he was three hundred miles from home and in the middle of a snowstorm, that he wasn't beginning to think it had been some kind of self-induced hysteria, born out of his own wishful thinking and the fact that it was January.\n\nHe hated January. The church always looked cheerless and abandoned, with all the Christmas decorations taken down, the sanctuary dim and chilly in the gray winter light, Epiphany over and nothing to look forward to but Lent and taxes. And Good Friday. Attendance and the collection down, half the congregation out with the flu and the other half away on a winter cruise, those who were there looking abandoned, too, and like they wished they had somewhere to go.\n\nThat was why he had decided against his sermon on Christian duty and pulled an old one out of the files, a sermon on Jesus's promise that He would return. To get that abandoned look off their faces.\n\n\"This is the hardest time,\" he had said, \"when Christmas is over, and the bills have all come due, and it seems like winter is never going to end and summer is never going to come. But Christ tells us that we 'know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the morning,' and when he comes, we must be ready for him. He may come tomorrow or next year or a thousand years from now. He may already be here, right now. At this moment\u2026\"\n\nAnd as he said it, he had had an overwhelming feeling that it was true, that He had already come, and he must go find Him.\n\nBut now he wondered if it was just the desire to be somewhere else, too, somewhere besides the cold, poinsettia-less sanctuary.\n\nIf so, you came the wrong way, he thought. It was freezing, and the windshield was starting to fog up. Mel kicked the defroster all the way up to high and swiped at the windshield with his gloved hand.\n\nThe snow was coming down much harder, and the wind was picking up. Mel switched on the radio to hear a weather report.\n\n\"\u2026and in the last days, the Book of Revelation tells us,\" a voice said, \" 'there will be hail and fire mingled with blood.' \"\n\nHe hoped that wasn't the weather report. He hit the scan button on the radio and listened as it cycled through the stations: \u2026\"latest on the scandal involving the President and\"\u2026the voice of Randy Travis, singing \"Forever and Ever, Amen\"\u2026\"hog futures at\"\u2026\"and the disciples said, 'Lord, show us a sign\u2026.' \"\n\nA sign, that was what he needed, Mel thought, peering at the road. A sign that he was not crazy.\n\nA semi roared past in a blinding blast of snow and exhaust. He leaned forward, trying to see the lines on the pavement, and another truck went by, full of orange-and-yellow bumper cars. Bumper cars. How appropriate. They were all going to be driving bumper cars if this snow kept up, Mel thought, watching the truck pull into the lane ahead of him. It fishtailed wildly as it did, and Mel put his foot on the brake, felt it skid, and lifted his foot off.\n\nWell, he had asked for a sign, he thought, carefully slowing down, and this one couldn't be clearer if it was written in fiery letters: Go home! This was a crazy idea! You're going to be killed, and then what will the congregation think? Go home!\n\nWhich was easier said than done. He could scarcely see the road, let alone any exit signs, and the windshield was starting to ice up. He swiped at the window again.\n\nHe didn't dare pull over and stop\u2014those semis would never see him\u2014but he was going to have to. The defroster wasn't having any effect on the ice on the windshield, and neither were the windshield wipers.\n\nHe rolled down the window and leaned out, trying to grab the wiper and slap it against the windshield to shake the ice off. Snow stabbed his face, stinging it.\n\n\"All right, all right,\" he shouted into the wind. \"I get the message!\"\n\nHe rolled the window back up, shivering, and swiped at the inside of the windshield again. The only kind of sign he wanted now was an exit sign, but he couldn't see the side of the road.\n\nIf I'm on the road, he thought, trying to spot the shoulder, a telltale outline, but the whole world had disappeared into a featureless whiteness. And what would keep him from driving right off the road and into a ditch?\n\nHe leaned forward tensely, trying to spot something, anything, and thought he saw, far ahead, a light.\n\nA yellow light, too high up for a taillight\u2014a reflector on a motorcycle, maybe. That was impossible, there was no way a motorcycle could be out in this. One of those lights on the top corners of a semi.\n\nIf that was what it was, he couldn't see the other one, but the light was moving steadily in front of him, and he followed it, trying to keep pace.\n\nThe windshield wipers were icing up again. He rolled down the window, and in the process lost sight of the light. And the road, he thought frightenedly. No, there was the light, still high up, but closer, and it wasn't a light, it was a whole cluster of them, round yellow bulbs in the shape of an arrow.\n\nThe arrow on top of a police car, he thought, telling you to change lanes. There must be some kind of accident up ahead. He strained forward, trying to make out flashing blue ambulance lights.\n\nBut the yellow arrow moved steadily ahead, and as he got closer, he saw that the arrow was pointed down at an angle. And that it was slowing. Mel slowed, too, focusing his whole attention on the road and on pumping his brakes to keep the car from skidding.\n\nWhen he looked up again, the arrow had slowed nearly to a stop, and he could see it clearly. It was part of a lighted sign on the back of a truck. \"Shooting Star\" it said in a flowing script, and next to the arrow in neon pink, \"Tickets.\"\n\nThe truck came to a complete stop, its turn light blinking, and then started up again, and in its headlights he caught a glimpse of snow-spattered red. A stop sign.\n\nAnd this was an exit. He had followed the truck off the highway onto an exit without even knowing it.\n\nAnd now he was hopefully following it into a town, he thought, clicking on his right-turn signal and turning after the truck, but in the moment he had hesitated, he had lost it. And the blowing snow was worse here than on the highway.\n\nThere was the yellow arrow again. No, what he was seeing was a Burger King crown. He pulled in, scraping the snow-covered curb, and saw that he was wrong again. It was a motel sign. \"King's Rest,\" with a crown of sulfur-yellow bulbs.\n\nHe parked the car and got out, slipping in the snow, and started for the office, which had, thank goodness, a \"Vacancy\" sign in the same neon pink as the \"Tickets\" sign.\n\nA little blue Honda pulled up beside him and a short, plump woman got out of it, winding a bright purple muffler around her head. \"Thank goodness you knew where you were going,\" she said, pulling on a pair of turquoise mittens. \"I couldn't see a thing except your taillights.\" She reached back into the Honda for a vivid green canvas bag. \"Anybody who'd be on the roads in weather like this would have to be crazy, wouldn't they?\"\n\nAnd if the blizzard hadn't been sign enough, here was proof positive. \"Yes,\" he said, although she had already gone inside the motel office, \"they would.\"\n\nHe would check in, wait a few hours till the storm let up, and then start back. With luck he would be back home before Mrs. Bilderbeck got to the office tomorrow morning.\n\nHe went inside the office, where a balding man was handing the plump woman a room key and talking to someone on the phone.\n\n\"Another one,\" he said when Mel opened the door. \"Yeah.\" He hung up the phone and pushed a registration form and a pen at Mel.\n\n\"Which way'd you come from?\" he asked. \"East,\" Mel said.\n\nThe man shook his balding head. \"You got here in the nick of time,\" he said to both of them. \"They just closed all the roads east of here.\"\n\n\"And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat upon them.\"\n\n\u2014Revelation 9:17\n\nIn the morning, Mel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. \"I won't be in today. I've been called out of town.\"\n\n\"Out of town?\" Mrs. Bilderbeck said, interested.\n\n\"Yes. On personal business. I'll be gone most of the week.\"\n\n\"Oh, dear,\" she said, and Mel suddenly hoped that there was an emergency at the church, that Gus Uhank had had another stroke or Lottie Millar's mother had died, so that he would have to go back.\n\n\"I told Juan you'd be in,\" Mrs. Bilderbeck said. \"He's putting the sanctuary Christmas decorations away, and he wanted to know if you want to save the star for next year. And the pilot light went out again. The church was freezing when I got here this morning.\"\n\n\"Was Juan able to get it relit?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I think someone should look at it. What if it goes out on a Saturday night?\"\n\n\"Call Jake Adams at A-1 Heating,\" he said. Jake was a deacon.\n\n\"A-1 Heating,\" she said slowly, as if she were writing it down. \"What about the star? Are we going to use it again next year?\"\n\nIs there going to be a next year? Mel thought. \"Whatever you think,\" he said.\n\n\"And what about the ecumenical meeting?\" she asked. \"Will you be back in time for that?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, afraid if he said \"no,\" she would ask more questions.\n\n\"Is there a number where I can reach you?\"\n\n\"No. I'll check in tomorrow.\" He hung up quickly, and then sat there on the bed, trying to decide whether to call B.T. or not. He hadn't done anything major in the fifteen years they'd been friends without telling him, but Mel knew what he'd say. They'd met on the ecumenical committee, when the Unitarian chairman had decided that, to be truly ecumenical, they needed a resident atheist and Darwinian biologist. And, Mel suspected, an African American.\n\nIt was the only good thing that had ever come out of the ecumenical committee. He and B.T. had started by complaining about the idiocies of the ecumenical committee, which seemed bent on proving that denominations couldn't get along, progressed to playing chess and then to discussing religion and politics and disagreeing on both, and ended by becoming close friends.\n\nI have to call him, Mel thought, it's a betrayal of our friendship not to.\n\nAnd tell him what? That he'd had a holy vision? That the Book of Revelation was coming literally true? It sounded crazy to Mel, let alone to B.T., who was a scientist, who didn't believe in the First Coming, let alone the Second. But if it was true, how could he not call him?\n\nHe dialed B.T.'s area code and then put down the receiver and went to check out.\n\nThe roads east were still closed. \"You shouldn't have any trouble heading west, though,\" the balding man said, handing Mel his credit card receipt. \"The snow's supposed to let up by noon.\"\n\nMel hoped so. The interstate was snow-packed and unbelievably slick, and when Mel positioned himself behind a sand truck, a rock struck his windshield and made a ding.\n\nAt least there was hardly any traffic. There were only a few semis, and a navy blue pickup with a bumper sticker that said \"In case of the Rapture, this car will be unoccupied.\" There was no sign of the blue Honda or of the carnival. They had seen the light and were still at the King's Rest, sitting in the restaurant, drinking coffee. Or headed south for the winter.\n\nHe passed a snow-obscured sign that read \"For Weather Info Tune to AM 1410.\"\n\nHe did. \"\u2026and in the last days Christ Himself will appear,\" an evangelist, possibly the one from yesterday, or a different one\u2014they all had the same accent, the same intonation\u2014said. \"The Book of Revelation tells us He will appear riding a white horse and leading a mighty army of the righteous against the Antichrist in that last great battle of Armageddon. And the unbelievers\u2014the fornicators and the baby-murderers\u2014will be flung into the bottomless pit.\"\n\nThe ultimate \"Wait till your father gets home\" threat, Mel thought.\n\n\"And how do I know these things are coming?\" the radio said. \"I'll tell you how. The Lord came to me in a dream, and He said, 'These shall be the signs of my coming. There will be wars and rumors of wars.' Iraq, my friends, that's what he's talking about. The sun's face will be covered, and the godless will prosper. Look around you. Who do you see prospering? Abortion doctors and homosexuals and godless atheists. But when Christ comes, they will be punished. He told me so. The Lord spoke to me, just like he spoke to Moses, just like he spoke to Isaiah\u2026\"\n\nHe switched off the radio, but it didn't do any good. Because this was what had been bothering him ever since he started out. How did he know his vision wasn't just like some radio evangelist's?\n\nBecause his is born out of hatred, bigotry, and revenge, Mel thought. God no more spoke to him than did the man in the moon.\n\nAnd how do you know He spoke to you? Because it felt real? The voices telling the bomber to destroy the abortion clinic felt real, too. Emotion isn't proof. Signs aren't evidence. \"Do you have any outside confirmation?\" he could hear B.T. saying skeptically.\n\nThe sun came out, and the glare off the white road, the white fields, was worse than the snow had been. He almost didn't see the truck off to the side. Its emergency flashers weren't on, and at first he thought it had just slid off the road, but as he went past, he saw it was one of the carnival trucks with its hood up and steam coming out. A young man in a denim jacket was standing next to it, hooking his thumb for a ride.\n\nI should stop, Mel thought, but he was already past, and picking up hitchhikers was dangerous. He had found that out when he'd preached a sermon on the Good Samaritan last year. \"Let us not be like the Levite or the Pharisee who passes by the stranded motorist, the injured victim,\" he had told his congregation. \"Let us be like the Samaritan, who stopped and helped.\"\n\nIt had seemed like a perfectly harmless sermon topic, and he had been totally unprepared for the uproar that ensued. \"I cannot believe you told people to pick up hitchhikers!\" Dan Crosby had raged. \"If one of my daughters ends up raped, I'm holding you responsible.\"\n\n\"What were you thinking of?\" Mrs. Bilderbeck had said, hanging up after fending off Mabel Jenkins. \"On CNN last week there was a story about somebody who stopped to help a couple who was out of gas, and they cut off his head.\"\n\nHe had had to issue a retraction the next Sunday, saying that women had no business helping anyone (which had made Mamie Rollet mad, for feminist reasons) and that the best thing for everyone else to do was to alert the state patrol on their cell phones and let them take care of it, unless they knew the person, although somehow he couldn't imagine the Good Samaritan with a cell phone.\n\nThere was a median crossing up ahead, but it was marked with a sign that read \"Authorized Vehicles Only.\" And if I get my head cut off, he thought, the congregation will have no sympathy at all.\n\nBut it was threatening to snow again, and the green interstate sign up ahead said \"Wayside 28.\" And the carnival had been his Good Samaritan last night.\n\n\" 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me,' \" he murmured, and turned into the median crossing and onto the eastbound side of the highway, and started back.\n\nThe truck was still there, though he couldn't see the driver. Good, he thought, looking for a place to cross. Some other Samaritan picked him up. But when he pulled up behind the truck, the man got out of the truck's cab and started over to the car, his hands jammed into his denim jacket. Mel began to feel sorry he'd stopped. The man had a ragged scar across his forehead, and his hair was lank and greasy.\n\nHe slouched over to the side of the car, and Mel saw that he was much younger than he'd looked at first. He's just a kid, Mel thought.\n\nYeah, well, so was Billy the Kid, he reminded himself. And Andrew Cunanan.\n\nMel leaned across and pulled down the passenger window. \"What's the trouble?\"\n\nThe kid leaned down to talk to him. \"Died,\" he said, and grinned.\n\n\"Do you need a lift into town?\" he asked, and the kid immediately opened the car door, keeping his right hand in his jacket pocket. Where the gun is, Mel thought.\n\nThe kid slid in and shut the door, still using only one hand. When they find me robbed and murdered, they'll be convinced I was involved in some kind of drug deal, Mel thought. He started the car.\n\n\"Man, it was cold out there,\" the kid said, taking his right hand out of his pocket and rubbing his hands together. \"I been waiting forever.\"\n\nMel kicked the heater over to high, and the kid leaned forward and held his hands in front of the vent. There was a peace sign tattooed on the back of one of them and a fierce-looking lion on the other. Both looked like they'd been done by hand.\n\nThe kid rubbed his hands together, wincing, and Mel took another look. His hands were red with cold and between the tattoo lines there were ugly white splotches. The kid started rubbing them again.\n\n\"Don't\u2014\" Mel said, putting out his hand unthinkingly to stop him. \"That looks like frostbite. Don't rub it. You're supposed to\u2026\" he said, and then couldn't remember. Put them in warm water? Wrap them up? \"They're supposed to warm up slowly,\" he said finally.\n\n\"You mean like by warming 'em up in front of a heater?\" the kid said, holding his hands in front of the vent again. He put up his hand and touched the ding in the windshield. \"That's gonna spread,\" he said.\n\nHis hand looked even worse now that it was warming up. The sickly white splotches stood out starkly against the rest of his skin.\n\nMel took off his gloves, switching hands on the steering wheel and using his teeth to get the second one off. \"Here,\" he said, handing them to the kid. \"These are insulated.\"\n\nThe kid looked at him for a minute and then put them on.\n\n\"You should get your hands looked at,\" Mel said. \"I can take you to the emergency room when we get to town.\"\n\n\"I'll be okay,\" the kid said. \"You get used to being cold, working a carny.\"\n\n\"What's a carnival doing here in the middle of winter, anyway?\" Mel asked.\n\n\"Best time,\" the kid said. \"Catches 'em by surprise. What're you doin' out here?\"\n\nHe wondered what the kid would say if he told him. \"I'm a minister,\" he said instead.\n\n\"A preacher, huh?\" he said. \"You believe in the Second Coming?\"\n\n\"The Second Coming?\" Mel gasped, caught off guard.\n\n\"Yeah, we had a preacher come to the carny the other day telling us Jesus was coming back and was gonna punish everybody for hanging him on the cross, knock down the mountains, burn the whole planet up. You believe all that's gonna happen?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mel said. \"I don't think Jesus is coming back to punish anybody.\"\n\n\"The preacher said it was all right there in the Bible.\"\n\n\"There are lots of things in the Bible. They don't always turn out to mean what you thought they did.\"\n\nThe kid nodded sagely. \"Like the Siamese twins.\"\n\n\"Siamese twins?\" Mel said, unable to remember any Siamese twins in the Bible.\n\n\"Yeah, like this one carny up in Fargo. It had a big sign saying 'See the Siamese Twins,' and everybody pays a buck, thinking they're gonna see two people hooked together. And when they get there it's a cage with two Siamese kittens in it. Like that.\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Mel said. \"The prophecies aren't a scam to cheat people, they're\u2014\"\n\n\"What about Roswell? The alien autopsy and all that. You think that's a scam, too?\"\n\nWell, there was some outside confirmation for you. Mel was in a class with scam artists and UFO nuts.\n\n\"After what happened the first time, I don't know if I'd wanta come back or not,\" the kid said, and it took Mel a minute to realize he was talking about Christ. \"If I did, I'd wear some kind of disguise or something.\"\n\nLike the last time, Mel thought, when He came disguised as a baby.\n\nThe kid was still preoccupied with the ding. \"There's stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a little while,\" he said, \"but it's still gonna spread. There ain't nothing that can stop it.\" He pointed out the window at a sign. \"Wayside, exit 1 mile.\"\n\nMel pulled off and into a Total station, apparently all there was to Wayside. The kid opened the door and started to take off the gloves.\n\n\"Keep them,\" Mel said. \"Do you want me to wait till you find out if they've got a tow truck?\"\n\nThe kid shook his head. \"I'll call Pete.\" He reached into the pocket of the denim jacket and handed Mel three orange cardboard tickets. They were marked \"Admit One Free.\"\n\n\"It's a ticket to the show,\" the kid said. \"We got a triple Ferris wheel, three wheels one inside the other. And a great roller coaster. The Comet.\"\n\nMel splayed the tickets apart. \"There are three tickets here.\"\n\n\"Bring your friends,\" the kid said, slapped the car door, and ambled off toward the gas station.\n\nBring your friends.\n\nMel got back on the highway. It was getting dark. He hoped the next exit wasn't as far, or as uninhabited, as this one.\n\nBring your friends. I should have told B.T., he thought, even though he would have said, Don't go, you're crazy, let me recommend a good psychiatrist.\n\n\"I still should have told him,\" he said out loud, and was as certain of it as he had been of what he should do in that moment in the church. And now he had cut himself off from B.T. not only by hundreds of miles of closed highways and \"icy and snow-packed conditions,\" but by his deception, his failure to tell him.\n\nThe next exit didn't even have a gas station, and the one after that nothing but a Dairy Queen. It was nearly eight by the time he got to Zion Center and a Holiday Inn.\n\nHe walked straight in, not even stopping to get his luggage out of the trunk, and across the lobby toward the phones.\n\n\"Hello!\" The short, plump woman he'd seen the night before waylaid him. \"Here we are again, orphans of the storm. Weren't the roads awful?\" she said cheerfully. \"I almost went off in the ditch twice. My little Honda doesn't have four-wheel drive, and\u2014\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Mel interrupted her. \"I have a phone call I have to make.\"\n\n\"You can't,\" she said, still cheerfully. \"The lines are down.\"\n\n\"Down?\"\n\n\"Because of the storm. I tried to call my sister just now, and the clerk told me the phone's been out all day. I don't know what she's going to think when she doesn't hear from me. I promised faithfully that I'd call her every night and tell her where I was and that I'd gotten there safely.\"\n\nHe couldn't call B.T. Or get to him. \"Excuse me,\" he said, and started back across the lobby to the registration desk.\n\n\"Has the interstate going east opened up yet?\" he asked the girl behind the counter.\n\nShe shook her head. \"It's still closed between Malcolm and Iowa City. Ground blizzards,\" she said. \"Will you be checking in, sir? How many are there in your party?\"\n\n\"Two,\" a voice said.\n\nMel turned. And there, leaning against the end of the registration desk, was B.T.\n\n\"And there appeared another wonder in heaven, and behold a great red dragon.\"\n\n\u2014Revelation 12:3\n\nFor a moment he couldn't speak for the joy, the relief he felt. He clutched the checkout counter, vaguely aware that the girl behind the counter was saying something.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" he said finally.\n\nB.T. smiled his slow checkmate smile. \"Aren't I the one who should be asking that?\"\n\nAnd now that he was here, he would have to tell him. Mel felt the relief turn into resentment. \"I thought the roads were closed,\" he said.\n\n\"I didn't come that way,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"And how would you like to pay for that, sir?\" the clerk said, and Mel knew she had asked him before.\n\n\"Credit card,\" he said, fumbling for his wallet.\n\n\"License number?\" the clerk asked.\n\n\"I flew to Omaha and rented a car,\" B.T. said.\n\nMel handed her his MasterCard. \"TY 804.\"\n\n\"State?\"\n\n\"Pennsylvania.\" He looked at B.T. \"How did you find me?\"\n\n\" 'License number?' \" B.T. said, mimicking the clerk. \" 'Will you be putting this on your credit card, sir?' If you've got a computer, it's the easiest thing in the world to find someone these days, especially if they're using that.\" He gestured at the MasterCard the clerk was handing back to Mel.\n\nShe handed him a folder. \"Your room number is written inside, sir. It's not on the key for security purposes,\" the clerk said, as if his room number weren't in the computer, too. B.T. probably already knew it.\n\n\"You still haven't answered my question,\" B.T. said. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I have to go get my suitcase,\" Mel said, and walked past him and out to the parking lot and his car. He opened the trunk.\n\nB.T. reached past him and picked up Mel's suitcase, as if taking it into custody.\n\n\"How did you know I was missing?\" Mel asked, but he already knew the answer to that. \"Mrs. Bilderbeck sent you.\"\n\nB.T. nodded. \"She said she was worried about you, that you'd called and something was seriously wrong. She said she knew because you hadn't tried to get out of the ecumenical meeting on Thursday. She said you always tried to get out of it.\"\n\nThey say it's the little mistakes that trip criminals up, Mel thought.\n\n\"She said she thought you were sick and were going to see a specialist,\" B.T. said, his black face gray with worry. \"Out of town, so nobody in the congregation would find out about it. A brain tumor, she said.\" He shifted the suitcase to his other hand. \"Do you have a brain tumor?\"\n\nA brain tumor. That would be a nice, convenient explanation. When Ivor Sorenson had had a brain tumor, he had stood up during the offertory, convinced there was an ostrich sitting in the pew next to him.\n\n\"Are you sick?\" B.T. said.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But it is something serious.\"\n\n\"It's freezing out here,\" Mel said. \"Let's discuss this inside.\"\n\nB.T. didn't move. \"Whatever it is, no matter how bad it is, you can tell me.\"\n\n\"All right. Fine. 'For ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of Man cometh.' Matthew 25:13,\" Mel said. \"I had a revelation. About the Second Coming. I think He's here already, that the Second Coming's already happened.\"\n\nWhatever B.T. had imagined\u2014terminal illness or embezzlement or some other, worse crime\u2014it obviously wasn't as bad as this. His face went even grayer. \"The Second Coming,\" he said. \"Of Christ?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mel said. He told him what had happened during the sermon Sunday. \"I scared the choir half out of their wits,\" he said.\n\nB.T. nodded. \"Mrs. Bilderbeck told me. She said you stopped in the middle of a sentence and just stood there, staring into space with your hand up to your forehead. That's why she thought you had a brain tumor. How long did this\u2026vision last?\"\n\n\"It wasn't a vision,\" Mel said. \"It was a revelation, a conviction\u2026an epiphany.\"\n\n\"An epiphany,\" B.T. said in a flat, expressionless voice. \"And it told you He was here? In Zion Center?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mel said. \"I don't know where He is.\"\n\n\"You don't know where He is,\" B.T. repeated. \"You just got in your car and started driving?\"\n\n\"West,\" Mel said. \"I knew He was somewhere west.\"\n\n\"Somewhere west,\" B.T. said softly. He rubbed his hand over his mouth.\n\n\"Why don't you say it?\" Mel said. He slammed the trunk shut. \"You think I'm crazy.\"\n\n\"I think we're both crazy,\" he said, \"standing out here in the snow, fighting. Have you had supper?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mel said.\n\n\"Neither have I,\" B.T. said. He took Mel's arm. \"Let's go get some dinner.\"\n\n\"And a dose of antidepressants? A nice straitjacket?\"\n\n\"I was thinking steak,\" B.T. said, and tried to smile. \"Isn't that what they eat here in Iowa?\"\n\n\"Corn,\" Mel said.\n\n\"And when I looked, behold\u2026the appearance of the wheels was as the colour of a beryl stone and\u2026as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel.\"\n\n\u2014Ezekiel 10:9\u201310\n\nNeither corn nor steak was on the menu, which had the Holiday Inn star on the front, and they were out of nearly everything else. \"Because of the interstate being closed,\" the waitress said. \"We've got chicken teriyaki and beef chow mein.\"\n\nThey ordered the chow mein and coffee, and the waitress left. Mel braced himself for more questions, but B.T. only asked, \"How were the roads today?\" and told him about the problems he'd had getting a flight and a rental car. \"Chicago O'Hare was shut down because of a winter storm,\" he said, \"and Denver and Kansas City. I had to fly into Albuquerque and then up to Omaha.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you had to go to all that trouble,\" Mel said.\n\n\"I was worried about you.\"\n\nThe waitress arrived with their chow mein, which came with mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans.\n\n\"Interesting,\" B.T. said, poking at the gravy. He made a halfhearted attempt at the chow mein, and then pushed the plate away.\n\n\"There's something I don't understand,\" he said. \"The Second Coming is when Christ returns, right? I thought He was supposed to appear in the clouds in a blaze of glory, complete with trumpets and angel choirs.\"\n\nMel nodded.\n\n\"Then how can He already be here without anybody knowing?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Mel said. \"I don't understand any of this any more than you do. I just know He's here.\"\n\n\"But you don't know where.\"\n\n\"No. I thought when I got out here there would be a sign.\"\n\n\"A sign,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Mel said, getting angry all over again. \"You know. A burning bush, a pillar of fire, a star. A sign.\"\n\nHe must have been shouting. The waitress came scurrying over with the check. \"Are you through with this?\" she said, looking at the plates of half-eaten food.\n\n\"Yes,\" Mel said. \"We're through.\"\n\n\"You can pay at the register,\" the waitress said, and scurried away with their plates.\n\n\"Look,\" B.T. said, \"the brain's a very complicated thing. An alteration in brain chemistry\u2014are you on any medications? Sometimes medications can cause people to hear voices or\u2014\"\n\nMel picked up the check and stood, reaching for his wallet. \"It wasn't a voice.\"\n\nHe put down money for a tip and went over to the cash register.\n\n\"You said it was a strong feeling,\" B.T. said after Mel had paid. \"Sometimes endorphins can\u2014nothing like this has ever happened to you before, has it?\"\n\nMel walked out into the lobby. \"Yes,\" he said, and turned to face B.T. \"It happened once before.\"\n\n\"When?\" B.T. said, his face gray again.\n\n\"When I was nineteen. I was in college, studying pre-law. I went to church with a girlfriend, and the minister gave a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon on the evils of dancing and associating with anyone who did. He said Jesus said it was wrong to associate with nonbelievers, that they would corrupt and contaminate you. Jesus, who spent all His time with lowlifes\u2014tax collectors and prostitutes and lepers! And all of a sudden I had this overwhelming feeling\u2026this\u2014\"\n\n\"Epiphany,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"That I had to do something, that I had to fight him and all the other ministers like him. I stood up and walked out in the middle of the sermon,\" Mel said, remembering, \"and went home and applied to seminary.\"\n\nB.T. rubbed his hand across his mouth. \"And the epiphany you had yesterday was the same as that one?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Reverend Abrams?\" a woman's voice said.\n\nMel turned. The short, plump woman who'd been on the phone and at the motel the night before was hurrying toward them, lugging her bright green tote bag.\n\n\"Who's that?\" B.T. said.\n\nMel shook his head, wondering how she knew his name.\n\nShe came up to them. \"Oh, Reverend Abrams,\" she said breathlessly, \"I wanted to thank you\u2014I'm Cassie Hunter, by the way.\" She stuck out a plump, beringed hand.\n\n\"How do you do?\" Mel said, shaking it. \"This is Dr. Bernard Thomas, and I'm Mel Abrams.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I heard the desk clerk say your name. I didn't thank you the other night for saving my life.\"\n\n\"Saving your life?\" B.T. said, looking at Mel.\n\n\"There was this awful whiteout,\" Cassie said. \"You couldn't see the road at all, and if it hadn't been for the taillights on Reverend Abrams's car, I'd have ended up in a ditch.\"\n\nMel shook his head. \"You shouldn't thank me. You should thank the driver of the carnival truck I was following. He saved both of us.\"\n\n\"I saw those carnival trucks,\" Cassie said. \"I wondered what a carnival was doing in Iowa in the middle of winter.\" She laughed, a bright, chirpy laugh. \"Of course, you're probably wondering what a retired English teacher is doing in Iowa in the middle of winter. Of course, for that matter, what are you doing in Iowa in the middle of winter?\"\n\n\"We're on our way to a religious meeting,\" B.T. said before Mel could answer.\n\n\"Really? I've been visiting famous writers' birthplaces,\" she said. \"Everyone back home thinks I'm crazy, but except for the last few days, the weather's been fine. Oh, and I wanted to tell you, I just talked to the clerk, and she thinks the phones will be working again by tomorrow morning, so you should be able to make your call.\"\n\nShe rummaged in her voluminous tote bag and came up with a room key folder. \"Well, anyway, I just wanted to thank you. It was nice meeting you,\" she said to B.T., and bustled off across the lobby toward the coffee shop.\n\n\"Who were you trying to call?\" B.T. asked.\n\n\"You,\" Mel said bitterly. \"I realized I owed it to you to tell you, even if you did think I was crazy.\"\n\nB.T. didn't say anything.\n\n\"That is what you think, isn't it?\" Mel said. \"Why don't you just say it? You think I'm crazy.\"\n\n\"All right. I think you're crazy,\" B.T. said, and then continued angrily, \"Well, what do you expect me to say? You take off in the middle of a blizzard, you don't tell anyone where you're going, because you saw the Second Coming in a vision?\"\n\n\"It wasn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, right. It wasn't a vision. You had an epiphany. So did the woman in The Globe last week who saw the Virgin Mary on her refrigerator. So did the Heaven's Gate people. Are you telling me they're not crazy?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mel said, and started down the hall to his room.\n\n\"For fifteen years you've raved about faith healers and cults and preachers who claim they've got a direct line to God being frauds,\" B.T. said, following him, \"and now you suddenly believe in it?\"\n\nHe kept walking. \"No.\"\n\n\"But you're telling me I'm supposed to believe in your revelation because it's different, because this is the real thing.\"\n\n\"I'm not telling you anything,\" Mel said, turning to face him. \"You're the one who came out here and demanded to know what I was doing. I told you. You got what you came for. Now you can go back and tell Mrs. Bilderbeck I don't have a brain tumor, it's a chemical imbalance.\"\n\n\"And what do you intend to do? Drive west until you fall off the Santa Monica pier?\"\n\n\"I intend to find Him,\" Mel said.\n\nB.T. opened his mouth as if to say something and then shut it and stormed off down the hall.\n\nMel stood there, watching him till a door slammed, far down the hall.\n\nBring your friends, Mel thought. Bring your friends.\n\n\"For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face.\"\n\n\u2014I Corinthians 13:12\n\n\"I intend to find Him,\" Mel had said, and was glad B.T. hadn't shouted back \"How?\" because he had no idea.\n\nHe had not had a sign, which meant that the answer must be somewhere else. Mel sat down on the bed, opened the drawer of the bedside table, and got out the Gideon Bible.\n\nHe propped the pillows up against the headboard and leaned back against them and opened the Bible to the Book of Revelation.\n\nThe radio evangelists made it sound like the story of the Second Coming was a single narrative, but it was actually a hodgepodge of isolated scriptures\u2014Matthew 24 and sections of Isaiah and Daniel, verses out of Second Thessalonians and John and Joel, stray ravings from Revelation and Jeremiah, all thrown together by the evangelists as if the authors were writing at the same time. As if they were even writing about the same thing.\n\nAnd the references were full of contradictions. A trumpet would sound, and Christ would come in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. Or on a white horse, leading an army of a hundred and forty-four thousand. Or like a thief in the night. There would be earthquakes and pestilences and a star falling out of heaven. Or a dragon would come up out of the sea, or four great beasts, with the heads of a lion and a bear and a leopard and eagles' wings. Or darkness would cover the earth.\n\nBut in all the assorted prophecies there were no locations mentioned. Joel talked about a desolate wilderness and Jeremiah about a wasteland, but not about where they were. Luke said the faithful would come \"from the east, and from the west, and from the north\" to the kingdom of God, but neglected to say where it was located.\n\nThe only place mentioned by name in all the prophecies was Armageddon. But Armageddon (or Har-Magedon or Ar Himdah) was a word that appeared only once in the Scriptures and whose meaning was not known, a word that might be Hebrew or Greek or something else altogether, that might mean \"level\" or \"valley plain\" or \"place of desire.\"\n\nMel remembered from seminary that some scholars thought it referred to the plain in front of Mount Megiddo, the site of a battle between Israel and Sisera the Canaanite. But there was no Mount Megiddo on ancient or modern maps. It could be anywhere.\n\nHe put on his shoes and his coat and went out to the parking lot to get his road atlas out of the car.\n\nB.T. was leaning against the trunk.\n\n\"How long have you been out here?\" Mel asked, but the answer was obvious. B.T.'s dark face was pinched with cold, and his hands were jammed into his pockets like the carnival kid's had been.\n\n\"I've been thinking,\" he said, his voice shivering with the cold. \"I don't have to be back until Thursday, and I can fly out of Denver just as easily as out of Omaha. If we drive as far as Denver together, it'll give us more time\u2014\"\n\n\"For you to talk me out of this,\" Mel said, and then was sorry when he saw the expression on B.T.'s face.\n\n\"For us to talk,\" B.T. said. \"For me to figure this\u2014epiphany\u2014out.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Mel said. \"As far as Denver.\" He opened the car door. \"You can come inside now. I'm not going anywhere till morning.\" He leaned inside the car and got the atlas. \"It's a good thing I came out for this. You didn't actually intend to stand out here all night, did you?\"\n\nB.T. nodded, his teeth chattering. \"You're not the only one who's crazy.\"\n\n\"By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand, and seeing ye shall see and shall not perceive.\"\n\n\u2014Matthew 13:14\n\nThere wasn't a Hertz rental car agency in Zion Center. \"The nearest one's in Redfield,\" B.T. said unhappily.\n\n\"I'll meet you there,\" Mel said.\n\n\"Will you?\" B.T. said. \"You won't take off on your own?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mel said.\n\n\"What if you see a sign?\"\n\n\"If I see a burning bush, I'll pull off on the side and let you know,\" Mel said dryly. \"We can caravan if you want.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" B.T. said. \"I'll follow you.\"\n\n\"I don't know where the rental place is.\"\n\n\"I'll pull ahead of you once we get to Redfield,\" B.T. said, and got into his rental car. \"It's the second exit. What are the roads supposed to be like?\"\n\n\"Icy. Snow-packed. But the weather report said clear.\"\n\nMel got into his car. The kid from the carnival had been right. The ding had started to spread, raying out in three long cracks and one short one.\n\nHe led the way over to the interstate, being careful to signal lane changes and not to get too far ahead, so B.T. wouldn't think he was trying to escape.\n\nThe carnival must have stayed the night in Zion Center, too. He passed a truck carrying the Tilt-A-Whirl and one full of stacked, slanted mirrors for, Mel assumed, the Hall of Mirrors. A Blazer roared past him with the bumper sticker \"When the Rapture comes, I'm outta here!\"\n\nAs soon as Mel was on the interstate, he turned on the radio. \"\u2026and snow-packed. Partly cloudy becoming clear by midmorning. Interstate 80 between Victor and Davenport is closed, also U.S. 35 and State Highway 218. Partly cloudy skies, clearing by midmorning. The following schools are closed: Edgewater, Bennett, Olathe, Oskaloosa, Vinton, Shellsburg\u2026.\"\n\nMel twisted the knob.\n\n\"\u2026but the Second Coming is not something we believers have to be afraid of,\" the evangelist, this one with a Texas accent, said, \"for the Book of Revelation tells us that Christ will protect us from the final tribulation, and when He comes to power we will dwell with Him in His Holy City, which shines with jewels and precious stones, and we will drink from living fountains of water. The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and there\u2026be\u2026more\u2014\"\n\nThe evangelist sputtered into static and then out of range, which was just as well because Mel was heading into fog and needed to give his whole attention to his driving.\n\nThe fog got worse, descending like a smothering blanket. Mel turned on his lights. They didn't help at all, but Mel hoped B.T. would be able to see his taillights the way Cassie had. He couldn't see anything beyond a few yards in front of him. And if he had wanted a sign of his mental state, this was certainly appropriate.\n\n\"God has told us His will in no uncertain terms,\" the radio evangelist thundered, coming suddenly back into range. \"There can't be any question about it.\"\n\nBut he had dozens of questions. There had been no Megiddo on the map of Nebraska last night. Or of Kansas or Colorado or New Mexico, and nothing in all the prophecies about location except a reference to the New Jerusalem, and there was no New Jerusalem on the map either.\n\n\"And how do I know the Second Coming is at hand?\" the evangelist roared, suddenly back in range. \"Because the Bible tells us so. It tells us how He is coming and when!\"\n\nAnd that wasn't true, either. \"Ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh,\" Matthew had written, and Luke, \"The Son of man cometh at an hour when ye think not,\" and even Revelation, \"I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come.\" It was the only thing they were all agreed on.\n\n\"The signs are all around us,\" the evangelist shouted. \"They're as plain as the nose on your face! Air pollution, liberals outlawing school prayer, wickedness! Why, anybody'd have to be blind not to recognize them! Open your eyes and see!\"\n\n\"All I see is fog,\" Mel said, turning on the defrost and wiping his sleeve across the windshield, but it wasn't the windshield. It was the world, which had vanished completely in the whiteness.\n\nHe nearly missed the turnoff to Redfield. Luckily, the fog was less dense in town, and they were able to find not only the rental car place, but the local Tastee Freez. Mel went over to get some lunch to take with them while B.T. checked the car in.\n\nIt was full of farmers, all talking about the weather. \"Damned meter-ologists,\" one of them, red-faced and wearing a John Deere cap and earmuffs, grumbled. \"Said it was supposed to be clear.\"\n\n\"It is clear,\" another one in a down vest said. \"He just didn't say where. You get up above that fog, say thirty thousand feet, and it's clear as a bell.\"\n\n\"Number six,\" the woman behind the counter called.\n\nMel went up to the counter and paid. There was a fluorescent green poster for the carnival taped up on the wall beside the counter. \"Come have the time of your life!\" it read. \"Thrills, chills, excitement!\"\n\nChills is right, Mel thought, thinking of how cold being up in a Ferris wheel in this fog would be.\n\nIt was an old sign. \"Littletown, Dec. 24,\" it read. \"Ft. Dodge, Dec. 28. Cairo, Dec. 30.\"\n\nB.T. was already in the car when Mel got back with their hamburgers and coffee. He handed him the sack and got back on the highway.\n\nThat was a mistake. The fog was so thick he couldn't even take a hand off the wheel to hold the hamburger B.T. offered him. \"I'll eat it later,\" he said, leaning forward and squinting as if that would make things clearer. \"You go ahead and eat, and we'll switch places in a couple of exits.\"\n\nBut there were no exits, or Mel couldn't see them in the fog, and after twenty miles of it, he had B.T. hand him his coffee, now stone cold, and took a couple of sips.\n\n\"I've been looking at the Second Coming scientifically,\" B.T. said. \" 'A great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea and the third part of the sea became blood.' \"\n\nMel glanced over. B.T. was reading from a black leather Bible. \"Where'd you get that?\" he asked.\n\n\"It was in the hotel room,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"You stole a Gideon Bible?\" Mel said.\n\n\"They put them there for people who need them. And I'd say we qualify. 'There was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair and the moon became as blood. And the stars of heaven fell into the earth. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places.'\n\n\"All these things are supposed to happen along with the Second Coming,\" B.T. said. \"Earthquakes, wars and rumors of wars, pestilence, locusts.\" He leafed through the flimsy pages. \" 'And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth.' \"\n\nHe shut the Bible. \"All right, earthquakes happen all the time, and there have been wars and rumors of wars for the last ten thousand years, and I guess this\u2014'and the stars shall fall from the sky'\u2014could refer to meteors. But there's no sign of any of these other things. No locusts, no bottomless pit opening up, no 'third part of trees and grass were burnt up and a third part of the creatures which were in the sea died.' \"\n\n\"Nuclear war,\" Mel said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"According to the evangelists, that's supposed to refer to nuclear war,\" Mel said. \"And before that, to the Communist threat. Or fluoridation of water. Or anything else they disapprove of.\"\n\n\"Well, whatever it stands for, no bottomless pit has opened up lately or we would have seen it on CNN. And volcanoes don't cause locust swarms. Mel,\" he said seriously, \"let's say your experience was a real epiphany. Couldn't you have misinterpreted what it meant?\"\n\nAnd for a split second, Mel almost had it. The key to where He was and what was going to happen. The key to all of it.\n\n\"Couldn't it have been about something else?\" B.T. said. \"Something besides the Second Coming?\"\n\nNo, Mel thought, trying to hang on to the insight, it was the Second Coming, but\u2014it was gone. Whatever it was, he'd lost it.\n\nHe stared blindly ahead at the fog, trying to remember what had triggered it. B.T. had said, \"Couldn't you have misunderstood what it meant?\" No, that wasn't right. \"Couldn't you\u2014\"\n\n\"What is it?\" B.T. was pointing through the windshield.\"What is that? Up ahead?\"\n\n\"I don't see anything,\" Mel said, straining ahead. He couldn't see anything but fog. \"What was it?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I just saw a glimpse of lights.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Mel said. There was nothing there but whiteness.\n\n\"There it is again,\" B.T. said, pointing. \"Didn't you see it? Yellow flashing lights. There must be an accident. You'd better slow down.\"\n\nMel was already barely creeping along, but he slowed further, still unable to see anything. \"Was it on our side of the highway?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026I don't know,\" B.T. said, leaning forward. \"I don't see it now. But I'm sure it was there.\"\n\nMel crawled forward, squinting into the whiteness. \"Could it have been a truck? The carnival truck had a yellow arrow,\" he said, and saw the lights.\n\nAnd they were definitely not a sign for a carnival ride. They filled the road just ahead, flashing yellow and red and blue, all out of synch with each other. Police cars or fire trucks or ambulances. Definitely an accident. He pumped the brakes, hoping whoever was behind him could see his taillights, and slowed to a stop.\n\nA patrolman appeared out of the fog, holding up his hand in the sign for \"stop.\" He was wearing a yellow poncho and a clear plastic cover over his brown hat.\n\nMel rolled his window down, and the patrolman leaned in to talk to them. \"Road up ahead's closed. You need to get off at this exit.\"\n\n\"Exit?\" Mel said, looking to the right. He could just make out a green outline in the fog.\n\n\"It's right there, up about a hundred yards,\" the patrolman said, pointing into nothingness. \"We'll come tell you when it's open again.\"\n\n\"Are you closing it because of the weather?\" B.T. asked.\n\nThe patrolman shook his head. \"Accident,\" he said. \"Big mess. It'll be a while.\" He motioned them off to the right.\n\nMel felt his way to the exit and off the highway. At least it had a truck stop instead of just a gas station. He and B.T. parked and went into the restaurant.\n\nIt was jammed. Every booth, every seat at the counter was full. Mel and B.T. sat down at the last unoccupied table, and it immediately became clear why it had been unoccupied. The draft when the door opened made B.T., who had just taken his coat off, put it back on and then zip it up.\n\nMel had expected everyone to be angry about the delay, but the waitresses and customers all seemed to be in a holiday mood. Truckers leaned across the backs of the booths to talk to each other, laughing, and the waitresses, carrying pots of coffee, were smiling. One of them had, inexplicably, a plastic Kewpie doll stuck in her beehive hairdo.\n\nThe door opened again, sending an Arctic blast across their table, and a paramedic came in and went up to the counter to talk to the waitress. \"\u2026accident\u2026\" Mel heard him say, shaking his head, \"\u2026carnival truck\u2026\"\n\nMel went over. \"Excuse me,\" he said. \"I heard you say something about a carnival truck. Is that what had the accident?\"\n\n\"Disaster is more like it,\" the paramedic said, shaking his head. \"Took a turn too sharp and lost his whole load. And don't ask me what a carnival's doing up here in the middle of winter.\"\n\n\"Was the driver hurt?\" Mel asked anxiously.\n\n\"Hurt? Hell, no. Not a scratch. But that road's going to be closed the rest of the day.\" He pulled a bamboo Chinese finger trap out of his pocket and handed it to Mel. \"Truck was carrying all the prizes and stuff for the midway. The whole road's covered in stuffed animals and baseballs. And you can't even see to clean 'em up.\"\n\nMel went back to the table and told B.T. what had happened.\n\n\"We could go south and pick up Highway 33,\" B.T. said, consulting the road atlas.\n\n\"No, you can't,\" the waitress, appearing with two pots of coffee, said. \"It's closed. Fog. So's 15 north.\" She poured coffee into their cups. \"You're not going anywhere.\"\n\nThe draft hit them again, and the waitress glanced over at the door. \"Hey! Don't just stand there\u2014shut the door!\"\n\nMel looked toward the door. Cassie was standing there, wearing a bulky orange sweater that made her look even rounder, and scanning the restaurant for an empty booth. She was carrying a red dinosaur under one arm and her bright green tote bag over the other.\n\n\"Cassie!\" Mel called to her, and she smiled and came over.\n\n\"Put your dinosaur down and join us,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"It's not a dinosaur,\" she said, setting it on the table. \"It's a dragon. See?\" she said, pointing to two pieces of red felt on its back. \"Wings.\"\n\n\"Where'd you get it?\" Mel said.\n\n\"The driver of the truck that spilled them gave it to me,\" she said. \"I'd better call my sister before she hears about this on the news,\" she said, looking around the restaurant. \"Do you think the phones are working?\"\n\nB.T. pointed at a sign that said \"Phones,\" and she left.\n\nShe was back instantly. \"There's a line,\" she said, and sat down. The waitress came by again with coffee and menus, and they ordered pie, and then Cassie went to check the phones again.\n\n\"There's still a line,\" she said, coming back. \"My sister will have a fit when she hears about this. She already thinks I'm crazy. And out there in that fog today I thought so, too. I wish my grandmother had never looked up verses in the Bible.\"\n\n\"The Bible?\" Mel said.\n\nShe waved her hand dismissively. \"It's a long story.\"\n\n\"We seem to have plenty of time,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"Well,\" she said, settling herself. \"I'm an English teacher\u2014was an English teacher\u2014and the school board offered this early-retirement bonus that was too good to turn down, so I retired in June, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I'd always wanted to travel, but I hate traveling alone, and I didn't know where I wanted to go. So I got on the sub list\u2014our district has a terrible time getting subs, and there's been all this flu.\"\n\nIt is going to be a long story, Mel thought. He picked up the finger trap and idly stuck his finger into one end. B.T. leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"Well, anyway, I was subbing for Carla Sewell, who teaches sophomore lit, Julius Caesar, and I couldn't remember the speech about our fate being in the stars, dear Brutus.\"\n\nMel stuck a forefinger into the other side of the finger trap.\n\n\"So I was looking it up, but I read the page number wrong, so when I looked it up, it wasn't Julius Caesar, it was Twelfth Night.\"\n\nMel stretched the finger trap experimentally. It tightened on his fingers.\n\n\" 'Westward ho!' it said,\" Cassie said, \"and sitting there, reading it, I had this epiphany.\"\n\n\"Epiphany?\" Mel said, yanking his fingers apart.\n\n\"Epiphany?\" B.T. said.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Cassie said. \"I keep thinking I'm still an English teacher. 'Epiphany' is a literary term for a revelation, a sudden understanding, like in James Joyce's The Dubliners. The word comes from\u2014\"\n\n\"The story of the wise men,\" Mel said.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said delightedly, and Mel half expected her to announce that he had gotten an A. \" 'Epiphany' is the word for their arrival at the manger.\"\n\nAnd there it was again. The feeling that he knew where Christ was. The wise men's arrival at the manger. James Joyce.\n\n\"When I read the words 'Westward ho!' \" Cassie was saying, \"I thought, that means me. I have to go west. Something important is going to happen.\" She looked from one to the other. \"You probably think I'm crazy, doing something because of a line in Bartlett's Quotations. But whenever my grandmother had an important decision to make, she used to close her eyes and open her Bible and point at a Scripture, and when she opened her eyes, whatever the Scripture said to do, she'd do it. And, after all, Bartlett's is the Bible of English teachers. So I tried it. I closed the book and my eyes and picked a quotation at random, and it said, 'Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world.' \"\n\n\"Tennyson,\" Mel said.\n\nShe nodded. \"So here I am.\"\n\n\"And has something important happened?\" B.T. asked.\n\n\"Not yet,\" she said, sounding completely unconcerned. \"But it's going to happen soon\u2014I'm sure of it. And in the meantime, I'm seeing all these wonderful sights. I went to Gene Stratton-Porter's cabin in Geneva, and the house where Mark Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, and Sherwood Anderson's museum.\"\n\nShe looked at Mel. \"Struggling against it doesn't work,\" she said, pushing her index fingers together, and Mel realized he was struggling vainly to free his fingers from the finger trap. \"You have to push them together.\"\n\nThere was a blast of icy air and a patrolman wearing three pink plastic leis around his neck and carrying a spotted plush leopard came in.\n\n\"Road's open,\" he said, and there was a general scramble for coats. \"It's still real foggy out there,\" he said, raising his voice, \"so don't get carried away.\"\n\nMel freed himself from the finger trap and helped Cassie into her coat while B.T. paid the bill. \"Do you want to follow us?\" he asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said, \"I'm going to try to call my sister again, and if she's heard about this accident, it'll take forever. You go on.\"\n\nB.T. came back from paying, and they went out to the car, which had acquired a thin, rock-hard coating of ice. Mel, chipping at the windshield with the scraper, started a new offshoot in the rapidly spreading crack.\n\nThey got back on the interstate. The fog was thicker than ever. Mel peered through it, looking at objects dimly visible at the sides of the road. The debris from the accident\u2014baseballs and plastic leis and Coke bottles. Stuffed animals and Kewpie dolls littered the median, looking in the fog like the casualties of some great battle.\n\n\"I suppose you consider this the sign you were looking for,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"What?\" Mel said.\n\n\"Cassie's so-called epiphany. You can read anything you want into random quotations,\" B.T. said. \"You realize that, don't you? It's like reading your horoscope. Or a fortune cookie.\"\n\n\"The Devil can quote Scripture to his own ends,\" Mel murmured.\n\n\"Exactly,\" B.T. said, opening the Gideon Bible and closing his eyes. \"Look,\" he said \"Psalm 115, verse 5. 'Eyes have they, but they see not.' Obviously a reference to the fog.\"\n\nHe flipped to another page and stabbed his finger at it. \" 'Thou shalt not eat any abominable thing.' Oh, dear, we shouldn't have ordered that pie. You can make them mean anything. And you heard her, she'd retired, she liked to travel, she was obviously looking for an excuse to go somewhere. And her epiphany only said something important was going to happen. It didn't say a word about the Second Coming.\"\n\n\"It told her to go west,\" Mel said, trying to remember exactly what she had said. She had been looking for a speech from Julius Caesar and had stumbled on Twelfth Night instead. Twelfth night. Epiphany.\n\n\"How many times is the word 'west' mentioned in Bartlett's Quotations?\" B.T. said. \"A hundred? 'Oh, young Lochinvar is come out of the west'? 'Go west, young man'? 'One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo's nest'?\" He shut the Bible. \"I'm sorry,\" he said. \"It's just\u2014\" He turned and looked out his window at nothing. \"It looks like it might be breaking up.\"\n\nIt wasn't. The fog thinned a little, swirling away from the car in little eddies, and then descended again, more smothering than ever.\n\n\"Suppose you do find Him? What do you do then?\" B.T. said. \"Bow down and worship Him? Give Him frankincense and myrrh?\"\n\n\"Help Him,\" Mel said.\n\n\"Help Him what? Separate the sheep from the goats? Fight the battle of Armageddon?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Mel said. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"You really think there's going to be a battle between good and evil?\"\n\n\"There's always a battle between good and evil,\" Mel said. \"Look at the first time He came. He hadn't been on earth a week before Herod's men were out looking for Him. They murdered every baby and two-year-old in Bethlehem, trying to kill Him.\"\n\nAnd thirty-three years later they succeeded, Mel thought. Only killing couldn't stop Him. Nothing could stop Him.\n\nWho had said that? The kid from the carnival, talking about the windshield. \"Nothing can stop it. There's stuff you could do to keep it from spreading for a while, but it's still going to spread. There ain't nothing that can stop it.\"\n\nHe felt a flicker of the feeling again. Something about the kid from the carnival. What had he been talking about before that? Siamese twins. And Roswell. No. Something else.\n\nHe tried to think what Cassie had said at the truck stop. Something about the wise men arriving at the manger. And not struggling. \"You have to push them together,\" she had said.\n\nIt stayed tantalizingly out of reach, as elusive as a road sign glimpsed in the fog.\n\nB.T. reached forward and flicked on the radio. \"Foggy tonight, and colder,\" it said. \"In the teens for eastern Nebraska, down in the\u2026\" It faded to static. B.T. twisted the knob.\n\n\"And do you know what will happen to us when Jesus comes?\" an evangelist shouted, \"The Book of Revelation tells us we will be tormented with fire and brimstone, unless we repent now, before it's too late!\"\n\n\"A little fire and brimstone would be welcome right about now,\" B.T. said, reaching forward to turn the heater up to high.\n\n\"There's a blanket in the backseat,\" Mel said, and B.T. reached back and wrapped himself up in it.\n\n\"We will be scorched with fire,\" the radio said, \"and the smoke of our torment will rise up forever and ever.\"\n\nB.T. leaned his head against the doorjamb. \"Just so it's warm,\" he murmured, and closed his eyes.\n\n\"But that's not all that will happen to us if we do not repent,\" the evangelist said, \"if we do not take Jesus as our personal Savior. The Book of Revelation tells us in Chapter 14 that we will be cast into the winepress of God's wrath and be trodden in it till our blood covers the ground for a thousand miles! And don't fool yourselves, that day is coming soon! The signs are all around us! Wait till your father gets home.\"\n\nMel switched it off, but it was too late. The evangelist had hit it, the problem Mel had been trying to avoid since that moment in the sanctuary.\n\nI don't believe it, he had thought when he'd heard the minister talking about Jesus forbidding believers to associate with outcasts. And he had thought it again when he heard the radio evangelist that first day talking about Christ coming to get revenge.\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" he thought, and when B.T. stirred in his corner, he realized he had spoken aloud.\n\n\"I don't believe it,\" he murmured. God had so loved the world, He had sent His only begotten Son to live among men, to be a helpless baby and a little boy and a young man, had sent Him to be cold and confused, angry and overjoyed. \"To share our common lot,\" the Nicene Creed said. To undergo and understand and forgive. \"Father, forgive them,\" He had said, with nails driven through His hands, and when they had arrested Him, He had made the disciples put away their weapons. He had healed the soldier's ear Peter had cut off.\n\nHe would never, never come back in a blaze of wrath and revenge, slaughtering enemies, tormenting unbelievers, wreaking fire and pestilence and famine on them. Never.\n\nAnd how can I believe in a revelation about the Second Coming, Mel thought, when I don't believe in the Second Coming?\n\nBut the revelation wasn't about the Second Coming, he thought. He hadn't seen earthquakes or Armageddon or Christ coming in a blaze of clouds and glory. He's already here, Mel had thought, now, and had set out to find Him, to look for a sign.\n\nBut there aren't any, he thought, and saw one off in the mist. \"Prairie Home 5. Denver 468.\"\n\nDenver. They would be there tomorrow night. And B.T. would want him to fly home with him.\n\nUnless I figure out the key, Mel thought. Unless I'm given a sign. Or unless the roads are closed.\n\n\"And, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them.\"\n\n\u2014Matthew 2:9\n\n\"They should be open,\" the woman at the Wayfarer Motel said. The Holiday Inn and the Super 8 and the Innkeeper had all been full up, and the Wayfarer had only one room left. \"There's supposed to be fog in the morning, and then it's supposed to be nice all the way till Sunday.\"\n\n\"What about the roads east?\" B.T. asked.\n\n\"No problem,\" she said.\n\nThe Wayfarer didn't have a coffee shop. They ate supper at the Village Inn on the other end of town. As they were leaving, they ran into Cassie in the parking lot.\n\n\"Oh, good,\" she said. \"I was afraid I wouldn't have a chance to say goodbye.\"\n\n\"Goodbye?\" Mel said.\n\n\"I'm heading south tomorrow to Red Cloud. When I consulted Bartlett's, it said, 'Winter lies too long in country towns.' \"\n\n\"Oh?\" Mel said, wondering what this had to do with going south.\n\n\"Willa Cather,\" Cassie said. \"My \u00c1ntonia. I didn't understand it, either, so I tried the Gideon Bible in my hotel, it's so nice of them to leave them there, and it was Exodus 13:21, 'And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire.' \"\n\nShe smiled expectantly at them. \"Pillar of fire. Red Cloud. Willa Cather's museum is in Red Cloud.\"\n\nThey said goodbye to her and went back to the motel. B.T. sat down on his bed and took his laptop out of his suitcase. \"I've got some email I've got to answer,\" he said.\n\nAnd send? Mel wondered. \"Dear Mrs. Bilderbeck, we'll be in Denver tomorrow. Am hoping to persuade Mel to come home with me. Have straitjacket ready.\"\n\nMel sat down in the room's only chair with the Rand McNally and looked at the map of Nebraska, searching for a town named Megiddo or New Jerusalem. There was Red Cloud, down near the southern border of Nebraska. Pillar of fire. Why couldn't he have had a nice straightforward sign like that? A pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night. Or a star.\n\nBut Moses had wandered around in the wilderness for forty years following said pillar. And the star hadn't led the wise men to Bethlehem. It had led them straight into King Herod's arms. They hadn't had a clue where the newborn Christ was. \"Where is He that is born king of the Jews?\" they'd asked Herod.\n\n\"Where is He?\" Mel murmured, and B.T. glanced up from his laptop and then back down at it again, typing steadily.\n\nMel turned to the map of Colorado. Beulah. Bonanza. Firstview.\n\n\"Even if your\u2014epiphany\u2014was real,\" B.T. had asked him this afternoon, \"couldn't you have misinterpreted what it means?\"\n\nWell, if he had, he wouldn't have been the first one. The Bible was full of people who had misinterpreted prophecies. \"Dogs have compassed me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me,\" the Scriptures said, \"they pierced my hands and my feet.\" But nobody saw the Crucifixion coming. Or the Resurrection.\n\nHis own disciples didn't recognize Him. Easter Sunday they walked all the way to Emmaus with Him without figuring out who He was, and even when He told them, Thomas refused to believe Him and demanded to see the scars of the nails in His hands.\n\nThey had never recognized Him. Isaiah had plainly predicted a virgin who would bring forth a child \"out of the root of Jesse,\" a child who would redeem Israel. But nobody had thought that meant a baby in a stable.\n\nThey had thought he was talking about a warrior, a king who would raise an army and drive the hated foreigners out of their country, a hero on a white horse who would vanquish their enemies and set them free. And He had, but not in the way they expected.\n\nNobody had expected Him to be a poor itinerant preacher from an obscure family, with no college degree and no military training, a nobody. Even the wise men had expected Him to be royalty. \"Where is the king whose star we have seen in the east?\" they had asked Herod.\n\nAnd Herod had promptly sent soldiers out to search for a usurper, a threat to his throne.\n\nThey had been looking for the wrong thing. And maybe B.T.'s right, maybe I am, too, and that's the answer. The Second Coming isn't going to be battles and earthquakes and falling stars, and Revelation means something else, like the prophecies of the Messiah.\n\nOr maybe it wasn't the Second Coming, and Christ was here only in a symbolic sense, in the poor, the hungry, in those in need of help. \"As ye have done this unto the least of these\u2014\"\n\n\"Maybe the Second Coming really is here,\" B.T. said from the bed. \"Look at this.\"\n\nHe turned the laptop around so Mel could see the screen. \"Watch, therefore,\" it read, \"for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh.\"\n\n\"It's a website,\" B.T. said. \"www.watchman.\"\n\n\"It probably belongs to one of the radio evangelists,\" Mel said.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" B.T. said. He hit a key, and a new screen came up. It was full of entries.\n\n\"Meteor, 12-23, 4 mi. NNW Raton.\"\n\n\"Examined area. 12-28. No sign.\"\n\n\"Weather Channel 11-2, 9:15 A.M. PST. Reference to unusual cloud formations.\"\n\n\"Latitude and longitude? Need location.\"\n\n\"8.6 mi. WNW Prescott AZ 11-4.\"\n\n\"Denver Post 914P8C2\u2014Headline: 'Unusually high lightning activity strikes Carson National Forest.' MT2427.\"\n\n\"What do you think that stands for?\" B.T. said, pointing at the string of letters and numbers.\n\n\"Matthew 24, verse 27,\" Mel said. \" 'For the lightning cometh out of the west and shineth even unto the east, so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.' \"\n\nB.T. nodded and scrolled the screen down.\n\n\"Triple lightning strike. 7-11, Platteville CO. Nov. 28. Two injured.\"\n\n\"Lightning storm, Dec. 4, Truth or Consequences.\"\n\n\"What about that one?\" B.T. said, pointing at \"Truth or Consequences.\"\n\n\"It's a town in southern New Mexico,\" Mel said.\n\n\"Oh.\" B.T. scrolled the screen down some more.\n\n\"Falling star, 12-30, 2 mi. W of U.S. State Hwy 191, west of Bozeman, mile marker 161.\"\n\n\"Coma patient recovery, Yale\u2014New Haven Hosp. Connection?\"\n\n\"Negative. Too far east.\"\n\n\"Possible sighting Nevada.\"\n\n\"Need location.\"\n\nNeed location. \" 'Go search diligently for the young child,' \" Mel murmured, \" 'and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him.' \"\n\n\"What?\" B.T. said.\n\n\"It's what Herod said when the wise men told him about the star.\" He stared at the screen:\n\n\"L.A. Times Jan 2 P5C1. Fish die-off. RV89?\"\n\n\"Possible sighting. Old Faithful, Yellowstone Nat'l Pk, Jan. 2.\"\n\nAnd over and over again:\n\n\"Need location.\"\n\n\"Need location.\"\n\n\"Need location.\"\n\n\"They obviously think the Second Coming's happened,\" B.T. said, staring at the screen.\n\n\"Or aliens have landed at Roswell,\" Mel said. He pointed to the convenience store entry. \"Or Elvis is back.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" B.T. said, staring at the screen.\n\nMel went back to looking at the maps. Barren Rock. Deadwood. Last Chance.\n\nNeed location, he thought. Maybe he and Cassie and whoever had written \"Too far east\" on the website had all misinterpreted the message, and it was not \"west\" but \"West.\"\n\nHe turned to the gazetteer in the back. West. Westwood Hills, Kansas. Westville, Oklahoma. West Hollywood, California. Westview. Westgate. Westmont. There was a Westwood Hills in Kansas. Colorado had a Westcliffe, a Western Hills, and a Westminster. Neither Arizona nor New Mexico had any Wests. Nevada didn't either. Nebraska had a West Point.\n\nWest Point. Maybe it wasn't even in the west. Maybe it was West Orange, New Jersey, or West Palm Beach. Or West Berlin.\n\nHe shut the atlas and looked over at B.T. He had dozed off, his face tired and worried-looking even in sleep. His laptop was on his chest, and the Gideon Bible he had stolen from the Holiday Inn lay beside him.\n\nMel shut the laptop off and quietly closed it. B.T. didn't move. Mel picked up the Bible.\n\nThe answer had to be in the Scriptures. He opened the Bible to Matthew. \"Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.\"\n\nHe read on. Disasters and devastation and tribulation, as the prophets had spoken.\n\nThe prophets. He found Isaiah. \"Hear ye indeed but understand not; and see ye indeed but perceive not.\"\n\nHe shut the Bible. All right, he thought, standing it on its spine on his hand. Let's have a sign here. I'm running out of time.\n\nHe opened his eyes. His finger was on I Samuel 23, verse 14. \"And Saul sought him every day, but God delivered him not into his hand.\"\n\n\"For all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.\"\n\n\u2014Matthew 24:6\n\nAll the roads were open, and, from Grand Island, clear and dry, and the fog had lifted a little.\n\n\"With roads like this, we ought to be in Denver by tonight,\" B.T. said.\n\nYes, Mel thought, finishing what B.T. had said. If you fly back with me, we could be there in time for the ecumenical meeting. Nobody'd ever have to know he'd been gone, except Mrs. Bilderbeck, and he could tell her he'd been offered a job by another church, but had decided not to take it, which was true.\n\n\"It just didn't work out,\" he would tell Mrs. Bilderbeck, and she would be so overjoyed that he wasn't leaving, she wouldn't even ask for details.\n\nAnd he could go back to doing sermons and giving the choir plenty of warning, storing the star, and keeping the pilot light going, as if nothing had happened.\n\n\"Exit 312,\" a green interstate sign up ahead said. \"Hastings 18. Red Cloud 57.\"\n\nHe wondered if Cassie was already at Willa Cather's house, convinced she had been led there by Bartlett's Quotations.\n\nCassie had no trouble finding signs\u2014she saw them everywhere. And maybe they are everywhere, and I'm just not seeing them. Maybe Hastings is a sign, and the truck full of mirrors, and those stuffed toys all over the road. Maybe that Chinese finger trap I got stuck in yesterday was\u2014\n\n\"Look,\" B.T. said. \"Wasn't that Cassie's car?\"\n\n\"Where?\" Mel said, craning his neck around.\n\n\"In that ditch back there.\"\n\nThis time Mel didn't wait for an \"Authorized Vehicles Only\" crossing. He plunged into the snowy median and back along the other side of the highway, still unable to see anything.\n\n\"There,\" B.T. said, pointing, and he turned onto the median.\n\nHe had crossed both lanes and was onto the shoulder before he saw the Honda, halfway down a steep ditch and tilted at an awkward angle. He couldn't see anyone in the driver's seat.\n\nB.T. was out of the car before Mel got the car stopped and plunging down the snowy bank, with Mel behind him. B.T. wrenched the car door open.\n\nCassie's green tote bag was on the floor of the passenger seat. B.T. peered into the backseat. \"She's not here,\" he said unnecessarily.\n\n\"Cassie!\" Mel called. He ran around the front of the car, though she couldn't have been thrown out. The door would have been open if she'd been thrown out. \"Cassie!\"\n\n\"Here,\" a faint voice said, and Mel looked down the slope. Cassie lay at the bottom in tall dry weeds.\n\n\"She's down here,\" he said, and half walked, half slid down the ravine.\n\nShe was lying on her back with her leg bent under her. \"I think it's broken,\" she said to Mel.\n\n\"Go flag a semi down,\" Mel said to B.T., who'd appeared above them. \"Have them call an ambulance.\"\n\nB.T. disappeared, and Mel turned back to Cassie. \"How long have you been here?\" he asked her, pulling off his overcoat and tucking it around her.\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said, shivering. \"There was a patch of ice. I didn't think anybody'd see the car, so I got out to climb up to the road, and that's when I slipped. My leg's broken, isn't it?\"\n\nAt that angle, it had to be. \"I think it probably is,\" Mel said.\n\nShe turned her face away in the dry weeds. \"My sister was right.\"\n\nMel took off his jacket, rolled it up, and put it under her head. \"We'll have an ambulance here for you in no time.\"\n\n\"She told me I was crazy,\" Cassie said, still not looking at Mel, \"and this proves it, doesn't it? And she didn't even know about the epiphany.\" She turned and looked at Mel. \"Only it wasn't an epiphany. Just low estrogen levels.\"\n\n\"Conserve your strength,\" he said, and looked anxiously up the slope.\n\nCassie grabbed at his hand. \"I lied to you. I wasn't offered early retirement. I asked for it. I was so sure 'Westward ho!' meant something. I sold my house and took out all my savings.\"\n\nHer hand was red with cold. Mel wished he had taken his gloves back when the kid from the carnival offered them. He took her icy hand between his own and held it tightly.\n\n\"I was so sure,\" she said.\n\n\"Mel,\" B.T. called from above them. \"I've had four semis go by without stopping. I think it's the color.\" He pointed to his black face. \"You need to come up and try.\"\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" Mel called back up to him. \"I'll be right back,\" he said to Cassie.\n\n\"No,\" she said, clutching his hand. \"Don't you see? It didn't mean anything. It was nothing but menopause, like my sister said. She tried to tell me, but I wouldn't listen.\"\n\n\"Cassie,\" Mel said, gently releasing her hand, \"we need to get you out of here and into town to a hospital. You can tell me all about it then.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to tell,\" she said, and let go of his hand.\n\n\"Come on, there's another truck coming,\" B.T. called down, and Mel started up the slope. \"No, never mind,\" B.T. said. \"The cavalry's here,\" he said, and, amazingly, he laughed.\n\nThere was a screech of hydraulic brakes. Mel scrambled up the rest of the way. A truck was stopping. It was one of the carnival's, loaded with merry-go-round horses, white and black and palomino, with red-and-gold saddles and jeweled bridles. B.T. was already running toward the cab, asking, \"Do you have a CB?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" the driver said, and came around the back of the truck. It was the kid Mel had picked up, still wearing the gloves he had given him.\n\n\"We need an ambulance,\" Mel said. \"There's a lady hurt here.\"\n\n\"Sure thing,\" the kid said, and disappeared back around the truck.\n\nMel skidded back down the slope to Cassie. \"He's calling an ambulance,\" he said to her.\n\nShe nodded uninterestedly.\n\n\"They're on their way,\" the kid called down from above them. He went over to the Honda, B.T. following, and stuck his head under the back of it. He walked all around it, squatting next to the far wheels, and then disappeared back up the slope again.\n\n\"He says his truck doesn't have a tow rope,\" B.T. said, coming back to report, \"and he doesn't think he could get the car out anyway, so he's calling a tow truck.\"\n\nMel nodded. \"I saw a sign that said the next town was only ten miles. They'll have you in out of the cold before you know it.\"\n\nShe didn't answer. Mel wondered if perhaps she was going into shock. \"Cassie,\" he said, taking her hands again and rubbing them in spite of what he'd told the kid about frostbite. \"We were so surprised to see your car,\" he said, just to be saying something, to get her to talk. \"We thought you were going down to Red Cloud. What made you change your mind?\"\n\n\"Bartlett's,\" she said bitterly. \"When I was putting my tote bag in the car, it fell out onto the parking lot, and when I picked it up, the first thing I read was from William Blake. 'Turn away no more,' it said. I thought it meant I shouldn't turn south to Red Cloud, that I should keep going west. Can you imagine anybody being that stupid?\"\n\nYes, Mel thought.\n\nThe ambulance pulled up, sirens and yellow lights blazing, and two paramedics leaped out with a stretcher, skidded down the slope to where Cassie was, and began maneuvering her expertly onto it.\n\nMel went over to B.T. \"You go in with her in the ambulance,\" he said, \"and I'll wait here for the tow truck.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" B.T. said. \"I can wait here.\"\n\n\"No,\" Mel said. \"I'll follow the tow truck to the garage and find out what I can about her car. Then I'll meet you at the hospital. What time's the earliest flight home from Denver tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Flight?\" B.T. said. \"No. I'm not going home without you.\"\n\n\"You won't have to,\" Mel said. \"What time's the earliest flight?\"\n\n\"I don't understand\u2014\"\n\n\"Or we can drive back. If we take turns driving we can be back in time for the ecumenical meeting.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" B.T. said bewilderedly.\n\n\"I wanted a sign. Well, I got it,\" he said, waving his arm at Cassie, at her car. \"I don't have to be hit over the head to get the message. I'm out here in the middle of nowhere in the middle of winter on a fool's errand.\"\n\n\"What about the epiphany?\"\n\n\"It was a hallucination, a seizure, a temporary hormonal imbalance.\"\n\n\"And what about your call to the ministry?\" B.T. said. \"Was that a hallucination, too? What about Cassie?\"\n\n\"The Devil can quote Scripture, remember?\" Mel said bitterly. \"And Bartlett's Quotations.\"\n\n\"Can you give us a hand here?\" one of the paramedics called. They had Cassie on the stretcher and were ready to carry it up the slope.\n\n\"Coming,\" Mel said, and started toward them.\n\nB.T. took his arm. \"What about the others who are looking for Him? The watchman website?\"\n\n\"UFO nuts,\" Mel said, and went over to the stretcher. \"It doesn't mean anything.\"\n\nCassie lay under a gray blanket, her head turned to the side, the way it had been when Mel found her.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" B.T., taking hold of the other side of the stretcher, asked.\n\n\"No,\" she said, and a tear wobbled down her plump cheek. \"I'm sorry I put you to all this trouble.\"\n\nThe kid from the carnival took hold of the front of the stretcher. \"Things aren't always as bad as they look,\" he said, patting the blanket. \"I saw a guy fall off the top of the Ferris wheel once, and he wasn't even hurt.\"\n\nCassie shook her head. \"It was a mistake. I shouldn't have come.\"\n\n\"Don't say that,\" B.T. said. \"You got to see Mark Twain's house. And Gene Stratton-Porter's.\"\n\nShe turned her face away. \"What good are they? I'm not even an English teacher anymore.\"\n\nThings might not have been as bad as they looked for the guy who fell off the Ferris wheel, but they were even worse than they looked when it came to the snowy slope and getting Cassie up it. By the time they got her into the ambulance, her face was as gray as the blanket and twisted with pain. The paramedics began hooking her up to a blood pressure cuff and an IV.\n\n\"I'll meet you at the hospital,\" Mel said. \"You can call Mrs. Bilderbeck and tell her we're coming.\"\n\n\"What if the roads are closed?\" B.T. said.\n\n\"You heard the clerk last night. Clear both directions.\" He looked at B.T. \"I thought this was what you wanted, for me to come to my senses, to admit I was crazy.\"\n\nB.T. looked unhappy. \"Animals don't always leave tracks,\" he said. \"I learned that five years ago banding deer for a Lyme disease project. Sometimes they leave all sorts of sign, other times they're invisible.\"\n\nThe paramedics were shutting the doors. \"Wait,\" B.T. said. \"I'm going with her.\"\n\nHe clambered up into the back of the ambulance. \"Do you know the only way you can tell for sure the deer are there?\"\n\nMel shook his head.\n\n\"By the wolves,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign.\"\n\n\u2014Isaiah 7:14\n\nIt took nearly an hour for the tow truck to get there. Mel waited in his car with the heater running for a while, and then got out and went over to stare at Cassie's Honda.\n\nWolves, B.T. had said. Predators. \" 'For wheresoever the carcass is,' \" he quoted, \" 'there will the eagles be gathered together.' MT2428.\"\n\n\"The Devil can quote Scripture,\" he said aloud, and got back into the car.\n\nThe crack in the windshield had split again, splaying out in two new directions from the center. A definite sign.\n\nYou've had dozens of signs, he thought. Blizzards, road closures, icy and snow-packed conditions. You just chose to ignore them.\n\n\"Why, anybody'd have to be blind not to recognize them,\" the radio evangelist had said, and that was what he had been, willfully blind, pretending the yellow arrow, the roads closing behind him, were signs he was going in the right direction, that Cassie's \"Westward ho!\" was outside confirmation.\n\n\"It didn't mean anything,\" he said.\n\nIt was getting dark by the time the tow truck finally got there, and pitch-black by the time they got Cassie's Honda pulled up the slope.\n\nAnd that was a sign, too, Mel thought, following the tow truck. Like the fog and the carnival truck jackknifed across the highway and the \"No Vacancy\" signs on the motels. All of them flashing the same message: It was a mistake. Give up. Go home.\n\nThe tow truck had gotten far ahead of him. He stepped on the gas, but a very slow pickup pulled in front of him, and an even slower recreation vehicle was blocking the right lane. By the time he got to the gas station, the mechanic was already sliding out from under the Honda and shaking his head.\n\n\"Snapped an axle and did in the transmission,\" he said, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. \"Cost at least fifteen hundred to fix it, and I doubt if it's worth half that.\" He patted the hood sympathetically. \"I'm afraid it's the end of the road.\"\n\nThe end of the road. All right, all right, Mel thought, I get the message.\n\n\"So what do you want to do?\" the mechanic asked.\n\nGive up, Mel thought. Come to my senses. Go home. \"It's not my car,\" he said. \"I'll have to ask the owner. She's in the hospital right now.\"\n\n\"She hurt bad?\"\n\nMel remembered her lying there in the weeds, saying, \"It didn't mean anything.\"\n\n\"No,\" he lied.\n\n\"Tell her I can do an estimate on a new axle and a new transmission if she wants,\" the mechanic said reluctantly, \"but if I was her I'd take the insurance and start over.\"\n\n\"I'll tell her,\" Mel said. He opened the trunk and took out her suitcase, and then went around to the passenger side to get her green bag out of the backseat.\n\nThere was a bright yellow flyer rolled up and jammed in the door handle. Mel unrolled it. It was a flyer from the carnival. The kid must have stuck it there, Mel thought, smiling in spite of himself.\n\nThere was a drawing of a trumpet at the top, with \"Come one, come all!\" issuing from the mouth of it.\n\nUnderneath that, there was a drawing of the triple Ferris wheel, and scattered in boxes across the page, \"Marvel at the Living Fountains,\" \"Ride the Sea Dragon!,\" \"Popcorn, Snow Cones, Cotton Candy!,\" \"See a Lion and a Lamb in a Single Cage!\"\n\nMel stared at the flyer.\n\n\"Tell her if she wants to sell it for parts,\" the mechanic said, \"I can give her four hundred.\"\n\nA lion and a lamb. Wheels within wheels. \"For the Lamb shall lead them unto living fountains of waters.\"\n\n\"What's that you're reading?\" the mechanic said, coming around the car.\n\nA midway with stuffed animals for prizes\u2014bears and lions and red dragons\u2014and a ride called the Shooting Star, a hall of mirrors. \"For now we see in a glass darkly but then we shall see face to face.\"\n\nThe mechanic peered over his shoulder. \"Oh, an ad for that crazy carnival,\" he said. \"Yeah, I got a sign for it in the window.\"\n\nA sign. \"For behold, I give you a sign.\" And the sign was just what it said, a sign. Like the Siamese twins. Like the peace sign on the back of the kid's hand. \"For unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Prince of Peace.\" On the kid's scarred hand.\n\n\"If she wants an estimate, tell her it'll take some time,\" the mechanic said, but Mel wasn't listening. He was gazing blindly at the flyer. \"Peer into the Bottomless Pit!\" it said. \"Ride the Merry-Go-Round!\"\n\n\" 'And thus I saw the horses in the vision,' \" Mel murmured, \" 'and them that sat upon them.' \" He started to laugh.\n\nThe mechanic frowned at him. \"It ain't funny,\" he said. \"This car's a real mess. So what do you think she'll want to do?\"\n\n\"Go to a carnival,\" Mel said, and ran to get in his car.\n\n\"And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun.\"\n\n\u2014Revelation 22:5\n\nThe hospital was a three-story brick building. Mel parked in front of the emergency entrance and went in.\n\n\"May I help you?\" the admitting nurse asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"I'm looking for\u2014\" and then stopped. Behind the desk was a sign for the carnival with dates at the bottom. \"Crown Point, Dec. 14\" it read. \"Gresham, Jan. 13. Empyrean, Jan. 15.\"\n\n\"May I help you, sir?\" the nurse said again, and Mel turned to ask her where Empyrean was, but she wasn't talking to him. She was asking two men in navy blue suits.\n\n\"Yes,\" the taller one said, \"we're starting a hospital outreach, ministering to people who are in the hospital far from home. Do you have any patients here from out of town?\"\n\nThe nurse looked doubtful. \"I'm afraid we're not allowed to give out information about patients.\"\n\n\"Of course, I understand,\" the man said, opening his Bible. \"We don't want to violate anyone's privacy. We'd just like to be able to say a few words of comfort, like the Good Samaritan.\"\n\n\"I'm not supposed to\u2026\" the nurse said.\n\n\"We understand,\" the shorter man said. \"Will you join us in a moment of prayer? Precious Lord, we seek\u2014\"\n\nThe door opened, and as they all turned to look at a boy with a bleeding forehead, Mel slipped down the hall and up the stairs.\n\nWhere would they have taken her? he wondered, peering into rooms with open doors. Did a hospital this small even have separate wards, or were all the patients jumbled together?\n\nShe wasn't on the first floor. He hurried up the stairs to the second, keeping an eye out for the men in the navy blue suits. They didn't know her name yet, but they would soon. Even if they couldn't get it out of the admitting nurse, Cassie would have given them her health insurance card. It would all be in the computer. Where would they have taken her? X-ray, he thought.\n\n\"Can you tell me how to get to X-ray?\" he asked a middle-aged woman in a pink uniform.\n\n\"Third floor,\" she said, and pointed toward the elevator.\n\nMel thanked her, and as soon as she was out of sight, he took the stairs two at a time.\n\nCassie wasn't in X-ray. Mel started to look for a technician to ask and then saw B.T. down at the end of the hall.\n\n\"Good news,\" B.T. said as he hurried up to him. \"It's not broken. She's got a sprained knee.\"\n\n\"Where is she?\" Mel asked, taking B.T.'s arm.\n\n\"In 308,\" B.T. said, and Mel propelled him into the room and shut the door behind them.\n\nCassie, in a white hospital gown, was lying in the far bed, her head turned away from them as it had been in the frozen weeds. She looked pale and listless.\n\n\"She called her sister,\" B.T. said, looking anxiously at her. \"She's on her way down from Minnesota to get her.\"\n\n\"She told me I was lucky I hadn't gotten into worse trouble than a sprained knee,\" Cassie said, turning to look at Mel. \"How's my car?\"\n\n\"A dead loss,\" Mel said, stepping up to the head of the bed. \"But it doesn't matter. We\u2014\"\n\n\"You're right,\" she said, and turned her head on the pillow. \"It doesn't matter. I've come to my senses. I'm going home.\" She smiled wanly at Mel. \"I'm just sorry you had to go to all this trouble for me, but at least it won't be for much longer. My sister should be here tomorrow night, and the hospital is keeping me overnight for observation, so you two don't have to stay. You can go to your religious meeting.\"\n\n\"We lied to you,\" Mel said. \"We're not on our way to a religious meeting,\" and realized they were. \"You aren't the only one who had an epiphany.\"\n\n\"I'm not?\" she said, and pushed herself partway up against the pillows.\n\n\"No. I got a message to go west, too,\" Mel said. \"You were right. Something important is going to happen, and we want you to come with us.\"\n\nB.T. cut in, \"You know where He is?\"\n\n\"I know where He's going to be,\" Mel said. \"B.T., I want you to go get the road atlas and look up a town called Empyrean and see where it is.\"\n\n\"I know where it is,\" Cassie said, and sat up all the way. \"It's in Dante.\"\n\nThey both looked at her, and she said, half apologetically, \"I'm an English teacher, remember? It's the highest circle of Paradise. The Holy City of God.\"\n\n\"I doubt if that's going to be in Rand McNally,\" B.T. said.\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Mel said. \"We'll be able to find it by the lights. But we've got to get her out of here first. Cassie, do you think you can walk if we help you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She flung the covers off and began edging her bandaged knee toward the side of the bed. \"My clothes are in the closet there.\"\n\nMel helped her hobble to the closet.\n\n\"I'll go check her out,\" B.T. said, and went out.\n\nCassie pulled her dress off the hanger and began unzipping it. Mel turned his back and went over to the door to look out. There was no sign of the two men.\n\n\"Can you help me get my boots on?\" Cassie said, hobbling over to the chair. \"My knee's feeling a lot better,\" she said, lowering herself into the chair. \"It hardly hurts at all.\" Mel knelt and eased her feet into her fur-edged boots.\n\nB.T. came in. \"There are two men down at the admissions desk,\" he said, out of breath, \"trying to find out what room she's in.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\" Cassie asked.\n\n\"Herod's men,\" Mel said. \"It'll have to be the fire escape. Can you manage that?\"\n\nShe nodded. Mel helped her to her feet and went and got her coat. He and B.T. helped her into it, and each took an arm and helped her to the door, opening it cautiously and looking both ways down the hall, and then over to the fire escape.\n\n\"I should call my sister,\" Cassie said, \"and tell her I've changed my mind.\"\n\n\"We'll stop at a gas station,\" B.T. said, opening the door fully and looking both ways again. \"Okay,\" he said, and they went down the hall, through the emergency exit door, and onto the fire escape.\n\n\"You go bring the car around,\" B.T. said, and Mel clattered down the metal mesh steps and ducked across the parking lot to the car.\n\nThe emergency room door opened and two men stood in its light for a moment, talking to someone.\n\nMel jammed the key into the ignition, switched it on, and pulled the car around to the side of the hospital, where B.T. and Cassie were working their way down the last steps.\n\n\"Come on,\" B.T. said, grabbing Cassie under the arm, \"hurry,\" and hustled her across to the car.\n\nA siren blared. \"Hurry,\" Mel said, yanking the door open and pushing her into the backseat, slamming the door shut. B.T. ran around to the other side.\n\nThe siren came abruptly closer and then cut off, and Mel, reaching for the door handle, looked back toward the entrance. An ambulance pulled in, red and yellow lights flashing, and the two men in the door reached forward and took a stretcher off the back.\n\nAnd this is crazy, Mel thought. Nobody's after us. But they would be, as soon as the nurse saw Cassie was missing, and if not then, as soon as Cassie's sister got there. \"I saw two men push a woman into a car and then go peeling out of here,\" one of the interns unloading that stretcher would say. \"It looked like they were kidnapping her.\" And how would they explain to the police that they were looking for the City of God?\n\n\"This is insane,\" Mel started to say, reaching for the door handle.\n\nThere was a flyer wedged in it. Mel unrolled it and read it by the parking lot's vapor light. \"Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up to the Greatest Show on Earth!\" it read in letters of gold. \"Wonders, Marvels, Mysteries Revealed!\"\n\nMel got into the car and handed the flyer to B.T. \"Ready?\" he asked.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Cassie said, and leaned forward to point at the front door. Two men in navy blue suits were running down the front steps.\n\n\"Keep down,\" Mel said, and peeled out of the parking lot. He turned south, drove a block, turned onto a side street, pulled up to the curb, switched off the lights, and waited, watching in his rearview mirror until a navy blue car roared past them going south.\n\nHe started the car and drove two blocks without lights on, and then circled back to the highway and headed north. Five miles out of town, he turned east on a gravel road, drove till it ended, turned south, and then east again, and north onto a dirt road. There was no one behind them.\n\n\"Okay,\" he said, and B.T. and Cassie sat up.\n\n\"Where are we?\" Cassie asked.\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Mel said. He turned east again and then south on the first paved road he came to. \"Where are we going?\" B.T. asked.\n\n\"I don't know that, either. But I know what we're looking for.\" He waited till a beat-up pickup truck full of kids passed them and then pulled over to the side of the road and switched on the dome light.\n\n\"Where's your laptop?\" he asked B.T.\n\n\"Right here,\" B.T. said, opening it up and switching it on.\n\n\"All right,\" Mel said, holding the flyer up to the light. \"They were in Omaha on January fourth, Palmyra on the ninth, and Beatrice on the tenth.\" He concentrated, trying to remember the dates on the sign in the hospital.\n\n\"Beatrice,\" Cassie murmured. \"That's in Dante, too.\"\n\n\"The carnival was in Crown Point on December fourteenth,\" Mel went on, still trying to remember the dates, \"and Gresham on January thirteenth.\"\n\n\"The carnival?\" B.T. said. \"We're looking for a carnival?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mel said. \"Cassie, have you got your Bartlett's Quotations?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, and began rummaging in the emerald green tote bag.\n\n\"I saw them between Pittsburgh and Youngstown on Sunday,\" Mel said to B.T., who had started typing, \"and in Wayside, Iowa, on Monday.\"\n\n\"And the truck spill was at Seward,\" B.T. said, tapping keys.\n\n\"What have you got, Cassie?\" Mel said, looking in the rearview mirror.\n\nShe had her finger on an open page. \"It's Christina Rossetti,\" she said. \" 'Will the day's journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend.' \"\n\n\"They're skipping all over the map,\" B.T. said, turning the laptop so Mel could see the screen. It was a maze of connecting lines.\n\n\"Can you tell what general direction they're headed?\" Mel asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" B.T. said. \"West.\"\n\n\"West,\" Mel repeated. Of course. He started the car again and turned west on the first road they came to.\n\nThere were no cars at all, and only a few scattered lights, a farm and a grain elevator, and a radio tower. Mel drove steadily west across the flat, snowy landscape, looking for the distant glittering lights of the carnival.\n\nThe sky turned navy blue and then gray, and they stopped to get gas and call Cassie's sister.\n\n\"Use my calling card,\" B.T. said, handing it to Cassie. \"They're not looking for me yet. How much cash do we have?\"\n\nCassie had sixty and another two hundred in traveler's checks. Mel had a hundred sixty-eight. \"What did you do?\" B.T. asked. \"Rob the collection plate?\"\n\nMel called Mrs. Bilderbeck. \"I won't be back in time for the services on Sunday,\" he told her. \"Call Reverend Davidson and ask if he'll fill in. And tell the ecumenical meeting to read John 3:16\u201318 for a devotion.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you're all right?\" Mrs. Bilderbeck asked. \"There were some men here looking for you yesterday.\"\n\nMel gripped the receiver. \"What did you tell them?\"\n\n\"I didn't like the looks of them, so I told them you were at a ministerial alliance meeting in Boston.\"\n\n\"You're wonderful,\" Mel said, and started to hang up.\n\n\"Oh, wait, what about the furnace?\" Mrs. Bilderbeck said. \"What if the pilot light goes out again?\"\n\n\"It won't,\" Mel said. \"Nothing can put it out.\"\n\nHe hung up and handed the phone and the calling card to Cassie. She called her sister, who had a car phone, and told her not to come, that she was fine, her knee hadn't been sprained after all, just twisted.\n\n\"And I think it must have been,\" she said to Mel, walking back to the car. \"See? I'm not limping at all.\"\n\nB.T. had bought juice and doughnuts and a large bag of potato chips. They ate them while Mel drove, going south across the interstate and down to Highway 34.\n\nThe sun came up and glittered off metal silos and onto the star-shaped crack in the windshield. Mel squinted against its brilliance. They drove slowly through McCook and Sharon Springs and Maranatha, looking for flyers on telephone poles and in store windows, calling out the towns and dates to B.T., who added them to the ones on his laptop.\n\nTrucks passed them, none of them carrying Tilt-A-Whirls or concession stands, and Cassie consulted Bartlett's again. \"A cold coming we had of it,\" it said. \"Just the worst time of the year.\"\n\n\"T. S. Eliot,\" Cassie said wonderingly. \" 'Journey of the Magi.' \"\n\nThey stopped for gas again, and B.T. drove while Mel napped. It began to get dark. B.T. and Mel changed places, and Cassie got in front, moving stiffly.\n\n\"Is your knee hurting again?\" Mel asked.\n\n\"No,\" Cassie said. \"It doesn't hurt at all. I've just been sitting in the car too long,\" she said. \"At least it's not camels. Can you imagine what that must have been like?\"\n\nYes, Mel thought, I can. I'll bet everyone thought they were crazy. Including them.\n\nIt got very dark. They continued west, through Glorieta and Gilead and Beulah Center, searching for multicolored lights glimmering in a cold field, a spinning Ferris wheel and the smell of cotton candy, listening for the screams of the roller coaster and the music of a merry-go-round.\n\nAnd the star went before them." + }, + { + "title": "Just Like the Ones We Used to Know", + "text": "The snow started at 12:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time just outside of Branford, Connecticut. Noah and Terry Blake, on their way home from a party at the Whittiers' at which Miranda Whittier had said, \"I guess you could call this our Christmas Eve Eve party!\" at least fifty times, noticed a few stray flakes as they turned onto Canoe Brook Road, and by the time they reached home, the snow was coming down hard.\n\n\"Oh, good,\" Tess said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, \"I've been hoping we'd have a white Christmas this year.\"\n\nAt 1:37 A.M. Central Standard Time, Billy Grogan, filling in for KYZT's late-night radio request show out of Duluth, said, \"This just in from the National Weather Service. Snow advisory for the Great Lakes region tonight and tomorrow morning. Two to four inches expected,\" and then went back to discussing the callers' least favorite Christmas songs.\n\n\"I'll tell you the one I hate,\" a caller from Wauwatosa said. \" 'White Christmas.' I musta heard that thing five hundred times this month.\"\n\n\"Actually,\" Billy said, \"according to the St. Cloud Evening News, Bing Crosby's version of 'White Christmas' will be played 2,150 times during the month of December, and other artists' renditions of it will be played an additional 1,890 times.\"\n\nThe caller snorted. \"One time's too many for me. Who the heck wants a white Christmas anyway? I sure don't.\"\n\n\"Well, unfortunately, it looks like you're going to get one,\" Billy said. \"And, in that spirit, here's Destiny's Child, singing 'White Christmas.' \"\n\nAt 1:45 A.M., a number of geese in the city park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, woke up to a low, overcast sky and flew, flapping and honking loudly, over the city center, as if they had suddenly decided to fly farther south for the winter. The noise woke Maureen Reynolds, who couldn't get back to sleep. She turned on KYOU, which was playing \"Holly Jolly Oldies,\" including \"Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree\" and Brenda Lee's rendition of \"White Christmas.\"\n\nAt 3:15 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, Paula Devereaux arrived at DIA for the red-eye flight to Springfield, Illinois. It was beginning to snow, and as she waited in line at the express checkin (she was carrying on her maid-of-honor dress and the bag with her shoes and slip and makeup\u2014the last time she'd been in a wedding, her luggage had gotten lost and caused a major crisis) and in line at security and in line at the gate and in line to be de-iced, she began to hope they might not be able to take off, but no such luck.\n\nOf course not, Paula thought, looking out the window at the snow swirling around the wing, because Stacey wants me at her wedding.\n\n\"I want a Christmas Eve wedding,\" Stacey'd told Paula after she'd informed her she was going to be her maid of honor, \"all candlelight and evergreens. And I want snow falling outside the windows.\"\n\n\"What if the weather doesn't cooperate?\" Paula'd asked.\n\n\"It will,\" Stacey'd said. And here it was, snowing. She wondered if it was snowing in Springfield, too. Of course it is, she thought. Whatever Stacey wants, Stacey gets, Paula thought. Even Jim.\n\nDon't think about that, she told herself. Don't think about anything. Just concentrate on getting through the wedding. With luck, Jim won't even be there except for the ceremony, and you won't have to spend any time with him at all.\n\nShe picked up the in-flight magazine and tried to read, and then plugged in her headphones and listened to Channel 4, \"Seasonal Favorites.\" The first song was \"White Christmas\" by the Statler Brothers.\n\nAt 3:38 A.M., it began to snow in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The geese circling the city flew back to the park, landed, and hunkered down to sit it out on their island in the lake. Snow began to collect on their backs, but they didn't care, protected as they were by down and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat designed to keep them warm even in subzero temperatures.\n\nAt 3:39 A.M., Luke Lafferty woke up, convinced he'd forgotten to set the goose his mother had talked him into having for Christmas Eve dinner out to thaw. He went and checked. He had set it out. On his way back to bed, he looked out the window and saw it was snowing, which didn't worry him. The news had said isolated snow showers for Wichita, ending by mid-morning, and none of his relatives lived more than an hour and a half away, except Aunt Lulla, and if she couldn't make it, it wouldn't exactly put a crimp in the conversation. His mom and Aunt Madge talked so much it was hard for anybody else to get a word in edgewise, especially Aunt Lulla. \"She was always the shy one,\" Luke's mother said, and it was true; Luke couldn't remember her saying anything other than \"Please pass the potatoes\" at their family get-togethers.\n\nWhat did worry him was the goose. He should never have let his mother talk him into having one. It was bad enough her having talked him into having the family dinner at his place. He had no idea how to cook a goose.\n\n\"What if something goes wrong?\" he'd protested. \"Butterball doesn't have a goose hotline.\"\n\n\"You won't need a hotline,\" his mother had said. \"It's just like cooking a turkey, and it's not as if you had to cook it. I'll be there in time to put it in the oven and everything. All you have to do is set it out to thaw. Do you have a roasting pan?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Luke had said, but lying there, he couldn't remember if he did. When he got up at 4:14 A.M. to check\u2014he did\u2014it was still snowing.\n\nAt 4:16 Mountain Standard Time, Slade Henry, filling in on WRYT's late-night talk show out of Boise, said, \"For all you folks who wanted a white Christmas, it looks like you're going to get your wish. Three to six inches forecast for western Idaho.\" He played several bars of Johnny Cash's \"White Christmas,\" and then went back to discussing JFK's assassination with a caller who was convinced Clinton was somehow involved.\n\n\"Little Rock isn't all that far from Dallas, you know,\" the caller said. \"You could drive it in four and a half hours.\"\n\nActually, you couldn't, because I-30 was icing up badly, due to freezing rain which had started just after midnight and then turned to snow. The treacherous driving conditions did not slow Monty Luffer down, as he had a Ford Explorer. Shortly after five, he reached to change stations on the radio so he didn't have to listen to \"those damn Backstreet Boys\" singing \"White Christmas,\" and slid out of control just west of Texarkana. He crossed the median, causing the semi in the left-hand eastbound lane to jam on his brakes and jackknife, resulting in a thirty-seven-car pileup that closed the road for the rest of the night and all the next day.\n\nAt 5:21 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, four-year-old Miguel Gutierrez jumped on his mother, shouting, \"Is it Christmas yet?\"\n\n\"Not on Mommy's stomach, honey,\" Pilar murmured and rolled over.\n\nMiguel crawled over her and repeated his question directly into her ear. \"Is it Christmas yet?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said groggily. \"Tomorrow's Christmas. Go watch cartoons for a few minutes, okay, and then Mommy'll get up,\" and pulled the pillow over her head.\n\nMiguel was back again immediately. He can't find the remote, she thought wearily, but that couldn't be it, because he jabbed her in the ribs with it. \"What's the matter, honey?\" she said.\n\n\"Santa isn't gonna come,\" he said tearfully, which brought her fully awake.\n\nHe thinks Santa won't be able to find him, she thought. This is all Joe's fault. According to the original custody agreement, she had Miguel for Christmas and Joe had him for New Year's, but he'd gotten the judge to change it so they split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then, after she'd told Miguel, Joe had announced he needed to switch.\n\nWhen Pilar had said no, he'd threatened to take her back to court, so she'd agreed, after which he'd informed her that \"Christmas Day\" meant her delivering Miguel on Christmas Eve so he could wake up and open his presents at Joe's.\n\n\"He can open your presents to him before you come,\" he'd said, knowing full well Miguel still believed in Santa Claus. So after supper she was delivering both Miguel and his presents to Joe's in Escondido, where she would not get to see Miguel open them.\n\n\"I can't go to Daddy's,\" Miguel had said when she'd explained the arrangements, \"Santa's gonna bring my presents here.\"\n\n\"No, he won't,\" she'd said. \"I sent Santa a letter and told him you'd be at your daddy's on Christmas Eve, and he's going to take your presents there.\"\n\n\"You sent it to the North Pole?\" he'd demanded.\n\n\"To the North Pole. I took it to the post office this morning,\" and he'd seemed contented with that answer. Till now.\n\n\"Santa's going to come,\" she said, cuddling him to her. \"He's coming to Daddy's, remember?\"\n\n\"No, he's not,\" Miguel sniffled.\n\nDamn Joe. I shouldn't have given in, she thought, but every time they went back to court, Joe and his snake of a lawyer managed to wangle new concessions out of the judge, even though until the divorce was final, Joe had never paid any attention to Miguel at all. And she just couldn't afford any more court costs right now.\n\n\"Are you worried about Daddy living in Escondido?\" she asked Miguel. \"Because Santa's magic. He can travel all over California in one night. He can travel all over the world in one night.\"\n\nMiguel, snuggled against her, shook his head violently. \"No, he can't!\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because it isn't snowing! I want it to snow. Santa can't come in his sleigh if it doesn't.\"\n\nPaula's flight landed in Springfield at 7:48 A.M. Central Standard Time, twenty minutes late. Jim met her at the airport. \"Stacey's having her hair done,\" he said. \"I was afraid I wouldn't get here in time. It was a good thing your flight was a few minutes late.\"\n\n\"There was snow in Denver,\" Paula said, trying not to look at him. He was as cute as ever, with the same knee-weakening smile.\n\n\"It just started to snow here,\" he said.\n\nHow does she do it? Paula thought. You had to admire Stacey. Whatever she wanted, she got. I wouldn't have had to mess with carrying this stuff on, Paula thought, handing Jim the hanging bag with her dress in it. There's no way my luggage would have gotten lost. Stacey wanted it here.\n\n\"The roads are already starting to get slick,\" Jim was saying. \"I hope my parents get here okay. They're driving down from Chicago.\"\n\nThey will, Paula thought. Stacey wants them to.\n\nJim got Paula's bags off the carousel and then said, \"Hang on, I promised Stacey I'd tell her as soon as you got here.\" He flipped open his cell phone and put it to his ear. \"Stacey? She's here. Yeah, I will. Okay, I'll pick them up on our way. Yeah. Okay.\"\n\nHe flipped the phone shut. \"She wants us to pick up the evergreen garlands on our way,\" he said, \"and then I have to come back and get Kindra and David. We need to check on their flights before we leave.\"\n\nHe led the way upstairs to ticketing so they could check the arrival board. Outside the terminal windows snow was falling, large, perfect, lacy flakes.\n\n\"Kindra's on the 2:19 from Houston,\" Jim said, scanning the board, \"and David's on the 11:40 from Newark. Oh, good, they're both on time.\"\n\nOf course they are, Paula thought, looking at the board. The snow in Denver must be getting worse. All the Denver flights had \"delayed\" next to them, and so did a bunch of others: Cheyenne and Portland and Richmond. As she watched, Boston and then Chicago changed from \"on time\" to \"delayed\" and Rapid City went from \"delayed\" to \"canceled.\" She looked at Kindra's and David's flights again. They were still on time.\n\nSki areas in Aspen, Lake Placid, Squaw Valley, Stowe, Lake Tahoe, and Jackson Hole woke to several inches of fresh powder. The snow was greeted with relief by the people who had paid ninety dollars for their lift tickets, with irritation by the ski resort owners, who didn't see why it couldn't have come two weeks earlier when people were making their Christmas reservations, and with whoops of delight by snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps. They promptly set out from Breckenridge without maps, matches, helmets, avalanche beacons, avalanche probes, or telling anyone where they were going, for an off-limits backcountry area with \"totally extreme slopes.\"\n\nAt 7:05, Miguel came in and jumped on Pilar again, this time on her bladder, shouting, \"It's snowing! Now Santa can come! Now Santa can come!\"\n\n\"Snowing?\" she said blearily. In L.A.? \"Snowing? Where?\"\n\n\"On TV. Can I make myself some cereal?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said, remembering the last time. She reached for her robe. \"You go watch TV some more and Mommy'll make pancakes.\"\n\nWhen she brought the pancakes and syrup in, Miguel was sitting, absorbed, in front of the TV, watching a man in a green parka standing in the snow in front of an ambulance with flashing lights, saying, \"\u2014third weather-related fatality in Dodge City so far this morning\u2014\"\n\n\"Let's find some cartoons to watch,\" Pilar said, clicking the remote.\n\n\"\u2014outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where snow and icy conditions have caused a multicar accident\u2014\"\n\nShe clicked the remote again.\n\n\"\u2014to Columbia, South Carolina, where a surprise snowstorm has shut off power to\u2014\"\n\nClick.\n\n\"\u2014problem seems to be a low-pressure area covering Canada and the northern two thirds of the United States, bringing snow to the entire Midwest and Mid-Atlantic States and\u2014\"\n\nClick.\n\n\"\u2014snowing here in Bozeman\u2014\"\n\n\"I told you it was snowing,\" Miguel said happily, eating his pancakes, \"just like I wanted it to. After breakfast can we make a snowman?\"\n\n\"Honey, it isn't snowing here in California,\" Pilar said. \"That's the national weather, it's not here. That reporter's in Montana, not California.\"\n\nMiguel grabbed the remote and clicked to a reporter standing in the snow in front of a giant redwood tree. \"The snow started about four this morning here in Monterey, California. As you can see,\" she said, indicating her raincoat and umbrella, \"it caught everybody by surprise.\"\n\n\"She's in California,\" Miguel said.\n\n\"She's in northern California,\" Pilar said, \"which gets a lot colder than it does here in L.A. L.A.'s too warm for it to snow.\"\n\n\"No, it's not,\" Miguel said, and pointed out the window, where big white flakes were drifting down onto the palm trees across the street.\n\nAt 9:40 Central Standard Time the cell phone Nathan Andrews thought he'd turned off rang in the middle of a grant money meeting which was already going badly. Scheduling the meeting in Omaha on the day before Christmas had seemed like a good idea at the time\u2014businessmen had hardly any appointments that day and the spirit of the season was supposed to make them more willing to open their pocketbooks\u2014but instead they were merely distracted, anxious to do their last-minute Mercedes-Benz shopping or get the Christmas office party started or whatever it was businessmen did, and worried about the snow that had started during rush hour this morning.\n\nPlus, they were morons. \"So you're saying you want a grant to study global warming, but then you talk about wanting to measure snow levels,\" one of them had said. \"What does snow have to do with global warming?\"\n\nNathan had tried to explain again how warming could lead to increased amounts of moisture in the atmosphere and thus increased precipitation in the form of rain and snow, and how that increased snowfall could lead to increased albedo and surface cooling.\n\n\"If it's getting cooler, it's not getting warmer,\" another one of the businessmen had said. \"It can't be both.\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, it can,\" he'd said, and launched into his explanation of how polar melting could lead to an increase in freshwater in the North Atlantic, which would float on top of the Gulf Stream, preventing its warm water from sinking and cooling, and effectively shutting the current down. \"Europe would freeze,\" he'd said.\n\n\"Well, then, global warming would be a good thing, wouldn't it?\" yet another one had said. \"Heat the place up.\"\n\nHe had patiently tried to explain how the world would grow both hotter and colder, with widespread droughts, flooding, and a sharp increase in severe weather. \"And these changes may happen extremely quickly,\" he'd said. \"Rather than temperatures gradually increasing and sea levels rising, there may be a sudden, unexpected event\u2014a discontinuity. It may take the form of an abrupt, catastrophic temperature increase or a superhurricane or other form of megastorm, occurring without any warning. That's why this project is so critical. By setting up a comprehensive climate database, we'll be able to create more accurate computer models, from which we'll be able to\u2014\"\n\n\"Computer models!\" one of them had snorted. \"They're wrong more often than they're right!\"\n\n\"Because they don't include enough factors,\" Nathan said. \"Climate is an incredibly complicated system, with literally thousands of factors interacting in intricate ways\u2014weather patterns, clouds, precipitation, ocean currents, man-made activities, crops. Thus far, computer models have only been able to chart a handful of factors. This project will chart over two hundred of them and will enable the models to be exponentially more accurate. We'll be able to predict a discontinuity before it happens\u2014\"\n\nIt was at that point that his cell phone rang. It was his graduate assistant Chin Sung, from the lab. \"Where are you?\" Chin demanded.\n\n\"In a grant meeting,\" Nathan whispered. \"Can I call you back in a few minutes?\"\n\n\"Not if you still want the Nobel Prize,\" Chin said. \"You know that harebrained theory of yours about global warming producing a sudden discontinuity? Well, I think you'd better get over here. Today may be the day you turn out to be right.\"\n\n\"Why?\" Nathan asked, gripping the phone excitedly. \"What's happened? Have the Gulf Stream temp readings dropped?\"\n\n\"No, it's not the currents. It's what's happening here.\"\n\n\"Which is what?\"\n\nInstead of answering, Chin asked, \"Is it snowing where you are?\"\n\nNathan looked out the conference room window. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"I thought so. It's snowing here, too.\"\n\n\"And that's what you called me about?\" Nathan whispered. \"Because it's snowing in Nebraska in December? In case you haven't looked at a calendar lately, winter started three days ago. It's supposed to be snowing.\"\n\n\"You don't understand,\" Chin said. \"It isn't just snowing in Nebraska. It's snowing everywhere.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, everywhere?\"\n\n\"I mean everywhere. Seattle, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Providence, Chattanooga. All over Canada and the U.S. as far south as\"\u2014there was a pause and the sound of computer keys clicking\u2014\"Abilene and Shreveport and Savannah. No, wait, Tallahassee's reporting light snow. As far south as Tallahassee.\"\n\nThe jet stream must have dipped radically south. \"Where's the center of the low pressure system?\"\n\n\"That's just it,\" Chin said. \"There doesn't seem to be one.\"\n\n\"I'll be right there,\" Nathan said.\n\nA mile from the highway, snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps, unable to see the road in heavily falling snow, drove their car into a ditch. \"Shit,\" Bodine said, and attempted to get out of it by revving the engine and then flooring it, a technique which only succeeded in digging them in to the point where they couldn't open either car door.\n\nIt took Jim and Paula nearly two hours to pick up the evergreen garlands and get out to the church. The lacy flakes fell steadily faster and thicker, and it was so slick Jim had to crawl the last few miles. \"I hope this doesn't get any worse,\" he said worriedly, \"or people are going to have a hard time getting out here.\"\n\nBut Stacey wasn't worried at all. \"Isn't it beautiful? I wanted it to snow for my wedding more than anything,\" she said, meeting them at the door of the church. \"Come here, Paula, you've got to see how the snow looks through the sanctuary windows. It's going to be perfect.\"\n\nJim left immediately to go pick up Kindra and David, which Paula was grateful for. Being that close to him in the car had made her start entertaining the ridiculous hopes about him she'd had when they first met. And they were ridiculous. One look at Stacey had shown her that.\n\nThe bride-to-be looked beautiful even in a sweater and jeans, her makeup exquisite, her blond hair upswept into glittery snowflake-sprinkled curls. Every time Paula had had her hair done to be in a wedding, she had come out looking like someone in a bad 1950s movie. How does she do it? Paula wondered. You watch, the snow will stop, and start up again just in time for the ceremony.\n\nBut it didn't. It continued to come down steadily, and when the minister arrived for the rehearsal, she said, \"I don't know. It took me half an hour to get out of my driveway. You may want to think about canceling.\"\n\n\"Don't be silly. We can't cancel. It's a Christmas Eve wedding,\" Stacey said, and made Paula start tying the evergreen garlands to the pews with white satin ribbon.\n\nIt was sprinkling in Santa Fe when Bev Carey arrived at her hotel, and by the time she'd checked in and ventured out into the Plaza, it had turned into an icy, driving rain that went right through the light coat and thin gloves she'd brought with her. She had planned to spend the morning shopping, but the shops had signs on them saying \"Closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,\" and the sidewalk in front of the Governor's Palace, where, according to her guidebook, Zunis and Navajos sat to sell authentic silver-and-turquoise jewelry, was deserted.\n\nBut at least it's not snowing, she told herself, trudging, shivering, back to the hotel. And the shop windows were decorated with ristras and lights in the shape of chili peppers, and the Christmas tree in the hotel lobby was decorated with kachina dolls.\n\nHer friend Janice had already called and left a message with the hotel clerk. And if I don't call her back, she'll be convinced I've taken a bottle of sleeping pills, Bev thought, going up to her room. On the way to the airport, Janice had asked anxiously, \"You haven't been having suicidal thoughts, have you?\" and when her friend Louise had found out what Bev was planning, she'd said, \"I saw this piece on Dateline the other night about suicides at Christmas, and how people who've lost a spouse are especially vulnerable. You wouldn't do anything like that, would you?\"\n\nThey none of them understood that she was doing this to save her life, not end it, that it was Christmas at home, with its lighted trees and evergreen wreaths and candles, that would kill her. And its snow.\n\n\"I know you miss Howard,\" Janice had said, \"and that with Christmas coming, you're feeling sad.\"\n\nSad? She felt flayed, battered, beaten. Every memory, every thought of her husband, every use of the past tense, even\u2014\"Howard liked\u2026,\" \"Howard knew\u2026,\" \"Howard was\u2026\"\u2014was like a deadly blow. The grief-counseling books all talked about \"the pain of losing a loved one,\" but she had had no idea the pain could be this bad. It was like being stabbed over and over, and her only hope had been to get away. She hadn't \"decided to go to Santa Fe for Christmas.\" She had run there like a victim fleeing a murderer.\n\nShe took off her drenched coat and gloves and called Janice. \"You promised you'd call as soon as you got there,\" Janice said reproachfully. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Bev said. \"I was out walking around the Plaza.\" She didn't say anything about its raining. She didn't want Janice saying I told you so. \"It's beautiful here.\"\n\n\"I should have come with you,\" Janice said. \"It's snowing like crazy here. Ten inches so far. I suppose you're sitting on a patio drinking a margarita right now.\"\n\n\"Sangria,\" Bev lied. \"I'm going sightseeing this afternoon. The houses here are all pink and tan adobe with bright blue and red and yellow doors, and right now the whole town's decorated with luminarias. You should see them.\"\n\n\"I wish I could,\" Janice sighed. \"All I can see is snow. I have no idea how I'm going to get to the store. Oh, well, at least we'll have a white Christmas. It's so sad Howard can't be here to see this. He always loved white Christmases, didn't he?\"\n\nHoward, consulting the Farmer's Almanac, reading the weather forecast out loud to her, calling her over to the picture window to watch the snow beginning to fall, saying, \"Looks like we're going to get a white Christmas this year,\" as if it were a present under the tree, putting his arm around her\u2014\n\n\"Yes,\" Bev managed to say through the sudden, searing stab of pain. \"He did.\"\n\nIt was spitting snow when Warren Nesvick checked into the Marriott in Baltimore. As soon as he got Shara up to the suite, he told her he had to make a business call, \"and then I'll be all yours, honey.\" He went down to the lobby. The TV in the corner was showing a weather map. He looked at it for a minute and then got out his cell phone.\n\n\"Where are you?\" his wife Marjean said when she answered.\n\n\"In St. Louis,\" he said. \"Our flight got rerouted here because of snow at O'Hare. What's the weather like there?\"\n\n\"It's snowing,\" she said. \"When do you think you'll be able to get a flight out?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Everything's booked because of it being Christmas Eve. I'm waiting to see if I can get on standby. I'll call you as soon as I know something,\" and hung up before she could ask him which flight.\n\nIt took Nathan an hour and a half to drive the fifteen miles to the lab, during which he considered the likelihood that this was really a discontinuity and not just a major snowstorm. Global warming proponents (and opponents) confused the two all the time. Every hurricane, tornado, heat wave, or dry spell was attributed to global warming, even though nearly all of them fell well within the range of normal weather patterns.\n\nAnd there had been big December snowstorms before. The blizzard of 1888, for instance, and the Christmas Eve storm of 2002. And Chin was probably wrong about there being no center to the low pressure system. The likely explanation was that there was more than one system involved\u2014one centered in the Great Lakes and another just east of the Rockies, colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf Coast to create unusually widespread snow.\n\nAnd it was widespread. The car radio was reporting snow all across the Midwest and the entire East Coast\u2014Topeka, Tulsa, Peoria, northern Virginia, Hartford, Montpelier, Reno, Spokane. No, Reno and Spokane were west of the Rockies. There must be a third system, coming down from the Northwest. But it was still hardly a discontinuity.\n\nThe lab parking lot hadn't been plowed. He left the car on the street and struggled through the already knee-deep snow to the door, remembering when he was halfway across the expanse that Nebraska was famous for pioneers who got lost going out to the barn in a blizzard and whose frozen bodies weren't found till the following spring.\n\nHe reached the door, opened it, and stood there a moment blowing on his frozen hands and looking at the TV Chin had stuck on a cart in the corner of the lab. On it, a pretty reporter in a parka and a Mickey Mouse hat was standing in heavy snow in front of what seemed to be a giant snowman. \"The snow has really caused problems here at Disney World,\" she said over the sound of a marching band playing \"White Christmas.\" \"Their annual Christmas Eve Parade has\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, it's about time,\" Chin said, coming in from the fax room with a handful of printouts. \"What took you so long?\"\n\nNathan ignored that. \"Have you got the IPOC data?\" he asked.\n\nChin nodded. He sat down at his terminal and started typing. The upper left-hand screen lit up with columns of numbers.\n\n\"Let me see the National Weather Service map,\" Nathan said, unzipping his coat and sitting down at the main console.\n\nChin called up a U.S. map nearly half covered with blue, from western Oregon and Nevada east all the way to the Atlantic and up through New England and south to the Oklahoma panhandle, northern Mississippi, Alabama, and most of Georgia.\n\n\"Good Lord, that's even bigger than Marina in '92,\" Nathan said. \"Have you got a satellite photo?\"\n\nChin nodded and called it up. \"And this is a real-time composite of all the data coming in, including weather stations, towns, and spotters reporting in. The white's snow,\" he added unnecessarily.\n\nThe white covered even more territory than the blue on the NWS map, with jagged fingers stretching down into Arizona and Louisiana and west into Oregon and California. Surrounding them were wide uneven pink bands. \"Is the pink rain?\" Nathan asked.\n\n\"Sleet,\" Chin said. \"So what do you think? It's a discontinuity, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Nathan said, calling up the barometric readings and starting through them.\n\n\"What else could it be? It's snowing in Orlando. And San Diego.\"\n\n\"It's snowed in both of those places before,\" Nathan said. \"It's even snowed in Death Valley. The only place in the U.S. where it's never snowed is the Florida Keys. And Hawaii, of course. Everything on this map right now is within the range of normal weather events. You don't have to start worrying till it starts snowing in the Florida Keys.\"\n\n\"What about other places?\" Chin asked, looking at the center right-hand screen.\n\n\"What do you mean, other places?\"\n\n\"I mean, it isn't just snowing in the U.S. I'm getting reports from Canc\u00fan. And Jerusalem.\"\n\nAt 11:30 Pilar gave up trying to explain that there wasn't enough snow to make a snowman and took Miguel outside, bundled up in a sweatshirt, a sweater, and his warm jacket, with a pair of Pilar's tube socks for mittens. He lasted about five minutes.\n\nWhen they came back in, Pilar settled him at the kitchen table with crayons and paper so he could draw a picture of a snowman and went into the living room to check the weather forecast. It was really snowing hard out there, and she was getting a little worried about taking Miguel down to Escondido. Angelenos didn't know how to drive in snow, and Pilar's tires weren't that good.\n\n\"\u2014snowing here in Hollywood,\" said a reporter standing in front of the nearly invisible Hollywood sign, \"and this isn't soap flakes, folks, it's the real thing.\"\n\nShe switched channels. \"\u2014snowing in Santa Monica,\" a reporter standing on the beach was saying, \"but that isn't stopping the surfers\u2026.\"\n\nClick. \"\u2014por primera vez en cincuenta a\u00f1os en Marina del Rey\u2014\"\n\nClick. \"\u2014snowing here in L.A. for the first time in nearly fifty years. We're here on the set of xXx Two with Vin Diesel. What do you think of the snow, Vin?\"\n\nPilar gave up and went back in the kitchen, where Miguel announced he was ready to go outside again. She talked him into listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks instead. \"Okay,\" he said, and she left him warbling \"White Christmas\" along with Alvin and went in to check the weather again. The Santa Monica reporter briefly mentioned the roads were wet before moving on to interview a psychic who claimed to have predicted the snowstorm, and on a Spanish-language channel she caught a glimpse of the 405 moving along at its usual congested pace.\n\nThe roads must not be too bad, she thought, or they'd all be talking about it, but she still wondered if she hadn't better take Miguel down to Escondido early. She hated to give up her day with him, but his safety was the important thing, and the snow wasn't letting up at all.\n\nWhen Miguel came into the living room and asked when they could go outside, she said, \"After we pack your suitcase, okay? Do you want to take your Pok\u00e9mon jammies or your Spidermans?\" and began gathering up his things.\n\nBy noon Eastern Standard Time, it was snowing in every state in the lower forty-eight. Elko, Nevada, had over two feet of snow, Cincinnati was reporting thirty-eight inches at the airport, and it was spitting snow in Miami.\n\nOn talk radio, JFK's assassination had given way to the topic of the snow. \"You mark my words, the terrorists are behind this,\" a caller from Terre Haute said. \"They want to destroy our economy, and what better way to do it than by keeping us from doing our last-minute Christmas shopping? To say nothing of what this snow's going to do to my relationship with my wife. How am I supposed to go buy her something in this weather? I tell you, this has got Al Qaeda's name written all over it.\"\n\nDuring lunch, Warren Nesvick told Shara he needed to go try his business call again. \"The guy I was trying to get in touch with wasn't in the office before. Because of the snow,\" he said, and went out to the lobby to call Marjean again. On the TV in the corner, there were shots of snow-covered runways and jammed ticket counters. A blond reporter in a tight red sweater was saying, \"Here in Cincinnati, the snow just keeps on falling. The airport's still open, but officials indicate it may have to close. Snow is building up on the runways\u2014\"\n\nHe called Marjean. \"I'm in Cincinnati,\" he told her. \"I managed to get a flight at the last minute. There's a three-hour layover till my connecting flight, but at least I've got a seat.\"\n\n\"But isn't it snowing in Cincinnati?\" she asked. \"I was just watching the TV and\u2026\"\n\n\"It's supposed to let up here in an hour or so. I'm really sorry about this, honey. You know I'd be there for Christmas Eve if I could.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, sounding disappointed. \"It's okay, Warren. You can't control the weather.\"\n\nThe television was on in the hotel lobby when Bev came down to lunch. \"\u2026snowing in Albuquerque,\" she heard the announcer say, \"Raton, Santa Rosa, and Wagon Mound.\"\n\nBut not in Santa Fe, she told herself firmly, going into the dining room. \"It hardly ever snows there,\" the travel agent had said, \"New Mexico's a desert. And when it does snow, it never sticks.\"\n\n\"There's already four inches in Espa\u00f1ola,\" a plump waitress in a ruffled blouse and full red skirt was saying to the busboy. \"I'm worried about getting home.\"\n\n\"I'd rather it didn't snow for Christmas,\" Bev had teased Howard last year, \"all those people trying to get home.\"\n\n\"Heresy, woman, heresy! What would Currier and Ives think to hear you talk that way?\" he'd said, clutching his chest.\n\nLike she was clutching hers now. The plump waitress was looking at her worriedly. \"Are you all right, se\u00f1ora?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Bev said. \"One for lunch, please.\"\n\nThe waitress led her to a table, still looking concerned, and handed her a menu, and she clung to it like a life raft, concentrating fiercely on the unfamiliar terms, the exotic ingredients: blue corn tortillas, quesadillas, chipotle\u2014\n\n\"Can I get you something to drink?\" the waitress asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Bev said brightly, looking at the waitress's name tag. \"I'd like some sangria, Carmelita.\"\n\nCarmelita nodded and left, and Bev looked around the room, thinking, I'll drink my sangria and watch the other diners, eavesdrop on their conversations, but she was the only person in the broad tiled room. It faced the patio, and through the glass doors the rain, sleet now, drove sharply against the terra-cotta pots of cactus outside, the stacked tables and chairs, the collapsed umbrellas.\n\nShe had envisioned herself having lunch out on the patio, sitting in the sun under one of those umbrellas, looking out at the desert and listening to a mariachi band. The music coming over the loudspeakers was Christmas carols. As she listened, \"Let It Snow\" came to an end and the Supremes began to sing \"White Christmas.\"\n\n\"What would cloud-seeding be listed under?\" Howard had asked her one year when there was still no snow by the twenty-second, coming into the dining room, where she was wrapping presents, with the phone book.\n\n\"You are not hiring a cloud seeder,\" she had replied, laughing.\n\n\"Would it be under 'clouds' or 'rainmaker'?\" he'd asked mock-seriously. \"Or 'seeds'?\" And when it had finally snowed on the twenty-fourth, he had acted like he was personally responsible.\n\nI can't stand this, Bev thought, looking frantically around the dining room for Carmelita and her sangria. How do other people do it? She knew lots of widows, and they all seemed fine. When people mentioned their husbands, when they talked about them in the past tense, they were able to stand there, to smile back, to talk about them. Doreen Matthews had even said, \"Now that Bill's gone, I can finally have all pink ornaments on the Christmas tree. I've always wanted to have a pink tree, but he wouldn't hear of it.\"\n\n\"Here's your sangria,\" Carmelita said, still looking concerned. \"Would you like some tortilla chips and salsa?\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you,\" Bev said brightly. \"And I think I'll have the chicken enchiladas.\"\n\nCarmelita nodded and disappeared again. Bev took a gulp of her sangria and got her guidebook out of her bag. She would have a nice lunch and then go sightseeing. She opened the guidebook to Area Attractions. \"Pueblo de San Ildefonso.\" No, that would involve a lot of walking around outside, and it was still sleeting outside the window.\n\n\"Petroglyphs National Monument.\" No, that was in Albuquerque, where it was snowing. \"El Santuario de Chimayo. 28 mi. north of Santa Fe on Hwy. 76. Historic weaving center, shops, chapel dubbed 'American Lourdes.' The dirt in the anteroom beside the altar is reputed to have healing powers when rubbed on the afflicted part of the body.\"\n\nBut I hurt all over, she thought.\n\n\"Other attractions include five nineteenth-century reredoses, a carving of El Santo Ni\u00f1o de Atocha, a carved wooden altarpiece. (See also L\u00e1grima, p. 98.)\"\n\nShe turned the page to ninety-eight. \"Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, L\u00e1grima, 28 mi. SE of Santa Fe on Hwy 41. Sixteenth-century adobe mission church. In 1968 the statue of the Virgin Mary in the transept was reported to shed healing tears.\"\n\nHealing tears, holy dirt, and wasn't there supposed to be a miraculous staircase right here in town? Yes, there it was. The Loretto Chapel. \"Open 10\u20135 Apr\u2013Oct, closed Nov\u2013Mar.\"\n\nIt would have to be Chimayo. She got out the road map the car rental place had given her, and when Carmelita came with the chips and salsa, she said, \"I'm thinking of driving up to Chimayo. What's the best route?\"\n\n\"Today?\" Carmelita said, dismayed. \"That's not a good idea. The road's pretty curvy, and we just got a call from Taos that it's really snowing hard up there.\"\n\n\"How about one of the pueblos, then?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"You have to take dirt roads to get there, and it's getting really icy. You're better off doing something here in town. There's a Christmas Eve mass at the cathedral at midnight,\" she added helpfully.\n\nBut I need something to do this afternoon, Bev thought, bending over the guidebook again. Indian Research Center\u2014open weekends only. El Rancho de las Golondrinas\u2014closed Nov-Mar. Santa Fe Historical Museum\u2014closed Dec 24\u2013Jan 1.\n\nThe Georgia O'Keeffe Museum\u2014open daily.\n\nPerfect, Bev thought, reading the entry: \"Houses world's largest permanent collection of O'Keeffe's work. A major American artist, O'Keeffe lived in the Santa Fe area for many years. When she first arrived in 1929, she was physically and psychologically ill, but the dry, hot New Mexico climate healed and inspired her, and she painted much of her finest work here.\"\n\nPerfect. Sun-baked paintings of cow skulls and giant tropical flowers and desert buttes. \"Open daily. 10 A.M.\u20136 P.M. 217 Johnson St.\"\n\nShe looked up the address on her map. Only three blocks off the Plaza, within easy walking distance even in this weather. Perfect. When Carmelita brought her enchiladas, she attacked them eagerly.\n\n\"Did you find somewhere to go in town?\" Carmelita asked curiously.\n\n\"Yes, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Carmelita said, and vanished again. She was back almost immediately. \"I'm sorry, se\u00f1ora, but they're closed.\"\n\n\"Closed? It said in the guidebook the museum's open daily.\"\n\n\"It's because of the snow.\"\n\n\"Snow?\" Bev said, and looked past her to the patio, where the sleet had turned to a heavy, slashing snow.\n\nAt 1:20, Jim called from the airport to tell them Kindra's and David's planes had both been delayed, and a few minutes later the bakery delivered the wedding cake. \"No, no,\" Stacey said, \"that's supposed to go to the country club. That's where the reception is.\"\n\n\"We tried,\" the driver said. \"We couldn't get through. We can either leave it here or take it back to the bakery, take your pick. If we can get back to the bakery. Which I doubt.\"\n\n\"Leave it here,\" Stacey said. \"Jim can take it over when he gets here.\"\n\n\"But you just heard him,\" Paula said. \"If the truck can't get through, Jim won't be able to\u2014\" The phone rang.\n\nIt was the florist, calling to say they weren't going to be able to deliver the flowers. \"But you have to,\" Stacey said. \"The wedding's at five. Tell them they have to, Paula,\" and handed the phone to her.\n\n\"Isn't there any way you can get here?\" Paula asked.\n\n\"Not unless there's a miracle,\" the florist said. \"Our truck's in a ditch out at Pawnee, and there's no telling how long it'll take a tow truck to get there. It's a skating rink out there.\"\n\n\"Jim will have to go pick up the flowers when he gets back with Kindra and David,\" Stacey said blithely when Paula told her the bad news. \"He can do it on his way to the country club. Is the string quartet here yet?\"\n\n\"No, and I'm not sure they'll be able to get here. The florist said the roads are really icy,\" Paula said, and the viola player walked in.\n\n\"I told you,\" Stacey said happily, \"it'll all work out. Did I tell you, they're going to play Boccherini's Minuet No.8 for the wedding march?\" and went to get the candles for the altar stands.\n\nPaula went over to the viola player, a lanky young guy. He was brushing snow off his viola case. \"Where's the rest of the quartet?\"\n\n\"They're not here yet?\" he said, surprised. \"I had a lesson to give in town and told 'em I'd catch up with them.\" He sat down to take off his snow-crusted boots. \"And then my car ended up in a snowbank, and I had to walk the last mile and a half.\" He grinned up at her, panting. \"It's times like these I wish I played the piccolo. Although,\" he said, looking her up and down, \"there are compensations. Please tell me you're not the bride.\"\n\n\"I'm not the bride,\" she said. Even though I wish I was.\n\n\"Great!\" he said, and grinned at her again. \"What are you doing after the wedding?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure there's going to be one. Do you think the other musicians got stuck on the way here, too?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I would have seen them.\" He pulled out a cell phone and punched buttons. \"Shep? Yeah, where are you?\" There was a pause. \"That's what I was afraid of. What about Leif?\" Another pause. \"Well, if you find him, call me back.\" He flipped the phone shut. \"Bad news. The violins were in a fender bender and are waiting for the cops. They don't know where the cello is. How do you feel about a viola solo of Minuet No.8?\"\n\nPaula went to inform Stacey. \"The police can bring them out,\" Stacey said blithely, and handed Paula the white candles for the altar stands. \"The candlelight on the snow's going to be just beautiful.\"\n\nAt 1:48 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, snow flurries were reported at Sunset Point in the Florida Keys.\n\n\"I get to officially freak out now, right?\" Chin asked Nathan. \"Jeez, it really is the discontinuity you said would happen!\"\n\n\"We don't know that yet,\" Nathan said, looking at the National Weather Service map, which was now entirely blue, except for a small spot near Fargo and another one in north-central Texas which Nathan thought was Waco and Chin was convinced was the President's ranch in Crawford.\n\n\"What do you mean, we don't know that yet? It's snowing in Barcelona. It's snowing in Moscow.\"\n\n\"It's supposed to be snowing in Moscow. Remember Napoleon? It's not unusual for it to be snowing in over two thirds of these places reporting in: Oslo, Katmandu, Buffalo\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, it's sure as hell unusual for it to be snowing in Beirut,\" Chin said, pointing to the snow reports coming in, \"and Honolulu. I don't care what you say, I'm freaking out.\"\n\n\"You can't,\" Nathan said, superimposing an isobaric grid over the map. \"I need you to feed me the temp readings.\"\n\nChin started over to his terminal and then came back. \"What do you think?\" he asked seriously. \"Do you think it's a discontinuity?\"\n\nThere was nothing else it could be. Winter storms were frequently very large\u2014the February 1994 European storm had been huge, and the one in December 2002 had covered over a third of the U.S.\u2014but there'd never been one that covered the entire continental United States. And Mexico and Manitoba and Belize, he thought, watching the snowfall reports coming in.\n\nIn addition, snow was falling in six locations where it had never fallen before, and in twenty-eight, like Yuma, Arizona, where it had snowed only once or twice in the last hundred years. New Orleans had a foot of snow, for God's sake. And it was snowing in Guatemala.\n\nAnd it wasn't behaving like any storm he'd ever seen. According to the charts, snow had started simultaneously in Springfield, Illinois; Hoodoo, Tennessee; Park City, Utah; and Branford, Connecticut, and spread in a completely random pattern. There was no center to the storm, no leading edge, no front.\n\nAnd no letup. No station had reported the snow stopping, or even diminishing, and new stations were reporting in all the time. At this rate, it would be snowing everywhere by\u2014he made a rapid calculation\u20145 o'clock.\n\n\"Well?\" Chin said. \"Is it?\" He looked really frightened.\n\nAnd him freaking out is the last thing I need with all this data to feed in, Nathan thought. \"We don't have enough data to make a determination yet,\" he said.\n\n\"But you think it might be,\" Chin persisted. \"Don't you? You think all the signs are there?\"\n\nYes, Nathan thought. \"Definitely not,\" he said. \"Look at the TV.\"\n\n\"What about it?\"\n\n\"There's one sign that's not present.\" He gestured at the screen. \"No logo.\"\n\n\"No what?\"\n\n\"No logo. Nothing qualifies as a full-fledged crisis until the cable news channels give it a logo of its own, preferably with a colon. You know, O.J.: Trial of the Century or Sniper at Large or Attack: Iraq.\" He pointed at Dan Rather standing in thickly falling snow in front of the White House. \"Look, it says Breaking News, but there's no logo. So it can't be a discontinuity. So feed me those temps. And then go see if you can scare up a couple more TVs. I want to get a look at exactly what's going on out there. Maybe that'll give us some kind of clue.\"\n\nChin nodded, looking reassured, and went to get the temp readings. They were all over the place, too, from eighteen below in Saskatoon to thirty-one above in Fort Lauderdale. Nathan ran them against average temps for mid-December and then highs and lows for the twenty-fourth, looking for patterns, anomalies.\n\nChin wheeled in a big-screen TV on an AV cart, along with Professor Adler's portable, and plugged them in. \"What do you want these on?\" he asked.\n\n\"CNN, the Weather Channel, Fox\u2014\" Nathan began.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Chin said.\n\n\"What? What is it?\"\n\n\"Look,\" Chin said, and pointed to Professor Adler's portable. Wolf Blitzer was standing in the snow in front of the Empire State Building. At the lower right-hand corner was the CNN symbol. And in the upper left-hand corner: Storm of the Century.\n\nAs soon as Pilar had Miguel's things packed, she checked on the TV again.\n\n\"\u2014resulting in terrible road conditions,\" the reporter was saying. \"Police are reporting accidents at the intersection of Sepulveda and Figueroa, the intersection of San Pedro and Whittier, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine,\" while accident alerts crawled across the bottom of the screen. \"We're getting reports of a problem on the Santa Monica Freeway just past the Culver City exit and\u2026this just in: The northbound lanes of the 110 are closed due to a five-car accident. Travelers are advised to take alternate routes.\"\n\nThe phone rang. Miguel ran into the kitchen to answer it. \"Hi, Daddy, it's snowing,\" he shouted into the receiver. \"We're going outside and make a snowman,\" and then said, \"Okay,\" and handed it to Pilar.\n\n\"Go watch cartoons and let Mommy talk to Daddy,\" she said, and handed him the remote. \"Hello, Joe.\"\n\n\"I want you to bring Miguel down now,\" her ex-husband said without preamble, \"before the snow gets bad.\"\n\n\"It's already bad,\" Pilar said, standing in the door of the kitchen watching Miguel flip through the channels:\n\n\"\u2014really slick out here\u2014\"\n\n\"\u2014advised to stay home. If you don't have to go someplace, folks, don't.\"\n\n\"\u2014treacherous conditions\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not sure taking him out in this is a good idea,\" Pilar said. \"The TV's saying the roads are really slick, and\u2014\"\n\n\"And I'm saying bring him down here now,\" Joe said nastily. \"I know what you're doing. You think you can use a little snow as an excuse to keep my son away from me on Christmas.\"\n\n\"I am not,\" she protested. \"I'm just thinking about Miguel's safety. I don't have snow tires\u2014\"\n\n\"Like hell you're thinking about the kid! You're thinking this is a way to do me out of my rights. Well, we'll see what my lawyer has to say about that. I'm calling him and the judge and telling them what you're up to, and that I'm sick of this crap, I want full custody. And then I'm coming up there myself to get him. Have him ready when I get there!\" he shouted and hung up the phone.\n\nAt 2:22 P.M., Luke's mother called on her cell phone to say she was going to be late and to go ahead and start the goose. \"The roads are terrible, and people do not know how to drive. This red Subaru ahead of me just swerved into my lane and\u2014\"\n\n\"Mom, Mom,\" Luke cut in, \"the goose. What do you mean, start the goose? What do I have to do?\"\n\n\"Just put it in the oven. Shorty and Madge should be there soon, and she can take over. All you have to do is get it started. Take the bag of giblets out first. Put an aluminum foil tent over it.\"\n\n\"An aluminum foil what?\"\n\n\"Tent. Fold a piece of foil in half and lay it over the goose. It keeps it from browning too fast.\"\n\n\"How big a piece?\"\n\n\"Big enough to cover the goose. And don't tuck in the edges.\"\n\n\"Of the oven?\"\n\n\"Of the tent. You're making this much harder than it is. You wouldn't believe how many cars there are off the road, and every one of them's an SUV. It serves them right. They think just because they've got four-wheel drive, they can go ninety miles an hour in a blizzard\u2014\"\n\n\"Mom, Mom, what about stuffing? Don't I have to stuff the goose?\"\n\n\"No. Nobody does stuffing inside the bird anymore. Salmonella. Just put the goose in the roasting pan and stick it in the oven. At 350 degrees.\"\n\nI can do that, Luke thought, and did. Ten minutes later he realized he'd forgotten to put the aluminum foil tent on. It took him three tries to get a piece the right size, and his mother hadn't said whether the shiny or the dull side should be facing out, but when he checked the goose twenty minutes later, it seemed to be doing okay. It smelled good, and there were already juices forming in the pan.\n\nAfter Pilar hung up with Joe, she sat at the kitchen table a long time, trying to think which was worse, letting Joe take Miguel out into this snowstorm or having Miguel witness the fight that would ensue if she tried to stop him. \"Please, please\u2026\" she murmured, without even knowing what she was praying for.\n\nMiguel came into the kitchen and climbed into her lap. She wiped hastily at her eyes. \"Guess what, honey?\" she said brightly. \"Daddy's going to come get you in a little bit. You need to go pick out which toys you want to take.\"\n\n\"Hunh-unh,\" Miguel said, shaking his head.\n\n\"I know you wanted to make a snowman,\" she said, \"but guess what? It's snowing in Escondido, too. You can make a snowman with Daddy.\"\n\n\"Hunh-unh,\" he said, climbing down off her lap and tugging on her hand. He led her into the living room.\n\n\"What, honey?\" she said, and he pointed at the TV. On it, the Santa Monica reporter was saying, \"\u2014the following road closures: I-5 from Chula Vista to Santa Ana, I-15 from San Diego to Barstow, Highway 78 from Oceanside to Escondido\u2014\"\n\nThank you, she murmured silently, thank you. Miguel ran out to the kitchen and came back with a piece of construction paper and a red crayon. \"Here,\" he said, thrusting them at Pilar. \"You have to write Santa. So he'll know to bring my presents here and not Daddy's.\"\n\nBy ordering sopapillas and then Mexican coffee, Bev managed to make lunch last till nearly 2 o'clock. When Carmelita brought the coffee, she looked anxiously out at the snow piling up on the patio and then back at Bev, so Bev asked for her check and signed it so Carmelita could leave, and then went back up to her room for her coat and gloves.\n\nEven if the shops were closed, she could window-shop, she told herself, she could look at the Navajo rugs and Santa Clara pots and Indian jewelry displayed in the shops, but the snowstorm was getting worse. The luminarias that lined the walls were heaped with snow, the paper bags that held the candles sagging wetly under its weight.\n\nThey'll never get them lit, Bev thought, turning into the Plaza.\n\nBy the time she had walked down one side of it, the snow had become a blizzard, it was coming down so hard you couldn't see across the Plaza, and there was a cutting wind. She gave up and went back to the hotel.\n\nIn the lobby, the staff, including the front desk clerk and Carmelita in her coat and boots, was gathered in front of the TV looking at a weather map of New Mexico. \"\u2026currently snowing in most of New Mexico,\" the announcer was saying, \"including Gallup, Carlsbad, Ruidoso, and Roswell. Travel advisories out for central, western, and southern New Mexico, including Lordsburg, Las Cruces, and Truth or Consequences. It looks like a white Christmas for most of New Mexico, folks.\"\n\n\"You have two messages,\" the front desk clerk said when he saw her. They were both from Janice, and she phoned again while Bev was taking her coat off.\n\n\"I just saw on TV that it's snowing in Santa Fe, and you said you were going sightseeing,\" Janice said. \"I just wondered if you were okay.\"\n\n\"I'm here at the hotel,\" Bev said. \"I'm not going anywhere.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Janice said, relieved. \"Are you watching TV? The weathermen are saying this isn't an ordinary storm. It's some kind of extreme megastorm. We've got three feet here. The power's out all over town, and the airport just closed. I hope you're able to get home. Oops, the lights just flickered. I'd better go hunt up some candles before the lights go off,\" she said, and hung up.\n\nBev turned on the TV. The local channel was listing closings\u2014\"The First United Methodist Church Christmas pageant has been canceled and there will be no Posadas tonight at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Canyon Day Care Center will close at 3 P.M\u2026.\"\n\nShe clicked the remote. CNBC was discussing earlier Christmas Eve snowstorms, and on CNN, Daryn Kagan was standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue in a snowdrift. \"This is usually the busiest shopping day of the year,\" she said, \"but as you can see\u2014\"\n\nShe clicked the remote, looking for a movie to watch. Howard would have loved this, she thought involuntarily. He would have been in his element.\n\nShe clicked quickly through the other channels, trying to find a movie to watch, but they were all discussing the weather. \"It looks like the whole country's going to get a white Christmas this year,\" Anderson Cooper was saying, \"whether they want it or not.\"\n\nYou'd think there'd be a Christmas movie on, Bev thought grimly, flipping through the channels again. It's Christmas Eve. Christmas in Connecticut or Holiday Inn. Or White Christmas.\n\nHoward had insisted on watching it every time he came across it with the remote, even if it was nearly over. \"Why are you watching that?\" she'd ask, coming in to find him watching the next-to-the-last scene. \"We own the video.\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he'd say. \"It's just getting to the good part,\" and he'd lean forward to watch Bing Crosby push open the barn doors to reveal fake-looking snow falling on the equally fake-looking set.\n\nWhen he came into the kitchen afterward, she'd say sarcastically, \"How'd it end this time? Did Bing and Rosemary Clooney get back together? Did they save the General's inn and all live happily ever after?\"\n\nBut Howard would refuse to be baited. \"They got a white Christmas,\" he'd say happily, and go off to look out the windows at the clouds.\n\nExcept for news about the storm, there was nothing at all on except an infomercial selling a set of Ginsu knives. How appropriate, she thought, and sat back on the bed to watch it.\n\nAt 2:08, the weight of the new loose snow triggered a huge avalanche in the \"awesome slopes\" area near Breckenridge, knocking down huge numbers of Ponderosa pines and burying everything in its path, but not Kent and Bodine, who were still in their Honda, trying to keep warm and survive on a box of Tic-Tacs and an old doughnut they found in the glove compartment.\n\nBy 2:30, Madge and Shorty still weren't there, so Luke checked the goose. It seemed to be cooking okay, but there was an awful lot of juice in the pan. When he checked it again half an hour later, there was over an inch of the stuff.\n\nThat couldn't be right. The last time he'd gotten stuck with having the Christmas Eve dinner, the turkey had only produced a few tablespoons of juice. He remembered his mom pouring them off to make the gravy.\n\nHe tried his mom. Her cell phone said, \"Caller unavailable,\" which meant her batteries had run down, or she'd turned it off. He tried Aunt Madge. No answer.\n\nHe dug the plastic and net wrapping the goose had come in out of the trash, flattened it out, and read the instructions: \"Roast uncovered at 350\u02da for twenty-five minutes per pound.\"\n\nUncovered. That must be the problem, the aluminum foil tent. It wasn't allowing the extra juice to evaporate. He opened the oven and removed it. When he checked the goose again fifteen minutes later, it was sitting in two inches of grease, and even though, according to the wrapping, it still had three hours to go, the goose was getting brown and crispy on top.\n\nAt 2:51 P.M., Joe Gutierrez slammed out of his house and started up to get Miguel. He'd been trying ever since he hung up on Pilar to get his goddamned lawyer on the phone, but he wasn't answering.\n\nThe streets were a real mess, and when Joe got to the I-15 entrance ramp, there was a barricade across it. He roared back down the street to take Highway 78, but it was blocked, too. He stormed back home and called Pilar's lawyer, but he didn't answer, either. He then called the judge, using the unlisted cell phone number he'd seen on his lawyer's PalmPilot.\n\nThe judge, who had been stuck waiting for AAA in a Starbucks at the Bakersfield exit, listening to Harry Connick, Jr., destroy \"White Christmas\" for the last three hours, was not particularly sympathetic, especially when Joe started swearing at him.\n\nWords were exchanged, and the judge made a note to himself to have Joe declared in contempt of court. Then he called AAA to see what was taking so long, and when the operator told him he was nineteenth in line, and it would be at least another four hours, he decided to revisit the entire custody agreement.\n\nBy 3 o'clock, all the networks and cable news channels had logos. ABC had Winter Wonderland, NBC had Super Storm, and Fox News had Winter Wallop. CBS and MSNBC had both gone with White Christmas, flanked by a photo of Bing Crosby (MSNBC's wearing the Santa Claus hat from the movie).\n\nThe Weather Channel's logo was a changing world map that was now two thirds white, and snow was being reported in Karachi, Seoul, the Solomon Islands, and Bethlehem, where Christmas Eve services (usually canceled due to Israeli\u2013Palestinian violence) had been canceled due to the weather.\n\nAt 3:15 P.M., Jim called Paula from the airport to report that Kindra's and David's flights had both been delayed indefinitely. \"And the USAir guy says they're shutting down the airport in Houston. Dallas International's already closed, and so are JFK and O'Hare. How's Stacey?\"\n\nIncorrigible, Paula thought. \"Fine,\" she said. \"Do you want to talk to her?\"\n\n\"No. Listen, tell her I'm still hoping, but it doesn't look good.\"\n\nPaula told her, but it didn't have any effect. \"Go get your dress on,\" Stacey ordered her, \"so the minister can run through the service with you, and then you can show Kindra and David where to stand when they get here.\"\n\nPaula went and put on her bridesmaid dress, wishing it wasn't sleeveless, and they went through the rehearsal with the viola player, who had changed into his tux to get out of his snow-damp clothes, acting as best man. As soon as they were done, Paula went into the vestry to get a sweater out of her suitcase. The minister came in and shut the door. \"I've been trying to talk to Stacey,\" she said. \"You're going to have to cancel the wedding. The roads are getting really dangerous, and I just heard on the radio they've closed the interstate.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Paula said.\n\n\"Well, she doesn't. She's convinced everything's going to work out.\"\n\nAnd it might, Paula thought. After all, this is Stacey.\n\nThe viola player poked his head in the door. \"Good news,\" he said.\n\n\"The string quartet's here?\" the minister said.\n\n\"Jim's here?\" Paula said.\n\n\"No, but Shep and Leif found the cello player. He's got frostbite, but otherwise he's okay. They're taking him to the hospital.\" He gestured toward the sanctuary. \"Do you want to tell the Queen of Denial, or shall I?\"\n\n\"I will,\" Paula said, and went back into the sanctuary. \"Stacey\u2014\"\n\n\"Your dress looks beautiful!\" Stacey cried, and dragged her over to the windows. \"Look how it goes with the snow!\"\n\nWhen the doorbell rang at a quarter to four, Luke thought, Finally! Mom! and literally ran to answer the door. It was Aunt Lulla. He looked hopefully past her, but there was no one else pulling into the driveway or coming up the street. \"You don't know anything about cooking a goose, do you?\" he asked.\n\nShe looked at him a long, silent moment and then handed him the plate of olives she'd brought and took off her hat, scarf, gloves, plastic boots, and old-lady coat. \"Your mother and Madge were always the domestic ones,\" she said. \"I was the theatrical one,\" and while he was digesting that odd piece of information, \"Why did you ask? Is your goose cooked?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, and led her into the kitchen and showed her the goose, which was now swimming in a sea of fat.\n\n\"Good God!\" Aunt Lulla said. \"Where did all that grease come from?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said.\n\n\"Well, the first thing to do is pour some of it off before the poor thing drowns.\"\n\n\"I already did,\" Luke said. He took the lid off the saucepan he'd poured the drippings into earlier.\n\n\"Well, you need to pour off some more,\" she said practically, \"and you'll need a larger pan. Or maybe we should just pour it down the sink and get rid of the evidence.\"\n\n\"It's for the gravy,\" he said, rummaging in the cupboard under the sink for the big pot his mother had given him to cook spaghetti in.\n\n\"Oh, of course,\" she said, and then thoughtfully, \"I do know how to make gravy. Alec Guinness taught me.\"\n\nLuke stuck his head out of the cupboard. \"Alec Guinness taught you to make gravy?\"\n\n\"It's not really all that difficult,\" she said, opening the oven door and looking speculatively at the goose. \"You wouldn't happen to have any wine on hand, would you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" He emerged with the pot. \"Why? Will wine counteract the grease?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" she said, \"but one of the things I learned when I was playing off-Broadway was that when you're facing a flop or an opening night curtain, it helps to be a little sloshed.\"\n\n\"You played off-Broadway?\" Luke said. \"Mom never told me you were an actress.\"\n\n\"I wasn't,\" she said, opening cupboard doors. She pulled out two wineglasses. \"You should have seen my reviews.\"\n\nBy 4:00 P.M., all the networks and cable news channels had changed their logos to reflect the worsening situation. ABC had MegaBlizzard, NBC had MacroBlizzard, and CNN had Perfect Storm, with a graphic of a boat being swamped by a gigantic wave. CBS and MSNBC had both gone with Ice Age, CBS's with a question mark, MSNBC's with an exclamation point and a drawing of the Abominable Snowman. And Fox, ever the responsible news network, was proclaiming End of the World!\n\n\"Now can I freak out?\" Chin asked.\n\n\"No,\" Nathan said, feeding in snowfall rates. \"In the first place, it's Fox. In the second place, a discontinuity does not necessarily mean the end of the wo\u2014\"\n\nThe lights flickered. They both stopped and stared at the overhead fluorescents. They flickered again.\n\n\"Backup!\" Nathan shouted, and they both dived for their terminals, shoved in zip drives, and began frantically typing, looking anxiously up at the lights now and then.\n\nChin popped the zip disk out of the hard drive. \"You were saying that a discontinuity isn't necessarily the end of the world?\"\n\n\"Yes, but losing this data would be. From now on we back up every fifteen minutes.\"\n\nThe lights flickered again, went out for an endless ten seconds, and came back on again to Anderson Cooper saying, \"\u2014Huntsville, Alabama, where thousands are without power. I'm here at Byrd Middle School, which is serving as a temporary shelter.\" He stuck the microphone under the nose of a woman holding a candle. \"When did the power go off?\" he asked.\n\n\"About noon,\" she said. \"The lights flickered a couple of times before that, but both times the lights came back on, and I thought we were okay, and then I went to fix lunch, and they went off, like that\u2014\" She snapped her fingers, \"without any warning.\"\n\n\"We back up every five minutes,\" Nathan said, and to Chin, who was pulling on his parka, \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Out to my car to get a flashlight.\"\n\nHe came back in ten minutes later, caked in snow, his ears and cheeks bright red. \"It's four feet deep out there. Tell me again why I shouldn't freak out,\" he said, handing the flashlight to Nathan.\n\n\"Because I don't think this is a discontinuity,\" Nathan said. \"I think it's just a snowstorm.\"\n\n\"Just a snowstorm?\" Chin said, pointing at the TVs, where red-eared, red-cheeked reporters were standing in front of, respectively, a phalanx of snowplows on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, a derailed train in Casper, and a collapsed Walmart in Biloxi, \"\u2014from the weight of a record fifty-eight inches of snow,\" Brit Hume was saying. \"Luckily, there were no injuries here. In Cincinnati, however\u2014\"\n\n\"Fifty-eight inches,\" Chin said. \"In Mississippi. What if it keeps on snowing and snowing forever till the whole world\u2014?\"\n\n\"It can't,\" Nathan said. \"There isn't enough moisture in the atmosphere, and no low pressure system over the Gulf to keep pumping moisture up across the lower United States. There's no low pressure system at all, and no ridge of high pressure to push against it, no colliding air masses, nothing. Look at this. It started in four different places hundreds of miles from each other, in different latitudes, different altitudes, none of them along a ridge of high pressure. This storm isn't following any of the rules.\"\n\n\"But doesn't that prove it's a discontinuity?\" Chin asked nervously. \"Isn't that one of the signs, that it's completely different from what came before?\"\n\n\"The climate would be completely different, the weather would be completely different, not the laws of physics.\" He pointed to the world map on the mid-right-hand screen. \"If this were a discontinuity, you'd see a change in ocean current temps, a shift in the jet stream, changes in wind patterns. There's none of that. The jet stream hasn't moved, the rate of melting in the Antarctic is unchanged, the Gulf Stream's still there. El Ni\u00f1o's still there. Venice is still there.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but it's snowing on the Grand Canal,\" Chin said. \"So what's causing the megastorm?\"\n\n\"That's just it. It's not a megastorm. If it were, there'd be accompanying ice storms, hurricane-force winds, microbursts, tornadoes, none of which has shown up on the data. As near as I can tell, all it's doing is snowing.\" He shook his head. \"No, something else is going on.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I have no idea.\" He stared glumly at the screens. \"Weather's a remarkably complex system. Hundreds, thousands of factors we haven't figured in could be having an effect: cloud dynamics, localized temperature variations, pollution, solar activity. Or it could be something we haven't even considered: the effects of de-icers on highway albedo, beach erosion, the migratory patterns of geese. Or the effect on electromagnetic fields of playing 'White Christmas' hundreds of times on the radio this week.\"\n\n\"Four thousand nine hundred and thirty-three,\" Chin said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That's how many times Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas' is played the two weeks before Christmas, with an additional nine thousand and sixty-two times by other artists. Including Otis Redding, U2, Peggy Lee, the Three Tenors, and the Flaming Lips. I read it on the Internet.\"\n\n\"Nine thousand and sixty-two,\" Nathan said. \"That's certainly enough to affect something, all right.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean,\" Chin said. \"Have you heard Eminem's new rap version?\"\n\nBy 4:15 P.M., the spaghetti pot was two thirds full of goose grease, Luke's mother and Madge and Shorty still weren't there, and the goose was nearly done. Luke and Lulla had decided after their third glass of wine apiece to make the gravy.\n\n\"And put the tent back on,\" Lulla said, sifting flour into a bowl. \"One of the things I learned when I was playing the West End is that uncovered is not necessarily better.\" She added a cup of water. \"Particularly when you're doing Shakespeare.\"\n\nShe shook in some salt and pepper. \"I remember a particularly ill-conceived nude Macbeth I did with Larry Olivier.\" She thrust her hand out dramatically. \" 'Is this a dagger which I see before me?' should not be a laugh line. Richard taught me how to do this,\" she said, stirring the mixture briskly with a fork. \"It gets the lumps out.\"\n\n\"Richard? Richard Burton?\"\n\n\"Yes. Adorable man. Of course he drank like a fish when he was depressed\u2014this was after Liz left him for the second time\u2014but it never seemed to affect his performance in bed or in the kitchen. Not like Peter.\"\n\n\"Peter? Peter Ustinov?\"\n\n\"O'Toole. Here we go.\" Lulla poured the flour mixture into the hot drippings. It disappeared. \"It takes a moment to thicken up,\" she said hopefully, but after several minutes of combined staring into the pot, it was no thicker.\n\n\"I think we need more flour,\" she said, \"and a larger bowl. A much larger bowl. And another glass of wine.\"\n\nLuke fetched them, and after a good deal of stirring, she added the mixture to the drippings, which immediately began to thicken up. \"Oh, good,\" she said, stirring. \"As John Gielgud used to say, 'If at first you don't succeed\u2026' Oh, dear.\"\n\n\"What did he say that for\u2014 Oh, dear,\" Luke said, peering into the pot where the drippings had abruptly thickened into a solid, globular mass.\n\n\"That's not what gravy's supposed to look like,\" Aunt Lulla said.\n\n\"No,\" Luke said. \"We seem to have made a lard ball.\"\n\nThey both looked at it awhile.\n\n\"I don't suppose we could pass it off as a very large dumpling,\" Aunt Lulla suggested.\n\n\"No,\" Luke said, trying to chop at it with the fork.\n\n\"And I don't suppose it'll go down the garbage disposal. Could we stick sesame seeds on it and hang it on a tree and pretend it was a suet ball for the birds?\"\n\n\"Not unless we want PETA and the Humane Society after us. Besides, wouldn't that be cannibalism?\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Aunt Lulla said. \"But we've got to do something with it before your mother gets here. I suppose Yucca Mountain's too far away,\" she said thoughtfully. \"You wouldn't have any acid on hand, would you?\"\n\nAt 4:23 P.M., Slim Rushmore, on KFLG out of Flagstaff, Arizona, made a valiant effort to change the subject on his talk radio show to school vouchers, usually a surefire issue, but his callers weren't having any of it. \"This snow is a clear sign the Apocalypse is near,\" a woman from Colorado Springs informed him. \"In the Book of Daniel, it says that God will send snow 'to purge and to make them white, even to the time of the end,' and the Book of Psalms promises us 'snow and vapours, stormy wind fulfilling his word,' and in the Book of Isaiah\u2026\"\n\nAfter the fourth Scripture (from Job: \"For God saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth\") Slim cut her off and took a call from Dwayne in Poplar Bluffs.\n\n\"You know what started all this, don't you?\" Dwayne said belligerently. \"When the commies put fluoride in the water back in the fifties.\"\n\nAt 4:25 P.M., the country club called the church to say they were closing, none of the food and only two of the staff could get there, and anybody who was still trying to have a wedding in this weather was crazy. \"I'll tell her,\" Paula said, and went to find Stacey.\n\n\"She's in putting on her wedding dress,\" the viola player said.\n\nPaula moaned.\n\n\"Yeah, I know,\" he said. \"I tried to explain to her that the rest of the quartet was not coming, but I didn't get anywhere.\" He looked at her quizzically. \"I'm not getting anywhere with you either, am I?\" he asked, and Jim walked in.\n\nHe was covered in snow. \"The car got stuck,\" he said.\n\n\"Where are Kindra and David?\"\n\n\"They closed Houston,\" he said, pulling Paula aside, \"and Newark. And I just talked to Stacey's mom. She's stuck in Lavoy. They just closed the highway. There's no way she can get here. What are we going to do?\"\n\n\"You have to tell her the wedding has to be called off,\" Paula said. \"You don't have any other option. And you have to do it now, before the guests try to come to the church.\"\n\n\"You obviously haven't been out there lately,\" he said. \"Trust me, nobody's going to come out in that.\"\n\n\"Then you obviously have to cancel.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said worriedly. \"It's just\u2026she'll be so disappointed.\"\n\n\"Disappointed\" is not the word that springs to mind, Paula thought, and realized she had no idea how Stacey would react. She'd never seen her not get her way. I wonder what she'll do, she thought curiously, and started back into the vestry to change out of her maid-of-honor dress.\n\n\"Wait,\" Jim said, grabbing her hand. \"You have to help me tell her.\"\n\nThis is asking way too much, Paula thought. I want you to marry me, not her. \"I\u2014\" she said.\n\n\"I can't do this without you,\" he said. \"Please?\"\n\nShe extricated her hand. \"Okay,\" she said, and they went into the changing room, where Stacey was in her wedding dress, looking at herself in the mirror.\n\n\"Stacey, we have to talk,\" Jim said, after a glance at Paula. \"I just heard from your mother. She's not going to be able to get here. She's stuck at a truck stop outside Lavoy.\"\n\n\"She can't be,\" Stacey said to her reflection. \"She's bringing my veil.\" She turned to smile at Paula. \"It was my great-grandmother's. It's lace, with this snowflake pattern.\"\n\n\"Kindra and David can't get here, either,\" Jim said. He glanced at Paula and then plunged ahead. \"We're going to have to reschedule the wedding.\"\n\n\"Reschedule?\" Stacey said as if she'd never heard the word before. Which she probably hasn't, Paula thought. \"We can't reschedule. A Christmas Eve wedding has to be on Christmas Eve.\"\n\n\"I know, honey, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Nobody's going to be able to get here,\" Paula said. \"They've closed the roads.\"\n\nThe minister came in. \"The governor's declared a snow emergency and a ban on unnecessary travel. You've decided to cancel?\" she said hopefully.\n\n\"Cancel?\" Stacey said, adjusting her train. \"What are you talking about? Everything will be fine.\"\n\nAnd for one mad moment, Paula could almost see Stacey pulling it off, the weather magically clearing, the rest of the string quartet showing up, the flowers and Kindra and David and the veil all arriving in the next thirty-five minutes. She looked over at the windows. The snow, reflected softly in the candlelight, was coming down harder than ever.\n\n\"We don't have any other choice than to reschedule,\" Jim said. \"Your mother can't get here, your bridesmaids and my best man can't get here\u2014\"\n\n\"Tell them to take a different flight,\" Stacey said.\n\nPaula tried. \"Stacey, I don't think you realize, this is a major snowstorm. Airports all over the country are closed\u2014\"\n\n\"Including here,\" the viola player said, poking his head in. \"It was just on the news.\"\n\n\"Well, then, go get them,\" Stacey said, adjusting the drape of her skirt.\n\nPaula'd lost the thread of this conversation. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Kindra and David.\" She adjusted the neckline of her gown.\n\n\"To Houston?\" Jim said, looking helplessly at Paula.\n\n\"Listen, Stacey,\" Paula said, taking her firmly by the shoulders, \"I know how much you wanted a Christmas Eve wedding, but it's just not going to work. The roads are impassable. Your flowers are in a ditch, your mother's trapped at a truck stop\u2014\"\n\n\"The cello player's in the hospital with frostbite,\" the viola player put in.\n\nPaula nodded. \"And you don't want anyone else to end up there. You have to face facts. You can't have a Christmas Eve wedding.\"\n\n\"You could reschedule for Valentine's Day,\" the minister said brightly. \"Valentine weddings are very nice. I've got two weddings that day, but I could move one up. It could still be in the evening,\" but Paula could tell Stacey had stopped listening at \"You can't have\u2014\"\n\n\"You did this,\" Stacey snapped at Paula. \"You've always been jealous of me, and now you're taking it out on me by ruining my wedding.\"\n\n\"Nobody's ruining anything, Stacey,\" Jim said, stepping between them. \"It's a snowstorm.\"\n\n\"Oh, so I suppose it's my fault!\" Stacey said. \"Just because I wanted a winter wedding with snow\u2014\"\n\n\"It's nobody's fault,\" Jim said sternly. \"Listen, I don't want to wait, either, and we don't have to. We can get married right here, right now.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" the viola player said. \"You've got a minister.\" He grinned at Paula. \"You've got two witnesses.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Jim said. \"We've got everything we need right here. You're here, I'm here, and that's all that really matters, isn't it, not some fancy wedding?\" He took her hands in his. \"Will you marry me?\"\n\nAnd what woman could resist an offer like that? Paula thought. Oh, well, you knew when you got on the plane that he was going to marry her.\n\n\"Marry you,\" Stacey repeated blankly, and the minister hurried out, saying, \"I'll get my book. And my robe.\"\n\n\"Marry you?\" Stacey said. \"Marry you?\" She wrenched free of his grasp. \"Why on earth would I marry a loser who won't even do one simple thing for me? I want Kindra and David here. I want my flowers. I want my veil. What is the point of marrying you if I can't have what I want?\"\n\n\"I thought you wanted me,\" Jim said dangerously.\n\n\"You?\" Stacey said in a tone that made both Paula and the viola player wince. \"I wanted to walk down the aisle at twilight on Christmas Eve\"\u2014she waved her arm in the direction of the windows\u2014\"with candlelight reflecting off the windowpanes and snow falling outside.\" She turned, snatching up her train, and looked at him. \"Will I marry you? Are you kidding?\"\n\nThere was a short silence. Jim turned and looked seriously at Paula. \"How about you?\" he said.\n\nAt six o'clock on the dot, Madge and Shorty, Uncle Don, Cousin Denny, and Luke's mom all arrived. \"You poor darling,\" she whispered to Luke, handing him the green bean casserole and the sweet potatoes, \"stuck all afternoon with Aunt Lulla. Did she talk your ear off?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"We made a snowman. Why didn't you tell me Aunt Lulla had been an actress?\"\n\n\"An actress?\" she said, handing him the cranberry sauce. \"Is that what she told you? Don't tip it, it'll spill. Did you have any trouble with the goose?\" She opened the oven and looked at it, sitting in its pan, brown and crispy and done to a turn. \"They tend to be a little juicy.\"\n\n\"Not a bit,\" he said, looking past her out the window at the snowman in the backyard. The snow he and Aunt Lulla had packed around and on top of it was melting. He'd have to sneak out during dinner and pack more snow on.\n\n\"Here,\" his mom said, handing him the mashed potatoes. \"Heat these up in the microwave while I make the gravy.\"\n\n\"It's made,\" he said, lifting the lid off the saucepan to show her the gently bubbling gravy. It had taken them four tries, but as Aunt Lulla had pointed out, they had more than enough drippings to experiment with, and, as she had also pointed out, three lardballs made a more realistic snowman.\n\n\"The top one's too big,\" Luke had said, scooping up snow to cover it with.\n\n\"I may have gotten a little carried away with the flour,\" Aunt Lulla had admitted. \"On the other hand, it looks exactly like Orson.\" She stuck two olives in for eyes. \"And so appropriate. He always was a fathead.\"\n\n\"The gravy smells delicious,\" Luke's mother said, looking surprised. \"You didn't make it, did you?\"\n\n\"No. Aunt Lulla.\"\n\n\"Well, I think you're a saint for putting up with her and her wild tales all afternoon,\" she said, ladling the gravy into a bowl and handing it to Luke.\n\n\"You mean she made all that stuff up?\" Luke said.\n\n\"Do you have a gravy boat?\" his mother asked, opening cupboards.\n\n\"No,\" he said. \"Aunt Lulla wasn't really an actress?\"\n\n\"No.\" She took a bowl out of the cupboard. \"Do you have a ladle?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe got a dipper out of the silverware drawer. \"Lulla was never in a single play,\" she said, ladling the gravy into a bowl and handing it to Luke, \"where she hadn't gotten the part by sleeping with somebody. Lionel Barrymore, Ralph Richardson, Kenneth Branagh\u2026\" She opened the oven to look at the goose. \"\u2026and that's not even counting Alfred.\"\n\n\"Alfred Lunt?\" Luke asked.\n\n\"Hitchcock. I think this is just about done.\"\n\n\"But I thought you said she was the shy one.\"\n\n\"She was. That's why she went out for drama in high school, to overcome her shyness. Do you have a platter?\"\n\nAt 6:35 P.M., a member of the Breckenridge ski patrol, out looking for four missing cross-country skiers, spotted a taillight (the only part of Kent and Bodine's Honda not covered by snow). He had a collapsible shovel with him, and a GPS, a satellite phone, a walkie-talkie, Mylar blankets, insta-heat packs, energy bars, a thermos of hot cocoa, and a stern lecture on winter safety, which he delivered after he had dug Kent and Bodine out and which they really resented. \"Who did that fascist geek think he was, shaking his finger at us like that?\" Bodine asked Kent after several tequila slammers at the Laughing Moose.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Kent said eloquently, and they settled down to the serious business of how to take advantage of the fresh powder that had fallen while they were in their car.\n\n\"You know what'd be totally extreme?\" Bodine said. \"Snowboarding at night!\"\n\nShara was quite a girl. Warren didn't have a chance to call Marjean again until after seven. When Shara went in the bathroom, he took the opportunity to dial home. \"Where are you?\" Marjean said, practically crying. \"I've been worried sick! Are you all right?\"\n\n\"I'm still in Cincinnati at the airport,\" he said, \"and it looks like I'll be here all night. They just closed the airport.\"\n\n\"Closed the airport\u2026\" she echoed.\n\n\"I know,\" he said, his voice full of regret. \"I'd really counted on being home with you for Christmas Eve, but what can you do? It's snowing like crazy here. No flights out till tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. I'm in line at the airline counter right now, rebooking, and then I'm going to try to find a place to stay, but I don't know if I'll have much luck.\" He paused to give her a chance to commiserate. \"They're supposed to put us up for the night, but I wouldn't be surprised if I end up sleeping on the floor.\"\n\n\"At the airport,\" she said, \"in Cincinnati.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He laughed. \"Great place to spend Christmas Eve, huh?\" He paused to give her a chance to commiserate, but all she said was, \"You didn't make it home last year, either.\"\n\n\"Honey, you know I'd get there if I could,\" he said. \"I tried to rent a car and drive home, but the snow's so bad they're not even sure they can get a shuttle out here to take us to a hotel. I don't know how much snow they've had here\u2014\"\n\n\"Forty-six inches,\" she said.\n\nGood, he thought. From her voice he'd been worried it might not be snowing in Cincinnati after all. \"And it's still coming down hard. Oh, they just called my name. I'd better go.\"\n\n\"You do that,\" she said.\n\n\"All right. I love you, honey,\" he said, \"I'll be home as soon as I can,\" and hung up the phone.\n\n\"You're married,\" Shara said, standing in the door of the bathroom. \"You sonuvabitch.\"\n\nPaula didn't say yes to Jim's proposal after all. She'd intended to, but before she could, the viola player had cut in. \"Hey, wait a minute!\" he'd said. \"I saw her first!\"\n\n\"You did not,\" Jim said.\n\n\"Well, no, not technically,\" he admitted, \"but when I did see her, I had the good sense to flirt with her, not get engaged to Vampira like you did.\"\n\n\"It wasn't Jim's fault,\" Paula said. \"Stacey always gets what she wants.\"\n\n\"Not this time,\" he said. \"And not me.\"\n\n\"Only because she doesn't want you,\" Paula said. \"If she did\u2014\"\n\n\"Wanna bet? You underestimate us musicians. And yourself. At least give me a chance to make my pitch before you commit to this guy. You can't get married tonight anyway.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" Jim asked.\n\n\"Because you need two witnesses, and I have no intention of helping you,\" he pointed at Jim, \"get the woman I want. I doubt if Stacey's in the mood to be a witness, either,\" he said as Stacey stormed back in the sanctuary, with the minister in pursuit. Stacey had on her wedding dress, a parka, and boots.\n\n\"You can't go out in this,\" the minister was saying. \"It's too dangerous!\"\n\n\"I have no intention of staying here with him,\" Stacey said, shooting Jim a venomous glance. \"I want to go home now.\" She flung the door open on the thickly falling snow. \"And I want it to stop snowing!\"\n\nAt that exact moment, a snowplow's flashing yellow lights appeared through the snow, and Stacey ran out. Paula and Jim went over to the door and watched Stacey wave it down and get in. The plow continued on its way.\n\n\"Oh, good, now we'll be able to get out,\" the minister said, and went to get her car keys.\n\n\"You didn't answer my question, Paula,\" Jim said, standing very close.\n\nThe plow turned and came back. As it passed, it plowed a huge mass of snow across the end of the driveway.\n\n\"I mean it,\" Jim murmured. \"How about it?\"\n\n\"Look what I found,\" the viola player said, appearing at Paula's elbow. He handed her a piece of wedding cake.\n\n\"You can't eat that. It's\u2014\" Jim said.\n\n\"\u2014not bad,\" the viola player said. \"I prefer chocolate, though. What kind of cake shall we have at our wedding, Paula?\"\n\n\"Oh, look,\" the minister said, coming back in with her car keys and looking out the window. \"It's stopped snowing.\"\n\n\"It's stopped snowing,\" Chin said.\n\n\"It has?\" Nathan looked up from his keyboard. \"Here?\"\n\n\"No. In Oceanside, Oregon. And in Springfield, Illinois.\"\n\nNathan found them on the map. Two thousand miles apart. He checked their barometer readings, temperatures, snowfall amounts. No similarity. Springfield had thirty-two inches, Oceanside an inch and a half. And in every single town around them, it was still snowing hard. In Tillamook, six miles away, it was coming down at the rate of five inches an hour.\n\nBut ten minutes later, Chin reported the snow stopping in Gillette, Wyoming; Roulette, Massachusetts; and Saginaw, Michigan, and within half an hour the number of stations reporting in was over thirty, though they seemed just as randomly scattered all over the map as the storm's beginning had been.\n\n\"Maybe it has to do with their names,\" Chin said.\n\n\"Their names?\" Nathan said.\n\n\"Yeah. Look at this. It's stopped in Joker, West Virginia; Bluff, Utah; and Blackjack, Georgia.\"\n\nAt 7:22 P.M., the snow began to taper off in Wendover, Utah. Neither the Lucky Lady Casino nor the Big Nugget had any windows, so the event went unnoticed until Barbara Gomez, playing the quarter slots, ran out of money at 9:05 P.M. and had to go out to her car to get the emergency twenty she kept taped under the dashboard. By this time, the snow had nearly stopped. Barbara told the change girl, who said, \"Oh, good. I was worried about driving to Battle Mountain tomorrow. Were the plows out?\"\n\nBarbara said she didn't know and asked for four rolls of nickels, which she promptly lost playing video poker.\n\nBy 7:30 P.M. CNBC had replaced its logo with Digging Out, and ABC had retreated to Bing and White Christmas, though CNN still had side-by-side experts discussing the possibility of a new ice age, and on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera was intoning, \"In his classic poem 'Fire and Ice,' Robert Frost speculated that the world might end in ice. Today we are seeing the coming true of that dire prediction\u2014\"\n\nThe rest had obviously gotten the word, though, and CBS and the WB had both gone back to their regular programming. The movie White Christmas was on AMC.\n\n\"Whatever this was, it's stopping,\" Nathan said, watching \"I-80 now open from Lincoln to Ogalallah,\" scroll across the bottom of NBC's screen.\n\n\"Well, whatever you do, don't tell those corporate guys,\" Chin said, and, as if on cue, one of the businessmen Nathan had met with that morning called.\n\n\"I just wanted you to know we've voted to approve your grant,\" he said.\n\n\"Really? Thank you,\" Nathan said, trying to ignore Chin, who was mouthing, \"Are they giving us the money?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he mouthed back.\n\nChin scribbled down something and shoved it in front of Nathan. \"Get it in writing,\" it said.\n\n\"We all agreed this discontinuity thing is worth studying,\" the businessman said, then, shakily, \"They've been talking on TV about the end of the world. You don't think this discontinuity thing is that bad, do you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nathan said, \"in fact\u2014\"\n\n\"Ix-nay, ix-nay,\" Chin mouthed, wildly crossing his arms.\n\nNathan glared at him. \"\u2014we're not even sure yet if it is a discontinuity. It doesn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, we're not taking any chances,\" the businessman said. \"What's your fax number? I want to send you that confirmation before the power goes out over here. We want you to get started working on this thing as soon as you can.\"\n\nNathan gave him the number. \"There's really no need\u2014\" he said.\n\nChin jabbed his finger violently at the logo False Alarm on the screen of Adler's TV.\n\n\"Consider it a Christmas present,\" the businessman said, and the fax machine began to whir. \"There is going to be a Christmas, isn't there?\"\n\nChin yanked the fax out of the machine with a whoop.\n\n\"Definitely,\" Nathan said. \"Merry Christmas,\" but the businessman had already hung up.\n\nChin was still looking at the fax.\n\n\"How much did you ask them for?\"\n\n\"Fifty thousand,\" Nathan said.\n\nChin slapped the grant approval down in front of him. \"And a merry Christmas to you, too,\" he said.\n\nAt 7:40 P.M., after watching infomercials for NordicTrack, a combination egg poacher and waffle iron, and the revolutionary new DuckBed, Bev put on her thin coat and her still-damp gloves and went downstairs. There had to be a restaurant open somewhere in Santa Fe. She would find one and have a margarita and a beef chimichanga, sitting in a room decorated with sombreros or pi\u00f1atas, with striped curtains pulled across the windows to shut the snow out.\n\nAnd if they were all closed, she would come back and order from room service. Or starve. But she was not going to ask at the desk and have them phone ahead and tell her El Charito had closed early because of the weather; she was not going to let them cut off all avenues of escape, like Carmelita. She walked determinedly past the registration desk toward the double doors.\n\n\"Mrs. Carey!\" the clerk called to her, and when she kept walking, he hurried around the desk and across the lobby to her. \"I have a message for you from Carmelita. She wanted me to tell you midnight mass at the cathedral has been canceled,\" he said. \"The bishop was worried about people driving home on the icy roads. But Carmelita said to tell you they're having mass at eight o'clock, if you'd like to come to that. The cathedral's right up the street at the end of the Plaza. If you go out the north door,\" he pointed, \"it's only two blocks. It's a very pretty service, with the luminarias and all.\"\n\nAnd it's somewhere to go, Bev thought, letting him lead her to the north door. It's something to do. \"Tell Carmelita thank you for me,\" she said at the door. \"And Feliz Navidad.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas.\" He opened the door. \"You go down this street, turn left, and it's right there,\" he said, and ducked back inside, out of the snow.\n\nIt was inches deep on the sidewalk, and snowing hard as she hurried along the narrow street, head down. By morning it would look just like back home. It's not fair, she thought. She turned the corner and looked up at the sound of an organ.\n\nThe cathedral stood at the head of the Plaza, its windows glowing like flames, and she had been wrong about the luminarias being ruined\u2014they stood in rows leading up the walk, up the steps to the wide doors, lining the adobe walls and the roofs and the towers, burning steadily in the descending snow.\n\nIt fell silently, in great, spangled flakes, glittering in the light of the streetlamps, covering the wooden-posted porches, the pots of cactus, the pink adobe buildings. The sky above the cathedral was pink, too, and the whole scene had an unreal quality, like a movie set.\n\n\"Oh, Howard,\" Bev said, as if she had just opened a present, and then flinched away from the thought of him, waiting for the thrust of the knife, but it didn't come. She felt only regret that he couldn't be here to see this, and amusement that the sequined snowflakes sifting down on her hair, on her coat sleeve, looked just like the fake snow at the end of White Christmas. And, arching over it all, like the pink sky, she felt affection\u2014for the snow, for the moment, for Howard.\n\n\"You did this,\" she said, and started to cry.\n\nThe tears didn't trickle down her cheeks, they poured out, drenching her face, her coat, melting the snowflakes instantly where they fell. Healing tears, she thought, and realized suddenly that when she had asked Howard how the movie ended, he hadn't said, \"They lived happily ever after.\" He had said, \"They got a white Christmas.\"\n\n\"Oh, Howard.\"\n\nThe bells for the service began to ring. I need to stop crying and go in, she thought, fumbling for a tissue, but she couldn't. The tears kept coming, as if someone had opened a spigot.\n\nA black-shawled woman carrying a prayer book put her hand on Bev's shoulder and said, \"Are you all right, se\u00f1ora?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Bev said, \"I'll be fine,\" and something in her voice must have reassured the woman because she patted Bev's arm and went on into the cathedral.\n\nThe bells stopped ringing and the organ began again, but Bev continued to stand there until long after the mass had started, looking up at the falling snow.\n\n\"I don't know how you did this, Howard,\" she said, \"but I know you're responsible.\"\n\nAt 8 P.M., after anxiously checking the news to make sure the roads were still closed, Pilar put Miguel to bed. \"Now go to sleep,\" she said, kissing him good night. \"Santa's coming soon.\"\n\n\"Hunh-unh,\" he said, looking like he was going to cry. \"It's snowing too hard.\"\n\nHe's worried about the roads being closed, she thought. \"Santa doesn't need roads,\" she said. \"Remember, he has a magic sleigh that flies through the air even if it's snowing.\"\n\n\"Hunh-unh,\" he said, getting out of bed to get his Rudolph book. He showed her the illustration of the whirling blizzard and Santa shaking his head, and then stood up on his bed, pulled back the curtain, and pointed through the window. She had to admit it did look just like the picture.\n\n\"But he had Rudolph to show the way,\" she said. \"See?\" and turned the page, but he continued to look skeptical until she had read the book all the way through twice.\n\nAt 10:15 P.M. Warren Nesvick went down to the hotel's bar. He had tried to explain to Shara that Marjean was his five-year-old niece, but she had gotten completely unreasonable. \"So I'm a canceled flight out of Cincinnati, am I?\" she'd shouted. \"Well, I'm canceling you, you bastard!\" and slammed out, leaving him high and dry. On Christmas Eve, for Christ's sake.\n\nHe'd spent the next hour and a half on the phone. He'd called some women he knew from previous trips, but none of them had answered. He'd then tried to call Marjean to tell her the snow was letting up and United thought they could get him on standby early tomorrow morning and to try to patch things up\u2014she'd seemed kind of upset\u2014but she hadn't answered, either. She'd probably gone to bed.\n\nHe'd hung up and gone down to the bar. There wasn't a soul in the place except the bartender. \"How come the place is so dead?\" Warren asked him.\n\n\"Where the hell have you been?\" the bartender said, and turned on the TV above the bar.\n\n\"\u2026most widespread snowstorm in recorded history,\" Dan Abrams was saying. \"Although there are signs of the snow beginning to let up here in Baltimore, in other parts of the country they weren't so lucky. We take you now to Cincinnati, where emergency crews are still digging victims out of the rubble.\"\n\nIt cut to a reporter standing in front of a sign that read \"Cincinnati International Airport.\" \"A record forty-six inches of snow caused the roof of the main terminal to collapse this afternoon. Over two hundred passengers were injured, and forty are still missing.\"\n\nThe goose was a huge hit, crispy and tender and done to a turn, and everyone raved about the gravy. \"Luke made it,\" Aunt Lulla said, but Madge and his mom were talking about people not knowing how to drive in snow and didn't hear her.\n\nIt stopped snowing midway through dessert, and Luke began to worry about the snowman but didn't have a chance to duck out and check on it till nearly eleven, when everyone was putting on their coats.\n\nIt had melted (sort of), leaving a round greasy smear in the snow. \"Getting rid of the evidence?\" Aunt Lulla asked, coming up behind him in her old-lady coat, scarf, gloves, and plastic boots. She poked at the smear with the toe of her boot. \"I hope it doesn't kill the grass.\"\n\n\"I hope it doesn't affect the environment,\" Luke said.\n\nLuke's mother appeared in the back door. \"What are you two doing out there in the dark?\" she called to them. \"Come in. We're trying to decide who's going to have the dinner next Christmas. Madge and Shorty think it's Uncle Don's turn, but\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll have it,\" Luke said, and winked at Lulla.\n\n\"Oh,\" his mother said, surprised, and went back inside to tell Madge and Shorty and the others.\n\n\"But not goose,\" Luke said to Lulla. \"Something easy. And nonfat.\"\n\n\"Ian had a wonderful recipe for duck \u00e1 l'orange Alsacienne, as I remember,\" Lulla mused.\n\n\"Ian McKellen?\"\n\n\"No, of course not, Ian Holm. Ian McKellen's a terrible cook,\" she said. \"Or\u2014I've got an idea. How about Japanese blowfish?\"\n\nBy 11:15 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the snow had stopped in New England, the Middle East, the Texas panhandle, most of Canada, and Nooseneck, Rhode Island.\n\n\"The storm of the century definitely seems to be winding down,\" Wolf Blitzer was saying in front of CNN's new logo: The Sun'll Come Out Tomorrow, \"leaving in its wake a white Christmas for nearly everyone\u2014\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Chin said, handing Nathan the latest batch of temp readings. \"I just thought of what it was.\"\n\n\"What what was?\"\n\n\"The factor. You said there were thousands of factors contributing to global warming, and that any one of them, even something really small, could have been what caused this.\"\n\nHe hadn't really said that, but never mind. \"And you've figured out what this critical factor is?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Chin said. \"A white Christmas.\"\n\n\"A white Christmas,\" Nathan repeated.\n\n\"Yeah! You know how everybody wants it to snow for Christmas, little kids especially, but lots of adults, too. They have this Currier-and-Ives thing of what Christmas should look like, and the songs reinforce it: 'White Christmas' and 'Winter Wonderland' and that one that goes, 'The weather outside is frightful,' I never can remember the name\u2014\"\n\n\" 'Let It Snow,' \" Nathan said.\n\n\"Exactly,\" Chin said. \"Well, suppose all those people and all those little kids wished for a merry Christmas at the same time\u2014\"\n\n\"They wished this snowstorm into being?\" Nathan said.\n\n\"No. They thought about it, and their\u2014I don't know, their brain chemicals or synapses or something\u2014created some kind of electrochemical field or something, and that's the factor.\"\n\n\"That everybody was dreaming of a white Christmas.\"\n\n\"Yeah. It's a possibility, right?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Nathan said. Maybe there was some critical factor that had caused this. Not wishing for a white Christmas, of course, but something seemingly unconnected to weather patterns, like tiny variations in the earth's orbit. Or the migratory patterns of geese.\n\nOr an assortment of factors working in combination. And maybe the storm was an isolated incident, an aberration caused by a confluence of these unidentified factors, and would never happen again.\n\nOr maybe his discontinuity theory was wrong. A discontinuity was by definition an abrupt, unexpected event. But that didn't mean there might not be advance indicators, like the warning flickers of electric lights before the power goes off for good. In which case\u2014\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Chin said, coming in from scraping his windshield. \"Aren't you going home?\"\n\n\"Not yet. I want to run a couple more extrapolation sets. It's still snowing in L.A.\"\n\nChin looked immediately alarmed. \"You don't think it's going to start snowing everywhere again, do you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Nathan said. Not yet.\n\nAt 11:43 P.M., after singing several karaoke numbers at the Laughing Moose, including \"White Christmas,\" and telling the bartender they were going on \"a moonlight ride down this totally killer chute,\" Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps set out with their snowboards for an off-limits, high-avalanche-danger area near Vail and were never heard from again.\n\nAt 11:52 P.M., Miguel jumped on his sound-asleep mother, shouting, \"It's Christmas! It's Christmas!\"\n\nIt can't be morning yet, Pilar thought groggily, fumbling to look at the clock. \"Miguel, honey, it's still nighttime. If you're not in bed when Santa comes, he won't leave you any presents,\" she said, hustling him back to bed. She tucked him in. \"Now go to sleep. Santa and Rudolph will be here soon.\"\n\n\"Hunh-unh,\" he said, and stood up on his bed. He pulled the curtain back. \"He doesn't need Rudolph. The snow stopped, just like I wanted, and now Santa can come all by himself.\" He pointed out the window. Only a few isolated flakes were still sifting down.\n\nOh, no, Pilar thought. After she was sure he was asleep, she crept out to the living room and turned on the TV very low, hoping against hope.\n\n\"\u2014roads will remain closed until noon tomorrow,\" an exhausted-looking reporter said, \"to allow time for the snow plows to clear them: I-15, State Highway 56, I-15 from Chula Vista to Murrieta Hot Springs, Highway 78 from Vista to Escondido\u2014\"\n\nThank you, she murmured silently. Thank you.\n\nAt 11:59 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, Sam \"Hoot'n'Holler\" Farley's voice gave out completely. The only person who'd been able to make it to the station, he'd been broadcasting continuously on KTTS, \"Seattle's talk 24/7,\" since 5:36 A.M. when he'd come in to do the morning show, even though he had a bad cold. He'd gotten steadily hoarser all day, and during the 9:00 P.M. newsbreak, he'd had a bad coughing fit.\n\n\"The National Weather Service reports that that big snowstorm's finally letting up,\" he croaked, \"and we'll have nice weather tomorrow. Oh, this just in from NORAD, for all you kids who're up way too late. Santa's sleigh's just been sighted on radar over Vancouver and is headed this way.\"\n\nHe then attempted to say, \"In local news, the snow\u2014\" but nothing came out.\n\nHe tried again. Nothing.\n\nAfter the third try, he gave up, whispered, \"That's all, folks,\" into the mike, and put on a tape of Louis Armstrong singing \"White Christmas.\"" + }, + { + "title": "A Final Word on the Subject", + "text": "As Jo March said in Little Women, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without any presents. The giving and getting of gifts is inextricably bound up with the holiday and the Christmas story\u2014from the Magis' gold, frankincense, and myrrh to the partridge in the pear tree, from the turkey \"bigger than a boy\" that the formerly stingy Scrooge sends the Cratchits to the small bottle of cologne the still-stingy Amy buys for Marmee so she'll have enough money to buy some drawing pencils, from heart's desires like Ralphie's \"Red Ryder repeating carbine with a compass mounted in the stock\" to more symbolic gifts, like Amahl's crutch\u2014and the ham the Herdmans brought the Holy Family.\n\nOur family starts watching Christmas movies the day after Thanksgiving, and over the years we've added so many of them to our list that we're not done by the twenty-fifth and have to keep going straight through to Epiphany.\n\nWhich is kind of a miracle since we don't watch just any old thing (like say, for instance, the sappy movies on the Hallmark Channel or anything with bad Santas or Alvin and the Chipmunks in it). And the list of Christmas movies we loathe is nearly as long as the ones we love. Beginning with Jingle All the Way.\n\nSo this list isn't complete, but it's enough to get you to Christmas, and I'm sure you have your own to add.\n\n1. Miracle on 34th Street: The best Christmas movie ever made. (See Introduction.) I am of course talking about the original, with Natalie Wood and Edmund Gwenn. In black and white. Don't even think about either of the wretched remakes.\n\n2. Love, Actually: Tied for first, and possibly the best Christmas movie ever made because it shows us all sides of the holiday\u2014and all sides of the love that underpins it. It's by turns funny, sad, ironic, ridiculous (Mother: \"First lobster? There was more than one lobster present at the birth of the baby Jesus?\" Daughter: \"Duh.\"), romantic, wincingly painful, and uplifting. And the opening scene at Heathrow contains a Christmas message we could all use right now.\n\n3. A Christmas Story: A close second, this Jean Shepherd story of a boy who desperately wants a BB gun (\"You'll shoot your eye out, kid!\") for Christmas is that rarest of things\u2014nostalgic without a trace of sentimentality. It has a number of hilarious scenes\u2014the tongue stuck to the flagpole, the Bumpus dogs and the turkey, the trip to see the department-store Santa. Pick your favorite. Mine is the Major Award, no, wait, the Ovaltine magic decoder ring, no, wait\u2026.But it's not just a series of comic set pieces. More than any other holiday movie, A Christmas Story captures just how badly you want things when you're a kid and how central Christmas is to the kid's year.\n\n4. The Sure Thing: I almost didn't go see this movie. The preview (and the title) made it look like a beery teen sex movie. But then I noticed that certain scenes looked an awful lot like It Happened One Night and decided to take a chance. Now, every year we watch this great road picture about Alison, who's going to visit her boyfriend for Christmas, and Gib, who's trying to get to California for \"a sure thing\" and who, in classic romantic-comedy fashion, happens to hitch a ride in the same car with Alison.\n\n5. The Miracle of Morgan's Creek: Most movies made during World War II were about brave soldiers and the girls who waited faithfully for them on the home front. Preston Sturges instead decided to tell the story of a girl who goes to an Army dance and ends up getting married (maybe) and pregnant (definitely), and of her 4-F boyfriend, Norval, who tries to help her out of her predicament. But everything they attempt only makes things worse till nothing short of a miracle can save them, and you can't even imagine a miracle that would do any good.\n\n6. The Shop Around the Corner: This Ernst Lubitsch\u2013directed film about the people who work in a little shop in Depression-era Austria is a classic in every sense of the word. Not only does it star Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as pen pals who don't know the other's identity, but it's full of wonderful supporting characters, from Frank Morgan as the cranky boss to the long-suffering Pirovitch and the incorrigible Pepi. And it has Vienna at Christmastime. (NOTE: You can also watch the remake, You've Got Mail, with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, which I like a lot, but the original is better.)\n\n7. A Christmas Carol: The Movies. There are a jillion versions of this, starring everybody from Alastair Sim to Captain Picard to Bill Murray. My two favorites are the Muppets' and Mr. Magoo's. Not only are they the most literarily faithful (okay, okay, the Muppet one has two Marleys, but it also has Charles Dickens as a character\u2014and Rizzo the Rat), but they're the most fun. And they have wonderful scores. The Muppets' songs were written by Paul Williams. Mr. Magoo's were done by the Broadway team of Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, and include the wonderful \"When You're Alone in the World.\"\n\n8. The Santa Clause: I fully expected to hate this movie about a divorced father who accidentally kills Santa Claus and then finds himself legally required to take over for him. It had all the things I despise about modern Christmas movies\u2014big-budget production values, over-elaborate special effects, flatulent-reindeer jokes. And Tim Allen, who I loathed. Until I saw him in Galaxy Quest, where he totally won me over with his smart-mouthed, self-centered portrayal of Captain Jason Nesmith. He won me over in The Santa Clause, too, and so did the whole movie, with its smart-aleck dialogue and its clever twists on an old story, from a second-in-command at the North Pole named Bernard to the Oscar Meyer Weiner pennywhistle. And a team of elf commandos with some unusual weapons: \"Tinsel. Not just for decoration.\"\n\n9. The Homecoming: This TV movie about a West Virginia family coping with the Depression and waiting for their father to come home (if he is coming) was the pilot for the TV series The Waltons. But unlike the series, it doesn't pull any punches about how hard the Depression was\u2014or what it did to families. And to Christmas.\n\n10. Christmas in Connecticut: This 1945 movie about a Martha Stewart\u2013type magazine writer who can't actually cook and a sailor whose ship was torpedoed and who spent eighteen days on a raft dreaming of food not only has Barbara Stanwyck, but Sydney Greenstreet, Dennis Morgan, and \"Cuddles\" Sakall as her Uncle Felix, who's worth watching this movie for all by himself, especially the scene at the smorgasbord where Barbara's agreed to marry a man she doesn't love and he's telling her why she's made a good decision, as Felix, under the guise of filling a plate for her, tells her (and us) exactly how he feels about the situation: \"Bologna\u2026horseradish\u2026nuts.\"\n\n11. Amahl and the Night Visitors: This one-act opera by Gian Carlo Menotti about the wise men stopping at a poor widow's on their way to Bethlehem was originally produced for television. It's out on video, but, even better, it's often performed at Christmas by churches, colleges, and community theater groups, and I definitely recommend seeing it live. The story is haunting, the music is heartbreaking, and every production adds something to the simple story of the crippled shepherd boy, his embittered mother, and their distinguished visitors.\n\n12. While You Were Sleeping: This sweet and romantic comedy with Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman is about the loony complications that can result from being all alone at Christmastime and wishing you were part of a family.\n\n13. 3 Godfathers: A Christmas story in the last place you'd ever expect to find one\u2014a John Ford Western starring John Wayne\u20143 Godfathers tells the story of three bank robbers who find a pioneer woman about to give birth in a godforsaken place. This is the perfect movie to watch when you've overdosed on mistletoe and Santas and snow, and it may introduce you to John Ford's Westerns and convince you to go on to Stagecoach, Fort Apache, and The Searchers.\n\n14. Off Season: Set at a rundown motel in Florida, Off Season doesn't look at all like a Christmas movie, and at first it doesn't feel like one, but this story of a little boy who thinks the old man living at their rundown Florida hotel is really Santa Claus is great. Santa's actually a con man wanted in several states\u2014or is he? Either way, he's Hume Cronyn, who's terrific.\n\n15. Home Alone: However you feel about John Hughes, and yes, he is capable of exactly the kind of schmaltz I've railed against, or about Three Stooges humor (in this case, two stooges, both of them incredibly dumb), this is a great movie about our complicated relationships with our families. And the song \"Somewhere in My Memory\" (which I think should be a Christmas classic) and the scene in the church are worth the price of admission all by themselves.\n\n16. Meet John Doe: Frank Capra's other Christmas movie\u2014you know the one I mean\u2014is a lot more famous than this one (and shown approximately 987 times a day through the entire month of December), but this one, which stars Gary Cooper as a down-and-out hobo and Barbara Stanwyck as an enterprising reporter, is really interesting, especially in these days of religious cults, hungry-for-power politicians, a rampant press, and even more rampant cynicism.\n\n17. Elf: Having seen only the annoying Will Ferrell, I had to be talked into going to see this movie, but now it's one of our favorites, mostly because of the aforesaid Mr. Ferrell, who plays the role of Buddy the Elf absolutely straight, without a hint of irony or \"Isn't this ridiculous?\" Zooey Deschanel is wonderful, and the movie's full of great lines, from \"The yellow ones don't stop\" to \"I passed through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, through the sea of swirly-twirly gumdrops, and then I walked through the Lincoln Tunnel.\" And Gimbel's finally gets its chance to compete with Macy's!\n\n18. Bachelor Mother: No Christmas is complete without Ginger Rogers, who here is a department store employee who spots a baby being left on an orphanage doorstep and tries to rescue it. But in this world no good deed goes unpunished, so she finds herself labeled the mother, and the harder she tries to straighten out the mess, the worse it gets. The movie also stars Charles Coburn, who has my favorite line in any movie ever\u2014\"I don't care who the baby's father is. I'm the grandfather!\" and David Niven, whose life was saved during World War II by this movie. During the Battle of the Bulge, he was working for British Intelligence when he was stopped by an armed American sentry. \"Who won the World Series?\" the sentry asked, posing a question that German spies couldn't answer. \"I have no idea,\" Niven replied, \"but I did star with Ginger Rogers in Bachelor Mother.\" It did the trick. The sentry let him through.\n\n19. About a Boy: Hugh Grant stars as a man who's stuck in perpetual adolescence (thanks to his father, who wrote a Christmas song that allows him to live off the royalties)\u2014until he meets a boy with a suicidal mother. The script is by Nick Hornby, whom I adore. 'Nuff said?\n\n20. Meet Me in St. Louis: Except for the ending, this isn't really a Christmas movie\u2014we sometimes watch it in October instead because of its wonderful Halloween scene\u2014but it has one of the all-time-great Christmas songs in it\u2014\"Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas\"\u2014and its theme of a Christmas marked by partings and sadness is one that makes the movie truly memorable.\n\n21. The Lemon Drop Kid: Not only is this based on a Damon Runyon story (see comments on Runyon under \"Dancing Dan's Christmas\"), but it has Bob Hope. And the song \"Silver Bells.\"\n\n22. Spotlight: This Oscar-winning picture about the team of Boston Globe reporters who exposed a far-reaching scandal in the Catholic Church isn't technically a Christmas movie, though it takes place during the holidays, and its subject matter is heavier than that of the other films on this list. But its theme\u2014truth and justice fighting against seemingly overwhelming odds\u2014is entirely appropriate for the season. And more timely than ever.\n\n23. Little Women: This isn't a Christmas movie, either, but it starts out at Christmas, and the book has one of the great Christmas-story first lines ever, the aforementioned \" 'Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents,' grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.\" Plus, I watched it every Christmas when I was a kid. There are three versions to choose from. The one I grew up on was the June Allyson one (with Elizabeth Taylor perfectly cast as snotty Amy). The Katharine Hepburn version is generally acknowledged to be the best, but my personal favorite is the new one with Winona Ryder and Kirsten Dunst. Or you could watch them all.\n\n24. And finally, White Christmas: I know, I know, it's a complete clich\u00e9. And by rights, it should have been a disaster. In the first place, it was a sequel (to Holiday Inn, which isn't nearly as good), and was written solely to capitalize on the success of the song \"White Christmas.\" In the second place, it didn't have a real score, just a bunch of random Irving Berlin songs pulled from hither and yon, and its story of \"Hey, kids, let's put on a show,\" is the most overused plot in the book. Plus, Fred Astaire bailed, and then his replacement, Donald O'Connor, got sick. But somehow it managed to pull it all together to become a great movie, with bits like Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye doing \"Sisters\" in drag and the general sending his replacement off on a wild-goose chase, which get better every year. Plus, there's Mary Wickes and the whole running gag of Danny's injured arm. And the faces of the young boys, far from home and waiting to be called into battle, listening to a song from home. Inspired." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Good things to read at Christmas are trickier to find than good movies. Everything out there right now seems to be either treacly, annoyingly inspirational, or about someone attempting to overcome drug addiction, prostitution, and/or abusive parents. But here are twenty that manage to avoid being pious, goopily sentimental, and/or suicidally depressing.\n\n1. The Original Christmas Story (Matthew Chapter 1:18\u201325, 2:1\u201318, Luke Chapter 1:5\u201380, 2:1\u201352): It's got everything you could ask for in a story: adventure, excitement, love, betrayals, good guys, bad guys, narrow escapes, mysterious strangers, and a thrilling chase scene. And the promise of a great sequel.\n\n2. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens: The perfect Christmas story, which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only way to begin a Christmas story is with the line, \"Marley was dead: to begin with.\" And just because you know it all by heart\u2014Scrooge and Tiny Tim and the Ghost of Christmas Past, \"I forged these chains in life,\" and the bed-curtains and the turkey and \"God bless us, every one!\"\u2014is no reason not to read it again.\n\n3. \"The Tree That Didn't Get Trimmed\" by Christopher Morley: Obviously inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's sickeningly sentimental \"The Fir Tree,\" this story of a tree that doesn't get bought by anyone and instead gets thrown away not only avoids all the sins of its antecedent, but ends by telling a touching parable of those ultimate Christmas themes, suffering and redemption.\n\n4. \"Christmas Trees\" by Robert Frost: Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets. His poems are the essence of New England\u2014taciturn and down-to-earth\u2014and unique. Take, for example, that other poem of his that people associate with Christmas, \"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.\" Or this one, about a man with a hill full of fir trees\u2014and the man from the city who wants to buy them.\n\n5. The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson: This modest children's story of a church Nativity pageant invaded by the horrible Herdman kids, who steal and swear and smoke cigars (even the girls), accomplishes the nearly impossible\u2014the creation of a new classic\u2014and makes the reader look at the story of Mary and Joseph and the baby \"wrapped in wadded-up clothes\" as the Herdmans do, with new eyes.\n\n6. \"Santaland Diaries\" by David Sedaris: I first heard this on NPR, and I was riveted. I'd never heard a take on Christmas so wry, so cynical, and so dead-on. David Sedaris has gone on to write lots of pieces about Christmas, but this diary of his days as an elf in the toy department at Macy's remains my favorite.\n\n7. \"The Santa Claus Compromise\" by Thomas Disch: This parable of a future in which six-year-olds have finally gotten their political rights and are intent on doing investigative journalism to expose Santa Claus's true identity could have been written in today's group-rights-activism climate. The fact that it was written back in 1974, when satire was still possible, makes it chilling as well as funny.\n\n8. \"Journey of the Magi\" by T. S. Eliot: The Bible doesn't tell us anything about what the wise men's journey to Bethlehem was like, or how much it must have cost them emotionally to make it. Or what happened to them afterward, when it was time to go back home.\n\n9. \"Dancing Dan's Christmas\" by Damon Runyon: When the dust settles on the twentieth century, it's my belief that Damon Runyon will finally be recognized as one of our greatest writers and will be fully appreciated for his clever plots, his unerring ear for language, and his cast of guys, dolls, gangsters, bookies, chorus girls, crapshooters, Salvation Army soul-savers, high rollers, lowlifes, louts, and lovable losers. I chose \"Dancing Dan's Christmas,\" a story involving a mean mobster, a Santa Claus suit, a diamond vanity case, and a few too many Tom and Jerrys, to include here, but it was a tough call. \"Palm Beach Santa Claus\" and \"The Three Wise Guys\" were both a close second.\n\n10. \"The Star\" by Arthur C. Clarke: One of the classics of science fiction by one of the masters in the field, this tells a troubling story about the star that guided the wise men to Bethlehem.\n\n11. \"The Gift of the Magi\" by O. Henry: O. Henry is another underappreciated author, as witness the fact that dozens of stories, screenplays, and sitcoms have copied the plot of this story. But none of them have ever managed to copy the charm or the style of the original, a simple little tale of a watch fob and a set of tortoiseshell combs.\n\n12. The Memorial Hall Murder by Jane Langton: For all you mystery fans, Christmas offers an abundance of Christmas stories and detectives, from Sherlock Holmes (\"The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle\") to Hercule Poirot (Murder for Christmas), but you may not have met Detective Homer Kelly or read this mystery about a murder that occurs while a college choir's rehearsing the \"Messiah.\" And it doesn't get any more Christmassy than Handel and choirs. Or murder.\n\n13. \"Rumpole and the Spirit of Christmas\" by John Mortimer: If you've encountered the irascible Old Bailey hack, Horace Rumpole, on PBS's Mystery, he seems like the last person to have any Christmas spirit, and he is. Which is why this story works so well. Leave it to John Mortimer to teach us a new meaning of \"the Christmas spirit.\"\n\n14. \"The Chimes\" by Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol is only one of a score of holiday stories Dickens wrote. A few years ago I decided to read them all, and when I read \"The Chimes,\" I got a huge shock, as will you. I won't give it away, but let's just say the plot of a certain very famous Christmas movie bears a suspicious resemblance to this Dickens story about a man who wishes he'd never been born.\n\n15. Wishin' and Hopin': A Christmas Story by Wally Lamb: Set in the era of LBJ, Dragnet, and the Beatles, this story, about a fifth-grade boy who has a famous cousin (whom no one in the family has actually ever met) and who's been cast as the little drummer boy in the Catholic school Christmas pageant but who's more interested in girls, has pretty much everything you could want: nuns, rosaries, impure thoughts, angels with light-up halos, suicide Cokes, dodgeball, Dondi\u2014and Annette Funicello.\n\n16. The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter: When Beatrix Potter (of Peter Rabbit fame) was staying with relatives in the west of England, she heard a story of a tailor who'd fallen ill before he could finish sewing a coat he was making for the mayor and found it miraculously completed when he returned to work, and spun it into a Christmas tale about a bad cat, some beleaguered mice, and a twist of cherry-colored thread. The illustrations are some of Potter's loveliest, and the story's charming.\n\n17. \"Christmas Eve: Nearing Midnight in New York\" by Langston Hughes: One of my favorite poets, Langston Hughes has written Christmas-themed poems in several moods and modes, from the traditional \"Shepherd's Song at Christmas\" to the slashingly bitter \"Merry Christmas,\" and you should read them all. But I like this one, with its city images and tentative \"almosts,\" the best.\n\n18. \"Another Christmas Carol\" by P. G. Wodehouse: There's no way to describe a P. G. Wodehouse story, so I won't even try. I'll just say that this is the only Christmas story I know of that involves the bubonic plague and tofu, and that, if you've never read him, there could be no better Christmas gift than discovering P. G. Wodehouse.\n\n19. \"Down Pens\" by Saki (H. H. Munro): I love all Saki stories, but I'm especially fond of this take on the task of writing Christmas thank-yous, since my research on the subject for my novel Crosstalk (which consisted mostly of reading advice columns) proved conclusively that human beings think more about thank-you notes than anything else. Including sex.\n\n20. \"For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio\" by W. H. Auden: Part play, part poem, all masterpiece, this long work is what you should read in January, when you're taking down the Christmas decorations (and your sense of good will toward men) and putting them away for another year\u2014and then facing the bleak post-Bethlehem world we all find ourselves living in." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "One of the blessings of our so-called information age is that all these episodes are available to watch on YouTube or Netflix or Hulu. Or, in the case of Dr. Who, on BBC America or Syfy. Enjoy!\n\n1. Frasier, Season 3, Episode 9, \"Frasier Grinch\": Even though Frasier's son really wanted an Outlaw Laser Robo-Geek, Frasier bought him an educational toy\u2014which didn't arrive. So he and Niles have to try to find a present for him at the mall on Christmas Eve. Classic slapstick, brilliant title cards (as usual), and the ending had me in tears.\n\n2. Murphy Brown, Season 3, Episode 11, \"Jingle Hell, Jingle Hell, Jingle\u2026\": Murphy talked everyone in the office into making a charitable donation instead of exchanging gifts, and then broke the bargain by buying presents (just little ones), sending everyone scrambling for last-minute gifts in the only store open on Christmas Eve\u2014the drugstore. Which has a large (and very breakable) collection of gnomes.\n\n3. Big Bang Theory, Season 2, Episode 11, \"The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis\": All of this series' Christmas episodes are good and well worth watching, but none of them can top this one, in which Sheldon approaches the custom of giving gifts in his usual hyper-rational, unemotional way, calculating the precise exchange rate for small, medium, and large baskets of bath oil, soap, and scented candles\u2014and gets a lesson in higher mathematics (and Christmas) from Penny, of all people.\n\n4. The Muppet Christmas Special with John Denver: This was the first of the Muppet Christmas specials, and it's the best. Highlights include \"When the River Meets the Sea,\" an altercation with Miss Piggy over the words \"figgy pudding,\" a truly awful rendition of \"The Twelve Days of Christmas,\" and a lively rendition of \"Little Saint Nick.\"\n\n5. Doctor Who, The Christmas Specials: All the Doctor Who Christmas specials\u2014\"The Husbands of River Song,\" \"Last Christmas,\" \"The Time of the Doctor,\" \"The Snowmen,\" \"The End of Time,\" \"The Day of the Doctor\"\u2014are terrific. My favorite is probably \"Tooth and Claw,\" having, as it does, Queen Victoria, a werewolf, Scotland, the birth of Torchwood, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, but don't make me choose. You should watch them all.\n\n6. The Twilight Zone, \"Five Characters in Search of an Exit\": The Twilight Zone did a number of memorable Christmas stories. The most famous is \"The Night of the Meek,\" with Art Carney as a drunken department-store Santa, but \"Five Characters in Search of an Exit\" is more quintessentially Twilight Zone\u2013ish, with its five mismatched people\u2014a hobo, a bagpiper, a ballet dancer, a clown, and an Army major\u2014trapped in a strange place with no idea what's going on and no way out. And Rod Serling (who was born on Christmas) intoning, \"Tonight's odd cast of players on the odd stage known as\u2014the Twilight Zone.\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(Hobbs 1.5) The More The Merrier", + "author": "Elena Graf", + "genres": [ + "holiday", + "Christmas" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "The snow began as flurries while Maggie and Liz searched for their perfect tree. Should it be skinny to take up less floor space? Or bushy to hold the ornaments each of them had acquired over six-decades?\n\nSince combining their collections five years ago, they had rotated the ornaments so that all of them would eventually grace their tree. Every year, they bought a single ornament, and Maggie carefully painted the date on it. Liz wasn't usually a fan of romantic traditions, but she liked this one. It reminded her that they had logged some time together after being separated for forty years. More importantly, it marked another year that Maggie had been cancer-free.\n\nThe line to bag the trees snaked down into the parking area. No one seemed to be in a hurry. The people of Hobbs took any opportunity to catch up with their neighbors, whether at the post office, the supermarket, or waiting for their Christmas trees. Liz and Maggie had company coming, so they paid cash, and Liz tossed their tree into the back of her pickup truck.\n\nThey had decided to set up the tree on the enclosed porch because it was cooler there. Working together was not their strong point, each being the kind of woman who liked to run the show, but Liz tried to be patient as she lay beneath the tree, tightening or loosening the screws in response to Maggie's directions. Not completely trusting her wife's ability to eyeball ninety degrees, Liz got up to inspect the progress.\n\n\"I guess that's pretty straight,\" she grudgingly admitted.\n\n\"I'm more competent than you think.\"\n\n\"Yes, you are.\" Another grudging admission.\n\nMaggie pinched Liz gently. \"Thank you. Now, how about some mulled wine while you put on the lights?\"\n\nAs Maggie waited for the wine to heat, she watched the snow fall outside the kitchen window and wondered if their guests would brave the weather. She reminded herself they were Mainers, and a little snow wouldn't keep them away. When the wine began to steam. Maggie stirred it gently, strained it into two mugs, and headed to the porch.\n\n\"It smells wonderful out here,\" she said, inhaling the comforting scent of pine. \"Nothing smells quite like a fresh tree. I think it's our best ever.\"\n\n\"You say that every year.\"\n\n\"That's because every year it gets better.\" When Liz gave her a skeptical look, Maggie knew the double meaning had gone right over her head. \"For you, Dr. Stolz,\" she said, handing a mug to Liz.\n\n\"Thank you, Dr. Fitzgerald.\"\n\nMaggie took a seat on the wicker settee. \"Do you ever wish you hadn't talked me out of taking your name?\"\n\nLiz stopped fussing with the bottom string of lights and turned around to look at her. \"No.\"\n\n\"We're a family. Shouldn't we have the same name?\"\n\n\"It would be too confusing for the townspeople to have two Drs. Stolz. How would they know who to ask about a sore throat?\"\n\n\"Everyone knows you're the one for sore throats.\"\n\n\"I really didn't care what name you took. I just didn't want you to have his name.\"\n\n\"You'll never forgive me for marrying Barry, will you?\"\n\n\"I forgave you, or we wouldn't be here talking about it.\"\n\nMaggie nodded and took a sip of wine. \"It's good,\" she decided. \"Better with a cinnamon stick than powdered cinnamon.\"\n\n\"We probably shouldn't get too deep into our cups. Soon, we'll have dozens of people here.\"\n\nMaggie shrugged. \"Everything's ready. The stew and the chili are cooking. The snacks are prepared. You have most of the lights on the tree. Sit down for a minute and drink your wine.\"\n\nLiz looked doubtful, but she sat down beside Maggie. \"The snow is coming down harder,\" she said, glancing out the window. \"What does the weather report say?\"\n\n\"We could have ten inches or more. Do you think everyone will show up?\"\n\n\"Oh, they'll come. People look forward to our tree-trimming party. It's a tradition. Just think. After this, we'll be done with our holiday entertaining.\"\n\n\"Maybe this year we'll finally be able to have a quiet Christmas alone\u2026sitting by the fire, watching old Christmas movies, making love\u2026\" She suggestively raised a brow.\n\nLiz sighed. \"Wouldn't that be nice? It's been such a busy year. My mother in the hospital\u2026twice. Your promotion to chairman. Restructuring the practice. I thought we were supposed to be retired. We're busier than ever.\"\n\n\"We're not really retired. Only doing something different from our old day jobs.\" Maggie gave Liz's ratty Yale sweatshirt and threadbare mom jeans a disapproving frown. \"I hope you plan to change into something decent for the party. It's a special occasion.\"\n\n\"It's supposed to be casual.\"\n\n\"Casual, yes, but you look like you're ready to go out and paint the house!\"\n\n\"You can't paint a house in winter. The paint won't cure correctly. The minimum temperature for exterior painting is fifty-eight degrees. Otherwise, the paint scales off.\"\n\nMaggie wasn't distracted by the home improvement lesson. She knew that pedantic lectures were one of Liz's favorite ways to deflect. \"You know what I mean.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Liz grumbled. \"After I finish putting on the lights, I'll shovel the front steps. Then, I'll change.\"\n\nMaggie gave Liz a quick kiss. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"That's not a kiss,\" said Liz, setting down her mug. She tried to wrestle the mug out of Maggie's hand.\n\n\"No, you don't, or we'll be in bed when our guests arrive. Now, drink your wine and finish the lights.\"\n\nWith a sound between a growl and a groan, Liz got up to resume stringing the lights.\n\nAs Maggie set out wine and beer glasses for their guests, she heard the scrape of the shovel on the front steps. Not long after, the garage door slammed, followed by the sound of Liz's stocking feet running up the stairs to the third floor. Her wife soon returned, looking much more presentable in a red sweater, black dress pants and heels. She'd even put on some makeup.\n\n\"Better?\" Liz asked.\n\n\"Much.\"\n\n\"Now do I get a real kiss?\" asked Liz, trying to steal one.\n\n\"Stop. You'll wreck your lipstick and mine. You're such a tease!\" Maggie gently fended her off. \"Our guests will be arriving any minute.\" The ship's bell on the front porch rang. \"See? Go answer the door.\" She gave Liz a little shove.\n\n\"I'll get you later,\" said Liz, shaking her finger over her head as she headed to the front door.\n\nMaggie heard Tony Roselli's booming baritone in the entrance hall. \"We have come bearing gifts!\" A moment later, Tony was in the kitchen, giving Maggie a kiss on each cheek. \"How are you, Sweetie? You look fantastic!\" He held up a gold-tone blouse. \"Look what I found for you. Isn't it perfect for the holidays? Second hand, of course. But feel the quality!\"\n\nTony's husband, Fred elbowed his way in. \"Hello, Maggie,\" he said, giving her a kiss. \"You know he can't resist picking out clothes for you. He wishes he could wear them. But alas, he's lost his girlish figure.\" Fred set a foil-wrapped tray on the island. \"The stuffed mushrooms that Liz likes so much.\"\n\n\"Oh, I love them too!\" declared Tony. \"Can't you see?\" He patted his belly. His protests were an exaggeration. He was still slim, although a little weight had settled around his waist since he'd finally married Fred.\n\nLiz came into the kitchen. \"Drinks? How about an elderberry martini? Nathan's chef gave me the recipe.\"\n\n\"How did you wring it out him?\" asked Fred.\n\n\"He told me during his annual checkup, when I mentioned how much I liked them.\"\n\nFred stared at her dramatically. \"Aren't you breaching patient confidentiality?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. It doesn't apply to martini recipes.\"\n\nTony cornered Maggie near the refrigerator. \"I hear you're teaching twentieth century drama at UNE next term.\"\n\n\"You heard correctly.\"\n\n\"Would you consider directing Anouilh's Antigone at State?\"\n\nMaggie and Liz exchanged a smile. \"Maybe,\" said Maggie with sly look. \"I played Ismene in a college production.\"\n\n\"You could play the nurse,\" Tony suggested. \"Not a big part, but a good one.\"\n\n\"That's an old lady's role!\" Maggie replied, making a face.\n\n\"Well, you are old enough for Medicare,\" said Liz, pouring martinis for Tony and Fred.\n\n\"Liz, it's considered a faux pas to talk about a lady's age,\" chided Fred, shaking his bald head. \"Even I know that.\"\n\n\"Just yanking her chain. She hates to be reminded that I'm younger.\"\n\n\"Hah! In two years, you'll be old enough for Medicare too,\" Maggie said.\n\nThe doorbell rang. \"I'll get it,\" said Maggie. \"You finish making the drinks.\"\n\nMaggie opened the door to find Alyson Gagnon and her fianc\u00e9e, \"the dentist,\" which Liz insisted on calling Lynne Bates, although she was a perfectly lovely woman, whom Maggie liked very much. Maggie suspected there was a smidgen of jealousy over the fact that Liz's ex had finally found someone to accept her marriage proposal.\n\nAlyson shook the snowflakes out of her strawberry blond hair. The new arrivals added their boots to the others on the rack.\n\n\"How are the roads?\" Maggie asked, taking their coats.\n\n\"Getting a bit slick.\" Lynne slipped on a pair of flats. \"Thank heavens for four-wheel drive.\"\n\nAlyson held out two bottles of wine. \"Give them to Liz,\" said Maggie. \"She's in the kitchen making drinks.\"\n\nAfter stowing their coats on the bed in the downstairs guest room, Maggie returned to the kitchen in time to see Alyson's face light up when she saw Liz. She was relieved to see Liz's response was no more than a quick, friendly kiss.\n\n\"And here's the dentist!\" said Liz with a big grin as she hugged Lynne.\n\nThe bell rang again. After Maggie greeted Liz's friends from the hiking club, she found a note pad in the kitchen drawer and made a sign that said, \"COME ON IN!\" She taped it to the storm door and left the front door open. Soon, more people crowded into the kitchen to greet their hosts and find drinks\u2014faculty from University of New England, surgeons from Seacoast Women's health, and Liz's partners at Hobbs Family Practice\u2014Cathy Pelletier and Jim Bowden and their spouses. The noise level rose by a factor of ten. The officers of the Hobbs Fish and Game arrived, followed by Brenda Harrison, the Hobbs police chief. Liz moved the slow cookers with Maggie's savory stew and spicy chili to a counter and set up a bar on the island.\n\n\"You're pretty good with that cocktail mixer,\" said Brenda, \"not training for a second career, are you?\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose that would count as my third career, if I were.\"\n\nBrenda looked thoughtful, \"Yes, I guess that's right. First, a big shot surgeon, now just a humble family doc.\"\n\n\"I don't know how humble I am, but I try,\" replied Liz with a quick laugh. \"What can I get you, Brenda? You're not on duty tonight, are you?\"\n\n\"Nope, but with this snow coming down, I don't want to get too buzzed in case there's an emergency.\"\n\n\"How about some hot cider? It's not spiked, I promise.\"\n\n\"Perfect.\"\n\n\"Liz, I'm going to get the guests started on trimming the tree,\" said Maggie, \"before they get too inebriated and all the ornaments end up in one place.\"\n\nMaggie went out to the porch and turned the music down. \"May I have your attention, please,\" she announced in her actress voice, which easily projected over the buzz of conversation. Everyone fell silent. \"The bins for the ornaments are over there against the window. Before you have your next drink, I want each of you to put up at least five ornaments. Try to keep the heavy ones for the strong branches on the bottom.\" She scrolled through the playlist on her phone to find something more festive and noticed she'd missed two phone calls. There was also a text message.\n\nShe opened the message first. It was from her daughter, Alina. \"MOM ARE YOU THERE?\"\n\nShe checked the voicemails. Both were from Alina: \"Mom, I'm calling from Tampa airport. I know I said I wasn't coming for Christmas, but I changed my mind. Just me and the girls. I'll explain everything when I get there.\" Maggie tapped on the next voicemail. \"Mom, I really need to talk to you. We're boarding now, and I need to know someone can meet me in Boston. Please call or text me right away. It's really important.\" Maggie checked the time of the calls. They had come in over an hour ago. Why hadn't she heard them? She checked the ringer switch and found it had been turned off since the faculty meeting the previous afternoon.\n\nMaggie went into the kitchen. \"Liz, you need to listen to this.\" She held her phone up to Liz's ear as she finished pouring wine for their latest guests.\n\nLiz put down the wine bottle and took the phone. She checked the time of the messages. \"She must be in the air now. It would have been nice of her to leave her flight information.\"\n\n\"What are we going to do?\" asked Maggie. \"We can't leave with all these people here.\"\n\nLiz frowned as she thought. \"Maybe she can get a limo when she gets to the airport. Or she could take the bus into Dover.\"\n\n\"You know that will be hard with the baby.\"\n\nLiz sighed. \"Can you manage the gang without me? I'll go pick her up.\"\n\n\"Oh, Liz. The weather is terrible.\"\n\nLiz made a face. \"I know, but we can't leave her there.\"\n\n\"Maybe she could go to a hotel, and we could pick her up tomorrow.\"\n\n\"If we tell her that, she'll have a panic attack on the spot. Plus, she has two small children traveling with her. That will never work.\"\n\nLiz went out to the porch. The laughter and silliness, and Tony's booming voice audible above all the conversation, was proof the guests were enjoying the tree trimming. Despite Maggie's instructions, the tree looked a little bottom-heavy. Most of the ornaments were clustered near the front, leaving the back and sides bare. They'd have to fill in later.\n\n\"Listen up, everyone!\" said Liz. \"Unfortunately, I have to leave. We have some surprise guests arriving at Logan. Maggie's daughter and her kids are flying in, and I have to leave to pick them up.\" She gestured toward Maggie. \"My wife is in charge, so try to behave.\"\n\nEveryone laughed. Brenda raised her glass. \"Don't worry, Liz. I'll keep everyone in line.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Chief. I appreciate it.\"\n\n\"I wish I could go with you,\" said Brenda, \"but with this weather, I need to stick close to home\u2026in case there are accidents.\"\n\nMaggie and Liz went into the kitchen. \"Get your lunch cooler,\" said Maggie, \"I'll pack you something to eat.\" Maggie wrapped tea sandwiches and arranged hors d'oeuvres on an aluminum pie plate. She filled a travel mug with hot coffee while Liz changed into clothes better suited for a long drive on a snowy night. Although Liz lacked a sweet tooth, Maggie packed some cookies in a zip lock bag. They would provide energy if she got tired.\n\nLiz came down wearing jeans, a hoodie, a polar fleece vest, and heavy socks. She sat on the stairs to put on her boots. Maggie handed over her parka, hat and gloves. \"Stay warm.\"\n\n\"I have a quilt in the truck just in case. Good thing I had the cap put on last week. I can put the luggage back there.\"\n\nMaggie gave Liz a fierce hug. \"Please be safe. I would die if anything happened to you.\"\n\nLiz bent to kiss her. \"I know you're an actress, but a little less drama would be good at a time like this.\"\n\n\"Oh, get out of here,\" said Maggie, giving her a little shove. \"And be careful!\"\n\n\"I will,\" promised Liz. \"If you get any more information from Alina, call me right away.\"\n\nFrom the front door, Maggie watched the taillights of the truck until they disappeared down the driveway." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "The local roads hadn't been plowed. Liz grumbled as she switched on the four-wheel drive. This mission was completely irrational. No one in their right mind would drive to Boston with it snowing so hard. In clear weather, with no traffic, it was, at least, an hour and a half drive. Never mind that it was a Friday night less than a week before Christmas, and there would be drunk drivers coming from holiday parties.\n\nLiz pulled herself up short. She knew from many years as a surgeon that, in a stressful situation, confidence and attitude could make the difference between success and disaster. Besides, she needed to keep her energy level high. From the looks of the weather, this could turn out to be a very long trip.\n\nShe was relieved to see that Route 9 had been plowed, and when she reached the interstate, that was clear too. She allowed herself to relax a little and asked Siri to open her opera play list.\n\nShe hadn't gotten far when a telephone call broke into the drinking song from La Traviata.\n\n\"Where are you?\" asked Maggie's voice. Liz smiled. She was barely out of sight, but Maggie was already checking on her.\n\n\"I just got on 95.\"\n\n\"How are the roads?\"\n\n\"Not bad. They're plowed and sanded.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Maggie. \"Be careful.\"\n\n\"I will be. Call me when you hear from them.\"\n\n\"I will. Love you.\"\n\n\"Love you too.\"\n\nMaggie hung up.\n\nLiz was suddenly ravenous. She felt around in the foil-wrapped packages and her hand found some of Maggie's caramelized onion-and-feta tartlets and her tangy cheese puffs. Sometimes, Liz teased Maggie that she had married her for her cooking. There might be some truth to that, but certainly, it wasn't the only reason. Liz's hand rooted around in the warm foil and found some of Fred's savory stuffed mushrooms. She popped one into her mouth. It was just enough to satisfy her hunger. Despite her pleasure in the wonderful tastes, she decided not to gorge on all the goodies. She'd save the cold canapes and tea sandwiches for later. She'd need to pace herself to keep up her energy.\n\nOpera seemed too intrusive after Maggie's call, so Liz switched to orchestral music. Anything but Christmas carols. She hated them with a passion only because by Christmas she was oversaturated with them and wanted to plug her ears. The popular songs no longer recalled happy memories of childhood; only of being mobbed by shoppers in the Maine Mall.\n\nShe came up to two plow trucks driving side by side and decided to keep her distance. The reduced speed sign was flashing as she came to the overpass, so she let up a little on the gas pedal. Yes, this was going to be a long trip.\n\nShe wondered what she would encounter when she got to the airport. Maggie had mentioned that there were problems in her daughter's marriage. After the birth of her second child, Alina had quit her job as a news producer to become a full-time mother. She'd been the breadwinner in the family, so it had put a burden on Jeff to make a living from app development. He'd had to get a second \"real\" job as a web designer to help make up the difference.\n\nLiz remembered Alina's first visit to Maine, when she had witnessed the young woman's panic attack after she had abruptly stopped her antidepressants. Alina was being treated for PTSD from her early childhood in an overcrowded Romanian orphanage. What a challenge it must have been for Maggie and her husband to raise two abused orphans, but Maggie had proven herself as a mother. Her daughters were not only functional but accomplished. Her elder daughter, Sophia, had become a doctor and had recently finished a pediatric oncology fellowship.\n\nLiz ate the last of the hot canapes. They were just barely warm at this point, but she savored every bite. She took a swig from her travel mug. Fortunately, the coffee was still scalding hot, just the way she liked it. She ramped up the windshield defrost because the temperature had risen since she'd crossed the New Hampshire line, and the precipitation was now mixed. She could hear the ice pinging against the glass, and the wipers crunching as they cleared a wedge-shaped opening. The poor visibility made her tense. She forced herself to relax the muscles in her shoulders as she did in the operating room during long surgeries.\n\nA telephone call broke through the music again.\n\n\"Where are you now?\"\n\n\"I'm into Massachusetts.\"\n\n\"You're making good time despite the weather.\"\n\n\"Yes, keep your fingers crossed. It's changed over to freezing rain.\"\n\n\"Oh, Liz! Be careful!\"\n\n\"How's the party going?\" asked Liz, listening to the sound of Christmas carols and laughter in the background.\n\n\"Brenda headed to the police station. There have been quite a few accidents. My friends from UNE are still here and your partners. Tony and Fred are spending the night.\"\n\n\"Put them in the downstairs guest room.\"\n\n\"I will. And I think Alyson and Lynne are going to stay too. Let's just say they're having a really good time.\"\n\n\"Full house. Oh, well. The more the merrier.\"\n\n\"Liz, stay safe. Call me in half an hour and let me know how you're doing.\"\n\nLiz agreed to call and hung up. She cut the music, deciding the sound of the wipers and the slush in the wheel wells helped her focus better on the road. The temperature had gone down again, and the freezing rain had changed to snow. Fortunately, there were few other drivers, but the heavy snow obscured their taillights until she was practically on top of them.\n\nShe was hungry again, so she reached into the insulated bag for a sandwich. She remembered Maggie's elegant hands preparing them, cutting the crusts off the bread in perfect imitation of the tea sandwiches they'd enjoyed when they'd visited Ireland. One of Maggie's colleagues at NYU had gotten Irish citizenship through her grandmother and had moved there to retire. Liz and Maggie talked about buying the little cottage on sale down the road. But Liz wanted to travel, not settle down in some Idyllic ocean-side cottage to play out some fantasy of domesticity. She wanted to see the world and make every minute with Maggie count after being separated from her for forty years.\n\nAnd the cancer.\n\nLiz pushed that thought out of her mind and put on some music as a distraction, tenor opera arias. She didn't care that she wasn't a real tenor because she could at least sing along. Forget the soprano roles. They were too far out of range.\n\nLiz became so wrapped up in her singing that she forgot to call Maggie at the appointed time. On schedule, the phone call broke through, interrupting the great trio from Faust.\n\n\"Hello, dear,\" said Liz.\n\n\"You said you would call me!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" said Liz. \"You didn't give me a chance!\"\n\n\"Everyone left. They're worried about the weather. Tony and Fred are still here. So are Alyson and Lynne. We're sitting out on the porch, admiring the tree and drinking mulled wine. We're all pretty crocked, but that's okay. We don't have to drive anywhere.\"\n\nBut I do, thought Liz enviously. She imagined the cozy scene on the porch, the propane stove burning brightly, the multicolored lights on the tree reflecting in the glass ornaments, and that amazing pine smell. \"Don't get too mellow. You'll have to deal with the kids when we get back.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. I'll be ready when they come.\"\n\n\"Are you having fun?\"\n\n\"Yes, our friends are good company. But I really miss you, Dr. Stolz. I miss feeling your arm around me while we sit on the loveseat, and you can be sure I have plans for you later.\" As an actress, Maggie could use her voice as expressively as her face. Her come-hither voice had enormous range.\n\n\"Okay, Maggie. I get the picture. No phone sex now. I have to drive and it's pretty ugly out here.\"\n\n\"I was afraid to ask.\"\n\n\"Nothing from Alina yet?\"\n\n\"No, but Lynne helped find the flights from Tampa to Boston. We're guessing she's on the Delta flight landing in about twenty minutes. I checked. It's still on time despite the weather.\"\n\n\"Okay text me the flight number and any other flights you think she might have taken.\"\n\n\"Liz, please, please promise me you'll be careful.\"\n\n\"I will be careful. Promise.\"\n\n\"Drink coffee.\"\n\n\"Yes, boss.\"\n\nMaggie chuckled. \"I'll call you as soon as I hear something from Alina.\"\n\nLiz flipped open her travel mug. She smiled when she found the coffee still hot. Although Maggie's attention could sometimes be overbearing, she took very good care of her.\n\nLiz began to see signs for the airport and knew she had to pay attention. For someone who seldom drove the roads around Boston, navigating could be a nightmare, even in good weather. Fortunately, it was long past rush hour, so traffic was light.\n\nLiz ate her last sandwich and finished her coffee. She glanced at the clock. She should be in the airport in about fifteen minutes.\n\nA call came through the Bluetooth. \"You again!\" said Liz, grinning as she tried to sound exasperated, which spoiled the effect.\n\n\"I finally heard from Alina. They landed. I told her you were coming to get her. She sounded so relieved.\"\n\n\"I bet. Tell her to find a restaurant and get something to eat. I'll be there soon. I have to park and get into the airport first.\"\n\nThere was a long silence. Liz could tell that Maggie had gone into another room because the background sounds had deadened. \"She has very little cash and no credit cards.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"She left in a hurry. When Jeff saw the alert for charging the tickets to Boston, he canceled all her credit and debit cards.\"\n\n\"What!\"\n\n\"I know. It's terrible.\"\n\n\"I had no idea it had gotten so bad between them.\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"You had so much going on with your mother in the hospital.\"\n\n\"Maggie\u2026\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said slowly and then sighed. \"I really didn't want to talk about it. Can you understand?\"\n\n\"Okay, but you could have told me.\" Liz hadn't meant to sound so scolding. \"I'm sorry. I understand\u2026sort of.\"\n\nThere was another long silence. \"I'll tell you later when we have some privacy.\"\n\n\"Maybe Alina will tell me herself.\"\n\n\"I doubt she'll say anything in front of the girls. She's so protective of them after her own difficult childhood.\"\n\n\"Listen, sweetheart, I'd love to talk to you, but I have to pay attention to the signs now.\"\n\n\"She's going to be waiting for you in the luggage claim area, carousel three. I texted you the information. It's the Delta flight from Tampa. Oh, Liz, thank you so much for picking them up. What did I ever do to deserve you?\"\n\n\"That's a complicated subject. Let's talk about it later.\"\n\nLiz saw the sign for the Delta terminal and took the exit. The short-term lot was full, so she had to park in the much more remote, long-term parking area. She hiked to the shuttle bus stop and pulled up her hood against the wind as she waited. When the bus came, she climbed aboard, passing the passengers dully staring forward as she headed toward the back to claim the only remaining seat. Finally, the Delta terminal was announced. From the shuttle stop, it was a long walk and several escalator rides until she reached the baggage claim area. Another flight was coming in, a large plane from overseas, and the place was mobbed with people with large luggage. Twice, Liz walked back and forth, looking for Alina and her daughters.\n\n\"Fuck,\" she muttered to herself. \"How will I ever find them?\"\n\n\"Liz?\"\n\nLiz turned around. Standing behind her was tiny Alina with an enormous wheeled suitcase and two small girls.\n\n\"Alina! I almost tripped over you.\"\n\n\"Grandma Liz!\" exclaimed Katrina and wrapped herself around her leg. Katrina was seven, but tiny for her age. The younger girl, Nicoleta, \"Nicki\" to the family, looked up and stared.\n\n\"Oh, my God. I can't tell you how happy I am to see you!\" said Alina, throwing her arms around Liz's neck. Her dark hair fell in Liz's face. It smelled slightly of sweat and anxiety. Alina finally let go, and Liz assessed her mental state in a glance. The sclera of Alina's eyes was red from crying and perhaps sleepless nights. She was pale. Her mouth was pinched. This was a woman under profound stress.\n\n\"Are you hungry?\" asked Liz. \"Do you want to get something to eat?\"\n\n\"Starving, but let's get out of this mad house.\"\n\n\"Good idea,\" said Liz, and pointed to the exit. She wrangled the big suitcase, so Alina could carry Nicki, and herded her little flock toward the door.\n\nA brisk, cutting wind was blowing as they waited for the shuttle bus.\n\n\"Mommy, I'm cold,\" complained Katrina, who was thinly dressed for the New England weather.\n\n\"I know, honey. We'll be inside the shuttle soon.\"\n\nFortunately, the shuttle van arrived a few minutes later. Liz hauled the big suitcase on board and placed it on the luggage rack.\n\n\"Is Mom upset?\" asked Alina as Liz sat down beside her.\n\n\"She's worried, of course.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry to intrude on you like this.\"\n\n\"Glad you felt our house was a safe place to go,\" said Liz, patting Alina's hand.\n\nTears filled the young woman's eyes. \"I didn't know what else to do. I didn't feel welcome at Dad's. His wife has been so strange lately.\"\n\nLiz vaguely remembered Maggie saying, with a hint of Schadenfreude, that she thought there were problems in her ex's second marriage. Liz nodded, but offered no opinion of Barry, whom she still secretly loathed for taking Maggie away forty-five years ago.\n\n\"We're very happy you'll be spending Christmas with us,\" sat Liz, giving Alina's hand a little squeeze.\n\nKatrina plopped down in Liz's lap. \"Will it be warm at your house, Grandma Liz? It's so cold here. Not like where we live.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Grandma Maggie kept the fire going. We were having a party when I left.\" Liz opened her parka so Katrina could snuggle close and benefit from her body heat.\n\nThey reached the area of the parking lot where Liz had left her truck. She turned on the engine to warm up and arranged the quilt around the girls in the backseat.\n\n\"Thanks for remembering the car seats for the girls,\" Alina murmured.\n\n\"That's what grandmothers are for.\"\n\nAlina nodded solemnly.\n\nLiz climbed into the driver's seat. \"Everybody ready to go to Maine?\" she asked with all the enthusiasm of a camp counselor.\n\n\"Yeah!\" said Katrina.\n\n\"Yeah!\" Her little sister repeated over and over.\n\nLiz headed for the airport exit. \"There are some fast food restaurants on the way to the highway. I'm sorry, but that's the best we can do at this hour or we'll waste a lot of time. With this weather, I'd rather get home.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter at this point. Anything edible. We haven't eaten since this morning.\"\n\n\"You should have eaten something before you left Tampa.\"\n\n\"I don't have any money,\" Alina said in a quiet voice.\n\n\"So, it's true he cut off your cards.\"\n\n\"He didn't cut them off. He can't do that. He reported them stolen, but it will be days before it gets sorted out. Meanwhile, I have less than five dollars in my wallet.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. You won't need money at our house, and I can give you some cash.\"\n\nAt that, Alina let out one pitiful sob. \"Thank you.\"\n\nLiz sighed and they drove in silence for a few minutes. \"How's the anxiety?\" Liz asked.\n\n\"Are you asking as a doctor or my stepmother?\"\n\n\"Both.\"\n\n\"I'm managing\u2026barely. I wanted to go off the Zoloft during the pregnancy and while I'm breast feeding, but my doctor insisted it was safe.\"\n\n\"According to the studies, it is. It must be helping. You seem pretty calm.\"\n\n\"What choice do I have? I have to hold myself together for the girls.\"\n\nLiz saw a sign come up for MacDonald's. \"How about we stop here and get you something to eat?\"\n\n\"Yes, anything. I'm sure the girls are so hungry.\"\n\n\"I wish I hadn't eaten all the food your mom packed for me.\"\n\n\"She packed it for you, not us.\"\n\n\"She gave me some cookies, but we should save them for after you have some real food.\"\n\n\"Oh, my God, I love Mom's cookies,\" said Alina.\n\nLiz reached into her lunch box and handed her the bag of cookies. She turned into entrance to MacDonalds and got on the line for the drive-through. \"What should I order for the kids?\"\n\n\"MacNuggets. Fries. Milk. As a doctor, you probably think I'm a bad mother for letting them eat that stuff.\"\n\n\"The only thing I think is that your kids are hungry. What would you like to eat?\"\n\n\"I hate MacDonalds, but I'll have a fish sandwich and fries because I'm so hungry.\"\n\n\"It's just to tide you over. Then you can eat your mom's cookies.\" Liz reached over and patted Alina's arm. \"We'll be home soon, where there's good stuff to eat. Your mother cooked up a storm for this party. Literally.\" She chuckled at her own pun.\n\nThe cab of the truck was quiet while everyone ate.\n\n\"Your truck will be a mess after the girls eat back there,\" said Alina.\n\n\"Doesn't matter. I'll clean it out later.\"\n\nLiz headed to the highway. The snow was getting heavier, and the wind was blowing it around wildly. Liz turned up the defrost and the wipers.\n\n\"I'm so sorry to drag you out on such a terrible night,\" said Alina.\n\n\"You had no way of knowing the weather would be so bad up here.\"\n\nA cell phone began to ring. Alina dug in her purse for it. She glanced at the screen. \"Hi, Mom. We're on the way. Just stopped to get the kids something to eat.\" Alina listened for a few minutes before saying, \"Liz, she wants me to tell you to be careful.\"\n\nLiz laughed. \"Of course, she does. As if I haven't heard that a dozen times tonight!\"\n\nAlina held her phone to Liz's ear. \"Thanks soooo much for picking them up,\" said Maggie. \"You have no idea how much I appreciate it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Maggie heard the clock chime and realized that Liz had been gone for almost five hours. Their houseguests were showing no sign of fading. She was glad that the subject had changed from the sad story of Alina's failing marriage. Crazed with worry about the people she loved driving through the storm, she had confided her daughter's sorry situation. If she hadn't had so much wine, she probably wouldn't have been so garrulous. Now, she felt slightly disloyal to her daughter, but their friends had been nothing but sympathetic.\n\nTony's booming voice filled the room. With his penchant for high drama, he made Maggie's promotion to chairwoman of the department at UNE sound like a palace coup.\n\n\"Of course, no one even came close to her credentials. Yale Ph.D., New York University full professor. One semester, she's an adjunct, the next an associate professor, and now chairwoman!\" said Tony with the pride of a director who'd discovered a rising star.\n\n\"And I thought I'd retired from teaching,\" said Maggie, shaking her head.\n\n\"Oh, you were so ready for a second act,\" said Fred. \"Admit it.\"\n\n\"But I thought I could make a comeback as an actress.\"\n\n\"And you have,\" said Tony, \"but you're also a wonderful teacher and director. I wish you would direct Antigone. With the current political situation, it's so apt.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Tony. I have a long history with this play. So does Liz.\"\n\n\"Liz?\" Tony flexed his bushy brows in surprise.\n\n\"She was the stage manager when I played Ismene in college. You might even say it was that play that brought us together.\"\n\n\"Really?\" asked Fred, sitting on the edge of his seat. \"Do tell.\"\n\n\"It was the seventies, and all that weird experimental theater was all the rage. The director encouraged all this touching and kissing between the main characters, which was weird because they were supposed to be sisters. When I came back to the dorm after rehearsals, I practiced what I learned on Liz.\"\n\n\"Oh, you, crafty lady,\" said Tony wiggling his dark brows.\n\nAlyson laughed. \"Liz has always been an easy mark. For someone so smart, she misses a lot of cues.\"\n\n\"You noticed?\" said Maggie. Despite Alyson's history with Liz, Maggie found it hard not to like her. Besides being stunning with her strawberry blond hair and perfect features, she was warm and gracious. She was also an excellent physician. Alyson was the radiologist who had pinpointed Maggie's breast cancer. Twice a year, she read Maggie's mammograms and patiently took the time to explain every detail.\n\nAlyson checked her watch. \"Shouldn't they be home by now?\"\n\n\"The weather is terrible. I'm not surprised it's taking so long,\" said Lynne. \"I'm sure the roads are awful.\"\n\nMaggie heard the garage door open and the sound of children's voices in the hall. \"They're home,\" she said, jumping up. \"Finally.\"\n\n\"Grandma!\" said Katrina, catapulting herself into Maggie's open arms. Alina, carrying Nicki, kissed her mother.\n\n\"Thank heavens, you're home,\" said Maggie, squeezing them into a hug.\n\nLiz dragged the enormous suitcase up the garage stairs into the house. \"I'll take this upstairs. We'll put you in the North Woods room with the moose.\"\n\n\"Moose! Moose!\" cried Katrina with glee. \"We got the moose!\" She danced around happily.\n\n\"Honey, do you want something to eat?\" Maggie asked her daughter.\n\n\"No, thanks, Mom. I just want to get the girls to bed.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"Let me know if you need any help.\"\n\nTony got up, followed by Fred. \"I think we'll turn in, if you don't mind.\"\n\n\"You're in the downstairs room, Tony. Let me get the coats off the bed.\"\n\n\"We should go to bed too,\" said Alyson.\n\n\"You're in the seashore room.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Maggie. I know where it is.\"\n\nMaggie collected the glasses and dishes and put them in the dishwasher before heading upstairs. She found Liz sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed. She looked up wearily when Maggie came into the room. \"Katrina's taking a bath in our bathroom,\" she explained. \"The downstairs bathrooms are kind of busy.\"\n\n\"Oh, Sweetie, you look so exhausted,\" said Maggie, stroking her back. \"Thank you for rescuing Alina and the girls.\" She gave Liz a kiss.\n\n\"You're welcome.\" Liz let out a long sigh. \"I wish we didn't have such a full house. I was looking forward to winding down with you after the party.\"\n\n\"Once everyone's in bed, we'll have some time alone, and I'll make good on my promise.\" Maggie allowed her fingertips to linger on Liz's cheek.\n\nKatrina ran out of the bathroom with only her pajama bottoms and wet hair. Maggie corralled her and directed her back inside, where she vigorously toweled her hair. She finished the job with Liz's hair dryer.\n\n\"All right, Miss, let's go downstairs to Mommy's room.\"\n\n\"Noooo,\" protested Katrina, \"I want to stay here with you and Grandma Liz.\"\n\n\"Not tonight, Sweetie Pie. Grandma Liz is tired from driving in the snow. She needs to rest.\"\n\n\"But I want her to read me a story.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you a story. Come on. Let's go down to Mommy.\"\n\nMaggie walked downstairs with Katrina. Alina was just tucking her youngest into bed. \"Oh, Mom. Thanks for bathing Katrina.\"\n\n\"Liz took care of it.\"\n\nAlina nodded and sank down on the bed.\n\n\"Oh, honey, you look so tired.\"\n\n\"I am.\" Alina sighed. \"It's been such a long day.\"\n\n\"I'll tell the girls a story while you get ready for bed.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mom. You don't know what a treat that is.\" She rummaged in her luggage and found a nightgown. Shoulders drooping, she headed to the bathroom.\n\nMaggie had a whole repertoire of fairy tales from performing in children's theater. She recited the \"Princess and the Pea\" for her granddaughters, enjoying the expressions on their faces change as she altered her voice for the characters in the story.\n\n\"More!\" cried Katrina.\n\n\"More!\" echoed Nicki.\n\n\"Tomorrow night, I'll tell you two stories,\" said Maggie, pulling the comforter up to their chins. \"Grandma wants to talk to Mommy now.\" Maggie kissed each of the girls. \"Now, sleep tight!\"\n\n\"Don't let the bed bugs bite!\" said Katrina.\n\n\"No bed bugs here, sweetie.\"\n\nKatrina giggled. \"I know. Just roaches.\"\n\n\"Who told you that?\" asked Maggie indignantly.\n\n\"Grandma Liz. She said when you lived in New York, you had roaches everywhere!\"\n\n\"But not here. Now, settle down and go to sleep.\"\n\nMaggie turned off the lights and closed the door. Alina was just coming out of the bathroom. Maggie gestured for her to follow her into the TV room.\n\n\"Did the girls go to bed without an argument?\"\n\n\"I had to promise to tell two stories tomorrow.\"\n\nAlina shook her head. \"Those two drive a hard bargain.\"\n\nMaggie closed the door and sat down on one of the futons. She patted a place for Alina beside her.\n\n\"Oh, Mom,\" sobbed Alina. \"What a mess!\"\n\nMaggie put her arms around her. \"Honey, I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"I found out he hasn't paid the mortgage in eight months. He lost his web job weeks ago and never told me. Mom, I trusted him when he said he could take care of us if I quit my job to stay home with the kids. I never thought it would end like this.\" Alina began to cry. Maggie held her tighter.\n\n\"Was he abusive? Did he hit you?\"\n\n\"No, but he smashed things all over the house. He was drunk, screaming at the top of his lungs. When I left, the place was a wreck. Mom, he has a gun. I was so afraid. I had to leave.\"\n\n\"I know, honey, and I'm glad you came here.\"\n\n\"I didn't know where else to go. Dad's wife has been acting so strange lately.\"\n\n\"Well, that's not your concern. You have enough going on. Most of all, you need a good night's sleep.\"\n\nAlina nodded.\n\n\"You and the girls could use a diversion. Tomorrow is the Hobbs Christmas parade.\"\n\n\"That sounds like fun.\"\n\n\"I think the kids will enjoy it.\"\n\nAlina aggressively rubbed her forehead with her fingertips.\n\n\"Headache?\"\n\n\"Just really, really tired.\"\n\n\"Come on, off to bed with you.\"\n\nMaggie walked her daughter back to her room. \"Sleep in tomorrow,\" she said, kissing her. \"We'll manage the kids.\"\n\nAlina gave her mother a fierce hug. \"Thank you so much. And tell Liz too.\"\n\nWearily, Maggie trudged up the stairs to the third floor. Liz was already in bed, burrowed so deeply under the comforter only her steel-gray hair was visible. Maggie put on her nightgown and attended to her evening chores. As she brushed her teeth, she realized how grateful she was that the episode hadn't triggered one of Alina's panic attacks. She hadn't heard much from her daughter about the anxiety and hoped that meant she was learning to cope with it better.\n\nMaggie crawled into bed.\n\n\"Everyone down for the night?\"\n\n\"I think so.\" Maggie moved closer and spooned Liz. She reached around her and cupped her breast.\n\n\"Oh, Maggie. I'm too tired.\"\n\nMaggie blew in her ear, which she had known since they were lovers in college was guaranteed to get Liz's attention. \"Are you sure?\" she asked on a warm breath of air.\n\n\"No, I'm not sure.\" Liz rolled on her back, and Maggie slid her hand under her T-shirt.\n\n\"Maybe I can find a way to rouse your interest.\" She gently pinched Liz's nipple.\n\n\"That's a good start,\" said Liz, reaching for Maggie's face to kiss her.\n\nThe door clicked open and the sound of small feet crossing the wood floor could be heard.\n\n\"Grandma?\"\n\n\"You didn't lock the door?\" whispered Liz.\n\n\"I forgot.\"\n\nMaggie sighed and sat up. Liz pulled down her T-shirt.\n\n\"Katrina, you should be in bed,\" Maggie scolded gently.\n\n\"I know, but I'm scared. It's so dark in Maine.\"\n\n\"I'll bring her back downstairs,\" Maggie volunteered.\n\n\"It's okay. Let her sleep here. Call Alina and let her know where she is.\"\n\n\"Yay!\" cried Katrina, climbing on the bed. She insinuated herself between Liz and Maggie and pulled the comforter up to her chin. \"It's nice and warm in your bed.\"\n\nLiz sighed and lay down again.\n\nMaggie called Alina, who answered in a sleepy voice.\n\n\"We have your daughter up here with us, and we'll keep her for the night if that's all right with you.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mom.\"\n\nWhen Maggie got off the phone, Katrina asked, \"Grandma, will you tell me a story?\"\n\n\"Yes, Grandma, tell us a story,\" agreed Liz with mock enthusiasm.\n\n\"All right, but just one.\" Maggie began to tell the story of \"The Leap Frog\" because it was so short, but by the time she finished, both Katrina and Liz were sound asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Liz opened her eyes to see two dark eyes staring back. The sun had just risen, sending streams of golden light into the bedroom.\n\n\"What are you doing awake?\" asked Liz in a whisper.\n\n\"I'm hungry,\" Katrina whispered back.\n\n\"Okay. Let's go downstairs and get something to eat.\"\n\nLiz got up and put on a zip sweatshirt and her slippers. She took Katrina by the hand and they went down to the second floor. Liz held her finger to her lips as she paused outside the North Woods bedroom where Alina and Nicki were sleeping. To minimize the noise, she slowly turned the knob and let herself in. She rummaged in the huge suitcase, which was surprisingly well organized considering that three people were living out of it. Fortunately, Alina had adopted her father's penchant for neatness and not her mother's habit of spreading her clothes everywhere. Curing herself of that habit was the price Maggie had paid for moving into Liz's bedroom. \"Be a slob and you'll have to sleep downstairs by yourself,\" Liz had threatened when Maggie had begun to backslide.\n\nIn Alina's suitcase, Liz found a jacket that looked like the right size for Katrina and a colorful pair of little girl's socks folded into one another. She quietly closed the door and gave the clothes to Katrina to put on. Then the two of them crept downstairs.\n\n\"How about hot chocolate?\" asked Liz, still speaking in hushed tones because Tony and Fred were in the downstairs guest room. The girl nodded. Liz filled a coffee pod with hot chocolate mix. While it ran through the machine, she filled another pod with coffee for herself. \"Would you like some of Grandma's blueberry bread to get you started?\"\n\nKatrina nodded. Liz cut a few slices and put them on a plate.\n\n\"I'm going to start a fire to warm us up. Can you be neat enough to sit in the living room?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Katrina solemnly.\n\nLiz fixed herself a cup of coffee and arranged their cups and plates on a tray. \"Come with me.\"\n\nKatrina watched carefully as Liz made quick work of getting the wood stove started. She left the door slightly ajar and drank her coffee in silence as the flames began to lick the logs.\n\n\"You do that good,\" said Katrina.\n\n\"You do that well,\" Liz corrected gently.\n\n\"Well,\" agreed Katrina, nodding. Liz noticed that the girl's dark hair was a nest of knots. Let Maggie deal with it, she decided. Hair was not Liz's thing, which was why she kept hers short.\n\nThe ship's bell hanging on the front porch began to ring. It was too strong a ring for it to be the wind, so Liz pulled aside the blinds and looked out. Brenda Harrison, the police chief was standing on the porch.\n\nLiz opened the door. \"Don't tell me there's a medical emergency. I'm not even dressed yet.\"\n\nBrenda laughed softly. \"No. No. I just thought I'd stop by and see how your trip went last night.\"\n\n\"Well, come in and have some coffee.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nBrenda stepped into house and took off her boots. She hung her flat-brimmed campaign hat on a peg by the door.\n\n\"Are you Smokey the Bear?\" asked Katrina.\n\nBrenda laughed. \"No, I'm Chief Harrison. Don't you remember me?\"\n\nKatrina, nodding shyly, clung to Liz's pajama leg.\n\n\"Everyone still asleep here?\" Brenda asked, looking around. \"Guess I'm too early.\"\n\n\"Only my young friend here is awake,\" said Liz. \"Let's go into the kitchen.\" Liz led them through the living room to check the fire and pick up the tray on the way. In the kitchen, she lifted Katrina onto a stool at the island so she could finish her cake and hot chocolate.\n\n\"What brings you out so early?\" Liz asked Brenda as she filled a pod with coffee.\n\n\"Have to report soon to get ready for the parade.\"\n\n\"Glad the snow stopped, or the parade route would be a mess.\"\n\n\"They're working on clearing it now.\"\n\n\"I can make you some breakfast. Fried eggs and bacon okay?\"\n\n\"My favorite, thanks.\" Brenda sat down beside Katrina at the island. \"That looks like your grandma Maggie's cake. Is it good?\"\n\nKatrina nodded decisively.\n\n\"Brenda, we need to find you a good woman to cook you breakfast,\" said Liz, \"and keep you warm at night.\"\n\n\"Small chance of that. Who wants an old lady like me?\"\n\n\"You're younger than I am!\"\n\n\"You're a surgeon with a ton of money and cool cars. That makes you a chick magnet.\"\n\nLiz laughed. \"Don't sell yourself short, Brenda. A lot of women are suckers for a uniform. That's makes you a chick magnet too.\" Liz took out her cast iron frying pans and arranged them on the stove. \"Over easy, right?\"\n\nBrenda nodded.\n\n\"Katrina, would you like some eggs?\"\n\nKatrina shook her head dramatically, her long, dark hair flying back and forth.\n\n\"What do you say when someone offers you something and you don't want it?\" asked Liz in a stern voice.\n\n\"No, thank you!\" declared Katrina.\n\n\"How about some oatmeal?\"\n\n\"Yuck!\" Katrina screwed up her face for emphasis.\n\n\"The girl knows her mind,\" said Brenda with a chuckle.\n\n\"Blueberry pancakes?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" agreed Katrina enthusiastically.\n\n\"Well, that settles it,\" said Brenda. \"Better mix a lot of batter. Everyone loves your blueberry pancakes.\"\n\nLiz searched in a cabinet for a can of wild blueberries and a jug of maple syrup. \"Don't want to make promises I can't keep,\" she explained. \"Brenda, will you keep an eye on my sidekick while I check the fire?\" Liz sliced a few more pieces of blueberry bread and put them on a plate for Brenda.\n\nLiz loaded up the wood stove and turned down the air vents. When she returned to the kitchen, she found Alina had come downstairs with Nicki.\n\n\"Coffee?\" Liz asked.\n\n\"I'm still breastfeeding, so no, thanks.\"\n\nLiz raised a brow. \"If you pace yourself, the caffeine will be out of your body by the time she feeds.\"\n\n\"I know it's not a big risk. But I quit for my pregnancy, and if I start now, I'll be back to drinking gallons of coffee.\"\n\nBrenda laughed at the hyperbole.\n\n\"I'll make you some herbal tea,\" said Liz.\n\n\"I can make it,\" Alina said. \"I'm homeless, not a cripple.\"\n\nLiz gave her a hard look. \"You are not homeless, Alina. You always have a home here with us.\"\n\nMaggie came into the kitchen. She had already showered and put on some makeup. Liz knew it was because they had guests. Maggie, inveterate actress that she was, never showed her naked face to anyone but her family. She kissed Alina and Nicki. Liz turned her face from mixing the batter to get a kiss.\n\n\"Good morning, Brenda,\" said Maggie. \"Looks like a full house this morning.\"\n\n\"Not any more than you have all summer,\" observed Brenda. \"Forgive me for intruding.\"\n\n\"You never intrude,\" replied Maggie, giving Brenda a hug around her shoulders. She turned to Liz. \"What can I do to help?\"\n\n\"First, have a cup of coffee. Then you can keep an eye on the pancakes while I fry eggs.\"\n\nMaggie sat down with her coffee at the counter.\n\n\"Grandma, you snore a lot,\" said Katrina.\n\n\"Thank you, dear,\" said Maggie, patting the girl's thigh. \"Grandma Liz tells me that all the time.\"\n\n\"You should put that band-aid on your nose like daddy does. It works good.\"\n\nLiz exchanged a look with Maggie. \"Not that I haven't suggested it.\"\n\nMaggie rolled her eyes.\n\nAlyson breezed into the kitchen, looking like a model in a winter-white polar fleece. \"Good morning, everyone,\" she said, heading to the coffee maker. \"Lynne's in the shower and will be down shortly.\"\n\nEventually, Tony and Fred found their way into the kitchen and helped themselves to coffee. Meanwhile, Liz made a mountain of pancakes. She took orders for eggs, and soon everyone was seated in the dining room at the big harvest table that Liz had built.\n\n\"Alina, your mom tells us you might be looking for a TV news job up here,\" said Tony, reaching for the plate of bacon.\n\nLiz glanced up to see Alina give Maggie a sharp look. Everyone at the table fell silent.\n\n\"I only said that if you decided to stay here, you might need to go up to Portland to find a job in your field,\" Maggie explained.\n\n\"The news director at Channel 8 is a good friend of mine,\" said Tony, apparently missing the change in atmosphere. \"Do you want me to put out a feeler?\"\n\nAlina looked upset but mastered herself quickly. \"Thanks, Tony. That's so kind of you.\"\n\nLiz glanced from Alina to Maggie, who shook her head. \"Alina just got here,\" said Liz. \"It might only be for Christmas or maybe longer. Let's see what happens.\"\n\n\"If you need a car,\" said Alyson, \"I'm selling mine. I've decided to give myself a new car for Christmas. The old one has a lot of mileage, so the dealer won't give me much. I kept it longer than I probably should have, but I love it and it runs great!\"\n\n\"We might take you up on that, Al,\" said Liz. \"We could always use another car around here for summer visitors.\"\n\n\"There's one catch, Liz. You'll have to go with me to the dealership. No one intimidates car salesmen like you do.\"\n\nLiz turned to Maggie with an apologetic look and explained, \"She thinks I got her a good deal on her last car.\"\n\n\"You did,\" said Alyson. \"I thought the salesman would report you for theft.\"\n\n\"So, if you decide to stay, you might have a job and maybe even a Lexus,\" said Tony. \"How's that for progress?\"\n\nAlina abruptly got up from the table. \"Excuse me. I need to feed the baby.\" She left her half-eaten plate of food and headed to the living room. Maggie got up to follow her.\n\nLiz offered the group an embarrassed smile. \"Eat up, everyone, before your food gets cold.\"\n\nTheir houseguests left after breakfast. Brenda had to report to the station to organize the officers for the parade. The others packed up and headed out.\n\nKatrina kept Liz company while she cleaned up the kitchen, chattering nonstop about her pet gerbil who had escaped in the house and later turned up dead in a cabinet where he'd eaten himself to death. Liz grunted from time to time during the story, but her mind was elsewhere, wondering what Alina and Maggie were talking about in the living room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "\"On Monday, I'll call the bank and get this straightened out,\" said Alina, laying the sated toddler, who'd fallen asleep while feeding, on the sofa. She arranged a blanket around her.\n\n\"Honey, I know you don't want to hear this, but you should always have your own bank account and credit cards.\"\n\n\"I know, Mom. But I trusted, Jeff. We've never had any problems like this before.\"\n\n\"That's because you were the breadwinner and had your own money. You called the shots. Jeff would rather pretend he's a successful app producer than get a real job. You know he never made any money at it.\"\n\n\"But I never thought he could be so ugly. And that gun! Do you know the percentage of gun deaths caused by domestic violence?\"\n\n\"No, but I'm sure it's high.\" Maggie thought of the gun Liz always carried. It still terrified her.\n\nLiz knocked on the doorjamb. \"I'm going to take Katrina up and get her dressed. And I need to get dressed myself. I have to be there by eleven thirty. Kitchen's all cleaned up.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Liz,\" said Maggie. \"Liz is one of the judges of the floats in the parades,\" she explained. \"Part of her Chamber of Commerce duties.\"\n\n\"I'm going to leave Katrina with you,\" Liz added. \"She can't sit with me on the dais.\"\n\n\"All right. Bring her down when she's dressed.\"\n\nMaggie listened to them go up the stairs. \"I'm sorry I shared your troubles with our friends.\"\n\n\"I know, Mom. And they only want to help. You're so lucky to have landed here. Liz adores you. The people are so kind and decent. I thought you'd be bored after living in New York, but you seem right at home here.\"\n\n\"It's pretty quiet, especially in the wintertime, but I love teaching at UNE and acting at the Playhouse and the State Theater. Yes, I'd have a higher profile career if I'd stayed in New York. But there I'd be a tiny fish in a huge pond. Here, I'm a star.\"\n\n\"Mom, I love it here too, but I can't impose on you and Liz for long. I'll start looking for another place to stay as soon as I get my finances straightened out.\"\n\n\"You know we have lots of room.\"\n\n\"Yes, but that's for your summer guests, not permanent residents.\"\n\nMaggie patted Alina's arm. \"I'll talk to Liz. I'm sure she'd be fine with your staying with us. Are you sure there's no hope for a reconciliation with Jeff?\"\n\nAlina shook her head. \"No. Not after this. He was on oxycontin for his back pain before all this happened. I think his drug problem has only gotten worse.\"\n\nMaggie's mouth parted slightly. \"You never told me that part.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to worry you. You had enough to handle with your cancer.\"\n\n\"Maybe there was something we could have done before it got out of hand.\"\n\nAlina shook her head. \"There was nothing anyone could do.\"\n\nMaggie put her arm around her. \"Oh, Honey. I'm so sorry.\" She held her daughter while she cried.\n\nFinally, Alina sat back and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. \"I'm sorry I'm such a mess.\"\n\n\"You're tired, and it's been a lot. But, sweetheart, we need to get ready or we'll be late for the parade.\"\n\nMaggie dressed the baby while Alina showered. As Maggie searched through the suitcase, she saw how few items were warm enough for December in Maine. She decided that after the parade, they would head to Reny's and the consignment shops to get Alina and the children some winter clothes.\n\nWhen Alina returned, Maggie went upstairs to get dressed. She put on ski underwear because she knew from experience that it would be cold standing along the parade route. Before she went downstairs, she pulled some fleece throws out of the linen closet to bundle up the children.\n\nLiz came down dressed in one of her best pantsuits. She had done her hair and put on makeup. Since \"retiring,\" Liz hated to dress up, but when called upon to appear as the president of the Chamber of Commerce or a surgeon at Seacoast Women's Health, Liz always looked the part. She allowed herself a little more latitude as the head physician at Hobb's Family Practice and was known to show up in shorts and a polo shirt in the summer.\n\nLiz leaned down to kiss Maggie. \"See you after the parade. I'll meet you at LaScala. I made reservations.\"\n\nMaggie put her arms around Liz to keep her there a moment longer. \"After we eat, can we take them to Reny's for warm clothes?\"\n\nLiz nodded. \"Yes, I saw. No problem.\" She pulled her dress coat out of the hall closet. \"Gotta go, Mag. See you later.\" She gave her a quick kiss.\n\nMaggie herded Alina and her girls into the garage. She was pleased to see that Liz had remembered to put the car seats for the children into her car. Maggie checked to make sure the sling chairs were still in the back. She always kept them in the car for impromptu visits to the beach.\n\nAlina swung the diaper bag into the backseat. \"I found the juice boxes from last summer in the cabinet. I hope you don't mind that I took them for the kids.\"\n\n\"Of course, not. There's some string cheese too. And goldfish in the bread bin. I'll get them.\"\n\nOnce everyone was strapped in, and Maggie headed to town. She knew that parking would be a problem, so she took the back way to the high school where they could catch the shuttle to the Post Road. A few of the trollies that ran from Hobbs to Webhanet during the tourist season had been taken out of winter storage to ferry passengers from the parking areas to the parade route. Alone, Maggie would have walked, but it was a long hike with two young children.\n\nKatrina jumped up and down with excitement when the trolley pulled into the stop. She scrambled aboard and found a seat. Maggie was glad to be there to help Alina with the folding baby stroller. The kids' gear was mostly second-hand, collected by a woman in town, a retired nurse, who also rescued durable medical equipment otherwise destined for a landfill. Maggie liked that Mainers had such strong attitudes about unnecessary waste. Since moving to the state, Maggie had learned their well-known frugality was about more than money.\n\nThey huddled together on the trolley. Fortunately, they were only using only the enclosed trolleys instead of the open-sided summer models. Although it was a bright sunny day, after the night's snowstorm, the temperature had dropped sharply and the wind had picked up. Their breath was vapor as they settled on the sidewalk near the front of the library, not far from the judges' dais.\n\nMaggie waved vigorously, but Liz was engaged in conversations with one of the town selectmen. People often said Liz should run for office herself, but Maggie couldn't imagine Liz as a politician. She had learned some tact since they'd known one another in college, but Liz could still be stunningly blunt.\n\nMaggie bundled up the girls with the fleece throws to keep them warm while they waited for the parade to start. As long as it stepped off on time, it wouldn't be a long wait, but in a small town there was a more casual approach to schedules. In the distance, Maggie could hear the persistent beat of drums, one of the bands waiting in the middle school parking lot. Parades always excited her. From childhood, she'd loved the feel of the drumbeats against her chest when a marching band went by.\n\nAlina held little Nicki on her lap to keep her warm. Maggie tried hold Katrina, but the girl wiggled out of her arms and insisted on standing.\n\n\"Aren't you cold?\" asked Maggie.\n\nAlina shook her head. Maggie, watching out of the corner of her eye, saw that Katrina was more interested in the little girl next to her than the parade. At least, another girl her age would keep her occupied.\n\nThe parade finally began to form. A Hobbs police car was poised at the front of the line, flashing its blue and red lights, followed by the department honor guard. The first band in the parade would be Hobbs High School Marching Band, actually not bad as school bands went. A string of local business floats passed, including one from Hobbs Family Practice with the doctors and nurses wearing matching green parkas, Santa Claus hats, and red stethoscopes. Liz was forbidden to vote for that float, of course, but she waved enthusiastically. The water rescue squad in wet suits came next.\n\nMaggie stood up to see if she could get Liz's attention, but her wife was now chatting with the president of the Rotary. It wasn't easy being married to a woman who was involved in everything. When no amount of waving could draw Liz's eye, Maggie finally sat down. She glanced around, looking for Katrina, but her granddaughter was no longer standing next to the girl who'd caught her interest.\n\n\"Alina! Where's Katrina?\"\n\n\"She was just here.\" Alina put the baby into the stroller and stood up. \"Katrina!\" she called.\n\nThe girl whom Katrina had befriended stood beside her mother, attentively watching the parade. Maggie hurried over to her. \"Excuse me\u2026where is the girl who was standing next to you?\"\n\nThe girl shrugged. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Katrina!\" Maggie called in her loudest voice as she wove through the crowd, frantically looking for her granddaughter. She felt everyone staring at her. She didn't care.\n\nAfter fruitlessly searching through the crowd twice, Maggie pulled out her phone and called Liz.\n\n\"Maggie. What's up?\"\n\n\"Katrina is missing. She was right here, next to Alina, and now she's gone!\"\n\n\"What?\" asked Liz. Then her voice was muted. Maggie could hear her repeating the information, probably to Brenda. \"Okay,\" said Liz. \"Brenda is on it. Where are you?\" Maggie waved vigorously. \"I see you,\" said Liz. \"I'll be right there.\"\n\nMaggie worried for Liz's bad knee when she saw her jump down from the dais to get around someone blocking her path. Limping slightly, she was at Maggie's side within minutes.\n\n\"When did you last see her?\"\n\n\"It was only minutes ago. She can't have gotten far. Oh, Liz! This can't be happening!\"\n\nWhen Liz hugged her, Maggie clung to her desperately. \"Don't worry. We'll find her. Brenda and her officers are searching for her right now.\" Maggie finally released her. \"Let's split up,\" Liz suggested. \"I'll meet you back at the chairs.\"\n\nThere was an announcement over the PA system. \"If anyone sees a seven-year-old girl named Katrina, please bring her to the judges' dais immediately! Katrina is three foot, six inches tall, weighs approximately forty pounds. She has long, dark hair and blue eyes.\"\n\nAfter Maggie and Liz had combed the immediate area without any sign of Katrina, they met back at the chairs. Alina returned too, dangling on the edge of a panic attack.\n\nLiz reached out for her hand. \"Alina, are you all right?\"\n\n\"No! I'm not all right,\" she replied in a testy voice. \"My daughter is missing!\"\n\n\"I know. But the police are looking for her, and we'll find her soon. This is a small town.\"\n\n\"But the ocean is right there!\" said Alina, pointing.\n\nLiz looked directly into Alina's eyes when she spoke. \"It's a very long walk to the ocean from here,\" she said in the calm voice she used in medical situations, \"especially for a small person with short legs.\"\n\nThe sound of a radio squawking preceded Brenda's appearance at Maggie's side. \"I want to give you an update. I've got ten of my best officers out looking for Katrina. I put out an Amber alert, but that's just a precaution. We have no reason to believe she was taken.\"\n\nAlina's hand flew to her mouth and she let out a little cry.\n\n\"Like I said, it's just a precaution,\" said Brenda, squeezing Alina's shoulder. \"We'll find her.\"\n\n\"Maggie, I think you should take Alina and Nicki home,\" said Liz. \"They're not dressed for this kind of weather.\"\n\nMaggie shook her head. \"I'm staying until we find Katrina.\"\n\n\"If you get chilled standing around waiting, what good will it do?\" asked Liz. \"Please take them home. Give them something hot to eat and drink..\"\n\n\"And what are you going to do?\" asked Maggie.\n\n\"I'm going back to my truck to change my shoes and put on my parka. Then I'll help them look for her. She can't have gotten far. She's probably in plain sight, but we're missing her.\"\n\n\"Liz, I'm so frightened.\"\n\nLiz put her arms around Maggie. She spoke directly into her ear. \"Please take them home and warm them up, or we'll have a real emergency on our hands.\"\n\n\"Promise me you'll find her.\"\n\n\"We'll find her.\"\n\nBrenda nudged her. \"Come on, Liz. We need to go.\"\n\n\"Go home,\" said Liz to Maggie as she released her. \"I'll call you as soon as I know something, and I'll check in every half hour. Okay?\"\n\nMaggie nodded.\n\n\"Let's go, Maggie,\" said Brenda, \"I'll give you a ride back to your car.\"\n\nAs Maggie sat in the front seat of the chief's police car, she wanted to cry, but she didn't dare for fear it might set off Alina's anxiety. Brenda glanced at Maggie as she turned around to back up the car.\n\n\"Don't worry, Maggie. She can't have gotten far.\" Brenda's steady calm momentarily eased her fears, but as soon as the police chief turned on her lights to get through the crowd, Maggie's heart began to pound." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "When Brenda returned, Liz climbed into the police car. She always found it unnerving to hear the police scan, and she desperately hoped never to hear it report something terrible happening to a dark-haired, seven-year-old girl.\n\n\"Where do you think this kid might have gone?\" Brenda asked, interrupting Liz's thoughts.\n\n\"I have no idea.\"\n\n\"She didn't get far unless she hitched a ride or was snatched.\"\n\nLiz involuntarily shivered. \"You don't really think she was taken by someone?\"\n\nBrenda shrugged. \"I wasn't about to say it in front of the mother or Maggie, but nowadays, anything can happen. And there are always so many tourists in town for the parade.\"\n\nLiz allowed herself the luxury of a nervous laugh. \"Why do they come? The parade is pretty awful.\"\n\n\"It is, but you know that small town nostalgia gets them every time.\"\n\n\"It keeps the economy booming and the real estate taxes low, so I'm all for it.\"\n\n\"Stop being such a cynic, Liz. You love it here, and we're glad to have you. Best doc we ever had.\"\n\nLiz glanced over at Brenda and saw that her comment was completely sincere. \"Thank you.\"\n\nBrenda nodded. \"Now let's go find this kid. Officers and deputies are covering the area where she was last seen and all the parking areas. Let's head down to the harbor to see if somehow she landed down there.\"\n\nThe thought made Liz uneasy. Harbor Park was less than a hundred yards from the water. Liz herself had taught Katrina to swim last summer, but in December, the water temperature was frigid. Anyone who landed in it wouldn't last long.\n\nThe chamber of commerce had set up a booth in Harbor Park to offer free hot chocolate and mulled cider to the paradegoers who had parked there. The parking lot was already mostly empty, and the people manning the booth were looking cold. They were organizing the table to pack up and leave. \"Anyone seen a little girl, this high,\" asked Brenda. She demonstrated by holding her hand up to chest height. \"She has long, dark hair and big blue eyes.\"\n\nThe volunteers at the booth all shook their heads.\n\n\"Let's check the parking lot and the dock,\" Brenda suggested.\n\n\"Okay, I'll take the dock,\" said Liz, watching the trolley leave the parking lot after delivering the last round of passengers returning from the parade.\n\n\"Brenda\u2026\" Liz caught the police chief's arm to get her attention. \"Katrina loves the trolley. Maybe she hopped on it somewhere along the route.\"\n\nThe police chief nodded and spoke into the radio strapped to her shoulder. \"Hey, Davis. Head over to the trolley garage and see if anyone's seen the Cummings kid.\" She turned to Liz. \"Let's check the parking lot anyway and look down at the dock.\n\nAs Liz walked along the dock, which undulated with the wake from the passing boats, she dreaded seeing the ghostly figure of a child floating in the water. She couldn't even imagine the pain that it would cause Alina and Maggie if anything happened to the girl. She'd never had a child of her own, so she couldn't say she understood what Alina was experiencing, but she had seen the pure fear in the young woman's eyes.\n\nThe cold wind near the water was cutting. Katrina wasn't dressed warmly enough for this weather. One of Liz's real fears was hypothermia. In a small child, it could come on quickly and be deadly.\n\n\"Liz!\" Brenda shouted. She motioned for her to come up from the dock. Liz was halfway up the stairs when Brenda, cupped her hands around her mouth and called down, \"Davis found her in the trolley garage.\" Liz ran up the stairs. \"Davis boarded all the trolleys that went out today,\" Brenda explained. \"She found Katrina in one of them, sitting on the floor between the seats. The girl said she was hiding from the driver.\"\n\n\"The temperature is supposed to go way down tonight. She would have frozen to death in that unheated garage.\"\n\n\"Davis is bringing her down. She seems fine, if a little cold.\"\n\nLiz quickly texted Maggie: \"We found her. She's okay.\"\n\nA text shot back: \"Thank God!\"\n\nA moment later, a police cruiser blazing all its lights drove into the harbor parking lot and parked in front of the bait shop. Liz opened the rear door and found Katrina wrapped in a metallic emergency blanket. The girl's teeth were chattering, and her lips were blue.\n\n\"Mind if I borrow your blanket?\"\n\n\"You can have it,\" said Officer Davis. She chuckled. \"We can never get them back into the package once it's been opened.\"\n\n\"Thanks for finding her.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, Doc.\" Officer Davis touched the brim of her hat.\n\nLiz gave Katrina a quick once over. She checked her pulse and pupils. Apart from being chilled, she looked no worse for wear.\n\n\"I'm cold,\" said Katrina.\n\n\"All right, sweetie. Let's go home to mommy and grandma.\"\n\n\"I'll drive you to your truck, Doctor Liz,\" Davis offered.\n\nLiz got in the back seat with Katrina. \"Let's see your fingers.\" Liz was relieved to see they were white with cold, but there was no apparent frost bite or other damage. \"You're lucky,\" said Liz, putting her arm around her. \"You're going to be fine.\"\n\nKatrina started to cry. \"I just wanted to go home and see Daddy.\"\n\n\"But the trolley can't take you back to Florida.\"\n\n\"I thought it would take me to the airport like the one we rode on when we came here.\"\n\nLiz frowned as she tried to figure out what the girl was trying to say. Then she remembered the ride on the parking shuttle in the airport and began to see the connection. \"Our trolley only drives around town. It doesn't go to the airport.\"\n\nKatrina looked miserable. \"I want to see Daddy.\"\n\n\"I know, honey, but your mommy was very worried about you. Grandma too.\"\n\n\"Were you worried?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course I was worried, but I know you are smart girl and will learn a lesson from this adventure.\"\n\nOfficer Davis parked next to Liz's truck. \"Do you need any help with her?\"\n\n\"No, thanks, Gina. I've got it from here.\"\n\nLiz carried Katrina to the truck and strapped her in with the silver emergency blanket still wrapped around her. She tucked the old quilt she kept in the back around her too. \"It will get warmer in here in a few minutes,\" Liz explained, ready to close the door.\n\n\"Grandma Liz\u2026\"\n\n\"Yes, Katrina?\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\n\"I love you too, sweetie.\"\n\nLiz climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine. Within moments a call came through. \"Are you on your way home?\" asked Maggie.\n\n\"Yes, I'll be there in a few minutes.\"\n\n\"How is she?\"\n\n\"She can hear you, you know.\"\n\n\"I'm fine, Grandma,\" Katrina shouted from the back seat. \"Fine!\"\n\nBy the time they arrived home, Katrina insisted on walking on her own into the house, and Liz didn't argue.\n\n\"She does look fine,\" said Maggie with surprise as Katrina rushed into her mother's arms.\n\nLiz shrugged. \"Kids are pretty resilient. Unfortunately, their small bodies can succumb to hypothermia really quickly. We probably found her just in time.\"\n\n\"They all need warmer clothes. I'll take them to Reny's this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Can we eat something first?\" asked Liz. \"I'm starving.\"\n\n\"You're always starving.\" Maggie gave her arm a little squeeze. \"I'm heating up some of the mac and cheese from last night and the chili.\"\n\n\"Great. How's Alina doing? No panic attacks, I hope.\"\n\n\"She's fine, except Jeffrey keeps texting her threatening to kill her if she doesn't come home.\"\n\n\"That's friendly,\" said Liz, raising a brow. \"I'm sure that makes her want to run right home.\"\n\n\"It's over from what she tells me. She tried to log into their online banking and found herself locked out. How can he do that?\"\n\n\"Report fraud and have all the passwords reset,\" replied Liz, hanging up her coat. \"This isn't going to be fun.\"\n\n\"No,\" agreed Maggie. \"It's not.\"\n\n\"I'm going to take Katrina into my office and examine her to make sure she's okay. I'll be right back.\"\n\nLiz sat Katrina on the sofa in her office and gave her a quick exam. While she was listening to her chest sounds, Katrina asked, \"Can I listen to my heart, Grandma?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Liz and relocated the ear pieces to the girl's ears. She positioned the diaphragm on the girls chest. \"Hear that?\"\n\nKatrina nodded. \"Do you let other kids listen too?\"\n\n\"Sometimes. When they're really scared of me. Do I look scary to you?\"\n\nKatrina giggled. \"No.\"\n\nMaggie knocked on the door. \"Almost done? Come into the kitchen and get something to eat.\"\n\nThey headed to the kitchen. While Liz was wolfing down her chili, she heard her phone ringing in her bag.\n\n\"Elizabeth Stolz,\" she answered out of habit without looking at the screen.\n\n\"Liz. It's Erika.\" The clarification was unnecessary. Erika's crisp British accent with a slight undercurrent of German intonation was instantly recognizable. They'd known each other since Liz had been a surgical resident at Yale and Erika had been a graduate student in the philosophy department. They'd met in a local pub and discovered a shared affection for single-malt scotch and continental philosophy and indulged it by meeting regularly to drink, speak German, and discuss phenomenology.\n\nLiz's first impulse was to ask solicitously about Erika's mental state. Her friend had been despondent since her longtime partner had died suddenly of a heart attack in the spring. But Liz sensed that an upbeat tone might be a better approach. \"Erika! How nice to hear from you!\"\n\n\"Liz, I'm glad I caught you. I have an enormous favor to ask.\"\n\n\"Ask away.\"\n\n\"I need to get away from here. Everyone's gone for holidays. The place is like a bloody tomb.\" Erika had been living in the professor's residence at Colby for years. It was not the first time she'd found spending the holidays there too depressing. Usually, she and Jeannine had gone someplace warm for Christmas. They were both vocal atheists and didn't celebrate the holiday, so it didn't matter where they were. \"I thought about opening the beach cottage, \" Erika explained, \"but I just spent all that money getting it winterized. Could I possibly impose\u2026?\"\n\n\"You're not imposing. Of course, you can stay here. When are you coming?\"\n\n\"Is this afternoon too soon?\"\n\nLiz mentally arranged the guestrooms, thinking of the two bedrooms that had been recently vacated by their party guests. She hated to ask Ellie, her housekeeper to clean on a weekend. There was another bedroom on the second floor, but with the children upstairs, Erika would be more comfortable downstairs.\n\n\"Of course, you're always welcome. I'll let Maggie know. I'm sure it's fine, but we had a very exciting morning.\" Liz briefly recounted the story of Katrina's disappearance and recovery. She was used to summarizing cases and very good at getting stories down to the essential facts.\n\n\"That's horrible,\" said Erika when Liz had finished her tale. \"I'm so glad she was found so quickly. Too many of these cases end badly.\"\n\n\"I never wanted to imagine it ending badly,\" Liz admitted. \"Unless you hear from me in the next ten minutes, pack up and head down.\" After she got off the phone, Liz glanced at her watch. If Erika left shortly, she would arrive in about two hours.\n\nLiz went into the kitchen to tell Maggie, who was scooping out more macaroni and cheese for the children. Liz bent to speak in her ear.\n\n\"Erika Bultmann asked if she could stay with us.\"\n\nMaggie gave her a quick, anxious look. \"When?\"\n\n\"She wants to come today.\"\n\n\"How long is she staying?\"\n\n\"I didn't ask. Probably through Christmas.\"\n\n\"I forgot to tell you with all the excitement, but Sophia has decided to come for Christmas. She called while you were on the way home.\"\n\n\"I thought she wasn't coming.\"\n\n\"She said she has big news to share and wants to tell us in person.\"\n\n\"When is she coming?\"\n\n\"She's flying into Boston tomorrow morning, but we won't need to pick her up. She's renting a car at the airport.\"\n\n\"Okay. To make this work, we'll need to split up. You go with Alina to Reny's and get some warm clothes for the kids. I'll change the linens and clean the bathrooms.\"\n\nMaggie turned to stare at Liz. \"You? You're going to do housecleaning?\"\n\nLiz gave her a dirty look. \"I can, if I really have to. I hate to bother Ellie on the weekend. The poor woman works three jobs.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should pay her more.\"\n\n\"I pay her more than anyone else. I pay her double and triple when we have company.\"\n\n\"Tell her you'll pay her triple if she'll clean the guest rooms today. How much you want to bet she'll be happy for money right before Christmas?\"\n\n\"I don't bet on a sure thing. Okay. Let me call her.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "By the time Maggie returned from town with Alina and the girls, Liz and Ellie had put the house in order for their new guests. Ellie was just leaving. She waved to Maggie and called, \"Merry Christmas!\" as she got into her car.\n\nMaggie rolled down her window. \"You too!\"\n\n\"Thanks for the gift card!\" Ellie called, waving an envelope.\n\nMaggie had no idea what she was talking about but she called back: \"You're welcome! Merry Christmas.\"\n\nMaggie helped Alina bring in the bags.\n\n\"I guess you were successful,\" said Liz, watching the parade of shopping bags coming through the door.\n\n\"The girls should be set for now. We also found a very nice winter parka for Alina. It's hard to find small sizes sometimes.\"\n\n\"That's because we grow 'em big up here,\" quipped Liz.\n\nMaggie came closer so she could speak privately. \"Did you pay Ellie triple?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2026on your orders. And I had an extra hundred-dollar gift card left over from the office party, so I gave her that too.\"\n\n\"You're generous to a fault sometimes,\" said Maggie kissing her. \"But I love that about you.\"\n\nThe ship's bell on the front porch sounded. \"That will be Erika,\" said Liz, glancing at her watch. \"I'll get the door.\"\n\nMaggie heard the bustle in the hall as Erika came in with her bag.\n\n\"We'll put you in the downstairs guestroom, if you don't mind.\" Liz reached for a bag. \"We have kids on the second floor.\"\n\n\"Suits me fine,\" said Erika. \"Beggars can't be choosers, not that I think the downstairs room isn't perfectly lovely or mind sharing the floor with children.\"\n\n\"You're so adaptable,\" said Liz.\n\n\"Of course, I am. I'm a philosopher. I'm always reasonable.\"\n\nAfter depositing Erika's bags in the guest room, Liz and Erika came into the kitchen. \"Hello, my dear,\" said Erika, sweeping Maggie into a hug. \"You look as ravishing as ever! Our very own star.\"\n\nMaggie had to admit she enjoyed the hyperbole. Erika, who was mostly reserved and cynical, occasionally allowed herself moments of extravagance.\n\nShe and Liz were the proverbial \"two peas in a pod.\" Erika was nearly as tall as Liz and as lanky as her friend. She was blond, now tending to white hair as approached her mid-fifties. Her parents had escaped from East Germany. She liked to recount the adventure like a thriller plot. In fact, it had been a harrowing experience for the young girl. Her stay in England after the escape had a left her with the distinctive British accent.\n\n\"Was m\u00f6chtest du trinken?\" asked Liz.\n\n\"Etwas wein, danke.\"\n\n\"Rot oder weiss?\"\n\n\"Rot, denke ich. Die Nacht is kalt und ich brauche irgendetwas kr\u00e4ftiges.\"\n\nLiz poured Erika a glass of red wine.\n\nErika raised her glass to Maggie. \"Thank you, Maggie, for taking in one of Liz's strays. I am eternally grateful.\"\n\n\"We're used to having a full house. My daughter is here along with her two girls. My other daughter is coming tomorrow.\"\n\n\"A very female holiday,\" observed Erika, raising her glass. \"I approve.\"\n\nAlina came into the kitchen. Erika reached out her hands. \"Alina, my darling, how are you? I hear you've had a difficult day.\"\n\nAlina sighed. \"That's putting it mildly. It was terrifying.\"\n\n\"All's well that ends well, I hear.\"\n\n\"We're heading there, I hope.\" Alina handed the local paper to her mother and pointed out a display ad. \"There's a carol ceremony tomorrow night at the Episcopalian church. Can we go?\"\n\n\"As long as it's not religious,\" muttered Liz, scowling.\n\n\"Oh, Liz, don't be a spoil sport,\" said Erika. \"Cultural Christianity is nothing to be ashamed of. It has sponsored some of the world's most sublime music.\"\n\n\"You, the penultimate atheist, want to go to church?\" asked Liz with an exaggerated look of surprise.\n\n\"Sure, why not?\" said Erika, shrugging. \"I adore liturgical music.\"\n\n\"I've heard about the new vicar there,\" said Maggie. \"She's a retired opera singer. She sang at the Met.\"\n\n\"Really?\" said Liz and Erika in unison.\n\nThey were both opera fans, so Maggie was not surprised this information got their immediate attention.\n\n\"It would be interesting to hear why she made such a big switch,\" said Liz.\n\n\"Obviously, some kind of Pauline conversion,\" said Erika in her archest voice. \"She fell off her horse and bumped her head. Never been the same since.\"\n\nLiz and Erika laughed, but Maggie wasn't so sure she was willing to dismiss the woman and her conversion so lightly. \"You two should show some more respect.\"\n\nLiz shrugged. \"Why?\"\n\nMaggie, hands on hips, gave her a severe look. \"Liz, I'm really surprised at you. She's a community leader, like you, and an accomplished woman, like you. Just because she's religious doesn't mean she doesn't deserve respect.\" Maggie stared at Erika, who averted her eyes like a guilty child. \"You two are dangerous together. Now, try to behave yourselves.\"\n\nWhen Maggie left the room, Liz muttered, \"She spoils all my fun.\"\n\n\"I heard that!\" called Maggie.\n\nAfter dinner, Liz turned on the propane fireplace on the porch and sat talking with Erika. Maggie watched anxiously when Liz brought in an empty scotch bottle and opened a new one.\n\nMaggie helped Alina put the kids to bed and told them two stories as she'd promised. After she tucked them in, she went up to bed to read. After every chapter, she glanced at the clock. When the time went into single digits, she decided to turn off the lights. She lay there for a few moments wondering if she should go down and encourage Liz to come up to bed but reminded herself that Liz was old enough to decide for herself. After worrying for a few minutes more, Maggie finally fell asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "The next morning, Liz didn't want to get up, so Maggie shook her arm. \"You smell like a distillery. I hope you had fun.\"\n\nLiz punched her pillow and rolled over. \"Not really. But I enjoyed the conversation\u2026I think. Erika told me she is rereading Sein und Zeit and has rediscovered Heidegger.\"\n\n\"Heidegger?\"\n\n\"Dreadful man. He became a Nazi and threw his mentor, Edmund Husserl under the bus. Brilliant, though.\"\n\nIt was too early in the morning for a philosophy lesson. Maggie just nodded and put on her bathrobe. \"Everyone is awake. We need to get up too.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" agreed Liz, but seconds later, she was sound asleep.\n\nMaggie took a quick shower, put on her makeup and went downstairs. Fortunately, Alina knew where everything was from her summer visits. She'd fed the children yogurt and cereal and had made herself some herbal tea.\n\n\"Good morning, Mom,\" she said, raising her bloodshot eyes when Maggie came into the breakfast room.\n\n\"You look exhausted.\"\n\nAlina sighed. \"The girls have been awake since five. I tried to keep them quiet so they wouldn't wake everyone.\"\n\n\"I heard them, but it was time to get up. Did you get any sleep?\"\n\n\"A little. My phone kept pinging. Finally, I switched off the sound.\"\n\n\"Is Jeff still sending you angry messages?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. Now he's pleading for me to come home.\"\n\n\"Do you want to go home?\"\n\n\"Of course, I want to go home. But I can't go back to Jeff.\"\n\nMaggie nodded. \"I understand.\"\n\n\"I had some time this morning go online and check our finances. He's reset the password on all our accounts, but I could get in by calling the banks and giving my social security number. I asked for a new debit card so I can access our money, but when I checked the balance, it was down to a few hundred dollars. The credit cards are maxed out. The mortgage is in arrears, and the bank has filed for foreclosure. Thank God, I still have my 401K. He can't touch that.\"\n\nMaggie put her arm around her daughter. \"Oh, honey, I'm so sorry. Where did the money go?\"\n\n\"I think his drug problem is worse than I thought. And he was never any good with money. That's why I always managed it. But he begged to take it on. Obviously, I was a fool to trust him. I should have checked. It's only been a year since we switched. I can't believe it happened so fast.\"\n\nMaggie sighed. \"Money can go quickly. When did your financial problems start?\"\n\n\"He won't tell me. And that's the real reason it's over. He won't be honest with me. He lies about everything.\"\n\n\"It's pretty hard to trust people again when they consistently lie to you. That's what broke up my marriage to your father, lying about his affair. Meanwhile, I knew. Of course, I knew.\"\n\nLiz came into the room. Maggie wasn't surprised to see her looking relatively put-together. She'd showered and dressed. When she leaned down to kiss her, she smelled minty from toothpaste and mouthwash, no doubt to hide the evidence of her indulgence.\n\n\"I'm going to make a sausage and egg casserole, okay?\"\n\n\"You don't always have to cook. I'll make breakfast. Sit down and have some coffee.\" Maggie got up and made Liz a cup of coffee using the super-dark-roast blend she liked.\n\n\"I'll make the casserole after I have a cup of diesel oil to start the engines,\" said Liz and took a sip of coffee.\n\nErika came into the breakfast room, looking perfectly normal. She was dressed and ready for the day. \"Good morning, all,\" she said brightly, heading for the coffee maker.\n\n\"It's not fair that you look so good after all that single malt,\" grumbled Liz. \"I hate you.\"\n\n\"I've had more recent practice, I think.\" Erika sat down next to her.\n\n\"As a doctor, I wouldn't encourage imbibing in such volume. Doesn't do good things for your liver\u2026or stomach\u2026or esophagus.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know, but it's fun once in a while.\"\n\n\"What are your plans for the day, Erika?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"Apart from that lovely carol service you have planned, I think I shall head down to the cottage to see if the new property agent had the driveway plowed. They charge more than the last one, who was a disaster. You saw the mess after they failed to drain the water heater. Thank heavens, Liz looks in on the place from time to time, or the water would have been running for weeks! Second homes can be such a burden!\"\n\n\"I'm surprised you didn't offer it for winter rental,\" said Liz. \"They're very popular.\"\n\n\"Too much bother,\" said Erika. \"The tenants never properly clean up after themselves.\"\n\n\"But it would be good to have someone living there. With all the storms last year, there were a lot of break-ins at the shore. Many people didn't shovel or plow, so it was easy for thieves to identify the unoccupied homes.\"\n\n\"That's why I want to make sure they're plowing. And if it's not too windy, I'd like to go for a walk on the beach.\"\n\n\"That sounds wonderful,\" said Alina.\n\n\"You're welcome to join me,\" replied Erika, reaching out her hand and taking Alina's. \"It would be nice to have company.\"\n\nAlina's hopeful expression faded. \"But I have the kids.\"\n\n\"I'll watch the children,\" Maggie offered. \"You go. You could use a walk by ocean. It's very calming.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Mom.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Erika. \"We'll go after breakfast.\"\n\n\"Speaking of which\u2026\" said Liz, getting up.\n\n\"No, you don't,\" said Maggie, with a hand on Liz's arm. \"I'll make breakfast. You sit and entertain your guest.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Liz was glad for the quiet while she prepared the short ribs to go into the slow cooker. It was one of her favorite recipes, but short ribs had become ridiculously expensive. Fortunately, she had a surplus of them, cut from the whole rib roast she'd ordered for Christmas dinner. She'd had it cut in three with the idea that she and Maggie would be alone. Now, she was glad she hadn't put the other sections in the freezer.\n\nEveryone was out doing something. Alina and Erika had gone to the beach house. Maggie had taken the girls to the thrift shops to buy them more warm clothes. The house was blissfully quiet. Liz briefly considered a nap while the house was empty and she'd have some peace, but she'd had too much coffee at breakfast. Of course, if she didn't take this opportunity, she wouldn't be able to nap later. Sophia, Maggie's eldest, was due soon. She'd taken an early flight from Dallas.\n\nAfter all the talk of having a quiet Christmas, Liz couldn't believe they had such a full house. One year, Maggie and Liz had talked about renting a cabin on Moosehead lake to get away from their holiday guests. \"Why not leave the house to them and run away from home?\" Liz had suggested.\n\n\"Sometime soon, that's exactly what we'll do,\" agreed Maggie.\n\n\"Wouldn't everyone be surprised?\"\n\nMaggie shrugged. \"Who cares? As long as I have you all to myself.\"\n\nThe memory of the conversation brought a smile to Liz's lips. Then she remembered Katrina showing up in their room and sighed. The interruption had frustrated her, and she wondered when they could finally get back to what they'd started. It had been five years since Maggie had seduced her in the little cabin in Acadia, but Liz still wanted her as much as she had on that night. She was grateful the breast cancer drugs hadn't diminished Maggie libido, but as her wife often reminded her, sex is more than physical.\n\nMaggie filled the slow cooker with the ribs and other ingredients and turned it on to low. She salivated at the thought of the succulent results. The carol ceremony was at four o'clock. By the time they returned, dinner would be ready.\n\nOn second thought, Liz decided, a nap would be a good idea. She'd be much friendlier afterward and maybe after a nap, her pounding headache would be gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Sophia wanted some time with her nieces, so she volunteered to stay home with the girls while the others went to the carol ceremony. Maggie was glad for the break. She'd spent the entire day with the girls, and as much as loved them, they needed so much attention, especially Katrina. She was bright and curious, but also never turned down an opportunity for mischief. After the previous day's misadventure, Maggie didn't dare let her out of her sight.\n\n\"I'm going with Alyson tomorrow to look at cars,\" said Liz as she drove to St. Margaret's by the Sea Episcopal Church for the carol ceremony.\n\n\"What does Lynne have to say about that?\" asked Maggie uneasily.\n\n\"Nothing. She's coming along. They're buying the car together.\"\n\n\"Really? I guess that means there will eventually be a wedding,\" said Maggie, sounding more relieved than she had intended.\n\n\"Did you have any doubt?\"\n\n\"They haven't set a date yet.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes they did. Al told me at the party. It will be in May. The seventeenth, I think.\"\n\n\"You didn't tell me,\" scolded Maggie.\n\n\"I forgot.\"\n\n\"You forget to tell me a lot.\"\n\n\"It was a little busy that night,\" replied Liz impatiently.\n\n\"Now, now, girls,\" chided Erika from the backseat. \"It's Christmas. Time of good cheer.\"\n\n\"Bah humbug,\" said Liz. She chuckled softly. \"Just kidding.\" She turned on to the Post Road. \"I'm pretty sure I'll buy Alyson's Lexus. It still has some life in it, and we can use another vehicle.\"\n\nMaggie, who by now could pretty much read Liz's mind, knew the car was for Alina, but she wondered where they would store it if Alina decided not to stay. All the bays in the garage were in use in the winter because Liz pulled in her truck so the driveway could be plowed. Never mind, she thought. Liz has a plan. She always has a plan.\n\n\"Maggie, how do you know so much about the new Episcopal vicar?\" asked Erika, obviously changing the subject.\n\n\"She still sings in local opera productions. One of my students knows her and thinks she's wonderful. She's developed quite a reputation as a sermonizer too.\"\n\n\"And how do you know that?\" asked Liz.\n\n\"Joan goes to that church,\" said Maggie, referring to a neighbor in their bridge group.\n\n\"You're all very cozy down here, aren't you?\" observed Erika.\n\n\"Well, you know how it is\u2014small town in Maine\u2026long, cold winters. We huddle together for warmth.\"\n\n\"You make it sound so inviting. Maybe I'll move down here when I retire. I hear the local doctor is quite good.\"\n\n\"I might be retired by then too.\"\n\n\"I rather doubt that,\" replied Erika, gazing out the window.\n\nAlina took her mother's arm as they headed into the church. \"You don't know how much this means to me\u2014having the company of adult women without the kids in tow. Sometimes, I think becoming a stay-at-home mom was the worst idea ever.\"\n\nIt was on the tip of Maggie's tongue to say something about the impact on Alina's marriage, but she kept that thought to herself.\n\nThey entered the Church through the main door. Liz paid the requested donation for the four of them. \"This is a pleasant, little church. I've never been in here before,\" she said, looking around.\n\n\"It takes music for me to darken the door of a church, and obviously, you too,\" said Erika, glancing at the program. \"What an interesting selection. Eclectic and sophisticated. Some baroque. Some modern. I wonder if this is the influence of the new vicar.\"\n\nThey searched for a pew with space for four, navigating around the knots of people chatting in the aisles. A red-haired woman wearing a priest's choir vestments emerged from the vestry. Maggie turned to say, \"That's the vicar, Lucille Bartlett,\" and saw that Erika and Liz had already noticed. Maggie cleared her throat. \"You two need to put your eyes back in their sockets. You're embarrassing yourselves.\"\n\n\"She's stunning!\" said Erika. \"Why didn't you say so? I might become a convert.\"\n\nLiz snickered. \"Now that I'll have to see to believe. You'd convert for a woman?\"\n\n\"Well, not just any woman.\"\n\n\"Wir wissen nicht, ob sie lesbisch ist,\" said Liz.\n\n\"Es macht nichts.\"\n\nLiz raised a brow.\n\n\"I'll just sit and look at her,\" Erika explained. \"I am capable of platonic admiration, you know.\"\n\n\"You two are shameless!\" Maggie said. \"What if someone hears you?\"\n\n\"So?\" asked Liz.\n\n\"You're the town doctor!\"\n\n\"They all know about me.\"\n\n\"Know what? That you're a pervert who drools over the local clergy?\"\n\nErika chuckled. \"I think Maggie's jealous, Liz. We can compare notes later.\"\n\nThe majority of the program was traditional carols sung by the adult and children's choir of the parish accompanied by the organist. There were some more difficult pieces, including a few selections from Britten's Ceremony of the Carols. The music was several levels better than the Catholic church down the street, Maggie decided. She'd attended Mass a few times after she'd first arrived but hadn't recently. The clergy pedophile scandal sickened her, and Liz was a fallen away Catholic turned atheist, who wouldn't hear of going to church.\n\nAt the conclusion of the choral program, the choir director, an older, obviously gay man stepped into the aisle. \"A few of us have been trying to convince Mother Bartlett to sing for us tonight, but she's very resistant.\" There was a disapproving murmur from the audience. The vicar smiled but shook her head. \"Maybe you, the audience, can help change her mind.\" The choir director began to clap, and the audience joined in with enthusiastic applause.\n\n\"Thank you very much,\" said the vicar. \"You will hear me sing at high mass on Christmas eve and Christmas morning\u2026along with our splendid choir.\" She reached out expansively toward the choir. Maggie could see that she'd been well trained as an actress and knew how to hold an audience's attention. Liz and Erika were enthralled.\n\n\"But Mother Lucy, we want to make sure you're in good voice for Christmas,\" said the choir director. \"A little practice won't hurt, will it?\"\n\nThe audience applauded loudly. The priest laughed. \"Obviously, I have a few fans out there.\" She conferred with the choir director who headed over to the organist. He nodded and began to play.\n\nThe selection was the Alleluia from Mozart's Exsultate, Jubilate. The woman's stunningly powerful voice cut through the church like a beam of light. She effortlessly sang all of the coloratura passages and hit the high notes with perfect accuracy. The applause that followed was deafening.\n\nErika leaned over to speak into Maggie's ear. \"Your little town just became much more interesting.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" said Maggie. Being in a church made her feel nostalgic, even homesick. The High Episcopal liturgy was close enough to the Catholic tradition in which she'd been raised to be both familiar and comforting. She might even consider attending services, especially if the new vicar was the brilliant sermonizer everyone said she was.\n\nStill clapping along, the choirmaster came to the front again. Finally, the applause died down. \"Now, doesn't that deserve an encore?\" he asked the audience, which resulted in an instant standing ovation.\n\nShaking her head, the vicar said, \"Well, all right. I'll sing Schubert's 'Ave Maria' as he wrote it, with the original text, a German translation of a passage from Walter Scott's poem, 'The Lady of the Lake.'\"\n\n\"Nice little music lesson,\" Erika remarked. \"Well done.\"\n\nAs the vicar sang, Maggie looked down the pew and saw that Liz and Erika were completely engrossed in the performance. The applause that followed was more thunderous than before. When it finally ended, the vicar thanked everyone for coming and reminded them of the times for the Christmas services.\n\n\"Let's come for Christmas,\" Maggie said to Liz as they waited for the crowd in the aisle to clear.\n\nLiz made a little face. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"I'll go with you, Maggie, if Liz won't,\" said Erika, \"but now, I'd like to meet this woman.\"\n\nThey waited for a break in the knot of well-wishers around the vicar before approaching. Mother Bartlett reached out both her hands. \"Hello. Thank you so much for coming!\"\n\nLiz shook her hand. \"That was quite a performance.\"\n\n\"Are you a member of the parish? I'm so new here, I'm afraid I don't know everyone yet.\"\n\n\"No, not a parishioner. I'm Liz Stolz. Hobbs Family Practice.\"\n\n\"Oh, you're the doctor I keep hearing about. I've been meaning to call you, but preparing the holiday liturgies has taken up all of my time.\"\n\n\"May I introduce my wife, Dr. Maggie Fitzgerald, her daughter, Alina Cummings, and my friend, Dr. Erika Bultmann.\"\n\n\"Oh, my. So many doctors. What eminent company I find myself in tonight.\"\n\n\"Liz is the only medical doctor,\" explained Erika, reaching out her hand. \"The rest of us are merely humble academics.\"\n\n\"Humble is not a word I would ordinarily apply to you, Erika, but since the new vicar has just met you, I won't dispute it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Liz. Sometime, I might return the favor.\"\n\n\"Reverend, do you have plans for dinner?\" Liz asked to Maggie's complete surprise. \"We have a tasty meal waiting for us at home, and we'd love for you to join us.\"\n\n\"Please, call me Lucy. And I don't know what to say. That's a very generous invitation.\"\n\n\"Just say, 'yes,'\" Maggie advised. \"It's so much easier.\"\n\nLucy laughed. \"All right, then. Yes! Let me take off my vestments, and I'll meet you here in a few minutes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "\"Still taking in strays, I see,\" said Maggie, returning to the kitchen after serving drinks to their guests. They had settled in the living room, where the fire was blazing in the wood stove.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I should have asked first if you minded inviting another guest.\"\n\n\"I don't mind. You can invite as many drop-dead gorgeous women who sing opera as you like\u2026now that your eyes are back in your head.\"\n\nLiz paused mashing the potatoes and leaned over to give Maggie a kiss. \"I have eyes only for you.\"\n\n\"You can look all you want, Liz. Just don't touch,\" said Maggie, pinching Liz's thigh.\n\n\"Speaking of women, I wasn't go to tell you, but Jenny called. She and Laura are back from their honeymoon. They have no tree and the cupboard is bare. She asked it they could come for Christmas.\"\n\nMaggie gave her a sharp look. \"Liz, no. I've already entertained one of your exes for the holidays. That's enough. What did you tell her?\"\n\n\"I said we already had a full house, but maybe they could come for New Years.\"\n\n\"Do what you want, but I, for one, could use a break,\" said Maggie irritably. \"I was hoping we could do something romantic for New Years.\"\n\n\"Maybe I can get a cabin up at Moosehead.\"\n\n\"I said romantic, Liz, not rustic.\"\n\n\"Maybe we could see the Northern Lights.\"\n\n\"Maybe we could stay home and relax\u2026alone.\"\n\n\"Okay. If that's what you want\u2026.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" said Maggie, reaching up to kiss her cheek.\n\n\"Would you mind telling everyone that dinner is ready while I toss the salad?\"\n\nMaggie called their guests to the table.\n\n\"My goodness, this looks delicious,\" said Lucy taking the seat next to Erika. \"How lucky for me that you decided to come to the carols ceremony.\"\n\n\"It was Alina's idea,\" Erika explained. \"And lucky for us to hear such a fine soprano voice. I've heard rumors that you used to sing at the Met.\"\n\nLucy blushed a little, which Liz found charming in such a poised, confident woman. \"Yes, I was on the roster of sopranos at the Met, never a big star, but I sang there.\"\n\n\"Quite a change of profession,\" observed Erika. \"Obviously, it wasn't because you lost your voice.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Lucy, laughing softly. \"Nothing like that.\" She gave Erika a quick, curious look. \"You said your name was Bultmann. There was a famous Lutheran theologian by that name.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know,\" replied Erika, making a face. \"No relation, thank heavens.\"\n\nLucy's eyebrows rose slightly, but otherwise she seemed to take no offense. She turned to Liz. \"Would you like me to lead us in a prayer before we eat?\"\n\nLiz took a deep breath to keep a \"No, thank you,\" from shooting out of her mouth. She glanced across the table at Maggie for direction.\n\n\"Yes, please, Lucy,\" said Maggie graciously. \"I'm sure we could all use some prayer.\"\n\nLucy made the sign of the cross of over the food and bowed her head. \"Mother of us all, we give you thanks for this meal prepared for us by the skillful hands of your daughters. Thank you for their generosity in welcoming a stranger, and for the love and friendship that has brought us together at this table. Amen.\"\n\n\"That was a rather unconventional prayer,\" observed Erika.\n\n\"I think you'll find I am a rather unconventional priest,\" said Lucy, accepting the bowl of mashed potatoes.\n\n\"Have you already written your Christmas homily?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"It's nearly done.\"\n\n\"May I ask the subject?\" asked Erika.\n\n\"I thought I'd preach on welcoming strangers. It's germane to the Christmas story, of course, and we've suddenly have such an influx of refugees in Maine. At the Advent services, we've been collecting things they desperately need\u2014warm clothing, toiletries, diapers for the babies.\"\n\n\"What a wonderful idea,\" Maggie said.\n\nLucy nodded. \"It's very moving to see the response. People here are so generous.\"\n\nThey were quiet while they consumed the meal. Liz who cooked by instinct and never cooked anything the same way twice was satisfied with the result and happy to see everyone enjoying her cooking.\n\n\"Mom, I have a surprise for you,\" said Sophia. \"Dana-Farber has hired me as an attending in its oncology department. I'll be moving to Boston.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's wonderful news!\" said Maggie.\n\n\"Congratulations, Sophia,\" said Liz. \"What a great start to your career.\"\n\n\"It was your recommendation that tipped the scales in my favor.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but you have impressive credentials. They are lucky to have you.\"\n\n\"When I'm in Boston, I'll only be an hour and half away so I can come see you more often.\"\n\n\"And I'll get to see you more often too, Phi. I'm staying up here.\"\n\nSophia frowned sympathetically. \"Oh, Al. I'm sorry. Is it really that bad?\"\n\nAlina sighed and nodded. \"I'm afraid so.\"\n\nEveryone at the table had fallen silent while the sisters spoke. Lucy put her hand on Alina's arm. \"If you ever need someone to talk to, I'll be happy to listen.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nTo dispel the gloomy atmosphere, Liz raised her wine glass. \"Here's to old friends and new friends, and happy holidays to all!\"\n\n\"I can drink to that!\" Erika agreed, raising her glass.\n\nAfter the toast, Nicki began to fidget. \"She wants to be fed,\" said Alina, pushing back from the table.\n\n\"I'll take her for few minutes while you eat,\" said Liz, getting up to reach for her. The baby squawked briefly, but finally settled down.\n\n\"Dr. Stolz, I haven't had a wonderful home cooked meal like this in forever,\" Lucy said.\n\n\"Thank you. But you must call me Liz. Everyone in town does.\"\n\n\"I really like that about this place. Everyone is so relaxed and friendly, even people I've just met. A plumber came to fix the water heater in the vicarage. Afterwards, he stood in my kitchen for an hour chatting with me. I offered him a cup of coffee, but he declined, saying he was leaving. Then he stood there for another hour, talking.\"\n\n\"Sounds about right,\" Liz said with a quick laugh. \"I learn a lot about what's going on in town from the tradesmen. Also, I get to pick their brains about home repairs.\"\n\n\"It's so different here from other places I've been stationed. Different in a good way.\"\n\n\"Well, we're glad to have you,\" said Maggie. \"It might seem like a cozy, little place, but we have lots going on beneath the surface.\"\n\n\"Like everywhere,\" observed Lucy, nodding." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "After dinner, Maggie took the girls upstairs to get them ready for bed while Liz tidied the kitchen. Their guests made themselves comfortable near the wood stove, luxuriating in the warm, dry heat. Liz heard the low murmur of their voices but couldn't make out any of the words. She only knew that Alina was speaking because her voice was higher pitched than the others.\n\nLiz wrung out the sponge and switched off the overhead light. \"Kitchen is closed,\" she said aloud to herself as she always did when she finished cleanup.\n\nMaggie breezed into the room and gave her a quick kiss. \"I came down to help you, but I see you're all done.\"\n\n\"Good timing there, Maggie Fitzgerald.\"\n\n\"My intentions were good. You were just too quick,\" said Maggie pulling her face down for a kiss. \"You're often too quick. You barely give me time to get started.\"\n\n\"And you can be sure I'll be quick if I ever get you alone.\"\n\n\"Tonight, I'll be sure to lock the door,\" said Maggie, giving Liz's backside an appreciative caress.\n\n\"At least, we have Sophia here to absorb some of your granddaughter's exuberant affection. Katrina can crawl into bed with her tonight.\" Liz pulled her close to kiss her.\n\n\"Oh, excuse me.\" Erika's voice. \"I didn't mean to interrupt.\"\n\n\"It's fine, Erika,\" said Liz. \"We shouldn't be making out in the kitchen like two kids.\"\n\n\"Why not? I think it's perfectly lovely that you still do. But you really should put up some mistletoe so the rest of us can get in on the act.\"\n\n\"Mistletoe,\" repeated Maggie. \"Never thought of that.\"\n\n\"Maggie, I came to ask you if you have a little gift bag for something very small.\"\n\n\"Notice she asks you,\" said Liz.\n\n\"That's because she knows I would have something like that and know where it is, whereas you wouldn't have a clue.\"\n\nMaggie searched in the pantry closet and came up with a tiny red and white bag decorated with glitter. \"How's this? Too small?\"\n\n\"No, perfect. Thank you,\" said Erika, taking away the little bag.\n\n\"I wonder what that's about,\" said Liz.\n\n\"We should join our guests,\" Maggie suggested. She gave Liz a quick kiss. \"Later, you,\" she said, grazing Liz's crotch with her fingertips.\n\nBefore taking a seat, Liz put wood on the fire and turned down the vent. \"Everyone comfortable?\"\n\n\"Oh, it's wonderful,\" said Lucy. \"Delicious food and drink, amazing conversation, toasty fire\u2026Can I stay forever?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" said Liz. \"We have lots of room.\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, I have chaplain duty at the hospice in the morning, but another time, perhaps,\" said Lucy, glancing shyly at Erika.\n\nErika cleared her throat. \"Yes, well, now that Liz and Maggie have joined us, I have a gift for someone.\" She rose and placed the little gift bag in Alina's lap.\n\n\"What's this?\" asked Alina, looking puzzled.\n\n\"Look inside.\"\n\nAlina put her hand in the bag and came up with a key on a keychain with a smiling sun charm.\n\n\"It's the key to my beach cottage,\" Erika explained. \"It's a four-season house, fully insulated. The oil tank is full and, as you saw, there's a very nice fireplace. It only has two bedrooms, but for the time being, I hope that's enough.\"\n\n\"But I can't pay you rent. I don't have any money and no job.\"\n\n\"Never mind that. I don't want rent. You'd be doing me an enormous favor by keeping an eye on the place. It's only temporary, mind you. I'll be back at the end of May around Memorial Day. Hopefully, by then, you'll have found something else.\"\n\n\"I don't know what to say.\" A single tear ran down Alina's cheek. \"That's so kind. I'll pay you back rent once I get a job.\"\n\n\"No, you won't. You'll save your money to get back on your feet.\"\n\n\"Alina, I forgot to tell you that Tony called,\" said Liz. \"His friend at Channel Eight is willing to talk to you. Tony said to call him tomorrow to get all the details. I'll give you his number.\"\n\nAt that, Alina began to cry openly. Maggie got up to offer her some tissues. \"You're all so kind,\" said Alina, mopping her face. Lucy, sitting beside her, gently rubbed her shoulder.\n\nAlina escaped into the bathroom for privacy. Liz got up to get a bottle of cognac and glasses from the media room. Maggie followed her.\n\n\"Did you have any idea Erika was going to offer her the cottage?\"\n\n\"No. None. But that's Erika, sometimes she takes in strays too. Must come from being a refugee herself. That crusty exterior hides a very warm heart.\"\n\nAlina chose to go to bed soon afterwards, followed by her sister, who'd gotten up early to make her flight. Maggie and Liz stayed up another hour with their guests.\n\n\"Leave the light on over the stove when you go to bed,\" Liz told Erika as she got up to leave.\n\n\"Yes, Liz, I remember,\" Erika replied, but her eyes never left Lucy's face.\n\nLiz reached out her hand to Lucy. \"Thanks for accepting my spur of the moment invitation. I've enjoyed getting to know you.\"\n\nLucy got up and hugged Liz. \"Thank you. This is the warmest welcome I've had since I arrived.\" She hugged Maggie and gave her a kiss on the cheek. \"I hear you're a singer too. We could use another professional voice to keep our choir in line,\" she said close to Maggie's ear.\n\n\"Hmmn. I don't know about that. I'm not an early riser.\"\n\n\"Our Eucharist service is at ten thirty.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe that's not too early. We'll see.\"\n\n\"Choir practice on Thursday nights at seven.\"\n\nAs Liz and Maggie walked the two flights of stairs to the third-floor bedroom, Maggie asked in a whisper, \"Do you think it's safe to leave them alone?\"\n\n\"They're both adults.\"\n\n\"What do you think of her?\"\n\n\"I'm not usually a fan of people who wear dog collars, but this one is very interesting.\"\n\n\"I agree. I wonder what her story is. Quitting the Met to become a priest?\"\n\n'We don't know anything about her, but we'll find out, I guess.\"\n\nLiz was getting ready for bed when she saw car lights against the bathroom window. \"I see Lucy's heading home.\" She glanced at the clock. It was near midnight. \"Probably a good idea for the new vicar to sleep in her own bed and avoid gossip.\"\n\n\"Do you think there's any interest?\"\n\nLiz shrugged. \"Erika certainly finds her attractive. And she is. No one can deny it. Are you going to sing in her church choir?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" said Maggie, heading out of the bathroom with a little wag of her hip.\n\n\"You, tease,\" said Liz, following her. She got into bed. \"Finally, some peace and quiet.\"\n\n\"And now,\" said Maggie, moving over her, \"we can finally finish what we started. When was that? Two days ago? It seems like an eternity.\" She kissed Liz, teasing her lips with her tongue. \"Last night, you were useless.\"\n\n\"Blame Erika.\"\n\n\"Did she pour the scotch down your throat? Tap an IV?\" asked Maggie, reaching into Liz's pajama bottoms.\n\nThere was a soft knock on the bedroom door. \"Grandma?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head. \"It's locked,\" she whispered. \"She'll go back downstairs in a moment.\"\n\nBarely breathing, they both listened in the dark. Then they heard another voice, Sophia's. \"Come on, kiddo. Back to bed. Let your grandmas sleep. They're tired.\"\n\nThey listened to the footsteps retreat down the stairs. Maggie giggled softly. \"There. All fixed. Now, where was I?\"" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "A Big Sky Christmas", + "author": "William W. Johnstone", + "genres": [ + "western" + ], + "tags": [ + "Christmas", + "1870s" + ], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Montana, 1947", + "text": "The roar of gunshots seemed to hammer against the old man's ears. Alexander Cantrell couldn't hear well anymore. Time had taken its toll on him, as it does on everyone. But he could plainly hear\u2014or at least thought he could\u2014the dull boom of pistols going off and the ear-splitting crack of rifle fire. The smell of burned powder was strong in his nose.\n\nLikewise his vision wasn't what it once had been, but that didn't stop his bleary eyes from making out the sight of dozens of Indians charging toward him, their faces painted for war and contorted with hate as they attacked, yelling and whooping at the top of their lungs. Some people might say he was imagining them, but at this moment, they were as real to him as they had ever been.\n\nBehind them leaped giant flames, as if the old man were looking straight into the mouth of Hell itself....\n\n\"Blast it,\" the old woman standing beside him said. \"Have you gone to sleep on your feet again?\"\n\n\"What? No. No, I'm not asleep.\" The old man shook his head and smiled at his sister Abigail. They were twins, and even at their advanced age, the resemblance between them was obvious. \"Just remembering how things used to be.\"\n\n\"Good memories, I hope.\"\n\nAlexander thought about the violence that had wracked this land and the blood that had been spilled. \"Well, I don't know.\"\n\nBut in a way she was right, he mused. There were plenty of good memories to go along with the bad. In the end, the good outweighed the bad. The violence was the price that had to be paid for the long, happy life that followed.\n\nBrought back to the present by the exchange with Abigail, he looked around. They stood side by side at the top of a slight rise. The grassy slope in front of them led gently down into a broad, lush valley bordered by wooded hills on the far side. A crooked line of trees in the middle of the valley marked the meandering course of the stream that watered the range and made it such fine grazing land. There was no more beautiful place in all the world, the old man thought, than this vast ranch where he and his sister had spent much of their childhood.\n\nAbout fifty yards down the slope was a level stretch of ground surrounded by a wrought iron fence. Inside the enclosed area, the grass was cut short and carefully tended. Here and there were bright spots of color where wildflowers had grown up and been left to bloom. The place had a serene beauty about it, surrounded as it was by rangeland and roofed by the huge, arching vault of the blue Montana sky.\n\nBig sky country, they called it, and there was no truer description than that. The Montana sky was the biggest and bluest to be found anywhere, and the rich cobalt shade was made even more striking by the white clouds that sailed in it like ships. As a young man he had lain on grassy hills like this one and looked at the clouds and actually seen ships in them, and every other shape under the sun as well.\n\n\"There you go drifting off again,\" Abigail said. \"If you're not careful the young folks will start thinking you're a senile old man who ought to be stuck in a home somewhere.\"\n\nAlexander snorted. \"I'd like to see 'em try.\"\n\nHe was tall and spare, with crisp white hair under his Stetson and a white mustache that stood out in sharp contrast against his lean face that the elements had tanned permanently to the color of old saddle leather. He wore a Western-cut suit and boots and looked like he could still leap onto a horse and gallop across the rolling landscape.\n\nHe was just as glad he didn't have to, though. He knew it would hurt like blazes if he did.\n\nThe small, birdlike old woman beside him had white hair, too. When it was loose it hung down her back to her waist, but she wore it in long braids that were wound around her head. A stylish hat perched on those braids. She wore a wool dress and jacket that helped keep her warm, even though the day wasn't really cold. Old blood didn't flow as well as young.\n\nAlexander glanced over his shoulder at the group of men, women, and children who were waiting a respectful distance away beside the dirt road that led to the ranch and the two big Packards that had brought all of them, his children and grandchildren in one vehicle and Abigail's in the other. He linked arms with his sister and said gruffly, \"Come on, we might as well get this done.\"\n\n\"You don't have to make it sound so much like a chore. I enjoy coming here to see Ma and Pa.\"\n\n\"I do, too,\" the old man admitted in a quiet voice. Soon enough, he would be coming and staying, like the others laid under the good Montana soil, their final resting places marked by weathered stone monuments.\n\nStiff-kneed, they started down the slope to the small private cemetery. The afternoon was achingly quiet, so quiet he could hear the faint rumble of trucks on the highway more than a mile in the distance. Overhead an airplane cut a trail through the sky.\n\nThe world had changed so much in the time that he'd been alive, the old man thought. Now you could hop in a car and drive clear across the country, and if you wanted to get where you were going even faster, you could get on an airplane and be at your destination in a matter of hours.\n\nPeople didn't appreciate how lucky they were. It hadn't been like that when he was young, that was for sure. In those days, if you wanted to move across the country, you loaded your belongings in a covered wagon, hitched up a team of horses or mules or oxen, and set off on a journey that would take months. Months of hardship and danger...\n\nThose journeys had been filled with courage and honor and love. Heroes strode through those days like warrior gods of ancient mythology, towering men who protected the weak and innocent, who stood up for what was right, who brought justice and peace to a lawless land with hard fists and fast guns." + }, + { + "title": "Kansas City, Missouri, 1873", + "text": "People stood aside from Jamie Ian MacCallister. His sheer size alone would have prompted most folks to get out of his way. He was a head taller than most men and had shoulders as wide as an ax handle was long. Despite the fact that he was getting on in years, the comfortable old buckskins he wore bulged with muscles. Strength and power radiated from him.\n\nAnybody who wasn't intimidated by how big he was might take a look at the weapons he carried and conclude that he was a man to step lightly around. Holstered on his hips were a pair of Colt .44 Army revolvers, the Model 60 conversion. Tucked under his left arm was a Winchester \"Yellow Boy\" rifle, also in .44 caliber. A hunting knife with a long, heavy blade rode in a fringed sheath behind the right-hand gun. Jamie was, in the parlance of the time, armed for bear, and those weapons would kill a man even quicker and easier than they would a big old silvertip grizzly.\n\nBut size and weaponry aside, the real reason most folks naturally left Jamie alone was the intensity of the gaze that came from his deep-set, eagle-like eyes. Those piercing orbs peered out from under shaggy brows and dominated his craggy, unhandsome, but powerful face. They had seen everything, the eyes seemed to say. Seen the elephant and then some. When angered, they could turn dark and threatening as a thunderstorm rolling across the prairie.\n\nThe thing of it was, when folks got to know him, Jamie's eyes could twinkle with humor or shine with compassion. He was every bit as big and rugged and dangerous as he looked, but his greatest strength was the magnificent frontiersman's heart that beat in his massive chest.\n\nAt the moment, he was striding down one of the streets in Kansas City, taking a look around on a beautiful, crisp autumn afternoon. He had visited the town before, but it had been awhile. The place had grown quite a bit from the rude frontier settlement that had started life as a fur trading post known as Chouteau's Landing. It was an honest-to-God city and even had a railroad bridge that had opened a few years earlier spanning the Missouri River.\n\nCivilization, Jamie thought. He didn't mind it as much as some of the old-time mountain men did, but despite its advantages it would never be able to hold a candle to the prairies, the mountains, and the deserts of the West where he had grown up and lived his life.\n\nHe had left his rangy, sand-colored stallion Sundown and his pack horse tied in front of a general store to take his pasear along the street. He passed a big open area where dozens of covered wagons were parked. The teams were gathered in a large corral nearby.\n\nMen worked on the vehicles, making repairs on things that had broken during the first part of their journey. Women stirred cook pots simmering on campfires. Soon it would be time for supper. Kids ran here and there, playing and enjoying not having to be in school like their peers who were tied down to one place.\n\nA lot of immigrants traveled by train these days, since the completion of the transcontinental railroad a few years earlier, but there was still plenty of country where the trains didn't go. If somebody wanted to settle in one of those places, they had to travel by wagon, the same way other pioneers had done for decades.\n\nJamie supposed these pilgrims were on their way somewhere, although he hoped for their sake that their destination wasn't too far off. It was awfully late in the year to be starting a long trek anywhere. Travelers shouldn't cross the plains after winter settled in.\n\nA group of riders jogged past him in the street. He glanced over at them, the longstanding habit making him take note of everything that happened around him. A man who had made as many enemies as he had over the years needed to keep a close eye out for trouble. That was one reason he'd stayed alive as long as he had.\n\nThe riders looked like they might be trouble for somebody, all right. There were about twenty of them, all roughly dressed and well armed. Even though Jamie had never seen any of them before, he recognized the sort of hard-planed, beard-stubbled faces they bore. Drifters, hardcases, maybe out-and-out owlhoots.\n\nHe felt an instinctive dislike for the men, fueled by the damage similar hombres had done to his family, but as long as they steered clear of him, he wouldn't bother them.\n\nOne of the men said, \"My mouth's so dry I'm spittin' cotton, Eldon. How many saloons are we gonna ride past before we get to one that suits your fancy?\"\n\nThe man riding slightly in the lead of the group turned in the saddle to frown at the one who had spoken. He was a tall, rawboned man with a lantern-jawed face and tufts of straw-colored hair sticking out from under a black, flat-crowned hat with a concho-studded band.\n\n\"Just keep your shirt on, Jake,\" he snapped. \"We'll stop when I'm good and ready, and if that don't suit your fancy, you know what you can do about it.\"\n\nThe man called Jake grinned and held up a hand, palm out. \"Whoa. Didn't mean any offense. You know I'm fine with you callin' the shots.\"\n\n\"You better be. It's worked out pretty good so far.\"\n\n\"That it has,\" Jake agreed, but Eldon had already turned back around and was ignoring him.\n\nThe group rode on down the street.\n\nJamie continued on his way, too, forgetting about the hardcases. In the next block, he paused to tip his head back and study the big fancy sign that stretched along the front of the building where he had paused. In gilt letters, it read CHANNING'S VARIETY THEATER. The building was fancy, too, with two stories and a lot of elaborate scrollwork and trim on its front. It had double doors with a lot of glass in them and a window where people could buy tickets to go inside.\n\nPosters had been tacked up next to the ticket window announcing that a troupe of actors and entertainers headed by that noted thespian Cyrus O'Hanlon would be performing at the theater. Troubadours and terpsichoreans would put on a show, according to the poster, and after a moment Jamie figured out that was a highfalutin' way of saying singers and dancers. The troupe would also perform excerpts from famous plays through the ages, ranging from Sophocles and Aristophanes to the immortal bard of Avon, William Shakespeare himself.\n\nThere were pictures of the various players, including several women. Jamie knew that most people considered actresses to be little better than whores, an attitude that had always irritated him because one of his daughters was an actress and she was as fine a young woman as anybody would ever want to meet.\n\nHe might take in the show while he was in Kansas City, he told himself. If he stayed around long enough. Never could tell when he might take the notion to just up and go.\n\nThat was what he'd been doing for a while.\n\nDrifting.\n\nEver since he had finished the grim chore of avenging his wife Kate's murder.\n\nOver the course of several years he had tracked down and killed forty-four members of the gang of outlaws responsible for Kate's death. It had been a long, hard, bloody road he had followed, and the taking of it had drained something from him.\n\nWhen his quest had come to an end, he could have returned to MacCallister's Valley in Colorado and settled down to live out his life on the ranch there, surrounded by his and Kate's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. It would have been a quiet, comfortable life.\n\nBut that wasn't Jamie Ian MacCallister's way.\n\nHe had stayed home for a while, long enough to visit with all the young ones, then he'd slapped a saddle on Sundown, the horse he'd gotten from his son Falcon. Some folks considered Sundown a killer horse, but he and Jamie had come to an understanding and the stallion had served the big man well.\n\nFrom Colorado, he had set out on a journey of memory, determined to revisit many of the places where he had been in his long life, places that were important to him. He'd started out by riding all the way down into East Texas, to the place where he and Kate had been married, where their first child, a daughter named Karen who hadn't survived infancy, was buried. Knowing that he might never get back there, he had found the grave site, carved a new marker for it, and said his final farewell to his little girl.\n\nThen he'd turned Sundown's nose west, an appropriate direction considering the horse's name.\n\nOn across the Southwest he'd gone, adventuring a mite along the way. Then a great loop to the north and back down the Great Plains. Jamie had considered going all the way to St. Louis, then decided that Kansas City was far enough east for him. He could resupply there and he and Sundown could rest for a few days, then they would head back to Colorado.\n\nAssuming something more interesting didn't come along first." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Dusk was settling down over Kansas City and lights were being lit in most of the buildings. None were brighter than those in the Bella Royale Saloon. The place was so big it took up an entire block, with its entrance situated on one of the corners. Gaily colored lamps hung along the boardwalks on both streets that flanked the double doors.\n\nAs Jamie paused to watch, a fellow in a swamper's apron went along lighting those lamps with a long match. Even though the doors were closed, Jamie could hear music and laughter coming from inside the place. Obviously, folks had a good time in the Bella Royale.\n\nHe had planned to return to the store where he had left his horses, put in an order with the proprietor for a load of supplies, and then ask the man for recommendations of good places to eat and sleep, as well as a livery stable where his animals would be cared for properly.\n\nAs he looked at the gaudy saloon, though, he realized that he had a thirst. It wouldn't hurt anything to wash some of the trail dust out of his throat before he got around to those other things, he decided.\n\nOnce Jamie had made up his mind, he didn't wait around. He strode across the street, opened one of the doors, and stepped into the Bella Royale.\n\nNoise and smoke filled the air, along with the odors of beer, whiskey, bay rum, unwashed flesh, and human waste. The sawdust sprinkled liberally on the floor couldn't soak up all of that typical saloon smell.\n\nJamie's nose wrinkled slightly. Anybody who had ever taken a deep breath of early morning, high country air like he had thousands of times in his life could never be satisfied with this... stench. But he could put up with it long enough to down a mug of beer. Then he'd go on about his business.\n\nHe had seen a lot of horses tied up at the hitch rails outside the saloon, so he wasn't surprised that the place was doing a brisk business. He recognized some of the men lined up along the bar as the ones who had ridden past him in the street a few minutes earlier.\n\nThe one called Eldon, who seemed to be their leader, stood with his back to the bar, his elbows resting on it as his eyes scanned the room. His gaze lighted on Jamie, but stayed there for only a second. Evidently he didn't consider the big man in buckskins all that interesting.\n\nThat was fine with Jamie. He walked to the bar, found an empty spot where he could belly up to the hardwood, and nodded to the apron-wearing bartender who came along to take his order. The man had a pleasant, round face that seemed even rounder because he parted his thinning brown hair in the middle and slicked it down.\n\n\"What can I do for you, mister?\" the bartender asked as Jamie laid the Winchester on the bar. The man looked at the rifle, but didn't say anything about it.\n\n\"If your beer's cold I'll take a mug of it.\"\n\n\"Coldest in Kansas City,\" the bartender replied with a grin. \"At least that's what they tell me. I can't say as I've sampled all of it to know for sure. That'd make a good hobby for a man, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\"If he didn't have anything better to do,\" Jamie said with a grunt. He had always been plainspoken and didn't plan to change his ways.\n\nThe bartender raised his eyebrows and then shrugged. \"Whatever you say, my friend.\" He filled a mug with beer from a tap and slid it in front of Jamie. \"That'll be six bits.\"\n\n\"Think mighty highly of the stuff, don't you?\"\n\n\"I don't set the prices,\" the bartender said as he spread his hands and shrugged. \"I just work here.\"\n\nJamie took a couple coins from the buckskin poke he carried and dropped them on the bar. Then he picked up the mug and took a long swallow of the beer. It was cold and had a good flavor to it, to boot. Maybe it was worth six bits, after all.\n\n\"Are you callin' me a liar?\" The loud, angry voice came from one of the tables where men were sitting and drinking, as opposed to the gambling layouts in the rear half of the big room.\n\nJamie barely glanced over his shoulder at the disturbance. Men got their dander up in saloons all the time. It went hand in hand with guzzling down cheap liquor. As long as the ruckus didn't have anything to do with him, he made it a habit to mind his own business.\n\nAnother man at the table said, \"I didn't call you a liar, Ralston. I just said you'd have a hard time gettin' those wagons to Montana before winter sets in.\"\n\nThe man called Ralston smacked a big fist down on the table so hard it made the glasses on it jump. \"And I'm sayin' I'll do it!\" he insisted. \"I'll have those pilgrims in their new homes by Christmas, by Godfrey! An' if you say I can't do it, then you're callin' me a liar!\"\n\nJudging by the loud, slurred quality of Ralston's voice, he was drunk. Jamie watched in the bar mirror as Ralston leaned over the table and made his point by jabbing a blunt finger against his fellow drinker's chest. That man swatted Ralston's hand away impatiently, and Ralston seized that as an excuse to start the trouble he obviously wanted to. He lunged out of his chair, fist cocked to throw a punch.\n\nJamie sighed, set his half-finished beer on the bar, and turned around. \"Hold it!\" he snapped.\n\nRalston stopped with his fist poised. He was a thick-bodied man with a round-crowned, broad-brimmed hat tilted back on a thatch of sandy hair. A soup-strainer mustache of the same shade drooped over his mouth. His face was red, the nose swollen from habitual drunken binges. \"Who in tarnation are you?\" he demanded as he glared at Jamie.\n\nGood intentions to avoid trouble notwithstanding, Jamie didn't like the conversation he had just overheard. He stepped toward the table.\n\nSensing a possible ruckus in the offing, a lot of the saloon's patrons had quieted down to see what was going to happen. The girls who worked there, dressed in short, spangled dresses, moved well clear of the table where Ralston stood glowering at the big stranger.\n\nJamie didn't answer Ralston's question about who he was. Instead, he asked one of his own. \"Did I hear you say that you're taking that wagon train to Montana?\"\n\n\"That's right. What business is it of yours?\"\n\n\"You're the wagon master?\" Jamie's tone of voice clearly registered his disbelief and disapproval.\n\n\"Damn right I am! Jeb Ralston, finest wagon master on the frontier!\"\n\nJamie's skeptical grunt made it plain how he felt about that claim.\n\nFrom the corner of his eye, he saw one of the saloon's front doors swing open. A slender man stepped inside quickly and closed it behind him. He wore a black suit and hat and a collarless white shirt, and a pair of spectacles perched on his nose. He looked utterly harmless, and Jamie barely took note of him since nearly all of his attention was focused on Jeb Ralston.\n\n\"Look, I'm not trying to pick a fight,\" Jamie told Ralston. \"But it's too late in the year to be starting out to Montana from here. You won't make it before winter, and you don't want to be up there on those plains when the northers start sweeping down from Canada.\"\n\nRalston sneered at him. \"How do you know so much about it?\"\n\n\"Because I've been there myself,\" Jamie said harshly. \"I nearly died in a few of those blizzards.\"\n\n\"This doesn't concern you, old man. You'd better shut up and go back to your beer.\"\n\nJamie wasn't in the habit of backing down when he knew he was right. \"If you start to Montana now, you'll be risking the lives of every one of those pilgrims.\"\n\n\"They paid me to do the job, and by Godfrey, I'm gonna do it!\"\n\n\"Then they made a bad mistake by hiring a drunken fool like you.\"\n\nHe knew Ralston wouldn't stand for that insult. He didn't care. It was true, and Jamie Ian MacCallister was a man who spoke the truth.\n\nRalston's face flushed darker. His eyes widened with outrage. He drew in a deep breath, bellowed in anger, and charged Jamie like a maddened bull." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Jamie expected the attack. Ralston was big\u2014although not as big as Jamie\u2014and probably plenty strong. More than likely he had plenty of experience brawling in saloons.\n\nBut Jamie had fought for his life in desperate battles hundreds of times. He stepped aside, grabbed Ralston, and used the man's own momentum to heave him up and over the bar.\n\nRalston let out a startled yell as he sailed through the air. The crash as he landed against the back bar cut off that yell and replaced it with the sound of bottles shattering. Ralston bounced off and landed in the floor behind the bar.\n\nThe slick-haired bartender stood a few feet away, his eyes bugging out as he stared at Jamie. The man babbled, \"You... you just picked him up... and threw him!\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Jamie said. \"Sorry about all the damage. I'll pay for it.\"\n\nHe could well afford to. During his wanderings over the past five decades, he had cached small fortunes in gold and silver in numerous places across the West. In addition, he had an entire cave full of Spanish treasure that had been hidden there a couple of centuries earlier. All of that didn't include the money he had made from his ranch and the other successful businesses in which he had invested, many of them operated by family members. The MacCallisters were a dynasty, and a mighty wealthy one, at that.\n\nJamie was aware that the room was completely silent as he took out his poke and counted five double eagles onto the bar. That was more than enough to cover the cost of the spilled liquor. He glanced at his still half-full mug of beer and decided he was in no mood to finish it.\n\n\"When that fella wakes up\"\u2014he nodded toward the area behind the bar where Ralston had fallen\u2014\"somebody ought to try to talk some sense into him about starting for Montana this late in the year. If he won't listen to reason, somebody needs to warn those pilgrims he plans to lead them right into trouble.\"\n\n\"Nobody talks sense to Jeb Ralston, mister,\" the bartender said. \"He has his own ideas, and he's not shy about using his fists to defend them.\"\n\n\"Well, it backfired on him this time, didn't it?\" Jamie turned away from the bar to leave the saloon.\n\nHe had taken only a couple of steps when somebody yelled, \"Look out!\"\n\nJamie whirled around, and saw that Ralston had regained his senses and climbed to the top of the bar. He leaped from it in a diving tackle aimed at Jamie.\n\nUnable to get out of the way in time, Ralston's weight slammed into Jamie's left shoulder, the collision's impact making Jamie stagger. He stayed on his feet, though, planted his left hand in the middle of Ralston's chest, and shoved him back a step. With enough room, Jamie swung a right-hand punch that landed on Ralston's jaw like a pile driver.\n\nThe blow jerked Ralston's head to the side but didn't put him down. Drunk he might be, but it surely wasn't the first fight he'd had when he was full of booze. He hooked a right fist of his own into Jamie's midsection. The punch landed with considerable power. Ralston could hit.\n\nJamie sent a short, sharp left into the wagon master's face. Ralston came back with a left of his own that tagged Jamie on the chin. For several long moments as the saloon filled with cheers and shouts of encouragement on both sides, the two men stood toe to toe and slugged it out.\n\nThey were pretty evenly matched, but Jamie was a little taller and heavier and had a slightly longer reach. Those things gave him an advantage.\n\nThe wagon master fought with the intensity of a crazed animal, though, and for one of the few times in his life, Jamie found himself being forced to give ground a little.\n\nHis back came up against the bar. Bracing himself against it, he hunched his shoulders to protect his head and snapped two quick lefts into Ralston's face. Ralston's nose was redder and more swollen, but it was from being hit, not drinking. Jamie whipped a right into Ralston's solar plexus.\n\nThe wagon master leaned forward, his face going gray from the shock of the blow. He lowered his head and plowed forward. The top of his head rammed Jamie's chin, forcing his head back.\n\nJamie grabbed hold of Ralston and pulled him in closer, grappling with him. He got his arms around Ralston's waist and swung him into the air again. The muscles of Jamie's arms, back, and shoulders swelled so much from the effort it looked almost like they were about to burst through the buckskin shirt he wore.\n\nOnce Ralston was off his feet, he couldn't get his balance to fight anymore. Jamie turned him upside-down and then lifted the wagon master into the air above his head. It was an amazing feat of strength, the stuff of which legends were made. As he supported that massive burden, Jamie took a couple of stiff-legged steps and then smashed Ralston down onto one of the empty tables. Wood splintered and cracked as the table collapsed under the impact.\n\nRalston lay there senseless among the wreckage of the table.\n\nHe wouldn't be getting up any time soon, Jamie thought.\n\nA frown creased his forehead as he saw just how true that was. Ralston's right leg was twisted at an odd, unnatural angle. Something white stuck out through a bloody rip in his trousers.\n\nJamie drew in a deep breath as he realized it was the jagged end of a bone. He had broken the wagon master's leg.\n\nHe wasn't the only one to notice that. A man in the crowd yelled, \"Holy cow! Look at Ralston's leg!\"\n\n\"Somebody better fetch a doctor!\" another man added excitedly.\n\nJamie scowled. He had set plenty of broken bones in his time and had no doubt that he could do a passable job on Ralston's leg, but he reminded himself that he was in the middle of a good-sized city where there were probably a number of doctors practicing medicine. It would be better to leave the job to one of them.\n\nHe noticed the fellow who had come into the Bella Royale just as the fight was starting. The man edged forward to stare at Ralston's unconscious form. His eyes were big with horror behind the spectacles he wore.\n\nOne of the saloon's patrons nudged the man with an elbow and asked, \"What's the matter, mister? Ain't you never seen somebody with a busted leg before?\"\n\n\"Yes, but... but...\" the man stammered. \"That... that's a piece of bone sticking out!\"\n\nHe suddenly clamped a hand over his mouth, whirled around, and sprinted for the door as several of the customers guffawed at him.\n\nThe door was still open from the man's hasty departure when another man stepped in, this one a burly, middle-aged individual with a badge pinned to his coat lapel. He had a revolver on his hip and a shotgun tucked under his arm. He strode toward the bar and said in a loud voice, \"All right, all right, everybody just settle down. What happened here?\" He stopped and frowned at Ralston. \"Good Lord, that man's leg is broken!\"\n\nOne thing you could say about folks in Kansas City, Jamie thought. They seemed to have a firm grasp of the obvious.\n\nThe constable or deputy or whatever he was glared around the room and demanded, \"Somebody tell me what happened here. Who busted this man's leg?\"\n\nJamie saved everybody the trouble of pointing him out by saying, \"That was me.\"\n\nThe lawman looked him up and down, still frowning darkly. \"And who might you be?\"\n\n\"Name's Jamie Ian MacCallister.\"\n\nDespite the lawman having told them to be quiet, that announcement brought a stir from the crowd. Probably not everyone in the Bella Royale recognized the name, but a lot of them did. Jamie was one of the most famous men on the frontier, and his recent campaign of vengeance against the Miles Nelson gang had added to his already staggering reputation.\n\n\"MacCallister, eh?\" the lawman said after a moment. \"What did Ralston do, look crossways at you?\"\n\nThe bartender spoke up. \"That's not fair, Deputy. Ralston started the fight. He was drunk and obnoxious, as usual, and he attacked Mr. MacCallister. Mr. MacCallister was just defending himself.\"\n\n\"I suppose Ralston should be glad you didn't defend yourself with those Colts,\" the deputy muttered. \"How many men is it you've killed now?\"\n\n\"I don't keep count,\" Jamie replied curtly. \"But I never killed a single one that didn't need killing.\"\n\nThe deputy looked like he wanted to say something in response to that, but he didn't. He looked around at the crowd. \"Has anybody gone for a doctor?\"\n\nThe saloon's customers looked back at him mutely.\n\n\"Well, what in blazes is wrong with you?\" the deputy roared. \"Somebody go and do that!\"\n\nSeveral men hurried out of the saloon.\n\nThe lawman went on. \"Anybody here want to argue with the claim that MacCallister acted in self-defense? No?\" He blew out an exasperated breath and turned back to Jamie. \"I reckon there's no point in arresting you. Under the circumstances, a judge would just dismiss any charges against you.\"\n\n\"And justifiably so,\" the bartender put in. \"Nobody's gonna shed any tears over what happened to Ralston. This wasn't the first fight he's caused in here over the past few years, since he showed up and started guiding those wagon trains west. He just picked the wrong fella to try to buffalo this time.\"\n\nThe lawman looked at Jamie through narrowed eyes. \"Just try to stay out of trouble the rest of the time you're in town, MacCallister. I know your reputation. Anywhere you go, all hell seems to break loose.\"\n\n\"That's hell's choice, not mine,\" Jamie said.\n\nThe deputy stomped out.\n\nAs the customers returned to their drinking and gambling and flirting with the saloon girls, the bartender said, \"Let me set you up with a real drink, Mr. MacCallister. On the house, of course.\"\n\n\"I'm obliged, but what I'd really like is a good meal. Where's the best place to eat in this town?\"\n\n\"Herbert's Steak House, three blocks up and one to the right, is mighty good,\" the bartender said. \"Tell 'em Clancy sent you. That's me.\"\n\n\"I'll do that,\" Jamie promised. He took one more look at Ralston, who was still sprawled on the floor, shook his head, picked up his rifle, and walked out.\n\nThe room buzzed behind him as people talked about having seen the famous Jamie Ian MacCallister in action.\n\nHe had never thought of himself as being any sort of famous personage, even though he was. He just went about his business and did what had to be done.\n\nAs he stepped out onto the boardwalk in front of the saloon, movement to his left caught his attention. He stopped and turned that way, his right hand going to the Colt on his hip. His fingers closed around the gun's grips, but he didn't draw it.\n\nThe bespectacled man who had run out of the saloon a few minutes earlier stood there. His face was pale and drawn, and he looked scared. He took an involuntary step back and held out his hands, palms toward Jamie. \"Please, Mr. MacCallister! Don't shoot me!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Jamie frowned at the stranger for a second, then took his hand away from his gun and said sharply, \"Take it easy, mister. I'm not in the habit of going around shooting people unless they shoot at me first.\"\n\n\"That... that's good to know. I mean you no harm, Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\nJamie grunted. The fellow was about half his size and didn't look like any sort of gunslinger or knife artist. The chances of him being able to do any harm were about zero.\n\nJamie wasn't rude enough to point that out, however. \"How you do know my name? You ran out of there before I said what it was.\"\n\n\"The deputy left the door open some when he went in. I listened to what was going on inside after I...\" He looked toward the alley. \"Well, after my... my digestion settled down. From the way people in there were acting, they seemed to recognize your name.\"\n\n\"You don't?\"\n\n\"No. I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't.\"\n\nA grin split Jamie's rugged face. \"Nothing to be sorry about. I don't know your name, either.\"\n\n\"Oh. That's right. It's Moses. Moses Danzig.\"\n\nJamie extended his right hand. \"Pleasure to meet you, Mr. Danzig.\" His big paw pretty much swallowed up the other man's hand.\n\nMoses Danzig looked nervous, like he was afraid that Jamie would crush his fingers, but Jamie took it easy on him.\n\nAfter they'd shook, Moses said, \"Obviously, you're some sort of frontiersman.\"\n\n\"Some sort, yeah,\" Jamie agreed.\n\n\"Would you happen to be looking for work?\"\n\nJamie rubbed his chin. \"Not really. But what did you have in mind?\"\n\nMoses took a deep breath and went on. \"I'm traveling with the wagon train that's supposed to pull out tomorrow. We're going to have to find a new wagon master and guide.\" He paused, then added dryly, \"Somebody broke the leg of the one we had.\"\n\nJamie looked at the smaller man for a moment, then burst out laughing. Moses Danzig might not be very big and his stomach might be a little delicate at the sight of blood, but he had some sand in his craw, that was for sure.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Danzig, that is a problem, but I can't help you. In fact, I was thinking as I left the saloon just now that it was a good thing Ralston jumped me the way he did. I didn't want trouble with him, but at least with him laid up, that wagon train will be stuck here until spring.\"\n\n\"But we can't wait until spring,\" Moses insisted. \"We have to get started to Montana now.\"\n\nJamie shook his head. \"It's too late in the year. You can't get there before winter sets in. Ralston ought to have known that. It's too dangerous.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ralston promised he could get us to our destination by Christmas.\"\n\nJamie snorted and shook his head. \"Even if he managed to do that, it's still five or six weeks too late. You might be able to travel up until the end of November, but even that's mighty chancy.\"\n\n\"He said winter was going to be late this year. He'd studied the almanac and all the signs and that if we made it by Christmas we would be all right.\"\n\n\"And you'd trust your life to some drunk saying that?\" Jamie asked. \"Because that's what you'd be doing.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Moses said, his voice growing hollow with despair. \"We can't stay here, you see. There's no money. Everyone with the wagon train... spent everything they had to get this far and buy supplies for the rest of the trip.\"\n\n\"You've got those supplies,\" Jamie pointed out. \"Live on them until spring.\"\n\nMoses shook his head. \"They won't last that long, and even if they did, we couldn't afford to buy more for the rest of the journey.\"\n\n\"Sure you could. Some of the folks could get jobs and work over the winter.\"\n\n\"Most of the families saved for years to afford to come out here, Mr. MacCallister. They couldn't make enough in a few months. No, they have to reach those homesteads waiting for them in Montana or give up their dreams.\"\n\n\"Then maybe that's just what they should do,\" Jamie said bluntly.\n\n\"Would you?\" Moses asked. \"I don't know you, Mr. MacCallister, but you don't strike me as the sort of man who would give up on much of anything you wanted.\"\n\nThat was true enough, Jamie thought. When the Good Lord made him, He'd put in a few extra pinches of stubbornness. Sheer muleheadedness, Kate would have called it. And she had, on more than one occasion.\n\n\"What is it you want me to do?\"\n\n\"You're a frontiersman,\" Moses said. \"Evidently quite an accomplished one, from the way the people in the saloon were acting when they found out who you are. It seems to me that the answer is simple.\"\n\n\"I'm listening,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"You can take us to Montana.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Jamie didn't know whether to laugh or let out a disgusted snort, but he did neither. \"I told you, Moses, I'm not looking for work.\"\n\n\"I'll wager that you've guided wagon trains before, though, haven't you?\"\n\nJamie's broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. As a matter of fact, he had guided several wagon trains to where they were going, but that didn't mean he wanted to do it again, especially under these circumstances.\n\n\"And you know the country,\" Moses went on. \"You told Mr. Ralston you'd been up there.\"\n\n\"I've been to Montana Territory,\" Jamie admitted. \"Where are the homesteads you people are claiming?\"\n\n\"They're in a place called Eagle Valley. Do you know it?\"\n\nJamie frowned slightly. \"I know it, all right. It's a beautiful little valley with plenty of decent land for farms and ranches. The last time I was there, though, it was covered with buffalo. The Sioux and the Blackfeet considered it part of their hunting grounds and fought over it now and then.\"\n\n\"Mr. Hendricks was assured that the Indians in the area had been pacified.\"\n\nJamie snorted disgustedly. \"Who's this fella Hendricks?\"\n\n\"The captain of the wagon train. His name is Lamar Hendricks.\"\n\nJamie knew that wagon train captain was an elected position, making Hendricks the leader of the immigrants, but it was a title without much real power. The wagon master was really the one in charge.\n\nAnd this bunch didn't have one, since, as Moses had correctly pointed out, Jamie had broken the son of a gun's leg.\n\n\"Who told Hendricks the Indians weren't a threat?\"\n\n\"Someone with the government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, I believe. I don't really know the details.\"\n\nThat answer didn't surprise Jamie. There must be something in the water in Washington, D.C., that made all those bureaucrats think they knew better about everything than everybody else. Darned fools was what they really were.\n\n\"I wouldn't go so far as to say that the Indians are pacified. From what I hear, there hasn't been much trouble up there lately, but that's because the big buffalo herds have moved north into Canada and most of the bands have followed them. They could come back any time, and then it's liable to start all over again.\"\n\n\"Captain Hendricks and his people just want to live peacefully. I'm sure they'll make every effort to get along with the Indians.\"\n\nJamie didn't say anything in response to that. All across the frontier, settlers had risked their lives moving into areas where the Indians didn't want them. Running such risks was just part of being a pioneer. The choice was up to them.\n\nHe was curious about something else, though. \"You mentioned Hendricks and his people. Aren't you one of 'em?\"\n\nMoses smiled and pushed his spectacles up on his nose. \"Not really. I'm just traveling with their wagon train, and they agreed to let me stay with them in Eagle Valley until the spring. But when winter's done I'll be moving on to Oregon. I'm supposed to take over a synagogue in Portland.\"\n\n\"That's like a Hebrew church, isn't it?\"\n\n\"That's right. I'm a rabbi.\"\n\nJamie grunted. \"First one I've ever met, I reckon. I figured you were a farmer like most homesteaders are.\"\n\n\"I am. It's just the crop I help to cultivate consists of people's souls. It's a calling that I've followed all the way from my home in Poland.\"\n\n\"From Poland all the way to the American frontier. That's quite a journey.\"\n\n\"And it's not finished yet,\" Moses said quietly. \"But I need your help to get where I'm going, Mr. MacCallister. All of us with the wagon train do.\"\n\n\"Eagle Valley, eh?\" Jamie mused.\n\n\"Yes. If you could find it in your heart to at least talk to Mr. Hendricks and meet the others...\"\n\n\"Well, I suppose that wouldn't hurt anything.\" Even as he said it, Jamie wondered if he was making a big mistake. He wasn't the sort of man to brood over such things, though, so he put that uncertainty out of his mind. All he'd agreed to do was talk to Lamar Hendricks. He could try to convince Hendricks that it would be best to lay over in Kansas City until the spring. By then, they ought to be able to find another wagon master.\n\nShoot, if it came right down to it, he could help those pilgrims out with enough money to tide them over. He'd never miss it. As long as he had enough for food and ammunition and a few other supplies, that was all he needed while he was on the drift.\n\nMoses had a big grin on his face. \"That's wonderful, Mr. MacCallister. Come with me and I'll introduce you. You'll stay for supper and get to know everyone. You'll see what a fine group it is.\"\n\n\"I need to fetch my horses first and find a livery stable for them.\"\n\n\"Bring them with you,\" Moses suggested. \"You can put them in with our livestock. I'm sure you'd all be welcome to spend the night.\"\n\n\"You're bound and determined to rope me into this, aren't you?\"\n\n\"It just seems like such a fitting solution. I mean, since you're the one responsible for Mr. Ralston's injury\u2014\"\n\n\"He brought that on himself,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"I know, I know. I'm just saying that everything works out for a reason. Like tonight, when Captain Hendricks asked me to look for Mr. Ralston and I had a feeling I'd find him in that saloon\u2014\"\n\n\"I was wondering what you were doing there.\"\n\n\"I was looking for the man who's going to lead us to the promised land.\" Moses chuckled. \"And I think I found him, just not the one I intended.\"\n\nAs they started walking along the street, Jamie scowled. \"If I remember right from reading the Good Book, it was an hombre named Moses who led the Israelites to the promised land. Maybe your name is the Lord's way of saying that you should have the job.\"\n\n\"Me?\" Moses said with a squeak in his voice. \"The biblical Moses took the Israelites to Canaan, all right, but he never set foot in it himself. All he could do was look across the River Jordan at it and see that it was good.\" A worried note came into his voice. \"Do you think that's a bad omen for me, Mr. MacCallister? That I'll make it to Montana but never set foot in Eagle Valley?\"\n\nJamie didn't know how to answer that. His ideas of faith and spirituality came more from the Indians than from any of the so-called organized religions.\n\nHe slapped a big hand against Moses's back hard enough to make the smaller man stumble a little. \"Don't worry about that. For now, let's try to figure out the best way to get there.\"\n\n\"Does that mean\u2014\"\n\nJamie shrugged. \"It means I'll talk to those folks and think about it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Inside the Bella Royale Saloon, people were still talking about the brutal fight between Jeb Ralston and Jamie Ian MacCallister. It wasn't every day folks got to see a brawl involving a legendary frontiersman like MacCallister who was known from one end of the West to the other. It was something many of them would tell their grandchildren about.\n\nEldon Swint didn't seem too impressed. He sat at one of the tables with several of his men, a bottle and glass in front of him. He filled his glass again, then leaned back in a chair and stretched out his long legs. \"People talk about that fella MacCallister like he was Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie and Kit Carson all rolled into one. He didn't look so dang special to me. Just another old man who ain't had the sense to die yet.\" Swint downed the drink and licked his lips.\n\n\"You must be joshin', boss,\" Three-Finger Jake Lucas said. He was a handsome young man with a quick, cocky grin and a full head of brown hair under his tipped back hat. The last two fingers of his left hand were gone, pinched off cleanly when he got them trapped between his rope and saddle horn as he took a dally to stop a runaway steer during a drive up the trail from Texas. It was a mistake many cowboys had made, which was why many of them were missing a finger or two.\n\nJake had taken the accident hard. It had embittered him, and when the herd he was with reached Abilene and the Texas crew started home, Jake hadn't gone with them. He had stayed in Abilene, spent all his wages on a monumental drunk, and vowed never to return home in his mutilated state.\n\nIn the four years since then, he had fallen in with bad company, as they say. His best friend Bodie Cantrell knew that... because he was a member of that so-called bad company himself.\n\nBodie was sitting at the table with Swint, Jake, and three other men, all of them drinking heavily. Bodie had a pretty fuzzy glow going from the liquor. He didn't like to get drunk as much as some of his companions did, but from time to time he gave in to the urge, anyway. The whiskey usually helped him forget what had happened in Kansas a couple weeks earlier.\n\nIt wasn't helping so much that night.\n\n\"It's just a little flag stop out in the middle of nowhere,\" Eldon Swint said. \"There's only one man on duty at night. He's the telegrapher, ticket agent, and baggage clerk, all in one. When we throw down on him, he'll put that flag up, you can bet a hat on that.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but will the train stop?\" one of the men asked.\n\n\"It's not an express. It'll stop,\" Swint said confidently. \"That's what it's supposed to do.\"\n\n\"Why would they ship all that money from the mint on a train that's not an express?\" Bodie asked. \"That doesn't make sense to me.\"\n\n\"Because they're tryin' to be tricky. They don't think anybody'll suspect the shipment's on a local like that. They got a whole series of 'em set up to get the money from Denver to St. Louis.\"\n\nThe outlaws sat their horses on a slight rise looking north toward a small settlement on the rolling Kansas plains. The railroad tracks ran straight as a string east and west, disappearing in the distance in both directions.\n\nA small depot sat next to the tracks on the north side, and behind it was the settlement's short, single street with half a dozen businesses on each side. At the far end of the street stood a whitewashed church that doubled as a schoolhouse during the week. Maybe two dozen residences were scattered around haphazardly.\n\nBodie didn't know the name of the place. It was so small it didn't really deserve one, although he was sure it had some sort of official designation on railroad maps since there was a station there.\n\nOne of the men said to Swint, \"You're sure you can trust the fella who told you about all this, boss?\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" Swint said with an ugly grin. \"He thought he was sellin' out the government for a share of the loot, so he didn't have any reason to lie. He sure was surprised when he found out that his share was a bullet!\"\n\nSwint's haw-haw of laughter made Bodie's guts clench. He was well aware that he wasn't riding with a bunch of choir boys, but Eldon Swint making a joke out of cold-blooded murder rubbed him the wrong way.\n\nBodie had done plenty of things he wasn't proud of in his life. He had been on his own since he was nine years old, when both his parents had died of a fever while the family was on its way west. The only way he had survived the fifteen years since was by doing whatever it took, even if that meant breaking a few laws. He had stolen money and food plenty of times, and after he got older he had stuck a gun in men's faces and made them hand over their valuables.\n\nBut he had never killed anybody while committing his crimes, or any other time, either. Maybe he'd just been lucky that things had worked out that way, but he liked to think it was more than that. He hoped he still had a shred of decency left in him.\n\nNobody would ever say that about Eldon Swint. The man had a reputation for being cunning and ruthless, and it was well deserved. The gang he led had been growing for several years, its latest recruits being Bodie Cantrell and Jake Lucas.\n\nThe two young men had quickly become good friends. Jake had opened up a little to him during long nights standing guard while the gang was on the run from the law. It was how Bodie knew about the bitterness hidden behind Jake's easygoing grin.\n\nThey were on the verge of pulling their biggest job yet. According to the information Swint had gotten, almost $80,000 in new gold coins would be on the train coming through Kansas tonight, on their way to several banks in St. Louis. Even divided among the almost two dozen men in the gang, that was more than three grand apiece. Bodie could hardly conceive of having that much money.\n\nOnce he had his share of the loot, he could quit the gang, head farther west, maybe even start a little spread somewhere. After a decade and a half of drifting around, struggling to survive, getting in and out of trouble, the idea of settling down and trying to forge a real life for himself held a powerful appeal.\n\n\"The east bound's due to come through a little after eight o'clock tonight,\" Swint went on. \"If we all ride in there before that, it's bound to raise some suspicions. So here's what we'll do. Four of us will ride in. Me, of course\"\u2014he looked around the gang\u2014\"and Charley.\"\n\nCharley Green was one of Swint's top lieutenants. He had been in the gang for a couple years.\n\nSwint pointed to another man. \"You, too, Hinkley, and... Cantrell. You'll be the fourth man.\"\n\nBodie nodded. He wasn't sure what Swint had in mind for the four of them to do, and he would have just as soon not been picked by the boss outlaw, but he would go along with whatever he needed to do. He wanted that stake.\n\n\"We'll ride in as soon as it gets dark,\" Swint continued. \"Maybe have a drink in the saloon and size the place up. Then we'll drift over to the depot one by one and get the drop on the fella working there. Once he's raised the flag to get the eastbound to stop, we'll signal the rest of you. You'll be waitin' up here. As soon as the train pulls in, all of you charge down to the station and make sure nobody interferes with us while we're gettin' that loot out of the express car.\"\n\nBodie had to admit, the plan sounded like it would work. If everything broke their way, they would ride off into the night $80,000 richer, without a shot being fired.\n\nIt would be a good way to end his career as a desperado, he thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Later that afternoon, while they were waiting in a small grove of cottonwoods for night to fall, Jake came over to Bodie. \"I wish the boss had picked me as one of the four to go into town tonight.\"\n\n\"It doesn't really matter,\" Bodie said. \"You'll get your share either way.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know, but you boys get to have a drink first, maybe even pat some calico cat on the rump while you're waitin'. I get to hang around out here with a bunch of stinkin', whiskery ol' owlhoots.\"\n\n\"I'll be sure to drink a shot of whiskey and flirt with a soiled dove for you,\" Bodie said with a grin.\n\n\"Yeah, you do that.\" Jake grew more serious. \"Just keep your eyes open, Bodie. Could be you'll have a chance to slip a few of those double eagles in your pocket without Eldon noticin'. I'll expect you to share your good fortune if you do.\"\n\nBodie frowned. \"I'm not sure I'd risk that, even if I did have a chance. Eldon would put a bullet through a man's head, sure as sin, if he tried to help himself to more than his fair share.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Jake said with a shrug. \"And maybe it'd be worth the risk.\"\n\nBodie didn't say anything else about that, and neither did Jake. Bodie worried, though, that sooner or later his friend would give in to temptation and try to double-cross Swint. That could lead to bad trouble.\n\nBodie felt himself getting tense as night approached. The time seemed to go by fast.\n\nToo soon, Swint was calling out, \"All right, boys, mount up. Time for us to go.\"\n\nThe three men he had picked to accompany him swung into their saddles. They circled west of the settlement, crossed the railroad tracks, and came in from that direction.\n\nThe saloon didn't have a sign on it, just the word SALOON painted in big letters on the upper part of the false front. Swint, Bodie, Hinkley, and Green tied their horses at the hitch rail in front of it and went inside.\n\nThe place wasn't very busy. Four men were playing poker at a table; three more stood at the bar drinking while a single bartender lazily polished glasses with a grimy rag. Bodie didn't see a woman in the place, so if he told Jake any stories about flirting with one, he'd have to lie.\n\nThe bartender wasn't talkative like a lot of drink jugglers were. He brought their beers and left them alone, which was fine with Bodie. He'd hoped the beer would calm his nerves a little, but that didn't seem to be the case.\n\nHe would be glad when the robbery was over and done with. Despite all the things he had done, maybe he wasn't cut out to be an outlaw.\n\nWhen it was good and dark, Swint downed what was left of the beer he'd been nursing and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. \"See you later, boys.\"\n\nThe other three knew what that meant. Swint was on his way to the depot. The rest of them would follow at short intervals. Green would go first, then Hinkley, and finally Bodie.\n\nSoon he was the last of the quartet in the saloon, and it occurred to him that he could go outside, get on his horse, and ride away. The other three were all waiting down at the train station. They wouldn't be able to stop him. He didn't have to go through with it. He could put this life of banditry behind him right here and now.\n\nBut where would he go and what would he do? Not nearly as far or as much as he could with $3,000, he told himself.\n\nNo, he would do what he'd said he would do, he decided. He wasn't going to run out on his partners.\n\nHe left the saloon and strolled toward the station in apparent innocence. As he neared it, a hiss came from the thick shadows beside the building. Bodie darted into the gloom and found the other three men waiting there for him.\n\n\"All right,\" Swint whispered. \"Cantrell, you go in and ask the fella if the train's on time. That'll distract him while we come in the platform door.\"\n\nBodie nodded, realized that Swint couldn't see him in the darkness, and said, \"I understand.\"\n\nHe left them there and stepped back into the dim glow of the lantern that hung over the depot's entrance. Trying not to look as nervous as he felt, he went inside and found himself in a small, dusty waiting room with a ticket window to the left and a storage room to the right. A door on the other side of the waiting room led out onto the platform. The night was warm, and the platform door was open to allow some cross-ventilation.\n\nIf the agent was behind the ticket window, Bodie would have to lure him into the waiting room some way. Luck was with him, though, and the man emerged from the storeroom, dusting his hands off from moving something around in there. He was a middle-aged, balding man wearing a green eyeshade. With a friendly smile, he asked Bodie, \"Something I can do for you, young fella?\"\n\n\"Is the eastbound train on time?\"\n\nThe agent scratched at his jaw. \"Yeah, I reckon. Haven't heard anything saying otherwise. You need to buy a ticket? I can flag it down for you if you do. Ought to be here in another fifteen, twenty minutes.\"\n\nWhile the man was talking, Swint and the other two cat-footed into the depot from the platform behind him. Bodie had to use all his willpower not to look directly at them and give the game away.\n\nOf course, it wouldn't really matter if he did. They outnumbered the agent four to one, and he didn't even appear to be armed.\n\nSwint put the barrel of his revolver against the back of the man's neck and eared back the hammer. The metallic ratcheting echoed sinisterly in the small room. \"Oh, you'll flag down the train, all right, friend. Now don't you move.\"\n\nThe agent stiffened and his eyes widened in fear.\n\nBodie felt sorry for the man. He drew his gun and told him, \"You just do what we tell you and you'll be all right.\"\n\nThe agent's mouth opened and closed, but he didn't say anything.\n\nSwint prodded him with the gun again. \"You understand, friend?\"\n\n\"S-Sure,\" the agent stammered. \"Just don't kill me.\"\n\n\"I won't shoot you,\" Swint promised. \"Not as long as you cooperate.\"\n\n\"What is it you fellas want? That train's not carrying anything except freight and a few passengers. There's nothing special in the express car.\"\n\nSwint laughed. \"That shows how much you know, amigo. The railroad don't tell you little fellas about the deals it makes with the government. They probably figure it's safer that way, keepin' you in the dark. Might have been, too, if somebody hadn't sold 'em out.\"\n\n\"Mister, I don't have the slightest idea what you're talkin' about.\"\n\n\"That don't matter. Just come with me and raise that flag so the engineer'll know to stop. You be sure to give him the right signal, too. No mistakes or you'll be mighty sorry.\" As Swint started to take the agent out onto the platform, he glanced back at Bodie and added, \"Go get the horses.\"\n\nBodie nodded, pouched his iron, and hurried out of the depot.\n\nHe was back in less than five minutes, leading all four horses. He tied them outside the station and went back in. Hinkley and Green were standing watch just inside the door, in case any of the townspeople should show up, but Bodie saw right away that wasn't the case. The depot was just as empty as he'd left it.\n\nSwint waited on the far side of the waiting room by the platform door. Bodie frowned as he realized he didn't see the agent. Then he glanced toward the storeroom door, which was still partially open, and stiffened as he saw a pair of legs on the floor.\n\n\"What in blazes?\" Bodie muttered. He pushed the door open farther and drew in a startled breath as light from the waiting room spilled over the man's motionless body. A dark pool of blood was spreading slowly around his head. Bodie could see the gaping wound where the man's throat had been cut.\n\nHe turned his shocked gaze toward Swint. \"You told him you weren't going to kill him.\"\n\n\"I said I wouldn't shoot him,\" Swint replied with a leering grin. \"I didn't. That trusty knife of mine did the trick and made sure he wouldn't try to warn anybody.\"\n\nA ball of sickness rolled around Bodie's guts. He had seen violent death before, more times than he liked to think about, but this was cold-blooded murder and he didn't like it. \"They hang men for things like this.\"\n\n\"Only when they catch 'em,\" Swint said. \"And nobody's gonna catch us, Bodie.\"\n\nIn the distance, a train whistle sounded, a long, wailing cry that seemed to Bodie like the howl of a lost soul....\n\nThe noise faded from his memory and blended in with the racket from a piano in a corner of the Bella Royale that a sleeve-gartered entertainer had started pounding. Bodie was back in Kansas City again, sitting at the table with Swint, Jake Lucas, and several other members of the gang.\n\nThe rest of the robbery had gone off without a hitch, a couple weeks earlier. The train had rolled in and stopped just like it was supposed to, and the rest of the gang had swarmed over it, taking control of the engineer and the fireman in the locomotive cab, the conductor in the caboose, and the travelers in the two passenger cars.\n\nSwint, Bodie, Green, and Hinkley got the drop on the messenger in the express car. The man had thought about putting up a fight, but with four guns staring him in the face, he had thought better of it.\n\nAnd so they had ridden away just as Bodie had hoped, without firing a shot.\n\nEven so, they had left a dead man behind them, a dead man whose face still haunted Bodie's dreams from time to time.\n\nWhat made it even worse was that he hadn't been able to leave the gang like he'd planned. Swint was dragging his feet on divvying up the loot. He had said they would do it once they got to Kansas City.\n\nBodie hoped that was true. He wanted to get away from these men. He hoped he could persuade Jake to take his share and come with him. If they partnered up, they could start a fine ranch somewhere with the money they'd have.\n\n\"I sure wouldn't want to tangle with MacCallister,\" Jake was saying. \"No telling how many badmen he's sent over the divide in his time.\"\n\n\"Stories like that always get blown up bigger than they really are,\" Swint insisted. \"I ain't afraid of that old man, or anybody else for that matter. He'll get his comeuppance one o' these days, and if he ever crosses me, I'll give it to him myself. I'll blow his lights out, I will.\"\n\nPart of Bodie would have liked to witness such an encounter. He thought Swint was completely wrong about Jamie Ian MacCallister, and it might be satisfying to watch the results.\n\nSwint changed the subject. \"Did you boys notice that theater when we were comin' into town? Posters out front said there was gonna be a show. I hope we haven't missed it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "\"Hark! What light through yonder window\u2014Dadblast it! Who put that board there? I almost tripped and broke my bloody neck! We open tomorrow night, my friends. We can't have things like this happening!\"\n\nSavannah McCoy put a hand over her mouth to stifle the laughter she felt trying to bubble up her throat. The sight of Cyrus O'Hanlon's portly figure in tights and doublet was pretty ridiculous to start with, and the way he had stumbled as he crossed the stage and nearly fallen on his face made him seem even more like a comedian. He would have made a good one, Savannah thought, if he hadn't considered himself the greatest dramatic actor of his generation.\n\nOf course, great dramatic actors didn't head up troupes that played in second-rate variety theaters and opera houses across the Midwest, occasionally venturing as far out on the frontier as Kansas City, which seemed like the Wild West of penny dreadful fame to Savannah.\n\nShe pushed back the rich brown ringlets of hair that kept trying to fall in front of her face when she leaned through Juliet's \"window,\" which was part of the set the troupe had erected on the stage of Mr. Channing's theater. She pulled up the neckline of her dress. Cyrus had designed the costumes, of course. He had a hand in everything the troupe did. He'd had the neckline cut low enough to display what Savannah considered a scandalous amount of cleavage, especially when she leaned forward to say her lines.\n\n\"Give the rubes in the front row what they want to see,\" he always said.\n\nSavannah didn't like it. Most people already considered actresses to be little better than harlots. They didn't see that it was a true calling, like any other artistic endeavor. She didn't think it was a good idea to reinforce their prejudice by dressing like a saloon girl.\n\nSo she pulled the dress up as much as she could, but in the end, Cyrus was the boss. That was why, at the age of fifty-five, he was playing the stripling youth, Romeo. Savannah, though six or seven years older than Juliet was supposed to be in the play, was at least a lot closer to the right age.\n\nCyrus took off the hat with a tired-looking feather plume that he wore, ran his fingers through his mostly gray hair as he recovered his composure, and pulled the hat back on. \"We'll begin again,\" he said in a loud, ringing voice. He was so accustomed to projecting to the back of the house that he talked that way all the time.\n\nHe launched once again into Romeo's balcony speech, and Savannah tried to concentrate on what he was saying so that she couldn't miss her cues. It was difficult to keep her mind from wandering. She had been doing this scene for months, ever since the platform behind the \"window\" had collapsed during a performance in Chicago, dumping Cyrus's wife Dollie, the previous Juliet, on her amply padded rear end.\n\nEven though she hadn't been injured in the fall, following that accident Dollie had declared that she was too old to be clambering around on scenery and told Cyrus to find himself a new Juliet. The role had fallen to Savannah, who had been with the troupe for about a year.\n\nAfter Cyrus had made that announcement, Dollie had taken Savannah aside and told her, \"Cyrus sometimes gets carried away and thinks his love scenes with his leading ladies ought to continue offstage. In fact, that's how the two of us wound up married.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure that won't ever happen,\" Savannah had said. \"Mr. O'Hanlon is much too professional.\"\n\n\"It had better not,\" Dollie had warned her. \"If it does, you're liable to find yourself stranded in some backwater with more livestock than people. Don't think your acting talents would help you then.\"\n\nSince that day, Savannah had learned that there was some truth to what Dollie had told her. Cyrus had made some advances\u2014subtle ones, to be sure\u2014but unmistakable in their intention. Savannah had gotten quite skilled in fending them off without seeming to do so.\n\nShe realized that Cyrus had paused and knew it was her line. For a split second, she couldn't think of where they were in the scene, but then it came back to her. Her acting instincts were good and hardly ever let her down. She leaned out the window and delivered her line, and below her on the stage Cyrus started emoting once more.\n\nSavannah's mind strayed again, back to the stately white mansion in the Georgia city that had given her name to her. At least, the name she was currently using...\n\n\"No daughter of mine is going to be an actress!\" William Thorpe thundered as he stalked back and forth in his study.\n\nHer father was good at thundering, Gillian Thorpe thought as she steeled herself against his rage. He preferred to shout rather than discuss anything in a calm, rational manner. He seemed to think that whoever was the loudest in any argument was going to prevail. And to be fair, that was usually what happened when William Thorpe was involved. Goodness knew his wife Helen, Gillian's mother, had long since given up ever trying to convince her husband of anything. He would just shout her down.\n\nArguing with a man who was always right, at least in his own head, was just a waste of time and energy.\n\n\"Of course, Father,\" Gillian said. \"I understand.\"\n\nHe stopped short and frowned at her in surprise. \"You understand? Does that mean you're going to give up this mad idea of parading yourself on a stage like a painted woman in a house of ill repute?\"\n\nFor a second Gillian wanted to ask her father how he knew so much about painted women and what went on in houses of ill repute, but she decided not to, probably wisely.\n\n\"No, Father, I understand why you feel the way you do, but I haven't changed my mind. I still believe that it's my destiny to become an actress.\"\n\n\"Destiny!\" he snorted. \"Romantic claptrap! I realize you're just a female, Gillian, and as such it's your nature to bury yourself in folderol and foolishness, but good Lord, girl, I thought better of you than this! I thought I'd raised you better!\"\n\nAgain Gillian had to restrain an impulse, the urge to pick up one of the paperweights on his desk and throw it at him. Just a female, indeed!\n\n\"You're not the only one who raised me, Father,\" she pointed out.\n\n\"I know,\" he said with a scathing sneer. \"And I'm not really surprised that your mother filled your head with so many foolish notions.\"\n\n\"She taught me to do what I believe to be right.\"\n\n\"You have no business believing anything except what I tell you to believe.\"\n\nThat summed it up, all right, Gillian thought. She had a brain in her head, a good brain, but her father didn't want her to use it. As long as she lived under his roof, he wouldn't allow her to use it. So the solution was simple.\n\nTerence had been right. If she wanted to do anything worthwhile with her life, she had to get out of there. She had to run away.\n\nWith him.\n\nTerence Flanagan was an actor, a breathtakingly handsome man. Gillian had met him backstage after a performance of a play she and her mother had attended. She had been impressed with him right away and very pleased that he took an interest in her. From that moment on, a friendship had developed between them... a friendship that Gillian sensed Terence wanted to turn into something more. She hadn't yet made up her mind about that, but the two of them had gotten close enough that she had confided her ambitions to him.\n\nHe had been receptive to the idea right away. \"There's a spot for you in the company to which I belong, Gillian dear. All you have to do is say the word and I'll speak to the director. We'll soon be leaving on an extended tour, and I'm sure he'd be willing to take you along.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Terence. Leaving home seems like such an extreme step....\"\n\nThey were sitting on a bench in one of Savannah's lovely, gracious parks. The city hadn't suffered as much damage in the Late Unpleasantness as Atlanta and Richmond, for example, and these days it looked much the way it had before the war.\n\nWith so many people around on the bright, beautiful day, Terence had to be discreet, but he reached over and rested his hand on Gillian's. \"I want you to have a chance to fulfill your dreams, my dear. How about this? Perhaps a small role in one of our productions while we're performing here in Savannah? That would allow you to see what the theater is really like, firsthand.\"\n\nThe idea held great appeal for Gillian. And the thrill that went through her when Terence's hand pressed warmly against hers made her long for the opportunity to get to know him better.\n\nAll she had to do was convince her father....\n\nBringing up the idea led to a war on a much smaller scale, but no less passionate. The two of them had gone around and around about it for more than a week, and finally it was too late. The troupe had left the day before, continuing on to the next stop on their tour\u2014Nashville.\n\nBut Gillian had a plan, and the final confrontation with her father convinced her that she had no choice but to go through with it. She wished that she could tell her mother she was leaving, but she knew if she did, the older woman would just try to talk her out of it.\n\nGillian couldn't blame her for that. She wouldn't have wanted to be left alone with William Thorpe, either.\n\nHer father always retired early. He had very lucrative interests in a shipping concern, a bank, and a number of warehouses, and he liked to be at his office before anyone else in the morning. That way he could see when all the employees arrived... and the ones who made a habit of being later than William Thorpe thought appropriate would pay for their tardiness.\n\nGillian knew that if she waited until her father was asleep, he wouldn't be aware of what was going on until it was too late to stop her. She had already checked the railroad schedule and knew there was a train for Nashville leaving at ten o'clock.\n\nShe packed a bag, taking as little as she thought she could get by with, then slipped stealthily down the rear stairs and out of the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "It was frightening to walk to the train station in the darkness. Her heart was in her throat the whole way. But people who never took risks never accomplished anything worthwhile in life, she told herself, and she clung to that thought for strength as she made her way to the depot.\n\nOnce she was there, she ran into an unexpected obstacle. She had plenty of money, but there were no compartments available on the train. She had to purchase a ticket that allowed her to sit up in one of the regular passenger cars.\n\nIt was a frightening ordeal, and it lasted a lot longer than the walk to the station had. Several of the male passengers leered at her as she made her way to her seat, and she knew what they were thinking. An attractive young woman, traveling alone... well, there was only one sort of woman she could be, as far as they were concerned. She sat stiffly and avoided their eyes, hoping that her chilly demeanor would be enough to keep any of them from approaching her.\n\nAtlanta, Chattanooga, the whole trip was just a blur to her. She didn't dare let herself go to sleep so she was utterly exhausted by the time the train pulled into Nashville in the middle of the next day. But she had made it, and all she had to do was find the hotel where she knew the acting troupe was staying.\n\nHansom cabs were lined up outside the station, and she had brought enough money with her to afford one. The driver knew the hotel, and when they got there Gillian was surprised to see that it was rather rundown. She would have thought the troupe would stay somewhere better.\n\nShe went inside and inquired at the desk for the number of Mr. Flanagan's room. The clerk gave her a smug, knowing smile that irritated her, but he told her the number. Gillian climbed to the third floor and knocked on the door.\n\nAt first she thought Terence must be out, perhaps at the theater, because no one answered. But then a thick voice said, \"Whass... who... hold on.\"\n\nThat was Terence, or at least she thought it was. She heard him muttering curses under his breath as he approached the door.\n\nThen abruptly he jerked it open and stood there wearing only the bottom half of a pair of long underwear. His hair was in disarray, his face was puffy and flushed, and his eyes were bleary. Obviously, he had been sleeping, and before that he'd been drinking... a lot.\n\nBut he recognized her and exclaimed, \"Gillian! My God. I'd given up on you. Finally worked up the gumption to run away from the old goat, eh?\"\n\nBefore Gillian could answer, a woman's voice said, \"Terence? Who is it?\"\n\nHe half turned, so Gillian could see past him into the hotel room. A woman with tousled blond hair was sitting up in the bed, holding the sheet around what was apparently her nude body.\n\n\"Look who's here, darling,\" Terence said to her. \"That young ing\u00e9nue I was telling you about. Come on in, Gillian, and I'll introduce you to our leading lady. I'm sure the two of you will enjoy getting to know each other.\"\n\nGillian was too shocked and stunned to move. It was like her feet were nailed to the floor. What had happened to Terence? All his charm and sophistication had disappeared, leaving only crudeness behind. She couldn't believe she had left her home and come all this way, only to find that he... he...\n\n\"Come on, Gillian,\" Terence said, sounding a little impatient. \"It'll be all right. We'll take good care of you.\"\n\nGillian turned and ran down the dingy hotel corridor, her bag bumping against her leg. Terence stepped into the hall and called out behind her, but she ignored him. The blond woman said something else, and he went back into the room and closed the door.\n\nIf the trip from Savannah had been a blur, the next few minutes were even worse. Gillian wasn't sure how she made it back downstairs and out of the hotel. She had no idea what she was going to do. She could go home, of course, but if she did she would have to listen to her father browbeat her about her foolishness for the rest of his life. She knew he would never let her forget it.\n\nBut what else could she do? She was hundreds of miles from home, in a city where she didn't know anyone, and she was scared and desperate....\n\nShe didn't see the well-dressed older man until she bumped right into him on the sidewalk outside the hotel. She might have fallen if he hadn't reached out and caught hold of her arm to steady her.\n\nThe elegant-looking woman with the man said worriedly, \"Are you all right, dearie? You look like you've had quite a fright.\"\n\n\"No, I just... I was going to join an acting troupe...\"\n\nThe man wrinkled his nose. \"Not Flanagan's Players, I hope. They're a sorry lot, if I do say so myself. Den of iniquity and all that. Not the least bit professional, like O'Hanlon's Traveling Company.\"\n\nGillian shook her head. \"I... I'm afraid I'm not familiar with them.\"\n\n\"Are you an actress?\"\n\n\"Well... I want to be.\"\n\nThe man was wearing a top hat, which he swept off and held in front of him as he performed a half-bow. \"Cyrus O'Hanlon, at your service, miss.\"\n\nThe woman with him laughed.\n\n\"This is my wife, Dollie. If you'd care to discuss joining our troupe, we'd be glad to talk to you. We can always use another player. If you're truly devoted to your craft, that is.\"\n\n\"I hope I would be. I think it would be wonderful to be an actress.\"\n\n\"Well, you've got a lot to learn,\" Dollie O'Hanlon said. \"But if you throw in with us, at least you'd be learning around decent folks. Not like that lecher Flanagan.\"\n\nGillian swallowed hard. Her father was right about one thing. She really did believe in destiny and other romantic notions like that. \"I think I might like that.\"\n\n\"What's your name, dear?\"\n\nGillian had thought about that. When her father found out that she was gone, he might hire detectives to look for her. She didn't want to be found, didn't want to return home until it was on her own terms. She had decided that she ought to use a different name to make it harder to find her. But she hadn't settled on a name.\n\nShe had no time to ponder the question further. She glanced across the street at McCoy's Hardware Store, thought about her hometown, and put a smile on her face as she told the O'Hanlons, \"Savannah McCoy. My name is Savannah McCoy.\"\n\nAnd so it had been ever since, until even she thought of herself by that name, through performances in countless towns and in Kansas City as the troupe ran through its dress rehearsal before the opening performance, which was the next night.\n\nShe had been lucky. That hotel in Nashville had catered to the theatrical trade, and the O'Hanlon Traveling Company was staying there, too. Cyrus and Dollie had gone out to eat and had been returning to the hotel when she literally ran into them.\n\nShe'd gone with them to the troupe's performance that night and been welcomed by all the members of the company. Cyrus liked to say that they were like a family and he was the paterfamilias, and it was true. Romantic notion or not, Savannah felt like she had found a home with them.\n\nShe couldn't imagine anything changing that, at least not any time soon.\n\nIt would take a new twist of fate, a new rendezvous with destiny, to do that.\n\nShe figured she was through with such things." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Jamie went back to the hardware store where he had left Sundown and the pack horse tied to the hitch rack. Nobody had bothered the animals, which came as no surprise to him. When anybody but Jamie approached the big sand-colored stallion, Sundown got proddy. Any time he bared his teeth and started moving around skittishly, folks tended to make a wide circle around him.\n\n\"That's an impressive-looking horse,\" Moses Danzig said as he looked at Sundown with admiration.\n\n\"He's mean as all get out,\" Jamie said bluntly. \"But he'll run all day if he has to. Run until his heart busts if that's what it takes. He's got as much grit as any horse I've ever seen.\" He handed the pack horse's reins to Moses. \"Here, you can lead this one. He won't give you any trouble.\"\n\nThey headed for the open area where the immigrants were camped. As they approached, Jamie heard loud, boisterous music. It sounded like several fiddlers were scraping their bows across the strings of their instruments with great enthusiasm, if not a great deal of talent, and the lively tune made Jamie's blood perk up. He had always enjoyed dancing, although he hadn't done any in quite some time.\n\nNot since before Kate died, actually.\n\nHe put that thought out of his mind and watched the couples spinning and whirling around near the big campfire in the center of the area between the circled wagons. People who weren't dancing had gathered around to watch, too. They clapped in time to the music and called out encouragement to the dancers.\n\nNot everybody seemed to be enjoying themselves, though. Jamie noticed one man standing off to the side with a glare of disapproval on his stern face. He was tall and heavily built, with a barrel chest and prematurely white hair that grew in a tangle on his head. He wore a sober black suit, and his big hands rested on the shoulders of two children who stood with him\u2014a boy and a girl about ten years old. Jamie looked closer at the resemblance between the youngsters and realized they were twins.\n\nJamie turned to Moses and nodded toward the glowering man. \"Who's that? Not your wagon captain, I hope.\"\n\n\"No, certainly not. That's Reverend Bradford. He's on his way to Montana, too, with his children. I'm afraid he doesn't approve of the dancing and has made that clear to Captain Hendricks. He says it's sinful for men and women to cavort around together like heathens. But the captain thinks it's good for the group's spirits to have these little celebrations of life from time to time.\"\n\n\"Is that what they're celebrating? Just life in general, nothing in particular?\"\n\n\"Well, in this case,\" Moses explained, \"there's another reason. There was a wedding earlier today. R.G. Hamilton married Alice Dennison. R.G. is one of the single men traveling west\u2014or at least he was\u2014and Alice is the daughter of one of the immigrant families. They're a fine couple and an excellent match, and everyone is happy about it.\"\n\n\"Except that fella Bradford,\" Jamie said with another nod toward the preacher.\n\n\"Oh, he doesn't mind the marriage. Actually, he performed the wedding ceremony. He just doesn't like dancing... among other things.\"\n\nFrom the sound of that comment, Jamie thought that Moses didn't get along very well with Reverend Bradford. He didn't pursue that question, however, since it was none of his business.\n\nAs the three fiddlers\u2014two whiskery old-timers and a skinny, gangling man who was much younger\u2014came to the end of the merry tune they had been playing, people laughed and applauded. One couple seemed to be at the center of the dancers, and Jamie ventured a guess that they were the ones who'd gotten hitched earlier.\n\nMoses confirmed it, then pointed out the wagon train captain. \"There's Captain Hendricks.\" As the musicians took a break and the immigrants began to mill around and talk he nodded in Hendricks's direction. \"Come on, I'll introduce you.\"\n\nLamar Hendricks was a tall, fair-haired man with a rawboned, middle-aged face under a broad-brimmed brown hat. He wore a brown leather vest over a homespun shirt. As the two men approached him, he said, \"There you are, Moses. I was starting to wonder what had happened to you. Where's Mr. Ralston?\"\n\n\"That's an, um, interesting story, Captain,\" Moses replied. \"By the way, this is Jamie Ian MacCallister. He's quite a famous frontiersman.\"\n\nHendricks grunted. \"Is that so?\" Obviously, he hadn't heard of Jamie. He held out a hand. \"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\n\"You, too, Captain,\" Jamie replied with a nod as they shook hands.\n\nHendricks turned back to Moses. \"Were you not able to find Mr. Ralston?\"\n\n\"Oh, I found him, all right. But there's been... an accident. Mr. Ralston is injured.\"\n\nA look of alarm instantly appeared on Hendricks's face. \"An accident? What sort of accident?\"\n\nMoses looked pretty uncomfortable at the prospect of answering that question, so Jamie saved him the trouble. \"I broke the varmint's leg.\"\n\nHendricks's eyes widened in surprise. \"Why in the world would you do something like that?\"\n\n\"Because he was trying to do the same or worse to me.\"\n\nMoses said, \"Mr. Ralston attacked Mr. MacCallister, Captain. I found him in that saloon he frequented, just as I feared I might. He had been drinking heavily. When Mr. MacCallister disagreed with him about something, Mr. Ralston started a fight. I saw the whole thing. Mr. MacCallister was only defending himself. He didn't do anything wrong.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe not,\" Hendricks said with a frown, \"but don't expect me to be happy about what you did, MacCallister. We were counting on Jeb Ralston to get us to our new homes in Montana.\"\n\n\"Then you were counting on a drunken bully,\" Jamie said, not mincing words.\n\nHendricks controlled his anger with a visible effort. \"You'll have to excuse me. I need to start figuring out what we're going to do now. We have to find another wagon master as quickly as possible.\"\n\n\"You see, that's just it, Captain,\" Moses told him. \"I've asked Mr. MacCallister if he would consider guiding us to Montana Territory.\"\n\nHendricks looked surprised again, and still angry. \"You had no right to do that, Moses. I'm the captain of this wagon train. We need an experienced guide\u2014\"\n\n\"Ask around town,\" Moses suggested. \"Mr. MacCallister is a famous frontiersman, much more well known and respected than Mr. Ralston. And probably much more capable of leading the wagon train to Montana, I suspect.\"\n\n\"No offense, MacCallister,\" Hendricks said grudgingly. \"I'm not aware of your reputation.\"\n\n\"I never asked for a reputation,\" Jamie said. \"Just to be left alone to live my life. But I don't control what folks say about me. I can tell you one thing\u2014setting out for Montana this late in the year is a mighty foolish thing to do, and I'd bet this old hat of mine on that.\"\n\n\"We have no choice.\" Hendricks's voice was as stiff as his back seemed to be. \"We can't afford to wait for spring. Besides... I promised everyone that we'd be in our new homes in Eagle Valley by Christmas.\"\n\n\"Maybe you shouldn't make promises you can't deliver.\"\n\nThe air of tension between the two men was thick. Moses stepped in. \"In your opinion, Mr. MacCallister, what would it take for us to reach our destination in time?\"\n\n\"Well, you'd have to leave pretty quick,\" Jamie said. \"First thing tomorrow morning, if you can.\"\n\nHendricks shook his head. \"That's impossible. It'll take at least another day to finish making repairs on our wagons.\"\n\n\"Day after tomorrow, then,\" Jamie said. \"And you may wish later on you had that extra day back.\"\n\n\"What else?\" Moses asked.\n\nJamie's eyes narrowed in thought. \"You'd have to push hard, and I'm talking about livestock and human folks as well. The days on the trail would be mighty long ones, from as soon as it's light enough to see in the morning until it's too dark to go on. Under normal circumstances, you could afford to stop and lay over for a few days every now and then, mainly to give the stock some time to rest. If you leave now, you can't risk doing that. You'll have to push on every day without any breaks. By the time you get there, your teams will be worn down to a nub... and so will most of your people.\"\n\n\"But we could do all that if we have to,\" Moses insisted. \"Couldn't we, Captain Hendricks?\"\n\n\"We'll do whatever's necessary,\" Hendricks said with a curt nod. \"We all knew when we started out that there would be hardships along the way.\"\n\nJamie said, \"You'd need plenty of luck, too. Luck that you don't run into any Indian trouble, and that the weather cooperates. That last is the main thing. Winter would have to hold off, at least the worst of it. Where you're going, nothing will kill you quicker than a Great Plains blizzard.\"\n\n\"We have faith,\" Hendricks said. \"The Good Lord watches over us.\"\n\n\"He'd have to, for you to have a chance of getting there.\"\n\nMoses turned to Jamie. \"But you could do it,\" he insisted. \"With God's help, of course. You could make all those things happen and lead us to Montana.\"\n\n\"I can't do anything about the weather,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"But if it did get bad, you could tell us what we need to do to survive. And then when conditions improved, we could move on again.\"\n\n\"It would depend on how bad things got\"\u2014Jamie's brawny shoulders rose and fell\u2014\"but yeah, maybe. If anybody could get you through, I reckon I can.\"\n\n\"Then it's settled, right?\" Moses said eagerly. \"Mr. MacCallister has the job, Captain?\"\n\nHendricks peered at Jamie. \"Do you want the job, MacCallister?\"\n\n\"Not particularly,\" Jamie replied, being honest as always. \"But this young fella tells me that you'll be setting out for Montana Territory anyway, whether I go with you or not.\"\n\n\"That's true. We don't have any choice.\"\n\n\"And I can't stand by and wind up with the lives of... how many in your bunch?\"\n\n\"Two hundred and seventeen souls, Mr. MacCallister. Men, women, and children.\"\n\n\"I won't have the lives of that many people thrown away if there's anything I can do about it. I'll take you to Montana.\"\n\nThere. It was done. His earlier idea of paying for them to stay in Kansas City until spring and then set out on their journey was forgotten, and he had a pretty good idea why he had discarded it. Jamie Ian MacCallister wasn't a vain man, but he was a proud one, and Moses had played on his pride in a shrewd manner. That one was plenty smart.\n\n\"It's settled, then,\" Moses said again. \"You can put your horses with our stock, since you're one of us now. Isn't that right, Captain?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I reckon,\" Hendricks said, still not completely convinced it was a good idea. Apparently he was going to make the best of it, though. \"Then I'll introduce you around. People will need to know what's happened.\"\n\nAfter taking that short break, the musicians were starting up again. The strains of their new tune filled the night air. Jamie felt one of his booted toes begin to tap slightly in time to the music. It would be a long, hard trail to Montana, he thought, and these pilgrims had no real idea of what they were facing.\n\nLet them enjoy what time they had left, before they set out on what might be a trail to disaster." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Moses Danzig invited Jamie to share his wagon, but Jamie told the young rabbi that he would just spread his bedroll underneath the vehicle. \"I'm pretty sure it's not going to rain, and I've spent many a night sleeping on the ground. Maybe that's not as comfortable for these old bones as it once was, but it doesn't bother me all that much.\"\n\n\"Suit yourself, Mr. MacCallister,\" Moses said.\n\n\"Call me Jamie.\"\n\n\"All right, Jamie. Since we didn't get around to meeting everybody, I'll introduce you to the rest of the group in the morning.\"\n\n\"You're acquainted with everybody in the wagon train, are you?\" Jamie asked.\n\n\"Well, most of them, anyway. Once you get to know me, you'll see that I'm the gregarious sort.\"\n\n\"Does that mean friendly and talkative?\" Jamie asked, even though he knew that was exactly what the word meant.\n\n\"Yes, it does.\"\n\n\"Reckon I'd sort of figured that out already,\" Jamie said dryly.\n\nHe had put his horses in the corral after unsaddling Sundown and moving his supplies from the pack horse to the back of Moses's wagon. He would use the pack animal as an extra saddle mount if he needed one and eventually press it into service again as a beast of burden once he parted ways with the immigrants after they reached Montana Territory... although he might not be leaving Eagle Valley right away, he realized. That would depend on the weather. If snowstorms closed the passes, it was possible he might have to remain with the pilgrims until spring, unable to reach his home in Colorado until winter was over.\n\nHe spent the night under the wagon, and as he had predicted, he slept just fine. His muscles creaked a little and his joints popped when he crawled out of his bedroll the next morning, but there was nothing uncommon about that.\n\nAs usual, he was up well before dawn, had a fire going and his coffeepot boiling by the time Moses crawled out of the wagon with his hair rumpled and a sleepy expression on his face.\n\n\"What time is it?\" Moses asked.\n\n\"Time for folks to be up and stirring around,\" Jamie told him. \"Most of them already are.\"\n\nIt was true. The women had cook fires blazing, and the men were tending to the animals. Jamie had already checked on his horses and knew they were all right.\n\nMoses dropped from the tailgate to the ground and ran his fingers through his tangled hair. He put his hat on and hunkered next to the fire. The days were still pleasant some of the time but the nights were almost always cold. His breath fogged a little in front of his face as he held his hands out toward the fire's heat.\n\nJamie handed him a tin cup of Arbuckle's. \"That'll warm you up.\"\n\nMoses sipped the strong black brew gratefully.\n\n\"Once we're on the trail, we'll be moving by this time of the morning every day.\" Jamie waved a big hand toward the arching gray vault of the eastern sky. \"There's enough light for the men handling the teams to see where they're going. That's all we really need.\"\n\n\"You weren't joking when you said that the days would be long ones, were you?\"\n\n\"Not one blasted bit. What do you usually do for meals?\"\n\n\"I, uh, prevail upon the generosity of some of my fellow pilgrims, and in return I provide them with some supplies. I'm afraid that I'm not much of a cook myself.\"\n\n\"Well, no need for you to do that anymore. I'll fix us some flapjacks and fry up a mess of bacon.\"\n\n\"Uh, Jamie... I don't exactly eat bacon... You know, because of my religion...\"\n\nJamie vaguely recalled hearing something like that about the Hebrew religion. He wasn't sure how anybody could live without eating bacon or salt jowl, but he supposed that was Moses's business, not his. \"We'll just stick with the flapjacks, then, if they're all right for you to eat.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Moses said with a smile. \"Actually, that sounds really good.\"\n\nAfter they had finished breakfast, Moses offered to clean up.\n\nJamie thanked him. \"While you're doing that I'll go talk to Cap'n Hendricks. Point me to his wagon.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Moses told him how to find the captain's wagon, and he began to walk around the big circle that formed the camp.\n\nHe had passed about a dozen of the covered vehicles when a figure stepped out from behind one of them and confronted him. Jamie recognized the man Moses had identified as Reverend Bradford. He and the two children with him had disappeared by the time Moses had started introducing Jamie to the rest of the group the previous night.\n\nIt appeared that Bradford was intent on meeting him. He planted his feet and stood with a stern expression on his face.\n\nJamie could have moved him out of the way if necessary, but it would have taken a little work.\n\n\"You're MacCallister,\" the big man said bluntly. \"The new wagon master and guide.\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Jamie didn't feel any instinctive liking for the reverend, but he was willing to wait and see what the man had to say, so long as Bradford didn't waste too much of his time. He held out his hand to see if Bradford would shake.\n\n\"You've befriended the Israelite,\" Bradford went on, ignoring Jamie's hand and making the words sound like an accusation of some sort.\n\n\"If you're talking about Moses, I believe he's from Poland,\" Jamie said as he lowered his hand. His eyes narrowed. It seemed that his initial dislike of Bradford had been right on the money.\n\n\"I don't care where he's from, he's a Hebrew, and someone like that has no place among decent, God-fearing folks like the ones with this wagon train.\"\n\n\"Now hold on a minute,\" Jamie snapped. \"He's got a right to be here, same as anybody else\u2014\"\n\nBefore Jamie could go on, rapid footsteps sounded behind him. He whirled around, instinct making his hand flash to the butts of the .44s holstered at his hips." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "He stopped before he made the draw, as two youngsters skidded to a halt in front of him. Their eyes widened at the sight of the big frontiersman looming over them in a slight crouch, clearly ready to jerk his Colts from leather and set those deadly smokepoles to work.\n\n\"Good Lord!\" Bradford exclaimed. \"MacCallister, no! Those are my children.\"\n\nJamie straightened, took his hands away from his revolvers, and willed the snarl off his face. He drew in a deep breath and smiled as he nodded to the children. \"Sorry, younkers. I didn't mean to spook you. It's not a good idea to come running up behind an old-timer like me, though. We spook easy.\"\n\nThe boy swallowed. \"That's all right, mister. We didn't mean to scare you.\"\n\nThat brought a genuine chuckle from Jamie. \"That's all right. Just don't do it again.\"\n\n\"This is a perfect example of why we don't need some gunman accompanying this wagon train,\" Bradford said from behind him. \"Guns never bring anything but trouble.\"\n\nJamie glanced over his shoulder at the reverend. \"If you ever get set upon by Indians or road agents, you'll be mighty happy to have somebody around who knows how to handle a shooting iron. Now, why don't you introduce me to these young'uns of yours?\"\n\nGrudgingly, Bradford performed the introductions. \"This is my son Alexander and my daughter Abigail.\"\n\n\"We're twins,\" Alexander told Jamie.\n\nJamie nodded. \"I can see that. How old are you?\"\n\n\"We're ten,\" Alexander replied.\n\n\"And our mama's dead,\" Abigail added.\n\nJamie looked at Bradford again. \"I'm sorry to hear that.\"\n\n\"It's true that I'm a widower,\" the preacher said. \"My dear wife, rest her soul, went to be with our Lord more than a year ago.\"\n\n\"So you've been raising these little ones by yourself since then?\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Bradford said. \"Bringing them up in the way they should be raised.\"\n\nAlexander said, \"We're not so little.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Abigail said. \"We're just the right size for our age.\"\n\nJamie grinned down at her. \"I reckon that's true, missy. I didn't mean any offense.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" Abigail said graciously. \"You're pretty big for your age, aren't you?\"\n\n\"I reckon you could say that.\"\n\nBradford asked, \"What do you children want? I thought you were going to play with the Harper youngsters today.\"\n\n\"We were,\" Alexander said, \"but we saw you talking to Mr. MacCallister. Billy Harper says that he's a famous gunman and Indian fighter. We wanted to get a look at him close up.\"\n\n\"Do you think the Indians will scalp us, Mr. MacCallister?\" Abigail asked.\n\n\"Don't you worry about that,\" Jamie told her. \"It's my job to see to it that nobody hurts you, Indians or anybody else.\"\n\n\"You'll take care of us, then?\"\n\n\"Well... that's really your pa's job. But I'll help him any way I can.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Alexander said, evidently satisfied by Jamie's answer. \"Let's go, Abby. Billy said he knew where there was a dead frog we can look at.\"\n\nThe two children turned and ran off. Jamie watched them go, then looked at Bradford. \"That's a couple of fine youngsters you got there. I've got quite a few children myself, and a passel of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.\"\n\n\"You and your wife must be proud of them,\" Bradford said stiffly.\n\n\"My wife's dead, too,\" Jamie said, his voice hard and flat. \"So I reckon we got that in common, Reverend. Because of that I won't take any offense about what you had to say about my friend Moses... this time.\"\n\nBradford glared, but he didn't say anything else. He just turned and stalked off.\n\nJamie shook his head as he watched Bradford walk away. He hadn't known many Jewish fellas in his life, but Moses Danzig seemed like a decent hombre and Jamie was willing to give any man the benefit of the doubt.\n\nBradford, on the other hand, rubbed him the wrong way. Jamie would try to keep things civil between them because he liked the man's kids. Bradford must not be all bad, he told himself, if he'd had a hand in raising Alexander and Abigail.\n\nJamie started toward Lamar Hendricks's wagon again, but he hadn't gone very far before he was intercepted again. Three men stepped up and barred his path. They wore belligerent expressions and planted their feet as if they didn't intend to move until they'd had their say, whatever that was.\n\nJamie stopped and studied them. The one on his left was tall and lean, but the ropy muscles of his arms and shoulders testified to his strength. His hands were clenched into knobby-knuckled fists. The one on the right was tall, but broad-shouldered and powerful-looking. He sported a bristly black beard, while the other two were clean shaven.\n\nThe man in the middle probably looked shorter than he really was, since he was standing between the two tall men. He seemed almost as broad as he was tall, and small, piggy eyes were buried in deep pits of gristle above a prominent nose in his round, sunburned face.\n\nHe was the one who spoke. \"You're MacCallister.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"The man who attacked Jeb Ralston for no good reason and broke his leg.\"\n\n\"Well, you've got that half right,\" Jamie drawled. \"Ralston started the fight. As for breaking his leg, that wasn't my intention. It just sort of happened in the heat of battle.\" Jamie's voice hardened. \"But I didn't lose any sleep over it last night.\"\n\n\"Jeb is a good man and a top-notch wagon master. He deserves better.\"\n\n\"I don't plan on wasting my time arguing with you,\" Jamie said. \"Step aside.\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" the piggish man snapped. \"We hired on with Jeb as scouts. We've worked with him before. Now we hear you figure on waltzin' in here and takin' over.\"\n\n\"Agreeing to take this train to Montana wasn't exactly my idea. But I've said that I'll do it, and that's what I plan to do, with you men or without you. It makes no never mind to me. We'll get there either way.\"\n\n\"One of us should've got that job, blast it! It's not right that you cripple Jeb and then take his job!\"\n\n\"You've seen Ralston?\" Jamie was mildly curious about the man's condition. \"How's he doing?\"\n\n\"The sawbones says it'll be months before he can walk normal again, if he ever does. He may not ever get over what you done to him.\"\n\nJamie shrugged. \"He should've let it go after I threw him over that bar, instead of coming after me again.\" In a voice like flint, he added, \"He's lucky I didn't kill him.\"\n\n\"Mister... by the time we get through with you, you're gonna wish it was the other way around!\"\n\nAll three men attacked at the same time, charging at Jamie with fists swinging." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "That didn't surprise Jamie. He'd been able to tell as soon as the men got in his way that they were on the prod. They'd just taken a few minutes to talk themselves up into doing something about it.\n\nAt least they hadn't come after him with guns or knives. Maybe he wouldn't have to kill the stupid varmints.\n\nThat thought flashed through his brain as he planted his feet and hit the short man first, since he was the closest of the three hombres. Jamie's fist crashed into that prominent nose and flattened it. Blood spurted hotly across his knuckles. The blow rocked the man's head back and stopped him as abruptly as if he'd run into a stone wall.\n\nThe lanky man with the malletlike fists darted in quickly. Jamie didn't have time to block the punch he threw. All he could do was lean his head to the side and let the man's bony fist scrape along the side of his head. That hurt his ear a little but didn't do any real damage.\n\nJamie hooked a hard left high into the man's midsection, just under the heart. The man hunched over and his face turned a sick shade of gray. He tried to throw another punch, but it was wide and flailing.\n\nAfter dealing with the first two, Jamie couldn't hope to avoid taking a punch from the third man. His fist landed solidly against Jamie's jaw, sending him staggering to the side as his hat flew off his head. The bearded man was the biggest of the three, and he hit hard.\n\nStill on his feet, Jamie's head and eyesight were clear. He grinned at his opponent. \"That the best you got, son? Can't even put an old, old man like me on the ground?\"\n\nThat gibe had the desired result. The man roared angrily and charged. Jamie twisted out of the way, grabbed the man's shoulder, and slung him up against the nearest wagon. The man crashed headfirst into the heavy side boards and bounced off. He fell on the ground and rolled over, stunned.\n\n\"Look out, Mr. MacCallister!\" a little girl's voice cried.\n\nJamie wheeled around in time to meet another charge from the short, broad man who had recovered his wits after the painful blow that had broken his nose. Blood streamed from his nostrils, smearing the bottom half of his face and giving him a fearsome look. He threw punch after punch as he bored in at Jamie, landing some of them.\n\nThe big frontiersman shrugged off the blows, and threw a couple of his own, a left-right combination that landed on the attacker's gut and chin. Jamie would have hit him again, but a couple arms like thick cables wrapped around him from behind, pinning his arms to his sides.\n\n\"I got him, Keeler!\" a harsh voice yelled in Jamie's ear. It belonged to the tall, lanky man recovered from Jamie's initial blow. \"Teach the old codger a lesson!\"\n\nA vicious grin split the bloody face of the short, piggish Keeler. He laughed, clenched his fists, and rushed at Jamie, obviously intent on dealing out a lot of damage.\n\nJamie let him get fairly close, then lifted his right leg and planted his boot heel in Keeler's belly. The collision made Jamie's leg bend, but his muscles caught the weight and straightened his leg.\n\nThat sent Keeler flying away from him, and drove him and his lanky captor backward. The man tripped and lost his balance. When he fell, Jamie's massive form came crashing down on top of him.\n\nJamie rolled away, came up on hands and knees, and surged to his feet. All three of his opponents were still on the ground, stunned. A lot of the immigrants had gathered around to watch the battle, although he hadn't been aware of that while he was fighting. All his attention had been focused on his opponents.\n\nSome of the people looked excited, as if the brawl were a welcome break from the monotony of their journey. Others appeared to be shocked and upset by the violence.\n\nReverend Bradford stood to one side, the usual frown of disapproval on his face. Jamie picked up his hat and slapped it against his leg to get some of the dust off of it. \"What's the matter, Reverend? Fighting bother you just as much as dancing does?\"\n\nBradford snorted. \"To tell the truth, Mr. MacCallister, I didn't really expect any better of you.\"\n\nBefore Jamie could respond to that, Lamar Hendricks hurried up and demanded, \"What's going on here? Someone told me there was a fight.\"\n\n\"If you can call it that, Captain,\" one of the immigrants said. He waved a hand at the men on the ground. \"Mr. MacCallister just whipped all three of these fellows!\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" Hendricks asked Jamie.\n\n\"Seems they hold a grudge against me because of what happened to Ralston. They ran their mouths some, then jumped me.\" Jamie shrugged and nodded toward Keeler. \"Well, that fella there is really the one who did all the talking.\"\n\n\"Keeler,\" Hendricks said, making a little face as if the name tasted bad in his mouth. \"I'm not surprised. He's a hothead and too fond of drink, just like Ralston. It's no wonder they're friends. But Ralston swore these men were good scouts.\"\n\n\"Maybe they are. You can be good at your job and still be a polecat.\"\n\nHendricks frowned. \"Do you want me to discharge them? I'd assumed they would work for you the same way they were going to work for Ralston, but if there's going to be trouble between you all the way...\"\n\n\"That's up to them,\" Jamie said. \"I don't hold a grudge against any man over a little ruckus like this.\"\n\nHe didn't say it, but he reserved his grudges\u2014and his vengeance\u2014for animals like the outlaws who had murdered his wife.\n\nThe three men were groaning and moving around on the ground. Hendricks strode over to them and said sharply, \"Keeler! Holcomb! Gilworth! Get up.\"\n\nThe three men gradually climbed to their feet and shook their heads as they tried to get their wits back about them. Keeler and Holcomb, the tall, lanky one, glared murderously at Jamie, but big, bearded Gilworth looked sort of confused as he stood there shaking his head slowly.\n\n\"What's the meaning of this?\" Hendricks snapped at them. \"You had no call to attack Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\n\"Ain't you even gonna listen to our side of the story, Cap'n?\" Keeler asked in a whining tone.\n\n\"That's what I'm doing. Why did you attack our wagon master?\"\n\n\"Because he hadn't ought to be the wagon master!\" Holcomb said. \"Jeb's the rightful wagon master, and we're his scouts.\"\n\n\"Not anymore. Mr. MacCallister has the job now, and you'll work for him and take his orders.\"\n\n\"Damned if I will!\" Holcomb said.\n\n\"The same goes for me,\" Keeler rumbled in his gravelly voice.\n\n\"Then you can gather your gear and get out of here,\" Hendricks said with a curt nod. \"And since we haven't left Kansas City yet, you won't have any wages coming to you.\"\n\n\"That ain't right,\" Keeler insisted. \"It's been four days since Jeb hired us. That's four days we could've been workin' at some other job.\"\n\n\"No, it's more likely four more days you would have spent lying around whatever saloon or house of ill repute Ralston found you in. Get out of this camp or I'll summon the authorities.\"\n\nWith surly, hate-filled glares, Keeler and Holcomb stumbled off. The crowd parted to let them through. Several of the women looked repulsed by the two men.\n\nHendricks looked at the third man. \"Well, how about you, Gilworth? Do you have anything to say for yourself?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I do.\"\n\nGilworth took a step toward Jamie.\n\nThe crowd drew back a little, and a mutter of anticipation went through the group of immigrants. They expected to see more fighting.\n\nGilworth stuck out his big paw of a hand. \"Sorry, Mr. MacCallister. I went along with the others 'cause they got so worked up about what happened to Ralston, but to tell you the truth I was never that fond of the fella myself.\" He grinned sheepishly. \"I reckon I like a good fight, too. From what I'd heard of you, I figured we'd get one.\" He grunted. \"Never figured you'd whip all of us, though. I mean, one\u2014\"\n\n\"One old man?\" Jamie finished for him when Gilworth stopped short in his sentence.\n\n\"Well, yeah. No offense, but you ain't no spring chicken, that's for sure.\"\n\nJamie snorted. \"I'm not ready to be put out to pasture yet, either.\" Gilworth's hand was still out, so he gripped it. \"Jamie Ian MacCallister.\"\n\n\"Hector Gilworth. I've heard a heap about you, Mr. MacCallister, and I'm mighty pleased to make your acquaintance.\"\n\n\"You want to scout for this wagon train and work with me, Hector?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'd plumb admire to,\" Hector said with a decisive nod. \"That is, if you'll have me.\"\n\n\"You don't make a habit of getting liquored up, do you?\"\n\n\"Not when there's a job to do. Don't get me wrong, Mr. MacCallister. I like to blow off steam just as much as the next man, but I reckon there's a time and place for it.\"\n\nJamie clapped a hand on Hector's shoulder. \"You'll do\u2014at least until you give me reason to think otherwise. And you can call me Jamie.\"\n\n\"That'd be an honor. I've heard a whole heap about you, Mister\u2014I mean, Jamie. I won't let you down.\"\n\nJamie looked over at Hendricks. \"There's still a problem. We'll need a couple more scouts, since those two quit.\"\n\n\"If you know anyone...\" the captain began.\n\n\"That's just it, I don't,\" Jamie said. \"I didn't know a soul in Kansas City until yesterday, and I've been a mite too busy to make any acquaintances except here among your bunch.\"\n\nHector said, \"I might know somebody.\"\n\n\"Friend of yours?\"\n\n\"My cousin. Name of Jess Neville. I don't think he ever worked as a wagon train scout before, but he's been a fur trapper and a prospector and a bullwhacker and done plenty of wanderin' around. Reckon he probably knows the ground between here and Montana about as well as anybody else would.\"\n\n\"He's here in Kansas City?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, and he's at loose ends. He just quit workin' for a freight outfit not long ago.\"\n\nHendricks said, \"He wasn't fired for drinking or causing trouble, was he?\"\n\n\"No, Jess is the one who up and quit. He never did like stayin' in the same job for too long. When we were growin' up, folks said he was shiftless, but I think it's more like he gets tired of doin' the same thing.\"\n\nJamie said, \"If you can hunt him up, I'll talk to him. If I like the look of him, we'll give him a job, but he'll have to stay with it until the wagons get where they're going. He can't just go wandering off if he feels like it.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'll make sure he understands that.\"\n\n\"Even if you hire this fellow Neville, you'll still need at least one more scout, won't you?\" Hendricks asked.\n\n\"That's right,\" Jamie said with a nod. \"Hector, let's go see that cousin of yours, and while we're at it we'll see if we can't come up with somebody else.\"\n\n\"I really appreciate you puttin' so much faith in me, Jamie.\"\n\nJamie grinned. \"I like to think I can size up a fella's character pretty good, especially after I've swapped punches with him. You'll do. At least, like I said, until you prove different.\"\n\n\"You don't have to worry about that,\" Hector said fervently. \"If you want to go hunt up Jess right now, I know where he's been stayin'.\"\n\nAs the two big men, one young and one old, were leaving the wagon camp, they passed a group of children who stopped playing to gaze up at them in awe-struck admiration. Jamie spotted the Bradford twins among them and paused to say, \"Abigail, that was you who called out that warning to me a little while ago, wasn't it?\"\n\nThe little girl looked embarrassed and didn't say anything, but Alexander replied, \"It sure was, Mr. MacCallister. She just beat me to it, though. I was about to yell for you to look out when Abby did it.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the two of you looking out for me,\" Jamie told them. \"How about we make the two of you honorary wagon train scouts?\"\n\nTheir faces lit up with grins. Abigail said, \"You mean it, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"I'm not in the habit of saying things I don't mean,\" Jamie said. \"But that's a serious job I'm giving you. You've got to keep your eyes open for trouble, and if you see anything that doesn't look right, you come find me or Mr. Gilworth or Captain Hendricks and tell us about it, all right?\"\n\nThey nodded solemnly in unison, and Alexander promised, \"We sure will.\"\n\nJamie lifted a hand in farewell, and he and Hector walked on.\n\nHector said, \"Those are cute kids. The preacher's young'uns, ain't they?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\nHector made a face. \"I probably shouldn't say it, but I'm not all that fond of their pa.\"\n\n\"Can't argue with you there,\" Jamie said. \"Come on, let's find your cousin.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Hector Gilworth led Jamie to a rundown hotel on one of the side streets. \"I know the place has seen better days, but I reckon it's all Jess can afford right now.\"\n\n\"There's no shame in a man being poor,\" Jamie said. \"There's been plenty of times in my life when I didn't have two pennies to rub together.\" He didn't mention that these days he had more than two pennies to his name... a lot more. This was one of many situations in which he'd found himself where how rich he was didn't matter one blasted bit.\n\nThey went up stairs that sagged a little under their weight and down a dusty hallway to the door of Jess Neville's room. Hector banged a fist against the panel and called, \"Jess? You awake in there? It's me, Hector.\"\n\nJamie heard shuffling footsteps on the other side of the door. It swung open, and a man slightly below medium height peered out at them with bleary, confused eyes. He had thinning brown hair, a couple day's worth of beard stubble, and looked thoroughly unimpressive.\n\nJamie didn't smell liquor, though, so he was willing to give the man the benefit of the doubt and figure that his bleary eyes came from being sleepy, not hungover.\n\n\"What time is it, Hector?\" the man asked as he dragged fingers through his hair.\n\n\"Sun's been up a couple hours,\" Hector replied.\n\n\"Well, the sun may have been up, but I ain't.\" The man frowned at Jamie. \"Who's this big old galoot?\"\n\n\"Jamie Ian MacCallister,\" Jamie introduced himself.\n\nVague recognition stirred in Jess Neville's eyes. \"I think I heard of you, mister. Can't rightly recollect what it was that I heard, though.\"\n\n\"He's the new wagon master for that bunch of immigrants I signed on with,\" Hector explained.\n\n\"What happened to that fella Ralston?\" Neville asked.\n\nHector pointed at Jamie with a thumb and grinned. \"Mr. MacCallister\u2014I mean, Jamie\u2014happened to him. Ralston started a ruckus with him in the Bella Royale, and he wound up with a broken leg.\"\n\n\"Ralston did?\"\n\n\"Yep. You don't see Mr. MacCallister hobblin' around with a broken leg, do you?\"\n\nNeville shook his head. \"This early in the mornin', I don't trust my eyes not to be playin' tricks on me, so it don't matter what I see. What is it you want?\"\n\n\"The other two fellas who were supposed to be scouts up and quit because of what happened to Ralston. I thought maybe you'd be interested in one of the jobs.\"\n\nNeville hadn't invited them into the room, but that was all right with Jamie. He could look past the man's shoulder and see that the room was sparsely furnished with a chair, a rickety table, and a bed with grimy sheets that were so tangled they resembled a rat's nest.\n\nNeville put a hand on the door like he was about to shut it and said, \"Dadgum it, Hector. You know I just quit that bullwhackin' job a few days ago. I ain't ready to go back to work yet.\"\n\n\"You mean you ain't completely out of money yet.\"\n\n\"Same thing, ain't it?\" Neville tried to swing the door closed.\n\nHector wedged a big, booted foot between the door and the jamb. \"Here's the thing, Jess. We're in sort of a bind. We need a couple scouts, and like I told Jamie, you know the country.\"\n\nNeville frowned. \"Where is it those pilgrims are goin' again?\"\n\n\"Montana Territory. A place called Eagle Valley.\"\n\nNeville scratched at his patchy beard as his forehead furrowed in thought. \"I think I've heard of it. Wouldn't rightly know how to find it, though.\"\n\n\"Cap'n Hendricks has a map. He's the fella the rest of the immigrants elected to be in charge.\"\n\n\"I know where it is,\" Jamie said. \"I can get the wagons there. It'd be a lot easier with some good help to scout out the trail, though.\"\n\n\"Well, you could get an argument about whether or not I fall into that category, mister.\" Neville squinted up at him. \"Did this big ol' grizzly of a Gilworth tell you that I'm just about the laziest human bein' on the face of the earth.\"\n\nJamie glanced at Hector and said dryly, \"No, I don't reckon he mentioned that.\"\n\n\"Well, he should have. It ain't that I don't do my work. I do, and you can ask anybody I ever drew wages from about that. But when I ain't workin', I'm not of a mind to do much of anything except take it easy. That seems to rub most people the wrong way.\"\n\n\"You do your job and I don't care how much you sleep,\" Jamie declared. \"That's not any of my business.\"\n\n\"Now, see, that's a reasonable attitude. Most folks I work for, they just ain't reasonable.\"\n\n\"I'm not most folks,\" Jamie said flatly.\n\nNeville glanced up and down Jamie's tall, rugged frame. \"Yeah, I can see that.\"\n\n\"You want the job or not?\" Hector asked.\n\n\"Now, don't rush me, don't rush me. That's another problem folks have these days. They're in too much of an all-fired hurry all the time. It don't hurt to just slow down and ponder things for awhile 'fore you make up your mind.\"\n\n\"The wagon train's leaving at first light tomorrow,\" Jamie said. \"We don't have any time to waste. If you're not coming with us, Neville, we'll need to find somebody else.\"\n\n\"Well, if you're gonna put it that way... I promised my aunt Sadie, his mama\u2014Neville nodded at his cousin\u2014that I'd look after ol' Hector here. He's big as an ox, but he ain't much more'n a babe in the woods, you know what I mean?\"\n\n\"Blast it,\" Hector said. \"I been around. You make it sound like I'm some sort of tenderfoot, Jess.\"\n\nNeville ignored that outburst and went on. \"I reckon I can come along. Can't stay here in Kansas City, that's for sure. If I did, I might have to take a job clerkin' in a store or something else that's inside. I can't hardly abide havin' walls and a roof around me all the time.\"\n\n\"You won't find many walls and roofs on the prairie between here and Montana Territory,\" Jamie said.\n\nNeville grinned. \"No, that's sure enough true.\" He put out his hand. \"Count me in, I reckon, Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\n\"Call me Jamie.\" As they shook hands, Jamie went on. \"I don't suppose you know somebody else we can hire as a scout.\"\n\n\"I surely don't. Sorry.\"\n\nHector said, \"Get your possibles together and come on over to the wagon camp today. You can stay there tonight. Might as well save the cost of this hotel room, and that way there's no chance you'll sleep too late.\"\n\n\"Leavin' at first light, you said?\" Neville winced a little. \"I sure do hate to hear that, but I'll be there. And my word is good.\"\n\nAs they were headed back downstairs, Jamie asked Hector, \"Is he telling the truth about his word being good?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Jess has got his faults, no doubt about that, but he's honest as the day is long. If he tells you he'll do something, you can count on it.\" With a note of worry in his voice, Hector asked, \"What are we gonna do about findin' another scout?\"\n\n\"We'll just have to look around, maybe check in some of the saloons and hash houses. If we don't find anybody\"\u2014Jamie's brawny shoulders rose and fell\u2014\"I reckon we'll start out with three scouts, counting me, instead of four. Maybe somebody who's already part of the wagon train would take the job. Some youngster, eighteen or so, who's traveling with his folks.\"\n\n\"Scoutin' on the plains is pretty dangerous for somebody who's inexperienced.\"\n\n\"Setting out for Montana at this time of year is pretty dangerous for everybody involved,\" Jamie pointed out. \"They all seem bound and determined to do it, though.\"\n\nThey left the hotel and turned back toward the main business district. Jamie figured they would have a look in the Bella Royale first. It was early in the day, but there might be somebody already in there who'd be interested in a scouting job.\n\nAs they passed the variety theater, he glanced at two young men who were looking at the posters for the show that was starting that night. They were dressed like cowboys, which meant they probably had experience with long days in the saddle, and he thought about asking them if they'd like to sign on with the wagon train.\n\nThey turned away before he could say anything, though, and he didn't go after them. There was bound to be somebody else in Kansas City who wanted to go to Montana." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Now that the gang was in Kansas City, Bodie thought Edwin Swint would go ahead and divide up the loot from the train robbery, as he had said he would. But Swint seemed to be in no hurry to do so.\n\nThe money, in the form of twenty dollar gold pieces, had been packed in a chest in the express car. He had split the loot between five sets of saddlebags so it could be carried away. All those saddlebags were safely cached in Swint's hotel room, and a couple men guarded them around the clock, everybody in the gang taking a turn at that duty.\n\nThe night before, Swint had kicked the guards out of the room when he came back to the hotel from the Bella Royale with one of the soiled doves who worked there. He'd told the guards to stay right outside in the hall, just to make sure nobody bothered him and his lady friend... and the money.\n\nBodie heard about that from his friend Three-Finger Jake Lucas, who'd heard the story from one of the guards Swint had booted out of the room. The two young men were sitting at a table in a nearby caf\u00e9 over a late breakfast.\n\nJake sipped his coffee. \"I'm startin' to wonder if the boss plans to double-cross us and just keep all that loot for himself. Otherwise why don't he go ahead and divvy it up like he promised he would?\"\n\n\"I guess he's got his reasons,\" Bodie said.\n\nJake grunted skeptically. \"Yeah, like bein' a dang crook. Think about who you're talkin' about, Bodie. A man like Eldon Swint can't be trusted.\" Jake's eyes narrowed in thought. \"If a man was smart, he might try to get his hands on those double eagles himself and not wait for somebody to just hand him his share.\"\n\nBodie frowned and put down his coffee cup. \"You'd better not be thinking what it sounds like, Jake. Swint would kill anybody who tried that. We've talked about things like this before.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and I haven't changed my way of thinkin' about it, either.\" An easy grin flashed across Jake's face. \"But shoot, don't worry about it. I'm just talkin', is all. I'd never go against a pard.\" He paused. \"The thing of it is, Eldon ain't really a pard. He's the boss.\"\n\nBodie changed the subject. \"Are you going to that show tonight?\"\n\n\"To see some singin' and dancin' girls? You bet I am! We've been out on the trail long enough I'm ready for some entertainment.\"\n\nThey had stopped by the theater on their way to the caf\u00e9. The place was closed, but Bodie and Jake had stood on the boardwalk in front of the building, looking at the posters tacked up next to the ticket window. The posters had drawings of the members of the troupe on them, and Bodie had been particularly intrigued by one of them, a young woman with a mass of dark, curly hair.\n\nMiss Savannah McCoy, her name was, according to the poster.\n\nHe didn't know which parts she played in the show, but he was looking forward to finding out. Thinking about her and the performance they were going to watch that night made him forget all about the fortune in double eagles for the time being.\n\nEven though she had been a member of the troupe for more than a year, Savannah still got nervous before each performance. The butterflies, as Cyrus called them, weren't as bad as they had been starting out, but they were still potent enough to force her to stand backstage with one hand pressed to her stomach while she made herself take deep breaths. She closed her eyes and imagined how the night's performance would go, letting it all play out inside her head.\n\nPerfectly, of course.\n\nAfter awhile, the routine began to calm her. She was ready.\n\nWhen Dollie bustled past and smiled at her, Savannah was able to return that smile and mean it.\n\n\"I just snuck a glance at the crowd,\" Dollie said. \"Looks like we're going to have a full house.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" Savannah said.\n\n\"You bet it is. We need to do well here.\"\n\nSavannah thought she heard a trace of worry in the older woman's voice. The troupe hadn't been doing as well financially in recent months. Quite a few of the performances in various cities hadn't sold out, and it seemed like the expenses of traveling and staying on the road just kept going up. She didn't think the troupe was in any real danger of folding, but that unwelcome possibility lurked in the back of her head, anyway. If that ever happened, she didn't know what she would do.\n\nShe had a little money saved up; she could always return to her home in Georgia. But if she did that, it would mean admitting defeat. Worse, there was the chance that her father wouldn't allow her to come home. For all she knew, William Thorpe might have disowned her. She hadn't had any contact with him in more than a year.\n\nWith a little shake of her head, Savannah put all that out of her thoughts. Concentrate on the thing that was at hand, she told herself, and that was tonight's show. That was the only thing she could do anything about at the moment.\n\nA minute later, Cyrus parted the curtain and walked out on stage to loud applause, dressed in his Shakespearean costume. He swept his plumed hat off his head and gave the audience his usual welcoming spiel, then launched into Hamlet's famous \"To be or not to be\" speech.\n\nThe crowd listened politely, but as she waited behind the curtain Savannah could hear them growing slightly restless toward the end. She knew that some of the men in the audience had come mostly for the singing and dancing, and to look at her and the other female members of the troupe.\n\nCyrus concluded the famous passage and said, \"Now, ladies and gentlemen, a beautiful rendition of one of your favorite melodies by our lovely songbird of the South, Miss Savannah McCoy!\"\n\nSavannah stepped through the curtains and out onto the stage. She smiled as she walked forward, letting her eyes sweep over the audience. As she began to sing Stephen Foster's \"Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,\" her gaze settled on a man about four rows back, in the middle of the theater.\n\nShe had learned that her performances were always better when she pretended to be singing directly to a member of the audience. It was largely a matter of luck who that person happened to be. As long as they were in a good place, that was all Savannah cared about.\n\nThe person on the receiving end of her song happened to be a young man who looked a few years older than her, with dark hair and a hard-planed face. He was dressed like a cowboy, as was the young man who sat beside him. The other man was more handsome, but there was something compelling about the man Savannah had selected.\n\nSinging to him was no trouble at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "\"I swear, she's lookin' right at you.\" Three-Finger Jake dug an enthusiastic elbow into Bodie's ribs. \"She must be sweet on you!\"\n\n\"I don't even know the girl,\" Bodie protested. \"I mean, I know she's Miss Savannah McCoy, but that's all.\"\n\n\"That's what the fella said when he introduced her.\"\n\n\"I would have known it anyway. I would have recognized her from her picture on the poster.\"\n\nIt was true. The artist had done a good job of capturing Savannah McCoy's likeness. If anything, she was even prettier in person than she was on the poster, although before he saw her Bodie wouldn't have thought that was possible.\n\nShe sang beautifully, too. Cyrus O'Hanlon had been right to describe her as a songbird. Savannah was lovely and talented, and if Bodie hadn't known better, he might have said that he was smitten with her.\n\nBut that was loco, of course. He could tell just by looking at her that she was a real lady, despite the immoral reputation that actresses and entertainers sometimes had. She wouldn't ever have anything to do with a lawless ruffian like him. For all he knew, she might already be married to one of the other members of the troupe.\n\nJust sit back and enjoy the show, he told himself, and stop thinking about things that could never be.\n\nThe show was certainly enjoyable. After Savannah's song, a couple jugglers came out and entertained the crowd for several minutes while the curtains were closed behind them. Bodie heard people moving around back there and figured they were getting ready for something else.\n\nHe was right. When the jugglers finished and the curtains were pulled back, several fellows with what looked like bed sheets wrapped around them were standing on steps with white-painted columns at the top. One of them stood a little apart from the others and started talking, but as he did so, several of his companions took out knives and began to sneak up behind him with evil expressions on their faces.\n\n\"What the Sam Hill!\" Jake exclaimed. \"They're gonna stab that hombre like they was red Injuns!\" He reached for the gun on his hip. \"I'll stop 'em!\"\n\nBodie's hand shot out and closed around Jake's wrist before Jake could draw the revolver. \"Hold on!\" Bodie whispered. \"I think it's all part of the show.\"\n\nNot everybody in the audience figured that out as quickly as he did. Several men shouted warnings, which the sheet-wrapped figures on stage ignored. A nervous tingle ran through Bodie's brain. What if he was wrong? What if they were about to commit cold-blooded murder right there on the stage?\n\nThat was loco, of course, and a moment later he saw proof of that as the men with knives pretended to stab the fellow who was spouting words. They didn't even do a very good job of pretending, but it was enough to make the audience hoot and holler in enthusiasm. The supposed victim of the assault staggered around and made a real production of dying.\n\nOnce he had slumped onto the steps and wasn't moving anymore\u2014except for a twitch every now and then that Bodie could see\u2014Cyrus O'Hanlon came out again, dressed in a sheet like the others, and started making another long speech about burying Caesar. Bodie couldn't follow all of what O'Hanlon said, but the whole thing was stirring, no doubt about that.\n\nO'Hanlon finally shut up and the curtains closed again. An older but still attractive woman came out and sang a song. She was good, Bodie thought, but not as good as Savannah. Then she danced with a young man while another man with a walrus mustache played a piano at the edge of the stage. She was pretty light on her feet, despite her hefty build.\n\nAfter that, everything started to run together a little for Bodie. There were more dramatic scenes, more singing, more dancing, even some acrobats, one of whom was a gal in a scandalously scanty costume that exposed her knees. But he was waiting to see Savannah McCoy again, and when she didn't appear he began to get a little impatient.\n\nCyrus O'Hanlon came out in that silly hat with the feather on it again. \"Finally, ladies and gentlemen, to conclude our performance tonight we are proud to present one of the most famous scenes in the illustrious history of the theater... the balcony scene from the great tragedy Romeo and Juliet, as written by Mr. William Shakespeare. It will be performed by yours truly and Miss Savannah McCoy.\"\n\nBodie sat up straighter in his seat and thought that it was about time.\n\nJake elbowed him again. \"She's the only one you like, ain't she?\"\n\n\"Shhh,\" Bodie said. \"They're about to start.\"\n\nThe curtains parted and went back. Some fake bushes had been placed around the stage to represent a garden of sorts, and to one side rose a wall with a window in it. Bodie edged forward in his seat as Savannah appeared in that window and leaned through it so the audience could get a good look at her.\n\nShe was worth looking at, wearing a thin gown that was cut almost sinfully low in front. Bodie felt vaguely embarrassed for her having to wear such a getup, but at the same time he couldn't take his eyes off her. She was so attractive that just looking at her felt almost like a punch in the gut to him.\n\nCyrus O'Hanlon strode onto the stage, wandered through the fake bushes toward the wall, and stopped to throw out an arm and bellow, \"Hark! What light through yonder window breaks? 'Tis the east, and Juliet is the sun!\"\n\nSavannah was as bright and pretty as the sun, that was for sure, Bodie thought. He could have sat there and watched her all night, but the scene was over all too quickly as far as he was concerned. The curtains swept across the stage again. Bodie sighed. He didn't want the performance to be finished, but there was nothing he could do about it.\n\nThe whole troupe came out for a curtain call as the audience cheered, whistled, and applauded, so he got to see Savannah again, if only for a moment.\n\nFinally, the audience began to file out of the theater.\n\nAs they left, Jake said, \"Now, ain't you glad we came to Kansas City? If we hadn't, you never would've seen that brown-haired gal. You were practically droolin' over her all night like a dog with a big ol' soup bone.\"\n\n\"No, I wasn't,\" Bodie said. \"I think she's pretty, but\u2014\"\n\nJake's snort interrupted him. \"I reckon you'd marry her if you got the chance\u2014which is a durned fool way to feel, if you ask me. You know what actresses are like. You might as well marry a\u2014\"\n\nJake stopped short as Bodie stiffened. He had seen enough gunfights to recognize Bodie's stance as that of a man who was ready to hook and draw.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Jake muttered quickly. \"I reckon I was all wrong about Miss McCoy.\"\n\n\"I reckon you were,\" Bodie snapped. He forced himself to relax. Jake Lucas was his only real friend in the gang, and he didn't want to lose that friendship. He put a smile on his face, even though he was still a little irritated.\n\nAs they reached the sidewalk in front of the theater, a very well-dressed man with dark blond hair under his black hat and a neatly trimmed mustache of the same shade bumped hard into Bodie's shoulder. \"Watch where you're going, cowboy,\" the man snapped as he brushed past.\n\n\"Hey,\" Jake said angrily. \"You're the one who ran into my pard, mister.\"\n\nA couple of larger men in cheap suits were trailing the well-dressed gent. Bodie noticed them and realized they were probably bodyguards. Bulges under their coats told him they were carrying guns.\n\nThe blond dandy glared at Jake and demanded, \"What did you say, Tex?\"\n\n\"I'm not from Texas,\" Jake shot back as he squared himself up for trouble.\n\nBodie put a hand on his friend's arm. \"Let it go, Jake.\"\n\n\"But this galoot ran into you and then acted like it was your fault,\" Jake protested.\n\n\"It's not worth causing a ruckus over.\" Bodie steered Jake away from the dandy.\n\nThe man gave them a sneering smile as they turned to leave. \"That's right. I'm an important man in this city. Trifle with me and you'll regret it.\"\n\nJake looked back over his shoulder and said hotly, \"Oh, yeah? Well, you'll regret\u2014\"\n\n\"Come on.\" Bodie lowered his voice and added, \"We don't want the law talking to us, now do we?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Jake said in sudden understanding. \"No, I reckon we don't.\"\n\nBodie glanced back at the dandy. The man's arrogant attitude rubbed him the wrong way. If it came down to a fight, Bodie figured he and Jake could have held their own against the bodyguards, whether with fists or guns.\n\nBut that would have almost certainly landed them in trouble with the law, and they sure didn't need that. If they were arrested, somebody might figure out they were part of the gang that had held up the train in Kansas. At the very least, Eldon Swint might take it as an excuse to split their shares among the rest of the outlaws... or just keep that money for himself.\n\nBodie wouldn't forget the blond man's face, though. Maybe one of these days their trails would cross again under different circumstances. If that ever happened, Bodie figured he would give Mr. High-and-Mighty a little lesson in manners. If that meant gunplay, then so be it.\n\nIn the meantime, he told himself to forget about that hombre and think about Savannah. He just wished there was some way he could let her know how much he had enjoyed her performance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Since there were only a few female members of the troupe, they used the same dressing room, with the exception of Dollie who shared a dressing room with Cyrus. Savannah was sitting at one of the tables in front of a mirror, removing the makeup she had worn as Juliet, when Cyrus knocked on the door and poked his head into the room.\n\n\"Ah, ladies, you're all decently attired,\" he said.\n\nAs usual, Savannah couldn't tell if he was relieved or faintly disappointed by that.\n\n\"Savannah, a word with you, my dear?\"\n\n\"Of course. Was there something wrong with my performance tonight?\"\n\nCyrus shook his head. \"Not at all, not at all. Quite the contrary, in fact. There's a gentleman out here who was in the audience. He wishes to convey his compliments to you in person.\"\n\nSavannah frowned slightly. That was unusual but not unheard of. Sometimes members of the audience\u2014usually middle-aged or even older men\u2014came backstage and tried to approach the women in the troupe, probably because of the reputation that stubbornly clung to actresses.\n\nCyrus fended them off most of the time, but now and then\u2014when he judged that the would-be suitor had plenty of money and might be persuaded to make a donation to the troupe\u2014he allowed them to talk to the women.\n\nThat bothered Savannah, but she recognized it as a part of her job. She had to be nice to the people who bought tickets. That didn't mean she had to go beyond politeness and surface friendliness, and she never did. \"Would you like for me to talk to this man, Cyrus?\"\n\n\"I think it would be a good thing if you did. It shouldn't be too terrible an ordeal. He's rather attractive, you know, and much younger than some of your, ah, admirers.\"\n\nShe supposed it wouldn't hurt anything. She nodded. \"All right.\"\n\n\"The rest of you ladies, let's give Savannah some privacy, shall we?\" Cyrus ushered the other female performers out of the dressing room, leaving Savannah alone.\n\nShe picked up a dressing gown and shrugged into it. She was still wearing the costume she wore as Juliet, which was daring enough onstage. In close quarters, it definitely would be immodest.\n\nA moment later a man appeared in the open doorway, holding his hat in one hand. Savannah could tell that the suit he wore was very expensive. He had the unmistakable look of wealth about him, from his carefully barbered dark blond hair to the soft hands to the shoes on his feet that probably cost as much as Cyrus paid her in a year.\n\n\"Miss McCoy,\" he said, his lips smiling under the neatly trimmed mustache, \"I can't begin to tell you how much I enjoyed your performance tonight.\"\n\nShe returned the smile. \"I believe you just did, Mister...?\"\n\n\"Kane. Gideon Kane.\"\n\nHe moved closer to her and put out his hand, and without thinking she reached to take it. Instead of shaking hands with her, he turned her hand, held it, lifted it, and pressed his lips to the back of it.\n\nShe had played scenes where a man kissed the back of a woman's hand, but she had never seen it happen in real life, only on the stage of a theater. Certainly she had never had it happen to her. She wasn't sure whether to laugh or be touched by the melodramatic gesture.\n\nShe settled for saying, \"I'm Savannah McCoy.\"\n\n\"I know. Just as I knew when I saw your picture on that poster outside the theater that I had to attend tonight's performance. Kansas City is a rather squalid place, Miss McCoy. I'm not sure a sight as lovely as you has ever been seen here before.\"\n\nSavannah forced a laugh. \"You're flattering me, Mr. Kane\u2014\"\n\n\"Call me Gideon,\" he suggested. \"It's not flattery when it's true.\"\n\nShe tried to change the subject. \"You're in business here?\"\n\nHis smile twisted a little. \"My family is. We own stockyards and slaughterhouses and have interests in the railroad as well as other enterprises. All quite successful, of course. None of it particularly interests me, though. I'm more fond of the arts, such as the theater.\"\n\n\"It's my calling,\" Savannah said.\n\n\"Anyone can tell that by watching you perform. You bring such life and passion to your roles, and you sing wonderfully. I plan to be in the audience every night while your troupe is in Kansas City.\"\n\n\"Oh, you wouldn't want to do that. The show doesn't really change. Of course, there are minor differences in every performance, but really, if you've seen one of them\u2014\"\n\n\"Seeing you once is not nearly enough,\" he broke in. \"I don't care about the rest of the performance. I want to see you. Every night.\"\n\nShe was starting to get uncomfortable. She had been looked at by men often enough to recognize lust when she saw it. In Gideon Kane's eyes it bordered on obsession. It was time to ease him out of the dressing room....\n\nUsing the heel of one of those expensive shoes, he closed the door behind him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Savannah felt a tingle of alarm as the latch clicked shut. \"Please, Mr. Kane\u2014\"\n\n\"Gideon.\"\n\n\"Please, Mr. Kane,\" she repeated, \"it's inappropriate enough for the two of us to be alone in here. To have the door closed is simply unacceptable.\"\n\n\"Not to me. However, I don't want to make you uncomfortable. I'll step out into the hall if you'll agree to have a late supper with me.\"\n\n\"I didn't know any restaurants were still open.\"\n\nKane shook his head. \"I'm not talking about going to a restaurant. My carriage is right outside the theater. We'll go to my house. I've already sent one of my men with word for my cook to prepare a meal\u2014\"\n\nSavannah was shaking her head. \"No, I simply couldn't do that. It wouldn't be proper. We just met tonight.\"\n\nShe saw the fingers of his hand holding the hat tighten a little on the expensive material.\n\n\"When I see something I want, it doesn't take me long to make up my mind to have it. Besides, I'm willing to purchase a large block of tickets for every performance, and from the way O'Hanlon talked when I asked him about you, the troupe can use the money. You won't have to do anything... unpleasant... to insure those sales, Miss McCoy, I can promise you that. Actually, I think you'd thoroughly enjoy spending time with me.\"\n\nHe stepped closer to her, and if his blatant lechery hadn't been enough to start her heart pounding with anger and fear already, that would have done it.\n\nOnce again the wild thought that this was like something out of a melodrama crossed her mind as she said coldly, \"I think you've mistaken the sort of woman I am, Mr. Kane.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I doubt it. What can I do to get you to call me Gideon?\"\n\n\"Nothing. The only thing I want you to do for me is to leave this dressing room.\"\n\n\"Not until I get what I came here for. At least part of it, anyway.\" He tossed the hat onto the dressing table and reached for her. \"A kiss, at the very least\u2014\"\n\nSavannah had dealt with persistent, unwanted suitors before. She supposed every woman in the theater had at one time or another. Somehow, though, she sensed that Gideon Kane was more dangerous than most.\n\nShe didn't hesitate. She still wore Juliet's slippers, but that didn't stop her from kicking him in the groin.\n\nThe blow seemed to take him completely by surprise. As her heel sunk into his flesh, he grunted in pain and bent forward. His hand shot out, grabbed the dressing gown, and ripped it open. Some of the costume came with it, exposing even more of Savannah's skin. She jerked back and pulled free from him, and while he was off-balance she gave him a hard shove that sent him falling back toward the door. He landed against it with a heavy thud.\n\nClose by in the backstage corridor, Cyrus called worriedly, \"Savannah, are you all right?\"\n\nKane held one hand to his painful nether region while the other pressed against the wall to hold himself up. He glared at her and grated, \"You little bi....\"\n\n\"Cyrus!\" Savannah called.\n\nHe flung the door open and stood in the doorway with several members of the troupe crowding up behind him, including a couple burly stagehands. \"Are you all right, lass?\" Still wearing Romeo's costume, he put his hand on the hilt of the prop sword that hung sheathed at his waist.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" Savannah said as she pulled her garments closed again, calling on her skills as an actress to sound a lot more calm than she really felt. \"Mr. Kane was just leaving.\"\n\nKane said, \"You'll\u2014\"\n\n\"Regret this?\" Savannah interrupted him. She shook her head. \"I don't think so.\"\n\n\"Good night, Mr. Kane,\" Cyrus said. \"The time for backstage visits is over.\"\n\nKane glared murderously at both of them, then straightened with a visible effort and stepped unsteadily toward the door. Cyrus moved aside to let him out.\n\n\"Oh, wait!\" Savannah picked up Kane's hat from the dressing table, and when he turned back toward her, she tossed it to him. \"You wouldn't want to forget your hat.\"\n\nHe caught it awkwardly, and his glare grew even darker. He put the hat on and moved slowly past the members of the troupe in the hallway, all of whom frowned menacingly at him.\n\nDollie looked like she would have cheerfully taken a knife to him and carved him up like a turkey.\n\nWhen Kane was gone, Savannah said, \"I'm sorry about the tickets he promised to buy, Cyrus. I know the troupe could use the money.\"\n\nBefore Cyrus could reply, Dollie said briskly, \"Nonsense. We don't need the money of scoundrels like that. Did he hurt you, dear?\"\n\n\"He never laid a finger on me,\" Savannah replied honestly. \"Well, except when he kissed the back of my hand.\"\n\n\"He what?\" Cyrus exclaimed. \"What does he think this is, some French farce?\"\n\n\"Never mind about that.\" Dollie took her husband's arm. \"Come on, everyone. Let's let Savannah get dressed. We'll see you back at the hotel, dear.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Savannah said with a nod.\n\nThe others left, and she closed the door and quickly got dressed in her regular clothes. As she did, she worried about what Gideon Kane might do. He hadn't struck her as the sort of man to just forget about what had happened tonight.\n\nEven though she had no proof that he was as rich and powerful as he'd said, she didn't doubt it for a second. It took real wealth for a man to display the sort of cruel, careless arrogance that he had. As usual, when the will of someone like that was thwarted, he had started to bluster and threaten.\n\nIt was possible that Kane might go to the owner of the theater and pressure the man to cancel the rest of the troupe's engagement and refuse to pay them. She had seen men employ tactics like that before when they held a grudge.\n\nActually, it was the sort of thing her father might have done if someone angered him, although William Thorpe would never make improper advances toward a young woman.\n\nSavannah stepped out of the dressing room and looked for the others. She didn't see anyone backstage, so she supposed they were waiting for her out front.\n\nBut Dollie had said they would see her back at the hotel, Savannah recalled. They could have gone on, figuring that she would catch up with them. The hotel was less than two blocks away, after all.\n\nEven so, she felt nervous as she walked through the darkened theater. Her footsteps echoed from the cavernous ceiling. Lamps still burned here and there, casting enough light for her to see her way without any trouble.\n\nAn old man was sweeping up. He nodded to her as she passed. \"Good night, miss.\"\n\n\"Good night,\" Savannah told him. For a second she thought about asking him if he would walk her back to the hotel, but then she discarded that idea. That wasn't his job, and she didn't want to inconvenience him.\n\nShe went out through the theater lobby, past the box office, and stepped onto the sidewalk. The street was fairly dark, but again, she could see well enough to get where she was going. From where she stood, the hotel was even visible a short distance up the street, a warm yellow glow coming from its lobby windows.\n\nThere was also enough light for her to see the carriage that suddenly pulled up beside her and stopped on the cobblestone street. Two men, large and threatening in the gloom, stepped out of it, and one of them rumbled, \"You're comin' with us, Miss McCoy.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Bodie couldn't get Savannah McCoy out of his mind. From the theater he and Jake had gone to the Bella Royale for a drink and to see if any of the other boys were there. The saloon had become the gang's unofficial headquarters while they were in Kansas City waiting for Eldon Swint to divide the loot.\n\nBodie nursed a beer at a table with Jake and a couple other outlaws, Clete Mahaffey and Dave Pearsoll. They were playing a desultory game of poker, but Bodie couldn't concentrate on his cards. His thoughts kept straying to Savannah.\n\nJake grinned as he raked in another pot after winning a hand from Bodie. \"You know why our pard here keeps losin', boys?\" Without waiting for an answer he went on. \"It's because he's distracted. He's too busy moonin' over a gal to think about playin' poker.\"\n\n\"What gal's that?\" Mahaffey asked. \"That redheaded soiled dove called Dora who works here, maybe? She knows some tricks that'd sure keep a man's mind occupied... among other things.\" He guffawed with laughter.\n\nPearsoll joined in, and Bodie wished Jake would just shut up about the subject.\n\nBut Jake wasn't going to do that. \"Naw, it's an actress we saw at the theater tonight. We took in the show, and it was a good one. But Bodie here didn't have eyes for nobody but this brown-haired Southern belle named Savannah.\"\n\nThe other two men hooted even more.\n\nGlaring across the table at his friend, Bodie scraped his chair back. \"I don't reckon I feel like playing anymore. Deal me out.\"\n\n\"You're gonna quit just because I was hoo-rawin' you a little?\" Jake asked. \"That ain't like you, Bodie.\"\n\n\"I'm just tired, that's all,\" Bodie said with a shake of his head. \"Think I'll head for the hotel and turn in.\"\n\nJake shrugged. \"Suit yourself.\" He seemed a little insulted.\n\nBut Bodie didn't really care. He didn't appreciate being made sport of. As he turned to walk away from the table, he heard Jake say to Mahaffey and Pearsoll, \"There's somethin' I've been wantin' to talk to you boys about.\"\n\nBodie didn't hear any more. The hubbub in the saloon swallowed up the rest of Jake's words. Whatever the conversation was, Bodie didn't know or care anything about it.\n\nHe drew in a deep breath of night air as he stepped out of the saloon. Kansas City wasn't the most fragrant place in the world; the vast stockyards on the edge of town took care of that. The pungent smells that came from there drifted over the whole town.\n\nBut even so, the air outside seemed cleaner to Bodie than that inside the Bella Royale. After pausing on the sidewalk for a moment, he turned toward the hotel.\n\nWhen he reached the next corner, his steps carried him in a different direction. He realized he was heading toward Channing's Variety Theater.\n\nNo point in going there, he told himself. The show had been over for a while. All the performers, including Savannah, would have left already and gone back to wherever they were staying or to get something to eat. All he could do was stand in front of the darkened theater and gaze at it, remembering what he had seen inside earlier.\n\nIt would have to be enough, he decided, and walked a little faster. It wasn't far to the theater.\n\nAs he approached, he saw the carriage that had pulled up in front of it. Several shadowy forms were moving around on the sidewalk between the street and the theater. Something about the situation made the hackles rise on the back of Bodie's neck.\n\nA second later, a woman's voice rang out clearly. \"Gideon Kane sent you, didn't he?\"\n\n\"Never you mind about who sent us, gal,\" a rough male voice answered. \"You just come on with us, and there won't have to be no trouble.\"\n\n\"Get away from me. I'll scream!\"\n\n\"Look out. She's gonna run! Grab her!\"\n\nBodie was already moving. He'd recognized Savannah's voice when the woman first spoke.\n\nShe lunged away from the two men, but they were too fast for her and had her hemmed in against the building.\n\nBodie left his feet in a diving tackle. His shoulder rammed into the back of the nearest man. The impact drove the man toward his companion. They crashed together, and their feet got tangled up. All three men fell to the sidewalk.\n\nBodie scrambled to his feet first. Savannah stood a few feet away, gaping at him in surprise. His hat had come off when he tackled the first man, so he snatched it off the sidewalk and grabbed Savannah's arm with his other hand. \"Come on, Miss McCoy! I'll get you out of here!\"\n\nHe didn't know who the two bruisers were, except that Savannah thought they worked for Gideon Kane, whoever that was. It didn't matter. They had threatened her, and he had to get her away from them.\n\nBut as they turned to run, one of the men regained his feet and shot out a hand to snag Bodie's shirt collar. Bodie felt himself being jerked backward, away from Savannah. He was whirled around, and a punch exploded against his jaw, knocking him back against the carriage.\n\nThe big man bored in, obviously intent on keeping Bodie pinned against the carriage with his bulk while he hammered the young outlaw with his fists. Bodie sensed as much as he saw another powerful blow rocketing at his face and dropped desperately out of its path.\n\nThe punch went over his head and smashed into the side of the carriage. The man howled in pain and danced back, shaking his injured hand.\n\nBodie looked around for Savannah but couldn't locate her. The second man blocked his view, looming up to throw a roundhouse punch that would take Bodie's head off if it landed.\n\nOnce again, Bodie avoided the blow at the last second, weaving aside so that the man's fist barely scraped the side of his head. He buried the toe of his boot in the man's belly, doubling him over. Moving fast, he clapped his hat back on his head, clubbed his fists together, and brought them down on the back of the man's neck, driving him to the ground.\n\nBodie took a step away from the carriage but didn't even have time to think about finding Savannah and hustling her to safety. Something crashed down on his back from above, knocking him off his feet.\n\nThe small part of his brain that was still working realized the carriage must have a driver, and that man had leaped from the high seat onto him. The next instant, the man's weight came down hard enough on Bodie to force all the air from his lungs. The world spun crazily and the night turned red in front of his eyes for a second, and he knew he was close to passing out.\n\nIf he lost consciousness, the three men might stomp him to death. Even worse, they might succeed in kidnapping Savannah.\n\nWith that thought fueling his efforts, he forced himself to ram an elbow up and back, into the midsection of the man who had tackled him. At the same time, he heaved up with his other arm and his legs.\n\nBodie wasn't big, but he had the lean, muscular build of a panther and had spent years taking care of himself and learning how to survive. He was stronger than he looked, and he was able to throw his opponent off to the side.\n\nHe surged to his feet, but the other two men had recovered enough to attack him again. He was trapped between them as their fists crashed into him. He couldn't block all the blows, couldn't get set to throw some punches of his own.\n\nOne man screamed suddenly and reeled backward, pawing frantically at the side of his neck, startling his companion enough to give Bodie an opening. He jabbed a stinging left into the man's face and followed it with a right cross that landed solidly on the hombre's jaw, sending him spinning to the sidewalk.\n\nThe one who had started yelling staggered into a slanting ray of light coming from a window in a nearby building, and for the first time, Bodie got a good look at his face. A second later, he realized where he had seen the man before.\n\nEarlier, the big bruiser had been with the rich, blond gent who had bumped into Bodie outside the theater. That meant the second man was probably the other bodyguard.\n\nBased on what Savannah had said, the rich, arrogant son of a gun would be Gideon Kane, Bodie supposed. Not that it mattered. Anybody who wanted to hurt Savannah McCoy, for whatever reason, was his enemy.\n\nThe yelling man finally plucked whatever was bothering him from his neck and shouted, \"Shoot him! Shoot that cowboy!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "For a second, Bodie didn't know who the man was talking to, then from the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of the driver fumbling under his coat, trying to pull a gun.\n\nNobody would ever mistake Bodie Cantrell for a real gunfighter like Wild Bill Hickok, but he could get his Colt out of its holster fairly fast, and he usually hit what he aimed at. He drew the revolver and smoothly eared back the hammer as the barrel came up. He had beaten the carriage driver cleanly to the draw, so he expected the man to give up.\n\nBut the driver fumbled out a pistol and thrust it toward Bodie.\n\nThat took the decision out of Bodie's hands. He squeezed off a shot before the man could pull the trigger. The Colt roared and bucked against his palm.\n\nThe bullet smashed into the man's shoulder and slewed him around. He yelled as the pistol flew from his fingers.\n\nSavannah grabbed Bodie's arm and tugged on it. \"Come on!\" she urged. \"Maybe they won't chase us as long as you've got that gun!\"\n\nBodie didn't figure they could count on that. He fired again, aiming low so that the bullet hit the sidewalk near the two men who were still on their feet. The one going after the driver's pistol forgot about it for the moment as they both leaped for cover.\n\nBodie wheeled around and started to run. He took Savannah's arm and pulled her along, making sure he didn't outdistance her with his long-legged strides.\n\nHe was a little surprised she was still there. He had hoped she would take off running as soon as she got the chance. But she had waited for him and they needed to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the three men.\n\nBodie didn't know where he was going. He wasn't familiar with any of Kansas City except the area around the hotel, the Bella Royale Saloon, and the theater. But as an open stretch of ground loomed up to his right, he saw the wagons parked there and steered Savannah in that direction.\n\n\"We'll hide among those wagons,\" he told her in a whisper. \"They won't be able to find us.\"\n\nShe didn't say anything, but she went with him willingly. Even though he knew perfectly well who she was, she wouldn't have any idea as to his identity. All she knew was that he was trying to help her, and he supposed that was enough for the time being.\n\nThey ducked around the closest of the big, canvas-covered vehicles. The wagons were arranged in a rough circle, the same formation the immigrants would use when they were traveling out on the prairie. The difference was that away from town, the livestock would be kept inside the circled wagons, not in a corral adjacent to the lot where the wagons were parked.\n\nThe big campfire in the center of the circle had burned down to mostly embers and a few faintly flickering flames that didn't cast much light. The wagons were dark and quiet. Everybody in the camp seemed to be asleep.\n\nBodie led Savannah farther away from the street. When he thought they were deep enough in the camp, he dropped to a knee beside one of the big wheels and urged Savannah to kneel beside him. He didn't like the idea of her getting her dress dirty, but they needed to hide in the shadows in case the three men came looking for them.\n\nHe leaned closer to her, and suddenly felt a little lightheaded from the fight or from the clean, tantalizing scent of her thick brown hair. He didn't know which.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked in a whisper. \"Did those varmints hurt you?\"\n\n\"No, I'm fine,\" she replied, keeping her voice as quiet as his. \"Just scared.\"\n\n\"You don't have to be scared, Miss McCoy. I won't let them get you.\"\n\n\"You know who I am?\" She sounded a little surprised.\n\n\"Why, sure I do. I was in the audience at the theater tonight. Right in the center on the fourth row.\"\n\nTheir shoulders were touching as they knelt beside the wagon. He felt her tiny start of surprise and wondered what it was about.\n\nShe whispered, \"I saw you while I was singing my first number.\"\n\n\"It was a mighty pretty song. My name's Bodie, by the way. Bodie Cantrell.\"\n\n\"I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Cantrell. Under the circumstances, very pleased indeed.\"\n\nThey crouched there for a moment in silence, catching their breath. Then Bodie asked, \"Why were those fellas trying to grab you?\"\n\n\"To take me back to their employer's mansion, I expect. They work for a man named Gideon Kane.\"\n\n\"Fancy dressed fella with blond hair and a mustache?\" Once again he felt Savannah react slightly.\n\nWith a note of worry in her voice, she said, \"That's him, all right. He's not a friend of yours, is he?\"\n\n\"Not hardly. Me and a pard of mine had a run-in with him earlier this evening. I didn't like him then, and now that I know he likes to have girls kidnapped, I don't cotton to him that much more.\"\n\n\"I think he's probably a bad man to have for an enemy.\"\n\n\"I've heard it said you can judge a man by his enemies. In this fella's case, I reckon it says some pretty good things about us.\"\n\nShe was quiet for a second, then she laughed softly. Bodie had seldom heard a nicer sound.\n\n\"I think you're right about that, Mr. Cantrell.\"\n\nThey were quiet again, and Bodie listened intently, searching the night for any indication that Kane's men were coming after them. When he didn't hear anything that seemed unusual, he asked, \"Do you know how come that fella started screaming and grabbing at his neck?\"\n\n\"I certainly do. I stuck a hat pin in the side of his neck as hard as I could.\"\n\nIt was all Bodie could do not to burst out laughing. He held it in check and chuckled softly. \"I didn't notice you wearing a hat.\"\n\n\"I wasn't. But I always carry a hatpin in my bag, anyway, just in case. Tonight it came in handy.\"\n\n\"It sure did,\" Bodie agreed. \"That was pretty brave of you, jumping in like that. They had me in a pretty bad spot. I might not have been able to get away from them if you hadn't given me a hand.\"\n\n\"You were risking your life to help me. It was the least I could do.\"\n\nBodie was about to tell her that he would have given his life to save her, but he didn't get a chance to say anything else. At that moment, an arm looped around his neck from behind, closed on his throat like an iron bar, and jerked him to his feet. He felt the cold, hard ring of a gun muzzle pressed to the side of his head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "One thing about growing older, Jamie had discovered, was that he didn't seem to need as much sleep as he once had. He found himself awake at night fairly often, and he wasn't the sort to just lie there in his bunk or bedroll and stare at the darkness. He felt better getting up and moving around. He liked to stay busy, always had.\n\nBesides, even though the wagon train was camped in a city and surrounded by civilization, it didn't mean there were no dangers lurking in the darkness. In some ways, the situation was more precarious than if the immigrants had been out on the prairie. The threats were just different, that's all.\n\nFor those reasons, Jamie was up and taking a pasear around the camp when he spotted a couple figures skulking beside one of the wagons.\n\nThey might be two of the immigrants, he told himself. Maybe a boy and a girl who weren't supposed to be courting had slipped out of their families' wagons for a midnight rendezvous. In that case, it wouldn't be any of his business. Young love could run its course\u2014or not\u2014without any meddling from him.\n\nHowever, in one way of looking at it, anything that happened involving the wagon train was the wagon master's business, he thought. Anyway, something about those two struck Jamie as suspicious, and he had long since learned to trust what his gut was telling him.\n\nWith the same stealth that had allowed him to sneak up unnoticed on countless enemies over the past five decades, he approached the two shadowy forms. One of his Colts came smoothly out of its holster with only the faintest brushing of steel against leather.\n\nThe two people were whispering to each other and seemed to have no idea he was right behind them. Jamie's eyes, still keen despite his years, made out the fact that one of the figures was male and the other female, but they didn't sound like a couple of love struck kids.\n\nActually, they were talking like they were in some sort of trouble, maybe with the law. Regardless, they were strangers and didn't belong there. Since Jamie had taken the job of getting the pilgrims safely to Montana Territory, his first responsibility was to protect the wagon train.\n\nBecause the man was armed, Jamie decided the best thing to do was make sure he couldn't yank that gun out and start blazing away. With so many folks around, flying lead could tear through the canvas covers on the wagons and would be a real danger.\n\nWhen Jamie made his move, it was swift and sure, grabbing the man from behind, hauling him to his feet, and pressing the Colt to his head. \"Take it easy, mister,\" he rasped into the man's ear. \"It wouldn't take much to make this gun go off and splatter your brains all over that canvas.\"\n\nThe woman sprang to her feet, and for a second Jamie thought she was going to bolt.\n\nBut she didn't. She said urgently, \"Please don't kill him! He doesn't really have anything to do with this. Just let him go and... and I'll go with you to Mr. Kane's house.\"\n\nThe fella Jamie had hold of made a squawking sound, like he was trying to object to what the woman had just said, but he couldn't get any words past Jamie's iron grip on his throat.\n\n\"Miss, I don't have any idea what you're talking about,\" Jamie told her. \"I don't know anybody named Kane. I just want to know why you're sneaking around these wagons. You plan on robbing some of them?\"\n\n\"No!\" the woman exclaimed. \"We're not thieves, I swear. We're just trying to hide from some men who... who wanted to kidnap me.\"\n\nThe story came pouring out of her in disjointed fashion, some wild yarn about her being an actress and a rich fellow who had taken a fancy to her and was used to getting what he wanted, even if that meant taking it by force.\n\nJamie could believe the part about the woman being an actress, because the story she told sounded like something out of a play penned by some crazy scribbler. When the flow of words from her finally ran down, he asked, \"So who's this hombre I've got hold of?\"\n\n\"His name is Bodie Cantrell. He risked his life to help me get away from those terrible men. That's all I really know about him.\"\n\nDespite being a little lurid, the woman's story had the ring of truth about it. Jamie had a hunch she wasn't lying to him, and since he was in the habit of following his hunches, he let go of Bodie.\n\nThere was nothing wrong with being careful. Now that he had a hand free, Jamie reached down and plucked the man's revolver from its holster before Bodie had a chance to stop him. The man was too busy at the moment dragging air back into his lungs after being choked for a couple minutes.\n\nJamie had been careful not to squeeze hard enough to kill him or even make him pass out, so he recovered quickly. Still a little breathless, he asked, \"Who... who are you?\"\n\n\"Jamie Ian MacCallister. Wagon master for this bunch that's headed to Montana.\"\n\n\"You didn't have to try to kill me,\" Bodie complained.\n\nJamie chuckled coldly. \"Mister, if I wanted you dead, you wouldn't be standing there right now. You'd already be shaking hands with St. Peter.\"\n\nHe was about to say something else when one of the numerous dogs that belonged with the wagon train started to bark. None of the curs had raised a ruckus when Cantrell and the woman, whatever her name was, had sneaked into the camp a few minutes earlier, but several of them began to carry on.\n\nA shaft of light played around the camp from the direction of the street. Somebody had a bull's-eye lantern, Jamie realized. The light darted toward them like a searching finger in the night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "\"Get under the wagon,\" Jamie told the two strangers in a low, urgent voice.\n\n\"What?\" Bodie said.\n\n\"Under the wagon,\" Jamie repeated. \"That's probably the varmints who were after the gal.\"\n\nThey didn't need any more urging. Bodie took hold of Savannah's arm and helped her crawl underneath the wagon. Jamie moved so that his buckskin-clad legs would help shield them and planted his feet solidly on the ground as several men approached. One of them carried the lantern.\n\nThe Colt .44 was still in Jamie's hand. He raised the weapon, pointed it at the intruders, and called softly, \"Lower that light, by God, or I'll shoot it out!\"\n\nThe light played over him, but only for a second before it dipped toward the ground. It was long enough for the men to have seen that he had the drop on them.\n\n\"Take it easy, mister,\" one of them said. \"We're not lookin' for any trouble.\"\n\n\"You may have found it anyway,\" Jamie snapped. \"I'm the boss of this wagon camp. Who are you, and what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"We're looking for a woman,\" another man said. \"She's a thief. She stole something from our boss, and we're just tryin' to get it back.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" the first man added. \"She's got this cowboy with her. I think he's an outlaw. He must be in on it with her.\"\n\nOnce again Jamie's instincts passed judgment on what he was hearing... and he didn't like it. These men were lying\u2014which meant Cantrell and the woman were probably telling the truth.\n\n\"Well, there's nobody like that around here,\" Jamie told the three men. \"I've been standing guard all night, and I'd know.\"\n\nThe man with the lantern came closer, but he kept the light pointed toward the ground.\n\n\"No offense, old-timer, but we're not going to just take your word for it. We'll have a look around\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\" Jamie's voice was hard, flat, and dangerous as he interrupted.\n\n\"Look, you may have a gun, but there are three of us\u2014\"\n\n\"Which means I'll have two bullets left over in this old Colt of mine when I get through with you, since I carry the hammer on an empty chamber.\" There was no mistaking the threat in Jamie's voice. He wasn't bluffing. The men were strangers, and they had bullied their way into the wagon camp uninvited. As far as he was concerned, he would be well within his rights to ventilate all three of them.\n\nThe moment stretched out tensely until one of the men muttered, \"That old coot sounds crazy enough to do it. I've already been shot at once tonight, and I ain't in the mood to have it happen again.\"\n\nThe man with the lantern argued. \"The boss won't like it if we come back without\u2014\"\n\n\"He's smart. He can figure out what to do about it. Come on,\" interrupted the other man who had spoken.\n\nTwo men started backing away, and the one with the lantern wasn't going to stay there and take on Jamie by himself. He blustered, \"You don't know how much trouble you're getting yourself into, mister,\" then turned and followed his companions out of the camp.\n\nAfter a few moments, Jamie said quietly to the couple under the wagon, \"You two stay right where you are until I get back.\"\n\nHe walked to the edge of the camp where he could look along the street and make sure the three intruders were gone. He saw them walking quickly away from the camp, already more than a block away. He supposed they were on their way to report to the man who had ordered them to kidnap the young woman. If she had told him her name, he had missed it.\n\nHe pouched the iron and turned back to the wagon where he had left her and her rescuer. He knew it was possible they might have crawled out and lit a shuck without waiting for him, as he had told them to do. However, when he reached the right wagon and said, \"Come on out of there,\" they emerged from under the vehicle.\n\nBodie stood up first, then helped the woman to her feet. \"Are they gone?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I made sure of that. Of course, they might circle back and try to slip into the camp again, so why don't the two of you come with me?\"\n\n\"Where are you taking us?\" the woman asked nervously. If what she had told him earlier was true, Jamie didn't blame her for not being very trusting.\n\n\"I want to get the two of you out of sight while we hash this out. We'll go to my friend Moses's wagon. He won't mind us disturbing him. He's a preacher, sort of, so he ought to be used to folks waking him up and needing his help in the middle of the night.\" Jamie led them across the camp and stopped beside one of the wagons. It was a little hard to tell them apart in the dark, so he hoped he had the right one as he hissed Moses's name through the opening above the tailgate.\n\nA moment later, he heard a sleepy mutter from inside the wagon, then Moses stuck his head through the opening. \"Jamie? What's going on? It's awfully late.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know. I've got a couple people here who need a place to get out of sight for a little while. Reckon you can let them stay here?\"\n\n\"Well... sure, I guess so. Climb on in, folks. These are hardly luxury accommodations, though.\"\n\n\"We don't care about that,\" Bodie said.\n\nJamie lowered the tailgate, and Bodie helped the woman climb into the wagon. Moses gave her a hand, too.\n\nWhen the younger people were inside, Jamie perched a hip on the tailgate. \"All right, Cantrell, introduce the lady to Moses and me.\"\n\n\"We really just met tonight, too, Mr. MacCallister, but this is Miss Savannah McCoy. She's part of the troupe of entertainers that's performing at Channing's Variety Theater, down the street.\"\n\n\"I remember seeing the place,\" Jamie said with a nod. \"It's a pleasure to meet you, Miss McCoy.\"\n\n\"Indeed it is,\" Moses added. \"May I offer you something to drink?\"\n\n\"No, but thank you,\" Savannah said. \"I just want to get back to the hotel where my friends are staying.\"\n\n\"We'll see that you get there safely,\" Jamie promised. \"First, though, I want to hear more about those three hombres who were after you.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it's very simple. Their employer, like too many other people, believes that actresses are the same as prostitutes.\"\n\n\"My daughter's an actress,\" Jamie said curtly. \"I don't cotton to people who think like that.\"\n\nBodie shook his head. \"Neither do I. Once you're safe, Miss McCoy, I think I might have to look up this Gideon Kane and teach him a lesson.\"\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Savannah said quickly. \"You've already done enough for me tonight, Mr. Cantrell. More than enough. You risked your life by fighting those men. And you saved me from being dragged off by them and turned over to that... that...\"\n\n\"No-good polecat will do,\" Jamie finished for her. \"I reckon I can say that even though I never met Gideon Kane.\"\n\n\"You got that right, Mr. MacCallister,\" Bodie said. \"If anything, you're not being fair to the polecats of the world.\"\n\nJamie laughed. He felt an instinctive liking for this young man. If he had seen the same thing going on, a young woman being threatened, he would have jumped right into the middle of the fracas just like Cantrell had. \"What are you doing here in Kansas City? You wouldn't happen to be looking for a job, would you?\"\n\nJamie and Hector Gilworth had spent all day trying to find someone else who was willing to sign on with the wagon train as a scout, but they hadn't had any luck. Jamie was prepared to set out with just him, Hector, and Jess Neville to handle the scouting chores, but it would be better if they had at least one more good man.\n\nCantrell hesitated, then said in reply to Jamie's question, \"No, I reckon not. I'm not working at anything right now, but I've got some possibilities coming up soon.\"\n\n\"Well, if you change your mind between now and first light, let me know,\" Jamie told him. \"I'm looking for another scout to help me get these wagons to Montana.\"\n\nBrodie let out a low whistle of surprise. \"Montana's a long way off. You're setting out this late in the year?\"\n\n\"It's their idea,\" Jamie said. \"I've warned 'em about it. Seems like we're going, though, one way or the other.\"\n\n\"There's really no choice,\" Moses put in.\n\nJamie let that pass. There was at least a chance they would make it, and if anybody could get those immigrants where they were going, he knew it was him. That wasn't boastful on his part, just a realistic acknowledgment of his abilities.\n\nSavannah said, \"I hate to inconvenience you even more, Mr. Cantrell, but do you think you could accompany me back to my hotel?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Bodie answered without hesitation. \"I planned to all along.\"\n\n\"And I'm coming, too,\" Jamie said. \"With both of us along, I don't reckon anybody's liable to bother you. How about you, Moses?\"\n\n\"Well, I wouldn't be any good in a fight, but I'll come along,\" the young rabbi said. \"Strength in numbers, eh?\" He fingered the nightshirt he was wearing. \"Just let me put some pants on.\"\n\nBodie and Savannah climbed out of the wagon. Moses joined them a couple minutes later. Together, the four of them left the wagon camp and walked toward the hotel where the O'Hanlon troupe was staying.\n\nJamie kept his right hand on the butt of the Colt on that side, but he didn't need the gun. No one bothered them. When they reached the hotel, he was about to turn back when Savannah said, \"If you could just come into the lobby with me. Those men might be waiting.\"\n\nThat was true, Jamie thought. It would be a shame to get Savannah this close to safety and then have Gideon Kane's men grab her after all.\n\nThe lamps in the lobby were turned low, and no clerk was on duty at the desk. It was bright enough in the room for Jamie to get his first good look at Bodie and Savannah. The young woman was a beauty, all right, even with her dress disheveled and dirty from crawling around under a covered wagon. Bodie Cantrell was a medium-sized young man in range clothes, with black hair under his tipped-back hat.\n\nThe four of them had just entered the lobby when a man stood up from a chair next to a potted plant where he'd obviously been waiting. He started toward them, but clearly he was no threat. Middle-aged and portly, he sported a black eye, and there was dried blood around his mouth. \"Savannah!\" he exclaimed. \"Thank God! We didn't know what had happened to you or if you were all right.\"\n\nSavannah caught hold of his extended hands and gaped at him in surprise. \"Cyrus, what happened to you? You look like you've been in a fight!\"\n\n\"I have,\" Cyrus O'Hanlon said grimly. \"Gideon Kane and his men have been here, Savannah... and they were looking for you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "The news hit Savannah hard. She gasped as if she'd been punched in the stomach. Beside her, Bodie put a hand on her arm to steady her.\n\n\"Oh, Cyrus, I'm so sorry,\" she was able to say after a moment. \"Are you hurt badly? Was anyone else hurt?\"\n\nCyrus waved a hand. \"Don't worry about me, child. This isn't the first time I've been roughed up. I'll be fine. Harry Sennett has a broken arm, but no one else suffered anything except bumps and bruises.\"\n\nBodie asked, \"Why would they do something like that?\"\n\n\"Because they were looking for me,\" Savannah answered before Cyrus could say anything. \"Isn't that right?\"\n\n\"Aye,\" Cyrus answered with a shrug. The gesture made him wince. \"Kane demanded to know if you were here, and when I told him you weren't, he said that I was lying. One of his men hit me, and Harry jumped into the fight. He wasn't any match for them, though. The commotion drew the rest of the troupe. We tried to give a good account of ourselves, but\"\u2014he shrugged again\u2014\"we're performers, not brawlers.\"\n\n\"Wish I'd been here to lend you a hand,\" Jamie MacCallister growled.\n\nCyrus looked him up and down. \"My, you're big as a mountain, aren't you, friend? I wish you'd been here, too. Who's this, Savannah?\"\n\n\"This is Mr. MacCallister. He's the wagon master for that wagon train camped down the street. He helped us after Mr. Cantrell got me away from Kane's men to start with.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm not acquainted with young Mr. Cantrell, either... although you do look a bit familiar, sir.\"\n\n\"I was in the audience at the show tonight.\"\n\n\"Ah! That explains it.\" Cyrus still looked puzzled, though. \"You're a friend of Savannah's?\"\n\n\"He is now,\" she said. \"He risked his life fighting Kane's men when they tried to kidnap me. We got away and hid among Mr. MacCallister's wagons.\"\n\n\"I'm starting to get the players straight,\" Cyrus said with a nod. He turned to Moses Danzig. \"And you are...?\"\n\nMoses introduced himself, then added, \"I'm going to Montana Territory with Jamie and the rest of the wagon train.\"\n\nJamie asked, \"Did anybody send for the law while that ruckus with Kane's men was going on?\"\n\nCyrus nodded. \"One of our people did. But that just made things worse. When the police came in\u2014\" He had to stop and draw a deep breath. \"When the police came in, Kane and his men claimed that we had attacked them. He accused us of being criminals. He said we had pickpockets working the crowd and that we were no better than gypsies.\"\n\n\"Let me guess,\" Jamie said with a frown. \"The law believed them.\"\n\nCyrus spread his hands helplessly. \"Kane and his family are rich. Of course the authorities believed him. The officers threatened to run us out of town... but Kane said he didn't want to cause trouble for us and told them he didn't want to press charges. After the police left, though, he said he would see to it that we were all thrown in jail unless we turned Savannah over to him. Then he told us we had until morning to find her and take her to his house.\"\n\nSavannah felt sick and light-headed. If not for Bodie's hand on her arm, she might have collapsed. How could things have taken such a bad turn, so quickly? She hadn't done anything to cause it. She'd just been going about her job, following her calling, practicing her art. Then suddenly, without any warning, Gideon Kane had walked into her dressing room, and with him had come pure evil.\n\nThat was just the way things were in life, she told herself. Bad things happened for no apparent reason.\n\nBut understanding that and being able to accept it were two different things. It wasn't fair for Cyrus and the other members of the troupe to suffer just because Gideon Kane had decided he had to have her.\n\n\"Listen,\" she said, speaking quickly so she wouldn't back out on going through with the idea that had just occurred to her. \"I have to leave the troupe.\"\n\n\"What?\" Cyrus said with a confused frown. \"No! You don't need to do that. We'll figure some way out of this\u2014\"\n\n\"There isn't any other way out of it,\" she told him. \"Kane will use the law against you, and you know he'll get away with it, too. At the very least, he'll have you run out of town. At worst, you'll all be locked up. I can't stand to have that on my conscience, Cyrus. I just can't.\"\n\n\"We'll fight him,\" Cyrus insisted. \"I'll hire a lawyer and fight him in court.\"\n\nSavannah shook her head. \"No lawyer worth anything will want to go up against the Kane family. There's just no other answer, Cyrus, and you know it.\"\n\nHe looked miserable as he tried to come up with something else to say and couldn't. Finally he managed to ask, \"But where will you go?\"\n\nSavannah turned to look at Jamie MacCallister. \"To Montana Territory. You can find a place for me in your wagon train, can't you, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"It's not really my wagon train,\" Jamie replied. \"I don't have any say over who stays and who goes, as long as they follow my orders once we're on the trail.\"\n\n\"I can follow orders. I'm good at taking direction, aren't I, Cyrus?\"\n\n\"You're a quick study,\" Cyrus admitted. \"You won't be playing a part, though, Savannah. You'd really be an immigrant.\"\n\nWith a faint smile, she said, \"Isn't all life just playing a part, at least to a certain extent? We know what we're supposed to do because we've read it in books and seen it onstage. And then as we live it, it becomes real.\"\n\n\"I suppose you could look at it like that,\" Cyrus said grudgingly. \"But I don't want to lose you. Neither will the others.\"\n\n\"It's for their own good. The troupe has to come first.\" Still smiling, she added, \"The show must go on.\"\n\nCyrus winced again. \"To have such a hoary old chestnut used against me.\" He sighed. \"Very well. You'll probably be safer with a behemoth such as Mr. MacCallister rather than with a bunch of actors. No offense intended by that behemoth comment, sir.\"\n\n\"None taken,\" Jamie said with a grin. \"I know I'm a big galoot.\" He grew more serious. \"I'm not sure about you being any safer, though, Miss McCoy. We're talking about going all the way to Montana, not on some picnic lunch. Hundreds of miles of riding in a wagon that's not very comfortable, miserable weather, maybe hostile Indians and outlaws. Lots of bad things can happen.\"\n\n\"Something bad will happen if I stay here,\" Savannah pointed out. \"Gideon Kane has seen to that. Besides, maybe I wouldn't have to go all the way to Montana. The troupe's next stop is Des Moines, isn't that right, Cyrus?\"\n\n\"Yes, we'll be there in a couple weeks.\"\n\n\"I could travel with the wagon train for a week or so, long enough for Kane to give up on finding me, then leave and join the troupe again in Des Moines.\"\n\n\"You can't go gallivanting across the prairie by yourself.\" Bodie looked at Jamie. \"You still interested in hiring another scout, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\nJamie regarded him with narrowed eyes. \"A temporary scout? Just for a week? I don't know about that. But I don't reckon I can stop you from coming along, if that's what you want. You'll have to talk to Captain Hendricks about it, though. He's in charge of the bunch.\"\n\nSavannah frowned. \"Mr. Cantrell, I can't ask you to\u2014\"\n\n\"You're not asking me to do anything,\" Bodie interrupted. \"I'm volunteering.\" He paused. \"I'll have to talk to some friends of mine, though, and let them know that I'm leaving.\"\n\n\"It's very thoughtful of you to want to help me. I really appreciate it.\"\n\n\"Hey, I don't like that fella Kane, either,\" Bodie said. \"Anything I can do to put a burr under his saddle, I'm all for it.\"\n\nMoses spoke up. \"I don't want to throw cold water on these plans, but how are you going to convince Kane that you're gone, Miss McCoy? He's liable to think that the troupe is just hiding you.\"\n\nSavannah frowned again. \"I hadn't thought about that. I know. I'll write him a letter telling him that I'm leaving Kansas City and leaving the troupe. You can give it to him, Cyrus.\"\n\n\"Even if you do that, there's no guarantee that he'll believe it.\"\n\n\"He can search the hotel and the theater. He can come to all the performances. I really will be gone, so when he can't find me he'll have no choice but to believe it.\"\n\nCyrus rubbed his chin and frowned in thought. After a moment he said, \"Hmm. It might work....\"\n\n\"It's the only chance we have to keep him from causing more trouble for the troupe.\"\n\n\"You won't tell him where you're going, just that you're leaving town?\"\n\nSavannah glanced at Jamie and Bodie. \"That's right. I don't want to cause trouble for those immigrants, either.\"\n\n\"I'm not worried too much about some rich young wastrel like that, miss,\" Jamie told her. \"I reckon I've dealt with a lot worse in my time.\"\n\n\"All right, it's settled then. I'm starting to Montana with the wagon train. That is, if I can find someone to let me travel with them...\"\n\nMoses said, \"That shouldn't be a problem. There are plenty of families who ought to be willing to make room for you. These are good people, Miss McCoy.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they are.\" She put a hand on Cyrus's arm. \"And if I don't show up in Des Moines, you'll know not to wait for me. Just go on with the tour.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" he asked. \"Why wouldn't you join us?\"\n\n\"Well, something might happen. As Mr. MacCallister pointed out, a trip like this could be dangerous.\" Savannah smiled. \"Or you never know... once I'm on the way, I might decide that I want to be a pioneer woman!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\"We'd better go out the back way,\" Bodie suggested before they left the hotel. Savannah had gone upstairs and quickly packed her carpetbag. Luckily, the troupe's nomadic existence had taught her the art of traveling light. \"Kane could've posted somebody outside to keep an eye on the place.\"\n\nJamie said, \"I thought of the same thing. That's why I had a good look around when we came up. I didn't see anybody skulking around, but it's possible I missed something. We'll go out the back just to be sure.\"\n\nBodie had a hunch it would be hard to out-think Jamie MacCallister, and it was mighty unlikely that he would miss anything, too. He had heard of the big frontiersman. Anybody who had been around as long as Jamie had, leading that sort of adventurous life, was bound to be pretty cunning, not to mention experienced in all kinds of trouble.\n\nSavannah had found pen and ink and paper behind the registration desk and quickly written a note for Gideon Kane, telling him that she was quitting the troupe and leaving Kansas City, to boot. She didn't tell him where she was going, but she warned him not to try to find her. She read the message out loud to the others, then sealed it and gave it to Cyrus O'Hanlon to have it delivered to Kane.\n\nCyrus insisted on calling the rest of the troupe down to the lobby so they could say good-bye to Savannah. It was an emotional farewell, full of hugs and tears, and it bothered Bodie that she had to abandon the life she enjoyed just because of some worthless skunk like Gideon Kane.\n\nFinally Savannah was able to tear herself away from her friends and colleagues. She and Bodie, along with Jamie and Moses, went to the hotel's back door.\n\nJamie said, \"Better let me go out first and have a look around, just to make sure Kane's men haven't set up an ambush for us.\"\n\n\"I'll come with you,\" Bodie said.\n\n\"No, you stay here. In case anything happens to me, you'll have to look out for Miss McCoy.\"\n\n\"What about me?\" Moses asked.\n\n\"Have you got a gun?\"\n\n\"Well... no.\"\n\n\"Ever fired a gun?\"\n\n\"Actually, I haven't.\"\n\n\"Then you'd best stay here with Cantrell and Miss McCoy,\" Jamie said. \"Stick to doing whatever it is rabbis do and let me burn any powder that needs burning.\"\n\n\"When you put it like that, I see your point,\" Moses said.\n\nJamie slipped out the door, moving with unusual grace for such a big man, and returned after a few tense minutes to report that the coast seemed to be clear. \"Kane's probably convinced that he spooked your friends so bad they won't have any choice but to turn you over to him, Miss McCoy.\"\n\n\"Since we're all going to be traveling together, why don't you call me Savannah?\" she suggested. \"And the three of you will be Bodie and Moses and... Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\nThat brought a chuckle from Jamie.\n\nSavannah smiled. \"It's just that you're old enough to be my, well, my father.\"\n\n\"I'm older than that, girl,\" Jamie said. \"I could be your grandpa. But I've never cared much what folks call me, as long as they don't call me late for supper.\"\n\nBodie grinned. \"I figured you were going to say that.\"\n\nSavannah changed the subject. \"Kane is underestimating just how tough Cyrus and the others are. They'd never help him.\"\n\n\"They wouldn't as long as he didn't box 'em in where they didn't have any choice. Maybe that letter of yours will keep that from happening.\"\n\nThey went into the alley behind the hotel. It was pitch black, but Jamie led them through it as if it were bright as day. A short time later, they were back at the wagon train camp, which was still dark and peaceful.\n\nJamie went to one of the wagons, knocked softly on the tailgate, and called, \"Cap'n Hendricks.\"\n\nA man with tousled hair stuck his head out of the wagon. \"Who's there?\" He thrust the twin barrels of a shotgun over the tailgate.\n\nJamie grasped the barrels and shoved them skyward. \"Take it easy with that greener,\" he snapped. \"It's MacCallister and Moses Danzig. We've got a couple more pilgrims for your expedition, and one of 'em's going to be my third scout, at least for the time being.\"\n\nWearing a long nightshirt much like the one Moses had been sporting earlier, Captain Hendricks climbed out of his wagon and listened as Jamie introduced Bodie and Savannah and explained the situation.\n\nWhen Jamie was finished with the story, Hendricks said, \"Normally when a person joins a wagon train, they have to contribute something\u2014\"\n\n\"I can pay,\" Savannah broke in. \"I have a little money saved up.\"\n\nHendricks smiled and shook his head. \"I was about to say that under the circumstances, I think we can forget about that, at least for now. Since it's possible you may not be with us for long, there's even less reason to worry about it.\" The wagon train captain scratched his angular jaw. \"Now, there's the matter of finding you a place....\"\n\n\"What about with the Binghams?\" Moses suggested. \"There's just the two of them, so they'd probably have room in their wagon.\"\n\n\"Yes, that might work.\" Hendricks turned to Savannah. \"They're a couple getting on in age, really probably too old to have pulled up stakes and started west like they did, but their children are all grown and Edward Bingham wanted to see some new country. Can't say as I blame him. I feel sort of the same way myself.\"\n\n\"Once a man's feet get restless, there's not much he can do about it except move on,\" Jamie said. \"I know that feeling mighty well.\"\n\nSo did Bodie. He had been pretty fiddle-footed himself since his parents' deaths had left him alone, but it was from necessity, not choice. As filled with trouble as his life had been, he'd had to stay on the move.\n\nThat thought reminded him that he still had something to do before morning, something pretty important. He had to see about getting his share of the train robbery loot from Eldon Swint.\n\nNow that they had obtained Captain Hendricks's approval for joining the wagon train, Moses took Savannah to the wagon belonging to the elderly couple. Before they left, Bodie said to her, \"I'll see you later.\"\n\n\"I really hate to disrupt whatever plans you had,\" she said.\n\n\"Trust me, I didn't have any real plans, and you're not disrupting a thing.\"\n\nThat was true. For her sake, he hated what Savannah was having to go through, but it was a good excuse to leave the gang. He had never been that comfortable riding with Swint and the others, and after the cold-blooded murder of that station agent, Bodie wanted more than ever to get away from them.\n\nAs Savannah and Moses walked off, Bodie hung back with Jamie. \"There's something I have to do before I can leave in the morning.\"\n\n\"Yeah, you said something about that before. You need a hand with whatever it is?\"\n\nThat was just the sort of man Jamie MacCallister was, thought Bodie. Jamie had to at least suspect that Bodie's business might involve some degree of danger, but he'd volunteered to come along anyway, without the slightest hesitation. By that, Bodie could tell that Jamie already considered him a friend, and it was a good feeling.\n\nHe shook his head. \"No, I can handle it. But I'm obliged to you for the offer.\"\n\n\"We're pulling out at first light. You'll need to be back here by then.\"\n\n\"I will be,\" Bodie promised." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "He left the wagon camp and headed back to the hotel where the gang was staying, which was seedier than the one being used by the troupe of performers. Swint might be there, or he might be at the Bella Royale. Bodie thought the odds were good that he would find the gang leader at one place or the other.\n\nOn the second floor of the hotel, he found Clete Mahaffey and Dave Pearsoll sitting on ladder-back chairs in the hallway outside Swint's room. \"I didn't know you fellas had first shift on guard duty tonight.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's us\u2014just sittin' here while the rest of the boys are out havin' fun,\" Mahaffey groused.\n\n\"You need something, Cantrell?\" Pearsoll asked.\n\nBodie nodded. \"I'm looking for the boss. Is he in his room?\"\n\n\"Nah, we haven't seen Swint for a couple hours. Check the saloon.\"\n\n\"That was going to be my next stop. Much obliged.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Mahaffey said. \"Is something wrong, Cantrell?\"\n\n\"No, not at all,\" Bodie lied. \"I just need to talk to him for a few minutes.\"\n\nClearly, both men were curious what was going on, but they weren't going to poke their noses in another man's business. They just grunted as Bodie lifted a hand in farewell and headed back downstairs.\n\nHe should have asked them where Jake was, he thought as he left the hotel. Jake was the only member of the gang he considered a friend\u2014one that he wanted to say good-bye to before pulling out with the wagon train.\n\nHe could find Jake later, he decided. It was more important to settle things with Swint.\n\nThe hour was getting really late, but the Bella Royale was still busy. Bodie entered the saloon but didn't see Swint anywhere, so he went to the bar and asked the bartender if he'd seen the boss outlaw.\n\nThe apron nodded toward a closed door. \"There's a poker game going on in that private room back there. Swint and some of his boys are sitting in on it. Say, aren't you one of his bunch?\"\n\n\"I was,\" Bodie said. All that had changed tonight.\n\nHe hadn't known it at the time, but it had changed the moment he first laid eyes on Savannah McCoy.\n\nWith that thought in mind, Bodie went to the door and knocked on it. A voice he didn't recognize told him to come in.\n\nWhen he stepped into the room he saw that it was windowless and dark except for a lamp that cast a cone of light over a round table topped with green baize, the cards and money scattered on it, and to a lesser extent, the men who sat around it. Swint sat on the far side of the table, facing the door.\n\nThat came as no surprise to Bodie; Swint wouldn't want anybody coming in behind him where he couldn't see them. That was just common sense for someone with a lot of enemies and a price on his head.\n\nTo Swint's right was a frock-coated man Bodie didn't know, probably a professional gambler. To the gambler's right was another man Bodie didn't know who had the well-fed look of a successful businessman. The other three men at the table were members of the gang: Charley Green, who was usually Swint's second in command when the gang pulled a job, a gunman from Arizona named Jack Perkins, and Joe Guerra, a 'breed from the border country down in Texas.\n\nIt appeared that a hand had just concluded and the frock-coated gambler had won. He finished pulling in the pot, then glanced up at Bodie. \"We don't have a chair open right now, but you're welcome to stay and watch in case one of these gents drops out.\"\n\n\"I'm not goin' anywhere,\" Swint said irritably. \"Not until I've had a chance to win back that money I lost.\"\n\nThe gambler took a slender black cigarillo from his vest pocket, put it between his lips, left it unlit, and rolled it from one side of his mouth to the other. \"That's the sort of talk I like to hear. It shows you're passionate about the game, my friend... and it tells me I'm going to have a chance to take even more of your money.\"\n\nSwint scowled, and Bodie thought that the gambler didn't really know what sort of loco hombre he was dealing with. Swint was quick to take offense, quick to reach for the gun on his hip.\n\nThe boss outlaw's reaction lasted only for a second before he controlled it and forced a grin. \"You just go ahead and think that way, amigo. We'll see who's rakin' in the pot next time.\" He glanced up at Bodie. \"Did you want somethin', Cantrell, or do you plan to just stand there?\"\n\n\"I need to talk to you for a minute,\" Bodie said. \"In private.\"\n\nSwint's scowl came back. \"You got somethin' you can't say in front of these fellas? I'm not sure I like the sound of that.\"\n\n\"It's just business, that's all.\"\n\nSwint drummed the fingers of his left hand on the table. \"My luck's due to change. I can feel it in my bones. If I sit out this next hand, that luck's liable to pass right over me.\"\n\n\"Why don't we take a short break?\" the gambler suggested. \"That way you can talk to your friend, I'll go get another bottle from Horace, and we can all stretch our legs.\"\n\n\"All right,\" Swint said as he scraped back his chair. \"But don't start again without me, you hear? Cantrell, this isn't gonna take very long, is it?\"\n\n\"It shouldn't,\" Bodie said. Just long enough for you to go upstairs, get the money that you owe me, and hand it over, he thought.\n\nSwint stood up. \"Come on. We'll step out into the alley.\"\n\nThey left the private room and went out through a side door into the narrow passage between the Bella Royale and the building next to it. Swint left the door open so that a rectangle of light slanted through it and the glow lit up most of the alley.\n\n\"All right,\" Swint said. \"What is it you want?\"\n\n\"My share of the money,\" Bodie replied bluntly.\n\nSwint's scowl got even more fierce. \"You know we'll divvy up that loot when the time is right. And I'm the one who decides when that is, Cantrell, not you.\"\n\n\"I'm not saying you have to divvy up with everybody.\"\n\n\"That wouldn't be fair to the others. What makes you so dang special, anyway?\"\n\n\"I'm leaving the gang,\" Bodie said.\n\nSwint stared at him for a second as if he couldn't comprehend what Bodie had just said. Finally he repeated, \"Leaving the gang?\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\nSwint's eyes narrowed, and his face began to flush with anger. \"What's the matter, we ain't good enough for you anymore? You gonna go out and start your own gang, show ol' Eldon what it's like to be a famous owlhoot?\"\n\n\"It's not like that.\" It wasn't going as smoothly as Bodie had hoped, but to tell the truth he hadn't really expected Swint to take the news very well. \"In fact, I plan to give up being an outlaw altogether.\"\n\n\"So you really do think you're too good for the likes of us. But when it comes to the money the rest of us took off that train, you ain't so high and mighty that you'll turn your back on it, are you? You're just as greedy as the rest of us where that loot's concerned.\"\n\nBodie felt a flash of anger of his own. \"Listen here, I did everything you told me to do during that holdup. If there had been trouble, my neck would have been on the line just like yours. So I think I've got a right to my share.\"\n\nSwint hooked his thumbs in his gun belt and sneered. \"Only members of the gang get shares. You walk away now and you won't have a damn dime comin' to you.\"\n\n\"Now hold on! You never said anything about that before.\"\n\n\"Never figured I'd have to explain it. It's just common sense.\"\n\nActually, it was a chance for Swint to get his hands on an extra share, Bodie realized... assuming that the leader of the gang didn't mean to hang on to all the loot. Chances were, Swint didn't really care whether Bodie stayed or went. He had never been any great shakes as an outlaw. Swint could replace him with any of a hundred drifting hardcases.\n\nSwint had his pride, though, and he felt insulted. For that reason alone, he was willing to make it an issue.\n\nBoth men stood tensely in the mixture of dim light and shadows in the alley. It was bright enough for Bodie to see the anticipation of violence in Swint's stance. He knew that if he made even the slightest move toward his gun, Swint would slap leather, too. The killing lust burned in the man's eyes.\n\nSuddenly, Bodie felt sick. His guts clenched. But it wasn't from fear. He and Swint were pretty evenly matched when it came to gun speed, he thought.\n\nWhat gripped him was revulsion. He was ready to kill or be killed over money stained with the blood of that murdered station agent. The whole thing was loco.\n\nBesides, Savannah McCoy needed his help to stay safe. Sure, if he got himself killed over a pile of ill-gotten loot, Jamie MacCallister, Captain Hendricks, and Moses Danzig would still do their best to look after her. Bodie had a feeling that Jamie would be more than a match for any threat the wagon train might run up against.\n\nBut even so, there might come a time when he was all that stood between Savannah and disaster, like when Kane's men had tried to grab her earlier. He couldn't afford to run the risk of not being there.\n\nHe drew in a deep breath. \"You know what, Eldon? Keep my share. I don't care.\"\n\nSwint's eyes narrowed with suspicion. Obviously he couldn't comprehend such a decision. \"Is this some sort of trick?\"\n\nBodie shook his head. \"No trick. There are other things I need to do, and they're more important than any stack of gold eagles. You keep my share and divide it up among the other men. Or just keep it for yourself. It doesn't matter to me either way, as long as you're all right with letting me walk away from the gang.\"\n\n\"I don't give a damn whether you're in the gang or not,\" Swint snapped, confirming what Bodie had thought a few moments earlier. \"I still think you're tryin' to put somethin' over on me, though.\"\n\n\"I'm not. I give you my word.\" Bodie stuck out his hand. \"I'll even shake on it.\"\n\nSwint hesitated, but finally he clasped Bodie's hand. \"What is it you've got to do?\"\n\nBodie opened his mouth to explain about Savannah, Gideon Kane, and the wagon train, then thought better of it. Swint didn't have any reason to know about any of that. \"Just some personal business to take care of.\"\n\n\"Fine. It ain't like I care. You remember one thing, though, Cantrell. You walk away from me, and we're done. We ain't partners no more, and if you ever cross me in the future, I'll kill you just as quick as I would a total stranger.\"\n\nBodie wouldn't have expected anything less from the man. He didn't see any reason his trail ought to cross that of Eldon Swint any time in the future, though. It would be perfectly fine with him if he never saw the lantern-jawed outlaw again. \"I understand. You won't have any trouble from me, Eldon.\"\n\nSwint snorted contemptuously. \"I'd better not, or you'll wind up filled full of lead, you got that?\"\n\nBodie thought back and realized that he had never seen Swint engage in an actual gunfight. The outlaw had killed several men, but always from ambush or when he already had the drop on them. Maybe Swint wasn't quite the deadly pistoleer he always bragged about being.\n\nNone of that mattered, Bodie told himself. He was going with Savannah, and he would never see Swint again.\n\n\"You know where Three-Finger Jake is?\" he murmured. He still hadn't given up on the idea of saying good-bye to his friend.\n\n\"I ain't got the slightest idea. It's not my job to keep up with the whereabouts of a bunch of no-account road agents when they're not pullin' a job for me.\"\n\n\"All right. If you see him\u2014\" Bodie stopped and shook his head. He didn't want to tell Swint that he was going to be traveling with the wagon train. Even though it was unlikely, that might somehow put Kane on Savannah's trail. Bodie wasn't going to take the chance.\n\n\"So long, Eldon. That's all.\"\n\n\"You're loco, you know that?\" Swint growled as Bodie turned away. \"Givin' up that loot just don't make sense.\"\n\n\"It does if maybe you've found something more valuable,\" Bodie said, thinking about Savannah McCoy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Jamie was up long before dawn the next morning, making sure people were awake and getting ready to depart from Kansas City. He had said that he meant for the wagons to roll at first light, and he meant it. As far as he was concerned, the eastern sky barely had to turn gray for it to count as first light.\n\nAs he was making the rounds of the camp, he came up to one of the cook fires and found Moses Danzig and Bodie Cantrell hunkered beside the flames, sipping coffee from tin cups. The pot was sitting at the edge of the fire, keeping warm.\n\n\"Some coffee, Mr. MacCallister?\" Moses asked.\n\n\"Don't mind if I do,\" Jamie said. He'd already had a cup with Captain Hendricks, but a man couldn't have too much coffee when he planned to spend a long, long day in the saddle.\n\nMoses went to his nearby wagon and brought another cup, filled it from the pot, and handed it to Jamie.\n\nHe sipped gratefully at the strong black brew. \"Did you get your business taken care of last night, Cantrell?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, I did,\" the young man replied.\n\nJamie nodded. \"Glad to hear it.\" He didn't press for any more information. He felt an instinctive liking for Bodie Cantrell, but the young man's affairs were his own and Jamie didn't intend to interfere in them. \"Seen Miss McCoy this morning?\"\n\nBodie shook his head. \"No, but I'm sure she's fine with the Binghams. I wouldn't want to intrude on her.\"\n\n\"Moses, you mind going and checking on her? I want to make sure she didn't change her mind about going with us.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Moses said with a shrug. He ambled off toward the Bingham wagon.\n\nBodie said, \"I don't think Miss Savannah would just up and run off.\"\n\n\"She was pretty scared last night,\" Jamie pointed out. \"It's hard to tell what somebody will do if they get spooked bad enough. I've seen animals bolt right into danger instead of away from it, all because they were too scared to think straight.\"\n\nBodie looked worried. He drained the last of his coffee from the cup and rose from his position beside the fire. \"Reckon I'll go make sure, too\u2014\"\n\n\"I told Moses to do that,\" Jamie cut in. \"What you need to do is make sure your horse is ready to ride. We've got to get moving soon, or the day's going to be half gone.\"\n\nBodie squinted and frowned at the eastern sky, which was still almost pitch black with plenty of stars showing. He figured Jamie was a little loco, and a bit of a slave driver, to boot.\n\nBut like the others in the group, he didn't fully grasp what a difficult undertaking it would be to get the wagons to Eagle Valley in Montana Territory before winter closed in around them and stranded them. Jamie would have to use every available minute of every day to accomplish that goal, and it was going to be hard on everybody, human and livestock alike. They might as well get used to that, right from the start.\n\nBodie went to see to his horse, as Jamie had suggested, and the big frontiersman continued making sure that everything was ready for the journey. Any time he found immigrants who weren't preparing fast enough, he prodded them into hurrying without being overly harsh about it. He was prepared to lay down the law to them if he had to, the law of the trail according to Jamie Ian MacCallister, but they seemed a fairly well disciplined bunch, so he didn't want to do that... yet.\n\nOnce they got started to Montana it might be a different story.\n\nNot everyone was completely cooperative. When he got to the Bradford wagon, he found the twins, Alexander and Abigail, struggling to get the team of oxen hitched to the vehicle. The huge, stolid beasts dwarfed the children and paid little attention to their efforts to get them into the traces.\n\n\"Where's your pa?\" Jamie asked the youngsters. \"He should be doing this.\"\n\n\"He's in the wagon reading the Bible,\" Alexander said.\n\n\"Pa always reads some in the Good Book every morning and every night,\" Abigail added.\n\nJamie scowled. Being spiritual was all well and good, but there was a time for that and a time to get earthly work done, he thought. After all, the book said that the Lord helped those who helped themselves.\n\nHe stepped to the back of the wagon and saw that a candle was burning inside. \"Reverend Bradford?\"\n\n\"What is it?\" Bradford answered without lifting the canvas flap over the opening at the rear of the wagon. He sounded clearly annoyed.\n\n\"We'll be rolling soon. You need to get your team hitched up. Those kids can't do it by themselves.\" And even if they could, they shouldn't have to, Jamie thought.\n\nBradford pushed the canvas aside and glared out, looking as irritated as he'd sounded. \"The needs of a man's immortal soul won't wait, Mr. MacCallister. These wagons will.\"\n\n\"That's where you're wrong,\" Jamie said, making his voice as hard as flint. \"If you're not ready to go when the rest of us are, we'll leave you here. Whether or not you catch up is up to you.\"\n\n\"You'd abandon us here?\" Bradford demanded in obvious outrage. \"I won't hear of it. I paid my fee to join this wagon train, just like everyone else. I'll speak to Captain Hendricks about this high-handed behavior.\"\n\n\"Go right ahead,\" Jamie told him. \"It won't change anything. I'm wagon master now, and we leave when I say we leave. It's your responsibility to be ready.\" He didn't like speaking to Bradford this way in front of the man's children, but facts were facts and they needed to get on the trail.\n\n\"Very well,\" Bradford said disgustedly. He set aside his big, leather-bound Bible, pushed the canvas flap back farther, and clambered out of the wagon. \"But I still plan to speak to Captain Hendricks.\"\n\n\"Go right ahead,\" Jamie invited. It wouldn't make any difference, and he knew it.\n\nHe waited a moment to make sure Bradford was going to help the two youngsters hitch up the team. When he was satisfied about that, he moved on to the area where the saddle horses were picketed.\n\nBodie was there, tightening the cinches on his saddle. So were Hector Gilworth and his cousin Jess Neville, who were also getting their horses ready to ride.\n\n\"Did you fellas introduce yourselves to each other?\" Jamie asked the scouts.\n\n\"Sure did,\" Hector replied. \"I'm glad you found somebody to help us with the scoutin', Jamie.\"\n\n\"I'll try to live up to the responsibility,\" Bodie said.\n\n\"Keep your eyes open and don't do anything foolish, and you'll be fine,\" Jamie told him.\n\n\"Are you takin' the point today?\" Hector asked.\n\nJamie nodded. \"That's right. Bodie, you'll be with me. Hector and Jess, you fellas take the flanks.\"\n\n\"Nobody bringing up the rear?\" Bodie asked.\n\n\"Not today. Once we've gotten farther from town, one of us will drop back from time to time to check our back trail. I don't really expect much trouble from behind, though. It's what'll be in front of us that we'll have to worry about.\"\n\n\"Meanin' Injuns?\" Neville said.\n\n\"And outlaws and bad weather and flooded streams and buffalo stampedes and just about anything else you can think of,\" Jamie said with a grin. \"This isn't going to be an easy trip. If all four of us make it to Montana Territory alive, we'll be doing pretty good.\" Of course, Bodie might not be going that far, he reminded himself.\n\nThat all depended on Savannah McCoy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Edward Bingham was a tall man who had once been handsome. With his gray hair and close-cropped, grizzled beard, now he was distinguished, Savannah thought. His tiny, birdlike wife Leticia had long gray hair twisted into braids and wound around her head. The two of them were a good couple. They suited each other, in Savannah's opinion.\n\nThey were happy to make room for her things in their wagon and give her a place to sleep, as Moses had suggested they would. They had sold most of their goods before they left their long-time home in Reading, Pennsylvania, bringing with them only what they needed for the journey and to set up basic housekeeping in Montana, avoiding the trap of trying to take everything that some immigrants fell into.\n\nAs Mrs. Bingham prepared breakfast, Savannah offered to help, even though her cooking skills had never been anything to boast about. Living on the road with the troupe as she had, there hadn't been many opportunities to better them.\n\n\"There'll be plenty of chances for you to pitch in once we're on the trail, dear,\" the older woman said. \"This is your first morning with the wagon train, so I'll take care of this.\"\n\nSavannah suspected that Mrs. Bingham had her own way of doing things and didn't want anybody interfering with that routine. She could go along with that for now, but she was determined to carry her weight during the trip, for as long as she was with the wagon train.\n\nShe'd expected to see Bodie Cantrell again this morning, she thought as she sipped coffee and ate the hotcakes and bacon Mrs. Bingham had cooked. So far, though, she hadn't seen the young man. She supposed he was busy with whatever duties he had as one of the party's scouts.\n\nThe most important thing, she told herself, was that she hadn't seen Gideon Kane or any of his men. She would have liked to think that he had already given up searching for her, but she couldn't bring herself to believe that. She had seen a look of pure obsession in Kane's eyes. The look of madness, almost.\n\n\"Mrs. Bingham, do you happen to have a sun bonnet I can borrow?\" Savannah asked when they had finished breakfast.\n\n\"Of course. You don't need it now, what with the sun not being up yet, but you will before the day's over, I'm thinking.\"\n\nThat was true, but the main reason Savannah wanted the bonnet was so that it would obscure her face if any of Kane's men came by the wagon camp looking for her. She had put on her oldest, drabbest dress, and if she wore the bonnet and kept her face turned away from the street as much as possible, she thought there was a good chance she could go unnoticed. \"I just want to get used to wearing one.\"\n\n\"All right. I'll fetch one of my extras,\" Mrs. Bingham said.\n\nWhen Mr. Bingham went to hitch up the oxen, Savannah offered to help with that, too. He gave her a dubious frown. \"No offense, Miss McCoy, but you don't strike me as a farm girl. Have you ever handled oxen before?\"\n\n\"No, sir, but I'm a quick\u2014\" She started to say she was a quick study, then switched from that theatrical term. For the time being, she wasn't an actress.\n\nShe was a fugitive.\n\n\"I learn quickly,\" she said. \"And I'm not afraid of hard work, even though I have to admit I'm not exactly accustomed to it.\"\n\nHe thought about her offer for a moment, then nodded. \"All right. I can always use a helping hand. Just be careful. Those great brutes are peaceful and slow-moving most of the time, but they can be surly beasts now and then.\" He smiled. \"Sort of like people.\"\n\nJamie MacCallister stopped by the wagon when they were almost ready to go. \"Everything quiet the rest of the night?\"\n\n\"Quiet as can be, thanks to you and Mr. Cantrell,\" Savannah said. \"Speaking of Mr. Cantrell, I haven't seen him yet this morning....\"\n\n\"He's around,\" Jamie said vaguely. \"You'll be seeing plenty of him during the trip.\" He smiled. \"I like that bonnet. You look like a real pioneer woman.\"\n\nSavannah smiled. \"I suppose for now, that's exactly what I am.\"\n\nA short time later, the wagons began pulling out of their places in the circle and lining up. As captain, Lamar Hendricks had the first spot in line. The others pulled in behind him as they were ready. The Bingham wagon was about halfway along the column by the time the train had finished forming up.\n\nSavannah was sitting on the lowered tailgate as Jamie and Bodie rode past. She lifted a hand and waved at them. Jamie nodded and touched a finger to the wide brim of his hat. Bodie followed suit. He didn't smile; his face was serious in the gray light of approaching dawn.\n\nThat was all right, Savannah told herself. He was handsome in his rugged way, even when he didn't smile. She was looking forward to the chance to talk with him again.\n\nBut that wouldn't come for a while. Jamie and Bodie rode to the front of the train, where the big frontiersman paused and lifted his right arm above his head. His powerful voice carried along the length of the train as he bellowed, \"Wagons... hooooo!\"\n\nWith a shuffling of hooves, a creaking of leather, and a rasp of wheels turning, the wagons lurched forward into motion.\n\nThey were off to Montana." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Jamie could tell that the big sand-colored stallion Sundown was glad to get out on the trail and stretch his legs again. To tell the truth, so was he. He was even happier to have a destination and a goal again. The drifting he had done since the end of his vengeance quest had felt right at the time, but after a lifetime of getting things done, he was ready to accomplish something again.\n\nIf he got the pilgrims safely to where they were going, that would be an accomplishment, all right. A mighty big accomplishment.\n\nThe wagons followed a well-defined trail along the Kansas River westward, keeping the stream to the left. Jamie and Bodie rode about a hundred yards in front of the lead wagon.\n\nIt wasn't really necessary to do any scouting yet. Their route was easy to follow, and as the sun rose behind them, its golden light washed over the plains and revealed the way before them. Once the wagons were out of town, the trail would lead through farming country for the next few days, so there weren't any significant dangers to watch out for.\n\nThat would change once they swung to the northwest. The country would become more sparsely settled, and they would be traveling through regions where it was still possible to run into roving bands of Pawnee and Cheyenne that might prove hostile.\n\nAs they rode, Bodie said, \"I'd sure like to hear about some of your adventures, Mr. MacCallister, if you don't mind talking about them.\"\n\n\"Make it Jamie. And who said I'd had adventures?\"\n\nBodie frowned. \"Well... just about everybody who's ever heard of you, I reckon.\"\n\nJamie chuckled. \"I'm just joshing you, son. I guess I've run into my fair share of trouble. Ever hear of a place called the Alamo?\"\n\n\"Well, sure.\"\n\n\"I was there for a spell, before it fell to the Mexicans, of course. A long, long time ago.\"\n\nJamie reminisced about that and some of his other exploits as he was growing up a child of a wild, young country. It was a sign that a man was growing old when his own kids didn't want to listen to his stories anymore, but Bodie was an eager audience, paying rapt attention to the yarns Jamie spun. There had been a time when his boy Falcon had been like that, before he had grown up and become one of the most dangerous gunfighters west of the Mississippi.\n\nJamie hipped around in the saddle and peered along the line of wagons from time to time, checking their back trail.\n\nBodie followed that example. \"You're making sure Kane isn't following us, right?\"\n\n\"Would you put it past him, if he thought there was a chance Miss McCoy had joined the wagon train?\"\n\n\"Not for a minute. From what I saw of the man, he's loco... and poison mean.\"\n\nJamie nodded. \"I haven't met him, but I've got a hunch you're right.\"\n\nThe wagons rolled along steadily for several hours before Jamie called a halt to let the livestock rest for a short time. He and Bodie went to Captain Hendricks's wagon, where Jamie asked the man, \"Have you got a map of the route you were supposed to follow? I know where Montana is, right enough, but if you were supposed to go a certain way we'll try to stick to it... as long as I don't know a better trail.\"\n\n\"Actually, yes, I have a map that Mr. Ralston prepared,\" Hendricks replied. \"I'll get it.\"\n\nWhile they were waiting for him to do that, Jamie glanced eastward behind the wagon train again, just out of habit, and stiffened in the saddle as he spotted several riders following the trail along the river and coming toward them. He caught Bodie's attention, lifted a hand, and pointed.\n\nA worried frown appeared on Bodie's face as he looked at the riders. \"Kane's men?\"\n\n\"Could be. Let's go find out.\"\n\nHendricks had climbed over the seat into the wagon to look for the map. As Jamie and Bodie turned their horses toward the rear of the train, he stuck his head back out. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"Just to check something out,\" Jamie said. \"We'll have a look at that map later.\"\n\nHe heeled Sundown into a lope. Bodie rode alongside him. Some of the immigrants waved and called greetings to them as they went past the wagons.\n\nHector Gilworth and Jess Neville had come in from the flanks when the train stopped. They saw Jamie and Bodie approaching, and Hector asked, \"Something wrong, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"Probably not, but come along with us anyway.\"\n\nThe four of them reached the end of the wagon train when the newcomers were still about a quarter mile away. Jamie's keen eyes didn't recognize any of them as men he had seen the night before, but that didn't have to mean anything. Gideon Kane was wealthy enough to hire any number of men to do his bidding.\n\nBodie suddenly let out a startled exclamation. \"I know those fellas.\"\n\n\"Friends of yours?\" Jamie asked.\n\n\"Well, one of them is, anyway. And the others are all right, I think.\"\n\nThe four wagon train men reined in and waited for the riders to come to them. As the men approached, Bodie moved his horse out in front of his companions and called, \"Jake! What in the world are you doing here?\"\n\nThe riders came up and halted. The one in the lead grinned and said to Bodie, \"I'll bet you didn't expect to see me again so soon, did you, pard?\"\n\n\"That's right. I didn't.\" Bodie glanced around at Jamie. \"Mr. MacCallister, this is my friend Jake Lucas.\"\n\n\"Three-Finger Jake, they call me, and you can see why.\" He held up his left hand with its missing digits. \"I blame an old brindle steer and my own dumb luck for that. Call it a souvenir of my cowboyin' days.\"\n\nBodie introduced the other two men. \"These hombres are Clete Mahaffey and Dave Pearsoll. Boys, this is Jamie Ian MacCallister, Hector Gilworth, and Jess Neville.\"\n\nThe men exchanged nods. Jamie studied the newcomers, sizing them up. Jake Lucas seemed to be a brash, cocky young cowboy, while Mahaffey and Pearsoll were older, more hard-edged.\n\n\"I thought you were staying back in Kansas City,\" Bodie said to them. \"You know, until that other business got cleared up.\"\n\nJake shook his head. \"There's nothin' I hate worse than sittin' around, Bodie, you know that. When I heard that you'd left town, I reckon it put ideas in my head. We got everything squared away and decided to come after you.\"\n\nA frown creased Bodie's forehead. \"I didn't tell anybody I was leaving with this wagon train.\"\n\n\"Well, where else would you have gone?\" Jake asked with a laugh. \"That sounded like something you'd do, takin' off with a bunch of pilgrims bound for Montana. There's a lot of talk about it back in town. In fact, we were thinkin' we might just throw in with you.\"\n\nJamie watched Bodie's face, but the young man seemed to be keeping his features carefully impassive. Even as insightful as he was, Jamie couldn't tell how Bodie felt about the idea Jake Lucas had just come out with.\n\nBodie shrugged. \"That's not up to me. Mr. MacCallister is the wagon master, and the immigrants have a captain they've elected. They'd be the ones to decide who comes along and who doesn't.\"\n\nSomething nagged at Jamie, just a vague feeling that maybe not everything was as it appeared to be on the surface. But having three more experienced men along on the journey might not be a bad idea. The wagons were bound to run into trouble somewhere along the way, the sort of trouble that meant gunplay. Even though Mahaffey and Pearsoll had a rough, hard-bitten look about them, they might make good allies. \"If it's all right with Captain Hendricks, it's all right with me. That is, if you vouch for these fellas, Bodie.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Bodie said. \"Why wouldn't I?\"\n\nThat was something Jamie wondered about, and he resolved to ask Bodie about it later, in private.\n\n\"One thing,\" Jamie went on. \"You boys will have to earn your keep if you travel with this train. Bodie's signed on as a scout, and I could use some more pairs of eyes and ears, if you're interested.\"\n\n\"Why, that sounds like a bang-up idea, Mr. MacCallister,\" Jake said. \"We'd be glad to work as scouts, wouldn't we, boys?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Mahaffey said, and Pearsoll just shrugged and grunted his assent.\n\nJamie turned Sundown toward the front of the train again. \"Come on,\" he told the newcomers. \"We'll go see Captain Hendricks and make sure it's all right with him. I expect it will be, though.\"\n\nIn a matter of moments, he had gone from having barely enough scouts to maybe having too many, Jamie thought as he rode toward the front of the train. But considering the wild country they would be traversing before they reached their destination, maybe it wasn't possible to have too many scouts.\n\nOr too many men who were good with a gun." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Bodie's head was spinning. Of all the people he might have run into on the way to Montana, Jake Lucas, Clete Mahaffey, and Dave Pearsoll were just about the last ones he would have expected. He had a bunch of questions for them, starting with their reasons for leaving the gang... and whether or not they had managed to get their share of the loot from Eldon Swint.\n\nThat had to wait until later, though. He couldn't say anything about it while Jamie or the other scouts were around. He didn't want to reveal his outlaw past to them. The wagon train was his chance to start over. Maybe his last chance.\n\nWhen he dared to let himself think about it, he thought that Savannah might be a chance to start over, too. She needed one, and so did he.\n\nWhy not together?\n\nBodie put that thought out of his head for the time being. When they talked to Captain Hendricks, he acknowledged that he and Jake and the other two men had been acquainted for a while and that he trusted them.\n\n\"That's good enough for me, I suppose,\" Hendricks said. \"I realize I've known you only a very short time, Mr. Cantrell, but Mr. MacCallister seems to trust you. That carries a great deal of weight with me.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" Bodie said. \"I'll try to live up to his trust, and yours as well.\"\n\nHe didn't get a chance to talk to Jake privately until the wagons had stopped for the midday meal and to let the teams rest again. Jake was standing on the riverbank, watering his horse, when Bodie walked over to join him.\n\n\"I don't reckon I've ever been as surprised in my life as I was when I saw you,\" Bodie said quietly.\n\n\"Why?\" Jake asked. \"You didn't think I was gonna stay with that lobo wolf Swint forever, did you?\"\n\n\"You never said anything about leaving.\"\n\n\"Maybe that's because you never put the idea in my head until now,\" Jake said with a shrug. \"When Swint told me you were gone, I asked myself why not? It was as good a time as any to make a break. I'll be honest with you, Bodie. Sooner or later, Eldon was gonna land us smack-dab in some trouble that we couldn't shoot our way out of. I don't want to wind up dancin' at the end of a rope, thrown in a cheap pine box, and stuck in some potter's field. That's what was gonna happen if we kept ridin' the owlhoot.\"\n\n\"Where we're going, wolves may wind up scattering your bones.\"\n\n\"That's a chance I'll take. When I said I was leavin', Clete and Dave wanted to come with me. They're as tired of Swint's bull as I was.\"\n\nBodie lowered his voice to a whisper. \"What about the money? Did you get him to give you your share?\"\n\n\"We did better than that,\" Jake said with his quick grin. \"We talked him into givin' us your share, too, so we could deliver it to you when we caught up. He tried to pull that ol' business about how if somebody left the gang, they didn't get what was comin' to 'em. That didn't fly, and we told him so. He backed down.\"\n\nUntil his own confrontation with Eldon Swint, Bodie might not have believed that was possible. He had seen for himself, though, that Swint might be more bluster than real threat, especially when the odds weren't overwhelmingly on his side. He could believe that Swint hadn't wanted to stand up to Jake, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll.\n\n\"You must have been mighty sure I was with the wagon train, if you figured on bringing my share of the loot with you.\"\n\nJake chuckled. \"Well, if we guessed wrong and hadn't found you, I reckon we would've just had to keep that money ourselves. It would have been a shame, but we could've brung ourselves to do it.\"\n\nBodie let out a wry laugh and shook his head. \"Well, you're here now, and that's all that matters, I reckon. You plan to stay with the wagon train all the way to Montana?\"\n\n\"We'll have to wait and see about that. Right now all that matters is that we're on the move again, and it feels mighty good. I was already tired of that town. Too many people crowdin' around all the time. I'm a Texas boy. Used to wide open spaces all around me, you know.\"\n\nBodie nodded. \"From what I've heard, there'll be plenty of those where we're going.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Back in Kansas City, Eldon Swint stirred in the grimy sheets of his hotel room bed. Somebody muttered and moaned beside him. Unable to recall which of the soiled doves he had brought from the Bella Royale the night before, he raised himself on an elbow so he could look over at his companion.\n\nThe tangled mass of hennaed hair on the other pillow looked vaguely familiar. Harriet? Hermione? Helen, that was it, he told himself... not that it really mattered to him what the dove's name was.\n\nHe reached over and smacked a beefy hip under the sheet.\n\nHelen groaned again, rolled over, and opened her eyes to slits, wincing at the morning light coming in through the gap between the threadbare curtains over the room's lone window. \"What time is it?\" she muttered.\n\n\"Time for you to get up and haul yourself out of here,\" Swint told her.\n\nShe didn't seem to have heard his answer. \"You can't expect to go again this mornin'. You didn't pay me that much, honey.\"\n\n\"I didn't say I wanted to go again. I said you need to get out.\"\n\nTo emphasize his point, Swint planted a bare foot against her rump and shoved. Helen let out a yelp of dismay as she slid out of the bed. The thud as she hit the floor cut off her cry.\n\nShe came up angry, exclaiming, \"You son of a\u2014\"\n\nSwint had already swung his legs out of bed and stood up. Standing on the far side of the bed, his bony frame clad only in the bottom half of a pair of long underwear, he turned his head to look at her. The ice-cold menace in his slate-gray eyes made her shut up in a hurry.\n\n\"You don't have to treat me so mean.\" Helen pouted as she started looking around for her dress. She still wore stockings rolled just above her knees, and those stockings, her slippers, and the dress were the only things she had been wearing when Swint brought her to the hotel the previous night.\n\nThe bare wood floor was cold against the soles of Swint's feet as he went over to a small table where some of his gear was piled. He pawed through it until he found one of the thin black cheroots he favored and a match. He snapped the lucifer to life with his thumbnail and set fire to the gasper. He didn't have any interest in watching the soiled dove get dressed. The night before, he had thought she was beautiful, but a bottle of rotgut whiskey improved any woman's looks immeasurably.\n\n\"Are you coming to the Bella Royale tonight, honey?\" Helen asked behind him.\n\n\"More than likely,\" Swint replied without looking around. He stared out the window instead.\n\n\"Well, I'll be there. You'll look for me, won't you, honey?\"\n\n\"We'll see,\" Swint said dully.\n\nHis mouth tasted like something had crawled into it and died. His head was throbbing a little from all the who-hit-John he'd guzzled down the night before. His guts roiled unpleasantly. He had hoped the cheroot would help with those problems, but it wasn't doing a blasted bit of good.\n\nHelen tried again. \"I had a mighty fine time with you last night.\"\n\n\"Forget it,\" Swint snapped. \"Just get out.\"\n\nShe sniffed angrily, and a moment later the door slammed behind her on her way out of the room. Swint grimaced as the noise made his head throb harder. It felt like imps straight from Hades were capering around inside his skull, banging on it with ball-peen hammers.\n\nAnother memory stole back into his thoughts. Bodie Cantrell had quit the gang last night, he recalled with a scowl. That infuriated him. After all he'd done for Cantrell, only to be treated like that!\n\nAt least Cantrell hadn't insisted on getting his share of the loot. Swint would let the rest of the gang think that he had. That way Swint could pocket it for himself.\n\nThinking about the money made him turn away from the window. When he'd brought Helen back to the hotel, he had hefted the saddlebags before they got down to business. No matter how drunk he was, he always checked on the loot.\n\nAs the cheroot dangled from his lips, he had the urge to let some of those double eagles trickle through his fingers. That always made him feel better. He went to the wardrobe where he'd stashed the saddlebags, reached inside, and picked up one of them. The weight was comforting, and so was the clink of coins as he set the bags on the table. He unfastened one of the pouches and thrust his hand inside.\n\nHe knew instantly that something was wrong. His fingers touched coins, all right, but they weren't the right size to be double eagles. And there was something else in the pouch...\n\nRocks.\n\nSwint's teeth clamped down on the cheroot so hard that he bit off the end and the thin black twisted cylinder fell onto the table next to the saddlebags. Swint ignored it and spat out the piece left in his mouth. He upended the pouch and stared in shock and disbelief at the rocks that fell out onto the table, along with a handful of pennies.\n\nAfter a moment, he ripped the other pouch open and dumped its contents as well. More rocks and pennies spilled out. Bellowing a curse, Swint lunged for the wardrobe to get the other saddlebags.\n\nA minute later, he had confirmed the awful truth.\n\nSomebody had stolen all the loot.\n\nChoking with fury, Swint yanked his revolver from the holster attached to the coiled shell belt lying on the table. He threw the door open and ran out into the hall, still wearing just the long underwear.\n\nTwo doors down the corridor, Swint hammered on the panel of Charley Green's room and yelled, \"Charley! Damn it, Charley, get out here!\"\n\nWhen Green opened the door wearing a pair of baggy long-handles, he looked just as bleary-eyed as Swint had been upon first awakening. He coughed and cleared his throat. \"Eldon, what's wrong?\"\n\nSwint started to blurt out that the loot was gone, but then he stopped himself. It might not be smart to let the others know what had happened until he figured it out himself. He grated, \"Who was standin' guard here last night?\"\n\nGreen raked his fingers through his tangled hair and frowned. \"I dunno,\" he said after a second. \"You must've seen 'em when you came in.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I can't remember\u2014\" Swint stopped short as a couple faces locked into place in his mind. \"Wait a minute. Mahaffey and Pearsoll. They were the ones.\"\n\n\"Well, there you go, then,\" Green said as he started to turn away and close the door. Clearly, he didn't grasp the depth of the problem.\n\nSwint slapped his free hand against the door. \"Where are they?\" he demanded.\n\n\"What? Who?\" Green gave his head a violent shake as if he were trying to clear the cobwebs from his brain. \"Oh, you mean Mahaffey and Pearsoll. Shoot, I don't know. I don't keep track of where everybody is.\"\n\n\"We've got to find them,\" Swint said. \"Get dressed. Now!\"\n\nHe stomped back to his room and started pulling on his clothes. Once he was dressed and had his gun belt strapped around his hips, he rousted out the other members of the gang. Green, still confused, helped him.\n\nWithin ten minutes, everybody was gathered in Swint's room, with three notable exceptions: Clete Mahaffey and Dave Pearsoll, who had been guarding the loot the night before... and Three-Finger Jake Lucas.\n\nSwint questioned his men, his angry voice lashing them like a whip. Nobody admitted to having seen Mahaffey, Pearsoll, or Lucas since the previous night. Swint ordered them to spread out through the area and conduct a search. There were plenty of saloons, brothels, dance halls, and gambling dens where the three men might be.\n\nHe had an unhappy feeling that they wouldn't be found in any of those places.\n\nBy mid-morning the conclusion was inescapable. Lucas and the other two were gone. Only one reason for their disappearance made sense. They had stolen the loot from the train robbery and lit a shuck out of Kansas City.\n\nSwint had no choice but to break the news to his men. They took it with startled curses, followed by bitter anger.\n\n\"What are we gonna do, Eldon?\" Charley Green asked when the hubbub in Swint's room subsided.\n\n\"I'll tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna find those damned double-crossers and get our money back! And when we do... those three are going to wish they'd never been born.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Gideon Kane was in the habit of rising late. There was no reason for him not to, since he had never done an actual day's work in his life. Things like that were for lesser men.\n\nIn the mansion on the outskirts of Kansas City, breakfast and coffee were waiting for him on a table covered with a fine linen cloth in the sitting room next to his bedroom, even though it was late enough that most people were starting to think about their midday meal. He belted a silk dressing gown around his waist and sat down to eat.\n\nA bell pull hung within reach. Kane tugged on the cord, and a moment later his butler, Jenkins, appeared in the doorway. \"Yes, sir?\"\n\nKane sipped from the fine bone china cup and then asked, \"Is Harrison here?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, he's in your study. He arrived a short time ago and said that he had a report for you when you woke up. I assumed that's where you would want to receive it after you'd eaten.\"\n\n\"Normally, yes. I'm feeling rather impatient this morning, however. Send him up here.\"\n\nJenkins inclined his head forward. \"Yes, sir. Right away.\"\n\nKane went back to his breakfast.\n\nA few minutes later a knock sounded on the partially open sitting room door. Kane called, \"Come in.\"\n\nEli Harrison stepped into the room. He was a tall, heavy-shouldered man with massive fists and a face like a slab of raw meat. He had worked for the Kane family in a number of capacities over the years, starting out as a stableman.\n\nNow he worked exclusively for Gideon Kane as a troubleshooter of sorts. Whenever Kane had a problem, no matter what it was, Harrison found a way to take care of it. He was brutal when he had to be and utterly ruthless.\n\nWithout looking up, Kane said, \"I hope you're here to tell me that you've located that girl and brought her here.\"\n\n\"I wish I could, Mr. Kane,\" Harrison said bluntly, \"but my men haven't turned up any sign of her yet.\"\n\n\"You kept watch on the hotel where that troupe of entertainers is staying?\"\n\n\"I sent a couple men to do that.\" Harrison didn't sound happy about what he had to say next. \"They got sidetracked. One of 'em felt like he had to stop and pay off a gambling debt. They wound up, ah, gettin' mixed up in a game for a while.\"\n\nKane frowned as he laid aside the spoon he had been using. \"So the hotel went unguarded?\"\n\n\"Not for long. Only about an hour.\"\n\nKane felt his face warming with anger. Harrison knew as well as he did that a lot of things could happen in an hour.\n\n\"I want those two fools fired,\" Kane snapped.\n\n\"Already done it, sir.\" Harrison lifted one of his huge fists. The knuckles were skinned and raw. \"Had a talk with 'em about falling down on the job, too.\"\n\n\"You have men watching the hotel now?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. If she's still there, we'll pick her up whenever she goes out.\"\n\nJenkins stepped into the doorway behind Harrison. He cleared his throat. \"A note was delivered for you earlier this morning, sir.\"\n\n\"Who's it from?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Jenkins lifted a piece of paper that was folded and sealed with wax. \"I have it here.\"\n\nKane pushed his empty plate aside and made a curt gesture toward the table. Jenkins crossed the room and placed the note on the linen. Kane picked it up and ripped the seal open.\n\nHis eyes scanned the words written in a feminine hand on the paper. More anger welled up inside him. He started to crumple the note, then stopped, set it down again, smoothed the creases from it. \"Bring me O'Hanlon,\" he said softly.\n\n\"Sir?\" Jenkins murmured.\n\n\"I'm talking to Eli.\" Kane stared coldly at Harrison. \"O'Hanlon, the head of that acting troupe. Bring him here. Now.\"\n\nHarrison nodded and left the room.\n\nBy the time Harrison returned to the mansion, Kane was dressed and waiting downstairs in his study. He had been pacing back and forth angrily, but he forced himself to regain his composure when Jenkins announced that Harrison was there and had brought Cyrus O'Hanlon with him as ordered. Kane gave the butler a curt nod to indicate that he was ready for them.\n\nHarrison gave O'Hanlon a little shove as they came into the study, making the actor stumble. O'Hanlon caught himself before he fell. Drawing himself up straighter, he glared at Kane. \"The authorities will hear about you having me kidnapped like this, Mr. Kane.\"\n\n\"Kidnapped?\" Kane repeated. He smiled coolly. \"I don't know what you're talking about. I asked Mr. Harrison to request that you honor me by visiting my home, and that's all that happened, Mr. O'Hanlon.\"\n\n\"You know good and well that's not true,\" O'Hanlon blustered. \"This bruiser of yours practically dragged me bodily out of the hotel. My wife witnessed the incident, and so did other members of my troupe.\"\n\n\"We've had this discussion before,\" Kane chided. \"As far as the law is concerned, my version of events is what actually happened, not the fantasies of some wild-eyed actor. Now...\" His voice hardened. \"Where is Miss McCoy?\"\n\n\"I have no idea.\"\n\nKane leaned over and picked up the note from Savannah that he had brought down with him from the sitting room. \"You arranged for her note to be delivered to me.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Please. You look after her. You must know where she's hiding.\" Kane tossed the paper back onto the desk. \"I don't believe for one second that she's left town. You've just got her stashed away somewhere, that's all.\"\n\nStubbornly, O'Hanlon shook his head. \"She left the troupe,\" he insisted. \"I hated to see her go, but you made it impossible for her to do anything else, you... you...\"\n\nHarrison's big hand came down heavily on O'Hanlon's shoulder as the actor sputtered, searching for a suitable epithet.\n\n\"I'll find her,\" Kane said confidently. \"I'll involve the law if I have to. The police can scour the entire city for her. Or you can save us all a great deal of trouble by telling me where she is.\"\n\n\"I can't tell you because I don't know. And if I did know, I wouldn't tell you!\"\n\nKane looked at him for a second, then sighed and nodded to Eli Harrison.\n\nThe big man kicked O'Hanlon in the back of the right knee. O'Hanlon cried out in pain and toppled to the side as his right leg collapsed under him. Harrison kicked him again as he fell, digging the toe of his boot into O'Hanlon's shoulder blade. O'Hanlon lay on the floor, writhing and making little noises as he tried to keep from crying.\n\n\"I'll ask you again,\" Kane said. \"Where is Miss McCoy?\"\n\n\"G-go to hell!\" O'Hanlon spat out between clenched teeth.\n\n\"You'll regret that you didn't cooperate with me, O'Hanlon,\" Kane warned.\n\n\"I already regret that I ever saw your damned face!\"\n\nKane nodded to Harrison again.\n\nBy the time the big man finished, O'Hanlon had passed out. There wasn't a mark on his face to indicate that he'd been beaten, but Kane wouldn't have worried if there had been. No one was going to believe the actor's story.\n\nHarrison stood over the unconscious O'Hanlon and frowned. In his rumbling voice, he said, \"I'm startin' to think that he's tellin' the truth, boss. If he knew where the girl was, he'd have spilled it by now.\"\n\n\"I believe you may be right.\" Kane picked up the note again. \"But if she's abandoned the troupe and left Kansas City, where could she have gone?\"\n\nJenkins cleared his throat again. The butler had been standing to one side during the brutal beating, his unlined face as imperturbable as ever. \"I beg your pardon, sir, but I have a thought.\"\n\nKane turned to face him. \"You're a smart man, Jenkins. What is it?\"\n\n\"Miss McCoy has been traveling with this troupe of actors and entertainers, which means she's accustomed to having a group of people around her. I have my doubts that she would set out all alone from a strange place. Didn't your men report that they pursued Miss McCoy and that unknown cowboy to a place where a wagon train was camped? A wagon train that, I believe, departed from Kansas City this morning?\"\n\n\"That's right.\" Kane closed his eyes for a second and made a face. \"Of course! She went with the wagon train!\"\n\n\"That would be my guess, sir.\"\n\nKane flipped a hand at O'Hanlon and told Harrison, \"Take him out and dump him somewhere. If anyone ever asks, he was fine when he left here after our visit. Thieves must have attacked him on his way back to the hotel.\"\n\n\"It'll look more realistic if he doesn't have any money left on him,\" Harrison pointed out.\n\n\"Fine, fine, I don't care about that. Just put together a group of men and get after that wagon train. Stop it and search it.\" A thought occurred to Kane and put a smile on his face. \"Not right away, though. Let it get several days away from here.\" He laughed. \"That way Miss McCoy will believe that she's gotten away from me. How delicious it will be when she's dragged back here.\"\n\nHarrison nodded slowly. \"There's just one problem we might have with that, boss.\"\n\n\"I pay you very well to take care of problems,\" Kane snapped. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"From what I've heard, a fella named MacCallister took over as wagon master for that bunch of pilgrims. He's supposed to be a pretty tough gent. A real ring-tailed roarer.\"\n\n\"Mr. Harrison... did you ever see a man who was tougher than a bullet from a gun?\"\n\n\"Well, no, sir, I haven't.\"\n\n\"There's your answer, then,\" Kane said. \"No problem at all. If this fellow MacCallister or anybody else gets in your way, just kill him.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "As Jamie expected that it would, life on the trail soon settled into a routine. He had the immigrants up early every morning, and they broke camp and the wagons rolled when the sky was still gray. Other than short breaks to rest the teams, he kept them moving all day.\n\nUnfortunately, the sun slipped below the horizon a little earlier each day, cutting down the time that they could travel.\n\nLate every afternoon, the wagons pulled off the trail and formed a big circle next to the river. He and some of the scouts stood guard while the livestock was watered and then driven into the circle.\n\nThe train had come far enough from Kansas City that the land was sparsely settled with a few isolated ranches in the area. Jamie didn't think there was any real danger from Indians yet, but it never hurt to be careful.\n\nAnd outlaws, of course, could strike anywhere.\n\nOnce everyone had eaten supper, they turned in for the night, tired from the long day on the trail. There was no big center campfire where the immigrants gathered to play music, sing, and dance the way they had done back in Kansas City. They didn't have the energy for diversions like that anymore. The hard pace that Jamie established saw to that.\n\nHe set up guard shifts at night, drawing on volunteers from the wagon train along with his scouts. Moses Danzig was always willing to pitch in and do whatever was needed. He wouldn't be much good in a fight, Jamie knew, but he could stay alert and give the alarm in case of trouble as well as anybody else.\n\nSo far Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll had worked out fairly well. Mahaffey and Pearsoll weren't very friendly with the immigrants and the other scouts and kept to themselves most of the time. But they didn't cause any trouble and they did what Jamie told them without any arguments.\n\nJake Lucas, on the other hand, seldom stopped talking and always had a friendly word for everybody. He flirted with all the teenage girls whose families were part of the group and even with some of the married women, which Jamie thought might lead to problems sooner or later. He asked Bodie to have a word with his friend about it.\n\nBodie agreed to do so, but he added, \"Jake doesn't mean anything by the way he acts. That's just how he is. He's friendly with everybody.\"\n\n\"Get too friendly with a married woman and punches can get thrown,\" Jamie cautioned. \"That's if you're lucky. If you're not, guns go off.\"\n\n\"I'll talk to him,\" Bodie promised.\n\nLamar Hendricks and Jamie had gotten together and studied the map that Jeb Ralston had drawn before they left. The route Ralston had laid out turned northwest away from the Kansas River, followed the Oregon Trail for a good long ways, then cut almost due north, crossing the Platte and continuing to skirt the Rocky Mountains to the east as they headed for Montana.\n\nOnce they were there the wagons would turn west again, travel through the foothills and on into Eagle Valley. It was a route without any extremely rugged terrain to cross, just plains and rolling hills, which meant the wagons could move fairly fast over it.\n\nJamie planned to follow that route. Ralston might have been a braggart and a bully, and reckless to boot, but he had sketched out a decent trail for the immigrants he was supposed to lead.\n\nSeveral days out of Kansas City, they camped where the Blue River flowed into the Kansas from the northwest. It was where the Oregon Trail turned away from the larger stream.\n\nThat evening Jamie called his scouts together. \"We haven't had much to worry about so far, but from here to the Platte we'll have to be a mite more watchful for trouble. Wagon trains have been taking this trail for a long time, so the Indians are used to seeing them, but you never know when some band will take it into their heads to get proddy.\" He paused to emphasize the next point. \"The important thing is that if we do run into any Cheyenne, Arapaho, or Pawnee, everybody needs to stay calm until we see what they've got in mind. That goes for us as well as the pilgrims. No shooting unless I say so. More blood's been spilled because of itchy trigger fingers than any other reason.\"\n\nThe men nodded their agreement, even the normally taciturn Mahaffey and Pearsoll.\n\n\"Get a good night's sleep,\" Jamie added. \"We'll all be in the saddle early tomorrow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "\"And where are you off to, my friend?\" Moses asked as Bodie stood up from their supper fire after they finished eating. \"As if I didn't know.\"\n\n\"I've hardly gotten a glimpse of Savannah\u2014I mean, Miss McCoy\u2014since we left Kansas City. And I sure haven't gotten a chance to talk to her. I want to see how she's doing.\"\n\n\"Do I need to come with you to serve as a chaperone?\" Moses asked with a grin.\n\n\"I just want to talk to her,\" Bodie said, slightly irritated. \"I don't plan to do any sparking with her, or anything else that'd need a chaperone.\" He paused. \"Besides, I reckon Mr. and Mrs. Bingham will be right there.\"\n\n\"I don't know, maybe you could convince her to go for a walk with you around the camp. I'm just saying...\"\n\nBodie waved a hand at his friend, clapped his hat on his head, and went to look for the Bingham wagon. He wasn't exactly sure where in the big circle it was parked.\n\nHe was walking past the area where the saddle mounts were picketed when he heard a murmur of voices. Something about the sound struck him as secretive, so he circled around the horses to see what was going on.\n\nSeveral figures stood in the deep shadows next to a wagon. They seemed familiar to Bodie, and as he came closer he recognized Jake Lucas, Clete Mahaffey, and Dave Pearsoll. They were having an animated discussion, but Pearsoll noticed Bodie coming and said something curt to the others, who immediately fell silent.\n\nJake turned to greet Bodie. \"What's up? Is MacCallister lookin' for us?\"\n\n\"No, not as far as I know,\" Bodie replied. \"What are you fellas doing?\"\n\n\"Oh, nothin' that amounts to anything,\" Jake said with a laugh. \"This 'tarnal idjit here\"\u2014he jerked a thumb at Mahaffey\u2014\"is tryin' to claim that he saw a panther today while he was scoutin'. I told him we're a heck of a long way from anywhere that a panther would be. Likely you just saw a coyote, Clete.\"\n\n\"Or a prairie dog,\" Pearsoll added in an uncharacteristic display of dry humor.\n\n\"You lunkheads are both wrong,\" Mahaffey snapped. \"I know what I saw.\"\n\n\"Where are you headed, Bodie?\" Jake asked.\n\n\"I, uh, thought I'd go see how Miss McCoy is doing,\" Bodie admitted.\n\nJake grinned. \"At least we know now why you left the gang back yonder in Kansas City.\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about that,\" Bodie said as he quickly glanced around to see if anyone was within earshot. \"That part of my life is over.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. It's the same way with all of us, pard. Although I wonder sometimes if you can ever leave behind who you really are.\"\n\n\"Sure you can,\" Bodie said. He hoped that was true, anyway.\n\nHe said so long to the three men and moved on toward the Bingham wagon. As he did, he wondered about the conversation they had been having. Even though he hadn't been able to make out any of the words, it had sounded to him as if they were arguing.\n\nBut somehow he wasn't convinced that they had been arguing about panthers.\n\nThoughts of Savannah crowded back into his mind and made him forget about the encounter with Jake and the other two former outlaws. When he reached the Bingham wagon, Savannah and Mrs. Bingham were cleaning up after supper. The cooking fire had burned down to a small blaze, but it gave off enough light for Bodie to see how pretty Savannah was, even with her face flushed slightly from washing dishes in an iron pot of hot water.\n\n\"Hello, Bodie,\" she said brightly. \"How are you?\"\n\n\"Fine. How about you?\"\n\n\"Oh... all right, I suppose.\"\n\nHe realized how stilted and uncomfortable this exchange was, but he couldn't seem to bring himself to relax around her. \"I haven't had much of a chance to talk to you since we left Kansas City.\"\n\n\"I know. Mr. MacCallister must keep you really busy with your scouting duties.\"\n\n\"He does. He's not overbearing about it, though. He just wants to keep the wagon train safe.\"\n\nLeticia Bingham came up beside Savannah. \"Goodness, you two need to start talking to each other like actual human beings. Savannah, let me finish up here. You go visit with Mr. Cantrell.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Savannah asked. \"Because I really don't mind\u2014\"\n\n\"Go,\" Mrs. Bingham said again. \"Sit on the wagon tongue. It's a nice night, just a little chilly. If you sit close, you won't be too cold.\"\n\nThe thought of sitting close to Savannah made Bodie's pulse race a little faster. He was grateful to Mrs. Bingham for suggesting it.\n\n\"All right.\" Savannah dried her hands on the apron she wore, then walked with Bodie to the front of the wagon. They sat down.\n\n\"I've been keeping an eye on our back trail,\" Bodie said. \"You know, just in case Kane sends anybody after us.\"\n\n\"After me, you mean. He probably doesn't have any idea who you are. You haven't seen anyone following the wagon train, have you?\"\n\n\"Not so far. And it's been several days. I think if they were back there, they would have caught up by now.\"\n\n\"I hope that means my note worked and that Kane has given up on finding me,\" Savannah said. \"But I don't want to talk about him anymore, Bodie.\"\n\n\"I don't blame you. I don't want to talk about the no-good scoundrel, either.\" He grinned. \"How do you like traveling with the wagon train?\"\n\nShe smiled back at him. \"Well, it's not like I never traveled by wagon before. The troupe travels from city to city in wagons, so I'm used to riding in one. Although Mr. MacCallister certainly has us covering more ground quicker than Cyrus ever did.\"\n\nBodie chuckled. \"Jamie MacCallister isn't one to let grass grow under his feet, that's for sure.\"\n\n\"You sound like you admire him.\"\n\n\"I've never met anybody else quite like him. The places he's been, the things he's seen and done... I could listen to him talk about them all day. I find myself thinking... a fella could do a lot worse for himself than trying to be like Jamie Ian MacCallister.\"\n\nSavannah's voice was quiet as she said, \"I think you're doing fine just being Bodie Cantrell.\"\n\n\"It's nice of you to say so, but\u2014\"\n\nShe silenced him by leaning closer to him and kissing him.\n\nThat took him by surprise. He wouldn't have thought she would be so daring with the Binghams only a few yards away. But he certainly didn't pull back from her, instead lifting a hand to rest it lightly on her shoulder as he enjoyed the sweet warmth of her lips on his.\n\n\"I told Moses we wouldn't need a chaperone,\" he whispered when she finally broke the kiss after a long, delicious moment.\n\n\"We don't.\" Savannah stood up. \"I'll be turning in now, Mr. Cantrell. I'll say good night.\"\n\n\"Good night to you, too, Miss McCoy,\" he replied, his voice thick in his throat.\n\nHe stood there while she went to the rear of the wagon and climbed in. If he was going to tell the truth, he had been thinking about Savannah and wishing he could kiss her ever since they'd left Kansas City. Now that he had...\n\nNow that he had, he realized as a grin broke across his face, he was ready to do it again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "\"Forget about sharin' the loot with Cantrell,\" Clete Mahaffey said as the three former outlaws resumed their conversation once Bodie had walked off toward the Binghams' wagon. \"That fool doesn't care about money, anyway. The only thing he can think about now is the girl.\"\n\n\"She's worth thinkin' about,\" Jake said. \"She's a mighty pretty gal.\"\n\nDave Pearsoll grunted and declared, \"A big pile of double eagles is prettier. That's what we've got, and I agree with Clete. I ain't inclined to share 'em with Cantrell. He didn't do anything to earn a share.\"\n\n\"He was with us when we took them off that train,\" Jake pointed out. \"Shoot, he helped Eldon and the others take over the depot and make sure the train stopped. We wouldn't have that pile of double eagles if they hadn't done that.\"\n\n\"But he wasn't there when we risked our necks to steal them from Swint,\" Mahaffey said. \"Anyway, he quit the gang back there in Kansas City. That was his own decision.\"\n\n\"So did we,\" Jake reminded him. \"But I'm not gonna argue about it with you boys. Bodie don't know we've got the loot, and as long as he don't know he can't say that we're cheatin' him out of anything. So I'll go along with whatever you say. When the time comes to leave the wagon train, we'll go our own way and leave Bodie behind.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, when's that gonna be?\" Pearsoll asked.\n\nThat was the question they had been wrangling about when Bodie came up to them a short time earlier and caused Jake to come up with that story about the panther. Mahaffey and Pearsoll thought it was already time to leave the wagons behind and disappear in the middle of the night with the loot they had liberated from Eldon Swint, but Jake wanted to wait and stay with the train a while longer.\n\n\"We'll reach the Platte River in a few weeks,\" Jake said. \"By then, we'll know for sure whether or not Eldon's gonna come after us. If we haven't seen hide nor hair of him, we can figure he doesn't know where we are and go wherever we want from there. San Francisco, Mexico, wherever suits our fancy.\"\n\nDespite the fact that he was younger and less experienced than the other two outlaws, he was in charge and he didn't want them to forget it, so his voice hardened slightly. \"Until then, we'll stay with the wagons. If Swint and the rest of the gang show up lookin' for us with guns in their hands and blood in their eyes, we'll need all the help we can get fightin' 'em off. Bodie and his new friends will pitch in on our side, I'm sure of that. Those pilgrims will think they're under attack by owlhoots, and that'll be the truth. They just won't know the reason why.\"\n\n\"All right, all right,\" Mahaffey muttered. \"I reckon what you say makes sense, Jake. That big varmint MacCallister worries me, though.\"\n\n\"Me, too,\" Pearsoll agreed. \"Sometimes when he looks at me, it feels like he can see right through me, Jake. Like he knows everythin' I'm thinkin' or feelin'. Man's got eyes like a hawk... or an eagle.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about Jamie MacCallister,\" Jake said. \"He's just like Bodie.\" He grinned. \"He don't suspect a thing.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Moses was checking the hubs on his wagon wheels to see if they needed to be greased again when he heard rapid footsteps coming up behind him.\n\nHe straightened and turned quickly, not really expecting trouble right in camp but knowing that it was best to be careful. He relaxed when he saw the two children who had just run up to his wagon.\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Danzig,\" Alexander Bradford said.\n\n\"Hello,\" his sister Abigail added.\n\n\"Good evening to you, children,\" Moses told the youngsters with a solemn nod. \"What brings you to see me? Shouldn't you be back at your father's wagon, getting ready to go to sleep? You know how Mr. MacCallister likes to make an early start in the morning!\"\n\n\"We were hopin' you could show us that toy again,\" Alexander said.\n\n\"You know, the spinning one,\" Abigail said.\n\nMoses grinned. \"Ah, you mean the dreidel. Let me get it.\"\n\nThey had seen him idly spinning the dreidel one day back in Kansas City. It helped him to think, and he had explained a little about it to them during that conversation.\n\nHe climbed into the wagon over the lowered tailgate and emerged a moment later to hop back down to the ground. Motioning for Alexander and Abigail to come closer, he poised the four-sided top on the tailgate. \"Here we go.\"\n\nGrasping the little shaft that stuck up from the dreidel, he flicked it between his thumb and index finger and gave it a spin. The top whirled so fast that the four Hebrew letters painted on it, one on each side, blurred and became unreadable.\n\nNot that the children could have read them anyway, Moses thought. He was quite probably the only member of the wagon train who could.\n\nBut they enjoyed watching the top spin. Abigail clapped her hands together and giggled. Alexander grinned and fidgeted, shuffling his feet back and forth. Moses knew the boy was anxious to try spinning the top himself.\n\n\"We use the dreidel to play a game during one of my people's holidays,\" Moses told them.\n\n\"Like Christmas?\" Abigail asked.\n\n\"Well, not exactly. Our holiday is called Hanukkah, which means the Feast of Lights, and even though it comes at about the same time of year as Christmas, it's different\u2014\"\n\n\"Alexander! Abigail!\" The angry bellow came from Reverend Bradford, who stalked toward Moses's wagon with his hands clenched into knobby-knuckled fists.\n\nThe children scurried away from the tailgate, obviously not wanting to incur any more of their father's wrath than they already had by being there. Moses frowned. He didn't like to see children acting so frightened. He worried that they had good reason to be scared.\n\nThe dreidel had stopped spinning and fallen over onto its side. Moses picked it up and held it in his hands where Bradford could see it and hopefully realize that he had just been entertaining the youngsters with a harmless toy. \"Good evening, Reverend.\"\n\nBradford came to a stop and glared at him. \"What are you doing with my children?\"\n\n\"I was just showing them the dreidel,\" Moses explained. \"I was going to let them play with it.\"\n\n\"You were preaching your heathen religion to them!\"\n\nMoses shook his head. \"Not at all. I wouldn't do that. They're just children.\"\n\n\"I heard you telling them about your Hebrew holiday, the one you celebrate instead of Christmas.\" Bradford stabbed a blunt finger toward the dreidel. \"Look at it! It's got religious symbols painted on it!\"\n\n\"They're just Hebrew letters\u2014\" Moses stopped and drew a deep breath. It was true that the markings on the dreidel had some significance in his faith, and as a rabbi he could have explained all that to Bradford in a calm, rational manner, but he knew the man didn't want to hear it.\n\nInstead he said simply, \"I'm sorry. If you'd rather the children not play with it, I'll honor your wishes, of course.\"\n\n\"I'd rather that they not have anything to do with the likes of you,\" Bradford snapped. \"If they come around here again, you send them packing, you hear?\"\n\nMoses made an effort to hang on to his temper. \"All right. They're your children.\"\n\n\"And don't you forget it.\"\n\nBradford turned and stalked off across the camp. Alexander and Abigail had already disappeared, no doubt scurrying back to their wagon.\n\nMoses watched the man go and shook his head. It was a shame that Bradford had to be so hostile, but with some people, once they made their minds up there was no changing them.\n\n\"The reverend's lucky you didn't take a swing at him.\"\n\nThe quiet voice made Moses jerk his head around. The huge shape that loomed up in the firelight was instantly recognizable as that of Jamie Ian MacCallister.\n\n\"Mr. MacCallister,\" Moses said. \"I didn't hear you.\" He had wondered before how a man as large as Jamie could move so silently. The big frontiersman was as stealthy as Moses supposed an Indian to be.\n\n\"I was keeping an eye on things. If Bradford had jumped you, I would have stepped in. If you'd needed my help, that is.\"\n\n\"I think that's a foregone conclusion. I'm not exactly what you'd call a... a brawler.\"\n\n\"No, but you've got sand.\"\n\n\"Sand?\" Moses repeated with a frown.\n\n\"Courage,\" Jamie said.\n\nMoses shook his head slowly. \"I don't know about that. I've never been renowned for my bravery.\"\n\nJamie hooked his thumbs in his gun belt. \"You came all the way to this country from Poland and then set out across it just because that's what your faith told you to do, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Well, yes,\" Moses admitted. \"But that's my calling, I guess you'd say.\"\n\n\"You joined up with a wagon train full of folks different from you, knowing that some of 'em wouldn't like you, but you're as friendly as you can be toward them and do everything you can to help out.\"\n\nMoses spread his hands. \"What can I say, I was raised to get along with people. And to be practical. I have to get to Oregon somehow, and this seemed like the quickest way.\"\n\nJamie sat on the tailgate. \"Most of my spiritual beliefs, if you can call 'em that, come from the Indians. They figure we all had to get here somehow, and that somebody put us here. Some of them call him Man Above, some call him the Great Spirit. They have other names for the creator, too. But no matter what they call him, there's always somebody bigger than us, somebody who looks out for us and expects us to be the best folks we can.\"\n\n\"Nothing in my faith would disagree with that,\" Moses said.\n\nJamie nodded. \"That's what I'm saying. Bradford's got it in his head that he's got all the answers. Me?\" The big man chuckled. \"I don't reckon I even know all the questions yet. Probably won't while I'm still on this earth. But what I do know is that you'll do to ride the river with, Moses Danzig.\"\n\n\"Ride the river? I'm afraid I don't understand.\"\n\nJamie lifted a hand to say good night, and as he turned away he told Moses, \"By the time we get where we're going, you'll have figured it out.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "The months she had spent with the theatrical troupe had gotten Savannah in the habit of going to bed late and sleeping late in the morning. She'd had to get over that in a hurry, and after a couple days of being extremely groggy most of the day after being rousted out of her bedroll early, she was starting to get used to the schedule set by Mr. MacCallister.\n\nIn fact, she awoke this morning even before he came around to make sure everyone was up and about, getting ready for the day's journey. The pattering of rain on the wagon's canvas cover may have had something to do with that. It was a soothing sound, but at the same time it was different enough to make Savannah want to get up and see how the weather was.\n\nMr. and Mrs. Bingham slept in an actual bunk built into the side of the wagon, while Savannah rolled up in blankets next to the tailgate. She lifted her head and pushed the canvas flap aside to peer out, only to discover that she couldn't see anything. The thick cloud cover made the predawn hours even darker than usual.\n\nSavannah wasn't sure what time it was, but she suspected it was late enough that Mr. MacCallister would be coming around soon. She pushed the blankets aside, sat up, and dug around in the bag she had brought with her until she found her rain slicker. The idea of going out in the rain to attend to her personal needs didn't appeal to her, but she didn't have any choice.\n\nShe pulled the slicker on and climbed out of the wagon, dropping easily to the ground. It wasn't very muddy yet, which told her the rain hadn't been falling for long. It was just a drizzle at the moment, not much more than a fine mist.\n\nSavannah thought she might try to go ahead and rig a cover of some sort so that she could get a fire started using chunks of wood from the supply that the Binghams carried in a rope sling underneath the wagon's body.\n\nThat would wait until she had taken care of her other chores. She took a couple of steps away from the wagon...\n\nThe arm that came out of the darkness wrapped around her with brutal, startling force, jerking her off her feet. She opened her mouth to scream, but before any sound could come out, a big, powerful hand clamped across her mouth and silenced any cry.\n\nDuring the night a steady rain began to fall. Jamie wasn't surprised. So far the weather had been cool and clear, almost perfect for traveling. He had known that such a run of good luck couldn't last.\n\nOne thing he and the other scouts would have to keep an eye out for was mud. Heavy wagons had a tendency to bog down on muddy ground. Jamie hoped that they could put some miles behind them as long as the rain wasn't falling too hard. With a slow drizzle, it would take a while before the ground softened enough to cause a problem.\n\n\"Let's go, let's go!\" He called as he strode through the camp, his powerful voice carrying from one side of the circle to the other. \"We need to get a move on!\"\n\nHe heard a thud from the direction of one of the wagons, then his keen ears picked up what sounded like a scuffle. As he swung in that direction his eyes narrowed. The thick overcast made it difficult to see, and so did the water dripping off the brim of his hat.\n\nHe was able to make out several figures near the back of one of the wagons, however, and the way they lurched back and forth told him that a struggle was going on.\n\nHe broke into a run toward the wagon. He didn't shout or announce in any other fashion that he was on his way, but loped across the ground in near-silence, a runaway locomotive of a man clad in buckskins.\n\nAs he came closer, he could tell that one of the struggling figures wore a dress, and he had a pretty good idea who the woman was. She had to be Savannah McCoy. A tall, male shape had his arms around her, and two more men hovered nearby, ready to grab her if she managed to get away.\n\nJamie targeted one of those other two men first, clubbing his fists together and swinging them with all the power of his brawny arms and shoulders and his own momentum. They smashed into the back of the unsuspecting man's neck with the force of a sledgehammer, causing him to drop like a stone.\n\nThe other man yelled in alarm and whirled toward Jamie. The goal of sneaking into the wagon camp during the predawn hours when everybody was asleep, grabbing Savannah, and getting out again without being detected was ruined, so there was no longer any need for stealth. A shot roared as flame gouted from the muzzle of a gun, almost singeing Jamie's face.\n\nBefore the intruder could fire again, the fingers of Jamie's left hand closed around the wrist of the man's gun hand. He thrust that arm skyward and gave the wrist such a powerful wrench that bones snapped like kindling.\n\nThe man started to scream in pain, but Jamie put an abrupt stop to that with a pile-driver punch that broke more bones in the man's face and knocked him out cold. When Jamie let go of him, the man flopped to the ground.\n\nThe hombre who had hold of Savannah swept her up bodily, threw her over his shoulder like she was a sack of grain, and took off running through the cold mist.\n\nJamie couldn't risk a shot with Savannah in the man's grasp, so all he could do was give chase. The man he was pursuing was tall, and his long legs covered the ground quickly. Jamie lost sight of him in the gloom, then spotted him again.\n\nHe spotted something else, too: tall, bulky shapes that could only be picketed horses. He grimaced. Sundown and the other saddle mounts were back at the camp. If the kidnapper managed to get on one of those horses with Savannah, he could gallop away into the darkness before Jamie could return to the camp and grab a mount of his own.\n\nJamie wasn't built for running, and he wasn't as young as he used to be, but he poured on as much speed as he could and saw that he was closing the gap. Savannah was still struggling, and that threw her captor off his stride.\n\nWhen Jamie judged that he was close enough, he left his feet in a diving tackle that caught the man around the knees. Savannah yelped as the man fell and she went sailing through the air. Jamie hoped she would be all right when she landed, but he didn't have time to check on her. He had his hands full with the man he had just brought down.\n\nThe kidnapper rolled over and launched a kick that caught Jamie on the left shoulder. It was powerful enough to make the big frontiersman's arm go numb.\n\nJamie grimaced but didn't make a sound. When the man tried to kick him again, Jamie caught hold of the man's foot with his right hand and heaved, rolling the man over onto his belly. Jamie scrambled after him, intending to pin the man down with a knee in the small of his back.\n\nHis opponent twisted aside and shot a fist upward in a blow that landed on Jamie's jaw, a powerful punch that threw Jamie to one side.\n\nIt had been a good long while since he had faced anybody who was almost his equal in size and strength. In a way, he almost looked forward to continuing the battle, he thought as he slapped a hand against the muddy ground and pushed himself up.\n\nThe two men came to their feet at practically the same instant, about ten feet apart. Jamie glanced around to see if he could locate Savannah, but it was still too dark. He saw a fuzzy, wavering glow coming through the rain from the direction of the wagon train, though. The shot that had been fired had roused the immigrants and somebody had lit a lantern. He hoped Savannah was already on her way back to them, seeking help.\n\nThen he no longer had time to worry about anything because the other man charged him, malletlike fists swinging dangerously at the end of long, powerful arms." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "They were like two bulls coming together. Jamie blocked the man's first punch, but the second got through and crashed against his sternum, rocking him back a step. Jamie planted a foot on the ground and counterpunched, twisting at the hips as he threw a right that landed cleanly on the man's jaw.\n\nFor a long moment, they stood there toe-to-toe, slugging away at each other. Jamie was hammering away at his opponent, doing plenty of damage. His massive, heavily muscled form was able to absorb a great deal of punishment, but he knew he couldn't keep it up forever.\n\nThe man suddenly changed tactics, feinting and then lunging forward to catch Jamie in a bear hug.\n\nThe collision knocked both men off their feet again. They rolled over and over on the wet ground, grappling and wrestling and trying to get the upper hand. The would-be kidnapper managed to slide his arm around Jamie's neck from behind, and suddenly it clamped down across the big frontiersman's throat like an iron bar, cutting off his air.\n\nJamie drove an elbow back into the man's belly, causing him to grunt in pain and expel a big gust of foul-smelling breath. That loosened the grip on Jamie's neck just enough for him to twist halfway around and wedge his elbow under the man's chin. He levered the man's head back and broke free completely.\n\nThe separation lasted only a second before they were wrapped around each other again, battling for any advantage. Jamie grabbed the man's hair, hunched his shoulders, and head-butted the man in the face.\n\nHe sensed the tide swinging in his direction, but at that moment something smashed against the side of his head with stunning force. The dark predawn lit up with jagged red lightning bolts he knew were only inside his head.\n\nIn the few seconds that his muscles refused to obey his brain's commands, the man shoved him away. Jamie knew there was a good chance the intruder had hit him with a gun, which meant the next thing might be a shot. He forced himself to move, galvanizing his muscles through sheer force of will and rolling across the ground.\n\nA revolver went off with a roar like thunder. Jamie saw the muzzle flash, dragged out his right-hand .44, and returned the fire. With rain in his eyes and his head still spinning from the clout he had taken, he couldn't tell if he hit anything.\n\nThe next moment he heard hoofbeats pounding against the ground and knew his shot hadn't found its target. The intruder had gotten on one of the horses and was fleeing. Jamie lifted the Colt and triggered three more shots in the direction of the sound, but he knew it would be sheer luck if he hit the man.\n\nAs he climbed to his feet, he saw lights from the wagon train bobbing closer. People were coming to see what was going on. They were probably pretty spooked, so to keep them from getting trigger-happy, Jamie called, \"Hold your fire! It's MacCallister!\"\n\nBodie Cantrell was in the lead when the group of armed men hurried up to Jamie. \"Mr. MacCallister! Are you all right?\"\n\nJamie was covered with mud and he knew that by the next day he would be stiff and sore from the fight. \"I'm fine. What about Savannah?\"\n\n\"She's all right,\" Bodie said. \"She ran back to the wagons and told us you were out here fighting with the man who tried to carry her off. Where is he?\"\n\n\"Gone,\" Jamie replied curtly. \"He got on a horse and lit a shuck before I could stop him. At least we've got the two I left back in camp.\"\n\nBodie shook his head. His face was etched with grim lines in the lantern light. \"There's only one man in camp, and he's dead. His neck is broken.\"\n\nJamie grunted. Obviously, the man he'd hit in the back of the neck with his clubbed fists had been injured worse than he thought. It wasn't the first time he had killed a man with his bare hands, but it had been a while since that happened. \"There was another one. I'm pretty sure I broke his wrist. May have broken his nose or a cheekbone, too. He was out cold when I left him.\"\n\n\"He must have come to, crawled off in the dark, and slipped away,\" Bodie said. \"As soon as it gets light enough, we can search for him\u2014\"\n\nJamie waved away that suggestion. \"We've got better things to do. As bad as he's hurt, he's not going to be interested in causing any more trouble for us. He'll probably try to find one of the horses he and his friends brought with them and head on back to Kansas City.\"\n\nAnd if the man wasn't able to catch one of the horses, he'd probably die out there, injured as he was. Jamie wasn't going to waste any time worrying about a no-good kidnapper, though.\n\nBodie said, \"They had to be some of Kane's men. They didn't pick Savannah at random to go after.\"\n\n\"I reckon you're right about that. Help me find my hat.\"\n\nIt was Hector Gilworth who found Jamie's hat in the mud where it had fallen off and gotten trampled on during the battle. \"Looks like it's in pretty bad shape,\" he said as he handed it to Jamie.\n\n\"The rain'll wash the mud off,\" Jamie said as he punched it back into shape. \"This old hat's been through almost as much as I have. It'll be all right.\"\n\nThey trooped back to the wagons. Jamie told Hector and Jess to make sure everybody was awake and preparing for the day's journey, then he went with Bodie to the Binghams' wagon. He wanted to talk to Savannah and see for himself that she was really all right.\n\nA lantern was burning inside the wagon, its yellow glow coming through the gaps around the canvas flaps in front and back. Bodie stepped up to the tailgate. \"Savannah?\"\n\nLeticia Bingham pulled the flap aside. \"She's resting. What do you want, Mr. Cantrell?\"\n\n\"Mr. MacCallister wants to talk to her.\"\n\nSavannah might have been resting, but she wasn't sleeping. She heard what Bodie said and spoke up from behind the older woman. \"It's all right, Mrs. Bingham. I need to speak to Mr. MacCallister, too.\"\n\n\"All right, dear, but you've been through an ordeal. You should take it easy for a little while.\"\n\nMrs. Bingham moved back, and Savannah put her head in the opening at the rear of the wagon. \"Mr. MacCallister, are you all right?\" she asked anxiously. \"I heard some shots...\"\n\n\"Nothing to worry about,\" Jamie told her. \"Those fellas are long gone and won't be bothering you again.\"\n\n\"You killed them?\" Her voice was hushed.\n\n\"Well... only one of 'em.\" But it wasn't from lack of trying, Jamie thought. He would have gladly sent all three of the varmints packing across the divide. \"The other two got away, but I don't think they'll be coming back.\"\n\n\"You can't be sure of that.\"\n\n\"Not much in this life is certain. Did you get a good look at any of them?\"\n\nSavannah shook her head. \"No. One of them grabbed me from behind. The big one who carried me off. I never even saw him. I didn't even have a chance to fight. But I did manage to kick the wagon tongue. I hoped that would make enough noise to attract someone's attention.\"\n\n\"So that's what I heard,\" Jamie said. \"That was fast thinking on your part. If you hadn't done that, they might've been able to drag you off without anybody noticing.\"\n\nA shudder went through Savannah at the thought. \"You said a couple of them got away. You know what's going to happen now, don't you, Mr. MacCallister? Now they're sure that I'm traveling with the wagon train. They'll go back to Gideon Kane and tell him, and since this attempt to kidnap me failed, he'll try something else. Something bigger and more dangerous.\"\n\n\"Let him try,\" Bodie said. \"We'll be ready for him.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Jamie agreed. But at the same time he was thinking that Savannah was right. Kane would send a larger group next time, and chances were that they wouldn't be worried about stealth. He would hire gunmen, and their goal would be to catch up to the wagon train and take Savannah away by force.\n\nIf that happened\u2014when that happened, Jamie amended because every instinct in his body told him that it would\u2014the rest of the pilgrims would be in danger as well.\n\nIt was too bad he hadn't taken the time to hunt up Gideon Kane while they were still in Kansas. He could have gone ahead and put a bullet in the varmint then and there.\n\nSometimes the simplest ways were the best." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "The rain continued as the wagon train rolled northwestward along the Blue River that morning. The sky was such a flat, leaden gray it seemed like the immigrants traveled in a depressing state of perpetual twilight.\n\nThe warmth of the sun was nowhere to be found. A dank cold had settled over the landscape, the sort of weather that chilled a person to the bone.\n\nJamie felt it in his bones, that was for sure. He felt every one of his more than sixty years of life.\n\nBut he didn't let that stop him from doing the job that needed to be done. He was out ahead of the wagon train with Hector Gilworth riding beside him as they watched out for muddy areas that the wagons needed to avoid.\n\nThe rain grew harder at midday, turning into a slashing downpour that quickly formed large puddles on the already wet ground. Jamie grimaced under the dripping brim of his hat as mud began to suck at Sundown's hooves. \"All right,\" he told Hector. \"We might as well turn around and tell the wagons to stop for the day before they get bogged down. If some of those wheels sink down far enough in the mud, it might take days to get them back out again.\"\n\nWhen they arrived at the lead wagon and told Captain Hendricks of the decision, the leader of the immigrants wasn't happy. \"We haven't covered much distance today,\" he complained. \"Don't you think we can push on just a little farther, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"No, I don't,\" Jamie replied bluntly. \"You'll be risking an even longer delay if you do. It'll be better to stay here, hope the rain stops tonight, and that the sun will come out tomorrow and dry the ground some. It hasn't been a very rainy autumn so far, so the dirt ought to suck up most of the water pretty fast once it gets a chance.\"\n\nHendricks heaved a sigh and nodded. \"Very well. Tell everyone to go ahead and make camp. We're not going to be able to build fires in this weather, though.\"\n\n\"It'll be a cold camp,\" Jamie agreed. If folks were smart, they would gnaw a little jerky, crawl into their blankets, huddle together for warmth, and wait it out.\n\nEarlier, he had told Bodie to drop back a ways behind the wagon train and watch for pursuers. It was possible the men who had sneaked into the camp early that morning to kidnap Savannah had been part of a larger force. If that was the case, they might make another attempt, and Jamie wanted some warning if that was going to happen.\n\nThe other scouts had seen that the wagons were stopped and came on in. Jamie left them to keep an eye on things while he rode back to meet Bodie. He had gone about half a mile before he saw the gray figure plodding toward him on horseback, shrouded in the curtains of rain.\n\nJamie reined in and waited for Bodie to come to him. He slipped a hand under the yellow slicker he wore and tried to dry it on his damp buckskins. He didn't have much luck with that, but it was better than nothing.\n\nThen he wrapped that hand around the butt of one of his .44s, just in case it wasn't Bodie Cantrell coming toward him through the downpour.\n\nA few moments later Jamie relaxed as Bodie hailed him. He took his hand off the gun.\n\n\"Any sign of anybody coming after us?\" Jamie asked as Bodie rode up to him.\n\nBodie sounded as wet and miserable as he looked. \"I didn't see anything but this blasted rain. Ulysses S. Grant could be right behind us with the Army of the Potomac, and I wouldn't know it!\"\n\nJamie chuckled. \"I think old Useless S. Grant has his hands full right now being president and dealing with that bank panic back east I heard about. He's too busy to be chasing us, even if he had any reason to.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but I still say there could be an army back there. You couldn't prove it by me one way or the other.\"\n\n\"We'll figure there's not,\" Jamie said. \"Come on. I'd say you can go get warm, but I'm afraid that may be an impossible chore under these conditions.\"\n\n\"How long do you think it's going to rain?\" Bodie asked as they rode side by side toward the wagons.\n\n\"Hard to say. I've seen it settle in and rain like this for days. Maybe even as long as a week. Or it could stop tonight. You don't ever know.\"\n\n\"This is why you warned everybody it might be hard to reach Montana by Christmas.\"\n\n\"One reason,\" Jamie said. \"There are still plenty of other things that can go wrong, too.\"\n\nWhen they arrived at the camp, Jamie saw that the wagons had been formed into a circle, as usual, and the men were unhitching their teams. As they passed the Bingham wagon, Savannah stuck her head out the back. \"Why don't you two come in here and get out of the rain? It's miserable out there!\"\n\n\"I'll be back as soon as I tend to my horse,\" Bodie promised. \"How about you, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"I'm going to scout around for a while longer,\" Jamie said. \"Then I reckon I'll climb in with Moses, since he's got that wagon to himself.\" He touched a finger to the broad brim of his hat. \"But I appreciate the invitation, Miss McCoy.\"\n\nJamie made a big circuit around the camp on Sundown. Satisfied that there were no imminent threats, he rode to Moses Danzig's wagon, tied Sundown's reins to the vehicle, and unsaddled the big stallion. The horses and the other animals were going to be even more wet, cold, and uncomfortable than the humans, but there was nothing that could be done about that.\n\nHardships were part of life on the frontier. The sooner the immigrants knew and understood that, the better.\n\nJamie rapped his knuckles on the tailgate and climbed over it into the wagon.\n\nMoses welcomed him. \"Come in, Mr. MacCallister. I can't offer much in the way of hospitality other than a canvas roof over your head.\"\n\n\"Right now I'll take it.\" Jamie stripped off his slicker and hung it over the tailgate.\n\nMoses sat on a crate beside a candle burning on top of a keg and Jamie perched on a second crate. He handed an airtight to Jamie, who opened it with his Bowie knife. Moses then used the candle flame to heat up the can of beans, although it wasn't very effective for that chore.\n\n\"All the comforts of home,\" Moses said with awry grin. \"What do you think, Jamie? Is it going to rain for forty days and forty nights, like in the Old Testament?\"\n\n\"It better not. If it does, this prairie will get so muddy it's liable to swallow up the wagons whole.\"\n\nAs it turned out, they didn't have to worry about that. The rain stopped during the night. In the wee hours, Jamie woke up enough to be aware that he no longer heard it hitting the canvas cover, then he dozed off again. When he woke up at his usual time, long before dawn, and climbed out the back of the wagon, he tilted his head to look up at the sky.\n\nStars glittered against the ebony backdrop. The overcast had broken and the clouds had moved on, which meant the sun would be shining later.\n\nThe wagons wouldn't be going anywhere for a while, though. The softness of the muddy ground under Jamie's boots told him that. As long as the vehicles stayed put, they would be all right, but if they tried to move their iron-tired wheels would sink deeply into the earth.\n\nThere wouldn't be any early start that day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Once the sky cleared, the temperature had dropped during the night. Some of the puddles had thin skims of ice on them. But once the sun was up, the temperature began to rise and by noon the day was fairly pleasant.\n\nThe ground was still too wet for the wagons to risk moving. Out on the plains, there wasn't much chance for rainfall to run off. Once it fell, it had to soak into the ground, which took time.\n\nJamie conferred with Lamar Hendricks. \"Let's give it until tomorrow. I hate to waste a day, but we don't want to do anything that'll cost us even more time in the long run.\"\n\nWith a gloomy expression on his face, Hendricks nodded in agreement. \"I trust your judgment, Mr. MacCallister. I have a feeling that if Jeb Ralston were still our wagon master, we'd be good and stuck here.\"\n\n\"You might be right about that.\"\n\nSince he had plenty of time to kill, Jamie took Hector and Jess and rode out to make another big scouting circuit. He would have taken Bodie with him, but he was still hanging around the Bingham wagon so Jamie decided it would be better to leave him where he was. Jamie didn't expect any more trouble from Kane's men right away, but if anything came up, he knew he could count on Bodie to protect Savannah, even if it cost him his own life.\n\nBodie was head over heels in love with that girl.\n\nJamie and his two companions were riding about a mile west of the wagon train when Hector suddenly said, \"Look over there, Mr. MacCallister. Is that what I think it is?\"\n\nHector was smart enough not to lift his arm and point. Instead he indicated the direction he was looking with a nod of his bearded chin.\n\nJamie didn't have to turn his head to look. He had spotted the Indian pacing them a good five minutes earlier. The lone warrior was riding along the top of a slight rise about a quarter mile away.\n\n\"Pawnee, if I had to guess,\" Jamie said quietly. \"He's just taking a gander at us.\"\n\n\"What else can he do?\" Jess asked. \"There's one of him and three of us.\"\n\n\"There's only one of him that we can see,\" Jamie pointed out. \"Could be fifty more just like him right on the other side of that rise. Maybe more than that.\"\n\nHector and Jess got nervous expressions on their faces, and Jamie knew they were thinking about what he had just said.\n\n\"He wants us to see him,\" Jamie went on, \"otherwise we wouldn't know he was there. That's his way of making sure we know he's not afraid of us.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can say the same thing,\" Jess admitted. \"Redskins make me downright antsy.\"\n\n\"He's not looking for trouble right now. He's just curious.\"\n\n\"What about later?\" Hector asked. \"He could come back with a bunch of his friends, and they could be looking for trouble.\"\n\n\"We'll just have to wait and see about that,\" Jamie said.\n\nAfter a few minutes, the distant rider peeled away and disappeared from sight. His absence didn't seem to make Hector and Jess relax. If anything, they were more watchful than they had been earlier.\n\nThe three scouts rode back to the wagon train in the late afternoon.\n\nJamie told Hector and Jess, \"There's no point in saying anything about what we saw today. People would worry about it and might get all worked up for no good reason. I'll tell Cap'n Hendricks, and we'll let it go at that for right now.\"\n\nHector and Jess nodded in understanding.\n\nCaptain Hendricks, on the other hand, didn't take the news as well. When Jamie told him about seeing the Indian, he became agitated. \"We have to warn everyone on the train.\"\n\n\"So they can do what?\" Jamie asked. \"Keep their eyes open? They're already doing that if they've got any sense, and anyway, that's what the scouts and I are for, to serve as the eyes and ears of this wagon train. You don't want a bunch of inexperienced pilgrims on edge and ready to start blasting away at anything that moves. That's how innocent folks wind up getting shot.\"\n\nHendricks paced back and forth on the still-muddy ground next to his wagon as they talked. \"I suppose you're right. You're a lot more experienced at this sort of thing than I am. But I was hoping we could make it through to Montana without encountering any savages.\"\n\n\"We might yet,\" Jamie said, although he knew how unlikely that was.\n\n\"What about the ground?\" Hendricks asked. \"Do you think it'll be dry enough tomorrow that we can get started again and only lose one day?\"\n\n\"Maybe. As long as it doesn't start raining again tonight.\"\n\nLuck held. The weather remained clear, cold, and dry overnight, and the next morning Jamie swung up into Sundown's saddle and rode around the camp, checking the ground. He had waited until the sun was up so he could take a good look at the landscape, and he was satisfied with what he saw.\n\n\"We'll have to avoid any low spots that might be muddier,\" he reported to Hendricks, \"but I think if we're careful we can get these wagons rolling again.\"\n\nHendricks heaved a sigh of relief. \"I'll pass the word. We'll be ready to leave as soon as possible.\"\n\nSpirits were higher as the immigrants prepared to break camp. They had been able to build fires, cook food, and boil coffee, and even though the air was still cold, not having rain pouring down put people in a better mood. They worked enthusiastically as they got the wagons ready to roll again.\n\nSoon the line of canvas-covered vehicles stretched across the prairie again, rolling slowly to the northwest. Jamie sent out the scouts and took the point himself. Bodie Cantrell rode with him.\n\n\"The river's up,\" Jamie mused after a while. He nodded toward the line of scrubby, bare-limbed trees that marked the course of the stream, about half a mile west of the wagon train's route. \"I can hear it.\"\n\n\"Is that a problem?\" Bodie asked.\n\n\"Not necessarily. We won't be crossing it for a good while yet, so it'll have time to go down. But the fact that it's running like it is means that the smaller streams feeding into it are up, too, and we might come upon one of them and need to get across it.\"\n\nJamie's words proved to be prophetic. That afternoon, he and Bodie came to a creek that cut directly across the path of the wagon train. They reined in to study the fast-flowing stream, which was about sixty feet wide, filling the depression through which it ran.\n\n\"Normally that creek wouldn't be more than eight or ten feet wide and maybe a foot deep,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"How deep is it now?\" Bodie asked.\n\n\"Hard to say. Four or five feet, more than likely.\"\n\n\"Will we have to wait for it to go down?\"\n\nJamie rubbed his grizzled jaw as he frowned in thought. \"That might be the smartest thing to do, but to tell you the truth, I'd rather keep moving.\"\n\nHe decided to tell Bodie what he and Hector and Jess had seen the day before. \"I've got a hunch there's a band of Pawnee in the area, and I'd just as soon move on out, in case they consider this their hunting ground and figure we're interlopers.\"\n\n\"You think they'll attack us?\"\n\n\"They'll be less likely to if they can see that we don't intend to stay and cause them any trouble.\"\n\nBodie looked around. \"You reckon they're watching us now?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't surprise me a bit. Come on. Let's see if we can swim our horses across that creek. If we can, the wagons ought to be able to make it.\"\n\nSundown and Bodie's horse swam across the creek without any trouble. Jamie could tell that the water was deep enough to float the wagons. The current was fast, but the oxen and mules would be able to handle it.\n\nThe wagons were catching up, and Jamie and Bodie rode back to tell Captain Hendricks what lay ahead. Then Jamie went along the line of wagons, explaining to the immigrants how they would ford the creek.\n\n\"We'll take the women and children across on horseback,\" Jamie told his scouts when he had gathered them around him. \"That'll be less weight for the wagons, and it'll be safer for them, too. I think the wagons can make it without any problems, but if any of them get into trouble, I don't want a bunch of kids who maybe can't swim getting dumped in the creek.\"\n\nJake grinned at Bodie. \"I bet I know which of the ladies you'll be ferryin' across, Bodie.\"\n\n\"I'll do whatever I'm told,\" Bodie said stiffly.\n\nJamie jerked a thumb toward the Bingham wagon. \"Go ahead and get Miss McCoy, Bodie. Nobody's going to stop you.\"\n\nBodie smiled somewhat sheepishly and turned his horse to fetch Savannah.\n\nLamar Hendricks had his wagon poised at the edge of the stream. As Jamie moved his horse up alongside the vehicle, Hendricks said, \"I'm ready to give this a try, Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\n\"Let the team do the work for you,\" Jamie told him. \"Just keep 'em moving as steady and straight across as you can. The current will push you downstream some, but not enough to worry about.\"\n\nHendricks nodded. He used the whip on the rumps of the stolid oxen and got them moving. They plodded forward into the creek, obviously a little reluctant to fight the current, but as it took hold of them they began to swim and pulled the wagon into the deeper water. Hendricks perched on the seat looking nervous as the vehicle began to float.\n\nSundown, with Jamie in the saddle, swam alongside the wagon. Jamie had his lasso ready to throw if the wagon happened to capsize. He figured he could drop a loop over Hendricks and haul him out if necessary.\n\nHendricks made it to the other side of the rain-swollen stream without any problems. The wagon rolled up the shallow bank and came to a stop as he hauled back on the team's reins. He looked over at Jamie and sleeved sweat off his face, even though the day was still chilly. \"I never did like boats, and that's what it felt like I was on when the wagon started floating. I prefer solid ground.\"\n\n\"You did fine,\" Jamie told him with a grin. He turned his horse, took off his hat, and waved it over his head to signal the folks waiting on the other side. \"Come on over, one wagon at a time!\"\n\nThe crossing proceeded without incident for an hour, with the men guiding the floating wagons across while the scouts ferried the women and children on horseback.\n\nThen one of the women refused to leave her husband to take their wagon across. Hector swam his horse across the flooded creek to report on the situation to Jamie and Hendricks.\n\n\"The lady's name is Hamilton,\" Hector said after he passed along the news. \"She's being mighty stubborn about it.\"\n\n\"That's Alice Hamilton,\" Hendricks said. \"She and her husband R.G. were married just a couple days before we left Kansas City.\"\n\nJamie nodded. \"I remember. You folks were celebrating the wedding the night I met you.\"\n\n\"That's right. I suppose Alice doesn't want to leave R.G.'s side because they're newlyweds.\"\n\nHector looked uncomfortable as he said, \"I can take her off the wagon seat and bring her on horseback whether she wants to come or not, but I don't know how her husband will feel about that, Jamie.\"\n\n\"I don't reckon we want to go that far. Tell her she can stay with the wagon, but it's her choice.\"\n\nHector nodded, wheeled his horse, and urged the animal back into the water.\n\nThe Hamilton wagon was the second in line. Jamie watched as Hector conveyed the message to the young, recently married couple. Alice Hamilton clutched her husband's arm, clearly not intending to leave his side. She couldn't weigh very much, Jamie thought, so it shouldn't really make any difference whether she rode across on the wagon.\n\nA short time later, R.G. Hamilton urged his team of mules into the creek. They swam strongly toward the center of the stream.\n\nThe wagon hadn't reached the mid-point, when Jamie noticed that something was wrong. It was riding lower in the water than the others, and he felt a surge of alarm when he saw that it was starting to tilt. The cracks between the boards in these vehicles were supposed to be sealed with pitch to keep water out, but it was possible the Hamilton wagon had sprung a leak.\n\nJamie cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, \"Hector!\" When the burly scout turned to look at him, Jamie waved a hand toward the wagon, urgently gesturing for Hector to get out there and see what he could do to help. As soon as he had done that, Jamie heeled Sundown into motion and entered the creek from the north side of the stream.\n\nR.G. could feel the wagon tipping underneath him. So could his wife, who grabbed his arm even harder. He lashed the mules in an attempt to get them to go faster, so the wagon might get across the creek before it capsized, but it was taking on water too quickly for that.\n\nAlice screamed as the wagon suddenly rolled to the side. The water caught the canvas cover and pulled it over. Both Hamiltons were thrown off the wagon seat and disappeared into the muddy, fast-moving water." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Jamie jabbed his heels into Sundown's flanks and sent the big stallion churning through the creek toward the overturned wagon. Hector was coming from the other direction. So were Bodie and Jake, having heard shouts of alarm from some of the immigrants when the Hamilton wagon rolled over.\n\nJamie's keen eyes searched the water for any sign of R.G. or Alice popping back to the surface. Even flooded, the creek wasn't really that deep, but it was deep enough for a person to drown in it, especially if he or she was disoriented or had hit their head and was stunned.\n\nAlice Hamilton had bright red hair, so she was easy to spot when she broke the surface. The current was carrying her swiftly downstream. Jamie angled after her.\n\nWith Sundown's powerful legs stroking through the water, Jamie caught up with the young woman in a matter of moments. He leaned down from the saddle and reached for her as she flailed wildly in panic.\n\nHis hand wrapped around her wrist and he hauled upward, lifting her from the stream almost effortlessly as if she had been a child's toy. Hysterical with fear, she grabbed him, winding her arms around his neck and hanging on in sheer desperation.\n\n\"Take it easy,\" Jamie told her. \"You're all right, Miz Hamilton. Just settle down. I'll take you to shore.\"\n\nHis firm, steady voice seemed to penetrate her shocked brain. She still clung to him, but not quite as urgently. She began to shiver from being dunked in the cold water.\n\nJamie knew she would need to get out of the wet clothes as soon as possible. Some of the women could wrap her in blankets and set her down next to a big fire. That would thaw her out in a hurry.\n\n\"R.G.,\" she said. \"Where's R.G.?\"\n\nJamie glanced over his shoulder as he urged Sundown toward the northern bank. Several of the scouts were looking around, but it appeared they hadn't found R.G. Hamilton yet.\n\n\"Don't worry, some of the other fellas are helping him.\" Jamie kept her turned so she couldn't see the search going on in the middle of the flooded stream. It wouldn't do any good to worry the young woman when her husband might come thrashing out of the creek at any moment.\n\nLeticia Bingham and Savannah were waiting on the bank when Jamie got there, along with Alice's mother, who was almost as distraught as her daughter. Leticia reached up. \"Let us have her, Mr. MacCallister. We'll take care of her.\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I planned to do, ladies,\" Jamie said as he gently lowered Alice into their waiting hands. As the women hustled her away, he turned his horse and plunged back into the flooded creek. \"Any luck?\" he called to the scouts as he swam Sundown out to join them.\n\nBodie shook his head. \"There's no sign of him so far, Mr. MacCallister. He's got to be around here somewhere, though.\"\n\nJamie had a bad feeling. If R.G. had been knocked unconscious when he fell from the wagon, he could have drowned in as little as a minute or two. Several minutes had passed since the accident, and the situation was beginning to look bleak.\n\n\"Hey, over here!\"\n\nThe shout came from Jess Neville. He was about fifty yards downstream, where the roots of one of the scrubby trees on the bank extended out into the water. Something was caught in those roots. Grim lines formed on Jamie's rugged, weathered face.\n\nThe men on horseback headed in that direction. So did some of the immigrants on the northern bank who had heard Jess's shout. They all got there about the same time.\n\nAs soon as Jamie saw R.G. Hamilton's pale face and the wide, sightlessly staring eyes, he knew the young man was dead. The water had washed away the blood, but a large gash was still visible on his forehead. Obviously he had struck it on something when he fell, just as Jamie feared, and that had doomed him.\n\nJamie didn't think he had said more than a dozen words to the young man during the journey, but he felt sorry for what had happened, anyway.\n\nHe had known before they ever left Kansas City that not everyone in the wagon train would make it safely to Montana. Trouble along the way was inevitable, and so were losses.\n\nBut Hamilton was the first to die, and that was painful.\n\nJess Neville looked at Jamie. \"What do we do, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"Work him out of those roots,\" Jamie said flatly. \"Hector, give him a hand.\" To the other scouts, he added, \"The rest of you get back to work. We've still got wagons to bring safely across this creek.\"\n\nOne of the people who had come running along the bank, the wagon train captain looked pointedly at Jamie. \"We'll get started digging a grave. Reverend Bradford can conduct the service. He's the one who performed the wedding.\"\n\nIt was almost dark before the last of the wagons rolled out of the water and onto the northern bank. Some of the time had been spent hooking up extra teams to the Hamilton wagon and dragging it out of the creek. The men set it upright and examined it for the leak that had caused the tragedy and any other damage. All the goods inside the vehicle had been soaked, of course. Some of them were salvageable, and those that weren't would be discarded and done without.\n\nJamie assumed that Alice Hamilton would continue the journey to Montana Territory along with her parents and her two younger brothers. There was really nothing else she could do. They couldn't leave her out in the middle of nowhere by herself.\n\nThe burial service took place by torchlight that evening. Alice, who had started whimpering and moaning and wailing when she was told of her husband's death, hadn't stopped. Her mother and several of the women, including Savannah, tried to comfort her as best they could, but she was inconsolable in her grief.\n\nReverend Bradford droned on endlessly. Jamie tried to be respectful as he stood with the others, his hat in one hand and his head bowed, but he would have rather been almost anywhere else.\n\nWhen the service was finally over, the women led a weeping Alice away while several of the men began filling in the muddy grave where R.G. Hamilton's blanket-shrouded body lay. Somebody had fashioned a marker to put up.\n\nIt was a nice gesture, Jamie supposed, but ultimately meaningless. The elements would take that marker in a matter of months. It would fall and rot into the ground as if it had never been there. The mounded dirt would flatten out. And come spring, grass would poke up through that dirt, maybe a few wildflowers. By the next summer, no one would be able to tell there was a grave there.\n\nMaybe that was the way it ought to be. Man was on earth and then he moved on, sometimes after a long, full life, sometimes before it seemed like his days ought to be up. The answers to such things were beyond mortals, mused Jamie. They belonged only to the Man Above.\n\nBodie came up to Jamie as the immigrants scattered from the grave site and went about their business. \"What are we going to do now, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"You mean after we try to get some sleep?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow morning, when there's enough light to see, these wagons are rolling north toward Montana again. What did you think we'd do, turn around and go back just because one hombre's bad luck caught up to him?\"\n\n\"No, but\u2014\"\n\n\"This is the first grave we've had to dig since we left,\" Jamie said. \"I can promise you, it won't be the last.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Gideon Kane sipped from the glass of champagne and watched the woman cross the room toward him.\n\nHer walk was a thing of sinuous grace. Her blue eyes were full of temptation, and her mane of blond hair draped over her bare shoulders, dipping toward the creamy swells of her breasts exposed by the scandalously low neckline of the gown she wore. She could get away with such an outfit because her family was rich. Her name was Deirdre Burton.\n\nKane had taken her to his bed a couple times, and she had assumed that meant they would get married, creating a marital and a business relationship between their families. He had other ideas, however. He had quickly become bored with her that first night and given her another tumble later on just to make sure it hadn't been just an off night for him.\n\nThat experience only confirmed his first impression. The thought of spending the rest of his life with someone as bland and complacent as Deirdre Burton held no appeal for him at all. Good Lord, he told himself when he considered the idea, he'd have to take a new mistress every few weeks just to keep from dying of boredom.\n\nSavannah McCoy, now, she would be a different story, Kane thought as he took another drink of his champagne. Someone as fiery as she could keep him interested.\n\nShe was an actress, after all. From one night to the next, she could be anyone he wanted her to be....\n\n\"You give the best parties, Gideon,\" Deirdre said as she came up to him. Musicians played softly on the other side of the big ballroom. \"I'd love to dance with you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps later,\" he told her. \"I have a lot on my mind right now. Business matters.\"\n\nHe had expected Eli Harrison to be back with Savannah by now. It had been more than a week since the wagon train had left Kansas City.\n\nDeirdre leaned closer to him and said in a throaty voice she thought was seductive, \"I can take your mind off of business if you'd like, Gideon. I guarantee, you won't be thinking of anything except\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped her by pushing the half-empty glass of champagne into her hand. He had spotted Jenkins coming toward him, and he could tell by the expression on the butler's face that something had happened.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" he said curtly.\n\nShe had taken the glass instinctively and stood there with a surprised expression on her face. That look turned angry as he pushed past her and walked away, but he ignored it.\n\n\"What is it?\" he asked quietly as he and Jenkins met in the crowd of well-dressed men and women\u2014Kansas City's elite\u2014filling the ballroom.\n\n\"Mr. Harrison is back,\" Jenkins said equally quietly.\n\nKane's pulse surged as he caught his breath. If Harrison had returned, that meant\u2014 He quickly asked, \"Is she with him?\"\n\nWith a doleful look on his face, Jenkins shook his head.\n\nThe anticipation Kane had felt was replaced abruptly with fury. \"Where is he?\"\n\n\"In the study.\"\n\nKane stepped past the butler without another word. Several of his guests smiled and spoke to him as he left the ballroom, but he paid no attention to them. His rudeness might cause a minor scandal among the city's upper crust, but he didn't give a damn.\n\nHarrison had a haggard look on his ugly face when Kane came into the room. His appearance testified that he had spent several long, hard days in the saddle.\n\nKane closed the door hard behind him and snapped, \"What happened?\"\n\n\"We trailed the wagon train for a while, like you said for us to do. The girl's there with those immigrants. We saw her. Hell, I had my hands on her.\"\n\n\"But you let her get away?\" Kane couldn't believe it.\n\n\"MacCallister,\" Harrison spat out. \"He stuck his nose in. The man's as big as a blasted grizzly bear, and even faster than that. We tangled, and I did good just to get away from him. The fellas I had with me weren't so lucky.\"\n\n\"If you didn't get Miss McCoy, it doesn't matter if you got away from him,\" Kane said coldly. \"You failed.\"\n\n\"This time.\" Harrison's right hand clenched into a huge fist. \"I didn't take enough men with me the first time. I'm going to round up some more and go after the wagon train again. I've got a score to settle with that big bas\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care about your scores,\" Kane cut in. \"I just want Miss McCoy brought back here, and I won't tolerate another failure, Harrison. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"You bet I do. I can hire a dozen men?\"\n\n\"Hire two dozen if you want. Just bring the girl back here.\"\n\n\"And if anybody else gets hurt along the way? There are a lot of innocent pilgrims on that wagon train.\"\n\nThe scornful look that Kane gave him was more than enough of an answer to Harrison's question.\n\nHarrison spent the evening in some of the worst saloons, taverns, and dives in Kansas City, scouring them for gunmen who would be willing to sign on for the job of taking Savannah McCoy away from that wagon train.\n\nHe had tried being stealthy, sneaking in and carrying off the girl with no one the wiser until it was too late to stop them, and that hadn't worked at all. Things were going to get ugly next time. There would be gunplay, and people would die. And Harrison didn't care as long as he got what his boss was after.\n\nIf he let Gideon Kane down again, he knew he might as well keep going and never come back to Kansas City. He had seen Kane fly into a rage once when a drunken freighter had bumped into him on the street and his filthy boots had gotten dung on Kane's shoes. Kane had beaten the man to death with his walking stick, right then and there.\n\nThat wouldn't happen to him; Harrison wouldn't stand still for such an attack, and Kane no doubt knew that. He would just hire as many men as it took to beat Harrison to death rather than do it himself.\n\nHarrison was in a squalid saloon, looking for hardcases willing to hire on to use their guns, when two men sidled up to him at the bar. Harrison barely spared them a glance. They were tough enough in a way, he supposed, but not really the sort of ruthless professionals he was after.\n\nBut the smaller one, who had eyes like a pig and a swinish face, said, \"Word's gettin' around that you're hirin' men.\"\n\nHarrison shook his head. \"You must have heard wrong, mister.\"\n\nThe man got a shrewd look on his face\u2014if a pig could be said to look shrewd. \"You're not goin' after that wagon train Jamie MacCallister's leadin' to Montana Territory?\"\n\nHarrison stiffened. He supposed he had let a few too many hints slip when he was making the rounds of the saloons. But what did it really matter? Where he and the men he recruited would be going, there wasn't much law. In most places, there wasn't any. \"What if I am?\"\n\nThe short, squat man said, \"My name's Keeler.\" He jerked a thumb at his taller companion. \"This is Holcomb. We signed on as scouts to go with that wagon train when our pard Jeb Ralston was supposed to be the wagon master. That was before MacCallister broke his leg and stole the job for himself.\"\n\nThat was interesting, Harrison thought. \"So you've got a grudge against MacCallister?\"\n\n\"Damn right we do. But there's more than that, mister. We went over the route with Jeb more'n once. I'd say we know where MacCallister's takin' those wagons just as well as he does. Maybe better.\"\n\nGoing by what he'd heard about Jamie MacCallister, Harrison doubted that, but he was intrigued anyway. \"You think you could help me catch up to them?\"\n\n\"I know we could,\" Keeler said confidently. \"And if you plan on tanglin' with MacCallister... well, we wouldn't mind gettin' in on that, too.\"\n\nHe and his men would be able to travel faster if they knew where the wagon train was going, Harrison thought. They might even be able to get ahead of the wagons and set up an ambush. MacCallister would be watching his back trail, but he probably wouldn't expect death to be waiting in front of him.\n\n\"Keeler,\" Harrison said as he stuck out a big paw, \"you've got a deal.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Days of searching hadn't turned up any clues to the whereabouts of the men who had stolen the loot from the train robbery. The failure filled Eldon Swint with a fury he was barely able to contain.\n\nWhen he finally found Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll\u2014and he would find them, he had no doubt about that\u2014he would see to it that they died long and painfully for daring to steal from him. Before he was through with them, they would wish a bunch of bloodthirsty Apaches had gotten hold of them instead.\n\nThe problem was... he didn't know where they were. The frontier was a mighty big place. Without some sort of trail to follow, it might take months, maybe even years, to locate the thieves.\n\nSwint was sitting in the Bella Royale, seething as usual and trying to distract himself with a bottle of whiskey. It wasn't working. He glanced up as Charley Green entered the saloon and crossed the room toward him. Green looked a little excited about something, which was unusual for him. He was usually about as stolid as a lump of stone.\n\nWithout waiting to be invited to sit down, Green pulled back one of the chairs and lowered himself into it. He reached for the bottle, but Swint pulled it out of reach.\n\n\"You look like you've got something to say, Charley,\" Swint told his second in command. \"Spit it out first, then maybe you can have a drink.\"\n\n\"I might have a line on where those three varmints took off to with our money.\"\n\nSwint's bushy, almost colorless eyebrows crawled up his forehead in surprise. He pushed the bottle back where Green could reach it. \"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Bodie Cantrell.\"\n\nSwint's eyebrows came back down in a frown. \"What about him?\"\n\n\"He disappeared the same night, didn't he?\"\n\n\"Well, yeah,\" Swint admitted. \"But he told me he was leaving the gang. He wouldn't have done that if he was mixed up with Lucas and those other two. That was just a, what do you call it, coincidence.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but Cantrell and Lucas were friends. Lucas could've told Cantrell what he and Mahaffey and Pearsoll were plannin' to do. Shoot, for all we know, stealin' those double eagles might've been Cantrell's idea.\"\n\nSwint restrained his impatience and the urge to take the bottle away from Green again. \"I've been over and over this in my head, Charley. You're not tellin' me anything that I don't already know. Let's say you're right and Cantrell was part of the whole scheme, maybe even the mastermind, although I still don't know why he'd draw attention to himself ahead of time. We don't know where Cantrell went any more than we do Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll.\"\n\n\"Maybe we do,\" Green said with a self-satisfied smile. \"I talked to a fella who saw Cantrell ride out with a wagon train the same morning that the others vanished with our loot.\"\n\nSwint leaned forward sharply in his chair, sensing with his predator's instincts that this might be the lead they had been looking for. \"How'd you happen to do that?\"\n\n\"I've still been goin' around town askin' questions, describin' all four of those hombres, not just Lucas and the other two but Cantrell as well, on the chance that he might've been involved. I found a fella who saw him with those pilgrims who were headed to Montana. It was just pure luck, I reckon, Eldon. Luck, and bein' stubborn about it.\"\n\n\"But the man you talked to, he didn't see Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll with the wagon train?\"\n\nGreen shook his head. \"No, but that don't mean anything. They could've rendezvoused with it later, after the wagons left town. That probably would've been the smart thing to do.\"\n\nSwint considered the theory. It made sense, but it was far from what he'd consider proof. On the other hand, they hadn't found any other leads so far....\n\n\"But that ain't all,\" Green went on. \"There's a fella goin' around town puttin' together a crew of hired guns to go after that wagon train.\"\n\nSwint's nostrils flared as he took a sharp, angry breath. \"Going after our money?\" he demanded.\n\nGreen shook his head again. \"No, from what I hear, they're after a girl who joined up with the immigrants here in Kansas City. She's some sort of actress, and they're workin' for a fella who's stuck on her and wants her brought back.\"\n\n\"I don't see what this has to do with us and that missing money,\" Swint said.\n\n\"I talked to some of the boys about Cantrell. They said that he was stuck on an actress from that show, too, and I figure it's got to be the same one, boss.\"\n\n\"How do you figure that?\"\n\n\"Because he quit the gang with no warnin', and then he shows up with that wagon train, too. It's all got to be connected.\"\n\nGreen was a good man, plenty tough, and he followed orders well and could be depended on. Swint had never considered him to be all that smart, though. But as he followed his lieutenant's reasoning, he had to give Green some grudging credit for his intelligence. The theory Green had worked out actually made sense, and it was the best explanation so far for what had happened.\n\nPlus it sure beat nothing, which was what they had come up with so far.\n\n\"So what are you saying, that we need to follow that wagon train?\"\n\n\"Well, it's a place to start, anyway,\" Green said.\n\n\"And if you're wrong,\" Swint snapped, \"we'll have lost a lot of time. Enough time that we might never be able to find those blasted thieves.\"\n\n\"It's up to you, Eldon,\" Green replied with a shake of his head. \"I've never pretended to be in charge of this gang and don't want to be. You're the boss and we'll do whatever you say. I just thought\u2014\"\n\n\"And you did a good job. I'll admit that.\" Swint took the bottle back from Green, tilted it to his mouth, and swallowed a long swig of the fiery liquor before thumping the mostly empty bottle down on the tabletop. He had reached a decision. \"Round up the rest of the boys. Get some pack animals and lay in plenty of supplies. We're liable to be on the trail for quite a while.\"\n\n\"So we're goin' after the wagon train?\" Green asked excitedly.\n\n\"We're going after the wagon train,\" Swint agreed. \"And it's a long way from here to Montana Territory.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "The weather held for several days as the wagon train continued northward. A glittering blanket of frost covered the ground every morning, but it melted away when the sun came up. Chilly winds blew from the north, sending towering white clouds scudding through the blue sky like tall-masted ships. The thick wool and sheepskin coats worn by the immigrants kept them from getting too cold.\n\nThe brisk air didn't bother Jamie. After the rugged life he had led and the iron constitution it had given him, he was practically immune to the weather unless it became really extreme. He enjoyed the cold, clear conditions.\n\nFor one thing, the wagon train was making good time again, and he was satisfied with the number of miles they covered every day. There was still a slim chance they would reach Eagle Valley by Christmas.\n\nOne of the teenage boys in the group had been recruited to drive R.G. Hamilton's wagon. R.G. had no family and had been traveling alone until romance had blossomed between him and Alice and they had wound up getting married in Kansas City.\n\nAlice insisted on staying with the wagon, even though she could have gone back to traveling with her family. Savannah rode with the grieving widow sometimes, keeping her company. After several days, Jamie sought her out at the Bingham wagon one evening to ask how Alice was doing.\n\nNot surprising, Bodie Cantrell was having supper with Savannah, Edward, and Leticia. Any time he wasn't out scouting, Bodie could be found somewhere near the Bingham wagon. He was so head-over-heels in love with Savannah that Jamie sometimes had a hard time not chuckling at the moonstruck look on the young man's face.\n\nThe good thing was that Savannah seemed to return the feeling. There weren't many things worse in this world than being desperately in love with somebody who didn't really give a darn about you.\n\nAt least, Jamie supposed that to be the case. He had never experienced such unrequited love himself, since he and Kate had been soul mates right from the start and that feeling hadn't lessened a whit over the years.\n\nIt had taken an outlaw's bullet to part them, and Jamie would carry that loss with him for the rest of his life.\n\n\"Would you like something to eat, Mr. MacCallister?\" Leticia Bingham asked him as he came up to the wagon.\n\nJamie shook his head. \"No, ma'am, but I'm obliged to you for the offer. Moses and I already had supper a little while ago.\" He grinned. \"I'm teaching him how to cook trail grub.\"\n\n\"How's he taking to that?\" Bodie asked with a smile.\n\n\"Not bad. He's a pretty smart fella. Can do most anything he puts his mind to.\" Jamie tipped his hat back. \"I really came to talk to you, Savannah, and ask how Alice Hamilton is getting on.\"\n\nSavannah's pretty face wore a solemn expression. \"It's been really hard on her, Mr. MacCallister. That's not surprising, of course, losing her husband like that so soon after they were married... although I suppose it would be difficult no matter how long it had been.\"\n\n\"Has she said anything about wanting to go back? She might be able to manage that, come spring.\"\n\nSavannah shook her head. \"No, it was R.G.'s dream for them to have a place of their own in Eagle Valley, and Alice seems determined to go through with that. She says she's going to take up the homestead R.G. intended to file. But other times...\" Savannah looked worried. \"Other times she acts like she's too overwhelmed with grief to go on. She says she doesn't think she can make it.\"\n\n\"Probably be a good idea for you to keep an eye on her as much as you can,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"You don't think she'd... hurt herself, do you, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"I hope not, but you never know what folks might do when they've suffered a bad loss.\" Some folks might even set out to hunt down an entire gang of vicious killers and outlaws, he thought.\n\nHe put that out of his mind and went on. \"If you get a chance, tell Alice's folks about how she's acting.\"\n\n\"They already know,\" Savannah said. \"They're worried about her, too. Her mother keeps trying to talk her into coming back to their wagon, but Alice won't hear of it. She insists she's going to stay in the wagon she shared with R.G., because that's where she was happy.\"\n\n\"Seems to me like there would be too many reminders of him in that wagon,\" Bodie commented.\n\n\"People never really know what they'll do until they're faced with something. Then it's too late to prepare. You've just got to do what it takes to survive.\" That was something Jamie Ian MacCallister knew all about\u2014survival.\n\nThe next day dawned clear, but by noon there was a dark blue line on the northern horizon. Within an hour it had grown into a low cloud bank that seemed to be rushing toward the wagon train. To Jamie it looked closer with every minute that passed. He pointed it out to Bodie, who was riding ahead of the wagons with him. \"Blue Norther.\"\n\n\"A snowstorm, you mean?\"\n\n\"Might be some snow with it, might not be. At this time of year, it's hard to say until the blasted thing is right on top of you. But whether it snows or not, we need to stop and hunker down until it's passed us by.\"\n\nThey turned and rode back to the lead wagon. At Jamie's command, Bodie headed on along the line of vehicles, telling the drivers to stop and form up in a circle.\n\n\"What's going on here?\" Captain Hendricks asked.\n\nJamie leveled a finger at the onrushing clouds. \"We're in for a bad blow. The wind's going to be so hard it'll seem like these prairie schooners of yours are about to lift up off the ground and fly. The temperature's liable to drop forty degrees in an hour, too.\"\n\n\"But it's not much above freezing now,\" Hendricks protested. \"If it drops forty degrees...\" His eyes widened at the thought.\n\nJamie grunted. \"Yeah. That's what happens when you start out on a trip like this so late in the year.\"\n\nHendricks's face hardened angrily, but he said, \"What do we need to do?\"\n\n\"We'll go ahead and make camp. Build fires now while we still can and get some hot food and coffee in everybody. Then tie everything down tight to keep it from blowing away, climb in the wagons, and heap as many blankets and quilts as you can on top of you. It'll be a mighty cold night, but we ought to make it through all right.\"\n\nHendricks nodded. \"I'll make sure everybody gets busy and does what you said.\"\n\nFor the next hour, as the Blue Norther rampaged closer and closer, the camp was a beehive of activity. Everyone seemed to understand the seriousness of the situation. As the cloud bank swept in, it grew darker and more sinister.\n\nThe wind, which had been fairly light, died down to almost nothing as Jamie walked around the circle of wagons, checking to make sure everything was secured as much as possible. Most of the immigrants were worried. He tried to reassure them. They had all been through cold snaps back where they came from, he told them. A great plains norther was a mite more... enthusiastic, he explained, but they could ride it out.\n\n\"Keep everybody close,\" he said again and again. \"And huddle up together. You'll need the warmth by morning.\"\n\nSatisfied that the immigrants were as ready as they were going to be, he headed for Moses's wagon. The clouds had swallowed up the sun, and even though the hour was just past mid-afternoon, it was almost dark as night.\n\nThe wind hit while Jamie was walking across the camp.\n\nHe reached up quickly and grabbed his hat to keep it from blowing away. The wind smacked into his face like an icy fist. By the time he reached the wagon he was leaning forward into it, struggling against the violent gusts.\n\nHe climbed into the wagon, ducked through the opening, and pulled the canvas flap tightly closed behind him, tying it in place with the cords attached to it. He could feel the wagon vibrating from the wind pushing against it.\n\n\"You know, I've seen some bad blizzards back in Poland,\" Moses said. \"Is this one going to be worse, Jamie?\"\n\n\"Don't know. I've never been to Poland. I don't smell any snow in the air, though. I think we're just going to get the cold wind. But it's going to be mighty cold.\"\n\n\"You can smell snow?\" Moses sounded like he found that hard to believe.\n\n\"Sure. Snow, rain, dust storms... you get to where you can smell what the weather's going to do if you stay out here on the frontier long enough.\"\n\n\"Somehow I don't doubt it. I don't think I'd doubt anything you had to tell me, Jamie.\"\n\n\"Oh, I can spin a few windies when the mood strikes me,\" Jamie said with a smile. \"But when it comes to getting by out here, I won't steer you wrong.\"\n\nThe wind began to howl in mindless shrieks that sounded like lost souls being tormented in hell. It made the cold seem even more numbing. Jamie dug an old buffalo robe he'd had for more than thirty years out of his gear and wrapped himself in it. Night closed down quickly, and he slept the way any frontiersman would sleep when he had the chance.\n\nHe woke to shouts, stirred himself, crawled out of the buffalo robe, and untied the flap over the back of the wagon. He had just stuck his head out when Savannah McCoy came running toward the vehicle, carrying a lantern and calling urgently, \"Mr. MacCallister! Mr. MacCallister!\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\nSavannah lifted her stricken face toward him. \"It's Alice Hamilton, Mr. MacCallister. She's gone!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\"What do you mean, gone?\" he asked Savannah as he climbed out of Moses's wagon.\n\n\"I decided she shouldn't be alone tonight and went over to her wagon right after the wind hit. Alice seemed glad to see me. We put our bedrolls next to each other on the floor. I... I tried to stay awake, but I dozed off. When I woke up, she wasn't there anymore.\" Tears began to roll down Savannah's cheeks. \"I'm so, so sorry\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop that. It's not your fault. Anything you did to watch out for that gal was from the goodness of your heart, and nobody's going to blame you for what's happened.\"\n\n\"Do you think something has... happened?\"\n\nJamie didn't answer that question directly. \"Let's go take a look around. Maybe we can find her.\"\n\nMoses was leaning out the back of the wagon. He had overheard what Savannah said, and asked, \"Should I rouse everyone else, Jamie, to help you look?\"\n\nJamie considered for a second. The wind was bitingly cold, and it was only going to get worse. Everybody was hunkered down in their wagons, buried in quilts and blankets, and that was where they needed to stay.\n\n\"Get Bodie and that fella Lucas,\" Jamie decided. \"We won't tell anybody else for now.\" He reached back into the wagon, got his hat, and tugged it down tight on his head. He pulled out the buffalo robe as well and wrapped it around his shoulders. Then he took the lantern from Savannah and headed for Alice Hamilton's wagon.\n\nHe studied the ground around the wagon for tracks, but it had dried out since the rain several days earlier and he didn't see any footprints. He found a place where he thought the dry grass had been disturbed, but he couldn't be sure about that.\n\nBodie and Jake Lucas arrived, looking half-frozen already even though they had blankets wrapped tightly around themselves. Bodie asked, \"What can we do to help, Jamie?\"\n\n\"We're going to look for Miz Hamilton, but we don't want anybody else wandering off and getting lost, so stay close together while we search.\"\n\n\"Do you think that's what happened to her?\" Savannah asked. \"Do you think she got lost?\"\n\n\"More than likely. She might've stepped out of the wagon to tend to some personal business, gotten turned around, and started off in the wrong direction, thinking she was coming back. By the time she figured out she was going the wrong way, she couldn't locate the camp anymore.\"\n\nThat explanation was entirely possible, Jamie thought. But his gut told him it wasn't the only explanation.\n\nSince her husband's death, Alice Hamilton had been trying to drag herself up out of a pit of despair. Maybe it had pulled her down so deep she couldn't escape from it.\n\n\"I'll help you look,\" Savannah said.\n\n\"No!\" Jamie and Bodie said at the same time.\n\n\"Get back in the wagon, out of the wind,\" Jamie told her. \"The four of us will find her.\"\n\nAs he, Moses, Bodie, and Jake spread out in a fan shape from the Hamilton wagon, Jamie thought about how the chances of finding Alice would be increased if more people were searching for her.\n\nBut the chances of somebody else getting lost and freezing to death would be greater, too. It was like the old saying about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Whatever he did increased the risk of somebody dying.\n\nWith the temperature dropping the way it was and the savage wind ripping away any trace of warmth, a person could freeze to death in an hour, maybe less. The frigid cold wouldn't kill as quickly as that flooded creek had, but it could kill just as surely.\n\nJamie cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, \"Mrs. Hamilton! Alice!\" The other men began calling her name, too. Somebody at the wagon train might hear the shouting and wonder what was going on, but that couldn't be helped. If Alice was lost and truly wanted to be found, the sound of their voices might save her life.\n\nThe yelling helped Jamie keep track of the other men, too. He didn't want to lose anybody else.\n\nThey spread out away from the wagon for what seemed like a long time. When Jamie estimated that they had covered close to a mile, he called his three companions to him. \"I don't think she could have gotten this far. We've missed her somewhere.\"\n\n\"She could have headed off from the wagons at any angle,\" Bodie pointed out.\n\nMoses suggested, \"Maybe we should go back and start over, taking a different direction this time.\"\n\n\"That's all we can do,\" Jamie said. \"Come on.\"\n\nThe night dragged past. First one hour, then two, then three. Jamie's worry had grown with every minute that ticked by. Somebody could survive in the wind for this long\u2014he and his companions were doing it, after all\u2014but they were all bundled up in thick jackets and blankets. Even so, they were suffering. Jamie knew he was going to have to call off the search soon or else risk the men suffering from frostbite.\n\n\"I... I can't feel my fingers and toes anymore,\" Moses said, reinforcing Jamie's concern for their safety.\n\n\"Let's head on back,\" he said with a heavy sigh. \"We can't do any more.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Bodie protested. \"You can't mean to just leave poor Mrs. Hamilton out here.\"\n\n\"I don't mean to let you three fellas freeze to death, either. Or lose your fingers and toes.\"\n\nMoses gulped. \"Is that what's going to happen?\"\n\n\"It could if we don't get you warmed up.\" Jamie herded them back to the wagon train.\n\nSavannah met them, and the lantern light revealed the worry etched into her face. Her expression fell when she saw that the men were alone. \"You didn't find her.\" It wasn't a question.\n\n\"We can't stay out there anymore,\" Jamie said. \"Maybe she found a place to get out of the wind and hole up for a while. There are little gullies and such\u2014\"\n\n\"You know she didn't,\" Savannah said. \"She didn't get turned around so that she couldn't find her way back to the wagons, either.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Jake Lucas asked.\n\nMoses said gently, \"I suppose she didn't want to live without her husband. She thought the pain was too much for her to bear and she couldn't go on. So she walked off into the night, never intending to come back.\"\n\nSavannah started to cry again. Bodie took her in his arms and drew her against him.\n\nJamie let the young man comfort Savannah for a few moments, then told her, \"You'd better go back to the Bingham wagon. The rest of us will hunker down in Moses's wagon. We can start searching again at first light. It'll be easier then.\"\n\nThey would be able to see better in the morning, he thought, but the chances of finding Alice Hamilton alive then would be practically nonexistent.\n\nHe didn't sleep much the rest of the night. Along toward dawn, the wind died down, ceasing its eerie howling. The stars came out as the overcast broke. And the temperature dropped harder and faster, like the bottom had fallen out of the thermometer.\n\nJamie and his companions resumed the search in the gray light of dawn. The air was so cold it seemed to burn their lungs with every breath. Huge clouds of steam fogged the air in front of the men's faces every time they exhaled. It looked like smoke wreathing their upper bodies.\n\nThey found Alice about half a mile from the wagons. She was in a small gully, all right, but from the way she was lying there it appeared that she had stumbled and fallen into it instead of seeking shelter. It hadn't saved her. Frost glittered on her open, sightless eyes, and her flesh was cold and hard as stone.\n\nBy the time they got back with her body, everybody in the wagon train knew that Alice was missing. Sobs filled the air as the men carried in her blanket-wrapped form. Alice's mother threw herself on her daughter's body and wailed piteously.\n\nJamie felt the grief that gripped the camp, but didn't show it. In his life he had seen so much death and suffering that he knew it was inevitable. He drew Captain Hendricks and several other men aside. \"It hasn't been cold enough long enough to freeze the ground. We'd better get a grave dug while we can.\"\n\n\"It's a shame the poor girl couldn't be laid to rest beside her husband,\" Hendricks said.\n\n\"I reckon it's a big country on the other side of the divide,\" Jamie said, \"but not so big that the two of them won't be able to find each other.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "As often happened out on the plains, within a couple days the fierce, freezing wind out of the north was replaced by a much gentler, warmer breeze from the south. Jamie knew it would be only a matter of time until the next Blue Norther came barreling down on them, so he wanted to cover as much ground as he could while the weather was decent. He pushed everyone hard and used every bit of daylight he could.\n\nThe grinding pace meant there wasn't much time to mourn Alice Hamilton. Her death and that of her husband were tragic and senseless, but those graves were behind the wagon train. Everyone needed to look ahead, because that was where the next challenge would be found.\n\nAs Jamie could have predicted, that challenge wasn't long in coming. He was riding the point with Hector Gilworth several days later when he spotted riders paralleling their course about half a mile to the west.\n\nWithout saying anything to Hector, Jamie turned his head and looked to the east. He saw more riders in that direction. That came as no surprise to him. He had been expecting something like this. The wagon train was just too tempting a target.\n\n\"Ride on back and tell Cap'n Hendricks to have everybody circle the wagons,\" Jamie said quietly to Hector.\n\n\"But it's the middle of the day,\" the burly, bearded scout protested. \"We don't usually circle up until we stop at nightfall.\"\n\n\"Well, we're going to today, because there are Indians on both sides of us.\"\n\nHector let out a surprised exclamation. \"Are they going to attack us?\"\n\n\"Too soon to say, but we'd better be ready in case they do. Now git!\"\n\nHector got, hauling his horse around and galloping back toward the wagons.\n\nJamie reined Sundown to a halt and sat easily in the saddle. As soon as the Indians saw the wagons forming up into a circle, they would know that their presence had been discovered. If they planned to attack, they would probably do it quickly, before the immigrants had time to get set up for defense.\n\nOn the other hand, it could be that the Indians just wanted to parley. Some of the tribes didn't mind the wagon trains passing through their territory as long as they received some sort of tribute in return for safe passage.\n\nThey liked to negotiate from a position of strength, though, which is why they usually showed up with a considerable number of warriors, all painted fiercely and bristling with lances, bows and arrows, and occasionally, rifles. They liked to throw a scare into the settlers.\n\nIt wasn't just for show. If things didn't go well, the Indians would welcome a fight.\n\nJamie turned his head slowly from side to side. More mounted figures were visible in both directions, and they were angling their ponies toward the wagon train. The Indians were closing in, but they weren't getting in any hurry about it. Jamie hoped that meant they just wanted to talk.\n\nHe turned the stallion and rode back toward the spot where the immigrants were hurriedly pulling the wagons into a circle. Seeing the train stopping, the other scouts and outriders were coming in, too, some of them galloping hard to make it back to the relative safety of the wagons.\n\nBodie Cantrell rode out to meet Jamie a couple hundred yards away from the wagons. \"Hector says there are Indians about to attack us.\" They both reined to a halt.\n\n\"That's jumping the gun a mite,\" Jamie said. \"Right now it looks to me like they don't want to fight. Of course, that could change mighty quick-like.\"\n\n\"What should we do?\"\n\nJamie narrowed his eyes in thought. After a moment he said, \"Your friend Lucas is pretty good with a gun, isn't he?\"\n\nBodie looked a little uncomfortable about answering that, but he said, \"Yeah, I suppose so.\"\n\n\"He's cool-headed and can take orders?\"\n\n\"I'd say so.\"\n\n\"Go get him. The three of us will ride out to see what they want.\"\n\nBodie nodded. He was aware that what Jamie was asking of him involved considerable risk, but he wasn't the sort to dodge trouble.\n\nWhen Bodie came back, he didn't have just Jake Lucas with him. Captain Lamar Hendricks rode with them, too.\n\nBefore Jamie could say anything, Hendricks spoke up to explain his presence. \"If you're going to talk to these savages, I need to be there. I was elected to be the leader of this wagon train.\"\n\n\"And I was hired to be the wagon master,\" Jamie said. \"Who'd you leave in charge back there?\"\n\n\"Hector Gilworth.\"\n\n\"Well, Hector's a good man, I suppose. If we all get killed, he'll put up a good fight.\"\n\nHendricks was a little pale under his tan. \"Do you think there's a chance we'll all be killed?\"\n\n\"There's always a chance.\" Jamie inclined his head toward the north. \"I reckon we'll find out pretty soon, because here they come.\"\n\nAbout a dozen warriors were trotting their ponies toward the four men. As they drew closer, Jamie saw that they were painted for war. But that didn't have to mean anything, he reminded himself. They might still be able to get out of this without a fight.\n\n\"Somebody else is coming from the wagon train,\" Jake said suddenly.\n\nJamie twisted around in the saddle to look. It was hard to surprise him, but his eyebrows rose slightly when he saw Moses Danzig riding toward them on one of the extra saddle horses.\n\nConfronting a bunch of potentially angry Cheyenne was just about the last thing Moses needed to be doing, Jamie thought. But it was too late to send the rabbi back to the wagons. Jamie turned back to keep an eye on the approaching Indians.\n\nAs Moses came up beside him, panting slightly from the effort of riding two hundred yards on horseback, Jamie said quietly, \"Moses, what in the Sam Hill are you doing out here?\"\n\n\"Hector wanted to let you know that we're all dug in and ready to fight if need be,\" Moses replied. \"He was going to send his cousin to do it, but I suggested that he let me ride out here instead. Jess can use a gun and I can't, so he's of more value there.\"\n\n\"If there's a fight out here, you can't even defend yourself.\"\n\n\"I'll trust in a higher power for that.\"\n\nJake said, \"On these plains, ain't no higher power than Mr. Colt and Mr. Winchester.\"\n\n\"We'll save the theological debate for later,\" Moses said. \"Oh, my. They're certainly savage-looking, aren't they?\"\n\nThe Indians were close enough to confirm by the markings on their faces and the decorations on their buckskins that they were Cheyenne, just as Jamie had suspected. As Moses had pointed out, they looked fierce.\n\nJamie remained utterly calm. That required an effort of will, but he kept his face just as stony as those of the warriors who brought their ponies to a halt about twenty feet away. Beyond them, about as far distant as the wagons were, a hundred more warriors waited on horseback.\n\nJamie raised a hand in the universal signal of friendship and said in the Cheyenne tongue, \"Greetings. We come seeking only a trail to travel peacefully to the north.\"\n\nOne of the older warriors in the group, a man Jamie suspected was the war chief for this band, responded. \"This is our land. We have hunted it for many, many moons. It gives my people life. We would not have it taken away from us.\"\n\n\"Nor do we wish to take it,\" Jamie said with the formality such parleys always demanded. \"If we hunt the buffalo, it will be for fresh meat only, and we will kill no more than one.\"\n\n\"You already have the buffalo with sleek hides,\" the Cheyenne said.\n\nJamie knew he was talking about the oxen. \"We do,\" he acknowledged, \"but we need them to pull the wagons. They are not for eating.\"\n\n\"If you kill a buffalo, you should replace it. Give us one of your animals for this buffalo of ours that you may kill.\"\n\nHendricks asked nervously, \"What are the two of you saying? It sounds very serious.\"\n\n\"He wants us to give him an ox,\" Jamie drawled in English. \"I reckon we can spare one. Unless you'd rather fight over one animal.\"\n\n\"No, no. Not at all,\" Hendricks said quickly. \"If that's all it takes for them to let us go on safely, then by all means, give them an ox!\"\n\nJamie conveyed that to the war chief, but before the Cheyenne leader could respond, one of the other warriors suddenly pushed his pony forward and spoke up angrily. \"It is not enough! We must have one of their women in trade for their safety as well!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Jamie instantly knew what the interruption was about. The warrior who had just made the outrageous demand was probably one of the war chief's rivals. He didn't want the encounter with the white interlopers to end peacefully. He wanted a fight, wanted the wagon train wiped out so that he could claim credit for the massacre and further his own cause among the tribe.\n\nThe varmint had to know good and well that the immigrants would never turn over one of their women.\n\n\"What did that one say just then?\" Hendricks asked. \"It didn't sound good. What's this about?\"\n\nThe chief turned to glare at the warrior who had butted in as Jamie said, \"The other fella has upped the stakes. He wants an ox... and one of your womenfolks.\"\n\nThe men gasped in shock and anger, and Jake exclaimed, \"Why, that dirty\u2014\" He grated out a curse and reached for the gun on his hip. He had just cleared leather when Jamie leaned over in the saddle and shot his hand out to clamp around Lucas's wrist to keep him from raising the revolver and firing.\n\nIt was too late. The damage had already been done. The warrior who had started this ruckus cried out and jerked a rifle to his shoulder, ready to fire.\n\nJamie heard some rapid words he didn't understand behind him, but ignored them. He was about to reach for his Colts, knowing that in another second the air would be full of gun smoke and flying lead and arrows.\n\n\"Stop!\"\n\nThe voice was old and not exactly powerful, but the piercing timbre of it cut through the air of impending violence and made all the men on both sides freeze in their actions. Another of the Cheyenne pushed his horse forward. He was ancient, his coppery face so lined with wrinkles that he seemed a hundred years old. His braided hair was pure white. But despite his obvious age he sat tall and straight in the saddle, like a much younger man. He leveled a buckskin-clad arm, pointing as he asked, \"Who is this mighty shaman?\"\n\nJamie didn't have any idea who the Indian was talking about. Realizing that the man was pointing past him, he glanced over his shoulder and saw Moses sitting on horseback, looking terrified. The young man's lips were moving as he muttered unfamiliar words under his breath.\n\nThe war chief reached over and grabbed the barrel of the angry warrior's rifle, forcing it down.\n\nJamie said harshly to Jake, \"Pouch that iron, mister!\" They had been given an unexpected respite, and he didn't intend to waste it. \"Everybody else, keep your hands away from your guns!\"\n\nThe tension was still thick as the two groups of riders faced each other.\n\nJamie went on. \"Moses, the old man is talking about you. He says you're a mighty shaman and wants to know who you are.\"\n\n\"A... a shaman?\" Moses shook his head. \"I don't even know what that is.\"\n\n\"A medicine man, like I suspect that old fella is himself. Sort of like the spiritual leader of the tribe.\"\n\n\"Oh. I suppose you could say that, although Reverend Bradford certainly wouldn't agree.\"\n\n\"What was that you were saying a minute ago, Moses?\"\n\n\"I was praying.\" A glimmer of understanding dawned on the young man's face. \"I was praying in Hebrew...\"\n\nBefore Jamie could stop him, Moses walked his horse forward, putting himself between the two groups. Several of the warriors lifted lances, but a sharp word from the chief made them lower the weapons.\n\nThe ancient Cheyenne moved his pony forward until he and Moses sat alongside each other with their mounts facing in opposite directions. Moses began speaking again in Hebrew.\n\nJamie didn't understand a word of the speech, of course. He didn't see how the Cheyenne medicine man could understand it, but the old man listened attentively. When Moses was finished, the old man surprised Jamie by lifting a hand and launching into a long speech of his own.\n\nJamie was fluent in the Cheyenne tongue, but what the medicine man was speaking was something else. It was similar to the Cheyenne language, enough so that Jamie thought he caught a word every now and then, but at the same time the words carried a sense of antiquity with them, as if the old-timer were speaking a long-forgotten tongue that had mostly vanished from the face of the earth.\n\nWhen he was done, he held out his hand. Moses clasped it, and they sat there like that for a long moment. Then the medicine man turned to the warriors and barked words in Cheyenne that Jamie understood.\n\n\"What's going on now?\" Bodie asked in a hushed voice.\n\n\"The old man is telling them to turn and ride away,\" Jamie explained. \"He says that we're among the favored of the Great Spirit and that their medicine will become very bad if they harm us.\"\n\n\"We don't have to give them the ox anymore?\" Hendricks asked as the Indians began to turn their ponies and ride away, some with obvious reluctance. They weren't willing to go against the old medicine man's decree.\n\n\"No, they won't bother us again, thanks to Moses.\"\n\nBodie said to the young rabbi, \"What in the world did you do, pard?\"\n\nMoses shook his head. \"I just called down blessings upon him and his people and told him that we were peaceful and would cause no trouble as we crossed the lands that traditionally belong to them.\" He smiled faintly. \"I said it in Hebrew, of course, and made it all sound a lot more flowery.\"\n\n\"And he understood you?\" Jake asked, visibly astonished.\n\n\"I don't know. He seemed to. Or maybe he just understood the tone of what I was saying.\"\n\n\"How about all that palaver he gave back to you?\" Jamie asked. \"Did it mean anything to you?\"\n\nMoses frowned. \"He wasn't speaking Cheyenne?\"\n\n\"Not the Cheyenne I know.\"\n\n\"That's... odd. I didn't actually understand what he was saying, of course, but every now and then I... I sort of felt like I ought to understand. Do you know what I mean?\"\n\n\"Like if you went back far enough, the lingo he was talking had something in common with what you were saying to him?\"\n\n\"Exactly!\" Moses exclaimed. \"And that makes perfect sense.\"\n\nBodie said, \"How in the world do you figure that?\"\n\n\"Have you ever heard of the Lost Tribes of Israel? In biblical times, the land of Canaan was ruled by twelve tribes. But when Canaan was split into two kingdoms\u2014Israel and Judah\u2014those tribes to the north that formed the Kingdom of Israel vanished from history and are now considered lost. According to legend, they were forced by enemies to leave their homeland and spread out across the world.\" Moses smiled. \"There are some who say that one of those tribes found its way to the North American continent and eventually became the Indians that we know today.\"\n\n\"Wait just a doggone minute,\" Jake said. \"You're sayin' that you... and those Cheyenne... are related somehow? Like distant cousins?\"\n\nMoses spread his hands. \"Well, it's just a theory... but you have to admit, that old medicine man responded when he heard me praying in Hebrew. The fact that we're all still alive and no blood was spilled... I'd say those prayers were answered, wouldn't you?\"\n\nJamie nodded. \"I'm not exactly sure how you managed it, Moses, and I don't care.\"\n\nAll the Indians had vanished. The plains were empty around them again.\n\n\"Let's get those wagons lined out and rolling again,\" Jamie continued. \"We've dodged a bullet, and we've still got some daylight left. Let's put some more miles behind us!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Even though the encounter with the Indians hadn't resulted in any fighting, the immigrants were more nervous as the wagon train continued on its way. It took a week for them to stop looking over their shoulders and expecting to see painted, war bonneted savages intent on scalping them.\n\nOf course, the more prudent among them continued being watchful as the wagons rolled northward, but that was a good thing. The more alert they were, the better, Jamie thought.\n\nThey reached the Platte River and crossed the broad, shallow, muddy stream without incident. From there, the route diverged from the Oregon Trail, which headed west toward South Pass. The wagon train would keep going north for several more weeks.\n\nThey spotted their first buffalo herd a few days later. Jamie had expected to run across the shaggy beasts much earlier. The great herds always moved south for the winter, but other than that one cold blast, the weather had been unseasonably warm.\n\n\"Good Lord,\" Bodie exclaimed as he and Jamie reined in atop a ridge and looked at the vast sea of brown in front of them. The herd stretched as far as the eye could see.\n\nJamie grinned and rested his crossed hands on the saddle horn, shifting his weight forward to ease weary muscles. \"You haven't seen buffalo before?\"\n\n\"Well, yeah, of course I've seen them,\" the young man replied. \"But never that many in one place. There must be a million of them!\"\n\n\"I wouldn't doubt it. Maybe more than that. I've seen herds go by all day, all night, and all the next day before they finally got out of the way.\"\n\n\"We're going to have to stop and wait for this one to go past, aren't we?\"\n\nJamie took a pair of field glasses from one of his saddlebags and studied the herd. \"They're moving southeast. They'll miss us and ought to be out of our way by tomorrow.\"\n\nWith a worried tone in his voice, Bodie asked, \"What if they were to turn and stampede toward the wagon train?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be good,\" Jamie replied. \"A buffalo stampede is just as much a force of nature as floods, fire, and cyclones. Every bit as destructive, too. You can't stop it, so you just have to get out of its way if you can.\"\n\nThe big frontiersman turned in his saddle to look behind them. \"The wagons are about a mile back. Go tell the cap'n to stop right where he is and don't come any closer. Teams stay hitched to the wagons until those critters are clear of us, in case we have to light a shuck and make a run for it. I'll stay here and keep an eye on the buffalo for now. We'll have scouts watching them all the time, just in case something makes them turn toward the wagons. We'll need as much warning as possible if that happens.\"\n\nBodie nodded, wheeled his horse, and galloped away.\n\nJamie turned his attention back to the buffalo. He had hunted the creatures many times, sometimes with his Indian friends using lances and bows and arrows, sometimes with groups of white hunters armed with Sharps rifles.\n\nEven though the sight of a herd like this made it seem as if the buffalo were endless, Jamie knew that wasn't the case. Many of them had been killed already for meat to feed the crews building the transcontinental railroad several years earlier.\n\nThey continued to be slaughtered for their hides. Back in southern Kansas, Jamie had seen stacks of those hides piled so high that they looked like shaggy brown hills. It was wasteful and shameful, the unknowable number of carcasses skinned and left to rot, their bones littering the plains. The Indians, at least, used every bit of the buffalo, instead of just taking one part and throwing away the rest.\n\nIt was such slaughter, he mused, that would spell defeat for the natives in the end. Without the animals they had depended upon to feed and clothe and shelter them for centuries, they would have no choice but to turn to their white conquerors and change their entire way of life.\n\nJamie believed in manifest destiny, but at the same time he could share a moment of sympathy for those swept aside in the inexorable tide of progress.\n\nThe enormous buffalo herd moved on without menacing the wagon train, and as Jamie had predicted, by the middle of the next day the route was clear again. But they had lost a day to the delay, and with December almost upon them, every day was becoming more and more crucial.\n\nA couple days later, they saw something unexpected: cattle. Not wild cattle, but what appeared to be well-grazed stock with wide, spreading horns.\n\n\"Dadgum it!\" Jake exclaimed when he saw them. \"Those are Texas longhorns. I've seen 'em down in Kansas at the railheads. What are they doing up here?\" He and Bodie and Jamie were scouting ahead of the wagon train.\n\nJamie said, \"Some of the ranchers from Texas are moving their herds up here and starting spreads. I've heard tell there are even some in Wyoming and Montana. I'm a little surprised we haven't run across any before now.\"\n\n\"I guess it makes sense,\" Bodie said. \"There's plenty of grassland up here. That's about all there is, in fact.\"\n\n\"Since the farmers haven't gotten this far west yet, it's all open range. I expect that'll change one of these days, but for now this is some of the best ranching country in the world... if you don't count the Indians and the blizzards, of course. But you've got problems like that wherever you go, I reckon.\"\n\n\"Those are some fine-looking beef cows,\" Jake mused as he studied the grazing animals.\n\n\"Don't get any ideas in your head,\" Jamie said sharply. \"If we slaughter any of those critters for meat, we'll buy them from their owners first. There won't be any rustling.\"\n\n\"Never said there would be,\" Jake replied.\n\nJamie had a hunch that was what had been in the young man's mind, though. His instincts had told him all along that Jake Lucas wasn't the same sort of upstanding young hombre as Bodie Cantrell, even though the two of them were friends.\n\nWhere there were cows, there were cowboys, and later that afternoon Jamie spotted riders coming toward them. He reined in and motioned for his companions to follow suit. A few minutes later the horsemen rode up, their chaps and big hats telling him that they were from Texas as he had suspected.\n\n\"Howdy,\" one of the men called. \"Mind if we ask what you fellas are doin' riding on Slash M range?\"\n\n\"That's where we are?\" Jamie asked.\n\n\"Have been for the past five miles,\" the puncher replied. \"This is Mr. Owen Murdock's spread. I'm Jim Haseltine, his foreman.\"\n\n\"Jamie Ian MacCallister.\" Jamie nodded. He leaned his head toward the other two and added, \"Bodie Cantrell and Jake Lucas. We're scouting for a wagon train that's coming up about a mile behind us.\"\n\nOne of the other cowboys, a lean man with a dark, hawklike face, leaned to the side and spat. \"Wagon train,\" he repeated scornfully. \"That means a bunch of damn sodbusters. You better not be intendin' to stay on Slash M range, mister. You'll get a hot lead welcome if you do.\"\n\nAnger darkened Jake's face.\n\nJamie knew the young man was a hothead, so he snapped, \"Take it easy. I'm handling the talking here.\"\n\nHe turned back to the cowboys. \"I'm not going to argue the idea of open range with you. As a matter of fact, the people with those wagons are bound for Montana Territory, so they shouldn't be any concern to you boys at all. We'll just pass through and go on our way.\"\n\nJim Haseltine had a speculative look on his face. \"Seems like I've heard of you, Mr. MacCallister. You wouldn't be the one who tangled with the Miles Nelson gang, would you?\"\n\n\"That was me,\" Jamie said heavily, recalling the bloody months he had spent avenging his wife's murder.\n\n\"Doss, don't go makin' threats against this man,\" Haseltine said to the hawk-faced cowboy. \"He chews up and spits out two-bit pistoleers like you.\"\n\nDoss exclaimed, \"By God, Haseltine, you can't talk to me like that!\"\n\n\"I just did,\" Haseltine said coldly. \"You can draw down on me if you want. I know you're faster than me. But I don't reckon you'll last long if you do.\"\n\n\"You've just been lookin' for an excuse to run me off.\"\n\n\"I don't need an excuse other than bein' sick and tired of you. Go back to the ranch and draw your pay. You're done on the Slash M.\"\n\nFor a moment Jamie thought Doss was going to slap leather, but the man jerked his horse around and galloped off.\n\n\"Looks like we caused you some trouble after all,\" Jamie said to Haseltine.\n\nThe ranch foreman shook his head. \"No, that's been buildin' up for a while. I just got tired of that hombre's blusterin' around all the time. Maybe he's right and I was lookin' for an excuse to tell him to rattle his hocks.\"\n\n\"Is he fast on the draw?\" Jake asked.\n\n\"Fast enough to have killed three men in fair fights,\" Haseltine answered. \"Fast enough to get a swelled head and make a blasted nuisance of himself.\" He changed the subject. \"You need any help gettin' through our range, Mr. MacCallister?\"\n\n\"You don't have any of it fenced off, do you?\"\n\nHaseltine made a face like he had just bitten into a rotten apple. \"You won't find any fences within five hundred miles of here, Mr. MacCallister. And that's just the way we like it in these parts.\"\n\nYou'd better enjoy it while you can, Jamie thought, because it won't last. \"Then I reckon we'll be fine. Obliged for the offer, though. We might cut out one of these steers and butcher it, if you'll tell me what price your boss would want for it.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about that,\" Haseltine said. \"We can spare one of the critters. And the boss'll back me up on that.\"\n\nJamie nodded again. \"Obliged.\" He lifted a hand in a wave of farewell as the cowboys rode on.\n\n\"Tough-looking bunch,\" Bodie commented.\n\n\"Texas cowboys,\" Jamie said. \"They're tough, all right. Let's take Haseltine up on his offer and cut out one of these steers.\"\n\n\"Steaks tonight!\" Jake said with a grin.\n\nThe fresh meat lifted the spirits of the immigrants, even though longhorns tended to be a little tough and stringy. The wagons had been on the trail for a long time, and sometimes it seemed like Montana was still as far off as it had been when they started.\n\nJamie knew they had made good progress, but there was still a long way to go.\n\nHe was standing beside Moses's wagon that evening, sipping from a cup of coffee, when he heard hoofbeats approaching the circle of wagons. He set the cup on the lowered tailgate and turned toward the sound.\n\nThe horse came to a stop, and as Jamie walked toward the gap between two of the wagons, a tall, lean figure appeared in it. The cowboy called Doss stepped into the glow from several nearby campfires. When he spotted Jamie coming toward him, he stiffened and his hands curled into claws poised above the black butts of the Colts holstered on his hips, ready to hook and draw.\n\n\"There you are!\" he called. \"They tell me you're one of the big he-wolf gunfighters, MacCallister! Well, I'm here to call you out!\"\n\nAnd with that, his hands streaked for the revolvers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "There were too many people around. A group of women stood a few yards behind Jamie, talking. Off to his right several kids were chasing each other around, and one of the big yellow mutts that accompanied the wagon train ran after them, barking. It was a peaceful scene. A stray bullet could alter it suddenly, tragically, and irrevocably.\n\nThere was no time to do anything except kill the troublemaker.\n\nFaster than the eye could follow, Jamie's big hands swept down and back up. Even though Doss had already cleared leather before Jamie started his draw, the man never got a shot off. Jamie's Colts crashed, the two shots coming so close together they sounded like one.\n\nThe pair of .44 slugs punched into Doss's chest and drove him backward. The back of his calves struck a lowered wagon tongue, and he flipped over it. His guns finally roared as his fingers contracted in death spasms, the shots going harmlessly into the heavens. Doss thudded onto his back and his arms fell out loosely to the sides.\n\nHe didn't move again. One of Jamie's bullets had ripped through a lung. The other had pulped his heart. He was already dead when he hit the ground.\n\nThe chatter that had filled the camp a couple seconds earlier stopped short, leaving a stunned silence. As the echoes of the shots rolled away, the silence was broken by shouted questions and running footsteps.\n\nJamie holstered the left-hand Colt and began reloading the expended chamber in the other revolver. Bodie Cantrell, Hector Gilworth, and Jess Neville came pounding up to him with their own guns out and ready.\n\nBodie asked, \"Jamie, are you all right? What happened?\"\n\nJamie leaned his head toward the fallen gunman, whose legs were still visible hanging over the wagon tongue. \"That fella Doss came looking for me, I guess he figured he'd add to his reputation by killing me.\" Jamie paused. \"It didn't work out for him.\"\n\nHector took a lantern from one of the settlers who had come to investigate the shooting and carried it over to shine its light on the dead man. \"It sure didn't. Looks like you drilled him dead center twice, Jamie.\"\n\n\"And the man already had his guns out before Jamie drew,\" Moses added, having joined the group, too. \"I saw the whole thing. It was amazing.\"\n\nJamie leathered the right-hand gun and set about replacing the spent cartridge in the other weapon. He turned his head to listen as he picked up the sound of more horses coming toward the wagon train. \"I don't know if Doss had any friends, but just in case he did, all these kids and womenfolks ought to get inside where it's safer.\"\n\nMoses and several of the men hurried to spread the word and hustle the women and children into cover. Jamie, Bodie, Hector, and Jess moved to get ready for whoever was galloping toward the wagons. Jake Lucas, Clete Mahaffey, and Dave Pearsoll hurried up as well, and Jamie waved them into position around one of the wagons. They were a formidable group and if the night riders were looking for a fight, they would get it.\n\nInstead, the hoofbeats stopped, and a man's voice called, \"Hello, the camp! Hold your fire! We're friends!\"\n\nJamie grunted as he recognized the voice. \"That's Jim Haseltine, the Slash M ramrod.\" He raised his voice. \"Come on in, Haseltine, unless you're hunting trouble!\"\n\n\"No trouble,\" Haseltine replied. The man walked his horse forward into the light, trailed by several more members of Owen Murdock's crew. \"In fact, we came to warn you. That varmint Doss may come looking for you, Mr. MacCallister. There's a trading post a few miles west of here, and Doss was there earlier tonight gettin' liquored up. He was bragging about how he was gonna find you and kill you, and to warm up for it he shot one of my men who tried to talk some sense into his head.\"\n\n\"Kill him?\" Jamie asked curtly.\n\n\"No, thank the Lord. Just wounded him.\"\n\n\"Well, Doss won't shoot anybody else.\" Jamie holstered his guns and pointed. \"You want to bury him, or should we take care of the chore?\"\n\nHaseltine swung down from his saddle, walked over to where Doss's body lay, and looked down at it. He let out a low whistle of admiration. \"He's got his guns in his hands. I hate to admit it, but he was mighty fast. I guess he ran up against somebody faster, though.\"\n\n\"There's always somebody faster,\" Jamie said. \"About planting him...?\"\n\n\"We'll do it. Shoot, we owe you that much. He was always causing trouble. I'm sorry he came here and caused more.\"\n\n\"Not your fault,\" Jamie said with a shrug.\n\n\"Maybe not, but I hope the rest of your time on the Slash M is a mite more peaceful.\"\n\nA short time later, the Texas cowboys rode off, taking Doss's body with them, draped over the saddle of his horse. The commotion caused by the gunfight settled down quickly. The immigrants knew that come morning, Jamie would have them up before first light, getting ready to push on toward their destination.\n\nA chilly rain started a couple days later. There was no wind, so it came straight down from a leaden sky, steady but not hard enough to turn the landscape into a quagmire. The wagons were able to continue their journey, although the rain made everyone cold, wet, and miserable.\n\nThe sickness started a couple days after that.\n\nSome of the immigrants had been sick at times, but none seriously. As the rain continued to fall, fever raged through the train with little warning. So many people were ill, Jamie knew there was no choice but to stop until the outbreak ran its course.\n\nAround the clock, the sound of the constant drizzle was punctuated by coughing, wheezing, and gagging from half the wagons. Those fortunate enough not to catch the sickness stayed well away from those who had fallen ill... with a few notable exceptions.\n\nMoses Danzig seemed to be everywhere at once, doing whatever he could to comfort the afflicted and nurse them back to health. As he explained to Jamie, \"For a while back in Poland, when I was younger, I thought I might become a doctor. I even had a little medical training before I accepted the calling to attend rabbinical school. Unfortunately, there's not much even a real doctor could do for these poor people. I just keep them as comfortable as I can and try to help them let their own bodies fight the sickness.\"\n\nA lot of the time, Savannah McCoy was at Moses's side, helping him despite Bodie's objections. Bodie just wanted her to be safe and not come down with the fever herself, so he urged her to avoid those who were sick.\n\n\"I can't do that, Bodie,\" she told him. \"These people... they took me in when I had nowhere else to go. They protected me, gave me a new home.\" She smiled sadly. \"Why do you think I haven't gone back to the troupe? When we left Kansas City, I didn't plan to stay with the wagon train all the way to Montana Territory, you know.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said softly as they stood under a canvas cover rigged at the back of the Bingham wagon and watched the rain fall.\n\n\"I couldn't leave. I waited until I thought enough time had passed that it might be safe, but by then... I just couldn't. I love Edward and Leticia. They're almost like a second set of parents to me. And I've made so many other good friends, like Moses and Mr. MacCallister and the Bradford twins. Alexander and Abigail had been spending a lot of time with me before this rain started, you know, even though they had to sneak away from their father to do it.\"\n\nBodie's jaw tightened at the mention of Reverend Thomas Bradford. \"Do you know what I heard that so-called preacher saying yesterday?\"\n\n\"I don't have any idea,\" Savannah replied. \"I think he's capable of saying almost anything.\"\n\n\"He said the rain, and folks falling sick from it, were because we'd offended God by harboring too many sinners among us.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that as an actress I'm one of those sinners he was talking about.\"\n\n\"That's crazy!\" Bodie exclaimed. \"You're about the best person I've ever known, Savannah. The way you and Moses have tried to take care of everybody\u2014\"\n\n\"Reverend Bradford probably thinks that Moses being here is another reason the wagon train is being punished.\"\n\n\"Let him think whatever dang fool thing he wants. All I really care about is you taking care of yourself, Savannah. If anything happened to you... if you got sick and... and... I don't know how I'd stand it.\" Bodie reached out, drew her into his arms, and cradled her against him.\n\nShe rested her head on his chest and sighed. The two of them clung to each other in the gloom as the rain continued to drizzle down.\n\nFour people\u2014two children, a man, and a woman\u2014died during the outbreak of fever. Considering the number of immigrants who had fallen ill, Jamie was surprised the death toll wasn't higher. As he told Moses, \"I figure it would have been a lot worse if not for what you and Savannah did.\"\n\n\"I just tried to help,\" Moses replied with a shake of his head, \"and so did a lot of other people. Not just Savannah. Bodie pitched in, and Hector and Jess and so many others. We're past the worst of it now, I think. People are on the mend again. Another few days and we might be able to travel again. That is, if this blasted rain will ever stop.\"\n\nThe rain did stop. And the wagon train moved on, leaving four new graves behind it.\n\nChristmas was less than a month away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "It was a rare sunny day, and as a result slightly warmer, when the wagon train stopped next to a creek so the immigrants could fill the water barrels lashed to their wagons. The creek had some ice along its edges, but it wasn't frozen over as it would be later on in the winter.\n\nAll the scouts were out except Jake Lucas and Dave Pearsoll, who had been left behind to keep an eye on the wagons as the pilgrims went about their chores. Jake saw Savannah McCoy walking along the creek bank with the preacher's kids and strolled after them. The youngsters were carrying buckets to help fill their father's water barrels, and he supposed Savannah was watching out for them.\n\nThey stopped at the edge of the creek, and when Savannah saw him coming, she smiled. \"Hello, Jake.\" The two of them were on friendly terms, even though Savannah had never been around Jake much when Bodie wasn't there, too.\n\nHe returned the smile and tugged on the brim of his hat. \"Nice day, ain't it?\"\n\n\"The nicest we've had lately,\" she agreed. She watched with approval as Alexander and Abigail Bradford filled the wooden buckets in the stream and then started back toward the wagons with them.\n\n\"Why don't we walk down there where those trees are?\" Jake suggested, pointing to some bare-limbed aspen that grew about fifty yards downstream.\n\n\"Why would we do that?\" Savannah asked with a slight frown of puzzlement.\n\n\"I want to talk to you about Bodie.\"\n\nSavannah's frown deepened. \"There's nothing wrong, is there?\"\n\n\"No, not really. It's just that, well, him and me have been friends for quite a while, and there's something that's worrying me a mite.\"\n\nSavannah hesitated a moment more, but then she nodded. \"All right. If it's about Bodie.\"\n\nThe kids came back with their empty buckets. Savannah told them to keep carrying water to the reverend's wagon, then she and Jake walked toward the trees.\n\nThe trunks were close enough together that they formed a screen of sorts and provided a little privacy. When they stopped, Savannah turned to Jake. \"Now, what's this about Bodie? What are you worried about, Jake?\"\n\nA grin stretched across his face. \"I'm worried that he don't know how to take proper care of a beautiful girl like you.\"\n\nBefore she could stop him, he had his arms around her, pulling her against him. His mouth came down on hers in an urgent, demanding kiss.\n\nSavannah stiffened and shoved her hands against his chest, but she couldn't break away from him. Nor could she twist her lips away from his until he broke the kiss and pulled back slightly, grinning again.\n\nHer hand flashed up and cracked across his cheek. \"How dare you!\" she exclaimed. \"You... you... I never\u2014\"\n\n\"Maybe that's your problem,\" he cut in. His hands were tight on her arms. \"Listen, Savannah, you can do a lot better than Bodie Cantrell. I can treat you right, and I've got a lot more money than he does.\" He didn't explain how he had come by that money. \"Once we get to Montana, if you stick with me I'll show you a better time than Bodie ever could.\"\n\n\"Let go of me, Mr. Lucas,\" she said coldly. \"If you don't, I'll scream, and the people at the wagons will hear me. Don't think they won't.\"\n\nHe knew she was right. He wasn't ready to leave the wagon train just yet, so he released her arms, but he didn't step back. He still crowded close to her, and with the icy stream right behind her, there was nowhere she could go.\n\n\"Maybe I took you by surprise,\" he said. \"I'm sorry if I did. But I had to tell you how I feel. I had to show you\u2014\"\n\n\"No, you didn't,\" she snapped. \"You could have had the common decency to respect your friend... and me. From now on I want you to stay away from me, Mr. Lucas. Far away.\"\n\nJake's face hardened. He asked harshly, \"Are you sure about that?\"\n\n\"I'm positive. And if you don't, I'll tell Bodie\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't want to do that,\" Jake told her in a hard, menacing tone. \"I know Bodie. If you tell him what happened here today, he'll figure he's got to come gunnin' for me. And if he does, I'll kill him. Simple as that. I'm faster than him, and if he draws on me, he'll die.\"\n\nHe could see in her eyes that she knew he was telling the truth. Fear sprang up in them, fear for Bodie's life.\n\n\"If you don't bother me again, I won't say anything.\"\n\n\"We understand each other, then.\"\n\n\"We do,\" Savannah said quietly.\n\nJake stepped back to let her go past him. As she did, he told her, \"You're makin' a mistake. I can do more for you than Bodie ever can.\"\n\nShe didn't reply, didn't even look around as she hurried back toward the wagons.\n\nJake stood there glaring and muttering curses under his breath until a sudden footstep from among the trees made him turn quickly and reach for his gun.\n\n\"Take it easy,\" Dave Pearsoll said as he moved out into the open.\n\n\"What are you doin' skulkin' around here?\" Jake demanded. \"We're supposed to be keepin' an eye on those pilgrims.\"\n\n\"You were sure enough keepin' an eye on one of them,\" Pearsoll said with a sly grin. \"A really close eye, looked like to me.\" His grin disappeared as he went on. \"I reckon I understand now why we're still with this blasted wagon train. We could've taken off for the tall and uncut weeks ago, once we were well clear of Kansas City, but no, you insisted that we ought to stay with 'em a little while longer, Jake. But it's just one of them you're interested in. The McCoy girl.\"\n\n\"That's none of your business,\" Jake snapped.\n\n\"It is when you're hangin' on to my share of that money,\" Pearsoll said. \"You're doin' just like Swint, draggin' your feet about divvyin' up. What's the idea, Jake? Are you hopin' something will happen to Clete and me so you can keep all of the loot?\"\n\n\"That's just loco,\" Jake scoffed, although in truth such a prospect had entered his mind more than once. \"I'm just still not convinced that Eldon won't come after us. Hell, he could be on our trail right now. It makes more sense to stay where we've got friends who'll back our play if it comes to a fight.\"\n\n\"Friends,\" Pearsoll repeated. \"Like the McCoy girl. She didn't look any too friendly when she slapped your face.\"\n\nJake felt himself flushing. He blustered, \"She'll come around. She just needs some time, that's all.\"\n\n\"And maybe for something to happen to Bodie. That'd make things easier for you, wouldn't it? Maybe more inclined to keep your word to your real friends and honor the deal you made with them.\"\n\n\"Forget it. Nothing's gonna happen to Bodie.\"\n\n\"Is that so? You know good and well that if you're ever gonna get that girl, he'll have to die. You change your mind about that, let me know.\" Pearsoll turned and walked off toward the wagons, leaving Jake standing there with a worried frown on his face.\n\nHe didn't want to admit it, even to himself, but maybe there was some truth in what Pearsoll said.\n\n\"I'm getting tired of carrying water,\" Abigail said. \"Can't we do something else?\"\n\n\"Miss Savannah asked us to do this,\" Alexander told her. \"I don't want to let her down.\"\n\nAbigail made a face, but she walked back toward the creek with her brother. As they dipped the buckets in the water, she exclaimed, \"Alex, did you see that?\"\n\n\"What?\" he asked as he looked around.\n\nShe pointed. \"I saw something up the creek that way. It looked like a pretty bird with bright-colored feathers.\"\n\n\"All the birds have gone south for the winter,\" Alexander pointed out. \"You're just saying that because you want me to say we can quit fetching water.\"\n\n\"That's not true! I did see it, and if you'll come with me, I'll prove it.\"\n\n\"What are you doing, Abby?\" Alexander asked as his sister set her bucket aside.\n\n\"I told you. I'm going to find that bird.\" She started walking along the creek, toward a bend in the stream a couple hundred yards away where low brush lined the banks.\n\nAlexander looked around for Savannah, but didn't see her. A few minutes earlier, she had been talking to Bodie's friend, that other scout Mr. Lucas. But he wasn't in sight, either.\n\nAbigail was beyond where the wagons were parked, and she wasn't slowing down. Alexander knew how impulsive and dadblasted stubborn his sister could be when she put her mind to it. She was going to get in trouble if she wandered off. She would get both of them in trouble, since their father would take it for granted that Alexander should have been looking out for her.\n\nHe trotted after her, calling, \"Abby, hold on.\" When he caught up to her, he frowned. \"I'll come with you to look for that stupid bird that's not even there.\"\n\n\"It is, too,\" she insisted.\n\nHe ignored that. \"But then we've got to go back. Just a few minutes, all right?\"\n\n\"I saw it right up here, moving around in those bushes.\"\n\nAlexander still didn't believe it. Either Abigail was seeing things, or she had just made up the story. If she had made it up and their father found out about it, he would punish her. Making up stories was lying, he always said, and lying was a terrible sin.\n\nSometimes it seemed to Alexander that most things in life were terrible sins.\n\nThe closest wagon was about a hundred yards away when they walked around the bend and into the brush. Alexander looked around. \"I don't see anything except a bunch of old dead bushes\u2014\"\n\nAt that moment, something closed around his right ankle and jerked. Before he knew what was happening, he'd been pulled right off the creek bank. Somebody grabbed him, looping an arm around his ribs and squeezing so tight he couldn't breathe. At the same time, a hand covered his mouth and clamped down equally hard, so he had no chance to yell.\n\nHis eyes widened in horror as he saw an Indian standing a few feet away. The man wore buckskins and had feathers in his hair\u2014feathers!\u2014and the worst thing of all was that he had hold of Abigail and was clutching her tightly to him as she kicked and squirmed. The Indian was more than twice her size, and Alexander knew his sister had no chance of getting away.\n\nHe knew that an Indian had hold of him, too, and even though he fought, there was nothing he could do. The Indians began walking through the creek, taking their two young prisoners with them.\n\nNobody at the wagon train even knew they were gone, Alexander's panic-stricken brain screamed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Jamie knew something was wrong as soon as he got back to the creek where the wagons had stopped to water up. He heard shouting. There was anger in the sound, of course, but there was also something else.\n\nFear.\n\nHe swung down from the saddle and dropped the reins. Sundown would stay ground-hitched. He walked toward the large group of immigrants gathered beside the stream. Several people were talking at once, but the loudest voice belonged to Reverend Thomas Bradford.\n\n\"\u2014unforgivable!\" he was saying. \"I knew I couldn't trust a... a shameless jezebel like you to watch my children! I never should have allowed them to associate with the likes of you! I should have put a stop to it as soon as they started sneaking off to visit you!\"\n\nThe crowd parted without Jamie having to say anything. It was just a natural result of his imposing presence. He saw that Bradford was shouting at Savannah. The preacher's rough-hewn face was as red as a brick, while Savannah's, by contrast, had all the color washed out of it. She looked frightened.\n\nMoses stepped up. \"Please, Reverend, there's no need to browbeat Miss McCoy\u2014\"\n\n\"You stay out of it, you damned Christ-killer!\" Bradford roared.\n\nMoses went pale, too.\n\nBradford went on. \"This harlot was probably seducing some man when she should have been watching my children\u2014\"\n\n\"That's enough,\" Jamie said as he moved forward. He hooked his thumbs in his gun belt and confronted Bradford. \"There's no need for talk like that. You'd better be glad Bodie Cantrell isn't here right now, mister. If he was, I reckon he'd be going after you for saying such things. I'm tempted to myself.\"\n\n\"You don't know what she did!\" Bradford leveled a finger at Savannah. \"My children were with her, and now they're gone! Disappeared!\"\n\nNow they were getting down to it. Jamie turned to Savannah. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Reverend Bradford is right,\" she replied in a shaky voice. \"It's my fault. I was supposed to be watching Alexander and Abigail while they fetched water, and they... they vanished while I was busy talking to someone else.\"\n\n\"They can't have gotten very far on foot,\" Jamie said, keeping his tone calm and reassuring. \"Where was the last place you saw 'em?\"\n\n\"They were right here along the creek, getting water for their father's water barrels.\"\n\nLamar Hendricks spoke up. \"I've been asking around, Jamie, and a couple people saw the children walking up the creek toward that bend.\" He pointed. \"But I looked up there and there's no sign of them.\"\n\nThere might be sign that Hendricks wasn't experienced enough to see, Jamie thought. \"I'll take a look.\" He glanced around, spotted Jake in the crowd. \"Come on, Jake.\"\n\nThe young man fell in with Jamie as his long legs carried him along the creek bank. Several other men tagged along, including Hendricks.\n\nThe banks deepened around the bend. They were about four feet high, and the ground was covered fairly thickly with brush on both sides of the creek. Jamie studied the growth, looking for broken branches that might indicate a struggle. When he didn't find anything, he turned his attention to the creek itself and the narrow band of muddy earth at its edge.\n\nHis jaw tightened as he spotted a familiar-looking indentation. He pointed it out to the men who had come with him. \"That's a footprint. The fella who made it was wearing moccasins.\"\n\n\"Indians!\" Hendricks exclaimed.\n\n\"Looks like it.\" Jamie nodded and pointed to a vertical mark on the bank. \"Something skidded along there. A foot, maybe, like somebody slid down the bank... or was pulled.\" He pointed again. \"Another footprint there, but not left by the same man. There were two of them.\"\n\nHendricks said, \"They lurked here and kidnapped the Bradford children.\"\n\n\"Maybe. I want to look around some more.\"\n\nIt took Jamie another few minutes to locate hoofprints left by unshod ponies on the far side of the creek, beyond the clump of brush. The Indians had left their mounts there, skulked along the creek to spy on the wagons, and then when Alexander and Abigail had come wandering up the creek for whatever reason, had grabbed the kids and carried them off.\n\nThis was bad, Jamie thought, but it could have been worse. Indians seldom killed such young captives. They might murder children in the heat of battle, but if they went to the trouble to take prisoners away with them, they usually kept those captives alive. They would either make slaves of the children, or more likely raise them as members of the tribe.\n\nHe didn't intend to let either of those things happen. \"How long have they been gone?\"\n\n\"Less than an hour,\" Hendricks replied.\n\nJamie jerked his head in a curt nod. \"I'll get after them. There's a good chance I can bring 'em back. There were only two Indians. Probably just out hunting, although they could have been scouting for a war party, I suppose. If I can catch up to them before they get back to their village, I'll rescue those kids.\"\n\n\"But what if there wind up being more Indians?\" Hendricks asked. \"You'll need help, Jamie. I'm coming with you.\"\n\nSeveral other men voiced their eager agreement with that sentiment.\n\nJamie didn't want to be saddled with a bunch of inexperienced pilgrims, but if there was a whole war party out there, he probably couldn't risk taking them on by himself. That would put the children in too much danger.\n\nHe compromised. \"I'm starting after them right now. Hector Gilworth ought to be coming in soon. Jake, maybe you can go find him and bring him in sooner. Hector can put together a rescue party and lead it after me. He ought to be able to follow my trail. No more than a dozen men, though. The rest need to stay with the wagons. This could be a diversion.\"\n\nHendricks said, \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"They could've grabbed the kids thinking they'd use 'em to lure most of the men away from the wagons, while the rest of the war party circles around and hits the train from another direction. I don't think that's what's happened here, but we can't risk it.\"\n\n\"I understand. We'll do what you say, Jamie.\"\n\nJamie's long legs carried him back quickly to the wagons. As he was about to swing up into the saddle, Reverend Bradford stormed up to him and demanded, \"What did you find out, MacCallister?\"\n\nJamie knew the truth would just set off the reverend even more, but Bradford would find it out soon enough from one of the others even if Jamie didn't tell him. \"It looks like Indians have them, but I'm going after them right now. I'll bring them back.\"\n\nBradford looked horrified. \"My God!\" he burst out. \"My poor innocent children, tortured and scalped\u2014!\"\n\n\"Nobody said anything about them being tortured and scalped,\" Jamie snapped. \"Usually when Indians take white kids like that, they adopt 'em into the tribe.\"\n\nThat seemed to bother Bradford more. Eyes wide, he said, \"I'd rather them be killed than see them turned into godless heathen savages!\"\n\nJamie put his foot in the stirrup and swung up onto Sundown's back rather than say what he was thinking. He supposed most people would share the sentiments Bradford had just expressed. That made no sense to Jamie, though. Life was too precious to throw it away that easily.\n\nHe turned the stallion and heeled Sundown into motion, splashing across the creek. It took him only a moment to pick up the trail of the two unshod ponies as they headed north. He followed it, his eyes constantly scanning the landscape for signs of danger." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "After following the Indians for about an hour, Jamie came to a spot where the hoofprints of the two ponies joined with those of a number of other horses. He reined in, studied the marks on the ground, and frowned.\n\nThe hoofprints confirmed one of his biggest worries. The two men who had grabbed the kids had rendezvoused with a larger party. The prints were such a muddle, he couldn't tell for sure how many there were. More than a dozen, that was certain. Maybe as many as twenty-five or thirty. Even if the group from the wagon train caught up to him, they would still be outnumbered.\n\nBut he wasn't going to leave Alexander and Abigail to become part of whatever tribe had taken them.\n\nPeople usually fell into one of two extremes when it came to the Indians. Most folks considered them filthy, bloodthirsty savages, little better than animals. But some people\u2014usually easterners who had never actually seen an Indian, much less had anything to do with them\u2014claimed that they were noble aristocrats of the plains, living in harmony with nature, the land, and each other.\n\nAs usual, both sides were full of buffalo droppings. There were plenty of things to admire about the Indian way of life, but there was no escaping the fact that most of them suffered through hard, short, brutal existences, struggling to survive and constantly warring on each other. The odds of starving to death, dying of illness, freezing in the winter, or being killed in a raid by another tribe were high.\n\nJamie wasn't going to abandon the Bradford children to such a fate. He would get them back or die trying. Once the two kidnappers joined up with the war party, if that's what it was, the trail was easier to follow. He pushed on, confident that Hector and the others would be able to find him.\n\nBy late afternoon Jamie entered a range of small, wooded hills, the highest elevations and the most trees he had seen in quite awhile. With his instincts warning him that he might be closing in on his quarry, he used every bit of cover he could find as he continued following the trail.\n\nHe smelled the camp before he saw it. Wood smoke, cooking meat, and horseflesh. He dismounted and went up the slope ahead of him on foot, moving in silence over a carpet of pine needles. Before he reached the top he took off his hat and got down on his belly to crawl the rest of the way. When he got to the top, he worked his way through a patch of undergrowth, parted some branches, and looked down into a little canyon where more than two dozen Indians had made camp.\n\nBlackfeet, Jamie thought as he saw the markings on their buckskins and the way they wore their hair. No women and children in sight. It was a raiding party. Several of the warriors sported crude bandages, which meant they had already been in a fight. They'd probably skirmished with another tribe and were on their way back to their usual hunting grounds, taking with them the two white captives a couple scouts had been fortunate enough to come across.\n\nJamie saw Alexander and Abigail sitting with their backs propped against a fallen log. They appeared to be all right, although their hands and feet were tied and Abigail was slumped against her brother's side, sobbing. Alexander had his head up and Jamie could tell that the boy was trying to be brave, but he had to be scared out of his wits.\n\nNot for much longer, son, Jamie thought.\n\nThe trick was figuring out how to get him out.\n\nJamie studied the landscape around the Blackfoot camp. The canyon was formed by two ridges that dropped off almost sheer for about forty feet. He lay where those ridges angled in and came together. The trail the Indians had used to get into the canyon zigzagged down from that point. Anybody going down it would be in plain sight from the camp below.\n\nAt the far end, the canyon ended in a shale slope at the top of which rose a stone wall. The drop from the top of that wall to the shale was about twenty feet. However, the cliff face was rugged enough that it would provide handholds and footholds so that a man could climb down part of the way, leaving a reasonable drop to the shale.\n\nIf a man tried that and landed right, he could slide all the way to the canyon floor. If he didn't land right... well, he'd probably break an ankle, at the very least.\n\nJamie didn't see any other way into the canyon. He would have to have help to manage it.\n\nHe moved back down the near slope and glanced at the sky. About an hour of daylight was left, giving the other men from the wagon train time to catch up to him. He could finish working out his plan then.\n\nThe sun had just dropped below the western horizon when Jamie heard horses coming. He stepped out of the thick stand of pines where he'd been waiting and waved his hat over his head to signal the approaching riders.\n\nThey angled toward him. Hector Gilworth was in the lead, with Bodie Cantrell and Jess Neville right behind him, trailed by nine or ten men from the wagon train. Most of them were carrying rifles or shotguns.\n\nHe didn't see Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll and figured those three had stayed behind at the wagons. That was good. Jamie wanted some seasoned fighting men left with the rest of the immigrants.\n\nHe was much less pleased to see Reverend Thomas Bradford with the rescue party. He had hoped that Bradford would stay behind. He didn't trust that the preacher would follow his orders. In his arrogant stubbornness\u2014and, to be fair, his legitimate concern for his children\u2014Bradford was liable to try some foolish stunt that would endanger all of them.\n\nJamie would make sure to tell Hector to keep a close eye on the man.\n\nBradford crowded his mount ahead of the others and said loudly, \"Have you found them? Have you found Alexander and Abigail?\"\n\n\"Keep your voice down,\" Jamie snapped. \"Sounds carry farther out here than you think they would, and the Indians are right on the other side of that ridge. I figure they'll be posting guards on top of it any time now since it's getting dark, and we don't want them to know we're here.\"\n\nBradford was a little quieter as he said, \"All right. But what about my children? Have you seen them?\"\n\n\"I have. They look fine, just a little tired and scared.\" As the men gathered around him, Jamie went on to describe everything he had seen.\n\nJess Neville said, \"That ain't good, is it? Them Injuns bein' Blackfeet, I mean. From what I hear tell, they hate white folks more than any of the other tribes in these parts.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Jamie admitted, \"but chances are, if they were going to hurt those kids, they'd have done it before now. We just need to get them out of that camp.\"\n\n\"How are we going to do that?\" Bodie asked. \"It sounds like there's no way in there that wouldn't be suicide.\"\n\n\"There's no good way,\" Jamie explained. \"But I think a couple men could work their way around to the cliff above that shale slope and drop down into the canyon from there. The rest of our bunch can cause a distraction that'll keep those Blackfeet busy while the two hombres grab the kids.\"\n\nBodie shook his head. \"No offense, Jamie, but how do they get back out?\"\n\nJamie rubbed his chin and frowned, realizing that he hadn't gotten that far in his thinking. After a moment he said, \"We'll have to take ropes with us and tie 'em at the top of the cliff. That'll help us get down, and the kids can hang on to us while we use the ropes to climb out.\"\n\n\"Us?\" Bodie repeated with a faint smile.\n\n\"I was thinking you might want to come with me.\"\n\nBradford said, \"I'll do it. They're my children.\"\n\n\"That they are,\" Jamie agreed, \"but how are you at using a gun, Reverend? There's a chance whoever goes into that camp will have to fight their way out.\"\n\n\"I've never believed in violence,\" Bradford said stiffly.\n\n\"And I believe in using whatever does the job best. Bodie's coming with me. Unless you don't want to, son.\"\n\n\"Try and stop me. Savannah's tearing herself up over this. She'll never forgive herself if we don't get those kids back safe and sound.\"\n\nBradford started to bluster something, but Jamie stopped him with a hard look. He figured the preacher was about to say something else bad about Savannah, then Bodie would take offense, and they didn't need that complication.\n\n\"What do you want the rest of us to do, Jamie?\" Hector asked. \"How do we provide that distraction you were talking about?\"\n\n\"Well, there's only one way to do it as far as I can see. You fellas are about to get your feet wet when it comes to Indian fighting.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "With a faint glow still in the western sky, Jamie and Bodie started out. They circled wide to come at the canyon from the west.\n\nHector and the other men were dug in behind rocks and trees on the other side of the ridge, waiting for the two rescuers to get into position. Hector owned a railroad watch that had been left to him by his father, and when exactly an hour had gone by, he and the other men would charge the ridge, yelling and shooting, before turning around and dashing back to their defensive positions.\n\nThe outbreak of gunfire would be the signal for Jamie and Bodie to make their move.\n\nAs darkness gathered, Bodie asked, \"How are we going to find our way to the top of that cliff you mentioned?\"\n\n\"I took a pretty good look at it a while ago,\" Jamie replied. \"Studied the lay of the land while there was still some light in the sky. I'll be able to get us there.\"\n\n\"When it comes to surviving out here, is there anything you can't do, Jamie?\"\n\nA grin stretched across the big frontiersman's rugged face. \"There's bound to be, but since I'm still alive I reckon I've figured it out pretty well so far.\" He led them unerringly to the foot of a ridge where they dismounted.\n\n\"That canyon where the Blackfeet are camped ought to be just on the other side,\" Jamie said quietly. \"Get the rope off your horse and let's go.\"\n\nThe slope on that side of the ridge was too steep for horses, but Jamie and Bodie were able to negotiate it on foot, carrying the ropes with them. As they climbed, Jamie sniffed the air and smelled smoke from the Blackfoot campfire. His instincts had been reliable yet again.\n\nWhen they reached the top of the narrow ridge, the two men crawled forward until they could look down into the canyon. The campfire still burned, and in its flickering orange light they saw some members of the war party still moving around. Others slept. Jamie spotted the two children, dozing as they huddled against the same log where he had seen them sitting earlier. He touched Bodie's shoulder and pointed them out to the young man, who nodded.\n\nMoving quickly and silently, they knotted one end of the ropes around the trunks of pine trees that grew atop the ridge. When that was done, they stretched out on the ground again, and Jamie whispered, \"Now we wait. Shouldn't be long.\"\n\nIt wasn't. Within ten minutes, gunfire suddenly roared in the distance. Jamie saw muzzle flashes from the opposite ridge and knew the Blackfoot sentries posted up there were returning the fire. In the camp, the rest of the war party grabbed rifles and began charging up the twisting path to the top of the ridge.\n\n\"Let's go,\" he said.\n\nThey dropped the ropes over the cliff and swung out onto them, walking down the cliff backwards. It wasn't that far. When they reached the shale, they let go, left the ropes hanging there, and slid down the rest of the way to the canyon floor.\n\nJamie drew his Bowie knife as he ran toward the log where the children were lying, wide awake because of the yelling and shooting. He had warned Bodie against using their guns unless they absolutely had to, since that might alert the Blackfeet that something was going on behind them.\n\nWith a grace and agility unusual in a man of his size and age, Jamie vaulted over the log and dropped to one knee next to Alexander and Abigail. Abigail opened her mouth to scream. From her perspective, all she could see was a dark, giant figure looming over her.\n\nJamie put his free hand over her mouth. \"Hush, Abby. It's me, Mr. MacCallister. Mr. Cantrell is with me. We're going to get you and Alexander out of here.\"\n\nHe started sawing through the tough strips of rawhide with which they were bound while Bodie crouched next to the log and kept a lookout. Jamie had Abigail loose when Bodie suddenly hissed, \"Somebody's coming!\"\n\nJamie looked up just as a couple Blackfoot warriors charged into the firelight. The leader of the war party had sent them back to keep an eye on the prisoners. It was a smart move, but it had occurred to the fellow too late.\n\nSpotting the two white men trying to free the captives, the warriors skidded to a halt and tried to raise their rifles. Firelight winked from the blade of Jamie's knife as it flashed across the clearing to bury nearly a foot of cold steel in the chest of one of the Blackfeet. The man gasped, stumbled, and dropped his rifle without firing it. He crumpled to the ground.\n\nLess than half a second later, Jamie's left-hand Colt roared. The bullet ripped through the second warrior's throat and bored through the lower part of his brain. He dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.\n\nBodie had drawn his gun but hadn't had a chance to shoot. Jamie's blinding speed had seen to that.\n\nJamie pouched the iron. \"Get my knife.\"\n\nIt had taken only one pistol shot to dispose of the second warrior, and neither Blackfoot had gotten off a shot. He hoped the single shot had gone unnoticed by the other Indians, since they were busy trading lead with the rest of the rescue party and things were pretty noisy.\n\nBodie ran to the fallen warriors, pulled the knife from the chest of the one Jamie had killed with it, and hurried back to hand the blood-smeared blade to the big frontiersman.\n\nWhile he was cutting Alexander loose, Jamie told Abigail, \"You go with Mr. Cantrell now, honey. You'll have to put your arms around him and hang on tight to him while he climbs up a rope. Can you do that?\"\n\n\"I'd rather you take me, Mr. MacCallister,\" the little girl said.\n\n\"I'm busy with your brother. Mr. Cantrell will take good care of you. You just do everything he tells you, and don't be scared, all right?\"\n\n\"I... I'll try.\"\n\n\"Good girl. Go on, now.\"\n\nBodie scooped Abigail up in his arms and ran for the cliff. It wouldn't be easy getting back up that loose shale while carrying the girl, but he'd manage.\n\nA moment later, the last of the rawhide thongs fell away from Alexander's ankles. \"You don't have to carry me, Mr. MacCallister. I can run.\"\n\n\"Mighty fast?\"\n\n\"Mighty fast!\"\n\nJamie grinned in the darkness. \"Come on, then.\"\n\nThey hurried to the cliff. Through the moonlight, Jamie could see Bodie climbing the rope with Abigail clinging to his back, her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist.\n\n\"I can climb the rope, too,\" Alexander said.\n\n\"I expect you can, but it might be faster if you got on my back, like your sister did with Mr. Cantrell. Reckon you can do that?\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nAlexander clambered onto Jamie's back as the big man knelt, then Jamie started up the slope. It took every bit of balance he had not to slip back down the shale. The climb seemed to take a long time, but finally he was able to reach up and grasp the rope. That steadied him the rest of the way and allowed him to go a little faster. He reached the bottom of the cliff, planted a booted foot against the rock, and started that part of the climb. It was the hardest part of the climb, taking a lot of muscle power to lift a man of Jamie's size. Alexander's weight added to the burden.\n\n\"Hang on tight,\" Jamie grated.\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Alexander said. \"I won't let go.\"\n\nJamie tipped his head back to watch the top of the cliff come closer. Bodie and Abigail reached the rimrock and vanished over it. Jamie was relieved they were safe. In a matter of moments, he and Alexander would be, too.\n\nBelow them, a shot suddenly blasted, and a bullet smacked into the rock face less than a yard away from them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Jamie twisted his head to look down and behind them and saw that several of the Blackfoot warriors had run back into the camp and were pointing rifles at them. Jamie couldn't let go of the rope to grab his guns and put up a fight. He and Alexander would plummet to the ground if he did.\n\nBodie appeared at the rimrock and shouted at Jamie, \"Keep climbing!\" Then the revolver in his hand spouted flame as he opened fire on the Indians, spraying the clearing with lead.\n\nThat scattered the Blackfeet momentarily, but Jamie knew it wouldn't take long for them to regroup. He redoubled his efforts, grunting with the strain as his thickly corded muscles hauled him and the boy up the rope.\n\nMore slugs from below began to pepper the cliff around them. Jamie felt rock splinters sting his cheeks and hands. He called to Alexander, \"Hang on tight, son!\"\n\nBodie's gun ran dry. Jamie knew there wouldn't be time for his young friend to reload. Still clinging to the rope with his left hand, he let go with his right and reached down to pluck the .44 on that side from its holster. \"Catch!\" he yelled as he tossed the Colt the seven or eight feet to the rim.\n\nBodie dropped his gun beside him and grabbed Jamie's by the barrel, fumbling with it for a second before he secured it. He reversed it, pointed it down into the canyon, and started shooting again.\n\nJamie heaved, reached higher, heaved again. They were almost at the top. Another second or two...\n\nHe felt the heat of a bullet as it whipped past his ear. The slug hit the cliff and sprayed grit in his eyes, blinding him momentarily. He clenched his jaw and kept climbing.\n\nHe reached up for the rim, only to have a strong hand close around his wrist. Bodie hollered, \"Keep coming! I've got you!\"\n\n\"Grab the boy!\" Jamie gasped out.\n\n\"Come on, Alexander!\"\n\nA second later, Alexander's weight lifted from Jamie's back.\n\n\"I've got him!\" Bodie exclaimed as he fell back from the rim, taking Alexander with him.\n\nAt that instant, a bullet clipped Jamie on top of the left shoulder. The impact was enough to make his arm go numb. His grip on the rope slipped, and at the same time his toes slid off the tiny foothold where they had found purchase. He yelled as all his weight dangled from the grip of his right hand on the rope.\n\nAt that moment, Jamie Ian MacCallister's almost superhuman strength was all that saved him. He hung there with bullets screaming around him and smacking into the cliff for what seemed like an eternity.\n\nIn reality, it was only a couple heartbeats before he forced his left arm to work again and grabbed the rope with that hand. He hauled himself up another foot, then Bodie caught hold of the buckskin shirt. Jamie dug his toes against the rock as Bodie lifted him through the air and he rolled over the edge of the rimrock.\n\nHis pulse hammered inside his head like a gang of railroad workers driving spikes as he lay there on his back trying to catch his breath. A couple feet away, Bodie knelt and fired down at the Blackfeet, ducking occasionally as one of their bullets came too close to his head.\n\nJamie rolled onto his side and lifted his head. In the moonlight, he saw Alexander and Abigail watching him worriedly. He grinned at them. \"I'm all right, kids. We'd better get out of here.\"\n\nBodie threw one final shot at the Indians, then retreated from the edge. \"That sounds like a good idea to me.\" He handed Jamie's gun back to him. \"Sorry it's empty.\"\n\n\"I'm not. I hope you hit some of 'em.\"\n\nThe four of them hurried down the slope as fast as they could, heading for the spot where Jamie and Bodie had left their horses. Within minutes they were mounted, with Abigail riding in front of Bodie and Alexander in front of Jamie, as they circled back toward the rest of the rescue party.\n\nJamie was counting on Hector and the other men to keep the Blackfeet bottled up in that canyon. The Indian ponies could only get in and out of the camp by one route, up that zigzag trail. As long as the men from the wagon train kept raking the top of that ridge with rifle fire, it ought to keep the Blackfeet from getting out.\n\nOnce Jamie, Bodie, and the Bradford kids rejoined the others, they would all have to make a run for it back to the wagon train. Jamie didn't think a war party of less than three dozen would dare to attack the entire group of immigrants. The Blackfeet would be angry because somebody had stolen their prisoners from them, but more than likely they would cut their losses and head on back to their home.\n\nThat's how Jamie hoped it would play out, anyway. With Indians, it was impossible to predict with absolute certainty what they would do.\n\nAs they galloped through the night, Bodie called over to Jamie, \"How bad were you hit?\"\n\nFeeling had returned to Jamie's left arm. The wound on top of his shoulder throbbed, but he was able to move his arm and roll that shoulder without any trouble other than a twinge of pain. \"Just nicked me. It's nothing.\"\n\nIf the Blackfoot who had fired that shot had gotten it off a couple seconds earlier, the bullet probably would have hit Alexander in the head. It had been that close a call. Just thinking about it made Jamie go a little cold in the belly.\n\nThey could no longer hear gunshots over the pounding hoofbeats of Sundown and Bodie's mount, but Jamie hoped the fighting was still going on. If not, the four of them might be riding right into trouble.\n\nFinally, the moonlight revealed a saddle between two hills, one of the landmarks he remembered, and as they rode through it he saw the glow from muzzle flashes in the trees up ahead.\n\n\"Who's that?\" a voice challenged in the darkness. \"Sing out!\"\n\n\"MacCallister!\" Jamie replied. \"I've got Cantrell and the kids with me.\"\n\n\"Thank the Lord!\"\n\nThat was Bradford's voice, prompting Alexander to exclaim, \"Pa!\"\n\nAs Jamie reined in, he scrambled down from the stallion's back and ran toward his father. Abigail was right behind him. Bradford stepped forward and gathered them up in his arms.\n\nThe preacher was an unlikable son of a gun, thought Jamie, but he loved his kids and they returned the feeling. He had to give the man credit for that.\n\n\"Hector, where are you?\" Jamie called.\n\n\"Right here,\" Hector responded as he stepped out of the shadows under some trees. \"Are all of you all right?\"\n\n\"Good enough,\" Jamie said. \"Get the men on their horses. We're lighting a shuck back to the wagon train.\"\n\n\"What about the Blackfeet?\"\n\n\"When they realize nobody's taking potshots at them anymore, they're liable to come boiling out of there and chase after us. It'll be a race back to the wagon train, but I think we'll have enough of a lead to beat them there, and once we do, they'll give up and turn back.\"\n\nHector hurried to carry out Jamie's orders, moving through the trees and rocks where the rescuers were forted up. \"Back to your horses! Mount up, mount up!\"\n\nThe men swung into their saddles.\n\nJamie rode over to Bradford. \"Better let Bodie and me take the kids again, Reverend. Our horses can handle the extra weight, and you're not used to riding double, or in this case, triple.\"\n\n\"I can take care of my own children,\" Bradford snapped. But then common sense prevailed and he relented. \"You two go with Mr. MacCallister and Mr. Cantrell.\"\n\n\"I want to stay with you,\" Abigail wailed.\n\n\"Hush now, and do as I say!\"\n\nThat sharply voiced command got the children to obey. Jamie reached down, grasped Alexander's hands, and pulled the boy up in front of him again. He wheeled Sundown around as the line of men formed and started to leave the shelter of the trees.\n\nThey had just emerged into the open when muzzle flame split the darkness, coming from in front of them. Bullets raked through the rescue party, drawing pained shouts and sending two of the men toppling from their saddles." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "\"Fall back!\" Jamie bellowed as he hauled hard on the reins. \"Back into the trees! Take cover!\"\n\nBullets whined around them as the men hastily retreated. Over the sound of the shots, Jamie heard strident whoops from the unexpected attackers. He knew none of the Blackfeet in the canyon could have gotten in front of them, so that left only one other explanation.\n\nThe war party that had camped in the canyon was meeting another group of Blackfoot warriors, and the second bunch had shown up at just the wrong time.\n\nJamie and his companions, already outnumbered, were caught between the two forces.\n\nJamie swung Alexander to the ground and then flung himself out of the saddle, taking his Winchester with him. He told the boy to find his sister and make sure both of them stayed down as low as they could on the ground.\n\nTaking cover behind a tree, Jamie brought the rifle to his shoulder, nestled his cheek against the smooth wood of the stock, and began firing at the muzzle flashes from the second group of Indians, cranking off the rounds as fast as he could work the Winchester's lever. More shots rang out as the other men began mounting a defense again.\n\nBodie Cantrell ran up and knelt behind a tree next to Jamie. \"This is pretty bad, isn't it?\"\n\n\"They've got us pinned down from both directions,\" Jamie acknowledged. \"These trees and rocks give us pretty good cover, so we ought to be able to hold them off for a while, but sooner or later we'll run out of bullets.\"\n\n\"We can't count on any help from the wagon train, either. They don't have any way of knowing we're in trouble, so they won't send anybody after us.\"\n\n\"I reckon not,\" Jamie agreed grimly.\n\n\"If we hit the ones in front of us hard enough, could we bust through them?\"\n\n\"Not without getting half our bunch killed, including those kids.\"\n\n\"Who are they? What's going on here, anyway?\"\n\n\"Pure bad luck,\" Jamie said. \"That's what's going on.\" He went on to explain his theory that the first bunch of Blackfeet had planned to rendezvous in the canyon with another war party.\n\nBodie agreed that made sense.\n\nThe firing from both directions died away.\n\nJamie called softly, \"Everybody keep your head down! They're trying to draw us out into the open, but we're staying put.\"\n\nSilence settled down over the rugged landscape.\n\nBodie said in a whisper, \"Now we wait?\"\n\n\"Now we wait,\" Jamie agreed. But only until morning, he thought.\n\nSome people thought Indians wouldn't fight at night. Obviously, that wasn't true. But they preferred to do their killing during the day, and Jamie figured that's what they had in mind. They would keep the rescue party pinned down until daylight, and once they could see what they were doing, the Blackfeet would attack from both directions at once and overwhelm the defenders in the trees.\n\nWhen that time came, Jamie and his companions would sell their lives as dearly as possible. There was nothing else they could do.\n\nThe hours stretched out uncomfortably. Jamie heard a lot of frightened muttering from the men. Abigail cried for a while before drifting off into an exhausted sleep. Alexander let out a few sniffles, too, but he was trying to be brave.\n\nReverend Bradford crawled up to Jamie's position and said in a low, angry voice, \"You've managed to get us all killed, MacCallister. We'll never get out of this alive.\"\n\n\"I thought you were supposed to have faith, Reverend.\"\n\n\"I have faith in the Lord. I have none in you.\"\n\n\"Well, I'd be the last person to put myself on the same level as the Lord. I'm just a poor sinner trying to make his way in the world the same as anybody else. But I'll tell you the truth, Bradford. I did the best I knew how to do to help get those kids of yours back. Our luck ran out, that's all.\"\n\n\"Our luck ran out when we agreed to let you lead us to Montana,\" Bradford said bitterly.\n\nBodie said, \"Why don't you just shut your mouth, Bradford? You're always telling other people how they've fallen short, but you're sure as hell not perfect yourself! Those two kids are scared of you, you know that? You're nothing but a damned hardheaded tyrant!\"\n\nBradford started to get to his feet. \"You can't talk that way to a man of God\u2014\"\n\nJamie reached over, put a hand on Bradford's shoulder, and shoved him back down. \"Stay put, Reverend,\" he said coldly. \"I don't cotton to you, but for your kids' sake I don't want you getting a bullet in the head.\"\n\n\"The Indians aren't shooting anymore. We don't even know they're still out there. Maybe they gave up and left.\"\n\n\"They're out there, all right,\" Jamie said. \"Mark my words, Reverend. They're out there.\"\n\nHowever, everything was still quiet by morning. As dawn turned the sky gray and then golden light spread from the east, Jamie scanned the landscape in front of the trees. He didn't see anything... but he knew that didn't matter.\n\nHe wasn't the only one watching the broad valley between the rolling hills that represented their way out. With no warning, Reverend Bradford suddenly strode out into the open, holding his Bible in one hand and waving it in the air.\n\n\"They're gone!\" he said loudly. \"See for yourselves! The red devils have departed!\" He turned to gaze in triumph at Jamie.\n\n\"Get down, you fool!\"\n\n\"The Lord has delivered us from\u2014\"\n\nAt that instant, a rifle cracked. Jamie saw blood fly in the dawn light as a slug bored into the side of Bradford's head and exploded out the other side in a grisly pink shower. The preacher dropped limply, dead by the time he hit the ground.\n\nAbigail screamed and tried to run to her father. Bodie grabbed her as she went by and rolled onto the ground with her as the Blackfeet opened up again. Bullets thudded into tree trunks and shredded through branches.\n\nThe barrage lasted only a moment before ending abruptly. Startled yells came from the war parties in both directions. Guns roared again, but the reports were the duller booms of revolvers. Hoofbeats hammered the ground. Men howled in pain.\n\nThe oddest thing was that with all that shooting going on, none of the bullets seemed to be directed toward the trees where Jamie and his friends were.\n\n\"What's going on out there?\" Hector asked as he knelt behind a rock.\n\n\"Sounds like reinforcements showed up,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"Reinforcements? From where?\"\n\n\"I don't know... but I'm glad they're here!\"\n\nStampeding ponies burst into view, along with Blackfoot warriors fleeing on foot to avoid being trampled. With targets out in the open like that, Jamie brought his Winchester up and took advantage of the opportunity. His deadly accurate shots took a toll as .44-40 rounds ripped through the warriors. Around him, the other men joined the battle again, too.\n\nThe Blackfeet were the ones caught in a crossfire, and they were smart enough to know that the best thing to do was get out while they could. Several of them grabbed stampeding ponies, hung on desperately to the manes, and swung up onto bare backs. They fled, shouting angrily. The ones who still could, followed that example.\n\n\"Must be a cavalry patrol came along and heard the shooting,\" Bodie said as the gunfire tapered off again. The surviving Blackfeet from both war parties were taking off for the tall and uncut.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Jamie said. \"I reckon we'll find out pretty soon.\"\n\n\"What about the preacher?\" Bodie nodded toward the body of Bradford.\n\nWith a glance at the sobbing Alexander and Abigail, Jamie said quietly, \"Leave him for now, until we're sure those war parties are gone.\"\n\nA few tense moments went by, then Bodie asked, \"Who in the world is that?\"\n\nA man had stepped out into the open and was walking toward the trees, apparently as casual as if he were out for a Sunday stroll. He was tall and lean and clad in greasy buckskins. His hat was pushed back on thinning white hair, and he sported a grizzled beard. Despite his obvious age, he moved with the ease and vitality of a much younger man.\n\nAnother man appeared behind him, leading several horses. He was younger, clean shaven, with sandy hair and a very broad set of shoulders.\n\nJess Neville said, \"We got a couple of hombres comin' in from this other side, too.\"\n\nJamie looked around and saw an even more unusual pair approaching the line of trees and rocks. One was a thick-bodied Indian with long, graying hair. Beside him, hurrying to keep up, was a white man not even four feet tall, also dressed in buckskins.\n\n\"There's your so-called cavalry patrol,\" Jamie told Bodie with a grin.\n\n\"Four men? That's all? How is that possible? Four men couldn't rout a whole Blackfoot war party, let alone two of 'em!\"\n\n\"Depends on who they are. I don't know the young fella, but I'm acquainted with the other three, although it's been a long time since we crossed trails.\"\n\nJamie stepped out of the trees and raised a hand in greeting to the skinny, grizzled old-timer.\n\nThe man squinted at him. \"Well, if that don't beat all! Jamie Ian MacCallister his own self, still big as a mountain and twice as ugly!\"\n\n\"How are you doing, Preacher?\" Jamie grinned and extended his hand. \"Long time no see!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "The reunion was a happy one, although Jamie's pleasure at seeing the old mountain man called Preacher was tempered by Reverend Bradford's sudden and senseless death. The two veteran frontiersmen shook hands and slapped each other heartily on the back.\n\nAlmost forty years had passed since Jamie and Preacher had first met down in Texas. Since then, they had run into each other from time to time, often with years between meetings.\n\nJamie wasn't sure exactly how old Preacher was, but he knew the mountain man was at least a decade older than him. If anyone had asked him, he wouldn't have been sure whether Preacher was even still alive.\n\nObviously, Preacher had proven to be amazingly resilient. Jamie wasn't sure the gun or knife had been made that could kill the old buckskinner.\n\n\"Who's this?\" Jamie asked with a nod toward the young man accompanying Preacher.\n\n\"Fella name of Smoke,\" Preacher said. \"Smoke Jensen. We been driftin' around together for the past few years, ever since Smoke's pa got hisself killed by some no-good polecats. Heard a rumor those varmints might be over in Idaho, so we're sort of amblin' in that direction.\"\n\n\"Plan to settle the score, do you?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Smoke said curtly.\n\n\"Smoke's about as naturally fast on the draw as anybody I ever seen,\" Preacher said with a note of pride in his voice. \"That's how come I started callin' him Smoke. His real front handle is Kirby, but he don't go by it no more. I pree-dict you'll be hearin' a heap about him on down the line.\"\n\nSmoke shook his head. \"I'm not looking for a reputation. Just justice.\"\n\nPreacher waved a hand toward his other two companions. \"You remember Audie and Nighthawk, of course.\"\n\n\"Sure.\" Jamie shook hands with both men, former fur trappers who were long-time friends of Preacher. \"How are you, Audie?\"\n\n\"Exceedingly fine,\" the short white man answered. \"The fresh air and hardy life I've experienced out here on the frontier seems to have allowed me to stave off decrepitude, at least for the time being.\"\n\nAudie spoke like an educated man, which was exactly what he was. At one time, he had been a professor at a college back east before he had abandoned that stifling academic life and headed west. Although he was small in size, he had the fighting heart and spirit of a much larger man.\n\nJamie went on. \"You're looking good, Nighthawk.\"\n\nThe impassive Crow warrior nodded solemnly. \"Ummm.\"\n\n\"Still as talkative as ever, I see,\" Jamie commented with a grin. \"Fellas, this young scalawag is Bodie Cantrell. Big hombre with the beard over there is Hector Gilworth, and the fella with him is his cousin Jess Neville.\" Jamie went on to introduce the other men in the rescue party.\n\n\"Who's the sky pilot who got in the way of a bullet?\" Preacher asked.\n\n\"That would be Reverend Thomas Bradford,\" Jamie said. \"Pa to those two youngsters.\"\n\nPreacher's expressive mouth twisted in a grimace. \"Tough on young'uns, seein' their pa gunned down like that.\"\n\n\"Yeah. They got carried off by some of those Blackfeet, and we were trying to get 'em back when we got pinned down here. It's a mighty good thing for us you came along when you did. What did you do, pull that old trick of yours where you slip into the enemy's camp during the night and cut some throats?\"\n\nPreacher chuckled. \"It does tend to shake folks up a mite to find a few of their compadres with new mouths carved in their necks. When it got light, Audie and me stampeded the ponies that belonged to each bunch, whilst Smoke and Nighthawk waded in, their hoglegs a-blazin'. Every way those redskinned varmints turned, they was either a bullet or a wild-eyed bronc waitin' to ventilate 'em or trample 'em. Didn't take much o' that to make 'em light a shuck.\"\n\n\"What's left of the two bunches are liable to get together somewhere,\" Jamie mused. \"We'd better get on back to the wagons while we can.\"\n\n\"Wagons?\" Preacher repeated. \"These fellas are from a wagon train?\"\n\n\"That's right. Bound for Eagle Valley in Montana Territory.\"\n\n\"Mighty pretty place,\" Preacher said. \"But in case you ain't noticed the chill in the air... it's December! What sort of dang fool takes a wagon train to Montana at this time o' year?\"\n\n\"You're looking at him,\" Jamie said.\n\nThe old mountain man snorted. \"I stand by that dang fool business.\"\n\n\"I'm not arguing the point. But we're here, and I'm bound and determined to get those pilgrims where they're going by Christmas.\" An idea occurred to Jamie. \"Why don't the four of you come along with us?\"\n\n\"Told you, we're headed for Idaho,\" Preacher said with a frown.\n\n\"And that's the general direction we're going,\" Jamie pointed out. \"I wouldn't mind visiting with you for a while, Preacher... and having four more good men along for the rest of the trip wouldn't exactly make me unhappy, either.\"\n\nPreacher scratched his grizzled jaw in thought and looked at Smoke. \"What do you think, youngster? It's your pa we're goin' to settle the score for.\"\n\nSmoke pondered the question for a moment, then said in his grave manner, \"Chances are some of the passes where we need to go in Idaho are already closed, Preacher. We knew we might have to winter somewhere. I reckon it might as well be with these folks.\"\n\n\"There's your answer, Jamie,\" Preacher told the big frontiersman. \"We'll come with you.\"\n\nJamie nodded in satisfaction.\n\nQuickly, he got everyone mounted. Reverend Bradford's body was draped over his saddle and lashed in place. Several other men had been wounded in the fighting during the night, but none of the injuries were bad enough to keep them from riding. Bradford was the group's only casualty.\n\nTo Alexander and Abigail, though, it was a big loss. The two youngsters were orphans now. The only good thing about the situation was that Jamie was sure one of the families with the wagon train would be willing to take them in.\n\nJamie and Preacher took the point, and as the two old pioneers rode together, they talked about the things they had been doing since they had seen each other last.\n\n\"I was mighty sorry to hear about what happened to your woman, Jamie,\" Preacher said. \"Heard tell you went after the sorry bunch responsible for her dyin' and rained down hellfire and brimstone on their heads.\"\n\n\"I settled the score for Kate as best I could,\" Jamie said, his face and voice grim. \"It wasn't enough.\"\n\n\"No, I don't 'spect it was. I've lost folks I loved, too, and no matter how much vengeance you get, it ain't never enough 'cause it don't bring back them you lost. Nothin' does.\"\n\n\"But that doesn't stop us from trying.\"\n\n\"Nope. Reckon we wouldn't be human if we didn't want to even things up, so we try even though we know it won't really put our hearts at ease.\"\n\nA chuckle came from Jamie. \"Preacher, you're getting profound in your old age.\"\n\n\"Reckon it comes from bein' around Audie too much. That fella goes on and on about philosophy and such-like. And who in blazes are you callin' old?\"\n\nBy midday, the rescue party, along with its newest additions, came in sight of the wagons parked next to the creek. Several men led by Jake galloped out to meet them and escorted them on in. Everyone gathered around to celebrate the safe return of Alexander and Abigail.\n\nThe immigrants were sobered by the death of Reverend Bradford. After his body was laid out on the ground, Moses covered it with a blanket and took his hat off, holding it over his heart. \"The reverend might not want the likes of me praying over him, but I feel like I have to do it anyway.\"\n\n\"I don't reckon all those disagreements mean a blasted thing now,\" Jamie said. \"The fella's dead, and I hope his soul is at peace.\"\n\n\"So do I,\" Moses murmured. \"So do I. If it's all right with everyone, I'll conduct the funeral.\"\n\n\"I don't think anybody's going to object. You've got a lot of friends on this wagon train, Moses. Your faith may be different, but after what you did during that outbreak of fever and all the other ways you've pitched in, if these folks have a spiritual leader now... it's you.\"\n\nMoses swallowed and nodded. \"I'll try to live up to that.\"\n\nJamie nodded. \"What we need to figure out now is who's going to take care of those kids.\"\n\nA voice spoke up from behind him. \"That's not going to be a problem, Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\nJamie and Moses turned to see Savannah standing there. She had her arms around the shoulders of Alexander and Abigail, whose pale, tear-streaked faces testified to their grief. They huddled against Savannah's skirts, obviously taking comfort from her presence.\n\n\"I'm going to take care of them,\" Savannah went on. \"I can handle their wagon and see to it that they have everything they need.\"\n\n\"Are you sure about that?\" Jamie asked with a frown. \"You being an unmarried woman and all?\"\n\n\"They were being raised by the reverend alone since his wife passed on,\" Savannah pointed out. \"The children and I have become close, and this is something I'd really like to do.\"\n\n\"Well... if that's what all of you want... I don't reckon it's my place to say no.\"\n\n\"I'm sure everyone in the group will pitch in to help if need be.\" Moses paused. \"Did you happen to ask Bodie what he thought about this idea?\"\n\n\"It's not Bodie's decision to make,\" Savannah replied. \"It's mine.\"\n\n\"Sounds to me like it's settled, then.\" Jamie looked at Alexander and Abigail. \"You two have been mighty brave all through this. Miss Savannah's going to need you to keep on being brave. Reckon you can do that?\"\n\nAlexander nodded. He used the back of his hand to wipe away a stray tear. \"This is all our fault. If we hadn't wandered off and let those Indians grab us, our pa would still be alive.\"\n\nJamie shook his head. \"There are too many things going on in the world to say something like that for sure. Too many turning points where everything could turn out different. Might as well blame me for not keeping a closer eye on your pa, so that he couldn't step out there in the open where the Blackfeet could get a shot at him. Things happen, and I reckon we just have to tell ourselves that there's a reason for the way they do, and then we go on from there.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Moses said. \"On to your new homes in Eagle Valley. When do you think we'll get there, Jamie?\"\n\n\"By Christmas, like I've been saying all along.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "When the wagon train had left Kansas City, Jamie had worried that he might not have enough scouts. With the addition of Preacher, Smoke Jensen, Audie, and Nighthawk, he almost had too many.\n\nOn the other hand, he also had four more first-class fighting men to help out in case of trouble. He knew from experience that Preacher, Audie, and Nighthawk were hell on wheels in a ruckus, and it didn't take much time to realize that Smoke Jensen might well be the deadliest of them all.\n\nDuring one of the wagon train's midday halts a few days after the rescue of the Bradford children, Preacher urged Smoke to get in a little practice with his guns. The old mountain man pointed out a fallen aspen about fifty feet away. \"See if you can pick off some of them branches that are stickin' up.\"\n\nJamie was close by and heard what Preacher said. He looked at the fallen tree and saw that the branches weren't much more than twigs maybe half an inch wide. They were barely visible. Jamie figured he could have hit those branches with a rifle, if he'd had time to draw a bead on them.\n\nSmoke swept out one of his .44s and started firing in less than the blink of an eye. He didn't shoot from the hip, but rather thrust the gun out at the end of his arm, taking no more than a split second to aim before the Colt began to roar.\n\nHe triggered off five shots. Even with having to cock the single-action Colt each time, the reports sounded so close together they formed one continuous peal of gun-thunder. To Jamie's amazement, five of the aspen branches leaped into the air as Smoke's bullets smashed through them.\n\nMoses had wandered up in time to witness the display. He let out a shrill whistle of admiration and awe. \"I never saw such shooting!\"\n\n\"Taught the younker everything he knows,\" Preacher said with a proud grin.\n\nSmoke smiled faintly as he reloaded the expended chambers.\n\nPreacher shrugged. \"Of course, the boy had some natural talent to begin with.\"\n\nMoses said, \"Mr. Preacher, do you think you could teach me to shoot?\"\n\n\"Hold on a minute,\" Jamie told him. \"Moses, you never said anything to me about wanting to learn how to shoot.\"\n\n\"Well, it just seems so foreign to me. But the longer we stay out here on the frontier, the more it seems like maybe it's something I should learn how to do.\"\n\n\"Why, sure, I'd be glad to give you a few leetle pointers,\" Preacher said. \"Don't go to thinkin' you'll ever be as good with a hogleg as Smoke is, though. To that boy, usin' a gun is just as natural as breathin'.\"\n\n\"I just want to be able to protect people who need to be protected,\" Moses said.\n\n\"That there's an honorable goal. There's a heap of bad folks in this world, and it falls to them who have good hearts to stand up to those varmints and do what's right. You got a gun?\"\n\n\"Well... no.\"\n\nDrawn by the shooting, Bodie walked up in time to hear most of the conversation. He grinned and unbuckled his gun belt. \"You can borrow mine, Moses.\"\n\n\"Oh... all right. Thanks.\" Moses took the belt and rather awkwardly strapped it around his hips.\n\n\"Hitch that belt up a mite,\" Preacher told him. \"Your holster's too low. You want the gun butt about halfway betwixt your wrist and your elbow, so when you raise your arm your hand'll hit it natural-like. Yeah, that's right,\" he went on as Moses adjusted the belt. \"You saw that log Smoke was a-shootin' at. Pull that hogleg and see if you can hit it.\"\n\nMoses faced the log, squared his shoulders, and took a deep breath. He made what he probably thought was a quick grab at the gun, although the move seemed painfully slow to Jamie's eyes.\n\nThe gun came clear of the holster, and Moses immediately exclaimed, \"Whoa!\" He grabbed it with his other hand to keep from dropping it. \"It's heavy!\"\n\n\"You'll get used to it,\" Preacher said. \"It's a dang good thing that log ain't gonna be shootin' back at you. Now burn some powder, son!\"\n\nMoses pointed the revolver at the fallen tree. The barrel wobbled back and forth violently. He grunted as he tried to pull the trigger, but nothing happened.\n\nBodie said, \"You've got to cock it. Pull the hammer back until it locks into place. Then pull the trigger.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Moses said. \"I didn't notice Smoke doing that\u2014\"\n\n\"That's because he does it too fast for the eye to follow. But you can take your time, Moses.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Moses looped his right thumb over the hammer and pulled it back. The effort caused the barrel to point upward.\n\n\"Straighten it back down,\" Preacher said.\n\nStill using both hands, Moses pointed the gun at the log. It was still pretty shaky. Seconds stretched out as Moses tried to get the barrel to stop jumping around enough that he could aim.\n\n\"Any time now,\" Preacher drawled.\n\nMoses jerked the trigger.\n\nThe Colt boomed. The recoil forced the gun up, and Moses obviously wasn't ready for it. He yelled as the revolver flew out of his hands.\n\n\"Duck, boys!\" Preacher shouted.\n\nJamie stepped forward and caught the gun before it could fall to the ground.\n\nMoses had his hands clapped over his ears. \"That was so loud. It sounds even louder when you're holding the gun.\"\n\n\"Here you go,\" Jamie said as he handed the weapon back to Moses. Quickly he pushed the barrel down toward the ground. \"Don't point it at me or anybody else. Not unless it's somebody who needs shooting.\"\n\nMoses squinted at the log. \"Did I hit it?\"\n\n\"You didn't even come close,\" Preacher said. \"Your bullet went ten or twelve feet over it, I reckon. Try again.\"\n\nBy now quite a crowd was gathering. Savannah, with Alexander and Abigail, was one of the spectators. She called, \"You can do it, Moses!\"\n\n\"Yeah!\" Alexander added.\n\n\"I appreciate the vote of confidence,\" Moses said, \"but I'm beginning to have my doubts.\"\n\n\"A man never knows until he tries,\" Jamie said. \"Sometimes he has to try a bunch of times.\"\n\n\"You're right, of course.\" Moses took a deep breath and aimed at the fallen aspen again.\n\nFifteen minutes later, he had emptied the Colt, Bodie had reloaded it, and Moses had emptied it again. He had dropped the gun four times, nearly shot himself in the foot twice, and hadn't hit the log even once.\n\n\"Moses, ol' son, I hate to tell you this,\" Preacher drawled, \"but you ain't cut out to be a pistoleer. I reckon if you was to find yourself in a gunfight, you'd be more of a danger to them who was on your side instead of the hombres you're supposed to ventilate.\"\n\nMoses sighed and nodded. \"I think you're right, Mr. Preacher.\" He unbuckled the gun belt. \"I need to be a good sport about it, though. Not everyone can be good at everything.\"\n\n\"That's all right,\" Bodie told him as he took the Colt back. \"You just leave the shooting to the rest of us.\"\n\nMoses brightened and suggested, \"Maybe I could learn how to use a rifle. Or a shotgun.\"\n\nJamie felt a shiver of apprehension go through him at the thought of Moses Danzig with a scattergun in his hands. \"Not today. Back to your wagons, folks. It's time for us to be rolling again!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "The wagon train turned west a couple days later. If Jamie had figured correctly\u2014and he was pretty sure he had\u2014Eagle Valley was right in front of them, about two weeks' journey away.\n\nTwo more weeks for the good weather to hold, he mused as he rode in front of the wagon train. Would that be possible? Already winter had held off with its full force for longer than he had dared hope.\n\nNot that it wasn't cold all the time. Every morning ice had to be broken off the top of the water buckets before the animals could drink. The sun shone most days, but its light was weak and watery and held only scant warmth. The temperature usually climbed above freezing, but not always. People lived in their coats now, not taking them off even at night when they crawled into their bedrolls.\n\nBy the time they got where they were going, the whole lot of them would be pretty gamey, Jamie thought with a smile.\n\nBodie came up alongside him and waved a hand at the grasslands surrounding them. \"It's mighty dry up here. Is there a drought going on?\"\n\n\"No. The cold's killed all the grass, at least on top of the ground. The snows will come in and cover it up for several months, and then come spring when the snow melts, all that water will soak into the ground, down to the roots of the grass. That's when it'll start budding out again. Once these pilgrims get where they're going, they can plant winter grass next fall if they want to, so they'll have some graze for their livestock almost year-round. Anyway, as I recall, Eagle Valley has more and better vegetation to start with. The foothills get more rain in the spring and fall than the plains do.\"\n\nBodie squinted at the western horizon. \"If Eagle Valley is in the foothills of the Rockies, like you said, Jamie, shouldn't we be able to see the mountains by now?\"\n\n\"Be patient,\" Jamie told him. \"You'll see 'em soon enough. When you do, it'll seem like you're never going to get there. They'll sit there in front of us for days without looking like they're getting any closer.\"\n\nJamie's prediction proved to be true. A day later, the immigrants spotted what looked like low-lying white clouds in the distance. Jamie rode along the train to the Bradford wagon, which was being driven by Savannah, who had proven to be an adept hand at getting the oxen to move.\n\nJamie pointed to the west and said to Alexander and Abigail, \"See those white patches up in the sky, way off over yonder? That's snow on top of the Rocky Mountains.\"\n\nThe children were impressed, and so was Savannah.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" she said. \"I never thought I'd see such a sight. When you spend your days in hotel rooms and your nights in a darkened theater, your idea of scenery is a painted backdrop. I like the real thing much better.\"\n\n\"You've changed a mite in the past couple months while we've been on the trail,\" Jamie said.\n\nSavannah shook her head. \"No. I've changed a lot. And all for the better, thanks to you, Mr. MacCallister.\"\n\n\"Not just thanks to me. A certain young fella had something to do with it, too.\"\n\nJamie couldn't be sure if Savannah's cheeks were red from the chilly wind... or if she was blushing a little, too. But she looked happy, and that was the main thing, he supposed, whatever the reason.\n\nSavannah had gotten Alexander and Abigail nested down in a veritable mountain of blankets and quilts when she heard a soft footstep outside the wagon. The children were asleep, so she moved to the back of the vehicle and whispered through the gap around the canvas flap, \"Who's there?\"\n\n\"It's just me.\"\n\nThe voice was familiar, and it made warmth well up inside her. Not real, physical warmth, although that would have been more than welcome, but rather an emotional one that was quite comforting, anyway.\n\nShe climbed over the tailgate and out of the wagon, her movements hampered somewhat by the thick layers of clothing she wore. Bodie reached up, took hold of her under her arms, and helped her to the ground.\n\nThat made it easy for him to press her body against his as he hugged her. As many clothes as they both had on, there wasn't anything sensual about the embrace, but Savannah found it very satisfying, anyway.\n\nAnd when he leaned down to kiss her... well, that was sensual, and it started her heart pounding harder as their lips clung together.\n\n\"I'm sure glad you decided not to leave the wagon train and go back to acting,\" he said quietly as they held each other and she rested her head against his chest.\n\n\"I miss Cyrus and Dollie and everybody else in the troupe,\" Savannah said. \"I'd be lying if I said I didn't. One day I'd like to see them all again. But I've made so many friends here on the wagon train... Moses and Hector and the Binghams... and you. I can't imagine ever leaving now.\" She paused. \"When we get to Eagle Valley... you're going to stay, aren't you, Bodie?\"\n\n\"I've been talking to Captain Hendricks. I told him I want to claim a homestead, too. I've spent a lot of years on the drift, Savannah, ever since my folks died. I reckon it's time that I settled down.\"\n\nHe wouldn't have to find a homestead to claim, she thought. The one where Reverend Bradford had planned to settle with his children ought to be available. Savannah planned to see to it that Alexander and Abigail got what was coming to them, but they would need a grown-up to help them.\n\nMaybe a couple grown-ups... a couple... and two children...\n\nWell, that made a family, didn't it?\n\nShe didn't allow herself to say any of those thoughts out loud. She didn't want to rush Bodie or pressure him into anything. But he was a smart man, she told herself. He would figure it out soon enough. If the idea hadn't occurred to him by the time the wagon train reached Eagle Valley, surely it would once they had been there a while.\n\nMoses had conducted Reverend Bradford's funeral. Maybe he would be willing to perform a marriage ceremony, too.\n\nThe two of them held each other for a time, talking quietly and kissing now and then. Even though the night was very cold, the time they spent together was a pleasant interlude.\n\nFinally Savannah said, \"I need to get back in the wagon, I guess. If the weather was nicer\u2014\"\n\n\"But it's not,\" Bodie said. \"One of these days it will be again, though. When that day comes, we'll spend a lot of time together and enjoy every minute of it.\"\n\n\"I can't wait.\" Savannah gave him another kiss and climbed into the wagon.\n\nBodie's heart was light as he walked back toward Moses's wagon. He had come mighty close to asking Savannah to marry him, but he wanted to wait for a better time. For one thing, he wanted to see the look on her face when he asked her that all-important question, and the night was too dark for that.\n\nThere would be plenty of chances to propose later, he told himself. Now that they had both decided to remain in Eagle Valley permanently, they had all the time in the world. That thought made him so happy he started whistling a tune. It wasn't a real song, just an irrepressible expression of how he felt at the moment.\n\nIt also served inadvertently to cover up the sound of a footstep behind him. He had no warning before something smashed into the back of his head, driving him to his knees.\n\nPain exploded inside his skull, pain so intense that it blinded him momentarily. He tried to fight his way to his feet, but somebody kicked him in the back and knocked him facedown on the ground. Weight came down on him, a knee digging painfully into the small of his back and pinning him there. An icy-cold ring of metal pressed into his temple.\n\nHe recognized it as the muzzle of a gun and stopped trying to struggle. He had no idea who had attacked him, but he sensed that his life was hanging by a slender thread. All that would be required to end it was a little pressure on the trigger....\n\n\"That's better,\" a man said in a harsh whisper.\n\nThe voice was familiar, but Bodie couldn't place it right away. The man bent over closer to him, close enough for Bodie to smell the whiskey on his breath.\n\n\"Don't give me any trouble,\" the man went on, \"and you might come out of this alive. But I wouldn't count on that, you dirty, stinkin' double-crosser.\"\n\nBodie knew the voice, knew who it was that had come out of the cold, dark night to wreck all his plans.\n\nEldon Swint." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "The outlaw wrapped the fingers of his left hand around Bodie's arm and hauled the young man to his feet, keeping the gun barrel pressed to Bodie's head.\n\nBodie tried to force his brain to work despite the throbbing in his skull and make some sense of what Swint had said. \"Eldon, why are you doing this? I never double-crossed you! I told you I was leaving the gang. I even gave up my share of the loot.\"\n\nSwint ground the gun barrel against Bodie's temple, making him gasp in pain. \"You pretended to give up your share! I'll bet it was your idea for Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll to steal that whole pile of double eagles!\"\n\nBodie's heart sank. Everything suddenly made sense. He knew why Jake and the other two had left the gang right after he did and had joined up with the wagon train.\n\nHe had considered Jake his friend and didn't like to think that he was capable of such treachery, but Bodie's instincts told him it was true. Jake had been angling to get his hands on more than his fair share, right from the start. Clearly, he had come up with a way to do it.\n\nSwint had figured out who was responsible for the loss of the loot, as well as where they had fled, and he had gotten on their trail like a bloodhound.\n\n\"You followed us all the way from Kansas City?\"\n\n\"Damn right we did,\" Swint said. \"Took us awhile to realize where that money must've gone, and we've run into nothin' but trouble chasin' you boys down. Fever hit the whole bunch of us and laid us low for a while. Killed a couple of the fellas. But the rest of us got over it, and now we've caught up to you at last, you no-good thief.\"\n\n\"Listen to me, Eldon,\" Bodie said, trying to make his voice as convincing as he possibly could. \"I swear I didn't have anything to do with taking that money. I gave up my share, just like I told you back in Kansas City. That's the truth. All I wanted was to come with this wagon train.\"\n\n\"And be with your little whore of an actress.\" Swint laughed as Bodie stiffened. \"Yeah, I know all about her. If you don't want somethin' mighty bad to happen to her as well as you, you'll tell me where the loot is.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I swear I don't.\"\n\nSwint took the gun away from Bodie's temple, but before the young man could react, Swint raked the barrel across the side of his head in a vicious swipe. Bodie gasped as he felt blood well from the gash that the gun sight had opened up.\n\n\"I'll kill you, you damn fool,\" Swint grated. \"You know that, don't you?\"\n\nIt had been a mistake for him to ever think that Eldon Swint might not be as tough and brutal as he appeared to be, Bodie realized. The man was a ruthless hardcase, through and through, and would do anything to get what he wanted.\n\n\"If I knew, I'd tell you, Eldon. I really would. But I can't tell you something I don't know.\"\n\n\"Where's Lucas and the other two?\"\n\nBodie hesitated. If he sold out Jake, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll, it would be the same thing as signing their death warrant. Swint intended to kill them.\n\nBut Swint intended to kill him, too. Bodie had no doubt about that. And he had threatened Savannah.\n\n\"You brought the whole gang with you?\"\n\n\"That's right, except for the two the fever took. They're situated all around the camp, ready to open fire at my signal. We'll lay waste to this wagon train if we have to, Cantrell. You better believe it.\"\n\nBodie believed it, all right, and with a sinking feeling inside him, he realized the situation was worse than he had thought. Swint wouldn't want to leave any witnesses alive, and he wouldn't pass up whatever loot he could find in the wagons. A cold certainty came over Bodie, colder even than the frigid winter temperatures in Montana Territory.\n\nSwint planned to wipe out everyone on the wagon train\u2014Savannah, the kids, Moses, everybody\u2014take everything of value from it, and probably burn the wagons behind him as a memorial to his evil.\n\nTo give himself time, Bodie took a deep breath and sighed. He suddenly realized Swint's mistake was not knowing who was accompanying the wagon train. He decided to go along with what Swint thought had happened. \"Blast it, all right. I should've known all along that I couldn't fool you, Eldon. But just for the record, it was Jake's idea, not mine.\"\n\nThat was the truth, anyway.\n\n\"That don't surprise me none,\" Swint said. \"I always thought Lucas was a sneaky little snake. Show me where the loot's hid and I'll let you live. Lucas and them other two got to die, though.\"\n\n\"Fine.\" The bitterness in Bodie's voice was genuine even if the sentiment he expressed was not. \"He never should've been greedy and gotten us into this mess.\"\n\n\"Damn right. Now move, and don't forget that I'll blow your brains out if you try anything funny. I don't really need you. It'll be easier if you show me where the money is, but I'll find it one way or another.\"\n\n\"There's a false bottom in one of the wagons,\" Bodie said, his brain working furiously as he formulated his plan. It would take a considerable amount of luck to make it work, but he didn't really have any other choice. \"It's over here.\"\n\nWith the gun still at his head, he stumbled toward the wagon where Moses was asleep.\n\nMoses... and Jamie Ian MacCallister.\n\nJamie didn't sleep as well as he once had. It was just part of growing older. The cold didn't help matters, either. He felt it more as it seeped into his bones and made them ache and his muscles grow stiff. He was half-awake as footsteps approached the wagon.\n\nSomething was off about them. The gait was wrong, causing Jamie's instincts to warn him. Instantly, he was fully awake and alert. His hands reached out in the darkness and unerringly closed around the butts of the .44s he had placed where he could get to them easily.\n\nHe rose up, a massive, bearlike shape in the shadows inside the wagon, and moved silently to the rear of the vehicle. Using the barrel of one gun, he moved the canvas flap aside slightly. Two men were coming toward the wagon, one of them stumbling slightly like he was drunk. The other man held his arm as if the first man had imbibed too much.\n\nAs clouds moved away from the moon, Jamie saw the second man holding a gun and knew the first man wasn't drunk. Something was very wrong.\n\nThe first man said, \"I'll show you how to get into that false bottom in the wagon. The loot's hidden there. You've got to give me your word, though, Eldon, that you and the rest of the gang won't hurt anybody.\"\n\n\"Nobody but Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll,\" the second man said.\n\nJamie knew he was lying. He could hear it in the man's voice.\n\n\"Those double-crossers got to die.\"\n\n\"Fine, but you've got to get word to the men hidden outside the camp not to open fire,\" the first man said.\n\nJamie recognized the voice. It belonged to Bodie Cantrell. He was doing a good job of letting him know what was going on.\n\n\"That's enough jabberin',\" the other man snapped. \"Anybody in that wagon?\"\n\n\"No, it's mine. I took it over after the fella who had it died of a fever, too. The same sickness hit us. After that happened, I fixed up the false bottom and hid those sacks of double eagles in it.\"\n\n\"All right, open it up. I want to see that loot of mine... and then get down to business.\"\n\nKilling business, Jamie thought. He could hear the bloodlust in the man's voice.\n\nThey were right outside the wagon. It was time to make his move.\n\nJamie swept the canvas aside and bellowed, \"Hit the dirt, Bodie!\" He came out of the wagon like a whirlwind, both guns extended in front of him.\n\nBodie rammed an elbow back into his captor's body and twisted away just as Swint pulled the trigger. Flame spouted from the gun muzzle. Bodie cried out as if he were hit.\n\nJamie didn't have time to check on him. He was too busy killing the viper in their midst.\n\nBoth .44s roared as he thumbed off shot after shot. Tongues of flame a foot long licked out from the gun barrels. Eldon was tough and stayed on his feet for a moment as Jamie's bullets pounded into him. He even got another shot off, the slug whining harmlessly over Jamie's head.\n\nThen the lead storm took its toll. Eldon went over backwards, shot to pieces.\n\nJamie rammed the revolvers behind his belt, reached back into the wagon, and plucked his Winchester from the floor. He levered a round into the chamber as he shouted, \"Preacher! Smoke! Outlaws around the camp!\"\n\nHe leaped over a wagon tongue and plunged into the night, ready to do battle. He didn't know how many outlaws were hiding around the camp, but with him, Preacher, and Smoke going after them, to say nothing of Audie and Nighthawk...\n\nWell, however many there were, the varmints were outnumbered.\n\nThey just didn't know it yet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "The next few minutes were flame-streaked chaos. Hidden gunmen opened fire on Jamie, and he returned the shots with deadly effect. He hoped all the immigrants were keeping their heads down while the fight raged.\n\nThe battle ringed the camp. Jamie heard a rapid fusillade of six-gun fire and figured that was Smoke Jensen getting in on the action. He didn't think anybody else could keep a pair of hoglegs singing that fast.\n\nThe Winchester's magazine ran dry. As it did, a man leaped up from the ground nearby and ran at Jamie, thrusting out a gun, eager for a sure shot.\n\nJamie ducked as the blast rang out, then stepped in to meet the charge. He drove the rifle's butt into the man's face and heard the satisfying crunch of bone. The outlaw dropped like a rock.\n\n\"Jamie, look out!\" someone called.\n\nJamie twisted and crouched, and another shot blasted close enough he felt the heat from the muzzle. Before he could do anything else, Bodie appeared, the gun in his hand flaming. The outlaw who had nearly ventilated Jamie went down, twisted off his feet by Bodie's shots.\n\n\"Glad to see you're all right,\" Jamie told the young man.\n\n\"Muzzle flash nearly burned my eyebrows off,\" Bodie said, \"but the bullet missed and that's all that counts.\"\n\n\"You're right about that. Let's finish cleaning up these rats... and then you'll have to tell me what this is all about.\"\n\nJust as Jamie expected, the outlaws were no match for the fighting men from the wagon train. Hector Gilworth and Jess Neville had joined in the battle, too, and had given a good account of themselves. Jess might claim to be lazy, but he had tackled two of the gunmen in a fierce shoot-out and brought them both down, taking a bullet through his left arm in the process. Hector had gotten his hands on one of the outlaws and broken the man's neck.\n\nPreacher, Smoke, Audie, and Nighthawk wiped out the rest of the gang in short order. They weren't the sort of men who asked for or gave quarter, especially when faced with human vermin. By the time they finished sweeping in a big circle around the wagon train, the plains were littered with owlhoot corpses.\n\nThen, as Jamie had told Bodie, it was time for explanations.\n\nThe main campfire in the center of the circle was built up until it was blazing brightly and casting light over the gathering. The first thing Bodie did was look around for Jake Lucas, Clete Mahaffey, and Dave Pearsoll.\n\nThere was no sign of the three men.\n\nThey must have realized what was going on and taken advantage of the confusion to slip away, Jamie decided once Bodie had revealed that they were all former members of Eldon Swint's outlaw gang and spilled the story about the stolen loot.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Savannah,\" Bodie said to the young woman as she stared solemnly at him. A bloodstained bandage was wrapped around his head where Swint had pistol-whipped him. \"I hoped you'd never find out about my past. I'm ashamed that I ever got mixed up with a bunch of owlhoots like that.\"\n\nFor a long moment, Savannah didn't say anything. Then, \"You could have told me, Bodie. I thought you trusted me more than that.\"\n\n\"I do trust you,\" he insisted. \"I just didn't want you to think bad of me.\"\n\n\"I've seen what you're really like these past weeks.\" Savannah looked around at the rest of the immigrants. \"We all have. You risked your life to save Abigail and Alexander. You've been a good friend to everybody on this wagon train. I'm sure you've made some mistakes, done some things you regret and wish you could take back... but everyone has. I know I have.\" She shook her head. \"But it doesn't make me feel any differently toward you.\"\n\nRelief washed over Bodie's face. \"Thank the Lord! I was afraid you'd hate me when you found out the truth.\"\n\nSavannah shook her head, moved closer to Bodie, and laid a hand on his arm. \"I could never hate you.\"\n\nJamie stepped between them and the rest of the crowd, putting his back to the two young people so they could have a moment of privacy as he addressed the group. \"Hector, we need to get some horses and rope and drag those carcasses well away from the wagons. I reckon the wolves will take care of them after that.\"\n\nMoses made a face. \"Is it really necessary to deal with them in such a callous manner, Jamie?\"\n\n\"The ground's too hard to dig a grave big enough for all of them.\"\n\nPreacher added, \"I wouldn't be inclined to go to that much trouble for such a bunch of polecats, anyway. Nature's got its own way of dealin' with varmints like that, and I don't figure on losin' a second's sleep over how they end up.\"\n\n\"What about those other three Bodie mentioned?\" Smoke asked. \"The ones who made off with that money to start with and started all this trouble.\"\n\nA grim smile touched Jamie's mouth. \"I thought you and me and Preacher might take a little hunting trip.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a mighty fine idea to me,\" the old mountain man said with a savage grin of his own on his grizzled face.\n\n\"I told you we should've gotten far away from that wagon train a long time ago,\" Clete Mahaffey groused as the three men rode through the dawn light.\n\n\"Yeah, and you've said that how many times since we lit out?\" Jake Lucas shot back at him.\n\nDave Pearsoll said, \"Look, we're all lucky to be alive. If Swint had gone after us first instead of Cantrell, we probably wouldn't be. We've still got the loot, so let's count our blessings. We're on our own now, and from the sound of the shooting back there when we rode out, at least some of Swint's gang have to be dead. Maybe all of 'em if they went up against MacCallister, Preacher, and that Smoke kid.\"\n\nPearsoll had a point, Jake thought. If he was being really honest with himself, he had to admit that he had hung around the wagon train for as long as he had only because of Savannah McCoy.\n\nEven after the unsatisfying incident along the creek where the Bradford kids had been snatched by the Blackfeet, he had harbored feelings for her. Clearly, though, the little tramp was never going to see that she ought to be with him instead of Bodie, so staying with the wagons was a waste of time.\n\nHell, he was a rich man, he mused. He could find all the willing women he wanted. Women a lot better looking than Savannah McCoy...\n\nHe wasn't convinced of the truth of that last part, but he could tell himself that, anyway.\n\nFate had taken a hand and forced their separation from the pilgrims.\n\nJake said, \"You know, I've heard about a place over in Idaho we ought to look for, a settlement called Bury. From the sound of it, gents like us are welcome there.\"\n\n\"Bury?\" Mahaffey repeated. \"What sort of name is that for a town?\"\n\n\"Don't know and don't care, as long as that's not what they do to us there,\" Jake said with a grin. He didn't feel too bad any longer.\n\nSure, it was bothersome that Eldon Swint had trailed them all that way. But luck had been on Jake's side, as it always was, and he was convinced that Swint and the other outlaws had been wiped out in the fighting around the wagon train. From here on out, he and his two pards could just enjoy life.\n\nHe died with the grin still on his face as an arrow struck him between the shoulder blades with such force that its flint head drove all the way through his body and ripped out from his chest. Jake's body toppled loosely from the saddle and hit the ground beside the spooked horse as shots, war cries, and, ultimately, screams filled the cold morning air." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Preacher sniffed the air. \"I don't know about you fellas, but that smells like snow to me.\"\n\nThe morning had dawned clear as Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke set out on the trail of the three outlaws, but thick gray clouds soon had moved down from the north, obscuring the sun and making the cold wind seem more frigid.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Jamie agreed with the old mountain man's prediction. \"Not today, I don't reckon, but it wouldn't surprise me to see some snow tonight.\"\n\n\"How far you reckon we are from Eagle Valley?\" Preacher asked as he squinted at the sky.\n\n\"Three days, maybe. I've known we were getting close for a while now, but I didn't tell those pilgrims just yet.\"\n\nSmoke said, \"I'm pretty sure this is December twenty-first.\"\n\nThe two older men looked at him.\n\nSmoke's broad shoulders rose and fell in a shrug. \"Just pointing out that three more days will be Christmas Eve. You said you wanted to get there by Christmas, Jamie.\" A rare smile touched the young man's face. \"You're cutting it a mite close.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but Bodie and Hector will keep those wagons moving as fast as they can until we get back.\"\n\nPreacher suddenly drew back on his reins and frowned. \"Danged if I don't smell somethin' else now. And it ain't nothin' good, neither.\"\n\nJamie and Smoke reined in, too. Jamie took a deep breath, and his face was as grim as Preacher's. \"Gun smoke.\"\n\nThey hadn't heard any gunfire. Whatever had happened was over, leaving only faint traces in the air.\n\nAll three men drew their rifles and laid them across the saddles in front of them, then rode forward, still following the tracks. The trail led over a gently rolling hill. As they crested it, they brought their mounts to a halt again.\n\nAbout a hundred yards in front of them, at the bottom of the grassy slope, lay three bloody, huddled shapes that had once been human.\n\nJamie took a pair of field glasses from one of his saddlebags and used them to study the dead men. They had been scalped and mutilated. The blood that covered their faces was already freezing in the cold air.\n\n\"Is that the three we're after?\" Smoke asked.\n\n\"Just going by what's left of them, that's hard to say,\" Jamie replied. \"But I recognize the clothes. That's Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll, all right.\"\n\nPreacher said, \"From the looks of 'em, they run into a bunch of Blackfeet. Might be the leavin's from those war parties we scrapped with awhile back.\"\n\nJamie grunted. \"Let's take a closer look.\"\n\nThey rode forward, eyes constantly scanning the landscape around them for any sign of an attack. Jamie spotted a double eagle lying on the prairie and pointed it out.\n\n\"The Blackfeet scattered that money those fellas had with them,\" he said. \"They let the earth have it. That's their way of showing it didn't mean anything to them.\"\n\nJamie's instincts told him that the Indians were gone. They'd had their brutal sport with the three luckless outlaws and then moved on.\n\nThe question was, where had they gone?\n\nOnce Jamie got a closer look at the bodies, he was convinced that they were Lucas, Mahaffey, and Pearsoll. The gruesome sight didn't particularly bother him; he had seen plenty of violent death in his time.\n\nWhat worried him were the tracks of the unshod ponies they found around the mutilated corpses. He gestured toward the hoofprints. \"Looks like there were forty or fifty Blackfeet. That's more than we left alive in that battle.\"\n\n\"The ones who got away met up with some of their pards,\" Preacher suggested.\n\n\"And then what?\" Smoke asked.\n\nJamie rode in a big circle and found tracks moving away from the place where the three outlaws had been killed. He pointed them out to his two companions. \"It looks to me like they angled off on a course that'll cross the path of the wagon train.\"\n\n\"Chances are that was what they was after all along,\" Preacher said. \"They're mad about gettin' whipped before, and they're goin' after the whole wagon train this time. They just happened to run across these three varmints along the way and took advantage of the chance to kill 'em.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" Jamie said as he wheeled Sundown. \"We'd better get back there as fast as we can.\"\n\nA grim hunch filled him as he rode, a hunch that said they might already be too late.\n\nBodie rode out in front of the wagons with Audie and Nighthawk. He enjoyed talking to the little mountain man, who seemed to know something about almost everything. No matter what the subject was, Audie could converse on it. Bodie didn't always fully understand what the former professor was saying, but it was interesting, anyway.\n\n\"And that's why I believe it's imminently possible that life may exist on other planets in our solar system,\" Audie said. \"If we can ever develop telescopes powerful enough to study them more closely, we may see the evidence of great civilizations with our own eyes. Don't you agree, Nighthawk?\"\n\n\"Ummm,\" said the Crow warrior.\n\n\"Yes, but you like to argue just on general principles, my friend. You'll see, one of these days. The evidence will prove me correct, as it always does.\"\n\n\"So, let me get this straight,\" Bodie said. \"You're saying there are people like us on other planets?\"\n\n\"Well... not necessarily like us. Different conditions might produce different sorts of life. But they could still be self-aware and highly intelligent. More intelligent than we are, perhaps.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't that be something?\" Bodie mused. \"I'm not sure I'd want to meet a man from another planet.\"\n\n\"I would,\" Audie said. \"I would consider it a great privilege and honor, not to mention the most scientifically intriguing encounter of our age or any other.\"\n\n\"Ummm,\" Nighthawk said.\n\nAudie turned to frown at his friend. \"What do you mean, we have bigger prob\u2014Oh, Lord. Bodie, look at that.\"\n\nThe three men reined in. Bodie's breath seemed to freeze in his throat as he saw the dozens of mounted figures on a rise to their left. Even at that distance, his keen eyes could make out the feathers in their hair.\n\n\"Blackfeet,\" Audie said. \"We need to get back to the wagons\u2014now!\"\n\nThe three men wheeled their horses and kicked them into a gallop. As they raced back toward the wagons, Nighthawk pointed to a group of Indians closing in from the other direction.\n\n\"Make some racket!\" Bodie yelled. \"We've got to warn the train!\"\n\nThey pulled their guns and started firing into the air. Bodie was confident that Hector Gilworth would hear the shots and order the immigrants to stop and pull the wagons into a defensive circle.\n\nHe glanced over his shoulder at the pursuit and saw puffs of smoke as the Indians opened fire on them. At that range, shooting from the back of their ponies, the likelihood of any of those bullets finding their targets was extremely small, but Bodie couldn't rule out pure bad luck, though. His muscles were tense as he halfway anticipated the shock of a slug hitting him.\n\nThe wagons came into sight. He felt a surge of relief when he saw that they were already forming into a circle, just as he'd hoped. The Blackfoot war party was a large one, but the men of the wagon train had some experience at fighting Indians. They would give the Blackfeet a hot reception.\n\nIn fact, shots had already begun to crackle from between the parked wagons by the time Bodie, Audie, and Nighthawk reached the train. They leaped their horses through one of the gaps as gunfire and shrill war whoops filled the air and lead tore through the canvas covers on some of the wagons. Hector Gilworth ran along the line of wagons, bellowing, \"Everybody keep your head down!\"\n\nBodie threw himself out of the saddle, dragging his Winchester from its sheath, and looked around frantically for Savannah. He spotted the wagon she had been driving and ran toward it, but before he could get there he heard Jess Neville shout, \"Bodie! Over here! Those red devils are chargin'!\"\n\nBodie swung around and saw a large group of Blackfeet thundering toward a gap in the circle. If they broke through and got inside, it would be bloody chaos. Bodie sprang to join Jess and several other men in defending the opening. He brought the rifle to his shoulder and began firing as fast as he could work the lever. Clouds of powder smoke rolled around him, stinging his eyes and nose, and the constant roar of shots deafened him.\n\nThe savages wouldn't get through, he vowed to himself. They would never reach Savannah or any of the other women and children. He would stop them.\n\nOr die trying." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke heard the shooting before they came in sight of the wagon train. The immigrants had had a little warning, because they'd been able to pull the wagons into a loose circle. They were defending that stronghold from at least fifty Blackfoot warriors who were galloping their ponies around and around the circle.\n\nJamie drew rein and lifted his rifle. \"Let's see if we can pick some of them off and even the odds a little.\"\n\nThree Winchesters cracked as the frontiersmen opened fire. With all the shooting already going on, the Blackfeet didn't notice right away that some of the bullets were coming from a different direction. That gave the three men a chance to do some real damage before they were discovered.\n\nJamie fired, saw a warrior throw up his arms and pitch to the ground from his pony's back as the .44-40 slug bored through him. By the time that Blackfoot hit the ground, Jamie had worked the repeater's lever and shifted his aim. The Winchester blasted again, and another of the attackers fell.\n\nThe shots from Preacher and Smoke were just as deadly. Nearly a dozen members of the war party died before the Blackfeet realized what was going on. Shrieking in outrage, a group of them peeled off and charged toward the three men.\n\n\"Time for us to light a shuck,\" Preacher drawled as he slid his rifle back in its saddle boot.\n\n\"I want to get back to the wagons,\" Jamie said. \"Let's take them by surprise and plow right through them.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me.\" Smoke pulled both Colts from their holsters.\n\nPreacher did likewise.\n\nJamie filled his hands with his .44s and dug his boot heels into Sundown's flanks. The big stallion leaped forward.\n\nIt was a mad, outrageous maneuver, filled with gun thunder, swirling clouds of powder smoke, pounding hoofbeats, and the constant whine of bullets slashing through the air around them. The three men never broke off in their advance, smashing into the group of Blackfeet and scattering them. The hail of lead from six revolvers shredded through the warriors, and several of those who escaped being ventilated were knocked from their ponies and trampled.\n\nAs Jamie's Colts ran dry, a mounted Blackfoot with his face painted dashed in from the side and thrust a lance at him. Jamie twisted away from the deadly weapon and as the warrior came within arm's length, Jamie reversed his left-hand Colt and crashed the butt into the man's forehead, crushing it and driving bone splinters into the man's brain. He grabbed the lance away from the dying warrior.\n\nPreacher and Smoke were slowed down by hand-to-hand battles, but they broke through and galloped toward the wagons. Jamie was right behind them. As he charged past another of the Blackfeet, he threw the lance like a spear. His massive strength put so much power behind the throw that it tore all the way through the man's torso and stood out a foot on the other side.\n\nThe wagon train's defenders saw them coming and intensified their fire, giving cover to the three men. One after another they leaped their horses over a wagon tongue and into the circle.\n\nAs they piled off their horses and ran to join the defenders, Bodie, who was a couple wagons over, called to them, \"You got back just in time!\"\n\n\"Durn right we did!\" Preacher responded. \"We was about to miss all the fun!\"\n\nIf it was \"fun\" the old mountain man wanted, he got plenty of it for the next few hours. With their initial charge beaten back and their numbers cut into by the unexpected attack by Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke, the Blackfeet settled down to a waiting game, continually circling the wagons just out of easy rifle range. From time to time, some of them would dash in and concentrate heavy fire on one part of the wagon train, then pull back sharply as the immigrants mounted a stronger defense at that position. Then, mere moments later, the Indians would attack somewhere else.\n\nThe Blackfeet suffered losses with each foray, but so did the immigrants. Several men were killed, and a dozen more were wounded.\n\nDuring the afternoon, Jamie was able to talk to Bodie and tell him about finding the bodies of Jake Lucas, Clete Mahaffey, and Dave Pearsoll.\n\nBodie sighed and shook his head solemnly. \"I know that they nearly got all of us killed and that Jake never could be trusted after all, but there was a time when I considered him a friend, Jamie. I don't think he was all bad. He was just too weak where money was concerned.\"\n\n\"Most folks have their weak spots. You've just got to learn how to keep from breaking at those spots.\"\n\n\"I suppose. I'm sorry for what happened to Jake, anyway.\" Bodie's voice hardened. \"But if I'd had the chance, I might have shot him myself.\"\n\n\"Reckon I know the feeling.\"\n\nMoses kept busy bringing water and ammunition to the defenders. At one point in the afternoon as he handed a box of cartridges to Jamie, he said, \"I wish now I'd been able to learn how to shoot. I feel like I'm useless.\"\n\n\"Not hardly.\" Jamie hefted the box of ammunition. \"I didn't have to go fetch this myself. I was able to keep fighting.\"\n\n\"Remember what Preacher said when he was trying to teach me? Maybe I should volunteer to fight on the side of the Blackfeet. Then they'd be wiped out for sure!\"\n\nJamie laughed. \"You stay right where you are, Moses. We need you to send up a few prayers for us.\"\n\n\"I can do that,\" Moses said. \"In fact, I have been for several hours now!\"\n\nA short time later, during a lull in the fighting, Preacher came over to Jamie. \"What do you reckon the chances are they'll give up once the sun goes down?\"\n\nJamie glanced at the sky where the thickening clouds meant that it would get dark earlier than usual. \"I got my doubts.\" Something caught his eye, and he pointed it out to Preacher. \"Even more so now.\"\n\n\"Dadgum it!\" Preacher exclaimed as he looked at the column of gray smoke that was starting to thicken and climb into the equally leaden sky. \"You don't think they've started a prairie fire, do you?\"\n\n\"No. I think they've started more than one,\" Jamie replied grimly as he pointed out several more clouds of smoke in different directions. \"They're putting a ring of fire around us, Preacher. If they can't kill us one way, they'll do it another.\"\n\n\"We got to get movin'. If we just sit here whilst them blazes join up with each other and completely surround us, we'll never get out. All that grass is dry as tinder this time of year.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Jamie said with a nod. \"But if we start to hitch up the teams, the Blackfeet will come charging in while we're busy with that and overrun us.\"\n\nPreacher's eyes narrowed. \"Not if some of us keep the varmints busy.\"\n\n\"You mean take the fight to them again?\" Jamie pondered the idea for a second, then nodded. \"The ones who do that probably won't stand a chance, but the wagons might be able to get away. I seem to recall there's a little river a mile or two from here. If the wagons can get on the other side of it before the fire pins them in, those folks could make it.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm goin', that's for durn sure,\" Preacher declared.\n\n\"So am I,\" added Smoke, who had come up in time to hear the two older men formulating the plan.\n\n\"We'll need seven or eight other men,\" Jamie said, \"all of them volunteers.\" He sighed. \"I'll spread the word.\"\n\nEverybody had seen the smoke and was worried about it. Within a few minutes, Jamie had put together a force of volunteers who would attack the Blackfeet and keep them occupied while the wagons made a dash for the river.\n\nIt wasn't a surprise that Bodie was one of the volunteers. Savannah clung to him for a long moment, sobbing, but she didn't beg him not to go.\n\nBodie was relieved by that. She had Alexander and Abigail to think of, and anything that gave the children a better chance of getting through this ordeal alive had to be done.\n\nHector and Jess were going along, too, as was Captain Lamar Hendricks. \"These people elected me to lead them. I don't know of any better way to do it than to do whatever I can to see that they get where they're going.\"\n\n\"I wasn't too sure about you starting out, Cap'n,\" Jamie said. \"I reckon you'll do, though. Yes, sir, you'll do.\"\n\nHalf a dozen more men joined the group. They were all mounted and ready to charge out of the circle. Edward Bingham had been put in charge of getting the teams hitched up and leading the race to the river. He shook hands with Jamie. \"Buy us some time, Mr. MacCallister. We'll do the rest.\"\n\n\"Never doubted it,\" Jamie said.\n\nThey were just about ready to launch the counterattack when Moses appeared, also mounted on a saddle horse and carrying a rifle.\n\n\"Blast it, Moses!\" Bodie exclaimed. \"You shouldn't be doing this.\"\n\n\"We're causing a distraction, right? Keeping the Indians busy? I can give them something to shoot at. Don't worry, I won't shoot any of you by accident.\" Moses grinned. \"This rifle isn't even loaded!\"\n\nJamie moved Sundown over next to Moses's horse. \"You've been a mighty good friend to all of us, and I appreciate what you're trying to do here. You ready, Moses?\"\n\nMoses swallowed hard and nodded. \"I'm ready.\"\n\n\"Good.\" Jamie's arm shot out and he hit Moses in the jaw, a crashing, big-fisted blow that knocked the young rabbi out of the saddle and sent him sprawling on the ground, out cold. \"Somebody put him in a wagon. I reckon he'll forgive me when this is all over.\"\n\nHe turned to the other men, looped Sundown's reins around the saddle horn, and drew both revolvers. With a rebel yell, he sent the stallion lunging forward and led the attack as the men galloped toward the startled Blackfeet, guns blazing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "It was even more loco than the earlier dash through the war party ringed around the wagon train. They were outnumbered at least three to one.\n\nBut the Blackfeet weren't the same sort of fighters on horseback that, say, the Sioux or the Comanche were. More used to battling on foot, they didn't respond quite as quickly as they might have. The men from the wagon train were among them almost before the Blackfeet knew what was happening.\n\nNot only that, but Jamie Ian MacCallister, the old mountain man called Preacher, and the young gunfighter named Smoke Jensen were veritable engines of destruction. The guns in their hands roared again and again, left, right, left, right, and each time flame spouted from the muzzle of a Colt, one of the warriors cried out and died as a bullet ripped through him.\n\nBodie, Hector, and Jess fought savagely, desperately, too. So did Captain Hendricks and all the other men. Seeing their fellow warriors being slaughtered, the rest of the Blackfeet closed in, surrounding the men from the wagon train. Jamie couldn't see the wagons anymore, but he hoped they were on the move.\n\nTruthfully, he couldn't see much of anything because of all the smoke around him. Suddenly, he realized that it wasn't all powder smoke.\n\nLike a runaway freight train, a wall of flames swept over the top of a hill and barreled down on the fighting men.\n\nSome of the Blackfeet were too slow to get out of the way, and the fire engulfed their shrieking forms. The rest of the war party broke and ran. Their strategy had worked too well. The thick grass was so dry the flames had moved faster than they'd expected.\n\nThe smoke made the horses panicky. Jamie fought to control Sundown and hauled the big stallion around. He waved an empty gun at Preacher and Smoke and shouted, \"Head for the river!\" He spotted Bodie, Hector, and Jess and repeated the command to them, then rounded up the rest of the men from the wagon train. Some of them were wounded, but managed to stay in their saddles as they fled from the onrushing flames. Those who had been shot off their horses lay lifelessly on the prairie.\n\nJamie saw the wagons moving fast up ahead. The sky was filled with smoke, and the oxen and mules pulling the wagons were as frightened as the horses were. Every instinct they possessed told them to flee, and they were doing it rapidly.\n\nJamie galloped past the Bingham wagon in the lead and saw the line of trees that marked the course of the river. But he also saw fires closing in from both sides. His heart sank as he realized they weren't going to make it. The flames seemed to race toward each other with supernatural speed... and the gap he had counted on closed, forming a fiery, impenetrable wall.\n\nGroaning, he hauled back on the reins. Despite everything they had done, the wagon train was completely surrounded by barriers of flame and smoke. Most of the flames were still half a mile or more away, but it wouldn't take long for them to continue their inexorable advance until that whole part of the country was burning, with the wagons and the immigrants right in the middle of the inferno.\n\nThe sky overhead was black as midnight from the smoke and the clouds, but the plains and the hills were lit up by the blazes so it looked like the landscape of hell. Jamie wheeled Sundown and saw that the wagons had come to a stop. So had the men who had attacked the Blackfeet. Everyone realized that they were trapped. There was no way out.\n\nThey had come so far only to meet a fiery death days before the holiest time of the year.\n\nJamie rode back to the wagons, not getting in any hurry. His eyes searched the landscape around him, what he could see between the clouds of smoke, anyway. He didn't see any sign of the Blackfeet. Any of them who had survived the battle had either been swallowed up by the fire or managed to find a way out, so they were on the other side of the flames and no longer a threat.\n\nSeeing quite a few people gathered beside the Bingham wagon, Jamie headed for them. He dismounted, and the crowd parted to reveal Jess Neville lying on the ground with his head pillowed on Savannah's lap. She was crying. Bodie and Hector knelt on either side of Jess. Burly, bearded Hector was bawling like a baby.\n\n\"D-don't worry about it,\" Jess said in a weak voice.\n\nJamie hadn't noticed him being wounded before, but Jess's coat was pulled back and the shirt underneath it was sodden with blood.\n\nJess went on. \"The way I look at it... I'm finally gonna get plenty of... rest now.\"\n\nHector took his cousin's hand and held it tightly. He said in a voice choked with emotion, \"That's right, Jess. You just rest. You... you've got it comin'.\"\n\n\"Yeah... just a nice long... sleep...\" Jess's eyes closed, and a final sigh came from him.\n\nBodie reached over and squeezed Hector's shoulder. \"I'm sorry, Hector. He was a heck of a fine fella.\"\n\nMoses came up behind Hector. The young rabbi had a bruise forming on his jaw, courtesy of Jamie's fist earlier. He rested a hand on Hector's other shoulder. \"He died trying to save us all. No man could ask for a more honorable end.\"\n\n\"I reckon not,\" Hector agreed with a heavy sigh. He lifted his head and looked around. \"But it won't be long before all of us are crossing over the divide, will it?\"\n\nOne of the men burst out, \"I can't stand this! We're all going to burn to death! I won't let that happen to my wife and kids. Where's my gun? I... I'll end it for all of us!\"\n\nJamie grabbed the man's arm and jerked him around. \"No, you won't. Nobody's going to give up hope. Not yet.\"\n\n\"But we're trapped,\" someone else said. \"The fire's all around us. We can't get away.\"\n\n\"No, but look at the smoke,\" Jamie insisted. He had just noticed something. \"It's going almost straight up now. That means the wind isn't blowing as hard. If the wind's not blowing as hard, the fire won't move as fast.\"\n\n\"So it gets here in fifteen minutes instead of five,\" one of the men said bitterly. \"What difference does that make?\"\n\n\"That's ten more minutes to say good-bye,\" Jamie said. And ten more minutes to hope for a miracle, he thought.\n\nHe was a pragmatic man, always had been. He looked at life as it was, not as he wished it could be. He had stared death in the face on many, many occasions. He knew that when his time was up, his days on earth were going to come to an end.\n\nBut he also knew that when that time came, he would lie down for his eternal rest next to his beloved Kate. They would be together again, never to be separated. He knew that with every fiber of his being\u2014which meant that it couldn't be the end. It just couldn't.\n\nBlamed if he could see any way out, though.\n\nHe stood there as the immigrants slowly dispersed, going back to their wagons to be with their families for what they believed would be their final minutes on earth. He saw Bodie huddling with Savannah, Alexander, and Abigail.\n\n\"You reckon this is the end of the trail?\" Preacher asked from beside him.\n\nJamie looked over at the old mountain man and shook his head. \"No. For some reason, I don't.\"\n\n\"Neither do I,\" said Smoke, who came up on Preacher's other side. \"I've still got too much to do.\"\n\nAudie said, \"We all know Preacher here is just too stubborn to die.\"\n\n\"Ummm,\" Nighthawk added.\n\nThey stood there together, five of the more formidable fighting men the West had ever known. Between them they had killed hundreds of badmen, had risked their lives to protect the innocent countless times, had seen things and done things that few other men ever had. Even though Smoke Jensen was still young, he was one of them as much as any man could be. It was bred into his blood. If Smoke survived, Jamie was sure he would go on to carve the most illustrious career of them all.\n\nThe flames crept closer.\n\n\"Dang, I'm sure glad we got to fight side by side again, you ol' hoss,\" Preacher said.\n\n\"I am, too,\" Jamie whispered.\n\nSomething touched his cheek.\n\nHe lifted his head. It wasn't an ember that had come swirling down from the sky to land on his rugged face. That would have been hot. The thing that had touched his cheek was... cold. Then he felt another and another.\n\nPreacher said, \"What in tarnation?\"\n\nJamie looked up into the sky and saw more of the fat white flakes, heavy with moisture as they tumbled down from the heavens. Dozens, no, hundreds, thousands, millions, were falling almost straight down because there was no wind, already blanketing the ground.\n\nA smile spread across his face. \"It's snowing.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "It wasn't a blizzard, but the snow fell so thickly that it was hard to see more than a few feet ahead. At first, the terrific heat of the fire melted the snow as it fell and vaporized the water, but there were just too many flakes. When the flames reached the unburned ground that was covered with a couple inches of snow, they couldn't go any farther. Soon they began to sizzle and go out.\n\nThe danger was over. It might not be Christmas yet, Jamie reflected as he stood with his friends and watched their salvation piling up whitely on the ground, but it was sure close enough to call it a Christmas miracle.\n\nMoses, Bodie, Savannah, and the Bradford children came to stand with the frontier men. Jamie rested a big hand on Moses's shoulder. \"You were the most valuable fighter of us all, amigo.\"\n\n\"How do you figure that?\"\n\n\"You fought for us with your prayers.\" Jamie swept his other hand at the deepening snow. \"If this isn't an answered prayer, I don't know what is.\"\n\nBy morning, the snow was a couple feet deep, completely blanketing the landscape so that there was only a vast expanse of pristine white around the wagon train. The ugly swath of black, burned ground was hidden underneath the snow.\n\nJamie worried that if the drifts got much deeper, the wagons wouldn't be able to move. They would be stuck there, maybe for weeks.\n\nThe snow stopped falling not long after dawn. It would slow the wagons' progress, but it wouldn't stop them. They could still push on to Eagle Valley.\n\nThe immigrants took half a day to bury Jess Neville and the other men who had been killed in the fighting. Some of the bodies were badly burned from the prairie fire, which made the grisly task even worse. It wasn't easy chipping graves out of the frozen ground, but they did it.\n\nWith the sun starting to peek through the thinning overcast, they moved on, bound for their new homes.\n\nLate in the afternoon of December 24, 1873, Jamie Ian MacCallister reined Sundown to a halt at the top of a saddle between two hills and looked down into a broad, fairly level valley bounded by wooded slopes on the north and south. The valley stretched for fifteen miles before more hills gradually rose into the snowcapped peaks looming over it. A twisting line of trees showed the course of the stream that meandered through the valley. Frozen over now, come spring it would thaw and water the land, turning it into a verdant oasis. Protected from the worst of winter's storms by the heights around it and fertile in the summer, Eagle Valley was one of the prettiest places Jamie had ever seen. It would make a fine home for the pilgrims in the wagon train rolling slowly up the trail behind him.\n\nHe looked to his right and saw a lone pine tree growing there. Snow dusted its branches. A smile spread slowly across his weather-beaten face as he looked at the tree.\n\nBodie rode up to him. \"What are you thinking, Jamie?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking we'll camp right here tonight. It's Christmas Eve, and there's our tree. We'll celebrate here and thank the Good Lord for getting us this far.\"\n\n\"That's a fine idea,\" Bodie agreed. \"I'll go tell the others.\" He turned his horse and rode back to the wagons.\n\nJamie stayed where he was, resting his hands on the saddle horn, easing weary bones and muscles. He looked up at the mountains and the towering vault of sky above them. \"I figured it was loco, starting out with those pilgrims so late in the year, but that was Your plan all along, wasn't it? You got us through, and now You'll watch over these folks while they make their homes here. I'm glad I could be a part of it.\"\n\nThe children improvised decorations and tied them to the branches of the little pine tree. Everyone gathered around that evening and sang hymns and Christmas carols. As the strains of \"Silent Night\" drifted out across the valley, Jamie walked over to Moses, who stood watching silently.\n\n\"Must be sort of hard on you, seeing them like this when your faith doesn't agree with what they're doing,\" Jamie commented.\n\n\"Hard?\" Moses smiled and shook his head. \"Not at all. I'm happy for them. They have their beliefs to sustain them, just as I have mine. The differences... well, right now they're not as important as the things we all have in common. Love one another, your scriptures say, and that's what matters the most.\"\n\n\"Remember when I told you you'd do to ride the river with, Moses? I reckon that's more true than ever.\"\n\n\"And you as well, my friend. We've been to see the elephant together, haven't we, Jamie?\"\n\nJamie laughed and slapped Moses on the back. \"You're learning, amigo. You're learning.\"\n\nThey were still standing there a few minutes later when Bodie and Savannah came over to them. Bodie shook hands with Jamie and Moses. \"We've got a favor to ask of you, Moses.\"\n\n\"Anything,\" Moses answered without hesitation.\n\n\"We'd like for you to perform our wedding tomorrow,\" Savannah said.\n\n\"A Christmas Day wedding?\" Moses said, smiling. \"Well, that should be easy for you to remember.\"\n\n\"We figure we'd better be married,\" Bodie said, \"since we're adopting Alexander and Abigail. I'm not sure how we'll go about doing that legally, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry about that,\" Jamie said. \"I've got friends in the territorial capital. We'll see to it that it gets done. I don't reckon a piece of paper will make much difference, though. In all the ways that count, you two are already mother and father to those kids.\"\n\nSavannah said, \"I don't want them to ever forget their real parents. Reverend Bradford had his faults, but he loved them and I'm sure their mother did, too. They'll grow up knowing that.\"\n\n\"They won't have to worry about knowing they're loved,\" Moses said. \"I think you and Bodie will handle that just fine.\"\n\n\"So you'll do it?\" Bodie said. \"You'll perform the ceremony?\"\n\n\"Of course. Tomorrow, before everyone spreads out across the valley to find their homesteads. It's my Christmas gift to the both of you.\"\n\nMost of the snow from several days earlier had melted, but there were still patches of white here and there, enough to make the valley beautiful on Christmas morning. Jamie was up early, as usual, and was sipping a cup of coffee when Preacher came up and helped himself to a cup from the pot sitting at the edge of one of the campfires.\n\n\"Well, you done it,\" the old mountain man said. \"Got them pilgrims here by Christmas.\"\n\n\"With a lot of help from you and Smoke.\"\n\n\"I got a hunch you'd have brought 'em through somehow even if we hadn't come along. I'm glad we got to help out, though.\" Preacher sipped the hot, strong brew. \"As soon as ol' Bodie gets hisself hitched to that pretty little Savannah gal, Smoke and me are gonna be movin' on. We got places to go.\" He paused. \"Varmints to kill.\"\n\n\"I could give you a hand with that,\" Jamie suggested.\n\nPreacher shook his head. \"Nope, but I'm obliged for the offer. This is just too personal. The fellas we're after killed Smoke's daddy. Score like that, an hombre's got to settle his own self. I'll do my best to help him catch up to those murderin' skunks, but once he does, he'll want to take 'em on alone.\"\n\n\"I reckon I can understand that,\" Jamie said.\n\n\"How about you? I recollect how fiddle-footed you can be. You'll be movin' on, too?\"\n\n\"Maybe when winter's over,\" Jamie mused. \"Reckon I'll stay long enough to see to it that these folks get established all right. And then come spring, I'd like to make sure Moses gets to where he's going. He has a calling of his own he needs to answer.\" Jamie thought of something else. \"What about Audie and Nighthawk?\"\n\n\"Those two are gone already.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It's true,\" Preacher said with a nod. \"They drifted out last night. Audie said they was gonna spend Christmas in the high country, then maybe winter with Nighthawk's people.\"\n\nJamie shook his head. \"Wish I could've told them so long.\"\n\n\"That's just it with them two,\" Preacher said with a chuckle. \"They'll turn up again one o' these days. They got a habit of showin' up when their friends need 'em.\"\n\nAt mid-morning, the immigrants began assembling in the center of the camp for the wedding. Bodie had no suit, but he had cleaned up his clothes as best he could. Savannah left the Bingham wagon wearing a white dress that Leticia had altered to fit her. Bodie stood with Moses, waiting for her, a big smile on his face.\n\nSavannah stopped short as she started to walk up the aisle formed by the gathered immigrants. With a worried frown on her face, she asked, \"Where are Alexander and Abigail?\" She raised her voice. \"Bodie, where are the children? I thought they were with you.\"\n\n\"I thought they were with you.\" Bodie started toward Savannah. \"Where in the world\u2014\"\n\n\"Right here,\" a man's harsh voice called out.\n\nTall, powerfully built, and ugly, he stepped out from behind one of the wagons with his right hand clamped around Alexander's arm, his left holding Abigail equally cruelly. Behind him loomed a large group of men bristling with guns. \"And unless you want them to die on Christmas Day, Miss McCoy is coming with us.\"\n\nJamie, Preacher, and Smoke stood to one side. Bodie had taken his gun off for the wedding, but they were all packing two irons apiece, as usual. They couldn't slap leather with those kids in the line of fire, though.\n\n\"Kane!\" Savannah gasped. \"Kane sent you! You're the man who tried to kidnap me before!\"\n\nThe big stranger grinned, but that didn't make him any less ugly. \"That's right. It's taken us a long time to catch up to you.\" He glanced at two of the men with him. \"My so-called guides didn't really know where they were going, after all. But this time I'll be taking you back to the boss, just like I promised.\"\n\nJamie recognized Keeler and Holcomb, the former scouts. Somehow the treacherous varmints had thrown in with Gideon Kane's men, he thought.\n\nHector growled, \"Jamie, what do you want us to do?\"\n\n\"Have everybody back off,\" Jamie ordered. \"If bullets start to fly, we want as many folks out of the way as possible.\"\n\nHector prodded the immigrants back, leaving a rough triangle with Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke at one corner, Bodie and Moses at another, and Savannah, the two youngsters, and the gunmen at the final point.\n\nMoses suddenly stepped forward, putting himself between Jamie and his companions and the hired killers. He held his hands up and said quickly, \"Let's all just settle down here. It's Christmas Day. A holy day for these people. We don't want any bloodshed or violence.\"\n\n\"There doesn't have to be, as long as Miss McCoy comes with us,\" the leader of the gunmen said.\n\nMoses came closer, still with his hands lifted beseechingly. \"Please be reasonable. You can't expect to come in here and steal a bride away from her groom.\"\n\n\"We're taking her,\" the man grated. \"No matter who we have to kill do to it.\"\n\nMoses sighed. \"I was hoping I could get through to you, talk some sense to you. I really hoped it wouldn't come to this.\"\n\nThe man sneered at him. \"You're some sort of sky pilot, aren't you? What the hell are you gonna do?\"\n\n\"This,\" Moses said softly.\n\nHe launched himself into a diving tackle. His arms, already spread out, went around Alexander and Abigail and jolted them loose from their captor, knocking them to the ground. As he shielded the children with his body he cried out, \"Now, Jamie!\"\n\nThe hired killers already had their guns out. They were completely ruthless men, eager to slay without conscience or hesitation.\n\nBut they were facing Jamie Ian MacCallister, Preacher, and Smoke Jensen.\n\nThey never had a chance.\n\nIt was a gun battle that would be talked about in that part of the country for years, even decades. Less than two hundred people actually witnessed it, and of those, many caught only brief, chaotic glimpses because they were too busy ducking for cover as shots rang out. But even so, over time thousands of people told friends or children or grandkids about how, yep, they were there when Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke faced thirty hired killers. Or forty. Or a hundred, depending on how the story got inflated. The important thing was Jamie, Preacher, and Smoke all suffered wounds that laid them up for a while.\n\nAnd all the gunmen who had come to kidnap Savannah died.\n\nThe stuff of powder smoke legends, to be sure... but only one more adventure in the lives of those three frontiersmen.\n\nWhen the guns had fallen silent, the wounds had been bound up, and the dead dragged away, a man and a woman stood together and pledged their love for each other, in front of God and their friends, and for two young children, that union and the family it created proved to be the greatest Christmas gift they ever received." + }, + { + "title": "EPILOGUE", + "text": "[ Montana, 1947 ]\n\nAlexander Cantrell sighed.\n\nBeside him, his sister Abigail said, \"Are you all right, Alex? Are you having a touch of that angina again?\"\n\nAlexander shook his head. Mere moments had passed, although to him it was as if he had traveled back in time seventy-four years. He looked down at the graves of his parents. \"I was just remembering again.\"\n\n\"The wagon train?\"\n\n\"Yep. And everything that happened on the way up here.\"\n\nAbigail shivered. \"Some of those times were awful, like when the Indians got us. And that terrible fire... I never saw anything like it.\"\n\n\"I thought about those things,\" Alexander said, \"but mostly I thought about Ma and Pa... and the Reverend... and Moses...\"\n\n\"And Jamie,\" Abigail whispered.\n\n\"And Jamie,\" Alexander agreed.\n\nAlthough it still seemed hard to believe, less than three years after that fateful Christmas Day, Jamie Ian MacCallister was dead, struck down in 1876 by bushwhackers who had mistaken him for his son, the famous gunfighter Falcon MacCallister. When they had heard that awful news in Eagle Valley, Bodie had wanted to strap on his guns and leave the Diamond C ranch to track down Jamie's murderers. Hector Gilworth, Lamar Hendricks, and a number of the other settlers in the valley had been ready to saddle up and go with him.\n\nBefore that could happen, they got word that Falcon had wreaked his bloody judgment on the killers. Jamie's death was avenged, and he slumbered peacefully, eternally, under the earth of his home range, next to his beloved wife Kate.\n\nFrom time to time, they had gotten news of Smoke Jensen, too, and knew how the young man had settled the score for the death of his father. For many years, Smoke continued to be the deadliest gunfighter the West had ever known... but he was also a devoted family man, marrying twice, raising a whole passel of children and grandchildren, and establishing one of the finest ranches in Colorado.\n\nAs for Preacher... well, for a time he had been thought to be dead, but as it turned out, the old mountain man was too tough to kill. His friends in Eagle Valley never did know for sure what happened to him. For all Alexander knew, Preacher was still out there somewhere, roaming the wild places and getting into one scrape after another. That idea was pretty farfetched, of course. Downright impossible, in fact. But when Alexander thought about Preacher... well, it was hard to rule out anything completely.\n\nMoses Danzig had visited the Diamond C now and then and enjoyed the time spent with his old friends Bodie and Savannah. Cyrus O'Hanlon, who had recovered from the beating he'd received from Kane's men, his wife Dollie, and the rest of the troupe had come to Montana, too, and performed in the Opera House in Billings. Savannah had joined them for one night and thoroughly enjoyed being an actress again, but that was enough. She had an even better life on the ranch, she told her old friends, being married to Bodie and raising a fine pair of twins, although she and Bodie were never blessed with children of their own.\n\nAlexander's parents never spoke of Gideon Kane, but years later, giving in to curiosity, Alexander had looked into the situation and found out what had happened to the man from Kansas City. He remembered Jamie saying something ominous about paying a visit to Kane, but that hadn't come about. Some woman whose affections Kane had spurned had killed him in February 1874, sticking a knife in his chest. As far as Alexander was concerned, it was a more merciful end than the lowdown snake deserved.\n\nThe farms and ranches in Eagle Valley were some of the best in the territory, and then later, in the state, and the Diamond C was the best of them all. Years passed, and Alexander and Abigail grew to adulthood, married fine partners, and raised families of their own. Some of those children and grandchildren had brought them out to the old burying ground on the ranch.\n\nIt was the tenth anniversary of Bodie Cantrell's death. His beloved wife Savannah had gone to be with the Lord a couple years before that. Alexander missed them every day. He would for the rest of his life, however much of it was still allotted to him.\n\nHe took off his hat as Abigail leaned over and placed one bouquet of flowers on her father's grave and another on her mother's. Bodie and Savannah had adopted them, but as Jamie had once said, the piece of paper didn't matter nearly as much as the love, and they always had that.\n\nOh, they had that.\n\n\"Dad...? We'd probably better be starting back to town.\"\n\nAlexander nodded, tightened his arm around his sister's shoulders for a moment, and then put his hat on. He turned and told his son, \"You're right, Jamie. Let's go. Come along, Abigail.\"\n\n\"You think we can make it home without the Indians getting us?\"\n\n\"I reckon,\" Alexander said.\n\nThey walked away, cradled in the memories of days gone by, of days when true heroes walked the earth under the big Montana sky." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "A Christmas Carol", + "author": "Charles Dickens", + "genres": [ + "Christmas", + "19th century" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "MARLEY'S GHOST", + "text": "Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door\u2013nail.\n\nMind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door\u2013nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin\u2013nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will, therefore, permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door\u2013nail.\n\nScrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.\n\nThe mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle\u2013aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot\u2014say St. Paul's Church\u2013yard, for instance\u2014literally to astonish his son's weak mind.\n\nScrooge never painted out Old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.\n\nOh! but he was a tight\u2013fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self\u2013contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog\u2013days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.\n\nExternal heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often \"came down\" handsomely and Scrooge never did.\n\nNobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, \"My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?\" No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to know him; and, when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, \"No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!\"\n\nBut what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call \"nuts\" to Scrooge.\n\nOnce upon a time\u2014of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve\u2014old Scrooge sat busy in his counting\u2013house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The City clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already\u2014it had not been light all day\u2014and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that, although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that nature lived hard by and was brewing on a large scale.\n\nThe door of Scrooge's counting\u2013house was open, that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal\u2013box in his own room; and so surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of strong imagination, he failed.\n\n\"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!\" cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.\n\n\"Bah!\" said Scrooge. \"Humbug!\"\n\nHe had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.\n\n\"Christmas a humbug, uncle!\" said Scrooge's nephew. \"You don't mean that, I am sure?\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Scrooge. \"Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.\"\n\n\"Come, then,\" returned the nephew gaily. \"What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.\"\n\nScrooge, having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, \"Bah!\" again; and followed it up with \"Humbug!\"\n\n\"Don't be cross, uncle!\" said the nephew.\n\n\"A Merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!\" cried a cheerful voice.\n\n\"What else can I be,\" returned the uncle, \"when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas\u2013time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books, and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,\" said Scrooge indignantly, \"every idiot who goes about with \"Merry Christmas\" on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!\"\n\n\"Uncle!\" pleaded the nephew.\n\n\"Nephew!\" returned the uncle sternly, \"keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.\"\n\n\"Keep it!\" repeated Scrooge's nephew. \"But you don't keep it.\"\n\n\"Let me leave it alone, then,\" said Scrooge. \"Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!\"\n\n\"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,\" returned the nephew; \"Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas\u2013time, when it has come round\u2014apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that\u2014as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut\u2013up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow\u2013passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!\"\n\nThe clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.\n\n\"Let me hear another sound from you,\" said Scrooge, \"and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your situation! You're quite a powerful speaker, sir,\" he added, turning to his nephew. \"I wonder you don't go into Parliament.\"\n\n\"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to\u2013morrow.\"\n\nScrooge said that he would see him\u2014\u2014Yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.\n\n\"But why?\" cried Scrooge's nephew. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Why did you get married?\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Because I fell in love.\"\n\n\"Because you fell in love!\" growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. \"Good afternoon!\"\n\n\"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?\"\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?\"\n\n\"Good afternoon!\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!\"\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"And A Happy New Year!\"\n\n\"Good afternoon!\" said Scrooge.\n\nHis nephew left the room without an angry word, notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned them cordially.\n\n\"There's another fellow,\" muttered Scrooge, who overheard him: \"my clerk, with fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam.\"\n\nThis lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.\n\n\"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe,\" said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. \"Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?\"\n\n\"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,\" Scrooge replied. \"He died seven years ago, this very night.\"\n\n\"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner,\" said the gentleman, presenting his credentials.\n\nIt certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word \"liberality\" Scrooge frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.\n\n\"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,\" said the gentleman, taking up a pen, \"it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.\"\n\n\"Are there no prisons?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"Plenty of prisons,\" said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.\n\n\"And the Union workhouses?\" demanded Scrooge. \"Are they still in operation?\"\n\n\"They are. Still,\" returned the gentleman, \"I wish I could say they were not.\"\n\n\"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Both very busy, sir.\"\n\n\"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,\" said Scrooge. \"I am very glad to hear it.\"\n\n\"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,\" returned the gentleman, \"a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?\"\n\n\"Nothing!\" Scrooge replied.\n\n\"You wish to be anonymous?\"\n\n\"I wish to be left alone,\" said Scrooge. \"Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned\u2014they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.\"\n\n\"Many can't go there; and many would rather die.\"\n\n\"If they would rather die,\" said Scrooge, \"they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides\u2014excuse me\u2014I don't know that.\"\n\n\"But you might know it,\" observed the gentleman.\n\n\"It's not my business,\" Scrooge returned. \"It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!\"\n\nSeeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.\n\nMeanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards, as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas\u2013pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water\u2013plug being left in solitude, its overflowings suddenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops, where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers' trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and blood\u2013thirsty in the streets, stirred up to\u2013morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.\n\nFoggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good St. Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol; but, at the first sound of:\n\n\u2003God bless you, merry gentleman,\n\n\u2003May nothing you dismay!\n\nScrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog, and even more congenial frost.\n\nAt length the hour of shutting up the counting\u2013house arrived. With an ill\u2013will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.\n\n\"You'll want all day to\u2013morrow, I suppose?\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"If quite convenient, sir.\"\n\n\"It's not convenient,\" said Scrooge, \"and it's not fair. If I was to stop half\u2013a\u2013crown for it, you'd think yourself ill used, I'll be bound?\"\n\nThe clerk smiled faintly.\n\n\"And yet,\" said Scrooge, \"you don't think me ill used when I pay a day's wages for no work.\"\n\nThe clerk observed that it was only once a year.\n\n\"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty\u2013fifth of December!\" said Scrooge, buttoning his great\u2013coat to the chin. \"But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning.\"\n\nThe clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no great\u2013coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas\u2013eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's buff.\n\nScrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide\u2013and\u2013seek with other houses, and have forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough; for nobody lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.\n\nNow, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is called fancy about him as any man in the City of London, even including\u2014which is a bold word\u2014the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley since his last mention of his seven\u2013years'-dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change\u2014not a knocker, but Marley's face.\n\nMarley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow, as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath of hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the face, and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.\n\nAs Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it was a knocker again.\n\nTo say that he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.\n\nHe did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said, \"Pooh, pooh!\" and closed it with a bang.\n\nThe sound resounded through the house like thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine merchant's cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and up the stairs: slowly, too: trimming his candle as he went.\n\nYou may talk vaguely about driving a coach and six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken it broadwise, with the splinter\u2013bar towards the wall, and the door towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half\u2013a\u2013dozen gas\u2013lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with Scrooge's dip.\n\nUp Scrooge went, not caring a button for that. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But, before he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection of the face to desire to do that.\n\nSitting\u2013room, bedroom, lumber\u2013room. All as they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing\u2013gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude against the wall. Lumber\u2013room as usual. Old fire\u2013guard, old shoes, two fish baskets, washing\u2013stand on three legs, and a poker.\n\nQuite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked himself in; double locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing\u2013gown and slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.\n\nIt was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fire\u2013place was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters, Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather beds, Abrahams, Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter\u2013boats, hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.\n\n\"Humbug!\" said Scrooge; and walked across the room.\n\nAfter several turns he sat down again. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated, for some purpose now forgotten, with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that, as he looked, he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.\n\nThis might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased, as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as dragging chains.\n\nThe cellar door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.\n\n\"It's humbug still!\" said Scrooge. \"I won't believe it.\"\n\nHis colour changed, though, when, without a pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, \"I know him! Marley's Ghost!\" and fell again.\n\nThe same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat\u2013skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash\u2013boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.\n\nScrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.\n\nNo, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the chilling influence of its death\u2013cold eyes; and marked the very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.\n\n\"How now!\" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. \"What do you want with me?\"\n\n\"Much!\"\u2014Marley's voice, no doubt about it.\n\n\"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Ask me who I was.\"\n\n\"Who were you, then?\" said Scrooge, raising his voice. \"You're particular, for a shade.\" He was going to say \"to a shade,\" but substituted this, as more appropriate.\n\n\"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.\"\n\n\"Can you\u2014can you sit down?\" asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.\n\n\"I can.\"\n\n\"Do it, then.\"\n\nScrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt that, in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the Ghost sat down on the opposite side of the fire\u2013place, as if he were quite used to it.\n\n\"You don't believe in me,\" observed the Ghost.\n\n\"I don't,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your own senses?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Why do you doubt your senses?\"\n\n\"Because,\" said Scrooge, \"a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!\"\n\nScrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel in his heart by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.\n\nTo sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal atmosphere of his own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts, and tassels were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.\n\n\"You see this toothpick?\" said Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.\n\n\"I do,\" replied the Ghost.\n\n\"You are not looking at it,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"But I see it,\" said the Ghost, \"notwithstanding.\"\n\n\"Well!\" returned Scrooge, \"I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you; humbug!\"\n\nAt this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was his horror when the phantom, taking off the bandage round his head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!\n\nScrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands before his face.\n\n\"Mercy!\" he said. \"Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?\"\n\n\"Man of the worldly mind!\" replied the Ghost, \"do you believe in me or not?\"\n\n\"I do,\" said Scrooge. \"I must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?\"\n\nTo sit staring at those fixed glazed eyes in silence, for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him.\n\n\"It is required of every man,\" the Ghost returned, \"that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow\u2013men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world\u2014oh, woe is me!\u2014and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!\"\n\nAgain the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.\n\n\"You are fettered,\" said Scrooge, trembling. \"Tell me why?\"\n\n\"I wear the chain I forged in life,\" replied the Ghost. \"I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free\u2013will, and of my own free\u2013will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?\"\n\nScrooge trembled more and more.\n\n\"Or would you know,\" pursued the Ghost, \"the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas\u2013eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!\"\n\nScrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable, but he could see nothing.\n\n\"Jacob!\" he said imploringly. \"Old Jacob Marley, tell me more! Speak comfort to me, Jacob!\"\n\n\"I have none to give,\" the Ghost replied. \"It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A very little more is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our counting\u2013house\u2014mark me;\u2014in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money\u2013changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me!\"\n\nIt was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his knees.\n\n\"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,\" Scrooge observed in a business\u2013like manner, though with humility and deference.\n\n\"Slow!\" the Ghost repeated.\n\n\"Seven years dead,\" mused Scrooge. \"And travelling all the time?\"\n\n\"The whole time,\" said the Ghost. \"No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse.\"\n\n\"You travel fast?\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"On the wings of the wind,\" replied the Ghost.\n\n\"You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years,\" said Scrooge.\n\nThe Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.\n\n\"Oh! captive, bound, and double\u2013ironed,\" cried the phantom, \"not to know that ages of incessant labour, by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed! Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness! Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh, such was I!\"\n\n\"But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,\" faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.\n\n\"Business!\" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. \"Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!\"\n\nIt held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.\n\n\"At this time of the rolling year,\" the spectre said, \"I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow\u2013beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode? Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me?\"\n\nScrooge was very much dismayed to hear the spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake exceedingly.\n\n\"Hear me!\" cried the Ghost. \"My time is nearly gone.\"\n\n\"I will,\" said Scrooge. \"But don't be hard upon me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!\"\n\n\"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day.\"\n\nIt was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.\n\n\"That is no light part of my penance,\" pursued the Ghost. \"I am here to\u2013night to warn you that you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer.\"\n\n\"You were always a good friend to me,\" said Scrooge. \"Thankee!\"\n\n\"You will be haunted,\" resumed the Ghost, \"by Three Spirits.\"\n\nScrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the Ghost's had done.\n\n\"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned, Jacob?\" he demanded in a faltering voice.\n\n\"It is.\"\n\n\"I\u2014I think I'd rather not,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Without their visits,\" said the Ghost, \"you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to\u2013morrow when the bell tolls One.\"\n\n\"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over, Jacob?\" hinted Scrooge.\n\n\"Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third, upon the next night when the last stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!\"\n\nWhen it had said these words, the spectre took its wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head as before. Scrooge knew this by the smart sound its teeth made when the jaws were brought together by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and about its arm.\n\nThe apparition walked backward from him; and, at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that, when the spectre reached it, it was wide open. It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.\n\nNot so much in obedience as in surprise and fear; for, on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and self\u2013accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment, joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.\n\nScrooge followed to the window: desperate in his curiosity. He looked out.\n\nThe air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below upon a doorstep. The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power for ever.\n\nWhether these creatures faded into mist, or mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.\n\nScrooge closed the window, and examined the door by which the Ghost had entered. It was double locked, as he had locked it with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say \"Humbug!\" but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the hour, much in need of repose, went straight to bed without undressing, and fell asleep upon the instant." + }, + { + "title": "THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS", + "text": "When Scrooge awoke it was so dark, that, looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters. So he listened for the hour.\n\nTo his great astonishment, the heavy bell went on from six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve; then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have got into the works. Twelve!\n\nHe touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve, and stopped.\n\n\"Why, it isn't possible,\" said Scrooge, \"that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night. It isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon!\"\n\nThe idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing\u2013gown before he could see anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world. This was a great relief, because \"Three days after sight of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order,\" and so forth, would have become a mere United States security if there were no days to count by.\n\nScrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought it over and over, and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and, the more he endeavoured not to think, the more he thought.\n\nMarley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, \"Was it a dream or not?\"\n\nScrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he could no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was, perhaps, the wisest resolution in his power.\n\nThe quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock. At length it broke upon his listening ear.\n\n\"Ding, dong!\"\n\n\"A quarter past,\" said Scrooge, counting.\n\n\"Ding, dong!\"\n\n\"Half past,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Ding, dong!\"\n\n\"A quarter to it,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Ding, dong!\"\n\n\"The hour itself,\" said Scrooge triumphantly, \"and nothing else!\"\n\nHe spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.\n\nThe curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half\u2013recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.\n\nIt was a strange figure\u2014like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white, as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand: and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.\n\nEven this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For, as its belt sparkled and glittered, now in one part and now in another, and what was light one instant at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which dissolving parts no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And, in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and clear as ever.\n\n\"Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"I am!\"\n\nThe voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if, instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.\n\n\"Who and what are you?\" Scrooge demanded.\n\n\"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.\"\n\n\"Long Past?\" inquired Scrooge; observant of its dwarfish stature.\n\n\"No. Your past.\"\n\nPerhaps Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.\n\n\"What!\" exclaimed the Ghost, \"would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow?\"\n\nScrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend or any knowledge of having wilfully \"bonneted\" the Spirit at any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what business brought him there.\n\n\"Your welfare!\" said the Ghost.\n\nScrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard him thinking, for it said immediately:\n\n\"Your reclamation, then. Take heed!\"\n\nIt put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him gently by the arm.\n\n\"Rise! and walk with me!\"\n\nIt would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes; that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers, dressing\u2013gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand, was not to be resisted. He rose: but, finding that the Spirit made towards the window, clasped its robe in supplication.\n\n\"I am a mortal,\" Scrooge remonstrated, \"and liable to fall.\"\n\n\"Bear but a touch of my hand there,\" said the Spirit, laying it upon his heart, \"and you shall be upheld in more than this!\"\n\nAs the words were spoken, they passed through the wall, and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with the snow upon the ground.\n\n\"Good Heaven!\" said Scrooge, clasping his hands together as he looked about him. \"I was bred in this place. I was a boy here!\"\n\nThe Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still present to the old man's sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares long, long forgotten!\n\n\"Your lip is trembling,\" said the Ghost. \"And what is that upon your cheek?\"\n\nScrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he would.\n\n\"You recollect the way?\" inquired the Spirit.\n\n\"Remember it!\" cried Scrooge with fervour; \"I could walk it blindfold.\"\n\n\"Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!\" observed the Ghost. \"Let us go on.\"\n\n\"You recollect the way?\" inquired the spirit. \"Remember it!\" cried Scrooge with fervour; \"I could walk it blindfold.\"\n\nThey walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every gate, and post, and tree, until a little market\u2013town appeared in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it.\n\n\"These are but shadows of the things that have been,\" said the Ghost. \"They have no consciousness of us.\"\n\nThe jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all bounds to see them? Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they went past? Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross\u2013roads and by\u2013ways for their several homes? What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?\n\n\"The school is not quite deserted,\" said the Ghost. \"A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.\"\n\nScrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.\n\nThey left the high\u2013road by a well\u2013remembered lane, and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weather\u2013cock surmounted cupola on the roof and a bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken fortunes: for the spacious offices were little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables; and the coach\u2013houses and sheds were overrun with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state within; for, entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthly savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle\u2013light, and not too much to eat.\n\nThey went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he had used to be.\n\nNot a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half\u2013thawed water\u2013spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty storehouse door, no, not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with softening influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.\n\nThe Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man in foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.\n\n\"Why, it's Ali Baba!\" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. \"It's dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know. One Christmas\u2013time when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And Valentine,\" said Scrooge, \"and his wild brother, Orson; there they go! And what's his name, who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the gate of Damascus; don't you see him? And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii: there he is upon his head! Serve him right! I'm glad of it. What business had he to be married to the Princess?\"\n\nTo hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in the City, indeed.\n\n\"Why, it's Ali Baba!\" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. \"It's dear old honest Ali Baba.\"\n\n\"There's the Parrot!\" cried Scrooge. \"Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe he called him, when he came home again after sailing round the island. \"Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin Crusoe?\" The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't. It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!\"\n\nThen, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, \"Poor boy!\" and cried again.\n\n\"I wish,\" Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his cuff: \"but it's too late now.\"\n\n\"What is the matter?\" asked the Spirit.\n\n\"Nothing,\" said Scrooge. \"Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should like to have given him something: that's all.\"\n\nThe Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand: saying, as it did so, \"Let us see another Christmas!\"\n\nScrooge's former self grew larger at the words, and the room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk, the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how all this was brought about Scrooge knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct: that everything had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.\n\nHe was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and, with a mournful shaking of his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.\n\nIt opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and, putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her \"dear, dear brother.\"\n\n\"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!\" said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh. \"To bring you home, home, home!\"\n\n\"Home, little Fan?\" returned the boy.\n\n\"Yes!\" said the child, brimful of glee. \"Home for good and all. Home for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home's like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach to bring you. And you're to be a man!\" said the child, opening her eyes; \"and are never to come back here; but first we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world.\"\n\n\"You are quite a woman, little Fan!\" exclaimed the boy.\n\nShe clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his head; but, being too little, laughed again, and stood on tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing loath to go, accompanied her.\n\nA terrible voice in the hall cried, \"Bring down Master Scrooge's box, there!\" and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best parlour that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments of those dainties to the young people: at the same time sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of \"something\" to the postboy who answered that he thanked the gentleman, but, if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good\u2013bye right willingly; and, getting into it, drove gaily down the garden sweep; the quick wheels dashing the hoar frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.\n\n\"Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have withered,\" said the Ghost. \"But she had a large heart!\"\n\n\"So she had,\" cried Scrooge. \"You're right. I will not gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!\"\n\n\"She died a woman,\" said the Ghost, \"and had, as I think, children.\"\n\n\"One child,\" Scrooge returned.\n\n\"True,\" said the Ghost. \"Your nephew!\"\n\nScrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly, \"Yes.\"\n\nAlthough they had but that moment left the school behind them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy carts and coaches battled for the way, and all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by the dressing of the shops, that here, too, it was Christmas\u2013time again; but it was evening, and the streets were lighted up.\n\nThe Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it.\n\n\"Know it!\" said Scrooge. \"Was I apprenticed here?\"\n\nThey went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two inches taller, he must have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:\n\n\"Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart, it's Fezziwig alive again!\"\n\nOld Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and called out, in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:\n\n\"Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!\"\n\nScrooge's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-'prentice.\n\n\"Dick Wilkins, to be sure!\" said Scrooge to the Ghost. \"Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear!\"\n\n\"Yo ho, my boys!\" said Fezziwig. \"No more work to\u2013night. Christmas\u2013eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's have the shutters up,\" cried old Fezziwig with a sharp clap of his hands, \"before a man can say Jack Robinson!\"\n\nYou wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it! They charged into the street with the shutters\u2014one, two, three\u2014had 'em up in their places\u2014four, five, six\u2014barred 'em and pinned 'em\u2014seven, eight, nine\u2014and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like race\u2013horses.\n\n\"Hilli\u2013ho!\" cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the high desk with wonderful agility. \"Clear away, my lads, and let's have lots of room here! Hilli\u2013ho, Dick! Chirrup, Ebenezer!\"\n\nClear away! There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and bright a ball\u2013room as you would desire to see upon a winter's night.\n\nIn came a fiddler with a music\u2013book, and went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty stomachaches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin the baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling; in they all came, any how and every how. Away they all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off again as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance, cried out, \"Well done!\" and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But, scorning rest upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran\u2013new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.\n\nThere were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince\u2013pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up \"Sir Roger de Coverley.\" Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.\n\nBut if they had been twice as many\u2014ah! four times\u2014old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsy, cork\u2013screw, thread\u2013the\u2013needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig \"cut\"\u2014cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.\n\nWhen the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up. Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side the door, and, shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas. When everybody had retired but the two 'prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away, and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a counter in the back\u2013shop.\n\nDuring the whole of this time Scrooge had acted like a man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self. He corroborated everything, remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its head burnt very clear.\n\n\"A small matter,\" said the Ghost, \"to make these silly folks so full of gratitude.\"\n\n\"Small!\" echoed Scrooge.\n\nThe Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig; and, when he had done so, said:\n\n\"Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four, perhaps. Is that so much that he deserves this praise?\"\n\n\"It isn't that,\" said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter self. \"It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.\"\n\nHe felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.\n\n\"What is the matter?\" asked the Ghost.\n\n\"Nothing particular,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"Something, I think?\" the Ghost insisted.\n\n\"No,\" said Scrooge, \"no. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all.\"\n\nHis former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side in the open air.\n\n\"My time grows short,\" observed the Spirit. \"Quick!\"\n\nThis was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.\n\nHe was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.\n\n\"It matters little,\" she said softly. \"To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and, if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve.\"\n\n\"What Idol has displaced you?\" he rejoined.\n\n\"A golden one.\"\n\n\"This is the even\u2013handed dealing of the world!\" he said. \"There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!\"\n\n\"You fear the world too much,\" she answered gently. \"All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?\"\n\n\"What then?\" he retorted. \"Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you.\"\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n\"Am I?\"\n\n\"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor, and content to be so, until, in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed. When it was made you were another man.\"\n\n\"I was a boy,\" he said impatiently.\n\n\"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are,\" she returned. \"I am. That which promised happiness when we were one in heart is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you.\"\n\n\"Have I ever sought release?\"\n\n\"In words. No. Never.\"\n\n\"In what, then?\"\n\n\"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had never been between us,\" said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him, \"tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!\"\n\nHe seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition in spite of himself. But he said, with a struggle, \"You think not.\"\n\n\"I would gladly think otherwise if I could,\" she answered. \"Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free to\u2013day, to\u2013morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl\u2014you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were.\"\n\nHe was about to speak; but, with her head turned from him, she resumed.\n\n\"You may\u2014the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will\u2014have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!\"\n\nShe left him, and they parted.\n\n\"Spirit!\" said Scrooge, \"show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?\"\n\n\"One shadow more!\" exclaimed the Ghost.\n\n\"No more!\" cried Scrooge. \"No more! I don't wish to see it. Show me no more!\"\n\nBut the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.\n\nThey were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children there than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of them! Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and, for the precious little shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment, and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.\n\nBut now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a rush immediately ensued that she, with laughing face and plundered dress, was borne towards it in the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him, with chairs for ladders, to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown\u2013paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round the neck, pummel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received! The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying\u2013pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees, the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and, by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house, where they went to bed, and so subsided.\n\nAnd now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him father, and been a spring\u2013time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.\n\n\"Belle,\" said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, \"I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Who was it?\"\n\n\"Guess!\"\n\n\"How can I? Tut, don't I know?\" she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. \"Mr. Scrooge.\"\n\n\"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe.\"\n\n\"Spirit!\" said Scrooge in a broken voice, \"remove me from this place.\"\n\n\"I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,\" said the Ghost. \"That they are what they are, do not blame me!\"\n\n\"Remove me!\" Scrooge exclaimed. \"I cannot bear it!\"\n\nHe turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.\n\n\"Leave me! Take me back! Haunt me no longer!\"\n\nIn the struggle\u2014if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost, with no visible resistance on its own part, was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary\u2014Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head.\n\nThe Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form; but, though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light, which streamed from under it in an unbroken flood upon the ground.\n\nHe was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed before he sank into a heavy sleep." + }, + { + "title": "THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS", + "text": "Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger dispatched to him through Jacob Marley's intervention. But, finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands, and, lying down again, established a sharp look\u2013out all round the bed. For he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise and made nervous.\n\nGentlemen of the free\u2013and\u2013easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time of day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch\u2013and\u2013toss to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and a rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.\n\nNow, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and consequently, when the bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think\u2014as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too\u2014at last, I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly, and shuffled in his slippers to the door.\n\nThe moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.\n\nIt was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney as that dull petrifaction of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking\u2013pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince\u2013pies, plum\u2013puddings, barrels of oysters, red\u2013hot chestnuts, cherry\u2013cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth\u2013cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge as he came peeping round the door.\n\n\"Come in!\" exclaimed the Ghost. \"Come in! and know me better, man!\"\n\nScrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and, though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.\n\n\"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,\" said the Spirit. \"Look upon me!\"\n\nScrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple deep green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.\n\n\"You have never seen the like of me before!\" exclaimed the Spirit.\n\n\"Never,\" Scrooge made answer to it.\n\n\"Have never walked forth with the younger members of my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers born in these later years?\" pursued the Phantom.\n\n\"I don't think I have,\" said Scrooge. \"I am afraid I have not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit?\"\n\n\"More than eighteen hundred,\" said the Ghost.\n\n\"A tremendous family to provide for,\" muttered Scrooge.\n\nThe Ghost of Christmas Present rose.\n\n\"Spirit,\" said Scrooge submissively, \"conduct me where you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. To\u2013night, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it.\"\n\n\"Touch my robe!\"\n\nScrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.\n\nHolly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting into artificial little snow\u2013storms.\n\nThe house\u2013fronts looked black enough, and the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed and recrossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace, in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.\n\nFor, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball\u2014better\u2013natured missile far than many a wordy jest\u2014laughing heartily if it went right, and not less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round, pot\u2013bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown\u2013faced, broad\u2013girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung\u2013up mistletoe. There were pears and apples clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence, to dangle from conspicuous hooks that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squab and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags, and eaten after dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and stagnant\u2013blooded race, appeared to know that there was something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.\n\nThe Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers\u2013on feel faint, and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly\u2013decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh, that the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.\n\nBut soon the steeples called good people all to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time there emerged, from scores of by\u2013streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor revellers appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and, taking off the covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice, when there were angry words between some dinner\u2013carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good\u2013humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas\u2013day. And so it was! God love it, so it was!\n\nIn time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners, and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.\n\n\"Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from your torch?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"There is. My own.\"\n\n\"Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"To any kindly given. To a poor one most.\"\n\n\"Why to a poor one most?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"Because it needs it most.\"\n\n\"Spirit!\" said Scrooge after a moment's thought. \"I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent enjoyment.\"\n\n\"I!\" cried the Spirit.\n\n\"You would deprive them of their means of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at all,\" said Scrooge; \"wouldn't you?\"\n\n\"I!\" cried the Spirit.\n\n\"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day,\" said Scrooge. \"And it comes to the same thing.\"\n\n\"I seek!\" exclaimed the Spirit.\n\n\"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your name, or at least in that of your family,\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"There are some upon this earth of yours,\" returned the Spirit, \"who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill\u2013will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us, and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.\"\n\nScrooge promised that he would; and they went on, invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that, notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as gracefully and like a supernatural creature as it was possible he could have done in any lofty hall.\n\nAnd perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind, generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor men, that led him straight to Scrooge's clerk's; for there he went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe; and, on the threshold of the door, the Spirit smiled, and stopped to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinklings of his torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen \"Bob\" a week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present blessed his four\u2013roomed house!\n\nThen up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out but poorly in a twice\u2013turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are cheap, and make a goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and, getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private property, conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and, basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes, bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan lid to be let out and peeled.\n\n\"What has ever got your precious father, then?\" said Mrs. Cratchit. \"And your brother, Tiny Tim? And Martha warn't as late last Christmas\u2013day by half an hour!\"\n\n\"Here's Martha, mother!\" said a girl, appearing as she spoke.\n\n\"Here's Martha, mother!\" cried the two young Cratchits. \"Hurrah! There's such a goose, Martha!\"\n\n\"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!\" said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.\n\n\"We'd a deal of work to finish up last night,\" replied the girl, \"and had to clear away this morning, mother!\"\n\n\"Well! never mind so long as you are come,\" said Mrs. Cratchit. \"Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have a warm, Lord bless ye!\"\n\n\"No, no! There's father coming,\" cried the two young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. \"Hide, Martha, hide!\"\n\nSo Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter, exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!\n\n\"Why, where's our Martha?\" cried Bob Cratchit, looking round.\n\n\"Not coming,\" said Mrs. Cratchit.\n\n\"Not coming!\" said Bob with a sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way from church, and had come home rampant. \"Not coming upon Christmas\u2013day!\"\n\nMartha didn't like to see him disappointed, if it were only in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash\u2013house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.\n\n\"And how did little Tim behave?\" asked Mrs. Cratchit when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart's content.\n\n\"As good as gold,\" said Bob, \"and better. Somehow, he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas\u2013day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.\"\n\nBob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.\n\nHis active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister to his stool beside the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs\u2014as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby\u2014compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round, and put it on the hob to simmer, Master Peter and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.\n\nSuch a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan was a matter of course\u2014and, in truth, it was something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and, mounting guard upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving\u2013knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the long\u2013expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!\n\nThere never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits, in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone\u2014too nervous to bear witnesses\u2014to take the pudding up, and bring it in.\n\nSuppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back\u2013yard and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose\u2014a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.\n\nHallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing\u2013day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating\u2013house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered\u2014flushed, but smiling proudly\u2014with the pudding, like a speckled cannon\u2013ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half\u2013a\u2013quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.\n\nOh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that, now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.\n\nAt last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and a shovel full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers and a custard cup without a handle.\n\nThese held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:\n\n\"A merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!\"\n\nWhich all the family re\u2013echoed.\n\n\"God bless us every one!\" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.\n\nHe sat very close to his father's side, upon his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken from him.\n\n\"Spirit,\" said Scrooge with an interest he had never felt before, \"tell me if Tiny Tim will live.\"\n\n\"I see a vacant seat,\" replied the Ghost, \"in the poor chimney\u2013corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" said Scrooge. \"Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared.\"\n\n\"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,\" returned the Ghost, \"will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.\"\n\nScrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.\n\n\"Man,\" said the Ghost, \"if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that, in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!\"\n\nScrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and, trembling, cast his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily on hearing his own name.\n\n\"Mr. Scrooge!\" said Bob. \"I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!\"\n\n\"The Founder of the Feast, indeed!\" cried Mrs. Cratchit, reddening. \"I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good appetite for it.\"\n\n\"My dear,\" said Bob, \"the children! Christmas\u2013day.\"\n\n\"It should be Christmas\u2013day, I am sure,\" said she, \"on which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert! Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow!\"\n\n\"My dear!\" was Bob's mild answer. \"Christmas\u2013day.\"\n\n\"I'll drink his health for your sake and the Day's,\" said Mrs. Cratchit, \"not for his. Long life to him! A merry Christmas and a happy New Year! He'll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!\"\n\nThe children drank the toast after her. It was the first of their proceedings which had no heartiness in it. Tiny Tim drank it last of all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for full five minutes.\n\nAfter it had passed away they were ten times merrier than before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full five\u2013and\u2013sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of business; and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favour when he came into the receipt of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed to\u2013morrow morning for a good long rest; to\u2013morrow being a holiday she passed at home. Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some days before, and how the lord \"was much about as tall as Peter\"; at which Peter pulled up his collars so high, that you couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All this time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by\u2013and\u2013by they had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed.\n\nThere was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being waterproof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawn\u2013broker's. But they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.\n\nBy this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness. There, all the children of the house were running out into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. Here, again, were shadows on the window blinds of guests assembling; and there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur\u2013booted, and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single man who saw them enter\u2014artful witches, well they knew it\u2014in a glow!\n\nBut, if you had judged from the numbers of people on their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at home to give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting company, and piling up its fires half\u2013chimney high. Blessings on it, how the Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and opened its capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with a generous hand, its bright and harmless mirth on everything within its reach! The very lamp\u2013lighter, who ran on before, dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamp\u2013lighter that he had any company but Christmas.\n\nAnd now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial\u2013place or giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed; or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse, rank grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and, frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.\n\n\"What place is this?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of the earth,\" returned the Spirit. \"But they know me. See!\"\n\nA light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their children and their children's children, and another generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire. The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a Christmas song; it had been a very old song when he was a boy; and from time to time they all joined in the chorus. So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and, so surely as they stopped, his vigour sank again.\n\nThe Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his robe, and, passing on above the moor, sped whither? Not to sea? To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.\n\nBuilt upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of seaweed clung to its base, and storm\u2013birds\u2014born of the wind, one might suppose, as seaweed of the water\u2014rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.\n\nBut, even here, two men who watched the light had made a fire that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and one of them, the elder too, with his face all damaged and scarred with hard weather, as the figure\u2013head of an old ship might be, struck up a sturdy song that was like a gale in itself.\n\nAgain the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea\u2014on, on\u2014until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the look\u2013out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some bygone Christmas\u2013day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for one another on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted to remember him.\n\nIt was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as death: it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge to recognise it as his own nephew's, and to find himself in a bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling by his side, and looking at that same nephew with approving affability!\n\n\"Ha, ha!\" laughed Scrooge's nephew. \"Ha, ha, ha!\"\n\nIf you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a man more blessed in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.\n\nIt is a fair, even\u2013handed, noble adjustment of things, that, while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good\u2013humour. When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way, holding his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions, Scrooge's niece, by marriage, laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends, being not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.\n\n\"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!\"\n\n\"He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!\" cried Scrooge's nephew. \"He believed it, too!\"\n\n\"More shame for him, Fred!\" said Scrooge's niece indignantly. Bless those women! they never do anything by halves. They are always in earnest.\n\nShe was very pretty; exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled, surprised\u2013looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that seemed made to be kissed\u2014as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly satisfactory!\n\n\"He's a comical old fellow,\" said Scrooge's nephew, \"that's the truth; and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing to say against him.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred,\" hinted Scrooge's niece. \"At least, you always tell me so.\"\n\n\"What of that, my dear?\" said Scrooge's nephew. \"His wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good with it. He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the satisfaction of thinking\u2014ha, ha, ha!\u2014that he is ever going to benefit Us with it.\"\n\n\"I have no patience with him,\" observed Scrooge's niece. Scrooge's niece's sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed the same opinion.\n\n\"Oh, I have!\" said Scrooge's nephew. \"I am sorry for him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims? Himself always. Here he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won't come and dine with us. What's the consequence? He don't lose much of a dinner.\"\n\n\"Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner,\" interrupted Scrooge's niece. Everybody else said the same, and they must be allowed to have been competent judges, because they had just had dinner; and, with the dessert upon the table, were clustered round the fire, by lamp\u2013light.\n\n\"Well! I am very glad to hear it,\" said Scrooge's nephew, \"because I haven't any great faith in these young housekeepers. What do you say, Topper?\"\n\nTopper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast, who had no right to express an opinion on the subject. Whereat Scrooge's niece's sister\u2014the plump one with the lace tucker, not the one with the roses\u2014blushed.\n\n\"Do go on, Fred,\" said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands. \"He never finishes what he begins to say! He is such a ridiculous fellow!\"\n\nScrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh, and, as it was impossible to keep the infection off, though the plump sister tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar, his example was unanimously followed.\n\n\"I was only going to say,\" said Scrooge's nephew, \"that the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts, either in his mouldy old office or his dusty chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can't help thinking better of it\u2014I defy him\u2014if he finds me going there in good temper, year after year, and saying, \"Uncle Scrooge, how are you?\" If it only puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds, that's something; and I think I shook him yesterday.\"\n\nIt was their turn to laugh, now, at the notion of his shaking Scrooge. But, being thoroughly good\u2013natured, and not much caring what they laughed at, so that they laughed at any rate, he encouraged them in their merriment, and passed the bottle, joyously.\n\nAfter tea they had some music. For they were a musical family, and knew what they were about when they sung a Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who could growl away in the bass like a good one, and never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and played, among other tunes, a simple little air (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the boarding\u2013school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him came upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob Marley.\n\nBut they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After awhile they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop! There was first a game at blindman's buff. Of course there was. And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after that plump sister in the lace tucker was an outrage on the credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire\u2013irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping up against the piano, smothering himself amongst the curtains, wherever she went, there went he! He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up against him (as some of them did) on purpose, he would have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn't fair; and it really was not. But when, at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got her into a corner whence there was no escape, then his conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her head\u2013dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain about her neck, was vile, monstrous! No doubt she told him her opinion of it when, another blind man being in office, they were so very confidential together behind the curtains.\n\nScrooge's niece was not one of the blindman's buff party, but was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool, in a snug corner where the Ghost and Scrooge were close behind her. But she joined in the forfeits, and loved her love to admiration with all the letters of the alphabet. Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was very great, and, to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat her sisters hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as Topper could have told you. There might have been twenty people there, young and old, but they all played, and so did Scrooge; for, wholly forgetting, in the interest he had in what was going on, that his voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with his guess quite loud, and very often guessed right, too, for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in his head to be.\n\nThe Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood, and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like a boy to be allowed to stay until the guests departed. But this the Spirit said could not be done.\n\n\"Here is a new game,\" said Scrooge. \"One half\u2013hour, Spirit, only one!\"\n\nIt was a game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew had to think of something, and the rest must find out what; he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he was exposed elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in London, and walked about the streets, and wasn't made a show of, and wasn't led by anybody, and didn't live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market, and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that he was obliged to get up off the sofa, and stamp. At last the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:\n\n\"I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know what it is!\"\n\n\"What is it?\" cried Fred.\n\n\"It's your uncle Scro\u2013o\u2013o\u2013o\u2013oge!\"\n\nWhich it certainly was. Admiration was the universal sentiment, though some objected that the reply to \"Is it a bear?\" ought to have been \"Yes\": inasmuch as an answer in the negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any tendency that way.\n\n\"He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure,\" said Fred, \"and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health. Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I say, \"Uncle Scrooge!\"\n\n\"Well! Uncle Scrooge!\" they cried.\n\n\"A merry Christmas and a happy New Year to the old man, whatever he is!\" said Scrooge's nephew. \"He wouldn't take it from me, but may he have it nevertheless. Uncle Scrooge!\"\n\nUncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech, if the Ghost had given him time. But the whole scene passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.\n\nMuch they saw, and far they went, and many homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick\u2013beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and gaol, in misery's every refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.\n\nIt was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that, while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it, until they left a children's Twelfth\u2013Night party, when, looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey.\n\n\"Are spirits' lives so short?\" asked Scrooge.\n\n\"My life upon this globe is very brief,\" replied the Ghost. \"It ends to\u2013night.\"\n\n\"To\u2013night!\" cried Scrooge.\n\n\"To\u2013night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near.\"\n\nThe chimes were ringing the three\u2013quarters past eleven at that moment.\n\n\"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,\" said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, \"but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?\"\n\n\"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it,\" was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. \"Look here.\"\n\nFrom the foldings of its robe it brought two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.\n\n\"Oh, Man! look here! Look, look, down here!\" exclaimed the Ghost.\n\nThey were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.\n\nScrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.\n\n\"Spirit! are they yours?\" Scrooge could say no more.\n\n\"They are Man's,\" said the Spirit, looking down upon them. \"And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!\" cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. \"Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!\"\n\n\"Have they no refuge or resource?\" cried Scrooge.\n\n\"Are there no prisons?\" said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. \"Are there no workhouses?\"\n\nThe bell struck Twelve.\n\nScrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of old Jacob Marley, and, lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming like a mist along the ground towards him." + }, + { + "title": "THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS", + "text": "The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.\n\nIt was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible, save one outstretched hand. But for this, it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.\n\nHe felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.\n\n\"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come?\" said Scrooge.\n\nThe Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.\n\n\"You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,\" Scrooge pursued. \"Is that so, Spirit?\"\n\nThe upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer he received.\n\nAlthough well used to ghostly company by this time, Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it. The Spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.\n\nBut Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror to know that, behind the dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap of black.\n\n\"Ghost of the Future!\" he exclaimed, \"I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But, as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak to me?\"\n\nIt gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them.\n\n\"Lead on!\" said Scrooge. \"Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead on, Spirit!\"\n\nThe phantom moved away as it had come towards him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he thought, and carried him along.\n\nThey scarcely seemed to enter the City; for the City rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they were in the heart of it; on 'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.\n\nThe Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.\n\n\"No,\" said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, \"I don't know much about it either way. I only know he's dead.\"\n\n\"When did he die?\" inquired another.\n\n\"Last night, I believe.\"\n\n\"Why, what was the matter with him?\" asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff\u2013box. \"I thought he'd never die.\"\n\n\"God knows,\" said the first with a yawn.\n\n\"What has he done with his money?\" asked a red\u2013faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey\u2013cock.\n\n\"I haven't heard,\" said the man with the large chin, yawning again. \"Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't left it to me. That's all I know.\"\n\nThis pleasantry was received with a general laugh.\n\n\"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral,\" said the same speaker; \"for, upon my life, I don't know of anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party, and volunteer?\"\n\n\"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided,\" observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. \"But I must be fed if I make one.\"\n\nAnother laugh.\n\n\"Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,\" said the first speaker, \"for I never wear black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I'll offer to go if anybody else will. When I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that I wasn't his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye, bye!\"\n\nSpeakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit for an explanation.\n\nThe Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that the explanation might lie here.\n\nHe knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.\n\n\"How are you?\" said one.\n\n\"How are you?\" returned the other.\n\n\"Well!\" said the first. \"Old Scratch has got his own at last, hey?\"\n\n\"So I am told,\" returned the second. \"Cold, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Seasonable for Christmas\u2013time. You are not a skater, I suppose?\"\n\n\"No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!\"\n\nNot another word. That was their meeting, their conversation, and their parting.\n\nScrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so trivial; but, feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be. They could scarcely be supposed to have any bearing on the death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past, and this Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of any one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could apply them. But nothing doubting that, to whomsoever they applied, they had some latent moral for his own improvement, he resolved to treasure up every word he heard, and everything he saw; and especially to observe the shadow of himself when it appeared. For he had an expectation that the conduct of his future self would give him the clue he missed, and would render the solution of these riddles easy.\n\nHe looked about in that very place for his own image, but another man stood in his accustomed corner, and, though the clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured in through the Porch. It gave him little surprise, however; for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and thought and hoped he saw his new\u2013born resolutions carried out in this.\n\nQuiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his thoughtful quest, he fancied, from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and feel very cold.\n\nThey left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although he recognised its situation and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched; the people half naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell, and dirt, and life upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth and misery.\n\nFar in this den of infamous resort, there was a low\u2013browed, beetling shop, below a pent\u2013house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal were bought. Upon the floor within were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a charcoal stove made of old bricks, was a grey\u2013haired rascal, nearly seventy years of age, who had screened himself from the cold air without by a frouzy curtaining of miscellaneous tatters hung upon a line, and smoked his pipe in all the luxury of calm retirement.\n\nScrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another woman, similarly laden, came in too, and she was closely followed by a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight of them than they had been upon the recognition of each other. After a short period of blank astonishment, in which the old man with the pipe had joined them, they all three burst into a laugh.\n\n\"Let the charwoman alone to be the first!\" cried she who had entered first. \"Let the laundress alone to be the second; and let the undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look here, old Joe, here's a chance! If we haven't all three met here without meaning it!\"\n\n\"You couldn't have met in a better place,\" said old Joe, removing his pipe from his mouth. \"Come into the parlour. You were made free of it long ago, you know; and the other two an't strangers. Stop till I shut the door of the shop. Ah! How it skreeks! There an't such a rusty bit of metal in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and I'm sure there's no such old bones here as mine. Ha! ha! We're all suitable to our calling, we're well matched. Come into the parlour. Come into the parlour.\"\n\nThe parlour was the space behind the screen of rags. The old man raked the fire together with an old stair\u2013rod, and, having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night) with the stem of his pipe, put it into his mouth again.\n\nWhile he did this, the woman who had already spoken threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and looking with a bold defiance at the other two.\n\n\"What odds, then? What odds, Mrs. Dilber?\" said the woman. \"Every person has a right to take care of themselves. He always did!\"\n\n\"That's true, indeed!\" said the laundress. \"No man more so.\"\n\n\"Why, then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid, woman! Who's the wiser? We're not going to pick holes in each other's coats, I suppose?\"\n\n\"No, indeed!\" said Mrs. Dilber and the man together. \"We should hope not.\"\n\n\"Very well, then!\" cried the woman. \"That's enough. Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like these? Not a dead man, I suppose?\"\n\n\"No, indeed,\" said Mrs. Dilber, laughing.\n\n\"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old screw,\" pursued the woman, \"why wasn't he natural in his lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by himself.\"\n\n\"It's the truest word that ever was spoke,\" said Mrs. Dilber, \"It's a judgment on him.\"\n\n\"I wish it was a little heavier judgment,\" replied the woman; \"and it should have been, you may depend upon it, if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. Speak out plain. I'm not afraid to be the first, nor afraid for them to see it. We knew pretty well that we were helping ourselves before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the bundle, Joe.\"\n\nBut the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this; and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first, produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two, a pencil\u2013case, a pair of sleeve\u2013buttons, and a brooch of no great value, were all. They were severally examined and appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed to give for each upon the wall, and added them up into a total when he found that there was nothing more to come.\n\n\"That's your account,\" said Joe, \"and I wouldn't give another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it. Who's next?\"\n\nMrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing apparel, two old\u2013fashioned silver tea\u2013spoons, a pair of sugar\u2013tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall in the same manner.\n\n\"I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine, and that's the way I ruin myself,\" said old Joe. \"That's your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made it an open question, I'd repent of being so liberal, and knock off half\u2013a\u2013crown.\"\n\n\"And now undo my bundle, Joe,\" said the first woman.\n\nJoe went down on his knees for the greater convenience of opening it, and, having unfastened a great many knots, dragged out a large heavy roll of some dark stuff.\n\n\"What do you call this?\" said Joe. \"Bed\u2013curtains?\"\n\n\"Ah!\" returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward on her crossed arms. \"Bed\u2013curtains!\"\n\n\"You don't mean to say you took 'em down, rings and all, with him lying there?\" said Joe.\n\n\"Yes, I do,\" replied the woman. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"You were born to make your fortune,\" said Joe, \"and you'll certainly do it.\"\n\n\"I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He was, I promise you, Joe,\" returned the woman coolly. \"Don't drop that oil upon the blankets, now.\"\n\n\"His blankets?\" asked Joe.\n\n\"Whose else's do you think?\" replied the woman. \"He isn't likely to take cold without 'em, I dare say.\"\n\n\"I hope he didn't die of anything catching? Eh?\" said old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.\n\n\"Don't you be afraid of that,\" returned the woman. \"I an't so fond of his company that I'd loiter about him for such things, if he did. Ah! You may look through that shirt till your eyes ache; but you won't find a hole in it, nor a threadbare place. It's the best he had, and a fine one too. They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me.\"\n\n\"What do you call wasting of it?\" asked old Joe.\n\n\"Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure,\" replied the woman with a laugh. \"Somebody was fool enough to do it, but I took it off again. If calico an't good enough for such a purpose, it isn't good enough for anything. It's quite as becoming to the body. He can't look uglier than he did in that one.\"\n\nScrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.\n\n\"Ha, ha!\" laughed the same woman when old Joe, producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their several gains upon the ground. \"This is the end of it, you see! He frightened every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!\"\n\n\"Spirit!\" said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. \"I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own. My life tends that way now. Merciful Heaven, what is this?\"\n\nHe recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which, beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up, which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful language.\n\nThe room was very dark, too dark to be observed with any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon the bed: and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.\n\nScrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it; but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the spectre at his side.\n\nOh, cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy, and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal!\n\nNo voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard dealing, griping cares? They have brought him to a rich end, truly!\n\nHe lay, in the dark, empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child to say he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth\u2013stone. What they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.\n\n\"Spirit!\" he said, \"this is a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!\"\n\nStill the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the head.\n\n\"I understand you,\" Scrooge returned, \"and I would do it if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have not the power.\"\n\nAgain it seemed to look upon him.\n\n\"If there is any person in the town who feels emotion caused by this man's death,\" said Scrooge, quite agonised, \"show that person to me, Spirit! I beseech you.\"\n\nThe Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a moment, like a wing; and, withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight, where a mother and her children were.\n\nShe was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started at every sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly bear the voices of her children in their play.\n\nAt length the long\u2013expected knock was heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.\n\nHe sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for him by the fire, and, when she asked him faintly what news (which was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.\n\n\"Is it good,\" she said, \"or bad?\" to help him.\n\n\"Bad,\" he answered.\n\n\"We are quite ruined?\"\n\n\"No. There is hope yet, Caroline.\"\n\n\"If he relents,\" she said, amazed, \"there is! Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has happened.\"\n\n\"He is past relenting,\" said her husband. \"He is dead.\"\n\nShe was a mild and patient creature, if her face spoke truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of her heart.\n\n\"What the half\u2013drunken woman, whom I told you of last night, said to me when I tried to see him and obtain a week's delay, and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid me, turns out to have been quite true. He was not only very ill, but dying, then.\"\n\n\"To whom will our debt be transferred?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But, before that time, we shall be ready with the money; and, even though we were not, it would be bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor. We may sleep to\u2013night with light hearts, Caroline!\"\n\nYes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter. The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man's death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of pleasure.\n\n\"Let me see some tenderness connected with a death,\" said Scrooge; \"or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just now, will be for ever present to me.\"\n\nThe Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar to his feet; and, as they went along, Scrooge looked here and there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They entered poor Bob Cratchit's house,\u2014the dwelling he had visited before,\u2014and found the mother and the children seated round the fire.\n\nQuiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter, who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters were engaged in sewing. But surely they were very quiet!\n\n\"And he took a child, and set him in the midst of them.\"\n\nWhere had Scrooge heard those words? He had not dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not go on?\n\nThe mother laid her work upon the table, and put her hand up to her face.\n\n\"The colour hurts my eyes,\" she said.\n\nThe colour? Ah, poor Tiny Tim!\n\n\"They're better now again,\" said Cratchit's wife. \"It makes them weak by candle\u2013light; and I wouldn't show weak eyes to your father, when he comes home, for the world. It must be near his time.\"\n\n\"Past it rather,\" Peter answered, shutting up his book. \"But I think he has walked a little slower than he used, these few last evenings, mother.\"\n\nThey were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:\n\n\"I have known him walk with\u2014I have known him walk with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder very fast indeed.\"\n\n\"And so have I,\" cried Peter. \"Often.\"\n\n\"And so have I,\" exclaimed another. So had all.\n\n\"But he was very light to carry,\" she resumed, intent upon her work, \"and his father loved him so, that it was no trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the door!\"\n\nShe hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter\u2014he had need of it, poor fellow\u2014came in. His tea was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried who should help him to it most. Then the two young Cratchits got upon his knees, and laid, each child, a little cheek against his face, as if they said, \"Don't mind it, father. Don't be grieved!\"\n\nBob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to all the family. He looked at the work upon the table, and praised the industry and speed of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls. They would be done long before Sunday, he said.\n\n\"Sunday! You went to\u2013day, then, Robert?\" said his wife.\n\n\"Yes, my dear,\" returned Bob. \"I wish you could have gone. It would have done you good to see how green a place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child!\" cried Bob. \"My little child!\"\n\nHe broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther apart, perhaps, than they were.\n\nHe left the room, and went up\u2013stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of some one having been there lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and, when he had thought a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what had happened, and went down again quite happy.\n\nThey drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness of Mr. Scrooge's nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but once, and who, meeting him in the street that day, and seeing that he looked a little\u2014\"just a little down, you know,\" said Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him. \"On which,\" said Bob, \"for he is the pleasantest\u2013spoken gentleman you ever heard, I told him. \"I am heartily sorry for it, Mr. Cratchit,\" he said, \"and heartily sorry for your good wife.\" By\u2013the\u2013bye, how he ever knew that I don't know.\"\n\n\"Knew what, my dear?\"\n\n\"Why, that you were a good wife,\" replied Bob.\n\n\"Everybody knows that,\" said Peter.\n\n\"Very well observed, my boy!\" cried Bob. \"I hope they do. \"Heartily sorry,\" he said, \"for your good wife. If I can be of service to you in any way,\" he said, giving me his card, \"that's where I live. Pray come to me.\" Now, it wasn't,\" cried Bob, \"for the sake of anything he might be able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known our Tiny Tim, and felt with us.\"\n\n\"I'm sure he's a good soul!\" said Mrs. Cratchit.\n\n\"You would be sure of it, my dear,\" returned Bob, \"if you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn't be at all surprised\u2014mark what I say!\u2014if he got Peter a better situation.\"\n\n\"Only hear that, Peter,\" said Mrs. Cratchit.\n\n\"And then,\" cried one of the girls, \"Peter will be keeping company with some one, and setting up for himself.\"\n\n\"Get along with you!\" retorted Peter, grinning.\n\n\"It's just as likely as not,\" said Bob, \"one of these days; though there's plenty of time for that, my dear. But, however and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim\u2014shall we\u2014or this first parting that there was among us?\"\n\n\"Never, father!\" cried they all.\n\n\"And I know,\" said Bob, \"I know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was, although he was a little, little child, we shall not quarrel easily among ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it.\"\n\n\"No, never, father!\" they all cried again.\n\n\"I am very happy,\" said little Bob, \"I am very happy!\"\n\nMrs. Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!\n\n\"Spectre,\" said Scrooge, \"something informs me that our parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?\"\n\nThe Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as before\u2014though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were in the Future\u2014into the resorts of business men, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired, until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.\n\n\"This court,\" said Scrooge, \"through which we hurry now, is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be in days to come.\"\n\nThe Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.\n\n\"The house is yonder,\" Scrooge exclaimed. \"Why do you point away?\"\n\nThe inexorable finger underwent no change.\n\nScrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself. The Phantom pointed as before.\n\nHe joined it once again, and, wondering why and whither he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He paused to look round before entering.\n\nA churchyard. Here, then, the wretched man, whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A worthy place!\n\nThe Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.\n\n\"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,\" said Scrooge, \"answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of the things that May be only?\"\n\nStill the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.\n\n\"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead,\" said Scrooge. \"But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!\"\n\nThe Spirit was immovable as ever.\n\nScrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and, following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.\n\n\"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?\" he cried upon his knees.\n\nThe finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.\n\n\"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!\"\n\nThe finger still was there.\n\n\"Spirit!\" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, \"hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?\"\n\nFor the first time the hand appeared to shake.\n\n\"Good Spirit,\" he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: \"your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me by an altered life?\"\n\nThe kind hand trembled.\n\n\"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!\"\n\nIn his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.\n\nHolding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost." + }, + { + "title": "THE END OF IT", + "text": "Yes! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!\n\n\"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!\" Scrooge repeated as he scrambled out of bed. \"The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh, Jacob Marley! Heaven and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!\"\n\nHe was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.\n\n\"They are not torn down,\" cried Scrooge, folding one of his bed\u2013curtains in his arms, \"they are not torn down, rings and all. They are here\u2014I am here\u2014the shadows of the things that would have been may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!\"\n\nHis hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.\n\n\"I don't know what to do!\" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laoco\u00f6n of himself with his stockings. \"I am as light as a feather, I am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a school\u2013boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world! Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!\"\n\nHe had frisked into the sitting\u2013room, and was now standing there: perfectly winded.\n\n\"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!\" cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fire\u2013place. \"There's the door by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There's the corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened. Ha, ha, ha!\"\n\nReally, for a man who had been out of practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh. The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!\n\n\"I don't know what day of the month it is,\" said Scrooge. \"I don't know how long I have been among the Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!\"\n\nHe was checked in his transports by the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clash, hammer; ding, dong, bell! Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!\n\nRunning to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sun\u2013light; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!\n\n\"What's to\u2013day?\" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.\n\n\"EH?\" returned the boy with all his might of wonder.\n\n\"What's to\u2013day, my fine fellow?\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"To\u2013day!\" replied the boy. \"Why, CHRISTMAS DAY.\"\n\n\"It's Christmas Day!\" said Scrooge to himself. \"I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!\"\n\n\"Hallo!\" returned the boy.\n\n\"Do you know the Poulterer's in the next street but one, at the corner?\" Scrooge inquired.\n\n\"I should hope I did,\" replied the lad.\n\n\"An intelligent boy!\" said Scrooge. \"A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that was hanging up there?\u2014Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?\"\n\n\"What! the one as big as me?\" returned the boy.\n\n\"What a delightful boy!\" said Scrooge. \"It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!\"\n\n\"It's hanging there now,\" replied the boy.\n\n\"Is it?\" said Scrooge. \"Go and buy it.\"\n\n\"Walk\u2013ER!\" exclaimed the boy.\n\n\"No, no,\" said Scrooge, \"I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the directions where to take it. Come back with the man, and I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes, and I'll give you half\u2013a\u2013crown!\"\n\nThe boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.\n\n\"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's,\" whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. \"He shan't know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!\"\n\nThe hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady one; but write it he did, somehow, and went down\u2013stairs to open the street\u2013door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.\n\n\"I shall love it as long as I live!\" cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand. \"I scarcely ever looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its face! It's a wonderful knocker!\u2014Here's the Turkey. Hallo! Whoop! How are you? Merry Christmas!\"\n\nIt was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a minute, like sticks of sealing\u2013wax.\n\n\"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,\" said Scrooge. \"You must have a cab.\"\n\nThe chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried.\n\nShaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you don't dance while you are at it. But, if he had cut the end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of sticking\u2013plaster over it, and been quite satisfied.\n\nHe dressed himself \"all in his best,\" and at last got out into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and, walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four good\u2013humoured fellows said, \"Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!\" And Scrooge said often afterwards that, of all the blithe sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.\n\nHe had not gone far when, coming on towards him, he beheld the portly gentleman who had walked into his counting\u2013house the day before, and said, \"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe?\" It sent a pang across his heart to think how this old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but he knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.\n\n\"My dear sir,\" said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands, \"how do you do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!\"\n\n\"Mr. Scrooge?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Scrooge. \"That is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon. And will you have the goodness\u2014\u2014\" Here Scrooge whispered in his ear.\n\n\"Lord bless me!\" cried the gentleman, as if his breath were taken away. \"My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?\"\n\n\"If you please,\" said Scrooge. \"Not a farthing less. A great many back\u2013payments are included in it, I assure you. Will you do me that favour?\"\n\n\"My dear sir,\" said the other, shaking hands with him, \"I don't know what to say to such munifi\u2014\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't say anything, please,\" retorted Scrooge. \"Come and see me. Will you come and see me?\"\n\n\"I will!\" cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he meant to do it.\n\n\"Thankee,\" said Scrooge. \"I am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty times. Bless you!\"\n\nHe went to church, and walked about the streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted the children on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows; and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never dreamed that any walk\u2014that anything\u2014could give him so much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew's house.\n\nHe passed the door a dozen times before he had the courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and did it.\n\n\"Is your master at home, my dear?\" said Scrooge to the girl. Nice girl! Very.\n\n\"Yes sir.\"\n\n\"Where is he, my love?\" said Scrooge.\n\n\"He's in the dining\u2013room, sir, along with mistress. I'll show you up\u2013stairs, if you please.\"\n\n\"Thankee. He knows me,\" said Scrooge, with his hand already on the dining\u2013room lock. \"I'll go in here, my dear.\"\n\nHe turned it gently, and sidled his face in round the door. They were looking at the table (which was spread out in great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points, and like to see that everything is right.\n\n\"Fred!\" said Scrooge.\n\nDear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started! Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done it on any account.\n\n\"Why, bless my soul!\" cried Fred, \"who's that?\"\n\n\"It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner. Will you let me in, Fred?\"\n\nLet him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off. He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier. His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, won\u2013der\u2013ful happiness!\n\nBut he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was early there! If he could only be there first, and catch Bob Cratchit coming late! That was the thing he had set his heart upon.\n\nAnd he did it; yes, he did! The clock struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see him come into the tank.\n\nHis hat was off before he opened the door; his comforter too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.\n\n\"Hallo!\" growled Scrooge in his accustomed voice as near as he could feign it. \"What do you mean by coming here at this time of day?\"\n\n\"I am very sorry, sir,\" said Bob. \"I am behind my time.\"\n\n\"You are!\" repeated Scrooge. \"Yes. I think you are. Step this way, sir, if you please.\"\n\n\"It's only once a year, sir,\" pleaded Bob, appearing from the tank. \"It shall not be repeated. I was making rather merry yesterday, sir.\"\n\n\"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend,\" said Scrooge. \"I am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And therefore,\" he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the tank again: \"and therefore I am about to raise your salary!\"\n\nBob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait\u2013waistcoat.\n\n\"A merry Christmas, Bob!\" said Scrooge with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the back. \"A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires and buy another coal\u2013scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man as the good old City knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and, knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.\n\nHe had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon the Total\u2013Abstinence Principle ever afterwards; and it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "(The Fiore Family 3) Christmas with the Sheriff", + "author": "C. M. Steele", + "genres": [ + "nsfw", + "Christmas", + "mf" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Mia", + "text": "\"You have got to be shitting me.\" My GPS recalibrates for the second time in twenty minutes, sending me in a completely different direction. The snow is making it hard to see the road in front of me, including the dividing lines.\n\nOf all the days to get stuck in a snowstorm, it has to be Christmas Eve. It's about an hour until sunset, and with the already slippery roads and the continuous white flakes adding to the chaos, it's probably best that I stop at the first town I see.\n\nI squint my eyes as the wiper blades work double time to smear the white mess out of my field of vision, but it's doing little to no good while I search for any hint of large green metal through all this white. Finally with a sigh of relief, I spot something up ahead.\n\n\u2002Snowfall, New York\n\n\u20021 Mile\n\nHow apropos!\n\nI take the one-mile drive slower than I would prefer. I was planning to drive down to New York City to meet some friends and spend the holidays. It's clearly out of the question this Christmas. Maybe I should have left a day or two earlier instead of changing my plans at the last minute. Instead of enjoying the holidays with those I love, I'm forced to be alone and I have no one to blame but myself. Why did I finally decide to be impulsive? I'm never impulsive.\n\nI wish I'd stayed with my family, but they have their own new families and I feel out of place. Last year my two cousins met their perfect matches, falling madly in love with twin sisters. My brother, Soren, is still single; working hard on the family vineyard is his passion, and he isn't interested in finding love.\n\nI am.\n\nUnfortunately, it's hard to meet men these days, and the ones I have met are either married or not manly enough for me. I need a man like my cousins and brother. Having grown up around them, there's just some shit I can't tolerate. I want a man like I read about and watch on TV\u2014powerful, loving, and strong. Although, none of that will matter if I don't concentrate on the road ahead.\n\nTaking the exit, I come to a long road that has me making a left and going down another barren strip of snow-covered road for another mile before finding a sign that points in two directions. Stone Hill Right, Snowfall Left.\n\nThe sign on the highway had been for Snowfall, so I make the left, hoping that it leads to somewhere with inhabitants. Finally down the road on the left-hand side I spot a gas station. Since my tank is still pretty full and honestly, I just want to get somewhere and park so I'm safe, I continue on into the town. It's quite busy with people milling around despite the falling snow, but then again, living here, it must be common. I creep down the road and squint my eyes, looking for a hotel nearby. It's not a large town, and it looks like I've hit their main street. One light blinks red because it's not even a traffic light, but rather a stop sign.\n\nI make a complete stop and then roll my eyes, and that's when I spot the Snowfall Inn. It's a large building with a rustic feel, and outside is a burly man bundled up in a plaid winter coat shoveling the snow. Smiling, I pull into their small lot, hoping they have a signal and can take a credit card. I'm just glad they're open.\n\nI throw my purse over my shoulder, slip on my winter hat, and step outside of my vehicle, locking it. A blast of icy cold swipes across my face, so I quickly zip my coat and wrap up in my scarf. Locking my car door, I walk toward the sidewalk. Looking around at the small storefronts with snow blanketing the edges of the windowsills, I say, \"Holy shit, I've run straight into a Hallmark movie.\"\n\n\"Well, we do have some good-looking men here,\" a young woman says, stepping alongside of me. I'm glad that I don't scare easily because that was a little too quiet for me, or maybe I was lost in my thoughts. She's got to be about my age, a bit shorter than me if that's possible and as adorable as hell with her chocolate curls and rosy cheeks. \"Although that one is taken.\" She points to the handsome man I noticed when I first arrived. He gives us a look over his shoulder as he hears her speaking about him, smiles, and then he walks into the inn. Wow, yep that man is a looker and a half.\n\n\"Yeah, well, I can see why. Do you know if there is availability at the inn?\" I ask, pointing to where her man was standing.\n\n\"Yes. We don't get many visitors to our small town. Usually those just passing by or families needing extra space for their guests on the holidays.\"\n\n\"The first option would be me. The weather has definitely changed my plans.\" And the fact that I didn't bother to use my brain and got lost didn't help. Hell, I don't know how far south or east from Rochester I am.\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that, but we have more than enough room at the inn. Do you have any bags?\" she asks, looking down at my empty mitten covered-hands.\n\nI smile and point to my vehicle. \"Oh, yes. I wanted to check in to be sure before I dragged out my suitcase.\"\n\nShe nods with understanding. \"Derek, please help this lady with her bags,\" she says, looking just behind me.\n\n\"Yes, dear.\" I twist my entire body to the sound. The burly man, who I didn't hear, seems to just appear out of nowhere and comes up right beside her. Damn, he moves light as a feather for a man that looks anything but light on his feet.\n\n\"I can get them myself,\" I insist, hating that I'm interrupting his hard work.\n\n\"No. It's no big deal, ma'am.\" He walks over to my vehicle, ignoring my protests and waits.\n\nI nod and pop the trunk, acquiescing because I'm sure he's not going to let me carry my own luggage and frankly I don't want to, but I didn't want to look lazy. He scoops out my Louis Vuitton suitcase and travel bag, but he doesn't make a face or grumble. As a small town, I'm sure they don't like outsiders, especially ones with money. Maybe I've seen one too many movies. Then again, I love me some Christmas movies.\n\nI'm well off, but I'm not rich like my cousins and brother. In fact, my luggage was a Christmas present from my cousin Franco. As his assistant, I make a quarter of a million dollars a year. It's more than I should make as his executive assistant, but when he became injured three years ago, I took on a lot more of his day-to-day, which earned me a large raise. Most of my money's saved up for the day I'm no longer needed. I've saved almost two million dollars which will be for my retirement one day.\n\n\"Come on in.\" The woman takes my arm, hooking it with hers and leading me inside with a smile on her pretty face. She adds, \"Welcome to Snowfall Inn.\" We enter the warm lobby, and I'm surprised by the feel of home. It's wood all around, like a ski lodge, and it's inviting.\n\n\"It's beautiful.\"\n\n\"Thank you. My husband has done so many renovations for me since he moved to Snowfall.\" So he wasn't a local? Interesting. The more I steal glances at the man, I can see he has something dark around him\u2014a hidden secret. I'm betting he's a former assassin or something like that.\n\n\"Oh, well, that's wonderful to have such a sweet man.\" A twinge of jealousy and loneliness fills me. It's been hitting me hard these days, and I hate it. \"So, about the room?\"\n\n\"Yes. I just need some information, and we can help you up there.\" I give her my driver's license and credit card. For being an extremely small town, everything here is full of modern technology and the internet isn't terrible because we finish up pretty quickly.\n\n\"My name is Jenny. I'm the owner along with that handsome man. If you need anything, don't hesitate to ask. We're only a call away. We're off soon, heading home to enjoy the holiday with our family. The local diner is just across the street, and down the road is the grocery store.\n\n\"Thank you.\" They walk me up to my room and unlock my door for me. Derek sets my bags just inside the door but doesn't go in.\n\nJenny steps inside and shows me around just briefly, smiling and shrugging her shoulders like she's nervous. Does she think I won't like this place? It's super cute and cozy. She takes a deep breath and then says, \"So\u2026I know you don't know us, but since you're alone for the holidays, you're more than welcome to join us for dinner tonight.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I'm good. I wouldn't want to intrude.\"\n\n\"Still, if you are interested, my brother can pick you up after his shift tonight.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I'll be okay.\" I'm not sure if she's normally this friendly or if she's just in the holiday spirit. Either way, the gesture is kind.\n\n\"You're welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here, Ms. Fiore.\"\n\n\"Call me Mia.\" Most places I go, I prefer Ms. Fiore because it's usually for business purposes, but this town makes me feel like home for some strange reason.\n\n\"I'm Jenny.\" She pauses and rolls her eyes with a quirky smile. \"Oh, wait\u2014totally said that already. It's been a very long day.\" I bet it has. It's still quite early, but she probably gets here at the crack of dawn to keep her inn running smoothly.\n\n\"It's still nice to meet you, Jenny.\"\n\n\"Sweetheart, we have to get going,\" her husband tells her, looking up from his phone that had just chimed.\n\n\"There's only two other guests, and they're visiting family. Remember, here's our number if you need anything. Please don't hesitate.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She gives me a hug, forgetting herself, which makes me smile. Some people can't help but be friendly, and I could really use that right now. They leave me in my room, and I close the door. An overwhelming feeling of being alone floods my bones the second their footfalls disappear.\n\nI strip out of my winter coat, boots, and hat, setting them on the rack to dry. The large bed in the middle of the room is calling my name, but I want to check out the rest of the features. On the wall next to the large work desk is the list of contacts if needed, as well as the Wi-Fi password. There's a postcard-sized menu for a restaurant in town, probably one of their only ones. It sounds incredible, but I'm not in the mood to eat alone.\n\nMaybe I should have accepted her offer, but I don't know them and who the hell knows what trouble I could get myself into. Thankfully, my phone rings. I make a mad dash to where my coat's hanging and scoop it out of my deep pockets, fumbling until I swipe the green button. \"When are you going to get here?\" Mal asks with a sing-song cadence.\n\nMy bestie, Mal, is the one I'm supposed to be hanging with for the holidays along with her younger sister, Allison. We're close as can be, although we live in different towns. They grew up in Rochester but decided to go to college at NYU and haven't left.\n\n\"I'm not coming. At least not today. I've gotten stuck in a snowstorm, so I had to stop in a small town and get a room for a night or two depending on the conditions.\"\n\n\"Oh goodness. It's not one of those spooky kinds, is it?\"\n\n\"No, Mal. It's actually picturesque. A Christmas village in a snow-globe kind of town.\"\n\n\"Ooh! Any hot lumberjacks to keep you warm?\"\n\nI giggle and plop onto the bed. \"I've only seen one, and he belongs to the innkeeper. They're one hot couple and so sweet. They invited me to join them for Christmas Eve dinner since I was alone.\"\n\n\"Uh-oh. What if they're one of those swinger couples?\"\n\nShe's been in NYC too long; she's forgotten normal people exist. \"I doubt it. The man had his hands on her every single second he was in the room and barely looked at me other than to greet me and it was practically a grunt.\"\n\n\"Well, does he have a brother?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but she was hinting that she has a brother who can bring me there if I change my mind.\" I'm not sure I'd like to meet her brother, but if I'm here for more than a day, I'll probably run into him. This town is small enough that I bet everyone knows each other.\n\n\"Well, fill me in if you find your small-town romance\u2014like the owner of the hardware store with a little one who needs love and tenderness, but you're a busy, hardworking city girl.\"\n\n\"Girl, didn't we watch that movie already?\" I say, tossing my coat onto the chair.\n\n\"Yeah, but you know they'll make three more just like it.\"\n\n\"And we'll still be watching them.\" We love those films like guilty pleasures.\n\n\"Damn right. I miss you, girl.\" My friends and I used to be so close like sisters and these days it gets hard to make time, but we do take vacations together since we don't have men to spend them with.\n\n\"Samesies.\"\n\n\"I wish you were here. Still, Allison and I will drink and toast to you. Maybe on New Year's we can get together if you're not working your ass off for Franco.\"\n\n\"I do have the next two weeks off. He's enjoying the holiday with his family, so I can too.\" It's been a true blessing that Franco has finally married Isabelle because work has taken a backseat to his true happiness.\n\n\"Yay! Girls' night!\" They were happy that my cousin finally came out of his self-induced isolation.\n\n\"Mark it down.\"\n\n\"Have a Merry Christmas, Mia. Call us when you can, and check out the hardware store just for me, please.\"\n\n\"I will. Merry Christmas. Give Ally-Cat a kiss for me and tell her I miss her too.\"\n\n\"Sure thing. Be safe. I have to go before my boss finds my ass on the phone again. He's always on my case.\"\n\n\"Bye, beautiful.\" My friends are completely stunning, and it surprises people because they think we get jealous of each other, but we always fix each other's crowns. I don't know what I'd do without them in my life, even if it's at a distance.\n\nI settle in and then notice the snow's only getting heavier, blanketing the street and sidewalks. \"I better find the hardware store.\" Bundling back up, I fix my lipstick and head down. There's a young guy sitting at the front desk, and he nearly drops his book when he sees me.\n\n\"Hello, ma'am.\" He can't be more than sixteen, and I might have to close his mouth for him because it nearly hit the desk when he looked at me.\n\n\"Hi, I'll be back soon. I just want to check out the town before the weather gets worse.\"\n\n\"Um\u2026yes.\"\n\n\"Do you know where the hardware store is?\"\n\n\"Um\u2026 is there something you need fixed? I'm not as handy as Mr. Black, but I can do a couple of small jobs.\" He winks at me, and I pause. Is this kid flirting with me? No. That can't be right because he's nearly a decade younger.\n\nShaking my head, I answer, \"No. Nothing to fix. I'm just curious.\"\n\n\"Well, it's down the road next to the grocery store.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'm sorry, I don't know your name.\"\n\n\"Sorry, we don't have name tags around here since most of the guests are family members of the locals. I'm Frank. My uncle owns the hardware store.\"\n\nI nod. \"Cool. It's nice to meet you, Frank.\" I wave as I walk out the door. So his uncle owns the place. I wonder if he's single, or is he happily married too? After all, Mal sent me on a mission to uncover all the hot, single men for her. I shake my head and laugh at myself, which might cause some talk if anyone could see through this wintry mess. Pulling my hat down to cover my ears, I head up the road, passing the grocery store that is about two city blocks away.\n\nOkay\u2014this town is bigger than it appears, but I think I've reached the end of the main road. It's too dark to go roaming, but since I've reached my destination, I might as well stop in. Hank's Hardware has a spray-painted Christmas tree and d\u00e9cor on the front picture window. A feeling of warmth fills me, and then I finally grab the handle and nearly crash into the man from earlier. \"Sorry, sir.\"\n\n\"No problem. Are you okay, Miss Fiore?\"\n\n\"Yeah, my friend wanted me to check out the owner of the hardware store.\" I wink, as if he understands my meaning, which clearly from the look on his face, he's clueless.\n\n\"Check out?\"\n\nI swipe my hand and say, \"Never mind\u2014forget I said anything. It's just silly.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" He shrugs his shoulders and walks away to a running vehicle. Entering the store, I smell the sawdust and metal in the air, reminding me of a construction site. It's strange, because I've only been on a couple in my life. \"How can I help you, miss?\" At the counter stands a seventy-year-old man.\n\n\"Do you have shovels?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he says, pointing to a bunch of them directly beside me. I roll my eyes for sounding like an idiot. I have one in my trunk because you never know when you'll get snowed in during the winter.\n\n\"Um\u2026thanks.\" I grab one, pay for it, and leave. The sun has already set; even if it's early, it feels like the middle of the night. I hate the dark and being alone, but I remember that I'm in Snowfall, so I should be fine.\n\nAs I drop it off at my vehicle, I shoot Mal a text. Hardware store man is like seventy. Sorry.\n\nShit. There goes my dream. *sighs*\n\nBetter luck in the next town.\n\nOne day. Smooches.\n\nGiggling to myself, I tuck my phone back in my pocket and then make my way to the grocery store. Surprisingly, it's not that small. It's not massive either, but it's bigger than the mom-and-pop shop I pictured in my head.\n\nGrabbing a shopping cart, I figure that I'll need stuff for tonight and tomorrow. With the weather and the holiday, I'm not sure I'll be able to have anything to eat. My room has a microwave and a small refrigerator. I hit the fresh fruit section where the sign reads \"locally grown.\" I snag an apple, some grapes, and a pint of strawberries. A clerk stacking the bananas smiles at me, so I return his polite gesture with my own.\n\nI love fruit, but I don't have a place to store it and since I won't be here long, I don't take much. Next, I walk down to the bakery section. It's the holiday, and I'm all alone so I should just grab a single serving, but my eyes linger on the Eli's Cheesecake, and well, I can't help setting it in my cart.\n\nAt least it's freezing out so my car can act as a fridge, or at least that's the lie I plan to use to justify it\u2014although I'm not sure to who. Anyway, I continue my perusal through the store when I see the sugar cookies in the cooler. I hate them, but below is a can of whipped cream. \"What can I get to go with this?\" I ask myself, and then I see it like a golden beacon: the last container of eggnog." + }, + { + "title": "Mark", + "text": "I close my eyes, rubbing my temples. Shift's done, so now I'm off to enjoy a delicious Christmas Eve dinner with my family. My sister and her husband along with their three kids are having their usual gathering. My parents will be there as well. It's going to be a great night, especially when I get my hands on some eggnog. It's my favorite, and we never go without it.\n\n\"Have a Merry Christmas, Sheriff,\" Bethany, my dispatcher, says. She's working until six because she's young. We have little to no crime in our small town, so after that, any calls will be forwarded directly to my work cell phone. We have two deputies and myself, but nothing ever happens here, so we're not too bothered by no one around to man the calls in the actual station.\n\n\"Same to you, Bethany.\" I wave to her before walking out.\n\nI hop in my SUV and ride down to my sister's place. As soon as I pull up to the house, my brother-in-law, Derek, comes out, shrugging his coat onto his shoulders. His eyes widen when he sees me. \"Shit.\"\n\n\"What's up?\" I ask, hoping nothing's wrong.\n\n\"They forgot your eggnog.\"\n\n\"What?\" I bark out like the worn-out, grumpy man that I am. That's definitely not right.\n\n\"Yes. Jenny didn't find it at the store, so she was going to go to the other one in the next town but got distracted, and then the snowstorm came, bringing in a last-minute arrival at the inn.\" I'm not mad at my sister. She's insanely busy, running her inn and raising three small children. I should have picked it up last week when I went grocery shopping, but I forgot and I don't have kids to distract me.\n\n\"It's fine. I'll be back. I'm heading to the general store. Maybe they got some more in since she went.\"\n\n\"Okay, brother. I'm sorry.\" We shake hands. \"I'll tell your sister so she doesn't freak out.\"\n\n\"Sure\u2014don't have her freaking out for nothing. It's cool. I won't be long.\" I rush back to my vehicle and turn out of their driveway. They live fifteen minutes from the store, so hopefully I'll get there and back before the weather doubles down. I have snow tires and chains if necessary, but that doesn't mean I want to spend my evening on the road.\n\nLuckily our town is so small that most people can walk to their homes if needed, and in twenty minutes, all the stores will close early for the holiday. Everything stays open only until six on Christmas Eve, and everything except the gas station is closed tomorrow.\n\nI pull into the lot where there are a few residents making their last-minute purchases and loading their vehicles. Some wave and say a quick greeting before hurrying. It's not the time to dawdle as the holiday is in full swing. I spot the elderly Mr. Cain putting his groceries in the trunk. \"Hello, Mr. Cain. How are you?\"\n\n\"Good, Mark. Did you see there's a pretty little thing that came into Hank's Hardware store? She was alone, and no ring on her finger. I've never seen her before. Maybe you can finally get a wife.\"\n\n\"Thanks, sir, but she's probably just passing through town.\" He's almost eighty and stops by to help his grandson Hank who took over the place when the man got a little too old to do the daily chores.\n\nHank had been living a quiet life away from this town, but no one knew what he did while he was gone. He came back, looking buff and hardened. He doesn't speak much. Never really did, but maybe he'll be interested in the new girl. \"Why didn't you introduce her to Hank?\"\n\n\"I would have, but the boy grumbles and grunts. She's too pretty, too city for a bear.\" Too city? I've heard that one before, and I'll pass. Nothing good about a city girl in these parts because they ain't staying. \"Maybe she'll stay for the festival. She's a real looker with a beautiful smile.\"\n\n\"Understood, sir. Let me get that for you.\" I grab his cart so he doesn't have to walk it back. \"Have a Merry Christmas.\"\n\n\"You, too. Don't forget to look your best tomorrow.\"\n\n\"What are you doing, Pops?\" Hank approaches with his coat open and a grimace on his face. \"I told you that I would do the shopping as soon as I closed up the shop.\"\n\n\"I'm not that old, boy. I can still manage to get by.\" Hank barely contains his frustration. He's worried the old man won't make it long. For whatever he was up to, he loves his grandfather.\n\n\"Well, let me drive you home.\" They live in the family home just outside of our downtown area. Most of the families live just outside of town because our town is small.\n\n\"You need to find a girl. The both of you do.\" He points his finger at both of us.\n\n\"One day,\" we both grunt because I'm a grumpy bear as well.\n\nI shake my head and laugh. \"Have a great holiday. I have to hurry before my sister sends out a search party. See you tomorrow.\" I wave them away and keep moving.\n\n\"That's a good woman. You missed out on her, Hank.\" I turn just in time to see Hank roll his eyes and then help his grandfather into the car. I shake my head again and take the cart inside. I only need one thing, and I'm hoping they have it.\n\nMaking a beeline to the dairy section, I catch sight of the seasonal cooler and a petite redhead, smiling and putting a can of Reddi-Wip into her cart. I get closer and see the last eggnog, but I also get this unfamiliar pain in my chest as my heart slams against my ribcage. Her eyes dart up as if she senses me approaching, and those pretty blues land on me. Fuck\u2026all thoughts of coming in for one thing change. All of a sudden, I've found something I truly need.\n\n\"Hello\u2026\" I say, forgetting how to speak.\n\n\"Hello,\" she replies with a blush on her delicate, pale cheeks. My fingers ache with the need to brush her rosy apples, wondering how truly soft they are.\n\n\"Are you here with someone?\" I ask, wanting to know if I have to find a place to hide a body because a primal urge to eliminate all competition fills my bones.\n\n\"Maybe. Why do you want to know?\" Her brow arches and then she looks me up and down, and not in a flirtatious way but in a cautious way.\n\n\"Because I want to find out if I have to deal with an angry boyfriend. I'm Mark, by the way.\"\n\n\"Mia.\" She doesn't answer my question. Instead, she turns back to the cooler with the last eggnog.\n\n\"Um, that's mine,\" I insist as she wraps her perfectly manicured hand around the container of eggnog. \"I might consider sharing it with you, if you're alone.\"\n\n\"Actually, this one is mine; as you can see, I got it first. Maybe you can ask the manager if there's more,\" she sasses with a smirk.\n\n\"I don't think so, gorgeous.\" I shake my head and smirk. I always get what I want, but never have I wanted someone like her. I don't even need the eggnog anymore. It's little Miss Mia that I need and will have.\n\n\"Well, I do. Excuse me.\" She puts it in her cart and walks away from me. I came for one thing and I'm not leaving without it, even if I have to take matters into my own hands. I follow two steps behind her as she heads to the register. I wait, letting her put all her things on the conveyor belt, but it won't matter because she's not paying for them.\n\n\"Hello, Mark,\" Susie, the cashier, says with a little more flirting in her voice than normal, giving Mia a side-eye. We're nearly the same age, and I never speak to her unless necessary.\n\n\"Hello, Susie.\" As soon as she reads Mia the total, I slip my card into the reader, paying for her groceries.\n\n\"Hey, what are you doing?\" Mia hisses, glaring at me.\n\n\"Paying for the groceries. It's the least I can do,\" I answer with as much sugar in my tone as I can muster.\n\n\"Trying to make me jealous?\" Susie asks, rudely interrupting a conversation she wasn't invited into. \"I wouldn't worry\u2014she'll flee just like Nicki did. City girls can't deal with small-town men.\"\n\nHell, no. I want to say something and put Susie in her place, but my sweet red asks, \"Are you two\u2026\" I can't believe that bitch went there. I could ring her damn neck, but instead, I finish the transaction and shake my head with a seriously hard negative.\n\n\"Mark?\" Mia calls out softly. I give my attention to my future wife. With a wicked grin on her face, she smirks at Susie and then turns back to me. Mia grasps my face and brushing her soft, sexy lips against mine. Growling, I grip her head on both sides and deepen the kiss, unable to control the violent desire to make her mine right on the belt. She pulls back and stares in shock.\n\n\"No, darling. I'm all yours.\" Both women are staring at me looking dumbfounded, but I snatch up the receipt and begin pushing her cart to the door. My girl might have kissed me to piss off Susie and to shut her up, but she wasn't expecting to like it so much, and frankly, neither was I.\n\n\"Hey, what are you doing? Those are mine,\" she cries, coming up behind me and attempting to stop the cart, but my body is too wide and her legs are way shorter than mine.\n\nShe fucked up with that kiss. I could have let her walk away with her number only, but now that's not good enough. \"Technically, they're mine. I paid for them.\"\n\n\"That's total bullshit. Give me my cart or I'll call the police.\" She keeps pace with me, even though I can see she's struggling with my long stride, so I slow down a bit.\n\n\"Go ahead and try, beautiful.\" She digs into her pocket and pulls out her phone. Before she can call, I bend and grab her at the knees, flipping her over my shoulder. \"Put me down, you brute.\" She bangs on my back, so I pretend to loosen my grip which freaks her out, causing her to hold on.\n\n\"Nope. See, we want the same thing, so there's only one option and that's to share it. Since I have to be somewhere, and I'm guessing since I've never seen you in town, you must be the last-minute guest staying at the inn that I heard about. You don't have anywhere to be tonight except with me.\"\n\n\"What? I'm not going anywhere with you. I'm taking my groceries and going to my room,\" she says, pressing a fruitless issue because I'm not letting her little ass get away from me, especially not to spend the holiday alone.\n\n\"So cute.\" I click the button to unlock the doors, and then I use one hand to load the back seat. Carrying my last-minute item, I bring the cart back to the corral before marching her to the passenger side of the SUV. Setting her inside, she attempts to hit me, but I grip her wrists easily.\n\n\"Sweetheart, you're so lucky that I wouldn't do anything to hurt you because you aren't any match for a man wanting to lay his hands on you. I'll need to teach you some safety moves.\"\n\n\"Fuck off. Let me go.\"\n\n\"No. We're going to have a nice family dinner, and you're going to call the sheriff on me.\" I brush her cheek, giving her a wink.\n\n\"Damn right. I am calling.\" She brings out her phone as I close the door, locking it before walking around the front so that she can see me.\n\n\"Snowfall Sheriff's Office, Sheriff Stone speaking.\"\n\nShe gasps on the other end." + }, + { + "title": "Mia", + "text": "You have to be fucking kidding me. I've been kidnapped by the sheriff himself. The bossy, handsome eggnog thief just up and paid for my groceries to claim them as his and then did the same with me. I should be fighting my way out of the vehicle since mine is only down the block, but I don't. Ending the pointless call, I scowl at the bastard.\n\n\"What are you going to do to me?\" I question the second he jumps inside the vehicle with a grin on his handsome face.\n\n\"Depends on what you want me to do to you. I'm thinking that I'll introduce you to my family, and then we'll have a delicious dinner that my sister has prepared while we share this eggnog. Maybe if you're a good girl, I'll have your pussy for dessert.\" I should be repulsed, angry, and yet, I want to climb across the center console and grind on his thick thighs. How is it that he's so sexy? I stare at the six-foot-five, dark-haired, strong man who acts like this is natural.\n\n\"Do you abduct young women all the time?\" I question, since he has no qualms about picking me up like another grocery item in the store.\n\n\"Nope. Never, but I can't let you slip away when I've finally found what I'm looking for.\" My pussy throbs painfully at the sincerity in his voice. \"Sit back and behave. I'm Mark, by the way.\"\n\n\"Yeah. You told me, and your girlfriend repeated.\"\n\n\"She's not my girl. You are.\"\n\n\"I'm not, but does she know you're not with her? She appeared awfully put out with you.\"\n\n\"Our relationship shouldn't bother her, since I've never given her the time of day. Besides, she has a boyfriend, and even if she didn't, I'm not interested. If I was, I sure as fuck wouldn't have picked you up from the store.\"\n\n\"Picked me up? You acted like I was on your grocery list.\"\n\n\"You weren't, until I saw you. You know how it is\u2014you go into a store needing only one thing and come out with more than you planned.\" He smiles and shrugs, driving away from the store like everything is fine. I want to scream that it isn't, but I can't find the words. All I can think about is that I kissed him first.\n\n\"Yeah, but not usually another person.\"\n\n\"Why are you here on Christmas Eve alone?\" he growls out.\n\n\"Not that it's any of your business, but I didn't think it was safe for me to drive in this weather.\" My phone rings, stopping my tirade or any response from him. I pull it out of my coat pocket and notice that it's Franco. A wicked idea comes to mind, and I tilt it enough so he sees that it's a guy on the line.\n\nI answer it, wanting to test the gruff, dirty-mouthed sheriff who doesn't mind breaking the law. \"Hey, Franco. What's going on?\"\n\n\"Where the fuck are you? Fabio told me you weren't coming,\" he growls in his typical fashion. My cousin is so bossy and grumpy. You'd think getting married would have softened him up a bit, but it hasn't, unless it's his wife. She calms and soothes the grumpy beast.\n\n\"Yeah, well, I'm currently in a small town called Snowfall.\"\n\n\"Are you coming home tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'll drive there tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You should be here, sweetie.\"\n\nFranco's loud enough for Mark to hear, and he snatches my phone. \"Sorry, but she's with her fianc\u00e9, so she won't be going anywhere for a long time and definitely not to another man.\" He growls as he hangs up.\n\n\"Do you have a death wish?\" I chuckle, taking my phone from the handsome man. Wow, did I get what I asked for. He's everything masculine that I've been craving, and my pulse is wild with need.\n\n\"You think I'm afraid of some ex-boyfriend?\"\n\n\"Ex-boyfriend?\"\n\n\"Yes, because as far as I'm concerned, it's over between you two.\" I giggle harder. Oh my goodness. Ask and you shall receive. \"You think I'm kidding. You kissed me in the middle of the store. I'm pretty sure he'd consider it cheating.\" Wow, my body loves every ounce of that hostility vibrating off him. He's staking his claim\u2026but I suppose I staked mine first. I'm not sure what came over me in the store except that bitch's look of undisguised lust for my man. Yes, he's mine. Or at least he's acting like it.\n\n\"Well, Franco sure wouldn't\u2026\"\n\n\"The hell he wouldn't. No man in his right mind would let you go around kissing other men.\"\n\n\"Franco would, since he's my cousin and boss.\"\n\nHis face flattens for a minute and then he smiles. \"Oh shit.\" Even he laughs to himself, knowing that he's made an ass of himself with my family.\n\nMy phone rings again, and this time it's my brother. \"Hello, Soren.\"\n\n\"Who the fuck are you with?\" There's a growl coming from Mark at the way my brother is snarling on the other end.\n\n\"The local sheriff.\"\n\n\"And who was the asshole saying you're engaged?\"\n\n\"The sheriff,\" I say with a laugh bubbling out of me.\n\n\"Well, then, you sound like you're having fun. He better not be playing with your feelings, or I'll kill him and bury him beneath my grapes.\"\n\n\"We're not getting married, so just chill.\"\n\n\"Yes, we are,\" Mark snarls with his eyes on the road ahead. A flutter of excitement runs through me, but I do my best to hide how much that notion arouses me.\n\nI roll my eyes at Mark. \"I promise that I'm fine.\"\n\n\"Okay. As long as you're safe, I'll let you get back to your holiday, although Mama and Papa will want to meet him.\" That's definitely going to be fun. I don't even know this man aside from what my body wants to believe. It's singing as if it's found its missing half.\n\n\"Yeah, well, we'll see.\"\n\n\"Yes, we will. Merry Christmas, Mia.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas, Soren.\" I end the call and give Mark a dirty look.\n\n\"You are trouble, Sheriff.\"\n\n\"Just wait until I get you alone.\" He winks and then turns off a long stretch of road and onto a lengthy driveway. The house is a massive country-style home with a wraparound porch.\n\nWe pull up to the front behind another black SUV, and I see the man from the inn shoveling the snow\u2014Jenny's husband, Derek. \"Are you kidding me?\" I laugh even harder.\n\n\"What is it?\" Mark asks as he opens my door to help me out.\n\n\"Oh, it seems you were able to join us,\" Derek says with a grin on his handsome face while Mark steps to my side with a bit more tension than necessary. Seriously, this town is full of good-looking guys. Still, I think Mark's the hottest one, although I don't have much to compare to yet.\n\n\"Yes, it seems your sheriff just doesn't take no for an answer.\" His brows raise, and then he chuckles. \"He kidnapped me from the grocery store because I took the last of the eggnog.\"\n\n\"Uh-oh. You've committed a crime, then, and he has the right to arrest you,\" Derek teases.\n\n\"I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't comply. She assaulted me, and since it's Christmas Eve I couldn't just arrest her, so I was forced to bring her along.\" He rolls his eyes like it was a chore and he was doing it for my benefit. I could kick and kiss him at the same time.\n\n\"Whatever. Don't forget my cheesecake,\" I huff, walking up to the porch, stomping my snowy boots all the way up the steps and onto the mat before entering the large home.\n\n\"Oh my goodness. Who are you?\" An older woman approaches me with a huge smile that is clearly like her daughter's.\n\n\"You made it,\" Jenny cheers, walking into the room with a grin and a glass of wine that she hands to the older woman.\n\n\"Yeah. She begged me to come, so I brought her with me,\" Mark says, stepping inside the house behind me.\n\nI roll my eyes and shake my head again. \"Damn, you're such a liar. This brute kidnapped me because I bought the last eggnog.\"\n\n\"I bought it and you tried to take it from me, so that's stealing and an arrest-able offense.\"\n\nHe's going with that again. I have a feeling I stand no chance with this man when it comes to winning an argument. \"Whatever. Did you bring in my cheesecake?\"\n\n\"Yes, I did, dear.\" He bends down and kisses my cheek before he addresses the older woman. \"Merry Christmas, Mother.\"\n\n\"My boy. It's so good of you to not press charges on the holiday. It wouldn't bode well for a happy marriage.\" She gives him a hug and pats his chest like he's a good boy.\n\n\"Hey, son. Welcome back. Did you get\u2026who is this?\" He looks just like Mark, or I suppose it's the other way around.\n\n\"I picked her up at the grocery store.\"\n\n\"Yeah, quite literally.\" They all look like it's no big deal, so I introduce myself. \"I'm Mia, by the way.\"\n\n\"It's a pleasure to meet you, my dear. I'm James and this is my wife, Audrey.\" They both grin at me and back at Mark who has his hand on the small of my back nearly touching my ass. I almost want to lean into it, but I refrain.\n\nThe tension grows with every second and then his Mark's father clears his throat. \"So, who's ready to eat? I'm starving, and that bird ain't gonna carve itself.\" I think I've entered bizarro-land.\n\n\"Come along, Mia,\" Jenny says. I snatch the cheesecake from Mark with a huff. \"Ooh, that looks good.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not sharing it with that jerk.\" I give him a dirty look and then follow Jenny into the kitchen.\n\n\"If you want, I can have my husband drive you back to the inn.\" I can tell she doesn't want to, but she wants me to know I have an option no matter what her brother says.\n\nI smile and set the cheesecake platter on the counter. \"No. It's okay. It's not like I have anyone to spend the holidays with. And despite being a brute, your brother is really hot.\"\n\nShe giggles and nods. \"Yeah, but he's a big lug head. He came back from the service a hero, but he's been anti-social. I thought he'd fall for one of the girls here\u2014\"\n\nI cut her off. \"Like Susie.\" I can't hide the jealousy in my voice. That bitch rubbed me the wrong way from the start. Women like that want to start trouble and she sure enough tried, but it didn't seem like Mark gave her any drop of attention. It did make me feel a little less crazy when I kissed him.\n\n\"She's been after him since he filled out in high school, but he's a saint in a sinner's world. They chase, and he ignores. I'm six years younger, and I'm the one married with kids already. He and my husband were buddies in the service.\"\n\n\"Wow, that explains their builds. Do they have any brothers?\" I wag my brows, knowing I don't really care because my heart's set on that idiot out there\u2014or at least my body is.\n\n\"No, but you haven't seen Hank Cain yet, have you? He owns the hardware store.\"\n\nI whip my head back and tilt it, looking at her like she's nuts. \"The old man?\"\n\nShe laughs heartily. \"Damn, you should see your face. No. That's his grandfather. He's young and built like our men out there.\"\n\nMark walks into the room and grabs two beers out of the fridge. \"Damn, he's hot too?\" I say in a loud whisper, attempting to torment my kidnapper sheriff. He deserves it after stealing me away from my night alone, and besides\u2014getting him riled up seems to be a kink for me. Who knew?\n\n\"Who the fuck are you talking about?\" he snarls, setting the beers on the counter. Mark crowds my space, hands bracketing me against the counter, eyes locked onto mine.\n\nWith a smile, I answer, \"None of your business, Sheriff.\"\n\n\"Hank,\" Jenny blurts out, giggling behind me.\n\n\"You stay the fuck away from him,\" he barks.\n\nI lean into him so my breasts are nearly touching his chest. \"What are you going to do to stop me?\"\n\n\"I'd hate to kill the guy. I actually like him.\"\n\n\"I'd hate to see what you're like when it's someone you don't like.\" My voice is shaky with lust and if his sister wasn't in the room, I'd probably be grinding all up on him like a horny teen.\n\n\"Just wait to see if anyone tries to come between us.\" He cups my face and slams his mouth down on mine. Roughly releasing me, he leaves the kitchen.\n\n\"Holy shit. I've never seen him like that. Like ever. Wow. Just wow. I think my brother has lost his mind.\" Why does that make my heart do flips? I should be appalled, but I want more kisses and so much more. The heat that passed between us could have set the room ablaze.\n\n\"He's not the only one.\" I fan myself because I feel like I'm burning up.\n\n\"I can see. You're still here for a reason. Tell me a little about yourself, Mia.\"\n\n\"Well, you know I'm from Rochester. I work for my cousin as his executive assistant. I have two really close friends who live in New York City, and they were the people I was heading down to visit.\"\n\n\"Do you have family besides your cousin and close friends?\"\n\n\"Yes. My parents and brother are in Rochester along with my aunt and uncle and cousins with their babies.\" A vision of Mark holding and protecting our babies comes to mind, and I let out a sigh. I'm getting way ahead of myself.\n\n\"Okay. So do you get along with them?\" She adds some seasonings to the bowl of mashed potatoes.\n\n\"Yes. Of course. I love all of them.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I only ask because you'd rather be with your friends than your family.\"\n\nI shrug. \"It's complicated.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm still glad complicated led you here because my brother has been a grumpy asshole for a long time.\" She points toward the closed door.\n\nI turn to the door like he's just going to be standing there, but he's not. \"Doesn't seem like much has changed.\"\n\n\"Ha. I suppose you have a point, but I've never seen him like that.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Mark", + "text": "\"Do you have any idea how much trouble you could be in if she decided to file charges?\" my father says as soon as Mia and Jenny leave the room.\n\nI dismiss it with a wave and say, \"The way she kissed me in the store, I doubt she'd press charges.\"\n\n\"She kissed you?\" my mother says, staring wide-eyed with a smile spreading across her face. I can see the wheels turning in her head, preparing for a house full of more grandbabies. My parents want me to be happy more than anything, and I can't say I was truly happy until today. Even now, I want to be thrilled but the fear of her leaving fills my gut.\n\nJust thinking about what preempted her kiss ticks me off. \"Yeah, that stupid broad Susie had to insult Mia by reminding me that Nicki had abandoned me.\"\n\nMy mother's mouth drops open, and a gasp goes around the room. \"What a little bitch! I could choke her myself, but that means that Mia was trying to show something to that bitch in the store.\"\n\nWe all stare at her in shock, but I'm the first to speak. \"Mom, that's the most I've ever heard you curse.\"\n\nShe cups my face and then pinches my cheek. \"Yes. Well, no one hurts my babies and gets away with it, and she knew damn well that saying that would hurt. You're a good man, Mark, and I'm happy to be your mother and will defend you from anyone who dares to upset your peace.\"\n\n\"Honestly, Susie's a narcissist, but I should send her some flowers or some shit because it caused Mia to claim me.\" I'm trying to ignore the trouble Susie stirred up because she has a point. What the fuck am I going to do when Mia tries to leave me?\n\nThe thought immediately sets my teeth on edge. I can't let Mia go. From the second she crossed my path, I knew she belonged with me, to me. I wasn't just warning her family off when I took the phone from her. I'm deadly serious. I've seen a lot, been through a lot, and for the first time in my life, I've found a sense of peace.\n\n\"I need a beer,\" I grumble, running my fingers through my hair that is still a little damp from the snow.\n\n\"Bring me one too,\" my father says. I walk into the kitchen and hear shit that's going to get Jenny on my bad side. Storming out with a warning to Mia and with a taste of her lips and my beers, I hand one over to my dad.\n\n\"We don't know anything about her, but she seems feisty,\" Derek says.\n\n\"Oh yeah. Well, Jenny's telling her about Hank.\"\n\n\"Fucking Hank.\" Derek snarls, flexing his fists. \"I still want to beat his ass for all the times I've heard how he and Jenny should have been together.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" I know I was one of those people who believed they would make a great couple. Truthfully, it was only to piss off Derek because I knew neither of them were interested in each other. \"Hank's a really fucking good guy, but you're perfect for her, even if you and I haven't always seen eye to eye.\" Derek and I were enemies at one point over the years, having been working for different agencies, but Jenny doesn't know the full story and we'll keep it that way.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Our tension eased up after he fell in love with my sister, and we're brothers now. \"So are you going to string him up by his balls?\"\n\n\"Maybe. It's a strong possibility.\" The thought of the bastard stealing her affections instantly pissed me off.\n\n\"I'm gonna warn Jenny now,\" my mother says. She knows the both of us are extremely serious about harming our friend. Good guy or not, if Mia gives him her smiles, I'll shoot him in the nuts.\n\n\"Smart move, Mom.\" She kisses my cheek.\n\n\"You boys are so cute. Now, set the table for us so we can eat.\" We both move around like we've been ordered by our CO because even though this is Derek's house, he's not crossing my mother and I learned a long time ago to mind my p's and q's.\n\n\"So where are my little niece and nephews at?\" I haven't heard a round of chaos or two since I arrived. My niece and nephews are absolutely adorable, yet they love to have fun. I can't wait to have a horde of little ones with Mia.\n\n\"Napping. The thing about little ones is that you never know when they'll just decide to take a time-out. Of course, it's not when it's the right time.\"\n\n\"Ah the joys of being a kid again.\"\n\n\"That's for sure. Now, since you asked, you can help me bring them down.\" We go upstairs and into the boys' room where my niece, the oldest, is sitting with her feet crossed in her holiday dress.\n\n\"Uncle Mark,\" Lily squeals, scrambling to her feet and running to me. \"I missed you.\" She's four going on twenty.\n\n\"Have you been up for a while, princess?\" Derek asks as she hugs my legs.\n\n\"Yes, Daddy. I was waiting for you to come rescue me from the evil creatures over there. Shh. We must be quiet.\" She presses her finger to her lips, whispering even though she just shouted down the room. Her baby brother is sleeping in the crib across from her, and Jacob is in his play yard, rolling awake.\n\nShe puts her hands on her hips and huffs, \"Great, see what you did, Daddy? We better hurry before they wake.\"\n\n\"Sorry, princess, but your brothers need to join us for dinner. Well, little Dean can stay asleep, but go with Uncle Mark and show Grandma your pretty dress.\" I scoop her up and take her out the door with my finger to my lips.\n\n\"So we have a guest joining us tonight. She's going to be my wife soon,\" I tell her as we hit the top of the stairs.\n\n\"Really? Like Mommy and Daddy.\" Lily speaks fast and learns even faster. They've got their hands full with her. The boys aren't much easier and have his personality already. My sister's a bubbly, sweet, and caring woman, and she married a grumpy asshole. Hopefully the boys take after her, but it's not looking good.\n\n\"And is she having a baby? Mommy's having another baby. Grandma says Daddy loves giving Mommy babies.\" I chuckle because she has no filter. I don't know if it's all kids or just her, but she's a riot.\n\n\"Yeah, he does.\" Although I don't want to think about how they're making them. She's my baby sister and has been with him since she was eighteen.\n\nWe reach the bottom step and walk into the dining room where everyone but Derek is standing and my sweet niece asks, \"Are you going to give her babies?\"\n\nInstead of letting the shock and embarrassment hit me, I answer truthfully while keeping my eyes on Mia. \"A bunch of babies.\"\n\n\"Excuse me.\" Mia walks out of the dining room with her phone rising up to her ear. \"Hello?\" She disappears before I can hear their conversation.\n\nI set my niece down and follow Mia, needing to know how much competition I have. \"Of course. I'll be there. Okay. Miss you too.\"\n\nShe turns and spots me, giving me a half smile. \"Okay. I'll talk to you later. Give everyone my love.\"\n\n\"Everything good?\" I ask, wondering if she's going to tell me the truth.\n\n\"Yes. My brother called again. He wants me to come home soon.\"\n\n\"Where's home?\" It's something I need to know because the closer she lives, the better luck I'll have getting her to stay with me.\n\n\"Rochester.\"\n\n\"Rochester? I thought you were from a much bigger city.\"\n\n\"Why, because of Nicki? Did she break your heart when she left?\" Damn, so she hadn't forgotten what Susie said. How the hell do I straighten this out?\n\n\"It was a long time ago.\" It's not something I want to talk about on Christmas Eve or ever, but I will. Just not now.\n\n\"Dinner's ready,\" Jenny says, popping her head into the room.\n\nI turn my head and say, \"Give us a minute.\"\n\n\"No. I don't want to keep anyone waiting.\" She walks past me, but she doesn't look upset. Still, I know she is, although I'm not sure why, exactly. I'll ask Jenny later. We take our seats, and my sister places Mia to my right.\n\nMy father begins carving the twenty-pound turkey, setting down slices onto a large platter that we pass around.\n\n\"So, Mia, what brings you to our small town?\" my father asks as he sits down.\n\nPassing the potatoes to me, Mia answers, \"The bad weather. My phone doesn't like the reception either. It just kept recalibrating my maps, so I decided it was best to pull in somewhere for the night.\"\n\n\"That means you're leaving after the weather clears?\" Mom asks. Of course it's something I should be aware of, but I'm hoping to change her mind.\n\n\"Yes. I'm supposed to be meeting friends in NYC, but I'll be heading home for a few days to hang with my family before my brother goes home.\"\n\n\"You have a brother?\" Lily asks. \"Does he smell too?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have an older brother, and no\u2014most of the time he smells very nice.\"\n\n\"So your brother doesn't live nearby?\"\n\n\"No, my brother lives in Italy. He's visiting for the holidays before returning home.\"\n\nNow it's Jenny's turn to ask something, and she doesn't miss the chance. \"Wow, what does he do?\" I feel like they're taking turns trying to drag every ounce of information out of her.\n\n\"He owns the family vineyard.\"\n\n\"So you said you work; what do you do?\" I ask her before someone beats me to it. I don't give two fucks about her family because I want to know all about her.\n\n\"I'm the executive assistant to my cousin Franco Fiore.\"\n\n\"Fiore Realty?\" Dad asks.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you get this a lot, but do you have any relation to the restaurant Fiore's in Rochester?\" Jenny questions while plopping down a small serving of mashed potatoes onto Lily's plate.\n\n\"Yes. My other cousin Fabio owns it, and that's how Franco met his wife. She was Fabio's head chef.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful. I bet all of your parents are proud.\"\n\n\"They really are, but they just want our happiness now and plenty of little ones to spoil.\"\n\n\"I've met your cousin Franco once. He was interested in some property in the area, but then with his accident, all discussions stopped.\" I look at their father and think about it. Stone Hill Ridge. That's where I remember the name from.\n\n\"Yes. Now I remember it; you and I spoke briefly on the phone. It was about the Stone Hill Ridge property. I saw the sign when I drove here today. It's not too far from Rochester, right?\"\n\n\"Yes. It's just ten miles from here. It was in our family for a long time before we stopped working the land. My father had wanted more for us, but I'm the only one of my siblings who stayed in the area so he left it to me, but things don't always work out. I passed the property on to Mark. It's his choice what to do with it.\"\n\n\"If you're still interested, I can mention it to my cousin,\" she says to me.\n\n\"I'm not interested in selling it anymore,\" I say because it's large enough to have a family home for us.\n\n\"Okay.\" Mia's phone rings at the table, and she's quick to send it to voicemail after seeing who's calling. \"Sorry. I forgot to shut it off.\"\n\n\"You're a busy woman,\" I remark, feeling the weight of the fact she's successful and has a life away from here. It burns in my gut, knowing she's going to leave.\n\n\"Most of the time, yes, but it's all family and all your fault.\" Her nostrils flare, and she gives me a haughty glare.\n\n\"My fault?\"\n\n\"Yes. You happened to have told them we were engaged. I come from a hard-core Italian family, and no one has met you. They all want to talk to me now.\"\n\nI just shrug because she's got a point. \"Fair enough.\"\n\n\"Who's ready for some food?\" Derek asks, trying to save me a possible fight.\n\n\"Me. I'm starving,\" my father says. We finish filling our plates and dig in. I watch as Mia takes a bite of her turkey that she's slathered in gravy. Fuck, I'm jealous of the fork that slides between her lips and the moan that the food elicits from them.\n\n\"Your food is going to get cold if you spend the whole time watching Mia eat,\" Jenny says like a jerk. I'd flip her off, but my mother's watching.\n\n\"Jenny, leave the man alone. I know Derek was just as bad and I don't think he ate a warm meal for weeks,\" my mother adds.\n\n\"Oh, I ate a few warm meals,\" he growls against her ear. Asshole.\n\n\"We're trying to eat,\" I grumble.\n\n\"Some of us are.\" He winks at me and goes back to eating his meal. Finally I dive in and eat. When it's time for dessert, Derek and Jenny bring out the pies and the eggnog.\n\nIt's not the brand that I bought today. \"Wait, you have eggnog?\"\n\n\"No, I didn't buy any,\" Jenny insists.\n\nMy mother raises her hand with a blush on her face. \"I did. I could have told you that, but by the time I found out that Jenny meant to send Derek, you were already on your way to the store. I thought it would be a lovely surprise if you didn't find any, but it seems you found some and much more.\"\n\nI chuckle because I'd gotten so much more than I intended, and I'm not complaining. \"I'm glad I missed out on that little bit of information earlier.\"\n\nI pour two glasses for Mia and myself. \"Does anyone else want any?\"\n\n\"No, Mark's the only one who likes it.\"\n\n\"Oh. Well, then, there's more to share.\"\n\nWe eat our dessert in silence until Jenny says, \"It's a shame that you have to leave so soon.\"\n\nJacob starts crying. He gets out of his chair and climbs onto Mia's lap. She cradles him as if it's second nature to her. \"What's the matter?\"\n\n\"Do weave us.\"\n\n\"Okay. Not right now.\"\n\n\"Go sit back in your seat, or you can't have any apple pie,\" Derek tells him.\n\n\"Oh okay.\" He jumps off her lap and runs back to his daddy.\n\n\"Sorry about him. He can be a bit needy sometimes,\" Jenny apologizes.\n\n\"He's adorable.\" I love the way Mia smiles at my nephew because it gives me so much hope for a family with her.\n\n\"Now don't go getting any ideas about jumping in her lap,\" my father tells me as I stare at my woman.\n\n\"Hey, she'll be sitting on mine if I get my way.\" I might have to fight to keep her here, but I'm not afraid to be a little underhanded.\n\nMy phone rings next, and I redden because I'd given her shit about hers. \"Sorry, I have to take this.\" I stand and walk into the other room. \"Snowfall Sheriff's Office. Sheriff Stone speaking.\"\n\n\"Sheriff, there's a fire on Cook Creek, and we need all people on the scene. The old Miller home is ablaze as well. It's leading up to Stone Hill.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'm on my way.\" I come back to the table and explain. \"Sorry, everyone. I have to leave. A large fire.\"\n\n\"Do you need my assistance?\" Derek asks.\n\n\"I don't know, but all hands are on deck.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" Jenny tells Derek. He's a great guy willing to lend a hand any way he can.\n\n\"Come on.\" I walk up to Mia and kiss her hard. \"Please don't leave town, or I'll find you.\"\n\n\"Be careful, please.\"\n\n\"Absolutely, babe.\" I peck her lips and run out the door, sliding on my coat as I head down the steps.\n\n\"We're in for a fun night.\" I look at my brother-in-law and nod. \"Don't worry. She's not going anywhere.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure about that.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Mia", + "text": "We clean up the kitchen, and I can't help but look out the window to see if I can spot some lights coming up the road.\n\n\"Relax. I know it's late, but they don't just work on putting out the fire. They tend to the families who have been displaced. It might be hours before we hear from them.\" His mother puts her hands on my shoulders, and I feel the warmth of her well-meaning kindness. Their mother reminds me of mine, and I believe they'd get along quite well if they meet.\n\n\"With the weather like this, I think you should spend the night,\" Jenny adds, looking out the window just as nervously as I am. Her bottom lip is bothered by her teeth, gnawing on it just enough to give her emotions away.\n\n\"The inn isn't too far away.\" I'd love to stay and wait for Mark, but I don't want them to be put out. She's already stressed about her husband and brother dealing with a fire.\n\nJenny spins away from the window and smiles. \"But Mark will come back here looking for you,\" she says.\n\n\"I suppose. We didn't even get to talk about much or have more eggnog.\"\n\nShe takes off her apron because technically we're done with cleaning up and all leftovers have been stuffed into their full fridge. \"Well, then, you better stay because he'll arrest you if you take it with you.\" I giggle because I can see him picking me up again and punishing me. A heat floods my cheeks as I picture Mark storming into the inn, setting me over his knees and pulling down my pants to spank my ass.\n\n\"We'll be going home now,\" her father says.\n\n\"Oh. Do you live near the inn?\" I ask, wondering if maybe they could give me a ride.\n\n\"No. We live a half a mile from here,\" Mrs. Stone says before she kisses both of our cheeks. \"I hope we'll see you tomorrow. In town, there's a Christmas Day Festival. It starts at noon and goes until ten at night.\"\n\nMy eyes widen, knowing this is an excuse for me to stay. It's hard to even consider leaving, but I don't have much time to decide. In fact, my brother wants to see me before he goes back, even though we saw each other for the past week. \"A festival on Christmas? That sounds wonderful. What does it entail?\"\n\n\"Games, a visit from the town's Santa, a bunch of photos, hot chocolate, treats, and more. It really becomes a wonderland as the sun sets. My mother is on the set-up committee,\" Jenny says.\n\n\"Yes, I am. I still have some things to finish for it tonight, but we'll be back by morning to see the kiddies open their gifts.\"\n\n\"I'll walk you out.\" Jenny and her mother walk out, and I go about the kitchen to see if I've missed anything else that needs to be cleaned. We managed to turn the gorgeous room back into a photo-worthy, ready-for-display kitchen online or in the best magazines for home d\u00e9cor.\n\nTheir house is spectacular inside and out. Although I didn't get to examine the exterior much, I noticed that it's more than a country home out in the middle of the woods. It screams money, although I'm not sure what the family does other than the inn which, as they admitted, only gets some people throughout the year who are passing through.\n\n\"Are you going to stay for the festival?\"\n\n\"Wow, I can't wait to see it. I love Christmas, and it's a big part of why I wanted to go to NYC. The displays down there are so beautiful.\"\n\n\"I've never been there.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes. I've lived here my whole life and only passed through JFK when I've gone on family vacations to Florida or when I traveled on my honeymoon to Greece. Come on. I'm going to check on the kids.\"\n\nI follow her and say, \"You should check it out one day. It's truly beautiful, especially when there isn't a crowd. It's hard to find days like that, but there are a few.\"\n\n\"I will one day. Maybe Derek and I can have a date night or holiday.\"\n\n\"I'm a decent babysitter.\"\n\n\"Well, then, I'll have to talk Derek into taking me away. Let's get off to bed and hope for a nice holiday in the morning.\" She winks at me and loops her arm in mine, leading me down the hall.\n\nI pull away and gasp. \"Oh no. If I'm intruding on your Christmas morning, I can go.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" She hooks my arm again, and we walk side by side through the house and upstairs. \"Here's your room for the night.\" She opens the door, and I can tell it's Mark's as well. I'm not bothered by it because it makes sense. Still, I wonder if he'll come lie with me when he gets back.\n\n\"I think he's left some clothes here. You can just borrow some, or I can give you a nightgown if you'd like.\"\n\n\"No, I'll just look for a tee shirt.\"\n\nShe smiles and whispers, \"Goodnight,\" and closes the door behind her. I strip out of my clothes, leaving my tank top and panties on before sliding under the covers. Their house is warm, but there's still a slight chill from the freezing temperatures outside. I do my best to wait up or so I believe, but quickly, I find myself asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "I turn in bed and feel the empty spot beside me, which is cool to the touch. He hasn't come home and it's dark out, so I have no idea what time it is. Still, an overwhelming feeling of sadness hits me, but so does the urge to pee. Jumping out of bed, I rush toward the bathroom quickly do my business and wash up. I should have flipped on the light because I have no idea where the bed and as soon as I step out of the bathroom I bang my hip on the dresser and then I trip on someone on the floor.\n\n\"Mark,\" I cry out. His arms fly out, catching me before I face-plant on the floor.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mia.\" He pulls me in, our faces nearly touching. Our bodies are flush against each other.\n\n\"I was worried you didn't come back,\" I blurt out, trying to catch my breath.\n\n\"I'll always be here. Merry Christmas, angel.\"\n\n\"Merry Christmas, Mark.\" I bend down and kiss his lips gently. His arms wrap around me tightly like steel bands as he growls and then pushes his tongue into my mouth. We roll on the floor, my back pinned as he presses his length against my heat.\n\n\"I missed you,\" he says, running his hand up and down my arm.\n\n\"Then why didn't you lie down with me?\" I ask, staring at his bare chest that's covered slightly in a dark patch of hair at his pecs. I can't see any lower, but it's not like I can take my eyes off his sexy muscled torso.\n\n\"Eyes up here, trouble.\" He grips my chin and tilts my head so our eyes connect.\n\n\"I'm not trouble.\"\n\n\"You're going to be in trouble if you keep rubbing that hot pussy on my cock.\" I freeze and blush because I had no idea I'd been grinding on him. \"Now, as to why I wasn't holding you in my arms the past two hours is because one, I didn't want to scare you, and two, your pretty ass sleeps like a damn spider and I didn't want to wake you when I tried to crawl into bed.\"\n\n\"Oh my goodness. I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be sorry. Just tell me that we have a chance together.\" I nod my head, rocking my hips up again.\n\n\"Keep it up, and I'm going to finish unwrapping my Christmas present.\" I skim my hands down his sides, feeling his boxer briefs. \"For fighting a fire, you smell so good and are almost completely unwrapped.\"\n\n\"I went home and showered before coming back so you didn't have to deal with it.\" He moves to stand, and I immediately regret the distraction because he must not be interested in me anymore. Suddenly, I'm on my feet and in his arms.\n\n\"Whoa,\" I cry out softly before my back hits the mattress.\n\n\"What was going on in that pretty head of yours a minute ago? Did you think I was stopping?\" I nod, shame filling my expression. \"I've no intention of stopping unless you tell me to stop. You're mine, Mia, and I mean that shit. I need to be inside of you, sweet red.\"\n\n\"Take me, Mark. Fill me up,\" I respond, fingers going to his biceps, digging into his taut muscles, wanting his strength and power dominating me.\n\nWe kiss and let our hands wander up and down each other, feeling his hard muscles as he cups my breasts. \"More, more,\" I beg as he plucks on my nipples and then his tongue hits my sensitive skin, sending my back off the bed, bowing for him.\n\n\"I'm going to give you everything, baby.\" I can barely breathe as his mouth moves from one nipple to the other before trailing a warm, wet path down my stomach until he reaches my panties. \"God, I need you so painfully, Mia. I need to taste this sweet slit. You're going to be a good girl and feed me, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I moan, forgetting any nerves because all thoughts are about coming for him. Mark tugs my panties down my legs and brings them to his nose, breathing them in. I close my eyes and blush.\n\n\"Open those eyes, Mia. I want you to see how much I need this.\" He thrusts my legs apart, dropping onto his stomach as he lifts my thighs over his shoulders. His brown hair falls slightly over his forehead as he bends and takes the first swipe. Thoughts, words, nothing comes to me except pleasure. My nerve endings fire off as he repeatedly assaults my lips with the broadside of his tongue and then his soft lips wrap around my clit. I shoot off, coming without any other stimulation. \"Mark, oh my God. I just\u2026fuck\u2026yes.\"\n\n\"Give it to me, Mia. Let me know how good you like your pussy licked.\" His finger pushes inside, stretching my convulsing walls. \"So fucking tight.\" He pumps it in and out, sucking on my clit again, bringing me back for another round. Slowly he adds another finger and then pulls back, sliding down his boxers. \"I need to be inside you now. I can't wait another minute.\"\n\n\"I need you,\" I'm pleading as another orgasm is ready to burst through me. Mark plants one hand flat on the mattress beside me while his other hand guides his thick length past my slit. I know it's going to hurt, but I relax and remember that pleasure will come again. He slides his hand to my hip and then thrusts forward, slamming past the remnants of my innocence. It burns and I feel stuffed like a damn turkey, but I take a deep breath as he freezes above me.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you.\"\n\n\"No, it's not bad. Please start moving.\" I slide my heels up and down the back of his thighs and calves, needing to rebuild that hunger, and it works. My body shakes with urgency that I'm not sure I can handle.\n\nMark rocks his hips, hands on the bed, bracing me. \"You're mine, Mia. There's no going back. We'll figure all this out, but I just can't let you go.\"\n\n\"Mark,\" I cry out as his words catapult me over and I come hard, squeezing his huge cock.\n\n\"Fuck, you're so sexy when you shout my name.\" He grunts and his head rolls back as he gives me one solid motion, coming with my name on his lips. I don't know how we lie with his body over mine, but my eyes grow heavy and so does his." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "The sun's peeking through the curtains, and morning's most definitely here. I don't know how long we slept, but I'm wrapped up tightly in his arms and I don't want to move.\n\nWe didn't use any protection and I'm sure my family will say we're rushing this, but I want to be with Mark without a doubt. My heart and soul felt it, and my panic was real last night. Three years ago, I learned that life was too short to waste and that finding someone who makes you want things you've only dreamed about is difficult. My cousins taught me valuable lessons in their love for their wives.\n\n\"Good morning, Mia.\"\n\n\"Good morning, Mark.\"\n\n\"What's got that brain of yours running overtime? Do you regret what we did?\"\n\nAs I stumble on my words, trying to find the right way to say I'm falling for him, there's a knock at the door.\n\n\"There's coffee and breakfast,\" Derek calls out.\n\n\"What time is it?\" Mark shouts.\n\n\"Ten on the dot,\" Derek answers before his footsteps head away from the door.\n\nI push him slightly and get up off the floor. \"Oh my goodness, it's already ten. The festival will start soon.\" Standing up, I brush my hands through my messy hair, trying to look less wild.\n\n\"You want to go to the festival?\" Mark asks as he stands up, pulling me into his arms. A smile spreads across his face.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You'll love it.\" He kisses my cheek.\n\n\"Do you have to work?\"\n\n\"Yes and no. I'm patrolling the area while officially off duty, but honestly, it's only just in case someone gets out of hand, which hasn't happened in years.\"\n\n\"Will you show me around?\"\n\n\"Of course, angel. My Christmas beauty needs to be spirited around town. Now\u2014how about we join the family, and then I'll drive you to the inn to change.\"\n\n\"Perfect.\" I kiss his cheek and then we get ready for coffee and presents. As he's slipping on some jeans, I shoot a text to the family saying Merry Christmas and letting them know that I'm fine and will be attending a winter festival.\n\nAnabelle's the first to respond. I want to go. Jealous.\n\nI don't know how fun it will be, but it's cool if you guys want to come.\n\nWe will be there, Soren adds. I don't need caps or even to hear his voice to know that it isn't a maybe. I can picture him scowling at his phone, angry and worried about Mark and me. I'm sure as soon as he meets him, they'll get along. I tuck away my phone and finish dressing.\n\nAfter about ten minutes, the family is gathered in the living room around the Christmas tree, and it feels like home. A smile creeps over my face as I take in the scene. Mark's hands slide around my waist as he presses his body firmly against mine.\n\n\"I can't wait to have a family.\" My ovaries are practically shouting, sending endorphins through my body. It's like he was reading my mind. It's perfect\u2026too perfect." + }, + { + "title": "Mark", + "text": "She stiffens in my arms, and I know I've pushed too hard. Derek might be wrong when it comes to Mia. She's not ready for the future I have in mind, and I don't have much time to change her mind. The festival will have to be it. I have eight hours to prove that she belongs here by my side.\n\nWe take a seat on the sofa, and I pull her onto my lap. She doesn't fight to get off, but then my mother comes into the room with coffee for us. \"Here you two go.\" It's this moment that Mia chooses to take the seat next to me.\n\n\"I saved you a seat,\" I grunt in her ear.\n\nShe turns her head and answers, \"I know, but I don't want coffee down my back.\" With a quick peck on my cheek, she returns to the kids who are giggling on the floor by the tree. Jenny has her Nikon camera, snapping photos of the kids, but I think she should be watching.\n\n\"Jen, pass me the camera. You should be in the pictures with your babies.\"\n\n\"You don't mind?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" She hands me the camera and I take tons of pictures. I haven't touched a camera in years, even when it comes to crime scenes. It's my little quirk, but I suddenly feel unbothered by the past. One picture I need is the beauty next to me as she smiles at the kids. God, my balls are ready to fill her womb from the longing that crosses her expression, and it takes me by surprise. She wants the same thing. Does she not want that with me? Or can she not have babies? Fuck, I've steamrolled her with my feelings and didn't consider anything else.\n\n\"Uncle Mark. Uncle Mark. Dis for you.\" Jacob comes up to me with a grin, handing me a small present that has been clearly wrapped by the kids or Derek. \"Thank you.\"\n\nI'm about to set the camera down, but Mia takes it from me and snaps a picture of Jacob by my legs staring up at me, waiting with a joy in his eyes that screams innocence. \"Open, Open.\" He claps his hands.\n\n\"Relax, Jake. He's old. He takes his time like Mr. Cain,\" Lily says, rolling her eyes. Four and full of attitude already.\n\n\"Well, this is too small to be a cane.\"\n\n\"It's okay. I'll lend you mine.\"\n\n\"You don't have one,\" I huff while everyone laughs. Tearing the paper, I see a children's book labeled \"Uncle Mark.\"\n\n\"It's a first edition, just off the press.\"\n\n\"Are you serious?\" I look at the name on the bottom. Written and Illustrated by Jenny Mason.\n\nIt's been published by Snowfall Publishing, which isn't a surprise because everyone in town knows she's gifted, even Mr. Miller who opened the business years ago. I stand up and hug my sister. \"I'm so proud of you.\"\n\n\"I'm proud of you, big brother.\" I look at Mia, and she's snapping pictures. I sit back down and look at the book before turning back to Mia. Taking the camera, I pull her to me and kiss her lips.\n\n\"Can I see it?\"\n\n\"Sure.\" I hand it to her and then take a drink from my coffee because my throat feels tight.\n\n\"So, enough with that mushy shit.\"\n\n\"Mouth, Derek,\" Jenny says.\n\n\"I'll give you my mouth, wife,\" he growls, grabbing her around the face and kissing her.\n\n\"Again,\" Lily huffs with her hands on her waist, rolling her round little eyes.\n\nMia's voice brings my attention to her. \"Adorable.\" I think she's talking about Lily, but her eyes are focused on the book.\n\n\"It is pretty cool, right?\"\n\n\"Yes. Jenny, you have an amazing gift.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I wouldn't have been able to do it without all of these wonderful people pushing me.\"\n\n\"Momma, we don't have a present for Aunt Mia.\"\n\nLily looks so distraught, but Derek is quick to answer his little girl. \"It's okay, sweetie. We're going to pick out something for her at the festival. How does that sound?\"\n\n\"Can we please?\"\n\n\"Yes, sweetie.\"\n\n\"Can I have a hug?\" Mia asks.\n\n\"Yes,\" Lily shouts, running through the paper mess and into Mia's arms. I'll gladly stay Uncle Mark forever if Mia will stay with me.\n\n\"Okay. It's getting late, and I have to get to the square. You know I'm on the committee.\" My mother jumps out of her seat. \"Who's going to drive me?\"\n\n\"I'm going that way to take Mia to the inn.\"\n\n\"Well, let's get moving.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mother.\" We get up and gather our things, saying goodbye to the family who will meet us at the event. I'm exhausted, but I need to make this day count as much as I can. I owe Lily another present for that Aunt Mia comment. She's in my corner one hundred and ten percent. Actually, everyone is.\n\nWe get to the inn after dropping my mom off down the street. \"Hey, wake up,\" I say, nudging young Frankie Jones at the desk.\n\n\"Oh, sorry, Sheriff. I fell asleep, so I stayed to make up the time and I guess I fell asleep again.\" There's an hour until the festival starts, so no one will be checking in and everything is on a secure network with all rooms locked and cameras in the hallways and lobby.\n\n\"Relax, Frank. Merry Christmas. Go on home and get ready for the festival tonight. I'll be closing up the front desk soon. See you tonight.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" He should have left at midnight last night. Poor kid is always trying to prove he's not his father. I take a seat behind the desk and look through the system, finding Mia's registration information and mentally memorizing her address.\n\nThe doorbell rings at the entrance and a tall man in a puffy coat and scarf comes in, taking off his gloves. His eyes go around the room, looking everywhere like he's assessing the place. \"Hello\u2014can I help you, sir?\"\n\n\"Yes. I heard there's a festival today and wanted to see if you had any rooms available.\"\n\n\"We do. What is it that you're looking for, and is it just for yourself?\"\n\n\"Soren!\" Mia calls out from the edge of the stairway. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nHe pulls her into his arms, and I do my best not to be jealous because I know that's her brother. She slips out of his grip and looks cute with her pretty sweater and hat on. \"I came to check this place out and to find that asshole and make sure he's on the up and up.\"\n\n\"Ugh. I'm fine, Soren. Besides, I must remind you that I'm an adult.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I'll remind you that I'm your older brother who worries. So where is this guy at?\"\n\n\"Right here.\"\n\n\"You? I thought you said you were a sheriff.\"\n\n\"I am. My sister owns this place, and I came to handle things for a bit while Mia gets ready for the festival. I'm Mark Stone.\" I stick out my hand and we shake hands, although her brother is attempting to test my strength. He's a tough guy even though he's much more slender than me, but I have years of military training and a hell of a grip. Still, I maintain my composure.\n\n\"What are your intentions with her?\"\n\n\"I intend to take her out and get to know her. After that, I plan on marrying her, but that's still all up to her.\"\n\n\"What's your income? How long have you been in law enforcement?\"\n\n\"Soren,\" a growl comes from the door, and there's an older man who could be his replica and a woman who is Mia's older doppelg\u00e4nger. \"You could not wait, no?\"\n\n\"Hello, I am Maria Fiore. You must be Sheriff Mark.\"\n\n\"It's a pleasure, Mrs. Fiore. And I'm not bothered by your son's questions, although I'm grateful it's not in front of the entire town. Please, let's have a seat.\" I lead them over to the group of comfortable seating.\n\n\"This is a very quaint village. Although most of the streets are blocked off, we were lucky to be coming from this direction.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. With the festival, which is pretty much just the residents of the town, everyone is already prepared for the traffic situation.\"\n\nJenny comes in and asks, \"Ah, there you are. Can you hold him for a minute?\" She hands Dean to Mia. \"I am losing my mind this morning.\" She rushes around the desk. \"I forgot his bag and am so glad I keep one here.\" She looks up and sees that we're not alone. \"Oh.\" Her face pinks.\n\n\"These are my parents, Mr. and Mrs. Fiore, and my brother, Soren.\"\n\n\"Hello, welcome to Snowfall. I hope you're here for the festival and to grill Mark.\" She winks. She slides the bag over her shoulder and asks, \"Do you need rooms for the night?\"\n\n\"No. We will be driving back home in a couple of hours. It's not far from here.\"\n\n\"Well, let me know if you change your mind. I'll be out there celebrating with our family and friends.\" She takes Dean from Mia and says, \"Thanks.\" She kisses Mia's cheek and leaves.\n\n\"Sorry, my sister's overly friendly.\"\n\n\"I like her.\"\n\n\"She's married,\" Derek snarls with Lily in one arm and Jacob in the other, coming from the door.\n\n\"Hello, Derek.\"\n\n\"Aunt Mia, Uncle Mark, I've got to tinkle.\"\n\n\"Okay. Come on, baby.\"\n\n\"I'm not a baby, Daddy. I'm a big girl,\" she says while clinging to her father.\n\n\"She's adorable.\"\n\n\"Well, you have an interesting family, Sheriff Stone. Mia, I'd like a moment alone with you, and then we'll go enjoy the festivities.\"\n\n\"I'll be waiting outside, babe.\" I leave them to talk, but I'm not going far.\n\n\"Hello, son.\" I turn, and my eyes widen.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing here?\"\n\n\"That kind of language on Christmas isn't very becoming of the sheriff.\"\n\n\"You need to leave right now. You're not welcome here.\"\n\n\"Actually, I am. I was invited.\"\n\n\"Not a soul would invite you here.\"\n\n\"That's what you think. Now, I heard you have a girlfriend. That's extremely interesting.\"\n\n\"Nicki, you should leave now.\"\n\n\"'Nicki'? I'm your mother.\"\n\n\"You will never be my mother. Now, if you don't leave, I'll have you arrested for trespassing.\"\n\n\"I don't have to leave town, but I'll leave this filth.\"\n\n\"Takes one to know one.\" I storm away, aching to punch someone in the face. Once I find out who brought her here, I'm going to destroy them.\n\n\"Sheriff Stone. Everything okay?\"\n\n\"Yes. Where's my father?\"\n\n\"At the bookstore, helping them set up.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Mia", + "text": "I see a woman attempting to touch Mark, but he quickly tears his arm away from her grip. I can't see her face at this distance, but she's beautiful and then I hear the words coming from Derek. \"What do you mean Nicki's here?\"\n\nI call feel the color drain from my face and my stomach turn. That's her. The enemy, the heartbreak, the other woman. \"Sweetheart, is something wrong?\"\n\nIt takes me a second to process my mother's words. Shaking my head lightly, I mutter an excuse. \"Nothing more than a headache, Mother. I'm going to head upstairs for some rest.\"\n\nShe rubs my temples lightly, attempting to alleviate the pain like the wonderful mother that she is, but that's not where my true ache lies. \"Well, Fabio is driving the rest of the family here now as well. We might decide to get a room. Your father is going to get a hold of the owners and see what they have available and if it's worth the effort. It also depends on what your cousin plans on doing.\"\n\n\"Okay. Go on. I'll be fine right here.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" She gives me that look that makes me wonder if she knows I'm lying.\n\n\"I'm a big girl, mama,\" I insist and then kiss her cheek which produces a big smile from her.\n\n\"But you will always be my little girl.\" She kisses my forehead and then slips on her gloves. As soon as my mother follows after my father, I sneak out the entrance and stare at the woman from a distance. There's the woman from the grocery store whose face I can't forget. She sees me and gives me the nastiest glare. I smile brighter even though I don't feel like it. Mark's ex is here, and I'm not sure I can stand seeing her.\n\nI walk toward the hardware store, hoping to talk to the old man because other than the Stones, I don't know anyone else. Stepping inside, I see Frank smiling. \"Miss Fiore, it's good to see you this afternoon. Merry Christmas. Uncle Hank, this is the woman staying at the inn.\"\n\n\"Hello, Hank. I'm Mia.\"\n\n\"It's nice to meet you, Mia.\"\n\n\"So Jenny was right about you.\"\n\n\"What did she say?\"\n\nI know this is going to come off flirtatious even though it's not my intent, but Mal's going to want details, and what kind of friend would I be if I didn't get them? \"That you were handsome and large. Are you single?\"\n\n\"Why the fuck do you care?\" a snarl comes from the back where Mark comes out with the old man. My mouth slams shut as I work out what I'm going to say. \"I've asked you a question, Mia. Explain to me why you're asking this asshole if he's single.\"\n\n\"It's none of your business. Why don't you go back to that woman you were with?\" I turn on my heel and walk out of the shop, but I don't get more than a foot before he has his hand on my bicep, flipping me over his shoulder. \"Put me down, you asshole.\"\n\n\"Not going to happen until we get something straight.\" He walks me back into the shop. \"Office is available, but don't go christening shit.\"\n\n\"We won't,\" I hiss. He slams the door and then flips me right side up, setting me on the desk, but then thinks better of it.\n\n\"I don't want your ass on his desk. Now, care to explain yourself?\"\n\n\"Nicki. I heard she's back in town and I saw you two talking.\"\n\n\"Did you hear what I was saying to her?\"\n\n\"No. It doesn't matter. I've already been compared to her more than once, and I won't play second fiddle to a brokenhearted man looking for a replacement.\"\n\n\"First, you're not second fiddle to anyone. Second, I replaced that woman a long time ago in my heart with my stepmother. Nicki isn't an ex-girlfriend. She's my birth giver. I'd call her my mother, but that title is only given to the best of women, and she's nothing of the sort.\"\n\n\"Wait, I thought\u2026\"\n\n\"She's my stepmother. My father met her after Nicki left, and they had Jenny shortly after becoming a couple. I'd been a mistake that Nicki regretted, but my father has reminded me that I could never have been a mistake to him.\"\n\n\"I don't understand it all.\"\n\n\"When Susie compared you to Nicki, it was a way to remind me that you weren't from here and that we'd never have a chance together because you'd leave when life got boring. I know I can't compare to your friends in NYC and your extravagant lifestyle.\"\n\n\"Extravagant? I live in Rochester, which isn't anything like the metropolis that the city is. I don't know what makes you think I'm extravagant. Yes, I dress nice, but no nicer than your sister.\"\n\n\"Derek told me about your luggage.\"\n\n\"Snitch. It was a gift from my boss.\" His brow furrows in anger. \"My boss is my cousin.\"\n\n\"Shit, I forgot.\"\n\n\"Anyway, we used to travel a lot for business. It was a Christmas present because he was tired of my old luggage.\"\n\n\"Oh. Used to travel? You don't anymore?\"\n\n\"Not since his accident. I normally work at his home office or in the downtown office.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Look, let's start over.\"\n\n\"I have one question\u2026about that single shit\u2026\" I press my hand to his lips.\n\n\"As much as I wanted to return the jealousy feeling your way, it has nothing to do with me. My besties and I have an addiction to Hallmark Christmas movies, and Mal asked me if there was a hardware store owner here with a small child needing a woman like her.\"\n\n\"Oh. Yeah.\"\n\n\"I only met the older man.\" I show him the texts, and he laughs hard as hell. \"So why don't you show me why this festival is wonderful and then you take me back to your place, defile me again, tie me up, and make sure I can't run away.\"\n\n\"I can ask Hank where the ropes are, but I do have some cuffs.\"\n\n\"I didn't mean that way. I recall you mentioning a family of your own.\"\n\n\"Woman, you can't say shit like that and expect me to enjoy this festival.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" He takes my hand and presses it firmly against his thick, stiff length. \"Okay.\"\n\n\"Well, you're just going to have to suffer through it, Sheriff Stone, because I want to rub it in Susie's face how happy I am to be here.\"\n\n\"Let's do it, Mia. By the way, where are your parents and brother?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but they're roaming around here somewhere. My cousins are coming with their families, so we're going to have a bunch of strangers invading your small town.\"\n\n\"The more the merrier, as long as you're here.\"\n\n\"It's where I want to be.\"\n\n\"Thank fuck because I'm serious about keeping you tied to the bed.\"\n\n\"What the hell?\" We nearly collide with Soren. \"Keep that shit inside somewhere.\"\n\n\"What brings you into the hardware store?\"\n\n\"Looking for you. Franco's here with the family.\"\n\n\"Oh. Good. Come on.\" We walk out of the hardware store, and Mark gives Hank another glare before leaving. \"You know I'm not interested in him.\"\n\n\"That's good. He'll live a lot longer, then.\"\n\n\"Ha. You and our cousins will get along just fine,\" Soren says.\n\nFranco and Fabio stand on the edge of the sidewalk with their babies in strollers. \"There you are.\" Franco hugs me first and then Fabio. \"So you must be Sheriff Stone.\"\n\n\"Yes, and this asshole is just like the two of you. He's about to kick the hardware store guy's ass over Mia.\"\n\n\"Over him?\" Fabio points toward the old man.\n\n\"No. Over him,\" Mark snarls as Hank comes out.\n\n\"Oh. Yeah, keep that fucker away from our wives and we won't have a problem.\"\n\n\"See what I mean?\" Soren throws his hands up.\n\n\"Good company,\" Franco says, shaking Mark's hand.\n\n\"You'll understand one day, cousin.\"\n\n\"I know that woman,\" Fabio remarks, staring at Nicki.\n\n\"You do?\" Mark answers, body tensing.\n\n\"Yes. I had her banned from my restaurant in the city.\"\n\n\"Good riddance to bad rubbish,\" Franco adds.\n\n\"You can say that again.\"\n\n\"Mark, dear. Why haven't you introduced me to all your handsome friends?\" Nicki says, winking at Derek in particular which is going to get her clobbered by Jenny. She knows exactly what she's doing.\n\n\"Get out of here, you two.\"\n\n\"Is that any way to treat your mother and your fianc\u00e9e?\" Susie says, glaring at me while reaching out for Mark. He quickly dodges her grasp and snarls.\n\n\"That's it, Susie. As the sheriff, I have the law on my side and if you don't get the fuck away from my family, I'm going to have a restraining order put on your ass. I'll run you out of town, but not without having you arrested first.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't.\"\n\n\"Come on, Nicki. Let's go.\"\n\n\"So you're the one who invited her. I will file the restraining order on both of you.\" They quickly turn away. \"Love, do me a favor. Stay away from them at all costs.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. I have a security team here with my family,\" Franco says. He nods to a man across the street from us, and the man slowly follows the two women.\n\n\"Still, I'd have to kill someone if something ever happened to you.\"\n\n\"Same here. Now show me around.\" The snow begins to lightly come down as the sky darkens and the sun sets. The streetlights along with the Christmas lights turn on, creating an evening of beauty. I gasp when the sound of Christmas music fills in the silence.\n\nWe break away from the group, walking around the streets as he introduces me to all his favorite shop owners and his Deputy, Simon Hart, who is a handsome man in his early twenties. I think he's a couple of years younger than me. He's on duty and patrolling the festival in his uniform coat and hat. It makes me want to see Mark in his. I'd never thought twice about a man in uniform before until now.\n\nWe make it over to an empty spot under a streetlamp when The Eagles' \"Please Come Home for Christmas\" plays on the speaker just above the light.\n\n\"Dance with me,\" he demands, holding his hand out.\n\n\"Yes, Sheriff Stone.\"\n\n\"One day, you'll be calling me husband.\"\n\n\"One day, I just might.\"\n\n\"There's no might. I have the handcuffs.\"\n\n\"In that case, I might hold off on marrying you,\" I answer with a wink.\n\n\"Fuck, woman, you're making me rock solid.\" He twirls me in a circle and then pulls me close. \"That's hard to do in freezing temps.\"\n\n\"Can we call it a night?\"\n\n\"Let's say goodbye to your family.\"\n\n\"Yes. Of course. How silly of me.\" We search for my family who are gathered around one of the three hot chocolate stands on the streets. It's almost midnight when we make it back to his home. It's small but nice, although he doesn't give me a tour. Instead, he yanks off my boots and kicks off his. I'm in his arms and he's taking the stairs two at a time. I giggle as he growls.\n\n\"You're my best Christmas gift ever.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Mark", + "text": "I need to be inside her again. The thought of her with anyone else sets me off more than I can even explain. Knowing how upset she was and her motivation when it came to Hank eased some of the tension, but that misunderstanding could have been the end of us if she'd left.\n\nFrom the first second she mentioned Nicki to me, I should have told her the truth. Everyone in this town knows and so it wasn't a state secret or anything, but I didn't want to mar our future with the past. Instead, that shit came to bite me right on the ass and then some.\n\nAs I take the stairs two at a time, I forget about all the other problems and celebrate the fact that I have Mia in my arms and there's no way in hell I'll be letting her go. Once we make it into my bedroom, I make quick work of our clothes. I need to be inside her again, but I have to make sure that I don't break my future wife's little pussy. After pummeling it this morning I should behave myself, but there's something I need to do.\n\nSliding one hand around her waist, I grip her hair and pull her head back to look up at me. \"You're mine, Mia. I want you to understand that,\" I growl against her ear. Mia nods, smiling as she slides her slender fingers up my bare chest. Then she tugs herself free of my grip so she can place kisses along my neck.\n\n\"It's not like you didn't already pick me up from the store.\"\n\n\"You're right. I got you then, and I'm not letting you go. I'll even share my eggnog with you.\"\n\n\"You better, or that's grounds for release.\"\n\n\"The only release you'll get is going to come from between your legs.\"\n\n\"It's the only one I want. Now give it to me, Sheriff. My pussy's been locked up tight long enough.\"\n\nShe's going to make me come before I get inside of her. I spin her around, bend her over the bed, and swat her ass once. \"Don't tell me what to do, woman. You're in trouble.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"Making me jealous, threatening to leave me, and intentionally teasing me with your hot pussy while we danced in the street.\"\n\n\"Damn, okay. I'm just racking up those offenses.\"\n\n\"Damn right you are. Now\u2014knees on the bed. I'm going to eat your pussy, and then I'm going to fuck it nice and hard until you understand that I can't tolerate you committing such crimes against me.\" I press my hand to her back and push her upper body down with her ass in the air. Fuck, my dick jerks, pre-cum coating the head, so I give it a squeeze to calm that bastard down\u2014no can do because her pink coin-slot slit is glistening right at me.\n\nI move in, dropping my head and licking her right down the middle, tasting her sticky sweetness. \"Fuck, so damn good.\" Sliding one finger into her, I glide my tongue up and down, loving the way she squirms and pushes back, searching for relief. And I'm going to give it to her, but first, I want to enjoy my meal.\n\n\"Mark, I'm going to\u2026\"\n\n\"What,\" I say, voice muffled through her soaked flesh.\n\n\"I'm coming,\" she screams, and I feel the sweet gush of her juices all over my face. I bite her ass and then swat the other cheek before standing. Turning her around and pressing her back down on the bed, I climb up onto the mattress. My fingers tease her slit, feeling her juices coat them.\n\n\"I think you're ready for me now. So sloppy wet like I want you.\" I press the head of my cock at her entrance, watching it disappear between her silky folds. Closing my eyes, a groan rips through my chest as I settle deep inside her tight pussy. Gripping her legs, I hold them up against my chest and pump into her.\n\nShe grabs her breasts, squeezing them and drawing my attention to her needs. I part her legs and fall between them, sending my cock deeper within her vise-grip walls and take her mouth in a quick kiss before dragging my lips down to her tits that deserve my care. They're so large and soft, ripe for my touch. I suck on them, enjoying every ounce of pleasure it brings both of us as I continue to slowly work in and out of her womb.\n\nMia's hands dig into my hair, pulling up for a kiss and then I lose control, beating faster and faster into her pussy. She pants and moans as we grind together. \"Fuck\u2014you need to come, babe, because I'm about to come.\"\n\nI reach between us and strum her clit, sending her over the edge. I squirt streams of cum into her depths, marking her womb where it fucking belongs. My mouth crushes hers again. When I pull back, she lets out an adorable yawn. \"It's time for bed, babe.\" I kiss her nose and then gently pull out and adjust us in bed.\n\n\"I'm going to miss you,\" I whisper, cradling her in my arms.\n\n\"Miss me?\" she gasps, suddenly fully awake.\n\n\"Yes, I work tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Oh. Yeah. Duh. And I'm going home to go see my brother for a bit.\"\n\n\"I'll be back in a couple of days to pick you up.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's perfect, Sheriff Stone.\" She kisses my chest and snuggles in close. I don't want to close my eyes because the morning will come sooner." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "I walk into the sheriff's office, passing by my staff who all have anxious looks on their faces. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Sir. Chief Rosen is waiting for you in your office.\" Shit. The fire chief is here? A bad feeling washes over me.\n\n\"Hey, Chip, what can I do you for?\"\n\n\"Hey, Mark. I have a problem. The fire at the Miller's farm was arson.\"\n\n\"Shit. Are you sure?\" He frowns. \"Of course you're sure. Do you have any suspects?\"\n\n\"No. The Millers don't have any enemies, but we had two new people in town that night.\"\n\n\"Mia had nothing to do with it. She wasn't even there to start a fire.\" I won't have anyone diminishing her character for even just a moment. The thought of the presumption of her as evil or a criminal pisses me off.\n\n\"I wasn't really thinking about her\u2026\" My brows shoot up as I think about what he's implying.\n\n\"Are you thinking Nicki?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What are you thinking? Why?\"\n\n\"Well, when they mentioned that the Miller's place was burned down and nearly reached Stone Hill, she paled and said she had to leave, according to Doreen at the bank. You know that woman pays attention to everything.\" Yes, Doreen is one of the nosiest residents in all of Snowfall. If you didn't want her to know your business, you'd keep your distance, bank out of town or online.\n\n\"That she does. So you came to break it to me first that she tried to burn down my property, or that you're going to charge her?\"\n\n\"I wanted your opinion. Would she do it?\" He's asking me that? Like I'd have anything nice to say about that worthless cunt.\n\n\"Yes. Although, I'm not sure I'm able to investigate the matter because of our strained relationship, and any lawyer would play into that right away.\" She abandoned her only child to pursue a modeling career because she realized how great she looked in front of a camera from a couple of pictures I took of her as a small boy. I was four with a good camera. I thought it was my fault for so long.\n\n\"I know. I've turned it over to the state police. I hate to do it, but I wanted to give you the heads up before they come to speak with you.\"\n\n\"No. It's the right thing to do. Thanks for stopping by.\"\n\nA knock on my door frame draws my attention. \"Sheriff Stone. There's a Detective Larson here to see you.\"\n\n\"Okay. Let me know if you need anything.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" I look over to my dispatcher and say, \"Send the detective in.\"\n\nIn walks a woman close to my age in a long coat, gloves off and in her hand. \"Hello, Sheriff Stone? I'm Bobbi Larson.\" She extends her hand, and I shake it. \"This is my partner, Detective Steve Andrews. May we have a moment of your time?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Please, have a seat,\" I answer, shaking his hand as well. When they sit, I take my seat again and ask, \"So I'm assuming this has to do with the fire up at the Millers' place.\"\n\n\"Yes. We don't know how much the fire chief has informed you of, but we need to discuss your relationship with Ms. Blakely.\"\n\n\"She's nothing more than a birth giver. I was shocked to see her yesterday, and I'm ready to file a restraining order on both her and Susie Miller, who invited her to Snowfall.\"\n\n\"Susie Miller?\"\n\n\"Yes. She's one of the nieces in the Miller family and a real piece of work.\"\n\n\"Interesting. Does she have any stake in the insurance on the home that you would be aware of?\"\n\n\"Not likely. The two sets of Millers don't get along at all. Susie's been extremely spiteful and petty the past few days. I'd look into her and her relationship with Nicki because they were arm in arm at the festival.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sheriff Stone. Oh, and one more question before we go.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"About Ms. Mia Fiore?\"\n\n\"What about her?\" I snarl, standing up and ready to fight someone.\n\n\"It was mentioned that she was in town and now gone after the fire.\"\n\n\"Yes. As it so happens, she was passing through, taking shelter from the storm. Why is everyone bringing her up? Who told you about her in the first place?\"\n\n\"Small towns talk and when asked about anything new, some mentioned her.\"\n\n\"Well, she was with my family when the fire started, and she was at the store before that because that's where she and I met.\"\n\n\"Okay. No one suggested anything nefarious, but those are the questions we need to ask. You understand that, right?\"\n\n\"Yes. Well, if you have any questions for me, please contact my office.\" It doesn't matter to me. Her name coming up in an investigation ticks me off. My phone rings with a text message from Mia. Hey, call me when you want. I'm hanging with Soren, but he understands that I miss you.\n\n\"Fuck,\" I groan. Knowing that she misses me does my heart a world of good. I call her right away. \"Hey, babe. How are you?\"\n\n\"I'm great. We just had brunch and now we're going to play some cards. I'm going to my apartment tonight to start packing.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't be doing it alone.\"\n\n\"Soren's going to stay with me and help.\"\n\n\"That's fucking good to hear. When are you going to be coming back home? I'll be able to head to Rochester in two days.\"\n\n\"I'll be in Snowfall by the thirtieth. Is that going to work?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I still want to see you before that. I'm going to come up there tonight after my shift.\"\n\n\"Yay! I can't wait.\"\n\nThere's a knock at my door. \"I've got to go, babe.\" I end the call and stand as my deputy Hart comes in. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"There's an issue at the inn.\" Damn it. I rush out and jump in my patrol vehicle with Hart jumping in my passenger seat.\n\n\"What is happening?\"\n\n\"Jenny called because Derek has your mother pinned down after she attacked Jenny.\"\n\n\"Shit.\"\n\n\"Okay. You make the arrest, and I'll be the second on it.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" We enter the building and find Nicki tied to the floor and Jenny with a handprint on her face.\n\n\"Fuck.\"\n\nDeputy Hart nudges Derek out of the way and takes over, cuffing Nicki. As he lifts her off the floor, he says, \"Nicole Blakely, you're under arrest for assault. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.\"\n\n\"Do you need a doctor, Jenny?\"\n\n\"No, Mark. I'm fine.\"\n\n\"I think she needs to go in.\"\n\n\"After we get everything squared away, we will.\"\n\nHe takes her outside and loads her into the backseat of my patrol vehicle and then comes back in. \"Mrs. Mason, can you please tell me what happened?\"\n\n\"She came in here looking for a room, or so she said, but she started asking about Mia and your relationship to her and her family. I told her she wasn't welcome here. I went in the back to call Derek up front, and she went onto my computer, trying to get Mia's information, but the computer was locked. I don't know why she wants to know all that, but she's crazy. When I pulled her away from the computer, she slapped and then backhanded me. Derek tackled her down, and that was it when I called.\"\n\n\"Do you want to press charges?\" Deputy Hart asks.\n\nDerek snarls with his head bobbing up and down. \"Yes, and if anything happens to my unborn baby, she better pray they don't let me know where she's at.\"\n\n\"Mr. Mason, I'm going to pretend that I didn't hear that.\" He's right, though. We have ways of disposing of bodies from back when we were contractors overseas. Our lives were darker back then, but just because we want the family life now doesn't mean we won't go dark to protect them.\n\n\"Seriously, Jenny, I think you need to see the doctor, for Derek's sake.\"\n\n\"I will, but I need someone to watch the inn.\"\n\n\"Call in Frank and get going. I'll be standing outside until then.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about this, Mark.\"\n\n\"No. I'm the one who's sorry. She doesn't belong in any of our lives, and I have a feeling she's here to cause more trouble. What she's after, I don't know exactly. Is it to ruin my life? Get revenge on our dad's happiness? Or is she just looking to get rich by scheming\u2014who knows? But what I do know is she's not going to get anything she wants.\"\n\n\"Frank's on his way. Come on, my heart. Let's get you out of here.\" He scoops her up in his arms before she can argue and rushes her out the door. I chuckle and step out in front of the inn and wait for Frank to arrive. It doesn't take too long since he lives above the hardware store with his mom.\n\n\"Hey, Sheriff Stone. Everything okay with Mrs. Mason?\"\n\n\"Yes, just needed a quick checkup with the doctor.\"\n\n\"That's good. I'm due to help uncle Hank this afternoon at the store.\"\n\n\"They won't be that long.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\" He's a really good kid with a bright future. I leave and head to the office, walking since Hart took my vehicle. I arrive a few minutes later, cheeks a little frozen but the heat from my anger keeps me warm.\n\n\"You piece of crap. This town is nothing, and you're nothing,\" I hear Nicki shout down the hall by the cells.\n\nI dial the number for Detective Larson, and she picks up after a couple of rings. \"Hello, Sheriff. How can I help you?\" She says it so suspiciously that I'm taken aback by it, but then Nicki shouts again about how much of a pussy I am and how I'm just a loser like my daddy. \"Sheriff?\"\n\n\"Oh, sorry. I called because I have Nicole Blakely at the station this morning. She's been detained after an altercation at the inn. She'll be facing the Warren County judge on Tuesday.\" The courthouse is closed for the holiday. They run a much shorter week between Christmas and New Year's.\n\n\"I guess she just booked herself for a nice long stay. We'll be down there in about an hour to ask her some questions.\"\n\n\"Sounds good.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sheriff.\" I end the call and think about why she was looking for Mia. I have a feeling this all has to do with me and my happiness because she can't handle anyone else's success or joy. Yes, she had no idea about Mia, but it must have galled her to see me happy.\n\n\"Hey, Ms. Blakely. You'll be a guest of ours until Tuesday, so I suggest you make yourself comfortable and stop insulting our officers.\"\n\n\"You. This is all your fault. You should have fallen for that twit, Susie. She couldn't do something as simple as seducing you.\"\n\n\"Seducing me?\"\n\n\"Yes. You wouldn't have gone home with that Fiore slut.\"\n\n\"Another word out of you, and you'll be getting just the basic bread and water.\"\n\nI walk away and into my office and close the door. Why did she want me to be with Susie, and what did they expect to happen if I'd gone out with Susie that night? Seriously\u2014they must have the most convoluted plan in the world. It's ridiculous.\n\nTwenty minutes later, my phone rings and I don't recognize the number, but it's from the Rochester area code. \"Stone here.\"\n\n\"Mark. This is Soren Fiore.\"\n\n\"What's up?\"\n\n\"So, as Mia's brother, I thought it in my best interest to pull a report on you. In the process, my guy found something that you should know about.\"\n\n\"First, I'm not bothered by that shit at all. Do what you have to, but your sister is everything to me. Second, what is it?\"\n\n\"You have a hefty insurance policy out on you.\"\n\n\"Yeah? Who's the beneficiary?\"\n\n\"A Nicole Blakely.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Yes. It was taken out three years ago with a payout of two million in the event of your death before the age of thirty.\"\n\n\"Fuck, I turn thirty in two weeks.\"\n\n\"I noticed. I can have friends locate her.\"\n\n\"That's okay. I have her in custody, but that's not it. She has people in on it. Keep Mia safe. I'll be there as soon as I can. Can you send me that information? It will take me too long to pull it.\"\n\n\"For sure, I will.\" I end the call and summon Hart into my office.\n\n\"We have a situation. That bitch in that cell has an insurance policy out on me.\"\n\n\"Do you think\u2026the fire?\"\n\n\"Yes. It was a setup to get me out there and then whatever happened, they didn't get the result they were hoping for. I don't know, but I need to get out of here and over to Rochester.\"\n\n\"I overheard her threat about Susie. I think I'll bring her in for questioning.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me. Keep me up to date, and stay out of their crosshairs. Contact our state agency for assistance.\" As the sheriff, I should be handling the matters, but I'm just way too close to the entire situation in every way, from the fire to the possible suspects and the assault. I head home and pack a bag, noticing Susie's boyfriend watching me from his car. I call Hart. \"I need assistance outside my home. Dwayne Janke is sitting outside my home watching me from his vehicle.\"\n\n\"I'm on my way. I'll have State pick up Susie Miller.\"\n\n\"Thanks.\"\n\nTwo minutes later, Hart speeds through, pinning Dwayne's car in. \"Step out of the vehicle with your hands up, Janke,\" Hart says over the speaker. When he doesn't move, Hart repeats himself. \"Did you hear me? Hands up and out of the vehicle.\"\n\nHe finally does with his face cold and flat. \"I don't want trouble, but I can't do this no more. I swear I'm not in for killing a cop.\" He puts his hands on his head and surrenders without incident.\n\nThe rest of the afternoon is full of questions asked, charges filed, and lawyers requested. Larson is taking all three into custody and transferring them to their state facility to be brought up on additional charges, including fraud and attempted murder. Fuck. I didn't realize how close I'd come.\n\n\"I have to go.\" I say goodbye to my staff because I have to see Mia now. I need to hold her and remind myself that everything is going to be okay. I was supposed to be killed just in time for Christmas morning\u2014a gift for my father from my birth giver. She wanted him to suffer as much as humanly possible. Dwayne was supposed to be the one to off me, but he couldn't do it. He's a petty crook, but that was too far for him.\n\nTalk about a Christmas miracle that the bitch hadn't hired a real killer.\n\nI drive all the way to Rochester, knowing that I'm not leaving without my ring on Mia's finger. Life's too short to give it time. I knew she was mine the second she looked up and met my eyes. It's the first thing I pick up from the store as I reach the downtown area. I found the best store with the most expensive rings. Shooting a text to Soren, he texts me back ten minutes later with the answer. I get the one that I feel is the best and head toward her parents' home.\n\nAs soon as I pull up to their gated home, the gates open and I'm let up the long driveway. My woman tried to play off that she isn't wealthy, but I don't give a fuck because I can give her all this and more. She doesn't know about the money I have. Being a sheriff is just what I do as a means of returning to normal life after years of overseas activities.\n\n\"There's something we need to discuss,\" I say as soon as I reach the top of the stairs.\n\n\"Is it about the fire?\"\n\n\"Yes, how did\u2026\"\n\n\"I got a visit this afternoon. It's amazing how much information people can gather in small towns. Anyway, I gave the cops my timeline, including the receipt for the hardware store and then my trip to the grocery store, followed by my night at your sister's house. They told me that they were just making sure to rule out all possibilities. I'm not bothered by it. It's not the first time I've been questioned. When my cousin was in the crash, I was grilled vigorously, multiple times, but don't tell him because I never did. He would be pissed to know they did it.\"\n\n\"They thought you had a part in it?\" That's hard to fathom, having met her and Franco. They have a very close bond.\n\n\"No, but you know I was close to him, so all of us close or with something to gain had been questioned. Since I refused to go on the flight, it seemed suspicious to them. I'm just not a fan of helicopters.\"\n\n\"Fuck, I'm grateful that you never went.\"\n\n\"Me too, but I still feel guilty. I should have talked them both out of going in the first place.\"\n\n\"It's in the past. At least Franco's happy with his life now, and you're mine.\" I drop my mouth down on hers, kissing my wife-to-be, and then I pull back and head into the house. \"There's more to discuss, but first, I have to say this. From the moment I met you, I knew that I wanted to be with you for the rest of my days. It's crazy soon and wild, but I love you, Mia.\"\n\n\"I love you too, Mark. I knew it the second you flipped me over your shoulder.\"\n\n\"Then why did you fight me?\"\n\n\"Fight? Hardly. Besides, as I recall, you kidnapped me.\"\n\n\"I recall it as picking up a last-minute item at the store, so let's just agree to disagree.\"\n\n\"Fine. I know it's a lost cause anyway.\" She rolls her eyes.\n\nI steal another kiss before dropping down on one knee. \"I love you, Mia Fiore. You're smart, beautiful, kind, and you make me whole. Will you marry me?\"\n\nShe nods vigorously and sobs, \"Yes.\" I slide the ring on her finger and stand, bringing her in for another kiss as the family gathers around, and that's when I notice it's the entire family, including Franco and Fabio's side.\n\n\"Told you it was worth getting over here quickly.\"\n\n\"Damn right. Way to go, Soren.\"\n\n\"Hey, I'm the one engaged.\"\n\n\"Heck, yes. Show me that ring,\" Fabio's wife squeals, running up to Mia. I can only tell them apart because he's got a firm grip on her at all times, just like Franco with his wife. I'm too happy to ruin it with the rest of the drama, so I'll save it for later.\n\n\"Who's ready to celebrate?\" Mrs. Fiore waves two bottles of champagne.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Don't worry\u2014this one is non-alcoholic,\" she says, eyeing all the women. Our families are really going to get along well at parties." + }, + { + "title": "Epilogue - Six Months Later", + "text": "[ Mark ]\n\n\"Thank you, Sheriff.\" I've spent the last hour helping him drop off supplies after I left the station.\n\n\"No problem, Mr. Miller. I'm so glad we could help with the rebuild.\" The older man sighs, knowing what we all know. His family had come extremely close to losing everything, including their lives, and thankfully, that wasn't the case.\n\nThose who were involved in the arson were arrested and pled guilty after a mountain of evidence led the way. All I'm grateful for is that Nicki was one of the ones given a solid jumpsuit especially after she had plans to end my life as well to make it look like an accident and claim millions in life insurance. How she had it cooked up for so fucking long is a damn shocker to me. That woman is pure evil and right where she belongs.\n\n\"It's been a long six months.\" A lot of good with the bad. I married Mia as soon as I could get her to agree, so by January thirty-first, she'd become my wife and the next day we found out we were having a baby. It's been a wonderful blessing.\n\nThe demons of my past are being laid to rest while my future has just begun with Mia and our growing family.\n\n\"I'm sure it has. Just let us know if you need anything. We're right up the road,\" I say with a genuine grin on my face. Meeting Mia gave me a purpose I hadn't had before and a reason to move into our old family home with so much land to build on, so it's now where we live as a family.\n\n\"It's good to see that home finally filled.\" And it's going to be filled to the brim with little ones. I want an army of babies with Mia and she feels the same way. I'm not sure how we'll feel once we start having a few, but we'll see as we go along. There is a lot of space and we're currently making adding a lot more.\n\n\"Yes. It's so damn good. I can't wait to have our little ones making tons of racket and coming to play with your grandbabies.\" He has about half a dozen little ones running around when his kids stop by which is pretty often.\n\n\"I'm looking forward to it, too.\" We shake hands, and then I head back to my house down the road to see the woman who makes every single day better than the next.\n\nAs soon as I pull through the gate, I spot my wife on the porch. Smiling like a fool to myself, I put it into park. \"It feels good to be home.\" I hop out and as soon as my feet hit the dirt path Mia rushes down the steps.\n\n\"Whoa, slow down, babe. You could fall,\" I call out, catching her and lifting her into my arms. This woman means the world to me and so does our little one growing inside of her. God, having my own family is exciting\u2026just so refreshing.\n\n\"I'm fine. I just missed you,\" she pants, bringing her head down to mine, kissing my lips.\n\n\"I missed you, too.\" I live for this woman.\n\n\"Are you getting bored so soon?\" I hope not. She didn't have to stop working, but it was her choice which I fully supported.\n\n\"Hardly. I've been working with Franco's assistant over the phone and via email all morning. He's trying to get everything just right because my cousin can be a bit hard to deal with.\"\n\n\"I think Franco just wants you to stay with him.\"\n\n\"True. I'm one of the only people willing to put up with his bad attitude, although it's definitely improved over the years. So how was your last day?\"\n\n\"It was good. It's nice to see Simon taking over for me. He's going to make a great sheriff, although there's hardly any crime unless you consider that riffraff you brought from New York City with you.\"\n\n\"Ah\u2026did you just call Mal and Al 'riffraff'? They are sweethearts. Besides, who uses riffraff these days?\"\n\n\"A small-town sheriff says riffraff, woman.\"\n\n\"Seriously though. My friends are absolute sweethearts,\" she insists as I nuzzle on her neck.\n\nI pull back my head and look at her like she's crazy. \"Sweethearts? Yeah\u2026okay. I think they caused a big uproar when they arrived for our wedding.\"\n\nShe blushes because yes, they caused quite a stir. Both women are lovely, but they're true city girls and I swear they're a handful. It's not my problem, but it made for an entertaining show at our wedding. Which will make one hell of a story that I'm sure will be told at every holiday gathering from here on out.\n\nI kiss her once more and set her on her feet, walking her into our home. \"Let's get you some food, and I'll rub your swollen feet.\"\n\n\"Wow, you are a wonderful husband. Later, you can eat my pussy too,\" she says with a moan.\n\n\"Why wait?\"\n\n\"Because I'm still here,\" my father says, coming into view wiping his hands with a rag. He may be getting up in age, but he loves getting his hands dirty every once in a while and especially when it comes to building things.\n\n\"Oh, hey, Pops. Sorry,\" I say, giving him a wink.\n\nHe laughs and shakes his head. \"I've finished the framing with Hank.\"\n\n\"Hank's here and you're wearing that?\" I snarl, looking at her sexy body. She's got on a sundress that covers her rounded belly and goes to the middle of her thighs, but her ample chest isn't as covered. It's adorable and hot at the same time, nothing provocative, but anything on her is appealing because she's always so damn hot to me in no matter what she's wearing. Mia married an extremely territorial and possessive man.\n\n\"Oh, hush. I'm fully covered, and he's happily married.\"\n\n\"And you're not happily married?\"\n\n\"Well, I'll be happier once I get my feet rubbed and my\u2026\" I press my hand to her mouth.\n\n\"We're leaving anyway.\" My dad calls for Hank. \"Let's get out of here. The horny old man's back.\"\n\n\"Good. I need to go home anyway.\" He winks and carries out his toolbox.\n\n\"Will you be helping us tomorrow?\" my dad asks.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" I shake their hands and that's when I notice Hank's truck in front of my father's. Another streak of jealousy fills my bones like the sick fuck that I am, so as soon as they pull out of our driveway, I scoop up my beautiful wife. \"You in for becoming the happiest wife ever, Mrs. Stone?\"\n\n\"Woohoo. Bragging rights!\" I swat her ass and make sure she has bragging rights for the rest of the night, although I'm sure she'll come back tomorrow saying she's been bumped off the leaderboard and needs a repeat. Which I never mind staying on top or bottom\u2026" + }, + { + "title": "Two Years Later", + "text": "[ Mia ]\n\n\"Are you ready, angel?\" I spin around and face my husband with my brow cocked and makeup on point. We have a date tonight, and I love when he stares at me with hungry eyes.\n\n\"Angel? You were calling me the devil this morning.\" I fight a smile, knowing I'm a devil when it comes to my husband.\n\nHe slides his hands around my waist, dragging me into his arms so I can feel his length. \"That's when you tried to close your legs on me after teasing me all night, rubbing your round ass on my cock.\"\n\n\"That's not my fault. You're so warm, and I was cold last night,\" I lie, and he knows it.\n\n\"You wanted your pussy fed last night, and you should have said something.\"\n\n\"You already gave me some an hour earlier?\" I'm always so horny, and more so when I'm pregnant. Baby number two has only started to show, but the emotions coursing through me are in full swing.\n\n\"Your parents are waiting for us to drop off the baby, so get your pretty butt ready to go. I want to get you fed and in the hotel to spread you out wide and celebrate New Year's Day between my wife's legs.\"\n\n\"Fuck, I'm so tempted to stay inside.\"\n\n\"Same here, baby, but you deserve a night out. We both are busy building the cybersecurity firm and raising our baby boy, so I don't get time to properly show you off as mine to the world.\"\n\n\"Okay. Let's go.\"\n\nWe bundle up Callahan in his cute sweater and tuck him into his car seat under the blankets before driving to her parents'. Since we're going out in Rochester, her parents decided to offer up sitting for us or my parents would have gladly taken our little guy for the night.\n\n\"You're everything to me, Mia.\"\n\n\"I live for you, Mark.\"\n\nWe skip dinner altogether and ring in the new year with an earth-shattering orgasm. Life can't get any better, but I'm sure as hell open to welcoming more happiness. I'm so grateful for one hell of a Christmas snowfall and an insanely hot sheriff." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Comedic Fantasy.json b/Comedic Fantasy.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..faef31ca94664e3cd42c425d9119822899143941 --- /dev/null +++ b/Comedic Fantasy.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:f8b537c0cdf99edb584ec212944c987bd606973b12d02dbf03aa6c2cd89bcdd7 +size 50046020 diff --git a/Contemporary.json b/Contemporary.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..b2b98bcb7bb871b9807527ab60ae24e2657d75dc --- /dev/null +++ b/Contemporary.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:a376877f543aacef3d0e20790f3497baa7ca8d577b3ee808211983ca1dcccb7f +size 38989548 diff --git a/CrossGenre.json b/CrossGenre.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..5777ea4779344f9741920d4b2968eb1703a205ed --- /dev/null +++ b/CrossGenre.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:91b9a41379d6b269592ef6b80cebbbb10406fc41678b1fc493a036938a4ddf30 +size 101035387 diff --git a/Cyberpunk.json b/Cyberpunk.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..9d91a17b105ecd47f700b06b17fabca7029caa3a --- /dev/null +++ b/Cyberpunk.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:6a257807f4f5ece22e65f1d50fd667a64a8257d3134d6081b0a01406ae3277a8 +size 19896265 diff --git a/Dark Fantasy.json b/Dark Fantasy.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..43b95288563d9aee7e2c2ea953c01d1b4812b5e3 --- /dev/null +++ b/Dark Fantasy.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:4d85764cd5a2a7e6a09ed9d527beff69505e8941737d2be624e023eb4f5471c4 +size 36130601 diff --git a/Dragons.json b/Dragons.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..535b7a32112fe9d641e9af2f8d7c8077b6b4642b --- /dev/null +++ b/Dragons.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:bda99d150742726bb5bd84e228825dba6cf6c7c90f4b4c715f6a12df7ad08ef8 +size 38148272 diff --git a/Edgar Allan Poe.json b/Edgar Allan Poe.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..d02a722f350b72478e0046b502c07ccb5f206b90 --- /dev/null +++ b/Edgar Allan Poe.json @@ -0,0 +1,197 @@ +[ + { + "title": "Complete Tales", + "author": "Edgar Allan Poe", + "genres": [ + "poems", + "prose" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "\u2002Intensos rigidam in frontem ascendere canos\n\n\u2002Passus erat\n\n\u2014Lucan\n\n\"Let us hurry to the walls,\" said Abel-Phittim to Buzi-Ben-Levi and Simeon the Pharisee, on the tenth day of the month Thammuz, in the year of the world three thousand nine hundred and forty-one \u2014\"let us hasten to the ramparts adjoining the gate of Benjamin, which is in the city of David, and overlooking the camp of the uncircumcised; for it is the last hour of the fourth watch, being sunrise; and the idolaters, in fulfilment of the promise of Pompey, should be awaiting us with the lambs for the sacrifices.\"\n\nSimeon, Abel-Phittim, and Buzi-Ben-Levi, were the Gizbarim, or sub-collectors of the offering, in the holy city of Jerusalem.\n\n\"Verily,\" replied the Pharisee, \"let us hasten: for this generosity in the heathen is unwonted; and fickle-mindedness has ever been an attribute of the worshippers of Baal.\"\n\n\"That they are fickle-minded and treacherous is as true as the Pentateuch,\" said Buzi-Ben-Levi, \"but that is only towards the people of Adonai. When was it ever known that the Ammonites proved wanting to their own interests? Methinks it is no great stretch of generosity to allow us lambs for the altar of the Lord, receiving in lieu thereof thirty silver shekels per head!\"\n\n\"Thou forgettest, however, Ben-Levi,\" replied Abel-Phittim, \"that the Roman Pompey, who is now impiously besieging the city of the Most High, has no assurity that we apply not the lambs thus purchased for the altar, to the sustenance of the body, rather than of the spirit.\"\n\n\"Now, by the five corners of my beard!\" shouted the Pharisee, who belonged to the sect called The Dashers (that little knot of saints whose manner of dashing and lacerating the feet against the pavement was long a thorn and a reproach to less zealous devotees \u2014 a stumbling-block to less gifted perambulators)\u2014\"by the five corners of that beard which, as a priest, I am forbidden to shave! \u2014 have we lived to see the day when a blaspheming and idolatrous upstart of Rome shall accuse us of appropriating to the appetites of the flesh the most holy and consecrated elements? Have we lived to see the day when\u2014\"\n\n\"Let us not question the motives of the Philistine,\" interrupted Abel-Phittim, \"for to-day we profit for the first time by his avarice or by his generosity, but rather let us hurry to the ramparts, lest offerings should be wanting for that altar whose fire the rains of heaven cannot extinguish, and whose pillars of smoke no tempest can turn aside.\"\n\nThat part of the city to which our worthy Gizbarin now hastened, and which bore the name of its architect, King David, was esteemed the most strongly fortified district of Jerusalem; being situated upon the steep and lofty hill of Zion. Here, a broad, deep, circumvallatory trench, hewn from the solid rock, was defended by a wall of great strength erected upon its inner edge. This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart, sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek \u2014 the loftiest of all the turrets around about Jerusalem, and the usual place of conference with the besieging army \u2014 they looked down upon the camp of the enemy from an eminence excelling by many feet that of the Pyramid of Cheops, and, by several, that of the temple of Belus.\n\n\"Verily,\" sighed the Pharisee, as he peered dizzly over the precipice, \"the uncircumcised are as the sands by the seashore \u2014 as the locusts in the wilderness! The valley of The King hath become the valley of Adommin.\"\n\n\"And yet,\" added Ben-Levi, \"thou canst not point me out a Philistine \u2014 no, not one \u2014 from Aleph to Tau \u2014 from the wilderness to the battlements \u2014 who seemeth any bigger than the letter Jod!\"\n\n\"Lower away the basket with the shekels of silver!\" here shouted a Roman soldier in a hoarse, rough voice, which appeared to issue from the regions of Pluto \u2014\"lower away the basket with the accursed coin which it has broken the jaw of a noble Roman to pronounce! Is it thus you evince your gratitude to our master Pompeius, who, in his condescension, has thought fit to listen to your idolatrous importunities? The god Phoebus, who is a true god, has been charioted for an hour \u2014 and were you not to be on the ramparts by sunrise? Aedepol! do you think that we, the conquerors of the world, have nothing better to do than stand waiting by the walls of every kennel, to traffic with the dogs of the earth? Lower away! I say \u2014 and see that your trumpery be bright in color and just in weight!\"\n\n\"El Elohim!\" ejaculated the Pharisee, as the discordant tones of the centurion rattled up the crags of the precipice, and fainted away against the temple \u2014\"El Elohim! \u2014 who is the God Phoebus? \u2014 whom doth the blasphemer invoke? Thou, Buzi-Ben-Levi! who art read in the laws of the Gentiles, and hast sojourned among them who dabble with the Teraphim! \u2014 is it Nergal of whom the idolater speaketh? \u2014 or Ashimah? \u2014 or \u2014 Nibhaz? \u2014 or Tartak? \u2014 or Adramalech? \u2014 or Anamalech? \u2014 or Succoth-Benith? \u2014 or Dragon? \u2014 or Belial? \u2014 or Baal-Perith? \u2014 or Baal-Peor? \u2014 or Baal-Zebub?\"\n\n\"Verily it is neither \u2014 but beware how thou lettest the rope slip too rapidly through thy fingers; for should the wicker-work chance to hang on the projection of yonder crag, there will be a woful outpouring of the holy things of the sanctuary.\"\n\nBy the assistance of some rudely constructed machinery, the heavily laden basket was now carefully lowered down among the multitude; and, from the giddy pinnacle, the Romans were seen gathering confusedly round it; but owing to the vast height and the prevalence of a fog, no distinct view of their operations could be obtained.\n\nHalf an hour had already elapsed.\n\n\"We shall be too late!\" sighed the Pharisee, as at the expiration of this period, he looked over into the abyss \u2014\"we shall be too late! we shall be turned out of office by the Katholim.\"\n\n\"No more,\" responded Abel-Phittim \u2014 \"no more shall we feast upon the fat of the land \u2014 no longer shall our beards be odorous with frankincense \u2014 our loins girded up with fine linen from the Temple.\"\n\n\"Raca!\" swore Ben-Levi, \"Raca! do they mean to defraud us of the purchase money? or, Holy Moses! are they weighing the shekels of the tabernacle?\n\n\"They have given the signal at last!\" cried the Pharisee \u2014\"they have given the signal at last! \u2014 pull away, Abel-Phittim! \u2014 and thou, Buzi-Ben-Levi, pull away! \u2014 for verily the Philistines have either still hold upon the basket, or the Lord hath softened their hearts to place therein a beast of good weight!\" And the Gizbarim pulled away, while their burthen swung heavily upwards through the still increasing mist.\n\n\"Booshoh he!\"\u2014 as, at the conclusion of an hour, some object at the extremity of the rope became indistinctly visible \u2014\"Booshoh he!\" was the exclamation which burst from the lips of Ben-Levi.\n\n\"Booshoh he! \u2014 for shame! \u2014 it is a ram from the thickets of Engedi, and as rugged as the valley of Jehosaphat!\"\n\n\"It is a firstling of the flock,\" said Abel-Phittim, \"I know him by the bleating of his lips, and the innocent folding of his limbs. His eyes are more beautiful than the jewels of the Pectoral, and his flesh is like the honey of Hebron.\"\n\n\"It is a fatted calf from the pastures of Bashan,\" said the Pharisee, \"the heathen have dealt wonderfully with us! \u2014 let us raise up our voices in a psalm! \u2014 let us give thanks on the shawm and on the psaltery \u2014 on the harp and on the huggab \u2014 on the cythern and on the sackbutt\"\n\nIt was not until the basket had arrived within a few feet of the Gizbarium, that a low grunt betrayed to their perception a hog of no common size.\n\n\"Now El Emanu!\" slowly, and with upturned eyes ejaculated the trio, as, letting go their hold, the emancipated porker tumbled headlong among the Philistines, \"El Emanu! \u2014 God be with us \u2014 it is the unutterable flesh!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Bon-Bon (The Bargain Lost) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Quand un bon vin meuble mon estomac\n\n\u2003Je suis plus savant que Balzac \u2014\n\n\u2003Plus sage que Pibrac;\n\n\u2003Mon brass seul faisant l'attaque\n\n\u2003De la nation Coseaque,\n\n\u2003La mettroit au sac;\n\n\u2003De Charon je passerois le lac\n\n\u2003En dormant dans son bac,\n\n\u2003J'irois au fier Eac,\n\n\u2003Sans que mon coeur fit tic ni tac,\n\n\u2003Premmer du tabac.\n\n\u2014French Vaudeville\n\nThat Pierre Bon-Bon was a restaurateur of uncommon qualifications, the cul-de-sac Le Febvre at Rouen, will, I imagine, feel himself at liberty to dispute. That Pierre Bon-Bon was, in an equal degree, skilled in the philosophy of that period is, I presume still more especially undeniable. His pates a la fois were beyond doubt immaculate; but what pen can do justice to his essays sur la Nature \u2014 his thoughts sur l'Ame \u2014 his observations sur l'Esprit? If his omelettes \u2014 if his fricandeaux were inestimable, what litterateur of that day would not have given twice as much for an \"Idee de Bon-Bon\" as for all the trash of \"Idees\" of all the rest of the savants? Bon-Bon had ransacked libraries which no other man had ransacked \u2014 had more than any other would have entertained a notion of reading \u2014 had understood more than any other would have conceived the possibility of understanding; and although, while he flourished, there were not wanting some authors at Rouen to assert \"that his dicta evinced neither the purity of the Academy, nor the depth of the Lyceum\"\u2014 although, mark me, his doctrines were by no means very generally comprehended, still it did not follow that they were difficult of comprehension. It was, I think, on account of their self-evidency that many persons were led to consider them abstruse. It is to Bon-Bon \u2014 but let this go no farther \u2014 it is to Bon-Bon that Kant himself is mainly indebted for his metaphysics. The former was indeed not a Platonist, nor strictly speaking an Aristotelian \u2014 nor did he, like the modern Leibnitz, waste those precious hours which might be employed in the invention of a fricasee or, facili gradu, the analysis of a sensation, in frivolous attempts at reconciling the obstinate oils and waters of ethical discussion. Not at all. Bon-Bon was Ionic \u2014 Bon-Bon was equally Italic. He reasoned a priori \u2014 He reasoned also a posteriori. His ideas were innate \u2014 or otherwise. He believed in George of Trebizonde \u2014 He believed in Bossarion. Bon-Bon was emphatically a \u2014 Bon-Bonist.\n\nI have spoken of the philosopher in his capacity of restaurateur. I would not, however, have any friend of mine imagine that, in fulfilling his hereditary duties in that line, our hero wanted a proper estimation of their dignity and importance. Far from it. It was impossible to say in which branch of his profession he took the greater pride. In his opinion the powers of the intellect held intimate connection with the capabilities of the stomach. I am not sure, indeed, that he greatly disagreed with the Chinese, who held that the soul lies in the abdomen. The Greeks at all events were right, he thought, who employed the same words for the mind and the diaphragm. By this I do not mean to insinuate a charge of gluttony, or indeed any other serious charge to the prejudice of the metaphysician. If Pierre Bon-Bon had his failings \u2014 and what great man has not a thousand? \u2014 if Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, had his failings, they were failings of very little importance \u2014 faults indeed which, in other tempers, have often been looked upon rather in the light of virtues. As regards one of these foibles, I should not even have mentioned it in this history but for the remarkable prominency \u2014 the extreme alto relievo \u2014 in which it jutted out from the plane of his general disposition. He could never let slip an opportunity of making a bargain.\n\nNot that he was avaricious \u2014 no. It was by no means necessary to the satisfaction of the philosopher, that the bargain should be to his own proper advantage. Provided a trade could be effected \u2014 a trade of any kind, upon any terms, or under any circumstances \u2014 a triumphant smile was seen for many days thereafter to enlighten his countenance, and a knowing wink of the eye to give evidence of his sagacity.\n\nAt any epoch it would not be very wonderful if a humor so peculiar as the one I have just mentioned, should elicit attention and remark. At the epoch of our narrative, had this peculiarity not attracted observation, there would have been room for wonder indeed. It was soon reported that, upon all occasions of the kind, the smile of Bon-Bon was wont to differ widely from the downright grin with which he would laugh at his own jokes, or welcome an acquaintance. Hints were thrown out of an exciting nature; stories were told of perilous bargains made in a hurry and repented of at leisure; and instances were adduced of unaccountable capacities, vague longings, and unnatural inclinations implanted by the author of all evil for wise purposes of his own.\n\nThe philosopher had other weaknesses \u2014 but they are scarcely worthy our serious examination. For example, there are few men of extraordinary profundity who are found wanting in an inclination for the bottle. Whether this inclination be an exciting cause, or rather a valid proof of such profundity, it is a nice thing to say. Bon-Bon, as far as I can learn, did not think the subject adapted to minute investigation; \u2014 nor do I. Yet in the indulgence of a propensity so truly classical, it is not to be supposed that the restaurateur would lose sight of that intuitive discrimination which was wont to characterize, at one and the same time, his essais and his omelettes. In his seclusions the Vin de Bourgogne had its allotted hour, and there were appropriate moments for the Cotes du Rhone. With him Sauterne was to Medoc what Catullus was to Homer. He would sport with a syllogism in sipping St. Peray, but unravel an argument over Clos de Vougeot, and upset a theory in a torrent of Chambertin. Well had it been if the same quick sense of propriety had attended him in the peddling propensity to which I have formerly alluded \u2014 but this was by no means the case. Indeed to say the truth, that trait of mind in the philosophic Bon-Bon did begin at length to assume a character of strange intensity and mysticism, and appeared deeply tinctured with the diablerie of his favorite German studies.\n\nTo enter the little Cafe in the cul-de-sac Le Febvre was, at the period of our tale, to enter the sanctum of a man of genius. Bon-Bon was a man of genius. There was not a sous-cusinier in Rouen, who could not have told you that Bon-Bon was a man of genius. His very cat knew it, and forebore to whisk her tail in the presence of the man of genius. His large water-dog was acquainted with the fact, and upon the approach of his master, betrayed his sense of inferiority by a sanctity of deportment, a debasement of the ears, and a dropping of the lower jaw not altogether unworthy of a dog. It is, however, true that much of this habitual respect might have been attributed to the personal appearance of the metaphysician. A distinguished exterior will, I am constrained to say, have its way even with a beast; and I am willing to allow much in the outward man of the restaurateur calculated to impress the imagination of the quadruped. There is a peculiar majesty about the atmosphere of the little great \u2014 if I may be permitted so equivocal an expression \u2014 which mere physical bulk alone will be found at all times inefficient in creating. If, however, Bon-Bon was barely three feet in height, and if his head was diminutively small, still it was impossible to behold the rotundity of his stomach without a sense of magnificence nearly bordering upon the sublime. In its size both dogs and men must have seen a type of his acquirements \u2014 in its immensity a fitting habitation for his immortal soul.\n\nI might here \u2014 if it so pleased me \u2014 dilate upon the matter of habiliment, and other mere circumstances of the external metaphysician. I might hint that the hair of our hero was worn short, combed smoothly over his forehead, and surmounted by a conical-shaped white flannel cap and tassels \u2014 that his pea-green jerkin was not after the fashion of those worn by the common class of restaurateurs at that day \u2014 that the sleeves were something fuller than the reigning costume permitted \u2014 that the cuffs were turned up, not as usual in that barbarous period, with cloth of the same quality and color as the garment, but faced in a more fanciful manner with the particolored velvet of Genoa \u2014 that his slippers were of a bright purple, curiously filigreed, and might have been manufactured in Japan, but for the exquisite pointing of the toes, and the brilliant tints of the binding and embroidery \u2014 that his breeches were of the yellow satin-like material called aimable \u2014 that his sky-blue cloak, resembling in form a dressing-wrapper, and richly bestudded all over with crimson devices, floated cavalierly upon his shoulders like a mist of the morning \u2014 and that his tout ensemble gave rise to the remarkable words of Benevenuta, the Improvisatrice of Florence, \"that it was difficult to say whether Pierre Bon-Bon was indeed a bird of Paradise, or rather a very Paradise of perfection.\" I might, I say, expatiate upon all these points if I pleased \u2014 but I forbear, merely personal details may be left to historical novelists \u2014 they are beneath the moral dignity of matter-of-fact.\n\nI have said that \"to enter the Cafe in the cul-de-sac Le Febvre was to enter the sanctum of a man of genius\"\u2014 but then it was only the man of genius who could duly estimate the merits of the sanctum. A sign, consisting of a vast folio, swung before the entrance. On one side of the volume was painted a bottle; on the reverse a pate. On the back were visible in large letters Oeuvres de Bon-Bon. Thus was delicately shadowed forth the two-fold occupation of the proprietor.\n\nUpon stepping over the threshold, the whole interior of the building presented itself to view. A long, low-pitched room, of antique construction, was indeed all the accommodation afforded by the Cafe. In a corner of the apartment stood the bed of the metaphysician. An army of curtains, together with a canopy a la Grecque, gave it an air at once classic and comfortable. In the corner diagonary opposite, appeared, in direct family communion, the properties of the kitchen and the bibliotheque. A dish of polemics stood peacefully upon the dresser. Here lay an ovenful of the latest ethics \u2014 there a kettle of dudecimo melanges. Volumes of German morality were hand and glove with the gridiron \u2014 a toasting-fork might be discovered by the side of Eusebius \u2014 Plato reclined at his ease in the frying-pan \u2014 and contemporary manuscripts were filed away upon the spit.\n\nIn other respects the Cafe de Bon-Bon might be said to differ little from the usual restaurants of the period. A fireplace yawned opposite the door. On the right of the fireplace an open cupboard displayed a formidable array of labelled bottles.\n\nIt was here, about twelve o'clock one night during the severe winter the comments of his neighbours upon his singular propensity \u2014 that Pierre Bon-Bon, I say, having turned them all out of his house, locked the door upon them with an oath, and betook himself in no very pacific mood to the comforts of a leather-bottomed arm-chair, and a fire of blazing fagots.\n\nIt was one of those terrific nights which are only met with once or twice during a century. It snowed fiercely, and the house tottered to its centre with the floods of wind that, rushing through the crannies in the wall, and pouring impetuously down the chimney, shook awfully the curtains of the philosopher's bed, and disorganized the economy of his pate-pans and papers. The huge folio sign that swung without, exposed to the fury of the tempest, creaked ominously, and gave out a moaning sound from its stanchions of solid oak.\n\nIt was in no placid temper, I say, that the metaphysician drew up his chair to its customary station by the hearth. Many circumstances of a perplexing nature had occurred during the day, to disturb the serenity of his meditations. In attempting des oeufs a la Princesse, he had unfortunately perpetrated an omelette a la Reine; the discovery of a principle in ethics had been frustrated by the overturning of a stew; and last, not least, he had been thwarted in one of those admirable bargains which he at all times took such especial delight in bringing to a successful termination. But in the chafing of his mind at these unaccountable vicissitudes, there did not fail to be mingled some degree of that nervous anxiety which the fury of a boisterous night is so well calculated to produce. Whistling to his more immediate vicinity the large black water-dog we have spoken of before, and settling himself uneasily in his chair, he could not help casting a wary and unquiet eye toward those distant recesses of the apartment whose inexorable shadows not even the red firelight itself could more than partially succeed in overcoming. Having completed a scrutiny whose exact purpose was perhaps unintelligible to himself, he drew close to his seat a small table covered with books and papers, and soon became absorbed in the task of retouching a voluminous manuscript, intended for publication on the morrow.\n\nHe had been thus occupied for some minutes when \"I am in no hurry, Monsieur Bon-Bon,\" suddenly whispered a whining voice in the apartment.\n\n\"The devil!\" ejaculated our hero, starting to his feet, overturning the table at his side, and staring around him in astonishment.\n\n\"Very true,\" calmly replied the voice.\n\n\"Very true! \u2014 what is very true? \u2014 how came you here?\" vociferated the metaphysician, as his eye fell upon something which lay stretched at full length upon the bed.\n\n\"I was saying,\" said the intruder, without attending to the interrogatives \u2014 \"I was saying that I am not at all pushed for time \u2014 that the business upon which I took the liberty of calling, is of no pressing importance \u2014 in short, that I can very well wait until you have finished your Exposition.\"\n\n\"My Exposition! \u2014 there now! \u2014 how do you know? \u2014 how came you to understand that I was writing an Exposition? \u2014 good God!\"\n\n\"Hush!\" replied the figure, in a shrill undertone; and, arising quickly from the bed, he made a single step toward our hero, while an iron lamp that depended over-head swung convulsively back from his approach.\n\nThe philosopher's amazement did not prevent a narrow scrutiny of the stranger's dress and appearance. The outlines of his figure, exceedingly lean, but much above the common height, were rendered minutely distinct, by means of a faded suit of black cloth which fitted tight to the skin, but was otherwise cut very much in the style of a century ago. These garments had evidently been intended for a much shorter person than their present owner. His ankles and wrists were left naked for several inches. In his shoes, however, a pair of very brilliant buckles gave the lie to the extreme poverty implied by the other portions of his dress. His head was bare, and entirely bald, with the exception of a hinder part, from which depended a queue of considerable length. A pair of green spectacles, with side glasses, protected his eyes from the influence of the light, and at the same time prevented our hero from ascertaining either their color or their conformation. About the entire person there was no evidence of a shirt, but a white cravat, of filthy appearance, was tied with extreme precision around the throat and the ends hanging down formally side by side gave (although I dare say unintentionally) the idea of an ecclesiastic. Indeed, many other points both in his appearance and demeanor might have very well sustained a conception of that nature. Over his left ear, he carried, after the fashion of a modern clerk, an instrument resembling the stylus of the ancients. In a breast-pocket of his coat appeared conspicuously a small black volume fastened with clasps of steel. This book, whether accidentally or not, was so turned outwardly from the person as to discover the words \"Rituel Catholique\" in white letters upon the back. His entire physiognomy was interestingly saturnine \u2014 even cadaverously pale. The forehead was lofty, and deeply furrowed with the ridges of contemplation. The corners of the mouth were drawn down into an expression of the most submissive humility. There was also a clasping of the hands, as he stepped toward our hero \u2014 a deep sigh \u2014 and altogether a look of such utter sanctity as could not have failed to be unequivocally preposessing. Every shadow of anger faded from the countenance of the metaphysician, as, having completed a satisfactory survey of his visiter's person, he shook him cordially by the hand, and conducted him to a seat.\n\nThere would however be a radical error in attributing this instantaneous transition of feeling in the philosopher, to any one of those causes which might naturally be supposed to have had an influence. Indeed, Pierre Bon-Bon, from what I have been able to understand of his disposition, was of all men the least likely to be imposed upon by any speciousness of exterior deportment. It was impossible that so accurate an observer of men and things should have failed to discover, upon the moment, the real character of the personage who had thus intruded upon his hospitality. To say no more, the conformation of his visiter's feet was sufficiently remarkable \u2014 he maintained lightly upon his head an inordinately tall hat \u2014 there was a tremulous swelling about the hinder part of his breeches \u2014 and the vibration of his coat tail was a palpable fact. Judge, then, with what feelings of satisfaction our hero found himself thrown thus at once into the society of a person for whom he had at all times entertained the most unqualified respect. He was, however, too much of the diplomatist to let escape him any intimation of his suspicions in regard to the true state of affairs. It was not his cue to appear at all conscious of the high honor he thus unexpectedly enjoyed; but, by leading his guest into the conversation, to elicit some important ethical ideas, which might, in obtaining a place in his contemplated publication, enlighten the human race, and at the same time immortalize himself \u2014 ideas which, I should have added, his visitor's great age, and well-known proficiency in the science of morals, might very well have enabled him to afford.\n\nActuated by these enlightened views, our hero bade the gentleman sit down, while he himself took occasion to throw some fagots upon the fire, and place upon the now re-established table some bottles of Mousseux. Having quickly completed these operations, he drew his chair vis-a-vis to his companion's, and waited until the latter should open the conversation. But plans even the most skilfully matured are often thwarted in the outset of their application \u2014 and the restaurateur found himself nonplussed by the very first words of his visiter's speech.\n\n\"I see you know me, Bon-Bon,\" said he; \"ha! ha! ha! \u2014 he! he! he! \u2014 hi! hi! hi! \u2014 ho! ho! ho! \u2014 hu! hu! hu!\"\u2014 and the devil, dropping at once the sanctity of his demeanor, opened to its fullest extent a mouth from ear to ear, so as to display a set of jagged and fang-like teeth, and, throwing back his head, laughed long, loudly, wickedly, and uproariously, while the black dog, crouching down upon his haunches, joined lustily in the chorus, and the tabby cat, flying off at a tangent, stood up on end, and shrieked in the farthest corner of the apartment.\n\nNot so the philosopher; he was too much a man of the world either to laugh like the dog, or by shrieks to betray the indecorous trepidation of the cat. It must be confessed, he felt a little astonishment to see the white letters which formed the words \"Rituel Catholique\" on the book in his guest's pocket, momently changing both their color and their import, and in a few seconds, in place of the original title the words Regitre des Condamnes blazed forth in characters of red. This startling circumstance, when Bon-Bon replied to his visiter's remark, imparted to his manner an air of embarrassment which probably might, not otherwise have been observed.\n\n\"Why sir,\" said the philosopher, \"why sir, to speak sincerely \u2014 I I imagine \u2014 I have some faint \u2014 some very faint idea \u2014 of the remarkable honor\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh! \u2014 ah! \u2014 yes! \u2014 very well!\" interrupted his Majesty; \"say no more \u2014 I see how it is.\" And hereupon, taking off his green spectacles, he wiped the glasses carefully with the sleeve of his coat, and deposited them in his pocket.\n\nIf Bon-Bon had been astonished at the incident of the book, his amazement was now much increased by the spectacle which here presented itself to view. In raising his eyes, with a strong feeling of curiosity to ascertain the color of his guest's, he found them by no means black, as he had anticipated \u2014 nor gray, as might have been imagined \u2014 nor yet hazel nor blue \u2014 nor indeed yellow nor red \u2014 nor purple \u2014 nor white \u2014 nor green \u2014 nor any other color in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. In short, Pierre Bon-Bon not only saw plainly that his Majesty had no eyes whatsoever, but could discover no indications of their having existed at any previous period \u2014 for the space where eyes should naturally have been was, I am constrained to say, simply a dead level of flesh.\n\nIt was not in the nature of the metaphysician to forbear making some inquiry into the sources of so strange a phenomenon, and the reply of his Majesty was at once prompt, dignified, and satisfactory.\n\n\"Eyes! my dear Bon-Bon \u2014 eyes! did you say? \u2014 oh! \u2014 ah! \u2014 I perceive! The ridiculous prints, eh, which are in, circulation, have given you a false idea of my personal appearance? Eyes! \u2014 true. Eyes, Pierre Bon-Bon, are very well in their proper place \u2014 that, you would say, is the head? \u2014 right \u2014 the head of a worm. To you, likewise, these optics are indispensable \u2014 yet I will convince you that my vision is more penetrating than your own. There is a cat I see in the corner \u2014 a pretty cat \u2014 look at her \u2014 observe her well. Now, Bon-Bon, do you behold the thoughts \u2014 the thoughts, I say \u2014 the ideas \u2014 the reflections \u2014 which are being engendered in her pericranium? There it is, now \u2014 you do not! She is thinking we admire the length of her tail and the profundity of her mind. She has just concluded that I am the most distinguished of ecclesiastics, and that you are the most superficial of metaphysicians. Thus you see I am not altogether blind; but to one of my profession, the eyes you speak of would be merely an incumbrance, liable at any time to be put out by a toasting-iron, or a pitchfork. To you, I allow, these optical affairs are indispensable. Endeavor, Bon-Bon, to use them well; \u2014 my vision is the soul.\"\n\nHereupon the guest helped himself to the wine upon the table, and pouring out a bumper for Bon-Bon, requested him to drink it without scruple, and make himself perfectly at home.\n\n\"A clever book that of yours, Pierre,\" resumed his Majesty, tapping our friend knowingly upon the shoulder, as the latter put down his glass after a thorough compliance with his visiter's injunction. \"A clever book that of yours, upon my honor. It's a work after my own heart. Your arrangement of the matter, I think, however, might be improved, and many of your notions remind me of Aristotle. That philosopher was one of my most intimate acquaintances. I liked him as much for his terrible ill temper, as for his happy knack at making a blunder. There is only one solid truth in all that he has written, and for that I gave him the hint out of pure compassion for his absurdity. I suppose, Pierre Bon-Bon, you very well know to what divine moral truth I am alluding?\"\n\n\"Cannot say that I\u2014\"\n\n\"Indeed! \u2014 why it was I who told Aristotle that by sneezing, men expelled superfluous ideas through the proboscis.\"\n\n\"Which is \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 undoubtedly the case,\" said the metaphysician, while he poured out for himself another bumper of Mousseux, and offered his snuff-box to the fingers of his visiter.\n\n\"There was Plato, too,\" continued his Majesty, modestly declining the snuff-box and the compliment it implied \u2014\"there was Plato, too, for whom I, at one time, felt all the affection of a friend. You knew Plato, Bon-Bon? \u2014 ah, no, I beg a thousand pardons. He met me at Athens, one day, in the Parthenon, and told me he was distressed for an idea. I bade him write, down that o nous estin aulos. He said that he would do so, and went home, while I stepped over to the pyramids. But my conscience smote me for having uttered a truth, even to aid a friend, and hastening back to Athens, I arrived behind the philosopher's chair as he was inditing the 'aulos.'\"\n\n\"Giving the lambda a fillip with my finger, I turned it upside down. So the sentence now read 'o nous estin augos', and is, you perceive, the fundamental doctrines in his metaphysics.\"\n\n\"Were you ever at Rome?\" asked the restaurateur, as he finished his second bottle of Mousseux, and drew from the closet a larger supply of Chambertin.\n\nBut once, Monsieur Bon-Bon, but once. There was a time,\" said the devil, as if reciting some passage from a book \u2014\"there was a time when occurred an anarchy of five years, during which the republic, bereft of all its officers, had no magistracy besides the tribunes of the people, and these were not legally vested with any degree of executive power \u2014 at that time, Monsieur Bon-Bon \u2014 at that time only I was in Rome, and I have no earthly acquaintance, consequently, with any of its philosophy.\"2\n\n2Ils ecrivaient sur la Philosophie (Cicero, Lucretius, Seneca) mais c'etait la Philosophie Grecque. \u2014 Condorcet.\n\n\"What do you think of \u2014 what do you think of \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 Epicurus?\"\n\n\"What do I think of whom?\" said the devil, in astonishment, \"you cannot surely mean to find any fault with Epicurus! What do I think of Epicurus! Do you mean me, sir? \u2014 I am Epicurus! I am the same philosopher who wrote each of the three hundred treatises commemorated by Diogenes Laertes.\"\n\n\"That's a lie!\" said the metaphysician, for the wine had gotten a little into his head.\n\n\"Very well! \u2014 very well, sir! \u2014 very well, indeed, sir!\" said his Majesty, apparently much flattered.\n\n\"That's a lie!\" repeated the restaurateur, dogmatically; \"that's a \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 a lie!\"\n\n\"Well, well, have it your own way!\" said the devil, pacifically, and Bon-Bon, having beaten his Majesty at argument, thought it his duty to conclude a second bottle of Chambertin.\n\n\"As I was saying,\" resumed the visiter \u2014\"as I was observing a little while ago, there are some very outre notions in that book of yours Monsieur Bon-Bon. What, for instance, do you mean by all that humbug about the soul? Pray, sir, what is the soul?\"\n\n\"The \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 soul,\" replied the metaphysician, referring to his MS., \"is undoubtedly\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir!\"\n\n\"Indubitably\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir!\"\n\n\"Indisputably\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir!\"\n\n\"Evidently\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir!\"\n\n\"Incontrovertibly\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir!\"\n\n\"Hiccup!\u2014\"\n\n\"No, sir!\"\n\n\"And beyond all question, a\u2014\"\n\n\"No sir, the soul is no such thing!\" (Here the philosopher, looking daggers, took occasion to make an end, upon the spot, of his third bottle of Chambertin.)\n\n\"Then \u2014 hic-cup! \u2014 pray, sir \u2014 what \u2014 what is it?\"\n\n\"That is neither here nor there, Monsieur Bon-Bon,\" replied his Majesty, musingly. \"I have tasted \u2014 that is to say, I have known some very bad souls, and some too \u2014 pretty good ones.\" Here he smacked his lips, and, having unconsciously let fall his hand upon the volume in his pocket, was seized with a violent fit of sneezing.\n\nHe continued.\n\n\"There was the soul of Cratinus \u2014 passable: Aristophanes \u2014 racy: Plato \u2014 exquisite \u2014 not your Plato, but Plato the comic poet; your Plato would have turned the stomach of Cerberus \u2014 faugh! Then let me see! there were Naevius, and Andronicus, and Plautus, and Terentius. Then there were Lucilius, and Catullus, and Naso, and Quintus Flaccus \u2014 dear Quinty! as I called him when he sung a seculare for my amusement, while I toasted him, in pure good humor, on a fork. But they want flavor, these Romans. One fat Greek is worth a dozen of them, and besides will keep, which cannot be said of a Quirite. \u2014 Let us taste your Sauterne.\"\n\nBon-Bon had by this time made up his mind to nil admirari and endeavored to hand down the bottles in question. He was, however, conscious of a strange sound in the room like the wagging of a tail. Of this, although extremely indecent in his Majesty, the philosopher took no notice:\u2014 simply kicking the dog, and requesting him to be quiet. The visiter continued:\n\n\"I found that Horace tasted very much like Aristotle; \u2014 you know I am fond of variety. Terentius I could not have told from Menander. Naso, to my astonishment, was Nicander in disguise. Virgilius had a strong twang of Theocritus. Martial put me much in mind of Archilochus \u2014 and Titus Livius was positively Polybius and none other.\"\n\n\"Hic-cup!\" here replied Bon-Bon, and his majesty proceeded:\n\n\"But if I have a penchant, Monsieur Bon-Bon \u2014 if I have a penchant, it is for a philosopher. Yet, let me tell you, sir, it is not every dev \u2014 I mean it is not every gentleman who knows how to choose a philosopher. Long ones are not good; and the best, if not carefully shelled, are apt to be a little rancid on account of the gall!\"\n\n\"Shelled!\"\n\n\"I mean taken out of the carcass.\"\n\n\"What do you think of a \u2014 hic-cup! \u2014 physician?\"\n\n\"Don't mention them! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh!\" (Here his Majesty retched violently.) \"I never tasted but one \u2014 that rascal Hippocrates! \u2014 smelt of asafoetida \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 caught a wretched cold washing him in the Styx \u2014 and after all he gave me the cholera morbus.\"\n\n\"The \u2014 hiccup \u2014 wretch!\" ejaculated Bon-Bon, \"the \u2014 hic-cup! \u2014 absorption of a pill-box!\"\u2014 and the philosopher dropped a tear.\n\n\"After all,\" continued the visiter, \"after all, if a dev \u2014 if a gentleman wishes to live, he must have more talents than one or two; and with us a fat face is an evidence of diplomacy.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"Why, we are sometimes exceedingly pushed for provisions. You must know that, in a climate so sultry as mine, it is frequently impossible to keep a spirit alive for more than two or three hours; and after death, unless pickled immediately (and a pickled spirit is not good), they will \u2014 smell \u2014 you understand, eh? Putrefaction is always to be apprehended when the souls are consigned to us in the usual way.\"\n\n\"Hiccup! \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 good God! how do you manage?\"\n\nHere the iron lamp commenced swinging with redoubled violence, and the devil half started from his seat; \u2014 however, with a slight sigh, he recovered his composure, merely saying to our hero in a low tone: \"I tell you what, Pierre Bon-Bon, we must have no more swearing.\"\n\nThe host swallowed another bumper, by way of denoting thorough comprehension and acquiescence, and the visiter continued.\n\n\"Why, there are several ways of managing. The most of us starve: some put up with the pickle: for my part I purchase my spirits vivente corpore, in which case I find they keep very well.\"\n\n\"But the body! \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 the body!\"\n\n\"The body, the body \u2014 well, what of the body? \u2014 oh! ah! I perceive. Why, sir, the body is not at all affected by the transaction. I have made innumerable purchases of the kind in my day, and the parties never experienced any inconvenience. There were Cain and Nimrod, and Nero, and Caligula, and Dionysius, and Pisistratus, and \u2014 and a thousand others, who never knew what it was to have a soul during the latter part of their lives; yet, sir, these men adorned society. Why possession of his faculties, mental and corporeal? Who writes a keener epigram? Who reasons more wittily? Who \u2014 but stay! I have his agreement in my pocket-book.\"\n\nThus saying, he produced a red leather wallet, and took from it a number of papers. Upon some of these Bon-Bon caught a glimpse of the letters Machi \u2014 Maza \u2014 Robesp \u2014 with the words Caligula, George, Elizabeth. His Majesty selected a narrow slip of parchment, and from it read aloud the following words:\n\n\"In consideration of certain mental endowments which it is unnecessary to specify, and in further consideration of one thousand louis d'or, I being aged one year and one month, do hereby make over to the bearer of this agreement all my right, title, and appurtenance in the shadow called my soul. (Signed) A.... \" (Here His Majesty repeated a name which I did not feel justified in indicating more unequivocally.)\n\n\"A clever fellow that,\" resumed he; \"but like you, Monsieur Bon-Bon, he was mistaken about the soul. The soul a shadow, truly! The soul a shadow; Ha! ha! ha! \u2014 he! he! he! \u2014 hu! hu! hu! Only think of a fricasseed shadow!\"\n\n\"Only think \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 of a fricasseed shadow!\" exclaimed our hero, whose faculties were becoming much illuminated by the profundity of his Majesty's discourse.\n\n\"Only think of a hiccup! \u2014 fricasseed shadow!! Now, damme! \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 humph! If I would have been such a \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 nincompoop! My soul, Mr. \u2014 humph!\"\n\n\"Your soul, Monsieur Bon-Bon?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 my soul is\u2014\"\n\n\"What, sir?\"\n\n\"No shadow, damme!\"\n\n\"Did you mean to say\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, my soul is \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 humph! \u2014 yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Did you not intend to assert\u2014\"\n\n\"My soul is \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 peculiarly qualified for \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 a\u2014\"\n\n\"What, sir?\"\n\n\"Stew.\"\n\n\"Ha!\"\n\n\"Soufflee.\"\n\n\"Eh!\"\n\n\"Fricassee.\"\n\n\"Indeed!\"\n\n\"Ragout and fricandeau \u2014 and see here, my good fellow! I'll let you have it \u2014 hiccup! \u2014 a bargain.\" Here the philosopher slapped his Majesty upon the back.\n\n\"Couldn't think of such a thing,\" said the latter calmly, at the same time rising from his seat. The metaphysician stared.\n\n\"Am supplied at present,\" said his Majesty.\n\n\"Hiccup \u2014 e-h?\" said the philosopher.\n\n\"Have no funds on hand.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Besides, very unhandsome in me\u2014\"\n\n\"Sir!\"\n\n\"To take advantage of\u2014\"\n\n\"Hiccup!\"\n\n\"Your present disgusting and ungentlemanly situation.\"\n\nHere the visiter bowed and withdrew \u2014 in what manner could not precisely be ascertained \u2014 but in a well-concerted effort to discharge a bottle at \"the villain,\" the slender chain was severed that depended from the ceiling, and the metaphysician prostrated by the downfall of the lamp.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Loss of Breath (A Decided Loss) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'O Breathe not, etc.' \u2014Moore's Melodies\n\nThe most notorious ill-fortune must in the end yield to the untiring courage of philosophy \u2014 as the most stubborn city to the ceaseless vigilance of an enemy. Shalmanezer, as we have it in holy writings, lay three years before Samaria; yet it fell. Sardanapalus \u2014 see Diodorus \u2014 maintained himself seven in Nineveh; but to no purpose. Troy expired at the close of the second lustrum; and Azoth, as Aristaeus declares upon his honour as a gentleman, opened at last her gates to Psammetichus, after having barred them for the fifth part of a century....\n\n\"Thou wretch! \u2014 thou vixen! \u2014 thou shrew!\" said I to my wife on the morning after our wedding; \"thou witch! \u2014 thou hag! \u2014 thou whippersnapper \u2014 thou sink of iniquity! \u2014 thou fiery-faced quintessence of all that is abominable! \u2014 thou \u2014 thou-\" here standing upon tiptoe, seizing her by the throat, and placing my mouth close to her ear, I was preparing to launch forth a new and more decided epithet of opprobrium, which should not fail, if ejaculated, to convince her of her insignificance, when to my extreme horror and astonishment I discovered that I had lost my breath.\n\nThe phrases \"I am out of breath,\" \"I have lost my breath,\" etc., are often enough repeated in common conversation; but it had never occurred to me that the terrible accident of which I speak could bona fide and actually happen! Imagine \u2014 that is if you have a fanciful turn \u2014 imagine, I say, my wonder \u2014 my consternation \u2014 my despair!\n\nThere is a good genius, however, which has never entirely deserted me. In my most ungovernable moods I still retain a sense of propriety, et le chemin des passions me conduit \u2014 as Lord Edouard in the \"Julie\" says it did him \u2014 a la philosophie veritable.\n\nAlthough I could not at first precisely ascertain to what degree the occurence had affected me, I determined at all events to conceal the matter from my wife, until further experience should discover to me the extent of this my unheard of calamity. Altering my countenance, therefore, in a moment, from its bepuffed and distorted appearance, to an expression of arch and coquettish benignity, I gave my lady a pat on the one cheek, and a kiss on the other, and without saying one syllable (Furies! I could not), left her astonished at my drollery, as I pirouetted out of the room in a Pas de Zephyr.\n\nBehold me then safely ensconced in my private boudoir, a fearful instance of the ill consequences attending upon irascibility \u2014 alive, with the qualifications of the dead \u2014 dead, with the propensities of the living \u2014 an anomaly on the face of the earth \u2014 being very calm, yet breathless.\n\nYes! breathless. I am serious in asserting that my breath was entirely gone. I could not have stirred with it a feather if my life had been at issue, or sullied even the delicacy of a mirror. Hard fate! \u2014 yet there was some alleviation to the first overwhelming paroxysm of my sorrow. I found, upon trial, that the powers of utterance which, upon my inability to proceed in the conversation with my wife, I then concluded to be totally destroyed, were in fact only partially impeded, and I discovered that had I, at that interesting crisis, dropped my voice to a singularly deep guttural, I might still have continued to her the communication of my sentiments; this pitch of voice (the guttural) depending, I find, not upon the current of the breath, but upon a certain spasmodic action of the muscles of the throat.\n\nThrowing myself upon a chair, I remained for some time absorbed in meditation. My reflections, be sure, were of no consolatory kind. A thousand vague and lachrymatory fancies took possesion of my soul \u2014 and even the idea of suicide flitted across my brain; but it is a trait in the perversity of human nature to reject the obvious and the ready, for the far-distant and equivocal. Thus I shuddered at self-murder as the most decided of atrocities while the tabby cat purred strenuously upon the rug, and the very water dog wheezed assiduously under the table, each taking to itself much merit for the strength of its lungs, and all obviously done in derision of my own pulmonary incapacity.\n\nOppressed with a tumult of vague hopes and fears, I at length heard the footsteps of my wife descending the staircase. Being now assured of her absence, I returned with a palpitating heart to the scene of my disaster.\n\nCarefully locking the door on the inside, I commenced a vigorous search. It was possible, I thought, that, concealed in some obscure corner, or lurking in some closet or drawer, might be found the lost object of my inquiry. It might have a vapory \u2014 it might even have a tangible form. Most philosophers, upon many points of philosophy, are still very unphilosophical. William Godwin, however, says in his \"Mandeville,\" that \"invisible things are the only realities,\" and this, all will allow, is a case in point. I would have the judicious reader pause before accusing such asseverations of an undue quantum of absurdity. Anaxagoras, it will be remembered, maintained that snow is black, and this I have since found to be the case.\n\nLong and earnestly did I continue the investigation: but the contemptible reward of my industry and perseverance proved to be only a set of false teeth, two pair of hips, an eye, and a bundle of billets-doux from Mr. Windenough to my wife. I might as well here observe that this confirmation of my lady's partiality for Mr. W. occasioned me little uneasiness. That Mrs. Lackobreath should admire anything so dissimilar to myself was a natural and necessary evil. I am, it is well known, of a robust and corpulent appearance, and at the same time somewhat diminutive in stature. What wonder, then, that the lath-like tenuity of my acquaintance, and his altitude, which has grown into a proverb, should have met with all due estimation in the eyes of Mrs. Lackobreath. But to return.\n\nMy exertions, as I have before said, proved fruitless. Closet after closet \u2014 drawer after drawer \u2014 corner after corner \u2014 were scrutinized to no purpose. At one time, however, I thought myself sure of my prize, having, in rummaging a dressing-case, accidentally demolished a bottle of Grandjean's Oil of Archangels \u2014 which, as an agreeable perfume, I here take the liberty of recommending.\n\nWith a heavy heart I returned to my boudoir \u2014 there to ponder upon some method of eluding my wife's penetration, until I could make arrangements prior to my leaving the country, for to this I had already made up my mind. In a foreign climate, being unknown, I might, with some probability of success, endeavor to conceal my unhappy calamity \u2014 a calamity calculated, even more than beggary, to estrange the affections of the multitude, and to draw down upon the wretch the well-merited indignation of the virtuous and the happy. I was not long in hesitation. Being naturally quick, I committed to memory the entire tragedy of \"Metamora.\" I had the good fortune to recollect that in the accentuation of this drama, or at least of such portion of it as is allotted to the hero, the tones of voice in which I found myself deficient were altogether unnecessary, and the deep guttural was expected to reign monotonously throughout.\n\nI practised for some time by the borders of a well frequented marsh; \u2014 herein, however, having no reference to a similar proceeding of Demosthenes, but from a design peculiarly and conscientiously my own. Thus armed at all points, I determined to make my wife believe that I was suddenly smitten with a passion for the stage. In this, I succeeded to a miracle; and to every question or suggestion found myself at liberty to reply in my most frog-like and sepulchral tones with some passage from the tragedy \u2014 any portion of which, as I soon took great pleasure in observing, would apply equally well to any particular subject. It is not to be supposed, however, that in the delivery of such passages I was found at all deficient in the looking asquint \u2014 the showing my teeth \u2014 the working my knees \u2014 the shuffling my feet \u2014 or in any of those unmentionable graces which are now justly considered the characteristics of a popular performer. To be sure they spoke of confining me in a strait-jacket \u2014 but, good God! they never suspected me of having lost my breath.\n\nHaving at length put my affairs in order, I took my seat very early one morning in the mail stage for \u2014 giving it to be understood, among my acquaintances, that business of the last importance required my immediate personal attendance in that city.\n\nThe coach was crammed to repletion; but in the uncertain twilight the features of my companions could not be distinguished. Without making any effectual resistance, I suffered myself to be placed between two gentlemen of colossal dimensions; while a third, of a size larger, requesting pardon for the liberty he was about to take, threw himself upon my body at full length, and falling asleep in an instant, drowned all my guttural ejaculations for relief, in a snore which would have put to blush the roarings of the bull of Phalaris. Happily the state of my respiratory faculties rendered suffocation an accident entirely out of the question.\n\nAs, however, the day broke more distinctly in our approach to the outskirts of the city, my tormentor, arising and adjusting his shirt-collar, thanked me in a very friendly manner for my civility. Seeing that I remained motionless (all my limbs were dislocated and my head twisted on one side), his apprehensions began to be excited; and arousing the rest of the passengers, he communicated, in a very decided manner, his opinion that a dead man had been palmed upon them during the night for a living and responsible fellow-traveller; here giving me a thump on the right eye, by way of demonstrating the truth of his suggestion.\n\nHereupon all, one after another (there were nine in company), believed it their duty to pull me by the ear. A young practising physician, too, having applied a pocket-mirror to my mouth, and found me without breath, the assertion of my persecutor was pronounced a true bill; and the whole party expressed a determination to endure tamely no such impositions for the future, and to proceed no farther with any such carcasses for the present.\n\nI was here, accordingly, thrown out at the sign of the \"Crow\" (by which tavern the coach happened to be passing), without meeting with any farther accident than the breaking of both my arms, under the left hind wheel of the vehicle. I must besides do the driver the justice to state that he did not forget to throw after me the largest of my trunks, which, unfortunately falling on my head, fractured my skull in a manner at once interesting and extraordinary.\n\nThe landlord of the \"Crow,\" who is a hospitable man, finding that my trunk contained sufficient to indemnify him for any little trouble he might take in my behalf, sent forthwith for a surgeon of his acquaintance, and delivered me to his care with a bill and receipt for ten dollars.\n\nThe purchaser took me to his apartments and commenced operations immediately. Having cut off my ears, however, he discovered signs of animation. He now rang the bell, and sent for a neighboring apothecary with whom to consult in the emergency. In case of his suspicions with regard to my existence proving ultimately correct, he, in the meantime, made an incision in my stomach, and removed several of my viscera for private dissection.\n\nThe apothecary had an idea that I was actually dead. This idea I endeavored to confute, kicking and plunging with all my might, and making the most furious contortions \u2014 for the operations of the surgeon had, in a measure, restored me to the possession of my faculties. All, however, was attributed to the effects of a new galvanic battery, wherewith the apothecary, who is really a man of information, performed several curious experiments, in which, from my personal share in their fulfillment, I could not help feeling deeply interested. It was a course of mortification to me, nevertheless, that although I made several attempts at conversation, my powers of speech were so entirely in abeyance, that I could not even open my mouth; much less, then, make reply to some ingenious but fanciful theories of which, under other circumstances, my minute acquaintance with the Hippocratian pathology would have afforded me a ready confutation.\n\nNot being able to arrive at a conclusion, the practitioners remanded me for farther examination. I was taken up into a garret; and the surgeon's lady having accommodated me with drawers and stockings, the surgeon himself fastened my hands, and tied up my jaws with a pocket-handkerchief \u2014 then bolted the door on the outside as he hurried to his dinner, leaving me alone to silence and to meditation.\n\nI now discovered to my extreme delight that I could have spoken had not my mouth been tied up with the pocket-handkerchief. Consoling myself with this reflection, I was mentally repeating some passages of the \"Omnipresence of the Deity,\" as is my custom before resigning myself to sleep, when two cats, of a greedy and vituperative turn, entering at a hole in the wall, leaped up with a flourish a la Catalani, and alighting opposite one another on my visage, betook themselves to indecorous contention for the paltry consideration of my nose.\n\nBut, as the loss of his ears proved the means of elevating to the throne of Cyrus, the Magian or Mige-Gush of Persia, and as the cutting off his nose gave Zopyrus possession of Babylon, so the loss of a few ounces of my countenance proved the salvation of my body. Aroused by the pain, and burning with indignation, I burst, at a single effort, the fastenings and the bandage. Stalking across the room I cast a glance of contempt at the belligerents, and throwing open the sash to their extreme horror and disappointment, precipitated myself, very dexterously, from the window. this moment passing from the city jail to the scaffold erected for his execution in the suburbs. His extreme infirmity and long continued ill health had obtained him the privilege of remaining unmanacled; and habited in his gallows costume \u2014 one very similar to my own \u2014 he lay at full length in the bottom of the hangman's cart (which happened to be under the windows of the surgeon at the moment of my precipitation) without any other guard than the driver, who was asleep, and two recruits of the sixth infantry, who were drunk.\n\nAs ill-luck would have it, I alit upon my feet within the vehicle. immediately, he bolted out behind, and turning down an alley, was out of sight in the twinkling of an eye. The recruits, aroused by the bustle, could not exactly comprehend the merits of the transaction. Seeing, however, a man, the precise counterpart of the felon, standing upright in the cart before their eyes, they were of (so they expressed themselves,) and, having communicated this opinion to one another, they took each a dram, and then knocked me down with the butt-ends of their muskets.\n\nIt was not long ere we arrived at the place of destination. Of course nothing could be said in my defence. Hanging was my inevitable fate. I resigned myself thereto with a feeling half stupid, half acrimonious. Being little of a cynic, I had all the sentiments of a dog. The hangman, however, adjusted the noose about my neck. The drop fell.\n\nI forbear to depict my sensations upon the gallows; although here, undoubtedly, I could speak to the point, and it is a topic upon which nothing has been well said. In fact, to write upon such a theme it is necessary to have been hanged. Every author should confine himself to matters of experience. Thus Mark Antony composed a treatise upon getting drunk.\n\nI may just mention, however, that die I did not. My body was, but I had no breath to be, suspended; and but for the knot under my left ear (which had the feel of a military stock) I dare say that I should have experienced very little inconvenience. As for the jerk given to my neck upon the falling of the drop, it merely proved a corrective to the twist afforded me by the fat gentleman in the coach.\n\nFor good reasons, however, I did my best to give the crowd the worth of their trouble. My convulsions were said to be extraordinary. My spasms it would have been difficult to beat. The populace encored. Several gentlemen swooned; and a multitude of ladies were carried home in hysterics. Pinxit availed himself of the opportunity to retouch, from a sketch taken upon the spot, his admirable painting of the \"Marsyas flayed alive.\"\n\nWhen I had afforded sufficient amusement, it was thought proper to remove my body from the gallows; \u2014 this the more especially as the real culprit had in the meantime been retaken and recognized, a fact which I was so unlucky as not to know.\n\nMuch sympathy was, of course, exercised in my behalf, and as no one made claim to my corpse, it was ordered that I should be interred in a public vault.\n\nHere, after due interval, I was deposited. The sexton departed, and I was left alone. A line of Marston's \"Malcontent\"\u2014\n\n\u2003Death's a good fellow and keeps open house\u2014\n\n\u2003struck me at that moment as a palpable lie.\n\nI knocked off, however, the lid of my coffin, and stepped out. The place was dreadfully dreary and damp, and I became troubled with ennui. By way of amusement, I felt my way among the numerous coffins ranged in order around. I lifted them down, one by one, and breaking open their lids, busied myself in speculations about the mortality within.\n\n\"This,\" I soliloquized, tumbling over a carcass, puffy, bloated, and rotund \u2014\"this has been, no doubt, in every sense of the word, an unhappy \u2014 an unfortunate man. It has been his terrible lot not to walk but to waddle \u2014 to pass through life not like a human being, but like an elephant \u2014 not like a man, but like a rhinoceros.\n\n\"His attempts at getting on have been mere abortions, and his circumgyratory proceedings a palpable failure. Taking a step forward, it has been his misfortune to take two toward the right, and three toward the left. His studies have been confined to the poetry of Crabbe. He can have no idea of the wonder of a pirouette. To him a pas de papillon has been an abstract conception. He has never ascended the summit of a hill. He has never viewed from any steeple the glories of a metropolis. Heat has been his mortal enemy. In the dog-days his days have been the days of a dog. Therein, he has dreamed of flames and suffocation \u2014 of mountains upon mountains \u2014 of Pelion upon Ossa. He was short of breath \u2014 to say all in a word, he was short of breath. He thought it extravagant to play upon wind instruments. He was the inventor of self-moving fans, wind-sails, and ventilators. He patronized Du Pont the bellows-maker, and he died miserably in attempting to smoke a cigar. His was a case in which I feel a deep interest \u2014 a lot in which I sincerely sympathize.\n\n\"But here,\"\u2014 said I\u2014\"here\"\u2014 and I dragged spitefully from its receptacle a gaunt, tall and peculiar-looking form, whose remarkable appearance struck me with a sense of unwelcome familiarity \u2014\"here is a wretch entitled to no earthly commiseration.\" Thus saying, in order to obtain a more distinct view of my subject, I applied my thumb and forefinger to its nose, and causing it to assume a sitting position upon the ground, held it thus, at the length of my arm, while I continued my soliloquy.\n\n\"Entitled,\" I repeated, \"to no earthly commiseration. Who indeed would think of compassioning a shadow? Besides, has he not had his full share of the blessings of mortality? He was the originator of tall monuments \u2014 shot-towers \u2014 lightning-rods \u2014 Lombardy poplars. His treatise upon \"Shades and Shadows\" has immortalized him. He edited with distinguished ability the last edition of \"South on the Bones.\" He went early to college and studied pneumatics. He then came home, talked eternally, and played upon the French-horn. He patronized the bagpipes. Captain Barclay, who walked against Time, would not walk against him. Windham and Allbreath were his favorite writers \u2014 his favorite artist, Phiz. He died gloriously while inhaling gas \u2014 levique flatu corrupitur, like the fama pudicitae in Hieronymus. He was indubitably a\"\u2014\n\n\"How can you? \u2014 how \u2014 can \u2014 you?\"\u2014 interrupted the object of my animadversions, gasping for breath, and tearing off, with a desperate exertion, the bandage around its jaws \u2014\"how can you, Mr. Lackobreath, be so infernally cruel as to pinch me in that manner by the nose? Did you not see how they had fastened up my mouth \u2014 and you must know \u2014 if you know any thing \u2014 how vast a superfluity of breath I have to dispose of! If you do not know, however, sit down and you shall see. In my situation it is really a great relief to be able to open ones mouth \u2014 to be able to expatiate \u2014 to be able to communicate with a person like yourself, who do not think yourself called upon at every period to interrupt the thread of a gentleman's discourse. Interruptions are annoying and should undoubtedly be abolished \u2014 don't you think so? \u2014 no reply, I beg you \u2014 one person is enough to be speaking at a time. \u2014 I shall be done by and by, and then you may begin. \u2014 How the devil sir, did you get into this place? \u2014 not a word I beseech you \u2014 been here some time myself \u2014 terrible accident! \u2014 heard of it, I suppose? \u2014 awful calamity! \u2014 walking under your windows \u2014 some short while ago \u2014 about the time you were stage-struck \u2014 horrible occurrence! \u2014 heard of \"catching one's breath,\" eh? \u2014 hold your tongue I tell you! \u2014 I caught somebody elses! \u2014 had always too much of my own \u2014 met Blab at the corner of the street \u2014 wouldn't give me a chance for a word \u2014 couldn't get in a syllable edgeways \u2014 attacked, consequently, with epilepsis \u2014 Blab made his escape \u2014 damn all fools! \u2014 they took me up for dead, and put me in this place \u2014 pretty doings all of them! \u2014 heard all you said about me \u2014 every word a lie \u2014 horrible! \u2014 wonderful \u2014 outrageous! \u2014 hideous! \u2014 incomprehensible! \u2014 et cetera \u2014 et cetera \u2014 et cetera \u2014 et cetera-\"\n\nIt is impossible to conceive my astonishment at so unexpected a discourse, or the joy with which I became gradually convinced that the breath so fortunately caught by the gentleman (whom I soon recognized as my neighbor Windenough) was, in fact, the identical expiration mislaid by myself in the conversation with my wife. Time, place, and circumstances rendered it a matter beyond question. I did not at least during the long period in which the inventor of Lombardy poplars continued to favor me with his explanations.\n\nIn this respect I was actuated by that habitual prudence which has ever been my predominating trait. I reflected that many difficulties might still lie in the path of my preservation which only extreme exertion on my part would be able to surmount. Many persons, I considered, are prone to estimate commodities in their possession \u2014 however valueless to the then proprietor \u2014 however troublesome, or distressing \u2014 in direct ratio with the advantages to be derived by others from their attainment, or by themselves from their abandonment. Might not this be the case with Mr. Windenough? In displaying anxiety for the breath of which he was at present so willing to get rid, might I not lay myself open to the exactions of his avarice? There are scoundrels in this world, I remembered with a sigh, who will not scruple to take unfair opportunities with even a next door neighbor, and (this remark is from Epictetus) it is precisely at that time when men are most anxious to throw off the burden of their own calamities that they feel the least desirous of relieving them in others.\n\nUpon considerations similar to these, and still retaining my grasp upon the nose of Mr. W., I accordingly thought proper to model my reply.\n\n\"Monster!\" I began in a tone of the deepest indignation \u2014\"monster and double-winded idiot! \u2014 dost thou, whom for thine iniquities it has pleased heaven to accurse with a two-fold respimtion \u2014 dost thou, I say, presume to address me in the familiar language of an old acquaintance? \u2014'I lie,' forsooth! and 'hold my tongue,' to be sure! \u2014 pretty conversation indeed, to a gentleman with a single breath! \u2014 all this, too, when I have it in my power to relieve the calamity under which thou dost so justly suffer \u2014 to curtail the superfluities of thine unhappy respiration.\"\n\nLike Brutus, I paused for a reply \u2014 with which, like a tornado, Mr. Windenough immediately overwhelmed me. Protestation followed upon protestation, and apology upon apology. There were no terms with which he was unwilling to comply, and there were none of which I failed to take the fullest advantage.\n\nPreliminaries being at length arranged, my acquaintance delivered me the respiration; for which (having carefully examined it) I gave him afterward a receipt.\n\nI am aware that by many I shall be held to blame for speaking in a manner so cursory, of a transaction so impalpable. It will be thought that I should have entered more minutely, into the details of an occurrence by which \u2014 and this is very true \u2014 much new light might be thrown upon a highly interesting branch of physical philosophy.\n\nTo all this I am sorry that I cannot reply. A hint is the only answer which I am permitted to make. There were circumstances \u2014 but I think it much safer upon consideration to say as little as possible about an affair so delicate \u2014 so delicate, I repeat, and at the time involving the interests of a third party whose sulphurous resentment I have not the least desire, at this moment, of incurring.\n\nWe were not long after this necessary arrangement in effecting an escape from the dungeons of the sepulchre. The united strength of our resuscitated voices was soon sufficiently apparent. Scissors, the Whig editor, republished a treatise upon \"the nature and origin of subterranean noises.\" A reply \u2014 rejoinder \u2014 confutation \u2014 and justification \u2014 followed in the columns of a Democratic Gazette. It was not until the opening of the vault to decide the controversy, that the appearance of Mr. Windenough and myself proved both parties to have been decidedly in the wrong.\n\nI cannot conclude these details of some very singular passages in a life at all times sufficiently eventful, without again recalling to the attention of the reader the merits of that indiscriminate philosophy which is a sure and ready shield against those shafts of calamity which can neither be seen, felt nor fully understood. It was in the spirit of this wisdom that, among the ancient Hebrews, it was believed the gates of Heaven would be inevitably opened to that sinner, or saint, who, with good lungs and implicit confidence, should vociferate the word \"Amen!\" It was in the spirit of this wisdom that, when a great plague raged at Athens, and every means had been in vain attempted for its removal, Epimenides, as Laertius relates, in his second book, of that philosopher, advised the erection of a shrine and temple \"to the proper God.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Metzengerstein by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'Pestis eram vivus - moriens tua mors ero.' \u2014Martin Luther\n\nHorror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the interior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves \u2014 that is, of their falsity, or of their probability \u2014 I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity \u2014 as La Bruyere says of all our unhappiness \u2014\"vient de ne pouvoir etre seuls.\"\n\nBut there are some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity. They \u2014 the Hungarians \u2014 differed very essentially from their Eastern authorities. For example, \"The soul,\" said the former \u2014 I give the words of an acute and intelligent Parisian \u2014\"ne demeure qu'un seul fois dans un corps sensible: au reste \u2014 un cheval, un chien, un homme meme, n'est que la ressemblance peu tangible de ces animaux.\"\n\nThe families of Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein had been at variance for centuries. Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly. Indeed at the era of this history, it was observed by an old crone of haggard and sinister appearance, that \"fire and water might sooner mingle than a Berlifitzing clasp the hand of a Metzengerstein.\" The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy \u2014\"A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing.\"\n\nTo be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning. But more trivial causes have given rise \u2014 and that no long while ago \u2014 to consequences equally eventful. Besides, the estates, which were contiguous, had long exercised a rival influence in the affairs of a busy government. Moreover, near neighbors are seldom friends; and the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing might look, from their lofty buttresses, into the very windows of the palace Metzengerstein. Least of all had the more than feudal magnificence, thus discovered, a tendency to allay the irritable feelings of the less ancient and less wealthy Berlifitzings. What wonder then, that the words, however silly, of that prediction, should have succeeded in setting and keeping at variance two families already predisposed to quarrel by every instigation of hereditary jealousy? The prophecy seemed to imply \u2014 if it implied anything \u2014 a final triumph on the part of the already more powerful house; and was of course remembered with the more bitter animosity by the weaker and less influential.\n\nWilhelm, Count Berlifitzing, although loftily descended, was, at the epoch of this narrative, an infirm and doting old man, remarkable for nothing but an inordinate and inveterate personal antipathy to the family of his rival, and so passionate a love of horses, and of hunting, that neither bodily infirmity, great age, nor mental incapacity, prevented his daily participation in the dangers of the chase.\n\nFrederick, Baron Metzengerstein, was, on the other hand, not yet of age. His father, the Minister G \u2014 died young. His mother, the Lady Mary, followed him quickly after. Frederick was, at that time, in his fifteenth year. In a city, fifteen years are no long period \u2014 a child may be still a child in his third lustrum: but in a wilderness \u2014 in so magnificent a wilderness as that old principality, fifteen years have a far deeper meaning.\n\nThe beautiful Lady Mary! How could she die? \u2014 and of consumption! But it is a path I have prayed to follow. I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease. How glorious \u2014 to depart in the heyday of the young blood \u2014 the heart of all passion \u2014 the imagination all fire \u2014 amid the remembrances of happier days \u2014 in the fall of the year \u2014 and so be buried up forever in the gorgeous autumnal leaves!\n\nThus died the Lady Mary. The young Baron Frederick stood without a living relative by the coffin of his dead mother. He placed his hand upon her placid forehead. No shudder came over his delicate frame \u2014 no sigh from his flinty bosom. Heartless, self-willed and impetuous from his childhood, he had reached the age of which I speak through a career of unfeeling, wanton, and reckless dissipation; and a barrier had long since arisen in the channel of all holy thoughts and gentle recollections.\n\nFrom some peculiar circumstances attending the administration of his father, the young Baron, at the decease of the former, entered immediately upon his vast possessions. Such estates were seldom held before by a nobleman of Hungary. His castles were without number. The chief in point of splendor and extent was the \"Chateau Metzengerstein.\" The boundary line of his dominions was never clearly defined; but his principal park embraced a circuit of fifty miles.\n\nUpon the succession of a proprietor so young, with a character so well known, to a fortune so unparalleled, little speculation was afloat in regard to his probable course of conduct. And, indeed, for the space of three days, the behavior of the heir out-heroded Herod, and fairly surpassed the expectations of his most enthusiastic admirers. Shameful debaucheries \u2014 flagrant treacheries \u2014 unheard-of atrocities \u2014 gave his trembling vassals quickly to understand that no servile submission on their part \u2014 no punctilios of conscience on his own \u2014 were thenceforward to prove any security against the remorseless fangs of a petty Caligula. On the night of the fourth day, the stables of the castle Berlifitzing were discovered to be on fire; and the unanimous opinion of the neighborhood added the crime of the incendiary to the already hideous list of the Baron's misdemeanors and enormities.\n\nBut during the tumult occasioned by this occurrence, the young nobleman himself sat apparently buried in meditation, in a vast and desolate upper apartment of the family palace of Metzengerstein. The rich although faded tapestry hangings which swung gloomily upon the walls, represented the shadowy and majestic forms of a thousand illustrious ancestors. Here, rich-ermined priests, and pontifical dignitaries, familiarly seated with the autocrat and the sovereign, put a veto on the wishes of a temporal king, or restrained with the fiat of papal supremacy the rebellious sceptre of the Arch-enemy. There, the dark, tall statures of the Princes Metzengerstein \u2014 their muscular war-coursers plunging over the carcasses of fallen foes \u2014 startled the steadiest nerves with their vigorous expression; and here, again, the voluptuous and swan-like figures of the dames of days gone by, floated away in the mazes of an unreal dance to the strains of imaginary melody.\n\nBut as the Baron listened, or affected to listen, to the gradually increasing uproar in the stables of Berlifitzing \u2014 or perhaps pondered upon some more novel, some more decided act of audacity \u2014 his eyes became unwittingly rivetted to the figure of an enormous, and unnaturally colored horse, represented in the tapestry as belonging to a Saracen ancestor of the family of his rival. The horse itself, in the foreground of the design, stood motionless and statue-like \u2014 while farther back, its discomfited rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein.\n\nOn Frederick's lip arose a fiendish expression, as he became aware of the direction which his glance had, without his consciousness, assumed. Yet he did not remove it. On the contrary, he could by no means account for the overwhelming anxiety which appeared falling like a pall upon his senses. It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake. The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell \u2014 the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry. But the tumult without becoming suddenly more violent, with a compulsory exertion he diverted his attention to the glare of ruddy light thrown full by the flaming stables upon the windows of the apartment.\n\nThe action, however, was but momentary, his gaze returned mechanically to the wall. To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his gigantic and disgusting teeth.\n\nStupefied with terror, the young nobleman tottered to the door. As he threw it open, a flash of red light, streaming far into the chamber, flung his shadow with a clear outline against the quivering tapestry, and he shuddered to perceive that shadow \u2014 as he staggered awhile upon the threshold \u2014 assuming the exact position, and precisely filling up the contour, of the relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing.\n\nTo lighten the depression of his spirits, the Baron hurried into the open air. At the principal gate of the palace he encountered three equerries. With much difficulty, and at the imminent peril of their lives, they were restraining the convulsive plunges of a gigantic and fiery-colored horse.\n\n\"Whose horse? Where did you get him?\" demanded the youth, in a querulous and husky tone of voice, as he became instantly aware that the mysterious steed in the tapestried chamber was the very counterpart of the furious animal before his eyes.\n\n\"He is your own property, sire,\" replied one of the equerries, \"at least he is claimed by no other owner. We caught him flying, all smoking and foaming with rage, from the burning stables of the Castle Berlifitzing. Supposing him to have belonged to the old Count's stud of foreign horses, we led him back as an estray. But the grooms there disclaim any title to the creature; which is strange, since he bears evident marks of having made a narrow escape from the flames.\n\n\"The letters W. V. B. are also branded very distinctly on his forehead,\" interrupted a second equerry, \"I supposed them, of course, to be the initials of Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing \u2014 but all at the castle are positive in denying any knowledge of the horse.\"\n\n\"Extremely singular!\" said the young Baron, with a musing air, and apparently unconscious of the meaning of his words. \"He is, as you say, a remarkable horse \u2014 a prodigious horse! although, as you very justly observe, of a suspicious and untractable character, let him be mine, however,\" he added, after a pause, \"perhaps a rider like Frederick of Metzengerstein, may tame even the devil from the stables of Berlifitzing.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken, my lord; the horse, as I think we mentioned, is not from the stables of the Count. If such had been the case, we know our duty better than to bring him into the presence of a noble of your family.\"\n\n\"True!\" observed the Baron, dryly, and at that instant a page of the bedchamber came from the palace with a heightened color, and a precipitate step. He whispered into his master's ear an account of the sudden disappearance of a small portion of the tapestry, in an apartment which he designated; entering, at the same time, into particulars of a minute and circumstantial character; but from the low tone of voice in which these latter were communicated, nothing escaped to gratify the excited curiosity of the equerries.\n\nThe young Frederick, during the conference, seemed agitated by a variety of emotions. He soon, however, recovered his composure, and an expression of determined malignancy settled upon his countenance, as he gave peremptory orders that a certain chamber should be immediately locked up, and the key placed in his own possession.\n\n\"Have you heard of the unhappy death of the old hunter Berlifitzing?\" said one of his vassals to the Baron, as, after the departure of the page, the huge steed which that nobleman had adopted as his own, plunged and curvetted, with redoubled fury, down the long avenue which extended from the chateau to the stables of Metzengerstein.\n\n\"No!\" said the Baron, turning abruptly toward the speaker, \"dead! say you?\"\n\n\"It is indeed true, my lord; and, to a noble of your name, will be, I imagine, no unwelcome intelligence.\"\n\nA rapid smile shot over the countenance of the listener. \"How died he?\"\n\n\"In his rash exertions to rescue a favorite portion of his hunting stud, he has himself perished miserably in the flames.\"\n\n\"I-n-d-e-e-d-!\" ejaculated the Baron, as if slowly and deliberately impressed with the truth of some exciting idea.\n\n\"Indeed;\" repeated the vassal.\n\n\"Shocking!\" said the youth, calmly, and turned quietly into the chateau.\n\nFrom this date a marked alteration took place in the outward demeanor of the dissolute young Baron Frederick Von Metzengerstein. Indeed, his behavior disappointed every expectation, and proved little in accordance with the views of many a manoeuvering mamma; while his habits and manner, still less than formerly, offered any thing congenial with those of the neighboring aristocracy. He was never to be seen beyond the limits of his own domain, and, in this wide and social world, was utterly companionless \u2014 unless, indeed, that unnatural, impetuous, and fiery-colored horse, which he henceforward continually bestrode, had any mysterious right to the title of his friend.\n\nNumerous invitations on the part of the neighborhood for a long time, however, periodically came in. \"Will the Baron honor our festivals with his presence?\" \"Will the Baron join us in a hunting of the boar?\" - \"Metzengerstein does not hunt;\" \"Metzengerstein will not attend,\" were the haughty and laconic answers.\n\nThese repeated insults were not to be endured by an imperious nobility. Such invitations became less cordial \u2014 less frequent \u2014 in time they ceased altogether. The widow of the unfortunate Count Berlifitzing was even heard to express a hope \"that the Baron might be at home when he did not wish to be at home, since he disdained the company of his equals; and ride when he did not wish to ride, since he preferred the society of a horse.\" This to be sure was a very silly explosion of hereditary pique; and merely proved how singularly unmeaning our sayings are apt to become, when we desire to be unusually energetic.\n\nThe charitable, nevertheless, attributed the alteration in the conduct of the young nobleman to the natural sorrow of a son for the untimely loss of his parents \u2014 forgetting, however, his atrocious and reckless behavior during the short period immediately succeeding that bereavement. Some there were, indeed, who suggested a too haughty idea of self-consequence and dignity. Others again (among them may be mentioned the family physician) did not hesitate in speaking of morbid melancholy, and hereditary ill-health; while dark hints, of a more equivocal nature, were current among the multitude.\n\nIndeed, the Baron's perverse attachment to his lately-acquired charger \u2014 an attachment which seemed to attain new strength from every fresh example of the animal's ferocious and demon-like propensities \u2014 at length became, in the eyes of all reasonable men, a hideous and unnatural fervor. In the glare of noon \u2014 at the dead hour of night \u2014 in sickness or in health \u2014 in calm or in tempest \u2014 the young Metzengerstein seemed rivetted to the saddle of that colossal horse, whose intractable audacities so well accorded with his own spirit.\n\nThere were circumstances, moreover, which coupled with late events, gave an unearthly and portentous character to the mania of the rider, and to the capabilities of the steed. The space passed over in a single leap had been accurately measured, and was found to exceed, by an astounding difference, the wildest expectations of the most imaginative. The Baron, besides, had no particular name for the animal, although all the rest in his collection were distinguished by characteristic appellations. His stable, too, was appointed at a distance from the rest; and with regard to grooming and other necessary offices, none but the owner in person had ventured to officiate, or even to enter the enclosure of that particular stall. It was also to be observed, that although the three grooms, who had caught the steed as he fled from the conflagration at Berlifitzing, had succeeded in arresting his course, by means of a chain-bridle and noose \u2014 yet no one of the three could with any certainty affirm that he had, during that dangerous struggle, or at any period thereafter, actually placed his hand upon the body of the beast. Instances of peculiar intelligence in the demeanor of a noble and high-spirited horse are not to be supposed capable of exciting unreasonable attention \u2014 especially among men who, daily trained to the labors of the chase, might appear well acquainted with the sagacity of a horse \u2014 but there were certain circumstances which intruded themselves per force upon the most skeptical and phlegmatic; and it is said there were times when the animal caused the gaping crowd who stood around to recoil in horror from the deep and impressive meaning of his terrible stamp \u2014 times when the young Metzengerstein turned pale and shrunk away from the rapid and searching expression of his earnest and human-looking eye.\n\nAmong all the retinue of the Baron, however, none were found to doubt the ardor of that extraordinary affection which existed on the part of the young nobleman for the fiery qualities of his horse; at least, none but an insignificant and misshapen little page, whose deformities were in everybody's way, and whose opinions were of the least possible importance. He \u2014 if his ideas are worth mentioning at all \u2014 had the effrontery to assert that his master never vaulted into the saddle without an unaccountable and almost imperceptible shudder, and that, upon his return from every long-continued and habitual ride, an expression of triumphant malignity distorted every muscle in his countenance.\n\nOne tempestuous night, Metzengerstein, awaking from a heavy slumber, descended like a maniac from his chamber, and, mounting in hot haste, bounded away into the mazes of the forest. An occurrence so common attracted no particular attention, but his return was looked for with intense anxiety on the part of his domestics, when, after some hours' absence, the stupendous and magnificent battlements of the Chateau Metzengerstein, were discovered crackling and rocking to their very foundation, under the influence of a dense and livid mass of ungovernable fire.\n\nAs the flames, when first seen, had already made so terrible a progress that all efforts to save any portion of the building were evidently futile, the astonished neighborhood stood idly around in silent and pathetic wonder. But a new and fearful object soon rivetted the attention of the multitude, and proved how much more intense is the excitement wrought in the feelings of a crowd by the contemplation of human agony, than that brought about by the most appalling spectacles of inanimate matter.\n\nUp the long avenue of aged oaks which led from the forest to the main entrance of the Chateau Metzengerstein, a steed, bearing an unbonneted and disordered rider, was seen leaping with an impetuosity which outstripped the very Demon of the Tempest, and extorted from every stupefied beholder the ejaculation \u2014\"horrible.\"\n\nThe career of the horseman was indisputably, on his own part, uncontrollable. The agony of his countenance, the convulsive struggle of his frame, gave evidence of superhuman exertion: but no sound, save a solitary shriek, escaped from his lacerated lips, which were bitten through and through in the intensity of terror. One instant, and the clattering of hoofs resounded sharply and shrilly above the roaring of the flames and the shrieking of the winds \u2014 another, and, clearing at a single plunge the gate-way and the moat, the steed bounded far up the tottering staircases of the palace, and, with its rider, disappeared amid the whirlwind of chaotic fire.\n\nThe fury of the tempest immediately died away, and a dead calm sullenly succeeded. A white flame still enveloped the building like a shroud, and, streaming far away into the quiet atmosphere, shot forth a glare of preternatural light; while a cloud of smoke settled heavily over the battlements in the distinct colossal figure of \u2014 a horse.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Duc de l'Omelette by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'And stepped at once into a cooler clime.' \u2014Cowper\n\nKeats fell by a criticism. Who was it died of \"The Andromache\"? Ignoble souls! \u2014 De L'Omelette perished of an ortolan. L'histoire en est breve. Assist me, Spirit of Apicius!\n\nA golden cage bore the little winged wanderer, enamored, melting, indolent, to the Chaussee D'Antin, from its home in far Peru. From its queenly possessor La Bellissima, to the Duc De L'Omelette, six peers of the empire conveyed the happy bird.\n\nThat night the Duc was to sup alone. In the privacy of his bureau he reclined languidly on that ottoman for which he sacrificed his loyalty in outbidding his king \u2014 the notorious ottoman of Cadet.\n\nHe buries his face in the pillow. The clock strikes! Unable to restrain his feelings, his Grace swallows an olive. At this moment the door gently opens to the sound of soft music, and lo! the most delicate of birds is before the most enamored of men! But what inexpressible dismay now overshadows the countenance of the Duc? \u2014\"Horreur! \u2014 chien! \u2014 Baptiste! \u2014 l'oiseau! ah, bon Dieu! cet oiseau modeste que tu as deshabille de ses plumes, et que tu as servi sans papier!\" It is superfluous to say more:\u2014 the Duc expired in a paroxysm of disgust.\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha!\" said his Grace on the third day after his decease.\n\n\"He! he! he!\" replied the Devil faintly, drawing himself up with an air of hauteur.\n\n\"Why, surely you are not serious,\" retorted De L'Omelette. \"I have sinned \u2014 c'est vrai \u2014 but, my good sir, consider! \u2014 you have no actual intention of putting such \u2014 such barbarous threats into execution.\"\n\n\"No what?\" said his majesty \u2014\"come, sir, strip!\"\n\n\"Strip, indeed! very pretty i' faith! no, sir, I shall not strip. Who are you, pray, that I, Duc De L'Omelette, Prince de Foie-Gras, just come of age, author of the 'Mazurkiad,' and Member of the Academy, should divest myself at your bidding of the sweetest pantaloons ever made by Bourdon, the daintiest robe-de-chambre ever put together by Rombert \u2014 to say nothing of the taking my hair out of paper \u2014 not to mention the trouble I should have in drawing off my gloves?\"\n\n\"Who am I? \u2014 ah, true! I am Baal-Zebub, Prince of the Fly. I took thee, just now, from a rose-wood coffin inlaid with ivory. Thou wast curiously scented, and labelled as per invoice. Belial sent thee \u2014 my Inspector of Cemeteries. The pantaloons, which thou sayest were made by Bourdon, are an excellent pair of linen drawers, and thy robe-de-chambre is a shroud of no scanty dimensions.\"\n\n\"Sir!\" replied the Duc, \"I am not to be insulted with impunity! \u2014 Sir! I shall take the earliest opportunity of avenging this insult! \u2014 Sir! you shall hear from me! in the meantime au revoir!\"\u2014 and the Duc was bowing himself out of the Satanic presence, when he was interrupted and brought back by a gentleman in waiting. Hereupon his Grace rubbed his eyes, yawned, shrugged his shoulders, reflected. Having become satisfied of his identity, he took a bird's eye view of his whereabouts.\n\nThe apartment was superb. Even De L'Omelette pronounced it bien comme il faut. It was not its length nor its breadth \u2014 but its height \u2014 ah, that was appalling! \u2014 There was no ceiling \u2014 certainly none \u2014 but a dense whirling mass of fiery-colored clouds. His Grace's brain reeled as he glanced upward. From above, hung a chain of an unknown blood-red metal \u2014 its upper end lost, like the city of Boston, parmi les nues. From its nether extremity swung a large cresset. The Duc knew it to be a ruby; but from it there poured a light so intense, so still, so terrible, Persia never worshipped such \u2014 Gheber never imagined such \u2014 Mussulman never dreamed of such when, drugged with opium, he has tottered to a bed of poppies, his back to the flowers, and his face to the God Apollo. The Duc muttered a slight oath, decidedly approbatory.\n\nThe corners of the room were rounded into niches. Three of these were filled with statues of gigantic proportions. Their beauty was Grecian, their deformity Egyptian, their tout ensemble French. In the fourth niche the statue was veiled; it was not colossal. But then there was a taper ankle, a sandalled foot. De L'Omelette pressed his hand upon his heart, closed his eyes, raised them, and caught his Satanic Majesty \u2014 in a blush.\n\nBut the paintings! \u2014 Kupris! Astarte! Astoreth! \u2014 a thousand and the same! And Rafaelle has beheld them! Yes, Rafaelle has been here, for did he not paint the \u2014-? and was he not consequently damned? The paintings \u2014 the paintings! O luxury! O love! \u2014 who, gazing on those forbidden beauties, shall have eyes for the dainty devices of the golden frames that besprinkled, like stars, the hyacinth and the porphyry walls?\n\nBut the Duc's heart is fainting within him. He is not, however, as you suppose, dizzy with magnificence, nor drunk with the ecstatic breath of those innumerable censers. C'est vrai que de toutes ces choses il a pense beaucoup \u2014 mais! The Duc De L'Omelette is terror-stricken; for, through the lurid vista which a single uncurtained window is affording, lo! gleams the most ghastly of all fires!\n\nLe pauvre Duc! He could not help imagining that the glorious, the voluptuous, the never-dying melodies which pervaded that hall, as they passed filtered and transmuted through the alchemy of the enchanted window-panes, were the wailings and the howlings of the hopeless and the damned! And there, too! \u2014 there! \u2014 upon the ottoman! \u2014 who could he be? \u2014 he, the petitmaitre \u2014 no, the Deity \u2014 who sat as if carved in marble, et qui sourit, with his pale countenance, si amerement?\n\nMais il faut agir \u2014 that is to say, a Frenchman never faints outright. Besides, his Grace hated a scene \u2014 De L'Omelette is himself again. There were some foils upon a table \u2014 some points also. The Duc s'echapper. He measures two points, and, with a grace inimitable, offers his Majesty the choice. Horreur! his Majesty does not fence!\n\nMais il joue! \u2014 how happy a thought! \u2014 but his Grace had always an excellent memory. He had dipped in the \"Diable\" of Abbe Gualtier. Therein it is said \"que le Diable n'ose pas refuser un jeu d'ecarte.\"\n\nBut the chances \u2014 the chances! True \u2014 desperate: but scarcely more desperate than the Duc. Besides, was he not in the secret? \u2014 had he not skimmed over Pere Le Brun? \u2014 was he not a member of the Club Vingt-un? \"Si je perds,\" said he, \"je serai deux fois perdu \u2014 I shall be doubly dammed \u2014 voila tout! (Here his Grace shrugged his shoulders.) Si je gagne, je reviendrai a mes ortolans \u2014 que les cartes soient preparees!\"\n\nHis Grace was all care, all attention \u2014 his Majesty all confidence. A spectator would have thought of Francis and Charles. His Grace thought of his game. His Majesty did not think; he shuffled. The Duc cut.\n\nThe cards were dealt. The trump is turned \u2014 it is \u2014 it is \u2014 the king! No \u2014 it was the queen. His Majesty cursed her masculine habiliments. De L'Omelette placed his hand upon his heart.\n\nThey play. The Duc counts. The hand is out. His Majesty counts heavily, smiles, and is taking wine. The Duc slips a card.\n\n\"C'est a vous a faire,\" said his Majesty, cutting. His Grace bowed, dealt, and arose from the table en presentant le Roi.\n\nHis Majesty looked chagrined.\n\nHad Alexander not been Alexander, he would have been Diogenes; and the Duc assured his antagonist in taking leave, \"que s'il n'eut ete De L'Omelette il n'aurait point d'objection d'etre le Diable.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ MS. Found in a Bottle by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Qui n'a plus qu'un moment a vivre\n\n\u2002N'a plus rien a dissimuler.\n\n\u2014Quinault-Atys\n\nOf my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up. \u2014 Beyond all things, the study of the German moralists gave me great delight; not from any ill-advised admiration of their eloquent madness, but from the ease with which my habits of rigid thought enabled me to detect their falsities. I have often been reproached with the aridity of my genius; a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime; and the Pyrrhonism of my opinions has at all times rendered me notorious. Indeed, a strong relish for physical philosophy has, I fear, tinctured my mind with a very common error of this age \u2014 I mean the habit of referring occurrences, even the least susceptible of such reference, to the principles of that science. Upon the whole, no person could be less liable than myself to be led away from the severe precincts of truth by the ignes fatui of superstition. I have thought proper to premise thus much, lest the incredible tale I have to tell should be considered rather the raving of a crude imagination, than the positive experience of a mind to which the reveries of fancy have been a dead letter and a nullity.\n\nAfter many years spent in foreign travel, I sailed in the year 18 \u2014 from the port of Batavia, in the rich and populous island of Java, on a voyage to the Archipelago of the Sunda islands. I went as passenger \u2014 having no other inducement than a kind of nervous restlessness which haunted me as a fiend.\n\nOur vessel was a beautiful ship of about four hundred tons, copper-fastened, and built at Bombay of Malabar teak. She was freighted with cotton-wool and oil, from the Lachadive islands. We had also on board coir, jaggeree, ghee, cocoa-nuts, and a few cases of opium. The stowage was clumsily done, and the vessel consequently crank.\n\nWe got under way with a mere breath of wind, and for many days stood along the eastern coast of Java, without any other incident to beguile the monotony of our course than the occasional meeting with some of the small grabs of the Archipelago to which we were bound.\n\nOne evening, leaning over the taffrail, I observed a very singular, isolated cloud, to the N.W. It was remarkable, as well for its color, as from its being the first we had seen since our departure from Batavia. I watched it attentively until sunset, when it spread all at once to the eastward and westward, girting in the horizon with a narrow strip of vapor, and looking like a long line of low beach. My notice was soon afterwards attracted by the dusky-red appearance of the moon, and the peculiar character of the sea. The latter was undergoing a rapid change, and the water seemed more than usually transparent. Although I could distinctly see the bottom, yet, heaving the lead, I found the ship in fifteen fathoms. The air now became intolerably hot, and was loaded with spiral exhalations similar to those arising from heat iron. As night came on, every breath of wind died away, an more entire calm it is impossible to conceive. The flame of a candle burned upon the poop without the least perceptible motion, and a long hair, held between the finger and thumb, hung without the possibility of detecting a vibration. However, as the captain said he could perceive no indication of danger, and as we were drifting in bodily to shore, he ordered the sails to be furled, and the anchor let go. No watch was set, and the crew, consisting principally of Malays, stretched themselves deliberately upon deck. I went below \u2014 not without a full presentiment of evil. Indeed, every appearance warranted me in apprehending a Simoom. I told the captain my fears; but he paid no attention to what I said, and left me without deigning to give a reply. My uneasiness, however, prevented me from sleeping, and about midnight I went upon deck. \u2014 As I placed my foot upon the upper step of the companion-ladder, I was startled by a loud, humming noise, like that occasioned by the rapid revolution of a mill-wheel, and before I could ascertain its meaning, I found the ship quivering to its centre. In the next instant, a wilderness of foam hurled us upon our beam-ends, and, rushing over us fore and aft, swept the entire decks from stem to stern.\n\nThe extreme fury of the blast proved, in a great measure, the salvation of the ship. Although completely water-logged, yet, as her masts had gone by the board, she rose, after a minute, heavily from the sea, and, staggering awhile beneath the immense pressure of the tempest, finally righted.\n\nBy what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say. Stunned by the shock of the water, I found myself, upon recovery, jammed in between the stern-post and rudder. With great difficulty I gained my feet, and looking dizzily around, was, at first, struck with the idea of our being among breakers; so terrific, beyond the wildest imagination, was the whirlpool of mountainous and foaming ocean within which we were engulfed. After a while, I heard the voice of an old Swede, who had shipped with us at the moment of our leaving port. I hallooed to him with all my strength, and presently he came reeling aft. We soon discovered that we were the sole survivors of the accident. All on deck, with the exception of ourselves, had been swept overboard; \u2014 the captain and mates must have perished as they slept, for the cabins were deluged with water. Without assistance, we could expect to do little for the security of the ship, and our exertions were at first paralyzed by the momentary expectation of going down. Our cable had, of course, parted like pack-thread, at the first breath of the hurricane, or we should have been instantaneously overwhelmed. We scudded with frightful velocity before the sea, and the water made clear breaches over us. The frame-work of our stern was shattered excessively, and, in almost every respect, we had received considerable injury; but to our extreme Joy we found the pumps unchoked, and that we had made no great shifting of our ballast. The main fury of the blast had already blown over, and we apprehended little danger from the violence of the wind; but we looked forward to its total cessation with dismay; well believing, that, in our shattered condition, we should inevitably perish in the tremendous swell which would ensue. But this very just apprehension seemed by no means likely to be soon verified. For five entire days and nights \u2014 during which our only subsistence was a small quantity of jaggeree, procured with great difficulty from the forecastle \u2014 the hulk flew at a rate defying computation, before rapidly succeeding flaws of wind, which, without equalling the first violence of the Simoom, were still more terrific than any tempest I had before encountered. Our course for the first four days was, with trifling variations, S.E. and by S.; and we must have run down the coast of New Holland. \u2014 On the fifth day the cold became extreme, although the wind had hauled round a point more to the northward. \u2014 The sun arose with a sickly yellow lustre, and clambered a very few degrees above the horizon \u2014 emitting no decisive light. \u2014 There were no clouds apparent, yet the wind was upon the increase, and blew with a fitful and unsteady fury. About noon, as nearly as we could guess, our attention was again arrested by the appearance of the sun. It gave out no light, properly so called, but a dull and sullen glow without reflection, as if all its rays were polarized. Just before sinking within the turgid sea, its central fires suddenly went out, as if hurriedly extinguished by some unaccountable power. It was a dim, sliver-like rim, alone, as it rushed down the unfathomable ocean.\n\nWe waited in vain for the arrival of the sixth day \u2014 that day to me has not arrived \u2014 to the Swede, never did arrive. Thenceforward we were enshrouded in patchy darkness, so that we could not have seen an object at twenty paces from the ship. Eternal night continued to envelop us, all unrelieved by the phosphoric sea-brilliancy to which we had been accustomed in the tropics. We observed too, that, although the tempest continued to rage with unabated violence, there was no longer to be discovered the usual appearance of surf, or foam, which had hitherto attended us. All around were horror, and thick gloom, and a black sweltering desert of ebony. \u2014 Superstitious terror crept by degrees into the spirit of the old Swede, and my own soul was wrapped up in silent wonder. We neglected all care of the ship, as worse than useless, and securing ourselves, as well as possible, to the stump of the mizen-mast, looked out bitterly into the world of ocean. We had no means of calculating time, nor could we form any guess of our situation. We were, however, well aware of having made farther to the southward than any previous navigators, and felt great amazement at not meeting with the usual impediments of ice. In the meantime every moment threatened to be our last \u2014 every mountainous billow hurried to overwhelm us. The swell surpassed anything I had imagined possible, and that we were not instantly buried is a miracle. My companion spoke of the lightness of our cargo, and reminded me of the excellent qualities of our ship; but I could not help feeling the utter hopelessness of hope itself, and prepared myself gloomily for that death which I thought nothing could defer beyond an hour, as, with every knot of way the ship made, the swelling of the black stupendous seas became more dismally appalling. At times we gasped for breath at an elevation beyond the albatross \u2014 at times became dizzy with the velocity of our descent into some watery hell, where the air grew stagnant, and no sound disturbed the slumbers of the kraken.\n\nWe were at the bottom of one of these abysses, when a quick scream from my companion broke fearfully upon the night. \"See! see!\" cried he, shrieking in my ears, \"Almighty God! see! see!\" As he spoke, I became aware of a dull, sullen glare of red light which streamed down the sides of the vast chasm where we lay, and threw a fitful brilliancy upon our deck. Casting my eyes upwards, I beheld a spectacle which froze the current of my blood. At a terrific height directly above us, and upon the very verge of the precipitous descent, hovered a gigantic ship of, perhaps, four thousand tons. Although upreared upon the summit of a wave more than a hundred times her own altitude, her apparent size exceeded that of any ship of the line or East Indiaman in existence. Her huge hull was of a deep dingy black, unrelieved by any of the customary carvings of a ship. A single row of brass cannon protruded from her open ports, and dashed from their polished surfaces the fires of innumerable battle-lanterns, which swung to and fro about her rigging. But what mainly inspired us with horror and astonishment, was that she bore up under a press of sail in the very teeth of that supernatural sea, and of that ungovernable hurricane. When we first discovered her, her bows were alone to be seen, as she rose slowly from the dim and horrible gulf beyond her. For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity, then trembled and tottered, and \u2014 came down.\n\nAt this instant, I know not what sudden self-possession came over my spirit. Staggering as far aft as I could, I awaited fearlessly the ruin that was to overwhelm. Our own vessel was at length ceasing from her struggles, and sinking with her head to the sea. The shock of the descending mass struck her, consequently, in that portion of her frame which was already under water, and the inevitable result was to hurl me, with irresistible violence, upon the rigging of the stranger.\n\nAs I fell, the ship hove in stays, and went about; and to the confusion ensuing I attributed my escape from the notice of the crew. With little difficulty I made my way unperceived to the main hatchway, which was partially open, and soon found an opportunity of secreting myself in the hold. Why I did so I can hardly tell. An indefinite sense of awe, which at first sight of the navigators of the ship had taken hold of my mind, was perhaps the principle of my concealment. I was unwilling to trust myself with a race of people who had offered, to the cursory glance I had taken, so many points of vague novelty, doubt, and apprehension. I therefore thought proper to contrive a hiding-place in the hold. This I did by removing a small portion of the shifting-boards, in such a manner as to afford me a convenient retreat between the huge timbers of the ship.\n\nI had scarcely completed my work, when a footstep in the hold forced me to make use of it. A man passed by my place of concealment with a feeble and unsteady gait. I could not see his face, but had an opportunity of observing his general appearance. There was about it an evidence of great age and infirmity. His knees tottered beneath a load of years, and his entire frame quivered under the burthen. He muttered to himself, in a low broken tone, some words of a language which I could not understand, and groped in a corner among a pile of singular-looking instruments, and decayed charts of navigation. His manner was a wild mixture of the peevishness of second childhood, and the solemn dignity of a God. He at length went on deck, and I saw him no more.\n\nA feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul \u2014 a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of bygone times are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key. To a mind constituted like my own, the latter consideration is an evil. I shall never \u2014 I know that I shall never \u2014 be satisfied with regard to the nature of my conceptions. Yet it is not wonderful that these conceptions are indefinite, since they have their origin in sources so utterly novel. A new sense \u2014 a new entity is added to my soul.\n\nIt is long since I first trod the deck of this terrible ship, and the rays of my destiny are, I think, gathering to a focus. Incomprehensible men! Wrapped up in meditations of a kind which I cannot divine, they pass me by unnoticed. Concealment is utter folly on my part, for the people will not see. It was but just now that I passed directly before the eyes of the mate \u2014 it was no long while ago that I ventured into the captain's own private cabin, and took thence the materials with which I write, and have written. I shall from time to time continue this Journal. It is true that I may not find an opportunity of transmitting it to the world, but I will not fall to make the endeavour. At the last moment I will enclose the MS. in a bottle, and cast it within the sea.\n\nAn incident has occurred which has given me new room for meditation. Are such things the operation of ungoverned Chance? I had ventured upon deck and thrown myself down, without attracting any notice, among a pile of ratlin-stuff and old sails in the bottom of the yawl. While musing upon the singularity of my fate, I unwittingly daubed with a tar-brush the edges of a neatly-folded studding-sail which lay near me on a barrel. The studding-sail is now bent upon the ship, and the thoughtless touches of the brush are spread out into the word DISCOVERY.\n\nI have made many observations lately upon the structure of the vessel. Although well armed, she is not, I think, a ship of war. Her rigging, build, and general equipment, all negative a supposition of this kind. What she is not, I can easily perceive \u2014 what she is I fear it is impossible to say. I know not how it is, but in scrutinizing her strange model and singular cast of spars, her huge size and overgrown suits of canvas, her severely simple bow and antiquated stern, there will occasionally flash across my mind a sensation of familiar things, and there is always mixed up with such indistinct shadows of recollection, an unaccountable memory of old foreign chronicles and ages long ago. I have been looking at the timbers of the ship. She is built of a material to which I am a stranger. There is a peculiar character about the wood which strikes me as rendering it unfit for the purpose to which it has been applied. I mean its extreme porousness, considered independently by the worm-eaten condition which is a consequence of navigation in these seas, and apart from the rottenness attendant upon age. It will appear perhaps an observation somewhat over-curious, but this wood would have every, characteristic of Spanish oak, if Spanish oak were distended by any unnatural means.\n\nIn reading the above sentence a curious apothegm of an old weather-beaten Dutch navigator comes full upon my recollection. \"It is as sure,\" he was wont to say, when any doubt was entertained of his veracity, \"as sure as there is a sea where the ship itself will grow in bulk like the living body of the seaman.\"\n\nAbout an hour ago, I made bold to thrust myself among a group of the crew. They paid me no manner of attention, and, although I stood in the very midst of them all, seemed utterly unconscious of my presence. Like the one I had at first seen in the hold, they all bore about them the marks of a hoary old age. Their knees trembled with infirmity; their shoulders were bent double with decrepitude; their shrivelled skins rattled in the wind; their voices were low, tremulous and broken; their eyes glistened with the rheum of years; and their gray hairs streamed terribly in the tempest. Around them, on every part of the deck, lay scattered mathematical instruments of the most quaint and obsolete construction.\n\nI mentioned some time ago the bending of a studding-sail. From that period the ship, being thrown dead off the wind, has continued her terrific course due south, with every rag of canvas packed upon her, from her trucks to her lower studding-sail booms, and rolling every moment her top-gallant yard-arms into the most appalling hell of water which it can enter into the mind of a man to imagine. I have just left the deck, where I find it impossible to maintain a footing, although the crew seem to experience little inconvenience. It appears to me a miracle of miracles that our enormous bulk is not swallowed up at once and forever. We are surely doomed to hover continually upon the brink of Eternity, without taking a final plunge into the abyss. From billows a thousand times more stupendous than any I have ever seen, we glide away with the facility of the arrowy sea-gull; and the colossal waters rear their heads above us like demons of the deep, but like demons confined to simple threats and forbidden to destroy. I am led to attribute these frequent escapes to the only natural cause which can account for such effect. \u2014 I must suppose the ship to be within the influence of some strong current, or impetuous under-tow.\n\nI have seen the captain face to face, and in his own cabin \u2014 but, as I expected, he paid me no attention. Although in his appearance there is, to a casual observer, nothing which might bespeak him more or less than man-still a feeling of irrepressible reverence and awe mingled with the sensation of wonder with which I regarded him. In stature he is nearly my own height; that is, about five feet eight inches. He is of a well-knit and compact frame of body, neither robust nor remarkably otherwise. But it is the singularity of the expression which reigns upon the face \u2014 it is the intense, the wonderful, the thrilling evidence of old age, so utter, so extreme, which excites within my spirit a sense \u2014 a sentiment ineffable. His forehead, although little wrinkled, seems to bear upon it the stamp of a myriad of years. \u2014 His gray hairs are records of the past, and his grayer eyes are Sybils of the future. The cabin floor was thickly strewn with strange, iron-clasped folios, and mouldering instruments of science, and obsolete long-forgotten charts. His head was bowed down upon his hands, and he pored, with a fiery unquiet eye, over a paper which I took to be a commission, and which, at all events, bore the signature of a monarch. He muttered to himself, as did the first seaman whom I saw in the hold, some low peevish syllables of a foreign tongue, and although the speaker was close at my elbow, his voice seemed to reach my ears from the distance of a mile.\n\nThe ship and all in it are imbued with the spirit of Eld. The crew glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries; their eyes have an eager and uneasy meaning; and when their fingers fall athwart my path in the wild glare of the battle-lanterns, I feel as I have never felt before, although I have been all my life a dealer in antiquities, and have imbibed the shadows of fallen columns at Balbec, and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin.\n\nWhen I look around me I feel ashamed of my former apprehensions. If I trembled at the blast which has hitherto attended us, shall I not stand aghast at a warring of wind and ocean, to convey any idea of which the words tornado and simoom are trivial and ineffective? All in the immediate vicinity of the ship is the blackness of eternal night, and a chaos of foamless water; but, about a league on either side of us, may be seen, indistinctly and at intervals, stupendous ramparts of ice, towering away into the desolate sky, and looking like the walls of the universe.\n\nAs I imagined, the ship proves to be in a current; if that appellation can properly be given to a tide which, howling and shrieking by the white ice, thunders on to the southward with a velocity like the headlong dashing of a cataract.\n\nTo conceive the horror of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge \u2014 some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the southern pole itself. It must be confessed that a supposition apparently so wild has every probability in its favor.\n\nThe crew pace the deck with unquiet and tremulous step; but there is upon their countenances an expression more of the eagerness of hope than of the apathy of despair.\n\nIn the meantime the wind is still in our poop, and, as we carry a crowd of canvas, the ship is at times lifted bodily from out the sea \u2014 Oh, horror upon horror! the ice opens suddenly to the right, and to the left, and we are whirling dizzily, in immense concentric circles, round and round the borders of a gigantic amphitheatre, the summit of whose walls is lost in the darkness and the distance. But little time will be left me to ponder upon my destiny \u2014 the circles rapidly grow small \u2014 we are plunging madly within the grasp of the whirlpool \u2014 and amid a roaring, and bellowing, and thundering of ocean and of tempest, the ship is quivering, oh God! and \u2014 going down.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Assignation (The Visionary) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Stay for me there! I will not fail\n\n\u2003To meet thee in that hollow vale.\n\n\u2014Exequy on the death of his wife, by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester\n\nHill-fated and mysterious man! \u2014 bewildered in the brilliancy of thine own and fallen in the flames of thine own youth! Again in fancy I behold thee! Once more thy form hath risen before me! \u2014 not \u2014 oh not as thou art \u2014 in the cold valley and shadow \u2014 but as thou shouldst be \u2014 squandering away a life of magnificent meditation in that city of dim visions, thine own Venice \u2014 which is a star-beloved Elysium of the sea, and the wide windows of whose Palladian palaces look down with a deep and bitter meaning upon the secrets of her silent waters. Yes! I repeat it-as thou shouldst be. There are surely other worlds than this \u2014 other thoughts than the thoughts of the multitude \u2014 other speculations than the speculations of the sophist. Who then shall call thy conduct into question? who blame thee for thy visionary hours, or denounce those occupations as a wasting away of life, which were but the overflowings of thine everlasting energies?\n\nIt was at Venice, beneath the covered archway there called the Ponte di Sospiri, that I met for the third or fourth time the person of whom I speak. It is with a confused recollection that I bring to mind the circumstances of that meeting. Yet I remember \u2014 aah! how should I forget? \u2014 the deep midnight, the Bridge of Sighs, the beauty of woman, and the Genius of Romance that stalked up and down the narrow canal.\n\nIt was a night of unusual gloom. The great clock of the Piazza had sounded the fifth hour of the Italian evening. The square of the Campanile lay silent and deserted, and the lights in the old Ducal Palace were dying fast away. I was returning home from the Piazetta, by way of the Grand Canal. But as my gondola arrived opposite the mouth of the canal San Marco, a female voice from its recesses broke suddenly upon the night, in one hysterical, and long continued shriek. Startled at the sound, I sprang upon my feet: while the gondolier, letting slip his single oar, lost it in the pitchy darkness beyond a chance of recovery, and we were consequently left to the guidance of the current which here sets from the greater into the smaller channel. Like some huge and sable-feathered condor, we were slowly drifting down towards the Bridge of Sighs, when a thousand flambeaux flashing from the windows, and down the staircases of the Ducal Palace, turned all at once that deep gloom into a livid and preternatural day.\n\nA child, slipping from the arms of its own mother, had fallen from an upper window of the lofty structure into the deep and dim canal. The quiet waters had closed placidly over their victim; and, although my own gondola was the only one in sight, many a stout swimmer, already in the stream, was seeking in vain upon the surface, the treasure which was to be found, alas! only within the abyss. Upon the broad black marble flagstones at the entrance of the palace, and a few steps above the water, stood a figure which none who then saw can have ever since forgotten. It was the Marchesa Aphrodite \u2014 the adoration of all Venice \u2014 the gayest of the gay \u2014 the most lovely where all were beautiful \u2014 but still the young wife of the old and intriguing Mentoni, and the mother of that fair child, her first and only one, who now deep beneath the murky water, was thinking in bitterness of heart upon her sweet caresses, and exhausting its little life in struggles to call upon her name.\n\nShe stood alone. Her small, bare, and silvery feet gleamed in the black mirror of marble beneath her. Her hair, not as yet more than half loosened for the night from its ball-room array, clustered, amid a shower of diamonds, round and round her classical head, in curls like those of the young hyacinth. A snowy-white and gauze-like drapery seemed to be nearly the sole covering to her delicate form; but the mid-summer and midnight air was hot, sullen, and still, and no motion in the statue-like form itself, stirred even the folds of that raiment of very vapor which hung around it as the heavy marble hangs around the Niobe. Yet \u2014 strange to say! \u2014 her large lustrous eyes were not turned downwards upon that grave wherein her brightest hope lay buried \u2014 but riveted in a widely different direction! The prison of the Old Republic is, I think, the stateliest building in all Venice \u2014 but how could that lady gaze so fixedly upon it, when beneath her lay stifling her only child? Yon dark, gloomy niche, too, yawns right opposite her chamber window \u2014 what, then, could there be in its shadows \u2014 in its architecture \u2014 in its ivy-wreathed and solemn cornices \u2014 that the Marchesa di Mentoni had not wondered at a thousand times before? Nonsense! \u2014 Who does not remember that, at such a time as this, the eye, like a shattered mirror, multiplies the images of its sorrow, and sees in innumerable far-off places, the wo which is close at hand?\n\nMany steps above the Marchesa, and within the arch of the water-gate, stood, in full dress, the Satyr-like figure of Mentoni himself. He was occasionally occupied in thrumming a guitar, and seemed ennuye to the very death, as at intervals he gave directions for the recovery of his child. Stupefied and aghast, I had myself no power to move from the upright position I had assumed upon first hearing the shriek, and must have presented to the eyes of the agitated group a spectral and ominous appearance, as with pale countenance and rigid limbs, I floated down among them in that funereal gondola.\n\nAll efforts proved in vain. Many of the most energetic in the search were relaxing their exertions, and yielding to a gloomy sorrow. There seemed but little hope for the child; (how much less than for the mother!) but now, from the interior of that dark niche which has been already mentioned as forming a part of the Old Republican prison, and as fronting the lattice of the Marchesa, a figure muffled in a cloak, stepped out within reach of the light, and, pausing a moment upon the verge of the giddy descent, plunged headlong into the canal. As, in an instant afterwards, he stood with the still living and breathing child within his grasp, upon the marble flagstones by the side of the Marchesa, his cloak, heavy with the drenching water, became unfastened, and, falling in folds about his feet, discovered to the wonder-stricken spectators the graceful person of a very young man, with the sound of whose name the greater part of Europe was then ringing.\n\nNo word spoke the deliverer. But the Marchesa! She will now receive her child \u2014 she will press it to her heart \u2014 she will cling to its little form, and smother it with her caresses. Alas! another's arms have taken it from the stranger \u2014 another's arms have taken it away, and borne it afar off, unnoticed, into the palace! And the Marchesa! Her lip \u2014 her beautiful lip trembles: tears are gathering in her eyes \u2014 those eyes which, like Pliny's acanthus, are \"soft and almost liquid.\" Yes! tears are gathering in those eyes-and see! the entire woman thrills throughout the soul, and the statue has started into life! The pallor of the marble countenance, the swelling of the marble bosom, the very purity of the marble feet, we behold suddenly flushed over with a tide of ungovernable crimson; and a slight shudder quivers about her delicate frame, as a gentle air at Napoli about the rich silver lilies in the grass.\n\nWhy should that lady blush! To this demand there is no answer \u2014 except that, having left, in the eager haste and terror of a mother's heart, the privacy of her own boudoir, she has neglected to enthrall her tiny feet in their slippers, and utterly forgotten to throw over her Venetian shoulders that drapery which is their due. What other possible reason could there have been for her so blushing? \u2014 for the glance of those wild appealing eyes? for the unusual tumult of that throbbing bosom? \u2014 for the convulsive pressure of that trembling hand? \u2014 that hand which fell, as Mentoni turned into the palace, accidentally, upon the hand of the stranger. What reason could there have been for the low \u2014 the singularly low tone of those unmeaning words which the lady uttered hurriedly in bidding him adieu? \"Thou hast conquered \u2014\" she said, or the murmurs of the water deceived me\u2014\"thou hast conquered \u2014 one hour after sunrise \u2014 we shall meet \u2014 so let it be!\"\n\nThe tumult had subsided, the lights had died away within the palace, and the stranger, whom I now recognized, stood alone upon the flags. He shook with inconceivable agitation, and his eye glanced around in search of a gondola. I could not do less than offer him the service of my own; and he accepted the civility. Having obtained an oar at the water-gate, we proceeded together to his residence, while he rapidly recovered his self-possession, and spoke of our former slight acquaintance in terms of great apparent cordiality.\n\nThere are some subjects upon which I take pleasure in being minute. The person of the stranger \u2014 let me call him by this title, who to all the world was still a stranger \u2014 the person of the stranger is one of these subjects. In height he might have been below rather than above the medium size: although there were moments of intense passion when his frame actually expanded and belled the assertion. The light, almost slender symmetry of his figure, promised more of that ready activity which he evinced at the Bridge of Sighs, than of that Herculean strength which he has been known to wield without an effort, upon occasions of more dangerous emergency. With the mouth and chin of a deity \u2014 singular, wild, full, liquid eyes, whose shadows varied from pure hazel to intense and brilliant jet \u2014 and a profusion of curling, black hair, from which a forehead of unusual breadth gleamed forth at intervals all light and ivory \u2014 his were features than which I have seen none more classically regular, except, perhaps, the marble ones of the Emperor Commodus. Yet his countenance was, nevertheless, one of those which all men have seen at some period of their lives, and have never afterwards seen again. It had no peculiar \u2014 it had no settled predominant expression to be fastened upon the memory; a countenance seen and instantly forgotten \u2014 but forgotten with a vague and never-ceasing desire of recalling it to mind. Not that the spirit of each rapid passion failed, at any time, to throw its own distinct image upon the mirror of that face \u2014 but that the mirror, mirror-like, retained no vestige of the passion, when the passion had departed.\n\nUpon leaving him on the night of our adventure, he solicited me, in what I thought an urgent manner, to call upon him very early the next morning. Shortly after sunrise, I found myself accordingly at his Palazzo, one of those huge structures of gloomy, yet fantastic pomp, which tower above the waters of the Grand Canal in the vicinity of the Rialto. I was shown up a broad winding staircase of mosaics, into an apartment whose unparalleled splendor burst through the opening door with an actual glare, making me blind and dizzy with luxuriousness.\n\nI knew my acquaintance to be wealthy. Report had spoken of his possessions in terms which I had even ventured to call terms of ridiculous exaggeration. But as I gazed about me, I could not bring myself to believe that the wealth of any subject in Europe could have supplied the princely magnificence which burned and blazed around.\n\nAlthough, as I say, the sun had arisen, yet the room was still brilliantly lighted up. I judge from this circumstance, as well as from an air of exhaustion in the countenance of my friend, that he had not retired to bed during the whole of the preceding night. In the architecture and embellishments of the chamber, the evident design had been to dazzle and astound. Little attention had been paid to the decora of what is technically called keeping, or to the proprieties of nationality. The eye wandered from object to object, and rested upon none \u2014 neither the grotesques of the Greek painters, nor the sculptures of the best Italian days, nor the huge carvings of untutored Egypt. Rich draperies in every part of the room trembled to the vibration of low, melancholy music, whose origin was not to be discovered. The senses were oppressed by mingled and conflicting perfumes, reeking up from strange convolute censers, together with multitudinous flaring and flickering tongues of emerald and violet fire. The rays of the newly, risen sun poured in upon the whole, through windows formed each of a single pane of crimson-tinted glass. Glancing to and fro, in a thousand reflections, from curtains which rolled from their cornices like cataracts of molten silver, the beams of natural glory mingled at length fitfully with the artificial light, and lay weltering in subdued masses upon a carpet of rich, liquid-looking cloth of Chili gold.\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha! \u2014 ha! ha! ha!\"\u2014 laughed the proprietor, motioning me to a seat as I entered the room, and throwing himself back at full length upon an ottoman. \"I see,\" said he, perceiving that I could not immediately reconcile myself to the bienseance of so singular a welcome \u2014\"I see you are astonished at my apartment \u2014 at my statues \u2014 my pictures \u2014 my originality of conception in architecture and upholstery \u2014 absolutely drunk, eh? with my magnificence? But pardon me, my dear sir, (here his tone of voice dropped to the very spirit of cordiality,) pardon me for my uncharitable laughter. You appeared so utterly astonished. Besides, some things are so completely ludicrous that a man must laugh or die. To die laughing must be the most glorious of all glorious deaths! Sir Thomas More \u2014 a very fine man was Sir Thomas More \u2014 Sir Thomas More died laughing, you remember. Also in the Absurdities of Ravisius Textor, there is a long list of characters who came to the same magnificent end. Do you know, however,\" continued he musingly, \"that at Sparta (which is now Palaeochori,) at Sparta, I say, to the west of the citadel, among a chaos of scarcely visible ruins, is a kind of socle, upon which are still legible the letters 'LASM'. They are undoubtedly part of 'GELASMA'. Now at Sparta were a thousand temples and shrines to a thousand different divinities. How exceedingly strange that the altar of Laughter should have survived all the others! But in the present instance,\" he resumed, with a singular alteration of voice and manner, \"I have no right to be merry at your expense. You might well have been amazed. Europe cannot produce anything so fine as this, my little regal cabinet. My other apartments are by no means of the same order; mere ultras of fashionable insipidity. This is better than fashion \u2014 is it not? Yet this has but to be seen to become the rage \u2014 that is, with those who could afford it at the cost of their entire patrimony. I have guarded, however, against any such profanation. With one exception you are the only human being besides myself and my valet, who has been admitted within the mysteries of these imperial precincts, since they have been bedizened as you see!\"\n\nI bowed in acknowledgment; for the overpowering sense of splendor and perfume, and music, together with the unexpected eccentricity of his address and manner, prevented me from expressing, in words, my appreciation of what I might have construed into a compliment.\n\n\"Here,\" he resumed, arising and leaning on my arm as he sauntered around the apartment, \"here are paintings from the Greeks to Cimabue, and from Cimabue to the present hour. Many are chosen, as you see, with little deference to the opinions of Virtu. They are all, however, fitting tapestry for a chamber such as this. Here too, are some chefs d'oeuvre of the unknown great \u2014 and here unfinished designs by men, celebrated in their day, whose very names the perspicacity of the academies has left to silence and to me. What think you,\" said he, turning abruptly as he spoke \u2014\"what think you of this Madonna della Pieta?\"\n\nIt is Guido's own!\" I said with all the enthusiasm of my nature, for I had been poring intently over its surpassing loveliness. \"It is Guido's own! \u2014 how could you have obtained it? \u2014 she is undoubtedly in painting what the Venus is in sculpture.\"\n\n\"Ha!\" said he thoughtfully, \"the Venus \u2014 the beautiful Venus? \u2014 the Venus of the Medici? \u2014 she of the diminutive head and the gilded hair? Part of the left arm (here his voice dropped so as to be heard with difficulty,) and all the right are restorations, and in the coquetry of that right arm lies, I think, the quintessence of all affectation. Give me the Canova! The Apollo, too! \u2014 is a copy \u2014 there can be no doubt of it \u2014 blind fool that I am, who cannot behold the boasted inspiration of the Apollo! I cannot help \u2014 pity me! \u2014 I cannot help preferring the Antinous. Was it not Socrates who said that the statuary found his statue in the block of marble? Then Michael Angelo was by no means original in his couplet \u2014\n\n\u2003'Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto\n\n\u2003Che tin marmo solo in se non circonscriva.'\"\n\nIt has been, or should be remarked, that, in the manner of the true gentleman, we are always aware of a difference from the bearing of the vulgar, without being at once precisely able to determine in what such difference consists. Allowing the remark to have applied in its full force to the outward demeanor of my acquaintance, I felt it, on that eventful morning, still more fully applicable to his moral temperament and character. Nor can I better define that peculiarity of spirit which seemed to place him so essentially apart from all other human beings, than by calling it a habit of intense and continual thought, pervading even his most trivial actions \u2014 intruding upon his moments of dalliance \u2014 and interweaving itself with his very flashes of merriment \u2014 like adders which writhe from out the eyes of the grinning masks in the cornices around the temples of Persepolis.\n\nI could not help, however, repeatedly observing, through the mingled tone of levity and solemnity with which he rapidly descanted upon matters of little importance, a certain air of trepidation \u2014 a degree of nervous unction in action and in speech \u2014 an unquiet excitability of manner which appeared to me at all times unaccountable, and upon some occasions even filled me with alarm. Frequently, too, pausing in the middle of a sentence whose commencement he had apparently forgotten, he seemed to be listening in the deepest attention, as if either in momentary expectation of a visitor, or to sounds, which must have had existence in his imagination alone.\n\nIt was during one of these reveries or pauses of apparent abstraction, that, in turning over a page of the poet and scholar Politian's beautiful tragedy \"The Orfeo,\" (the first native Italian tragedy,) which lay near me upon an ottoman, I discovered a passage underlined in pencil. It was a passage towards the end of the third act \u2014 a passage of the most heart-stirring excitement \u2014 a passage which, although tainted with impurity, no man shall read without a thrill of novel emotion \u2014 no woman without a sigh. The whole page was blotted with fresh tears, and, upon the opposite interleaf, were the following English lines, written in a hand so very different from the peculiar characters of my acquaintance, that I had some difficulty in recognising it as his own.\n\n\u2003Thou wast that all to me, love,\n\n\u2003For which my soul did pine \u2014\n\n\u2003A green isle in the sea, love,\n\n\u2003A fountain and a shrine,\n\n\u2003All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers;\n\n\u2003And all the flowers were mine.\n\n\u2003Ah, dream too bright to last;\n\n\u2003Ah, starry Hope that didst arise\n\n\u2003But to be overcast!\n\n\u2003A voice from out the Future cries\n\n\u2003\"Onward!\"\u2014 but o'er the Past\n\n\u2003(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies,\n\n\u2003Mute, motionless, aghast!\n\n\u2003For alas! alas! me\n\n\u2003The light of life is o'er.\n\n\u2003\"No more-no more-no more,\"\n\n\u2003(Such language holds the solemn sea\n\n\u2003To the sands upon the shore,)\n\n\u2003Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,\n\n\u2003Or the stricken eagle soar!\n\n\u2003Now all my hours are trances;\n\n\u2003And all my nightly dreams\n\n\u2003Are where the dark eye glances,\n\n\u2003And where thy footstep gleams,\n\n\u2003In what ethereal dances,\n\n\u2003By what Italian streams.\n\n\u2003Alas! for that accursed time\n\n\u2003They bore thee o'er the billow,\n\n\u2003For Love to titled age and crime,\n\n\u2003And an unholy pillow \u2014\n\n\u2003From me, and from our misty clime,\n\n\u2003Where weeps the silver willow!\n\nThat these lines were written in English \u2014 a language with which I had not believed their author acquainted \u2014 afforded me little matter for surprise. I was too well aware of the extent of his acquirements, and of the singular pleasure he took in concealing them from observation, to be astonished at any similar discovery; but the place of date, I must confess, occasioned me no little amazement. It had been originally written London, and afterwards carefully overscored \u2014 not, however, so effectually as to conceal the word from a scrutinizing eye. I say this occasioned me no little amazement; for I well remember that, in a former conversation with a friend, I particularly inquired if he had at any time met in London the Marchesa di Mentoni, (who for some years previous to her marriage had resided in that city,) when his answer, if I mistake not, gave me to understand that he had never visited the metropolis of Great Britain. I might as well here mention, that I have more than once heard, (without of course giving credit to a report involving so many improbabilities,) that the person of whom I speak was not only by birth, but in education, an Englishman.\n\n\"There is one painting,\" said he, without being aware of my notice of the tragedy \u2014\"there is still one painting which you have not seen.\" And throwing aside a drapery, he discovered a full length portrait of the Marchesa Aphrodite.\n\nHuman art could have done no more in the delineation of her superhuman beauty. The same ethereal figure which stood before me the preceding night upon the steps of the Ducal Palace, stood before me once again. But in the expression of the countenance, which was beaming all over with smiles, there still lurked (incomprehensible anomaly!) that fitful stain of melancholy which will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful. Her right arm lay folded over her bosom. With her left she pointed downward to a curiously fashioned vase. One small, fairy foot, alone visible, barely touched the earth \u2014 and, scarcely discernible in the brilliant atmosphere which seemed to encircle and enshrine her loveliness, floated a pair of the most delicately imagined wings. My glance fell from the painting to the figure of my friend, and the vigorous words of Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois quivered instinctively upon my lips:\n\n\u2002\"He is up\n\n\u2002There like a Roman statue! He will stand\n\n\u2002Till Death hath made him marble!\"\n\n\"Come!\" he said at length, turning towards a table of richly enamelled and massive silver, upon which were a few goblets fantastically stained, together with two large Etruscan vases, fashioned in the same extraordinary model as that in the foreground of the portrait, and filled with what I supposed to be Johannisberger. \"Come!\" he said abruptly, \"let us drink! It is early \u2014 but let us drink. It is indeed early,\" he continued, musingly, as a cherub with a heavy golden hammer, made the apartment ring with the first hour after sunrise \u2014\"It is indeed early, but what matters it? let us drink! Let us pour out an offering to yon solemn sun which these gaudy lamps and censers are so eager to subdue!\" And, having made me pledge him in a bumper, he swallowed in rapid succession several goblets of the wine.\n\n\"To dream\", he continued, resuming the tone of his desultory conversation, as he held up to the rich light of a censer one of the magnificent vases \u2014\"to dream has been the business of my life. I have therefore framed for myself, as you see, a bower of dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better? You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments. The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold. Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. Once I was myself a decorist: but that sublimation of folly has palled upon my soul. All this is now the fitter for my purpose. Like these arabesque censers, my spirit is writhing in fire, and the delirium of this scene is fashioning me for the wilder visions of that land of real dreams whither I am now rapidly departing.\" He here paused abruptly, bent his head to his bosom, and seemed to listen to a sound which I could not hear. At length, erecting his frame, he looked upwards and ejaculated the lines of the Bishop of Chichester:\u2014\n\n\u2002Stay for me there! I will not fail\n\n\u2002To meet thee in that hollow vale.\n\nIn the next instant, confessing the power of the wine, he threw himself at full length upon an ottoman.\n\nA quick step was now heard upon the staircase, and a loud knock at the door rapidly succeeded. I was hastening to anticipate a second disturbance, when a page of Mentoni's household burst into the room, and faltered out, in a voice choking with emotion, the incoherent words, \"My mistress! \u2014 my mistress! \u2014 poisoned! \u2014 poisoned! Oh beautiful \u2014 oh beautiful Aphrodite!\"\n\nBewildered, I flew to the ottoman, and endeavored to arouse the sleeper to a sense of the startling intelligence. But his limbs were rigid \u2014 his lips were livid \u2014 his lately beaming eyes were riveted in death. I staggered back toward the table \u2014 my hand fell upon a cracked and blackened goblet \u2014 and a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth flashed suddenly over my soul.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Dicebant mihi sodales,\n\n\u2002si sepulchrum amicae visitarem,\n\n\u2002curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.\n\n\u2014Ebn Zaiat.\n\nMisery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, \u2014 as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow! How is it that from beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? \u2014 from the covenant of peace a simile of sorrow? But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.\n\nMy baptismal name is Egaeus; that of my family I will not mention. Yet there are no towers in the land more time-honored than my gloomy, gray, hereditary halls. Our line has been called a race of visionaries; and in many striking particulars \u2014 in the character of the family mansion \u2014 in the frescos of the chief saloon \u2014 in the tapestries of the dormitories \u2014 in the chiselling of some buttresses in the armory \u2014 but more especially in the gallery of antique paintings \u2014 in the fashion of the library chamber \u2014 and, lastly, in the very peculiar nature of the library's contents, there is more than sufficient evidence to warrant the belief.\n\nThe recollections of my earliest years are connected with that chamber, and with its volumes \u2014 of which latter I will say no more. Here died my mother. Herein was I born. But it is mere idleness to say that I had not lived before \u2014 that the soul has no previous existence. You deny it? \u2014 let us not argue the matter. Convinced myself, I seek not to convince. There is, however, a remembrance of aerial forms \u2014 of spiritual and meaning eyes \u2014 of sounds, musical yet sad \u2014 a remembrance which will not be excluded; a memory like a shadow, vague, variable, indefinite, unsteady; and like a shadow, too, in the impossibility of my getting rid of it while the sunlight of my reason shall exist.\n\nIn that chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy-land \u2014 into a palace of imagination \u2014 into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition \u2014 it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye \u2014 that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as years rolled away, and the noon of manhood found me still in the mansion of my fathers \u2014 it is wonderful what stagnation there fell upon the springs of my life \u2014 wonderful how total an inversion took place in the character of my commonest thought. The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn, \u2014 not the material of my every-day existence-but in very deed that existence utterly and solely in itself.\n\nBerenice and I were cousins, and we grew up together in my paternal halls. Yet differently we grew \u2014 I ill of health, and buried in gloom \u2014 she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers the ramble on the hill-side \u2014 mine the studies of the cloister \u2014 I living within my own heart, and addicted body and soul to the most intense and painful meditation \u2014 she roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path, or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours. Berenice! \u2014 I call upon her name \u2014 Berenice! \u2014 and from the gray ruins of memory a thousand tumultuous recollections are startled at the sound! Ah! vividly is her image before me now, as in the early days of her light-heartedness and joy! Oh! gorgeous yet fantastic beauty! Oh! sylph amid the shrubberies of Arnheim! \u2014 Oh! Naiad among its fountains! \u2014 and then \u2014 then all is mystery and terror, and a tale which should not be told. Disease \u2014 a fatal disease \u2014 fell like the simoom upon her frame, and, even while I gazed upon her, the spirit of change swept, over her, pervading her mind, her habits, and her character, and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible, disturbing even the identity of her person! Alas! the destroyer came and went, and the victim \u2014 where was she, I knew her not \u2014 or knew her no longer as Berenice.\n\nAmong the numerous train of maladies superinduced by that fatal and primary one which effected a revolution of so horrible a kind in the moral and physical being of my cousin, may be mentioned as the most distressing and obstinate in its nature, a species of epilepsy not unfrequently terminating in trance itself \u2014 trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution, and from which her manner of recovery was in most instances, startlingly abrupt. In the mean time my own disease \u2014 for I have been told that I should call it by no other appelation \u2014 my own disease, then, grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form \u2014 hourly and momently gaining vigor \u2014 and at length obtaining over me the most incomprehensible ascendancy. This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive. It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe.\n\nTo muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device on the margin, or in the topography of a book; to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day, in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the door; to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire; to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower; to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence, by means of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in; \u2014 such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to anything like analysis or explanation.\n\nYet let me not be misapprehended. \u2014 The undue, earnest, and morbid attention thus excited by objects in their own nature frivolous, must not be confounded in character with that ruminating propensity common to all mankind, and more especially indulged in by persons of ardent imagination. It was not even, as might be at first supposed, an extreme condition or exaggeration of such propensity, but primarily and essentially distinct and different. In the one instance, the dreamer, or enthusiast, being interested by an object usually not frivolous, imperceptibly loses sight of this object in a wilderness of deductions and suggestions issuing therefrom, until, at the conclusion of a day dream often replete with luxury, he finds the incitamentum or first cause of his musings entirely vanished and forgotten. In my case the primary object was invariably frivolous, although assuming, through the medium of my distempered vision, a refracted and unreal importance. Few deductions, if any, were made; and those few pertinaciously returning in upon the original object as a centre. The meditations were never pleasurable; and, at the termination of the reverie, the first cause, so far from being out of sight, had attained that supernaturally exaggerated interest which was the prevailing feature of the disease. In a word, the powers of mind more particularly exercised were, with me, as I have said before, the attentive, and are, with the day-dreamer, the speculative.\n\nMy books, at this epoch, if they did not actually serve to irritate the disorder, partook, it will be perceived, largely, in their imaginative and inconsequential nature, of the characteristic qualities of the disorder itself. I well remember, among others, the treatise of the noble Italian Coelius Secundus Curio \"de Amplitudine Beati Regni dei\"; St. Austin's great work, the \"City of God\"; and Tertullian \"de Carne Christi,\" in which the paradoxical sentence \"Mortuus est Dei filius; credible est quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est\" occupied my undivided time, for many weeks of laborious and fruitless investigation.\n\nThus it will appear that, shaken from its balance only by trivial things, my reason bore resemblance to that ocean-crag spoken of by Ptolemy Hephestion, which steadily resisting the attacks of human violence, and the fiercer fury of the waters and the winds, trembled only to the touch of the flower called Asphodel. And although, to a careless thinker, it might appear a matter beyond doubt, that the alteration produced by her unhappy malady, in the moral condition of Berenice, would afford me many objects for the exercise of that intense and abnormal meditation whose nature I have been at some trouble in explaining, yet such was not in any degree the case. In the lucid intervals of my infirmity, her calamity, indeed, gave me pain, and, taking deeply to heart that total wreck of her fair and gentle life, I did not fall to ponder frequently and bitterly upon the wonder-working means by which so strange a revolution had been so suddenly brought to pass. But these reflections partook not of the idiosyncrasy of my disease, and were such as would have occurred, under similar circumstances, to the ordinary mass of mankind. True to its own character, my disorder revelled in the less important but more startling changes wrought in the physical frame of Berenice \u2014 in the singular and most appalling distortion of her personal identity.\n\nDuring the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me, had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the gray of the early morning \u2014 among the trellissed shadows of the forest at noonday \u2014 and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her \u2014 not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream \u2014 not as a being of the earth, earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being-not as a thing to admire, but to analyze \u2014 not as an object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation. And now \u2014 now I shuddered in her presence, and grew pale at her approach; yet bitterly lamenting her fallen and desolate condition, I called to mind that she had loved me long, and, in an evil moment, I spoke to her of marriage.\n\nAnd at length the period of our nuptials was approaching, when, upon an afternoon in the winter of the year, \u2014 one of those unseasonably warm, calm, and misty days which are the nurse of the beautiful Halcyon, \u2014 I sat, (and sat, as I thought, alone,) in the inner apartment of the library. But uplifting my eyes I saw that Berenice stood before me.\n\nWas it my own excited imagination \u2014 or the misty influence of the atmosphere \u2014 or the uncertain twilight of the chamber \u2014 or the gray draperies which fell around her figure \u2014 that caused in it so vacillating and indistinct an outline? I could not tell. She spoke no word, I\u2014 not for worlds could I have uttered a syllable. An icy chill ran through my frame; a sense of insufferable anxiety oppressed me; a consuming curiosity pervaded my soul; and sinking back upon the chair, I remained for some time breathless and motionless, with my eyes riveted upon her person. Alas! its emaciation was excessive, and not one vestige of the former being, lurked in any single line of the contour. My burning glances at length fell upon the face.\n\nThe forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once jetty hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with innumerable ringlets now of a vivid yellow, and Jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupil-less, and I shrank involuntarily from their glassy stare to the contemplation of the thin and shrunken lips. They parted; and in a smile of peculiar meaning, the teeth of the changed Berenice disclosed themselves slowly to my view. Would to God that I had never beheld them, or that, having done so, I had died!\n\nThe shutting of a door disturbed me, and, looking up, I found that my cousin had departed from the chamber. But from the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth. Not a speck on their surface \u2014 not a shade on their enamel \u2014 not an indenture in their edges \u2014 but what that period of her smile had sufficed to brand in upon my memory. I saw them now even more unequivocally than I beheld them then. The teeth! \u2014 the teeth! \u2014 they were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development. Then came the full fury of my monomania, and I struggled in vain against its strange and irresistible influence. In the multiplied objects of the external world I had no thoughts but for the teeth. For these I longed with a phrenzied desire. All other matters and all different interests became absorbed in their single contemplation. They \u2014 they alone were present to the mental eye, and they, in their sole individuality, became the essence of my mental life. I held them in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their nature. I shuddered as I assigned to them in imagination a sensitive and sentient power, and even when unassisted by the lips, a capability of moral expression. Of Mad'selle Salle it has been well said, \"que tous ses pas etaient des sentiments,\" and of Berenice I more seriously believed que toutes ses dents etaient des idees. Des idees! \u2014 ah here was the idiotic thought that destroyed me! Des idees! \u2014 ah therefore it was that I coveted them so madly! I felt that their possession could alone ever restore me to peace, in giving me back to reason.\n\nAnd the evening closed in upon me thus-and then the darkness came, and tarried, and went \u2014 and the day again dawned \u2014 and the mists of a second night were now gathering around \u2014 and still I sat motionless in that solitary room; and still I sat buried in meditation, and still the phantasma of the teeth maintained its terrible ascendancy as, with the most vivid hideous distinctness, it floated about amid the changing lights and shadows of the chamber. At length there broke in upon my dreams a cry as of horror and dismay; and thereunto, after a pause, succeeded the sound of troubled voices, intermingled with many low moanings of sorrow, or of pain. I arose from my seat and, throwing open one of the doors of the library, saw standing out in the antechamber a servant maiden, all in tears, who told me that Berenice was \u2014 no more. She had been seized with epilepsy in the early morning, and now, at the closing in of the night, the grave was ready for its tenant, and all the preparations for the burial were completed.\n\nI found myself sitting in the library, and again sitting there alone. It seemed that I had newly awakened from a confused and exciting dream. I knew that it was now midnight, and I was well aware that since the setting of the sun Berenice had been interred. But of that dreary period which intervened I had no positive \u2014 at least no definite comprehension. Yet its memory was replete with horror \u2014 horror more horrible from being vague, and terror more terrible from ambiguity. It was a fearful page in the record my existence, written all over with dim, and hideous, and unintelligible recollections. I strived to decypher them, but in vain; while ever and anon, like the spirit of a departed sound, the shrill and piercing shriek of a female voice seemed to be ringing in my ears. I had done a deed \u2014 what was it? I asked myself the question aloud, and the whispering echoes of the chamber answered me, \"what was it?\"\n\nOn the table beside me burned a lamp, and near it lay a little box. It was of no remarkable character, and I had seen it frequently before, for it was the property of the family physician; but how came it there, upon my table, and why did I shudder in regarding it? These things were in no manner to be accounted for, and my eyes at length dropped to the open pages of a book, and to a sentence underscored therein. The words were the singular but simple ones of the poet Ebn Zaiat, \"Dicebant mihi sodales si sepulchrum amicae visitarem, curas meas aliquantulum fore levatas.\" Why then, as I perused them, did the hairs of my head erect themselves on end, and the blood of my body become congealed within my veins?\n\nThere came a light tap at the library door, and pale as the tenant of a tomb, a menial entered upon tiptoe. His looks were wild with terror, and he spoke to me in a voice tremulous, husky, and very low. What said he? \u2014 some broken sentences I heard. He told of a wild cry disturbing the silence of the night \u2014 of the gathering together of the household-of a search in the direction of the sound; \u2014 and then his tones grew thrillingly distinct as he whispered me of a violated grave \u2014 of a disfigured body enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!\n\nHe pointed to garments;-they were muddy and clotted with gore. I spoke not, and he took me gently by the hand; \u2014 it was indented with the impress of human nails. He directed my attention to some object against the wall; \u2014 I looked at it for some minutes; \u2014 it was a spade. With a shriek I bounded to the table, and grasped the box that lay upon it. But I could not force it open; and in my tremor it slipped from my hands, and fell heavily, and burst into pieces; and from it, with a rattling sound, there rolled out some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ King Pest by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002A Tale Containing an Allegory\n\n\u2002The gods do bear and will allow in kings\n\n\u2002The things which they abhor in rascal routes.\n\n\u2014Buckhurst's Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex\n\nAbout twelve o'clock, one night in the month of October, and during the chivalrous reign of the third Edward, two seamen belonging to the crew of the \"Free and Easy,\" a trading schooner plying between Sluys and the Thames, and then at anchor in that river, were much astonished to find themselves seated in the tap-room of an ale-house in the parish of St. Andrews, London \u2014 which ale-house bore for sign the portraiture of a \"Jolly Tar.\"\n\nThe room, although ill-contrived, smoke-blackened, low-pitched, and in every other respect agreeing with the general character of such places at the period \u2014 was, nevertheless, in the opinion of the grotesque groups scattered here and there within it, sufficiently well adapted to its purpose.\n\nOf these groups our two seamen formed, I think, the most interesting, if not the most conspicuous.\n\nThe one who appeared to be the elder, and whom his companion addressed by the characteristic appellation of \"Legs,\" was at the same time much the taller of the two. He might have measured six feet and a half, and an habitual stoop in the shoulders seemed to have been the necessary consequence of an altitude so enormous. \u2014 Superfluities in height were, however, more than accounted for by deficiencies in other respects. He was exceedingly thin; and might, as his associates asserted, have answered, when drunk, for a pennant at the mast-head, or, when sober, have served for a jib-boom. But these jests, and others of a similar nature, had evidently produced, at no time, any effect upon the cachinnatory muscles of the tar. With high cheek-bones, a large hawk-nose, retreating chin, fallen under-jaw, and huge protruding white eyes, the expression of his countenance, although tinged with a species of dogged indifference to matters and things in general, was not the less utterly solemn and serious beyond all attempts at imitation or description.\n\nThe younger seaman was, in all outward appearance, the converse of his companion. His stature could not have exceeded four feet. A pair of stumpy bow-legs supported his squat, unwieldy figure, while his unusually short and thick arms, with no ordinary fists at their extremities, swung off dangling from his sides like the fins of a sea-turtle. Small eyes, of no particular color, twinkled far back in his head. His nose remained buried in the mass of flesh which enveloped his round, full, and purple face; and his thick upper-lip rested upon the still thicker one beneath with an air of complacent self-satisfaction, much heightened by the owner's habit of licking them at intervals. He evidently regarded his tall shipmate with a feeling half-wondrous, half-quizzical; and stared up occasionally in his face as the red setting sun stares up at the crags of Ben Nevis.\n\nVarious and eventful, however, had been the peregrinations of the worthy couple in and about the different tap-houses of the neighbourhood during the earlier hours of the night. Funds even the most ample, are not always everlasting: and it was with empty pockets our friends had ventured upon the present hostelrie.\n\nAt the precise period, then, when this history properly commences, Legs, and his fellow Hugh Tarpaulin, sat, each with both elbows resting upon the large oaken table in the middle of the floor, and with a hand upon either cheek. They were eyeing, from behind a huge flagon of unpaid-for \"humming-stuff,\" the portentous words, \"No Chalk,\" which to their indignation and astonishment were scored over the doorway by means of that very mineral whose presence they purported to deny. Not that the gift of decyphering written characters \u2014 a gift among the commonalty of that day considered little less cabalistical than the art of inditing \u2014 could, in strict justice, have been laid to the charge of either disciple of the sea; but there was, to say the truth, a certain twist in the formation of the letters \u2014 an indescribable lee-lurch about the whole \u2014-which foreboded, in the opinion of both seamen, a long run of dirty weather; and determined them at once, in the allegorical words of Legs himself, to \"pump ship, clew up all sail, and scud before the wind.\"\n\nHaving accordingly disposed of what remained of the ale, and looped up the points of their short doublets, they finally made a bolt for the street. Although Tarpaulin rolled twice into the fire-place, mistaking it for the door, yet their escape was at length happily effected \u2014 and half after twelve o'clock found our heroes ripe for mischief, and running for life down a dark alley in the direction of St. Andrew's Stair, hotly pursued by the landlady of the \"Jolly Tar.\"\n\nAt the epoch of this eventful tale, and periodically, for many years before and after, all England, but more especially the metropolis, resounded with the fearful cry of \"Plague!\" The city was in a great measure depopulated \u2014 and in those horrible regions, in the vicinity of the Thames, where amid the dark, narrow, and filthy lanes and alleys, the Demon of Disease was supposed to have had his nativity, Awe, Terror, and Superstition were alone to be found stalking abroad.\n\nBy authority of the king such districts were placed under ban, and all persons forbidden, under pain of death, to intrude upon their dismal solitude. Yet neither the mandate of the monarch, nor the huge barriers erected at the entrances of the streets, nor the prospect of that loathsome death which, with almost absolute certainty, overwhelmed the wretch whom no peril could deter from the adventure, prevented the unfurnished and untenanted dwellings from being stripped, by the hand of nightly rapine, of every article, such as iron, brass, or lead-work, which could in any manner be turned to a profitable account.\n\nAbove all, it was usually found, upon the annual winter opening of the barriers, that locks, bolts, and secret cellars, had proved but slender protection to those rich stores of wines and liquors which, in consideration of the risk and trouble of removal, many of the numerous dealers having shops in the neighbourhood had consented to trust, during the period of exile, to so insufficient a security.\n\nBut there were very few of the terror-stricken people who attributed these doings to the agency of human hands. Pest-spirits, plague-goblins, and fever-demons, were the popular imps of mischief; and tales so blood-chilling were hourly told, that the whole mass of forbidden buildings was, at length, enveloped in terror as in a shroud, and the plunderer himself was often scared away by the horrors his own depreciations had created; leaving the entire vast circuit of prohibited district to gloom, silence, pestilence, and death.\n\nIt was by one of the terrific barriers already mentioned, and which indicated the region beyond to be under the Pest-ban, that, in scrambling down an alley, Legs and the worthy Hugh Tarpaulin found their progress suddenly impeded. To return was out of the question, and no time was to be lost, as their pursuers were close upon their heels. With thorough-bred seamen to clamber up the roughly fashioned plank-work was a trifle; and, maddened with the twofold excitement of exercise and liquor, they leaped unhesitatingly down within the enclosure, and holding on their drunken course with shouts and yellings, were soon bewildered in its noisome and intricate recesses.\n\nHad they not, indeed, been intoxicated beyond moral sense, their reeling footsteps must have been palsied by the horrors of their situation. The air was cold and misty. The paving-stones, loosened from their beds, lay in wild disorder amid the tall, rank grass, which sprang up around the feet and ankles. Fallen houses choked up the streets. The most fetid and poisonous smells everywhere prevailed; \u2014 and by the aid of that ghastly light which, even at midnight, never fails to emanate from a vapory and pestilential at atmosphere, might be discerned lying in the by-paths and alleys, or rotting in the windowless habitations, the carcass of many a nocturnal plunderer arrested by the hand of the plague in the very perpetration of his robbery.\n\n\u2014 But it lay not in the power of images, or sensations, or impediments such as these, to stay the course of men who, naturally brave, and at that time especially, brimful of courage and of \"humming-stuff!\" would have reeled, as straight as their condition might have permitted, undauntedly into the very jaws of Death. Onward \u2014 still onward stalked the grim Legs, making the desolate solemnity echo and re-echo with yells like the terrific war-whoop of the Indian: and onward, still onward rolled the dumpy Tarpaulin, hanging on to the doublet of his more active companion, and far surpassing the latter's most strenuous exertions in the way of vocal music, by bull-roarings in basso, from the profundity of his stentorian lungs.\n\nThey had now evidently reached the strong hold of the pestilence. Their way at every step or plunge grew more noisome and more horrible \u2014 the paths more narrow and more intricate. Huge stones and beams falling momently from the decaying roofs above them, gave evidence, by their sullen and heavy descent, of the vast height of the surrounding houses; and while actual exertion became necessary to force a passage through frequent heaps of rubbish, it was by no means seldom that the hand fell upon a skeleton or rested upon a more fleshly corpse.\n\nSuddenly, as the seamen stumbled against the entrance of a tall and ghastly-looking building, a yell more than usually shrill from the throat of the excited Legs, was replied to from within, in a rapid succession of wild, laughter-like, and fiendish shrieks. Nothing daunted at sounds which, of such a nature, at such a time, and in such a place, might have curdled the very blood in hearts less irrevocably on fire, the drunken couple rushed headlong against the door, burst it open, and staggered into the midst of things with a volley of curses.\n\nThe room within which they found themselves proved to be the shop of an undertaker; but an open trap-door, in a corner of the floor near the entrance, looked down upon a long range of wine-cellars, whose depths the occasional sound of bursting bottles proclaimed to be well stored with their appropriate contents. In the middle of the room stood a table \u2014 in the centre of which again arose a huge tub of what appeared to be punch. Bottles of various wines and cordials, together with jugs, pitchers, and flagons of every shape and quality, were scattered profusely upon the board. Around it, upon coffin-tressels, was seated a company of six. This company I will endeavor to delineate one by one.\n\nFronting the entrance, and elevated a little above his companions, sat a personage who appeared to be the president of the table. His stature was gaunt and tall, and Legs was confounded to behold in him a figure more emaciated than himself. His face was as yellow as saffron \u2014 but no feature excepting one alone, was sufficiently marked to merit a particular description. This one consisted in a forehead so unusually and hideously lofty, as to have the appearance of a bonnet or crown of flesh superadded upon the natural head. His mouth was puckered and dimpled into an expression of ghastly affability, and his eyes, as indeed the eyes of all at table, were glazed over with the fumes of intoxication. This gentleman was clothed from head to foot in a richly-embroidered black silk-velvet pall, wrapped negligently around his form after the fashion of a Spanish cloak. \u2014 His head was stuck full of sable hearse-plumes, which he nodded to and fro with a jaunty and knowing air; and, in his right hand, he held a huge human thigh-bone, with which he appeared to have been just knocking down some member of the company for a song.\n\nOpposite him, and with her back to the door, was a lady of no whit the less extraordinary character. Although quite as tall as the person just described, she had no right to complain of his unnatural emaciation. She was evidently in the last stage of a dropsy; and her figure resembled nearly that of the huge puncheon of October beer which stood, with the head driven in, close by her side, in a corner of the chamber. Her face was exceedingly round, red, and full; and the same peculiarity, or rather want of peculiarity, attached itself to her countenance, which I before mentioned in the case of the president \u2014 that is to say, only one feature of her face was sufficiently distinguished to need a separate characterization: indeed the acute Tarpaulin immediately observed that the same remark might have applied to each individual person of the party; every one of whom seemed to possess a monopoly of some particular portion of physiognomy. With the lady in question this portion proved to be the mouth. Commencing at the right ear, it swept with a terrific chasm to the left \u2014 the short pendants which she wore in either auricle continually bobbing into the aperture. She made, however, every exertion to keep her mouth closed and look dignified, in a dress consisting of a newly starched and ironed shroud coming up close under her chin, with a crimpled ruffle of cambric muslin.\n\nAt her right hand sat a diminutive young lady whom she appeared to patronise. This delicate little creature, in the trembling of her wasted fingers, in the livid hue of her lips, and in the slight hectic spot which tinged her otherwise leaden complexion, gave evident indications of a galloping consumption. An air of gave extreme haut ton, however, pervaded her whole appearance; she wore in a graceful and degage manner, a large and beautiful winding-sheet of the finest India lawn; her hair hung in ringlets over her neck; a soft smile played about her mouth; but her nose, extremely long, thin, sinuous, flexible and pimpled, hung down far below her under lip, and in spite of the delicate manner in which she now and then moved it to one side or the other with her tongue, gave to her countenance a somewhat equivocal expression.\n\nOver against her, and upon the left of the dropsical lady, was seated a little puffy, wheezing, and gouty old man, whose cheeks reposed upon the shoulders of their owner, like two huge bladders of Oporto wine. With his arms folded, and with one bandaged leg deposited upon the table, he seemed to think himself entitled to some consideration. He evidently prided himself much upon every inch of his personal appearance, but took more especial delight in calling attention to his gaudy-colored surtout. This, to say the truth, must have cost him no little money, and was made to fit him exceedingly well \u2014 being fashioned from one of the curiously embroidered silken covers appertaining to those glorious escutcheons which, in England and elsewhere, are customarily hung up, in some conspicuous place, upon the dwellings of departed aristocracy.\n\nNext to him, and at the right hand of the president, was a gentleman in long white hose and cotton drawers. His frame shook, in a ridiculous manner, with a fit of what Tarpaulin called \"the horrors.\" His jaws, which had been newly shaved, were tightly tied up by a bandage of muslin; and his arms being fastened in a similar way at the wrists, I I prevented him from helping himself too freely to the liquors upon the table; a precaution rendered necessary, in the opinion of Legs, by the peculiarly sottish and wine-bibbing cast of his visage. A pair of prodigious ears, nevertheless, which it was no doubt found impossible to confine, towered away into the atmosphere of the apartment, and were occasionally pricked up in a spasm, at the sound of the drawing of a cork.\n\nFronting him, sixthly and lastly, was situated a singularly stiff-looking personage, who, being afflicted with paralysis, must, to speak seriously, have felt very ill at ease in his unaccommodating habiliments. He was habited, somewhat uniquely, in a new and handsome mahogany coffin. Its top or head-piece pressed upon the skull of the wearer, and extended over it in the fashion of a hood, giving to the entire face an air of indescribable interest. Arm-holes had been cut in the sides, for the sake not more of elegance than of convenience; but the dress, nevertheless, prevented its proprietor from sitting as erect as his associates; and as he lay reclining against his tressel, at an angle of forty-five degrees, a pair of huge goggle eyes rolled up their awful whites towards the celling in absolute amazement at their own enormity.\n\nBefore each of the party lay a portion of a skull, which was used as a drinking cup. Overhead was suspended a human skeleton, by means of a rope tied round one of the legs and fastened to a ring in the ceiling. The other limb, confined by no such fetter, stuck off from the body at right angles, causing the whole loose and rattling frame to dangle and twirl about at the caprice of every occasional puff of wind which found its way into the apartment. In the cranium of this hideous thing lay quantity of ignited charcoal, which threw a fitful but vivid light over the entire scene; while coffins, and other wares appertaining to the shop of an undertaker, were piled high up around the room, and against the windows, preventing any ray from escaping into the street.\n\nAt sight of this extraordinary assembly, and of their still more extraordinary paraphernalia, our two seamen did not conduct themselves with that degree of decorum which might have been expected. Legs, leaning against the wall near which he happened to be standing, dropped his lower jaw still lower than usual, and spread open his eyes to their fullest extent: while Hugh Tarpaulin, stooping down so as to bring his nose upon a level with the table, and spreading out a palm upon either knee, burst into a long, loud, and obstreperous roar of very ill-timed and immoderate laughter.\n\nWithout, however, taking offence at behaviour so excessively rude, the tall president smiled very graciously upon the intruders \u2014 nodded to them in a dignified manner with his head of sable plumes \u2014 and, arising, took each by an arm, and led him to a seat which some others of the company had placed in the meantime for his accommodation. Legs to all this offered not the slightest resistance, but sat down as he was directed; while tile gallant Hugh, removing his coffin tressel from its station near the head of the table, to the vicinity of the little consumptive lady in the winding sheet, plumped down by her side in high glee, and pouring out a skull of red wine, quaffed it to their better acquaintance. But at this presumption the stiff gentleman in the coffin seemed exceedingly nettled; and serious consequences might have ensued, had not the president, rapping upon the table with his truncheon, diverted the attention of all present to the following speech:\n\n\"It becomes our duty upon the present happy occasion\"\u2014\n\n\"Avast there!\" interrupted Legs, looking very serious, \"avast there a bit, I say, and tell us who the devil ye all are, and what business ye have here, rigged off like the foul fiends, and swilling the snug blue ruin stowed away for the winter by my honest shipmate, Will Wimble the undertaker!\"\n\nAt this unpardonable piece of ill-breeding, all the original company half started to their feet, and uttered the same rapid succession of wild fiendish shrieks which had before caught the attention of the seamen. The president, however, was the first to recover his composure, and at length, turning to Legs with great dignity, recommenced:\n\n\"Most willingly will we gratify any reasonable curiosity on the part of guests so illustrious, unbidden though they be. Know then that in these dominions I am monarch, and here rule with undivided empire under the title of 'King Pest the First.'\n\n\"This apartment, which you no doubt profanely suppose to be the shop of Will Wimble the undertaker \u2014 a man whom we know not, and whose plebeian appellation has never before this night thwarted our royal ears \u2014 this apartment, I say, is the Dais-Chamber of our Palace, devoted to the councils of our kingdom, and to other sacred and lofty purposes.\n\n\"The noble lady who sits opposite is Queen Pest, our Serene Consort. The other exalted personages whom you behold are all of our family, and wear the insignia of the blood royal under the respective titles of 'His Grace the Arch Duke Pest-Iferous'\u2014'His Grace the Duke PestIlential'\u2014'His Grace the Duke Tem-Pest'\u2014 and 'Her Serene Highness the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.'\n\n\"As regards,\" continued he, \"your demand of the business upon which we sit here in council, we might be pardoned for replying that it concerns, and concerns alone, our own private and regal interest, and is in no manner important to any other than ourself. But in consideration of those rights to which as guests and strangers you may feel yourselves entitled, we will furthermore explain that we are here this night, prepared by deep research and accurate investigation, to examine, analyze, and thoroughly determine the indefinable spirit \u2014 the incomprehensible qualities and nature \u2014 of those inestimable treasures of the palate, the wines, ales, and liqueurs of this goodly metropolis: by so doing to advance not more our own designs than the true welfare of that unearthly sovereign whose reign is over us all, whose dominions are unlimited, and whose name is 'Death.'\n\n\"Whose name is Davy Jones!\" ejaculated Tarpaulin, helping the lady by his side to a skull of liqueur, and pouring out a second for himself.\n\n\"Profane varlet!\" said the president, now turning his attention to the worthy Hugh, \"profane and execrable wretch! \u2014 we have said, that in consideration of those rights which, even in thy filthy person, we feel no inclination to violate, we have condescended to make reply to thy rude and unseasonable inquiries. We nevertheless, for your unhallowed intrusion upon our councils, believe it our duty to mulct thee and thy companion in each a gallon of Black Strap \u2014 having imbibed which to the prosperity of our kingdom \u2014 at a single draught \u2014 and upon your bended knees \u2014 ye shall be forthwith free either to proceed upon your way, or remain and be admitted to the privileges of our table, according to your respective and individual pleasures.\"\n\n\"It would be a matter of utter impossibility,\" replied Legs, whom the assumptions and dignity of King Pest the First had evidently inspired some feelings of respect, and who arose and steadied himself by the table as he spoke \u2014\"It would, please your majesty, be a matter of utter impossibility to stow away in my hold even one-fourth part of the same liquor which your majesty has just mentioned. To say nothing of the stuffs placed on board in the forenoon by way of ballast, and not to mention the various ales and liqueurs shipped this evening at different sea-ports, I have, at present, a full cargo of 'humming stuff' taken in and duly paid for at the sign of the 'Jolly Tar.' You will, therefore, please your majesty, be so good as to take the will for the deed \u2014 for by no manner of means either can I or will I swallow another drop \u2014 least of all a drop of that villainous bilge-water that answers to the hall of 'Black Strap.'\"\n\n\"Belay that!\" interrupted Tarpaulin, astonished not more at the length of his companion's speech than at the nature of his refusal \u2014\"Belay that you tubber! \u2014 and I say, Legs, none of your palaver! My hull is still light, although I confess you yourself seem to be a little top-heavy; and as for the matter of your share of the cargo, why rather than raise a squall I would find stowageroom for it myself, but\"\u2014\n\n\"This proceeding,\" interposed the president, \"is by no means in accordance with the terms of the mulct or sentence, which is in its nature Median, and not to be altered or recalled. The conditions we have imposed must be fulfilled to the letter, and that without a moment's hesitation \u2014 in failure of which fulfilment we decree that you do here be tied neck and heels together, and duly drowned as rebels in yon hogshead of October beer!\"\n\n\"A sentence! \u2014 a sentence! \u2014 a righteous and just sentence! \u2014 a glorious decree! \u2014 a most worthy and upright, and holy condemnation!\" shouted the Pest family altogether. The king elevated his forehead into innumerable wrinkles; the gouty little old man puffed like a pair of bellows; the lady of the winding sheet waved her nose to and fro; the gentleman in the cotton drawers pricked up his ears; she of the shroud gasped like a dying fish; and he of the coffin looked stiff and rolled up his eyes.\n\n\"Ugh! ugh! ugh!\" chuckled Tarpaulin without heeding the general excitation, \"ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 I was saying,\" said he, \"I was saying when Mr. King Pest poked in his marlin-spike, that as for the matter of two or three gallons more or less of Black Strap, it was a trifle to a tight sea-boat like myself not overstowed \u2014 but when it comes to drinking the health of the Devil (whom God assoilzie) and going down upon my marrow bones to his ill-favored majesty there, whom I know, as well as I know myself to be a sinner, to be nobody in the whole world, but Tim Hurlygurly the stage-player \u2014 why! it's quite another guess sort of a thing, and utterly and altogether past my comprehension.\"\n\nHe was not allowed to finish this speech in tranquillity. At the name Tim Hurlygurly the whole assembly leaped from their name seats.\n\n\"Treason!\" shouted his Majesty King Pest the First.\n\n\"Treason!\" said the little man with the gout.\n\n\"Treason!\" screamed the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.\n\n\"Treason!\" muttered the gentleman with his jaws tied up.\n\n\"Treason!\" growled he of the coffin.\n\n\"Treason! treason!\" shrieked her majesty of the mouth; and, seizing by the hinder part of his breeches the unfortunate Tarpaulin, who had just commenced pouring out for himself a skull of liqueur, she lifted him high into the air, and let him fall without ceremony into the huge open puncheon of his beloved ale. Bobbing up and down, for a few seconds, like an apple in a bowl of toddy, he, at length, finally disappeared amid the whirlpool of foam which, in the already effervescent liquor, his struggles easily succeeded in creating.\n\nNot tamely, however, did the tall seaman behold the discomfiture of his companion. Jostling King Pest through the open trap, the valiant Legs slammed the door down upon him with an oath, and strode towards the centre of the room. Here tearing down the skeleton which swung over the table, he laid it about him with so much energy and good will, that, as the last glimpses of light died away within the apartment, he succeeded in knocking out the brains of the little gentleman with the gout. Rushing then with all his force against the fatal hogshead full of October ale and Hugh Tarpaulin, he rolled it over and over in an instant. Out burst a deluge of liquor so fierce \u2014 so impetuous \u2014 so overwhelming \u2014 that the room was flooded from wall to wall \u2014 the loaded table was overturned \u2014 the tressels were thrown upon their backs \u2014 the tub of punch into the fire-place \u2014 and the ladies into hysterics. Piles of death-furniture floundered about. Jugs, pitchers, and carboys mingled promiscuously in the melee, and wicker flagons encountered desperately with bottles of junk. The man with the horrors was drowned upon the spot-the little stiff gentleman floated off in his coffin \u2014 and the victorious Legs, seizing by the waist the fat lady in the shroud, rushed out with her into the street, and made a bee-line for the \"Free and Easy,\" followed under easy sail by the redoubtable Hugh Tarpaulin, who, having sneezed three or four times, panted and puffed after him with the Arch Duchess Ana-Pest.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lionizing by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002All people went\n\n\u2002Upon their ten toes in wild wondernment.\n\n\u2014Bishop Hall's Satires\n\nI am, that is to say I was, a great man, but I am neither the author of Junius nor the man in the mask, for my name, I believe, is Robert Jones, and I was born somewhere in the city of Fum-Fudge.\n\nThe first action of my life was the taking hold of my nose with both hands. My mother saw this and called me a genius:\u2014 my father wept for joy and presented me with a treatise on Nosology. This I mastered before I was breeched.\n\nI now began to feel my way in the science, and soon came to understand that, provided a man had a nose sufficiently conspicuous, he might by merely following it, arrive at a Lionship. But my attention was not confined to theories alone. Every morning I gave my proboscis a couple of pulls and swallowed a half-dozen of drams.\n\nWhen I came of age my father asked me, one day, if I would step with him into his study.\n\n\"My son,\" he said, when we were seated, \"what is the chief end of your existence?\"\n\n\"My father,\" I answered, \"it is the study of Nosology.\"\n\n\"And what, Robert,\" he inquired, \"is Nosology?\"\n\n\"Sir,\" I said, \"it is the science of Noses.\"\n\n\"And can you tell me,\" he demanded, \"what is the meaning of a nose?\"\n\n\"A nose, my father,\" I replied, greatly softened, \"has been variously defined by about a thousand different authors.\" [Here I pulled out my watch.] \"It is now noon, or thereabouts \u2014 We shall have time enough to get through with them all before midnight. To commence then: The nose, according to Bartholinus, is that protuberance \u2014 that bump \u2014 that excresence \u2014 that\u2014\"\n\n\"Will do, Robert,\" interupted the old gentleman. \"I am thunderstruck at the extent of your information \u2014 I am positively \u2014 upon my soul.\" [Here he closed his eyes and placed his hand upon his heart.] \"Come here!\" [Here he took me by the arm.] \"Your education may now be considered as finished \u2014 it is high time you should scuffle for yourself \u2014 and you cannot do a better thing than merely follow your nose \u2014 so \u2014 so \u2014 so\u2014\" [Here he kicked me down stairs and out of the door.]\u2014\"So get out of my house, and God bless you!\"\n\nAs I felt within me the divine afflatus, I considered this accident rather fortunate than otherwise. I resolved to be guided by the paternal advice. I determined to follow my nose. I gave it a pull or two upon the spot, and wrote a pamphlet on Nosology forthwith.\n\nAll Fum-Fudge was in an uproar.\n\n\"Wonderful genius!\" said the Quarterly.\n\n\"Superb physiologist!\" said the Westminster.\n\n\"Clever fellow!\" said the Foreign.\n\n\"Fine writer!\", said the Edinburgh.\n\n\"Profound thinker!\" said the Dublin.\n\n\"Great man!\" said Bentley.\n\n\"Divine soul!\" said Fraser.\n\n\"One of us!\" said Blackwood.\n\n\"Who can he be?\" said Mrs. Bas-Bleu.\n\n\"What can he be?\" said big Miss Bas-Bleu.\n\n\"Where can he be?\" said little Miss Bas-Bleu. \u2014 But I paid these people no attention whatever \u2014 I just stepped into the shop of an artist.\n\nThe Duchess of Bless-my-Soul was sitting for her portrait; the Marquis of So-and-So was holding the Duchess' poodle; the Earl of This-and-That was flirting with her salts; and his Royal Highness of Touch-me-Not was leaning upon the back of her chair.\n\nI approached the artist and turned up my nose.\n\n\"Oh, beautiful!\" sighed her Grace.\n\n\"Oh, my!\" lisped the Marquis.\n\n\"Oh, shocking!\" groaned the Earl.\n\n\"Oh, abominable!\" growled his Royal Highness.\n\n\"What will you take for it?\" asked the artist.\n\n\"For his nose!\" shouted her Grace.\n\n\"A thousand pounds,\" said I, sitting down.\n\n\"A thousand pounds?\" inquired the artist, musingly.\n\n\"A thousand pounds,\" said I.\n\n\"Beautiful!\" said he, entranced.\n\n\"A thousand pounds,\" said I.\n\n\"Do you warrant it?\" he asked, turning the nose to the light.\n\n\"I do,\" said I, blowing it well.\n\n\"Is it quite original?\" he inquired, touching it with reverence.\n\n\"Humph!\" said I, twisting it to one side.\n\n\"Has no copy been taken?\" he demanded, surveying it through a microscope.\n\n\"None,\" said I, turning it up.\n\n\"Admirable!\" he ejaculated, thrown quite off his guard by the beauty of the manoeuvre.\n\n\"A thousand pounds,\" said I.\n\n\"A thousand pounds?\" said he.\n\n\"Precisely,\" said I.\n\n\"A thousand pounds?\" said he.\n\n\"Just so,\" said I.\n\n\"You shall have them,\" said he. \"What a piece of virtu!\" So he drew me a check upon the spot, and took a sketch of my nose. I engaged rooms in Jermyn street, and sent her Majesty the ninety-ninth edition of the \"Nosology,\" with a portrait of the proboscis. That sad little rake, the Prince of Wales, invited me to dinner.\n\nWe are all lions and recherches.\n\nThere was a modern Platonist. He quoted Porphyry, Iamblicus, Plotinus, Proclus, Hierocles, Maximus Tyrius, and Syrianus.\n\nThere was a human-perfectibility man. He quoted Turgot, Price, Priestly, Condorcet, De Stael, and the \"Ambitious Student in Ill-Health.\"\n\nThere was Sir Positive Paradox. He observed that all fools were philosophers, and that all philosophers were fools.\n\nThere was Aestheticus Ethix. He spoke of fire, unity, and atoms; bi-part and pre-existent soul; affinity and discord; primitive intelligence and homoomeria.\n\nThere was Theologos Theology. He talked of Eusebius and Arianus; heresy and the Council of Nice; Puseyism and consubstantialism; Homousios and Homouioisios.\n\nThere was Fricassee from the Rocher de Cancale. He mentioned Muriton of red tongue; cauliflowers with veloute sauce; veal a la St. Menehoult; marinade a la St. Florentin; and orange jellies en mosaiques.\n\nThere was Bibulus O'Bumper. He touched upon Latour and Markbrunnen; upon Mosseux and Chambertin; upon Richbourg and St. George; upon Haubrion, Leonville, and Medoc; upon Barac and Preignac; upon Grave, upon Sauterne, upon Lafitte, and upon St. Peray. He shook his head at Clos de Vougeot, and told with his eyes shut, the difference between Sherry and Amontillado.\n\nThere was Signor Tintontintino from Florence. He discoursed of Cimabue, Arpino, Carpaccio, and Argostino \u2014 of the gloom of Caravaggio, of the amenity of Albano, of the colors of Titian, of the frows of Rubens, and of the waggeries of Jan Steen.\n\nThere was the President of the Fum-Fudge University. He was of the opinion that the moon was called Bendis in Thrace, Bubastis in Egypt, Dian in Rome, and Artemis in Greece.\n\nThere was a Grand Turk from Stamboul. He could not help thinking that the angels were horses, cocks, and bulls; that somebody in the sixth heaven had seventy thousand heads; and that the earth was supported by a sky-blue cow with an incalculable number of green horns.\n\nThere was Delphinus Polyglott. He told us what had become of the eighty-three lost tragedies of Aeschylus; of the fifty-four orations of Isaeus; of the three hundred and ninety-one speeches of Lysias; of the hundred and eighty treatises of Theophrastus; of the eighth book of the conic sections of Apollonius; of Pindar's hymns and dithyrambics, and of the five and forty tragedies of Homer Junior.\n\nThere was Ferdinand Fitz-Fossillus Feltspar. He informed us all about internal fires and tertiary formations; about aeriforms, fluidiforms, and solidforms; about quartz and marl; about schist and schorl; about gypsum and trap; about talc and calc; about blende and horn-blende; about micaslate and pudding-stone; about cyanite and lepidolite; about haematite and tremolite; about antimony and calcedony; about manganese and whatever you please.\n\nThere was myself. I spoke of myself; \u2014 of myself, of myself, of myself; \u2014 of Nosology, of my pamphlet, and of myself. I turned up my nose, and I spoke of myself.\n\n\"Marvellous clever man!\" said the Prince.\n\n\"Superb!\" said his guests; \u2014 and next morning her Grace of Bless-my-soul paid me a visit.\n\n\"Will you go to Almack's, pretty creature?\" she said, tapping me under the chin.\n\n\"Upon honor,\" said I.\n\n\"Nose and all?\" she asked.\n\n\"As I live,\" I replied.\n\n\"Here then is a card, my life. Shall I say you will be there?\"\n\n\"Dear, Duchess, with all my heart.\"\n\n\"Pshaw, no! \u2014 but with all your nose?\"\n\n\"Every bit of it, my love,\" said I:\u2014 so I gave it a twist or two, and found myself at Almack's.\n\nThe rooms were crowded to suffocation.\n\n\"He is coming!\" said somebody on the staircase.\n\n\"He is coming!\" said somebody farther up.\n\n\"He is coming!\" said somebody farther still.\n\n\"He is come!\" exclaimed the Duchess, \"He is come, the little love!\"\u2014 and, seizing me firmly by both hands, she kissed me thrice upon the nose.\n\nA marked sensation immediately ensued.\n\n\"Diavolo!\" cried Count Capricornutti.\n\n\"Dios guarda!\" muttered Don Stiletto.\n\n\"Mille tonnerres!\" ejaculated the Prince de Grenouille.\n\n\"Tousand teufel!\" growled the Elector of Bluddennuff.\n\nIt was not to be borne. I grew angry. I turned short upon Bluddennuff.\n\n\"Sir!\" said I to him, \"you are a baboon.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" he replied, after a pause. \"Donner und Blitzen!\"\n\nThis was all that could be desired. We exchanged cards. At Chalk-Farm, the next morning, I shot off his nose \u2014 and then called upon my friends.\n\n\"Bete!\" said the first.\n\n\"Fool!\" said the second.\n\n\"Dolt!\" said the third.\n\n\"Ass!\" said the fourth.\n\n\"Ninny!\" said the fifth.\n\n\"Noodle!\" said the sixth.\n\n\"Be off!\" said the seventh.\n\nAt all this I felt mortified, and so called upon my father.\n\n\"Father,\" I asked, \"what is the chief end of my existence?\"\n\n\"My son,\" he replied, \"it is still the study of Nosology; but in hitting the Elector upon the nose you have overshot your mark. You have a fine nose, it is true; but then Bluddennuff has none. You are damned, and he has become the hero of the day. I grant you that in Fum-Fudge the greatness of a lion is in proportion to the size of his proboscis \u2014 but, good heavens! there is no competing with a lion who has no proboscis at all.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Morella by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Itself, by itself, solely,\n\n\u2002one everlasting, and single.\n\n\u2014Plato: Sympos.\n\nWith a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella. Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the altar, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream.\n\nMorella's erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no common order \u2014 her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in many matters, became her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually considered the mere dross of the early German literature. These, for what reason I could not imagine, were her favourite and constant study \u2014 and that in process of time they became my own, should be attributed to the simple but effectual influence of habit and example.\n\nIn all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself, were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism which I read to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife, and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies of her studies. And then \u2014 then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me \u2014 would Morella place her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a dead philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange meaning burned themselves in upon my memory. And then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful became the most hideous, as Hinnon became Ge-Henna.\n\nIt is unnecessary to state the exact character of those disquisitions which, growing out of the volumes I have mentioned, formed, for so long a time, almost the sole conversation of Morella and myself. By the learned in what might be termed theological morality they will be readily conceived, and by the unlearned they would, at all events, be little understood. The wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modified Paliggenedia of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines of Identity as urged by Schelling, were generally the points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to the imaginative Morella. That identity which is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly defines to consist in the saneness of rational being. And since by person we understand an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all to be that which we call ourselves, thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think, and giving us our personal identity. But the principium indivduationis, the notion of that identity which at death is or is not lost for ever, was to me, at all times, a consideration of intense interest; not more from the perplexing and exciting nature of its consequences, than from the marked and agitated manner in which Morella mentioned them.\n\nBut, indeed, the time had now arrived when the mystery of my wife's manner oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers, nor the low tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew all this, but did not upbraid; she seemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and, smiling, called it fate. She seemed also conscious of a cause, to me unknown, for the gradual alienation of my regard; but she gave me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was she woman, and pined away daily. In time the crimson spot settled steadily upon the cheek, and the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent; and one instant my nature melted into pity, but in, next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then my soul sickened and became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downward into some dreary and unfathomable abyss.\n\nShall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of Morella's decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay for many days, for many weeks and irksome months, until my tortured nerves obtained the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a fiend, cursed the days and the hours and the bitter moments, which seemed to lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the dying of the day.\n\nBut one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament had surely fallen.\n\n\"It is a day of days,\" she said, as I approached; \"a day of all days either to live or die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and life \u2014 ah, more fair for the daughters of heaven and death!\"\n\nI kissed her forehead, and she continued:\n\n\"I am dying, yet shall I live.\"\n\n\"Morella!\"\n\n\"The days have never been when thou couldst love me \u2014 but her whom in life thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore.\"\n\n\"Morella!\"\n\n\"I repeat I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection \u2014 ah, how little! \u2014 which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live \u2014 thy child and mine, Morella's. But thy days shall be days of sorrow \u2014 that sorrow which is the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours of thy happiness are over and joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of Paestum twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, play the Teian with time, but, being ignorant of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on the earth, as do the Moslemin at Mecca.\"\n\n\"Morella!\" I cried, \"Morella! how knowest thou this?\" but she turned away her face upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard her voice no more.\n\nYet, as she had foretold, her child, to which in dying she had given birth, which breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child, a daughter, lived. And she grew strangely in stature and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible to feel for any denizen of earth.\n\nBut, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, and gloom, and horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said the child grew strangely in stature and intelligence. Strange, indeed, was her rapid increase in bodily size, but terrible, oh! terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered in the conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman? when the lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this beeame evident to my appalled senses, when I could no longer hide it from my soul, nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered at that suspicions, of a nature fearful and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a being whom destiny compelled me to adore, and in the rigorous seclusion of my home, watched with an agonizing anxiety over all which concerned the beloved.\n\nAnd as years rolled away, and I gazed day after day upon her holy, and mild, and eloquent face, and poured over her maturing form, day after day did I discover new points of resemblance in the child to her mother, the melancholy and the dead. And hourly grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more full, and more definite, and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile was like her mother's I could bear; but then I shuddered at its too perfect identity, that her eyes were like Morella's I could endure; but then they, too, often looked down into the depths of my soul with Morella's own intense and bewildering meaning. And in the contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of her speech, and above all \u2014 oh, above all, in the phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thought and horror, for a worm that would not die.\n\nThus passed away two lustra of her life, and as yet my daughter remained nameless upon the earth. \"My child,\" and \"my love,\" were the designations usually prompted by a father's affection, and the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella's name died with her at her death. Of the mother I had never spoken to the daughter, it was impossible to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of her existence, the latter had received no impressions from the outward world, save such as might have been afforded by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length the ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its unnerved and agitated condition, a present deliverance from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal font I hesitated for a name. And many titles of the wise and beautiful, of old and modern times, of my own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips, with many, many fair titles of the gentle, and the happy, and the good. What prompted me then to disturb the memory of the buried dead? What demon urged me to breathe that sound, which in its very recollection was wont to make ebb the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the heart? What fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man the syllables \u2014 Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread them with hues of death, as starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our ancestral vault, responded \u2014 \"I am here!\"\n\nDistinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds within my ear, and thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain. Years \u2014 years may pass away, but the memory of that epoch never. Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the vine \u2014 but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and among them all I beheld only \u2014 Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed but one sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea murmured evermore \u2014 Morella. But she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second. \u2014 Morella.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Shadow \u2014 A Parable by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nYea, though I walk through the valley of the Shadow:\n\n\u2014Psalm of David.\n\nYe who read are still among the living; but I who write shall have long since gone my way into the region of shadows. For indeed strange things shall happen, and secret things be known, and many centuries shall pass away, ere these memorials be seen of men. And, when seen, there will be some to disbelieve, and some to doubt, and yet a few who will find much to ponder upon in the characters here graven with a stylus of iron.\n\nThe year had been a year of terror, and of feelings more intense than terror for which there is no name upon the earth. For many prodigies and signs had taken place, and far and wide, over sea and land, the black wings of the Pestilence were spread abroad. To those, nevertheless, cunning in the stars, it was not unknown that the heavens wore an aspect of ill; and to me, the Greek Oinos, among others, it was evident that now had arrived the alternation of that seven hundred and ninety-fourth year when, at the entrance of Aries, the planet Jupiter is conjoined with the red ring of the terrible Saturnus. The peculiar spirit of the skies, if I mistake not greatly, made itself manifest, not only in the physical orb of the earth, but in the souls, imaginations, and meditations of mankind.\n\nOver some flasks of the red Chian wine, within the walls of a noble hall, in a dim city called Ptolemais, we sat, at night, a company of seven. And to our chamber there was no entrance save by a lofty door of brass: and the door was fashioned by the artisan Corinnos, and, being of rare workmanship, was fastened from within. Black draperies, likewise, in the gloomy room, shut out from our view the moon, the lurid stars, and the peopleless streets \u2014 but the boding and the memory of Evil they would not be so excluded. There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account \u2014 things material and spiritual \u2014 heaviness in the atmosphere \u2014 a sense of suffocation \u2014 anxiety \u2014 and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. A dead weight hung upon us. It hung upon our limbs \u2014 upon the household furniture \u2014 upon the goblets from which we drank; and all things were depressed, and borne down thereby \u2014 all things save only the flames of the seven lamps which illumined our revel. Uprearing themselves in tall slender lines of light, they thus remained burning all pallid and motionless; and in the mirror which their lustre formed upon the round table of ebony at which we sat, each of us there assembled beheld the pallor of his own countenance, and the unquiet glare in the downcast eyes of his companions. Yet we laughed and were merry in our proper way \u2014 which was hysterical; and sang the songs of Anacreon \u2014 which are madness; and drank deeply \u2014 although the purple wine reminded us of blood. For there was yet another tenant of our chamber in the person of young Zoilus. Dead, and at full length he lay, enshrouded; the genius and the demon of the scene. Alas! he bore no portion in our mirth, save that his countenance, distorted with the plague, and his eyes, in which Death had but half extinguished the fire of the pestilence, seemed to take such interest in our merriment as the dead may haply take in the merriment of those who are to die. But although I, Oinos, felt that the eyes of the departed were upon me, still I forced myself not to perceive the bitterness of their expression, and gazing down steadily into the depths of the ebony mirror, sang with a loud and sonorous voice the songs of the son of Teios. But gradually my songs they ceased, and their echoes, rolling afar off among the sable draperies of the chamber, became weak, and undistinguishable, and so faded away. And lo! from among those sable draperies where the sounds of the song departed, there came forth a dark and undefined shadow \u2014 a shadow such as the moon, when low in heaven, might fashion from the figure of a man: but it was the shadow neither of man nor of God, nor of any familiar thing. And quivering awhile among the draperies of the room, it at length rested in full view upon the surface of the door of brass. But the shadow was vague, and formless, and indefinite, and was the shadow neither of man nor of God \u2014 neither God of Greece, nor God of Chaldaea, nor any Egyptian God. And the shadow rested upon the brazen doorway, and under the arch of the entablature of the door, and moved not, nor spoke any word, but there became stationary and remained. And the door whereupon the shadow rested was, if I remember aright, over against the feet of the young Zoilus enshrouded. But we, the seven there assembled, having seen the shadow as it came out from among the draperies, dared not steadily behold it, but cast down our eyes, and gazed continually into the depths of the mirror of ebony. And at length I, Oinos, speaking some low words, demanded of the shadow its dwelling and its appellation. And the shadow answered, \"I am Shadow, and my dwelling is near to the Catacombs of Ptolemais, and hard by those dim plains of Helusion which border upon the foul Charonian canal.\" And then did we, the seven, start from our seats in horror, and stand trembling, and shuddering, and aghast, for the tones in the voice of the shadow were not the tones of any one being, but of a multitude of beings, and, varying in their cadences from syllable to syllable fell duskly upon our ears in the well-remembered and familiar accents of many thousand departed friends.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nBy late accounts from Rotterdam, that city seems to be in a high state of philosophical excitement. Indeed, phenomena have there occurred of a nature so completely unexpected \u2014 so entirely novel \u2014 so utterly at variance with preconceived opinions \u2014 as to leave no doubt on my mind that long ere this all Europe is in an uproar, all physics in a ferment, all reason and astronomy together by the ears. date), a vast crowd of people, for purposes not specifically mentioned, were assembled in the great square of the Exchange in the well-conditioned city of Rotterdam. The day was warm \u2014 unusually so for the season \u2014 there was hardly a breath of air stirring; and the multitude were in no bad humor at being now and then besprinkled with friendly showers of momentary duration, that fell from large white masses of cloud which chequered in a fitful manner the blue vault of the firmament. Nevertheless, about noon, a slight but remarkable agitation became apparent in the assembly: the clattering of ten thousand tongues succeeded; and, in an instant afterward, ten thousand faces were upturned toward the heavens, ten thousand pipes descended simultaneously from the corners of ten thousand mouths, and a shout, which could be compared to nothing but the roaring of Niagara, resounded long, loudly, and furiously, through all the environs of Rotterdam.\n\nThe origin of this hubbub soon became sufficiently evident. From behind the huge bulk of one of those sharply-defined masses of cloud already mentioned, was seen slowly to emerge into an open area of blue space, a queer, heterogeneous, but apparently solid substance, so oddly shaped, so whimsically put together, as not to be in any manner comprehended, and never to be sufficiently admired, by the host of sturdy burghers who stood open-mouthed below. What could it be? In the name of all the vrows and devils in Rotterdam, what could it possibly portend? No one knew, no one could imagine; no one \u2014 not even the burgomaster Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk \u2014 had the slightest clew by which to unravel the mystery; so, as nothing more reasonable could be done, every one to a man replaced his pipe carefully in the corner of his mouth, and cocking up his right eye towards the phenomenon, puffed, paused, waddled about, and grunted significantly \u2014 then waddled back, grunted, paused, and finally \u2014 puffed again.\n\nIn the meantime, however, lower and still lower toward the goodly city, came the object of so much curiosity, and the cause of so much smoke. In a very few minutes it arrived near enough to be accurately discerned. It appeared to be \u2014 yes! it was undoubtedly a species of balloon; but surely no such balloon had ever been seen in Rotterdam before. For who, let me ask, ever heard of a balloon manufactured entirely of dirty newspapers? No man in Holland certainly; yet here, under the very noses of the people, or rather at some distance above their noses was the identical thing in question, and composed, I have it on the best authority, of the precise material which no one had ever before known to be used for a similar purpose. It was an egregious insult to the good sense of the burghers of Rotterdam. As to the shape of the phenomenon, it was even still more reprehensible. Being little or nothing better than a huge foolscap turned upside down. And this similitude was regarded as by no means lessened when, upon nearer inspection, there was perceived a large tassel depending from its apex, and, around the upper rim or base of the cone, a circle of little instruments, resembling sheep-bells, which kept up a continual tinkling to the tune of Betty Martin. But still worse. Suspended by blue ribbons to the end of this fantastic machine, there hung, by way of car, an enormous drab beaver bat, with a brim superlatively broad, and a hemispherical crown with a black band and a silver buckle. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that many citizens of Rotterdam swore to having seen the same hat repeatedly before; and indeed the whole assembly seemed to regard it with eyes of familiarity; while the vrow Grettel Pfaall, upon sight of it, uttered an exclamation of joyful surprise, and declared it to be the identical hat of her good man himself. Now this was a circumstance the more to be observed, as Pfaall, with three companions, had actually disappeared from Rotterdam about five years before, in a very sudden and unaccountable manner, and up to the date of this narrative all attempts had failed of obtaining any intelligence concerning them whatsoever. To be sure, some bones which were thought to be human, mixed up with a quantity of odd-looking rubbish, had been lately discovered in a retired situation to the east of Rotterdam, and some people went so far as to imagine that in this spot a foul murder had been committed, and that the sufferers were in all probability Hans Pfaall and his associates. But to return.\n\nThe balloon (for such no doubt it was) had now descended to within a hundred feet of the earth, allowing the crowd below a sufficiently distinct view of the person of its occupant. This was in truth a very droll little somebody. He could not have been more than two feet in height; but this altitude, little as it was, would have been sufficient to destroy his equilibrium, and tilt him over the edge of his tiny car, but for the intervention of a circular rim reaching as high as the breast, and rigged on to the cords of the balloon. The body of the little man was more than proportionately broad, giving to his entire figure a rotundity highly absurd. His feet, of course, could not be seen at all, although a horny substance of suspicious nature was occasionally protruded through a rent in the bottom of the car, or to speak more properly, in the top of the hat. His hands were enormously large. His hair was extremely gray, and collected in a cue behind. His nose was prodigiously long, crooked, and inflammatory; his eyes full, brilliant, and acute; his chin and cheeks, although wrinkled with age, were broad, puffy, and double; but of ears of any kind or character there was not a semblance to be discovered upon any portion of his head. This odd little gentleman was dressed in a loose surtout of sky-blue satin, with tight breeches to match, fastened with silver buckles at the knees. His vest was of some bright yellow material; a white taffety cap was set jauntily on one side of his head; and, to complete his equipment, a blood-red silk handkerchief enveloped his throat, and fell down, in a dainty manner, upon his bosom, in a fantastic bow-knot of super-eminent dimensions.\n\nHaving descended, as I said before, to about one hundred feet from the surface of the earth, the little old gentleman was suddenly seized with a fit of trepidation, and appeared disinclined to make any nearer approach to terra firma. Throwing out, therefore, a quantity of sand from a canvas bag, which, he lifted with great difficulty, he became stationary in an instant. He then proceeded, in a hurried and agitated manner, to extract from a side-pocket in his surtout a large morocco pocket-book. This he poised suspiciously in his hand, then eyed it with an air of extreme surprise, and was evidently astonished at its weight. He at length opened it, and drawing there from a huge letter sealed with red sealing-wax and tied carefully with red tape, let it fall precisely at the feet of the burgomaster, Superbus Von Underduk. His Excellency stooped to take it up. But the aeronaut, still greatly discomposed, and having apparently no farther business to detain him in Rotterdam, began at this moment to make busy preparations for departure; and it being necessary to discharge a portion of ballast to enable him to reascend, the half dozen bags which he threw out, one after another, without taking the trouble to empty their contents, tumbled, every one of them, most unfortunately upon the back of the burgomaster, and rolled him over and over no less than one-and-twenty times, in the face of every man in Rotterdam. It is not to be supposed, however, that the great Underduk suffered this impertinence on the part of the little old man to pass off with impunity. It is said, on the contrary, that during each and every one of his one-and twenty circumvolutions he emitted no less than one-and-twenty distinct and furious whiffs from his pipe, to which he held fast the whole time with all his might, and to which he intends holding fast until the day of his death.\n\nIn the meantime the balloon arose like a lark, and, soaring far away above the city, at length drifted quietly behind a cloud similar to that from which it had so oddly emerged, and was thus lost forever to the wondering eyes of the good citizens of Rotterdam. All attention was now directed to the letter, the descent of which, and the consequences attending thereupon, had proved so fatally subversive of both person and personal dignity to his Excellency, the illustrious Burgomaster Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk. That functionary, however, had not failed, during his circumgyratory movements, to bestow a thought upon the important subject of securing the packet in question, which was seen, upon inspection, to have fallen into the most proper hands, being actually addressed to himself and Professor Rub-a-dub, in their official capacities of President and Vice-President of the Rotterdam College of Astronomy. It was accordingly opened by those dignitaries upon the spot, and found to contain the following extraordinary, and indeed very serious, communications.\n\nTo their Excellencies Von Underduk and Rub-a-dub, President and Vice-President of the States' College of Astronomers, in the city of Rotterdam.\n\nYour Excellencies may perhaps be able to remember an humble artizan, by name Hans Pfaall, and by occupation a mender of bellows, who, with three others, disappeared from Rotterdam, about five years ago, in a manner which must have been considered by all parties at once sudden, and extremely unaccountable. If, however, it so please your Excellencies, I, the writer of this communication, am the identical Hans Pfaall himself. It is well known to most of my fellow citizens, that for the period of forty years I continued to occupy the little square brick building, at the head of the alley called Sauerkraut, in which I resided at the time of my disappearance. My ancestors have also resided therein time out of mind \u2014 they, as well as myself, steadily following the respectable and indeed lucrative profession of mending of bellows. For, to speak the truth, until of late years, that the heads of all the people have been set agog with politics, no better business than my own could an honest citizen of Rotterdam either desire or deserve. Credit was good, employment was never wanting, and on all hands there was no lack of either money or good-will. But, as I was saying, we soon began to feel the effects of liberty and long speeches, and radicalism, and all that sort of thing. People who were formerly, the very best customers in the world, had now not a moment of time to think of us at all. They had, so they said, as much as they could do to read about the revolutions, and keep up with the march of intellect and the spirit of the age. If a fire wanted fanning, it could readily be fanned with a newspaper, and as the government grew weaker, I have no doubt that leather and iron acquired durability in proportion, for, in a very short time, there was not a pair of bellows in all Rotterdam that ever stood in need of a stitch or required the assistance of a hammer. This was a state of things not to be endured. I soon grew as poor as a rat, and, having a wife and children to provide for, my burdens at length became intolerable, and I spent hour after hour in reflecting upon the most convenient method of putting an end to my life. Duns, in the meantime, left me little leisure for contemplation. My house was literally besieged from morning till night, so that I began to rave, and foam, and fret like a caged tiger against the bars of his enclosure. There were three fellows in particular who worried me beyond endurance, keeping watch continually about my door, and threatening me with the law. Upon these three I internally vowed the bitterest revenge, if ever I should be so happy as to get them within my clutches; and I believe nothing in the world but the pleasure of this anticipation prevented me from putting my plan of suicide into immediate execution, by blowing my brains out with a blunderbuss. I thought it best, however, to dissemble my wrath, and to treat them with promises and fair words, until, by some good turn of fate, an opportunity of vengeance should be afforded me.\n\nOne day, having given my creditors the slip, and feeling more than usually dejected, I continued for a long time to wander about the most obscure streets without object whatever, until at length I chanced to stumble against the corner of a bookseller's stall. Seeing a chair close at hand, for the use of customers, I threw myself doggedly into it, and, hardly knowing why, opened the pages of the first volume which came within my reach. It proved to be a small pamphlet treatise on Speculative Astronomy, written either by Professor Encke of Berlin or by a Frenchman of somewhat similar name. I had some little tincture of information on matters of this nature, and soon became more and more absorbed in the contents of the book, reading it actually through twice before I awoke to a recollection of what was passing around me. By this time it began to grow dark, and I directed my steps toward home. But the treatise had made an indelible impression on my mind, and, as I sauntered along the dusky streets, I revolved carefully over in my memory the wild and sometimes unintelligible reasonings of the writer. There are some particular passages which affected my imagination in a powerful and extraordinary manner. The longer I meditated upon these the more intense grew the interest which had been excited within me. The limited nature of my education in general, and more especially my ignorance on subjects connected with natural philosophy, so far from rendering me diffident of my own ability to comprehend what I had read, or inducing me to mistrust the many vague notions which had arisen in consequence, merely served as a farther stimulus to imagination; and I was vain enough, or perhaps reasonable enough, to doubt whether those crude ideas which, arising in ill-regulated minds, have all the appearance, may not often in effect possess all the force, the reality, and other inherent properties, of instinct or intuition; whether, to proceed a step farther, profundity itself might not, in matters of a purely speculative nature, be detected as a legitimate source of falsity and error. In other words, I believed, and still do believe, that truth, is frequently of its own essence, superficial, and that, in many cases, the depth lies more in the abysses where we seek her, than in the actual situations wherein she may be found. Nature herself seemed to afford me corroboration of these ideas. In the contemplation of the heavenly bodies it struck me forcibly that I could not distinguish a star with nearly as much precision, when I gazed on it with earnest, direct and undeviating attention, as when I suffered my eye only to glance in its vicinity alone. I was not, of course, at that time aware that this apparent paradox was occasioned by the center of the visual area being less susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the exterior portions of the retina. This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful five years, during which I have dropped the prejudices of my former humble situation in life, and forgotten the bellows-mender in far different occupations. But at the epoch of which I speak, the analogy which a casual observation of a star offered to the conclusions I had already drawn, struck me with the force of positive conformation, and I then finally made up my mind to the course which I afterwards pursued.\n\nIt was late when I reached home, and I went immediately to bed. My mind, however, was too much occupied to sleep, and I lay the whole night buried in meditation. Arising early in the morning, and contriving again to escape the vigilance of my creditors, I repaired eagerly to the bookseller's stall, and laid out what little ready money I possessed, in the purchase of some volumes of Mechanics and Practical Astronomy. Having arrived at home safely with these, I devoted every spare moment to their perusal, and soon made such proficiency in studies of this nature as I thought sufficient for the execution of my plan. In the intervals of this period, I made every endeavor to conciliate the three creditors who had given me so much annoyance. In this I finally succeeded \u2014 partly by selling enough of my household furniture to satisfy a moiety of their claim, and partly by a promise of paying the balance upon completion of a little project which I told them I had in view, and for assistance in which I solicited their services. By these means \u2014 for they were ignorant men \u2014 I found little difficulty in gaining them over to my purpose.\n\nMatters being thus arranged, I contrived, by the aid of my wife and with the greatest secrecy and caution, to dispose of what property I had remaining, and to borrow, in small sums, under various pretences, and without paying any attention to my future means of repayment, no inconsiderable quantity of ready money. With the means thus accruing I proceeded to procure at intervals, cambric muslin, very fine, in pieces of twelve yards each; twine; a lot of the varnish of caoutchouc; a large and deep basket of wicker-work, made to order; and several other articles necessary in the construction and equipment of a balloon of extraordinary dimensions. This I directed my wife to make up as soon as possible, and gave her all requisite information as to the particular method of proceeding. In the meantime I worked up the twine into a net-work of sufficient dimensions; rigged it with a hoop and the necessary cords; bought a quadrant, a compass, a spy-glass, a common barometer with some important modifications, and two astronomical instruments not so generally known. I then took opportunities of conveying by night, to a retired situation east of Rotterdam, five iron-bound casks, to contain about fifty gallons each, and one of a larger size; six tinned ware tubes, three inches in diameter, properly shaped, and ten feet in length; a quantity of a particular metallic substance, or semi-metal, which I shall not name, and a dozen demijohns of a very common acid. The gas to be formed from these latter materials is a gas never yet generated by any other person than myself \u2014 or at least never applied to any similar purpose. The secret I would make no difficulty in disclosing, but that it of right belongs to a citizen of Nantz, in France, by whom it was conditionally communicated to myself. The same individual submitted to me, without being at all aware of my intentions, a method of constructing balloons from the membrane of a certain animal, through which substance any escape of gas was nearly an impossibility. I found it, however, altogether too expensive, and was not sure, upon the whole, whether cambric muslin with a coating of gum caoutchouc, was not equally as good. I mention this circumstance, because I think it probable that hereafter the individual in question may attempt a balloon ascension with the novel gas and material I have spoken of, and I do not wish to deprive him of the honor of a very singular invention.\n\nOn the spot which I intended each of the smaller casks to occupy respectively during the inflation of the balloon, I privately dug a hole two feet deep; the holes forming in this manner a circle twenty-five feet in diameter. In the centre of this circle, being the station designed for the large cask, I also dug a hole three feet in depth. In each of the five smaller holes, I deposited a canister containing fifty pounds, and in the larger one a keg holding one hundred and fifty pounds, of cannon powder. These \u2014 the keg and canisters \u2014 I connected in a proper manner with covered trains; and having let into one of the canisters the end of about four feet of slow match, I covered up the hole, and placed the cask over it, leaving the other end of the match protruding about an inch, and barely visible beyond the cask. I then filled up the remaining holes, and placed the barrels over them in their destined situation.\n\nBesides the articles above enumerated, I conveyed to the depot, and there secreted, one of M. Grimm's improvements upon the apparatus for condensation of the atmospheric air. I found this machine, however, to require considerable alteration before it could be adapted to the purposes to which I intended making it applicable. But, with severe labor and unremitting perseverance, I at length met with entire success in all my preparations. My balloon was soon completed. It would contain more than forty thousand cubic feet of gas; would take me up easily, I calculated, with all my implements, and, if I managed rightly, with one hundred and seventy-five pounds of ballast into the bargain. It had received three coats of varnish, and I found the cambric muslin to answer all the purposes of silk itself, quite as strong and a good deal less expensive.\n\nEverything being now ready, I exacted from my wife an oath of secrecy in relation to all my actions from the day of my first visit to the bookseller's stall; and promising, on my part, to return as soon as circumstances would permit, I gave her what little money I had left, and bade her farewell. Indeed I had no fear on her account. She was what people call a notable woman, and could manage matters in the world without my assistance. I believe, to tell the truth, she always looked upon me as an idle boy, a mere make-weight, good for nothing but building castles in the air, and was rather glad to get rid of me. It was a dark night when I bade her good-bye, and taking with me, as aides-de-camp, the three creditors who had given me so much trouble, we carried the balloon, with the car and accoutrements, by a roundabout way, to the station where the other articles were deposited. We there found them all unmolested, and I proceeded immediately to business.\n\nIt was the first of April. The night, as I said before, was dark; there was not a star to be seen; and a drizzling rain, falling at intervals, rendered us very uncomfortable. But my chief anxiety was concerning the balloon, which, in spite of the varnish with which it was defended, began to grow rather heavy with the moisture; the powder also was liable to damage. I therefore kept my three duns working with great diligence, pounding down ice around the central cask, and stirring the acid in the others. They did not cease, however, importuning me with questions as to what I intended to do with all this apparatus, and expressed much dissatisfaction at the terrible labor I made them undergo. They could not perceive, so they said, what good was likely to result from their getting wet to the skin, merely to take a part in such horrible incantations. I began to get uneasy, and worked away with all my might, for I verily believe the idiots supposed that I had entered into a compact with the devil, and that, in short, what I was now doing was nothing better than it should be. I was, therefore, in great fear of their leaving me altogether. I contrived, however, to pacify them by promises of payment of all scores in full, as soon as I could bring the present business to a termination. To these speeches they gave, of course, their own interpretation; fancying, no doubt, that at all events I should come into possession of vast quantities of ready money; and provided I paid them all I owed, and a trifle more, in consideration of their services, I dare say they cared very little what became of either my soul or my carcass.\n\nIn about four hours and a half I found the balloon sufficiently inflated. I attached the car, therefore, and put all my implements in it \u2014 not forgetting the condensing apparatus, a copious supply of water, and a large quantity of provisions, such as pemmican, in which much nutriment is contained in comparatively little bulk. I also secured in the car a pair of pigeons and a cat. It was now nearly daybreak, and I thought it high time to take my departure. Dropping a lighted cigar on the ground, as if by accident, I took the opportunity, in stooping to pick it up, of igniting privately the piece of slow match, whose end, as I said before, protruded a very little beyond the lower rim of one of the smaller casks. This manoeuvre was totally unperceived on the part of the three duns; and, jumping into the car, I immediately cut the single cord which held me to the earth, and was pleased to find that I shot upward, carrying with all ease one hundred and seventy-five pounds of leaden ballast, and able to have carried up as many more.\n\nScarcely, however, had I attained the height of fifty yards, when, roaring and rumbling up after me in the most horrible and tumultuous manner, came so dense a hurricane of fire, and smoke, and sulphur, and legs and arms, and gravel, and burning wood, and blazing metal, that my very heart sunk within me, and I fell down in the bottom of the car, trembling with unmitigated terror. Indeed, I now perceived that I had entirely overdone the business, and that the main consequences of the shock were yet to be experienced. Accordingly, in less than a second, I felt all the blood in my body rushing to my temples, and immediately thereupon, a concussion, which I shall never forget, burst abruptly through the night and seemed to rip the very firmament asunder. When I afterward had time for reflection, I did not fail to attribute the extreme violence of the explosion, as regarded myself, to its proper cause \u2014 my situation directly above it, and in the line of its greatest power. But at the time, I thought only of preserving my life. The balloon at first collapsed, then furiously expanded, then whirled round and round with horrible velocity, and finally, reeling and staggering like a drunken man, hurled me with great force over the rim of the car, and left me dangling, at a terrific height, with my head downward, and my face outwards, by a piece of slender cord about three feet in length, which hung accidentally through a crevice near the bottom of the wicker-work, and in which, as I fell, my left foot became most providentially entangled. It is impossible \u2014 utterly impossible \u2014 to form any adequate idea of the horror of my situation. I gasped convulsively for breath \u2014 a shudder resembling a fit of the ague agitated every nerve and muscle of my frame \u2014 I felt my eyes starting from their sockets \u2014 a horrible nausea overwhelmed me \u2014 and at length I fainted away.\n\nHow long I remained in this state it is impossible to say. It must, however, have been no inconsiderable time, for when I partially recovered the sense of existence, I found the day breaking, the balloon at a prodigious height over a wilderness of ocean, and not a trace of land to be discovered far and wide within the limits of the vast horizon. My sensations, however, upon thus recovering, were by no means so rife with agony as might have been anticipated. Indeed, there was much of incipient madness in the calm survey which I began to take of my situation. I drew up to my eyes each of my hands, one after the other, and wondered what occurrence could have given rise to the swelling of the veins, and the horrible blackness of the fingemails. I afterward carefully examined my head, shaking it repeatedly, and feeling it with minute attention, until I succeeded in satisfying myself that it was not, as I had more than half suspected, larger than my balloon. Then, in a knowing manner, I felt in both my breeches pockets, and, missing therefrom a set of tablets and a toothpick case, endeavored to account for their disappearance, and not being able to do so, felt inexpressibly chagrined. It now occurred to me that I suffered great uneasiness in the joint of my left ankle, and a dim consciousness of my situation began to glimmer through my mind. But, strange to say! I was neither astonished nor horror-stricken. If I felt any emotion at all, it was a kind of chuckling satisfaction at the cleverness I was about to display in extricating myself from this dilemma; and I never, for a moment, looked upon my ultimate safety as a question susceptible of doubt. For a few minutes I remained wrapped in the profoundest meditation. I have a distinct recollection of frequently compressing my lips, putting my forefinger to the side of my nose, and making use of other gesticulations and grimaces common to men who, at ease in their arm-chairs, meditate upon matters of intricacy or importance. Having, as I thought, sufficiently collected my ideas, I now, with great caution and deliberation, put my hands behind my back, and unfastened the large iron buckle which belonged to the waistband of my inexpressibles. This buckle had three teeth, which, being somewhat rusty, turned with great difficulty on their axis. I brought them, however, after some trouble, at right angles to the body of the buckle, and was glad to find them remain firm in that position. Holding the instrument thus obtained within my teeth, I now proceeded to untie the knot of my cravat. I had to rest several times before I could accomplish this manoeuvre, but it was at length accomplished. To one end of the cravat I then made fast the buckle, and the other end I tied, for greater security, tightly around my wrist. Drawing now my body upwards, with a prodigious exertion of muscular force, I succeeded, at the very first trial, in throwing the buckle over the car, and entangling it, as I had anticipated, in the circular rim of the wicker-work.\n\nMy body was now inclined towards the side of the car, at an angle of about forty-five degrees; but it must not be understood that I was therefore only forty-five degrees below the perpendicular. So far from it, I still lay nearly level with the plane of the horizon; for the change of situation which I had acquired, had forced the bottom of the car considerably outwards from my position, which was accordingly one of the most imminent and deadly peril. It should be remembered, however, that when I fell in the first instance, from the car, if I had fallen with my face turned toward the balloon, instead of turned outwardly from it, as it actually was; or if, in the second place, the cord by which I was suspended had chanced to hang over the upper edge, instead of through a crevice near the bottom of the car \u2014 I say it may be readily conceived that, in either of these supposed cases, I should have been unable to accomplish even as much as I had now accomplished, and the wonderful adventures of Hans Pfaall would have been utterly lost to posterity, I had therefore every reason to be grateful; although, in point of fact, I was still too stupid to be anything at all, and hung for, perhaps, a quarter of an hour in that extraordinary manner, without making the slightest farther exertion whatsoever, and in a singularly tranquil state of idiotic enjoyment. But this feeling did not fail to die rapidly away, and thereunto succeeded horror, and dismay, and a chilling sense of utter helplessness and ruin. In fact, the blood so long accumulating in the vessels of my head and throat, and which had hitherto buoyed up my spirits with madness and delirium, had now begun to retire within their proper channels, and the distinctness which was thus added to my perception of the danger, merely served to deprive me of the self-possession and courage to encounter it. But this weakness was, luckily for me, of no very long duration. In good time came to my rescue the spirit of despair, and, with frantic cries and struggles, I jerked my way bodily upwards, till at length, clutching with a vise-like grip the long-desired rim, I writhed my person over it, and fell headlong and shuddering within the car.\n\nIt was not until some time afterward that I recovered myself sufficiently to attend to the ordinary cares of the balloon. I then, however, examined it with attention, and found it, to my great relief, uninjured. My implements were all safe, and, fortunately, I had lost neither ballast nor provisions. Indeed, I had so well secured them in their places, that such an accident was entirely out of the question. Looking at my watch, I found it six o'clock. I was still rapidly ascending, and my barometer gave a present altitude of three and three-quarter miles. Immediately beneath me in the ocean, lay a small black object, slightly oblong in shape, seemingly about the size, and in every way bearing a great resemblance to one of those childish toys called a domino. Bringing my telescope to bear upon it, I plainly discerned it to be a British ninety four-gun ship, close-hauled, and pitching heavily in the sea with her head to the W.S.W. Besides this ship, I saw nothing but the ocean and the sky, and the sun, which had long arisen.\n\nIt is now high time that I should explain to your Excellencies the object of my perilous voyage. Your Excellencies will bear in mind that distressed circumstances in Rotterdam had at length driven me to the resolution of committing suicide. It was not, however, that to life itself I had any, positive disgust, but that I was harassed beyond endurance by the adventitious miseries attending my situation. In this state of mind, wishing to live, yet wearied with life, the treatise at the stall of the bookseller opened a resource to my imagination. I then finally made up my mind. I determined to depart, yet live \u2014 to leave the world, yet continue to exist \u2014 in short, to drop enigmas, I resolved, let what would ensue, to force a passage, if I could, to the moon. Now, lest I should be supposed more of a madman than I actually am, I will detail, as well as I am able, the considerations which led me to believe that an achievement of this nature, although without doubt difficult, and incontestably full of danger, was not absolutely, to a bold spirit, beyond the confines of the possible.\n\nThe moon's actual distance from the earth was the first thing to be attended to. Now, the mean or average interval between the centres of the two planets is 59.9643 of the earth's equatorial radii, or only about 237,000 miles. I say the mean or average interval. But it must be borne in mind that the form of the moon's orbit being an ellipse of eccentricity amounting to no less than 0.05484 of the major semi-axis of the ellipse itself, and the earth's centre being situated in its focus, if I could, in any manner, contrive to meet the moon, as it were, in its perigee, the above mentioned distance would be materially diminished. But, to say nothing at present of this possibility, it was very certain that, at all events, from the 237,000 miles I would have to deduct the radius of the earth, say 4,000, and the radius of the moon, say 1080, in all 5,080, leaving an actual interval to be traversed, under average circumstances, of 231,920 miles. Now this, I reflected, was no very extraordinary distance. Travelling on land has been repeatedly accomplished at the rate of thirty miles per hour, and indeed a much greater speed may be anticipated. But even at this velocity, it would take me no more than 322 days to reach the surface of the moon. There were, however, many particulars inducing me to believe that my average rate of travelling might possibly very much exceed that of thirty miles per hour, and, as these considerations did not fail to make a deep impression upon my mind, I will mention them more fully hereafter.\n\nThe next point to be regarded was a matter of far greater importance. From indications afforded by the barometer, we find that, in ascensions from the surface of the earth we have, at the height of 1,000 feet, left below us about one-thirtieth of the entire mass of atmospheric air, that at 10,600 we have ascended through nearly one-third; and that at 18,000, which is not far from the elevation of Cotopaxi, we have surmounted one-half the material, or, at all events, one-half the ponderable, body of air incumbent upon our globe. It is also calculated that at an altitude not exceeding the hundredth part of the earth's diameter \u2014 that is, not exceeding eighty miles \u2014 the rarefaction would be so excessive that animal life could in no manner be sustained, and, moreover, that the most delicate means we possess of ascertaining the presence of the atmosphere would be inadequate to assure us of its existence. But I did not fail to perceive that these latter calculations are founded altogether on our experimental knowledge of the properties of air, and the mechanical laws regulating its dilation and compression, in what may be called, comparatively speaking, the immediate vicinity of the earth itself; and, at the same time, it is taken for granted that animal life is and must be essentially incapable of modification at any given unattainable distance from the surface. Now, all such reasoning and from such data must, of course, be simply analogical. The greatest height ever reached by man was that of 25,000 feet, attained in the aeronautic expedition of Messieurs Gay-Lussac and Biot. This is a moderate altitude, even when compared with the eighty miles in question; and I could not help thinking that the subject admitted room for doubt and great latitude for speculation.\n\nBut, in point of fact, an ascension being made to any given altitude, the ponderable quantity of air surmounted in any farther ascension is by no means in proportion to the additional height ascended (as may be plainly seen from what has been stated before), but in a ratio constantly decreasing. It is therefore evident that, ascend as high as we may, we cannot, literally speaking, arrive at a limit beyond which no atmosphere is to be found. It must exist, I argued; although it may exist in a state of infinite rarefaction.\n\nOn the other hand, I was aware that arguments have not been wanting to prove the existence of a real and definite limit to the atmosphere, beyond which there is absolutely no air whatsoever. But a circumstance which has been left out of view by those who contend for such a limit seemed to me, although no positive refutation of their creed, still a point worthy very serious investigation. On comparing the intervals between the successive arrivals of Encke's comet at its perihelion, after giving credit, in the most exact manner, for all the disturbances due to the attractions of the planets, it appears that the periods are gradually diminishing; that is to say, the major axis of the comet's ellipse is growing shorter, in a slow but perfectly regular decrease. Now, this is precisely what ought to be the case, if we suppose a resistance experienced from the comet from an extremely rare ethereal medium pervading the regions of its orbit. For it is evident that such a medium must, in retarding the comet's velocity, increase its centripetal, by weakening its centrifugal force. In other words, the sun's attraction would be constantly attaining greater power, and the comet would be drawn nearer at every revolution. Indeed, there is no other way of accounting for the variation in question. But again. The real diameter of the same comet's nebulosity is observed to contract rapidly as it approaches the sun, and dilate with equal rapidity in its departure towards its aphelion. Was I not justifiable in supposing with M. Valz, that this apparent condensation of volume has its origin in the compression of the same ethereal medium I have spoken of before, and which is only denser in proportion to its solar vicinity? The lenticular-shaped phenomenon, also called the zodiacal light, was a matter worthy of attention. This radiance, so apparent in the tropics, and which cannot be mistaken for any meteoric lustre, extends from the horizon obliquely upward, and follows generally the direction of the sun's equator. It appeared to me evidently in the nature of a rare atmosphere extending from the sun outward, beyond the orbit of Venus at least, and I believed indefinitely farther. Indeed, this medium I could not suppose confined to the path of the comet's ellipse, or to the immediate neighborhood of the sun. It was easy, on the contrary, to imagine it pervading the entire regions of our planetary system, condensed into what we call atmosphere at the planets themselves, and perhaps at some of them modified by considerations, so to speak, purely geological.\n\nHaving adopted this view of the subject, I had little further hesitation. Granting that on my passage I should meet with atmosphere essentially the same as at the surface of the earth, I conceived that, by means of the very ingenious apparatus of M. Grimm, I should readily be enabled to condense it in sufficient quantity for the purposes of respiration. This would remove the chief obstacle in a journey to the moon. I had indeed spent some money and great labor in adapting the apparatus to the object intended, and confidently looked forward to its successful application, if I could manage to complete the voyage within any reasonable period. This brings me back to the rate at which it might be possible to travel.\n\nIt is true that balloons, in the first stage of their ascensions from the earth, are known to rise with a velocity comparatively moderate. Now, the power of elevation lies altogether in the superior lightness of the gas in the balloon compared with the atmospheric air; and, at first sight, it does not appear probable that, as the balloon acquires altitude, and consequently arrives successively in atmospheric strata of densities rapidly diminishing \u2014 I say, it does not appear at all reasonable that, in this its progress upwards, the original velocity should be accelerated. On the other hand, I was not aware that, in any recorded ascension, a diminution was apparent in the absolute rate of ascent; although such should have been the case, if on account of nothing else, on account of the escape of gas through balloons ill-constructed, and varnished with no better material than the ordinary varnish. It seemed, therefore, that the effect of such escape was only sufficient to counterbalance the effect of some accelerating power. I now considered that, provided in my passage I found the medium I had imagined, and provided that it should prove to be actually and essentially what we denominate atmospheric air, it could make comparatively little difference at what extreme state of rarefaction I should discover it \u2014 that is to say, in regard to my power of ascending \u2014 for the gas in the balloon would not only be itself subject to rarefaction partially similar (in proportion to the occurrence of which, I could suffer an escape of so much as would be requisite to prevent explosion), but, being what it was, would, at all events, continue specifically lighter than any compound whatever of mere nitrogen and oxygen. In the meantime, the force of gravitation would be constantly diminishing, in proportion to the squares of the distances, and thus, with a velocity prodigiously accelerating, I should at length arrive in those distant regions where the force of the earth's attraction would be superseded by that of the moon. In accordance with these ideas, I did not think it worth while to encumber myself with more provisions than would be sufficient for a period of forty days.\n\nThere was still, however, another difficulty, which occasioned me some little disquietude. It has been observed, that, in balloon ascensions to any considerable height, besides the pain attending respiration, great uneasiness is experienced about the head and body, often accompanied with bleeding at the nose, and other symptoms of an alarming kind, and growing more and more inconvenient in proportion to the altitude attained. This was a reflection of a nature somewhat startling. Was it not probable that these symptoms would increase indefinitely, or at least until terminated by death itself? I finally thought not. Their origin was to be looked for in the progressive removal of the customary atmospheric pressure upon the surface of the body, and consequent distention of the superficial blood-vessels \u2014 not in any positive disorganization of the animal system, as in the case of difficulty in breathing, where the atmospheric density is chemically insufficient for the due renovation of blood in a ventricle of the heart. Unless for default of this renovation, I could see no reason, therefore, why life could not be sustained even in a vacuum; for the expansion and compression of chest, commonly called breathing, is action purely muscular, and the cause, not the effect, of respiration. In a word, I conceived that, as the body should become habituated to the want of atmospheric pressure, the sensations of pain would gradually diminish \u2014 and to endure them while they continued, I relied with confidence upon the iron hardihood of my constitution.\n\nThus, may it please your Excellencies, I have detailed some, though by no means all, the considerations which led me to form the project of a lunar voyage. I shall now proceed to lay before you the result of an attempt so apparently audacious in conception, and, at all events, so utterly unparalleled in the annals of mankind.\n\nHaving attained the altitude before mentioned, that is to say three miles and three-quarters, I threw out from the car a quantity of feathers, and found that I still ascended with sufficient rapidity; there was, therefore, no necessity for discharging any ballast. I was glad of this, for I wished to retain with me as much weight as I could carry, for reasons which will be explained in the sequel. I as yet suffered no bodily inconvenience, breathing with great freedom, and feeling no pain whatever in the head. The cat was lying very demurely upon my coat, which I had taken off, and eyeing the pigeons with an air of nonchalance. These latter being tied by the leg, to prevent their escape, were busily employed in picking up some grains of rice scattered for them in the bottom of the car.\n\nAt twenty minutes past six o'clock, the barometer showed an elevation of 26,400 feet, or five miles to a fraction. The prospect seemed unbounded. Indeed, it is very easily calculated by means of spherical geometry, what a great extent of the earth's area I beheld. The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere. Now, in my case, the versed sine \u2014 that is to say, the thickness of the segment beneath me \u2014 was about equal to my elevation, or the elevation of the point of sight above the surface. \"As five miles, then, to eight thousand,\" would express the proportion of the earth's area seen by me. In other words, I beheld as much as a sixteen-hundredth part of the whole surface of the globe. The sea appeared unruffled as a mirror, although, by means of the spy-glass, I could perceive it to be in a state of violent agitation. The ship was no longer visible, having drifted away, apparently to the eastward. I now began to experience, at intervals, severe pain in the head, especially about the ears \u2014 still, however, breathing with tolerable freedom. The cat and pigeons seemed to suffer no inconvenience whatsoever.\n\nAt twenty minutes before seven, the balloon entered a long series of dense cloud, which put me to great trouble, by damaging my condensing apparatus and wetting me to the skin. This was, to be sure, a singular recontre, for I had not believed it possible that a cloud of this nature could be sustained at so great an elevation. I thought it best, however, to throw out two five-pound pieces of ballast, reserving still a weight of one hundred and sixty-five pounds. Upon so doing, I soon rose above the difficulty, and perceived immediately, that I had obtained a great increase in my rate of ascent. In a few seconds after my leaving the cloud, a flash of vivid lightning shot from one end of it to the other, and caused it to kindle up, throughout its vast extent, like a mass of ignited and glowing charcoal. This, it must be remembered, was in the broad light of day. No fancy may picture the sublimity which might have been exhibited by a similar phenomenon taking place amid the darkness of the night. Hell itself might have been found a fitting image. Even as it was, my hair stood on end, while I gazed afar down within the yawning abysses, letting imagination descend, as it were, and stalk about in the strange vaulted halls, and ruddy gulfs, and red ghastly chasms of the hideous and unfathomable fire. I had indeed made a narrow escape. Had the balloon remained a very short while longer within the cloud \u2014 that is to say \u2014 had not the inconvenience of getting wet, determined me to discharge the ballast, inevitable ruin would have been the consequence. Such perils, although little considered, are perhaps the greatest which must be encountered in balloons. I had by this time, however, attained too great an elevation to be any longer uneasy on this head.\n\nI was now rising rapidly, and by seven o'clock the barometer indicated an altitude of no less than nine miles and a half. I began to find great difficulty in drawing my breath. My head, too, was excessively painful; and, having felt for some time a moisture about my cheeks, I at length discovered it to be blood, which was oozing quite fast from the drums of my ears. My eyes, also, gave me great uneasiness. Upon passing the hand over them they seemed to have protruded from their sockets in no inconsiderable degree; and all objects in the car, and even the balloon itself, appeared distorted to my vision. These symptoms were more than I had expected, and occasioned me some alarm. At this juncture, very imprudently, and without consideration, I threw out from the car three five-pound pieces of ballast. The accelerated rate of ascent thus obtained, carried me too rapidly, and without sufficient gradation, into a highly rarefied stratum of the atmosphere, and the result had nearly proved fatal to my expedition and to myself. I was suddenly seized with a spasm which lasted for more than five minutes, and even when this, in a measure, ceased, I could catch my breath only at long intervals, and in a gasping manner \u2014 bleeding all the while copiously at the nose and ears, and even slightly at the eyes. The pigeons appeared distressed in the extreme, and struggled to escape; while the cat mewed piteously, and, with her tongue hanging out of her mouth, staggered to and fro in the car as if under the influence of poison. I now too late discovered the great rashness of which I had been guilty in discharging the ballast, and my agitation was excessive. I anticipated nothing less than death, and death in a few minutes. The physical suffering I underwent contributed also to render me nearly incapable of making any exertion for the preservation of my life. I had, indeed, little power of reflection left, and the violence of the pain in my head seemed to be greatly on the increase. Thus I found that my senses would shortly give way altogether, and I had already clutched one of the valve ropes with the view of attempting a descent, when the recollection of the trick I had played the three creditors, and the possible consequences to myself, should I return, operated to deter me for the moment. I lay down in the bottom of the car, and endeavored to collect my faculties. In this I so far succeeded as to determine upon the experiment of losing blood. Having no lancet, however, I was constrained to perform the operation in the best manner I was able, and finally succeeded in opening a vein in my right arm, with the blade of my penknife. The blood had hardly commenced flowing when I experienced a sensible relief, and by the time I had lost about half a moderate basin full, most of the worst symptoms had abandoned me entirely. I nevertheless did not think it expedient to attempt getting on my feet immediately; but, having tied up my arm as well as I could, I lay still for about a quarter of an hour. At the end of this time I arose, and found myself freer from absolute pain of any kind than I had been during the last hour and a quarter of my ascension. The difficulty of breathing, however, was diminished in a very slight degree, and I found that it would soon be positively necessary to make use of my condenser. In the meantime, looking toward the cat, who was again snugly stowed away upon my coat, I discovered to my infinite surprise, that she had taken the opportunity of my indisposition to bring into light a litter of three little kittens. This was an addition to the number of passengers on my part altogether unexpected; but I was pleased at the occurrence. It would afford me a chance of bringing to a kind of test the truth of a surmise, which, more than anything else, had influenced me in attempting this ascension. I had imagined that the habitual endurance of the atmospheric pressure at the surface of the earth was the cause, or nearly so, of the pain attending animal existence at a distance above the surface. Should the kittens be found to suffer uneasiness in an equal degree with their mother, I must consider my theory in fault, but a failure to do so I should look upon as a strong confirmation of my idea.\n\nBy eight o'clock I had actually attained an elevation of seventeen miles above the surface of the earth. Thus it seemed to me evident that my rate of ascent was not only on the increase, but that the progression would have been apparent in a slight degree even had I not discharged the ballast which I did. The pains in my head and ears returned, at intervals, with violence, and I still continued to bleed occasionally at the nose; but, upon the whole, I suffered much less than might have been expected. I breathed, however, at every moment, with more and more difficulty, and each inhalation was attended with a troublesome spasmodic action of the chest. I now unpacked the condensing apparatus, and got it ready for immediate use.\n\nThe view of the earth, at this period of my ascension, was beautiful indeed. To the westward, the northward, and the southward, as far as I could see, lay a boundless sheet of apparently unruffled ocean, which every moment gained a deeper and a deeper tint of blue and began already to assume a slight appearance of convexity. At a vast distance to the eastward, although perfectly discernible, extended the islands of Great Britain, the entire Atlantic coasts of France and Spain, with a small portion of the northern part of the continent of Africa. Of individual edifices not a trace could be discovered, and the proudest cities of mankind had utterly faded away from the face of the earth. From the rock of Gibraltar, now dwindled into a dim speck, the dark Mediterranean sea, dotted with shining islands as the heaven is dotted with stars, spread itself out to the eastward as far as my vision extended, until its entire mass of waters seemed at length to tumble headlong over the abyss of the horizon, and I found myself listening on tiptoe for the echoes of the mighty cataract. Overhead, the sky was of a jetty black, and the stars were brilliantly visible.\n\nThe pigeons about this time seeming to undergo much suffering, I determined upon giving them their liberty. I first untied one of them, a beautiful gray-mottled pigeon, and placed him upon the rim of the wicker-work. He appeared extremely uneasy, looking anxiously around him, fluttering his wings, and making a loud cooing noise, but could not be persuaded to trust himself from off the car. I took him up at last, and threw him to about half a dozen yards from the balloon. He made, however, no attempt to descend as I had expected, but struggled with great vehemence to get back, uttering at the same time very shrill and piercing cries. He at length succeeded in regaining his former station on the rim, but had hardly done so when his head dropped upon his breast, and be fell dead within the car. The other one did not prove so unfortunate. To prevent his following the example of his companion, and accomplishing a return, I threw him downward with all my force, and was pleased to find him continue his descent, with great velocity, making use of his wings with ease, and in a perfectly natural manner. In a very short time he was out of sight, and I have no doubt he reached home in safety. Puss, who seemed in a great measure recovered from her illness, now made a hearty meal of the dead bird and then went to sleep with much apparent satisfaction. Her kittens were quite lively, and so far evinced not the slightest sign of any uneasiness whatever.\n\nAt a quarter-past eight, being no longer able to draw breath without the most intolerable pain, I proceeded forthwith to adjust around the car the apparatus belonging to the condenser. This apparatus will require some little explanation, and your Excellencies will please to bear in mind that my object, in the first place, was to surround myself and cat entirely with a barricade against the highly rarefied atmosphere in which I was existing, with the intention of introducing within this barricade, by means of my condenser, a quantity of this same atmosphere sufficiently condensed for the purposes of respiration. With this object in view I had prepared a very strong perfectly air-tight, but flexible gum-elastic bag. In this bag, which was of sufficient dimensions, the entire car was in a manner placed. That is to say, it (the bag) was drawn over the whole bottom of the car, up its sides, and so on, along the outside of the ropes, to the upper rim or hoop where the net-work is attached. Having pulled the bag up in this way, and formed a complete enclosure on all sides, and at botttom, it was now necessary to fasten up its top or mouth, by passing its material over the hoop of the net-work \u2014 in other words, between the net-work and the hoop. But if the net-work were separated from the hoop to admit this passage, what was to sustain the car in the meantime? Now the net-work was not permanently fastened to the hoop, but attached by a series of running loops or nooses. I therefore undid only a few of these loops at one time, leaving the car suspended by the remainder. Having thus inserted a portion of the cloth forming the upper part of the bag, I refastened the loops \u2014 not to the hoop, for that would have been impossible, since the cloth now intervened \u2014 but to a series of large buttons, affixed to the cloth itself, about three feet below the mouth of the bag, the intervals between the buttons having been made to correspond to the intervals between the loops. This done, a few more of the loops were unfastened from the rim, a farther portion of the cloth introduced, and the disengaged loops then connected with their proper buttons. In this way it was possible to insert the whole upper part of the bag between the net-work and the hoop. It is evident that the hoop would now drop down within the car, while the whole weight of the car itself, with all its contents, would be held up merely by the strength of the buttons. This, at first sight, would seem an inadequate dependence; but it was by no means so, for the buttons were not only very strong in themselves, but so close together that a very slight portion of the whole weight was supported by any one of them. Indeed, had the car and contents been three times heavier than they were, I should not have been at all uneasy. I now raised up the hoop again within the covering of gum-elastic, and propped it at nearly its former height by means of three light poles prepared for the occasion. This was done, of course, to keep the bag distended at the top, and to preserve the lower part of the net-work in its proper situation. All that now remained was to fasten up the mouth of the enclosure; and this was readily accomplished by gathering the folds of the material together, and twisting them up very tightly on the inside by means of a kind of stationary tourniquet.\n\nIn the sides of the covering thus adjusted round the car, had been inserted three circular panes of thick but clear glass, through which I could see without difficulty around me in every horizontal direction. In that portion of the cloth forming the bottom, was likewise, a fourth window, of the same kind, and corresponding with a small aperture in the floor of the car itself. This enabled me to see perpendicularly down, but having found it impossible to place any similar contrivance overhead, on account of the peculiar manner of closing up the opening there, and the consequent wrinkles in the cloth, I could expect to see no objects situated directly in my zenith. This, of course, was a matter of little consequence; for had I even been able to place a window at top, the balloon itself would have prevented my making any use of it.\n\nAbout a foot below one of the side windows was a circular opening, eight inches in diameter, and fitted with a brass rim adapted in its inner edge to the windings of a screw. In this rim was screwed the large tube of the condenser, the body of the machine being, of course, within the chamber of gum-elastic. Through this tube a quantity of the rare atmosphere circumjacent being drawn by means of a vacuum created in the body of the machine, was thence discharged, in a state of condensation, to mingle with the thin air already in the chamber. This operation being repeated several times, at length filled the chamber with atmosphere proper for all the purposes of respiration. But in so confined a space it would, in a short time, necessarily become foul, and unfit for use from frequent contact with the lungs. It was then ejected by a small valve at the bottom of the car \u2014 the dense air readily sinking into the thinner atmosphere below. To avoid the inconvenience of making a total vacuum at any moment within the chamber, this purification was never accomplished all at once, but in a gradual manner \u2014 the valve being opened only for a few seconds, then closed again, until one or two strokes from the pump of the condenser had supplied the place of the atmosphere ejected. For the sake of experiment I had put the cat and kittens in a small basket, and suspended it outside the car to a button at the bottom, close by the valve, through which I could feed them at any moment when necessary. I did this at some little risk, and before closing the mouth of the chamber, by reaching under the car with one of the poles before mentioned to which a hook had been attached.\n\nBy the time I had fully completed these arrangements and filled the chamber as explained, it wanted only ten minutes of nine o'clock. During the whole period of my being thus employed, I endured the most terrible distress from difficulty of respiration, and bitterly did I repent the negligence or rather fool-hardiness, of which I had been guilty, of putting off to the last moment a matter of so much importance. But having at length accomplished it, I soon began to reap the benefit of my invention. Once again I breathed with perfect freedom and ease \u2014 and indeed why should I not? I was also agreeably surprised to find myself, in a great measure, relieved from the violent pains which had hitherto tormented me. A slight headache, accompanied with a sensation of fulness or distention about the wrists, the ankles, and the throat, was nearly all of which I had now to complain. Thus it seemed evident that a greater part of the uneasiness attending the removal of atmospheric pressure had actually worn off, as I had expected, and that much of the pain endured for the last two hours should have been attributed altogether to the effects of a deficient respiration.\n\nAt twenty minutes before nine o'clock \u2014 that is to say, a short time prior to my closing up the mouth of the chamber, the mercury attained its limit, or ran down, in the barometer, which, as I mentioned before, was one of an extended construction. It then indicated an altitude on my part of 132,000 feet, or five-and-twenty miles, and I consequently surveyed at that time an extent of the earth's area amounting to no less than the three hundred-and-twentieth part of its entire superficies. At nine o'clock I had again lost sight of land to the eastward, but not before I became aware that the balloon was drifting rapidly to the N. N. W. The convexity of the ocean beneath me was very evident indeed, although my view was often interrupted by the masses of cloud which floated to and fro. I observed now that even the lightest vapors never rose to more than ten miles above the level of the sea.\n\nAt half past nine I tried the experiment of throwing out a handful of feathers through the valve. They did not float as I had expected; but dropped down perpendicularly, like a bullet, en masse, and with the greatest velocity \u2014 being out of sight in a very few seconds. I did not at first know what to make of this extraordinary phenomenon; not being able to believe that my rate of ascent had, of a sudden, met with so prodigious an acceleration. But it soon occurred to me that the atmosphere was now far too rare to sustain even the feathers; that they actually fell, as they appeared to do, with great rapidity; and that I had been surprised by the united velocities of their descent and my own elevation.\n\nBy ten o'clock I found that I had very little to occupy my immediate attention. Affairs went swimmingly, and I believed the balloon to be going upward witb a speed increasing momently although I had no longer any means of ascertaining the progression of the increase. I suffered no pain or uneasiness of any kind, and enjoyed better spirits than I had at any period since my departure from Rotterdam, busying myself now in examining the state of my various apparatus, and now in regenerating the atmosphere within the chamber. This latter point I determined to attend to at regular intervals of forty minutes, more on account of the preservation of my health, than from so frequent a renovation being absolutely necessary. In the meanwhile I could not help making anticipations. Fancy revelled in the wild and dreamy regions of the moon. Imagination, feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land. Now there were boary and time-honored forests, and craggy precipices, and waterfalls tumbling with a loud noise into abysses without a bottom. Then I came suddenly into still noonday solitudes, where no wind of heaven ever intruded, and where vast meadows of poppies, and slender, lily-looking flowers spread themselves out a weary distance, all silent and motionless forever. Then again I journeyed far down away into another country where it was all one dim and vague lake, with a boundary line of clouds. And out of this melancholy water arose a forest of tall eastern trees, like a wilderness of dreams. And I have in mind that the shadows of the trees which fell upon the lake remained not on the surface where they fell, but sunk slowly and steadily down, and commingled with the waves, while from the trunks of the trees other shadows were continually coming out, and taking the place of their brothers thus entombed. \"This then,\" I said thoughtfully, \"is the very reason why the waters of this lake grow blacker with age, and more melancholy as the hours run on.\" But fancies such as these were not the sole possessors of my brain. Horrors of a nature most stern and most appalling would too frequently obtrude themselves upon my mind, and shake the innermost depths of my soul with the bare supposition of their possibility. Yet I would not suffer my thoughts for any length of time to dwell upon these latter speculations, rightly judging the real and palpable dangers of the voyage sufficient for my undivided attention.\n\nAt five o'clock, p.m., being engaged in regenerating the atmosphere within the chamber, I took that opportunity of observing the cat and kittens through the valve. The cat herself appeared to suffer again very much, and I had no hesitation in attributing her uneasiness chiefly to a difficulty in breathing; but my experiment with the kittens had resulted very strangely. I had expected, of course, to see them betray a sense of pain, although in a less degree than their mother, and this would have been sufficient to confirm my opinion concerning the habitual endurance of atmospheric pressure. But I was not prepared to find them, upon close examination, evidently enjoying a high degree of health, breathing with the greatest ease and perfect regularity, and evincing not the slightest sign of any uneasiness whatever. I could only account for all this by extending my theory, and supposing that the highly rarefied atmosphere around might perhaps not be, as I had taken for granted, chemically insufficient for the purposes of life, and that a person born in such a medium might, possibly, be unaware of any inconvenience attending its inhalation, while, upon removal to the denser strata near the earth, he might endure tortures of a similar nature to those I had so lately experienced. It has since been to me a matter of deep regret that an awkward accident, at this time, occasioned me the loss of my little family of cats, and deprived me of the insight into this matter which a continued experiment might have afforded. In passing my hand through the valve, with a cup of water for the old puss, the sleeves of my shirt became entangled in the loop which sustained the basket, and thus, in a moment, loosened it from the bottom. Had the whole actually vanished into air, it could not have shot from my sight in a more abrupt and instantaneous manner. Positively, there could not have intervened the tenth part of a second between the disengagement of the basket and its absolute and total disappearance with all that it contained. My good wishes followed it to the earth, but of course, I had no hope that either cat or kittens would ever live to tell the tale of their misfortune.\n\nAt six o'clock, I perceived a great portion of the earth's visible area to the eastward involved in thick shadow, which continued to advance with great rapidity, until, at five minutes before seven, the whole surface in view was enveloped in the darkness of night. It was not, however, until long after this time that the rays of the setting sun ceased to illumine the balloon; and this circumstance, although of course fully anticipated, did not fail to give me an infinite deal of pleasure. It was evident that, in the morning, I should behold the rising luminary many hours at least before the citizens of Rotterdam, in spite of their situation so much farther to the eastward, and thus, day after day, in proportion to the height ascended, would I enjoy the light of the sun for a longer and a longer period. I now determined to keep a journal of my passage, reckoning the days from one to twenty-four hours continuously, without taking into consideration the intervals of darkness.\n\nAt ten o'clock, feeling sleepy, I determined to lie down for the rest of the night; but here a difficulty presented itself, which, obvious as it may appear, had escaped my attention up to the very moment of which I am now speaking. If I went to sleep as I proposed, how could the atmosphere in the chamber be regenerated in the interim? To breathe it for more than an hour, at the farthest, would be a matter of impossibility, or, if even this term could be extended to an hour and a quarter, the most ruinous consequences might ensue. The consideration of this dilemma gave me no little disquietude; and it will hardly be believed, that, after the dangers I had undergone, I should look upon this business in so serious a light, as to give up all hope of accomplishing my ultimate design, and finally make up my mind to the necessity of a descent. But this hesitation was only momentary. I reflected that man is the veriest slave of custom, and that many points in the routine of his existence are deemed essentially important, which are only so at all by his having rendered them habitual. It was very certain that I could not do without sleep; but I might easily bring myself to feel no inconvenience from being awakened at intervals of an hour during the whole period of my repose. It would require but five minutes at most to regenerate the atmosphere in the fullest manner, and the only real difficulty was to contrive a method of arousing myself at the proper moment for so doing. But this was a question which, I am willing to confess, occasioned me no little trouble in its solution. To be sure, I had heard of the student who, to prevent his falling asleep over his books, held in one hand a ball of copper, the din of whose descent into a basin of the same metal on the floor beside his chair, served effectually to startle him up, if, at any moment, he should be overcome with drowsiness. My own case, however, was very different indeed, and left me no room for any similar idea; for I did not wish to keep awake, but to be aroused from slumber at regular intervals of time. I at length hit upon the following expedient, which, simple as it may seem, was hailed by me, at the moment of discovery, as an invention fully equal to that of the telescope, the steam-engine, or the art of printing itself.\n\nIt is necessary to premise, that the balloon, at the elevation now attained, continued its course upward with an even and undeviating ascent, and the car consequently followed with a steadiness so perfect that it would have been impossible to detect in it the slightest vacillation whatever. This circumstance favored me greatly in the project I now determined to adopt. My supply of water had been put on board in kegs containing five gallons each, and ranged very securely around the interior of the car. I unfastened one of these, and taking two ropes tied them tightly across the rim of the wicker-work from one side to the other; placing them about a foot apart and parallel so as to form a kind of shelf, upon which I placed the keg, and steadied it in a horizontal position. About eight inches immediately below these ropes, and four feet from the bottom of the car I fastened another shelf \u2014 but made of thin plank, being the only similar piece of wood I had. Upon this latter shelf, and exactly beneath one of the rims of the keg, a small earthern pitcher was deposited. I now bored a hole in the end of the keg over the pitcher, and fitted in a plug of soft wood, cut in a tapering or conical shape. This plug I pushed in or pulled out, as might happen, until, after a few experiments, it arrived at that exact degree of tightness, at which the water, oozing from the hole, and falling into the pitcher below, would fill the latter to the brim in the period of sixty minutes. This, of course, was a matter briefly and easily ascertained, by noticing the proportion of the pitcher filled in any given time. Having arranged all this, the rest of the plan is obvious. My bed was so contrived upon the floor of the car, as to bring my head, in lying down, immediately below the mouth of the pitcher. It was evident, that, at the expiration of an hour, the pitcher, getting full, would be forced to run over, and to run over at the mouth, which was somewhat lower than the rim. It was also evident, that the water thus falling from a height of more than four feet, could not do otherwise than fall upon my face, and that the sure consequences would be, to waken me up instantaneously, even from the soundest slumber in the world.\n\nIt was fully eleven by the time I had completed these arrangements, and I immediately betook myself to bed, with full confidence in the efficiency of my invention. Nor in this matter was I disappointed. Punctually every sixty minutes was I aroused by my trusty chronometer, when, having emptied the pitcher into the bung-hole of the keg, and performed the duties of the condenser, I retired again to bed. These regular interruptions to my slumber caused me even less discomfort than I had anticipated; and when I finally arose for the day, it was seven o'clock, and the sun had attained many degrees above the line of my horizon.\n\nApril 3d. I found the balloon at an immense height indeed, and the earth's apparent convexity increased in a material degree. Below me in the ocean lay a cluster of black specks, which undoubtedly were islands. Far away to the northward I perceived a thin, white, and exceedingly brilliant line, or streak, on the edge of the horizon, and I had no hesitation in supposing it to be the southern disk of the ices of the Polar Sea. My curiosity was greatly excited, for I had hopes of passing on much farther to the north, and might possibly, at some period, find myself placed directly above the Pole itself. I now lamented that my great elevation would, in this case, prevent my taking as accurate a survey as I could wish. Much, however, might be ascertained. Nothing else of an extraordinary nature occurred during the day. My apparatus all continued in good order, and the balloon still ascended without any perceptible vacillation. The cold was intense, and obliged me to wrap up closely in an overcoat. When darkness came over the earth, I betook myself to bed, although it was for many hours afterward broad daylight all around my immediate situation. The water-clock was punctual in its duty, and I slept until next morning soundly, with the exception of the periodical interruption.\n\nApril 4th. Arose in good health and spirits, and was astonished at the singular change which had taken place in the appearance of the sea. It had lost, in a great measure, the deep tint of blue it had hitherto worn, being now of a grayish-white, and of a lustre dazzling to the eye. The islands were no longer visible; whether they had passed down the horizon to the southeast, or whether my increasing elevation had left them out of sight, it is impossible to say. I was inclined, however, to the latter opinion. The rim of ice to the northward was growing more and more apparent. Cold by no means so intense. Nothing of importance occurred, and I passed the day in reading, having taken care to supply myself with books.\n\nApril 5th. Beheld the singular phenomenon of the sun rising while nearly the whole visible surface of the earth continued to be involved in darkness. In time, however, the light spread itself over all, and I again saw the line of ice to the northward. It was now very distinct, and appeared of a much darker hue than the waters of the ocean. I was evidently approaching it, and with great rapidity. Fancied I could again distinguish a strip of land to the eastward, and one also to the westward, but could not be certain. Weather moderate. Nothing of any consequence happened during the day. Went early to bed.\n\nApril 6th. Was surprised at finding the rim of ice at a very moderate distance, and an immense field of the same material stretching away off to the horizon in the north. It was evident that if the balloon held its present course, it would soon arrive above the Frozen Ocean, and I had now little doubt of ultimately seeing the Pole. During the whole of the day I continued to near the ice. Toward night the limits of my horizon very suddenly and materially increased, owing undoubtedly to the earth's form being that of an oblate spheroid, and my arriving above the flattened regions in the vicinity of the Arctic circle. When darkness at length overtook me, I went to bed in great anxiety, fearing to pass over the object of so much curiosity when I should have no opportunity of observing it.\n\nApril 7th. Arose early, and, to my great joy, at length beheld what there could be no hesitation in supposing the northern Pole itself. It was there, beyond a doubt, and immediately beneath my feet; but, alas! I had now ascended to so vast a distance, that nothing could with accuracy be discerned. Indeed, to judge from the progression of the numbers indicating my various altitudes, respectively, at different periods, between six A.M. on the second of April, and twenty minutes before nine A.M. of the same day (at which time the barometer ran down), it might be fairly inferred that the balloon had now, at four o'clock in the morning of April the seventh, reached a height of not less, certainly, than 7,254 miles above the surface of the sea. This elevation may appear immense, but the estimate upon which it is calculated gave a result in all probability far inferior to the truth. At all events I undoubtedly beheld the whole of the earth's major diameter; the entire northern hemisphere lay beneath me like a chart orthographically projected: and the great circle of the equator itself formed the boundary line of my horizon. Your Excellencies may, however, readily imagine that the confined regions hitherto unexplored within the limits of the Arctic circle, although situated directly beneath me, and therefore seen without any appearance of being foreshortened, were still, in themselves, comparatively too diminutive, and at too great a distance from the point of sight, to admit of any very accurate examination. Nevertheless, what could be seen was of a nature singular and exciting. Northwardly from that huge rim before mentioned, and which, with slight qualification, may be called the limit of human discovery in these regions, one unbroken, or nearly unbroken, sheet of ice continues to extend. In the first few degrees of this its progress, its surface is very sensibly flattened, farther on depressed into a plane, and finally, becoming not a little concave, it terminates, at the Pole itself, in a circular centre, sharply defined, wbose apparent diameter subtended at the balloon an angle of about sixty-five seconds, and whose dusky hue, varying in intensity, was, at all times, darker than any other spot upon the visible hemisphere, and occasionally deepened into the most absolute and impenetrable blackness. Farther than this, little could be ascertained. By twelve o'clock the circular centre had materially decreased in circumference, and by seven P.M. I lost sight of it entirely; the balloon passing over the western limb of the ice, and floating away rapidly in the direction of the equator.\n\nApril 8th. Found a sensible diminution in the earth's apparent diameter, besides a material alteration in its general color and appearance. The whole visible area partook in different degrees of a tint of pale yellow, and in some portions had acquired a brilliancy even painful to the eye. My view downward was also considerably impeded by the dense atmosphere in the vicinity of the surface being loaded with clouds, between whose masses I could only now and then obtain a glimpse of the earth itself. This difficulty of direct vision had troubled me more or less for the last forty-eight hours; but my present enormous elevation brought closer together, as it were, the floating bodies of vapor, and the inconvenience became, of course, more and more palpable in proportion to my ascent. Nevertheless, I could easily perceive that the balloon now hovered above the range of great lakes in the continent of North America, and was holding a course, due south, which would bring me to the tropics. This circumstance did not fail to give me the most heartful satisfaction, and I hailed it as a happy omen of ultimate success. Indeed, the direction I had hitherto taken, had filled me with uneasiness; for it was evident that, had I continued it much longer, there would have been no possibility of my arriving at the moon at all, whose orbit is inclined to the ecliptic at only the small angle of 5 degrees 8' 48\".\n\nApril 9th. To-day the earth's diameter was greatly diminished, and the color of the surface assumed hourly a deeper tint of yellow. The balloon kept steadily on her course to the southward, and arrived, at nine P.M., over the northern edge of the Mexican Gulf.\n\nApril 10th. I was suddenly aroused from slumber, about five o'clock this morning, by a loud, crackling, and terrific sound, for which I could in no manner account. It was of very brief duration, but, while it lasted resembled nothing in the world of which I had any previous experience. It is needless to say that I became excessively alarmed, having, in the first instance, attributed the noise to the bursting of the balloon. I examined all my apparatus, however, with great attention, and could discover nothing out of order. Spent a great part of the day in meditating upon an occurrence so extraordinary, but could find no means whatever of accounting for it. Went to bed dissatisfied, and in a state of great anxiety and agitation.\n\nApril 11th. Found a startling diminution in the apparent diameter of the earth, and a considerable increase, now observable for the first time, in that of the moon itself, which wanted only a few days of being full. It now required long and excessive labor to condense within the chamber sufficient atmospheric air for the sustenance of life.\n\nApril 12th. A singular alteration took place in regard to the direction of the balloon, and although fully anticipated, afforded me the most unequivocal delight. Having reached, in its former course, about the twentieth parallel of southern latitude, it turned off suddenly, at an acute angle, to the eastward, and thus proceeded throughout the day, keeping nearly, if not altogether, in the exact plane of the lunar elipse. What was worthy of remark, a very perceptible vacillation in the car was a consequence of this change of route \u2014 a vacillation which prevailed, in a more or less degree, for a period of many hours.\n\nApril 13th. Was again very much alarmed by a repetition of the loud, crackling noise which terrified me on the tenth. Thought long upon the subject, but was unable to form any satisfactory conclusion. Great decrease in the earth's apparent diameter, which now subtended from the balloon an angle of very little more than twenty-five degrees. The moon could not be seen at all, being nearly in my zenith. I still continued in the plane of the elipse, but made little progress to the eastward.\n\nApril 14th. Extremely rapid decrease in the diameter of the earth. To-day I became strongly impressed with the idea, that the balloon was now actually running up the line of apsides to the point of perigee \u2014 in other words, holding the direct course which would bring it immediately to the moon in that part of its orbit the nearest to the earth. The moon iself was directly overhead, and consequently hidden from my view. Great and long-continued labor necessary for the condensation of the atmosphere.\n\nApril 15th. Not even the outlines of continents and seas could now be traced upon the earth with anything approaching distinctness. About twelve o'clock I became aware, for the third time, of that appalling sound which had so astonished me before. It now, however, continued for some moments, and gathered intensity as it continued. At length, while, stupefied and terror-stricken, I stood in expectation of I knew not what hideous destruction, the car vibrated with excessive violence, and a gigantic and flaming mass of some material which I could not distinguish, came with a voice of a thousand thunders, roaring and booming by the balloon. When my fears and astonishment had in some degree subsided, I had little difficulty in supposing it to be some mighty volcanic fragment ejected from that world to which I was so rapidly approaching, and, in all probability, one of that singular class of substances occasionally picked up on the earth, and termed meteoric stones for want of a better appellation.\n\nApril 16th. To-day, looking upward as well as I could, through each of the side windows alternately, I beheld, to my great delight, a very small portion of the moon's disk protruding, as it were, on all sides beyond the huge circumference of the balloon. My agitation was extreme; for I had now little doubt of soon reaching the end of my perilous voyage. Indeed, the labor now required by the condenser had increased to a most oppressive degree, and allowed me scarcely any respite from exertion. Sleep was a matter nearly out of the question. I became quite ill, and my frame trembled with exhaustion. It was impossible that human nature could endure this state of intense suffering much longer. During the now brief interval of darkness a meteoric stone again passed in my vicinity, and the frequency of these phenomena began to occasion me much apprehension.\n\nApril 17th. This morning proved an epoch in my voyage. It will be remembered that, on the thirteenth, the earth subtended an angular breadth of twenty-five degrees. On the fourteenth this had greatly diminished; on the fifteenth a still more remarkable decrease was observable; and, on retiring on the night of the sixteenth, I had noticed an angle of no more than about seven degrees and fifteen minutes. What, therefore, must have been my amazement, on awakening from a brief and disturbed slumber, on the morning of this day, the seventeenth, at finding the surface beneath me so suddenly and wonderfully augmented in volume, as to subtend no less than thirty-nine degrees in apparent angular diameter! I was thunderstruck! No words can give any adequate idea of the extreme, the absolute horror and astonishment, with which I was seized possessed, and altogether overwhelmed. My knees tottered beneath me \u2014 my teeth chattered \u2014 my hair started up on end. \"The balloon, then, had actually burst!\" These were the first tumultuous ideas that hurried through my mind: \"The balloon had positively burst! \u2014 I was falling \u2014 falling with the most impetuous, the most unparalleled velocity! To judge by the immense distance already so quickly passed over, it could not be more than ten minutes, at the farthest, before I should meet the surface of the earth, and be hurled into annihilation!\" But at length reflection came to my relief. I paused; I considered; and I began to doubt. The matter was impossible. I could not in any reason have so rapidly come down. Besides, although I was evidently approaching the surface below me, it was with a speed by no means commensurate with the velocity I had at first so horribly conceived. This consideration served to calm the perturbation of my mind, and I finally succeeded in regarding the phenomenon in its proper point of view. In fact, amazement must have fairly deprived me of my senses, when I could not see the vast difference, in appearance, between the surface below me, and the surface of my mother earth. The latter was indeed over my head, and completely hidden by the balloon, while the moon \u2014 the moon itself in all its glory \u2014 lay beneath me, and at my feet.\n\nThe stupor and surprise produced in my mind by this extraordinary change in the posture of affairs was perhaps, after all, that part of the adventure least susceptible of explanation. For the bouleversement in itself was not only natural and inevitable, but had been long actually anticipated as a circumstance to be expected whenever I should arrive at that exact point of my voyage where the attraction of the planet should be superseded by the attraction of the satellite \u2014 or, more precisely, where the gravitation of the balloon toward the earth should be less powerful than its gravitation toward the moon. To be sure I arose from a sound slumber, with all my senses in confusion, to the contemplation of a very startling phenomenon, and one which, although expected, was not expected at the moment. The revolution itself must, of course, have taken place in an easy and gradual manner, and it is by no means clear that, had I even been awake at the time of the occurrence, I should have been made aware of it by any internal evidence of an inversion \u2014 that is to say, by any inconvenience or disarrangement, either about my person or about my apparatus.\n\nIt is almost needless to say that, upon coming to a due sense of my situation, and emerging from the terror which had absorbed every faculty of my soul, my attention was, in the first place, wholly directed to the contemplation of the general physical appearance of the moon. It lay beneath me like a chart \u2014 and although I judged it to be still at no inconsiderable distance, the indentures of its surface were defined to my vision with a most striking and altogether unaccountable distinctness. The entire absence of ocean or sea, and indeed of any lake or river, or body of water whatsoever, struck me, at first glance, as the most extraordinary feature in its geological condition. Yet, strange to say, I beheld vast level regions of a character decidedly alluvial, although by far the greater portion of the hemisphere in sight was covered with innumerable volcanic mountains, conical in shape, and having more the appearance of artificial than of natural protuberance. The highest among them does not exceed three and three-quarter miles in perpendicular elevation; but a map of the volcanic districts of the Campi Phlegraei would afford to your Excellencies a better idea of their general surface than any unworthy description I might think proper to attempt. The greater part of them were in a state of evident eruption, and gave me fearfully to understand their fury and their power, by the repeated thunders of the miscalled meteoric stones, which now rushed upward by the balloon with a frequency more and more appalling.\n\nApril 18th. To-day I found an enormous increase in the moon's apparent bulk \u2014 and the evidently accelerated velocity of my descent began to fill me with alarm. It will be remembered, that, in the earliest stage of my speculations upon the possibility of a passage to the moon, the existence, in its vicinity, of an atmosphere, dense in proportion to the bulk of the planet, had entered largely into my calculations; this too in spite of many theories to the contrary, and, it may be added, in spite of a general disbelief in the existence of any lunar atmosphere at all. But, in addition to what I have already urged in regard to Encke's comet and the zodiacal light, I had been strengthened in my opinion by certain observations of Mr. Schroeter, of Lilienthal. He observed the moon when two days and a half old, in the evening soon after sunset, before the dark part was visible, and continued to watch it until it became visible. The two cusps appeared tapering in a very sharp faint prolongation, each exhibiting its farthest extremity faintly illuminated by the solar rays, before any part of the dark hemisphere was visible. Soon afterward, the whole dark limb became illuminated. This prolongation of the cusps beyond the semicircle, I thought, must have arisen from the refraction of the sun's rays by the moon's atmosphere. I computed, also, the height of the atmosphere (which could refract light enough into its dark hemisphere to produce a twilight more luminous than the light reflected from the earth when the moon is about 32 degrees from the new) to be 1,356 Paris feet; in this view, I supposed the greatest height capable of refracting the solar ray, to be 5,376 feet. My ideas on this topic had also received confirmation by a passage in the eighty-second volume of the Philosophical Transactions, in which it is stated that at an occultation of Jupiter's satellites, the third disappeared after having been about 1\" or 2\" of time indistinct, and the fourth became indiscernible near the limb.\n\nCassini frequently observed Saturn, Jupiter, and the fixed stars, when approaching the moon to occultation, to have their circular figure changed into an oval one; and, in other occultations, he found no alteration of figure at all. Hence it might be supposed, that at some times and not at others, there is a dense matter encompassing the moon wherein the rays of the stars are refracted.\n\nUpon the resistance or, more properly, upon the support of an atmosphere, existing in the state of density imagined, I had, of course, entirely depended for the safety of my ultimate descent. Should I then, after all, prove to have been mistaken, I had in consequence nothing better to expect, as a finale to my adventure, than being dashed into atoms against the rugged surface of the satellite. And, indeed, I had now every reason to be terrified. My distance from the moon was comparatively trifling, while the labor required by the condenser was diminished not at all, and I could discover no indication whatever of a decreasing rarity in the air.\n\nApril 19th. This morning, to my great joy, about nine o'clock, the surface of the moon being frightfully near, and my apprehensions excited to the utmost, the pump of my condenser at length gave evident tokens of an alteration in the atmosphere. By ten, I had reason to believe its density considerably increased. By eleven, very little labor was necessary at the apparatus; and at twelve o'clock, with some hesitation, I ventured to unscrew the tourniquet, when, finding no inconvenience from having done so, I finally threw open the gum-elastic chamber, and unrigged it from around the car. As might have been expected, spasms and violent headache were the immediate consequences of an experiment so precipitate and full of danger. But these and other difficulties attending respiration, as they were by no means so great as to put me in peril of my life, I determined to endure as I best could, in consideration of my leaving them behind me momently in my approach to the denser strata near the moon. This approach, however, was still impetuous in the extreme; and it soon became alarmingly certain that, although I had probably not been deceived in the expectation of an atmosphere dense in proportion to the mass of the satellite, still I had been wrong in supposing this density, even at the surface, at all adequate to the support of the great weight contained in the car of my balloon. Yet this should have been the case, and in an equal degree as at the surface of the earth, the actual gravity of bodies at either planet supposed in the ratio of the atmospheric condensation. That it was not the case, however, my precipitous downfall gave testimony enough; why it was not so, can only be explained by a reference to those possible geological disturbances to which I have formerly alluded. At all events I was now close upon the planet, and coming down with the most terrible impetuosity. I lost not a moment, accordingly, in throwing overboard first my ballast, then my water-kegs, then my condensing apparatus and gum-elastic chamber, and finally every article within the car. But it was all to no purpose. I still fell with horrible rapidity, and was now not more than half a mile from the surface. As a last resource, therefore, having got rid of my coat, hat, and boots, I cut loose from the balloon the car itself, which was of no inconsiderable weight, and thus, clinging with both hands to the net-work, I had barely time to observe that the whole country, as far as the eye could reach, was thickly interspersed with diminutive habitations, ere I tumbled headlong into the very heart of a fantastical-looking city, and into the middle of a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable, or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance, but stood, like a parcel of idiots, grinning in a ludicrous manner, and eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo. I turned from them in contempt, and, gazing upward at the earth so lately left, and left perhaps for ever, beheld it like a huge, dull, copper shield, about two degrees in diameter, fixed immovably in the heavens overhead, and tipped on one of its edges with a crescent border of the most brilliant gold. No traces of land or water could be discovered, and the whole was clouded with variable spots, and belted with tropical and equatorial zones.\n\nThus, may it please your Excellencies, after a series of great anxieties, unheard of dangers, and unparalleled escapes, I had, at length, on the nineteenth day of my departure from Rotterdam, arrived in safety at the conclusion of a voyage undoubtedly the most extraordinary, and the most momentous, ever accomplished, undertaken, or conceived by any denizen of earth. But my adventures yet remain to be related. And indeed your Excellencies may well imagine that, after a residence of five years upon a planet not only deeply interesting in its own peculiar character, but rendered doubly so by its intimate connection, in capacity of satellite, with the world inhabited by man, I may have intelligence for the private ear of the States' College of Astronomers of far more importance than the details, however wonderful, of the mere voyage which so happily concluded. This is, in fact, the case. I have much \u2014 very much which it would give me the greatest pleasure to communicate. I have much to say of the climate of the planet; of its wonderful alternations of heat and cold, of unmitigated and burning sunshine for one fortnight, and more than polar frigidity for the next; of a constant transfer of moisture, by distillation like that in vacuo, from the point beneath the sun to the point the farthest from it; of a variable zone of running water, of the people themselves; of their manners, customs, and political institutions; of their peculiar physical construction; of their ugliness; of their want of ears, those useless appendages in an atmosphere so peculiarly modified; of their consequent ignorance of the use and properties of speech; of their substitute for speech in a singular method of inter-communication; of the incomprehensible connection between each particular individual in the moon with some particular individual on the earth \u2014 a connection analogous with, and depending upon, that of the orbs of the planet and the satellites, and by means of which the lives and destinies of the inhabitants of the one are interwoven with the lives and destinies of the inhabitants of the other; and above all, if it so please your Excellencies \u2014 above all, of those dark and hideous mysteries which lie in the outer regions of the moon \u2014 regions which, owing to the almost miraculous accordance of the satellite's rotation on its own axis with its sidereal revolution about the earth, have never yet been turned, and, by God's mercy, never shall be turned, to the scrutiny of the telescopes of man. All this, and more \u2014 much more \u2014 would I most willingly detail. But, to be brief, I must have my reward. I am pining for a return to my family and to my home, and as the price of any farther communication on my part \u2014 in consideration of the light which I have it in my power to throw upon many very important branches of physical and metaphysical science \u2014 I must solicit, through the influence of your honorable body, a pardon for the crime of which I have been guilty in the death of the creditors upon my departure from Rotterdam. This, then, is the object of the present paper. Its bearer, an inhabitant of the moon, whom I have prevailed upon, and properly instructed, to be my messenger to the earth, will await your Excellencies' pleasure, and return to me with the pardon in question, if it can, in any manner, be obtained.\n\nI have the honor to be, etc., your Excellencies' very humble servant,\n\nHans Pfaall.\n\nUpon finishing the perusal of this very extraordinary document, Professor Rub-a-dub, it is said, dropped his pipe upon the ground in the extremity of his surprise, and Mynheer Superbus Von Underduk having taken off his spectacles, wiped them, and deposited them in his pocket, so far forgot both himself and his dignity, as to turn round three times upon his heel in the quintessence of astonishment and admiration. There was no doubt about the matter \u2014 the pardon should be obtained. So at least swore, with a round oath, Professor Rub-a-dub, and so finally thought the illustrious Von Underduk, as he took the arm of his brother in science, and without saying a word, began to make the best of his way home to deliberate upon the measures to be adopted. Having reached the door, however, of the burgomaster's dwelling, the professor ventured to suggest that as the messenger had thought proper to disappear \u2014 no doubt frightened to death by the savage appearance of the burghers of Rotterdam \u2014 the pardon would be of little use, as no one but a man of the moon would undertake a voyage to so vast a distance. To the truth of this observation the burgomaster assented, and the matter was therefore at an end. Not so, however, rumors and speculations. The letter, having been published, gave rise to a variety of gossip and opinion. Some of the over-wise even made themselves ridiculous by decrying the whole business; as nothing better than a hoax. But hoax, with these sort of people, is, I believe, a general term for all matters above their comprehension. For my part, I cannot conceive upon what data they have founded such an accusation. Let us see what they say:\n\nImprimus. That certain wags in Rotterdam have certain especial antipathies to certain burgomasters and astronomers.\n\nDon't understand at all.\n\nSecondly. That an odd little dwarf and bottle conjurer, both of whose ears, for some misdemeanor, have been cut off close to his head, has been missing for several days from the neighboring city of Bruges.\n\nWell \u2014 what of that?\n\nThirdly. That the newspapers which were stuck all over the little balloon were newspapers of Holland, and therefore could not have been made in the moon. They were dirty papers \u2014 very dirty \u2014 and Gluck, the printer, would take his Bible oath to their having been printed in Rotterdam.\n\nHe was mistaken \u2014 undoubtedly \u2014 mistaken.\n\nFourthly. That Hans Pfaall himself, the drunken villain, and the three very idle gentlemen styled his creditors, were all seen, no longer than two or three days ago, in a tippling house in the suburbs, having just returned, with money in their pockets, from a trip beyond the sea.\n\nDon't believe it \u2014 don't believe a word of it.\n\nLastly. That it is an opinion very generally received, or which ought to be generally received, that the College of Astronomers in the city of Rotterdam, as well as other colleges in all other parts of the world \u2014 not to mention colleges and astronomers in general \u2014 are, to say the least of the matter, not a whit better, nor greater, nor wiser than they ought to be.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Four Beasts in One (Epimanes) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Chacun a ses vertus.\n\n\u2014Crebillon's Xerxes\n\nAntiochus Epiphanes is very generally looked upon as the Gog of the prophet Ezekiel. This honor is, however, more properly attributable to Cambyses, the son of Cyrus. And, indeed, the character of the Syrian monarch does by no means stand in need of any adventitious embellishment. His accession to the throne, or rather his usurpation of the sovereignty, a hundred and seventy-one years before the coming of Christ; his attempt to plunder the temple of Diana at Ephesus; his implacable hostility to the Jews; his pollution of the Holy of Holies; and his miserable death at Taba, after a tumultuous reign of eleven years, are circumstances of a prominent kind, and therefore more generally noticed by the historians of his time than the impious, dastardly, cruel, silly, and whimsical achievements which make up the sum total of his private life and reputation.\n\nLet us suppose, gentle reader, that it is now the year of the world three thousand eight hundred and thirty, and let us, for a few minutes, imagine ourselves at that most grotesque habitation of man, the remarkable city of Antioch. To be sure there were, in Syria and other countries, sixteen cities of that appellation, besides the one to which I more particularly allude. But ours is that which went by the name of Antiochia Epidaphne, from its vicinity to the little village of Daphne, where stood a temple to that divinity. It was built (although about this matter there is some dispute) by Seleucus Nicanor, the first king of the country after Alexander the Great, in memory of his father Antiochus, and became immediately the residence of the Syrian monarchy. In the flourishing times of the Roman Empire, it was the ordinary station of the prefect of the eastern provinces; and many of the emperors of the queen city (among whom may be mentioned, especially, Verus and Valens) spent here the greater part of their time. But I perceive we have arrived at the city itself. Let us ascend this battlement, and throw our eyes upon the town and neighboring country.\n\n\"What broad and rapid river is that which forces its way, with innumerable falls, through the mountainous wilderness, and finally through the wilderness of buildings?\"\n\nThat is the Orontes, and it is the only water in sight, with the exception of the Mediterranean, which stretches, like a broad mirror, about twelve miles off to the southward. Every one has seen the Mediterranean; but let me tell you, there are few who have had a peep at Antioch. By few, I mean, few who, like you and me, have had, at the same time, the advantages of a modern education. Therefore cease to regard that sea, and give your whole attention to the mass of houses that lie beneath us. You will remember that it is now the year of the world three thousand eight hundred and thirty. Were it later \u2014 for example, were it the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and forty-five, we should be deprived of this extraordinary spectacle. In the nineteenth century Antioch is \u2014 that is to say, Antioch will be \u2014 in a lamentable state of decay. It will have been, by that time, totally destroyed, at three different periods, by three successive earthquakes. Indeed, to say the truth, what little of its former self may then remain, will be found in so desolate and ruinous a state that the patriarch shall have removed his residence to Damascus. This is well. I see you profit by my advice, and are making the most of your time in inspecting the premises \u2014\n\n\u2014satisfying your eyes\n\nWith the memorials and the things of fame\n\nThat most renown this city. \u2014\n\nI beg pardon; I had forgotten that Shakespeare will not flourish for seventeen hundred and fifty years to come. But does not the appearance of Epidaphne justify me in calling it grotesque?\n\n\"It is well fortified; and in this respect is as much indebted to nature as to art.\"\n\nVery true.\n\n\"There are a prodigious number of stately palaces.\"\n\nThere are.\n\n\"And the numerous temples, sumptuous and magnificent, may bear comparison with the most lauded of antiquity.\"\n\nAll this I must acknowledge. Still there is an infinity of mud huts, and abominable hovels. We cannot help perceiving abundance of filth in every kennel, and, were it not for the over-powering fumes of idolatrous incense, I have no doubt we should find a most intolerable stench. Did you ever behold streets so insufferably narrow, or houses so miraculously tall? What gloom their shadows cast upon the ground! It is well the swinging lamps in those endless colonnades are kept burning throughout the day; we should otherwise have the darkness of Egypt in the time of her desolation.\n\n\"It is certainly a strange place! What is the meaning of yonder singular building? See! it towers above all others, and lies to the eastward of what I take to be the royal palace.\"\n\nThat is the new Temple of the Sun, who is adored in Syria under the title of Elah Gabalah. Hereafter a very notorious Roman Emperor will institute this worship in Rome, and thence derive a cognomen, Heliogabalus. I dare say you would like to take a peep at the divinity of the temple. You need not look up at the heavens; his Sunship is not there \u2014 at least not the Sunship adored by the Syrians. That deity will be found in the interior of yonder building. He is worshipped under the figure of a large stone pillar terminating at the summit in a cone or pyramid, whereby is denoted Fire.\n\n\"Hark \u2014 behold! \u2014 who can those ridiculous beings be, half naked, with their faces painted, shouting and gesticulating to the rabble?\"\n\nSome few are mountebanks. Others more particularly belong to the race of philosophers. The greatest portion, however \u2014 those especially who belabor the populace with clubs \u2014 are the principal courtiers of the palace, executing as in duty bound, some laudable comicality of the king's.\n\n\"But what have we here? Heavens! the town is swarming with wild beasts! How terrible a spectacle! \u2014 how dangerous a peculiarity!\"\n\nTerrible, if you please; but not in the least degree dangerous. Each animal if you will take the pains to observe, is following, very quietly, in the wake of its master. Some few, to be sure, are led with a rope about the neck, but these are chiefly the lesser or timid species. The lion, the tiger, and the leopard are entirely without restraint. They have been trained without difficulty to their present profession, and attend upon their respective owners in the capacity of valets-de-chambre. It is true, there are occasions when Nature asserts her violated dominions; \u2014 but then the devouring of a man-at-arms, or the throttling of a consecrated bull, is a circumstance of too little moment to be more than hinted at in Epidaphne.\n\n\"But what extraordinary tumult do I hear? Surely this is a loud noise even for Antioch! It argues some commotion of unusual interest.\"\n\nYes \u2014 undoubtedly. The king has ordered some novel spectacle \u2014 some gladiatorial exhibition at the hippodrome \u2014 or perhaps the massacre of the Scythian prisoners \u2014 or the conflagration of his new palace \u2014 or the tearing down of a handsome temple \u2014 or, indeed, a bonfire of a few Jews. The uproar increases. Shouts of laughter ascend the skies. The air becomes dissonant with wind instruments, and horrible with clamor of a million throats. Let us descend, for the love of fun, and see what is going on! This way \u2014 be careful! Here we are in the principal street, which is called the street of Timarchus. The sea of people is coming this way, and we shall find a difficulty in stemming the tide. They are pouring through the alley of Heraclides, which leads directly from the palace; \u2014 therefore the king is most probably among the rioters. Yes; \u2014 I hear the shouts of the herald proclaiming his approach in the pompous phraseology of the East. We shall have a glimpse of his person as he passes by the temple of Ashimah. Let us ensconce ourselves in the vestibule of the sanctuary; he will be here anon. In the meantime let us survey this image. What is it? Oh! it is the god Ashimah in proper person. You perceive, however, that he is neither a lamb, nor a goat, nor a satyr, neither has he much resemblance to the Pan of the Arcadians. Yet all these appearances have been given \u2014 I beg pardon \u2014 will be given \u2014 by the learned of future ages, to the Ashimah of the Syrians. Put on your spectacles, and tell me what it is. What is it?\n\n\"Bless me! it is an ape!\"\n\nTrue \u2014 a baboon; but by no means the less a deity. His name is a derivation of the Greek Simia \u2014 what great fools are antiquarians! But see! \u2014 see! \u2014 yonder scampers a ragged little urchin. Where is he going? What is he bawling about? What does he say? Oh! he says the king is coming in triumph; that he is dressed in state; that he has just finished putting to death, with his own hand, a thousand chained Israelitish prisoners! For this exploit the ragamuffin is lauding him to the skies. Hark! here comes a troop of a similar description. They have made a Latin hymn upon the valor of the king, and are singing it as they go:\n\n\u2003Mille, mille, mille,\n\n\u2003Mille, mille, mille,\n\n\u2003Decollavimus, unus homo!\n\n\u2003Mille, mille, mille, mille, decollavimus!\n\n\u2003Mille, mille, mille,\n\n\u2003Vivat qui mille mille occidit!\n\n\u2003Tantum vini habet nemo\n\n\u2003Quantum sanguinis effudit!\n\n\u2003Which may be thus paraphrased:\n\n\u2003A thousand, a thousand, a thousand,\n\n\u2003A thousand, a thousand, a thousand,\n\n\u2003We, with one warrior, have slain!\n\n\u2003A thousand, a thousand, a thousand, a thousand.\n\n\u2003Sing a thousand over again!\n\n\u2003Soho! \u2014 let us sing\n\n\u2003Long life to our king,\n\n\u2003Who knocked over a thousand so fine!\n\n\u2003Soho! \u2014 let us roar,\n\n\u2003He has given us more\n\n\u2003Red gallons of gore\n\n\u2003Than all Syria can furnish of wine!\n\n\u2003\"Do you hear that flourish of trumpets?\"\n\nYes: the king is coming! See! the people are aghast with admiration, and lift up their eyes to the heavens in reverence. He comes; \u2014 he is coming; \u2014 there he is!\n\n\"Who? \u2014 where? \u2014 the king? \u2014 do not behold him \u2014 cannot say that I perceive him.\"\n\nThen you must be blind.\n\n\"Very possible. Still I see nothing but a tumultuous mob of idiots and madmen, who are busy in prostrating themselves before a gigantic cameleopard, and endeavoring to obtain a kiss of the animal's hoofs. See! the beast has very justly kicked one of the rabble over \u2014 and another \u2014 and another \u2014 and another. Indeed, I cannot help admiring the animal for the excellent use he is making of his feet.\"\n\nRabble, indeed! \u2014 why these are the noble and free citizens of Epidaphne! Beasts, did you say? \u2014 take care that you are not overheard. Do you not perceive that the animal has the visage of a man? Why, my dear sir, that cameleopard is no other than Antiochus Epiphanes, Antiochus the Illustrious, King of Syria, and the most potent of all the autocrats of the East! It is true, that he is entitled, at times, Antiochus Epimanes \u2014 Antiochus the madman \u2014 but that is because all people have not the capacity to appreciate his merits. It is also certain that he is at present ensconced in the hide of a beast, and is doing his best to play the part of a cameleopard; but this is done for the better sustaining his dignity as king. Besides, the monarch is of gigantic stature, and the dress is therefore neither unbecoming nor over large. We may, however, presume he would not have adopted it but for some occasion of especial state. Such, you will allow, is the massacre of a thousand Jews. With how superior a dignity the monarch perambulates on all fours! His tail, you perceive, is held aloft by his two principal concubines, Elline and Argelais; and his whole appearance would be infinitely prepossessing, were it not for the protuberance of his eyes, which will certainly start out of his head, and the queer color of his face, which has become nondescript from the quantity of wine he has swallowed. Let us follow him to the hippodrome, whither he is proceeding, and listen to the song of triumph which he is commencing:\n\n\u2003Who is king but Epiphanes?\n\n\u2003Say \u2014 do you know?\n\n\u2003Who is king but Epiphanes?\n\n\u2003Bravo! \u2014 bravo!\n\n\u2003There is none but Epiphanes,\n\n\u2003No \u2014 there is none:\n\n\u2003So tear down the temples,\n\n\u2003And put out the sun!\n\nWell and strenuously sung! The populace are hailing him 'Prince of Poets,' as well as 'Glory of the East,' 'Delight of the Universe,' and 'Most Remarkable of Cameleopards.' They have encored his effusion, and do you hear? \u2014 he is singing it over again. When he arrives at the hippodrome, he will be crowned with the poetic wreath, in anticipation of his victory at the approaching Olympics.\n\n\"But, good Jupiter! what is the matter in the crowd behind us?\"\n\nBehind us, did you say? \u2014 oh! ah! \u2014 I perceive. My friend, it is well that you spoke in time. Let us get into a place of safety as soon as possible. Here! \u2014 let us conceal ourselves in the arch of this aqueduct, and I will inform you presently of the origin of the commotion. It has turned out as I have been anticipating. The singular appearance of the cameleopard and the head of a man, has, it seems, given offence to the notions of propriety entertained, in general, by the wild animals domesticated in the city. A mutiny has been the result; and, as is usual upon such occasions, all human efforts will be of no avail in quelling the mob. Several of the Syrians have already been devoured; but the general voice of the four-footed patriots seems to be for eating up the cameleopard. 'The Prince of Poets,' therefore, is upon his hinder legs, running for his life. His courtiers have left him in the lurch, and his concubines have followed so excellent an example. 'Delight of the Universe,' thou art in a sad predicament! 'Glory of the East,' thou art in danger of mastication! Therefore never regard so piteously thy tail; it will undoubtedly be draggled in the mud, and for this there is no help. Look not behind thee, then, at its unavoidable degradation; but take courage, ply thy legs with vigor, and scud for the hippodrome! Remember that thou art Antiochus Epiphanes. Antiochus the Illustrious! \u2014 also 'Prince of Poets,' 'Glory of the East,' 'Delight of the Universe,' and 'Most Remarkable of Cameleopards!' Heavens! what a power of speed thou art displaying! What a capacity for leg-bail thou art developing! Run, Prince! \u2014 Bravo, Epiphanes! Well done, Cameleopard! \u2014 Glorious Antiochus! \u2014 He runs! \u2014 he leaps! \u2014 he flies! Like an arrow from a catapult he approaches the hippodrome! He leaps! \u2014 he shrieks! \u2014 he is there! This is well; for hadst thou, 'Glory of the East,' been half a second longer in reaching the gates of the Amphitheatre, there is not a bear's cub in Epidaphne that would not have had a nibble at thy carcase. Let us be off \u2014 let us take our departure! \u2014 for we shall find our delicate modern ears unable to endure the vast uproar which is about to commence in celebration of the king's escape! Listen! it has already commenced. See! \u2014 the whole town is topsy-turvy.\n\n\"Surely this is the most populous city of the East! What a wilderness of people! what a jumble of all ranks and ages! what a multiplicity of sects and nations! what a variety of costumes! what a Babel of languages! what a screaming of beasts! what a tinkling of instruments! what a parcel of philosophers!\"\n\nCome let us be off.\n\n\"Stay a moment! I see a vast hubbub in the hippodrome; what is the meaning of it, I beseech you?\"\n\nThat? \u2014 oh, nothing! The noble and free citizens of Epidaphne being, as they declare, well satisfied of the faith, valor, wisdom, and divinity of their king, and having, moreover, been eye-witnesses of his late superhuman agility, do think it no more than their duty to invest his brows (in addition to the poetic crown) with the wreath of victory in the footrace \u2014 a wreath which it is evident he must obtain at the celebration of the next Olympiad, and which, therefore, they now give him in advance.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Mystification (Von Jung, the Mystific) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe Baron Ritzner Von Jung was a noble Hungarian family, every member of which (at least as far back into antiquity as any certain records extend) was more or less remarkable for talent of some description \u2014 the majority for that species of grotesquerie in conception of which Tieck, a scion of the house, has given a vivid, although by no means the most vivid exemplifications. My acquaintance with Ritzner commenced at the magnificent Chateau Jung, into which a train of droll adventures, not to be made public, threw a place in his regard, and here, with somewhat more difficulty, a partial insight into his mental conformation. In later days this insight grew more clear, as the intimacy which had at first permitted it became more close; and when, after three years of the character of the Baron Ritzner von Jung.\n\nI remember the buzz of curiosity which his advent excited within the college precincts on the night of the twenty-fifth of June. I remember still more distinctly, that while he was pronounced by all parties at first sight \"the most remarkable man in the world,\" no person made any attempt at accounting for his opinion. That he was unique appeared so undeniable, that it was deemed impertinent to inquire wherein the uniquity consisted. But, letting this matter pass for the present, I will merely observe that, from the first moment of his setting foot within the limits of the university, he began to exercise over the habits, manners, persons, purses, and propensities of the whole community which surrounded him, an influence the most extensive and despotic, yet at the same time the most indefinite and altogether unaccountable. Thus the brief period of his residence at the university forms an era in its annals, and is characterized by all classes of people appertaining to it or its dependencies as \"that very extraordinary epoch forming the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung.\" then of no particular age, by which I mean that it was impossible to form a guess respecting his age by any data personally afforded. He might have been fifteen or fifty, and was twenty-one years and seven months. He was by no means a handsome man \u2014 perhaps the reverse. The contour of his face was somewhat angular and harsh. His forehead was lofty and very fair; his nose a snub; his eyes large, heavy, glassy, and meaningless. About the mouth there was more to be observed. The lips were gently protruded, and rested the one upon the other, after such a fashion that it is impossible to conceive any, even the most complex, combination of human features, conveying so entirely, and so singly, the idea of unmitigated gravity, solemnity and repose.\n\nIt will be perceived, no doubt, from what I have already said, that the Baron was one of those human anomalies now and then to be found, who make the science of mystification the study and the business of their lives. For this science a peculiar turn of mind gave him instinctively the cue, while his physical appearance afforded him unusual facilities for carrying his prospects into effect. I quaintly termed the domination of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, ever rightly entered into the mystery which overshadowed his character. I truly think that no person at the university, with the exception of myself, ever suspected him to be capable of a joke, verbal or practical:\u2014 the old bull-dog at the garden-gate would sooner have been accused \u2014 the ghost of Heraclitus \u2014 or the wig of the Emeritus Professor of Theology. This, too, when it was evident that the most egregious and unpardonable of all conceivable tricks, whimsicalities and buffooneries were brought about, if not directly by him, at least plainly through his intermediate agency or connivance. The beauty, if I may so call it, of his art mystifique, lay in that consummate ability (resulting from an almost intuitive knowledge of human nature, and a most wonderful self-possession,) by means of which he never failed to make it appear that the drolleries he was occupied in bringing to a point, arose partly in spite, and partly in consequence of the laudable efforts he was making for their prevention, and for the preservation of the good order and dignity of Alma Mater. The deep, the poignant, the overwhelming mortification, which upon each such failure of his praise worthy endeavors, would suffuse every lineament of his countenance, left not the slightest room for doubt of his sincerity in the bosoms of even his most skeptical companions. The adroitness, too, was no less worthy of observation by which he contrived to shift the sense of the grotesque from the creator to the created \u2014 from his own person to the absurdities to which he had given rise. In no instance before that of which I speak, have I known the habitual mystific escape the natural consequence of his manoevres \u2014 an attachment of the ludicrous to his own character and person. Continually enveloped in an atmosphere of whim, my friend appeared to live only for the severities of society; and not even his own household have for a moment associated other ideas than those of the rigid and august with the memory of the Baron Ritzner von Jung. the demon of the dolce far niente lay like an incubus upon the university. Nothing, at least, was done beyond eating and drinking and making merry. The apartments of the students were converted into so many pot-houses, and there was no pot-house of them all more famous or more frequented than that of the Baron. Our carousals here were many, and boisterous, and long, and never unfruitful of events.\n\nUpon one occasion we had protracted our sitting until nearly daybreak, and an unusual quantity of wine had been drunk. The company consisted of seven or eight individuals besides the Baron and myself. Most of these were young men of wealth, of high connection, of great family pride, and all alive with an exaggerated sense of honor. They abounded in the most ultra German opinions respecting the duello. To these Quixotic notions some recent Parisian publications, backed by three or four desperate and fatal conversation, during the greater part of the night, had run wild upon the all \u2014 engrossing topic of the times. The Baron, who had been unusually silent and abstracted in the earlier portion of the evening, at length seemed to be aroused from his apathy, took a leading part in the discourse, and dwelt upon the benefits, and more especially upon the beauties, of the received code of etiquette in passages of arms with an ardor, an eloquence, an impressiveness, and an affectionateness of manner, which elicited the warmest enthusiasm from his hearers in general, and absolutely staggered even myself, who well knew him to be at heart a ridiculer of those very points for which he contended, and especially to hold the entire fanfaronade of duelling etiquette in the sovereign contempt which it deserves.\n\nLooking around me during a pause in the Baron's discourse (of which my readers may gather some faint idea when I say that it bore resemblance to the fervid, chanting, monotonous, yet musical sermonic manner of Coleridge), I perceived symptoms of even more than the general interest in the countenance of one of the party. This gentleman, whom I shall call Hermann, was an original in every respect \u2014 except, perhaps, in the single particular that he was a very great fool. He contrived to bear, however, among a particular set at the university, a reputation for deep metaphysical thinking, and, I believe, for some logical talent. As a duellist he had acquired who had fallen at his hands; but they were many. He was a man of courage undoubtedly. But it was upon his minute acquaintance with the etiquette of the duello, and the nicety of his sense of honor, that he most especially prided himself. These things were a hobby which he rode to the death. To Ritzner, ever upon the lookout for the grotesque, his peculiarities had for a long time past afforded food for mystification. Of this, however, I was not aware; although, in the present instance, I saw clearly that something of a whimsical nature was upon the tapis with my friend, and that Hermann was its especial object.\n\nAs the former proceeded in his discourse, or rather monologue I perceived the excitement of the latter momently increasing. At length he spoke; offering some objection to a point insisted upon by R., and giving his reasons in detail. To these the Baron replied at length (still maintaining his exaggerated tone of sentiment) and concluding, in what I thought very bad taste, with a sarcasm and a sneer. The hobby of Hermann now took the bit in his teeth. This I could discern by the studied hair-splitting farrago of his rejoinder. His last words I distinctly remember. \"Your opinions, allow me to say, Baron von Jung, although in the main correct, are, in many nice points, discreditable to yourself and to the university of which you are a member. In a few respects they are even unworthy of serious refutation. I would say more than this, sir, were it not for the fear of giving you offence (here the speaker smiled blandly), I would say, sir, that your opinions are not the opinions to be expected from a gentleman.\"\n\nAs Hermann completed this equivocal sentence, all eyes were turned upon the Baron. He became pale, then excessively red; then, dropping his pocket-handkerchief, stooped to recover it, when I caught a glimpse of his countenance, while it could be seen by no one else at the table. It was radiant with the quizzical expression which was its natural character, but which I had never seen it assume except when we were alone together, and when he unbent himself freely. In an instant afterward he stood erect, confronting Hermann; and so total an alteration of countenance in so short a period I certainly never saw before. For a moment I even fancied that I had misconceived him, and that he was in sober earnest. He appeared to be stifling with passion, and his face was cadaverously white. For a short time he remained silent, apparently striving to master his emotion. Having at length seemingly succeeded, he reached a decanter which stood near him, saying as he held it firmly clenched \"The language you have thought proper to employ, Mynheer Hermann, in addressing yourself to me, is objectionable in so many particulars, that I have neither temper nor time for specification. That my opinions, however, are not the opinions to be expected from a gentleman, is an observation so directly offensive as to allow me but one line of conduct. Some courtesy, nevertheless, is due to the presence of this company, and to yourself, at this moment, as my guest. You will pardon me, therefore, if, upon this consideration, I deviate slightly from the general usage among gentlemen in similar cases of personal affront. You will forgive me for the moderate tax I shall make upon your imagination, and endeavor to consider, for an instant, the reflection of your person in yonder mirror as the living Mynheer Hermann himself. This being done, there will be no difficulty whatever. I shall discharge this decanter of wine at your image in yonder mirror, and thus fulfil all the spirit, if not the exact letter, of resentment for your insult, while the necessity of physical violence to your real person will be obviated.\"\n\nWith these words he hurled the decanter, full of wine, against the mirror which hung directly opposite Hermann; striking the reflection of his person with great precision, and of course shattering the glass into fragments. The whole company at once started to their feet, and, with the exception of myself and Ritzner, took their departure. As Hermann went out, the Baron whispered me that I should follow him and make an offer of my services. To this I agreed; not knowing precisely what to make of so ridiculous a piece of business.\n\nThe duellist accepted my aid with his stiff and ultra recherche air, and, taking my arm, led me to his apartment. I could hardly forbear laughing in his face while he proceeded to discuss, with the profoundest gravity, what he termed \"the refinedly peculiar character\" of the insult he had received. After a tiresome harangue in his ordinary style, he took down from his book shelves a number of musty volumes on the subject of the duello, and entertained me for a long time with their contents; reading aloud, and commenting earnestly as he read. I can just remember the titles of some of the works. There were the \"Ordonnance of Philip le Bel on Single Combat\"; the \"Theatre of Honor,\" by Favyn, and a treatise \"On the Permission of Duels,\" by Andiguier. He displayed, also, with much pomposity, Brantome's \"Memoirs of Duels,\"\u2014 published at Cologne, 1666, in the types of Elzevir \u2014 a precious and unique vellum-paper volume, with a fine margin, and bound by Derome. But he requested my attention particularly, and with an air of mysterious sagacity, to a thick octavo, written in barbarous Latin by one Hedelin, a Frenchman, and having the quaint title, \"Duelli Lex Scripta, et non; aliterque.\" From this he read me one of the drollest chapters in the world concerning \"Injuriae per applicationem, per constructionem, et per se,\" about half of which, he averred, was strictly applicable to his own \"refinedly peculiar\" case, although not one syllable of the whole matter could I understand for the life of me. Having finished the chapter, he closed the book, and demanded what I thought necessary to be done. I replied that I had entire confidence in his superior delicacy of feeling, and would abide by what he proposed. With this answer he seemed flattered, and sat down to write a note to the Baron. It ran thus:\n\n\u2002To the Baron Ritzner von Jung,\n\n\u2002Sir \u2014 My friend, M. P.-, will hand you this note. I find it incumbent upon me to request, at your earliest convenience, an explanation of this evening's occurrences at your chambers. In the event of your declining this request, Mr. P. will be happy to arrange, with any friend whom you may appoint, the steps preliminary to a meeting.\n\n\u2002With sentiments of perfect respect,\n\n\u2002Your most humble servant,\n\n\u2002JOHANN HERMAN.\n\nNot knowing what better to do, I called upon Ritzner with this epistle. He bowed as I presented it; then, with a grave countenance, motioned me to a seat. Having perused the cartel, he wrote the following reply, which I carried to Hermann.\n\n\u2002The Herr Johann Hermann\n\n\u2002SIR \u2014 Through our common friend, Mr. P., I have received your note of this evening. Upon due reflection I frankly admit the propriety of the explanation you suggest. This being admitted, I still find great difficulty, (owing to the refinedly peculiar nature of our disagreement, and of the personal affront offered on my part,) in so wording what I have to say by way of apology, as to meet all the minute exigencies, and all the variable shadows, of the case. I have great reliance, however, on that extreme delicacy of discrimination, in matters appertaining to the rules of etiquette, for which you have been so long and so pre-eminently distinguished. With perfect certainty, therefore, of being comprehended, I beg leave, in lieu of offering any sentiments of my own, to refer you to the opinions of Sieur Hedelin, as set forth in the ninth paragraph of the chapter of \"Injuriae per applicationem, per constructionem, et per se,\" in his \"Duelli Lex scripta, et non; aliterque.\" The nicety of your discernment in all the matters here treated, will be sufficient, I am assured, to convince you that the mere circumstance of me referring you to this admirable passage, ought to satisfy your request, as a man of honor, for explanation.\n\n\u2002With sentiments of profound respect,\n\n\u2002Your most obedient servant,\n\n\u2002VON JUNG.\n\nHermann commenced the perusal of this epistle with a scowl, which, however, was converted into a smile of the most ludicrous self-complacency as he came to the rigmarole about Injuriae per applicationem, per constructionem, et per se. Having finished reading, he begged me, with the blandest of all possible smiles, to be seated, while he made reference to the treatise in question. Turning to the passage specified, he read it with great care to himself, then closed the book, and desired me, in my character of confidential acquaintance, to express to the Baron von Jung his exalted sense of his chivalrous behavior, and, in that of second, to assure him that the explanation offered was of the fullest, the most honorable, and the most unequivocally satisfactory nature.\n\nSomewhat amazed at all this, I made my retreat to the Baron. He seemed to receive Hermann's amicable letter as a matter of course, and after a few words of general conversation, went to an inner room and brought out the everlasting treatise \"Duelli Lex scripta, et non; aliterque.\" He handed me the volume and asked me to look over some portion of it. I did so, but to little purpose, not being able to gather the least particle of meaning. He then took the book himself, and read me a chapter aloud. To my surprise, what he read proved to be a most horribly absurd account of a duel between two baboons. He now explained the mystery; showing that the volume, as it appeared prima facie, was written upon the plan of the nonsense verses of Du Bartas; that is to say, the language was ingeniously framed so as to present to the ear all the outward signs of intelligibility, and even of profundity, while in fact not a shadow of meaning existed. The key to the whole was found in leaving out every second and third word alternately, when there appeared a series of ludicrous quizzes upon a single combat as practised in modern times.\n\nThe Baron afterwards informed me that he had purposely thrown the treatise in Hermann's way two or three weeks before the adventure, and that he was satisfied, from the general tenor of his conversation, that he had studied it with the deepest attention, and firmly believed it to be a work of unusual merit. Upon this hint he proceeded. Hermann would have died a thousand deaths rather than acknowledge his inability to understand anything and everything in the universe that had ever been written about the duello.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n[ Preface ]\n\nUpon my return to the United States a few months ago, after the extraordinary series of adventure in the South Seas and elsewhere, of which an account is given in the following pages, accident threw me into the society of several gentlemen in Richmond, Va., who felt deep interest in all matters relating to the regions I had visited, and who were constantly urging it upon me, as a duty, to give my narrative to the public. I had several reasons, however, for declining to do so, some of which were of a nature altogether private, and concern no person but myself, others not so much so. One consideration which deterred me was, that, having kept no journal during a greater portion of the time in which I was absent, I feared I should not be able to write, from mere memory, a statement so minute and connected as to have the appearance of that truth it would really possess, barring only the natural and unavoidable exaggeration to which all of us are prone when detailing events which have had powerful influence in exciting the imaginative faculties. Another reason was, that the incidents to be narrated were of a nature so positively marvellous, that, unsupported as my assertions must necessarily be (except by the evidence of a single individual, and he a half-breed Indian), I could only hope for belief among my family, and those of my friends who have had reason, through life, to put faith in my veracity \u2014 the probability being that the public at large would regard what I should put forth as merely an impudent and ingenious fiction. A distrust in my own abilities as a writer was, nevertheless, one of the principal causes which prevented me from complying with the suggestion of my advisers.\n\nAmong those gentlemen in Virginia who expressed the greatest interest in my statement, more particularly in regard to that portion of it which related to the Antarctic Ocean, was Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a monthly magazine, published by Mr. Thomas W. White, in the city of Richmond. He strongly advised me, among others, to prepare at once a full account of what I had seen and undergone, and trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public \u2014 insisting, with great plausibility, that however roughly, as regards mere authorship, my book should be got up, its very uncouthness, if there were any, would give it all the better chance of being received as truth.\n\nNotwithstanding this representation, I did not make up my mind to do as he suggested. He afterward proposed (finding that I would not stir in the matter) that I should allow him to draw up, in his own words, a narrative of the earlier portion of my adventures, from facts afforded by myself, publishing it in the Southern Messenger under the garb of fiction. To this, perceiving no objection, I consented, stipulating only that my real name should be retained. Two numbers of the pretended fiction appeared, consequently, in the Messenger for January and February, (1837), and, in order that it might certainly be regarded as fiction, the name of Mr. Poe was affixed to the articles in the table of contents of the magazine.\n\nThe manner in which this ruse was received has induced me at length to undertake a regular compilation and publication of the adventures in question; for I found that, in spite of the air of fable which had been so ingeniously thrown around that portion of my statement which appeared in the Messenger (without altering or distorting a single fact), the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable, and several letters were sent to Mr. P.'s address, distinctly expressing a conviction to the contrary. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity, and that I had consequently little to fear on the score of popular incredulity.\n\nThis expose being made, it will be seen at once how much of what follows I claim to be my own writing; and it will also be understood that no fact is misrepresented in the first few pages which were written by Mr. Poe. Even to those readers who have not seen the Messenger, it will be unnecessary to point out where his portion ends and my own commences; the difference in point of style will be readily perceived.\n\nA. G. PYM. New-York, July, 1838." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "My name is Arthur Gordon Pym. My father was a respectable trader in sea-stores at Nantucket, where I was born. My maternal grandfather was an attorney in good practice. He was fortunate in every thing, and had speculated very successfully in stocks of the Edgarton New Bank, as it was formerly called. By these and other means he had managed to lay by a tolerable sum of money. He was more attached to myself, I believe, than to any other person in the world, and I expected to inherit the most of his property at his death. He sent me, at six years of age, to the school of old Mr. Ricketts, a gentleman with only one arm and of eccentric manners \u2014 he is well known to almost every person who has visited New Bedford. I stayed at his school until I was sixteen, when I left him for Mr. E. Ronald's academy on the hill. Here I became intimate with the son of Mr. Barnard, a sea-captain, who generally sailed in the employ of Lloyd and Vredenburgh \u2014 Mr. Barnard is also very well known in New Bedford, and has many relations, I am certain, in Edgarton. His son was named Augustus, and he was nearly two years older than myself. He had been on a whaling voyage with his father in the John Donaldson, and was always talking to me of his adventures in the South Pacific Ocean. I used frequently to go home with him, and remain all day, and sometimes all night. We occupied the same bed, and he would be sure to keep me awake until almost light, telling me stories of the natives of the Island of Tinian, and other places he had visited in his travels. At last I could not help being interested in what he said, and by degrees I felt the greatest desire to go to sea. I owned a sailboat called the Ariel, and worth about seventy-five dollars. She had a half-deck or cuddy, and was rigged sloop-fashion \u2014 I forget her tonnage, but she would hold ten persons without much crowding. In this boat we were in the habit of going on some of the maddest freaks in the world; and, when I now think of them, it appears to me a thousand wonders that I am alive to-day.\n\nI will relate one of these adventures by way of introduction to a longer and more momentous narrative. One night there was a party at Mr. Barnard's, and both Augustus and myself were not a little intoxicated toward the close of it. As usual, in such cases, I took part of his bed in preference to going home. He went to sleep, as I thought, very quietly (it being near one when the party broke up), and without saying a word on his favorite topic. It might have been half an hour from the time of our getting in bed, and I was just about falling into a doze, when he suddenly started up, and swore with a terrible oath that he would not go to sleep for any Arthur Pym in Christendom, when there was so glorious a breeze from the southwest. I never was so astonished in my life, not knowing what he intended, and thinking that the wines and liquors he had drunk had set him entirely beside himself. He proceeded to talk very coolly, however, saying he knew that I supposed him intoxicated, but that he was never more sober in his life. He was only tired, he added, of lying in bed on such a fine night like a dog, and was determined to get up and dress, and go out on a frolic with the boat. I can hardly tell what possessed me, but the words were no sooner out of his mouth than I felt a thrill of the greatest excitement and pleasure, and thought his mad idea one of the most delightful and most reasonable things in the world. It was blowing almost a gale, and the weather was very cold \u2014 it being late in October. I sprang out of bed, nevertheless, in a kind of ecstasy, and told him I was quite as brave as himself, and quite as tired as he was of lying in bed like a dog, and quite as ready for any fun or frolic as any Augustus Barnard in Nantucket.\n\nWe lost no time in getting on our clothes and hurrying down to the boat. She was lying at the old decayed wharf by the lumber-yard of Pankey & Co., and almost thumping her side out against the rough logs. Augustus got into her and bailed her, for she was nearly half full of water. This being done, we hoisted jib and mainsail, kept full, and started boldly out to sea.\n\nThe wind, as I before said, blew freshly from the southwest. The night was very clear and cold. Augustus had taken the helm, and I stationed myself by the mast, on the deck of the cuddy. We flew along at a great rate \u2014 neither of us having said a word since casting loose from the wharf. I now asked my companion what course he intended to steer, and what time he thought it probable we should get back. He whistled for a few minutes, and then said crustily: \"I am going to sea \u2014 you may go home if you think proper.\" Turning my eyes upon him, I perceived at once that, in spite of his assumed nonchalance, he was greatly agitated. I could see him distinctly by the light of the moon \u2014 his face was paler than any marble, and his hand shook so excessively that he could scarcely retain hold of the tiller. I found that something had gone wrong, and became seriously alarmed. At this period I knew little about the management of a boat, and was now depending entirely upon the nautical skill of my friend. The wind, too, had suddenly increased, as we were fast getting out of the lee of the land \u2014 still I was ashamed to betray any trepidation, and for almost half an hour maintained a resolute silence. I could stand it no longer, however, and spoke to Augustus about the propriety of turning back. As before, it was nearly a minute before he made answer, or took any notice of my suggestion. \"By-and-by,\" said he at length \u2014 \"time enough \u2014 home by-and-by.\" I had expected a similar reply, but there was something in the tone of these words which filled me with an indescribable feeling of dread. I again looked at the speaker attentively. His lips were perfectly livid, and his knees shook so violently together that he seemed scarcely able to stand. \"For God's sake, Augustus,\" I screamed, now heartily frightened, \"what ails you? \u2014 what is the matter? \u2014 what are you going to do?\" \"Matter!\" he stammered, in the greatest apparent surprise, letting go the tiller at the same moment, and falling forward into the bottom of the boat \u2014 \"matter \u2014 why, nothing is the \u2014 matter \u2014 going home \u2014 d-d-don't you see?\" The whole truth now flashed upon me. I flew to him and raised him up. He was drunk \u2014 beastly drunk \u2014 he could no longer either stand, speak or see. His eyes were perfectly glazed; and as I let him go in the extremity of my despair, he rolled like a mere log into the bilge-water, from which I had lifted him. It was evident that, during the evening, he had drunk far more than I suspected, and that his conduct in bed had been the result of a highly-concentrated state of intoxication \u2014 a state which, like madness, frequently enables the victim to imitate the outward demeanour of one in perfect possession of his senses. The coolness of the night air, however, had had its usual effect \u2014 the mental energy began to yield before its influence \u2014 and the confused perception which he no doubt then had of his perilous situation had assisted in hastening the catastrophe. He was now thoroughly insensible, and there was no probability that he would be otherwise for many hours.\n\nIt is hardly possible to conceive the extremity of my terror. The fumes of the wine lately taken had evaporated, leaving me doubly timid and irresolute. I knew that I was altogether incapable of managing the boat, and that a fierce wind and strong ebb tide were hurrying us to destruction. A storm was evidently gathering behind us; we had neither compass nor provisions; and it was clear that, if we held our present course, we should be out of sight of land before daybreak. These thoughts, with a crowd of others equally fearful, flashed through my mind with a bewildering rapidity, and for some moments paralyzed me beyond the possibility of making any exertion. The boat was going through the water at a terrible rate \u2014 full before the wind \u2014 no reef in either jib or mainsail \u2014 running her bows completely under the foam. It was a thousand wonders she did not broach to \u2014 Augustus having let go the tiller, as I said before, and I being too much agitated to think of taking it myself. By good luck, however, she kept steady, and gradually I recovered some degree of presence of mind. Still the wind was increasing fearfully, and whenever we rose from a plunge forward, the sea behind fell combing over our counter, and deluged us with water. I was so utterly benumbed, too, in every limb, as to be nearly unconscious of sensation. At length I summoned up the resolution of despair, and rushing to the mainsail let it go by the run. As might have been expected, it flew over the bows, and, getting drenched with water, carried away the mast short off by the board. This latter accident alone saved me from instant destruction. Under the jib only, I now boomed along before the wind, shipping heavy seas occasionally over the counter, but relieved from the terror of immediate death. I took the helm, and breathed with greater freedom as I found that there yet remained to us a chance of ultimate escape. Augustus still lay senseless in the bottom of the boat; and as there was imminent danger of his drowning (the water being nearly a foot deep just where he fell), I contrived to raise him partially up, and keep him in a sitting position, by passing a rope round his waist, and lashing it to a ringbolt in the deck of the cuddy. Having thus arranged every thing as well as I could in my chilled and agitated condition, I recommended myself to God, and made up my mind to bear whatever might happen with all the fortitude in my power.\n\nHardly had I come to this resolution, when, suddenly, a loud and long scream or yell, as if from the throats of a thousand demons, seemed to pervade the whole atmosphere around and above the boat. Never while I live shall I forget the intense agony of terror I experienced at that moment. My hair stood erect on my head \u2014 I felt the blood congealing in my veins \u2014 my heart ceased utterly to beat, and without having once raised my eyes to learn the source of my alarm, I tumbled headlong and insensible upon the body of my fallen companion.\n\nI found myself, upon reviving, in the cabin of a large whaling-ship (the Penguin) bound to Nantucket. Several persons were standing over me, and Augustus, paler than death, was busily occupied in chafing my hands. Upon seeing me open my eyes, his exclamations of gratitude and joy excited alternate laughter and tears from the rough-looking personages who were present. The mystery of our being in existence was now soon explained. We had been run down by the whaling-ship, which was close-hauled, beating up to Nantucket with every sail she could venture to set, and consequently running almost at right angles to our own course. Several men were on the look-out forward, but did not perceive our boat until it was an impossibility to avoid coming in contact \u2014 their shouts of warning upon seeing us were what so terribly alarmed me. The huge ship, I was told, rode immediately over us with as much ease as our own little vessel would have passed over a feather, and without the least perceptible impediment to her progress. Not a scream arose from the deck of the victim \u2014 there was a slight grating sound to be heard mingling with the roar of wind and water, as the frail bark which was swallowed up rubbed for a moment along the keel of her destroyer \u2014 but this was all. Thinking our boat (which it will be remembered was dismasted) some mere shell cut adrift as useless, the captain (Captain E. T. V. Block, of New London) was for proceeding on his course without troubling himself further about the matter. Luckily, there were two of the look-out who swore positively to having seen some person at our helm, and represented the possibility of yet saving him. A discussion ensued, when Block grew angry, and, after a while, said that \"it was no business of his to be eternally watching for egg-shells; that the ship should not put about for any such nonsense; and if there was a man run down, it was nobody's fault but Henderson, the first mate, now took the matter up, being justly indignant, as well as the whole ship's crew, at a speech evincing so base a degree of heartless atrocity. He spoke plainly, seeing himself upheld by the men, told the captain he considered him a fit subject for the gallows, and that he would disobey his orders if he were hanged for it the moment he set his foot on shore. He strode aft, jostling Block (who turned pale and made no answer) on one side, and seizing the helm, gave the word, in a firm voice, Hard-a-lee! The men flew to their posts, and the ship went cleverly about. All this had occupied nearly five minutes, and it was supposed to be hardly within the bounds of possibility that any individual could be saved \u2014 allowing any to have been on board the boat. Yet, as the reader has seen, both Augustus and myself were rescued; and our deliverance seemed to have been brought about by two of those almost inconceivable pieces of good fortune which are attributed by the wise and pious to the special interference of Providence.\n\nWhile the ship was yet in stays, the mate lowered the jolly-boat and jumped into her with the very two men, I believe, who spoke up as having seen me at the helm. They had just left the lee of the vessel (the moon still shining brightly) when she made a long and heavy roll to windward, and Henderson, at the same moment, starting up in his seat bawled out to his crew to back water. He would say nothing else \u2014 repeating his cry impatiently, back water! black water! The men put back as speedily as possible, but by this time the ship had gone round, and gotten fully under headway, although all hands on board were making great exertions to take in sail. In despite of the danger of the attempt, the mate clung to the main-chains as soon as they came within his reach. Another huge lurch now brought the starboard side of the vessel out of water nearly as far as her keel, when the cause of his anxiety was rendered obvious enough. The body of a man was seen to be affixed in the most singular manner to the smooth and shining bottom (the Penguin was coppered and copper-fastened), and beating violently against it with every movement of the hull. After several ineffectual efforts, made during the lurches of the ship, and at the imminent risk of swamping the boat I was finally disengaged from my perilous situation and taken on board \u2014 for the body proved to be my own. It appeared that one of the timber-bolts having started and broken a passage through the copper, it had arrested my progress as I passed under the ship, and fastened me in so extraordinary a manner to her bottom. The head of the bolt had made its way through the collar of the green baize jacket I had on, and through the back part of my neck, forcing itself out between two sinews and just below the right ear. I was immediately put to bed \u2014 although life seemed to be totally extinct. There was no surgeon on board. The captain, however, treated me with every attention \u2014 to make amends, I presume, in the eyes of his crew, for his atrocious behaviour in the previous portion of the adventure.\n\nIn the meantime, Henderson had again put off from the ship, although the wind was now blowing almost a hurricane. He had not been gone many minutes when he fell in with some fragments of our boat, and shortly afterward one of the men with him asserted that he could distinguish a cry for help at intervals amid the roaring of the tempest. This induced the hardy seamen to persevere in their search for more than half an hour, although repeated signals to return were made them by Captain Block, and although every moment on the water in so frail a boat was fraught to them with the most imminent and deadly peril. Indeed, it is nearly impossible to conceive how the small jolly they were in could have escaped destruction for a single instant. She was built, however, for the whaling service, and was fitted, as I have since had reason to believe, with air-boxes, in the manner of some life-boats used on the coast of Wales.\n\nAfter searching in vain for about the period of time just mentioned, it was determined to get back to the ship. They had scarcely made this resolve when a feeble cry arose from a dark object that floated rapidly by. They pursued and soon overtook it. It proved to be the entire deck of the Ariel's cuddy. Augustus was struggling near it, apparently in the last agonies. Upon getting hold of him it was found that he was attached by a rope to the floating timber. This rope, it will be remembered, I had myself tied around his waist, and made fast to a ringbolt, for the purpose of keeping him in an upright position, and my so doing, it appeared, had been ultimately the means of preserving his life. The Ariel was slightly put together, and in going down her frame naturally went to pieces; the deck of the cuddy, as might have been expected, was lifted, by the force of the water rushing in, entirely from the main timbers, and floated (with other fragments, no doubt) to the surface \u2014 Augustus was buoyed up with it, and thus escaped a terrible death.\n\nIt was more than an hour after being taken on board the Penguin before he could give any account of himself, or be made to comprehend the nature of the accident which had befallen our boat. At length he became thoroughly aroused, and spoke much of his sensations while in the water. Upon his first attaining any degree of consciousness, he found himself beneath the surface, whirling round and round with inconceivable rapidity, and with a rope wrapped in three or four folds tightly about his neck. In an instant afterward he felt himself going rapidly upward, when, his head striking violently against a hard substance, he again relapsed into insensibility. Upon once more reviving he was in fuller possession of his reason \u2014 this was still, however, in the greatest degree clouded and confused. He now knew that some accident had occurred, and that he was in the water, although his mouth was above the surface, and he could breathe with some freedom. Possibly, at this period the deck was drifting rapidly before the wind, and drawing him after it, as he floated upon his back. Of course, as long as he could have retained this position, it would have been nearly impossible that he should be drowned. Presently a surge threw him directly athwart the deck, and this post he endeavored to maintain, screaming at intervals for help. just before he was discovered by Mr. Henderson, he had been obliged to relax his hold through exhaustion, and, falling into the sea, had given himself up for lost. During the whole period of his struggles he had not the faintest recollection of the Ariel, nor of the matters in connexion with the source of his disaster. A vague feeling of terror and despair had taken entire possession of his faculties. When he was finally picked up, every power of his mind had failed him; and, as before said, it was nearly an hour after getting on board the Penguin before he became fully aware of his condition. In regard to myself \u2014 I was resuscitated from a state bordering very nearly upon death (and after every other means had been tried in vain for three hours and a half) by vigorous friction with flannels bathed in hot oil \u2014 a proceeding suggested by Augustus. The wound in my neck, although of an ugly appearance, proved of little real consequence, and I soon recovered from its effects.\n\nThe Penguin got into port about nine o'clock in the morning, after encountering one of the severest gales ever experienced off Nantucket. Both Augustus and myself managed to appear at Mr. Barnard's in time for breakfast \u2014 which, luckily, was somewhat late, owing to the party over night. I suppose all at the table were too much fatigued themselves to notice our jaded appearance \u2014 of course, it would not have borne a very rigid scrutiny. Schoolboys, however, can accomplish wonders in the way of deception, and I verily believe not one of our friends in Nantucket had the slightest suspicion that the terrible story told by some sailors in town of their having run down a vessel at sea and drowned some thirty or forty poor devils, had reference either to the Ariel, my companion, or myself. We two have since very frequently talked the matter over \u2014 but never without a shudder. In one of our conversations Augustus frankly confessed to me, that in his whole life he had at no time experienced so excruciating a sense of dismay, as when on board our little boat he first discovered the extent of his intoxication, and felt himself sinking beneath its influence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "In no affairs of mere prejudice, pro or con, do we deduce inferences with entire certainty, even from the most simple data. It might be supposed that a catastrophe such as I have just related would have effectually cooled my incipient passion for the sea. On the contrary, I never experienced a more ardent longing for the wild adventures incident to the life of a navigator than within a week after our miraculous deliverance. This short period proved amply long enough to erase from my memory the shadows, and bring out in vivid light all the pleasurably exciting points of color, all the picturesqueness, of the late perilous accident. My conversations with Augustus grew daily more frequent and more intensely full of interest. He had a manner of relating his stories of the ocean (more than one half of which I now suspect to have been sheer fabrications) well adapted to have weight with one of my enthusiastic temperament and somewhat gloomy although glowing imagination. It is strange, too, that he most strongly enlisted my feelings in behalf of the life of a seaman, when he depicted his more terrible moments of suffering and despair. For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions or desires \u2014 for they amounted to desires \u2014 are common, I have since been assured, to the whole numerous race of the melancholy among men \u2014 at the time of which I speak I regarded them only as prophetic glimpses of a destiny which I felt myself in a measure bound to fulfil. Augustus thoroughly entered into my state of mind. It is probable, indeed, that our intimate communion had resulted in a partial interchange of character.\n\nAbout eighteen months after the period of the Ariel's disaster, the firm of Lloyd and Vredenburgh (a house connected in some manner with the Messieurs Enderby, I believe, of Liverpool) were engaged in repairing and fitting out the brig Grampus for a whaling voyage. She was an old hulk, and scarcely seaworthy when all was done to her that could be done. I hardly know why she was chosen in preference to other good vessels belonging to the same owners \u2014 but so it was. Mr. Barnard was appointed to command her, and Augustus was going with him. While the brig was getting ready, he frequently urged upon me the excellency of the opportunity now offered for indulging my desire of travel. He found me by no means an unwilling listener \u2014 yet the matter could not be so easily arranged. My father made no direct opposition; but my mother went into hysterics at the bare mention of the design; and, more than all, my grandfather, from whom I expected much, vowed to cut me off with a shilling if I should ever broach the subject to him again. These difficulties, however, so far from abating my desire, only added fuel to the flame. I determined to go at all hazards; and, having made known my intentions to Augustus, we set about arranging a plan by which it might be accomplished. In the meantime I forbore speaking to any of my relations in regard to the voyage, and, as I busied myself ostensibly with my usual studies, it was supposed that I had abandoned the design. I have since frequently examined my conduct on this occasion with sentiments of displeasure as well as of surprise. The intense hypocrisy I made use of for the furtherance of my project \u2014 an hypocrisy pervading every word and action of my life for so long a period of time \u2014 could only have been rendered tolerable to myself by the wild and burning expectation with which I looked forward to the fulfilment of my long-cherished visions of travel.\n\nIn pursuance of my scheme of deception, I was necessarily obliged to leave much to the management of Augustus, who was employed for the greater part of every day on board the Grampus, attending to some arrangements for his father in the cabin and cabin hold. At night, however, we were sure to have a conference and talk over our hopes. After nearly a month passed in this manner, without our hitting upon any plan we thought likely to succeed, he told me at last that he had determined upon everything necessary. I had a relation living in New Bedford, a Mr. Ross, at whose house I was in the habit of spending occasionally two or three weeks at a time. The brig was to sail about the middle of June (June, 1827), and it was agreed that, a day or two before her putting to sea, my father was to receive a note, as usual, from Mr. Ross, asking me to come over and spend a fortnight with Robert and Emmet (his sons). Augustus charged himself with the inditing of this note and getting it delivered. Having set out as supposed, for New Bedford, I was then to report myself to my companion, who would contrive a hiding-place for me in the Grampus. This hiding-place, he assured me, would be rendered sufficiently comfortable for a residence of many days, during which I was not to make my appearance. When the brig had proceeded so far on her course as to make any turning back a matter out of question, I should then, he said, be formally installed in all the comforts of the cabin; and as to his father, he would only laugh heartily at the joke. Vessels enough would be met with by which a letter might be sent home explaining the adventure to my parents.\n\nThe middle of June at length arrived, and every thing had been matured. The note was written and delivered, and on a Monday morning I left the house for the New Bedford packet, as supposed. I went, however, straight to Augustus, who was waiting for me at the corner of a street. It had been our original plan that I should keep out of the way until dark, and then slip on board the brig; but, as there was now a thick fog in our favor, it was agreed to lose no time in secreting me. Augustus led the way to the wharf, and I followed at a little distance, enveloped in a thick seaman's cloak, which he had brought with him, so that my person might not be easily recognized. just as we turned the second corner, after passing Mr. Edmund's well, who should appear, standing right in front of me, and looking me full in the face, but old Mr. Peterson, my grandfather. \"Why, bless my soul, Gordon,\" said he, after a long pause, \"why, why, \u2014 whose dirty cloak is that you have on?\" \"Sir!\" I replied, assuming, as well as I could, in the exigency of the moment, an air of offended surprise, and talking in the gruffest of all imaginable tones \u2014 \"sir! you are a sum'mat mistaken \u2014 my name, in the first place, bee'nt nothing at all like Goddin, and I'd want you for to know better, you blackguard, than to call my new obercoat a darty one.\" For my life I could hardly refrain from screaming with laughter at the odd manner in which the old gentleman received this handsome rebuke. He started back two or three steps, turned first pale and then excessively red, threw up his spectacles, then, putting them down, ran full tilt at me, with his umbrella uplifted. He stopped short, however, in his career, as if struck with a sudden recollection; and presently, turning round, hobbled off down the street, shaking all the while with rage, and muttering between his teeth: \"Won't do \u2014 new glasses \u2014 thought it was.\n\nAfter this narrow escape we proceeded with greater caution, and arrived at our point of destination in safety. There were only one or two of the hands on board, and these were busy forward, doing something to the forecastle combings. Captain Barnard, we knew very well, was engaged at Lloyd and Vredenburgh's, and would remain there until late in the evening, so we had little to apprehend on his account. Augustus went first up the vessel's side, and in a short while I followed him, without being noticed by the men at work. We proceeded at once into the cabin, and found no person there. It was fitted up in the most comfortable style \u2014 a thing somewhat unusual in a whaling-vessel. There were four very excellent staterooms, with wide and convenient berths. There was also a large stove, I took notice, and a remarkably thick and valuable carpet covering the floor of both the cabin and staterooms. The ceiling was full seven feet high, and, in short, every thing appeared of a more roomy and agreeable nature than I had anticipated. Augustus, however, would allow me but little time for observation, insisting upon the necessity of my concealing myself as soon as possible. He led the way into his own stateroom, which was on the starboard side of the brig, and next to the bulkheads. Upon entering, he closed the door and bolted it. I thought I had never seen a nicer little room than the one in which I now found myself. It was about ten feet long, and had only one berth, which, as I said before, was wide and convenient. In that portion of the closet nearest the bulkheads there was a space of four feet square, containing a table, a chair, and a set of hanging shelves full of books, chiefly books of voyages and travels. There were many other little comforts in the room, among which I ought not to forget a kind of safe or refrigerator, in which Augustus pointed out to me a host of delicacies, both in the eating and drinking department.\n\nHe now pressed with his knuckles upon a certain spot of the carpet in one corner of the space just mentioned, letting me know that a portion of the flooring, about sixteen inches square, had been neatly cut out and again adjusted. As he pressed, this portion rose up at one end sufficiently to allow the passage of his finger beneath. In this manner he raised the mouth of the trap (to which the carpet was still fastened by tacks), and I found that it led into the after hold. He next lit a small taper by means of a phosphorous match, and, placing the light in a dark lantern, descended with it through the opening, bidding me follow. I did so, and be then pulled the cover upon the hole, by means of a nail driven into the under side \u2014 the carpet, of course, resuming its original position on the floor of the stateroom, and all traces of the aperture being concealed.\n\nThe taper gave out so feeble a ray that it was with the greatest difficulty I could grope my way through the confused mass of lumber among which I now found myself. By degrees, however, my eyes became accustomed to the gloom, and I proceeded with less trouble, holding on to the skirts of my friend's coat. He brought me, at length, after creeping and winding through innumerable narrow passages, to an iron-bound box, such as is used sometimes for packing fine earthenware. It was nearly four feet high, and full six long, but very narrow. Two large empty oil-casks lay on the top of it, and above these, again, a vast quantity of straw matting, piled up as high as the floor of the cabin. In every other direction around was wedged as closely as possible, even up to the ceiling, a complete chaos of almost every species of ship-furniture, together with a heterogeneous medley of crates, hampers, barrels, and bales, so that it seemed a matter no less than miraculous that we had discovered any passage at all to the box. I afterward found that Augustus had purposely arranged the stowage in this hold with a view to affording me a thorough concealment, having had only one assistant in the labour, a man not going out in the brig.\n\nMy companion now showed me that one of the ends of the box could be removed at pleasure. He slipped it aside and displayed the interior, at which I was excessively amused. A mattress from one of the cabin berths covered the whole of its bottom, and it contained almost every article of mere comfort which could be crowded into so small a space, allowing me, at the same time, sufficient room for my accommodation, either in a sitting position or lying at full length. Among other things, there were some books, pen, ink, and paper, three blankets, a large jug full of water, a keg of sea-biscuit, three or four immense Bologna sausages, an enormous ham, a cold leg of roast mutton, and half a dozen bottles of cordials and liqueurs. I proceeded immediately to take possession of my little apartment, and this with feelings of higher satisfaction, I am sure, than any monarch ever experienced upon entering a new palace. Augustus now pointed out to me the method of fastening the open end of the box, and then, holding the taper close to the deck, showed me a piece of dark whipcord lying along it. This, he said, extended from my hiding-place throughout an the necessary windings among the lumber, to a nail which was driven into the deck of the hold, immediately beneath the trap-door leading into his stateroom. By means of this cord I should be enabled readily to trace my way out without his guidance, provided any unlooked-for accident should render such a step necessary. He now took his departure, leaving with me the lantern, together with a copious supply of tapers and phosphorous, and promising to pay me a visit as often as he could contrive to do so without observation. This was on the seventeenth of June.\n\nI remained three days and nights (as nearly as I could guess) in my hiding-place without getting out of it at all, except twice for the purpose of stretching my limbs by standing erect between two crates just opposite the opening. During the whole period I saw nothing of Augustus; but this occasioned me little uneasiness, as I knew the brig was expected to put to sea every hour, and in the bustle he would not easily find opportunities of coming down to me. At length I heard the trap open and shut. and presently he called in a low voice, asking if all was well, and if there was any thing I wanted. \"Nothing,\" I replied; \"I am as comfortable as can be; when will the brig sail?\" \"She will be under weigh in less than half an hour,\" he answered. \"I came to let you know, and for fear you should be uneasy at my absence. I shall not have a chance of coming down again for some time \u2014 perhaps for three or four days more. All is going on right aboveboard. After I go up and close the trap, do you creep along by the whipcord to where the nail is driven in. You will find my watch there \u2014 it may be useful to you, as you have no daylight to keep time by. I suppose you can't tell how long you have been buried \u2014 only three days \u2014 this is the twentieth. I would bring the watch to your box, but am afraid of being missed.\" With this he went up.\n\nIn about an hour after he had gone I distinctly felt the brig in motion, and congratulated myself upon having at length fairly commenced a voyage. Satisfied with this idea, I determined to make my mind as easy as possible, and await the course of events until I should be permitted to exchange the box for the more roomy, although hardly more comfortable, accommodations of the cabin. My first care was to get the watch. Leaving the taper burning, I groped along in the dark, following the cord through windings innumerable, in some of which I discovered that, after toiling a long distance, I was brought back within a foot or two of a former position. At length I reached the nail, and securing the object of my journey, returned with it in safety. I now looked over the books which had been so thoughtfully provided, and selected the expedition of Lewis and Clarke to the mouth of the Columbia. With this I amused myself for some time, when, growing sleepy, I extinguished the light with great care, and soon fell into a sound slumber.\n\nUpon awakening I felt strangely confused in mind, and some time elapsed before I could bring to recollection all the various circumstances of my situation. By degrees, however, I remembered all. Striking a light, I looked at the watch; but it was run down, and there were, consequently, no means of determining how long I slept. My limbs were greatly cramped, and I was forced to relieve them by standing between the crates. Presently feeling an almost ravenous appetite, I bethought myself of the cold mutton, some of which I had eaten just before going to sleep, and found excellent. What was my astonishment in discovering it to be in a state of absolute putrefaction! This circumstance occasioned me great disquietude; for, connecting it with the disorder of mind I experienced upon awakening, I began to suppose that I must have slept for an inordinately long period of time. The close atmosphere of the hold might have had something to do with this, and might, in the end, be productive of the most serious results. My head ached excessively; I fancied that I drew every breath with difficulty; and, in short, I was oppressed with a multitude of gloomy feelings. Still I could not venture to make any disturbance by opening the trap or otherwise, and, having wound up the watch, contented myself as well as possible.\n\nThroughout the whole of the next tedious twenty-four hours no person came to my relief, and I could not help accusing Augustus of the grossest inattention. What alarmed me chiefly was, that the water in my jug was reduced to about half a pint, and I was suffering much from thirst, having eaten freely of the Bologna sausages after the loss of my mutton. I became very uneasy, and could no longer take any interest in my books. I was overpowered, too, with a desire to sleep, yet trembled at the thought of indulging it, lest there might exist some pernicious influence, like that of burning charcoal, in the confined air of the hold. In the meantime the roll of the brig told me that we were far in the main ocean, and a dull humming sound, which reached my ears as if from an immense distance, convinced me no ordinary gale was blowing. I could not imagine a reason for the absence of Augustus. We were surely far enough advanced on our voyage to allow of my going up. Some accident might have happened to him \u2014 but I could think of none which would account for his suffering me to remain so long a prisoner, except, indeed, his having suddenly died or fallen overboard, and upon this idea I could not dwell with any degree of patience. It was possible that we had been baffled by head winds, and were still in the near vicinity of Nantucket. This notion, however, I was forced to abandon; for such being the case, the brig must have frequently gone about; and I was entirely satisfied, from her continual inclination to the larboard, that she had been sailing all along with a steady breeze on her starboard quarter. Besides, granting that we were still in the neighborhood of the island, why should not Augustus have visited me and informed me of the circumstance? Pondering in this manner upon the difficulties of my solitary and cheerless condition, I resolved to wait yet another twenty-four hours, when, if no relief were obtained, I would make my way to the trap, and endeavour either to hold a parley with my friend, or get at least a little fresh air through the opening, and a further supply of water from the stateroom. While occupied with this thought, however, I fell in spite of every exertion to the contrary, into a state of profound sleep, or rather stupor. My dreams were of the most terrific description. Every species of calamity and horror befell me. Among other miseries I was smothered to death between huge pillows, by demons of the most ghastly and ferocious aspect. Immense serpents held me in their embrace, and looked earnestly in my face with their fearfully shining eyes. Then deserts, limitless, and of the most forlorn and awe-inspiring character, spread themselves out before me. Immensely tall trunks of trees, gray and leafless, rose up in endless succession as far as the eye could reach. Their roots were concealed in wide-spreading morasses, whose dreary water lay intensely black, still, and altogether terrible, beneath. And the strange trees seemed endowed with a human vitality, and waving to and fro their skeleton arms, were crying to the silent waters for mercy, in the shrill and piercing accents of the most acute agony and despair. The scene changed; and I stood, naked and alone, amidst the burning sand-plains of Sahara. At my feet lay crouched a fierce lion of the tropics. Suddenly his wild eyes opened and fell upon me. With a conculsive bound he sprang to his feet, and laid bare his horrible teeth. In another instant there burst from his red throat a roar like the thunder of the firmament, and I fell impetuously to the earth. Stifling in a paroxysm of terror, I at last found myself partially awake. My dream, then, was not all a dream. Now, at least, I was in possession of my senses. The paws of some huge and real monster were pressing heavily upon my bosom \u2014 his hot breath was in my ear \u2014 and his white and ghastly fangs were gleaming upon me through the gloom.\n\nHad a thousand lives hung upon the movement of a limb or the utterance of a syllable, I could have neither stirred nor spoken. The beast, whatever it was, retained his position without attempting any immediate violence, while I lay in an utterly helpless, and, I fancied, a dying condition beneath him. I felt that my powers of body and mind were fast leaving me \u2014 in a word, that I was perishing, and perishing of sheer fright. My brain swam \u2014 I grew deadly sick \u2014 my vision failed \u2014 even the glaring eyeballs above me grew dim. Making a last strong effort, I at length breathed a faint ejaculation to God, and resigned myself to die. The sound of my voice seemed to arouse all the latent fury of the animal. He precipitated himself at full length upon my body; but what was my astonishment, when, with a long and low whine, he commenced licking my face and hands with the greatest eagerness, and with the most extravagant demonstration of affection and joy! I was bewildered, utterly lost in amazement \u2014 but I could not forget the peculiar whine of my Newfoundland dog Tiger, and the odd manner of his caresses I well knew. It was he. I experienced a sudden rush of blood to my temples \u2014 a giddy and overpowering sense of deliverance and reanimation. I rose hurriedly from the mattress upon which I had been lying, and, throwing myself upon the neck of my faithful follower and friend, relieved the long oppression of my bosom in a flood of the most passionate tears.\n\nAs upon a former occasion my conceptions were in a state of the greatest indistinctness and confusion after leaving the mattress. For a long time I found it nearly impossible to connect any ideas; but, by very slow degrees, my thinking faculties returned, and I again called to memory the several incidents of my condition. For the presence of Tiger I tried in vain to account; and after busying myself with a thousand different conjectures respecting him, was forced to content myself with rejoicing that he was with me to share my dreary solitude, and render me comfort by his caresses. Most people love their dogs, but for Tiger I had an affection far more ardent than common; and never, certainly, did any creature more truly deserve it. For seven years he had been my inseparable companion, and in a multitude of instances had given evidence of all the noble qualities for which we value the animal. I had rescued him, when a puppy, from the clutches of a malignant little villain in Nantucket who was leading him, with a rope around his neck, to the water; and the grown dog repaid the obligation, about three years afterward, by saving me from the bludgeon of a street robber.\n\nGetting now hold of the watch, I found, upon applying it to my ear, that it had again run down; but at this I was not at all surprised, being convinced, from the peculiar state of my feelings, that I had slept, as before, for a very long period of time, how long, it was of course impossible to say. I was burning up with fever, and my thirst was almost intolerable. I felt about the box for my little remaining supply of water, for I had no light, the taper having burnt to the socket of the lantern, and the phosphorus-box not coming readily to hand. Upon finding the jug, however, I discovered it to be empty \u2014 Tiger, no doubt, having been tempted to drink it, as well as to devour the remnant of mutton, the bone of which lay, well picked, by the opening of the box. The spoiled meat I could well spare, but my heart sank as I thought of the water. I was feeble in the extreme \u2014 so much so that I shook all over, as with an ague, at the slightest movement or exertion. To add to my troubles, the brig was pitching and rolling with great violence, and the oil-casks which lay upon my box were in momentary danger of falling down, so as to block up the only way of ingress or egress. I felt, also, terrible sufferings from sea-sickness. These considerations determined me to make my way, at all hazards, to the trap, and obtain immediate relief, before I should be incapacitated from doing so altogether. Having come to this resolve, I again felt about for the phosphorus-box and tapers. The former I found after some little trouble; but, not discovering the tapers as soon as I had expected (for I remembered very nearly the spot in which I had placed them), I gave up the search for the present, and bidding Tiger lie quiet, began at once my journey toward the trap.\n\nIn this attempt my great feebleness became more than ever apparent. It was with the utmost difficulty I could crawl along at all, and very frequently my limbs sank suddenly from beneath me; when, falling prostrate on my face, I would remain for some minutes in a state bordering on insensibility. Still I struggled forward by slow degrees, dreading every moment that I should swoon amid the narrow and intricate windings of the lumber, in which event I had nothing but death to expect as the result. At length, upon making a push forward with all the energy I could command, I struck my forehead violently against the sharp corner of an iron-bound crate. The accident only stunned me for a few moments; but I found, to my inexpressible grief, that the quick and violent roll of the vessel had thrown the crate entirely across my path, so as effectually to block up the passage. With my utmost exertions I could not move it a single inch from its position, it being closely wedged in among the surrounding boxes and ship-furniture. It became necessary, therefore, enfeebled as I was, either to leave the guidance of the whipcord and seek out a new passage, or to climb over the obstacle, and resume the path on the other side. The former alternative presented too many difficulties and dangers to be thought of without a shudder. In my present weak state of both mind and body, I should infallibly lose my way if I attempted it, and perish miserably amid the dismal and disgusting labyrinths of the hold. I proceeded, therefore, without hesitation, to summon up all my remaining strength and fortitude, and endeavour, as I best might, to clamber over the crate.\n\nUpon standing erect, with this end in view, I found the undertaking even a more serious task than my fears had led me to imagine. On each side of the narrow passage arose a complete wall of various heavy lumber, which the least blunder on my part might be the means of bringing down upon my head; or, if this accident did not occur, the path might be effectually blocked up against my return by the descending mass, as it was in front by the obstacle there. The crate itself was a long and unwieldy box, upon which no foothold could be obtained. In vain I attempted, by every means in my power, to reach the top, with the hope of being thus enabled to draw myself up. Had I succeeded in reaching it, it is certain that my strength would have proved utterly inadequate to the task of getting over, and it was better in every respect that I failed. At length, in a desperate effort to force the crate from its ground, I felt a strong vibration in the side next me. I thrust my hand eagerly to the edge of the planks, and found that a very large one was loose. With my pocket-knife, which, luckily, I had with me, I succeeded, after great labour, in prying it entirely off; and getting it through the aperture, discovered, to my exceeding joy, that there were no boards on the opposite side \u2014 in other words, that the top was wanting, it being the bottom through which I had forced my way. I now met with no important difficulty in proceeding along the line until I finally reached the nail. With a beating heart I stood erect, and with a gentle touch pressed against the cover of the trap. It did not rise as soon as I had expected, and I pressed it with somewhat more determination, still dreading lest some other person than Augustus might be in his stateroom. The door, however, to my astonishment, remained steady, and I became somewhat uneasy, for I knew that it had formerly required but little or no effort to remove it. I pushed it strongly \u2014 it was nevertheless firm: with all my strength \u2014 it still did not give way: with rage, with fury, with despair \u2014 it set at defiance my utmost efforts; and it was evident, from the unyielding nature of the resistance, that the hole had either been discovered and effectually nailed up, or that some immense weight had been placed upon it, which it was useless to think of removing.\n\nMy sensations were those of extreme horror and dismay. In vain I attempted to reason on the probable cause of my being thus entombed. I could summon up no connected chain of reflection, and, sinking on the floor, gave way, unresistingly, to the most gloomy imaginings, in which the dreadful deaths of thirst, famine, suffocation, and premature interment crowded upon me as the prominent disasters to be encountered. At length there returned to me some portion of presence of mind. I arose, and felt with my fingers for the seams or cracks of the aperture. Having found them, I examined them closely to ascertain if they emitted any light from the stateroom; but none was visible. I then forced the blade of my pen-knife through them, until I met with some hard obstacle. Scraping against it, I discovered it to be a solid mass of iron, which, from its peculiar wavy feel as I passed the blade along it, I concluded to be a chain-cable. The only course now left me was to retrace my way to the box, and there either yield to my sad fate, or try so to tranquilize my mind as to admit of my arranging some plan of escape. I immediately set about the attempt, and succeeded, after innumerable difficulties, in getting back. As I sank, utterly exhausted, upon the mattress, Tiger threw himself at full length by my side, and seemed as if desirous, by his caresses, of consoling me in my troubles, and urging me to bear them with fortitude.\n\nThe singularity of his behavior at length forcibly arrested my attention. After licking my face and hands for some minutes, he would suddenly cease doing so, and utter a low whine. Upon reaching out my hand toward him, I then invariably found him lying on his back, with his paws uplifted. This conduct, so frequently repeated, appeared strange, and I could in no manner account for it. As the dog seemed distressed, I concluded that he had received some injury; and, taking his paws in my hands, I examined them one by one, but found no sign of any hurt. I then supposed him hungry, and gave him a large piece of ham, which he devoured with avidity \u2014 afterward, however, resuming his extraordinary manoeuvres. I now imagined that he was suffering, like myself, the torments of thirst, and was about adopting this conclusion as the true one, when the idea occurred to me that I had as yet only examined his paws, and that there might possibly be a wound upon some portion of his body or head. The latter I felt carefully over, but found nothing. On passing my hand, however, along his back, I perceived a slight erection of the hair extending completely across it. Probing this with my finger, I discovered a string, and tracing it up, found that it encircled the whole body. Upon a closer scrutiny, I came across a small slip of what had the feeling of letter paper, through which the string had been fastened in such a manner as to bring it immediately beneath the left shoulder of the animal." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "The thought instantly occurred to me that the paper was a note from Augustus, and that some unaccountable accident having happened to prevent his relieving me from my dungeon, he had devised this method of acquainting me with the true state of affairs. Trembling with eagerness, I now commenced another search for my phosphorus matches and tapers. I had a confused recollection of having put them carefully away just before falling asleep; and, indeed, previously to my last journey to the trap, I had been able to remember the exact spot where I had deposited them. But now I endeavored in vain to call it to mind, and busied myself for a full hour in a fruitless and vexatious search for the missing articles; never, surely, was there a more tantalizing state of anxiety and suspense. At length, while groping about, with my head close to the ballast, near the opening of the box, and outside of it, I perceived a faint glimmering of light in the direction of the steerage. Greatly surprised, I endeavored to make my way toward it, as it appeared to be but a few feet from my position. Scarcely had I moved with this intention, when I lost sight of the glimmer entirely, and, before I could bring it into view again, was obliged to feel along by the box until I had exactly resumed my original situation. Now, moving my head with caution to and fro, I found that, by proceeding slowly, with great care, in an opposite direction to that in which I had at first started, I was enabled to draw near the light, still keeping it in view. Presently I came directly upon it (having squeezed my way through innumerable narrow windings), and found that it proceeded from some fragments of my matches lying in an empty barrel turned upon its side. I was wondering how they came in such a place, when my hand fell upon two or three pieces of taper wax, which had been evidently mumbled by the dog. I concluded at once that he had devoured the whole of my supply of candles, and I felt hopeless of being ever able to read the note of Augustus. The small remnants of the wax were so mashed up among other rubbish in the barrel, that I despaired of deriving any service from them, and left them as they were. The phosphorus, of which there was only a speck or two, I gathered up as well as I could, and returned with it, after much difficulty, to my box, where Tiger had all the while remained.\n\nWhat to do next I could not tell. The hold was so intensely dark that I could not see my hand, however close I would hold it to my face. The white slip of paper could barely be discerned, and not even that when I looked at it directly; by turning the exterior portions of the retina toward it \u2014 that is to say, by surveying it slightly askance, I found that it became in some measure perceptible. Thus the gloom of my prison may be imagined, and the note of my friend, if indeed it were a note from him, seemed only likely to throw me into further trouble, by disquieting to no purpose my already enfeebled and agitated mind. In vain I revolved in my brain a multitude of absurd expedients for procuring light \u2014 such expedients precisely as a man in the perturbed sleep occasioned by opium would be apt to fall upon for a similar purpose \u2014 each and all of which appear by turns to the dreamer the most reasonable and the most preposterous of conceptions, just as the reasoning or imaginative faculties flicker, alternately, one above the other. At last an idea occurred to me which seemed rational, and which gave me cause to wonder, very justly, that I had not entertained it before. I placed the slip of paper on the back of a book, and, collecting the fragments of the phosphorus matches which I had brought from the barrel, laid them together upon the paper. I then, with the palm of my hand, rubbed the whole over quickly, yet steadily. A clear light diffused itself immediately throughout the whole surface; and had there been any writing upon it, I should not have experienced the least difficulty, I am sure, in reading it. Not a syllable was there, however \u2014 nothing but a dreary and unsatisfactory blank; the illumination died away in a few seconds, and my heart died away within me as it went.\n\nI have before stated more than once that my intellect, for some period prior to this, had been in a condition nearly bordering on idiocy. There were, to be sure, momentary intervals of perfect sanity, and, now and then, even of energy; but these were few. It must be remembered that I had been, for many days certainly, inhaling the almost pestilential atmosphere of a close hold in a whaling vessel, and for a long portion of that time but scantily supplied with water. For the last fourteen or fifteen hours I had none \u2014 nor had I slept during that time. Salt provisions of the most exciting kind had been my chief, and, indeed, since the loss of the mutton, my only supply of food, with the exception of the sea-biscuit; and these latter were utterly useless to me, as they were too dry and hard to be swallowed in the swollen and parched condition of my throat. I was now in a high state of fever, and in every respect exceedingly ill. This will account for the fact that many miserable hours of despondency elapsed after my last adventure with the phosphorus, before the thought suggested itself that I had examined only one side of the paper. I shall not attempt to describe my feelings of rage (for I believe I was more angry than any thing else) when the egregious oversight I had committed flashed suddenly upon my perception. The blunder itself would have been unimportant, had not my own folly and impetuosity rendered it otherwise \u2014 in my disappointment at not finding some words upon the slip, I had childishly torn it in pieces and thrown it away, it was impossible to say where.\n\nFrom the worst part of this dilemma I was relieved by the sagacity of Tiger. Having got, after a long search, a small piece of the note, I put it to the dog's nose, and endeavored to make him understand that he must bring me the rest of it. To my astonishment, (for I had taught him none of the usual tricks for which his breed are famous,) he seemed to enter at once into my meaning, and, rummaging about for a few moments, soon found another considerable portion. Bringing me this, he paused awhile, and, rubbing his nose against my hand, appeared to be waiting for my approval of what he had done. I patted him on the head, when he immediately made off again. It was now some minutes before he came back \u2014 but when he did come, he brought with him a large slip, which proved to be all the paper missing \u2014 it having been torn, it seems, only into three pieces. Luckily, I had no trouble in finding what few fragments of the phosphorus were left \u2014 being guided by the indistinct glow one or two of the particles still emitted. My difficulties had taught me the necessity of caution, and I now took time to reflect upon what I was about to do. It was very probable, I considered, that some words were written upon that side of the paper which had not been examined \u2014 but which side was that? Fitting the pieces together gave me no clew in this respect, although it assured me that the words (if there were any) would be found all on one side, and connected in a proper manner, as written. There was the greater necessity of ascertaining the point in question beyond a doubt, as the phosphorus remaining would be altogether insufficient for a third attempt, should I fail in the one I was now about to make. I placed the paper on a book as before, and sat for some minutes thoughtfully revolving the matter over in my mind. At last I thought it barely possible that the written side might have some unevenness on its surface, which a delicate sense of feeling might enable me to detect. I determined to make the experiment and passed my finger very carefully over the side which first presented itself. Nothing, however, was perceptible, and I turned the paper, adjusting it on the book. I now again carried my forefinger cautiously along, when I was aware of an exceedingly slight, but still discernable glow, which followed as it proceeded. This, I knew, must arise from some very minute remaining particles of the phosphorus with which I had covered the paper in my previous attempt. The other, or under side, then, was that on which lay the writing, if writing there should finally prove to be. Again I turned the note, and went to work as I had previously done. Having rubbed in the phosphorus, a brilliancy ensued as before \u2014 but this time several lines of MS. in a large hand, and apparently in red ink, became distinctly visible. The glimmer, although sufficiently bright, was but momentary. Still, had I not been too greatly excited, there would have been ample time enough for me to peruse the whole three sentences before me \u2014 for I saw there were three. In my anxiety, however, to read all at once, I succeeded only in reading the seven concluding words, which thus appeared \u2014 \"blood \u2014 your life depends upon lying close.\"\n\nHad I been able to ascertain the entire contents of the note-the full meaning of the admonition which my friend had thus attempted to convey, that admonition, even although it should have revealed a story of disaster the most unspeakable, could not, I am firmly convinced, have imbued my mind with one tithe of the harrowing and yet indefinable horror with which I was inspired by the fragmentary warning thus received. And \"blood,\" too, that word of all words \u2014 so rife at all times with mystery, and suffering, and terror \u2014 how trebly full of import did it now appear \u2014 how chilly and heavily (disjointed, as it thus was, from any foregoing words to qualify or render it distinct) did its vague syllables fall, amid the deep gloom of my prison, into the innermost recesses of my soul!\n\nAugustus had, undoubtedly, good reasons for wishing me to remain concealed, and I formed a thousand surmises as to what they could be \u2014 but I could think of nothing affording a satisfactory solution of the mystery. just after returning from my last journey to the trap, and before my attention had been otherwise directed by the singular conduct of Tiger, I had come to the resolution of making myself heard at all events by those on board, or, if I could not succeed in this directly, of trying to cut my way through the orlop deck. The half certainty which I felt of being able to accomplish one of these two purposes in the last emergency, had given me courage (which I should not otherwise have had) to endure the evils of my situation. The few words I had been able to read, however, had cut me off from these final resources, and I now, for the first time, felt all the misery of my fate. In a paroxysm of despair I threw myself again upon the mattress, where, for about the period of a day and night, I lay in a kind of stupor, relieved only by momentary intervals of reason and recollection.\n\nAt length I once more arose, and busied myself in reflection upon the horrors which encompassed me. For another twenty-four hours it was barely possible that I might exist without water \u2014 for a longer time I could not do so. During the first portion of my imprisonment I had made free use of the cordials with which Augustus had supplied me, but they only served to excite fever, without in the least degree assuaging thirst. I had now only about a gill left, and this was of a species of strong peach liqueur at which my stomach revolted. The sausages were entirely consumed; of the ham nothing remained but a small piece of the skin; and all the biscuit, except a few fragments of one, had been eaten by Tiger. To add to my troubles, I found that my headache was increasing momentarily, and with it the species of delirium which had distressed me more or less since my first falling asleep. For some hours past it had been with the greatest difficulty I could breathe at all, and now each attempt at so doing was attended with the most depressing spasmodic action of the chest. But there was still another and very different source of disquietude, and one, indeed, whose harassing terrors had been the chief means of arousing me to exertion from my stupor on the mattress. It arose from the demeanor of the dog.\n\nI first observed an alteration in his conduct while rubbing in the phosphorus on the paper in my last attempt. As I rubbed, he ran his nose against my hand with a slight snarl; but I was too greatly excited at the time to pay much attention to the circumstance. Soon afterward, it will be remembered, I threw myself on the mattress, and fell into a species of lethargy. Presently I became aware of a singular hissing sound close at my ears, and discovered it to proceed from Tiger, who was panting and wheezing in a state of the greatest apparent excitement, his eyeballs flashing fiercely through the gloom. I spoke to him, when he replied with a low growl, and then remained quiet. Presently I relapsed into my stupor, from which I was again awakened in a similar manner. This was repeated three or four times, until finally his behaviour inspired me with so great a degree of fear, that I became fully aroused. He was now lying close by the door of the box, snarling fearfully, although in a kind of undertone, and grinding his teeth as if strongly convulsed. I had no doubt whatever that the want of water or the confined atmosphere of the hold had driven him mad, and I was at a loss what course to pursue. I could not endure the thought of killing him, yet it seemed absolutely necessary for my own safety. I could distinctly perceive his eyes fastened upon me with an expression of the most deadly animosity, and I expected every instant that he would attack me. At last I could endure my terrible situation no longer, and determined to make my way from the box at all hazards, and dispatch him, if his opposition should render it necessary for me to do so. To get out, I had to pass directly over his body, and he already seemed to anticipate my design \u2014 missing himself upon his fore. legs (as I perceived by the altered position of his eyes), and displayed the whole of his white fangs, which were easily discernible. I took the remains of the ham-skin, and the bottle containing the liqueur, and secured them about my person, together with a large carving-knife which Augustus had left me \u2014 then, folding my cloak around me as closely as possible, I made a movement toward the mouth of the box. No sooner did I do this, than the dog sprang with a loud growl toward my throat. The whole weight of his body struck me on the right shoulder, and I fell violently to the left, while the enraged animal passed entirely over me. I had fallen upon my knees, with my head buried among the blankets, and these protected me from a second furious assault, during which I felt the sharp teeth pressing vigorously upon the woollen which enveloped my neck \u2014 yet, luckily, without being able to penetrate all the folds. I was now beneath the dog, and a few moments would place me completely in his power. Despair gave me strength, and I rose boldly up, shaking him from me by main force, and dragging with me the blankets from the mattress. These I now threw over him, and before he could extricate himself, I had got through the door and closed it effectually against his pursuit. In this struggle, however, I had been forced to drop the morsel of ham-skin, and I now found my whole stock of provisions reduced to a single gill of liqueur, As this reflection crossed my mind, I felt myself actuated by one of those fits of perverseness which might be supposed to influence a spoiled child in similar circumstances, and, raising the bottle to my lips, I drained it to the last drop, and dashed it furiously upon the floor.\n\nScarcely had the echo of the crash died away, when I heard my name pronounced in an eager but subdued voice, issuing from the direction of the steerage. So unexpected was anything of the kind, and so intense was the emotion excited within me by the sound, that I endeavoured in vain to reply. My powers of speech totally failed, and in an agony of terror lest my friend should conclude me dead, and return without attempting to reach me, I stood up between the crates near the door of the box, trembling convulsively, and gasping and struggling for utterance. Had a thousand words depended upon a syllable, I could not have spoken it. There was a slight movement now audible among the lumber somewhere forward of my station. The sound presently grew less distinct, then again less so, and still less. Shall I ever forget my feelings at this moment? He was going \u2014 my friend, my companion, from whom I had a right to expect so much \u2014 he was going \u2014 he would abandon me \u2014 he was gone! He would leave me to perish miserably, to expire in the most horrible and loathesome of dungeons \u2014 and one word, one little syllable, would save me \u2014 yet that single syllable I could not utter! I felt, I am sure, more than ten thousand times the agonies of death itself. My brain reeled, and I fell, deadly sick, against the end of the box.\n\nAs I fell the carving-knife was shaken out from the waist-band of my pantaloons, and dropped with a rattling sound to the floor. Never did any strain of the richest melody come so sweetly to my ears! With the intensest anxiety I listened to ascertain the effect of the noise upon Augustus \u2014 for I knew that the person who called my name could be no one but himself. All was silent for some moments. At length I again heard the word \"Arthur!\" repeated in a low tone, and one full of hesitation. Reviving hope loosened at once my powers of speech, and I now screamed at the top of my voice, \"Augustus! oh, Augustus!\" \"Hush! for God's sake be silent!\" he replied, in a voice trembling with agitation; \"I will be with you immediately \u2014 as soon as I can make my way through the hold.\" For a long time I heard him moving among the lumber, and every moment seemed to me an age. At length I felt his hand upon my shoulder, and he placed, at the same moment, a bottle of water to my lips. Those only who have been suddenly redeemed from the jaws of the tomb, or who have known the insufferable torments of thirst under circumstances as aggravated as those which encompassed me in my dreary prison, can form any idea of the unutterable transports which that one long draught of the richest of all physical luxuries afforded.\n\nWhen I had in some degree satisfied my thirst, Augustus produced from his pocket three or four boiled potatoes, which I devoured with the greatest avidity. He had brought with him a light in a dark lantern, and the grateful rays afforded me scarcely less comfort than the food and drink. But I was impatient to learn the cause of his protracted absence, and he proceeded to recount what had happened on board during my incarceration." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The brig put to sea, as I had supposed, in about an hour after he had left the watch. This was on the twentieth of June. It will be remembered that I had then been in the hold for three days; and, during this period, there was so constant a bustle on board, and so much running to and fro, especially in the cabin and staterooms, that he had had no chance of visiting me without the risk of having the secret of the trap discovered. When at length he did come, I had assured him that I was doing as well as possible; and, therefore, for the two next days be felt but little uneasiness on my account \u2014 still, however, watching an opportunity of going down. It was not until the fourth day that he found one. Several times during this interval he had made up his mind to let his father know of the adventure, and have me come up at once; but we were still within reaching distance of Nantucket, and it was doubtful, from some expressions which had escaped Captain Barnard, whether he would not immediately put back if he discovered me to be on board. Besides, upon thinking the matter over, Augustus, so he told me, could not imagine that I was in immediate want, or that I would hesitate, in such case, to make myself heard at the trap. When, therefore, he considered everything he concluded to let me stay until he could meet with an opportunity of visiting me unobserved. This, as I said before, did not occur until the fourth day after his bringing me the watch, and the seventh since I had first entered the hold. He then went down without taking with him any water or provisions, intending in the first place merely to call my attention, and get me to come from the box to the trap, \u2014 when he would go up to the stateroom and thence hand me down a sup. ply. When he descended for this purpose he found that I was asleep, for it seems that I was snoring very loudly. From all the calculations I can make on the subject, this must have been the slumber into which I fell just after my return from the trap with the watch, and which, consequently, must have lasted for more than three entire days and nights at the very least. Latterly, I have had reason both from my own experience and the assurance of others, to be acquainted with the strong soporific effects of the stench arising from old fish-oil when closely confined; and when I think of the condition of the hold in which I was imprisoned, and the long period during which the brig had been used as a whaling vessel, I am more inclined to wonder that I awoke at all, after once falling asleep, than that I should have slept uninterruptedly for the period specified above.\n\nAugustus called to me at first in a low voice and without closing the trap \u2014 but I made him no reply. He then shut the trap, and spoke to me in a louder, and finally in a very loud tone \u2014 still I continued to snore. He was now at a loss what to do. It would take him some time to make his way through the lumber to my box, and in the meanwhile his absence would be noticed by Captain Barnard, who had occasion for his services every minute, in arranging and copying papers connected with the business of the voyage. He determined, therefore, upon reflection, to ascend, and await another opportunity of visiting me. He was the more easily induced to this resolve, as my slumber appeared to be of the most tranquil nature, and he could not suppose that I had undergone any inconvenience from my incarceration. He had just made up his mind on these points when his attention was arrested by an unusual bustle, the sound of which proceeded apparently from the cabin. He sprang through the trap as quickly as possible, closed it, and threw open the door of his stateroom. No sooner had he put his foot over the threshold than a pistol flashed in his face, and he was knocked down, at the same moment, by a blow from a handspike.\n\nA strong hand held him on the cabin floor, with a tight grasp upon his throat; still he was able to see what was going on around him. His father was tied hand and foot, and lying along the steps of the companion-way, with his head down, and a deep wound in the forehead, from which the blood was flowing in a continued stream. He spoke not a word, and was apparently dying. Over him stood the first mate, eyeing him with an expression of fiendish derision, and deliberately searching his pockets, from which he presently drew forth a large wallet and a chronometer. Seven of the crew (among whom was the cook, a negro) were rummaging the staterooms on the larboard for arms, where they soon equipped themselves with muskets and ammunition. Besides Augustus and Captain Barnard, there were nine men altogether in the cabin, and these among the most ruffianly of the brig's company. The villains now went upon deck, taking my friend with them after having secured his arms behind his back. They proceeded straight to the forecastle, which was fastened down \u2014 two of the mutineers standing by it with axes \u2014 two also at the main hatch. The mate called out in a loud voice: \"Do you hear there below? tumble up with you, one by one \u2014 now, mark that \u2014 and no grumbling!\" It was some minutes before any one appeared:\u2014 at last an Englishman, who had shipped as a raw hand, came up, weeping piteously, and entreating the mate, in the most humble manner, to spare his life. The only reply was a blow on the forehead from an axe. The poor fellow fell to the deck without a groan, and the black cook lifted him up in his arms as he would a child, and tossed him deliberately into the sea. Hearing the blow and the plunge of the body, the men below could now be induced to venture on deck neither by threats nor promises, until a proposition was made to smoke them out. A general rush then ensued, and for a moment it seemed possible that the brig might be retaken. The mutineers, however, succeeded at last in closing the forecastle effectually before more than six of their opponents could get up. These six, finding themselves so greatly outnumbered and without arms, submitted after a brief struggle. The mate gave them fair words \u2014 no doubt with a view of inducing those below to yield, for they had no difficulty in hearing all that was said on deck. The result proved his sagacity, no less than his diabolical villainy. All in the forecastle presently signified their intention of submitting, and, ascending one by one, were pinioned and then thrown on their backs, together with the first six \u2014 there being in all, of the crew who were not concerned in the mutiny, twenty-seven.\n\nA scene of the most horrible butchery ensued. The bound seamen were dragged to the gangway. Here the cook stood with an axe, striking each victim on the head as he was forced over the side of the vessel by the other mutineers. In this manner twenty-two perished, and Augustus had given himself up for lost, expecting every moment his own turn to come next. But it seemed that the villains were now either weary, or in some measure disgusted with their bloody labour; for the four remaining prisoners, together with my friend, who had been thrown on the deck with the rest, were respited while the mate sent below for rum, and the whole murderous party held a drunken carouse, which lasted until sunset. They now fell to disputing in regard to the fate of the survivors, who lay not more than four paces off, and could distinguish every word said. Upon some of the mutineers the liquor appeared to have a softening effect, for several voices were heard in favor of releasing the captives altogether, on condition of joining the mutiny and sharing the profits. The black cook, however (who in all respects was a perfect demon, and who seemed to exert as much influence, if not more, than the mate himself), would listen to no proposition of the kind, and rose repeatedly for the purpose of resuming his work at the gangway. Fortunately he was so far overcome by intoxication as to be easily restrained by the less bloodthirsty of the party, among whom was a line-manager, who went by the name of Dirk Peters. This man was the son of an Indian squaw of the tribe of Upsarokas, who live among the fastnesses of the Black Hills, near the source of the Missouri. His father was a fur-trader, I believe, or at least connected in some manner with the Indian trading-posts on Lewis river. Peter himself was one of the most ferocious-looking men I ever beheld. He was short in stature, not more than four feet eight inches high, but his limbs were of Herculean mould. His hands, especially, were so enormously thick and broad as hardly to retain a human shape. His arms, as well as legs, were bowed in the most singular manner, and appeared to possess no flexibility whatever. His head was equally deformed, being of immense size, with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes), and entirely bald. To conceal this latter deficiency, which did not proceed from old age, he usually wore a wig formed of any hair-like material which presented itself \u2014 occasionally the skin of a Spanish dog or American grizzly bear. At the time spoken of, he had on a portion of one of these bearskins; and it added no little to the natural ferocity of his countenance, which betook of the Upsaroka character. The mouth extended nearly from ear to ear, the lips were thin, and seemed, like some other portions of his frame, to be devoid of natural pliancy, so that the ruling expression never varied under the influence of any emotion whatever. This ruling expression may be conceived when it is considered that the teeth were exceedingly long and protruding, and never even partially covered, in any instance, by the lips. To pass this man with a casual glance, one might imagine him to be convulsed with laughter, but a second look would induce a shuddering acknowledgment, that if such an expression were indicative of merriment, the merriment must be that of a demon. Of this singular being many anecdotes were prevalent among the seafaring men of Nantucket. These anecdotes went to prove his prodigious strength when under excitement, and some of them had given rise to a doubt of his sanity. But on board the Grampus, it seems, he was regarded, at the time of the mutiny, with feelings more of derision than of anything else. I have been thus particular in speaking of Dirk Peters, because, ferocious as he appeared, he proved the main instrument in preserving the life of Augustus, and because I shall have frequent occasion to mention him hereafter in the course of my narrative \u2014 a narrative, let me here say, which, in its latter portions, will be found to include incidents of a nature so entirely out of the range of human experience, and for this reason so far beyond the limits of human credulity, that I proceed in utter hopelessness of obtaining credence for all that I shall tell, yet confidently trusting in time and progressing science to verify some of the most important and most improbable of my statements.\n\nAfter much indecision and two or three violent quarrels, it was determined at last that all the prisoners (with the exception of Augustus, whom Peters insisted in a jocular manner upon keeping as his clerk) should be set adrift in one of the smallest whaleboats. The mate went down into the cabin to see if Captain Barnard was still living \u2014 for, it will be remembered, he was left below when the mutineers came up. Presently the two made their appearance, the captain pale as death, but somewhat recovered from the effects of his wound. He spoke to the men in a voice hardly articulate, entreated them not to set him adrift, but to return to their duty, and promising to land them wherever they chose, and to take no steps for bringing them to justice. He might as well have spoken to the winds. Two of the ruffians seized him by the arms and hurled him over the brig's side into the boat, which had been lowered while the mate went below. The four men who were lying on the deck were then untied and ordered to follow, which they did without attempting any resistance \u2014 Augustus being still left in his painful position, although he struggled and prayed only for the poor satisfaction of being permitted to bid his father farewell. A handful of sea-biscuit and a jug of water were now handed down; but neither mast, sail, oar, nor compass. The boat was towed astern for a few minutes, during which the mutineers held another consultation \u2014 it was then finally cut adrift. By this time night had come on \u2014 there were neither moon nor stars visible \u2014 and a short and ugly sea was running, although there was no great deal of wind. The boat was instantly out of sight, and little hope could be entertained for the unfortunate sufferers who were in it. This event happened, however, in latitude 35 degrees 30' north, longitude 61 degrees 20' west, and consequently at no very great distance from the Bermuda Islands. Augustus therefore endeavored to console himself with the idea that the boat might either succeed in reaching the land, or come sufficiently near to be fallen in with by vessels off the coast.\n\nAll sail was now put upon the brig, and she continued her original course to the southwest \u2014 the mutineers being bent upon some piratical expedition, in which, from all that could be understood, a ship was to be intercepted on her way from the Cape Verd Islands to Porto Rico. No attention was paid to Augustus, who was untied and suffered to go about anywhere forward of the cabin companion-way. Dirk Peters treated him with some degree of kindness, and on one occasion saved him from the brutality of the cook. His situation was still one of the most precarious, as the men were continually intoxicated, and there was no relying upon their continued good-humor or carelessness in regard to himself. His anxiety on my account be represented, however, as the most distressing result of his condition; and, indeed, I had never reason to doubt the sincerity of his friendship. More than once he had resolved to acquaint the mutineers with the secret of my being on board, but was restrained from so doing, partly through recollection of the atrocities he had already beheld, and partly through a hope of being able soon to bring me relief. For the latter purpose he was constantly on the watch; but, in spite of the most constant vigilance, three days elapsed after the boat was cut adrift before any chance occurred. At length, on the night of the third day, there came on a heavy blow from the eastward, and all hands were called up to take in sail. During the confusion which ensued, he made his way below unobserved, and into the stateroom. What was his grief and horror in discovering that the latter had been rendered a place of deposit for a variety of sea-stores and ship-furniture, and that several fathoms of old chain-cable, which had been stowed away beneath the companion-ladder, had been dragged thence to make room for a chest, and were now lying immediately upon the trap! To remove it without discovery was impossible, and he returned on deck as quickly as he could. As be came up, the mate seized him by the throat, and demanding what he had been doing in the cabin, was about flinging him over the larboard bulwark, when his life was again preserved through the interference of Dirk Peters. Augustus was now put in handcuffs (of which there were several pairs on board), and his feet lashed tightly together. He was then taken into the steerage, and thrown into a lower berth next to the forecastle bulkheads, with the assurance that he should never put his foot on deck again \"until the brig was no longer a brig.\" This was the expression of the cook, who threw him into the berth \u2014 it is hardly possible to say what precise meaning intended by the phrase. The whole affair, however, proved the ultimate means of my relief, as will presently appear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "For some minutes after the cook had left the forecastle, Augustus abandoned himself to despair, never hoping to leave the berth alive. He now came to the resolution of acquainting the first of the men who should come down with my situation, thinking it better to let me take my chance with the mutineers than perish of thirst in the hold, \u2014 for it had been ten days since I was first imprisoned, and my jug of water was not a plentiful supply even for four. As he was thinking on this subject, the idea came all at once into his head that it might be possible to communicate with me by the way of the main hold. In any other circumstances, the difficulty and hazard of the undertaking would have pre. vented him from attempting it; but now he had, at all events, little prospect of life, and consequently little to lose, he bent his whole mind, therefore, upon the task.\n\nHis handcuffs were the first consideration. At first he saw no method of removing them, and feared that he should thus be baffled in the very outset; but upon a closer scrutiny he discovered that the irons could be slipped off and on at pleasure, with very little effort or inconvenience, merely by squeezing his hands through them, \u2014 this species of manacle being altogether ineffectual in confining young persons, in whom the smaller bones readily yield to pressure. He now untied his feet, and, leaving the cord in such a manner that it could easily be readjusted in the event of any person's coming down, proceeded to examine the bulkhead where it joined the berth. The partition here was of soft pine board, an inch thick, and he saw that he should have little trouble in cutting his way through. A voice was now heard at the forecastle companion-way, and he had just time to put his right hand into its handcuff (the left had not been removed) and to draw the rope in a slipknot around his ankle, when Dirk Peters came below, followed by Tiger, who immediately leaped into the berth and lay down. The dog had been brought on board by Augustus, who knew my attachment to the animal, and thought it would give me pleasure to have him with me during the voyage. He went up to our house for him immediately after first taking me into the hold, but did not think of mentioning the circumstance upon his bringing the watch. Since the mutiny, Augustus had not seen him before his appearance with Dirk Peters, and had given him up for lost, supposing him to have been thrown overboard by some of the malignant villains belonging to the mate's gang. It appeared afterward that he had crawled into a hole beneath a whale-boat, from which, not having room to turn round, he could not extricate himself. Peters at last let him out, and, with a species of good feeling which my friend knew well how to appreciate, had now brought him to him in the forecastle as a companion, leaving at the same time some salt junk and potatoes, with a can of water, he then went on deck, promising to come down with something more to eat on the next day.\n\nWhen he had gone, Augustus freed both hands from the manacles and unfastened his feet. He then turned down the head of the mattress on which he had been lying, and with his penknife (for the ruffians had not thought it worth while to search him) commenced cutting vigorously across one of the partition planks, as closely as possible to the floor of the berth. He chose to cut here, because, if suddenly interrupted, he would be able to conceal what had been done by letting the head of the mattress fall into its proper position. For the remainder of the day, however, no disturbance occurred, and by night he had completely divided the plank. It should here be observed that none of the crew occupied the forecastle as a sleeping-place, living altogether in the cabin since the mutiny, drinking the wines and feasting on the sea-stores of Captain Barnard, and giving no more heed than was absolutely necessary to the navigation of the brig. These circumstances proved fortunate both for myself and Augustus; for, had matters been otherwise, he would have found it impossible to reach me. As it was, he proceeded with confidence in his design. It was near daybreak, however, before he completed the second division of the board (which was about a foot above the first cut), thus making an aperture quite large enough to admit his passage through with facility to the main orlop deck. Having got here, he made his way with but little trouble to the lower main hatch, although in so doing he had to scramble over tiers of oil-casks piled nearly as high as the upper deck, there being barely room enough left for his body. Upon reaching the hatch he found that Tiger had followed him below, squeezing between two rows of the casks. It was now too late, however, to attempt getting to me before dawn, as the chief difficulty lay in passing through the close stowage in the lower hold. He therefore resolved to return, and wait till the next night. With this design, he proceeded to loosen the hatch, so that he might have as little detention as possible when he should come again. No sooner had he loosened it than Tiger sprang eagerly to the small opening produced, snuffed for a moment, and then uttered a long whine, scratching at the same time, as if anxious to remove the covering with his paws. There could be no doubt, from his behaviour, that he was aware of my being in the hold, and Augustus thought it possible that he would be able to get to me if he put him down. He now hit upon the expedient of sending the note, as it was especially desirable that I should make no attempt at forcing my way out at least under existing circumstances, and there could be no certainty of his getting to me himself on the morrow as he intended. After-events proved how fortunate it was that the idea occurred to him as it did; for, had it not been for the receipt of the note, I should undoubtedly have fallen upon some plan, however desperate, of alarming the crew, and both our lives would most probably have been sacrificed in consequence.\n\nHaving concluded to write, the difficulty was now to procure the mate. rials for so doing. An old toothpick was soon made into a pen; and this by means of feeling altogether, for the between-decks was as dark as pitch. Paper enough was obtained from the back of a letter \u2014 a duplicate of the forged letter from Mr. Ross. This had been the original draught; but the handwriting not being sufficiently well imitated, Augustus had written another, thrusting the first, by good fortune, into his coat-pocket, where it was now most opportunely discovered. Ink alone was thus wanting, and a substitute was immediately found for this by means of a slight incision with the penknife on the back of a finger just above the nail \u2014 a copious flow of blood ensuing, as usual, from wounds in that vicinity. The note was now written, as well as it could be in the dark and under the circumstances. It briefly explained that a mutiny had taken place; that Captain Barnard was set adrift; and that I might expect immediate relief as far as provisions were concerned, but must not venture upon making any disturbance. It concluded with these words: \"I have scrawled this with blood \u2014 your life depends upon lying close.\"\n\nThis slip of paper being tied upon the dog, he was now put down the hatchway, and Augustus made the best of his way back to the forecastle, where be found no reason to believe that any of the crew had been in his absence. To conceal the hole in the partition, he drove his knife in just above it, and hung up a pea-jacket which he found in the berth. His handcuffs were then replaced, and also the rope around his ankles.\n\nThese arrangements were scarcely completed when Dirk Peters came below, very drunk, but in excellent humour, and bringing with him my friend's allowance of provision for the day. This consisted of a dozen large Irish potatoes roasted, and a pitcher of water. He sat for some time on a chest by the berth, and talked freely about the mate and the general concerns of the brig. His demeanour was exceedingly capricious, and even grotesque. At one time Augustus was much alarmed by odd conduct. At last, however, he went on deck, muttering a promise to bring his prisoner a good dinner on the morrow. During the day two of the crew (harpooners) came down, accompanied by the cook, all three in nearly the last stage of intoxication. Like Peters, they made no scruple of talking unreservedly about their plans. It appeared that they were much divided among themselves as to their ultimate course, agreeing in no point, except the attack on the ship from the Cape Verd Islands, with which they were in hourly expectation of meeting. As far as could be ascertained, the mutiny had not been brought about altogether for the sake of booty; a private pique of the chief mate's against Captain Barnard having been the main instigation. There now seemed to be two principal factions among the crew \u2014 one headed by the mate, the other by the cook. The former party were for seizing the first suitable vessel which should present itself, and equipping it at some of the West India Islands for a piratical cruise. The latter division, however, which was the stronger, and included Dirk Peters among its partisans, were bent upon pursuing the course originally laid out for the brig into the South Pacific; there either to take whale, or act otherwise, as circumstances should suggest. The representations of Peters, who had frequently visited these regions, had great weight, apparently, with the mutineers, wavering, as they were, between half-engendered notions of profit and pleasure. He dwelt on the world of novelty and amusement to be found among the innumerable islands of the Pacific, on the perfect security and freedom from all restraint to be enjoyed, but, more particularly, on the deliciousness of the climate, on the abundant means of good living, and on the voluptuous beauty of the women. As yet, nothing had been absolutely determined upon; but the pictures of the hybrid line-manager were taking strong hold upon the ardent imaginations of the seamen, and there was every possibility that his intentions would be finally carried into effect.\n\nThe three men went away in about an hour, and no one else entered the forecastle all day. Augustus lay quiet until nearly night. He then freed himself from the rope and irons, and prepared for his attempt. A bottle was found in one of the berths, and this he filled with water from the pitcher left by Peters, storing his pockets at the same time with cold potatoes. To his great joy he also came across a lantern, with a small piece of tallow candle in it. This he could light at any moment, as be had in his possession a box of phosphorus matches. When it was quite dark, he got through the hole in the bulkhead, having taken the precaution to arrange the bedclothes in the berth so as to convey the idea of a person covered up. When through, he hung up the pea-jacket on his knife, as before, to conceal the aperture \u2014 this manoeuvre being easily effected, as he did not readjust the piece of plank taken out until afterward. He was now on the main orlop deck, and proceeded to make his way, as before, between the upper deck and the oil-casks to the main hatchway. Having reached this, he lit the piece of candle, and descended, groping with extreme difficulty among the compact stowage of the hold. In a few moments he became alarmed at the insufferable stench and the closeness of the atmosphere. He could not think it possible that I had survived my confinement for so long a period breathing so oppressive an air. He called my name repeatedly, but I made him no reply, and his apprehensions seemed thus to be confirmed. The brig was rolling violently, and there was so much noise in consequence, that it was useless to listen for any weak sound, such as those of my breathing or snoring. He threw open the lantern, and held it as high as possible, whenever an opportunity occurred, in order that, by observing the light, I might, if alive, be aware that succor was approaching. Still nothing was heard from me, and the supposition of my death began to assume the character of certainty. He determined, nevertheless, to force a passage, if possible, to the box, and at least ascertain beyond a doubt the truth of his surmises. He pushed on for some time in a most pitiable state of anxiety, until, at length, he found the pathway utterly blocked up, and that there was no possibility of making any farther way by the course in which he had set out. Overcome now by his feelings, he threw himself among the lumber in despair, and wept like a child. It was at this period that he heard the crash occasioned by the bottle which I had thrown down. Fortunate, indeed, was it that the incident occurred \u2014 for, upon this incident, trivial as it appears, the thread of my destiny depended. Many years elapsed, however, before I was aware of this fact. A natural shame and regret for his weakness and indecision prevented Augustus from confiding to me at once what a more intimate and unreserved communion afterward induced him to reveal. Upon finding his further progress in the hold impeded by obstacles which he could not overcome, he had resolved to abandon his attempt at reaching me, and return at once to the forecastle. Before condemning him entirely on this head, the harassing circumstances which embarrassed him should be taken into consideration. The night was fast wearing away, and his absence from the forecastle might be discovered; and indeed would necessarily be so, if be should fail to get back to the berth by daybreak. His candle was expiring in the socket, and there would be the greatest difficulty in retracing his way to the hatchway in the dark. It must be allowed, too, that he had every good reason to believe me dead; in which event no benefit could result to me from his reaching the box, and a world of danger would be encountered to no purpose by himself. He had repeatedly called, and I had made him no answer. I had been now eleven days and nights with no more water than that contained in the jug which he had left with me \u2014 a supply which it was not at all probable I had boarded in the beginning of my confinement, as I had every cause to expect a speedy release. The atmosphere of the hold, too, must have appeared to him, coming from the comparatively open air of the steerage, of a nature absolutely poisonous, and by far more intolerable than it had seemed to me upon my first taking up my quarters in the box \u2014 the hatchways at that time having been constantly open for many months previous. Add to these considerations that of the scene of bloodshed and terror so lately witnessed by my friend; his confinement, privations, and narrow escapes from death, together with the frail and equivocal tenure by which he still existed \u2014 circumstances all so well calculated to prostrate every energy of mind \u2014 and the reader will be easily brought, as I have been, to regard his apparent falling off in friendship and in faith with sentiments rather of sorrow than of anger.\n\nThe crash of the bottle was distinctly heard, yet Augustus was not sure that it proceeded from the hold. The doubt, however, was sufficient inducement to persevere. He clambered up nearly to the orlop deck by means of the stowage, and then, watching for a lull in the pitchings of the vessel, he called out to me in as loud a tone as he could command, regardless, for the moment, of being overheard by the crew. It will be remembered that on this occasion the voice reached me, but I was so entirely overcome by violent agitation as to be incapable of reply. Confident, now, that his worst apprehensions were well founded, be descended, with a view of getting back to the forecastle without loss of time. In his haste some small boxes were thrown down, the noise occasioned by which I heard, as will be recollected. He had made considerable progress on his return when the fall of the knife again caused him to hesitate. He retraced his steps immediately, and, clambering up the stowage a second time, called out my name, loudly as before, having watched for a lull. This time I found voice to answer. Overjoyed at discovering me to be still alive, he now resolved to brave every difficulty and danger in reaching me. Having extricated himself as quickly as possible from the labyrinth of lumber by which he was hemmed in, he at length struck into an opening which promised better, and finally, after a series of struggles, arrived at the box in a state of utter exhaustion." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "The leading particulars of this narration were all that Augustus communicated to me while we remained near the box. It was not until afterward that he entered fully into all the details. He was apprehensive of being missed, and I was wild with impatience to leave my detested place of confinement. We resolved to make our way at once to the hole in the bulkhead, near which I was to remain for the present, while he went through to reconnoiter. To leave Tiger in the box was what neither of us could endure to think of, yet, how to act otherwise was the question. He now seemed to be perfectly quiet, and we could not even distinguish the sound of his breathing upon applying our ears closely to the box. I was convinced that he was dead, and determined to open the door. We found him lying at full length, apparently in a deep stupor, yet still alive. No time was to be lost, yet I could not bring myself to abandon an animal who had now been twice instrumental in saving my life, without some attempt at preserving him. We therefore dragged him along with us as well as we could, although with the greatest difficulty and fatigue; Augustus, during part of the time, being forced to clamber over the impediments in our way with the huge dog in his arms \u2014 a feat to which the feebleness of my frame rendered me totally inadequate. At length we succeeded in reaching the hole, when Augustus got through, and Tiger was pushed in afterward. All was found to be safe, and we did not fail to return sincere thanks to God for our deliverance from the imminent danger we had escaped. For the present, it was agreed that I should remain near the opening, through which my companion could readily supply me with a part of his daily provision, and where I could have the advantages of breathing an atmosphere comparatively pure.\n\nIn explanation of some portions of this narrative, wherein I have spoken of the stowage of the brig, and which may appear ambiguous to some of my readers who may have seen a proper or regular stowage, I must here state that the manner in which this most important duty had been per formed on board the Grampus was a most shameful piece of neglect on the part of Captain Barnard, who was by no means as careful or as experienced a seaman as the hazardous nature of the service on which he was employed would seem necessarily to demand. A proper stowage cannot be accomplished in a careless manner, and many most disastrous accidents, even within the limits of my own experience, have arisen from neglect or ignorance in this particular. Coasting vessels, in the frequent hurry and bustle attendant upon taking in or discharging cargo, are the most liable to mishap from the want of a proper attention to stowage. The great point is to allow no possibility of the cargo or ballast shifting position even in the most violent rollings of the vessel. With this end, great attention must be paid, not only to the bulk taken in, but to the nature of the bulk, and whether there be a full or only a partial cargo. In most kinds of freight the stowage is accomplished by means of a screw. Thus, in a load of tobacco or flour, the whole is screwed so tightly into the hold of the vessel that the barrels or hogsheads, upon discharging, are found to be completely flattened, and take some time to regain their original shape. This screwing, however, is resorted to principally with a view of obtaining more room in the hold; for in a full load of any such commodities as flour or tobacco, there can be no danger of any shifting whatever, at least none from which inconvenience can result. There have been instances, indeed, where this method of screwing has resulted in the most lamentable consequences, arising from a cause altogether distinct from the danger attendant upon a shifting of cargo. A load of cotton, for example, tightly screwed while in certain conditions, has been known, through the expansion of its bulk, to rend a vessel asunder at sea. There can be no doubt either that the same result would ensue in the case of tobacco, while undergoing its usual course of fermentation, were it not for the interstices consequent upon the rotundity of the hogsheads.\n\nIt is when a partial cargo is received that danger is chiefly to be apprehended from shifting, and that precautions should be always taken to guard against such misfortune. Only those who have encountered a violent gale of wind, or rather who have experienced the rolling of a vessel in a sudden calm after the gale, can form an idea of the tremendous force of the plunges, and of the consequent terrible impetus given to all loose articles in the vessel. It is then that the necessity of a cautious stowage, when there is a partial cargo, becomes obvious. When lying-to (especially with a small bead sail), a vessel which is not properly modelled in the bows is frequently thrown upon her beam-ends; this occurring even every fifteen or twenty minutes upon an average, yet without any serious consequences resulting, provided there be a proper stowage. If this, however, has not been strictly attended to, in the first of these heavy lurches the whole of the cargo tumbles over to the side of the vessel which lies upon the water, and, being thus prevented from regaining her equilibrium, as she would otherwise necessarily do, she is certain to fill in a few seconds and go down. It is not too much to say that at least one-half of the instances in which vessels have foundered in heavy gales at sea may be attributed to a shifting of cargo or of ballast.\n\nWhen a partial cargo of any kind is taken on board, the whole, after being first stowed as compactly as may be, should be covered with a layer of stout shifting-boards, extending completely across the vessel. Upon these boards strong temporary stanchions should be erected, reaching to the timbers above, and thus securing every thing in its place. In cargoes consisting of grain, or any similar matter, additional precautions are requisite. A hold filled entirely with grain upon leaving port will be found not more than three fourths full upon reaching its destination \u2014 this, too, although the freight, when measured bushel by bushel by the consignee, will overrun by a vast deal (on account of the swelling of the grain) the quantity consigned. This result is occasioned by settling during the voyage, and is the more perceptible in proportion to the roughness of the weather experienced. If grain loosely thrown in a vessel, then, is ever so well secured by shifting-boards and stanchions, it will be liable to shift in a long passage so greatly as to bring about the most distressing calamities. To prevent these, every method should be employed before leaving port to settle the cargo as much as possible; and for this there are many contrivances, among which may be mentioned the driving of wedges into the grain. Even after all this is done, and unusual pains taken to secure the shifting-boards, no seaman who knows what he is about will feel altogether secure in a gale of any violence with a cargo of grain on board, and, least of all, with a partial cargo. Yet there are hundreds of our coasting vessels, and, it is likely, many more from the ports of Europe, which sail daily with partial cargoes, even of the most dangerous species, and without any precaution whatever. The wonder is that no more accidents occur than do actually happen. A lamentable instance of this heedlessness occurred to my knowledge in the case of Captain Joel Rice of the schooner Firefly, which sailed from Richmond, Virginia, to Madeira, with a cargo of corn, in the year 1825. The captain had gone many voyages without serious accident, although he was in the habit of paying no attention whatever to his stowage, more than to secure it in the ordinary manner. He had never before sailed with a cargo of grain, and on this occasion had the corn thrown on board loosely, when it did not much more than half fill the vessel. For the first portion of the voyage he met with nothing more than light breezes; but when within a day's sail of Madeira there came on a strong gale from the N. N. E. which forced him to lie-to. He brought the schooner to the wind under a double-reefed foresail alone, when she rode as well as any vessel could be expected to do, and shipped not a drop of water. Toward night the gale somewhat abated, and she rolled with more unsteadiness than before, but still did very well, until a heavy lurch threw her upon her beam-ends to starboard. The corn was then heard to shift bodily, the force of the movement bursting open the main hatchway. The vessel went down like a shot. This happened within hail of a small sloop from Madeira, which picked up one of the crew (the only person saved), and which rode out the gale in perfect security, as indeed a jolly boat might have done under proper management.\n\nThe stowage on board the Grampus was most clumsily done, if stowage that could be called which was little better than a promiscuous huddling together of oil-casks and ship furniture. I have already spoken of the condition of articles in the hold. On the orlop deck there was space enough for my body (as I have stated) between the oil-casks and the upper deck; a space was left open around the main hatchway; and several other large spaces were left in the stowage. Near the hole cut through the bulkhead by Augustus there was room enough for an entire cask, and in this space I found myself comfortably situated for the present.\n\nBy the time my friend had got safely into the berth, and readjusted his handcuffs and the rope, it was broad daylight. We had made a narrow escape indeed; for scarcely had he arranged all matters, when the mate came below, with Dirk Peters and the cook. They talked for some time about the vessel from the Cape Verds, and seemed to be excessively anxious for her appearance. At length the cook came to the berth in which Augustus was lying, and seated himself in it near the head. I could see and hear every thing from my hiding-place, for the piece cut out had not been put back, and I was in momentary expectation that the negro would fall against the pea-jacket, which was hung up to conceal the aperture, in which case all would have been discovered, and our lives would, no doubt, have been instantly sacrificed. Our good fortune prevailed, however; and although he frequently touched it as the vessel rolled, he never pressed against it sufficiently to bring about a discovery. The bottom of the jacket had been carefully fastened to the bulkhead, so that the hole might not be seen by its swinging to one side. All this time Tiger was lying in the foot of the berth, and appeared to have recovered in some measure his faculties, for I could see him occasionally open his eyes and draw a long breath.\n\nAfter a few minutes the mate and cook went above, leaving Dirk Peters behind, who, as soon as they were gone, came and sat himself down in the place just occupied by the mate. He began to talk very sociably with Augustus, and we could now see that the greater part of his apparent intoxication, while the two others were with him, was a feint. He answered all my companion's questions with perfect freedom; told him that he had no doubt of his father's having been picked up, as there were no less than five sail in sight just before sundown on the day he was cut adrift; and used other language of a consolatory nature, which occasioned me no less surprise than pleasure. Indeed, I began to entertain hopes, that through the instrumentality of Peters we might be finally enabled to regain possession of the brig, and this idea I mentioned to Augustus as soon as I found an opportunity. He thought the matter possible, but urged the necessity of the greatest caution in making the attempt, as the conduct of the hybrid appeared to be instigated by the most arbitrary caprice alone; and, indeed, it was difficult to say if be was at any moment of sound mind. Peters went upon deck in about an hour, and did not return again until noon, when he brought Augustus a plentiful supply of junk beef and pudding. Of this, when we were left alone, I partook heartily, without returning through the hole. No one else came down into the forecastle during the day, and at night, I got into Augustus' berth, where I slept soundly and sweetly until nearly daybreak, when he awakened me upon hearing a stir upon deck, and I regained my hiding-place as quickly as possible. When the day was fully broke, we found that Tiger had recovered his strength almost entirely, and gave no indications of hydrophobia, drinking a little water that was offered him with great apparent eagerness. During the day he regained all his former vigour and appetite. His strange conduct had been brought on, no doubt, by the deleterious quality of the air of the hold, and had no connexion with canine madness. I could not sufficiently rejoice that I had persisted in bringing him with me from the box. This day was the thirtieth of June, and the thirteenth since the Grampus made sad from Nantucket.\n\nOn the second of July the mate came below drunk as usual, and in an excessively good-humor. He came to Augustus's berth, and, giving him a slap on the back, asked him if he thought he could behave himself if he let him loose, and whether he would promise not to be going into the cabin again. To this, of course, my friend answered in the affirmative, when the ruffian set him at liberty, after making him drink from a flask of rum which he drew from his coat-pocket. Both now went on deck, and I did not see Augustus for about three hours. He then came below with the good news that he had obtained permission to go about the brig as be pleased anywhere forward of the mainmast, and that he had been ordered to sleep, as usual, in the forecastle. He brought me, too, a good dinner, and a plentiful supply of water. The brig was still cruising for the vessel from the Cape Verds, and a sail was now in sight, which was thought to be the one in question. As the events of the ensuing eight days were of little importance, and had no direct bearing upon the main incidents of my narrative, I will here throw them into the form of a journal, as I do not wish to omit them altogether.\n\nJuly 3. \u2014 Augustus furnished me with three blankets, with which I contrived a comfortable bed in my hiding-place. No one came below, except my companion, during the day. Tiger took his station in the berth just by the aperture, and slept heavily, as if not yet entirely recovered from the effects of his sickness. Toward night a flaw of wind struck the brig before sail could be taken in, and very nearly capsized her. The puff died away immediately, however, and no damage was done beyond the splitting of the foretopsail. Dirk Peters treated Augustus all this day with great kindness and entered into a long conversation with him respecting the Pacific Ocean, and the islands he had visited in that region. He asked him whether be would not like to go with the mutineers on a kind of exploring and pleasure voyage in those quarters, and said that the men were gradually coming over to the mate's views. To this Augustus thought it best to reply that he would be glad to go on such an adventure, since nothing better could be done, and that any thing was preferable to a piratical life.\n\nJuly 4. \u2014 The vessel in sight proved to be a small brig from Liverpool, and was allowed to pass unmolested. Augustus spent most of his time on deck, with a view of obtaining all the information in his power respecting the intentions of the mutineers. They had frequent and violent quarrels among themselves, in one of which a harpooner, Jim Bonner, was thrown overboard. The party of the mate was gaining ground. Jim Bonner belonged to the cook's gang, of which Peters was a partisan.\n\nJuly 5. \u2014 About daybreak there came on a stiff breeze from the west, which at noon freshened into a gale, so that the brig could carry nothing more than her trysail and foresail. In taking in the foretopsail, Simms, one of the common hands, and belonging also to the cook's gang, fell overboard, being very much in liquor, and was drowned \u2014 no attempt being made to save him. The whole number of persons on board was now thirteen, to wit: Dirk Peters; Seymour, the of the cook's party; the mate, whose name I never learned; Absalom party; \u2014 besides Augustus and myself.\n\nJuly 6. \u2014 The gale lasted all this day, blowing in heavy squalls, accompanied with rain. The brig took in a good deal of water through her seams, and one of the pumps was kept continually going, Augustus being forced to take his turn. just at twilight a large ship passed close by us, without having been discovered until within hail. The ship was supposed to be the one for which the mutineers were on the lookout. The mate hailed her, but the reply was drowned in the roaring of the gale. At eleven, a sea was shipped amidships, which tore away a great portion of the larboard bulwarks, and did some other slight damage. Toward morning the weather moderated, and at sunrise there was very little wind.\n\nJuly 7. \u2014 There was a heavy swell running all this day, during which the brig, being light, rolled excessively, and many articles broke loose in the hold, as I could hear distinctly from my hiding-place. I suffered a great deal from sea-sickness. Peters had a long conversation this day with Augustus, and told him that two of his gang, Greely and Allen, had gone over to the mate, and were resolved to turn pirates. He put several questions to Augustus which he did not then exactly understand. During a part of this evening the leak gained upon the vessel; and little could be done to remedy it, as it was occasioned by the brigs straining, and taking in the water through her seams. A sail was thrummed, and got under the bows, which aided us in some measure, so that we began to gain upon the leak.\n\nJuly 8. \u2014 A light breeze sprang up at sunrise from the eastward, when the mate headed the brig to the southwest, with the intention of making some of the West India islands in pursuance of his piratical designs. No opposition was made by Peters or the cook \u2014 at least none in the hearing of Augustus. All idea of taking the vessel from the Cape Verds was abandoned. The leak was now easily kept under by one pump going every three quarters of an hour. The sail was drawn from beneath the bows. Spoke two small schooners during the day.\n\nJuly 9. \u2014 Fine weather. All hands employed in repairing bulwarks. Peters had again a long conversation with Augustus, and spoke more plainly than he had done heretofore. He said nothing should induce him to come into the mate's views, and even hinted his intention of taking the brig out of his hands. He asked my friend if he could depend upon his aid in such case, to which Augustus said, \"Yes,\" without hesitation. Peters then said he would sound the others of his party upon the subject, and went away. During the remainder of the day Augustus had no opportunity of speaking with him privately." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "July 10. \u2014 Spoke a brig from Rio, bound to Norfolk. Weather hazy, with a light baffling wind from the eastward. To-day Hartman Rogers died, having been attacked on the eighth with spasms after drinking a glass of grog. This man was of the cook's party, and one upon whom Peters placed his main reliance. He told Augustus that he believed the mate had poisoned him, and that he expected, if he did not be on the look-out, his own turn would come shortly. There were now only himself, Jones, and the cook belonging to his own gang \u2014 on the other side there were five. He had spoken to Jones about taking the command from the mate; but the project having been coolly received, he had been deterred from pressing the matter any further, or from saying any thing to the cook. It was well, as it happened, that he was so prudent, for in the afternoon the cook expressed his determination of siding with the mate, and went over formally to that party; while Jones took an opportunity of quarrelling with Peters, and hinted that he would let the mate know of the plan in agitation. There was now, evidently, no time to be lost, and Peters expressed his determination of attempting to take the vessel at all hazards, provided Augustus would lend him his aid. My friend at once assured him of his willingness to enter into any plan for that purpose, and, thinking the opportunity a favourable one, made known the fact of my being on board. At this the hybrid was not more astonished than delighted, as he had no reliance whatever upon Jones, whom he already considered as belonging to the party of the mate. They went below immediately, when Augustus called to me by name, and Peters and myself were soon made acquainted. It was agreed that we should attempt to retake the vessel upon the first good opportunity, leaving Jones altogether out of our councils. In the event of success, we were to run the brig into the first port that offered, and deliver her up. The desertion of his party had frustrated Peters' design of going into the Pacific \u2014 an adventure which could not be accomplished without a crew, and he depended upon either getting acquitted upon trial, on the score of insanity (which he solemnly avowed had actuated him in lending his aid to the mutiny), or upon obtaining a pardon, if found guilty, through the representations of Augustus and myself. Our deliberations were interrupted for the present by the cry of, \"All hands take in sail,\" and Peters and Augustus ran up on deck.\n\nAs usual, the crew were nearly all drunk; and, before sail could be properly taken in, a violent squall laid the brig on her beam-ends. By keeping her away, however, she righted, having shipped a good deal of water. Scarcely was everything secure, when another squall took the vessel, and immediately afterward another \u2014 no damage being done. There was every appearance of a gale of wind, which, indeed, shortly came on, with great fury, from the northward and westward. All was made as snug as possible, and we laid-to, as usual, under a close-reefed foresail. As night drew on, the wind increased in violence, with a remarkably heavy sea. Peters now came into the forecastle with Augustus, and we resumed our deliberations.\n\nWe agreed that no opportunity could be more favourable than the present for carrying our designs into effect, as an attempt at such a moment would never be anticipated. As the brig was snugly laid-to, there would be no necessity of manoeuvring her until good weather, when, if we succeeded in our attempt, we might liberate one, or perhaps two of the men, to aid us in taking her into port. The main difficulty was the great disproportion in our forces. There were only three of us, and in the cabin there were nine. All the arms on board, too, were in their possession, with the exception of a pair of small pistols which Peters had concealed about his person, and the large seaman's knife which he always wore in the waistband of his pantaloons. From certain indications, too \u2014 such, for example, as there being no such thing as an axe or a handspike lying in their customary places \u2014 we began to fear that the mate had his suspicions, at least in regard to Peters, and that he would let slip no opportunity of getting rid of him. It was clear, indeed, that what we should determine to do could not be done too soon. Still the odds were too much against us to allow of our proceeding without the greatest caution.\n\nPeters proposed that he should go up on deck, and enter into conversation with the watch (Allen), when he would be able to throw him into the sea without trouble, and without making any disturbance, by seizing a good opportunity, that Augustus and myself should then come up, and endeavour to provide ourselves with some kind of weapons from the deck, and that we should then make a rush together, and secure the companionway before any opposition could be offered. I objected to this, because I could not believe that the mate (who was a cunning fellow in all matters which did not affect his superstitious prejudices) would suffer himself to be so easily entrapped. The very fact of there being a watch on deck at all was sufficient proof that he was upon the alert, \u2014 it not being usual except in vessels where discipline is most rigidly enforced, to station a watch on deck when a vessel is lying-to in a gale of wind. As I address myself principally, if not altogether, to persons who have never been to sea, it may be as well to state the exact condition of a vessel under such circumstances. Lying-to, or, in sea-parlance, \"laying-to,\" is a measure resorted to for various purposes, and effected in various manners. In moderate weather it is frequently done with a view of merely bringing the vessel to a stand-still, to wait for another vessel or any similar object. If the vessel which lies-to is under full sail, the manoeuvre is usually accomplished by throwing round some portion of her sails, so as to let the wind take them aback, when she becomes stationary. But we are now speaking of lying-to in a gale of wind. This is done when the wind is ahead, and too violent to admit of carrying sail without danger of capsizing; and sometimes even when the wind is fair, but the sea too heavy for the vessel to be put before it. If a vessel be suffered to scud before the wind in a very heavy sea, much damage is usually done her by the shipping of water over her stern, and sometimes by the violent plunges she makes forward. This manoeuvre, then, is seldom resorted to in such case, unless through necessity. When the vessel is in a leaky condition she is often put before the wind even in the heaviest seas; for, when lying-to, her seams are sure to be greatly opened by her violent straining, and it is not so much the case when scudding. Often, too, it becomes necessary to scud a vessel, either when the blast is so exceedingly furious as to tear in pieces the sail which is employed with a view of bringing her head to the wind, or when, through the false modelling of the frame or other causes, this main object cannot be effected.\n\nVessels in a gale of wind are laid-to in different manners, according to their peculiar construction. Some lie-to best under a foresail, and this, I believe, is the sail most usually employed. Large square-rigged vessels have sails for the express purpose, called storm-staysails. But the jib is occasionally employed by itself, \u2014 sometimes the jib and foresail, or a double-reefed foresail, and not unfrequently the after-sails, are made use of. Foretopsails are very often found to answer the purpose better than any other species of sail. The Grampus was generally laid-to under a close-reefed foresail.\n\nWhen a vessel is to be laid-to, her head is brought up to the wind just so nearly as to fill the sail under which she lies when hauled flat aft, that is, when brought diagonally across the vessel. This being done, the bows point within a few degrees of the direction from which the wind issues, and the windward bow of course receives the shock of the waves. In this situation a good vessel will ride out a very heavy gale of wind without shipping a drop of water, and without any further attention being requisite on the part of the crew. The helm is usually lashed down, but this is altogether unnecessary (except on account of the noise it makes when loose), for the rudder has no effect upon the vessel when lying-to. Indeed, the helm had far better be left loose than lashed very fast, for the rudder is apt to be torn off by heavy seas if there be no room for the helm to play. As long as the sail holds, a well modelled vessel will maintain her situation, and ride every sea, as if instinct with life and reason. If the violence of the wind, however, should tear the sail into pieces (a feat which it requires a perfect hurricane to accomplish under ordinary circumstances), there is then imminent danger. The vessel falls off from the wind, and, coming broadside to the sea, is completely at its mercy: the only resource in this case is to put her quietly before the wind, letting her scud until some other sail can be set. Some vessels will lie-to under no sail whatever, but such are not to be trusted at sea.\n\nBut to return from this digression. It had never been customary with the mate to have any watch on deck when lying-to in a gale of wind, and the fact that he had now one, coupled with the circumstance of the missing axes and handspikes, fully convinced us that the crew were too well on the watch to be taken by surprise in the manner Peters had suggested. Something, however, was to be done, and that with as little delay as practicable, for there could be no doubt that a suspicion having been once entertained against Peters, he would be sacrificed upon the earliest occasion, and one would certainly be either found or made upon the breaking of the gale.\n\nAugustus now suggested that if Peters could contrive to remove, under any pretext, the piece of chain-cable which lay over the trap in the stateroom, we might possibly be able to come upon them unawares by means of the hold; but a little reflection convinced us that the vessel rolled and pitched too violently for any attempt of that nature.\n\nBy good fortune I at length hit upon the idea of working upon the superstitious terrors and guilty conscience of the mate. It will be remembered that one of the crew, Hartman Rogers, had died during the morning, having been attacked two days before with spasms after drinking some spirits and water. Peters had expressed to us his opinion that this man had been poisoned by the mate, and for this belief he had reasons, so he said, which were incontrovertible, but which he could not be pre. vailed upon to explain to us \u2014 this wayward refusal being only in keeping with other points of his singular character. But whether or not he had any better grounds for suspecting the mate than we had ourselves, we were easily led to fall in with his suspicion, and determined to act accordingly.\n\nRogers had died about eleven in the forenoon, in violent convulsions; and the corpse presented in a few minutes after death one of the most horrid and loathsome spectacles I ever remember to have seen. The stomach was swollen immensely, like that of a man who has been drowned and lain under water for many weeks. The hands were in the same condition, while the face was shrunken, shrivelled, and of a chalky whiteness, except where relieved by two or three glaring red blotches like those occasioned by the erysipelas: one of these blotches extended diagonally across the face, completely covering up an eye as if with a band of red velvet. In this disgusting condition the body had been brought up from the cabin at noon to be thrown overboard, when the mate getting a glimpse of it (for he now saw it for the first time), and being either touched with remorse for his crime or struck with terror at so horrible a sight, ordered the men to sew the body up in its hammock, and allow it the usual rites of sea-burial. Having given these directions, he went below, as if to avoid any further sight of his victim. While preparations were making to obey his orders, the gale came on with great fury, and the design was abandoned for the present. The corpse, left to itself, was washed into the larboard scuppers, where it still lay at the time of which I speak, floundering about with the furious lurches of the brig.\n\nHaving arranged our plan, we set about putting it in execution as speedily as possible. Peters went upon deck, and, as he had anticipated, was immediately accosted by Allen, who appeared to be stationed more as a watch upon the forecastle than for any other purpose. The fate of this villain, however, was speedily and silently decided; for Peters, approaching him in a careless manner, as if about to address him, seized him by the throat, and, before he could utter a single cry, tossed him over the bulwarks. He then called to us, and we came up. Our first precaution was to look about for something with which to arm ourselves, and in doing this we had to proceed with great care, for it was impossible to stand on deck an instant without holding fast, and violent seas broke over the vessel at every plunge forward. It was indispensable, too, that we should be quick in our operations, for every minute we expected the mate to be up to set the pumps going, as it was evident the brig must be taking in water very fast. After searching about for some time, we could find nothing more fit for our purpose than the two pump-handles, one of which Augustus took, and I the other. Having secured these, we stripped off the shirt of the corpse and dropped the body overboard. Peters and myself then went below, leaving Augustus to watch upon deck, where he took his station just where Allen had been placed, and with his back to the cabin companionway, so that, if any of the mates gang should come up, he might suppose it was the watch.\n\nAs soon as I got below I commenced disguising myself so as to represent the corpse of Rogers. The shirt which we had taken from the body aided us very much, for it was of singular form and character, and easily recognizable \u2014 a kind of smock, which the deceased wore over his other clothing. It was a blue stockinett, with large white stripes running across. Having put this on, I proceeded to equip myself with a false stomach, in imitation of the horrible deformity of the swollen corpse. This was soon effected by means of stuffing with some bedclothes. I then gave the same appearance to my hands by drawing on a pair of white woollen mittens, and filling them in with any kind of rags that offered themselves. Peters then arranged my face, first rubbing it well over with white chalk, and afterward blotching it with blood, which he took from a cut in his finger. The streak across the eye was not forgotten and presented a most shocking appearance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "As I viewed myself in a fragment of looking-glass which hung up in the cabin, and by the dim light of a kind of battle-lantern, I was so impressed with a sense of vague awe at my appearance, and at the recollection of the terrific reality which I was thus representing, that I was seized with a violent tremour, and could scarcely summon resolution to go on with my part. It was necessary, however, to act with decision, and Peters and myself went upon deck.\n\nWe there found everything safe, and, keeping close to the bulwarks, the three of us crept to the cabin companion-way. It was only partially closed, precautions having been taken to prevent its being suddenly pushed to from without, by means of placing billets of wood on the upper step so as to interfere with the shutting. We found no difficulty in getting a full view of the interior of the cabin through the cracks where the hinges were placed. It now proved to have been very fortunate for us that we had not attempted to take them by surprise, for they were evidently on the alert. Only one was asleep, and he lying just at the foot of the companion-ladder, with a musket by his side. The rest were seated on several mattresses, which had been taken from the berths and thrown on the floor. They were engaged in earnest conversation; and although they had been carousing, as appeared from two empty jugs, with some tin tumblers which lay about, they were not as much intoxicated as usual. All had knives, one or two of them pistols, and a great many muskets were lying in a berth close at hand.\n\nWe listened to their conversation for some time before we could make up our minds how to act, having as yet resolved on nothing determinate, except that we would attempt to paralyze their exertions, when we should attack them, by means of the apparition of Rogers. They were discussing their piratical plans, in which all we could hear distinctly was, that they would unite with the crew of a schooner Hornet, and, if possible, get the schooner herself into their possession preparatory to some attempt on a large scale, the particulars of which could not be made out by either of us.\n\nOne of the men spoke of Peters, when the mate replied to him in a low voice which could not be distinguished, and afterward added more loudly, that \"he could not understand his being so much forward with the captain's brat in the forecastle, and he thought the sooner both of them were overboard the better.\" To this no answer was made, but we could easily perceive that the hint was well received by the whole party, and more particularly by Jones. At this period I was excessively agitated, the more so as I could see that neither Augustus nor Peters could determine how to act. I made up my mind, however, to sell my life as dearly as possible, and not to suffer myself to be overcome by any feelings of trepidation.\n\nThe tremendous noise made by the roaring of the wind in the rigging, and the washing of the sea over the deck, prevented us from hearing what was said, except during momentary lulls. In one of these, we all distinctly heard the mate tell one of the men to \"go forward, have an eye upon them, for he wanted no such secret doings on board the brig.\" It was well for us that the pitching of the vessel at this moment was so violent as to prevent this order from being carried into instant execution. The cook got up from his mattress to go for us, when a tremendous lurch, which I thought would carry away the masts, threw him headlong against one of the larboard stateroom doors, bursting it open, and creating a good deal of other confusion. Luckily, neither of our party was thrown from his position, and we had time to make a precipitate retreat to the forecastle, and arrange a hurried plan of action before the messenger made his appearance, or rather before he put his head out of the companion-hatch, for he did not come on deck. From this station he could not notice the absence of Allen, and he accordingly bawled out, as if to him, repeating the orders of the mate. Peters cried out, \"Ay, ay,\" in a disguised voice, and the cook immediately went below, without entertaining a suspicion that all was not right.\n\nMy two companions now proceeded boldly aft and down into the cabin, Peters closing the door after him in the same manner he had found it. The mate received them with feigned cordiality, and told Augustus that, since he had behaved himself so well of late, he might take up his quarters in the cabin and be one of them for the future. He then poured him out a tumbler half full of rum, and made him drink it. All this I saw and heard, for I followed my friends to the cabin as soon as the door was shut, and took up my old point of observation. I had brought with me the two pump-handles, one of which I secured near the companion-way, to be ready for use when required.\n\nI now steadied myself as well as possible so as to have a good view of all that was passing within, and endeavoured to nerve myself to the task of descending among the mutineers when Peters should make a signal to me, as agreed upon. Presently he contrived to turn the conversation upon the bloody deeds of the mutiny, and by degrees led the men to talk of the thousand superstitions which are so universally current among seamen. I could not make out all that was said, but I could plainly see the effects of the conversation in the countenances of those present. The mate was evidently much agitated, and presently, when some one mentioned the terrific appearance of Rogers' corpse, I thought he was upon the point of swooning. Peters now asked him if he did not think it would be better to have the body thrown overboard at once as it was too horrible a sight to see it floundering about in the scuppers. At this the villain absolutely gasped for breath, and turned his head slowly round upon his companions, as if imploring some one to go up and perform the task. No one, however, stirred, and it was quite evident that the whole party were wound up to the highest pitch of nervous excitement. Peters now made me the signal. I immediately threw open the door of the companion-way, and, descending, without uttering a syllable, stood erect in the midst of the party.\n\nThe intense effect produced by this sudden apparition is not at all to be wondered at when the various circumstances are taken into consideration. Usually, in cases of a similar nature, there is left in the mind of the spectator some glimmering of doubt as to the reality of the vision before his eyes; a degree of hope, however feeble, that he is the victim of chicanery, and that the apparition is not actually a visitant from the old world of shadows. It is not too much to say that such remnants of doubt have been at the bottom of almost every such visitation, and that the appalling horror which has sometimes been brought about, is to be attributed, even in the cases most in point, and where most suffering has been experienced, more to a kind of anticipative horror, lest the apparition might possibly be real, than to an unwavering belief in its reality. But, in the present instance, it will be seen immediately, that in the minds of the mutineers there was not even the shadow of a basis upon which to rest a doubt that the apparition of Rogers was indeed a revivification of his disgusting corpse, or at least its spiritual image. The isolated situation of the brig, with its entire inaccessibility on account of the gale, confined the apparently possible means of deception within such narrow and definite limits, that they must have thought themselves enabled to survey them all at a glance. They had now been at sea twenty-four days, without holding more than a speaking communication with any vessel whatever. The whole of the crew, too \u2014 at least all whom they had the most remote reason for suspecting to be on board \u2014 were assembled in the cabin, with the exception of Allen, the watch; and his gigantic stature (be was six feet six inches high) was too familiar in their eyes to permit the notion that he was the apparition before them to enter their minds even for an instant. Add to these considerations the awe-inspiring nature of the tempest, and that of the conversation brought about by Peters; the deep impression which the loathsomeness of the actual corpse had made in the morning upon the imaginations of the men; the excellence of the imitation in my person, and the uncertain and wavering light in which they beheld me, as the glare of the cabin lantern, swinging violently to and fro, fell dubiously and fitfully upon my figure, and there will be no reason to wonder that the deception had even more than the entire effect which we had anticipated. The mate sprang up from the mattress on which he was lying, and, without uttering a syllable, fell back, stone dead, upon the cabin floor, and was hurled to the leeward like a log by a heavy roll of the brig. Of the remaining seven, there were but three who had at first any degree of presence of mind. The four others sat for some time rooted apparently to the floor, the most pitiable objects of horror and utter despair my eyes ever encountered. The only opposition we experienced at all was from the cook, John Hunt, and Richard Parker; but they made but a feeble and irresolute defence. The two former were shot instantly by Peters, and I felled Parker with a blow on the head from the pump-handle which I had brought with me. In the meantime, Augustus seized one of the muskets lying on the floor now but three remaining; but by this time they had become aroused from their lethargy, and perhaps began to see that a deception had been practised upon them, for they fought with great resolution and fury, and, but for the immense muscular strength of Peters, might have the floor, stabbed him in several places along the right arm, and would no doubt have soon dispatched him (as neither Peters nor myself could immediately get rid of our own antagonists) had it not been for the timely aid of a friend, upon whose assistance we, surely, had never depended. This friend was no other than Tiger. With a low growl, he bounded into the cabin, at a most critical moment for Augustus, and throwing himself upon Jones, pinned him to the floor in an instant. My friend, however, was now too much injured to render us any aid whatever, and I was so encumbered with my disguise that I could do but little. The dog would not leave his hold upon the throat of Jones \u2014 Peters, nevertheless, was far more than a match for the two men who remained, and would, no doubt, have dispatched them sooner, had it not been for the narrow space in which he had to act, and the tremendous lurches of the vessel. Presently he was enabled to get hold of a heavy stool, several of which lay about the floor. With this he beat out the brains of Greely as he was in the act of discharging a musket at me, and immediately afterward a roll of the brig throwing him in contact with Hicks, he seized him by the throat, and, by dint of sheer strength, strangled him instantaneously. Thus, in far less time than I have taken to tell it, we found ourselves masters of the brig.\n\nThe only person of our opponents who was left alive was Richard Parker. This man, it will be remembered, I had knocked down with a blow from the pump-handle at the commencement of the attack. He now lay motionless by the door of the shattered stateroom; but, upon Peters touching him with his foot, he spoke, and entreated for mercy. His head was only slightly cut, and otherwise he had received no injury, having been merely stunned by the blow. He now got up, and, for the present, we secured his hands behind his back. The dog was still growling over Jones; but, upon examination, we found him completely dead, the blood issuing in a stream from a deep wound in the throat, inflicted, no doubt, by the sharp teeth of the animal.\n\nIt was now about one o'clock in the morning, and the wind was still blowing tremendously. The brig evidently laboured much more than usual, and it became absolutely necessary that something should be done with a view of easing her in some measure. At almost every roll to leeward she shipped a sea, several of which came partially down into the cabin during our scuffle, the hatchway having been left open by myself when I descended. The entire range of bulwarks to larboard had been swept away, as well as the caboose, together with the jollyboat from the counter. The creaking and working of the mainmast, too, gave indication that it was nearly sprung. To make room for more stowage in the afterhold, the heel of this mast had been stepped between decks (a very reprehensible practice, occasionally resorted to by ignorant ship-builders), so that it was in imminent danger of working from its step. But, to crown all our difficulties, we plummed the well, and found no less than seven feet of water.\n\nLeaving the bodies of the crew lying in the cabin, we got to work immediately at the pumps \u2014 Parker, of course, being set at liberty to assist us in the labour. Augustus's arm was bound up as well as we could effect it, and he did what he could, but that was not much. However, we found that we could just manage to keep the leak from gaining upon us by having one pump constantly going. As there were only four of us, this was severe labour; but we endeavoured to keep up our spirits, and looked anxiously for daybreak, when we hoped to lighten the brig by cutting away the mainmast.\n\nIn this manner we passed a night of terrible anxiety and fatigue, and, when the day at length broke, the gale had neither abated in the least, nor were there any signs of its abating. We now dragged the bodies on deck and threw them overboard. Our next care was to get rid of the mainmast. The necessary preparations having been made, Peters cut away at the mast (having found axes in the cabin), while the rest of us stood by the stays and lanyards. As the brig gave a tremendous lee-lurch, the word was given to cut away the weather-lanyards, which being done, the whole mass of wood and rigging plunged into the sea, clear of the brig, and without doing any material injury. We now found that the vessel did not labour quite as much as before, but our situation was still exceedingly precarious, and in spite of the utmost exertions, we could not gain upon the leak without the aid of both pumps. The little assistance which Augustus could render us was not really of any importance. To add to our distress, a heavy sea, striking the brig to the windward, threw her off several points from the wind, and, before she could regain her position, another broke completely over her, and hurled her full upon her beam-ends. The ballast now shifted in a mass to leeward (the stowage had been knocking about perfectly at random for some time), and for a few moments we thought nothing could save us from capsizing. Presently, however, we partially righted; but the ballast still retaining its place to larboard, we lay so much along that it was useless to think of working the pumps, which indeed we could not have done much longer in any case, as our hands were entirely raw with the excessive labour we had undergone, and were bleeding in the most horrible manner.\n\nContrary to Parker's advice, we now proceeded to cut away the foremast, and at length accomplished it after much difficulty, owing to the position in which we lay. In going overboard the wreck took with it the bowsprit, and left us a complete hulk.\n\nSo far we had had reason to rejoice in the escape of our longboat, which had received no damage from any of the huge seas which had come on board. But we had not long to congratulate ourselves; for the foremast having gone, and, of course, the foresail with it, by which the brig had been steadied, every sea now made a complete breach over us, and in five minutes our deck was swept from stern to stern, the longboat and starboard bulwarks torn off, and even the windlass shattered into fragments. It was, indeed, hardly possible for us to be in a more pitiable condition.\n\nAt noon there seemed to be some slight appearance of the gale's abating, but in this we were sadly disappointed, for it only lulled for a few minutes to blow with redoubled fury. About four in the afternoon it was utterly impossible to stand up against the violence of the blast; and, as the night closed in upon us, I had not a shadow of hope that the vessel would hold together until morning.\n\nBy midnight we had settled very deep in the water, which was now up to the orlop deck. The rudder went soon afterward, the sea which tore it away lifting the after portion of the brig entirely from the water, against which she thumped in her descent with such a concussion as would be occasioned by going ashore. We had all calculated that the rudder would hold its own to the last, as it was unusually strong, being rigged as I have never seen one rigged either before or since. Down its main timber there ran a succession of stout iron hooks, and others in the same manner down the stern-post. Through these hooks there extended a very thick wrought-iron rod, the rudder being thus held to the stern-post and swinging freely on the rod. The tremendous force of the sea which tore it off may be estimated by the fact, that the hooks in the stern-post, which ran entirely through it, being clinched on the inside, were drawn every one of them completely out of the solid wood.\n\nWe had scarcely time to draw breath after the violence of this shock, when one of the most tremendous waves I had then ever known broke right on board of us, sweeping the companion-way clear off, bursting in the hatchways, and firing every inch of the vessel with water." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Luckily, just before night, all four of us had lashed ourselves firmly to the fragments of the windlass, lying in this manner as flat upon the deck as possible. This precaution alone saved us from destruction. As it was, we were all more or less stunned by the immense weight of water which tumbled upon us, and which did not roll from above us until we were nearly exhausted. As soon as I could recover breath, I called aloud to my companions. Augustus alone replied, saying: \"It is all over with us, and may God have mercy upon our souls!\" By-and-by both the others were enabled to speak, when they exhorted us to take courage, as there was still hope; it being impossible, from the nature of the cargo, that the brig could go down, and there being every chance that the gale would blow over by the morning. These words inspired me with new life; for, strange as it may seem, although it was obvious that a vessel with a cargo of empty oil-casks would not sink, I had been hitherto so confused in mind as to have overlooked this consideration altogether; and the danger which I had for some time regarded as the most imminent was that of foundering. As hope revived within me, I made use of every opportunity to strengthen the lashings which held me to the remains of the windlass, and in this occupation I soon discovered that my companions were also busy. The night was as dark as it could possibly be, and the horrible shrieking din and confusion which surrounded us it is useless to attempt describing. Our deck lay level with the sea, or rather we were encircled with a towering ridge of foam, a portion of which swept over us even instant. It is not too much to say that our heads were not fairly out of the water more than one second in three. Although we lay close together, no one of us could see the other, or, indeed, any portion of the brig itself, upon which we were so tempestuously hurled about. At intervals we called one to the other, thus endeavouring to keep alive hope, and render consolation and encouragement to such of us as stood most in need of it. The feeble condition of Augustus made him an object of solicitude with us all; and as, from the lacerated condition of his right arm, it must have been impossible for him to secure his lashings with any degree of firmness, we were in momentary expectation of finding that he had gone overboard \u2014 yet to render him aid was a thing altogether out of the question. Fortunately, his station was more secure than that of any of the rest of us; for the upper part of his body lying just beneath a portion of the shattered windlass, the seas, as they tumbled in upon him, were greatly broken in their violence. In any other situation than this (into which he had been accidentally thrown after having lashed himself in a very exposed spot) he must inevitably have perished before morning. Owing to the brig's lying so much along, we were all less liable to be washed off than otherwise would have been the case. The heel, as I have before stated, was to larboard, about one half of the deck being constantly under water. The seas, therefore, which struck us to starboard were much broken, by the vessel's side, only reaching us in fragments as we lay flat on our faces; while those which came from larboard being what are called back-water seas, and obtaining little hold upon us on account of our posture, had not sufficient force to drag us from our fastenings.\n\nIn this frightful situation we lay until the day broke so as to show us more fully the horrors which surrounded us. The brig was a mere log, rolling about at the mercy of every wave; the gale was upon the increase, if any thing, blowing indeed a complete hurricane, and there appeared to us no earthly prospect of deliverance. For several hours we held on in silence, expecting every moment that our lashings would either give way, that the remains of the windlass would go by the board, or that some of the huge seas, which roared in every direction around us and above us, would drive the hulk so far beneath the water that we should be drowned before it could regain the surface. By the mercy of God, however, we were preserved from these imminent dangers, and about midday were cheered by the light of the blessed sun. Shortly afterward we could perceive a sensible diminution in the force of the wind, when, now for the first time since the latter part of the evening before, Augustus spoke, asking Peters, who lay closest to him, if he thought there was any possibility of our being saved. As no reply was at first made to this question, we all concluded that the hybrid had been drowned where he lay; but presently, to our great joy, he spoke, although very feebly, saying that he was in great pain, being so cut by the tightness of his lashings across the stomach, that he must either find means of loosening them or perish, as it was impossible that he could endure his misery much longer. This occasioned us great distress, as it was altogether useless to think of aiding him in any manner while the sea continued washing over us as it did. We exhorted him to bear his sufferings with fortitude, and promised to seize the first opportunity which should offer itself to relieve him. He replied that it would soon be too late; that it would be all over with him before we could help him; and then, after moaning for some minutes, lay silent, when we concluded that he had perished.\n\nAs the evening drew on, the sea had fallen so much that scarcely more than one wave broke over the hulk from windward in the course of five minutes, and the wind had abated a great deal, although still blowing a severe gale. I had not heard any of my companions speak for hours, and now called to Augustus. He replied, although very feebly, so that I could not distinguish what he said. I then spoke to Peters and to Parker, neither of whom returned any answer.\n\nShortly after this period I fell into a state of partial insensibility, during which the most pleasing images floated in my imagination; such as green trees, waving meadows of ripe grain, processions of dancing girls, troops of cavalry, and other phantasies. I now remember that, in all which passed before my mind's eye, motion was a predominant idea. Thus, I never fancied any stationary object, such as a house, a mountain, or any thing of that kind; but windmills, ships, large birds, balloons, people on horseback, carriages driving furiously, and similar moving objects, presented themselves in endless succession. When I recovered from this state, the sun was, as near as I could guess, an hour high. I had the greatest difficulty in bringing to recollection the various circumstances connected with my situation, and for some time remained firmly convinced that I was still in the hold of the brig, near the box, and that the body of Parker was that of Tiger.\n\nWhen I at length completely came to my senses, I found that the wind blew no more than a moderate breeze, and that the sea was comparatively calm; so much so that it only washed over the brig amidships. My left arm had broken loose from its lashings, and was much cut about the elbow; my right was entirely benumbed, and the hand and wrist swollen prodigiously by the pressure of the rope, which had worked from the shoulder downward. I was also in great pain from another rope which went about my waist, and had been drawn to an insufferable degree of tightness. Looking round upon my companions, I saw that Peters still lived, although a thick line was pulled so forcibly around his loins as to give him the appearance of being cut nearly in two; as I stiffed, he made a feeble motion to me with his hand, pointing to the rope. Augustus gave no indication of life whatever, and was bent nearly double across a splinter of the windlass. Parker spoke to me when he saw me moving, and asked me if I had not sufficient strength to release him from his situation, saying that if I would summon up what spirits I could, and contrive to untie him, we might yet save our lives; but that otherwise we must all perish. I told him to take courage, and I would endeavor to free him. Feeling in my pantaloons' pocket, I got hold of my penknife, and, after several ineffectual attempts, at length succeeded in opening it. I then, with my left hand, managed to free my right from its fastenings, and afterward cut the other ropes which held me. Upon attempting, however, to move from my position, I found that my legs failed me altogether, and that I could not get up; neither could I move my right arm in any direction. Upon mentioning this to Parker, he advised me to lie quiet for a few minutes, holding on to the windlass with my left hand, so as to allow time for the blood to circulate. Doing this, the numbness presently began to die away so that I could move first one of my legs, and then the other, and, shortly afterward I regained the partial use of my right arm. I now crawled with great caution toward Parker, without getting on my legs, and soon cut loose all the lashings about him, when, after a short delay, he also recovered the partial use of his limbs. We now lost no time in getting loose the rope from Peters. It had cut a deep gash through the waistband of his woollen pantaloons, and through two shirts, and made its way into his groin, from which the blood flowed out copiously as we removed the cordage. No sooner had we removed it, however, than he spoke, and seemed to experience instant relief \u2014 being able to move with much greater ease than either Parker or myself \u2014 this was no doubt owing to the discharge of blood.\n\nWe had little hopes that Augustus would recover, as he evinced no signs of life; but, upon getting to him, we discovered that he had merely swooned from the loss of blood, the bandages we had placed around his wounded arm having been torn off by the water; none of the ropes which held him to the windlass were drawn sufficiently tight to occasion his death. Having relieved him from the fastenings, and got him clear of the broken wood about the windlass, we secured him in a dry place to windward, with his head somewhat lower than his body, and all three of us busied ourselves in chafing his limbs. In about half an hour he came to himself, although it was not until the next morning that he gave signs of recognizing any of us, or had sufficient strength to speak. By the time we had thus got clear of our lashings it was quite dark, and it began to cloud up, so that we were again in the greatest agony lest it should come on to blow hard, in which event nothing could have saved us from perishing, exhausted as we were. By good fortune it continued very moderate during the night, the sea subsiding every minute, which gave us great hopes of ultimate preservation. A gentle breeze still blew from the N. W., but the weather was not at all cold. Augustus was lashed carefully to windward in such a manner as to prevent him from slipping overboard with the rolls of the vessel, as he was still too weak to hold on at all. For ourselves there was no such necessity. We sat close together, supporting each other with the aid of the broken ropes about the windlass, and devising methods of escape from our frightful situation. We derived much comfort from taking off our clothes and wringing the water from them. When we put them on after this, they felt remarkably warm and pleasant, and served to invigorate us in no little degree. We helped Augustus off with his, and wrung them for him, when he experienced the same comfort.\n\nOur chief sufferings were now those of hunger and thirst, and when we looked forward to the means of relief in this respect, our hearts sunk within us, and we were induced to regret that we had escaped the less dreadful perils of the sea. We endeavoured, however, to console ourselves with the hope of being speedily picked up by some vessel and encouraged each other to bear with fortitude the evils that might happen.\n\nThe morning of the fourteenth at length dawned, and the weather still continued clear and pleasant, with a steady but very light breeze from the N. W. The sea was now quite smooth, and as, from some cause which we could not determine, the brig did not he so much along as she had done before, the deck was comparatively dry, and we could move about with freedom. We had now been better than three entire days and nights without either food or drink, and it became absolutely necessary that we should make an attempt to get up something from below. As the brig was completely full of water, we went to this work despondently, and with but little expectation of being able to obtain anything. We made a kind of drag by driving some nails which we broke out from the remains of the companion-hatch into two pieces of wood. Tying these across each other, and fastening them to the end of a rope, we threw them into the cabin, and dragged them to and fro, in the faint hope of being thus able to entangle some article which might be of use to us for food, or which might at least render us assistance in getting it. We spent the greater part of the morning in this labour without effect, fishing up nothing more than a few bedclothes, which were readily caught by the nails. Indeed, our contrivance was so very clumsy that any greater success was hardly to be anticipated.\n\nWe now tried the forecastle, but equally in vain, and were upon the brink of despair, when Peters proposed that we should fasten a rope to his body, and let him make an attempt to get up something by diving into the cabin. This proposition we hailed with all the delight which reviving hope could inspire. He proceeded immediately to strip off his clothes with the exception of his pantaloons; and a strong rope was then carefully fastened around his middle, being brought up over his shoulders in such a manner that there was no possibility of its slipping. The undertaking was one of great difficulty and danger; for, as we could hardly expect to find much, if any, provision in the cabin itself, it was necessary that the diver, after letting himself down, should make a turn to the right, and proceed under water a distance of ten or twelve feet, in a narrow passage, to the storeroom, and return, without drawing breath.\n\nEverything being ready, Peters now descended in the cabin, going down the companion-ladder until the water reached his chin. He then plunged in, head first, turning to the right as he plunged, and endeavouring to make his way to the storeroom. In this first attempt, however, he was altogether unsuccessful. In less than half a minute after his going down we felt the rope jerked violently (the signal we had agreed upon when he desired to be drawn up). We accordingly drew him up instantly, but so incautiously as to bruise him badly against the ladder. He had brought nothing with him, and had been unable to penetrate more than a very little way into the passage, owing to the constant exertions he found it necessary to make in order to keep himself from floating up against the deck. Upon getting out he was very much exhausted, and had to rest full fifteen minutes before he could again venture to descend.\n\nThe second attempt met with even worse success; for he remained so long under water without giving the signal, that, becoming alarmed for his safety, we drew him out without it, and found that he was almost at the last gasp, having, as he said, repeatedly jerked at the rope without our feeling it. This was probably owing to a portion of it having become entangled in the balustrade at the foot of the ladder. This balustrade was, indeed, so much in the way, that we determined to remove it, if possible, before proceeding with our design. As we had no means of getting it away except by main force, we all descended into the water as far as we could on the ladder, and giving a pull against it with our united strength, succeeded in breaking it down.\n\nThe third attempt was equally unsuccessful with the two first, and it now became evident that nothing could be done in this manner without the aid of some weight with which the diver might steady himself, and keep to the floor of the cabin while making his search. For a long time we looked about in vain for something which might answer this purpose; but at length, to our great joy, we discovered one of the weather-forechains so loose that we had not the least difficulty in wrenching it off. Having fastened this securely to one of his ankles, Peters now made his fourth descent into the cabin, and this time succeeded in making his way to the door of the steward's room. To his inexpressible grief, however, he found it locked, and was obliged to return without effecting an entrance, as, with the greatest exertion, he could remain under water not more, at the utmost extent, than a single minute. Our affairs now looked gloomy indeed, and neither Augustus nor myself could refrain from bursting into tears, as we thought of the host of difficulties which encompassed us, and the slight probability which existed of our finally making an escape. But this weakness was not of long duration. Throwing ourselves on our knees to God, we implored His aid in the many dangers which beset us; and arose with renewed hope and vigor to think what could yet be done by mortal means toward accomplishing our deliverance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Shortly afterward an incident occurred which I am induced to look upon as more intensely productive of emotion, as far more replete with the extremes first of delight and then of horror, than even any of the thousand chances which afterward befell me in nine long years, crowded with events of the most startling and, in many cases, of the most unconceived and unconceivable character. We were lying on the deck near the companion-way, and debating the possibility of yet making our way into the storeroom, when, looking toward Augustus, who lay fronting myself, I perceived that he had become all at once deadly pale, and that his lips were quivering in the most singular and unaccountable manner. Greatly alarmed, I spoke to him, but he made me no reply, and I was beginning to think that he was suddenly taken ill, when I took notice of his eyes, which were glaring apparently at some object behind me. I turned my head, and shall never forget the ecstatic joy which thrilled through every particle of my frame, when I perceived a large brig bearing down upon us, and not more than a couple of miles off. I sprung to my feet as if a musket bullet had suddenly struck me to the heart; and, stretching out my arms in the direction of the vessel, stood in this manner, motionless, and unable to articulate a syllable. Peters and Parker were equally affected, although in different ways. The former danced about the deck like a madman, uttering the most extravagant rhodomontades, intermingled with howls and imprecations, while the latter burst into tears, and continued for many minutes weeping like a child.\n\nThe vessel in sight was a large hermaphrodite brig, of a Dutch build, and painted black, with a tawdry gilt figure-head. She had evidently seen a good deal of rough weather, and, we supposed, had suffered much in the gale which had proved so disastrous to ourselves; for her foretopmast was gone, and some of her starboard bulwarks. When we first saw her, she was, as I have already said, about two miles off and to windward, bearing down upon us. The breeze was very gentle, and what astonished us chiefly was, that she had no other sails set than her foremast and mainsail, with a flying jib \u2014 of course she came down but slowly, and our impatience amounted nearly to phrensy. The awkward manner in which she steered, too, was remarked by all of us, even excited as we were. She yawed about so considerably, that once or twice we thought it impossible she could see us, or imagined that, having seen us, and discovered no person on board, she was about to tack and make off in another direction. Upon each of these occasions we screamed and shouted at the top of our voices, when the stranger would appear to change for a moment her intention, and again hold on toward us \u2014 this singular conduct being repeated two or three times, so that at last we could think of no other manner of accounting for it than by supposing the helmsman to be in liquor.\n\nNo person was seen upon her decks until she arrived within about a quarter of a mile of us. We then saw three seamen, whom by their dress we took to be Hollanders. Two of these were lying on some old sails near the forecastle, and the third, who appeared to be looking at us with great curiosity, was leaning over the starboard bow near the bowsprit. This last was a stout and tall man, with a very dark skin. He seemed by his manner to be encouraging us to have patience, nodding to us in a cheerful although rather odd way, and smiling constantly, so as to display a set of the most brilliantly white teeth. As his vessel drew nearer, we saw a red flannel cap which he had on fall from his head into the water; but of this he took little or no notice, continuing his odd smiles and gesticulations. I relate these things and circumstances minutely, and I relate them, it must be understood, precisely as they appeared to us.\n\nThe brig came on slowly, and now more steadily than before, and \u2014 I cannot speak calmly of this event-our hearts leaped up wildly within us, and we poured out our whole souls in shouts and thanksgiving to God for the complete, unexpected, and glorious deliverance that was so palpably at hand. Of a sudden, and all at once, there came wafted over the ocean from the strange vessel (which was now close upon us) a smell, a stench, such as the whole world has no name for \u2014 no conception of \u2014 hellish \u2014 utterly suffocating \u2014 insufferable, inconceivable. I gasped for breath, and turning to my companions, perceived that they were paler than marble. But we had now no time left for question or surmise \u2014 the brig was within fifty feet of us, and it seemed to be her intention to run under our counter, that we might board her without putting out a boat. We rushed aft, when, suddenly, a wide yaw threw her off full five or six points from the course she had been running, and, as she passed under our stern at the distance of about twenty feet, we had a full view of her decks. Shall I ever forget the triple horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathsome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company! We were raving with horror and despair \u2014 thoroughly mad through the anguish of our grievous disappointment.\n\nAs our first loud yell of terror broke forth, it was replied to by something, from near the bowsprit of the stranger, so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived. At this instant another sudden yaw brought the region of the forecastle for a moment into view, and we beheld at once the origin of the sound. We saw the tall stout figure still leaning on the bulwark, and still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it. His arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward. His knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead. On his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood. As the brig moved farther round so as to bring us close in view, the bird, with much apparent difficulty, drew out its crimsoned head, and, after eyeing us for a moment as if stupefied, arose lazily from the body upon which it had been feasting, and, flying directly above our deck, hovered there a while with a portion of clotted and liver-like substance in its beak. The horrid morsel dropped at length with a sullen splash immediately at the feet of Parker. May God forgive me, but now, for the first time, there flashed through my mind a thought, a thought which I will not mention, and I felt myself making a step toward the ensanguined spot. I looked upward, and the eyes of Augustus met my own with a degree of intense and eager meaning which immediately brought me to my senses. I sprang forward quickly, and, with a deep shudder, threw the frightful thing into the sea.\n\nThe body from which it had been taken, resting as it did upon the rope, had been easily swayed to and fro by the exertions of the carnivorous bird, and it was this motion which had at first impressed us with the belief of its being alive. As the gull relieved it of its weight, it swung round and fell partially over, so that the face was fully discovered. Never, surely, was any object so terribly full of awe! The eyes were gone, and the whole flesh around the mouth, leaving the teeth utterly naked. This, then, was the smile which had cheered us on to hope! this the \u2014 but I forbear. The brig, as I have already told, passed under our stern, and made its way slowly but steadily to leeward. With her and with her terrible crew went all our gay visions of deliverance and joy. Deliberately as she went by, we might possibly have found means of boarding her, had not our sudden disappointment and the appalling nature of the discovery which accompanied it laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body. We had seen and felt, but we could neither think nor act, until, alas! too late. How much our intellects had been weakened by this incident may be estimated by the fact, that when the vessel had proceeded so far that we could perceive no more than the half of her hull, the proposition was seriously entertained of attempting to overtake her by swimming!\n\nI have, since this period, vainly endeavoured to obtain some clew to the hideous uncertainty which enveloped the fate of the stranger. Her build and general appearance, as I have before stated, led us to the belief that she was a Dutch trader, and the dresses of the crew also sustained this opinion. We might have easily seen the name upon her stern, and, indeed, taken other observations, which would have guided us in making out her character; but the intense excitement of the moment blinded us to every thing of that nature. From the saffron-like hue of such of the corpses as were not entirely decayed, we concluded that the whole of her company had perished by the yellow fever, or some other virulent disease of the same fearful kind. If such were the case (and I know not what else to imagine), death, to judge from the positions of the bodies, must have come upon them in a manner awfully sudden and overwhelming, in a way totally distinct from that which generally characterizes even the most deadly pestilences with which mankind are acquainted. It is possible, indeed, that poison, accidentally introduced into some of their sea-stores, may have brought about the disaster, or that the eating of some unknown venomous species of fish, or other marine animal, or oceanic bird, might have induced it, \u2014 but it is utterly useless to form conjectures where all is involved, and will, no doubt, remain for ever involved, in the most appalling and unfathomable mystery." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "We spent the remainder of the day in a condition of stupid lethargy, gazing after the retreating vessel until the darkness, hiding her from our sight, recalled us in some measure to our senses. The pangs of hunger and thirst then returned, absorbing all other cares and considerations. Nothing, however, could be done until the morning, and, securing ourselves as well as possible, we endeavoured to snatch a little repose. In this I succeeded beyond my expectations, sleeping until my companions, who had not been so fortunate, aroused me at daybreak to renew our attempts at getting up provisions from the hull.\n\nIt was now a dead calm, with the sea as smooth as I have ever known it, \u2014 the weather warm and pleasant. The brig was out of sight. We commenced our operations by wrenching off, with some trouble, another of the forechains; and having fastened both to Peters' feet, he again made an endeavour to reach the door of the storeroom, thinking it possible that he might be able to force it open, provided he could get at it in sufficient time; and this he hoped to do, as the hulk lay much more steadily than before.\n\nHe succeeded very quickly in reaching the door, when, loosening one of the chains from his ankle, be made every exertion to force the passage with it, but in vain, the framework of the room being far stronger than was anticipated. He was quite exhausted with his long stay under water, and it became absolutely necessary that some other one of us should take his place. For this service Parker immediately volunteered; but, after making three ineffectual efforts, found that he could never even succeed in getting near the door. The condition of Augustus's wounded arm rendered it useless for him to attempt going down, as he would be unable to force the room open should be reach it, and it accordingly now devolved upon me to exert myself for our common deliverance.\n\nPeters had left one of the chains in the passage, and I found, upon plunging in, that I had not sufficient balance to keep me firmly down. I determined, therefore, to attempt no more, in my first effort, than merely to recover the other chain. In groping along the floor of the passage for this, I felt a hard substance, which I immediately grasped, not having time to ascertain what it was, but returning and ascending instantly to the surface. The prize proved to be a bottle, and our joy may be conceived when I say that it was found to be full of port wine. Giving thanks to God for this timely and cheering assistance, we immediately drew the cork with my penknife, and, each taking a moderate sup, felt the most indescribable comfort from the warmth, strength, and spirits with which it inspired us. We then carefully recorked the bottle, and, by means of a handkerchief, swung it in such a manner that there was no possibility of its getting broken.\n\nHaving rested a while after this fortunate discovery, I again descended, and now recovered the chain, with which I instantly came up. I then fastened it on and went down for the third time, when I became fully satisfied that no exertions whatever, in that situation, would enable me to force open the door of the storeroom. I therefore returned in despair.\n\nThere seemed now to be no longer any room for hope, and I could perceive in the countenances of my companions that they had made up their minds to perish. The wine had evidently produced in them a species of delirium, which, perhaps, I had been prevented from feeling by the immersion I had undergone since drinking it. They talked incoherently, and about matters unconnected with our condition, Peters repeatedly asking me questions about Nantucket. Augustus, too, I remember, approached me with a serious air, and requested me to lend him a pocket-comb, as his hair was full of fish-scales, and he wished to get them out before going on shore. Parker appeared somewhat less affected, and urged me to dive at random into the cabin, and bring up any article which might come to hand. To this I consented, and, in the first attempt, after staying under a full minute, brought up a small leather trunk belonging to Captain Barnard. This was immediately opened in the faint hope that it might contain something to eat or drink. We found nothing, however, except a box of razors and two linen shirts. I now went down again, and returned without any success. As my head came above water I heard a crash on deck, and, upon getting up, saw that my companions had ungratefully taken advantage of my absence to drink the remainder of the wine, having let the bottle fall in the endeavour to replace it before I saw them. I remonstrated with them on the heartlessness of their conduct, when Augustus burst into tears. The other two endeavoured to laugh the matter off as a joke, but I hope never again to behold laughter of such a species: the distortion of countenance was absolutely frightful. Indeed, it was apparent that the stimulus, in the empty state of their stomachs, had taken instant and violent effect, and that they were all exceedingly intoxicated. With great difficulty I prevailed upon them to lie down, when they fell very soon into a heavy slumber, accompanied with loud stertorous breathing. I now found myself, as it were, alone in the brig, and my reflections, to be sure, were of the most fearful and gloomy nature. No prospect offered itself to my view but a lingering death by famine, or, at the best, by being overwhelmed in the first gale which should spring up, for in our present exhausted condition we could have no hope of living through another.\n\nThe gnawing hunger which I now experienced was nearly insupportable, and I felt myself capable of going to any lengths in order to appease it. With my knife I cut off a small portion of the leather trunk, and endeavoured to eat it, but found it utterly impossible to swallow a single morsel, although I fancied that some little alleviation of my suffering was obtained by chewing small pieces of it and spitting them out. Toward night my companions awoke, one by one, each in an indescribable state of weakness and horror, brought on by the wine, whose fumes had now evaporated. They shook as if with a violent ague, and uttered the most lamentable cries for water. Their condition affected me in the most lively degree, at the same time causing me to rejoice in the fortunate train of circumstances which had prevented me from indulging in the wine, and consequently from sharing their melancholy and most distressing sensations. Their conduct, however, gave me great uneasiness and alarm; for it was evident that, unless some favourable change took place, they could afford me no assistance in providing for our common safety. I had not yet abandoned all idea being able to get up something from below; but the attempt could not possibly be resumed until some one of them was sufficiently master of himself to aid me by holding the end of the rope while I went down. Parker appeared to be somewhat more in possession of his senses than the others, and I endeavoured, by every means in my power, to rouse him. Thinking that a plunge in the sea-water might have a beneficial effect, I contrived to fasten the end of a rope around his body, and then, leading him to the companion-way (he remaining quite passive all the while), pushed him in, and immediately drew him out. I had good reason to congratulate myself upon having made this experiment; for he appeared much revived and invigorated, and, upon getting out, asked me, in a rational manner, why I had so served him. Having explained my object, he expressed himself indebted to me, and said that he felt greatly better from the immersion, afterward conversing sensibly upon our situation. We then resolved to treat Augustus and Peters in the same way, which we immediately did, when they both experienced much benefit from the shock. This idea of sudden immersion had been suggested to me by reading in some medical work the good effect of the shower-bath in a case where the patient was suffering from mania a potu.\n\nFinding that I could now trust my companions to hold the end of the rope, I again made three or four plunges into the cabin, although it was now quite dark, and a gentle but long swell from the northward rendered the hulk somewhat unsteady. In the course of these attempts I succeeded in bringing up two case-knives, a three-gallon jug, empty, and a blanket, but nothing which could serve us for food. I continued my efforts, after getting these articles, until I was completely exhausted, but brought up nothing else. During the night Parker and Peters occupied themselves by turns in the same manner; but nothing coming to hand, we now gave up this attempt in despair, concluding that we were exhausting ourselves in vain.\n\nWe passed the remainder of this night in a state of the most intense mental and bodily anguish that can possibly be imagined. The morning of the sixteenth at length dawned, and we looked eagerly around the horizon for relief, but to no purpose. The sea was still smooth, with only a long swell from the northward, as on yesterday. This was the sixth day since we had tasted either food or drink, with the exception of the bottle of port wine, and it was clear that we could hold out but a very little while longer unless something could be obtained. I never saw before, nor wish to see again, human beings so utterly emaciated as Peters and Augustus. Had I met them on shore in their present condition I should not have had the slightest suspicion that I had ever beheld them. Their countenances were totally changed in character, so that I could not bring myself to believe them really the same individuals with whom I had been in company but a few days before. Parker, although sadly reduced, and so feeble that he could not raise his head from his bosom, was not so far gone as the other two. He suffered with great patience, making no complaint, and endeavouring to inspire us with hope in every manner he could devise. For myself, although at the commencement of the voyage I had been in bad health, and was at all times of a delicate constitution, I suffered less than any of us, being much less reduced in frame, and retaining my powers of mind in a surprising degree, while the rest were completely prostrated in intellect, and seemed to be brought to a species of second childhood, generally simpering in their expressions, with idiotic smiles, and uttering the most absurd platitudes. At intervals, however, they would appear to revive suddenly, as if inspired all at once with a consciousness of their condition, when they would spring upon their feet in a momentary flash of vigour, and speak, for a short period, of their prospects, in a manner altogether rational, although full of the most intense despair. It is possible, however, that my companions may have entertained the same opinion of their own condition as I did of mine, and that I may have unwittingly been guilty of the same extravagances and imbecilities as themselves \u2014 this is a matter which cannot be determined.\n\nAbout noon Parker declared that he saw land off the larboard quarter, and it was with the utmost difficulty I could restrain him from plunging into the sea with the view of swimming toward it. Peters and Augustus took little notice of what he said, being apparently wrapped up in moody contemplation. Upon looking in the direction pointed out, I could not perceive the faintest appearance of the shore \u2014 indeed, I was too well aware that we were far from any land to indulge in a hope of that nature. It was a long time, nevertheless, before I could convince Parker of his mistake. He then burst into a flood of tears, weeping like a child, with loud cries and sobs, for two or three hours, when becoming exhausted, he fell asleep.\n\nPeters and Augustus now made several ineffectual efforts to swallow portions of the leather. I advised them to chew it and spit it out; but they were too excessively debilitated to be able to follow my advice. I continued to chew pieces of it at intervals, and found some relief from so doing; my chief distress was for water, and I was only prevented from taking a draught from the sea by remembering the horrible consequences which thus have resulted to others who were similarly situated with ourselves.\n\nThe day wore on in this manner, when I suddenly discovered a sail to the eastward, and on our larboard bow. She appeared to be a large ship, and was coming nearly athwart us, being probably twelve or fifteen miles distant. None of my companions had as yet discovered her, and I forbore to tell them of her for the present, lest we might again be disappointed of relief. At length upon her getting nearer, I saw distinctly that she was heading immediately for us, with her light sails filled. I could now contain myself no longer, and pointed her out to my fellow-sufferers. They immediately sprang to their feet, again indulging in the most extravagant demonstrations of joy, weeping, laughing in an idiotic manner, jumping, stamping upon the deck, tearing their hair, and praying and cursing by turns. I was so affected by their conduct, as well as by what I considered a sure prospect of deliverance, that I could not refrain from joining in with their madness, and gave way to the impulses of my gratitude and ecstasy by lying and rolling on the deck, clapping my hands, shouting, and other similar acts, until I was suddenly called to my recollection, and once more to the extreme human misery and despair, by perceiving the ship all at once with her stern fully presented toward us, and steering in a direction nearly opposite to that in which I had at first perceived her.\n\nIt was some time before I could induce my poor companions to believe that this sad reverse in our prospects had actually taken place. They replied to all my assertions with a stare and a gesture implying that they were not to be deceived by such misrepresentations. The conduct of Augustus most sensibly affected me. In spite of all I could say or do to the contrary, he persisted in saying that the ship was rapidly nearing us, and in making preparations to go on board of her. Some seaweed floating by the brig, he maintained that it was the ship's boat, and endeavoured to throw himself upon it, howling and shrieking in the most heartrending manner, when I forcibly restrained him from thus casting himself into the sea.\n\nHaving become in some degree pacified, we continued to watch the ship until we finally lost sight of her, the weather becoming hazy, with a light breeze springing up. As soon as she was entirely gone, Parker turned suddenly toward me with an expression of countenance which made me shudder. There was about him an air of self-possession which I had not noticed in him until now, and before he opened his lips my heart told me what he would say. He proposed, in a few words, that one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "I had for some time past, dwelt upon the prospect of our being reduced to this last horrible extremity, and had secretly made up my mind to suffer death in any shape or under any circumstances rather than resort to such a course. Nor was this resolution in any degree weakened by the present intensity of hunger under which I laboured. The proposition had not been heard by either Peters or Augustus. I therefore took Parker aside; and mentally praying to God for power to dissuade him from the horrible purpose he entertained, I expostulated with him for a long time, and in the most supplicating manner, begging him in the name of every thing which he held sacred, and urging him by every species of argument which the extremity of the case suggested, to abandon the idea, and not to mention it to either of the other two.\n\nHe heard all I said without attempting to controvert any of my arguments, and I had begun to hope that he would be prevailed upon to do as I desired. But when I had ceased speaking, he said that he knew very well all I had said was true, and that to resort to such a course was the most horrible alternative which could enter into the mind of man; but that he had now held out as long as human nature could be sustained; that it was unnecessary for all to perish, when, by the death of one, it was possible, and even probable, that the rest might be finally preserved; adding that I might save myself the trouble of trying to turn him from his purpose, his mind having been thoroughly made up on the subject even before the appearance of the ship, and that only her heaving in sight had prevented him from mentioning his intention at an earlier period.\n\nI now begged him, if he would not be prevailed upon to abandon his design, at least to defer it for another day, when some vessel might come to our relief; again reiterating every argument I could devise, and which I thought likely to have influence with one of his rough nature. He said, in reply, that he had not spoken until the very last possible moment, that he could exist no longer without sustenance of some kind, and that therefore in another day his suggestion would be too late, as regarded himself at least.\n\nFinding that he was not to be moved by anything I could say in a mild tone, I now assumed a different demeanor, and told him that he must be aware I had suffered less than any of us from our calamities; that my health and strength, consequently, were at that moment far better than his own, or than that either of Peters or Augustus; in short, that I was in a condition to have my own way by force if I found it necessary; and that if he attempted in any manner to acquaint the others with his bloody and cannibal designs, I would not hesitate to throw him into the sea. Upon this he immediately seized me by the throat, and drawing a knife, made several ineffectual efforts to stab me in the stomach; an atrocity which his excessive debility alone prevented him from accomplishing. In the meantime, being roused to a high pitch of anger, I forced him to the vessel's side, with the full intention of throwing him overboard. He was saved from his fate, however, by the interference of Peters, who now approached and separated us, asking the cause of the disturbance. This Parker told before I could find means in any manner to prevent him.\n\nThe effect of his words was even more terrible than what I had anticipated. Both Augustus and Peters, who, it seems, had long secretly entertained the same fearful idea which Parker had been merely the first to broach, joined with him in his design and insisted upon its immediately being carried into effect. I had calculated that one at least of the two former would be found still possessed of sufficient strength of mind to side with myself in resisting any attempt to execute so dreadful a purpose, and, with the aid of either one of them, I had no fear of being able to prevent its accomplishment. Being disappointed in this expectation, it became absolutely necessary that I should attend to my own safety, as a further resistance on my part might possibly be considered by men in their frightful condition a sufficient excuse for refusing me fair play in the tragedy that I knew would speedily be enacted.\n\nI now told them I was willing to submit to the proposal, merely requesting a delay of about one hour, in order that the fog which had gathered around us might have an opportunity of lifting, when it was possible that the ship we had seen might be again in sight. After great difficulty I obtained from them a promise to wait thus long; and, as I had anticipated (a breeze rapidly coming in), the fog lifted before the hour had expired, when, no vessel appearing in sight, we prepared to draw lots.\n\nIt is with extreme reluctance that I dwell upon the appalling scene which ensued; a scene which, with its minutest details, no after events have been able to efface in the slightest degree from my memory, and whose stern recollection will embitter every future moment of my existence. Let me run over this portion of my narrative with as much haste as the nature of the events to be spoken of will permit. The only method we could devise for the terrific lottery, in which we were to take each a chance, was that of drawing straws. Small splinters of wood were made to answer our purpose, and it was agreed that I should be the holder. I retired to one end of the hulk, while my poor companions silently took up their station in the other with their backs turned toward me. The bitterest anxiety which I endured at any period of this fearful drama was while I occupied myself in the arrangement of the lots. There are few conditions into which man can possibly fall where he will not feel a deep interest in the preservation of his existence; an interest momentarily increasing with the frailness of the tenure by which that existence may be held. But now that the silent, definite, and stern nature of the business in which I was engaged (so different from the tumultuous dangers of the storm or the gradually approaching horrors of famine) allowed me to reflect on the few chances I had of escaping the most appalling of deaths \u2014 a death for the most appalling of purposes \u2014 every particle of that energy which had so long buoyed me up departed like feathers before the wind, leaving me a helpless prey to the most abject and pitiable terror. I could not, at first, even summon up sufficient strength to tear and fit together the small splinters of wood, my fingers absolutely refusing their office, and my knees knocking violently against each other. My mind ran over rapidly a thousand absurd projects by which to avoid becoming a partner in the awful speculation. I thought of falling on my knees to my companions, and entreating them to let me escape this necessity; of suddenly rushing upon them, and, by putting one of them to death, of rendering the decision by lot useless \u2014 in short, of every thing but of going through with the matter I had in hand. At last, after wasting a long time in this imbecile conduct, I was recalled to my senses by the voice of Parker, who urged me to relieve them at once from the terrible anxiety they were enduring. Even then I could not bring myself to arrange the splinters upon the spot, but thought over every species of finesse by which I could trick some one of my fellow-sufferers to draw the short straw, as it had been agreed that whoever drew the shortest of four splinters from my hand was to die for the preservation of the rest. Before any one condemn me for this apparent heartlessness, let him be placed in a situation precisely similar to my own.\n\nAt length delay was no longer possible, and, with a heart almost bursting from my bosom, I advanced to the region of the forecastle, where my companions were awaiting me. I held out my hand with the splinters, and Peters immediately drew. He was free \u2014 his, at least, was not the shortest; and there was now another chance against my escape. I summoned up all my strength, and passed the lots to Augustus. He also drew immediately, and he also was free; and now, whether I should live or die, the chances were no more than precisely even. At this moment all the fierceness of the tiger possessed my bosom, and I felt toward my poor fellow-creature, Parker, the most intense, the most diabolical hatred. But the feeling did not last; and, at length, with a convulsive shudder and closed eyes, I held out the two remaining splinters toward him. It was fully five minutes before he could summon resolution to draw, during which period of heartrending suspense I never once opened my eyes. Presently one of the two lots was quickly drawn from my hand. The decision was then over, yet I knew not whether it was for me or against me. No one spoke, and still I dared not satisfy myself by looking at the splinter I held. Peters at length took me by the hand, and I forced myself to look up, when I immediately saw by the countenance of Parker that I was safe, and that he it was who had been doomed to suffer. Gasping for breath, I fell senseless to the deck.\n\nI recovered from my swoon in time to behold the consummation of the tragedy in the death of him who had been chiefly instrumental in bringing it about. He made no resistance whatever, and was stabbed in the back by Peters, when he fell instantly dead. I must not dwell upon the fearful repast which immediately ensued. Such things may be imagined, but words have no power to impress the mind with the exquisite horror of their reality. Let it suffice to say that, having in some measure appeased the raging thirst which consumed us by the blood of the victim, and having by common consent taken off the hands, feet, and head, throwing them together with the entrails, into the sea, we devoured the rest of the body, piecemeal, during the four ever memorable days of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth of the month.\n\nOn the nineteenth, there coming on a smart shower which lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, we contrived to catch some water by means of a sheet which had been fished up from the cabin by our drag just after the gale. The quantity we took in all did not amount to more than half a gallon; but even this scanty allowance supplied us with comparative strength and hope.\n\nOn the twenty-first we were again reduced to the last necessity. The weather still remained warm and pleasant, with occasional fogs and light breezes, most usually from N. to W.\n\nOn the twenty-second, as we were sitting close huddled together, gloomily revolving over our lamentable condition, there flashed through my mind all at once an idea which inspired me with a bright gleam of hope. I remembered that, when the foremast had been cut away, Peters, being in the windward chains, passed one of the axes into my hand, requesting me to put it, if possible, in a place of security, and that a few minutes before the last heavy sea struck the brig and filled her I had taken this axe into the forecastle and laid it in one of the larboard berths. I now thought it possible that, by getting at this axe, we might cut through the deck over the storeroom, and thus readily supply ourselves with provisions.\n\nWhen I communicated this object to my companions, they uttered a feeble shout of joy, and we all proceeded forthwith to the forecastle. The difficulty of descending here was greater than that of going down in the cabin, the opening being much smaller, for it will be remembered that the whole framework about the cabin companion-hatch had been carried away, whereas the forecastle-way, being a simple hatch of only about three feet square, had remained uninjured. I did not hesitate, however, to attempt the descent; and a rope being fastened round my body as before, I plunged boldly in, feet foremost, made my way quickly to the berth, and at the first attempt brought up the axe. It was hailed with the most ecstatic joy and triumph, and the ease with which it had been obtained was regarded as an omen of our ultimate preservation.\n\nWe now commenced cutting at the deck with all the energy of rekindled hope, Peters and myself taking the axe by turns, Augustus's wounded arm not permitting him to aid us in any degree. As we were still so feeble as to be scarcely able to stand unsupported, and could consequently work but a minute or two without resting, it soon became evident that many long hours would be necessary to accomplish our task \u2014 that is, to cut an opening sufficiently large to admit of a free access to the storeroom. This consideration, however, did not discourage us; and, working all night by the light of the moon, we succeeded in effecting our purpose by daybreak on the morning of the twenty-third.\n\nPeters now volunteered to go down; and, having made all arrangements as before, he descended, and soon returned bringing up with him a small jar, which, to our great joy, proved to be full of olives. Having shared these among us, and devoured them with the greatest avidity, we proceeded to let him down again. This time he succeeded beyond our utmost expectations, returning instantly with a large ham and a bottle of Madeira wine. Of the latter we each took a moderate sup, having learned by experience the pernicious consequences of indulging too freely. The ham, except about two pounds near the bone, was not in a condition to be eaten, having been entirely spoiled by the salt water. The sound part was divided among us. Peters and Augustus, not being able to restrain their appetite, swallowed theirs upon the instant; but I was more cautious, and ate but a small portion of mine, dreading the thirst which I knew would ensue. We now rested a while from our labors, which had been intolerably severe.\n\nBy noon, feeling somewhat strengthened and refreshed, we again renewed our attempt at getting up provisions, Peters and myself going down alternately, and always with more or less success, until sundown. During this interval we had the good fortune to bring up, altogether, four more small jars of olives, another ham, a carboy containing nearly three gallons of excellent Cape Madeira wine, and, what gave us still more delight, a small tortoise of the Gallipago breed, several of which had been taken on board by Captain Barnard, as the Grampus was leaving port, from the schooner Mary Pitts, just returned from a sealing voyage in the Pacific.\n\nIn a subsequent portion of this narrative I shall have frequent occasion to mention this species of tortoise. It is found principally, as most of my readers may know, in the group of islands called the Gallipagos, which, indeed, derive their name from the animal \u2014 the Spanish word Gallipago meaning a fresh-water terrapin. From the peculiarity of their shape and action they have been sometimes called the elephant tortoise. They are frequently found of an enormous size. I have myself seen several which would weigh from twelve to fifteen hundred pounds, although I do not remember that any navigator speaks of having seen them weighing more than eight hundred. Their appearance is singular, and even disgusting. Their steps are very slow, measured, and heavy, their bodies being carried about a foot from the ground. Their neck is long, and exceedingly slender, from eighteen inches to two feet is a very common length, and I killed one, where the distance from the shoulder to the extremity of the head was no less than three feet ten inches. The head has a striking resemblance to that of a serpent. They can exist without food for an almost incredible length of time, instances having been known where they have been thrown into the hold of a vessel and lain two years without nourishment of any kind \u2014 being as fat, and, in every respect, in as good order at the expiration of the time as when they were first put in. In one particular these extraordinary animals bear a resemblance to the dromedary, or camel of the desert. In a bag at the root of the neck they carry with them a constant supply of water. In some instances, upon killing them after a full year's deprivation of all nourishment, as much as three gallons of perfectly sweet and fresh water have been found in their bags. Their food is chiefly wild parsley and celery, with purslain, sea-kelp, and prickly pears, upon which latter vegetable they thrive wonderfully, a great quantity of it being usually found on the hillsides near the shore wherever the animal itself is discovered. They are excellent and highly nutritious food, and have, no doubt, been the means of preserving the lives of thousands of seamen employed in the whale-fishery and other pursuits in the Pacific.\n\nThe one which we had the good fortune to bring up from the storeroom was not of a large size, weighing probably sixty-five or seventy pounds. It was a female, and in excellent condition, being exceedingly fat, and having more than a quart of limpid and sweet water in its bag. This was indeed a treasure; and, falling on our knees with one accord, we returned fervent thanks to God for so seasonable a relief.\n\nWe had great difficulty in getting the animal up through the opening, as its struggles were fierce and its strength prodigious. It was upon the point of making its escape from Peter's grasp, and slipping back into the water, when Augustus, throwing a rope with a slipknot around its throat, held it up in this manner until I jumped into the hole by the side of Peters, and assisted him in lifting it out.\n\nThe water we drew carefully from the bag into the jug; which, it will be remembered, had been brought up before from the cabin. Having done this, we broke off the neck of a bottle so as to form, with the cork, a kind of glass, holding not quite half a gill. We then each drank one of these measures full, and resolved to limit ourselves to this quantity per day as long as it should hold out.\n\nDuring the last two or three days, the weather having been dry and pleasant, the bedding we had obtained from the cabin, as well as our clothing, had become thoroughly dry, so that we passed this night (that of the twenty-third) in comparative comfort, enjoying a tranquil repose, after having supped plentifully on olives and ham, with a small allowance of the wine. Being afraid of losing some of our stores overboard during the night, in the event of a breeze springing up, we secured them as well as possible with cordage to the fragments of the windlass. Our tortoise, which we were anxious to preserve alive as long as we could, we threw on its back, and otherwise carefully fastened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "July 24. \u2014 This morning saw us wonderfully recruited in spirits and strength. Notwithstanding the perilous situation in which we were still placed, ignorant of our position, although certainly at a great distance from land, without more food than would last us for a fortnight even with great care, almost entirely without water, and floating about at the mercy of every wind and wave on the merest wreck in the world, still the infinitely more terrible distresses and dangers from which we had so lately and so providentially been delivered caused us to regard what we now endured as but little more than an ordinary evil \u2014 so strictly comparative is either good or ill.\n\nAt sunrise we were preparing to renew our attempts at getting up something from the storeroom, when, a smart shower coming on, with some lightning, we turn our attention to the catching of water by means of the sheet we had used before for this purpose. We had no other means of collecting the rain than by holding the sheet spread out with one of the forechain-plates in the middle of it. The water, thus conducted to the centre, was drained through into our jug. We had nearly filled it in this manner, when, a heavy squall coming on from the northward, obliged us to desist, as the hulk began once more to roll so violently that we could no longer keep our feet. We now went forward, and, lashing ourselves securely to the remnant of the windlass as before, awaited the event with far more calmness than could have been anticipated or would have been imagined possible under the circumstances. At noon the wind had freshened into a two-reef breeze, and by night into a stiff gale, accompanied with a tremendously heavy swell. Experience having taught us, however, the best method of arranging our lashings, we weathered this dreary night in tolerable security, although thoroughly drenched at almost every instant by the sea, and in momentary dread of being washed off. Fortunately, the weather was so warm as to render the water rather grateful than otherwise.\n\nJuly 25. \u2014 This morning the gale had diminished to a mere ten-knot breeze, and the sea had gone down with it so considerably that we were able to keep ourselves dry upon the deck. To our great grief, however, we found that two jars of our olives, as well as the whole of our ham, had been washed overboard, in spite of the careful manner in which they had been fastened. We determined not to kill the tortoise as yet, and contented ourselves for the present with a breakfast on a few of the olives, and a measure of water each, which latter we mixed half and half, with wine, finding great relief and strength from the mixture, without the distressing intoxication which had ensued upon drinking the port. The sea was still far too rough for the renewal of our efforts at getting up provision from the storeroom. Several articles, of no importance to us in our present situation, floated up through the opening during the day, and were immediately washed overboard. We also now observed that the hulk lay more along than ever, so that we could not stand an instant without lashing ourselves. On this account we passed a gloomy and uncomfortable day. At noon the sun appeared to be nearly vertical, and we had no doubt that we had been driven down by the long succession of northward and northwesterly winds into the near vicinity of the equator. Toward evening saw several sharks, and were somewhat alarmed by the audacious manner in which an enormously large one approached us. At one time, a lurch throwing the deck very far beneath the water, the monster actually swam in upon us, floundering for some moments just over the companion-hatch, and striking Peters violently with his tail. A heavy sea at length hurled him overboard, much to our relief. In moderate weather we might have easily captured him.\n\nJuly 26. \u2014 This morning, the wind having greatly abated, and the sea not being very rough, we determined to renew our exertions in the storeroom. After a great deal of hard labor during the whole day, we found that nothing further was to be expected from this quarter, the partitions of the room having been stove during the night, and its contents swept into the hold. This discovery, as may be supposed, filled us with despair.\n\nJuly 27. \u2014 The sea nearly smooth, with a light wind, and still from the northward and westward. The sun coming out hotly in the afternoon, we occupied ourselves in drying our clothes. Found great relief from thirst, and much comfort otherwise, by bathing in the sea; in this, however, we were forced to use great caution, being afraid of sharks, several of which were seen swimming around the brig during the day.\n\nJuly 28. \u2014 Good weather still. The brig now began to lie along so alarmingly that we feared she would eventually roll bottom up. Prepared ourselves as well as we could for this emergency, lashing our tortoise, waterjug, and two remaining jars of olives as far as possible over to the windward, placing them outside the hull below the main-chains. The sea very smooth all day, with little or no wind.\n\nJuly 29. \u2014 A continuance of the same weather. Augustus's wounded arm began to evince symptoms of mortification. He complained of drowsiness and excessive thirst, but no acute pain. Nothing could be done for his relief beyond rubbing his wounds with a little of the vinegar from the olives, and from this no benefit seemed to be experienced. We did every thing in our power for his comfort, and trebled his allowance of water.\n\nJuly 30. \u2014 An excessively hot day, with no wind. An enormous shark kept close by the hulk during the whole of the forenoon. We made several unsuccessful attempts to capture him by means of a noose. Augustus much worse, and evidently sinking as much from want of proper nourishment as from the effect of his wounds. He constantly prayed to be relieved from his sufferings, wishing for nothing but death. This evening we ate the last of our olives, and found the water in our jug so putrid that we could not swallow it at all without the addition of wine. Determined to kill our tortoise in the morning.\n\nJuly 31. \u2014 After a night of excessive anxiety and fatigue, owing to the position of the hulk, we set about killing and cutting up our tortoise. He proved to be much smaller than we had supposed, although in good condition, \u2014 the whole meat about him not amounting to more than ten pounds. With a view of preserving a portion of this as long as possible, we cut it into fine pieces, and filled with them our three remaining olive jars and the wine-bottle (all of which had been kept), pouring in afterward the vinegar from the olives. In this manner we put away about three pounds of the tortoise, intending not to touch it until we had consumed the rest. We concluded to restrict ourselves to about four ounces of the meat per day; the whole would thus last us thirteen days. A brisk shower, with severe thunder and lightning, came on about dusk, but lasted so short a time that we only succeeded in catching about half a pint of water. The whole of this, by common consent, was given to Augustus, who now appeared to be in the last extremity. He drank the water from the sheet as we caught it (we holding it above him as he lay so as to let it run into his mouth), for we had now nothing left capable of holding water, unless we had chosen to empty out our wine from the carboy, or the stale water from the jug. Either of these expedients would have been resorted to had the shower lasted.\n\nThe sufferer seemed to derive but little benefit from the draught. His arm was completely black from the wrist to the shoulder, and his feet were like ice. We expected every moment to see him breathe his last. He was frightfully emaciated; so much so that, although he weighed a hundred and twenty-seven pounds upon his leaving Nantucket, he now did not weigh more than forty or fifty at the farthest. His eyes were sunk far in his head, being scarcely perceptible, and the skin of his cheeks hung so loosely as to prevent his masticating any food, or even swallowing any liquid, without great difficulty.\n\nAugust 1. \u2014 A continuance of the same calm weather, with an oppressively hot sun. Suffered exceedingly from thirst, the water in the jug being absolutely putrid and swarming with vermin. We contrived, nevertheless, to swallow a portion of it by mixing it with wine; our thirst, however, was but little abated. We found more relief by bathing in the sea, but could not avail ourselves of this expedient except at long intervals, on account of the continual presence of sharks. We now saw clearly that Augustus could not be saved; that he was evidently dying. We could do nothing to relieve his sufferings, which appeared to be great. About twelve o'clock he expired in strong convulsions, and without having spoken for several days. His death filled us with the most gloomy forebodings, and had so great an effect upon our spirits that we sat motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never addressed each other except in a whisper. It was not until some time after dark that we took courage to get up and throw the body overboard. It was then loathsome beyond expression, and so far decayed that, as Peters attempted to lift it, an entire leg came off in his grasp. As the mass of putrefaction slipped over the vessel's side into the water, the glare of phosphoric light with which it was surrounded plainly discovered to us seven or eight large sharks, the clashing of whose horrible teeth, as their prey was torn to pieces among them, might have been heard at the distance of a mile. We shrunk within ourselves in the extremity of horror at the sound.\n\nAugust 2. \u2014 The same fearfully calm and hot weather. The dawn found us in a state of pitiable dejection as well as bodily exhaustion. The water in the jug was now absolutely useless, being a thick gelatinous mass; nothing but frightful-looking worms mingled with slime. We threw it out, and washed the jug well in the sea, afterward pouring a little vinegar in it from our bottles of pickled tortoise. Our thirst could now scarcely be endured, and we tried in vain to relieve it by wine, which seemed only to add fuel to the flame, and excited us to a high degree of intoxication. We afterward endeavoured to relieve our sufferings by mixing the wine with seawater; but this instantly brought about the most violent retchings, so that we never again attempted it. During the whole day we anxiously sought an opportunity of bathing, but to no purpose; for the hulk was now entirely besieged on all sides with sharks \u2014 no doubt the identical monsters who had devoured our poor companion on the evening before, and who were in momentary expectation of another similar feast. This circumstance occasioned us the most bitter regret and filled us with the most depressing and melancholy forebodings. We had experienced indescribable relief in bathing, and to have this resource cut off in so frightful a manner was more than we could bear. Nor, indeed, were we altogether free from the apprehension of immediate danger, for the least slip or false movement would have thrown us at once within reach of those voracious fish, who frequently thrust themselves directly upon us, swimming up to leeward. No shouts or exertions on our part seemed to alarm them. Even when one of the largest was struck with an axe by Peters and much wounded, he persisted in his attempts to push in where we were. A cloud came up at dusk, but, to our extreme anguish, passed over without discharging itself. It is quite impossible to conceive our sufferings from thirst at this period. We passed a sleepless night, both on this account and through dread of the sharks.\n\nAugust 3. \u2014 No prospect of relief, and the brig lying still more and more along, so that now we could not maintain a footing upon deck at all. Busied ourselves in securing our wine and tortoise-meat, so that we might not lose them in the event of our rolling over. Got out two stout spikes from the forechains, and, by means of the axe, drove them into the hull to windward within a couple of feet of the water, this not being very far from the keel, as we were nearly upon our beam-ends. To these spikes we now lashed our provisions, as being more secure than their former position beneath the chains. Suffered great agony from thirst during the whole day \u2014 no chance of bathing on account of the sharks, which never left us for a moment. Found it impossible to sleep.\n\nAugust 4. \u2014 A little before daybreak we perceived that the hulk was heeling over, and aroused ourselves to prevent being thrown off by the movement. At first the roll was slow and gradual, and we contrived to clamber over to windward very well, having taken the precaution to leave ropes hanging from the spikes we had driven in for the provision. But we had not calculated sufficiently upon the acceleration of the impetus; for, presently the heel became too violent to allow of our keeping pace with it; and, before either of us knew what was to happen, we found ourselves hurled furiously into the sea, and struggling several fathoms beneath the surface, with the huge hull immediately above us.\n\nIn going under the water I had been obliged to let go my hold upon the rope; and finding that I was completely beneath the vessel, and my strength nearly exhausted, I scarcely made a struggle for life, and resigned myself, in a few seconds, to die. But here again I was deceived, not having taken into consideration the natural rebound of the hull to windward. The whirl of the water upward, which the vessel occasioned in Tolling partially back, brought me to the surface still more violently than I had been plunged beneath. Upon coming up I found myself about twenty yards from the hulk, as near as I could judge. She was lying keel up, rocking furiously from side to side, and the sea in all directions around was much agitated, and full of strong whirlpools. I could see nothing of Peters. An oil-cask was floating within a few feet of me, and various other articles from the brig were scattered about.\n\nMy principal terror was now on account of the sharks, which I knew to be in my vicinity. In order to deter these, if possible, from approaching me, I splashed the water vigorously with both hands and feet as I swam towards the hulk, creating a body of foam. I have no doubt that to this expedient, simple as it was, I was indebted for my preservation; for the sea all round the brig, just before her rolling over, was so crowded with these monsters, that I must have been, and really was, in actual contact with some of them during my progress. By great good fortune, however, I reached the side of the vessel in safety, although so utterly weakened by the violent exertion I had used that I should never have been able to get upon it but for the timely assistance of Peters, who, now, to my great joy, made his appearance (having scrambled up to the keel from the opposite side of the hull), and threw me the end of a rope \u2014 one of those which had been attached to the spikes.\n\nHaving barely escaped this danger, our attention was now directed to the dreadful imminency of another \u2014 that of absolute starvation. Our whole stock of provision had been swept overboard in spite of all our care in securing it; and seeing no longer the remotest possibility of obtaining more, we gave way both of us to despair, weeping aloud like children, and neither of us attempting to offer consolation to the other. Such weakness can scarcely be conceived, and to those who have never been similarly situated will, no doubt, appear unnatural; but it must be remembered that our intellects were so entirely disordered by the long course of privation and terror to which we had been subjected, that we could not justly be considered, at that period, in the light of rational beings. In subsequent perils, nearly as great, if not greater, I bore up with fortitude against all the evils of my situation, and Peters, it will be seen, evinced a stoical philosophy nearly as incredible as his present childlike supineness and imbecility \u2014 the mental condition made the difference.\n\nThe overturning of the brig, even with the consequent loss of the wine and turtle, would not, in fact, have rendered our situation more deplorable than before, except for the disappearance of the bedclothes by which we had been hitherto enabled to catch rainwater, and of the jug in which we had kept it when caught; for we found the whole bottom, from within two or three feet of the bends as far as the keel, together with the keel itself, thickly covered with large barnacles, which proved to be excellent and highly nutritious food. Thus, in two important respects, the accident we had so greatly dreaded proved to be a benefit rather than an injury; it had opened to us a supply of provisions which we could not have exhausted, using it moderately, in a month; and it had greatly contributed to our comfort as regards position, we being much more at ease, and in infinitely less danger, than before.\n\nThe difficulty, however, of now obtaining water blinded us to all the benefits of the change in our condition. That we might be ready to avail ourselves, as far as possible, of any shower which might fall we took off our shirts, to make use of them as we had of the sheets \u2014 not hoping, of course, to get more in this way, even under the most favorable circumstances, than half a gill at a time. No signs of a cloud appeared during the day, and the agonies of our thirst were nearly intolerable. At night, Peters obtained about an hour's disturbed sleep, but my intense sufferings would not permit me to close my eyes for a single moment.\n\nAugust 5. \u2014 To-day, a gentle breeze springing up carried us through a vast quantity of seaweed, among which we were so fortunate as to find eleven small crabs, which afforded us several delicious meals. Their shells being quite soft, we ate them entire, and found that they irritated our thirst far less than the barnacles. Seeing no trace of sharks among the seaweed, we also ventured to bathe, and remained in the water for four or five hours, during which we experienced a very sensible diminution of our thirst. Were greatly refreshed, and spent the night somewhat more comfortably than before, both of us snatching a little sleep.\n\nAugust 6. \u2014 This day we were blessed by a brisk and continual rain, lasting from about noon until after dark. Bitterly did we now regret the loss of our jug and carboy; for, in spite of the little means we had of catching the water, we might have filled one, if not both of them. As it was, we contrived to satisfy the cravings of thirst by suffering the shirts to become saturated, and then wringing them so as to let the grateful fluid trickle into our mouths. In this occupation we passed the entire day.\n\nAugust 7. \u2014 Just at daybreak we both at the same instant descried a sail to the eastward, and evidently coming towards us! We hailed the glorious sight with a long, although feeble shout of rapture; and began instantly to make every signal in our power, by flaring the shirts in the air, leaping as high as our weak condition would permit, and even by hallooing with all the strength of our lungs, although the vessel could not have been less than fifteen miles distant. However, she still continued to near our hulk, and we felt that, if she but held her present course, she must eventually come so close as to perceive us. In about an hour after we first discovered her, we could clearly see the people on her decks. She was a long, low, and rakish-looking topsail schooner, with a black ball in her foretopsail, and had, apparently, a full crew. We now became alarmed, for we could hardly imagine it possible that she did not observe us, and were apprehensive that she meant to leave us to perish as we were \u2014 an act of fiendish barbarity, which, however incredible it may appear, has been repeatedly perpetuated at sea, under circumstances very nearly similar, and by beings who were regarded as belonging to the human species.* In this instance, however, by the mercy of God, we were destined to be most happily deceived; for, presently we were aware of a sudden commotion on the deck of the stranger, who immediately afterward ran up a British flag, and, hauling her wind, bore up directly upon us. In half an hour more we found ourselves in her cabin. She proved to be the Jane Guy, of Liverpool, Captain Guy, bound on a sealing and trading voyage to the South Seas and Pacific.\n\n* The case of the brig Polly, of Boston, is one so much in point, and her fate, in many respects, so remarkably similar to our own, that I cannot forbear alluding to it here. This vessel, of one hundred and thirty tons burden, sailed from Boston, with a cargo of lumber and provisions, for Santa Croix, on the twelfth of December, 1811, under the command of Captain Casneau. There were eight souls on board besides the captain \u2014 the mate, four seamen, and the cook, together with a Mr. Hunt, and a negro girl belonging to him. On the fifteenth, having cleared the shoal of Georges, she sprung a leak in a gale of wind from the southeast, and was finally capsized; but, the masts going by the board, she afterward righted. They remained in this situation, without fire, and with very little provision, for the period of one hundred and ninety-one days (from December the fifteenth to June the twentieth), when Captain Casneau and Samuel Badger, the only survivors, were taken off the wreck by the Fame, of Hull, Captain Featherstone, bound home from Rio Janeiro. When picked up, they were in latitude 28 degrees N., longitude 13 degrees W., having drifted above two thousand miles! On the ninth of July the Fame fell in with the brig Dromero, Captain Perkins, who landed the two sufferers in Kennebeck. The narrative from which we gather these details ends in the following words:\n\n\"It is natural to inquire how they could float such a vast distance, upon the most frequented part of the Atlantic, and not be discovered all this time. They were passed by more than a dozen sail, one of which came so nigh them that they could distinctly see the people on deck and on the rigging looking at them; but, to the inexpressible disappointment of the starving and freezing men, they stifled the dictates of compassion, hoisted sail, and cruelly abandoned them to their fate.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "The Jane Guy was a fine-looking topsail schooner of a hundred and eighty tons burden. She was unusually sharp in the bows, and on a wind, in moderate weather, the fastest sailer I have ever seen. Her qualities, however, as a rough seaboat, were not so good, and her draught of water was by far too great for the trade to which she was destined. For this peculiar service, a larger vessel, and one of a light proportionate draught, is desirable \u2014 say a vessel of from three hundred to three hundred and fifty tons. She should be bark-rigged, and in other respects of a different construction from the usual South Sea ships. It is absolutely necessary that she should be well armed. She should have, say ten or twelve twelve-pound carronades, and two or three long twelves, with brass blunderbusses, and water-tight arm-chests for each top. Her anchors and cables should be of far greater strength than is required for any other species of trade, and, above all, her crew should be numerous and efficient \u2014 not less, for such a vessel as I have described, than fifty or sixty able-bodied men. The Jane Guy had a crew of thirty-five, all able seamen, besides the captain and mate, but she was not altogether as well armed or otherwise equipped, as a navigator acquainted with the difficulties and dangers of the trade could have desired.\n\nCaptain Guy was a gentleman of great urbanity of manner, and of considerable experience in the southern traffic, to which he had devoted a great portion of his life. He was deficient, however, in energy, and, consequently, in that spirit of enterprise which is here so absolutely requisite. He was part owner of the vessel in which he sailed, and was invested with discretionary powers to cruise in the South Seas for any cargo which might come most readily to hand. He had on board, as usual in such voyages, beads, looking-glasses, tinder-works, axes, hatchets, saws, adzes, planes, chisels, gouges, gimlets, files, spokeshaves, rasps, hammers, nails, knives, scissors, razors, needles, thread, crockery-ware, calico, trinkets, and other similar articles.\n\nThe schooner sailed from Liverpool on the tenth of July, crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the twenty-fifth, in longitude twenty degrees west, and reached Sal, one of the Cape Verd islands, on the twenty-ninth, where she took in salt and other necessaries for the voyage. On the third of August, she left the Cape Verds and steered southwest, stretching over toward the coast of Brazil, so as to cross the equator between the meridians of twenty-eight and thirty degrees west longitude. This is the course usually taken by vessels bound from Europe to the Cape of Good Hope, or by that route to the East Indies. By proceeding thus they avoid the calms and strong contrary currents which continually prevail on the coast of Guinea, while, in the end, it is found to be the shortest track, as westerly winds are never wanting afterward by which to reach the Cape. It was Captain Guy's intention to make his first stoppage at Kerguelen's Land \u2014 I hardly know for what reason. On the day we were picked up the schooner was off Cape St. Roque, in longitude thirty-one degrees west; so that, when found, we had drifted probably, from north to south, not less than five-and-twenty degrees!\n\nOn board the Jane Guy we were treated with all the kindness our distressed situation demanded. In about a fortnight, during which time we continued steering to the southeast, with gentle breezes and fine weather, both Peters and myself recovered entirely from the effects of our late privation and dreadful sufferings, and we began to remember what had passed rather as a frightful dream from which we had been happily awakened, than as events which had taken place in sober and naked reality. I have since found that this species of partial oblivion is usually brought about by sudden transition, whether from joy to sorrow or from sorrow to joy \u2014 the degree of forgetfulness being proportioned to the degree of difference in the exchange. Thus, in my own case, I now feel it impossible to realize the full extent of the misery which I endured during the days spent upon the hulk. The incidents are remembered, but not the feelings which the incidents elicited at the time of their occurrence. I only know, that when they did occur, I then thought human nature could sustain nothing more of agony.\n\nWe continued our voyage for some weeks without any incidents of greater moment than the occasional meeting with whaling-ships, and more frequently with the black or right whale, so called in contradistinction to the spermaceti. These, however, were chiefly found south of the twenty-fifth parallel. On the sixteenth of September, being in the vicinity of the Cape of Good Hope, the schooner encountered her first gale of any violence since leaving Liverpool. In this neighborhood, but more frequently to the south and east of the promontory (we were to the westward), navigators have often to contend with storms from the northward, which rage with great fury. They always bring with them a heavy sea, and one of their most dangerous features is the instantaneous chopping round of the wind, an occurrence almost certain to take place during the greatest force of the gale. A perfect hurricane will be blowing at one moment from the northward or northeast, and in the next not a breath of wind will be felt in that direction, while from the southwest it will come out all at once with a violence almost inconceivable. A bright spot to the southward is the sure forerunner of the change, and vessels are thus enabled to take the proper precautions.\n\nIt was about six in the morning when the blow came on with a white squall, and, as usual, from the northward. By eight it had increased very much, and brought down upon us one of the most tremendous seas I had then ever beheld. Every thing had been made as snug as possible, but the schooner laboured excessively, and gave evidence of her bad qualities as a seaboat, pitching her forecastle under at every plunge and with the greatest difficulty struggling up from one wave before she was buried in another. just before sunset the bright spot for which we had been on the look-out made its appearance in the southwest, and in an hour afterward we perceived the little headsail we carried flapping listlessly against the mast. In two minutes more, in spite of every preparation, we were hurled on our beam-ends, as if by magic, and a perfect wilderness of foam made a clear breach over us as we lay. The blow from the southwest, however, luckily proved to be nothing more than a squall, and we had the good fortune to right the vessel without the loss of a spar. A heavy cross sea gave us great trouble for a few hours after this, but toward morning we found ourselves in nearly as good condition as before the gale. Captain Guy considered that he had made an escape little less than miraculous.\n\nOn the thirteenth of October we came in sight of Prince Edward's Island, in latitude 46 degrees 53' S., longitude 37 degrees 46' E. Two days afterward we found ourselves near Possession Island, and presently passed the islands of Crozet, in latitude 42 degrees 59' S., longitude 48 degrees E. On the eighteenth we made Kerguelen's or Desolation Island, in the Southern Indian Ocean, and came to anchor in Christmas Harbour, having four fathoms of water.\n\nThis island, or rather group of islands, bears southeast from the Cape of Good Hope, and is distant therefrom nearly eight hundred leagues. It was first discovered in 1772, by the Baron de Kergulen, or Kerguelen, a Frenchman, who, thinking the land to form a portion of an extensive southern continent carried home information to that effect, which produced much excitement at the time. The government, taking the matter up, sent the baron back in the following year for the purpose of giving his new discovery a critical examination, when the mistake was discovered. In 1777, Captain Cook fell in with the same group, and gave to the principal one the name of Desolation Island, a title which it certainly well deserves. Upon approaching the land, however, the navigator might be induced to suppose otherwise, as the sides of most of the hills, from September to March, are clothed with very brilliant verdure. This deceitful appearance is caused by a small plant resembling saxifrage, which is abundant, growing in large patches on a species of crumbling moss. Besides this plant there is scarcely a sign of vegetation on the island, if we except some coarse rank grass near the harbor, some lichen, and a shrub which bears resemblance to a cabbage shooting into seed, and which has a bitter and acrid taste.\n\nThe face of the country is hilly, although none of the hills can be called lofty. Their tops are perpetually covered with snow. There are several harbors, of which Christmas Harbour is the most convenient. It is the first to be met with on the northeast side of the island after passing Cape Francois, which forms the northern shore, and, by its peculiar shape, serves to distinguish the harbour. Its projecting point terminates in a high rock, through which is a large hole, forming a natural arch. The entrance is in latitude 48 degrees 40' S., longitude 69 degrees 6' E. Passing in here, good anchorage may be found under the shelter of several small islands, which form a sufficient protection from all easterly winds. Proceeding on eastwardly from this anchorage you come to Wasp Bay, at the head of the harbour. This is a small basin, completely landlocked, into which you can go with four fathoms, and find anchorage in from ten to three, hard clay bottom. A ship might lie here with her best bower ahead all the year round without risk. To the westward, at the head of Wasp Bay, is a small stream of excellent water, easily procured.\n\nSome seal of the fur and hair species are still to be found on Kerguelen's Island, and sea elephants abound. The feathered tribes are discovered in great numbers. Penguins are very plenty, and of these there are four different kinds. The royal penguin, so called from its size and beautiful plumage, is the largest. The upper part of the body is usually gray, sometimes of a lilac tint; the under portion of the purest white imaginable. The head is of a glossy and most brilliant black, the feet also. The chief beauty of plumage, however, consists in two broad stripes of a gold color, which pass along from the head to the breast. The bill is long, and either pink or bright scarlet. These birds walk erect; with a stately carriage. They carry their heads high with their wings drooping like two arms, and, as their tails project from their body in a line with the legs, the resemblance to a human figure is very striking, and would be apt to deceive the spectator at a casual glance or in the gloom of the evening. The royal penguins which we met with on Kerguelen's Land were rather larger than a goose. The other kinds are the macaroni, the jackass, and the rookery penguin. These are much smaller, less beautiful in plumage, and different in other respects.\n\nBesides the penguin many other birds are here to be found, among which may be mentioned sea-hens, blue peterels, teal, ducks, Port Egmont hens, shags, Cape pigeons, the nelly, sea swallows, terns, sea gulls, Mother Carey's chickens, Mother Carey's geese, or the great peterel, and, lastly, the albatross.\n\nThe great peterel is as large as the common albatross, and is carnivorous. It is frequently called the break-bones, or osprey peterel. They are not at all shy, and, when properly cooked, are palatable food. In flying they sometimes sail very close to the surface of the water, with the wings expanded, without appearing to move them in the least degree, or make any exertion with them whatever.\n\nThe albatross is one of the largest and fiercest of the South Sea birds. It is of the gull species, and takes its prey on the wing, never coming on land except for the purpose of breeding. Between this bird and the penguin the most singular friendship exists. Their nests are constructed with great uniformity upon a plan concerted between the two species \u2014 that of the albatross being placed in the centre of a little square formed by the nests of four penguins. Navigators have agreed in calling an assemblage of such encampments a rookery. These rookeries have been often described, but as my readers may not all have seen these descriptions, and as I shall have occasion hereafter to speak of the penguin and albatross, it will not be amiss to say something here of their mode of building and living.\n\nWhen the season for incubation arrives, the birds assemble in vast numbers, and for some days appear to be deliberating upon the proper course to be pursued. At length they proceed to action. A level piece of ground is selected, of suitable extent, usually comprising three or four acres, and situated as near the sea as possible, being still beyond its reach. The spot is chosen with reference to its evenness of surface, and that is preferred which is the least encumbered with stones. This matter being arranged, the birds proceed, with one accord, and actuated apparently by one mind, to trace out, with mathematical accuracy, either a square or other parallelogram, as may best suit the nature of the ground, and of just sufficient size to accommodate easily all the birds assembled, and no more \u2014 in this particular seeming determined upon preventing the access of future stragglers who have not participated in the labor of the encampment. One side of the place thus marked out runs parallel with the water's edge, and is left open for ingress or egress.\n\nHaving defined the limits of the rookery, the colony now begin to clear it of every species of rubbish, picking up stone by stone, and carrying them outside of the lines, and close by them, so as to form a wall on the three inland sides. Just within this wall a perfectly level and smooth walk is formed, from six to eight feet wide, and extending around the encampment \u2014 thus serving the purpose of a general promenade.\n\nThe next process is to partition out the whole area into small squares exactly equal in size. This is done by forming narrow paths, very smooth, and crossing each other at right angles throughout the entire extent of the rookery. At each intersection of these paths the nest of an albatross is constructed, and a penguin's nest in the centre of each square \u2014 thus every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses, and each albatross by a like number of penguins. The penguin's nest consists of a hole in the earth, very shallow, being only just of sufficient depth to keep her single egg from rolling. The albatross is somewhat less simple in her arrangements, erecting a hillock about a foot high and two in diameter. This is made of earth, seaweed, and shells. On its summit she builds her nest.\n\nThe birds take especial care never to leave their nests unoccupied for an instant during the period of incubation, or, indeed, until the young progeny are sufficiently strong to take care of themselves. While the male is absent at sea in search of food, the female remains on duty, and it is only upon the return of her partner that she ventures abroad. The eggs are never left uncovered at all \u2014 while one bird leaves the nest the other nestling in by its side. This precaution is rendered necessary by the thieving propensities prevalent in the rookery, the inhabitants making no scruple to purloin each other's eggs at every good opportunity.\n\nAlthough there are some rookeries in which the penguin and albatross are the sole population, yet in most of them a variety of oceanic birds are to be met with, enjoying all the privileges of citizenship, and scattering their nests here and there, wherever they can find room, never interfering, however, with the stations of the larger species. The appearance of such encampments, when seen from a distance, is exceedingly singular. The whole atmosphere just above the settlement is darkened with the immense number of the albatross (mingled with the smaller tribes) which are continually hovering over it, either going to the ocean or returning home. At the same time a crowd of penguins are to be observed, some passing to and fro in the narrow alleys, and some marching with the military strut so peculiar to them, around the general promenade ground which encircles the rookery. In short, survey it as we will, nothing can be more astonishing than the spirit of reflection evinced by these feathered beings, and nothing surely can be better calculated to elicit reflection in every well-regulated human intellect.\n\nOn the morning after our arrival in Christmas Harbour the chief mate, Mr. Patterson, took the boats, and (although it was somewhat early in the season) went in search of seal, leaving the captain and a young relation of his on a point of barren land to the westward, they having some business, whose nature I could not ascertain, to transact in the interior of the island. Captain Guy took with him a bottle, in which was a sealed letter, and made his way from the point on which he was set on shore toward one of the highest peaks in the place. It is probable that his design was to leave the letter on that height for some vessel which he expected to come after him. As soon as we lost sight of him we proceeded (Peters and myself being in the mate's boat) on our cruise around the coast, looking for seal. In this business we were occupied about three weeks, examining with great care every nook and corner, not only of Kerguelen's Land, but of the several small islands in the vicinity. Our labours, however, were not crowned with any important success. We saw a great many fur seal, but they were exceedingly shy, and with the greatest exertions, we could only procure three hundred and fifty skins in all. Sea elephants were abundant, especially on the western coast of the mainland, but of these we killed only twenty, and this with great difficulty. On the smaller islands we discovered a good many of the hair seal, but did not molest them. We returned to the schooner: on the eleventh, where we found Captain Guy and his nephew, who gave a very bad account of the interior, representing it as one of the most dreary and utterly barren countries in the world. They had remained two nights on the island, owing to some misunderstanding, on the part of the second mate, in regard to the sending a jollyboat from the schooner to take them off." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "On the twelfth we made sail from Christmas Harbour retracing our way to the westward, and leaving Marion's Island, one of Crozet's group, on the larboard. We afterward passed Prince Edward's Island, leaving it also on our left, then, steering more to the northward, made, in fifteen days, the islands of Tristan d'Acunha, in latitude 37 degrees 8' S, longitude 12 degrees 8' W.\n\nThis group, now so well known, and which consists of three circular islands, was first discovered by the Portuguese, and was visited afterward by the Dutch in 1643, and by the French in 1767. The three islands together form a triangle, and are distant from each other about ten miles, there being fine open passages between. The land in all of them is very high, especially in Tristan d'Acunha, properly so called. This is the largest of the group, being fifteen miles in circumference, and so elevated that it can be seen in clear weather at the distance of eighty or ninety miles. A part of the land toward the north rises more than a thousand feet perpendicularly from the sea. A tableland at this height extends back nearly to the centre of the island, and from this tableland arises a lofty cone like that of Teneriffe. The lower half of this cone is clothed with trees of good size, but the upper region is barren rock, usually hidden among the clouds, and covered with snow during the greater part of the year. There are no shoals or other dangers about the island, the shores being remarkably bold and the water deep. On the northwestern coast is a bay, with a beach of black sand where a landing with boats can be easily effected, provided there be a southerly wind. Plenty of excellent water may here be readily procured; also cod and other fish may be taken with hook and line.\n\nThe next island in point of size, and the most westwardly of the group, is that called the Inaccessible. Its precise situation is 37 degrees 17' S. latitude, longitude 12 degrees 24' W. It is seven or eight miles in circumference, and on all sides presents a forbidding and precipitous aspect. Its top is perfectly flat, and the whole region is sterile, nothing growing upon it except a few stunted shrubs.\n\nNightingale Island, the smallest and most southerly, is in latitude 37 degrees 26' S., longitude 12 degrees 12' W. Off its southern extremity is a high ledge of rocky islets; a few also of a similar appearance are seen to the northeast. The ground is irregular and sterile, and a deep valley partially separates it.\n\nThe shores of these islands abound, in the proper season, with sea lions, sea elephants, the hair and fur seal, together with a great variety of oceanic birds. Whales are also plenty in their vicinity. Owing to the ease with which these various animals were here formerly taken, the group has been much visited since its discovery. The Dutch and French frequented it at a very early period. In 1790, Captain Patten, of the ship Industry, of Philadelphia, made Tristan d'Acunha, where he remained seven months (from August, 1790, to April, 1791) for the purpose of collecting sealskins. In this time he gathered no less than five thousand six hundred, and says that he would have had no difficulty in loading a large ship with oil in three weeks. Upon his arrival he found no quadrupeds, with the exception of a few wild goats; the island now abounds with all our most valuable domestic animals, which have been introduced by subsequent navigators.\n\nI believe it was not long after Captain Patten's visit that Captain Colquhoun, of the American brig Betsey, touched at the largest of the islands for the purpose of refreshment. He planted onions, potatoes, cabbages, and a great many other vegetables, an abundance of all which is now to be met with.\n\nIn 1811, a Captain Haywood, in the Nereus, visited Tristan. He found there three Americans, who were residing upon the island to prepare sealskins and oil. One of these men was named Jonathan Lambert, and he called himself the sovereign of the country. He had cleared and cultivated about sixty acres of land, and turned his attention to raising the coffee-plant and sugar-cane, with which he had been furnished by the American Minister at Rio Janeiro. This settlement, however, was finally abandoned, and in 1817 the islands were taken possession of by the British Government, who sent a detachment for that purpose from the Cape of Good Hope. They did not, however, retain them long; but, upon the evacuation of the country as a British possession, two or three English families took up their residence there independently of the Government. On the twenty-fifth of March, 1824, the Berwick, Captain Jeffrey, from London to Van Diemen's Land, arrived at the place, where they found an Englishman of the name of Glass, formerly a corporal in the British artillery. He claimed to be supreme governor of the islands, and had under his control twenty-one men and three women. He gave a very favourable account of the salubrity of the climate and of the productiveness of the soil. The population occupied themselves chiefly in collecting sealskins and sea elephant oil, with which they traded to the Cape of Good Hope, Glass owning a small schooner. At the period of our arrival the governor was still a resident, but his little community had multiplied, there being fifty-six persons upon Tristan, besides a smaller settlement of seven on Nightingale Island. We had no difficulty in procuring almost every kind of refreshment which we required \u2014 sheep, hogs, bullocks, rabbits, poultry, goats, fish in great variety, and vegetables were abundant. Having come to anchor close in with the large island, in eighteen fathoms, we took all we wanted on board very conveniently. Captain Guy also purchased of Glass five hundred sealskins and some ivory. We remained here a week, during which the prevailing winds were from the northward and westward, and the weather somewhat hazy. On the fifth of November we made sail to the southward and westward, with the intention of having a thorough search for a group of islands called the Auroras, respecting whose existence a great diversity of opinion has existed.\n\nThese islands are said to have been discovered as early as 1762, by the commander of the ship Aurora. In 1790, Captain Manuel de Oyarvido, in the ship Princess, belonging to the Royal Philippine Company, sailed, as he asserts, directly among them. In 1794, the Spanish corvette Atrevida went with the determination of ascertaining their precise situation, and, in a paper published by the Royal Hydrographical Society of Madrid in the year 1809, the following language is used respecting this expedition: \"The corvette Atrevida practised, in their immediate vicinity, from the twenty-first to the twenty-seventh of January, all the necessary observations, and measured by chronometers the difference of longitude between these islands and the port of Soledad in the Manillas. The islands are three, they are very nearly in the same meridian; the centre one is rather low, and the other two may be seen at nine leagues' distance.\" The observations made on board the Atrevida give the following results as the precise situation of each island. The most northern is in latitude 52 degrees 37' 24\" S., longitude 47 degrees, 43' 15\" W.; the middle one in latitude 53 degrees 2' 40\" S., longitude 47 degrees 55' 15\" W.; and the most southern in latitude 53 degrees 15' 22\" S., longitude 47 degrees 57' 15\" W.\n\nOn the twenty-seventh of January, 1820, Captain James Weddel, of the British navy, sailed from Staten Land also in search of the Auroras. He reports that, having made the most diligent search and passed not only immediately over the spots indicated by the commander of the Atrevida, but in every direction throughout the vicinity of these spots, he could discover no indication of land. These conflicting statements have induced other navigators to look out for the islands; and, strange to say, while some have sailed through every inch of sea where they are supposed to lie without finding them, there have been not a few who declare positively that they have seen them; and even been close in with their shores. It was Captain Guy's intention to make every exertion within his power to settle the question so oddly in dispute.\n\nWe kept on our course, between the south and west, with variable weather, until the twentieth of the month, when we found ourselves on the debated ground, being in latitude 53 degrees 15' S., longitude 47 degrees 58' W. \u2014 that is to say, very nearly upon the spot indicated as the situation of the most southern of the group. Not perceiving any sip of land, we continued to the westward of the parallel of fifty-three degrees south, as far as the meridian of fifty degrees west. We then stood to the north as far as the parallel of fifty-two degrees south, when we turned to the eastward, and kept our parallel by double altitudes, morning and evening, and meridian altitudes of the planets and moon. Having thus gone eastwardly to the meridian of the western coast of Georgia, we kept that meridian until we were in the latitude from which we set out. We then took diagonal courses throughout the entire extent of sea circumscribed, keeping a lookout constantly at the masthead, and repeating our examination with the greatest care for a period of three weeks, during which the weather was remarkably pleasant and fair, with no haze whatsoever. Of course we were thoroughly satisfied that, whatever islands might have existed in this vicinity at any former period, no vestige of them remained at the present day. Since my return home I find that the same ground was traced over, with equal care, in 1822, by Captain Johnson, of the American schooner Henry, and by Captain Morrell in the American schooner Wasp \u2014 in both cases with the same result as in our own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "It had been Captain Guy's original intention, after satisfying himself about the Auroras, to proceed through the Strait of Magellan, and up along the western coast of Patagonia; but information received at Tristan d'Acunha induced him to steer to the southward, in the hope of falling in with some small islands said to lie about the parallel of 60 degrees S., longitude 41 degrees 20' W. In the event of his not discovering these lands, he designed, should the season prove favourable, to push on toward the pole. Accordingly, on the twelfth of December, we made sail in that direction. On the eighteenth we found ourselves about the station indicated by Glass, and cruised for three days in that neighborhood without finding any traces of the islands he had mentioned. On the twenty-first, the weather being unusually pleasant, we again made sail to the southward, with the resolution of penetrating in that course as far as possible. Before entering upon this portion of my narrative, it may be as well, for the information of those readers who have paid little attention to the progress of discovery in these regions, to give some brief account of the very few attempts at reaching the southern pole which have hitherto been made.\n\nThat of Captain Cook was the first of which we have any distinct account. In 1772 he sailed to the south in the Resolution, accompanied by Lieutenant Furneaux in the Adventure. In December he found himself as far as the fifty-eighth parallel of south latitude, and in longitude 26 degrees 57' E. Here he met with narrow fields of ice, about eight or ten inches thick, and running northwest and southeast. This ice was in large cakes, and usually it was packed so closely that the vessel had great difficulty in forcing a passage. At this period Captain Cook supposed, from the vast number of birds to be seen, and from other indications, that he was in the near vicinity of land. He kept on to the southward, the weather being exceedingly cold, until he reached the sixty-fourth parallel, in longitude 38 degrees 14' W.. Here he had mild weather, with gentle breezes, for five days, the thermometer being at thirty-six. In January, 1773, the vessels crossed the Antarctic circle, but did not succeed in penetrating much farther; for upon reaching latitude 67 degrees 15' they found all farther progress impeded by an immense body of ice, extending all along the southern horizon as far as the eye could reach. This ice was of every variety \u2014 and some large floes of it, miles in extent, formed a compact mass, rising eighteen or twenty feet above the water. It being late in the season, and no hope entertained of rounding these obstructions, Captain Cook now reluctantly turned to the northward.\n\nIn the November following he renewed his search in the Antarctic. In latitude 59 degrees 40' he met with a strong current setting to the southward. In December, when the vessels were in latitude 67 degrees 31', longitude 142 degrees 54' W., the cold was excessive, with heavy gales and fog. Here also birds were abundant; the albatross, the penguin, and the peterel especially. In latitude 70 degrees 23' some large islands of ice were encountered, and shortly afterward the clouds to the southward were observed to be of a snowy whiteness, indicating the vicinity of field ice. In latitude 71 degrees 10', longitude 106 degrees 54' W., the navigators were stopped, as before, by an immense frozen expanse, which filled the whole area of the southern horizon. The northern edge of this expanse was ragged and broken, so firmly wedged together as to be utterly impassible, and extending about a mile to the southward. Behind it the frozen surface was comparatively smooth for some distance, until terminated in the extreme background by gigantic ranges of ice mountains, the one towering above the other. Captain Cook concluded that this vast field reached the southern pole or was joined to a continent. Mr. J. N. Reynolds, whose great exertions and perseverance have at length succeeded in getting set on foot a national expedition, partly for the purpose of exploring these regions, thus speaks of the attempt of the Resolution. \"We are not surprised that Captain Cook was unable to go beyond 71 degrees 10', but we are astonished that he did attain that point on the meridian of 106 degrees 54' west longitude. Palmer's Land lies south of the Shetland, latitude sixty-four degrees, and tends to the southward and westward farther than any navigator has yet penetrated. Cook was standing for this land when his progress was arrested by the ice; which, we apprehend, must always be the case in that point, and so early in the season as the sixth of January \u2014 and we should not be surprised if a portion of the icy mountains described was attached to the main body of Palmer's Land, or to some other portions of land lying farther to the southward and westward.\"\n\nIn 1803, Captains Kreutzenstern and Lisiausky were dispatched by Alexander of Russia for the purpose of circumnavigating the globe. In endeavouring to get south, they made no farther than 59 degrees 58', in longitude 70 degrees 15' W. They here met with strong currents setting eastwardly. Whales were abundant, but they saw no ice. In regard to this voyage, Mr. Reynolds observes that, if Kreutzenstern had arrived where he did earlier in the season, he must have encountered ice \u2014 it was March when he reached the latitude specified. The winds, prevailing, as they do, from the southward and westward, had carried the floes, aided by currents, into that icy region bounded on the north by Georgia, east by Sandwich Land and the South Orkneys, and west by the South Shetland islands.\n\nIn 1822, Captain James Weddell, of the British navy, with two very small vessels, penetrated farther to the south than any previous navigator, and this, too, without encountering extraordinary difficulties. He states that although he was frequently hemmed in by ice before reaching the seventy-second parallel, yet, upon attaining it, not a particle was to be discovered, and that, upon arriving at the latitude of 74 degrees 15', no fields, and only three islands of ice were visible. It is somewhat remarkable that, although vast flocks of birds were seen, and other usual indications of land, and although, south of the Shetlands, unknown coasts were observed from the masthead tending southwardly, Weddell discourages the idea of land existing in the polar regions of the south.\n\nOn the 11th of January, 1823, Captain Benjamin Morrell, of the American schooner Wasp, sailed from Kerguelen's Land with a view of penetrating as far south as possible. On the first of February he found himself in latitude 64 degrees 52' S., longitude 118 degrees 27' E. The following passage is extracted from his journal of that date. \"The wind soon freshened to an eleven-knot breeze, and we embraced this opportunity of making to the west,; being however convinced that the farther we went south beyond latitude sixty-four degrees, the less ice was to be apprehended, we steered a little to the southward, until we crossed the Antarctic circle, and were in latitude 69 degrees 15' E. In this latitude there was no field ice, and very few ice islands in sight.\n\nUnder the date of March fourteenth I find also this entry. The sea was now entirely free of field ice, and there were not more than a dozen ice islands in sight. At the same time the temperature of the air and water was at least thirteen degrees higher (more mild) than we had ever found it between the parallels of sixty and sixty-two south. We were now in latitude 70 degrees 14' S., and the temperature of the air was forty-seven, and that of the water forty-four. In this situation I found the variation to be 14 degrees 27' easterly, per azimuth.... I have several times passed within the Antarctic circle, on different meridians, and have uniformly found the temperature, both of the air and the water, to become more and more mild the farther I advanced beyond the sixty-fifth degree of south latitude, and that the variation decreases in the same proportion. While north of this latitude, say between sixty and sixty-five south, we frequently had great difficulty in finding a passage for the vessel between the immense and almost innumerable ice islands, some of which were from one to two miles in circumference, and more than five hundred feet above the surface of the water.\"\n\nBeing nearly destitute of fuel and water, and without proper instruments, it being also late in the season, Captain Morrell was now obliged to put back, without attempting any further progress to the westward, although an entirely open, sea lay before him. He expresses the opinion that, had not these overruling considerations obliged him to retreat, he could have penetrated, if not to the pole itself, at least to the eighty-fifth parallel. I have given his ideas respecting these matters somewhat at length, that the reader may have an opportunity of seeing how far they were borne out by my own subsequent experience.\n\nIn 1831, Captain Briscoe, in the employ of the Messieurs Enderby, whale-ship owners of London, sailed in the brig Lively for the South Seas, accompanied by the cutter Tula. On the twenty-eighth of February, being in latitude 66 degrees 30' S., longitude 47 degrees 31' E., he descried land, and \"clearly discovered through the snow the black peaks of a range of mountains running E. S. E.\" He remained in this neighbourhood during the whole of the following month, but was unable to approach the coast nearer than within ten leagues, owing to the boisterous state of the weather. Finding it impossible to make further discovery during this season, he returned northward to winter in Van Diemen's Land.\n\nIn the beginning of 1832 he again proceeded southwardly, and on the fourth of February was seen to the southeast in latitude 67 degrees 15' longitude 69 degrees 29' W. This was soon found to be an island near the headland of the country he had first discovered. On the twenty-first of the month he succeeded in landing on the latter, and took possession of it in the name of William IV, calling it Adelaide's Island, in honour of the English queen. These particulars being made known to the Royal Geographical Society of London, the conclusion was drawn by that body \"that there is a continuous tract of land extending from 47 degrees 30' E. to 69 degrees 29' W. longitude, running the parallel of from sixty-six to sixty-seven degrees south latitude.\" In respect to this conclusion Mr. Reynolds observes: \"In the correctness of it we by no means concur; nor do the discoveries of Briscoe warrant any such indifference. It was within these limits that Weddel proceeded south on a meridian to the east of Georgia, Sandwich Land, and the South Orkney and Shetland islands.\" My own experience will be found to testify most directly to the falsity of the conclusion arrived at by the society.\n\nThese are the principal attempts which have been made at penetrating to a high southern latitude, and it will now be seen that there remained, previous to the voyage of the Jane, nearly three hundred degrees of longitude in which the Antarctic circle had not been crossed at all. Of course a wide field lay before us for discovery, and it was with feelings of most intense interest that I heard Captain Guy express his resolution of pushing boldly to the southward." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "We kept our course southwardly for four days after giving up the search for Glass's islands, without meeting with any ice at all. On the twenty-sixth, at noon, we were in latitude 63 degrees 23' S., longitude 41 degrees 25' W. We now saw several large ice islands, and a floe of field ice, not, however, of any great extent. The winds generally blew from the southeast, or the northeast, but were very light. Whenever we had a westerly wind, which was seldom, it was invariably attended with a rain squall. Every day we had more or less snow. The thermometer, on the twenty-seventh stood at thirtyfive.\n\nJanuary 1, 1828. \u2014 This day we found ourselves completely hemmed in by the ice, and our prospects looked cheerless indeed. A strong gale blew, during the whole forenoon, from the northeast, and drove large cakes of the drift against the rudder and counter with such violence that we all trembled for the consequences. Toward evening, the gale still blowing with fury, a large field in front separated, and we were enabled, by carrying a press of sail to force a passage through the smaller flakes into some open water beyond. As we approached this space we took in sail by degrees, and having at length got clear, lay-to under a single. reefed foresail.\n\nJanuary 2. \u2014 We had now tolerably pleasant weather. At noon we found ourselves in latitude 69 degrees 10' S, longitude 42 degrees 20' W, having crossed the Antarctic circle. Very little ice was to be seen to the southward, although large fields of it lay behind us. This day we rigged some sounding gear, using a large iron pot capable of holding twenty gallons, and a line of two hundred fathoms. We found the current setting to the north, about a quarter of a mile per hour. The temperature of the air was now about thirty-three. Here we found the variation to be 14 degrees 28' easterly, per azimuth.\n\nJanuary 5. \u2014 We had still held on to the southward without any very great impediments. On this morning, however, being in latitude 73 degrees 15' E., longitude 42 degrees 10' W, we were again brought to a stand by an immense expanse of firm ice. We saw, nevertheless, much open water to the southward, and felt no doubt of being able to reach it eventually. Standing to the eastward along the edge of the floe, we at length came to a passage of about a mile in width, through which we warped our way by sundown. The sea in which we now were was thickly covered with ice islands, but had no field ice, and we pushed on boldly as before. The cold did not seem to increase, although we had snow very frequently, and now and then hail squalls of great violence. Immense flocks of the albatross flew over the schooner this day, going from southeast to northwest.\n\nJanuary 7. \u2014 The sea still remained pretty well open, so that we had no difficulty in holding on our course. To the westward we saw some icebergs of incredible size, and in the afternoon passed very near one whose summit could not have been less than four hundred fathoms from the surface of the ocean. Its girth was probably, at the base, three-quarters of a league, and several streams of water were running from crevices in its sides. We remained in sight of this island two days, and then only lost it in a fog.\n\nJanuary 10. \u2014 Early this morning we had the misfortune to lose a man overboard. He was an American named Peter Vredenburgh, a native of New York, and was one of the most valuable hands on board the schooner. In going over the bows his foot slipped, and he fell between two cakes of ice, never rising again. At noon of this day we were in latitude 78 degrees 30', longitude 40 degrees 15' W. The cold was now excessive, and we had hail squalls continually from the northward and eastward. In this direction also we saw several more immense icebergs, and the whole horizon to the eastward appeared to be blocked up with field ice, rising in tiers, one mass above the other. Some driftwood floated by during the evening, and a great quantity of birds flew over, among which were nellies, peterels, albatrosses, and a large bird of a brilliant blue plumage. The variation here, per azimuth, was less than it had been previously to our passing the Antarctic circle.\n\nJanuary 12.-Our passage to the south again looked doubtful, as nothing was to be seen in the direction of the pole but one apparently limitless floe, backed by absolute mountains of ragged ice, one precipice of which arose frowningly above the other. We stood to the westward until the fourteenth, in the hope of finding an entrance.\n\nJanuary 14.-This morning we reached the western extremity of the field which had impeded us, and, weathering it, came to an open sea, without a particle of ice. Upon sounding with two hundred fathoms, we here found a current setting southwardly at the rate of half a mile per hour. The temperature of the air was forty-seven, that of the water thirtyfour. We now sailed to the southward without meeting any interruption of moment until the sixteenth, when, at noon, we were in latitude 81 degrees 21', longitude 42 degrees W. We here again sounded, and found a current setting still southwardly, and at the rate of three quarters of a mile per hour. The variation per azimuth had diminished, and the temperature of the air was mild and pleasant, the thermometer being as high as fifty-one. At this period not a particle of ice was to be discovered. All hands on board now felt certain of attaining the pole.\n\nJanuary 17. \u2014 This day was full of incident. Innumerable flights of birds flew over us from the southward, and several were shot from the deck, one of them, a species of pelican, proved to be excellent eating. About midday a small floe of ice was seen from the masthead off the larboard bow, and upon it there appeared to be some large animal. As the weather was good and nearly calm, Captain Guy ordered out two of the boats to see what it was. Dirk Peters and myself accompanied the mate in the larger boat. Upon coming up with the floe, we perceived that it was in the possession of a gigantic creature of the race of the Arctic bear, but far exceeding in size the largest of these animals. Being well armed, we made no scruple of attacking it at once. Several shots were fired in quick succession, the most of which took effect, apparently, in the head and body. Nothing discouraged, however, the monster threw himself from the ice, and swam with open jaws, to the boat in which were Peters and myself. Owing to the confusion which ensued among us at this unexpected turn of the adventure, no person was ready immediately with a second shot, and the bear had actually succeeded in getting half his vast bulk across our gunwale, and seizing one of the men by the small of his back, before any efficient means were taken to repel him. In this extremity nothing but the promptness and agility of Peters saved us from destruction. Leaping upon the back of the huge beast, he plunged the blade of a knife behind the neck, reaching the spinal marrow at a blow. The brute tumbled into the sea lifeless, and without a struggle, rolling over Peters as he fell. The latter soon recovered himself, and a rope being thrown him, returned in triumph to the schooner, towing our trophy behind us. This bear, upon admeasurement, proved to be full fifteen feet in his greatest length. His wool was perfectly white, and very coarse, curling tightly. The eyes were of a blood red, and larger than those of the Arctic bear, the snout also more rounded, rather resembling the snout of the bulldog. The meat was tender, but excessively rank and fishy, although the men devoured it with avidity, and declared it excellent eating.\n\nScarcely had we got our prize alongside, when the man at the masthead gave the joyful shout of \"land on the starboard bow!\" All hands were now upon the alert, and, a breeze springing up very opportunely from the northward and eastward, we were soon close in with the coast. It proved to be a low rocky islet, of about a league in circumference, and altogether destitute of vegetation, if we except a species of prickly pear. In approaching it from the northward, a singular ledge of rock is seen projecting into the sea, and bearing a strong resemblance to corded bales of cotton. Around this ledge to the westward is a small bay, at the bottom of which our boats effected a convenient landing.\n\nIt did not take us long to explore every portion of the island, but, with one exception, we found nothing worthy of our observation. In the southern extremity, we picked up near the shore, half buried in a pile of loose stones, a piece of wood, which seemed to have formed the prow of a canoe. There had been evidently some attempt at carving upon it, and Captain Guy fancied that he made out the figure of a tortoise, but the resemblance did not strike me very forcibly. Besides this prow, if such it were, we found no other token that any living creature had ever been here before. Around the coast we discovered occasional small floes of ice \u2014 but these were very few. The exact situation of the islet (to which Captain Guy gave the name of Bennet's Islet, in honour of his partner in the ownership of the schooner) is 82 degrees 50' S. latitude, 42 degrees 20' W. longitude.\n\nWe had now advanced to the southward more than eight degrees farther than any previous navigators, and the sea still lay perfectly open before us. We found, too, that the variation uniformly decreased as we proceeded, and, what was still more surprising, that the temperature of the air, and latterly of the water, became milder. The weather might even be called pleasant, and we had a steady but very gentle breeze always from some northern point of the compass. The sky was usually clear, with now and then a slight appearance of thin vapour in the southern horizon \u2014 this, however, was invariably of brief duration. Two difficulties alone presented themselves to our view; we were getting short of fuel, and symptoms of scurvy had occurred among several of the crew. These considerations began to impress upon Captain Guy the necessity of returning, and he spoke of it frequently. For my own part, confident as I was of soon arriving at land of some description upon the course we were pursuing, and having every reason to believe, from present appearances, that we should not find it the sterile soil met with in the higher Arctic latitudes, I warmly pressed upon him the expediency of persevering, at least for a few days longer, in the direction we were now holding. So tempting an opportunity of solving the great problem in regard to an Antarctic continent had never yet been afforded to man, and I confess that I felt myself bursting with indignation at the timid and ill-timed suggestions of our commander. I believe, indeed, that what I could not refrain from saying to him on this head had the effect of inducing him to push on. While, therefore, I cannot but lament the most unfortunate and bloody events which immediately arose from my advice, I must still be allowed to feel some degree of gratification at having been instrumental, however remotely, in opening to the eye of science one of the most intensely exciting secrets which has ever engrossed its attention." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "January 18. \u2014 This morning* we continued to the southward, with the same pleasant weather as before. The sea was entirely smooth, the air tolerably warm and from the northeast, the temperature of the water fifty-three. We now again got our sounding-gear in order, and, with a hundred and fifty fathoms of line, found the current setting toward the pole at the rate of a mile an hour. This constant tendency to the southward, both in the wind and current, caused some degree of speculation, and even of alarm, in different quarters of the schooner, and I saw distinctly that no little impression had been made upon the mind of Captain Guy. He was exceedingly sensitive to ridicule, however, and I finally succeeded in laughing him out of his apprehensions. The variation was now very trivial. In the course of the day we saw several large whales of the right species, and innumerable flights of the albatross passed over the vessel. We also picked up a bush, full of red berries, like those of the hawthorn, and the carcass of a singular-looking land-animal. It was three feet in length, and but six inches in height, with four very short legs, the feet armed with long claws of a brilliant scarlet, and resembling coral in substance. The body was covered with a straight silky hair, perfectly white. The tail was peaked like that of a rat, and about a foot and a half long. The head resembled a cat's, with the exception of the ears \u2014 these were flopped like the ears of a dog. The teeth were of the same brilliant scarlet as the claws.\n\n* The terms morning and evening, which I have made use of to avoid confusion in my narrative, as far as possible, must not, of course, be taken in their ordinary sense. For a long time past we had had no night at all, the daylight being continual. The dates throughout are according to nautical time, and the bearing must be understood as per compass. I would also remark, in this place, that I cannot, in the first portion of what is here written, pretend to strict accuracy in respect to dates, or latitudes and longitudes, having kept no regular journal until after the period of which this first portion treats. In many instances I have relied altogether upon memory.\n\nJanuary 19. \u2014 To-day, being in latitude 83 degrees 20', longitude 43 degrees 5' W. (the sea being of an extraordinarily dark colour), we again saw land from the masthead, and, upon a closer scrutiny, found it to be one of a group of very large islands. The shore was precipitous, and the interior seemed to be well wooded, a circumstance which occasioned us great joy. In about four hours from our first discovering the land we came to anchor in ten fathoms, sandy bottom, a league from the coast, as a high surf, with strong ripples here and there, rendered a nearer approach of doubtful expediency. The two largest boats were now ordered out, and a party, well armed (among whom were Peters and myself), proceeded to look for an opening in the reef which appeared to encircle the island. After searching about for some time, we discovered an inlet, which we were entering, when we saw four large canoes put off from the shore, filled with men who seemed to be well armed. We waited for them to come up, and, as they moved with great rapidity, they were soon within hail. Captain Guy now held up a white handkerchief on the blade of an oar, when the strangers made a full stop, and commenced a loud jabbering all at once, intermingled with occasional shouts, in which we could distinguish the words Anamoo-moo! and Lama-Lama! They continued this for at least half an hour, during which we had a good opportunity of observing their appearance.\n\nIn the four canoes, which might have been fifty feet long and five broad, there were a hundred and ten savages in all. They were about the ordinary stature of Europeans, but of a more muscular and brawny frame. Their complexion a jet black, with thick and long woolly hair. They were clothed in skins of an unknown black animal, shaggy and silky, and made to fit the body with some degree of skill, the hair being inside, except where turned out about the neck, wrists, and ankles. Their arms consisted principally of clubs, of a dark, and apparently very heavy wood. Some spears, however, were observed among them, headed with flint, and a few slings. The bottoms of the canoes were full of black stones about the size of a large egg.\n\nWhen they had concluded their harangue (for it was clear they intended their jabbering for such), one of them who seemed to be the chief stood up in the prow of his canoe, and made signs for us to bring our boats alongside of him. This hint we pretended not to understand, thinking it the wiser plan to maintain, if possible, the interval between us, as their number more than quadrupled our own. Finding this to be the case, the chief ordered the three other canoes to hold back, while he advanced toward us with his own. As soon as he came up with us he leaped on board the largest of our boats, and seated himself by the side of Captain Guy, pointing at the same time to the schooner, and repeating the word Anamoo-moo! and Lama-Lama! We now put back to the vessel, the four canoes following at a little distance.\n\nUpon getting alongside, the chief evinced symptoms of extreme surprise and delight, clapping his hands, slapping his thighs and breast, and laughing obstreperously. His followers behind joined in his merriment, and for some minutes the din was so excessive as to be absolutely deafening. Quiet being at length restored, Captain Guy ordered the boats to be hoisted up, as a necessary precaution, and gave the chief (whose name we soon found to be Too-wit) to understand that we could admit no more than twenty of his men on deck at one time. With this arrangement he appeared perfectly satisfied, and gave some directions to the canoes, when one of them approached, the rest remaining about fifty yards off. Twenty of the savages now got on board, and proceeded to ramble over every part of the deck, and scramble about among the rigging, making themselves much at home, and examining every article with great inquisitiveness.\n\nIt was quite evident that they had never before seen any of the white race \u2014 from whose complexion, indeed, they appeared to recoil. They believed the Jane to be a living creature, and seemed to be afraid of hurting it with the points of their spears, carefully turning them up. Our crew were much amused with the conduct of Too-wit in one instance. The cook was splitting some wood near the galley, and, by accident, struck his axe into the deck, making a gash of considerable depth. The chief immediately ran up, and pushing the cook on one side rather roughly, commenced a half whine, half howl, strongly indicative of sympathy in what he considered the sufferings of the schooner, patting and smoothing the gash with his hand, and washing it from a bucket of seawater which stood by. This was a degree of ignorance for which we were not prepared, and for my part I could not help thinking some of it affected.\n\nWhen the visitors had satisfied, as well as they could, their curiosity in regard to our upper works, they were admitted below, when their amazement exceeded all bounds. Their astonishment now appeared to be far too deep for words, for they roamed about in silence, broken only by low ejaculations. The arms afforded them much food for speculation, and they were suffered to handle and examine them at leisure. I do not believe that they had the least suspicion of their actual use, but rather took them for idols, seeing the care we had of them, and the attention with which we watched their movements while handling them. At the great guns their wonder was redoubled. They approached them with every mark of the profoundest reverence and awe, but forbore to examine them minutely. There were two large mirrors in the cabin, and here was the acme of their amazement. Too-wit was the first to approach them, and he had got in the middle of the cabin, with his face to one and his back to the other, before he fairly perceived them. Upon raising his eyes and seeing his reflected self in the glass, I thought the savage would go mad; but, upon turning short round to make a retreat, and beholding himself a second time in the opposite direction, I was afraid he would expire upon the spot. No persuasion could prevail upon him to take another look; throwing himself upon the floor, with his face buried in his hands, he remained thus until we were obliged to drag him upon deck.\n\nThe whole of the savages were admitted on board in this manner, twenty at a time, Too-wit being suffered to remain during the entire period. We saw no disposition to thievery among them, nor did we miss a single article after their departure. Throughout the whole of their visit they evinced the most friendly manner. There were, however, some points in their demeanour which we found it impossible to understand; for example, we could not get them to approach several very harmless objects \u2014 such as the schooner's sails, an egg, an open book, or a pan of flour. We endeavoured to ascertain if they had among them any articles which might be turned to account in the way of traffic, but found great difficulty in being comprehended. We made out, nevertheless, what greatly astonished us, that the islands abounded in the large tortoise of the Gallipagos, one of which we saw in the canoe of Too-wit. We saw also some biche de mer in the hands of one of the savages, who was greedily devouring it in its natural state. These anomalies \u2014 for they were such when considered in regard to the latitude \u2014 induced Captain Guy to wish for a thorough investigation of the country, in the hope of making a profitable speculation in his discovery. For my own part, anxious as I was to know something more of these islands, I was still more earnestly bent on prosecuting the voyage to the southward without delay. We had now fine weather, but there was no telling how long it would last; and being already in the eighty-fourth parallel, with an open sea before us, a current setting strongly to the southward, and the wind fair, I could not listen with any patience to a proposition of stopping longer than was absolutely necessary for the health of the crew and the taking on board a proper supply of fuel and fresh provisions. I represented to the captain that we might easily make this group on our return, and winter here in the event of being blocked up by the ice. He at length came into my views (for in some way, hardly known to myself, I had acquired much influence over him), and it was finally resolved that, even in the event of our finding biche de mer, we should only stay here a week to recruit, and then push on to the southward while we might. Accordingly we made every necessary preparation, and, under the guidance of Too-wit, got the Jane through the reef in safety, coming to anchor about a mile from the shore, in an excellent bay, completely landlocked, on the southeastern coast of the main island, and in ten fathoms of water, black sandy bottom. At the head of this bay there were three fine springs (we were told) of good water, and we saw abundance of wood in the vicinity. The four canoes followed us in, keeping, however, at a respectful distance. Too-wit himself remained on board, and, upon our dropping anchor, invited us to accompany him on shore, and visit his village in the interior. To this Captain Guy consented; and ten savages being left on board as hostages, a party of us, twelve in all, got in readiness to attend the chief. We took care to be well armed, yet without evincing any distrust. The schooner had her guns run out, her boarding-nettings up, and every other proper precaution was taken to guard against surprise. Directions were left with the chief mate to admit no person on board during our absence, and, in the event of our not appearing in twelve hours, to send the cutter, with a swivel, around the island in search of us.\n\nAt every step we took inland the conviction forced itself upon us that we were in a country differing essentially from any hitherto visited by civilized men. We saw nothing with which we had been formerly conversant. The trees resembled no growth of either the torrid, the temperate, of the northern frigid zones, and were altogether unlike those of the lower southern latitudes we had already traversed. The very rocks were novel in their mass, their color, and their stratification; and the streams themselves, utterly incredible as it may appear, had so little in common with those of other climates, that we were scrupulous of tasting them, and, indeed, had difficulty in bringing ourselves to believe that their qualities were purely those of nature. At a small brook which crossed our path (the first we had reached) Too-wit and his attendants halted to drink. On account of the singular character of the water, we refused to taste it, supposing it to be polluted; and it was not until some time afterward we came to understand that such was the appearance of the streams throughout the whole group. I am at a loss to give a distinct idea of the nature of this liquid, and cannot do so without many words. Although it flowed with rapidity in all declivities where common water would do so, yet never, except when falling in a cascade, had it the customary appearance of limpidity. It was, nevertheless, in point of fact, as perfectly limpid as any limestone water in existence, the difference being only in appearance. At first sight, and especially in cases where little declivity was found, it bore re. semblance, as regards consistency, to a thick infusion of gum arabic in common water. But this was only the least remarkable of its extraordinary qualities. It was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour \u2014 presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple; like the hues of a changeable silk. This variation in shade was produced in a manner which excited as profound astonishment in the minds of our party as the mirror had done in the case of Too-wit. Upon collecting a basinful, and allowing it to settle thoroughly, we perceived that the whole mass of liquid was made up of a number of distinct veins, each of a distinct hue; that these veins did not commingle; and that their cohesion was perfect in regard to their own particles among themselves, and imperfect in regard to neighbouring veins. Upon passing the blade of a knife athwart the veins, the water closed over it immediately, as with us, and also, in withdrawing it, all traces of the passage of the knife were instantly obliterated. If, however, the blade was passed down accurately between the two veins, a perfect separation was effected, which the power of cohesion did not immediately rectify. The phenomena of this water formed the first definite link in that vast chain of apparent miracles with which I was destined to be at length encircled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "We were nearly three hours in reaching the village, it being more than nine miles in the interior, and the path lying through a rugged country. As we passed along, the party of Too-wit (the whole hundred and ten savages of the canoes) was momentarily strengthened by smaller detachments, of from two to six or seven, which joined us, as if by accident, at different turns of the road. There appeared so much of system in this that I could not help feeling distrust, and I spoke to Captain Guy of my apprehensions. It was now too late, however, to recede, and we concluded that our best security lay in evincing a perfect confidence in the good faith of Too-wit. We accordingly went on, keeping a wary eye upon the manoeuvres of the savages, and not permitting them to divide our numbers by pushing in between. In this way, passing through a precipitous ravine, we at length reached what we were told was the only collection of habitations upon the island. As we came in sight of them, the chief set up a shout, and frequently repeated the word Klock-klock, which we sup. posed to be the name of the village, or perhaps the generic name for villages.\n\nThe dwellings were of the most miserable description imaginable, and, unlike those of even the lowest of the savage races with which mankind are acquainted, were of no uniform plan. Some of them (and these we found belonged to the Wampoos or Yampoos, the great men of the land) consisted of a tree cut down at about four feet from the root, with a large black skin thrown over it, and hanging in loose folds upon the ground. Under this the savage nestled. Others were formed by means of rough limbs of trees, with the withered foliage upon them, made to recline, at an angle of forty-five degrees, against a bank of clay, heaped up, without regular form, to the height of five or six feet. Others, again, were mere holes dug in the earth perpendicularly, and covered over with similar branches, these being removed when the tenant was about to enter, and pulled on again when he had entered. A few were built among the forked limbs of trees as they stood, the upper limbs being partially cut through, so as to bend over upon the lower, thus forming thicker shelter from the weather. The greater number, however, consisted of small shallow caverns, apparently scratched in the face of a precipitous ledge of dark stone, resembling fuller's earth, with which three sides of the village were bounded. At the door of each of these primitive caverns was a small rock, which the tenant carefully placed before the entrance upon leaving his residence, for what purpose I could not ascertain, as the stone itself was never of sufficient size to close up more than a third of the opening.\n\nThis village, if it were worthy of the name, lay in a valley of some depth, and could only be approached from the southward, the precipitous ledge of which I have already spoken cutting off all access in other directions. Through the middle of the valley ran a brawling stream of the same magical-looking water which has been described. We saw several strange animals about the dwellings, all appearing to be thoroughly domesticated. The largest of these creatures resembled our common hog in the structure of the body and snout; the tail, however, was bushy, and the legs slender as those of the antelope. Its motion was exceedingly awkward and indecisive, and we never saw it attempt to run. We noticed also several animals very similar in appearance, but of a greater length of body, and covered with a black wool. There were a great variety of tame fowls running about, and these seemed to constitute the chief food of the natives. To our astonishment we saw black albatross among these birds in a state of entire domestication, going to sea periodically for food, but always returning to the village as a home, and using the southern shore in the vicinity as a place of incubation. There they were joined by their friends the pelicans as usual, but these latter never followed them to the dwellings of the savages. Among the other kinds of tame fowls were ducks, differing very little from the canvass-back of our own country, black gannets, and a large bird not unlike the buzzard in appearance, but not carnivorous. Of fish there seemed to be a great abundance. We saw, during our visit, a quantity of dried salmon, rock cod, blue dolphins, mackerel, blackfish, skate, conger eels, elephantfish, mullets, soles, parrotfish, leather-jackets, gurnards, hake, flounders, paracutas, and innumerable other varieties. We noticed, too, that most of them were similar to the fish about the group of Lord Auckland Islands, in a latitude as low as fifty-one degrees south. The Gallipago tortoise was also very plentiful. We saw but few wild animals, and none of a large size, or of a species with which we were familiar. One or two serpents of a formidable aspect crossed our path, but the natives paid them little attention, and we concluded that they were not venomous.\n\nAs we approached the village with Too-wit and his party, a vast crowd of the people rushed out to meet us, with loud shouts, among which we could only distinguish the everlasting Anamoo-moo! and Lama-Lama! We were much surprised at perceiving that, with one or two exceptions, these new comers were entirely naked, and skins being used only by the men of the canoes. All the weapons of the country seemed also to be in the possession of the latter, for there was no appearance of any among the villagers. There were a great many women and children, the former not altogether wanting in what might be termed personal beauty. They were straight, tall, and well formed, with a grace and freedom of carriage not to be found in civilized society. Their lips, however, like those of the men, were thick and clumsy, so that, even when laughing, the teeth were never disclosed. Their hair was of a finer texture than that of the males. Among these naked villagers there might have been ten or twelve who were clothed, like the party of Too-wit, in dresses of black skin, and armed with lances and heavy clubs. These appeared to have great influence among the rest, and were always addressed by the title Wampoo. These, too, were the tenants of the black skin palaces. That of Too-wit was situated in the centre of the village, and was much larger and somewhat better constructed than others of its kind. The tree which formed its support was cut off at a distance of twelve feet or thereabouts from the root, and there were several branches left just below the cut, these serving to extend the covering, and in this way prevent its flapping about the trunk. The covering, too, which consisted of four very large skins fastened together with wooden skewers, was secured at the bottom with pegs driven through it and into the ground. The floor was strewed with a quantity of dry leaves by way of carpet.\n\nTo this hut we were conducted with great solemnity, and as many of the natives crowded in after us as possible. Too-wit seated himself on the leaves, and made signs that we should follow his example. This we did, and presently found ourselves in a situation peculiarly uncomfortable, if not indeed critical. We were on the ground, twelve in number, with the savages, as many as forty, sitting on their hams so closely around us that, if any disturbance had arisen, we should have found it impossible to make use of our arms, or indeed to have risen to our feet. The pressure was not only inside the tent, but outside, where probably was every individual on the whole island, the crowd being prevented from trampling us to death only by the incessant exertions and vociferations of Too-wit. Our chief security lay, however, in the presence of Too-wit himself among us, and we resolved to stick by him closely, as the best chance of extricating ourselves from the dilemma, sacrificing him immediately upon the first appearance of hostile design.\n\nAfter some trouble a certain degree of quiet was restored, when the chief addressed us in a speech of great length, and very nearly resembling the one delivered in the canoes, with the exception that the Anamoo-moos! were now somewhat more strenuously insisted upon than the Lama-Lamas! We listened in profound silence until the conclusion of this harangue, when Captain Guy replied by assuring the chief of his eternal friendship and goodwill, concluding what he had to say be a present of several strings of blue beads and a knife. At the former the monarch, much to our surprise, turned up his nose with some expression of contempt, but the knife gave him the most unlimited satisfaction, and he immediately ordered dinner. This was handed into the tent over the heads of the attendants, and consisted of the palpitating entrails of a specials of unknown animal, probably one of the slim-legged hogs which we had observed in our approach to the village. Seeing us at a loss how to proceed, he began, by way of setting us an example, to devour yard after yard of the enticing food, until we could positively stand it no longer, and evinced such manifest symptoms of rebellion of stomach as inspired his majesty with a degree of astonishment only inferior to that brought about by the looking-glasses. We declined, however, partaking of the delicacies before us, and endeavoured to make him understand that we had no appetite whatever, having just finished a hearty dejeuner.\n\nWhen the monarch had made an end of his meal, we commenced a series of cross-questioning in every ingenious manner we could devise, with a view of discovering what were the chief productions of the country, and whether any of them might be turned to profit. At length he seemed to have some idea of our meaning, and offered to accompany us to a part of coast where he assured us the biche de mer (pointing to a specimen of that animal) was to be found in great abundance. We were glad of this early opportunity of escaping from the oppression of the crowd, and signified our eagerness to proceed. We now left the tent, and, accompanied by the whole population of the village, followed the chief to the southeastern extremity of the island, nor far from the bay where our vessel lay at anchor. We waited here for about an hour, until the four canoes were brought around by some of the savages to our station. the whole of our party then getting into one of them, we were paddled along the edge of the reef before mentioned, and of another still farther out, where we saw a far greater quantity of biche de mer than the oldest seamen among us had ever seen in those groups of the lower latitudes most celebrated for this article of commerce. We stayed near these reefs only long enough to satisfy ourselves that we could easily load a dozen vessels with the animal if necessary, when we were taken alongside the schooner, and parted with Too-wit, after obtaining from him a promise that he would bring us, in the course of twenty-four hours, as many of the canvass-back ducks and Gallipago tortoises as his canoes would hold. In the whole of this adventure we saw nothing in the demeanour of the natives calculated to create suspicion, with the single exception of the systematic manner in which their party was strengthened during our route from the schooner to the village." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "The chief was as good as his word, and we were soon plentifully sup. plied with fresh provisions. We found the tortoises as fine as we had ever seen, and the ducks surpassed our best species of wild fowl, being exceedingly tender, juicy, and well-flavoured. Besides these, the savages brought us, upon our making them comprehend our wishes, a vast quantity of brown celery and scurvy grass, with a canoe-load of fresh fish and some dried. The celery was a treat indeed, and the scurvy grass proved of incalculable benefit in restoring those of our men who had shown symptoms of disease. In a very short time we had not a single person on the sick-list. We had also plenty of other kinds of fresh provisions, among which may be mentioned a species of shellfish resembling the mussel in shape, but with the taste of an oyster. Shrimps, too, and prawns were abundant, and albatross and other birds' eggs with dark shells. We took in, too, a plentiful stock of the flesh of the hog which I have mentioned before. Most of the men found it a palpatable food, but I thought it fishy and otherwise disagreeable. In return for these good things we presented the natives with blue beads, brass trinkets, nails, knives, and pieces of red cloth, they being fully delighted in the exchange. We established a regular market on shore, just under the guns of the schooner, where our barterings were carried on with every appearance of good faith, and a degree of order which their conduct at the village of Klock-klock had not led us to expect from the savages.\n\nMatters went on thus very amicably for several days, during which parties of the natives were frequently on board the schooner, and parties of our men frequently on shore, making long excursions into the interior, and receiving no molestation whatever. Finding the ease with which the vessel might be loaded with biche de mer, owing to the friendly disposition of the islanders, and the readiness with which they would render us assistance in collecting it, Captain Guy resolved to enter into negotiations with Too-wit for the erection of suitable houses in which to cure the article, and for the services of himself and tribe in gathering as much as possible, while he himself took advantage of the fine weather to prosecute his voyage to the southward. Upon mentioning this project to the chief he seemed very willing to enter into an agreement. A bargain was accordingly struck, perfectly satisfactory to both parties, by which it was arranged that, after making the necessary preparations, such as laying off the proper grounds, erecting a portion of the buildings, and doing some other work in which the whole of our crew would be required, the schooner should proceed on her route, leaving three of her men on the island to superintend the fulfilment of the project, and instruct the natives in drying the biche de mer. In regard to terms, these were made to depend upon the exertions of the savages in our absence. They were to receive a stipulated quantity of blue beads, knives, red cloth, and so forth, for every certain number of piculs of the biche de mer which should be ready on our return.\n\nA description of the nature of this important article of commerce, and the method of preparing it, may prove of some interest to my readers, and I can find no more suitable place than this for introducing an account of it. The following comprehensive notice of the substance is taken from a modern history of a voyage to the South Seas.\n\n\"It is that mollusca from the Indian Seas which is known to commerce by the French name bouche de mer (a nice morsel from the sea). If I am not much mistaken, the celebrated Cuvier calls it gasteropeda pulmonifera. It is abundantly gathered in the coasts of the Pacific islands, and gathered especially for the Chinese market, where it commands a great price, perhaps as much as their much-talked-of edible birds' nests, which are properly made up of the gelatinous matter picked up by a species of swallow from the body of these molluscae. They have no shell, no legs, nor any prominent part, except an absorbing and an excretory, opposite organs; but, by their elastic wings, like caterpillars or worms, they creep in shallow waters, in which, when low, they can be seen by a kind of swallow, the sharp bill of which, inserted in the soft animal, draws a gummy and filamentous substance, which, by drying, can be wrought into the solid walls of their nest. Hence the name of gasteropeda pulmonifera.\n\n\"This mollusca is oblong, and of different sizes, from three to eighteen inches in length; and I have seen a few that were not less than two feet long. They were nearly round, a little flattish on one side, which lies next to the bottom of the sea; and they are from one to eight inches thick. They crawl up into shallow water at particular seasons of the year, probably for the purpose of gendering, as we often find them in pairs. It is when the sun has the most power on the water, rendering it tepid, that they approach the shore; and they often go up into places so shallow that, on the tide's receding, they are left dry, exposed to the beat of the sun. But they do not bring forth their young in shallow water, as we never see any of their progeny, and full-grown ones are always observed coming in from deep water. They feed principally on that class of zoophytes which produce the coral.\n\n\"The biche de mer is generally taken in three or four feet of water; after which they are brought on shore, and split at one end with a knife, the incision being one inch or more, according to the size of the mollusca. Through this opening the entrails are forced out by pressure, and they are much like those of any other small tenant of the deep. The article is then washed, and afterward boiled to a certain degree, which must not be too much or too little. They are then buried in the ground for four hours, then boiled again for a short time, after which they are dried, either by the fire or the sun. Those cured by the sun are worth the most; but where one picul (133 1/3 lbs.) can be cured that way, I can cure thirty piculs by the fire. When once properly cured, they can be kept in a dry place for two or three years without any risk; but they should be examined once in every few months, say four times a year, to see if any dampness is likely to affect them.\n\n\"The Chinese, as before stated, consider biche de mer a very great luxury, believing that it wonderfully strengthens and nourishes the system, and renews the exhausted system of the immoderate voluptuary. The first quality commands a high price in Canton, being worth ninety dollars a picul; the second quality, seventy-five dollars; the third, fifty dollars; the fourth, thirty dollars; the fifth, twenty dollars; the sixth, twelve dollars; the seventh, eight dollars; and the eighth, four dollars; small cargoes, however, will often bring more in Manilla, Singapore, and Batavia.\"\n\nAn agreement having been thus entered into, we proceeded immediately to land everything necessary for preparing the buildings and clearing the ground. A large flat space near the eastern shore of the bay was selected, where there was plenty of both wood and water, and within a convenient distance of the principal reefs on which the biche de mer was to be procured. We now all set to work in good earnest, and soon, to the great astonishment of the savages, had felled a sufficient number of trees for our purpose, getting them quickly in order for the framework of the houses, which in two or three days were so far under way that we could safely trust the rest of the work to the three men whom we intended to leave behind. These I believe), who volunteered their services in this respect.\n\nBy the last of the month we had everything in readiness for departure. We had agreed, however, to pay a formal visit of leave-taking to the village, and Too-wit insisted so pertinaciously upon our keeping the promise that we did not think it advisable to run the risk of offending him by a final refusal. I believe that not one of us had at this time the slightest suspicion of the good faith of the savages. They had uniformly behaved with the greatest decorum, aiding us with alacrity in our work, offering us their commodities, frequently without price, and never, in any instance, pilfering a single article, although the high value they set upon the goods we had with us was evident by the extravagant demonstrations of joy always manifested upon our making them a present. The women especially were most obliging in every respect, and, upon the whole, we should have been the most suspicious of human beings had we entertained a single thought of perfidy on the part of a people who treated us so well. A very short while sufficed to prove that this apparent kindness of disposition was only the result of a deeply laid plan for our destruction, and that the islanders for whom we entertained such inordinate feelings of esteem, were among the most barbarous, subtle, and bloodthirsty wretches that ever contaminated the face of the globe.\n\nIt was on the first of February that we went on shore for the purpose of visiting the village. Although, as said before, we entertained not the slightest suspicion, still no proper precaution was neglected. Six men were left in the schooner, with instructions to permit none of the savages to approach the vessel during our absence, under any pretence whatever, and to remain constantly on deck. The boarding-nettings were up, the guns double-shotted with grape and canister, and the swivels loaded with canisters of musket-balls. She lay, with her anchor apeak, about a mile from the shore, and no canoe could approach her in any direction without being distinctly seen and exposed to the full fire of our swivels immediately.\n\nThe six men being left on board, our shore-party consisted of thirty. two persons in all. We were armed to the teeth, having with us muskets, pistols, and cutlasses; besides, each had a long kind of seaman's knife, somewhat resembling the bowie knife now so much used throughout our western and southern country. A hundred of the black skin warriors met us at the landing for the purpose of accompanying us on our way. We noticed, however, with some surprise, that they were now entirely without arms; and, upon questioning Too-wit in relation to this circumstance, he merely answered that Mattee non we pa pa si \u2014 meaning that there was no need of arms where all were brothers. We took this in good part, and proceeded.\n\nWe had passed the spring and rivulet of which I before spoke, and were now entering upon a narrow gorge leading through the chain of soapstone hills among which the village was situated. This gorge was very rocky and uneven, so much so that it was with no little difficulty we scrambled through it on our first visit to Klock-klock. The whole length of the ravine might have been a mile and a half, or probably two miles. It wound in every possible direction through the hills (having apparently formed, at some remote period, the bed of a torrent), in no instance proceeding more than twenty yards without an abrupt turn. The sides of this dell would have averaged, I am sure, seventy or eighty feet in perpendicular altitude throughout the whole of their extent, and in some portions they arose to an astonishing height, overshadowing the pass so completely that but little of the light of day could penetrate. The general width was about forty feet, and occasionally it diminished so as not to allow the passage of more than five or six persons abreast. In short, there could be no place in the world better adapted for the consummation of an ambuscade, and it was no more than natural that we should look carefully to our arms as we entered upon it. When I now think of our egregious folly, the chief subject of astonishment seems to be, that we should have ever ventured, under any circumstances, so completely into the power of unknown savages as to permit them to march both before and behind us in our progress through this ravine. Yet such was the order we blindly took up, trusting foolishly to the force of our party, the unarmed condition of Too-wit and his men, the certain efficacy of our firearms (whose effect was yet a secret to the natives), and, more than all, to the long-sustained pretension of friendship kept up by these infamous wretches. Five or six of them went on before, as if to lead the way, ostentatiously busying themselves in removing the larger stones and rubbish from the path. Next came our own party. We walked closely together, taking care only to prevent separation. Behind followed the main body of the savages, observing unusual order and decorum.\n\nDirk Peters, a man named Wilson Allen, and myself were on the right of our companions, examining, as we went along, the singular stratification of the precipice which overhung us. A fissure in the soft rock attracted our attention. It was about wide enough for one person to enter without squeezing, and extended back into the hill some eighteen or twenty feet in a straight course, sloping afterward to the left. The height of the opening, is far as we could see into it from the main gorge, was perhaps sixty or seventy feet. There were one or two stunted shrubs growing from the crevices, bearing a species of filbert which I felt some curiosity to examine, and pushed in briskly for that purpose, gathering five or six of the nuts at a grasp, and then hastily retreating. As I turned, I found that Peters and Allen had followed me. I desired them to go back, as there was not room for two persons to pass, saying they should have some of my nuts. They accordingly turned, and were scrambling back, Allen being close to the mouth of the fissure, when I was suddenly aware of a concussion resembling nothing I had ever before experienced, and which impressed me with a vague conception, if indeed I then thought of anything, that the whole foundations of the solid globe were suddenly rent asunder, and that the day of universal dissolution was at hand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "As soon as I could collect my scattered senses, I found myself nearly suffocated, and grovelling in utter darkness among a quantity of loose earth, which was also falling upon me heavily in every direction, threatening to bury me entirely. Horribly alarmed at this idea, I struggled to gain my feet, and at last succeeded. I then remained motionless for some moments, endeavouring to conceive what had happened to me, and where I was. Presently I heard a deep groan just at my ear, and afterward the smothered voice of Peters calling to me for aid in the name of God. I scrambled one or two paces forward, when I fell directly over the head and shoulders of my companion, who, I soon discovered, was buried in a loose mass of earth as far as his middle, and struggling desperately to free himself from the pressure. I tore the dirt from around him with all the energy I could command, and at length succeeded in getting him out.\n\nAs soon as we sufficiently recovered from our fright and surprise to be capable of conversing rationally, we both came to the conclusion that the walls of the fissure in which we had ventured had, by some convulsion of nature, or probably from their own weight, caved in overhead, and that we were consequently lost for ever, being thus entombed alive. For a long time we gave up supinely to the most intense agony and despair, such as cannot be adequately imagined by those who have never been in a similar position. I firmly believed that no incident ever occurring in the course of human events is more adapted to inspire the supremeness of mental and bodily distress than a case like our own, of living inhumation. The blackness of darkness which envelops the victim, the terrific oppression of lungs, the stifling fumes from the damp earth, unite with the ghastly considerations that we are beyond the remotest confines of hope, and that such is the allotted portion of the dead, to carry into the human heart a degree of appalling awe and horror not to be tolerated \u2014 never to be conceived.\n\nAt length Peters proposed that we should endeavour to ascertain precisely the extent of our calamity, and grope about our prison; it being barely possible, he observed, that some opening might yet be left us for escape. I caught eagerly at this hope, and, arousing myself to exertion, attempted to force my way through the loose earth. Hardly had I advanced a single step before a glimmer of light became perceptible, enough to convince me that, at all events, we should not immediately perish for want of air. We now took some degree of heart, and encouraged each other to hope for the best. Having scrambled over a bank of rubbish which impeded our farther progress in the direction of the light, we found less difficulty in advancing and also experienced some relief from the excessive oppression of lungs which had tormented us. Presently we were enabled to obtain a glimpse of the objects around, and discovered that we were near the extremity of the straight portion of the fissure, where it made a turn to the left. A few struggles more, and we reached the bend, when to our inexpressible joy, there appeared a long seam or crack extending upward a vast distance, generally at an angle of about forty-five degrees, although sometimes much more precipitous. We could not see through the whole extent of this opening; but, as a good deal of light came down it, we had little doubt of finding at the top of it (if we could by any means reach the top) a clear passage into the open air.\n\nI now called to mind that three of us had entered the fissure from the main gorge, and that our companion, Allen, was still missing; we determined at once to retrace our steps and look for him. After a long search, and much danger from the farther caving in of the earth above us, Peters at length cried out to me that he had hold of our companion's foot, and that his whole body was deeply buried beneath the rubbish beyond the possibility of extricating him. I soon found that what he said was too true, and that, of course, life had been long extinct. With sorrowful hearts, therefore, we left the corpse to its fate, and again made our way to the bend.\n\nThe breadth of the seam was barely sufficient to admit us, and, after one or two ineffectual efforts at getting up, we began once more to despair. I have before said that the chain of hills through which ran the main gorge was composed of a species of soft rock resembling soap. stone. The sides of the cleft we were now attempting to ascend were of the same material, and so excessively slippery, being wet, that we could get but little foothold upon them even in their least precipitous parts; in some places, where the ascent was nearly perpendicular, the difficulty was, of course, much aggravated; and, indeed, for some time we thought insurmountable. We took courage, however, from despair, and what, by dint of cutting steps in the soft stone with our bowie knives, and swinging at the risk of our lives, to small projecting points of a harder species of slaty rock which now and then protruded from the general mass, we at length reached a natural platform, from which was perceptible a patch of blue sky, at the extremity of a thickly-wooded ravine. Looking back now, with somewhat more leisure, at the passage through which we had thus far proceeded, we clearly saw from the appearance of its sides, that it was of late formation, and we concluded that the concussion, whatever it was, which had so unexpectedly overwhelmed us, had also, at the same moment, laid open this path for escape. Being quite exhausted with exertion, and indeed, so weak that we were scarcely able to stand or articulate, Peters now proposed that we should endeavour to bring our companions to the rescue by firing the pistols which still remained in our girdles \u2014 the muskets as well as cutlasses had been lost among the loose earth at the bottom of the chasm. Subsequent events proved that, had we fired, we should have sorely repented it, but luckily a half suspicion of foul play had by this time arisen in my mind, and we forbore to let the savages know of our whereabouts.\n\nAfter having reposed for about an hour, we pushed on slowly up the ravine, and had gone no great way before we heard a succession of tremendous yells. At length we reached what might be called the surface of the ground; for our path hitherto, since leaving the platform, had lain beneath an archway of high rock and foliage, at a vast distance overhead. With great caution we stole to a narrow opening, through which we had a clear sight of the surrounding country, when the whole dreadful secret of the concussion broke upon us in one moment and at one view.\n\nThe spot from which we looked was not far from the summit of the highest peak in the range of the soapstone hills. The gorge in which our party of thirty-two had entered ran within fifty feet to the left of us. But, for at least one hundred yards, the channel or bed of this gorge was entirely filled up with the chaotic ruins of more than a million tons of earth and stone that had been artificially tumbled within it. The means by which the vast mass had been precipitated were not more simple than evident, for sure traces of the murderous work were yet remaining. In several spots along the top of the eastern side of the gorge (we were now on the western) might be seen stakes of wood driven into the earth. In these spots the earth had not given way, but throughout the whole extent of the face of the precipice from which the mass had fallen, it was clear, from marks left in the soil resembling those made by the drill of the rock blaster, that stakes similar to those we saw standing had been inserted, at not more than a yard apart, for the length of perhaps three hundred feet, and ranging at about ten feet back from the edge of the gulf. Strong cords of grape vine were attached to the stakes still remaining on the hill, and it was evident that such cords had also been attached to each of the other stakes. I have already spoken of the singular stratification of these soapstone hills; and the description just given of the narrow and deep fissure through which we effected our escape from inhumation will afford a further conception of its nature. This was such that almost every natural convulsion would be sure to split the soil into perpendicular layers or ridges running parallel with one another, and a very moderate exertion of art would be sufficient for effecting the same purpose. Of this stratification the savages had availed themselves to accomplish their treacherous ends. There can be no doubt that, by the continuous line of stakes, a partial rupture of the soil had been brought about probably to the depth of one or two feet, when by means of a savage pulling at the end of each of the cords (these cords being attached to the tops of the stakes, and extending back from the edge of the cliff), a vast leverage power was obtained, capable of hurling the whole face of the hill, upon a given signal, into the bosom of the abyss below. The fate of our poor companions was no longer a matter of uncertainty. We alone had escaped from the tempest of that overwhelming destruction. We were the only living white men upon the island." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Our situation, as it now appeared, was scarcely less dreadful than when we had conceived ourselves entombed forever. We saw before us no prospect but that of being put to death by the savages, or of dragging out a miserable existence in captivity among them. We might, to be sure, conceal ourselves for a time from their observation among the fastnesses of the hills, and, as a final resort, in the chasm from which we had just issued; but we must either perish in the long polar winter through cold and famine, or be ultimately discovered in our efforts to obtain relief.\n\nThe whole country around us seemed to be swarming with savages, crowds of whom, we now perceived, had come over from the islands to the southward on flat rafts, doubtless with a view of lending their aid in the capture and plunder of the Jane. The vessel still lay calmly at anchor in the bay, those on board being apparently quite unconscious of any danger awaiting them. How we longed at that moment to be with them! either to aid in effecting their escape, or to perish with them in attempting a defence. We saw no chance even of warning them of their danger without bringing immediate destruction upon our own heads, with but a remote hope of benefit to them. A pistol fired might suffice to apprise them that something wrong had occurred; but the report could not possibly inform them that their only prospect of safety lay in getting out of the harbour forthwith \u2014 nor tell them no principles of honour now bound them to remain, that their companions were no longer among the living. Upon hearing the discharge they could not be more thoroughly prepared to meet the foe, who were now getting ready to attack, than they already were, and always had been. No good, therefore, and infinite harm, would result from our firing, and after mature deliberation, we forbore.\n\nOur next thought was to attempt to rush toward the vessel, to seize one of the four canoes which lay at the head of the bay, and endeavour to force a passage on board. But the utter impossibility of succeeding in this desperate task soon became evident. The country, as I said before, was literally swarming with the natives, skulking among the bushes and recesses of the hills, so as not to be observed from the schooner. In our immediate vicinity especially, and blockading the sole path by which we could hope to attain the shore at the proper point were stationed the whole party of the black skin warriors, with Too-wit at their head, and apparently only waiting for some re-enforcement to commence his onset upon the Jane. The canoes, too, which lay at the head of the bay, were manned with savages, unarmed, it is true, but who undoubtedly had arms within reach. We were forced, therefore, however unwillingly, to remain in our place of concealment, mere spectators of the conflict which presently ensued.\n\nIn about half an hour we saw some sixty or seventy rafts, or flatboats, with outriggers, filled with savages, and coming round the southern bight of the harbor. They appeared to have no arms except short clubs, and stones which lay in the bottom of the rafts. Immediately afterward another detachment, still larger, appeared in an opposite direction, and with similar weapons. The four canoes, too, were now quickly filled with natives, starting up from the bushes at the head of the bay, and put off swiftly to join the other parties. Thus, in less time than I have taken to tell it, and as if by magic, the Jane saw herself surrounded by an immense multitude of desperadoes evidently bent upon capturing her at all hazards.\n\nThat they would succeed in so doing could not be doubted for an instant. The six men left in the vessel, however resolutely they might engage in her defence, were altogether unequal to the proper management of the guns, or in any manner to sustain a contest at such odds. I could hardly imagine that they would make resistance at all, but in this was deceived; for presently I saw them get springs upon the cable, and bring the vessel's starboard broadside to bear upon the canoes, which by this time were within pistol range, the rafts being nearly a quarter of a mile to windward. Owing to some cause unknown, but most probably to the agitation of our poor friends at seeing themselves in so hopeless a situation, the discharge was an entire failure. Not a canoe was hit or a single savage injured, the shots striking short and ricocheting over their heads. The only effect produced upon them was astonishment at the unexpected report and smoke, which was so excessive that for some moments I almost thought they would abandon their design entirely, and return to the shore. And this they would most likely have done had our men followed up their broadside by a discharge of small arms, in which, as the canoes were now so near at hand, they could not have failed in doing some execution, sufficient, at least, to deter this party from a farther advance, until they could have given the rafts also a broadside. But, in place of this, they left the canoe party to recover from their panic, and, by looking about them, to see that no injury had been sustained, while they flew to the larboard to get ready for the rafts.\n\nThe discharge to larboard produced the most terrible effect. The star and double-headed shot of the large guns cut seven or eight of the rafts completely asunder, and killed, perhaps, thirty or forty of the savages outright, while a hundred of them, at least, were thrown into the water, the most of them dreadfully wounded. The remainder, frightened out of their senses, commenced at once a precipitate retreat, not even waiting to pick up their maimed companions, who were swimming about in every direction, screaming and yelling for aid. This great success, however, came too late for the salvation of our devoted people. The canoe party were already on board the schooner to the number of more than a hundred and fifty, the most of them having succeeded in scrambling up the chains and over the boarding-netting even before the matches had been applied to the larboard guns. Nothing now could withstand their brute rage. Our men were borne down at once, overwhelmed, trodden under foot, and absolutely torn to pieces in an instant.\n\nSeeing this, the savages on the rafts got the better of their fears, and came up in shoals to the plunder. In five minutes the Jane was a pitiable scene indeed of havoc and tumultuous outrage. The decks were split open and ripped up; the cordage, sails, and everything movable on deck demolished as if by magic, while, by dint of pushing at the stern, towing with the canoes, and hauling at the sides, as they swam in thousands around the vessel, the wretches finally forced her on shore (the cable having been slipped), and delivered her over to the good offices of Too-wit, who, during the whole of the engagement, had maintained, like a skilful general, his post of security and reconnaissance among the hills, but, now that the victory was completed to his satisfaction, condescended to scamper down with his warriors of the black skin, and become a partaker in the spoils.\n\nToo-wit's descent left us at liberty to quit our hiding place and reconnoitre the hill in the vicinity of the chasm. At about fifty yards from the mouth of it we saw a small spring of water, at which we slaked the burning thirst that now consumed us. Not far from the spring we discovered several of the filbert-bushes which I mentioned before. Upon tasting the nuts we found them palatable, and very nearly resembling in flavour the common English filbert. We collected our hats full immediately, deposited them within the ravine, and returned for more. While we were busily employed in gathering these, a rustling in the bushes alarmed us, and we were upon the point of stealing back to our covert, when a large black bird of the bittern species strugglingly and slowly arose above the shrubs. I was so much startled that I could do nothing, but Peters had sufficient presence of mind to run up to it before it could make its escape, and seize it by the neck. Its struggles and screams were tremendous, and we had thoughts of letting it go, lest the noise should alarm some of the savages who might be still lurking in the neighbourhood. A stab with a bowie knife, however, at length brought it to the ground, and we dragged it into the ravine, congratulating ourselves that, at all events, we had thus obtained a supply of food enough to last us for a week.\n\nWe now went out again to look about us, and ventured a considerable distance down the southern declivity of the hill, but met with nothing else which could serve us for food. We therefore collected a quantity of dry wood and returned, seeing one or two large parties of the natives on their way to the village, laden with the plunder of the vessel, and who, we were apprehensive, might discover us in passing beneath the hill.\n\nOur next care was to render our place of concealment as secure as possible, and with this object, we arranged some brushwood over the aperture which I have before spoken of as the one through which we saw the patch of blue sky, on reaching the platform from the interior of the chasm. We left only a very small opening just wide enough to admit of our seeing the, bay, without the risk of being discovered from below. Having done this, we congratulated ourselves upon the security of the position; for we were now completely excluded from observation, as long as we chose to remain within the ravine itself, and not venture out upon the hill, We could perceive no traces of the savages having ever been within this hollow; but, indeed, when we came to reflect upon the probability that the fissure through which we attained it had been only just now created by the fall of the cliff opposite, and that no other way of attaining it could be perceived, we were not so much rejoiced at the thought of being secure from molestation as fearful lest there should be absolutely no means left us for descent. We resolved to explore the summit of the hill thoroughly, when a good opportunity should offer. In the meantime we watched the motions of the savages through our loophole.\n\nThey had already made a complete wreck of the vessel, and were now preparing to set her on fire. In a little while we saw the smoke ascending in huge volumes from her main hatchway, and, shortly afterward, a dense mass of flame burst up from the forecastle. The rigging, masts and what remained of the sails caught immediately, and the fire spread rapidly along the decks. Still a great many of the savages retained their stations about her, hammering with large stones, axes, and cannon balls at the bolts and other iron and copper work. On the beach, and in canoes and rafts, there were not less, altogether, in the immediate vicinity of the schooner, than ten thousand natives, besides the shoals of them who, laden with booty, were making their way inland and over to the neighbouring islands. We now anticipated a catastrophe, and were not disappointed. First of all there came a smart shock (which we felt as distinctly where we were as if we had been slightly galvanized), but unattended with any visible signs of an explosion. The savages were evidently startled, and paused for an instant from their labours and yellings. They were upon the point of recommencing, when suddenly a mass of smoke puffed up from the decks, resembling a black and heavy thundercloud \u2014 then, as if from its bowels, arose a tall stream of vivid fire to the height, apparently, of a quarter of a mile \u2014 then there came a sudden circular expansion of the flame \u2014 then the whole atmosphere was magically crowded, in a single instant, with a wild chaos of wood, and metal, and human limbs-and, lastly, came the concussion in its fullest fury, which hurled us impetuously from our feet, while the hills echoed and re-echoed the tumult, and a dense shower of the minutest fragments of the ruins tumbled headlong in every direction around us.\n\nThe havoc among the savages far exceeded our utmost expectation, and they had now, indeed, reaped the full and perfect fruits of their treachery. Perhaps a thousand perished by the explosion, while at least an equal number were desperately mangled. The whole surface of the bay was literally strewn with the struggling and drowning wretches, and on shore matters were even worse. They seemed utterly appalled by the suddenness and completeness of their discomfiture, and made no efforts at assisting one another. At length we observed a total change in their demeanour. From absolute stupor, they appeared to be, all at once, aroused to the highest pitch of excitement, and rushed wildly about, going to and from a certain point on the beach, with the strangest expressions of mingled horror, rage, and intense curiosity depicted on their countenances, and shouting, at the top of their voices, \"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\"\n\nPresently we saw a large body go off into the hills, whence they returned in a short time, carrying stakes of wood. These they brought to the station where the crowd was the thickest, which now separated so as to afford us a view of the object of all this excitement. We perceived something white lying upon the ground, but could not immediately make out what it was. At length we saw that it was the carcass of the strange animal with the scarlet teeth and claws which the schooner had picked up at sea on the eighteenth of January. Captain Guy had had the body preserved for the purpose of stuffing the skin and taking it to England. I remember he had given some directions about it just before our making the island, and it had been brought into the cabin and stowed away in one of the lockers. It had now been thrown on shore by the explosion; but why it had occasioned so much concern among the savages was more than we could comprehend. Although they crowded around the carcass at a little distance, none of them seemed willing to approach it closely. By-and-by the men with the stakes drove them in a circle around it, and no sooner was this arrangement completed, than the whole of the vast assemblage rushed into the interior of the island, with loud screams of \"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "During the six or seven days immediately following we remained in our hiding-place upon the hill, going out only occasionally, and then with the greatest precaution, for water and filberts. We had made a kind of penthouse on the platform, furnishing it with a bed of dry leaves, and placing in it three large flat stones, which served us for both fireplace and table. We kindled a fire without difficulty by rubbing two pieces of dry wood together, the one soft, the other hard. The bird we had taken in such good season proved excellent eating, although somewhat tough. It was not an oceanic fowl, but a species of bittern, with jet black and grizzly plumage, and diminutive wings in proportion to its bulk. We afterward saw three of the same kind in the vicinity of the ravine, apparently seeking for the one we had captured; but, as they never alighted, we had no opportunity of catching them.\n\nAs long as this fowl lasted we suffered nothing from our situation, but it was now entirely consumed, and it became absolutely necessary that we should look out for provision. The filberts would not satisfy the cravings of hunger, afflicting us, too, with severe gripings of the bowels, and, if freely indulged in, with violent headache. We had seen several large tortoises near the seashore to the eastward of the hill, and perceived they might be easily taken, if we could get at them without the observation of the natives. It was resolved, therefore, to make an attempt at descending.\n\nWe commenced by going down the southern declivity, which seemed to offer the fewest difficulties, but had not proceeded a hundred yards before (as we had anticipated from appearances on the hilltop) our progress was entirely arrested by a branch of the gorge in which our companions had perished. We now passed along the edge of this for about a quarter of a mile, when we were again stopped by a precipice of immense depth, and, not being able to make our way along the brink of it, we were forced to retrace our steps by the main ravine.\n\nWe now pushed over to the eastward, but with precisely similar fortune. After an hour's scramble, at the risk of breaking our necks, we discovered that we had merely descended into a vast pit of black granite, with fine dust at the bottom, and whence the only egress was by the rugged path in which we had come down. Toiling again up this path, we now tried the northern edge of the hill. Here we were obliged to use the greatest possible caution in our manoeuvres, as the least indiscretion would expose us to the full view of the savages in the village. We crawled along, therefore, on our hands and knees, and, occasionally, were even forced to throw ourselves at full length, dragging our bodies along by means of the shrubbery. In this careful manner we had proceeded but a little way, when we arrived at a chasm far deeper than any we had yet seen, and leading directly into the main gorge. Thus our fears were fully confirmed, and we found ourselves cut off entirely from access to the world below. Thoroughly exhausted by our exertions, we made the best of our way back to the platform, and throwing ourselves upon the bed of leaves, slept sweetly and soundly for some hours.\n\nFor several days after this fruitless search we were occupied in exploring every part of the summit of the hill, in order to inform ourselves of its actual resources. We found that it would afford us no food, with the exception of the unwholesome filberts, and a rank species of scurvy grass, which grew in a little patch of not more than four rods square, and would be soon exhausted. On the fifteenth of February, as near as I can remember, there was not a blade of this left, and the nuts were growing scarce; our situation, therefore, could hardly be more lamentable. On the sixteenth we again went round the walls of our prison, in hope of finding some avenue of escape; but to no purpose. We also descended the chasm in which we had been overwhelmed, with the faint expectation of discovering, through this channel, some opening to the main ravine. Here, too, we were disappointed, although we found and brought up with us a musket.\n\nOn the seventeenth we set out with the determination of examining more thoroughly the chasm of black granite into which we had made our way in the first search. We remembered that one of the fissures in the sides of this pit had been but partially looked into, and we were anxious to explore it, although with no expectation of discovering here any opening.\n\nWe found no great difficulty in reaching the bottom of the hollow as before, and were now sufficiently calm to survey it with some attention. It was, indeed, one of the most singular-looking places imaginable, and we could scarcely bring ourselves to believe it altogether the work of nature. The pit, from its eastern to its western extremity, was about five hundred yards in length, when all its windings were threaded; the distance from east to west in a straight line not being more (I should suppose, having no means of accurate examination) than forty or fifty yards. Upon first descending into the chasm, that is to say, for a hundred feet downward from the summit of the hill, the sides of the abyss bore little resemblance to each other, and, apparently, had at no time been connected, the one surface being of the soapstone, and the other of marl, granulated with some metallic matter. The average breadth or interval between the two cliffs was probably here sixty feet, but there seemed to be no regularity of formation. Passing down, however, beyond the limit spoken of, the interval rapidly contracted, and the sides began to run parallel, although, for some distance farther, they were still dissimilar in their material and form of surface. Upon arriving within fifty feet of the bottom, a perfect regularity commenced. The sides were now entirely uniform in substance, in colour, and in lateral direction, the material being a very black and shining granite, and the distance between the two sides, at all points facing each other, exactly twenty yards. The precise formation of the chasm will be best understood by means of a delineation taken upon the spot; for I had luckily with me a pocketbook and pencil, which I preserved with great care through a long series of subsequent adventure, and to which I am indebted for memoranda of many subjects which would otherwise have been crowded from my remembrance.\n\nThis figure (see fig. 1) gives the general outlines of the chasm, without the minor cavities in the sides, of which there were several, each cavity having a corresponding protuberance opposite. The bottom of the gulf was covered to the depth of three or four inches with a powder almost impalpable, beneath which we found a continuation of the black granite. To the right, at the lower extremity, will be noticed the appearance of a small opening; this is the fissure alluded to above, and to examine which more minutely than before was the object of our second visit. We now pushed into it with vigor, cutting away a quantity of brambles which impeded us, and removing a vast heap of sharp flints somewhat resembling arrowheads in shape. We were encouraged to persevere, however, by perceiving some little light proceeding from the farther end. We at length squeezed our way for about thirty feet, and found that the aperture was a low and regularly formed arch, having a bottom of the same impalpable powder as that in the main chasm. A strong light now broke upon us, and, turning a short bend, we found ourselves in another lofty chamber, similar to the one we had left in every respect but longitudinal form. Its general figure is here given. (See fig. 2.)\n\nThe total length of this chasm, commencing at the opening a and proceeding round the curve b to the extremity d, is five hundred and fifty yards. At c we discovered a small aperture similar to the one through which we had issued from the other chasm, and this was choked up in the same manner with brambles and a quantity of the white arrowhead flints. We forced our way through it, finding it about forty feet long, and emerged into a third chasm. This, too, was precisely like the first, except in its longitudinal shape, which was thus. (See fig. 3.)\n\nWe found the entire length of the third chasm three hundred and twenty yards. At the point a was an opening about six feet wide, and extending fifteen feet into the rock, where it terminated in a bed of marl, there being no other chasm beyond, as we had expected. We were about leaving this fissure, into which very little light was admitted, when Peters called my attention to a range of singular-looking indentures in the surface of the marl forming the termination of the cul-de-sac. With a very slight exertion of the imagination, the left, or most northern of these indentures might have been taken for the intentional, although rude, representation of a human figure standing erect, with outstretched arm. The rest of them bore also some little resemblance to alphabetical characters, and Peters was willing, at all events, to adopt the idle opinion that they were really such. I convinced him of his error, finally, by directing his attention to the floor of the fissure, where, among the powder, we picked up, piece by piece, several large flakes of the marl, which had evidently been broken off by some convulsion from the surface where the indentures were found, and which had projecting points exactly fitting the indentures; thus proving them to have been the work of nature. Fig. 5 presents an accurate copy of the whole.\n\nAfter satisfying ourselves that these singular caverns afforded us no means of escape from our prison, we made our way back, dejected and dispirited, to the summit of the hill. Nothing worth mentioning occurred during the next twenty-four hours, except that, in examining the ground to the eastward of the third chasm, we found two triangular holes of great depth, and also with black granite sides. Into these holes we did not think it worth while to attempt descending, as they had the appearance of mere natural wells, without outlet. They were each about twenty yards in circumference, and their shape, as well as relative position in regard to the third chasm, is shown in figure 4." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "On the twentieth of the month, finding it altogether impossible to subsist any longer upon the filberts, the use of which occasioned us the most excruciating torment, we resolved to make a desperate attempt at descending the southern declivity of the hill. The face of the precipice was here of the softest species of soapstone, although nearly perpendicular throughout its whole extent (a depth of a hundred and fifty feet at the least), and in many places even overarching. After long search we discovered a narrow ledge about twenty feet below the brink of the gulf; upon this Peters contrived to leap, with what assistance I could render him by means of our pocket-handkerchiefs tied together. With somewhat more difficulty I also got down; and we then saw the possibility of descending the whole way by the process in which we had clambered up from the chasm when we had been buried by the fall of the hill \u2014 that is, by cutting steps in the face of the soapstone with our knives. The extreme hazard of the attempt can scarcely be conceived; but, as there was no other resource, we determined to undertake it.\n\nUpon the ledge where we stood there grew some filbert bushes; and to one of these we made fast an end of our rope of handkerchiefs. The other end being tied round Peters' waist, I lowered him down over the edge of the precipice until the handkerchiefs were stretched tight. He now proceeded to dig a deep hole in the soapstone (as far in as eight or ten inches), sloping away the rock above to the height of a foot, or thereabout, so as to allow of his driving, with the butt of a pistol, a tolerably strong peg into the levelled surface. I then drew him up for about four feet when he made a hole similar to the one below, driving in a peg as before and having thus a resting place for both feet and hands. I now unfastened the handkerchiefs from the bush, throwing him the end, which he tied to the peg in the uppermost hole, letting himself down gently to a station about three feet lower than he had yet been \u2014 that is, to the full extent of the handkerchiefs. Here he dug another hole, and drove another peg. He then drew himself up, so as to rest his feet in the hole just cut, taking hold with his hands upon the peg in the one above. It was now necessary to untie the handkerchiefs from the topmost peg, with the view of fastening them to the second; and here he found that an error had been committed in cutting the holes at so great a distance apart. However, after one or two unsuccessful and dangerous attempts at reaching the knot (having to hold on with his left hand while he laboured to undo the fastening with his right), he at length cut the string, leaving six inches of it affixed to the peg. Tying the handkerchiefs now to the second peg, he descended to a station below the third, taking care not to go too far down. By these means (means which I should never have conceived of myself, and for which we were indebted altogether to Peters' ingenuity and resolution) my companion finally succeeded, with the occasional aid of projections in the cliff, in reaching the bottom without accident.\n\nIt was some time before I could summon sufficient resolution to follow him; but I did at length attempt it. Peters had taken off his shirt before descending, and this, with my own, formed the rope necessary for the adventure. After throwing down the musket found in the chasm, I fastened this rope to the bushes, and let myself down rapidly, striving, by the vigour of my movements, to banish the trepidation which I could overcome in no other manner. This answered sufficiently well for the first four or five steps; but presently I found my imagination growing terribly excited by thoughts of the vast depths yet to be descended, and the precarious nature of the pegs and soapstone holes which were my only support. It was in vain I endeavoured to banish these reflections, and to keep my eyes steadily bent upon the flat surface of the cliff before me. The more earnestly I struggled not to think, the more intensely vivid became my conceptions, and the more horribly distinct. At length arrived that crisis of fancy, so fearful in all similar cases, the crisis in which we begin to anticipate the feelings with which we shall fall \u2014 to picture to ourselves the sickness, and dizziness, and the last struggle, and the half swoon, and the final bitterness of the rushing and headlong descent. And now I found these fancies creating their own realities, and all imagined horrors crowding upon me in fact. I felt my knees strike violently together, while my fingers were gradually but certainly relaxing their grasp. There was a ringing in my ears, and I said, \"This is my knell of death!\" And now I was consumed with the irrepressible desire of looking below. I could not, I would not, confine my glances to the cliff; and, with a wild, indefinable emotion, half of horror, half of a relieved oppression, I threw my vision far down into the abyss. For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape wandered, like a shadow, through my mind \u2014 in the next my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable. I let go at once my grasp upon the and, turning half round from the precipice, remained tottering for an instant against its naked face. But now there came a spinning of the brain; a shrill-sounding and phantom voice screamed within my ears; a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sunk down with a bursting heart, and plunged within its arms.\n\nI had swooned, and Peters had caught me as I fell. He had observed my proceedings from his station at the bottom of the cliff; and perceiving my imminent danger, had endeavoured to inspire me with courage by every suggestion he could devise; although my confusion of mind had been so great as to prevent my hearing what he said, or being conscious that he had even spoken to me at all. At length, seeing me totter, he hastened to ascend to my rescue, and arrived just in time for my preservation. Had I fallen with my full weight, the rope of linen would inevitably have snapped, and I should have been precipitated into the abyss; as it was, he contrived to let me down gently, so as to remain suspended without danger until animation returned. This was in about fifteen minutes. On recovery, my trepidation had entirely vanished; I felt a new being, and, with some little further aid from my companion, reached the bottom also in safety.\n\nWe now found ourselves not far from the ravine which had proved the tomb of our friends, and to the southward of the spot where the hill had fallen. The place was one of singular wildness, and its aspect brought to my mind the descriptions given by travellers of those dreary regions marking the site of degraded Babylon. Not to speak of the ruins of the disrupted cliff, which formed a chaotic barrier in the vista to the northward, the surface of the ground in every other direction was strewn with huge tumuli, apparently the wreck of some gigantic structures of art; although, in detail, no semblance of art could be detected. Scoria were abundant, and large shapeless blocks of the black granite, intermingled with others of marl, and both granulated with metal. Of vegetation there were no traces whatsoever throughout the whole of the desolate area within sight. Several immense scorpions were seen, and various reptiles not elsewhere to be found in the high latitudes.\n\nAs food was our most immediate object, we resolved to make our way to the seacoast, distant not more than half a mile, with a view of catching turtle, several of which we had observed from our place of concealment on the hill. We had proceeded some hundred yards, threading our route cautiously between the huge rocks and tumuli, when, upon turning a corner, five savages sprung upon us from a small cavern, felling Peters to the ground with a blow from a club. As he fell the whole party rushed upon him to secure their victim, leaving me time to recover from my astonishment. I still had the musket, but the barrel had received so much injury in being thrown from the precipice that I cast it aside as useless, preferring to trust my pistols, which had been carefully preserved in order. With these I advanced upon the assailants, firing one after the other in quick succession. Two savages fell, and one, who was in the act of thrusting a spear into Peters, sprung to his feet without accomplishing his purpose. My companion being thus released, we had no further difficulty. He had his pistols also, but prudently declined using them, confiding in his great personal strength, which far exceeded that of any person I have ever known. Seizing a club from one of the savages who had fallen, he dashed out the brains of the three who remained, killing each instantaneously with a single blow of the weapon, and leaving us completely masters of the field.\n\nSo rapidly had these events passed, that we could scarcely believe in their reality, and were standing over the bodies of the dead in a species of stupid contemplation, when we were brought to recollection by the sound of shouts in the distance. It was clear that the savages had been alarmed by the firing, and that we had little chance of avoiding discovery. To regain the cliff, it would be necessary to proceed in the direction of the shouts; and even should we succeed in arriving at its base, we should never be able to ascend it without being seen. Our situation was one of the greatest peril, and we were hesitating in which path to commence a flight, when one of the savages whom I had shot, and supposed dead, sprang briskly to his feet, and attempted to make his escape. We overtook him, however, before he had advanced many paces, and were about to put him to death, when Peters suggested that we might derive some benefit from forcing him to accompany us in our attempt to escape. We therefore dragged him with us, making him understand that we would shoot him if he offered resistance. In a few minutes he was perfectly submissive, and ran by our sides as we pushed in among the rocks, making for the seashore.\n\nSo far, the irregularities of the ground we had been traversing hid the sea, except at intervals, from our sight, and, when we first had it fairly in view, it was perhaps, two hundred yards distant. As we emerged into the open beach we saw, to our great dismay, an immense crowd of the natives pouring from the village, and from all visible quarters of the island, making toward us with gesticulations of extreme fury, and howling like wild beasts. We were upon the point of turning upon our steps, and trying to secure a retreat among the fastnesses of the rougher ground, when I discovered the bows of two canoes projecting from behind a large rock which ran out into the water. Toward these we now ran with all speed, and, reaching them, found them unguarded, and without any other freight than three of the large Gallipago turtles and the usual supply of paddles for sixty rowers. We instantly took possession of one of them, and, forcing our captive on board, pushed out to sea with an the strength we could command.\n\nWe had not made, however, more than fifty yards from the shore before we became sufficiently calm to perceive the great oversight of which we had been guilty in leaving the other canoe in the power of the savages, who, by this time, were not more than twice as far from the beach as ourselves, and were rapidly advancing to the pursuit. No time was now to be lost. Our hope was, at best, a forlorn one, but we had none other. It was very doubtful whether, with the utmost exertion, we could get back in time to anticipate them in taking possession of the canoe; but yet there was a chance that we could. We might save ourselves if we succeeded, while not to make the attempt was to resign ourselves to inevitable butchery.\n\nThe canoe was modelled with the bow and stern alike, and, in place of turning it round, we merely changed our position in paddling. As soon as the savages perceived this they redoubled their yells, as well as their speed, and approached with inconceivable rapidity. We pulled, however, with all the energy of desperation, and arrived at the contested point before more than one of the natives had attained it. This man paid dearly for his superior agility, Peters shooting him through the head with a pistol as he approached the shore. The foremost among the rest of his party were probably some twenty or thirty paces distant as we seized upon the canoe. We at first endeavoured to pull her into the deep water, beyond the reach of the savages, but, finding her too firmly aground, and there being no time to spare, Peters, with one or two heavy strokes from the butt of the musket, succeeded in dashing out a large portion of the bow and of one side. We then pushed off. Two of the natives by this time had got hold of our boat, obstinately refusing to let go, until we were forced to despatch them with our knives. We were now clear off, and making great way out to sea. The main body of the savages, upon reaching the broken canoe, set up the most tremendous yell of rage and disappointment conceivable. In truth, from every thing I could see of these wretches, they appeared to be the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish race of men upon the face of the globe. It is clear we should have had no mercy had we fallen into their hands. They made a mad attempt at following us in the fractured canoe, but, finding it useless, again vented their rage in a series of hideous vociferations, and rushed up into the hills.\n\nWe were thus relieved from immediate danger, but our situation was still sufficiently gloomy. We knew that four canoes of the kind we had were at one time in the possession of the savages, and were not aware of the fact (afterward ascertained from our captive) that two of these had been blown to pieces in the explosion of the Jane Guy. We calculated, therefore, upon being yet pursued, as soon as our enemies could get round to the bay (distant about three miles) where the boats were usually laid up. Fearing this, we made every exertion to leave the island behind us, and went rapidly through the water, forcing the prisoner to take a paddle. In about half an hour, when we had gained, probably, five or six miles to the southward, a large fleet of the flat-bottomed canoes or rafts were seen to emerge from the bay evidently with the design of pursuit. Presently they put back, despairing to overtake us." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "We now found ourselves in the wide and desolate Antarctic Ocean, in a latitude exceeding eighty-four degrees, in a frail canoe, and with no provision but the three turtles. The long polar winter, too, could not be considered as far distant, and it became necessary that we should deliberate well upon the course to be pursued. There were six or seven islands in sight belonging to the same group, and distant from each other about five or six leagues; but upon neither of these had we any intention to venture. In coming from the northward in the Jane Guy we had been gradually leaving behind us the severest regions of ice \u2014 this, however little it may be in accordance with the generally received notions respecting the Antarctic, was a fact experience would not permit us to deny. To attempt, therefore, getting back would be folly \u2014 especially at so late a period of the season. Only one course seemed to be left open for hope. We resolved to steer boldly to the southward, where there was at least a probability of discovering lands, and more than a probability of finding a still milder climate.\n\nSo far we had found the Antarctic, like the Arctic Ocean, peculiarly free from violent storms or immoderately rough water, but our canoe was, at best, of frail structure, although large, and we set busily to work with a view of rendering her as safe as the limited means in our possession would admit. The body of the boat was of no better material than bark \u2014 the bark of a tree unknown. The ribs were of a tough osier, well adapted to the purpose for which it was used. We had fifty feet room from stern to stern, from four to six in breadth, and in depth throughout four feet and a half \u2014 the boats thus differing vastly in shape from those of any other inhabitants of the Southern Ocean with whom civilized nations are acquainted. We never did believe them the workmanship of the ignorant islanders who owned them; and some days after this period discovered, by questioning our captive, that they were in fact made by the natives of a group to the southwest of the country where we found them, having fallen accidentally into the hands of our barbarians. What we could do for the security of our boat was very little indeed. Several wide rents were discovered near both ends, and these we contrived to patch up with pieces of woollen jacket. With the help of the superfluous paddles, of which there were a great many, we erected a kind of framework about the bow, so as to break the force of any seas which might threaten to fill us in that quarter. We also set up two paddle blades for masts, placing them opposite each other, one by each gunwale, thus saving the necessity of a yard. To these masts we attached a sail made of our shirts \u2014 doing this with some difficulty, as here we could get no assistance from our prisoner whatever, although he had been willing enough to labour in all the other operations. The sight of the linen seemed to affect him in a very singular manner. He could not be prevailed upon to touch it or go near it, shuddering when we attempted to force him, and shrieking out, \"Tekeli-li!\"\n\nHaving completed our arrangements in regard to the security of the canoe, we now set sail to the south southeast for the present, with the view of weathering the most southerly of the group in sight. This being done, we turned the bow full to the southward. The weather could by no means be considered disagreeable. We had a prevailing and very gentle wind from the northward, a smooth sea, and continual daylight. No ice whatever was to be seen; nor did I ever see one particle of this after leaving the parallel of Bennet's Islet. Indeed, the temperature of the water was here far too warm for its existence in any quantity. Having killed the largest of our tortoises, and obtained from him not only food but a copious supply of water, we continued on our course, without any incident of moment, for perhaps seven or eight days, during which period we must have proceeded a vast distance to the southward, as the wind blew constantly with us, and a very strong current set continually in the direction we were pursuing.\n\nMarch 1.* \u2014 Many unusual phenomena now indicated that we were entering upon a region of novelty and wonder. A high range of light gray vapour appeared constantly in the southern horizon, flaring up occasionally in lofty streaks, now darting from east to west, now from west to east, and again presenting a level and uniform summit \u2014 in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis. The average height of this vapour, as apparent from our station, was about twenty-five degrees. The temperature of the sea seemed to be increasing momentarily, and there was a very perceptible alteration in its colour.\n\n* For obvious reasons I cannot pretend to strict accuracy in these dates. They are given principally with a view to perspicuity of narration, and as set down in my pencil memorandum.\n\nMarch 2. \u2014 To-day by repeated questioning of our captive, we came to the knowledge of many particulars in regard to the island of the massacre, its inhabitants, and customs \u2014 but with these how can I now detain the reader? I may say, however, that we learned there were eight islands in the group \u2014 that they were governed by a common king, named Tsalemon or Psalemoun, who resided in one of the smallest of the islands; that the black skins forming the dress of the warriors came from an animal of huge size to be found only in a valley near the court of the king \u2014 that the inhabitants of the group fabricated no other boats than the flat-bottomed rafts; the four canoes being all of the kind in their possession, and these having been obtained, by mere accident, from some large island in the southwest \u2014 that his own name was Nu-Nu \u2014 that he had no knowledge of Bennet's Islet \u2014 and that the appellation of the island he had left was Tsalal. The commencement of the words Tsalemon and Tsalal was given with a prolonged hissing sound, which we found it impossible to imitate, even after repeated endeavours, and which was precisely the same with the note of the black bittern we had eaten up on the summit of the hill.\n\nMarch 3. \u2014 The heat of the water was now truly remarkable, and in colour was undergoing a rapid change, being no longer transparent, but of a milky consistency and hue. In our immediate vicinity it was usually smooth, never so rough as to endanger the canoe \u2014 but we were frequently surprised at perceiving, to our right and left, at different distances, sudden and extensive agitations of the surface \u2014 these, we at length noticed, were always preceded by wild flickerings in the region of vapour to the southward.\n\nMarch 4. \u2014 To-day, with the view of widening our sail, the breeze from the northward dying away perceptibly, I took from my coat-pocket a white handkerchief. Nu-Nu was seated at my elbow, and the linen accidentally flaring in his face, he became violently affected with convulsions. These were succeeded by drowsiness and stupor, and low murmurings of \"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\"\n\nMarch 5. \u2014 The wind had entirely ceased, but it was evident that we were still hurrying on to the southward, under the influence of a powerful current. And now, indeed, it would seem reasonable that we should experience some alarm at the turn events were taking \u2014 but we felt none. The countenance of Peters indicated nothing of this nature, although it wore at times an expression I could not fathom. The polar winter appeared to be coming on \u2014 but coming without its terrors. I felt a numbness of body and mind \u2014 a dreaminess of sensation \u2014 but this was all.\n\nMarch 6. \u2014 The gray vapour had now arisen many more degrees above the horizon, and was gradually losing its grayness of tint. The heat of the water was extreme, even unpleasant to the touch, and its milky hue was more evident than ever. To-day a violent agitation of the water occurred very close to the canoe. It was attended, as usual, with a wild flaring up of the vapour at its summit, and a momentary division at its base. A fine white powder, resembling ashes \u2014 but certainly not such \u2014 fell over the canoe and over a large surface of the water, as the flickering died away among the vapour and the commotion subsided in the sea. Nu-Nu now threw himself on his face in the bottom of the boat, and no persuasions could induce him to arise.\n\nMarch 7. \u2014 This day we questioned Nu-Nu concerning the motives of his countrymen in destroying our companions; but he appeared to be too utterly overcome by terror to afford us any rational reply. He still obstinately lay in the bottom of the boat; and, upon reiterating the questions as to the motive, made use only of idiotic gesticulations, such as raising with his forefinger the upper lip, and displaying the teeth which lay beneath it. These were black. We had never before seen the teeth of an inhabitant of Tsalal.\n\nMarch 8. \u2014 To-day there floated by us one of the white animals whose appearance upon the beach at Tsalal had occasioned so wild a commotion among the savages. I would have picked it up, but there came over me a sudden listlessness, and I forbore. The heat of the water still increased, and the hand could no longer be endured within it. Peters spoke little, and I knew not what to think of his apathy. Nu-Nu breathed, and no more.\n\nMarch 9. \u2014 The whole ashy material fell now continually around us, and in vast quantities. The range of vapour to the southward had arisen prodigiously in the horizon, and began to assume more distinctness of form. I can liken it to nothing but a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven, The gigantic curtain ranged along the whole extent of the southern horizon. It emitted no sound.\n\nMarch 21. \u2014 A sullen darkness now hovered above us \u2014 but from out the milky depths of the ocean a luminous glare arose, and stole up along the bulwarks of the boat. We were nearly overwhelmed by the white ashy shower which settled upon us and upon the canoe, but melted into the water as it fell. The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.\n\nMarch 22. \u2014 The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. Hereupon Nu-Nu stirred in the bottom of the boat; but upon touching him, we found his spirit departed. And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.\n\nNote: The circumstances connected with the late sudden and distressing death of Mr. Pym are already well known to the public through the medium of the daily press. It is feared that the few remaining chapters which were to have completed his narrative, and which were retained by him, while the above were in type, for the purpose of revision, have been irrecoverably lost through the accident by which he perished himself. This, however, may prove not to be the case, and the papers, if ultimately found, will be given to the public.\n\nNo means have been left untried to remedy the deficiency. The gentleman whose name is mentioned in the preface, and who, from the statement there made, might be supposed able to fill the vacuum, has declined the task \u2014 this for satisfactory reasons connected with the general inaccuracy of the details afforded him, and his disbelief in the entire truth of the latter portions of the narration. Peters, from whom some information might be expected, is still alive, and a resident of Illinois, but cannot be met with at present. He may hereafter be found, and will, no doubt, afford material for a conclusion of Mr. Pym's account.\n\nThe loss of the two or three final chapters (for there were but two or three) is the more deeply to be regretted, as, it cannot be doubted, they contained matter relative to the Pole itself, or at least to regions in its very near proximity; and as, too, the statements of the author in relation to these regions may shortly be verified or contradicted by means of the governmental expedition now preparing for the Southern Ocean.\n\nOn one point in the Narrative some remarks may be well offered; and it would afford the writer of this appendix much pleasure if what he may here observe should have a tendency to throw credit, in any degree, upon the very singular pages now published. We allude to the chasms found in the island of Tsalal, and to the whole of the figures presented in Chapter 23.\n\nMr. Pym has given the figures of the chasm without comment, and speaks decidedly of the indentures found at the extremity of the most easterly of these chasms as having but a fanciful resemblance to alphabetical characters, and, in short, as being positively not such. This assertion is made in a manner so simple, and sustained by a species of demonstration so conclusive (viz., the fitting of the projections of the fragments found among the dust into the indentures upon the wall), that we are forced to believe the writer in earnest; and no reasonable reader should suppose otherwise. But as the facts in relation to all the figures are most singular (especially when taken in connexion with statements made in the body of the narrative), it may be as well to say a word or two concerning them all \u2014 this, too, the more especially as the facts in question have, beyond doubt, escaped the attention of Mr. Poe.\n\nFigure 1, then figure 2, figure 3, and figure 4, when conjoined with one another in the precise order which the chasms themselves presented, and when deprived of the small lateral branches or arches (which, it will be remembered, served only as means of communication between the main chambers, and were of totally distinct character), constitute an Ethiopian verbal root \u2014 the root.\n\n\"To be shady\" \u2014 whence all the inflections of shadow or darkness.\n\nIn regard to the \"left or most northwardly\" of the indentures in figure 4, it is more than probable that the opinion of Peters was correct, and that the hieroglyphical appearance was really the work of art, and intended as the representation of a human form. The delineation is before the reader, and he may, or may not, perceive the resemblance suggested; but the rest of the indentures afford strong confirmation of Peters' idea. The upper range is evidently the Arabic verbal root.\n\n\"To be white,\" whence all the inflections of brilliancy and whiteness. The lower range is not so immediately perspicuous. The characters are somewhat broken and disjointed; nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that, in their perfect state, they formed the full Egyptian word.\n\n\"The region of the south.\" It should be observed that these interpretations confirm the opinion of Peters in regard to the \"most northwardly\" of the figures. The arm is outstretched towards the south.\n\nConclusions such as these open a wide field for speculation and exciting conjecture. They should be regarded, perhaps, in connexion with some of the most faintly-detailed incidents of the narrative; although in no visible manner is this chain of connexion complete. Tekeli-li! was the cry of the affrighted natives of Tsalal upon discovering the carcass of the white animal picked up at sea. This also was the shuddering exclamation of the captive Tsalalian upon encountering the white materials in possession of Mr. Pym. This also was the shriek of the swift-flying, white, and gigantic birds which issued from the vapoury white curtain of the South. Nothing white was to be found at Tsalal, and nothing otherwise in the subsequent voyage to the region beyond. It is not impossible that \"Tsalal,\" the appellation of the island of the chasms, may be found, upon minute philological scrutiny, to betray either some alliance with the chasms themselves, or some reference to the Ethiopian characters so mysteriously written in their windings.\n\n\"I have graven it within the hills, and my vengeance upon the dust within the rock.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ How to Write a Blackwood Article (The Psyche Zenobia) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002\"In the name of the prophets \u2014 figs!!\" \u2014Cry of Turkish fig-peddler\n\nI presume everybody has heard of me. My name is the Signora Psyche Zenobia. This I know to be a fact. Nobody but my enemies ever calls me Suky Snobbs. I have been assured that Suky is but a vulgar corruption of Psyche, which is good Greek, and means \"the soul\" (that's me, I'm all soul) and sometimes \"a butterfly,\" which latter meaning undoubtedly alludes to my appearance in my new crimson satin dress, with the sky-blue Arabian mantelet, and the trimmings of green agraffas, and the seven flounces of orange-colored auriculas. As for Snobbs \u2014 any person who should look at me would be instantly aware that my name wasn't Snobbs. Miss Tabitha Turnip propagated that report through sheer envy. Tabitha Turnip indeed! Oh the little wretch! But what can we expect from a turnip? Wonder if she remembers the old adage about \"blood out of a turnip,\" &c.? [Mem. put her in mind of it the first opportunity. Mem. again \u2014 pull her nose.] Where was I? Ah! I have been assured that Snobbs is a mere corruption of Zenobia, and that Zenobia was a queen \u2014(So am I. Dr. Moneypenny always calls me the Queen of the Hearts)\u2014 and that Zenobia, as well as Psyche, is good Greek, and that my father was \"a Greek,\" and that consequently I have a right to our patronymic, which is Zenobia and not by any means Snobbs. Nobody but Tabitha Turnip calls me Suky Snobbs. I am the Signora Psyche Zenobia.\n\nAs I said before, everybody has heard of me. I am that very Signora Psyche Zenobia, so justly celebrated as corresponding secretary to the \"Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange, Tea, Total, Young, Belles, Lettres, Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical, Association, To, Civilize, Humanity.\" Dr. Moneypenny made the title for us, and says he chose it because it sounded big like an empty rum-puncheon. (A vulgar man that sometimes \u2014 but he's deep.) We all sign the initials of the society after our names, in the fashion of the R. S. A., Royal Society of Arts \u2014 the S. D. U. K., Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, &c, &c. Dr. Moneypenny says that S. stands for stale, and that D. U. K. spells duck, (but it don't,) that S. D. U. K. stands for Stale Duck and not for Lord Brougham's society \u2014 but then Dr. Moneypenny is such a queer man that I am never sure when he is telling me the truth. At any rate we always add to our names the initials P. R. E. T. T. Y. B. L. U. E. B. A. T. C. H. \u2014 that is to say, Philadelphia, Regular, Exchange, Tea, Total, Young, Belles, Lettres, Universal, Experimental, Bibliographical, Association, To, Civilize, Humanity \u2014 one letter for each word, which is a decided improvement upon Lord Brougham. Dr. Moneypenny will have it that our initials give our true character \u2014 but for my life I can't see what he means.\n\nNotwithstanding the good offices of the Doctor, and the strenuous exertions of the association to get itself into notice, it met with no very great success until I joined it. The truth is, the members indulged in too flippant a tone of discussion. The papers read every Saturday evening were characterized less by depth than buffoonery. They were all whipped syllabub. There was no investigation of first causes, first principles. There was no investigation of any thing at all. There was no attention paid to that great point, the \"fitness of things.\" In short there was no fine writing like this. It was all low \u2014 very! No profundity, no reading, no metaphysics \u2014 nothing which the learned call spirituality, and which the unlearned choose to stigmatize as cant. [Dr. M. says I ought to spell \"cant\" with a capital K\u2014 but I know better.]\n\nWhen I joined the society it was my endeavor to introduce a better style of thinking and writing, and all the world knows how well I have succeeded. We get up as good papers now in the P. R. E. T. T. Y. B. L. U. E. B. A. T. C. H. as any to be found even in Blackwood. I say, Blackwood, because I have been assured that the finest writing, upon every subject, is to be discovered in the pages of that justly celebrated Magazine. We now take it for our model upon all themes, and are getting into rapid notice accordingly. And, after all, it's not so very difficult a matter to compose an article of the genuine Blackwood stamp, if one only goes properly about it. Of course I don't speak of the political articles. Everybody knows how they are managed, since Dr. Moneypenny explained it. Mr. Blackwood has a pair of tailor's -shears, and three apprentices who stand by him for orders. One hands him the \"Times,\" another the \"Examiner\" and a third a \"Culley's New Compendium of Slang-Whang.\" Mr. B. merely cuts out and intersperses. It is soon done \u2014 nothing but \"Examiner,\" \"Slang-Whang,\" and \"Times\"\u2014 then \"Times,\" \"Slang-Whang,\" and \"Examiner\"\u2014 and then \"Times,\" \"Examiner,\" and \"Slang-Whang.\"\n\nBut the chief merit of the Magazine lies in its miscellaneous articles; and the best of these come under the head of what Dr. Moneypenny calls the bizarreries (whatever that may mean) and what everybody else calls the intensities. This is a species of writing which I have long known how to appreciate, although it is only since my late visit to Mr. Blackwood (deputed by the society) that I have been made aware of the exact method of composition. This method is very simple, but not so much so as the politics. Upon my calling at Mr. B.'s, and making known to him the wishes of the society, he received me with great civility, took me into his study, and gave me a clear explanation of the whole process.\n\n\"My dear madam,\" said he, evidently struck with my majestic appearance, for I had on the crimson satin, with the green agraffas, and orange-colored auriclas. \"My dear madam,\" said he, \"sit down. The matter stands thus: In the first place your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. And, mark me, Miss Psyche Zenobia!\" he continued, after a pause, with the most expressive energy and solemnity of manner, \"mark me! \u2014 that pen \u2014 must \u2014 never be mended! Herein, madam, lies the secret, the soul, of intensity. I assume upon myself to say, that no individual, of however great genius ever wrote with a good pen \u2014 understand me \u2014 a good article. You may take, it for granted, that when manuscript can be read it is never worth reading. This is a leading principle in our faith, to which if you cannot readily assent, our conference is at an end.\"\n\nHe paused. But, of course, as I had no wish to put an end to the conference, I assented to a proposition so very obvious, and one, too, of whose truth I had all along been sufficiently aware. He seemed pleased, and went on with his instructions.\n\n\"It may appear invidious in me, Miss Psyche Zenobia, to refer you to any article, or set of articles, in the way of model or study, yet perhaps I may as well call your attention to a few cases. Let me see. There was 'The Dead Alive,' a capital thing! \u2014 the record of a gentleman's sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body \u2014 full of tastes, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater'\u2014 fine, very fine! \u2014 glorious imagination \u2014 deep philosophy acute speculation \u2014 plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote the paper \u2014 but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper, over a rummer of Hollands and water, 'hot, without sugar.'\" [This I could scarcely have believed had it been anybody but Mr. Blackwood, who assured me of it.] \"Then there was 'The Involuntary Experimentalist,' all about a gentleman who got baked in an oven, and came out alive and well, although certainly done to a turn. And then there was 'The Diary of a Late Physician,' where the merit lay in good rant, and indifferent Greek \u2014 both of them taking things with the public. And then there was 'The Man in the Bell,' a paper by-the-by, Miss Zenobia, which I cannot sufficiently recommend to your attention. It is the history of a young person who goes to sleep under the clapper of a church bell, and is awakened by its tolling for a funeral. The sound drives him mad, and, accordingly, pulling out his tablets, he gives a record of his sensations. Sensations are the great things after all. Should you ever be drowned or hung, be sure and make a note of your sensations \u2014 they will be worth to you ten guineas a sheet. If you wish to write forcibly, Miss Zenobia, pay minute attention to the sensations.\"\n\n\"That I certainly will, Mr. Blackwood,\" said I.\n\n\"Good!\" he replied. \"I see you are a pupil after my own heart. But I must put you au fait to the details necessary in composing what may be denominated a genuine Blackwood article of the sensation stamp \u2014 the kind which you will understand me to say I consider the best for all purposes.\n\n\"The first thing requisite is to get yourself into such a scrape as no one ever got into before. The oven, for instance \u2014 that was a good hit. But if you have no oven or big bell, at hand, and if you cannot conveniently tumble out of a balloon, or be swallowed up in an earthquake, or get stuck fast in a chimney, you will have to be contented with simply imagining some similar misadventure. I should prefer, however, that you have the actual fact to bear you out. Nothing so well assists the fancy, as an experimental knowledge of the matter in hand. 'Truth is strange,' you know, 'stranger than fiction'\u2014 besides being more to the purpose.\"\n\nHere I assured him I had an excellent pair of garters, and would go and hang myself forthwith.\n\n\"Good!\" he replied, \"do so; \u2014 although hanging is somewhat hacknied. Perhaps you might do better. Take a dose of Brandreth's pills, and then give us your sensations. However, my instructions will apply equally well to any variety of misadventure, and in your way home you may easily get knocked in the head, or run over by an omnibus, or bitten by a mad dog, or drowned in a gutter. But to proceed.\n\n\"Having determined upon your subject, you must next consider the tone, or manner, of your narration. There is the tone didactic, the tone enthusiastic, the tone natural \u2014 all common \u2014 place enough. But then there is the tone laconic, or curt, which has lately come much into use. It consists in short sentences. Somehow thus: Can't be too brief. Can't be too snappish. Always a full stop. And never a paragraph.\n\n\"Then there is the tone elevated, diffusive, and interjectional. Some of our best novelists patronize this tone. The words must be all in a whirl, like a humming-top, and make a noise very similar, which answers remarkably well instead of meaning. This is the best of all possible styles where the writer is in too great a hurry to think.\n\n\"The tone metaphysical is also a good one. If you know any big words this is your chance for them. Talk of the Ionic and Eleatic schools \u2014 of Archytas, Gorgias, and Alcmaeon. Say something about objectivity and subjectivity. Be sure and abuse a man named Locke. Turn up your nose at things in general, and when you let slip any thing a little too absurd, you need not be at the trouble of scratching it out, but just add a footnote and say that you are indebted for the above profound observation to the 'Kritik der reinem Vernunft,' or to the 'Metaphysithe Anfongsgrunde der Noturwissenchaft.' This would look erudite and \u2014 and \u2014 and frank.\n\n\"There are various other tones of equal celebrity, but I shall mention only two more \u2014 the tone transcendental and the tone heterogeneous. In the former the merit consists in seeing into the nature of affairs a very great deal farther than anybody else. This second sight is very efficient when properly managed. A little reading of the 'Dial' will carry you a great way. Eschew, in this case, big words; get them as small as possible, and write them upside down. Look over Channing's poems and quote what he says about a 'fat little man with a delusive show of Can.' Put in something about the Supernal Oneness. Don't say a syllable about the Infernal Twoness. Above all, study innuendo. Hint everything \u2014 assert nothing. If you feel inclined to say 'bread and butter,' do not by any means say it outright. You may say any thing and every thing approaching to 'bread and butter.' You may hint at buck-wheat cake, or you may even go so far as to insinuate oat-meal porridge, but if bread and butter be your real meaning, be cautious, my dear Miss Psyche, not on any account to say 'bread and butter!'\n\nI assured him that I should never say it again as long as I lived. He kissed me and continued:\n\n\"As for the tone heterogeneous, it is merely a judicious mixture, in equal proportions, of all the other tones in the world, and is consequently made up of every thing deep, great, odd, piquant, pertinent, and pretty.\n\n\"Let us suppose now you have determined upon your incidents and tone. The most important portion \u2014 in fact, the soul of the whole business, is yet to be attended to \u2014 I allude to the filling up. It is not to be supposed that a lady, or gentleman either, has been leading the life of a book worm. And yet above all things it is necessary that your article have an air of erudition, or at least afford evidence of extensive general reading. Now I'll put you in the way of accomplishing this point. See here!\" (pulling down some three or four ordinary-looking volumes, and opening them at random). \"By casting your eye down almost any page of any book in the world, you will be able to perceive at once a host of little scraps of either learning or bel-espritism, which are the very thing for the spicing of a Blackwood article. You might as well note down a few while I read them to you. I shall make two divisions: first, Piquant Facts for the Manufacture of Similes, and, second, Piquant Expressions to be introduced as occasion may require. Write now!\"\u2014 and I wrote as he dictated.\n\n\"PIQUANT FACTS FOR SIMILES. 'There were originally but three Muses \u2014 Melete, Mneme, Aoede \u2014 meditation, memory, and singing.' You may make a good deal of that little fact if properly worked. You see it is not generally known, and looks recherche. You must be careful and give the thing with a downright improviso air.\n\n\"Again. 'The river Alpheus passed beneath the sea, and emerged without injury to the purity of its waters.' Rather stale that, to be sure, but, if properly dressed and dished up, will look quite as fresh as ever.\n\n\"Here is something better. 'The Persian Iris appears to some persons to possess a sweet and very powerful perfume, while to others it is perfectly scentless.' Fine that, and very delicate! Turn it about a little, and it will do wonders. We'll have some thing else in the botanical line. There's nothing goes down so well, especially with the help of a little Latin. Write!\n\n\"'The Epidendrum Flos Aeris, of Java, bears a very beautiful flower, and will live when pulled up by the roots. The natives suspend it by a cord from the ceiling, and enjoy its fragrance for years.' That's capital! That will do for the similes. Now for the Piquant Expressions.\n\n\"PIQUANT EXPRESSIONS. 'The Venerable Chinese novel Ju-Kiao-Li.' Good! By introducing these few words with dexterity you will evince your intimate acquaintance with the language and literature of the Chinese. With the aid of this you may either get along without either Arabic, or Sanscrit, or Chickasaw. There is no passing muster, however, without Spanish, Italian, German, Latin, and Greek. I must look you out a little specimen of each. Any scrap will answer, because you must depend upon your own ingenuity to make it fit into your article. Now write!\n\n\"'Aussi tendre que Zaire'\u2014 as tender as Zaire-French. Alludes to the frequent repetition of the phrase, la tendre Zaire, in the French tragedy of that name. Properly introduced, will show not only your knowledge of the language, but your general reading and wit. You can say, for instance, that the chicken you were eating (write an article about being choked to death by a chicken-bone) was not altogether aussi tendre que Zaire. Write!\n\n\u2003'Van muerte tan escondida,\n\n\u2003Que no te sienta venir,\n\n\u2003Porque el plazer del morir,\n\n\u2003No mestorne a dar la vida.'\n\n\"That's Spanish \u2014 from Miguel de Cervantes. 'Come quickly, O death! but be sure and don't let me see you coming, lest the pleasure I shall feel at your appearance should unfortunately bring me back again to life.' This you may slip in quite a propos when you are struggling in the last agonies with the chicken-bone. Write!\n\n\u2003'Il pover 'huomo che non se'n era accorto,\n\n\u2003Andava combattendo, e era morto.'\n\nThat's Italian, you perceive \u2014 from Ariosto. It means that a great hero, in the heat of combat, not perceiving that he had been fairly killed, continued to fight valiantly, dead as he was. The application of this to your own case is obvious \u2014 for I trust, Miss Psyche, that you will not neglect to kick for at least an hour and a half after you have been choked to death by that chicken-bone. Please to write!\n\n\u2003'Und sterb'ich doch, no sterb'ich den\n\n\u2003Durch sie \u2014 durch sie!'\n\nThat's German \u2014 from Schiller. 'And if I die, at least I die \u2014 for thee \u2014 for thee!' Here it is clear that you are apostrophizing the cause of your disaster, the chicken. Indeed what gentleman (or lady either) of sense, wouldn't die, I should like to know, for a well fattened capon of the right Molucca breed, stuffed with capers and mushrooms, and served up in a salad-bowl, with orange-jellies en mosaiques. Write! (You can get them that way at Tortoni's )\u2014 Write, if you please!\n\n\"Here is a nice little Latin phrase, and rare too, (one can't be too recherche or brief in one's Latin, it's getting so common \u2014 ignoratio elenchi. He has committed an ignoratio elenchi \u2014 that is to say, he has understood the words of your proposition, but not the idea. The man was a fool, you see. Some poor fellow whom you address while choking with that chicken-bone, and who therefore didn't precisely understand what you were talking about. Throw the ignoratio elenchi in his teeth, and, at once, you have him annihilated. If he dares to reply, you can tell him from Lucan (here it is) that speeches are mere anemonae verborum, anemone words. The anemone, with great brilliancy, has no smell. Or, if he begins to bluster, you may be down upon him with insomnia Jovis, reveries of Jupiter \u2014 a phrase which Silius Italicus (see here!) applies to thoughts pompous and inflated. This will be sure and cut him to the heart. He can do nothing but roll over and die. Will you be kind enough to write?\n\n\"In Greek we must have some thing pretty \u2014 from Demosthenes, for example.\n\n\u2003Anerh o pheugoen kai palin makesetai\n\n\u2003There is a tolerably good translation of it in Hudibras\n\n\u2003'For he that flies may fight again,\n\n\u2003Which he can never do that's slain.'\n\nIn a Blackwood article nothing makes so fine a show as your Greek. The very letters have an air of profundity about them. Only observe, madam, the astute look of that Epsilon! That Phi ought certainly to be a bishop! Was ever there a smarter fellow than that Omicron? Just twig that Tau! In short, there is nothing like Greek for a genuine sensation-paper. In the present case your application is the most obvious thing in the world. Rap out the sentence, with a huge oath, and by way of ultimatum at the good-for-nothing dunder-headed villain who couldn't understand your plain English in relation to the chicken-bone. He'll take the hint and be off, you may depend upon it.\"\n\nThese were all the instructions Mr. B. could afford me upon the topic in question, but I felt they would be entirely sufficient. I was, at length, able to write a genuine Blackwood article, and determined to do it forthwith. In taking leave of me, Mr. B. made a proposition for the purchase of the paper when written; but as he could offer me only fifty guineas a sheet, I thought it better to let our society have it, than sacrifice it for so paltry a sum. Notwithstanding this niggardly spirit, however, the gentleman showed his consideration for me in all other respects, and indeed treated me with the greatest civility. His parting words made a deep impression upon my heart, and I hope I shall always remember them with gratitude.\n\n\"My dear Miss Zenobia,\" he said, while the tears stood in his eyes, \"is there anything else I can do to promote the success of your laudable undertaking? Let me reflect! It is just possible that you may not be able, so soon as convenient, to \u2014 to \u2014 get yourself drowned, or \u2014 choked with a chicken-bone, or \u2014 or hung \u2014 or \u2014 bitten by a \u2014 but stay! Now I think me of it, there are a couple of very excellent bull-dogs in the yard \u2014 fine fellows, I assure you \u2014 savage, and all that \u2014 indeed just the thing for your money \u2014 they'll have you eaten up, auricula and all, in less than five minutes (here's my watch!)\u2014 and then only think of the sensations! Here! I say \u2014 Tom! \u2014 Peter! \u2014 Dick, you villain! \u2014 let out those\"\u2014 but as I was really in a great hurry, and had not another moment to spare, I was reluctantly forced to expedite my departure, and accordingly took leave at once \u2014 somewhat more abruptly, I admit, than strict courtesy would have otherwise allowed.\n\nIt was my primary object upon quitting Mr. Blackwood, to get into some immediate difficulty, pursuant to his advice, and with this view I spent the greater part of the day in wandering about Edinburgh, seeking for desperate adventures \u2014 adventures adequate to the intensity of my feelings, and adapted to the vast character of the article I intended to write. In this excursion I was attended by one negro \u2014 servant, Pompey, and my little lap-dog Diana, whom I had brought with me from Philadelphia. It was not, however, until late in the afternoon that I fully succeeded in my arduous undertaking. An important event then happened of which the following Blackwood article, in the tone heterogeneous, is the substance and result.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Predicament by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nWhat chance, good lady, hath bereft you thus?\n\n\u2014Comus\n\nIt was a quiet and still afternoon when I strolled forth in the goodly city of Edina. The confusion and bustle in the streets were terrible. Men were talking. Women were screaming. Children were choking. Pigs were whistling. Carts they rattled. Bulls they bellowed. Cows they lowed. Horses they neighed. Cats they caterwauled. Dogs they danced. Danced! Could it then be possible? Danced! Alas, thought I, my dancing days are over! Thus it is ever. What a host of gloomy recollections will ever and anon be awakened in the mind of genius and imaginative contemplation, especially of a genius doomed to the everlasting and eternal, and continual, and, as one might say, the \u2014 continued \u2014 yes, the continued and continuous, bitter, harassing, disturbing, and, if I may be allowed the expression, the very disturbing influence of the serene, and godlike, and heavenly, and exalted, and elevated, and purifying effect of what may be rightly termed the most enviable, the most truly enviable \u2014 nay! the most benignly beautiful, the most deliciously ethereal, and, as it were, the most pretty (if I may use so bold an expression) thing (pardon me, gentle reader!) in the world \u2014 but I am always led away by my feelings. In such a mind, I repeat, what a host of recollections are stirred up by a trifle! The dogs danced! I\u2014 I could not! They frisked \u2014 I wept. They capered \u2014 I sobbed aloud. Touching circumstances! which cannot fail to bring to the recollection of the classical reader that exquisite passage in relation to the fitness of things, which is to be found in the commencement of the third volume of that admirable and venerable Chinese novel the Jo-Go-Slow.\n\nIn my solitary walk through, the city I had two humble but faithful companions. Diana, my poodle! sweetest of creatures! She had a quantity of hair over her one eye, and a blue ribband tied fashionably around her neck. Diana was not more than five inches in height, but her head was somewhat bigger than her body, and her tail being cut off exceedingly close, gave an air of injured innocence to the interesting animal which rendered her a favorite with all.\n\nAnd Pompey, my negro! \u2014 sweet Pompey! how shall I ever forget thee? I had taken Pompey's arm. He was three feet in height (I like to be particular) and about seventy, or perhaps eighty, years of age. He had bow-legs and was corpulent. His mouth should not be called small, nor his ears short. His teeth, however, were like pearl, and his large full eyes were deliciously white. Nature had endowed him with no neck, and had placed his ankles (as usual with that race) in the middle of the upper portion of the feet. He was clad with a striking simplicity. His sole garments were a stock of nine inches in height, and a nearly \u2014 new drab overcoat which had formerly been in the service of the tall, stately, and illustrious Dr. Moneypenny. It was a good overcoat. It was well cut. It was well made. The coat was nearly new. Pompey held it up out of the dirt with both hands.\n\nThere were three persons in our party, and two of them have already been the subject of remark. There was a third \u2014 that person was myself. I am the Signora Psyche Zenobia. I am not Suky Snobbs. My appearance is commanding. On the memorable occasion of which I speak I was habited in a crimson satin dress, with a sky-blue Arabian mantelet. And the dress had trimmings of green agraffas, and seven graceful flounces of the orange-colored auricula. I thus formed the third of the party. There was the poodle. There was Pompey. There was myself. We were three. Thus it is said there were originally but three Furies \u2014 Melty, Nimmy, and Hetty \u2014 Meditation, Memory, and Fiddling.\n\nLeaning upon the arm of the gallant Pompey, and attended at a respectable distance by Diana, I proceeded down one of the populous and very pleasant streets of the now deserted Edina. On a sudden, there presented itself to view a church \u2014 a Gothic cathedral \u2014 vast, venerable, and with a tall steeple, which towered into the sky. What madness now possessed me? Why did I rush upon my fate? I was seized with an uncontrollable desire to ascend the giddy pinnacle, and then survey the immense extent of the city. The door of the cathedral stood invitingly open. My destiny prevailed. I entered the ominous archway. Where then was my guardian angel? \u2014 if indeed such angels there be. If! Distressing monosyllable! what world of mystery, and meaning, and doubt, and uncertainty is there involved in thy two letters! I entered the ominous archway! I entered; and, without injury to my orange-colored auriculas, I passed beneath the portal, and emerged within the vestibule. Thus it is said the immense river Alfred passed, unscathed, and unwetted, beneath the sea.\n\nI thought the staircase would never have an end. Round! Yes, they went round and up, and round and up and round and up, until I could not help surmising, with the sagacious Pompey, upon whose supporting arm I leaned in all the confidence of early affection \u2014 I could not help surmising that the upper end of the continuous spiral ladder had been accidentally, or perhaps designedly, removed. I paused for breath; and, in the meantime, an accident occurred of too momentous a nature in a moral, and also in a metaphysical point of view, to be passed over without notice. It appeared to me \u2014 indeed I was quite confident of the fact \u2014 I could not be mistaken \u2014 no! I had, for some moments, carefully and anxiously observed the motions of my Diana \u2014 I say that I could not be mistaken \u2014 Diana smelt a rat! At once I called Pompey's attention to the subject, and he \u2014 he agreed with me. There was then no longer any reasonable room for doubt. The rat had been smelled \u2014 and by Diana. Heavens! shall I ever forget the intense excitement of the moment? Alas! what is the boasted intellect of man? The rat! \u2014 it was there \u2014 that is to say, it was somewhere. Diana smelled the rat. I\u2014 I could not! Thus it is said the Prussian Isis has, for some persons, a sweet and very powerful perfume, while to others it is perfectly scentless.\n\nThe staircase had been surmounted, and there were now only three or four more upward steps intervening between us and the summit. We still ascended, and now only one step remained. One step! One little, little step! Upon one such little step in the great staircase of human life how vast a sum of human happiness or misery depends! I thought of myself, then of Pompey, and then of the mysterious and inexplicable destiny which surrounded us. I thought of Pompey! \u2014 alas, I thought of love! I thought of my many false steps which have been taken, and may be taken again. I resolved to be more cautious, more reserved. I abandoned the arm of Pompey, and, without his assistance, surmounted the one remaining step, and gained the chamber of the belfry. I was followed immediately afterward by my poodle. Pompey alone remained behind. I stood at the head of the staircase, and encouraged him to ascend. He stretched forth to me his hand, and unfortunately in so doing was forced to abandon his firm hold upon the overcoat. Will the gods never cease their persecution? The overcoat is dropped, and, with one of his feet, Pompey stepped upon the long and trailing skirt of the overcoat. He stumbled and fell \u2014 this consequence was inevitable. He fell forward, and, with his accursed head, striking me full in the \u2014 in the breast, precipitated me headlong, together with himself, upon the hard, filthy, and detestable floor of the belfry. But my revenge was sure, sudden, and complete. Seizing him furiously by the wool with both hands, I tore out a vast quantity of black, and crisp, and curling material, and tossed it from me with every manifestation of disdain. It fell among the ropes of the belfry and remained. Pompey arose, and said no word. But he regarded me piteously with his large eyes and \u2014 sighed. Ye Gods \u2014 that sigh! It sunk into my heart. And the hair \u2014 the wool! Could I have reached that wool I would have bathed it with my tears, in testimony of regret. But alas! it was now far beyond my grasp. As it dangled among the cordage of the bell, I fancied it alive. I fancied that it stood on end with indignation. Thus the happy-dandy Flos Aeris of Java bears, it is said, a beautiful flower, which will live when pulled up by the roots. The natives suspend it by a cord from the ceiling and enjoy its fragrance for years.\n\nOur quarrel was now made up, and we looked about the room for an aperture through which to survey the city of Edina. Windows there were none. The sole light admitted into the gloomy chamber proceeded from a square opening, about a foot in diameter, at a height of about seven feet from the floor. Yet what will the energy of true genius not effect? I resolved to clamber up to this hole. A vast quantity of wheels, pinions, and other cabalistic \u2014 looking machinery stood opposite the hole, close to it; and through the hole there passed an iron rod from the machinery. Between the wheels and the wall where the hole lay there was barely room for my body \u2014 yet I was desperate, and determined to persevere. I called Pompey to my side.\n\n\"You perceive that aperture, Pompey. I wish to look through it. You will stand here just beneath the hole \u2014 so. Now, hold out one of your hands, Pompey, and let me step upon it \u2014 thus. Now, the other hand, Pompey, and with its aid I will get upon your shoulders.\"\n\nHe did every thing I wished, and I found, upon getting up, that I could easily pass my head and neck through the aperture. The prospect was sublime. Nothing could be more magnificent. I merely paused a moment to bid Diana behave herself, and assure Pompey that I would be considerate and bear as lightly as possible upon his shoulders. I told him I would be tender of his feelings \u2014 ossi tender que beefsteak. Having done this justice to my faithful friend, I gave myself up with great zest and enthusiasm to the enjoyment of the scene which so obligingly spread itself out before my eyes.\n\nUpon this subject, however, I shall forbear to dilate. I will not describe the city of Edinburgh. Every one has been to the city of Edinburgh. Every one has been to Edinburgh \u2014 the classic Edina. I will confine myself to the momentous details of my own lamentable adventure. Having, in some measure, satisfied my curiosity in regard to the extent, situation, and general appearance of the city, I had leisure to survey the church in which I was, and the delicate architecture of the steeple. I observed that the aperture through which I had thrust my head was an opening in the dial-plate of a gigantic clock, and must have appeared, from the street, as a large key-hole, such as we see in the face of the French watches. No doubt the true object was to admit the arm of an attendant, to adjust, when necessary, the hands of the clock from within. I observed also, with surprise, the immense size of these hands, the longest of which could not have been less than ten feet in length, and, where broadest, eight or nine inches in breadth. They were of solid steel apparently, and their edges appeared to be sharp. Having noticed these particulars, and some others, I again turned my eyes upon the glorious prospect below, and soon became absorbed in contemplation.\n\nFrom this, after some minutes, I was aroused by the voice of Pompey, who declared that he could stand it no longer, and requested that I would be so kind as to come down. This was unreasonable, and I told him so in a speech of some length. He replied, but with an evident misunderstanding of my ideas upon the subject. I accordingly grew angry, and told him in plain words, that he was a fool, that he had committed an ignoramus e-clench-eye, that his notions were mere insommary Bovis, and his words little better than an ennemywerrybor'em. With this he appeared satisfied, and I resumed my contemplations.\n\nIt might have been half an hour after this altercation when, as I was deeply absorbed in the heavenly scenery beneath me, I was startled by something very cold which pressed with a gentle pressure on the back of my neck. It is needless to say that I felt inexpressibly alarmed. I knew that Pompey was beneath my feet, and that Diana was sitting, according to my explicit directions, upon her hind legs, in the farthest corner of the room. What could it be? Alas! I but too soon discovered. Turning my head gently to one side, I perceived, to my extreme horror, that the huge, glittering, scimetar-like minute-hand of the clock had, in the course of its hourly revolution, descended upon my neck. There was, I knew, not a second to be lost. I pulled back at once \u2014 but it was too late. There was no chance of forcing my head through the mouth of that terrible trap in which it was so fairly caught, and which grew narrower and narrower with a rapidity too horrible to be conceived. The agony of that moment is not to be imagined. I threw up my hands and endeavored, with all my strength, to force upward the ponderous iron bar. I might as well have tried to lift the cathedral itself. Down, down, down it came, closer and yet closer. I screamed to Pompey for aid; but he said that I had hurt his feelings by calling him 'an ignorant old squint-eye:' I yelled to Diana; but she only said 'bow-wow-wow,' and that I had told her 'on no account to stir from the corner.' Thus I had no relief to expect from my associates.\n\nMeantime the ponderous and terrific Scythe of Time (for I now discovered the literal import of that classical phrase) had not stopped, nor was it likely to stop, in its career. Down and still down, it came. It had already buried its sharp edge a full inch in my flesh, and my sensations grew indistinct and confused. At one time I fancied myself in Philadelphia with the stately Dr. Moneypenny, at another in the back parlor of Mr. Blackwood receiving his invaluable instructions. And then again the sweet recollection of better and earlier times came over me, and I thought of that happy period when the world was not all a desert, and Pompey not altogether cruel.\n\nThe ticking of the machinery amused me. Amused me, I say, for my sensations now bordered upon perfect happiness, and the most trifling circumstances afforded me pleasure. The eternal click-clak, click-clak, click-clak of the clock was the most melodious of music in my ears, and occasionally even put me in mind of the graceful sermonic harangues of Dr. Ollapod. Then there were the great figures upon the dial-plate \u2014 how intelligent how intellectual, they all looked! And presently they took to dancing the Mazurka, and I think it was the figure V. who performed the most to my satisfaction. She was evidently a lady of breeding. None of your swaggerers, and nothing at all indelicate in her motions. She did the pirouette to admiration \u2014 whirling round upon her apex. I made an endeavor to hand her a chair, for I saw that she appeared fatigued with her exertions \u2014 and it was not until then that I fully perceived my lamentable situation. Lamentable indeed! The bar had buried itself two inches in my neck. I was aroused to a sense of exquisite pain. I prayed for death, and, in the agony of the moment, could not help repeating those exquisite verses of the poet Miguel De Cervantes:\n\nVanny Buren, tan escondida\n\nQuery no te senty venny\n\nPork and pleasure, delly morry\n\nNommy, torny, darry, widdy!\n\nBut now a new horror presented itself, and one indeed sufficient to startle the strongest nerves. My eyes, from the cruel pressure of the machine, were absolutely starting from their sockets. While I was thinking how I should possibly manage without them, one actually tumbled out of my head, and, rolling down the steep side of the steeple, lodged in the rain gutter which ran along the eaves of the main building. The loss of the eye was not so much as the insolent air of independence and contempt with which it regarded me after it was out. There it lay in the gutter just under my nose, and the airs it gave itself would have been ridiculous had they not been disgusting. Such a winking and blinking were never before seen. This behavior on the part of my eye in the gutter was not only irritating on account of its manifest insolence and shameful ingratitude, but was also exceedingly inconvenient on account of the sympathy which always exists between two eyes of the same head, however far apart. I was forced, in a manner, to wink and to blink, whether I would or not, in exact concert with the scoundrelly thing that lay just under my nose. I was presently relieved, however, by the dropping out of the other eye. In falling it took the same direction (possibly a concerted plot) as its fellow. Both rolled out of the gutter together, and in truth I was very glad to get rid of them.\n\nThe bar was now four inches and a half deep in my neck, and there was only a little bit of skin to cut through. My sensations were those of entire happiness, for I felt that in a few minutes, at farthest, I should be relieved from my disagreeable situation. And in this expectation I was not at all deceived. At twenty-five minutes past five in the afternoon, precisely, the huge minute-hand had proceeded sufficiently far on its terrible revolution to sever the small remainder of my neck. I was not sorry to see the head which had occasioned me so much embarrassment at length make a final separation from my body. It first rolled down the side of the steeple, then lodge, for a few seconds, in the gutter, and then made its way, with a plunge, into the middle of the street.\n\nI will candidly confess that my feelings were now of the most singular \u2014 nay, of the most mysterious, the most perplexing and incomprehensible character. My senses were here and there at one and the same moment. With my head I imagined, at one time, that I, the head, was the real Signora Psyche Zenobia \u2014 at another I felt convinced that myself, the body, was the proper identity. To clear my ideas on this topic I felt in my pocket for my snuff-box, but, upon getting it, and endeavoring to apply a pinch of its grateful contents in the ordinary manner, I became immediately aware of my peculiar deficiency, and threw the box at once down to my head. It took a pinch with great satisfaction, and smiled me an acknowledgement in return. Shortly afterward it made me a speech, which I could hear but indistinctly without ears. I gathered enough, however, to know that it was astonished at my wishing to remain alive under such circumstances. In the concluding sentences it quoted the noble words of Ariosto \u2014\n\nIl pover hommy che non sera corty\n\nAnd have a combat tenty erry morty; thus comparing me to the hero who, in the heat of the combat, not perceiving that he was dead, continued to contest the battle with inextinguishable valor. There was nothing now to prevent my getting down from my elevation, and I did so. What it was that Pompey saw so very peculiar in my appearance I have never yet been able to find out. The fellow opened his mouth from ear to ear, and shut his two eyes as if he were endeavoring to crack nuts between the lids. Finally, throwing off his overcoat, he made one spring for the staircase and disappeared. I hurled after the scoundrel these vehement words of Demosthenes \u2014\n\nAndrew O'Phlegethon, you really make haste to fly, and then turned to the darling of my heart, to the one-eyed! the shaggy-haired Diana. Alas! what a horrible vision affronted my eyes? Was that a rat I saw skulking into his hole? Are these the picked bones of the little angel who has been cruelly devoured by the monster? Ye gods! and what do I behold \u2014 is that the departed spirit, the shade, the ghost, of my beloved puppy, which I perceive sitting with a grace so melancholy, in the corner? Hearken! for she speaks, and, heavens! it is in the German of Schiller \u2014\n\n\"Unt stubby duk, so stubby dun\n\nDuk she! duk she!\"\n\nAlas! and are not her words too true?\n\n\"And if I died, at least I died\n\nFor thee \u2014 for thee.\"\n\nSweet creature! she too has sacrificed herself in my behalf. Dogless, niggerless, headless, what now remains for the unhappy Signora Psyche Zenobia? Alas \u2014 nothing! I have done.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.\"\n\n\u2014Joseph Glanvill\n\nI cannot, for my soul, remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the lady Ligeia. Long years have since elapsed, and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or, perhaps, I cannot now bring these points to mind, because, in truth, the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language, made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large, old, decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family \u2014 I have surely heard her speak. That it is of a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligeia! Ligeia! in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world, it is by that sweet word alone \u2014 by Ligeia \u2014 that I bring before mine eyes in fancy the image of her who is no more. And now, while I write, a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies, and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligeia? or was it a test of my strength of affection, that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? or was it rather a caprice of my own \u2014 a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself \u2014 what wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it? And, indeed, if ever she, the wan and the misty-winged Ashtophet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell, over marriages ill-omened, then most surely she presided over mine.\n\nThere is one dear topic, however, on which my memory falls me not. It is the person of Ligeia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and, in her latter days, even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease, of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her footfall. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study save by the dear music of her low sweet voice, as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream \u2014 an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered vision about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mould which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. \"There is no exquisite beauty,\" says Bacon, Lord Verulam, speaking truly of all the forms and genera of beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion.\" Yet, although I saw that the features of Ligeia were not of a classic regularity \u2014 although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed \"exquisite,\" and felt that there was much of \"strangeness\" pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of \"the strange.\" I examined the contour of the lofty and pale forehead \u2014 it was faultless \u2014 how cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so divine! \u2014 the skin rivalling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose, the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples; and then the raven-black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally-curling tresses, setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet, \"hyacinthine!\" I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose \u2014 and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostrils speaking the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly \u2014 the magnificent turn of the short upper lip \u2014 the soft, voluptuous slumber of the under \u2014 the dimples which sported, and the color which spoke \u2014 the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin \u2014 and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek \u2014 the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eves of Ligeia.\n\nFor eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been, too, that in these eves of my beloved lay the secret to which Lord Verulam alludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nourjahad. Yet it was only at intervals \u2014 in moments of intense excitement \u2014 that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligeia. And at such moments was her beauty \u2014 in my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps \u2014 the beauty of beings either above or apart from the earth \u2014 the beauty of the fabulous Houri of the Turk. The hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black, and, far over them, hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows, slightly irregular in outline, had the same tint. The \"strangeness,\" however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it \u2014 that something more profound than the well of Democritus \u2014 which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion to discover. Those eyes! those large, those shining, those divine orbs! they became to me twin stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.\n\nThere is no point, among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, more thrillingly exciting than the fact \u2014 never, I believe, noticed in the schools \u2014 that, in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression \u2014 felt it approaching \u2014 yet not quite be mine \u2014 and so at length entirely depart! And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to theat expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia's beauty passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always aroused within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine \u2014 in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven \u2014(one especially, a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable, to be found near the large star in Lyra) in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanvill, which (perhaps merely from its quaintness \u2014 who shall say?) never failed to inspire me with the sentiment; \u2014\"And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.\"\n\nLength of years, and subsequent reflection, have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Ligeia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech, was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index, of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Ligeia, was the most violently a prey to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion. And of such passion I could form no estimate, save by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which at once so delighted and appalled me \u2014 by the almost magical melody, modulation, distinctness and placidity of her very low voice \u2014 and by the fierce energy (rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of utterance) of the wild words which she habitually uttered.\n\nI have spoken of the learning of Ligeia: it was immense \u2014 such as I have never known in woman. In the classical tongues was she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed upon any theme of the most admired, because simply the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Ligeia at fault? How singularly \u2014 how thrillingly, this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period only, upon my attention! I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in woman \u2014 but where breathes the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science? I saw not then what I now clearly perceive, that the acquisitions of Ligeia were gigantic, were astounding; yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a child-like confidence, to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph \u2014 with how vivid a delight \u2014 with how much of all that is ethereal in hope \u2014 did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought \u2014 but less known \u2014 that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, down whose long, gorgeous, and all untrodden path, I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden!\n\nHow poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wings to themselves and fly away! Without Ligeia I was but as a child groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone, rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant lustre of her eyes, letters, lambent and golden, grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored. Ligeia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with a too \u2014 too glorious effulgence; the pale fingers became of the transparent waxen hue of the grave, and the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank impetuously with the tides of the gentle emotion. I saw that she must die \u2014 and I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim Azrael. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that, to her, death would have come without its terrors; \u2014 but not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the Shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. would have soothed \u2014 I would have reasoned; but, in the intensity of her wild desire for life \u2014 for life \u2014 but for life \u2014 solace and reason were the uttermost folly. Yet not until the last instance, amid the most convulsive writhings of her fierce spirit, was shaken the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle \u2014 grew more low \u2014 yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I hearkened entranced, to a melody more than mortal \u2014 to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known.\n\nThat she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have reigned no ordinary passion. But in death only, was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection. For long hours, detaining my hand, would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions? \u2014 how had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of her making them, But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only, that in Ligeia's more than womanly abandonment to a love, alas! all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length recognized the principle of her longing with so wildly earnest a desire for the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing \u2014 it is this eager vehemence of desire for life \u2014 but for life \u2014 that I have no power to portray \u2014 no utterance capable of expressing.\n\nAt high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me, peremptorily, to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her. \u2014 They were these:\n\n\u2003Lo! 'tis a gala night\n\n\u2003Within the lonesome latter years!\n\n\u2003An angel throng, bewinged, bedight\n\n\u2003In veils, and drowned in tears,\n\n\u2003Sit in a theatre, to see\n\n\u2003A play of hopes and fears,\n\n\u2003While the orchestra breathes fitfully\n\n\u2003The music of the spheres.\n\n\u2003Mimes, in the form of God on high,\n\n\u2003Mutter and mumble low,\n\n\u2003And hither and thither fly \u2014\n\n\u2003Mere puppets they, who come and go\n\n\u2003At bidding of vast formless things\n\n\u2003That shift the scenery to and fro,\n\n\u2003Flapping from out their Condor wings\n\n\u2003Invisible Wo!\n\n\u2003That motley drama! \u2014 oh, be sure\n\n\u2003It shall not be forgot!\n\n\u2003With its Phantom chased forever more,\n\n\u2003By a crowd that seize it not,\n\n\u2003Through a circle that ever returneth in\n\n\u2003To the self-same spot,\n\n\u2003And much of Madness and more of Sin\n\n\u2003And Horror the soul of the plot.\n\n\u2003But see, amid the mimic rout,\n\n\u2003A crawling shape intrude!\n\n\u2003A blood-red thing that writhes from out\n\n\u2003The scenic solitude!\n\n\u2003It writhes! \u2014 it writhes! \u2014 with mortal pangs\n\n\u2003The mimes become its food,\n\n\u2003And the seraphs sob at vermin fangs\n\n\u2003In human gore imbued.\n\n\u2003Out \u2014 out are the lights \u2014 out all!\n\n\u2003And over each quivering form,\n\n\u2003The curtain, a funeral pall,\n\n\u2003Comes down with the rush of a storm,\n\n\u2003And the angels, all pallid and wan,\n\n\u2003Uprising, unveiling, affirm\n\n\u2003That the play is the tragedy, \"Man,\"\n\n\u2003And its hero the Conqueror Worm.\n\n\"O God!\" half shrieked Ligeia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with a spasmodic movement, as I made an end of these lines \u2014\"O God! O Divine Father! \u2014 shall these things be undeviatingly so? \u2014 shall this Conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in Thee? Who \u2014 who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its vigor? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.\"\n\nAnd now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to fall, and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I bent to them my ear and distinguished, again, the concluding words of the passage in Glanvill \u2014\"Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will.\"\n\nShe died; \u2014 and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls wealth. Ligeia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinarily falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased, and put in some repair, an abbey, which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time-honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet although the external abbey, with its verdant decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way, with a child-like perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within. \u2014 For such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed a taste and now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the Bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold! I had become a bounden slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. But these absurdities must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber, ever accursed, whither in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride \u2014 as the successor of the unforgotten Ligeia \u2014 the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine.\n\nThere is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not now visibly before me. Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride, when, through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved? I have said that I minutely remember the details of the chamber \u2014 yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment \u2014 and here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display, to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of the castellated abbey, was pentagonal in shape, and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagon was the sole window \u2014 an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice \u2014 a single pane, and tinted of a leaden hue, so that the rays of either the sun or moon, passing through it, fell with a ghastly lustre on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window, extended the trellice-work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling, of gloomy-looking oak, was excessively lofty, vaulted, and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-Gothic, semi-Druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting, depended, by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge censer of the same metal, Saracenic in pattern, and with many perforations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them, as if endued with a serpent vitality, a continual succession of parti-colored fires.\n\nSome few ottomans and golden candelabra, of Eastern figure, were in various stations about \u2014 and there was the couch, too \u2014 bridal couch \u2014 of an Indian model, and low, and sculptured of solid ebony, with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite, from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of immemorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay, alas! the chief phantasy of all. The lofty walls, gigantic in height \u2014 even unproportionably so \u2014 were hung from summit to foot, in vast folds, with a heavy and massive-looking tapestry \u2014 tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor, as a covering for the ottomans and the ebony bed, as a canopy for the bed, and as the gorgeous volutes of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over, at irregular intervals, with arabesque figures, about a foot in diameter, and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most jetty black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view. By a contrivance now common, and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity, they were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room, they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities; but upon a farther advance, this appearance gradually departed; and step by step, as the visitor moved his station in the chamber, he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belong to the superstition of the Norman, or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of wind behind the draperies \u2014 giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole.\n\nIn halls such as these \u2014 in a bridal chamber such as this \u2014 I passed, with the Lady of Tremaine, the unhallowed hours of the first month of our marriage \u2014 passed them with but little disquietude. That my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper \u2014 that she shunned me and loved me but little \u2014 I could not help perceiving; but it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back, (oh, with what intensity of regret!) to Ligeia, the beloved, the august, the beautiful, the entombed. I revelled in recollections of her purity, of her wisdom, of her lofty, her ethereal nature, of her passionate, her idolatrous love. Now, then, did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams (for I was habitually fettered in the shackles of the drug) I would call aloud upon her name, during the silence of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if, through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed, I could restore her to the pathway she had abandoned \u2014 ah, could it be forever? \u2014 upon the earth.\n\nAbout the commencement of the second month of the marriage, the Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness, from which her recovery was slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy; and in her perturbed state of half-slumber, she spoke of sounds, and of motions, in and about the chamber of the turret, which I concluded had no origin save in the distemper of her fancy, or perhaps in the phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length convalescent \u2014 finally well. Yet but a brief period elapsed, ere a second more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering; and from this attack her frame, at all times feeble, never altogether recovered. Her illnesses were, after this epoch, of alarming character, and of more alarming recurrence, defying alike the knowledge and the great exertions of her physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease which had thus, apparently, taken too sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by human means, I could not fall to observe a similar increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament, and in her excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again, and now more frequently and pertinaciously, of the sounds \u2014 of the slight sounds \u2014 and of the unusual motions among the tapestries, to which she had formerly alluded.\n\nOne night, near the closing in of September, she pressed this distressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber, and I had been watching, with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by the side of her ebony bed, upon one of the ottomans of India. She partly arose, and spoke, in an earnest low whisper, of sounds which she then heard, but which I could not hear \u2014 of motions which she then saw, but which I could not perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries, and I wished to show her (what, let me confess it, I could not all believe) that those almost inarticulate breathings, and those very gentle variations of the figures upon the wall, were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor, overspreading her face, had proved to me that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting, and no attendants were within call. I remembered where was deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her physicians, and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But, as I stepped beneath the light of the censer, two circumstances of a startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable although invisible object had passed lightly by my person; and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet, in the very middle of the rich lustre thrown from the censer, a shadow \u2014 a faint, indefinite shadow of angelic aspect \u2014 such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade. But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium, and heeded these things but little, nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having found the wine, I recrossed the chamber, and poured out a gobletful, which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially recovered, however, and took the vessel herself, while I sank upon an ottoman near me, with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet, and near the couch; and in a second thereafter, as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips, I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet, as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room, three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw \u2014 not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhesitatingly, and I forbore to speak to her of a circumstance which must, after all, I considered, have been but the suggestion of a vivid imagination, rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady, by the opium, and by the hour.\n\nYet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that, immediately subsequent to the fall of the ruby-drops, a rapid change for the worse took place in the disorder of my wife; so that, on the third subsequent night, the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb, and on the fourth, I sat alone, with her shrouded body, in that fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride. \u2014 Wild visions, opium-engendered, flitted, shadow-like, before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the drapery, and upon the writhing of the parti-colored fires in the censer overhead. My eyes then fell, as I called to mind the circumstances of a former night, to the spot beneath the glare of the censer where I had seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no longer; and breathing with greater freedom, I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligeia \u2014 and then came back upon my heart, with the turbulent violence of a flood, the whole of that unutterable wo with which I had regarded her thus enshrouded. The night waned; and still, with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved, I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena.\n\nIt might have been midnight, or perhaps earlier, or later, for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct, startled me from my revery. \u2014 I felt that it came from the bed of ebony \u2014 the bed of death. I listened in an agony of superstitious terror \u2014 but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse \u2014 but there was not the slightest perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. I had heard the noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely and perseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body. Many minutes elapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble, and barely noticeable tinge of color had flushed up within the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror and awe, for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitate in our preparations \u2014 that Rowena still lived. It was necessary that some immediate exertion be made; yet turret was altogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by the servants \u2014 there were none within call \u2014 I had no means of summoning them to my aid without leaving the room for many minutes \u2014 and this I could not venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in my endeavors to call back the spirit ill hovering. In a short period it was certain, however, that a relapse had taken place; the color disappeared from both eyelid and cheek, leaving a wanness even more than that of marble; the lips became doubly shrivelled and pinched up in the ghastly expression of death; a repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of the body; and all the usual rigorous illness immediately supervened. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startlingly aroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of Ligeia.\n\nAn hour thus elapsed when (could it be possible?) I was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I listened \u2014 in extremity of horror. The sound came again \u2014 it was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse, I saw \u2014 distinctly saw \u2014 a tremor upon the lips. In a minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth. Amazement now struggled in my bosom with the profound awe which had hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, that my reason wandered; and it was only by a violent effort that I at length succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus once more had pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon the cheek and throat; a perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame; there was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady lived; and with redoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the temples and the hands, and used every exertion which experience, and no little. medical reading, could suggest. But in vain. Suddenly, the color fled, the pulsation ceased, the lips resumed the expression of the dead, and, in an instant afterward, the whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of that which has been, for many days, a tenant of the tomb.\n\nAnd again I sunk into visions of Ligeia \u2014 and again, (what marvel that I shudder while I write,) again there reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal appearance of the corpse? Let me hurry to a conclusion.\n\nThe greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead, once again stirred \u2014 and now more vigorously than hitherto, although arousing from a dissolution more appalling in its utter hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions, of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The corpse, I repeat, stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance \u2014 the limbs relaxed \u2014 and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment.\n\nI trembled not \u2014 I stirred not \u2014 for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed \u2014 had chilled me into stone. I stirred not \u2014 but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts \u2014 a tumult unappeasable. Could it, indeed, be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all \u2014 the fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine? Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth \u2014 but then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the cheeks \u2014 there were the roses as in her noon of life \u2014 yes, these might indeed be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples, as in health, might it not be hers? \u2014 but had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness seized me with that thought? One bound, and I had reached her feet! Shrinking from my touch, she let fall from her head, unloosened, the ghastly cerements which had confined it, and there streamed forth, into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber, huge masses of long and dishevelled hair; it was blacker than the raven wings of the midnight! And now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. \"Here then, at least,\" I shrieked aloud, \"can I never \u2014 can I never be mistaken \u2014 these are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes \u2014 of my lost love \u2014 of the lady \u2014 of the LADY Ligeia.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Silence \u2014 A Fable (Siope) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n'Eudosin d'orheon korhuphai te kai pharhagges'\n\n'Prhones te kai charhadrhai.'\n\n\u2014Alcman. (60 (10),646.)\n\n\"Listen to me,\" said the Demon as he placed his hand upon my head. \"The region of which I speak is a dreary region in Libya, by the borders of the river Zaire. And there is no quiet there, nor silence.\n\n\"The waters of the river have a saffron and sickly hue; and they flow not onwards to the sea, but palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the sun with a tumultuous and convulsive motion. For many miles on either side of the river's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads. And there is an indistinct murmur which cometh out from among them like the rushing of subterrene water. And they sigh one unto the other.\n\n\"But there is a boundary to their realm \u2014 the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty forest. There, like the waves about the Hebrides, the low underwood is agitated continually. But there is no wind throughout the heaven. And the tall primeval trees rock eternally hither and thither with a crashing and mighty sound. And from their high summits, one by one, drop everlasting dews. And at the roots strange poisonous flowers lie writhing in perturbed slumber. And overhead, with a rustling and loud noise, the gray clouds rush westwardly forever, until they roll, a cataract, over the fiery wall of the horizon. But there is no wind throughout the heaven. And by the shores of the river Zaire there is neither quiet nor silence.\n\n\"It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood. And I stood in the morass among the tall and the rain fell upon my head \u2014 and the lilies sighed one unto the other in the solemnity of their desolation.\n\n\"And, all at once, the moon arose through the thin ghastly mist, and was crimson in color. And mine eyes fell upon a huge gray rock which stood by the shore of the river, and was lighted by the light of the moon. And the rock was gray, and ghastly, and tall, \u2014 and the rock was gray. Upon its front were characters engraven in the stone; and I walked through the morass of water-lilies, until I came close unto the shore, that I might read the characters upon the stone. But I could not decypher them. And I was going back into the morass, when the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rock, and upon the characters; \u2014 and the characters were DESOLATION.\n\n\"And I looked upwards, and there stood a man upon the summit of the rock; and I hid myself among the water-lilies that I might discover the actions of the man. And the man was tall and stately in form, and was wrapped up from his shoulders to his feet in the toga of old Rome. And the outlines of his figure were indistinct \u2014 but his features were the features of a deity; for the mantle of the night, and of the mist, and of the moon, and of the dew, had left uncovered the features of his face. And his brow was lofty with thought, and his eye wild with care; and, in the few furrows upon his cheek I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust with mankind, and a longing after solitude.\n\n\"And the man sat upon the rock, and leaned his head upon his hand, and looked out upon the desolation. He looked down into the low unquiet shrubbery, and up into the tall primeval trees, and up higher at the rustling heaven, and into the crimson moon. And I lay close within shelter of the lilies, and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; \u2014 but the night waned, and he sat upon the rock.\n\n\"And the man turned his attention from the heaven, and looked out upon the dreary river Zaire, and upon the yellow ghastly waters, and upon the pale legions of the water-lilies. And the man listened to the sighs of the water-lilies, and to the murmur that came up from among them. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; \u2014 but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.\n\n\"Then I went down into the recesses of the morass, and waded afar in among the wilderness of the lilies, and called unto the hippopotami which dwelt among the fens in the recesses of the morass. And the hippopotami heard my call, and came, with the behemoth, unto the foot of the rock, and roared loudly and fearfully beneath the moon. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; \u2014 but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.\n\n\"Then I cursed the elements with the curse of tumult; and a frightful tempest gathered in the heaven where, before, there had been no wind. And the heaven became livid with the violence of the tempest \u2014 and the rain beat upon the head of the man \u2014 and the floods of the river came down \u2014 and the river was tormented into foam \u2014 and the water-lilies shrieked within their beds \u2014 and the forest crumbled before the wind \u2014 and the thunder rolled \u2014 and the lightning fell \u2014 and the rock rocked to its foundation. And I lay close within my covert and observed the actions of the man. And the man trembled in the solitude; \u2014 but the night waned and he sat upon the rock.\n\n\"Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of silence, the river, and the lilies, and the wind, and the forest, and the heaven, and the thunder, and the sighs of the water-lilies. And they became accursed, and were still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven \u2014 and the thunder died away \u2014 and the lightning did not flash \u2014 and the clouds hung motionless \u2014 and the waters sunk to their level and remained \u2014 and the trees ceased to rock \u2014 and the water-lilies sighed no more \u2014 and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed; \u2014 and the characters were Silence.\n\n\"And mine eyes fell upon the countenance of the man, and his countenance was wan with terror. And, hurriedly, he raised his head from his hand, and stood forth upon the rock and listened. But there was no voice throughout the vast illimitable desert, and the characters upon the rock were Silence. And the man shuddered, and turned his face away, and fled afar off, in haste, so that I beheld him no more.\"\n\nNow there are fine tales in the volumes of the Magi \u2014 in the iron-bound, melancholy volumes of the Magi. Therein, I say, are glorious histories of the Heaven, and of the Earth, and of the mighty sea \u2014 and of the Genii that over-ruled the sea, and the earth, and the lofty heaven. There was much lore too in the sayings which were said by the Sybils; and holy, holy things were heard of old by the dim leaves that trembled around Dodona \u2014 but, as Allah liveth, that fable which the Demon told me as he sat by my side in the shadow of the tomb, I hold to be the most wonderful of all! And as the Demon made an end of his story, he fell back within the cavity of the tomb and laughed. And I could not laugh with the Demon, and he cursed me because I could not laugh. And the lynx which dwelleth forever in the tomb, came out therefrom, and lay down at the feet of the Demon, and looked at him steadily in the face.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'I will bring fire to thee.' \u2014Euripides Andiom\n\nEiros: Why do you call me Eiros?\n\nCharmion: So henceforth will you always be called. You must forget, too, my earthly name, and speak to me as Charmion.\n\nEiros: This is indeed no dream!\n\nCharmion: Dreams are with us no more; but of these mysteries anon. I rejoice to see you looking like-life and rational. The film of the shadow has already passed from off your eyes. Be of heart and fear nothing. Your allotted days of stupor have expired; and, to-morrow, I will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence.\n\nEiros: True, I feel no stupor, none at all. The wild sickness and the terrible darkness have left me, and I hear no longer that mad, rushing, horrible sound, like the \"voice of many waters.\" Yet my senses are bewildered, Charmion, with the keenness of their perception of the new.\n\nCharmion: A few days will remove all this; \u2014 but I fully understand you, and feel for you. It is now ten earthly years since I underwent what you undergo, yet the remembrance of it hangs by me still. You have now suffered all of pain, however, which you will suffer in Aidenn.\n\nEiros: In Aidenn?\n\nCharmion: In Aidenn.\n\nEiros: Oh, God! \u2014 pity me, Charmion! \u2014 I am overburthened with the majesty of all things \u2014 of the unknown now known \u2014 of the speculative Future merged in the august and certain Present.\n\nCharmion: Grapple not now with such thoughts. Tomorrow we will speak of this. Your mind wavers, and its agitation will find relief in the exercise of simple memories. Look not around, nor forward \u2014 but back. I am burning with anxiety to hear the details of that stupendous event which threw you among us. Tell me of it. Let us converse of familiar things, in the old familiar language of the world which has so fearfully perished.\n\nEiros: Most fearfully, fearfully! \u2014 this is indeed no dream.\n\nCharmion: Dreams are no more. Was I much mourned, my Eiros?\n\nEiros: Mourned, Charmion? \u2014 oh deeply. To that last hour of all, there hung a cloud of intense gloom and devout sorrow over your household.\n\nCharmion: And that last hour \u2014 speak of it. Remember that, beyond the naked fact of the catastrophe itself, I know nothing. When, coming out from among mankind, I passed into Night through the Grave \u2014 at that period, if I remember aright, the calamity which overwhelmed you was utterly unanticipated. But, indeed, I knew little of the speculative philosophy of the day.\n\nEiros: The individual calamity was, as you say, entirely unanticipated; but analogous misfortunes had been long a subject of discussion with astronomers. I need scarce tell you, my friend, that, even when you left us, men had agreed to understand those passages in the most holy writings which speak of the final destruction of all things by fire, as having reference to the orb of the earth alone. But in regard to the immediate agency of the ruin, speculation had been at fault from that epoch in astronomical knowledge in which the comets were divested of the terrors of flame. The very moderate density of these bodies had been well established. They had been observed to pass among the satellites of Jupiter, without bringing about any sensible alteration either in the masses or in the orbits of these secondary planets. We had long regarded the wanderers as vapory creations of inconceivable tenuity, and as altogether incapable of doing injury to our substantial globe, even in the event of contact. But contact was not in any degree dreaded; for the elements of all the comets were accurately known. That among them we should look for the agency of the threatened fiery destruction had been for many years considered an inadmissible idea. But wonders and wild fancies had been, of late days, strangely rife among mankind; and although it was only with a few of the ignorant that actual apprehension prevailed, upon the announcement by astronomers of a new comet, yet this announcement was generally received with I know not what of agitation and mistrust.\n\nThe elements of the strange orb were immediately calculated, and it was at once conceded by all observers, that its path, at perihelion, would bring it into very close proximity with the earth. There were two or three astronomers, of secondary note, who resolutely maintained that a contact was inevitable. I cannot very well express to you the effect of this intelligence upon the people. For a few short days they would not believe an assertion which their intellect, so long employed among worldly considerations, could not in any manner grasp. But the truth of a vitally important fact soon makes its way into the understanding of even the most stolid. Finally, all men saw that astronomical knowledge lied not, and they awaited the comet. Its approach was not, at first, seemingly rapid; nor was its appearance of very unusual character. It was of a dull red, and had little perceptible train. For seven or eight days we saw no material increase in its apparent diameter, and but a partial alteration in its color. Meantime the ordinary affairs of men were discarded, and all interests absorbed in a growing discussion, instituted by the philosophic, in respect to the cometary nature. Even the grossly ignorant aroused their sluggish capacities to such considerations. The learned now gave their intellect \u2014 their soul \u2014 to no such points as the allaying of fear, or to the sustenance of loved theory. They sought \u2014 they panted for right views. They groaned for perfected knowledge. Truth arose in the purity of her strength and exceeding majesty, and the wise bowed down and adored.\n\nThat material injury to our globe or to its inhabitants would result from the apprehended contact, was an opinion which hourly lost ground among the wise; and the wise were now freely permitted to rule the reason and the fancy of the crowd. It was demonstrated, that the density of the comet's nucleus was far less than that of our rarest gas; and the harmless passage of a similar visitor among the satellites of Jupiter was a point strongly insisted upon, and which served greatly to allay terror. Theologists, with an earnestness fear-enkindled, dwelt upon the biblical prophecies, and expounded them to the people with a directness and simplicity of which no previous instance had been known. That the final destruction of the earth must be brought about by the agency of fire, was urged with a spirit that enforced everywhere conviction; and that the comets were of no fiery nature (as all men now knew) was a truth which relieved all, in a great measure, from the apprehension of the great calamity foretold. It is noticeable that the popular prejudices and vulgar errors in regard to pestilences and wars \u2014 errors which were wont to prevail upon every appearance of a comet \u2014 were now altogether unknown. As if by some sudden convulsive exertion, reason had at once hurled superstition from her throne. The feeblest intellect had derived vigor from excessive interest.\n\nWhat minor evils might arise from the contact were points of elaborate question. The learned spoke of slight geological disturbances, of probable alterations in climate, and consequently in vegetation; of possible magnetic and electric influences. Many held that no visible or perceptible effect would in any manner be produced. While such discussions were going on, their subject gradually approached, growing larger in apparent diameter, and of a more brilliant lustre. Mankind grew paler as it came. All human operations were suspended. There was an epoch in the course of the general sentiment when the comet had attained, at length, a size surpassing that of any previously recorded visitation. The people now, dismissing any lingering hope that the astronomers were wrong, experienced all the certainty of evil. The chimerical aspect of their terror was gone. The hearts of the stoutest of our race beat violently within their bosoms. A very few days sufficed, however, to merge even such feelings in sentiments more unendurable. We could no longer apply to the strange orb any accustomed thoughts. Its historical attributes had disappeared. It oppressed us with a hideous novelty of emotion. We saw it not as an astronomical phenomenon in the heavens, but as an incubus upon our hearts, and a shadow upon our brains. It had taken, with inconceivable rapidity, the character of a gigantic mantle of rare flame, extending from horizon to horizon.\n\nYet a day, and men breathed with greater freedom. It was clear that we were already within the influence of the comet; yet we lived. We even felt an unusual elasticity of frame and vivacity of mind. The exceeding tenuity of the object of our dread was apparent; for all heavenly objects were plainly visible through it. Meantime, our vegetation had perceptibly altered; and we gained faith, from this predicted circumstance, in the foresight of the wise. A wild luxuriance of foliage, utterly unknown before, burst out upon every vegetable thing.\n\nYet another day \u2014 and the evil was not altogether upon us. It was now evident that its nucleus would first reach us. A wild change had come over all men; and the first sense of pain was the wild signal for general lamentation and horror. This first sense of pain lay in a rigorous constriction of the breast and lungs, and an insufferable dryness of the skin. It could not be denied that our atmosphere was radically affected; the conformation of this atmosphere and the possible modifications to which it might be subjected, were now the topics of discussion. The result of investigation sent an electric thrill of the intensest terror through the universal heart of man.\n\nIt had been long known that the air which encircled us was a compound of oxygen and nitrogen gases, in the proportion of twenty-one measures of oxygen, and seventy-nine of nitrogen, in every one hundred of the atmosphere. Oxygen, which was the principle of combustion, and the vehicle of heat, was absolutely necessary to the support of animal life, and was the most powerful and energetic agent in nature. Nitrogen, on the contrary, was incapable of supporting either animal life or flame. An unnatural excess of oxygen would result, it had been ascertained, in just such an elevation of the animal spirits as we had latterly experienced. It was the pursuit, the extension of the idea, which had engendered awe. What would be the result of a total extraction of the nitrogen? A combustion irresistible, all-devouring, omni-prevalent, immediate; the entire fulfillment, in all their minute and terrible details, of the fiery and horror-inspiring denunciations of the prophecies of the Holy Book.\n\nWhy need I paint, Charmion, the now disenchained frenzy of mankind? That tenuity in the comet which had previously inspired us with hope, was now the source of the bitterness of despair. In its impalpable gaseous character we clearly perceived the consummation of Fate. Meantime a day again passed, bearing away with it the last shadow of Hope. We gasped in the rapid modification of the air. The red blood bounded tumultuously through its strict channels. A furious delirium possessed all men; and, with arms rigidly outstretched toward the threatening heavens, they trembled and shrieked aloud. But the nucleus of the destroyer was now upon us; even here in Aidenn, I shudder while I speak. Let me be brief \u2014 brief as the ruin that overwhelmed. For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then \u2014 let us bow down, Charmion, before the excessive majesty of the great God! \u2014 then, there came a shouting and pervading sound, as if from the mouth itself of HIM; while the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name. Thus ended all.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Devil in the Belfry by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'What o'clock is it?' \u2014Old Saying\n\nEverybody knows, in a general way, that the finest place in the world is \u2014 or, alas, was \u2014 the Dutch borough of Vondervotteimittiss. Yet as it lies some distance from any of the main roads, being in a somewhat out-of-the-way situation, there are perhaps very few of my readers who have ever paid it a visit. For the benefit of those who have not, therefore, it will be only proper that I should enter into some account of it. And this is indeed the more necessary, as with the hope of enlisting public sympathy in behalf of the inhabitants, I design here to give a history of the calamitous events which have so lately occurred within its limits. No one who knows me will doubt that the duty thus self-imposed will be executed to the best of my ability, with all that rigid impartiality, all that cautious examination into facts, and diligent collation of authorities, which should ever distinguish him who aspires to the title of historian.\n\nBy the united aid of medals, manuscripts, and inscriptions, I am enabled to say, positively, that the borough of Vondervotteimittiss has existed, from its origin, in precisely the same condition which it at present preserves. Of the date of this origin, however, I grieve that I can only speak with that species of indefinite definiteness which mathematicians are, at times, forced to put up with in certain algebraic formulae. The date, I may thus say, in regard to the remoteness of its antiquity, cannot be less than any assignable quantity whatsoever.\n\nTouching the derivation of the name Vondervotteimittiss, I confess myself, with sorrow, equally at fault. Among a multitude of opinions upon this delicate point \u2014 some acute, some learned, some sufficiently the reverse \u2014 I am able to select nothing which ought to be considered satisfactory. Perhaps the idea of Grogswigg \u2014 nearly coincident with that of Kroutaplenttey \u2014 is to be cautiously preferred. \u2014 It runs:\u2014 Vondervotteimittis \u2014 Vonder, lege Donder \u2014 Votteimittis, quasi und Bleitziz \u2014 Bleitziz obsol:\u2014 pro Blitzen.\" This derivative, to say the truth, is still countenanced by some traces of the electric fluid evident on the summit of the steeple of the House of the Town-Council. I do not choose, however, to commit myself on a theme of such importance, and must refer the reader desirous of information to the \"Oratiunculae de Rebus Praeter-Veteris,\" of Dundergutz. See, also, Blunderbuzzard \"De Derivationibus,\" pp. 27 to 5010, Folio, Gothic edit., Red and Black character, Catch-word and No Cypher; wherein consult, also, marginal notes in the autograph of Stuffundpuff, with the Sub-Commentaries of Gruntundguzzell.\n\nNotwithstanding the obscurity which thus envelops the date of the foundation of Vondervotteimittis, and the derivation of its name, there can be no doubt, as I said before, that it has always existed as we find it at this epoch. The oldest man in the borough can remember not the slightest difference in the appearance of any portion of it; and, indeed, the very suggestion of such a possibility is considered an insult. The site of the village is in a perfectly circular valley, about a quarter of a mile in circumference, and entirely surrounded by gentle hills, over whose summit the people have never yet ventured to pass. For this they assign the very good reason that they do not believe there is anything at all on the other side.\n\nRound the skirts of the valley (which is quite level, and paved throughout with flat tiles), extends a continuous row of sixty little houses. These, having their backs on the hills, must look, of course, to the centre of the plain, which is just sixty yards from the front door of each dwelling. Every house has a small garden before it, with a circular path, a sun-dial, and twenty-four cabbages. The buildings themselves are so precisely alike, that one can in no manner be distinguished from the other. Owing to the vast antiquity, the style of architecture is somewhat odd, but it is not for that reason the less strikingly picturesque. They are fashioned of hard-burned little bricks, red, with black ends, so that the walls look like a chess-board upon a great scale. The gables are turned to the front, and there are cornices, as big as all the rest of the house, over the eaves and over the main doors. The windows are narrow and deep, with very tiny panes and a great deal of sash. On the roof is a vast quantity of tiles with long curly ears. The woodwork, throughout, is of a dark hue and there is much carving about it, with but a trifling variety of pattern for, time out of mind, the carvers of Vondervotteimittiss have never been able to carve more than two objects \u2014 a timepiece and a cabbage. But these they do exceedingly well, and intersperse them, with singular ingenuity, wherever they find room for the chisel.\n\nThe dwellings are as much alike inside as out, and the furniture is all upon one plan. The floors are of square tiles, the chairs and tables of black-looking wood with thin crooked legs and puppy feet. The mantelpieces are wide and high, and have not only timepieces and cabbages sculptured over the front, but a real timepiece, which makes a prodigious ticking, on the top in the middle, with a flower-pot containing a cabbage standing on each extremity by way of outrider. Between each cabbage and the timepiece, again, is a little China man having a large stomach with a great round hole in it, through which is seen the dial-plate of a watch.\n\nThe fireplaces are large and deep, with fierce crooked-looking fire-dogs. There is constantly a rousing fire, and a huge pot over it, full of sauerkraut and pork, to which the good woman of the house is always busy in attending. She is a little fat old lady, with blue eyes and a red face, and wears a huge cap like a sugar-loaf, ornamented with purple and yellow ribbons. Her dress is of orange-colored linsey-woolsey, made very full behind and very short in the waist \u2014 and indeed very short in other respects, not reaching below the middle of her leg. This is somewhat thick, and so are her ankles, but she has a fine pair of green stockings to cover them. Her shoes \u2014 of pink leather \u2014 are fastened each with a bunch of yellow ribbons puckered up in the shape of a cabbage. In her left hand she has a little heavy Dutch watch; in her right she wields a ladle for the sauerkraut and pork. By her side there stands a fat tabby cat, with a gilt toy-repeater tied to its tail, which \"the boys\" have there fastened by way of a quiz.\n\nThe boys themselves are, all three of them, in the garden attending the pig. They are each two feet in height. They have three-cornered cocked hats, purple waistcoats reaching down to their thighs, buckskin knee-breeches, red stockings, heavy shoes with big silver buckles, long surtout coats with large buttons of mother-of-pearl. Each, too, has a pipe in his mouth, and a little dumpy watch in his right hand. He takes a puff and a look, and then a look and a puff. The pig \u2014 which is corpulent and lazy \u2014 is occupied now in picking up the stray leaves that fall from the cabbages, and now in giving a kick behind at the gilt repeater, which the urchins have also tied to his tail in order to make him look as handsome as the cat.\n\nRight at the front door, in a high-backed leather-bottomed armed chair, with crooked legs and puppy feet like the tables, is seated the old man of the house himself. He is an exceedingly puffy little old gentleman, with big circular eyes and a huge double chin. His dress resembles that of the boys \u2014 and I need say nothing farther about it. All the difference is, that his pipe is somewhat bigger than theirs and he can make a greater smoke. Like them, he has a watch, but he carries his watch in his pocket. To say the truth, he has something of more importance than a watch to attend to \u2014 and what that is, I shall presently explain. He sits with his right leg upon his left knee, wears a grave countenance, and always keeps one of his eyes, at least, resolutely bent upon a certain remarkable object in the centre of the plain.\n\nThis object is situated in the steeple of the House of the Town Council. The Town Council are all very little, round, oily, intelligent men, with big saucer eyes and fat double chins, and have their coats much longer and their shoe-buckles much bigger than the ordinary inhabitants of Vondervotteimittiss. Since my sojourn in the borough, they have had several special meetings, and have adopted these three important resolutions:\n\n\"That it is wrong to alter the good old course of things:\"\n\n\"That there is nothing tolerable out of Vondervotteimittiss:\" and \u2014\n\n\"That we will stick by our clocks and our cabbages.\"\n\nAbove the session-room of the Council is the steeple, and in the steeple is the belfry, where exists, and has existed time out of mind, the pride and wonder of the village \u2014 the great clock of the borough of Vondervotteimittiss. And this is the object to which the eyes of the old gentlemen are turned who sit in the leather-bottomed arm-chairs.\n\nThe great clock has seven faces \u2014 one in each of the seven sides of the steeple \u2014 so that it can be readily seen from all quarters. Its faces are large and white, and its hands heavy and black. There is a belfry-man whose sole duty is to attend to it; but this duty is the most perfect of sinecures \u2014 for the clock of Vondervotteimittis was never yet known to have anything the matter with it. Until lately, the bare supposition of such a thing was considered heretical. From the remotest period of antiquity to which the archives have reference, the hours have been regularly struck by the big bell. And, indeed the case was just the same with all the other clocks and watches in the borough. Never was such a place for keeping the true time. When the large clapper thought proper to say \"Twelve o'clock!\" all its obedient followers opened their throats simultaneously, and responded like a very echo. In short, the good burghers were fond of their sauerkraut, but then they were proud of their clocks.\n\nAll people who hold sinecure offices are held in more or less respect, and as the belfry \u2014 man of Vondervotteimittiss has the most perfect of sinecures, he is the most perfectly respected of any man in the world. He is the chief dignitary of the borough, and the very pigs look up to him with a sentiment of reverence. His coat-tail is very far longer \u2014 his pipe, his shoe \u2014 buckles, his eyes, and his stomach, very far bigger \u2014 than those of any other old gentleman in the village; and as to his chin, it is not only double, but triple.\n\nI have thus painted the happy estate of Vondervotteimittiss: alas, that so fair a picture should ever experience a reverse!\n\nThere has been long a saying among the wisest inhabitants, that \"no good can come from over the hills\"; and it really seemed that the words had in them something of the spirit of prophecy. It wanted five minutes of noon, on the day before yesterday, when there appeared a very odd-looking object on the summit of the ridge of the eastward. Such an occurrence, of course, attracted universal attention, and every little old gentleman who sat in a leather-bottomed arm-chair turned one of his eyes with a stare of dismay upon the phenomenon, still keeping the other upon the clock in the steeple.\n\nBy the time that it wanted only three minutes to noon, the droll object in question was perceived to be a very diminutive foreign-looking young man. He descended the hills at a great rate, so that every body had soon a good look at him. He was really the most finicky little personage that had ever been seen in Vondervotteimittiss. His countenance was of a dark snuff-color, and he had a long hooked nose, pea eyes, a wide mouth, and an excellent set of teeth, which latter he seemed anxious of displaying, as he was grinning from ear to ear. What with mustachios and whiskers, there was none of the rest of his face to be seen. His head was uncovered, and his hair neatly done up in papillotes. His dress was a tight-fitting swallow-tailed black coat (from one of whose pockets dangled a vast length of white handkerchief), black kerseymere knee-breeches, black stockings, and stumpy-looking pumps, with huge bunches of black satin ribbon for bows. Under one arm he carried a huge chapeau-de-bras, and under the other a fiddle nearly five times as big as himself. In his left hand was a gold snuff-box, from which, as he capered down the hill, cutting all manner of fantastic steps, he took snuff incessantly with an air of the greatest possible self-satisfaction. God bless me! \u2014 here was a sight for the honest burghers of Vondervotteimittiss!\n\nTo speak plainly, the fellow had, in spite of his grinning, an audacious and sinister kind of face; and as he curvetted right into the village, the old stumpy appearance of his pumps excited no little suspicion; and many a burgher who beheld him that day would have given a trifle for a peep beneath the white cambric handkerchief which hung so obtrusively from the pocket of his swallow-tailed coat. But what mainly occasioned a righteous indignation was, that the scoundrelly popinjay, while he cut a fandango here, and a whirligig there, did not seem to have the remotest idea in the world of such a thing as keeping time in his steps.\n\nThe good people of the borough had scarcely a chance, however, to get their eyes thoroughly open, when, just as it wanted half a minute of noon, the rascal bounced, as I say, right into the midst of them; gave a chassez here, and a balancez there; and then, after a pirouette and a pas-de-zephyr, pigeon-winged himself right up into the belfry of the House of the Town Council, where the wonder-stricken belfry-man sat smoking in a state of dignity and dismay. But the little chap seized him at once by the nose; gave it a swing and a pull; clapped the big chapeau de-bras upon his head; knocked it down over his eyes and mouth; and then, lifting up the big fiddle, beat him with it so long and so soundly, that what with the belfry-man being so fat, and the fiddle being so hollow, you would have sworn that there was a regiment of double-bass drummers all beating the devil's tattoo up in the belfry of the steeple of Vondervotteimittiss.\n\nThere is no knowing to what desperate act of vengeance this unprincipled attack might have aroused the inhabitants, but for the important fact that it now wanted only half a second of noon. The bell was about to strike, and it was a matter of absolute and pre-eminent necessity that every body should look well at his watch. It was evident, however, that just at this moment the fellow in the steeple was doing something that he had no business to do with the clock. But as it now began to strike, nobody had any time to attend to his manoeuvres, for they had all to count the strokes of the bell as it sounded.\n\n\"One!\" said the clock.\n\n\"Von!\" echoed every little old gentleman in every leather-bottomed arm-chair in Vondervotteimittiss. \"Von!\" said his watch also; \"von!\" said the watch of his vrow; and \"von!\" said the watches of the boys, and the little gilt repeaters on the tails of the cat and pig.\n\n\"Two!\" continued the big bell; and\n\n\"Doo!\" repeated all the repeaters.\n\n\"Three! Four! Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Nine! Ten!\" said the bell.\n\n\"Dree! Vour! Fibe! Sax! Seben! Aight! Noin! Den!\" answered the others.\n\n\"Eleven!\" said the big one.\n\n\"Eleben!\" assented the little ones.\n\n\"Twelve!\" said the bell.\n\n\"Dvelf!\" they replied perfectly satisfied, and dropping their voices.\n\n\"Und dvelf it is!\" said all the little old gentlemen, putting up their watches. But the big bell had not done with them yet.\n\n\"Thirteen!\" said he.\n\n\"Der Teufel!\" gasped the little old gentlemen, turning pale, dropping their pipes, and putting down all their right legs from over their left knees.\n\n\"Der Teufel!\" groaned they, \"Dirteen! Dirteen!! \u2014 Mein Gott, it is Dirteen o'clock!!\"\n\nWhy attempt to describe the terrible scene which ensued? All Vondervotteimittiss flew at once into a lamentable state of uproar.\n\n\"Vot is cum'd to mein pelly?\" roared all the boys \u2014\"I've been ongry for dis hour!\"\n\n\"Vot is com'd to mein kraut?\" screamed all the vrows, \"It has been done to rags for this hour!\"\n\n\"Vot is cum'd to mein pipe?\" swore all the little old gentlemen, \"Donder and Blitzen; it has been smoked out for dis hour!\"\u2014 and they filled them up again in a great rage, and sinking back in their arm-chairs, puffed away so fast and so fiercely that the whole valley was immediately filled with impenetrable smoke.\n\nMeantime the cabbages all turned very red in the face, and it seemed as if old Nick himself had taken possession of every thing in the shape of a timepiece. The clocks carved upon the furniture took to dancing as if bewitched, while those upon the mantelpieces could scarcely contain themselves for fury, and kept such a continual striking of thirteen, and such a frisking and wriggling of their pendulums as was really horrible to see. But, worse than all, neither the cats nor the pigs could put up any longer with the behavior of the little repeaters tied to their tails, and resented it by scampering all over the place, scratching and poking, and squeaking and screeching, and caterwauling and squalling, and flying into the faces, and running under the petticoats of the people, and creating altogether the most abominable din and confusion which it is possible for a reasonable person to conceive. And to make matters still more distressing, the rascally little scape-grace in the steeple was evidently exerting himself to the utmost. Every now and then one might catch a glimpse of the scoundrel through the smoke. There he sat in the belfry upon the belfry-man, who was lying flat upon his back. In his teeth the villain held the bell-rope, which he kept jerking about with his head, raising such a clatter that my ears ring again even to think of it. On his lap lay the big fiddle, at which he was scraping, out of all time and tune, with both hands, making a great show, the nincompoop! of playing \"Judy O'Flannagan and Paddy O'Rafferty.\"\n\nAffairs being thus miserably situated, I left the place in disgust, and now appeal for aid to all lovers of correct time and fine kraut. Let us proceed in a body to the borough, and restore the ancient order of things in Vondervotteimittiss by ejecting that little fellow from the steeple.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Son coeur est un luth suspendu;\n\n\u2003Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.\n\n\u2014De Beranger\n\nDuring the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was \u2014 but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me \u2014 upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain \u2014 upon the bleak walls \u2014 upon the vacant eye-like windows \u2014 upon a few rank sedges \u2014 and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees \u2014 with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium \u2014 the bitter lapse into everyday life-the hideous dropping off of the reveller upon opium \u2014 the bitter lapse into everyday life \u2014 the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart \u2014 an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it \u2014 I paused to think \u2014 what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down \u2014 but with a shudder even more thrilling than before \u2014 upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.\n\nNevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country \u2014 a letter from him \u2014 which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness \u2014 of a mental disorder which oppressed him \u2014 and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said \u2014 it the apparent heart that went with his request \u2014 which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.\n\nAlthough, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honoured as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other \u2014 it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the \"House of Usher\" \u2014 an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.\n\nI have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment \u2014 that of looking down within the tarn \u2014 had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition \u2014 for why should I not so term it? \u2014 served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy \u2014 a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity-an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn \u2014 a pestilent and mystic vapour, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.\n\nShaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinising observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.\n\nNoticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me \u2014 while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy \u2014 while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this \u2014 I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.\n\nThe room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.\n\nUpon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality \u2014 of the constrained effort of the ennuye man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eve, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.\n\nIn the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence \u2014 an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy \u2014 an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision \u2014 that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation \u2014 that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.\n\nIt was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy \u2014 a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture; the odours of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.\n\nTo an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. \"I shall perish,\" said he, \"I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect \u2014 in terror. In this unnerved-in this pitiable condition \u2014 I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR.\"\n\nI learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth \u2014 in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated \u2014 an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit-an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.\n\nHe admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin \u2014 to the severe and long-continued illness \u2014 indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution-of a tenderly beloved sister \u2014 his sole companion for long years \u2014 his last and only relative on earth. \"Her decease,\" he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, \"would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.\" While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread \u2014 and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother \u2014 but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.\n\nThe disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain \u2014 that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.\n\nFor several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavours to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.\n\nI shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my cars. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why; \u2014 from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavour to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least \u2014 in the circumstances then surrounding me \u2014 there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.\n\nOne of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendour.\n\nI have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled \"The Haunted Palace,\" ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "\u2003In the greenest of our valleys,\n\n\u2003By good angels tenanted,\n\n\u2003Once fair and stately palace \u2014\n\n\u2003Radiant palace \u2014 reared its head.\n\n\u2003In the monarch Thought's dominion \u2014\n\n\u2003It stood there!\n\n\u2003Never seraph spread a pinion\n\n\u2003Over fabric half so fair." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "\u2003Banners yellow, glorious, golden,\n\n\u2003On its roof did float and flow;\n\n\u2003(This \u2014 all this \u2014 was in the olden\n\n\u2003Time long ago)\n\n\u2003And every gentle air that dallied,\n\n\u2003In that sweet day,\n\n\u2003Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,\n\n\u2003A winged odour went away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\u2003Wanderers in that happy valley\n\n\u2003Through two luminous windows saw\n\n\u2003Spirits moving musically\n\n\u2003To a lute's well-tuned law,\n\n\u2003Round about a throne, where sitting\n\n\u2003(Porphyrogene!)\n\n\u2003In state his glory well befitting,\n\n\u2003The ruler of the realm was seen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "\u2003And all with pearl and ruby glowing\n\n\u2003Was the fair palace door,\n\n\u2003Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing\n\n\u2003And sparkling evermore,\n\n\u2003A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty\n\n\u2003Was but to sing,\n\n\u2003In voices of surpassing beauty,\n\n\u2003The wit and wisdom of their king." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "\u2003But evil things, in robes of sorrow,\n\n\u2003Assailed the monarch's high estate;\n\n\u2003(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow\n\n\u2003Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)\n\n\u2003And, round about his home, the glory\n\n\u2003That blushed and bloomed\n\n\u2003Is but a dim-remembered story\n\n\u2003Of the old time entombed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "\u2003And travellers now within that valley,\n\n\u2003Through the red-litten windows, see\n\n\u2003Vast forms that move fantastically\n\n\u2003To a discordant melody;\n\n\u2003While, like a rapid ghastly river,\n\n\u2003Through the pale door,\n\n\u2003A hideous throng rush out forever,\n\n\u2003And laugh \u2014 but smile no more.\n\nI well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones \u2014 in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around \u2014 above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence \u2014 the evidence of the sentience \u2014 was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him \u2014 what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.\n\nOur books \u2014 the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid \u2014 were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indagine, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favourite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and AEgipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic \u2014 the manual of a forgotten church \u2014 the Vigilae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae.\n\nI could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the stair case, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.\n\nAt the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.\n\nHaving deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead \u2014 for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toll, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.\n\nAnd now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue \u2014 but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was labouring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified-that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.\n\nIt was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch \u2014 while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavoured to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room \u2014 of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremour gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened \u2014 I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me \u2014 to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavoured to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.\n\nI had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan \u2014 but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes \u2014 an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanour. His air appalled me \u2014 but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.\n\n\"And you have not seen it?\" he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence \u2014 \"you have not then seen it? \u2014 but, stay! you shall.\" Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.\n\nThe impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this \u2014 yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars \u2014 nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapour, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.\n\n\"You must not \u2014 you shall not behold this!\" said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. \"These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon \u2014 or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement; \u2014 the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favourite romances. I will read, and you shall listen; \u2014 and so we will pass away this terrible night together.\"\n\nThe antique volume which I had taken up was the \"Mad Trist\" of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favourite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild over-strained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.\n\nI had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:\n\n\"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling there-with sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest.\n\nAt the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) \u2014 it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:\n\n\"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanour, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten \u2014\n\nWho entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;\n\nWho slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;\n\nAnd Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.\"\n\nHere again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement \u2014 for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound \u2014 the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.\n\nOppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of the second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanour. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast \u2014 yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea \u2014 for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded: \"And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.\"\n\nNo sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than \u2014 as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.\n\n\"Not hear it? \u2014 yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long \u2014 long \u2014 long \u2014 many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it \u2014 yet I dared not \u2014 oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! \u2014 I dared not \u2014 I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them \u2014 many, many days ago \u2014 yet I dared not \u2014 I dared not speak! And now \u2014 to-night \u2014 Ethelred \u2014 ha! ha! \u2014 the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangour of the shield! \u2014 say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!\" here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul \u2014 \"MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!\"\n\nAs if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell \u2014 the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust \u2014 but then without those doors there DID stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold, then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.\n\nFrom that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could wi have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened \u2014 there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind \u2014 the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight \u2014 my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder \u2014 there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters \u2014 and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the \"HOUSE OF USHER.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Man that was Used Up by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Pleurez, pleurez, mes yeux, et fondez vous en eau!\n\n\u2003La moitie de ma vie a mis l'autre au tombeau.\n\n\u2014Corneille\n\nI cannot just now remember when or where I first made the acquaintance of that truly fine-looking fellow, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith. Some one did introduce me to the gentleman, I am sure \u2014 at some public meeting, I know very well \u2014 held about something of great importance, no doubt \u2014 at some place or other, I feel convinced, whose name I have unaccountably forgotten. The truth is \u2014 that the introduction was attended, upon my part, with a degree of anxious embarrassment which operated to prevent any definite impressions of either time or place. I am constitutionally nervous \u2014 this, with me, is a family failing, and I can't help it. In especial, the slightest appearance of mystery \u2014 of any point I cannot exactly comprehend \u2014 puts me at once into a pitiable state of agitation.\n\nThere was something, as it were, remarkable \u2014 yes, remarkable, although this is but a feeble term to express my full meaning \u2014 about the entire individuality of the personage in question. He was, perhaps, six feet in height, and of a presence singularly commanding. There was an air distingue pervading the whole man, which spoke of high breeding, and hinted at high birth. Upon this topic \u2014 the topic of Smith's personal appearance \u2014 I have a kind of melancholy satisfaction in being minute. His head of hair would have done honor to a Brutus \u2014 nothing could be more richly flowing, or possess a brighter gloss. It was of a jetty black \u2014 which was also the color, or more properly the no-color of his unimaginable whiskers. You perceive I cannot speak of these latter without enthusiasm; it is not too much to say that they were the handsomest pair of whiskers under the sun. At all events, they encircled, and at times partially overshadowed, a mouth utterly unequalled. Here were the most entirely even, and the most brilliantly white of all conceivable teeth. From between them, upon every proper occasion, issued a voice of surpassing clearness, melody, and strength. In the matter of eyes, also, my acquaintance was pre-eminently endowed. Either one of such a pair was worth a couple of the ordinary ocular organs. They were of a deep hazel exceedingly large and lustrous; and there was perceptible about them, ever and anon, just that amount of interesting obliquity which gives pregnancy to expression.\n\nThe bust of the General was unquestionably the finest bust I ever saw. For your life you could not have found a fault with its wonderful proportion. This rare peculiarity set off to great advantage a pair of shoulders which would have called up a blush of conscious inferiority into the countenance of the marble Apollo. I have a passion for fine shoulders, and may say that I never beheld them in perfection before. The arms altogether were admirably modelled. Nor were the lower limbs less superb. These were, indeed, the ne plus ultra of good legs. Every connoisseur in such matters admitted the legs to be good. There was neither too much flesh nor too little \u2014 neither rudeness nor fragility. I could not imagine a more graceful curve than that of the os femoris, and there was just that due gentle prominence in the rear of the fibula which goes to the conformation of a properly proportioned calf. I wish to God my young and talented friend Chiponchipino, the sculptor, had but seen the legs of Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith.\n\nBut although men so absolutely fine-looking are neither as plenty as reasons or blackberries, still I could not bring myself to believe that the remarkable something to which I alluded just now \u2014 that the odd air of je ne sais quoi which hung about my new acquaintance \u2014 lay altogether, or indeed at all, in the supreme excellence of his bodily endowments. Perhaps it might be traced to the manner \u2014 yet here again I could not pretend to be positive. There was a primness, not to say stiffness, in his carriage \u2014 a degree of measured and, if I may so express it, of rectangular precision attending his every movement, which, observed in a more diminutive figure, would have had the least little savor in the world of affectation, pomposity, or constraint, but which, noticed in a gentleman of his undoubted dimensions, was readily placed to the account of reserve, hauteur \u2014 of a commendable sense, in short, of what is due to the dignity of colossal proportion.\n\nThe kind friend who presented me to General Smith whispered in my ear some few words of comment upon the man. He was a remarkable man \u2014 a very remarkable man \u2014 indeed one of the most remarkable men of the age. He was an especial favorite, too, with the ladies \u2014 chiefly on account of his high reputation for courage.\n\n\"In that point he is unrivalled \u2014 indeed he is a perfect desperado \u2014 a downright fire-eater, and no mistake,\" said my friend, here dropping his voice excessively low, and thrilling me with the mystery of his tone.\n\n\"A downright fire-eater, and no mistake. Showed that, I should say, to some purpose, in the late tremendous swamp-fight, away down South, with the Bugaboo and Kickapoo Indians.\" [Here my friend opened his eyes to some extent.] \"Bless my soul! \u2014 blood and thunder, and all that! \u2014 prodigies of valor! \u2014 heard of him of course? \u2014 you know he's the man\u2014\"\n\n\"Man alive, how do you do? why, how are ye? very glad to see ye, indeed!\" here interrupted the General himself, seizing my companion by the hand as he drew near, and bowing stiffly but profoundly, as I was presented. I then thought (and I think so still) that I never heard a clearer nor a stronger voice, nor beheld a finer set of teeth: but I must say that I was sorry for the interruption just at that moment, as, owing to the whispers and insinuations aforesaid, my interest had been greatly excited in the hero of the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign.\n\nHowever, the delightfully luminous conversation of Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith soon completely dissipated this chagrin. My friend leaving us immediately, we had quite a long tete-a-tete, and I was not only pleased but really-instructed. I never heard a more fluent talker, or a man of greater general information. With becoming modesty, he forebore, nevertheless, to touch upon the theme I had just then most at heart \u2014 I mean the mysterious circumstances attending the Bugaboo war \u2014 and, on my own part, what I conceive to be a proper sense of delicacy forbade me to broach the subject; although, in truth, I was exceedingly tempted to do so. I perceived, too, that the gallant soldier preferred topics of philosophical interest, and that he delighted, especially, in commenting upon the rapid march of mechanical invention. Indeed, lead him where I would, this was a point to which he invariably came back.\n\n\"There is nothing at all like it,\" he would say, \"we are a wonderful people, and live in a wonderful age. Parachutes and rail-roads-mantraps and spring-guns! Our steam-boats are upon every sea, and the Nassau balloon packet is about to run regular trips (fare either way only twenty pounds sterling) between London and Timbuctoo. And who shall calculate the immense influence upon social life \u2014 upon arts \u2014 upon commerce \u2014 upon literature \u2014 which will be the immediate result of the great principles of electro-magnetics! Nor, is this all, let me assure you! There is really no end to the march of invention. The most wonderful \u2014 the most ingenious \u2014 and let me add, Mr. \u2014 Mr. \u2014 Thompson, I believe, is your name \u2014 let me add, I say the most useful \u2014 the most truly useful \u2014 mechanical contrivances are daily springing up like mushrooms, if I may so express myself, or, more figuratively, like \u2014 ah \u2014 grasshoppers \u2014 like grasshoppers, Mr. Thompson \u2014 about us and ah \u2014 ah \u2014 ah \u2014 around us!\"\n\nThompson, to be sure, is not my name; but it is needless to say that I left General Smith with a heightened interest in the man, with an exalted opinion of his conversational powers, and a deep sense of the valuable privileges we enjoy in living in this age of mechanical invention. My curiosity, however, had not been altogether satisfied, and I resolved to prosecute immediate inquiry among my acquaintances, touching the Brevet Brigadier General himself, and particularly respecting the tremendous events quorum pars magna fuit, during the Bugaboo and Kickapoo campaign.\n\nThe first opportunity which presented opportunity which presented itself, and which (horresco referens) I did not in the least scruple to seize, occurred at the Church of the Reverend Doctor Drummummupp, where I found myself established, one Sunday, just at sermon time, not only in the pew, but by the side of that worthy and communicative little friend of mine, Miss Tabitha T. Thus seated, I congratulated myself, and with much reason, upon the very flattering state of affairs. If any person knew any thing about Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, that person it was clear to me, was Miss Tabitha T. We telegraphed a few signals and then commenced, soto voce, a brisk tete-a-tete.\n\n\"Smith!\" said she in reply to my very earnest inquiry: \"Smith! \u2014 why, not General John A. B. C.? Bless me, I thought you knew all about him! This is a wonderfully inventive age! Horrid affair that! \u2014 a bloody set of wretches, those Kickapoos! \u2014 fought like a hero \u2014 prodigies of valor \u2014 immortal renown. Smith! \u2014 Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C.! Why, you know he's the man \u2014\n\n\"Man,\" here broke in Doctor Drummummupp, at the top of his voice, and with a thump that came near knocking the pulpit about our ears; \"man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live; he cometh up and is cut down like a flower!\" I started to the extremity of the pew, and perceived by the animated looks of the divine, that the wrath which had nearly proved fatal to the pulpit had been excited by the whispers of the lady and myself. There was no help for it; so I submitted with a good grace, and listened, in all the martyrdom of dignified silence, to the balance of that very capital discourse.\n\nNext evening found me a somewhat late visitor at the Rantipole Theatre, where I felt sure of satisfying my curiosity at once, by merely stepping into the box of those exquisite specimens of affability and omniscience, the Misses Arabella and Miranda Cognoscenti. That fine tragedian, Climax, was doing Iago to a very crowded house, and I experienced some little difficulty in making my wishes understood; especially as our box was next the slips, and completely overlooked the stage.\n\n\"Smith!\" said Miss Arabella, as she at comprehended the purport of my query; \"Smith? \u2014 why, not General John A. B. C.?\"\n\n\"Smith!\" inquired Miranda, musingly. \"God bless me, did you ever behold a finer figure?\"\n\n\"Never, madam, but do tell me\u2014\"\n\n\"Or so inimitable grace?\"\n\n\"Never, upon my word! \u2014 But pray, inform me\u2014\"\n\n\"Or so just an appreciation of stage effect?\"\n\n\"Madam!\"\n\n\"Or a more delicate sense of the true beauties of Shakespeare? Be so good as to look at that leg!\"\n\n\"The devil!\" and I turned again to her sister.\n\n\"Smith!\" said she, \"why, not General John A. B. C.? Horrid affair that, wasn't it? \u2014 great wretches, those Bugaboos \u2014 savage and so on \u2014 but we live in a wonderfully inventive age! \u2014 Smith! \u2014 O yes! great man! \u2014 perfect desperado \u2014 immortal renown \u2014 prodigies of valor! Never heard!\" [This was given in a scream.] \"Bless my soul! why, he's the man\u2014\"\n\n\u2003\"\u2014mandragora\n\n\u2003Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world\n\n\u2003Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep\n\n\u2003Which thou ow'dst yesterday!\"\n\nHere roared our Climax just in my ear, and shaking his fist in my face all the time, in a way that I couldn't stand, and I wouldn't. I left the Misses Cognoscenti immediately, went behind the scenes forthwith, and gave the beggarly scoundrel such a thrashing as I trust he will remember till the day of his death.\n\nAt the soiree of the lovely widow, Mrs. Kathleen O'Trump, I was confident that I should meet with no similar disappointment. Accordingly, I was no sooner seated at the card-table, with my pretty hostess for a vis-a-vis, than I propounded those questions the solution of which had become a matter so essential to my peace.\n\n\"Smith!\" said my partner, \"why, not General John A. B. C.? Horrid affair that, wasn't it? \u2014 diamonds did you say? \u2014 terrible wretches those Kickapoos! \u2014 we are playing whist, if you please, Mr. Tattle \u2014 however, this is the age of invention, most certainly the age, one may say \u2014 the age par excellence \u2014 speak French? \u2014 oh, quite a hero \u2014 perfect desperado! \u2014 no hearts, Mr. Tattle? I don't believe it! \u2014 Immortal renown and all that! \u2014 prodigies of valor! Never heard!! \u2014 why, bless me, he's the man\u2014\"\n\n\"Mann? \u2014 Captain Mann!\" here screamed some little feminine interloper from the farthest corner of the room. \"Are you talking about Captain Mann and the duel? \u2014 oh, I must hear \u2014 do tell \u2014 go on, Mrs. O'Trump! \u2014 do now go on!\" And go on Mrs. O'Trump did \u2014 all about a certain Captain Mann, who was either shot or hung, or should have been both shot and hung. Yes! Mrs. O'Trump, she went on, and I\u2014 I went off. There was no chance of hearing any thing farther that evening in regard to Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith.\n\nStill I consoled myself with the reflection that the tide of ill-luck would not run against me forever, and so determined to make a bold push for information at the rout of that bewitching little angel, the graceful Mrs. Pirouette.\n\n\"Smith!\" said Mrs. P., as we twirled about together in a pas de zephyr, \"Smith? \u2014 why, not General John A. B. C.? Dreadful business that of the Bugaboos, wasn't it? \u2014 dreadful creatures, those Indians! \u2014 do turn out your toes! I really am ashamed of you \u2014 man of great courage, poor fellow! \u2014 but this is a wonderful age for invention \u2014 O dear me, I'm out of breath \u2014 quite a desperado \u2014 prodigies of valor \u2014 never heard!! \u2014 can't believe it \u2014 I shall have to sit down and enlighten you \u2014 Smith! why, he's the man\u2014\"\n\n\"Man-Fred, I tell you!\" here bawled out Miss Bas-Bleu, as I led Mrs. Pirouette to a seat. \"Did ever anybody hear the like? It's Man-Fred, I say, and not at all by any means Man-Friday.\" Here Miss Bas-Bleu beckoned to me in a very peremptory manner; and I was obliged, will I nill I, to leave Mrs. P. for the purpose of deciding a dispute touching the title of a certain poetical drama of Lord Byron's. Although I pronounced, with great promptness, that the true title was Man-Friday, and not by any means Man-Fred yet when I returned to seek Mrs. Pirouette she was not to be discovered, and I made my retreat from the house in a very bitter spirit of animosity against the whole race of the Bas-Bleus.\n\nMatters had now assumed a really serious aspect, and I resolved to call at once upon my particular friend, Mr. Theodore Sinivate; for I knew that here at least I should get something like definite information.\n\n\"Smith!\" said he, in his well known peculiar way of drawling out his syllables; \"Smith! \u2014 why, not General John A. B. C.? Savage affair that with the Kickapoo-o-os, wasn't it? Say, don't you think so? \u2014 perfect despera-a-ado \u2014 great pity, 'pon my honor! \u2014 wonderfully inventive age! \u2014 pro-o-digies of valor! By the by, did you ever hear about Captain Ma-a-a-a-n?\"\n\n\"Captain Mann be d-d!\" said I; \"please to go on with your story.\"\n\n\"Hem! \u2014 oh well! \u2014 quite la meme cho-o-ose, as we say in France. Smith, eh? Brigadier-General John A. B. C.? I say\"\u2014[here Mr. S. thought proper to put his finger to the side of his nose]\u2014\"I say, you don't mean to insinuate now, really and truly, and conscientiously, that you don't know all about that affair of Smith's, as well as I do, eh? Smith? John A-B-C.? Why, bless me, he's the ma-a-an\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Sinivate,\" said I, imploringly, \"is he the man in the mask?\"\n\n\"No-o-o!\" said he, looking wise, \"nor the man in the mo-o-on.\"\n\nThis reply I considered a pointed and positive insult, and so left the house at once in high dudgeon, with a firm resolve to call my friend, Mr. Sinivate, to a speedy account for his ungentlemanly conduct and ill breeding.\n\nIn the meantime, however, I had no notion of being thwarted touching the information I desired. There was one resource left me yet. I would go to the fountain head. I would call forthwith upon the General himself, and demand, in explicit terms, a solution of this abominable piece of mystery. Here, at least, there should be no chance for equivocation. I would be plain, positive, peremptory \u2014 as short as pie-crust \u2014 as concise as Tacitus or Montesquieu.\n\nIt was early when I called, and the General was dressing, but I pleaded urgent business, and was shown at once into his bedroom by an old negro valet, who remained in attendance during my visit. As I entered the chamber, I looked about, of course, for the occupant, but did not immediately perceive him. There was a large and exceedingly odd looking bundle of something which lay close by my feet on the floor, and, as I was not in the best humor in the world, I gave it a kick out of the way.\n\n\"Hem! ahem! rather civil that, I should say!\" said the bundle, in one of the smallest, and altogether the funniest little voices, between a squeak and a whistle, that I ever heard in all the days of my existence.\n\n\"Ahem! rather civil that I should observe.\"\n\nI fairly shouted with terror, and made off, at a tangent, into the farthest extremity of the room.\n\n\"God bless me, my dear fellow!\" here again whistled the bundle, \"what \u2014 what \u2014 what \u2014 why, what is the matter? I really believe you don't know me at all.\"\n\nWhat could I say to all this \u2014 what could I? I staggered into an armchair, and, with staring eyes and open mouth, awaited the solution of the wonder.\n\n\"Strange you shouldn't know me though, isn't it?\" presently resqueaked the nondescript, which I now perceived was performing upon the floor some inexplicable evolution, very analogous to the drawing on of a stocking. There was only a single leg, however, apparent.\n\n\"Strange you shouldn't know me though, isn't it? Pompey, bring me that leg!\" Here Pompey handed the bundle a very capital cork leg, already dressed, which it screwed on in a trice; and then it stood upright before my eyes.\n\n\"And a bloody action it was,\" continued the thing, as if in a soliloquy; \"but then one mustn't fight with the Bugaboos and Kickapoos, and think of coming off with a mere scratch. Pompey, I'll thank you now for that arm. Thomas\" [turning to me] \"is decidedly the best hand at a cork leg; but if you should ever want an arm, my dear fellow, you must really let me recommend you to Bishop.\" Here Pompey screwed on an arm.\n\n\"We had rather hot work of it, that you may say. Now, you dog, slip on my shoulders and bosom. Pettit makes the best shoulders, but for a bosom you will have to go to Ducrow.\"\n\n\"Bosom!\" said I.\n\n\"Pompey, will you never be ready with that wig? Scalping is a rough process, after all; but then you can procure such a capital scratch at De L'Orme's.\"\n\n\"Scratch!\"\n\n\"Now, you nigger, my teeth! For a good set of these you had better go to Parmly's at once; high prices, but excellent work. I swallowed some very capital articles, though, when the big Bugaboo rammed me down with the butt end of his rifle.\"\n\n\"Butt end! ram down!! my eye!!\"\n\n\"O yes, by the way, my eye \u2014 here, Pompey, you scamp, screw it in! Those Kickapoos are not so very slow at a gouge; but he's a belied man, that Dr. Williams, after all; you can't imagine how well I see with the eyes of his make.\"\n\nI now began very clearly to perceive that the object before me was nothing more nor less than my new acquaintance, Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith. The manipulations of Pompey had made, I must confess, a very striking difference in the appearance of the personal man. The voice, however, still puzzled me no little; but even this apparent mystery was speedily cleared up.\n\n\"Pompey, you black rascal,\" squeaked the General, \"I really do believe you would let me go out without my palate.\"\n\nHereupon, the negro, grumbling out an apology, went up to his master, opened his mouth with the knowing air of a horse-jockey, and adjusted therein a somewhat singular-looking machine, in a very dexterous manner, that I could not altogether comprehend. The alteration, however, in the entire expression of the General's countenance was instantaneous and surprising. When he again spoke, his voice had resumed all that rich melody and strength which I had noticed upon our original introduction.\n\n\"D-n the vagabonds!\" said he, in so clear a tone that I positively started at the change, \"D-n the vagabonds! they not only knocked in the roof of my mouth, but took the trouble to cut off at least seven-eighths of my tongue. There isn't Bonfanti's equal, however, in America, for really good articles of this description. I can recommend you to him with confidence,\" [here the General bowed,] \"and assure you that I have the greatest pleasure in so doing.\"\n\nI acknowledged his kindness in my best manner, and took leave of him at once, with a perfect understanding of the true state of affairs \u2014 with a full comprehension of the mystery which had troubled me so long. It was evident. It was a clear case. Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith was the man \u2014 the man that was used up.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nIt's on my visiting cards sure enough (and it's them that's all o' pink satin paper) that inny gintleman that plases may behould the intheristhin words, \"Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, 39 Southampton Row, Russell Square, Parrish o' Bloomsbury.\" And shud ye be wantin' to diskiver who is the pink of purliteness quite, and the laider of the hot tun in the houl city o' Lonon \u2014 why it's jist mesilf. And fait that same is no wonder at all at all (so be plased to stop curlin your nose), for every inch o' the six wakes that I've been a gintleman, and left aff wid the bogthrothing to take up wid the Barronissy, it's Pathrick that's been living like a houly imperor, and gitting the iddication and the graces. Och! and wouldn't it be a blessed thing for your spirrits if ye cud lay your two peepers jist, upon Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, when he is all riddy drissed for the hopperer, or stipping into the Brisky for the drive into the Hyde Park. But it's the illigant big figgur that I ave, for the rason o' which all the ladies fall in love wid me. Isn't it my own swate silf now that'll missure the six fut, and the three inches more nor that, in me stockins, and that am excadingly will proportioned all over to match? And it is ralelly more than three fut and a bit that there is, inny how, of the little ould furrener Frinchman that lives jist over the way, and that's a oggling and a goggling the houl day, (and bad luck to him,) at the purty widdy Misthress Tracle that's my own nixt-door neighbor, (God bliss her!) and a most particuller frind and acquaintance? You percave the little spalpeen is summat down in the mouth, and wears his lift hand in a sling, and it's for that same thing, by yur lave, that I'm going to give you the good rason.\n\nThe truth of the houl matter is jist simple enough; for the very first day that I com'd from Connaught, and showd my swate little silf in the strait to the widdy, who was looking through the windy, it was a gone case althegither with the heart o' the purty Misthress Tracle. I percaved it, ye see, all at once, and no mistake, and that's God's truth. First of all it was up wid the windy in a jiffy, and thin she threw open her two peepers to the itmost, and thin it was a little gould spy-glass that she clapped tight to one o' them and divil may burn me if it didn't spake to me as plain as a peeper cud spake, and says it, through the spy-glass: \"Och! the tip o' the mornin' to ye, Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, mavourneen; and it's a nate gintleman that ye are, sure enough, and it's mesilf and me forten jist that'll be at yur sarvice, dear, inny time o' day at all at all for the asking.\" And it's not mesilf ye wud have to be bate in the purliteness; so I made her a bow that wud ha' broken yur heart altegither to behould, and thin I pulled aff me hat with a flourish, and thin I winked at her hard wid both eyes, as much as to say, \"True for you, yer a swate little crature, Mrs. Tracle, me darlint, and I wish I may be drownthed dead in a bog, if it's not mesilf, Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, that'll make a houl bushel o' love to yur leddyship, in the twinkling o' the eye of a Londonderry purraty.\"\n\nAnd it was the nixt mornin', sure, jist as I was making up me mind whither it wouldn't be the purlite thing to sind a bit o' writin' to the widdy by way of a love-litter, when up com'd the delivery servant wid an illigant card, and he tould me that the name on it (for I niver could rade the copperplate printin on account of being lift handed) was all about Mounseer, the Count, A Goose, Look \u2014 aisy, Maiter-di-dauns, and that the houl of the divilish lingo was the spalpeeny long name of the little ould furrener Frinchman as lived over the way.\n\nAnd jist wid that in cum'd the little willian himself, and then he made me a broth of a bow, and thin he said he had ounly taken the liberty of doing me the honor of the giving me a call, and thin he went on to palaver at a great rate, and divil the bit did I comprehind what he wud be afther the tilling me at all at all, excipting and saving that he said \"pully wou, woolly wou,\" and tould me, among a bushel o' lies, bad luck to him, that he was mad for the love o' my widdy Misthress Tracle, and that my widdy Mrs. Tracle had a puncheon for him.\n\nAt the hearin' of this, ye may swear, though, I was as mad as a grasshopper, but I remimbered that I was Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, and that it wasn't althegither gentaal to lit the anger git the upper hand o' the purliteness, so I made light o' the matter and kipt dark, and got quite sociable wid the little chap, and afther a while what did he do but ask me to go wid him to the widdy's, saying he wud give me the feshionable inthroduction to her leddyship.\n\n\"Is it there ye are?\" said I thin to mesilf, \"and it's thrue for you, Pathrick, that ye're the fortunittest mortal in life. We'll soon see now whither it's your swate silf, or whither it's little Mounseer Maiter-di-dauns, that Misthress Tracle is head and ears in the love wid.\"\n\nWid that we wint aff to the widdy's, next door, and ye may well say it was an illigant place; so it was. There was a carpet all over the floor, and in one corner there was a forty-pinny and a Jew's harp and the divil knows what ilse, and in another corner was a sofy, the beautifullest thing in all natur, and sitting on the sofy, sure enough, there was the swate little angel, Misthress Tracle.\n\n\"The tip o' the mornin' to ye,\" says I, \"Mrs. Tracle,\" and thin I made sich an illigant obaysance that it wud ha quite althegither bewildered the brain o' ye. \"Wully woo, pully woo, plump in the mud,\" says the little furrenner Frinchman, \"and sure Mrs. Tracle,\" says he, that he did, \"isn't this gintleman here jist his reverence Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, and isn't he althegither and entirely the most particular frind and acquaintance that I have in the houl world?\"\n\nAnd wid that the widdy, she gits up from the sofy, and makes the swatest curthchy nor iver was seen; and thin down she sits like an angel; and thin, by the powers, it was that little spalpeen Mounseer Maiter-di-dauns that plumped his silf right down by the right side of her. Och hon! I ixpicted the two eyes o' me wud ha cum'd out of my head on the spot, I was so dispirate mad! Howiver, \"Bait who!\" says I, after awhile. \"Is it there ye are, Mounseer Maiter-di-dauns?\" and so down I plumped on the lift side of her leddyship, to be aven with the willain. Botheration! it wud ha done your heart good to percave the illigant double wink that I gived her jist thin right in the face with both eyes.\n\nBut the little ould Frinchman he niver beginned to suspict me at all at all, and disperate hard it was he made the love to her leddyship. \"Woully wou,\" says he, Pully wou,\" says he, \"Plump in the mud,\" says he.\n\n\"That's all to no use, Mounseer Frog, mavourneen,\" thinks I; and I talked as hard and as fast as I could all the while, and throth it was mesilf jist that divarted her leddyship complately and intirely, by rason of the illigant conversation that I kipt up wid her all about the dear bogs of Connaught. And by and by she gived me such a swate smile, from one ind of her mouth to the ither, that it made me as bould as a pig, and I jist took hould of the ind of her little finger in the most dillikitest manner in natur, looking at her all the while out o' the whites of my eyes.\n\nAnd then ounly percave the cuteness of the swate angel, for no sooner did she obsarve that I was afther the squazing of her flipper, than she up wid it in a jiffy, and put it away behind her back, jist as much as to say, \"Now thin, Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, there's a bitther chance for ye, mavourneen, for it's not altogether the gentaal thing to be afther the squazing of my flipper right full in the sight of that little furrenner Frinchman, Mounseer Maiter-di-dauns.\"\n\nWid that I giv'd her a big wink jist to say, \"lit Sir Pathrick alone for the likes o' them thricks,\" and thin I wint aisy to work, and you'd have died wid the divarsion to behould how cliverly I slipped my right arm betwane the back o' the sofy, and the back of her leddyship, and there, sure enough, I found a swate little flipper all a waiting to say, \"the tip o' the mornin' to ye, Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt.\" And wasn't it mesilf, sure, that jist giv'd it the laste little bit of a squaze in the world, all in the way of a commincement, and not to be too rough wid her leddyship? and och, botheration, wasn't it the gentaalest and dilikittest of all the little squazes that I got in return? \"Blood and thunder, Sir Pathrick, mavourneen,\" thinks I to mesilf, \"fait it's jist the mother's son of you, and nobody else at all at all, that's the handsomest and the fortunittest young bog-throtter that ever cum'd out of Connaught!\" And with that I givd the flipper a big squaze, and a big squaze it was, by the powers, that her leddyship giv'd to me back. But it would ha split the seven sides of you wid the laffin' to behould, jist then all at once, the consated behavior of Mounseer Maiter-di-dauns. The likes o' sich a jabbering, and a smirking, and a parley-wouing as he begin'd wid her leddyship, niver was known before upon arth; and divil may burn me if it wasn't me own very two peepers that cotch'd him tipping her the wink out of one eye. Och, hon! if it wasn't mesilf thin that was mad as a Kilkenny cat I shud like to be tould who it was!\n\n\"Let me infarm you, Mounseer Maiter-di-dauns,\" said I, as purlite as iver ye seed, \"that it's not the gintaal thing at all at all, and not for the likes o' you inny how, to be afther the oggling and a goggling at her leddyship in that fashion,\" and jist wid that such another squaze as it was I giv'd her flipper, all as much as to say, \"isn't it Sir Pathrick now, my jewel, that'll be able to the proticting o' you, my darlint?\" and then there cum'd another squaze back, all by way of the answer. \"Thrue for you, Sir Pathrick,\" it said as plain as iver a squaze said in the world, \"Thrue for you, Sir Pathrick, mavourneen, and it's a proper nate gintleman ye are \u2014 that's God's truth,\" and with that she opened her two beautiful peepers till I belaved they wud ha' cum'd out of her hid althegither and intirely, and she looked first as mad as a cat at Mounseer Frog, and thin as smiling as all out o' doors at mesilf.\n\n\"Thin,\" says he, the willian, \"Och hon! and a wolly-wou, pully-wou,\" and then wid that he shoved up his two shoulders till the divil the bit of his hid was to be diskivered, and then he let down the two corners of his purraty-trap, and thin not a haporth more of the satisfaction could I git out o' the spalpeen.\n\nBelave me, my jewel, it was Sir Pathrick that was unreasonable mad thin, and the more by token that the Frinchman kipt an wid his winking at the widdy; and the widdy she kept an wid the squazing of my flipper, as much as to say, \"At him again, Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, mavourneen:\" so I just ripped out wid a big oath, and says I;\n\n\"Ye little spalpeeny frog of a bog-throtting son of a bloody noun!\"\u2014 and jist thin what d'ye think it was that her leddyship did? Troth she jumped up from the sofy as if she was bit, and made off through the door, while I turned my head round afther her, in a complate bewilderment and botheration, and followed her wid me two peepers. You percave I had a reason of my own for knowing that she couldn't git down the stares althegither and intirely; for I knew very well that I had hould of her hand, for the divil the bit had I iver lit it go. And says I; \"Isn't it the laste little bit of a mistake in the world that ye've been afther the making, yer leddyship? Come back now, that's a darlint, and I'll give ye yur flipper.\" But aff she wint down the stairs like a shot, and thin I turned round to the little Frinch furrenner. Och hon! if it wasn't his spalpeeny little paw that I had hould of in my own \u2014 why thin \u2014 thin it wasn't \u2014 that's all.\n\nAnd maybe it wasn't mesilf that jist died then outright wid the laffin', to behold the little chap when he found out that it wasn't the widdy at all at all that he had had hould of all the time, but only Sir Pathrick O'Grandison. The ould divil himself niver behild sich a long face as he pet an! As for Sir Pathrick O'Grandison, Barronitt, it wasn't for the likes of his riverence to be afther the minding of a thrifle of a mistake. Ye may jist say, though (for it's God's thruth), that afore I left hould of the flipper of the spalpeen (which was not till afther her leddyship's futman had kicked us both down the stairs, I giv'd it such a nate little broth of a squaze as made it all up into raspberry jam.\n\n\"Woully wou,\" says he, \"pully wou,\" says he \u2014\"Cot tam!\"\n\nAnd that's jist the thruth of the rason why he wears his lift hand in a sling.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ William Wilson by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003What say of it? what say of CONSCIENCE grim,\n\n\u2003That spectre in my path?\n\n\u2014Chamberlayne's Pharronida\n\nLet me call myself, for the present, William Wilson. The fair page now lying before me need not be sullied with my real appellation. This has been already too much an object for the scorn \u2014 for the horror \u2014 for the detestation of my race. To the uttermost regions of the globe have not the indignant winds bruited its unparalleled infamy? Oh, outcast of all outcasts most abandoned! \u2014 to the earth art thou not forever dead? to its honors, to its flowers, to its golden aspirations? \u2014 and a cloud, dense, dismal, and limitless, does it not hang eternally between thy hopes and heaven?\n\nI would not, if I could, here or to-day, embody a record of my later years of unspeakable misery, and unpardonable crime. This epoch \u2014 these later years \u2014 took unto themselves a sudden elevation in turpitude, whose origin alone it is my present purpose to assign. Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle. From comparatively trivial wickedness I passed, with the stride of a giant, into more than the enormities of an Elah-Gabalus. What chance \u2014 what one event brought this evil thing to pass, bear with me while I relate. Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit. I long, in passing through the dim valley, for the sympathy \u2014 I had nearly said for the pity \u2014 of my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow \u2014 what they cannot refrain from allowing \u2014 that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before \u2014 certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?\n\nI am the descendant of a race whose imaginative and easily excitable temperament has at all times rendered them remarkable; and, in my earliest infancy, I gave evidence of having fully inherited the family character. As I advanced in years it was more strongly developed; becoming, for many reasons, a cause of serious disquietude to my friends, and of positive injury to myself. I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, and a prey to the most ungovernable passions. Weak-minded, and beset with constitutional infirmities akin to my own, my parents could do but little to check the evil propensities which distinguished me. Some feeble and ill-directed efforts resulted in complete failure on their part, and, of course, in total triumph on mine. Thenceforward my voice was a household law; and at an age when few children have abandoned their leading-strings, I was left to the guidance of my own will, and became, in all but name, the master of my own actions.\n\nMy earliest recollections of a school-life, are connected with a large, rambling, Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted Gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep.\n\nIt gives me, perhaps, as much of pleasure as I can now in any manner experience, to dwell upon minute recollections of the school and its concerns. Steeped in misery as I am \u2014 misery, alas! only too real \u2014 I shall be pardoned for seeking relief, however slight and temporary, in the weakness of a few rambling details. These, moreover, utterly trivial, and even ridiculous in themselves, assume, to my fancy, adventitious importance, as connected with a period and a locality when and where I recognise the first ambiguous monitions of the destiny which afterwards so fully overshadowed me. Let me then remember.\n\nThe house, I have said, was old and irregular. The grounds were extensive, and a high and solid brick wall, topped with a bed of mortar and broken glass, encompassed the whole. This prison-like rampart formed the limit of our domain; beyond it we saw but thrice a week \u2014 once every Saturday afternoon, when, attended by two ushers, we were permitted to take brief walks in a body through some of the neighbouring fields \u2014 and twice during Sunday, when we were paraded in the same formal manner to the morning and evening service in the one church of the village. Of this church the principal of our school was pastor. With how deep a spirit of wonder and perplexity was I wont to regard him from our remote pew in the gallery, as, with step solemn and slow, he ascended the pulpit! This reverend man, with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and so vast, \u2014 -could this be he who, of late, with sour visage, and in snuffy habiliments, administered, ferule in hand, the Draconian laws of the academy? Oh, gigantic paradox, too utterly monstrous for solution!\n\nAt an angle of the ponderous wall frowned a more ponderous gate. It was riveted and studded with iron bolts, and surmounted with jagged iron spikes. What impressions of deep awe did it inspire! It was never opened save for the three periodical egressions and ingressions already mentioned; then, in every creak of its mighty hinges, we found a plenitude of mystery \u2014 a world of matter for solemn remark, or for more solemn meditation.\n\nThe extensive enclosure was irregular in form, having many capacious recesses. Of these, three or four of the largest constituted the play-ground. It was level, and covered with fine hard gravel. I well remember it had no trees, nor benches, nor anything similar within it. Of course it was in the rear of the house. In front lay a small parterre, planted with box and other shrubs; but through this sacred division we passed only upon rare occasions indeed \u2014 such as a first advent to school or final departure thence, or perhaps, when a parent or friend having called for us, we joyfully took our way home for the Christmas or Midsummer holy-days.\n\nBut the house! \u2014 how quaint an old building was this! \u2014 to me how veritably a palace of enchantment! There was really no end to its windings \u2014 to its incomprehensible subdivisions. It was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be. From each room to every other there were sure to be found three or four steps either in ascent or descent. Then the lateral branches were innumerable \u2014 inconceivable \u2014 and so returning in upon themselves, that our most exact ideas in regard to the whole mansion were not very far different from those with which we pondered upon infinity. During the five years of my residence here, I was never able to ascertain with precision, in what remote locality lay the little sleeping apartment assigned to myself and some eighteen or twenty other scholars.\n\nThe school-room was the largest in the house \u2014 I could not help thinking, in the world. It was very long, narrow, and dismally low, with pointed Gothic windows and a celling of oak. In a remote and terror-inspiring angle was a square enclosure of eight or ten feet, comprising the sanctum, \"during hours,\" of our principal, the Reverend Dr. Bransby. It was a solid structure, with massy door, sooner than open which in the absence of the \"Dominic,\" we would all have willingly perished by the peine forte et dure. In other angles were two other similar boxes, far less reverenced, indeed, but still greatly matters of awe. One of these was the pulpit of the \"classical\" usher, one of the \"English and mathematical.\" Interspersed about the room, crossing and recrossing in endless irregularity, were innumerable benches and desks, black, ancient, and time-worn, piled desperately with much-bethumbed books, and so beseamed with initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures, and other multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have entirely lost what little of original form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket with water stood at one extremity of the room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other.\n\nEncompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon \u2014 even much of the outre. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray shadow \u2014 a weak and irregular remembrance \u2014 an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the exergues of the Carthaginian medals.\n\nYet in fact \u2014 in the fact of the world's view \u2014 how little was there to remember! The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its intrigues; \u2014 these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. \"Oh, le bon temps, que ce siecle de fer!\"\n\nIn truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself; \u2014 over all with a single exception. This exception was found in the person of a scholar, who, although no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself; \u2014 a circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those everyday appellations which seem, by prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson, \u2014 a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted \"our set,\" presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class \u2014 in the sports and broils of the play-ground \u2014 to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will \u2014 indeed, to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions.\n\nWilson's rebellion was to me a source of the greatest embarrassment; \u2014 the more so as, in spite of the bravado with which in public I made a point of treating him and his pretensions, I secretly felt that I feared him, and could not help thinking the equality which he maintained so easily with myself, a proof of his true superiority; since not to be overcome cost me a perpetual struggle. Yet this superiority \u2014 even this equality \u2014 was in truth acknowledged by no one but myself; our associates, by some unaccountable blindness, seemed not even to suspect it. Indeed, his competition, his resistance, and especially his impertinent and dogged interference with my purposes, were not more pointed than private. He appeared to be destitute alike of the ambition which urged, and of the passionate energy of mind which enabled me to excel. In his rivalry he might have been supposed actuated solely by a whimsical desire to thwart, astonish, or mortify myself; although there were times when I could not help observing, with a feeling made up of wonder, abasement, and pique, that he mingled with his injuries, his insults, or his contradictions, a certain most inappropriate, and assuredly most unwelcome affectionateness of manner. I could only conceive this singular behavior to arise from a consummate self-conceit assuming the vulgar airs of patronage and protection.\n\nPerhaps it was this latter trait in Wilson's conduct, conjoined with our identity of name, and the mere accident of our having entered the school upon the same day, which set afloat the notion that we were brothers, among the senior classes in the academy. These do not usually inquire with much strictness into the affairs of their juniors. I have before said, or should have said, that Wilson was not, in the most remote degree, connected with my family. But assuredly if we had been brothers we must have been twins; for, after leaving Dr. Bransby's, I casually learned that my namesake was born on the nineteenth of January, 1813 \u2014 and this is a somewhat remarkable coincidence; for the day is precisely that of my own nativity.\n\nIt may seem strange that in spite of the continual anxiety occasioned me by the rivalry of Wilson, and his intolerable spirit of contradiction, I could not bring myself to hate him altogether. We had, to be sure, nearly every day a quarrel in which, yielding me publicly the palm of victory, he, in some manner, contrived to make me feel that it was he who had deserved it; yet a sense of pride on my part, and a veritable dignity on his own, kept us always upon what are called \"speaking terms,\" while there were many points of strong congeniality in our tempers, operating to awake me in a sentiment which our position alone, perhaps, prevented from ripening into friendship. It is difficult, indeed, to define,or even to describe, my real feelings towards him. They formed a motley and heterogeneous admixture; \u2014 some petulant animosity, which was not yet hatred, some esteem, more respect, much fear, with a world of uneasy curiosity. To the moralist it will be unnecessary to say, in addition, that Wilson and myself were the most inseparable of companions.\n\nIt was no doubt the anomalous state of affairs existing between us, which turned all my attacks upon him, (and they were many, either open or covert) into the channel of banter or practical joke (giving pain while assuming the aspect of mere fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional disease, would have been spared by any antagonist less at his wit's end than myself; \u2014 my rival had a weakness in the faucal or guttural organs, which precluded him from raising his voice at any time above a very low whisper. Of this defect I did not fall to take what poor advantage lay in my power.\n\nWilson's retaliations in kind were many; and there was one form of his practical wit that disturbed me beyond measure. How his sagacity first discovered at all that so petty a thing would vex me, is a question I never could solve; but, having discovered, he habitually practised the annoyance. I had always felt aversion to my uncourtly patronymic, and its very common, if not plebeian praenomen. The words were venom in my ears; and when, upon the day of my arrival, a second William Wilson came also to the academy, I felt angry with him for bearing the name, and doubly disgusted with the name because a stranger bore it, who would be the cause of its twofold repetition, who would be constantly in my presence, and whose concerns, in the ordinary routine of the school business, must inevitably, on account of the detestable coincidence, be often confounded with my own.\n\nThe feeling of vexation thus engendered grew stronger with every circumstance tending to show resemblance, moral or physical, between my rival and myself. I had not then discovered the remarkable fact that we were of the same age; but I saw that we were of the same height, and I perceived that we were even singularly alike in general contour of person and outline of feature. I was galled, too, by the rumor touching a relationship, which had grown current in the upper forms. In a word, nothing could more seriously disturb me, although I scrupulously concealed such disturbance,) than any allusion to a similarity of mind, person, or condition existing between us. But, in truth, I had no reason to believe that (with the exception of the matter of relationship, and in the case of Wilson himself,) this similarity had ever been made a subject of comment, or even observed at all by our schoolfellows. That he observed it in all its bearings, and as fixedly as I, was apparent; but that he could discover in such circumstances so fruitful a field of annoyance, can only be attributed, as I said before, to his more than ordinary penetration.\n\nHis cue, which was to perfect an imitation of myself, lay both in words and in actions; and most admirably did he play his part. My dress it was an easy matter to copy; my gait and general manner were, without difficulty, appropriated; in spite of his constitutional defect, even my voice did not escape him. My louder tones were, of course, unattempted, but then the key, it was identical; and his singular whisper, it grew the very echo of my own.\n\nHow greatly this most exquisite portraiture harassed me, (for it could not justly be termed a caricature,) I will not now venture to describe. I had but one consolation \u2014 in the fact that the imitation, apparently, was noticed by myself alone, and that I had to endure only the knowing and strangely sarcastic smiles of my namesake himself. Satisfied with having produced in my bosom the intended effect, he seemed to chuckle in secret over the sting he had inflicted, and was characteristically disregardful of the public applause which the success of his witty endeavours might have so easily elicited. That the school, indeed, did not feel his design, perceive its accomplishment, and participate in his sneer, was, for many anxious months, a riddle I could not resolve. Perhaps the gradation of his copy rendered it not so readily perceptible; or, more possibly, I owed my security to the master air of the copyist, who, disdaining the letter, (which in a painting is all the obtuse can see,) gave but the full spirit of his original for my individual contemplation and chagrin.\n\nI have already more than once spoken of the disgusting air of patronage which he assumed toward me, and of his frequent officious interference withy my will. This interference often took the ungracious character of advice; advice not openly given, but hinted or insinuated. I received it with a repugnance which gained strength as I grew in years. Yet, at this distant day, let me do him the simple justice to acknowledge that I can recall no occasion when the suggestions of my rival were on the side of those errors or follies so usual to his immature age and seeming inexperience; that his moral sense, at least, if not his general talents and worldly wisdom, was far keener than my own; and that I might, to-day, have been a better, and thus a happier man, had I less frequently rejected the counsels embodied in those meaning whispers which I then but too cordially hated and too bitterly despised.\n\nAs it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented more and more openly what I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first years of our connexion as schoolmates, my feelings in regard to him might have been easily ripened into friendship: but, in the latter months of my residence at the academy, although the intrusion of his ordinary manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure, abated, my sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook very much of positive hatred. Upon one occasion he saw this, I think, and afterwards avoided, or made a show of avoiding me.\n\nIt was about the same period, if I remember aright, that, in an altercation of violence with him, in which he was more than usually thrown off his guard, and spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied I discovered, in his accent, his air, and general appearance, a something which first startled, and then deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancy \u2014 wild, confused and thronging memories of a time when memory herself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago \u2014 some point of the past even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last conversation I there held with my singular namesake.\n\nThe huge old house, with its countless subdivisions, had several large chambers communicating with each other, where slept the greater number of the students. There were, however, (as must necessarily happen in a building so awkwardly planned,) many little nooks or recesses, the odds and ends of the structure; and these the economic ingenuity of Dr. Bransby had also fitted up as dormitories; although, being the merest closets, they were capable of accommodating but a single individual. One of these small apartments was occupied by Wilson.\n\nOne night, about the close of my fifth year at the school, and immediately after the altercation just mentioned, finding every one wrapped in sleep, I arose from bed, and, lamp in hand, stole through a wilderness of narrow passages from my own bedroom to that of my rival. I had long been plotting one of those ill-natured pieces of practical wit at his expense in which I had hitherto been so uniformly unsuccessful. It was my intention, now, to put my scheme in operation, and I resolved to make him feel the whole extent of the malice with which I was imbued. Having reached his closet, I noiselessly entered, leaving the lamp, with a shade over it, on the outside. I advanced a step, and listened to the sound of his tranquil breathing. Assured of his being asleep, I returned, took the light, and with it again approached the bed. Close curtains were around it, which, in the prosecution of my plan, I slowly and quietly withdrew, when the bright rays fell vividly upon the sleeper, and my eyes, at the same moment, upon his countenance. I looked; \u2014 and a numbness, an iciness of feeling instantly pervaded my frame. My breast heaved, my knees tottered, my whole spirit became possessed with an objectless yet intolerable horror. Gasping for breath, I lowered the lamp in still nearer proximity to the face. Were these \u2014 these the lineaments of William Wilson? I saw, indeed, that they were his, but I shook as if with a fit of the ague in fancying they were not. What was there about them to confound me in this manner? I gazed; \u2014 while my brain reeled with a multitude of incoherent thoughts. Not thus he appeared \u2014 assuredly not thus \u2014 in the vivacity of his waking hours. The same name! the same contour of person! the same day of arrival at the academy! And then his dogged and meaningless imitation of my gait, my voice, my habits, and my manner! Was it, in truth, within the bounds of human possibility, that what I now saw was the result, merely, of the habitual practice of this sarcastic imitation? Awe-stricken, and with a creeping shudder, I extinguished the lamp, passed silently from the chamber, and left, at once, the halls of that old academy, never to enter them again.\n\nAfter a lapse of some months, spent at home in mere idleness, I found myself a student at Eton. The brief interval had been sufficient to enfeeble my remembrance of the events at Dr. Bransby's, or at least to effect a material change in the nature of the feelings with which I remembered them. The truth \u2014 the tragedy \u2014 of the drama was no more. I could now find room to doubt the evidence of my senses; and seldom called up the subject at all but with wonder at extent of human credulity, and a smile at the vivid force of the imagination which I hereditarily possessed. Neither was this species of scepticism likely to be diminished by the character of the life I led at Eton. The vortex of thoughtless folly into which I there so immediately and so recklessly plunged, washed away all but the froth of my past hours, engulfed at once every solid or serious impression, and left to memory only the veriest levities of a former existence.\n\nI do not wish, however, to trace the course of my miserable profligacy here \u2014 a profligacy which set at defiance the laws, while it eluded the vigilance of the institution. Three years of folly, passed without profit, had but given me rooted habits of vice, and added, in a somewhat unusual degree, to my bodily stature, when, after a week of soulless dissipation, I invited a small party of the most dissolute students to a secret carousal in my chambers. We met at a late hour of the night; for our debaucheries were to be faithfully protracted until morning. The wine flowed freely, and there were not wanting other and perhaps more dangerous seductions; so that the gray dawn had already faintly appeared in the east, while our delirious extravagance was at its height. Madly flushed with cards and intoxication, I was in the act of insisting upon a toast of more than wonted profanity, when my attention was suddenly diverted by the violent, although partial unclosing of the door of the apartment, and by the eager voice of a servant from without. He said that some person, apparently in great haste, demanded to speak with me in the hall.\n\nWildly excited with wine, the unexpected interruption rather delighted than surprised me. I staggered forward at once, and a few steps brought me to the vestibule of the building. In this low and small room there hung no lamp; and now no light at all was admitted, save that of the exceedingly feeble dawn which made its way through the semi-circular window. As I put my foot over the threshold, I became aware of the figure of a youth about my own height, and habited in a white kerseymere morning frock, cut in the novel fashion of the one I myself wore at the moment. This the faint light enabled me to perceive; but the features of his face I could not distinguish. Upon my entering he strode hurriedly up to me, and, seizing me by. the arm with a gesture of petulant impatience, whispered the words \"William Wilson!\" in my ear.\n\nI grew perfectly sober in an instant.\n\nThere was that in the manner of the stranger, and in the tremulous shake of his uplifted finger, as he held it between my eyes and the light, which filled me with unqualified amazement; but it was not this which had so violently moved me. It was the pregnancy of solemn admonition in the singular, low, hissing utterance; and, above all, it was the character, the tone, the key, of those few, simple, and familiar, yet whispered syllables, which came with a thousand thronging memories of bygone days, and struck upon my soul with the shock of a galvanic battery. Ere I could recover the use of my senses he was gone.\n\nAlthough this event failed not of a vivid effect upon my disordered imagination, yet was it evanescent as vivid. For some weeks, indeed, I busied myself in earnest inquiry, or was wrapped in a cloud of morbid speculation. I did not pretend to disguise from my perception the identity of the singular individual who thus perseveringly interfered with my affairs, and harassed me with his insinuated counsel. But who and what was this Wilson? \u2014 and whence came he? \u2014 and what were his purposes? Upon neither of these points could I be satisfied; merely ascertaining, in regard to him, that a sudden accident in his family had caused his removal from Dr. Bransby's academy on the afternoon of the day in which I myself had eloped. But in a brief period I ceased to think upon the subject; my attention being all absorbed in a contemplated departure for Oxford. Thither I soon went; the uncalculating vanity of my parents furnishing me with an outfit and annual establishment, which would enable me to indulge at will in the luxury already so dear to my heart, \u2014 to vie in profuseness of expenditure with the haughtiest heirs of the wealthiest earldoms in Great Britain.\n\nExcited by such appliances to vice, my constitutional temperament broke forth with redoubled ardor, and I spurned even the common restraints of decency in the mad infatuation of my revels. But it were absurd to pause in the detail of my extravagance. Let it suffice, that among spendthrifts I out-Heroded Herod, and that, giving name to a multitude of novel follies, I added no brief appendix to the long catalogue of vices then usual in the most dissolute university of Europe.\n\nIt could hardly be credited, however, that I had, even here, so utterly fallen from the gentlemanly estate, as to seek acquaintance with the vilest arts of the gambler by profession, and, having become an adept in his despicable science, to practise it habitually as a means of increasing my already enormous income at the expense of the weak-minded among my fellow-collegians. Such, nevertheless, was the fact. And the very enormity of this offence against all manly and honourable sentiment proved, beyond doubt, the main if not the sole reason of the impunity with which it was committed. Who, indeed, among my most abandoned associates, would not rather have disputed the clearest evidence of his senses, than have suspected of such courses, the gay, the frank, the generous William Wilson \u2014 the noblest and most commoner at Oxford \u2014 him whose follies (said his parasites) were but the follies of youth and unbridled fancy \u2014 whose errors but inimitable whim \u2014 whose darkest vice but a careless and dashing extravagance?\n\nI had been now two years successfully busied in this way, when there came to the university a young parvenu nobleman, Glendinning \u2014 rich, said report, as Herodes Atticus \u2014 his riches, too, as easily acquired. I soon found him of weak intellect, and, of course, marked him as a fitting subject for my skill. I frequently engaged him in play, and contrived, with the gambler's usual art, to let him win considerable sums, the more effectually to entangle him in my snares. At length, my schemes being ripe, I met him (with the full intention that this meeting should be final and decisive) at the chambers of a fellow-commoner, (Mr. Preston,) equally intimate with both, but who, to do him Justice, entertained not even a remote suspicion of my design. To give to this a better colouring, I had contrived to have assembled a party of some eight or ten, and was solicitously careful that the introduction of cards should appear accidental, and originate in the proposal of my contemplated dupe himself. To be brief upon a vile topic, none of the low finesse was omitted, so customary upon similar occasions that it is a just matter for wonder how any are still found so besotted as to fall its victim.\n\nWe had protracted our sitting far into the night, and I had at length effected the manoeuvre of getting Glendinning as my sole antagonist. The game, too, was my favorite ecarte!. The rest of the company, interested in the extent of our play, had abandoned their own cards, and were standing around us as spectators. The parvenu, who had been induced by my artifices in the early part of the evening, to drink deeply, now shuffled, dealt, or played, with a wild nervousness of manner for which his intoxication, I thought, might partially, but could not altogether account. In a very short period he had become my debtor to a large amount, when, having taken a long draught of port, he did precisely what I had been coolly anticipating \u2014 he proposed to double our already extravagant stakes. With a well-feigned show of reluctance, and not until after my repeated refusal had seduced him into some angry words which gave a color of pique to my compliance, did I finally comply. The result, of course, did but prove how entirely the prey was in my toils; in less than an hour he had quadrupled his debt. For some time his countenance had been losing the florid tinge lent it by the wine; but now, to my astonishment, I perceived that it had grown to a pallor truly fearful. I say to my astonishment. Glendinning had been represented to my eager inquiries as immeasurably wealthy; and the sums which he had as yet lost, although in themselves vast, could not, I supposed, very seriously annoy, much less so violently affect him. That he was overcome by the wine just swallowed, was the idea which most readily presented itself; and, rather with a view to the preservation of my own character in the eyes of my associates, than from any less interested motive, I was about to insist, peremptorily, upon a discontinuance of the play, when some expressions at my elbow from among the company, and an ejaculation evincing utter despair on the part of Glendinning, gave me to understand that I had effected his total ruin under circumstances which, rendering him an object for the pity of all, should have protected him from the ill offices even of a fiend.\n\nWhat now might have been my conduct it is difficult to say. The pitiable condition of my dupe had thrown an air of embarrassed gloom over all; and, for some moments, a profound silence was maintained, during which I could not help feeling my cheeks tingle with the many burning glances of scorn or reproach cast upon me by the less abandoned of the party. I will even own that an intolerable weight of anxiety was for a brief instant lifted from my bosom by the sudden and extraordinary interruption which ensued. The wide, heavy folding doors of the apartment were all at once thrown open, to their full extent, with a vigorous and rushing impetuosity that extinguished, as if by magic, every candle in the room. Their light, in dying, enabled us just to perceive that a stranger had entered, about my own height, and closely muffled in a cloak. The darkness, however, was now total; and we could only feel that he was standing in our midst. Before any one of us could recover from the extreme astonishment into which this rudeness had thrown all, we heard the voice of the intruder.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he said, in a low, distinct, and never-to-be-forgotten whisper which thrilled to the very marrow of my bones, \"Gentlemen, I make no apology for this behaviour, because in thus behaving, I am but fulfilling a duty. You are, beyond doubt, uninformed of the true character of the person who has to-night won at ecarte a large sum of money from Lord Glendinning. I will therefore put you upon an expeditious and decisive plan of obtaining this very necessary information. Please to examine, at your leisure, the inner linings of the cuff of his left sleeve, and the several little packages which may be found in the somewhat capacious pockets of his embroidered morning wrapper.\"\n\nWhile he spoke, so profound was the stillness that one might have heard a pin drop upon the floor. In ceasing, he departed at once, and as abruptly as he had entered. Can I\u2014 shall I describe my sensations? \u2014 must I say that I felt all the horrors of the damned? Most assuredly I had little time given for reflection. Many hands roughly seized me upon the spot, and lights were immediately reprocured. A search ensued. In the lining of my sleeve were found all the court cards essential in ecarte, and, in the pockets of my wrapper, a number of packs, facsimiles of those used at our sittings, with the single exception that mine were of the species called, technically, arrondees; the honours being slightly convex at the ends, the lower cards slightly convex at the sides. In this disposition, the dupe who cuts, as customary, at the length of the pack, will invariably find that he cuts his antagonist an honor; while the gambler, cutting at the breadth, will, as certainly, cut nothing for his victim which may count in the records of the game.\n\nAny burst of indignation upon this discovery would have affected me less than the silent contempt, or the sarcastic composure, with which it was received.\n\n\"Mr. Wilson,\" said our host, stooping to remove from beneath his feet an exceedingly luxurious cloak of rare furs, \"Mr. Wilson, this is your property.\" (The weather was cold; and, upon quitting my own room, I had thrown a cloak over my dressing wrapper, putting it off upon reaching the scene of play.) \"I presume it is supererogatory to seek here (eyeing the folds of the garment with a bitter smile) for any farther evidence of your skill. Indeed, we have had enough. You will see the necessity, I hope, of quitting Oxford \u2014 at all events, of quitting instantly my chambers.\"\n\nAbased, humbled to the dust as I then was, it is probable that I should have resented this galling language by immediate personal violence, had not my whole attention been at the moment arrested by a fact of the most startling character. The cloak which I had worn was of a rare description of fur; how rare, how extravagantly costly, I shall not venture to say. Its fashion, too, was of my own fantastic invention; for I was fastidious to an absurd degree of coxcombry, in matters of this frivolous nature. When, therefore, Mr. Preston reached me that which he had picked up upon the floor, and near the folding doors of the apartment, it was with an astonishment nearly bordering upon terror, that I perceived my own already hanging on my arm, (where I had no doubt unwittingly placed it,) and that the one presented me was but its exact counterpart in every, in even the minutest possible particular. The singular being who had so disastrously exposed me, had been muffled, I remembered, in a cloak; and none had been worn at all by any of the members of our party with the exception of myself. Retaining some presence of mind, I took the one offered me by Preston; placed it, unnoticed, over my own; left the apartment with a resolute scowl of defiance; and, next morning ere dawn of day, commenced a hurried journey from Oxford to the continent, in a perfect agony of horror and of shame.\n\nI fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion had as yet only begun. Scarcely had I set foot in Paris ere I had fresh evidence of the detestable interest taken by this Wilson in my concerns. Years flew, while I experienced no relief. Villain! \u2014 at Rome, with how untimely, yet with how spectral an officiousness, stepped he in between me and my ambition! At Vienna, too \u2014 at Berlin \u2014 and at Moscow! Where, in truth, had I not bitter cause to curse him within my heart? From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence; and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.\n\nAnd again, and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, would I demand the questions \"Who is he? \u2014 whence came he? \u2014 and what are his objects?\" But no answer was there found. And then I scrutinized, with a minute scrutiny, the forms, and the methods, and the leading traits of his impertinent supervision. But even here there was very little upon which to base a conjecture. It was noticeable, indeed, that, in no one of the multiplied instances in which he had of late crossed my path, had he so crossed it except to frustrate those schemes, or to disturb those actions, which, if fully carried out, might have resulted in bitter mischief. Poor justification this, in truth, for an authority so imperiously assumed! Poor indemnity for natural rights of self-agency so pertinaciously, so insultingly denied!\n\nI had also been forced to notice that my tormentor, for a very long period of time, (while scrupulously and with miraculous dexterity maintaining his whim of an identity of apparel with myself,) had so contrived it, in the execution of his varied interference with my will, that I saw not, at any moment, the features of his face. Be Wilson what he might, this, at least, was but the veriest of affectation, or of folly. Could he, for an instant, have supposed that, in my admonisher at Eton \u2014 in the destroyer of my honor at Oxford, \u2014 in him who thwarted my ambition at Rome, my revenge at Paris, my passionate love at Naples, or what he falsely termed my avarice in Egypt, \u2014 that in this, my arch-enemy and evil genius, could fall to recognise the William Wilson of my school boy days, \u2014 the namesake, the companion, the rival, \u2014 the hated and dreaded rival at Dr. Bransby's? Impossible! \u2014 But let me hasten to the last eventful scene of the drama.\n\nThus far I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination.\n\nThe sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although bitterly reluctant submission to his arbitrary will. But, of late days, I had given myself up entirely to wine; and its maddening influence upon my hereditary temper rendered me more and more impatient of control. I began to murmur, \u2014 to hesitate, \u2014 to resist. And was it only fancy which induced me to believe that, with the increase of my own firmness, that of my tormentor underwent a proportional diminution? Be this as it may, I now began to feel the inspiration of a burning hope, and at length nurtured in my secret thoughts a stern and desperate resolution that I would submit no longer to be enslaved.\n\nIt was at Rome, during the Carnival of 18 \u2014 that I attended a masquerade in the palazzo of the Neapolitan Duke Di Broglio. I had indulged more freely than usual in the excesses of the wine-table; and now the suffocating atmosphere of the crowded rooms irritated me beyond endurance. The difficulty, too, of forcing my way through the mazes of the company contributed not a little to the ruffling of my temper; for I was anxiously seeking, (let me not say with what unworthy motive) the young, the gay, the beautiful wife of the aged and doting Di Broglio. With a too unscrupulous confidence she had previously communicated to me the secret of the costume in which she would be habited, and now, having caught a glimpse of her person, I was hurrying to make my way into her presence. \u2014 At this moment I felt a light hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within my ear.\n\nIn an absolute phrenzy of wrath, I turned at once upon him who had thus interrupted me, and seized him violently by tile collar. He was attired, as I had expected, in a costume altogether similar to my own; wearing a Spanish cloak of blue velvet, begirt about the waist with a crimson belt sustaining a rapier. A mask of black silk entirely covered his face.\n\n\"Scoundrel!\" I said, in a voice husky with rage, while every syllable I uttered seemed as new fuel to my fury, \"scoundrel! impostor! accursed villain! you shall not \u2014 you shall not dog me unto death! Follow me, or I stab you where you stand!\" \u2014 and I broke my way from the ball-room into a small ante-chamber adjoining \u2014 dragging him unresistingly with me as I went.\n\nUpon entering, I thrust him furiously from me. He staggered against the wall, while I closed the door with an oath, and commanded him to draw. He hesitated but for an instant; then, with a slight sigh, drew in silence, and put himself upon his defence.\n\nThe contest was brief indeed. I was frantic with every species of wild excitement, and felt within my single arm the energy and power of a multitude. In a few seconds I forced him by sheer strength against the wainscoting, and thus, getting him at mercy, plunged my sword, with brute ferocity, repeatedly through and through his bosom.\n\nAt that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, \u2014 so at first it seemed to me in my confusion \u2014 now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.\n\nThus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist \u2014 it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment \u2014 not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!\n\nIt was Wilson; but he spoke no longer in a whisper, and I could have fancied that I myself was speaking while he said:\n\n\"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead \u2014 dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist \u2014 and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Business Man (Peter Pendulum) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'Method is the soul of business.' \u2014Old Saying\n\nI am a business man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all. But there are no people I more heartily despise than your eccentric fools who prate about method without understanding it; attending strictly to its letter, and violating its spirit. These fellows are always doing the most out-of-the-way things in what they call an orderly manner. Now here, I conceive, is a positive paradox. True method appertains to the ordinary and the obvious alone, and cannot be applied to the outre. What definite idea can a body attach to such expressions as \"methodical Jack o' Dandy,\" or \"a systematical Will o' the Wisp\"?\n\nMy notions upon this head might not have been so clear as they are, but for a fortunate accident which happened to me when I was a very little boy. A good-hearted old Irish nurse (whom I shall not forget in my will) took me up one day by the heels, when I was making more noise than was necessary, and swinging me round two or knocked my head into a cocked hat against the bedpost. This, I say, decided my fate, and made my fortune. A bump arose at once on my sinciput, and turned out to be as pretty an organ of order as one shall see on a summer's day. Hence that positive appetite for system and regularity which has made me the distinguished man of business that I am.\n\nIf there is any thing on earth I hate, it is a genius. Your geniuses are all arrant asses \u2014 the greater the genius the greater the ass \u2014 and to this rule there is no exception whatever. Especially, you cannot make a man of business out of a genius, any more than money out of a Jew, or the best nutmegs out of pine-knots. The creatures are always going off at a tangent into some fantastic employment, or ridiculous speculation, entirely at variance with the \"fitness of things,\" and having no business whatever to be considered as a business at all. Thus you may tell these characters immediately by the nature of their occupations. If you ever perceive a man setting up as a merchant or a manufacturer, or going into the cotton or tobacco trade, or any of those eccentric pursuits; or getting to be a drygoods dealer, or soap-boiler, or something of that kind; or pretending to be a lawyer, or a blacksmith, or a physician \u2014 any thing out of the usual way \u2014 you may set him down at once as a genius, and then, according to the rule-of-three, he's an ass.\n\nNow I am not in any respect a genius, but a regular business man. My Day-book and Ledger will evince this in a minute. They are well kept, though I say it myself; and, in my general habits of accuracy and punctuality, I am not to be beat by a clock. Moreover, my occupations have been always made to chime in with the ordinary habitudes of my fellowmen. Not that I feel the least indebted, upon this score, to my exceedingly weak-minded parents, who, beyond doubt, would have made an arrant genius of me at last, if my guardian angel had not come, in good time, to the rescue. In biography the truth is every thing, and in autobiography it is especially so \u2014 yet I scarcely hope to be believed when I state, however solemnly, that my poor father put me, when I was about fifteen years of age, into the counting-house of what be termed \"a respectable hardware and commission merchant doing a capital bit of business!\" A capital bit of fiddlestick! However, the consequence of this folly was, that in two or three days, I had to be sent home to my button-headed family in a high state of fever, and with a most violent and dangerous pain in the sinciput, all around about my organ of order. It was nearly a gone case with me then \u2014 just touch-and-go for six weeks \u2014 the physicians giving me up and all that sort of thing. But, although I suffered much, I was a thankful boy in the main. I was saved from being a \"respectable hardware and commission merchant, doing a capital bit of business,\" and I felt grateful to the protuberance which had been the means of my salvation, as well as to the kindhearted female who had originally put these means within my reach.\n\nThe most of boys run away from home at ten or twelve years of age, but I waited till I was sixteen. I don't know that I should have gone even then, if I had not happened to hear my old mother talk about setting me up on my own hook in the grocery way. The grocery way! \u2014 only think of that! I resolved to be off forthwith, and try and establish myself in some decent occupation, without dancing attendance any longer upon the caprices of these eccentric old people, and running the risk of being made a genius of in the end. In this project I succeeded perfectly well at the first effort, and by the time I was fairly eighteen, found myself doing an extensive and profitable business in the Tailor's Walking-Advertisement line.\n\nI was enabled to discharge the onerous duties of this profession, only by that rigid adherence to system which formed the leading feature of my mind. A scrupulous method characterized my actions as well as my accounts. In my case it was method \u2014 not money \u2014 which made the man: at least all of him that was not made by the tailor whom I served. At nine, every morning, I called upon that individual for the clothes of the day. Ten o'clock found me in some fashionable promenade or other place of public amusement. The precise regularity with which I turned my handsome person about, so as to bring successively into view every portion of the suit upon my back, was the admiration of all the knowing men in the trade. Noon never passed without my bringing home a customer to the house of my employers, Messrs. Cut & Comeagain. I say this proudly, but with tears in my eyes \u2014 for the firm proved themselves the basest of ingrates. The little account, about which we quarreled and finally parted, cannot, in any item, be thought overcharged, by gentlemen really conversant with the nature of the business. Upon this point, however, I feel a degree of proud satisfaction in permitting the reader to judge for himself. My bill ran thus:\n\nMessrs. Cut & Comeagain, Merchant Tailors.\n\n\u2002To Peter Proffit, Walking Advertiser,\n\n\u2002JULY 10. To promenade, as usual, and customer brought home: $00,25\n\n\u2002JULY 11. To promenade, as usual, and customer brought home: $00,25\n\n\u2002JULY 12. To one lie, second class; damaged black cloth sold for invisible green: $00,25\n\n\u2002JULY 13. To one lie, first class, extra quality and size; recommended milled satinet as broadcloth: $00,75\n\n\u2002JULY 20. To purchasing bran new paper shirt collar or dickey, to set off gray Petersham: $00,02\n\n\u2002AUG. 15. To wearing double-padded bobtail frock (thermometer 206 in the shade): $00,25\n\n\u2002AUG. 16. Standing on one leg three hours, to show off new-style strapped pants at 12 \u00bd cents per leg per hour: $00,37 \u00bd\n\n\u2002AUG. 17. To promenade, as usual, and large customer brought (fat man): $00,50\n\n\u2002AUG. 18. To promenade, as usual (medium size): $00,25\n\n\u2002AUG. 19. To promenade, as usual (small man and bad pay): $00,06 \u00bc\n\n\u2002TOTAL: $2,96 \u00be\n\nThe item chiefly disputed in this bill was the very moderate charge of two pennies for the dickey. Upon my word of honor, this was not an unreasonable price for that dickey. It was one of the cleanest and prettiest little dickeys I ever saw; and I have good reason to believe that it effected the sale of three Petershams. The elder partner of the firm, however, would allow me only one penny of the charge, and took it upon himself to show in what manner four of the same sized conveniences could be got out of a sheet of foolscap. But it is needless to say that I stood upon the principle of the thing. Business is business, and should be done in a business way. There was no system whatever in swindling me out of a penny \u2014 a clear fraud of fifty per cent \u2014 no method in any respect. I left at once the employment of Messrs. Cut & Comeagain, and set up in the Eye-Sore line by myself \u2014 one of the most lucrative, respectable, and independent of the ordinary occupations.\n\nMy strict integrity, economy, and rigorous business habits, here again came into play. I found myself driving a flourishing trade, and soon became a marked man upon 'Change. The truth is, I never dabbled in flashy matters, but jogged on in the good old sober routine of the calling \u2014 a calling in which I should, no doubt, have remained to the present hour, but for a little accident which happened to me in the prosecution of one of the usual business operations of the profession. Whenever a rich old hunks or prodigal heir or bankrupt corporation gets into the notion of putting up a palace, there is no such thing in the world as stopping either of them, and this every intelligent person knows. The fact in question is indeed the basis of the Eye-Sore trade. As soon, therefore, as a building-project is fairly afoot by one of these parties, we merchants secure a nice corner of the lot in contemplation, or a prime little situation just adjoining, or tight in front. This done, we wait until the palace is half-way up, and then we pay some tasty architect to run us up an ornamental mud hovel, right against it; or a Down-East or Dutch Pagoda, or a pig-sty, or an ingenious little bit of fancy work, either Esquimau, Kickapoo, or Hottentot. Of course we can't afford to take these structures down under a bonus of five hundred per cent upon the prime cost of our lot and plaster. Can we? I ask the question. I ask it of business men. It would be irrational to suppose that we can. And yet there was a rascally corporation which asked me to do this very thing \u2014 this very thing! I did not reply to their absurd proposition, of course; but I felt it a duty to go that same night, and lamp-black the whole of their palace. For this the unreasonable villains clapped me into jail; and the gentlemen of the Eye-Sore trade could not well avoid cutting my connection when I came out.\n\nThe Assault-and-Battery business, into which I was now forced to adventure for a livelihood, was somewhat ill-adapted to the delicate nature of my constitution; but I went to work in it with a good heart, and found my account here, as heretofore, in those stern habits of methodical accuracy which had been thumped into me by that delightful old nurse \u2014 I would indeed be the basest of men not to remember her well in my will. By observing, as I say, the strictest system in all my dealings, and keeping a well-regulated set of books, I was enabled to get over many serious difficulties, and, in the end, to establish myself very decently in the profession. The truth is, that few individuals, in any line, did a snugger little business than I. I will just copy a page or so out of my Day-Book; and this will save me the necessity of blowing my own trumpet \u2014 a contemptible practice of which no high-minded man will be guilty. Now, the Day-Book is a thing that don't lie.\n\n\"Jan. 1. \u2014 New Year's Day. Met Snap in the street, groggy. Mem \u2014 he'll do. Met Gruff shortly afterward, blind drunk. Mem \u2014 he'll answer, too. Entered both gentlemen in my Ledger, and opened a running account with each.\n\n\"Jan. 2. \u2014 Saw Snap at the Exchange, and went up and trod on his toe. Doubled his fist and knocked me down. Good! \u2014 got up again. Some trifling difficulty with Bag, my attorney. I want the damages at a thousand, but he says that for so simple a knock down we can't lay them at more than five hundred. Mem \u2014 must get rid of Bag \u2014 no system at all.\n\n\"Jan. 3 \u2014 Went to the theatre, to look for Gruff. Saw him sitting in a side box, in the second tier, between a fat lady and a lean one. Quizzed the whole party through an opera-glass, till I saw the fat lady blush and whisper to G. Went round, then, into the box, and put my nose within reach of his hand. Wouldn't pull it \u2014 no go. Blew it, and tried again \u2014 no go. Sat down then, and winked at the lean lady, when I had the high satisfaction of finding him lift me up by the nape of the neck, and fling me over into the pit. Neck dislocated, and right leg capitally splintered. Went home in high glee, drank a bottle of champagne, and booked the young man for five thousand. Bag says it'll do.\n\n\"Feb. 15 \u2014 Compromised the case of Mr. Snap. Amount entered in Journal \u2014 fifty cents \u2014 which see.\n\n\"Feb. 16. \u2014 Cast by that ruffian, Gruff, who made me a present of five dollars. Costs of suit, four dollars and twenty-five cents. Nett profit \u2014 see Journal \u2014 seventy-five cents.\"\n\nNow, here is a clear gain, in a very brief period, of no less than one dollar and twenty-five cents \u2014 this is in the mere cases of Snap and Gruff; and I solemnly assure the reader that these extracts are taken at random from my Day-Book.\n\nIt's an old saying, and a true one, however, that money is nothing in comparison with health. I found the exactions of the profession somewhat too much for my delicate state of body; and, discovering, at last, that I was knocked all out of shape, so that I didn't know very well what to make of the matter, and so that my friends, when they met me in the street, couldn't tell that I was Peter Proffit at all, it occurred to me that the best expedient I could adopt was to alter my line of business. I turned my attention, therefore, to Mud-Dabbling, and continued it for some years.\n\nThe worst of this occupation is, that too many people take a fancy to it, and the competition is in consequence excessive. Every ignoramus of a fellow who finds that he hasn't brains in sufficient quantity to make his way as a walking advertiser, or an eye-sore prig, or a salt-and-batter man, thinks, of course, that he'll answer very well as a dabbler of mud. But there never was entertained a more erroneous idea than that it requires no brains to mud-dabble. Especially, there is nothing to be made in this way without method. I did only a retail business myself, but my old habits of system carried me swimmingly along. I selected my street-crossing, in the first place, with great deliberation, and I never put down a broom in any part of the town but that. I took care, too, to have a nice little puddle at hand, which I could get at in a minute. By these means I got to be well known as a man to be trusted; and this is one-half the battle, let me tell you, in trade. Nobody ever failed to pitch me a copper, and got over my crossing with a clean pair of pantaloons. And, as my business habits, in this respect, were sufficiently understood, I never met with any attempt at imposition. I wouldn't have put up with it, if I had. Never imposing upon any one myself, I suffered no one to play the possum with me. The frauds of the banks of course I couldn't help. Their suspension put me to ruinous inconvenience. These, however, are not individuals, but corporations; and corporations, it is very well known, have neither bodies to be kicked nor souls to be damned.\n\nI was making money at this business when, in an evil moment, I was induced to merge it in the Cur-Spattering \u2014 a somewhat analogous, but, by no means, so respectable a profession. My location, to be sure, was an excellent one, being central, and I had capital blacking and brushes. My little dog, too, was quite fat and up to all varieties of snuff. He had been in the trade a long time, and, I may say, understood it. Our general routine was this:\u2014 Pompey, having rolled himself well in the mud, sat upon end at the shop door, until he observed a dandy approaching in bright boots. He then proceeded to meet him, and gave the Wellingtons a rub or two with his wool. Then the dandy swore very much, and looked about for a boot-black. There I was, full in his view, with blacking and brushes. It was only a minute's work, and then came a sixpence. This did moderately well for a time; \u2014 in fact, I was not avaricious, but my dog was. I allowed him a third of the profit, but he was advised to insist upon half. This I couldn't stand \u2014 so we quarrelled and parted.\n\nI next tried my hand at the Organ-Grinding for a while, and may say that I made out pretty well. It is a plain, straightforward business, and requires no particular abilities. You can get a music-mill for a mere song, and to put it in order, you have but to open the works, and give them three or four smart raps with a hammer. In improves the tone of the thing, for business purposes, more than you can imagine. This done, you have only to stroll along, with the mill on your back, until you see tanbark in the street, and a knocker wrapped up in buckskin. Then you stop and grind; looking as if you meant to stop and grind till doomsday. Presently a window opens, and somebody pitches you a sixpence, with a request to \"Hush up and go on,\" etc. I am aware that some grinders have actually afforded to \"go on\" for this sum; but for my part, I found the necessary outlay of capital too great to permit of my \"going on\" under a shilling.\n\nAt this occupation I did a good deal; but, somehow, I was not quite satisfied, and so finally abandoned it. The truth is, I labored under the disadvantage of having no monkey \u2014 and American streets are so muddy, and a Democratic rabble is so obstrusive, and so full of demnition mischievous little boys.\n\nI was now out of employment for some months, but at length succeeded, by dint of great interest, in procuring a situation in the Sham-Post. The duties, here, are simple, and not altogether unprofitable. For example:\u2014 very early in the morning I had to make up my packet of sham letters. Upon the inside of each of these I had to scrawl a few lines on any subject which occurred to me as sufficiently mysterious \u2014 signing all the epistles Tom Dobson, or Bobby Tompkins, or anything in that way. Having folded and sealed all, and stamped them with sham postmarks \u2014 New Orleans, Bengal, Botany Bay, or any other place a great way off \u2014 I set out, forthwith, upon my daily route, as if in a very great hurry. I always called at the big houses to deliver the letters, and receive the postage. Nobody hesitates at paying for a letter \u2014 especially for a double one \u2014 people are such fools \u2014 and it was no trouble to get round a corner before there was time to open the epistles. The worst of this profession was, that I had to walk so much and so fast; and so frequently to vary my route. Besides, I had serious scruples of conscience. I can't bear to hear innocent individuals abused \u2014 and the way the whole town took to cursing Tom Dobson and Bobby Tompkins was really awful to hear. I washed my hands of the matter in disgust.\n\nMy eighth and last speculation has been in the Cat-Growing way. I have found that a most pleasant and lucrative business, and, really, no trouble at all. The country, it is well known, has become infested with cats \u2014 so much so of late, that a petition for relief, most numerously and respectably signed, was brought before the Legislature at its late memorable session. The Assembly, at this epoch, was unusually well-informed, and, having passed many other wise and wholesome enactments, it crowned all with the Cat-Act. In its original form, this law offered a premium for cat-heads (fourpence a-piece), but the Senate succeeded in amending the main clause, so as to substitute the word \"tails\" for \"heads.\" This amendment was so obviously proper, that the House concurred in it nem. con.\n\nAs soon as the governor had signed the bill, I invested my whole estate in the purchase of Toms and Tabbies. At first I could only afford to feed them upon mice (which are cheap), but they fulfilled the scriptural injunction at so marvellous a rate, that I at length considered it my best policy to be liberal, and so indulged them in oysters and turtle. Their tails, at a legislative price, now bring me in a good income; for I have discovered a way, in which, by means of Macassar oil, I can force three crops in a year. It delights me to find, too, that the animals soon get accustomed to the thing, and would rather have the appendages cut off than otherwise. I consider myself, therefore, a made man, and am bargaining for a country seat on the Hudson.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Journal of Julius Rodman by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nWhat we must consider an unusual piece of good fortune has enabled us to present our readers, under this head, with a narrative of very remarkable character, and certainly of very deep interest. The Journal which follows not only embodies a relation of the first successful attempt to cross the gigantic barriers of that immense chain of mountains which stretches from the Polar Sea in the north, to the Isthmus of Darien in the south, forming a craggy and snow-capped rampart throughout its whole course, but, what is of still greater importance, gives the particulars of a tour, beyond these mountains, through an immense extent of territory, which, at this day, is looked upon as totally untravelled and unknown, and which, in every map of the country to which we can obtain access, is marked as \"an unexplored region.\" It is, moreover, the only unexplored region within the limits of the continent of North America. Such being the case, our friends will know how to pardon us for the slight amount of unction with which we have urged this Journal upon the public attention. For our own parts, we have found, in its perusal, a degree, and a species of interest such as no similar narrative ever inspired. Nor do we think that our relation to these papers, as the channel through which they will be first made known, has had more than a moderate influence in begetting this interest. We feel assured that all our readers will unite with us in thinking the adventures here recorded unusually entertaining and important. The peculiar character of the gentleman who was the leader and soul of the expedition, as well as its historian, has imbued what he has written with a vast deal of romantic fervor, very different from the luke-warm and statistical air which pervades most records of the kind. Mr. James E. Rodman, from whom we obtained the MS., is well known to many of the readers of this Magazine; and partakes, in some degree, of that temperament which embittered the earlier portion of the life of his grandfather, Mr. Julius Rodman, the writer of the narrative. We allude to an hereditary hypochondria. It was the instigation of this disease which, more than any thing else, led him to attempt the extraordinary journey here detailed. The hunting and trapping designs, of which he speaks himself, in the beginning of his Journal, were, as far as we can perceive, but excuses made to his own reason, for the audacity and novelty of his attempt. There can be no doubt, we think, (and our readers will think with us,) that he was urged solely by a desire to seek, in the bosom of the wilderness, that peace which his peculiar disposition would not suffer him to enjoy among men. He fled to the desert as to a friend. In no other view of the case can we reconcile many points of his record with our ordinary notions of human action.\n\nAs we have thought proper to omit two pages of the MS., in which Mr. R. gives some account of his life previous to his departure up the Missouri, it may be as well to state here that he was a native of England, where his relatives were of excellent standing, where he had received a good education, and from which country he emigrated to this, in 1784, (being then about eighteen years of age,) with his father, and two maiden sisters. The family first settled in New York; but afterwards made their way to Kentucky, and established themselves, almost in hermit fashion, on the banks of the Mississippi, near where Mills' Point now makes into the river. Here old Mr. Rodman died, in the fall of 1790; and, in the ensuing winter, both his daughters perished of the small-pox, within a few weeks of each other. Shortly afterwards, (in the spring of 1791,) Mr. Julius Rodman, the son, set out upon the expedition which forms the subject of the following pages. Returning from this in 1794, as hereinafter stated, he took up his abode near Abingdon, in Virginia, where he married, and had three children, and where most of his descendants now live.\n\nWe are informed by Mr. James Rodman, that his grandfather had merely kept an outline diary of his tour, during the many difficulties of its progress; and that the MSS. with which we have been furnished were not written out in detail, from that diary, until many years afterwards, when the tourist was induced to undertake the task, at the instigation of M. Andre Michau, the botanist, and author of the Flora Boreali-Americana, and of the Histoire des Ch\u00eanes d'Amerique. M. Michau, it will be remembered, had made an offer of his services to Mr. Jefferson, when that statesman first contemplated sending an expedition across the Rocky Mountains. He was engaged to prosecute the journey, and had even proceeded on his way as far as Kentucky, when he was overtaken by an order from the French minister, then at Philadelphia, requiring him to relinquish the design, and to pursue elsewhere the botanical inquiries on which he was employed by his government. The contemplated undertaking then fell into the hands of Messieurs Lewis and Clarke, by whom it was successfully accomplished.\n\nThe MS. when completed, however, never reached M. Michau, for whose inspection it had been drawn up; and was always supposed to have been lost on the road by the young man to whom it was entrusted for delivery at M. M.'s temporary residence, near Monticello. Scarcely any attempt was made to recover the papers; Mr. Rodman's peculiar disposition leading him to take but little interest in the search. Indeed, strange as it may appear, we doubt, from what we are told of him, whether he would have ever taken any stepsto make public the results of his most extraordinary tour; we think that his only object in re-touching his original Diary was to oblige M. Michau. Even Mr. Jefferson's exploring project, a project which, at the time it was broached, excited almost universal comment, and was considered a perfect novelty, drew from the hero of our narrative, only a few general observations, addressed to the members of his family. He never made his own journey a subject of conversation; seeming, rather, to avoid the topic. He died before the return of Lewis and Clarke; and the Diary, which had been given into the hands of the messenger for delivery to M. Michau, was found, about three months ago, in a secret drawer of a bureau which had belonged to Mr. Julius R. We do not learn by whom it was placed there \u2014 Mr. R.'s relatives all exonerate him from the suspicion of having secreted it; but, without intending any disrespect to the memory of that gentleman, or to Mr. James Rodman, (to whom we feel under especial obligation,) we cannot help thinking that the supposition of the narrator's having, by some means, reprocured the package from the messenger, and concealed it where it was discovered, is very reasonable, and not at all out of keeping with the character of that morbid sensibility which distinguished the individual.\n\nWe did not wish, by any means, to alter the manner of Mr. Rodman's narration, and have, therefore, taken very few liberties with the MS., and these few only in the way of abridgment. The style, indeed, could scarcely be improved \u2014 it is simple and very effective; giving evidence of the deep delight with which the traveller revelled in the majestic novelties through which he passed, day after day. There is a species of affectionateness which pervades his account, even of the severest hardships and dangers, which lets us at once into the man's whole idiosyncrasy. He was possessed with a burning love of Nature; and worshipped her, perhaps, more in her dreary and savage aspects, than in her manifestations of placidity and joy. He stalked through that immense and often terrible wilderness with an evident rapture at his heart which we envy him as we read. He was, indeed, the man to journey amid all that solemn desolation which he, plainly, so loved to depict. His was the proper spirit to perceive; his the true ability to feel. We look, therefore, upon his MS. as a rich treasure \u2014 in its way absolutely unsurpassed \u2014 indeed, never equalled.\n\nThat the events of this narrative have hitherto lain perdus; that even the fact of the Rocky Mountains having been crossed by Mr. Rodman prior to the expedition of Lewis and Clarke, has never been made public, or at all alluded to in the works of any writer on American geography, (for it certainly never has been thus alluded to, as far as we can ascertain,) must be regarded as very remarkable \u2014 indeed, as exceedingly strange. The only reference to the journey at all, of which we can hear in any direction, is said to be contained in an unpublished letter of M. Michau's, in the possession of Mr. W. Wyatt, of Charlottesville, Virginia. It is there spoken of in a casual way, and collaterally, as \"a gigantic idea wonderfully carried out.\" If there has been any farther allusion to the journey, we know nothing of it.\n\nBefore entering upon Mr. Rodman's own relation, it will not be improper to glance at what has been done by others, in the way of discovery, upon the North-Western portion of our continent. If the reader will turn to a map of North America, he will be better enabled to follow us in our observations.\n\nIt will be seen that the continent extends from the Arctic ocean, or from about the 70th parallel of north latitude, to the 9th; and from the 56th meridian west of Greenwich, to the 168th. The whole of this immense extent of territory has been visited by civilized man, in a greater or less degree; and indeed a very large portion of it has been permanently settled. But there is an exceedingly wide tract which is still marked upon all our maps as unexplored, and which, until this day, has always been so considered. This tract lies within the 60th parallel on the south, the Arctic Ocean on the north, the Rocky Mountains on the west, and the possessions of Russia on the east. To Mr. Rodman, however, belongs the honor of having traversed this singularly wild region in many directions; and the most interesting particulars of the narrative now published have reference to his adventures and discoveries therein.\n\nPerhaps the earliest travels of any extent made in North America by white people, were those of Hennepin and his friends, in 1698 \u2014 but as his researches were mostly in the south, we do not feel called upon to speak of them more fully.\n\nMr. Irving, in his Astoria, mentions the attempt of Captain Jonathan Carver, as being the first ever made to cross the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean; but in this he appears to be mistaken; for we find, in one of the journals of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, that two different enterprises were set on foot, with that especial object in view, by the Hudson Bay Fur Company, the one in 1758, the other as early as 1749; both of which are supposed to have entirely failed, as no accounts of the actual expeditions are extant. It was in 1763, shortly after the acquisition of the Canadas by Great Britain, that Captain Carver undertook the journey. His intention was to cross the country, between the forty-third and forty-sixth degrees of north latitude, to the shores of the Pacific. His object was to ascertain the breadth of the continent at its broadest part, and to determine upon some place, on the western coast, where government might establish a post to facilitate the discovery of a north-west passage, or a communication between Hudson's bay, and the Pacific ocean. He had supposed that the Columbia, then termed the Oregon, disembogued itself somewhere about the straits of Annian; and it was here that he expected the post to be formed. He thought, also, that a settlement in this neighborhood would disclose new sources of trade, and open a more direct communication with China, and the British possessions in the East Indies, than the old route afforded, by the Cape of Good Hope. He was baffled, however, in his attempt to cross the mountains.\n\nIn point of time, the next important expedition, in the northern portion of America, was that of Samuel Hearne, who, with the object of discovering copper mines, pushed north-westwardly during the years 1769, '70, '71, and '72, from the Prince of Wales' Fort, in Hudson's bay, as far as the shores of the Arctic ocean.\n\nWe have, after this, to record a second attempt of Captain Carver's, which was set on foot in 1774, and in which he was joined by Richard Whitworth, a member of Parliament, and a man of wealth. We only notice this enterprize on account of the extensive scale on which it was projected; for in fact it was never carried into execution. The gentlemen were to take with them fifty or sixty men, artificers and mariners, and, with these, make their way up one of the branches of the Missouri, explore the mountains for the source of the Oregon, and sail down that river to its supposed mouth, near the straits of Annian. Here a fort was to be built, as well as vessels for the purpose of farther discovery. The undertaking was stopped by the breaking out of the American revolution.\n\nAs early as 1775, the fur trade had been carried by the Canadian missionaries, north and west to the banks of the Saskatchawine river, in 53 north latitude, 102 west longitude; and, in the beginning of 1776, Mr. Joseph Frobisher proceeded, in this direction, as far as 55, N. and 103, W.\n\nIn 1778, Mr. Peter Bond, with four canoes, pushed on to the Elk river, about thirty miles south of its junction with the Lake of the Hills.\n\nWe have now to mention another attempt, which was baffled at its very outset, to cross the broadest portion of the continent from ocean to ocean. This attempt is scarcely known by the public to have been made at all, and is mentioned by Mr. Jefferson alone, and by him only in a cursory way. Mr. J. relates that Ledyard called upon him in Paris, panting for some new enterprise, after his successful voyage with Captain Cook; and that he (Mr. J.) proposed to him that he should go by land to Kamschatka, cross in some of the Russian vessels to Nootka Sound, fall down into the latitude of the Missouri, and then, striking through the country, pass down that river to the United States. \u2014 Ledyard agreed to the proposal provided the permission of the Russian government could be obtained. Mr. Jefferson succeeded in obtaining this; and the traveller, setting out from Paris, arrived at St. Petersburgh after the Empress had left that place to pass the winter at Moscow. His finances not permitting him to make unnecessary stay at St. P., he continued on his route with a passport from one of the ministers, and, at two hundred miles from Kamschatka, was arrested by an officer of the Empress, who had changed her mind, and now forbade his proceeding. He was put into a close carriage, and driven day and night, without stopping, till he reached Poland, where he was set down and dismissed. Mr. Jefferson, in speaking of Ledyard's undertaking, erroneously calls it \"the first attempt to explore the western part of our northern continent.\"\n\nThe next enterprise of moment was the remarkable one of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, which was prosecuted in 1789. He started from Montreal, pushed through the Utawas river, Lake Nipissing, Lake Huron, around the northern shore of Lake Superior, through what is called the Grand Portage, thence along Rain River, the Lake of the Woods, Bonnet Lake, the upper part of Dog-Head Lake, the south coast of Lake Winnipeg, through Cedar Lake and past the mouth of the Saskatchawine, to Sturgeon Lake; thence again, by portage, to the Missinipi, and through Black Bear, Primo's and Buffalo Lakes, to a range of high mountains running N. E. and S. W. \u2014 then taking Elk river to the Lake of the Hills \u2014 then passing through Slave river to Slave Lake \u2014 around the northern shore of this latter to Mackenzie's river, and down this, lastly, to the Polar Sea \u2014 an immense journey, during which he encountered dangers innumerable, and hardships of the severest kind. In the whole of his course down Mackenzie's river to its embouchure, he passed along the bottom of the eastern declivity of the Rocky Mountains, but never crossed these barriers. In the spring of 1793, however, starting from Montreal and pursuing the route of his first journey as far as the mouth of the Unjigah or Peace River, he then turned off to the westward, up this stream, pushed through the Mountains in latitude 56, then proceeded to the south until he struck a river which he called the Salmon (now Frazer's) and following this, finally reached the Pacific in about the 40th parallel of N. L.\n\nThe memorable expedition of captains Lewis and Clarke was in progress during the years 1804, '5, and '6. In 1803, the act for establishing trading houses with the Indian tribes being about to expire, some modifications of it (with an extension of its views to the Indians on the Missouri) were recommended to Congress by a confidential Message from Mr. Jefferson, of January 18th. In order to prepare the way, it was proposed to send a party to trace the Missouri to its source, cross the Rocky Mountains, and follow the best water communication which offered itself thence to the Pacific ocean. This design was fully carried out; captain Lewis exploring (but not first \"discovering\" as Mr. Irving relates) the upper waters of the Columbia river, and following the course of that stream to its embouchure. The head waters of the Columbia were visited by Mackenzie as early as 1793.\n\nCoincident with the exploring tour of Lewis and Clarke up the Missouri, was that of Major Zebulon M. Pike up the Mississippi, which he succeeded in tracing to its source in Itasca Lake. Upon his return from this voyage he penetrated, by the orders of government, from the Mississippi westwardly, during the years 1805, '6, and '7, to the head waters of the Arkansas (beyond the Rocky Mountains in latitude 40 N.) passing along the Osage and Kanzas rivers, and to the source of the Platte.\n\nIn 1810, Mr. David Thompson, a partner of the North West Fur Company, set out from Montreal, with a strong party, to cross the continent to the Pacific. The first part of the route was that of Mackenzie in 1793. The object was to anticipate a design of Mr. John Jacob Astor's \u2014 to wit, the establishment of a trading post at the mouth of the Columbia. Most of his people deserted him on the eastern side of the mountains; but he finally succeeded in crossing the chain, with only eight followers, when he struck the northern branch of the Columbia, and descended that river from a point much nearer its source than any white man had done before.\n\nIn 1811, Mr. Astor's own remarkable enterprise was carried into effect \u2014 at least so far as the joumey across the country is concerned. As Mr. Irving has already made all readers well acquainted with the particulars of this journey, we need only mention it in brief. The design we have just spoken of. The track of the party (under command of Mr. Wilson Price Hunt) was from Montreal, up the Utawas, through Lake Nipissing, and a succession of small lakes and rivers, to Michilimackinac, or Mackinaw \u2014 thence by Green Bay, Fox and Wisconsin rivers, to the Prairie du Chien \u2014 thence down the Mississippi to St. Louis \u2014 thence up the Missouri, to the village of the Arickara Indians, between the 46th and 47th parallels of N. latitude, and fourteen hundred and thirty miles above the mouth of the river \u2014 thence, bending to the southwest across the desert, over the mountains about where the head waters of the Platte and Yellowstone take rise, and, along the south branch of the Columbia, to the sea. Two small return parties from this expedition made most perilous and eventful passages across the country.\n\nThe travels of major Stephen H. Long are the next important ones in point of time. This gentleman, in 1823, proceeded to the source of St. Peter's river, to Lake Winnipeg, to the Lake of the Woods, etc., etc. Of the more recent journeys of Captain Bonneville and others it is scarcely necessary to speak, as they still dwell in the public memory. Captain B.'s adventures have been well related by Mr. Irving. In 1832, he passed from Fort Osage across the Rocky Mountains, and spent nearly three years in the regions beyond. Within the limits of the United States there is very little ground which has not, of late years, been traversed by the man of science, or the adventurer. But in those wide and desolate regions which lie north of our territory, and to the westward of Mackenzie's river, the foot of no civilized man, with the exception of Mr. Rodman and his very small party, has ever been known to tread. In regard to the question of the first passage across the Rocky Mountains, it will be seen, from what we have already said, that the credit of the enterprize should never have been given to Lewis and Clarke, since Mackenzie succeeded in it, in the year 1793; and that in point of fact, Mr. Rodman was the first who overcame those gigantic barriers; crossing them as he did in 1792. Thus it is not without good reason that we claim public attention for the extraordinary narrative which ensues." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "After the death of my father, and both sisters, I took no farther interest in our plantation at the Point, and sold it, at a complete sacrifice, to M. Jun\u00f4t. I had often thought of trapping up the Missouri, and resolved now to go on an expedition up that river, and try to procure peltries, which I was sure of being able to sell at Petite C\u00f4te to the private agents of the Northwest Fur Company. I believed that much more property might be acquired in this way, with a little enterprise and courage, than I could make by any other means. I had always been fond, too, of hunting and trapping, although I had never made a business of either, and I had a great desire to explore some portion of our western country, about which Pierre Jun\u00f4t had often spoken to me. He was the eldest son of the neighbor who bought me out, and was a man of strange manners and somewhat eccentric turn of mind, but still one of the best-hearted fellows in the world, and certainly as courageous a man as ever drew breath, although of no great bodily strength. He was of Canadian descent, and having gone, once or twice, on short excursions for the Fur Company, in which he had acted as voyageur, was fond of calling himself one, and of talking about his trips. My father had been very fond of Pierre, and I thought a good deal of him myself; he was a great favorite, too, with my younger sister, Jane, and I believe they would have been married had it been God's will to have spared her.\n\nWhen Pierre discovered that I had not entirely made up my mind what course to pursue after my father's death, he urged me to fit out a small expedition for the river, in which he would accompany me; and he had no difficulty in bringing me over to his wishes. We agreed to push up the Missouri as long as we found it possible, hunting and trapping as we went, and not to return until we had secured as many peltries as would be a fortune for us both. His father made no objection, and gave him about three hundred dollars; when we proceeded to Petite C\u00f4te for the purpose of getting our equipments, and raising as many men as we could for the voyage.\n\nPetite C\u00f4te is a small place on the north bank of the Missouri, about twenty miles from its junction with the Mississippi. It lies at the foot of a range of low hills, and upon a sort of ledge, high enough above the river to be out of reach of the June freshets. There are not more than five or six houses, and these of wood, in the upper part of the place; but, nearer to the east, there is a chapel and twelve or fifteen good dwellings, running parrallel with the river. There are about a hundred inhabitants, mostly Creoles of Canadian descent. They are extremely indolent, and make no attempt at cultivating the country around them, which is a rich soil; except now and then when a little is done in the way of gardening. They live principally by hunting, and trading with the Indians for peltries, which they sell again to the North-West Company's agents. We expected to meet with no difficulty here in getting recruits for our journey, or equipments, but were disappointed in both particulars; for the place was too poor in every respect to furnish all that we wanted, so as to render our voyage safe and efficient.\n\nWe designed to pass through the heart of a country infested with Indian tribes, of whom we knew nothing except by vague report, and whom we had every reason to believe ferocious and treacherous. It was therefore particularly necessary that we should go well provided with arms and ammunition, as well as in some force as regards numbers; and if our voyage was to be a source of profit, we must take with us canoes of sufficient capacity to bring home what peltries we might collect. It was the middle of March when we first reached Petite C\u00f4te, and we did not succeed in getting ready until the last of May. We had to send twice down the river to the Point for men and supplies, and neither could be obtained except at great cost. We should have failed at last in getting many things absolutely requisite, if it had not so happened that Pierre met with a party on its return from a trip up the Mississippi, and engaged six of its best men, besides a canoe or piroque; purchasing, at the same time, most of the surplus stores and ammunition.\n\nThis seasonable aid enabled us to get fairly ready for the voyage before the first of June. On the third of this month (1791) we bid adieu to our friends at Petite C\u00f4te, and started on our expedition. Our party consisted in all of fifteen persons. Of these, five were Canadians from Petite C\u00f4te, and had all been on short excursions up the river. They were good boatmen, and excellent companions, as far as singing French songs went, and drinking, at which they were pre-eminent; although, in truth, it was a rare thing to see any of them so far the worse for liquor, as to be incapable of attending to duty. They were always in a good humor, and always ready to work; but as hunters I did not think them worth much, and as fighting men I soon discovered they were not to be depended upon. There were two of these five Canadians who engaged to act as interpreters for the first five or six hundred miles up the river (should we proceed so far) and then we hoped to procure an Indian occasionally to interpret, should it be necessary; but we had resolved to avoid, as far as possible, any meetings with the Indians, and rather to trap ourselves, than run the great risk of trading, with so small a party as we numbered. It was our policy to proceed with the greatest caution, and expose ourselves to notice only when we could not avoid it.\n\nThe six men whom Pierre had engaged from aboard the return Mississippi boat were as different a set from the Canadians as could well be imagined. Five of them were brothers, by the name of Greely (John, Robert, Meredith, Frank, and Poindexter) and bolder or finer looking persons it would have been difficult to find. John Greely was the eldest and stoutest of the five, and had the reputation of being the strongest man, as well as best shot in Kentucky \u2014 from which State they all came. He was full six feet in height, and of most extraordinary breadth across the shoulders, with large strongly-knit limbs. Like most men of great physical strength, he was exceedingly good-tempered, and on this account was greatly beloved by us all. The other four brothers were all strong well-built men, too, although not to be compared with John. Poindexter was as tall, but very gaunt, and of a singularly fierce appearance; but, like his elder brother, he was of peaceable demeanor. All of them were experienced hunters and capital shots. They had gladly accepted Pierre's offer to go with us, and we made an arrangement with them which ensured them an equal share with Pierre and myself in the profits of the enterprise \u2014 that is to say, we divided the proceeds into three parts; one of which was to be mine, one Pierre's, and one shared among the five brothers.\n\nThe sixth man whom we enlisted from the return boat was, also, a good recruit. His name was Alexander Wormley, a Virginian, and a very strange character. He had originally been a preacher of the gospel, and had afterwards fancied himself a prophet, going about the country with a long beard and hair, and in his bare feet, haranguing every one he met. This hallucination was now diverted into another channel, and he thought of nothing else than of finding gold mines in some of the fastnesses of the country. Upon this subject he was as entirely mad as any man could well be; but upon all others was remarkably sensible and even acute. He was a good boatman and a good hunter, and as brave a fellow as ever stepped, besides being of great bodily strength and swiftness of foot. I counted much upon this recruit, on account of his enthusiastic character, and in the end I was not deceived, as will appear.\n\nOur other two recruits were a negro belonging to Pierre Jun\u00f4t, named Toby, and a stranger whom we had picked up in the woods near Mills' Point, and who joined our expedition upon the instant as soon as we mentioned our design. His name was Andrew Thornton, also a Virginian, and I believe of excellent family, belonging to the Thorntons of the northern part of the State. He had been from Virginia about three years; during the whole of which time he had been rambling about the western country, with no other companion than a large dog of the Newfoundland species. He had collected no peltries, and did not seem to have any object in view, more than the gratification of a roving and adventurous propensity. He frequently amused us, when sitting around our camp fires at night, with the relation of his adventures and hardships in the wilderness \u2014 recounting them with a strait-forward earnestness which left us no room to doubt their truth; although indeed, many of them had a marvellous air. Experience afterwards taught us that the dangers and difficulties of the solitary hunter can scarcely be exaggerated, and that the real task is to depict them to the hearer in sufficiently distinct colors. I took a great liking to Thornton, from the first hour in which I saw him.\n\nI have only said a few words respecting Toby; but he was not the least important personage of our party. He had been in old M. Jun\u00f4t's family for a great number of years, and had proved himself a faithful negro. He was rather too old to accompany such an expedition as ours; but Pierre was not willing to leave him. He was an able-bodied man, however, and still capable of enduring great fatigue. Pierre himself was probably the feeblest of our whole company, as regards bodily strength, but he possessed great sagacity, and a courage which nothing could daunt. His manners were sometimes extravagant and boisterous, which led him to get into frequent quarrels, and had once or twice seriously endangered the success of our expedition; but he was a true friend, and in that one point I considered him invaluable.\n\nI have now given a brief account of all our party, as it was when we left Petite C\u00f4te. To carry ourselves and accoutrements, as well as to bring home what peltries might be obtained, we had two large boats. The smallest of these was a piroque made of birch bark, sewed together with the fibres of the roots of the spruce tree, the seams payed with pine resin, and the whole so light that six men could carry it with case. It was twenty feet long, and could be rowed with from four to twelve oars; drawing about eighteen inches water when loaded to the gunwale, and, when empty, not more than ten. The other was a keel-boat which we had made at Petite C\u00f4te (the canoe having been purchased by Pierre from the Mississippi party.) It was thirty feet long, and, when loaded to the gunwale, drew two feet water. It had a deck for twenty feet of its length forward, forming a cuddy-cabin, with a strong door, and of sufficient dimensions to contain our whole party with close crowding, as the boat was very broad. This part of it was bullet-proof, being wadded with oakum between two coatings of oak-plank; and in several positions we had small holes bored, through which we could have fired upon an enemy in case of attack, as well as observe their movements; these holes, at the same time, gave us air and light, when we closed the door; and we had secure plugs to fit them when necessary. The remaining ten feet of the length was open, and here we could use as many as six oars \u2014 but our main dependance was upon poles which we employed by walking along the deck. We had also a short mast, easily shipped and unshipped, which was stepped about seven feet from the bow, and upon which we set a large square sail when the wind was fair, taking in mast and all when it was ahead.\n\nIn a division made in the bow, under deck, we deposited ten kegs of good powder, and as much lead as we considered proportionate, one tenth ready moulded in rifle bullets. We had also stowed away here, a small brass cannon and carriage, dismounted and taken to pieces, so as to lie in little compass, thinking that such a means of defence might possibly come into play at some period of our expedition. This cannon was one of three which had been brought down the Missouri by the Spaniards two years previously, and lost overboard from a piroque, some miles above Petite C\u00f4te. A sand-bar had so far altered the channel at the place where the canoe capsized, that an Indian discovered one of the guns, and procured assistance to carry it down to the settlement, where he sold it for a gallon of whiskey. The people at Petite C\u00f4te then went up and procured the other two. They were very small guns, but of good metal, and beautiful workmanship, being carved and ornamented with serpents like some of the French field pieces. Fifty iron balls were found with the guns, and these we procured. I mention the way in which we obtained this cannon, because it performed an important part in some of our operations, as will be found hereafter. Besides it, we had fifteen spare rifles, boxed up, and deposited forward with the other heavy goods. We put the weight here, to sink our bows well in the water, which is the best method, on account of the snags and sawyers in the river.\n\nIn the way of other arms we were sufficiently provided; each man having a stout hatchet, and knife, besides his ordinary rifle and ammunition. Each boat was provided with a camp kettle, three large axes, a towing-line, two oil-cloths to cover the goods when necessary, and two large sponges for bailing. The piroque had also a small mast and sail, (which I omitted to mention,) and carried a quantity of gum, birch-bark and watape, to make repairs with. She, also, had in charge all the Indian goods which we had thought necessary to bring with us, and which we purchased from the Missisippi boat. It was not our design to trade with the Indians; but these goods were offered us at a low rate, and we thought it better to take them, as they might prove of service. They consisted of silk and cotton handkerchiefs; thread, lines and twine; hats, shoes, and hose; small cutlery and ironmongery; calicoes and printed cottons; Manchester goods; twist and carrot tobacco; milled blankets; and glass toys, beads, etc., etc. All these were done up in small packages, three of which were a man's load. The provisions were also put up so as to be easily handled; and a part was deposited in each boat. We had, altogether, two hundred weight of pork, six hundred weight of buiscuit, and six hundred weight of pemmican. This we had made at Petite C\u00f4te, by the Canadians, who told us that it was used by the Northwest Fur Company in all their long voyages, when it is feared that game may not prove abundant. It is manufactured in a singular manner. The lean parts of the flesh of the larger animals is cut into thin slices, and placed on a wooden grate over a slow fire, or exposed to the sun, (as ours was) or sometimes to the frost. When it was sufficiently dried in this way, it is pounded between two heavy stones, and will then keep for years. If, however, much of it is kept together, it ferments upon the breaking up of the frost in the spring, and, if not well exposed to the air, soon decays. The inside fat, with that of the rump, is melted down and mixed, in a boiling state, with the pounded meat, half and half; it is then squeezed into bags, and is ready to eat without any farther cooking, being very palatable without salt, or vegetables. The best pemmican is made with the addition of marrow and dried berries, and is a capital article of food. Our whiskey was in carboys, of five gallons each, and we had twenty of these, a hundred gallons in all.\n\nWhen every thing was well on board, with our whole company, including Thornton's dog, we found that there was but little room to spare, except in the big cabin, which we wished to preserve free of goods, as a sleeping place in bad weather; we had nothing in here except arms and ammunition, with some beaver-traps and a carpet of bear-skins. Our crowded state suggested an expedient which ought to have been adopted at all events; that of detaching four hunters from the party, to course along the river banks, and keep us in game, as well as to act in capacity of scouts, to warn us of the approach of Indians. With this object we procured two good horses, giving one of them in charge of Robert and Meredith Greely, who were to keep upon the south bank; and the other in charge of Frank and Poindexter (Greely) who were to course along the north side. By means of the horses they could bring in what game was shot.\n\nThis arrangement relieved our boats very considerably, lessening our number to eleven. In the small boat were two of the men from Petite C\u00f4te, with Toby and Pierre Jun\u00f4t. In the large one were the Prophet (as we called him) or Alexander Wormley, John Greely, Andrew Thornton, three of the Petite C\u00f4te men, and myself, with Thomton's dog.\n\nOur mode of proceeding was sometimes with oars, but not generally; we most frequently pulled ourselves along by the limbs of trees on shore; or, where the ground permitted it, we used a tow-line, which is the easiest way; some of us being on shore to haul, while some remained on board, to set the boat off shore with poles. Very often we poled altogether. In this method, (which is a good one when the bottom is not too muddy, or full of quicksands, and when the depth of water is not too great) the Canadians are very expert, as well as at rowing. They use long, stiff, and light poles, pointed with iron; with these they proceed to the bow of the boat, an equal number of men at each side; the face is then turned to the stern, and the pole inserted in the river, reaching the bottom; a firm hold being thus taken, the boatmen apply the heads of the poles to the shoulder, which is protected by a cushion, and, pushing in this manner, while they walk along the gunwale, the boat is urged forward with great force. There is no necessity for any steersman, while using the pole; for the poles direct the vessel with wonderful accuracy.\n\nIn these various modes of getting along, now and then varied with the necessity of wading, and dragging our vessels by hand, in rapid currents, or through shallow water, we commenced our eventful voyage up the Missouri river. The skins which were considered as the leading objects of the expedition were to be obtained, principally, by hunting and trapping, as privately as possible, and without direct trade with the Indians, whom we had long learned to know as, in the main, a treacherous race, not to be dealt with safely in so small a party as ours. The furs usually collected by previous adventurers upon our contemplated route, included beaver, otter, marten, lynx, mink, musquash, bear, fox, kitt-fox, wolverine, racoon, fisher, wolf, buffalo, deer, and elk; but we proposed to confine ourselves to the more costly kinds.\n\nThe morning on which we set out from Petite C\u00f4te was one of the most inspiring, and delicious; and nothing could exceed the hilarity of our whole party. The summer had hardly yet commenced, and the wind, which blew a strong breeze against us, at first starting, had all the voluptuous softness of spring. The sun shone clearly, but with no great heat. The ice had disappeared from the river, and the current, which was pretty full, concealed all those marshy, and ragged alluvia which disfigure the borders of the Missouri at low water. It had now the most majestic appearance, washing up among the willows and cotton-wood on one side, and rushing, with a bold volume, by the sharp cliffs on the other. As I looked up the stream (which here stretched away to the westward, until the waters apparently met the sky in the great distance) and reflected on the immensity of territory through which those waters had probably passed, a territory as yet altogether unknown to white people, and perhaps abounding in the magnificent works of God, I felt an excitement of soul such as I had never before experienced, and secretly resolved that it should be no slight obstacle which should prevent my pushing up this noble river farther than any previous adventurer had done. At that moment I seemed possessed of an energy more than human; and my animal spirits rose to so high a degree that I could with difficulty content myself in the narrow limits of the boat. I longed to be with the Greelys on the bank, that I might give full vent to the feelings which inspired me, by leaping and running in the prairie. In these feelings Thornton participated strongly, evincing a deep interest in our expedition, and an admiration of the beautiful scenery around us, which rendered him from that moment a particular favorite with myself. I never, at any period of my life, felt so keenly as I then did, the want of some friend to whom I could converse freely, and without danger of being misunderstood. The sudden loss of all my relatives by death, had saddened, but not depressed my spirits, which appeared to seek relief in a contemplation of the wild scenes of Nature; and these scenes and the reflections which they encouraged, could not, I found, be thoroughly enjoyed, without the society of some one person of reciprocal sentiments. Thornton was precisely the kind of individual to whom I could unburthen my full heart, and unburthen it of all its extravagant emotion, without fear of incurring a shadow of ridicule, and even in the certainty of finding a listener as impassioned as myself. I never, before or since, met with any one who so fully entered into my own notions respecting natural scenery; and this circumstance alone was sufficient to bind him to me in a firm friendship. We were as intimate, during our whole expedition, as brothers could possibly be, and I took no steps without consulting him. Pierre and myself were also friends, but there was not the tie of reciprocal thought between us \u2014 that strongest of all mortal bonds. His nature, although sensitive, was too volatile, to comprehend all the devotional fervor of my own.\n\nThe incidents of the first day of our voyage had nothing remarkable in them; except that we had some difficulty in forcing our way, towards nightfall, by the mouth of a large cave on the south side of the river. This cave had a very dismal appearance as we passed it, being situated at the foot of a lofty bluff, full two hundred feet high, and jutting somewhat over the stream. We could not distinctly perceive the depth of the cavern, but it was about sixteen or seventeen feet high, and at least fifty in width. The current ran past it with great velocity, and, as from the nature of the cliff, we could not tow, it required the utmost exertion to make our way by it; which we at length effected by getting all of us, with the exception of one man, into the large boat. This one remained in the piroque, and anchored it below the cave. By uniting our force, then, in rowing, we brought the large boat up beyond the difficult pass, paying out a line to the piroque as we proceeded, and by this line hauling it up after us, when we had fairly ascended. We passed, during the day, Bonhomme, and Osage Femme Rivers, with two small creeks, and several islands of little extent. We made about twenty-five miles, notwithstanding the head wind, and encamped at night on the north bank, and at the foot of a rapid called Diable.\n\nJune the fourth. Early this morning, Frank and Poindexter Greely came into our camp with a fat buck, upon which we all breakfasted in high glee, and afterwards pushed on with spirit. At the Diable rapid, the current sets with much force against some rocks which jut out from the south, and render the navigation difficult. A short distance above this we met with several quicksand bars, which put us to trouble; the banks of the river here fall in continually, and, in the process of time, must greatly alter the bed. At eight o'clock we had a fine fresh wind from the eastward, and, with its assistance, made rapid progress, so that by night we had gone perhaps thirty miles, or more. We passed, on the north, the river Du Bois, a creek called Charit\u00e9, and several small islands. The river was rising fast as we came to, at night, under a group of cotton-wood trees, there being no ground near at hand upon which we were disposed to encamp. It was beautiful weather, and I felt too much excited to sleep; so, asking Thornton to accompany me, I took a stroll into the country, and did not return until nearly daylight. The rest of our crew occupied the cabin, for the first time, and found it quite roomy enough for five or six more persons. They had been disturbed, in the night, by a strange noise overhead, on deck, the origin of which they had not been able to ascertain; as, when some of the party rushed out to see, the disturber had disappeared. From the account given of the noise, I concluded that it must have proceeded from an Indian dog, who had scented our fresh provisions (the buck of yesterday) and was endeavoring to make off with a portion. In this view I felt perfectly satisfied; but the occurrence suggested the great risk we ran in not posting a regular watch at night, and it was agreed to do so for the future.\n\nHaving thus given, in Mr. Rodman's own words, the incidents of the two first days of the voyage, we forbear to follow him minutely in his passage up the Missouri to the mouth of the Platte, at which he arrived on the tenth of August. The character of the river throughout this extent is so well known, and has been so frequently described, that any farther account of it is unnecessary; and the Journal takes note of little else, at this portion of the tour, than the natural features of the country \u2014 together with the ordinary boating and hunting occurrences. The party made three several halts for the purpose of trapping, but met with no great success; and finally concluded to push farther into the heart of the country, before making any regular attempts at collecting peltries. Only two events, of moment, are recorded, for the two months which we omit. One of these was the death of a Canadian, Jacques Lauzanne, by the bite of a rattle-snake; the other was the encountering a Spanish commission sent to intercept and turn the party back, by order of the commandant of the province. The officer in charge of the detachment, however, was so much interested in the expedition, and took so great a fancy to Mr. Rodman, that our travellers were permitted to proceed. Many small bodies of Osage and Kanzas Indians hovered occasionally about the boats, but evinced nothing of hostility. We leave the voyagers for the present, therefore, at the mouth of the river Platte, on the tenth of August, 1791 \u2014 their number having been reduced to fourteen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Having reached the mouth of the river Platte, our voyagers encamped for three days, during which they were busily occupied in drying and airing their goods and provisions, making new oars and poles, and repairing the birch canoe, which had sustained material injury. The hunters brought in an abundance of game, with which the boats were loaded to repletion. Deer was had for the asking, and turkeys and fat grouse were met with in great plenty. The party, moreover, regaled on several species of fish, and, at a short distance from the river banks, found an exquisite kind of wild grape. No Indians had been seen for better than a fortnight, as this was the hunting season, and they were doubtless engaged in the prairies, taking buffalo. After perfectly recruiting, the voyagers broke up their encampment, and pushed on up the Missouri. We resume the words of the Journal.\n\nAugust 14. We started with a delightful breeze from the S. E., and kept along by the Southern shore, taking advantage of the eddy, and going at a great rate, notwithstanding the current, which, in the middle, was unusually full and strong. At noon, we stopped to examine some remarkable mounds on the south-western shore, at a spot where the ground seems to have sunk considerably to an extent of three hundred acres, or more. A large pond is in the vicinity, and appears to have drained the low tract. This is covered with mounds of various sizes, and shapes, all formed of sand and mud, the highest being nearest the river. I could not make up my mind whether these hillocks were of natural or artificial construction. I should have supposed them made by the Indians, but for the general appearance of the soil, which had apparently been subjected to the violent action of water. We staid at this spot the rest of the day, having made altogether twenty miles.\n\nAugust 15. To-day we had a heavy, disagreeable head wind, and made only fifteen miles, with great labor; encamping at night beneath a bluff on the north shore, this being the first bluff on that side which we had seen since leaving the Nodaway river. In the night it came on to rain in torrents, and the Greelys brought in their horses, and ensconced themselves in the cabin. Robert swam the river with his horse from the South shore, and then took the canoe across for Meredith. He appeared to think nothing of either of these feats, although the night was one of the darkest and most boisterous I ever saw, and the river was much swollen. We all sat in the cabin very comfortably, for the weather was quite cool, and were kept awake for a long time by the anecdotes of Thornton, who told story after story of his adventures with the Indians on the Mississippi. His huge dog appeared to listen with profound attention to every word that was said. Whenever any particularly incredible circumstance was related, Thornton would gravely refer to him as a witness. \"Nep,\" he would say, \"don 't you remember that time?\" \u2014 or \"Nep can swear to the truth of that \u2014 can 't you, Nep?\" \u2014 when the animal would roll up his eyes immediately, loll out his monstrous tongue, and wag his great head up and down, as much as to say \u2014 \"Oh it's every bit as true as the Bible.\" Although we all knew that this trick had been taught the dog, yet for our lives we could not forbear shouting with laughter, whenever Thornton would appeal to him.\n\nAugust 16. Early this morning passed an island, and a creek about fifteen yards wide, and, at a farther distance of twelve miles, a large island in the middle of the river. We had now, generally, high prairie, and timbered hills on the north, with low ground on the south, covered with cotton-wood. The river was excessively crooked, but not so rapid as before we passed the Platte. Altogether there is less timber than formerly; what there is, is mostly elm, cotton-wood, hickory, and walnut, with some oak. Had a strong wind nearly all day, and by means of the eddy and this, we made twenty-five miles before night. Our encampment was on the south, upon a large plain, covered with high grass, and bearing a great number of plum-trees and currant-bushes. In our rear was a steep woody ridge, ascending which we found another prairie extending back for about a mile, and stopped again by a similar woody ridge, followed by another vast prairie, going off into the distance as far as the eye can reach. From the cliffs just above us we had one of the most beautiful prospects in the world.\n\nAugust 17. We remained at the encampment all day, and occupied ourselves in various employments. Getting Thornton, with his dog, to accompany me, I strolled to some distance to the southward, and was enchanted with the voluptuous beauty of the country. The prairies exceeded in beauty any thing told in the tales of the Arabian Nights. On the edges of the creeks there was a wild mass of flowers which looked more like Art than Nature, so profusely and fantastically were their vivid colors blended together. Their rich odor was almost oppressive. Every now and then we came to a kind of green island of trees, placed amid an ocean of purple, blue, orange, and crimson blossoms, all waving to and fro in the wind. These islands consisted of the most majestic forest oaks, and, beneath them, the grass resembled a robe of the softest green velvet, while up their huge stems there clambered, generally, a profusion of grape vines, laden with delicious ripe fruit. The Missouri, in the distance, presented the most majestic appearance; and many of the real islands with which it was studded were entirely covered with plum bushes, or other shrubbery, except where crossed in various directions by narrow, mazy paths, like the alleys in an English flower-garden; and in these alleys we could always see either elks or antelopes, who had no doubt made them. We returned, at sun-set, to the encampment, delighted with our excursion. The night was warm, and we were excessively annoyed by musquitoes.\n\nAugust 18. To-day passed through a narrow part of the river, not more than two hundred yards wide, with a rapid channel, much obstructed with logs and drift wood. Ran the large boat on a sawyer, and half filled her with water before we could extricate her from the difficulty. We were obliged to halt, in consequence, and overhaul our things. Some of the biscuit was injured, but none of the powder. Remained all day \u2014 having only made five miles.\n\nAugust 19. We started early this morning and made great headway. The weather was cool and cloudy, and at noon we had a drenching shower. Passed a creek on the south, the mouth of which is nearly concealed by a large sand-island of singular appearance. Went about fifteen miles beyond this. The highlands now recede from the river, and are probably from ten to twenty miles apart. On the north is a good deal of fine timber, but on the south very little. Near the river are beautiful prairies, and along the banks we procured four or five different species of grape, all of good flavor and quite ripe; one is a large purple grape of excellent quality. The hunters came into camp, at night, from both sides of the river, and brought us more game than we well knew what to do with \u2014 grouse, turkies, two deer, an antelope, and a quantity of yellow birds with black-striped wings \u2014 these latter proved delicious eating. We made about twenty miles during the day.\n\nAugust 20. The river, this morning, was full of sand-bars and other obstructions; but we proceeded with spirit, and reached the mouth of a pretty large creek, before night, at a distance of twenty miles from our last encampment. The creek comes in from the north, and has a large island opposite its mouth. Here we made our camp, with the resolution of remaining four or five days to trap beaver, as we saw great signs of them in the neighborhood. This island was one of the most fairy-looking situations in the world, and filled my mind with the most delightful and novel emotions. The whole scenery rather resembled what I had dreamed of when a boy, than an actual reality. The banks sloped down very gradually into the water, and were carpeted with a short soft grass of a brilliant green hue, which was visible under the surface of the stream for some distance from the shore; especially on the north side, where the clear creek fell into the river. All round the island, which was probably about twenty acres in extent, was a complete fringe of cotton-wood; the trunks loaded with grape vines in full fruit, and so closely-interlocking with each other, that we could scarcely get a glimpse of the river between the leaves. Within this circle the grass was somewhat higher, and of a coarser texture, with a pale yellow or white streak down the middle of each blade, and giving out a remarkably delicious perfume, resembling that of the Vanilla bean, but much stronger, so that the whole atmosphere was loaded with it. The common English sweet grass is no doubt of the same genus, but greatly inferior in beauty, and fragrance. Interspersed among it in every direction, were myriads of the most brilliant flowers, in full bloom, and most of them of fine odor \u2014 blue, pure white, bright yellow, purple, crimson, gaudy scarlet, and some with streaked leaves like tulips. Little knots of cherry trees and plum bushes grew in various directions about, and there were many narrow winding paths which circled the island, and which had been made by elk or antelopes. Nearly in the centre, was a spring of sweet and clear water, which bubbled up from among a cluster of steep rocks, covered from head to foot with moss and flowering vines. The whole bore a wonderful resemblance to an artificial flower garden, but was infinitely more beautiful \u2014 looking rather like some of those scenes of enchantment which we read of in old books. We were all in extacy with the spot, and prepared our camp in the highest glee, amid its wilderness of sweets.\n\n[The party remained here a week, during which time, the neighboring country to the north was explored in many directions, and some peltries obtained, especially upon the creek mentioned. The weather was fine, and the enjoyment of the voyagers suffered no alloy, in their terrestrial Paradise. Mr. Rodman, however, omitted no necessary precautions, and sentries were regularly posted every night, when all hands assembled at camp, and made merry. Such feasting and drinking were never before known; the Canadians proving themselves the very best fellows in the world at a song, or over a flagon. They did nothing but eat, and cook, and dance, and shout French carols at the top of their voice. During the day they were chiefly entrusted with the charge of the encampment, while the steadier members of the party were absent upon hunting or trapping expeditions. In one of these Mr. Rodman enjoyed an excellent opportunity of observing the habits of the beaver; and his account of this singular animal is highly interesting \u2014 the more so as it differs materially, in some points, from the ordinary descriptions.\n\nHe was attended, as usual, by Thornton and his dog, and had traced up a small creek to its source in the highlands about ten miles from the river. The party came at length to a place where a large swamp had been made by the beavers, in damming up the creek. A thick grove of willows occupied one extremity of the swamp, some of them overhanging the water at a spot where several of the animals were observed. Our adventurers crept stealthily round to these willows, and making Neptune lie down at a little distance, succeeded in climbing, unobserved, into a large and thick tree, where they could look immediately down upon all that was going on.\n\nThe beavers were repairing a portion of their dam, and every step of their progress was distinctly seen. One by one the architects were perceived to approach the edge of the swamp, each with a small branch in his mouth. With this he proceeded to the dam, and placed it carefully, and longitudinally, on the part which had given way. Having done this, he dived immediately, and in a few seconds re-appeared above the surface with a quantity of stiff mud, which he first squeezed so as to drain it of its moisture in a great degree, and then applied with its feet and tail (using the latter as a trowel) to the branch which he had just laid upon the breach. He then made off among the trees, and was quickly succeeded by another of the community, who went through precisely the same operation.\n\nIn this way the damage sustained by the dam was in a fair way of being soon repaired. Messieurs Rodman and Thornton observed the progress of the work for more than two hours, and bear testimony to the exquisite skill of the artizans. But as soon as a beaver left the edge of the swamp in search of a branch, he was lost sight of among the willows, much to the chagrin of the observers, who were anxious to watch his farther operations. By clambering a little higher up in the tree, however, they discovered every thing. A small sycamore had been felled, apparently, and was now nearly denuded of all its fine branches, a few beavers still nibbling off some that remained, and proceeding with them to the dam. In the mean time a great number of the animals surrounded a much older and larger tree, which they were busily occupied in cutting down. There were as many as fifty or sixty of the creatures around the trunk, of which number six or seven would work at once, leaving off one by one, as each became weary; a fresh one stepping in to the vacated place. When our travellers first observed the sycamore, it had been already cut through to a great extent, but only on the side nearest the swamp, upon the edge of which it grew. The incision was nearly a foot wide, and as cleanly made as if done with an axe; and the ground at the bottom of the tree was covered with fine longitudinal slips, like straws, which had been nibbled out, and not eaten; as it appears that these animals only use the bark for food. When at work some sat upon the hind legs, in the posture so conunon with squirrels, and gnawed at the wood; their fore feet resting upon the edge of the cut, and their heads thrust far into the aperture. Two of them, however, were entirely within the incision; lying at length, and working with great eagerness for a short time, when they were relieved by their companions.\n\nAlthough the position of our voyagers was any thing but comfortable, so great was their curiosity to witness the felling of the sycamore, that they resolutely maintained their post until sunset, an interval of eight hours from the time of ascending. Their chief embarrassment was on Neptune's account, who could with difficulty be kept from plunging in the swamp after the plasterers who were repairing the dam. The noise he made had several times disturbed the nibblers at the tree, who would every now and then start, as if all actuated by one mind, and listen attentively for many minutes. As evening approached, however, the dog gave over his freaks, and lay quiet; while the beavers went on uninterruptedly with their labor.\n\nJust as the sun began to set, a sudden commotion was observed among the wood-cutters, who all started from the tree, and flew round to the side which was untouched. In an instant afterwards it was seen to settle down gradually on the gnawed side, till the lips of the incision met; but still it did not fall, being sustained partially by the unsundered bark. This was now attacked with zeal by as many nibblers as could find room to work at it, and very quickly severed; when the huge tree, to which the proper inclination had already been so ingeniously given, fell with a tremendous crash, and spread a great portion of its topmost branches over the surface of the swamp. This matter accomplished, the whole community seemed to think a holiday was deserved, and, ceasing work at once, began to chase each other about in the water, diving, and slapping the surface with their tails.\n\nThe account here given of the method employed by the beaver in its wood-cutting operations, is more circumstantial than any we have yet seen, and seems to be conclusive in regard to the question of design on the animal's part. The intention of making the tree fall towards the water appears here to be obvious. Captain Bonneville, it will be remembered, discredits the alleged sagacity of the animal in this respect, and thinks it has no farther aim than to get the tree down, without any subtle calculation in respect to its mode of descent. This attribute, he thinks, has been ascribed to it from the circumstance that trees in general, which grow near the margin of water, either lean bodily towards the stream, or stretch their most ponderous limbs in that direction, in search of the light, space, and air, which are there usually found. The beaver, he says, attacks, of course, those trees which are nearest at hand, and on the banks of the stream or pond, and these, when cut through, naturally preponderate towards the water. This suggestion is well-timed; but by no means conclusive against the design of the beaver; whose sagacity, at best, is far beneath that which is positively ascertained in respect to many classes of inferior animals \u2014 infinitely below that of the lion-ant, of the bee, and of the corralliferi. The probability is that, were two trees offered to the choice of the beaver, one of which preponderated to the water, and the other did not, he would, in felling the first, omit, as unnecessary, the precautions just described, but observe them in felling the second.\n\nIn a subsequent portion of the Journal other particulars are given respecting the habits of the singular animal in question, and of the mode of trapping it employed by the party, and we give them here for the sake of continuity. The principal food of the beavers is bark, and of this they put by regularly a large store for winter provision, selecting the proper kind with care and deliberation. A whole tribe, consisting sometimes of two or three hundred, will set out together upon a foraging expedition, and pass through groves of trees all apparently similar, until a particular one suits their fancy. This they cut down, and, breaking off its most tender branches, divide them into short slips of equal length and divest these slips of their bark, which they carry to the nearest stream leading to their village, thence floating it home. Occasionally the slips are stored away for the winter without being stripped of the bark; and, in this event, they are careful to remove the refuse wood from their dwellings, as soon as they have eaten the rind, taking the sticks to some distance. During the spring of the year the males are never found with the tribe at home, but always by themselves, either singly, or in parties of two or three, when they appear to lose their usual habits of sagacity, and fall an easy prey to the arts of the trapper. In summer they return home, and busy themselves, with the females, in making provision for winter. They are described as exceedingly ferocious animals when irritated.\n\nNow and then they may be caught upon shore; especially the males in spring, who are then fond of roving to some distance from the water in search of food. When thus caught, they are easily killed with a blow from a stick; but the most certain and efficacious mode of taking them is by means of the trap. This is simply constructed to catch the foot of the animal. The trapper places it usually in some position near the shore, and just below the surface of the water, fastening it by a small chain to a pole stuck in the mud. In the mouth of the machine is placed one end of a small branch; the other end rising above the surface, and well soaked in the liquid bait whose odor is found to be attractive to the beaver. As soon as the animal scents it, he rubs his nose against the twig, and, in so doing, steps upon the trap, springs it, and is caught. The trap is made very light, for the convenience of portage, and the prey would easily swim off with it but for its being fastened to the pole by a chain \u2014 no other species of fastening could resist his teeth. The experienced trapper readily detects the presence of beaver in any pond or stream; discovering them by a thousand appearances which would afford no indication to the unpractised observer.\n\nMany of the identical wood-cutters whom the two voyagers had watched so narrowly from the tree-top, fell afterwards a victim to trap, and their fine furs became a prey to the spoilers, who made sad havoc in the lodge at the swamp. Other waters in the neighborhood also afforded the travellers much sport; and they long remembered the island at the creek's mouth, by the name of Beaver Island, in consequence. They left this little Paradise in high spirits on the twenty-seventh of the month, and, pursuing their hitherto somewhat uneventful voyage up the river, arrived, by the first of September, without any incident of note, at the mouth of a large river on the south, to which they gave the name of Currant River, from some berries abounding upon its margin, but which was, beyond doubt, the Quicourre. The principal objects of which the Journal takes notice in this interval, are the numerous herds of buffalo which darkened the prairies in every direction, and the remains of a fortification on the south shore of the river, nearly opposite the upper extremity of what has been since called Bonhomme Island. Of these remains a minute description is given, which tallies in every important particular with that of Captains Lewis and Clarke. The travellers had passed the Little Sioux, Floyd's, the Great Sioux, White-Stone, and Jacques rivers on the North; with Wawandysenche creek, and White-Paint river on the south, but at neither of these streams did they stop to trap for any long period. They had also passed the great village of the Omahas, of which the Journal takes no notice whatever. This village, at the time, consisted of full three hundred houses, and was inhabited by a numerous and powerful tribe; but it is not immediately upon the banks of the Missouri, and the boats probably went by it during the night \u2014 for the party had begun to adopt this mode of progress, through fear of the Sioux. We resume the narrative of Mr. Rodman, with the second of September.]\n\nSeptember 2. We had now reached a part of the river where, according to all report, a great deal of danger was to be apprehended from the Indians, and we became extremely cautious in our movements. This was the region inhabited by the Sioux, a warlike and ferocious tribe, who had, upon several occasions, evinced hostility to the whites, and were knonvn to be constantly at war with all the neighboring tribes. The Canadians had many incidents to relate respecting their savage propensities, and I had much apprehension lest these cowardly creatures should take an opportunity of deserting, and retracing their way to the Mississippi. To lessen the chances of this, I removed one of them from the piroque, and supplied his place by Poindexter Greely. All the Greelys came in from the shore, turning loose the horses. Our arrangement was now as follows: \u2014 In the piroque, Poindexter Greely, Pierre Jun\u00f4t, Toby, and one Canadian \u2014 in the large boat, myself; Thornton; Wormley; John, Frank, Robert, and Meredith Greely; and three Canadians, with the dog. We set sail about dusk, and, having a brisk wind from the south, made good headway, although, as night came on, we were greatly embarrassed by the shoals. We continued our course without interruption, however, until a short time before day-break, when we ran into the mouth of a creek, and concealed the boats among the underwood.\n\nSeptember 3 and 4. During both of these days it rained and blew with excessive violence, so that we did not leave our retreat at all. The weather depressed our spirits very much, and the narratives of the Canadians about the terrible Sioux did not serve to raise them. We all congregated in the cabin of the large boat, and held a council in regard to our future movements. The Greelys were for a bold push through the dangerous country, maintaining that the stories of the voyagers were mere exaggerations, and that the Sioux would only be a little troublesome, without proceeding to hostility. Wormley and Thornton, however, as well as Pierre (all of whom had much experience in the Indian character) thought that our present policy was the best, although it would necessarily detain us much longer on our voyage than would otherwise be the case. My own opinion coincided with theirs \u2014 in our present course we might escape any collision with the Sioux \u2014 and I did not regard the delay as a matter of consequence.\n\nSeptember 5. We set off at night, and proceeded for about ten miles, when the day began to appear, and we hid the boats as before, in a narrow creek, which was well adapted to the purpose, as its mouth was almost blocked up by a thickly-wooded island. It again came on to rain furiously, and we were all drenched to the skin before we could arrange matters for turning in, in the cabin. Our spirits were much depressed by the bad weather, and the Canadians especially were in a miserable state of dejection. We had now come to a narrow part of the river where the current was strong, and the cliffs on both sides overhung the water, and were thickly wooded with lynn, oak, black-walnut, ash, and chesnut. Through such a gorge we knew it would be exceedingly difficult to pass without observation, even at night, and our apprehensions of attack were greatly increased. We resolved not to re-commence our journey until late, and then to proceed with the most stealthy caution. In the meantime we posted a sentry on shore, and one in the piroque, while the rest of us busied ourselves in overhauling the arms and ammunition, and preparing for the worst.\n\nAbout ten o'clock we were getting ready to start, when the dog gave a low growl, which made us all fly to our rifles; but the cause of the disturbance proved to be a single Indian of the Ponca tribe, who came up frankly to our sentry on shore, and extended his hand. We brought him on board, and gave him whiskey, when he became very communicative, and told us that his tribe, who lived some miles lower down the river, had been watching our movements for several days past, but that the Poncas were friends and would not molest the whites, and would trade with us upon our return. They had sent him now to caution the whites against the Sioux, who were great robbers, and who were lying in wait for the party at a bend of the river, twenty miles farther up. There were three bands of them, he said, and it was their intention to kill us all, in revenge for an insult sustained by one of their chiefs, many years previously, at the hands of a French trapper." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "[We left our travellers, on the fifth of September, apprehending a present attack from the Sioux. Exaggerated accounts of the ferocity of this tribe had inspired the party with an earnest wish to avoid them; but the tale told by the friendly Ponca made it evident that a collision must take place. The night voyages were therefore abandoned as impolitic, and it was resolved to put a bold face upon the matter, and try what could be effected by blustering. The remainder of the night of the fifth was spent in warlike demonstration. The large boat was cleared for action as well as possible, and the fiercest aspect assumed which the nature of the case would permit. Among other preparations for defence, the cannon was got out from below, and placed forward upon the cuddy deck, with a load of bullets, by way of cannister shot. Just before sunrise the adventurers started up the river in high bravado, aided by a heavy wind. That the enemy might perceive no semblance of fear or mistrust, the whole party joined the Canadians in an uproarious boat song at the top of their voices, making the woods reverberate, and the buffaloes stare.\n\nThe Sioux, indeed, appear to have been Mr. Rodman's bugbearspar excellence, and he dwells upon them and their exploits with peculiar emphasis. The narrative embodies a detailed account of the tribe \u2014 an account which we can only follow in such portions as appear to possess novelty, or other important interest. Sioux is the French term for the Indians in question \u2014 the English have corrupted it into Sues. Their primitive name is said to be Darcotas. Their original seats were on the Mississippi, but they had gradually extended their dominions, and, at the date of the Journal, occupied almost the whole of that vast territory circumscribed by the Mississippi, the Saskatchawine, the Missouri, and the Red River of Lake Winnipeg. They were sub-divided into numerous clans. The Darcotas proper were the Winowacants, called the Gens du Lac by the French \u2014 consisting of about five hundred warriors, and living on both sides of the Mississippi, in the vicinity of the Falls of St. Anthony. Neighbors of the Winowacants, and residing north of them on the river St. Peters ', were the Wappatomies, about two hundred men. Still farther up the St. Peters ' lived a band of one hundred, called the Wappytooties, among themselves, and by the French the Gens des Feuilles. Higher up the river yet, and near its source, resided the Sissytoonies, in number two hundred or thereabouts. On the Missouri dwelt the Yanktons and the Tetons. Of the first tribe there were two branches, the northern and southern, of which the former led an Arab life in the plains at the sources of the Red, Sioux, and Jacques rivers, being in number about five hundred. The southern branch kept possession of the tract lying between the river Des Moines on the one hand, and the rivers Jacques and Sioux on the other. But the Sioux most renowned for deeds of violence are the Tetons; and of these there were four tribes \u2014 the Saonies, the Minnakenozzies, the Okydandies, and the Bois-Brul\u00e9s. These last, a body of whom were now lying in wait to intercept the voyagers, were the most savage and formidable of the whole race, numbering about two hundred men, and residing on both sides of the Missouri near the rivers called by Captains Lewis and Clarke, The White and Teton. Just below the Chayenne river were the Okydandies, one hundred and fifty. The Minnackennozzies \u2014 two hundred and fifty \u2014 occupied a tract between the Chayenne and the Watarhoo; and the Saonies, the largest of the Teton bands, counting as many as three hundred warriors, were found in the vicinity of the Warreconne.\n\nBesides these four divisions \u2014 the regular Sioux \u2014 there were five tribes of seceders called Assiniboins; the Menatop\u00e6 Assiniboins, two hundred, on Mouse river, between the Assiniboin and the Missouri; the Gens de Feuilles Assiniboins, two hundred and fifty, occupying both sides of White river; the Big Devils, four hundred and fifty, wandering about the heads of Porcupine and Milk rivers; with two other bands whose names are not mentioned, but who roved on the Saskatchawine, and numbered together, about seven hundred men. These seceders were often at war with the parent or original Sioux.\n\nIn person, the Sioux generally are an ugly ill-made race, their limbs being much too small for the trunk, according to our ideas of the human form \u2014 their cheek bones are high, and their eyes protruding and dull. The heads of the men are shaved, with the exception of a small spot on the crown, whence a long tuft is permitted to fall in plaits upon the shoulders; this tuft is an object of scrupulous care, but is now and then cut off, upon an occasion of grief or solemnity. A full dressed Sioux chief presents a striking appearance. The whole surface of the body is painted with grease and coal. A shirt of skins is worn as far down as the waist, while round the middle is a girdle of the same material, and sometimes of cloth, about an inch in width; this supports a piece of blanket or fur passing between the thighs. Over the shoulders is a white-dressed buffalo mantle, the hair of which is worn next the skin in fair weather, but turned outwards in wet. This robe is large enough to envelope the whole body, and is frequently ornamented with porcupine quills (which make a rattling noise as the warrior moves) as well as with a great variety of rudely painted figures, emblematical of the wearer's military character. Fastened to the top of the head is worn a hawk's feather, adorned with porcupine quills. Leggings of dressed antelope skin serve the purpose of pantaloons, and have seams at the sides, about two inches wide, and bespotted here and there with small tufts of human hair, the trophies of some scalping excursion. The moccasins are of elk or buffalo skin, the hair worn inwards; on great occasions the chief is seen with the skin of a polecat dangling at the heel of each boot. The Sioux are indeed partial to this noisome animal; whose fur is in high favor for tobacco-pouches and other appendages.\n\nThe dress of a chieftain's squaw is also remarkable. Her hair is suffered to grow long, is parted across the forehead, and hangs loosely behind, or is collected into a kind of net. Her moccasins do not differ from her husband's; but her leggings extend upwards only as far as the knee, where they are met by an awkward shirt of elk-skin depending to the ancles, and supported above by a string going over the shoulders. This shirt is usually confined to the waist by a girdle, and over all is thrown a buffalo mantle like that of the men. The tents of the Teton Sioux are described as of neat construction, being formed of white-dressed buffalo hide, well secured and supported by poles.\n\nThe region infested by the tribe in question extends along the banks of the Missouri for some hundred and fifty miles or more, and is chiefly prairie land, but is occasionally diversified by hills. These latter are always deeply cut by gorges or ravines, which in the middle of summer are dry, but form the channels of muddy and impetuous torrents during the season of rain. Their edges are fringed with thick woods, as well at top, as at bottom; but the prevalent aspect of the country is that of a bleak low land, with rank herbage, and without trees. The soil is strongly impregnated with mineral substances in great variety \u2014 among others with glauber salts, copperas, sulphur, and alum, which tinge the water of the river and impart to it a nauseous odor and taste. The wild animals most usual are the buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope. We again resume the words of the Journal.]\n\nSeptember 6. The country was open, and the day remarkably pleasant: so that we were all in pretty good spirits notwithstanding the expectation of attack. So far, we had not caught even a glimpse of an Indian, and we were making rapid way through their dreaded territory. I was too well aware, however, of the savage tactics to suppose that we were not narrowly watched, and had made up my mind that we should hear something of the Tetons at the first gorge which would afford them a convenient lurking-place.\n\nAbout noon a Canadian bawled out \"The Sioux! \u2014 the Sioux\" \u2014 and directed attention to a long narrow ravine, which intersected the prairie on our left, extending from the banks of the Missouri as far as the eye could reach, in a southwardly course. This gully was the bed of a creek, but its waters were now low, and the sides rose up like huge regular walls on each side. By the aid of a spy glass I perceived at once the cause of the alarm given by the voyageur. A large party of mounted savages were coming down the gorge in Indian file, with the evident intention of taking us unawares. Their calumet feathers had been the means of their detection; for every now and then we could see some of these bobbing up above the edge of the gulley, as the bed of the ravine forced the wearer to rise higher than usual. We could tell that they were on horseback by the motion of these feathers. The party was coming upon us with great rapidity; and I gave the word to pull on with all haste so as to pass the mouth of the creek before they reached it. As soon as the Indians perceived by our increased speed that they were discovered, they immediately raised a yell, scrambled out of the gorge, and galloped down upon us, to the number of about one hundred.\n\nOur situation was now somewhat alarming. At almost any other part of the Missouri which we had passed during the day, I should not have cared so much for these freebooters; but, just here, the banks were remarkably steep and high, partaking of the character of the creek banks, and the savages were enabled to overlook us completely, while the cannon, upon which we had placed so much reliance, could not be brought to bear upon them at all. What added to our difficulty was that the current in the middle of the river was so turbulent and strong that we could make no headway against it except by dropping arms, and employing our whole force at the oars. The water near the northern shore was too shallow even for the piroque, and our only mode of proceeding, if we designed to proceed at all, was by pushing in within a moderate stone's throw of the left or southern bank, where we were completely at the mercy of the Sioux, but where we could make good headway by means of our poles and the wind, aided by the eddy. Had the savages attacked us at this juncture I cannot see how we could have escaped them. They were all well provided with bows and arrows, and small round shields, presenting a very noble and picturesque appearance. Some of the chiefs had spears, with fanciful flags attached, and were really gallant-looking men. The portrait here annexed is that of the commander-in-chief of the party which now interrupted us, and was sketched by Thornton, at a subsequent period.\n\nEither good luck upon our own parts, or great stupidity on the parts of the Indians, relieved us very unexpectedly from the dilemma. The savages, having galloped up to the edge of the cliff just above us, set up another yell, and commenced a variety of gesticulations, whose meaning we at once knew to be that we should stop and come on shore. I had expected this demand, and had made up my mind that it would be most prudent to pay no attention to it at all, but proceed on our course. My refusal to stop had at least one good effect, for it appeared to mystify the Indians most wonderfully, who could not be brought to understand the measure in the least, and stared at us, as we kept on our way without answering them, in the most ludicrous amazement. Presently they commenced an agitated conversation among themselves, and at last finding that nothing could be made of us, fairly turned their horses ' heads to the southward and galloped out of sight, leaving us as much surprised as rejoiced at their departure.\n\nIn the meantime we made the most of the opportunity, and pushed on with might and main, in order to get out of the region of steep banks before the anticipated return of our foes. In about two hours we again saw them in the south, at a great distance, and their number much augmented. They came on at full gallop, and were soon at the river; but our position was now much more advantageous, for the banks were sloping, and there were no trees to shelter the savages from our shot. The current, moreover, was not so rapid as before, and we were enabled to keep in mid-channel. The party, it seems, had only retreated to procure an interpreter, who now appeared upon a large gray horse, and, coming into the river as far as he could without swimming, called out to us in bad French to stop, and come on shore. To this I made one of the Canadians reply that, to oblige our friends the Sioux, we would willingly stop, for a short time, and converse, but that it was inconvenient for us to come on shore, as we could not do so without incommoding our great medicine (here the Canadian pointed to the cannon) who was anxious to proceed on his voyage, and whom we were afraid to disobey.\n\nAt this they began again their agitated whisperings and gesticulations among themselves, and seemed quite at a loss what to do. In the meantime the boats had been brought to anchor in a favorable position, and I was resolved to fight now, if necessary, and endeavor to give the fre[e]booters so warm a reception as would inspire them with wholesome dread for the future. I reflected that it was nearly impossible to keep on good terms with these Sioux, who were our enemies at heart, and who could only be restrained from pillaging and murdering us by a conviction of our prowess. Should we comply with their present demands, go on shore, and even succeed in purchasing a temporary safety by concessions and donations, such conduct would not avail us in the end, and would be rather a palliation than a radical cure of the evil. They would be sure to glut their vengeance sooner or later, and, if they suffered us to go on our way now, might hereafter attack us at a disadvantage, when it might be as much as we could do to repel them, to say nothing of inspiring them with awe. Situated as we were here, it was in our power to give them a lesson they would be apt to remember; and we might never be in so good a situation again. Thinking thus, and all except the Canadians agreeing with me in opinion, I determined to assume a bold stand, and rather provoke hostilities than avoid them. This was our true policy. The savages had no fire arms which we could discover, except an old carabine carried by one of the chiefs; and their arrows would not prove very effective weapons when employed at so great a distance as that now between us. In regard to their number, we did not care much for that. Their position was one which would expose them to the full sweep of our cannon.\n\nWhen Jules (the Canadian) had finished his speech about incommoding our great medicine, and when the consequent agitation had somewhat subsided among the savages, the interpreter spoke again and propounded three queries. He wished to know, first, whether we had any tobacco, or whiskey, or fire-guns \u2014 secondly, whether we did not wish the aid of the Sioux in rowing our large boat up the Missouri as far as the country of the Ricarees, who were great rascals \u2014 and, thirdly, whether our great medicine was not a very large and strong green grasshopper.\n\nTo these questions, propounded with profound gravity, Jules replied, by my directions, as follows. First, that we had plenty of whiskey, as well as tobacco, with an inexhaustible supply of fire-guns and powder \u2014 but that our great medicine had just told us that the Tetons were greater rascals than the Ricarees \u2014 that they were our enemies \u2014 that they had been lying in wait to intercept and kill us for many days past \u2014 that we must give them nothing at all, and hold no intercourse with them whatever; we should therefore be afraid to give them anything, even if so disposed, for fear of the anger of the great medicine, who was not to be trifled with. Secondly, that, after the character just given the Sioux Tetons, we could not think of employing them to row our boat \u2014 and, thirdly, that it was a good thing for them (the Sioux) that our great medicine had not overheard their last query, respecting the \"large green grasshopper;\" for, in that case, it might have gone very hard with them (the Sioux). Our great medicine was anything but a large green grasshopper, and that they should soon see, to their cost, if they did not immediately go, the whole of them, about their business.\n\nNotwithstanding the imminent danger in which we were all placed, we could scarcely keep our countenances in beholding the air of profound admiration and astonishment with which the savages listened to these replies; and I believe that they would have immediately dispersed, and left us to proceed on our voyage, had it not been for the unfortunate words in which I informed them that they were greater rascals than the Ricarees. This was, apparently, an insult of the last atrocity, and excited them to an incontrollable degree of fury. We heard the words \"Ricaree! Ricaree!\" repeated, every now and then, with the utmost emphasis and excitement; and the whole band, as well as we could judge, seemed to be divided into two factions; the one urging the immense power of the great medicine, and the other the outrageous insult of being called greater rascals than the Ricarees. While matters stood thus, we retained our position in the middle of the stream, firmly resolved to give the villains a dose of our cannister-shot, upon the first indignity which should be offered us.\n\nPresently, the interpreter on the gray horse came again into the river, and said that he believed we were no better than we should be \u2014 that all the pale faces who had previously gone up the river had been friends of the Sioux, and had made them large presents \u2014 that they, the Tetons, were determined not to let us proceed another step unless we came on shore and gave up all our fire-guns and whiskey, with half of our tobacco \u2014 that it was plain we were allies of the Ricarees, (who were now at war with the Sioux,) and that our design was to carry them supplies, which we should not do \u2014 lastly, that they did not think very much of our great medicine, for he had told us a lie in relation to the designs of the Tetons, and was positively nothing but a great green grasshopper, in spite of all that we thought to the contrary. These latter words, about the great green grasshopper, were taken up by the whole assemblage as the interpreter uttered them, and shouted out at the top of the voice, that the great medicine himself might be sure to hear the taunt. At the same time, they all broke into wild disorder, galloping their horses furiously in short circles, using contemptuous and indecent gesticulations, brandishing their spears, and drawing their arrows to the head.\n\nI knew that the next thing would be an attack, and so determined to anticipate it at once, before any of our party were wounded by the discharge of their weapons \u2014 there was nothing to be gained by delay, and every thing by prompt and resolute action. As soon as a good opportunity presented itself, the word was given to fire, and instantly obeyed. The effect of the discharge was very severe, and answered all our purposes to the full. Six of the Indians were killed, and perhaps three times as many badly wounded. The rest were thrown into the greatest terror and confusion, and made off into the prairie at full speed, as we drew up our anchors, after reloading the gun, and pulled boldly in for the shore. By the time we had reached it, there was not an unwounded Teton within sight.\n\nI now left John Greely, with three Canadians, in charge of the boats, landed with the rest of the men, and, approaching a savage who was severely but not dangerously wounded, held a conversation with him, by means of Jules. I told him that the whites were well disposed to the Sioux, and to all the Indian nations; that our sole object in visiting his country was to trap beaver, and see the beautiful region which had been given the red men by the Great Spirit; that when we had procured as many furs as we wished, and seen all we came to see, we should return home; that we had heard that the Sioux, and especially the Tetons, were a quarrelsome race, and that therefore we had brought with us our great medicine for protection; that he was now much exasperated with the Tetons on account of their intolerable insult in calling him a green grasshopper (which he was not); that I had had great difficulty in restraining him from a pursuit of the warriors who had fled, and from sacrificing the wounded who now lay around us; and that I had only succeeded in pacifying him by becoming personally responsible for the future good behavior of the savages. At this portion of my discourse the poor fellow appeared much relieved, and extended his hand in token of amity. I took it, and assured him and his friends of my protection as long as we were unmolested, following up this promise by a present of twenty carrots of tobacco, some small hardware, beads, and red flannel, for himself and the rest of the wounded.\n\nWhile all this was going on, we kept a sharp look out for the fugitive Sioux. As I concluded making the presents, several gangs of these were observable in the distance, and were evidently seen by the disabled savage; but I thought it best to pretend not to perceive them, and shortly afterwards returned to the boats. The whole interruption had detained us full three hours, and it was after three o 'clock when we once more started on our route. We made extraordinary haste, as I was anxious to get as far as possible from the scene of action before night. We had a strong wind at our back, and the current diminished in strength as we proceeded, owing to the widening of the stream. We therefore made great way, and by nine o 'clock, had reached a large and thickly wooded island, near the northern bank, and close by the mouth of a creek. Here we resolved to encamp, and had scarcely set foot on shore, when one of the Greelys shot and secured a fine buffalo, many of which were upon the place. After posting our sentries for the night, we had the hump for supper, with as much whiskey as was good for us. Our exploit of the day was then freely discussed, and by most of the men was treated as an excellent joke; but I could by no means enter into any merriment upon the subject. Human blood had never, before this epoch, been shed at my hands; and although reason urged that I had taken the wisest, and what would no doubt prove in the end the most merciful course, still conscience, refusing to hearken even to reason herself, whispered pertinaciously within my ear \u2014 \"it is human blood which thou hast shed.\" The hours wore away slowly \u2014 I found it impossible to sleep. At length the morning dawned, and with its fresh dews, its fresher breezes, and smiling flowers, there came a new courage, and a bolder tone of thought, which enabled me to look more steadily upon what had been done, and to regard in its only proper point of view the urgent necessity of the deed.\n\nSeptember 7. Started early, and made great way, with a strong cold wind from the east. Arrived about noon at the upper gorge of what is called the Great Bend, a place where the river performs a circuit of full thirty miles, while by land the direct distance is not more than fifteen hundred yards. Six miles beyond this is a creek about thirty-five yards wide, coming in from the south. The country here is of peculiar character; on each side of the river the shore is strewed thickly with round stones washed from the bluffs, and presenting a remarkable appearance for miles. The channel is very shallow, and much interrupted with sand-bars. Cedar is here met with more frequently than any other species of timber, and the prairies are covered with a stiff kind of prickly pear, over which our men found it no easy matter to walk in their moccasins.\n\nAbout sunset, in endeavoring to avoid a rapid channel, we had the misfortune to run the larboard side of the large boat on the edge of a sand-bar, which so heeled us over that we were very near getting filled with water, in spite of the greatest exertion. As it was, much damage was done to the loose powder, and the Indian goods were all more or less injured. As soon as we found the boat careering, we all jumped into the water, which was here up to our arm-pits, and by main force held the sinking side up. But we were still in a dilemma, for all our exertions were barely sufficient to keep from capsising, and we could not spare a man to do any thing towards pushing off. We were relieved, very unexpectedly, by the sinking of the whole sand-bar from under the boat, just as we were upon the point of despair. The bed of the river in this neighborhood is much obstructed by these shifting sands, which frequently change situations with great rapidity, and without apparent cause. The material of the bars is a fine hard yellow sand, which, when dry, is of a brilliant glass-like appearance, and almost impalpable.\n\nSeptember 8. We were still in the heart of the Teton country, and kept a sharp look-out, stopping as seldom as possible, and then only upon the islands, which abounded with game in great variety \u2014 buffaloes, elk, deer, goats, black-tailed deer, and antelopes, with plover and brant of many kinds. The goats are uncommonly tame, and haveno beard. Fish is not so abundant here as lower down the river. A white wolf was killed by John Greely in a ravine upon one of the smaller islands. Owing to the difficult navigation, and the frequent necessity of employing the tow-line, we did not make great progress this day.\n\nSeptember 9. Weather growing sensibly colder, which made us all anxious of pushing our way through the Sioux country, as it would be highly dangerous to form our winter encampment in their vicinity. We aroused ourselves to exertion, and proceeded rapidly, the Canadians singing and shouting as we went. Now and then we saw, in the extreme distance, a solitary Teton, but no attempt was made to molest us, and we began to gather courage from this circumstance. Made twenty-eight miles during the day, and encamped at night, in high glee, on a large island well stocked with game, and thickly covered with cotton-wood.\n\n[We omit the adventures of Mr. Rodman from this period until the tenth of April. By the last of October, nothing of importance happening in the interval, the party made their way to a small creek which they designated as Otter creek, and, proceeding up this about a mile to an island well adapted for their purpose, built a log fort and took up their quarters for the winter. The location is just above the old Ricara villages. Several parties of these Indians visited the voyagers, and behaved with perfect friendliness \u2014 they had heard of the skirmish with the Tetons, the result of which hugely pleased them. No farther trouble was experienced from any of the Sioux. The winter wore away pleasantly, and without accident of note. On the tenth of April the party resumed their voyage.]" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "April 10, 1792. The weather was now again most delicious, and revived our spirits exceedingly. The sun began to have power, and the river was quite free of ice, so the Indians assured us, for a hundred miles ahead. We bade adieu to Little Snake [a chief of the Ricarees who had shown the voyagers many evidences of friendship during the winter] and his band, with unfeigned regret, and set out, after breakfast, on our voyage. Perrine [an agent of the Hudson Bay fur company on his way to Petite C\u00f4te] accompanied us with three Indians for the first ten miles, when he took leave of us and made his way back to the village, where (as we afterwards heard) he met with a violent death from the hands of a squaw, to whom he offered some insult. Upon parting with the agent, we pushed on vigorously up the river, and made great way, notwithstanding a rapid current. In the afternoon, Thornton, who had been complaining for some days past, was taken seriously ill; so much so that I urged the return of the whole party to the hut, there to wait until he should get better; but he resisted this offer so strongly that I was forced to yield. We made him a comfortable bed in the cabin, and paid him every attention; but he had a raging fever, with occasional delirium, and I was much afraid that we should lose him. In the meantime we still pushed ahead with resolution, and by night had made twenty miles \u2014 an excellent day's work.\n\nApril 11. Still beautiful weather. We started early, and had a good wind, which aided us greatly; so that, but for Thornton's illness, we should all have been in fine spirits. He seemed to grow much worse, and I scarcely knew how to act. Every thing was done for his comfort which could be done; Jules, the Canadian, made him some tea, from prairie herbs, which had the effect of inducing perspiration, and allayed the fever very sensibly. We stopped at night on the main land to the north, and three hunters went out into the prairie by moonlight, returning at one in the morning, without their rifles, and with a fat antelope.\n\nThey related that, having proceeded many miles across the country, they reached the banks of a beautiful rivulet, where they were much surprised and alarmed at discovering a large war-party of the Saonie Sioux, who immediately took them prisoners, and carried them a mile on the other side of the stream to a kind of park, or enclosure, walled with mud and sticks, in which was a large herd of antelopes. These animals were still coming into the park, the gates of which were so contrived as to prevent escape. This was an annual practice of the Indians. In the autumn, the antelopes retire for food and shelter from the prairie to the mountainous regions on the south of the river. In the spring they re-cross it in great numbers, and are then easily taken by being enticed into a strong enclosure as above described.\n\nThe hunters, (John Greely, the Prophet, and a Canadian) had scarcely any hope of escape from the clutches of the Indians, (who numbered as many as fifty,) and had well nigh made up their minds to die. Greely and the Prophet were disarmed and tied hand and foot; the Canadian, however, was suffered, for some reason not perfectly understood, to remain unbound, and was only deprived of his rifle, the savages leaving him in possession of his hunter's knife, (which, possibly, they did not perceive, as it was worn in a sort of sheath in the side of his legging) and treating him otherwise with a marked difference from their demeanor to the others. This circumstance proved the source of the party's deliverance.\n\nIt was, perhaps, nine o 'clock at night when they were first taken. The moon was bright, but, as the air was unusually cool for the season, the savages had kindled two large fires at a sufficient distance from the park not to frighten the antelopes, who were still pouring into it continually. At these fires they were occupied in cooking their game when the hunters so unexpectedly came upon them from round a clump of trees. Greely and the Prophet, after being disarmed and bound with strong thongs of buffalo hide, were thrown down under a tree at some distance from the blaze; while the Canadian was permitted to seat himself, in charge of two savages, by one of the fires, the rest of the Indians forming a circle round the other and larger one. In this arrangement, the time wore away slowly, and the hunters were in momentary expectation of death; the cords of the two who were bound caused them, also, infinite pain, from the tightness with which they were fastened. The Canadian had endeavored to hold a conversation with his guards, in the hope of bribing them to release him, but could not make himself understood. About midnight, the congregation around the large fire were suddenly disturbed by the dash of several large antelopes in succession through the midst of the blaze. These animals had burst through a portion of the mud wall which confined them, and, mad with rage and affright, had made for the light of the fire, as is the habit of insects at night in like circumstances. It seems, however, that the Saonies had never heard of any similar feat of these usually timid creatures, for they were in great terror at the unexpected interruption, and their alarm increased to perfect dismay, as the whole captured herd came rushing and bounding upon them, after the lapse of a minute or so from the outbreak of the first few. The hunters described the scene as one of the most singular nature. The beasts were apparently frantic, and the velocity and impetuosity with which they flew, rather than leaped, through the flames, and through the midst of the terrified savages, was said by Greely (a man not in the least prone to exaggerate) to have been not only an imposing but even a terrible spectacle. They carried every thing before them in their first plunges; but, having cleared the large fire, they immediately dashed at the small one, scattering the brands and blazing wood about; then returned, as if bewildered, to the large one, and so backwards and forwards until the decline of the fires, when, in small parties, they scampered off like lightning to the woods.\n\nMany of the Indians were knocked down in this furious m\u00eal\u00e9e, and there is no doubt that some of them were seriously, if not mortally, wounded by the sharp hoofs of the agile antelopes. Some threw themselves flat on the ground, and so avoided injury. The Prophet and Greely, not being near the fires, were in no danger. The Canadian was prostrated at the first onset by a kick which rendered him senseless for some minutes. When he came to himself he was nearly in darkness; for the moon had gone behind a heavy thunder-cloud, and the fires were almost out, or only existed in brands scattered hither and thither. He saw no Indians near him, and instantly arousing himself to escape, made, as well as he could, for the tree where his two comrades were lying. Their thongs were soon cut, and the three set off at full speed in the direction of the river, without stopping to think of their rifles, or of any thing beyond present security. Having run for some miles, and finding no one in pursuit, they slackened their pace, and made their way to a spring for a draught of water. Here it was they met with the antelope which, as I mentioned before, they brought with them to the boats. The poor creature lay panting, and unable to move, by the border of the spring. One of its legs was broken, and it bore evident traces of fire. It was no doubt one of the herd which had been the means of deliverance. Had there been even a chance of its recovery the hunters would have spared it in token of their gratitude, but it was miserably injured, so they put it at once out of its misery, and brought it home to the boats, where we made an excellent breakfast upon it next morning.\n\nApril 12, 13, 14, and 15. During these four days we kept on our course without any adventure of note. The weather was very pleasant during the middle of the day, but the nights and mornings were exceedingly cold, and we had sharp frosts. Game was abundant. Thornton still continued ill, and his sickness perplexed and grieved me beyond measure. I missed his society very much, and now found that he was almost the only member of our party in whom I could strictly confide. By this I merely mean that he was almost the only one to whom I could, or would, freely unburthen my heart, with all its wild hopes, and fantastic wishes \u2014 not that any individual among us was unworthy of implicit faith. On the contrary, we were all like brothers, and a dispute, of any importance, never occurred. One interest seemed to bind all; or rather we appeared to be a band of voyagers without interest in view \u2014 mere travellers for pleasure. What ideas the Canadians might have held upon this subject I cannot, indeed, exactly say. These fellows talked a great deal, to be sure, about the profits of the enterprise, and especially about their expected share of it; yet I can scarcely think they cared much for these points, for they were the most simple-minded, and certainly the most obliging set of beings upon the face of the earth. As for the rest of the crew, I have no doubt in the world that the pecuniary benefit to be afforded by the expedition was the last thing upon which they speculated. Some singular evidences of the feeling which more or less pervaded us all occurred during the prosecution of the voyage. Interests, which, in the settlements, would have been looked upon as of the highest importance, were here treated as matters unworthy of a serious word, and neglected, or totally discarded upon the most frivolous pretext. Men who had travelled thousands of miles through a howling wilderness, beset by horrible dangers, and enduring the most heart-rending privations for the ostensible purpose of collecting peltries, would seldom take the trouble to secure them when obtained, and would leave behind them without a sigh an entire cache of fine beaver skin rather than forego the pleasure of pushing up some romantic-looking river, or penetrating into some craggy and dangerous cavern, for minerals whose use they knew nothing about, and which they threw aside as lumber at the first decent opportunity.\n\nIn all this my own heart was very much with the rest of the party; and I am free to say that, as we proceeded on our journey, I found myself less and less interested in the main business of the expedition, and more and more willing to turn aside in pursuit of idle amusement \u2014 if indeed I am right in calling by so feeble a name as amusement that deep and most intense excitement with which I surveyed the wonders and majestic beauties of the wilderness. No sooner had I examined one region than I was possessed with an irresistible desire to push forward and explore another. As yet, however, I felt as if in too close proximity to the settlements for the full enjoyment of my burning love of Nature, and of the unknown. I could not help being aware that some civilized footsteps, although few, had preceded me in my journey \u2014 that some eyes before mine own had been enraptured with the scenes around me. But for this sentiment, ever obtruding itself, I should no doubt have loitered more frequently on the way, turning aside to survey the features of the region bordering upon the river, and perhaps penetrating deeply, at times, into the heart of the country to the north and south of our route. But I was anxious to go on \u2014 to get, if possible, beyond the extreme bounds of civilization \u2014 to gaze, if I could, upon those gigantic mountains of which the existence had been made known to us only by the vague accounts of the Indians. These ulterior hopes and views I communicated fully to no one of our party save Thornton. He participated in all my most visionary projects, and entered completely into the spirit of romantic enterprise which pervaded my soul. I therefore felt his illness as a bitter evil. He grew worse daily, while it was out of our power to render him any effectual assistance.\n\nApril 16. To-day we had a cold rain with a high wind from the north, obliging us to come to anchor until late in the afternoon. At four o 'clock, P. M., we proceeded, and made five miles by night. Thornton was much worse.\n\nApril 17, and 18. During both these days we had a continuance of raw unpleasant weather, with the same cold wind from the north. We observed many large masses of ice in the river, which was much swollen and very muddy. The time passed unpleasantly, and we made no way. Thornton appeared to be dying, and I now resolved to encamp at the first convenient spot, and remain until his illness should terminate. We accordingly, at noon this day, drew the boats up a large creek coming in from the south, and formed an encampment on the main land.\n\nApril 25. We remained at the creek until this morning, when, to the great joy of us all, Thornton was sufficiently recovered to go on. The weather was fine, and we proceeded gaily through a most lovely portion of the country, without encountering a single Indian, or meeting with any adventure out of the usual course until the last of the month, when we reached the country of the Mandans, or rather of the Mandans, the Minnetarees, and the Ahnahaways; for these three tribes all live in the near vicinity of each other, occupying five villages. Not a great many years ago the Mandans were settled in nine villages, about eighty miles below, the ruins of which we passed without knowing what they were \u2014 seven on the west and two on the east of the river; but they were thinned off by the small-pox and their old enemies the Sioux, until reduced to a mere handful, when they ascended to their present position. [Mr. R. gives here a tolerably full account of the Minnetarees and Ahnahaways or Wassatoons; but we omit it, as differing in no important particular from the ordinary statements respecting these nations.] The Mandans received us with perfect friendliness, and we remained in their neighborhood three days, during which we overhauled and repaired the piroque, and otherwise refitted. We also obtained a good supply of a hard corn, of a mixed color, which the savages had preserved through the winter in holes, near the front of their lodges. While with the Mandans we were visited by a Minnetaree chief, called Waukerassah, who behaved with much civility, and was of service to us in many respects. The son of this chief we engaged to accompany us as interpreter as far as the great fork. We made the father several presents, with which he was greatly pleased. On the first of May we bade adieu to the Mandans, and went on our way.\n\nMay 1. The weather was mild, and the surrounding country began to assume a lovely appearance with the opening vegetation, which was now much advanced. The cotton-wood leaves were quite as large as a crown, and many flowers were full blown. The low grounds began to spread out here more than usual, and were well supplied with timber. The cotton-wood and common willow, as well as red willow, abounded; with rose-bushes in great plenty. Beyond the low grounds on the river, the country extended in one immense plain without wood of any kind. The soil was remarkably rich. The game was more abundant than we had ever yet seen it. We kept a hunter ahead of us on each bank, and to-day they brought in an elk, a goat, five beavers, and a great number of plovers. The beavers were very tame and easily taken. This animal is quite abonne bouche as an article of food; especially the tail, which is of a somewhat glutinous nature, like the fins of the halibut. A beaver tail will suffice for a plentiful dinner for three men. We made twenty miles before night.\n\nMay 2. We had a fine wind this morning, and used our sails until noon, when it became rather too much for us, and we stopped for the day. Our hunters went out and shortly returned with an immense elk, whom Neptune had pulled down after a long chase, the animal having been only slightly wounded by a buck shot. He measured six feet in height. An antelope was also caught about dusk. As soon as the creature saw our men, it flew off with the greatest velocity, but after a few minutes stopped, and returned on its steps, apparently through curiosity \u2014 then bounded away again. This conduct was repeated frequently, each time the game coming nearer and nearer, until at length it ventured within rifle distance, when a shot from the Prophet brought it down. It was lean and with young. These animals, although of incredible swiftness of foot, are still bad swimmers, and thus frequently fall a victim to the wolves, in their attempts to cross a stream. Today made twelve miles.\n\nMay 3. This morning we made great headway, and by night had accomplished full thirty miles. The game continued to be abundant. Buffaloes, in vast numbers, lay dead along the shore, and we saw many wolves devouring the carcases. They fled always at our approach. We were much at a loss to account for the death of the buffaloes, but some weeks afterwards the mystery was cleared up. Arriving at a pass of the river where the bluffs were steep and the water deep at their base, we observed a large herd of the huge beasts swimming across, and stopped to watch their motions. They came in a sidelong manner down the current, and had apparently entered the water from a gorge, about half a mile above, where the bank sloped into the stream. Upon reaching the land on the west side of the river they found it impossible to ascend the cliffs, and the water was beyond their depth. After struggling for some time, and endeavoring in vain to get a foot-hold in the steep and slippery clay, they turned and swam to the eastern shore, where the same kind of inaccessible precipices presented themselves, and where the ineffectual struggle to ascend was repeated. They now turned a second time, a third, a fourth, and a fifth \u2014 always making the shore at very nearly the same places. Instead of suffering themselves to go down with the current in search of a more favorable landing, (which might have been found a quarter of a mile below), they seemed bent upon maintaining their position, and, for this purpose, swam with their breasts at an acute angle to the stream and used violent exertions to prevent being borne down. At the fifth time of crossing, the poor beasts were so entirely exhausted that it was evident they could do no more. They now struggled fearfully to scramble up the bank, and one or two of them had nearly succeeded, when, to our great distress (for we could not witness their noble efforts without commisseration) the whole mass of loose earth above caved in, and buried several of them in its fall, without leaving the cliff in better condition for ascent. Upon this the rest of the herd commenced a lamentable kind of lowing or moaning \u2014 a sound conveying more of a dismal sorrow and despair than any thing which it is possible to imagine \u2014 I shall never get it out of my head. Some of the beasts made another attempt to swim the river, struggled a few minutes, and sank \u2014 the waves above them being dyed with the red blood that gushed from their nostrils in the death agony. But the greater part, after the moaning described, seemed to yield supinely to their fate, rolled over on their backs, and disappeared. The whole herd were drowned \u2014 not a buffalo escaped. Their carcases were thrown up in half an hour afterwards upon the flat grounds a short distance below, where, but for their ignorant obstinacy, they might so easily have landed in safety.\n\nMay 4. The weather was delightful, and, with a fair warm wind from the south, we made twenty-five miles before night. To-day Thornton was sufficiently recovered to assist in the duties of the boat. In the afternoon he went out with me into the prairie on the west, where we saw a great number of early spring flowers of a kind never seen in the settlements. Many of them were of a rare beauty and delicious perfume. We saw also game in great variety, but shot none, as we were sure the hunters would bring in more than was wanted for use, and I was averse to the wanton destruction of life. On our way home we came upon two Indians of the Assiniboin nation, who accompanied us to the boats. They had evinced nothing like distrust on the way, but, on the contrary, had been frank and bold in demeanor; we were therefore much surprised to see them, upon coming within a stone's throw of the piroque, turn, both of them, suddenly round, and make off into the prairie at full speed. Upon getting a good distance from us, they stopped and ascended a knoll which commanded a view of the river. Here they lay on their bellies, and, resting their chins on their hands, seemed to regard us with the deepest astonishment. By the aid of a spy-glass I could minutely observe their countenances, which bore evidence of both amazement and terror. They continued watching us for a long time. At length, as if struck with a sudden thought, they arose hurriedly and commenced a rapid flight in the direction from which we had seen them issue at first.\n\nMay 5. As we were getting under way very early this morning, a large party of Assiniboins suddenly rushed upon the boats, and succeeded in taking possession of the piroque before we could make any effectual resistance. No one was in it at the time except Jules, who escaped by throwing himself into the river, and swimming to the large boat, which we had pushed out into the stream. These Indians had been brought upon us by the two who had visited us the day before, and the party must have approached us in the most stealthy manner imaginable, as we had our sentries regularly posted, and even Neptune failed to give any token of their vicinity.\n\nWe were preparing to fire upon the enemy when Misquash (the new interpreter \u2014 son of Waukerassah) gave us to understand that the Assiniboins were friends and were now making signals of amity. Although we could not help thinking that the highway robbery of our boat was but an indifferent way of evincing friendship, still we were willing to see what these people had to say, and desired Misquash to ask them why they had behaved as they did. They replied with many protestations of regard; and we at length found that they really had no intention of molesting us any farther than to satisfy an ardent curiosity which consumed them, and which they now intreated us to appease. It appeared that the two Indians of the day before, whose singular conduct had so surprised us, had been struck with sudden amazement at the sooty appearance of our negro, Toby. They had never before seen or heard of a blackamoor, and it must therefore be confessed that their astonishment was not altogether causeless. Toby, moreover, was as ugly an old gentleman as ever spoke \u2014 having all the peculiar features of his race; the swollen lips, large white protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and bow legs. Upon relating their adventure to their companions, the two savages could obtain no credit for the wonderful story, and were about losing caste for ever, as liars and double-dealers, when they proposed to conduct the whole band to the boats by way of vindicating their veracity. The sudden attack seemed to have been the mere result of impatience on the part of the still incredulous Assiniboins; for they never afterwards evinced the slightest hostility, and yielded up the piroque as soon as we made them understand that we would let them have a good look at old Toby. The latter personage took the matter as a very good joke, and went ashore at once,in naturalibus, that the inquisitive savages might observe the whole extent of the question. Their astonishment and satisfaction were profound and complete. At first they doubted the evidence of their own eyes, spitting upon their fingers and rubbing the skin of the negro to be sure that it was not painted. The wool on the head elicited repeated shouts of applause, and the bandy legs were the subject of unqualified admiration. A jig dance on the part of our ugly friend brought matters to a climax. Wonder was now at its height. Approbation could go no farther. Had Toby but possessed a single spark of ambition he might then have made his fortune for ever by ascending the throne of the Assiniboins, and reigning as King Toby the First.\n\nThis incident detained us until late in the day. After interchanging some civilities and presents with the savages, we accepted the aid of six of the band in rowing us about five miles on our route \u2014 a very acceptable assistance, and one for which we did not fail to thank Toby. We made, to-day, only twelve miles, and encamped at night on a beautiful island which we long remembered for the delicious fish and fowl which its vicinity afforded us. We staid at this pleasant spot two days, during which we feasted and made merry, with very little care for the morrow, and with very little regard to the numerous beaver which disported around us. We might have taken at this island one or two hundred skins without difficulty. As it was, we collected about twenty. The island is at the mouth of a tolerably large river coming in from the south, and at a point where the Missouri strikes off in a due westerly direction. The latitude is about 48.\n\nMay 8. We proceeded with fair winds and fine weather, and after making twenty or twenty-five miles, reached a large river coming in from the north. Where it debouches, however, it is very narrow \u2014 not more than a dozen yards wide, and appears to be quite choked up with mud. Upon ascending it a short distance, a fine bold stream is seen, seventy or eighty yards wide, and very deep, passing through a beautiful valley, abounding in game. Our new guide told us the name of this river, but I have no memorandum of it. Robert Greely shot here some geese which build their nests upon trees.\n\nMay 9. In many places a little distant from the river banks, to-day, we observed the ground encrusted with a white substance which proved to be a strong salt. We made only fifteen miles, owing to several petty hindrances, and encamped at night on the main land, among some clumps of cotton-wood and rabbit-berry bushes.\n\nMay 10. To-day the weather was cold, and the wind strong, but fair. We made great headway. The hills in this vicinity are rough and jagged, showing irregular broken masses of rock, some of which tower to a great height, and appear to have been subject to the action of water. We picked up several pieces of petrified wood and bone; and coal was scattered about in every direction. The river gets very crooked.\n\nMay 11. Detained the greater part of the day by squalls and rain. Towards evening it cleared up beautifully with a fair wind, of which we took advantage, making ten miles before encamping. Several fat beavers were caught, and a wolf was shot upon the bank. He seemed to have strayed from a large herd which were prowling about us.\n\nMay 12. Landed to-day at noon, after making ten miles, upon a small steep island, for the purpose of overhauling some of our things. As we were about taking our departure, one of the Canadians, who led the van of the party and was several yards in advance, suddenly disappeared from our view with a loud scream. We all ran forward immediately and laughed heartily upon finding that our man had only tumbled into an empty cache, from which we soon extricated him. Had he been alone, however, there is much room for question if he would have got out at all. We examined the hole carefully but found nothing in it beyond a few empty bottles; we did not even see any thing serving to show whether French, British, or Americans had concealed their goods here; and we felt some curiosity upon this point.\n\nMay 13. Arrived at the junction of the Yellowstone with the Missouri, after making twenty-five miles during the day. Misquash here left us, and returned home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "The character of the country through which we had passed for the last two or three days was cheerless in comparison with that to which we had been accustomed. In general it was more level; the timber being more abundant on the skirts of the stream, with little or none at all in the distance. Wherever bluffs appeared upon the margin we descried indications of coal, and we saw one extensive bed of a thick bituminous nature which very much discolored the water for some hundred yards below it. The current is more gentle than hitherto, the water clearer, and the rocky points and shoals fewer, although such as we had to pass were as difficult as ever. We had rain incessantly, which rendered the banks so slippery that the men who had the towing lines could scarcely walk. The air too was disagreeably chilly, and upon ascending some low hills near the river we observed no small quantity of snow lying in the clefts and ridges. In the extreme distance on our right we had perceived several Indian encampments which had the appearance of being temporary, and had been only lately abandoned. This region gives no indication of any permanent settlement, but appears to be a favorite hunting ground with the tribes in the vicinity \u2014 a fact rendered evident by the frequent traces of the hunt, which we came across in every direction. The Minnetarees of the Missouri, it is well known, extend their excursions in pursuit of game as high as the great fork, on the south side; while the Assiniboins go up still higher. Misquash informed us that between our present encampment and the Rocky Mountains we should meet with no lodges except those of the Minnetarees that reside on the lower or south side of the Saskatchawine.\n\nThe game had been exceedingly abundant, and in great variety \u2014 elk, buffalo, big-horn, mule-deer, bears, foxes, beaver, etc., etc., with wild fowl innumerable. Fish was also plentiful. The width of the stream varied considerably from two hundred and fifty yards to passes where the current rushed between bluffs not more than a hundred feet apart. The face of these bluffs generally was composed of a light yellowish freestone, intermingled with burnt earth, pumice-stone, and mineral salts. At one point the aspect of the country underwent a remarkable change, the hills retiring on both sides to a great distance from the river, which was thickly interspersed with small and beautiful islands, covered with cotton-wood. The low grounds appeared to be very fertile; those on the north wide and low, and opening into three extensive valleys. Here seemed to be the extreme northern termination of the range of mountains through which the Missouri had been passing for so long a time, and which are called the Black Hills by the savages. The change from the mountainous region to the level was indicated by the atmosphere, which now became dry and pure; so much so indeed that we perceived its effects upon the seams of our boats, and our few mathematical instruments.\n\nAs we made immediate approach to the forks it came on to rain very hard, and the obstructions in the river were harassing in the extreme. The banks in some places were so slippery, and the clay so soft and stiff that the men were obliged to go barefooted, as they could not keep on their moccasins. The shores also were full of pools of stagnant water, through which we were obliged to wade, sometimes up to our arm-pits. Then again we had to scramble over enormous shoals of sharp-pointed flints, which appeared to be the wreck of cliffs that had fallen down en masse. Occasionally we came to a precipitous gorge or gully, which it would put us to the greatest labor to pass, and in attempting to push by one of these the rope of the large boat (being old and much worn) gave way and permitted her to be swung round by the current upon a ledge of rock in the middle of the stream, where the water was so deep that we could only work in getting her off by the aid of the piroque, and so were full six hours in effecting it.\n\nAt one period we arrived at a high wall of black rock on the south, towering above the ordinary cliffs for about a quarter of a mile along the stream; after which there was an open plain, and about three miles beyond this again, another wall of a light color on the same side, fully two hundred feet high; then another plain or valley, and then still another wall of the most singular appearance arises on the north, soaring in height probably two hundred and fifty feet, and being in thickness about twelve, with a very regular artificial character. These cliffs present indeed the most extraordinary aspect, rising perpendicularly from the water. The last mentioned are composed of very white soft sandstone, which readily receives the impression of the water. In the upper portion of them appears a sort of frieze or cornice formed by the intervention of several thin horizontal strata of a white freestone, hard, and unaffected by the rains. Above them is a dark rich soil, sloping gradually back from the water to the extent of a mile or thereabouts, when other hills spring up abruptly to the height of full five hundred feet more.\n\nThe face of these remarkable cliffs, as might be supposed, is chequered with a variety of lines formed by the trickling of the rains upon the soft material, so that a fertile fancy might easily imagine them to be gigantic monuments reared by human art, and carved over with hieroglyphical devices. Sometimes there are complete niches (like those we see for statues in common temples) formed by the dropping out bodily of large fragments of the sandstone; and there are several points where staircases and long corridors appear, as accidental fractures in the freestone cornice happen to let the rain trickle down uniformly upon the softer material below. We passed these singular bluffs in a bright moonlight and their effect upon my imagination I shall never forget. They had all the air of enchanted structures, (such as I have dreamed of,) and the twittering of myriads of martins, which have built their nests in the holes that every where perforate the mass, aided this conception not a little. Besides the main walls there are, at intervals, inferior ones, of from twenty to a hundred feet high, and from one to twelve or fifteen feet thick, perfectly regular in shape, and perpendicular. These are formed of a succession of large black-looking stones, apparently made up of loam, sand, and quartz, and absolutely symmetrical in figure, although of various sizes. They are usually square, but sometimes oblong (always parrallelepipedal) and are lying one above the other as exactly and with as perfect regularity as if placed there by some mortal mason; each upper stone covering and securing the point of junction between two lower ones, just as bricks are laid in a wall. Sometimes these singular erections run in parallel lines, as many as four abreast; sometimes they leave the river and go back until lost amid the hills; sometimes they cross each other at right angles, seeming to enclose large artificial gardens, the vegetation within which is often of a character to preserve the illusion. Where the walls are thinnest, there the bricks are less in size, and the converse. We regarded the scenery presented to our view at this portion of the Missouri as altogether the most surprising, if not the most beautiful which we had yet seen. It left upon my own mind an impression of novelty \u2014 of singularity, which can never be effaced.\n\nShortly before reaching the fork we came to a pretty large island on the northern side, one mile and a quarter from which is a low ground on the south very thickly covered with fine timber. After this there were several small islands, at each of which we touched for a few minutes as we passed. Then we came to a very black-looking bluff on the north, and then to two other small islands, about which we observed nothing remarkable. Going a few miles farther we reached a tolerably large island situated near the point of a steep promontory; afterwards passing two others, smaller. All these islands are well timbered. It was at night on the 13th of May, that we were shown by Misquash the mouth of the large river, which in the settlements goes by the name of the Yellow Stone, but by the Indians is called the Ahmateaza. We made our camp on the south shore in a beautiful plain covered with cotton-wood.\n\nMay 14. This morning we were all awake and stirring at an early hour, as the point we had now reached was one of great importance, and it was requisite that, before proceeding any farther, we should make some survey by way of ascertaining which of the two large streams in view would afford us the best passage onward. It seemed to be the general wish of the party to push up one of these rivers as far as practicable, with a view of reaching the Rocky Mountains, when we might perhaps hit upon the head waters of the large stream Aregan, described by all the Indians with whom we had conversed upon the subject, as running into the great Pacific Ocean. I was also anxious to attain this object, which opened to my fancy a world of exciting adventure, but I foresaw many difficulties which we must necessarily encounter if we made the attempt with our present limited information in respect to the region we should have to traverse, and the savages who occupied it; about which latter we only knew indeed that they were generally the most ferocious of the North American Indians. I was afraid, too, that we might get into the wrong stream, and involve ourselves in an endless labyrinth of troubles which would dishearten the men. These thoughts, however, did not give me any long uneasiness, and I set to work at once to explore the neighborhood; sending some of the party up the banks of each stream to estimate the comparative volume of water in each, while I myself, with Thornton and John Greely, proceeded to ascend the high grounds in the fork, whence an extensive prospect of the surrounding region might be attained. We saw here an immense and magnificent country spreading out on every side into a vast plain, waving with glorious verdure, and alive with countless herds of buffaloes and wolves, intermingled with occasional elk and antelope. To the south the prospect was interrupted by a range of high, snow-capped mountains, stretching from south east to north west, and terminating abruptly. Behind these again was a higher range, extending to the very horizon in the north west. The two rivers presented the most enchanting appearance as they wound away their long snake-like lengths in the distance, growing thinner and thinner until they looked like mere faint threads of silver as they vanished in the shadowy mists of the sky. We could glean nothing, from their direction so far, as regards their ultimate course, and so descended from our position much at a loss what to do.\n\nThe examination of the two currents gave us but little more satisfaction. The north stream was found to be the deeper, but the south was the wider, and the volume of water differed but little. The first had all the color of the Missouri, but the latter had the peculiar round gravelly bed which distinguishes a river that issues from a mountainous region. We were finally determined by the easier navigation of the north branch to pursue this course, although from the rapidly increasing shallowness we found that in a few days, at farthest, we should have to dispense with the large boat. We spent three days at our encampment, during which we collected a great many fine skins, and deposited them with our whole stock on hand, in a well constructed cache on a small island in the river a mile below the junction. We also brought in a great quantity of game, and especially of deer, some haunches of which we pickled or corned for future use. We found great abundance of the prickly pear in this vicinity, as well as chokeberries in great plenty upon the low grounds and ravines. There were also many yellow and red currants (not ripe) with gooseberries. Wild roses were just beginning to open their buds in the most wonderful profusion. We left our encampment in fine spirits on the morning of May 18. The day was pleasant, and we proceeded merrily, notwithstanding the constant interruptions occasioned by the shoals and jutting points with which the stream abounds. The men, one and all, were enthusiastic in their determination to persevere, and the Rocky Mountains were the sole theme of conversation. In leaving our peltries behind us, we had considerably lightened the boats, and we found much less difficulty in getting them forward through the rapid currents than would otherwise have been the case. The river was crowded with islands, at nearly all of which we touched. At night we reached a deserted Indian encampment, near bluffs of a blackish clay. Rattlesnakes disturbed us very much, and before morning we had a heavy rain.\n\nMay 19. We had not proceeded far before we found the character of the stream materially altered, and very much obstructed by sand bars, or rather ridges of small stones, so that it was with the greatest difficulty we could force a passage for the larger boat. Sending two men ahead to reconnoitre, they returned with an account of a wider and deeper channel above, and once again we felt encouraged to persevere. We pushed on for ten miles and encamped on a small island for the night. We observed a peculiar mountain in the distance to the south, of a conical form, isolated, and entirely covered with snow.\n\nMay 20. We now entered into a better channel, and pursued our course with little interruption for sixteen miles, through a clayey country of peculiar character, and nearly destitute of vegetation. At night we encamped on a very large island, covered with tall trees, many of which were new to us. We remained at this spot for five days to make some repairs in the piroque.\n\nDuring our sojourn here an incident of note occurred. The banks of the Missouri in this neighborhood are precipitous, and formed of a peculiar blue clay, which becomes excessively slippery after rain. The cliffs, from the bed of the stream back to the distance of a hundred yards, or thereabouts, form a succession of steep terraces of this clay, intersected in numerous directions by deep and narrow ravines, so sharply worn by the action of water at some remote period of time as to have the appearance of artificial channels. The mouths of these ravines, where they debouche upon the river, have a very remarkable appearance, and look from the opposite bank, by moonlight, like gigantic columns standing erect upon the shore. To an observer from the uppermost terrace the whole descent towards the stream has an indescribably chaotic and dreary air. No vegetation of any kind is seen.\n\nJohn Greely, the Prophet, the interpreter Jules, and myself started out after breakfast one morning to ascend to the topmost terrace on the south shore for the purpose of looking around us; in short to see what could be seen. With great labor, and by using scrupulous caution, we succeeded in reaching the level grounds at the summit opposite our encampment. The prairie here differs from the general character of that kind of land in being thickly overgrown for many miles back with cotton-wood, rose-bushes, red willow, and broad-leaved willow; the soil being unsteady, and at times swampy, like that of the ordinary low grounds \u2014 it consists of a black-looking loam, one-third sand, and when a handful of it is thrown into water, it dissolves in the manner of sugar, with strong bubbles. In several spots we observed deep incrustations of common salt, some of which we collected and used.\n\nUpon reaching these level grounds we all sat down to rest, and had scarcely done so when we were alarmed by a loud growl immediately in our rear, proceeding from the thick underwood. We started to our feet at once in great terror, for we had left our rifles at the island, that we might be unincumbered in the scramble up the cliffs, and the only arms we had were pistols and knives. We had scarcely time to say a word to each other before two enormous brown bears (the first we had yet encountered during the voyage) came rushing at us open-mouthed from a clump of rose-bushes. These animals are much dreaded by the Indians, and with reason, for they are indeed formidable creatures, possessing prodigious strength, with untameable ferocity, and the most wonderful tenacity of life. There is scarcely any way of killing them by a bullet, unless the shot be through the brains, and these are defended by two large muscles covering the side of the forehead, as well as by a projection of a thick frontal bone. They have been known to live for days with half a dozen balls through the lungs, and even with very severe injuries in the heart. So far we had never met with a brown bear, although often with its tracks in the mud or sand, and these we had seen nearly a foot in length, exclusive of the claws, and full eight inches in width.\n\nWhat to do was now the question. To stand and fight, with such weapons as we possessed, was madness; and it was folly to think of escape by flight in the direction of the prairie; for not only were the bears running towards us from that quarter, but, at a very short distance back from the cliffs, the underwood of briar-bushes, dwarf willow, etc., was so thick that we could not have made our way through it at all, and if we kept our course along the river between the underwood and the top of the cliff, the animals would catch us in an instant; for as the ground was boggy we could make no progress upon it, while the large flat foot of the bear would enable him to travel with ease. It seemed as if these reflections (which it takes some time to embody in words) flashed all of them through the minds of all of us in an instant \u2014 for every man sprang at once to the cliffs, without sufficiently thinking of the hazard that lay there.\n\nThe first descent was some thirty or forty feet, and not very precipitous; the clay here also partook in a slight degree of the loam of the upper soil; so that we scrambled down with no great difficulty to the first terrace, the bears plunging after us with headlong fury. Arrived here, we had not a moment for hesitation. There was nothing left for us now but to encounter the enraged beasts upon the narrow platform where we stood, or to go over the second precipice. This was nearly perpendicular, sixty or seventy feet deep, and composed entirely of the blue clay which was now saturated with late rains, and as slippery as glass itself. The Canadian, frightened out of his senses, leaped to the edge at once, slid with the greatest velocity down the cliff, and was hurled over the third descent by the impetus of his course. We then lost sight of him, and of course supposed him killed; for we could have no doubt that his terrific slide would be continued from precipice to precipice until it terminated with a plunge over the last into the river \u2014 a fall of more than a hundred and fifty feet.\n\nHad Jules not gone in this way it is more than probable that we should all have decided, in our extremity, upon attempting the descent; but his fate caused us to waver, and in the meantime the monsters were upon us. This was the first time in all my life I had ever been brought to close quarters with a wild animal of any strength or ferocity, and I have no scruple to acknowledge that my nerves were completely unstrung. For some moments I felt as if about to swoon, but a loud scream from Greely, who had been seized by the foremost bear, had the effect of arousing me to exertion, and when once fairly aroused I experienced a kind of wild and savage pleasure from the conflict.\n\nOne of the beasts, upon reaching the narrow ledge where we stood, had made an immediate rush at Greely, and had borne him to the earth, where he stood over him, holding him with his huge teeth lodged in the breast of his overcoat \u2014 which, by the greatest good fortune, he had worn, the wind being chilly. The other, rolling rather than scrambling down the cliff, was under so much headway when he reached our station that he could not stop himself until the one-half of his body hung over the precipice; he staggered in a sidelong manner, and his right legs went over while he held on in an awkward way with his two left. While thus situated he seized Wormley by the heel with his mouth, and for an instant I feared the worst, for in his efforts to free himself from the grasp the terrified struggler aided the bear to regain his footing. While I stood helpless, as above described, through terror, and watching the event without ability to render the slightest aid, the shoe and moccasin of W. were torn off in the grasp of the animal, who now tumbled headlong down to the next terrace, but stopped himself, by means of his huge claws, from sliding farther. It was now that Greely screamed for aid, and the Prophet and myself rushed to his assistance. We both fired our pistols at the bear's head; and my own ball, I am sure, must have gone through some portion of his skull, for I held the weapon close to his ear. He seemed more angry, however, than hurt; the only good effect of the discharge was in his quitting his hold of Greely (who had sustained no injury) and making at us. We had nothing but our knives to depend upon, and even the refuge of the terrace below was cut off from us by the presence of another bear there. We had our backs to the cliff, and were preparing for a deadly contest, not dreaming of help from Greely (whom we supposed mortally injured) when we heard a shot, and the huge beast fell at our feet, just when we felt his hot and horribly fetid breath in our faces. Our deliverer, who had fought many a bear in his life-time, had put his pistol deliberately to the eye of the monster, and the contents had entered the brain.\n\nLooking now downwards, we discovered the fallen bruin making ineffectual efforts to scramble up to us \u2014 the soft clay yielded to his claws, and he fell repeatedly and heavily. We tried him with several shots, but did no harm, and resolved to leave him where he was for the crows. I do not see how he could ever have made his escape from the spot. We crawled along the ledge on which we stood for nearly half a mile before we found a practicable path to the prairie above us, and did not get to camp until late in the night. Jules was there all alive, but cruelly bruised \u2014 so much so indeed that he had been unable to give any intelligible account of his accident or of our whereabouts. He had lodged in one of the ravines upon the third terrace, and had made his way down its bed to the river shore.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Man of the Crowd by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul.' \u2014La Bruy\u00e8re\n\nIt was well said of a certain German book that \"er lasst sich nicht lesen\" \u2014 it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors, and looking them piteously in the eyes \u2014 die with despair of heart and convulsion of throat, on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged.\n\nNot long ago, about the closing in of an evening in autumn, I sat at the large bow-window of the D\u2014 Coffee-House in London. For some months I had been ill in health, but was now convalescent, and, with returning strength, found myself in one of those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui-moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs \u2014 achlus os prin epeen \u2014 and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its everyday condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper in my lap, I had been amusing myself for the greater part of the afternoon, now in poring over advertisements, now in observing the promiscuous company in the room, and now in peering through the smoky panes into the street.\n\nThis latter is one of the principal thoroughfares of the city, and had been very much crowded during the whole day. But, as the darkness came on, the throng momently increased; and, by the time the lamps were well lighted, two dense and continuous tides of population were rushing past the door. At this particular period of the evening I had never before been in a similar situation, and the tumultuous sea of human heads filled me, therefore, with a delicious novelty of emotion. I gave up, at length, all care of things within the hotel, and became absorbed in contemplation of the scene without.\n\nAt first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.\n\nBy far the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied, business-like demeanor, and seemed to be thinking only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. Others, still a numerous class, were restless in their movements, had flushed faces, and talked and gesticulated to themselves, as if feeling in solitude on account of the very denseness of the company around. When impeded in their progress, these people suddenly ceased muttering; but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon their lips, the course of the persons impeding them. If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed with confusion. There was nothing very distinctive about these two large classes beyond what I have noted. Their habiliments belonged to that order which is pointedly termed the decent. They were undoubtedly noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers \u2014 the Eupatrids and the common-places of society \u2014 men of leisure and men actively engaged in affairs of their own \u2014 conducting business upon their own responsibility. They did not greatly excite my attention.\n\nThe tribe of clerks was an obvious one; and here I discerned two remarkable divisions. There were the junior clerks of flash houses \u2014 young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips. Setting aside a certain dapperness of carriage, which may be termed deskism for want of a better word, the manner of these persons seemed to be an exact facsimile of what had been the perfection of bon ton about twelve or eighteen months before. They wore the castoff graces of the gentry; \u2014 and this, I believe, involves the best definition of the class.\n\nThe division of the upper clerks of staunch firms, or of the \"steady old fellows,\" it was not possible to mistake. These were known by their coats and pantaloons of black or brown, made to sit comfortably, with white cravats and waistcoats, broad solid-looking shoes, and thick hose or gaiters. They had all slightly bald heads, from which the right ears, long used to pen-holding, had an odd habit of standing off on end. I observed that they always removed or settled their hats with both bands, and wore watches, with short gold chains of a substantial and ancient pattern. Theirs was the affectation of respectability \u2014 if indeed there be an affectation so honorable.\n\nThere were many individuals of dashing appearance, whom I easily understood as belonging to the race of swell pick-pockets, with which all great cities are infested. I watched these gentry with much inquisitiveness, and found it difficult to imagine how they should ever be mistaken for gentlemen by gentlemen themselves. Their voluminousness of wristband, with an air of excessive frankness, should betray them at once.\n\nThe gamblers, of whom I descried not a few, were still more easily recognizable. They wore every variety of dress, from that of the desperate thimble-rig bully, with velvet waistcoat, fancy neckerchief, gilt chains, and filagreed buttons, to that of the scrupulously inornate clergyman, than which nothing could be less liable to suspicion. Still all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip. There were two other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect them: a guarded lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary extension of the thumb in a direction at right angles with the fingers. Very often, in company with these sharpers, I observed an order of men somewhat different in habits, but still birds of a kindred feather. They may be defined as the gentlemen who live by their wits. They seem to prey upon the public in two battalions \u2014 that of the dandies and that of the military men. Of the first grade the leading features are long locks and smiles; of the second, frogged coats and frowns.\n\nDescending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation. I saw Jew pedlars, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, and shrinking more tearfully than indignantly from the glances of ruffians, whose direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all kinds and of all ages \u2014 the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her womanhood, putting one in mind of the statue in Lucian, with the surface of Parian marble, and the interior filled with filth \u2014 the loathsome and utterly lost leper in rags \u2014 the wrinkled, bejewelled, and paint-begrimed beldame, making a last effort at youth \u2014 the mere child of immature form, yet, from long association, an adept in the dreadful coquetries of her trade, and burning with a rabid ambition to be ranked the equal of her elders in vice; drunkards innumerable and indescribable \u2014 some in shreds and patches, reeling, inarticulate, with bruised visage and lack-lustre eyes \u2014 some in whole although filthy garments, with a slightly unsteady swagger, thick sensual lips, and hearty-looking rubicund faces \u2014 others clothed in materials which had once been good, and which even now were scrupulously well brushed-men who walked with a more than naturally firm and springy step, but whose countenances were fearfully pale, and whose eyes were hideously wild and red; and who clutched with quivering fingers, as they strode through the crowd, at every object which came within their reach; beside these, pic-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey-exhibitors, and ballad-mongers, those who vended with those who sang; ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and all full of a noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.\n\nAs the night deepened, so deepened to me the interest of the scene; for not only did the general character of the crowd materially alter (its gentler features retiring in the gradual withdrawal of the more orderly portion of the people, and its harsher ones coming out into bolder relief, as the late hour brought forth every species of infamy from its den), but the rays of the gas-lamps, feeble at first in their struggle with the dying day, had now at length gained ascendancy, and threw over every thing a fitful and garish lustre. All was dark yet splendid \u2014 as that ebony to which has been likened the style of Tertullian.\n\nThe wild effects of the light enchained me to an examination of individual faces; and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years.\n\nWith my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age) \u2014 a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before. I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retszch, had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend. As I endeavored, during the brief minute of my original survey, to form some analysis of the meaning conveyed, there arose confusedly and paradoxically within my mind, the ideas of vast mental power, of caution, of penuriousness, of avarice, of coolness, of malice, of blood-thirstiness, of triumph, of merriment, of excessive terror, of intense \u2014 of supreme despair. I felt singularly aroused, startled, fascinated. \"How wild a history,\" I said to myself, \"is written within that bosom!\" Then came a craving desire to keep the man in view \u2014 to know more of him. Hurriedly putting on all overcoat, and seizing my hat and cane, I made my way into the street, and pushed through the crowd in the direction which I had seen him take; for he had already disappeared. With some little difficulty I at length came within sight of him, approached, and followed him closely, yet cautiously, so as not to attract his attention.\n\nI had now a good opportunity of examining his person. He was short in stature, very thin, and apparently very feeble. His clothes, generally, were filthy and ragged; but as he came, now and then, within the strong glare of a lamp, I perceived that his linen, although dirty, was of beautiful texture; and my vision deceived me, or, through a rent in a closely buttoned and evidently second-handed roquelaire which enveloped him, I caught a glimpse both of a diamond and of a dagger. These observations heightened my curiosity, and I resolved to follow the stranger whithersoever he should go.\n\nIt was now fully night-fall, and a thick humid fog hung over the city, soon ending in a settled and heavy rain. This change of weather had an odd effect upon the crowd, the whole of which was at once put into new commotion, and overshadowed by a world of umbrellas. The waver, the jostle, and the hum increased in a tenfold degree. For my own part I did not much regard the rain \u2014 the lurking of an old fever in my system rendering the moisture somewhat too dangerously pleasant. Tying a handkerchief about my mouth, I kept on. For half an hour the old man held his way with difficulty along the great thoroughfare; and I here walked close at his elbow through fear of losing sight of him. Never once turning his head to look back, he did not observe me. By and by he passed into a cross street, which, although densely filled with people, was not quite so much thronged as the main one he had quitted. Here a change in his demeanor became evident. He walked more slowly and with less object than before \u2014 more hesitatingly. He crossed and re-crossed the way repeatedly, without apparent aim; and the press was still so thick, that, at every such movement, I was obliged to follow him closely. The street was a narrow and long one, and his course lay within it for nearly an hour, during which the passengers had gradually diminished to about that number which is ordinarily seen at noon in Broadway near the park \u2014 so vast a difference is there between a London populace and that of the most frequented American city. A second turn brought us into a square, brilliantly lighted, and overflowing with life. The old manner of the stranger reappeared. His chin fell upon his breast, while his eyes rolled wildly from under his knit brows, in every direction, upon those who hemmed him in. He urged his way steadily and perseveringly. I was surprised, however, to find, upon his having made the circuit of the square, that he turned and retraced his steps. Still more was I astonished to see him repeat the same walk several times \u2014 once nearly detecting me as he came around with a sudden movement.\n\nIn this exercise he spent another hour, at the end of which we met with far less interruption from passengers than at first. The rain fell fast, the air grew cool; and the people were retiring to their homes. With a gesture of impatience, the wanderer passed into a by-street comparatively deserted. Down this, some quarter of a mile long, he rushed with an activity I could not have dreamed of seeing in one so aged, and which put me to much trouble in pursuit. A few minutes brought us to a large and busy bazaar, with the localities of which the stranger appeared well acquainted, and where his original demeanor again became apparent, as he forced his way to and fro, without aim, among the host of buyers and sellers.\n\nDuring the hour and a half, or thereabouts, which we passed in this place, it required much caution on my part to keep him within reach without attracting his observation. Luckily I wore a pair of caoutchouc overshoes, and could move about in perfect silence. At no moment did he see that I watched him. He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and looked at all objects with a wild and vacant stare. I was now utterly amazed at his behavior, and firmly resolved that we should not part until I had satisfied myself in some measure respecting him.\n\nA loud-toned clock struck eleven, and the company were fast deserting the bazaar. A shop-keeper, in putting up a shutter, jostled the old man, and at the instant I saw a strong shudder come over his frame. He hurried into the street, looked anxiously around him for an instant, and then ran with incredible swiftness through many crooked and peopleless lanes, until we emerged once more upon the great thoroughfare whence we had started \u2014 the street of the D\u2014 Hotel. It no longer wore, however, the same aspect. It was still brilliant with gas; but the rain fell fiercely, and there were few persons to be seen. The stranger grew pale. He walked moodily some paces up the once populous avenue, then, with a heavy sigh, turned in the direction of the river, and, plunging through a great variety of devious ways, came out, at length, in view of one of the principal theatres. It was about being closed, and the audience were thronging from the doors. I saw the old man gasp as if for breath while he threw himself amid the crowd; but I thought that the intense agony of his countenance had, in some measure, abated. His head again fell upon his breast; he appeared as I had seen him at first. I observed that he now took the course in which had gone the greater number of the audience but, upon the whole, I was at a loss to comprehend the waywardness of his actions.\n\nAs he proceeded, the company grew more scattered, and his old uneasiness and vacillation were resumed. For some time he followed closely a party of some ten or twelve roisterers; but from this number one by one dropped off, until three only remained together, in a narrow and gloomy lane, little frequented. The stranger paused, and, for a moment, seemed lost in thought; then, with every mark of agitation, pursued rapidly a route which brought us to the verge of the city, amid regions very different from those we had hitherto traversed. It was the most noisome quarter of London, where every thing wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime. By the dim light of an accidental lamp, tall, antique, worm-eaten, wooden tenements were seen tottering to their fall, in directions so many and capricious, that scarce the semblance of a passage was discernible between them. The paving-stones lay at random, displaced from their beds by the rankly-growing grass. Horrible filth festered in the dammed-up gutters. The whole atmosphere teemed with desolation. Yet, as we proceeded, the sounds of human life revived by sure degrees, and at length large bands of the most abandoned of a London populace were seen reeling to and fro. The spirits of the old man again flickered up, as a lamp which is near its death-hour. Once more he strode onward with elastic tread. Suddenly a corner was turned, a blaze of light burst upon our sight, and we stood before one of the huge suburban temples of Intemperance \u2014 one of the palaces of the fiend, Gin.\n\nIt was now nearly daybreak; but a number of wretched inebriates still pressed in and out of the flaunting entrance. With a half shriek of joy the old man forced a passage within, resumed at once his original bearing, and stalked backward and forward, without apparent object, among the throng. He had not been thus long occupied, however, before a rush to the doors gave token that the host was closing them for the night. It was something even more intense than despair that I then observed upon the countenance of the singular being whom I had watched so pertinaciously. Yet he did not hesitate in his career, but, with a mad energy, retraced his steps at once, to the heart of the mighty London. Long and swiftly he fled, while I followed him in the wildest amazement, resolute not to abandon a scrutiny in which I now felt an interest all-absorbing. The sun arose while we proceeded, and, when we had once again reached that most thronged mart of the populous town, the street of the D\u2014 Hotel, it presented an appearance of human bustle and activity scarcely inferior to what I had seen on the evening before. And here, long, amid the momently increasing confusion, did I persist in my pursuit of the stranger. But, as usual, he walked to and fro, and during the day did not pass from out the turmoil of that street. And, as the shades of the second evening came on, I grew wearied unto death, and, stopping fully in front of the wanderer, gazed at him steadfastly in the face. He noticed me not, but resumed his solemn walk, while I, ceasing to follow, remained absorbed in contemplation. \"The old man,\" I said at length, \"is the type and the genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow, for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds. The worst heart of the world is a grosser book than the 'Hortulus Animae,' and perhaps it is but one of the great mercies of God that \"er lasst sich nicht lesen.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Descent into the Maelstr\u00f6m by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.' \u2014Joseph Glanville\n\nWe had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.\n\n\"Not long ago,\" said he at length, \"and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man \u2014 or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of \u2014 and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man \u2014 but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow. Do you know I can scarcely look over this little cliff without getting giddy?\"\n\nThe \"little cliff,\" upon whose edge he had so carelessly thrown himself down to rest that the weightier portion of his body hung over it, while he was only kept from falling by the tenure of his elbow on its extreme and slippery edge \u2014 this \"little cliff\" arose, a sheer unobstructed precipice of black shining rock, some fifteen or sixteen hundred feet from the world of crags beneath us. Nothing would have tempted me to within half a dozen yards of its brink. In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky \u2014 while I struggled in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger from the fury of the winds. It was long before I could reason myself into sufficient courage to sit up and look out into the distance.\n\n\"You must get over these fancies,\" said the guide, \"for I have brought you here that you might have the best possible view of the scene of that event I mentioned \u2014 and to tell you the whole story with the spot just under your eye.\"\n\n\"We are now,\" he continued, in that particularizing manner which distinguished him \u2014\"we are now close upon the Norwegian coast \u2014 in the sixty-eighth degree of latitude \u2014 in the great province of Nordland \u2014 and in the dreary district of Lofoden. The mountain upon whose top we sit is Helseggen, the Cloudy. Now raise yourself up a little higher \u2014 hold on to the grass if you feel giddy \u2014 so \u2014 and look out beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the sea.\"\n\nI looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean, whose waters wore so inky a hue as to bring at once to my mind the Nubian geographer's account of the Mare Tenebrarum. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by a cluster of dark rocks.\n\nThe appearance of the ocean, in the space between the more distant island and the shore, had something very unusual about it. Although, at the time, so strong a gale was blowing landward that a brig in the remote offing lay to under a double-reefed trysail, and constantly plunged her whole hull out of sight, still there was here nothing like a regular swell, but only a short, quick, angry cross dashing of water in every direction \u2014 as well in the teeth of the wind as otherwise. Of foam there was little except in the immediate vicinity of the rocks.\n\n\"The island in the distance,\" resumed the old man, \"is called by the Norwegians Vurrgh. The one midway is Moskoe. That a mile to the northward is Ambaaren. Yonder are Iflesen, Hoeyholm, Kieldholm, Suarven, and Buckholm. Farther off \u2014 between Moskoe and Vurrgh \u2014 are Otterholm, Flimen, Sandflesen, and Skarholm. These are the true names of the places \u2014 but why it has been thought necessary to name them at all, is more than either you or I can understand. Do you hear any thing? Do you see any change in the water?\"\n\nWe had now been about ten minutes upon the top of Helseggen, to which we had ascended from the interior of Lofoden, so that we had caught no glimpse of the sea until it had burst upon us from the summit. As the old man spoke, I became aware of a loud and gradually increasing sound, like the moaning of a vast herd of buffaloes upon an American prairie; and at the same moment I perceived that what seamen term the chopping character of the ocean beneath us, was rapidly changing into a current which set to the eastward. Even while I gazed, this current acquired a monstrous velocity. Each moment added to its speed \u2014 to its headlong impetuosity. In five minutes the whole sea, as far as Vurrgh, was lashed into ungovernable fury; but it was between Moskoe and the coast that the main uproar held its sway. Here the vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into phrensied convulsion \u2014 heaving, boiling, hissing \u2014 gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging on to the eastward with a rapidity which water never elsewhere assumes except in precipitous descents.\n\nIn a few minutes more, there came over the scene another radical alteration. The general surface grew somewhat more smooth, and the whirlpools, one by one, disappeared, while prodigious streaks of foam became apparent where none had been seen before. These streaks, at length, spreading out to a great distance, and entering into combination, took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form the germ of another more vast. Suddenly \u2014 very suddenly \u2014 this assumed a distinct and definite existence, in a circle of more than half a mile in diameter. The edge of the whirl was represented by a broad belt of gleaming spray; but no particle of this slipped into the mouth of the terrific funnel, whose interior, as far as the eye could fathom it, was a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, inclined to the horizon at an angle of some forty-five degrees, speeding dizzily round and round with a swaying and sweltering motion, and sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.\n\nThe mountain trembled to its very base, and the rock rocked. I threw myself upon my face, and clung to the scant herbage in an excess of nervous agitation.\n\n\"This,\" said I at length, to the old man \u2014\"this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom.\"\n\n\"So it is sometimes termed,\" said he. \"We Norwegians call it the Moskoe-strom, from the island of Moskoe in the midway.\"\n\nThe ordinary accounts of this vortex had by no means prepared me for what I saw. That of Jonas Ramus, which is perhaps the most circumstantial of any, cannot impart the faintest conception either of the magnificence, or of the horror of the scene \u2014 or of the wild bewildering sense of the novel which confounds the beholder. I am not sure from what point of view the writer in question surveyed it, nor at what time; but it could neither have been from the summit of Helseggen, nor during a storm. There are some passages of his description, nevertheless, which may be quoted for their details, although their effect is exceedingly feeble in conveying an impression of the spectacle.\n\n\"Between Lofoden and Moskoe,\" he says, \"the depth of the water is between thirty-six and forty fathoms; but on the other side, toward Ver (Vurrgh) this depth decreases so as not to afford a convenient passage for a vessel, without the risk of splitting on the rocks, which happens even in the calmest weather. When it is flood, the stream runs up the country between Lofoden and Moskoe with a boisterous rapidity; but the roar of its impetuous ebb to the sea is scarce equalled by the loudest and most dreadful cataracts; the noise being heard several leagues off, and the vortices or pits are of such an extent and depth, that if a ship comes within its attraction, it is inevitably absorbed and carried down to the bottom, and there beat to pieces against the rocks; and when the water relaxes, the fragments thereof are thrown up again. But these intervals of tranquillity are only at the turn of the ebb and flood, and in calm weather, and last but a quarter of an hour, its violence gradually returning. When the stream is most boisterous, and its fury heightened by a storm, it is dangerous to come within a Norway mile of it. Boats, yachts, and ships have been carried away by not guarding against it before they were within its reach. It likewise happens frequently, that whales come too near the stream, and are overpowered by its violence; and then it is impossible to describe their howlings and bellowings in their fruitless struggles to disengage themselves. A bear once, attempting to swim from Lofoden to Moskoe, was caught by the stream and borne down, while he roared terribly, so as to be heard on shore. Large stocks of firs and pine trees, after being absorbed by the current, rise again broken and torn to such a degree as if bristles grew upon them. This plainly shows the bottom to consist of craggy rocks, among which they are whirled to and fro. This stream is regulated by the flux and reflux of the sea \u2014 it being constantly high and low water every six hours. In the year 1645, early in the morning of Sexagesima Sunday, it raged with such noise and impetuosity that the very stones of the houses on the coast fell to the ground.\"\n\nIn regard to the depth of the water, I could not see how this could have been ascertained at all in the immediate vicinity of the vortex. The \"forty fathoms\" must have reference only to portions of the channel close upon the shore either of Moskoe or Lofoden. The depth in the centre of the Moskoe-strom must be immeasurably greater; and no better proof of this fact is necessary than can be obtained from even the sidelong glance into the abyss of the whirl which may be had from the highest crag of Helseggen. Looking down from this pinnacle upon the howling Phlegethon below, I could not help smiling at the simplicity with which the honest Jonas Ramus records, as a matter difficult of belief, the anecdotes of the whales and the bears; for it appeared to me, in fact, a self-evident thing, that the largest ships of the line in existence, coming within the influence of that deadly attraction, could resist it as little as a feather the hurricane, and must disappear bodily and at once.\n\nThe attempts to account for the phenomenon \u2014 some of which, I remember, seemed to me sufficiently plausible in perusal \u2014 now wore a very different and unsatisfactory aspect. The idea generally received is that this, as well as three smaller vortices among the Feroe islands, \"have no other cause than the collision of waves rising and falling, at flux and reflux, against a ridge of rocks and shelves, which confines the water so that it precipitates itself like a cataract; and thus the higher the flood rises, the deeper must the fall be, and the natural result of all is a whirlpool or vortex, the prodigious suction of which is sufficiently known by lesser experiments.\"\u2014 These are the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Kircher and others imagine that in the centre of the channel of the Maelstrom is an abyss penetrating the globe, and issuing in some very remote part \u2014 the Gulf of Bothnia being somewhat decidedly named in one instance. This opinion, idle in itself, was the one to which, as I gazed, my imagination most readily assented; and, mentioning it to the guide, I was rather surprised to hear him say that, although it was the view almost universally entertained of the subject by the Norwegians, it nevertheless was not his own. As to the former notion he confessed his inability to comprehend it; and here I agreed with him \u2014 for, however conclusive on paper, it becomes altogether unintelligible, and even absurd, amid the thunder of the abyss.\n\n\"You have had a good look at the whirl now,\" said the old man, \"and if you will creep round this crag, so as to get in its lee, and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to know something of the Moskoe-strom.\"\n\nI placed myself as desired, and he proceeded.\n\n\"Myself and my two brothers once owned a schooner-rigged smack of about seventy tons burthen, with which we were in the habit of fishing among the islands beyond Moskoe, nearly to Vurrgh. In all violent eddies at sea there is good fishing, at proper opportunities, if one has only the courage to attempt it; but among the whole of the Lofoden coastmen, we three were the only ones who made a regular business of going out to the islands, as I tell you. The usual grounds are a great way lower down to the southward. There fish can be got at all hours, without much risk, and therefore these places are preferred. The choice spots over here among the rocks, however, not only yield the finest variety, but in far greater abundance; so that we often got in a single day, what the more timid of the craft could not scrape together in a week. In fact, we made it a matter of desperate speculation \u2014 the risk of life standing instead of labor, and courage answering for capital.\n\n\"We kept the smack in a cove about five miles higher up the coast than this; and it was our practice, in fine weather, to take advantage of the fifteen minutes' slack to push across the main channel of the Moskoe-strom, far above the pool, and then drop down upon anchorage somewhere near Otterholm, or Sandflesen, where the eddies are not so violent as elsewhere. Here we used to remain until nearly time for slackwater again, when we weighed and made for home. We never set out upon this expedition without a steady side wind for going and coming \u2014 one that we felt sure would not fall us before our return \u2014 and we seldom made a miscalculation upon this point. Twice, during six years, we were forced to stay all night at anchor on account of a dead calm, which is a rare thing indeed just about here; and once we had to remain on the grounds nearly a week, starving to death, owing to a gale which blew up shortly after our arrival, and made the channel too boisterous to be thought of. Upon this occasion we should have been driven out to sea in spite of everything, (for the whirlpools threw us round and round so violently that, at length, we fouled our anchor and dragged it) if it had not been that we drifted into one of the innumerable cross currents-here to-day and gone to-morrow \u2014 which drove us under the lee of Flimen, where, by good luck, we brought up.\n\n\"I could not tell you the twentieth part of the difficulties we encountered 'on the ground'\u2014 it is a bad spot to be in, even in good weather \u2014 but we made shift always to run the gauntlet of the Moskoe-strom itself without accident; although at times my heart has been in my mouth when we happened to be a minute or so behind or before the slack. The wind sometimes was not as strong as we thought it at starting, and then we made rather less way than we could wish, while the current rendered the smack unmanageable. My eldest brother had a son eighteen years old, and I had two stout boys of my own. These would have been of great assistance at such times, in using the sweeps, as well as afterward in fishing \u2014 but, somehow, although we ran the risk ourselves, we had not the heart to let the young ones get into the danger \u2014 for, after all said and done, it was a horrible danger, and that is the truth.\n\n\"It is now within a few days of three years since what I am going to tell you occurred. It was on the tenth of July, 18 \u2014 a day which the people of this part of the world will never forget \u2014 for it was one in which blew the most terrible hurricane that ever came out of the heavens. And yet all the morning, and indeed until late in the afternoon, there was a gentle and steady breeze from the south-west, while the sun shone brightly, so that the oldest seaman among us could not have foreseen what was to follow.\n\n\"The three of us \u2014 my two brothers and myself \u2014 had crossed over to the islands about two o'clock P. M., and soon nearly loaded the smack with fine fish, which, we all remarked, were more plenty that day than we had ever known them. It was just seven, by my watch, when we weighed and started for home, so as to make the worst of the Strom at slack water, which we knew would be at eight.\n\n\"We set out with a fresh wind on our starboard quarter, and for some time spanked along at a great rate, never dreaming of danger, for indeed we saw not the slightest reason to apprehend it. All at once we were taken aback by a breeze from over Helseggen. This was most unusual \u2014 something that had never happened to us before \u2014 and I began to feel a little uneasy, without exactly knowing why. We put the boat on the wind, but could make no headway at all for the eddies, and I was upon the point of proposing to return to the anchorage, when, looking astern, we saw the whole horizon covered with a singular copper-colored cloud that rose with the most amazing velocity.\n\n\"In the meantime the breeze that had headed us off fell away, and we were dead becalmed, drifting about in every direction. This state of things, however, did not last long enough to give us time to think about it. In less than a minute the storm was upon us \u2014 in less than two the sky was entirely overcast \u2014 and what with this and the driving spray, it became suddenly so dark that we could not see each other in the smack.\n\n\"Such a hurricane as then blew it is folly to attempt describing. The oldest seaman in Norway never experienced any thing like it. We had let our sails go by the run before it cleverly took us; but, at the first puff, both our masts went by the board if they had been sawed off \u2014 the mainmast taking with it my as I youngest brother, who had lashed himself to it for safety.\n\n\"Our boat was the lightest feather of a thing that ever sat upon water. It had a complete flush deck, with only a small hatch near the bow, and this hatch it had always been our custom to batten down when about to cross the Strom, by way of precaution against the chopping seas. But for this circumstance we should have foundered at once \u2014 for we lay entirely buried for some moments. How my elder brother escaped destruction I cannot say, for I never had an opportunity of ascertaining. For my part, as soon as I had let the foresail run, I threw myself flat on deck, with my feet against the narrow gunwale of the bow, and with my hands grasping a ring-bolt near the foot of the foremast. It was mere instinct that prompted me to do this \u2014 which was undoubtedly the very best thing I could have done \u2014 for I was too much flurried to think.\n\n\"For some moments we were completely deluged, as I say, and all this time I held my breath, and clung to the bolt. When I could stand it no longer I raised myself upon my knees, still keeping hold with my hands, and thus got my head clear. Presently our little boat gave herself a shake, just as a dog does in coming out of the water, and thus rid herself, in some measure, of the seas. I was now trying to get the better of the stupor that had come over me, and to collect my senses so as to see what was to be done, when I felt somebody grasp my arm. It was my elder brother, and my heart leaped for joy, for I had made sure that he was overboard \u2014 but the next moment all this joy was turned into horror \u2014 for he put his mouth close to my ear, and screamed out the word 'Moskoe-strom!'\n\n\"No one ever will know what my feelings were at that moment. I shook from head to foot as if I had had the most violent fit of the ague. I knew what he meant by that one word well enough \u2014 I knew what he wished to make me understand. With the wind that now drove us on, we were bound for the whirl of the Strom, and nothing could save us!\n\n\"You perceive that in crossing the Strom channel, we always went a long way up above the whirl, even in the calmest weather, and then had to wait and watch carefully for the slack \u2014 but now we were driving right upon the pool itself, and in such a hurricane as this! 'To be sure,' I thought, 'we shall get there just about the slack \u2014 there is some little hope in that'\u2014 but in the next moment I cursed myself for being so great a fool as to dream of hope at all. I knew very well that we were doomed, had we been ten times a ninety-gun ship.\n\n\"By this time the first fury of the tempest had spent itself, or perhaps we did not feel it so much, as we scudded before it, but at all events the seas, which at first had been kept down by the wind, and lay flat and frothing, now got up into absolute mountains. A singular change, too, had come over the heavens. Around in every direction it was still as black as pitch, but nearly overhead there burst out, all at once, a circular rift of clear sky \u2014 as clear as I ever saw \u2014 and of a deep bright blue \u2014 and through it there blazed forth the full moon with a lustre that I never before knew her to wear. She lit up every thing about us with the greatest distinctness \u2014 but, oh God, what a scene it was to light up!\n\n\"I now made one or two attempts to speak to my brother \u2014 but in some manner which I could not understand, the din had so increased that I could not make him hear a single word, although I screamed at the top of my voice in his ear. Presently he shook his head, looking as pale as death, and held up one of his fingers, as to say 'listen!'\n\n\"At first I could not make out what he meant \u2014 but soon a hideous thought flashed upon me. I dragged my watch from its fob. It was not going. I glanced as its face by the moonlight, and then burst into tears as I flung it far away into the ocean. It had run down at seven o'clock! We were behind the time of the slack, and the whirl of the Strom was in full fury!\n\n\"When a boat is well built, properly trimmed, and not deep laden, the waves in a strong gale, when she is going large, seem always to slip from beneath her \u2014 which appears very strange to a landsman \u2014 and this is what is called riding, in sea phrase.\n\n\"Well, so far we had ridden the swells very cleverly; but presently a gigantic sea happened to take us right under the counter, and bore us with it as it rose \u2014 up \u2014 up \u2014 as if into the sky. I would not have believed that any wave could rise so high. And then down we came with a sweep, a slide, and a plunge, that made me feel sick and dizzy, as if I was falling from some lofty mountain-top in a dream. But while we were up I had thrown a quick glance around \u2014 and that one glance was all sufficient. I saw our exact position in an instant. The Moskoe-strom whirlpool was about a quarter of a mile dead ahead \u2014 but no more like the every-day Moskoe-strom, than the whirl as you now see it, is like a mill-race. If I had not known where we were, and what we had to expect, I should not have recognised the place at all. As it was, I involuntarily closed my eyes in horror. The lids clenched themselves together as if in a spasm.\n\n\"It could not have been more than two minutes afterwards until we suddenly felt the waves subside, and were enveloped in foam. The boat made a sharp half turn to larboard, and then shot off in its new direction like a thunderbolt. At the same moment the roaring noise of the water was completely drowned in a kind of shrill shriek \u2014 such a sound as you might imagine given out by the water-pipes of many thousand steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together. We were now in the belt of surf that always surrounds the whirl; and I thought, of course, that another moment would plunge us into the abyss \u2014 down which we could only see indistinctly on account of the amazing velocity with which we were borne along. The boat did not seem to sink into the water at all, but to skim like an air-bubble upon the surface of the surge. Her starboard side was next the whirl, and on the larboard arose the world of ocean we had left. It stood like a huge writhing wall between us and the horizon.\n\n\"It may appear strange, but now, when we were in the very jaws of the gulf, I felt more composed than when we were only approaching it. Having made up my mind to hope no more, I got rid of a great deal of that terror which unmanned me at first. I suppose it was despair that strung my nerves.\n\n\"It may look like boasting \u2014 but what I tell you is truth \u2014 I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner, and how foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life, in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God's power. I do believe that I blushed with shame when this idea crossed my mind. After a little while I became possessed with the keenest curiosity about the whirl itself. I positively felt a wish to explore its depths, even at the sacrifice I was going to make; and my principal grief was that I should never be able to tell my old companions on shore about the mysteries I should see. These, no doubt, were singular fancies to occupy a man's mind in such extremity \u2014 and I have often thought since, that the revolutions of the boat around the pool might have rendered me a little light-headed.\n\n\"There was another circumstance which tended to restore my self-possession; and this was the cessation of the wind, which could not reach us in our present situation \u2014 for, as you saw yourself, the belt of surf is considerably lower than the general bed of the ocean, and this latter now towered above us, a high, black, mountainous ridge. If you have never been at sea in a heavy gale, you can form no idea of the confusion of mind occasioned by the wind and the spray together. They blind, deafen and strangle you, and take away all power of action or reflection. But we were now, in a great measure, rid of these annoyances \u2014 just as death-condemned felons in prison are allowed petty indulgences, forbidden them while their doom is yet uncertain.\n\n\"How often we made the circuit of the belt it is impossible to say. We careered round and round for perhaps an hour, flying rather than floating, getting gradually more and more into the middle of the surge, and then nearer and nearer to its horrible inner edge. All this time I had never let go of the ring-bolt. My brother was at the stern, holding on to a large empty water-cask which had been securely lashed under the coop of the counter, and was the only thing on deck that had not been swept overboard when the gale first took us. As we approached the brink of the pit he let go his hold upon this, and made for the ring, from which, in the agony of his terror, he endeavored to force my hands, as it was not large enough to afford us both a secure grasp. I never felt deeper grief than when I saw him attempt this act \u2014 although I knew he was a madman when he did it \u2014 a raving maniac through sheer fright. I did not care, however, to contest the point with him. I thought it could make no difference whether either of us held on at all; so I let him have the bolt, and went astern to the cask. This there was no great difficulty in doing; for the smack flew round steadily enough, and upon an even keel \u2014 only swaying to and fro, with the immense sweeps and swelters of the whirl. Scarcely had I secured myself in my new position, when we gave a wild lurch to starboard, and rushed headlong into the abyss. I muttered a hurried prayer to God, and thought all was over.\n\n\"As I felt the sickening sweep of the descent, I had instinctively tightened my hold upon the barrel, and closed my eyes. For some seconds I dared not open them \u2014 while I expected instant destruction, and wondered that I was not already in my death-struggles with the water. But moment after moment elapsed. I still lived. The sense of falling had ceased; and the motion of the vessel seemed much as it had been before while in the belt of foam, with the exception that she now lay more along. I took courage and looked once again upon the scene.\n\n\"Never shall I forget the sensations of awe, horror, and admiration with which I gazed about me. The boat appeared to be hanging, as if by magic, midway down, upon the interior surface of a funnel vast in circumference, prodigious in depth, and whose perfectly smooth sides might have been mistaken for ebony, but for the bewildering rapidity with which they spun around, and for the gleaming and ghastly radiance they shot forth, as the rays of the full moon, from that circular rift amid the clouds which I have already described, streamed in a flood of golden glory along the black walls, and far away down into the inmost recesses of the abyss.\n\n\"At first I was too much confused to observe anything accurately. The general burst of terrific grandeur was all that I beheld. When I recovered myself a little, however, my gaze fell instinctively downward. In this direction I was able to obtain an unobstructed view, from the manner in which the smack hung on the inclined surface of the pool. She was quite upon an even keel \u2014 that is to say, her deck lay in a plane parallel with that of the water \u2014 but this latter sloped at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, so that we seemed to be lying upon our beam-ends. I could not help observing, nevertheless, that I had scarcely more difficulty in maintaining my hold and footing in this situation, than if we had been upon a dead level; and this, I suppose, was owing to the speed at which we revolved.\n\n\"The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf; but still I could make out nothing distinctly, on account of a thick mist in which everything there was enveloped, and over which there hung a magnificent rainbow, like that narrow and tottering bridge which Mussulmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity. This mist, or spray, was no doubt occasioned by the clashing of the great walls of the funnel, as they all met together at the bottom \u2014 but the yell that went up to the Heavens from out of that mist, I dare not attempt to describe.\n\n\"Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam above, had carried us to a great distance down the slope; but our farther descent was by no means proportionate. Round and round we swept \u2014 not with any uniform movement \u2014 but in dizzying swings and jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred feet \u2014 sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl. Our progress downward, at each revolution, was slow, but very perceptible.\n\n\"Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne, I perceived that our boat was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below us were visible fragments of vessels, large masses of building timber and trunks of trees, with many smaller articles, such as pieces of house furniture, broken boxes, barrels and staves. I have already described the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my original terrors. It appeared to grow upon me as I drew nearer and nearer to my dreadful doom. I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company. I must have been delirious \u2014 for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. 'This fir tree,' I found myself at one time saying, 'will certainly be the next thing that takes the awful plunge and disappears,'\u2014 and then I was disappointed to find that the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship overtook it and went down before. At length, after making several guesses of this nature, and being deceived in all \u2014 this fact \u2014 the fact of my invariable miscalculation, set me upon a train of reflection that made my limbs again tremble, and my heart beat heavily once more.\n\n\"It was not a new terror that thus affected me, but the dawn of a more exciting hope. This hope arose partly from memory, and partly from present observation. I called to mind the great variety of buoyant matter that strewed the coast of Lofoden, having been absorbed and then thrown forth by the Moskoe-strom. By far the greater number of the articles were shattered in the most extraordinary way \u2014 so chafed and roughened as to have the appearance of being stuck full of splinters \u2014 but then I distinctly recollected that there were some of them which were not disfigured at all. Now I could not account for this difference except by supposing that the roughened fragments were the only ones which had been completely absorbed \u2014 that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, from some reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the ebb, as the case might be. I conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been drawn in more early or absorbed more rapidly. I made, also, three important observations. The first was, that as a general rule, the larger the bodies were, the more rapid their descent; \u2014 the second, that, between two masses of equal extent, the one spherical, and the other of any other shape, the superiority in speed of descent was with the sphere; \u2014 the third, that, between two masses of equal size, the one cylindrical, and the other of any other shape, the cylinder was absorbed the more slowly.\n\nSince my escape, I have had several conversations on this subject with an old school-master of the district; and it was from him that I learned the use of the words 'cylinder' and 'sphere.' He explained to me \u2014 although I have forgotten the explanation \u2014 how what I observed was, in fact, the natural consequence of the forms of the floating fragments \u2014 and showed me how it happened that a cylinder, swimming in a vortex, offered more resistance to its suction, and was drawn in with greater difficulty than an equally bulky body, of any form whatever.\n\n\"There was one startling circumstance which went a great way in enforcing these observations, and rendering me anxious to turn them to account, and this was that, at every revolution, we passed something like a barrel, or else the broken yard or the mast of a vessel, while many of these things, which had been on our level when I first opened my eyes upon the wonders of the whirlpool, were now high up above us, and seemed to have moved but little from their original station.\n\n\"I no longer hesitated what to do. I resolved to lash myself securely to the water cask upon which I now held, to cut it loose from the counter, and to throw myself with it into the water. I attracted my brother's attention by signs, pointed to the floating barrels that came near us, and did everything in my power to make him understand what I was about to do. I thought at length that he comprehended my design \u2014 but, whether this was the case or not, he shook his head despairingly, and refused to move from his station by the ring-bolt. It was impossible to force him; the emergency admitted no delay; and so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter, and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment's hesitation.\n\n\"The result was precisely what I had hoped it might be. As it is myself who now tell you this tale \u2014 as you see that I did escape \u2014 and as you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say \u2014 I will bring my story quickly to conclusion. It might have been an hour, or thereabout, after my quitting the smack, when, having descended to a vast distance beneath me, it made three or four wild gyrations in rapid succession, and, bearing my loved brother with it, plunged headlong, at once and forever, into the chaos of foam below. The barrel to which I was attached sunk very little farther than half the distance between the bottom of the gulf and the spot at which I leaped overboard, before a great change took place in the character of the whirlpool. The slope of the sides of the vast funnel became momently less and less steep. The gyrations of the whirl grew, gradually, less and less violent. By degrees, the froth and the rainbow disappeared, and the bottom of the gulf seemed slowly to uprise. The sky was clear, the winds had gone down, and the full moon was setting radiantly in the west, when I found myself on the surface of the ocean, in full view of the shores of Lofoden, and above the spot where the pool of the Moskoe-strom had been. It was the hour of the slack \u2014 but the sea still heaved in mountainous waves from the effects of the hurricane. I was borne violently into the channel of the Strom and in a few minutes, was hurried down the coast into the 'grounds' of the fishermen. A boat picked me up \u2014 exhausted from fatigue \u2014 and (now that the danger was removed) speechless from the memory of its horror. Those who drew me on board were my old mates and dally companions \u2014 but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveller from the spirit-land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. They say too that the whole expression of my countenance had changed. I told them my story \u2014 they did not believe it. I now tell it to you \u2014 and I can scarcely expect you to put more faith in it than did the merry fishermen of Lofoden.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Eleonora by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'Sub conservatione formae specificae salva anima.' \u2014Raymond Lully\n\nI am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence \u2014 whether much that is glorious \u2014 whether all that is profound \u2014 does not spring from disease of thought \u2014 from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in awakening, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the \"light ineffable,\" and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, \"agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi.\"\n\nWe will say, then, that I am mad. I grant, at least, that there are two distinct conditions of my mental existence \u2014 the condition of a lucid reason, not to be disputed, and belonging to the memory of events forming the first epoch of my life \u2014 and a condition of shadow and doubt, appertaining to the present, and to the recollection of what constitutes the second great era of my being. Therefore, what I shall tell of the earlier period, believe; and to what I may relate of the later time, give only such credit as may seem due, or doubt it altogether, or, if doubt it ye cannot, then play unto its riddle the Oedipus.\n\nShe whom I loved in youth, and of whom I now pen calmly and distinctly these remembrances, was the sole daughter of the only sister of my mother long departed. Eleonora was the name of my cousin. We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. No unguided footstep ever came upon that vale; for it lay away up among a range of giant hills that hung beetling around about it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recesses. No path was trodden in its vicinity; and, to reach our happy home, there was need of putting back, with force, the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions of fragrant flowers. Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley \u2014 I, and my cousin, and her mother.\n\nFrom the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the \"River of Silence\"; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever.\n\nThe margin of the river, and of the many dazzling rivulets that glided through devious ways into its channel, as well as the spaces that extended from the margins away down into the depths of the streams until they reached the bed of pebbles at the bottom, \u2014 these spots, not less than the whole surface of the valley, from the river to the mountains that girdled it in, were carpeted all by a soft green grass, thick, short, perfectly even, and vanilla-perfumed, but so besprinkled throughout with the yellow buttercup, the white daisy, the purple violet, and the ruby-red asphodel, that its exceeding beauty spoke to our hearts in loud tones, of the love and of the glory of God.\n\nAnd, here and there, in groves about this grass, like wildernesses of dreams, sprang up fantastic trees, whose tall slender stems stood not upright, but slanted gracefully toward the light that peered at noon-day into the centre of the valley. Their mark was speckled with the vivid alternate splendor of ebony and silver, and was smoother than all save the cheeks of Eleonora; so that, but for the brilliant green of the huge leaves that spread from their summits in long, tremulous lines, dallying with the Zephyrs, one might have fancied them giant serpents of Syria doing homage to their sovereign the Sun.\n\nHand in hand about this valley, for fifteen years, roamed I with Eleonora before Love entered within our hearts. It was one evening at the close of the third lustrum of her life, and of the fourth of my own, that we sat, locked in each other's embrace, beneath the serpent-like trees, and looked down within the water of the River of Silence at our images therein. We spoke no words during the rest of that sweet day, and our words even upon the morrow were tremulous and few. We had drawn the God Eros from that wave, and now we felt that he had enkindled within us the fiery souls of our forefathers. The passions which had for centuries distinguished our race, came thronging with the fancies for which they had been equally noted, and together breathed a delirious bliss over the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. A change fell upon all things. Strange, brilliant flowers, star-shaped, burn out upon the trees where no flowers had been known before. The tints of the green carpet deepened; and when, one by one, the white daisies shrank away, there sprang up in place of them, ten by ten of the ruby-red asphodel. And life arose in our paths; for the tall flamingo, hitherto unseen, with all gay glowing birds, flaunted his scarlet plumage before us. The golden and silver fish haunted the river, out of the bosom of which issued, little by little, a murmur that swelled, at length, into a lulling melody more divine than that of the harp of Aeolus-sweeter than all save the voice of Eleonora. And now, too, a voluminous cloud, which we had long watched in the regions of Hesper, floated out thence, all gorgeous in crimson and gold, and settling in peace above us, sank, day by day, lower and lower, until its edges rested upon the tops of the mountains, turning all their dimness into magnificence, and shutting us up, as if forever, within a magic prison-house of grandeur and of glory.\n\nThe loveliness of Eleonora was that of the Seraphim; but she was a maiden artless and innocent as the brief life she had led among the flowers. No guile disguised the fervor of love which animated her heart, and she examined with me its inmost recesses as we walked together in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, and discoursed of the mighty changes which had lately taken place therein.\n\nAt length, having spoken one day, in tears, of the last sad change which must befall Humanity, she thenceforward dwelt only upon this one sorrowful theme, interweaving it into all our converse, as, in the songs of the bard of Schiraz, the same images are found occurring, again and again, in every impressive variation of phrase.\n\nShe had seen that the finger of Death was upon her bosom \u2014 that, like the ephemeron, she had been made perfect in loveliness only to die; but the terrors of the grave to her lay solely in a consideration which she revealed to me, one evening at twilight, by the banks of the River of Silence. She grieved to think that, having entombed her in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, I would quit forever its happy recesses, transferring the love which now was so passionately her own to some maiden of the outer and everyday world. And, then and there, I threw myself hurriedly at the feet of Eleonora, and offered up a vow, to herself and to Heaven, that I would never bind myself in marriage to any daughter of Earth \u2014 that I would in no manner prove recreant to her dear memory, or to the memory of the devout affection with which she had blessed me. And I called the Mighty Ruler of the Universe to witness the pious solemnity of my vow. And the curse which I invoked of Him and of her, a saint in Helusion should I prove traitorous to that promise, involved a penalty the exceeding great horror of which will not permit me to make record of it here. And the bright eyes of Eleonora grew brighter at my words; and she sighed as if a deadly burthen had been taken from her breast; and she trembled and very bitterly wept; but she made acceptance of the vow, (for what was she but a child?) and it made easy to her the bed of her death. And she said to me, not many days afterward, tranquilly dying, that, because of what I had done for the comfort of her spirit she would watch over me in that spirit when departed, and, if so it were permitted her return to me visibly in the watches of the night; but, if this thing were, indeed, beyond the power of the souls in Paradise, that she would, at least, give me frequent indications of her presence, sighing upon me in the evening winds, or filling the air which I breathed with perfume from the censers of the angels. And, with these words upon her lips, she yielded up her innocent life, putting an end to the first epoch of my own.\n\nThus far I have faithfully said. But as I pass the barrier in Times path, formed by the death of my beloved, and proceed with the second era of my existence, I feel that a shadow gathers over my brain, and I mistrust the perfect sanity of the record. But let me on. \u2014 Years dragged themselves along heavily, and still I dwelled within the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass; but a second change had come upon all things. The star-shaped flowers shrank into the stems of the trees, and appeared no more. The tints of the green carpet faded; and, one by one, the ruby-red asphodels withered away; and there sprang up, in place of them, ten by ten, dark, eye-like violets, that writhed uneasily and were ever encumbered with dew. And Life departed from our paths; for the tall flamingo flaunted no longer his scarlet plumage before us, but flew sadly from the vale into the hills, with all the gay glowing birds that had arrived in his company. And the golden and silver fish swam down through the gorge at the lower end of our domain and bedecked the sweet river never again. And the lulling melody that had been softer than the wind-harp of Aeolus, and more divine than all save the voice of Eleonora, it died little by little away, in murmurs growing lower and lower, until the stream returned, at length, utterly, into the solemnity of its original silence. And then, lastly, the voluminous cloud uprose, and, abandoning the tops of the mountains to the dimness of old, fell back into the regions of Hesper, and took away all its manifold golden and gorgeous glories from the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.\n\nYet the promises of Eleonora were not forgotten; for I heard the sounds of the swinging of the censers of the angels; and streams of a holy perfume floated ever and ever about the valley; and at lone hours, when my heart beat heavily, the winds that bathed my brow came unto me laden with soft sighs; and indistinct murmurs filled often the night air, and once \u2014 oh, but once only! I was awakened from a slumber, like the slumber of death, by the pressing of spiritual lips upon my own.\n\nBut the void within my heart refused, even thus, to be filled. I longed for the love which had before filled it to overflowing. At length the valley pained me through its memories of Eleonora, and I left it for ever for the vanities and the turbulent triumphs of the world.\n\nI found myself within a strange city, where all things might have served to blot from recollection the sweet dreams I had dreamed so long in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. The pomps and pageantries of a stately court, and the mad clangor of arms, and the radiant loveliness of women, bewildered and intoxicated my brain. But as yet my soul had proved true to its vows, and the indications of the presence of Eleonora were still given me in the silent hours of the night. Suddenly these manifestations they ceased, and the world grew dark before mine eyes, and I stood aghast at the burning thoughts which possessed, at the terrible temptations which beset me; for there came from some far, far distant and unknown land, into the gay court of the king I served, a maiden to whose beauty my whole recreant heart yielded at once \u2014 at whose footstool I bowed down without a struggle, in the most ardent, in the most abject worship of love. What, indeed, was my passion for the young girl of the valley in comparison with the fervor, and the delirium, and the spirit-lifting ecstasy of adoration with which I poured out my whole soul in tears at the feet of the ethereal Ermengarde? \u2014 Oh, bright was the seraph Ermengarde! and in that knowledge I had room for none other. \u2014 Oh, divine was the angel Ermengarde! and as I looked down into the depths of her memorial eyes, I thought only of them \u2014 and of her.\n\nI wedded; \u2014 nor dreaded the curse I had invoked; and its bitterness was not visited upon me. And once \u2014 but once again in the silence of the night; there came through my lattice the soft sighs which had forsaken me; and they modelled themselves into familiar and sweet voice, saying:\n\n\"Sleep in peace! \u2014 for the Spirit of Love reigneth and ruleth, and, in taking to thy passionate heart her who is Ermengarde, thou art absolved, for reasons which shall be made known to thee in Heaven, of thy vows unto Eleonora.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Never Bet the Devil Your Head by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\"Con tal que las costumbres de un autor,\" says Don Thomas de las Torres, in the preface to his \"Amatory Poems\" \"sean puras y castas, importo muy poco que no sean igualmente severas sus obras\"\u2014 meaning, in plain English, that, provided the morals of an author are pure personally, it signifies nothing what are the morals of his books. We presume that Don Thomas is now in Purgatory for the assertion. It would be a clever thing, too, in the way of poetical justice, to keep him there until his \"Amatory Poems\" get out of print, or are laid definitely upon the shelf through lack of readers. Every fiction should have a moral; and, what is more to the purpose, the critics have discovered that every fiction has. Philip Melanchthon, some time ago, wrote a commentary upon the \"Batrachomyomachia,\" and proved that the poet's object was to excite a distaste for sedition. Pierre la Seine, going a step farther, shows that the intention was to recommend to young men temperance in eating and drinking. Just so, too, Jacobus Hugo has satisfied himself that, by Euenis, Homer meant to insinuate John Calvin; by Antinous, Martin Luther; by the Lotophagi, Protestants in general; and, by the Harpies, the Dutch. Our more modern Scholiasts are equally acute. These fellows demonstrate a hidden meaning in \"The Antediluvians,\" a parable in Powhatan,\" new views in \"Cock Robin,\" and transcendentalism in \"Hop O' My Thumb.\" In short, it has been shown that no man can sit down to write without a very profound design. Thus to authors in general much trouble is spared. A novelist, for example, need have no care of his moral. It is there \u2014 that is to say, it is somewhere \u2014 and the moral and the critics can take care of themselves. When the proper time arrives, all that the gentleman intended, and all that he did not intend, will be brought to light, in the \"Dial,\" or the \"Down-Easter,\" together with all that he ought to have intended, and the rest that he clearly meant to intend:\u2014 so that it will all come very straight in the end.\n\nThere is no just ground, therefore, for the charge brought against me by certain ignoramuses \u2014 that I have never written a moral tale, or, in more precise words, a tale with a moral. They are not the critics predestined to bring me out, and develop my morals:\u2014 that is the secret. By and by the \"North American Quarterly Humdrum\" will make them ashamed of their stupidity. In the meantime, by way of staying execution \u2014 by way of mitigating the accusations against me \u2014 I offer the sad history appended \u2014 a history about whose obvious moral there can be no question whatever, since he who runs may read it in the large capitals which form the title of the tale. I should have credit for this arrangement \u2014 a far wiser one than that of La Fontaine and others, who reserve the impression to be conveyed until the last moment, and thus sneak it in at the fag end of their fables.\n\nDefuncti injuria ne afficiantur was a law of the twelve tables, and De mortuis nil nisi bonum is an excellent injunction \u2014 even if the dead in question be nothing but dead small beer. It is not my design, therefore, to vituperate my deceased friend, Toby Dammit. He was a sad dog, it is true, and a dog's death it was that he died; but he himself was not to blame for his vices. They grew out of a personal defect in his mother. She did her best in the way of flogging him while an infant \u2014 for duties to her well \u2014 regulated mind were always pleasures, and babies, like tough steaks, or the modern Greek olive trees, are invariably the better for beating \u2014 but, poor woman! she had the misfortune to be left-handed, and a child flogged left-handedly had better be left unflogged. The world revolves from right to left. It will not do to whip a baby from left to right. If each blow in the proper direction drives an evil propensity out, it follows that every thump in an opposite one knocks its quota of wickedness in. I was often present at Toby's chastisements, and, even by the way in which he kicked, I could perceive that he was getting worse and worse every day. At last I saw, through the tears in my eyes, that there was no hope of the villain at all, and one day when he had been cuffed until he grew so black in the face that one might have mistaken him for a little African, and no effect had been produced beyond that of making him wriggle himself into a fit, I could stand it no longer, but went down upon my knees forthwith, and, uplifting my voice, made prophecy of his ruin.\n\nThe fact is that his precocity in vice was awful. At five months of age he used to get into such passions that he was unable to articulate. At six months, I caught him gnawing a pack of cards. At seven months he was in the constant habit of catching and kissing the female babies. At eight months he peremptorily refused to put his signature to the Temperance pledge. Thus he went on increasing in iniquity, month after month, until, at the close of the first year, he not only insisted upon wearing moustaches, but had contracted a propensity for cursing and swearing, and for backing his assertions by bets.\n\nThrough this latter most ungentlemanly practice, the ruin which I had predicted to Toby Dammit overtook him at last. The fashion had \"grown with his growth and strengthened with his strength,\" so that, when he came to be a man, he could scarcely utter a sentence without interlarding it with a proposition to gamble. Not that he actually laid wagers \u2014 no. I will do my friend the justice to say that he would as soon have laid eggs. With him the thing was a mere formula \u2014 nothing more. His expressions on this head had no meaning attached to them whatever. They were simple if not altogether innocent expletives \u2014 imaginative phrases wherewith to round off a sentence. When he said \"I'll bet you so and so,\" nobody ever thought of taking him up; but still I could not help thinking it my duty to put him down. The habit was an immoral one, and so I told him. It was a vulgar one \u2014 this I begged him to believe. It was discountenanced by society \u2014 here I said nothing but the truth. It was forbidden by act of Congress \u2014 here I had not the slightest intention of telling a lie. I remonstrated \u2014 but to no purpose. I demonstrated \u2014 in vain. I entreated \u2014 he smiled. I implored \u2014 he laughed. I preached \u2014 he sneered. I threatened \u2014 he swore. I kicked him \u2014 he called for the police. I pulled his nose \u2014 he blew it, and offered to bet the Devil his head that I would not venture to try that experiment again.\n\nPoverty was another vice which the peculiar physical deficiency of Dammit's mother had entailed upon her son. He was detestably poor, and this was the reason, no doubt, that his expletive expressions about betting, seldom took a pecuniary turn. I will not be bound to say that I ever heard him make use of such a figure of speech as \"I'll bet you a dollar.\" It was usually \"I'll bet you what you please,\" or \"I'll bet you what you dare,\" or \"I'll bet you a trifle,\" or else, more significantly still, \"I'll bet the Devil my head.\"\n\nThis latter form seemed to please him best; \u2014 perhaps because it involved the least risk; for Dammit had become excessively parsimonious. Had any one taken him up, his head was small, and thus his loss would have been small too. But these are my own reflections and I am by no means sure that I am right in attributing them to him. At all events the phrase in question grew daily in favor, notwithstanding the gross impropriety of a man betting his brains like bank-notes:\u2014 but this was a point which my friend's perversity of disposition would not permit him to comprehend. In the end, he abandoned all other forms of wager, and gave himself up to \"I'll bet the Devil my head,\" with a pertinacity and exclusiveness of devotion that displeased not less than it surprised me. I am always displeased by circumstances for which I cannot account. Mysteries force a man to think, and so injure his health. The truth is, there was something in the air with which Mr. Dammit was wont to give utterance to his offensive expression \u2014 something in his manner of enunciation \u2014 which at first interested, and afterwards made me very uneasy \u2014 something which, for want of a more definite term at present, I must be permitted to call queer; but which Mr. Coleridge would have called mystical, Mr. Kant pantheistical, Mr. Carlyle twistical, and Mr. Emerson hyperquizzitistical. I began not to like it at all. Mr. Dammits soul was in a perilous state. I resolved to bring all my eloquence into play to save it. I vowed to serve him as St. Patrick, in the Irish chronicle, is said to have served the toad \u2014 that is to say, \"awaken him to a sense of his situation.\" I addressed myself to the task forthwith. Once more I betook myself to remonstrance. Again I collected my energies for a final attempt at expostulation.\n\nWhen I had made an end of my lecture, Mr. Dammit indulged himself in some very equivocal behavior. For some moments he remained silent, merely looking me inquisitively in the face. But presently he threw his head to one side, and elevated his eyebrows to a great extent. Then he spread out the palms of his hands and shrugged up his shoulders. Then he winked with the right eye. Then he repeated the operation with the left. Then he shut them both up very tight. Then he opened them both so very wide that I became seriously alarmed for the consequences. Then, applying his thumb to his nose, he thought proper to make an indescribable movement with the rest of his fingers. Finally, setting his arms a-kimbo, he condescended to reply.\n\nI can call to mind only the beads of his discourse. He would be obliged to me if I would hold my tongue. He wished none of my advice. He despised all my insinuations. He was old enough to take care of himself. Did I still think him baby Dammit? Did I mean to say any thing against his character? Did I intend to insult him? Was I a fool? Was my maternal parent aware, in a word, of my absence from the domiciliary residence? He would put this latter question to me as to a man of veracity, and he would bind himself to abide by my reply. Once more he would demand explicitly if my mother knew that I was out. My confusion, he said, betrayed me, and he would be willing to bet the Devil his head that she did not.\n\nMr. Dammit did not pause for my rejoinder. Turning upon his heel, he left my presence with undignified precipitation. It was well for him that he did so. My feelings had been wounded. Even my anger had been aroused. For once I would have taken him up upon his insulting wager. I would have won for the Arch-Enemy Mr. Dammit's little head \u2014 for the fact is, my mamma was very well aware of my merely temporary absence from home.\n\nBut Khoda shefa midehed \u2014 Heaven gives relief \u2014 as the Mussulmans say when you tread upon their toes. It was in pursuance of my duty that I had been insulted, and I bore the insult like a man. It now seemed to me, however, that I had done all that could be required of me, in the case of this miserable individual, and I resolved to trouble him no longer with my counsel, but to leave him to his conscience and himself. But although I forebore to intrude with my advice, I could not bring myself to give up his society altogether. I even went so far as to humor some of his less reprehensible propensities; and there were times when I found myself lauding his wicked jokes, as epicures do mustard, with tears in my eyes:\u2014 so profoundly did it grieve me to hear his evil talk.\n\nOne fine day, having strolled out together, arm in arm, our route led us in the direction of a river. There was a bridge, and we resolved to cross it. It was roofed over, by way of protection from the weather, and the archway, having but few windows, was thus very uncomfortably dark. As we entered the passage, the contrast between the external glare and the interior gloom struck heavily upon my spirits. Not so upon those of the unhappy Dammit, who offered to bet the Devil his head that I was hipped. He seemed to be in an unusual good humor. He was excessively lively \u2014 so much so that I entertained I know not what of uneasy suspicion. It is not impossible that he was affected with the transcendentals. I am not well enough versed, however, in the diagnosis of this disease to speak with decision upon the point; and unhappily there were none of my friends of the \"Dial\" present. I suggest the idea, nevertheless, because of a certain species of austere Merry-Andrewism which seemed to beset my poor friend, and caused him to make quite a Tom-Fool of himself. Nothing would serve him but wriggling and skipping about under and over every thing that came in his way; now shouting out, and now lisping out, all manner of odd little and big words, yet preserving the gravest face in the world all the time. I really could not make up my mind whether to kick or to pity him. At length, having passed nearly across the bridge, we approached the termination of the footway, when our progress was impeded by a turnstile of some height. Through this I made my way quietly, pushing it around as usual. But this turn would not serve the turn of Mr. Dammit. He insisted upon leaping the stile, and said he could cut a pigeon-wing over it in the air. Now this, conscientiously speaking, I did not think he could do. The best pigeon-winger over all kinds of style was my friend Mr. Carlyle, and as I knew he could not do it, I would not believe that it could be done by Toby Dammit. I therefore told him, in so many words, that he was a braggadocio, and could not do what he said. For this I had reason to be sorry afterward; \u2014 for he straightway offered to bet the Devil his head that he could.\n\nI was about to reply, notwithstanding my previous resolutions, with some remonstrance against his impiety, when I heard, close at my elbow, a slight cough, which sounded very much like the ejaculation \"ahem!\" I started, and looked about me in surprise. My glance at length fell into a nook of the frame \u2014 work of the bridge, and upon the figure of a little lame old gentleman of venerable aspect. Nothing could be more reverend than his whole appearance; for he not only had on a full suit of black, but his shirt was perfectly clean and the collar turned very neatly down over a white cravat, while his hair was parted in front like a girl's. His hands were clasped pensively together over his stomach, and his two eyes were carefully rolled up into the top of his head.\n\nUpon observing him more closely, I perceived that he wore a black silk apron over his small-clothes; and this was a thing which I thought very odd. Before I had time to make any remark, however, upon so singular a circumstance, he interrupted me with a second \"ahem!\"\n\nTo this observation I was not immediately prepared to reply. The fact is, remarks of this laconic nature are nearly unanswerable. I have known a Quarterly Review non-plussed by the word \"Fudge!\" I am not ashamed to say, therefore, that I turned to Mr. Dammit for assistance.\n\n\"Dammit,\" said I, \"what are you about? don't you hear? \u2014 the gentleman says 'ahem!'\" I looked sternly at my friend while I thus addressed him; for, to say the truth, I felt particularly puzzled, and when a man is particularly puzzled he must knit his brows and look savage, or else he is pretty sure to look like a fool.\n\n\"Dammit,\" observed I\u2014 although this sounded very much like an oath, than which nothing was further from my thoughts \u2014\"Dammit,\" I suggested \u2014\"the gentleman says 'ahem!'\"\n\nI do not attempt to defend my remark on the score of profundity; I did not think it profound myself; but I have noticed that the effect of our speeches is not always proportionate with their importance in our own eyes; and if I had shot Mr. D. through and through with a Paixhan bomb, or knocked him in the head with the \"Poets and Poetry of America,\" he could hardly have been more discomfited than when I addressed him with those simple words: \"Dammit, what are you about? \u2014 don't you hear? \u2014 the gentleman says 'ahem!'\"\n\n\"You don't say so?\" gasped he at length, after turning more colors than a pirate runs up, one after the other, when chased by a man-of-war. \"Are you quite sure he said that? Well, at all events I am in for it now, and may as well put a bold face upon the matter. Here goes, then \u2014 ahem!\"\n\nAt this the little old gentleman seemed pleased \u2014 God only knows why. He left his station at the nook of the bridge, limped forward with a gracious air, took Dammit by the hand and shook it cordially, looking all the while straight up in his face with an air of the most unadulterated benignity which it is possible for the mind of man to imagine.\n\n\"I am quite sure you will win it, Dammit,\" said he, with the frankest of all smiles, \"but we are obliged to have a trial, you know, for the sake of mere form.\"\n\n\"Ahem!\" replied my friend, taking off his coat, with a deep sigh, tying a pocket-handkerchief around his waist, and producing an unaccountable alteration in his countenance by twisting up his eyes and bringing down the corners of his mouth \u2014\"ahem!\" And \"ahem!\" said he again, after a pause; and not another word more than \"ahem!\" did I ever know him to say after that. \"Aha!\" thought I, without expressing myself aloud \u2014\"this is quite a remarkable silence on the part of Toby Dammit, and is no doubt a consequence of his verbosity upon a previous occasion. One extreme induces another. I wonder if he has forgotten the many unanswerable questions which he propounded to me so fluently on the day when I gave him my last lecture? At all events, he is cured of the transcendentals.\"\n\n\"Ahem!\" here replied Toby, just as if he had been reading my thoughts, and looking like a very old sheep in a revery.\n\nThe old gentleman now took him by the arm, and led him more into the shade of the bridge \u2014 a few paces back from the turnstile. \"My good fellow,\" said he, \"I make it a point of conscience to allow you this much run. Wait here, till I take my place by the stile, so that I may see whether you go over it handsomely, and transcendentally, and don't omit any flourishes of the pigeon-wing. A mere form, you know. I will say 'one, two, three, and away.' Mind you, start at the word 'away'\" Here he took his position by the stile, paused a moment as if in profound reflection, then looked up and, I thought, smiled very slightly, then tightened the strings of his apron, then took a long look at Dammit, and finally gave the word as agreed upon \u2014\n\nOne \u2014 two \u2014 three \u2014 and \u2014 away!\n\nPunctually at the word \"away,\" my poor friend set off in a strong gallop. The stile was not very high, like Mr. Lord's \u2014 nor yet very low, like that of Mr. Lord's reviewers, but upon the whole I made sure that he would clear it. And then what if he did not? \u2014 ah, that was the question \u2014 what if he did not? \"What right,\" said I, \"had the old gentleman to make any other gentleman jump? The little old dot-and-carry-one! who is he? If he asks me to jump, I won't do it, that's flat, and I don't care who the devil he is.\" The bridge, as I say, was arched and covered in, in a very ridiculous manner, and there was a most uncomfortable echo about it at all times \u2014 an echo which I never before so particularly observed as when I uttered the four last words of my remark.\n\nBut what I said, or what I thought, or what I heard, occupied only an instant. In less than five seconds from his starting, my poor Toby had taken the leap. I saw him run nimbly, and spring grandly from the floor of the bridge, cutting the most awful flourishes with his legs as he went up. I saw him high in the air, pigeon-winging it to admiration just over the top of the stile; and of course I thought it an unusually singular thing that he did not continue to go over. But the whole leap was the affair of a moment, and, before I had a chance to make any profound reflections, down came Mr. Dammit on the flat of his back, on the same side of the stile from which he had started. At the same instant I saw the old gentleman limping off at the top of his speed, having caught and wrapt up in his apron something that fell heavily into it from the darkness of the arch just over the turnstile. At all this I was much astonished; but I had no leisure to think, for Dammit lay particularly still, and I concluded that his feelings had been hurt, and that he stood in need of my assistance. I hurried up to him and found that he had received what might be termed a serious injury. The truth is, he had been deprived of his head, which after a close search I could not find anywhere; so I determined to take him home and send for the homoeopathists. In the meantime a thought struck me, and I threw open an adjacent window of the bridge, when the sad truth flashed upon me at once. About five feet just above the top of the turnstile, and crossing the arch of the foot-path so as to constitute a brace, there extended a flat iron bar, lying with its breadth horizontally, and forming one of a series that served to strengthen the structure throughout its extent. With the edge of this brace it appeared evident that the neck of my unfortunate friend had come precisely in contact.\n\nHe did not long survive his terrible loss. The homoeopathists did not give him little enough physic, and what little they did give him he hesitated to take. So in the end he grew worse, and at length died, a lesson to all riotous livers. I bedewed his grave with my tears, worked a bar sinister on his family escutcheon, and, for the general expenses of his funeral, sent in my very moderate bill to the transcendentalists. The scoundrels refused to pay it, so I had Mr. Dammit dug up at once, and sold him for dog's meat.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Colloquy of Monos and Una by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThese things are in the future.\n\n\u2014Sophocles: Antig.\n\nUna: \"Born again?\"\n\nMonos: Yes, fairest and best beloved Una, \"born again.\" These were the words upon whose mystical meaning I had so long pondered, rejecting the explanations of the priesthood, until Death itself resolved for me the secret.\n\nUna: Death!\n\nMonos: How strangely, sweet Una, you echo my words! I observe, too, a vacillation in your step, a joyous inquietude in your eyes. You are confused and oppressed by the majestic novelty of the Life Eternal. Yes, it was of Death I spoke. And here how singularly sounds that word which of old was wont to bring terror to all hearts, throwing a mildew upon all pleasures!\n\nUna: Ah, Death, the spectre which sate at all feasts! How often, Monos, did we lose ourselves in speculations upon its nature! How mysteriously did it act as a check to human bliss, saying unto it \"thus far and no further!\" That earnest mutual love, my own Monos, which burned within our bosoms \u2014 how vainly did we flatter ourselves, feeling happy in its first upspringing, that our happiness would strengthen with its strength! Alas! as it grew, so grew in our hearts the dread of that evil hour which was hurrying to separate us forever! Thus, in time, it became painful to love. Hate would have been mercy then.\n\nMonos: Speak not here of these griefs, dear Una \u2014 mine, mine, forever now!\n\nUna: But the memory of past sorrow \u2014 is it not present joy? I have much to say yet of the things which have been. Above all, I burn to know the incidents of your own passage through the dark Valley and Shadow.\n\nMonos: And when did the radiant Una ask any thing of her Monos in vain? I will be minute in relating all \u2014 but at what point shall the weird narrative begin?\n\nUna: At what point?\n\nMonos: You have said.\n\nUna: Monos, I comprehend you. In Death we have both learned the propensity of man to define the indefinable. I will not say, then, commence with the moment of life's cessation \u2014 but commence with that sad, sad instant when, the fever having abandoned you, you sank into a breathless and motionless torpor, and I pressed down your pallid eyelids with the passionate fingers of love.\n\nMonos: One word first, my Una, in regard to man's general condition at this epoch. You will remember that one or two of the wise among our forefathers \u2014 wise in fact, although not in the world's esteem \u2014 had ventured to doubt the propriety of the term \"improvement,\" as applied to the progress of our civilization. There were periods in each of the five or six centuries immediately preceding our dissolution, when arose some vigorous intellect, boldly contending for those principles whose truth appears now, to our disenfranchised reason, so utterly obvious \u2014 principles which should have taught our race to submit to the guidance of the natural laws, rather than attempt their control. At long intervals some master-minds appeared, looking upon each advance in practical science as a retro-gradation in the true utility. Occasionally the poetic intellect \u2014 that intellect which we now feel to have been the most exalted of all \u2014 since those truths which to us were of the most enduring importance could only be reached by that analogy which speaks in proof-tones to the imagination alone, and to the unaided reason bears no weight \u2014 occasionally did this poetic intellect proceed a step farther in the evolving of the vague idea of the philosophic, and find in the mystic parable that tells of the tree of knowledge, and of its forbidden fruit, death-producing, a distinct intimation that knowledge was not meet for man in the infant condition of his soul. And these men, the poets, living and perishing amid the scorn of the \"utilitarians\" \u2014 or rough pedants, who arrogated to themselves a title which could have been properly applied only to the scorned \u2014 these men, the poets, ponder piningly, yet not unwisely, upon the ancient days when our wants were not more simple than our enjoyments were keen \u2014 days when mirth was a word unknown, so solemnly deep-toned was happiness \u2014 holy, august and blissful days, when blue rivers ran undammed, between hills unhewn, into far forest solitudes, primeval, odorous, and unexplored.\n\nYet these noble exceptions from the general misrule served but to strengthen it by opposition. Alas! we had fallen upon the most evil of all our evil days. The great \"movement\" \u2014 that was the cant term \u2014 went on: a diseased commotion, moral and physical. Art \u2014 the Arts \u2014 arose supreme, and, once enthroned, cast chains upon the intellect which had elevated them to power. Man, because he could not but acknowledge the majesty of Nature, fell into childish exultation at his acquired and still increasing dominion over her elements. Even while he stalked a God in his own fancy, an infantine imbecility came over him. As might be supposed from the origin of his disorder, he grew infected with system, and with abstraction. He enwrapped himself in generalities. Among other odd ideas, that of universal equality gained ground; and in the face of analogy and of God \u2014 in despite of the loud warning voice of the laws of gradation so visibly pervading all things in Earth and Heaven \u2014 wild attempts at an omni-prevalent Democracy were made. Yet this evil sprang necessarily from the leading evil \u2014 Knowledge. Man could not both know and succumb. Meantime huge smoking cities arose, innumerable. Green leaves shrank before the hot breath of furnaces. The fair face of Nature was deformed as with the ravages of some loathsome disease. And methinks, sweet Una, even our slumbering sense of the forced and of the farfetched might have arrested us here. But now it appears that we had worked out our own destruction in the perversion of our taste, or rather in the blind neglect of its culture in the schools. For, in truth, it was at this crisis that taste alone \u2014 that faculty which, holding a middle position between the pure intellect and the moral sense, could never safely have been disregarded \u2014 it was now that taste alone could have led us gently back to Beauty, to Nature, and to Life. But alas for the pure contemplative spirit and majestic intuition of Plato! Alas for the mousika which he justly regarded as an all sufficient education for the soul! Alas for him and for it! \u2014 since both were most desperately needed when both were most entirely forgotten or despised.\n\nPascal, a philosopher whom we both love, has said, how truly! \u2014 \"que tout notre raisonnement se reduit a ceder au sentiment,\" and it is not impossible that the sentiment of the natural, had time permitted it, would have regained its old ascendancy over the harsh mathematical reason of the schools. But this thing was not to be. Prematurely induced by intemperance of knowledge, the old age of the world drew on. This the mass of mankind saw not, or, living lustily although unhappily, affected not to see. But, for myself, the Earth's records had taught me to look for widest ruin as the price of highest civilization. I had imbibed a prescience of our Fate from comparison of China the simple and enduring, with Assyria the architect, with Egypt the astrologer, with Nubia, more crafty than either, the turbulent mother of all Arts. In history of these regions I met with a ray from the Future. The individual artificialities of the three latter were local diseases of the Earth, and in their individual overthrows we had seen local remedies applied; but for the infected world at large I could anticipate no regeneration save in death. That man, as a race, should not become extinct, I saw that he must be \"born again.\"\n\nAnd now it was, fairest and dearest, that we wrapped our spirits, daily, in dreams, Now it was that, in twilight, we discoursed of the days to come, when the Art-scarred surface of the Earth, having undergone that purification which alone could efface its rectangular obscenities, should clothe itself anew in the verdure and the mountain-slopes and the smiling waters of Paradise, and be rendered at length a fit dwelling-place for man:\u2014 for man the Death-purged \u2014 for man to whose now exalted intellect there should be poison in knowledge no more \u2014 for the redeemed, regenerated, blissful, and now immortal, but still for the material, man.\n\nUna: Well do I remember these conversations, dear Monos; but the epoch of the fiery overthrow was not so near at hand as we believed, and as the corruption you indicate did surely warrant us in believing. Men lived; and died individually. You yourself sickened, and passed into the grave; and thither your constant Una speedily followed you. And though the century which has since elapsed, and whose conclusion brings us thus together once more, tortured our slumbering senses with no impatience of duration, yet, my Monos, it was a century still.\n\nMonos: Say, rather, a point in the vague infinity. Unquestionably, it was in the Earth's dotage that I died. Wearied at heart with anxieties which had their origin in the general turmoil and decay, I succumbed to the fierce fever. After some few days of pain, and many of dreamy delirium replete with ecstasy, the manifestations of which you mistook for pain, while I longed but was impotent to undeceive you \u2014 after some days there came upon me, as you have said, a breathless and motionless torpor; and this was termed Death by those who stood around me.\n\nWords are vague things. My condition did not deprive me of sentience. It appeared to me not greatly dissimilar to the extreme quiescence of him, who, having slumbered long and profoundly, lying motionless and fully prostrate in a midsummer noon, begins to steal slowly back into consciousness, through the mere sufficiency of his sleep, and without being awakened by external disturbances.\n\nI breathed no longer. The pulses were still. The heart had ceased to beat. Volition had not departed, but was powerless. The senses were unusually active, although eccentrically so \u2014 assuming often each other's functions at random. The taste and the smell were inextricably confounded, and became one sentiment, abnormal and intense. The rosewater with which your tenderness had moistened my lips to the last, affected me with sweet fancies of flowers \u2014 fantastic flowers, far more lovely than any of the old Earth, but whose prototypes we have here blooming around us. The eyelids, transparent and bloodless, offered no complete impediment to vision. As volition was in abeyance the balls could not roll in their sockets \u2014 but all objects within the range of the visual hemisphere were seen with more or less distinctness; the rays which fell upon the external retina, or into the corner of the eye, producing a more vivid effect than those which struck the front or anterior surface. Yet, in the former instance, this effect was so far anomalous that I appreciated it only as sound \u2014 sound sweet or discordant as the matters presenting themselves at my side were light or dark in shade \u2014 curved or angular in outline. The hearing at the same time, although excited in degree, was not irregular in action \u2014 estimating real sounds with an extravagance of precision, not less than of sensibility. Touch had undergone a modification more peculiar. Its impressions were tardily received, but pertinaciously retained, and resulted always in the highest physical pleasure. Thus the pressure of your sweet fingers upon my eyelids, at first only recognized through vision, at length, long after their removal, filled my whole being with a sensual delight immeasurable. I say with a sensual delight. All my perceptions were purely sensual. The materials furnished the passive brain by the senses were not in the least degree wrought into shape by the deceased understanding. Of pain there was some little; of pleasure there was much; but of moral pain or pleasure none at all. Thus your wild sobs floated into my ears with all their mournful cadences, and were appreciated in their every variation of sad tone; but they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave them birth; while the large and constant tears which fell upon my face, telling the bystanders of a heart which broke, thrilled every fibre of my frame with ecstasy alone. And this was in truth the Death of which these bystanders spoke reverently, in low whispers \u2014 you, sweet Una, gaspingly, with loud cries.\n\nThey attired me for the coffin \u2014 three or four dark figures which flitted busily to and fro. As these crossed the direct line of my vision they affected me as forms; but upon passing to my side their images impressed me with the idea of shrieks, groans, and other dismal expressions of terror, of horror, or of wo. You alone, habited in a white robe, passed in all directions musically about me.\n\nThe day waned; and, as its light faded away, I became possessed by a vague uneasiness \u2014 an anxiety such as the sleeper feels when sad real sounds fall continuously within his ear \u2014 low distant bell tones, solemn, at long but equal intervals, and commingling with melancholy dreams. Night arrived; and with its shadows a heavy discomfort. It oppressed my limbs with the oppression of some dull weight, and was palpable. There was also a moaning sound, not unlike the distant reverberation of surf, but more continuous, which beginning with the first twilight, had grown in strength with the darkness. Suddenly lights were brought into the room, and this reverberation became forthwith interrupted into frequent unequal bursts of the same sound, but less dreary and less distinct. The ponderous oppression was in a great measure relieved; and, issuing from the flame of each lamp, (for there were many,) there flowed unbrokenly into my ears a strain of melodious monotone. And when now, dear Una, approaching the bed upon which I lay outstretched, you sat gently by my side, breathing odor from your sweet lips, and pressing them upon my brow, there arose tremulously within my bosom, and mingling with the merely physical sensations which circumstances had called forth, a something akin to sentiment itself \u2014 a feeling that, half appreciating, half responded to your earnest love and sorrow, \u2014 but this feeling took no root in the pulseless heart, and seemed indeed rather a shadow than a reality, and faded quickly away, first into extreme quiescence, and then into a purely sensual pleasure as before.\n\nAnd now, from the wreck and the chaos of the usual senses, there appeared to have arisen within me a sixth, all perfect. In its exercise I found a wild delight yet a delight still physical, inasmuch as the understanding had in it no part. Motion in the animal frame had fully ceased. No muscle quivered; no nerve thrilled; no artery throbbed. But there seemed to have sprung up in the brain, that of which no words could convey to the merely human intelligence even an indistinct conception. Let me term it a mental pendulous pulsation. It was the moral embodiment of man's abstract idea of Time. By the absolute equalization of this movement \u2014 or of such as this \u2014 had the cycles of the firmamental orbs themselves, been adjusted. By its aid I measured the irregularities of the clock upon the mantel, and of the watches of the attendants. Their tickings came sonorously to my ears. The slightest deviation from the true proportion \u2014 and these deviations were omni-prevalent \u2014 affected me just as violations of abstract truth were wont, on earth, to affect the moral sense. Although no two of the time-pieces in the chamber struck individual seconds accurately together, yet I had no difficulty in holding steadily in mind the tones, and the respective momentary errors of each. And this \u2014 this keen, perfect, self-existing sentiment of duration \u2014 this sentiment existing (as man could not possibly have conceived it to exist) independently of any succession of events \u2014 this idea \u2014 this sixth sense, upspringing from the ashes of the rest, was the first obvious and certain step of the intemporal soul upon the threshold of the temporal Eternity.\n\nIt was midnight; and you still sat by my side. All others had departed from the chamber of Death. They had deposited me in the coffin. The lamps burned flickeringly; for this I knew by the tremulousness of the monotonous strains. But, suddenly these strains diminished in distinctness and in volume. Finally they ceased. The perfume in my nostrils died away. Forms affected my vision no longer. The oppression of the Darkness uplifted itself from my bosom. A dull shock like that of electricity pervaded my frame, and was followed by total loss of the idea of contact. All of what man has termed sense was merged in the sole consciousness of entity, and in the one abiding sentiment of duration. The mortal body had been at length stricken with the hand of the deadly Decay.\n\nYet had not all of sentience departed; for the consciousness and the sentiment remaining supplied some of its functions by a lethargic intuition. I appreciated the direful change now in operation upon the flesh, and, as the dreamer is sometimes aware of the bodily presence of one who leans over him, so, sweet Una, I still dully felt that you sat by my side. So, too, when the noon of the second day came, I was not unconscious of those movements which displaced you from my side, which confined me within the coffin, which deposited me within the hearse, which bore me to the grave, which lowered me within it, which heaped heavily the mould upon me, and which thus left me, in blackness and corruption, to my sad and solemn slumbers with the worm.\n\nAnd here, in the prison-house which has few secrets to disclose, they rolled away days and weeks and months; and the soul watched narrowly each second as it flew, and, without effort, took record of its flight \u2014 without effort and without object.\n\nA year passed. The consciousness of being had grown hourly more indistinct, and that of mere locality had, in great measure, usurped its position. The idea of entity was becoming merged in that of place. The narrow space immediately surrounding what had been the body, was now growing to be the body itself. At length, as often happens to the sleeper (by sleep and its world alone is Death imaged) \u2014 at length, as sometimes happened on Earth to the deep slumberer, when some flitting light half startled him into awaking, yet left him half enveloped in dreams \u2014 so to me, in the strict embrace of the Shadow, came that light which alone might have had power to startle \u2014 the light of enduring Love. Men toiled at the grave in which I lay darkling. They upthrew the damp earth. Upon my mouldering bones there descended the coffin of Una.\n\nAnd now again all was void. That nebulous light had been extinguished. That feeble thrill had vibrated itself into quiescence. Many lustra had supervened. Dust had returned to dust. The worm had food no more. The sense of being at length utterly departed, and there reigned in its stead \u2014 instead of all things \u2014 dominant and perpetual \u2014 the autocrats Place and Time. For that which was not \u2014 for that which had no form \u2014 for that which had no thought \u2014 for that which had no sentience \u2014 for that which was soulless, yet of which matter formed no portion \u2014 for all this nothingness, yet for all this immortality, the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Island of the Fay by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002'Nullus enim locus sine genio est.' \u2014Servius\n\n\"La musique,\" says Marmontel, in those \"Contes Moraux\" which in all our translations, we have insisted upon calling \"Moral Tales,\" as if in mockery of their spirit \u2014\"la musique est le seul des talents qui jouissent de lui-meme; tous les autres veulent des temoins.\" He here confounds the pleasure derivable from sweet sounds with the capacity for creating them. No more than any other talent, is that for music susceptible of complete enjoyment, where there is no second party to appreciate its exercise. And it is only in common with other talents that it produces effects which may be fully enjoyed in solitude. The idea which the raconteur has either failed to entertain clearly, or has sacrificed in its expression to his national love of point, is, doubtless, the very tenable one that the higher order of music is the most thoroughly estimated when we are exclusively alone. The proposition, in this form, will be admitted at once by those who love the lyre for its own sake, and for its spiritual uses. But there is one pleasure still within the reach of fallen mortality and perhaps only one \u2014 which owes even more than does music to the accessory sentiment of seclusion. I mean the happiness experienced in the contemplation of natural scenery. In truth, the man who would behold aright the glory of God upon earth must in solitude behold that glory. To me, at least, the presence \u2014 not of human life only, but of life in any other form than that of the green things which grow upon the soil and are voiceless \u2014 is a stain upon the landscape \u2014 is at war with the genius of the scene. I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all \u2014 I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole \u2014 a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain \u2014 a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.\n\nOur telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on every hand \u2014 notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the priesthood \u2014 that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are accurately such as, within a given surface, to include the greatest possible amount of matter; \u2014 while the surfaces themselves are so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it. And since we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a principle \u2014 indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the leading principle in the operations of Deity \u2014 it is scarcely logical to imagine it confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it, and not extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within cycle without end \u2014 yet all revolving around one far-distant centre which is the God-head, may we not analogically suppose in the same manner, life within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine? In short, we are madly erring, through self-esteem, in believing man, in either his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment in the universe than that vast \"clod of the valley\" which he tills and contemns, and to which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than that he does not behold it in operation.\n\nThese fancies, and such as these, have always given to my meditations among the mountains and the forests, by the rivers and the ocean, a tinge of what the everyday world would not fail to term fantastic. My wanderings amid such scenes have been many, and far-searching, and often solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through many a dim, deep valley, or gazed into the reflected Heaven of many a bright lake, has been an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed and gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman was it who said in allusion to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that, \"la solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude est une belle chose?\" The epigram cannot be gainsayed; but the necessity is a thing that does not exist.\n\nIt was during one of my lonely journeyings, amid a far distant region of mountain locked within mountain, and sad rivers and melancholy tarn writhing or sleeping within all \u2014 that I chanced upon a certain rivulet and island. I came upon them suddenly in the leafy June, and threw myself upon the turf, beneath the branches of an unknown odorous shrub, that I might doze as I contemplated the scene. I felt that thus only should I look upon it \u2014 such was the character of phantasm which it wore.\n\nOn all sides \u2014 save to the west, where the sun was about sinking \u2014 arose the verdant walls of the forest. The little river which turned sharply in its course, and was thus immediately lost to sight, seemed to have no exit from its prison, but to be absorbed by the deep green foliage of the trees to the east \u2014 while in the opposite quarter (so it appeared to me as I lay at length and glanced upward) there poured down noiselessly and continuously into the valley, a rich golden and crimson waterfall from the sunset fountains of the sky.\n\nAbout midway in the short vista which my dreamy vision took in, one small circular island, profusely verdured, reposed upon the bosom of the stream.\n\n\u2003So blended bank and shadow there\n\n\u2003That each seemed pendulous in air\n\nSo mirror-like was the glassy water, that it was scarcely possible to say at what point upon the slope of the emerald turf its crystal dominion began.\n\nMy position enabled me to include in a single view both the eastern and western extremities of the islet; and I observed a singularly-marked difference in their aspects. The latter was all one radiant harem of garden beauties. It glowed and blushed beneath the eyes of the slant sunlight, and fairly laughed with flowers. The grass was short, springy, sweet-scented, and Asphodel-interspersed. The trees were lithe, mirthful, erect \u2014 bright, slender, and graceful \u2014 of eastern figure and foliage, with bark smooth, glossy, and parti-colored. There seemed a deep sense of life and joy about all; and although no airs blew from out the heavens, yet every thing had motion through the gentle sweepings to and fro of innumerable butterflies, that might have been mistaken for tulips with wings.\n\nThe other or eastern end of the isle was whelmed in the blackest shade. A sombre, yet beautiful and peaceful gloom here pervaded all things. The trees were dark in color, and mournful in form and attitude, wreathing themselves into sad, solemn, and spectral shapes that conveyed ideas of mortal sorrow and untimely death. The grass wore the deep tint of the cypress, and the heads of its blades hung droopingly, and hither and thither among it were many small unsightly hillocks, low and narrow, and not very long, that had the aspect of graves, but were not; although over and all about them the rue and the rosemary clambered. The shade of the trees fell heavily upon the water, and seemed to bury itself therein, impregnating the depths of the element with darkness. I fancied that each shadow, as the sun descended lower and lower, separated itself sullenly from the trunk that gave it birth, and thus became absorbed by the stream; while other shadows issued momently from the trees, taking the place of their predecessors thus entombed.\n\nThis idea, having once seized upon my fancy, greatly excited it, and I lost myself forthwith in revery. \"If ever island were enchanted,\" said I to myself, \"this is it. This is the haunt of the few gentle Fays who remain from the wreck of the race. Are these green tombs theirs? \u2014 or do they yield up their sweet lives as mankind yield up their own? In dying, do they not rather waste away mournfully, rendering unto God, little by little, their existence, as these trees render up shadow after shadow, exhausting their substance unto dissolution? What the wasting tree is to the water that imbibes its shade, growing thus blacker by what it preys upon, may not the life of the Fay be to the death which engulfs it?\"\n\nAs I thus mused, with half-shut eyes, while the sun sank rapidly to rest, and eddying currents careered round and round the island, bearing upon their bosom large, dazzling, white flakes of the bark of the sycamore-flakes which, in their multiform positions upon the water, a quick imagination might have converted into any thing it pleased, while I thus mused, it appeared to me that the form of one of those very Fays about whom I had been pondering made its way slowly into the darkness from out the light at the western end of the island. She stood erect in a singularly fragile canoe, and urged it with the mere phantom of an oar. While within the influence of the lingering sunbeams, her attitude seemed indicative of joy \u2014 but sorrow deformed it as she passed within the shade. Slowly she glided along, and at length rounded the islet and re-entered the region of light. \"The revolution which has just been made by the Fay,\" continued I, musingly, \"is the cycle of the brief year of her life. She has floated through her winter and through her summer. She is a year nearer unto Death; for I did not fail to see that, as she came into the shade, her shadow fell from her, and was swallowed up in the dark water, making its blackness more black.\"\n\nAnd again the boat appeared and the Fay, but about the attitude of the latter there was more of care and uncertainty and less of elastic joy. She floated again from out the light and into the gloom (which deepened momently) and again her shadow fell from her into the ebony water, and became absorbed into its blackness. And again and again she made the circuit of the island, (while the sun rushed down to his slumbers), and at each issuing into the light there was more sorrow about her person, while it grew feebler and far fainter and more indistinct, and at each passage into the gloom there fell from her a darker shade, which became whelmed in a shadow more black. But at length when the sun had utterly departed, the Fay, now the mere ghost of her former self, went disconsolately with her boat into the region of the ebony flood, and that she issued thence at all I cannot say, for darkness fell over an things and I beheld her magical figure no more.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles\n\n\u2003assumed when he hid himself among women,\n\n\u2003although puzzling questions are not beyond all conjecture.\n\n\u2014Sir Thomas Browne, Urn-Burial\n\nThe mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their effects. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment. As the strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles. He derives pleasure from even the most trivial occupations bringing his talents into play. He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, of hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension preternatural. His results, brought about by the very soul and essence of method, have, in truth, the whole air of intuition. The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyze. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract \u2014 Let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherche movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometimes indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.\n\nWhist has long been noted for its influence upon what is termed the calculating power; and men of the highest order of intellect have been known to take an apparently unaccountable delight in it, while eschewing chess as frivolous. Beyond doubt there is nothing of a similar nature so greatly tasking the faculty of analysis. The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind. When I say proficiency, I mean that perfection in the game which includes a comprehension of all the sources whence legitimate advantage may be derived. These are not only manifold but multiform, and lie frequently among recesses of thought altogether inaccessible to the ordinary understanding. To observe attentively is to remember distinctly; and, so far, the concentrative chess-player will do very well at whist; while the rules of Hoyle (themselves based upon the mere mechanism of the game) are sufficiently and generally comprehensible. Thus to have a retentive memory, and to proceed by \"the book,\" are points commonly regarded as the sum total of good playing. But it is in matters beyond the limits of mere rule that the skill of the analyst is evinced. He makes, in silence, a host of observations and inferences. So, perhaps, do his companions; and the difference in the extent of the information obtained, lies not so much in the validity of the inference as in the quality of the observation. The necessary knowledge is that of what to observe. Our player confines himself not at all; nor, because the game is the object, does he reject deductions from things external to the game. He examines the countenance of his partner, comparing it carefully with that of each of his opponents. He considers the mode of assorting the cards in each hand; often counting trump by trump, and honor by honor, through the glances bestowed by their holders upon each. He notes every variation of face as the play progresses, gathering a fund of thought from the differences in the expression of certainty, of surprise, of triumph, or chagrin. From the manner of gathering up a trick he judges whether the person taking it can make another in the suit. He recognizes what is played through feint, by the air with which it is thrown upon the table. A casual or inadvertent word; the accidental dropping or turning of a card, with the accompanying anxiety or carelessness in regard to its concealment; the counting of the tricks, with the order of their arrangement; embarrassment, hesitation, eagerness or trepidation \u2014 all afford, to his apparently intuitive perception, indications of the true state of affairs. The first two or three rounds having been played, he is in full possession of the contents of each hand, and thenceforward puts down his cards with as absolute a precision of purpose as if the rest of the party had turned outward the faces of their own.\n\nThe analytical power should not be confounded with simple ingenuity; for while the analyst is necessarily ingenious, the ingenious man often remarkably incapable of analysis. The constructive or combining power, by which ingenuity is usually manifested, and which the phrenologists (I believe erroneously) have assigned a separate organ, supposing it a primitive faculty, has been so frequently seen in those whose intellect bordered otherwise upon idiocy, as to have attracted general observation among writers on morals. Between ingenuity and the analytic ability there exists a difference far greater, indeed, than that between the fancy and the imagination, but of a character very strictly analogous. It will found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.\n\nThe narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced.\n\nResiding in Paris during the spring and part of the summer of 18 \u2014 I there became acquainted with a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. This young gentleman was of an excellent \u2014 indeed of an illustrious family, but, by a variety of untoward events, had been reduced to such poverty that the energy of his character succumbed beneath it, and he ceased to bestir himself in the world, or to care for the retrieval of his fortunes. By courtesy of his creditors, there still remained in his possession a small remnant of his patrimony; and, upon the income arising from this, he managed, by means of a rigorous economy, to procure the necessaries of life, without troubling himself about its superfluities. Books, indeed, were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained.\n\nOur first meeting was at an obscure library in the Rue Montmartre, where the accident of our both being in search of the same very rare and very remarkable volume, brought us into closer communion. We saw each other again and again. I was deeply interested in the little family history which he detailed to me with all that candor which a Frenchman indulges whenever mere self is the theme. I was astonished, too, at the vast extent of his reading; and, above all, I felt my soul enkindled within me by the wild fervor, and the vivid freshness of his imagination. Seeking in Paris the objects I then sought, I felt that the society of such a man would be to me a treasure beyond price; and this feeling I frankly confided to him. It was at length arranged that we should live together during my stay in the city; and as my worldly circumstances were somewhat less embarrassed than his own, I was permitted to be at the expense of renting, and furnishing in a style which suited the rather fantastic gloom of our common temper, a time-eaten and grotesque mansion, long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire, and tottering to its fall in a retired and desolate portion of the Faubourg St. Germain.\n\nHad the routine of our life at this place been known to the world, we should have been regarded as madmen \u2014 although, perhaps, as madmen of a harmless nature. Our seclusion was perfect. We admitted no visitors. Indeed the locality of our retirement had been carefully kept a secret from my own former associates; and it had been many years since Dupin had ceased to know or be known in Paris. We existed within ourselves alone.\n\nIt was a freak of fancy in my friend (for what else shall I call it?) to be enamored of the Night for her own sake; and into this bizarrerie, as into all his others, I quietly fell; giving myself up to his wild whims with a perfect abandon. The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always; but we could counterfeit her presence. At the first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we then busied our souls in dreams \u2014 reading, writing, or conversing, until warned by the clock of the advent of the true Darkness. Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm and arm, continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.\n\nAt such times I could not help remarking and admiring (although from his rich ideality I had been prepared to expect it) a peculiar analytic ability in Dupin. He seemed, too, to take an eager delight in its exercise \u2014 if not exactly in its display \u2014 and did not hesitate to confess the pleasure thus derived. He boasted to me, with a low chuckling laugh, that most men, in respect to himself, wore windows in their bosoms, and was wont to follow up such assertions by direct and very startling proofs of his intimate knowledge of my own. His manner at these moments was frigid and abstract; his eyes were vacant in expression; while his voice, usually a rich tenor, rose into a treble which would have sounded petulantly but for the deliberateness and entire distinctness of the enunciation. Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin \u2014 the creative and the resolvent.\n\nLet it not be supposed, from what I have just said, that I am detailing any mystery, or penning any romance. What I have described in the Frenchman, was merely the result of an excited, or perhaps of a diseased intelligence. But of the character of his remarks at the periods in question an example will best convey the idea.\n\nWe were strolling one night down a long dirty street, in the vicinity of the Palais Royal. Being both, apparently, occupied with thought, neither of us had spoken a syllable for fifteen minutes at least. All at once Dupin broke forth with these words:\u2014\n\n\"He is a very little fellow, that's true, and would do better for the Theatre des Varietes.\"\n\n\"There can be no doubt of that,\" I replied unwittingly, and not at first observing (so much had I been absorbed in reflection) the extraordinary manner in which the speaker had chimed in with my meditations. In an instant afterward I recollected myself, and my astonishment was profound.\n\n\"Dupin,\" said I, gravely, \"this is beyond my comprehension. I do not hesitate to say that I am amazed, and can scarcely credit my senses. How was it possible you should know I was thinking of \u2014?\" Here I paused, to ascertain beyond a doubt whether he really knew of whom I thought.\n\n\u2014\"of Chantilly,\" said he, \"why do you pause? You were remarking to yourself that his diminutive figure unfitted him for tragedy.\"\n\nThis was precisely what had formed the subject of my reflections. Chantilly was a quondam cobbler of the Rue St. Denis, who, becoming stage-mad, had attempted the role of Xerxes, in Crebillon's tragedy so called, and been notoriously Pasquinaded for his pains.\n\n\"Tell me, for Heaven's sake,\" I exclaimed, \"the method \u2014 if method there is \u2014 by which you have been enabled to fathom my soul in this matter.\" In fact I was even more startled than I would have been willing to express.\n\n\"It was the fruiterer,\" replied my friend, \"who brought you to the conclusion that the mender of soles was not of sufficient height for Xerxes et id genus omne.\"\n\n\"The fruiterer! \u2014 you astonish me \u2014 I know no fruiterer whomsoever.\"\n\n\"The man who ran up against you as we entered the street \u2014 it may have been fifteen minutes ago.\"\n\nI now remembered that, in fact, a fruiterer, carrying upon his head a large basket of apples, had nearly thrown me down, by accident, as we passed from the Rue C\u2014 into the thoroughfare where we stood; but what this had to do with Chantilly I could not possibly understand.\n\nThere was not a particle of charlatanerie about Dupin. \"I will explain,\" he said, \"and that you may comprehend all clearly, we will explain,\" he said, \"and that you may comprehend all clearly, we will first retrace the course of your meditations, from the moment in which I spoke to you until that of the rencontre with the fruiterer in question. The larger links of the chain run thus \u2014 Chantilly, Orion, Dr. Nichols, Epicurus, Stereotomy, the street stones, the fruiterer.\"\n\nThere are few persons who have not, at some period of their lives, amused themselves in retracing the steps by which particular conclusions of their own minds have been attained. The occupation is often full of interest; and he who attempts it for the first time is astonished by the apparently illimitable distance and incoherence between the starting-point and the goal. What, then, must have been my amazement when I heard the Frenchman speak what he had just spoken, and when I could not help acknowledging that he had spoken the truth. He continued:\n\n\"We had been talking of horses, if I remember aright, just before leaving the Rue C\u2014. This was the last subject we discussed. As we crossed into this street, a fruiterer, with a large basket upon his head, brushing quickly past us, thrust you upon a pile of paving-stones collected at a spot where the causeway is undergoing repair. You stepped upon one of the loose fragments) slipped, slightly strained your ankle, appeared vexed or sulky, muttered a few words, turned to look at the pile, and then proceeded in silence. I was not particularly attentive to what you did; but observation has become with me, of late, a species of necessity.\n\n\"You kept your eyes upon the ground \u2014 glancing, with a petulant expression, at the holes and ruts in the pavement, (so that I saw you were still thinking of the stones,) until we reached the little alley called Lamartine, which has been paved, by way of experiment, with the overlapping and riveted blocks. Here your countenance brightened up, and, perceiving your lips move, I could not doubt that you murmured the word 'stereotomy,' a term very affectedly applied to this species of pavement. I knew that you could not say to yourself 'stereotomy' without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus; and since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion, and I certainly expected that you would do so. You did look up; and I was now assured that I had correctly followed your steps. But in that bitter tirade upon Chantilly, which appeared in yesterday's 'Musee,' the satirist, making some disgraceful allusions to the cobbler's change of name upon assuming the buskin, quoted a Latin line about which we have often conversed. I mean the line:\n\n\u2002Perdidit antiquum litera prima sonum.\n\nI had told you that this was in reference to Orion, formerly written Urion; and, from certain pungencies connected with this explanation, I was aware that you could not have forgotten it. It was clear, therefore, that you would not fall to combine the ideas of Orion and Chantilly. That you did combine them I say by the character of the smile which passed over your lips. You thought of the poor cobbler's immolation. So far, you had been stooping in your gait; but now I saw you draw yourself up to your full height. I was then sure that you reflected upon the diminutive figure of Chantilly. At this point I interrupted your meditations to remark that as, in fact, he was a very little fellow \u2014 that Chantilly \u2014 he would do better at the Theatre des Varietes.\"\n\nNot long after this, we were looking over an evening edition of the \"Gazette des Tribunaux,\" when the following paragraphs arrested our attention. \"Extraordinary Murders. \u2014 This morning, about three o'clock, the inhabitants of the Quartier St. Roch were aroused from sleep by a succession of terrific shrieks, issuing, apparently, from the fourth story of a house in the Rue Morgue, known to be in the sole occupancy of one Madame L'Espanaye, and her daughter, Mademoiselle Camille L'Espanaye. After some delay, occasioned by a fruitless attempt to procure admission in the usual manner, the gateway was broken in with a crowbar, and eight or ten of the neighbors entered, accompanied by two gendarmes. By this time the cries had ceased; but, as the party rushed up the first flight of stairs, two or more rough voices, in angry contention, were distinguished, and seemed to proceed from the upper part of the house. As the second landing was reached, these sounds, also, had ceased, and everything remained perfectly quiet. The party spread themselves, and hurried from room to room. Upon arriving at a large back chamber in the fourth story, (the door of which, being found locked, with the key inside, was forced open,) a spectacle presented itself which struck every one present not less with horror than with astonishment.\n\n\"The apartment was in the wildest disorder \u2014 the furniture broken and thrown about in all directions. There was only one bedstead; and from this the bed had been removed, and thrown into the middle of the floor. On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood. On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood, and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots. Upon the floor were found four Napoleons, an ear-ring of topaz, three large silver spoons, three smaller of metal d'Alger, and two bags, containing nearly four thousand francs in gold. The drawers of a bureau, which stood in one corner, were open, and had been, apparently, rifled, although many articles still remained in them. A small iron safe was discovered under the bed (not under the bedstead). It was open, with the key still in the door. It had no contents beyond a few old letters, and other papers of little consequence.\n\n\"Of Madame L'Espanaye no traces were here seen; but an unusual quantity of soot being observed in the fire-place, a search was made in the chimney, and (horrible to relate!) the corpse of the daughter, head downward, was dragged therefrom; it having been thus forced up the narrow aperture for a considerable distance. The body was quite warm. Upon examining it, many excoriations were perceived, no doubt occasioned by the violence with which it had been thrust up and disengaged. Upon the face were many severe scratches, and, upon the throat, dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger nails, as if the deceased had been throttled to death.\n\n\"After a thorough investigation of every portion of the house, without farther discovery, the party made its way into a small paved yard in the rear of the building, where lay the corpse of the old lady, with her throat so entirely cut that, upon an attempt to raise her, the head fell off. The body, as well as the head, was fearfully mutilated \u2014 the former so much so as scarcely to retain any semblance of humanity.\n\n\"To this horrible mystery there is not as yet, we believe, the slightest clew.\"\n\nThe next day's paper had these additional particulars.\n\n\"The Tragedy in the Rue Morgue. Many individuals have been examined in relation to this most extraordinary and frightful affair,\" [The word 'affaire' has not yet, in France, that levity of import which it conveys with us] \"but nothing whatever has transpired to throw light upon We give below all the material testimony elicited.\n\n\"Pauline Dubourg, laundress, deposes that she has known both the deceased for three years, having washed for them during that period. The old lady and her daughter seemed on good terms-very affectionate towards each other. They were excellent pay. Could not speak in regard to their mode or means of living. Believed that Madame L. told fortunes for a living. Was reputed to have money put by. Never met any persons in the house when she called for the clothes or took them home. Was sure that they had no servant in employ. There appeared to be no furniture in any part of the building except in the fourth story.\n\n\"Pierre Moreau, tobacconist, deposes that he has been in the habit of selling small quantities of tobacco and snuff to Madame L'Espanaye for nearly four years. Was born in the neighborhood, and has always resided there. The deceased and her daughter had occupied the house in which the corpses were found, for more than six years. It was formerly occupied by a jeweller, who under-let the upper rooms to various persons. The house was the property of Madame L. She became dissatisfied with the abuse of the premises by her tenant, and moved into them herself, refusing to let any portion. The old lady was childish. Witness had seen the daughter some five or six times during the six years. The two lived an exceedingly retired life \u2014 were reputed to have money. Had heard it said among the neighbors that Madame L. told fortunes \u2014 did not believe it. Had never seen any person enter the door except the old lady and her daughter, a porter once or twice, and a physician some eight or ten times.\n\n\"Many other persons, neighbors, gave evidence to the same effect. No one was spoken of as frequenting the house. It was not known whether there were any living connexions of Madame L. and her daughter. The shutters of the front windows were seldom opened. Those in the rear were always closed, with the exception of the large back room, fourth story. The house was a good house \u2014 not very old.\n\n\"Isidore Muset, gendarme, deposes that he was called to the house about three o'clock in the morning, and found some twenty or thirty persons at the gateway, endeavoring to gain admittance. Forced it open, at length, with a bayonet \u2014 not with a crowbar. Had but little difficulty in getting it open, on account of its being a double or folding gate, and bolted neither at bottom nor top. The shrieks were continued until the gate was forced \u2014 and then suddenly ceased. They seemed to be screams of some person (or persons) in great agony \u2014 were loud and drawn out, not short and quick. Witness led the way up stairs. Upon reaching the first landing, heard two voices in loud and angry contention-the one a gruff voice, the other much shriller \u2014 a very strange voice. Could distinguish some words of the former, which was that of a Frenchman. Was positive that it was not a woman's voice. Could distinguish the words 'sacre' and 'diable.' The shrill voice was that of a foreigner. Could not be sure whether it was the voice of a man or of a woman. Could not make out what was said, but believed the language to be Spanish. The state of the room and of the bodies was described by this witness as we described them yesterday.\n\n\"Henri Duval, a neighbor, and by trade a silversmith, deposes that he was one of the party who first entered the house. Corroborates the testimony of Muset in general. As soon as they forced an entrance, they reclosed the door, to keep out the crowd, which collected very fast, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. The shrill voice, the witness thinks, was that of an Italian. Was certain it was not French. Could not be sure that it was a man's voice. It might have been a woman's. Was not acquainted with the Italian language. Could not distinguish the words, but was convinced by the intonation that the speaker was an Italian. Knew Madame L. and her daughter. Had conversed with both frequently. Was sure that the shrill voice was not that of either of the deceased.\n\n\"\u2014 Odenheimer, restaurateur. This witness volunteered his testimony. Not speaking French, was examined through an interpreter. Is a native of Amsterdam. Was passing the house at the time of the shrieks. They lasted for several minutes \u2014 probably ten. They were long and loud \u2014 very awful and distressing. Was one of those who entered the building. Corroborated the previous evidence in every respect but one. Was sure that the shrill voice was that of a man \u2014 of a Frenchman. Could not distinguish the words uttered. They were loud and quick \u2014 unequal \u2014 spoken apparently in fear as well as in anger. The voice was harsh \u2014 not so much shrill as harsh. Could not call it a shrill voice. The gruff voice said repeatedly 'sacre,' 'diable' and once 'mon Dieu.'\n\n\"Jules Mignaud, banker, of the firm of Mignaud et Fils, Rue Deloraine. Is the elder Mignaud. Madame L'Espanaye had some property. Had opened an account with his baking house in the spring of the year \u2014(eight years previously). Made frequent deposits in small sums. Had checked for nothing until the third day before her death, when she took out in person the sum of 4000 francs. This sum was paid in gold, and a clerk sent home with the money.\n\n\"Adolphe Le Bon, clerk to Mignaud et Fils, deposes that on the day in question, about noon, he accompanied Madame L'Espanaye to her residence with the 4000 francs, put up in two bags. Upon the door being opened, Mademoiselle L. appeared and took from his hands one of the bags, while the old lady relieved him of the other. He then bowed and departed. Did not see any person in the street at the time. It is a bye-street \u2014 very lonely.\n\nWilliam Bird, tailor, deposes that he was one of the party who entered the house. Is an Englishman. Has lived in Paris two years. Was one of the first to ascend the stairs. Heard the voices in contention. The gruff voice was that of a Frenchman. Could make out several words, but cannot now remember all. Heard distinctly 'sacre' and 'mon Dieu.' There was a sound at the moment as if of several persons struggling \u2014 a scraping and scuffling sound. The shrill voice was very loud \u2014 louder than the gruff one. Is sure that it was not the voice of an Englishman. Appeared to be that of a German. Might have been a woman's voice. Does not understand German.\n\n\"Four of the above-named witnesses, being recalled, deposed that the door of the chamber in which was found the body of Mademoiselle L. was locked on the inside when the party reached it. Every thing was perfectly silent \u2014 no groans or noises of any kind. Upon forcing the door no person was seen. The windows, both of the back and front room, were down and firmly fastened from within. A door between the two rooms was closed, but not locked. The door leading from the front room into the passage was locked, with the key on the inside. A small room in the front of the house, on the fourth story, at the head of the passage, was open, the door being ajar. This room was crowded with old beds, boxes, and so forth. These were carefully removed and searched. There was not an inch of any portion of the house which was not carefully searched. Sweeps were sent up and down the chimneys. The house was a four story one, with garrets (mansardes). A trap-door on the roof was nailed down very securely \u2014 did not appear to have been opened for years. The time elapsing between the hearing of the voices in contention and the breaking open of the room door, was variously stated by the witnesses. Some made it as short as three minutes \u2014 some as long as five. The door was opened with difficulty.\n\n\"Alfonzo Garcio, undertaker, deposes that he resides in the Rue Morgue. Is a native of Spain. Was one of the party who entered the house. Did not proceed up stairs. Is nervous, and was apprehensive of the consequences of agitation. Heard the voices in contention. The gruff voice was that of a Frenchman. Could not distinguish what was said. The shrill voice was that of an Englishman \u2014 is sure of this. Does not understand the English language, but judges by the intonation.\n\n\"Alberto Montani, confectioner, deposes that he was among the first to ascend the stairs. Heard the voices in question. The gruff voice was that of a Frenchman. Distinguished several words. The speaker appeared to be expostulating. Could not make out the words of the shrill voice. Spoke quick and unevenly. Thinks it the voice of a Russian. Corroborates the general testimony. Is an Italian. Never conversed with a native of Russia.\n\n\"Several witnesses, recalled, here testified that the chimneys of all the rooms on the fourth story were too narrow to admit the passage of a human being. By 'sweeps' were meant cylindrical sweeping-brushes, such as are employed by those who clean chimneys. These brushes were passed up and down every flue in the house. There is no back passage by which any one could have descended while the party proceeded up stairs. The body of Mademoiselle L'Espanaye was so firmly wedged in the chimney that it could not be got down until four or five of the party united their strength.\n\n\"Paul Dumas, physician, deposes that he was called to view the bodies about day-break. They were both then lying on the sacking of the bedstead in the chamber where Mademoiselle L. was found. The corpse of the young lady was much bruised and excoriated. The fact that it had been thrust up the chimney would sufficiently account for these appearances. The throat was greatly chafed. There were several deep scratches just below the chin, together with a series of livid spots which were evidently the impression of fingers. The face was fearfully discolored, and the eye-balls protruded. The tongue had been partially bitten through. A large bruise was discovered upon the pit of the stomach, produced, apparently, by the pressure of a knee. In the opinion of M. Dumas, Mademoiselle L'Espanaye had been throttled to death by some person or persons unknown. The corpse of the mother was horribly mutilated. All the bones of the right leg and arm were more or less shattered. The left tibia much splintered, as well as all the ribs of the left side. Whole body dreadfully bruised and discolored. It was not possible to say how the injuries had been inflicted. A heavy club of wood, or a broad bar of iron \u2014 a chair \u2014 any large, heavy, and obtuse weapon have produced such results, if wielded by the hands of a very powerful man. No woman could have inflicted the blows with any weapon. The head of the deceased, when seen by witness, was entirely separated from the body, and was also greatly shattered. The throat had evidently been cut with some very sharp instrument \u2014 probably with a razor.\n\n\"Alexandre Etienne, surgeon, was called with M. Dumas to view the bodies. Corroborated the testimony, and the opinions of M. Dumas.\n\n\"Nothing farther of importance was elicited, although several other persons were examined. A murder so mysterious, and so perplexing in all its particulars, was never before committed in Paris \u2014 if indeed a murder has been committed at all. The police are entirely at fault \u2014 an unusual occurrence in affairs of this nature. There is not, however, the shadow of a clew apparent.\" The evening edition of the paper stated that the greatest excitement continued in the Quartier St. Roch \u2014 that the premises in question had been carefully researched, and fresh examinations of witnesses instituted, but all to no purpose. A postscript, however mentioned that Adolphe Le Bon had been arrested and imprisoned \u2014 although nothing appeared to criminate him, beyond the facts already detailed.\n\nDupin seemed singularly interested in the progress of this affair \u2014 at least so I judged from his manner, for he made no comments. It was only after the announcement that Le Bon had been imprisoned, that he asked me my opinion respecting the murders.\n\nI could merely agree with all Paris in considering them an insoluble mystery. I saw no means by which it would be possible to trace the murderer.\n\n\"We must not judge of the means,\" said Dupin, \"by this shell of an examination. The Parisian police, so much extolled for acumen, are cunning, but no more. There is no method in their proceedings, beyond the method of the moment. They make a vast parade of measures; but, not unfrequently, these are so ill adapted to the objects proposed, as to put us in mind of Monsieur Jourdain's calling for his robe-de-chambre \u2014 pour mieux entendre la musique. The results attained by them are not unfrequently surprising, but, for the most part, are brought about by simple diligence and activity. When these qualities are unavailing, their schemes fall. Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser, and a persevering man. But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus there is such a thing as being too profound. Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial. The depth lies in the valleys where we seek her, and not upon the mountain-tops where she is found. The modes and sources of this kind of error are well typified in the contemplation of the heavenly bodies. To look at a star by glances \u2014 to view it in a side-long way, by turning toward it the exterior portions of the retina (more susceptible of feeble impressions of light than the interior), is to behold the star distinctly \u2014 is to have the best appreciation of its lustre \u2014 a lustre which grows dim just in proportion as we turn our vision fully upon it. A greater number of rays actually fall upon the eye in the latter case, but, in the former, there is the more refined capacity for comprehension. By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.\n\n\"As for these murders, let us enter into some examinations for ourselves, before we make up an opinion respecting them. An inquiry will afford us amusement,\" (I thought this an odd term, so applied, but said nothing) \"and, besides, Le Bon once rendered me a service for which I am not ungrateful. We will go and see the premises with our own eyes. I know G \u2014 the Prefect of Police, and shall have no difficulty in obtaining the necessary permission.\"\n\nThe permission was obtained, and we proceeded at once to the Rue Morgue. This is one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box, with a sliding way, on one si panel in the window, indicating a loge de concierge. Before going in we walked up the street, turned down an alley, and then, again turning, passed in the rear of the building-Dupin, meanwhile, examining the whole neighborhood, as well as the house, with a minuteness of attention for which I could see no possible object.\n\nRetracing our steps, we came again to the front of the dwelling, rang, and, having shown our credentials, were admitted by the agents in charge. We went up stairs \u2014 into the chamber where the body of Mademoiselle L'Espanaye had been found, and where both the deceased still lay. The disorders of the room had, as usual, been suffered to exist. I saw nothing beyond what had been stated in the \"Gazette des Tribunaux.\" Dupin scrutinized every thing-not excepting the bodies of the victims. We then went into the other rooms, and into the yard; a gendarme accompanying us throughout. The examination occupied us until dark, when we took our departure. On our way home my companion stopped in for a moment at the office of one of the dally papers.\n\nI have said that the whims of my friend were manifold, and that Fe les menageais:\u2014 for this phrase there is no English equivalent. It was his humor, now, to decline all conversation on the subject of the murder, until about noon the next day. He then asked me, suddenly, if I had observed any thing peculiar at the scene of the atrocity.\n\nThere was something in his manner of emphasizing the word \"peculiar,\" which caused me to shudder, without knowing why.\n\n\"No, nothing peculiar,\" I said; \"nothing more, at least, than we both saw stated in the paper.\"\n\n\"The 'Gazette,'\" he replied, \"has not entered, I fear, into the unusual horror of the thing. But dismiss the idle opinions of this print. It appears to me that this mystery is considered insoluble, for the very reason which should cause it to be regarded as easy of solution \u2014 I mean for the outre character of its features. The police are confounded by the seeming absence of motive \u2014 not for the murder itself \u2014 but for the atrocity of the murder. They are puzzled, too, by the seeming impossibility of reconciling the voices heard in contention, with the facts that no one was discovered up stairs but the assassinated Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, and that there were no means of egress without the notice of the party ascending. The wild disorder of the room; the corpse thrust, with the head downward, up the chimney; the frightful mutilation of the body of the old lady; these considerations with those just mentioned, and others which I need not mention, have sufficed to paralyze the powers, by putting completely at fault the boasted acumen, of the government agents. They have fallen into the gross but common error of confounding the unusual with the abstruse. But it is by these deviations from the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. In investigations such as we are now pursuing, it should not be so much asked 'what has occurred,' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before.' In fact, the facility with which I shall arrive, or have arrived, at the solution of this mystery, is in the direct ratio of its apparent insolubility in the eyes of the police.\"\n\nI stared at the speaker in mute astonishment.\n\n\"I am now awaiting,\" continued he, looking toward the door of our apartment \u2014\"I am now awaiting a person who, although perhaps not the perpetrator of these butcheries, must have been in some measure implicated in their perpetration. Of the worst portion of the crimes committed, it is probable that he is innocent. I hope that I am right in this supposition; for upon it I build my expectation of reading the entire riddle. I look for the man here \u2014 in this room \u2014 every moment. It is true that he may not arrive; but the probability is that he will. Should he come, it will be necessary to detain him. Here are pistols; and we both know how to use them when occasion demands their use.\"\n\nI took the pistols, scarcely knowing what I did, or believing what I heard, while Dupin went on, very much as if in a soliloquy. I have already spoken of his abstract manner at such times. His discourse was addressed to myself; but his voice, although by no means loud, had that intonation which is commonly employed in speaking to some one at a great distance. His eyes, vacant in expression, regarded only the wall.\n\n\"That the voices heard in contention,\" he said, \"by the party upon the stairs, were not the voices of the women themselves, was fully proved by the evidence. This relieves us of all doubt upon the question whether the old lady could have first destroyed the daughter, and afterward have committed suicide. I speak of this point chiefly for the sake of method; for the strength of Madame L'Espanaye would have been utterly unequal to the task of thrusting her daughter's corpse up the chimney as it was found; and the nature of the wounds upon her own person entirely preclude the idea of self-destruction. Murder, then, has been committed by some third party; and the voices of this third party were those heard in contention. Let me now advert \u2014 not to the whole testimony respecting these voices \u2014 but to what was peculiar in that testimony. Did you observe anything peculiar about it?\"\n\nI remarked that, while all the witnesses agreed in supposing the gruff voice to be that of a Frenchman, there was much disagreement in regard to the shrill, or, as one individual termed it, the harsh voice.\n\n\"That was the evidence itself,\" said Dupin, \"but it was not the peculiarity of the evidence. You have observed nothing distinctive. Yet there was something to be observed. The witnesses, as you remark, agreed about the gruff voice; they were here unanimous. But in regard to the shrill voice, the peculiarity is not that they disagreed \u2014 but that, while an Italian, an Englishman, a Spaniard, a Hollander, and a Frenchman attempted to describe it, each one spoke of it as that of a foreigner. Each is sure that it was not the voice of one of his own countrymen. Each likens it \u2014 not to the voice of an individual of any nation with whose language he is conversant \u2014 but the converse. The Frenchman supposes it the voice of a Spaniard, and 'might have distinguished some words had he been acquainted with the Spanish.' The Dutchman maintains it to have been that of a Frenchman; but we find it stated that 'not understanding French this witness was examined through an interpreter.' The Englishman thinks it the voice of a German, and 'does not understand German.' The Spaniard 'is sure' that it was that of an Englishman, but 'judges by the intonation' altogether, 'as he has no knowledge of the English.' The Italian believes it the voice of a Russian, but 'has never conversed with a native of Russia.' A second Frenchman differs, moreover, with the first, and is positive that the voice was that of an Italian; but, not being cognizant of that tongue, is, like the Spaniard, 'convinced by the intonation.' Now, how strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited! \u2014 in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognise nothing familiar! You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic \u2014 of an African. Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris; but, without denying the inference, I will now merely call your attention to three points. The voice is termed by one witness 'harsh rather than shrill.' It is represented by two others to have been 'quick and unequal' No words \u2014 no sounds resembling words \u2014 were by any witness mentioned as distinguishable.\n\n\"I know not,\" continued Dupin, \"what impression I may have made, so far, upon your own understanding; but I do not hesitate to say that legitimate deductions even from this portion of the testimony \u2014 the portion respecting the gruff and shrill voices \u2014 are in themselves sufficient to engender a suspicion which should give direction to all farther progress in the investigation of the mystery. I said 'legitimate deductions;' but my meaning is not thus fully expressed. I designed to imply that the deductions are the sole proper ones, and that the suspicion arises inevitably from them as the single result. What the suspicion is, however, I will not say just yet. I merely wish you to bear in mind that, with myself, it was sufficiently forcible to give a definite form \u2014 a certain tendency \u2014 to my inquiries in the chamber.\n\n\"Let us now transport ourselves, in fancy, to this chamber. What shall we first seek here? The means of egress employed by the murderers. It is not too much to say that neither of us believe in praeternatural events. Madame and Mademoiselle L'Espanaye were not destroyed by spirits. The doers of the deed were material, and escaped materially. Then how? Fortunately, there is but one mode of reasoning upon the point, and that mode must lead us to a definite decision. \u2014 Let us examine, each by each, the possible means of egress. It is clear that the assassins were in the room where Mademoiselle L'Espanaye was found, or at least in the room adjoining, when the party ascended the stairs. It is then only from these two apartments that we have to seek issues. The police have laid bare the floors, the ceilings, and the masonry of the walls, in every direction. No secret issues could have escaped their vigilance. But, not trusting to their eyes, I examined with my own. There were, then, no secret issues. Both doors leading from the rooms into the passage were securely locked, with the keys inside. Let us turn to the chimneys. These, although of ordinary width for some eight or ten feet above the hearths, will not admit, throughout their extent, the body of a large cat. The impossibility of egress, by means already stated, being thus absolute, we are reduced to the windows. Through those of the front room no one could have escaped without notice from the crowd in the street. The murderers must have passed, then, through those of the back room. Now, brought to this conclusion in so unequivocal a manner as we are, it is not our part, as reasoners, to reject it on account of apparent impossibilities. It is only left for us to prove that these apparent 'impossibilities' are, in reality, not such.\n\n\"There are two windows in the chamber. One of them is unobstructed by furniture, and is wholly visible. The lower portion of the other is hidden from view by the head of the unwieldy bedstead which is thrust close up against it. The former was found securely fastened from within. It resisted the utmost force of those who endeavored to raise it. A large gimlet-hole had been pierced in its frame to the left, and a very stout nail was found fitted therein, nearly to the head. Upon examining the other window, a similar nail was seen similarly fitted in it; and a vigorous attempt to raise this sash, failed also. The police were now entirely satisfied that egress had not been in these directions. And, therefore, it was thought a matter of supererogation to withdraw the nails and open the windows.\n\n\"My own examination was somewhat more particular, and was so for the reason I have just given \u2014 because here it was, I knew, that all apparent impossibilities must be proved to be not such in reality.\n\n\"I proceeded to think thus \u2014 a posteriori. The murderers did escape from one of these windows. This being so, they could not have re-fastened the sashes from the inside, as they were found fastened; \u2014 the consideration which put a stop, through its obviousness, to the scrutiny of the police in this quarter. Yet the sashes were fastened. They must, then, have the power of fastening themselves. There was no escape from this conclusion. I stepped to the unobstructed casement, withdrew the nail with some difficulty, and attempted to raise the sash. It resisted all my efforts, as I had anticipated. A concealed spring must, I now knew, exist; and this corroboration of my idea convinced me that my premises, at least, were correct, however mysterious still appeared the circumstances attending the nails. A careful search soon brought to light the hidden spring. I pressed it, and, satisfied with the discovery, forebore to upraise the sash.\n\n\"I now replaced the nail and regarded it attentively. A person passing out through this window might have reclosed it, and the spring would have caught \u2014 but the nail could not have been replaced. The conclusion was plain, and again narrowed in the field of my investigations. The assassins must have escaped through the other window. Supposing, then, the springs upon each sash to be the same, as was probable, there must be found a difference between the nails, or at least between the modes of their fixture. Getting upon the sacking of the bedstead, I looked over the headboard minutely at the second casement. Passing my hand down behind the board, I readily discovered and pressed the spring, which was, as I had supposed, identical in character with its neighbor. I now looked at the nail. It was as stout as the other, and apparently fitted in the same manner \u2014 driven in nearly up to the head.\n\n\"You will say that I was puzzled; but, if you think so, you must have misunderstood the nature of the inductions. To use a sporting phrase, I had not been once 'at fault.' The scent had never for an instant been lost. There was no flaw in any link of the chain. I had traced the secret to its ultimate result \u2014 and that result was the nail. It had, I say, in every respect, the appearance of its fellow in the other window; but this fact was an absolute nullity (conclusive as it might seem to be) when compared with the consideration that here, at this point, terminated the clew. 'There must be something wrong,' I said, 'about the nail.' I touched it; and the head, with about a quarter of an inch of the shank, came off in my fingers. The rest of the shank was in the gimlet-hole, where it had been broken off. The fracture was an old one (for its edges were incrusted with rust), and had apparently been accomplished by the blow of a hammer, which had partially imbedded, in the top of the bottom sash, the head portion of the nail. now carefully replaced this head portion in the indentation whence I had taken it, and the resemblance to a perfect nail was complete-the fissure was invisible. Pressing the spring, I gently raised the sash for a few inches; the head went up with it, remaining firm in its bed. I closed the window, and the semblance of the whole nail was again perfect.\n\n\"The riddle, so far, was now unriddled. The assassin had escaped through the window which looked upon the bed. Dropping of its own accord upon his exit (or perhaps purposely closed) it had become fastened by the spring; and it was the retention of this spring which had been mistaken by the police for that of the nail \u2014 farther inquiry being thus considered unnecessary.\n\n\"The next question is that of the mode of descent. Upon this point I had been satisfied in my walk with you around the building. About five feet and a half from the casement in question there runs a lightning-rod. From this rod it would have been impossible for any one to reach the window itself, to say nothing of entering it. I observed, however, that shutters of the fourth story were of the peculiar kind called by Parisian carpenters ferrades \u2014 a kind rarely employed at the present day, but frequently seen upon very old mansions at Lyons and Bordeaux. They are in the form of an ordinary door, (a single, not a folding door) except that the upper half is latticed or worked in open trellis \u2014 thus affording an excellent hold for the hands. In the present instance these shutters are fully three feet and a half broad. When we saw them from the rear of the house, they were both about half open \u2014 that is to say, they stood off at right angles from the wall. It is probable that the police, as well as myself, examined the back of the tenement; but, if so, in looking at these ferrades in the line of their breadth (as they must have done), they did not perceive this great breadth itself, or, at all events, failed to take it into due consideration. In fact, having once satisfied themselves that no egress could have been made in this quarter, they would naturally bestow here a very cursory examination. It was clear to me, however, that the shutter belonging to the window at the head of the bed, would, if swung fully back to the wall, reach to within two feet of the lightning-rod. It was also evident that, by exertion of a very unusual degree of activity and courage, an entrance into the window, from the rod, might have been thus effected. \u2014 By reaching to the distance of two feet and a half (we now suppose the shutter open to its whole extent) a robber might have taken a firm grasp upon the trellis-work. Letting go, then, his hold upon the rod, placing his feet securely against the wall, and springing boldly from it, he might have swung the shutter so as to close it, and, if we imagine the window open at the time, might have swung himself into the room.\n\n\"I wish you to bear especially in mind that I have spoken of a very unusual degree of activity as requisite to success in so hazardous and so difficult a feat. It is my design to show you, first, that the thing might possibly have been accomplished:\u2014 but, secondly and chiefly, I wish to impress upon your understanding the very extraordinary \u2014 the almost praeternatural character of that agility which could have accomplished it.\n\n\"You will say, no doubt, using the language of the law, that 'to make out my case' I should rather undervalue, than insist upon a full estimation of the activity required in this matter. This may be the practice in law, but it is not the usage of reason. My ultimate object is only the truth. My immediate purpose is to lead you to place in juxta-position that very unusual activity of which I have just spoken, with that very peculiar shrill (or harsh) and unequal voice, about whose nationality no two persons could be found to agree, and in whose utterance no syllabification could be detected.\"\n\nAt these words a vague and half-formed conception of the meaning of Dupin flitted over my mind. I seemed to be upon the verge of comprehension, without power to comprehend \u2014 as men, at times, find themselves upon the brink of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember. My friend went on with his discourse.\n\n\"You will see,\" he said, \"that I have shifted the question from the mode of egress to that of ingress. It was my design to suggest that both were effected in the same manner, at the same point. Let us now revert to the interior of the room. Let us survey the appearances here. The drawers of the bureau, it is said, had been rifled, although many articles of apparel still remained within them. The conclusion here is absurd. It is a mere guess \u2014 a very silly one \u2014 and no more. How are we to know that the articles found in the drawers were not all these drawers had originally contained? Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter lived an exceedingly retired life \u2014 saw no company \u2014 seldom went out \u2014 had little use for numerous changes of habiliment. Those found were at least of as good quality as any likely to be possessed by these ladies. If a thief had taken any, why did he not take the best \u2014 why did he not take all? In a word, why did he abandon four thousand francs in gold to encumber himself with a bundle of linen? The gold was abandoned. Nearly the whole sum mentioned by Monsieur Mignaud, the banker, was discovered, in bags, upon the floor. I wish you, therefore, to discard from your thoughts the blundering idea of motive, engendered in the brains of the police by that portion of the evidence which speaks of money delivered at the door of the house. Coincidences ten times as remarkable as this (the delivery of the money, and murder committed within three days upon the party receiving it), happen to all of us every hour of our lives, without attracting even momentary notice. Coincidences, in general, are great stumbling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated to know nothing of the theory of probabilities \u2014 that theory to which the most glorious objects of human research are indebted for the most glorious of illustration. In the present instance, had the gold been gone, the fact of its delivery three days before would have formed something more than a coincidence. It would have been corroborative of this idea of motive. But, under the real circumstances of the case, if we are to suppose gold the motive of this outrage, we must also imagine the perpetrator so vacillating an idiot as to have abandoned his gold and his motive together.\n\n\"Keeping now steadily in mind the points to which I have drawn your attention \u2014 that peculiar voice, that unusual agility, and that startling absence of motive in a murder so singularly atrocious as this \u2014 let us glance at the butchery itself. Here is a woman strangled to death by manual strength, and thrust up a chimney, head downward. Ordinary assassins employ no such modes of murder as this. Least of all, do they thus dispose of the murdered. In the manner of thrusting the corpse up the chimney, you will that there was something excessively outre \u2014 something altogether irreconcilable with our common notions of human action, even when we suppose the actors the most depraved of men. Think, too, how great must have been that strength which could have thrust the body up such an aperture so forcibly that the united vigor of several persons was found barely sufficient to drag it down!\n\n\"Turn, now, to other indications of the employment of a vigor most marvellous. On the hearth were thick tresses \u2014 very thick tresses \u2014 of grey human hair. These had been torn out by the roots. You are aware of the great force necessary in tearing thus from the head even twenty or thirty hairs together. You saw the locks in question as well as myself. Their roots (a hideous sight!) were clotted with fragments of the flesh of the scalp \u2014 sure token of the prodigious power which had been exerted in uprooting perhaps half a million of hairs at a time. The throat of the old lady was not merely cut, but the head absolutely severed from the body: the instrument was a mere razor. I wish you also to look at the brutal ferocity of these deeds. Of the bruises upon the body of Madame L'Espanaye I do not speak. Monsieur Dumas, and his worthy coadjutor Monsieur Etienne, have pronounced that they were inflicted by some obtuse instrument; and so far these gentlemen are very correct. The obtuse instrument was clearly the stone pavement in the yard, upon which the victim had fallen from the window which looked in upon the bed. This idea, however simple it may now seem, escaped the police for the same reason that the breadth of the shutters escaped them \u2014 because, by the affair of the nails, their perceptions had been hermetically sealed against the possibility of the windows have ever been opened at all.\n\nIf now, in addition to all these things, you have properly reflected upon the odd disorder of the chamber, we have gone so far as to combine the ideas of an agility astounding, a strength superhuman, a ferocity brutal, a butchery without motive, a grotesquerie in horror absolutely alien from humanity, and a voice foreign in tone to the ears of men of many nations, and devoid of all distinct or intelligible syllabification. What result, then, has ensued? What impression have I made upon your fancy?\"\n\nI felt a creeping of the flesh as Dupin asked me the question. \"A madman,\" I said, \"has done this deed \u2014 some raving maniac, escaped from a neighboring Maison de Sante.\"\n\n\"In some respects,\" he replied, \"your idea is not irrelevant. But the voices of madmen, even in their wildest paroxysms, are never found to tally with that peculiar voice heard upon the stairs. Madmen are of some nation, and their language, however incoherent in its words, has always the coherence of syllabification. Besides, the hair of a madman is not such as I now hold in my hand. I disentangled this little tuft from the rigidly clutched fingers of Madame L'Espanaye. Tell me what you can make of it.\"\n\n\"Dupin!\" I said, completely unnerved; \"this hair is most unusual \u2014 this is no human hair.\"\n\n\"I have not asserted that it is,\" said he; \"but, before we decide this point, I wish you to glance at the little sketch I have here traced upon this paper. It is a fac-simile drawing of what has been described in one portion of the testimony as 'dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger nails,' upon the throat of Mademoiselle L'Espanaye, and in another, (by Messrs. Dumas and Etienne,) as a 'series of livid spots, evidently the impression of fingers.'\n\n\"You will perceive,\" continued my friend, spreading out the paper upon the table before us, \"that this drawing gives the idea of a firm and fixed hold. There is no slipping apparent. Each finger has retained \u2014 possibly until the death of the victim \u2014 the fearful grasp by which it originally imbedded itself. Attempt, now, to place all your fingers, at the same time, in the respective impressions as you see them.\"\n\nI made the attempt in vain.\n\n\"We are possibly not giving this matter a fair trial,\" he said. \"The paper is spread out upon a plane surface; but the human throat is cylindrical. Here is a billet of wood, the circumference of which is about that of the throat. Wrap the drawing around it, and try the experiment again.\"\n\nI did so; but the difficulty was even more obvious than before.\n\n\"This,\" I said, \"is the mark of no human hand.\"\n\n\"Read now,\" replied Dupin, \"this passage from Cuvier.\" It was a minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang of the East Indian Islands. The gigantic stature, the prodigious strength and activity, the wild ferocity, and the imitative propensities of these mammalia are sufficiently well known to all. I understood the full horrors of the murder at once.\n\n\"The description of the digits,\" said I, as I made an end of reading, \"is in exact accordance with this drawing, I see that no animal but an Ourang-Outang, of the species here mentioned, could have impressed the indentations as you have traced them. This tuft of tawny hair, too, is identical in character with that of the beast of Cuvier. But I cannot possibly comprehend the particulars of this frightful mystery. Besides, there were two voices heard in contention, and one of them was unquestionably the voice of a Frenchman.\"\n\nTrue; and you will remember an expression attributed almost unanimously, by the evidence, to this voice \u2014 the expression, 'mon Dieu!' This, under the circumstances, has been justly characterized by one of the witnesses (Montani, the confectioner,) as an expression of remonstrance or expostulation. Upon these two words, therefore, I have mainly built my hopes of a full solution of the riddle. A Frenchman was cognizant of the murder. It is possible \u2014 indeed it is far more than probable \u2014 that he was innocent of all participation in the bloody transactions which took place. The Ourang-Outang may have escaped from him. He may have traced it to the chamber; but, under the agitating circumstances which ensued, he could never have recaptured it. It is still at large. I will not pursue these guesses-for I have no right to call them more \u2014 since the shades of reflection upon which they are based are scarcely of sufficient depth to be appreciable by my own intellect, and since I could not pretend to make them intelligible to the understanding of another. We will call them guesses then, and speak of them as such. If the Frenchman in question is indeed, as I suppose, innocent of this atrocity, this advertisement, which I left last night, upon our return home, at the office of 'Le Monde,' (a paper devoted to the shipping interest, and much sought by sailors,) will bring him to our residence.\"\n\nHe handed me a paper, and I read thus: Caught \u2014 In the Bois de Boulogne, early in the morning of the \u2014 inst., (the morning of the murder,) a very large, tawny Ourang-Outang of the Bornese species. The owner, (who is ascertained to be a sailor, belonging to a Maltese vessel,) may have the animal again, upon identifying it satisfactorily, and paying a few charges arising from its capture and keeping. Call at No. \u2014 Rue \u2014 Faubourg St. Germain \u2014 au troisieme.\n\n\"How was it possible,\" I asked, \"that you should know the man to be a sailor, and belonging to a Maltese vessel?\"\n\n\"I do not know it,\" said Dupin. \"I am not sure of it. Here, however, is a small piece of ribbon, which from its form, and from its greasy appearance, has evidently been used in tying the hair in one of those long queues of which sailors are so fond. Moreover, this knot is one which few besides sailors can tie, and is peculiar to the Maltese. I picked the ribbon up at the foot of the lightning-rod. It could not have belonged to either of the deceased. Now if, after all, I am wrong in my induction from this ribbon, that the Frenchman was a sailor belonging to a Maltese vessel, still I can have done no harm in saying what I did in the advertisement. If I am in error, he will merely suppose that I have been misled by some circumstance into which he will not take the trouble to inquire. But if I am right, a great point is gained. Cognizant although innocent of the murder, the Frenchman will naturally hesitate about replying to the advertisement \u2014 about demanding the Ourang-Outang. He will reason thus:\u2014'I am innocent; I am poor; my Ourang-Outang is of great value \u2014 to one in my circumstances a fortune of itself \u2014 why should I lose it through idle apprehensions of danger? Here it is, within my grasp. It was found in the Bois de Boulogne \u2014 at a vast distance from the scene of that butchery. How can it ever be suspected that a brute beast should have done the deed? The police are at fault \u2014 they have failed to procure the slightest clew. Should they even trace the animal, it would be impossible to prove me cognizant of the murder, or to implicate me in guilt on account of that cognizance. Above all, I am known. The advertiser designates me as the possessor of the beast. I am not sure to what limit his knowledge may extend. Should I avoid claiming a property of so great value, which it is known that I possess, I will render the animal, at least, liable to suspicion. It is not my policy to attract attention either to myself or to the beast. I will answer the advertisement, get the Ourang-Outang, and keep it close until this matter has blown over.\n\nAt this moment we heard a step upon the stairs.\n\n\"Be ready,\" said Dupin, \"with your pistols, but neither use them nor show them until at a signal from myself.\"\n\nThe front door of the house had been left open, and the visitor had entered, without ringing, and advanced several steps upon the staircase. Now, however, he seemed to hesitate. Presently we heard him descending. Dupin was moving quickly to the door, when we again heard him coming up. He did not turn back a second time, but stepped up with decision and rapped at the door of our chamber.\n\n\"Come in,\" said Dupin, in a cheerful and hearty tone.\n\nA man entered. He was a sailor, evidently \u2014 a tall, stout, and muscular-looking person, with a certain dare-devil expression of countenance, not altogether unprepossessing. His face, greatly sunburnt, was more than half hidden by whisker and mustachio. He had with him a huge oaken cudgel, but appeared to be otherwise unarmed. He bowed awkwardly, and bade us \"good evening,\" in French accents, which, although somewhat Neufchatelish, were still sufficiently indicative of a Parisian origin.\n\nSit down, my friend,\" said Dupin. \"I suppose you have called about the Ourang-Outang. Upon my word, I almost envy you the possession of him; a remarkably fine, and no doubt a very valuable animal. How old do you suppose him to be?\"\n\nThe sailor drew a long breath, with the air of a man relieved of some intolerable burden, and then replied, in an assured tone:\n\n\"I have no way of telling \u2014 but he can't be more than four or five years old. Have you got him here?\"\n\n\"Oh no; we had no conveniences for keeping him here. He is at a livery stable in the Rue Dubourg, just by. You can get him in the morning. Of course you are prepared to identify the property?\"\n\n\"To be sure I am, sir.\"\n\n\"I shall be sorry to part with him,\" said Dupin.\n\n\"I don't mean that you should be at all this trouble for nothing, sir,\" said the man. \"Couldn't expect it. Am very willing to pay a reward for the finding of the animal \u2014 that is to say, any thing in reason.\"\n\n\"Well,\" replied my friend, \"that is all very fair, to be sure. Let me think! \u2014 what should I have? Oh! I will tell you. My reward shall be this. You shall give me all the information in your power about these murders in the Rue Morgue.\"\n\nDupin said the last words in a very low tone, and very quietly. Just as quietly, too, he walked toward the door, locked it, and put the key in his pocket. He then drew a pistol from his bosom and placed it, without the least flurry, upon the table.\n\nThe sailor's face flushed up as if he were struggling with suffocation. He started to his feet and grasped his cudgel; but the next moment he fell back into his seat, trembling violently, and with the countenance of death itself. He spoke not a word. I pitied him from the bottom of my heart.\n\n\"My friend,\" said Dupin, in a kind tone, \"you are alarming yourself unnecessarily \u2014 you are indeed. We mean you no harm whatever. I pledge you the honor of a gentleman, and of a Frenchman, that we intend you no injury. I perfectly well know that you are innocent of the atrocities in the Rue Morgue. It will not do, however, to deny that you are in some measure implicated in them. From what I have already said, you must know that I have had means of information about this matter \u2014 means of which you could never have dreamed. Now the thing stands thus. You have done nothing which you could have avoided \u2014 nothing, certainly, which renders you culpable. You were not even guilty of robbery, when you might have robbed with impunity. You have nothing to conceal. You have no reason for concealment. On the other hand, you are bound by every principle of honor to confess all you know. An innocent man is now imprisoned, charged with that crime of which you can point out the perpetrator.\"\n\nThe sailor had recovered his presence of mind, in a great measure, while Dupin uttered these words; but his original boldness of bearing was all gone.\n\n\"So help me God,\" said he, after a brief pause, \"I will tell you all I know about this affair; \u2014 but I do not expect you to believe one half I say \u2014 I would be a fool indeed if I did. Still, I am innocent, and I will make a clean breast if I die for it.\"\n\nWhat he stated was, in substance, this. He had lately made a voyage to the Indian Archipelago. A party, of which he formed one, landed at Borneo, and passed into the interior on an excursion of pleasure. Himself and a companion had captured the Ourang-Outang. This companion dying, the animal fell into his own exclusive possession. After great trouble, occasioned by the intractable ferocity of his captive during the home voyage, he at length succeeded in lodging it safely at his own residence in Paris, where, not to attract toward himself the unpleasant curiosity of his neighbors, he kept it carefully secluded, until such time as it should recover from a wound in the foot, received from a splinter on board ship. His ultimate design was to sell it.\n\nReturning home from some sailors' frolic on the night, or rather in the morning of the murder, he found the beast occupying his own bed-room, into which it had broken from a closet adjoining, where it had been, as was thought, securely confined. Razor in hand, and fully lathered, it was sitting before a looking-glass, attempting the operation of shaving, in which it had no doubt previously watched its master through the key-hole of the closet. Terrified at the sight of so dangerous a weapon in the possession of an animal so ferocious, and so well able to use it, the man, for some moments, was at a loss what to do. He had been accustomed, however, to quiet the creature, even in its fiercest moods, by the use of a whip, and to this he now resorted. Upon sight of it, the Ourang-Outang sprang at once through the door of the chamber, down the stairs, and thence, through a window, unfortunately open, into the street.\n\nThe Frenchman followed in despair; the ape, razor still in hand, occasionally stopping to look back and gesticulate at its pursuer, until the latter had nearly come up with it. It then again made off. In this manner the chase continued for a long time. The streets were profoundly quiet, as it was nearly three o'clock in the morning. In passing down an alley in the rear of the Rue Morgue, the fugitive's attention was arrested by a light gleaming from the open window of Madame L'Espanaye's chamber, in the fourth story of her house. Rushing to the building, it perceived the lightning-rod, clambered up with inconceivable agility, grasped the shutter, which was thrown fully back against the wall, and, by its means, swung itself directly upon the headboard of the bed. The whole feat did not occupy a minute. The shutter was kicked open again by the Ourang-Outang as it entered the room.\n\nThe sailor, in the meantime, was both rejoiced and perplexed. He had strong hopes of now recapturing the brute, as it could scarcely escape from the trap into which it had ventured, except by the rod, where it might be intercepted as it came down. On the other hand, there was much cause for anxiety as to what it might do in the house. This latter reflection urged the man still to follow the fugitive. A lightning-rod is ascended without difficulty, especially by a sailor; but, when he had arrived as high as the window, which lay far to his left, his career was stopped; the most that he could accomplish was to reach over so as to obtain a glimpse of the interior of the room. At this glimpse he nearly fell from his hold through excess of horror. Now it was that those hideous shrieks arose upon the night, which had startled from slumber the inmates of the Rue Morgue. Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, habited in their night clothes, had apparently been arranging some papers in the iron chest already mentioned, which had been wheeled into the middle of the room. It was open, and its contents lay beside it on the floor. The victims must have been sitting with their backs toward the window; and, from the time elapsing between the ingress of the beast and the screams, it seems probable that it was not immediately perceived. The flapping-to of the shutter would naturally have been attributed to the wind.\n\nAs the sailor looked in, the gigantic animal had seized Madame L'Espanaye by the hair, (which was loose, as she had been combing it,) and was flourishing the razor about her face, in imitation of the motions of a barber. The daughter lay prostrate and motionless; she had swooned. The screams and struggles of the old lady (during which the hair was torn from her head) had the effect of changing the probably pacific purposes of the Ourang-Outang into those of wrath. With one determined sweep of its muscular arm it nearly severed her head from her body. The sight of blood inflamed its anger into phrenzy. Gnashing its teeth, and flashing fire from its eves, it flew upon the body of the girl, and imbedded its fearful talons in her throat, retaining its grasp until she expired. Its wandering and wild glances fell at this moment upon the head of the bed, over which the face of its master, rigid with horror, was just discernible. The fury of the beast, who no doubt bore still in mind the dreaded whip, was instantly converted into fear. Conscious of having deserved punishment, it seemed desirous of concealing its bloody deeds, and skipped about the chamber in an agony of nervous agitation; throwing down and breaking the furniture as it moved, and dragging the bed from the bedstead. In conclusion, it seized first the corpse of the daughter, and thrust it up the chimney, as it was found; then that of the old lady, which it immediately hurled through the window headlong.\n\nAs the ape approached the casement with its mutilated burden, the sailor shrank aghast to the rod, and, rather gliding than clambering down it, hurried at once home \u2014 dreading the consequences of the butchery, and gladly abandoning, in his terror, all solicitude about the fate of the Ourang-Outang. The words heard by the party upon the staircase were the Frenchman's exclamations of horror and affright, commingled with the fiendish jabberings of the brute.\n\nI have scarcely anything to add. The Ourang-Outang must have escaped from the chamber, by the rod, just before the breaking of the door. It must have closed the window as it passed through it. It was subsequently caught by the owner himself, who obtained for it a very large sum at the Jardin des Plantes. Le Bon was instantly released, upon our narration of the circumstances (with some comments from Dupin) at the bureau of the Prefect of Police. This functionary, however well disposed to my friend, could not altogether conceal his chagrin at the turn which affairs had taken, and was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety of every person minding his own business.\n\n\"Let them talk,\" said Dupin, who had not thought it necessary to reply. \"Let him discourse; it will ease his conscience. I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle. Nevertheless, that he failed in the solution of this mystery, is by no means that matter for wonder which he supposes it; for, in truth, our friend the Prefect is somewhat too cunning to be profound. In his wisdom is no stamen. It is all head and no body, like the pictures of the Goddess Laverna \u2014 or, at best, all head and shoulders, like a codfish. But he is a good creature after all. I like him especially for one master stroke of cant, by which he has attained his reputation for ingenuity. I mean the way he has 'de nier ce qui est, et d'expliquer ce qui n'est pas.'\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Three Sundays in a Week (A Succession of Sundays) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nYou hard-headed, dunder-headed, obstinate, rusty, crusty, musty, fusty, old savage!\" said I, in fancy, one afternoon, to my grand uncle Rumgudgeon \u2014 shaking my fist at him in imagination.\n\nOnly in imagination. The fact is, some trivial discrepancy did exist, just then, between what I said and what I had not the courage to say \u2014 between what I did and what I had half a mind to do.\n\nThe old porpoise, as I opened the drawing-room door, was sitting with his feet upon the mantel-piece, and a bumper of port in his paw, making strenuous efforts to accomplish the ditty.\n\nRemplis ton verre vide!\n\nVide ton verre plein!\n\n\"My dear uncle,\" said I, closing the door gently, and approaching him with the blandest of smiles, \"you are always so very kind and considerate, and have evinced your benevolence in so many \u2014 so very many ways \u2014 that \u2014 that I feel I have only to suggest this little point to you once more to make sure of your full acquiescence.\"\n\n\"Hem!\" said he, \"good boy! go on!\"\n\n\"I am sure, my dearest uncle [you confounded old rascal!], that you have no design really, seriously, to oppose my union with Kate. This is merely a joke of yours, I know \u2014 ha! ha! ha! \u2014 how very pleasant you are at times.\"\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha!\" said he, \"curse you! yes!\"\n\n\"To be sure \u2014 of course! I knew you were jesting. Now, uncle, all that Kate and myself wish at present, is that you would oblige us with your advice as \u2014 as regards the time \u2014 you know, uncle \u2014 in short, when will it be most convenient for yourself, that the wedding shall \u2014 shall come off, you know?\"\n\n\"Come off, you scoundrel! \u2014 what do you mean by that? \u2014 Better wait till it goes on.\"\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha! \u2014 he! he! he! \u2014 hi! hi! hi! \u2014 ho! ho! ho! \u2014 hu! hu! hu! \u2014 that's good! \u2014 oh that's capital \u2014 such a wit! But all we want just now, you know, uncle, is that you would indicate the time precisely.\"\n\n\"Ah! \u2014 precisely?\"\n\n\"Yes, uncle \u2014 that is, if it would be quite agreeable to yourself.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't it answer, Bobby, if I were to leave it at random \u2014 some time within a year or so, for example? \u2014 must I say precisely?\"\n\n\"If you please, uncle \u2014 precisely.\"\n\n\"Well, then, Bobby, my boy \u2014 you're a fine fellow, aren't you? \u2014 since you will have the exact time I'll \u2014 why I'll oblige you for once:\"\n\n\"Dear uncle!\"\n\n\"Hush, sir!\" [drowning my voice]\u2014 I'll oblige you for once. You shall have my consent \u2014 and the plum, we mus'n't forget the plum \u2014 let me see! when shall it be? To-day's Sunday \u2014 isn't it? Well, then, you shall be married precisely \u2014 precisely, now mind! \u2014 when three Sundays come together in a week! Do you hear me, sir! What are you gaping at? I say, you shall have Kate and her plum when three Sundays come together in a week \u2014 but not till then \u2014 you young scapegrace \u2014 not till then, if I die for it. You know me \u2014 I'm a man of my word \u2014 now be off!\" Here he swallowed his bumper of port, while I rushed from the room in despair.\n\nA very \"fine old English gentleman,\" was my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon, but unlike him of the song, he had his weak points. He was a little, pursy, pompous, passionate semicircular somebody, with a red nose, a thick scull, [sic] a long purse, and a strong sense of his own consequence. With the best heart in the world, he contrived, through a predominant whim of contradiction, to earn for himself, among those who only knew him superficially, the character of a curmudgeon. Like many excellent people, he seemed possessed with a spirit of tantalization, which might easily, at a casual glance, have been mistaken for malevolence. To every request, a positive \"No!\" was his immediate answer, but in the end \u2014 in the long, long end \u2014 there were exceedingly few requests which he refused. Against all attacks upon his purse he made the most sturdy defence; but the amount extorted from him, at last, was generally in direct ratio with the length of the siege and the stubbornness of the resistance. In charity no one gave more liberally or with a worse grace.\n\nFor the fine arts, and especially for the belles-lettres, he entertained a profound contempt. With this he had been inspired by Casimir Perier, whose pert little query \"A quoi un poete est il bon?\" he was in the habit of quoting, with a very droll pronunciation, as the ne plus ultra of logical wit. Thus my own inkling for the Muses had excited his entire displeasure. He assured me one day, when I asked him for a new copy of Horace, that the translation of \"Poeta nascitur non fit\" was \"a nasty poet for nothing fit\"\u2014 a remark which I took in high dudgeon. His repugnance to \"the humanities\" had, also, much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the street, mistaking him for no less a personage than Doctor Dubble L. Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent; and just at the epoch of this story \u2014 for story it is getting to be after all \u2014 my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon was accessible and pacific only upon points which happened to chime in with the caprioles of the hobby he was riding. For the rest, he laughed with his arms and legs, and his politics were stubborn and easily understood. He thought, with Horsley, that \"the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.\"\n\nI had lived with the old gentleman all my life. My parents, in dying, had bequeathed me to him as a rich legacy. I believe the old villain loved me as his own child \u2014 nearly if not quite as well as he loved Kate \u2014 but it was a dog's existence that he led me, after all. From my first year until my fifth, he obliged me with very regular floggings. From five to fifteen, he threatened me, hourly, with the House of Correction. From fifteen to twenty, not a day passed in which he did not promise to cut me off with a shilling. I was a sad dog, it is true \u2014 but then it was a part of my nature \u2014 a point of my faith. In Kate, however, I had a firm friend, and I knew it. She was a good girl, and told me very sweetly that I might have her (plum and all) whenever I could badger my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon, into the necessary consent. Poor girl! \u2014 she was barely fifteen, and without this consent, her little amount in the funds was not come-at-able until five immeasurable summers had \"dragged their slow length along.\" What, then, to do? At fifteen, or even at twenty-one [for I had now passed my fifth olympiad] five years in prospect are very much the same as five hundred. In vain we besieged the old gentleman with importunities. Here was a piece de resistance (as Messieurs Ude and Careme would say) which suited his perverse fancy to a T. It would have stiffed the indignation of Job himself, to see how much like an old mouser he behaved to us two poor wretched little mice. In his heart he wished for nothing more ardently than our union. He had made up his mind to this all along. In fact, he would have given ten thousand pounds from his own pocket (Kate's plum was her own) if he could have invented any thing like an excuse for complying with our very natural wishes. But then we had been so imprudent as to broach the subject ourselves. Not to oppose it under such circumstances, I sincerely believe, was not in his power.\n\nI have said already that he had his weak points; but in speaking of these, I must not be understood as referring to his obstinacy: which was one of his strong points \u2014\"assurement ce n' etait pas sa foible.\" When I mention his weakness I have allusion to a bizarre old-womanish superstition which beset him. He was great in dreams, portents, et id genus omne of rigmarole. He was excessively punctilious, too, upon small points of honor, and, after his own fashion, was a man of his word, beyond doubt. This was, in fact, one of his hobbies. The spirit of his vows he made no scruple of setting at naught, but the letter was a bond inviolable. Now it was this latter peculiarity in his disposition, of which Kates ingenuity enabled us one fine day, not long after our interview in the dining-room, to take a very unexpected advantage, and, having thus, in the fashion of all modern bards and orators, exhausted in prolegomena, all the time at my command, and nearly all the room at my disposal, I will sum up in a few words what constitutes the whole pith of the story.\n\nIt happened then \u2014 so the Fates ordered it \u2014 that among the naval acquaintances of my betrothed, were two gentlemen who had just set foot upon the shores of England, after a year's absence, each, in foreign travel. In company with these gentlemen, my cousin and I, preconcertedly paid uncle Rumgudgeon a visit on the afternoon of Sunday, October the tenth \u2014 just three weeks after the memorable decision which had so cruelly defeated our hopes. For about half an hour the conversation ran upon ordinary topics, but at last, we contrived, quite naturally, to give it the following turn:\n\nCAPT. PRATT: \"Well I have been absent just one year. \u2014 Just one year to-day, as I live \u2014 let me see! yes! \u2014 this is October the tenth. You remember, Mr. Rumgudgeon, I called, this day year to bid you good-bye. And by the way, it does seem something like a coincidence, does it not \u2014 that our friend, Captain Smitherton, here, has been absent exactly a year also \u2014 a year to-day!\"\n\nSMITHERTON: \"Yes! just one year to a fraction. You will remember, Mr. Rumgudgeon, that I called with Capt. Pratol on this very day, last year, to pay my parting respects.\"\n\nUNCLE: \"Yes, yes, yes \u2014 I remember it very well \u2014 very queer indeed! Both of you gone just one year. A very strange coincidence, indeed! Just what Doctor Dubble L. Dee would denominate an extraordinary concurrence of events. Doctor Dub\u2014\"\n\nKATE: [Interrupting.] \"To be sure, papa, it is something strange; but then Captain Pratt and Captain Smitherton didn't go altogether the same route, and that makes a difference, you know.\"\n\nUNCLE: \"I don't know any such thing, you huzzy! How should I? I think it only makes the matter more remarkable, Doctor Dubble L. Dee \u2014\n\nKATE: Why, papa, Captain Pratt went round Cape Horn, and Captain Smitherton doubled the Cape of Good Hope.\"\n\nUNCLE: \"Precisely! \u2014 the one went east and the other went west, you jade, and they both have gone quite round the world. By the by, Doctor Dubble L. Dee \u2014\n\nMYSELF: [Hurriedly.] \"Captain Pratt, you must come and spend the evening with us to-morrow \u2014 you and Smitherton \u2014 you can tell us all about your voyage, and well have a game of whist and \u2014\n\nPRATT: \"Wist, my dear fellow \u2014 you forget. To-morrow will be Sunday. Some other evening \u2014\n\nKATE: \"Oh, no. fie! \u2014 Robert's not quite so bad as that. To-day's Sunday.\"\n\nPRATT: \"I beg both your pardons \u2014 but I can't be so much mistaken. I know to-morrow's Sunday, because\u2014\"\n\nSMITHERTON: [Much surprised.] \"What are you all thinking about? Wasn't yesterday, Sunday, I should like to know?\"\n\nALL: \"Yesterday indeed! you are out!\"\n\nUNCLE: \"To-days Sunday, I say \u2014 don't I know?\"\n\nPRATT: \"Oh no! \u2014 to-morrow's Sunday.\"\n\nSMITHERTON: \"You are all mad \u2014 every one of you. I am as positive that yesterday was Sunday as I am that I sit upon this chair.\"\n\nKATE: [jumping up eagerly.] \"I see it \u2014 I see it all. Papa, this is a judgment upon you, about \u2014 about you know what. Let me alone, and I'll explain it all in a minute. It's a very simple thing, indeed. Captain Smitherton says that yesterday was Sunday: so it was; he is right. Cousin Bobby, and uncle and I say that to-day is Sunday: so it is; we are right. Captain Pratt maintains that to-morrow will be Sunday: so it will; he is right, too. The fact is, we are all right, and thus three Sundays have come together in a week.\"\n\nSMITHERTON: [After a pause.] \"By the by, Pratt, Kate has us completely. What fools we two are! Mr. Rumgudgeon, the matter stands thus: the earth, you know, is twenty-four thousand miles in circumference. Now this globe of the earth turns upon its own axis \u2014 revolves \u2014 spins round \u2014 these twenty-four thousand miles of extent, going from west to east, in precisely twenty-four hours. Do you understand Mr. Rumgudgeon?\u2014\"\n\nUNCLE: \"To be sure \u2014 to be sure \u2014 Doctor Dub\u2014\"\n\nSMITHERTON: [Drowning his voice.] \"Well, sir; that is at the rate of one thousand miles per hour. Now, suppose that I sail from this position a thousand miles east. Of course I anticipate the rising of the sun here at London by just one hour. I see the sun rise one hour before you do. Proceeding, in the same direction, yet another thousand miles, I anticipate the rising by two hours \u2014 another thousand, and I anticipate it by three hours, and so on, until I go entirely round the globe, and back to this spot, when, having gone twenty-four thousand miles east, I anticipate the rising of the London sun by no less than twenty-four hours; that is to say, I am a day in advance of your time. Understand, eh?\"\n\nUNCLE: \"But Double L. Dee\u2014\"\n\nSMITHERTON: [Speaking very loud.] \"Captain Pratt, on the contrary, when he had sailed a thousand miles west of this position, was an hour, and when he had sailed twenty-four thousand miles west, was twenty-four hours, or one day, behind the time at London. Thus, with me, yesterday was Sunday \u2014 thus, with you, to-day is Sunday \u2014 and thus, with Pratt, to-morrow will be Sunday. And what is more, Mr. Rumgudgeon, it is positively clear that we are all right; for there can be no philosophical reason assigned why the idea of one of us should have preference over that of the other.\"\n\nUNCLE: \"My eyes! \u2014 well, Kate \u2014 well, Bobby! \u2014 this is a judgment upon me, as you say. But I am a man of my word \u2014 mark that! you shall have her, boy, (plum and all), when you please. Done up, by Jove! Three Sundays all in a row! I'll go, and take Dubble L. Dee's opinion upon that.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Domain of Arnheim (The Landscape Garden) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The garden like a lady fair was cut,\n\n\u2003That lay as if she slumbered in delight,\n\n\u2003And to the open skies her eyes did shut.\n\n\u2003The azure fields of Heaven were 'sembled right\n\n\u2003In a large round, set with the flowers of light.\n\n\u2003The flowers de luce, and the round sparks of dew.\n\n\u2003That hung upon their azure leaves did shew\n\n\u2003Like twinkling stars that sparkle in the evening blue.\n\n\u2014Giles Fletcher\n\nFrom his cradle to his grave a gale of prosperity bore my friend Ellison along. Nor do I use the word prosperity in its mere worldly sense. I mean it as synonymous with happiness. The person of whom I speak seemed born for the purpose of foreshadowing the doctrines of Turgot, Price, Priestley, and Condorcet \u2014 of exemplifying by individual instance what has been deemed the chimera of the perfectionists. In the brief existence of Ellison I fancy that I have seen refuted the dogma, that in man's very nature lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of bliss. An anxious examination of his career has given me to understand that in general, from the violation of a few simple laws of humanity arises the wretchedness of mankind \u2014 that as a species we have in our possession the as yet unwrought elements of content \u2014 and that, even now, in the present darkness and madness of all thought on the great question of the social condition, it is not impossible that man, the individual, under certain unusual and highly fortuitous conditions, may be happy.\n\nWith opinions such as these my young friend, too, was fully imbued, and thus it is worthy of observation that the uninterrupted enjoyment which distinguished his life was, in great measure, the result of preconcert. It is indeed evident that with less of the instinctive philosophy which, now and then, stands so well in the stead of experience, Mr. Ellison would have found himself precipitated, by the very extraordinary success of his life, into the common vortex of unhappiness which yawns for those of pre-eminent endowments. But it is by no means my object to pen an essay on happiness. The ideas of my friend may be summed up in a few words. He admitted but four elementary principles, or more strictly, conditions of bliss. That which he considered chief was (strange to say!) the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air. \"The health,\" he said, \"attainable by other means is scarcely worth the name.\" He instanced the ecstasies of the fox-hunter, and pointed to the tillers of the earth, the only people who, as a class, can be fairly considered happier than others. His second condition was the love of woman. His third, and most difficult of realization, was the contempt of ambition. His fourth was an object of unceasing pursuit; and he held that, other things being equal, the extent of attainable happiness was in proportion to the spirituality of this object.\n\nEllison was remarkable in the continuous profusion of good gifts lavished upon him by fortune. In personal grace and beauty he exceeded all men. His intellect was of that order to which the acquisition of knowledge is less a labor than an intuition and a necessity. His family was one of the most illustrious of the empire. His bride was the loveliest and most devoted of women. His possessions had been always ample; but on the attainment of his majority, it was discovered that one of those extraordinary freaks of fate had been played in his behalf which startle the whole social world amid which they occur, and seldom fail radically to alter the moral constitution of those who are their objects.\n\nIt appears that about a hundred years before Mr. Ellison's coming of age, there had died, in a remote province, one Mr. Seabright Ellison. This gentleman had amassed a princely fortune, and, having no immediate connections, conceived the whim of suffering his wealth to accumulate for a century after his decease. Minutely and sagaciously directing the various modes of investment, he bequeathed the aggregate amount to the nearest of blood, bearing the name of Ellison, who should be alive at the end of the hundred years. Many attempts had been made to set aside this singular bequest; their ex post facto character rendered them abortive; but the attention of a jealous government was aroused, and a legislative act finally obtained, forbidding all similar accumulations. This act, however, did not prevent young Ellison from entering into possession, on his twenty-first birthday, as the heir of his ancestor Seabright, of a fortune of four hundred and fifty millions of dollars.\n\nWhen it had become known that such was the enormous wealth inherited, there were, of course, many speculations as to the mode of its disposal. The magnitude and the immediate availability of the sum bewildered all who thought on the topic. The possessor of any appreciable amount of money might have been imagined to perform any one of a thousand things. With riches merely surpassing those of any citizen, it would have been easy to suppose him engaging to supreme excess in the fashionable extravagances of his time \u2014 or busying himself with political intrigue \u2014 or aiming at ministerial power \u2014 or purchasing increase of nobility \u2014 or collecting large museums of virtu \u2014 or playing the munificent patron of letters, of science, of art \u2014 or endowing, and bestowing his name upon extensive institutions of charity. But for the inconceivable wealth in the actual possession of the heir, these objects and all ordinary objects were felt to afford too limited a field. Recourse was had to figures, and these but sufficed to confound. It was seen that, even at three per cent., the annual income of the inheritance amounted to no less than thirteen millions and five hundred thousand dollars; which was one million and one hundred and twenty-five thousand per month; or thirty-six thousand nine hundred and eighty-six per day; or one thousand five hundred and forty-one per hour; or six and twenty dollars for every minute that flew. Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up. Men knew not what to imagine. There were some who even conceived that Mr. Ellison would divest himself of at least one-half of his fortune, as of utterly superfluous opulence \u2014 enriching whole troops of his relatives by division of his superabundance. To the nearest of these he did, in fact, abandon the very unusual wealth which was his own before the inheritance.\n\nI was not surprised, however, to perceive that he had long made up his mind on a point which had occasioned so much discussion to his friends. Nor was I greatly astonished at the nature of his decision. In regard to individual charities he had satisfied his conscience. In the possibility of any improvement, properly so called, being effected by man himself in the general condition of man, he had (I am sorry to confess it) little faith. Upon the whole, whether happily or unhappily, he was thrown back, in very great measure, upon self.\n\nIn the widest and noblest sense he was a poet. He comprehended, moreover, the true character, the august aims, the supreme majesty and dignity of the poetic sentiment. The fullest, if not the sole proper satisfaction of this sentiment he instinctively felt to lie in the creation of novel forms of beauty. Some peculiarities, either in his early education, or in the nature of his intellect, had tinged with what is termed materialism all his ethical speculations; and it was this bias, perhaps, which led him to believe that the most advantageous at least, if not the sole legitimate field for the poetic exercise, lies in the creation of novel moods of purely physical loveliness. Thus it happened he became neither musician nor poet \u2014 if we use this latter term in its every-day acceptation. Or it might have been that he neglected to become either, merely in pursuance of his idea that in contempt of ambition is to be found one of the essential principles of happiness on earth. Is it not indeed, possible that, while a high order of genius is necessarily ambitious, the highest is above that which is termed ambition? And may it not thus happen that many far greater than Milton have contentedly remained \"mute and inglorious?\" I believe that the world has never seen \u2014 and that, unless through some series of accidents goading the noblest order of mind into distasteful exertion, the world will never see \u2014 that full extent of triumphant execution, in the richer domains of art, of which the human nature is absolutely capable.\n\nEllison became neither musician nor poet; although no man lived more profoundly enamored of music and poetry. Under other circumstances than those which invested him, it is not impossible that he would have become a painter. Sculpture, although in its nature rigorously poetical was too limited in its extent and consequences, to have occupied, at any time, much of his attention. And I have now mentioned all the provinces in which the common understanding of the poetic sentiment has declared it capable of expatiating. But Ellison maintained that the richest, the truest, and most natural, if not altogether the most extensive province, had been unaccountably neglected. No definition had spoken of the landscape-gardener as of the poet; yet it seemed to my friend that the creation of the landscape-garden offered to the proper Muse the most magnificent of opportunities. Here, indeed, was the fairest field for the display of imagination in the endless combining of forms of novel beauty; the elements to enter into combination being, by a vast superiority, the most glorious which the earth could afford. In the multiform and multicolor of the flowers and the trees, he recognised the most direct and energetic efforts of Nature at physical loveliness. And in the direction or concentration of this effort \u2014 or, more properly, in its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth \u2014 he perceived that he should be employing the best means \u2014 laboring to the greatest advantage \u2014 in the fulfilment, not only of his own destiny as poet, but of the august purposes for which the Deity had implanted the poetic sentiment in man.\n\n\"Its adaptation to the eyes which were to behold it on earth.\" In his explanation of this phraseology, Mr. Ellison did much toward solving what has always seemed to me an enigma:\u2014 I mean the fact (which none but the ignorant dispute) that no such combination of scenery exists in nature as the painter of genius may produce. No such paradises are to be found in reality as have glowed on the canvas of Claude. In the most enchanting of natural landscapes, there will always be found a defect or an excess \u2014 many excesses and defects. While the component parts may defy, individually, the highest skill of the artist, the arrangement of these parts will always be susceptible of improvement. In short, no position can be attained on the wide surface of the natural earth, from which an artistical eye, looking steadily, will not find matter of offence in what is termed the \"composition\" of the landscape. And yet how unintelligible is this! In all other matters we are justly instructed to regard nature as supreme. With her details we shrink from competition. Who shall presume to imitate the colors of the tulip, or to improve the proportions of the lily of the valley? The criticism which says, of sculpture or portraiture, that here nature is to be exalted or idealized rather than imitated, is in error. No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human liveliness do more than approach the living and breathing beauty. In landscape alone is the principle of the critic true; and, having felt its truth here, it is but the headlong spirit of generalization which has led him to pronounce it true throughout all the domains of art. Having, I say, felt its truth here; for the feeling is no affectation or chimera. The mathematics afford no more absolute demonstrations than the sentiments of his art yields the artist. He not only believes, but positively knows, that such and such apparently arbitrary arrangements of matter constitute and alone constitute the true beauty. His reasons, however, have not yet been matured into expression. It remains for a more profound analysis than the world has yet seen, fully to investigate and express them. Nevertheless he is confirmed in his instinctive opinions by the voice of all his brethren. Let a \"composition\" be defective; let an emendation be wrought in its mere arrangement of form; let this emendation be submitted to every artist in the world; by each will its necessity be admitted. And even far more than this:\u2014 in remedy of the defective composition, each insulated member of the fraternity would have suggested the identical emendation.\n\nI repeat that in landscape arrangements alone is the physical nature susceptible of exaltation, and that, therefore, her susceptibility of improvement at this one point, was a mystery I had been unable to solve. My own thoughts on the subject had rested in the idea that the primitive intention of nature would have so arranged the earth's surface as to have fulfilled at all points man's sense of perfection in the beautiful, the sublime, or the picturesque; but that this primitive intention had been frustrated by the known geological disturbances \u2014 disturbances of form and color \u2014 grouping, in the correction or allaying of which lies the soul of art. The force of this idea was much weakened, however, by the necessity which it involved of considering the disturbances abnormal and unadapted to any purpose. It was Ellison who suggested that they were prognostic of death. He thus explained:\u2014 Admit the earthly immortality of man to have been the first intention. We have then the primitive arrangement of the earth's surface adapted to his blissful estate, as not existent but designed. The disturbances were the preparations for his subsequently conceived deathful condition.\n\n\"Now,\" said my friend, \"what we regard as exaltation of the landscape may be really such, as respects only the moral or human point of view. Each alteration of the natural scenery may possibly effect a blemish in the picture, if we can suppose this picture viewed at large \u2014 in mass \u2014 from some point distant from the earth's surface, although not beyond the limits of its atmosphere. It is easily understood that what might improve a closely scrutinized detail, may at the same time injure a general or more distantly observed effect. There may be a class of beings, human once, but now invisible to humanity, to whom, from afar, our disorder may seem order \u2014 our unpicturesqueness picturesque, in a word, the earth-angels, for whose scrutiny more especially than our own, and for whose death \u2014 refined appreciation of the beautiful, may have been set in array by God the wide landscape-gardens of the hemispheres.\"\n\nIn the course of discussion, my friend quoted some passages from a writer on landscape-gardening who has been supposed to have well treated his theme:\n\n\"There are properly but two styles of landscape-gardening, the natural and the artificial. One seeks to recall the original beauty of the country, by adapting its means to the surrounding scenery, cultivating trees in harmony with the hills or plain of the neighboring land; detecting and bringing into practice those nice relations of size, proportion, and color which, hid from the common observer, are revealed everywhere to the experienced student of nature. The result of the natural style of gardening, is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities \u2014 in the prevalence of a healthy harmony and order \u2014 than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles. The artificial style has as many varieties as there are different tastes to gratify. It has a certain general relation to the various styles of building. There are the stately avenues and retirements of Versailles; Italian terraces; and a various mixed old English style, which bears some relation to the domestic Gothic or English Elizabethan architecture. Whatever may be said against the abuses of the artificial landscape \u2014 gardening, a mixture of pure art in a garden scene adds to it a great beauty. This is partly pleasing to the eye, by the show of order and design, and partly moral. A terrace, with an old moss \u2014 covered balustrade, calls up at once to the eye the fair forms that have passed there in other days. The slightest exhibition of art is an evidence of care and human interest.\"\n\n\"From what I have already observed,\" said Ellison, \"you will understand that I reject the idea, here expressed, of recalling the original beauty of the country. The original beauty is never so great as that which may be introduced. Of course, every thing depends on the selection of a spot with capabilities. What is said about detecting and bringing into practice nice relations of size, proportion, and color, is one of those mere vaguenesses of speech which serve to veil inaccuracy of thought. The phrase quoted may mean any thing, or nothing, and guides in no degree. That the true result of the natural style of gardening is seen rather in the absence of all defects and incongruities than in the creation of any special wonders or miracles, is a proposition better suited to the grovelling apprehension of the herd than to the fervid dreams of the man of genius. The negative merit suggested appertains to that hobbling criticism which, in letters, would elevate Addison into apotheosis. In truth, while that virtue which consists in the mere avoidance of vice appeals directly to the understanding, and can thus be circumscribed in rule, the loftier virtue, which flames in creation, can be apprehended in its results alone. Rule applies but to the merits of denial \u2014 to the excellencies which refrain. Beyond these, the critical art can but suggest. We may be instructed to build a \"Cato,\" but we are in vain told how to conceive a Parthenon or an \"Inferno.\" The thing done, however; the wonder accomplished; and the capacity for apprehension becomes universal. The sophists of the negative school who, through inability to create, have scoffed at creation, are now found the loudest in applause. What, in its chrysalis condition of principle, affronted their demure reason, never fails, in its maturity of accomplishment, to extort admiration from their instinct of beauty.\n\n\"The author's observations on the artificial style,\" continued Ellison, \"are less objectionable. A mixture of pure art in a garden scene adds to it a great beauty. This is just; as also is the reference to the sense of human interest. The principle expressed is incontrovertible \u2014 but there may be something beyond it. There may be an object in keeping with the principle \u2014 an object unattainable by the means ordinarily possessed by individuals, yet which, if attained, would lend a charm to the landscape-garden far surpassing that which a sense of merely human interest could bestow. A poet, having very unusual pecuniary resources, might, while retaining the necessary idea of art or culture, or, as our author expresses it, of interest, so imbue his designs at once with extent and novelty of beauty, as to convey the sentiment of spiritual interference. It will be seen that, in bringing about such result, he secures all the advantages of interest or design, while relieving his work of the harshness or technicality of the worldly art. In the most rugged of wildernesses \u2014 in the most savage of the scenes of pure nature \u2014 there is apparent the art of a creator; yet this art is apparent to reflection only; in no respect has it the obvious force of a feeling. Now let us suppose this sense of the Almighty design to be one step depressed \u2014 to be brought into something like harmony or consistency with the sense of human art \u2014 to form an intermedium between the two:\u2014 let us imagine, for example, a landscape whose combined vastness and definitiveness \u2014 whose united beauty, magnificence, and strangeness, shall convey the idea of care, or culture, or superintendence, on the part of beings superior, yet akin to humanity \u2014 then the sentiment of interest is preserved, while the art intervolved is made to assume the air of an intermediate or secondary nature \u2014 a nature which is not God, nor an emanation from God, but which still is nature in the sense of the handiwork of the angels that hover between man and God.\"\n\nIt was in devoting his enormous wealth to the embodiment of a vision such as this \u2014 in the free exercise in the open air ensured by the personal superintendence of his plans \u2014 in the unceasing object which these plans afforded \u2014 in the high spirituality of the object \u2014 in the contempt of ambition which it enabled him truly to feel \u2014 in the perennial springs with which it gratified, without possibility of satiating, that one master passion of his soul, the thirst for beauty, above all, it was in the sympathy of a woman, not unwomanly, whose loveliness and love enveloped his existence in the purple atmosphere of Paradise, that Ellison thought to find, and found, exemption from the ordinary cares of humanity, with a far greater amount of positive happiness than ever glowed in the rapt day-dreams of De Stael.\n\nI despair of conveying to the reader any distinct conception of the marvels which my friend did actually accomplish. I wish to describe, but am disheartened by the difficulty of description, and hesitate between detail and generality. Perhaps the better course will be to unite the two in their extremes.\n\nMr. Ellison's first step regarded, of course, the choice of a locality, and scarcely had he commenced thinking on this point, when the luxuriant nature of the Pacific Islands arrested his attention. In fact, he had made up his mind for a voyage to the South Seas, when a night's reflection induced him to abandon the idea. \"Were I misanthropic,\" he said, \"such a locale would suit me. The thoroughness of its insulation and seclusion, and the difficulty of ingress and egress, would in such case be the charm of charms; but as yet I am not Timon. I wish the composure but not the depression of solitude. There must remain with me a certain control over the extent and duration of my repose. There will be frequent hours in which I shall need, too, the sympathy of the poetic in what I have done. Let me seek, then, a spot not far from a populous city \u2014 whose vicinity, also, will best enable me to execute my plans.\"\n\nIn search of a suitable place so situated, Ellison travelled for several years, and I was permitted to accompany him. A thousand spots with which I was enraptured he rejected without hesitation, for reasons which satisfied me, in the end, that he was right. We came at length to an elevated table-land of wonderful fertility and beauty, affording a panoramic prospect very little less in extent than that of Aetna, and, in Ellison's opinion as well as my own, surpassing the far-famed view from that mountain in all the true elements of the picturesque.\n\n\"I am aware,\" said the traveller, as he drew a sigh of deep delight after gazing on this scene, entranced, for nearly an hour, \"I know that here, in my circumstances, nine-tenths of the most fastidious of men would rest content. This panorama is indeed glorious, and I should rejoice in it but for the excess of its glory. The taste of all the architects I have ever known leads them, for the sake of 'prospect,' to put up buildings on hill-tops. The error is obvious. Grandeur in any of its moods, but especially in that of extent, startles, excites \u2014 and then fatigues, depresses. For the occasional scene nothing can be better \u2014 for the constant view nothing worse. And, in the constant view, the most objectionable phase of grandeur is that of extent; the worst phase of extent, that of distance. It is at war with the sentiment and with the sense of seclusion \u2014 the sentiment and sense which we seek to humor in 'retiring to the country.' In looking from the summit of a mountain we cannot help feeling abroad in the world. The heart-sick avoid distant prospects as a pestilence.\"\n\nIt was not until toward the close of the fourth year of our search that we found a locality with which Ellison professed himself satisfied. It is, of course, needless to say where was the locality. The late death of my friend, in causing his domain to be thrown open to certain classes of visiters, has given to Arnheim a species of secret and subdued if not solemn celebrity, similar in kind, although infinitely superior in degree, to that which so long distinguished Fonthill.\n\nThe usual approach to Arnheim was by the river. The visiter left the city in the early morning. During the forenoon he passed between shores of a tranquil and domestic beauty, on which grazed innumerable sheep, their white fleeces spotting the vivid green of rolling meadows. By degrees the idea of cultivation subsided into that of merely pastoral care. This slowly became merged in a sense of retirement \u2014 this again in a consciousness of solitude. As the evening approached, the channel grew more narrow, the banks more and more precipitous; and these latter were clothed in rich, more profuse, and more sombre foliage. The water increased in transparency. The stream took a thousand turns, so that at no moment could its gleaming surface be seen for a greater distance than a furlong. At every instant the vessel seemed imprisoned within an enchanted circle, having insuperable and impenetrable walls of foliage, a roof of ultramarine satin, and no floor \u2014 the keel balancing itself with admirable nicety on that of a phantom bark which, by some accident having been turned upside down, floated in constant company with the substantial one, for the purpose of sustaining it. The channel now became a gorge \u2014 although the term is somewhat inapplicable, and I employ it merely because the language has no word which better represents the most striking \u2014 not the most distinctive-feature of the scene. The character of gorge was maintained only in the height and parallelism of the shores; it was lost altogether in their other traits. The walls of the ravine (through which the clear water still tranquilly flowed) arose to an elevation of a hundred and occasionally of a hundred and fifty feet, and inclined so much toward each other as, in a great measure, to shut out the light of day; while the long plume-like moss which depended densely from the intertwining shrubberies overhead, gave the whole chasm an air of funereal gloom. The windings became more frequent and intricate, and seemed often as if returning in upon themselves, so that the voyager had long lost all idea of direction. He was, moreover, enwrapt in an exquisite sense of the strange. The thought of nature still remained, but her character seemed to have undergone modification, there was a weird symmetry, a thrilling uniformity, a wizard propriety in these her works. Not a dead branch \u2014 not a withered leaf \u2014 not a stray pebble \u2014 not a patch of the brown earth was anywhere visible. The crystal water welled up against the clean granite, or the unblemished moss, with a sharpness of outline that delighted while it bewildered the eye.\n\nHaving threaded the mazes of this channel for some hours, the gloom deepening every moment, a sharp and unexpected turn of the vessel brought it suddenly, as if dropped from heaven, into a circular basin of very considerable extent when compared with the width of the gorge. It was about two hundred yards in diameter, and girt in at all points but one \u2014 that immediately fronting the vessel as it entered \u2014 by hills equal in general height to the walls of the chasm, although of a thoroughly different character. Their sides sloped from the water's edge at an angle of some forty-five degrees, and they were clothed from base to summit \u2014 not a perceptible point escaping \u2014 in a drapery of the most gorgeous flower-blossoms; scarcely a green leaf being visible among the sea of odorous and fluctuating color. This basin was of great depth, but so transparent was the water that the bottom, which seemed to consist of a thick mass of small round alabaster pebbles, was distinctly visible by glimpses \u2014 that is to say, whenever the eye could permit itself not to see, far down in the inverted heaven, the duplicate blooming of the hills. On these latter there were no trees, nor even shrubs of any size. The impressions wrought on the observer were those of richness, warmth, color, quietude, uniformity, softness, delicacy, daintiness, voluptuousness, and a miraculous extremeness of culture that suggested dreams of a new race of fairies, laborious, tasteful, magnificent, and fastidious; but as the eye traced upward the myriad-tinted slope, from its sharp junction with the water to its vague termination amid the folds of overhanging cloud, it became, indeed, difficult not to fancy a panoramic cataract of rubies, sapphires, opals, and golden onyxes, rolling silently out of the sky.\n\nThe visiter, shooting suddenly into this bay from out the gloom of the ravine, is delighted but astounded by the full orb of the declining sun, which he had supposed to be already far below the horizon, but which now confronts him, and forms the sole termination of an otherwise limitless vista seen through another chasm \u2014 like rift in the hills.\n\nBut here the voyager quits the vessel which has borne him so far, and descends into a light canoe of ivory, stained with arabesque devices in vivid scarlet, both within and without. The poop and beak of this boat arise high above the water, with sharp points, so that the general form is that of an irregular crescent. It lies on the surface of the bay with the proud grace of a swan. On its ermined floor reposes a single feathery paddle of satin-wood; but no oarsmen or attendant is to be seen. The guest is bidden to be of good cheer \u2014 that the fates will take care of him. The larger vessel disappears, and he is left alone in the canoe, which lies apparently motionless in the middle of the lake. While he considers what course to pursue, however, he becomes aware of a gentle movement in the fairy bark. It slowly swings itself around until its prow points toward the sun. It advances with a gentle but gradually accelerated velocity, while the slight ripples it creates seem to break about the ivory side in divinest melody-seem to offer the only possible explanation of the soothing yet melancholy music for whose unseen origin the bewildered voyager looks around him in vain.\n\nThe canoe steadily proceeds, and the rocky gate of the vista is approached, so that its depths can be more distinctly seen. To the right arise a chain of lofty hills rudely and luxuriantly wooded. It is observed, however, that the trait of exquisite cleanness where the bank dips into the water, still prevails. There is not one token of the usual river debris. To the left the character of the scene is softer and more obviously artificial. Here the bank slopes upward from the stream in a very gentle ascent, forming a broad sward of grass of a texture resembling nothing so much as velvet, and of a brilliancy of green which would bear comparison with the tint of the purest emerald. This plateau varies in width from ten to three hundred yards; reaching from the river-bank to a wall, fifty feet high, which extends, in an infinity of curves, but following the general direction of the river, until lost in the distance to the westward. This wall is of one continuous rock, and has been formed by cutting perpendicularly the once rugged precipice of the stream's southern bank, but no trace of the labor has been suffered to remain. The chiselled stone has the hue of ages, and is profusely overhung and overspread with the ivy, the coral honeysuckle, the eglantine, and the clematis. The uniformity of the top and bottom lines of the wall is fully relieved by occasional trees of gigantic height, growing singly or in small groups, both along the plateau and in the domain behind the wall, but in close proximity to it; so that frequent limbs (of the black walnut especially) reach over and dip their pendent extremities into the water. Farther back within the domain, the vision is impeded by an impenetrable screen of foliage.\n\nThese things are observed during the canoe's gradual approach to what I have called the gate of the vista. On drawing nearer to this, however, its chasm-like appearance vanishes; a new outlet from the bay is discovered to the left \u2014 in which direction the wall is also seen to sweep, still following the general course of the stream. Down this new opening the eye cannot penetrate very far; for the stream, accompanied by the wall, still bends to the left, until both are swallowed up by the leaves.\n\nThe boat, nevertheless, glides magically into the winding channel; and here the shore opposite the wall is found to resemble that opposite the wall in the straight vista. Lofty hills, rising occasionally into mountains, and covered with vegetation in wild luxuriance, still shut in the scene.\n\nFloating gently onward, but with a velocity slightly augmented, the voyager, after many short turns, finds his progress apparently barred by a gigantic gate or rather door of burnished gold, elaborately carved and fretted, and reflecting the direct rays of the now fast-sinking sun with an effulgence that seems to wreath the whole surrounding forest in flames. This gate is inserted in the lofty wall; which here appears to cross the river at right angles. In a few moments, however, it is seen that the main body of the water still sweeps in a gentle and extensive curve to the left, the wall following it as before, while a stream of considerable volume, diverging from the principal one, makes its way, with a slight ripple, under the door, and is thus hidden from sight. The canoe falls into the lesser channel and approaches the gate. Its ponderous wings are slowly and musically expanded. The boat glides between them, and commences a rapid descent into a vast amphitheatre entirely begirt with purple mountains, whose bases are laved by a gleaming river throughout the full extent of their circuit. Meantime the whole Paradise of Arnheim bursts upon the view. There is a gush of entrancing melody; there is an oppressive sense of strange sweet odor \u2014 there is a dream \u2014 like intermingling to the eye of tall slender Eastern trees \u2014 bosky shrubberies \u2014 flocks of golden and crimson birds \u2014 lily-fringed lakes \u2014 meadows of violets, tulips, poppies, hyacinths, and tuberoses \u2014 long intertangled lines of silver streamlets \u2014 and, upspringing confusedly from amid all, a mass of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic architecture sustaining itself by miracle in mid-air, glittering in the red sunlight with a hundred oriels, minarets, and pinnacles; and seeming the phantom handiwork, conjointly, of the Sylphs, of the Fairies, of the Genii and of the Gnomes.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe \"Red Death\" had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal \u2014 the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour.\n\nBut the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. A strong and lofty wall girdled it in. This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The abbey was amply provisioned. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. The external world could take care of itself. In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the \"Red Death.\"\n\nIt was toward the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence.\n\nIt was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven \u2014 an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole extent is scarcely impeded. Here the case was very different; as might have been expected from the duke's love of the bizarre. The apartments were so irregularly disposed that the vision embraced but little more than one at a time. There was a sharp turn at every twenty or thirty yards, and at each turn a novel effect. To the right and left, in the middle of each wall, a tall and narrow Gothic window looked out upon a closed corridor which pursued the windings of the suite. These windows were of stained glass whose color varied in accordance with the prevailing hue of the decorations of the chamber into which it opened. That at the eastern extremity was hung, for example, in blue \u2014 and vividly blue were its windows. The second chamber was purple in its ornaments and tapestries, and here the panes were purple. The third was green throughout, and so were the casements. The fourth was furnished and lighted with orange \u2014 the fifth with white \u2014 the sixth with violet. The seventh apartment was closely shrouded in black velvet tapestries that hung all over the ceiling and down the walls, falling in heavy folds upon a carpet of the same material and hue. But in this chamber only, the color of the windows failed to correspond with the decorations. The panes here were scarlet \u2014 a deep blood color. Now in no one of the seven apartments was there any lamp or candelabrum, amid the profusion of golden ornaments that lay scattered to and fro or depended from the roof. There was no light of any kind emanating from lamp or candle within the suite of chambers. But in the corridors that followed the suite, there stood, opposite to each window, a heavy tripod, bearing a brazier of fire that protected its rays through the tinted glass and so glaringly illumined the room. And thus were produced a multitude of gaudy and fantastic appearances. But in the western or black chamber the effect of the fire-light that streamed upon the dark hangings through the blood-tinted panes, was ghastly in the extreme, and produced so wild a look upon the countenances of those who entered, that there were few of the company bold enough to set foot within its precincts at all.\n\nIt was in this apartment, also, that there stood against the western wall, a gigantic clock of ebony. Its pendulum swung to and fro with a dull, heavy, monotonous clang; and when the minute-hand made the circuit of the face, and the hour was to be stricken, there came from the brazen lungs of the clock a sound which was clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical, but of so peculiar a note and emphasis that, at each lapse of an hour, the musicians of the orchestra were constrained to pause, momentarily, in their performance, to hearken to the sound; and thus the waltzers perforce ceased their evolutions; and there was a brief disconcert of the whole gay company; and, while the chimes of the clock yet rang, it was observed that the giddiest grew pale, and the more aged and sedate passed their hands over their brows as if in confused reverie or meditation. But when the echoes had fully ceased, a light laughter at once pervaded the assembly; the musicians looked at each other and smiled as if at their own nervousness and folly, and made whispering vows, each to the other, that the next chiming of the clock should produce in them no similar emotion; and then, after the lapse of sixty minutes, (which embrace three thousand and six hundred seconds of the Time that flies,) there came yet another chiming of the clock, and then were the same disconcert and tremulousness and meditation as before.\n\nBut, in spite of these things, it was a gay and magnificent revel. The tastes of the duke were peculiar. He had a fine eye for colors and effects. He disregarded the decora of mere fashion. His plans were bold and fiery, and his conceptions glowed with barbaric lustre. There are some who would have thought him mad. His followers felt that he was not. It was necessary to hear and see and touch him to be sure that he was not.\n\nHe had directed, in great part, the moveable embellishments of the seven chambers, upon occasion of this great fete; and it was his own guiding taste which had given character to the masqueraders. Be sure they were grotesque. There were much glare and glitter and piquancy and phantasm \u2014 much of what has been since seen in \"Hernani.\" There were arabesque figures with unsuited limbs and appointments. There were delirious fancies such as the madman fashions. There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust. To and fro in the seven chambers there stalked, in fact, a multitude of dreams. And these \u2014 the dreams \u2014 writhed in and about, taking hue from the rooms, and causing the wild music of the orchestra to seem as the echo of their steps. And, anon, there strikes the ebony clock which stands in the hall of the velvet. And then, for a moment, all is still, and all is silent save the voice of the clock. The dreams are stiff-frozen as they stand. But the echoes of the chime die away \u2014 they have endured but an instant \u2014 and a light, half-subdued laughter floats after them as they depart. And now again the music swells, and the dreams live, and writhe to and fro more merrily than ever, taking hue from the many-tinted windows through which stream the rays from the tripods. But to the chamber which lies most westwardly of the seven, there are now none of the maskers who venture; for the night is waning away; and there flows a ruddier light through the blood-colored panes; and the blackness of the sable drapery appals; and to him whose foot falls upon the sable carpet, there comes from the near clock of ebony a muffled peal more solemnly emphatic than any which reaches their ears who indulge in the more remote gaieties of the other apartments.\n\nBut these other apartments were densely crowded, and in them beat feverishly the heart of life. And the revel went whirlingly on, until at length there commenced the sounding of midnight upon the clock. And then the music ceased, as I have told; and the evolutions of the waltzers were quieted; and there was an uneasy cessation of all things as before. But now there were twelve strokes to be sounded by the bell of the clock; and thus it happened, perhaps, that more of thought crept, with more of time, into the meditations of the thoughtful among those who revelled. And thus, too, it happened, perhaps, that before the last echoes of the last chime had utterly sunk into silence, there were many individuals in the crowd who had found leisure to become aware of the presence of a masked figure which had arrested the attention of no single individual before. And the rumor of this new presence having spread itself whisperingly around, there arose at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise \u2014 then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.\n\nIn an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade license of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made. The whole company, indeed, seemed now deeply to feel that in the costume and bearing of the stranger neither wit nor propriety existed. The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood \u2014 and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror.\n\nWhen the eyes of Prince Prospero fell upon this spectral image (which with a slow and solemn movement, as if more fully to sustain its role, stalked to and fro among the waltzers) he was seen to be convulsed, in the first moment with a strong shudder either of terror or distaste; but, in the next, his brow reddened with rage.\n\n\"Who dares?\" he demanded hoarsely of the courtiers who stood near him \u2014\"who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him \u2014 that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise, from the battlements!\"\n\nIt was in the eastern or blue chamber in which stood the Prince Prospero as he uttered these words. They rang throughout the seven rooms loudly and clearly \u2014 for the prince was a bold and robust man, and the music had become hushed at the waving of his hand.\n\nIt was in the blue room where stood the prince, with a group of pale courtiers by his side. At first, as he spoke, there was a slight rushing movement of this group in the direction of the intruder, who at the moment was also near at hand, and now, with deliberate and stately step, made closer approach to the speaker. But from a certain nameless awe with which the mad assumptions of the mummer had inspired the whole party, there were found none who put forth hand to seize him; so that, unimpeded, he passed within a yard of the prince's person; and, while the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple \u2014 through the purple to the green \u2014 through the green to the orange \u2014 through this again to the white \u2014 and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. It was then, however, that the Prince Prospero, maddening with rage and the shame of his own momentary cowardice, rushed hurriedly through the six chambers, while none followed him on account of a deadly terror that had seized upon all. He bore aloft a drawn dagger, and had approached, in rapid impetuosity, to within three or four feet of the retreating figure, when the latter, having attained the extremity of the velvet apartment, turned suddenly and confronted his pursuer. There was a sharp cry \u2014 and the dagger dropped gleaming upon the sable carpet, upon which, instantly afterwards, fell prostrate in death the Prince Prospero. Then, summoning the wild courage of despair, a throng of the revellers at once threw themselves into the black apartment, and, seizing the mummer, whose tall figure stood erect and motionless within the shadow of the ebony clock, gasped in unutterable horror at finding the grave-cerements and corpse-like mask which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form.\n\nAnd now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Mystery of Marie Roget by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThere are ideal series of events which run parallel with the real ones. They rarely coincide. Men and circumstances generally modify the ideal train of events, so that it seems imperfect, and its consequences are equally imperfect. Thus with the Reformation; instead of Protestantism came Lutheranism.\n\n\u2014Novalis. Moral Ansichten\n\nThere are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. Such sentiments \u2014 for the half-credences of which I speak have never the full force of thought \u2014 such sentiments are seldom thoroughly stifled unless by reference to the doctrine of chance, or, as it is technically termed, the Calculus of Probabilities. Now this Calculus is, in its essence, purely mathematical; and thus we have the anomaly of the most rigidly exact in science applied to the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation.\n\nThe extraordinary details which I am now called upon to make public, will be found to form, as regards sequence of time, the primary branch of a series of scarcely intelligible coincidences, whose secondary or concluding branch will be recognized by all readers in the late murder of MARY CECILIA ROGERS, at New York.\n\nWhen, in an article entitled \"The Murders in the Rue Morgue,\" I endeavored, about a year ago, to depict some very remarkable features in the mental character of my friend, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, it did not occur to me that I should ever resume the subject. This depicting of character constituted my design; and this design was thoroughly fulfilled in the wild train of circumstances brought to instance Dupin's idiosyncrasy. I might have adduced other examples, but I should have proven no more. Late events, however, in their surprising development, have startled me into some farther details, which will carry with them the air of extorted confession. Hearing what I have lately heard, it would be indeed strange should I remain silent in regard to what I both heard and saw so long ago.\n\nUpon the winding up of the tragedy involved in the deaths of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, the Chevalier dismissed the affair at once from his attention, and relapsed into his old habits of moody revery. Prone, at all times, to abstraction, I readily fell in with his humor; and continuing to occupy our chambers in the Faubourg Saint Germain, we gave the Future to the winds, and slumbered tranquilly in the Present, weaving the dull world around us into dreams.\n\nBut these dreams were not altogether uninterrupted. It may readily be supposed that the part played by my friend, in the drama at the Rue Morgue had not failed of its impression upon the fancies of the Parisian police. With its emissaries, the name of Dupin had grown into a household word. The simple character of those inductions by which he had disentangled the mystery never having been explained even to the Prefect, or to any other individual than myself, of course it is not surprising that the affair was regarded as little less than miraculous, or that the Chevalier's analytical abilities acquired for him the credit of intuition. His frankness would have led him to disabuse every inquirer of such prejudice; but his indolent humor forbade all further agitation of a topic whose interest to himself had long ceased. It thus happened that he found himself the cynosure of the political eyes; and the cases were not few in which attempt was made to engage his services at the Prefecture. One of the most remarkable instances was that of the murder of a young girl named Marie Roget.\n\nThis event occurred about two years after the atrocity in the Rue Morgue. Marie, whose Christian and family name will at once arrest attention from their resemblance to those of the unfortunate \"cigar-girl\" was the only daughter of the widow Estelle Roget. The father had died during the child's infancy, and from the period of his death, until within eighteen months before the assassination which forms the subject of our narrative, the mother and daughter had dwelt together in the Rue Pavee Saint Andree; Madame there keeping a pension, assisted by Marie. Affairs went on thus until the latter had attained her twenty-second year, when her great beauty attracted the notice of a perfumer, who occupied one of the shops in the basement of the Palais Royal, and whose custom lay, chiefly among the desperate adventurers infesting that neighborhood. Monsieur Le Blanc was not unaware of the advantages to be derived from the attendance of the fair Marie in his perfumery; and his liberal proposals were accepted eagerly by the girl, although with somewhat more of hesitation by Madame.\n\nThe anticipations of the shopkeeper were realized, and his rooms soon became notorious through the charms of the sprightly grisette. She had been in his employ about a year, when her admirers were thrown into confusion by her sudden disappearance from the shop. Monsieur Le Blanc was unable to account for her absence, and Madame Roget was distracted with anxiety and terror. The public papers immediately took up the theme, and the police were upon the point of making serious investigations, when, one fine morning, after the lapse of a week, Marie, in good health, but with a somewhat saddened air, made her reappearance at her usual counter in the perfumery. All inquiry, except that of a private character, was of course, immediately hushed. Monsieur Le Blanc professed total ignorance, as before. Marie, with Madame, replied to all questions, that the last week had been spent at the house of a relation in the country. Thus the affair died away, and was generally forgotten; for the girl, ostensibly to relieve herself from the impertinence of curiosity soon bade a final adieu to the perfumer, and sought the shelter of her mother's residence in the Rue Pavee Saint Andree.\n\nIt was about five months after this return home, that her friends were alarmed by her sudden disappearance for the second time. Three days elapsed, and nothing was heard of her. On the fourth her corpse was found floating in the Seine near the shore which is opposite the Quartier of the Rue Saint Andre, and at a point not very far distant from the secluded neighborhood of the Barriere du Roule.\n\nThe atrocity of this murder (for it was at once evident that murder had been committed), the youth and beauty of the victim, and, above all her previous notoriety, conspired to produce intense excitement in the minds of the sensitive Parisians. I can call to mind no similar occurrence producing so general and so intense an effect. For several weeks, in the discussion of this one absorbing theme, even the momentous political topics of the day were forgotten. The Prefect made unusual exertions; and the powers of the whole Parisian police were, of course, tasked to the utmost extent.\n\nUpon the first discovery of the corpse, it was not supposed that the murderer would be able to elude, for more than a very brief period, the inquisition which was immediately set on foot. It was not until the expiration of a week that it was deemed necessary to offer a reward; and even then this reward was limited to a thousand francs. In the meantime the investigation proceeded with vigor, if not always with judgment, and numerous individuals were examined to no purpose; while, owing to the continual absence of all clew to the mystery, the popular excitement greatly increased. At the end of the tenth day it was thought advisable to double the sum originally proposed; and, at length, the second week having elapsed without leading to any discoveries, and the prejudice which always exists in Paris against the Police having given vent to itself in several serious emeutes, the Prefect took it upon himself to offer the sum of twenty thousand francs \"for the conviction of the assassin,\" or, if more than one should prove to have been implicated, \"for the conviction of any one of the assassins.\" In the proclamation setting forth this reward, a full pardon was promised to any accomplice who should come forward in evidence against his fellow; and to the whole was appended, wherever it appeared, the private placard of a committee of citizens, offering ten thousand francs, in addition to the amount proposed by the Prefecture. The entire reward thus stood at no less than thirty thousand francs, which will be regarded as an extraordinary sum when we consider the humble condition of the girl, and the great frequency, in large cities, of such atrocities as the one described.\n\nNo one doubted now that the mystery of this murder would be immediately brought to light. But although, in one or two instances, arrests were made which promised elucidation, yet nothing was elicited which could implicate the parties suspected; and they were discharged forthwith. Strange as it may appear, the third week from the discovery of the body had passed, and passed without any light being thrown upon the subject, before even a rumor of the events which had so agitated the public mind reached the ears of Dupin and myself. Engaged in researches which had absorbed our whole attention, it had been nearly a month since either of us had gone abroad, or received a visitor, or more than glanced at the leading political articles in one of the daily papers. The first intelligence of the murder was brought us by G \u2014 in person. He called upon us early in the afternoon of the thirteenth of July, 18-, and remained with us until late in the night. He had been piqued by the failure of all his endeavors to ferret out the assassins. His reputation \u2014 so he said with a peculiarly Parisian air \u2014 was at stake. Even his honor was concerned. The eyes of the public were upon him; and there was really no sacrifice which he would not be willing to make for the development of the mystery. He concluded a somewhat droll speech with a compliment upon what he was pleased to term the tact of Dupin, and made him a direct and certainly a liberal proposition, the precise nature of which I do not feel myself at liberty to disclose, but which has no bearing upon the proper subject of my narrative.\n\nThe compliment my friend rebutted as best he could, but the proposition he accepted at once, although its advantages were altogether provisional. This point being settled, the Prefect broke forth at once into explanations of his own views, interspersing them with long comments upon the evidence; of which latter we were not yet in possession. He discoursed much and, beyond doubt, learnedly; while I hazarded an occasional suggestion as the night wore drowsily away. Dupin, sitting steadily in his accustomed armchair, was the embodiment of respectful attention. He wore spectacles, during the whole interview; and an occasional glance beneath their green glasses sufficed to convince me that he slept not the less soundly, because silently, throughout the seven or eight leaden-footed hours which immediately preceded the departure of the Prefect.\n\nIn the morning, I procured, at the Prefecture, a full report of all the evidence elicited, and, at the various newspaper offices, a copy of every paper in which, from first to last, had been published any decisive information in regard to this sad affair. Freed from all that was positively disproved, this mass of information stood thus:\n\nMarie Roget left the residence of her mother, in the Rue Pavee St. Andree, about nine o'clock in the morning of Sunday, June the twenty second, 18-. In going out, she gave notice to a Monsieur Jacques St. Eustache, and to him only, of her intention to spend the day with an aunt, who resided in the Rue des Dromes. The Rue des Dromes is a short and narrow but populous thoroughfare, not far from the banks of the river, and at a distance of some two miles, in the most direct course possible, from the pension of Madame Roget. St. Eustache was the accepted suitor of Marie, and lodged, as well as took his meals, at the pension. He was to have gone for his betrothed at dusk, and to have escorted her home. In the afternoon, however, it came on to rain heavily; and, supposing that she would remain all night at her aunt's (as she had done under similar circumstances before), he did not think it necessary to keep his promise. As night drew on, Madame Roget (who was an infirm old lady, seventy years of age) was heard to express a fear \"that she should never see Marie again;\" but this observation attracted little attention at the time.\n\nOn Monday it was ascertained that the girl had not been to the Rue des Dromes; and when the day elapsed without tidings of her, a tardy search was instituted at several points in the city and its environs. It was not, however, until the fourth day from the period of her disappearance that any thing satisfactory was ascertained respecting her. On this day (Wednesday, the twenty-fifth of June) a Monsieur Beauvais, who, with a friend, had been making inquiries for Marie near the Barriere du Roule, on the shore of the Seine which is opposite the Rue Pavee St. Andree, was informed that a corpse had just been towed ashore by some fishermen, who had found it floating in the river. Upon seeing the body, Beauvais, after some hesitation, identified it as that of the perfumery-girl. His friend recognized it more promptly.\n\nThe face was suffused with dark blood, some of which issued from the mouth. No foam was seen, as in the case of the merely drowned. There was no discoloration in the cellular tissue. About the throat were bruises and impressions of fingers. The arms were bent over on the chest, and were rigid. The right hand was clenched; the left partially open. On the left wrist were two circular excoriations, apparently the effect of ropes, or of a rope in more than one volution. A part of the right wrist, also, was much chafed, as well as the back throughout its extent, but more especially at the shoulder-blades. In bringing the body to the shore the fishermen had attached to it a rope, but none of the excorations had been effected by this. The flesh of the neck was much swollen. There were no cuts apparent, or bruises which appeared the effect of blows. A piece of lace was found tied so tightly around the neck as to be hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh, and was fastened by a knot which lay just under the left ear. This alone would have sufficed to produce death. The medical testimony spoke confidently of the virtuous character of the deceased. She had been subjected, it said, to brutal violence. The corpse was in such condition when found, that there could have been no difficulty in its recognition by friends.\n\nThe dress was much torn and otherwise disordered. In the outer garment, a slip, about a foot wide, had been torn upward from the bottom hem to the waist, but not torn off. It was wound three times around the waist, and secured by a sort of hitch in the back. The dress immediately beneath the frock was of fine muslin; and from this a slip eighteen inches wide had been torn entirely out-torn very evenly and with great care. It was found around her neck, fitting loosely, and secured with a hard knot. Over this muslin slip and the slip of lace the strings of a bonnet were attached, the bonnet being appended. The knot by which the strings of the bonnet were fastened was not a lady's, but a slip or sailors knot.\n\nAfter the recognition of the corpse, it was not, as usual, taken to the Morgue (this formality being superfluous), but hastily interred not far from the spot at which it was brought ashore. Through the exertions of Beauvais, the matter was industriously hushed up, as far as possible; and several days had elapsed before any public emotion resulted. A weekly paper, however, at length took up the theme; the corpse was disinterred, and a re-examination instituted; but nothing was elicited beyond what has been already noted. The clothes, however, were now submitted to the mother and friends of the deceased, and fully identified as those worn by the girl upon leaving home.\n\nMeantime, the excitement increased hourly. Several individuals were arrested and discharged. St. Eustache fell especially under suspicion; and he failed, at first, to give an intelligible account of his whereabouts during the Sunday on which Marie left home. Subsequently, however, he submitted to Monsieur G \u2014 affidavits, accounting satisfactorily for every hour of the day in question. As time passed and no discovery ensued, a thousand contradictory rumors were circulated and journalists busied themselves in suggestions. Among these, the one which attracted the most notice, was the idea that Marie Roget still lived \u2014 that the corpse found in the Seine was that of some other unfortunate. It will be proper that I submit to the reader some passages which embody the suggestion alluded to. These passages are literal translations from L'Etoile, a paper conducted, in general, with much ability.\n\n\"Mademoiselle Roget left her mother's house on Sunday morning, June the twenty-second, 18-, with the ostensible purpose of going to see her aunt, or some other connection, in the Rue des Dromes. From that hour, nobody is proved to have seen her. There is no trace or tidings of her at all.... There has no person, whatever, come forward, so far, who saw her at all in that day, after she left her mother's door.... Now, though we have no evidence that Marie Roget was in the land of the living after nine o'clock on Sunday, June the twenty-second, we have proof that, up to that hour, she was alive. On Wednesday noon, at twelve, a female body was discovered afloat on the shore of the Barriere du Roule. This was, even if we presume that Marie Roget was thrown into the river within three hours after she left her mother's house, only three days from the time she left her home \u2014 three days to an hour. But it is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight. Those who are guilty of such horrid crimes choose darkness rather than light... Thus we see that if the body found in the river was that of Marie Roget it could only have been in the water two and a half days, or three at the outside. All experience has shown that drowned bodies, or bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence, require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water. Even where a cannon is fired over a corpse, and it rises before at least five or six days' immersion, it sinks again, if left alone. Now, we ask, what was there in this case to cause a departure from the ordinary course of nature?... If the body had been kept in its mangled state on shore until Tuesday night some trace would be found in shore of the murderers. It is a doubtful point, also, whether the body would be so soon afloat, even were it thrown in after having been dead two days. And, furthermore, it is exceedingly improbable that any villains who had committed such a murder as is here supposed, would have thrown the body in without weight to sink it, when such a precaution could have so easily been taken.\"\n\nThe editor here proceeds to argue that the body must have been in the water \"not three days merely, but, at least, five times three days,\" because it was so far decomposed that Beauvais had great difficulty in recognizing it. This latter point, however, was fully disproved. I continue the translation:\n\n\"What, then, are the facts on which M. Beauvais says that he had no doubt the body was that of Marie Roget? He ripped up the gown sleeve, and says he found marks which satisfied him of the identity. The public generally supposed those marks to have consisted of some description of scars. He rubbed the arm and found hair upon it \u2014 something as indefinite, we think, as can readily be imagined \u2014 as little conclusive as finding an arm in the sleeve. M. Beauvais did not return that night, but sent word to Madame Roget, at seven o'clock, on Wednesday evening, that an investigation was still in progress respecting her daughter. If we allow that Madame Roget, from her age and grief, could not go over (which is allowing a great deal), there certainly must have been some one who would have thought it worth while to go over and attend the investigation, if they thought the body was that of Marie. Nobody went over. There was nothing said or heard about the matter in the Rue Pavee St. Andree, that reached even the occupants of the same building. M. St. Eustache, the lover and intended husband of Marie, who boarded in her mother's house, deposes that he did not hear of the discovery of the body of his intended until the next morning, when M. Beauvais came into his chamber and told him of it. For an item of news like this, it strikes us it was very coolly received.\"\n\nIn this way the journal endeavored to create the impression of an apathy on the part of the relatives of Marie, inconsistent with the supposition that these relatives believed the corpse to be hers. Its insinuations amount to this:\u2014 that Marie, with the connivance of her friends, had absented herself from the city for reasons involving a charge against her chastity; and that these friends upon the discovery of a corpse in the Seine, somewhat resembling that of the girl, had availed themselves of the opportunity to impress the public with the belief of her death. But L'Etoile was again overhasty. It was distinctly proved that no apathy, such as was imagined, existed; that the old lady was exceedingly feeble, and so agitated as to be unable to attend to any duty; that St. Eustache, so far from receiving the news coolly, was distracted with grief, and bore himself so frantically, that M. Beauvais prevailed upon a friend and relative to take charge of him, and prevent his attending the examination at the disinterment. Moreover, although it was stated by L'Etoile, that the corpse was re-interred at the public expense \u2014 that an advantageous offer of private sepulture was absolutely declined by the family \u2014 and that no member of the family attended the ceremonial:\u2014 although, I say, all this was asserted by L'Etoile in furtherance of the impression it designed to convey \u2014 yet all this was satisfactorily disproved. In a subsequent number of the paper, an attempt was made to throw suspicion upon Beauvais himself. The editor says:\n\n\"Now, then, a change comes over the matter. We are told that, on one occasion, while a Madame B\u2014 was at Madame Roget's house, M. Beauvais, who was going out, told her that a gendarme was expected there, and that she, Madame B., must not say any thing to the gendarme until he returned, but let the matter be for him.... In the present posture of affairs, M. Beauvais appears to have the whole matter locked up in his head. A single step cannot be taken without M. Beauvais, for, go which way you will you run against him.... For some reason he determined that nobody shall have anything to do with the proceedings but himself, and he has elbowed the male relatives out of the way, according to their representations, in a very singular manner. He seems to have been very much averse to permitting the relatives to see the body.\"\n\nBy the following fact, some color was given to the suspicion thus thrown upon Beauvais. A visitor at his office, a few days prior to the girl's disappearance, and during the absence of its occupant, had observed a rose in the key-hole of the door, and the name \"Marie\" inscribed upon a slate which hung near at hand.\n\nThe general impression, so far as we were enabled to glean it from the newspapers, seemed to be, that Marie had been the victim of a gang of desperadoes \u2014 that by these she had been borne across the river, maltreated, and murdered. Le Commerciel, however, a print of extensive influence, was earnest in combatting this popular idea. I quote a passage or two from its columns:\n\n\"We are persuaded that pursuit has hitherto been on a false scent, so far as it has been directed to the Barriere du Roule. It is impossible that a person so well known to thousands as this young woman was, should have passed three blocks without some one having seen her; and any one who saw her would have remembered it, for she interested all who knew her. It was when the streets were full of people, when she went out.... It is impossible that she could have gone to the Barriere du Roule, or to the Rue des Dromes, without being recognized by a dozen persons; yet no one has come forward who saw her outside of her mother's door, and there is no evidence, except the testimony concerning her expressed intentions, that she did go out at all. Her gown was torn, bound round her, and tied; and by that the body was carried as a bundle. If the murder had been committed at the Barriere du Roule, there would have been no necessity for any such arrangement. The fact that the body was found floating near the Barriere, is no proof as to where it was thrown into the water.... A piece of one of the unfortunate girl's petticoats, two feet long and one foot wide, was torn out and tied under her chin around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams. This was done by fellows who had no pocket-handkerchief.\"\n\nA day or two before the Prefect called upon us, however, some important information reached the police, which seemed to overthrow, at least, the chief portion of Le Commerciel's argument. Two small boys, sons of a Madame Deluc, while roaming among the woods near the Barriere du Roule, chanced to penetrate a close thicket, within which were three or four large stones, forming a kind of seat with a back and footstool. On the upper stone lay a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf. A parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief were also here found. The handkerchief bore the name \"Marie Roget.\" Fragments of dress were discovered on the brambles around. The earth was trampled, the bushes were broken, and there was every evidence of a struggle. Between the thicket and the river, the fences were found taken down, and the ground bore evidence of some heavy burthen having been dragged along it.\n\nA weekly paper, Le Soleil, had the following comments upon this discovery \u2014 comments which merely echoed the sentiment of the whole Parisian press:\n\n\"The things had all evidently been there at least three or four weeks; they were all mildewed down hard with the action of the rain, and stuck together from mildew. The grass had grown around and over some of them. The silk on the parasol was strong, but the threads of it were run together within. The upper part, where it had been doubled and folded, was all mildewed and rotten, and tore on its being opened.... The pieces of her frock torn out by the bushes were about three inches wide and six inches long. One part was the hem of the frock, and it had been mended; the other piece was part of the skirt, not the hem. They looked like strips torn off, and were on the thorn bush, about a foot from the ground.... There can be no doubt, therefore, that the spot of this appalling outrage has been discovered.\"\n\nConsequent upon this discovery, new evidence appeared. Madame Deluc testified that she keeps a roadside inn not far from the bank of the river, opposite the Barriere du Roule. The neighborhood is secluded \u2014 particularly so. It is the usual Sunday resort of blackguards from the city, who cross the river in boats. About three o'clock, in the afternoon of the Sunday in question, a young girl arrived at the inn, accompanied by a young man of dark complexion. The two remained here for some time. On their departure, they took the road to some thick woods in the vicinity. Madame Deluc's attention was called to the dress worn by the girl, on account of its resemblance to one worn by a deceased relative. A scarf was particularly noticed. Soon after the departure of the couple, a gang of miscreants made their appearance, behaved boisterously, ate and drank without making payment, followed in the route of the young man and girl, returned to the inn about dusk, and re-crossed the river as if in great haste.\n\nIt was soon after dark, upon this same evening, that Madame Deluc, as well as her eldest son, heard the screams of a female in the vicinity of the inn. The screams were violent but brief. Madame D. recognized not only the scarf which was found in the thicket, but the dress which was discovered upon the corpse. An omnibus-driver, Valence, now also testified that he saw Marie Roget cross a ferry on the Seine, on the Sunday in question, in company with a young man of dark complexion. He, Valence, knew Marie, and could not be mistaken in her identity. The articles found in the thicket were fully identified by the relatives of Marie.\n\nThe items of evidence and information thus collected by myself, from the newspapers, at the suggestion of Dupin, embraced only one more point \u2014 but this was a point of seemingly vast consequence. It appears that, immediately after the discovery of the clothes as above described, the lifeless or nearly lifeless body of St. Eustache, Marie's betrothed, was found in the vicinity of what all now supposed the scene of the outrage. A phial labelled \"laudanum,\" and emptied, was found near him. His breath gave evidence of the poison. He died without speaking. Upon his person was found a letter, briefly stating his love for Marie, with his design of self-destruction.\n\n\"I need scarcely tell you,\" said Dupin, as he finished the perusal of my notes, \"that this is a far more intricate case than that of the Rue Morgue; from which it differs in one important respect. This is an ordinary, although an atrocious, instance of crime. There is nothing peculiarly outre about it. You will observe that, for this reason, the mystery has been considered easy, when, for this reason, it should have been considered difficult, of solution. Thus, at first, it was thought unnecessary to offer a reward. The myrmidons of G\u2014 were able at once to comprehend how and why such an atrocity might have been committed. They could picture to their imaginations a mode \u2014 many modes \u2014 and a motive \u2014 many motives; and because it was not impossible that either of these numerous modes or motives could have been the actual one, they have taken it for granted that one of them must. But the ease with which these variable fancies were entertained, and the very plausibility which each assumed, should have been understood as indicative rather of the difficulties than of the facilities which must attend elucidation. I have before observed that it is by prominences above the plane of the ordinary, that reason feels her way, if at all, in her search for the true, and that the proper question in cases such as this, is not so much 'what has occurred?' as 'what has occurred that has never occurred before?' In the investigations at the house of Madame L'Espanaye, the agents of G\u2014 were discouraged and confounded by that very unusualness which, to a properly regulated intellect, would have afforded the surest omen of success; while this same intellect might have been plunged in despair at the ordinary character of all that met the eye in the case of the perfumery girl, and yet told of nothing but easy triumph to the functionaries of the Prefecture.\n\n\"In the case of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter, there was, even at the begining of our investigation, no doubt that murder had been committed. The idea of suicide was excluded at once. Here, too, we are freed, at the commencement, from all supposition of self-murder. The body found at the Barriere du Roule was found under such circumstances as to leave us no room for embarrassment upon this important point. But it has been suggested that the corpse discovered is not that of the Marie Roget for the conviction of whose assassin, or assassins, the reward is offered, and respecting whom, solely, our agreement has been arranged with the Prefect. We both know this gentleman well. It will not do to trust him too far. If, dating our inquiries from the body found, and then tracing a murderer, we yet discover this body to be that of some other individual than Marie; or if, starting from the living Marie, we find her, yet find her unassassinated \u2014 in either case we lose our labor; since it is Monsieur G\u2014 with whom we have to deal. For our own purpose, therefore, if not for the purpose of justice, it is indispensable that our first step should be the determination of the identity of the corpse with the Marie Roget who is missing.\n\n\"With the public the arguments of L'Etoile have had weight; and that the journal itself is convinced of their importance would appear from the manner in which it commences one of its essays upon the subject \u2014'Several of the morning papers of the day,' it says, 'speak of the conclusive article in Monday's Etoile.' To me, this article appears conclusive of little beyond the zeal of its inditer. We should bear in mind that, in general, it is the object of our newspapers rather to create a sensation \u2014 to make a point \u2014 than to further the cause of truth. The latter end is only pursued when it seems coincident with the former. The print which merely falls in with ordinary opinion (however well founded this opinion may be) earns for itself no credit with the mob. The mass of the people regard as profound only him who suggests pungent contradictions of the general idea. In ratiocination, not less than in literature, it is the epigram which is the most immediately and the most universally appreciated. In both, it is of the lowest order of merit.\n\n\"What I mean to say is, that it is the mingled epigram and melodrame of the idea, that Marie Roget still lives, rather than any true plausibility in this idea, which have suggested it to L'Etoile, and secured it a favorable reception with the public. Let us examine the heads of this journal's argument, endeavoring to avoid the incoherence with which it is originally set forth.\n\n\"The first aim of the writer is to show, from the brevity of the interval between Marie's disappearance and the finding of the floating corpse, that this corpse cannot be that of Marie. The reduction of this interval to its smallest possible dimension, becomes thus, at once, an object with the reasoner. In the rash pursuit of this object, he rushes into mere assumption at the outset. 'It is folly to suppose,' he says, 'that the murder, if murder was committed on her body, could have been consummated soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight.' We demand at once, and very naturally, why? Why is it folly to suppose that the murder was committed within five minutes after the girl's quitting her mother's house? Why is it folly to suppose that the murder was committed at any given period of the day? There have been assassinations at all hours. But, had the murder taken place at any moment between nine o'clock in the morning of Sunday and a quarter before midnight, there would still have been time enough 'to throw the body into the river before midnight.' This assumption, then, amounts precisely to this \u2014 that the murder was not committed on Sunday at all \u2014 and, if we allow L'Etoile to assume this, we may permit it any liberties whatever. The paragraph beginning 'It is folly to suppose that the murder, etc.,' however it appears as printed in L'Etoile, may be imagined to have existed actually thus in the brain of its inditer: 'It is folly to suppose that the murder, if murder was committed on the body, could have been committed soon enough to have enabled her murderers to throw the body into the river before midnight; it is folly, we say, to suppose all this, and to suppose at the same time, (as we are resolved to suppose), that the body was not thrown in until after midnight'\u2014 a sentence sufficiently inconsequential in itself, but not so utterly preposterous as the one printed.\n\n\"Were it my purpose,\" continued Dupin, \"merely to make out a case against this passage of L'Etoile's argument, I might safely leave it where it is. It is not, however, with L'Etoile that we have to do, but with truth. The sentence in question has but one meaning, as it stands; and this meaning I have fairly stated, but it is material that we go behind the mere words, for an idea which these words have obviously intended, and failed to convey. It was the design of the journalists to say that at whatever period of the day or night of Sunday this murder was committed, it was improbable that the assassins would have ventured to bear the corpse to the river before midnight. And herein lies, really, the assumption of which I complain. It is assumed that the murder was committed at such a position, and under such circumstances, that the bearing it to the river became necessary. Now, the assassination might have taken place upon the river's brink, or on the river itself; and, thus, the throwing the corpse in the water might have been resorted to at any period of the day or night, as the most obvious and most immediate mode of disposal. You will understand that I suggest nothing here as probable, or as coincident with my own opinion. My design, so far, has no reference to the facts of the case. I wish merely to caution you against the whole tone of L'Etoile's suggestion, by calling your attention to its ex-parte character at the outset.\n\n\"Having prescribed thus a limit to suit its own preconceived notions; having assumed that, if this were the body of Marie, it could have been in the water but a very brief time, the journal goes on to say:\n\nAll experience has shown that drowned bodies, or bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence, require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water. Even when a cannon is fired over a corpse, and it rises before at least five or six days' immersion, it sinks again if let alone.\n\n\"These assertions have been tacitly received by every paper in Paris, with the exception of Le Moniteur. This latter print endeavors to combat that portion of the paragraph which has reference to 'drowned bodies' only, by citing some five or six instances in which the bodies of individuals known to be drowned were found floating after the lapse of less time than is insisted upon by L'Etoile. But there is something excessively unphilosophical in the attempt, on the part of Le Moniteur, to rebut the general assertion of L'Etoile, by a citation of particular instances militating against that assertion. Had it been possible to adduce fifty instead of five examples of bodies found floating at the end of two or three days, these fifty examples could still have been properly regarded only as exceptions to L'Etoile's rule, until such time as the rule itself should be confuted. Admitting the rule, (and this Le Moniteur does not deny, insisting merely upon its exceptions,) the argument of L'Etoile is suffered to remain in full force; for this argument does not pretend to involve more than a question of the probability of the body having risen to the surface in less than three days; and this probability will be in favor of L'Etoile's position until the instances so childishly adduced shall be sufficient in number to establish an antagonistical rule.\n\n\"You will see at once that all argument upon this head should be urged, if at all, against the rule itself; and for this end we must examine the rationale of the rule. Now the human body, in general is neither much lighter nor much heavier than the water of the Seine; that is to say, the specific gravity of the human body, in its natural condition, is about equal to the bulk of fresh water which it displaces. The bodies of fat and fleshy persons, with small bones, and of women generally, are lighter than those of the lean and large-boned, and of men; and the specific gravity of the water of a river is somewhat influenced by the presence of the tide from the sea. But, leaving this tide out of the question, it may be said that very few human bodies will sink at all, even in fresh water, of their own accord. Almost any one, falling into a river, will be enabled to float, if he suffer the specific gravity of the water fairly to be adduced in comparison with his own \u2014 that is to say, if he suffer his whole person to be immersed, with as little exception as possible. The proper position for one who cannot swim, is the upright position of the walker on land, with the head thrown fully back, and immersed; the mouth and nostrils alone remaining above the surface. Thus circumstanced; we shall find that we float without difficulty and without exertion. It is evident, however, that the gravities of the body, and of the bulk of water displaced, are very nicely balanced, and that a trifle will cause either to preponderate. An arm, for instance, uplifted from the water, and thus deprived of its support, is an additional weight sufficient to immerse the whole head, while the accidental aid of the smallest piece of timber will enable us to elevate the head so as to look about. Now, in the struggles of one unused to swimming, the arms are invariably thrown upward, while an attempt is made to keep the head in its usual perpendicular position. The result is the immersion of the mouth and nostrils, and the inception, during efforts to breathe while beneath the surface, of water into the lungs. Much is also received into the stomach, and the whole body becomes heavier by the difference between the weight of the air originally distending these cavities, and that of the fluid which now fills them. This difference is sufficient to cause the body to sink, as a general rule; but is insufficient in the case of individuals with small bones and an abnormal quantity of flaccid or fatty matter. Such individuals float even after drowning.\n\n\"The corpse, being supposed at the bottom of the river, will there remain until, by some means, its specific gravity again becomes less than that of the bulk of water which it displaces. This effect is brought about by decomposition, or otherwise. The result of decomposition is the generation of gas, distending the cellular tissues and all the cavities, and giving the puffed appearance which is so horrible. When this distension has so far progressed that the bulk of the corpse is materially increased without a corresponding increase of mass or weight, its specific gravity becomes less than that of the water displaced, and it forthwith makes its appearance at the surface. But decomposition is modified by innumerable circumstances \u2014 is hastened or retarded by innumerable agencies; for example, by the heat or cold of the season, by the mineral impregnation or purity of the water, by its depth or shallowness, by its currency or stagnation, by the temperament of the body, by its infection or freedom from disease before death. Thus it is evident that we can assign no period, with anything like accuracy, at which the corpse shall rise through decomposition. Under certain conditions this result would be brought about within an hour, under others it might not take place at all. There are chemical infusions by which the animal frame can be preserved forever from corruption; the Bi-chloride of Mercury is one. But, apart from decomposition, there may be, and very usually is, a generation of gas within the stomach, from the acetous fermentation of vegetable matter (or within other cavities from other causes), sufficient to induce a distension which will bring the body to the surface. The effect produced by the firing of a cannon is that of simple vibration. This may either loosen the corpse from the soft mud or ooze in which it is imbedded, thus permitting it to rise when other agencies have already prepared it for so doing, or it may overcome the tenacity of some putrescent portions of the cellular tissue, allowing the cavities to distend under the influence of the gas.\n\n\"Having thus before us the whole philosophy of this subject, we can easily test by it the assertions of L'Etoile. 'All experience shows,' says this paper, 'that drowned bodies, or bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence, require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the top of the water. Even when a cannon is fired over a corpse, and it rises before at least five or six days' immersion, it sinks again if let alone.'\n\n\"The whole of this paragraph must now appear a tissue of inconsequence and incoherence. All experience does not show that 'drowned bodies' require from six to ten days for sufficient decomposition to take place to bring them to the surface. Both science and experience show that the period of their rising is, and necessarily must be, indeterminate. If, moreover, a body has risen to the surface through firing of cannon, it will not 'sink again if let alone,' until decomposition has so far progressed as to permit the escape of the generated gas. But I wish to call your attention to the distinction which is made between 'drowned bodies,' and 'bodies thrown into the water immediately after death by violence: Although the writer admits the distinction, he yet includes them all in the same category. I have shown how it is that the body of a drowning man becomes specifically heavier than its bulk of water, and that he would not sink at all, except for the struggle by which he elevates his arms above the surface, and his gasps for breath while beneath the surface \u2014 gasps which supply by water the place of the original air in the lungs. But these struggles and these gasps would not occur in the body 'thrown into the water immediately after death by violence.' Thus, in the latter instance, the body, as a general rule, would not sink at all \u2014 a fact of which L'Etoile is evidently ignorant. When decomposition had proceeded to a very great extent \u2014 when the flesh had in a great measure left the bones \u2014 then, indeed, but not till then, should we lose sight of the corpse.\n\n\"And now what are we to make of the argument, that the body found could not be that of Marie Roget, because, three days only having elapsed, this body was found floating? If drowned, being a woman, she might never have sunk; or, having sunk, might have reappeared in twenty \u2014 four hours or less. But no one supposes her to have been drowned; and, dying before being thrown into the river, she might have been found floating at any period afterwards whatever.\n\n\"'But,' says L'Etoile, 'if the body had been kept in its mangled state on shore until Tuesday night, some trace would be found on shore of the murderers.' Here it is at first difficult to perceive the intention of the reasoner. He means to anticipate what he imagines would be an objection to his theory \u2014 viz.: that the body was kept on shore two days, suffering rapid decomposition \u2014 more rapid than if immersed in water. He supposes that, had this been the case, it might have appeared at the surface on the Wednesday, and thinks that only under such circumstances it could so have appeared. He is accordingly in haste to show that it was not kept on shore; for, if so, 'some trace would be found on shore of the murderers.' I presume you smile at the sequitur. You cannot be made to see how the mere duration of the corpse on the shore could operate to multiply traces of the assassins. Nor can I.\n\n\"'And furthermore it is exceedingly improbable,' continues our journal, 'that any villains who had committed such a murder as is here supposed, would have thrown the body in without weight to sink it, when such a precaution could have so easily been taken.' Observe, here, the laughable confusion of thought! No one \u2014 not even L'Etoile \u2014 disputes the murder committed on the body found. The marks of violence are too obvious. It is our reasoner's object merely to show that this body is not Marie's. He wishes to prove that Marie is not assassinated \u2014 not that the corpse was not. Yet his observation proves only the latter point. Here is a corpse without weight attached. Murderers, casting it in, would not have failed to attach a weight. Therefore it was not thrown in by murderers. This is all which is proved, if any thing is. The question of identity is not even approached, and L'Etoile has been at great pains merely to gainsay now what it has admitted only a moment before. 'We are perfectly convinced,' it says, 'that the body found was that of a murdered female.'\n\n\"Nor is this the sole instance, even in this division of the subject, where our reasoner unwittingly reasons against himself. His evident object I have already said, is to reduce, as much as possible, the interval between Marie's disappearance and the finding of the corpse. Yet we find him urging the point that no person saw the girl from the moment of her leaving her mother's house. 'We have no evidence,' he says, 'that Marie Roget was in the land of the living after nine o'clock on Sunday, June the twenty-second.' As his argument is obviously an ex-parte one, he should, at least, have left this matter out of sight; for had any one been known to see Marie, say on Monday, or on Tuesday, the interval in question would have been much reduced, and, by his own ratiocination, the probability much diminished of the corpse being that of the grisette. It is, nevertheless, amusing to observe that L'Etoile insists upon its point in the full belief of its furthering its general argument.\n\n\"Reperuse now that portion of this argument which has reference to the identification of the corpse by Beauvais. In regard to the hair upon the arm, L'Etoile has been obviously disingenuous. M. Beauvais, not being an idiot, could never have urged in identification of the corpse, simply hair upon its arm. No arm is without hair. The generality of the expression of L'Etoile is a mere perversion of the witness' phraseology. He must have spoken of some peculiarity in this hair. It must have been a peculiarity of color, of quantity, of length, or of situation.\n\n\"'Her foot,' says the journal, 'was small \u2014 so are thousands of feet. Her garter is no proof whatever \u2014 nor is her shoe \u2014 for shoes and garters are sold in packages. The same may be said of the flowers in her hat. One thing upon which M. Beauvais strongly insists is, that the clasp on the garter found had been set back to take it in. This amounts to nothing; for most women find it proper to take a pair of garters home and, fit them to the size of the limbs they are to encircle, rather than to try them in the store where they purchase.' Here it is difficult to suppose the reasoner in earnest. Had M. Beauvais, in his search for the body of Marie, discovered a corpse corresponding in general size and appearance to the missing girl, he would have been warranted (without reference to the question of habiliment at all) in forming an opinion that his search had been successful. If, in addition to the point of general size and contour, he had found upon the arm a peculiar hairy appearance which he had observed upon the living Marie, his opinion might have been justly strengthened; and the increase of positiveness might well have been in the ratio of the peculiarity, or unusualness, of the hairy mark. If, the feet of Marie being small, those of the corpse were also small, the increase of probability that the body was that of Marie would not be an increase in a ratio merely arithmetical, but in one highly geometrical, or accumulative. Add to all this shoes such as she had been known to wear upon the day of her disappearance, and, although these shoes may be 'sold in packages,' you so far augment the probability as to verge upon the certain. What, of itself, would be no evidence of identity, becomes through its corroborative position, proof most sure. Give us, then, flowers in the hat corresponding to those worn by the missing girl, and we seek for nothing farther. If only one flower, we seek for nothing farther \u2014 what then if two or three, or more? Each successive one is multiple evidence \u2014 proof not added to proof, but multiplied by hundreds or thousands. Let us now discover, upon the deceased, garters such as the living used, and it is almost folly to proceed. But these garters are found to be tightened, by the setting back of a clasp, in just such a manner as her own had been tightened by Marie shortly previous to her leaving home. It is now madness or hypocrisy to doubt. What L'Etoile says in respect to this abbreviation of the garter's being an unusual occurrence, shows nothing beyond its own pertinacity in error. The elastic nature of the clasp-garter is self-demonstration of the unusualness of the abbreviation. What is made to adjust itself, must of necessity require foreign adjustment but rarely. It must have been by an accident, in its strictest sense, that these garters of Marie needed the tightening described. They alone would have amply established her identity. But it is not that the corpse was found to have the garters of the missing girl, or found to have her shoes, or her bonnet, or the flowers of her bonnet, or her feet, or a peculiar mark upon the arm, or her general size and appearance \u2014 it is that the corpse had each and all collectively. Could it be proved that the editor of L'Etoile really entertained a doubt, under the circumstances, there would be no need, in his case, of a commission de lunatico inquirendo. He has thought it sagacious to echo the small talk of the lawyers, who, for the most part, content themselves with echoing the rectangular precepts of the courts. I would here observe that very much of what is rejected as evidence by a court, is the best of evidence to the intellect. For the court, guiding itself by the general principles of evidence \u2014 the recognized and booked principles \u2014 is averse from swerving at particular instances. And this steadfast adherence to principle, with rigorous disregard of the conflicting exception, is a sure mode of attaining the maximum of attainable truth, in any long sequence of time. The practice, in mass, is therefore philosophical; but it is not the less certain that it engenders vast individual error.\n\n\"In respect to the insinuations levelled at Beauvais, you will be willing to dismiss them in a breath. You have already fathomed the true character of this good gentleman. He is a busy-body, with much of romance and little of wit. Any one so constituted will readily so conduct himself, upon occasion of real excitement, as to render himself liable to suspicion on the part of the over-acute, or the ill-disposed. M. Beauvais (as it appears from your notes) had some personal interviews with the editor of L'Etoile, and offended him by venturing an opinion that the corpse, notwithstanding the theory of the editor, was, in sober fact, that of Marie. 'He persists,' says the paper, 'in asserting the corpse to be that of Marie, but cannot give a circumstance, in addition to those which we have commented upon, to make others believe.' Now, without readverting to the fact that stronger evidence 'to make others believe,' could never have been adduced, it may be remarked that a man may very well be understood to believe, in a case of this kind, without the ability to advance a single reason for the belief of a second party. Nothing is more vague than impressions of individual identity. Each man recognizes his neighbor, yet there are few instances in which any one is prepared to give a reason for his recognition. The editor of L'Etoile had no right to be offended at M. Beauvais' unreasoning belief.\n\n\"The suspicious circumstances which invest him, will be found to tally much better with my hypothesis of romantic busy-bodyism, than with the reasoner's suggestion of guilt. Once adopting the more charitable interpretation, we shall find no difficulty in comprehending the rose in the key-hole; the 'Marie' upon the slate; the 'elbowing the male relatives out of the way'; the 'aversion to permitting them to see the body'; the caution given to Madame B-, that she must hold no conversation with the gendarme until his return (Beauvais); and, lastly, his apparent determination 'that nobody should have any thing to do with the proceedings except himself.' It seems to be unquestionable that Beauvais was a suitor of Marie's; that she coquetted with him; and that he was ambitious of being thought to enjoy her fullest intimacy and confidence. I shall say nothing more upon this point; and, as the evidence fully rebuts the assertion of L'Etoile, touching the matter of apathy on the part of the mother and other relatives \u2014 an apathy inconsistent with the supposition of their believing the corpse to be that of the perfumery \u2014 girl \u2014 we shall now proceed as if the question of identity were settled to our perfect satisfaction.\"\n\n\"And what,\" I here demanded, \"do you think of the opinions of Le Commerciel?\"\n\n\"That in spirit, they are far more worthy of attention than any which have been promulgated upon the subject. The deductions from the premises are philosophical and acute; but the premises, in two instances, at least, are founded in imperfect observation. Le Commerciel wishes to intimate that Marie was seized by some gang of low ruffians not far from her mother's door. 'It is impossible,' it urges, 'that a person so well known to thousands as this young woman was, should have passed three blocks without some one having seen her.\" This is the idea of a man long resident in Paris \u2014 a public man \u2014 and one whose walks to and fro in the city have been mostly limited to the vicinity of the public offices. He is aware that he seldom passes so far as a dozen blocks from his own bureau, without being recognized and accosted. And, knowing the extent of his personal acquaintance with others, and of others with him, he compares his notoriety with that of the perfumery-girl, finds no great difference between them, and reaches at once the conclusion that she, in her walks, would be equally liable to recognition with himself in his. This could only be the case were her walks of the same unvarying, methodical character, and within the same species of limited region as are his own. He passes to and fro, at regular intervals, within a confined periphery, abounding in individuals who are led to observation of his person through interest in the kindred nature of his occupation with their own. But the walks of Marie may, in general, be supposed discursive. In this particular instance, it will be understood as most probable, that she proceeded upon a route of more than average diversity from her accustomed ones. The parallel which we imagine to have existed in the mind of Le Commerciel would only be sustained in the event of the two individuals traversing the whole city. In this case, granting the personal acquaintances to be equal, the chances would be also equal that an equal number of personal encounters would be made. For my own part, I should hold it not only as possible, but as very far more probable, that Marie might have proceeded, at any given period, by any one of the many routes between her own residence and that of her aunt, without meeting a single individual whom she knew, or by whom she was known. In viewing this question in its full and proper light, we must hold steadily in mind the great disproportion between the personal acquaintances of even the most noted individual in Paris, and the entire population of Paris itself.\n\n\"But whatever force there may still appear to be in the suggestion of Le Commerciel, will be much diminished when we take into consideration the hour at which the girl went abroad. 'It was when the streets were full of people,' says Le Commerciel, 'that she went out.' But not so. It was at nine o'clock in the morning. Now at nine o'clock of every morning in the week, with the exception of Sunday, the streets of the city are, it is true, thronged with people. At nine on Sunday, the populace are chiefly within doors preparing for church. No observing person can have failed to notice the peculiarly deserted air of the town, from about eight until ten on the morning of every Sabbath. Between ten and eleven the streets are thronged, but not at so early a period as that designated.\n\n\"There is another point at which there seems a deficiency of observation on the part of Le Commerciel. 'A piece,' it says, 'of one of the unfortunate girl's petticoats, two feet long, and one foot wide, was torn out and tied under her chin, and around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams. This was done by fellows who had no pocket-handkerchiefs.' Whether this idea is or is not well founded, we will endeavor to see hereafter, but by 'fellows who have no pocket-handkerchiefs,' the editor intends the lowest class of ruffians. These, however, are the very description of people who will always be found to have handkerchiefs even when destitute of shirts. You must have had occasion to observe how absolutely indispensable, of late years, to the thorough blackguard, has become the pocket-handkerchief.\"\n\n\"And what are we to think,\" I asked, \"of the article in Le Soleil?\"\n\n\"That it is a vast pity its inditer was not born a parrot \u2014 in which case he would have been the most illustrious parrot of his race. He has merely repeated the individual items of the already published opinion; collecting them, with a laudable industry, from this paper and from that. 'The things had all evidently been there,' he says, 'at least three or four weeks, and there can be no doubt that the spot of this appalling outrage has been discovered.' The facts here restated by Le Soleil, are very far indeed from removing my own doubts upon this subject, and we will examine them more particularly hereafter in connection with another division of the theme.\n\n\"At present we must occupy ourselves with other investigations. You cannot fail to have remarked the extreme laxity of the examination of the corpse. To be sure, the question of identity was readily determined, or should have been; but there were other points to be ascertained. Had the body been in any respect despoiled? Had the deceased any articles of jewelry about her person upon leaving home? If so, had she any when found? These are important questions utterly untouched by the evidence; and there are others of equal moment, which have met with no attention. We must endeavor to satisfy ourselves by personal inquiry. The case of St. Eustache must be re-examined. I have no suspicion of this person; but let us proceed methodically. We will ascertain beyond a doubt the validity of the affidavits in regard to his whereabouts on the Sunday. Affidavits of this character are readily made matter of mystification. Should there be nothing wrong here, however, we will dismiss St. Eustache from our investigations. His suicide, however, corroborative of suspicion, were there found to be deceit in the affidavits, is, without such deceit, in no respect an unaccountable circumstance, or one which need cause us to deflect from the line of ordinary analysis.\n\n\"In that which I now propose, we will discard the interior points of this tragedy, and concentrate our attention upon its outskirts. Not the least usual error in investigations such as this is the limiting of inquiry to the immediate, with total disregard of the collateral or circumstantial events. It is the malpractice of the courts to confine evidence and discussion to the bounds of apparent relevancy. Yet experience has shown, and a true philosophy will always show, that a vast, perhaps the larger, portion of truth arises from the seemingly irrelevant. It is through the spirit of this principle, if not precisely through its letter, that modern science has resolved to calculate upon the unforeseen. But perhaps you do not comprehend me. The history of human knowledge has so uninterruptedly shown that to collateral, or incidental, or accidental events we are indebted for the most numerous and most valuable discoveries, that it has at length become necessary, in any prospective view of improvement, to make not only large, but the largest, allowances for inventions that shall arise by chance, and quite out of the range of ordinary expectation. It is no longer philosophical to base upon what has been a vision of what is to be. Accident is admitted as a portion of the substructure. We make chance a matter of absolute calculation. We subject the unlooked for and unimagined to the mathematical formulae of the schools.\n\n\"I repeat that it is no more than fact that the larger portion of all truth has sprung from the collateral; and it is but in accordance with the spirit of the principle involved in this fact that I would divert inquiry, in the present case, from the trodden and hitherto unfruitful ground of the event itself to the contemporary circumstances which surround it. While you ascertain the validity of the affidavits, I will examine the newspapers more generally than you have as yet done. So far, we have only reconnoitred the field of investigation; but it will be strange, indeed, if a comprehensive survey, such as I propose, of the public prints will not afford us some minute points which shall establish a direction for inquiry.\"\n\nIn pursuance of Dupin's suggestion, I made scrupulous examination of the affair of the affidavits. The result was a firm conviction of their validity, and of the consequent innocence of St. Eustache. In the meantime my friend occupied himself, with what seemed to me a minuteness altogether objectless, in a scrutiny of the various newspaper files. At the end of a week he placed before me the following extracts:\n\n\"About three years and a half ago, a disturbance very similar to the present was caused by the disappearance of this same Marie Roget from the parfumerie of Monsieur Le Blanc, in the Palais Royal. At the end of a week, however, she reappeared at her customary comptoir, as well as ever, with the exception of a slight paleness not altogether usual. It was given out by Monsieur Le Blanc and her mother that she had merely been on a visit to some friend in the country; and the affair was speedily hushed up. We presume that the present absence is a freak of the same nature, and that, at the expiration of a week or, perhaps, of a month, we shall have her among us again.\"\u2014 Evening Paper, Monday, June 23.\n\n\"An evening journal of yesterday refers to a former mysterious disappearance of Mademoiselle Roget. It is well known that, during the week of her absence from Le Blanc's parfumerie, she was in the company of a young naval officer much noted for his debaucheries. A quarrel, it is supposed, providentially, led to her return home. We have the name of the Lothario in question, who is at present stationed in Paris, but for obvious reasons forbear to make it public.\"\u2014 Le Mercure, Tuesday Morning, June 24.\n\n\"An outrage of the most atrocious character was perpetrated near this city the day before yesterday. A gentleman, with his wife and daughter, engaged, about dusk, the services of six young men, who were idly rowing a boat to and fro near the banks of the Seine, to convey him across the river. Upon reaching the opposite shore the three passengers stepped out, and had proceeded so far as to be beyond the view of the boat, when the daughter discovered that she had left in it her parasol. She returned for it, was seized by the gang, carried out into the stream, gagged, brutally treated, and finally taken to the shore at a point not far from that at which she had originally entered the boat with her parents. The villains have escaped for the time, but the police are upon their trail, and some of them will soon be taken.\"\u2014 Morning Paper, June 25.\n\n\"We have received one or two communications, the object of which is to fasten the crime of the late atrocity upon Mennais; but as this gentleman has been fully exonerated by a legal inquiry, and as the arguments of our several correspondents appear to be more zealous than profound, we do not think it advisable to make them public.\"\u2014 Morning Paper, June 28.\n\n\"We have received several forcibly written communications, apparently from various sources, and which go far to render it a matter of certainty that the unfortunate Marie Roget has become a victim of one of the numerous bands of blackguards which infest the vicinity of the city upon Sunday. Our own opinion is decidedly in favor of this supposition. We shall endeavor to make room for some of these arguments hereafter.\"\u2014 Evening Paper, Tuesday, June 31.\n\n\"On Monday, one of the bargemen connected with the revenue service saw an empty boat floating down the Seine. Sails were lying in the bottom of the boat. The bargeman towed it under the barge office. The next morning it was taken from thence without the knowledge of any of the officers. The rudder is now at the barge office.\"\u2014 Le Diligence, Thursday, June 26.\n\nUpon reading these various extracts, they not only seemed to me irrelevant, but I could perceive no mode in which any one of them could be brought to bear upon the matter in hand. I waited for some explanation from Dupin.\n\n\"It is not my present design,\" he said, \"to dwell upon the first and second of these extracts. I have copied them chiefly to show you the extreme remissness of the police, who, as far as I can understand from the Prefect, have not troubled themselves, in any respect, with an examination of the naval officer alluded to. Yet it is mere folly to say that between the first and second disappearance of Marie there is no supposable connection. Let us admit the first elopement to have resulted in a quarrel between the lovers, and the return home of the betrayed. We are now prepared to view a second elopement (if we know that an elopement has again taken place) as indicating a renewal of the betrayer's advances, rather than as the result of new proposals by a second individual \u2014 we are prepared to regard it as a 'making up' of the old amour, rather than as the commencement of a new one. The chances are ten to one, that he who had once eloped with Marie would again propose an elopement, rather than that she to whom proposals of an elopement had been made by one individual, should have them made to her by another. And here let me call your attention to the fact, that the time elapsing between the first ascertained and the second supposed elopement is a few months more than the general period of the cruises of our men-of-war. Had the lover been interrupted in his first villainy by the necessity of departure to sea, and had he seized the first moment of his return to renew the base designs not yet altogether accomplished \u2014 or not yet altogether accomplished by him? Of all these things we know nothing.\n\n\"You will say, however, that, in the second instance, there was no elopement as imagined. Certainly not \u2014 but are we prepared to say that there was not the frustrated design? Beyond St. Eustache, and perhaps Beauvais, we find no recognized, no open, no honorable suitors of Marie. Of none other is there any thing said. Who, then, is the secret lover, of whom the relatives (at least most of them) know nothing, but whom Marie meets upon the morning of Sunday, and who is so deeply in her confidence, that she hesitates not to remain with him until the shades of the evening descend, amid the solitary groves of the Barriere du Roule? Who is that secret lover, I ask, of whom, at least, most of the relatives know nothing? And what means the singular prophecy of Madam Roget on the morning of Marie's departure? \u2014 'I fear that I shall never see Marie again.'\n\n\"But if we cannot imagine Madame Roget privy to the design of elopement, may we not at least suppose this design entertained by the girl? Upon quitting home, she gave it to be understood that she was about to visit her aunt in the Rue des Dromes, and St. Eustache was requested to call for her at dark. Now, at first glance, this fact strongly militates against my suggestion; \u2014 but let us reflect. That she did meet some companion, and proceed with him across the river, reaching the Barriere du Roule at so late an hour as three o'clock in the afternoon, is known. But in consenting so to accompany this individual, (for whatever purpose \u2014 to her mother known or unknown,) she must have thought of her expressed intention when leaving home, and of the surprise and suspicion aroused in the bosom of her affianced suitor, St. Eustache, when, calling for her, at the hour appointed, in the Rue des Dromes, he should find that she had not been there, and when, moreover, upon returning to the pension with this alarming intelligence, he should become aware of her continued absence from home. She must have thought of these things, I say. She must have foreseen the chagrin of St. Eustache, the suspicion of all. She could not have thought of returning to brave this suspicion; but the suspicion becomes a point of trivial importance to her, if we suppose her not intending to return.\n\n\"We may imagine her thinking thus \u2014'I am to meet a certain person for the purpose of elopement, or for certain other purposes known only to myself. It is necessary that there be no chance of interruption \u2014 there must be sufficient time given us to elude pursuit \u2014 I will give it to be understood that I shall visit and spend the day with my aunt at the Rue des Dromes \u2014 I will tell St. Eustache not to call for me until dark \u2014 in this way, my absence from home for the longest possible period, without causing suspicion or anxiety, will be accounted for, and I shall gain more time than in any other manner. If I bid St. Eustache call for me at dark, he will be sure not to call before; but if I wholly neglect to bid him call, my time for escape will be diminished, since it will be expected that I return the earlier, and my absence will the sooner excite anxiety. Now, if it were my design to return at all \u2014 if I had in contemplation merely a stroll with the individual in question \u2014 it would not be my policy to bid St. Eustache call; for, calling, he will be sure to ascertain that I have played him false \u2014 a fact of which I might keep him forever in ignorance, by leaving home without notifying him of my intention, by returning before dark, and by then stating that I had been to visit my aunt in the Rue des Dromes. But, as it is my design never to return \u2014 or not for some weeks \u2014 or not until certain concealments are effected \u2014 the gaining of time is the only point about which I need give myself any concern.'\n\n\"You have observed, in your notes, that the most general opinion in relation to this sad affair is, and was from the first, that the girl had been the victim of a gang of blackguards. Now, the popular opinion, under certain conditions, is not to be disregarded. When arising of itself \u2014 when manifesting itself in a strictly spontaneous manner \u2014 we should look upon it as analogous with that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius. In ninety-nine cases from the hundred I would abide by its decision. But it is important that we find no palpable traces of suggestion. The opinion must be rigorously the public's own, and the distinction is often exceedingly difficult to perceive and to maintain. In the present instance, it appears to me that this 'public opinion,' in respect to a gang, has been superinduced by the collateral event which is detailed in the third of my extracts. All Paris is excited by the discovered corpse of Marie, a girl young, beautiful, and notorious. This corpse is found, bearing marks of violence, and floating in the river. But it is now made known that, at the very period, or about the very period, in which it is supposed that the girl was assassinated, an outrage similar in nature to that endured by the deceased, although less in extent, was perpetrated by a gang of young ruffians, upon the person of a second young female. Is it wonderful that the one known atrocity should influence the popular judgment in regard to the other unknown? This judgment awaited direction, and the known outrage seemed so opportunely to afford it! Marie, too, was found in the river; and upon this very river was this known outrage committed. The connection of the two events had about it so much of the palpable, that the true wonder would have been a failure of the populace to appreciate and to seize it. But, in fact, the one atrocity, known to be so committed, is, if any thing, evidence that the other, committed at a time nearly coincident, was not so committed. It would have been a miracle indeed, if, while a gang of ruffians were perpetrating, at a given locality, a most unheard \u2014 of wrong, there should have been another similar gang, in a similar locality, in the same city, under the same circumstances, with the same means and appliances, engaged in a wrong of precisely the same aspect, at precisely the same period of time! Yet in what, if not in this marvellous train of coincidence, does the accidentally suggested opinion of the populace call upon us to believe?\n\n\"Before proceeding farther, let us consider the supposed scene of the assassination, in the thicket at the Barriere du Roule. This thicket, although dense, was in the close vicinity of a public road. Within were three or four large stones, forming a kind of seat with a back and a footstool. On the upper stone was discovered a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf. A parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief were also here found. The handkerchief bore the name 'Marie Roget'. Fragments of dress were seen on the branches around. The earth was trampled, the bushes were broken, and there was every evidence of a violent struggle.\n\n\"Notwithstanding the acclamation with which the discovery of this thicket was received by the press, and the unanimity with which it was supposed to indicate the precise scene of the outrage, it must be admitted that there was some very good reason for doubt. That it was the scene, I may or I may not believe \u2014 but there was excellent reason for doubt. Had the true scene been, as Le Commerciel suggested, in the neighborhood of the Rue Pavee St. Andree, the perpetrators of the crime, supposing them still resident in Paris, would naturally have been stricken with terror at the public attention thus acutely directed into the proper channel; and, in certain classes of minds, there would have arisen, at once, a sense of the necessity of some exertion to re-divert this attention. And thus, the thicket of the Barriere du Roule having been already suspected, the idea of placing the articles where they were found, might have been naturally entertained. There is no real evidence, although Le Soleil so supposes, that the articles discovered had been more than a very few days in the thicket; while there is much circumstantial proof that they could not have remained there, without attracting attention, during the twenty days elapsing between the fatal Sunday and the afternoon upon which they were found by the boys. 'They were all mildewed down hard,' says Le Soleil, adopting the opinions of its predecessors, 'with the action of the rain and stuck together from mildew. The grass had grown around and over some of them. The silk of the parasol was strong, but the threads of it were run together within. The upper part, where it had been doubled and folded, was all mildewed and rotten, and tore on being opened.' In respect to the grass having 'grown around and over some of them,' it is obvious that the fact could only have been ascertained from the words, and thus from the recollections, of two small boys; for these boys removed the articles and took them home before they had been seen by a third party. But the grass will grow, especially in warm and damp weather (such as was that of the period of the murder), as much as two or three inches in a single day. A parasol lying upon a newly turfed ground, might, in a single week, be entirely concealed from sight by the upspringing grass. And touching that mildew upon which the editor of Le Soleil so pertinaciously insists, that he employs the word no less than three times in the brief paragraph just quoted, is he really unaware of the nature of this mildew? Is he to be told that it is one of the many classes of fungus, of which the most ordinary feature is its upspringing and decadence within twenty-four hours?\n\n\"Thus we see, at a glance, that what has been most triumphantly adduced in support of the idea that the articles had been 'for at least three or four weeks' in the thicket, is most absurdly null as regards any evidence of that fact. On the other hand, it is exceedingly difficult to believe that these articles could have remained in the thicket specified for a longer period than a single week \u2014 for a longer period than from one Sunday to the next. Those who know any thing of the vicinity of Paris, know the extreme difficulty of finding seclusion, unless at a great distance from its suburbs. Such a thing as an unexplored or even an unfrequently visited recess, amid its woods or groves, is not for a moment to be imagined. Let any one who, being at heart a lover of nature, is yet chained by duty to the dust and heat of this great metropolis \u2014 let any such one attempt, even during the week-days, to slake his thirst for solitude amid the scenes of natural loveliness which immediately surround us. At every second step, he will find the growing charm dispelled by the voice and personal intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards. He will seek privacy amid the densest foliage, all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound \u2014 here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of the heart the wanderer will flee back to the polluted Paris as to a less odious because less incongruous sink of pollution. But if the vicinity of the city is so beset during the working days of the week, how much more so on the Sabbath! It is now especially that, released from the claims of labor, or deprived of the customary opportunities of crime, the town blackguard seeks the precincts of the town, not through love of the rural, which in his heart he despises, but by way of escape from the restraints and conventionalities of society. He desires less the fresh air and the green trees, than the utter license of the country. Here, at the roadside inn, or beneath the foliage of the woods, he indulges unchecked by any eye except those of his boon companions, in all the mad excess of a counterfeit hilarity \u2014 the joint offspring of liberty and of rum. I say nothing more than what must be obvious to every dispassionate observer, when I repeat that the circumstance of the articles in question having remained undiscovered, for a longer period than from one Sunday to another, in any thicket in the immediate neighborhood of Paris, is to be looked upon as little less than miraculous.\n\n\"But there are not wanting other grounds for the suspicion that the articles were placed in the thicket with the view of diverting attention from the real scene of the outrage. And first, let me direct your notice to the date of the discovery of the articles. Collate this with the date of the fifth extract made by myself from the newspapers. You will find that the discovery followed, almost immediately, the urgent communications sent to the evening paper. These communications, although various, and apparently from various sources, tended all to the same point-viz., the directing of attention to a gang as the perpetrators of the outrage, and to the neighborhood of the Barriere du Roule as its scene. Now, here, of course, the suspicion is not that, in consequence of these communications, or of the public attention by them directed, the articles were found by the boys; but the suspicion might and may well have been, that the articles were not before found by the boys, for the reason that the articles had not before been in the thicket; having been deposited there only at so late a period as at the date, or shortly prior to the date of the communications, by the guilty authors of these communications themselves.\n\n\"This thicket was a singular \u2014 an exceedingly singular one. It was unusually dense. Within its naturally walled enclosure were three extraordinary stones, forming a seat with a back and a footstool. And this thicket, so full of art, was in the immediate vicinity, within a few rods, of the dwelling of Madame Deluc, whose boys were in the habit of closely examining the shrubberies about them in search of the bark of the sassafras. Would it be a rash wager \u2014 a wager of one thousand to one \u2014 that a day never passed over the heads of these boys without finding at least one of them ensconced in the umbrageous hall, and enthroned upon its natural throne? Those who would hesitate at such a wager, have either never been boys themselves, or have forgotten the boyish nature. I repeat \u2014 it is exceedingly hard to comprehend how the articles could have remained in this thicket undiscovered, for a longer period than one or two days; and that thus there is good ground for suspicion, in spite of the dogmatic ignorance of Le Soleil, that they were, at a comparatively late date, deposited where found.\n\n\"But there are still other and stronger reasons for believing them so deposited, than any which I have as yet urged. And, now, let me beg your notice to the highly artificial arrangement of the articles. On the upper stone lay a white petticoat; on the second, a silk scarf; scattered around, were a parasol, gloves, and a pocket-handkerchief bearing the name 'Marie Roget.' Here is just such an arrangement as would naturally be made by a not over-acute person wishing to dispose the articles naturally. But it is by no means a really natural arrangement. I should rather have looked to see the things all lying on the ground and trampled under foot. In the narrow limits of that bower, it would have been scarcely possible that the petticoat and scarf should have retained a position upon the stones, when subjected to the brushing to and fro of many struggling persons. 'There was evidence,' it is said, 'of a struggle; and the earth was trampled, the bushes were broken,'\u2014 but the petticoat and the scarf are found deposited as if upon shelves. 'The pieces of the frock torn out by the bushes were about three inches wide and six inches long. One part was the hem of the frock and it had been mended. They looked like strips torn off.' Here, inadvertently, Le Soleil has employed an exceedingly suspicious phrase. The pieces, as described, do indeed look like strips torn off; but purposely and by hand. It is one of the rarest of accidents that a piece is 'torn off,' from any garment such as is now in question, by the agency of a thorn. From the very nature of such fabrics, a thorn or nail becoming tangled in them, tears them rectangularly \u2014 divides them into two longitudinal rents, at right angles with each other, and meeting at an apex where the thorn enters \u2014 but it is scarcely possible to conceive the piece 'torn off.' I never so knew it, nor did you. To tear a piece off from such fabric, two distinct forces, in different directions, will be, in almost every case, required. If there be two edges to the fabric \u2014 if, for example, it be a pocket-handkerchief, and it is desired to tear from it a slip, then, and then only, will the one force serve the purpose. But in the present case the question is of a dress, presenting but one edge. To tear a piece from the interior, where no edge is presented, could only be effected by a miracle through the agency of thorns, and no one thorn could accomplish it. But, even where an edge is presented, two thorns will be necessary, operating, the one in two distinct directions, and the other in one. And this in the supposition that the edge is unhemmed. If hemmed, the matter is nearly out of the question. We thus see the numerous and great obstacles in the way of pieces being 'torn off' through the simple agency of 'thorns'; yet we are required to believe not only that one piece but that many have been so torn. 'And one part,' too, 'was the hem of the frock'! Another piece was 'part of the skirt, not the hem,'\u2014 that is to say, was torn completely out, through the agency of thorns, from the unedged interior of the dress! These, I say, are things which one may well be pardoned for disbelieving; yet, taken collectedly, they form, perhaps, less of reasonable ground for suspicion, than the one startling circumstance of the articles having been left in this thicket at all, by any murderers who had enough precaution to think of removing the corpse. You will not have apprehended me rightly, however, if you suppose it my design to deny this thicket as the scene of the outrage. There might have been a wrong here, or more possibly, an accident at Madame Deluc's. But, in fact, this is a point of minor importance. We are not engaged in an attempt to discover the scene, but to produce the perpetrators of the murder. What I have adduced, notwithstanding the minuteness with which I have adduced it, has been with the view, first, to show the folly of the positive and headlong assertions of Le Soleil, but secondly and chiefly, to bring you, by the most natural route, to a further contemplation of the doubt whether this assassination has, or has not, been the work of a gang.\n\n\"We will resume this question by mere allusion to the revolting details of the surgeon examined at the inquest. It is only necessary to say that his published inferences, in regard to the number of the ruffians, have been properly ridiculed as unjust and totally baseless, by all the reputable anatomists of Paris. Not that the matter might not have been as inferred, but that there was no ground for the inference:\u2014 was there not much for another?\n\n\"Let us reflect now upon 'the traces of a struggle'; let me \u2014 ask what these traces have been supposed to demonstrate. A gang. But do they not rather demonstrate the absence of a gang? What struggle could have taken place \u2014 what struggle so violent and so enduring as to have left its 'traces' in all directions \u2014 between a weak and defenceless girl and a gang of ruffians imagined? The silent grasp of a few rough arms and all would have been over. The victim must have been absolutely passive at their will. You will here bear in mind that the arguments urged against the thicket as the scene, are applicable, in chief part, only against it as the scene of an outrage committed by more than a single individual. If we imagine but one violator, we can conceive, and thus only conceive, the struggle of so violent and so obstinate a nature as to have left the 'traces' apparent.\n\n\"And again. I have already mentioned the suspicion to be excited by the fact that the articles in question were suffered to remain at all in the thicket where discovered. It seems almost impossible that these evidences of guilt should have been accidentally left where found. There was sufficient presence of mind (it is supposed) to remove the corpse, and yet a more positive evidence than the corpse itself (whose features might have been quickly obliterated by decay), is allowed to lie conspicuously in the scene of the outrage \u2014 I allude to the handkerchief with the name of the deceased. If this was accident, it was not the accident of a gang. We can imagine it only the accident of an individual. Let us see. An individual has committed the murder. He is alone with the ghost of the departed. He is appalled by what lies motionless before him. The fury of his passion is over, and there is abundant room in his heart for the natural awe of the deed. His is none of that confidence which the presence of numbers inevitably inspires. He is alone with the dead. He trembles and is bewildered. Yet there is a necessity for disposing of the corpse. He bears it to the river, and leaves behind him the other evidences of his guilt; for it is difficult, if not impossible to carry all the burthen at once, and it will be easy to return for what is left. But in his toilsome journey to the water his fears redouble within him. The sounds of life encompass his path. A dozen times he hears or fancies he hears the step of an observer. Even the very lights from the city bewilder him. Yet, in time, and by long and frequent pauses of deep agony, he reaches the river's brink, and disposes of his ghastly charge \u2014 perhaps through the medium of a boat. But now what treasure does the world hold \u2014 what threat of vengeance could it hold out \u2014 which would have power to urge the return of that lonely murderer over that toilsome and perilous path, to the thicket and its blood-chilling recollections? He returns not, let the consequences be what they may. He could not return if he would. His sole thought is immediate escape. He turns his back forever upon those dreadful shrubberies, and flees as from the wrath to come.\n\n\"But how with a gang? Their number would have inspired them with confidence; if, indeed, confidence is ever wanting in the breast of the arrant blackguard; and of arrant blackguards alone are the supposed gangs ever constituted. Their number, I say, would have prevented the bewildering and unreasoning terror which I have imagined to paralyze the single man. Could we suppose an oversight in one, or two, or three, this oversight would have been remedied by a fourth. They would have left nothing behind them; for their number would have enabled them to carry all at once. There would have been no need of return.\n\n\"Consider now the circumstance that, in the outer garment of the corpse when found, 'a slip, about a foot wide, had been torn upward from the bottom hem to the waist, wound three times around the waist, and secured by a sort of hitch in the back.' This was done with the obvious design of affording a handle by which to carry the body. But would any number of men have dreamed of resorting to such an expedient? To three or four, the limbs of the corpse would have afforded not only a sufficient, but the best possible, hold. The device is that of a single individual; and this brings us to the fact that 'between the thicket and the river, the rails of the fences were found taken down, and the ground bore evident traces of some heavy burden having been dragged along it!' But would a number of men have put themselves to the superfluous trouble of taking down a fence, for the purpose of dragging through it a corpse which they might have lifted over any fence in an instant? Would a number of men have so dragged a corpse at all as to have left evident traces of the dragging?\n\n\"And here we must refer to an observation of Le Commerciel; an observation upon which I have already, in some measure, commented. 'A piece,' says this journal, 'of one of the unfortunate girl's petticoats was torn out and tied under her chin, and around the back of her head, probably to prevent screams. This was done by fellows who had no pocket-handkerchiefs.'\n\n\"I have before suggested that a genuine blackguard is never without a pocket-handkerchief. But it is not to this fact that I now especially advert. That it was not through want of a handkerchief for the purpose imagined by Le Commerciel that this bandage was employed, is rendered apparent by the handkerchief left in the thicket; and that the object was not 'to prevent screams' appears, also, from the bandage having been employed in preference to what would so much better have answered the purpose. But the language of the evidence speaks of the strip in question as 'found around the neck, fitting loosely, and secured with a hard knot.' These words are sufficiently vague, but differ materially from those of Le Commerciel. The slip was eighteen inches wide, and therefore, although of muslin, would form a strong band when folded or rumpled longitudinally. And thus rumpled it was discovered. My inference is this. The solitary murderer, having borne the corpse for some distance (whether from the thicket or elsewhere) by means of the bandage hitched around its middle, found the weight, in this mode of procedure, too much for his strength. He resolved to drag the burthen \u2014 the evidence goes to show that it was dragged. With this object in view, it became necessary to attach something like a rope to one of the extremities. It could be best attached about the neck, where the head would prevent it slipping off. And now the murderer bethought him, unquestionably, of the bandage about the loins. He would have used this, but for its volution about the corpse, the hitch which embarrassed it, and the reflection that it had not been 'torn off from the garment. It was easier to tear a new slip from the petticoat. He tore it, made it fast about the neck, and so dragged his victim to the brink of the river. That this 'bandage,' only attainable with trouble and delay, and but imperfectly answering its purpose \u2014 that this bandage was employed at all, demonstrates that the necessity for its employment sprang from circumstances arising at a period when the handkerchief was no longer attainable \u2014 that is to say, arising, as we have imagined, after quitting the thicket (if the thicket it was), and on the road between the thicket and the river.\n\n\"But the evidence, you will say, of Madame Deluc(!) points especially to the presence of a gang in the vicinity of the thicket, at or about the epoch of the murder. This I grant. I doubt if there were not a dozen gangs, such as described by Madame Deluc, in and about the vicinity of the Barriere du Roule at or about the period of this tragedy. But the gang which has drawn upon itself the pointed animadversion, although the somewhat tardy and very suspicious evidence, of Madame Deluc, is the only gang which is represented by that honest and scrupulous old lady as having eaten her cakes and swallowed her brandy, without putting themselves to the trouble of making her payment. Et hinc illae irae?\n\n\"But what is the precise evidence of Madame Deluc? 'A gang of miscreants made their appearance, behaved boisterously, ate and drank without making payment, followed in the route of the young man and the girl, returned to the inn about dusk, and re-crossed the river as if in great haste.'\n\n\"Now this 'great haste very possibly seemed greater haste in the eyes of Madame Deluc, since she dwelt lingeringly and lamentingly upon her violated cakes and ale \u2014 cakes and ale for which she might still have entertained a faint hope of compensation. Why, otherwise, since it was about dusk, should she make a point of the haste? It is no cause for wonder, surely, that even a gang of blackguards should make haste to get home when a wide river is to be crossed in small boats, when storm impends, and when night approaches.\n\n\"I say approaches, for the night had not yet arrived. It was only about dusk that the indecent haste of these 'miscreants' offended the sober eyes of Madame Deluc. But we are told that it was upon this very evening that Madame Deluc, as well as her eldest son, 'heard the screams of a female in the vicinity of the inn.' And in what words does Madame Deluc designate the period of the evening at which these screams were heard? 'It was soon after dark' she says. But 'soon after dark' is, at least, dark; and 'about dusk' is as certainly daylight. Thus it is abundantly clear that the gang quitted the Barriere da Roule prior to the screams overheard(?) by Madame Deluc. And although, in all the many reports of the evidence, the relative expressions in question are distinctly and invariably employed just as I have employed them in this conversation with yourself, no notice whatever of the gross discrepancy has, as yet, been taken by any of the public journals, or by any of the myrmidons of police.\n\n\"I shall add but one to the arguments against a gang, but this one has, to my own understanding at least, a weight altogether irresistible. Under the circumstances of large reward offered, and full pardon to any king's evidence, it is not to be imagined, for a moment, that some member of a gang of low ruffians, or of any body of men would not long ago have betrayed his accomplices. Each one of a gang, so placed, is not so much greedy of reward, or anxious for escape, as fearful of betrayal. He betrays eagerly and early that he may not himself be betrayed. That the secret has not been divulged is the very best of proof that it is, in fact, a secret. The horrors of this dark deed are known only to one, or two, living human beings, and to God.\n\n\"Let us sum up now the meagre yet certain fruits of our long analysis. We have attained the idea either of a fatal accident under the roof of Madame Deluc, or of a murder perpetrated, in the thicket at the Barriere du Roule, by a lover, or at least by an intimate and secret associate of the deceased. This associate is of swarthy complexion. This complexion, the 'hitch' in the bandage, and the 'sailor's knot' with which the bonnet-ribbon is tied, point to a seaman. His companionship with the deceased, a gay but not an abject young girl, designates him as above the grade of the common sailor. Here the well-written and urgent communications to the journals are much in the way of corroboration. The circumstance of the first elopement as mentioned by Le Mercurie, tends to blend the idea of this seaman with that of that 'naval officer' who is first known to have led the unfortunate into crime.\n\n\"And here, most fitly, comes the consideration of the continued absence of him of the dark complexion. Let me pause to observe that the complexion of this man is dark and swarthy; it was no common swarthiness which constituted the sole point of remembrance, both as regards Valence and Madame Deluc. But why is this man absent? Was he murdered by the gang? If so, why are there only traces of the assassinated girl? The scene of the two outrages will naturally be supposed identical. And where is his corpse? The assassins would most probably have disposed of both in the same way. But it may be said that this man lives, and is deterred from making himself known, through dread of being charged with the murder. This consideration might be supposed to operate upon him now \u2014 at late period \u2014 since it has been given in evidence that he was seen with Marie \u2014 but it would have had no force at the period of the deed. The first impulse of an innocent man would have been to announce the outrage, and to aid in identifying the ruffians. This, policy would have suggested. He had been seen with the girl. He had crossed the river with her in an open ferry-boat. The denouncing of the assassins would have appeared, even to an idiot, the surest and sole means of relieving himself from suspicion. We cannot suppose him, on the night of the fatal Sunday, both innocent himself and incognizant of an outrage committed. Yet only under such circumstances is it possible to imagine that he would have failed, if alive, in the denouncement of the assassins.\n\n\"And what means are ours of attaining the truth? We shall find these means multiplying and gathering distinctness as we proceed. Let us sift to the bottom this affair of the first elopement. Let us know the full history of 'the officer,' with his present circumstances, and his whereabouts at the precise period of the murder. Let us carefully compare with each other the various communications sent to the evening paper, in which the object was to inculpate a gang. This done, let us compare these communications, both as regards style and MS., with those sent to the morning paper, at a previous period, and insisting so vehemently upon the guilt of Mennais. And, all this done, let us again compare these various communications with the known MSS. of the officer. Let us endeavor to ascertain, by repeated questionings of Madame Deluc and her boys, as well as of the omnibus-driver, Valence, something more of the personal appearance and bearing of the 'man of dark complexion.' Queries, skillfully directed will not fail to elicit, from some of these parties, information on this particular point (or upon others)\u2014 information which the parties themselves may not even be aware of possessing. And let us now trace the boat picked up by the bargeman on the morning of Monday the twenty-third of June, and which was removed from the barge-office, without the cognizance of the officer in attendance, and without the rudder, at some period prior to the discovery of the corpse. With a proper caution and perseverance we shall infallibly trace this boat; for not only can the bargeman who picked it up identify it, but the rudder is at hand. The rudder of a sail boat would not have been abandoned, without inquiry, by one altogether at ease in heart. And here let me pause to insinuate a question. There was no advertisement of the picking up of this boat. It was silently taken to the barge-office and as silently removed. But its owner or employer \u2014 how happened he, at so early a period as Tuesday morning, to be informed, without the agency of advertisement, of the locality of the boat taken up on Monday, unless we imagine some connection with the navy \u2014 some personal permanent connexion leading to cognizance of its minute interests \u2014 its petty local news?\n\n\"In speaking of the lonely assassin dragging his burden to the shore, I have already suggested the probability of his availing himself of a boat. Now we are to understand that Marie Roget was precipitated from a boat. This would naturally have been the case. The corpse could not have been trusted to the shallow waters of the shore. The peculiar marks on the back and shoulders of the victim tell of the bottom ribs of a boat. That the body was found without weight is also corroborative of the idea. If thrown from the shore a weight would have been attached. We can only account for its absence by supposing the murderer to have neglected the precaution of supplying himself with it before pushing off. In the act of consigning the corpse to the water, he would unquestionably have noticed his oversight; but then no remedy would have been at hand. Any risk would have been preferred to a return to that accursed shore. Having rid himself of his ghastly charge, the murderer would have hastened to the city. There, at some obscure wharf, he would have leaped on land. But the boat \u2014 would he have secured it? He would have been in too great haste for such things as securing a boat. Moreover, in fastening it to the wharf, he would have felt as if securing evidence against himself. His natural thought would have been to cast from him, as far as possible, all that had held connection with his crime. He would not only have fled from the wharf, but he would not have permitted the boat to remain. Assuredly he would have cast it adrift. Let us pursue our fancies. In the morning, the wretch is stricken with unutterable horror at finding that the boat has been picked up and detained at a locality which he is in the daily habit of frequenting \u2014 at a locality, perhaps, which his duty compels him to frequent. The next night, without daring to ask for the rudder, he removes it. Now where is that rudderless boat? Let it be one of our first purposes to discover. With the first glimpse we obtain of it, the dawn of our success shall begin. This boat shall guide us, with a rapidity which will surprise even ourselves, to him who employed it in the midnight of the fatal Sabbath. Corroboration will rise upon corroboration, and the murderer will be traced.\"\n\n[For reasons which we shall not specify, but which to many readers will appear obvious, we have taken the liberty of here omitting, from the MSS. placed in our hands, such portion as details the following up of the apparently slight clew obtained by Dupin. We feel it advisable only to state, in brief, that the result desired was brought to pass; and that the Prefect fulfilled punctually, although with reluctance, the terms of his compact with the Chevalier. Mr. Poe's article concludes with the following words. \u2014 Eds.]\n\nIt will be understood that I speak of coincidences and no more. What I have said above upon this topic must suffice. In my own heart there dwells no faith in praeter-nature. That Nature and its God are two, no man who thinks will deny. That the latter, creating the former, can, at will, control or modify it, is also unquestionable. I say \"at will\"; for the question is of will, and not, as the insanity of logic has assumed, of power. It is not that the Deity cannot modify his laws, but that we insult him in imagining a possible necessity for modification. In their origin these laws were fashioned to embrace all contingencies which could lie in the Future. With God all is Now.\n\nI repeat, then, that I speak of these things only as of coincidences. And further: in what I relate it will be seen that between the fate of the unhappy Mary Cecilia Rogers, so far as that fate is known, and the fate of one Marie Roget up to a certain epoch in her history, there has existed a parallel in the contemplation of whose wonderful exactitude the reason becomes embarrassed. I say all this will be seen. But let it not for a moment be supposed that, in proceeding with the sad narrative of Marie from the epoch just mentioned, and in tracing to its denouement the mystery which enshrouded her, it is my covert design to hint at an extension of the parallel, or even to suggest that the measures adopted in Paris for the discovery of the assassin of a grisette, or measures founded in any similar ratiocination would produce any similar result.\n\nFor, in respect to the latter branch of the supposition, it should be considered that the most trifling variation in the facts of the two cases might give rise to the most important miscalculations, by diverting thoroughly the two courses of events; very much as, in arithmetic, an error which, in its own individuality, may be inappreciable, produces, at length, by dint of multiplication at all points of the process, a result enormously at variance with truth. And, in regard to the former branch, we must not fail to hold in view that the very Calculus of Probabilities to which I have referred, forbids all idea of the extension of the parallel \u2014 forbids it with a positiveness strong and decided just in proportion as this parallel has already been long-drawn and exact. This is one of those anomalous propositions which, seemingly appealing to thought altogether apart from the mathematical, is yet one which only the mathematician can fully entertain. Nothing, for example, is more difficult than to convince the merely general reader that the fact of sixes having been thrown twice in succession by a player at dice, is sufficient cause for betting the largest odds that sixes will not be thrown in the third attempt. A suggestion to this effect is usually rejected by the intellect at once. It does not appear that the two throws which have been completed, and which lie now absolutely in the Past, can have influence upon the throw which exists only in the Future. The chance for throwing sixes seems to be precisely as it was at any ordinary time \u2014 that is to say, subject only to the influence of the various other throws which may be made by the dice. And this is a reflection which appears so exceedingly obvious that attempts to controvert it are received more frequently with a derisive smile than with any thing like respectful attention. The error here involved \u2014 a gross error redolent of mischief \u2014 I cannot pretend to expose within the limits assigned me at present; and with the philosophical it needs no exposure. It may be sufficient here to say that it forms one of an infinite series of mistakes which arise in the path of Reason through her propensity for seeking truth in detail.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Oval Portrait (Life in Death) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe chateau into which my valet had ventured to make forcible entrance, rather than permit me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the open air, was one of those piles of commingled gloom and grandeur which have so long frowned among the Appennines, not less in fact than in the fancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. To all appearance it had been temporarily and very lately abandoned. We established ourselves in one of the smallest and least sumptuously furnished apartments. It lay in a remote turret of the building. Its decorations were rich, yet tattered and antique. Its walls were hung with tapestry and bedecked with manifold and multiform armorial trophies, together with an unusually great number of very spirited modern paintings in frames of rich golden arabesque. In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary \u2014 in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room \u2014 since it was already night \u2014 to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed \u2014 and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself. I wished all this done that I might resign myself, if not to sleep, at least alternately to the contemplation of these pictures, and the perusal of a small volume which had been found upon the pillow, and which purported to criticise and describe them.\n\nLong \u2014 long I read \u2014 and devoutly, devotedly I gazed. Rapidly and gloriously the hours flew by and the deep midnight came. The position of the candelabrum displeased me, and outreaching my hand with difficulty, rather than disturb my slumbering valet, I placed it so as to throw its rays more fully upon the book.\n\nBut the action produced an effect altogether unanticipated. The rays of the numerous candles (for there were many) now fell within a niche of the room which had hitherto been thrown into deep shade by one of the bed-posts. I thus saw in vivid light a picture all unnoticed before. It was the portrait of a young girl just ripening into womanhood. I glanced at the painting hurriedly, and then closed my eyes. Why I did this was not at first apparent even to my own perception. But while my lids remained thus shut, I ran over in my mind my reason for so shutting them. It was an impulsive movement to gain time for thought \u2014 to make sure that my vision had not deceived me \u2014 to calm and subdue my fancy for a more sober and more certain gaze. In a very few moments I again looked fixedly at the painting.\n\nThat I now saw aright I could not and would not doubt; for the first flashing of the candles upon that canvas had seemed to dissipate the dreamy stupor which was stealing over my senses, and to startle me at once into waking life.\n\nThe portrait, I have already said, was that of a young girl. It was a mere head and shoulders, done in what is technically termed a vignette manner; much in the style of the favorite heads of Sully. The arms, the bosom, and even the ends of the radiant hair melted imperceptibly into the vague yet deep shadow which formed the back-ground of the whole. The frame was oval, richly gilded and filigreed in Moresque. As a thing of art nothing could be more admirable than the painting itself. But it could have been neither the execution of the work, nor the immortal beauty of the countenance, which had so suddenly and so vehemently moved me. Least of all, could it have been that my fancy, shaken from its half slumber, had mistaken the head for that of a living person. I saw at once that the peculiarities of the design, of the vignetting, and of the frame, must have instantly dispelled such idea \u2014 must have prevented even its momentary entertainment. Thinking earnestly upon these points, I remained, for an hour perhaps, half sitting, half reclining, with my vision riveted upon the portrait. At length, satisfied with the true secret of its effect, I fell back within the bed. I had found the spell of the picture in an absolute life-likeliness of expression, which, at first startling, finally confounded, subdued, and appalled me. With deep and reverent awe I replaced the candelabrum in its former position. The cause of my deep agitation being thus shut from view, I sought eagerly the volume which discussed the paintings and their histories. Turning to the number which designated the oval portrait, I there read the vague and quaint words which follow:\n\n\"She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee; all light and smiles, and frolicsome as the young fawn; loving and cherishing all things; hating only the Art which was her rival; dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover. It was thus a terrible thing for this lady to hear the painter speak of his desire to pourtray even his young bride. But she was humble and obedient, and sat meekly for many weeks in the dark, high turret-chamber where the light dripped upon the pale canvas only from overhead. But he, the painter, took glory in his work, which went on from hour to hour, and from day to day. And he was a passionate, and wild, and moody man, who became lost in reveries; so that he would not see that the light which fell so ghastly in that lone turret withered the health and the spirits of his bride, who pined visibly to all but him. Yet she smiled on and still on, uncomplainingly, because she saw that the painter (who had high renown) took a fervid and burning pleasure in his task, and wrought day and night to depict her who so loved him, yet who grew daily more dispirited and weak. And in sooth some who beheld the portrait spoke of its resemblance in low words, as of a mighty marvel, and a proof not less of the power of the painter than of his deep love for her whom he depicted so surpassingly well. But at length, as the labor drew nearer to its conclusion, there were admitted none into the turret; for the painter had grown wild with the ardor of his work, and turned his eyes from canvas merely, even to regard the countenance of his wife. And he would not see that the tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him. And when many weeks bad passed, and but little remained to do, save one brush upon the mouth and one tint upon the eye, the spirit of the lady again flickered up as the flame within the socket of the lamp. And then the brush was given, and then the tint was placed; and, for one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved:\u2014 She was dead!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Impia tortorum longos hic turba furores\n\n\u2003Sanguinis innocui, non satiata, aluit.\n\n\u2003Sospite nunc patria, fracto nunc funeris antro,\n\n\u2003Mors ubi dira fuit vita salusque patent.\n\n\u2014(Quatrain composed for the gates of a market to be erected upon the site of the Jacobin Club House at Paris.)\n\nI was sick \u2014 sick unto death with that long agony; and when they at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me. The sentence \u2014 the dread sentence of death \u2014 was the last of distinct accentuation which reached my ears. After that, the sound of the inquisitorial voices seemed merged in one dreamy indeterminate hum. It conveyed to my soul the idea of revolution \u2014 perhaps from its association in fancy with the burr of a mill wheel. This only for a brief period; for presently I heard no more. Yet, for a while, I saw; but with how terrible an exaggeration! I saw the lips of the black-robed judges. They appeared to me white \u2014 whiter than the sheet upon which I trace these words \u2014 and thin even to grotesqueness; thin with the intensity of their expression of firmness \u2014 of immoveable resolution \u2014 of stern contempt of human torture. I saw that the decrees of what to me was Fate, were still issuing from those lips. I saw them writhe with a deadly locution. I saw them fashion the syllables of my name; and I shuddered because no sound succeeded. I saw, too, for a few moments of delirious horror, the soft and nearly imperceptible waving of the sable draperies which enwrapped the walls of the apartment. And then my vision fell upon the seven tall candles upon the table. At first they wore the aspect of charity, and seemed white and slender angels who would save me; but then, all at once, there came a most deadly nausea over my spirit, and I felt every fibre in my frame thrill as if I had touched the wire of a galvanic battery, while the angel forms became meaningless spectres, with heads of flame, and I saw that from them there would be no help. And then there stole into my fancy, like a rich musical note, the thought of what sweet rest there must be in the grave. The thought came gently and stealthily, and it seemed long before it attained full appreciation; but just as my spirit came at length properly to feel and entertain it, the figures of the judges vanished, as if magically, from before me; the tall candles sank into nothingness; their flames went out utterly; the blackness of darkness supervened; all sensations appeared swallowed up in a mad rushing descent as of the soul into Hades. Then silence, and stillness, night were the universe.\n\nI had swooned; but still will not say that all of consciousness was lost. What of it there remained I will not attempt to define, or even to describe; yet all was not lost. In the deepest slumber \u2014 no! In delirium \u2014 no! In a swoon \u2014 no! In death \u2014 no! even in the grave all is not lost. Else there is no immortality for man. Arousing from the most profound of slumbers, we break the gossamer web of some dream. Yet in a second afterward, (so frail may that web have been) we remember not that we have dreamed. In the return to life from the swoon there are two stages; first, that of the sense of mental or spiritual; secondly, that of the sense of physical, existence. It seems probable that if, upon reaching the second stage, we could recall the impressions of the first, we should find these impressions eloquent in memories of the gulf beyond. And that gulf is \u2014 what? How at least shall we distinguish its shadows from those of the tomb? But if the impressions of what I have termed the first stage, are not, at will, recalled, yet, after long interval, do they not come unbidden, while we marvel whence they come? He who has never swooned, is not he who finds strange palaces and wildly familiar faces in coals that glow; is not he who beholds floating in mid-air the sad visions that the many may not view; is not he who ponders over the perfume of some novel flower \u2014 is not he whose brain grows bewildered with the meaning of some musical cadence which has never before arrested his attention.\n\nAmid frequent and thoughtful endeavors to remember; amid earnest struggles to regather some token of the state of seeming nothingness into which my soul had lapsed, there have been moments when I have dreamed of success; there have been brief, very brief periods when I have conjured up remembrances which the lucid reason of a later epoch assures me could have had reference only to that condition of seeming unconsciousness. These shadows of memory tell, indistinctly, of tall figures that lifted and bore me in silence down \u2014 down \u2014 still down \u2014 till a hideous dizziness oppressed me at the mere idea of the interminableness of the descent. They tell also of a vague horror at my heart, on account of that heart's unnatural stillness. Then comes a sense of sudden motionlessness throughout all things; as if those who bore me (a ghastly train!) had outrun, in their descent, the limits of the limitless, and paused from the wearisomeness of their toil. After this I call to mind flatness and dampness; and then all is madness \u2014 the madness of a memory which busies itself among forbidden things.\n\nVery suddenly there came back to my soul motion and sound \u2014 the tumultuous motion of the heart, and, in my ears, the sound of its beating. Then a pause in which all is blank. Then again sound, and motion, and touch \u2014 a tingling sensation pervading my frame. Then the mere consciousness of existence, without thought \u2014 a condition which lasted long. Then, very suddenly, thought, and shuddering terror, and earnest endeavor to comprehend my true state. Then a strong desire to lapse into insensibility. Then a rushing revival of soul and a successful effort to move. And now a full memory of the trial, of the judges, of the sable draperies, of the sentence, of the sickness, of the swoon. Then entire forgetfulness of all that followed; of all that a later day and much earnestness of endeavor have enabled me vaguely to recall.\n\nSo far, I had not opened my eyes. I felt that I lay upon my back, unbound. I reached out my hand, and it fell heavily upon something damp and hard. There I suffered it to remain for many minutes, while I strove to imagine where and what I could be. I longed, yet dared not to employ my vision. I dreaded the first glance at objects around me. It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible, but that I grew aghast lest there should be nothing to see. At length, with a wild desperation at heart, I quickly unclosed my eyes. My worst thoughts, then, were confirmed. The blackness of eternal night encompassed me. I struggled for breath. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The atmosphere was intolerably close. I still lay quietly, and made effort to exercise my reason. I brought to mind the inquisitorial proceedings, and attempted from that point to deduce my real condition. The sentence had passed; and it appeared to me that a very long interval of time had since elapsed. Yet not for a moment did I suppose myself actually dead. Such a supposition, notwithstanding what we read in fiction, is altogether inconsistent with real existence; \u2014 but where and in what state was I? The condemned to death, I knew, perished usually at the autos-da-fe, and one of these had been held on the very night of the day of my trial. Had I been remanded to my dungeon, to await the next sacrifice, which would not take place for many months? This I at once saw could not be. Victims had been in immediate demand. Moreover, my dungeon, as well as all the condemned cells at Toledo, had stone floors, and light was not altogether excluded.\n\nA fearful idea now suddenly drove the blood in torrents upon my heart, and for a brief period, I once more relapsed into insensibility. Upon recovering, I at once started to my feet, trembling convulsively in every fibre. I thrust my arms wildly above and around me in all directions. I felt nothing; yet dreaded to move a step, lest I should be impeded by the walls of a tomb. Perspiration burst from every pore, and stood in cold big beads upon my forehead. The agony of suspense grew at length intolerable, and I cautiously moved forward, with my arms extended, and my eyes straining from their sockets, in the hope of catching some faint ray of light. I proceeded for many paces; but still all was blackness and vacancy. I breathed more freely. It seemed evident that mine was not, at least, the most hideous of fates.\n\nAnd now, as I still continued to step cautiously onward, there came thronging upon my recollection a thousand vague rumors of the horrors of Toledo. Of the dungeons there had been strange things narrated \u2014 fables I had always deemed them \u2014 but yet strange, and too ghastly to repeat, save in a whisper. Was I left to perish of starvation in this subterranean world of darkness; or what fate, perhaps even more fearful, awaited me? That the result would be death, and a death of more than customary bitterness, I knew too well the character of my judges to doubt. The mode and the hour were all that occupied or distracted me.\n\nMy outstretched hands at length encountered some solid obstruction. It was a wall, seemingly of stone masonry \u2014 very smooth, slimy, and cold. I followed it up; stepping with all the careful distrust with which certain antique narratives had inspired me. This process, however, afforded me no means of ascertaining the dimensions of my dungeon; as I might make its circuit, and return to the point whence I set out, without being aware of the fact; so perfectly uniform seemed the wall. I therefore sought the knife which had been in my pocket, when led into the inquisitorial chamber; but it was gone; my clothes had been exchanged for a wrapper of coarse serge. I had thought of forcing the blade in some minute crevice of the masonry, so as to identify my point of departure. The difficulty, nevertheless, was but trivial; although, in the disorder of my fancy, it seemed at first insuperable. I tore a part of the hem from the robe and placed the fragment at full length, and at right angles to the wall. In groping my way around the prison, I could not fail to encounter this rag upon completing the circuit. So, at least I thought: but I had not counted upon the extent of the dungeon, or upon my own weakness. The ground was moist and slippery. I staggered onward for some time, when I stumbled and fell. My excessive fatigue induced me to remain prostrate; and sleep soon overtook me as I lay.\n\nUpon awaking, and stretching forth an arm, I found beside me a loaf and a pitcher with water. I was too much exhausted to reflect upon this circumstance, but ate and drank with avidity. Shortly afterward, I resumed my tour around the prison, and with much toil came at last upon the fragment of the serge. Up to the period when I fell I had counted fifty-two paces, and upon resuming my walk, I had counted forty-eight more; \u2014 when I arrived at the rag. There were in all, then, a hundred paces; and, admitting two paces to the yard, I presumed the dungeon to be fifty yards in circuit. I had met, however, with many angles in the wall, and thus I could form no guess at the shape of the vault; for vault I could not help supposing it to be.\n\nI had little object \u2014 certainly no hope these researches; but a vague curiosity prompted me to continue them. Quitting the wall, I resolved to cross the area of the enclosure. At first I proceeded with extreme caution, for the floor, although seemingly of solid material, was treacherous with slime. At length, however, I took courage, and did not hesitate to step firmly; endeavoring to cross in as direct a line as possible. I had advanced some ten or twelve paces in this manner, when the remnant of the torn hem of my robe became entangled between my legs. I stepped on it, and fell violently on my face.\n\nIn the confusion attending my fall, I did not immediately apprehend a somewhat startling circumstance, which yet, in a few seconds afterward, and while I still lay prostrate, arrested my attention. It was this \u2014 my chin rested upon the floor of the prison, but my lips and the upper portion of my head, although seemingly at a less elevation than the chin, touched nothing. At the same time my forehead seemed bathed in a clammy vapor, and the peculiar smell of decayed fungus arose to my nostrils. I put forward my arm, and shuddered to find that I had fallen at the very brink of a circular pit, whose extent, of course, I had no means of ascertaining at the moment. Groping about the masonry just below the margin, I succeeded in dislodging a small fragment, and let it fall into the abyss. For many seconds I hearkened to its reverberations as it dashed against the sides of the chasm in its descent; at length there was a sullen plunge into water, succeeded by loud echoes. At the same moment there came a sound resembling the quick opening, and as rapid closing of a door overhead, while a faint gleam of light flashed suddenly through the gloom, and as suddenly faded away.\n\nI saw clearly the doom which had been prepared for me, and congratulated myself upon the timely accident by which I had escaped. Another step before my fall, and the world had seen me no more. And the death just avoided, was of that very character which I had regarded as fabulous and frivolous in the tales respecting the Inquisition. To the victims of its tyranny, there was the choice of death with its direst physical agonies, or death with its most hideous moral horrors. I had been reserved for the latter. By long suffering my nerves had been unstrung, until I trembled at the sound of my own voice, and had become in every respect a fitting subject for the species of torture which awaited me.\n\nShaking in every limb, I groped my way back to the wall; resolving there to perish rather than risk the terrors of the wells, of which my imagination now pictured many in various positions about the dungeon. In other conditions of mind I might have had courage to end my misery at once by a plunge into one of these abysses; but now I was the veriest of cowards. Neither could I forget what I had read of these pits \u2014 that the sudden extinction of life formed no part of their most horrible plan.\n\nAgitation of spirit kept me awake for many long hours; but at length I again slumbered. Upon arousing, I found by my side, as before, a loaf and a pitcher of water. A burning thirst consumed me, and I emptied the vessel at a draught. It must have been drugged; for scarcely had I drunk, before I became irresistibly drowsy. A deep sleep fell upon me \u2014 a sleep like that of death. How long it lasted of course, I know not; but when, once again, I unclosed my eyes, the objects around me were visible. By a wild sulphurous lustre, the origin of which I could not at first determine, I was enabled to see the extent and aspect of the prison.\n\nIn its size I had been greatly mistaken. The whole circuit of its walls did not exceed twenty-five yards. For some minutes this fact occasioned me a world of vain trouble; vain indeed! for what could be of less importance, under the terrible circumstances which environed me, then the mere dimensions of my dungeon? But my soul took a wild interest in trifles, and I busied myself in endeavors to account for the error I had committed in my measurement. The truth at length flashed upon me. In my first attempt at exploration I had counted fifty-two paces, up to the period when I fell; I must then have been within a pace or two of the fragment of serge; in fact, I had nearly performed the circuit of the vault. I then slept, and upon awaking, I must have returned upon my steps \u2014 thus supposing the circuit nearly double what it actually was. My confusion of mind prevented me from observing that I began my tour with the wall to the left, and ended it with the wall to the right.\n\nI had been deceived, too, in respect to the shape of the enclosure. In feeling my way I had found many angles, and thus deduced an idea of great irregularity; so potent is the effect of total darkness upon one arousing from lethargy or sleep! The angles were simply those of a few slight depressions, or niches, at odd intervals. The general shape of the prison was square. What I had taken for masonry seemed now to be iron, or some other metal, in huge plates, whose sutures or joints occasioned the depression. The entire surface of this metallic enclosure was rudely daubed in all the hideous and repulsive devices to which the charnel superstition of the monks has given rise. The figures of fiends in aspects of menace, with skeleton forms, and other more really fearful images, overspread and disfigured the walls. I observed that the outlines of these monstrosities were sufficiently distinct, but that the colors seemed faded and blurred, as if from the effects of a damp atmosphere. I now noticed the floor, too, which was of stone. In the centre yawned the circular pit from whose jaws I had escaped; but it was the only one in the dungeon.\n\nAll this I saw indistinctly and by much effort: for my personal condition had been greatly changed during slumber. I now lay upon my back, and at full length, on a species of low framework of wood. To this I was securely bound by a long strap resembling a surcingle. It passed in many convolutions about my limbs and body, leaving at liberty only my head, and my left arm to such extent that I could, by dint of much exertion, supply myself with food from an earthen dish which lay by my side on the floor. I saw, to my horror, that the pitcher had been removed. I say to my horror; for I was consumed with intolerable thirst. This thirst it appeared to be the design of my persecutors to stimulate: for the food in the dish was meat pungently seasoned.\n\nLooking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison. It was some thirty or forty feet overhead, and constructed much as the side walls. In one of its panels a very singular figure riveted my whole attention. It was the painted figure of Time as he is commonly represented, save that, in lieu of a scythe, he held what, at a casual glance, I supposed to be the pictured image of a huge pendulum such as we see on antique clocks. There was something, however, in the appearance of this machine which caused me to regard it more attentively. While I gazed directly upward at it (for its position was immediately over my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion. In an instant afterward the fancy was confirmed. Its sweep was brief, and of course slow. I watched it for some minutes, somewhat in fear, but more in wonder. Wearied at length with observing its dull movement, I turned my eyes upon the other objects in the cell.\n\nA slight noise attracted my notice, and, looking to the floor, I saw several enormous rats traversing it. They had issued from the well, which lay just within view to my right. Even then, while I gazed, they came up in troops, hurriedly, with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat. From this it required much effort and attention to scare them away.\n\nIt might have been half an hour, perhaps even an hour, (for in cast my I could take but imperfect note of time) before I again cast my eyes upward. What I then saw confounded and amazed me. The sweep of the pendulum had increased in extent by nearly a yard. As a natural consequence, its velocity was also much greater. But what mainly disturbed me was the idea that had perceptibly descended. I now observed \u2014 with what horror it is needless to say \u2014 that its nether extremity was formed of a crescent of glittering steel, about a foot in length from horn to horn; the horns upward, and the under edge evidently as keen as that of a razor. Like a razor also, it seemed massy and heavy, tapering from the edge into a solid and broad structure above. It was appended to a weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.\n\nI could no longer doubt the doom prepared for me by monkish ingenuity in torture. My cognizance of the pit had become known to the inquisitorial agents \u2014 the pit whose horrors had been destined for so bold a recusant as myself \u2014 the pit, typical of hell, and regarded by rumor as the Ultima Thule of all their punishments. The plunge into this pit I had avoided by the merest of accidents, I knew that surprise, or entrapment into torment, formed an important portion of all the grotesquerie of these dungeon deaths. Having failed to fall, it was no part of the demon plan to hurl me into the abyss; and thus (there being no alternative) a different and a milder destruction awaited me. Milder! I half smiled in my agony as I thought of such application of such a term.\n\nWhat boots it to tell of the long, long hours of horror more than mortal, during which I counted the rushing vibrations of the steel! Inch by inch \u2014 line by line \u2014 with a descent only appreciable at intervals that seemed ages \u2014 down and still down it came! Days passed \u2014 it might have been that many days passed \u2014 ere it swept so closely over me as to fan me with its acrid breath. The odor of the sharp steel forced itself into my nostrils. I prayed \u2014 I wearied heaven with my prayer for its more speedy descent. I grew frantically mad, and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm, and lay smiling at the glittering death, as a child at some rare bauble.\n\nThere was another interval of utter insensibility; it was brief; for, upon again lapsing into life there had been no perceptible descent in the pendulum. But it might have been long; for I knew there were demons who took note of my swoon, and who could have arrested the vibration at pleasure. Upon my recovery, too, I felt very \u2014 oh, inexpressibly sick and weak, as if through long inanition. Even amid the agonies of that period, the human nature craved food. With painful effort I outstretched my left arm as far as my bonds permitted, and took possession of the small remnant which had been spared me by the rats. As I put a portion of it within my lips, there rushed to my mind a half formed thought of joy \u2014 of hope. Yet what business had I with hope? It was, as I say, a half formed thought \u2014 man has many such which are never completed. I felt that it was of joy \u2014 of hope; but felt also that it had perished in its formation. In vain I struggled to perfect \u2014 to regain it. Long suffering had nearly annihilated all my ordinary powers of mind. I was an imbecile \u2014 an idiot.\n\nThe vibration of the pendulum was at right angles to my length. I saw that the crescent was designed to cross the region of the heart. It would fray the serge of my robe \u2014 it would return and repeat its operations \u2014 again \u2014 and again. Notwithstanding terrifically wide sweep (some thirty feet or more) and the its hissing vigor of its descent, sufficient to sunder these very walls of iron, still the fraying of my robe would be all that, for several minutes, it would accomplish. And at this thought I paused. I dared not go farther than this reflection. I dwelt upon it with a pertinacity of attention \u2014 as if, in so dwelling, I could arrest here the descent of the steel. I forced myself to ponder upon the sound of the crescent as it should pass across the garment \u2014 upon the peculiar thrilling sensation which the friction of cloth produces on the nerves. I pondered upon all this frivolity until my teeth were on edge.\n\nDown \u2014 steadily down it crept. I took a frenzied pleasure in contrasting its downward with its lateral velocity. To the right \u2014 to the left \u2014 far and wide \u2014 with the shriek of a damned spirit; to my heart with the stealthy pace of the tiger! I alternately laughed and howled as the one or the other idea grew predominant.\n\nDown \u2014 certainly, relentlessly down! It vibrated within three inches of my bosom! I struggled violently, furiously, to free my left arm. This was free only from the elbow to the hand. I could reach the latter, from the platter beside me, to my mouth, with great effort, but no farther. Could I have broken the fastenings above the elbow, I would have seized and attempted to arrest the pendulum. I might as well have attempted to arrest an avalanche!\n\nDown \u2014 still unceasingly \u2014 still inevitably down! I gasped and struggled at each vibration. I shrunk convulsively at its every sweep. My eyes followed its outward or upward whirls with the eagerness of the most unmeaning despair; they closed themselves spasmodically at the descent, although death would have been a relief, oh! how unspeakable! Still I quivered in every nerve to think how slight a sinking of the machinery would precipitate that keen, glistening axe upon my bosom. It was hope that prompted the nerve to quiver \u2014 the frame to shrink. It was hope \u2014 the hope that triumphs on the rack \u2014 that whispers to the death-condemned even in the dungeons of the Inquisition.\n\nI saw that some ten or twelve vibrations would bring the steel in actual contact with my robe, and with this observation there suddenly came over my spirit all the keen, collected calmness of despair. For the first time during many hours \u2014 or perhaps days \u2014 I thought. It now occurred to me that the bandage, or surcingle, which enveloped me, was unique. I was tied by no separate cord. The first stroke of the razorlike crescent athwart any portion of the band, would so detach it that it might be unwound from my person by means of my left hand. But how fearful, in that case, the proximity of the steel! The result of the slightest struggle how deadly! Was it likely, moreover, that the minions of the torturer had not foreseen and provided for this possibility! Was it probable that the bandage crossed my bosom in the track of the pendulum? Dreading to find my faint, and, as it seemed, in last hope frustrated, I so far elevated my head as to obtain a distinct view of my breast. The surcingle enveloped my limbs and body close in all directions \u2014 save in the path of the destroying crescent.\n\nScarcely had I dropped my head back into its original position, when there flashed upon my mind what I cannot better describe than as the unformed half of that idea of deliverance to which I have previously alluded, and of which a moiety only floated indeterminately through my brain when I raised food to my burning lips. The whole thought was now present \u2014 feeble, scarcely sane, scarcely definite \u2014 but still entire. I proceeded at once, with the nervous energy of despair, to attempt its execution.\n\nFor many hours the immediate vicinity of the low framework upon which I lay, had been literally swarming with rats. They were wild, bold, ravenous; their red eyes glaring upon me as if they waited but for motionlessness on my part to make me their prey. \"To what food,\" I thought, \"have they been accustomed in the well?\"\n\nThey had devoured, in spite of all my efforts to prevent them, all but a small remnant of the contents of the dish. I had fallen into an habitual see-saw, or wave of the hand about the platter: and, at length, the unconscious uniformity of the movement deprived it of effect. In their voracity the vermin frequently fastened their sharp fangs in my fingers. With the particles of the oily and spicy viand which now remained, I thoroughly rubbed the bandage wherever I could reach it; then, raising my hand from the floor, I lay breathlessly still.\n\nAt first the ravenous animals were startled and terrified at the change \u2014 at the cessation of movement. They shrank alarmedly back; many sought the well. But this was only for a moment. I had not counted in vain upon their voracity. Observing that I remained without motion, one or two of the boldest leaped upon the framework, and smelt at the surcingle. This seemed the signal for a general rush. Forth from the well they hurried in fresh troops. They clung to the wood \u2014 they overran it, and leaped in hundreds upon my person. The measured movement of the pendulum disturbed them not at all. Avoiding its strokes they busied themselves with the anointed bandage. They pressed \u2014 they swarmed upon me in ever accumulating heaps. They writhed upon my throat; their cold lips sought my own; I was half stifled by their thronging pressure; disgust, for which the world has no name, swelled my bosom, and chilled, with a heavy clamminess, my heart. Yet one minute, and I felt that the struggle would be over. Plainly I perceived the loosening of the bandage. I knew that in more than one place it must be already severed. With a more than human resolution I lay still.\n\nNor had I erred in my calculations \u2014 nor had I endured in vain. I at length felt that I was free. The surcingle hung in ribands from my body. But the stroke of the pendulum already pressed upon my bosom. It had divided the serge of the robe. It had cut through the linen beneath. Twice again it swung, and a sharp sense of pain shot through every nerve. But the moment of escape had arrived. At a wave of my hand my deliverers hurried tumultuously away. With a steady movement \u2014 cautious, sidelong, shrinking, and slow \u2014 I slid from the embrace of the bandage and beyond the reach of the scimitar. For the moment, at least, I was free.\n\nFree! \u2014 and in the grasp of the Inquisition! I had scarcely stepped from my wooden bed of horror upon the stone floor of the prison, when the motion of the hellish machine ceased and I beheld it drawn up, by some invisible force, through the ceiling. This was a lesson which I took desperately to heart. My every motion was undoubtedly watched. Free! \u2014 I had but escaped death in one form of agony, to be delivered unto worse than death in some other. With that thought I rolled my eves nervously around on the barriers of iron that hemmed me in. Something unusual \u2014 some change which, at first, I could not appreciate distinctly \u2014 it was obvious, had taken place in the apartment. For many minutes of a dreamy and trembling abstraction, I busied myself in vain, unconnected conjecture. During this period, I became aware, for the first time, of the origin of the sulphurous light which illumined the cell. It proceeded from a fissure, about half an inch in width, extending entirely around the prison at the base of the walls, which thus appeared, and were, completely separated from the floor. I endeavored, but of course in vain, to look through the aperture.\n\nAs I arose from the attempt, the mystery of the alteration in the chamber broke at once upon my understanding. I have observed that, although the outlines of the figures upon the walls were sufficiently distinct, yet the colors seemed blurred and indefinite. These colors had now assumed, and were momentarily assuming, a startling and most intense brilliancy, that gave to the spectral and fiendish portraitures an aspect that might have thrilled even firmer nerves than my own. Demon eyes, of a wild and ghastly vivacity, glared upon me in a thousand directions, where none had been visible before, and gleamed with the lurid lustre of a fire that I could not force my imagination to regard as unreal.\n\nUnreal! \u2014 Even while I breathed there came to my nostrils the breath of the vapour of heated iron! A suffocating odour pervaded the prison! A deeper glow settled each moment in the eyes that glared at my agonies! A richer tint of crimson diffused itself over the pictured horrors of blood. I panted! I gasped for breath! There could be no doubt of the design of my tormentors \u2014 oh! most unrelenting! oh! most demoniac of men! I shrank from the glowing metal to the centre of the cell. Amid the thought of the fiery destruction that impended, the idea of the coolness of the well came over my soul like balm. I rushed to its deadly brink. I threw my straining vision below. The glare from the enkindled roof illumined its inmost recesses. Yet, for a wild moment, did my spirit refuse to comprehend the meaning of what I saw. At length it forced \u2014 it wrestled its way into my soul \u2014 it burned itself in upon my shuddering reason. \u2014 Oh! for a voice to speak! \u2014 oh! horror! \u2014 oh! any horror but this! With a shriek, I rushed from the margin, and buried my face in my hands \u2014 weeping bitterly.\n\nThe heat rapidly increased, and once again I looked up, shuddering as with a fit of the ague. There had been a second change in the cell \u2014 and now the change was obviously in the form. As before, it was in vain that I, at first, endeavoured to appreciate or understand what was taking place. But not long was I left in doubt. The Inquisitorial vengeance had been hurried by my two-fold escape, and there was to be no more dallying with the King of Terrors. The room had been square. I saw that two of its iron angles were now acute \u2014 two, consequently, obtuse. The fearful difference quickly increased with a low rumbling or moaning sound. In an instant the apartment had shifted its form into that of a lozenge. But the alteration stopped not here \u2014 I neither hoped nor desired it to stop. I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. \"Death,\" I said, \"any death but that of the pit!\" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me? Could I resist its glow? or, if even that, could I withstand its pressure And now, flatter and flatter grew the lozenge, with a rapidity that left me no time for contemplation. Its centre, and of course, its greatest width, came just over the yawning gulf. I shrank back \u2014 but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward. At length for my seared and writhing body there was no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor of the prison. I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair. I felt that I tottered upon the brink \u2014 I averted my eyes \u2014\n\nThere was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Raising the Wind (Diddling) by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Hey, diddle diddle\n\n\u2003The cat and the fiddle\n\nSince the world began there have been two Jeremys. The one wrote a Jeremiad about usury, and was called Jeremy Bentham. He has been much admired by Mr. John Neal, and was a great man in a small way. The other gave name to the most important of the Exact Sciences, and was a great man in a great way \u2014 I may say, indeed, in the very greatest of ways.\n\nDiddling \u2014 or the abstract idea conveyed by the verb to diddle \u2014 is sufficiently well understood. Yet the fact, the deed, the thing diddling, is somewhat difficult to define. We may get, however, at a tolerably distinct conception of the matter in hand, by defining \u2014 not the thing, diddling, in itself \u2014 but man, as an animal that diddles. Had Plato but hit upon this, he would have been spared the affront of the picked chicken.\n\nVery pertinently it was demanded of Plato, why a picked chicken, which was clearly \"a biped without feathers,\" was not, according to his own definition, a man? But I am not to be bothered by any similar query. Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man. It will take an entire hen-coop of picked chickens to get over that.\n\nWhat constitutes the essence, the nare, the principle of diddling is, in fact, peculiar to the class of creatures that wear coats and pantaloons. A crow thieves; a fox cheats; a weasel outwits; a man diddles. To diddle is his destiny. \"Man was made to mourn,\" says the poet. But not so:\u2014 he was made to diddle. This is his aim \u2014 his object \u2014 his end. And for this reason when a man's diddled we say he's \"done.\"\n\nDiddling, rightly considered, is a compound, of which the ingredients are minuteness, interest, perseverance, ingenuity, audacity, nonchalance, originality, impertinence, and grin.\n\nMinuteness:\u2014 Your diddler is minute. His operations are upon a small scale. His business is retail, for cash, or approved paper at sight. Should he ever be tempted into magnificent speculation, he then, at once, loses his distinctive features, and becomes what we term \"financier.\" This latter word conveys the diddling idea in every respect except that of magnitude. A diddler may thus be regarded as a banker in petto \u2014 a \"financial operation,\" as a diddle at Brobdignag. The one is to the other, as Homer to \"Flaccus\"\u2014 as a Mastodon to a mouse \u2014 as the tail of a comet to that of a pig.\n\nInterest:\u2014 Your diddler is guided by self-interest. He scorns to diddle for the mere sake of the diddle. He has an object in view \u2014 his pocket \u2014 and yours. He regards always the main chance. He looks to Number One. You are Number Two, and must look to yourself.\n\nPerseverance:\u2014 Your diddler perseveres. He is not readily discouraged. Should even the banks break, he cares nothing about it. He steadily pursues his end, and\n\nUt canis a corio nunquam absterrebitur uncto - so he never lets go of his game.\n\nIngenuity:\u2014 Your diddler is ingenious. He has constructiveness large. He understands plot. He invents and circumvents. Were he not Alexander he would be Diogenes. Were he not a diddler, he would be a maker of patent rat-traps or an angler for trout.\n\nAudacity:\u2014 Your diddler is audacious. \u2014 He is a bold man. He carries the war into Africa. He conquers all by assault. He would not fear the daggers of Frey Herren. With a little more prudence Dick Turpin would have made a good diddler; with a trifle less blarney, Daniel O'Connell; with a pound or two more brains Charles the Twelfth.\n\nNonchalance:\u2014 Your diddler is nonchalant. He is not at all nervous. He never had any nerves. He is never seduced into a flurry. He is never put out \u2014 unless put out of doors. He is cool \u2014 cool as a cucumber. He is calm \u2014\"calm as a smile from Lady Bury.\" He is easy \u2014 easy as an old glove, or the damsels of ancient Baiae.\n\nOriginality:\u2014 Your diddler is original \u2014 conscientiously so. His thoughts are his own. He would scorn to employ those of another. A stale trick is his aversion. He would return a purse, I am sure, upon discovering that he had obtained it by an unoriginal diddle.\n\nImpertinence. \u2014 Your diddler is impertinent. He swaggers. He sets his arms a-kimbo. He thrusts. his hands in his trowsers' pockets. He sneers in your face. He treads on your corns. He eats your dinner, he drinks your wine, he borrows your money, he pulls your nose, he kicks your poodle, and he kisses your wife.\n\nGrin:\u2014 Your true diddler winds up all with a grin. But this nobody sees but himself. He grins when his daily work is done \u2014 when his allotted labors are accomplished \u2014 at night in his own closet, and altogether for his own private entertainment. He goes home. He locks his door. He divests himself of his clothes. He puts out his candle. He gets into bed. He places his head upon the pillow. All this done, and your diddler grins. This is no hypothesis. It is a matter of course. I reason a priori, and a diddle would be no diddle without a grin.\n\nThe origin of the diddle is referrable to the infancy of the Human Race. Perhaps the first diddler was Adam. At all events, we can trace the science back to a very remote period of antiquity. The moderns, however, have brought it to a perfection never dreamed of by our thick-headed progenitors. Without pausing to speak of the \"old saws,\" therefore, I shall content myself with a compendious account of some of the more \"modern instances.\"\n\nA very good diddle is this. A housekeeper in want of a sofa, for instance, is seen to go in and out of several cabinet warehouses. At length she arrives at one offering an excellent variety. She is accosted, and invited to enter, by a polite and voluble individual at the door. She finds a sofa well adapted to her views, and upon inquiring the price, is surprised and delighted to hear a sum named at least twenty per cent. lower than her expectations. She hastens to make the purchase, gets a bill and receipt, leaves her address, with a request that the article be sent home as speedily as possible, and retires amid a profusion of bows from the shopkeeper. The night arrives and no sofa. A servant is sent to make inquiry about the delay. The whole transaction is denied. No sofa has been sold \u2014 no money received \u2014 except by the diddler, who played shopkeeper for the nonce.\n\nOur cabinet warehouses are left entirely unattended, and thus afford every facility for a trick of this kind. Visiters enter, look at furniture, and depart unheeded and unseen. Should any one wish to purchase, or to inquire the price of an article, a bell is at hand, and this is considered amply sufficient.\n\nAgain, quite a respectable diddle is this. A well-dressed individual enters a shop, makes a purchase to the value of a dollar; finds, much to his vexation, that he has left his pocketbook in another coat pocket; and so says to the shopkeeper \u2014\n\n\"My dear sir, never mind; just oblige me, will you, by sending the bundle home? But stay! I really believe that I have nothing less than a five dollar bill, even there. However, you can send four dollars in change with the bundle, you know.\"\n\n\"Very good, sir,\" replies the shopkeeper, who entertains, at once, a lofty opinion of the high-mindedness of his customer. \"I know fellows,\" he says to himself, \"who would just have put the goods under their arm, and walked off with a promise to call and pay the dollar as they came by in the afternoon.\"\n\nA boy is sent with the parcel and change. On the route, quite accidentally, he is met by the purchaser, who exclaims:\n\n\"Ah! This is my bundle, I see \u2014 I thought you had been home with it, long ago. Well, go on! My wife, Mrs. Trotter, will give you the five dollars \u2014 I left instructions with her to that effect. The change you might as well give to me \u2014 I shall want some silver for the Post Office. Very good! One, two, is this a good quarter? \u2014 three, four \u2014 quite right! Say to Mrs. Trotter that you met me, and be sure now and do not loiter on the way.\"\n\nThe boy doesn't loiter at all \u2014 but he is a very long time in getting back from his errand \u2014 for no lady of the precise name of Mrs. Trotter is to be discovered. He consoles himself, however, that he has not been such a fool as to leave the goods without the money, and re-entering his shop with a self-satisfied air, feels sensibly hurt and indignant when his master asks him what has become of the change.\n\nA very simple diddle, indeed, is this. The captain of a ship, which is about to sail, is presented by an official looking person with an unusually moderate bill of city charges. Glad to get off so easily, and confused by a hundred duties pressing upon him all at once, he discharges the claim forthwith. In about fifteen minutes, another and less reasonable bill is handed him by one who soon makes it evident that the first collector was a diddler, and the original collection a diddle.\n\nAnd here, too, is a somewhat similar thing. A steamboat is casting loose from the wharf. A traveller, portmanteau in hand, is discovered running toward the wharf, at full speed. Suddenly, he makes a dead halt, stoops, and picks up something from the ground in a very agitated manner. It is a pocketbook, and \u2014\"Has any gentleman lost a pocketbook?\" he cries. No one can say that he has exactly lost a pocketbook; but a great excitement ensues, when the treasure trove is found to be of value. The boat, however, must not be detained.\n\n\"Time and tide wait for no man,\" says the captain.\n\n\"For God's sake, stay only a few minutes,\" says the finder of the book \u2014\"the true claimant will presently appear.\"\n\n\"Can't wait!\" replies the man in authority; \"cast off there, d'ye hear?\"\n\n\"What am I to do?\" asks the finder, in great tribulation. \"I am about to leave the country for some years, and I cannot conscientiously retain this large amount in my possession. I beg your pardon, sir,\" (here he addresses a gentleman on shore,) \"but you have the air of an honest man. Will you confer upon me the favor of taking charge of this pocketbook \u2014 I know I can trust you \u2014 and of advertising it? The notes, you see, amount to a very considerable sum. The owner will, no doubt, insist upon rewarding you for your trouble \u2014\n\n\"Me! \u2014 no, you! \u2014 it was you who found the book.\"\n\n\"Well, if you must have it so \u2014 I will take a small reward \u2014 just to satisfy your scruples. Let me see \u2014 why these notes are all hundreds \u2014 bless my soul! a hundred is too much to take \u2014 fifty would be quite enough, I am sure \u2014\n\n\"Cast off there!\" says the captain.\n\n\"But then I have no change for a hundred, and upon the whole, you had better \u2014\n\n\"Cast off there!\" says the captain.\n\n\"Never mind!\" cries the gentleman on shore, who has been examining his own pocketbook for the last minute or so \u2014\"never mind! I can fix it \u2014 here is a fifty on the Bank of North America \u2014 throw the book.\"\n\nAnd the over-conscientious finder takes the fifty with marked reluctance, and throws the gentleman the book, as desired, while the steamboat fumes and fizzes on her way. In about half an hour after her departure, the \"large amount\" is seen to be a \"counterfeit presentment,\" and the whole thing a capital diddle.\n\nA bold diddle is this. A camp-meeting, or something similar, is to be held at a certain spot which is accessible only by means of a free bridge. A diddler stations himself upon this bridge, respectfully informs all passers by of the new county law, which establishes a toll of one cent for foot passengers, two for horses and donkeys, and so forth, and so forth. Some grumble but all submit, and the diddler goes home a wealthier man by some fifty or sixty dollars well earned. This taking a toll from a great crowd of people is an excessively troublesome thing.\n\nA neat diddle is this. A friend holds one of the diddler's promises to pay, filled up and signed in due form, upon the ordinary blanks printed in red ink. The diddler purchases one or two dozen of these blanks, and every day dips one of them in his soup, makes his dog jump for it, and finally gives it to him as a bonne bouche. The note arriving at maturity, the diddler, with the diddler's dog, calls upon the friend, and the promise to pay is made the topic of discussion. The friend produces it from his escritoire, and is in the act of reaching it to the diddler, when up jumps the diddler's dog and devours it forthwith. The diddler is not only surprised but vexed and incensed at the absurd behavior of his dog, and expresses his entire readiness to cancel the obligation at any moment when the evidence of the obligation shall be forthcoming.\n\nA very mean diddle is this. A lady is insulted in the street by a diddler's accomplice. The diddler himself flies to her assistance, and, giving his friend a comfortable thrashing, insists upon attending the lady to her own door. He bows, with his hand upon his heart, and most respectfully bids her adieu. She entreats him, as her deliverer, to walk in and be introduced to her big brother and her papa. With a sigh, he declines to do so. \"Is there no way, then, sir,\" she murmurs, \"in which I may be permitted to testify my gratitude?\"\n\n\"Why, yes, madam, there is. Will you be kind enough to lend me a couple of shillings?\"\n\nIn the first excitement of the moment the lady decides upon fainting outright. Upon second thought, however, she opens her purse-strings and delivers the specie. Now this, I say, is a diddle minute \u2014 for one entire moiety of the sum borrowed has to be paid to the gentleman who had the trouble of performing the insult, and who had then to stand still and be thrashed for performing it.\n\nRather a small but still a scientific diddle is this. The diddler approaches the bar of a tavern, and demands a couple of twists of tobacco. These are handed to him, when, having slightly examined them, he says:\n\n\"I don't much like this tobacco. Here, take it back, and give me a glass of brandy and water in its place.\" The brandy and water is furnished and imbibed, and the diddler makes his way to the door. But the voice of the tavern-keeper arrests him.\n\n\"I believe, sir, you have forgotten to pay for your brandy and water.\"\n\n\"Pay for my brandy and water! \u2014 didn't I give you the tobacco for the brandy and water? What more would you have?\"\n\n\"But, sir, if you please, I don't remember that you paid me for the tobacco.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that, you scoundrel? \u2014 Didn't I give you back your tobacco? Isn't that your tobacco lying there? Do you expect me to pay for what I did not take?\"\n\n\"But, sir,\" says the publican, now rather at a loss what to say, \"but sir-\"\n\n\"But me no buts, sir,\" interrupts the diddler, apparently in very high dudgeon, and slamming the door after him, as he makes his escape. \u2014\"But me no buts, sir, and none of your tricks upon travellers.\"\n\nHere again is a very clever diddle, of which the simplicity is not its least recommendation. A purse, or pocketbook, being really lost, the loser inserts in one of the daily papers of a large city a fully descriptive advertisement.\n\nWhereupon our diddler copies the facts of this advertisement, with a change of heading, of general phraseology and address. The original, for instance, is long, and verbose, is headed \"A PocketBook Lost!\" and requires the treasure, when found, to be left at No. 1 Tom Street. The copy is brief, and being headed with \"Lost\" only, indicates No. 2 Dick, or No. 3 Harry Street, as the locality at which the owner may be seen. Moreover, it is inserted in at least five or six of the daily papers of the day, while in point of time, it makes its appearance only a few hours after the original. Should it be read by the loser of the purse, he would hardly suspect it to have any reference to his own misfortune. But, of course, the chances are five or six to one, that the finder will repair to the address given by the diddler, rather than to that pointed out by the rightful proprietor. The former pays the reward, pockets the treasure and decamps.\n\nQuite an analogous diddle is this. A lady of ton has dropped, some where in the street, a diamond ring of very unusual value. For its recovery, she offers some forty or fifty dollars reward \u2014 giving, in her advertisement, a very minute description of the gem, and of its settings, and declaring that, on its restoration at No. so and so, in such and such Avenue, the reward would be paid instanter, without a single question being asked. During the lady's absence from home, a day or two afterwards, a ring is heard at the door of No. so and so, in such and such Avenue; a servant appears; the lady of the house is asked for and is declared to be out, at which astounding information, the visitor expresses the most poignant regret. His business is of importance and concerns the lady herself. In fact, he had the good fortune to find her diamond ring. But perhaps it would be as well that he should call again. \"By no means!\" says the servant; and \"By no means!\" says the lady's sister and the lady's sister-in-law, who are summoned forthwith. The ring is clamorously identified, the reward is paid, and the finder nearly thrust out of doors. The lady returns and expresses some little dissatisfaction with her sister and sister-in-law, because they happen to have paid forty or fifty dollars for a fac-simile of her diamond ring \u2014 a fac-simile made out of real pinch-beck and unquestionable paste.\n\nBut as there is really no end to diddling, so there would be none to this essay, were I even to hint at half the variations, or inflections, of which this science is susceptible. I must bring this paper, perforce, to a conclusion, and this I cannot do better than by a summary notice of a very decent, but rather elaborate diddle, of which our own city was made the theatre, not very long ago, and which was subsequently repeated with success, in other still more verdant localities of the Union. A middle-aged gentleman arrives in town from parts unknown. He is remarkably precise, cautious, staid, and deliberate in his demeanor. His dress is scrupulously neat, but plain, unostentatious. He wears a white cravat, an ample waistcoat, made with an eye to comfort alone; thick-soled cosy-looking shoes, and pantaloons without straps. He has the whole air, in fact, of your well-to-do, sober-sided, exact, and respectable \"man of business,\" Par excellence \u2014 one of the stern and outwardly hard, internally soft, sort of people that we see in the crack high comedies \u2014 fellows whose words are so many bonds, and who are noted for giving away guineas, in charity, with the one hand, while, in the way of mere bargain, they exact the uttermost fraction of a farthing with the other.\n\nHe makes much ado before he can get suited with a boarding house. He dislikes children. He has been accustomed to quiet. His habits are methodical \u2014 and then he would prefer getting into a private and respectable small family, piously inclined. Terms, however, are no object \u2014 only he must insist upon settling his bill on the first of every month, (it is now the second) and begs his landlady, when he finally obtains one to his mind, not on any account to forget his instructions upon this point \u2014 but to send in a bill, and receipt, precisely at ten o'clock, on the first day of every month, and under no circumstances to put it off to the second.\n\nThese arrangements made, our man of business rents an office in a reputable rather than a fashionable quarter of the town. There is nothing he more despises than pretense. \"Where there is much show,\" he says, \"there is seldom any thing very solid behind\"\u2014 an observation which so profoundly impresses his landlady's fancy, that she makes a pencil memorandum of it forthwith, in her great family Bible, on the broad margin of the Proverbs of Solomon.\n\nThe next step is to advertise, after some such fashion as this, in the principal business six-pennies of the city \u2014 the pennies are eschewed as not \"respectable\"\u2014 and as demanding payment for all advertisements in advance. Our man of business holds it as a point of his faith that work should never be paid for until done.\n\n\"WANTED\u2014 The advertisers, being about to commence extensive business operations in this city, will require the services of three or four intelligent and competent clerks, to whom a liberal salary will be paid. The very best recommendations, not so much for capacity, as for integrity, will be expected. Indeed, as the duties to be performed involve high responsibilities, and large amounts of money must necessarily pass through the hands of those engaged, it is deemed advisable to demand a deposit of fifty dollars from each clerk employed. No person need apply, therefore, who is not prepared to leave this sum in the possession of the advertisers, and who cannot furnish the most satisfactory testimonials of morality. Young gentlemen piously inclined will be preferred. Application should be made between the hours of ten and eleven A. M., and four and five P. M., of Messrs.\n\n\u2002\"Bogs, Hogs Logs, Frogs & Co.,\n\n\u2002\"No. 110 Dog Street\"\n\n\u2002By the thirty-first day of the month, this advertisement has brought to the office of Messrs. Bogs, Hogs, Logs, Frogs, and Company, some fifteen or twenty young gentlemen piously inclined. But our man of business is in no hurry to conclude a contract with any \u2014 no man of business is ever precipitate \u2014 and it is not until the most rigid catechism in respect to the piety of each young gentleman's inclination, that his services are engaged and his fifty dollars receipted for, just by way of proper precaution, on the part of the respectable firm of Bogs, Hogs, Logs, Frogs, and Company. On the morning of the first day of the next month, the landlady does not present her bill, according to promise \u2014 a piece of neglect for which the comfortable head of the house ending in ogs would no doubt have chided her severely, could he have been prevailed upon to remain in town a day or two for that purpose.\n\n\u2002As it is, the constables have had a sad time of it, running hither and thither, and all they can do is to declare the man of business most emphatically, a \"hen knee high\"\u2014 by which some persons imagine them to imply that, in fact, he is n. e. i. \u2014 by which again the very classical phrase non est inventus, is supposed to be understood. In the meantime the young gentlemen, one and all, are somewhat less piously inclined than before, while the landlady purchases a shilling's worth of the Indian rubber, and very carefully obliterates the pencil memorandum that some fool has made in her great family Bible, on the broad margin of the Proverbs of Solomon.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nFor the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not \u2014 and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified \u2014 have tortured \u2014 have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror \u2014 to many they will seem less terrible than baroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place \u2014 some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects.\n\nFrom my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiar of character grew with my growth, and in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of pleasure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.\n\nI married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.\n\nThis latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point \u2014 and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.\n\nPluto \u2014 this was the cat's name \u2014 was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets.\n\nOur friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character \u2014 through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance \u2014 had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate language to my At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill-used them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufficient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me \u2014 for what disease is like Alcohol! \u2014 and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and consequently somewhat peevish \u2014 even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper.\n\nOne night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he inflicted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its flight from my body; and a more than fiendish malevolence, gin-nurtured, thrilled every fibre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.\n\nWhen reason returned with the morning \u2014 when I had slept off the fumes of the night's debauch \u2014 I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed.\n\nIn the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart \u2014 one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself \u2014 to offer violence to its own nature \u2014 to do wrong for the wrong's sake only \u2014 that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; \u2014 hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; \u2014 hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; \u2014 hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin \u2014 a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it \u2014 if such a thing were possible \u2014 even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.\n\nOn the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difficulty that my wife, a servant, and myself, made our escape from the conflagration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair.\n\nI am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts \u2014 and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day succeeding the fire, I visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great measure, resisted the action of the fire \u2014 a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a particular portion of it with every minute and eager attention. The words \"strange!\" \"singular!\" and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief upon the white surface, the figure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accuracy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal's neck.\n\nWhen I first beheld this apparition \u2014 for I could scarcely regard it as less \u2014 my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd \u2014 by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, had then with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.\n\nAlthough I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact 'just detailed, it did not the less fall to make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same species, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place.\n\nOne night as I sat, half stupefied, in a den of more than infamy, my attention was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the immense hogsheads of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat \u2014 a very large one \u2014 fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indefinite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast.\n\nUpon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it \u2014 knew nothing of it \u2014 had never seen it before.\n\nI continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the house it domesticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favorite with my wife.\n\nFor my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but I know not how or why it was \u2014 its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually \u2014 very gradually \u2014 I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to flee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence.\n\nWhat added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures.\n\nWith my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be difficult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly it at by a memory of my former crime, but chiefly \u2014 let me confess it at once \u2014 by absolute dread of the beast.\n\nThis dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil \u2014 and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to define it. I am almost ashamed to own \u2014 yes, even in this felon's cell, I am almost ashamed to own \u2014 that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the merest chimaeras it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called my attention, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees \u2014 degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful \u2014 it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name \u2014 and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared \u2014 it was now, I say, the image of a hideous \u2014 of a ghastly thing \u2014 of the GALLOWS! \u2014 oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime \u2014 of Agony and of Death!\n\nAnd now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast \u2014 whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed \u2014 a brute beast to work out for me \u2014 for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God \u2014 so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight \u2014 an incarnate Night-Mare that I had no power to shake off \u2014 incumbent eternally upon my heart!\n\nBeneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates \u2014 the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sudden, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers.\n\nOne day she accompanied me, upon some household errand, into the cellar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exasperated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.\n\nThis hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by fire. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the floor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard \u2014 about packing it in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in the cellar \u2014 as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims.\n\nFor a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from hardening. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused by a false chimney, or fireplace, that had been filled up, and made to resemble the rest of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect anything suspicious.\n\nAnd in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crow-bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little trouble, I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick-work. When I had finished, I felt satisfied that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the floor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself \u2014 \"Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain.\"\n\nMy next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, firmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it, at the moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forebore to present itself in my present mood. It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night \u2014 and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul!\n\nThe second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a free-man. The monster, in terror, had fled the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted \u2014 but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as secured.\n\nUpon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous investigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment whatever. The officers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly satisfied and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, \"I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more courtesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this \u2014 this is a very well constructed house.\" (In the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all.) \u2014 \"I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls \u2014 are you going, gentlemen? \u2014 these walls are solidly put together\"; and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick-work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom.\n\nBut may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch-Fiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! \u2014 by a cry, at first muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman \u2014 a howl \u2014 a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation.\n\nOf my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the opposite wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were tolling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clotted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of fire, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Gold-Bug by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002What ho! what ho! this fellow is dancing mad!\n\n\u2002He hath been bitten by the Tarantula.\n\n\u2014All in the Wrong\n\nMany years ago, I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy; but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the mortification consequent upon his disasters, he left New Orleans, the city of his forefathers, and took up his residence at Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, South Carolina.\n\nThis Island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the main land by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard, white beach on the seacoast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle, so much prized by the horticulturists of England. The shrub here often attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burthening the air with its fragrance.\n\nIn the inmost recesses of this coppice, not far from the eastern or more remote end of the island, Legrand had built himself a small hut, which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship \u2014 for there was much in the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated, with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological specimens;-his collection of the latter might have been envied by a Swammerdamm. In these excursions he was usually accompanied by an old negro, called Jupiter, who had been manumitted before the reverses of the family, but who could be induced, neither by threats nor by promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance upon the footsteps of his young \"Massa Will.\" It is not improbable that the relatives of Legrand, conceiving him to be somewhat unsettled in intellect, had contrived to instil this obstinacy into Jupiter, with a view to the supervision and guardianship of the wanderer.\n\nThe winters in the latitude of Sullivan's Island are seldom very severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed when a fire is considered necessary. About the middle of October, 18 \u2014 there occurred, however, a day of remarkable chilliness. Just before sunset I scrambled my way through the evergreens to the hut of my friend, whom I had not visited for several weeks \u2014 my residence being, at that time, in Charleston, a distance of nine my miles from the Island, while the facilities of passage and re-passage were very far behind those of the present day. Upon reaching the hut I rapped, as was my custom, and getting no reply, sought for the key where I knew it was secreted, unlocked the door and went in. A fine fire was blazing upon the hearth. It was a novelty, and by no means an ungrateful one. I threw off an overcoat, took an arm-chair by the crackling logs, and awaited patiently the arrival of my hosts.\n\nSoon after dark they arrived, and gave me a most cordial welcome. Jupiter, grinning from ear to ear, bustled about to prepare some marsh-hens for supper. Legrand was in one of his fits \u2014 how else shall I term them? \u2014 of enthusiasm. He had found an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus, and, more than this, he had hunted down and secured, with Jupiter's assistance, a scarabaeus which he believed to be totally new, but in respect to which he wished to have my opinion on the morrow.\n\n\"And why not tonight?\" I asked, rubbing my hands over the blaze, and wishing the whole tribe of scarabaei at the devil.\n\n\"Ah, if I had only known you were here!\" said Legrand, \"but it's so long since I saw you; and how could I foresee that you would pay me a visit this very night of all others? As I was coming home I met Lieutenant G \u2014 from the fort, and, very foolishly, I lent him the bug; so it will be impossible for you to see it until morning. Stay here tonight, and I will send Jup down for it at sunrise. It is the loveliest thing in creation!\"\n\n\"What? \u2014 sunrise?\"\n\n\"Nonsense! no! \u2014 the bug. It is of a brilliant gold color \u2014 about the size of a large hickory-nut \u2014 with two jet black spots near one extremity of the back, and another, somewhat longer, at the other. The antennae are \u2014\"\n\n\"Dey aint no tin in him, Massa Will, I keep a tellin on you,\" here interrupted Jupiter; \"de bug is a goole bug, solid, ebery bit of him, inside and all, sep him wing \u2014 neber feel half so hebby a bug in my life.\"\n\n\"Well, suppose it is, Jup,\" replied Legrand, somewhat more earnestly, it seemed to me, than the case demanded, \"is that any reason for your letting the birds burn? The color\" \u2014 here he turned to me \u2014 \"is really almost enough to warrant Jupiter's idea. You never saw a more brilliant metallic lustre than the scales emit \u2014 but of this you cannot judge till tomorrow. In the mean time I can give you some idea of the shape.\" Saying this, he seated himself at a small table, on which were a pen and ink, but no paper. He looked for some in a drawer, but found none.\n\n\"Never mind,\" said he at length, \"this will answer\"; and he drew from his waistcoat pocket a scrap of what I took to be very dirty foolscap, and made upon it a rough drawing with the pen. While he did this, I retained my seat by the fire, for I was still chilly. When the design was complete, he handed it to me without rising. As I received it, a loud growl was heard, succeeded by a scratching at the door. Jupiter opened it, and a large Newfoundland, belonging to Legrand, rushed in, leaped upon my shoulders, and loaded me with caresses; for I had shown him much attention during previous visits. When his gambols were over, I looked at the paper, and, to speak the truth, found myself not a little puzzled at what my friend had depicted.\n\n\"Well!\" I said, after contemplating it for some minutes, \"this is a strange scarabaeus, I must confess: new to me: never saw anything like it before \u2014 unless it was a skull, or a death's-head \u2014 which it more nearly resembles than anything else that has come under my observation.\"\n\n\"A death's-head!\" echoed Legrand \u2014 \"Oh \u2014 yes \u2014 well, it has something of that appearance upon paper, no doubt. The two upper black spots look like eyes, eh? and the longer one at the bottom like a mouth \u2014 and then the shape of the whole is oval.\"\n\n\"Perhaps so,\" said I; \"but, Legrand, I fear you are no artist. I must wait until I see the beetle itself, if I am to form any idea of its personal appearance.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't know,\" said he, a little nettled, \"I draw tolerably \u2014 should do it at least \u2014 have had good masters, and flatter myself that I am not quite a blockhead.\"\n\n\"But, my dear fellow, you are joking then,\" said I, \"this is a very passable skull \u2014 indeed, I may say that it is a very excellent skull, according to the vulgar notions about such specimens of physiology \u2014 and your scarabaeus must be the queerest scarabaeus in the world if it resembles it. Why, we may get up a very thrilling bit of superstition upon this hint. I presume you will call the bug scarabaeus caput hominis, or something of that kind \u2014 there are many titles in the Natural Histories. But where are the antennae you spoke of?\"\n\n\"The antennae!\" said Legrand, who seemed to be getting unaccountably warm upon the subject; \"I am sure you must see the antennae. I made them as distinct as they are in the original insect, and I presume that is sufficient.\"\n\n\"Well, well,\" I said, \"perhaps you have \u2014 still I don't see them;\" and I handed him the paper without additional remark, not wishing to ruffle his temper; but I was much surprised at the turn affairs had taken; his ill humor puzzled me \u2014 and, as for the drawing of the beetle, there were positively no antennae visible, and the whole did bear a very close resemblance to the ordinary cuts of a death's-head.\n\nHe received the paper very peevishly, and was about to crumple it, apparently to throw it in the fire, when a casual glance at the design seemed suddenly to rivet his attention. In an instant his face grew violently red \u2014 in another as excessively pale. For some minutes he continued to scrutinize the drawing minutely where he sat. At length he arose, took a candle from the table, and proceeded to seat himself upon a sea-chest in the farthest corner of the room. Here again he made an anxious examination of the paper; turning it in all directions. He said nothing, however, and his conduct greatly astonished me; yet I thought it prudent not to exacerbate the growing moodiness of his temper by any comment. Presently he took from his coat pocket a wallet, placed the paper carefully in it, and deposited both in a writing-desk, which he locked. He now grew more composed in his demeanor; but his original air of enthusiasm had quite disappeared. Yet he seemed not so much sulky as abstracted. As the evening wore away he became more and more absorbed in reverie, from which no sallies of mine could arouse him. It had been my to pass the night at the hut, as I had frequently done before, but, seeing my host in this mood, I deemed it proper to take leave. He did not press me to remain, but, as I departed, he shook my hand with even more than his usual cordiality.\n\nIt was about a month after this (and during the interval I had seen nothing of Legrand) when I received a visit, at Charleston, from his man, Jupiter. I had never seen the good old negro look so dispirited, and I feared that some serious disaster had befallen my friend.\n\n\"Well, Jup,\" said I, \"what is the matter now? \u2014 how is your master?\"\n\n\"Why, to speak de troof, massa, him not so berry well as mought be.\"\n\n\"Not well! I am truly sorry to hear it. What does he complain of?\"\n\nDar! dat's it! \u2014 him neber plain of notin \u2014 but him berry sick for all dat.\"\n\n\"Very sick, Jupiter! \u2014 why didn't you say so at once? Is he confined to bed?\"\n\n\"No, dat he ain't! \u2014 he ain't find nowhar \u2014 dat's just whar de shoe pinch \u2014 my mind is got to be berry hebby bout poor Massa Will.\"\n\n\"Jupiter, I should like to understand what it is you are talking about. You say your master is sick. Hasn't he told you what ails him?\"\n\n\"Why, massa, taint worf while for to git mad bout de matter \u2014 Massa Will say noffin at all ain't de matter wid him \u2014 but den what make him go about looking dis here way, wid he head down and he soldiers up, and as white as a gose? And den he keep a syphon all de time \u2014\"\n\n\"Keeps a what, Jupiter?\"\n\n\"Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate \u2014 de queerest figgurs I ebber did see. Ise gittin to be skeered, I tell you. Hab for to keep mighty tight eye pon him noovers. Todder day he gib me slip fore de sun up and was gone de whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick ready cut for to gib him d \u2014 d good beating when he did come \u2014 but Ise sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart arter all \u2014 he look so berry poorly.\"\n\n\"Eh? \u2014 what? \u2014 ah yes! \u2014 upon the whole I think you had better not be too severe with the poor fellow \u2014 don't flog him, Jupiter \u2014 he can't very well stand it \u2014 but can you form no idea of what has occasioned this illness, or rather this change of conduct? Has anything unpleasant happened since I saw you?\"\n\n\"No, massa, dey ain't bin noffin onpleasant since den \u2014 't was fore den I'm feared \u2014 't was de berry day you was dare.\"\n\n\"How? what do you mean?\"\n\n\"Why, massa, I mean de bug \u2014 dare now.\"\n\n\"The what?\"\n\n\"De bug \u2014 I'm berry sartain dat Massa Will bin bit somewhere bout de head by dat goole-bug.\"\n\n\"And what cause have you, Jupiter, for such a supposition?\"\n\n\"Claws enoff, massa, and mouff too. I nabber did see sich a d \u2014 d bug \u2014 he kick and he bite ebery ting what cum near him. Massa Will cotch him fuss, but had for to let him go gin mighty quick, I tell you \u2014 den was de time he must ha got de bite. I didn't like de look ob de bug mouff, myself, no how, so I wouldn't take hold ob him wid my finger, but I cotch him wid a piece ob paper dat I found. I rap him up in de paper and stuff piece ob it in he mouff \u2014 dat was de way.\"\n\n\"And you think, then, that your master was really bitten by the beetle, and that the bite made him sick?\"\n\n\"I don't tink noffin about it \u2014 I nose it. What make him dream bout de goole so much, if tain't cause he bit by de goole-bug? Ise heerd bout dem goole-bugs fore dis.\"\n\n\"But how do you know he dreams about gold?\"\n\n\"How I know? why cause he talk about it in he sleep \u2014 dat's how I nose.\"\n\n\"Well, Jup, perhaps you are right; but to what fortunate circumstance am I to attribute the honor of a visit from you to-day?\"\n\n\"What de matter, massa?\"\n\n\"Did you bring any message from Mr. Legrand?\"\n\n\"No, massa, I bring dis here pissel;\" and here Jupiter handed me a note which ran thus:\n\n\u2002My DEAR\u2014\n\n\u2002Why have I not seen you for so long a time? I hope you have not been so foolish as to take offence at any little brusquerie of mine; but no, that is improbable.\n\n\u2002Since I saw you I have had great cause for anxiety. I have something to tell you, yet scarcely know how to tell it, or whether I should tell it at all.\n\n\u2002I have not been quite well for some days past, and poor old Jup annoys me, almost beyond endurance, by his well-meant attentions. Would you believe it? \u2014 he had prepared a huge stick, the other day, with which to chastise me for giving him the slip, and spending the day, solus, among the hills on the main land. I verily believe that my ill looks alone saved me a flogging.\n\n\u2002I have made no addition to my cabinet since we met.\n\n\u2002If you can, in any way, make it convenient, come over with Jupiter. Do come. I wish to see you tonight, upon business of importance. I assure you that it is of the highest importance.\n\n\u2002Ever yours,\n\n\u2002WILLIAM LEGRAND.\n\nThere was something in the tone of this note which gave me great uneasiness. Its whole style differed materially from that of Legrand. What could he be dreaming of? What new crotchet possessed his excitable brain? What \"business of the highest importance\" could he possibly have to transact? Jupiter's account of him boded no good. I dreaded lest the continued pressure of misfortune had, at length, fairly unsettled the reason of my friend. Without a moment's hesitation, therefore, I prepared to accompany the negro.\n\nUpon reaching the wharf, I noticed a scythe and three spades, all apparently new, lying in the bottom of the boat in which we were to embark.\n\n\"What is the meaning of all this, Jup?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Him syfe, massa, and spade.\"\n\n\"Very true; but what are they doing here?\"\n\n\"Him de syfe and de spade what Massa Will sis pon my buying for him in de town, and de debbil's own lot of money I had to gib for em.\"\n\nBut what, in the name of all that is mysterious, is your 'Massa Will' going to do with scythes and spades?\"\n\n\"Dat's more dan I know, and debbil take me if I don't blieve 'tis more dan he know, too. But it's all cum ob de bug.\"\n\nFinding that no satisfaction was to be obtained of Jupiter, whose whole intellect seemed to be absorbed by \"de bug,\" I now stepped into the boat and made sail. With a fair and strong breeze we soon ran into the little cove to the northward of Fort Moultrie, and a walk of some two miles brought us to the hut. It was about three in the afternoon when we arrived. Legrand had been awaiting us in eager expectation. He grasped my hand with a nervous empressement which alarmed me and strengthened the suspicions already entertained. His countenance was pale even to ghastliness, and his deep-set eyes glared with unnatural lustre. After some inquiries respecting his health, I asked him, not knowing what better to say, if he had yet obtained the scarabaeus from Lieutenant G\u2014.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" he replied, coloring violently, \"I got it from him the next morning. Nothing should tempt me to part with that scarabaeus. Do you know that Jupiter is quite right about it?\"\n\n\"In what way?\" I asked, with a sad foreboding at heart.\n\n\"In supposing it to be a bug of real gold.\" He said this with an air of profound seriousness, and I felt inexpressibly shocked.\n\n\"This bug is to make my fortune,\" he continued, with a triumphant smile, \"to reinstate me in my family possessions. Is it any wonder, then, that I prize it? Since Fortune has thought fit to bestow it upon me, I have only to use it properly and I shall arrive at the gold of which it is the index. Jupiter, bring me that scarabaeus!\"\n\n\"What! de bug, massa? I'd rudder not go fer trubble dat bug \u2014 you mus git him for your own self.\" Hereupon Legrand arose, with a grave and stately air, and brought me the beetle from a glass case in which it was enclosed. It was a beautiful scarabaeus, and, at that time, unknown to naturalists \u2014 of course a great prize in a scientific point of view. There were two round, black spots near one extremity of the back, and a long one near the other. The scales were exceedingly hard and glossy, with all the appearance of burnished gold. The weight of the insect was very remarkable, and, taking all things into consideration, I could hardly blame Jupiter for his opinion respecting it; but what to make of Legrand's agreement with that opinion, I could not, for the life of me, tell.\n\n\"I sent for you,\" said he, in a grandiloquent tone, when I had completed my examination of the beetle, \"I sent for you, that I might have your counsel and assistance in furthering the views of Fate and of the bug\"\u2014\n\n\"My dear Legrand,\" I cried, interrupting him, \"you are certainly unwell, and had better use some little precautions. You shall go to bed, and I will remain with you a few days, until you get over this. You are feverish and\"\u2014\n\n\"Feel my pulse,\" said he.\n\nI felt it, and, to say the truth, found not the slightest indication of fever.\n\n\"But you may be ill and yet have no fever. Allow me this once to prescribe for you. In the first place, go to bed. In the next\"\u2014\n\n\"You are mistaken,\" he interposed, \"I am as well as I can expect to be under the excitement which I suffer. If you really wish me well, you will relieve this excitement.\"\n\n\"And how is this to be done?\"\n\n\"Very easily. Jupiter and myself are going upon an expedition into the hills, upon the main land, and, in this expedition, we shall need the aid of some person in whom we can confide. You are the only one we can trust. Whether we succeed or fail, the excitement which you now perceive in me will be equally allayed.\"\n\n\"I am anxious to oblige you in any way,\" I replied; \"but do you mean to say that this infernal beetle has any connection with your expedition into the hills?\"\n\n\"It has.\"\n\n\"Then, Legrand, I can become a party to no such absurd proceeding.\n\n\"I am sorry \u2014 very sorry \u2014 for we shall have to try it by ourselves.\"\n\n\"Try it by yourselves! The man is surely mad! \u2014 but stay! \u2014 how long do you propose to be absent?\"\n\n\"Probably all night. We shall start immediately, and be back, at all events, by sunrise.\"\n\n\"And will you promise me, upon your honor, that when this freak of yours is over, and the bug business (good God!) settled to your satisfaction, you will then return home and follow my advice implicitly, as that of your physician?\"\n\n\"Yes; I promise; and now let us be off, for we have no time to lose.\"\n\nWith a heavy heart I accompanied my friend. We started about four o'clock \u2014 Legrand, Jupiter, the dog, and myself. Jupiter had with him the scythe and spades \u2014 the whole of which he insisted upon carrying \u2014 more through fear, it seemed to me, of trusting either of the implements within reach of his master, than from any excess of industry or complaisance. His demeanor was dogged in the extreme, and \"dat d \u2014 d bug\" were the sole words which escaped his lips during the journey. For my own part, I had charge of a couple of dark lanterns, while Legrand contented himself with the scarabaeus, which he carried attached to the end of a bit of whip-cord; twirling it to and fro, with the air of a conjuror, as he went. When I observed this last, plain evidence of my friend's aberration of mind, I could scarcely refrain from tears. I thought it best, however, to humor his fancy, at least for the present, or until I could adopt some more energetic measures with a chance of success. In the mean time I endeavored, but all in vain, to sound him in regard to the object of the expedition. Having succeeded in inducing me to accompany him, he seemed unwilling to hold conversation upon any topic of minor importance, and to all my questions vouchsafed no other reply than \"we shall see!\"\n\nWe crossed the creek at the head of the island by means of a skiff, and, ascending the high grounds on the shore of the mainland, proceeded in a northwesterly direction, through a tract of country excessively wild and desolate, where no trace of a human footstep was to be seen. Legrand led the way with decision; pausing only for an instant, here and there, to consult what appeared to be certain landmarks of his own contrivance upon a former occasion.\n\nIn this manner we journeyed for about two hours, and the sun was just setting when we entered a region infinitely more dreary than any yet seen. It was a species of table land, near the summit of an almost inaccessible hill, densely wooded from base to pinnacle, and interspersed with huge crags that appeared to lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below, merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ravines, in various directions, gave an air of still sterner solemnity to the scene.\n\nThe natural platform to which we had clambered was thickly overgrown with brambles, through which we soon discovered that it would have been impossible to force our way but for the scythe; and Jupiter, by direction of his master, proceeded to clear for us a path to the foot of an enormously tall tulip-tree, which stood, with some eight or ten oaks, upon the level, and far surpassed them all, and all other trees which I had then ever seen, in the beauty of its foliage and form, in the wide spread of its branches, and in the general majesty of its appearance. When we reached this tree, Legrand turned to Jupiter, and asked him if he thought he could climb it. The old man seemed a little staggered by the question, and for some moments made no reply. At length he approached the huge trunk, walked slowly around it, and examined it with minute attention. When he had completed his scrutiny, he merely said, \"Yes, massa, Jup climb any tree he ebber see in he life.\"\n\n\"Then up with you as soon as possible, for it will soon be too dark to see what we are about.\"\n\n\"How far mus go up, massa?\" inquired Jupiter.\n\n\"Get up the main trunk first, and then I will tell you which way to go \u2014 and here \u2014 stop! take this beetle with you.\"\n\n\"De bug, Massa Will! \u2014 de goole bug!\" cried the negro, drawing back in dismay \u2014 \"what for mus tote de bug way up de tree? \u2014 d \u2014 n if I do!\"\n\n\"If you are afraid, Jup, a great big negro like you, to take hold of a harmless little dead beetle, why you can carry it up by this string \u2014 but, if you do not take it up with you in some way, I shall be under the necessity of breaking your head with this shovel.\"\n\n\"What de matter now, massa?\" said Jup, evidently shamed into compliance; \"always want for to raise fuss wid old nigger. Was only funnin' anyhow. Me feered de bug! what I keer for de bug?\" Here he took cautiously hold of the extreme end of the string, and, maintaining the insect as far from his person as circumstances would permit, prepared to ascend the tree.\n\nIn youth, the tulip-tree, or Liriodendron Tulipiferum, the most magnificent of American foresters, has a trunk peculiarly smooth, and often rises to a great height without lateral branches; but, in its riper age, the bark becomes gnarled and uneven, while many short limbs make their appearance on the stem. Thus the difficulty of ascension, in the present case, lay more in semblance than in reality. Embracing the huge cylinder, as closely as possible, with his arms and knees, seizing with his hands some projections, and resting his naked toes upon others, Jupiter, after one or two narrow escapes from falling, at length wriggled himself into the first great fork, and seemed to consider the whole business as virtually accomplished. The risk of the achievement was, in fact, now over, although the climber was some sixty or seventy feet from the ground.\n\n\"Which way mus go now, Massa Will?\" he asked. Keep up the largest branch \u2014 the one on this side,\" said Legrand. The negro obeyed him promptly, and apparently with but little trouble; ascending higher and higher, until no glimpse of his squat figure could be obtained through the dense foliage which enveloped it. Presently his voice was heard in a sort of halloo.\n\n\"How much fudder is got for go?\"\n\n\"How high up are you?\" asked Legrand.\n\n\"Ebber so fur,\" replied the negro; \"can see de sky fru de top ob de tree.\"\n\n\"Never mind the sky, but attend to what I say. Look down the trunk and count the limbs below you on this side. How many limbs have you passed?\"\n\n\"One, two, tree, four, fibe \u2014 I done pass fibe big limb, massa, 'pon dis side.\"\n\n\"Then go one limb higher.\"\n\nIn a few minutes the voice was heard again, announcing that the seventh limb was attained.\n\n\"Now, Jup,\" cried Legrand, evidently much excited, \"I want you to work your way out upon that limb as far as you can. If you see anything strange, let me know.\"\n\nBy this time what little doubt I might have entertained of my poor friend's insanity, was put finally at rest. I had no alternative but to conclude him stricken with lunacy, and I became seriously anxious about getting him home. While I was pondering upon what was best to be done, Jupiter's voice was again heard.\n\n\"Mos' feerd for to ventur 'pon dis limb berry far \u2014 'tis dead limb putty much all de way.\"\n\n\"Did you say it was a dead limb, Jupiter?\" cried Legrand in a quavering voice.\n\n\"Yes, massa, him dead as de door-nail \u2014 done up for sartain \u2014 done departed dis here life.\"\n\n\"What in the name of heaven shall I do?\" asked Legrand, seemingly in the greatest distress.\n\n\"Do!\" said I, glad of an opportunity to interpose a word, \"why come home and go to bed. Come now! \u2014 that's a fine fellow. It's getting late, and, besides, you remember your promise.\"\n\n\"Jupiter,\" cried he, without heeding me in the least, \"do you hear me?\"\n\n\"Yes, Massa Will, hear you ebber so plain.\"\n\n\"Try the wood well, then, with your knife, and see if you think it very rotten.\"\n\n\"Him rotten, massa, sure nuff,\" replied the negro in a few moments, \"but not so berry rotten as mought be. Mought ventur out leetle way pon de limb by myself, dat's true.\"\n\n\"By yourself! \u2014 what do you mean?\"\n\n\"Why I mean de bug. 'Tis berry hebby bug. Spose I drop him down fuss, and den de limb won't break wid just de weight ob one nigger.\"\n\n\"You infernal scoundrel!\" cried Legrand, apparently much relieved, \"what do you mean by telling me such nonsense as that? As sure as you let that beetle fall! \u2014 I'll break your neck. Look here, Jupiter! do you hear me?\"\n\n\"Yes, massa, needn't hollo at poor nigger dat style.\"\n\n\"Well! now listen! \u2014 if you will venture out on the limb as far as you think safe, and not let go the beetle, I'll make you a present of a silver dollar as soon as you get down.\"\n\n\"I'm gwine, Massa Will \u2014 deed I is,\" replied the negro very promptly \u2014 \"mos out to the eend now.\"\n\n\"Out to the end!\" here fairly screamed Legrand, \"do you say you are out to the end of that limb?\"\n\n\"Soon be to de eend, massa, \u2014 o-o-o-o-oh! Lor-gol-a-marcy! what is dis here pon de tree?\"\n\n\"Well!\" cried Legrand, highly delighted, \"what is it?\"\n\n\"Why taint noffin but a skull \u2014 somebody bin lef him head up de tree, and de crows done gobble ebery bit ob de meat off.\"\n\n\"A skull, you say! \u2014 very well! \u2014 how is it fastened to the limb? \u2014 what holds it on?\"\n\n\"Sure nuff, massa; mus look. Why dis berry curous sarcumstance, pon my word \u2014 dare's a great big nail in de skull, what fastens ob it on to de tree.\"\n\n\"Well now, Jupiter, do exactly as I tell you \u2014 do you hear?\"\n\n\"Yes, massa.\"\n\n\"Pay attention, then! \u2014 find the left eye of the skull.\"\n\n\"Hum! hoo! dat's good! why dar ain't no eye lef' at all.\"\n\n\"Curse your stupidity! do you know your right hand from your left?\"\n\n\"Yes, I nose dat \u2014 nose all bout dat \u2014 'tis my left hand what I chops de wood wid.\"\n\n\"To be sure! you are left-handed; and your left eye is on the same side as your left hand. Now, I suppose, you can find the left eye of the skull, or the place where the left eye has been. Have you found it?\"\n\nHere was a long pause. At length the negro asked, \"Is de lef' eye of de skull pon de same side as de lef' hand of de skull, too? \u2014 cause de skull ain't got not a bit ob a hand at all \u2014 nebber mind! I got de lef' eye now \u2014 here de lef' eye! what mus do wid it?\"\n\n\"Let the beetle drop through it, as far as the string will reach \u2014 but be careful and not let go your hold of the string.\"\n\n\"All dat done, Massa Will; mighty easy ting for to put de bug fru de hole \u2014 look out for him dar below?\"\n\nDuring this colloquy no portion of Jupiter's person could be seen; but the beetle, which he had suffered to descend, was now visible at the end of the string, and glistened, like a globe of burnished gold, in the last rays of the setting sun, some of which still faintly illumined the eminence upon which we stood. The scarabaeus hung quite clear of any branches, and, if allowed to fall, would have fallen at our feet. Legrand immediately took the scythe, and cleared with it a circular space, three or four yards in diameter, just beneath the insect, and, having accomplished this, ordered Jupiter to let go the string and come down from the tree.\n\nDriving a peg, with great nicety, into the ground, at the precise spot where the beetle fell, my friend now produced from his pocket a tape-measure. Fastening one end of this at that point of the trunk of the tree which was nearest the peg, he unrolled it till it reached the peg, and thence farther unrolled it, in the direction already established by the two points of the tree and the peg, for the distance of fifty feet \u2014 Jupiter clearing away the brambles with the scythe. At the spot thus attained a second peg was driven, and about this, as a centre, a rude circle, about four feet in diameter, described. Taking now a spade himself, and giving one to Jupiter and one to me, Legrand begged us to set about one to digging as quickly as possible.\n\nTo speak the truth, I had no especial relish for such amusement at any time, and, at that particular moment, would most willingly have declined it; for the night was coming on, and I felt much fatigued with the exercise already taken; but I saw no mode of escape, and was fearful of disturbing my poor friend's equanimity by a refusal. Could I have depended, indeed, upon Jupiter's aid, I would have had no hesitation in attempting to get the lunatic home by force; but I was too well assured of the old negro's disposition, to hope that he would assist me, under any circumstances, in a personal contest with his master. I made no doubt that the latter had been infected with some of the innumerable Southern superstitions about money buried, and that his phantasy had received confirmation by the finding of the scarabaeus, or, perhaps, by Jupiter's obstinacy in maintaining it to be \"a bug of real gold.\" A mind disposed to lunacy would readily be led away by such suggestions \u2014 especially if chiming in with favorite preconceived ideas \u2014 and then I called to mind the poor fellow's speech about the beetle's being \"the index of his fortune.\" Upon the whole, I was sadly vexed and puzzled, but, at length, I concluded to make a virtue of necessity \u2014 to dig with a good will, and thus the sooner to convince the visionary, by ocular demonstration, of the fallacy of the opinions he entertained.\n\nThe lanterns having been lit, we all fell to work with a zeal worthy a more rational cause; and, as the glare fell upon our persons and implements, I could not help thinking how picturesque a group we composed, and how strange and suspicious our labors must have appeared to any interloper who, by chance, might have stumbled upon our whereabouts.\n\nWe dug very steadily for two hours. Little was said; and our chief embarrassment lay in the yelpings of the dog, who took exceeding interest in our proceedings. He, at length, became so obstreperous that we grew fearful of his giving the alarm to some stragglers in the vicinity; \u2014 or, rather, this was the apprehension of Legrand; \u2014 for myself, I should have rejoiced at any interruption which might have enabled me to get the wanderer home. The noise was, at length, very effectually silenced by Jupiter, who, getting out of the hole with a dogged air of deliberation, tied the brute's mouth up with one of his suspenders, and then returned, with a grave chuckle, to his task.\n\nWhen the time mentioned had expired, we had reached a depth of five feet, and yet no signs of any treasure became manifest. A general pause ensued, and I began to hope that the farce was at an end. Legrand, however, although evidently much disconcerted, wiped his brow thoughtfully and recommenced. We had excavated the entire circle of four feet diameter, and now we slightly enlarged the limit, and went to the farther depth of two feet. Still nothing appeared. The gold-seeker, whom I sincerely pitied, at length clambered from the pit, with the bitterest disappointment imprinted upon every feature, and proceeded, slowly and reluctantly, to put on his coat, which he had thrown off at the beginning of his labor. In the mean time I made no remark. Jupiter, at a signal from his master, began to gather up his tools. This done, and the dog having been unmuzzled, we turned in profound silence towards home.\n\nWe had taken, perhaps, a dozen steps in this direction, when, with a loud oath, Legrand strode up to Jupiter, and seized him by the collar. The astonished negro opened his eyes and mouth to the fullest extent, let fall the spades, and fell upon his knees.\n\n\"You scoundrel,\" said Legrand, hissing out the syllables from between his clenched teeth \u2014 \"you infernal black villain! \u2014 speak, I tell you! \u2014 answer me this instant, without prevarication! which \u2014 which is your left eye?\"\n\n\"Oh, my golly, Massa Will! ain't dis here my lef' eye for sartain?\" roared the terrified Jupiter, placing his hand upon his right organ of vision, and holding it there with a desperate pertinacity, as if in immediate dread of his master's attempt at a gouge.\n\n\"I thought so! \u2014 I knew it! \u2014 hurrah!\" vociferated Legrand, letting the negro go, and executing a series of curvets and caracols, much to the astonishment of his valet, who, arising from his knees, looked, mutely, from his master to myself, and then from myself to his master.\n\n\"Come! we must go back,\" said the latter, \"the game's not up yet;\" and he again led the way to the tulip-tree.\n\n\"Jupiter,\" said he, when we reached its foot, come here! was the skull nailed to the limb with the face outward, or with the face to the limb?\"\n\n\"De face was out, massa, so dat de crows could get at de eyes good, widout any trouble.\"\n\n\"Well, then, was it this eye or that through which you let the beetle fall?\" \u2014 here Legrand touched each of Jupiter's eyes.\n\n\"'Twas dis eye, massa \u2014 de lef' eye \u2014 jis as you tell me,\" and here it was his right eye that the negro indicated.\n\n\"That will do \u2014 we must try it again.\"\n\nHere my friend, about whose madness I now saw, or fancied that I saw, certain indications of method, removed the peg which marked the spot where the beetle fell, to a spot about three inches to the westward of its former position. Taking, now, the tape-measure from the nearest point of the trunk to the peg, as before, and continuing the extension in a straight line to the distance of fifty feet, a spot was indicated, removed, by several yards, from the point at which we had been digging.\n\nAround the new position a circle, somewhat larger than in the former instance, was now described, and we again set to work with the spades. I was dreadfully weary, but, scarcely understanding what had occasioned the change in my thoughts, I felt no longer any great aversion from the labor imposed. I had become most unaccountably interested \u2014 nay, even excited. Perhaps there was something, amid all the extravagant demeanor of Legrand \u2014 some air of forethought, or of deliberation, which impressed me. I dug eagerly, and now and then caught myself actually looking, with something that very much resembled expectation, for the fancied treasure, the vision of which had demented my unfortunate companion. At a period when such vagaries of thought most fully possessed me, and when we had been at work perhaps an hour and a half, we were again interrupted by the violent howlings of the dog. His uneasiness, in the first instance, had been, evidently, but the result of playfulness or caprice, but he now assumed a bitter and serious tone. Upon Jupiter's again attempting to muzzle him, he made furious resistance, and, leaping into the hole, tore up the mould frantically with his claws. In a few seconds he had uncovered a mass of human bones, forming two complete skeletons, intermingled with several buttons of metal, and what appeared to be the dust of decayed woollen. One or two strokes of a spade upturned the blade of a large Spanish knife, and, as we dug farther, three or four loose pieces of gold and silver coin came to light.\n\nAt sight of these the joy of Jupiter could scarcely be restrained, but the countenance of his master wore an air of extreme disappointment. He urged us, however, to continue our exertions, and the words were hardly uttered when I stumbled and fell forward, having caught the toe of my boot in a large ring of iron that lay half buried in the loose earth.\n\nWe now worked in earnest, and never did I pass ten minutes of more intense excitement. During this interval we had fairly unearthed an oblong chest of wood, which, from its perfect preservation, and wonderful hardness, had plainly been subjected to some mineralizing process \u2014 perhaps that of the Bi-chloride of Mercury. This box was three feet and a half long, three feet broad, and two and a half feet deep. It was firmly secured by bands of wrought iron, riveted, and forming a kind of trellis-work over the whole. On each side of the chest, near the top, were three rings of iron \u2014 six in all \u2014 by means of which a firm hold could be obtained by six persons. Our utmost united endeavors served only to disturb the coffer very slightly in its bed. We at once saw the impossibility of removing so great a weight. Luckily, the sole fastenings of the lid consisted of two sliding bolts. These we drew back \u2014 trembling and panting with anxiety. In an instant, a treasure of incalculable value lay gleaming before us. As the rays of the lanterns fell within the pit, there flashed upwards, from a confused heap of gold and of jewels, a glow and a glare that absolutely dazzled our eyes.\n\nI shall not pretend to describe the feelings with which I gazed. Amazement was, of course, predominant. Legrand appeared exhausted with excitement, and spoke very few words. Jupiter's countenance wore, for some minutes, as deadly a pallor as it is possible, in the nature of things, for any negro's visage to assume. He seemed stupefied \u2014 thunder-stricken. Presently he fell upon his knees in the pit, and, burying his naked arms up to the elbows in gold, let them there remain, as if enjoying the luxury of a bath. At length, with a deep sigh, he exclaimed, as if in a soliloquy.\n\n\"And dis all cum ob de goole-bug! de putty goole-bug! de poor little goole-bug, what I boosed in dat sabage kind ob style! Ain't you shamed ob yourself, nigger? \u2014 answer me dat!\"\n\nIt became necessary, at last, that I should arouse both master and valet to the expediency of removing the treasure. It was growing late, and it behooved us to make exertion, that we might get every thing housed before daylight. It was difficult to say what should be done; and much time was spent in deliberation \u2014 so confused were the ideas of all. We, finally, lightened the box by removing two thirds of its contents, when we were enabled, with some trouble, to raise it from the hole. The articles taken out were deposited among the brambles, and the dog left to guard them, with strict orders from Jupiter neither, upon any pretence, to stir from the spot, nor to open his mouth until our return. We then hurriedly made for home with the chest; reaching the hut in safety, but after excessive toil, at one o'clock in the morning. Worn out as we were, it was not in human nature to do more just then. We rested until two, and had supper; starting for the hills immediately afterwards, armed with three stout sacks, which, by good luck, were upon the premises. A little before four we arrived at the pit, divided the remainder of the booty, as equally as might be, among us, and, leaving the holes unfilled, again set out for the hut, at which, for the second time, we deposited our golden burthens, just as the first streaks of the dawn gleamed from over the tree-tops in the East.\n\nWe were now thoroughly broken down; but the intense excitement of the time denied us repose. After an unquiet slumber of some three or four hours' duration, we arose, as if by preconcert, to make examination of our treasure.\n\nThe chest had been full to the brim, and we spent the whole day, and the greater part of the next night, in a scrutiny of its contents. There had been nothing like order or arrangement. Every thing had been heaped in promiscuously. Having assorted all with care, we found ourselves possessed of even vaster wealth than we had at first supposed. In coin there was rather more than four hundred and fifty thousand dollars \u2014 estimating the value of the pieces, as accurately as we could, by the tables of the period. There was not a particle of silver. All was gold of antique date and of great variety \u2014 French, Spanish, and German money, with a few English guineas, and some counters, of which we had never seen specimens before. There were several very large and heavy coins, so worn that we could make nothing of their inscriptions. There was no American money. The value of the jewels we found more difficulty in estimating. There were diamonds \u2014 some of them exceedingly large and fine \u2014 a hundred and ten in all, and not one of them small; eighteen rubies of remarkable brilliancy; \u2014 three hundred and ten emeralds, all very beautiful; and twenty-one sapphires, with an opal. These stones had all been broken from their settings and thrown loose in the chest. The settings themselves, which we picked out from among the other gold, appeared to have been beaten up with hammers, as if to prevent identification. Besides all this, there was a vast quantity of solid gold ornaments; \u2014 nearly two hundred massive finger and ear rings; \u2014 rich chains \u2014 thirty of these, if I remember; \u2014 eighty-three very large and heavy crucifixes; \u2014 five gold censers of great value; \u2014 a prodigious golden punch-bowl, ornamented with richly chased vine-leaves and Bacchanalian figures; with two sword-handles exquisitely embossed, and many other smaller articles which I cannot recollect. The weight of these valuables exceeded three hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois; and in this estimate I have not included one hundred and ninety-seven superb gold watches; three of the number being worth each five hundred dollars, if one. Many of them were very old, and as time keepers valueless; the works having suffered, more or less, from corrosion \u2014 but all were richly jewelled and in cases of great worth. We estimated the entire contents of the chest, that night, at a million and a half of dollars; and, upon the subsequent disposal of the trinkets and jewels (a few being retained for our own use), it was found that we had greatly undervalued the treasure.\n\nWhen, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had, in some measure, subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all the circumstances connected with it.\n\n\"You remember,\" said he, \"the night when I handed you the rough sketch I had made of the scarabaeus. You recollect also, that I became quite vexed at you for insisting that my drawing resembled a death's-head. When you first made this assertion I thought you were jesting; but afterwards I called to mind the peculiar spots on the back of the insect, and admitted to myself that your remark had some little foundation in fact. Still, the sneer at my graphic powers irritated me \u2014 for I am considered a good artist \u2014 and, therefore, when you handed me the scrap of parchment, I was about to crumple it up and throw it angrily into the fire.\"\n\n\"The scrap of paper, you mean,\" said I.\n\n\"No; it had much of the appearance of paper, and at first I supposed it to be such, but when I came to draw upon it, I discovered it, at once, to be a piece of very thin parchment. It was quite dirty, you remember. Well, as I was in the very act of crumpling it up, my glance fell upon the sketch at which you had been looking, and you may imagine my astonishment when I perceived, in fact, the figure of a death's-head just where, it seemed to me, I had made the drawing of the beetle. For a moment I was too much amazed to think with accuracy. I knew that my design was very different in detail from this \u2014 although there was a certain similarity in general outline. Presently I took a candle, and seating myself at the other end of the room, proceeded to scrutinize the parchment more closely. Upon turning it over, I saw my own sketch upon the reverse, just as I had made it. My first idea, now, was mere surprise at the really remarkable similarity of outline \u2014 at the singular coincidence involved in the fact, that unknown to me, there should have been a skull upon the other side of the parchment, immediately beneath my figure of the scarabaeus and that this skull, not only in outline, but in size, should so closely resemble my drawing. I say the singularity of this coincidence absolutely stupefied me for a time. This is the usual effect of such coincidences. The mind struggles to establish a connection \u2014 a sequence of cause and effect \u2014 and, being unable to do so, suffers a species of temporary paralysis. But, when I recovered from this stupor, there dawned upon me gradually a conviction which startled me even far more than the coincidence. I began distinctly, positively, to remember that there had been no drawing on the parchment when I made my sketch of the scarabaeus. I became perfectly certain of this; for I recollected turning up first one side and then the other, in search of the cleanest spot. Had the skull been then there, of course I could not have failed to notice it. Here was indeed a mystery which I felt it impossible to explain; but, even at that early moment, there it seemed to glimmer, faintly, within the most remote and secret chambers of my intellect, a glow-worm-like conception of that truth which last night's adventure brought to so magnificent a demonstration. I arose at once, and putting the parchment securely away, dismissed all farther reflection until I should be alone.\n\n\"When you had gone, and when Jupiter was fast asleep, I betook myself to a more methodical investigation of the affair. In the first place I considered the manner in which the parchment had come into my possession. The spot where we discovered the scarabaeus was on the coast of the main land, about a mile eastward of the island, and but a short distance above high water mark. Upon my taking hold of it, it gave me a sharp bite, which caused me to let it drop. Jupiter, with his accustomed caution, before seizing the insect, which had flown towards him, looked about him for a leaf, or something of that nature, by which to take hold of it. It was at this moment that his eyes, and mine also, fell upon the scrap of parchment, which I then supposed to be paper. It was lying half buried in the sand, a corner sticking up. Near the spot where we found it, I observed the remnants of the hull of what appeared to have been a ship's long boat. The wreck seemed to have been there for a very great while; for the resemblance to boat timbers could scarcely be traced.\n\n\"Well, Jupiter picked up the parchment, wrapped the beetle in it, and gave it to me. Soon afterwards we turned to go home, and on the way met Lieutenant G\u2014. I showed him the insect, and he begged me to let him take it to the fort. On my consenting, he thrust it forthwith into his waistcoat pocket, without the parchment in which it had been wrapped, and which I had continued to hold in my hand during his inspection. Perhaps he dreaded my changing my mind, and thought it best to make sure of the prize at once \u2014 you know how enthusiastic he is on all subjects connected with Natural History. At the same time without being conscious of it, I must have deposited the parchment in my own pocket.\n\n\"You remember that when I went to the table, for the purpose of making a sketch of the beetle, I found no paper where it was usually kept. I looked in the drawer, and found none there. I searched my pockets, hoping to find an old letter \u2014 and then my hand fell upon the parchment. I thus detail the precise mode in which it came into my possession; for the circumstances impressed me with peculiar force.\n\n\"No doubt you will think me fanciful \u2014 but I had already established a kind of connexion. I had put together two links of a great chain. There was a boat lying on a seacoast, and not far from the boat was a parchment \u2014 not a paper \u2014 with a skull depicted on it. You will, of course, ask 'where is the connexion?' I reply that the skull, or death's-head, is the well-known emblem of the pirate. The flag of the death's-head is hoisted in all engagements.\n\n\"I have said that the scrap was parchment, and not paper. Parchment is durable \u2014 almost imperishable. Matters of little moment are rarely consigned to parchment; since, for the mere ordinary purposes of drawing or writing, it is not nearly so well adapted as paper. This reflection suggested some meaning \u2014 some relevancy \u2014 in the death's-head. I did not fail to observe, also, the form of the parchment. Although one of its corners had been, by some accident, destroyed, it could be seen that the original form was oblong. It was just such a slip, indeed, as might have been chosen for a memorandum \u2014 for a record of something to be long remembered and carefully preserved.\"\n\n\"But,\" I interposed, \"you say that the skull was not upon the parchment when you made the drawing of the beetle. How then do you trace any connexion between the boat and the skull \u2014 since this latter, according to your own admission, must have been designed (God only knows how or by whom) at some period subsequent to your sketching the scarabaeus?\"\n\n\"Ah, hereupon turns the whole mystery; although the secret, at this point, I had comparatively little difficulty in solving. My steps were sure, and could afford but a single result. I reasoned, for example, thus: When I drew the scarabaeus, there was no skull apparent on the parchment. When I had completed the drawing, I gave it to you, and observed you narrowly until you returned it. You, therefore, did not design the skull, and no one else was present to do it. Then it was not done by human agency. And nevertheless it was done.\n\n\"At this stage of my reflections I endeavored to remember, and did remember, with entire distinctness, every incident which occurred about the period in question. The weather was chilly (oh rare and happy accident!), and a fire was blazing on the hearth. I was heated with exercise and sat near the table. You, however, had drawn a chair close to the chimney. Just as I placed the parchment in your hand, and as you were in the act of inspecting it, Wolf, the Newfoundland, entered, and leaped upon your shoulders. With your left hand you caressed him and kept him off, while your right, holding the parchment, was permitted to fall listlessly between your knees, and in close proximity to the fire. At one moment I thought the blaze had caught it, and was about to caution you, but, before I could speak, you had withdrawn it, and were engaged in its examination. When I considered all these particulars, I doubted not for a moment that heat had been the agent in bringing to light, on the parchment, the skull which I saw designed on it. You are well aware that chemical preparations exist, and have existed time out of mind, by means of which it is possible to write on either paper or vellum, so that the characters shall become visible only when subjected to the action of fire. Zaire, digested in aqua regia, and diluted with four times its weight of water, is sometimes employed; a green tint results. The regulus of cobalt, dissolved in spirit of nitre, gives a red. These colors disappear at longer or shorter intervals after the material written on cools, but again become apparent upon the re-application of heat.\n\n\"I now scrutinized the death's-head with care. Its outer edges \u2014 the edges of the drawing nearest the edge of the vellum \u2014 were far more distinct than the others. It was clear that the action of the caloric had been imperfect or unequal. I immediately kindled a fire, and subjected every portion of the parchment to a glowing heat. At first, the only effect was the strengthening of the faint lines in the skull; but, on persevering in the experiment, there became visible, at the corner of the slip, diagonally opposite to the spot in which the death's-head was delineated, the figure of what I at first supposed to be a goat. A closer scrutiny, however, satisfied me that it was intended for a kid.\"\n\n\"Ha! ha!\" said I, \"to be sure I have no right to laugh at you \u2014 a million and a half of money is too serious a matter for mirth \u2014 but you are not about to establish a third link in your chain \u2014 you will not find any especial connexion between your pirates and goat \u2014 pirates, you know, have nothing to do with goats; they appertain to the farming interest.\"\n\n\"But I have just said that the figure was not that of a goat.\"\n\n\"Well, a kid then \u2014 pretty much the same thing.\"\n\n\"Pretty much, but not altogether,\" said Legrand. \"You may have heard of one Captain Kidd. I at once looked on the figure of the animal as a kind of punning or hieroglyphical signature. I say signature; because its position on the vellum suggested this idea. The death's-head at the corner diagonally opposite, had, in the same manner, the air of a stamp, or seal. But I was sorely put out by the absence of all else \u2014 of the body to my imagined instrument \u2014 of the text for my context.\"\n\n\"I presume you expected to find a letter between the stamp and the signature.\"\n\n\"Something of that kind. The fact is, I felt irresistibly impressed with a presentiment of some vast good fortune impending. I can scarcely say why. Perhaps, after all, it was rather a desire than an actual belief; \u2014 but do you know that Jupiter's silly words, about the bug being of solid gold, had a remarkable effect on my fancy? And then the series of accidents and coincidences \u2014 these were so very extraordinary. Do you observe how mere an accident it was that these events should have occurred on the sole day of all the year in which it has been, or may be, sufficiently cool for fire, and that without the fire, or without the intervention of the dog at the precise moment in which he appeared, I should never have become aware of the death's-head, and so never the possessor of the treasure?\"\n\n\"But proceed \u2014 I am all impatience.\"\n\n\"Well; you have heard, of course, the many stories current \u2014 the thousand vague rumors afloat about money buried, somewhere on the Atlantic coast, by Kidd and his associates. These rumors must have had some foundation in fact. And that the rumors have existed so long and so continuously could have resulted, it appeared to me, only from the circumstance of the buried treasure still remaining entombed. Had Kidd concealed his plunder for a time, and afterwards reclaimed it, the rumors would scarcely have reached us in their present unvarying form. You will observe that the stories told are all about money-seekers, not about money-finders. Had the pirate recovered his money, there the affair would have dropped. It seemed to me that some accident \u2014 say the loss of a memorandum indicating its locality \u2014 had deprived him of the means of recovering it, and that this accident had become known to is followers, who otherwise might never have heard that treasure had been concealed at all, and who, busying themselves in vain, because unguided attempts, to regain it, had given first birth, and then universal currency, to the reports which are now so common. Have you ever heard of any important treasure being unearthed along the coast?\"\n\n\"Never.\"\n\n\"But that Kidd's accumulations were immense, is well known. I took it for granted, therefore, that the earth still held them; and you will scarcely be surprised when I tell you that I felt a hope, nearly amounting to certainty, that the parchment so strangely found, involved a lost record of the place of deposit.\"\n\n\"But how did you proceed?\"\n\n\"I held the vellum again to the fire, after increasing the heat; but nothing appeared. I now thought it possible that the coating of dirt might have something to do with the failure; so I carefully rinsed the parchment by pouring warm water over it, and, having done this, I placed it in a tin pan, with the skull downwards, and put the pan upon a furnace of lighted charcoal. In a few minutes, the pan having become thoroughly heated, I removed the slip, and, to my inexpressible joy, found it spotted, in several places, with what appeared to be figures arranged in lines. Again I placed it in the pan, and suffered it to remain another minute. On taking it off, the whole was just as you see it now.\"\n\nHere Legrand, having reheated the parchment, submitted it to my inspection. The following characters were rudely traced, in a red tint, between the death's-head and the goat.\n\n\"But,\" said I, returning him the slip, \"I am as much in the dark as ever. Were all the jewels of Golconda awaiting me on my solution of this enigma, I am quite sure that I should be unable to earn them.\"\n\n\"And yet,\" said Legrand, \"the solution is by no means so difficult as you might be led to imagine from the first hasty inspection of the characters. These characters, as any one might readily guess, form a cipher \u2014 that is to say, they convey a meaning; but then, from what is known of Kidd, I could not suppose him capable of constructing any of the more abstruse cryptographs. I made up my mind, at once, that this was of a simple species \u2014 such, however, as would appear, to the crude intellect of the sailor, absolutely insoluble without the key.\"\n\n\"And you really solved it?\"\n\n\"Readily; I have solved others of an abstruseness ten thousand times greater. Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve. In fact, having once established connected and legible characters, I scarcely gave a thought to the mere difficulty of developing their import.\n\n\"In the present case \u2014 indeed in all cases of secret writing \u2014 the first question regards the language of the cipher; for the principles of solution, so far, especially, as the more simple ciphers are concerned, depend on, and are varied by, the genius of the particular idiom. In general, there is no alternative but experiment (directed by probabilities) of every tongue known to him who attempts the solution, until the true one be attained. But, with the cipher now before us, all difficulty is removed by the signature. The pun on the word 'Kidd' is appreciable in no other language than the English. But for this consideration I should have begun my attempts with the Spanish and French, as the tongues in which a secret of this kind would most naturally have been written by a pirate of the Spanish main. As it was, I assumed the cryptograph to be English.\n\n\"You observe there are no divisions between the words. Had there been divisions, the task would have been comparatively easy. In such case I should have commenced with a collation and analysis of the shorter words, and, had a word of a single letter occurred, as is most likely, (a or I, for example,) I should have considered the solution as assured. But, there being no division, my first step was to ascertain the predominant letters, as well as the least frequent." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "\"We have, therefore, no less than ten of the most important letters represented, and it will be unnecessary to proceed with the details of the solution. I have said enough to convince you that ciphers of this nature are readily soluble, and to give you some insight into the rationale of their development. But be assured that the specimen before us appertains to the very simplest species of cryptograph. It now only remains to give you the full translation of the characters upon the parchment, as unriddled. Here it is:\n\n\"'A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's seat twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes northeast and by north main branch seventh limb east side shoot from the left eye of the death's-head a bee line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.'\"\n\n\"But,\" said I, \"the enigma seems still in as bad a condition as ever. How is it possible to extort a meaning from all this jargon about 'devil's seats,' 'death's-heads,' and 'bishop's hostel'?\"\n\n\"I confess,\" replied Legrand, \"that the matter still wears a serious aspect, when regarded with a casual glance. My first endeavor was to divide the sentence into the natural division intended by the cryptographist.\"\n\n\"You mean, to punctuate it?\"\n\n\"Something of that kind.\"\n\n\"But how was it possible to effect this?\"\n\n\"I reflected that it had been a point with the writer to run his words together without division, so as to increase the difficulty of solution. Now, a not overacute man, in pursuing such an object, would be nearly certain to overdo the matter. When, in the course of his composition, he arrived at a break in his subject which would naturally require a pause, or a point, he would be exceedingly apt to run his characters, at this place, more than usually close together. If you will observe the MS., in the present instance, you will easily detect five such cases of unusual crowding. Acting on this hint, I made the division thus:\n\n'A good glass in the bishop's hostel in the devil's \u2014 twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes \u2014 northeast and by north \u2014 main branch seventh limb east side \u2014 shoot from the left eye of the death's-head \u2014 a bee-line from the tree through the shot fifty feet out.'\"\n\n\"Even this division,\" said I, \"leaves me still in the dark.\"\n\n\"It left me also in the dark,\" replied Legrand, \"for a few days; during which I made diligent inquiry, in the neighborhood of Sullivan's Island, for any building which went by the name of the 'Bishop's Hotel'; for, of course, I dropped the obsolete word 'hostel.' Gaining no information on the subject, I was on the point of extending my sphere of search, and proceeding in a more systematic manner, when, one morning, it entered into my head, quite suddenly, that this 'Bishop's Hostel' might have some reference to an old family, of the name of Bessop, which, time out of mind, had held possession of an ancient manor-house, about four miles to the northward of the Island. I accordingly went over to the plantation, and reinstituted my inquiries among the older negroes of the place. At length one of the most aged of the women said that she had heard of such a place as Bessop's Castle, and thought that she could guide me to it, but that it was not a castle, nor a tavern, but a high rock.\n\n\"I offered to pay her well for her trouble, and, after some demur, she consented to accompany me to the spot. We found it without much difficulty, when, dismissing her, I proceeded to examine the place. The 'castle' consisted of an irregular assemblage of cliffs and rocks \u2014 one of the latter being quite remarkable for its height as well as for its insulated and artificial appearance. I clambered to its apex, and then felt much at a loss as to what should be next done.\n\n\"While I was busied in reflection, my eyes fell upon a narrow ledge in the eastern face of the rock, perhaps a yard below the summit on which I stood. This ledge projected about eighteen inches, and was not more than a foot wide, while a niche in the cliff just above it, gave it a rude resemblance to one of the hollow-backed chairs used by our ancestors. I made no doubt that here was the 'devil's-seat' alluded to in the MS., and now I seemed to grasp the full secret of the riddle.\n\n\"The 'good glass,' I knew, could have reference to nothing but a telescope; for the word 'glass' is rarely employed in any other sense by seamen. Now here, I at once saw, was a telescope to be used, and a definite point of view, admitting no variation, from which to use it. Nor did I hesitate to believe that the phrases, 'twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes,' and northeast and by north,' were intended as directions for the levelling of the glass. Greatly excited by these discoveries, I hurried home, procured a telescope, and returned to the rock.\n\n\"I let myself down to the ledge, and found that it was impossible to retain a seat on it unless in one particular position. This fact confirmed my preconceived idea. I proceeded to use the glass. Of course, the 'twenty-one degrees and thirteen minutes' could allude to nothing but elevation above the visible horizon, since the horizontal direction was clearly indicated by the words, 'northeast and by north.' This latter direction I at once established by means of a pocket-compass; then, pointing the glass as nearly at an angle of twenty-one degrees of elevation as I could do it by guess, I moved it cautiously up or down, until my attention was arrested by a circular rift or opening in the foliage of a large tree that overtopped its fellows in the distance. In the centre of this rift I perceived a white spot, but could not, at first, distinguish what it was. Adjusting the focus of the telescope, I again looked, and now made it out to be a human skull.\n\n\"On this discovery I was so sanguine as to consider the enigma solved; for the phrase 'main branch, seventh limb, east side,' could refer only to the position of the skull on the tree, while shoot from the left eye of the death's-head' admitted, also, of but one interpretation, in regard to a search for buried treasure. I perceived that the design was to drop a bullet from the left eye of the skull, and that a bee-line, or, in other words, a straight line, drawn from the nearest point of the trunk through 'the shot,' (or the spot where the bullet fell,) and thence extended to a distance of fifty feet, would indicate a definite point \u2014 and beneath this point I thought it at least possible that a deposit of value lay concealed.\"\n\n\"All this,\" I said, \"is exceedingly clear, and, although ingenious, still simple and explicit. When you left the Bishop's Hotel, what then?\"\n\n\"Why, having carefully taken the bearings of the tree, I turned homewards. The instant that I left 'the devil's seat,' however, the circular rift vanished; nor could I get a glimpse of it afterwards, turn as I would. What seems to me the chief ingenuity in this whole business, is the fact (for repeated experiment has convinced me it is a fact) that the circular opening in question is visible from no other attainable point of view than that afforded by the narrow ledge on the face of the rock.\n\n\"In this expedition to the 'Bishop's Hotel' I had been attended by Jupiter, who had, no doubt, observed, for some weeks past, the abstraction of my demeanor, and took especial care not to leave me alone. But, on the next day, getting up very early, I contrived to give him the slip, and went into the hills in search of the tree. After much toil I found it. When I came home at night my valet proposed to give me a flogging. With the rest of the adventure I believe you are as well acquainted as myself.\"\n\n\"I suppose,\" said I, \"you missed the spot, in the first attempt at digging through Jupiter's stupidity in letting the bug fall through the right instead of the left of the skull.\"\n\n\"Precisely. This mistake made a difference of about two inches and a half in the 'shot' \u2014 that is to say, in the position of the peg nearest the tree; and had the treasure been beneath the 'shot,' the error would have been of little moment; but the 'shot,' together with the nearest point of the tree, were merely two points for the establishment of a line of direction; of course the error, however trivial in the beginning, increased as we proceeded with the line, and by the time we had gone fifty feet, threw us quite off the scent. But for my deep-seated convictions that treasure was here somewhere actually buried, we might have had all our labor in vain.\"\n\n\"I presume the fancy of the skull, of letting fall a bullet through the skull's eye \u2014 was suggested to Kidd by the piratical flag. No doubt he felt a kind of poetical consistency in recovering his money through this ominous insignium.\"\n\n\"Perhaps so; still I cannot help thinking that common-sense had quite as much to do with the matter as poetical consistency. To be visible from the devil's-seat, it was necessary that the object, if small, should be white; and there is nothing like your human skull for retaining and even increasing its whiteness under exposure to all vicissitudes of weather.\"\n\n\"But your grandiloquence, and your conduct in swinging the beetle \u2014 how excessively odd! I was sure you were mad. And why did you insist on letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull?\"\n\n\"Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification. For this reason I swung the beetle, and for this reason I let it fall from the tree. An observation of yours about its great weight suggested the latter idea.\"\n\n\"Yes, I perceive; and now there is only one point which puzzles me. What are we to make of the skeletons found in the hole?\"\n\n\"That is a question I am no more able to answer than yourself. There seems, however, only one plausible way of accounting for them \u2014 and yet it is dreadful to believe in such atrocity as my suggestion would imply. It is clear that Kidd \u2014 if Kidd indeed secreted this treasure, which I doubt not \u2014 it is clear that he must have had assistance in the labor. But, the worst of this labor concluded, he may have thought it expedient to remove all participants in his secret. Perhaps a couple of blows with a mattock were sufficient, while his coadjutors were busy in the pit; perhaps it required a dozen \u2014 who shall tell?\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nTrue! \u2014 nervous \u2014 very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses \u2014 not destroyed \u2014 not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily \u2014 how calmly I can tell you the whole story.\n\nIt is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture \u2014 a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees \u2014 very gradually \u2014 I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.\n\nNow this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded \u2014 with what caution \u2014 with what foresight \u2014 with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it \u2014 oh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly \u2014 very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this, And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh, so cautiously \u2014 cautiously (for the hinges creaked) \u2014 I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights \u2014 every night just at midnight \u2014 but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he has passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.\n\nUpon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers \u2014 of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back \u2014 but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers,) and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily.\n\nI had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in bed, crying out \u2014 \"Who's there?\"\n\nI kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening; \u2014 just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.\n\nPresently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief \u2014 oh, no! \u2014 it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself \u2014 \"It is nothing but the wind in the chimney \u2014 it is only a mouse crossing the floor,\" or \"It is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp.\" Yes, he had been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel \u2014 although he neither saw nor heard \u2014 to feel the presence of my head within the room.\n\nWhen I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little \u2014 a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it \u2014 you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily \u2014 until, at length a simple dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell full upon the vulture eye.\n\nIt was open \u2014 wide, wide open \u2014 and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness \u2014 all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.\n\nAnd have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense? \u2014 now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.\n\nBut even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! \u2014 do you mark me well I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me \u2014 the sound would be heard by a neighbour! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once \u2014 once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.\n\nIf still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.\n\nI then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye \u2014 not even his \u2014 could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out \u2014 no stain of any kind \u2014 no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all \u2014 ha! ha!\n\nWhen I had made an end of these labors, it was four o'clock \u2014 still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart, \u2014 for what had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbour during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.\n\nI smiled, \u2014 for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search \u2014 search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.\n\nThe officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct:\u2014 It continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definiteness \u2014 until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.\n\nNo doubt I now grew very pale; \u2014 but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased \u2014 and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound \u2014 much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath \u2014 and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly \u2014 more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men \u2014 but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed \u2014 I raved \u2014 I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder \u2014 louder \u2014 louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! \u2014 no, no! They heard! \u2014 they suspected! \u2014 they knew! \u2014 they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now \u2014 again! \u2014 hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!\n\n\"Villains!\" I shrieked, \"dissemble no more! I admit the deed! \u2014 tear up the planks! here, here! \u2014 It is the beating of his hideous heart!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Tale of the Ragged Mountains by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nDuring the fall of the year 1827, while residing near Charlottesville, Virginia, I casually made the acquaintance of Mr. Augustus Bedloe. This young gentleman was remarkable in every respect, and excited in me a profound interest and curiosity. I found it impossible to comprehend him either in his moral or his physical relations. Of his family I could obtain no satisfactory account. Whence he came, I never ascertained. Even about his age \u2014 although I call him a young gentleman \u2014 there was something which perplexed me in no little degree. He certainly seemed young \u2014 and he made a point of speaking about his youth \u2014 yet there were moments when I should have had little trouble in imagining him a hundred years of age. But in no regard was he more peculiar than in his personal appearance. He was singularly tall and thin. He stooped much. His limbs were exceedingly long and emaciated. His forehead was broad and low. His complexion was absolutely bloodless. His mouth was large and flexible, and his teeth were more wildly uneven, although sound, than I had ever before seen teeth in a human head. The expression of his smile, however, was by no means unpleasing, as might be supposed; but it had no variation whatever. It was one of profound melancholy \u2014 of a phaseless and unceasing gloom. His eyes were abnormally large, and round like those of a cat. The pupils, too, upon any accession or diminution of light, underwent contraction or dilation, just such as is observed in the feline tribe. In moments of excitement the orbs grew bright to a degree almost inconceivable; seeming to emit luminous rays, not of a reflected but of an intrinsic lustre, as does a candle or the sun; yet their ordinary condition was so totally vapid, filmy, and dull as to convey the idea of the eyes of a long-interred corpse.\n\nThese peculiarities of person appeared to cause him much annoyance, and he was continually alluding to them in a sort of half explanatory, half apologetic strain, which, when I first heard it, impressed me very painfully. I soon, however, grew accustomed to it, and my uneasiness wore off. It seemed to be his design rather to insinuate than directly to assert that, physically, he had not always been what he was \u2014 that a long series of neuralgic attacks had reduced him from a condition of more than usual personal beauty, to that which I saw. For many years past he had been attended by a physician, named Templeton \u2014 an old gentleman, perhaps seventy years of age \u2014 whom he had first encountered at Saratoga, and from whose attention, while there, he either received, or fancied that he received, great benefit. The result was that Bedloe, who was wealthy, had made an arrangement with Dr. Templeton, by which the latter, in consideration of a liberal annual allowance, had consented to devote his time and medical experience exclusively to the care of the invalid.\n\nDoctor Templeton had been a traveller in his younger days, and at Paris had become a convert, in great measure, to the doctrines of Mesmer. It was altogether by means of magnetic remedies that he had succeeded in alleviating the acute pains of his patient; and this success had very naturally inspired the latter with a certain degree of confidence in the opinions from which the remedies had been educed. The Doctor, however, like all enthusiasts, had struggled hard to make a thorough convert of his pupil, and finally so far gained his point as to induce the sufferer to submit to numerous experiments. By a frequent repetition of these, a result had arisen, which of late days has become so common as to attract little or no attention, but which, at the period of which I write, had very rarely been known in America. I mean to say, that between Doctor Templeton and Bedloe there had grown up, little by little, a very distinct and strongly marked rapport, or magnetic relation. I am not prepared to assert, however, that this rapport extended beyond the limits of the simple sleep-producing power, but this power itself had attained great intensity. At the first attempt to induce the magnetic somnolency, the mesmerist entirely failed. In the fifth or sixth he succeeded very partially, and after long continued effort. Only at the twelfth was the triumph complete. After this the will of the patient succumbed rapidly to that of the physician, so that, when I first became acquainted with the two, sleep was brought about almost instantaneously by the mere volition of the operator, even when the invalid was unaware of his presence. It is only now, in the year 1845, when similar miracles are witnessed daily by thousands, that I dare venture to record this apparent impossibility as a matter of serious fact.\n\nThe temperature of Bedloe was, in the highest degree sensitive, excitable, enthusiastic. His imagination was singularly vigorous and creative; and no doubt it derived additional force from the habitual use of morphine, which he swallowed in great quantity, and without which he would have found it impossible to exist. It was his practice to take a very large dose of it immediately after breakfast each morning \u2014 or, rather, immediately after a cup of strong coffee, for he ate nothing in the forenoon \u2014 and then set forth alone, or attended only by a dog, upon a long ramble among the chain of wild and dreary hills that lie westward and southward of Charlottesville, and are there dignified by the title of the Ragged Mountains.\n\nUpon a dim, warm, misty day, toward the close of November, and during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America is termed the Indian Summer, Mr. Bedloe departed as usual for the hills. The day passed, and still he did not return.\n\nAbout eight o'clock at night, having become seriously alarmed at his protracted absence, we were about setting out in search of him, when he unexpectedly made his appearance, in health no worse than usual, and in rather more than ordinary spirits. The account which he gave of his expedition, and of the events which had detained him, was a singular one indeed.\n\n\"You will remember,\" said he, \"that it was about nine in the morning when I left Charlottesville. I bent my steps immediately to the mountains, and, about ten, entered a gorge which was entirely new to me. I followed the windings of this pass with much interest. The scenery which presented itself on all sides, although scarcely entitled to be called grand, had about it an indescribable and to me a delicious aspect of dreary desolation. The solitude seemed absolutely virgin. I could not help believing that the green sods and the gray rocks upon which I trod had been trodden never before by the foot of a human being. So entirely secluded, and in fact inaccessible, except through a series of accidents, is the entrance of the ravine, that it is by no means impossible that I was indeed the first adventurer \u2014 the very first and sole adventurer who had ever penetrated its recesses.\n\n\"The thick and peculiar mist, or smoke, which distinguishes the Indian Summer, and which now hung heavily over all objects, served, no doubt, to deepen the vague impressions which these objects created. So dense was this pleasant fog that I could at no time see more than a dozen yards of the path before me. This path was excessively sinuous, and as the sun could not be seen, I soon lost all idea of the direction in which I journeyed. In the meantime the morphine had its customary effect \u2014 that of enduing all the external world with an intensity of interest. In the quivering of a leaf \u2014 in the hue of a blade of grass \u2014 in the shape of a trefoil \u2014 in the humming of a bee \u2014 in the gleaming of a dew-drop \u2014 in the breathing of the wind \u2014 in the faint odors that came from the forest \u2014 there came a whole universe of suggestion \u2014 a gay and motley train of rhapsodical and immethodical thought.\n\n\"Busied in this, I walked on for several hours, during which the mist deepened around me to so great an extent that at length I was reduced to an absolute groping of the way. And now an indescribable uneasiness possessed me \u2014 a species of nervous hesitation and tremor. I feared to tread, lest I should be precipitated into some abyss. I remembered, too, strange stories told about these Ragged Hills, and of the uncouth and fierce races of men who tenanted their groves and caverns. A thousand vague fancies oppressed and disconcerted me \u2014 fancies the more distressing because vague. Very suddenly my attention was arrested by the loud beating of a drum.\n\n\"My amazement was, of course, extreme. A drum in these hills was a thing unknown. I could not have been more surprised at the sound of the trump of the Archangel. But a new and still more astounding source of interest and perplexity arose. There came a wild rattling or jingling sound, as if of a bunch of large keys, and upon the instant a dusky-visaged and half-naked man rushed past me with a shriek. He came so close to my person that I felt his hot breath upon my face. He bore in one hand an instrument composed of an assemblage of steel rings, and shook them vigorously as he ran. Scarcely had he disappeared in the mist before, panting after him, with open mouth and glaring eyes, there darted a huge beast. I could not be mistaken in its character. It was a hyena.\n\n\"The sight of this monster rather relieved than heightened my terrors \u2014 for I now made sure that I dreamed, and endeavored to arouse myself to waking consciousness. I stepped boldly and briskly forward. I rubbed my eyes. I called aloud. I pinched my limbs. A small spring of water presented itself to my view, and here, stooping, I bathed my hands and my head and neck. This seemed to dissipate the equivocal sensations which had hitherto annoyed me. I arose, as I thought, a new man, and proceeded steadily and complacently on my unknown way.\n\n\"At length, quite overcome by exertion, and by a certain oppressive closeness of the atmosphere, I seated myself beneath a tree. Presently there came a feeble gleam of sunshine, and the shadow of the leaves of the tree fell faintly but definitely upon the grass. At this shadow I gazed wonderingly for many minutes. Its character stupefied me with astonishment. I looked upward. The tree was a palm.\n\n\"I now arose hurriedly, and in a state of fearful agitation \u2014 for the fancy that I dreamed would serve me no longer. I saw \u2014 I felt that I had perfect command of my senses \u2014 and these senses now brought to my soul a world of novel and singular sensation. The heat became all at once intolerable. A strange odor loaded the breeze. A low, continuous murmur, like that arising from a full, but gently flowing river, came to my ears, intermingled with the peculiar hum of multitudinous human voices.\n\n\"While I listened in an extremity of astonishment which I need not attempt to describe, a strong and brief gust of wind bore off the incumbent fog as if by the wand of an enchanter.\n\n\"I found myself at the foot of a high mountain, and looking down into a vast plain, through which wound a majestic river. On the margin of this river stood an Eastern-looking city, such as we read of in the Arabian Tales, but of a character even more singular than any there described. From my position, which was far above the level of the town, I could perceive its every nook and corner, as if delineated on a map. The streets seemed innumerable, and crossed each other irregularly in all directions, but were rather long winding alleys than streets, and absolutely swarmed with inhabitants. The houses were wildly picturesque. On every hand was a wilderness of balconies, of verandas, of minarets, of shrines, and fantastically carved oriels. Bazaars abounded; and in these were displayed rich wares in infinite variety and profusion \u2014 silks, muslins, the most dazzling cutlery, the most magnificent jewels and gems. Besides these things, were seen, on all sides, banners and palanquins, litters with stately dames close veiled, elephants gorgeously caparisoned, idols grotesquely hewn, drums, banners, and gongs, spears, silver and gilded maces. And amid the crowd, and the clamor, and the general intricacy and confusion \u2014 amid the million of black and yellow men, turbaned and robed, and of flowing beard, there roamed a countless multitude of holy filleted bulls, while vast legions of the filthy but sacred ape clambered, chattering and shrieking, about the cornices of the mosques, or clung to the minarets and oriels. From the swarming streets to the banks of the river, there descended innumerable flights of steps leading to bathing places, while the river itself seemed to force a passage with difficulty through the vast fleets of deeply \u2014 burthened ships that far and wide encountered its surface. Beyond the limits of the city arose, in frequent majestic groups, the palm and the cocoa, with other gigantic and weird trees of vast age, and here and there might be seen a field of rice, the thatched hut of a peasant, a tank, a stray temple, a gypsy camp, or a solitary graceful maiden taking her way, with a pitcher upon her head, to the banks of the magnificent river.\n\n\"You will say now, of course, that I dreamed; but not so. What I saw \u2014 what I heard \u2014 what I felt \u2014 what I thought \u2014 had about it nothing of the unmistakable idiosyncrasy of the dream. All was rigorously self-consistent. At first, doubting that I was really awake, I entered into a series of tests, which soon convinced me that I really was. Now, when one dreams, and, in the dream, suspects that he dreams, the suspicion never fails to confirm itself, and the sleeper is almost immediately aroused. Thus Novalis errs not in saying that 'we are near waking when we dream that we dream.' Had the vision occurred to me as I describe it, without my suspecting it as a dream, then a dream it might absolutely have been, but, occurring as it did, and suspected and tested as it was, I am forced to class it among other phenomena.\"\n\n\"In this I am not sure that you are wrong,\" observed Dr. Templeton, \"but proceed. You arose and descended into the city.\"\n\n\"I arose,\" continued Bedloe, regarding the Doctor with an air of profound astonishment \"I arose, as you say, and descended into the city. On my way I fell in with an immense populace, crowding through every avenue, all in the same direction, and exhibiting in every action the wildest excitement. Very suddenly, and by some inconceivable impulse, I became intensely imbued with personal interest in what was going on. I seemed to feel that I had an important part to play, without exactly understanding what it was. Against the crowd which environed me, however, I experienced a deep sentiment of animosity. I shrank from amid them, and, swiftly, by a circuitous path, reached and entered the city. Here all was the wildest tumult and contention. A small party of men, clad in garments half-Indian, half-European, and officered by gentlemen in a uniform partly British, were engaged, at great odds, with the swarming rabble of the alleys. I joined the weaker party, arming myself with the weapons of a fallen officer, and fighting I knew not whom with the nervous ferocity of despair. We were soon overpowered by numbers, and driven to seek refuge in a species of kiosk. Here we barricaded ourselves, and, for the present were secure. From a loop-hole near the summit of the kiosk, I perceived a vast crowd, in furious agitation, surrounding and assaulting a gay palace that overhung the river. Presently, from an upper window of this place, there descended an effeminate-looking person, by means of a string made of the turbans of his attendants. A boat was at hand, in which he escaped to the opposite bank of the river.\n\n\"And now a new object took possession of my soul. I spoke a few hurried but energetic words to my companions, and, having succeeded in gaining over a few of them to my purpose made a frantic sally from the kiosk. We rushed amid the crowd that surrounded it. They retreated, at first, before us. They rallied, fought madly, and retreated again. In the mean time we were borne far from the kiosk, and became bewildered and entangled among the narrow streets of tall, overhanging houses, into the recesses of which the sun had never been able to shine. The rabble pressed impetuously upon us, harrassing us with their spears, and overwhelming us with flights of arrows. These latter were very remarkable, and resembled in some respects the writhing creese of the Malay. They were made to imitate the body of a creeping serpent, and were long and black, with a poisoned barb. One of them struck me upon the right temple. I reeled and fell. An instantaneous and dreadful sickness seized me. I struggled \u2014 I gasped \u2014 I died.\" \"You will hardly persist now,\" said I smiling, \"that the whole of your adventure was not a dream. You are not prepared to maintain that you are dead?\"\n\nWhen I said these words, I of course expected some lively sally from Bedloe in reply, but, to my astonishment, he hesitated, trembled, became fearfully pallid, and remained silent. I looked toward Templeton. He sat erect and rigid in his chair \u2014 his teeth chattered, and his eyes were starting from their sockets. \"Proceed!\" he at length said hoarsely to Bedloe.\n\n\"For many minutes,\" continued the latter, \"my sole sentiment \u2014 my sole feeling \u2014 was that of darkness and nonentity, with the consciousness of death. At length there seemed to pass a violent and sudden shock through my soul, as if of electricity. With it came the sense of elasticity and of light. This latter I felt \u2014 not saw. In an instant I seemed to rise from the ground. But I had no bodily, no visible, audible, or palpable presence. The crowd had departed. The tumult had ceased. The city was in comparative repose. Beneath me lay my corpse, with the arrow in my temple, the whole head greatly swollen and disfigured. But all these things I felt \u2014 not saw. I took interest in nothing. Even the corpse seemed a matter in which I had no concern. Volition I had none, but appeared to be impelled into motion, and flitted buoyantly out of the city, retracing the circuitous path by which I had entered it. When I had attained that point of the ravine in the mountains at which I had encountered the hyena, I again experienced a shock as of a galvanic battery, the sense of weight, of volition, of substance, returned. I became my original self, and bent my steps eagerly homeward \u2014 but the past had not lost the vividness of the real \u2014 and not now, even for an instant, can I compel my understanding to regard it as a dream.\"\n\n\"Nor was it,\" said Templeton, with an air of deep solemnity, \"yet it would be difficult to say how otherwise it should be termed. Let us suppose only, that the soul of the man of to-day is upon the verge of some stupendous psychal discoveries. Let us content ourselves with this supposition. For the rest I have some explanation to make. Here is a watercolor drawing, which I should have shown you before, but which an unaccountable sentiment of horror has hitherto prevented me from showing.\"\n\nWe looked at the picture which he presented. I saw nothing in it of an extraordinary character, but its effect upon Bedloe was prodigious. He nearly fainted as he gazed. And yet it was but a miniature portrait \u2014 a miraculously accurate one, to be sure \u2014 of his own very remarkable features. At least this was my thought as I regarded it.\n\n\"You will perceive,\" said Templeton, \"the date of this picture \u2014 it is here, scarcely visible, in this corner \u2014 1780. In this year was the portrait taken. It is the likeness of a dead friend \u2014 a Mr. Oldeb \u2014 to whom I became much attached at Calcutta, during the administration of Warren Hastings. I was then only twenty years old. When I first saw you, Mr. Bedloe, at Saratoga, it was the miraculous similarity which existed between yourself and the painting which induced me to accost you, to seek your friendship, and to bring about those arrangements which resulted in my becoming your constant companion. In accomplishing this point, I was urged partly, and perhaps principally, by a regretful memory of the deceased, but also, in part, by an uneasy, and not altogether horrorless curiosity respecting yourself.\n\n\"In your detail of the vision which presented itself to you amid the hills, you have described, with the minutest accuracy, the Indian city of Benares, upon the Holy River. The riots, the combat, the massacre, were the actual events of the insurrection of Cheyte Sing, which took place in 1780, when Hastings was put in imminent peril of his life. The man escaping by the string of turbans was Cheyte Sing himself. The party in the kiosk were sepoys and British officers, headed by Hastings. Of this party I was one, and did all I could to prevent the rash and fatal sally of the officer who fell, in the crowded alleys, by the poisoned arrow of a Bengalee. That officer was my dearest friend. It was Oldeb. You will perceive by these manuscripts,\" (here the speaker produced a note-book in which several pages appeared to have been freshly written,) \"that at the very period in which you fancied these things amid the hills, I was engaged in detailing them upon paper here at home.\"\n\nIn about a week after this conversation, the following paragraphs appeared in a Charlottesville paper:\n\n\"We have the painful duty of announcing the death of Mr. Augustus Bedlo, a gentleman whose amiable manners and many virtues have long endeared him to the citizens of Charlottesville.\n\n\"Mr. B., for some years past, has been subject to neuralgia, which has often threatened to terminate fatally; but this can be regarded only as the mediate cause of his decease. The proximate cause was one of especial singularity. In an excursion to the Ragged Mountains, a few days since, a slight cold and fever were contracted, attended with great determination of blood to the head. To relieve this, Dr. Templeton resorted to topical bleeding. Leeches were applied to the temples. In a fearfully brief period the patient died, when it appeared that in the jar containing the leeches, had been introduced, by accident, one of the venomous vermicular sangsues which are now and then found in the neighboring ponds. This creature fastened itself upon a small artery in the right temple. Its close resemblance to the medicinal leech caused the mistake to be overlooked until too late.\n\n\"N. B. The poisonous sangsue of Charlottesville may always be distinguished from the medicinal leech by its blackness, and especially by its writhing or vermicular motions, which very nearly resemble those of a snake.\"\n\nI was speaking with the editor of the paper in question, upon the topic of this remarkable accident, when it occurred to me to ask how it happened that the name of the deceased had been given as Bedlo.\n\n\"I presume,\" I said, \"you have authority for this spelling, but I have always supposed the name to be written with an e at the end.\"\n\n\"Authority? \u2014 no,\" he replied. \"It is a mere typographical error. The name is Bedlo with an e, all the world over, and I never knew it to be spelt otherwise in my life.\"\n\n\"Then,\" said I mutteringly, as I turned upon my heel, \"then indeed has it come to pass that one truth is stranger than any fiction \u2014 for Bedloe, without the e, what is it but Oldeb conversed! And this man tells me that it is a typographical error.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Mesmeric Revelation by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nWhatever doubt may still envelop the rationale of mesmerism, its startling facts are now almost universally admitted. Of these latter, those who doubt, are your mere doubters by profession \u2014 an unprofitable and disreputable tribe. There can be no more absolute waste of time than the attempt to prove, at the present day, that man, by mere exercise of will can so impress his fellow as to cast him into an abnormal condition, of which the phenomena resemble very closely those of death, or at least resemble them more nearly than they do the phenomena of any other normal condition within our cognizance; that, while in this state, the person so impressed employs only with effort, and then feebly, the external organs of sense, yet perceives, with keenly refined perception, and through channels supposed unknown, matters beyond the scope of the physical organs; that, moreover, his intellectual faculties are wonderfully exalted and invigorated; that his sympathies with the person so impressing him are profound, and, finally, that his susceptibility to the impression increases with its frequency, while in the same proportion, the peculiar phenomena elicited are more extended and more pronounced.\n\nI say that these \u2014 which are the laws of mesmerism in its general features \u2014 it would be supererogation to demonstrate; nor shall I inflict upon my readers so needless a demonstration to-day. My purpose at present is a very different one indeed. I am impelled, even in the teeth of a world of prejudice, to detail without comment, the very remarkable substance of a colloquy occurring between a sleep-waker and myself.\n\nI had long been in the habit of mesmerizing the person in question (Mr. Vankirk), and the usual acute susceptibility and exaltation of the mesmeric perception had supervened. For many months he had been laboring under confirmed phthisis, the more distressing effects of which had been relieved by my manipulations; and on the night of Wednesday, the fifteenth instant, I was summoned to his bedside.\n\nThe invalid was suffering with acute pain in the region of the heart, and breathed with great difficulty, having all the ordinary symptoms of asthma. In spasms such as these he had usually found relief from the application of mustard to the nervous centres, but to-night this had been attempted in vain.\n\nAs I entered his room he greeted me with a cheerful smile, and although evidently in much bodily pain, appeared to be, mentally, quite at ease.\n\n\"I sent for you to-night,\" he said, \"not so much to administer to my bodily ailment, as to satisfy me concerning certain physical impressions which, of late, have occasioned me much anxiety and surprise. I need not tell you how skeptical I have hitherto been on the topic of the soul's immortality. I cannot deny that there has always existed, as if in that very soul which I have been denying, a vague half-sentiment of its own existence. But this half-sentiment at no time amounted to conviction. With it my reason had nothing to do. All attempts at logical inquiry resulted, indeed, in leaving me more sceptical than before. I had been advised to study Cousin. I studied him in his own works as well as in those of his European and American echoes. The 'Charles Elwood' of Mr. Brownson for example, was placed in my hands. I read it with profound attention. Throughout I found it logical but the portions which were not merely logical were unhappily the initial arguments of the disbelieving hero of the book. In his summing up it seemed evident to me that the reasoner had not even succeeded in convincing himself. His end had plainly forgotten his beginning, like the government of Trinculo. In short, I was not long in perceiving that if man is to be intellectually convinced of his own immortality, he will never be so convinced by the mere abstractions which have been so long the fashion of the moralists of England, of France, and of Germany. Abstractions may amuse and exercise, but take no hold on the mind. Here upon earth, at least, philosophy, I am persuaded, will always in vain call upon us to look upon qualities as things. The will may assent \u2014 the soul \u2014 the intellect, never.\n\n\"I repeat, then, that I only half felt, and never intellectually believed. But latterly there has been a certain deepening of the feeling, until it has come so nearly to resemble the acquiesence of reason, that I find it difficult to distinguish the two. I am enabled, too, plainly to trace this effect to the mesmeric influence. I cannot better explain my meaning than by the hypothesis that the mesmeric exaltation enables me to perceive a train of ratiocination which, in my abnormal existence, convinces, but which, in full accordance with the mesmeric phenomena, does not extend, except through its effect, into my normal condition. In sleep-waking, the reasoning and its conclusion \u2014 the cause and its effect \u2014 are present together. In my natural state, the cause vanishes, the effect only, and perhaps only partially, remains.\n\n\"These considerations have led me to think that some good results might ensue from a series of well-directed questions propounded to me while mesmerized. You have often observed the profound self-cognizance evinced by the sleep-waker \u2014 the extensive knowledge he displays upon all points relating to the mesmeric condition itself, and from this self-cognizance may be deduced hints for the proper conduct of a catechism.\"\n\nI consented of course to make this experiment. A few passes threw Mr. Vankirk into the mesmeric sleep. His breathing became immediately more easy, and he seemed to suffer no physical uneasiness. The following conversation then ensued:-V. in the dialogue representing the patient, and P. myself.\n\nP. Are you asleep?\n\nV. Yes \u2014 no; I would rather sleep more soundly.\n\nP. [After a few more passes.] Do you sleep now?\n\nV. Yes.\n\nP. How do you think your present illness will result?\n\nV. [After a long hesitation and speaking as if with effort.] I must die.\n\nP. Does the idea of death afflict you?\n\nV. [Very quickly.] No \u2014 no!\n\nP. Are you pleased with the prospect?\n\nV. If I were awake I should like to die, but now it is no matter. The mesmeric condition is so near death as to content me.\n\nP. I wish you would explain yourself, Mr. Vankirk.\n\nV. I am willing to do so, but it requires more effort than I feel able to make. You do not question me properly.\n\nP. What then shall I ask?\n\nV. You must begin at the beginning.\n\nP. The beginning! But where is the beginning?\n\nV. You know that the beginning is GOD. [This was said in a low, fluctuating tone, and with every sign of the most profound veneration.]\n\nP. What, then, is God?\n\nV. [Hesitating for many minutes.] I cannot tell.\n\nP. Is not God spirit?\n\nV. While I was awake I knew what you meant by \"spirit,\" but now it seems only a word \u2014 such, for instance, as truth, beauty \u2014 a quality, I mean.\n\nP. Is not God immaterial?\n\nV. There is no immateriality \u2014 it is a mere word. That which is not matter, is not at all \u2014 unless qualities are things.\n\nP. Is God, then, material?\n\nV. No. [This reply startled me very much.]\n\nP. What, then, is he?\n\nV. [After a long pause, and mutteringly.] I see \u2014 but it is a thing difficult to tell. [Another long pause.] He is not spirit, for he exists. Nor is he matter, as you understand it. But there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmosphere. These gradations of matter increase in rarity or fineness until we arrive at a matter unparticled \u2014 without particles \u2014 indivisible-one, and here the law of impulsion and permeation is modified. The ultimate or unparticled matter not only permeates all things, but impels all things; and thus is all things within itself. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word \"thought,\" is this matter in motion.\n\nP. The metaphysicians maintain that all action is reducible to motion and thinking, and that the latter is the origin of the former.\n\nV. Yes; and I now see the confusion of idea. Motion is the action of mind, not of thinking. The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men call mind. And the power of self-movement (equivalent in effect to human volition) is, in the unparticled matter, the result of its unity and omniprevalence; how, I know not, and now clearly see that I shall never know. But the unparticled matter, set in motion by a law or quality existing within itself, is thinking.\n\nP. Can you give me no more precise idea of what you term the unparticled matter?\n\nV. The matters of which man is cognizant escape the senses in gradation. We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether. Now, we call all these things matter, and embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the luminiferous ether. When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihilty. The only consideration which restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution; and here, even, we have to seek aid from our notion of an atom, as something possessing in infinite minuteness, solidity, palpability, weight. Destroy the idea of the atomic constitution and we should no longer be able to regard the ether as an entity, or, at least, as matter. For want of a better word we might term it spirit. Take, now, a step beyond the luminiferous ether \u2014 conceive a matter as much more rare than the ether, as this ether is more rare than the metal, and we arrive at once (in spite of all the school dogmas) at a unique mass \u2014 an unparticled matter. For although we may admit infinite littleness in the atoms themselves, the infinitude of littleness in the spaces between them is an absurdity. There will be a point \u2014 there will be a degree of rarity at which, if the atoms are sufficiently numerous, the interspaces must vanish, and the mass absolutely coalesce. But the consideration of the atomic constitution being now taken away, the nature of the mass inevitably glides into what we conceive of spirit. It is clear, however, that it is as fully matter as before. The truth is, it is impossible to conceive spirit since it is impossible to imagine what is not. When we flatter ourselves that we have formed its conception, we have merely deceived our understanding by the consideration of infinitely rarefied matter.\n\nP. There seems to me an insurmountable objection to the idea of absolute coalescence; \u2014 and that is the very slight resistance experienced by the heavenly bodies in their revolutions through space \u2014 a resistance now ascertained, it is true, to exist in some degree, but which is, nevertheless, so slight as to have been quite overlooked by the sagacity even of Newton. We know that the resistance of bodies is, chiefly, in proportion to their density. Absolute coalescence is absolute density. Where there are no interspaces, there can be no yielding. An ether, absolutely dense, would put an infinitely more effectual stop to the progress of a star than would an ether of adamant or of iron.\n\nV. Your objection is answered with an ease which is nearly in the ratio of its apparent unanswerability. \u2014 As regards the progress of the star, it can make no difference whether the star passes through the ether or the ether through it. There is no astronomical error more unaccountable than that which reconciles the known retardation of the comets with the idea of their passage through an ether, for, however rare this ether be supposed, it would put a stop to all sidereal revolution in a very far briefer period than has been admitted by those astronomers who have endeavored to slur over a point which they found it impossible to comprehend. The retardation actually experienced is, on the other hand, about that which might be expected from the friction of the ether in the instantaneous passage through the orb. In the one case, the retarding force is momentary and complete within itself \u2014 in the other it is endlessly accumulative.\n\nP. But in all this \u2014 in this identification of mere matter with God \u2014 is there nothing of irreverence? [I was forced to repeat this question before the sleep-waker fully comprehended my meaning.]\n\nV. Can you say why matter should be less reverenced than mind? But you forget that the matter of which \"mind\" or \"spirit\" of the schools, so far as regards its high capacities, and is, moreover, the \"matter\" of these schools at the same time. God, with all the powers attributed to spirit, is but the perfection of matter.\n\nP. You assert, then, that the unparticled matter, in motion, is thought.\n\nV. In general, this motion is the universal thought of the universal mind. This thought creates. All created things are but the thoughts of God.\n\nP. You say, \"in general.\"\n\nV. Yes. The universal mind is God. For new individualities, matter is necessary.\n\nP. But you now speak of \"mind\" and \"matter\" as do the metaphysicians.\n\nV. Yes \u2014 to avoid confusion. When I say \"mind,\" I mean the unparticled or ultimate matter, by \"matter,\" I intend all else.\n\nP. You were saying that \"for new individualities matter is necessary.\"\n\nV. Yes; for mind, existing unincorporate, is merely God. To create individual, thinking beings, it was necessary to incarnate portions of the divine mind. Thus man is individualized. Divested of corporate investiture, he were God. Now the particular motion of the incarnated portions of the unparticled matter is the thought of man; as the motion of the whole is that of God.\n\nP. You say that divested of the body man will be God?\n\nV. [After much hesitation.] I could not have said this; it is an absurdity.\n\nP. [Referring to my notes.] You did say that \"divested of corporate investiture man were God.\"\n\nV. And this is true. Man thus divested would be God \u2014 would be unindividualized. But he can never be thus divested \u2014 at least never will be \u2014 else we must imagine an action of God returning upon itself \u2014 a purposeless and futile action. Man is a creature. Creatures are thoughts of God. It is the nature of thought to be irrevocable.\n\nP. I do not comprehend. You say that man will never put off the body?\n\nV. I say that he will never be bodiless.\n\nP. Explain.\n\nV. There are two bodies \u2014 the rudimental and the complete, corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call \"death,\" is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.\n\nP. But of the worm's metamorphosis we are palpably cognizant.\n\nV. We, certainly \u2014 but not the worm. The matter of which our rudimental body is composed, is within the ken of the organs of that body; or, more distinctly, our rudimental organs are adapted to the matter of which is formed the rudimental body, but not to that of which the ultimate is composed. The ultimate body thus escapes our rudimental senses, and we perceive only the shell which falls, in decaying, from the inner form, not that inner form itself; but this inner form as well as the shell, is appreciable by those who have already acquired the ultimate life.\n\nP. You have often said that the mesmeric state very nearly resembles death. How is this?\n\nV. When I say that it resembles death, I mean that it resembles the ultimate life; for when I am entranced the senses of my rudimental life are in abeyance and I perceive external things directly, without organs, through a medium which I shall employ in the ultimate, unorganized life.\n\nP. Unorganized?\n\nV. Yes; organs are contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relation with particular classes and forms of matter, to the exclusion of other classes and forms. The organs of man are adapted to his rudimental condition, and to that only; his ultimate condition, being unorganized, is of unlimited comprehension in all points but one \u2014 the nature of the volition of God \u2014 that is to say, the motion of the unparticled matter. You may have a distinct idea of the ultimate body by conceiving it to be entire brain. This it is not, but a conception of this nature will bring you near a comprehension of what it is. A luminous body imparts vibration to the luminiferous ether. The vibrations generate similar ones within the retina; these again communicate similar ones to the optic nerve. The nerve conveys similar ones to the brain; the brain, also, similar ones to the unparticled matter which permeates it. The motion of this latter is thought, of which perception is the first undulation. This is the mode by which the mind of the rudimental life communicates with the external world; and this external world is, to the rudimental life, limited, through the idiosyncrasy of its organs. But in the ultimate, unorganized life, the external world reaches the whole body, (which is of a substance having affinity to brain, as I have said,) with no other intervention than that of an infinitely rarer ether than even the luminiferous; and to this ether \u2014 in unison with it \u2014 the whole body vibrates, setting in motion the unparticled matter which permeates it. It is to the absence of idiosyncratic organs, therefore, that we must attribute the nearly unlimited perception of the ultimate life. To rudimental beings, organs are the cages necessary to confine them until fledged.\n\nP. You speak of rudimental \"beings.\" Are there other rudimental thinking beings than man?\n\nV. The multitudinous conglomeration of rare matter into nebulae, planets, suns, and other bodies which are neither nebulae, suns, nor planets, is for the sole purpose of supplying pabulum for the idiosyncrasy of the organs of an infinity of rudimental beings. But for the necessity of the rudimental, prior to the ultimate life, there would have been no bodies such as these. Each of these is tenanted by a distinct variety of organic rudimental thinking creatures. In all, the organs vary with the features of the place tenanted. At death, or metamorphosis, these creatures, enjoying the ultimate life \u2014 immortality \u2014 and cognizant of all secrets but the one, act all things and pass every where by mere volition:\u2014 indwelling, not the stars, which to us seem the sole palpabilities, and for the accommodation of which we blindly deem space created \u2014 but that space itself \u2014 that infinity of which the truly substantive vastness swallows up the star-shadows \u2014 blotting them out as non-entities from the perception of the angels.\n\nP. You say that \"but for the necessity of the rudimental life, there would have been no stars.\" But why this necessity?\n\nV. In the inorganic life, as well as in the inorganic matter generally, there is nothing to impede the action of one simple unique law \u2014 the Divine Volition. With the view of producing impediment, the organic life and matter (complex, substantial and law \u2014 encumbered) were contrived.\n\nP. But again \u2014 why need this impediment have been produced?\n\nV. The result of law inviolate is perfection \u2014 right \u2014 negative happiness. The result of law violate is imperfection, wrong, positive pain. Through the impediments afforded by the number, complexity, and substantiality of the laws of organic life and matter, the violation of law is rendered, to a certain extent, practicable. Thus pain, which is the inorganic life is impossible, is possible in the organic.\n\nP. But to what good end is pain thus rendered possible?\n\nV. All things are either good or bad by comparison. A sufficient analysis will show that pleasure in all cases, is but the contrast of pain. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. Never to suffer would have been never to have been blessed. But it has been shown that, in the inorganic life, pain cannot be; thus the necessity for the organic. The pain of the primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven.\n\nP. Still there is one of your expressions which I find it impossible to comprehend \u2014\"the truly substantive vastness of infinity.\"\n\nV. This, probably, is because you have no sufficiently generic conception of the term \"substance\" itself. We must not regard it as a quality, but as a sentiment:\u2014 it is the perception, in thinking beings, of the adaptation of matter to their organization. There are many things on the Earth, which would be nihility to the inhabitants of Venus \u2014 many things visible and tangible in Venus, which we could not be brought to appreciate as existing at all. But to the inorganic beings \u2014 to the angels \u2014 the whole of the unparticled matter is substance; that is to say, the whole of what we term \"space,\" is to them the truest substantiality; \u2014 the stars, meantime, through what we consider their materiality, escaping the angelic sense, just in proportion as the unparticled matter, through what we consider its immateriality, eludes the organic.\n\nAs the sleep-waker pronounced these latter words, in a feeble tone, I observed on his countenance a singular expression, which somewhat alarmed me, and induced me to awake him at once. No sooner had I done this than, with a bright smile irradiating all his features, he fell back upon his pillow and expired. I noticed that in less than a minute afterward his corpse had all the stern rigidity of stone. His brow was of the coldness of ice. Thus, ordinarily, should it have appeared, only after long pressure from Azrael's hand. Had the sleep-waker, indeed, during the latter portion of his discourse, been addressing me from out the regions of the shadows?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Angel of the Odd by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nIt was a chilly November afternoon. I had just consummated an unusually hearty dinner, of which the dyspeptic truffe formed not the least important item, and was sitting alone in the dining-room, with my feet upon the fender, and at my elbow a small table which I had rolled up to the fire, and upon which were some apologies for dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit, and liqueur. In the morning I had been reading Glover's \"Leonidas,\" Wilkies \"Epigoniad,\" Lamartine's \"Pilgrimage,\" Barlow's \"Columbiad,\" Tuckermann's \"Sicily,\" and Griswold's \"Curiosities\"; I am willing to confess, therefore, that I now felt a little stupid. I made effort to arouse myself by aid of frequent Lafitte, and, all failing, I betook myself to a stray newspaper in despair. Having carefully perused the column of \"houses to let,\" and the column of \"dogs lost,\" and then the two columns of \"wives and apprentices runaway,\" I attacked with great resolution the editorial matter, and, reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese, and so re-read it from the end to the beginning, but with no more satisfactory result. I was about throwing away, in disgust:\n\n\u2002This folio of four pages, happy work\n\n\u2002Which not even poets criticise,\n\n...when I felt my attention somewhat aroused by the paragraph which follows:\n\n\"The avenues to death are numerous and strange. A London paper mentions the decease of a person from a singular cause. He was playing at 'puff the dart,' which is played with a long needle inserted in some worsted, and blown at a target through a tin tube. He placed the needle at the wrong end of the tube, and drawing his breath strongly to puff the dart forward with force, drew the needle into his throat. It entered the lungs, and in a few days killed him.\"\n\nUpon seeing this I fell into a great rage, without exactly knowing why. \"This thing,\" I exclaimed, \"is a contemptible falsehood \u2014 a poor hoax \u2014 the lees of the invention of some pitiable penny-a-liner \u2014 of some wretched concoctor of accidents in Cocaigne. These fellows, knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age, set their wits to work in the imagination of improbable possibilities \u2014 of odd accidents, as they term them; but to a reflecting intellect (like mine,\" I added, in parenthesis, putting my forefinger unconsciously to the side of my nose), \"to a contemplative understanding such as I myself possess, it seems evident at once that the marvelous increase of late in these 'odd accidents' is by far the oddest accident of all. For my own part, I intend to believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the 'singular' about it.\n\n\"Mein Gott, den, vat a vool you bees for dat!\" replied one of the most remarkable voices I ever heard. At first I took it for a rumbling in my ears \u2014 such as man sometimes experiences when getting very drunk \u2014 but, upon second thought, I considered the sound as more nearly resembling that which proceeds from an empty barrel beaten with a big stick; and, in fact, this I should have concluded it to be, but for the articulation of the syllables and words. I am by no means naturally nervous, and the very few glasses of Lafitte which I had sipped served to embolden me a little, so that I felt nothing of trepidation, but merely uplifted my eyes with a leisurely movement, and looked carefully around the room for the intruder. I could not, however, perceive any one at all.\n\n\"Humph!\" resumed the voice, as I continued my survey, \"you mus pe so dronk as de pig, den, for not zee me as I zit here at your zide.\"\n\nHereupon I bethought me of looking immediately before my nose, and there, sure enough, confronting me at the table sat a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable. His body was a wine-pipe, or a rum-puncheon, or something of that character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper portion of the carcass two tolerably long bottles, with the necks outward for hands. All the head that I saw the monster possessed of was one of those Hessian canteens which resemble a large snuff-box with a hole in the middle of the lid. This canteen (with a funnel on its top, like a cavalier cap slouched over the eyes) was set on edge upon the puncheon, with the hole toward myself; and through this hole, which seemed puckered up like the mouth of a very precise old maid, the creature was emitting certain rumbling and grumbling noises which he evidently intended for intelligible talk.\n\n\"I zay,\" said he, \"you mos pe dronk as de pig, vor zit dare and not zee me zit ere; and I zay, doo, you most pe pigger vool as de goose, vor to dispelief vat iz print in de print. 'Tiz de troof-dat it iz \u2014 eberry vord ob it.\"\n\n\"Who are you, pray?\" said I, with much dignity, although somewhat puzzled; \"how did you get here? and what is it you are talking about?\"\n\n\"Az vor ow I com'd ere,\" replied the figure, \"dat iz none of your pizzness; and as vor vat I be talking apout, I be talk apout vot I tink proper; and as vor who I be, vy dat is de very ting I com'd here for to let you zee for yourzelf.\"\n\n\"You are a drunken vagabond,\" said I, \"and I shall ring the bell and order my footman to kick you into the street.\"\n\n\"He! he! he!\" said the fellow, \"hu! hu! hu! dat you can't do.\"\n\n\"Can't do!\" said I, \"what do you mean? \u2014 can't do what?\"\n\n\"Ring de pell,\" he replied, attempting a grin with his little villainous mouth.\n\nUpon this I made an effort to get up, in order to put my threat into execution; but the ruffian just reached across the table very deliberately, and hitting me a tap on the forehead with the neck of one of the long bottles, knocked me back into the arm-chair from which I had half arisen. I was utterly astounded; and, for a moment, was quite at a loss what to do. In the meantime, he continued his talk.\n\n\"You zee,\" said he, \"it iz te bess vor zit still; and now you shall know who I pe. Look at me! zee! I am te Angel ov te Odd!\"\n\n\"And odd enough, too,\" I ventured to reply; \"but I was always under the impression that an angel had wings.\"\n\n\"Te wing!\" he cried, highly incensed, \"vat I pe do mit te wing? Mein Gott! do you take me vor a shicken?\"\n\n\"No \u2014 oh, no!\" I replied, much alarmed, \"you are no chicken \u2014 certainly not.\"\n\n\"Well, den, zit still and pehabe yourself, or I'll rap you again mid me vist. It iz te shicken ab te wing, und te owl ab te wing, und te imp ab te wing, und te headteuffel ab te wing. Te angel ab not te wing, and I am te Angel ov te Odd.\"\n\n\"And your business with me at present is \u2014 is-\"\n\n\"My pizzness!\" ejaculated the thing, \"vy vot a low bred puppy you mos pe vor to ask a gentleman und an angel apout his pizzness!\"\n\nThis language was rather more than I could bear, even from an angel; so, plucking up courage, I seized a salt-cellar which lay within reach, and hurled it at the head of the intruder. Either he dodged, however, or my aim was inaccurate; for all I accomplished was the demolition of the crystal which protected the dial of the clock upon the mantelpiece. As for the Angel, he evinced his sense of my assault by giving me two or three hard consecutive raps upon the forehead as before. These reduced me at once to submission, and I am almost ashamed to confess that, either through pain or vexation, there came a few tears into my eyes.\n\n\"Mein Gott!\" said the Angel of the Odd, apparently much softened at my distress; \"mein Gott, te man is eder ferry dronck or ferry sorry. You mos not trink it so strong \u2014 you mos put de water in te wine. Here, trink dis, like a goot veller, und don't gry now \u2014 don't!\"\n\nHereupon the Angel of the Odd replenished my goblet (which was about a third full of Port) with a colorless fluid that he poured from one of his hand bottles. I observed that these bottles had labels about their necks, and that these labels were inscribed \"Kirschenwasser.\"\n\nThe considerate kindness of the Angel mollified me in no little measure; and, aided by the water with which he diluted my Port more than once, I at length regained sufficient temper to listen to his very extraordinary discourse. I cannot pretend to recount all that he told me, but I gleaned from what he said that he was the genius who presided over the contre temps of mankind, and whose business it was to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing the skeptic. Once or twice, upon my venturing to express my total incredulity in respect to his pretensions, he grew very angry indeed, so that at length I considered it the wiser policy to say nothing at all, and let him have his own way. He talked on, therefore, at great length, while I merely leaned back in my chair with my eyes shut, and amused myself with munching raisins and flipping the stems about the room. But, by and bye, the Angel suddenly construed this behavior of mine into contempt. He arose in a terrible passion, slouched his funnel down over his eyes, swore a vast oath, uttered a threat of some character which I did not precisely comprehend, and finally made me a low bow and departed, wishing me, in the language of the archbishop in Gil-Blas, \"beaucoup de bonheur et un peu plus de bon sens.\"\n\nHis departure afforded me relief. The very few glasses of Lafitte that I had sipped had the effect of rendering me drowsy, and I felt inclined to take a nap of some fifteen or twenty minutes, as is my custom after dinner. At six I had an appointment of consequence, which it was quite indispensable that I should keep. The policy of insurance for my dwelling house had expired the day before; and, some dispute having arisen, it was agreed that, at six, I should meet the board of directors of the company and settle the terms of a renewal. Glancing upward at the clock on the mantelpiece (for I felt too drowsy to take out my watch), I had the pleasure to find that I had still twenty-five minutes to spare. It was half past five; I could easily walk to the insurance office in five minutes; and my usual post prandian siestas had never been known to exceed five and twenty. I felt sufficiently safe, therefore, and composed myself to my slumbers forthwith.\n\nHaving completed them to my satisfaction, I again looked toward the time-piece, and was half inclined to believe in the possibility of odd accidents when I found that, instead of my ordinary fifteen or twenty minutes, I had been dozing only three; for it still wanted seven and twenty of the appointed hour. I betook myself again to my nap, and at length a second time awoke, when, to my utter amazement, it still wanted twenty-seven minutes of six. I jumped up to examine the clock, and found that it had ceased running. My watch informed me that it was half past seven; and, of course, having slept two hours, I was too late for my appointment \"It will make no difference,\" I said; \"I can call at the office in the morning and apologize; in the meantime what can be the matter with the clock?\" Upon examining it I discovered that one of the raisin-stems which I had been flipping about the room during the discourse of the Angel of the Odd had flown through the fractured crystal, and lodging, singularly enough, in the key-hole, with an end projecting outward, had thus arrested the revolution of the minute-hand.\n\n\"Ah!\" said I; \"I see how it is. This thing speaks for itself. A natural accident, such as will happen now and then!\"\n\nI gave the matter no further consideration, and at my usual hour retired to bed. Here, having placed a candle upon a reading-stand at the bed-head, and having made an attempt to peruse some pages of the \"Omnipresence of the Deity,\" I unfortunately fell asleep in less than twenty seconds, leaving the light burning as it was.\n\nMy dreams were terrifically disturbed by visions of the Angel of the Odd. Methought he stood at the foot of the couch, drew aside the curtains, and, in the hollow, detestable tones of a rum-puncheon, menaced me with the bitterest vengeance for the contempt with which I had treated him. He concluded a long harrangue by taking off his funnelcap, inserting the tube into my gullet, and thus deluging me with an ocean of Kirschenwasser, which he poured, in a continuous flood, from one of the long-necked bottles that stood him instead of an arm. My agony was at length insufferable, and I awoke just in time to perceive that a rat had ran off with the lighted candle from the stand, but not in season to prevent his making his escape with it through the hole. Very soon, a strong suffocating odor assailed my nostrils; the house, I clearly perceived, was on fire. In a few minutes the blaze broke forth with violence, and in an incredibly brief period the entire building was wrapped in flames. All egress from my chamber, except through a window, was cut off. The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd \u2014 when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took it suddenly into his head that his left shoulder needed scratching, and could find no more convenient rubbing post than that afforded by the foot of the ladder. In an instant I was precipitated, and had the misfortune to fracture my arm.\n\nThis accident, with the loss of my insurance, and with the more serious loss of my hair, the whole of which had been singed off by the fire, predisposed me to serious impressions, so that, finally, I made up my mind to take a wife. There was a rich widow disconsolate for the loss of her seventh husband, and to her wounded spirit I offered the balm of my vows. She yielded a reluctant consent to my prayers. I knelt at her feet in gratitude and adoration. She blushed, and bowed her luxuriant tresse into close contact with those supplied me, temporarily, by Grandjean. I know not how the entanglement took place, but so it was. I arose with a shining pate, wigless, she in disdain and wrath, half buried in alien hair. Thus ended my hopes of the widow by an accident which could not have been anticipated, to be sure, but which the natural sequence of events had brought about.\n\nWithout despairing, however, I undertook the siege of a less implacable heart. The fates were again propitious for a brief period; but again a trivial incident interfered. Meeting my betrothed in an avenue thronged with the elite of the city, I was hastening to greet her with one of my best considered bows, when a small particle of some foreign matter lodging in the corner of my eye, rendered me, for the moment, completely blind. Before I could recover my sight, the lady of my love had disappeared \u2014 irreparably affronted at what she chose to consider my premeditated rudeness in passing her by ungreeted. While I stood bewildered at the suddenness of this accident (which might have happened, nevertheless, to any one under the sun), and while I still continued incapable of sight, I was accosted by the Angel of the Odd, who proffered me his aid with a civility which I had no reason to expect. He examined my disordered eye with much gentleness and skill, informed me that I had a drop in it, and (whatever a \"drop\" was) took it out, and afforded me relief.\n\nI now considered it time to die, (since fortune had so determined to persecute me,) and accordingly made my way to the nearest river. Here, divesting myself of my clothes, (for there is no reason why we cannot die as we were born,) I threw myself headlong into the current; the sole witness of my fate being a solitary crow that had been seduced into the eating of brandy-saturated corn, and so had staggered away from his fellows. No sooner had I entered the water than this bird took it into its head to fly away with the most indispensable portion of my apparel. Postponing, therefore, for the present, my suicidal design, I just slipped my nether extremities into the sleeves of my coat, and betook myself to a pursuit of the felon with all the nimbleness which the case required and its circumstances would admit. But my evil destiny attended me still. As I ran at full speed, with my nose up in the atmosphere, and intent only upon the purloiner of my property, I suddenly perceived that my feet rested no longer upon terre firma; the fact is, I had thrown myself over a precipice, and should inevitably have been dashed to pieces, but for my good fortune in grasping the end of a long guide-rope, which descended from a passing balloon.\n\nAs soon as I sufficiently recovered my senses to comprehend the terrific predicament in which I stood or rather hung, I exerted all the power of my lungs to make that predicament known to the aeronaut overhead. But for a long time I exerted myself in vain. Either the fool could not, or the villain would not perceive me. Meantime the machine rapidly soared, while my strength even more rapidly failed. I was soon upon the point of resigning myself to my fate, and dropping quietly into the sea, when my spirits were suddenly revived by hearing a hollow voice from above, which seemed to be lazily humming an opera air. Looking up, I perceived the Angel of the Odd. He was leaning with his arms folded, over the rim of the car, and with a pipe in his mouth, at which he puffed leisurely, seemed to be upon excellent terms with himself and the universe. I was too much exhausted to speak, so I merely regarded him with an imploring air.\n\nFor several minutes, although he looked me full in the face, he said nothing. At length removing carefully his meerschaum from the right to the left corner of his mouth, he condescended to speak.\n\n\"Who pe you?\" he asked, \"und what der teuffel you pe do dare?\"\n\nTo this piece of impudence, cruelty, and affectation, I could reply only by ejaculating the monosyllable \"Help!\"\n\n\"Elp!\" echoed the ruffian \u2014\"not I. Dare iz te pottle \u2014 elp yourself, und pe tam'd!\"\n\nWith these words he let fall a heavy bottle of Kirschenwasser which, dropping precisely upon the crown of my head, caused me to imagine that my brains were entirely knocked out. Impressed with this idea, I was about to relinquish my hold and give up the ghost with a good grace, when I was arrested by the cry of the Angel, who bade me hold on.\n\n\"Old on!\" he said; \"don't pe in te urry \u2014 don't. Will you pe take de odder pottle, or ave you pe got zober yet and come to your zenzes?\"\n\nI made haste, hereupon, to nod my head twice \u2014 once in the negative, meaning thereby that I would prefer not taking the other bottle at present \u2014 and once in the affirmative, intending thus to imply that I was sober and had positively come to my senses. By these means I somewhat softened the Angel.\n\n\"Und you pelief, ten,\" he inquired, \"at te last? You pelief, ten, in te possibilty of te odd?\"\n\nI again nodded my head in assent.\n\n\"Und you ave pelief in me, te Angel of te Odd?\"\n\nI nodded again.\n\n\"Und you acknowledge tat you pe te blind dronk and te vool?\"\n\nI nodded once more.\n\n\"Put your right hand into your left hand preeches pocket, ten, in token oy your vull zubmission unto te Angel ov te Odd.\"\n\nThis thing, for very obvious reasons, I found it quite impossible to do. In the first place, my left arm had been broken in my fall from the ladder, and, therefore, had I let go my hold with the right hand, I must have let go altogether. In the second place, I could have no breeches until I came across the crow. I was therefore obliged, much to my regret, to shake my head in the negative \u2014 intending thus to give the Angel to understand that I found it inconvenient, just at that moment, to comply with his very reasonable demand! No sooner, however, had I ceased shaking my head than \u2014\n\n\"Go to der teuffel ten!\" roared the Angel of the Odd.\n\nIn pronouncing these words, he drew a sharp knife across the guide. rope by which I was suspended, and as we then happened to be precisely over my own house, (which, during my peregrinations, had been handsomely rebuilt,) it so occurred that I tumbled headlong down the ample chimney and alit upon the dining-room hearth.\n\nUpon coming to my senses, (for the fall had very thoroughly stunned me,) I found it about four o'clock in the morning. I lay outstretched where I had fallen from the balloon. My head grovelled in the ashes of an extinguished fire, while my feet reposed upon the wreck of a small table, overthrown, and amid the fragments of a miscellaneous dessert, intermingled with a newspaper, some broken glass and shattered bottles, and an empty jug of the Schiedam Kirschenwasser. Thus revenged himself the Angel of the Odd.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Balloon Hoax by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe great problem is at length solved! The air, as well as the earth and the ocean, has been subdued by science, and will become a common and convenient highway for mankind. The Atlantic has been actually crossed in a Balloon! and this too without difficulty \u2014 without any great apparent danger \u2014 with thorough control of the machine \u2014 and in the inconceivably brief period of seventy-five hours from shore to shore! By the energy of an agent at Charleston, S. C., we are enabled to be the first to furnish the public with a detailed account of this most extraordinary voyage, which was performed between Saturday, the 6th instant, at 11 A.M. and 2 P.M., on Tuesday, the 9th instant, by Sir Everard Bringhurst; Mr. Osborne, a nephew of Lord Bentinck's; Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Robert Holland, the well-known aeronauts; Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, author of \"Jack Sheppard,\" etc.; and Mr. Henson the projector of the late unsuccessful flying machine \u2014 with two seamen from Woolwich \u2014 in all, eight persons. The particulars furnished below may be relied on as authentic and accurate in every respect, as, with a slight exception, they are copied verbatim from the joint diaries of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Harrison Ainsworth, to whose politeness our agent is also indebted for much verbal information respecting the balloon itself, its construction, and other matters of interest. The only alteration in the MS. received, has been made for the purpose of throwing the hurried account of our agent, Mr. Forsyth, into a connected and intelligible form.\n\nThe Balloon\n\nTwo very decided failures, of late \u2014 those of Mr. Henson and Sir George Cayley \u2014 had much weakened the public interest in the subject of aerial navigation. Mr. Henson's scheme (which at first was considered very feasible even by men of science) was founded upon the principle of an inclined plane, started from an eminence by an extrinsic force, applied and continued by the revolution of impinging vanes, in form and number resembling the vanes of a windmill. But, in all the experiments made with models at the Adelaide Gallery, it was found that the operation of these fins not only did not propel the machine, but actually impeded its flight. The only propelling force it ever exhibited, was the mere impetus acquired from the descent of the inclined plane, and this impetus carried the machine farther when the vanes were at rest, than when they were in motion \u2014 a fact which sufficiently demonstrates their inutility, and in the absence of the propelling, which was also the sustaining power, the whole fabric would necessarily descend. This consideration led Sir George Cayley to think only of adapting a propeller to some machine having of itself an independent power of support \u2014 in a word, to a balloon; the idea, however, being novel, or original, with Sir George, only so far as regards the mode of its application to practice. He exhibited a model of his invention at the Polytechnic Institution. The propelling principle, or power, was here, also, applied to interrupted surfaces, or vanes, put in revolution. These vanes were four in number, but were found entirely ineffectual in moving the balloon, or in aiding its ascending power. The whole project was thus a complete failure.\n\nIt was at this juncture that Mr. Monck Mason (whose voyage from Dover to Weilburg in the balloon Nassau occasioned so much excitement in 1837) conceived the idea of employing the principle of the Archimedean screw for the purpose of propulsion through the air \u2014 rightly attributing the failure of Mr. Henson's scheme, and of Sir George Cayley's to the interruption of surface in the independent vanes. He made the first public experiment at Willis's Rooms, but afterward removed his model to the Adelaide Gallery.\n\nLike Sir George Cayley's balloon, his own was an ellipsoid. Its length was 13 feet 6 inches \u2014 height, 6 feet 8 inches. It contained about 320 cubic feet of gas, which, if pure hydrogen, would support 21 pounds upon its first inflation, before the gas has time to deteriorate or escape. The weight of the whole machine and apparatus was 17 pounds \u2014 leaving about 4 pounds to spare. Beneath the centre of the balloon, was a frame of light wood, about 9 feet long, and rigged on to the balloon itself with a network in the customary manner. From this framework was suspended a wicker basket or car.\n\nThe screw consists of an axis of hollow brass tube, 18 inches in length, through which, upon a semi-spiral inclined at 15 degrees, pass a series of steel-wire radii, 2 feet long, and thus projecting a foot on either side. These radii are connected at the outer extremities by 2 bands of flattened wire; the whole in this manner forming the framework of the screw, which is completed by a covering of oiled silk cut into gores, and tightened so as to present a tolerably uniform surface. At each end of its axis this screw is supported by pillars of hollow brass tube descending from the hoop. In the lower ends of these tubes are holes in which the pivots of the axis revolve. From the end of the axis which is next the car, proceeds a shaft of steel, connecting the screw with the pinion of a piece of spring machinery fixed in the car. By the operation of this spring, the screw is made to revolve with great rapidity, communicating a progressive motion to the whole. By means of the rudder, the machine was readily turned in any direction. The spring was of great power, compared with its dimensions, being capable of raising 45 pounds upon a barrel of 4 inches diameter, after the first turn, and gradually increasing as it was wound up. It weighed, altogether, eight pounds six ounces. The rudder was a light frame of cane covered with silk, shaped somewhat like a battledoor, and was about 3 feet long, and at the widest, one foot. Its weight was about 2 ounces. It could be turned flat, and directed upward or downward, as well as to the right or left-, and thus enabled the aeronaut to transfer the resistance of the air which in an inclined position it must generate in its passage, to any side upon which he might desire to act; thus determining the balloon in the opposite direction.\n\nThis model (which, through want of time, we have necessarily described in an imperfect manner) was put in action at the Adelaide Gallery, where it accomplished a velocity of 5 miles per hour; although, strange to say, it excited very little interest in comparison with the previous complex machine of Mr. Henson \u2014 so resolute is the world to despise anything which carries with it an air of simplicity. To accomplish the great desideratum of aerial navigation, it was very generally supposed that some exceedingly complicated application must be made of some unusually profound principle in dynamics.\n\nSo well satisfied, however, was Mr. Mason of the ultimate success of his invention, that he determined to construct immediately, if possible, a balloon of sufficient capacity to test the question by a voyage of some extent; the original design being to cross the British Channel, as before, in the Nassau balloon. To carry out his views, he solicited and obtained the patronage of Sir Everard Bringhurst and Mr. Osborne, two gentlemen well known for scientific acquirement, and especially for the interest they have exhibited in the progress of aerostation. The project, at the desire of Mr. Osborne, was kept a profound secret from the public \u2014 the only persons entrusted with the design being those actually engaged in the construction of the machine, which was built (under the superintendence of Mr. Mason, Mr. Holland, Sir Everard Bringhurst, and Mr. Osborne) at the seat of the latter gentleman near Penstruthal, in Wales. Mr. Henson, accompanied by his friend Mr. Ainsworth, was admitted to a private view of the balloon, on Saturday last; when the two gentlemen made final arrangements to be included in the adventure. We are not informed for what reason the two seamen were also included in the party \u2014 but in the course of a day or two, we shall put our readers in possession of the minutest particulars respecting this extraordinary voyage.\n\nThe balloon is composed of silk, varnished with the liquid gum caoutchouc. It is of vast dimensions, containing more than 40,000 cubic feet of gas; but as coal gas was employed in place of the more expensive and inconvenient hydrogen, the supporting power of the machine, when fully inflated, and immediately after inflation, is not more than about 2500 pounds. The coal gas is not only much less costly, but is easily procured and managed.\n\nFor its introduction into common use for purposes of aerostation, we are indebted to Mr. Charles Green. Up to his discovery, the process of inflation was not only exceedingly expensive, but uncertain. Two and even three days have frequently been wasted in futile attempts to procure a sufficiency of hydrogen to fill a balloon, from which it had great tendency to escape, owing to its extreme subtlety, and its affinity for the surrounding atmosphere. In a balloon sufficiently perfect to retain its contents of coal gas unaltered, in quantity or amount, for six months, an equal quantity of hydrogen could not be maintained in equal purity for six weeks.\n\nThe supporting power being estimated at 2500 pounds, and the united weights of the party amounting only to about 1200, there was left a surplus of 1300, of which again 1200 was exhausted by ballast, arranged in bags of different sizes, with their respective weights marked upon them \u2014 by cordage, barometers, telescopes, barrels containing provision for a fortnight, water-casks, cloaks, carpet-bags, and various other indispensable matters, including a coffee-warmer, contrived for warming coffee by means of slack-lime, so as to dispense altogether with fire, if it should be judged prudent to do so. All these articles, with the exception of the ballast, and a few trifles, were suspended from the hoop overhead. The car is much smaller and lighter, in proportion, than the one appended to the model. It is formed of a light wicker, and is wonderfully strong for so frail looking a machine. Its rim is about 4 feet deep. The rudder is also very much larger, in proportion, than that of the model; and the screw is considerably smaller. The balloon is furnished besides with a grapnel, and a guide-rope, which latter is of the most indispensable importance. A few words, in explanation, will here be necessary for such of our readers as are not conversant with the details of aerostation.\n\nAs soon as the balloon quits the earth, it is subjected to the influence of many circumstances tending to create a difference in its weight; augmenting or diminishing its ascending power. For example, there may be a deposition of dew upon the silk, to the extent, even, of several hundred pounds; ballast has then to be thrown out, or the machine may descend. This ballast being discarded, and a clear sunshine evaporating the dew, and at the same time expanding the gas in the silk, the whole will again rapidly ascend. To check this ascent, the only recourse is (or rather was, until Mr. Green's invention of the guide-rope) the permission of the escape of gas from the valve; but, in the loss of gas, is a proportionate general loss of ascending power; so that, in a comparatively brief period, the best-constructed balloon must necessarily exhaust all its resources, and come to the earth. This was the great obstacle to voyages of length.\n\nThe guide-rope remedies the difficulty in the simplest manner conceivable. It is merely a very long rope which is suffered to trail from the car, and the effect of which is to prevent the balloon from changing its level in any material degree. If, for example, there should be a deposition of moisture upon, the silk, and the machine begins to descend in consequence, there will be no necessity for discharging ballast to remedy the increase of weight, for it is remedied, or counteracted, in an exactly just proportion, by the deposit on the ground of just so much of the end of the rope as is necessary. If, on the other hand, any circumstances should cause undue levity, and consequent ascent, this levity is immediately counteracted by the additional weight of rope upraised from the earth. Thus, the balloon can neither ascend nor descend, except within very narrow limits, and its resources, either in gas or ballast, remain comparatively unimpaired. When passing over an expanse of water, it becomes necessary to employ small kegs of copper or wood, filled with liquid ballast of a lighter nature than water. These float, and serve all the purposes of a mere rope on land. Another most important office of the guide-rope, is to point out the direction of the balloon. The rope drags, either on land or sea, while the balloon is free; the latter, consequently, is always in advance, when any progress whatever is made, a comparison, therefore, by means of the compass, of the relative positions of the two objects, will always indicate the course. In the same way, the angle formed by the rope with the vertical axis of the machine, indicates the velocity. When there is no angle \u2014 in other words, when the rope hangs perpendicularly, the whole apparatus is stationary; but the larger the angle, that is to say, the farther the balloon precedes the end of the rope, the greater the velocity; and the converse.\n\nAs the original design was to cross the British Channel, and alight as near Paris as possible, the voyagers had taken the precaution to prepare themselves with passports directed to all parts of the Continent, specifying the nature of the expedition, as in the case of the Nassau voyage, and entitling the adventurers to exemption from the usual formalities of office; unexpected events, however, rendered these passports superfluous.\n\nThe inflation was commenced very quietly at daybreak, on Saturday morning, the 6th instant in the courtyard of Wheal-Vor House, Mr. Osborne's seat, about a mile from Penstruthal, in North Wales; and at 7 minutes past 11, everything being ready for departure, the balloon was set free, rising gently but steadily, in a direction nearly South; no use being made, for the first half hour, of either the screw or the rudder. We proceed now with the journal, as transcribed by Mr. Forsyth from the joint MSS. of Mr. Monck Mason and Mr. Ainsworth. The body of the journal, as given, is in the handwriting of Mr. Mason, and a P. S. is appended, each day, by Mr. Ainsworth, who has in preparation, and will shortly give the public a more minute and, no doubt, a thrillingly interesting account of the voyage.\n\nThe Journal\n\nSaturday, April the 6th. \u2014 Every preparation likely to embarrass us having been made overnight, we commenced the inflation this morning at daybreak; but owing to a thick fog which encumbered the folds of the silk and rendered it unmanageable, we did not get through before nearly eleven o'clock. Cut loose, then, in high spirits, and rose gently but steadily, with a light breeze at North, which bore us in the direction of the Bristol Channel. Found the ascending force greater than we had expected; and as we arose higher and so got clear of the cliffs, and more in the sun's rays, our ascent became very rapid. I did not wish, however, to lose gas at so early a period of the adventure, and so concluded to ascend for the present. We soon ran out our guide-rope; but even when we had raised it clear of the earth, we still went up very rapidly. The balloon was unusually steady, and looked beautifully. In about 10 minutes after starting, the barometer indicated an altitude of 15,000 feet. The weather was remarkably fine, and the view of the subjacent country \u2014 a most romantic one when seen from any point \u2014 was now especially sublime. The numerous deep gorges presented the appearance of lakes, on account of the dense vapors with which they were filled, and the pinnacles and crags to the South East, piled in inextricable confusion, resembling nothing so much as the giant cities of Eastern fable. We were rapidly approaching the mountains in the South, but our elevation was more than sufficient to enable us to pass them in safety. In a few minutes we soared over them in fine style; and Mr. Ainsworth, with the seamen, was surprised at their apparent want of altitude when viewed from the car, the tendency of great elevation in a balloon being to reduce inequalities of the surface below, to nearly a dead level. At half-past eleven still proceeding nearly South, we obtained our first view of the Bristol Channel; and, in fifteen minutes afterward, the line of breakers on the coast appeared immediately beneath us, and we were fairly out at sea. We now resolved to let off enough gas to bring our guide-rope, with the buoys affixed, into the water. This was immediately done, and we commenced a gradual descent. In about 20 minutes our first buoy dipped, and at the touch of the second soon afterward, we remained stationary as to elevation. We were all now anxious to test the efficiency of the rudder and screw, and we put them both into requisition forthwith, for the purpose of altering our direction more to the eastward, and in a line for Paris. By means of the rudder we instantly effected the necessary change of direction, and our course was brought nearly at right angles to that of the wind; when we set in motion the spring of the screw, and were rejoiced to find it propel us readily as desired. Upon this we gave nine hearty cheers, and dropped in the sea a bottle, inclosing a slip of parchment with a brief account of the principle of the invention. Hardly, however, had we done with our rejoicings, when an unforeseen accident occurred which discouraged us in no little degree. The steel rod connecting the spring with the propeller was suddenly jerked out of place, at the car end, (by a swaying of the car through some movement of one of the two seamen we had taken up,) and in an instant hung dangling out of reach, from the pivot of the axis of the screw. While we were endeavoring to regain it, our attention being completely absorbed, we became involved in a strong current of wind from the East, which bore us, with rapidly increasing force, toward the Atlantic. We soon found ourselves driving out to sea at the rate of not less, certainly, than 50 or 60 miles an hour, so that we came up with Cape Clear, at some 40 miles to our North, before we had secured the rod, and had time to think what we were about. It was now that Mr. Ainsworth made an extraordinary but, to my fancy, a by no means unreasonable or chimerical proposition, in which he was instantly seconded by Mr. Holland-viz.: that we should take advantage of the strong gale which bore us on, and in place of beating back to Paris, make an attempt to reach the coast of North America. After slight reflection, I gave a willing assent to this bold proposition, which (strange to say) met with objection from the two seamen only. As the stronger party, however, we overruled their fears, and kept resolutely upon our course. We steered due West; but as the trailing of the buoys materially impeded our progress, and we had the balloon abundantly at command, either for ascent or descent, we first threw out fifty pounds of ballast, and then wound up (by means of a windlass) so much of the rope as brought it quite clear of the sea. We perceived the effect of this manoeuvre immediately, in a vastly increased rate of progress; and, as the gale freshened, we flew with a velocity nearly inconceivable; the guide-rope flying out behind the car, like a streamer from a vessel. It is needless to say that a very short time sufficed us to lose sight of the coast. We passed over innumerable vessels of all kinds, a few of which were endeavoring to beat up, but the most of them lying to. We occasioned the greatest excitement on board all \u2014 an excitement greatly relished by ourselves, and especially by our two men, who, now under the influence of a dram of Geneva, seemed resolved to give all scruple, or fear, to the wind. Many of the vessels fired signal guns; and in all we were saluted with loud cheers (which we heard with surprising distinctness) and the waving of caps and handkerchiefs. We kept on in this manner throughout the day with no material incident, and, as the shades of night closed around us, we made a rough estimate of the distance traversed. It could not have been less than 500 miles, and was probably much more. The propeller was kept in constant operation, and, no doubt, aided our progress materially. As the sun went down, the gale freshened into an absolute hurricane, and the ocean beneath was clearly visible on account of its phosphorescence. The wind was from the East all night, and gave us the brightest omen of success. We suffered no little from cold, and the dampness of the atmosphere was most unpleasant; but the ample space in the car enabled us to lie down, and by means of cloaks and a few blankets we did sufficiently well.\n\nP.S. [by Mr. Ainsworth.] The last nine hours have been unquestionably the most exciting of my life. I can conceive nothing more sublimating than the strange peril and novelty of an adventure such as this. May God grant that we succeed! I ask not success for mere safety to my insignificant person, but for the sake of human knowledge and \u2014 for the vastness of the triumph. And yet the feat is only so evidently feasible that the sole wonder is why men have scrupled to attempt it before. One single gale such as now befriends us \u2014 let such a tempest whirl forward a balloon for 4 or 5 days (these gales often last longer) and the voyager will be easily borne, in that period, from coast to coast. In view of such a gale the broad Atlantic becomes a mere lake. I am more struck, just now, with the supreme silence which reigns in the sea beneath us, notwithstanding its agitation, than with any other phenomenon presenting itself. The waters give up no voice to the Heavens. The immense flaming ocean writhes and is tortured uncomplainingly. The mountainous surges suggest the idea of innumerable dumb gigantic fiends struggling in impotent agony. In a night such as is this to me, a man lives \u2014 lives a whole century of ordinary life \u2014 nor would I forego this rapturous delight for that of a whole century of ordinary existence.\n\nSunday, the 7th. [Mr. Mason's MS.] This morning the gale, by 10, had subsided to an eight \u2014 or nine \u2014 knot breeze (for a vessel at sea), and bears us, perhaps, 30 miles per hour, or more. It has veered, however, very considerably to the North; and now, at sundown, we are holding our course due West, principally by the screw and rudder, which answer their purposes to admiration. I regard the project as thoroughly successful, and the easy navigation of the air in any direction (not exactly in the teeth of a gale) as no longer problematical. We could not have made head against the strong wind of yesterday, but, by ascending, we might have got out of its influence, if requisite. Against a pretty stiff breeze, I feel convinced, we can make our way with the propeller. At noon, today, ascended to an elevation of nearly 25,000 feet, (about the height of Cotopaxi) by discharging ballast. Did this to search for a more direct current, but found none so favorable as the one we are now in. We have an abundance of gas to take us across this small pond, even should the voyage last 3 weeks. I have not the slightest fear for the result. The difficulty has been strangely exaggerated and misapprehended. I can choose my current, and should I find all currents against me, I can make very tolerable headway with the propeller. We have had no incidents worth recording. The night promises fair.\n\nP.S. [By Mr. Ainsworth.] I have little to record, except the fact (to me quite a surprising one) that, at an elevation equal to that of Cotopaxi, I experienced neither very intense cold, nor headache, nor difficulty of breathing; neither, I find, did Mr. Mason, nor Mr. Holland, nor Sir Everard. Mr. Osborne complained of constriction of the chest \u2014 but this soon wore off. We have flown at a great rate during the day, and we must be more than half way across the Atlantic. We have passed over some 20 or 30 vessels of various kinds, and all seem to be delightfully astonished. Crossing the ocean in a balloon is not so difficult a feat after all. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. Mem.: at 25,000 feet elevation the sky appears nearly black, and the stars are distinctly visible; while the sea does not seem convex (as one might suppose) but absolutely and most unequivocally concave.\n\nMonday, the 8th. [Mr. Mason's MS.] This morning we had again some little trouble with the rod of the propeller, which must be entirely remodelled, for fear of serious accident \u2014 I mean the steel rod, not the vanes. The latter could not be improved. The wind has been blowing steadily and strongly from the North-East all day; and so far fortune seems bent upon favoring us. Just before day, we were all somewhat alarmed at some odd noises and concussions in the balloon, accompanied with the apparent rapid subsidence of the whole machine. These phenomena were occasioned by the expansion of the gas, through increase of heat in the atmosphere, and the consequent disruption of the minute particles of ice with which the network had become encrusted during the night. Threw down several bottles to the vessels below. Saw one of them picked up by a large ship \u2014 seemingly one of the New York line packets. Endeavored to make out her name, but could not be sure of it. Mr. Osbornes telescope made it out something like \"Atalanta.\" It is now 12 at night, and we are still going nearly West, at a rapid pace. The sea is peculiarly phosphorescent.\n\nP.S. [By Mr. Ainsworth.] It is now 2 A.M., and nearly calm, as well as I can judge \u2014 but it is very difficult to determine this point since we move with the air so completely. I have not slept since quitting Wheal-Vor, but can stand it no longer, and must take a nap. We cannot be far from the American coast.\n\nTuesday, the 9th. [Mr. Ainsworth's MS.] One, P.M. We are in full view of the low coast of South Carolina. The great problem is accomplished. We have crossed the Atlantic \u2014 fairly and easily crossed it in a balloon! God be praised! Who shall say that anything is impossible hereafter?\n\nThe Journal here ceases. Some particulars of the descent were communicated, however, by Mr. Ainsworth to Mr. Forsyth. It was nearly dead calm when the voyagers first came in view of the coast, which was immediately recognized by both the seamen, and by Mr. Osborne. The latter gentleman having acquaintances at Fort Moultrie, it was immediately resolved to descend in its vicinity. The balloon was brought over the beach (the tide being out and the sand hard, smooth, and admirably adapted for a descent), and the grapnel let go, which took firm hold at once. The inhabitants of the Island, and of the Fort, thronged out, of course, to see the balloon; but it was with the greatest difficulty that any one could be made to credit the actual voyage \u2014 the crossing of the Atlantic. The grapnel caught at 2 P.M. precisely; and thus the whole voyage was completed in 75 hours; or rather less, counting from shore to shore. No serious accident occurred. No real danger was at any time apprehended. The balloon was exhausted and secured without trouble; and when the MS. from which this narrative is compiled was despatched from Charleston, the party were still at Fort Moultrie. Their further intentions were not ascertained; but we can safely promise our readers some additional information either on Monday or in the course of the next day, at furthest.\n\nThis is unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting, and the most important undertaking ever accomplished or even attempted by man. What magnificent events may ensue, it would be useless now to think of determining.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq. by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nI am now growing in years, and \u2014 since I understand that Shakespeare and Mr. Emmons are deceased \u2014 it is not impossible that I may even die. It has occurred to me, therefore, that I may as well retire from the field of Letters and repose upon my laurels. But I am ambitious of signalizing my abdication of the literary sceptre by some important bequest to posterity; and, perhaps, I cannot do a better thing than just pen for it an account of my earlier career. My name, indeed, has been so long and so constantly before the public eye, that I am not only willing to admit the naturalness of the interest which it has everywhere excited, but ready to satisfy the extreme curiosity which it has inspired. In fact, it is no more than the duty of him who achieves greatness to leave behind him, in his ascent, such landmarks as may guide others to be great. I propose, therefore, in the present paper (which I had some idea of calling \"Memoranda to Serve for the Literary History of America\") to give a detail of those important, yet feeble and tottering, first steps, by which, at length, I attained the high road to the pinnacle of human renown.\n\nOf one's very remote ancestors it is superfluous to say much. My father, Thomas Bob, Esq., stood for many years at the summit of his profession, which was that of a merchant-barber, in the city of Smug. His warehouse was the resort of all the principal people of the place, and especially of the editorial corps \u2014 a body which inspires all about it with profound veneration and awe. For my own part, I regarded them as gods, and drank in with avidity the rich wit and wisdom which continuously flowed from their august mouths during the process of what is styled \"lather.\" My first moment of positive inspiration must be dated from that ever-memorable epoch, when the brilliant conductor of the \"Gad-Fly,\" in the intervals of the important process just mentioned, recited aloud, before a conclave of our apprentices, an inimitable poem in honor of the \"Only Genuine Oil-of-Bob\" (so called from its talented inventor, my father), and for which effusion the editor of the \"Fly\" was remunerated with a regal liberality by the firm of Thomas Bob & Company, merchant-barbers.\n\nThe genius of the stanzas to the \"Oil-of-Bob\" first breathed into me, I say, the divine afflatus. I resolved at once to become a great man, and to commence by becoming a great poet. That very evening I fell upon my knees at the feet of my father.\n\n\"Father,\" I said, \"pardon me! \u2014 but I have a soul above lather. It is my firm intention to cut the shop. I would be an editor \u2014 I would be a poet \u2014 I would pen stanzas to the 'Oil-of-Bob.' Pardon me and aid me to be great!\"\n\n\"My dear Thingum,\" replied father, (I had been christened Thingum after a wealthy relative so surnamed,) \"My dear Thingum,\" he said, raising me from my knees by the ears \u2014\"Thingum, my boy, you're a trump, and take after your father in having a soul. You have an immense head, too, and it must hold a great many brains. This I have long seen, and therefore had thoughts of making you a lawyer. The business, however, has grown ungenteel and that of a politician don't pay. Upon the whole you judge wisely; \u2014 the trade of editor is best:\u2014 and if you can be a poet at the same time \u2014 as most of the editors are, by the by, why, you will kill two birds with the one stone. To encourage you in the beginning of things, I will allow you a garret, pen, ink, and paper, a rhyming dictionary; and a copy of the 'Gad-Fly.' I suppose you would scarcely demand any more.\"\n\n\"I would be an ungrateful villain if I did\" I replied with enthusiasm. \"Your generosity is boundless. I will repay it by making you the father of a genius.\"\n\nThus ended my conference with the best of men, and immediately upon its termination, I betook myself with zeal to my poetical labors; as upon these, chiefly, I founded my hopes of ultimate elevation to the editorial chair.\n\nIn my first attempts at composition I found the stanzas to \"The Oil-of-Bob\" rather a drawback than otherwise. Their splendor more dazzled than enlightened me. The contemplation of their excellence tended, naturally, to discourage me by comparison with my own abortions; so that for a long time I labored in vain. At length there came into my head one of those exquisitely original ideas which now and then will permeate the brain of a man of genius. It was this:\u2014 or, rather, thus was it carried into execution. From the rubbish of an old book-stall, in a very remote corner of the town, I got together several antique and altogether unknown or forgotten volumes. The bookseller sold them to me for a song. From one of these, which purported to be a translation of one Dantes \"Inferno,\" I copied with remarkable neatness a long passage about a man named Ugolino, who had a parcel of brats. From another, which contained a good many old plays by some person whose name I forget, I enacted in the same manner, and with the same care, a great number of lines about \"angels\" and \"ministers saying grace,\" and \"goblins damned,\" and more besides of that sort. From a third, which was the composition of some blind man or other, either a Greek or a Choctaw \u2014 I cannot be at the pains of remembering every trifle exactly \u2014 I took about fifty verses beginning with \"Achilles' wrath,\" and \"grease,\" and something else. From a fourth, which I recollect was also the work of a blind man, I selected a page or two all about \"hail\" and \"holy light\"; and, although a blind man has no business to write about light, still the verses were sufficiently good in their way.\n\nHaving made fair copies of these poems, I signed every one of them \"Oppodeldoc\" (a fine sonorous name), and, doing each up nicely in a separate envelope, I dispatched one to each of the four principal Magazines, with a request for speedy insertion and prompt pay. The result of this well-conceived plan, however, (the success of which would have saved me much trouble in after-life,) served to convince me that some editors are not to be bamboozled, and gave the coup-de-grace (as they say in France) to my nascent hopes (as they say in the city of the transcendentals).\n\nThe fact is, that each and every one of the Magazines in question gave Mr. \"Oppodeldoc\" a complete using-up, in the \"Monthly Notices to Correspondents.\" The \"Hum-Drum\" gave him a dressing after this fashion:\n\n\"'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) has sent us a long tirade concerning a bedlamite whom he styles 'Ugolino,' had a great many children that should have been all whipped and sent to bed without their suppers. The whole affair is exceedingly tame \u2014 not to say flat. 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) is entirely devoid of imagination \u2014 and imagination, in our humble opinion, is not only the soul of Poesy, but also its very heart. 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) has the audacity to demand of us, for his twattle, a 'speedy insertion and prompt pay.' We neither insert nor purchase any stuff of the sort. There can be no doubt, however, that he would meet with a ready sale for all the balderdash he can scribble, at the office of either the 'Rowdy-Dow,' the 'Lollipop,' or the 'Goosetherumfoodle.'\n\nAll this, it must be acknowledged, was very severe upon \"Oppodeldoc,\"\u2014 but the unkindest cut was putting the word Poesy in small caps. In those five pre-eminent letters what a world of bitterness is there not involved!\n\nBut \"Oppodeldoc\" was punished with equal severity in the \"Rowdy Dow,\" which spoke thus:\n\n\"We have received a most singular and insolent communication from a person (whoever he is) signing himself 'Oppodeldoc,'\u2014 thus desecrating the greatness of the illustrious Roman emperor so named. Accompanying the letter of 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) we find sundry lines of most disgusting and unmeaning rant about 'angels and ministers of grace,'\u2014 rant such as no madman short of a Nat Lee, or an 'Oppodeldoc,' could possibly perpetrate. And for this trash of trash, we are modestly requested to 'pay promptly.' No, sir \u2014 no! We pay for nothing of that sort. Apply to the 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Lollipop,' or the 'Goosetherumfoodle.' These periodicals will undoubtedly accept any literary offal you may send them \u2014 and as undoubtedly promise to pay for it.\"\n\nThis was bitter indeed upon poor \"Oppodeldoc\"; but, in this instance, the weight of the satire falls upon the \"Hum-Drum,\" the \"Lollipop,\" and the \"Goosetherumfoodle,\" who are pungently styled \"periodicals\"\u2014 in Italics, too \u2014 a thing that must have cut them to the heart.\n\nScarcely less savage was the \"Lollipop,\" which thus discoursed:\n\n\"Some individual, who rejoices in the appellation 'Oppodeldoc,' (to what low uses are the names of the illustrious dead too often applied!) has enclosed us some fifty or sixty verses commencing after this fashion:\n\n'Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring\n\nOf woes unnumbered, &c., &c., &c, &c.'\n\n\"'Oppodeldoc?' (whoever he is) is respectfully informed that there is not a printer's devil in our office who is not in the daily habit of composing better lines. Those of 'Oppodeldoc' will not scan. 'Oppodeldoc' should learn to count. But why he should have conceived the idea that we (of all others, we!) would disgrace our pages with his ineffable nonsense is utterly beyond comprehension. Why, the absurd twattle is scarcely good enough for the 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Rowdy-Dow,' the 'Goosetherumfoodle,'\u2014 things that are in the practice of publishing 'Mother Gooses Melodies' as original lyrics. And 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) has even the assurance to demand pay for this drivel. Does 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) know \u2014 is he aware that we could not be paid to insert it?\"\n\nAs I perused this I felt myself growing gradually smaller and smaller, and when I came to the point at which the editor sneered at the poem as \"verses,\" there was little more than an ounce of me left. As for \"Oppodeldoc,\" I began to experience compassion for the poor fellow. But the \"Goosetherumfoodle\" showed, if possible, less mercy than the \"Lollipop.\" It was the \"Goosetherumfoodle\" that said \u2014\n\n\"A wretched poetaster, who signs himself 'Oppodeldoc,' is silly enough to fancy that we will print and pay for a medley of incoherent and ungrammatical bombast which he has transmitted to us, and which commences with the following most intelligible line:\u2014\n\n'Hail Holy Light! Offspring of Heaven, first born.'\n\n\"We say, 'most intelligible.' 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) will be kind enough to tell us, perhaps, how 'hail' can be 'holy light.' We always regarded it as frozen rain. Will he inform us, also, how frozen rain can be, at one and the same time, both 'holy light' (whatever that is) and an 'off-spring'? \u2014 which latter term (if we understand anything about English) is only employed, with propriety, in reference to small babies of about six weeks old. But it is preposterous to descant upon such absurdity \u2014 although 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) has the unparalled effrontery to suppose that we will not only 'insert' his ignorant ravings, but (absolutely) pay for them?\n\n\"Now this is fine \u2014 it is rich! \u2014 and we have half a mind to punish this young scribbler for his egotism by really publishing his effusion verbatim et literatim, as he has written it. We could inflict no punishment so severe, and we would inflict it, but for the boredom which we should cause our readers in so doing.\n\n\"Let 'Oppodeldoc' (whoever he is) send any future composition of like character to the 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Lollipop,' or the 'Rowdy-Dow: They will 'insert' it. They 'insert' every month just such stuff. Send it to them. WE are not to be insulted with impunity.\"\n\nThis made an end of me, and as for the \"Hum-Drum,\" the \"Rowdy-Dow,\" and the \"Lollipop,\" I never could comprehend how they survived it. The putting them in the smallest possible minion (that was the rub \u2014 thereby insinuating their lowness \u2014 their baseness,) while WE stood looking upon them in gigantic capitals! \u2014 oh it was too bitter! \u2014 it was wormwood \u2014 it was gall. Had I been either of these periodicals I would have spared no pains to have the \"Goosetherumfoodle\" prosecuted. It might have been done under the Act for the \"Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.\" for Oppodeldoc (whoever he was), I had by this time lost all patience with the fellow, and sympathized with him no longer. He was a fool, beyond doubt, (whoever he was,) and got not a kick more than he deserved.\n\nThe result of my experiment with the old books convinced me, in the first place, that \"honesty is the best policy,\" and, in the second, that if I could not write better than Mr. Dante, and the two blind men, and the rest of the old set, it would, at least, be a difficult matter to write worse. I took heart, therefore, and determined to prosecute the \"entirely original\" (as they say on the covers of the magazines), at whatever cost of study and pains. I again placed before my eyes, as a model, the brilliant stanzas on \"The Oil-of-Bob\" by the editor of the \"Gad-Fly\" and resolved to construct an ode on the same sublime theme, in rivalry of what had already been done.\n\nWith my first line I had no material difficulty. It ran thus:\n\n\u2002\"To pen an Ode upon the 'Oil-of-Bob.'\"\n\n\u2002Having carefully looked out, however, all the legitimate rhymes to \"Bob,\" I found it impossible to proceed. In this dilemma I had recourse to paternal aid; and, after some hours of mature thought, my father and myself thus constructed the poem:\n\n\u2002\"To pen an Ode upon the 'Oil-of-Bob'\n\n\u2002Is all sorts of a job.\n\n\u2002(Signed) Snob.\"\n\nTo be sure, this composition was of no very great length \u2014 but I \"have yet to learn,\" as they say in the \"Edinburgh Review,\" that the mere extent of a literary work has anything to do with its merit. As for the Quarterly cant about \"sustained effort,\" it is impossible to see the sense of it. Upon the whole, therefore, I was satisfied with the success of my maiden attempt, and now the only question regarded the disposal I should make of it. My father suggested that I should send it to the \"Gad-Fly,\"\u2014 but there were two reasons which operated to prevent me from so doing. I dreaded the jealousy of the editor \u2014 and I had ascertained that he did not pay for original contributions. I therefore, after due deliberation, consigned the article to the more dignified pages of the \"Lollipop\" and awaited the event in anxiety, but with resignation.\n\nIn the very next published number I had the proud satisfaction of seeing my poem printed at length, as the leading article, with the following significant words, prefixed in italics and between brackets:\n\n\u2002We call the attention of our readers to the subjoined admirable on \"The Oil-of-Bob.\" We need say nothing of their sublimity, or of their pathos. \u2014 it is impossible to peruse them without tears. Those who have been nauseated with a sad dose on the same august topic from the goose-quill of the editor of the \"Gad-Fly,\" will do well to compare the two compositions.\n\n\u2002P. S. \u2014 We are consumed with anxiety to probe the mystery which envelops the evident pseudonym \"Snob\" May we hope for a personal interview?\n\nAll this was scarcely more than justice, but it was, I confess, rather more than I had expected:\u2014 I acknowledge this, be it observed, to the everlasting disgrace of my country and of mankind. I lost no time, however, in calling upon the editor of the \"Lollipop\" and had the good fortune to find this gentleman at home. He saluted me with an air of profound respect, slightly blended with a fatherly and patronizing admiration, wrought in him, no doubt, by my appearance of extreme youth and inexperience. Begging me to be seated, he entered at once upon the subject of my poem; \u2014 but modesty will ever forbid me to repeat the thousand compliments which he lavished upon me. The eulogies of Mr. Crab (such was the editor's name) were, however, by no means fulsomely indiscriminate. He analyzed my composition with much freedom and great ability \u2014 not hesitating to point out a few trivial defects \u2014 a circumstance which elevated him highly in my esteem. The \"Gad-Fly\" was, of course, brought upon the tapis, and I hope never to be subjected to a criticism so searching, or to rebukes so withering, as were bestowed by Mr. Crab upon that unhappy effusion. I had been accustomed to regard the editor of the \"Gad-Fly\" as something superhuman; but Mr. Crab soon disabused me of that idea. He set the literary as well as the personal character of the Fly (so Mr. C. satirically designated the rival editor), in its true light. He, the Fly, was very little better than he should be. He had written infamous things. He was a penny-a-liner, and a buffoon. He was a villain. He had composed a tragedy which set the whole country in a guffaw, and a farce which deluged the universe in tears. Besides all this, he had the impudence to pen what he meant for a lampoon upon himself (Mr. Crab), and the temerity to style him \"an ass.\" Should I at any time wish to express my opinion of Mr. Fly, the pages of the \"Lollipop,\" Mr. Crab assured me, were at my unlimited disposal. In the meantime, as it was very certain that I would be attacked in the \"Fly\" for my attempt at composing a rival poem on the \"Oil-of-Bob,\" he (Mr. Crab) would take it upon himself to attend, pointedly, to my private and personal interests. If I were not made a man of at once, it should not be the fault of himself (Mr. Crab).\n\nMr. Crab having now paused in his discourse (the latter portion of which I found it impossible to comprehend), I ventured to suggest something about the remuneration which I had been taught to expect for my poem, by an announcement on the cover of the \"Lollipop,\" declaring that it (the \"Lollipop\") \"insisted upon being permitted to pay exorbitant prices for all accepted contributions \u2014 frequently expending more money for a single brief poem than the whole annual cost of the 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Rowdy-Dow,' and the 'Goosetherumfoodle' combined.\"\n\nAs I mentioned the word \"remuneration,\" Mr. Crab first opened his eyes, and then his mouth, to quite a remarkable extent, causing his personal appearance to resemble that of a highly agitated elderly duck in the act of quacking; and in this condition he remained (ever and anon pressing his hinds tightly to his forehead, as if in a state of desperate bewilderment) until I had nearly made an end of what I had to say.\n\nUpon my conclusion, he sank back into his seat, as if much overcome, letting his arms fall lifelessly by his side, but keeping his mouth still rigorously open, after the fashion of the duck. While I remained in speechless astonishment at behavior so alarming he suddenly leaped to his feet and made a rush at the bell-rope; but just as he reached this, he appeared to have altered his intention, whatever it was, for he dived under a table and immediately re-appeared with a cudgel. This he was in the act of uplifting (for what purpose I am at a loss to imagine), when all at once, there came a benign smile over his features, and he sank placidly back in his chair.\n\n\"Mr. Bob,\" he said, (for I had sent up my card before ascending myself,) \"Mr. Bob, you are a young man, I presume \u2014 very?\"\n\nI assented; adding that I had not yet concluded my third lustrum.\n\n\"Ah!\" he replied, \"very good! I see how it is \u2014 say no more! Touching this matter of compensation, what you observe is very just \u2014 in fact it is excessively so. But ah \u2014 ah \u2014 the first contribution \u2014 the first, I say \u2014 it is never the Magazine custom to pay for \u2014 you comprehend, eh? The truth is, we are usually the recipients in such case.\" \u2014 Mr. Crab smiled blandly as he emphasized the word \"recipients.\" \u2014 \"for the most part, we are paid for the insertion of a maiden attempt \u2014 especially in verse. In the second place, Mr. Bob, the Magazine rule is never to disburse what we term in France the argent comptant:\u2014 I have no doubt you understand. In a quarter or two after publication of the article \u2014 or in a year or two \u2014 we make no objection to giving our note at nine months; provided, always, that we can so arrange our affairs as to be quite certain of a 'burst up' in six. I really do hope, Mr. Bob, that you will look upon this explanation as satisfactory.\" Here Mr. Crab concluded, and the tears stood in his eyes.\n\nGrieved to the soul at having been, however innocently, the cause of pain to so eminent and so sensitive a man, I hastened to apologize, and to reassure him, by expressing my perfect coincidence with his views, as well as my entire appreciation of the delicacy of his position. Having done all this in a neat speech, I took leave.\n\nOne fine morning, very shortly afterwards, \"I awoke and found myself famous.\" The extent of my renown will be best estimated by reference to the editorial opinions of the day. These opinions, it will be seen, were embodied in critical notices of the number of the \"Lollipop\" containing my poem, and are perfectly satisfactory, conclusive, and clear with the exception, perhaps, of the hieroglyphical marks, \"Sep. 15 \u2014 1 t,\" appended to each of the critiques.\n\nThe \"Owl\" a journal of profound sagacity, and well known for the deliberate gravity of its literary decisions \u2014 the \"Owl,\" I say, spoke as follows:\n\n\"The LOLLIPOP! The October number of this delicious Magazine surpasses its predecessors, and sets competition at defiance. In the beauty of its typography and paper \u2014 in the number and excellence of its steel plates \u2014 as well as in the literary merit of its contributions \u2014 the 'Lollipop' compares with its slow-paced rivals as Hyperion with Satyr. The 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Rowdy-Dow,' and the 'Goosetherumfoodle,' excel, it is true, in braggadocio, but in all other points, give us the 'Lollipop'! How this celebrated journal can sustain its evidently tremendous expenses, is more than we can understand. To be sure, it has a circulation of 100,000 and its subscription list has increased one fourth during the last month; but, on the other hand, the sums it disburses constantly for contributions are inconceivable. It is reported that Mr. Slyass received no less than thirty-seven and a half cents for his inimitable paper on 'Pigs.' With Mr. Crab, as editor, and with such names upon the list of contributors as SNOB and Slyass, there can be no such word as 'fail' for the 'Lollipop.' Go and subscribe. Sep. 15 \u2014 1 t.\"\n\nI must say that I was gratified with this high-toned notice from a paper so respectable as the \"Owl.\" The placing my name \u2014 that is to say, my nom de guerre \u2014 in priority of station to that of the great Slyass, was a compliment as happy as I felt it to be deserved.\n\nMy attention was next arrested by these paragraphs in the \"Toad\"\u2014 print highly distinguished for its uprightness and independence \u2014 for its entire freedom from sycophancy and subservience to the givers of dinners:\n\n\"The 'Lollipop' for October is out in advance of all its contemporaries, and infinitely surpasses them, of course, in the splendor of its embellishments, as well as in the richness of its contents. The 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Rowdy-Dow,' and the 'Goosetherumfoodle' excel, we admit, in braggadocio, but, in all other points, give us the 'Lollipop.' How this celebrated Magazine can sustain its evidently tremendous expenses is more than we can understand. To be sure, it has a circulation of 200,000 and its subscription list has increased one third during the last fortnight, but, on the other hand, the sums it disburses, monthly, for contributions, are fearfully great. We learn that Mr. Mumblethumb received no less than fifty cents for his late 'Monody in a Mud-Puddle.'\n\n\"Among the original contributors to the present number we notice (besides the eminent editor, Mr. Crab), such men as SNOB, Slyass, and Mumblethumb. Apart from the editorial matter, the most valuable paper, nevertheless, is, we think, a poetical gem by Snob, on the 'Oil-of-Bob.'-but our readers must not suppose, from the title of this incomparable bijou, that it bears any similitude to some balderdash on the same subject by a certain contemptible individual whose name is unmentionable to ears polite. The present poem 'On the Oil-of-Bob,' has excited universal anxiety and curiosity in respect to the owner of the evident pseudonym, 'Snob,'\u2014 a curiosity which, happily, we have it in our power to satisfy. 'Snob' is the nom de plume of Mr. Thingum Bob, of this city, a relative of the great Mr. Thingum, (after whom he is named), and otherwise connected with the most illustrious families of the State. His father, Thomas Bob, Esq., is an opulent merchant in Smug. Sep. 15 \u2014 1 t.\"\n\nThis generous approbation touched me to the heart \u2014 the more especially as it emanated from a source so avowedly \u2014 so proverbially pure as the \"Toad.\" The word \"balderdash,\" as applied to the \"Oil-of-Bob\" of the Fly, I considered singularly pungent and appropriate. The words \"gem\" and \"bijou,\" however, used in reference to my composition, struck me as being, in some degree, feeble. They seemed to me to be deficient in force. They were not sufficiently prononces (as we have it in France).\n\nI had hardly finished reading the \"Toad,\" when a friend placed in my hands a copy of the \"Mole,\" a daily, enjoying high reputation for the keenness of its perception about matters in general, and for the open, honest, above-ground style of its editorials. The \"Mole\" spoke of the \"Lollypop\" as follows:\n\n\"We have just received the 'Lollipop' for October, and must say that never before have we perused any single number of any periodical which afforded us a felicity so supreme. We speak advisedly. The 'Hum-Drum.' the 'Rowdy-Dow,' and the 'Goosetherumfoodle' must look well to their laurels. These prints, no doubt, surpass everything in loudness of pretension, but, in all other points, give us the 'Lollipop'! How this celebrated Magazine can sustain its evidently tremendous expenses, is more than we can comprehend. To be sure, it has a circulation of 300,000; and its subscription list has increased one half within the last week, but then the sum it disburses, monthly, for contributions, is astoundingly enormous. We have it upon good authority that Mr. Fatquack received no less than sixty-two cents and a half for his late Domestic Nouvellette, the 'Dish-Clout.'\n\n\"The contributors to the number before us are Mr. CRAB (the eminent editor), SNOB, Mumblethumb, Fatquack, and others; but, after the inimitable compositions of the editor himself, we prefer a diamond \u2014 like effusion from the pen of a rising poet who writes over the signature 'Snob'\u2014 a nom de guerre which we predict will one day extinguish the radiance of 'BOZ.' 'SNOB,' we learn, is a Mr. THINGUM BOB, Esq., sole heir of a wealthy merchant of this city, Thomas Bob, Esq., and a near relative of the distinguished Mr. Thingum. The title of Mr. B.'s admirable poem is the 'Oil-of-Bob'\u2014 a somewhat unfortunate name, by-the-bye, as some contemptible vagabond connected with the penny press has already disgusted the town with a great deal of drivel upon the same topic. There will be no danger, however, of confounding the compositions. Sep. 15 \u2014 1 t.\n\nThe generous approbation of so clear-sighted a journal as the \"Mole\" penetrated my soul with delight. The only objection which occurred to me was, that the terms \"contemptible vagabond\" might have been better written \"odious and contemptible wretch, villain, and vagabond.\" This would have sounded more graceful, I think. \"Diamond-like,\" also, was scarcely, it will be admitted, of sufficient intensity to express what the \"Mole\" evidently thought of the brilliancy of the \"Oil-of-Bob.\"\n\nOn the same afternoon in which I saw these notices in the \"Owl,\" the \"Toad\" and the \"Mole,\" I happened to meet with a copy of the \"Daddy-Long-Legs,\" a periodical proverbial for the extreme extent of its understanding. And it was the \"Daddy-Long-Legs\" which spoke thus:\n\n\"The 'Lollipop'! This gorgeous Magazine is already before the public for October. The question of pre-eminence is forever put to rest, and hereafter it will be preposterous in the 'Hum-Drum,' the 'Rowdy-Dow,' or the 'Goosetherumfoodle' to make any further spasmodic attempts at competition. These journals may excel the 'Lollipop' in outcry, but, in all other points, give us the 'Lollipop'! How this celebrated Magazine can sustain its evidently tremendous expenses, is past comprehension. To be sure it has a circulation of precisely half a million, and its subscription list has increased seventy-five per cent. within the last couple of days, but then the sums it disburses, monthly, for contributions, are scarcely credible; we are cognizant of the fact, that Mademoiselle Cribalittle received no less than eighty-seven cents and a half for her late valuable Revolutionary Tale, entitled 'The York-Town Katy-Did, and the Bunker-Hill Katy-Didn't.'\n\n\"The most able papers in the present number are, of course, those furnished by the editor (the eminent Mr. CRAB), but there are numerous magnificent contributions from such names as SNOB, Mademoiselle Cribalittle, Slyass, Mrs. Fibalittle, Mumblethumb, Mrs. Squibalittle, and last, though not least, Fatquack. The world may well be challenged to produce so rich a galaxy of genius.\n\n\"The poem over the signature, \"SNOB\" is, we find, attracting universal commendation, and, we are constrained to say, deserves, if possible, even more applause than it has received. The 'Oil-of-Bob' is the title of this masterpiece of eloquence and art. One or two of our readers may have a very faint, although sufficiently disgusting recollection of a poem (?) similarly entitled, the perpetration of a miserable penny-a-liner, mendicant, and cut-throat, connected in the capacity of scullion, we believe, with one of the indecent prints about the purlieus of the city, we beg them, for God's sake, not to confound the compositions. The author of the 'Oil-of-Bob' is, we hear, Thingum Bob, Esq, a gentleman of high genius, and a scholar. 'Snob' is merely a nom de guerre. Sep. 15 \u2014 1 t.\"\n\nI could scarcely restrain my indignation while I perused the concluding portions of this diatribe. It was clear to me that the yea-nay manner \u2014 not to say the gentleness \u2014 the positive forbearance \u2014 with which the \"Daddy-Long-Legs\" spoke of that pig, the editor of the \"Gad-Fly,\"\u2014 it was evident to me, I say, that this gentleness of speech could proceed from nothing else than a partiality for the \"Fly\"\u2014 whom it was clearly the intention of the \"Daddy-Long-Legs\" to elevate into reputation at my expense. Any one, indeed, might perceive, with half an eye, that, had the real design of the \"Daddy\" been what it wished to appear, it (the \"Daddy\") might have expressed itself in terms more direct, more pungent, and altogether more to the purpose. The words \"penny-a-liner,\" \"mendicant,\" \"scullion,\" and \"cut-throat,\" were epithets so intentionally inexpressive and equivocal, as to be worse than nothing when applied to the author of the very worst stanzas ever penned by one of the human race. We all know what is meant by \"damning with faint praise,\" and, on the other hand, who could fail seeing through the covert purpose of the \"Daddy,\"\u2014 that of glorifying with feeble abuse?\n\nWhat the \"Daddy\" chose to say to the \"Fly,\" however, was no business of mine. What it said of myself was. After the noble manner in which the \"Owl,\" the \"Toad,\" the \"Mole,\" had expressed themselves in respect to my ability, it was rather too much to be coolly spoken of by a thing like the \"Daddy-Long-Legs,\" as merely \"a gentleman of high genius and scholar.\" Gentleman indeed! I made up my mind at once either to get written apology from the \"Daddy-Long-Legs,\" or to call it out.\n\nFull of this purpose, I looked about me to find a friend whom I could entrust with a message to his \"Daddy\"ship, and as the editor of the \"Lollipop\" had given me marked tokens of regard, I at length concluded to seek assistance upon the present occasion.\n\nI have never yet been able to account, in a manner satisfactory to my own understanding, for the very peculiar countenance and demeanor with which Mr. Crab listened to me, as I unfolded to him my design. He again went through the scene of the bell-rope and cudgel, and did not omit the duck. At one period I thought he really intended to quack. His fit, nevertheless, finally subsided as before, and he began to act and speak in a rational way. He declined bearing the cartel, however, and in fact, dissuaded me from sending it at all; but was candid enough to admit that the \"Daddy-Long-Legs\" had been disgracefully in the wrong \u2014 more especially in what related to the epithets \"gentleman and scholar.\"\n\nToward the end of this interview with Mr. Crab, who really appeared to take a paternal interest in my welfare, he suggested to me that I might turn an honest penny, and at the same time, advance my reputation, by occasionally playing Thomas Hawk for the \"Lollypop.\"\n\nI begged Mr. Crab to inform me who was Mr. Thomas Hawk, and how it was expected that I should play him.\n\nHere Mr. Crab again \"made great eyes\" (as we say in Germany), but at length, recovering himself from a profound attack of astonishment, he assured me that he employed the words \"Thomas Hawk\" to avoid the colloquialism, Tommy, which was low \u2014 but that the true idea was Tommy Hawk \u2014 or tomahawk \u2014 and that by \"playing tomahawk\" he referred to scalping, brow-beating, and otherwise using \u2014 up the herd of poor-devil authors.\n\nI assured my patron that, if this was all, I was perfectly resigned to the task of playing Thomas Hawk. Hereupon Mr. Crab desired me to use up the editor of the \"Gad-Fly\" forthwith, in the fiercest style within the scope of my ability, and as a specimen of my powers. This I did, upon the spot, in a review of the original \"Oil-of-Bob,\" occupying thirty-six pages of the \"Lollipop.\" I found playing Thomas Hawk, indeed, a far less onerous occupation than poetizing; for I went upon system altogether, and thus it was easy to do the thing thoroughly well. My practice was this. I bought auction copies (cheap) of \"Lord Brougham's speeches,\" \"Cobbett's Complete Works,\" the \"New Slang-Syllabus,\" the \"Whole Art of Snubbing,\" \"Prentice's Billingsgate\" (folio edition), and \"Lewis G. Clarke on Tongue.\" These works I cut up thoroughly with a curry-comb, and then, throwing the shreds into a sieve, sifted out carefully all that might be thought decent (a mere trifle); reserving the hard phrases, which I threw into a large tin pepper-castor with longitudinal holes, so that an entire sentence could get through without material injury. The mixture was then ready for use. When called upon to play Thomas Hawk, I anointed a sheet of foolscap with the white of a gander's egg; then, shredding the thing to be reviewed as I had previously shredded the books \u2014 only with more care, so as to get every word separate \u2014 I threw the latter shreds in with the former, screwed on the lid of the castor, gave it a shake, and so dusted out the mixture upon the egged foolscap; where it stuck. The effect was beautiful to behold. It was captivating. Indeed, the reviews I brought to pass by this simple expedient have never been approached, and were the wonder of the world. At first, through bashfulness \u2014 the result of inexperience \u2014 I was a little put out by a certain inconsistency \u2014 a certain air of the bizarre (as we say in France), worn by the composition as a whole. All the phrases did not fit (as we say in the Anglo-Saxon). Many were quite awry. Some, even, were upside-down; and there were none of them which were not in some measure, injured in regard to effect, by this latter species of accident, when it occurred \u2014 with the exception of Mr. Lewis Clarkes paragraphs, which were so vigorous and altogether stout, that they seemed not particularly disconcerted by any extreme of position, but looked equally happy and satisfactory, whether on their heads, or on their heels.\n\nWhat became of the editor of the \"Gad-Fly\" after the publication of my criticism on his \"Oil-of-Bob,\" it is somewhat difficult to determine. The most reasonable conclusion is, that he wept himself to death. At all events he disappeared instantaneously from the face of the earth, and no man has seen even the ghost of him since.\n\nThis matter having been properly accomplished, and the Furies appeased, I grew at once into high favor with Mr. Crab. He took me into his confidence, gave me a permanent situation as Thomas Hawk of the \"Lollipop,\" and, as for the present, he could afford me no salary, allowed me to profit, at discretion, by his advice.\n\n\"My dear Thingum,\" said he to me one day after dinner, \"I respect your abilities and love you as a son. You shall be my heir. When I die I will bequeath you the \"Lollipop.\" In the meantime I will make a man of you \u2014 I will \u2014 provided always that you follow my counsel. The first thing to do is to get rid of the old bore.\"\n\n\"Boar?\" said I inquiringly \u2014\"pig, eh? \u2014 aper? (as we say in Latin)\u2014 who? \u2014 where?\"\n\n\"Your father,\" said he.\n\n\"Precisely,\" I replied \u2014\"pig.\"\n\n\"You have your fortune to make, Thingum,\" resumed Mr. Crab, \"and that governor of yours is a millstone about your neck. We must cut him at once.\" [Here I took out my knife.] \"We must cut him,\" continued Mr. Crab, \"decidedly and forever. He won't do \u2014 he won't. Upon second thoughts, you had better kick him, or cane him, or something of that kind.\"\n\n\"What do you say,\" I suggested modestly, \"to my kicking him in the first instance, caning him afterward, and winding up by tweaking his nose?\"\n\nMr. Crab looked at me musingly for some moments, and then answered:\n\n\"I think, Mr. Bob, that what you propose would answer sufficiently well \u2014 indeed remarkably well \u2014 that is to say, as far as it went \u2014 but barbers are exceedingly hard to cut, and I think, upon the whole, that, having performed upon Thomas Bob the operations you suggest, it would be advisable to blacken, with your fists, both his eyes, very carefully and thoroughly, to prevent his ever seeing you again in fashionable promenades. After doing this, I really do not perceive that you can do any more. However \u2014 it might be just as well to roll him once or twice in the gutter, and then put him in charge of the police. Any time the next morning you can call at the watch-house and swear an assault.\"\n\nI was much affected by the kindness of feeling toward me personally, which was evinced in this excellent advice of Mr. Crab, and I did not fail to profit by it forthwith. The result was, that I got rid of the old bore, and began to feel a little independent and gentleman-like. The want of money, however, was, for a few weeks, a source of some discomfort; but at length, by carefully putting to use my two eyes, and observing how matters went just in front of my nose, I perceived how the thing was to be brought about. I say \"thing\"\u2014 be it observed \u2014 for they tell me in the Latin for it is rem. By the way, talking of Latin, can any one tell me the meaning of quocunque \u2014 or what is the meaning of modo?\n\nMy plan was exceedingly simple. I bought, for a song, a sixteenth of the \"Snapping-Turtle\":\u2014 that was all. The thing was done, and I put money in my purse. There were some trivial arrangements afterward, to be sure, but these formed no portion of the plan. They were a consequence \u2014 a result. For example, I bought pen, ink, and paper, and put them into furious activity. Having thus completed a Magazine article, I gave it, for appellation, \"Fol Lol, by the Author of 'THE OIL-OF-BOB,'\" and enveloped it to the \"Goosetherumfoodle.\" That journal, however, having pronounced it \"twattle\" in the \"Monthly Notices to Correspondents,\" I reheaded the paper \"Hey-Diddle-Diddle,\" by Thigum BOB, Esq., Author of the Ode on 'The Oil-of-Bob,' and Editor of the 'Snapping Turtle.'\" With this amendment, I re-enclosed it to the \"Goosetherumfoodle,\" and, while I awaited a reply, published daily, in the \"Turtle,\" six columns of what may be termed philosophical and analytical investigation of the literary merits of the \"Goosetherumfoodle,\" as well as of the personal character of the editor of the \"Goosetherumfoodle.\" At the end of a week the \"Goosetherumfoodle,\" discovered that it had, by some odd mistake, \"confounded a stupid article, headed 'Hey-Diddle-Diddle,' and composed by some unknown ignoramus, with a gem of resplendent lustre similarly entitled, the work of Thingum Bob, Esq, the celebrated author of 'The Oil-of-Bob.'\" The \"Goosetherumfoodle\" deeply \"regretted this very natural accident,\" and promised, moreover, an insertion of the genuine \"Hey-Diddle-Diddle\" in the very next number of the Magazine.\n\nThe fact is, I thought \u2014 I really thought \u2014 I thought at the time \u2014 I thought then \u2014 and have no reason for thinking otherwise now \u2014 that the \"Goosetherumfoodle\" did make a mistake. With the best intentions in the world, I never knew any thing that made as many singular mistakes as the \"Goosetherumfoodle.\" From that day I took a liking to the \"Goosetherumfoodle\" and the result was I soon saw into the very depths of its literary merits, and did not fail to expatiate upon them, in the \"Turtle,\" whenever a fitting opportunity occurred. And it is to be regarded as a very peculiar coincidence \u2014 as one of those positively remarkable coincidences which set a man to serious thinking \u2014 that just such a total revolution of opinion \u2014 just such entire bouleversement (as we say in French)\u2014 just such thorough topsiturviness (if I may be permitted to employ a rather forcible term of the Choctaws), as happened, pro and con, between myself on the one part, and the \"Goosetherumfoodle\" on the other, did actually again happen, in a brief period afterwards, and with precisely similar circumstances, in the case of myself and the \"Rowdy-Dow,\" and in the case of myself and the \"Hum-Drum.\"\n\nThus it was that, by a master-stroke of genius, I at length consummated my triumphs by \"putting money in my purse,\" and thus may be said really and fairly to have commenced that brilliant and eventful career which rendered me illustrious, and which now enables me to say with Chateaubriand: \"I have made history\"\u2014 J'ai fait l'histoire.\"\n\nI have indeed \"made history.\" From the bright epoch which I now record, my actions \u2014 my works \u2014 are the property of mankind. They are familiar to the world. It is, then, needless for me to detail how, soaring rapidly, I fell heir to the \"Lollipop\"\u2014 how I merged this journal in the \"Hum-Drum\"\u2014 how again I made purchase of the \"Rowdy-Dow,\" thus combining the three periodicals \u2014 how lastly, I effected a bargain for the sole remaining rival, and united all the literature of the country in one magnificent Magazine known everywhere as the \u2014\n\n\u2002Rowdy-Dow, Lollipop, Hum-Drum,\n\n\u2002and\n\n\u2002Goosetherumfoodle.\n\nYes, I have made history. My fame is universal. It extends to the uttermost ends of the earth. You cannot take up a common newspaper in which you shall not see some allusion to the immortal Thigum Bob. It is Mr. Thingum Bob said so, and Mr. Thingum Bob wrote this, and Mr. Thingum Bob did that. But I am meek and expire with an humble heart. After all, what is it? \u2014 this indescribable something which men will persist in terming \"genius\"? I agree with Buffon \u2014 with Hogarth \u2014 it is but diligence after all.\n\nLook at me! \u2014 how I labored \u2014 how I toiled \u2014 how I wrote! Ye Gods, did I not write? I knew not the word \"ease.\" By day I adhered to my desk, and at night, a pale student, I consumed the midnight oil. You should have seen me \u2014 you should. I leaned to the right. I leaned to the left. I sat forward. I sat backward. I sat tete baissee (as they have it in the Kickapoo), bowing my head close to the alabaster page. And, through all, I\u2014 wrote. Through joy and through sorrow, I-wrote. Through hunger and through thirst, I-wrote. Through good report and through ill report \u2014 I wrote. Through sunshine and through moonshine, I-wrote. What I wrote it is unnecessary to say. The style! \u2014 that was the thing. I caught it from Fatquack \u2014 whizz! \u2014 fizz! \u2014 and I am giving you a specimen of it now.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Oblong Box by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nSome years ago, I engaged passage from Charleston, S. C, to the city of New York, in the fine packet-ship \"Independence,\" Captain Hardy. We were to sail on the fifteenth of the month (June), weather permitting; and on the fourteenth, I went on board to arrange some matters in my stateroom.\n\nI found that we were to have a great many passengers, including a more than usual number of ladies. On the list were several of my acquaintances, and among other names, I was rejoiced to see that of Mr. Cornelius Wyatt, a young artist, for whom I entertained feelings of warm friendship. He had been with me a fellow-student at C\u2014 University, where we were very much together. He had the ordinary temperament of genius, and was a compound of misanthropy, sensibility, and enthusiasm. To these qualities he united the warmest and truest heart which ever beat in a human bosom.\n\nI observed that his name was carded upon three staterooms; and, upon again referring to the list of passengers, I found that he had engaged passage for himself, wife, and two sisters \u2014 his own. The staterooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one above the other. These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three staterooms for these four persons. I was, just at that epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary stateroom. It was no business of mine, to be sure, but with none the less pertinacity did I occupy myself in attempts to resolve the enigma. At last I reached a conclusion which wrought in me great wonder why I had not arrived at it before. \"It is a servant of course,\" I said; \"what a fool I am, not sooner to have thought of so obvious a solution!\" And then I again repaired to the list \u2014 but here I saw distinctly that no servant was to come with the party, although, in fact, it had been the original design to bring one \u2014 for the words \"and servant\" had been first written and then overscored. \"Oh, extra baggage, to be sure,\" I now said to myself \u2014\"something he wishes not to be put in the hold \u2014 something to be kept under his own eye \u2014 ah, I have it \u2014 a painting or so \u2014 and this is what he has been bargaining about with Nicolino, the Italian Jew.\" This idea satisfied me, and I dismissed my curiosity for the nonce.\n\nWyatt's two sisters I knew very well, and most amiable and clever girls they were. His wife he had newly married, and I had never yet seen her. He had often talked about her in my presence, however, and in his usual style of enthusiasm. He described her as of surpassing beauty, wit, and accomplishment. I was, therefore, quite anxious to make her acquaintance.\n\nOn the day in which I visited the ship (the fourteenth), Wyatt and party were also to visit it \u2014 so the captain informed me \u2014 and I waited on board an hour longer than I had designed, in hope of being presented to the bride, but then an apology came. \"Mrs. W. was a little indisposed, and would decline coming on board until to-morrow, at the hour of sailing.\"\n\nThe morrow having arrived, I was going from my hotel to the wharf, when Captain Hardy met me and said that, \"owing to circumstances\" (a stupid but convenient phrase), \"he rather thought the 'Independence' would not sail for a day or two, and that when all was ready, he would send up and let me know.\" This I thought strange, for there was a stiff southerly breeze; but as \"the circumstances\" were not forthcoming, although I pumped for them with much perseverance, I had nothing to do but to return home and digest my impatience at leisure.\n\nI did not receive the expected message from the captain for nearly a week. It came at length, however, and I immediately went on board. The ship was crowded with passengers, and every thing was in the bustle attendant upon making sail. Wyatt's party arrived in about ten minutes after myself. There were the two sisters, the bride, and the artist \u2014 the latter in one of his customary fits of moody misanthropy. I was too well used to these, however, to pay them any special attention. He did not even introduce me to his wife \u2014 this courtesy devolving, per force, upon his sister Marian \u2014 a very sweet and intelligent girl, who, in a few hurried words, made us acquainted.\n\nMrs. Wyatt had been closely veiled; and when she raised her veil, in acknowledging my bow, I confess that I was very profoundly astonished. I should have been much more so, however, had not long experience advised me not to trust, with too implicit a reliance, the enthusiastic descriptions of my friend, the artist, when indulging in comments upon the loveliness of woman. When beauty was the theme, I well knew with what facility he soared into the regions of the purely ideal.\n\nThe truth is, I could not help regarding Mrs. Wyatt as a decidedly plain-looking woman. If not positively ugly, she was not, I think, very far from it. She was dressed, however, in exquisite taste \u2014 and then I had no doubt that she had captivated my friend's heart by the more enduring graces of the intellect and soul. She said very few words, and passed at once into her stateroom with Mr. W.\n\nMy old inquisitiveness now returned. There was no servant \u2014 that was a settled point. I looked, therefore, for the extra baggage. After some delay, a cart arrived at the wharf, with an oblong pine box, which was every thing that seemed to be expected. Immediately upon its arrival we made sail, and in a short time were safely over the bar and standing out to sea.\n\nThe box in question was, as I say, oblong. It was about six feet in length by two and a half in breadth; I observed it attentively, and like to be precise. Now this shape was peculiar; and no sooner had I seen it, than I took credit to myself for the accuracy of my guessing. I had reached the conclusion, it will be remembered, that the extra baggage of my friend, the artist, would prove to be pictures, or at least a picture; for I knew he had been for several weeks in conference with Nicolino:\u2014 and now here was a box, which, from its shape, could possibly contain nothing in the world but a copy of Leonardo's \"Last Supper;\" and a copy of this very \"Last Supper,\" done by Rubini the younger, at Florence, I had known, for some time, to be in the possession of Nicolino. This point, therefore, I considered as sufficiently settled. I chuckled excessively when I thought of my acumen. It was the first time I had ever known Wyatt to keep from me any of his artistical secrets; but here he evidently intended to steal a march upon me, and smuggle a fine picture to New York, under my very nose; expecting me to know nothing of the matter. I resolved to quiz him well, now and hereafter.\n\nOne thing, however, annoyed me not a little. The box did not go into the extra stateroom. It was deposited in Wyatt's own; and there, too, it remained, occupying very nearly the whole of the floor \u2014 no doubt to the exceeding discomfort of the artist and his wife; \u2014 this the more especially as the tar or paint with which it was lettered in sprawling capitals, emitted a strong, disagreeable, and, to my fancy, a peculiarly disgusting odor. On the lid were painted the words \u2014\"Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, Albany, New York. Charge of Cornelius Wyatt, Esq. This side up. To be handled with care.\"\n\nNow, I was aware that Mrs. Adelaide Curtis, of Albany, was the artist's wife's mother \u2014 but then I looked upon the whole address as a mystification, intended especially for myself. I made up my mind, of course, that the box and contents would never get farther north than the studio of my misanthropic friend, in Chambers Street, New York.\n\nFor the first three or four days we had fine weather, although the wind was dead ahead; having chopped round to the northward, immediately upon our losing sight of the coast. The passengers were, consequently, in high spirits and disposed to be social. I must except, however, Wyatt and his sisters, who behaved stiffly, and, I could not help thinking, uncourteously to the rest of the party. Wyatt's conduct I did not so much regard. He was gloomy, even beyond his usual habit \u2014 in fact he was morose \u2014 but in him I was prepared for eccentricity. For the sisters, however, I could make no excuse. They secluded themselves in their staterooms during the greater part of the passage, and absolutely refused, although I repeatedly urged them, to hold communication with any person on board.\n\nMrs. Wyatt herself was far more agreeable. That is to say, she was chatty; and to be chatty is no slight recommendation at sea. She became excessively intimate with most of the ladies; and, to my profound astonishment, evinced no equivocal disposition to coquet with the men. She amused us all very much. I say \"amused\"\u2014 and scarcely know how to explain myself. The truth is, I soon found that Mrs. W. was far oftener laughed at than with. The gentlemen said little about her; but the ladies, in a little while, pronounced her \"a good-hearted thing, rather indifferent looking, totally uneducated, and decidedly vulgar.\" The great wonder was, how Wyatt had been entrapped into such a match. Wealth was the general solution \u2014 but this I knew to be no solution at all; for Wyatt had told me that she neither brought him a dollar nor had any expectations from any source whatever. \"He had married,\" he said, \"for love, and for love only; and his bride was far more than worthy of his love.\" When I thought of these expressions, on the part of my friend, I confess that I felt indescribably puzzled. Could it be possible that he was taking leave of his senses? What else could I think? He, so refined, so intellectual, so fastidious, with so exquisite a perception of the faulty, and so keen an appreciation of the beautiful! To be sure, the lady seemed especially fond of him \u2014 particularly so in his absence \u2014 when she made herself ridiculous by frequent quotations of what had been said by her \"beloved husband, Mr. Wyatt.\" The word \"husband\" seemed forever \u2014 to use one of her own delicate expressions \u2014 forever \"on the tip of her tongue.\" In the meantime, it was observed by all on board, that he avoided her in the most pointed manner, and, for the most part, shut himself up alone in his stateroom, where, in fact, he might have been said to live altogether, leaving his wife at full liberty to amuse herself as she thought best, in the public society of the main cabin.\n\nMy conclusion, from what I saw and heard, was, that, the artist, by some unaccountable freak of fate, or perhaps in some fit of enthusiastic and fanciful passion, had been induced to unite himself with a person altogether beneath him, and that the natural result, entire and speedy disgust, had ensued. I pitied him from the bottom of my heart \u2014 but could not, for that reason, quite forgive his incommunicativeness in the matter of the \"Last Supper.\" For this I resolved to have my revenge.\n\nOne day he came upon deck, and, taking his arm as had been my wont, I sauntered with him backward and forward. His gloom, however (which I considered quite natural under the circumstances), seemed entirely unabated. He said little, and that moodily, and with evident effort. I ventured a jest or two, and he made a sickening attempt at a smile. Poor fellow! \u2014 as I thought of his wife, I wondered that he could have heart to put on even the semblance of mirth. I determined to commence a series of covert insinuations, or innuendoes, about the oblong box \u2014 just to let him perceive, gradually, that I was not altogether the butt, or victim, of his little bit of pleasant mystification. My first observation was by way of opening a masked battery. I said something about the \"peculiar shape of that box-,\" and, as I spoke the words, I smiled knowingly, winked, and touched him gently with my forefinger in the ribs.\n\nThe manner in which Wyatt received this harmless pleasantry convinced me, at once, that he was mad. At first he stared at me as if he found it impossible to comprehend the witticism of my remark; but as its point seemed slowly to make its way into his brain, his eyes, in the same proportion, seemed protruding from their sockets. Then he grew very red \u2014 then hideously pale \u2014 then, as if highly amused with what I had insinuated, he began a loud and boisterous laugh, which, to my astonishment, he kept up, with gradually increasing vigor, for ten minutes or more. In conclusion, he fell flat and heavily upon the deck. When I ran to uplift him, to all appearance he was dead.\n\nI called assistance, and, with much difficulty, we brought him to himself. Upon reviving he spoke incoherently for some time. At length we bled him and put him to bed. The next morning he was quite recovered, so far as regarded his mere bodily health. Of his mind I say nothing, of course. I avoided him during the rest of the passage, by advice of the captain, who seemed to coincide with me altogether in my views of his insanity, but cautioned me to say nothing on this head to any person on board.\n\nSeveral circumstances occurred immediately after this fit of Wyatt which contributed to heighten the curiosity with which I was already possessed. Among other things, this: I had been nervous \u2014 drank too much strong green tea, and slept ill at night \u2014 in fact, for two nights I could not be properly said to sleep at all. Now, my stateroom opened into the main cabin, or dining-room, as did those of all the single men on board. Wyatt's three rooms were in the after-cabin, which was separated from the main one by a slight sliding door, never locked even at night. As we were almost constantly on a wind, and the breeze was not a little stiff, the ship heeled to leeward very considerably; and whenever her starboard side was to leeward, the sliding door between the cabins slid open, and so remained, nobody taking the trouble to get up and shut it. But my berth was in such a position, that when my own stateroom door was open, as well as the sliding door in question (and my own door was always open on account of the heat,) I could see into the after-cabin quite distinctly, and just at that portion of it, too, where were situated the staterooms of Mr. Wyatt. Well, during two nights (not consecutive) while I lay awake, I clearly saw Mrs. W., about eleven o'clock upon each night, steal cautiously from the stateroom of Mr. W., and enter the extra room, where she remained until daybreak, when she was called by her husband and went back. That they were virtually separated was clear. They had separate apartments \u2014 no doubt in contemplation of a more permanent divorce; and here, after all I thought was the mystery of the extra stateroom.\n\nThere was another circumstance, too, which interested me much. During the two wakeful nights in question, and immediately after the disappearance of Mrs. Wyatt into the extra stateroom, I was attracted by certain singular cautious, subdued noises in that of her husband. After listening to them for some time, with thoughtful attention, I at length succeeded perfectly in translating their import. They were sounds occasioned by the artist in prying open the oblong box, by means of a chisel and mallet \u2014 the latter being apparently muffled, or deadened, by some soft woollen or cotton substance in which its head was enveloped.\n\nIn this manner I fancied I could distinguish the precise moment when he fairly disengaged the lid \u2014 also, that I could determine when he removed it altogether, and when he deposited it upon the lower berth in his room; this latter point I knew, for example, by certain slight taps which the lid made in striking against the wooden edges of the berth, as he endeavored to lay it down very gently \u2014 there being no room for it on the floor. After this there was a dead stillness, and I heard nothing more, upon either occasion, until nearly daybreak; unless, perhaps, I may mention a low sobbing, or murmuring sound, so very much suppressed as to be nearly inaudible \u2014 if, indeed, the whole of this latter noise were not rather produced by my own imagination. I say it seemed to resemble sobbing or sighing \u2014 but, of course, it could not have been either. I rather think it was a ringing in my own ears. Mr. Wyatt, no doubt, according to custom, was merely giving the rein to one of his hobbies \u2014 indulging in one of his fits of artistic enthusiasm. He had opened his oblong box, in order to feast his eyes on the pictorial treasure within. There was nothing in this, however, to make him sob. I repeat, therefore, that it must have been simply a freak of my own fancy, distempered by good Captain Hardy's green tea. just before dawn, on each of the two nights of which I speak, I distinctly heard Mr. Wyatt replace the lid upon the oblong box, and force the nails into their old places by means of the muffled mallet. Having done this, he issued from his stateroom, fully dressed, and proceeded to call Mrs. W. from hers.\n\nWe had been at sea seven days, and were now off Cape Hatteras, when there came a tremendously heavy blow from the southwest. We were, in a measure, prepared for it, however, as the weather had been holding out threats for some time. Every thing was made snug, alow and aloft; and as the wind steadily freshened, we lay to, at length, under spanker and foretopsail, both double-reefed.\n\nIn this trim we rode safely enough for forty-eight hours \u2014 the ship proving herself an excellent sea-boat in many respects, and shipping no water of any consequence. At the end of this period, however, the gale had freshened into a hurricane, and our after \u2014 sail split into ribbons, bringing us so much in the trough of the water that we shipped several prodigious seas, one immediately after the other. By this accident we lost three men overboard with the caboose, and nearly the whole of the larboard bulwarks. Scarcely had we recovered our senses, before the foretopsail went into shreds, when we got up a storm stay \u2014 sail and with this did pretty well for some hours, the ship heading the sea much more steadily than before.\n\nThe gale still held on, however, and we saw no signs of its abating. The rigging was found to be ill-fitted, and greatly strained; and on the third day of the blow, about five in the afternoon, our mizzen-mast, in a heavy lurch to windward, went by the board. For an hour or more, we tried in vain to get rid of it, on account of the prodigious rolling of the ship; and, before we had succeeded, the carpenter came aft and announced four feet of water in the hold. To add to our dilemma, we found the pumps choked and nearly useless.\n\nAll was now confusion and despair \u2014 but an effort was made to lighten the ship by throwing overboard as much of her cargo as could be reached, and by cutting away the two masts that remained. This we at last accomplished \u2014 but we were still unable to do any thing at the pumps; and, in the meantime, the leak gained on us very fast.\n\nAt sundown, the gale had sensibly diminished in violence, and as the sea went down with it, we still entertained faint hopes of saving ourselves in the boats. At eight P. M., the clouds broke away to windward, and we had the advantage of a full moon \u2014 a piece of good fortune which served wonderfully to cheer our drooping spirits.\n\nAfter incredible labor we succeeded, at length, in getting the longboat over the side without material accident, and into this we crowded the whole of the crew and most of the passengers. This party made off immediately, and, after undergoing much suffering, finally arrived, in safety, at Ocracoke Inlet, on the third day after the wreck.\n\nFourteen passengers, with the captain, remained on board, resolving to trust their fortunes to the jolly-boat at the stern. We lowered it without difficulty, although it was only by a miracle that we prevented it from swamping as it touched the water. It contained, when afloat, the captain and his wife, Mr. Wyatt and party, a Mexican officer, wife, four children, and myself, with a negro valet.\n\nWe had no room, of course, for any thing except a few positively necessary instruments, some provisions, and the clothes upon our backs. No one had thought of even attempting to save any thing more. What must have been the astonishment of all, then, when having proceeded a few fathoms from the ship, Mr. Wyatt stood up in the stern-sheets, and coolly demanded of Captain Hardy that the boat should be put back for the purpose of taking in his oblong box!\n\n\"Sit down, Mr. Wyatt,\" replied the captain, somewhat sternly, \"you will capsize us if you do not sit quite still. Our gunwhale is almost in the water now.\"\n\n\"The box!\" vociferated Mr. Wyatt, still standing \u2014\"the box, I say! Captain Hardy, you cannot, you will not refuse me. Its weight will be but a trifle \u2014 it is nothing \u2014 mere nothing. By the mother who bore you \u2014 for the love of Heaven \u2014 by your hope of salvation, I implore you to put back for the box!\"\n\nThe captain, for a moment, seemed touched by the earnest appeal of the artist, but he regained his stern composure, and merely said:\n\n\"Mr. Wyatt, you are mad. I cannot listen to you. Sit down, I say, or you will swamp the boat. Stay \u2014 hold him \u2014 seize him! \u2014 he is about to spring overboard! There \u2014 I knew it \u2014 he is over!\"\n\nAs the captain said this, Mr. Wyatt, in fact, sprang from the boat, and, as we were yet in the lee of the wreck, succeeded, by almost superhuman exertion, in getting hold of a rope which hung from the fore-chains. In another moment he was on board, and rushing frantically down into the cabin.\n\nIn the meantime, we had been swept astern of the ship, and being quite out of her lee, were at the mercy of the tremendous sea which was still running. We made a determined effort to put back, but our little boat was like a feather in the breath of the tempest. We saw at a glance that the doom of the unfortunate artist was sealed.\n\nAs our distance from the wreck rapidly increased, the madman (for as such only could we regard him) was seen to emerge from the companion \u2014 way, up which by dint of strength that appeared gigantic, he dragged, bodily, the oblong box. While we gazed in the extremity of astonishment, he passed, rapidly, several turns of a three-inch rope, first around the box and then around his body. In another instant both body and box were in the sea \u2014 disappearing suddenly, at once and forever.\n\nWe lingered awhile sadly upon our oars, with our eyes riveted upon the spot. At length we pulled away. The silence remained unbroken for an hour. Finally, I hazarded a remark.\n\n\"Did you observe, captain, how suddenly they sank? Was not that an exceedingly singular thing? I confess that I entertained some feeble hope of his final deliverance, when I saw him lash himself to the box, and commit himself to the sea.\"\n\n\"They sank as a matter of course,\" replied the captain, \"and that like a shot. They will soon rise again, however \u2014 but not till the salt melts.\"\n\n\"The salt!\" I ejaculated.\n\n\"Hush!\" said the captain, pointing to the wife and sisters of the deceased. \"We must talk of these things at some more appropriate time.\"\n\nWe suffered much, and made a narrow escape, but fortune befriended us, as well as our mates in the longboat. We landed, in fine, more dead than alive, after four days of intense distress, upon the beach opposite Roanoke Island. We remained here a week, were not ill-treated by the wreckers, and at length obtained a passage to New York.\n\nAbout a month after the loss of the \"Independence,\" I happened to meet Captain Hardy in Broadway. Our conversation turned, naturally, upon the disaster, and especially upon the sad fate of poor Wyatt. I thus learned the following particulars.\n\nThe artist had engaged passage for himself, wife, two sisters and a servant. His wife was, indeed, as she had been represented, a most lovely, and most accomplished woman. On the morning of the fourteenth of June (the day in which I first visited the ship), the lady suddenly sickened and died. The young husband was frantic with grief \u2014 but circumstances imperatively forbade the deferring his voyage to New York. It was necessary to take to her mother the corpse of his adored wife, and, on the other hand, the universal prejudice which would prevent his doing so openly was well known. Nine-tenths of the passengers would have abandoned the ship rather than take passage with a dead body.\n\nIn this dilemma, Captain Hardy arranged that the corpse, being first partially embalmed, and packed, with a large quantity of salt, in a box of suitable dimensions, should be conveyed on board as merchandise. Nothing was to be said of the lady's decease; and, as it was well understood that Mr. Wyatt had engaged passage for his wife, it became necessary that some person should personate her during the voyage. This the deceased lady's -maid was easily prevailed on to do. The extra stateroom, originally engaged for this girl during her mistress' life, was now merely retained. In this stateroom the pseudo-wife, slept, of course, every night. In the daytime she performed, to the best of her ability, the part of her mistress \u2014 whose person, it had been carefully ascertained, was unknown to any of the passengers on board.\n\nMy own mistake arose, naturally enough, through too careless, too inquisitive, and too impulsive a temperament. But of late, it is a rare thing that I sleep soundly at night. There is a countenance which haunts me, turn as I will. There is an hysterical laugh which will forever ring within my ears.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThere are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of \"pleasurable pain\" over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact \u2014 it is the reality \u2014 it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence.\n\nI have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august calamities on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the character of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not remind the reader that, from the long and weird catalogue of human miseries, I might have selected many individual instances more replete with essential suffering than any of these vast generalities of disaster. The true wretchedness, indeed \u2014 the ultimate woe \u2014 is particular, not diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass \u2014 for this let us thank a merciful God!\n\nTo be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very frequently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mysterious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?\n\nApart, however, from the inevitable conclusion, a priori that such causes must produce such effects \u2014 that the well-known occurrence of such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise, now and then, to premature interments \u2014 apart from this consideration, we have the direct testimony of medical and ordinary experience to prove that a vast number of such interments have actually taken place. I might refer at once, if necessary to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely-extended excitement. The wife of one of the most respectable citizens-a lawyer of eminence and a member of Congress \u2014 was seized with a sudden and unaccountable illness, which completely baffled the skill of her physicians. After much suffering she died, or was supposed to die. No one suspected, indeed, or had reason to suspect, that she was not actually dead. She presented all the ordinary appearances of death. The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lustreless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity. The funeral, in short, was hastened, on account of the rapid advance of what was supposed to be decomposition.\n\nThe lady was deposited in her family vault, which, for three subsequent years, was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term it was opened for the reception of a sarcophagus; \u2014 but, alas! how fearful a shock awaited the husband, who, personally, threw open the door! As its portals swung outwardly back, some white-apparelled object fell rattling within his arms. It was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmoulded shroud.\n\nA careful investigation rendered it evident that she had revived within two days after her entombment; that her struggles within the coffin had caused it to fall from a ledge, or shelf to the floor, where it was so broken as to permit her escape. A lamp which had been accidentally left, full of oil, within the tomb, was found empty; it might have been exhausted, however, by evaporation. On the uttermost of the steps which led down into the dread chamber was a large fragment of the coffin, with which, it seemed, that she had endeavored to arrest attention by striking the iron door. While thus occupied, she probably swooned, or possibly died, through sheer terror; and, in failing, her shroud became entangled in some iron \u2014 work which projected interiorly. Thus she remained, and thus she rotted, erect.\n\nIn the year 1810, a case of living inhumation happened in France, attended with circumstances which go far to warrant the assertion that truth is, indeed, stranger than fiction. The heroine of the story was a Mademoiselle Victorine Lafourcade, a young girl of illustrious family, of wealth, and of great personal beauty. Among her numerous suitors was Julien Bossuet, a poor litterateur, or journalist of Paris. His talents and general amiability had recommended him to the notice of the heiress, by whom he seems to have been truly beloved; but her pride of birth decided her, finally, to reject him, and to wed a Monsieur Renelle, a banker and a diplomatist of some eminence. After marriage, however, this gentleman neglected, and, perhaps, even more positively ill-treated her. Having passed with him some wretched years, she died \u2014 at least her condition so closely resembled death as to deceive every one who saw her. She was buried \u2014 not in a vault, but in an ordinary grave in the village of her nativity. Filled with despair, and still inflamed by the memory of a profound attachment, the lover journeys from the capital to the remote province in which the village lies, with the romantic purpose of disinterring the corpse, and possessing himself of its luxuriant tresses. He reaches the grave. At midnight he unearths the coffin, opens it, and is in the act of detaching the hair, when he is arrested by the unclosing of the beloved eyes. In fact, the lady had been buried alive. Vitality had not altogether departed, and she was aroused by the caresses of her lover from the lethargy which had been mistaken for death. He bore her frantically to his lodgings in the village. He employed certain powerful restoratives suggested by no little medical learning. In fine, she revived. She recognized her preserver. She remained with him until, by slow degrees, she fully recovered her original health. Her woman's heart was not adamant, and this last lesson of love sufficed to soften it. She bestowed it upon Bossuet. She returned no more to her husband, but, concealing from him her resurrection, fled with her lover to America. Twenty years afterward, the two returned to France, in the persuasion that time had so greatly altered the lady's appearance that her friends would be unable to recognize her. They were mistaken, however, for, at the first meeting, Monsieur Renelle did actually recognize and make claim to his wife. This claim she resisted, and a judicial tribunal sustained her in her resistance, deciding that the peculiar circumstances, with the long lapse of years, had extinguished, not only equitably, but legally, the authority of the husband.\n\nThe \"Chirurgical Journal\" of Leipsic \u2014 a periodical of high authority and merit, which some American bookseller would do well to translate and republish, records in a late number a very distressing event of the character in question.\n\nAn officer of artillery, a man of gigantic stature and of robust health, being thrown from an unmanageable horse, received a very severe contusion upon the head, which rendered him insensible at once; the skull was slightly fractured, but no immediate danger was apprehended. Trepanning was accomplished successfully. He was bled, and many other of the ordinary means of relief were adopted. Gradually, however, he fell into a more and more hopeless state of stupor, and, finally, it was thought that he died.\n\nThe weather was warm, and he was buried with indecent haste in one of the public cemeteries. His funeral took place on Thursday. On the Sunday following, the grounds of the cemetery were, as usual, much thronged with visiters, and about noon an intense excitement was created by the declaration of a peasant that, while sitting upon the grave of the officer, he had distinctly felt a commotion of the earth, as if occasioned by some one struggling beneath. At first little attention was paid to the man's asseveration; but his evident terror, and the dogged obstinacy with which he persisted in his story, had at length their natural effect upon the crowd. Spades were hurriedly procured, and the grave, which was shamefully shallow, was in a few minutes so far thrown open that the head of its occupant appeared. He was then seemingly dead; but he sat nearly erect within his coffin, the lid of which, in his furious struggles, he had partially uplifted.\n\nHe was forthwith conveyed to the nearest hospital, and there pronounced to be still living, although in an asphytic condition. After some hours he revived, recognized individuals of his acquaintance, and, in broken sentences spoke of his agonies in the grave.\n\nFrom what he related, it was clear that he must have been conscious of life for more than an hour, while inhumed, before lapsing into insensibility. The grave was carelessly and loosely filled with an exceedingly porous soil; and thus some air was necessarily admitted. He heard the footsteps of the crowd overhead, and endeavored to make himself heard in turn. It was the tumult within the grounds of the cemetery, he said, which appeared to awaken him from a deep sleep, but no sooner was he awake than he became fully aware of the awful horrors of his position.\n\nThis patient, it is recorded, was doing well and seemed to be in a fair way of ultimate recovery, but fell a victim to the quackeries of medical experiment. The galvanic battery was applied, and he suddenly expired in one of those ecstatic paroxysms which, occasionally, it superinduces.\n\nThe mention of the galvanic battery, nevertheless, recalls to my memory a well known and very extraordinary case in point, where its action proved the means of restoring to animation a young attorney of London, who had been interred for two days. This occurred in 1831, and created, at the time, a very profound sensation wherever it was made the subject of converse.\n\nThe patient, Mr. Edward Stapleton, had died, apparently of typhus fever, accompanied with some anomalous symptoms which had excited the curiosity of his medical attendants. Upon his seeming decease, his friends were requested to sanction a post-mortem examination, but declined to permit it. As often happens, when such refusals are made, the practitioners resolved to disinter the body and dissect it at leisure, in private. Arrangements were easily effected with some of the numerous corps of body-snatchers, with which London abounds; and, upon the third night after the funeral, the supposed corpse was unearthed from a grave eight feet deep, and deposited in the opening chamber of one of the private hospitals.\n\nAn incision of some extent had been actually made in the abdomen, when the fresh and undecayed appearance of the subject suggested an application of the battery. One experiment succeeded another, and the customary effects supervened, with nothing to characterize them in any respect, except, upon one or two occasions, a more than ordinary degree of life-likeness in the convulsive action.\n\nIt grew late. The day was about to dawn; and it was thought expedient, at length, to proceed at once to the dissection. A student, however, was especially desirous of testing a theory of his own, and insisted upon applying the battery to one of the pectoral muscles. A rough gash was made, and a wire hastily brought in contact, when the patient, with a hurried but quite unconvulsive movement, arose from the table, stepped into the middle of the floor, gazed about him uneasily for a few seconds, and then \u2014 spoke. What he said was unintelligible, but words were uttered; the syllabification was distinct. Having spoken, he fell heavily to the floor.\n\nFor some moments all were paralyzed with awe \u2014 but the urgency of the case soon restored them their presence of mind. It was seen that Mr. Stapleton was alive, although in a swoon. Upon exhibition of ether he revived and was rapidly restored to health, and to the society of his friends \u2014 from whom, however, all knowledge of his resuscitation was withheld, until a relapse was no longer to be apprehended. Their wonder \u2014 their rapturous astonishment \u2014 may be conceived.\n\nThe most thrilling peculiarity of this incident, nevertheless, is involved in what Mr. S. himself asserts. He declares that at no period was he altogether insensible \u2014 that, dully and confusedly, he was aware of everything which happened to him, from the moment in which he was pronounced dead by his physicians, to that in which he fell swooning to the floor of the hospital. \"I am alive,\" were the uncomprehended words which, upon recognizing the locality of the dissecting-room, he had endeavored, in his extremity, to utter.\n\nIt were an easy matter to multiply such histories as these \u2014 but I forbear \u2014 for, indeed, we have no need of such to establish the fact that premature interments occur. When we reflect how very rarely, from the nature of the case, we have it in our power to detect them, we must admit that they may frequently occur without our cognizance. Scarcely, in truth, is a graveyard ever encroached upon, for any purpose, to any great extent, that skeletons are not found in postures which suggest the most fearful of suspicions.\n\nFearful indeed the suspicion \u2014 but more fearful the doom! It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death. The unendurable oppression of the lungs \u2014 the stifling fumes from the damp earth \u2014 the clinging to the death garments \u2014 the rigid embrace of the narrow house \u2014 the blackness of the absolute Night \u2014 the silence like a sea that overwhelms \u2014 the unseen but palpable presence of the Conqueror Worm \u2014 these things, with the thoughts of the air and grass above, with memory of dear friends who would fly to save us if but informed of our fate, and with consciousness that of this fate they can never be informed \u2014 that our hopeless portion is that of the really dead \u2014 these considerations, I say, carry into the heart, which still palpitates, a degree of appalling and intolerable horror from which the most daring imagination must recoil. We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth \u2014 we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell. And thus all narratives upon this topic have an interest profound; an interest, nevertheless, which, through the sacred awe of the topic itself, very properly and very peculiarly depends upon our conviction of the truth of the matter narrated. What I have now to tell is of my own actual knowledge \u2014 of my own positive and personal experience.\n\nFor several years I had been subject to attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy, in default of a more definitive title. Although both the immediate and the predisposing causes, and even the actual diagnosis, of this disease are still mysterious, its obvious and apparent character is sufficiently well understood. Its variations seem to be chiefly of degree. Sometimes the patient lies, for a day only, or even for a shorter period, in a species of exaggerated lethargy. He is senseless and externally motionless; but the pulsation of the heart is still faintly perceptible; some traces of warmth remain; a slight color lingers within the centre of the cheek; and, upon application of a mirror to the lips, we can detect a torpid, unequal, and vacillating action of the lungs. Then again the duration of the trance is for weeks \u2014 even for months; while the closest scrutiny, and the most rigorous medical tests, fail to establish any material distinction between the state of the sufferer and what we conceive of absolute death. Very usually he is saved from premature interment solely by the knowledge of his friends that he has been previously subject to catalepsy, by the consequent suspicion excited, and, above all, by the non-appearance of decay. The advances of the malady are, luckily, gradual. The first manifestations, although marked, are unequivocal. The fits grow successively more and more distinctive, and endure each for a longer term than the preceding. In this lies the principal security from inhumation. The unfortunate whose first attack should be of the extreme character which is occasionally seen, would almost inevitably be consigned alive to the tomb.\n\nMy own case differed in no important particular from those mentioned in medical books. Sometimes, without any apparent cause, I sank, little by little, into a condition of hemi-syncope, or half swoon; and, in this condition, without pain, without ability to stir, or, strictly speaking, to think, but with a dull lethargic consciousness of life and of the presence of those who surrounded my bed, I remained, until the crisis of the disease restored me, suddenly, to perfect sensation. At other times I was quickly and impetuously smitten. I grew sick, and numb, and chilly, and dizzy, and so fell prostrate at once. Then, for weeks, all was void, and black, and silent, and Nothing became the universe. Total annihilation could be no more. From these latter attacks I awoke, however, with a gradation slow in proportion to the suddenness of the seizure. Just as the day dawns to the friendless and houseless beggar who roams the streets throughout the long desolate winter night \u2014 just so tardily \u2014 just so wearily \u2014 just so cheerily came back the light of the Soul to me.\n\nApart from the tendency to trance, however, my general health appeared to be good; nor could I perceive that it was at all affected by the one prevalent malady \u2014 unless, indeed, an idiosyncrasy in my ordinary sleep may be looked upon as superinduced. Upon awaking from slumber, I could never gain, at once, thorough possession of my senses, and always remained, for many minutes, in much bewilderment and perplexity; \u2014 the mental faculties in general, but the memory in especial, being in a condition of absolute abeyance.\n\nIn all that I endured there was no physical suffering but of moral distress an infinitude. My fancy grew charnel, I talked \"of worms, of tombs, and epitaphs.\" I was lost in reveries of death, and the idea of premature burial held continual possession of my brain. The ghastly Danger to which I was subjected haunted me day and night. In the former, the torture of meditation was excessive \u2014 in the latter, supreme. When the grim Darkness overspread the Earth, then, with every horror of thought, I shook \u2014 shook as the quivering plumes upon the hearse. When Nature could endure wakefulness no longer, it was with a struggle that I consented to sleep \u2014 for I shuddered to reflect that, upon awaking, I might find myself the tenant of a grave. And when, finally, I sank into slumber, it was only to rush at once into a world of phantasms, above which, with vast, sable, overshadowing wing, hovered, predominant, the one sepulchral Idea.\n\nFrom the innumerable images of gloom which thus oppressed me in dreams, I select for record but a solitary vision. Methought I was immersed in a cataleptic trance of more than usual duration and profundity. Suddenly there came an icy hand upon my forehead, and an impatient, gibbering voice whispered the word \"Arise!\" within my ear.\n\nI sat erect. The darkness was total. I could not see the figure of him who had aroused me. I could call to mind neither the period at which I had fallen into the trance, nor the locality in which I then lay. While I remained motionless, and busied in endeavors to collect my thought, the cold hand grasped me fiercely by the wrist, shaking it petulantly, while the gibbering voice said again:\n\n\"Arise! did I not bid thee arise?\"\n\n\"And who,\" I demanded, \"art thou?\"\n\n\"I have no name in the regions which I inhabit,\" replied the voice, mournfully; \"I was mortal, but am fiend. I was merciless, but am pitiful. Thou dost feel that I shudder. \u2014 My teeth chatter as I speak, yet it is not with the chilliness of the night \u2014 of the night without end. But this hideousness is insufferable. How canst thou tranquilly sleep? I cannot rest for the cry of these great agonies. These sights are more than I can bear. Get thee up! Come with me into the outer Night, and let me unfold to thee the graves. Is not this a spectacle of woe? \u2014 Behold!\"\n\nI looked; and the unseen figure, which still grasped me by the wrist, had caused to be thrown open the graves of all mankind, and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay, so that I could see into the innermost recesses, and there view the shrouded bodies in their sad and solemn slumbers with the worm. But alas! the real sleepers were fewer, by many millions, than those who slumbered not at all; and there was a feeble struggling; and there was a general sad unrest; and from out the depths of the countless pits there came a melancholy rustling from the garments of the buried. And of those who seemed tranquilly to repose, I saw that a vast number had changed, in a greater or less degree, the rigid and uneasy position in which they had originally been entombed. And the voice again said to me as I gazed:\n\n\"Is it not \u2014 oh! is it not a pitiful sight?\"\u2014 but, before I could find words to reply, the figure had ceased to grasp my wrist, the phosphoric lights expired, and the graves were closed with a sudden violence, while from out them arose a tumult of despairing cries, saying again: \"Is it not \u2014 O, God, is it not a very pitiful sight?\"\n\nPhantasies such as these, presenting themselves at night, extended their terrific influence far into my waking hours. My nerves became thoroughly unstrung, and I fell a prey to perpetual horror. I hesitated to ride, or to walk, or to indulge in any exercise that would carry me from home. In fact, I no longer dared trust myself out of the immediate presence of those who were aware of my proneness to catalepsy, lest, falling into one of my usual fits, I should be buried before my real condition could be ascertained. I doubted the care, the fidelity of my dearest friends. I dreaded that, in some trance of more than customary duration, they might be prevailed upon to regard me as irrecoverable. I even went so far as to fear that, as I occasioned much trouble, they might be glad to consider any very protracted attack as sufficient excuse for getting rid of me altogether. It was in vain they endeavored to reassure me by the most solemn promises. I exacted the most sacred oaths, that under no circumstances they would bury me until decomposition had so materially advanced as to render farther preservation impossible. And, even then, my mortal terrors would listen to no reason \u2014 would accept no consolation. I entered into a series of elaborate precautions. Among other things, I had the family vault so remodelled as to admit of being readily opened from within. The slightest pressure upon a long lever that extended far into the tomb would cause the iron portal to fly back. There were arrangements also for the free admission of air and light, and convenient receptacles for food and water, within immediate reach of the coffin intended for my reception. This coffin was warmly and softly padded, and was provided with a lid, fashioned upon the principle of the vault-door, with the addition of springs so contrived that the feeblest movement of the body would be sufficient to set it at liberty. Besides all this, there was suspended from the roof of the tomb, a large bell, the rope of which, it was designed, should extend through a hole in the coffin, and so be fastened to one of the hands of the corpse. But, alas? what avails the vigilance against the Destiny of man? Not even these well-contrived securities sufficed to save from the uttermost agonies of living inhumation, a wretch to these agonies foredoomed!\n\nThere arrived an epoch \u2014 as often before there had arrived \u2014 in which I found myself emerging from total unconsciousness into the first feeble and indefinite sense of existence. Slowly \u2014 with a tortoise gradation \u2014 approached the faint gray dawn of the psychal day. A torpid uneasiness. An apathetic endurance of dull pain. No care \u2014 no hope \u2014 no effort. Then, after a long interval, a ringing in the ears; then, after a lapse still longer, a prickling or tingling sensation in the extremities; then a seemingly eternal period of pleasurable quiescence, during which the awakening feelings are struggling into thought; then a brief re-sinking into non-entity; then a sudden recovery. At length the slight quivering of an eyelid, and immediately thereupon, an electric shock of a terror, deadly and indefinite, which sends the blood in torrents from the temples to the heart. And now the first positive effort to think. And now the first endeavor to remember. And now a partial and evanescent success. And now the memory has so far regained its dominion, that, in some measure, I am cognizant of my state. I feel that I am not awaking from ordinary sleep. I recollect that I have been subject to catalepsy. And now, at last, as if by the rush of an ocean, my shuddering spirit is overwhelmed by the one grim Danger \u2014 by the one spectral and ever-prevalent idea.\n\nFor some minutes after this fancy possessed me, I remained without motion. And why? I could not summon courage to move. I dared not make the effort which was to satisfy me of my fate \u2014 and yet there was something at my heart which whispered me it was sure. Despair \u2014 such as no other species of wretchedness ever calls into being \u2014 despair alone urged me, after long irresolution, to uplift the heavy lids of my eyes. I uplifted them. It was dark \u2014 all dark. I knew that the fit was over. I knew that the crisis of my disorder had long passed. I knew that I had now fully recovered the use of my visual faculties \u2014 and yet it was dark \u2014 all dark \u2014 the intense and utter raylessness of the Night that endureth for evermore.\n\nI endeavored to shriek-, and my lips and my parched tongue moved convulsively together in the attempt \u2014 but no voice issued from the cavernous lungs, which oppressed as if by the weight of some incumbent mountain, gasped and palpitated, with the heart, at every elaborate and struggling inspiration.\n\nThe movement of the jaws, in this effort to cry aloud, showed me that they were bound up, as is usual with the dead. I felt, too, that I lay upon some hard substance, and by something similar my sides were, also, closely compressed. So far, I had not ventured to stir any of my limbs \u2014 but now I violently threw up my arms, which had been lying at length, with the wrists crossed. They struck a solid wooden substance, which extended above my person at an elevation of not more than six inches from my face. I could no longer doubt that I reposed within a coffin at last.\n\nAnd now, amid all my infinite miseries, came sweetly the cherub Hope \u2014 for I thought of my precautions. I writhed, and made spasmodic exertions to force open the lid: it would not move. I felt my wrists for the bell-rope: it was not to be found. And now the Comforter fled for ever, and a still sterner Despair reigned triumphant; for I could not help perceiving the absence of the paddings which I had so carefully prepared \u2014 and then, too, there came suddenly to my nostrils the strong peculiar odor of moist earth. The conclusion was irresistible. I was not within the vault. I had fallen into a trance while absent from home-while among strangers \u2014 when, or how, I could not remember \u2014 and it was they who had buried me as a dog \u2014 nailed up in some common coffin \u2014 and thrust deep, deep, and for ever, into some ordinary and nameless grave.\n\nAs this awful conviction forced itself, thus, into the innermost chambers of my soul, I once again struggled to cry aloud. And in this second endeavor I succeeded. A long, wild, and continuous shriek, or yell of agony, resounded through the realms of the subterranean Night.\n\n\"Hillo! hillo, there!\" said a gruff voice, in reply.\n\n\"What the devil's the matter now!\" said a second.\n\n\"Get out o' that!\" said a third.\n\n\"What do you mean by yowling in that ere kind of style, like a cattymount?\" said a fourth; and hereupon I was seized and shaken without ceremony, for several minutes, by a junto of very rough-looking individuals. They did not arouse me from my slumber \u2014 for I was wide awake when I screamed \u2014 but they restored me to the full possession of my memory.\n\nThis adventure occurred near Richmond, in Virginia. Accompanied by a friend, I had proceeded, upon a gunning expedition, some miles down the banks of the James River. Night approached, and we were overtaken by a storm. The cabin of a small sloop lying at anchor in the stream, and laden with garden mould, afforded us the only available shelter. We made the best of it, and passed the night on board. I slept in one of the only two berths in the vessel \u2014 and the berths of a sloop of sixty or twenty tons need scarcely be described. That which I occupied had no bedding of any kind. Its extreme width was eighteen inches. The distance of its bottom from the deck overhead was precisely the same. I found it a matter of exceeding difficulty to squeeze myself in. Nevertheless, I slept soundly, and the whole of my vision \u2014 for it was no dream, and no nightmare \u2014 arose naturally from the circumstances of my position \u2014 from my ordinary bias of thought \u2014 and from the difficulty, to which I have alluded, of collecting my senses, and especially of regaining my memory, for a long time after awaking from slumber. The men who shook me were the crew of the sloop, and some laborers engaged to unload it. From the load itself came the earthly smell. The bandage about the jaws was a silk handkerchief in which I had bound up my head, in default of my customary nightcap.\n\nThe tortures endured, however, were indubitably quite equal for the time, to those of actual sepulture. They were fearfully \u2014 they were inconceivably hideous; but out of Evil proceeded Good; for their very excess wrought in my spirit an inevitable revulsion. My soul acquired tone \u2014 acquired temper. I went abroad. I took vigorous exercise. I breathed the free air of Heaven. I thought upon other subjects than Death. I discarded my medical books. \"Buchan\" I burned. I read no \"Night Thoughts\"\u2014 no fustian about churchyards \u2014 no bugaboo tales \u2014 such as this. In short, I became a new man, and lived a man's life. From that memorable night, I dismissed forever my charnel apprehensions, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.\n\nThere are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell \u2014 but the imagination of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern. Alas! the grim legion of sepulchral terrors cannot be regarded as altogether fanciful \u2014 but, like the Demons in whose company Afrasiab made his voyage down the Oxus, they must sleep, or they will devour us \u2014 they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Purloined Letter by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio.\n\n\u2014Seneca\n\nAt Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18 \u2014 I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum, in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book-closet, au troisieme, No. 33, Rue Dunot, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the curling eddies of smoke that oppressed the atmosphere of the chamber. For myself, however, I was mentally discussing certain topics which had formed matter for conversation between us at an earlier period of the evening; I mean the affair of the Rue Morgue, and the mystery attending the murder of Marie Roget. I looked upon it, therefore, as something of a coincidence, when the door of our apartment was thrown open and admitted our old acquaintance, Monsieur G \u2014 the Prefect of the Parisian police.\n\nWe gave him a hearty welcome; for there was nearly half as much of the entertaining as of the contemptible about the man, and we had not seen him for several years. We had been sitting in the dark, and Dupin now arose for the purpose of lighting a lamp, but sat down again, without doing so, upon G.'s saying that he had called to consult us, or rather to ask the opinion of my friend, about some official business which had occasioned a great deal of trouble.\n\n\"If it is any point requiring reflection,\" observed Dupin, as he forbore to enkindle the wick, \"we shall examine it to better purpose in the dark.\"\n\n\"That is another of your odd notions,\" said the Prefect, who had a fashion of calling every thing \"odd\" that was beyond his comprehension, and thus lived amid an absolute legion of \"oddities.\"\n\n\"Very true,\" said Dupin, as he supplied his visitor with a pipe, and rolled towards him a comfortable chair.\n\n\"And what is the difficulty now?\" I asked. \"Nothing more in the assassination way, I hope?\"\n\n\"Oh no; nothing of that nature. The fact is, the business is very simple indeed, and I make no doubt that we can manage it sufficiently well ourselves; but then I thought Dupin would like to hear the details of it, because it is so excessively odd.\"\n\n\"Simple and odd,\" said Dupin.\n\n\"Why, yes; and not exactly that, either. The fact is, we have all been a good deal puzzled because the affair is so simple, and yet baffles us altogether.\"\n\n\"Perhaps it is the very simplicity of the thing which puts you at fault,\" said my friend.\n\n\"What nonsense you do talk!\" replied the Prefect, laughing heartily.\n\n\"Perhaps the mystery is a little too plain,\" said Dupin.\n\n\"Oh, good heavens! who ever heard of such an idea?\"\n\n\"A little too self-evident.\"\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha! \u2014 ha! ha! ha! \u2014 ho! ho! ho!\"\u2014 roared our visitor, profoundly amused, \"oh, Dupin, you will be the death of me yet!\"\n\n\"And what, after all, is the matter on hand?\" I asked.\n\n\"Why, I will tell you,\" replied the Prefect, as he gave a long, steady, and contemplative puff, and settled himself in his chair. \"I will tell you in a few words; but, before I begin, let me caution you that this is an affair demanding the greatest secrecy, and that I should most probably lose the position I now hold, were it known that I confided it to any one.\n\n\"Proceed,\" said I.\n\n\"Or not,\" said Dupin.\n\n\"Well, then; I have received personal information, from a very high quarter, that a certain document of the last importance, has been purloined from the royal apartments. The individual who purloined it is known; this beyond a doubt; he was seen to take it. It is known, also, that it still remains in his possession.\"\n\n\"How is this known?\" asked Dupin.\n\n\"It is clearly inferred,\" replied the Prefect, \"from the nature of the document, and from the nonappearance of certain results which would at once arise from its passing out of the robber's possession; \u2014 that is to say, from his employing it as he must design in the end to employ it.\"\n\n\"Be a little more explicit,\" I said.\n\n\"Well, I may venture so far as to say that the paper gives its holder a certain power in a certain quarter where such power is immensely valuable.\" The Prefect was fond of the cant of diplomacy.\n\n\"Still I do not quite understand,\" said Dupin.\n\n\"No? Well; the disclosure of the document to a third person, who shall be nameless, would bring in question the honor of a personage of most exalted station; and this fact gives the holder of the document an ascendancy over the illustrious personage whose honor and peace are so jeopardized.\"\n\n\"But this ascendancy,\" I interposed, \"would depend upon the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber. Who would dare \u2014\"\n\n\"The thief,\" said G., is the Minister D \u2014 who dares all things, those unbecoming as well as those becoming a man. The method of the theft was not less ingenious than bold. The document in question \u2014 a letter, to be frank \u2014 had been received by the personage robbed while alone in the royal boudoir. During its perusal she was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of the other exalted personage from whom especially it was her wish to conceal it. After a hurried and vain endeavor to thrust it in a drawer, she was forced to place it, open as it was, upon a table. The address, however, was uppermost, and, the contents thus unexposed, the letter escaped notice. At this juncture enters the Minister D\u2014. His lynx eye immediately perceives the paper, recognises the handwriting of the address, observes the confusion of the personage addressed, and fathoms her secret. After some business transactions, hurried through in his ordinary manner, he produces a letter somewhat similar to the one in question, opens it, pretends to read it, and then places it in close juxtaposition to the other. Again he converses, for some fifteen minutes, upon the public affairs. At length, in taking leave, he takes also from the table the letter to which he had no claim. Its rightful owner saw, but, of course, dared not call attention to the act, in the presence of the third personage who stood at her elbow. The minister decamped; leaving his own letter \u2014 one of no importance \u2014 upon the table.\"\n\n\"Here, then,\" said Dupin to me, \"you have precisely what you demand to make the ascendancy complete \u2014 the robber's knowledge of the loser's knowledge of the robber.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" replied the Prefect; \"and the power thus attained has, for some months past, been wielded, for political purposes, to a very dangerous extent. The personage robbed is more thoroughly convinced, every day, of the necessity of reclaiming her letter. But this, of course, cannot be done openly. In fine, driven to despair, she has committed the matter to me.\"\n\n\"Than whom,\" said Dupin, amid a perfect whirlwind of smoke, \"no more sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired, or even imagined.\"\n\n\"You flatter me,\" replied the Prefect; \"but it is possible that some such opinion may have been entertained.\"\n\n\"It is clear,\" said I, \"as you observe, that the letter is still in possession of the minister; since it is this possession, and not any employment of the letter, which bestows the power. With the employment the power departs.\"\n\n\"True,\" said G. \"and upon this conviction I proceeded. My first care was to make thorough search of the minister's hotel; and here my chief embarrassment lay in the necessity of searching without his knowledge. Beyond all things, I have been warned of the danger which would result from giving him reason to suspect our design.\"\n\n\"But,\" said I, \"you are quite au fait in these investigations. The Parisian police have done this thing often before.\"\n\n\"Oh yes; and for this reason I did not despair. The habits of the minister gave me, too, a great advantage. He is frequently absent from home all night. His servants are by no means numerous. They sleep at a distance from their master's apartment, and, being chiefly Neapolitans, are readily made drunk. I have keys, as you know, with which I can open any chamber or cabinet in Paris. For three months a night has not passed, during the greater part of which I have not been engaged, personally, in ransacking the D\u2014 Hotel. My honor is interested, and, to mention a great secret, the reward is enormous. So I did not abandon the search until I had become fully satisfied that the thief is a more astute man than myself. I fancy that I have investigated every nook and corner of the premises in which it is possible that the paper can be concealed.\"\n\n\"But is it not possible,\" I suggested, \"that although the letter may be in possession of the minister, as it unquestionably is, he may have concealed it elsewhere than upon his own premises?\"\n\n\"This is barely possible,\" said Dupin. \"The present peculiar condition of affairs at court, and especially of those intrigues in which D\u2014 is known to be involved, would render the instant availability of the document \u2014 its susceptibility of being produced at a moment's notice \u2014 a point of nearly equal importance with its possession.\"\n\n\"Its susceptibility of being produced?\" said I.\n\n\"That is to say, of being destroyed,\" said Dupin.\n\n\"True,\" I observed; \"the paper is clearly then upon the premises. As for its being upon the person of the minister, we may consider that as out of the question.\"\n\n\"Entirely,\" said the Prefect. \"He has been twice waylaid, as if by footpads, and his person rigorously searched under my own inspection.\n\n\"You might have spared yourself this trouble,\" said Dupin. \"D \u2014 I presume, is not altogether a fool, and, if not, must have anticipated these waylayings, as a matter of course.\"\n\n\"Not altogether a fool,\" said G., \"but then he's a poet, which I take to be only one remove from a fool.\"\n\n\"True,\" said Dupin, after a long and thoughtful whiff from his meerschaum, \"although I have been guilty of certain doggerel myself.\"\n\n\"Suppose you detail,\" said I, \"the particulars of your search.\"\n\n\"Why the fact is, we took our time, and we searched every where. I have had long experience in these affairs. I took the entire building, room by room; devoting the nights of a whole week to each. We examined, first, the furniture of each apartment. We opened every possible drawer; and I presume you know that, to a properly trained police agent, such a thing as a secret drawer is impossible. Any man is a dolt who permits a 'secret' drawer to escape him in a search of this kind. The thing is so plain. There is a certain amount of bulk \u2014 of space \u2014 to be accounted for in every cabinet. Then we have accurate rules. The fiftieth part of a line could not escape us. After the cabinets we took the chairs. The cushions we probed with the fine long needles you have seen me employ. From the tables we removed the tops.\"\n\n\"Why so?\"\n\n\"Sometimes the top of a table, or other similarly arranged piece of furniture, is removed by the person wishing to conceal an article; then the leg is excavated, the article deposited within the cavity, and the top replaced. The bottoms and tops of bedposts are employed in the same way.\"\n\n\"But could not the cavity be detected by sounding?\" I asked.\n\n\"By no means, if, when the article is deposited, a sufficient wadding of cotton be placed around it. Besides, in our case, we were obliged to proceed without noise.\"\n\n\"But you could not have removed \u2014 you could not have taken to pieces all articles of furniture in which it would have been possible to make a deposit in the manner you mention. A letter may be compressed into a thin spiral roll, not differing much in shape or bulk from a large knitting-needle, and in this form it might be inserted into the rung of a chair, for example. You did not take to pieces all the chairs?\"\n\n\"Certainly not; but we did better \u2014 we examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and, indeed, the jointings of every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple. Any disorder in the glueing \u2014 any unusual gaping in the joints \u2014 would have sufficed to insure detection.\"\n\n\"I presume you looked to the mirrors, between the boards and the plates, and you probed the beds and the bed-clothes, as well as the curtains and carpets.\"\n\n\"That of course; and when we had absolutely completed every particle of the furniture in this way, then we examined the house itself. We divided its entire surface into compartments, which we numbered, so that none might be missed; then we scrutinized each individual square inch throughout the premises, including the two houses immediately adjoining, with the microscope, as before.\"\n\n\"The two houses adjoining!\" I exclaimed; \"you must have had a great deal of trouble.\"\n\n\"We had; but the reward offered is prodigious.\n\n\"You include the grounds about the houses?\"\n\n\"All the grounds are paved with brick. They gave us comparatively little trouble. We examined the moss between the bricks, and found it undisturbed.\"\n\n\"You looked among D\u2014's papers, of course, and into the books of the library?\"\n\n\"Certainly; we opened every package and parcel; we not only opened every book, but we turned over every leaf in each volume, not contenting ourselves with a mere shake, according to the fashion of some of our police officers. We also measured the thickness of every book-cover, with the most accurate admeasurement, and applied to each the most jealous scrutiny of the microscope. Had any of the bindings been recently meddled with, it would have been utterly impossible that the fact should have escaped observation. Some five or six volumes, just from the hands of the binder, we carefully probed, longitudinally, with the needles.\"\n\n\"You explored the floors beneath the carpets?\"\n\n\"Beyond doubt. We removed every carpet, and examined the boards with the microscope.\"\n\n\"And the paper on the walls?\"\n\n\"Yes.\n\n\"You looked into the cellars?\"\n\n\"We did.\"\n\n\"Then,\" I said, \"you have been making a miscalculation, and the letter is not upon the premises, as you suppose.\n\n\"I fear you are right there,\" said the Prefect. \"And now, Dupin, what would you advise me to do?\"\n\n\"To make a thorough re-search of the premises.\"\n\n\"That is absolutely needless,\" replied G\u2014. \"I am not more sure that I breathe than I am that the letter is not at the Hotel.\"\n\n\"I have no better advice to give you,\" said Dupin. \"You have, of course, an accurate description of the letter?\"\n\n\"Oh yes!\"\u2014 And here the Prefect, producing a memorandum-book, proceeded to read aloud a minute account of the internal, and especially of the external appearance of the missing document. Soon after finishing the perusal of this description, he took his departure, more entirely depressed in spirits than I had ever known the good gentleman before.\n\nIn about a month afterwards he paid us another visit, and found us occupied very nearly as before. He took a pipe and a chair and entered into some ordinary conversation. At length I said \u2014\n\n\"Well, but G \u2014 what of the purloined letter? I presume you have at last made up your mind that there is no such thing as overreaching the Minister?\"\n\n\"Confound him, say I\u2014 yes; I made the reexamination, however, as Dupin suggested \u2014 but it was all labor lost, as I knew it would be.\"\n\n\"How much was the reward offered, did you say?\" asked Dupin.\n\n\"Why, a very great deal \u2014 a very liberal reward \u2014 I don't like to say how much, precisely; but one thing I will say, that I wouldn't mind giving my individual check for fifty thousand francs to any one who could obtain me that letter. The fact is, it is becoming of more and more importance every day; and the reward has been lately doubled. If it were trebled, however, I could do no more than I have done.\"\n\n\"Why, yes,\" said Dupin, drawlingly, between the whiffs of his meerschaum, \"I really \u2014 think, G \u2014 you have not exerted yourself \u2014 to the utmost in this matter. You might \u2014 do a little more, I think, eh?\"\n\n\"How? \u2014 In what way?\"\n\n\"Why \u2014 puff, puff \u2014 you might \u2014 puff, puff \u2014 employ counsel in the matter, eh? \u2014 puff, puff, puff. Do you remember the story they tell of Abernethy?\"\n\n\"No; hang Abernethy!\"\n\n\"To be sure! hang him and welcome. But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual.\n\n\"'We will suppose,' said the miser, 'that his symptoms are such and such; now, doctor, what would you have directed him to take?'\n\n\"'Take!' said Abernethy, 'why, take advice, to be sure.'\"\n\n\"But,\" said the Prefect, a little discomposed, \"I am perfectly willing to take advice, and to pay for it. I would really give fifty thousand francs to any one who would aid me in the matter.\"\n\n\"In that case,\" replied Dupin, opening a drawer, and producing a check-book, \"you may as well fill me up a check for the amount mentioned. When you have signed it, I will hand you the letter.\"\n\nI was astounded. The Prefect appeared absolutely thunderstricken. For some minutes he remained speechless and motionless, less, looking incredulously at my friend with open mouth, and eyes that seemed starting from their sockets; then, apparently in some measure, he seized a pen, and after several pauses and vacant stares, finally filled up and signed a check for fifty thousand francs, and handed it across the table to Dupin. The latter examined it carefully and deposited it in his pocket-book; then, unlocking an escritoire, took thence a letter and gave it to the Prefect. This functionary grasped it in a perfect agony of joy, opened it with a trembling hand, cast a rapid glance at its contents, and then, scrambling and struggling to the door, rushed at length unceremoniously from the room and from the house, without having uttered a syllable since Dupin had requested him to fill up the check.\n\nWhen he had gone, my friend entered into some explanations.\n\n\"The Parisian police,\" he said, \"are exceedingly able in their way. They are persevering, ingenious, cunning, and thoroughly versed in the knowledge which their duties seem chiefly to demand. Thus, when G\u2014 detailed to us his mode of searching the premises at the Hotel D \u2014 I felt entire confidence in his having made a satisfactory investigation \u2014 so far as his labors extended.\"\n\n\"So far as his labors extended?\" said I.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Dupin. \"The measures adopted were not only the best of their kind, but carried out to absolute perfection. Had the letter been deposited within the range of their search, these fellows would, beyond a question, have found it.\"\n\nI merely laughed \u2014 but he seemed quite serious in all that he said.\n\n\"The measures, then,\" he continued, \"were good in their kind, and well executed; their defect lay in their being inapplicable to the case, and to the man. A certain set of highly ingenious resources are, with the Prefect, a sort of Procrustean bed, to which he forcibly adapts his designs. But he perpetually errs by being too deep or too shallow, for the matter in hand; and many a schoolboy is a better reasoner than he. I knew one about eight years of age, whose success at guessing in the game of 'even and odd' attracted universal admiration. This game is simple, and is played with marbles. One player holds in his hand a number of these toys, and demands of another whether that number is even or odd. If the guess is right, the guesser wins one; if wrong, he loses one. The boy to whom I allude won all the marbles of the school. Of course he had some principle of guessing; and this lay in mere observation and admeasurement of the astuteness of his opponents. For example, an arrant simpleton is his opponent, and, holding up his closed hand, asks, 'are they even or odd?' Our schoolboy replies, 'odd,' and loses; but upon the second trial he wins, for he then says to himself, the simpleton had them even upon the first trial, and his amount of cunning is just sufficient to make him have them odd upon the second; I will therefore guess odd'; \u2014 he guesses odd, and wins. Now, with a simpleton a degree above the first, he would have reasoned thus: 'This fellow finds that in the first instance I guessed odd, and, in the second, he will propose to himself upon the first impulse, a simple variation from even to odd, as did the first simpleton; but then a second thought will suggest that this is too simple a variation, and finally he will decide upon putting it even as before. I will therefore guess even' guesses even, and wins. Now this mode of reasoning in the schoolboy, whom his fellows termed \"lucky,\"\u2014 what, in its last analysis, is it?\"\n\n\"It is merely,\" I said, \"an identification of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent.\"\n\n\"It is,\" said Dupin;\" and, upon inquiring of the boy by what means he effected the thorough identification in which his success consisted, I received answer as follows: 'When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.' This response of the schoolboy lies at the bottom of all the spurious profundity which has been attributed to Rochefoucauld, to La Bougive, to Machiavelli, and to Campanella.\"\n\n\"And the identification,\" I said, \"of the reasoner's intellect with that of his opponent, depends, if I understand you aright upon the accuracy with which the opponent's intellect is admeasured.\"\n\n\"For its practical value it depends upon this,\" replied Dupin; and the Prefect and his cohort fall so frequently, first, by default of this identification, and, secondly, by ill-admeasurement, or rather through non-admeasurement, of the intellect with which they are engaged. They consider only their own ideas of ingenuity; and, in searching for anything hidden, advert only to the modes in which they would have hidden it. They are right in this much \u2014 that their own ingenuity is a faithful representative of that of the mass; but when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse in character from their own, the felon foils them, of course. This always happens when it is above their own, and very usually when it is below. They have no variation of principle in their investigations; at best, when urged by some unusual emergency \u2014 by some extraordinary reward \u2014 they extend or exaggerate their old modes of practice, without touching their principles. What, for example, in this case of D \u2014 has been done to vary the principle of action? What is all this boring, and probing, and sounding, and scrutinizing with the microscope, and dividing the surface of the building into registered square inches \u2014 what is it all but an exaggeration of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which the Prefect, in the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed? Do you not see he has taken it for granted that all men proceed to conceal a letter \u2014 not exactly in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg \u2014 but, at least, in some hole or corner suggested by the same tenor of thought which would urge a man to secrete a letter in a gimlet-hole bored in a chair-leg? And do you not see also, that such recherches nooks for concealment are adapted only for ordinary occasions, and would be adopted only by ordinary intellects; for, in all cases of concealment, a disposal of the article concealed \u2014 a disposal of it in this recherche manner \u2014 is, in the very first instance, presumable and presumed; and thus its discovery depends, not at all upon the acumen, but altogether upon the mere care, patience, and determination of the seekers; and where the case is of importance \u2014 or, what amounts to the same thing in the policial eyes, when the reward is of magnitude \u2014 the qualities in question have never been known to fall. You will now understand what I meant in suggesting that, had the purloined letter been hidden anywhere within the limits of the Prefect's examination \u2014 in other words, had the principle of its concealment been comprehended within the principles of the Prefect \u2014 its discovery would have been a matter altogether beyond question. This functionary, however, has been thoroughly mystified; and the remote source of his defeat lies in the supposition that the Minister is a fool, because he has acquired renown as a poet. All fools are poets; this the Prefect feels; and he is merely guilty of a non distributio medii in thence inferring that all poets are fools.\"\n\n\"But is this really the poet?\" I asked. \"There are two brothers, I know; and both have attained reputation in letters. The Minister I believe has written learnedly on the Differential Calculus. He is a mathematician, and no poet.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken; I know him well; he is both. As poet and mathematician, he would reason well; as mere mathematician, he could not have reasoned at all, and thus would have been at the mercy of the Prefect.\"\n\n\"You surprise me,\" I said, \"by these opinions, which have been contradicted by the voice of the world. You do not mean to set at naught the well-digested idea of centuries. The mathematical reason has long been regarded as the reason par excellence.\n\n\"'Il y a a parier,'\" replied Dupin, quoting from Chamfort, \"'que toute idee publique, toute convention recue, est une sottise, car elle a convenu au plus grand nombre.' The mathematicians, I grant you, have done their best to promulgate the popular error to which you allude, and which is none the less an error for its promulgation as truth. With an art worthy a better cause, for example, they have insinuated the term 'analysis' into application to algebra. The French are the originators of this particular deception; but if a term is of any importance \u2014 if words derive any value from applicability \u2014 then 'analysis' conveys 'algebra' about as much as, in Latin, 'ambitus' implies 'ambition,' 'religio' religion or 'homines honesti,' a set of honorable men.\"\n\n\"You have a quarrel on hand, I see,\" said I, \"with some of the algebraists of Paris; but proceed.\"\n\n\"I dispute the availability, and thus the value, of that reason which is cultivated in any especial form other than the abstractly logical. I dispute, in particular, the reason educed by mathematical study. The mathematics are the science of form and quantity; mathematical reasoning is merely logic applied to observation upon form and quantity. The great error lies in supposing that even the truths of what is called pure algebra, are abstract or general truths. And this error is so egregious that I am confounded at the universality with which it has been received. Mathematical axioms are not axioms of general truth. What is true of relation \u2014 of form and quantity \u2014 is often grossly false in regard to morals, for example. In this latter science it is very usually untrue that the aggregated parts are equal to the whole. In chemistry also the axiom falls. In the consideration of motive it falls; for two motives, each of a given value, have not, necessarily, a value when united, equal to the sum of their values apart. There are numerous other mathematical truths which are only truths within the limits of relation. But the mathematician argues, from his finite truths, through habit, as if they were of an absolutely general applicability \u2014 as the world indeed imagines them to be. Bryant, in his very learned 'Mythology,' mentions an analogous source of error, when he says that 'although the Pagan fables are not believed, yet we forget ourselves continually, and make inferences from them as existing realities.' With the algebraists, however, who are Pagans themselves, the 'Pagan fables' are believed, and the inferences are made, not so much through lapse of memory, as through an unaccountable addling of the brains. In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x squared + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x squared + px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down.\n\nI mean to say,\" continued Dupin, while I merely laughed at his last observations, \"that if the Minister had been no more than a mathematician, the Prefect would have been under no necessity of giving me this check. I knew him, however, as both mathematician and poet, and my measures were adapted to his capacity, with reference to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. I knew him as a courtier, too, and as a bold intriguant. Such a man, I considered, could not fall to be aware of the ordinary policial modes of action. He could not have failed to anticipate \u2014 and events have proved that he did not fail to anticipate \u2014 the waylayings to which he was subjected. He must have foreseen, I reflected, the secret investigations of his premises. His frequent absences from home at night, which were hailed by the Prefect as certain aids to his success, I regarded only as ruses, to afford opportunity for thorough search to the police, and thus the sooner to impress them with the conviction to which G \u2014 in fact, did finally arrive \u2014 the conviction that the letter was not upon the premises. I felt, also, that the whole train of thought, which I was at some pains in detailing to you just now, concerning the invariable principle of policial action in searches for articles concealed \u2014 I felt that this whole train of thought would necessarily pass through the mind of the Minister. It would imperatively lead him to despise all the ordinary nooks of concealment. He could not, I reflected, be so weak as not to see that the most intricate and remote recess of his hotel would be as open as his commonest closets to the eyes, to the probes, to the gimlets, and to the microscopes of the Prefect. I saw, in fine, that he would be driven, as a matter of course, to simplicity, if not deliberately induced to it as a matter of choice. You will remember, perhaps, how desperately the Prefect laughed when I suggested, upon our first interview, that it was just possible this mystery troubled him so much on account of its being so very self-evident.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said I, \"I remember his merriment well. I really thought he would have fallen into convulsions.\"\n\n\"The material world,\" continued Dupin, \"abounds with very strict analogies to the immaterial; and thus some color of truth has been given to the rhetorical dogma, that metaphor, or simile, may be made to strengthen an argument, as well as to embellish a description. The principle of the vis inertiae, for example, seems to be identical in physics and metaphysics. It is not more true in the former, that a large body is with more difficulty set in motion than a smaller one, and that its subsequent momentum is commensurate with this difficulty, than it is, in the latter, that intellects of the vaster capacity, while more forcible, more constant, and more eventful in their movements than those of inferior grade, are yet the less readily moved, and more embarrassed and full of hesitation in the first few steps of their progress. Again: have you ever noticed which of the street signs, over the shop doors, are the most attractive of attention?\"\n\n\"I have never given the matter a thought,\" I said.\n\n\"There is a game of puzzles,\" he resumed, \"which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word \u2014 the name of town, river, state or empire \u2014 any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart. A novice in the game generally seeks to embarrass his opponents by giving them the most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by dint of being excessively obvious; and here the physical oversight is precisely analogous with the moral inapprehension by which the intellect suffers to pass unnoticed those considerations which are too obtrusively and too palpably self-evident. But this is a point, it appears, somewhat above or beneath the understanding of the Prefect. He never once thought it probable, or possible, that the Minister had deposited the letter immediately beneath the nose of the whole world, by way of best preventing any portion of that world from perceiving it.\n\n\"But the more I reflected upon the daring, dashing, and discriminating ingenuity of D\u2014; upon the fact that the document must always have been at hand, if he intended to use it to good purpose; and upon the decisive evidence, obtained by the Prefect, that it was not hidden within the limits of that dignitary's ordinary search \u2014 the more satisfied I became that, to conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all.\n\n\"Full of these ideas, I prepared myself with a pair of green spectacles, and called one fine morning, quite by accident, at the Ministerial hotel. I found D\u2014 at home, yawning, lounging, and dawdling, as usual, and pretending to be in the last extremity of ennui. He is, perhaps, the most really energetic human being now alive \u2014 but that is only when nobody sees him.\n\n\"To be even with him, I complained of my weak eyes, and lamented the necessity of the spectacles, under cover of which I cautiously and thoroughly surveyed the apartment, while seemingly intent only upon the conversation of my host.\n\n\"I paid special attention to a large writing-table near which he sat, and upon which lay confusedly, some miscellaneous letters and other papers, with one or two musical instruments and a few books. Here, however, after a long and very deliberate scrutiny, I saw nothing to excite particular suspicion.\n\n\"At length my eyes, in going the circuit of the room, fell upon a trumpery filigree card-rack of pasteboard, that hung dangling by a dirty blue ribbon, from a little brass knob just beneath the middle of the mantelpiece. In this rack, which had three or four compartments, were five or six visiting cards and a solitary letter. This last was much soiled and crumpled. It was torn nearly in two, across the middle \u2014 as if a design, in the first instance, to tear it entirely up as worthless, had been altered, or stayed, in the second. It had a large black seal, bearing the D\u2014 cipher very conspicuously, and was addressed, in a diminutive female hand, to D \u2014 the minister, himself. It was thrust carelessly, and even, as it seemed, contemptuously, into one of the upper divisions of the rack.\n\n\"No sooner had I glanced at this letter, than I concluded it to be that of which I was in search. To be sure, it was, to all appearance, radically different from the one of which the Prefect had read us so minute a description. Here the seal was large and black, with the D\u2014 cipher; there it was small and red, with the ducal arms of the S\u2014 family. Here, the address, to the Minister, was diminutive and feminine; there the superscription, to a certain royal personage, was markedly bold and decided; the size alone formed a point of correspondence. But, then, the radicalness of these differences, which was excessive; the dirt; the soiled and torn condition of the paper, so inconsistent with the true methodical habits of D \u2014 and so suggestive of a design to delude the beholder into an idea of the worthlessness of the document; these things, together with the hyperobtrusive situation of this document, full in the view of every visitor, and thus exactly in accordance with the conclusions to which I had previously arrived; these things, I say, were strongly corroborative of suspicion, in one who came with the intention to suspect.\n\n\"I protracted my visit as long as possible, and, while I maintained a most animated discussion with the Minister, on a topic which I knew well had never failed to interest and excite him, I kept my attention really riveted upon the letter. In this examination, I committed to memory its external appearance and arrangement in the rack; and also fell, at length, upon a discovery which set at rest whatever trivial doubt I might have entertained. In scrutinizing the edges of the paper, I observed them to be more chafed than seemed necessary. They presented the broken appearance which is manifested when a stiff paper, having been once folded and pressed with a folder, is refolded in a reversed direction, in the same creases or edges which had formed the original fold. This discovery was sufficient. It was clear to me that the letter had been turned, as a glove, inside out, re-directed, and re-sealed. I bade the Minister good morning, and took my departure at once, leaving a gold snuff-box upon the table.\n\n\"The next morning I called for the snuff-box, when we resumed, quite eagerly, the conversation of the preceding day. While thus engaged, however, a loud report, as if of a pistol, was heard immediately beneath the windows of the hotel, and was succeeded by a series of fearful screams, and the shoutings of a mob. D\u2014 rushed to a casement, threw it open, and looked out. In the meantime, I stepped to the card-rack, took the letter, put it in my pocket, and replaced it by a fac-simile, (so far as regards externals,) which I had carefully prepared at my lodgings; imitating the D\u2014 cipher, very readily, by means of a seal formed of bread.\n\n\"The disturbance in the street had been occasioned by the frantic behavior of a man with a musket. He had fired it among a crowd of women and children. It proved, however, to have been without ball, and the fellow was suffered to go his way as a lunatic or a drunkard. When he had gone, D-came from the window, whither I had followed him immediately upon securing the object in view. Soon afterwards I bade him farewell. The pretended lunatic was a man in my own pay.\n\n\"But what purpose had you,\" I asked, in replacing the letter by a fac-simile? Would it not have been better, at the first visit, to have seized it openly, and departed?\"\n\n\"D \u2014 \" replied Dupin, \"is a desperate man, and a man of nerve. His hotel, too, is not without attendants devoted to his interests. Had I made the wild attempt you suggest, I might never have left the Ministerial presence alive. The good people of Paris might have heard of me no more. But I had an object apart from these considerations. You know my political prepossessions. In this matter, I act as a partisan of the lady concerned. For eighteen months the Minister has had her in his power. She has now him in hers; since, being unaware that the letter is not in his possession, he will proceed with his exactions as if it was. Thus will he inevitably commit himself, at once, to his political destruction. His downfall, too, will not be more precipitate than awkward. It is all very well to talk about the facilis descensus Averni; but in all kinds of climbing, as Catalani said of singing, it is far more easy to get up than to come down. In the present instance I have no sympathy \u2014 at least no pity \u2014 for him who descends. He is the monstrum horrendum, an unprincipled man of genius. I confess, however, that I should like very well to know the precise character of his thoughts, when, being defied by her whom the Prefect terms 'a certain personage,' he is reduced to opening the letter which I left for him in the card-rack.\"\n\n\"How? did you put any thing particular in it?\"\n\n\"Why \u2014 it did not seem altogether right to leave the interior blank \u2014 that would have been insulting. D \u2014 at Vienna once, did me an evil turn, which I told him, quite good-humoredly, that I should remember. So, as I knew he would feel some curiosity in regard to the identity of the person who had outwitted him, I thought it a pity not to give him a clue. He is well acquainted with my MS., and I just copied into the middle of the blank sheet the words \u2014\n\n\u2014 Un dessein si funeste,\n\nS'il n'est digne d'Atree, est digne de Thyeste.\n\nThey are to be found in Crebillon's 'Atree.'\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Spectacles by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nMany years ago, it was the fashion to ridicule the idea of \"love at first sight;\" but those who think, not less than those who feel deeply, have always advocated its existence. Modern discoveries, indeed, in what may be termed ethical magnetism or magnetoesthetics, render it probable that the most natural, and, consequently, the truest and most intense of the human affections are those which arise in the heart as if by electric sympathy \u2014 in a word, that the brightest and most enduring of the psychal fetters are those which are riveted by a glance. The confession I am about to make will add another to the already almost innumerable instances of the truth of the position.\n\nMy story requires that I should be somewhat minute. I am still a very young man \u2014 not yet twenty-two years of age. My name, at present, is a very usual and rather plebeian one \u2014 Simpson. I say \"at present;\" for it is only lately that I have been so called \u2014 having legislatively adopted this surname within the last year in order to receive a large inheritance left me by a distant male relative, Adolphus Simpson, Esq. The bequest was conditioned upon my taking the name of the testator \u2014 the family, not the Christian name; my Christian name is Napoleon Bonaparte \u2014 or, more properly, these are my first and middle appellations.\n\nI assumed the name, Simpson, with some reluctance, as in my true patronym, Froissart, I felt a very pardonable pride \u2014 believing that I could trace a descent from the immortal author of the \"Chronicles.\" While on the subject of names, by the bye, I may mention a singular coincidence of sound attending the names of some of my immediate predecessors. My father was a Monsieur Froissart, of Paris. His wife \u2014 my mother, whom he married at fifteen \u2014 was a Mademoiselle Croissart, eldest daughter of Croissart the banker, whose wife, again, being only sixteen when married, was the eldest daughter of one Victor Voissart. Monsieur Voissart, very singularly, had married a lady of similar name \u2014 a Mademoiselle Moissart. She, too, was quite a child when married; and her mother, also, Madame Moissart, was only fourteen when led to the altar. These early marriages are usual in France. Here, however, are Moissart, Voissart, Croissart, and Froissart, all in the direct line of descent. My own name, though, as I say, became Simpson, by act of Legislature, and with so much repugnance on my part, that, at one period, I actually hesitated about accepting the legacy with the useless and annoying proviso attached.\n\nAs to personal endowments, I am by no means deficient. On the contrary, I believe that I am well made, and possess what nine tenths of the world would call a handsome face. In height I am five feet eleven. My hair is black and curling. My nose is sufficiently good. My eyes are large and gray; and although, in fact they are weak a very inconvenient degree, still no defect in this regard would be suspected from their appearance. The weakness itself, however, has always much annoyed me, and I have resorted to every remedy \u2014 short of wearing glasses. Being youthful and good-looking, I naturally dislike these, and have resolutely refused to employ them. I know nothing, indeed, which so disfigures the countenance of a young person, or so impresses every feature with an air of demureness, if not altogether of sanctimoniousness and of age. An eyeglass, on the other hand, has a savor of downright foppery and affectation. I have hitherto managed as well as I could without either. But something too much of these merely personal details, which, after all, are of little importance. I will content myself with saying, in addition, that my temperament is sanguine, rash, ardent, enthusiastic \u2014 and that all my life I have been a devoted admirer of the women.\n\nOne night last winter I entered a box at the P\u2014 Theatre, in company with a friend, Mr. Talbot. It was an opera night, and the bills presented a very rare attraction, so that the house was excessively crowded. We were in time, however, to obtain the front seats which had been reserved for us, and into which, with some little difficulty, we elbowed our way.\n\nFor two hours my companion, who was a musical fanatico, gave his undivided attention to the stage; and, in the meantime, I amused myself by observing the audience, which consisted, in chief part, of the very elite of the city. Having satisfied myself upon this point, I was about turning my eyes to the prima donna, when they were arrested and riveted by a figure in one of the private boxes which had escaped my observation.\n\nIf I live a thousand years, I can never forget the intense emotion with which I regarded this figure. It was that of a female, the most exquisite I had ever beheld. The face was so far turned toward the stage that, for some minutes, I could not obtain a view of it \u2014 but the form was divine; no other word can sufficiently express its magnificent proportion \u2014 and even the term \"divine\" seems ridiculously feeble as I write it.\n\nThe magic of a lovely form in woman \u2014 the necromancy of female gracefulness \u2014 was always a power which I had found it impossible to resist, but here was grace personified, incarnate, the beau ideal of my wildest and most enthusiastic visions. The figure, almost all of which the construction of the box permitted to be seen, was somewhat above the medium height, and nearly approached, without positively reaching, the majestic. Its perfect fullness and tournure were delicious. The head of which only the back was visible, rivalled in outline that of the Greek Psyche, and was rather displayed than concealed by an elegant cap of gaze aerienne, which put me in mind of the ventum textilem of Apuleius. The right arm hung over the balustrade of the box, and thrilled every nerve of my frame with its exquisite symmetry. Its upper portion was draperied by one of the loose open sleeves now in fashion. This extended but little below the elbow. Beneath it was worn an under one of some frail material, close-fitting, and terminated by a cuff of rich lace, which fell gracefully over the top of the hand, revealing only the delicate fingers, upon one of which sparkled a diamond ring, which I at once saw was of extraordinary value. The admirable roundness of the wrist was well set off by a bracelet which encircled it, and which also was ornamented and clasped by a magnificent aigrette of jewels-telling, in words that could not be mistaken, at once of the wealth and fastidious taste of the wearer.\n\nI gazed at this queenly apparition for at least half an hour, as if I had been suddenly converted to stone; and, during this period, I felt the full force and truth of all that has been said or sung concerning \"love at first sight.\" My feelings were totally different from any which I had hitherto experienced, in the presence of even the most celebrated specimens of female loveliness. An unaccountable, and what I am compelled to consider a magnetic, sympathy of soul for soul, seemed to rivet, not only my vision, but my whole powers of thought and feeling, upon the admirable object before me. I saw \u2014 I felt \u2014 I knew that I was deeply, madly, irrevocably in love \u2014 and this even before seeing the face of the person beloved. So intense, indeed, was the passion that consumed me, that I really believe it would have received little if any abatement had the features, yet unseen, proved of merely ordinary character, so anomalous is the nature of the only true love \u2014 of the love at first sight \u2014 and so little really dependent is it upon the external conditions which only seem to create and control it.\n\nWhile I was thus wrapped in admiration of this lovely vision, a sudden disturbance among the audience caused her to turn her head partially toward me, so that I beheld the entire profile of the face. Its beauty even exceeded my anticipations \u2014 and yet there was something about it which disappointed me without my being able to tell exactly what it was. I said \"disappointed,\" but this is not altogether the word. My sentiments were at once quieted and exalted. They partook less of transport and more of calm enthusiasm of enthusiastic repose. This state of feeling arose, perhaps, from the Madonna-like and matronly air of the face; and yet I at once understood that it could not have arisen entirely from this. There was something else \u2014 some mystery which I could not develope \u2014 some expression about the countenance which slightly disturbed me while it greatly heightened my interest. In fact, I was just in that condition of mind which prepares a young and susceptible man for any act of extravagance. Had the lady been alone, I should undoubtedly have entered her box and accosted her at all hazards; but, fortunately, she was attended by two companions \u2014 a gentleman, and a strikingly beautiful woman, to all appearance a few years younger than herself.\n\nI revolved in my mind a thousand schemes by which I might obtain, hereafter, an introduction to the elder lady, or, for the present, at all events, a more distinct view of her beauty. I would have removed my position to one nearer her own, but the crowded state of the theatre rendered this impossible; and the stern decrees of Fashion had, of late, imperatively prohibited the use of the opera-glass in a case such as this, even had I been so fortunate as to have one with me \u2014 but I had not \u2014 and was thus in despair.\n\nAt length I bethought me of applying to my companion.\n\n\"Talbot,\" I said, \"you have an opera-glass. Let me have it.\"\n\n\"An opera \u2014 glass! \u2014 no! \u2014 what do you suppose I would be doing with an opera-glass?\" Here he turned impatiently toward the stage.\n\n\"But, Talbot,\" I continued, pulling him by the shoulder, \"listen to me will you? Do you see the stage \u2014 box? \u2014 there! \u2014 no, the next. \u2014 did you ever behold as lovely a woman?\"\n\n\"She is very beautiful, no doubt,\" he said.\n\n\"I wonder who she can be?\"\n\n\"Why, in the name of all that is angelic, don't you know who she is? 'Not to know her argues yourself unknown.' She is the celebrated Madame Lalande \u2014 the beauty of the day par excellence, and the talk of the whole town. Immensely wealthy too \u2014 a widow, and a great match \u2014 has just arrived from Paris.\"\n\n\"Do you know her?\"\n\n\"Yes; I have the honor.\"\n\n\"Will you introduce me?\"\n\n\"Assuredly, with the greatest pleasure; when shall it be?\"\n\n\"To-morrow, at one, I will call upon you at B\u2014's.\n\n\"Very good; and now do hold your tongue, if you can.\"\n\nIn this latter respect I was forced to take Talbot's advice; for he remained obstinately deaf to every further question or suggestion, and occupied himself exclusively for the rest of the evening with what was transacting upon the stage.\n\nIn the meantime I kept my eyes riveted on Madame Lalande, and at length had the good fortune to obtain a full front view of her face. It was exquisitely lovely \u2014 this, of course, my heart had told me before, even had not Talbot fully satisfied me upon the point \u2014 but still the unintelligible something disturbed me. I finally concluded that my senses were impressed by a certain air of gravity, sadness, or, still more properly, of weariness, which took something from the youth and freshness of the countenance, only to endow it with a seraphic tenderness and majesty, and thus, of course, to my enthusiastic and romantic temperment, with an interest tenfold.\n\nWhile I thus feasted my eyes, I perceived, at last, to my great trepidation, by an almost imperceptible start on the part of the lady, that she had become suddenly aware of the intensity of my gaze. Still, I was absolutely fascinated, and could not withdraw it, even for an instant. She turned aside her face, and again I saw only the chiselled contour of the back portion of the head. After some minutes, as if urged by curiosity to see if I was still looking, she gradually brought her face again around and again encountered my burning gaze. Her large dark eyes fell instantly, and a deep blush mantled her cheek. But what was my astonishment at perceiving that she not only did not a second time avert her head, but that she actually took from her girdle a double eyeglass \u2014 elevated it \u2014 adjusted it \u2014 and then regarded me through it, intently and deliberately, for the space of several minutes.\n\nHad a thunderbolt fallen at my feet I could not have been more thoroughly astounded \u2014 astounded only \u2014 not offended or disgusted in the slightest degree; although an action so bold in any other woman would have been likely to offend or disgust. But the whole thing was done with so much quietude \u2014 so much nonchalance \u2014 so much repose \u2014 with so evident an air of the highest breeding, in short \u2014 that nothing of mere effrontery was perceptible, and my sole sentiments were those of admiration and surprise.\n\nI observed that, upon her first elevation of the glass, she had seemed satisfied with a momentary inspection of my person, and was withdrawing the instrument, when, as if struck by a second thought, she resumed it, and so continued to regard me with fixed attention for the space of several minutes \u2014 for five minutes, at the very least, I am sure.\n\nThis action, so remarkable in an American theatre, attracted very general observation, and gave rise to an indefinite movement, or buzz, among the audience, which for a moment filled me with confusion, but produced no visible effect upon the countenance of Madame Lalande.\n\nHaving satisfied her curiosity \u2014 if such it was \u2014 she dropped the glass, and quietly gave her attention again to the stage; her profile now being turned toward myself, as before. I continued to watch her unremittingly, although I was fully conscious of my rudeness in so doing. Presently I saw the head slowly and slightly change its position; and soon I became convinced that the lady, while pretending to look at the stage was, in fact, attentively regarding myself. It is needless to say what effect this conduct, on the part of so fascinating a woman, had upon my excitable mind.\n\nHaving thus scrutinized me for perhaps a quarter of an hour, the fair object of my passion addressed the gentleman who attended her, and while she spoke, I saw distinctly, by the glances of both, that the conversation had reference to myself.\n\nUpon its conclusion, Madame Lalande again turned toward the stage, and, for a few minutes, seemed absorbed in the performance. At the expiration of this period, however, I was thrown into an extremity of agitation by seeing her unfold, for the second time, the eyeglass which hung at her side, fully confront me as before, and, disregarding the renewed buzz of the audience, survey me, from head to foot, with the same miraculous composure which had previously so delighted and confounded my soul.\n\nThis extraordinary behavior, by throwing me into a perfect fever of excitement \u2014 into an absolute delirium of love-served rather to embolden than to disconcert me. In the mad intensity of my devotion, I forgot everything but the presence and the majestic loveliness of the vision which confronted my gaze. Watching my opportunity, when I thought the audience were fully engaged with the opera, I at length caught the eyes of Madame Lalande, and, upon the instant, made a slight but unmistakable bow.\n\nShe blushed very deeply \u2014 then averted her eyes \u2014 then slowly and cautiously looked around, apparently to see if my rash action had been noticed \u2014 then leaned over toward the gentleman who sat by her side.\n\nI now felt a burning sense of the impropriety I had committed, and expected nothing less than instant exposure; while a vision of pistols upon the morrow floated rapidly and uncomfortably through my brain. I was greatly and immediately relieved, however, when I saw the lady merely hand the gentleman a play-bill, without speaking, but the reader may form some feeble conception of my astonishment \u2014 of my profound amazement \u2014 my delirious bewilderment of heart and soul \u2014 when, instantly afterward, having again glanced furtively around, she allowed her bright eyes to set fully and steadily upon my own, and then, with a faint smile, disclosing a bright line of her pearly teeth, made two distinct, pointed, and unequivocal affirmative inclinations of the head.\n\nIt is useless, of course, to dwell upon my joy \u2014 upon my transport \u2014 upon my illimitable ecstasy of heart. If ever man was mad with excess of happiness, it was myself at that moment. I loved. This was my first love \u2014 so I felt it to be. It was love supreme-indescribable. It was \"love at first sight;\" and at first sight, too, it had been appreciated and returned.\n\nYes, returned. How and why should I doubt it for an instant. What other construction could I possibly put upon such conduct, on the part of a lady so beautiful \u2014 so wealthy \u2014 evidently so accomplished \u2014 of so high breeding \u2014 of so lofty a position in society \u2014 in every regard so entirely respectable as I felt assured was Madame Lalande? Yes, she loved me \u2014 she returned the enthusiasm of my love, with an enthusiasm as blind \u2014 as uncompromising \u2014 as uncalculating \u2014 as abandoned \u2014 and as utterly unbounded as my own! These delicious fancies and reflections, however, were now interrupted by the falling of the drop-curtain. The audience arose; and the usual tumult immediately supervened. Quitting Talbot abruptly, I made every effort to force my way into closer proximity with Madame Lalande. Having failed in this, on account of the crowd, I at length gave up the chase, and bent my steps homeward; consoling myself for my disappointment in not having been able to touch even the hem of her robe, by the reflection that I should be introduced by Talbot, in due form, upon the morrow.\n\nThis morrow at last came, that is to say, a day finally dawned upon a long and weary night of impatience; and then the hours until \"one\" were snail-paced, dreary, and innumerable. But even Stamboul, it is said, shall have an end, and there came an end to this long delay. The clock struck. As the last echo ceased, I stepped into B\u2014's and inquired for Talbot.\n\n\"Out,\" said the footman \u2014 Talbot's own.\n\n\"Out!\" I replied, staggering back half a dozen paces \u2014\"let me tell you, my fine fellow, that this thing is thoroughly impossible and impracticable; Mr. Talbot is not out. What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Nothing, sir; only Mr. Talbot is not in, that's all. He rode over to S \u2014 immediately after breakfast, and left word that he would not be in town again for a week.\"\n\nI stood petrified with horror and rage. I endeavored to reply, but my tongue refused its office. At length I turned on my heel, livid with wrath, and inwardly consigning the whole tribe of the Talbots to the innermost regions of Erebus. It was evident that my considerate friend, il fanatico, had quite forgotten his appointment with myself \u2014 had forgotten it as soon as it was made. At no time was he a very scrupulous man of his word. There was no help for it; so smothering my vexation as well as I could, I strolled moodily up the street, propounding futile inquiries about Madame Lalande to every male acquaintance I met. By report she was known, I found, to all \u2014 to many by sight \u2014 but she had been in town only a few weeks, and there were very few, therefore, who claimed her personal acquaintance. These few, being still comparatively strangers, could not, or would not, take the liberty of introducing me through the formality of a morning call. While I stood thus in despair, conversing with a trio of friends upon the all absorbing subject of my heart, it so happened that the subject itself passed by.\n\n\"As I live, there she is!\" cried one.\n\n\"Surprisingly beautiful!\" exclaimed a second.\n\n\"An angel upon earth!\" ejaculated a third.\n\nI looked; and in an open carriage which approached us, passing slowly down the street, sat the enchanting vision of the opera, accompanied by the younger lady who had occupied a portion of her box.\n\n\"Her companion also wears remarkably well,\" said the one of my trio who had spoken first.\n\n\"Astonishingly,\" said the second; \"still quite a brilliant air, but art will do wonders. Upon my word, she looks better than she did at Paris five years ago. A beautiful woman still; \u2014 don't you think so, Froissart? \u2014 Simpson, I mean.\"\n\n\"Still!\" said I, \"and why shouldn't she be? But compared with her friend she is as a rush \u2014 light to the evening star \u2014 a glow \u2014 worm to Antares.\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha! \u2014 why, Simpson, you have an astonishing tact at making discoveries \u2014 original ones, I mean.\" And here we separated, while one of the trio began humming a gay vaudeville, of which I caught only the lines \u2014\n\n\u2003Ninon, Ninon, Ninon a bas\n\n\u2003A bas Ninon De L'Enclos!\n\nDuring this little scene, however, one thing had served greatly to console me, although it fed the passion by which I was consumed. As the carriage of Madame Lalande rolled by our group, I had observed that she recognized me; and more than this, she had blessed me, by the most seraphic of all imaginable smiles, with no equivocal mark of the recognition.\n\nAs for an introduction, I was obliged to abandon all hope of it until such time as Talbot should think proper to return from the country. In the meantime I perseveringly frequented every reputable place of public amusement; and, at length, at the theatre, where I first saw her, I had the supreme bliss of meeting her, and of exchanging glances with her once again. This did not occur, however, until the lapse of a fortnight. Every day, in the interim, I had inquired for Talbot at his hotel, and every day had been thrown into a spasm of wrath by the everlasting \"Not come home yet\" of his footman.\n\nUpon the evening in question, therefore, I was in a condition little short of madness. Madame Lalande, I had been told, was a Parisian \u2014 had lately arrived from Paris \u2014 might she not suddenly return? \u2014 return before Talbot came back \u2014 and might she not be thus lost to me forever? The thought was too terrible to bear. Since my future happiness was at issue, I resolved to act with a manly decision. In a word, upon the breaking up of the play, I traced the lady to her residence, noted the address, and the next morning sent her a full and elaborate letter, in which I poured out my whole heart.\n\nI spoke boldly, freely \u2014 in a word, I spoke with passion. I concealed nothing \u2014 nothing even of my weakness. I alluded to the romantic circumstances of our first meeting \u2014 even to the glances which had passed between us. I went so far as to say that I felt assured of her love; while I offered this assurance, and my own intensity of devotion, as two excuses for my otherwise unpardonable conduct. As a third, I spoke of my fear that she might quit the city before I could have the opportunity of a formal introduction. I concluded the most wildly enthusiastic epistle ever penned, with a frank declaration of my worldly circumstances \u2014 of my affluence \u2014 and with an offer of my heart and of my hand.\n\nIn an agony of expectation I awaited the reply. After what seemed the lapse of a century it came.\n\nYes, actually came. Romantic as all this may appear, I really received a letter from Madame Lalande \u2014 the beautiful, the wealthy, the idolized Madame Lalande. Her eyes \u2014 her magnificent eyes, had not belied her noble heart. Like a true Frenchwoman as she was she had obeyed the frank dictates of her reason \u2014 the generous impulses of her nature \u2014 despising the conventional pruderies of the world. She had not scorned my proposals. She had not sheltered herself in silence. She had not returned my letter unopened. She had even sent me, in reply, one penned by her own exquisite fingers. It ran thus:\n\n\"Monsieur Simpson vill pardonne me for not compose de butefulle tong of his contree so vell as might. It is only de late dat I am arrive, and not yet ave do opportunite for to \u2014 l'etudier.\n\n\"Vid dis apologie for the maniere, I vill now say dat, helas! \u2014 Monsieur Simpson ave guess but de too true. Need I say de more? Helas! am I not ready speak de too moshe?\n\n\u2002\"EUGENIE LALAND.\"\n\n\u2002This noble \u2014 spirited note I kissed a million times, and committed, no doubt, on its account, a thousand other extravagances that have now escaped my memory. Still Talbot would not return. Alas! could he have formed even the vaguest idea of the suffering his absence had occasioned his friend, would not his sympathizing nature have flown immediately to my relief? Still, however, he came not. I wrote. He replied. He was detained by urgent business \u2014 but would shortly return. He begged me not to be impatient \u2014 to moderate my transports \u2014 to read soothing books \u2014 to drink nothing stronger than Hock \u2014 and to bring the consolations of philosophy to my aid. The fool! if he could not come himself, why, in the name of every thing rational, could he not have enclosed me a letter of presentation? I wrote him again, entreating him to forward one forthwith. My letter was returned by that footman, with the following endorsement in pencil. The scoundrel had joined his master in the country:\n\n\u2002\"Left S\u2014 yesterday, for parts unknown \u2014 did not say where \u2014 or when be back \u2014 so thought best to return letter, knowing your handwriting, and as how you is always, more or less, in a hurry.\n\n\u2002\"Yours sincerely,\n\n\u2002\"STUBBS.\"\n\nAfter this, it is needless to say, that I devoted to the infernal deities both master and valet:\u2014 but there was little use in anger, and no consolation at all in complaint.\n\nBut I had yet a resource left, in my constitutional audacity. Hitherto it had served me well, and I now resolved to make it avail me to the end. Besides, after the correspondence which had passed between us, what act of mere informality could I commit, within bounds, that ought to be regarded as indecorous by Madame Lalande? Since the affair of the letter, I had been in the habit of watching her house, and thus discovered that, about twilight, it was her custom to promenade, attended only by a negro in livery, in a public square overlooked by her windows. Here, amid the luxuriant and shadowing groves, in the gray gloom of a sweet midsummer evening, I observed my opportunity and accosted her.\n\nThe better to deceive the servant in attendance, I did this with the assured air of an old and familiar acquaintance. With a presence of mind truly Parisian, she took the cue at once, and, to greet me, held out the most bewitchingly little of hands. The valet at once fell into the rear, and now, with hearts full to overflowing, we discoursed long and unreservedly of our love.\n\nAs Madame Lalande spoke English even less fluently than she wrote it, our conversation was necessarily in French. In this sweet tongue, so adapted to passion, I gave loose to the impetuous enthusiasm of my nature, and, with all the eloquence I could command, besought her to consent to an immediate marriage.\n\nAt this impatience she smiled. She urged the old story of decorum \u2014 that bug-bear which deters so many from bliss until the opportunity for bliss has forever gone by. I had most imprudently made it known among my friends, she observed, that I desired her acquaintance \u2014 thus that I did not possess it \u2014 thus, again, there was no possibility of concealing the date of our first knowledge of each other. And then she adverted, with a blush, to the extreme recency of this date. To wed immediately would be improper \u2014 would be indecorous \u2014 would be outre. All this she said with a charming air of naivete which enraptured while it grieved and convinced me. She went even so far as to accuse me, laughingly, of rashness \u2014 of imprudence. She bade me remember that I really even know not who she was \u2014 what were her prospects, her connections, her standing in society. She begged me, but with a sigh, to reconsider my proposal, and termed my love an infatuation \u2014 a will o' the wisp \u2014 a fancy or fantasy of the moment \u2014 a baseless and unstable creation rather of the imagination than of the heart. These things she uttered as the shadows of the sweet twilight gathered darkly and more darkly around us \u2014 and then, with a gentle pressure of her fairy-like hand, overthrew, in a single sweet instant, all the argumentative fabric she had reared.\n\nI replied as best I could \u2014 as only a true lover can. I spoke at length, and perseveringly of my devotion, of my passion \u2014 of her exceeding beauty, and of my own enthusiastic admiration. In conclusion, I dwelt, with a convincing energy, upon the perils that encompass the course of love \u2014 that course of true love that never did run smooth \u2014 and thus deduced the manifest danger of rendering that course unnecessarily long.\n\nThis latter argument seemed finally to soften the rigor of her determination. She relented; but there was yet an obstacle, she said, which she felt assured I had not properly considered. This was a delicate point \u2014 for a woman to urge, especially so; in mentioning it, she saw that she must make a sacrifice of her feelings; still, for me, every sacrifice should be made. She alluded to the topic of age. Was I aware \u2014 was I fully aware of the discrepancy between us? That the age of the husband, should surpass by a few years \u2014 even by fifteen or twenty \u2014 the age of the wife, was regarded by the world as admissible, and, indeed, as even proper, but she had always entertained the belief that the years of the wife should never exceed in number those of the husband. A discrepancy of this unnatural kind gave rise, too frequently, alas! to a life of unhappiness. Now she was aware that my own age did not exceed two and twenty; and I, on the contrary, perhaps, was not aware that the years of my Eugenie extended very considerably beyond that sum.\n\nAbout all this there was a nobility of soul \u2014 a dignity of candor \u2014 which delighted \u2014 which enchanted me \u2014 which eternally riveted my chains. I could scarcely restrain the excessive transport which possessed me.\n\n\"My sweetest Eugenie,\" I cried, \"what is all this about which you are discoursing? Your years surpass in some measure my own. But what then? The customs of the world are so many conventional follies. To those who love as ourselves, in what respect differs a year from an hour? I am twenty-two, you say, granted: indeed, you may as well call me, at once, twenty-three. Now you yourself, my dearest Eugenie, can have numbered no more than \u2014 can have numbered no more than \u2014 no more than \u2014 than \u2014 than \u2014 than\u2014\"\n\nHere I paused for an instant, in the expectation that Madame Lalande would interrupt me by supplying her true age. But a Frenchwoman is seldom direct, and has always, by way of answer to an embarrassing query, some little practical reply of her own. In the present instance, Eugenie, who for a few moments past had seemed to be searching for something in her bosom, at length let fall upon the grass a miniature, which I immediately picked up and presented to her.\n\n\"Keep it!\" she said, with one of her most ravishing smiles. \"Keep it for my sake \u2014 for the sake of her whom it too flatteringly represents. Besides, upon the back of the trinket you may discover, perhaps, the very information you seem to desire. It is now, to be sure, growing rather dark \u2014 but you can examine it at your leisure in the morning. In the meantime, you shall be my escort home to-night. My friends are about holding a little musical levee. I can promise you, too, some good singing. We French are not nearly so punctilious as you Americans, and I shall have no difficulty in smuggling you in, in the character of an old acquaintance.\"\n\nWith this, she took my arm, and I attended her home. The mansion was quite a fine one, and, I believe, furnished in good taste. Of this latter point, however, I am scarcely qualified to judge; for it was just dark as we arrived; and in American mansions of the better sort lights seldom, during the heat of summer, make their appearance at this, the most pleasant period of the day. In about an hour after my arrival, to be sure, a single shaded solar lamp was lit in the principal drawing-room; and this apartment, I could thus see, was arranged with unusual good taste and even splendor; but two other rooms of the suite, and in which the company chiefly assembled, remained, during the whole evening, in a very agreeable shadow. This is a well-conceived custom, giving the party at least a choice of light or shade, and one which our friends over the water could not do better than immediately adopt.\n\nThe evening thus spent was unquestionably the most delicious of my life. Madame Lalande had not overrated the musical abilities of her friends; and the singing I here heard I had never heard excelled in any private circle out of Vienna. The instrumental performers were many and of superior talents. The vocalists were chiefly ladies, and no individual sang less than well. At length, upon a peremptory call for \"Madame Lalande,\" she arose at once, without affectation or demur, from the chaise longue upon which she had sat by my side, and, accompanied by one or two gentlemen and her female friend of the opera, repaired to the piano in the main drawing-room. I would have escorted her myself, but felt that, under the circumstances of my introduction to the house, I had better remain unobserved where I was. I was thus deprived of the pleasure of seeing, although not of hearing, her sing.\n\nThe impression she produced upon the company seemed electrical but the effect upon myself was something even more. I know not how adequately to describe it. It arose in part, no doubt, from the sentiment of love with which I was imbued; but chiefly from my conviction of the extreme sensibility of the singer. It is beyond the reach of art to endow either air or recitative with more impassioned expression than was hers. Her utterance of the romance in Otello \u2014 the tone with which she gave the words \"Sul mio sasso,\" in the Capuletti \u2014 is ringing in my memory yet. Her lower tones were absolutely miraculous. Her voice embraced three complete octaves, extending from the contralto D to the D upper soprano, and, though sufficiently powerful to have filled the San Carlos, executed, with the minutest precision, every difficulty of vocal composition-ascending and descending scales, cadences, or fiorituri. In the final of the Somnambula, she brought about a most remarkable effect at the words:\n\n\u2003Ah! non guinge uman pensiero\n\n\u2003Al contento ond 'io son piena.\n\nHere, in imitation of Malibran, she modified the original phrase of Bellini, so as to let her voice descend to the tenor G, when, by a rapid transition, she struck the G above the treble stave, springing over an interval of two octaves.\n\nUpon rising from the piano after these miracles of vocal execution, she resumed her seat by my side; when I expressed to her, in terms of the deepest enthusiasm, my delight at her performance. Of my surprise I said nothing, and yet was I most unfeignedly surprised; for a certain feebleness, or rather a certain tremulous indecision of voice in ordinary conversation, had prepared me to anticipate that, in singing, she would not acquit herself with any remarkable ability.\n\nOur conversation was now long, earnest, uninterrupted, and totally unreserved. She made me relate many of the earlier passages of my life, and listened with breathless attention to every word of the narrative. I concealed nothing \u2014 felt that I had a right to conceal nothing \u2014 from her confiding affection. Encouraged by her candor upon the delicate point of her age, I entered, with perfect frankness, not only into a detail of my many minor vices, but made full confession of those moral and even of those physical infirmities, the disclosure of which, in demanding so much higher a degree of courage, is so much surer an evidence of love. I touched upon my college indiscretions \u2014 upon my extravagances \u2014 upon my carousals \u2014 upon my debts \u2014 upon my flirtations. I even went so far as to speak of a slightly hectic cough with which, at one time, I had been troubled \u2014 of a chronic rheumatism \u2014 of a twinge of hereditary gout \u2014 and, in conclusion, of the disagreeable and inconvenient, but hitherto carefully concealed, weakness of my eyes.\n\n\"Upon this latter point,\" said Madame Lalande, laughingly, \"you have been surely injudicious in coming to confession; for, without the confession, I take it for granted that no one would have accused you of the crime. By the by,\" she continued, \"have you any recollection\u2014\" and here I fancied that a blush, even through the gloom of the apartment, became distinctly visible upon her cheek \u2014\"have you any recollection, mon cher ami of this little ocular assistant, which now depends from my neck?\"\n\nAs she spoke she twirled in her fingers the identical double eyeglass which had so overwhelmed me with confusion at the opera.\n\n\"Full well \u2014 alas! do I remember it,\" I exclaimed, pressing passionately the delicate hand which offered the glasses for my inspection. They formed a complex and magnificent toy, richly chased and filigreed, and gleaming with jewels, which, even in the deficient light, I could not help perceiving were of high value.\n\n\"Eh bien! mon ami\" she resumed with a certain empressment of manner that rather surprised me \u2014\"Eh bien! mon ami, you have earnestly besought of me a favor which you have been pleased to denominate priceless. You have demanded of me my hand upon the morrow. Should I yield to your entreaties \u2014 and, I may add, to the pleadings of my own bosom \u2014 would I not be entitled to demand of you a very \u2014 a very little boon in return?\"\n\n\"Name it!\" I exclaimed with an energy that had nearly drawn upon us the observation of the company, and restrained by their presence alone from throwing myself impetuously at her feet. \"Name it, my beloved, my Eugenie, my own! \u2014 name it! \u2014 but, alas! it is already yielded ere named.\"\n\n\"You shall conquer, then, mon ami,\" said she, \"for the sake of the Eugenie whom you love, this little weakness which you have at last confessed \u2014 this weakness more moral than physical \u2014 and which, let me assure you, is so unbecoming the nobility of your real nature \u2014 so inconsistent with the candor of your usual character \u2014 and which, if permitted further control, will assuredly involve you, sooner or later, in some very disagreeable scrape. You shall conquer, for my sake, this affectation which leads you, as you yourself acknowledge, to the tacit or implied denial of your infirmity of vision. For, this infirmity you virtually deny, in refusing to employ the customary means for its relief. You will understand me to say, then, that I wish you to wear spectacles; \u2014 ah, hush! \u2014 you have already consented to wear them, for my sake. You shall accept the little toy which I now hold in my hand, and which, though admirable as an aid to vision, is really of no very immense value as a gem. You perceive that, by a trifling modification thus \u2014 or thus \u2014 it can be adapted to the eyes in the form of spectacles, or worn in the waistcoat pocket as an eyeglass. It is in the former mode, however, and habitually, that you have already consented to wear it for my sake.\"\n\nThis request \u2014 must I confess it? \u2014 confused me in no little degree. But the condition with which it was coupled rendered hesitation, of course, a matter altogether out of the question.\n\n\"It is done!\" I cried, with all the enthusiasm that I could muster at the moment. \"It is done \u2014 it is most cheerfully agreed. I sacrifice every feeling for your sake. To-night I wear this dear eyeglass, as an eyeglass, and upon my heart; but with the earliest dawn of that morning which gives me the pleasure of calling you wife, I will place it upon my \u2014 upon my nose \u2014 and there wear it ever afterward, in the less romantic, and less fashionable, but certainly in the more serviceable, form which you desire.\"\n\nOur conversation now turned upon the details of our arrangements for the morrow. Talbot, I learned from my betrothed, had just arrived in town. I was to see him at once, and procure a carriage. The soiree would scarcely break up before two; and by this hour the vehicle was to be at the door, when, in the confusion occasioned by the departure of the company, Madame L. could easily enter it unobserved. We were then to call at the house of a clergyman who would be in waiting; there be married, drop Talbot, and proceed on a short tour to the East, leaving the fashionable world at home to make whatever comments upon the matter it thought best.\n\nHaving planned all this, I immediately took leave, and went in search of Talbot, but, on the way, I could not refrain from stepping into a hotel, for the purpose of inspecting the miniature; and this I did by the powerful aid of the glasses. The countenance was a surpassingly beautiful one! Those large luminous eyes! \u2014 that proud Grecian nose! \u2014 those dark luxuriant curls! \u2014\"Ah!\" said I, exultingly to myself, \"this is indeed the speaking image of my beloved!\" I turned the reverse, and discovered the words \u2014\"Eugenie Lalande \u2014 aged twenty-seven years and seven months.\"\n\nI found Talbot at home, and proceeded at once to acquaint him with my good fortune. He professed excessive astonishment, of course, but congratulated me most cordially, and proffered every assistance in his power. In a word, we carried out our arrangement to the letter, and, at two in the morning, just ten minutes after the ceremony, I found myself in a close carriage with Madame Lalande \u2014 with Mrs. Simpson, I should say \u2014 and driving at a great rate out of town, in a direction Northeast by North, half-North.\n\nIt had been determined for us by Talbot, that, as we were to be up all night, we should make our first stop at C \u2014 a village about twenty miles from the city, and there get an early breakfast and some repose, before proceeding upon our route. At four precisely, therefore, the carriage drew up at the door of the principal inn. I handed my adored wife out, and ordered breakfast forthwith. In the meantime we were shown into a small parlor, and sat down.\n\nIt was now nearly if not altogether daylight; and, as I gazed, enraptured, at the angel by my side, the singular idea came, all at once, into my head, that this was really the very first moment since my acquaintance with the celebrated loveliness of Madame Lalande, that I had enjoyed a near inspection of that loveliness by daylight at all.\n\n\"And now, mon ami,\" said she, taking my hand, and so interrupting this train of reflection, \"and now, mon cher ami, since we are indissolubly one \u2014 since I have yielded to your passionate entreaties, and performed my portion of our agreement \u2014 I presume you have not forgotten that you also have a little favor to bestow \u2014 a little promise which it is your intention to keep. Ah! let me see! Let me remember! Yes; full easily do I call to mind the precise words of the dear promise you made to Eugenie last night. Listen! You spoke thus: 'It is done! \u2014 it is most cheerfully agreed! I sacrifice every feeling for your sake. To-night I wear this dear eyeglass as an eyeglass, and upon my heart; but with the earliest dawn of that morning which gives me the privilege of calling you wife, I will place it upon my \u2014 upon my nose \u2014 and there wear it ever afterward, in the less romantic, and less fashionable, but certainly in the more serviceable, form which you desire.' These were the exact words, my beloved husband, were they not?\"\n\n\"They were,\" I said; \"you have an excellent memory; and assuredly, my beautiful Eugenie, there is no disposition on my part to evade the performance of the trivial promise they imply. See! Behold! they are becoming \u2014 rather \u2014 are they not?\" And here, having arranged the glasses in the ordinary form of spectacles, I applied them gingerly in their proper position; while Madame Simpson, adjusting her cap, and folding her arms, sat bolt upright in her chair, in a somewhat stiff and prim, and indeed, in a somewhat undignified position.\n\n\"Goodness gracious me!\" I exclaimed, almost at the very instant that the rim of the spectacles had settled upon my nose \u2014\"My goodness gracious me! \u2014 why, what can be the matter with these glasses?\" and taking them quickly off, I wiped them carefully with a silk handkerchief, and adjusted them again.\n\nBut if, in the first instance, there had occurred something which occasioned me surprise, in the second, this surprise became elevated into astonishment; and this astonishment was profound \u2014 was extreme \u2014 indeed I may say it was horrific. What, in the name of everything hideous, did this mean? Could I believe my eyes? \u2014 could I? \u2014 that was the question. Was that \u2014 was that \u2014 was that rouge? And were those \u2014 and were those \u2014 were those wrinkles, upon the visage of Eugenie Lalande? And oh! Jupiter, and every one of the gods and goddesses, little and big! what \u2014 what \u2014 what \u2014 what had become of her teeth? I dashed the spectacles violently to the ground, and, leaping to my feet, stood erect in the middle of the floor, confronting Mrs. Simpson, with my arms set a-kimbo, and grinning and foaming, but, at the same time, utterly speechless with terror and with rage.\n\nNow I have already said that Madame Eugenie Lalande \u2014 that is to say, Simpson \u2014 spoke the English language but very little better than she wrote it, and for this reason she very properly never attempted to speak it upon ordinary occasions. But rage will carry a lady to any extreme; and in the present care it carried Mrs. Simpson to the very extraordinary extreme of attempting to hold a conversation in a tongue that she did not altogether understand.\n\n\"Vell, Monsieur,\" said she, after surveying me, in great apparent astonishment, for some moments \u2014\"Vell, Monsieur? \u2014 and vat den? \u2014 vat de matter now? Is it de dance of de Saint itusse dat you ave? If not like me, vat for vy buy de pig in the poke?\"\n\n\"You wretch!\" said I, catching my breath \u2014\"you \u2014 you \u2014 you villainous old hag!\"\n\n\"Ag? \u2014 ole? \u2014 me not so ver ole, after all! Me not one single day more dan de eighty-doo.\"\n\n\"Eighty-two!\" I ejaculated, staggering to the wall \u2014\"eighty-two hundred thousand baboons! The miniature said twenty-seven years and seven months!\"\n\n\"To be sure! \u2014 dat is so! \u2014 ver true! but den de portraite has been take for dese fifty-five year. Ven I go marry my segonde usbande, Monsieur Lalande, at dat time I had de portraite take for my daughter by my first usbande, Monsieur Moissart!\"\n\n\"Moissart!\" said I.\n\n\"Yes, Moissart,\" said she, mimicking my pronunciation, which, to speak the truth, was none of the best \u2014 \"and vat den? Vat you know about de Moissart?\"\n\n\"Nothing, you old fright! \u2014 I know nothing about him at all; only I had an ancestor of that name, once upon a time.\"\n\n\"Dat name! and vat you ave for say to dat name? 'Tis ver goot name; and so is Voissart \u2014 dat is ver goot name too. My daughter, Mademoiselle Moissart, she marry von Monsieur Voissart \u2014 and de name is bot ver respectaable name.\"\n\n\"Moissart?\" I exclaimed, \"and Voissart! Why, what is it you mean?\"\n\n\"Vat I mean? \u2014 I mean Moissart and Voissart; and for de matter of dat, I mean Croissart and Froisart, too, if I only tink proper to mean it. My daughter's daughter, Mademoiselle Voissart, she marry von Monsieur Croissart, and den again, my daughter's grande daughter, Mademoiselle Croissart, she marry von Monsieur Froissart; and I suppose you say dat dat is not von ver respectaable name.\u2014\"\n\n\"Froissart!\" said I, beginning to faint, \"why, surely you don't say Moissart, and Voissart, and Croissart, and Froissart?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied, leaning fully back in her chair, and stretching out her lower limbs at great length; \"yes, Moissart, and Voissart, and Croissart, and Froissart. But Monsieur Froissart, he vas von ver big vat you call fool \u2014 he vas von ver great big donce like yourself \u2014 for he lef la belle France for come to dis stupide Amerique \u2014 and ven he get here he went and ave von ver stupide, von ver, ver stupide sonn, so I hear, dough I not yet av ad de plaisir to meet vid him \u2014 neither me nor my companion, de Madame Stephanie Lalande. He is name de Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart, and I suppose you say dat dat, too, is not von ver respectable name.\"\n\nEither the length or the nature of this speech, had the effect of working up Mrs. Simpson into a very extraordinary passion indeed; and as she made an end of it, with great labor, she lumped up from her chair like somebody bewitched, dropping upon the floor an entire universe of bustle as she lumped. Once upon her feet, she gnashed her gums, brandished her arms, rolled up her sleeves, shook her fist in my face, and concluded the performance by tearing the cap from her head, and with it an immense wig of the most valuable and beautiful black hair, the whole of which she dashed upon the ground with a yell, and there trammpled and danced a fandango upon it, in an absolute ecstasy and agony of rage.\n\nMeantime I sank aghast into the chair which she had vacated. \"Moissart and Voissart!\" I repeated, thoughtfully, as she cut one of her pigeon-wings, and \"Croissart and Froissart!\" as she completed another \u2014\"Moissart and Voissart and Croissart and Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart! \u2014 why, you ineffable old serpent, that's me \u2014 that's me \u2014 d'ye hear? that's me\"\u2014 here I screamed at the top of my voice \u2014\"that's me-e-e! I am Napoleon Bonaparte Froissart! and if I havn't married my great, great, grandmother, I wish I may be everlastingly confounded!\"\n\nMadame Eugenie Lalande, quasi Simpson \u2014 formerly Moissart \u2014 was, in sober fact, my great, great, grandmother. In her youth she had been beautiful, and even at eighty-two, retained the majestic height, the sculptural contour of head, the fine eyes and the Grecian nose of her girlhood. By the aid of these, of pearl-powder, of rouge, of false hair, false teeth, and false tournure, as well as of the most skilful modistes of Paris, she contrived to hold a respectable footing among the beauties en peu passees of the French metropolis. In this respect, indeed, she might have been regarded as little less than the equal of the celebrated Ninon De L'Enclos.\n\nShe was immensely wealthy, and being left, for the second time, a widow without children, she bethought herself of my existence in America, and for the purpose of making me her heir, paid a visit to the United States, in company with a distant and exceedingly lovely relative of her second husband's \u2014 a Madame Stephanie Lalande.\n\nAt the opera, my great, great, grandmother's attention was arrested by my notice; and, upon surveying me through her eyeglass, she was struck with a certain family resemblance to herself. Thus interested, and knowing that the heir she sought was actually in the city, she made inquiries of her party respecting me. The gentleman who attended her knew my person, and told her who I was. The information thus obtained induced her to renew her scrutiny; and this scrutiny it was which so emboldened me that I behaved in the absurd manner already detailed. She returned my bow, however, under the impression that, by some odd accident, I had discovered her identity. When, deceived by my weakness of vision, and the arts of the toilet, in respect to the age and charms of the strange lady, I demanded so enthusiastically of Talbot who she was, he concluded that I meant the younger beauty, as a matter of course, and so informed me, with perfect truth, that she was \"the celebrated widow, Madame Lalande.\"\n\nIn the street, next morning, my great, great, grandmother encountered Talbot, an old Parisian acquaintance; and the conversation, very naturally turned upon myself. My deficiencies of vision were then explained; for these were notorious, although I was entirely ignorant of their notoriety, and my good old relative discovered, much to her chagrin, that she had been deceived in supposing me aware of her identity, and that I had been merely making a fool of myself in making open love, in a theatre, to an old woman unknown. By way of punishing me for this imprudence, she concocted with Talbot a plot. He purposely kept out of my way to avoid giving me the introduction. My street inquiries about \"the lovely widow, Madame Lalande,\" were supposed to refer to the younger lady, of course, and thus the conversation with the three gentlemen whom I encountered shortly after leaving Talbot's hotel will be easily explained, as also their allusion to Ninon De L'Enclos. I had no opportunity of seeing Madame Lalande closely during daylight; and, at her musical soiree, my silly weakness in refusing the aid of glasses effectually prevented me from making a discovery of her age. When \"Madame Lalande\" was called upon to sing, the younger lady was intended; and it was she who arose to obey the call; my great, great, grandmother, to further the deception, arising at the same moment and accompanying her to the piano in the main drawing-room. Had I decided upon escorting her thither, it had been her design to suggest the propriety of my remaining where I was; but my own prudential views rendered this unnecessary. The songs which I so much admired, and which so confirmed my impression of the youth of my mistress, were executed by Madame Stephanie Lalande. The eyeglass was presented by way of adding a reproof to the hoax \u2014 a sting to the epigram of the deception. Its presentation afforded an opportunity for the lecture upon affectation with which I was so especially edified. It is almost superfluous to add that the glasses of the instrument, as worn by the old lady, had been exchanged by her for a pair better adapted to my years. They suited me, in fact, to a T.\n\nThe clergyman, who merely pretended to tie the fatal knot, was a boon companion of Talbot's, and no priest. He was an excellent \"whip,\" however; and having doffed his cassock to put on a great-coat, he drove the hack which conveyed the \"happy couple\" out of town. Talbot took a seat at his side. The two scoundrels were thus \"in at the death,\" and through a half-open window of the back parlor of the inn, amused themselves in grinning at the denouement of the drama. I believe I shall be forced to call them both out.\n\nNevertheless, I am not the husband of my great, great, grandmother; and this is a reflection which affords me infinite relief \u2014 but I am the husband of Madame Lalande \u2014 of Madame Stephanie Lalande \u2014 with whom my good old relative, besides making me her sole heir when she dies \u2014 if she ever does \u2014 has been at the trouble of concocting me a match. In conclusion: I am done forever with billets doux and am never to be met without SPECTACLES.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Thou Art the Man by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nI will now play the Oedipus to the Rattleborough enigma. I will expound to you \u2014 as I alone can \u2014 the secret of the enginery that effected the Rattleborough miracle \u2014 the one, the true, the admitted, the undisputed, the indisputable miracle, which put a definite end to infidelity among the Rattleburghers and converted to the orthodoxy of the grandames all the carnal-minded who had ventured to be sceptical before.\n\nThis event \u2014 which I should be sorry to discuss in a tone of unsuitable levity \u2014 occurred in the summer of 18-. Mr. Barnabas Shuttleworthy \u2014 one of the wealthiest and most respectable citizens of the borough \u2014 had been missing for several days under circumstances which gave rise to suspicion of foul play. Mr. Shuttleworthy had set out from Rattleborough very early one Saturday morning, on horseback, with the avowed intention of proceeding to the city of-, about fifteen miles distant, and of returning the night of the same day. Two hours after his departure, however, his horse returned without him, and without the saddle-bags which had been strapped on his back at starting. The animal was wounded, too, and covered with mud. These circumstances naturally gave rise to much alarm among the friends of the missing man; and when it was found, on Sunday morning, that he had not yet made his appearance, the whole borough arose en masse to go and look for his body.\n\nThe foremost and most energetic in instituting this search was the bosom friend of Mr. Shuttleworthy \u2014 a Mr. Charles Goodfellow, or, as he was universally called, \"Charley Goodfellow,\" or \"Old Charley Goodfellow.\" Now, whether it is a marvellous coincidence, or whether it is that the name itself has an imperceptible effect upon the character, I have never yet been able to ascertain; but the fact is unquestionable, that there never yet was any person named Charles who was not an open, manly, honest, good-natured, and frank-hearted fellow, with a rich, clear voice, that did you good to hear it, and an eye that looked you always straight in the face, as much as to say: \"I have a clear conscience myself, am afraid of no man, and am altogether above doing a mean action.\" And thus all the hearty, careless, \"walking gentlemen\" of the stage are very certain to be called Charles.\n\nNow, \"Old Charley Goodfellow,\" although he had been in Rattleborough not longer than six months or thereabouts, and although nobody knew any thing about him before he came to settle in the neighborhood, had experienced no difficulty in the world in making the acquaintance of all the respectable people in the borough. Not a man of them but would have taken his bare word for a thousand at any moment; and as for the women, there is no saying what they would not have done to oblige him. And all this came of his having been christened Charles, and of his possessing, in consequence, that ingenuous face which is proverbially the very \"best letter of recommendation.\"\n\nI have already said that Mr. Shuttleworthy was one of the most respectable and, undoubtedly, he was the most wealthy man in Rattleborough, while \"Old Charley Goodfellow\" was upon as intimate terms with him as if he had been his own brother. The two old gentlemen were next-door neighbours, and, although Mr. Shuttleworthy seldom, if ever, visited \"Old Charley,\" and never was known to take a meal in his house, still this did not prevent the two friends from being exceedingly intimate, as I have just observed; for \"Old Charley\" never let a day pass without stepping in three or four times to see how his neighbour came on, and very often he would stay to breakfast or tea, and almost always to dinner, and then the amount of wine that was made way with by the two cronies at a sitting, it would really be a difficult thing to ascertain. \"Old Charleys\" favorite beverage was Chateau-Margaux, and it appeared to do Mr. Shuttleworthy's heart good to see the old fellow swallow it, as he did, quart after quart; so that, one day, when the wine was in and the wit as a natural consequence, somewhat out, he said to his crony, as he slapped him upon the back \u2014\"I tell you what it is, 'Old Charley,' you are, by all odds, the heartiest old fellow I ever came across in all my born days; and, since you love to guzzle the wine at that fashion, I'll be darned if I don't have to make thee a present of a big box of the Chateau-Margaux. Od rot me,\"\u2014(Mr. Shuttleworthy had a sad habit of swearing, although he seldom went beyond \"Od rot me,\" or \"By gosh,\" or \"By the jolly golly,\")\u2014\"Od rot me,\" says he, \"if I don't send an order to town this very afternoon for a double box of the best that can be got, and I'll make ye a present of it, I will! \u2014 ye needn't say a word now \u2014 I will, I tell ye, and there's an end of it; so look out for it \u2014 it will come to hand some of these fine days, precisely when ye are looking for it the least!\" I mention this little bit of liberality on the part of Mr. Shuttleworthy, just by way of showing you how very intimate an understanding existed between the two friends.\n\nWell, on the Sunday morning in question, when it came to be fairly understood that Mr. Shuttleworthy had met with foul play, I never saw any one so profoundly affected as \"Old Charley Goodfellow.\" When he first heard that the horse had come home without his master, and without his master's saddle-bags, and all bloody from a pistol-shot, that had gone clean through and through the poor animal's chest without quite killing him; when he heard all this, he turned as pale as if the missing man had been his own dear brother or father, and shivered and shook all over as if he had had a fit of the ague.\n\nAt first he was too much overpowered with grief to be able to do any thing at all, or to concert upon any plan of action; so that for a long time he endeavoured to dissuade Mr. Shuttleworthy's other friends from making a stir about the matter, thinking it best to wait awhile \u2014 say for a week or two, or a month, or two \u2014 to see if something wouldn't turn up, or if Mr. Shuttleworthy wouldn't come in the natural way, and explain his reasons for sending his horse on before. I dare say you have often observed this disposition to temporize, or to procrastinate, in people who are labouring under any very poignant sorrow. Their powers of mind seem to be rendered torpid, so that they have a horror of any thing like action, and like nothing in the world so well as to lie quietly in bed and \"nurse their grief,\" as the old ladies express it \u2014 that is to say, ruminate over the trouble.\n\nThe people of Rattleborough had, indeed, so high an opinion of the wisdom and discretion of \"Old Charley,\" that the greater part of them felt disposed to agree with him, and not make a stir in the business \"until something should turn up,\" as the honest old gentleman worded it; and I believe that, after all this would have been the general determination, but for the very suspicious interference of Mr. Shuttleworthy's nephew, a young man of very dissipated habits, and otherwise of rather bad character. This nephew, whose name was Pennifeather, would listen to nothing like reason in the matter of \"lying quiet,\" but insisted upon making immediate search for the \"corpse of the murdered man. \u2014 This was the expression he employed; and Mr. Goodfellow acutely remarked at the time, that it was \"a singular expression, to say no more.\" This remark of 'Old Charley's,' too, had great effect upon the crowd; and one of the party was heard to ask, very impressively, \"how it happened that young Mr. Pennifeather was so intimately cognizant of all the circumstances connected with his wealthy uncle's disappearance, as to feel authorized to assert, distinctly and unequivocally, that his uncle was 'a murdered man.'\" Hereupon some little squibbing and bickering occurred among various members of the crowd, and especially between \"Old Charley\" and Mr. Pennifeather \u2014 although this latter occurrence was, indeed, by no means a novelty, for no good will had subsisted between the parties for the last three or four months; and matters had even gone so far that Mr. Pennifeather had actually knocked down his uncles friend for some alleged excess of liberty that the latter had taken in the uncle's house, of which the nephew was an inmate. Upon this occasion \"Old Charley\" is said to have behaved with exemplary moderation and Christian charity. He arose from the blow, adjusted his clothes, and made no attempt at retaliation at all \u2014 merely muttering a few words about \"taking summary vengeance at the first convenient opportunity,\"\u2014 a natural and very justifiable ebullition of anger, which meant nothing, however, and, beyond doubt, was no sooner given vent to than forgotten.\n\nHowever these matters may be (which have no reference to the point now at issue), it is quite certain that the people of Rattleborough, principally through the persuasion of Mr. Pennifeather, came at length to the determination of dispersion over the adjacent country in search of the missing Mr. Shuttleworthy. I say they came to this determination in the first instance. After it had been fully resolved that a search should be made, it was considered almost a matter of course that the seekers should disperse \u2014 that is to say, distribute themselves in parties \u2014 for the more thorough examination of the region round about. I forget, however, by what ingenious train of reasoning it was that \"Old Charley\" finally convinced the assembly that this was the most injudicious plan that could be pursued. Convince them, however, he did \u2014 all except Mr. Pennifeather, and, in the end, it was arranged that a search should be instituted, carefully and very thoroughly, by the burghers en masse, \"Old Charley\" himself leading the way.\n\nAs for the matter of that, there could have been no better pioneer than \"Old Charley,\" whom everybody knew to have the eye of a lynx; but, although he led them into all manner of out-of-the-way holes and corners, by routes that nobody had ever suspected of existing in the neighbourhood, and although the search was incessantly kept up day and night for nearly a week, still no trace of Mr. Shuttleworthy could be discovered. When I say no trace, however, I must not be understood to speak literally, for trace, to some extent, there certainly was. The poor gentleman had been tracked, by his horses shoes (which were peculiar), to a spot about three miles to the east of the borough, on the main road leading to the city. Here the track made off into a by-path through a piece of woodland \u2014 the path coming out again into the main road, and cutting off about half a mile of the regular distance. Following the shoe-marks down this lane, the party came at length to a pool of stagnant water, half hidden by the brambles, to the right of the lane, and opposite this pool all vestige of the track was lost sight of. It appeared, however, that a struggle of some nature had here taken place, and it seemed as if some large and heavy body, much larger and heavier than a man, had been drawn from the by-path to the pool. This latter was carefully dragged twice, but nothing was found; and the party was upon the point of going away, in despair of coming to any result, when Providence suggested to Mr. Goodfellow the expediency of draining the water off altogether. This project was received with cheers, and many high compliments to \"Old Charley\" upon his sagacity and consideration. As many of the burghers had brought spades with them, supposing that they might possibly be called upon to disinter a corpse, the drain was easily and speedily effected; and no sooner was the bottom visible, than right in the middle of the mud that remained was discovered a black silk velvet waistcoat, which nearly every one present immediately recognized as the property of Mr. Pennifeather. This waistcoat was much torn and stained with blood, and there were several persons among the party who had a distinct remembrance of its having been worn by its owner on the very morning of Mr. Shuttleworthy's departure for the city; while there were others, again, ready to testify upon oath, if required, that Mr. P. did not wear the garment in question at any period during the remainder of that memorable day, nor could any one be found to say that he had seen it upon Mr. P.'s person at any period at all subsequent to Mr. Shuttleworthy's disappearance.\n\nMatters now wore a very serious aspect for Mr. Pennifeather, and it was observed, as an indubitable confirmation of the suspicions which were excited against him, that he grew exceedingly pale, and when asked what he had to say for himself, was utterly incapable of saying a word. Hereupon, the few friends his riotous mode of living had left him, deserted him at once to a man, and were even more clamorous than his ancient and avowed enemies for his instantaneous arrest. But, on the other hand, the magnanimity of Mr. Goodfellow shone forth with only the more brilliant lustre through contrast. He made a warm and intensely eloquent defence of Mr. Pennifeather, in which he alluded more than once to his own sincere forgiveness of that wild young gentleman \u2014\"the heir of the worthy Mr. Shuttleworthy,\"\u2014 for the insult which he (the young gentleman) had, no doubt in the heat of passion, thought proper to put upon him (Mr. Goodfellow). \"He forgave him for it,\" he said, \"from the very bottom of his heart; and for himself (Mr. Goodfellow), so far from pushing the suspicious circumstances to extremity, which he was sorry to say, really had arisen against Mr. Pennifeather, he (Mr. Goodfellow) would make every exertion in his power, would employ all the little eloquence in his possession to \u2014 to \u2014 to \u2014 soften down, as much as he could conscientiously do so, the worst features of this really exceedingly perplexing piece of business.\"\n\nMr. Goodfellow went on for some half hour longer in this strain, very much to the credit both of his head and of his heart; but your warm-hearted people are seldom apposite in their observations \u2014 they run into all sorts of blunders, contre-temps and mal apropos-isms, in the hot-headedness of their zeal to serve a friend \u2014 thus, often with the kindest intentions in the world, doing infinitely more to prejudice his cause than to advance it.\n\nSo, in the present instance, it turned out with all the eloquence of \"Old Charley\"; for, although he laboured earnestly in behalf of the suspected, yet it so happened, somehow or other, that every syllable he uttered of which the direct but unwitting tendency was not to exalt the speaker in the good opinion of his audience, had the effect to deepen the suspicion already attached to the individual whose cause he pleaded, and to arouse against him the fury of the mob.\n\nOne of the most unaccountable errors committed by the orator was his allusion to the suspected as \"the heir of the worthy old gentleman Mr. Shuttleworthy.\" The people had really never thought of this before. They had only remembered certain threats of disinheritance uttered a year or two previously by the uncle (who had no living relative except the nephew), and they had, therefore, always looked upon this disinheritance as a matter that was settled \u2014 so single-minded a race of beings were the Rattleburghers; but the remark of \"Old Charley\" brought them at once to a consideration of this point, and thus gave them to see the possibility of the threats having been nothing more than a threat. And straightway hereupon, arose the natural question of cui bono? \u2014 a question that tended even more than the waistcoat to fasten the terrible crime upon the young man. And here, lest I may be misunderstood, permit me to digress for one moment merely to observe that the exceedingly brief and simple Latin phrase which I have employed, is invariably mistranslated and misconceived. \"Cui bono?\" in all the crack novels and elsewhere \u2014 in those of Mrs. Gore, for example, (the author of \"Cecil,\") a lady who quotes all tongues from the Chaldaean to Chickasaw, and is helped to her learning, \"as needed,\" upon a systematic plan, by Mr. Beckford \u2014 in all the crack novels, I say, from those of Bulwer and Dickens to those of Bulwer and Dickens to those of Turnapenny and Ainsworth, the two little Latin words cui bono are rendered \"to what purpose?\" or, (as if quo bono,) \"to what good.\" Their true meaning, nevertheless, is \"for whose advantage.\" Cui, to whom; bono, is it for a benefit. It is a purely legal phrase, and applicable precisely in cases such as we have now under consideration, where the probability of the doer of a deed hinges upon the probability of the benefit accruing to this individual or to that from the deed's accomplishment. Now in the present instance, the question cui bono? very pointedly implicated Mr. Pennifeather. His uncle had threatened him, after making a will in his favour, with disinheritance. But the threat had not been actually kept; the original will, it appeared, had not been altered. Had it been altered, the only supposable motive for murder on the part of the suspected would have been the ordinary one of revenge; and even this would have been counteracted by the hope of reinstation into the good graces of the uncle. But the will being unaltered, while the threat to alter remained suspended over the nephew's head, there appears at once the very strongest possible inducement for the atrocity, and so concluded, very sagaciously, the worthy citizens of the borough of Rattle.\n\nMr. Pennifeather was, accordingly, arrested upon the spot, and the crowd, after some further search, proceeded homeward, having him in custody. On the route, however, another circumstance occurred tending to confirm the suspicion entertained. Mr. Goodfellow, whose zeal led him to be always a little in advance of the party, was seen suddenly to run forward a few paces, stoop, and then apparently to pick up some small object from the grass. Having quickly examined it he was observed, too, to make a sort of half attempt at concealing it in his coat pocket; but this action was noticed, as I say, and consequently prevented, when the object picked up was found to be a Spanish knife which a dozen persons at once recognized as belonging to Mr. Pennifeather. Moreover, his initials were engraved upon the handle. The blade of this knife was open and bloody.\n\nNo doubt now remained of the guilt of the nephew, and immediately upon reaching Rattleborough he was taken before a magistrate for examination.\n\nHere matters again took a most unfavourable turn. The prisoner, being questioned as to his whereabouts on the morning of Mr. Shuttleworthy's disappearance, had absolutely the audacity to acknowledge that on that very morning he had been out with his rifle deer-stalking, in the immediate neighbourhood of the pool where the blood-stained waistcoat had been discovered through the sagacity of Mr. Goodfellow.\n\nThis latter now came forward, and, with tears in his eyes, asked permission to be examined. He said that a stern sense of the duty he owed his Maker, not less than his fellow-men, would permit him no longer to remain silent. Hitherto, the sincerest affection for the young man (notwithstanding the latter's ill-treatment of himself, Mr. Goodfellow) had induced him to make every hypothesis which imagination could suggest, by way of endeavouring to account for what appeared suspicious in the circumstances that told so seriously against Mr. Pennifeather, but these circumstances were now altogether too convincing \u2014 too damning, he would hesitate no longer \u2014 he would tell all he knew, although his heart (Mr. Goodfellow's ) should absolutely burst asunder in the effort. He then went on to state that, on the afternoon of the day previous to Mr. Shuttleworthy's departure for the city, that worthy old gentleman had mentioned to his nephew, in his hearing (Mr. Goodfellow's ), that his object in going to town on the morrow was to make a deposit of an unusually large sum of money in the \"Farmers and Mechanics' Bank,\" and that, then and there, the said Mr. Shuttleworthy had distinctly avowed to the said nephew his irrevocable determination of rescinding the will originally made, and of cutting him off with a shilling. He (the witness) now solemnly called upon the accused to state whether what he (the witness) had just stated was or was not the truth in every substantial particular. Much to the astonishment of every one present, Mr. Pennifeather frankly admitted that it was.\n\nThe magistrate now considered it his duty to send a couple of constables to search the chamber of the accused in the house of his uncle. From this search they almost immediately returned with the well-known steel-bound, russet leather pocket-book which the old gentleman had been in the habit of carrying for years. Its valuable contents, however, had been abstracted, and the magistrate in vain endeavoured to extort from the prisoner the use which had been made of them, or the place of their concealment. Indeed, he obstinately denied all knowledge of the matter. The constables, also, discovered, between the bed and sacking of the unhappy man, a shirt and neck-handkerchief both marked with the initials of his name, and both hideously besmeared with the blood of the victim.\n\nAt this juncture, it was announced that the horse of the murdered man had just expired in the stable from the effects of the wound he had received, and it was proposed by Mr. Goodfellow that a post mortem examination of the beast should be immediately made, with the view, if possible, of discovering the ball. This was accordingly done; and, as if to demonstrate beyond a question the guilt of the accused, Mr. Goodfellow, after considerable searching in the cavity of the chest was enabled to detect and to pull forth a bullet of very extraordinary size, which, upon trial, was found to be exactly adapted to the bore of Mr. Pennifeather's rifle, while it was far too large for that of any other person in the borough or its vicinity. To render the matter even surer yet, however, this bullet was discovered to have a flaw or seam at right angles to the usual suture, and upon examination, this seam corresponded precisely with an accidental ridge or elevation in a pair of moulds acknowledged by the accused himself to be his own property. Upon finding of this bullet, the examining magistrate refused to listen to any farther testimony, and immediately committed the prisoner for trial-declining resolutely to take any bail in the case, although against this severity Mr. Goodfellow very warmly remonstrated, and offered to become surety in whatever amount might be required. This generosity on the part of \"Old Charley\" was only in accordance with the whole tenour of his amiable and chivalrous conduct during the entire period of his sojourn in the borough of Rattle. In the present instance the worthy man was so entirely carried away by the excessive warmth of his sympathy, that he seemed to have quite forgotten, when he offered to go bail for his young friend, that he himself (Mr. Goodfellow) did not possess a single dollar's worth of property upon the face of the earth.\n\nThe result of the committal may be readily foreseen. Mr. Pennifeather, amid the loud execrations of all Rattleborough, was brought to trial at the next criminal sessions, when the chain of circumstantial evidence (strengthened as it was by some additional damning facts, which Mr. Goodfellow's sensitive conscientiousness forbade him to withhold from the court) was considered so unbroken and so thoroughly conclusive, that the jury, without leaving their seats, returned an immediate verdict of \"Guilty of murder in the first degree.\" Soon afterward the unhappy wretch received sentence of death, and was remanded to the county jail to await the inexorable vengeance of the law.\n\nIn the meantime, the noble behaviour of \"Old Charley Goodfellow, had doubly endeared him to the honest citizens of the borough. He became ten times a greater favorite than ever, and, as a natural result of the hospitality with which he was treated, he relaxed, as it were, perforce, the extremely parsimonious habits which his poverty had hitherto impelled him to observe, and very frequently had little reunions at his own house, when wit and jollity reigned supreme-dampened a little, of course, by the occasional remembrance of the untoward and melancholy fate which impended over the nephew of the late lamented bosom friend of the generous host.\n\nOne fine day, this magnanimous old gentleman was agreeably surprised at the receipt of the following letter:\n\n\u2002Chat. Mar. A-No. 1.\n\n\u20026 doz. bottles (1/2 Gross)\n\n\u2002From H.F.B. & Co.\n\n\u2002Charles Goodfellow, Esq., Rattleborough\n\n\u2002\"Charles Goodfellow, Esquire.\n\n\u2002\"Dear Sir-In conformity with an order transmitted to our firm about two months since, by our esteemed correspondent, Mr. Barnabus Shuttleworthy, we have the honour of forwarding this morning, to your address, a double box of Chateau-Margaux of the antelope brand, violet seal. Box numbered and marked as per margin.\n\n\u2002\"We remain, sir, Your most ob'nt ser'ts, HOGGS, FROGS, BOGS, & CO. \"City of-, June 21, 18-.\n\n\u2002\"P.S. The box will reach you by wagon, on the day after your receipt of this letter. Our respects to Mr. Shuttleworthy.\n\n\u2002\"H., F., B., & CO.\"\n\nThe fact is, that Mr. Goodfellow had, since the death of Mr. Shuttleworthy, given over all expectation of ever receiving the promised Chateau-Margaux; and he, therefore, looked upon it now as a sort of especial dispensation of Providence in his behalf. He was highly delighted, of course, and in the exuberance of his joy invited a large party of friends to a petit souper on the morrow, for the purpose of broaching the good old Mr. Shuttleworthy's present. Not that he said any thing about \"the good old Mr. Shuttleworthy\" when he issued the invitations. The fact is, he thought much and concluded to say nothing at all. He did not mention to any one \u2014 if I remember aright \u2014 that he had received a present of Chateau-Margaux. He merely asked his friends to come and help him drink some, of a remarkable fine quality and rich flavour, that he had ordered up from the city a couple of months ago, and of which he would be in the receipt upon the morrow. I have often puzzled myself to imagine why it was that \"Old Charley\" came to the conclusion to say nothing about having received the wine from his old friend, but I could never precisely understand his reason for the silence, although he had some excellent and very magnanimous reason, no doubt.\n\nThe morrow at length arrived, and with it a very large and highly respectable company at Mr. Goodfellow's house. Indeed, half the borough was there \u2014 I myself among the number \u2014 but, much to the vexation of the host, the Chateau-Margaux did not arrive until a late hour, and when the sumptuous supper supplied by \"Old Charley\" had been done very ample justice by the guests. It came at length, however \u2014 a monstrously big box of it there was, too \u2014 and as the whole party were in excessively good humor, it was decided, nem. con., that it should be lifted upon the table and its contents disembowelled forthwith.\n\nNo sooner said than done. I lent a helping hand; and, in a trice we had the box upon the table, in the midst of all the bottles and glasses, not a few of which were demolished in the scuffle. \"Old Charley,\" who was pretty much intoxicated, and excessively red in the face, now took a seat, with an air of mock dignity, at the head of the board, and thumped furiously upon it with a decanter, calling upon the company to keep order \"during the ceremony of disinterring the treasure.\"\n\nAfter some vociferation, quiet was at length fully restored, and, as very often happens in similar cases, a profound and remarkable silence ensued. Being then requested to force open the lid, I complied, of course, \"with an infinite deal of pleasure.\" I inserted a chisel, and giving it a few slight taps with a hammer, the top of the box flew suddenly off, and at the same instant, there sprang up into a sitting position, directly facing the host, the bruised, bloody, and nearly putrid corpse of the murdered Mr. Shuttleworthy himself. It gazed for a few seconds, fixedly and sorrowfully, with its decaying and lack-lustre eyes, full into the countenance of Mr. Goodfellow; uttered slowly, but clearly and impressively, the words \u2014\"Thou art the man!\" and then, falling over the side of the chest as if thoroughly satisfied, stretched out its limbs quiveringly upon the table.\n\nThe scene that ensued is altogether beyond description. The rush for the doors and windows was terrific, and many of the most robust men in the room fainted outright through sheer horror. But after the first wild, shrieking burst of affright, all eyes were directed to Mr. Goodfellow. If I live a thousand years, I can never forget the more than mortal agony which was depicted in that ghastly face of his, so lately rubicund with triumph and wine. For several minutes he sat rigidly as a statue of marble; his eyes seeming, in the intense vacancy of their gaze, to be turned inward and absorbed in the contemplation of his own miserable, murderous soul. At length their expression appeared to flash suddenly out into the external world, when, with a quick leap, he sprang from his chair, and falling heavily with his head and shoulders upon the table, and in contact with the corpse, poured out rapidly and vehemently a detailed confession of the hideous crime for which Mr. Pennifeather was then imprisoned and doomed to die.\n\nWhat he recounted was in substance this:\u2014 He followed his victim to the vicinity of the pool; there shot his horse with a pistol; despatched its rider with the butt end; possessed himself of the pocket-book, and, supposing the horse dead, dragged it with great labour to the brambles by the pond. Upon his own beast he slung the corpse of Mr. Shuttleworthy, and thus bore it to a secure place of concealment a long distance off through the woods.\n\nThe waistcoat, the knife, the pocket-book, and bullet, had been placed by himself where found, with the view of avenging himself upon Mr. Pennifeather. He had also contrived the discovery of the stained handkerchief and shirt.\n\nTowards the end of the blood-churning recital the words of the guilty wretch faltered and grew hollow. When the record was finally exhausted, he arose, staggered backward from the table, and fell-dead.\n\nThe means by which this happily-timed confession was extorted, although efficient, were simple indeed. Mr. Goodfellow's excess of frankness had disgusted me, and excited my suspicions from the first. I was present when Mr. Pennifeather had struck him, and the fiendish expression which then arose upon his countenance, although momentary, assured me that his threat of vengeance would, if possible, be rigidly fulfilled. I was thus prepared to view the manoeuvering of \"Old Charley\" in a very different light from that in which it was regarded by the good citizens of Rattleborough. I saw at once that all the criminating discoveries arose, either directly or indirectly, from himself. But the fact which clearly opened my eyes to the true state of the case, was the affair of the bullet, found by Mr. G. in the carcass of the horse. I had not forgotten, although the Rattleburghers had, that there was a hole where the ball had entered the horse, and another where it went out. If it were found in the animal then, after having made its exit, I saw clearly that it must have been deposited by the person who found it. The bloody shirt and handkerchief confirmed the idea suggested by the bullet; for the blood on examination proved to be capital claret, and no more. When I came to think of these things, and also of the late increase of liberality and expenditure on the part of Mr. Goodfellow, I entertained a suspicion which was none the less strong because I kept it altogether to myself.\n\nIn the meantime, I instituted a rigorous private search for the corpse of Mr. Shuttleworthy, and, for good reasons, searched in quarters as divergent as possible from those to which Mr. Goodfellow conducted his party. The result was that, after some days, I came across an old dry well, the mouth of which was nearly hidden by brambles; and here, at the bottom, I discovered what I sought.\n\nNow it so happened that I had overheard the colloquy between the two cronies, when Mr. Goodfellow had contrived to cajole his host into the promise of a box of Chateaux-Margaux. Upon this hint I acted. I procured a stiff piece of whalebone, thrust it down the throat of the corpse, and deposited the latter in an old wine box-taking care so to double the body up as to double the whalebone with it. In this manner I had to press forcibly upon the lid to keep it down while I secured it with nails; and I anticipated, of course, that as soon as these latter were removed, the top would fly off and the body up.\n\nHaving thus arranged the box, I marked, numbered, and addressed it as already told; and then writing a letter in the name of the wine merchants with whom Mr. Shuttleworthy dealt, I gave instructions to my servant to wheel the box to Mr. Goodfellow's door, in a barrow, at a given signal from myself. For the words which I intended the corpse to speak, I confidently depended upon my ventriloquial abilities; for their effect, I counted upon the conscience of the murderous wretch.\n\nI believe there is nothing more to be explained. Mr. Pennifeather was released upon the spot, inherited the fortune of his uncle, profited by the lessons of experience, turned over a new leaf, and led happily ever afterward a new life.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nOf course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not-especially under the circumstances. Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had farther opportunities for investigation \u2014 through our endeavors to effect this \u2014 a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations, and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.\n\nIt is now rendered necessary that I give the facts \u2014 as far as I comprehend them myself. They are, succinctly, these:\n\nMy attention, for the last three years, had been repeatedly drawn to the subject of Mesmerism; and, about nine months ago it occurred to me, quite suddenly, that in the series of experiments made hitherto, there had been a very remarkable and most unaccountable omission:\u2014 no person had as yet been mesmerized in articulo mortis. It remained to be seen, first, whether, in such condition, there existed in the patient any susceptibility to the magnetic influence; secondly, whether, if any existed, it was impaired or increased by the condition; thirdly, to what extent, or for how long a period, the encroachments of Death might be arrested by the process. There were other points to be ascertained, but these most excited my curiosity \u2014 the last in especial, from the immensely important character of its consequences.\n\nIn looking around me for some subject by whose means I might test these particulars, I was brought to think of my friend, M. Ernest Valdemar, the well-known compiler of the \"Bibliotheca Forensica,\" and author (under the nom de plume of Issachar Marx) of the Polish versions of \"Wallenstein\" and \"Gargantua.\" M. Valdemar, who has resided principally at Harlaem, N.Y., since the year 1839, is (or was) particularly noticeable for the extreme spareness of his person \u2014 his lower limbs much resembling those of John Randolph; and, also, for the whiteness of his whiskers, in violent contrast to the blackness of his hair \u2014 the latter, in consequence, being very generally mistaken for a wig. His temperament was markedly nervous, and rendered him a good subject for mesmeric experiment. On two or three occasions I had put him to sleep with little difficulty, but was disappointed in other results which his peculiar constitution had naturally led me to anticipate. His will was at no period positively, or thoroughly, under my control, and in regard to clairvoyance, I could accomplish with him nothing to be relied upon. I always attributed my failure at these points to the disordered state of his health. For some months previous to my becoming acquainted with him, his physicians had declared him in a confirmed phthisis. It was his custom, indeed, to speak calmly of his approaching dissolution, as of a matter neither to be avoided nor regretted.\n\nWhen the ideas to which I have alluded first occurred to me, it was of course very natural that I should think of M. Valdemar. I knew the steady philosophy of the man too well to apprehend any scruples from him; and he had no relatives in America who would be likely to interfere. I spoke to him frankly upon the subject; and, to my surprise, his interest seemed vividly excited. I say to my surprise, for, although he had always yielded his person freely to my experiments, he had never before given me any tokens of sympathy with what I did. His disease was if that character which would admit of exact calculation in respect to the epoch of its termination in death; and it was finally arranged between us that he would send for me about twenty-four hours before the period announced by his physicians as that of his decease.\n\nIt is now rather more than seven months since I received, from M. Valdemar himself, the subjoined note:\n\n\"My DEAR P \u2014\n\n\"You may as well come now. D\u2014 and F\u2014 are agreed that I cannot hold out beyond to-morrow midnight; and I think they have hit the time very nearly.\n\nVALDEMAR\"\n\nI received this note within half an hour after it was written, and in fifteen minutes more I was in the dying man's chamber. I had not seen him for ten days, and was appalled by the fearful alteration which the brief interval had wrought in him. His face wore a leaden hue; the eyes were utterly lustreless; and the emaciation was so extreme that the skin had been broken through by the cheek-bones. His expectoration was excessive. The pulse was barely perceptible. He retained, nevertheless, in a very remarkable manner, both his mental power and a certain degree of physical strength. He spoke with distinctness \u2014 took some palliative medicines without aid \u2014 and, when I entered the room, was occupied in penciling memoranda in a pocket-book. He was propped up in the bed by pillows. Doctors D\u2014 and F\u2014 were in attendance.\n\nAfter pressing Valdemar's hand, I took these gentlemen aside, and obtained from them a minute account of the patient's condition. The left lung had been for eighteen months in a semi-osseous or cartilaginous state, and was, of course, entirely useless for all purposes of vitality. The right, in its upper portion, was also partially, if not thoroughly, ossified, while the lower region was merely a mass of purulent tubercles, running one into another. Several extensive perforations existed; and, at one point, permanent adhesion to the ribs had taken place. These appearances in the right lobe were of comparatively recent date. The ossification had proceeded with very unusual rapidity; no sign of it had discovered a month before, and the adhesion had only been observed during the three previous days. Independently of the phthisis, the patient was suspected of aneurism of the aorta; but on this point the osseous symptoms rendered an exact diagnosis impossible. It was the opinion of both physicians that M. Valdemar would die about midnight on the morrow (Sunday). It was then seven o'clock on Saturday evening.\n\nOn quitting the invalid's bed-side to hold conversation with myself, Doctors D\u2014 and F\u2014 had bidden him a final farewell. It had not been their intention to return; but, at my request, they agreed to look in upon the patient about ten the next night.\n\nWhen they had gone, I spoke freely with M. Valdemar on the subject of his approaching dissolution, as well as, more particularly, of the experiment proposed. He still professed himself quite willing and even anxious to have it made, and urged me to commence it at once. A male and a female nurse were in attendance; but I did not feel myself altogether at liberty to engage in a task of this character with no more reliable witnesses than these people, in case of sudden accident, might prove. I therefore postponed operations until about eight the next night, when the arrival of a medical student with whom I had some acquaintance, (Mr. Theodore L\u2014 l,) relieved me from farther embarrassment. It had been my design, originally, to wait for the physicians; but I was induced to proceed, first, by the urgent entreaties of M. Valdemar, and secondly, by my conviction that I had not a moment to lose, as he was evidently sinking fast.\n\nMr. L\u2014 l was so kind as to accede to my desire that he would take notes of all that occurred, and it is from his memoranda that what I now have to relate is, for the most part, either condensed or copied verbatim.\n\nIt wanted about five minutes of eight when, taking the patient's hand, I begged him to state, as distinctly as he could, to Mr. L\u2014 l, whether he (M. Valdemar) was entirely willing that I should make the experiment of mesmerizing him in his then condition.\n\nHe replied feebly, yet quite audibly, \"Yes, I wish to be \"I fear you have mesmerized\"\u2014 adding immediately afterwards, deferred it too long.\"\n\nWhile he spoke thus, I commenced the passes which I had already found most effectual in subduing him. He was evidently influenced with the first lateral stroke of my hand across his forehead; but although I exerted all my powers, no farther perceptible effect was induced until some minutes after ten o'clock, when Doctors D\u2014 and F\u2014 called, according to appointment. I explained to them, in a few words, what I designed, and as they opposed no objection, saying that the patient was already in the death agony, I proceeded without hesitation \u2014 exchanging, however, the lateral passes for downward ones, and directing my gaze entirely into the right eye of the sufferer.\n\nBy this time his pulse was imperceptible and his breathing was stertorous, and at intervals of half a minute.\n\nThis condition was nearly unaltered for a quarter of an hour. At the expiration of this period, however, a natural although a very deep sigh escaped the bosom of the dying man, and the stertorous breathing ceased \u2014 that is to say, its stertorousness was no longer apparent; the intervals were undiminished. The patient's extremities were of an icy coldness.\n\nAt five minutes before eleven I perceived unequivocal signs of the mesmeric influence. The glassy roll of the eye was changed for that expression of uneasy inward examination which is never seen except in cases of sleep-waking, and which it is quite impossible to mistake. With a few rapid lateral passes I made the lids quiver, as in incipient sleep, and with a few more I closed them altogether. I was not satisfied, however, with this, but continued the manipulations vigorously, and with the fullest exertion of the will, until I had completely stiffened the limbs of the slumberer, after placing them in a seemingly easy position. The legs were at full length; the arms were nearly so, and reposed on the bed at a moderate distance from the loin. The head was very slightly elevated.\n\nWhen I had accomplished this, it was fully midnight, and I requested the gentlemen present to examine M. Valdemar's condition. After a few experiments, they admitted him to be an unusually perfect state of mesmeric trance. The curiosity of both the physicians was greatly excited. Dr. D\u2014 resolved at once to remain with the patient all night, while Dr. F\u2014 took leave with a promise to return at daybreak. Mr. L\u2014 l and the nurses remained.\n\nWe left M. Valdemar entirely undisturbed until about three o'clock in the morning, when I approached him and found him in precisely the same condition as when Dr. F\u2014 went away \u2014 that is to say, he lay in the same position; the pulse was imperceptible; the breathing was gentle (scarcely noticeable, unless through the application of a mirror to the lips); the eyes were closed naturally; and the limbs were as rigid and as cold as marble. Still, the general appearance was certainly not that of death.\n\nAs I approached M. Valdemar I made a kind of half effort to influence his right arm into pursuit of my own, as I passed the latter gently to and fro above his person. In such experiments with this patient had never perfectly succeeded before, and assuredly I had little thought of succeeding now; but to my astonishment, his arm very readily, although feebly, followed every direction I assigned it with mine. I determined to hazard a few words of conversation.\n\n\"M. Valdemar,\" I said, \"are you asleep?\" He made no answer, but I perceived a tremor about the lips, and was thus induced to repeat the question, again and again. At its third repetition, his whole frame was agitated by a very slight shivering; the eyelids unclosed themselves so far as to display a white line of the ball; the lips moved sluggishly, and from between them, in a barely audible whisper, issued the words:\n\n\"Yes; \u2014 asleep now. Do not wake me! \u2014 let me die so!\"\n\nI here felt the limbs and found them as rigid as ever. The right arm, as before, obeyed the direction of my hand. I questioned the sleep-waker again:\n\n\"Do you still feel pain in the breast, M. Valdemar?\"\n\nThe answer now was immediate, but even less audible than before:\n\n\"No pain \u2014 I am dying.\"\n\nI did not think it advisable to disturb him farther just then, and nothing more was said or done until the arrival of Dr. F \u2014 who came a little before sunrise, and expressed unbounded astonishment at finding the patient still alive. After feeling the pulse and applying a mirror to the lips, he requested me to speak to the sleep-waker again. I did so, saying:\n\n\"M. Valdemar, do you still sleep?\"\n\nAs before, some minutes elapsed ere a reply was made; and during the interval the dying man seemed to be collecting his energies to speak. At my fourth repetition of the question, he said very faintly, almost inaudibly:\n\n\"Yes; still asleep \u2014 dying.\"\n\nIt was now the opinion, or rather the wish, of the physicians, that M. Valdemar should be suffered to remain undisturbed in his present apparently tranquil condition, until death should supervene \u2014 and this, it was generally agreed, must now take place within a few minutes. I concluded, however, to speak to him once more, and merely repeated my previous question.\n\nWhile I spoke, there came a marked change over the countenance of the sleep-waker. The eyes rolled themselves slowly open, the pupils disappearing upwardly; the skin generally assumed a cadaverous hue, resembling not so much parchment as white paper; and the circular hectic spots which, hitherto, had been strongly defined in the centre of each cheek, went out at once. I use this expression, because the suddenness of their departure put me in mind of nothing so much as the extinguishment of a candle by a puff of the breath. The upper lip, at the same time, writhed itself away from the teeth, which it had previously covered completely; while the lower jaw fell with an audible jerk, leaving the mouth widely extended, and disclosing in full view the swollen and blackened tongue. I presume that no member of the party then present had been unaccustomed to death-bed horrors; but so hideous beyond conception was the appearance of M. Valdemar at this moment, that there was a general shrinking back from the region of the bed.\n\nI now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into positive disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed.\n\nThere was no longer the faintest sign of vitality in M. Valdemar; and concluding him to be dead, we were consigning him to the charge of the nurses, when a strong vibratory motion was observable in the tongue. This continued for perhaps a minute. At the expiration of this period, there issued from the distended and motionless jaws a voice \u2014 such as it would be madness in me to attempt describing. There are, indeed, two or three epithets which might be considered as applicable to it in part; I might say, for example, that the sound was harsh, and broken and hollow; but the hideous whole is indescribable, for the simple reason that no similar sounds have ever jarred upon the ear of humanity. There were two particulars, nevertheless, which I thought then, and still think, might fairly be stated as characteristic of the intonation \u2014 as well adapted to convey some idea of its unearthly peculiarity. In the first place, the voice seemed to reach our ears \u2014 at least mine \u2014 from a vast distance, or from some deep cavern within the earth. In the second place, it impressed me (I fear, indeed, that it will be impossible to make myself comprehended) as gelatinous or glutinous matters impress the sense of touch.\n\nI have spoken both of \"sound\" and of \"voice.\" I mean to say that the sound was one of distinct \u2014 of even wonderfully, thrillingly distinct \u2014 syllabification. M. Valdemar spoke \u2014 obviously in reply to the question I had propounded to him a few minutes before. I had asked him, it will be remembered, if he still slept. He now said:\n\n\"Yes; \u2014 no; \u2014 I have been sleeping \u2014 and now \u2014 now \u2014 I am dead.\n\nNo person present even affected to deny, or attempted to repress, the unutterable, shuddering horror which these few words, thus uttered, were so well calculated to convey. Mr. L\u2014 l (the student) swooned. The nurses immediately left the chamber, and could not be induced to return. My own impressions I would not pretend to render intelligible to the reader. For nearly an hour, we busied ourselves, silently \u2014 without the utterance of a word \u2014 in endeavors to revive Mr. L\u2014 l. When he came to himself, we addressed ourselves again to an investigation of M. Valdemar's condition.\n\nIt remained in all respects as I have last described it, with the exception that the mirror no longer afforded evidence of respiration. An attempt to draw blood from the arm failed. I should mention, too, that this limb was no farther subject to my will. I endeavored in vain to make it follow the direction of my hand. The only real indication, indeed, of the mesmeric influence, was now found in the vibratory movement of the tongue, whenever I addressed M. Valdemar a question. He seemed to be making an effort to reply, but had no longer sufficient volition. To queries put to him by any other person than myself he seemed utterly insensible \u2014 although I endeavored to place each member of the company in mesmeric rapport with him. I believe that I have now related all that is necessary to an understanding of the sleep-waker's state at this epoch. Other nurses were procured; and at ten o'clock I left the house in company with the two physicians and Mr. L\u2014 l.\n\nIn the afternoon we all called again to see the patient. His condition remained precisely the same. We had now some discussion as to the propriety and feasibility of awakening him; but we had little difficulty in agreeing that no good purpose would be served by so doing. It was evident that, so far, death (or what is usually termed death) had been arrested by the mesmeric process. It seemed clear to us all that to awaken M. Valdemar would be merely to insure his instant, or at least his speedy dissolution.\n\nFrom this period until the close of last week \u2014 an interval of nearly seven months \u2014 we continued to make daily calls at M. Valdemar's house, accompanied, now and then, by medical and other friends. All this time the sleeper-waker remained exactly as I have last described him. The nurses' attentions were continual.\n\nIt was on Friday last that we finally resolved to make the experiment of awakening or attempting to awaken him; and it is the (perhaps) unfortunate result of this latter experiment which has given rise to so much discussion in private circles \u2014 to so much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted popular feeling.\n\nFor the purpose of relieving M. Valdemar from the mesmeric trance, I made use of the customary passes. These, for a time, were unsuccessful. The first indication of revival was afforded by a partial descent of the iris. It was observed, as especially remarkable, that this lowering of the pupil was accompanied by the profuse out-flowing of a yellowish ichor (from beneath the lids) of a pungent and highly offensive odor.\n\nIt was now suggested that I should attempt to influence the patient's arm, as heretofore. I made the attempt and failed. Dr. F\u2014 then intimated a desire to have me put a question. I did so, as follows:\n\n\"M. Valdemar, can you explain to us what are your feelings or wishes now?\"\n\nThere was an instant return of the hectic circles on the cheeks; the tongue quivered, or rather rolled violently in the mouth (although the jaws and lips remained rigid as before;) and at length the same hideous voice which I have already described, broke forth:\n\n\"For God's sake! \u2014 quick! \u2014 quick! \u2014 put me to sleep \u2014 or, quick! \u2014 waken me! \u2014 quick! \u2014 I say to you that I am dead!\"\n\nI was thoroughly unnerved, and for an instant remained undecided what to do. At first I made an endeavor to re-compose the patient; but, failing in this through total abeyance of the will, I retraced my steps and as earnestly struggled to awaken him. In this attempt I soon saw that I should be successful \u2014 or at least I soon fancied that my success would be complete \u2014 and I am sure that all in the room were prepared to see the patient awaken.\n\nFor what really occurred, however, it is quite impossible that any human being could have been prepared.\n\nAs I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of \"dead! dead!\" absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once \u2014 within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk \u2014 crumbled \u2014 absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome \u2014 of detestable putridity.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Imp of the Perverse by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nIn the consideration of the faculties and impulses \u2014 of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses, solely through want of belief \u2014 of faith; \u2014 whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in the Kabbala. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation. We saw no need of the impulse \u2014 for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself; \u2014 we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs \u2014 to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness, and this organ is the scourge with which the Deity compels man, will-I nill-I, into eating. Secondly, having settled it to be God's will that man should continue his species, we discovered an organ of amativeness, forthwith. And so with combativeness, with ideality, with causality, with constructiveness, \u2014 so, in short, with every organ, whether representing a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect. And in these arrangements of the Principia of human action, the Spurzheimites, whether right or wrong, in part, or upon the whole, have but followed, in principle, the footsteps of their predecessors: deducing and establishing every thing from the preconceived destiny of man, and upon the ground of the objects of his Creator.\n\nIt would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if classify we must) upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?\n\nInduction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motivirt. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable, but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse-elementary. It will be said, I am aware, that when we persist in acts because we feel we should not persist in them, our conduct is but a modification of that which ordinarily springs from the combativeness of phrenology. But a glance will show the fallacy of this idea. The phrenological combativeness has for its essence, the necessity of self-defence. It is our safeguard against injury. Its principle regards our well-being; and thus the desire to be well is excited simultaneously with its development. It follows, that the desire to be well must be excited simultaneously with any principle which shall be merely a modification of combativeness, but in the case of that something which I term perverseness, the desire to be well is not only not aroused, but a strongly antagonistical sentiment exists.\n\nAn appeal to one's own heart is, after all, the best reply to the sophistry just noticed. No one who trustingly consults and thoroughly questions his own soul, will be disposed to deny the entire radicalness of the propensity in question. It is not more incomprehensible than distinctive. There lives no man who at some period has not been tormented, for example, by an earnest desire to tantalize a listener by circumlocution. The speaker is aware that he displeases; he has every intention to please, he is usually curt, precise, and clear, the most laconic and luminous language is struggling for utterance upon his tongue, it is only with difficulty that he restrains himself from giving it flow; he dreads and deprecates the anger of him whom he addresses; yet, the thought strikes him, that by certain involutions and parentheses this anger may be engendered. That single thought is enough. The impulse increases to a wish, the wish to a desire, the desire to an uncontrollable longing, and the longing (to the deep regret and mortification of the speaker, and in defiance of all consequences) is indulged.\n\nWe have a task before us which must be speedily performed. We know that it will be ruinous to make delay. The most important crisis of our life calls, trumpet-tongued, for immediate energy and action. We glow, we are consumed with eagerness to commence the work, with the anticipation of whose glorious result our whole souls are on fire. It must, it shall be undertaken to-day, and yet we put it off until to-morrow, and why? There is no answer, except that we feel perverse, using the word with no comprehension of the principle. To-morrow arrives, and with it a more impatient anxiety to do our duty, but with this very increase of anxiety arrives, also, a nameless, a positively fearful, because unfathomable, craving for delay. This craving gathers strength as the moments fly. The last hour for action is at hand. We tremble with the violence of the conflict within us, \u2014 of the definite with the indefinite \u2014 of the substance with the shadow. But, if the contest have proceeded thus far, it is the shadow which prevails, \u2014 we struggle in vain. The clock strikes, and is the knell of our welfare. At the same time, it is the chanticleer \u2014 note to the ghost that has so long overawed us. It flies \u2014 it disappears \u2014 we are free. The old energy returns. We will labor now. Alas, it is too late!\n\nWe stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss \u2014 we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall \u2014 this rushing annihilation \u2014 for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination \u2014 for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore do we the most impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a Plunge. To indulge, for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.\n\nExamine these similar actions as we will, we shall find them resulting solely from the spirit of the Perverse. We perpetrate them because we feel that we should not. Beyond or behind this there is no intelligible principle; and we might, indeed, deem this perverseness a direct instigation of the Arch-Fiend, were it not occasionally known to operate in furtherance of good.\n\nI have said thus much, that in some measure I may answer your question, that I may explain to you why I am here, that I may assign to you something that shall have at least the faint aspect of a cause for my wearing these fetters, and for my tenanting this cell of the condemned. Had I not been thus prolix, you might either have misunderstood me altogether, or, with the rabble, have fancied me mad. As it is, you will easily perceive that I am one of the many uncounted victims of the Imp of the Perverse.\n\nIt is impossible that any deed could have been wrought with a more thorough deliberation. For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder. I rejected a thousand schemes, because their accomplishment involved a chance of detection. At length, in reading some French Memoirs, I found an account of a nearly fatal illness that occurred to Madame Pilau, through the agency of a candle accidentally poisoned. The idea struck my fancy at once. I knew my victim's habit of reading in bed. I knew, too, that his apartment was narrow and ill-ventilated. But I need not vex you with impertinent details. I need not describe the easy artifices by which I substituted, in his bed-room candle-stand, a wax-light of my own making for the one which I there found. The next morning he was discovered dead in his bed, and the Coroner's verdict was \u2014 \"Death by the visitation of God.\"\n\nHaving inherited his estate, all went well with me for years. The idea of detection never once entered my brain. Of the remains of the fatal taper I had myself carefully disposed. I had left no shadow of a clew by which it would be possible to convict, or even to suspect me of the crime. It is inconceivable how rich a sentiment of satisfaction arose in my bosom as I reflected upon my absolute security. For a very long period of time I was accustomed to revel in this sentiment. It afforded me more real delight than all the mere worldly advantages accruing from my sin. But there arrived at length an epoch, from which the pleasurable feeling grew, by scarcely perceptible gradations, into a haunting and harassing thought. It harassed because it haunted. I could scarcely get rid of it for an instant. It is quite a common thing to be thus annoyed with the ringing in our ears, or rather in our memories, of the burthen of some ordinary song, or some unimpressive snatches from an opera. Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious. In this manner, at last, I would perpetually catch myself pondering upon my security, and repeating, in a low undertone, the phrase, \"I am safe.\"\n\nOne day, whilst sauntering along the streets, I arrested myself in the act of murmuring, half aloud, these customary syllables. In a fit of petulance, I remodelled them thus; \"I am safe \u2014 I am safe \u2014 yes \u2014 if I be not fool enough to make open confession!\"\n\nNo sooner had I spoken these words, than I felt an icy chill creep to my heart. I had had some experience in these fits of perversity, (whose nature I have been at some trouble to explain), and I remembered well that in no instance I had successfully resisted their attacks. And now my own casual self-suggestion that I might possibly be fool enough to confess the murder of which I had been guilty, confronted me, as if the very ghost of him whom I had murdered \u2014 and beckoned me on to death.\n\nAt first, I made an effort to shake off this nightmare of the soul. I walked vigorously \u2014 faster \u2014 still faster \u2014 at length I ran. I felt a maddening desire to shriek aloud. Every succeeding wave of thought overwhelmed me with new terror, for, alas! I well, too well understood that to think, in my situation, was to be lost. I still quickened my pace. I bounded like a madman through the crowded thoroughfares. At length, the populace took the alarm, and pursued me. I felt then the consummation of my fate. Could I have torn out my tongue, I would have done it, but a rough voice resounded in my ears \u2014 a rougher grasp seized me by the shoulder. I turned \u2014 I gasped for breath. For a moment I experienced all the pangs of suffocation; I became blind, and deaf, and giddy; and then some invisible fiend, I thought, struck me with his broad palm upon the back. The long imprisoned secret burst forth from my soul.\n\nThey say that I spoke with a distinct enunciation, but with marked emphasis and passionate hurry, as if in dread of interruption before concluding the brief, but pregnant sentences that consigned me to the hangman and to hell.\n\nHaving related all that was necessary for the fullest judicial conviction, I fell prostrate in a swoon.\n\nBut why shall I say more? To-day I wear these chains, and am here! To-morrow I shall be fetterless! \u2014 but where?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Power of Words by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nOinos: Pardon, Agathos, the weakness of a spirit new-fledged with immortality!\n\nAgathos: You have spoken nothing, my Oinos, for which pardon is to be demanded. Not even here is knowledge a thing of intuition. For wisdom, ask of the angels freely, that it may be given!\n\nOinos: But in this existence, I dreamed that I should be at once cognizant of all things, and thus at once happy in being cognizant of all.\n\nAgathos: Ah, not in knowledge is happiness, but in the acquisition of knowledge! In for ever knowing, we are for ever blessed; but to know all, were the curse of a fiend.\n\nOinos: But does not The Most High know all?\n\nAgathos: That (since he is The Most Happy) must be still the one thing unknown even to HIM.\n\nOinos: But, since we grow hourly in knowledge, must not at last all things be known?\n\nAgathos: Look down into the abysmal distances! \u2014 attempt to force the gaze down the multitudinous vistas of the stars, as we sweep slowly through them thus \u2014 and thus \u2014 and thus! Even the spiritual vision, is it not at all points arrested by the continuous golden walls of the universe? \u2014 the walls of the myriads of the shining bodies that mere number has appeared to blend into unity?\n\nOinos: I clearly perceive that the infinity of matter is no dream.\n\nAgathos: There are no dreams in Aidenn \u2014 but it is here whispered that, of this infinity of matter, the sole purpose is to afford infinite springs, at which the soul may allay the thirst to know which is for ever unquenchable within it \u2014 since to quench it, would be to extinguish the soul's self. Question me then, my Oinos, freely and without fear. Come! we will leave to the left the loud harmony of the Pleiades, and swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart's-ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.\n\nOinos: And now, Agathos, as we proceed, instruct me! \u2014 speak to me in the earth's familiar tones! I understood not what you hinted to me, just now, of the modes or of the methods of what, during mortality, we were accustomed to call Creation. Do you mean to say that the Creator is not God?\n\nAgathos: I mean to say that the Deity does not create.\n\nOinos: Explain!\n\nAgathos: In the beginning only, he created. The seeming creatures which are now, throughout the universe, so perpetually springing into being, can only be considered as the mediate or indirect, not as the direct or immediate results of the Divine creative power.\n\nOinos: Among men, my Agathos, this idea would be considered heretical in the extreme.\n\nAgathos: Among angels, my Oinos, it is seen to be simply true.\n\nOinos: I can comprehend you thus far \u2014 that certain operations of what we term Nature, or the natural laws, will, under certain conditions, give rise to that which has all the appearance of creation. Shortly before the final overthrow of the earth, there were, I well remember, many very successful experiments in what some philosophers were weak enough to denominate the creation of animalcul\u00e6.\n\nAgathos: The cases of which you speak were, in fact, instances of the secondary creation \u2014 and of the only species of creation which has ever been, since the first word spoke into existence the first law.\n\nOinos: Are not the starry worlds that, from the abyss of nonentity, burst hourly forth into the heavens \u2014 are not these stars, Agathos, the immediate handiwork of the King?\n\nAgathos: Let me endeavor, my Oinos, to lead you, step by step, to the conception I intend. You are well aware that, as no thought can perish, so no act is without infinite result. We moved our hands, for example, when we were dwellers on the earth, and, in so doing, we gave vibration to the atmosphere which engirdled it. This vibration was indefinitely extended, till it gave impulse to every particle of the earth's air, which thenceforward, and for ever, was actuated by the one movement of the hand. This fact the mathematicians of our globe well knew. They made the special effects, indeed, wrought in the fluid by special impulses, the subject of exact calculation \u2014 so that it became easy to determine in what precise period an impulse of given extent would engirdle the orb, and impress (for ever) every atom of the atmosphere circumambient. Retrograding, they found no difficulty, from a given effect, under given conditions, in determining the value of the original impulse. Now the mathematicians who saw that the results of any given impulse were absolutely endless \u2014 and who saw that a portion of these results were accurately traceable through the agency of algebraic analysis \u2014 who saw, too, the facility of the retrogradation \u2014 these men saw, at the same time, that this species of analysis itself, had within itself a capacity for indefinite progress \u2014 that there were no bounds conceivable to its advancement and applicability, except within the intellect of him who advanced or applied it. But at this point our mathematicians paused.\n\nOinos: And why, Agathos, should they have proceeded?\n\nAgathos: Because there were some considerations of deep interest beyond. It was deducible from what they knew, that to a being of infinite understanding \u2014 one to whom the perfection of the algebraic analysis lay unfolded \u2014 there could be no difficulty in tracing every impulse given the air \u2014 and the ether through the air \u2014 to the remotest consequences at any even infinitely remote epoch of time. It is indeed demonstrable that every such impulse given the air, must, in the end, impress every individual thing that exists within the universe; \u2014 and the being of infinite understanding \u2014 the being whom we have imagined \u2014 might trace the remote undulations of the impulse \u2014 trace them upward and onward in their influences upon all particles of all matter \u2014 upward and onward for ever in their modifications of old forms \u2014 or, in other words, in their creation of new \u2014 until he found them reflected \u2014 unimpressive at last \u2014 back from the throne of the Godhead. And not only could such a being do this, but at any epoch, should a given result be afforded him \u2014 should one of these numberless comets, for example, be presented to his inspection \u2014 he could have no difficulty in determining, by the analytic retrogradation, to what original impulse it was due. This power of retrogradation in its absolute fulness and perfection \u2014 this faculty of referring at all epochs, all effects to all causes \u2014 is of course the prerogative of the Deity alone \u2014 but in every variety of degree, short of the absolute perfection, is the power itself exercised by the whole host of the Angelic Intelligences.\n\nOinos: But you speak merely of impulses upon the air.\n\nAgathos: In speaking of the air, I referred only to the earth: but the general proposition has reference to impulses upon the ether \u2014 which, since it pervades, and alone pervades all space, is thus the great medium of creation.\n\nOinos: Then all motion, of whatever nature, creates?\n\nAgathos: It must: but a true philosophy has long taught that the source of all motion is thought \u2014 and the source of all thought is \u2014\n\nOinos: God.\n\nAgathos: I have spoken to you, Oinos, as to a child of the fair Earth which lately perished \u2014 of impulses upon the atmosphere of the Earth.\n\nOinos: You did.\n\nAgathos: And while I thus spoke, did there not cross your mind some thought of the physical power of words? Is not every word an impulse on the air?\n\nOinos: But why, Agathos, do you weep \u2014 and why, oh why do your wings droop as we hover above this fair star \u2014 which is the greenest and yet most terrible of all we have encountered in our flight? Its brilliant flowers look like a fairy dream \u2014 but its fierce volcanoes like the passions of a turbulent heart.\n\nAgathos: They are! \u2014 they are! This wild star \u2014 it is now three centuries since, with clasped hands, and with streaming eyes, at the feet of my beloved \u2014 I spoke it \u2014 with a few passionate sentences \u2014 into birth. Its brilliant flowers are the dearest of all unfulfilled dreams, and its raging volcanoes are the passions of the most turbulent and unhallowed of hearts.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nDuring the autumn of 18 \u2014 while on a tour through the extreme southern provinces of France, my route led me within a few miles of a certain Maison de Sante or private mad-house, about which I had heard much in Paris from my medical friends. As I had never visited a place of the kind, I thought the opportunity too good to be lost; and so proposed to my travelling companion (a gentleman with whom I had made casual acquaintance a few days before) that we should turn aside, for an hour or so, and look through the establishment. To this he objected \u2014 pleading haste in the first place, and, in the second, a very usual horror at the sight of a lunatic. He begged me, however, not to let any mere courtesy towards himself interfere with the gratification of my curiosity, and said that he would ride on leisurely, so that I might overtake him during the day, or, at all events, during the next. As he bade me good-bye, I bethought me that there might be some difficulty in obtaining access to the premises, and mentioned my fears on this point. He replied that, in fact, unless I had personal knowledge of the superintendent, Monsieur Maillard, or some credential in the way of a letter, a difficulty might be found to exist, as the regulations of these private mad-houses were more rigid than the public hospital laws. For himself, he added, he had, some years since, made the acquaintance of Maillard, and would so far assist me as to ride up to the door and introduce me; although his feelings on the subject of lunacy would not permit of his entering the house.\n\nI thanked him, and, turning from the main road, we entered a grass-grown by-path, which, in half an hour, nearly lost itself in a dense forest, clothing the base of a mountain. Through this dank and gloomy wood we rode some two miles, when the Maison de Sante came in view. It was a fantastic chateau, much dilapidated, and indeed scarcely tenantable through age and neglect. Its aspect inspired me with absolute dread, and, checking my horse, I half resolved to turn back. I soon, however, grew ashamed of my weakness, and proceeded.\n\nAs we rode up to the gate-way, I perceived it slightly open, and the visage of a man peering through. In an instant afterward, this man came forth, accosted my companion by name, shook him cordially by the hand, and begged him to alight. It was Monsieur Maillard himself. He was a portly, fine-looking gentleman of the old school, with a polished manner, and a certain air of gravity, dignity, and authority which was very impressive.\n\nMy friend, having presented me, mentioned my desire to inspect the establishment, and received Monsieur Maillard's assurance that he would show me all attention, now took leave, and I saw him no more.\n\nWhen he had gone, the superintendent ushered me into a small and exceedingly neat parlor, containing, among other indications of refined taste, many books, drawings, pots of flowers, and musical instruments. A cheerful fire blazed upon the hearth. At a piano, singing an aria from Bellini, sat a young and very beautiful woman, who, at my entrance, paused in her song, and received me with graceful courtesy. Her voice was low, and her whole manner subdued. I thought, too, that I perceived the traces of sorrow in her countenance, which was excessively, although to my taste, not unpleasingly, pale. She was attired in deep mourning, and excited in my bosom a feeling of mingled respect, interest, and admiration.\n\nI had heard, at Paris, that the institution of Monsieur Maillard was managed upon what is vulgarly termed the \"system of soothing\"\u2014 that all punishments were avoided \u2014 that even confinement was seldom resorted to \u2014 that the patients, while secretly watched, were left much apparent liberty, and that most of them were permitted to roam about the house and grounds in the ordinary apparel of persons in right mind.\n\nKeeping these impressions in view, I was cautious in what I said before the young lady; for I could not be sure that she was sane; and, in fact, there was a certain restless brilliancy about her eyes which half led me to imagine she was not. I confined my remarks, therefore, to general topics, and to such as I thought would not be displeasing or exciting even to a lunatic. She replied in a perfectly rational manner to all that I said; and even her original observations were marked with the soundest good sense, but a long acquaintance with the metaphysics of mania, had taught me to put no faith in such evidence of sanity, and I continued to practise, throughout the interview, the caution with which I commenced it.\n\nPresently a smart footman in livery brought in a tray with fruit, wine, and other refreshments, of which I partook, the lady soon afterward leaving the room. As she departed I turned my eyes in an inquiring manner toward my host.\n\n\"No,\" he said, \"oh, no \u2014 a member of my family \u2014 my niece, and a most accomplished woman.\"\n\n\"I beg a thousand pardons for the suspicion,\" I replied, \"but of course you will know how to excuse me. The excellent administration of your affairs here is well understood in Paris, and I thought it just possible, you know \u2014\n\n\"Yes, yes \u2014 say no more \u2014 or rather it is myself who should thank you for the commendable prudence you have displayed. We seldom find so much of forethought in young men; and, more than once, some unhappy contre-temps has occurred in consequence of thoughtlessness on the part of our visitors. While my former system was in operation, and my patients were permitted the privilege of roaming to and fro at will, they were often aroused to a dangerous frenzy by injudicious persons who called to inspect the house. Hence I was obliged to enforce a rigid system of exclusion; and none obtained access to the premises upon whose discretion I could not rely.\"\n\n\"While your former system was in operation!\" I said, repeating his words \u2014\"do I understand you, then, to say that the 'soothing system' of which I have heard so much is no longer in force?\"\n\n\"It is now,\" he replied, \"several weeks since we have concluded to renounce it forever.\"\n\n\"Indeed! you astonish me!\"\n\n\"We found it, sir,\" he said, with a sigh, \"absolutely necessary to return to the old usages. The danger of the soothing system was, at all times, appalling; and its advantages have been much overrated. I believe, sir, that in this house it has been given a fair trial, if ever in any. We did every thing that rational humanity could suggest. I am sorry that you could not have paid us a visit at an earlier period, that you might have judged for yourself. But I presume you are conversant with the soothing practice \u2014 with its details.\"\n\n\"Not altogether. What I have heard has been at third or fourth hand.\"\n\n\"I may state the system, then, in general terms, as one in which the patients were menages-humored. We contradicted no fancies which entered the brains of the mad. On the contrary, we not only indulged but encouraged them; and many of our most permanent cures have been thus effected. There is no argument which so touches the feeble reason of the madman as the argumentum ad absurdum. We have had men, for example, who fancied themselves chickens. The cure was, to insist upon the thing as a fact \u2014 to accuse the patient of stupidity in not sufficiently perceiving it to be a fact \u2014 and thus to refuse him any other diet for a week than that which properly appertains to a chicken. In this manner a little corn and gravel were made to perform wonders.\"\n\n\"But was this species of acquiescence all?\"\n\n\"By no means. We put much faith in amusements of a simple kind, such as music, dancing, gymnastic exercises generally, cards, certain classes of books, and so forth. We affected to treat each individual as if for some ordinary physical disorder, and the word 'lunacy' was never employed. A great point was to set each lunatic to guard the actions of all the others. To repose confidence in the understanding or discretion of a madman, is to gain him body and soul. In this way we were enabled to dispense with an expensive body of keepers.\"\n\n\"And you had no punishments of any kind?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"And you never confined your patients?\"\n\n\"Very rarely. Now and then, the malady of some individual growing to a crisis, or taking a sudden turn of fury, we conveyed him to a secret cell, lest his disorder should infect the rest, and there kept him until we could dismiss him to his friends \u2014 for with the raging maniac we have nothing to do. He is usually removed to the public hospitals.\"\n\n\"And you have now changed all this \u2014 and you think for the better?\"\n\n\"Decidedly. The system had its disadvantages, and even its dangers. It is now, happily, exploded throughout all the Maisons de Sante of France.\"\n\n\"I am very much surprised,\" I said, \"at what you tell me; for I made sure that, at this moment, no other method of treatment for mania existed in any portion of the country.\"\n\n\"You are young yet, my friend,\" replied my host, \"but the time will arrive when you will learn to judge for yourself of what is going on in the world, without trusting to the gossip of others. Believe nothing you hear, and only one-half that you see. Now about our Maisons de Sante, it is clear that some ignoramus has misled you. After dinner, however, when you have sufficiently recovered from the fatigue of your ride, I will be happy to take you over the house, and introduce to you a system which, in my opinion, and in that of every one who has witnessed its operation, is incomparably the most effectual as yet devised.\"\n\n\"Your own?\" I inquired \u2014\"one of your own invention?\"\n\n\"I am proud,\" he replied, \"to acknowledge that it is \u2014 at least in some measure.\"\n\nIn this manner I conversed with Monsieur Maillard for an hour or two, during which he showed me the gardens and conservatories of the place.\n\n\"I cannot let you see my patients,\" he said, \"just at present. To a sensitive mind there is always more or less of the shocking in such exhibitions; and I do not wish to spoil your appetite for dinner. We will dine. I can give you some veal a la Menehoult, with cauliflowers in veloute sauce \u2014 after that a glass of Clos de Vougeot \u2014 then your nerves will be sufficiently steadied.\"\n\nAt six, dinner was announced; and my host conducted me into a large salle a manger, where a very numerous company were assembled \u2014 twenty-five or thirty in all. They were, apparently, people of rank-certainly of high breeding \u2014 although their habiliments, I thought, were extravagantly rich, partaking somewhat too much of the ostentatious finery of the vielle cour. I noticed that at least two-thirds of these guests were ladies; and some of the latter were by no means accoutred in what a Parisian would consider good taste at the present day. Many females, for example, whose age could not have been less than seventy were bedecked with a profusion of jewelry, such as rings, bracelets, and earrings, and wore their bosoms and arms shamefully bare. I observed, too, that very few of the dresses were well made \u2014 or, at least, that very few of them fitted the wearers. In looking about, I discovered the interesting girl to whom Monsieur Maillard had presented me in the little parlor; but my surprise was great to see her wearing a hoop and farthingale, with high-heeled shoes, and a dirty cap of Brussels lace, so much too large for her that it gave her face a ridiculously diminutive expression. When I had first seen her, she was attired, most becomingly, in deep mourning. There was an air of oddity, in short, about the dress of the whole party, which, at first, caused me to recur to my original idea of the \"soothing system,\" and to fancy that Monsieur Maillard had been willing to deceive me until after dinner, that I might experience no uncomfortable feelings during the repast, at finding myself dining with lunatics; but I remembered having been informed, in Paris, that the southern provincialists were a peculiarly eccentric people, with a vast number of antiquated notions; and then, too, upon conversing with several members of the company, my apprehensions were immediately and fully dispelled.\n\nThe dining-room itself, although perhaps sufficiently comfortable and of good dimensions, had nothing too much of elegance about it. For example, the floor was uncarpeted; in France, however, a carpet is frequently dispensed with. The windows, too, were without curtains; the shutters, being shut, were securely fastened with iron bars, applied diagonally, after the fashion of our ordinary shop-shutters. The apartment, I observed, formed, in itself, a wing of the chateau, and thus the windows were on three sides of the parallelogram, the door being at the other. There were no less than ten windows in all.\n\nThe table was superbly set out. It was loaded with plate, and more than loaded with delicacies. The profusion was absolutely barbaric. There were meats enough to have feasted the Anakim. Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life. There seemed very little taste, however, in the arrangements; and my eyes, accustomed to quiet lights, were sadly offended by the prodigious glare of a multitude of wax candles, which, in silver candelabra, were deposited upon the table, and all about the room, wherever it was possible to find a place. There were several active servants in attendance; and, upon a large table, at the farther end of the apartment, were seated seven or eight people with fiddles, fifes, trombones, and a drum. These fellows annoyed me very much, at intervals, during the repast, by an infinite variety of noises, which were intended for music, and which appeared to afford much entertainment to all present, with the exception of myself.\n\nUpon the whole, I could not help thinking that there was much of the bizarre about every thing I saw \u2014 but then the world is made up of all kinds of persons, with all modes of thought, and all sorts of conventional customs. I had travelled, too, so much, as to be quite an adept at the nil admirari; so I took my seat very coolly at the right hand of my host, and, having an excellent appetite, did justice to the good cheer set before me.\n\nThe conversation, in the meantime, was spirited and general. The ladies, as usual, talked a great deal. I soon found that nearly all the company were well educated; and my host was a world of good-humored anecdote in himself. He seemed quite willing to speak of his position as superintendent of a Maison de Sante; and, indeed, the topic of lunacy was, much to my surprise, a favorite one with all present. A great many amusing stories were told, having reference to the whims of the patients.\n\n\"We had a fellow here once,\" said a fat little gentleman, who sat at my right \u2014 \"a fellow that fancied himself a tea-pot; and by the way, is it not especially singular how often this particular crotchet has entered the brain of the lunatic? There is scarcely an insane asylum in France which cannot supply a human tea-pot. Our gentleman was a Britannia \u2014 ware tea-pot, and was careful to polish himself every morning with buckskin and whiting.\"\n\n\"And then,\" said a tall man just opposite, \"we had here, not long ago, a person who had taken it into his head that he was a donkey \u2014 which allegorically speaking, you will say, was quite true. He was a troublesome patient; and we had much ado to keep him within bounds. For a long time he would eat nothing but thistles; but of this idea we soon cured him by insisting upon his eating nothing else. Then he was perpetually kicking out his heels-so-so\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. De Kock! I will thank you to behave yourself!\" here interrupted an old lady, who sat next to the speaker. \"Please keep your feet to yourself! You have spoiled my brocade! Is it necessary, pray, to illustrate a remark in so practical a style? Our friend here can surely comprehend you without all this. Upon my word, you are nearly as great a donkey as the poor unfortunate imagined himself. Your acting is very natural, as I live.\"\n\n\"Mille pardons! Ma'm'selle!\" replied Monsieur De Kock, thus addressed \u2014\"a thousand pardons! I had no intention of offending. Ma'm'selle Laplace \u2014 Monsieur De Kock will do himself the honor of taking wine with you.\"\n\nHere Monsieur De Kock bowed low, kissed his hand with much ceremony, and took wine with Ma'm'selle Laplace.\n\n\"Allow me, mon ami,\" now said Monsieur Maillard, addressing myself, \"allow me to send you a morsel of this veal a la St. Menhoult \u2014 you will find it particularly fine.\"\n\nAt this instant three sturdy waiters had just succeeded in depositing safely upon the table an enormous dish, or trencher, containing what I supposed to be the \"monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum.\" A closer scrutiny assured me, however, that it was only a small calf roasted whole, and set upon its knees, with an apple in its mouth, as is the English fashion of dressing a hare.\n\n\"Thank you, no,\" I replied; \"to say the truth, I am not particularly partial to veal a la St. \u2014 what is it? \u2014 for I do not find that it altogether agrees with me. I will change my plate, however, and try some of the rabbit.\"\n\nThere were several side-dishes on the table, containing what appeared to be the ordinary French rabbit \u2014 a very delicious morceau, which I can recommend.\n\n\"Pierre,\" cried the host, \"change this gentleman's plate, and give him a side-piece of this rabbit au-chat.\"\n\n\"This what?\" said I.\n\n\"This rabbit au-chat.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you \u2014 upon second thoughts, no. I will just help myself to some of the ham.\"\n\nThere is no knowing what one eats, thought I to myself, at the tables of these people of the province. I will have none of their rabbit au-chat \u2014 and, for the matter of that, none of their cat-au-rabbit either.\n\n\"And then,\" said a cadaverous looking personage, near the foot of the table, taking up the thread of the conversation where it had been broken off \u2014 \"and then, among other oddities, we had a patient, once upon a time, who very pertinaciously maintained himself to be a Cordova cheese, and went about, with a knife in his hand, soliciting his friends to try a small slice from the middle of his leg.\"\n\n\"He was a great fool, beyond doubt,\" interposed some one, \"but not to be compared with a certain individual whom we all know, with the exception of this strange gentleman. I mean the man who took himself for a bottle of champagne, and always went off with a pop and a fizz, in this fashion.\"\n\nHere the speaker, very rudely, as I thought, put his right thumb in his left cheek, withdrew it with a sound resembling the popping of a cork, and then, by a dexterous movement of the tongue upon the teeth, created a sharp hissing and fizzing, which lasted for several minutes, in imitation of the frothing of champagne. This behavior, I saw plainly, was not very pleasing to Monsieur Maillard; but that gentleman said nothing, and the conversation was resumed by a very lean little man in a big wig.\n\n\"And then there was an ignoramus,\" said he, \"who mistook himself for a frog, which, by the way, he resembled in no little degree. I wish you could have seen him, sir,\"\u2014 here the speaker addressed myself \u2014\"it would have done your heart good to see the natural airs that he put on. Sir, if that man was not a frog, I can only observe that it is a pity he was not. His croak thus \u2014 o-o-o-o-gh \u2014 o-o-o-o-gh! was the finest note in the world \u2014 B flat; and when he put his elbows upon the table thus \u2014 after taking a glass or two of wine \u2014 and distended his mouth, thus, and rolled up his eyes, thus, and winked them with excessive rapidity, thus, why then, sir, I take it upon myself to say, positively, that you would have been lost in admiration of the genius of the man.\"\n\n\"I have no doubt of it,\" I said.\n\n\"And then,\" said somebody else, \"then there was Petit Gaillard, who thought himself a pinch of snuff, and was truly distressed because he could not take himself between his own finger and thumb.\"\n\n\"And then there was Jules Desoulieres, who was a very singular genius, indeed, and went mad with the idea that he was a pumpkin. He persecuted the cook to make him up into pies \u2014 a thing which the cook indignantly refused to do. For my part, I am by no means sure that a pumpkin pie a la Desoulieres would not have been very capital eating indeed!\"\n\n\"You astonish me!\" said I; and I looked inquisitively at Monsieur Maillard.\n\n\"Ha! ha! ha!\" said that gentleman \u2014\"he! he! he! \u2014 hi! hi! hi! \u2014 ho! ho! ho! \u2014 hu! hu! hu! hu! \u2014 very good indeed! You must not be astonished, mon ami; our friend here is a wit \u2014 a drole \u2014 you must not understand him to the letter.\"\n\n\"And then,\" said some other one of the party \u2014 \"then there was Bouffon Le Grand \u2014 another extraordinary personage in his way. He grew deranged through love, and fancied himself possessed of two heads. One of these he maintained to be the head of Cicero; the other he imagined a composite one, being Demosthenes' from the top of the forehead to the mouth, and Lord Brougham's from the mouth to the chin. It is not impossible that he was wrong; but he would have convinced you of his being in the right; for he was a man of great eloquence. He had an absolute passion for oratory, and could not refrain from display. For example, he used to leap upon the dinner-table thus, and \u2014 and\u2014\"\n\nHere a friend, at the side of the speaker, put a hand upon his shoulder and whispered a few words in his ear, upon which he ceased talking with great suddenness, and sank back within his chair.\n\n\"And then,\" said the friend who had whispered, \"there was Boullard, the teetotum. I call him the teetotum because, in fact, he was seized with the droll but not altogether irrational crotchet, that he had been converted into a teetotum. You would have roared with laughter to see him spin. He would turn round upon one heel by the hour, in this manner \u2014 so \u2014\n\nHere the friend whom he had just interrupted by a whisper, performed an exactly similar office for himself.\n\n\"But then,\" cried the old lady, at the top of her voice, \"your Monsieur Boullard was a madman, and a very silly madman at best; for who, allow me to ask you, ever heard of a human teetotum? The thing is absurd. Madame Joyeuse was a more sensible person, as you know. She had a crotchet, but it was instinct with common sense, and gave pleasure to all who had the honor of her acquaintance. She found, upon mature deliberation, that, by some accident, she had been turned into a chicken-cock; but, as such, she behaved with propriety. She flapped her wings with prodigious effect \u2014 so \u2014 so \u2014 and, as for her crow, it was delicious! Cock-a-doodle-doo! \u2014 cock-a-doodle-doo! \u2014 cock-a-doodle-de-doo-dooo-do-o-o-o-o-o-o!\"\n\n\"Madame Joyeuse, I will thank you to behave yourself!\" here interrupted our host, very angrily. \"You can either conduct yourself as a lady should do, or you can quit the table forthwith-take your choice.\"\n\nThe lady (whom I was much astonished to hear addressed as Madame Joyeuse, after the description of Madame Joyeuse she had just given) blushed up to the eyebrows, and seemed exceedingly abashed at the reproof. She hung down her head, and said not a syllable in reply. But another and younger lady resumed the theme. It was my beautiful girl of the little parlor.\n\n\"Oh, Madame Joyeuse was a fool!\" she exclaimed, \"but there was really much sound sense, after all, in the opinion of Eugenie Salsafette. She was a very beautiful and painfully modest young lady, who thought the ordinary mode of habiliment indecent, and wished to dress herself, always, by getting outside instead of inside of her clothes. It is a thing very easily done, after all. You have only to do so \u2014 and then so \u2014 so \u2014 so \u2014 and then so \u2014 so \u2014 so \u2014 and then so \u2014 so \u2014 and then \u2014\n\n\"Mon dieu! Ma'm'selle Salsafette!\" here cried a dozen voices at once. \"What are you about? \u2014 forbear! \u2014 that is sufficient! \u2014 we see, very plainly, how it is done! \u2014 hold! hold!\" and several persons were already leaping from their seats to withhold Ma'm'selle Salsafette from putting herself upon a par with the Medicean Venus, when the point was very effectually and suddenly accomplished by a series of loud screams, or yells, from some portion of the main body of the chateau.\n\nMy nerves were very much affected, indeed, by these yells; but the rest of the company I really pitied. I never saw any set of reasonable people so thoroughly frightened in my life. They all grew as pale as so many corpses, and, shrinking within their seats, sat quivering and gibbering with terror, and listening for a repetition of the sound. It came again \u2014 louder and seemingly nearer \u2014 and then a third time very loud, and then a fourth time with a vigor evidently diminished. At this apparent dying away of the noise, the spirits of the company were immediately regained, and all was life and anecdote as before. I now ventured to inquire the cause of the disturbance.\n\n\"A mere bagtelle,\" said Monsieur Maillard. \"We are used to these things, and care really very little about them. The lunatics, every now and then, get up a howl in concert; one starting another, as is sometimes the case with a bevy of dogs at night. It occasionally happens, however, that the concerto yells are succeeded by a simultaneous effort at breaking loose, when, of course, some little danger is to be apprehended.\"\n\n\"And how many have you in charge?\"\n\n\"At present we have not more than ten, altogether.\"\n\n\"Principally females, I presume?\"\n\n\"Oh, no \u2014 every one of them men, and stout fellows, too, I can tell you.\"\n\n\"Indeed! I have always understood that the majority of lunatics were of the gentler sex.\"\n\n\"It is generally so, but not always. Some time ago, there were about twenty-seven patients here; and, of that number, no less than eighteen were women; but, lately, matters have changed very much, as you see.\"\n\n\"Yes \u2014 have changed very much, as you see,\" here interrupted the gentleman who had broken the shins of Ma'm'selle Laplace.\n\n\"Yes \u2014 have changed very much, as you see!\" chimed in the whole company at once.\n\n\"Hold your tongues, every one of you!\" said my host, in a great rage. Whereupon the whole company maintained a dead silence for nearly a minute. As for one lady, she obeyed Monsieur Maillard to the letter, and thrusting out her tongue, which was an excessively long one, held it very resignedly, with both hands, until the end of the entertainment.\n\n\"And this gentlewoman,\" said I, to Monsieur Maillard, bending over and addressing him in a whisper \u2014\"this good lady who has just spoken, and who gives us the cock-a-doodle-de-doo \u2014 she, I presume, is harmless \u2014 quite harmless, eh?\"\n\n\"Harmless!\" ejaculated he, in unfeigned surprise, \"why \u2014 why, what can you mean?\"\n\n\"Only slightly touched?\" said I, touching my head. \"I take it for granted that she is not particularly not dangerously affected, eh?\"\n\n\"Mon dieu! what is it you imagine? This lady, my particular old friend Madame Joyeuse, is as absolutely sane as myself. She has her little eccentricities, to be sure \u2014 but then, you know, all old women \u2014 all very old women \u2014 are more or less eccentric!\"\n\n\"To be sure,\" said I \u2014 \"to be sure \u2014 and then the rest of these ladies and gentlemen\u2014\"\n\n\"Are my friends and keepers,\" interupted Monsieur Maillard, drawing himself up with hauteur \u2014 \"my very good friends and assistants.\"\n\n\"What! all of them?\" I asked \u2014 \"the women and all?\"\n\n\"Assuredly,\" he said \u2014 \"we could not do at all without the women; they are the best lunatic nurses in the world; they have a way of their own, you know; their bright eyes have a marvellous effect; \u2014 something like the fascination of the snake, you know.\"\n\n\"To be sure,\" said I \u2014 \"to be sure! They behave a little odd, eh? \u2014 they are a little queer, eh? \u2014 don't you think so?\"\n\n\"Odd! \u2014 queer! \u2014 why, do you really think so? We are not very prudish, to be sure, here in the South \u2014 do pretty much as we please \u2014 enjoy life, and all that sort of thing, you know\u2014\"\n\n\"To be sure,\" said I \u2014 \"to be sure.\"\n\nAnd then, perhaps, this Clos de Vougeot is a little heady, you know \u2014 a little strong \u2014 you understand, eh?\"\n\n\"To be sure,\" said I \u2014 \"to be sure. By the bye, Monsieur, did I understand you to say that the system you have adopted, in place of the celebrated soothing system, was one of very rigorous severity?\"\n\n\"By no means. Our confinement is necessarily close; but the treatment \u2014 the medical treatment, I mean \u2014 is rather agreeable to the patients than otherwise.\"\n\n\"And the new system is one of your own invention?\"\n\n\"Not altogether. Some portions of it are referable to Professor Tarr, of whom you have, necessarily, heard; and, again, there are modifications in my plan which I am happy to acknowledge as belonging of right to the celebrated Fether, with whom, if I mistake not, you have the honor of an intimate acquaintance.\"\n\n\"I am quite ashamed to confess,\" I replied, \"that I have never even heard the names of either gentleman before.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" ejaculated my host, drawing back his chair abruptly, and uplifting his hands. \"I surely do not hear you aright! You did not intend to say, eh? that you had never heard either of the learned Doctor Tarr, or of the celebrated Professor Fether?\"\n\n\"I am forced to acknowledge my ignorance,\" I replied; \"but the truth should be held inviolate above all things. Nevertheless, I feel humbled to the dust, not to be acquainted with the works of these, no doubt, extraordinary men. I will seek out their writings forthwith, and peruse them with deliberate care. Monsieur Maillard, you have really \u2014 I must confess it \u2014 you have really \u2014 made me ashamed of myself!\"\n\nAnd this was the fact.\n\n\"Say no more, my good young friend,\" he said kindly, pressing my hand \u2014 \"join me now in a glass of Sauterne.\"\n\nWe drank. The company followed our example without stint. They chatted \u2014 they jested \u2014 they laughed \u2014 they perpetrated a thousand absurdities \u2014 the fiddles shrieked \u2014 the drum row-de-dowed \u2014 the trombones bellowed like so many brazen bulls of Phalaris \u2014 and the whole scene, growing gradually worse and worse, as the wines gained the ascendancy, became at length a sort of pandemonium in petto. In the meantime, Monsieur Maillard and myself, with some bottles of Sauterne and Vougeot between us, continued our conversation at the top of the voice. A word spoken in an ordinary key stood no more chance of being heard than the voice of a fish from the bottom of Niagra Falls.\n\n\"And, sir,\" said I, screaming in his ear, \"you mentioned something before dinner about the danger incurred in the old system of soothing. How is that?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied, \"there was, occasionally, very great danger indeed. There is no accounting for the caprices of madmen; and, in my opinion as well as in that of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether, it is never safe to permit them to run at large unattended. A lunatic may be 'soothed,' as it is called, for a time, but, in the end, he is very apt to become obstreperous. His cunning, too, is proverbial and great. If he has a project in view, he conceals his design with a marvellous wisdom; and the dexterity with which he counterfeits sanity, presents, to the metaphysician, one of the most singular problems in the study of mind. When a madman appears thoroughly sane, indeed, it is high time to put him in a straitjacket.\"\n\n\"But the danger, my dear sir, of which you were speaking, in your own experience \u2014 during your control of this house \u2014 have you had practical reason to think liberty hazardous in the case of a lunatic?\"\n\n\"Here? \u2014 in my own experience? \u2014 why, I may say, yes. For example:\u2014 no very long while ago, a singular circumstance occurred in this very house. The 'soothing system,' you know, was then in operation, and the patients were at large. They behaved remarkably well-especially so, any one of sense might have known that some devilish scheme was brewing from that particular fact, that the fellows behaved so remarkably well. And, sure enough, one fine morning the keepers found themselves pinioned hand and foot, and thrown into the cells, where they were attended, as if they were the lunatics, by the lunatics themselves, who had usurped the offices of the keepers.\"\n\n\"You don't tell me so! I never heard of any thing so absurd in my life!\"\n\n\"Fact \u2014 it all came to pass by means of a stupid fellow \u2014 a lunatic \u2014 who, by some means, had taken it into his head that he had invented a better system of government than any ever heard of before \u2014 of lunatic government, I mean. He wished to give his invention a trial, I suppose, and so he persuaded the rest of the patients to join him in a conspiracy for the overthrow of the reigning powers.\"\n\n\"And he really succeeded?\"\n\n\"No doubt of it. The keepers and kept were soon made to exchange places. Not that exactly either \u2014 for the madmen had been free, but the keepers were shut up in cells forthwith, and treated, I am sorry to say, in a very cavalier manner.\"\n\n\"But I presume a counter-revolution was soon effected. This condition of things could not have long existed. The country people in the neighborhood-visitors coming to see the establishment \u2014 would have given the alarm.\"\n\n\"There you are out. The head rebel was too cunning for that. He admitted no visitors at all \u2014 with the exception, one day, of a very stupid-looking young gentleman of whom he had no reason to be afraid. He let him in to see the place \u2014 just by way of variety \u2014 to have a little fun with him. As soon as he had gammoned him sufficiently, he let him out, and sent him about his business.\"\n\n\"And how long, then, did the madmen reign?\"\n\n\"Oh, a very long time, indeed \u2014 a month certainly \u2014 how much longer I can't precisely say. In the meantime, the lunatics had a jolly season of it \u2014 that you may swear. They doffed their own shabby clothes, and made free with the family wardrobe and jewels. The cellars of the chateau were well stocked with wine; and these madmen are just the devils that know how to drink it. They lived well, I can tell you.\"\n\n\"And the treatment \u2014 what was the particular species of treatment which the leader of the rebels put into operation?\"\n\n\"Why, as for that, a madman is not necessarily a fool, as I have already observed; and it is my honest opinion that his treatment was a much better treatment than that which it superseded. It was a very capital system indeed \u2014 simple \u2014 neat \u2014 no trouble at all \u2014 in fact it was delicious it was\u2014\n\nHere my host's observations were cut short by another series of yells, of the same character as those which had previously disconcerted us. This time, however, they seemed to proceed from persons rapidly approaching.\n\n\"Gracious heavens!\" I ejaculated \u2014\"the lunatics have most undoubtedly broken loose.\"\n\n\"I very much fear it is so,\" replied Monsieur Maillard, now becoming excessively pale. He had scarcely finished the sentence, before loud shouts and imprecations were heard beneath the windows; and, immediately afterward, it became evident that some persons outside were endeavoring to gain entrance into the room. The door was beaten with what appeared to be a sledge-hammer, and the shutters were wrenched and shaken with prodigious violence.\n\nA scene of the most terrible confusion ensued. Monsieur Maillard, to my excessive astonishment threw himself under the side-board. I had expected more resolution at his hands. The members of the orchestra, who, for the last fifteen minutes, had been seemingly too much intoxicated to do duty, now sprang all at once to their feet and to their instruments, and, scrambling upon their table, broke out, with one accord, into, \"Yankee Doodle,\" which they performed, if not exactly in tune, at least with an energy superhuman, during the whole of the uproar.\n\nMeantime, upon the main dining-table, among the bottles and glasses, leaped the gentleman who, with such difficulty, had been restrained from leaping there before. As soon as he fairly settled himself, he commenced an oration, which, no doubt, was a very capital one, if it could only have been heard. At the same moment, the man with the teetotum predilection, set himself to spinning around the apartment, with immense energy, and with arms outstretched at right angles with his body; so that he had all the air of a teetotum in fact, and knocked everybody down that happened to get in his way. And now, too, hearing an incredible popping and fizzing of champagne, I discovered at length, that it proceeded from the person who performed the bottle of that delicate drink during dinner. And then, again, the frog-man croaked away as if the salvation of his soul depended upon every note that he uttered. And, in the midst of all this, the continuous braying of a donkey arose over all. As for my old friend, Madame Joyeuse, I really could have wept for the poor lady, she appeared so terribly perplexed. All she did, however, was to stand up in a corner, by the fireplace, and sing out incessantly at the top of her voice, \"Cock-a-doodle-de-dooooooh!\"\n\nAnd now came the climax \u2014 the catastrophe of the drama. As no resistance, beyond whooping and yelling and cock-a-doodling, was offered to the encroachments of the party without, the ten windows were very speedily, and almost simultaneously, broken in. But I shall never forget the emotions of wonder and horror with which I gazed, when, leaping through these windows, and down among us pele-mele, fighting, stamping, scratching, and howling, there rushed a perfect army of what I took to be Chimpanzees, Ourang-Outangs, or big black baboons of the Cape of Good Hope.\n\nI received a terrible beating \u2014 after which I rolled under a sofa and lay still. After lying there some fifteen minutes, during which time I listened with all my ears to what was going on in the room, I came to same satisfactory denouement of this tragedy. Monsieur Maillard, it appeared, in giving me the account of the lunatic who had excited his fellows to rebellion, had been merely relating his own exploits. This gentleman had, indeed, some two or three years before, been the superintendent of the establishment, but grew crazy himself, and so became a patient. This fact was unknown to the travelling companion who introduced me. The keepers, ten in number, having been suddenly overpowered, were first well tarred, then \u2014 carefully feathered, and then shut up in underground cells. They had been so imprisoned for more than a month, during which period Monsieur Maillard had generously allowed them not only the tar and feathers (which constituted his \"system\"), but some bread and abundance of water. The latter was pumped on them daily. At length, one escaping through a sewer, gave freedom to all the rest.\n\nThe \"soothing system,\" with important modifications, has been resumed at the chateau; yet I cannot help agreeing with Monsieur Maillard, that his own \"treatment\" was a very capital one of its kind. As he justly observed, it was \"simple \u2014 neat \u2014 and gave no trouble at all \u2014 not the least.\"\n\nI have only to add that, although I have searched every library in Europe for the works of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, I have, up to the present day, utterly failed in my endeavors at procuring an edition.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Truth is stranger than fiction.\n\n\u2014Old Saying\n\nHaving had occasion, lately, in the course of some Oriental investigations, to consult the Tellmenow Isitsoornot, a work which (like the Zohar of Simeon Jochaides) is scarcely known at all, even in Europe; and which has never been quoted, to my knowledge, by any American \u2014 if we except, perhaps, the author of the \"Curiosities of American Literature\"; \u2014 having had occasion, I say, to turn over some pages of the first \u2014 mentioned very remarkable work, I was not a little astonished to discover that the literary world has hitherto been strangely in error respecting the fate of the vizier's daughter, Scheherazade, as that fate is depicted in the \"Arabian Nights\"; and that the denouement there given, if not altogether inaccurate, as far as it goes, is at least to blame in not having gone very much farther.\n\nFor full information on this interesting topic, I must refer the inquisitive reader to the \"Isitsoornot\" itself, but in the meantime, I shall be pardoned for giving a summary of what I there discovered.\n\nIt will be remembered, that, in the usual version of the tales, a certain monarch having good cause to be jealous of his queen, not only puts her to death, but makes a vow, by his beard and the prophet, to espouse each night the most beautiful maiden in his dominions, and the next morning to deliver her up to the executioner.\n\nHaving fulfilled this vow for many years to the letter, and with a religious punctuality and method that conferred great credit upon him as a man of devout feeling and excellent sense, he was interrupted one afternoon (no doubt at his prayers) by a visit from his grand vizier, to whose daughter, it appears, there had occurred an idea.\n\nHer name was Scheherazade, and her idea was, that she would either redeem the land from the depopulating tax upon its beauty, or perish, after the approved fashion of all heroines, in the attempt.\n\nAccordingly, and although we do not find it to be leap-year (which makes the sacrifice more meritorious), she deputes her father, the grand vizier, to make an offer to the king of her hand. This hand the king eagerly accepts \u2014(he had intended to take it at all events, and had put off the matter from day to day, only through fear of the vizier) \u2014 but, in accepting it now, he gives all parties very distinctly to understand, that, grand vizier or no grand vizier, he has not the slightest design of giving up one iota of his vow or of his privileges. When, therefore, the fair Scheherazade insisted upon marrying the king, and did actually marry him despite her father's excellent advice not to do any thing of the kind \u2014 when she would and did marry him, I say, will I, nill I, it was with her beautiful black eyes as thoroughly open as the nature of the case would allow.\n\nIt seems, however, that this politic damsel (who had been reading Machiavelli, beyond doubt), had a very ingenious little plot in her mind. On the night of the wedding, she contrived, upon I forget what specious pretence, to have her sister occupy a couch sufficiently near that of the royal pair to admit of easy conversation from bed to bed; and, a little before cock-crowing, she took care to awaken the good monarch, her husband (who bore her none the worse will because he intended to wring her neck on the morrow) \u2014 she managed to awaken him, I say, (although on account of a capital conscience and an easy digestion, he slept well) by the profound interest of a story (about a rat and a black cat, I think) which she was narrating (all in an undertone, of course) to her sister. When the day broke, it so happened that this history was not altogether finished, and that Scheherazade, in the nature of things could not finish it just then, since it was high time for her to get up and be bowstrung \u2014 a thing very little more pleasant than hanging, only a trifle more genteel.\n\nThe king's curiosity, however, prevailing, I am sorry to say, even over his sound religious principles, induced him for this once to postpone the fulfilment of his vow until next morning, for the purpose and with the hope of hearing that night how it fared in the end with the black cat (a black cat, I think it was) and the rat.\n\nThe night having arrived, however, the lady Scheherazade not only put the finishing stroke to the black cat and the rat (the rat was blue) but before she well knew what she was about, found herself deep in the intricacies of a narration, having reference (if I am not altogether mistaken) to a pink horse (with green wings) that went, in a violent manner, by clockwork, and was wound up with an indigo key. With this history the king was even more profoundly interested than with the other \u2014 and, as the day broke before its conclusion (notwithstanding all the queen's endeavors to get through with it in time for the bowstringing), there was again no resource but to postpone that ceremony as before, for twenty-four hours. The next night there happened a similar accident with a similar result; and then the next \u2014 and then again the next; so that, in the end, the good monarch, having been unavoidably deprived of all opportunity to keep his vow during a period of no less than one thousand and one nights, either forgets it altogether by the expiration of this time, or gets himself absolved of it in the regular way, or (what is more probable) breaks it outright, as well as the head of his father confessor. At all events, Scheherazade, who, being lineally descended from Eve, fell heir, perhaps, to the whole seven baskets of talk, which the latter lady, we all know, picked up from under the trees in the garden of Eden-Scheherazade, I say, finally triumphed, and the tariff upon beauty was repealed.\n\nNow, this conclusion (which is that of the story as we have it upon record) is, no doubt, excessively proper and pleasant \u2014 but alas! like a great many pleasant things, is more pleasant than true, and I am indebted altogether to the \"Isitsoornot\" for the means of correcting the error. \"Le mieux,\" says a French proverb, \"est l'ennemi du bien,\" and, in mentioning that Scheherazade had inherited the seven baskets of talk, I should have added that she put them out at compound interest until they amounted to seventy-seven.\n\n\"My dear sister,\" said she, on the thousand-and-second night, (I quote the language of the \"Isitsoornot\" at this point, verbatim) \"my dear sister,\" said she, \"now that all this little difficulty about the bowstring has blown over, and that this odious tax is so happily repealed, I feel that I have been guilty of great indiscretion in withholding from you and the king (who I am sorry to say, snores \u2014 a thing no gentleman would do) the full conclusion of Sinbad the sailor. This person went through numerous other and more interesting adventures than those which I related; but the truth is, I felt sleepy on the particular night of their narration, and so was seduced into cutting them short \u2014 a grievous piece of misconduct, for which I only trust that Allah will forgive me. But even yet it is not too late to remedy my great neglect \u2014 and as soon as I have given the king a pinch or two in order to wake him up so far that he may stop making that horrible noise, I will forthwith entertain you (and him if he pleases) with the sequel of this very remarkable story.\n\nHereupon the sister of Scheherazade, as I have it from the \"Isitsoornot,\" expressed no very particular intensity of gratification; but the king, having been sufficiently pinched, at length ceased snoring, and finally said, \"hum!\" and then \"hoo!\" when the queen, understanding these words (which are no doubt Arabic) to signify that he was all attention, and would do his best not to snore any more \u2014 the queen, I say, having arranged these matters to her satisfaction, re-entered thus, at once, into the history of Sinbad the sailor:\n\n\"'At length, in my old age, [these are the words of Sinbad himself, as retailed by Scheherazade]\u2014'at length, in my old age, and after enjoying many years of tranquillity at home, I became once more possessed of a desire of visiting foreign countries; and one day, without acquainting any of my family with my design, I packed up some bundles of such merchandise as was most precious and least bulky, and, engaged a porter to carry them, went with him down to the sea-shore, to await the arrival of any chance vessel that might convey me out of the kingdom into some region which I had not as yet explored.\n\n\"'Having deposited the packages upon the sands, we sat down beneath some trees, and looked out into the ocean in the hope of perceiving a ship, but during several hours we saw none whatever. At length I fancied that I could hear a singular buzzing or humming sound; and the porter, after listening awhile, declared that he also could distinguish it. Presently it grew louder, and then still louder, so that we could have no doubt that the object which caused it was approaching us. At length, on the edge of the horizon, we discovered a black speck, which rapidly increased in size until we made it out to be a vast monster, swimming with a great part of its body above the surface of the sea. It came toward us with inconceivable swiftness, throwing up huge waves of foam around its breast, and illuminating all that part of the sea through which it passed, with a long line of fire that extended far off into the distance.\n\n\"'As the thing drew near we saw it very distinctly. Its length was equal to that of three of the loftiest trees that grow, and it was as wide as the great hall of audience in your palace, O most sublime and munificent of the Caliphs. Its body, which was unlike that of ordinary fishes, was as solid as a rock, and of a jetty blackness throughout all that portion of it which floated above the water, with the exception of a narrow blood-red streak that completely begirdled it. The belly, which floated beneath the surface, and of which we could get only a glimpse now and then as the monster rose and fell with the billows, was entirely covered with metallic scales, of a color like that of the moon in misty weather. The back was flat and nearly white, and from it there extended upwards of six spines, about half the length of the whole body.\n\n\"'The horrible creature had no mouth that we could perceive, but, as if to make up for this deficiency, it was provided with at least four score of eyes, that protruded from their sockets like those of the green dragon-fly, and were arranged all around the body in two rows, one above the other, and parallel to the blood-red streak, which seemed to answer the purpose of an eyebrow. Two or three of these dreadful eyes were much larger than the others, and had the appearance of solid gold.\n\n\"'Although this beast approached us, as I have before said, with the greatest rapidity, it must have been moved altogether by necromancy \u2014 for it had neither fins like a fish nor web-feet like a duck, nor wings like the seashell which is blown along in the manner of a vessel; nor yet did it writhe itself forward as do the eels. Its head and its tail were shaped precisely alike, only, not far from the latter, were two small holes that served for nostrils, and through which the monster puffed out its thick breath with prodigious violence, and with a shrieking, disagreeable noise.\n\n\"'Our terror at beholding this hideous thing was very great, but it was even surpassed by our astonishment, when upon getting a nearer look, we perceived upon the creature's back a vast number of animals about the size and shape of men, and altogether much resembling them, except that they wore no garments (as men do), being supplied (by nature, no doubt) with an ugly uncomfortable covering, a good deal like cloth, but fitting so tight to the skin, as to render the poor wretches laughably awkward, and put them apparently to severe pain. On the very tips of their heads were certain square-looking boxes, which, at first sight, I thought might have been intended to answer as turbans, but I soon discovered that they were excessively heavy and solid, and I therefore concluded they were contrivances designed, by their great weight, to keep the heads of the animals steady and safe upon their shoulders. Around the necks of the creatures were fastened black collars, (badges of servitude, no doubt,) such as we keep on our dogs, only much wider and infinitely stiffer, so that it was quite impossible for these poor victims to move their heads in any direction without moving the body at the same time; and thus they were doomed to perpetual contemplation of their noses \u2014 a view puggish and snubby in a wonderful, if not positively in an awful degree.\n\n\"'When the monster had nearly reached the shore where we stood, it suddenly pushed out one of its eyes to a great extent, and emitted from it a terrible flash of fire, accompanied by a dense cloud of smoke, and a noise that I can compare to nothing but thunder. As the smoke cleared away, we saw one of the odd man-animals standing near the head of the large beast with a trumpet in his hand, through which (putting it to his mouth) he presently addressed us in loud, harsh, and disagreeable accents, that, perhaps, we should have mistaken for language, had they not come altogether through the nose.\n\n\"'Being thus evidently spoken to, I was at a loss how to reply, as I could in no manner understand what was said; and in this difficulty I turned to the porter, who was near swooning through affright, and demanded of him his opinion as to what species of monster it was, what it wanted, and what kind of creatures those were that so swarmed upon its back. To this the porter replied, as well as he could for trepidation, that he had once before heard of this sea-beast; that it was a cruel demon, with bowels of sulphur and blood of fire, created by evil genii as the means of inflicting misery upon mankind; that the things upon its back were vermin, such as sometimes infest cats and dogs, only a little larger and more savage; and that these vermin had their uses, however evil \u2014 for, through the torture they caused the beast by their nibbling and stingings, it was goaded into that degree of wrath which was requisite to make it roar and commit ill, and so fulfil the vengeful and malicious designs of the wicked genii.\n\n\"This account determined me to take to my heels, and, without once even looking behind me, I ran at full speed up into the hills, while the porter ran equally fast, although nearly in an opposite direction, so that, by these means, he finally made his escape with my bundles, of which I have no doubt he took excellent care \u2014 although this is a point I cannot determine, as I do not remember that I ever beheld him again.\n\n\"'For myself, I was so hotly pursued by a swarm of the men-vermin (who had come to the shore in boats) that I was very soon overtaken, bound hand and foot, and conveyed to the beast, which immediately swam out again into the middle of the sea.\n\n\"'I now bitterly repented my folly in quitting a comfortable home to peril my life in such adventures as this; but regret being useless, I made the best of my condition, and exerted myself to secure the goodwill of the man-animal that owned the trumpet, and who appeared to exercise authority over his fellows. I succeeded so well in this endeavor that, in a few days, the creature bestowed upon me various tokens of his favor, and in the end even went to the trouble of teaching me the rudiments of what it was vain enough to denominate its language; so that, at length, I was enabled to converse with it readily, and came to make it comprehend the ardent desire I had of seeing the world.\n\n\"'Washish squashish squeak, Sinbad, hey-diddle diddle, grunt unt grumble, hiss, fiss, whiss,' said he to me, one day after dinner \u2014 but I beg a thousand pardons, I had forgotten that your majesty is not conversant with the dialect of the Cock-neighs (so the man-animals were called; I presume because their language formed the connecting link between that of the horse and that of the rooster). With your permission, I will translate. 'Washish squashish,' and so forth:\u2014 that is to say, 'I am happy to find, my dear Sinbad, that you are really a very excellent fellow; we are now about doing a thing which is called circumnavigating the globe; and since you are so desirous of seeing the world, I will strain a point and give you a free passage upon back of the beast.'\"\n\nWhen the Lady Scheherazade had proceeded thus far, relates the \"Isitsoornot,\" the king turned over from his left side to his right, and said:\n\n\"It is, in fact, very surprising, my dear queen, that you omitted, hitherto, these latter adventures of Sinbad. Do you know I think them exceedingly entertaining and strange?\"\n\nThe king having thus expressed himself, we are told, the fair Scheherazade resumed her history in the following words:\n\n\"Sinbad went on in this manner with his narrative to the caliph \u2014'I thanked the man-animal for its kindness, and soon found myself very much at home on the beast, which swam at a prodigious rate through the ocean; although the surface of the latter is, in that part of the world, by no means flat, but round like a pomegranate, so that we went \u2014 so to say \u2014 either up hill or down hill all the time.'\n\n\"That I think, was very singular,\" interrupted the king.\n\n\"Nevertheless, it is quite true,\" replied Scheherazade.\n\n\"I have my doubts,\" rejoined the king; \"but, pray, be so good as to go on with the story.\"\n\n\"I will,\" said the queen. \"'The beast,' continued Sinbad to the caliph, 'swam, as I have related, up hill and down hill until, at length, we arrived at an island, many hundreds of miles in circumference, but which, nevertheless, had been built in the middle of the sea by a colony of little things like caterpillars'\"\n\n\"Hum!\" said the king.\n\n\"'Leaving this island,' said Sinbad \u2014(for Scheherazade, it must be understood, took no notice of her husband's ill-mannered ejaculation) 'leaving this island, we came to another where the forests were of solid stone, and so hard that they shivered to pieces the finest-tempered axes with which we endeavoured to cut them down.\"'\n\nThis account, at first discredited, has since been corroborated by the discovery of a completely petrified forest, near the head waters of the Cheyenne, or Chienne river, which has its source in the Black Hills of the rocky chain.\n\nThere is scarcely, perhaps, a spectacle on the surface of the globe more remarkable, either in a geological or picturesque point of view than that presented by the petrified forest, near Cairo. The traveller, having passed the tombs of the caliphs, just beyond the gates of the city, proceeds to the southward, nearly at right angles to the road across the desert to Suez, and after having travelled some ten miles up a low barren valley, covered with sand, gravel, and sea shells, fresh as if the tide had retired but yesterday, crosses a low range of sandhills, which has for some distance run parallel to his path. The scene now presented to him is beyond conception singular and desolate. A mass of fragments of trees, all converted into stone, and when struck by his horse's hoof ringing like cast iron, is seen to extend itself for miles and miles around him, in the form of a decayed and prostrate forest. The wood is of a dark brown hue, but retains its form in perfection, the pieces being from one to fifteen feet in length, and from half a foot to three feet in thickness, strewed so closely together, as far as the eye can reach, that an Egyptian donkey can scarcely thread its way through amongst them, and so natural that, were it in Scotland or Ireland, it might pass without remark for some enormous drained bog, on which the exhumed trees lay rotting in the sun. The roots and rudiments of the branches are, in many cases, nearly perfect, and in some the worm-holes eaten under the bark are readily recognizable. The most delicate of the sap vessels, and all the finer portions of the centre of the wood, are perfectly entire, and bear to be examined with the strongest magnifiers. The whole are so thoroughly silicified as to scratch glass and are capable of receiving the highest polish. \u2014 Asiatic Magazine.\n\n\"Hum!\" said the king, again; but Scheherazade, paying him no attention, continued in the language of Sinbad.\n\n\"'Passing beyond this last island, we reached a country where there was a cave that ran to the distance of thirty or forty miles within the bowels of the earth, and that contained a greater number of far more spacious and more magnificent palaces than are to be found in all Damascus and Bagdad. From the roofs of these palaces there hung myriads of gems, liked diamonds, but larger than men; and in among the streets of towers and pyramids and temples, there flowed immense rivers as black as ebony, and swarming with fish that had no eyes.'\"\n\n\"Hum!\" said the king. \"'We then swam into a region of the sea where we found a lofty mountain, down whose sides there streamed torrents of melted metal, some of which were twelve miles wide and sixty miles long; while from an abyss on the summit, issued so vast a quantity of ashes that the sun was entirely blotted out from the heavens, and it became darker than the darkest midnight; so that when we were even at the distance of a hundred and fifty miles from the mountain, it was impossible to see the whitest object, however close we held it to our eyes.'\"\n\n\"Hum!\" said the king.\n\n\"'After quitting this coast, the beast continued his voyage until we met with a land in which the nature of things seemed reversed \u2014 for we here saw a great lake, at the bottom of which, more than a hundred feet beneath the surface of the water, there flourished in full leaf a forest of tall and luxuriant trees.'\"\n\n\"Hoo!\" said the king.\n\n\"Some hundred miles farther on brought us to a climate where the atmosphere was so dense as to sustain iron or steel, just as our own does feather.'\"\n\n\"Fiddle de dee,\" said the king.\n\n\"Proceeding still in the same direction, we presently arrived at the most magnificent region in the whole world. Through it there meandered a glorious river for several thousands of miles. This river was of unspeakable depth, and of a transparency richer than that of amber. It was from three to six miles in width; and its banks which arose on either side to twelve hundred feet in perpendicular height, were crowned with ever-blossoming trees and perpetual sweet-scented flowers, that made the whole territory one gorgeous garden; but the name of this luxuriant land was the Kingdom of Horror, and to enter it was inevitable death'\"\n\n\"Humph!\" said the king.\n\n\"'We left this kingdom in great haste, and, after some days, came to another, where we were astonished to perceive myriads of monstrous animals with horns resembling scythes upon their heads. These hideous beasts dig for themselves vast caverns in the soil, of a funnel shape, and line the sides of them with, rocks, so disposed one upon the other that they fall instantly, when trodden upon by other animals, thus precipitating them into the monster's dens, where their blood is immediately sucked, and their carcasses afterwards hurled contemptuously out to an immense distance from \"the caverns of death.\"'\"\n\n\"Pooh!\" said the king.\n\n\"'Continuing our progress, we perceived a district with vegetables that grew not upon any soil but in the air. There were others that sprang from the substance of other vegetables; others that derived their substance from the bodies of living animals; and then again, there were others that glowed all over with intense fire; others that moved from place to place at pleasure, and what was still more wonderful, we discovered flowers that lived and breathed and moved their limbs at will and had, moreover, the detestable passion of mankind for enslaving other creatures, and confining them in horrid and solitary prisons until the fulfillment of appointed tasks.'\"\n\n\"Pshaw!\" said the king.\n\n\"'Quitting this land, we soon arrived at another in which the bees and the birds are mathematicians of such genius and erudition, that they give daily instructions in the science of geometry to the wise men of the empire. The king of the place having offered a reward for the solution of two very difficult problems, they were solved upon the spot \u2014 the one by the bees, and the other by the birds; but the king keeping their solution a secret, it was only after the most profound researches and labor, and the writing of an infinity of big books, during a long series of years, that the men-mathematicians at length arrived at the identical solutions which had been given upon the spot by the bees and by the birds.'\"\n\nDuring the latter part of the last century, the question arose among mathematicians \u2014\"to determine the best form that can be given to the sails of a windmill, according to their varying distances from the revolving vanes, and likewise from the centres of the revolution.\" This is an excessively complex problem, for it is, in other words, to find the best possible position at an infinity of varied distances, and at an infinity of points on the arm. There were a thousand futile attempts to answer the query on the part of the most illustrious mathematicians; and when, at length, an undeniable solution was discovered, men found that the wing of a bird had given it with absolute precision ever since the first bird had traversed the air.\n\n\"Oh my!\" said the king.\n\n\"'We had scarcely lost sight of this empire when we found ourselves close upon another, from whose shores there flew over our heads a flock of fowls a mile in breadth, and two hundred and forty miles long; so that, although they flew a mile during every minute, it required no less than four hours for the whole flock to pass over us \u2014 in which there were several millions of millions of fowl.'\"\n\n\"Oh fy!\" said the king.\n\n\"'No sooner had we got rid of these birds, which occasioned us great annoyance, than we were terrified by the appearance of a fowl of another kind, and infinitely larger than even the rocs which I met in my former voyages; for it was bigger than the biggest of the domes on your seraglio, oh, most Munificent of Caliphs. This terrible fowl had no head that we could perceive, but was fashioned entirely of belly, which was of a prodigious fatness and roundness, of a soft-looking substance, smooth, shining and striped with various colors. In its talons, the monster was bearing away to his eyrie in the heavens, a house from which it had knocked off the roof, and in the interior of which we distinctly saw human beings, who, beyond doubt, were in a state of frightful despair at the horrible fate which awaited them. We shouted with all our might, in the hope of frightening the bird into letting go of its prey, but it merely gave a snort or puff, as if of rage and then let fall upon our heads a heavy sack which proved to be filled with sand!'\"\n\n\"Stuff!\" said the king.\n\n\"'It was just after this adventure that we encountered a continent of immense extent and prodigious solidity, but which, nevertheless, was supported entirely upon the back of a sky-blue cow that had no fewer than four hundred horns.'\"\n\n\"That, now, I believe,\" said the king, \"because I have read something of the kind before, in a book.\"\n\n\"'We passed immediately beneath this continent, (swimming in between the legs of the cow, and, after some hours, found ourselves in a wonderful country indeed, which, I was informed by the man-animal, was his own native land, inhabited by things of his own species. This elevated the man-animal very much in my esteem, and in fact, I now began to feel ashamed of the contemptuous familiarity with which I had treated him; for I found that the man-animals in general were a nation of the most powerful magicians, who lived with worms in their brain, which, no doubt, served to stimulate them by their painful writhings and wrigglings to the most miraculous efforts of imagination!'\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" said the king.\n\n\"'Among the magicians, were domesticated several animals of very singular kinds; for example, there was a huge horse whose bones were iron and whose blood was boiling water. In place of corn, he had black stones for his usual food; and yet, in spite of so hard a diet, he was so strong and swift that he would drag a load more weighty than the grandest temple in this city, at a rate surpassing that of the flight of most birds.'\"\n\n\"Twattle!\" said the king.\n\n\"'I saw, also, among these people a hen without feathers, but bigger than a camel; instead of flesh and bone she had iron and brick; her blood, like that of the horse, (to whom, in fact, she was nearly related,) was boiling water; and like him she ate nothing but wood or black stones. This hen brought forth very frequently, a hundred chickens in the day; and, after birth, they took up their residence for several weeks within the stomach of their mother.'\"\n\n\"Fa! lal!\" said the king.\n\n\"'One of this nation of mighty conjurors created a man out of brass and wood, and leather, and endowed him with such ingenuity that he would have beaten at chess, all the race of mankind with the exception of the great Caliph, Haroun Alraschid. Another of these magi constructed (of like material) a creature that put to shame even the genius of him who made it; for so great were its reasoning powers that, in a second, it performed calculations of so vast an extent that they would have required the united labor of fifty thousand fleshy men for a year. But a still more wonderful conjuror fashioned for himself a mighty thing that was neither man nor beast, but which had brains of lead, intermixed with a black matter like pitch, and fingers that it employed with such incredible speed and dexterity that it would have had no trouble in writing out twenty thousand copies of the Koran in an hour, and this with so exquisite a precision, that in all the copies there should not be found one to vary from another by the breadth of the finest hair. This thing was of prodigious strength, so that it erected or overthrew the mightiest empires at a breath; but its powers were exercised equally for evil and for good.'\"\n\n\"Ridiculous!\" said the king.\n\n\"'Among this nation of necromancers there was also one who had in his veins the blood of the salamanders; for he made no scruple of sitting down to smoke his chibouc in a red-hot oven until his dinner was thoroughly roasted upon its floor. Another had the faculty of converting the common metals into gold, without even looking at them during the process. Another had such a delicacy of touch that he made a wire so fine as to be invisible. Another had such quickness of perception that he counted all the separate motions of an elastic body, while it was springing backward and forward at the rate of nine hundred millions of times in a second.'\"\n\n\"Absurd!\" said the king.\n\n\"'Another of these magicians, by means of a fluid that nobody ever yet saw, could make the corpses of his friends brandish their arms, kick out their legs, fight, or even get up and dance at his will. Another had cultivated his voice to so great an extent that he could have made himself heard from one end of the world to the other. Another had so long an arm that he could sit down in Damascus and indite a letter at Bagdad \u2014 or indeed at any distance whatsoever. Another commanded the lightning to come down to him out of the heavens, and it came at his call; and served him for a plaything when it came. Another took two loud sounds and out of them made a silence. Another constructed a deep darkness out of two brilliant lights. Another made ice in a red-hot furnace. Another directed the sun to paint his portrait, and the sun did. Another took this luminary with the moon and the planets, and having first weighed them with scrupulous accuracy, probed into their depths and found out the solidity of the substance of which they were made. But the whole nation is, indeed, of so surprising a necromantic ability, that not even their infants, nor their commonest cats and dogs have any difficulty in seeing objects that do not exist at all, or that for twenty millions of years before the birth of the nation itself had been blotted out from the face of creation.\"'\n\n\"Preposterous!\" said the king.\n\n\"'The wives and daughters of these incomparably great and wise magi,'\" continued Scheherazade, without being in any manner disturbed by these frequent and most ungentlemanly interruptions on the part of her husband \u2014\"'the wives and daughters of these eminent conjurers are every thing that is accomplished and refined; and would be every thing that is interesting and beautiful, but for an unhappy fatality that besets them, and from which not even the miraculous powers of their husbands and fathers has, hitherto, been adequate to save. Some fatalities come in certain shapes, and some in others \u2014 but this of which I speak has come in the shape of a crotchet.'\"\n\n\"A what?\" said the king.\n\n\"'A crotchet'\" said Scheherazade. \"'One of the evil genii, who are perpetually upon the watch to inflict ill, has put it into the heads of these accomplished ladies that the thing which we describe as personal beauty consists altogether in the protuberance of the region which lies not very far below the small of the back. Perfection of loveliness, they say, is in the direct ratio of the extent of this lump. Having been long possessed of this idea, and bolsters being cheap in that country, the days have long gone by since it was possible to distinguish a woman from a dromedary\u2014'\"\n\n\"Stop!\" said the king \u2014\"I can't stand that, and I won't. You have already given me a dreadful headache with your lies. The day, too, I perceive, is beginning to break. How long have we been married? \u2014 my conscience is getting to be troublesome again. And then that dromedary touch \u2014 do you take me for a fool? Upon the whole, you might as well get up and be throttled.\"\n\nThese words, as I learn from the \"Isitsoornot,\" both grieved and astonished Scheherazade; but, as she knew the king to be a man of scrupulous integrity, and quite unlikely to forfeit his word, she submitted to her fate with a good grace. She derived, however, great consolation, (during the tightening of the bowstring,) from the reflection that much of the history remained still untold, and that the petulance of her brute of a husband had reaped for him a most righteous reward, in depriving him of many inconceivable adventures.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Some Words with a Mummy by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe symposium of the preceding evening had been a little too much for my nerves. I had a wretched headache, and was desperately drowsy. Instead of going out therefore to spend the evening as I had proposed, it occurred to me that I could not do a wiser thing than just eat a mouthful of supper and go immediately to bed.\n\nA light supper of course. I am exceedingly fond of Welsh rabbit. More than a pound at once, however, may not at all times be advisable. Still, there can be no material objection to two. And really between two and three, there is merely a single unit of difference. I ventured, perhaps, upon four. My wife will have it five; \u2014 but, clearly, she has confounded two very distinct affairs. The abstract number, five, I am willing to admit; but, concretely, it has reference to bottles of Brown Stout, without which, in the way of condiment, Welsh rabbit is to be eschewed.\n\nHaving thus concluded a frugal meal, and donned my night-cap, with the serene hope of enjoying it till noon the next day, I placed my head upon the pillow, and, through the aid of a capital conscience, fell into a profound slumber forthwith.\n\nBut when were the hopes of humanity fulfilled? I could not have completed my third snore when there came a furious ringing at the street-door bell, and then an impatient thumping at the knocker, which awakened me at once. In a minute afterward, and while I was still rubbing my eyes, my wife thrust in my face a note, from my old friend, Doctor Ponnonner. It ran thus:\n\n\"Come to me, by all means, my dear good friend, as soon as you receive this. Come and help us to rejoice. At last, by long persevering diplomacy, I have gained the assent of the Directors of the City Museum, to my examination of the Mummy \u2014 you know the one I mean. I have permission to unswathe it and open it, if desirable. A few friends only will be present \u2014 you, of course. The Mummy is now at my house, and we shall begin to unroll it at eleven to-night.\n\n\"Yours, ever, PONNONNER.\n\nBy the time I had reached the \"Ponnonner,\" it struck me that I was as wide awake as a man need be. I leaped out of bed in an ecstacy, overthrowing all in my way; dressed myself with a rapidity truly marvellous; and set off, at the top of my speed, for the doctor's.\n\nThere I found a very eager company assembled. They had been awaiting me with much impatience; the Mummy was extended upon the dining-table; and the moment I entered its examination was commenced.\n\nIt was one of a pair brought, several years previously, by Captain Arthur Sabretash, a cousin of Ponnonner's from a tomb near Eleithias, in the Lybian mountains, a considerable distance above Thebes on the Nile. The grottoes at this point, although less magnificent than the Theban sepulchres, are of higher interest, on account of affording more numerous illustrations of the private life of the Egyptians. The chamber from which our specimen was taken, was said to be very rich in such illustrations; the walls being completely covered with fresco paintings and bas-reliefs, while statues, vases, and Mosaic work of rich patterns, indicated the vast wealth of the deceased.\n\nThe treasure had been deposited in the Museum precisely in the same condition in which Captain Sabretash had found it; \u2014 that is to say, the coffin had not been disturbed. For eight years it had thus stood, subject only externally to public inspection. We had now, therefore, the complete Mummy at our disposal; and to those who are aware how very rarely the unransacked antique reaches our shores, it will be evident, at once that we had great reason to congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune.\n\nApproaching the table, I saw on it a large box, or case, nearly seven feet long, and perhaps three feet wide, by two feet and a half deep. It was oblong \u2014 not coffin-shaped. The material was at first supposed to be the wood of the sycamore (platanus), but, upon cutting into it, we found it to be pasteboard, or, more properly, papier mache, composed of papyrus. It was thickly ornamented with paintings, representing funeral scenes, and other mournful subjects \u2014 interspersed among which, in every variety of position, were certain series of hieroglyphical characters, intended, no doubt, for the name of the departed. By good luck, Mr. Gliddon formed one of our party; and he had no difficulty in translating the letters, which were simply phonetic, and represented the word Allamistakeo.\n\nWe had some difficulty in getting this case open without injury; but having at length accomplished the task, we came to a second, coffin-shaped, and very considerably less in size than the exterior one, but resembling it precisely in every other respect. The interval between the two was filled with resin, which had, in some degree, defaced the colors of the interior box.\n\nUpon opening this latter (which we did quite easily), we arrived at a third case, also coffin-shaped, and varying from the second one in no particular, except in that of its material, which was cedar, and still emitted the peculiar and highly aromatic odor of that wood. Between the second and the third case there was no interval \u2014 the one fitting accurately within the other.\n\nRemoving the third case, we discovered and took out the body itself. We had expected to find it, as usual, enveloped in frequent rolls, or bandages, of linen; but, in place of these, we found a sort of sheath, made of papyrus, and coated with a layer of plaster, thickly gilt and painted. The paintings represented subjects connected with the various supposed duties of the soul, and its presentation to different divinities, with numerous identical human figures, intended, very probably, as portraits of the persons embalmed. Extending from head to foot was a columnar, or perpendicular, inscription, in phonetic hieroglyphics, giving again his name and titles, and the names and titles of his relations.\n\nAround the neck thus ensheathed, was a collar of cylindrical glass beads, diverse in color, and so arranged as to form images of deities, of the scarabaeus, etc, with the winged globe. Around the small of the waist was a similar collar or belt.\n\nStripping off the papyrus, we found the flesh in excellent preservation, with no perceptible odor. The color was reddish. The skin was hard, smooth, and glossy. The teeth and hair were in good condition. The eyes (it seemed) had been removed, and glass ones substituted, which were very beautiful and wonderfully life-like, with the exception of somewhat too determined a stare. The fingers and the nails were brilliantly gilded.\n\nMr. Gliddon was of opinion, from the redness of the epidermis, that the embalmment had been effected altogether by asphaltum; but, on scraping the surface with a steel instrument, and throwing into the fire some of the powder thus obtained, the flavor of camphor and other sweet-scented gums became apparent.\n\nWe searched the corpse very carefully for the usual openings through which the entrails are extracted, but, to our surprise, we could discover none. No member of the party was at that period aware that entire or unopened mummies are not infrequently met. The brain it was customary to withdraw through the nose; the intestines through an incision in the side; the body was then shaved, washed, and salted; then laid aside for several weeks, when the operation of embalming, properly so called, began.\n\nAs no trace of an opening could be found, Doctor Ponnonner was preparing his instruments for dissection, when I observed that it was then past two o'clock. Hereupon it was agreed to postpone the internal examination until the next evening; and we were about to separate for the present, when some one suggested an experiment or two with the Voltaic pile.\n\nThe application of electricity to a mummy three or four thousand years old at the least, was an idea, if not very sage, still sufficiently original, and we all caught it at once. About one-tenth in earnest and nine-tenths in jest, we arranged a battery in the Doctor's study, and conveyed thither the Egyptian.\n\nIt was only after much trouble that we succeeded in laying bare some portions of the temporal muscle which appeared of less stony rigidity than other parts of the frame, but which, as we had anticipated, of course, gave no indication of galvanic susceptibility when brought in contact with the wire. This, the first trial, indeed, seemed decisive, and, with a hearty laugh at our own absurdity, we were bidding each other good night, when my eyes, happening to fall upon those of the Mummy, were there immediately riveted in amazement. My brief glance, in fact, had sufficed to assure me that the orbs which we had all supposed to be glass, and which were originally noticeable for a certain wild stare, were now so far covered by the lids, that only a small portion of the tunica albuginea remained visible.\n\nWith a shout I called attention to the fact, and it became immediately obvious to all.\n\nI cannot say that I was alarmed at the phenomenon, because \"alarmed\" is, in my case, not exactly the word. It is possible, however, that, but for the Brown Stout, I might have been a little nervous. As for the rest of the company, they really made no attempt at concealing the downright fright which possessed them. Doctor Ponnonner was a man to be pitied. Mr. Gliddon, by some peculiar process, rendered himself invisible. Mr. Silk Buckingham, I fancy, will scarcely be so bold as to deny that he made his way, upon all fours, under the table.\n\nAfter the first shock of astonishment, however, we resolved, as a matter of course, upon further experiment forthwith. Our operations were now directed against the great toe of the right foot. We made an incision over the outside of the exterior os sesamoideum pollicis pedis, and thus got at the root of the abductor muscle. Readjusting the battery, we now applied the fluid to the bisected nerves \u2014 when, with a movement of exceeding life-likeness, the Mummy first drew up its right knee so as to bring it nearly in contact with the abdomen, and then, straightening the limb with inconceivable force, bestowed a kick upon Doctor Ponnonner, which had the effect of discharging that gentleman, like an arrow from a catapult, through a window into the street below.\n\nWe rushed out en masse to bring in the mangled remains of the victim, but had the happiness to meet him upon the staircase, coming up in an unaccountable hurry, brimful of the most ardent philosophy, and more than ever impressed with the necessity of prosecuting our experiment with vigor and with zeal.\n\nIt was by his advice, accordingly, that we made, upon the spot, a profound incision into the tip of the subject's nose, while the Doctor himself, laying violent hands upon it, pulled it into vehement contact with the wire.\n\nMorally and physically \u2014 figuratively and literally \u2014 was the effect electric. In the first place, the corpse opened its eyes and winked very rapidly for several minutes, as does Mr. Barnes in the pantomime, in the second place, it sneezed; in the third, it sat upon end; in the fourth, it shook its fist in Doctor Ponnonner's face; in the fifth, turning to Messieurs Gliddon and Buckingham, it addressed them, in very capital Egyptian, thus:\n\n\"I must say, gentlemen, that I am as much surprised as I am mortified at your behaviour. Of Doctor Ponnonner nothing better was to be expected. He is a poor little fat fool who knows no better. I pity and forgive him. But you, Mr. Gliddon \u2014 and you, Silk \u2014 who have travelled and resided in Egypt until one might imagine you to the manner born \u2014 you, I say who have been so much among us that you speak Egyptian fully as well, I think, as you write your mother tongue \u2014 you, whom I have always been led to regard as the firm friend of the mummies \u2014 I really did anticipate more gentlemanly conduct from you. What am I to think of your standing quietly by and seeing me thus unhandsomely used? What am I to suppose by your permitting Tom, Dick, and Harry to strip me of my coffins, and my clothes, in this wretchedly cold climate? In what light (to come to the point) am I to regard your aiding and abetting that miserable little villain, Doctor Ponnonner, in pulling me by the nose?\"\n\nIt will be taken for granted, no doubt, that upon hearing this speech under the circumstances, we all either made for the door, or fell into violent hysterics, or went off in a general swoon. One of these three things was, I say, to be expected. Indeed each and all of these lines of conduct might have been very plausibly pursued. And, upon my word, I am at a loss to know how or why it was that we pursued neither the one nor the other. But, perhaps, the true reason is to be sought in the spirit of the age, which proceeds by the rule of contraries altogether, and is now usually admitted as the solution of every thing in the way of paradox and impossibility. Or, perhaps, after all, it was only the Mummy's exceedingly natural and matter-of-course air that divested his words of the terrible. However this may be, the facts are clear, and no member of our party betrayed any very particular trepidation, or seemed to consider that any thing had gone very especially wrong.\n\nFor my part I was convinced it was all right, and merely stepped aside, out of the range of the Egyptian's fist. Doctor Ponnonner thrust his hands into his breeches' pockets, looked hard at the Mummy, and grew excessively red in the face. Mr. Glidden stroked his whiskers and drew up the collar of his shirt. Mr. Buckingham hung down his head, and put his right thumb into the left corner of his mouth.\n\nThe Egyptian regarded him with a severe countenance for some minutes and at length, with a sneer, said:\n\n\"Why don't you speak, Mr. Buckingham? Did you hear what I asked you, or not? Do take your thumb out of your mouth!\"\n\nMr. Buckingham, hereupon, gave a slight start, took his right thumb out of the left corner of his mouth, and, by way of indemnification inserted his left thumb in the right corner of the aperture above-mentioned.\n\nNot being able to get an answer from Mr. B., the figure turned peevishly to Mr. Gliddon, and, in a peremptory tone, demanded in general terms what we all meant.\n\nMr. Gliddon replied at great length, in phonetics; and but for the deficiency of American printing-offices in hieroglyphical type, it would afford me much pleasure to record here, in the original, the whole of his very excellent speech.\n\nI may as well take this occasion to remark, that all the subsequent conversation in which the Mummy took a part, was carried on in primitive Egyptian, through the medium (so far as concerned myself and other untravelled members of the company)\u2014 through the medium, I say, of Messieurs Gliddon and Buckingham, as interpreters. These gentlemen spoke the mother tongue of the Mummy with inimitable fluency and grace; but I could not help observing that (owing, no doubt, to the introduction of images entirely modern, and, of course, entirely novel to the stranger) the two travellers were reduced, occasionally, to the employment of sensible forms for the purpose of conveying a particular meaning. Mr. Gliddon, at one period, for example, could not make the Egyptian comprehend the term \"politics,\" until he sketched upon the wall, with a bit of charcoal a little carbuncle-nosed gentleman, out at elbows, standing upon a stump, with his left leg drawn back, right arm thrown forward, with his fist shut, the eyes rolled up toward Heaven, and the mouth open at an angle of ninety degrees. Just in the same way Mr. Buckingham failed to convey the absolutely modern idea \"wig,\" until (at Doctor Ponnonner's suggestion) he grew very pale in the face, and consented to take off his own.\n\nIt will be readily understood that Mr. Gliddon's discourse turned chiefly upon the vast benefits accruing to science from the unrolling and disembowelling of mummies; apologizing, upon this score, for any disturbance that might have been occasioned him, in particular, the individual Mummy called Allamistakeo; and concluding with a mere hint (for it could scarcely be considered more) that, as these little matters were now explained, it might be as well to proceed with the investigation intended. Here Doctor Ponnonner made ready his instruments.\n\nIn regard to the latter suggestions of the orator, it appears that Allamistakeo had certain scruples of conscience, the nature of which I did not distinctly learn; but he expressed himself satisfied with the apologies tendered, and, getting down from the table, shook hands with the company all round.\n\nWhen this ceremony was at an end, we immediately busied ourselves in repairing the damages which our subject had sustained from the scalpel. We sewed up the wound in his temple, bandaged his foot, and applied a square inch of black plaster to the tip of his nose.\n\nIt was now observed that the Count (this was the title, it seems, of Allamistakeo) had a slight fit of shivering \u2014 no doubt from the cold. The Doctor immediately repaired to his wardrobe, and soon returned with a black dress coat, made in Jennings' best manner, a pair of sky-blue plaid pantaloons with straps, a pink gingham chemise, a flapped vest of brocade, a white sack overcoat, a walking cane with a hook, a hat with no brim, patent-leather boots, straw-colored kid gloves, an eye-glass, a pair of whiskers, and a waterfall cravat. Owing to the disparity of size between the Count and the doctor (the proportion being as two to one), there was some little difficulty in adjusting these habiliments upon the person of the Egyptian; but when all was arranged, he might have been said to be dressed. Mr. Gliddon, therefore, gave him his arm, and led him to a comfortable chair by the fire, while the Doctor rang the bell upon the spot and ordered a supply of cigars and wine.\n\nThe conversation soon grew animated. Much curiosity was, of course, expressed in regard to the somewhat remarkable fact of Allamistakeo's still remaining alive.\n\n\"I should have thought,\" observed Mr. Buckingham, \"that it is high time you were dead.\"\n\n\"Why,\" replied the Count, very much astonished, \"I am little more than seven hundred years old! My father lived a thousand, and was by no means in his dotage when he died.\"\n\nHere ensued a brisk series of questions and computations, by means of which it became evident that the antiquity of the Mummy had been grossly misjudged. It had been five thousand and fifty years and some months since he had been consigned to the catacombs at Eleithias.\n\n\"But my remark,\" resumed Mr. Buckingham, \"had no reference to your age at the period of interment (I am willing to grant, in fact, that you are still a young man), and my illusion was to the immensity of time during which, by your own showing, you must have been done up in asphaltum.\"\n\n\"In what?\" said the Count.\n\n\"In asphaltum,\" persisted Mr. B.\n\n\"Ah, yes; I have some faint notion of what you mean; it might be made to answer, no doubt \u2014 but in my time we employed scarcely any thing else than the Bichloride of Mercury.\"\n\n\"But what we are especially at a loss to understand,\" said Doctor Ponnonner, \"is how it happens that, having been dead and buried in Egypt five thousand years ago, you are here to-day all alive and looking so delightfully well.\"\n\n\"Had I been, as you say, dead,\" replied the Count, \"it is more than probable that dead, I should still be; for I perceive you are yet in the infancy of Calvanism, and cannot accomplish with it what was a common thing among us in the old days. But the fact is, I fell into catalepsy, and it was considered by my best friends that I was either dead or should be; they accordingly embalmed me at once \u2014 I presume you are aware of the chief principle of the embalming process?\"\n\n\"Why not altogether.\"\n\n\"Why, I perceive \u2014 a deplorable condition of ignorance! Well I cannot enter into details just now: but it is necessary to explain that to embalm (properly speaking), in Egypt, was to arrest indefinitely all the animal functions subjected to the process. I use the word 'animal' in its widest sense, as including the physical not more than the moral and vital being. I repeat that the leading principle of embalmment consisted, with us, in the immediately arresting, and holding in perpetual abeyance, all the animal functions subjected to the process. To be brief, in whatever condition the individual was, at the period of embalmment, in that condition he remained. Now, as it is my good fortune to be of the blood of the Scarabaeus, I was embalmed alive, as you see me at present.\"\n\n\"The blood of the Scarabaeus!\" exclaimed Doctor Ponnonner.\n\n\"Yes. The Scarabaeus was the insignium or the 'arms,' of a very distinguished and very rare patrician family. To be 'of the blood of the Scarabaeus,' is merely to be one of that family of which the Scarabaeus is the insignium. I speak figuratively.\"\n\n\"But what has this to do with you being alive?\"\n\n\"Why, it is the general custom in Egypt to deprive a corpse, before embalmment, of its bowels and brains; the race of the Scarabaei alone did not coincide with the custom. Had I not been a Scarabeus, therefore, I should have been without bowels and brains; and without either it is inconvenient to live.\"\n\n\"I perceive that,\" said Mr. Buckingham, \"and I presume that all the entire mummies that come to hand are of the race of Scarabaei.\"\n\n\"Beyond doubt.\"\n\n\"I thought,\" said Mr. Gliddon, very meekly, \"that the Scarabaeus was one of the Egyptian gods.\"\n\n\"One of the Egyptian what?\" exclaimed the Mummy, starting to its feet.\n\n\"Gods!\" repeated the traveller.\n\n\"Mr. Gliddon, I really am astonished to hear you talk in this style,\" said the Count, resuming his chair. \"No nation upon the face of the earth has ever acknowledged more than one god. The Scarabaeus, the Ibis, etc., were with us (as similar creatures have been with others) the symbols, or media, through which we offered worship to the Creator too august to be more directly approached.\"\n\nThere was here a pause. At length the colloquy was renewed by Doctor Ponnonner.\n\n\"It is not improbable, then, from what you have explained,\" said he, \"that among the catacombs near the Nile there may exist other mummies of the Scarabaeus tribe, in a condition of vitality?\"\n\n\"There can be no question of it,\" replied the Count; \"all the Scarabaei embalmed accidentally while alive, are alive now. Even some of those purposely so embalmed, may have been overlooked by their executors, and still remain in the tomb.\"\n\n\"Will you be kind enough to explain,\" I said, \"what you mean by 'purposely so embalmed'?\"\n\n\"With great pleasure!\" answered the Mummy, after surveying me leisurely through his eye-glass \u2014 for it was the first time I had ventured to address him a direct question.\n\n\"With great pleasure,\" he said. \"The usual duration of man's life, in my time, was about eight hundred years. Few men died, unless by most extraordinary accident, before the age of six hundred; few lived longer than a decade of centuries; but eight were considered the natural term. After the discovery of the embalming principle, as I have already described it to you, it occurred to our philosophers that a laudable curiosity might be gratified, and, at the same time, the interests of science much advanced, by living this natural term in installments. In the case of history, indeed, experience demonstrated that something of this kind was indispensable. An historian, for example, having attained the age of five hundred, would write a book with great labor and then get himself carefully embalmed; leaving instructions to his executors pro tem., that they should cause him to be revivified after the lapse of a certain period \u2014 say five or six hundred years. Resuming existence at the expiration of this time, he would invariably find his great work converted into a species of hap-hazard note-book \u2014 that is to say, into a kind of literary arena for the conflicting guesses, riddles, and personal squabbles of whole herds of exasperated commentators. These guesses, etc., which passed under the name of annotations, or emendations, were found so completely to have enveloped, distorted, and overwhelmed the text, that the author had to go about with a lantern to discover his own book. When discovered, it was never worth the trouble of the search. After re-writing it throughout, it was regarded as the bounden duty of the historian to set himself to work immediately in correcting, from his own private knowledge and experience, the traditions of the day concerning the epoch at which he had originally lived. Now this process of re-scription and personal rectification, pursued by various individual sages from time to time, had the effect of preventing our history from degenerating into absolute fable.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon,\" said Doctor Ponnonner at this point, laying his hand gently upon the arm of the Egyptian \u2014\"I beg your pardon, sir, but may I presume to interrupt you for one moment?\"\n\n\"By all means, sir,\" replied the Count, drawing up.\n\n\"I merely wished to ask you a question,\" said the Doctor. \"You mentioned the historian's personal correction of traditions respecting his own epoch. Pray, sir, upon an average what proportion of these Kabbala were usually found to be right?\"\n\n\"The Kabbala, as you properly term them, sir, were generally discovered to be precisely on a par with the facts recorded in the un-re-written histories themselves; \u2014 that is to say, not one individual iota of either was ever known, under any circumstances, to be not totally and radically wrong.\"\n\n\"But since it is quite clear,\" resumed the Doctor, \"that at least five thousand years have elapsed since your entombment, I take it for granted that your histories at that period, if not your traditions were sufficiently explicit on that one topic of universal interest, the Creation, which took place, as I presume you are aware, only about ten centuries before.\"\n\n\"Sir!\" said the Count Allamistakeo.\n\nThe Doctor repeated his remarks, but it was only after much additional explanation that the foreigner could be made to comprehend them. The latter at length said, hesitatingly:\n\n\"The ideas you have suggested are to me, I confess, utterly novel. During my time I never knew any one to entertain so singular a fancy as that the universe (or this world if you will have it so) ever had a beginning at all. I remember once, and once only, hearing something remotely hinted, by a man of many speculations, concerning the origin of the human race; and by this individual, the very word Adam (or Red Earth), which you make use of, was employed. He employed it, however, in a generical sense, with reference to the spontaneous germination from rank soil (just as a thousand of the lower genera of creatures are germinated)\u2014 the spontaneous germination, I say, of five vast hordes of men, simultaneously upspringing in five distinct and nearly equal divisions of the globe.\"\n\nHere, in general, the company shrugged their shoulders, and one or two of us touched our foreheads with a very significant air. Mr. Silk Buckingham, first glancing slightly at the occiput and then at the sinciput of Allamistakeo, spoke as follows:\n\n\"The long duration of human life in your time, together with the occasional practice of passing it, as you have explained, in installments, must have had, indeed, a strong tendency to the general development and conglomeration of knowledge. I presume, therefore, that we are to attribute the marked inferiority of the old Egyptians in all particulars of science, when compared with the moderns, and more especially with the Yankees, altogether to the superior solidity of the Egyptian skull.\"\n\n\"I confess again,\" replied the Count, with much suavity, \"that I am somewhat at a loss to comprehend you; pray, to what particulars of science do you allude?\"\n\nHere our whole party, joining voices, detailed, at great length, the assumptions of phrenology and the marvels of animal magnetism.\n\nHaving heard us to an end, the Count proceeded to relate a few anecdotes, which rendered it evident that prototypes of Gall and Spurzheim had flourished and faded in Egypt so long ago as to have been nearly forgotten, and that the manoeuvres of Mesmer were really very contemptible tricks when put in collation with the positive miracles of the Theban savans, who created lice and a great many other similar things.\n\nI here asked the Count if his people were able to calculate eclipses. He smiled rather contemptuously, and said they were.\n\nThis put me a little out, but I began to make other inquiries in regard to his astronomical knowledge, when a member of the company, who had never as yet opened his mouth, whispered in my ear, that for information on this head, I had better consult Ptolemy (whoever Ptolemy is), as well as one Plutarch de facie lunae.\n\nI then questioned the Mummy about burning-glasses and lenses, and, in general, about the manufacture of glass; but I had not made an end of my queries before the silent member again touched me quietly on the elbow, and begged me for God's sake to take a peep at Diodorus Siculus. As for the Count, he merely asked me, in the way of reply, if we moderns possessed any such microscopes as would enable us to cut cameos in the style of the Egyptians. While I was thinking how I should answer this question, little Doctor Ponnonner committed himself in a very extraordinary way.\n\n\"Look at our architecture!\" he exclaimed, greatly to the indignation of both the travellers, who pinched him black and blue to no purpose.\n\n\"Look,\" he cried with enthusiasm, \"at the Bowling-Green Fountain in New York! or if this be too vast a contemplation, regard for a moment the Capitol at Washington, D. C.!\"\u2014 and the good little medical man went on to detail very minutely, the proportions of the fabric to which he referred. He explained that the portico alone was adorned with no less than four and twenty columns, five feet in diameter, and ten feet apart.\n\nThe Count said that he regretted not being able to remember, just at that moment, the precise dimensions of any one of the principal buildings of the city of Aznac, whose foundations were laid in the night of Time, but the ruins of which were still standing, at the epoch of his entombment, in a vast plain of sand to the westward of Thebes. He recollected, however, (talking of the porticoes,) that one affixed to an inferior palace in a kind of suburb called Carnac, consisted of a hundred and forty-four columns, thirty-seven feet in circumference, and twenty-five feet apart. The approach to this portico, from the Nile, was through an avenue two miles long, composed of sphynxes, statues, and obelisks, twenty, sixty, and a hundred feet in height. The palace itself (as well as he could remember) was, in one direction, two miles long, and might have been altogether about seven in circuit. Its walls were richly painted all over, within and without, with hieroglyphics. He would not pretend to assert that even fifty or sixty of the Doctor's Capitols might have been built within these walls, but he was by no means sure that two or three hundred of them might not have been squeezed in with some trouble. That palace at Carnac was an insignificant little building after all. He (the Count), however, could not conscientiously refuse to admit the ingenuity, magnificence, and superiority of the Fountain at the Bowling Green, as described by the Doctor. Nothing like it, he was forced to allow, had ever been seen in Egypt or elsewhere.\n\nI here asked the Count what he had to say to our railroads.\n\n\"Nothing,\" he replied, \"in particular.\" They were rather slight, rather ill-conceived, and clumsily put together. They could not be compared, of course, with the vast, level, direct, iron-grooved causeways upon which the Egyptians conveyed entire temples and solid obelisks of a hundred and fifty feet in altitude.\n\nI spoke of our gigantic mechanical forces.\n\nHe agreed that we knew something in that way, but inquired how I should have gone to work in getting up the imposts on the lintels of even the little palace at Carnac.\n\nThis question I concluded not to hear, and demanded if he had any idea of Artesian wells; but he simply raised his eyebrows; while Mr. Gliddon winked at me very hard and said, in a low tone, that one had been recently discovered by the engineers employed to bore for water in the Great Oasis.\n\nI then mentioned our steel; but the foreigner elevated his nose, and asked me if our steel could have executed the sharp carved work seen on the obelisks, and which was wrought altogether by edge-tools of copper.\n\nThis disconcerted us so greatly that we thought it advisable to vary the attack to Metaphysics. We sent for a copy of a book called the \"Dial,\" and read out of it a chapter or two about something that is not very clear, but which the Bostonians call the Great Movement of Progress.\n\nThe Count merely said that Great Movements were awfully common things in his day, and as for Progress, it was at one time quite a nuisance, but it never progressed.\n\nWe then spoke of the great beauty and importance of Democracy, and were at much trouble in impressing the Count with a due sense of the advantages we enjoyed in living where there was suffrage ad libitum, and no king.\n\nHe listened with marked interest, and in fact seemed not a little amused. When we had done, he said that, a great while ago, there had occurred something of a very similar sort. Thirteen Egyptian provinces determined all at once to be free, and to set a magnificent example to the rest of mankind. They assembled their wise men, and concocted the most ingenious constitution it is possible to conceive. For a while they managed remarkably well; only their habit of bragging was prodigious. The thing ended, however, in the consolidation of the thirteen states, with some fifteen or twenty others, in the most odious and insupportable despotism that was ever heard of upon the face of the Earth.\n\nI asked what was the name of the usurping tyrant.\n\nAs well as the Count could recollect, it was Mob.\n\nNot knowing what to say to this, I raised my voice, and deplored the Egyptian ignorance of steam.\n\nThe Count looked at me with much astonishment, but made no answer. The silent gentleman, however, gave me a violent nudge in the ribs with his elbows \u2014 told me I had sufficiently exposed myself for once \u2014 and demanded if I was really such a fool as not to know that the modern steam-engine is derived from the invention of Hero, through Solomon de Caus.\n\nWe were now in imminent danger of being discomfited; but, as good luck would have it, Doctor Ponnonner, having rallied, returned to our rescue, and inquired if the people of Egypt would seriously pretend to rival the moderns in the all \u2014 important particular of dress.\n\nThe Count, at this, glanced downward to the straps of his pantaloons, and then taking hold of the end of one of his coat-tails, held it up close to his eyes for some minutes. Letting it fall, at last, his mouth extended itself very gradually from ear to ear; but I do not remember that he said any thing in the way of reply.\n\nHereupon we recovered our spirits, and the Doctor, approaching the Mummy with great dignity, desired it to say candidly, upon its honor as a gentleman, if the Egyptians had comprehended, at any period, the manufacture of either Ponnonner's lozenges or Brandreth's pills.\n\nWe looked, with profound anxiety, for an answer \u2014 but in vain. It was not forthcoming. The Egyptian blushed and hung down his head. Never was triumph more consummate; never was defeat borne with so ill a grace. Indeed, I could not endure the spectacle of the poor Mummy's mortification. I reached my hat, bowed to him stiffly, and took leave.\n\nUpon getting home I found it past four o'clock, and went immediately to bed. It is now ten A.M. I have been up since seven, penning these memoranda for the benefit of my family and of mankind. The former I shall behold no more. My wife is a shrew. The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that every thing is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall just step over to Ponnonner's and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled \u2014 but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong.\n\nIt must be understood that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my in to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my to smile now was at the thought of his immolation.\n\nHe had a weak point \u2014 this Fortunato \u2014 although in other regards he was a man to be respected and even feared. He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine. Few Italians have the true virtuoso spirit. For the most part their enthusiasm is adopted to suit the time and opportunity, to practise imposture upon the British and Austrian millionaires. In painting and gemmary, Fortunato, like his countrymen, was a quack, but in the matter of old wines he was sincere. In this respect I did not differ from him materially; \u2014 I was skilful in the Italian vintages myself, and bought largely whenever I could.\n\nIt was about dusk, one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season, that I encountered my friend. He accosted me with excessive warmth, for he had been drinking much. The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand.\n\nI said to him \u2014\"My dear Fortunato, you are luckily met. How remarkably well you are looking to-day. But I have received a pipe of what passes for Amontillado, and I have my doubts.\"\n\n\"How?\" said he. \"Amontillado, A pipe? Impossible! And in the middle of the carnival!\"\n\n\"I have my doubts,\" I replied; \"and I was silly enough to pay the full Amontillado price without consulting you in the matter. You were not to be found, and I was fearful of losing a bargain.\"\n\n\"Amontillado!\"\n\n\"I have my doubts.\"\n\n\"Amontillado!\"\n\n\"And I must satisfy them.\"\n\n\"Amontillado!\"\n\n\"As you are engaged, I am on my way to Luchresi. If any one has a critical turn it is he. He will tell me \u2014\"\n\n\"Luchresi cannot tell Amontillado from Sherry.\"\n\n\"And yet some fools will have it that his taste is a match for your own.\n\n\"Come, let us go.\"\n\n\"Whither?\"\n\n\"To your vaults.\"\n\n\"My friend, no; I will not impose upon your good nature. I perceive you have an engagement. Luchresi \u2014\"\n\n\"I have no engagement; \u2014 come.\"\n\n\"My friend, no. It is not the engagement, but the severe cold with which I perceive you are afflicted. The vaults are insufferably damp. They are encrusted with nitre.\"\n\n\"Let us go, nevertheless. The cold is merely nothing. Amontillado! You have been imposed upon. And as for Luchresi, he cannot distinguish Sherry from Amontillado.\"\n\nThus speaking, Fortunato possessed himself of my arm; and putting on a mask of black silk and drawing a roquelaire closely about my person, I suffered him to hurry me to my palazzo.\n\nThere were no attendants at home; they had absconded to make merry in honour of the time. I had told them that I should not return until the morning, and had given them explicit orders not to stir from the house. These orders were sufficient, I well knew, to insure their immediate disappearance, one and all, as soon as my back was turned.\n\nI took from their sconces two flambeaux, and giving one to Fortunato, bowed him through several suites of rooms to the archway that led into the vaults. I passed down a long and winding staircase, requesting him to be cautious as he followed. We came at length to the foot of the descent, and stood together upon the damp ground of the catacombs of the Montresors.\n\nThe gait of my friend was unsteady, and the bells upon his cap jingled as he strode.\n\n\"The pipe,\" he said.\n\n\"It is farther on,\" said I; \"but observe the white web-work which gleams from these cavern walls.\"\n\nHe turned towards me, and looked into my eves with two filmy orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication.\n\n\"Nitre?\" he asked, at length.\n\n\"Nitre,\" I replied. \"How long have you had that cough?\"\n\n\"Ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh! \u2014 ugh! ugh! ugh!\"\n\nMy poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.\n\n\"It is nothing,\" he said, at last.\n\n\"Come,\" I said, with decision, \"we will go back; your health is precious. You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was. You are a man to be missed. For me it is no matter. We will go back; you will be ill, and I cannot be responsible. Besides, there is Luchresi \u2014\"\n\n\"Enough,\" he said; \"the cough's a mere nothing; it will not kill me. I shall not die of a cough.\"\n\n\"True \u2014 true,\" I replied; \"and, indeed, I had no intention of alarming you unnecessarily \u2014 but you should use all proper caution. A draught of this Medoc will defend us from the damps.\n\nHere I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould.\n\n\"Drink,\" I said, presenting him the wine.\n\nHe raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled.\n\n\"I drink,\" he said, \"to the buried that repose around us.\"\n\n\"And I to your long life.\"\n\nHe again took my arm, and we proceeded.\n\n\"These vaults,\" he said, \"are extensive.\"\n\n\"The Montresors,\" I replied, \"were a great and numerous family.\"\n\n\"I forget your arms.\"\n\n\"A huge human foot d'or, in a field azure; the foot crushes a serpent rampant whose fangs are imbedded in the heel.\"\n\n\"And the motto?\"\n\n\"Nemo me impune lacessit.\"\n\n\"Good!\" he said.\n\nThe wine sparkled in his eyes and the bells jingled. My own fancy grew warm with the Medoc. We had passed through long walls of piled skeletons, with casks and puncheons intermingling, into the inmost recesses of the catacombs. I paused again, and this time I made bold to seize Fortunato by an arm above the elbow.\n\n\"The nitre!\" I said; \"see, it increases. It hangs like moss upon the vaults. We are below the river's bed. The drops of moisture trickle among the bones. Come, we will go back ere it is too late. Your cough \u2014\"\n\n\"It is nothing,\" he said; \"let us go on. But first, another draught of the Medoc.\"\n\nI broke and reached him a flagon of De Grave. He emptied it at a breath. His eyes flashed with a fierce light. He laughed and threw the bottle upwards with a gesticulation I did not understand.\n\nI looked at him in surprise. He repeated the movement \u2014 a grotesque one.\n\n\"You do not comprehend?\" he said.\n\n\"Not I,\" I replied.\n\n\"Then you are not of the brotherhood.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"You are not of the masons.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" I said; \"yes, yes.\"\n\n\"You? Impossible! A mason?\"\n\n\"A mason,\" I replied.\n\n\"A sign,\" he said, \"a sign.\"\n\n\"It is this,\" I answered, producing from beneath the folds of my roquelaire a trowel.\n\n\"You jest,\" he exclaimed, recoiling a few paces. \"But let us proceed to the Amontillado.\"\n\n\"Be it so,\" I said, replacing the tool beneath the cloak and again offering him my arm. He leaned upon it heavily. We continued our route in search of the Amontillado. We passed through a range of low arches, descended, passed on, and descending again, arrived at a deep crypt, in which the foulness of the air caused our flambeaux rather to glow than flame.\n\nAt the most remote end of the crypt there appeared another less spacious. Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris. Three sides of this interior crypt were still ornamented in this manner. From the fourth side the bones had been thrown down, and lay promiscuously upon the earth, forming at one point a mound of some size. Within the wall thus exposed by the displacing of the bones, we perceived a still interior crypt or recess, in depth about four feet, in width three, in height six or seven. It seemed to have been constructed for no especial use within itself, but formed merely the interval between two of the colossal supports of the roof of the catacombs, and was backed by one of their circumscribing walls of solid granite.\n\nIt was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavoured to pry into the depth of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see.\n\n\"Proceed,\" I said; \"herein is the Amontillado. As for Luchresi \u2014\"\n\n\"He is an ignoramus,\" interrupted my friend, as he stepped unsteadily forward, while I followed immediately at his heels. In niche, and finding an instant he had reached the extremity of the niche, and finding his progress arrested by the rock, stood stupidly bewildered. A moment more and I had fettered him to the granite. In its surface were two iron staples, distant from each other about two feet, horizontally. From one of these depended a short chain, from the other a padlock. Throwing the links about his waist, it was but the work of a few seconds to secure it. He was too much astounded to resist. Withdrawing the key I stepped back from the recess.\n\n\"Pass your hand,\" I said, \"over the wall; you cannot help feeling the nitre. Indeed, it is very damp. Once more let me implore you to return. No? Then I must positively leave you. But I must first render you all the little attentions in my power.\"\n\n\"The Amontillado!\" ejaculated my friend, not yet recovered from his astonishment.\n\n\"True,\" I replied; \"the Amontillado.\"\n\nAs I said these words I busied myself among the pile of bones of which I have before spoken. Throwing them aside, I soon uncovered a quantity of building stone and mortar. With these materials and with the aid of my trowel, I began vigorously to wall up the entrance of the niche.\n\nI had scarcely laid the first tier of the masonry when I discovered that the intoxication of Fortunato had in a great measure worn off. The earliest indication I had of this was a low moaning cry from the depth of the recess. It was not the cry of a drunken man. There was then a long and obstinate silence. I laid the second tier, and the third, and the fourth; and then I heard the furious vibrations of the chain. The noise lasted for several minutes, during which, that I might hearken to it with the more satisfaction, I ceased my labours and sat down upon the bones. When at last the clanking subsided, I resumed the trowel, and finished without interruption the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh tier. The wall was now nearly upon a level with my breast. I again paused, and holding the flambeaux over the mason-work, threw a few feeble rays upon the figure within.\n\nA succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back. For a brief moment I hesitated, I trembled. Unsheathing my rapier, I began to grope with it about the recess; but the thought of an instant reassured me. I placed my hand upon the solid fabric of the catacombs, and felt satisfied. I reapproached the wall; I replied to the yells of him who clamoured. I re-echoed, I aided, I surpassed them in volume and in strength. I did this, and the clamourer grew still.\n\nIt was now midnight, and my task was drawing to a close. I had completed the eighth, the ninth and the tenth tier. I had finished a portion of the last and the eleventh; there remained but a single stone to be fitted and plastered in. I struggled with its weight; I placed it partially in its destined position. But now there came from out the niche a low laugh that erected the hairs upon my head. It was succeeded by a sad voice, which I had difficulty in recognizing as that of the noble Fortunato. The voice said \u2014 \"Ha! ha! ha! \u2014 he! he! he! \u2014 a very good joke, indeed \u2014 an excellent jest. We will have many a rich laugh about it at the palazzo \u2014 he! he! he! \u2014 over our wine \u2014 he! he! he!\"\n\n\"The Amontillado!\" I said.\n\n\"He! he! he! \u2014 he! he! he! \u2014 yes, the Amontillado. But is it not getting late? Will not they be awaiting us at the palazzo, the Lady Fortunato and the rest? Let us be gone.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"let us be gone.\"\n\n\"For the love of God, Montresor!\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I said, \"for the love of God!\"\n\nBut to these words I hearkened in vain for a reply. I grew impatient. I called aloud \u2014\n\n\"Fortunato!\"\n\nNo answer. I called again \u2014\n\n\"Fortunato!\"\n\nNo answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so. I hastened to make an end of my labour. I forced the last stone into its position; I plastered it up. Against the new masonry I re-erected the old rampart of bones. For the half of a century no mortal has disturbed them. In pace requiescat!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Sphinx by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nDuring the dread reign of the Cholera in New York, I had accepted the invitation of a relative to spend a fortnight with him in the retirement of his cottage ornee on the banks of the Hudson. We had here around us all the ordinary means of summer amusement; and what with rambling in the woods, sketching, boating, fishing, bathing, music, and books, we should have passed the time pleasantly enough, but for the fearful intelligence which reached us every morning from the populous city. Not a day elapsed which did not bring us news of the decease of some acquaintance. Then as the fatality increased, we learned to expect daily the loss of some friend. At length we trembled at the approach of every messenger. The very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death. That palsying thought, indeed, took entire posession of my soul. I could neither speak, think, nor dream of any thing else. My host was of a less excitable temperament, and, although greatly depressed in spirits, exerted himself to sustain my own. His richly philosophical intellect was not at any time affected by unrealities. To the substances of terror he was sufficiently alive, but of its shadows he had no apprehension.\n\nHis endeavors to arouse me from the condition of abnormal gloom into which I had fallen, were frustrated, in great measure, by certain volumes which I had found in his library. These were of a character to force into germination whatever seeds of hereditary superstition lay latent in my bosom. I had been reading these books without his knowledge, and thus he was often at a loss to account for the forcible impressions which had been made upon my fancy.\n\nA favorite topic with me was the popular belief in omens \u2014 a belief which, at this one epoch of my life, I was almost seriously disposed to defend. On this subject we had long and animated discussions \u2014 he maintaining the utter groundlessness of faith in such matters \u2014 I contending that a popular sentiment arising with absolute spontaneity \u2014 that is to say, without apparent traces of suggestion \u2014 had in itself the unmistakable elements of truth, and was entitled to as much respect as that intuition which is the idiosyncrasy of the individual man of genius.\n\nThe fact is, that soon after my arrival at the cottage there had occurred to myself an incident so entirely inexplicable, and which had in it so much of the portentous character, that I might well have been excused for regarding it as an omen. It appalled, and at the same time so confounded and bewildered me, that many days elapsed before I could make up my mind to communicate the circumstances to my friend.\n\nNear the close of exceedingly warm day, I was sitting, book in hand, at an open window, commanding, through a long vista of the river banks, a view of a distant hill, the face of which nearest my position had been denuded by what is termed a land-slide, of the principal portion of its trees. My thoughts had been long wandering from the volume before me to the gloom and desolation of the neighboring city. Uplifting my eyes from the page, they fell upon the naked face of the bill, and upon an object \u2014 upon some living monster of hideous conformation, which very rapidly made its way from the summit to the bottom, disappearing finally in the dense forest below. As this creature first came in sight, I doubted my own sanity \u2014 or at least the evidence of my own eyes; and many minutes passed before I succeeded in convincing myself that I was neither mad nor in a dream. Yet when I described the monster (which I distinctly saw, and calmly surveyed through the whole period of its progress), my readers, I fear, will feel more difficulty in being convinced of these points than even I did myself.\n\nEstimating the size of the creature by comparison with the diameter of the large trees near which it passed \u2014 the few giants of the forest which had escaped the fury of the land-slide \u2014 I concluded it to be far larger than any ship of the line in existence. I say ship of the line, because the shape of the monster suggested the idea \u2014 the hull of one of our seventy-four might convey a very tolerable conception of the general outline. The mouth of the animal was situated at the extremity of a proboscis some sixty or seventy feet in length, and about as thick as the body of an ordinary elephant. Near the root of this trunk was an immense quantity of black shaggy hair \u2014 more than could have been supplied by the coats of a score of buffaloes; and projecting from this hair downwardly and laterally, sprang two gleaming tusks not unlike those of the wild boar, but of infinitely greater dimensions. Extending forward, parallel with the proboscis, and on each side of it, was a gigantic staff, thirty or forty feet in length, formed seemingly of pure crystal and in shape a perfect prism \u2014 it reflected in the most gorgeous manner the rays of the declining sun. The trunk was fashioned like a wedge with the apex to the earth. From it there were outspread two pairs of wings \u2014 each wing nearly one hundred yards in length \u2014 one pair being placed above the other, and all thickly covered with metal scales; each scale apparently some ten or twelve feet in diameter. I observed that the upper and lower tiers of wings were connected by a strong chain. But the chief peculiarity of this horrible thing was the representation of a Death's Head, which covered nearly the whole surface of its breast, and which was as accurately traced in glaring white, upon the dark ground of the body, as if it had been there carefully designed by an artist. While I regarded the terrific animal, and more especially the appearance on its breast, with a feeling or horror and awe \u2014 with a sentiment of forthcoming evil, which I found it impossible to quell by any effort of the reason, I perceived the huge jaws at the extremity of the proboscis suddenly expand themselves, and from them there proceeded a sound so loud and so expressive of wo, that it struck upon my nerves like a knell and as the monster disappeared at the foot of the hill, I fell at once, fainting, to the floor.\n\nUpon recovering, my first impulse, of course, was to inform my friend of what I had seen and heard \u2014 and I can scarcely explain what feeling of repugnance it was which, in the end, operated to prevent me.\n\nAt length, one evening, some three or four days after the occurrence, we were sitting together in the room in which I had seen the apparition \u2014 I occupying the same seat at the same window, and he lounging on a sofa near at hand. The association of the place and time impelled me to give him an account of the phenomenon. He heard me to the end \u2014 at first laughed heartily \u2014 and then lapsed into an excessively grave demeanor, as if my insanity was a thing beyond suspicion. At this instant I again had a distinct view of the monster \u2014 to which, with a shout of absolute terror, I now directed his attention. He looked eagerly \u2014 but maintained that he saw nothing \u2014 although I designated minutely the course of the creature, as it made its way down the naked face of the hill.\n\nI was now immeasurably alarmed, for I considered the vision either as an omen of my death, or, worse, as the fore-runner of an attack of mania. I threw myself passionately back in my chair, and for some moments buried my face in my hands. When I uncovered my eyes, the apparition was no longer apparent.\n\nMy host, however, had in some degree resumed the calmness of his demeanor, and questioned me very rigorously in respect to the conformation of the visionary creature. When I had fully satisfied him on this head, he sighed deeply, as if relieved of some intolerable burden, and went on to talk, with what I thought a cruel calmness, of various points of speculative philosophy, which had heretofore formed subject of discussion between us. I remember his insisting very especially (among other things) upon the idea that the principle source of error in all human investigations lay in the liability of the understanding to under-rate or to over-value the importance of an object, through mere mis-admeasurement of its propinquity. \"To estimate properly, for example,\" he said, \"the influence to be exercised on mankind at large by the thorough diffusion of Democracy, the distance of the epoch at which such diffusion may possibly be accomplished should not fail to form an item in the estimate. Yet can you tell me one writer on the subject of government who has ever thought this particular branch of the subject worthy of discussion at all?\"\n\nHe here paused for a moment, stepped to a book-case, and brought forth one of the ordinary synopses of Natural History. Requesting me then to exchange seats with him, that he might the better distinguish the fine print of the volume, he took my armchair at the window, and, opening the book, resumed his discourse very much in the same tone as before.\n\n\"But for your exceeding minuteness,\" he said, \"in describing the monster, I might never have had it in my power to demonstrate to you what it was. In the first place, let me read to you a schoolboy account of the genus Sphinx, of the family Crepuscularia of the order Lepidoptera, of the class of Insecta \u2014 or insects. The account runs thus:\n\n\"'Four membranous wings covered with little colored scales of metallic appearance; mouth forming a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic; abdomen pointed, The Death's \u2014 headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it wears upon its corslet.'\"\n\nHe here closed the book and leaned forward in the chair, placing himself accurately in the position which I had occupied at the moment of beholding \"the monster.\"\n\n\"Ah, here it is,\" he presently exclaimed \u2014\"it is reascending the face of the hill, and a very remarkable looking creature I admit it to be. Still, it is by no means so large or so distant as you imagined it \u2014 for the fact is that, as it wriggles its way up this thread, which some spider has wrought along the window-sash, I find it to be about the sixteenth of an inch in its extreme length, and also about the sixteenth of an inch distant from the pupil of my eye.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Hop-Frog or the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nI never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was. He seemed to live only for joking. To tell a good story of the joke kind, and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor. Thus it happened that his seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as jokers. They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent, oily men, as well as inimitable jokers. Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine; but certain it is that a lean joker is a rara avis in terris.\n\nAbout the refinements, or, as he called them, the 'ghost' of wit, the king troubled himself very little. He had an especial admiration for breadth in a jest, and would often put up with length, for the sake of it. Over-niceties wearied him. He would have preferred Rabelais' 'Gargantua' to the 'Zadig' of Voltaire: and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.\n\nAt the date of my narrative, professing jesters had not altogether gone out of fashion at court. Several of the great continental 'powers' still retain their 'fools,' who wore motley, with caps and bells, and who were expected to be always ready with sharp witticisms, at a moment's notice, in consideration of the crumbs that fell from the royal table.\n\nOur king, as a matter of course, retained his 'fool.' The fact is, he required something in the way of folly \u2014 if only to counterbalance the heavy wisdom of the seven wise men who were his ministers \u2014 not to mention himself.\n\nHis fool, or professional jester, was not only a fool, however. His value was trebled in the eyes of the king, by the fact of his being also a dwarf and a cripple. Dwarfs were as common at court, in those days, as fools; and many monarchs would have found it difficult to get through their days (days are rather longer at court than elsewhere) without both a jester to laugh with, and a dwarf to laugh at. But, as I have already observed, your jesters, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, are fat, round, and unwieldy \u2014 so that it was no small source of self-gratulation with our king that, in Hop-Frog (this was the fool's name), he possessed a triplicate treasure in one person.\n\nI believe the name 'Hop-Frog' was not that given to the dwarf by his sponsors at baptism, but it was conferred upon him, by general consent of the several ministers, on account of his inability to walk as other men do. In fact, Hop-Frog could only get along by a sort of interjectional gait \u2014 something between a leap and a wriggle \u2014 a movement that afforded illimitable amusement, and of course consolation, to the king, for (notwithstanding the protuberance of his stomach and a constitutional swelling of the head) the king, by his whole court, was accounted a capital figure.\n\nBut although Hop-Frog, through the distortion of his legs, could move only with great pain and difficulty along a road or floor, the prodigious muscular power which nature seemed to have bestowed upon his arms, by way of compensation for deficiency in the lower limbs, enabled him to perform many feats of wonderful dexterity, where trees or ropes were in question, or any thing else to climb. At such exercises he certainly much more resembled a squirrel, or a small monkey, than a frog.\n\nI am not able to say, with precision, from what country Hop-Frog originally came. It was from some barbarous region, however, that no person ever heard of \u2014 a vast distance from the court of our king. Hop-Frog, and a young girl very little less dwarfish than himself (although of exquisite proportions, and a marvellous dancer), had been forcibly carried off from their respective homes in adjoining provinces, and sent as presents to the king, by one of his ever-victorious generals.\n\nUnder these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that a close intimacy arose between the two little captives. Indeed, they soon became sworn friends. Hop-Frog, who, although he made a great deal of sport, was by no means popular, had it not in his power to render Trippetta many services; but she, on account of her grace and exquisite beauty (although a dwarf), was universally admired and petted; so she possessed much influence; and never failed to use it, whenever she could, for the benefit of Hop-Frog.\n\nOn some grand state occasion \u2014 I forgot what \u2014 the king determined to have a masquerade, and whenever a masquerade or any thing of that kind, occurred at our court, then the talents, both of Hop-Frog and Trippetta were sure to be called into play. Hop-Frog, in especial, was so inventive in the way of getting up pageants, suggesting novel characters, and arranging costumes, for masked balls, that nothing could be done, it seems, without his assistance.\n\nThe night appointed for the fete had arrived. A gorgeous hall had been fitted up, under Trippetta's eye, with every kind of device which could possibly give eclat to a masquerade. The whole court was in a fever of expectation. As for costumes and characters, it might well be supposed that everybody had come to a decision on such points. Many had made up their minds (as to what roles they should assume) a week, or even a month, in advance; and, in fact, there was not a particle of indecision anywhere \u2014 except in the case of the king and his seven minsters. Why they hesitated I never could tell, unless they did it by way of a joke. More probably, they found it difficult, on account of being so fat, to make up their minds. At all events, time flew; and, as a last resort they sent for Trippetta and Hop-Frog.\n\nWhen the two little friends obeyed the summons of the king they found him sitting at his wine with the seven members of his cabinet council; but the monarch appeared to be in a very ill humor. He knew that Hop-Frog was not fond of wine, for it excited the poor cripple almost to madness; and madness is no comfortable feeling. But the king loved his practical jokes, and took pleasure in forcing Hop-Frog to drink and (as the king called it) 'to be merry.'\n\n\"Come here, Hop-Frog,\" said he, as the jester and his friend entered the room; \"swallow this bumper to the health of your absent friends, [here Hop-Frog sighed,] and then let us have the benefit of your invention. We want characters \u2014 characters, man \u2014 something novel \u2014 out of the way. We are wearied with this everlasting sameness. Come, drink! the wine will brighten your wits.\"\n\nHop-Frog endeavored, as usual, to get up a jest in reply to these advances from the king; but the effort was too much. It happened to be the poor dwarf's birthday, and the command to drink to his 'absent friends' forced the tears to his eyes. Many large, bitter drops fell into the goblet as he took it, humbly, from the hand of the tyrant.\n\n\"Ah! ha! ha!\" roared the latter, as the dwarf reluctantly drained the beaker. \u2014\"See what a glass of good wine can do! Why, your eyes are shining already!\"\n\nPoor fellow! his large eyes gleamed, rather than shone; for the effect of wine on his excitable brain was not more powerful than instantaneous. He placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the company with a half-insane stare. They all seemed highly amused at the success of the king's 'joke.'\n\n\"And now to business,\" said the prime minister, a very fat man.\n\n\"Yes,\" said the King; \"Come lend us your assistance. Characters, my fine fellow; we stand in need of characters \u2014 all of us \u2014 ha! ha! ha!\" and as this was seriously meant for a joke, his laugh was chorused by the seven.\n\nHop-Frog also laughed although feebly and somewhat vacantly.\n\n\"Come, come,\" said the king, impatiently, \"have you nothing to suggest?\"\n\n\"I am endeavoring to think of something novel,\" replied the dwarf, abstractedly, for he was quite bewildered by the wine.\n\n\"Endeavoring!\" cried the tyrant, fiercely; \"what do you mean by that? Ah, I perceive. You are Sulky, and want more wine. Here, drink this!\" and he poured out another goblet full and offered it to the cripple, who merely gazed at it, gasping for breath.\n\n\"Drink, I say!\" shouted the monster, \"or by the fiends \u2014\"\n\nThe dwarf hesitated. The king grew purple with rage. The courtiers smirked. Trippetta, pale as a corpse, advanced to the monarch's seat, and, falling on her knees before him, implored him to spare her friend.\n\nThe tyrant regarded her, for some moments, in evident wonder at her audacity. He seemed quite at a loss what to do or say \u2014 how most becomingly to express his indignation. At last, without uttering a syllable, he pushed her violently from him, and threw the contents of the brimming goblet in her face.\n\nThe poor girl got up the best she could, and, not daring even to sigh, resumed her position at the foot of the table.\n\nThere was a dead silence for about half a minute, during which the falling of a leaf, or of a feather, might have been heard. It was interrupted by a low, but harsh and protracted grating sound which seemed to come at once from every corner of the room.\n\n\"What \u2014 what \u2014 what are you making that noise for?\" demanded the king, turning furiously to the dwarf.\n\nThe latter seemed to have recovered, in great measure, from his intoxication, and looking fixedly but quietly into the tyrant's face, merely ejaculated:\n\n\"I\u2014 I? How could it have been me?\"\n\n\"The sound appeared to come from without,\" observed one of the courtiers. \"I fancy it was the parrot at the window, whetting his bill upon his cage-wires.\"\n\n\"True,\" replied the monarch, as if much relieved by the suggestion; \"but, on the honor of a knight, I could have sworn that it was the gritting of this vagabond's teeth.\"\n\nHereupon the dwarf laughed (the king was too confirmed a joker to object to any one's laughing), and displayed a set of large, powerful, and very repulsive teeth. Moreover, he avowed his perfect willingness to swallow as much wine as desired. The monarch was pacified; and having drained another bumper with no very perceptible ill effect, Hop-Frog entered at once, and with spirit, into the plans for the masquerade.\n\n\"I cannot tell what was the association of idea,\" observed he, very tranquilly, and as if he had never tasted wine in his life, \"but just after your majesty, had struck the girl and thrown the wine in her face \u2014 just after your majesty had done this, and while the parrot was making that odd noise outside the window, there came into my mind a capital diversion \u2014 one of my own country frolics \u2014 often enacted among us, at our masquerades: but here it will be new altogether. Unfortunately, however, it requires a company of eight persons and \u2014\"\n\n\"Here we are!\" cried the king, laughing at his acute discovery of the coincidence; \"eight to a fraction \u2014 I and my seven ministers. Come! what is the diversion?\"\n\n\"We call it,\" replied the cripple, \"the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs, and it really is excellent sport if well enacted.\"\n\n\"We will enact it,\" remarked the king, drawing himself up, and lowering his eyelids.\n\n\"The beauty of the game,\" continued Hop-Frog, \"lies in the fright it occasions among the women.\"\n\n\"Capital!\" roared in chorus the monarch and his ministry.\n\n\"I will equip you as ourang-outangs,\" proceeded the dwarf; \"leave all that to me. The resemblance shall be so striking, that the company of masqueraders will take you for real beasts \u2014 and of course, they will be as much terrified as astonished.\"\n\n\"Oh, this is exquisite!\" exclaimed the king. \"Hop-Frog! I will make a man of you.\"\n\n\"The chains are for the purpose of increasing the confusion by their jangling. You are supposed to have escaped, en masse, from your keepers. Your majesty cannot conceive the effect produced, at a masquerade, by eight chained ourang-outangs, imagined to be real ones by most of the company; and rushing in with savage cries, among the crowd of delicately and gorgeously habited men and women. The contrast is inimitable!\"\n\n\"It must be,\" said the king: and the council arose hurriedly (as it was growing late), to put in execution the scheme of Hop-Frog.\n\nHis mode of equipping the party as ourang-outangs was very simple, but effective enough for his purposes. The animals in question had, at the epoch of my story, very rarely been seen in any part of the civilized world; and as the imitations made by the dwarf were sufficiently beast-like and more than sufficiently hideous, their truthfulness to nature was thus thought to be secured.\n\nThe king and his ministers were first encased in tight-fitting stockinet shirts and drawers. They were then saturated with tar. At this stage of the process, some one of the party suggested feathers; but the suggestion was at once overruled by the dwarf, who soon convinced the eight, by ocular demonstration, that the hair of such a brute as the ourang-outang was much more efficiently represented by flax. A thick coating of the latter was accordingly plastered upon the coating of tar. A long chain was now procured. First, it was passed about the waist of the king, and tied, then about another of the party, and also tied; then about all successively, in the same manner. When this chaining arrangement was complete, and the party stood as far apart from each other as possible, they formed a circle; and to make all things appear natural, Hop-Frog passed the residue of the chain in two diameters, at right angles, across the circle, after the fashion adopted, at the present day, by those who capture Chimpanzees, or other large apes, in Borneo.\n\nThe grand saloon in which the masquerade was to take place, was a circular room, very lofty, and receiving the light of the sun only through a single window at top. At night (the season for which the apartment was especially designed) it was illuminated principally by a large chandelier, depending by a chain from the centre of the sky-light, and lowered, or elevated, by means of a counterbalance as usual; but (in order not to look unsightly) this latter passed outside the cupola and over the roof.\n\nThe arrangements of the room had been left to Trippetta's superintendence; but, in some particulars, it seems, she had been guided by the calmer judgment of her friend the dwarf. At his suggestion it was that, on this occasion, the chandelier was removed. Its waxen drippings (which, in weather so warm, it was quite impossible to prevent) would have been seriously detrimental to the rich dresses of the guests, who, on account of the crowded state of the saloon, could not all be expected to keep from out its centre; that is to say, from under the chandelier. Additional sconces were set in various parts of the hall, out of the way, and a flambeau, emitting sweet odor, was placed in the right hand of each of the Caryatides that stood against the wall \u2014 some fifty or sixty altogether.\n\nThe eight ourang-outangs, taking Hop-Frog's advice, waited patiently until midnight (when the room was thoroughly filled with masqueraders) before making their appearance. No sooner had the clock ceased striking, however, than they rushed, or rather rolled in, all together \u2014 for the impediments of their chains caused most of the party to fall, and all to stumble as they entered.\n\nThe excitement among the masqueraders was prodigious, and filled the heart of the king with glee. As had been anticipated, there were not a few of the guests who supposed the ferocious-looking creatures to be beasts of some kind in reality, if not precisely ourang-outangs. Many of the women swooned with affright; and had not the king taken the precaution to exclude all weapons from the saloon, his party might soon have expiated their frolic in their blood. As it was, a general rush was made for the doors; but the king had ordered them to be locked immediately upon his entrance; and, at the dwarf's suggestion, the keys had been deposited with him.\n\nWhile the tumult was at its height, and each masquerader attentive only to his own safety (for, in fact, there was much real danger from the pressure of the excited crowd), the chain by which the chandelier ordinarily hung, and which had been drawn up on its removal, might have been seen very gradually to descend, until its hooked extremity came within three feet of the floor.\n\nSoon after this, the king and his seven friends having reeled about the hall in all directions, found themselves, at length, in its centre, and, of course, in immediate contact with the chain. While they were thus situated, the dwarf, who had followed noiselessly at their heels, inciting them to keep up the commotion, took hold of their own chain at the intersection of the two portions which crossed the circle diametrically and at right angles. Here, with the rapidity of thought, he inserted the hook from which the chandelier had been wont to depend; and, in an instant, by some unseen agency, the chandelier-chain was drawn so far upward as to take the hook out of reach, and, as an inevitable consequence, to drag the ourang-outangs together in close connection, and face to face.\n\nThe masqueraders, by this time, had recovered, in some measure, from their alarm; and, beginning to regard the whole matter as a well-contrived pleasantry, set up a loud shout of laughter at the predicament of the apes.\n\n\"Leave them to me!\" now screamed Hop-Frog, his shrill voice making itself easily heard through all the din. \"Leave them to me. I fancy I know them. If I can only get a good look at them, I can soon tell who they are.\"\n\nHere, scrambling over the heads of the crowd, he managed to get to the wall; when, seizing a flambeau from one of the Caryatides, he returned, as he went, to the centre of the room-leaping, with the agility of a monkey, upon the kings head, and thence clambered a few feet up the chain; holding down the torch to examine the group of ourang-outangs, and still screaming: \"I shall soon find out who they are!\"\n\nAnd now, while the whole assembly (the apes included) were convulsed with laughter, the jester suddenly uttered a shrill whistle; when the chain flew violently up for about thirty feet \u2014 dragging with it the dismayed and struggling ourang-outangs, and leaving them suspended in mid-air between the sky-light and the floor. Hop-Frog, clinging to the chain as it rose, still maintained his relative position in respect to the eight maskers, and still (as if nothing were the matter) continued to thrust his torch down toward them, as though endeavoring to discover who they were.\n\nSo thoroughly astonished was the whole company at this ascent, that a dead silence, of about a minute's duration, ensued. It was broken by just such a low, harsh, grating sound, as had before attracted the attention of the king and his councillors when the former threw the wine in the face of Trippetta. But, on the present occasion, there could be no question as to whence the sound issued. It came from the fang-like teeth of the dwarf, who ground them and gnashed them as he foamed at the mouth, and glared, with an expression of maniacal rage, into the upturned countenances of the king and his seven companions.\n\n\"Ah, ha!\" said at length the infuriated jester. \"Ah, ha! I begin to see who these people are now!\" Here, pretending to scrutinize the king more closely, he held the flambeau to the flaxen coat which enveloped him, and which instantly burst into a sheet of vivid flame. In less than half a minute the whole eight ourang-outangs were blazing fiercely, amid the shrieks of the multitude who gazed at them from below, horror-stricken, and without the power to render them the slightest assistance.\n\nAt length the flames, suddenly increasing in virulence, forced the jester to climb higher up the chain, to be out of their reach; and, as he made this movement, the crowd again sank, for a brief instant, into silence. The dwarf seized his opportunity, and once more spoke:\n\n\"I now see distinctly.\" he said, \"what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors \u2014 a king who does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester \u2014 and this is my last jest.\"\n\nOwing to the high combustibility of both the flax and the tar to which it adhered, the dwarf had scarcely made an end of his brief speech before the work of vengeance was complete. The eight corpses swung in their chains, a fetid, blackened, hideous, and indistinguishable mass. The cripple hurled his torch at them, clambered leisurely to the ceiling, and disappeared through the sky-light.\n\nIt is supposed that Trippetta, stationed on the roof of the saloon, had been the accomplice of her friend in his fiery revenge, and that, together, they effected their escape to their own country: for neither was seen again.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Landor's Cottage by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nDuring a pedestrian trip last summer, through one or two of the river counties of New York, I found myself, as the day declined, somewhat embarrassed about the road I was pursuing. The land undulated very remarkably; and my path, for the last hour, had wound about and about so confusedly, in its effort to keep in the valleys, that I no longer knew in what direction lay the sweet village of B-, where I had determined to stop for the night. The sun had scarcely shone \u2014 strictly speaking \u2014 during the day, which nevertheless, had been unpleasantly warm. A smoky mist, resembling that of the Indian summer, enveloped all things, and of course, added to my uncertainty. Not that I cared much about the matter. If I did not hit upon the village before sunset, or even before dark, it was more than possible that a little Dutch farmhouse, or something of that kind, would soon make its appearance \u2014 although, in fact, the neighborhood (perhaps on account of being more picturesque than fertile) was very sparsely inhabited. At all events, with my knapsack for a pillow, and my hound as a sentry, a bivouac in the open air was just the thing which would have amused me. I sauntered on, therefore, quite at ease \u2014 Ponto taking charge of my gun \u2014 until at length, just as I had begun to consider whether the numerous little glades that led hither and thither, were intended to be paths at all, I was conducted by one of them into an unquestionable carriage track. There could be no mistaking it. The traces of light wheels were evident; and although the tall shrubberies and overgrown undergrowth met overhead, there was no obstruction whatever below, even to the passage of a Virginian mountain wagon \u2014 the most aspiring vehicle, I take it, of its kind. The road, however, except in being open through the wood \u2014 if wood be not too weighty a name for such an assemblage of light trees \u2014 and except in the particulars of evident wheel-tracks \u2014 bore no resemblance to any road I had before seen. The tracks of which I speak were but faintly perceptible \u2014 having been impressed upon the firm, yet pleasantly moist surface of \u2014 what looked more like green Genoese velvet than any thing else. It was grass, clearly \u2014 but grass such as we seldom see out of England \u2014 so short, so thick, so even, and so vivid in color. Not a single impediment lay in the wheel-route \u2014 not even a chip or dead twig. The stones that once obstructed the way had been carefully placed \u2014 not thrown-along the sides of the lane, so as to define its boundaries at bottom with a kind of half-precise, half-negligent, and wholly picturesque definition. Clumps of wild flowers grew everywhere, luxuriantly, in the interspaces.\n\nWhat to make of all this, of course I knew not. Here was art undoubtedly \u2014 that did not surprise me \u2014 all roads, in the ordinary sense, are works of art; nor can I say that there was much to wonder at in the mere excess of art manifested; all that seemed to have been done, might have been done here \u2014 with such natural \"capabilities\" (as they have it in the books on Landscape Gardening)\u2014 with very little labor and expense. No; it was not the amount but the character of the art which caused me to take a seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and down this fairy \u2014 like avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I gazed: an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form, had superintended all these arrangements. The greatest care had been taken to preserve a due medium between the neat and graceful on the one hand, and the pittoresque, in the true sense of the Italian term, on the other. There were few straight, and no long uninterrupted lines. The same effect of curvature or of color appeared twice, usually, but not oftener, at any one point of view. Everywhere was variety in uniformity. It was a piece of \"composition,\" in which the most fastidiously critical taste could scarcely have suggested an emendation.\n\nI had turned to the right as I entered this road, and now, arising, I continued in the same direction. The path was so serpentine, that at no moment could I trace its course for more than two or three paces in advance. Its character did not undergo any material change.\n\nPresently the murmur of water fell gently upon my ear \u2014 and in a few moments afterward, as I turned with the road somewhat more abruptly than hitherto, I became aware that a building of some kind lay at the foot of a gentle declivity just before me. I could see nothing distinctly on account of the mist which occupied all the little valley below. A gentle breeze, however, now arose, as the sun was about descending; and while I remained standing on the brow of the slope, the fog gradually became dissipated into wreaths, and so floated over the scene.\n\nAs it came fully into view \u2014 thus gradually as I describe it \u2014 piece by piece, here a tree, there a glimpse of water, and here again the summit of a chimney, I could scarcely help fancying that the whole was one of the ingenious illusions sometimes exhibited under the name of \"vanishing pictures.\"\n\nBy the time, however, that the fog had thoroughly disappeared, the sun had made its way down behind the gentle hills, and thence, as it with a slight chassez to the south, had come again fully into sight, glaring with a purplish lustre through a chasm that entered the valley from the west. Suddenly, therefore \u2014 and as if by the hand of magic \u2014 this whole valley and every thing in it became brilliantly visible.\n\nThe first coup d'oeil, as the sun slid into the position described, impressed me very much as I have been impressed, when a boy, by the concluding scene of some well-arranged theatrical spectacle or melodrama. Not even the monstrosity of color was wanting; for the sunlight came out through the chasm, tinted all orange and purple; while the vivid green of the grass in the valley was reflected more or less upon all objects from the curtain of vapor that still hung overhead, as if loth to take its total departure from a scene so enchantingly beautiful.\n\nThe little vale into which I thus peered down from under the fog canopy could not have been more than four hundred yards long; while in breadth it varied from fifty to one hundred and fifty or perhaps two hundred. It was most narrow at its northern extremity, opening out as it tended southwardly, but with no very precise regularity. The widest portion was within eighty yards of the southern extreme. The slopes which encompassed the vale could not fairly be called hills, unless at their northern face. Here a precipitous ledge of granite arose to a height of some ninety feet; and, as I have mentioned, the valley at this point was not more than fifty feet wide; but as the visiter proceeded southwardly from the cliff, he found on his right hand and on his left, declivities at once less high, less precipitous, and less rocky. All, in a word, sloped and softened to the south; and yet the whole vale was engirdled by eminences, more or less high, except at two points. One of these I have already spoken of. It lay considerably to the north of west, and was where the setting sun made its way, as I have before described, into the amphitheatre, through a cleanly cut natural cleft in the granite embankment; this fissure might have been ten yards wide at its widest point, so far as the eye could trace it. It seemed to lead up, up like a natural causeway, into the recesses of unexplored mountains and forests. The other opening was directly at the southern end of the vale. Here, generally, the slopes were nothing more than gentle inclinations, extending from east to west about one hundred and fifty yards. In the middle of this extent was a depression, level with the ordinary floor of the valley. As regards vegetation, as well as in respect to every thing else, the scene softened and sloped to the south. To the north \u2014 on the craggy precipice \u2014 a few paces from the verge \u2014 up sprang the magnificent trunks of numerous hickories, black walnuts, and chestnuts, interspersed with occasional oak, and the strong lateral branches thrown out by the walnuts especially, spread far over the edge of the cliff. Proceeding southwardly, the explorer saw, at first, the same class of trees, but less and less lofty and Salvatorish in character; then he saw the gentler elm, succeeded by the sassafras and locust \u2014 these again by the softer linden, red-bud, catalpa, and maple \u2014 these yet again by still more graceful and more modest varieties. The whole face of the southern declivity was covered with wild shrubbery alone \u2014 an occasional silver willow or white poplar excepted. In the bottom of the valley itself \u2014(for it must be borne in mind that the vegetation hitherto mentioned grew only on the cliffs or hillsides)\u2014 were to be seen three insulated trees. One was an elm of fine size and exquisite form: it stood guard over the southern gate of the vale. Another was a hickory, much larger than the elm, and altogether a much finer tree, although both were exceedingly beautiful: it seemed to have taken charge of the northwestern entrance, springing from a group of rocks in the very jaws of the ravine, and throwing its graceful body, at an angle of nearly forty-five degrees, far out into the sunshine of the amphitheatre. About thirty yards east of this tree stood, however, the pride of the valley, and beyond all question the most magnificent tree I have ever seen, unless, perhaps, among the cypresses of the Itchiatuckanee. It was a triple \u2014 stemmed tulip-tree \u2014 the Liriodendron Tulipiferum \u2014 one of the natural order of magnolias. Its three trunks separated from the parent at about three feet from the soil, and diverging very slightly and gradually, were not more than four feet apart at the point where the largest stem shot out into foliage: this was at an elevation of about eighty feet. The whole height of the principal division was one hundred and twenty feet. Nothing can surpass in beauty the form, or the glossy, vivid green of the leaves of the tulip-tree. In the present instance they were fully eight inches wide; but their glory was altogether eclipsed by the gorgeous splendor of the profuse blossoms. Conceive, closely congregated, a million of the largest and most resplendent tulips! Only thus can the reader get any idea of the picture I would convey. And then the stately grace of the clean, delicately \u2014 granulated columnar stems, the largest four feet in diameter, at twenty from the ground. The innumerable blossoms, mingling with those of other trees scarcely less beautiful, although infinitely less majestic, filled the valley with more than Arabian perfumes.\n\nThe general floor of the amphitheatre was grass of the same character as that I had found in the road; if anything, more deliciously soft, thick, velvety, and miraculously green. It was hard to conceive how all this beauty had been attained.\n\nI have spoken of two openings into the vale. From the one to the northwest issued a rivulet, which came, gently murmuring and slightly foaming, down the ravine, until it dashed against the group of rocks out of which sprang the insulated hickory. Here, after encircling the tree, it passed on a little to the north of east, leaving the tulip tree some twenty feet to the south, and making no decided alteration in its course until it came near the midway between the eastern and western boundaries of the valley. At this point, after a series of sweeps, it turned off at right angles and pursued a generally southern direction meandering as it went \u2014 until it became lost in a small lake of irregular figure (although roughly oval), that lay gleaming near the lower extremity of the vale. This lakelet was, perhaps, a hundred yards in diameter at its widest part. No crystal could be clearer than its waters. Its bottom, which could be distinctly seen, consisted altogether, of pebbles brilliantly white. Its banks, of the emerald grass already described, rounded, rather than sloped, off into the clear heaven below; and so clear was this heaven, so perfectly, at times, did it reflect all objects above it, that where the true bank ended and where the mimic one commenced, it was a point of no little difficulty to determine. The trout, and some other varieties of fish, with which this pond seemed to be almost inconveniently crowded, had all the appearance of veritable flying-fish. It was almost impossible to believe that they were not absolutely suspended in the air. A light birch canoe that lay placidly on the water, was reflected in its minutest fibres with a fidelity unsurpassed by the most exquisitely polished mirror. A small island, fairly laughing with flowers in full bloom, and affording little more space than just enough for a picturesque little building, seemingly a fowl-house \u2014 arose from the lake not far from its northern shore \u2014 to which it was connected by means of an inconceivably light \u2014 looking and yet very primitive bridge. It was formed of a single, broad and thick plank of the tulip wood. This was forty feet long, and spanned the interval between shore and shore with a slight but very perceptible arch, preventing all oscillation. From the southern extreme of the lake issued a continuation of the rivulet, which, after meandering for, perhaps, thirty yards, finally passed through the \"depression\" (already described) in the middle of the southern declivity, and tumbling down a sheer precipice of a hundred feet, made its devious and unnoticed way to the Hudson.\n\nThe lake was deep \u2014 at some points thirty feet \u2014 but the rivulet seldom exceeded three, while its greatest width was about eight. Its bottom and banks were as those of the pond \u2014 if a defect could have been attributed, in point of picturesqueness, it was that of excessive neatness.\n\nThe expanse of the green turf was relieved, here and there, by an occasional showy shrub, such as the hydrangea, or the common snowball, or the aromatic seringa; or, more frequently, by a clump of geraniums blossoming gorgeously in great varieties. These latter grew in pots which were carefully buried in the soil, so as to give the plants the appearance of being indigenous. Besides all this, the lawn's velvet was exquisitely spotted with sheep \u2014 a considerable flock of which roamed about the vale, in company with three tamed deer, and a vast number of brilliantly \u2014 plumed ducks. A very large mastiff seemed to be in vigilant attendance upon these animals, each and all.\n\nAlong the eastern and western cliffs \u2014 where, toward the upper portion of the amphitheatre, the boundaries were more or less precipitous \u2014 grew ivy in great profusion \u2014 so that only here and there could even a glimpse of the naked rock be obtained. The northern precipice, in like manner, was almost entirely clothed by grape-vines of rare luxuriance; some springing from the soil at the base of the cliff, and others from ledges on its face.\n\nThe slight elevation which formed the lower boundary of this little domain, was crowned by a neat stone wall, of sufficient height to prevent the escape of the deer. Nothing of the fence kind was observable elsewhere; for nowhere else was an artificial enclosure needed:\u2014 any stray sheep, for example, which should attempt to make its way out of the vale by means of the ravine, would find its progress arrested, after a few yards' advance, by the precipitous ledge of rock over which tumbled the cascade that had arrested my attention as I first drew near the domain. In short, the only ingress or egress was through a gate occupying a rocky pass in the road, a few paces below the point at which I stopped to reconnoitre the scene.\n\nI have described the brook as meandering very irregularly through the whole of its course. Its two general directions, as I have said, were first from west to east, and then from north to south. At the turn, the stream, sweeping backward, made an almost circular loop, so as to form a peninsula which was very nearly an island, and which included about the sixteenth of an acre. On this peninsula stood a dwelling-house \u2014 and when I say that this house, like the infernal terrace seen by Vathek, \"etait d'une architecture inconnue dans les annales de la terre,\" I mean, merely, that its tout ensemble struck me with the keenest sense of combined novelty and propriety \u2014 in a word, of poetry \u2014(for, than in the words just employed, I could scarcely give, of poetry in the abstract, a more rigorous definition)\u2014 and I do not mean that merely outre was perceptible in any respect.\n\nIn fact nothing could well be more simple \u2014 more utterly unpretending than this cottage. Its marvellous effect lay altogether in its artistic arrangement as a picture. I could have fancied, while I looked at it, that some eminent landscape-painter had built it with his brush.\n\nThe point of view from which I first saw the valley, was not altogether, although it was nearly, the best point from which to survey the house. I will therefore describe it as I afterwards saw it \u2014 from a position on the stone wall at the southern extreme of the amphitheatre.\n\nThe main building was about twenty-four feet long and sixteen broad \u2014 certainly not more. Its total height, from the ground to the apex of the roof, could not have exceeded eighteen feet. To the west end of this structure was attached one about a third smaller in all its proportions:\u2014 the line of its front standing back about two yards from that of the larger house, and the line of its roof, of course, being considerably depressed below that of the roof adjoining. At right angles to these buildings, and from the rear of the main one \u2014 not exactly in the middle \u2014 extended a third compartment, very small \u2014 being, in general, one-third less than the western wing. The roofs of the two larger were very steep \u2014 sweeping down from the ridge-beam with a long concave curve, and extending at least four feet beyond the walls in front, so as to form the roofs of two piazzas. These latter roofs, of course, needed no support; but as they had the air of needing it, slight and perfectly plain pillars were inserted at the corners alone. The roof of the northern wing was merely an extension of a portion of the main roof. Between the chief building and western wing arose a very tall and rather slender square chimney of hard Dutch bricks, alternately black and red:\u2014 a slight cornice of projecting bricks at the top. Over the gables the roofs also projected very much:\u2014 in the main building about four feet to the east and two to the west. The principal door was not exactly in the main division, being a little to the east \u2014 while the two windows were to the west. These latter did not extend to the floor, but were much longer and narrower than usual \u2014 they had single shutters like doors \u2014 the panes were of lozenge form, but quite large. The door itself had its upper half of glass, also in lozenge panes \u2014 a movable shutter secured it at night. The door to the west wing was in its gable, and quite simple \u2014 a single window looked out to the south. There was no external door to the north wing, and it also had only one window to the east.\n\nThe blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it \u2014 the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the widely projecting eave these steps gave access to a door leading to the garret, or rather loft \u2014 for it was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to have been intended as a store-room.\n\nThe piazzas of the main building and western wing had no floors, as is usual; but at the doors and at each window, large, flat irregular slabs of granite lay imbedded in the delicious turf, affording comfortable footing in all weather. Excellent paths of the same material \u2014 not nicely adapted, but with the velvety sod filling frequent intervals between the stones, led hither and thither from the house, to a crystal spring about five paces off, to the road, or to one or two out \u2014 houses that lay to the north, beyond the brook, and were thoroughly concealed by a few locusts and catalpas.\n\nNot more than six steps from the main door of the cottage stood the dead trunk of a fantastic pear-tree, so clothed from head to foot in the gorgeous bignonia blossoms that one required no little scrutiny to determine what manner of sweet thing it could be. From various arms of this tree hung cages of different kinds. In one, a large wicker cylinder with a ring at top, revelled a mocking bird; in another an oriole; in a third the impudent bobolink \u2014 while three or four more delicate prisons were loudly vocal with canaries.\n\nThe pillars of the piazza were enwreathed in jasmine and sweet honeysuckle; while from the angle formed by the main structure and its west wing, in front, sprang a grape-vine of unexampled luxuriance. Scorning all restraint, it had clambered first to the lower roof \u2014 then to the higher; and along the ridge of this latter it continued to writhe on, throwing out tendrils to the right and left, until at length it fairly attained the east gable, and fell trailing over the stairs.\n\nThe whole house, with its wings, was constructed of the old-fashioned Dutch shingles \u2014 broad, and with unrounded corners. It is a peculiarity of this material to give houses built of it the appearance of being wider at bottom than at top \u2014 after the manner of Egyptian architecture; and in the present instance, this exceedingly picturesque effect was aided by numerous pots of gorgeous flowers that almost encompassed the base of the buildings.\n\nThe shingles were painted a dull gray; and the happiness with which this neutral tint melted into the vivid green of the tulip tree leaves that partially overshadowed the cottage, can readily be conceived by an artist.\n\nFrom the position near the stone wall, as described, the buildings were seen at great advantage \u2014 for the southeastern angle was thrown forward \u2014 so that the eye took in at once the whole of the two fronts, with the picturesque eastern gable, and at the same time obtained just a sufficient glimpse of the northern wing, with parts of a pretty roof to the spring-house, and nearly half of a light bridge that spanned the brook in the near vicinity of the main buildings.\n\nI did not remain very long on the brow of the hill, although long enough to make a thorough survey of the scene at my feet. It was clear that I had wandered from the road to the village, and I had thus good traveller's excuse to open the gate before me, and inquire my way, at all events; so, without more ado, I proceeded.\n\nThe road, after passing the gate, seemed to lie upon a natural ledge, sloping gradually down along the face of the north-eastern cliffs. It led me on to the foot of the northern precipice, and thence over the bridge, round by the eastern gable to the front door. In this progress, I took notice that no sight of the out-houses could be obtained.\n\nAs I turned the corner of the gable, the mastiff bounded towards me in stern silence, but with the eye and the whole air of a tiger. I held him out my hand, however, in token of amity \u2014 and I never yet knew the dog who was proof against such an appeal to his courtesy. He not only shut his mouth and wagged his tail, but absolutely offered me his paw-afterward extending his civilities to Ponto.\n\nAs no bell was discernible, I rapped with my stick against the door, which stood half open. Instantly a figure advanced to the threshold \u2014 that of a young woman about twenty-eight years of age \u2014 slender, or rather slight, and somewhat above the medium height. As she approached, with a certain modest decision of step altogether indescribable. I said to myself, \"Surely here I have found the perfection of natural, in contradistinction from artificial grace.\" The second impression which she made on me, but by far the more vivid of the two, was that of enthusiasm. So intense an expression of romance, perhaps I should call it, or of unworldliness, as that which gleamed from her deep-set eyes, had never so sunk into my heart of hearts before. I know not how it is, but this peculiar expression of the eye, wreathing itself occasionally into the lips, is the most powerful, if not absolutely the sole spell, which rivets my interest in woman. \"Romance, provided my readers fully comprehended what I would here imply by the word \u2014\"romance\" and \"womanliness\" seem to me convertible terms: and, after all, what man truly loves in woman, is simply her womanhood. The eyes of Annie (I heard some one from the interior call her \"Annie, darling!\") were \"spiritual grey;\" her hair, a light chestnut: this is all I had time to observe of her.\n\nAt her most courteous of invitations, I entered \u2014 passing first into a tolerably wide vestibule. Having come mainly to observe, I took notice that to my right as I stepped in, was a window, such as those in front of the house; to the left, a door leading into the principal room; while, opposite me, an open door enabled me to see a small apartment, just the size of the vestibule, arranged as a study, and having a large bow window looking out to the north.\n\nPassing into the parlor, I found myself with Mr. Landor \u2014 for this, I afterwards found, was his name. He was civil, even cordial in his manner, but just then, I was more intent on observing the arrangements of the dwelling which had so much interested me, than the personal appearance of the tenant.\n\nThe north wing, I now saw, was a bed-chamber, its door opened into the parlor. West of this door was a single window, looking toward the brook. At the west end of the parlor, were a fireplace, and a door leading into the west wing \u2014 probably a kitchen.\n\nNothing could be more rigorously simple than the furniture of the parlor. On the floor was an ingrain carpet, of excellent texture \u2014 a white ground, spotted with small circular green figures. At the windows were curtains of snowy white jaconet muslin: they were tolerably full, and hung decisively, perhaps rather formally in sharp, parallel plaits to the floor \u2014 just to the floor. The walls were prepared with a French paper of great delicacy, a silver ground, with a faint green cord running zig-zag throughout. Its expanse was relieved merely by three of Julien's exquisite lithographs a trois crayons, fastened to the wall without frames. One of these drawings was a scene of Oriental luxury, or rather voluptuousness; another was a \"carnival piece,\" spirited beyond compare; the third was a Greek female head \u2014 a face so divinely beautiful, and yet of an expression so provokingly indeterminate, never before arrested my attention.\n\nThe more substantial furniture consisted of a round table, a few chairs (including a large rocking-chair), and a sofa, or rather \"settee;\" its material was plain maple painted a creamy white, slightly interstriped with green; the seat of cane. The chairs and table were \"to match,\" but the forms of all had evidently been designed by the same brain which planned \"the grounds;\" it is impossible to conceive anything more graceful.\n\nOn the table were a few books, a large, square, crystal bottle of some novel perfume, a plain ground \u2014 glass astral (not solar) lamp with an Italian shade, and a large vase of resplendently-blooming flowers. Flowers, indeed, of gorgeous colours and delicate odour formed the sole mere decoration of the apartment. The fireplace was nearly filled with a vase of brilliant geranium. On a triangular shelf in each angle of the room stood also a similar vase, varied only as to its lovely contents. One or two smaller bouquets adorned the mantel, and late violets clustered about the open windows.\n\nIt is not the purpose of this work to do more than give in detail, a picture of Mr. Landor's residence \u2014 as I found it. How he made it what it was \u2014 and why \u2014 with some particulars of Mr. Landor himself \u2014 may, possibly form the subject of another article.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Von Kempelen and His Discovery by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nAfter the very minute and elaborate paper by Arago, to say nothing of the summary in 'Silliman's Journal,' with the detailed statement just published by Lieutenant Maury, it will not be supposed, of course, that in offering a few hurried remarks in reference to Von Kempelen's discovery, I have any design to look at the subject in a scientific point of view. My object is simply, in the first place, to say a few words of Von Kempelen himself (with whom, some years ago, I had the honor of a slight personal acquaintance), since every thing which concerns him must necessarily, at this moment, be of interest; and, in the second place, to look in a general way, and speculatively, at the results of the discovery.\n\nIt may be as well, however, to premise the cursory observations which I have to offer, by denying, very decidedly, what seems to be a general impression (gleaned, as usual in a case of this kind, from the newspapers), viz.: that this discovery, astounding as it unquestionably is, is unanticipated.\n\nBy reference to the 'Diary of Sir Humphrey Davy' (Cottle and Munroe, London, pp. 150), it will be seen at pp. 53 and 82, that this illustrious chemist had not only conceived the idea now in question, but had actually made no inconsiderable progress, experimentally, in the very identical analysis now so triumphantly brought to an issue by Von Kempelen, who although he makes not the slightest allusion to it, is, without doubt (I say it unhesitatingly, and can prove it, if required), indebted to the 'Diary' for at least the first hint of his own undertaking.\n\nThe paragraph from the 'Courier and Enquirer,' which is now going the rounds of the press, and which purports to claim the invention for a Mr. Kissam, of Brunswick, Maine, appears to me, I confess, a little apocryphal, for several reasons; although there is nothing either impossible or very improbable in the statement made. I need not go into details. My opinion of the paragraph is founded principally upon its manner. It does not look true. Persons who are narrating facts, are seldom so particular as Mr. Kissam seems to be, about day and date and precise location. Besides, if Mr. Kissam actually did come upon the discovery he says he did, at the period designated \u2014 nearly eight years ago \u2014 how happens it that he took no steps, on the instant, to reap the immense benefits which the merest bumpkin must have known would have resulted to him individually, if not to the world at large, from the discovery? It seems to me quite incredible that any man of common understanding could have discovered what Mr. Kissam says he did, and yet have subsequently acted so like a baby \u2014 so like an owl \u2014 as Mr. Kissam admits that he did. By-the-way, who is Mr. Kissam? and is not the whole paragraph in the 'Courier and Enquirer' a fabrication got up to 'make a talk'? It must be confessed that it has an amazingly moon-hoaxy-air. Very little dependence is to be placed upon it, in my humble opinion; and if I were not well aware, from experience, how very easily men of science are mystified, on points out of their usual range of inquiry, I should be profoundly astonished at finding so eminent a chemist as Professor Draper, discussing Mr. Kissam's (or is it Mr. Quizzem's?) pretensions to the discovery, in so serious a tone.\n\nBut to return to the 'Diary' of Sir Humphrey Davy. This pamphlet was not designed for the public eye, even upon the decease of the writer, as any person at all conversant with authorship may satisfy himself at once by the slightest inspection of the style. At page 13, for example, near the middle, we read, in reference to his researches about the protoxide of azote: 'In less than half a minute the respiration being continued, diminished gradually and were succeeded by analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles.' That the respiration was not 'diminished,' is not only clear by the subsequent context, but by the use of the plural, 'were.' The sentence, no doubt, was thus intended: 'In less than half a minute, the respiration [being continued, these feelings] diminished gradually, and were succeeded by [a sensation] analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles.' A hundred similar instances go to show that the MS. so inconsiderately published, was merely a rough note-book, meant only for the writer's own eye, but an inspection of the pamphlet will convince almost any thinking person of the truth of my suggestion. The fact is, Sir Humphrey Davy was about the last man in the world to commit himself on scientific topics. Not only had he a more than ordinary dislike to quackery, but he was morbidly afraid of appearing empirical; so that, however fully he might have been convinced that he was on the right track in the matter now in question, he would never have spoken out, until he had every thing ready for the most practical demonstration. I verily believe that his last moments would have been rendered wretched, could he have suspected that his wishes in regard to burning this 'Diary' (full of crude speculations) would have been unattended to; as, it seems, they were. I say 'his wishes,' for that he meant to include this note-book among the miscellaneous papers directed 'to be burnt,' I think there can be no manner of doubt. Whether it escaped the flames by good fortune or by bad, yet remains to be seen. That the passages quoted above, with the other similar ones referred to, gave Von Kempelen the hint, I do not in the slightest degree question; but I repeat, it yet remains to be seen whether this momentous discovery itself (momentous under any circumstances) will be of service or disservice to mankind at large. That Von Kempelen and his immediate friends will reap a rich harvest, it would be folly to doubt for a moment. They will scarcely be so weak as not to 'realize,' in time, by large purchases of houses and land, with other property of intrinsic value.\n\nIn the brief account of Von Kempelen which appeared in the 'Home Journal,' and has since been extensively copied, several misapprehensions of the German original seem to have been made by the translator, who professes to have taken the passage from a late number of the Presburg 'Schnellpost.' 'Viele' has evidently been misconceived (as it often is), and what the translator renders by 'sorrows,' is probably 'lieden,' which, in its true version, 'sufferings,' would give a totally different complexion to the whole account; but, of course, much of this is merely guess, on my part.\n\nVon Kempelen, however, is by no means 'a misanthrope,' in appearance, at least, whatever he may be in fact. My acquaintance with him was casual altogether; and I am scarcely warranted in saying that I know him at all; but to have seen and conversed with a man of so prodigious a notoriety as he has attained, or will attain in a few days, is not a small matter, as times go.\n\n'The Literary World' speaks of him, confidently, as a native of Presburg (misled, perhaps, by the account in 'The Home Journal') but I am pleased in being able to state positively, since I have it from his own lips, that he was born in Utica, in the State of New York, although both his parents, I believe, are of Presburg descent. The family is connected, in some way, with Maelzel, of Automaton-chess-player memory. In person, he is short and stout, with large, fat, blue eyes, sandy hair and whiskers, a wide but pleasing mouth, fine teeth, and I think a Roman nose. There is some defect in one of his feet. His address is frank, and his whole manner noticeable for bonhomie. Altogether, he looks, speaks, and acts as little like 'a misanthrope' as any man I ever saw. We were fellow-sojouners for a week about six years ago, at Earl's Hotel, in Providence, Rhode Island; and I presume that I conversed with him, at various times, for some three or four hours altogether. His principal topics were those of the day, and nothing that fell from him led me to suspect his scientific attainments. He left the hotel before me, intending to go to New York, and thence to Bremen; it was in the latter city that his great discovery was first made public; or, rather, it was there that he was first suspected of having made it. This is about all that I personally know of the now immortal Von Kempelen; but I have thought that even these few details would have interest for the public.\n\nThere can be little question that most of the marvellous rumors afloat about this affair are pure inventions, entitled to about as much credit as the story of Aladdin's lamp; and yet, in a case of this kind, as in the case of the discoveries in California, it is clear that the truth may be stranger than fiction. The following anecdote, at least, is so well authenticated, that we may receive it implicitly.\n\nVon Kempelen had never been even tolerably well off during his residence at Bremen; and often, it was well known, he had been put to extreme shifts in order to raise trifling sums. When the great excitement occurred about the forgery on the house of Gutsmuth & Co., suspicion was directed toward Von Kempelen, on account of his having purchased a considerable property in Gasperitch Lane, and his refusing, when questioned, to explain how he became possessed of the purchase money. He was at length arrested, but nothing decisive appearing against him, was in the end set at liberty. The police, however, kept a strict watch upon his movements, and thus discovered that he left home frequently, taking always the same road, and invariably giving his watchers the slip in the neighborhood of that labyrinth of narrow and crooked passages known by the flash name of the 'Dondergat.' Finally, by dint of great perseverance, they traced him to a garret in an old house of seven stories, in an alley called Flatzplatz \u2014 and, coming upon him suddenly, found him, as they imagined, in the midst of his counterfeiting operations. His agitation is represented as so excessive that the officers had not the slightest doubt of his guilt. After hand-cuffing him, they searched his room, or rather rooms, for it appears he occupied all the mansarde.\n\nOpening into the garret where they caught him, was a closet, ten feet by eight, fitted up with some chemical apparatus, of which the object has not yet been ascertained. In one corner of the closet was a very small furnace, with a glowing fire in it, and on the fire a kind of duplicate crucible \u2014 two crucibles connected by a tube. One of these crucibles was nearly full of lead in a state of fusion, but not reaching up to the aperture of the tube, which was close to the brim. The other crucible had some liquid in it, which, as the officers entered, seemed to be furiously dissipating in vapor. They relate that, on finding himself taken, Kempelen seized the crucibles with both hands (which were encased in gloves that afterwards turned out to be asbestic), and threw the contents on the tiled floor. It was now that they hand-cuffed him; and before proceeding to ransack the premises they searched his person, but nothing unusual was found about him, excepting a paper parcel, in his coat-pocket, containing what was afterward ascertained to be a mixture of antimony and some unknown substance, in nearly, but not quite, equal proportions. All attempts at analyzing the unknown substance have, so far, failed, but that it will ultimately be analyzed, is not to be doubted.\n\nPassing out of the closet with their prisoner, the officers went through a sort of ante-chamber, in which nothing material was found, to the chemist's sleeping-room. They here rummaged some drawers and boxes, but discovered only a few papers, of no importance, and some good coin, silver and gold. At length, looking under the bed, they saw a large, common hair trunk, without hinges, hasp, or lock, and with the top lying carelessly across the bottom portion. Upon attempting to draw this trunk out from under the bed, they found that, with their united strength (there were three of them, all powerful men), they 'could not stir it one inch.' Much astonished at this, one of them crawled under the bed, and looking into the trunk, said:\n\n'No wonder we couldn't move it \u2014 why it's full to the brim of old bits of brass!'\n\nPutting his feet, now, against the wall so as to get a good purchase, and pushing with all his force, while his companions pulled with an theirs, the trunk, with much difficulty, was slid out from under the bed, and its contents examined. The supposed brass with which it was filled was all in small, smooth pieces, varying from the size of a pea to that of a dollar; but the pieces were irregular in shape, although more or less flat-looking, upon the whole, 'very much as lead looks when thrown upon the ground in a molten state, and there suffered to grow cool.' Now, not one of these officers for a moment suspected this metal to be any thing but brass. The idea of its being gold never entered their brains, of course; how could such a wild fancy have entered it? And their astonishment may be well conceived, when the next day it became known, all over Bremen, that the 'lot of brass' which they had carted so contemptuously to the police office, without putting themselves to the trouble of pocketing the smallest scrap, was not only gold \u2014 real gold \u2014 but gold far finer than any employed in coinage-gold, in fact, absolutely pure, virgin, without the slightest appreciable alloy.\n\nI need not go over the details of Von Kempelen's confession (as far as it went) and release, for these are familiar to the public. That he has actually realized, in spirit and in effect, if not to the letter, the old chimaera of the philosopher's stone, no sane person is at liberty to doubt. The opinions of Arago are, of course, entitled to the greatest consideration; but he is by no means infallible; and what he says of bismuth, in his report to the Academy, must be taken cum grano salis. The simple truth is, that up to this period all analysis has failed; and until Von Kempelen chooses to let us have the key to his own published enigma, it is more than probable that the matter will remain, for years, in statu quo. All that as yet can fairly be said to be known is, that 'Pure gold can be made at will, and very readily from lead in connection with certain other substances, in kind and in proportions, unknown.'\n\nSpeculation, of course, is busy as to the immediate and ultimate results of this discovery \u2014 a discovery which few thinking persons will hesitate in referring to an increased interest in the matter of gold generally, by the late developments in California; and this reflection brings us inevitably to another \u2014 the exceeding inopportuneness of Von Kempelen's analysis. If many were prevented from adventuring to California, by the mere apprehension that gold would so materially diminish in value, on account of its plentifulness in the mines there, as to render the speculation of going so far in search of it a doubtful one \u2014 what impression will be wrought now, upon the minds of those about to emigrate, and especially upon the minds of those actually in the mineral region, by the announcement of this astounding discovery of Von Kempelen? a discovery which declares, in so many words, that beyond its intrinsic worth for manufacturing purposes (whatever that worth may be), gold now is, or at least soon will be (for it cannot be supposed that Von Kempelen can long retain his secret), of no greater value than lead, and of far inferior value to silver. It is, indeed, exceedingly difficult to speculate prospectively upon the consequences of the discovery, but one thing may be positively maintained \u2014 that the announcement of the discovery six months ago would have had material influence in regard to the settlement of California.\n\nIn Europe, as yet, the most noticeable results have been a rise of two hundred per cent. in the price of lead, and nearly twenty-five per cent. that of silver.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ X-ing a Paragrab by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nAs it is well known that the 'wise men' came 'from the East,' and as Mr. Touch-and-go Bullethead came from the East, it follows that Mr. Bullethead was a wise man; and if collateral proof of the matter be needed, here we have it \u2014 Mr. B. was an editor. Irascibility was his sole foible, for in fact the obstinacy of which men accused him was anything but his foible, since he justly considered it his forte. It was his strong point \u2014 his virtue; and it would have required all the logic of a Brownson to convince him that it was 'anything else.'\n\nI have shown that Touch-and-go Bullethead was a wise man; and the only occasion on which he did not prove infallible, was when, abandoning that legitimate home for all wise men, the East, he migrated to the city of Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis, or some place of a similar title, out West.\n\nI must do him the justice to say, however, that when he made up his mind finally to settle in that town, it was under the impression that no newspaper, and consequently no editor, existed in that particular section of the country. In establishing 'The Tea-Pot' he expected to have the field all to himself. I feel confident he never would have dreamed of taking up his residence in Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis had he been aware that, in Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis, there lived a gentleman named John Smith (if I rightly remember), who for many years had there quietly grown fat in editing and publishing the 'Alexander-the-Great-o-nopolis Gazette.' It was solely, therefore, on account of having been misinformed, that Mr. Bullethead found himself in Alex-suppose we call it Nopolis, 'for short'\u2014 but, as he did find himself there, he determined to keep up his character for obst \u2014 for firmness, and remain. So remain he did; and he did more; he unpacked his press, type, etc., etc., rented an office exactly opposite to that of the 'Gazette,' and, on the third morning after his arrival, issued the first number of 'The Alexan'\u2014 that is to say, of 'The Nopolis Tea-Pot'\u2014 as nearly as I can recollect, this was the name of the new paper.\n\nThe leading article, I must admit, was brilliant \u2014 not to say severe. It was especially bitter about things in general \u2014 and as for the editor of 'The Gazette,' he was torn all to pieces in particular. Some of Bullethead's remarks were really so fiery that I have always, since that time, been forced to look upon John Smith, who is still alive, in the light of a salamander. I cannot pretend to give all the 'Tea-Pot's ' paragraphs verbatim, but one of them runs thus:\n\n'Oh, yes! \u2014 Oh, we perceive! Oh, no doubt! The editor over the way is a genius \u2014 O, my! Oh, goodness, gracious! \u2014 what is this world coming to? Oh, tempora! Oh, Moses!'\n\nA philippic at once so caustic and so classical, alighted like a bombshell among the hitherto peaceful citizens of Nopolis. Groups of excited individuals gathered at the corners of the streets. Every one awaited, with heartfelt anxiety, the reply of the dignified Smith. Next morning it appeared as follows:\n\n'We quote from \"The Tea-Pot\" of yesterday the subjoined paragraph: \"Oh, yes! Oh, we perceive! Oh, no doubt! Oh, my! Oh, goodness! Oh, tempora! Oh, Moses!\" Why, the fellow is all O! That accounts for his reasoning in a circle, and explains why there is neither beginning nor end to him, nor to anything he says. We really do not believe the vagabond can write a word that hasn't an O in it. Wonder if this O-ing is a habit of his? By-the-by, he came away from Down-East in a great hurry. Wonder if he O's as much there as he does here? \"O! it is pitiful.\"'\n\nThe indignation of Mr. Bullethead at these scandalous insinuations, I shall not attempt to describe. On the eel-skinning principle, however, he did not seem to be so much incensed at the attack upon his integrity as one might have imagined. It was the sneer at his style that drove him to desperation. What! \u2014 he Touch-and-go Bullethead! \u2014 not able to write a word without an O in it! He would soon let the jackanapes see that he was mistaken. Yes! he would let him see how much he was mistaken, the puppy! He, Touch-and-go Bullethead, of Frogpondium, would let Mr. John Smith perceive that he, Bullethead, could indite, if it so pleased him, a whole paragraph \u2014 aye! a whole article \u2014 in which that contemptible vowel should not once \u2014 not even once \u2014 make its appearance. But no; \u2014 that would be yielding a point to the said John Smith. He, Bullethead, would make no alteration in his style, to suit the caprices of any Mr. Smith in Christendom. Perish so vile a thought! The O forever; He would persist in the O. He would be as O-wy as O-wy could be.\n\nBurning with the chivalry of this determination, the great Touch-and-go, in the next 'Tea-Pot,' came out merely with this simple but resolute paragraph, in reference to this unhappy affair:\n\n'The editor of the \"Tea-Pot\" has the honor of advising the editor of the \"Gazette\" that he (the \"Tea-Pot\") will take an opportunity in tomorrow morning's paper, of convincing him (the \"Gazette\") that he (the \"Tea-Pot\") both can and will be his own master, as regards style; he (the \"Tea-Pot\") intending to show him (the \"Gazette\") the supreme, and indeed the withering contempt with which the criticism of him (the \"Gazette\") inspires the independent bosom of him (the \"TeaPot\") by composing for the especial gratification (?) of him (the \"Gazette\") a leading article, of some extent, in which the beautiful vowel \u2014 the emblem of Eternity \u2014 yet so offensive to the hyper-exquisite delicacy of him (the \"Gazette\") shall most certainly not be avoided by his (the \"Gazette's \") most obedient, humble servant, the \"Tea-Pot.\" \"So much for Buckingham!\"'\n\nIn fulfilment of the awful threat thus darkly intimated rather than decidedly enunciated, the great Bullethead, turning a deaf ear to all entreaties for 'copy,' and simply requesting his foreman to 'go to the d-l,' when he (the foreman) assured him (the 'Tea-Pot'!) that it was high time to 'go to press': turning a deaf ear to everything, I say, the great Bullethead sat up until day-break, consuming the midnight oil, and absorbed in the composition of the really unparalleled paragraph, which follows:\u2014\n\n'So ho, John! how now? Told you so, you know. Don't crow, another time, before you're out of the woods! Does your mother know you're out? Oh, no, no! \u2014 so go home at once, now, John, to your odious old woods of Concord! Go home to your woods, old owl \u2014 go! You won't! Oh, poh, poh, don't do so! You've got to go, you know! So go at once, and don't go slow, for nobody owns you here, you know! Oh! John, John, if you don't go you're no homo \u2014 no! You're only a fowl, an owl, a cow, a sow \u2014 a doll, a poll; a poor, old, good-for-nothing-to-nobody, log, dog, hog, or frog, come out of a Concord bog. Cool, now \u2014 cool! Do be cool, you fool! None of your crowing, old cock! Don't frown so \u2014 don't! Don't hollo, nor howl nor growl, nor bow-wow-wow! Good Lord, John, how you do look! Told you so, you know \u2014 but stop rolling your goose of an old poll about so, and go and drown your sorrows in a bowl!'\n\nExhausted, very naturally, by so stupendous an effort, the great Touch-and-go could attend to nothing farther that night. Firmly, composedly, yet with an air of conscious power, he handed his MS. to the devil in waiting, and then, walking leisurely home, retired, with ineffable dignity to bed.\n\nMeantime the devil, to whom the copy was entrusted, ran up stairs to his 'case,' in an unutterable hurry, and forthwith made a commencement at 'setting' the MS. 'up.'\n\nIn the first place, of course \u2014 as the opening word was 'So,'\u2014 he made a plunge into the capital S hole and came out in triumph with a capital S. Elated by this success, he immediately threw himself upon the little-o box with a blindfold impetuosity \u2014 but who shall describe his horror when his fingers came up without the anticipated letter in their clutch? who shall paint his astonishment and rage at perceiving, as he rubbed his knuckles, that he had been only thumping them to no purpose, against the bottom of an empty box. Not a single little-o was in the little-o hole; and, glancing fearfully at the capital-O partition, he found that to his extreme terror, in a precisely similar predicament. Awe \u2014 stricken, his first impulse was to rush to the foreman.\n\n'Sir!' said he, gasping for breath, 'I can't never set up nothing without no o's.'\n\n'What do you mean by that?' growled the foreman, who was in a very ill humor at being kept so late.\n\n'Why, sir, there beant an o in the office, neither a big un nor a little un!'\n\n'What \u2014 what the d-l has become of all that were in the case?'\n\n'I don't know, sir,' said the boy, 'but one of them ere \"G'zette\" devils is bin prowling 'bout here all night, and I spect he's gone and cabbaged 'em every one.'\n\n'Dod rot him! I haven't a doubt of it,' replied the foreman, getting purple with rage 'but I tell you what you do, Bob, that's a good boy \u2014 you go over the first chance you get and hook every one of their i's and (d-n them!) their izzards.'\n\n'Jist so,' replied Bob, with a wink and a frown \u2014'I'll be into 'em, I'll let 'em know a thing or two; but in de meantime, that ere paragrab? Mus go in to-night, you know \u2014 else there'll be the d-l to pay, and-'\n\n'And not a bit of pitch hot,' interrupted the foreman, with a deep sigh, and an emphasis on the 'bit.' 'Is it a long paragraph, Bob?'\n\n'Shouldn't call it a wery long paragrab,' said Bob.\n\n'Ah, well, then! do the best you can with it! We must get to press,\" said the foreman, who was over head and ears in work; 'just stick in some other letter for o; nobody's going to read the fellow's trash anyhow.'\n\n'Wery well,' replied Bob, 'here goes it!' and off he hurried to his case, muttering as he went: 'Considdeble vell, them ere expressions, perticcler for a man as doesn't swar. So I's to gouge out all their eyes, eh? and d-n all their gizzards! Vell! this here's the chap as is just able for to do it.' The fact is that although Bob was but twelve years old and four feet high, he was equal to any amount of fight, in a small way.\n\nThe exigency here described is by no means of rare occurrence in printing-offices; and I cannot tell how to account for it, but the fact is indisputable, that when the exigency does occur, it almost always happens that x is adopted as a substitute for the letter deficient. The true reason, perhaps, is that x is rather the most superabundant letter in the cases, or at least was so in the old times \u2014 long enough to render the substitution in question an habitual thing with printers. As for Bob, he would have considered it heretical to employ any other character, in a case of this kind, than the x to which he had been accustomed.\n\n'I shell have to x this ere paragrab,' said he to himself, as he read it over in astonishment, 'but it's jest about the awfulest o-wy paragrab I ever did see': so x it he did, unflinchingly, and to press it went x-ed.\n\nNext morning the population of Nopolis were taken all aback by reading in 'The Tea-Pot,' the following extraordinary leader:\n\n'Sx hx, Jxhn! hxw nxw? Txld yxu sx, yxu knxw. Dxn't crxw, anxther time, befxre yxu're xut xf the wxxds! Dxes yxur mxther knxw yxu're xut? Xh, nx, nx! \u2014 sx gx hxme at xnce, nxw, Jxhn, tx yxur xdixus xld wxxds xf Cxncxrd! Gx hxme tx yxur wxxds, xld xwl \u2014 gx! Yxu wxn't? Xh, pxh, pxh, Jxhn, dxn't dx sx! Yxu've gxt tx gx, yxu knxw, sx gx at xnce, and dxn't gx slxw; fxr nxbxdy xwns yxu here, yxu knxw. Xh, Jxhn, Jxhn, Jxhn, if yxu dxn't gx yxu're nx hxmx \u2014 nx! Yxu're xnly a fxwl, an xwl; a cxw, a sxw; a dxll, a pxll; a pxxr xld gxxd-fxr-nxthing-tx-nxbxdy, lxg, dxg, hxg, xr frxg, cxme xut xf a Cxncxrd bxg. Cxxl, nxw \u2014 cxxl! Dx be cxxl, yxu fxxl! Nxne xf yxur crxwing, xld cxck! Dxn't frxwn sx \u2014 dxn't! Dxn't hxllx, nxr hxwl, nxr grxwl, nxr bxw-wxw-wxw! Gxxd Lxrd, Jxhn, hxw yxu dx lxxk! Txld yxu sx, yxu knxw \u2014 but stxp rxlling yxur gxxse xf an xld pxll abxut sx, and gx and drxwn yxur sxrrxws in a bxwl!'\n\nThe uproar occasioned by this mystical and cabalistical article, is not to be conceived. The first definite idea entertained by the populace was, that some diabolical treason lay concealed in the hieroglyphics; and there was a general rush to Bullethead's residence, for the purpose of riding him on a rail; but that gentleman was nowhere to be found. He had vanished, no one could tell how; and not even the ghost of him has ever been seen since.\n\nUnable to discover its legitimate object, the popular fury at length subsided; leaving behind it, by way of sediment, quite a medley of opinion about this unhappy affair.\n\nOne gentleman thought the whole an X-ellent joke.\n\nAnother said that, indeed, Bullethead had shown much X-uberance of fancy.\n\nA third admitted him X-entric, but no more.\n\nA fourth could only suppose it the Yankee's design to X-press, in a general way, his X-asperation.\n\n'Say, rather, to set an X-ample to posterity,' suggested a fifth.\n\nThat Bullethead had been driven to an extremity, was clear to all; and in fact, since that editor could not be found, there was some talk about lynching the other one.\n\nThe more common conclusion, however, was that the affair was, simply, Xtraordinary and in-X-plicable. Even the town mathematician confessed that he could make nothing of so dark a problem. X, every. body knew, was an unknown quantity; but in this case (as he properly observed), there was an unknown quantity of X.\n\nThe opinion of Bob, the devil (who kept dark about his having 'X-ed the paragrab'), did not meet with so much attention as I think it deserved, although it was very openly and very fearlessly expressed. He said that, for his part, he had no doubt about the matter at all, that it was a clear case, that Mr. Bullethead 'never could be persuaded fur to drink like other folks, but vas continually a-svigging o' that ere blessed XXX ale, and as a naiteral consekvence, it just puffed him up savage, and made him X (cross) in the X-treme.'\n\n[ THE POEMS ]\n\n[ Poetry ]\n\nThis poem, most likely incomplete, was never printed in Poe's lifetime. Its two lines were found written on a page of some of John Allan's financial records. This is the earliest surviving manuscript in Poe's own hand.\n\nLast night, with many cares and toils oppress'd Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest \u2014\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003In visions of the dark night\n\n\u2003I have dreamed of joy departed \u2014\n\n\u2003But a waking dream of life and light\n\n\u2003Hath left me broken-hearted.\n\n\u2003Ah! what is not a dream by day\n\n\u2003To him whose eyes are cast\n\n\u2003On things around him with a ray\n\n\u2003Turned back upon the past?\n\n\u2003That holy dream \u2014 that holy dream,\n\n\u2003While all the world were chiding,\n\n\u2003Hath cheered me as a lovely beam\n\n\u2003A lonely spirit guiding.\n\n\u2003What though that light, thro' storm and night,\n\n\u2003So trembled from afar \u2014\n\n\u2003What could there be more purely bright In Truth's day-star?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Dreams by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream!\n\n\u2003My spirit not awakening, till the beam\n\n\u2003Of an Eternity should bring the morrow.\n\n\u2003Yes! tho' that long dream were of hopeless sorrow,\n\n\u2003'Twere better than the cold reality\n\n\u2003Of waking life, to him whose heart must be,\n\n\u2003And hath been still, upon the lovely earth,\n\n\u2003A chaos of deep passion, from his birth.\n\n\u2003But should it be \u2014 that dream eternally\n\n\u2003Continuing \u2014 as dreams have been to me\n\n\u2003In my young boyhood \u2014 should it thus be given,\n\n\u2003\"Twere folly still to hope for higher Heaven.\n\n\u2003For I have revell'd, when the sun was bright\n\n\u2003I' the summer sky, in dreams of living light\n\n\u2003And loveliness \u2014 have left my very heart\n\n\u2003In climes of my imagining, apart\n\n\u2003From mine own home, with beings that have been\n\n\u2003Of mine own thought \u2014 what more could I have seen?\n\n\u2003'Twas once \u2014 and only once \u2014 and the wild hour\n\n\u2003From my remembrance shall not pass \u2014 some power\n\n\u2003Or spell had bound me \u2014'twas the chilly wind\n\n\u2003Came o'er me in the night, and left behind\n\n\u2003Its image on my spirit \u2014 or the moon\n\n\u2003Shone on my slumbers in her lofty noon\n\n\u2003Too coldly \u2014 or the stars \u2014 howe'er it was\n\n\u2003That dream was as that night-wind \u2014 let it pass.\n\n\u2003I have been happy, tho' in a dream.\n\n\u2003I have been happy \u2014 and I love the theme:\n\n\u2003Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life,\n\n\u2003As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife\n\n\u2003Of semblance with reality, which brings\n\n\u2003To the delirious eye, more lovely things\n\n\u2003Of Paradise and Love \u2014 and all our own!\n\n\u2003Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Evening Star by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003'Twas noontide of summer,\n\n\u2003And mid-time of night;\n\n\u2003And stars, in their orbits,\n\n\u2003Shone pale, thro' the light\n\n\u2003Of the brighter, cold moon,\n\n\u2003'Mid planets her slaves,\n\n\u2003Herself in the Heavens,\n\n\u2003Her beam on the waves.\n\n\u2003I gazed awhile\n\n\u2003On her cold smile;\n\n\u2003Too cold \u2014 too cold for me \u2014\n\n\u2003There pass'd, as a shroud,\n\n\u2003A fleecy cloud,\n\n\u2003And I turned away to thee,\n\n\u2003Proud Evening Star,\n\n\u2003In thy glory afar,\n\n\u2003And dearer thy beam shall be;\n\n\u2003For joy to my heart\n\n\u2003Is the proud part\n\n\u2003Thou bearest in Heaven at night,\n\n\u2003And more I admire\n\n\u2003Thy distant fire,\n\n\u2003Than that colder, lowly light.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Imitation by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nThe poem \"Imitation\" was first published in Poe's early collection Tamerlane and Other Poems. The 20-line poem is made up of rhymed couplets where the speaker likens his youth to a dream as his reality becomes more and more difficult. It has been considered potentially autobiographical, written during deepening strains in Poe's relationship with his foster-father John Allan.\n\nAfter several revisions, this poem evolved into the poem \"A Dream Within a Dream.\"\n\n\u2003A dark unfathomed tide\n\n\u2003Of interminable pride \u2014\n\n\u2003A mystery, and a dream,\n\n\u2003Should my early life seem;\n\n\u2003I say that dream was fraught\n\n\u2003With a wild and waking thought\n\n\u2003Of beings that have been,\n\n\u2003Which my spirit hath not seen,\n\n\u2003Had I let them pass me by,\n\n\u2003With a dreaming eye!\n\n\u2003Let none of earth inherit\n\n\u2003That vision of my spirit;\n\n\u2003Those thoughts I would control,\n\n\u2003As a spell upon his soul:\n\n\u2003For that bright hope at last\n\n\u2003And that light time have past,\n\n\u2003And my worldly rest hath gone\n\n\u2003With a sigh as it passed on:\n\n\u2003I care not though it perish\n\n\u2003With a thought I then did cherish.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Song by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\"Song\" is a ballad-style poem, which was first published in Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827, the speaker tells of a former love he saw from afar on her wedding day. A blush on her cheek, despite all the happiness around her, displays a hidden shame for having lost the speaker's love.\n\nIt is believed to reference Poe's lost teenage love Sarah Elmira Royster, who broke off her engagement with Poe presumably due to her father. She instead married the wealthy Alexander Shelton. If this is the case, Poe was taking poetic license: he was not in Richmond at the time of her wedding.\n\n\u2003I saw thee on thy bridal day \u2014\n\n\u2003When a burning blush came o'er thee,\n\n\u2003Though happiness around thee lay,\n\n\u2003The world all love before thee:\n\n\u2003And in thine eye a kindling light\n\n\u2003(Whatever it might be)\n\n\u2003Was all on Earth my aching sight\n\n\u2003Of Loveliness could see.\n\n\u2003That blush, perhaps, was maiden shame \u2014\n\n\u2003As such it well may pass \u2014\n\n\u2003Though its glow hath raised a fiercer flame In the breast of him, alas!\n\n\u2003Who saw thee on that bridal day,\n\n\u2003When that deep blush would come o'er thee, Though happiness around thee lay;\n\n\u2003The world all love before thee.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Spirits of the Dead by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\nOriginal manuscript of a revision of \"Spirits of the Dead\" in Poe's handwriting.\n\n\"Spirits of the Dead\" was first titled \"Visits of the Dead\" when it was published in the 1827 collection Tamerlane and Other Poems. The title was changed for the 1829 collection Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. The poem follows a dialogue between a dead speaker and a person visiting his grave. The spirit tells the person that those who one knows in life surround a person in death as well.\n\n\u2003Thy soul shall find itself alone\n\n\u2003'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;\n\n\u2003Not one, of all the crowd, to pry\n\n\u2003Into thine hour of secrecy.\n\n\u2003Be silent in that solitude,\n\n\u2003Which is not loneliness \u2014 for then\n\n\u2003The spirits of the dead, who stood\n\n\u2003In life before thee, are again\n\n\u2003In death around thee, and their will\n\n\u2003Shall overshadow thee; be still.\n\n\u2003The night, though clear, shall frown,\n\n\u2003And the stars shall not look down\n\n\u2003From their high thrones in the Heaven\n\n\u2003With light like hope to mortals given,\n\n\u2003But their red orbs, without beam,\n\n\u2003To thy weariness shall seem\n\n\u2003As a burning and a fever\n\n\u2003Which would cling to thee for ever.\n\n\u2003Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,\n\n\u2003Now are visions ne'er to vanish;\n\n\u2003From thy spirit shall they pass\n\n\u2003No more, like dew-drop from the grass.\n\n\u2003The breeze, the breath of God, is still,\n\n\u2003And the mist upon the hill\n\n\u2003Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,\n\n\u2003Is a symbol and a token.\n\n\u2003How it hangs upon the trees,\n\n\u2003A mystery of mysteries!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Stanzas by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003How often we forget all time, when lone\n\n\u2003Admiring Nature's universal throne;\n\n\u2003Her woods \u2014 her wilds \u2014 her mountains \u2014 the intense\n\n\u2003Reply of hers to our intelligence!\n\n\u2014Byron, The Island." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "\u2003In youth have I known one with whom the Earth\n\n\u2003In secret communing held \u2014 as he with it,\n\n\u2003In daylight, and in beauty from his birth:\n\n\u2003Whose fervid, flickering torch of life was lit\n\n\u2003From the sun and stars, whence he had drawn forth\n\n\u2003A passionate light \u2014 such for his spirit was fit \u2014\n\n\u2003And yet that spirit knew not, in the hour\n\n\u2003Of its own fervor what had o'er it power." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "\u2003Perhaps it may be that my mind is wrought\n\n\u2003To a fever by the moonbeam that hangs o'er,\n\n\u2003But I will half believe that wild light fraught\n\n\u2003With more of sovereignty than ancient lore\n\n\u2003Hath ever told \u2014 or is it of a thought\n\n\u2003The unembodied essence, and no more,\n\n\u2003That with a quickening spell doth o'er us pass\n\n\u2003As dew of the night-time o'er the summer grass?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "\u2003Doth o'er us pass, when, as th' expanding eye\n\n\u2003To the loved object \u2014 so the tear to the lid\n\n\u2003Will start, which lately slept in apathy?\n\n\u2003And yet it need not be \u2014 (that object) hid\n\n\u2003From us in life \u2014 but common \u2014 which doth lie\n\n\u2003Each hour before us \u2014 but then only, bid\n\n\u2003With a strange sound, as of a harp-string broken,\n\n\u2003To awake us \u2014 'Tis a symbol and a token" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "\u2003Of what in other worlds shall be \u2014 and given\n\n\u2003In beauty by our God, to those alone\n\n\u2003Who otherwise would fall from life and Heaven\n\n\u2003Drawn by their heart's passion, and that tone,\n\n\u2003That high tone of the spirit which hath striven,\n\n\u2003Tho' not with Faith \u2014 with godliness \u2014 whose throne\n\n\u2003With desperate energy 't hath beaten down;\n\n\u2003Wearing its own deep feeling as a crown.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Tamerlane by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Kind solace in a dying hour!\n\n\u2003Such, father, is not (now) my theme \u2014\n\n\u2003I will not madly deem that power\n\n\u2003Of Earth may shrive me of the sin\n\n\u2003Unearthly pride hath revell'd in\n\n\u2003I have no time to dote or dream:\n\n\u2003You call it hope \u2014 that fire of fire!\n\n\u2003It is but agony of desire:\n\n\u2003If I can hope \u2014 Oh God! I can \u2014\n\n\u2003Its fount is holier \u2014 more divine \u2014\n\n\u2003I would not call thee fool, old man,\n\n\u2003But such is not a gift of thine.\n\n\u2003Know thou the secret of a spirit\n\n\u2003Bow'd from its wild pride into shame.\n\n\u2003O yearning heart! I did inherit\n\n\u2003Thy withering portion with the fame,\n\n\u2003The searing glory which hath shone\n\n\u2003Amid the jewels of my throne,\n\n\u2003Halo of Hell! and with a pain\n\n\u2003Not Hell shall make me fear again \u2014\n\n\u2003O craving heart, for the lost flowers\n\n\u2003And sunshine of my summer hours!\n\n\u2003The undying voice of that dead time,\n\n\u2003With its interminable chime,\n\n\u2003Rings, in the spirit of a spell,\n\n\u2003Upon thy emptiness \u2014 a knell.\n\n\u2003I have not always been as now:\n\n\u2003The fever'd diadem on my brow\n\n\u2003I claim'd and won usurpingly \u2014\n\n\u2003Hath not the same fierce heirdom given\n\n\u2003Rome to the Caesar \u2014 this to me?\n\n\u2003The heritage of a kingly mind,\n\n\u2003And a proud spirit which hath striven\n\n\u2003Triumphantly with human kind.\n\n\u2003On mountain soil I first drew life:\n\n\u2003The mists of the Taglay have shed\n\n\u2003Nightly their dews upon my head,\n\n\u2003And, I believe, the winged strife\n\n\u2003And tumult of the headlong air\n\n\u2003Have nestled in my very hair.\n\n\u2003So late from Heaven \u2014 that dew \u2014 it fell\n\n\u2003(Mid dreams of an unholy night)\n\n\u2003Upon me with the touch of Hell,\n\n\u2003While the red flashing of the light\n\n\u2003From clouds that hung, like banners, o'er,\n\n\u2003Appeared to my half-closing eye\n\n\u2003The pageantry of monarchy,\n\n\u2003And the deep trumpet-thunder's roar\n\n\u2003Came hurriedly upon me, telling\n\n\u2003Of human battle, where my voice,\n\n\u2003My own voice, silly child! \u2014 was swelling\n\n\u2003(O! how my spirit would rejoice,\n\n\u2003And leap within me at the cry)\n\n\u2003The battle-cry of Victory!\n\n\u2003The rain came down upon my head\n\n\u2003Unshelter'd \u2014 and the heavy wind\n\n\u2003Rendered me mad and deaf and blind.\n\n\u2003It was but man, I thought, who shed\n\n\u2003Laurels upon me: and the rush \u2014\n\n\u2003The torrent of the chilly air\n\n\u2003Gurgled within my ear the crush\n\n\u2003Of empires \u2014 with the captive's prayer \u2014\n\n\u2003The hum of suitors \u2014 and the tone\n\n\u2003Of flattery 'round a sovereign's throne.\n\n\u2003My passions, from that hapless hour,\n\n\u2003Usurp'd a tyranny which men\n\n\u2003Have deem'd, since I have reach'd to power,\n\n\u2003My innate nature \u2014 be it so:\n\n\u2003But father, there liv'd one who, then,\n\n\u2003Then \u2014 in my boyhood \u2014 when their fire\n\n\u2003Burn'd with a still intenser glow,\n\n\u2003(For passion must, with youth, expire)\n\n\u2003E'en then who knew this iron heart\n\n\u2003In woman's weakness had a part.\n\n\u2003I have no words \u2014 alas! \u2014 to tell\n\n\u2003The loveliness of loving well!\n\n\u2003Nor would I now attempt to trace\n\n\u2003The more than beauty of a face\n\n\u2003Whose lineaments, upon my mind,\n\n\u2003Are \u2014 shadows on th' unstable wind:\n\n\u2003Thus I remember having dwelt\n\n\u2003Some page of early lore upon,\n\n\u2003With loitering eye, till I have felt\n\n\u2003The letters \u2014 with their meaning \u2014 melt\n\n\u2003To fantasies \u2014 with none.\n\n\u2003O, she was worthy of all love!\n\n\u2003Love \u2014 as in infancy was mine \u2014\n\n\u2003'Twas such as angel minds above\n\n\u2003Might envy; her young heart the shrine\n\n\u2003On which my every hope and thought\n\n\u2003Were incense \u2014 then a goodly gift,\n\n\u2003For they were childish and upright \u2014\n\n\u2003Pure \u2014 as her young example taught:\n\n\u2003Why did I leave it, and, adrift,\n\n\u2003Trust to the fire within, for light?\n\n\u2003We grew in age \u2014 and love \u2014 together,\n\n\u2003Roaming the forest, and the wild;\n\n\u2003My breast her shield in wintry weather \u2014\n\n\u2003And when the friendly sunshine smil'd,\n\n\u2003And she would mark the opening skies,\n\n\u2003I saw no Heaven \u2014 but in her eyes.\n\n\u2003Young Love's first lesson is \u2014 the heart:\n\n\u2003For 'mid that sunshine, and those smiles,\n\n\u2003When, from our little cares apart,\n\n\u2003And laughing at her girlish wiles,\n\n\u2003I'd throw me on her throbbing breast,\n\n\u2003And pour my spirit out in tears \u2014\n\n\u2003There was no need to speak the rest \u2014\n\n\u2003No need to quiet any fears\n\n\u2003Of her \u2014 who ask'd no reason why,\n\n\u2003But turn'd on me her quiet eye!\n\n\u2003Yet more than worthy of the love\n\n\u2003My spirit struggled with, and strove,\n\n\u2003When, on the mountain peak, alone,\n\n\u2003Ambition lent it a new tone \u2014\n\n\u2003I had no being \u2014 but in thee:\n\n\u2003The world, and all it did contain\n\n\u2003In the earth \u2014 the air \u2014 the sea \u2014\n\n\u2003Its joy \u2014 its little lot of pain\n\n\u2003That was new pleasure \u2014 the ideal,\n\n\u2003Dim vanities of dreams by night \u2014\n\n\u2003And dimmer nothings which were real \u2014\n\n\u2003(Shadows \u2014 and a more shadowy light!)\n\n\u2003Parted upon their misty wings,\n\n\u2003And, so, confusedly, became\n\n\u2003Thine image, and \u2014 a name \u2014 a name!\n\n\u2003Two separate \u2014 yet most intimate things.\n\n\u2003I was ambitious \u2014 have you known\n\n\u2003The passion, father? You have not:\n\n\u2003A cottager, I mark'd a throne\n\n\u2003Of half the world as all my own,\n\n\u2003And murmur'd at such lowly lot \u2014\n\n\u2003But, just like any other dream,\n\n\u2003Upon the vapour of the dew\n\n\u2003My own had past, did not the beam\n\n\u2003Of beauty which did while it thro'\n\n\u2003The minute \u2014 the hour \u2014 the day \u2014\n\n\u2003oppress My mind with double loveliness.\n\n\u2003We walk'd together on the crown\n\n\u2003Of a high mountain which look'd down\n\n\u2003Afar from its proud natural towers\n\n\u2003Of rock and forest, on the hills \u2014\n\n\u2003The dwindled hills! begirt with bowers,\n\n\u2003And shouting with a thousand rills.\n\n\u2003I spoke to her of power and pride,\n\n\u2003But mystically \u2014 in such guise\n\n\u2003That she might deem it nought beside\n\n\u2003The moment's converse; in her eyes\n\n\u2003I read, perhaps too carelessly \u2014\n\n\u2003A mingled feeling with my own \u2014\n\n\u2003The flush on her bright cheek, to me\n\n\u2003Seem'd to become a queenly throne\n\n\u2003Too well that I should let it be\n\n\u2003Light in the wilderness alone.\n\n\u2003I wrapp'd myself in grandeur then,\n\n\u2003And donn'd a visionary crown \u2014\n\n\u2003Yet it was not that Fantasy\n\n\u2003Had thrown her mantle over me \u2014\n\n\u2003But that, among the rabble \u2014 men,\n\n\u2003Lion ambition is chained down \u2014\n\n\u2003And crouches to a keeper's hand \u2014\n\n\u2003Not so in deserts where the grand \u2014\n\n\u2003The wild \u2014 the terrible conspire\n\n\u2003With their own breath to fan his fire.\n\n\u2003Look 'round thee now on Samarcand!\n\n\u2003Is not she queen of Earth? her pride\n\n\u2003Above all cities? in her hand\n\n\u2003Their destinies? in all beside\n\n\u2003Of glory which the world hath known\n\n\u2003Stands she not nobly and alone?\n\n\u2003Falling \u2014 her veriest stepping-stone\n\n\u2003Shall form the pedestal of a throne \u2014\n\n\u2003And who her sovereign? Timour \u2014 he\n\n\u2003Whom the astonished people saw\n\n\u2003Striding o'er empires haughtily\n\n\u2003A diadem'd outlaw!\n\n\u2003O, human love! thou spirit given\n\n\u2003On Earth, of all we hope in Heaven!\n\n\u2003Which fall'st into the soul like rain\n\n\u2003Upon the Siroc-wither'd plain,\n\n\u2003And, failing in thy power to bless,\n\n\u2003But leav'st the heart a wilderness!\n\n\u2003Idea! which bindest life around\n\n\u2003With music of so strange a sound,\n\n\u2003And beauty of so wild a birth \u2014\n\n\u2003Farewell! for I have won the Earth.\n\n\u2003When Hope, the eagle that tower'd, could see\n\n\u2003No cliff beyond him in the sky,\n\n\u2003His pinions were bent droopingly \u2014\n\n\u2003And homeward turn'd his soften'd eye.\n\n\u2003'Twas sunset: when the sun will part\n\n\u2003There comes a sullenness of heart\n\n\u2003To him who still would look upon\n\n\u2003The glory of the summer sun.\n\n\u2003That soul will hate the ev'ning mist,\n\n\u2003So often lovely, and will list\n\n\u2003To the sound of the coming darkness (known\n\n\u2003To those whose spirits hearken) as one\n\n\u2003Who, in a dream of night, would fly\n\n\u2003But cannot from a danger nigh.\n\n\u2003What tho' the moon \u2014 the white moon\n\n\u2003Shed all the splendour of her noon,\n\n\u2003Her smile is chilly, and her beam,\n\n\u2003In that time of dreariness, will seem\n\n\u2003(So like you gather in your breath)\n\n\u2003A portrait taken after death.\n\n\u2003And boyhood is a summer sun\n\n\u2003Whose waning is the dreariest one \u2014\n\n\u2003For all we live to know is known,\n\n\u2003And all we seek to keep hath flown \u2014\n\n\u2003Let life, then, as the day-flower, fall\n\n\u2003With the noon-day beauty \u2014 which is all.\n\n\u2003I reach'd my home \u2014 my home no more\n\n\u2003For all had flown who made it so.\n\n\u2003I pass'd from out its mossy door,\n\n\u2003And, tho' my tread was soft and low,\n\n\u2003A voice came from the threshold stone\n\n\u2003Of one whom I had earlier known \u2014\n\n\u2003O, I defy thee, Hell, to show\n\n\u2003On beds of fire that burn below,\n\n\u2003A humbler heart \u2014 a deeper woe.\n\n\u2003Father, I firmly do believe \u2014\n\n\u2003I know \u2014 for Death, who comes for me\n\n\u2003From regions of the blest afar,\n\n\u2003Where there is nothing to deceive,\n\n\u2003Hath left his iron gate ajar,\n\n\u2003And rays of truth you cannot see\n\n\u2003Are flashing thro' Eternity \u2014\n\n\u2003I do believe that Eblis hath\n\n\u2003A snare in every human path \u2014\n\n\u2003Else how, when in the holy grove\n\n\u2003I wandered of the idol, Love,\n\n\u2003Who daily scents his snowy wings\n\n\u2003With incense of burnt offerings\n\n\u2003From the most unpolluted things,\n\n\u2003Whose pleasant bowers are yet so riven\n\n\u2003Above with trellis'd rays from Heaven,\n\n\u2003No mote may shun \u2014 no tiniest fly \u2014\n\n\u2003The lightning of his eagle eye \u2014\n\n\u2003How was it that Ambition crept,\n\n\u2003Unseen, amid the revels there,\n\n\u2003Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt\n\n\u2003In the tangles of Love's very hair?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Happiest Day by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The happiest day \u2014 the happiest hour\n\n\u2003My sear'd and blighted heart hath known,\n\n\u2003The highest hope of pride and power, I feel hath flown.\n\n\u2003Of power! said I? yes! such I ween;\n\n\u2003But they have vanish'd long, alas!\n\n\u2003The visions of my youth have been \u2014\n\n\u2003But let them pass.\n\n\u2003And, pride, what have I now with thee?\n\n\u2003Another brow may even inherit\n\n\u2003The venom thou hast pour'd on me\n\n\u2003Be still, my spirit!\n\n\u2003The happiest day \u2014 the happiest hour\n\n\u2003Mine eyes shall see \u2014 have ever seen,\n\n\u2003The brightest glance of pride and power, I feel \u2014 have been:\n\n\u2003But were that hope of pride and power Now offer'd with the pain\n\n\u2003Even then I felt \u2014 that brightest hour I would not live again:\n\n\u2003For on its wing was dark alloy,\n\n\u2003And, as it flutter'd \u2014 fell\n\n\u2003An essence \u2014 powerful to destroy\n\n\u2003A soul that knew it well.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Lake. To \u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003In spring of youth it was my lot\n\n\u2003To haunt of the wide world a spot\n\n\u2003The which I could not love the less \u2014\n\n\u2003So lovely was the loneliness\n\n\u2003Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,\n\n\u2003And the tall pines that towered around.\n\n\u2003But when the Night had thrown her pall\n\n\u2003Upon that spot, as upon all,\n\n\u2003And the mystic wind went by\n\n\u2003Murmuring in melody \u2014\n\n\u2003Then \u2014 ah then I would awake\n\n\u2003To the terror of the lone lake.\n\n\u2003Yet that terror was not fright,\n\n\u2003But a tremulous delight \u2014\n\n\u2003A feeling not the jewelled mine\n\n\u2003Could teach or bribe me to define \u2014\n\n\u2003Nor Love \u2014 although the Love were thine.\n\n\u2003Death was in that poisonous wave,\n\n\u2003And in its gulf a fitting grave\n\n\u2003For him who thence could solace bring To his lone imagining \u2014\n\n\u2003Whose solitary soul could make\n\n\u2003An Eden of that dim lake.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To Margaret by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Who hath seduced thee to this foul revolt\n\n\u2003From the pure well of Beauty undefiled?\n\n\u2003So banish from true wisdom to prefer\n\n\u2003Such squalid wit to honourable rhyme?\n\n\u2003To write? To scribble? Nonsense and no more?\n\n\u2003I will not write upon this argument\n\n\u2003To write is human \u2014 not to write divine.\n\n\u2014Line 1 Milton Par. Lost Bk. I, 3, 4 Cowper's Task, Book I, 5 Shakespeare 6 do. Trolius & Cressida 7 Pope Essay on Man\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To Octavia by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003When wit, and wine, and friends have met\n\n\u2003And laughter crowns the festive hour In vain I struggle to forget\n\n\u2003Still does my heart confess thy power And fondly turn to thee!\n\n\u2003But Octavia, do not strive to rob\n\n\u2003My heart of all that soothes its pain The mournful hope that every throb\n\n\u2003Will make it break for thee!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To M\u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003O! I care not that my earthly lot\n\n\u2003Hath little of Earth in it,\n\n\u2003That years of love have been forgot\n\n\u2003In the fever of a minute:\n\n\u2003I heed not that the desolate\n\n\u2003Are happier, sweet, than I,\n\n\u2003But that you meddle with my fate\n\n\u2003Who am a passer by.\n\n\u2003It is not that my founts of bliss\n\n\u2003Are gushing \u2014 strange! with tears \u2014\n\n\u2003Or that the thrill of a single kiss\n\n\u2003Hath palsied many years \u2014\n\n\u2003'Tis not that the flowers of twenty springs\n\n\u2003Which have wither'd as they rose\n\n\u2003Lie dead on my heart-strings\n\n\u2003With the weight of an age of snows.\n\n\u2003Not that the grass \u2014 O! may it thrive!\n\n\u2003On my grave is growing or grown \u2014\n\n\u2003But that, while I am dead yet alive\n\n\u2003I cannot be, lady, alone.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To the River \u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow\n\n\u2003Of crystal, wandering water,\n\n\u2003Thou art an emblem of the glow\n\n\u2003Of beauty \u2014 the unhidden heart \u2014\n\n\u2003The playful maziness of art\n\n\u2003In old Alberto's daughter;\n\n\u2003But when within thy wave she looks \u2014\n\n\u2003Which glistens then, and trembles \u2014\n\n\u2003Why, then, the prettiest of brooks\n\n\u2003Her worshipper resembles;\n\n\u2003For in his heart, as in thy stream,\n\n\u2003Her image deeply lies \u2014\n\n\u2003His heart which trembles at the beam\n\n\u2003Of her soul-searching eyes.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Al Aaraaf by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003O! nothing earthly save the ray\n\n\u2003(Thrown back from flowers) of Beauty's eye,\n\n\u2003As in those gardens where the day\n\n\u2003Springs from the gems of Circassy \u2014\n\n\u2003O! nothing earthly save the thrill\n\n\u2003Of melody in woodland rill \u2014\n\n\u2003Or (music of the passion-hearted)\n\n\u2003Joy's voice so peacefully departed\n\n\u2003That like the murmur in the shell,\n\n\u2003Its echo dwelleth and will dwell \u2014\n\n\u2003Oh, nothing of the dross of ours \u2014\n\n\u2003Yet all the beauty \u2014 all the flowers\n\n\u2003That list our Love, and deck our bowers \u2014\n\n\u2003Adorn yon world afar, afar \u2014\n\n\u2003The wandering star.\n\n\u2003'Twas a sweet time for Nesace \u2014 for there\n\n\u2003Her world lay lolling on the golden air,\n\n\u2003Near four bright suns \u2014 a temporary rest \u2014\n\n\u2003An oasis in desert of the blest.\n\n\u2003Away \u2014 away \u2014'mid seas of rays that roll\n\n\u2003Empyrean splendor o'er th' unchained soul \u2014\n\n\u2003The soul that scarce (the billows are so dense)\n\n\u2003Can struggle to its destin'd eminence \u2014\n\n\u2003To distant spheres, from time to time, she rode\n\n\u2003And late to ours, the favor'd one of God \u2014\n\n\u2003But, now, the ruler of an anchor'd realm,\n\n\u2003She throws aside the sceptre \u2014 leaves the helm,\n\n\u2003And, amid incense and high spiritual hymns,\n\n\u2003Laves in quadruple light her angel limbs.\n\n\u2003Now happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,\n\n\u2003Whence sprang the \"Idea of Beauty\" into birth,\n\n\u2003(Falling in wreaths thro' many a startled star,\n\n\u2003Like woman's hair 'mid pearls, until, afar,\n\n\u2003It lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt)\n\n\u2003She looked into Infinity \u2014 and knelt.\n\n\u2003Rich clouds, for canopies, about her curled \u2014\n\n\u2003Fit emblems of the model of her world \u2014\n\n\u2003Seen but in beauty \u2014 not impeding sight\n\n\u2003Of other beauty glittering thro' the light \u2014\n\n\u2003A wreath that twined each starry form around,\n\n\u2003And all the opal'd air in color bound.\n\n\u2003All hurriedly she knelt upon a bed\n\n\u2003Of flowers: of lilies such as rear'd the head\n\n\u2003On the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang\n\n\u2003So eagerly around about to hang\n\n\u2003Upon the flying footsteps of \u2014 deep pride \u2014\n\n\u2003Of her who lov'd a mortal \u2014 and so died.\n\n\u2003The Sephalica, budding with young bees,\n\n\u2003Upreared its purple stem around her knees:\u2014\n\n\u2003And gemmy flower, of Trebizond misnam'd \u2014\n\n\u2003Inmate of highest stars, where erst it sham'd\n\n\u2003All other loveliness:\u2014 its honied dew\n\n\u2003(The fabled nectar that the heathen knew)\n\n\u2003Deliriously sweet, was dropp'd from Heaven,\n\n\u2003And fell on gardens of the unforgiven\n\n\u2003In Trebizond \u2014 and on a sunny flower\n\n\u2003So like its own above that, to this hour,\n\n\u2003It still remaineth, torturing the bee\n\n\u2003With madness, and unwonted reverie:\n\n\u2003In Heaven, and all its environs, the leaf\n\n\u2003And blossom of the fairy plant in grief\n\n\u2003Disconsolate linger \u2014 grief that hangs her head,\n\n\u2003Repenting follies that full long have Red,\n\n\u2003Heaving her white breast to the balmy air,\n\n\u2003Like guilty beauty, chasten'd and more fair:\n\n\u2003Nyctanthes too, as sacred as the light\n\n\u2003She fears to perfume, perfuming the night:\n\n\u2003And Clytia, pondering between many a sun,\n\n\u2003While pettish tears adown her petals run:\n\n\u2003And that aspiring flower that sprang on Earth,\n\n\u2003And died, ere scarce exalted into birth,\n\n\u2003Bursting its odorous heart in spirit to wing\n\n\u2003Its way to Heaven, from garden of a king:\n\n\u2003And Valisnerian lotus, thither flown\"\n\n\u2003From struggling with the waters of the Rhone:\n\n\u2003And thy most lovely purple perfume, Zante!\n\n\u2003Isola d'oro! \u2014 Fior di Levante!\n\n\u2003And the Nelumbo bud that floats for ever\n\n\u2003With Indian Cupid down the holy river \u2014\n\n\u2003Fair flowers, and fairy! to whose care is given\n\n\u2003To bear the Goddess' song, in odors, up to Heaven:\n\n\u2003\"Spirit! that dwellest where,\n\n\u2003In the deep sky,\n\n\u2003The terrible and fair,\n\n\u2003In beauty vie!\n\n\u2003Beyond the line of blue \u2014\n\n\u2003The boundary of the star\n\n\u2003Which turneth at the view\n\n\u2003Of thy barrier and thy bar \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the barrier overgone\n\n\u2003By the comets who were cast\n\n\u2003From their pride and from their throne\n\n\u2003To be drudges till the last \u2014\n\n\u2003To be carriers of fire\n\n\u2003(The red fire of their heart)\n\n\u2003With speed that may not tire\n\n\u2003And with pain that shall not part \u2014\n\n\u2003Who livest \u2014 that we know \u2014\n\n\u2003In Eternity \u2014 we feel \u2014\n\n\u2003But the shadow of whose brow\n\n\u2003What spirit shall reveal?\n\n\u2003Tho' the beings whom thy Nesace,\n\n\u2003Thy messenger hath known\n\n\u2003Have dream'd for thy Infinity\n\n\u2003A model of their own \u2014\n\n\u2003Thy will is done, O God!\n\n\u2003The star hath ridden high\n\n\u2003Thro' many a tempest, but she rode\n\n\u2003Beneath thy burning eye;\n\n\u2003And here, in thought, to thee \u2014\n\n\u2003In thought that can alone\n\n\u2003Ascend thy empire and so be\n\n\u2003A partner of thy throne \u2014\n\n\u2003By winged Fantasy,\n\n\u2003My embassy is given,\n\n\u2003Till secrecy shall knowledge be\n\n\u2003In the environs of Heaven.\"\n\n\u2003She ceas'd \u2014 and buried then her burning cheek\n\n\u2003Abash'd, amid the lilies there, to seek\n\n\u2003A shelter from the fervor of His eye;\n\n\u2003For the stars trembled at the Deity.\n\n\u2003She stirr'd not \u2014 breath'd not \u2014 for a voice was there\n\n\u2003How solemnly pervading the calm air!\n\n\u2003A sound of silence on the startled ear\n\n\u2003Which dreamy poets name \"the music of the sphere.\"\n\n\u2003Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call\n\n\u2003\"Silence\"\u2014 which is the merest word of all.\n\n\u2003All Nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things\n\n\u2003Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings \u2014\n\n\u2003But ah! not so when, thus, in realms on high\n\n\u2003The eternal voice of God is passing by,\n\n\u2003And the red winds are withering in the sky:\u2014\n\n\u2003\"What tho 'in worlds which sightless cycles run,\n\n\u2003Linked to a little system, and one sun \u2014\n\n\u2003Where all my love is folly and the crowd\n\n\u2003Still think my terrors but the thunder cloud,\n\n\u2003The storm, the earthquake, and the ocean-wrath \u2014\n\n\u2003(Ah! will they cross me in my angrier path?)\n\n\u2003What tho' in worlds which own a single sun\n\n\u2003The sands of Time grow dimmer as they run,\n\n\u2003Yet thine is my resplendency, so given\n\n\u2003To bear my secrets thro' the upper Heaven!\n\n\u2003Leave tenantless thy crystal home, and fly,\n\n\u2003With all thy train, athwart the moony sky \u2014\n\n\u2003Apart \u2014 like fire-flies in Sicilian night,\n\n\u2003And wing to other worlds another light!\n\n\u2003Divulge the secrets of thy embassy\n\n\u2003To the proud orbs that twinkle \u2014 and so be\n\n\u2003To ev'ry heart a barrier and a ban\n\n\u2003Lest the stars totter in the guilt of man!\"\n\n\u2003Up rose the maiden in the yellow night,\n\n\u2003The single-mooned eve! \u2014 on Earth we plight\n\n\u2003Our faith to one love \u2014 and one moon adore \u2014\n\n\u2003The birth-place of young Beauty had no more.\n\n\u2003As sprang that yellow star from downy hours\n\n\u2003Up rose the maiden from her shrine of flowers,\n\n\u2003And bent o'er sheeny mountains and dim plain\n\n\u2003Her way, but left not yet her Therasaean reign." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "\u2003High on a mountain of enamell'd head \u2014\n\n\u2003Such as the drowsy shepherd on his bed\n\n\u2003Of giant pasturage lying at his ease,\n\n\u2003Raising his heavy eyelid, starts and sees\n\n\u2003With many a mutter'd \"hope to be forgiven\"\n\n\u2003What time the moon is quadrated in Heaven \u2014\n\n\u2003Of rosy head that, towering far away\n\n\u2003Into the sunlit ether, caught the ray\n\n\u2003Of sunken suns at eve \u2014 at noon of night,\n\n\u2003While the moon danc'd with the fair stranger light \u2014\n\n\u2003Uprear'd upon such height arose a pile\n\n\u2003Of gorgeous columns on th' unburthen'd air,\n\n\u2003Flashing from Parian marble that twin smile\n\n\u2003Far down upon the wave that sparkled there,\n\n\u2003And nursled the young mountain in its lair.\n\n\u2003Of molten stars their pavement, such as fall\n\n\u2003Thro' the ebon air, besilvering the pall\n\n\u2003Of their own dissolution, while they die \u2014\n\n\u2003Adorning then the dwellings of the sky.\n\n\u2003A dome, by linked light from Heaven let down,\n\n\u2003Sat gently on these columns as a crown \u2014\n\n\u2003A window of one circular diamond, there,\n\n\u2003Look'd out above into the purple air,\n\n\u2003And rays from God shot down that meteor chain\n\n\u2003And hallow'd all the beauty twice again,\n\n\u2003Save, when, between th' empyrean and that ring,\n\n\u2003Some eager spirit Flapp'd his dusky wing.\n\n\u2003But on the pillars Seraph eyes have seen\n\n\u2003The dimness of this world: that greyish green\n\n\u2003That Nature loves the best Beauty's grave\n\n\u2003Lurk'd in each cornice, round each architrave \u2014\n\n\u2003And every sculptur'd cherub thereabout\n\n\u2003That from his marble dwelling peered out,\n\n\u2003Seem'd earthly in the shadow of his niche \u2014\n\n\u2003Achaian statues in a world so rich!\n\n\u2003Friezes from Tadmor and Persepolis \u2014\n\n\u2003From Balbec, and the stilly, clear abyss\n\n\u2003Of beautiful Gomorrah! O, the wave\n\n\u2003Is now upon thee \u2014 but too late to save!\n\n\u2003Sound loves to revel in a summer night:\n\n\u2003Witness the murmur of the grey twilight\n\n\u2003That stole upon the ear, in Eyraco,\n\n\u2003Of many a wild star-gazer long ago \u2014\n\n\u2003That stealeth ever on the ear of him\n\n\u2003Who, musing, gazeth on the distance dim,\n\n\u2003And sees the darkness coming as a cloud \u2014\n\n\u2003Is not its form \u2014 its voice \u2014 most palpable and loud?\n\n\u2003But what is this? \u2014 it cometh, and it brings\n\n\u2003A music with it \u2014'tis the rush of wings \u2014\n\n\u2003A pause \u2014 and then a sweeping, falling strain\n\n\u2003And Nesace is in her halls again.\n\n\u2003From the wild energy of wanton haste\n\n\u2003Her cheeks were flushing, and her lips apart;\n\n\u2003And zone that clung around her gentle waist\n\n\u2003Had burst beneath the heaving of her heart.\n\n\u2003Within the centre of that hall to breathe,\n\n\u2003She paused and panted, Zanthe! all beneath,\n\n\u2003The fairy light that kiss'd her golden hair\n\n\u2003And long'd to rest, yet could but sparkle there.\n\n\u2003Young flowers were whispering in melody\n\n\u2003To happy flowers that night \u2014 and tree to tree;\n\n\u2003Fountains were gushing music as they fell\n\n\u2003In many a star-lit grove, or moon-lit dell;\n\n\u2003Yet silence came upon material things \u2014\n\n\u2003Fair flowers, bright waterfalls and angel wings \u2014\n\n\u2003And sound alone that from the spirit sprang\n\n\u2003Bore burthen to the charm the maiden sang:\n\n\u2003\"'Neath the blue-bell or streamer \u2014\n\n\u2003Or tufted wild spray\n\n\u2003That keeps, from the dreamer,\n\n\u2003The moonbeam away \u2014\n\n\u2003Bright beings! that ponder,\n\n\u2003With half closing eyes,\n\n\u2003On the stars which your wonder\n\n\u2003Hath drawn from the skies,\n\n\u2003Till they glance thro' the shade, and\n\n\u2003Come down to your brow\n\n\u2003Like \u2014 eyes of the maiden\n\n\u2003Who calls on you now \u2014\n\n\u2003Arise! from your dreaming\n\n\u2003In violet bowers,\n\n\u2003To duty beseeming\n\n\u2003These star-litten hours \u2014\n\n\u2003And shake from your tresses\n\n\u2003Encumber'd with dew\n\n\u2003The breath of those kisses\n\n\u2003That cumber them too \u2014\n\n\u2003(O! how, without you, Love!\n\n\u2003Could angels be blest?)\n\n\u2003Those kisses of true Love\n\n\u2003That lull'd ye to rest!\n\n\u2003Up! \u2014 shake from your wing\n\n\u2003Each hindering thing:\n\n\u2003The dew of the night \u2014\n\n\u2003It would weigh down your flight\n\n\u2003And true love caresses \u2014\n\n\u2003O, leave them apart!\n\n\u2003They are light on the tresses,\n\n\u2003But lead on the heart.\n\n\u2003Ligeia! Ligeia!\n\n\u2003My beautiful one!\n\n\u2003Whose harshest idea\n\n\u2003Will to melody run,\n\n\u2003O! is it thy will\n\n\u2003On the breezes to toss?\n\n\u2003Or, capriciously still,\n\n\u2003Like the lone Albatros,\n\n\u2003Incumbent on night\n\n\u2003(As she on the air)\n\n\u2003To keep watch with delight\n\n\u2003On the harmony there?\n\n\u2003Ligeia! wherever\n\n\u2003Thy image may be,\n\n\u2003No magic shall sever\n\n\u2003Thy music from thee.\n\n\u2003Thou hast bound many eyes\n\n\u2003In a dreamy sleep \u2014\n\n\u2003But the strains still arise\n\n\u2003Which thy vigilance keep \u2014\n\n\u2003The sound of the rain,\n\n\u2003Which leaps down to the flower \u2014\n\n\u2003And dances again\n\n\u2003In the rhythm of the shower \u2014\n\n\u2003The murmur that springs\n\n\u2003From the growing of grass\n\n\u2003Are the music of things \u2014\n\n\u2003But are modell'd, alas! \u2014\n\n\u2003Away, then, my dearest,\n\n\u2003Oh! hie thee away\n\n\u2003To the springs that lie clearest\n\n\u2003Beneath the moon-ray \u2014\n\n\u2003To lone lake that smiles,\n\n\u2003In its dream of deep rest,\n\n\u2003At the many star-isles\n\n\u2003That enjewel its breast \u2014\n\n\u2003Where wild flowers, creeping,\n\n\u2003Have mingled their shade,\n\n\u2003On its margin is sleeping\n\n\u2003Full many a maid \u2014\n\n\u2003Some have left the cool glade, and\n\n\u2003Have slept with the bee \u2014\n\n\u2003Arouse them, my maiden,\n\n\u2003On moorland and lea \u2014\n\n\u2003Go! breathe on their slumber,\n\n\u2003All softly in ear,\n\n\u2003Thy musical number\n\n\u2003They slumbered to hear \u2014\n\n\u2003For what can awaken\n\n\u2003An angel so soon,\n\n\u2003Whose sleep hath been taken\n\n\u2003Beneath the cold moon,\n\n\u2003As the spell which no slumber\n\n\u2003Of witchery may test,\n\n\u2003The rhythmical number\n\n\u2003Which lull'd him to rest?\"\n\n\u2003Spirits in wing, and angels to the view,\n\n\u2003A thousand seraphs burst th' Empyrean thro',\n\n\u2003Young dreams still hovering on their drowsy flight \u2014\n\n\u2003Seraphs in all but \"Knowledge,\" the keen light\n\n\u2003That fell, refracted, thro' thy bounds, afar,\n\n\u2003O Death! from eye of God upon that star:\n\n\u2003Sweet was that error \u2014 sweeter still that death \u2014\n\n\u2003Sweet was that error \u2014 even with us the breath\n\n\u2003Of Science dims the mirror of our joy \u2014\n\n\u2003To them 'twere the Simoom, and would destroy \u2014\n\n\u2003For what (to them) availeth it to know\n\n\u2003That Truth is Falsehood \u2014 or that Bliss is Woe?\n\n\u2003Sweet was their death \u2014 with them to die was rife\n\n\u2003With the last ecstasy of satiate life \u2014\n\n\u2003Beyond that death no immortality \u2014\n\n\u2003But sleep that pondereth and is not \"to be'! \u2014\n\n\u2003And there \u2014 oh! may my weary spirit dwell \u2014\n\n\u2003Apart from Heaven's Eternity \u2014 and yet how far from Hell!\n\n\u2003What guilty spirit, in what shrubbery dim,\n\n\u2003Heard not the stirring summons of that hymn?\n\n\u2003But two: they fell: for Heaven no grace imparts\n\n\u2003To those who hear not for their beating hearts.\n\n\u2003A maiden-angel and her seraph-lover \u2014\n\n\u2003O! where (and ye may seek the wide skies over)\n\n\u2003Was Love, the blind, near sober Duty known?\n\n\u2003Unguided Love hath fallen \u2014'mid \"tears of perfect moan.\"\n\n\u2003He was a goodly spirit \u2014 he who fell:\n\n\u2003A wanderer by moss-y-mantled well \u2014\n\n\u2003A gazer on the lights that shine above \u2014\n\n\u2003A dreamer in the moonbeam by his love:\n\n\u2003What wonder? for each star is eye-like there,\n\n\u2003And looks so sweetly down on Beauty's hair \u2014\n\n\u2003And they, and ev'ry mossy spring were holy\n\n\u2003To his love-haunted heart and melancholy.\n\n\u2003The night had found (to him a night of woe)\n\n\u2003Upon a mountain crag, young Angelo \u2014\n\n\u2003Beetling it bends athwart the solemn sky,\n\n\u2003And scowls on starry worlds that down beneath it lie.\n\n\u2003Here sat he with his love \u2014 his dark eye bent\n\n\u2003With eagle gaze along the firmament:\n\n\u2003Now turn'd it upon her \u2014 but ever then\n\n\u2003It trembled to the orb of EARTH again.\n\n\u2003\"Ianthe, dearest, see \u2014 how dim that ray!\n\n\u2003How lovely 'tis to look so far away!\n\n\u2003She seem'd not thus upon that autumn eve\n\n\u2003I left her gorgeous halls \u2014 nor mourn'd to leave.\n\n\u2003That eve \u2014 that eve \u2014 I should remember well \u2014\n\n\u2003The sun-ray dropp'd in Lemnos, with a spell\n\n\u2003On th' arabesque carving of a gilded hall\n\n\u2003Wherein I sate, and on the draperied wall \u2014\n\n\u2003And on my eyelids \u2014 O the heavy light!\n\n\u2003How drowsily it weigh'd them into night!\n\n\u2003On flowers, before, and mist, and love they ran\n\n\u2003With Persian Saadi in his Gulistan:\n\n\u2003But O that light! \u2014 I slumber'd \u2014 Death, the while,\n\n\u2003Stole o'er my senses in that lovely isle\n\n\u2003So softly that no single silken hair\n\n\u2003Awoke that slept \u2014 or knew that he was there.\n\n\u2003\"The last spot of Earth's orb I trod upon\n\n\u2003Was a proud temple call'd the Parthenon;\n\n\u2003More beauty clung around her column'd wall\n\n\u2003Than ev'n thy glowing bosom beats withal,\n\n\u2003And when old Time my wing did disenthral\n\n\u2003Thence sprang I\u2014 as the eagle from his tower,\n\n\u2003And years I left behind me in an hour.\n\n\u2003What time upon her airy bounds I hung,\n\n\u2003One half the garden of her globe was flung\n\n\u2003Unrolling as a chart unto my view \u2014\n\n\u2003Tenantless cities of the desert too!\n\n\u2003Ianthe, beauty crowded on me then,\n\n\u2003And half I wish'd to be again of men.\"\n\n\u2003\"My Angelo! and why of them to be?\n\n\u2003A brighter dwelling-place is here for thee \u2014\n\n\u2003And greener fields than in yon world above,\n\n\u2003And woman's loveliness \u2014 and passionate love.\"\n\n\u2003\"But, list, Ianthe! when the air so soft\n\n\u2003Fail'd, as my pennon'd spirit leapt aloft,\n\n\u2003Perhaps my brain grew dizzy \u2014 but the world\n\n\u2003I left so late was into chaos hurl'd \u2014\n\n\u2003Sprang from her station, on the winds apart.\n\n\u2003And roll'd, a flame, the fiery Heaven athwart.\n\n\u2003Methought, my sweet one, then I ceased to soar\n\n\u2003And fell \u2014 not swiftly as I rose before,\n\n\u2003But with a downward, tremulous motion thro'\n\n\u2003Light, brazen rays, this golden star unto!\n\n\u2003Nor long the measure of my falling hours,\n\n\u2003For nearest of all stars was thine to ours \u2014\n\n\u2003Dread star! that came, amid a night of mirth,\n\n\u2003A red Daedalion on the timid Earth.\"\n\n\u2003\"We came \u2014 and to thy Earth \u2014 but not to us\n\n\u2003Be given our lady's bidding to discuss:\n\n\u2003We came, my love; around, above, below,\n\n\u2003Gay fire-fly of the night we come and go,\n\n\u2003Nor ask a reason save the angel-nod\n\n\u2003She grants to us, as granted by her God \u2014\n\n\u2003But, Angelo, than thine grey Time unfurl'd\n\n\u2003Never his fairy wing O'er fairier world!\n\n\u2003Dim was its little disk, and angel eyes\n\n\u2003Alone could see the phantom in the skies,\n\n\u2003When first Al Aaraaf knew her course to be\n\n\u2003Headlong thitherward o'er the starry sea \u2014\n\n\u2003But when its glory swell'd upon the sky,\n\n\u2003As glowing Beauty's bust beneath man's eye,\n\n\u2003We paused before the heritage of men,\n\n\u2003And thy star trembled \u2014 as doth Beauty then!\"\n\n\u2003Thus, in discourse, the lovers whiled away\n\n\u2003The night that waned and waned and brought no day.\n\n\u2003They fell: for Heaven to them no hope imparts\n\n\u2003Who hear not for the beating of their hearts.\n\n[ Alone ]\n\n\"Alone\" is a 22-line poem, originally written in 1829 and left untitled and unpublished during his lifetime. The original manuscript was signed \"E. A. Poe\" and dated March 17, 1829. In February of that year, Poe's foster mother Francis Allan had died. In September 1875, the poem, which had been in the possession of a family in Baltimore, was published with its title in Scribner's Monthly. The editor, E. L. Didier, also reproduced a facsimile of the manuscript, though he admitted he added the date himself. The poem is now often included in anthologies.\n\n\"Alone\" is often interpreted as autobiographical, expressing the author's feelings of isolation and inner torment. Poet Daniel Hoffman believed \"Alone\" was evidence that \"Poe really was a haunted man.\" The poem, however, is an introspective about Poe's youth, written when he was only 20 years old.\n\n\u2003From childhood's hour I have not been As others were; I have not seen\n\n\u2003As others saw; I could not bring\n\n\u2003My passions from a common spring.\n\n\u2003From the same source I have not taken\n\n\u2003My sorrow; I could not awaken\n\n\u2003My heart to joy at the same tone;\n\n\u2003And all I loved, I loved alone.\n\n\u2003Then \u2014 in my childhood, in the dawn\n\n\u2003Of a most stormy life \u2014 was drawn\n\n\u2003From every depth of good and ill\n\n\u2003The mystery which binds me still:\n\n\u2003From the torrent, or the fountain,\n\n\u2003From the red cliff of the mountain,\n\n\u2003From the sun that round me rolled\n\n\u2003In its autumn tint of gold,\n\n\u2003From the lightning in the sky\n\n\u2003As it passed me flying by,\n\n\u2003From the thunder and the storm,\n\n\u2003And the cloud that took the form\n\n\u2003(When the rest of Heaven was blue)\n\n\u2003Of a demon in my view.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ An Acrostic by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Elizabeth it is in vain you say\n\n\u2003\"Love not\"\u2014 thou sayest it in so sweet a way:\n\n\u2003In vain those words from thee or L. E. L.\n\n\u2003Zantippe's talents had enforced so well:\n\n\u2003Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,\n\n\u2003Breathe it less gently forth \u2014 and veil thine eyes.\n\n\u2003Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried\n\n\u2003To cure his love \u2014 was cured of all beside \u2014\n\n\u2003His folly \u2014 pride \u2014 and passion \u2014 for he died.\n\n\u2042[ Elizabeth ]\n\n\u2003Elizabeth, it surely is most fit\n\n\u2003[Logic and common usage so commanding]\n\n\u2003In thy own book that first thy name be writ,\n\n\u2003Zeno and other sages notwithstanding;\n\n\u2003And I have other reasons for so doing\n\n\u2003Besides my innate love of contradiction;\n\n\u2003Each poet \u2014 if a poet \u2014 in pursuing\n\n\u2003The muses thro' their bowers of\n\n\u2003Truth or Fiction, Has studied very little of his part,\n\n\u2003Read nothing, written less \u2014 in short's a fool\n\n\u2003Endued with neither soul, nor sense, nor art,\n\n\u2003Being ignorant of one important rule,\n\n\u2003Employed in even the theses of the school \u2014\n\n\u2003Called \u2014 I forget the heathenish Greek name\n\n\u2003[Called anything, its meaning is the same]\n\n\u2003\"Always write first things uppermost in the heart.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Fairy-Land by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Dim vales \u2014 and shadowy floods \u2014\n\n\u2003And cloudy-looking woods,\n\n\u2003Whose forms we can't discover\n\n\u2003For the tears that drip all over!\n\n\u2003Huge moons there wax and wane \u2014\n\n\u2003Again \u2014 again \u2014 again \u2014\n\n\u2003Every moment of the night \u2014\n\n\u2003Forever changing places \u2014\n\n\u2003And they put out the star-light\n\n\u2003With the breath from their pale faces.\n\n\u2003About twelve by the moon-dial,\n\n\u2003One more filmy than the rest\n\n\u2003(A kind which, upon trial,\n\n\u2003They have found to be the best)\n\n\u2003Comes down \u2014 still down \u2014 and down,\n\n\u2003With its centre on the crown\n\n\u2003Of a mountain's eminence,\n\n\u2003While its wide circumference\n\n\u2003In easy drapery falls\n\n\u2003Over hamlets, over halls,\n\n\u2003Wherever they may be \u2014\n\n\u2003O'er the strange woods \u2014 o'er the sea \u2014\n\n\u2003Over spirits on the wing \u2014\n\n\u2003Over every drowsy thing \u2014\n\n\u2003And buries them up quite\n\n\u2003In a labyrinth of light \u2014\n\n\u2003And then, how deep! \u2014 O, deep!\n\n\u2003Is the passion of their sleep.\n\n\u2003In the morning they arise,\n\n\u2003And their moony covering\n\n\u2003Is soaring in the skies,\n\n\u2003With the tempests as they toss,\n\n\u2003Like \u2014 almost anything \u2014\n\n\u2003Or a yellow Albatross.\n\n\u2003They use that moon no more\n\n\u2003For the same end as before \u2014\n\n\u2003Videlicet, a tent \u2014\n\n\u2003Which I think extravagant:\n\n\u2003Its atomies, however,\n\n\u2003Into a shower dissever,\n\n\u2003Of which those butterflies\n\n\u2003Of Earth, who seek the skies,\n\n\u2003And so come down again,\n\n\u2003(Never-contented things!)\n\n\u2003Have brought a specimen\n\n\u2003Upon their quivering wings.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Romance by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Among the green leaves as they shake\n\n\u2003Far down within some shadowy lake,\n\n\u2003To me a painted paroquet\n\n\u2003Hath been \u2014 a most familiar bird \u2014\n\n\u2003Taught me my alphabet to say \u2014\n\n\u2003To lisp my very earliest word\n\n\u2003While in the wild wood I did lie,\n\n\u2003A child \u2014 with a most knowing eye.\n\n\u2003Of late, eternal Condor years\n\n\u2003So shake the very Heaven on high\n\n\u2003With tumult as they thunder by,\n\n\u2003I have no time for idle cares\n\n\u2003Through gazing on the unquiet sky.\n\n\u2003And when an hour with calmer wings Its down upon my spirit flings \u2014\n\n\u2003That little time with lyre and rhyme\n\n\u2003To while away \u2014 forbidden things!\n\n\u2003My heart would feel to be a crime\n\n\u2003Unless it trembled with the strings.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Sonnet \u2014 To Science by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!\n\n\u2003Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.\n\n\u2003Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,\n\n\u2003Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?\n\n\u2003How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,\n\n\u2003Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering\n\n\u2003To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,\n\n\u2003Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?\n\n\u2003Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?\n\n\u2003And driven the Hamadryad from the wood\n\n\u2003To seek a shelter in some happier star?\n\n\u2003Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,\n\n\u2003The Elfin from the green grass, and from me\n\n\u2003The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To \u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The bowers whereat, in dreams, I see\n\n\u2003The wantonest singing birds,\n\n\u2003Are lips \u2014 and all thy melody\n\n\u2003Of lip-begotten words \u2014\n\n\u2003Thine eyes, in Heaven of heart enshrined,\n\n\u2003Then desolately fall,\n\n\u2003O God! on my funereal mind\n\n\u2003Like starlight on a pall \u2014\n\n\u2003Thy heart \u2014 thy heart! \u2014 I wake and sigh,\n\n\u2003And sleep to dream till day\n\n\u2003Of the truth that gold can never buy \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the baubles that it may.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To \u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Not long ago, the writer of these lines,\n\n\u2003In the mad pride of intellectuality,\n\n\u2003Maintained \"the power of words\"\u2014 denied that ever\n\n\u2003A thought arose within the human brain\n\n\u2003Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:\n\n\u2003And now, as if in mockery of that boast,\n\n\u2003Two words \u2014 two foreign soft dissyllables \u2014\n\n\u2003Italian tones, made only to be murmured\n\n\u2003By angels dreaming in the moonlit \"dew\n\n\u2003That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,\"\n\n\u2003Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,\n\n\u2003Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,\n\n\u2003Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions\n\n\u2003Than even seraph harper, Israfel,\n\n\u2003(Who has \"the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,\")\n\n\u2003Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.\n\n\u2003The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.\n\n\u2003With thy dear name as text, though bidden by thee,\n\n\u2003I cannot write \u2014 I cannot speak or think \u2014\n\n\u2003Alas, I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling,\n\n\u2003This standing motionless upon the golden\n\n\u2003Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams.\n\n\u2003Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,\n\n\u2003And thrilling as I see, upon the right,\n\n\u2003Upon the left, and all the way along,\n\n\u2003Amid empurpled vapors, far away\n\n\u2003To where the prospect terminates \u2014 thee only.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To Isaac Lea by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003It was my choice or chance or curse\n\n\u2003To adopt the cause for better or worse\n\n\u2003And with my worldly goods & wit\n\n\u2003And soul & body worship it \u2014\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Paean by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003How shall the burial rite be read?\n\n\u2003The solemn song be sung?\n\n\u2003The requiem for the loveliest dead,\n\n\u2003That ever died so young?\n\n\u2003Her friends are gazing on her,\n\n\u2003And on her gaudy bier,\n\n\u2003And weep! \u2014 oh! to dishonor\n\n\u2003Dead beauty with a tear!\n\n\u2003They loved her for her wealth \u2014\n\n\u2003And they hated her for her pride \u2014\n\n\u2003But she grew in feeble health,\n\n\u2003And they love her \u2014 that she died.\n\n\u2003They tell me (while they speak\n\n\u2003Of her \"costly broider'd pall\")\n\n\u2003That my voice is growing weak \u2014\n\n\u2003That I should not sing at all \u2014\n\n\u2003Or that my tone should be\n\n\u2003Tun'd to such solemn song\n\n\u2003So mournfully \u2014 so mournfully,\n\n\u2003That the dead may feel no wrong.\n\n\u2003But she is gone above,\n\n\u2003With young Hope at her side,\n\n\u2003And I am drunk with love\n\n\u2003Of the dead, who is my bride. \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the dead \u2014 dead who lies\n\n\u2003All perfum'd there,\n\n\u2003With the death upon her eyes,\n\n\u2003And the life upon her hair.\n\n\u2003Thus on the coffin loud and long\n\n\u2003I strike \u2014 the murmur sent\n\n\u2003Through the grey chambers to my song,\n\n\u2003Shall be the accompaniment.\n\n\u2003Thou died'st in thy life's June \u2014\n\n\u2003But thou did'st not die too fair:\n\n\u2003Thou did'st not die too soon,\n\n\u2003Nor with too calm an air.\n\n\u2003From more than fiends on earth,\n\n\u2003Thy life and love are riven,\n\n\u2003To join the untainted mirth\n\n\u2003Of more than thrones in heaven \u2014\n\n\u2003Therefore, to thee this night\n\n\u2003I will no requiem raise,\n\n\u2003But waft thee on thy flight,\n\n\u2003With a P\u00e6an of old days.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Israfel by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003In Heaven a spirit doth dwell\n\n\u2003\"Whose heart-strings are a lute\";\n\n\u2003None sing so wildly well\n\n\u2003As the angel Israfel,\n\n\u2003And the giddy stars (so legends tell),\n\n\u2003Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell\n\n\u2003Of his voice, all mute.\n\n\u2003Tottering above\n\n\u2003In her highest noon,\n\n\u2003The enamored moon\n\n\u2003Blushes with love,\n\n\u2003While, to listen, the red levin\n\n\u2003(With the rapid Pleiads, even,\n\n\u2003Which were seven,)\n\n\u2003Pauses in Heaven.\n\n\u2003And they say (the starry choir\n\n\u2003And the other listening things)\n\n\u2003That Israfeli's fire\n\n\u2003Is owing to that lyre\n\n\u2003By which he sits and sings \u2014\n\n\u2003The trembling living wire\n\n\u2003Of those unusual strings.\n\n\u2003But the skies that angel trod,\n\n\u2003Where deep thoughts are a duty \u2014\n\n\u2003Where Love's a grown-up God \u2014\n\n\u2003Where the Houri glances are\n\n\u2003Imbued with all the beauty\n\n\u2003Which we worship in a star.\n\n\u2003Therefore thou art not wrong,\n\n\u2003Israfeli, who despisest\n\n\u2003An unimpassioned song;\n\n\u2003To thee the laurels belong,\n\n\u2003Best bard, because the wisest!\n\n\u2003Merrily live, and long!\n\n\u2003The ecstasies above\n\n\u2003With thy burning measures suit \u2014\n\n\u2003Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,\n\n\u2003With the fervor of thy lute \u2014\n\n\u2003Well may the stars be mute!\n\n\u2003Yes, Heaven is thine; but this\n\n\u2003Is a world of sweets and sours;\n\n\u2003Our flowers are merely \u2014 flowers,\n\n\u2003And the shadow of thy perfect bliss\n\n\u2003Is the sunshine of ours.\n\n\u2003If I could dwell\n\n\u2003Where Israfel\n\n\u2003Hath dwelt, and he where I,\n\n\u2003He might not sing so wildly well\n\n\u2003A mortal melody,\n\n\u2003While a bolder note than this might swell\n\n\u2003From my lyre within the sky.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The City in the Sea by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Lo! Death has reared himself a throne\n\n\u2003In a strange city lying alone\n\n\u2003Far down within the dim West,\n\n\u2003Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best\n\n\u2003Have gone to their eternal rest.\n\n\u2003There shrines and palaces and towers\n\n\u2003(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)\n\n\u2003Resemble nothing that is ours.\n\n\u2003Around, by lifting winds forgot,\n\n\u2003Resignedly beneath the sky\n\n\u2003The melancholy waters he.\n\n\u2003No rays from the holy heaven come down\n\n\u2003On the long night-time of that town;\n\n\u2003But light from out the lurid sea\n\n\u2003Streams up the turrets silently \u2014\n\n\u2003Gleams up the pinnacles far and free \u2014\n\n\u2003Up domes \u2014 up spires \u2014 up kingly halls \u2014\n\n\u2003Up fanes \u2014 up Babylon-like walls \u2014\n\n\u2003Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers\n\n\u2003Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers \u2014\n\n\u2003Up many and many a marvellous shrine\n\n\u2003Whose wreathed friezes intertwine\n\n\u2003The viol, the violet, and the vine.\n\n\u2003Resignedly beneath the sky\n\n\u2003The melancholy waters lie.\n\n\u2003So blend the turrets and shadows there\n\n\u2003That all seem pendulous in air,\n\n\u2003While from a proud tower in the town\n\n\u2003Death looks gigantically down.\n\n\u2003There open fanes and gaping graves\n\n\u2003Yawn level with the luminous waves;\n\n\u2003But not the riches there that lie\n\n\u2003In each idol's diamond eye \u2014\n\n\u2003Not the gaily-jewelled dead\n\n\u2003Tempt the waters from their bed;\n\n\u2003For no ripples curl, alas!\n\n\u2003Along that wilderness of glass \u2014\n\n\u2003No swellings tell that winds may be\n\n\u2003Upon some far-off happier sea \u2014\n\n\u2003No heavings hint that winds have been\n\n\u2003On seas less hideously serene.\n\n\u2003But lo, a stir is in the air!\n\n\u2003The wave \u2014 there is a movement there!\n\n\u2003As if the towers had thrust aside,\n\n\u2003In slightly sinking, the dull tide \u2014\n\n\u2003As if their tops had feebly given\n\n\u2003A void within the filmy Heaven.\n\n\u2003The waves have now a redder glow \u2014\n\n\u2003The hours are breathing faint and low \u2014\n\n\u2003And when, amid no earthly moans,\n\n\u2003Down, down that town shall settle hence,\n\n\u2003Hell, rising from a thousand thrones,\n\n\u2003Shall do it reverence.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003At midnight, in the month of June,\n\n\u2003I stand beneath the mystic moon.\n\n\u2003An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,\n\n\u2003Exhales from out her golden rim,\n\n\u2003And, softly dripping, drop by drop,\n\n\u2003Upon the quiet mountain top,\n\n\u2003Steals drowsily and musically\n\n\u2003Into the universal valley.\n\n\u2003The rosemary nods upon the grave;\n\n\u2003The lily lolls upon the wave;\n\n\u2003Wrapping the fog about its breast,\n\n\u2003The ruin molders into rest;\n\n\u2003Looking like Lethe, see! the lake\n\n\u2003A conscious slumber seems to take,\n\n\u2003And would not, for the world, awake.\n\n\u2003All Beauty sleeps! \u2014 and lo! where lies\n\n\u2003Irene, with her Destinies!\n\n\u2003O, lady bright! can it be right \u2014\n\n\u2003This window open to the night?\n\n\u2003The wanton airs, from the tree-top,\n\n\u2003Laughingly through the lattice drop \u2014\n\n\u2003The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,\n\n\u2003Flit through thy chamber in and out,\n\n\u2003And wave the curtain canopy\n\n\u2003So fitfully \u2014 so fearfully \u2014\n\n\u2003Above the closed and fringed lid\n\n\u2003'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid,\n\n\u2003That, o'er the floor and down the wall,\n\n\u2003Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!\n\n\u2003Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?\n\n\u2003Why and what art thou dreaming here?\n\n\u2003Sure thou art come O'er far-off seas,\n\n\u2003A wonder to these garden trees!\n\n\u2003Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress,\n\n\u2003Strange, above all, thy length of tress,\n\n\u2003And this all solemn silentness!\n\n\u2003The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,\n\n\u2003Which is enduring, so be deep!\n\n\u2003Heaven have her in its sacred keep!\n\n\u2003This chamber changed for one more holy,\n\n\u2003This bed for one more melancholy,\n\n\u2003I pray to God that she may lie\n\n\u2003For ever with unopened eye,\n\n\u2003While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!\n\n\u2003My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep\n\n\u2003As it is lasting, so be deep!\n\n\u2003Soft may the worms about her creep!\n\n\u2003Far in the forest, dim and old,\n\n\u2003For her may some tall vault unfold \u2014\n\n\u2003Some vault that oft has flung its black\n\n\u2003And winged panels fluttering back,\n\n\u2003Triumphant, o'er the crested palls,\n\n\u2003Of her grand family funerals \u2014\n\n\u2003Some sepulchre, remote, alone,\n\n\u2003Against whose portal she hath thrown,\n\n\u2003In childhood, many an idle stone \u2014\n\n\u2003Some tomb from out whose sounding door\n\n\u2003She ne'er shall force an echo more,\n\n\u2003Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!\n\n\u2003It was the dead who groaned within.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Valley of Unrest by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Once it smiled a silent dell\n\n\u2003Where the people did not dwell;\n\n\u2003They had gone unto the wars,\n\n\u2003Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,\n\n\u2003Nightly, from their azure towers,\n\n\u2003To keep watch above the flowers,\n\n\u2003In the midst of which all day\n\n\u2003The red sunlight lazily lay.\n\n\u2003Now each visitor shall confess\n\n\u2003The sad valley's restlessness.\n\n\u2003Nothing there is motionless \u2014\n\n\u2003Nothing save the airs that brood\n\n\u2003Over the magic solitude.\n\n\u2003Ah, by no wind are stirred those trees\n\n\u2003That palpitate like the chill seas\n\n\u2003Around the misty Hebrides!\n\n\u2003Ah, by no wind those clouds are driven\n\n\u2003That rustle through the unquiet\n\n\u2003Heaven Uneasily, from morn till even,\n\n\u2003Over the violets there that lie\n\n\u2003In myriad types of the human eye \u2014\n\n\u2003Over the lilies there that wave\n\n\u2003And weep above a nameless grave!\n\n\u2003They wave:\u2014 from out their fragrant tops\n\n\u2003Eternal dews come down in drops.\n\n\u2003They weep:\u2014 from off their delicate stems\n\n\u2003Perennial tears descend in gems.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Helen, thy beauty is to me\n\n\u2003Like those Nicean barks of yore,\n\n\u2003That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,\n\n\u2003The weary, wayworn wanderer bore\n\n\u2003To his own native shore.\n\n\u2003On desperate seas long wont to roam,\n\n\u2003Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,\n\n\u2003Thy Naiad airs have brought me home\n\n\u2003To the glory that was Greece\n\n\u2003And the grandeur that was Rome.\n\n\u2003Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche\n\n\u2003How statue-like I see thee stand,\n\n\u2003The agate lamp within thy hand!\n\n\u2003Ah, Psyche, from the regions which\n\n\u2003Are Holy Land!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Enigma by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The noblest name in Allegory's page,\n\n\u2003The hand that traced inexorable rage;\n\n\u2003A pleasing moralist whose page refined,\n\n\u2003Displays the deepest knowledge of the mind;\n\n\u2003A tender poet of a foreign tongue,\n\n\u2003(Indited in the language that he sung.)\n\n\u2003A bard of brilliant but unlicensed page\n\n\u2003At once the shame and glory of our age,\n\n\u2003The prince of harmony and stirling sense,\n\n\u2003The ancient dramatist of eminence,\n\n\u2003The bard that paints imagination's powers,\n\n\u2003And him whose song revives departed hours,\n\n\u2003Once more an ancient tragic bard recall,\n\n\u2003In boldness of design surpassing all.\n\n\u2003These names when rightly read, a name known\n\n\u2003Which gathers all their glories in its own.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Fanny by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The dying swan by northern lakes\n\n\u2003Sing's its wild death song, sweet and clear,\n\n\u2003nd as the solemn music breaks\n\n\u2003O'er hill and glen dissolves in air;\n\n\u2003Thus musical thy soft voice came,\n\n\u2003Thus trembled on thy tongue my name.\n\n\u2003Like sunburst through the ebon cloud,\n\n\u2003 Which veils the solemn midnight sky,\n\n\u2003Piercing cold evening's sable shroud,\n\n\u2003hus came the first glance of that eye;\n\n\u2003But like the adamantine rock,\n\n\u2003My spirit met and braved the shock.\n\n\u2003Let memory the boy recall\n\n\u2003Who laid his heart upon thy shrine,\n\n\u2003When far away his footsteps fall,\n\n\u2003Think that he deem'd thy charms divine;\n\n\u2003A victim on love's alter slain,\n\n\u2003By witching eyes which looked disdain.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Serenade by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003So sweet the hour, so calm the time,\n\n\u2003I feel it more than half a crime,\n\n\u2003When Nature sleeps and stars are mute,\n\n\u2003To mar the silence ev'n with lute.\n\n\u2003At rest on ocean's brilliant dyes\n\n\u2003An image of Elysium lies:\n\n\u2003Seven Pleiades entranced in Heaven,\n\n\u2003Form in the deep another seven:\n\n\u2003Endymion nodding from above\n\n\u2003Sees in the sea a second love.\n\n\u2003Within the valleys dim and brown,\n\n\u2003And on the spectral mountain's crown,\n\n\u2003The wearied light is dying down,\n\n\u2003And earth, and stars, and sea, and sky\n\n\u2003Are redolent of sleep, as I\n\n\u2003Am redolent of thee and thine\n\n\u2003Enthralling love, my Adeline.\n\n\u2003But list, O list \u2014 so soft and low\n\n\u2003Thy lover's voice tonight shall flow, That, scarce awake, thy soul shall deem\n\n\u2003My words the music of a dream.\n\n\u2003Thus, while no single sound too rude\n\n\u2003Upon thy slumber shall intrude,\n\n\u2003Our thoughts, our souls \u2014 O God above!\n\n\u2003In every deed shall mingle, love.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Coliseum by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Type of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary\n\n\u2003Of lofty contemplation left to Time\n\n\u2003By buried centuries of pomp and power!\n\n\u2003At length \u2014 at length \u2014 after so many days\n\n\u2003Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst,\n\n\u2003(Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie,)\n\n\u2003I kneel, an altered and an humble man,\n\n\u2003Amid thy shadows, and so drink within\n\n\u2003My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!\n\n\u2003Vastness! and Age! and Memories of Eld!\n\n\u2003Silence! and Desolation! and dim Night!\n\n\u2003I feel ye now \u2014 I feel ye in your strength \u2014\n\n\u2003O spells more sure than e'er Judaean king\n\n\u2003Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane!\n\n\u2003O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee\n\n\u2003Ever drew down from out the quiet stars!\n\n\u2003Here, where a hero fell, a column falls!\n\n\u2003Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,\n\n\u2003A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!\n\n\u2003Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair\n\n\u2003Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle!\n\n\u2003Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,\n\n\u2003Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,\n\n\u2003Lit by the wan light of the horned moon,\n\n\u2003The swift and silent lizard of the stones!\n\n\u2003But stay! these walls \u2014 these ivy-clad arcades \u2014\n\n\u2003These moldering plinths \u2014 these sad and blackened shafts \u2014\n\n\u2003These vague entablatures \u2014 this crumbling frieze \u2014\n\n\u2003These shattered cornices \u2014 this wreck \u2014 this ruin \u2014\n\n\u2003These stones \u2014 alas! these grey stones \u2014 are they all \u2014\n\n\u2003All of the famed, and the colossal left\n\n\u2003By the corrosive Hours to Fate and me?\n\n\u2003\"Not all\"\u2014 the Echoes answer me \u2014\"not all!\n\n\u2003Prophetic sounds and loud, arise forever\n\n\u2003From us, and from all Ruin, unto the wise,\n\n\u2003As melody from Memnon to the Sun.\n\n\u2003We rule the hearts of mightiest men \u2014 we rule\n\n\u2003With a despotic sway all giant minds.\n\n\u2003We are not impotent \u2014 we pallid stones.\n\n\u2003Not all our power is gone \u2014 not all our fame \u2014\n\n\u2003Not all the magic of our high renown \u2014\n\n\u2003Not all the wonder that encircles us \u2014\n\n\u2003Not all the mysteries that in us lie \u2014\n\n\u2003Not all the memories that hang upon\n\n\u2003And cling around about us as a garment,\n\n\u2003Clothing us in a robe of more than glory.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To \u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Sleep on, sleep on, another hour \u2014\n\n\u2003I would not break so calm a sleep,\n\n\u2003To wake to sunshine and to show'r,\n\n\u2003To smile and weep.\n\n\u2003Sleep on, sleep on, like sculptured thing, Majestic, beautiful art thou;\n\n\u2003Sure seraph shields thee with his wing And fans thy brow \u2014\n\n\u2003We would not deem thee child of earth, For, O, angelic, is thy form!\n\n\u2003But, that in heav'n thou had'st thy birth, Where comes no storm\n\n\u2003To mar the bright, the perfect flow'r, But all is beautiful and still \u2014\n\n\u2003And golden sands proclaim the hour\n\n\u2003Which brings no ill.\n\n\u2003Sleep on, sleep on, some fairy dream Perchance is woven in thy sleep \u2014\n\n\u2003But, O, thy spirit, calm, serene,\n\n\u2003Must wake to weep.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To One in Paradise by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Thou wast all that to me, love,\n\n\u2003For which my soul did pine \u2014\n\n\u2003A green isle in the sea, love,\n\n\u2003A fountain and a shrine,\n\n\u2003All wreathed with fairy fruits and flowers,\n\n\u2003And all the flowers were mine.\n\n\u2003Ah, dream too bright to last!\n\n\u2003Ah, starry Hope! that didst arise\n\n\u2003But to be overcast!\n\n\u2003A voice from out the Future cries,\n\n\u2003\"On! on!\"\u2014 but o'er the Past\n\n\u2003(Dim gulf!) my spirit hovering lies\n\n\u2003Mute, motionless, aghast!\n\n\u2003For, alas! alas! me\n\n\u2003The light of Life is o'er!\n\n\u2003\"No more \u2014 no more \u2014 no more-\"\n\n\u2003(Such language holds the solemn sea\n\n\u2003To the sands upon the shore)\n\n\u2003Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree\n\n\u2003Or the stricken eagle soar!\n\n\u2003And all my days are trances,\n\n\u2003And all my nightly dreams\n\n\u2003Are where thy grey eye glances,\n\n\u2003And where thy footstep gleams \u2014\n\n\u2003In what ethereal dances,\n\n\u2003By what eternal streams.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Hymn by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003At morn \u2014 at noon \u2014 at twilight dim \u2014\n\n\u2003Maria! thou hast heard my hymn!\n\n\u2003In joy and woe \u2014 in good and ill \u2014\n\n\u2003Mother of God, be with me still!\n\n\u2003When the hours flew brightly by,\n\n\u2003And not a cloud obscured the sky,\n\n\u2003My soul, lest it should truant be,\n\n\u2003Thy grace did guide to thine and thee;\n\n\u2003Now, when storms of Fate o'ercast\n\n\u2003Darkly my Present and my Past,\n\n\u2003Let my Future radiant shine\n\n\u2003With sweet hopes of thee and thine!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To F\u2014s S. O\u2014d by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Thou wouldst be loved? \u2014 then let thy heart\n\n\u2003From its present pathway part not!\n\n\u2003Being everything which now thou art,\n\n\u2003Be nothing which thou art not.\n\n\u2003So with the world thy gentle ways,\n\n\u2003Thy grace, thy more than beauty,\n\n\u2003Shall be an endless theme of praise,\n\n\u2003And love \u2014 a simple duty.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Spiritual Song by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Hark, echo! \u2014 Hark; echo!\n\n\u2003'Tis the sound\n\n\u2003Of archangels, in happiness wrapt\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Bridal Ballad by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The ring is on my hand,\n\n\u2003And the wreath is on my brow;\n\n\u2003Satin and jewels grand\n\n\u2003Are all at my command,\n\n\u2003And I am happy now.\n\n\u2003And my lord he loves me well;\n\n\u2003But, when first he breathed his vow,\n\n\u2003I felt my bosom swell \u2014 For the words rang as a knell,\n\n\u2003And the voice seemed his who fell In the battle down the dell,\n\n\u2003And who is happy now.\n\n\u2003But he spoke to re-assure me,\n\n\u2003And he kissed my pallid brow,\n\n\u2003While a reverie came o'er me,\n\n\u2003And to the church-yard bore me,\n\n\u2003And I sighed to him before me,\n\n\u2003Thinking him dead D'Elormie,\n\n\u2003\"Oh, I am happy now!\"\n\n\u2003And thus the words were spoken,\n\n\u2003And this the plighted vow,\n\n\u2003And, though my faith be broken,\n\n\u2003And, though my heart be broken,\n\n\u2003Here is a ring, as token\n\n\u2003That I am happy now!\n\n\u2003Would God I could awaken!\n\n\u2003For I dream I know not how!\n\n\u2003And my soul is sorely shaken\n\n\u2003Lest an evil step be taken \u2014\n\n\u2003Lest the dead who is forsaken\n\n\u2003May not be happy now.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Sonnet \u2014 To Zante by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003How many memories of what radiant hours\n\n\u2003At sight of thee and thine at once awake!\n\n\u2003How many scenes of what departed bliss!\n\n\u2003How many thoughts of what entombed hopes!\n\n\u2003How many visions of a maiden that is\n\n\u2003No more \u2014 no more upon thy verdant slopes!\n\n\u2003No more! alas, that magical sad sound\n\n\u2003Transforming all! Thy charms shall please no more \u2014\n\n\u2003Thy memory no more! Accursed ground\n\n\u2003Henceforth I hold thy flower-enameled shore,\n\n\u2003O hyacinthine isle! O purple Zante!\n\n\u2003\"Isola d'oro! Fior di Levante!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003In the greenest of our valleys\n\n\u2003By good angels tenanted,\n\n\u2003Once a fair and stately palace \u2014\n\n\u2003Radiant palace \u2014 reared its head.\n\n\u2003In the monarch Thought's dominion \u2014\n\n\u2003It stood there!\n\n\u2003Never seraph spread a pinion\n\n\u2003Over fabric half so fair!\n\n\u2003Banners yellow, glorious, golden,\n\n\u2003On its roof did float and flow,\n\n\u2003(This \u2014 all this \u2014 was in the olden\n\n\u2003Time long ago,)\n\n\u2003And every gentle air that dallied,\n\n\u2003In that sweet day,\n\n\u2003Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,\n\n\u2003A winged odor went away.\n\n\u2003Wanderers in that happy valley,\n\n\u2003Through two luminous windows, saw\n\n\u2003Spirits moving musically,\n\n\u2003To a lute's well-tuned law,\n\n\u2003Round about a throne where, sitting\n\n\u2003(Porphyrogene!)\n\n\u2003In state his glory well-befitting,\n\n\u2003The ruler of the realm was seen.\n\n\u2003And all with pearl and ruby glowing\n\n\u2003Was the fair palace door,\n\n\u2003Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,\n\n\u2003And sparkling evermore,\n\n\u2003A troop of Echoes, whose sweet duty\n\n\u2003Was but to sing,\n\n\u2003In voices of surpassing beauty,\n\n\u2003The wit and wisdom of their king.\n\n\u2003But evil things, in robes of sorrow,\n\n\u2003Assailed the monarch's high estate.\n\n\u2003(Ah, let us mourn! \u2014 for never morrow\n\n\u2003Shall dawn upon him desolate!)\n\n\u2003And round about his home the glory\n\n\u2003That blushed and bloomed,\n\n\u2003Is but a dim-remembered story\n\n\u2003Of the old time entombed.\n\n\u2003And travellers, now, within that valley,\n\n\u2003Through the red-litten windows see\n\n\u2003Vast forms, that move fantastically\n\n\u2003To a discordant melody,\n\n\u2003While, like a ghastly rapid river,\n\n\u2003Through the pale door\n\n\u2003A hideous throng rush out forever\n\n\u2003And laugh \u2014 but smile no more.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Silence by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003A type of that twin entity which springs\n\n\u2003From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.\n\n\u2003There is a two-fold Silence \u2014 sea and shore \u2014\n\n\u2003Body and soul. One dwells in lonely places,\n\n\u2003Newly with grass o'ergrown; some solemn graces,\n\n\u2003Some human memories and tearful lore,\n\n\u2003Render him terrorless: his name's \"No More.\"\n\n\u2003He is the corporate Silence: dread him not!\n\n\u2003No power hath he of evil in himself;\n\n\u2003But should some urgent fate (untimely lot!)\n\n\u2003Bring thee to meet his shadow (nameless elf,\n\n\u2003That haunteth the lone regions where hath trod\n\n\u2003No foot of man,) commend thyself to God!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lenore by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!\n\n\u2003Let the bell toll! \u2014 a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;\n\n\u2003And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear? \u2014 weep now or nevermore!\n\n\u2003See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!\n\n\u2003Come! let the burial rite be read \u2014 the funeral song be sung! \u2014\n\n\u2003An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young \u2014\n\n\u2003A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.\n\n\u2003\"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,\n\n\u2003And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her \u2014 that she died!\n\n\u2003How shall the ritual, then, be read? \u2014 the requiem how be sung\n\n\u2003By you \u2014 by yours, the evil eye \u2014 by yours, the slanderous tongue\n\n\u2003That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?\"\n\n\u2003Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song\n\n\u2003Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong.\n\n\u2003The sweet Lenore hath \"gone before,\" with Hope, that flew beside,\n\n\u2003Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride.\n\n\u2003For her, the fair and debonair, that now so lowly lies,\n\n\u2003The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes\n\n\u2003The life still there, upon her hair \u2014 the death upon her eyes.\n\n\u2003\"Avaunt! avaunt! from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven \u2014\n\n\u2003From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven \u2014\n\n\u2003From grief and groan, to a golden throne, beside the King of Heaven!\n\n\u2003Let no bell toll, then \u2014 lest her soul, amid its hallowed mirth,\n\n\u2003Should catch the note as it doth float up from the damned Earth!\n\n\u2003And I! \u2014 to-night my heart is light! \u2014 no dirge will I upraise,\n\n\u2003But waft the angel on her flight with a Paean of old days!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Conqueror Worm by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Lo! 'tis a gala night\n\n\u2003Within the lonesome latter years!\n\n\u2003An angel throng, bewinged, bedight\n\n\u2003In veils, and drowned in tears,\n\n\u2003Sit in a theatre, to see\n\n\u2003A play of hopes and fears,\n\n\u2003While the orchestra breathes fitfully\n\n\u2003The music of the spheres.\n\n\u2003Mimes, in the form of God on high,\n\n\u2003Mutter and mumble low,\n\n\u2003And hither and thither fly \u2014\n\n\u2003Mere puppets they, who come and go\n\n\u2003At bidding of vast formless things\n\n\u2003That shift the scenery to and fro,\n\n\u2003Flapping from out their Condor wings\n\n\u2003Invisible Woe!\n\n\u2003That motley drama \u2014 oh, be sure\n\n\u2003It shall not be forgot!\n\n\u2003With its Phantom chased for evermore,\n\n\u2003By a crowd that seize it not,\n\n\u2003Through a circle that ever returneth in\n\n\u2003To the self-same spot,\n\n\u2003And much of Madness, and more of Sin,\n\n\u2003And Horror the soul of the plot.\n\n\u2003But see, amid the mimic rout\n\n\u2003A crawling shape intrude!\n\n\u2003A blood-red thing that writhes from out\n\n\u2003The scenic solitude!\n\n\u2003It writhes! \u2014 it writhes! \u2014 with mortal pangs\n\n\u2003The mimes become its food,\n\n\u2003And seraphs sob at vermin fangs\n\n\u2003In human gore imbued.\n\n\u2003Out \u2014 out are the lights \u2014 out all!\n\n\u2003And, over each quivering form,\n\n\u2003The curtain, a funeral pall,\n\n\u2003Comes down with the rush of a storm,\n\n\u2003While the angels, all pallid and wan,\n\n\u2003Uprising, unveiling, affirm\n\n\u2003That the play is the tragedy, \"Man,\"\n\n\u2003And its hero the Conqueror Worm.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lines on Joe Locke by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003As for Locke, he is all in my eye,\n\n\u2003May the d \u2014 l right soon for his soul call.\n\n\u2003He never was known to lie --\n\n\u2003In bed at reveille \"roll call.\"\n\n\u2003John Locke was a notable name;\n\n\u2003Joe locke is a greater; in short,\n\n\u2003The former was well known to fame,\n\n\u2003But the latter's well known \"to report.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Dream-Land by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003By a route obscure and lonely,\n\n\u2003Haunted by ill angels only,\n\n\u2003Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\n\n\u2003On a black throne reigns upright,\n\n\u2003I have reached these lands but newly\n\n\u2003From an ultimate dim Thule \u2014\n\n\u2003From a wild clime that lieth, sublime,\n\n\u2003Out of SPACE\u2014 out of TIME.\n\n\u2003Bottomless vales and boundless floods,\n\n\u2003And chasms, and caves, and Titan woods,\n\n\u2003With forms that no man can discover\n\n\u2003For the tears that drip all over;\n\n\u2003Mountains toppling evermore\n\n\u2003Into seas without a shore;\n\n\u2003Seas that restlessly aspire,\n\n\u2003Surging, unto skies of fire;\n\n\u2003Lakes that endlessly outspread\n\n\u2003Their lone waters \u2014 lone and dead \u2014\n\n\u2003Their still waters \u2014 still and chilly\n\n\u2003With the snows of the lolling lily.\n\n\u2003By the lakes that thus outspread\n\n\u2003Their lone waters, lone and dead \u2014\n\n\u2003Their sad waters, sad and chilly\n\n\u2003With the snows of the lolling lily \u2014\n\n\u2003By the mountains \u2014 near the river\n\n\u2003Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever \u2014\n\n\u2003By the grey woods \u2014 by the swamp\n\n\u2003Where the toad and the newt encamp \u2014\n\n\u2003By the dismal tarns and pools\n\n\u2003Where dwell the Ghouls \u2014\n\n\u2003By each spot the most unholy \u2014\n\n\u2003In each nook most melancholy \u2014\n\n\u2003There the traveller meets aghast\n\n\u2003Sheeted Memories of the Past \u2014\n\n\u2003Shrouded forms that start and sigh\n\n\u2003As they pass the wanderer by \u2014\n\n\u2003White-robed forms of friends long given,\n\n\u2003In agony, to the Earth \u2014 and Heaven.\n\n\u2003For the heart whose woes are legion\n\n\u2003'Tis a peaceful, soothing region \u2014\n\n\u2003For the spirit that walks in shadow\n\n\u2003'Tis \u2014 oh, 'tis an Eldorado!\n\n\u2003But the traveller, travelling through it,\n\n\u2003May not \u2014 dare not openly view it!\n\n\u2003Never its mysteries are exposed\n\n\u2003To the weak human eye unclosed;\n\n\u2003So wills its King, who hath forbid\n\n\u2003The uplifting of the fringed lid;\n\n\u2003And thus the sad Soul that here passes\n\n\u2003Beholds it but through darkened glasses.\n\n\u2003By a route obscure and lonely,\n\n\u2003Haunted by ill angels only,\n\n\u2003Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,\n\n\u2003On a black throne reigns upright,\n\n\u2003I have wandered home but newly\n\n\u2003From this ultimate dim Thule.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Eulalie by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003I dwelt alone\n\n\u2003In a world of moan,\n\n\u2003And my soul was a stagnant tide,\n\n\u2003Till the fair and gentle Eulalie became my blushing bride \u2014\n\n\u2003Till the yellow-haired young Eulalie became my smiling bride.\n\n\u2003Ah, less \u2014 less bright\n\n\u2003The stars of the night\n\n\u2003Than the eyes of the radiant girl!\n\n\u2003That the vapor can make\n\n\u2003With the moon-tints of purple and pearl,\n\n\u2003Can vie with the modest Eulalie's most unregarded curl \u2014\n\n\u2003Can compare with the bright-eyed Eulalie's most humble and careless curl.\n\n\u2003Now Doubt \u2014 now Pain\n\n\u2003Come never again,\n\n\u2003For her soul gives me sigh for sigh,\n\n\u2003And all day long\n\n\u2003Shines, bright and strong,\n\n\u2003Astarte within the sky,\n\n\u2003While ever to her dear Eulalie upturns her matron eye \u2014\n\n\u2003While ever to her young Eulalie upturns her violet eye.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Epigram for Wall Street by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003I'll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,\n\n\u2003Better than banking, trade or leases \u2014\n\n\u2003Take a bank note and fold it up,\n\n\u2003And then you will find your money in creases!\n\n\u2003This wonderful plan, without danger or loss,\n\n\u2003Keeps your cash in your hands, where nothing can trouble it;\n\n\u2003And every time that you fold it across,\n\n\u2003'Tis as plain as the light of the day that you double it!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Impromptu. To Kate Carol by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003When from your gems of thought I turn\n\n\u2003To those pure orbs, your heart to learn,\n\n\u2003I scarce know which to prize most high \u2014\n\n\u2003The bright i-dea, or the bright dear-eye.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Divine Right of Kings by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The only king by right divine\n\n\u2003Is Ellen King, and were she mine\n\n\u2003I'd strive for liberty no more,\n\n\u2003But hug the glorious chains I wore.\n\n\u2003Her bosom is an ivory throne,\n\n\u2003Where tyrant virtue reigns alone;\n\n\u2003No subject vice dare interfere,\n\n\u2003To check the power that governs here.\n\n\u2003O! would she deign to rule my fate,\n\n\u2003I'd worship Kings and kingly state,\n\n\u2003And hold this maxim all life long,\n\n\u2003The King \u2014 my King \u2014 can do no wrong.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,\n\n\u2003Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,\n\n\u2003While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,\n\n\u2003As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.\n\n\u2003\"'Tis some visitor,\" I muttered, \"tapping at my chamber door \u2014\n\n\u2003Only this, and nothing more.\"\n\n\u2003Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,\n\n\u2003And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.\n\n\u2003Eagerly I wished the morrow; \u2014 vainly I had sought to borrow\n\n\u2003From my books surcease of sorrow \u2014 sorrow for the lost Lenore \u2014\n\n\u2003For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore \u2014\n\n\u2003Nameless here for evermore.\n\n\u2003And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain\n\n\u2003Thrilled me \u2014 filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;\n\n\u2003So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,\n\n\u2003\"'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door \u2014\n\n\u2003Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; \u2014\n\n\u2003This it is, and nothing more.\"\n\n\u2003Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,\n\n\u2003\"Sir,\" said I, \"or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;\n\n\u2003But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,\n\n\u2003And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,\n\n\u2003That I scarce was sure I heard you\"\u2014 here I opened wide the door; \u2014\n\n\u2003Darkness there, and nothing more.\n\n\u2003Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,\n\n\u2003Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;\n\n\u2003But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,\n\n\u2003And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, \"Lenore!\"\n\n\u2003This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, \"Lenore!\"\u2014\n\n\u2003Merely this, and nothing more.\n\n\u2003Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,\n\n\u2003Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.\n\n\u2003\"Surely,\" said I, \"surely that is something at my window lattice:\n\n\u2003Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore \u2014\n\n\u2003Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; \u2014\n\n\u2003'Tis the wind and nothing more.\"\n\n\u2003Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,\n\n\u2003In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;\n\n\u2003Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;\n\n\u2003But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door \u2014\n\n\u2003Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door \u2014\n\n\u2003Perched, and sat, and nothing more.\n\n\u2003Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,\n\n\u2003By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore.\n\n\u2003\"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,\" I said, \"art sure no craven,\n\n\u2003Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the Nightly shore \u2014\n\n\u2003Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!\"\n\n\u2003Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,\n\n\u2003Though its answer little meaning \u2014 little relevancy bore;\n\n\u2003For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being\n\n\u2003Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door \u2014\n\n\u2003Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,\n\n\u2003With such name as \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only\n\n\u2003That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.\n\n\u2003Nothing further then he uttered \u2014 not a feather then he fluttered \u2014\n\n\u2003Till I scarcely more than muttered, \"other friends have flown before \u2014\n\n\u2003On the morrow he will leave me, as my hopes have flown before.\"\n\n\u2003Then the bird said, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,\n\n\u2003\"Doubtless,\" said I, \"what it utters is its only stock and store,\n\n\u2003Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster\n\n\u2003Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore \u2014\n\n\u2003Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore\n\n\u2003Of 'Never \u2014 nevermore'.\"\n\n\u2003But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,\n\n\u2003Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;\n\n\u2003Then upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking\n\n\u2003Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore \u2014\n\n\u2003What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore\n\n\u2003Meant in croaking \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing\n\n\u2003To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core;\n\n\u2003This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining\n\n\u2003On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamplight gloated o'er,\n\n\u2003But whose velvet violet lining with the lamplight gloating o'er,\n\n\u2003She shall press, ah, nevermore!\n\n\u2003Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer\n\n\u2003Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor.\n\n\u2003\"Wretch,\" I cried, \"thy God hath lent thee \u2014 by these angels he hath sent thee\n\n\u2003Respite \u2014 respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!\n\n\u2003Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!\"\n\n\u2003Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003\"Prophet!\" said I, \"thing of evil! \u2014 prophet still, if bird or devil! \u2014\n\n\u2003Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,\n\n\u2003Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted \u2014\n\n\u2003On this home by horror haunted \u2014 tell me truly, I implore \u2014\n\n\u2003Is there \u2014 is there balm in Gilead? \u2014 tell me \u2014 tell me, I implore!\"\n\n\u2003Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003\"Prophet!\" said I, \"thing of evil \u2014 prophet still, if bird or devil!\n\n\u2003By that Heaven that bends above us \u2014 by that God we both adore \u2014\n\n\u2003Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,\n\n\u2003It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore \u2014\n\n\u2003Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.\"\n\n\u2003Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003\"Be that word our sign in parting, bird or fiend,\" I shrieked, upstarting \u2014\n\n\u2003\"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!\n\n\u2003Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!\n\n\u2003Leave my loneliness unbroken! \u2014 quit the bust above my door!\n\n\u2003Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!\"\n\n\u2003Quoth the Raven, \"Nevermore.\"\n\n\u2003And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting\n\n\u2003On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;\n\n\u2003And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,\n\n\u2003And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;\n\n\u2003And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor\n\n\u2003Shall be lifted \u2014 nevermore!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To F\u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Beloved! amid the earnest woes\n\n\u2003That crowd around my earthly path \u2014\n\n\u2003(Drear path, alas! where grows\n\n\u2003Not even one lonely rose)\u2014\n\n\u2003My soul at least a solace hath\n\n\u2003In dreams of thee, and therein knows An Eden of bland repose.\n\n\u2003And thus thy memory is to me\n\n\u2003Like some enchanted far-off isle\n\n\u2003In some tumultuous sea \u2014\n\n\u2003Some ocean throbbing far and free\n\n\u2003With storms \u2014 but where meanwhile\n\n\u2003Serenest skies continually\n\n\u2003Just o'er that one bright island smile.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Valentine by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003For her this rhyme is penned, whose luminous eyes,\n\n\u2003Brightly expressive as the twins of Leda,\n\n\u2003Shall find her own sweet name, that nestling lies\n\n\u2003Upon the page, enwrapped from every reader.\n\n\u2003Search narrowly the lines! \u2014 they hold a treasure\n\n\u2003Divine \u2014 a talisman \u2014 an amulet\n\n\u2003That must be worn at heart. Search well the measure \u2014\n\n\u2003The words \u2014 the syllables! Do not forget\n\n\u2003The trivialest point, or you may lose your labor\n\n\u2003And yet there is in this no Gordian knot\n\n\u2003Which one might not undo without a sabre,\n\n\u2003If one could merely comprehend the plot.\n\n\u2003Enwritten upon the leaf where now are peering\n\n\u2003Eyes scintillating soul, there lie perdus\n\n\u2003Three eloquent words oft uttered in the hearing\n\n\u2003Of poets, by poets \u2014 as the name is a poet's, too,\n\n\u2003Its letters, although naturally lying\n\n\u2003Like the knight Pinto \u2014 Mendez Ferdinando \u2014\n\n\u2003Still form a synonym for Truth \u2014 Cease trying!\n\n\u2003You will not read the riddle, though you do the best you can do.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To M. L. S\u2014 by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Of all who hail thy presence as the morning \u2014\n\n\u2003Of all to whom thine absence is the night \u2014\n\n\u2003The blotting utterly from out high heaven\n\n\u2003The sacred sun \u2014 of all who, weeping, bless thee\n\n\u2003Hourly for hope \u2014 for life \u2014 ah! above all,\n\n\u2003For the resurrection of deep-buried faith\n\n\u2003In Truth \u2014 in Virtue \u2014 in Humanity \u2014\n\n\u2003Of all who, on Despair's unhallowed bed\n\n\u2003Lying down to die, have suddenly arisen\n\n\u2003At thy soft-murmured words, \"Let there be light!\"\n\n\u2003At the soft-murmured words that were fulfilled\n\n\u2003In the seraphic glancing of thine eyes \u2014\n\n\u2003Of all who owe thee most \u2014 whose gratitude\n\n\u2003Nearest resembles worship \u2014 oh, remember\n\n\u2003The truest \u2014 the most fervently devoted,\n\n\u2003And think that these weak lines are written by him \u2014\n\n\u2003By him who, as he pens them, thrills to think\n\n\u2003His spirit is communing with an angel's.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Ulalume by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003The skies they were ashen and sober;\n\n\u2003The leaves they were crisped and sere \u2014\n\n\u2003The leaves they were withering and sere;\n\n\u2003It was night in the lonesome October\n\n\u2003Of my most immemorial year;\n\n\u2003It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,\n\n\u2003In the misty mid region of Weir \u2014\n\n\u2003It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,\n\n\u2003In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\n\n\u2003Here once, through an alley Titanic,\n\n\u2003Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul \u2014\n\n\u2003Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.\n\n\u2003There were days when my heart was volcanic\n\n\u2003As the scoriac rivers that roll \u2014\n\n\u2003As the lavas that restlessly roll\n\n\u2003Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek\n\n\u2003In the ultimate climes of the pole \u2014\n\n\u2003That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek\n\n\u2003In the realms of the boreal pole.\n\n\u2003Our talk had been serious and sober,\n\n\u2003But our thoughts they were palsied and sere \u2014\n\n\u2003Our memories were treacherous and sere \u2014\n\n\u2003For we knew not the month was October,\n\n\u2003And we marked not the night of the year \u2014\n\n\u2003(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)\n\n\u2003We noted not the dim lake of Auber \u2014\n\n\u2003(Though once we had journeyed down here),\n\n\u2003Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,\n\n\u2003Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\n\n\u2003And now, as the night was senescent,\n\n\u2003And star-dials pointed to morn \u2014\n\n\u2003As the star-dials hinted of morn \u2014\n\n\u2003At the end of our path a liquescent\n\n\u2003And nebulous lustre was born,\n\n\u2003Out of which a miraculous crescent\n\n\u2003Arose with a duplicate horn \u2014\n\n\u2003Astarte's bediamonded crescent\n\n\u2003Distinct with its duplicate horn.\n\n\u2003And I said \u2014 \"She is warmer than Dian:\n\n\u2003She rolls through an ether of sighs \u2014\n\n\u2003She revels in a region of sighs:\n\n\u2003She has seen that the tears are not dry on\n\n\u2003These cheeks, where the worm never dies,\n\n\u2003And has come past the stars of the Lion,\n\n\u2003To point us the path to the skies \u2014\n\n\u2003To the Lethean peace of the skies \u2014\n\n\u2003Come up, in despite of the Lion,\n\n\u2003To shine on us with her bright eyes \u2014\n\n\u2003Come up through the lair of the Lion,\n\n\u2003With love in her luminous eyes.\"\n\n\u2003But Psyche, uplifting her finger,\n\n\u2003Said \u2014 \"Sadly this star I mistrust \u2014\n\n\u2003Her pallor I strangely mistrust:\u2014\n\n\u2003Oh, hasten! \u2014 oh, let us not linger!\n\n\u2003Oh, fly! \u2014 let us fly! \u2014 for we must.\"\n\n\u2003In terror she spoke, letting sink her\n\n\u2003Wings until they trailed in the dust \u2014\n\n\u2003In agony sobbed, letting sink her\n\n\u2003Plumes till they trailed in the dust \u2014\n\n\u2003Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.\n\n\u2003I replied \u2014 \"This is nothing but dreaming:\n\n\u2003Let us on by this tremulous light!\n\n\u2003Let us bathe in this crystalline light!\n\n\u2003Its Sybilic splendor is beaming\n\n\u2003With Hope and in Beauty to-night:\u2014\n\n\u2003See! \u2014 it flickers up the sky through the night!\n\n\u2003Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,\n\n\u2003And be sure it will lead us aright \u2014\n\n\u2003We safely may trust to a gleaming\n\n\u2003That cannot but guide us aright,\n\n\u2003Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night.\"\n\n\u2003Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,\n\n\u2003And tempted her out of her gloom \u2014\n\n\u2003And conquered her scruples and gloom;\n\n\u2003And we passed to the end of the vista,\n\n\u2003But were stopped by the door of a tomb \u2014\n\n\u2003By the door of a legended tomb;\n\n\u2003And I said \u2014\"What is written, sweet sister,\n\n\u2003On the door of this legended tomb?\"\n\n\u2003She replied \u2014\"Ulalume \u2014 Ulalume \u2014\n\n\u2003'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!\"\n\n\u2003Then my heart it grew ashen and sober\n\n\u2003As the leaves that were crisped and sere \u2014\n\n\u2003As the leaves that were withering and sere \u2014\n\n\u2003And I cried \u2014 \"It was surely October\n\n\u2003On this very night of last year\n\n\u2003That I journeyed \u2014 I journeyed down here \u2014\n\n\u2003That I brought a dread burden down here \u2014\n\n\u2003On this night of all nights in the year,\n\n\u2003Ah, what demon has tempted me here?\n\n\u2003Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber \u2014\n\n\u2003This misty mid region of Weir \u2014\n\n\u2003Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,\n\n\u2003This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To Marie Louise by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Not long ago, the writer of these lines,\n\n\u2003In the mad pride of intellectuality,\n\n\u2003Maintained \"the power of words\"\u2014 denied that ever\n\n\u2003A thought arose within the human brain\n\n\u2003Beyond the utterance of the human tongue:\n\n\u2003And now, as if in mockery of that boast,\n\n\u2003Two words \u2014 two foreign soft dissyllables \u2014\n\n\u2003Italian tones, made only to be murmured\n\n\u2003By angels dreaming in the moonlit \"dew\n\n\u2003That hangs like chains of pearl on Hermon hill,\"\n\n\u2003Have stirred from out the abysses of his heart,\n\n\u2003Unthought-like thoughts that are the souls of thought,\n\n\u2003Richer, far wilder, far diviner visions\n\n\u2003Than even seraph harper, Israfel,\n\n\u2003(Who has \"the sweetest voice of all God's creatures,\")\n\n\u2003Could hope to utter. And I! my spells are broken.\n\n\u2003The pen falls powerless from my shivering hand.\n\n\u2003With thy dear name as text, though bidden by thee,\n\n\u2003I cannot write \u2014 I cannot speak or think \u2014\n\n\u2003Alas, I cannot feel; for 'tis not feeling,\n\n\u2003This standing motionless upon the golden\n\n\u2003Threshold of the wide-open gate of dreams.\n\n\u2003Gazing, entranced, adown the gorgeous vista,\n\n\u2003And thrilling as I see, upon the right,\n\n\u2003Upon the left, and all the way along,\n\n\u2003Amid empurpled vapors, far away\n\n\u2003To where the prospect terminates \u2014 thee only.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ An Enigma by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003\"Seldom we find,\" says Solomon Don Dunce,\n\n\u2003\"Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.\n\n\u2003Through all the flimsy things we see at once\n\n\u2003As easily as through a Naples bonnet \u2014\n\n\u2003Trash of all trash! \u2014 how can a lady don it?\n\n\u2003Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff \u2014\n\n\u2003Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff\n\n\u2003Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.\"\n\n\u2003And, veritably, Sol is right enough.\n\n\u2003The general tuckermanities are arrant\n\n\u2003Bubbles \u2014 ephemeral and so transparent \u2014\n\n\u2003But this is, now \u2014 you may depend upon it \u2014\n\n\u2003Stable, opaque, immortal \u2014 all by dint\n\n\u2003Of the dear names that he concealed within 't.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Eldorado by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Gaily bedight,\n\n\u2003A gallant knight,\n\n\u2003In sunshine and in shadow,\n\n\u2003Had journeyed long,\n\n\u2003Singing a song,\n\n\u2003In search of Eldorado.\n\n\u2003But he grew old \u2014\n\n\u2003This knight so bold \u2014\n\n\u2003And o'er his heart a shadow\n\n\u2003Fell as he found\n\n\u2003No spot of ground\n\n\u2003That looked like Eldorado.\n\n\u2003And, as his strength\n\n\u2003Failed him at length,\n\n\u2003He met a pilgrim shadow \u2014\n\n\u2003\"Shadow,\" said he,\n\n\u2003\"Where can it be \u2014\n\n\u2003This land of Eldorado?\"\n\n\u2003\"Over the Mountains\n\n\u2003Of the Moon,\n\n\u2003Down the Valley of the Shadow,\n\n\u2003Ride, boldly ride,\"\n\n\u2003The shade replied \u2014\n\n\u2003\"If you seek for Eldorado!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Evangeline by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Do tell when shall we make common sense men out of the owl-eyed pundits\n\n\u2003Out of The Frog-faced stupid old God-born Pundits who lost in a fog-bank\n\n\u2003Strut about all along shore there somewhere close by the Down East\n\n\u2003Frog Duck Pond munching of pea nuts and pumpkins and buried in big-wigs\n\n\u2003Why ask who ever yet saw money made out of a fat old\n\n\u2003Jew or downright upright nutmegs out of a pine-knot\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Lines on Ale by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2002Fill with mingled cream and amber\n\n\u2003I will drain that glass again.\n\n\u2002Such hilarious visions clamber\n\n\u2002Through the chamber of my brain \u2014\n\n\u2003Quaintest thoughts \u2014 queerest fancies\n\n\u2003Come to life and fade away;\n\n\u2002What care I how time advances?\n\n\u2002I am drinking ale today\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Hear the sledges with the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Silver bells!\n\n\u2003What a world of merriment their melody foretells!\n\n\u2003How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,\n\n\u2003In the icy air of night!\n\n\u2003While the stars that oversprinkle\n\n\u2003All the heavens, seem to twinkle\n\n\u2003With a crystalline delight;\n\n\u2003Keeping time, time, time,\n\n\u2003In a sort of Runic rhyme,\n\n\u2003To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells\n\n\u2003From the bells, bells, bells, bells,\n\n\u2003Bells, bells, bells \u2014\n\n\u2003From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\u2003Hear the mellow wedding bells,\n\n\u2003Golden bells!\n\n\u2003What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!\n\n\u2003Through the balmy air of night\n\n\u2003How they ring out their delight!\n\n\u2003From the molten-golden notes,\n\n\u2003And an in tune,\n\n\u2003What a liquid ditty floats\n\n\u2003To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats\n\n\u2003On the moon!\n\n\u2003Oh, from out the sounding cells,\n\n\u2003What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!\n\n\u2003How it swells!\n\n\u2003How it dwells\n\n\u2003On the Future! how it tells\n\n\u2003Of the rapture that impels\n\n\u2003To the swinging and the ringing\n\n\u2003Of the bells, bells, bells,\n\n\u2003Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,\n\n\u2003Bells, bells, bells \u2014\n\n\u2003To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\u2003Hear the loud alarum bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Brazen bells!\n\n\u2003What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!\n\n\u2003In the startled ear of night\n\n\u2003How they scream out their affright!\n\n\u2003Too much horrified to speak,\n\n\u2003They can only shriek, shriek,\n\n\u2003Out of tune,\n\n\u2003In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,\n\n\u2003In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,\n\n\u2003Leaping higher, higher, higher,\n\n\u2003With a desperate desire,\n\n\u2003And a resolute endeavor,\n\n\u2003Now \u2014 now to sit or never,\n\n\u2003By the side of the pale-faced moon.\n\n\u2003Oh, the bells, bells, bells!\n\n\u2003What a tale their terror tells\n\n\u2003Of Despair!\n\n\u2003How they clang, and clash, and roar!\n\n\u2003What a horror they outpour\n\n\u2003On the bosom of the palpitating air!\n\n\u2003Yet the ear it fully knows,\n\n\u2003By the twanging,\n\n\u2003And the clanging,\n\n\u2003How the danger ebbs and flows:\n\n\u2003Yet the ear distinctly tells,\n\n\u2003In the jangling,\n\n\u2003And the wrangling,\n\n\u2003How the danger sinks and swells,\n\n\u2003By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,\n\n\u2003Bells, bells, bells \u2014\n\n\u2003In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "\u2003Hear the tolling of the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Iron Bells!\n\n\u2003What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!\n\n\u2003In the silence of the night,\n\n\u2003How we shiver with affright\n\n\u2003At the melancholy menace of their tone!\n\n\u2003For every sound that floats\n\n\u2003From the rust within their throats\n\n\u2003Is a groan.\n\n\u2003And the people \u2014 ah, the people \u2014\n\n\u2003They that dwell up in the steeple,\n\n\u2003All Alone\n\n\u2003And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,\n\n\u2003In that muffled monotone,\n\n\u2003Feel a glory in so rolling\n\n\u2003On the human heart a stone \u2014\n\n\u2003They are neither man nor woman \u2014\n\n\u2003They are neither brute nor human \u2014\n\n\u2003They are Ghouls:\n\n\u2003And their king it is who tolls;\n\n\u2003And he rolls, rolls, rolls,\n\n\u2003Rolls\n\n\u2003A paean from the bells!\n\n\u2003And his merry bosom swells\n\n\u2003With the paean of the bells!\n\n\u2003And he dances, and he yells;\n\n\u2003Keeping time, time, time,\n\n\u2003In a sort of Runic rhyme,\n\n\u2003To the paean of the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the bells:\n\n\u2003Keeping time, time, time,\n\n\u2003In a sort of Runic rhyme,\n\n\u2003To the throbbing of the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the bells, bells, bells \u2014\n\n\u2003To the sobbing of the bells;\n\n\u2003Keeping time, time, time,\n\n\u2003As he knells, knells, knells,\n\n\u2003In a happy Runic rhyme,\n\n\u2003To the rolling of the bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Of the bells, bells, bells:\n\n\u2003To the tolling of the bells,\n\n\u2003Of the bells, bells, bells, bells \u2014\n\n\u2003Bells, bells, bells \u2014\n\n\u2003To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To Helen by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003I saw thee once \u2014 once only \u2014 years ago:\n\n\u2003I must not say how many \u2014 but not many.\n\n\u2003It was a July midnight; and from out\n\n\u2003A full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul, soaring,\n\n\u2003Sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven,\n\n\u2003There fell a silvery-silken veil of light,\n\n\u2003With quietude, and sultriness, and slumber,\n\n\u2003Upon the upturned faces of a thousand\n\n\u2003Roses that grew in an enchanted garden,\n\n\u2003Where no wind dared to stir, unless on tiptoe \u2014\n\n\u2003Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses\n\n\u2003That gave out, in return for the love-light,\n\n\u2003Their odorous souls in an ecstatic death \u2014\n\n\u2003Fell on the upturn'd faces of these roses\n\n\u2003That smiled and died in this parterre, enchanted\n\n\u2003By thee, and by the poetry of thy presence.\n\n\u2003Clad all in white, upon a violet bank\n\n\u2003I saw thee half reclining; while the moon\n\n\u2003Fell on the upturn'd faces of the roses,\n\n\u2003And on thine own, upturn'd \u2014 alas, in sorrow!\n\n\u2003Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight \u2014\n\n\u2003Was it not Fate, (whose name is also Sorrow,)\n\n\u2003That bade me pause before that garden-gate,\n\n\u2003To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses?\n\n\u2003No footstep stirred: the hated world an slept,\n\n\u2003Save only thee and me. (Oh, Heaven! \u2014 oh, God!\n\n\u2003How my heart beats in coupling those two words!)\n\n\u2003Save only thee and me. I paused \u2014 I looked \u2014\n\n\u2003And in an instant all things disappeared.\n\n\u2003(Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!)\n\n\u2003The pearly lustre of the moon went out:\n\n\u2003The mossy banks and the meandering paths,\n\n\u2003The happy flowers and the repining trees,\n\n\u2003Were seen no more: the very roses' odors\n\n\u2003Died in the arms of the adoring airs.\n\n\u2003All \u2014 all expired save thee \u2014 save less than thou:\n\n\u2003Save only the divine light in thine eyes \u2014\n\n\u2003Save but the soul in thine uplifted eyes.\n\n\u2003I saw but them \u2014 they were the world to me!\n\n\u2003I saw but them \u2014 saw only them for hours,\n\n\u2003Saw only them until the moon went down.\n\n\u2003What wild heart-histories seemed to he enwritten\n\n\u2003Upon those crystalline, celestial spheres!\n\n\u2003How dark a woe, yet how sublime a hope!\n\n\u2003How silently serene a sea of pride!\n\n\u2003How daring an ambition; yet how deep \u2014\n\n\u2003How fathomless a capacity for love!\n\n\u2003But now, at length, dear Dian sank from sight,\n\n\u2003Into a western couch of thunder-cloud;\n\n\u2003And thou, a ghost, amid the entombing trees\n\n\u2003Didst glide away. Only thine eyes remained;\n\n\u2003They would not go \u2014 they never yet have gone;\n\n\u2003Lighting my lonely pathway home that night,\n\n\u2003They have not left me (as my hopes have) since;\n\n\u2003They follow me \u2014 they lead me through the years.\n\n\u2003They are my ministers \u2014 yet I their slave.\n\n\u2003Their office is to illumine and enkindle \u2014\n\n\u2003My duty, to be saved by their bright light,\n\n\u2003And purified in their electric fire,\n\n\u2003And sanctified in their elysian fire.\n\n\u2003They fill my soul with Beauty (which is Hope),\n\n\u2003And are far up in Heaven \u2014 the stars I kneel to\n\n\u2003In the sad, silent watches of my night;\n\n\u2003While even in the meridian glare of day\n\n\u2003I see them still \u2014 two sweetly scintillant\n\n\u2003Venuses, unextinguished by the sun!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Take this kiss upon the brow!\n\n\u2003And, in parting from you now,\n\n\u2003Thus much let me avow \u2014\n\n\u2003You are not wrong, who deem\n\n\u2003That my days have been a dream;\n\n\u2003Yet if hope has flown away\n\n\u2003In a night, or in a day,\n\n\u2003In a vision, or in none,\n\n\u2003Is it therefore the less gone?\n\n\u2003All that we see or seem\n\n\u2003Is but a dream within a dream.\n\n\u2003I stand amid the roar\n\n\u2003Of a surf-tormented shore,\n\n\u2003And I hold within my hand\n\n\u2003Grains of the golden sand \u2014\n\n\u2003How few! yet how they creep\n\n\u2003Through my fingers to the deep,\n\n\u2003While I weep \u2014 while I weep!\n\n\u2003O God! can I not grasp\n\n\u2003Them with a tighter clasp?\n\n\u2003O God! can I not save\n\n\u2003One from the pitiless wave?\n\n\u2003Is all that we see or seem\n\n\u2003But a dream within a dream?\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003It was many and many a year ago,\n\n\u2003In a kingdom by the sea,\n\n\u2003That a maiden there lived whom you may know\n\n\u2003By the name of Annabel Lee;\n\n\u2003And this maiden she lived with no other thought\n\n\u2003Than to love and be loved by me.\n\n\u2003I was a child and she was a child,\n\n\u2003In this kingdom by the sea;\n\n\u2003But we loved with a love that was more than love \u2014\n\n\u2003I and my Annabel Lee;\n\n\u2003With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven\n\n\u2003Coveted her and me.\n\n\u2003And this was the reason that, long ago,\n\n\u2003In this kingdom by the sea,\n\n\u2003A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling\n\n\u2003My beautiful Annabel Lee;\n\n\u2003So that her highborn kinsman came\n\n\u2003And bore her away from me,\n\n\u2003To shut her up in a sepulchre\n\n\u2003In this kingdom by the sea.\n\n\u2003The angels, not half so happy in heaven,\n\n\u2003Went envying her and me \u2014\n\n\u2003Yes! \u2014 that was the reason (as all men know,\n\n\u2003In this kingdom by the sea)\n\n\u2003That the wind came out of the cloud by night,\n\n\u2003Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.\n\n\u2003But our love it was stronger by far than the love\n\n\u2003Of those who were older than we \u2014\n\n\u2003Of many far wiser than we \u2014\n\n\u2003And neither the angels in heaven above,\n\n\u2003Nor the demons down under the sea,\n\n\u2003Can ever dissever my soul from the soul\n\n\u2003Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.\n\n\u2003For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams\n\n\u2003Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;\n\n\u2003And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes\n\n\u2003Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;\n\n\u2003And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side\n\n\u2003Of my darling \u2014 my darling \u2014 my life and my bride,\n\n\u2003In the sepulchre there by the sea,\n\n\u2003In her tomb by the sounding sea.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ For Annie by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Thank Heaven! the crisis \u2014\n\n\u2003The danger is past,\n\n\u2003And the lingering illness\n\n\u2003Is over at last \u2014\n\n\u2003And the fever called \"Living\"\n\n\u2003Is conquered at last.\n\n\u2003Sadly, I know\n\n\u2003I am shorn of my strength,\n\n\u2003And no muscle I move\n\n\u2003As I lie at full length \u2014\n\n\u2003But no matter!-I feel\n\n\u2003I am better at length.\n\n\u2003And I rest so composedly,\n\n\u2003Now, in my bed\n\n\u2003That any beholder\n\n\u2003Might fancy me dead \u2014\n\n\u2003Might start at beholding me,\n\n\u2003Thinking me dead.\n\n\u2003The moaning and groaning,\n\n\u2003The sighing and sobbing,\n\n\u2003Are quieted now,\n\n\u2003With that horrible throbbing\n\n\u2003At heart:\u2014 ah, that horrible,\n\n\u2003Horrible throbbing!\n\n\u2003The sickness \u2014 the nausea \u2014\n\n\u2003The pitiless pain \u2014\n\n\u2003Have ceased, with the fever\n\n\u2003That maddened my brain \u2014\n\n\u2003With the fever called \"Living\"\n\n\u2003That burned in my brain.\n\n\u2003And oh! of all tortures\n\n\u2003That torture the worst\n\n\u2003Has abated \u2014 the terrible\n\n\u2003Torture of thirst\n\n\u2003For the naphthaline river\n\n\u2003Of Passion accurst:\u2014\n\n\u2003I have drunk of a water\n\n\u2003That quenches all thirst:\u2014\n\n\u2003Of a water that flows,\n\n\u2003With a lullaby sound,\n\n\u2003From a spring but a very few\n\n\u2003Feet under ground \u2014\n\n\u2003From a cavern not very far\n\n\u2003Down under ground.\n\n\u2003And ah! let it never\n\n\u2003Be foolishly said\n\n\u2003That my room it is gloomy\n\n\u2003And narrow my bed;\n\n\u2003For man never slept\n\n\u2003In a different bed \u2014\n\n\u2003And, to sleep, you must slumber\n\n\u2003In just such a bed.\n\n\u2003My tantalized spirit\n\n\u2003Here blandly reposes,\n\n\u2003Forgetting, or never\n\n\u2003Regretting its roses \u2014\n\n\u2003Its old agitations\n\n\u2003Of myrtles and roses:\n\n\u2003For now, while so quietly\n\n\u2003Lying, it fancies\n\n\u2003A holier odor\n\n\u2003About it, of pansies \u2014\n\n\u2003A rosemary odor,\n\n\u2003Commingled with pansies \u2014\n\n\u2003With rue and the beautiful\n\n\u2003Puritan pansies.\n\n\u2003And so it lies happily,\n\n\u2003Bathing in many\n\n\u2003A dream of the truth\n\n\u2003And the beauty of Annie \u2014\n\n\u2003Drowned in a bath\n\n\u2003Of the tresses of Annie.\n\n\u2003She tenderly kissed me,\n\n\u2003She fondly caressed,\n\n\u2003And then I fell gently\n\n\u2003To sleep on her breast \u2014\n\n\u2003Deeply to sleep\n\n\u2003From the heaven of her breast.\n\n\u2003When the light was extinguished,\n\n\u2003She covered me warm,\n\n\u2003And she prayed to the angels\n\n\u2003To keep me from harm \u2014\n\n\u2003To the queen of the angels\n\n\u2003To shield me from harm.\n\n\u2003And I lie so composedly,\n\n\u2003Now, in my bed,\n\n\u2003(Knowing her love)\n\n\u2003That you fancy me dead \u2014\n\n\u2003And I rest so contentedly,\n\n\u2003Now, in my bed,\n\n\u2003(With her love at my breast)\n\n\u2003That you fancy me dead \u2014\n\n\u2003That you shudder to look at me,\n\n\u2003Thinking me dead.\n\n\u2003But my heart it is brighter\n\n\u2003Than all of the many\n\n\u2003Stars in the sky,\n\n\u2003For it sparkles with Annie \u2014\n\n\u2003It glows with the light\n\n\u2003Of the love of my Annie \u2014\n\n\u2003With the thought of the light\n\n\u2003Of the eyes of my Annie.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ To My Mother by Edgar Allan Poe ]\n\n\u2003Because I feel that, in the Heavens above,\n\n\u2003The angels, whispering to one another,\n\n\u2003Can find, among their burning terms of love,\n\n\u2003None so devotional as that of \"Mother,\"\n\n\u2003Therefore by that dear name I long have called you \u2014\n\n\u2003You who are more than mother unto me,\n\n\u2003And fill my heart of hearts, where\n\n\u2003Death installed you In setting my Virginia's spirit free.\n\n\u2003My mother \u2014 my own mother, who died early,\n\n\u2003Was but the mother of myself; but you\n\n\u2003Are mother to the one I loved so dearly,\n\n\u2003And thus are dearer than the mother I knew\n\n\u2003By that infinity with which my wife\n\n\u2003Was dearer to my soul than its soul-life." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Egypt.json b/Egypt.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..3fe3a300eb79afd355bdd5a7ea5688552dbb7fb3 --- /dev/null +++ b/Egypt.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:ef7d5c6119ad73f718d91c6c728d83502a452e80b0fc301935956b85cf3f04b4 +size 24443586 diff --git a/Feudal Japan.json b/Feudal Japan.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..d2116cbe374d8cff0e50071a0b59e8af8ec3af77 --- /dev/null +++ b/Feudal Japan.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:b7ae275144bbda44fbe237a8c28b4398ebb01abef0c683d824d51ea621963180 +size 20721582 diff --git a/Gaming.json b/Gaming.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..560ff911f32997cd6a841a7d1393585bf92b4b77 --- /dev/null +++ b/Gaming.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:703b334bad9cd5dbd0a81b318f8d00a43affdb7d0f7f2affcaeecddb687114d1 +size 22240677 diff --git a/General Fantasy.json b/General Fantasy.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..3081fecfb7a03e8ebe162ebb25d4bea7aa032bcb --- /dev/null +++ b/General Fantasy.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:34ed3adca4ae3a5e2126263b77683bdc3c5eea34ae57734fe127ad1815814ff3 +size 47028471 diff --git a/Golden Age Scifi.json b/Golden Age Scifi.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..96c3ba5afa45cbe928864c7fe72894cc7787f06a --- /dev/null +++ b/Golden Age Scifi.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:740f546b51b72aca916aa6190583c6912dc5dc606f83b473446114af10983c8e +size 15872725 diff --git a/H. P. Lovecraft.json b/H. P. Lovecraft.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..71ca4f4eff0d49ef3f3ced754b4321572c5e348a --- /dev/null +++ b/H. P. Lovecraft.json @@ -0,0 +1,789 @@ +[ + { + "title": "The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Collection", + "author": "H. P. Lovecraft", + "genres": [ + "classic", + "cosmic horror,short stories" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "The Alchemist by H. P. Lovecraft", + "text": "High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mount whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader.\n\nBut since those glorious years all is changed. A poverty but little above the level of dire want, together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life, have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour; and the falling stones of the walls, the overgrown vegetation in the parks, the dry and dusty moat, the ill-paved courtyards, and toppling towers without, as well as the sagging floors, the worm-eaten wainscots, and the faded tapestries within, all tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur. As the ages passed, first one, then another of the four great turrets were left to ruin, until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate.\n\nIt was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I, Antoine, last of the unhappy and accursed Comtes de C., first saw the light of day, ninety long years ago. Within these walls, and amongst the dark and shadowy forests, the wild ravines and grottoes of the hillside below, were spent the first years of my troubled life. My parents I never knew. My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two, a month before I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle; and my mother having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence, whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child, and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At the time, Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line, that were nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage hearths.\n\nThus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its foot. It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy. Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult in Nature most strongly claimed my attention.\n\nOf my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what small knowledge of it I was able to gain, seemed to depress me much. Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house; yet as I grew out of childhood, I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at which all the Comtes of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto considered this but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men, I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths, and began to connect them with the wanderings of the old man, who often spoke of a curse which for centuries had prevented the lives of the holders of my title from much exceeding the span of thirty-two years. Upon my twenty-first birthday, the aged Pierre gave to me a family document which he said had for many generations been handed down from father to son, and continued by each possessor. Its contents were of the most startling nature, and its perusal confirmed the gravest of my apprehensions. At this time, my belief in the supernatural was firm and deep-seated, else I should have dismissed with scorn the incredible narrative unfolded before my eyes.\n\nThe paper carried me back to the days of the thirteenth century, when the old castle in which I sat had been a feared and impregnable fortress. It told of a certain ancient man who had once dwelt on our estates, a person of no small accomplishments, though little above the rank of peasant; by name, Michel, usually designated by the surname of Mauvais, the Evil, on account of his sinister reputation. He had studied beyond the custom of his kind, seeking such things as the Philosopher's Stone, or the Elixir of Eternal Life, and was reputed wise in the terrible secrets of Black Magic and Alchemy. Michel Mauvais had one son, named Charles, a youth as proficient as himself in the hidden arts, and who had therefore been called Le Sorcier, or the Wizard. This pair, shunned by all honest folk, were suspected of the most hideous practices. Old Michel was said to have burnt his wife alive as a sacrifice to the Devil, and the unaccountable disappearances of many small peasant children were laid at the dreaded door of these two. Yet through the dark natures of the father and the son ran one redeeming ray of humanity; the evil old man loved his offspring with fierce intensity, whilst the youth had for his parent a more than filial affection.\n\nOne night the castle on the hill was thrown into the wildest confusion by the vanishment of young Godfrey, son to Henri the Comte. A searching party, headed by the frantic father, invaded the cottage of the sorcerers and there came upon old Michel Mauvais, busy over a huge and violently boiling cauldron. Without certain cause, in the ungoverned madness of fury and despair, the Comte laid hands on the aged wizard, and ere he released his murderous hold his victim was no more. Meanwhile joyful servants were proclaiming the finding of young Godfrey in a distant and unused chamber of the great edifice, telling too late that poor Michel had been killed in vain. As the Comte and his associates turned away from the lowly abode of the alchemists, the form of Charles Le Sorcier appeared through the trees. The excited chatter of the menials standing about told him what had occurred, yet he seemed at first unmoved at his father's fate. Then, slowly advancing to meet the Comte, he pronounced in dull yet terrible accents the curse that ever afterward haunted the house of C..\n\n\"May ne'er a noble of thy murd'rous line\n\nSurvive to reach a greater age than thine!\" spake he, when, suddenly leaping backwards into the black wood, he drew from his tunic a phial of colourless liquid which he threw into the face of his father's slayer as he disappeared behind the inky curtain of the night. The Comte died without utterance, and was buried the next day, but little more than two and thirty years from the hour of his birth. No trace of the assassin could be found, though relentless bands of peasants scoured the neighbouring woods and the meadow-land around the hill.\n\nThus time and the want of a reminder dulled the memory of the curse in the minds of the late Comte's family, so that when Godfrey, innocent cause of the whole tragedy and now bearing the title, was killed by an arrow whilst hunting, at the age of thirty-two, there were no thoughts save those of grief at his demise. But when, years afterward, the next young Comte, Robert by name, was found dead in a nearby field from no apparent cause, the peasants told in whispers that their seigneur had but lately passed his thirty-second birthday when surprised by early death. Louis, son to Robert, was found drowned in the moat at the same fateful age, and thus down through the centuries ran the ominous chronicle; Henris, Roberts, Antoines, and Armands snatched from happy and virtuous lives when little below the age of their unfortunate ancestor at his murder.\n\nThat I had left at most but eleven years of further existence was made certain to me by the words which I read. My life, previously held at small value, now became dearer to me each day, as I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the hidden world of black magic. Isolated as I was, modern science had produced no impression upon me, and I laboured as in the Middle Ages, as wrapt as had been old Michel and young Charles themselves in the acquisition of daemonological and alchemical learning. Yet read as I might, in no manner could I account for the strange curse upon my line. In unusually rational moments, I would even go so far as to seek a natural explanation, attributing the early deaths of my ancestors to the sinister Charles Le Sorcier and his heirs; yet having found upon careful inquiry that there were no known descendants of the alchemist, I would fall back to occult studies, and once more endeavour to find a spell that would release my house from its terrible burden. Upon one thing I was absolutely resolved. I should never wed, for since no other branches of my family were in existence, I might thus end the curse with myself.\n\nAs I drew near the age of thirty, old Pierre was called to the land beyond. Alone I buried him beneath the stones of the courtyard about which he had loved to wander in life. Thus was I left to ponder on myself as the only human creature within the great fortress, and in my utter solitude my mind began to cease its vain protest against the impending doom, to become almost reconciled to the fate which so many of my ancestors had met. Much of my time was now occupied in the exploration of the ruined and abandoned halls and towers of the old chateau, which in youth fear had caused me to shun, and some of which, old Pierre had once told me, had not been trodden by human foot for over four centuries. Strange and awesome were many of the objects I encountered. Furniture, covered by the dust of ages and crumbling with the rot of long dampness, met my eyes. Cobwebs in a profusion never before seen by me were spun everywhere, and huge bats flapped their bony and uncanny wings on all sides of the otherwise untenanted gloom.\n\nOf my exact age, even down to days and hours, I kept a most careful record, for each movement of the pendulum of the massive clock in the library told off so much more of my doomed existence. At length I approached that time which I had so long viewed with apprehension. Since most of my ancestors had been seized some little while before they reached the exact age of Comte Henri at his end, I was every moment on the watch for the coming of the unknown death. In what strange form the curse should overtake me, I knew not; but I was resolved, at least, that it should not find me a cowardly or a passive victim. With new vigour I applied myself to my examination of the old chateau and its contents.\n\nIt was upon one of the longest of all my excursions of discovery in the deserted portion of the castle, less than a week before that fatal hour which I felt must mark the utmost limit of my stay on earth, beyond which I could have not even the slightest hope of continuing to draw breath, that I came upon the culminating event of my whole life. I had spent the better part of the morning in climbing up and down half-ruined staircases in one of the most dilapidated of the ancient turrets. As the afternoon progressed, I sought the lower levels, descending into what appeared to be either a mediaeval place of confinement, or a more recently excavated storehouse for gunpowder. As I slowly traversed the nitre-encrusted passageway at the foot of the last staircase, the paving became very damp, and soon I saw by the light of my flickering torch that a blank, water-stained wall impeded my journey. Turning to retrace my steps, my eye fell upon a small trap-door with a ring, which lay directly beneath my feet. Pausing, I succeeded with difficulty in raising it, whereupon there was revealed a black aperture, exhaling noxious fumes which caused my torch to sputter, and disclosing in the unsteady glare the top of a flight of stone steps. As soon as the torch, which I lowered into the repellent depths, burned freely and steadily, I commenced my descent. The steps were many, and led to a narrow stone-flagged passage which I knew must be far underground. The passage proved of great length, and terminated in a massive oaken door, dripping with the moisture of the place, and stoutly resisting all my attempts to open it. Ceasing after a time my efforts in this direction, I had proceeded back some distance toward the steps, when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. My immediate sensations are incapable of analysis. To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of the presence of man or spirit, produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld. There in the ancient Gothic doorway stood a human figure. It was that of a man clad in a skull-cap and long mediaeval tunic of dark colour. His long hair and flowing beard were of a terrible and intense black hue, and of incredible profusion. His forehead, high beyond the usual dimensions; his cheeks, deep-sunken and heavily lined with wrinkles; and his hands, long, claw-like, and gnarled, were of such a deathly, marble-like whiteness as I have never elsewhere seen in man. His figure, lean to the proportions of a skeleton, was strangely bent and almost lost within the voluminous folds of his peculiar garment. But strangest of all were his eyes; twin caves of abysmal blackness, profound in expression of understanding, yet inhuman in degree of wickedness. These were now fixed upon me, piercing my soul with their hatred, and rooting me to the spot whereon I stood. At last the figure spoke in a rumbling voice that chilled me through with its dull hollowness and latent malevolence. The language in which the discourse was clothed was that debased form of Latin in use amongst the more learned men of the Middle Ages, and made familiar to me by my prolonged researches into the works of the old alchemists and daemonologists. The apparition spoke of the curse which had hovered over my house, told me of my coming end, dwelt on the wrong perpetrated by my ancestor against old Michel Mauvais, and gloated over the revenge of Charles Le Sorcier. He told how the young Charles had escaped into the night, returning in after years to kill Godfrey the heir with an arrow just as he approached the age which had been his father's at his assassination; how he had secretly returned to the estate and established himself, unknown, in the even then deserted subterranean chamber whose doorway now framed the hideous narrator; how he had seized Robert, son of Godfrey, in a field, forced poison down his throat, and left him to die at the age of thirty-two, thus maintaining the foul provisions of his vengeful curse. At this point I was left to imagine the solution of the greatest mystery of all, how the curse had been fulfilled since that time when Charles Le Sorcier must in the course of Nature have died, for the man digressed into an account of the deep alchemical studies of the two wizards, father and son, speaking most particularly of the researches of Charles Le Sorcier concerning the elixir which should grant to him who partook of it eternal life and youth.\n\nHis enthusiasm had seemed for the moment to remove from his terrible eyes the hatred that had at first so haunted them, but suddenly the fiendish glare returned, and with a shocking sound like the hissing of a serpent, the stranger raised a glass phial with the evident intent of ending my life as had Charles Le Sorcier, six hundred years before, ended that of my ancestor. Prompted by some preserving instinct of self-defence, I broke through the spell that had hitherto held me immovable, and flung my now dying torch at the creature who menaced my existence. I heard the phial break harmlessly against the stones of the passage as the tunic of the strange man caught fire and lit the horrid scene with a ghastly radiance. The shriek of fright and impotent malice emitted by the would-be assassin proved too much for my already shaken nerves, and I fell prone upon the slimy floor in a total faint.\n\nWhen at last my senses returned, all was frightfully dark, and my mind remembering what had occurred, shrank from the idea of beholding more; yet curiosity overmastered all. Who, I asked myself, was this man of evil, and how came he within the castle walls? Why should he seek to avenge the death of poor Michel Mauvais, and how had the curse been carried on through all the long centuries since the time of Charles Le Sorcier? The dread of years was lifted from my shoulders, for I knew that he whom I had felled was the source of all my danger from the curse; and now that I was free, I burned with the desire to learn more of the sinister thing which had haunted my line for centuries, and made of my own youth one long-continued nightmare. Determined upon further exploration, I felt in my pockets for flint and steel, and lit the unused torch which I had with me. First of all, the new light revealed the distorted and blackened form of the mysterious stranger. The hideous eyes were now closed. Disliking the sight, I turned away and entered the chamber beyond the Gothic door. Here I found what seemed much like an alchemist's laboratory. In one corner was an immense pile of a shining yellow metal that sparkled gorgeously in the light of the torch. It may have been gold, but I did not pause to examine it, for I was strangely affected by that which I had undergone. At the farther end of the apartment was an opening leading out into one of the many wild ravines of the dark hillside forest. Filled with wonder, yet now realising how the man had obtained access to the chateau, I proceeded to return. I had intended to pass by the remains of the stranger with averted face, but as I approached the body, I seemed to hear emanating from it a faint sound, as though life were not yet wholly extinct. Aghast, I turned to examine the charred and shrivelled figure on the floor. Then all at once the horrible eyes, blacker even than the seared face in which they were set, opened wide with an expression which I was unable to interpret. The cracked lips tried to frame words which I could not well understand. Once I caught the name of Charles Le Sorcier, and again I fancied that the words \"years\" and \"curse\" issued from the twisted mouth. Still I was at a loss to gather the purport of his disconnected speech. At my evident ignorance of his meaning, the pitchy eyes once more flashed malevolently at me, until, helpless as I saw my opponent to be, I trembled as I watched him.\n\nSuddenly the wretch, animated with his last burst of strength, raised his hideous head from the damp and sunken pavement. Then, as I remained, paralysed with fear, he found his voice and in his dying breath screamed forth those words which have ever afterward haunted my days and my nights. \"Fool,\" he shrieked, \"can you not guess my secret? Have you no brain whereby you may recognise the will which has through six long centuries fulfilled the dreadful curse upon your house? Have I not told you of the great elixir of eternal life? Know you not how the secret of Alchemy was solved? I tell you, it is I! I! I! that have lived for six hundred years to maintain my revenge, FOR I AM CHARLES LE SORCIER!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic\u2014with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap\u2014and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and a\u00ebrial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.\n\nIn the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles; and on the other hand, sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness. It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates, connected only with a small university, have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned.\n\nIt is further against us that we are not, in the strictest sense, specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned. As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent, aided by the remarkable drill devised by Prof. Frank H. Pabodie of our engineering department. I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this; but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection. Pabodie's drilling apparatus, as the public already knows from our reports, was unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness. Steel head, jointed rods, gasoline motor, collapsible wooden derrick, dynamiting paraphernalia, cording, rubbish-removal auger, and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to 1000 feet deep all formed, with needed accessories, no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry; this being made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned. Four large Dornier a\u00ebroplanes, designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie, could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points, and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us.\n\nWe planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic season\u2014or longer, if absolutely necessary\u2014would permit, operating mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea; regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, and Byrd. With frequent changes of camp, made by a\u00ebroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance, we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material; especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured. We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks, since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importance to our knowledge of the earth's past. That the antarctic continent was once temperate and even tropical, with a teeming vegetable and animal life of which the lichens, marine fauna, arachnida, and penguins of the northern edge are the only survivals, is a matter of common information; and we hoped to expand that information in variety, accuracy, and detail. When a simple boring revealed fossiliferous signs, we would enlarge the aperture by blasting in order to get specimens of suitable size and condition.\n\nOur borings, of varying depth according to the promise held out by the upper soil or rock, were to be confined to exposed or nearly exposed land surfaces\u2014these inevitably being slopes and ridges because of the mile or two-mile thickness of solid ice overlying the lower levels. We could not afford to waste drilling depth on any considerable amount of mere glaciation, though Pabodie had worked out a plan for sinking copper electrodes in thick clusters of borings and melting off limited areas of ice with current from a gasoline-driven dynamo. It is this plan\u2014which we could not put into effect except experimentally on an expedition such as ours\u2014that the coming Starkweather-Moore Expedition proposes to follow despite the warnings I have issued since our return from the antarctic.\n\nThe public knows of the Miskatonic Expedition through our frequent wireless reports to the Arkham Advertiser and Associated Press, and through the later articles of Pabodie and myself. We consisted of four men from the University\u2014Pabodie, Lake of the biology department, Atwood of the physics department (also a meteorologist), and I representing geology and having nominal command\u2014besides sixteen assistants; seven graduate students from Miskatonic and nine skilled mechanics. Of these sixteen, twelve were qualified a\u00ebroplane pilots, all but two of whom were competent wireless operators. Eight of them understood navigation with compass and sextant, as did Pabodie, Atwood, and I. In addition, of course, our two ships\u2014wooden ex-whalers, reinforced for ice conditions and having auxiliary steam\u2014were fully manned. The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, aided by a few special contributions, financed the expedition; hence our preparations were extremely thorough despite the absence of great publicity. The dogs, sledges, machines, camp materials, and unassembled parts of our five planes were delivered in Boston, and there our ships were loaded. We were marvellously well-equipped for our specific purposes, and in all matters pertaining to supplies, regimen, transportation, and camp construction we profited by the excellent example of our many recent and exceptionally brilliant predecessors. It was the unusual number and fame of these predecessors which made our own expedition\u2014ample though it was\u2014so little noticed by the world at large.\n\nAs the newspapers told, we sailed from Boston Harbour on September 2, 1930; taking a leisurely course down the coast and through the Panama Canal, and stopping at Samoa and Hobart, Tasmania, at which latter place we took on final supplies. None of our exploring party had ever been in the polar regions before, hence we all relied greatly on our ship captains\u2014J. B. Douglas, commanding the brig Arkham, and serving as commander of the sea party, and Georg Thorfinnssen, commanding the barque Miskatonic\u2014both veteran whalers in antarctic waters. As we left the inhabited world behind the sun sank lower and lower in the north, and stayed longer and longer above the horizon each day. At about 62\u00b0 South Latitude we sighted our first icebergs\u2014table-like objects with vertical sides\u2014and just before reaching the Antarctic Circle, which we crossed on October 20 with appropriately quaint ceremonies, we were considerably troubled with field ice. The falling temperature bothered me considerably after our long voyage through the tropics, but I tried to brace up for the worse rigours to come. On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage\u2014the first I had ever seen\u2014in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.\n\nPushing through the ice, which was fortunately neither extensive nor thickly packed, we regained open water at South Latitude 67\u00b0, East Longitude 175\u00b0. On the morning of October 26 a strong \"land blink\" appeared on the south, and before noon we all felt a thrill of excitement at beholding a vast, lofty, and snow-clad mountain chain which opened out and covered the whole vista ahead. At last we had encountered an outpost of the great unknown continent and its cryptic world of frozen death. These peaks were obviously the Admiralty Range discovered by Ross, and it would now be our task to round Cape Adare and sail down the east coast of Victoria Land to our contemplated base on the shore of McMurdo Sound at the foot of the volcano Erebus in South Latitude 77\u00b0 9\u2032.\n\nThe last lap of the voyage was vivid and fancy-stirring, great barren peaks of mystery looming up constantly against the west as the low northern sun of noon or the still lower horizon-grazing southern sun of midnight poured its hazy reddish rays over the white snow, bluish ice and water lanes, and black bits of exposed granite slope. Through the desolate summits swept raging intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. I was rather sorry, later on, that I had ever looked into that monstrous book at the college library.\n\nOn the seventh of November, sight of the westward range having been temporarily lost, we passed Franklin Island; and the next day descried the cones of Mts. Erebus and Terror on Ross Island ahead, with the long line of the Parry Mountains beyond. There now stretched off to the east the low, white line of the great ice barrier; rising perpendicularly to a height of 200 feet like the rocky cliffs of Quebec, and marking the end of southward navigation. In the afternoon we entered McMurdo Sound and stood off the coast in the lee of smoking Mt. Erebus. The scoriac peak towered up some 12,700 feet against the eastern sky, like a Japanese print of the sacred Fujiyama; while beyond it rose the white, ghost-like height of Mt. Terror, 10,900 feet in altitude, and now extinct as a volcano. Puffs of smoke from Erebus came intermittently, and one of the graduate assistants\u2014a brilliant young fellow named Danforth\u2014pointed out what looked like lava on the snowy slope; remarking that this mountain, discovered in 1840, had undoubtedly been the source of Poe's image when he wrote seven years later of:\n\n\u2003\"\u2014the lavas that restlessly roll\n\n\u2003Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek\n\n\u2003In the ultimate climes of the pole\u2014\n\n\u2003That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek\n\n\u2003In the realms of the boreal pole.\"\n\nDanforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only long story\u2014the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.\n\nUsing small boats, we effected a difficult landing on Ross Island shortly after midnight on the morning of the 9th, carrying a line of cable from each of the ships and preparing to unload supplies by means of a breeches-buoy arrangement. Our sensations on first treading antarctic soil were poignant and complex, even though at this particular point the Scott and Shackleton expeditions had preceded us. Our camp on the frozen shore below the volcano's slope was only a provisional one; headquarters being kept aboard the Arkham. We landed all our drilling apparatus, dogs, sledges, tents, provisions, gasoline tanks, experimental ice-melting outfit, cameras both ordinary and a\u00ebrial, a\u00ebroplane parts, and other accessories, including three small portable wireless outfits (besides those in the planes) capable of communicating with the Arkham's large outfit from any part of the antarctic continent that we would be likely to visit. The ship's outfit, communicating with the outside world, was to convey press reports to the Arkham Advertiser's powerful wireless station on Kingsport Head, Mass. We hoped to complete our work during a single antarctic summer; but if this proved impossible we would winter on the Arkham, sending the Miskatonic north before the freezing of the ice for another summer's supplies.\n\nI need not repeat what the newspapers have already published about our early work: of our ascent of Mt. Erebus; our successful mineral borings at several points on Ross Island and the singular speed with which Pabodie's apparatus accomplished them, even through solid rock layers; our provisional test of the small ice-melting equipment; our perilous ascent of the great barrier with sledges and supplies; and our final assembling of five huge a\u00ebroplanes at the camp atop the barrier. The health of our land party\u2014twenty men and 55 Alaskan sledge dogs\u2014was remarkable, though of course we had so far encountered no really destructive temperatures or windstorms. For the most part, the thermometer varied between zero and 20\u00b0 or 25\u00b0 above, and our experience with New England winters had accustomed us to rigours of this sort. The barrier camp was semi-permanent, and destined to be a storage cache for gasoline, provisions, dynamite, and other supplies. Only four of our planes were needed to carry the actual exploring material, the fifth being left with a pilot and two men from the ships at the storage cache to form a means of reaching us from the Arkham in case all our exploring planes were lost. Later, when not using all the other planes for moving apparatus, we would employ one or two in a shuttle transportation service between this cache and another permanent base on the great plateau from 600 to 700 miles southward, beyond Beardmore Glacier. Despite the almost unanimous accounts of appalling winds and tempests that pour down from the plateau, we determined to dispense with intermediate bases; taking our chances in the interest of economy and probable efficiency.\n\nWireless reports have spoken of the breath-taking four-hour non-stop flight of our squadron on November 21 over the lofty shelf ice, with vast peaks rising on the west, and the unfathomed silences echoing to the sound of our engines. Wind troubled us only moderately, and our radio compasses helped us through the one opaque fog we encountered. When the vast rise loomed ahead, between Latitudes 83\u00b0 and 84\u00b0, we knew we had reached Beardmore Glacier, the largest valley glacier in the world, and that the frozen sea was now giving place to a frowning and mountainous coastline. At last we were truly entering the white, aeon-dead world of the ultimate south, and even as we realised it we saw the peak of Mt. Nansen in the eastern distance, towering up to its height of almost 15,000 feet.\n\nThe successful establishment of the southern base above the glacier in Latitude 86\u00b0 7\u2032, East Longitude 174\u00b0 23\u2032, and the phenomenally rapid and effective borings and blastings made at various points reached by our sledge trips and short a\u00ebroplane flights, are matters of history; as is the arduous and triumphant ascent of Mt. Nansen by Pabodie and two of the graduate students\u2014Gedney and Carroll\u2014on December 13\u201315. We were some 8500 feet above sea-level, and when experimental drillings revealed solid ground only twelve feet down through the snow and ice at certain points, we made considerable use of the small melting apparatus and sunk bores and performed dynamiting at many places where no previous explorer had ever thought of securing mineral specimens. The pre-Cambrian granites and beacon sandstones thus obtained confirmed our belief that this plateau was homogeneous with the great bulk of the continent to the west, but somewhat different from the parts lying eastward below South America\u2014which we then thought to form a separate and smaller continent divided from the larger one by a frozen junction of Ross and Weddell Seas, though Byrd has since disproved the hypothesis.\n\nIn certain of the sandstones, dynamited and chiselled after boring revealed their nature, we found some highly interesting fossil markings and fragments\u2014notably ferns, seaweeds, trilobites, crinoids, and such molluscs as lingulae and gasteropods\u2014all of which seemed of real significance in connexion with the region's primordial history. There was also a queer triangular, striated marking about a foot in greatest diameter which Lake pieced together from three fragments of slate brought up from a deep-blasted aperture. These fragments came from a point to the westward, near the Queen Alexandra Range; and Lake, as a biologist, seemed to find their curious marking unusually puzzling and provocative, though to my geological eye it looked not unlike some of the ripple effects reasonably common in the sedimentary rocks. Since slate is no more than a metamorphic formation into which a sedimentary stratum is pressed, and since the pressure itself produces odd distorting effects on any markings which may exist, I saw no reason for extreme wonder over the striated depression.\n\nOn January 6, 1931, Lake, Pabodie, Danforth, all six of the students, four mechanics, and I flew directly over the south pole in two of the great planes, being forced down once by a sudden high wind which fortunately did not develop into a typical storm. This was, as the papers have stated, one of several observation flights; during others of which we tried to discern new topographical features in areas unreached by previous explorers. Our early flights were disappointing in this latter respect; though they afforded us some magnificent examples of the richly fantastic and deceptive mirages of the polar regions, of which our sea voyage had given us some brief foretastes. Distant mountains floated in the sky as enchanted cities, and often the whole white world would dissolve into a gold, silver, and scarlet land of Dunsanian dreams and adventurous expectancy under the magic of the low midnight sun. On cloudy days we had considerable trouble in flying, owing to the tendency of snowy earth and sky to merge into one mystical opalescent void with no visible horizon to mark the junction of the two.\n\nAt length we resolved to carry out our original plan of flying 500 miles eastward with all four exploring planes and establishing a fresh sub-base at a point which would probably be on the smaller continental division, as we mistakenly conceived it. Geological specimens obtained there would be desirable for purposes of comparison. Our health so far had remained excellent; lime-juice well offsetting the steady diet of tinned and salted food, and temperatures generally above zero enabling us to do without our thickest furs. It was now midsummer, and with haste and care we might be able to conclude work by March and avoid a tedious wintering through the long antarctic night. Several savage windstorms had burst upon us from the west, but we had escaped damage through the skill of Atwood in devising rudimentary a\u00ebroplane shelters and windbreaks of heavy snow blocks, and reinforcing the principal camp buildings with snow. Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.\n\nThe outside world knew, of course, of our programme, and was told also of Lake's strange and dogged insistence on a westward\u2014or rather, northwestward\u2014prospecting trip before our radical shift to the new base. It seems he had pondered a great deal, and with alarmingly radical daring, over that triangular striated marking in the slate; reading into it certain contradictions in Nature and geological period which whetted his curiosity to the utmost, and made him avid to sink more borings and blastings in the west-stretching formation to which the exhumed fragments evidently belonged. He was strangely convinced that the marking was the print of some bulky, unknown, and radically unclassifiable organism of considerably advanced evolution, notwithstanding that the rock which bore it was of so vastly ancient a date\u2014Cambrian if not actually pre-Cambrian\u2014as to preclude the probable existence not only of all highly evolved life, but of any life at all above the unicellular or at most the trilobite stage. These fragments, with their odd marking, must have been 500 million to a thousand million years old." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Popular imagination, I judge, responded actively to our wireless bulletins of Lake's start northwestward into regions never trodden by human foot or penetrated by human imagination; though we did not mention his wild hopes of revolutionising the entire sciences of biology and geology. His preliminary sledging and boring journey of January 11\u201318 with Pabodie and five others\u2014marred by the loss of two dogs in an upset when crossing one of the great pressure-ridges in the ice\u2014had brought up more and more of the Archaean slate; and even I was interested by the singular profusion of evident fossil markings in that unbelievably ancient stratum. These markings, however, were of very primitive life-forms involving no great paradox except that any life-forms should occur in rock as definitely pre-Cambrian as this seemed to be; hence I still failed to see the good sense of Lake's demand for an interlude in our time-saving programme\u2014an interlude requiring the use of all four planes, many men, and the whole of the expedition's mechanical apparatus. I did not, in the end, veto the plan; though I decided not to accompany the northwestward party despite Lake's plea for my geological advice. While they were gone, I would remain at the base with Pabodie and five men and work out final plans for the eastward shift. In preparation for this transfer one of the planes had begun to move up a good gasoline supply from McMurdo Sound; but this could wait temporarily. I kept with me one sledge and nine dogs, since it is unwise to be at any time without possible transportation in an utterly tenantless world of aeon-long death.\n\nLake's sub-expedition into the unknown, as everyone will recall, sent out its own reports from the short-wave transmitters on the planes; these being simultaneously picked up by our apparatus at the southern base and by the Arkham at McMurdo Sound, whence they were relayed to the outside world on wave-lengths up to fifty metres. The start was made January 22 at 4 A.M.; and the first wireless message we received came only two hours later, when Lake spoke of descending and starting a small-scale ice-melting and bore at a point some 300 miles away from us. Six hours after that a second and very excited message told of the frantic, beaver-like work whereby a shallow shaft had been sunk and blasted; culminating in the discovery of slate fragments with several markings approximately like the one which had caused the original puzzlement.\n\nThree hours later a brief bulletin announced the resumption of the flight in the teeth of a raw and piercing gale; and when I despatched a message of protest against further hazards, Lake replied curtly that his new specimens made any hazard worth taking. I saw that his excitement had reached the point of mutiny, and that I could do nothing to check this headlong risk of the whole expedition's success; but it was appalling to think of his plunging deeper and deeper into that treacherous and sinister white immensity of tempests and unfathomed mysteries which stretched off for some 1500 miles to the half-known, half-suspected coastline of Queen Mary and Knox Lands.\n\nThen, in about an hour and a half more, came that doubly excited message from Lake's moving plane which almost reversed my sentiments and made me wish I had accompanied the party.\n\n\"10:05 P.M. On the wing. After snowstorm, have spied mountain-range ahead higher than any hitherto seen. May equal Himalayas allowing for height of plateau. Probable Latitude 76\u00b0 15\u2032, Longitude 113\u00b0 10\u2032 E. Reaches far as can see to right and left. Suspicion of two smoking cones. All peaks black and bare of snow. Gale blowing off them impedes navigation.\"\n\nAfter that Pabodie, the men, and I hung breathlessly over the receiver. Thought of this titanic mountain rampart 700 miles away inflamed our deepest sense of adventure; and we rejoiced that our expedition, if not ourselves personally, had been its discoverers. In half an hour Lake called us again.\n\n\"Moulton's plane forced down on plateau in foothills, but nobody hurt and perhaps can repair. Shall transfer essentials to other three for return or further moves if necessary, but no more heavy plane travel needed just now. Mountains surpass anything in imagination. Am going up scouting in Carroll's plane, with all weight out. You can't imagine anything like this. Highest peaks must go over 35,000 feet. Everest out of the running. Atwood to work out height with theodolite while Carroll and I go up. Probably wrong about cones, for formations look stratified. Possibly pre-Cambrian slate with other strata mixed in. Queer skyline effects\u2014regular sections of cubes clinging to highest peaks. Whole thing marvellous in red-gold light of low sun. Like land of mystery in a dream or gateway to forbidden world of untrodden wonder. Wish you were here to study.\"\n\nThough it was technically sleeping-time, not one of us listeners thought for a moment of retiring. It must have been a good deal the same at McMurdo Sound, where the supply cache and the Arkham were also getting the messages; for Capt. Douglas gave out a call congratulating everybody on the important find, and Sherman, the cache operator, seconded his sentiments. We were sorry, of course, about the damaged a\u00ebroplane; but hoped it could be easily mended. Then, at 11 P.M., came another call from Lake.\n\n\"Up with Carroll over highest foothills. Don't dare try really tall peaks in present weather, but shall later. Frightful work climbing, and hard going at this altitude, but worth it. Great range fairly solid, hence can't get any glimpses beyond. Main summits exceed Himalayas, and very queer. Range looks like pre-Cambrian slate, with plain signs of many other upheaved strata. Was wrong about volcanism. Goes farther in either direction than we can see. Swept clear of snow above about 21,000 feet. Odd formations on slopes of highest mountains. Great low square blocks with exactly vertical sides, and rectangular lines of low vertical ramparts, like the old Asian castles clinging to steep mountains in Roerich's paintings. Impressive from distance. Flew close to some, and Carroll thought they were formed of smaller separate pieces, but that is probably weathering. Most edges crumbled and rounded off as if exposed to storms and climate changes for millions of years. Parts, especially upper parts, seem to be of lighter-coloured rock than any visible strata on slopes proper, hence an evidently crystalline origin. Close flying shews many cave-mouths, some unusually regular in outline, square or semicircular. You must come and investigate. Think I saw rampart squarely on top of one peak. Height seems about 30,000 to 35,000 feet. Am up 21,500 myself, in devilish gnawing cold. Wind whistles and pipes through passes and in and out of caves, but no flying danger so far.\"\n\nFrom then on for another half-hour Lake kept up a running fire of comment, and expressed his intention of climbing some of the peaks on foot. I replied that I would join him as soon as he could send a plane, and that Pabodie and I would work out the best gasoline plan\u2014just where and how to concentrate our supply in view of the expedition's altered character. Obviously, Lake's boring operations, as well as his a\u00ebroplane activities, would need a great deal delivered for the new base which he was to establish at the foot of the mountains; and it was possible that the eastward flight might not be made after all this season. In connexion with this business I called Capt. Douglas and asked him to get as much as possible out of the ships and up the barrier with the single dog-team we had left there. A direct route across the unknown region between Lake and McMurdo Sound was what we really ought to establish.\n\nLake called me later to say that he had decided to let the camp stay where Moulton's plane had been forced down, and where repairs had already progressed somewhat. The ice-sheet was very thin, with dark ground here and there visible, and he would sink some borings and blasts at that very point before making any sledge trips or climbing expeditions. He spoke of the ineffable majesty of the whole scene, and the queer state of his sensations at being in the lee of vast silent pinnacles whose ranks shot up like a wall reaching the sky at the world's rim. Atwood's theodolite observations had placed the height of the five tallest peaks at from 30,000 to 34,000 feet. The windswept nature of the terrain clearly disturbed Lake, for it argued the occasional existence of prodigious gales violent beyond anything we had so far encountered. His camp lay a little more than five miles from where the higher foothills abruptly rose. I could almost trace a note of subconscious alarm in his words\u2014flashed across a glacial void of 700 miles\u2014as he urged that we all hasten with the matter and get the strange new region disposed of as soon as possible. He was about to rest now, after a continuous day's work of almost unparalleled speed, strenuousness, and results.\n\nIn the morning I had a three-cornered wireless talk with Lake and Capt. Douglas at their widely separated bases; and it was agreed that one of Lake's planes would come to my base for Pabodie, the five men, and myself, as well as for all the fuel it could carry. The rest of the fuel question, depending on our decision about an easterly trip, could wait for a few days; since Lake had enough for immediate camp heat and borings. Eventually the old southern base ought to be restocked; but if we postponed the easterly trip we would not use it till the next summer, and meanwhile Lake must send a plane to explore a direct route between his new mountains and McMurdo Sound.\n\nPabodie and I prepared to close our base for a short or long period, as the case might be. If we wintered in the antarctic we would probably fly straight from Lake's base to the Arkham without returning to this spot. Some of our conical tents had already been reinforced by blocks of hard snow, and now we decided to complete the job of making a permanent Esquimau village. Owing to a very liberal tent supply, Lake had with him all that his base would need even after our arrival. I wirelessed that Pabodie and I would be ready for the northwestward move after one day's work and one night's rest.\n\nOur labours, however, were not very steady after 4 P.M.; for about that time Lake began sending in the most extraordinary and excited messages. His working day had started unpropitiously; since an a\u00ebroplane survey of the nearly exposed rock surfaces shewed an entire absence of those Archaean and primordial strata for which he was looking, and which formed so great a part of the colossal peaks that loomed up at a tantalising distance from the camp. Most of the rocks glimpsed were apparently Jurassic and Comanchian sandstones and Permian and Triassic schists, with now and then a glossy black outcropping suggesting a hard and slaty coal. This rather discouraged Lake, whose plans all hinged on unearthing specimens more than 500 million years older. It was clear to him that in order to recover the Archaean slate vein in which he had found the odd markings, he would have to make a long sledge trip from these foothills to the steep slopes of the gigantic mountains themselves.\n\nHe had resolved, nevertheless, to do some local boring as part of the expedition's general programme; hence set up the drill and put five men to work with it while the rest finished settling the camp and repairing the damaged a\u00ebroplane. The softest visible rock\u2014a sandstone about a quarter of a mile from the camp\u2014had been chosen for the first sampling; and the drill made excellent progress without much supplementary blasting. It was about three hours afterward, following the first really heavy blast of the operation, that the shouting of the drill crew was heard; and that young Gedney\u2014the acting foreman\u2014rushed into the camp with the startling news.\n\nThey had struck a cave. Early in the boring the sandstone had given place to a vein of Comanchian limestone full of minute fossil cephalopods, corals, echini, and spirifera, and with occasional suggestions of siliceous sponges and marine vertebrate bones\u2014the latter probably of teliosts, sharks, and ganoids. This in itself was important enough, as affording the first vertebrate fossils the expedition had yet secured; but when shortly afterward the drill-head dropped through the stratum into apparent vacancy, a wholly new and doubly intense wave of excitement spread among the excavators. A good-sized blast had laid open the subterrene secret; and now, through a jagged aperture perhaps five feet across and three feet thick, there yawned before the avid searchers a section of shallow limestone hollowing worn more than fifty million years ago by the trickling ground waters of a bygone tropic world.\n\nThe hollowed layer was not more than seven or eight feet deep, but extended off indefinitely in all directions and had a fresh, slightly moving air which suggested its membership in an extensive subterranean system. Its roof and floor were abundantly equipped with large stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met in columnar form; but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree-ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan-palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest palaeontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Molluscs, crustacean armour, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals\u2014great and small, known and unknown. No wonder Gedney ran back to the camp shouting, and no wonder everyone else dropped work and rushed headlong through the biting cold to where the tall derrick marked a new-found gateway to secrets of inner earth and vanished aeons.\n\nWhen Lake had satisfied the first keen edge of his curiosity he scribbled a message in his notebook and had young Moulton run back to the camp to despatch it by wireless. This was my first word of the discovery, and it told of the identification of early shells, bones of ganoids and placoderms, remnants of labyrinthodonts and thecodonts, great mososaur skull fragments, dinosaur vertebrae and armour-plates, pterodactyl teeth and wing-bones, archaeopteryx debris, Miocene sharks' teeth, primitive bird-skulls, and skulls, vertebrae, and other bones of archaic mammals such as palaeotheres, xiphodons, dinocerases, eohippi, oreodons, and titanotheres. There was nothing as recent as a mastodon, elephant, true camel, deer, or bovine animal; hence Lake concluded that the last deposits had occurred during the Oligocene age, and that the hollowed stratum had lain in its present dried, dead, and inaccessible state for at least thirty million years.\n\nOn the other hand, the prevalence of very early life-forms was singular in the highest degree. Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier; the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods\u2014even rudimentary fishes, molluscs, and corals as remote as the Silurian or Ordovician. The inevitable inference was that in this part of the world there had been a remarkable and unique degree of continuity between the life of over 300 million years ago and that of only thirty million years ago. How far this continuity had extended beyond the Oligocene age when the cavern was closed, was of course past all speculation. In any event, the coming of the frightful ice in the Pleistocene some 500,000 years ago\u2014a mere yesterday as compared with the age of this cavity\u2014must have put an end to any of the primal forms which had locally managed to outlive their common terms.\n\nLake was not content to let his first message stand, but had another bulletin written and despatched across the snow to the camp before Moulton could get back. After that Moulton stayed at the wireless in one of the planes; transmitting to me\u2014and to the Arkham for relaying to the outside world\u2014the frequent postscripts which Lake sent him by a succession of messengers. Those who followed the newspapers will remember the excitement created among men of science by that afternoon's reports\u2014reports which have finally led, after all these years, to the organisation of that very Starkweather-Moore Expedition which I am so anxious to dissuade from its purposes. I had better give the messages literally as Lake sent them, and as our base operator McTighe translated them from his pencil shorthand.\n\n\"Fowler makes discovery of highest importance in sandstone and limestone fragments from blasts. Several distinct triangular striated prints like those in Archaean slate, proving that source survived from over 600 million years ago to Comanchian times without more than moderate morphological changes and decrease in average size. Comanchian prints apparently more primitive or decadent, if anything, than older ones. Emphasise importance of discovery in press. Will mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics. Joins up with my previous work and amplifies conclusions. Appears to indicate, as I suspected, that earth has seen whole cycle or cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells. Was evolved and specialised not later than thousand million years ago, when planet was young and recently uninhabitable for any life-forms or normal protoplasmic structure. Question arises when, where, and how development took place.\"\n\n\"Later. Examining certain skeletal fragments of large land and marine saurians and primitive mammals, find singular local wounds or injuries to bony structure not attributable to any known predatory or carnivorous animal of any period. Of two sorts\u2014straight, penetrant bores, and apparently hacking incisions. One or two cases of cleanly severed bone. Not many specimens affected. Am sending to camp for electric torches. Will extend search area underground by hacking away stalactites.\"\n\n\"Still later. Have found peculiar soapstone fragment about six inches across and an inch and a half thick, wholly unlike any visible local formation. Greenish, but no evidences to place its period. Has curious smoothness and regularity. Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in centre of surface. Small, smooth depression in centre of unbroken surface. Arouses much curiosity as to source and weathering. Probably some freak of water action. Carroll, with magnifier, thinks he can make out additional markings of geologic significance. Groups of tiny dots in regular patterns. Dogs growing uneasy as we work, and seem to hate this soapstone. Must see if it has any peculiar odour. Will report again when Mills gets back with light and we start on underground area.\"\n\n\"10:15 P.M. Important discovery. Orrendorf and Watkins, working underground at 9:45 with light, found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature; probably vegetable unless overgrown specimen of unknown marine radiata. Tissue evidently preserved by mineral salts. Tough as leather, but astonishing flexibility retained in places. Marks of broken-off parts at ends and around sides. Six feet end to end, 3.5 feet central diameter, tapering to 1 foot at each end. Like a barrel with five bulging ridges in place of staves. Lateral breakages, as of thinnish stalks, are at equator in middle of these ridges. In furrows between ridges are curious growths. Combs or wings that fold up and spread out like fans. All greatly damaged but one, which gives almost seven-foot wing spread. Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon. These wings seem to be membraneous, stretched on framework of glandular tubing. Apparent minute orifices in frame tubing at wing tips. Ends of body shrivelled, giving no clue to interior or to what has been broken off there. Must dissect when we get back to camp. Can't decide whether vegetable or animal. Many features obviously of almost incredible primitiveness. Have set all hands cutting stalactites and looking for further specimens. Additional scarred bones found, but these must wait. Having trouble with dogs. They can't endure the new specimen, and would probably tear it to pieces if we didn't keep it at a distance from them.\"\n\n\"11:30 P.M. Attention, Dyer, Pabodie, Douglas. Matter of highest\u2014I might say transcendent\u2014importance. Arkham must relay to Kingsport Head Station at once. Strange barrel growth is the Archaean thing that left prints in rocks. Mills, Boudreau, and Fowler discover cluster of thirteen more at underground point forty feet from aperture. Mixed with curiously rounded and configured soapstone fragments smaller than one previously found\u2014star-shaped but no marks of breakage except at some of the points. Of organic specimens, eight apparently perfect, with all appendages. Have brought all to surface, leading off dogs to distance. They cannot stand the things. Give close attention to description and repeat back for accuracy. Papers must get this right.\n\n\"Objects are eight feet long all over. Six-foot five-ridged barrel torso 3.5 feet central diameter, 1 foot end diameters. Dark grey, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membraneous wings of same colour, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter grey, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges, are five systems of light grey flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over 3 feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks 3 inches diameter branch after 6 inches into five sub-stalks, each of which branches after 8 inches into five small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of 25 tentacles.\n\n\"At top of torso blunt bulbous neck of lighter grey with gill-like suggestions holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colours. Head thick and puffy, about 2 feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact centre of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye. Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in sac-like swellings of same colour which upon pressure open to bell-shaped orifices 2 inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp white tooth-like projections. Probable mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish-head found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.\n\n\"At bottom of torso rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-grey pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish-arrangement. Tough, muscular arms 4 feet long and tapering from 7 inches diameter at base to about 2.5 at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membraneous triangle 8 inches long and 6 wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudo-foot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from 3 inches diameter at base to 1 at tip. Orifices at tips. All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudo-neck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.\n\n\"Cannot yet assign positively to animal or vegetable kingdom, but odds now favour animal. Probably represents incredibly advanced evolution of radiata without loss of certain primitive features. Echinoderm resemblances unmistakable despite local contradictory evidences. Wing structure puzzles in view of probable marine habitat, but may have use in water navigation. Symmetry is curiously vegetable-like, suggesting vegetable's essentially up-and-down structure rather than animal's fore-and-aft structure. Fabulously early date of evolution, preceding even simplest Archaean protozoa hitherto known, baffles all conjecture as to origin.\n\n\"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomicon and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake. Students have always thought conception formed from morbid imaginative treatment of very ancient tropical radiata. Also like prehistoric folklore things Wilmarth has spoken of\u2014Cthulhu cult appendages, etc.\n\n\"Vast field of study opened. Deposits probably of late Cretaceous or early Eocene period, judging from associated specimens. Massive stalagmites deposited above them. Hard work hewing out, but toughness prevented damage. State of preservation miraculous, evidently owing to limestone action. No more found so far, but will resume search later. Job now to get fourteen huge specimens to camp without dogs, which bark furiously and can't be trusted near them. With nine men\u2014three left to guard the dogs\u2014we ought to manage the three sledges fairly well, though wind is bad. Must establish plane communication with McMurdo Sound and begin shipping material. But I've got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest. Wish I had a real laboratory here. Dyer better kick himself for having tried to stop my westward trip. First the world's greatest mountains, and then this. If this last isn't the high spot of the expedition, I don't know what is. We're made scientifically. Congrats, Pabodie, on the drill that opened up the cave. Now will Arkham please repeat description?\"\n\nThe sensations of Pabodie and myself at receipt of this report were almost beyond description, nor were our companions much behind us in enthusiasm. McTighe, who had hastily translated a few high spots as they came from the droning receiving set, wrote out the entire message from his shorthand version as soon as Lake's operator signed off. All appreciated the epoch-making significance of the discovery, and I sent Lake congratulations as soon as the Arkham's operator had repeated back the descriptive parts as requested; and my example was followed by Sherman from his station at the McMurdo Sound supply cache, as well as by Capt. Douglas of the Arkham. Later, as head of the expedition, I added some remarks to be relayed through the Arkham to the outside world. Of course, rest was an absurd thought amidst this excitement; and my only wish was to get to Lake's camp as quickly as I could. It disappointed me when he sent word that a rising mountain gale made early a\u00ebrial travel impossible.\n\nBut within an hour and a half interest again rose to banish disappointment. Lake was sending more messages, and told of the completely successful transportation of the fourteen great specimens to the camp. It had been a hard pull, for the things were surprisingly heavy; but nine men had accomplished it very neatly. Now some of the party were hurriedly building a snow corral at a safe distance from the camp, to which the dogs could be brought for greater convenience in feeding. The specimens were laid out on the hard snow near the camp, save for one on which Lake was making crude attempts at dissection.\n\nThis dissection seemed to be a greater task than had been expected; for despite the heat of a gasoline stove in the newly raised laboratory tent, the deceptively flexible tissues of the chosen specimen\u2014a powerful and intact one\u2014lost nothing of their more than leathery toughness. Lake was puzzled as to how he might make the requisite incisions without violence destructive enough to upset all the structural niceties he was looking for. He had, it is true, seven more perfect specimens; but these were too few to use up recklessly unless the cave might later yield an unlimited supply. Accordingly he removed the specimen and dragged in one which, though having remnants of the starfish-arrangements at both ends, was badly crushed and partly disrupted along one of the great torso furrows.\n\nResults, quickly reported over the wireless, were baffling and provocative indeed. Nothing like delicacy or accuracy was possible with instruments hardly able to cut the anomalous tissue, but the little that was achieved left us all awed and bewildered. Existing biology would have to be wholly revised, for this thing was no product of any cell-growth science knows about. There had been scarcely any mineral replacement, and despite an age of perhaps forty million years the internal organs were wholly intact. The leathery, undeteriorative, and almost indestructible quality was an inherent attribute of the thing's form of organisation; and pertained to some palaeogean cycle of invertebrate evolution utterly beyond our powers of speculation. At first all that Lake found was dry, but as the heated tent produced its thawing effect, organic moisture of pungent and offensive odour was encountered toward the thing's uninjured side. It was not blood, but a thick, dark-green fluid apparently answering the same purpose. By the time Lake reached this stage all 37 dogs had been brought to the still uncompleted corral near the camp; and even at that distance set up a savage barking and show of restlessness at the acrid, diffusive smell.\n\nFar from helping to place the strange entity, this provisional dissection merely deepened its mystery. All guesses about its external members had been correct, and on the evidence of these one could hardly hesitate to call the thing animal; but internal inspection brought up so many vegetable evidences that Lake was left hopelessly at sea. It had digestion and circulation, and eliminated waste matter through the reddish tubes of its starfish-shaped base. Cursorily, one would say that its respiratory apparatus handled oxygen rather than carbon dioxide; and there were odd evidences of air-storage chambers and methods of shifting respiration from the external orifice to at least two other fully developed breathing-systems\u2014gills and pores. Clearly, it was amphibian and probably adapted to long airless hibernation-periods as well. Vocal organs seemed present in connexion with the main respiratory system, but they presented anomalies beyond immediate solution. Articulate speech, in the sense of syllable-utterance, seemed barely conceivable; but musical piping notes covering a wide range were highly probable. The muscular system was almost preternaturally developed.\n\nThe nervous system was so complex and highly developed as to leave Lake aghast. Though excessively primitive and archaic in some respects, the thing had a set of ganglial centres and connectives arguing the very extremes of specialised development. Its five-lobed brain was surprisingly advanced; and there were signs of a sensory equipment, served in part through the wiry cilia of the head, involving factors alien to any other terrestrial organism. Probably it had more than five senses, so that its habits could not be predicted from any existing analogy. It must, Lake thought, have been a creature of keen sensitiveness and delicately differentiated functions in its primal world; much like the ants and bees of today. It reproduced like the vegetable cryptogams, especially the pteridophytes; having spore-cases at the tips of the wings and evidently developing from a thallus or prothallus.\n\nBut to give it a name at this stage was mere folly. It looked like a radiate, but was clearly something more. It was partly vegetable, but had three-fourths of the essentials of animal structure. That it was marine in origin, its symmetrical contour and certain other attributes clearly indicated; yet one could not be exact as to the limit of its later adaptations. The wings, after all, held a persistent suggestion of the a\u00ebrial. How it could have undergone its tremendously complex evolution on a new-born earth in time to leave prints in Archaean rocks was so far beyond conception as to make Lake whimsically recall the primal myths about Great Old Ones who filtered down from the stars and concocted earth-life as a joke or mistake; and the wild tales of cosmic hill things from Outside told by a folklorist colleague in Miskatonic's English department.\n\nNaturally, he considered the possibility of the pre-Cambrian prints' having been made by a less evolved ancestor of the present specimens; but quickly rejected this too facile theory upon considering the advanced structural qualities of the older fossils. If anything, the later contours shewed decadence rather than higher evolution. The size of the pseudo-feet had decreased, and the whole morphology seemed coarsened and simplified. Moreover, the nerves and organs just examined held singular suggestions of retrogression from forms still more complex. Atrophied and vestigial parts were surprisingly prevalent. Altogether, little could be said to have been solved; and Lake fell back on mythology for a provisional name\u2014jocosely dubbing his finds \"The Elder Ones\".\n\nAt about 2:30 A.M., having decided to postpone further work and get a little rest, he covered the dissected organism with a tarpaulin, emerged from the laboratory tent, and studied the intact specimens with renewed interest. The ceaseless antarctic sun had begun to limber up their tissues a trifle, so that the head-points and tubes of two or three shewed signs of unfolding; but Lake did not believe there was any danger of immediate decomposition in the almost sub-zero air. He did, however, move all the undissected specimens closer together and throw a spare tent over them in order to keep off the direct solar rays. That would also help to keep their possible scent away from the dogs, whose hostile unrest was really becoming a problem even at their substantial distance and behind the higher and higher snow walls which an increased quota of the men were hastening to raise around their quarters. He had to weight down the corners of the tent-cloth with heavy blocks of snow to hold it in place amidst the rising gale, for the titan mountains seemed about to deliver some gravely severe blasts. Early apprehensions about sudden antarctic winds were revived, and under Atwood's supervision precautions were taken to bank the tents, new dog-corral, and crude a\u00ebroplane shelters with snow on the mountainward side. These latter shelters, begun with hard snow blocks during odd moments, were by no means as high as they should have been; and Lake finally detached all hands from other tasks to work on them.\n\nIt was after four when Lake at last prepared to sign off and advised us all to share the rest period his outfit would take when the shelter walls were a little higher. He held some friendly chat with Pabodie over the ether, and repeated his praise of the really marvellous drills that had helped him make his discovery. Atwood also sent greetings and praises. I gave Lake a warm word of congratulation, owning up that he was right about the western trip; and we all agreed to get in touch by wireless at ten in the morning. If the gale was then over, Lake would send a plane for the party at my base. Just before retiring I despatched a final message to the Arkham with instructions about toning down the day's news for the outside world, since the full details seemed radical enough to rouse a wave of incredulity until further substantiated." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "None of us, I imagine, slept very heavily or continuously that morning; for both the excitement of Lake's discovery and the mounting fury of the wind were against such a thing. So savage was the blast, even where we were, that we could not help wondering how much worse it was at Lake's camp, directly under the vast unknown peaks that bred and delivered it. McTighe was awake at ten o'clock and tried to get Lake on the wireless, as agreed, but some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the westward seemed to prevent communication. We did, however, get the Arkham, and Douglas told me that he had likewise been vainly trying to reach Lake. He had not known about the wind, for very little was blowing at McMurdo Sound despite its persistent rage where we were.\n\nThroughout the day we all listened anxiously and tried to get Lake at intervals, but invariably without results. About noon a positive frenzy of wind stampeded out of the west, causing us to fear for the safety of our camp; but it eventually died down, with only a moderate relapse at 2 P.M. After three o'clock it was very quiet, and we redoubled our efforts to get Lake. Reflecting that he had four planes, each provided with an excellent short-wave outfit, we could not imagine any ordinary accident capable of crippling all his wireless equipment at once. Nevertheless the stony silence continued; and when we thought of the delirious force the wind must have had in his locality we could not help making the most direful conjectures.\n\nBy six o'clock our fears had become intense and definite, and after a wireless consultation with Douglas and Thorfinnssen I resolved to take steps toward investigation. The fifth a\u00ebroplane, which we had left at the McMurdo Sound supply cache with Sherman and two sailors, was in good shape and ready for instant use; and it seemed that the very emergency for which it had been saved was now upon us. I got Sherman by wireless and ordered him to join me with the plane and the two sailors at the southern base as quickly as possible; the air conditions being apparently highly favourable. We then talked over the personnel of the coming investigation party; and decided that we would include all hands, together with the sledge and dogs which I had kept with me. Even so great a load would not be too much for one of the huge planes built to our especial orders for heavy machinery transportation. At intervals I still tried to reach Lake with the wireless, but all to no purpose.\n\nSherman, with the sailors Gunnarsson and Larsen, took off at 7:30; and reported a quiet flight from several points on the wing. They arrived at our base at midnight, and all hands at once discussed the next move. It was risky business sailing over the antarctic in a single a\u00ebroplane without any line of bases, but no one drew back from what seemed like the plainest necessity. We turned in at two o'clock for a brief rest after some preliminary loading of the plane, but were up again in four hours to finish the loading and packing.\n\nAt 7:15 A.M., January 25th, we started flying northwestward under McTighe's pilotage with ten men, seven dogs, a sledge, a fuel and food supply, and other items including the plane's wireless outfit. The atmosphere was clear, fairly quiet, and relatively mild in temperature; and we anticipated very little trouble in reaching the latitude and longitude designated by Lake as the site of his camp. Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey; for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp.\n\nEvery incident of that four-and-a-half-hour flight is burned into my recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's laws. Thenceforward the ten of us\u2014but the student Danforth and myself above all others\u2014were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could. The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane; telling of our non-stop course, our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow-cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau. There came a point, though, when our sensations could not be conveyed in any words the press would understand; and a later point when we had to adopt an actual rule of strict censorship.\n\nThe sailor Larsen was first to spy the jagged line of witch-like cones and pinnacles ahead, and his shouts sent everyone to the windows of the great cabined plane. Despite our speed, they were very slow in gaining prominence; hence we knew that they must be infinitely far off, and visible only because of their abnormal height. Little by little, however, they rose grimly into the western sky; allowing us to distinguish various bare, bleak, blackish summits, and to catch the curious sense of phantasy which they inspired as seen in the reddish antarctic light against the provocative background of iridescent ice-dust clouds. In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things\u2014mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething, half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.\n\nIt was young Danforth who drew our notice to the curious regularities of the higher mountain skyline\u2014regularities like clinging fragments of perfect cubes, which Lake had mentioned in his messages, and which indeed justified his comparison with the dreamlike suggestions of primordial temple-ruins on cloudy Asian mountain-tops so subtly and strangely painted by Roerich. There was indeed something hauntingly Roerich-like about this whole unearthly continent of mountainous mystery. I had felt it in October when we first caught sight of Victoria Land, and I felt it afresh now. I felt, too, another wave of uneasy consciousness of Archaean mythical resemblances; of how disturbingly this lethal realm corresponded to the evilly famed plateau of Leng in the primal writings. Mythologists have placed Leng in Central Asia; but the racial memory of man\u2014or of his predecessors\u2014is long, and it may well be that certain tales have come down from lands and mountains and temples of horror earlier than Asia and earlier than any human world we know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself. Leng, wherever in space or time it might brood, was not a region I would care to be in or near; nor did I relish the proximity of a world that had ever bred such ambiguous and Archaean monstrosities as those Lake had just mentioned. At the moment I felt sorry that I had ever read the abhorred Necronomicon, or talked so much with that unpleasantly erudite folklorist Wilmarth at the university.\n\nThis mood undoubtedly served to aggravate my reaction to the bizarre mirage which burst upon us from the increasingly opalescent zenith as we drew near the mountains and began to make out the cumulative undulations of the foothills. I had seen dozens of polar mirages during the preceding weeks, some of them quite as uncanny and fantastically vivid as the present sample; but this one had a wholly novel and obscure quality of menacing symbolism, and I shuddered as the seething labyrinth of fabulous walls and towers and minarets loomed out of the troubled ice-vapours above our heads.\n\nThe effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five. All of these febrile structures seemed knit together by tubular bridges crossing from one to the other at various dizzy heights, and the implied scale of the whole was terrifying and oppressive in its sheer giganticism. The general type of mirage was not unlike some of the wilder forms observed and drawn by the Arctic whaler Scoresby in 1820; but at this time and place, with those dark, unknown mountain peaks soaring stupendously ahead, that anomalous elder-world discovery in our minds, and the pall of probable disaster enveloping the greater part of our expedition, we all seemed to find in it a taint of latent malignity and infinitely evil portent.\n\nI was glad when the mirage began to break up, though in the process the various nightmare turrets and cones assumed distorted temporary forms of even vaster hideousness. As the whole illusion dissolved to churning opalescence we began to look earthward again, and saw that our journey's end was not far off. The unknown mountains ahead rose dizzyingly up like a fearsome rampart of giants, their curious regularities shewing with startling clearness even without a field-glass. We were over the lowest foothills now, and could see amidst the snow, ice, and bare patches of their main plateau a couple of darkish spots which we took to be Lake's camp and boring. The higher foothills shot up between five and six miles away, forming a range almost distinct from the terrifying line of more than Himalayan peaks beyond them. At length Ropes\u2014the student who had relieved McTighe at the controls\u2014began to head downward toward the left-hand dark spot whose size marked it as the camp. As he did so, McTighe sent out the last uncensored wireless message the world was to receive from our expedition.\n\nEveryone, of course, has read the brief and unsatisfying bulletins of the rest of our antarctic sojourn. Some hours after our landing we sent a guarded report of the tragedy we found, and reluctantly announced the wiping out of the whole Lake party by the frightful wind of the preceding day, or of the night before that. Eleven known dead, young Gedney missing. People pardoned our hazy lack of details through realisation of the shock the sad event must have caused us, and believed us when we explained that the mangling action of the wind had rendered all eleven bodies unsuitable for transportation outside. Indeed, I flatter myself that even in the midst of our distress, utter bewilderment, and soul-clutching horror, we scarcely went beyond the truth in any specific instance. The tremendous significance lies in what we dared not tell\u2014what I would not tell now but for the need of warning others off from nameless terrors.\n\nIt is a fact that the wind had wrought dreadful havoc. Whether all could have lived through it, even without the other thing, is gravely open to doubt. The storm, with its fury of madly driven ice-particles, must have been beyond anything our expedition had encountered before. One a\u00ebroplane shelter\u2014all, it seems, had been left in a far too flimsy and inadequate state\u2014was nearly pulverised; and the derrick at the distant boring was entirely shaken to pieces. The exposed metal of the grounded planes and drilling machinery was bruised into a high polish, and two of the small tents were flattened despite their snow banking. Wooden surfaces left out in the blast were pitted and denuded of paint, and all signs of tracks in the snow were completely obliterated. It is also true that we found none of the Archaean biological objects in a condition to take outside as a whole. We did gather some minerals from a vast tumbled pile, including several of the greenish soapstone fragments whose odd five-pointed rounding and faint patterns of grouped dots caused so many doubtful comparisons; and some fossil bones, among which were the most typical of the curiously injured specimens.\n\nNone of the dogs survived, their hurriedly built snow enclosure near the camp being almost wholly destroyed. The wind may have done that, though the greater breakage on the side next the camp, which was not the windward one, suggests an outward leap or break of the frantic beasts themselves. All three sledges were gone, and we have tried to explain that the wind may have blown them off into the unknown. The drill and ice-melting machinery at the boring were too badly damaged to warrant salvage, so we used them to choke up that subtly disturbing gateway to the past which Lake had blasted. We likewise left at the camp the two most shaken-up of the planes; since our surviving party had only four real pilots\u2014Sherman, Danforth, McTighe, and Ropes\u2014in all, with Danforth in a poor nervous shape to navigate. We brought back all the books, scientific equipment, and other incidentals we could find, though much was rather unaccountably blown away. Spare tents and furs were either missing or badly out of condition.\n\nIt was approximately 4 P.M., after wide plane cruising had forced us to give Gedney up for lost, that we sent our guarded message to the Arkham for relaying; and I think we did well to keep it as calm and non-committal as we succeeded in doing. The most we said about agitation concerned our dogs, whose frantic uneasiness near the biological specimens was to be expected from poor Lake's accounts. We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the disordered region; objects including scientific instruments, a\u00ebroplanes, and machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened, moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harboured singular curiosity and investigativeness.\n\nAbout the fourteen biological specimens we were pardonably indefinite. We said that the only ones we discovered were damaged, but that enough was left of them to prove Lake's description wholly and impressively accurate. It was hard work keeping our personal emotions out of this matter\u2014and we did not mention numbers or say exactly how we had found those which we did find. We had by that time agreed not to transmit anything suggesting madness on the part of Lake's men, and it surely looked like madness to find six imperfect monstrosities carefully buried upright in nine-foot snow graves under five-pointed mounds punched over with groups of dots in patterns exactly like those on the queer greenish soapstones dug up from Mesozoic or Tertiary times. The eight perfect specimens mentioned by Lake seemed to have been completely blown away.\n\nWe were careful, too, about the public's general peace of mind; hence Danforth and I said little about that frightful trip over the mountains the next day. It was the fact that only a radically lightened plane could possibly cross a range of such height which mercifully limited that scouting tour to the two of us. On our return at 1 A.M. Danforth was close to hysterics, but kept an admirably stiff upper lip. It took no persuasion to make him promise not to shew our sketches and the other things we brought away in our pockets, not to say anything more to the others than what we had agreed to relay outside, and to hide our camera films for private development later on; so that part of my present story will be as new to Pabodie, McTighe, Ropes, Sherman, and the rest as it will be to the world in general. Indeed\u2014Danforth is closer mouthed than I; for he saw\u2014or thinks he saw\u2014one thing he will not tell even me.\n\nAs all know, our report included a tale of a hard ascent; a confirmation of Lake's opinion that the great peaks are of Archaean slate and other very primal crumpled strata unchanged since at least middle Comanchian times; a conventional comment on the regularity of the clinging cube and rampart formations; a decision that the cave-mouths indicate dissolved calcareous veins; a conjecture that certain slopes and passes would permit of the scaling and crossing of the entire range by seasoned mountaineers; and a remark that the mysterious other side holds a lofty and immense super-plateau as ancient and unchanging as the mountains themselves\u201420,000 feet in elevation, with grotesque rock formations protruding through a thin glacial layer and with low gradual foothills between the general plateau surface and the sheer precipices of the highest peaks.\n\nThis body of data is in every respect true so far as it goes, and it completely satisfied the men at the camp. We laid our absence of sixteen hours\u2014a longer time than our announced flying, landing, reconnoitring, and rock-collecting programme called for\u2014to a long mythical spell of adverse wind conditions; and told truly of our landing on the farther foothills. Fortunately our tale sounded realistic and prosaic enough not to tempt any of the others into emulating our flight. Had any tried to do that, I would have used every ounce of my persuasion to stop them\u2014and I do not know what Danforth would have done. While we were gone, Pabodie, Sherman, Ropes, McTighe, and Williamson had worked like beavers over Lake's two best planes; fitting them again for use despite the altogether unaccountable juggling of their operative mechanism.\n\nWe decided to load all the planes the next morning and start back for our old base as soon as possible. Even though indirect, that was the safest way to work toward McMurdo Sound; for a straight-line flight across the most utterly unknown stretches of the aeon-dead continent would involve many additional hazards. Further exploration was hardly feasible in view of our tragic decimation and the ruin of our drilling machinery; and the doubts and horrors around us\u2014which we did not reveal\u2014made us wish only to escape from this austral world of desolation and brooding madness as swiftly as we could.\n\nAs the public knows, our return to the world was accomplished without further disasters. All planes reached the old base on the evening of the next day\u2014January 27th\u2014after a swift non-stop flight; and on the 28th we made McMurdo Sound in two laps, the one pause being very brief, and occasioned by a faulty rudder in the furious wind over the ice-shelf after we had cleared the great plateau. In five days more the Arkham and Miskatonic, with all hands and equipment on board, were shaking clear of the thickening field ice and working up Ross Sea with the mocking mountains of Victoria Land looming westward against a troubled antarctic sky and twisting the wind's wails into a wide-ranged musical piping which chilled my soul to the quick. Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.\n\nSince our return we have all constantly worked to discourage antarctic exploration, and have kept certain doubts and guesses to ourselves with splendid unity and faithfulness. Even young Danforth, with his nervous breakdown, has not flinched or babbled to his doctors\u2014indeed, as I have said, there is one thing he thinks he alone saw which he will not tell even me, though I think it would help his psychological state if he would consent to do so. It might explain and relieve much, though perhaps the thing was no more than the delusive aftermath of an earlier shock. That is the impression I gather after those rare irresponsible moments when he whispers disjointed things to me\u2014things which he repudiates vehemently as soon as he gets a grip on himself again.\n\nIt will be hard work deterring others from the great white south, and some of our efforts may directly harm our cause by drawing inquiring notice. We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. Lake's reports of those biological monstrosities had aroused naturalists and palaeontologists to the highest pitch; though we were sensible enough not to shew the detached parts we had taken from the actual buried specimens, or our photographs of those specimens as they were found. We also refrained from shewing the more puzzling of the scarred bones and greenish soapstones; while Danforth and I have closely guarded the pictures we took or drew on the super-plateau across the range, and the crumpled things we smoothed, studied in terror, and brought away in our pockets. But now that Starkweather-Moore party is organising, and with a thoroughness far beyond anything our outfit attempted. If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last\u2014even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "It is only with vast hesitancy and repugnance that I let my mind go back to Lake's camp and what we really found there\u2014and to that other thing beyond the frightful mountain wall. I am constantly tempted to shirk the details, and to let hints stand for actual facts and ineluctable deductions. I hope I have said enough already to let me glide briefly over the rest; the rest, that is, of the horror at the camp. I have told of the wind-ravaged terrain, the damaged shelters, the disarranged machinery, the varied uneasinesses of our dogs, the missing sledges and other items, the deaths of men and dogs, the absence of Gedney, and the six insanely buried biological specimens, strangely sound in texture for all their structural injuries, from a world forty million years dead. I do not recall whether I mentioned that upon checking up the canine bodies we found one dog missing. We did not think much about that till later\u2014indeed, only Danforth and I have thought of it at all.\n\nThe principal things I have been keeping back relate to the bodies, and to certain subtle points which may or may not lend a hideous and incredible kind of rationale to the apparent chaos. At the time I tried to keep the men's minds off those points; for it was so much simpler\u2014so much more normal\u2014to lay everything to an outbreak of madness on the part of some of Lake's party. From the look of things, that daemon mountain wind must have been enough to drive any man mad in the midst of this centre of all earthly mystery and desolation.\n\nThe crowning abnormality, of course, was the condition of the bodies\u2014men and dogs alike. They had all been in some terrible kind of conflict, and were torn and mangled in fiendish and altogether inexplicable ways. Death, so far as we could judge, had in each case come from strangulation or laceration. The dogs had evidently started the trouble, for the state of their ill-built corral bore witness to its forcible breakage from within. It had been set some distance from the camp because of the hatred of the animals for those hellish Archaean organisms, but the precaution seemed to have been taken in vain. When left alone in that monstrous wind behind flimsy walls of insufficient height they must have stampeded\u2014whether from the wind itself, or from some subtle, increasing odour emitted by the nightmare specimens, one could not say. Those specimens, of course, had been covered with a tent-cloth; yet the low antarctic sun had beat steadily upon that cloth, and Lake had mentioned that solar heat tended to make the strangely sound and tough tissues of the things relax and expand. Perhaps the wind had whipped the cloth from over them, and jostled them about in such a way that their more pungent olfactory qualities became manifest despite their unbelievable antiquity.\n\nBut whatever had happened, it was hideous and revolting enough. Perhaps I had better put squeamishness aside and tell the worst at last\u2014though with a categorical statement of opinion, based on the first-hand observations and most rigid deductions of both Danforth and myself, that the then missing Gedney was in no way responsible for the loathsome horrors we found. I have said that the bodies were frightfully mangled. Now I must add that some were incised and subtracted from in the most curious, cold-blooded, and inhuman fashion. It was the same with dogs and men. All the healthier, fatter bodies, quadrupedal or bipedal, had had their most solid masses of tissue cut out and removed, as by a careful butcher; and around them was a strange sprinkling of salt\u2014taken from the ravaged provision-chests on the planes\u2014which conjured up the most horrible associations. The thing had occurred in one of the crude a\u00ebroplane shelters from which the plane had been dragged out, and subsequent winds had effaced all tracks which could have supplied any plausible theory. Scattered bits of clothing, roughly slashed from the human incision-subjects, hinted no clues. It is useless to bring up the half-impression of certain faint snow-prints in one shielded corner of the ruined enclosure\u2014because that impression did not concern human prints at all, but was clearly mixed up with all the talk of fossil prints which poor Lake had been giving throughout the preceding weeks. One had to be careful of one's imagination in the lee of those overshadowing mountains of madness.\n\nAs I have indicated, Gedney and one dog turned out to be missing in the end. When we came on that terrible shelter we had missed two dogs and two men; but the fairly unharmed dissecting tent, which we entered after investigating the monstrous graves, had something to reveal. It was not as Lake had left it, for the covered parts of the primal monstrosity had been removed from the improvised table. Indeed, we had already realised that one of the six imperfect and insanely buried things we had found\u2014the one with the trace of a peculiarly hateful odour\u2014must represent the collected sections of the entity which Lake had tried to analyse. On and around that laboratory table were strown other things, and it did not take long for us to guess that those things were the carefully though oddly and inexpertly dissected parts of one man and one dog. I shall spare the feelings of survivors by omitting mention of the man's identity. Lake's anatomical instruments were missing, but there were evidences of their careful cleansing. The gasoline stove was also gone, though around it we found a curious litter of matches. We buried the human parts beside the other ten men, and the canine parts with the other 35 dogs. Concerning the bizarre smudges on the laboratory table, and on the jumble of roughly handled illustrated books scattered near it, we were much too bewildered to speculate.\n\nThis formed the worst of the camp horror, but other things were equally perplexing. The disappearance of Gedney, the one dog, the eight uninjured biological specimens, the three sledges, and certain instruments, illustrated technical and scientific books, writing materials, electric torches and batteries, food and fuel, heating apparatus, spare tents, fur suits, and the like, was utterly beyond sane conjecture; as were likewise the spatter-fringed ink-blots on certain pieces of paper, and the evidences of curious alien fumbling and experimentation around the planes and all other mechanical devices both at the camp and at the boring. The dogs seemed to abhor this oddly disordered machinery. Then, too, there was the upsetting of the larder, the disappearance of certain staples, and the jarringly comical heap of tin cans pried open in the most unlikely ways and at the most unlikely places. The profusion of scattered matches, intact, broken, or spent, formed another minor enigma; as did the two or three tent-cloths and fur suits which we found lying about with peculiar and unorthodox slashings conceivably due to clumsy efforts at unimaginable adaptations. The maltreatment of the human and canine bodies, and the crazy burial of the damaged Archaean specimens, were all of a piece with this apparent disintegrative madness. In view of just such an eventuality as the present one, we carefully photographed all the main evidences of insane disorder at the camp; and shall use the prints to buttress our pleas against the departure of the proposed Starkweather-Moore Expedition.\n\nOur first act after finding the bodies in the shelter was to photograph and open the row of insane graves with the five-pointed snow mounds. We could not help noticing the resemblance of these monstrous mounds, with their clusters of grouped dots, to poor Lake's descriptions of the strange greenish soapstones; and when we came on some of the soapstones themselves in the great mineral pile we found the likeness very close indeed. The whole general formation, it must be made clear, seemed abominably suggestive of the starfish-head of the Archaean entities; and we agreed that the suggestion must have worked potently upon the sensitised minds of Lake's overwrought party. Our own first sight of the actual buried entities formed a horrible moment, and sent the imaginations of Pabodie and myself back to some of the shocking primal myths we had read and heard. We all agreed that the mere sight and continued presence of the things must have co\u00f6perated with the oppressive polar solitude and daemon mountain wind in driving Lake's party mad.\n\nFor madness\u2014centring in Gedney as the only possible surviving agent\u2014was the explanation spontaneously adopted by everybody so far as spoken utterance was concerned; though I will not be so naive as to deny that each of us may have harboured wild guesses which sanity forbade him to formulate completely. Sherman, Pabodie, and McTighe made an exhaustive a\u00ebroplane cruise over all the surrounding territory in the afternoon, sweeping the horizon with field-glasses in quest of Gedney and of the various missing things; but nothing came to light. The party reported that the titan barrier range extended endlessly to right and left alike, without any diminution in height or essential structure. On some of the peaks, though, the regular cube and rampart formations were bolder and plainer; having doubly fantastic similitudes to Roerich-painted Asian hill ruins. The distribution of cryptical cave-mouths on the black snow-denuded summits seemed roughly even as far as the range could be traced.\n\nIn spite of all the prevailing horrors we were left with enough sheer scientific zeal and adventurousness to wonder about the unknown realm beyond those mysterious mountains. As our guarded messages stated, we rested at midnight after our day of terror and bafflement; but not without a tentative plan for one or more range-crossing altitude flights in a lightened plane with a\u00ebrial camera and geologist's outfit, beginning the following morning. It was decided that Danforth and I try it first, and we awaked at 7 A.M. intending an early trip; though heavy winds\u2014mentioned in our brief bulletin to the outside world\u2014delayed our start till nearly nine o'clock.\n\nI have already repeated the non-committal story we told the men at camp\u2014and relayed outside\u2014after our return sixteen hours later. It is now my terrible duty to amplify this account by filling in the merciful blanks with hints of what we really saw in the hidden transmontane world\u2014hints of the revelations which have finally driven Danforth to a nervous collapse. I wish he would add a really frank word about the thing which he thinks he alone saw\u2014even though it was probably a nervous delusion\u2014and which was perhaps the last straw that put him where he is; but he is firm against that. All I can do is to repeat his later disjointed whispers about what set him shrieking as the plane soared back through the wind-tortured mountain pass after that real and tangible shock which I shared. This will form my last word. If the plain signs of surviving elder horrors in what I disclose be not enough to keep others from meddling with the inner antarctic\u2014or at least from prying too deeply beneath the surface of that ultimate waste of forbidden secrets and unhuman, aeon-cursed desolation\u2014the responsibility for unnamable and perhaps immensurable evils will not be mine.\n\nDanforth and I, studying the notes made by Pabodie in his afternoon flight and checking up with a sextant, had calculated that the lowest available pass in the range lay somewhat to the right of us, within sight of camp, and about 23,000 or 24,000 feet above sea-level. For this point, then, we first headed in the lightened plane as we embarked on our flight of discovery. The camp itself, on foothills which sprang from a high continental plateau, was some 12,000 feet in altitude; hence the actual height increase necessary was not so vast as it might seem. Nevertheless we were acutely conscious of the rarefied air and intense cold as we rose; for on account of visibility conditions we had to leave the cabin windows open. We were dressed, of course, in our heaviest furs.\n\nAs we drew near the forbidding peaks, dark and sinister above the line of crevasse-riven snow and interstitial glaciers, we noticed more and more the curiously regular formations clinging to the slopes; and thought again of the strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich. The ancient and wind-weathered rock strata fully verified all of Lake's bulletins, and proved that these hoary pinnacles had been towering up in exactly the same way since a surprisingly early time in earth's history\u2014perhaps over fifty million years. How much higher they had once been, it was futile to guess; but everything about this strange region pointed to obscure atmospheric influences unfavourable to change, and calculated to retard the usual climatic processes of rock disintegration.\n\nBut it was the mountainside tangle of regular cubes, ramparts, and cave-mouths which fascinated and disturbed us most. I studied them with a field-glass and took a\u00ebrial photographs whilst Danforth drove; and at times relieved him at the controls\u2014though my aviation knowledge was purely an amateur's\u2014in order to let him use the binoculars. We could easily see that much of the material of the things was a lightish Archaean quartzite, unlike any formation visible over broad areas of the general surface; and that their regularity was extreme and uncanny to an extent which poor Lake had scarcely hinted.\n\nAs he had said, their edges were crumbled and rounded from untold aeons of savage weathering; but their preternatural solidity and tough material had saved them from obliteration. Many parts, especially those closest to the slopes, seemed identical in substance with the surrounding rock surface. The whole arrangement looked like the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Andes, or the primal foundation-walls of Kish as dug up by the Oxford\u2013Field Museum Expedition in 1929; and both Danforth and I obtained that occasional impression of separate Cyclopean blocks which Lake had attributed to his flight-companion Carroll. How to account for such things in this place was frankly beyond me, and I felt queerly humbled as a geologist. Igneous formations often have strange regularities\u2014like the famous Giants' Causeway in Ireland\u2014but this stupendous range, despite Lake's original suspicion of smoking cones, was above all else non-volcanic in evident structure.\n\nThe curious cave-mouths, near which the odd formations seemed most abundant, presented another albeit a lesser puzzle because of their regularity of outline. They were, as Lake's bulletin had said, often approximately square or semicircular; as if the natural orifices had been shaped to greater symmetry by some magic hand. Their numerousness and wide distribution were remarkable, and suggested that the whole region was honeycombed with tunnels dissolved out of limestone strata. Such glimpses as we secured did not extend far within the caverns, but we saw that they were apparently clear of stalactites and stalagmites. Outside, those parts of the mountain slopes adjoining the apertures seemed invariably smooth and regular; and Danforth thought that the slight cracks and pittings of the weathering tended toward unusual patterns. Filled as he was with the horrors and strangenesses discovered at the camp, he hinted that the pittings vaguely resembled those baffling groups of dots sprinkled over the primeval greenish soapstones, so hideously duplicated on the madly conceived snow mounds above those six buried monstrosities.\n\nWe had risen gradually in flying over the higher foothills and along toward the relatively low pass we had selected. As we advanced we occasionally looked down at the snow and ice of the land route, wondering whether we could have attempted the trip with the simpler equipment of earlier days. Somewhat to our surprise we saw that the terrain was far from difficult as such things go; and that despite the crevasses and other bad spots it would not have been likely to deter the sledges of a Scott, a Shackleton, or an Amundsen. Some of the glaciers appeared to lead up to wind-bared passes with unusual continuity, and upon reaching our chosen pass we found that its case formed no exception.\n\nOur sensations of tense expectancy as we prepared to round the crest and peer out over an untrodden world can hardly be described on paper; even though we had no cause to think the regions beyond the range essentially different from those already seen and traversed. The touch of evil mystery in these barrier mountains, and in the beckoning sea of opalescent sky glimpsed betwixt their summits, was a highly subtle and attenuated matter not to be explained in literal words. Rather was it an affair of vague psychological symbolism and aesthetic association\u2014a thing mixed up with exotic poetry and paintings, and with archaic myths lurking in shunned and forbidden volumes. Even the wind's burden held a peculiar strain of conscious malignity; and for a second it seemed that the composite sound included a bizarre musical whistling or piping over a wide range as the blast swept in and out of the omnipresent and resonant cave-mouths. There was a cloudy note of reminiscent repulsion in this sound, as complex and unplaceable as any of the other dark impressions.\n\nWe were now, after a slow ascent, at a height of 23,570 feet according to the aneroid; and had left the region of clinging snow definitely below us. Up here were only dark, bare rock slopes and the start of rough-ribbed glaciers\u2014but with those provocative cubes, ramparts, and echoing cave-mouths to add a portent of the unnatural, the fantastic, and the dreamlike. Looking along the line of high peaks, I thought I could see the one mentioned by poor Lake, with a rampart exactly on top. It seemed to be half-lost in a queer antarctic haze; such a haze, perhaps, as had been responsible for Lake's early notion of volcanism. The pass loomed directly before us, smooth and windswept between its jagged and malignly frowning pylons. Beyond it was a sky fretted with swirling vapours and lighted by the low polar sun\u2014the sky of that mysterious farther realm upon which we felt no human eye had ever gazed.\n\nA few more feet of altitude and we would behold that realm. Danforth and I, unable to speak except in shouts amidst the howling, piping wind that raced through the pass and added to the noise of the unmuffled engines, exchanged eloquent glances. And then, having gained those last few feet, we did indeed stare across the momentous divide and over the unsampled secrets of an elder and utterly alien earth." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "I think that both of us simultaneously cried out in mixed awe, wonder, terror, and disbelief in our own senses as we finally cleared the pass and saw what lay beyond. Of course we must have had some natural theory in the back of our heads to steady our faculties for the moment. Probably we thought of such things as the grotesquely weathered stones of the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, or the fantastically symmetrical wind-carved rocks of the Arizona desert. Perhaps we even half thought the sight a mirage like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal, regular, and geometrically eurhythmic stone masses which reared their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously thinner.\n\nThe effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable, for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient tableland fully 20,000 feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than 500,000 years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision's limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defence could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. We had previously dismissed, so far as serious thought was concerned, any theory that the cubes and ramparts of the mountainsides were other than natural in origin. How could they be otherwise, when man himself could scarcely have been differentiated from the great apes at the time when this region succumbed to the present unbroken reign of glacial death?\n\nYet now the sway of reason seemed irrefutably shaken, for this Cyclopean maze of squared, curved, and angled blocks had features which cut off all comfortable refuge. It was, very clearly, the blasphemous city of the mirage in stark, objective, and ineluctable reality. That damnable portent had had a material basis after all\u2014there had been some horizontal stratum of ice-dust in the upper air, and this shocking stone survival had projected its image across the mountains according to the simple laws of reflection. Of course the phantom had been twisted and exaggerated, and had contained things which the real source did not contain; yet now, as we saw that real source, we thought it even more hideous and menacing than its distant image.\n\nOnly the incredible, unhuman massiveness of these vast stone towers and ramparts had saved the frightful thing from utter annihilation in the hundreds of thousands\u2014perhaps millions\u2014of years it had brooded there amidst the blasts of a bleak upland. \"Corona Mundi... Roof of the World...\" All sorts of fantastic phrases sprang to our lips as we looked dizzily down at the unbelievable spectacle. I thought again of the eldritch primal myths that had so persistently haunted me since my first sight of this dead antarctic world\u2014of the daemoniac plateau of Leng, of the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men of the Himalayas, of the Pnakotic Manuscripts with their pre-human implications, of the Cthulhu cult, of the Necronomicon, and of the Hyperborean legends of formless Tsathoggua and the worse than formless star-spawn associated with that semi-entity.\n\nFor boundless miles in every direction the thing stretched off with very little thinning; indeed, as our eyes followed it to the right and left along the base of the low, gradual foothills which separated it from the actual mountain rim, we decided that we could see no thinning at all except for an interruption at the left of the pass through which we had come. We had merely struck, at random, a limited part of something of incalculable extent. The foothills were more sparsely sprinkled with grotesque stone structures, linking the terrible city to the already familiar cubes and ramparts which evidently formed its mountain outposts. These latter, as well as the queer cave-mouths, were as thick on the inner as on the outer sides of the mountains.\n\nThe nameless stone labyrinth consisted, for the most part, of walls from 10 to 150 feet in ice-clear height, and of a thickness varying from five to ten feet. It was composed mostly of prodigious blocks of dark primordial slate, schist, and sandstone\u2014blocks in many cases as large as 4 \u00d7 6 \u00d7 8 feet\u2014though in several places it seemed to be carved out of a solid, uneven bed-rock of pre-Cambrian slate. The buildings were far from equal in size; there being innumerable honeycomb-arrangements of enormous extent as well as smaller separate structures. The general shape of these things tended to be conical, pyramidal, or terraced; though there were many perfect cylinders, perfect cubes, clusters of cubes, and other rectangular forms, and a peculiar sprinkling of angled edifices whose five-pointed ground plan roughly suggested modern fortifications. The builders had made constant and expert use of the principle of the arch, and domes had probably existed in the city's heyday.\n\nThe whole tangle was monstrously weathered, and the glacial surface from which the towers projected was strewn with fallen blocks and immemorial debris. Where the glaciation was transparent we could see the lower parts of the gigantic piles, and noticed the ice-preserved stone bridges which connected the different towers at varying distances above the ground. On the exposed walls we could detect the scarred places where other and higher bridges of the same sort had existed. Closer inspection revealed countless largish windows; some of which were closed with shutters of a petrified material originally wood, though most gaped open in a sinister and menacing fashion. Many of the ruins, of course, were roofless, and with uneven though wind-rounded upper edges; whilst others, of a more sharply conical or pyramidal model or else protected by higher surrounding structures, preserved intact outlines despite the omnipresent crumbling and pitting. With the field-glass we could barely make out what seemed to be sculptural decorations in horizontal bands\u2014decorations including those curious groups of dots whose presence on the ancient soapstones now assumed a vastly larger significance.\n\nIn many places the buildings were totally ruined and the ice-sheet deeply riven from various geologic causes. In other places the stonework was worn down to the very level of the glaciation. One broad swath, extending from the plateau's interior to a cleft in the foothills about a mile to the left of the pass we had traversed, was wholly free from buildings; and probably represented, we concluded, the course of some great river which in Tertiary times\u2014millions of years ago\u2014had poured through the city and into some prodigious subterranean abyss of the great barrier range. Certainly, this was above all a region of caves, gulfs, and underground secrets beyond human penetration.\n\nLooking back to our sensations, and recalling our dazedness at viewing this monstrous survival from aeons we had thought pre-human, I can only wonder that we preserved the semblance of equilibrium which we did. Of course we knew that something\u2014chronology, scientific theory, or our own consciousness\u2014was woefully awry; yet we kept enough poise to guide the plane, observe many things quite minutely, and take a careful series of photographs which may yet serve both us and the world in good stead. In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret\u2014to know what sort of beings had built and lived in this incalculably gigantic place, and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had.\n\nFor this place could be no ordinary city. It must have formed the primary nucleus and centre of some archaic and unbelievable chapter of earth's history whose outward ramifications, recalled only dimly in the most obscure and distorted myths, had vanished utterly amidst the chaos of terrene convulsions long before any human race we know had shambled out of apedom. Here sprawled a palaeogean megalopolis compared with which the fabled Atlantis and Lemuria, Commoriom and Uzuldaroum, and Olatho\u00eb in the land of Lomar are recent things of today\u2014not even of yesterday; a megalopolis ranking with such whispered pre-human blasphemies as Valusia, R'lyeh, Ib in the land of Mnar, and the Nameless City of Arabia Deserta. As we flew above that tangle of stark titan towers my imagination sometimes escaped all bounds and roved aimlessly in realms of fantastic associations\u2014even weaving links betwixt this lost world and some of my own wildest dreams concerning the mad horror at the camp.\n\nThe plane's fuel-tank, in the interest of greater lightness, had been only partly filled; hence we now had to exert caution in our explorations. Even so, however, we covered an enormous extent of ground\u2014or rather, air\u2014after swooping down to a level where the wind became virtually negligible. There seemed to be no limit to the mountain-range, or to the length of the frightful stone city which bordered its inner foothills. Fifty miles of flight in each direction shewed no major change in the labyrinth of rock and masonry that clawed up corpse-like through the eternal ice. There were, though, some highly absorbing diversifications; such as the carvings on the canyon where that broad river had once pierced the foothills and approached its sinking-place in the great range. The headlands at the stream's entrance had been boldly carved into Cyclopean pylons; and something about the ridgy, barrel-shaped designs stirred up oddly vague, hateful, and confusing semi-remembrances in both Danforth and me.\n\nWe also came upon several star-shaped open spaces, evidently public squares; and noted various undulations in the terrain. Where a sharp hill rose, it was generally hollowed out into some sort of rambling stone edifice; but there were at least two exceptions. Of these latter, one was too badly weathered to disclose what had been on the jutting eminence, while the other still bore a fantastic conical monument carved out of the solid rock and roughly resembling such things as the well-known Snake Tomb in the ancient valley of Petra.\n\nFlying inland from the mountains, we discovered that the city was not of infinite width, even though its length along the foothills seemed endless. After about thirty miles the grotesque stone buildings began to thin out, and in ten more miles we came to an unbroken waste virtually without signs of sentient artifice. The course of the river beyond the city seemed marked by a broad depressed line; while the land assumed a somewhat greater ruggedness, seeming to slope slightly upward as it receded in the mist-hazed west.\n\nSo far we had made no landing, yet to leave the plateau without an attempt at entering some of the monstrous structures would have been inconceivable. Accordingly we decided to find a smooth place on the foothills near our navigable pass, there grounding the plane and preparing to do some exploration on foot. Though these gradual slopes were partly covered with a scattering of ruins, low flying soon disclosed an ample number of possible landing-places. Selecting that nearest to the pass, since our next flight would be across the great range and back to camp, we succeeded about 12:30 P.M. in coming down on a smooth, hard snowfield wholly devoid of obstacles and well adapted to a swift and favourable takeoff later on.\n\nIt did not seem necessary to protect the plane with a snow banking for so brief a time and in so comfortable an absence of high winds at this level; hence we merely saw that the landing skis were safely lodged, and that the vital parts of the mechanism were guarded against the cold. For our foot journey we discarded the heaviest of our flying furs, and took with us a small outfit consisting of pocket compass, hand camera, light provisions, voluminous notebooks and paper, geologist's hammer and chisel, specimen-bags, coil of climbing rope, and powerful electric torches with extra batteries; this equipment having been carried in the plane on the chance that we might be able to effect a landing, take ground pictures, make drawings and topographical sketches, and obtain rock specimens from some bare slope, outcropping, or mountain cave. Fortunately we had a supply of extra paper to tear up, place in a spare specimen-bag, and use on the ancient principle of hare-and-hounds for marking our course in any interior mazes we might be able to penetrate. This had been brought in case we found some cave system with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trailblazing.\n\nWalking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west, we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously. True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks; yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago\u2014before any known race of men could have existed\u2014was none the less awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality. Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual; both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot. It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge roofless rampart still complete in its gigantic five-pointed outline and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet. For this latter we headed; and when at last we were able actually to touch its weathered Cyclopean blocks, we felt that we had established an unprecedented and almost blasphemous link with forgotten aeons normally closed to our species.\n\nThis rampart, shaped like a star and perhaps 300 feet from point to point, was built of Jurassic sandstone blocks of irregular size, averaging 6 \u00d7 8 feet in surface. There was a row of arched loopholes or windows about four feet wide and five feet high; spaced quite symmetrically along the points of the star and at its inner angles, and with the bottoms about four feet from the glaciated surface. Looking through these, we could see that the masonry was fully five feet thick, that there were no partitions remaining within, and that there were traces of banded carvings or bas-reliefs on the interior walls; facts we had indeed guessed before, when flying low over this rampart and others like it. Though lower parts must have originally existed, all traces of such things were now wholly obscured by the deep layer of ice and snow at this point.\n\nWe crawled through one of the windows and vainly tried to decipher the nearly effaced mural designs, but did not attempt to disturb the glaciated floor. Our orientation flights had indicated that many buildings in the city proper were less ice-choked, and that we might perhaps find wholly clear interiors leading down to the true ground level if we entered those structures still roofed at the top. Before we left the rampart we photographed it carefully, and studied its mortarless Cyclopean masonry with complete bewilderment. We wished that Pabodie were present, for his engineering knowledge might have helped us guess how such titanic blocks could have been handled in that unbelievably remote age when the city and its outskirts were built up.\n\nThe half-mile walk downhill to the actual city, with the upper wind shrieking vainly and savagely through the skyward peaks in the background, was something whose smallest details will always remain engraved on my mind. Only in fantastic nightmares could any human beings but Danforth and me conceive such optical effects. Between us and the churning vapours of the west lay that monstrous tangle of dark stone towers; its outr\u00e9 and incredible forms impressing us afresh at every new angle of vision. It was a mirage in solid stone, and were it not for the photographs I would still doubt that such a thing could be. The general type of masonry was identical with that of the rampart we had examined; but the extravagant shapes which this masonry took in its urban manifestations were past all description.\n\nEven the pictures illustrate only one or two phases of its infinite bizarrerie, endless variety, preternatural massiveness, and utterly alien exoticism. There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name\u2014cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation; terraces of every sort of provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad grotesqueness. As we drew nearer we could see beneath certain transparent parts of the ice-sheet, and detect some of the tubular stone bridges that connected the crazily sprinkled structures at various heights. Of orderly streets there seemed to be none, the only broad open swath being a mile to the left, where the ancient river had doubtless flowed through the town into the mountains.\n\nOur field-glasses shewed the external horizontal bands of nearly effaced sculptures and dot-groups to be very prevalent, and we could half imagine what the city must once have looked like\u2014even though most of the roofs and tower-tops had necessarily perished. As a whole, it had been a complex tangle of twisted lanes and alleys; all of them deep canyons, and some little better than tunnels because of the overhanging masonry or overarching bridges. Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream-phantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the low, reddish antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine; and when for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict. Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind in the great mountain passes behind us took on a wilder note of purposeful malignity. The last stage of our descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt, and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there. Under the glaciation, we believed, there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent.\n\nWhen at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself, clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls, our sensations again became such that I marvel at the amount of self-control we retained. Danforth was frankly jumpy, and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp\u2014which I resented all the more because I could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity. The speculations worked on his imagination, too; for in one place\u2014where a debris-littered alley turned a sharp corner\u2014he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like; whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary sound from some undefined point\u2014a muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves yet somehow disturbingly different. The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape; and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.\n\nNevertheless our scientific and adventurous souls were not wholly dead; and we mechanically carried out our programme of chipping specimens from all the different rock types represented in the masonry. We wished a rather full set in order to draw better conclusions regarding the age of the place. Nothing in the great outer walls seemed to date from later than the Jurassic and Comanchian periods, nor was any piece of stone in the entire place of a greater recency than the Pliocene age. In stark certainty, we were wandering amidst a death which had reigned at least 500,000 years, and in all probability even longer.\n\nAs we proceeded through this maze of stone-shadowed twilight we stopped at all available apertures to study interiors and investigate entrance possibilities. Some were above our reach, whilst others led only into ice-choked ruins as unroofed and barren as the rampart on the hill. One, though spacious and inviting, opened on a seemingly bottomless abyss without visible means of descent. Now and then we had a chance to study the petrified wood of a surviving shutter, and were impressed by the fabulous antiquity implied in the still discernible grain. These things had come from Mesozoic gymnosperms and conifers\u2014especially Cretaceous cycads\u2014and from fan-palms and early angiosperms of plainly Tertiary date. Nothing definitely later than the Pliocene could be discovered. In the placing of these shutters\u2014whose edges shewed the former presence of queer and long-vanished hinges\u2014usage seemed to be varied; some being on the outer and some on the inner side of the deep embrasures. They seemed to have become wedged in place, thus surviving the rusting of their former and probably metallic fixtures and fastenings.\n\nAfter a time we came across a row of windows\u2014in the bulges of a colossal five-ridged cone of undamaged apex\u2014which led into a vast, well-preserved room with stone flooring; but these were too high in the room to permit of descent without a rope. We had a rope with us, but did not wish to bother with this twenty-foot drop unless obliged to\u2014especially in this thin plateau air where great demands were made upon the heart action. This enormous room was probably a hall or concourse of some sort, and our electric torches shewed bold, distinct, and potentially startling sculptures arranged round the walls in broad, horizontal bands separated by equally broad strips of conventional arabesques. We took careful note of this spot, planning to enter here unless a more easily gained interior were encountered.\n\nFinally, though, we did encounter exactly the opening we wished; an archway about six feet wide and ten feet high, marking the former end of an a\u00ebrial bridge which had spanned an alley about five feet above the present level of glaciation. These archways, of course, were flush with upper-story floors; and in this case one of the floors still existed. The building thus accessible was a series of rectangular terraces on our left facing westward. That across the alley, where the other archway yawned, was a decrepit cylinder with no windows and with a curious bulge about ten feet above the aperture. It was totally dark inside, and the archway seemed to open on a well of illimitable emptiness.\n\nHeaped debris made the entrance to the vast left-hand building doubly easy, yet for a moment we hesitated before taking advantage of the long-wished chance. For though we had penetrated into this tangle of archaic mystery, it required fresh resolution to carry us actually inside a complete and surviving building of a fabulous elder world whose nature was becoming more and more hideously plain to us. In the end, however, we made the plunge; and scrambled up over the rubble into the gaping embrasure. The floor beyond was of great slate slabs, and seemed to form the outlet of a long, high corridor with sculptured walls.\n\nObserving the many inner archways which led off from it, and realising the probable complexity of the nest of apartments within, we decided that we must begin our system of hare-and-hound trailblazing. Hitherto our compasses, together with frequent glimpses of the vast mountain-range between the towers in our rear, had been enough to prevent our losing our way; but from now on, the artificial substitute would be necessary. Accordingly we reduced our extra paper to shreds of suitable size, placed these in a bag to be carried by Danforth, and prepared to use them as economically as safety would allow. This method would probably gain us immunity from straying, since there did not appear to be any strong air-currents inside the primordial masonry. If such should develop, or if our paper supply should give out, we could of course fall back on the more secure though more tedious and retarding method of rock-chipping.\n\nJust how extensive a territory we had opened up, it was impossible to guess without a trial. The close and frequent connexion of the different buildings made it likely that we might cross from one to another on bridges underneath the ice except where impeded by local collapses and geologic rifts, for very little glaciation seemed to have entered the massive constructions. Almost all the areas of transparent ice had revealed the submerged windows as tightly shuttered, as if the town had been left in that uniform state until the glacial sheet came to crystallise the lower part for all succeeding time. Indeed, one gained a curious impression that this place had been deliberately closed and deserted in some dim, bygone aeon, rather than overwhelmed by any sudden calamity or even gradual decay. Had the coming of the ice been foreseen, and had a nameless population left en masse to seek a less doomed abode? The precise physiographic conditions attending the formation of the ice-sheet at this point would have to wait for later solution. It had not, very plainly, been a grinding drive. Perhaps the pressure of accumulated snows had been responsible; and perhaps some flood from the river, or from the bursting of some ancient glacial dam in the great range, had helped to create the special state now observable. Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "It would be cumbrous to give a detailed, consecutive account of our wanderings inside that cavernous, aeon-dead honeycomb of primal masonry; that monstrous lair of elder secrets which now echoed for the first time, after uncounted epochs, to the tread of human feet. This is especially true because so much of the horrible drama and revelation came from a mere study of the omnipresent mural carvings. Our flashlight photographs of those carvings will do much toward proving the truth of what we are now disclosing, and it is lamentable that we had not a larger film supply with us. As it was, we made crude notebook sketches of certain salient features after all our films were used up.\n\nThe building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, and gave us an impressive notion of the architecture of that nameless geologic past. The inner partitions were less massive than the outer walls, but on the lower levels were excellently preserved. Labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels, characterised the entire arrangement; and we should certainly have been lost at the very outset but for the trail of torn paper left behind us. We decided to explore the more decrepit upper parts first of all, hence climbed aloft in the maze for a distance of some 100 feet, to where the topmost tier of chambers yawned snowily and ruinously open to the polar sky. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. It might be safe to say that their general average was about 30 \u00d7 30 feet in floor area, and 20 feet in height; though many larger apartments existed. After thoroughly examining the upper regions and the glacial level we descended story by story into the submerged part, where indeed we soon saw we were in a continuous maze of connected chambers and passages probably leading over unlimited areas outside this particular building. The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework. We soon realised from what the carvings revealed that this monstrous city was many million years old.\n\nWe cannot yet explain the engineering principles used in the anomalous balancing and adjustment of the vast rock masses, though the function of the arch was clearly much relied on. The rooms we visited were wholly bare of all portable contents, a circumstance which sustained our belief in the city's deliberate desertion. The prime decorative feature was the almost universal system of mural sculpture; which tended to run in continuous horizontal bands three feet wide and arranged from floor to ceiling in alternation with bands of equal width given over to geometrical arabesques. There were exceptions to this rule of arrangement, but its preponderance was overwhelming. Often, however, a series of smooth cartouches containing oddly patterned groups of dots would be sunk along one of the arabesque bands.\n\nThe technique, we soon saw, was mature, accomplished, and aesthetically evolved to the highest degree of civilised mastery; though utterly alien in every detail to any known art tradition of the human race. In delicacy of execution no sculpture I have ever seen could approach it. The minutest details of elaborate vegetation, or of animal life, were rendered with astonishing vividness despite the bold scale of the carvings; whilst the conventional designs were marvels of skilful intricacy. The arabesques displayed a profound use of mathematical principles, and were made up of obscurely symmetrical curves and angles based on the quantity of five. The pictorial bands followed a highly formalised tradition, and involved a peculiar treatment of perspective; but had an artistic force that moved us profoundly notwithstanding the intervening gulf of vast geologic periods. Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.\n\nThe arabesque tracery consisted altogether of depressed lines whose depth on unweathered walls varied from one to two inches. When cartouches with dot-groups appeared\u2014evidently as inscriptions in some unknown and primordial language and alphabet\u2014the depression of the smooth surface was perhaps an inch and a half, and of the dots perhaps a half-inch more. The pictorial bands were in counter-sunk low relief, their background being depressed about two inches from the original wall surface. In some specimens marks of a former colouration could be detected, though for the most part the untold aeons had disintegrated and banished any pigments which may have been applied. The more one studied the marvellous technique the more one admired the things. Beneath their strict conventionalisation one could grasp the minute and accurate observation and graphic skill of the artists; and indeed, the very conventions themselves served to symbolise and accentuate the real essence or vital differentiation of every object delineated. We felt, too, that besides these recognisable excellences there were others lurking beyond the reach of our perceptions. Certain touches here and there gave vague hints of latent symbols and stimuli which another mental and emotional background, and a fuller or different sensory equipment, might have made of profound and poignant significance to us.\n\nThe subject-matter of the sculptures obviously came from the life of the vanished epoch of their creation, and contained a large proportion of evident history. It is this abnormal historic-mindedness of the primal race\u2014a chance circumstance operating, through coincidence, miraculously in our favour\u2014which made the carvings so awesomely informative to us, and which caused us to place their photography and transcription above all other considerations. In certain rooms the dominant arrangement was varied by the presence of maps, astronomical charts, and other scientific designs on an enlarged scale\u2014these things giving a naive and terrible corroboration to what we gathered from the pictorial friezes and dadoes. In hinting at what the whole revealed, I can only hope that my account will not arouse a curiosity greater than sane caution on the part of those who believe me at all. It would be tragic if any were to be allured to that realm of death and horror by the very warning meant to discourage them.\n\nInterrupting these sculptured walls were high windows and massive twelve-foot doorways; both now and then retaining the petrified wooden planks\u2014elaborately carved and polished\u2014of the actual shutters and doors. All metal fixtures had long ago vanished, but some of the doors remained in place and had to be forced aside as we progressed from room to room. Window-frames with odd transparent panes\u2014mostly elliptical\u2014survived here and there, though in no considerable quantity. There were also frequent niches of great magnitude, generally empty, but once in a while containing some bizarre object carved from green soapstone which was either broken or perhaps held too inferior to warrant removal. Other apertures were undoubtedly connected with bygone mechanical facilities\u2014heating, lighting, and the like\u2014of a sort suggested in many of the carvings. Ceilings tended to be plain, but had sometimes been inlaid with green soapstone or other tiles, mostly fallen now. Floors were also paved with such tiles, though plain stonework predominated.\n\nAs I have said, all furniture and other moveables were absent; but the sculptures gave a clear idea of the strange devices which had once filled these tomb-like, echoing rooms. Above the glacial sheet the floors were generally thick with detritus, litter, and debris; but farther down this condition decreased. In some of the lower chambers and corridors there was little more than gritty dust or ancient incrustations, while occasional areas had an uncanny air of newly swept immaculateness. Of course, where rifts or collapses had occurred, the lower levels were as littered as the upper ones. A central court\u2014as in other structures we had seen from the air\u2014saved the inner regions from total darkness; so that we seldom had to use our electric torches in the upper rooms except when studying sculptured details. Below the ice-cap, however, the twilight deepened; and in many parts of the tangled ground level there was an approach to absolute blackness.\n\nTo form even a rudimentary idea of our thoughts and feelings as we penetrated this aeon-silent maze of unhuman masonry one must correlate a hopelessly bewildering chaos of fugitive moods, memories, and impressions. The sheer appalling antiquity and lethal desolation of the place were enough to overwhelm almost any sensitive person, but added to these elements were the recent unexplained horror at the camp, and the revelations all too soon effected by the terrible mural sculptures around us. The moment we came upon a perfect section of carving, where no ambiguity of interpretation could exist, it took only a brief study to give us the hideous truth\u2014a truth which it would be naive to claim Danforth and I had not independently suspected before, though we had carefully refrained from even hinting it to each other. There could now be no further merciful doubt about the nature of the beings which had built and inhabited this monstrous dead city millions of years ago, when man's ancestors were primitive archaic mammals, and vast dinosaurs roamed the tropical steppes of Europe and Asia.\n\nWe had previously clung to a desperate alternative and insisted\u2014each to himself\u2014that the omnipresence of the five-pointed motif meant only some cultural or religious exaltation of the Archaean natural object which had so patently embodied the quality of five-pointedness; as the decorative motifs of Minoan Crete exalted the sacred bull, those of Egypt the scarabaeus, those of Rome the wolf and the eagle, and those of various savage tribes some chosen totem-animal. But this lone refuge was now stripped from us, and we were forced to face definitely the reason-shaking realisation which the reader of these pages has doubtless long ago anticipated. I can scarcely bear to write it down in black and white even now, but perhaps that will not be necessary.\n\nThe things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects\u2014but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well-nigh a thousand million years... rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells... rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the Great Old Ones that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young\u2014the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred. And to think that only the day before Danforth and I had actually looked upon fragments of their millennially fossilised substance... and that poor Lake and his party had seen their complete outlines....\n\nIt is of course impossible for me to relate in proper order the stages by which we picked up what we know of that monstrous chapter of pre-human life. After the first shock of the certain revelation we had to pause a while to recuperate, and it was fully three o'clock before we got started on our actual tour of systematic research. The sculptures in the building we entered were of relatively late date\u2014perhaps two million years ago\u2014as checked up by geological, biological, and astronomical features; and embodied an art which would be called decadent in comparison with that of specimens we found in older buildings after crossing bridges under the glacial sheet. One edifice hewn from the solid rock seemed to go back forty or possibly even fifty million years\u2014to the lower Eocene or upper Cretaceous\u2014and contained bas-reliefs of an artistry surpassing anything else, with one tremendous exception, that we encountered. That was, we have since agreed, the oldest domestic structure we traversed.\n\nWere it not for the support of those flashlights soon to be made public, I would refrain from telling what I found and inferred, lest I be confined as a madman. Of course, the infinitely early parts of the patchwork tale\u2014representing the pre-terrestrial life of the star-headed beings on other planets, and in other galaxies, and in other universes\u2014can readily be interpreted as the fantastic mythology of those beings themselves; yet such parts sometimes involved designs and diagrams so uncannily close to the latest findings of mathematics and astrophysics that I scarcely know what to think. Let others judge when they see the photographs I shall publish.\n\nNaturally, no one set of carvings which we encountered told more than a fraction of any connected story; nor did we even begin to come upon the various stages of that story in their proper order. Some of the vast rooms were independent units so far as their designs were concerned, whilst in other cases a continuous chronicle would be carried through a series of rooms and corridors. The best of the maps and diagrams were on the walls of a frightful abyss below even the ancient ground level\u2014a cavern perhaps 200 feet square and sixty feet high, which had almost undoubtedly been an educational centre of some sort. There were many provoking repetitions of the same material in different rooms and buildings; since certain chapters of experience, and certain summaries or phases of racial history, had evidently been favourites with different decorators or dwellers. Sometimes, though, variant versions of the same theme proved useful in settling debatable points and filling in gaps.\n\nI still wonder that we deduced so much in the short time at our disposal. Of course, we even now have only the barest outline; and much of that was obtained later on from a study of the photographs and sketches we made. It may be the effect of this later study\u2014the revived memories and vague impressions acting in conjunction with his general sensitiveness and with that final supposed horror-glimpse whose essence he will not reveal even to me\u2014which has been the immediate source of Danforth's present breakdown. But it had to be; for we could not issue our warning intelligently without the fullest possible information, and the issuance of that warning is a prime necessity. Certain lingering influences in that unknown antarctic world of disordered time and alien natural law make it imperative that further exploration be discouraged." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "The full story, so far as deciphered, will shortly appear in an official bulletin of Miskatonic University. Here I shall sketch only the salient high lights in a formless, rambling way. Myth or otherwise, the sculptures told of the coming of those star-headed things to the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space\u2014their coming, and the coming of many other alien entities such as at certain times embark upon spatial pioneering. They seemed able to traverse the interstellar ether on their vast membraneous wings\u2014thus oddly confirming some curious hill folklore long ago told me by an antiquarian colleague. They had lived under the sea a good deal, building fantastic cities and fighting terrific battles with nameless adversaries by means of intricate devices employing unknown principles of energy. Evidently their scientific and mechanical knowledge far surpassed man's today, though they made use of its more widespread and elaborate forms only when obliged to. Some of the sculptures suggested that they had passed through a stage of mechanised life on other planets, but had receded upon finding its effects emotionally unsatisfying. Their preternatural toughness of organisation and simplicity of natural wants made them peculiarly able to live on a high plane without the more specialised fruits of artificial manufacture, and even without garments except for occasional protection against the elements.\n\nIt was under the sea, at first for food and later for other purposes, that they first created earth-life\u2014using available substances according to long-known methods. The more elaborate experiments came after the annihilation of various cosmic enemies. They had done the same thing on other planets; having manufactured not only necessary foods, but certain multicellular protoplasmic masses capable of moulding their tissues into all sorts of temporary organs under hypnotic influence and thereby forming ideal slaves to perform the heavy work of the community. These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the \"shoggoths\" in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb. When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesised their simple food forms and bred a good supply of shoggoths, they allowed other cell-groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes; extirpating any whose presence became troublesome.\n\nWith the aid of the shoggoths, whose expansions could be made to lift prodigious weights, the small, low cities under the sea grew to vast and imposing labyrinths of stone not unlike those which later rose on land. Indeed, the highly adaptable Old Ones had lived much on land in other parts of the universe, and probably retained many traditions of land construction. As we studied the architecture of all these sculptured palaeogean cities, including that whose aeon-dead corridors we were even then traversing, we were impressed by a curious coincidence which we have not yet tried to explain, even to ourselves. The tops of the buildings, which in the actual city around us had of course been weathered into shapeless ruins ages ago, were clearly displayed in the bas-reliefs; and shewed vast clusters of needle-like spires, delicate finials on certain cone and pyramid apexes, and tiers of thin, horizontal scalloped discs capping cylindrical shafts. This was exactly what we had seen in that monstrous and portentous mirage, cast by a dead city whence such skyline features had been absent for thousands and tens of thousands of years, which loomed on our ignorant eyes across the unfathomed mountains of madness as we first approached poor Lake's illfated camp.\n\nOf the life of the Old Ones, both under the sea and after part of them migrated to land, volumes could be written. Those in shallow water had continued the fullest use of the eyes at the ends of their five main head tentacles, and had practiced the arts of sculpture and of writing in quite the usual way\u2014the writing accomplished with a stylus on waterproof waxen surfaces. Those lower down in the ocean depths, though they used a curious phosphorescent organism to furnish light, pieced out their vision with obscure special senses operating through the prismatic cilia on their heads\u2014senses which rendered all the Old Ones partly independent of light in emergencies. Their forms of sculpture and writing had changed curiously during the descent, embodying certain apparently chemical coating processes\u2014probably to secure phosphorescence\u2014which the bas-reliefs could not make clear to us. The beings moved in the sea partly by swimming\u2014using the lateral crinoid arms\u2014and partly by wriggling with the lower tier of tentacles containing the pseudo-feet. Occasionally they accomplished long swoops with the auxiliary use of two or more sets of their fanlike folding wings. On land they locally used the pseudo-feet, but now and then flew to great heights or over long distances with their wings. The many slender tentacles into which the crinoid arms branched were infinitely delicate, flexible, strong, and accurate in muscular-nervous co\u00f6rdination; ensuring the utmost skill and dexterity in all artistic and other manual operations.\n\nThe toughness of the things was almost incredible. Even the terrific pressures of the deepest sea-bottoms appeared powerless to harm them. Very few seemed to die at all except by violence, and their burial-places were very limited. The fact that they covered their vertically inhumed dead with five-pointed inscribed mounds set up thoughts in Danforth and me which made a fresh pause and recuperation necessary after the sculptures revealed it. The beings multiplied by means of spores\u2014like vegetable pteridophytes as Lake had suspected\u2014but owing to their prodigious toughness and longevity, and consequent lack of replacement needs, they did not encourage the large-scale development of new prothalli except when they had new regions to colonise. The young matured swiftly, and received an education evidently beyond any standard we can imagine. The prevailing intellectual and aesthetic life was highly evolved, and produced a tenaciously enduring set of customs and institutions which I shall describe more fully in my coming monograph. These varied slightly according to sea or land residence, but had the same foundations and essentials.\n\nThough able, like vegetables, to derive nourishment from inorganic substances; they vastly preferred organic and especially animal food. They ate uncooked marine life under the sea, but cooked their viands on land. They hunted game and raised meat herds\u2014slaughtering with sharp weapons whose odd marks on certain fossil bones our expedition had noted. They resisted all ordinary temperatures marvellously; and in their natural state could live in water down to freezing. When the great chill of the Pleistocene drew on, however\u2014nearly a million years ago\u2014the land dwellers had to resort to special measures including artificial heating; until at last the deadly cold appears to have driven them back into the sea. For their prehistoric flights through cosmic space, legend said, they had absorbed certain chemicals and became almost independent of eating, breathing, or heat conditions; but by the time of the great cold they had lost track of the method. In any case they could not have prolonged the artificial state indefinitely without harm.\n\nBeing non-pairing and semi-vegetable in structure, the Old Ones had no biological basis for the family phase of mammal life; but seemed to organise large households on the principles of comfortable space-utility and\u2014as we deduced from the pictured occupations and diversions of co-dwellers\u2014congenial mental association. In furnishing their homes they kept everything in the centre of the huge rooms, leaving all the wall spaces free for decorative treatment. Lighting, in the case of the land inhabitants, was accomplished by a device probably electro-chemical in nature. Both on land and under water they used curious tables, chairs, and couches like cylindrical frames\u2014for they rested and slept upright with folded-down tentacles\u2014and racks for the hinged sets of dotted surfaces forming their books.\n\nGovernment was evidently complex and probably socialistic, though no certainties in this regard could be deduced from the sculptures we saw. There was extensive commerce, both local and between different cities; certain small, flat counters, five-pointed and inscribed, serving as money. Probably the smaller of the various greenish soapstones found by our expedition were pieces of such currency. Though the culture was mainly urban, some agriculture and much stock-raising existed. Mining and a limited amount of manufacturing were also practiced. Travel was very frequent, but permanent migration seemed relatively rare except for the vast colonising movements by which the race expanded. For personal locomotion no external aid was used; since in land, air, and water movement alike the Old Ones seemed to possess excessively vast capacities for speed. Loads, however, were drawn by beasts of burden\u2014shoggoths under the sea, and a curious variety of primitive vertebrates in the later years of land existence.\n\nThese vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life-forms\u2014animal and vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and a\u00ebrial\u2014were the products of unguided evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones but escaping beyond their radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course, were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very last and most decadent sculptures a shambling primitive mammal, used sometimes for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable. In the building of land cities the huge stone blocks of the high towers were generally lifted by vast-winged pterodactyls of a species heretofore unknown to palaeontology.\n\nThe persistence with which the Old Ones survived various geologic changes and convulsions of the earth's crust was little short of miraculous. Though few or none of their first cities seem to have remained beyond the Archaean age, there was no interruption in their civilisation or in the transmission of their records. Their original place of advent to the planet was the Antarctic Ocean, and it is likely that they came not long after the matter forming the moon was wrenched from the neighbouring South Pacific. According to one of the sculptured maps, the whole globe was then under water, with stone cities scattered farther and farther from the antarctic as aeons passed. Another map shews a vast bulk of dry land around the south pole, where it is evident that some of the beings made experimental settlements though their main centres were transferred to the nearest sea-bottom. Later maps, which display this land mass as cracking and drifting, and sending certain detached parts northward, uphold in a striking way the theories of continental drift lately advanced by Taylor, Wegener, and Joly.\n\nWith the upheaval of new land in the South Pacific tremendous events began. Some of the marine cities were hopelessly shattered, yet that was not the worst misfortune. Another race\u2014a land race of beings shaped like octopi and probably corresponding to the fabulous pre-human spawn of Cthulhu\u2014soon began filtering down from cosmic infinity and precipitated a monstrous war which for a time drove the Old Ones wholly back to the sea\u2014a colossal blow in view of the increasing land settlements. Later peace was made, and the new lands were given to the Cthulhu spawn whilst the Old Ones held the sea and the older lands. New land cities were founded\u2014the greatest of them in the antarctic, for this region of first arrival was sacred. From then on, as before, the antarctic remained the centre of the Old Ones' civilisation, and all the discoverable cities built there by the Cthulhu spawn were blotted out. Then suddenly the lands of the Pacific sank again, taking with them the frightful stone city of R'lyeh and all the cosmic octopi, so that the Old Ones were again supreme on the planet except for one shadowy fear about which they did not like to speak. At a rather later age their cities dotted all the land and water areas of the globe\u2014hence the recommendation in my coming monograph that some archaeologist make systematic borings with Pabodie's type of apparatus in certain widely separated regions.\n\nThe steady trend down the ages was from water to land; a movement encouraged by the rise of new land masses, though the ocean was never wholly deserted. Another cause of the landward movement was the new difficulty in breeding and managing the shoggoths upon which successful sea-life depended. With the march of time, as the sculptures sadly confessed, the art of creating new life from inorganic matter had been lost; so that the Old Ones had to depend on the moulding of forms already in existence. On land the great reptiles proved highly tractable; but the shoggoths of the sea, reproducing by fission and acquiring a dangerous degree of accidental intelligence, presented for a time a formidable problem.\n\nThey had always been controlled through the hypnotic suggestion of the Old Ones, and had modelled their tough plasticity into various useful temporary limbs and organs; but now their self-modelling powers were sometimes exercised independently, and in various imitative forms implanted by past suggestion. They had, it seems, developed a semi-stable brain whose separate and occasionally stubborn volition echoed the will of the Old Ones without always obeying it. Sculptured images of these shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles; and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume; throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.\n\nThey seem to have become peculiarly intractable toward the middle of the Permian age, perhaps 150 million years ago, when a veritable war of re-subjugation was waged upon them by the marine Old Ones. Pictures of this war, and of the headless, slime-coated fashion in which the shoggoths typically left their slain victims, held a marvellously fearsome quality despite the intervening abyss of untold ages. The Old Ones had used curious weapons of molecular disturbance against the rebel entities, and in the end had achieved a complete victory. Thereafter the sculptures shewed a period in which shoggoths were tamed and broken by armed Old Ones as the wild horses of the American west were tamed by cowboys. Though during the rebellion the shoggoths had shewn an ability to live out of water, this transition was not encouraged; since their usefulness on land would hardly have been commensurate with the trouble of their management.\n\nDuring the Jurassic age the Old Ones met fresh adversity in the form of a new invasion from outer space\u2014this time by half-fungous, half-crustacean creatures from a planet identifiable as the remote and recently discovered Pluto; creatures undoubtedly the same as those figuring in certain whispered hill legends of the north, and remembered in the Himalayas as the Mi-Go, or Abominable Snow-Men. To fight these beings the Old Ones attempted, for the first time since their terrene advent, to sally forth again into the planetary ether; but despite all traditional preparations found it no longer possible to leave the earth's atmosphere. Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race. In the end the Mi-Go drove the Old Ones out of all the northern lands, though they were powerless to disturb those in the sea. Little by little the slow retreat of the elder race to their original antarctic habitat was beginning.\n\nIt was curious to note from the pictured battles that both the Cthulhu spawn and the Mi-Go seem to have been composed of matter more widely different from that which we know than was the substance of the Old Ones. They were able to undergo transformations and reintegrations impossible for their adversaries, and seem therefore to have originally come from even remoter gulfs of cosmic space. The Old Ones, but for their abnormal toughness and peculiar vital properties, were strictly material, and must have had their absolute origin within the known space-time continuum; whereas the first sources of the other beings can only be guessed at with bated breath. All this, of course, assuming that the non-terrestrial linkages and the anomalies ascribed to the invading foes are not pure mythology. Conceivably, the Old Ones might have invented a cosmic framework to account for their occasional defeats; since historical interest and pride obviously formed their chief psychological element. It is significant that their annals failed to mention many advanced and potent races of beings whose mighty cultures and towering cities figure persistently in certain obscure legends.\n\nThe changing state of the world through long geologic ages appeared with startling vividness in many of the sculptured maps and scenes. In certain cases existing science will require revision, while in other cases its bold deductions are magnificently confirmed. As I have said, the hypothesis of Taylor, Wegener, and Joly that all the continents are fragments of an original antarctic land mass which cracked from centrifugal force and drifted apart over a technically viscous lower surface\u2014an hypothesis suggested by such things as the complementary outlines of Africa and South America, and the way the great mountain chains are rolled and shoved up\u2014receives striking support from this uncanny source.\n\nMaps evidently shewing the Carboniferous world of an hundred million or more years ago displayed significant rifts and chasms destined later to separate Africa from the once continuous realms of Europe (then the Valusia of hellish primal legend), Asia, the Americas, and the antarctic continent. Other charts\u2014and most significantly one in connexion with the founding fifty million years ago of the vast dead city around us\u2014shewed all the present continents well differentiated. And in the latest discoverable specimen\u2014dating perhaps from the Pliocene age\u2014the approximate world of today appeared quite clearly despite the linkage of Alaska with Siberia, of North America with Europe through Greenland, and of South America with the antarctic continent through Graham Land. In the Carboniferous map the whole globe\u2014ocean floor and rifted land mass alike\u2014bore symbols of the Old Ones' vast stone cities, but in the later charts the gradual recession toward the antarctic became very plain. The final Pliocene specimen shewed no land cities except on the antarctic continent and the tip of South America, nor any ocean cities north of the fiftieth parallel of South Latitude. Knowledge and interest in the northern world, save for a study of coastlines probably made during long exploration flights on those fanlike membraneous wings, had evidently declined to zero among the Old Ones.\n\nDestruction of cities through the upthrust of mountains, the centrifugal rending of continents, the seismic convulsions of land or sea-bottom, and other natural causes was a matter of common record; and it was curious to observe how fewer and fewer replacements were made as the ages wore on. The vast dead megalopolis that yawned around us seemed to be the last general centre of the race; built early in the Cretaceous age after a titanic earth-buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant. It appeared that this general region was the most sacred spot of all, where reputedly the first Old Ones had settled on a primal sea-bottom. In the new city\u2014many of whose features we could recognise in the sculptures, but which stretched fully an hundred miles along the mountain-range in each direction beyond the farthest limits of our a\u00ebrial survey\u2014there were reputed to be preserved certain sacred stones forming part of the first sea-bottom city, which were thrust up to light after long epochs in the course of the general crumpling of strata." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Naturally, Danforth and I studied with especial interest and a peculiarly personal sense of awe everything pertaining to the immediate district in which we were. Of this local material there was naturally a vast abundance; and on the tangled ground level of the city we were lucky enough to find a house of very late date whose walls, though somewhat damaged by a neighbouring rift, contained sculptures of decadent workmanship carrying the story of the region much beyond the period of the Pliocene map whence we derived our last general glimpse of the pre-human world. This was the last place we examined in detail, since what we found there gave us a fresh immediate objective.\n\nCertainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth's globe. Of all existing lands it was infinitely the most ancient; and the conviction grew upon us that this hideous upland must indeed be the fabled nightmare plateau of Leng which even the mad author of the Necronomicon was reluctant to discuss. The great mountain chain was tremendously long\u2014starting as a low range at Luitpold Land on the coast of Weddell Sea and virtually crossing the entire continent. The really high part stretched in a mighty arc from about Latitude 82\u00b0, E. Longitude 60\u00b0 to Latitude 70\u00b0, E. Longitude 115\u00b0, with its concave side toward our camp and its seaward end in the region of that long, ice-locked coast whose hills were glimpsed by Wilkes and Mawson at the Antarctic Circle.\n\nYet even more monstrous exaggerations of Nature seemed disturbingly close at hand. I have said that these peaks are higher than the Himalayas, but the sculptures forbid me to say that they are earth's highest. That grim honour is beyond doubt reserved for something which half the sculptures hesitated to record at all, whilst others approached it with obvious repugnance and trepidation. It seems that there was one part of the ancient land\u2014the first part that ever rose from the waters after the earth had flung off the moon and the Old Ones had seeped down from the stars\u2014which had come to be shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil. Cities built there had crumbled before their time, and had been found suddenly deserted. Then when the first great earth-buckling had convulsed the region in the Comanchian age, a frightful line of peaks had shot suddenly up amidst the most appalling din and chaos\u2014and earth had received her loftiest and most terrible mountains.\n\nIf the scale of the carvings was correct, these abhorred things must have been much over 40,000 feet high\u2014radically vaster than even the shocking mountains of madness we had crossed. They extended, it appeared, from about Latitude 77\u00b0, E. Longitude 70\u00b0 to Latitude 70\u00b0, E. Longitude 100\u00b0\u2014less than 300 miles away from the dead city, so that we would have spied their dreaded summits in the dim western distance had it not been for that vague opalescent haze. Their northern end must likewise be visible from the long Antarctic Circle coastline at Queen Mary Land.\n\nSome of the Old Ones, in the decadent days, had made strange prayers to those mountains; but none ever went near them or dared to guess what lay beyond. No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings I prayed that none ever might. There are protecting hills along the coast beyond them\u2014Queen Mary and Kaiser Wilhelm Lands\u2014and I thank heaven no one has been able to land and climb those hills. I am not as sceptical about old tales and fears as I used to be, and I do not laugh now at the pre-human sculptor's notion that lightning paused meaningfully now and then at each of the brooding crests, and that an unexplained glow shone from one of those terrible pinnacles all through the long polar night. There may be a very real and very monstrous meaning in the old Pnakotic whispers about Kadath in the Cold Waste.\n\nBut the terrain close at hand was hardly less strange, even if less namelessly accursed. Soon after the founding of the city the great mountain-range became the seat of the principal temples, and many carvings shewed what grotesque and fantastic towers had pierced the sky where now we saw only the curiously clinging cubes and ramparts. In the course of ages the caves had appeared, and had been shaped into adjuncts of the temples. With the advance of still later epochs all the limestone veins of the region were hollowed out by ground waters, so that the mountains, the foothills, and the plains below them were a veritable network of connected caverns and galleries. Many graphic sculptures told of explorations deep underground, and of the final discovery of the Stygian sunless sea that lurked at earth's bowels.\n\nThis vast nighted gulf had undoubtedly been worn by the great river which flowed down from the nameless and horrible westward mountains, and which had formerly turned at the base of the Old Ones' range and flowed beside that chain into the Indian Ocean between Budd and Totten Lands on Wilkes's coastline. Little by little it had eaten away the limestone hill base at its turning, till at last its sapping currents reached the caverns of the ground waters and joined with them in digging a deeper abyss. Finally its whole bulk emptied into the hollow hills and left the old bed toward the ocean dry. Much of the later city as we now found it had been built over that former bed. The Old Ones, understanding what had happened, and exercising their always keen artistic sense, had carved into ornate pylons those headlands of the foothills where the great stream began its descent into eternal darkness.\n\nThis river, once crossed by scores of noble stone bridges, was plainly the one whose extinct course we had seen in our a\u00ebroplane survey. Its position in different carvings of the city helped us to orient ourselves to the scene as it had been at various stages of the region's age-long, aeon-dead history; so that we were able to sketch a hasty but careful map of the salient features\u2014squares, important buildings, and the like\u2014for guidance in further explorations. We could soon reconstruct in fancy the whole stupendous thing as it was a million or ten million or fifty million years ago, for the sculptures told us exactly what the buildings and mountains and squares and suburbs and landscape setting and luxuriant Tertiary vegetation had looked like. It must have had a marvellous and mystic beauty, and as I thought of it I almost forgot the clammy sense of sinister oppression with which the city's inhuman age and massiveness and deadness and remoteness and glacial twilight had choked and weighed on my spirit. Yet according to certain carvings the denizens of that city had themselves known the clutch of oppressive terror; for there was a sombre and recurrent type of scene in which the Old Ones were shewn in the act of recoiling affrightedly from some object\u2014never allowed to appear in the design\u2014found in the great river and indicated as having been washed down through waving, vine-draped cycad-forests from those horrible westward mountains.\n\nIt was only in the one late-built house with the decadent carvings that we obtained any foreshadowing of the final calamity leading to the city's desertion. Undoubtedly there must have been many sculptures of the same age elsewhere, even allowing for the slackened energies and aspirations of a stressful and uncertain period; indeed, very certain evidence of the existence of others came to us shortly afterward. But this was the first and only set we directly encountered. We meant to look farther later on; but as I have said, immediate conditions dictated another present objective. There would, though, have been a limit\u2014for after all hope of a long future occupancy of the place had perished among the Old Ones, there could not but have been a complete cessation of mural decoration. The ultimate blow, of course, was the coming of the great cold which once held most of the earth in thrall, and which has never departed from the illfated poles\u2014the great cold that, at the world's other extremity, put an end to the fabled lands of Lomar and Hyperborea.\n\nJust when this tendency began in the antarctic it would be hard to say in terms of exact years. Nowadays we set the beginning of the general glacial periods at a distance of about 500,000 years from the present, but at the poles the terrible scourge must have commenced much earlier. All quantitative estimates are partly guesswork; but it is quite likely that the decadent sculptures were made considerably less than a million years ago, and that the actual desertion of the city was complete long before the conventional opening of the Pleistocene\u2014500,000 years ago\u2014as reckoned in terms of the earth's whole surface.\n\nIn the decadent sculptures there were signs of thinner vegetation everywhere, and of a decreased country life on the part of the Old Ones. Heating devices were shewn in the houses, and winter travellers were represented as muffled in protective fabrics. Then we saw a series of cartouches (the continuous band arrangement being frequently interrupted in these late carvings) depicting a constantly growing migration to the nearest refuges of greater warmth\u2014some fleeing to cities under the sea off the faraway coast, and some clambering down through networks of limestone caverns in the hollow hills to the neighbouring black abyss of subterrene waters.\n\nIn the end it seems to have been the neighbouring abyss which received the greatest colonisation. This was partly due, no doubt, to the traditional sacredness of this especial region; but may have been more conclusively determined by the opportunities it gave for continuing the use of the great temples on the honeycombed mountains, and for retaining the vast land city as a place of summer residence and base of communication with various mines. The linkage of old and new abodes was made more effective by means of several gradings and improvements along the connecting routes, including the chiselling of numerous direct tunnels from the ancient metropolis to the black abyss\u2014sharply down-pointing tunnels whose mouths we carefully drew, according to our most thoughtful estimates, on the guide map we were compiling. It was obvious that at least two of these tunnels lay within a reasonable exploring distance of where we were; both being on the mountainward edge of the city, one less than a quarter-mile toward the ancient river-course, and the other perhaps twice that distance in the opposite direction.\n\nThe abyss, it seems, had shelving shores of dry land at certain places; but the Old Ones built their new city under water\u2014no doubt because of its greater certainty of uniform warmth. The depth of the hidden sea appears to have been very great, so that the earth's internal heat could ensure its habitability for an indefinite period. The beings seem to have had no trouble in adapting themselves to part-time\u2014and eventually, of course, whole-time\u2014residence under water; since they had never allowed their gill systems to atrophy. There were many sculptures which shewed how they had always frequently visited their submarine kinsfolk elsewhere, and how they had habitually bathed on the deep bottom of their great river. The darkness of inner earth could likewise have been no deterrent to a race accustomed to long antarctic nights.\n\nDecadent though their style undoubtedly was, these latest carvings had a truly epic quality where they told of the building of the new city in the cavern sea. The Old Ones had gone about it scientifically; quarrying insoluble rocks from the heart of the honeycombed mountains, and employing expert workers from the nearest submarine city to perform the construction according to the best methods. These workers brought with them all that was necessary to establish the new venture\u2014shoggoth-tissue from which to breed stone-lifters and subsequent beasts of burden for the cavern city, and other protoplasmic matter to mould into phosphorescent organisms for lighting purposes.\n\nAt last a mighty metropolis rose on the bottom of that Stygian sea; its architecture much like that of the city above, and its workmanship displaying relatively little decadence because of the precise mathematical element inherent in building operations. The newly bred shoggoths grew to enormous size and singular intelligence, and were represented as taking and executing orders with marvellous quickness. They seemed to converse with the Old Ones by mimicking their voices\u2014a sort of musical piping over a wide range, if poor Lake's dissection had indicated aright\u2014and to work more from spoken commands than from hypnotic suggestions as in earlier times. They were, however, kept in admirable control. The phosphorescent organisms supplied light with vast effectiveness, and doubtless atoned for the loss of the familiar polar auroras of the outer-world night.\n\nArt and decoration were pursued, though of course with a certain decadence. The Old Ones seemed to realise this falling off themselves; and in many cases anticipated the policy of Constantine the Great by transplanting especially fine blocks of ancient carving from their land city, just as the emperor, in a similar age of decline, stripped Greece and Asia of their finest art to give his new Byzantine capital greater splendours than its own people could create. That the transfer of sculptured blocks had not been more extensive, was doubtless owing to the fact that the land city was not at first wholly abandoned. By the time total abandonment did occur\u2014and it surely must have occurred before the polar Pleistocene was far advanced\u2014the Old Ones had perhaps become satisfied with their decadent art\u2014or had ceased to recognise the superior merit of the older carvings. At any rate, the aeon-silent ruins around us had certainly undergone no wholesale sculptural denudation; though all the best separate statues, like other moveables, had been taken away.\n\nThe decadent cartouches and dadoes telling this story were, as I have said, the latest we could find in our limited search. They left us with a picture of the Old Ones shuttling back and forth betwixt the land city in summer and the sea-cavern city in winter, and sometimes trading with the sea-bottom cities off the antarctic coast. By this time the ultimate doom of the land city must have been recognised, for the sculptures shewed many signs of the cold's malign encroachments. Vegetation was declining, and the terrible snows of the winter no longer melted completely even in midsummer. The saurian livestock were nearly all dead, and the mammals were standing it none too well. To keep on with the work of the upper world it had become necessary to adapt some of the amorphous and curiously cold-resistant shoggoths to land life; a thing the Old Ones had formerly been reluctant to do. The great river was now lifeless, and the upper sea had lost most of its denizens except the seals and whales. All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.\n\nWhat had happened afterward we could only guess. How long had the new sea-cavern city survived? Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness? Had the subterranean waters frozen at last? To what fate had the ocean-bottom cities of the outer world been delivered? Had any of the Old Ones shifted north ahead of the creeping ice-cap? Existing geology shews no trace of their presence. Had the frightful Mi-Go been still a menace in the outer land world of the north? Could one be sure of what might or might not linger even to this day in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth's deepest waters? Those things had seemingly been able to withstand any amount of pressure\u2014and men of the sea have fished up curious objects at times. And has the killer-whale theory really explained the savage and mysterious scars on antarctic seals noticed a generation ago by Borchgrevingk?\n\nThe specimens found by poor Lake did not enter into these guesses, for their geologic setting proved them to have lived at what must have been a very early date in the land city's history. They were, according to their location, certainly not less than thirty million years old; and we reflected that in their day the sea-cavern city, and indeed the cavern itself, had no existence. They would have remembered an older scene, with lush Tertiary vegetation everywhere, a younger land city of flourishing arts around them, and a great river sweeping northward along the base of the mighty mountains toward a faraway tropic ocean.\n\nAnd yet we could not help thinking about these specimens\u2014especially about the eight perfect ones that were missing from Lake's hideously ravaged camp. There was something abnormal about that whole business\u2014the strange things we had tried so hard to lay to somebody's madness\u2014those frightful graves\u2014the amount and nature of the missing material\u2014Gedney\u2014the unearthly toughness of those archaic monstrosities, and the queer vital freaks the sculptures now shewed the race to have.... Danforth and I had seen a good deal in the last few hours, and were prepared to believe and keep silent about many appalling and incredible secrets of primal Nature." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "I have said that our study of the decadent sculptures brought about a change in our immediate objective. This of course had to do with the chiselled avenues to the black inner world, of whose existence we had not known before, but which we were now eager to find and traverse. From the evident scale of the carvings we deduced that a steeply descending walk of about a mile through either of the neighbouring tunnels would bring us to the brink of the dizzy sunless cliffs above the great abyss; down whose side adequate paths, improved by the Old Ones, led to the rocky shore of the hidden and nighted ocean. To behold this fabulous gulf in stark reality was a lure which seemed impossible of resistance once we knew of the thing\u2014yet we realised we must begin the quest at once if we expected to include it on our present flight.\n\nIt was now 8 P.M., and we had not enough battery replacements to let our torches burn on forever. We had done so much of our studying and copying below the glacial level that our battery supply had had at least five hours of nearly continuous use; and despite the special dry cell formula would obviously be good for only about four more\u2014though by keeping one torch unused, except for especially interesting or difficult places, we might manage to eke out a safe margin beyond that. It would not do to be without a light in these Cyclopean catacombs, hence in order to make the abyss trip we must give up all further mural deciphering. Of course we intended to revisit the place for days and perhaps weeks of intensive study and photography\u2014curiosity having long ago got the better of horror\u2014but just now we must hasten. Our supply of trailblazing paper was far from unlimited, and we were reluctant to sacrifice spare notebooks or sketching paper to augment it; but we did let one large notebook go. If worst came to worst, we could resort to rock-chipping\u2014and of course it would be possible, even in case of really lost direction, to work up to full daylight by one channel or another if granted sufficient time for plentiful trial and error. So at last we set off eagerly in the indicated direction of the nearest tunnel.\n\nAccording to the carvings from which we had made our map, the desired tunnel-mouth could not be much more than a quarter-mile from where we stood; the intervening space shewing solid-looking buildings quite likely to be penetrable still at a sub-glacial level. The opening itself would be in the basement\u2014on the angle nearest the foothills\u2014of a vast five-pointed structure of evidently public and perhaps ceremonial nature, which we tried to identify from our a\u00ebrial survey of the ruins. No such structure came to our minds as we recalled our flight, hence we concluded that its upper parts had been greatly damaged, or that it had been totally shattered in an ice-rift we had noticed. In the latter case the tunnel would probably turn out to be choked, so that we would have to try the next nearest one\u2014the one less than a mile to the north. The intervening river-course prevented our trying any of the more southerly tunnels on this trip; and indeed, if both of the neighbouring ones were choked it was doubtful whether our batteries would warrant an attempt on the next northerly one\u2014about a mile beyond our second choice.\n\nAs we threaded our dim way through the labyrinth with the aid of map and compass\u2014traversing rooms and corridors in every stage of ruin or preservation, clambering up ramps, crossing upper floors and bridges and clambering down again, encountering choked doorways and piles of debris, hastening now and then along finely preserved and uncannily immaculate stretches, taking false leads and retracing our way (in such cases removing the blind paper trail we had left), and once in a while striking the bottom of an open shaft through which daylight poured or trickled down\u2014we were repeatedly tantalised by the sculptured walls along our route. Many must have told tales of immense historical importance, and only the prospect of later visits reconciled us to the need of passing them by. As it was, we slowed down once in a while and turned on our second torch. If we had had more films we would certainly have paused briefly to photograph certain bas-reliefs, but time-consuming hand copying was clearly out of the question.\n\nI come now once more to a place where the temptation to hesitate, or to hint rather than state, is very strong. It is necessary, however, to reveal the rest in order to justify my course in discouraging further exploration. We had wormed our way very close to the computed site of the tunnel's mouth\u2014having crossed a second-story bridge to what seemed plainly the tip of a pointed wall, and descended to a ruinous corridor especially rich in decadently elaborate and apparently ritualistic sculptures of late workmanship\u2014when, about 8:30 P.M., Danforth's keen young nostrils gave us the first hint of something unusual. If we had had a dog with us, I suppose we would have been warned before. At first we could not precisely say what was wrong with the formerly crystal-pure air, but after a few seconds our memories reacted only too definitely. Let me try to state the thing without flinching. There was an odour\u2014and that odour was vaguely, subtly, and unmistakably akin to what had nauseated us upon opening the insane grave of the horror poor Lake had dissected.\n\nOf course the revelation was not as clearly cut at the time as it sounds now. There were several conceivable explanations, and we did a good deal of indecisive whispering. Most important of all, we did not retreat without further investigation; for having come this far, we were loath to be balked by anything short of certain disaster. Anyway, what we must have suspected was altogether too wild to believe. Such things did not happen in any normal world. It was probably sheer irrational instinct which made us dim our single torch\u2014tempted no longer by the decadent and sinister sculptures that leered menacingly from the oppressive walls\u2014and which softened our progress to a cautious tiptoeing and crawling over the increasingly littered floor and heaps of debris.\n\nDanforth's eyes as well as nose proved better than mine, for it was likewise he who first noticed the queer aspect of the debris after we had passed many half-choked arches leading to chambers and corridors on the ground level. It did not look quite as it ought after countless thousands of years of desertion, and when we cautiously turned on more light we saw that a kind of swath seemed to have been lately tracked through it. The irregular nature of the litter precluded any definite marks, but in the smoother places there were suggestions of the dragging of heavy objects. Once we thought there was a hint of parallel tracks, as if of runners. This was what made us pause again.\n\nIt was during that pause that we caught\u2014simultaneously this time\u2014the other odour ahead. Paradoxically, it was both a less frightful and a more frightful odour\u2014less frightful intrinsically, but infinitely appalling in this place under the known circumstances... unless, of course, Gedney.... For the odour was the plain and familiar one of common petrol\u2014every-day gasoline.\n\nOur motivation after that is something I will leave to psychologists. We knew now that some terrible extension of the camp horrors must have crawled into this nighted burial-place of the aeons, hence could not doubt any longer the existence of nameless conditions\u2014present or at least recent\u2014just ahead. Yet in the end we did let sheer burning curiosity\u2014or anxiety\u2014or auto-hypnotism\u2014or vague thoughts of responsibility toward Gedney\u2014or what not\u2014drive us on. Danforth whispered again of the print he thought he had seen at the alley-turning in the ruins above; and of the faint musical piping\u2014potentially of tremendous significance in the light of Lake's dissection report despite its close resemblance to the cave-mouth echoes of the windy peaks\u2014which he thought he had shortly afterward half heard from unknown depths below. I, in my turn, whispered of how the camp was left\u2014of what had disappeared, and of how the madness of a lone survivor might have conceived the inconceivable\u2014a wild trip across the monstrous mountains and a descent into the unknown primal masonry\u2014\n\nBut we could not convince each other, or even ourselves, of anything definite. We had turned off all light as we stood still, and vaguely noticed that a trace of deeply filtered upper day kept the blackness from being absolute. Having automatically begun to move ahead, we guided ourselves by occasional flashes from our torch. The disturbed debris formed an impression we could not shake off, and the smell of gasoline grew stronger. More and more ruin met our eyes and hampered our feet, until very soon we saw that the forward way was about to cease. We had been all too correct in our pessimistic guess about that rift glimpsed from the air. Our tunnel quest was a blind one, and we were not even going to be able to reach the basement out of which the abyssward aperture opened.\n\nThe torch, flashing over the grotesquely carven walls of the blocked corridor in which we stood, shewed several doorways in various states of obstruction; and from one of them the gasoline odour\u2014quite submerging that other hint of odour\u2014came with especial distinctness. As we looked more steadily, we saw that beyond a doubt there had been a slight and recent clearing away of debris from that particular opening. Whatever the lurking horror might be, we believed the direct avenue toward it was now plainly manifest. I do not think anyone will wonder that we waited an appreciable time before making any further motion.\n\nAnd yet, when we did venture inside that black arch, our first impression was one of anticlimax. For amidst the littered expanse of that sculptured crypt\u2014a perfect cube with sides of about twenty feet\u2014there remained no recent object of instantly discernible size; so that we looked instinctively, though in vain, for a farther doorway. In another moment, however, Danforth's sharp vision had descried a place where the floor debris had been disturbed; and we turned on both torches full strength. Though what we saw in that light was actually simple and trifling, I am none the less reluctant to tell of it because of what it implied. It was a rough levelling of the debris, upon which several small objects lay carelessly scattered, and at one corner of which a considerable amount of gasoline must have been spilled lately enough to leave a strong odour even at this extreme super-plateau altitude. In other words, it could not be other than a sort of camp\u2014a camp made by questing beings who like us had been turned back by the unexpectedly choked way to the abyss.\n\nLet me be plain. The scattered objects were, so far as substance was concerned, all from Lake's camp; and consisted of tin cans as queerly opened as those we had seen at that ravaged place, many spent matches, three illustrated books more or less curiously smudged, an empty ink bottle with its pictorial and instructional carton, a broken fountain pen, some oddly snipped fragments of fur and tent-cloth, a used electric battery with circular of directions, a folder that came with our type of tent heater, and a sprinkling of crumpled papers. It was all bad enough, but when we smoothed out the papers and looked at what was on them we felt we had come to the worst. We had found certain inexplicably blotted papers at the camp which might have prepared us, yet the effect of the sight down there in the pre-human vaults of a nightmare city was almost too much to bear.\n\nA mad Gedney might have made the groups of dots in imitation of those found on the greenish soapstones, just as the dots on those insane five-pointed grave-mounds might have been made; and he might conceivably have prepared rough, hasty sketches\u2014varying in their accuracy or lack of it\u2014which outlined the neighbouring parts of the city and traced the way from a circularly represented place outside our previous route\u2014a place we identified as a great cylindrical tower in the carvings and as a vast circular gulf glimpsed in our a\u00ebrial survey\u2014to the present five-pointed structure and the tunnel-mouth therein. He might, I repeat, have prepared such sketches; for those before us were quite obviously compiled as our own had been from late sculptures somewhere in the glacial labyrinth, though not from the ones which we had seen and used. But what this art-blind bungler could never have done was to execute those sketches in a strange and assured technique perhaps superior, despite haste and carelessness, to any of the decadent carvings from which they were taken\u2014the characteristic and unmistakable technique of the Old Ones themselves in the dead city's heyday.\n\nThere are those who will say Danforth and I were utterly mad not to flee for our lives after that; since our conclusions were now\u2014notwithstanding their wildness\u2014completely fixed, and of a nature I need not even mention to those who have read my account as far as this. Perhaps we were mad\u2014for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit\u2014albeit in a less extreme form\u2014in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half-paralysed with terror though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe and curiosity which triumphed in the end.\n\nOf course we did not mean to face that\u2014or those\u2014which we knew had been there, but we felt that they must be gone by now. They would by this time have found the other neighbouring entrance to the abyss, and have passed within to whatever night-black fragments of the past might await them in the ultimate gulf\u2014the ultimate gulf they had never seen. Or if that entrance, too, was blocked, they would have gone on to the north seeking another. They were, we remembered, partly independent of light.\n\nLooking back to that moment, I can scarcely recall just what precise form our new emotions took\u2014just what change of immediate objective it was that so sharpened our sense of expectancy. We certainly did not mean to face what we feared\u2014yet I will not deny that we may have had a lurking, unconscious wish to spy certain things from some hidden vantage-point. Probably we had not given up our zeal to glimpse the abyss itself, though there was interposed a new goal in the form of that great circular place shewn on the crumpled sketches we had found. We had at once recognised it as a monstrous cylindrical tower figuring in the very earliest carvings, but appearing only as a prodigious round aperture from above. Something about the impressiveness of its rendering, even in these hasty diagrams, made us think that its sub-glacial levels must still form a feature of peculiar importance. Perhaps it embodied architectural marvels as yet unencountered by us. It was certainly of incredible age according to the sculptures in which it figured\u2014being indeed among the first things built in the city. Its carvings, if preserved, could not but be highly significant. Moreover, it might form a good present link with the upper world\u2014a shorter route than the one we were so carefully blazing, and probably that by which those others had descended.\n\nAt any rate, the thing we did was to study the terrible sketches\u2014which quite perfectly confirmed our own\u2014and start back over the indicated course to the circular place; the course which our nameless predecessors must have traversed twice before us. The other neighbouring gate to the abyss would lie beyond that. I need not speak of our journey\u2014during which we continued to leave an economical trail of paper\u2014for it was precisely the same in kind as that by which we had reached the cul de sac; except that it tended to adhere more closely to the ground level and even descend to basement corridors. Every now and then we could trace certain disturbing marks in the debris or litter under foot; and after we had passed outside the radius of the gasoline scent we were again faintly conscious\u2014spasmodically\u2014of that more hideous and more persistent scent. After the way had branched from our former course we sometimes gave the rays of our single torch a furtive sweep along the walls; noting in almost every case the well-nigh omnipresent sculptures, which indeed seem to have formed a main aesthetic outlet for the Old Ones.\n\nAbout 9:30 P.M., while traversing a vaulted corridor whose increasingly glaciated floor seemed somewhat below the ground level and whose roof grew lower as we advanced, we began to see strong daylight ahead and were able to turn off our torch. It appeared that we were coming to the vast circular place, and that our distance from the upper air could not be very great. The corridor ended in an arch surprisingly low for these megalithic ruins, but we could see much through it even before we emerged. Beyond there stretched a prodigious round space\u2014fully 200 feet in diameter\u2014strown with debris and containing many choked archways corresponding to the one we were about to cross. The walls were\u2014in available spaces\u2014boldly sculptured into a spiral band of heroic proportions; and displayed, despite the destructive weathering caused by the openness of the spot, an artistic splendour far beyond anything we had encountered before. The littered floor was quite heavily glaciated, and we fancied that the true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth.\n\nBut the salient object of the place was the titanic stone ramp which, eluding the archways by a sharp turn outward into the open floor, wound spirally up the stupendous cylindrical wall like an inside counterpart of those once climbing outside the monstrous towers or ziggurats of antique Babylon. Only the rapidity of our flight, and the perspective which confounded the descent with the tower's inner wall, had prevented our noticing this feature from the air, and thus caused us to seek another avenue to the sub-glacial level. Pabodie might have been able to tell what sort of engineering held it in place, but Danforth and I could merely admire and marvel. We could see mighty stone corbels and pillars here and there, but what we saw seemed inadequate to the function performed. The thing was excellently preserved up to the present top of the tower\u2014a highly remarkable circumstance in view of its exposure\u2014and its shelter had done much to protect the bizarre and disturbing cosmic sculptures on the walls.\n\nAs we stepped out into the awesome half-daylight of this monstrous cylinder-bottom\u2014fifty million years old, and without doubt the most primally ancient structure ever to meet our eyes\u2014we saw that the ramp-traversed sides stretched dizzily up to a height of fully sixty feet. This, we recalled from our a\u00ebrial survey, meant an outside glaciation of some forty feet; since the yawning gulf we had seen from the plane had been at the top of an approximately twenty-foot mound of crumbled masonry, somewhat sheltered for three-fourths of its circumference by the massive curving walls of a line of higher ruins. According to the sculptures the original tower had stood in the centre of an immense circular plaza; and had been perhaps 500 or 600 feet high, with tiers of horizontal discs near the top, and a row of needle-like spires along the upper rim. Most of the masonry had obviously toppled outward rather than inward\u2014a fortunate happening, since otherwise the ramp might have been shattered and the whole interior choked. As it was, the ramp shewed sad battering; whilst the choking was such that all the archways at the bottom seemed to have been recently half-cleared.\n\nIt took us only a moment to conclude that this was indeed the route by which those others had descended, and that this would be the logical route for our own ascent despite the long trail of paper we had left elsewhere. The tower's mouth was no farther from the foothills and our waiting plane than was the great terraced building we had entered, and any further sub-glacial exploration we might make on this trip would lie in this general region. Oddly, we were still thinking about possible later trips\u2014even after all we had seen and guessed. Then as we picked our way cautiously over the debris of the great floor, there came a sight which for the time excluded all other matters.\n\nIt was the neatly huddled array of three sledges in that farther angle of the ramp's lower and outward-projecting course which had hitherto been screened from our view. There they were\u2014the three sledges missing from Lake's camp\u2014shaken by a hard usage which must have included forcible dragging along great reaches of snowless masonry and debris, as well as much hand portage over utterly unnavigable places. They were carefully and intelligently packed and strapped, and contained things memorably familiar enough\u2014the gasoline stove, fuel cans, instrument cases, provision tins, tarpaulins obviously bulging with books, and some bulging with less obvious contents\u2014everything derived from Lake's equipment. After what we had found in that other room, we were in a measure prepared for this encounter. The really great shock came when we stepped over and undid one tarpaulin whose outlines had peculiarly disquieted us. It seems that others as well as Lake had been interested in collecting typical specimens; for there were two here, both stiffly frozen, perfectly preserved, patched with adhesive plaster where some wounds around the neck had occurred, and wrapped with patent care to prevent further damage. They were the bodies of young Gedney and the missing dog." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Many people will probably judge us callous as well as mad for thinking about the northward tunnel and the abyss so soon after our sombre discovery, and I am not prepared to say that we would have immediately revived such thoughts but for a specific circumstance which broke in upon us and set up a whole new train of speculations. We had replaced the tarpaulin over poor Gedney and were standing in a kind of mute bewilderment when the sounds finally reached our consciousness\u2014the first sounds we had heard since descending out of the open where the mountain wind whined faintly from its unearthly heights. Well known and mundane though they were, their presence in this remote world of death was more unexpected and unnerving than any grotesque or fabulous tones could possibly have been\u2014since they gave a fresh upsetting to all our notions of cosmic harmony.\n\nHad it been some trace of that bizarre musical piping over a wide range which Lake's dissection report had led us to expect in those others\u2014and which, indeed, our overwrought fancies had been reading into every wind-howl we had heard since coming on the camp horror\u2014it would have had a kind of hellish congruity with the aeon-dead region around us. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. As it was, however, the noise shattered all our profoundly seated adjustments\u2014all our tacit acceptance of the inner antarctic as a waste as utterly and irrevocably void of every vestige of normal life as the sterile disc of the moon. What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. Instead, it was a thing so mockingly normal and so unerringly familiarised by our sea days off Victoria Land and our camp days at McMurdo Sound that we shuddered to think of it here, where such things ought not to be. To be brief\u2014it was simply the raucous squawking of a penguin.\n\nThe muffled sound floated from sub-glacial recesses nearly opposite to the corridor whence we had come\u2014regions manifestly in the direction of that other tunnel to the vast abyss. The presence of a living water-bird in such a direction\u2014in a world whose surface was one of age-long and uniform lifelessness\u2014could lead to only one conclusion; hence our first thought was to verify the objective reality of the sound. It was, indeed, repeated; and seemed at times to come from more than one throat. Seeking its source, we entered an archway from which much debris had been cleared; resuming our trailblazing\u2014with an added paper-supply taken with curious repugnance from one of the tarpaulin bundles on the sledges\u2014when we left daylight behind.\n\nAs the glaciated floor gave place to a litter of detritus, we plainly discerned some curious dragging tracks; and once Danforth found a distinct print of a sort whose description would be only too superfluous. The course indicated by the penguin cries was precisely what our map and compass prescribed as an approach to the more northerly tunnel-mouth, and we were glad to find that a bridgeless thoroughfare on the ground and basement levels seemed open. The tunnel, according to the chart, ought to start from the basement of a large pyramidal structure which we seemed vaguely to recall from our a\u00ebrial survey as remarkably well preserved. Along our path the single torch shewed a customary profusion of carvings, but we did not pause to examine any of these.\n\nSuddenly a bulky white shape loomed up ahead of us, and we flashed on the second torch. It is odd how wholly this new quest had turned our minds from earlier fears of what might lurk near. Those other ones, having left their supplies in the great circular place, must have planned to return after their scouting trip toward or into the abyss; yet we had now discarded all caution concerning them as completely as if they had never existed. This white, waddling thing was fully six feet high, yet we seemed to realise at once that it was not one of those others. They were larger and dark, and according to the sculptures their motion over land surfaces was a swift, assured matter despite the queerness of their sea-born tentacle equipment. But to say that the white thing did not profoundly frighten us would be vain. We were indeed clutched for an instant by a primitive dread almost sharper than the worst of our reasoned fears regarding those others. Then came a flash of anticlimax as the white shape sidled into a lateral archway to our left to join two others of its kind which had summoned it in raucous tones. For it was only a penguin\u2014albeit of a huge, unknown species larger than the greatest of the known king penguins, and monstrous in its combined albinism and virtual eyelessness.\n\nWhen we had followed the thing into the archway and turned both our torches on the indifferent and unheeding group of three we saw that they were all eyeless albinos of the same unknown and gigantic species. Their size reminded us of some of the archaic penguins depicted in the Old Ones' sculptures, and it did not take us long to conclude that they were descended from the same stock\u2014undoubtedly surviving through a retreat to some warmer inner region whose perpetual blackness had destroyed their pigmentation and atrophied their eyes to mere useless slits. That their present habitat was the vast abyss we sought, was not for a moment to be doubted; and this evidence of the gulf's continued warmth and habitability filled us with the most curious and subtly perturbing fancies.\n\nWe wondered, too, what had caused these three birds to venture out of their usual domain. The state and silence of the great dead city made it clear that it had at no time been an habitual seasonal rookery, whilst the manifest indifference of the trio to our presence made it seem odd that any passing party of those others should have startled them. Was it possible that those others had taken some aggressive action or tried to increase their meat supply? We doubted whether that pungent odour which the dogs had hated could cause an equal antipathy in these penguins; since their ancestors had obviously lived on excellent terms with the Old Ones\u2014an amicable relationship which must have survived in the abyss below as long as any of the Old Ones remained. Regretting\u2014in a flareup of the old spirit of pure science\u2014that we could not photograph these anomalous creatures, we shortly left them to their squawking and pushed on toward the abyss whose openness was now so positively proved to us, and whose exact direction occasional penguin tracks made clear.\n\nNot long afterward a steep descent in a long, low, doorless, and peculiarly sculptureless corridor led us to believe that we were approaching the tunnel-mouth at last. We had passed two more penguins, and heard others immediately ahead. Then the corridor ended in a prodigious open space which made us gasp involuntarily\u2014a perfect inverted hemisphere, obviously deep underground; fully an hundred feet in diameter and fifty feet high, with low archways opening around all parts of the circumference but one, and that one yawning cavernously with a black arched aperture which broke the symmetry of the vault to a height of nearly fifteen feet. It was the entrance to the great abyss.\n\nIn this vast hemisphere, whose concave roof was impressively though decadently carved to a likeness of the primordial celestial dome, a few albino penguins waddled\u2014aliens there, but indifferent and unseeing. The black tunnel yawned indefinitely off at a steep descending grade, its aperture adorned with grotesquely chiselled jambs and lintel. From that cryptical mouth we fancied a current of slightly warmer air and perhaps even a suspicion of vapour proceeded; and we wondered what living entities other than penguins the limitless void below, and the contiguous honeycombings of the land and the titan mountains, might conceal. We wondered, too, whether the trace of mountain-top smoke at first suspected by poor Lake, as well as the odd haze we had ourselves perceived around the rampart-crowned peak, might not be caused by the tortuous-channelled rising of some such vapour from the unfathomed regions of earth's core.\n\nEntering the tunnel, we saw that its outline was\u2014at least at the start\u2014about fifteen feet each way; sides, floor, and arched roof composed of the usual megalithic masonry. The sides were sparsely decorated with cartouches of conventional designs in a late, decadent style; and all the construction and carving were marvellously well preserved. The floor was quite clear, except for a slight detritus bearing outgoing penguin tracks and the inward tracks of those others. The farther one advanced, the warmer it became; so that we were soon unbuttoning our heavy garments. We wondered whether there were any actually igneous manifestations below, and whether the waters of that sunless sea were hot. After a short distance the masonry gave place to solid rock, though the tunnel kept the same proportions and presented the same aspect of carved regularity. Occasionally its varying grade became so steep that grooves were cut in the floor. Several times we noted the mouths of small lateral galleries not recorded in our diagrams; none of them such as to complicate the problem of our return, and all of them welcome as possible refuges in case we met unwelcome entities on their way back from the abyss. The nameless scent of such things was very distinct. Doubtless it was suicidally foolish to venture into that tunnel under the known conditions, but the lure of the unplumbed is stronger in certain persons than most suspect\u2014indeed, it was just such a lure which had brought us to this unearthly polar waste in the first place. We saw several penguins as we passed along, and speculated on the distance we would have to traverse. The carvings had led us to expect a steep downhill walk of about a mile to the abyss, but our previous wanderings had shewn us that matters of scale were not wholly to be depended on.\n\nAfter about a quarter of a mile that nameless scent became greatly accentuated, and we kept very careful track of the various lateral openings we passed. There was no visible vapour as at the mouth, but this was doubtless due to the lack of contrasting cooler air. The temperature was rapidly ascending, and we were not surprised to come upon a careless heap of material shudderingly familiar to us. It was composed of furs and tent-cloth taken from Lake's camp, and we did not pause to study the bizarre forms into which the fabrics had been slashed. Slightly beyond this point we noticed a decided increase in the size and number of the side-galleries, and concluded that the densely honeycombed region beneath the higher foothills must now have been reached. The nameless scent was now curiously mixed with another and scarcely less offensive odour\u2014of what nature we could not guess, though we thought of decaying organisms and perhaps unknown subterrene fungi. Then came a startling expansion of the tunnel for which the carvings had not prepared us\u2014a broadening and rising into a lofty, natural-looking elliptical cavern with a level floor; some 75 feet long and 50 broad, and with many immense side-passages leading away into cryptical darkness.\n\nThough this cavern was natural in appearance, an inspection with both torches suggested that it had been formed by the artificial destruction of several walls between adjacent honeycombings. The walls were rough, and the high vaulted roof was thick with stalactites; but the solid rock floor had been smoothed off, and was free from all debris, detritus, or even dust to a positively abnormal extent. Except for the avenue through which we had come, this was true of the floors of all the great galleries opening off from it; and the singularity of the condition was such as to set us vainly puzzling. The curious new foetor which had supplemented the nameless scent was excessively pungent here; so much so that it destroyed all trace of the other. Something about this whole place, with its polished and almost glistening floor, struck us as more vaguely baffling and horrible than any of the monstrous things we had previously encountered.\n\nThe regularity of the passage immediately ahead, as well as the larger proportion of penguin-droppings there, prevented all confusion as to the right course amidst this plethora of equally great cave-mouths. Nevertheless we resolved to resume our paper trailblazing if any further complexity should develop; for dust tracks, of course, could no longer be expected. Upon resuming our direct progress we cast a beam of torchlight over the tunnel walls\u2014and stopped short in amazement at the supremely radical change which had come over the carvings in this part of the passage. We realised, of course, the great decadence of the Old Ones' sculpture at the time of the tunnelling; and had indeed noticed the inferior workmanship of the arabesques in the stretches behind us. But now, in this deeper section beyond the cavern, there was a sudden difference wholly transcending explanation\u2014a difference in basic nature as well as in mere quality, and involving so profound and calamitous a degradation of skill that nothing in the hitherto observed rate of decline could have led one to expect it.\n\nThis new and degenerate work was coarse, bold, and wholly lacking in delicacy of detail. It was counter-sunk with exaggerated depth in bands following the same general line as the sparse cartouches of the earlier sections, but the height of the reliefs did not reach the level of the general surface. Danforth had the idea that it was a second carving\u2014a sort of palimpsest formed after the obliteration of a previous design. In nature it was wholly decorative and conventional; and consisted of crude spirals and angles roughly following the quintile mathematical tradition of the Old Ones, yet seeming more like a parody than a perpetuation of that tradition. We could not get it out of our minds that some subtly but profoundly alien element had been added to the aesthetic feeling behind the technique\u2014an alien element, Danforth guessed, that was responsible for the manifestly laborious substitution. It was like, yet disturbingly unlike, what we had come to recognise as the Old Ones' art; and I was persistently reminded of such hybrid things as the ungainly Palmyrene sculptures fashioned in the Roman manner. That others had recently noticed this belt of carving was hinted by the presence of a used torch battery on the floor in front of one of the most characteristic designs.\n\nSince we could not afford to spend any considerable time in study, we resumed our advance after a cursory look; though frequently casting beams over the walls to see if any further decorative changes developed. Nothing of the sort was perceived, though the carvings were in places rather sparse because of the numerous mouths of smooth-floored lateral tunnels. We saw and heard fewer penguins, but thought we caught a vague suspicion of an infinitely distant chorus of them somewhere deep within the earth. The new and inexplicable odour was abominably strong, and we could detect scarcely a sign of that other nameless scent. Puffs of visible vapour ahead bespoke increasing contrasts in temperature, and the relative nearness of the sunless sea-cliffs of the great abyss. Then, quite unexpectedly, we saw certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead\u2014obstructions which were quite definitely not penguins\u2014and turned on our second torch after making sure that the objects were quite stationary." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror. We saw, as I have said, certain obstructions on the polished floor ahead; and I may add that our nostrils were assailed almost simultaneously by a very curious intensification of the strange prevailing foetor, now quite plainly mixed with the nameless stench of those others which had gone before us. The light of the second torch left no doubt of what the obstructions were, and we dared approach them only because we could see, even from a distance, that they were quite as past all harming power as had been the six similar specimens unearthed from the monstrous star-mounded graves at poor Lake's camp.\n\nThey were, indeed, as lacking in completeness as most of those we had unearthed\u2014though it grew plain from the thick, dark-green pool gathering around them that their incompleteness was of infinitely greater recency. There seemed to be only four of them, whereas Lake's bulletins would have suggested no less than eight as forming the group which had preceded us. To find them in this state was wholly unexpected, and we wondered what sort of monstrous struggle had occurred down here in the dark.\n\nPenguins, attacked in a body, retaliate savagely with their beaks; and our ears now made certain the existence of a rookery far beyond. Had those others disturbed such a place and aroused murderous pursuit? The obstructions did not suggest it, for penguin beaks against the tough tissues Lake had dissected could hardly account for the terrible damage our approaching glance was beginning to make out. Besides, the huge blind birds we had seen appeared to be singularly peaceful.\n\nHad there, then, been a struggle among those others, and were the absent four responsible? If so, where were they? Were they close at hand and likely to form an immediate menace to us? We glanced anxiously at some of the smooth-floored lateral passages as we continued our slow and frankly reluctant approach. Whatever the conflict was, it had clearly been that which had frightened the penguins into their unaccustomed wandering. It must, then, have arisen near that faintly heard rookery in the incalculable gulf beyond, since there were no signs that any birds had normally dwelt here. Perhaps, we reflected, there had been a hideous running fight, with the weaker party seeking to get back to the cached sledges when their pursuers finished them. One could picture the daemoniac fray between namelessly monstrous entities as it surged out of the black abyss with great clouds of frantic penguins squawking and scurrying ahead.\n\nI say that we approached those sprawling and incomplete obstructions slowly and reluctantly. Would to heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded\u2014run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!\n\nBoth of our torches were turned on the prostrate objects, so that we soon realised the dominant factor in their incompleteness. Mauled, compressed, twisted, and ruptured as they were, their chief common injury was total decapitation. From each one the tentacled starfish-head had been removed; and as we drew near we saw that the manner of removal looked more like some hellish tearing or suction than like any ordinary form of cleavage. Their noisome dark-green ichor formed a large, spreading pool; but its stench was half overshadowed by that newer and stranger stench, here more pungent than at any other point along our route. Only when we had come very close to the sprawling obstructions could we trace that second, unexplainable foetor to any immediate source\u2014and the instant we did so Danforth, remembering certain very vivid sculptures of the Old Ones' history in the Permian age 150 million years ago, gave vent to a nerve-tortured cry which echoed hysterically through that vaulted and archaic passage with the evil palimpsest carvings.\n\nI came only just short of echoing his cry myself; for I had seen those primal sculptures, too, and had shudderingly admired the way the nameless artist had suggested that hideous slime-coating found on certain incomplete and prostrate Old Ones\u2014those whom the frightful shoggoths had characteristically slain and sucked to a ghastly headlessness in the great war of re-subjugation. They were infamous, nightmare sculptures even when telling of age-old, bygone things; for shoggoths and their work ought not to be seen by human beings or portrayed by any beings. The mad author of the Necronomicon had nervously tried to swear that none had been bred on this planet, and that only drugged dreamers had ever conceived them. Formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes\u2014viscous agglutinations of bubbling cells\u2014rubbery fifteen-foot spheroids infinitely plastic and ductile\u2014slaves of suggestion, builders of cities\u2014more and more sullen, more and more intelligent, more and more amphibious, more and more imitative\u2014Great God! What madness made even those blasphemous Old Ones willing to use and to carve such things?\n\nAnd now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage\u2014clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly re-sculptured wall in a series of grouped dots\u2014we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others\u2014for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them\u2014as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste\u2014and this was their tragic homecoming.\n\nThey had not been even savages\u2014for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch\u2014perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defence against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia... poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last\u2014what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn\u2014whatever they had been, they were men!\n\nThey had crossed the icy peaks on whose templed slopes they had once worshipped and roamed among the tree-ferns. They had found their dead city brooding under its curse, and had read its carven latter days as we had done. They had tried to reach their living fellows in fabled depths of blackness they had never seen\u2014and what had they found? All this flashed in unison through the thoughts of Danforth and me as we looked from those headless, slime-coated shapes to the loathsome palimpsest sculptures and the diabolical dot-groups of fresh slime on the wall beside them\u2014looked and understood what must have triumphed and survived down there in the Cyclopean watercity of that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss, whence even now a sinister curling mist had begun to belch pallidly as if in answer to Danforth's hysterical scream.\n\nThe shock of recognising that monstrous slime and headlessness had frozen us into mute, motionless statues, and it is only through later conversations that we have learned of the complete identity of our thoughts at that moment. It seemed aeons that we stood there, but actually it could not have been more than ten or fifteen seconds. That hateful, pallid mist curled forward as if veritably driven by some remoter advancing bulk\u2014and then came a sound which upset much of what we had just decided, and in so doing broke the spell and enabled us to run like mad past squawking, confused penguins over our former trail back to the city, along ice-sunken megalithic corridors to the great open circle, and up that archaic spiral ramp in a frenzied automatic plunge for the sane outer air and light of day.\n\nThe new sound, as I have intimated, upset much that we had decided; because it was what poor Lake's dissection had led us to attribute to those we had just judged dead. It was, Danforth later told me, precisely what he had caught in infinitely muffled form when at that spot beyond the alley-corner above the glacial level; and it certainly had a shocking resemblance to the wind-pipings we had both heard around the lofty mountain caves. At the risk of seeming puerile I will add another thing, too; if only because of the surprising way Danforth's impression chimed with mine. Of course common reading is what prepared us both to make the interpretation, though Danforth has hinted at queer notions about unsuspected and forbidden sources to which Poe may have had access when writing his Arthur Gordon Pym a century ago. It will be remembered that in that fantastic tale there is a word of unknown but terrible and prodigious significance connected with the antarctic and screamed eternally by the gigantic, spectrally snowy birds of that malign region's core. \"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\" That, I may admit, is exactly what we thought we heard conveyed by that sudden sound behind the advancing white mist\u2014that insidious musical piping over a singularly wide range.\n\nWe were in full flight before three notes or syllables had been uttered, though we knew that the swiftness of the Old Ones would enable any scream-roused and pursuing survivor of the slaughter to overtake us in a moment if it really wished to do so. We had a vague hope, however, that non-aggressive conduct and a display of kindred reason might cause such a being to spare us in case of capture; if only from scientific curiosity. After all, if such an one had nothing to fear for itself it would have no motive in harming us. Concealment being futile at this juncture, we used our torch for a running glance behind, and perceived that the mist was thinning. Would we see, at last, a complete and living specimen of those others? Again came that insidious musical piping\u2014\"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\"\n\nThen, noting that we were actually gaining on our pursuer, it occurred to us that the entity might be wounded. We could take no chances, however, since it was very obviously approaching in answer to Danforth's scream rather than in flight from any other entity. The timing was too close to admit of doubt. Of the whereabouts of that less conceivable and less mentionable nightmare\u2014that foetid, unglimpsed mountain of slime-spewing protoplasm whose race had conquered the abyss and sent land pioneers to re-carve and squirm through the burrows of the hills\u2014we could form no guess; and it cost us a genuine pang to leave this probably crippled Old One\u2014perhaps a lone survivor\u2014to the peril of recapture and a nameless fate.\n\nThank heaven we did not slacken our run. The curling mist had thickened again, and was driving ahead with increased speed; whilst the straying penguins in our rear were squawking and screaming and displaying signs of a panic really surprising in view of their relatively minor confusion when we had passed them. Once more came that sinister, wide-ranged piping\u2014\"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\" We had been wrong. The thing was not wounded, but had merely paused on encountering the bodies of its fallen kindred and the hellish slime inscription above them. We could never know what that daemon message was\u2014but those burials at Lake's camp had shewn how much importance the beings attached to their dead. Our recklessly used torch now revealed ahead of us the large open cavern where various ways converged, and we were glad to be leaving those morbid palimpsest sculptures\u2014almost felt even when scarcely seen\u2014behind.\n\nAnother thought which the advent of the cave inspired was the possibility of losing our pursuer at this bewildering focus of large galleries. There were several of the blind albino penguins in the open space, and it seemed clear that their fear of the oncoming entity was extreme to the point of unaccountability. If at that point we dimmed our torch to the very lowest limit of travelling need, keeping it strictly in front of us, the frightened squawking motions of the huge birds in the mist might muffle our footfalls, screen our true course, and somehow set up a false lead. Amidst the churning, spiralling fog the littered and unglistening floor of the main tunnel beyond this point, as differing from the other morbidly polished burrows, could hardly form a highly distinguishing feature; even, so far as we could conjecture, for those indicated special senses which made the Old Ones partly though imperfectly independent of light in emergencies. In fact, we were somewhat apprehensive lest we go astray ourselves in our haste. For we had, of course, decided to keep straight on toward the dead city; since the consequences of loss in those unknown foothill honeycombings would be unthinkable.\n\nThe fact that we survived and emerged is sufficient proof that the thing did take a wrong gallery whilst we providentially hit on the right one. The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist they seem to have done so. Only a benign fate kept the curling vapours thick enough at the right moment, for they were constantly shifting and threatening to vanish. Indeed, they did lift for a second just before we emerged from the nauseously re-sculptured tunnel into the cave; so that we actually caught one first and only half-glimpse of the oncoming entity as we cast a final, desperately fearful glance backward before dimming the torch and mixing with the penguins in the hope of dodging pursuit. If the fate which screened us was benign, that which gave us the half-glimpse was infinitely the opposite; for to that flash of semi-vision can be traced a full half of the horror which has ever since haunted us.\n\nOur exact motive in looking back again was perhaps no more than the immemorial instinct of the pursued to gauge the nature and course of its pursuer; or perhaps it was an automatic attempt to answer a subconscious question raised by one of our senses. In the midst of our flight, with all our faculties centred on the problem of escape, we were in no condition to observe and analyse details; yet even so our latent brain-cells must have wondered at the message brought them by our nostrils. Afterward we realised what it was\u2014that our retreat from the foetid slime-coating on those headless obstructions, and the coincident approach of the pursuing entity, had not brought us the exchange of stenches which logic called for. In the neighbourhood of the prostrate things that new and lately unexplainable foetor had been wholly dominant; but by this time it ought to have largely given place to the nameless stench associated with those others. This it had not done\u2014for instead, the newer and less bearable smell was now virtually undiluted, and growing more and more poisonously insistent each second.\n\nSo we glanced back\u2014simultaneously, it would appear; though no doubt the incipient motion of one prompted the imitation of the other. As we did so we flashed both torches full strength at the momentarily thinned mist; either from sheer primitive anxiety to see all we could, or in a less primitive but equally unconscious effort to dazzle the entity before we dimmed our light and dodged among the penguins of the labyrinth-centre ahead. Unhappy act! Not Orpheus himself, or Lot's wife, paid much more dearly for a backward glance. And again came that shocking, wide-ranged piping\u2014\"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\"\n\nI might as well be frank\u2014even if I cannot bear to be quite direct\u2014in stating what we saw; though at the time we felt that it was not to be admitted even to each other. The words reaching the reader can never even suggest the awfulness of the sight itself. It crippled our consciousness so completely that I wonder we had the residual sense to dim our torches as planned, and to strike the right tunnel toward the dead city. Instinct alone must have carried us through\u2014perhaps better than reason could have done; though if that was what saved us, we paid a high price. Of reason we certainly had little enough left. Danforth was totally unstrung, and the first thing I remember of the rest of the journey was hearing him light-headedly chant an hysterical formula in which I alone of mankind could have found anything but insane irrelevance. It reverberated in falsetto echoes among the squawks of the penguins; reverberated through the vaultings ahead, and\u2014thank God\u2014through the now empty vaultings behind. He could not have begun it at once\u2014else we would not have been alive and blindly racing. I shudder to think of what a shade of difference in his nervous reactions might have brought.\n\n\"South Station Under\u2014Washington Under\u2014Park Street Under\u2014Kendall\u2014Central\u2014Harvard....\" The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither irrelevance nor home-feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it. We had expected, upon looking back, to see a terrible and incredibly moving entity if the mists were thin enough; but of that entity we had formed a clear idea. What we did see\u2014for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned\u2014was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's 'thing that should not be'; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform\u2014the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.\n\nBut we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train\u2014a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry\u2014\"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\" And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths\u2014given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed\u2014had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Danforth and I have recollections of emerging into the great sculptured hemisphere and of threading our back trail through the Cyclopean rooms and corridors of the dead city; yet these are purely dream-fragments involving no memory of volition, details, or physical exertion. It was as if we floated in a nebulous world or dimension without time, causation, or orientation. The grey half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog. They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet will find them still undisturbed.\n\nIt was while struggling up the colossal spiral incline that we first felt the terrible fatigue and short breath which our race through the thin plateau air had produced; but not even the fear of collapse could make us pause before reaching the normal outer realm of sun and sky. There was something vaguely appropriate about our departure from those buried epochs; for as we wound our panting way up the sixty-foot cylinder of primal masonry we glimpsed beside us a continuous procession of heroic sculptures in the dead race's early and undecayed technique\u2014a farewell from the Old Ones, written fifty million years ago.\n\nFinally scrambling out at the top, we found ourselves on a great mound of tumbled blocks; with the curved walls of higher stonework rising westward, and the brooding peaks of the great mountains shewing beyond the more crumbled structures toward the east. The low antarctic sun of midnight peered redly from the southern horizon through rifts in the jagged ruins, and the terrible age and deadness of the nightmare city seemed all the starker by contrast with such relatively known and accustomed things as the features of the polar landscape. The sky above was a churning and opalescent mass of tenuous ice-vapours, and the cold clutched at our vitals. Wearily resting the outfit-bags to which we had instinctively clung throughout our desperate flight, we rebuttoned our heavy garments for the stumbling climb down the mound and the walk through the aeon-old stone maze to the foothills where our a\u00ebroplane waited. Of what had set us fleeing from the darkness of earth's secret and archaic gulfs we said nothing at all.\n\nIn less than a quarter of an hour we had found the steep grade to the foothills\u2014the probable ancient terrace\u2014by which we had descended, and could see the dark bulk of our great plane amidst the sparse ruins on the rising slope ahead. Half way uphill toward our goal we paused for a momentary breathing-spell, and turned to look again at the fantastic palaeogean tangle of incredible stone shapes below us\u2014once more outlined mystically against an unknown west. As we did so we saw that the sky beyond had lost its morning haziness; the restless ice-vapours having moved up to the zenith, where their mocking outlines seemed on the point of settling into some bizarre pattern which they feared to make quite definite or conclusive.\n\nThere now lay revealed on the ultimate white horizon behind the grotesque city a dim, elfin line of pinnacled violet whose needle-pointed heights loomed dreamlike against the beckoning rose-colour of the western sky. Up toward this shimmering rim sloped the ancient tableland, the depressed course of the bygone river traversing it as an irregular ribbon of shadow. For a second we gasped in admiration of the scene's unearthly cosmic beauty, and then vague horror began to creep into our souls. For this far violet line could be nothing else than the terrible mountains of the forbidden land\u2014highest of earth's peaks and focus of earth's evil; harbourers of nameless horrors and Archaean secrets; shunned and prayed to by those who feared to carve their meaning; untrodden by any living thing of earth, but visited by the sinister lightnings and sending strange beams across the plains in the polar night\u2014beyond doubt the unknown archetype of that dreaded Kadath in the Cold Waste beyond abhorrent Leng, whereof unholy primal legends hint evasively. We were the first human beings ever to see them\u2014and I hope to God we may be the last.\n\nIf the sculptured maps and pictures in that pre-human city had told truly, these cryptic violet mountains could not be much less than 300 miles away; yet none the less sharply did their dim elfin essence jut above that remote and snowy rim, like the serrated edge of a monstrous alien planet about to rise into unaccustomed heavens. Their height, then, must have been tremendous beyond all known comparison\u2014carrying them up into tenuous atmospheric strata peopled by such gaseous wraiths as rash flyers have barely lived to whisper of after unexplainable falls. Looking at them, I thought nervously of certain sculptured hints of what the great bygone river had washed down into the city from their accursed slopes\u2014and wondered how much sense and how much folly had lain in the fears of those Old Ones who carved them so reticently. I recalled how their northerly end must come near the coast at Queen Mary Land, where even at that moment Sir Douglas Mawson's expedition was doubtless working less than a thousand miles away; and hoped that no evil fate would give Sir Douglas and his men a glimpse of what might lie beyond the protecting coastal range. Such thoughts formed a measure of my overwrought condition at the time\u2014and Danforth seemed to be even worse.\n\nYet long before we had passed the great star-shaped ruin and reached our plane our fears had become transferred to the lesser but vast enough range whose recrossing lay ahead of us. From these foothills the black, ruin-crusted slopes reared up starkly and hideously against the east, again reminding us of those strange Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich; and when we thought of the damnable honeycombs inside them, and of the frightful amorphous entities that might have pushed their foetidly squirming way even to the topmost hollow pinnacles, we could not face without panic the prospect of again sailing by those suggestive skyward cave-mouths where the wind made sounds like an evil musical piping over a wide range. To make matters worse, we saw distinct traces of local mist around several of the summits\u2014as poor Lake must have done when he made that early mistake about volcanism\u2014and thought shiveringly of that kindred mist from which we had just escaped; of that, and of the blasphemous, horror-fostering abyss whence all such vapours came.\n\nAll was well with the plane, and we clumsily hauled on our heavy flying furs. Danforth got the engine started without trouble, and we made a very smooth takeoff over the nightmare city. Below us the primal Cyclopean masonry spread out as it had done when first we saw it\u2014so short, yet infinitely long, a time ago\u2014and we began rising and turning to test the wind for our crossing through the pass. At a very high level there must have been great disturbance, since the ice-dust clouds of the zenith were doing all sorts of fantastic things; but at 24,000 feet, the height we needed for the pass, we found navigation quite practicable. As we drew close to the jutting peaks the wind's strange piping again became manifest, and I could see Danforth's hands trembling at the controls. Rank amateur though I was, I thought at that moment that I might be a better navigator than he in effecting the dangerous crossing between pinnacles; and when I made motions to change seats and take over his duties he did not protest. I tried to keep all my skill and self-possession about me, and stared at the sector of reddish farther sky betwixt the walls of the pass\u2014resolutely refusing to pay attention to the puffs of mountain-top vapour, and wishing that I had wax-stopped ears like Ulysses' men off the Sirens' coast to keep that disturbing wind-piping from my consciousness.\n\nBut Danforth, released from his piloting and keyed up to a dangerous nervous pitch, could not keep quiet. I felt him turning and wriggling about as he looked back at the terrible receding city, ahead at the cave-riddled, cube-barnacled peaks, sidewise at the bleak sea of snowy, rampart-strown foothills, and upward at the seething, grotesquely clouded sky. It was then, just as I was trying to steer safely through the pass, that his mad shrieking brought us so close to disaster by shattering my tight hold on myself and causing me to fumble helplessly with the controls for a moment. A second afterward my resolution triumphed and we made the crossing safely\u2014yet I am afraid that Danforth will never be the same again.\n\nI have said that Danforth refused to tell me what final horror made him scream out so insanely\u2014a horror which, I feel sadly sure, is mainly responsible for his present breakdown. We had snatches of shouted conversation above the wind's piping and the engine's buzzing as we reached the safe side of the range and swooped slowly down toward the camp, but that had mostly to do with the pledges of secrecy we had made as we prepared to leave the nightmare city. Certain things, we had agreed, were not for people to know and discuss lightly\u2014and I would not speak of them now but for the need of heading off that Starkweather-Moore Expedition, and others, at any cost. It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.\n\nAll that Danforth has ever hinted is that the final horror was a mirage. It was not, he declares, anything connected with the cubes and caves of echoing, vaporous, wormily honeycombed mountains of madness which we crossed; but a single fantastic, daemoniac glimpse, among the churning zenith-clouds, of what lay back of those other violet westward mountains which the Old Ones had shunned and feared. It is very probable that the thing was a sheer delusion born of the previous stresses we had passed through, and of the actual though unrecognised mirage of the dead transmontane city experienced near Lake's camp the day before; but it was so real to Danforth that he suffers from it still.\n\nHe has on rare occasions whispered disjointed and irresponsible things about \"the black pit\", \"the carven rim\", \"the proto-shoggoths\", \"the windowless solids with five dimensions\", \"the nameless cylinder\", \"the elder pharos\", \"Yog-Sothoth\", \"the primal white jelly\", \"the colour out of space\", \"the wings\", \"the eyes in darkness\", \"the moon-ladder\", \"the original, the eternal, the undying\", and other bizarre conceptions; but when he is fully himself he repudiates all this and attributes it to his curious and macabre reading of earlier years. Danforth, indeed, is known to be among the few who have ever dared go completely through that worm-riddled copy of the Necronomicon kept under lock and key in the college library.\n\nThe higher sky, as we crossed the range, was surely vaporous and disturbed enough; and although I did not see the zenith I can well imagine that its swirls of ice-dust may have taken strange forms. Imagination, knowing how vividly distant scenes can sometimes be reflected, refracted, and magnified by such layers of restless cloud, might easily have supplied the rest\u2014and of course Danforth did not hint any of those specific horrors till after his memory had had a chance to draw on his bygone reading. He could never have seen so much in one instantaneous glance.\n\nAt the time his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single mad word of all too obvious source:\n\n\"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Azathoth by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWhen age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world's dreams had fled.\n\nOf the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloft at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder.\n\nThere came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold; vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Battle that Ended the Century by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOn the eve of the year 2001 a vast crowd of interested spectators were present amidst the romantic ruins of Cohen's Garage, on the former site of New York, to witness a fistic encounter between two renowned champions of the strange-story firmament\u2014Two-Gun Bob, the Terror of the Plains, and Knockout Bernie, the Wild Wolf of West Shokan. [The Wolf was fresh from his correspondence course in physical training, sold to him by Mr. Arthur Leeds.] Before the battle the auguries were determined by the venerated Thibetan Lama Bill Lum Li, who evoked the primal serpent-god of Valusia and found unmistakable signs of victory for both sides. Cream-puffs were inattentively vended by Wladislaw Brenryk\u2014the partakers being treated by the official surgeons, Drs. D. H. Killer and M. Gin Brewery.\n\nThe gong was sounded at 39 o'clock, after which the air grew red with the gore of battle, lavishly flung about by the mighty Texas slaughterer. Very shortly the first actual damage occurred\u2014the loosening of several teeth in both participants. One, bouncing out from the Wolf's mouth after a casual tap from Two-Gun, described a parabola toward Yucatan; being retrieved in a hasty expedition by Messrs. A. Hijacked Barrell and G. A. Scotland. This incident was used by the eminent sociologist and ex-poet Frank Chimesleep Short, Jr., as the basis of a ballad of proletarian propaganda with three intentionally defective lines. Meanwhile a potentate from a neighbouring kingdom, the Effjay of Akkamin (also known to himself as an amateur critic), expressed his frenzied disgust at the technique of the combatants, at the same time peddling photographs of the fighters (with himself in the foreground) at five cents each.\n\nIn round two the Shokan Soaker's sturdy right crashed through the Texan's ribs and became entangled in sundry viscera; thereby enabling Two-Gun to get in several telling blows on his opponent's unprotected chin. Bob was greatly annoyed by the effeminate squeamishness shewn by several onlookers as muscles, glands, gore, and bits of flesh were spattered over the ringside. During this round the eminent magazine-cover anatomist Mrs. M. Blunderage portrayed the battlers as a pair of spirited nudes behind a thin veil of conveniently curling tobacco-smoke, while the late Mr. C. Half-Cent provided a sketch of three Chinamen clad in silk hats and galoshes\u2014this being his own original conception of the affray. Among the amateur sketches made was one by Mr. Goofy Hooey, which later gained fame in the annual Cubist exhibit as \"Abstraction of an Eradicated Pudding\".\n\nIn the third round the fight grew really rough; several ears and other appurtenances being wholly or partially detached from the frontier battler by the Shokan Shocker. Somewhat irritated, Two-Gun countered with some exceptionally sharp blows; severing many fragments from his aggressor, who continued to fight with all his remaining members. [At this stage the audience gave signs of much nervous excitement\u2014instances of trampling and goring being frequent. The more enthusiastic members were placed in the custody of Mr. Harry Brobst of the Butler Hospital for Mental Diseases.]\n\nThe entire affair was reported by Mr. W. Lablache Talcum, his copy being revised by Horse Power Hateart. Throughout the event notes were taken by M. le Comte d'Erlette for a 200-volume novel-cycle in the Proustian manner, to be entitled Morning in September, with illustrations by Mrs. Blunderage. Mr. J. Caesar Warts frequently interviewed both battlers and all the more important spectators; obtaining as souvenirs (after a spirited struggle with the Effjay) an autographed quarter-rib of Two-Gun's, in an excellent state of preservation, and three fingernails from the Wild Wolf. Lighting effects were supplied by the Electrical Testing Laboratories under the supervision of H. Kanebrake. The fourth round was prolonged eight hours at the request of the official artist, Mr. H. Wanderer, who wished to put certain shadings of fantasy into his representation of the Wolf's depleted physiognomy, which included several supernumerary details supplied by the imagination.\n\nThe climax came in round five, when the Texas Tearer's left passed entirely through Battling Bernie's face and brought both sluggers to the mat. This was adjudged a finish by the referee\u2014Robertieff Essovitch Karovsky, the Muscovite Ambassador\u2014who, in view of the Shokan Shocker's gory state, declared the latter to be essentially liquidated according to the Marxian ideology. The Wild Wolf entered an official protest, which was promptly overruled on the ground that all the points necessary to technical death were theoretically present.\n\nThe gonfalons sounded a fanfare of triumph for the victor, while the technically vanquished was committed to the care of the official mortician, Mr. Teaberry Quince. During the ceremonies the theoretical corpse strolled away for a bite of bologna, but a tasteful cenotaph was supplied to furnish a focus for the rites. The funeral procession was headed by a gaily bedecked hearse driven by Malik Taus, the Peacock Sultan, who sat on the box in West Point uniform and turban, and steered an expert course over several formidable hedges and stone walls. About half way to the cemetery the cort\u00e8ge was rejoined by the corpse, who sat beside Sultan Malik on the box and finished his bologna sandwich\u2014his ample girth having made it impossible to enter the hastily selected cenotaph. An appropriate dirge was rendered by Maestro Sing Lee Bawledout on the piccolo; Messrs. De Silva, Brown, and Henderson's celebrated aria, \"Never Swat a Fly\", from the old cantata Just Imagine, being chosen for the occasion. The only detail omitted from the funeral was the interment, which was interrupted by the disconcerting news that the official gate-taker\u2014the celebrated financier and publisher Ivar K. Rodent, Esq.\u2014had absconded with the entire proceeds. [This omission was regretted chiefly by the Rev. D. Vest Wind, who was thereby forced to leave unspoken a long and moving sermon revised expressly for the celebration from a former discourse delivered at the burial of a favourite horse.]\n\nMr. Talcum's report of the event, illustrated by the well-known artist Klarkash-Ton (who esoterically depicted the fighters as boneless fungi), was printed after repeated rejections by the discriminating editor of the Windy City Grab-Bag\u2014as a broadside by W. Peter Chef[, with typographical supervision by Vrest Orton.]. This, through the efforts of Otis Adelbert Kline, was finally placed on sale in the bookshop of Smearum & Weep, three and a half copies finally being disposed of through the alluring catalogue description supplied by Samuelus Philanthropus, Esq.\n\nIn response to this wide demand, the text was finally reprinted by Mr. De Merit in the polychromatic pages of Wurst's Weakly Americana under the title \"Has Science Been Outmoded? or, The Millers in the Garage\". No copies, however, remain in circulation; since all which were not snapped up by fanatical bibliophiles were seized by the police in connexion with the libel suit of the Wild Wolf, who was, after several appeals ending with the World Court, adjudged not only officially alive but the clear winner of the combat.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Beast in the Cave by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThe horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty. I was lost, completely, hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recesses of the Mammoth Cave. Turn as I might, in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path. That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief. Hope had departed. Yet, indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study, I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour; for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations, I experienced none of these, but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings.\n\nNor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment. If I must die, I reflected, then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford; a conception which carried with it more of tranquility than of despair.\n\nStarving would prove my ultimate fate; of this I was certain. Some, I knew, had gone mad under circumstances such as these, but I felt that this end would not be mine. My disaster was the result of no fault save my own, since unbeknown to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers; and, wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave, had found myself unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my companions.\n\nAlready my torch had begun to expire; soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth. As I stood in the waning, unsteady light, I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end. I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives, who, taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world, with its steady, uniform temperature, pure air, and peaceful quiet, had found, instead, death in strange and ghastly form. I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages as I passed them by with the party, and had wondered what unnatural influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy and as vigorous as I. Now, I grimly told myself, my opportunity for settling this point had arrived, provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from this life.\n\nAs the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity, I resolved to leave no stone unturned, no possible means of escape neglected; so summoning all the powers possessed by my lungs, I set up a series of loud shoutings, in the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour. Yet, as I called, I believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose, and that my voice, magnified and reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze about me, fell upon no ears save my own. All at once, however, my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard the sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern. Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon? Had, then, all my horrible apprehensions been for naught, and was the guide, having marked my unwarranted absence from the party, following my course and seeking me out in this limestone labyrinth? Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain, I was on the point of renewing my cries, in order that my discovery might come the sooner, when in an instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened; for my ever acute ear, now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete silence of the cave, bore to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man. In the unearthly stillness of this subterranean region, the tread of the booted guide would have sounded like a series of sharp and incisive blows. These impacts were soft, and stealthy, as of the padded paws of some feline. Besides, at times, when I listened carefully, I seemed to trace the falls of four instead of two feet.\n\nI was now convinced that I had by my cries aroused and attracted some wild beast, perhaps a mountain lion which had accidentally strayed within the cave. Perhaps, I considered, the Almighty had chosen for me a swifter and more merciful death than that of hunger. Yet the instinct of self-preservation, never wholly dormant, was stirred in my breast, and though escape from the oncoming peril might but spare me for a sterner and more lingering end, I determined nevertheless to part with my life at as high a price as I could command. Strange as it may seem, my mind conceived of no intent on the part of the visitor save that of hostility. Accordingly, I became very quiet, in the hope that the unknown beast would, in the absence of a guiding sound, lose its direction as had I, and thus pass me by. But this hope was not destined for realisation, for the strange footfalls steadily advanced, the animal evidently having obtained my scent, which in an atmosphere so absolutely free from all distracting influences as is that of the cave, could doubtless be followed at great distance.\n\nSeeing therefore that I must be armed for defence against an uncanny and unseen attack in the dark, I grouped about me the largest of the fragments of rock which were strown upon all parts of the floor of the cavern in the vicinity, and, grasping one in each hand for immediate use, awaited with resignation the inevitable result. Meanwhile the hideous pattering of the paws drew near. Certainly, the conduct of the creature was exceedingly strange. Most of the time, the tread seemed to be that of a quadruped, walking with a singular lack of unison betwixt hind and fore feet, yet at brief and infrequent intervals I fancied that but two feet were engaged in the process of locomotion. I wondered what species of animal was to confront me; it must, I thought, be some unfortunate beast who had paid for its curiosity to investigate one of the entrances of the fearful grotto with a lifelong confinement in its interminable recesses. It doubtless obtained as food the eyeless fish, bats, and rats of the cave, as well as some of the ordinary fish that are wafted in at every freshet of Green River, which communicates in some occult manner with the waters of the cave. I occupied my terrible vigil with grotesque conjectures of what alterations cave life might have wrought in the physical structure of the beast, remembering the awful appearances ascribed by local tradition to the consumptives who had died after long residence in the cavern. Then I remembered with a start that, even should I succeed in killing my antagonist, I should never behold its form, as my torch had long since been extinct, and I was entirely unprovided with matches. The tension on my brain now became frightful. My disordered fancy conjured up hideous and fearsome shapes from the sinister darkness that surrounded me, and that actually seemed to press upon my body. Nearer, nearer, the dreadful footfalls approached. It seemed that I must give vent to a piercing scream, yet had I been sufficiently irresolute to attempt such a thing, my voice could scarce have responded. I was petrified, rooted to the spot. I doubted if my right arm would allow me to hurl its missile at the oncoming thing when the crucial moment should arrive. Now the steady pat, pat, of the steps was close at hand; now, very close. I could hear the laboured breathing of the animal, and terror-struck as I was, I realised that it must have come from a considerable distance, and was correspondingly fatigued. Suddenly the spell broke. My right hand, guided by my ever trustworthy sense of hearing, threw with full force the sharp-angled bit of limestone which it contained, toward that point in the darkness from which emanated the breathing and pattering, and, wonderful to relate, it nearly reached its goal, for I heard the thing jump, landing at a distance away, where it seemed to pause.\n\nHaving readjusted my aim, I discharged my second missile, this time most effectively, for with a flood of joy I listened as the creature fell in what sounded like a complete collapse, and evidently remained prone and unmoving. Almost overpowered by the great relief which rushed over me, I reeled back against the wall. The breathing continued, in heavy, gasping inhalations and expirations, whence I realised that I had no more than wounded the creature. And now all desire to examine the thing ceased. At last something allied to groundless, superstitious, fear had entered my brain, and I did not approach the body, nor did I continue to cast stones at it in order to complete the extinction of its life. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as nearly as I could estimate in my frenzied condition, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly I heard a sound, or rather, a regular succession of sounds. In another instant they had resolved themselves into a series of sharp, metallic clicks. This time there was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed, even shrieked with joy as I beheld in the vaulted arches above the faint and glimmering effulgence which I knew to be the reflected light of an approaching torch. I ran to meet the flare, and before I could completely understand what had occurred, was lying upon the ground at the feet of the guide, embracing his boots, and gibbering, despite my boasted reserve, in a most meaningless and idiotic manner, pouring out my terrible story, and at the same time overwhelming my auditor with protestations of gratitude. At length I awoke to something like my normal consciousness. The guide had noted my absence upon the arrival of the party at the entrance of the cave, and had, from his own intuitive sense of direction, proceeded to make a thorough canvass of the by-passages just ahead of where he had last spoken to me, locating my whereabouts after a quest of about four hours.\n\nBy the time he had related this to me, I, emboldened by his torch and his company, began to reflect upon the strange beast which I had wounded but a short distance back in the darkness, and suggested that we ascertain, by the rushlight's aid, what manner of creature was my victim. Accordingly I retraced my steps, this time with a courage born of companionship, to the scene of my terrible experience. Soon we descried a white object upon the floor, an object whiter even than the gleaming limestone itself. Cautiously advancing, we gave vent to a simultaneous ejaculation of wonderment, for of all the unnatural monsters either of us had in our lifetimes beheld, this was in surpassing degree the strangest. It appeared to be an anthropoid ape of large proportions, escaped, perhaps, from some itinerant menagerie. Its hair was snow-white, a thing due no doubt to the bleaching action of a long existence within the inky confines of the cave, but it was also surprisingly thin, being indeed largely absent save on the head, where it was of such length and abundance that it fell over the shoulders in considerable profusion. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay almost directly upon it. The inclination of the limbs was very singular, explaining, however, the alternation in their use which I had before noted, whereby the beast used sometimes all four, and on other occasions but two for its progress. From the tips of the fingers or toes long nail-like claws extended. The hands or feet were not prehensile, a fact that I ascribed to that long residence in the cave which, as I before mentioned, seemed evident from the all-pervading and almost unearthly whiteness so characteristic of the whole anatomy. No tail seemed to be present.\n\nThe respiration had now grown very feeble, and the guide had drawn his pistol with the evident intent of despatching the creature, when a sudden sound emitted by the latter caused the weapon to fall unused. The sound was of a nature difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known species of simian, and I wondered if this unnatural quality were not the result of a long-continued and complete silence, broken by the sensations produced by the advent of the light, a thing which the beast could not have seen since its first entrance into the cave. The sound, which I might feebly attempt to classify as a kind of deep-toned chattering, was faintly continued. All at once a fleeting spasm of energy seemed to pass through the frame of the beast. The paws went through a convulsive motion, and the limbs contracted. With a jerk, the white body rolled over so that its face was turned in our direction. For a moment I was so struck with horror at the eyes thus revealed that I noted nothing else. They were black, those eyes, deep, jetty black, in hideous contrast to the snow-white hair and flesh. Like those of other cave denizens, they were deeply sunken in their orbits, and were entirely destitute of iris. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a face less prognathous than that of the average ape, and infinitely more hairy. The nose was quite distinct.\n\nAs we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips opened, and several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death.\n\nThe guide clutched my coat-sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook fitfully, casting weird, moving shadows on the walls about us.\n\nI made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead.\n\nThen fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave was, or had at one time been, a MAN!!!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Beyond the Wall of Sleep by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.\"\n\n\u2014Shakespeare.\n\nI have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences\u2014Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism\u2014there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.\n\nIt was from a youthful reverie filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900\u20131901, when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as given on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of \"white trash\" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.\n\nJoe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character, certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when first I beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.\n\nFrom the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case. This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of language was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension. He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.\n\nAs Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradually increased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his arrival at the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused his arrest by the authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the man had roused himself most suddenly; with ululations so horrible and unearthly that they brought several neighbours to his cabin\u2014a filthy sty where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting his determination to reach some 'big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor, and the loud queer music far away'. As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain 'thing that shines and shakes and laughs'. At length, after temporarily felling one of his detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in a daemoniac ecstasy of bloodthirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he would 'jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that stopped him'. Family and neighbours had now fled in a panic, and when the more courageous of them returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an unrecognisable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, and it is likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine, they realised that he had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed searching party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally) became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined the seekers.\n\nOn the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree, and taken to the nearest gaol; where alienists from Albany examined him as soon as his senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had, he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much liquor. He had awaked to find himself standing bloody-handed in the snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbour Peter Slader at his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape from the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things he seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his interrogators bring out a single additional fact. That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he wakened with no singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Dr. Barnard, who had been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality; and in the flaccid lips an all but imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But when questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the mountaineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.\n\nOn the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks. After some show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so powerful that the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him in a strait-jacket. The alienists listened with keen attention to his words, since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbours. Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods dialect of great edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him. This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong, and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning every obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with the greatest suddenness he ceased. The fire of madness died from his eyes, and in dull wonder he looked at his questioners and asked why he was bound. Dr. Barnard unbuckled the leathern harness and did not restore it till night, when he succeeded in persuading Slater to don it of his own volition, for his own good. The man had now admitted that he sometimes talked queerly, though he knew not why.\n\nWithin a week two more attacks appeared, but from them the doctors learned little. On the source of Slater's visions they speculated at length, for since he could neither read nor write, and had apparently never heard a legend or fairy tale, his gorgeous imagery was quite inexplicable. That it could not come from any known myth or romance was made especially clear by the fact that the unfortunate lunatic expressed himself only in his own simple manner. He raved of things he did not understand and could not interpret; things which he claimed to have experienced, but which he could not have learned through any normal or connected narration. The alienists soon agreed that abnormal dreams were the foundation of the trouble; dreams whose vividness could for a time completely dominate the waking mind of this basically inferior man. With due formality Slater was tried for murder, acquitted on the ground of insanity, and committed to the institution wherein I held so humble a post.\n\nI have said that I am a constant speculator concerning dream life, and from this you may judge of the eagerness with which I applied myself to the study of the new patient as soon as I had fully ascertained the facts of his case. He seemed to sense a certain friendliness in me; born no doubt of the interest I could not conceal, and the gentle manner in which I questioned him. Not that he ever recognised me during his attacks, when I hung breathlessly upon his chaotic but cosmic word-pictures; but he knew me in his quiet hours, when he would sit by his barred window weaving baskets of straw and willow, and perhaps pining for the mountain freedom he could never enjoy again. His family never called to see him; probably it had found another temporary head, after the manner of decadent mountain folk.\n\nBy degrees I commenced to feel an overwhelming wonder at the mad and fantastic conceptions of Joe Slater. The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous and disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. How, I often asked myself, could the stolid imagination of a Catskill degenerate conjure up sights whose very possession argued a lurking spark of genius? How could any backwoods dullard have gained so much as an idea of those glittering realms of supernal radiance and space about which Slater ranted in his furious delirium? More and more I inclined to the belief that in the pitiful personality who cringed before me lay the disordered nucleus of something beyond my comprehension; something infinitely beyond the comprehension of my more experienced but less imaginative medical and scientific colleagues.\n\nAnd yet I could extract nothing definite from the man. The sum of all my investigation was, that in a kind of semi-uncorporeal dream life Slater wandered or floated through resplendent and prodigious valleys, meadows, gardens, cities, and palaces of light; in a region unbounded and unknown to man. That there he was no peasant or degenerate, but a creature of importance and vivid life; moving proudly and dominantly, and checked only by a certain deadly enemy, who seemed to be a being of visible yet ethereal structure, and who did not appear to be of human shape, since Slater never referred to it as a man, or as aught save a thing. This thing had done Slater some hideous but unnamed wrong, which the maniac (if maniac he were) yearned to avenge. From the manner in which Slater alluded to their dealings, I judged that he and the luminous thing had met on equal terms; that in his dream existence the man was himself a luminous thing of the same race as his enemy. This impression was sustained by his frequent references to flying through space and burning all that impeded his progress. Yet these conceptions were formulated in rustic words wholly inadequate to convey them, a circumstance which drove me to the conclusion that if a true dream-world indeed existed, oral language was not its medium for the transmission of thought. Could it be that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dulness could not utter? Could it be that I was face to face with intellectual emanations which would explain the mystery if I could but learn to discover and read them? I did not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is sceptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas. Besides, the head of the institution had but lately warned me in his paternal way that I was overworking; that my mind needed a rest.\n\nIt had long been my belief that human thought consists basically of atomic or molecular motion, convertible into ether waves of radiant energy like heat, light, and electricity. This belief had early led me to contemplate the possibility of telepathy or mental communication by means of suitable apparatus, and I had in my college days prepared a set of transmitting and receiving instruments somewhat similar to the cumbrous devices employed in wireless telegraphy at that crude, pre-radio period. These I had tested with a fellow-student; but achieving no result, had soon packed them away with other scientific odds and ends for possible future use. Now, in my intense desire to probe into the dream life of Joe Slater, I sought these instruments again; and spent several days in repairing them for action. When they were complete once more I missed no opportunity for their trial. At each outburst of Slater's violence, I would fit the transmitter to his forehead and the receiver to my own; constantly making delicate adjustments for various hypothetical wave-lengths of intellectual energy. I had but little notion of how the thought-impressions would, if successfully conveyed, arouse an intelligent response in my brain; but I felt certain that I could detect and interpret them. Accordingly I continued my experiments, though informing no one of their nature.\n\nIt was on the twenty-first of February, 1901, that the thing finally occurred. As I look back across the years I realise how unreal it seems; and sometimes half wonder if old Dr. Fenton was not right when he charged it all to my excited imagination. I recall that he listened with great kindness and patience when I told him, but afterward gave me a nerve-powder and arranged for the half-year's vacation on which I departed the next week. That fateful night I was wildly agitated and perturbed, for despite the excellent care he had received, Joe Slater was unmistakably dying. Perhaps it was his mountain freedom that he missed, or perhaps the turmoil in his brain had grown too acute for his rather sluggish physique; but at all events the flame of vitality flickered low in the decadent body. He was drowsy near the end, and as darkness fell he dropped off into a troubled sleep. I did not strap on the strait-jacket as was customary when he slept, since I saw that he was too feeble to be dangerous, even if he woke in mental disorder once more before passing away. But I did place upon his head and mine the two ends of my cosmic \"radio\"; hoping against hope for a first and last message from the dream-world in the brief time remaining. In the cell with us was one nurse, a mediocre fellow who did not understand the purpose of the apparatus, or think to inquire into my course. As the hours wore on I saw his head droop awkwardly in sleep, but I did not disturb him. I myself, lulled by the rhythmical breathing of the healthy and the dying man, must have nodded a little later.\n\nThe sound of weird lyric melody was what aroused me. Chords, vibrations, and harmonic ecstasies echoed passionately on every hand; while on my ravished sight burst the stupendous spectacle of ultimate beauty. Walls, columns, and architraves of living fire blazed effulgently around the spot where I seemed to float in air; extending upward to an infinitely high vaulted dome of indescribable splendour. Blending with this display of palatial magnificence, or rather, supplanting it at times in kaleidoscopic rotation, were glimpses of wide plains and graceful valleys, high mountains and inviting grottoes; covered with every lovely attribute of scenery which my delighted eye could conceive of, yet formed wholly of some glowing, ethereal, plastic entity, which in consistency partook as much of spirit as of matter. As I gazed, I perceived that my own brain held the key to these enchanting metamorphoses; for each vista which appeared to me, was the one my changing mind most wished to behold. Amidst this elysian realm I dwelt not as a stranger, for each sight and sound was familiar to me; just as it had been for uncounted aeons of eternity before, and would be for like eternities to come.\n\nThen the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? We floated thus for a little time, when I perceived a slight blurring and fading of the objects around us, as though some force were recalling me to earth\u2014where I least wished to go. The form near me seemed to feel a change also, for it gradually brought its discourse toward a conclusion, and itself prepared to quit the scene; fading from my sight at a rate somewhat less rapid than that of the other objects. A few more thoughts were exchanged, and I knew that the luminous one and I were being recalled to bondage, though for my brother of light it would be the last time. The sorry planet-shell being well-nigh spent, in less than an hour my fellow would be free to pursue the oppressor along the Milky Way and past the hither stars to the very confines of infinity.\n\nA well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of colour which had never before been present. The lips, too, seemed unusual; being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger character than had been Slater's. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes. I did not arouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged head-bands of my telepathic \"radio\", intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was now gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanded eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was visible in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high order.\n\nAt this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.\n\n\"Joe Slater is dead,\" came the soul-petrifying voice or agency from beyond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. \"He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much of an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years. I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquillity! Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence\u2014you who without knowing idly gave to its blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Daemon-Star. It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for aeons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by the Daemon-Star. I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my friend in the cosmos; you have been my only friend on this planet\u2014the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again\u2014perhaps in the shining mists of Orion's Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away.\"\n\nAt this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, and the pale eyes of the dreamer\u2014or can I say dead man?\u2014commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an insistent and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.\n\nThe climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Dr. Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of the long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honour that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folktales which circulate in even the most decadent of communities. All this he tells me\u2014yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biassed witness, another's pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Prof. Garrett P. Serviss:\n\n\"On February 22, 1901, a marvellous new star was discovered by Dr. Anderson, of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Book by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nMy memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin; for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey, formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard. My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have suffered a great shock\u2014perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique, incredible experience.\n\nThese cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I remember when I found it\u2014in a dimly lighted place near the black, oily river where the mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never learned its title, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling.\n\nThere was a formula\u2014a sort of list of things to say and do\u2014which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key\u2014a guide\u2014to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed. No printing-press, but the hand of some half-crazed monk, had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.\n\nI remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long afterward did I guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow, winding, mist-choked waterfront streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity\u2014as if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls and overhanging gables of mildewed brick and fungous plaster and timber\u2014with fishy, eye-like, diamond-paned windows that leered\u2014could hardly desist from advancing and crushing me... yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away.\n\nI remember how I read the book at last\u2014white-faced, and locked in the attic room that I had long devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very still, for I had not gone up till after midnight. I think I had a family then\u2014though the details are very uncertain\u2014and I know there were many servants. Just what the year was, I cannot say; for since then I have known many ages and dimensions, and have had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of candles that I read\u2014I recall the relentless dripping of the wax\u2014and there were chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries. I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness, as if I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.\n\nThen came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I had evoked\u2014and the book was indeed all I had suspected. That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision, and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before.\n\nNor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every once-familiar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened sight. From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known shapes; and with each new gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognise the things of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw about me none else saw; and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside shadow which never left my side. But still I read more\u2014in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to which my new vision led me\u2014and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and life-patterns toward the core of the unknown cosmos.\n\nI remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor, and stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from Tartary had brought. The walls melted away, and I was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needle-like pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the light of myriad stars forming strange, alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-litten plain far below me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city built in no fashion I had ever known or read of or dreamed of. As I floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space, and felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after a blankness was again in my attic room, sprawled flat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor. In that night's wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a former night's wandering; but there was more of terror because I knew I was closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before. Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut off from my body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never return.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds....\"\n\n\u2014Algernon Blackwood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "The Horror in Clay.\n\nThe most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.\n\nTheosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things\u2014in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.\n\nMy knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926\u201327 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder\u2014and more than wonder.\n\nAs my grand-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.\n\nThe bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.\n\nAbove these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.\n\nThe writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed \"CTHULHU CULT\" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed \"1925\u2014Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.\", and the second, \"Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.\u2014Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb's Acct.\" The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot's Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outr\u00e9 mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.\n\nThe first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself \"psychically hypersensitive\", but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely \"queer\". Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.\n\nOn the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, \"It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.\"\n\nIt was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, \"Cthulhu fhtagn\".\n\nThis verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters \"Cthulhu\" and \"R'lyeh\".\n\nOn March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing \"miles high\" which walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.\n\nOn April 2nd at about 3 p.m. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.\n\nHere the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought\u2014so much, in fact, that only the ingrained scepticism then forming my philosophy can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and really significant digest. Average people in society and business\u2014New England's traditional \"salt of the earth\"\u2014gave an almost completely negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March 23d and April 2nd\u2014the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.\n\nIt was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognisant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from aesthetes told a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the objects of the professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever reach them.\n\nThe press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic, mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was tremendous and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire future from visions he has seen. A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some \"glorious fulfilment\" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22\u201323. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous \"Dream Landscape\" in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters mentioned by the professor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.\n\nThe older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered only as \"Cthulhu\"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and demands for data.\n\nThe earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before, when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering and problems for expert solution.\n\nThe chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police. With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.\n\nInspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.\n\nThe figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable; yet not one link did it shew with any known type of art belonging to civilisation's youth\u2014or indeed to any other time. Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present, despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which our world and our conceptions have no part.\n\nAnd yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note. Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux whose religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders, saying that it had come down from horribly ancient aeons before ever the world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or tornasuk; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic copy from an aged angekok or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And so far as he could tell, it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing now lying before the meeting.\n\nThis data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers his men had arrested, he besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken down amongst the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What, in substance, both the Esquimau wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this\u2014the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud:\n\n\"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.\"\n\nLegrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:\n\n\"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.\"\n\nAnd now, in response to a general and urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshippers; telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound significance. It savoured of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to possess it.\n\nOn November 1st, 1907, there had come to the New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added, the people could stand it no more.\n\nSo a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile, had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragment of a rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create. At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod before.\n\nThe region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.\n\nOnly poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury and orgiastic licence here whipped themselves to daemoniac heights by howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now and then the less organised ululation would cease, and from what seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong chant that hideous phrase or ritual:\n\n\"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.\"\n\nThen the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotised with horror.\n\nIn a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing, and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire; in the centre of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in height; on top of which, incongruous with its diminutiveness, rested the noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from left to right in endless Bacchanal between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire.\n\nIt may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees\u2014but I suppose he had been hearing too much native superstition.\n\nActually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners, whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows of policemen. Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.\n\nExamined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness, the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, gave a colouring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetichism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprising consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.\n\nThey worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.\n\nMeanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret\u2014that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: \"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.\"\n\nOnly two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract, came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.\n\nOld Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.\n\nThese Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape\u2014for did not this star-fashioned image prove it?\u2014but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.\n\nThen, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim aeras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.\n\nIn the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died, and high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:\n\n\u2002\"That is not dead which can eternal lie,\n\n\u2002And with strange aeons even death may die.\"\n\nLegrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro, apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale of Professor Webb.\n\nThe feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale, corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent correspondence of those who attended; although scant mention occurs in the formal publications of the society. Caution is the first care of those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.\n\nThat my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man who had dreamed not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come in his dreams upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered alike by Esquimau diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell's instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle's expense. The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.\n\nWilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of seventeenth-century Breton architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms, and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, some time be heard from as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallised in clay and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and phantasies which Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in verse and in painting.\n\nDark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought with some subtlety to draw him out. In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he shewed me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless catechism had let fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.\n\nHe talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone\u2014whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong\u2014and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: \"Cthulhu fhtagn\", \"Cthulhu fhtagn\". These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams, in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the success his talent promises.\n\nThe matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and connexions. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro, unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as I wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.\n\nOne thing I began to suspect, and which I now fear I know, is that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana, and would not be surprised to learn of secret methods and poison needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor's data have come to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "The Madness from the Sea.\n\nIf heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of an Australian journal, the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. It had escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.\n\nI had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called the \"Cthulhu Cult\", and was visiting a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey; the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note. Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the Sydney Bulletin I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had found in the swamp.\n\nEagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length. What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It read as follows:\n\n\u2002MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA!\n\n\u2002Vigilant Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.\n\nOne Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale ofDesperate Battle and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.\n\nThe Morrison Co.'s freighter Vigilant, bound from Valparaiso, arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht Alert of Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34\u00b0 21\u2032, W. Longitude 152\u00b0 17\u2032 with one living and one dead man aboard.\n\nThe Vigilant left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2nd was driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted; and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had evidently been dead for more than a week. The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of common pattern.\n\nThis man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted schooner Emma of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th with a complement of eleven men. The Emma, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22nd, in S. Latitude 49\u00b0 51\u2032, W. Longitude 128\u00b0 34\u2032, encountered the Alert, manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes. Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused; whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment. The Emma's men shewed fight, says the survivor, and though the schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the savage crew on the yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all, the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.\n\nThree of the Emma's men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering back had existed. The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island, although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent about this part of his story, and speaks only of their falling into a rock chasm. Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd. From that time till his rescue on the 12th the man remembers little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his companion, died. Briden's death reveals no apparent cause, and was probably due to excitement or exposure. Cable advices from Dunedin report that the Alert was well known there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm and earth tremors of March 1st. Our Auckland correspondent gives the Emma and her crew an excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and worthy man. The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.\n\nThis was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to order back the Emma as they sailed about with their hideous idol? What was the unknown island on which six of the Emma's crew had died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what was known of the noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvellous of all, what deep and more than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully noted by my uncle?\n\nMarch 1st\u2014our February 28th according to the International Date Line\u2014the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd\u2014the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this\u2014and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind's soul.\n\nThat evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea-taverns. Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills. In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned with yellow hair turned white after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.\n\nAfter that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists, the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: \"They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.\"\n\nShaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I re\u00ebmbarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg. Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries that the greater city masqueraded as \"Christiana\". I made the brief trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.\n\nHe had not survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told the public, but had left a long manuscript\u2014of \"technical matters\" as he said\u2014written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a weakened constitution.\n\nI now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till I, too, am at rest; \"accidentally\" or otherwise. Persuading the widow that my connexion with her husband's \"technical matters\" was sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away and began to read it on the London boat. It was a simple, rambling thing\u2014a naive sailor's effort at a post-facto diary\u2014and strove to recall day by day that last awful voyage. I cannot attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to shew why the sound of the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.\n\nJohansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.\n\nJohansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty. The Emma, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's dreams. Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held up by the Alert on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends on the Alert he speaks with significant horror. There was some peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction seem almost a duty, and Johansen shews ingenuous wonder at the charge of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47\u00b0 9\u2032, W. Longitude 126\u00b0 43\u2032 come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of earth's supreme terror\u2014the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that was built in measureless aeons behind history by the vast, loathsome shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!\n\nI suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the waters. When I think of the extent of all that may be brooding down there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder daemons, and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the queer image found in the shrine on the Alert, is poignantly visible in every line of the mate's frightened description.\n\nWithout knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces\u2014surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.\n\nJohansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.\n\nSomething very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was only half-heartedly that they searched\u2014vainly, as it proved\u2014for some portable souvenir to bear away.\n\nIt was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.\n\nBriden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque stone moulding\u2014that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not after all horizontal\u2014and the men wondered how any door in the universe could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced. Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this phantasy of prismatic distortion it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.\n\nThe aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That tenebrousness was indeed a positive quality; for it obscured such parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually burst forth like smoke from its aeon-long imprisonment, visibly darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky on flapping membraneous wings. The odour arising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.\n\nPoor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described\u2014there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.\n\nThree men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan, Guerrera, and \u00c5ngstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat, and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and pulled desperately for the Alert as the mountainous monstrosity flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of the water.\n\nSteam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments of feverish rushing up and down between wheel and engines to get the Alert under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.\n\nBut Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could surely overtake the Alert until steam was fully up, he resolved on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where\u2014God in heaven!\u2014the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened every second as the Alert gained impetus from its mounting steam.\n\nThat was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged mocking imps of Tartarus.\n\nOut of that dream came rescue\u2014the Vigilant, the vice-admiralty court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell\u2014they would think him mad. He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.\n\nThat was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall go this record of mine\u2014this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.\n\nCthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is sunken once more, for the Vigilant sailed over the spot after the April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come\u2014but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward, and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case, since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character.\n\nIn the first place, the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant. Mental disturbance, it is true, will age one rapidly; but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry; the voice was lost, so that no sounds above a whisper were possible; digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded, either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before. In general, all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent.\n\nPsychologically, too, Charles Ward was unique. His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity, had actually increased since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar and an antiquarian; but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital, so powerful and lucid did the youth's mind seem; and only on the evidence of others, and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence, was he finally placed in confinement. To the very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted; and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody.\n\nOnly Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case. He was the last to see the patient before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Ward's escape became known three hours later. That escape itself is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's hospital. A window open above a sheer drop of sixty feet could hardly explain it, yet after that talk with Willett the youth was undeniably gone. Willett himself has no public explanations to offer, though he seems strangely easier in mind than before the escape. Many, indeed, feel that he would like to say more if he thought any considerable number would believe him. He had found Ward in his room, but shortly after his departure the attendants knocked in vain. When they opened the door the patient was not there, and all they found was the open window with a chill April breeze blowing in a cloud of fine bluish-grey dust that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled some time before; but that was while Willett was still present, and they had caught nothing and shewn no disturbance later on. Ward's father was told at once over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. By the time Dr. Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him, and both disavowed any knowledge or complicity in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward have any clues been gained, and even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact which remains is that up to the present time no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed.\n\nCharles Ward was an antiquarian from infancy, no doubt gaining his taste from the venerable town around him, and from the relics of the past which filled every corner of his parents' old mansion in Prospect Street on the crest of the hill. With the years his devotion to ancient things increased; so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship at length crowded everything else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember in considering his madness; for although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form. The gaps of information which the alienists noticed were all related to modern matters, and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters as brought out by adroit questioning; so that one would have fancied the patient literally transferred to a former age through some obscure sort of auto-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them through sheer familiarity; and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide; but it was clear to all who watched him that his whole programme of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his own life and of the ordinary practical and cultural background of the twentieth century as ought to have been his by virtue of his birth in 1902 and his education in the schools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in view of his vitally impaired range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today; the dominant opinion being that he is 'lying low' in some humble and unexacting position till his stock of modern information can be brought up to the normal.\n\nThe beginning of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among alienists. Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at the Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult, and refused to qualify for college on the ground that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search through town records and among old burying-grounds for a certain grave dug in 1771; the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen, some of whose papers he professed to have found behind the panelling of a very old house in Olney Court, on Stampers' Hill, which Curwen was known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable that the winter of 1919\u201320 saw a great change in Ward; whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into occult subjects both at home and abroad, varied only by this strangely persistent search for his forefather's grave.\n\nFrom this opinion, however, Dr. Willett substantially dissents; basing his verdict on his close and continuous knowledge of the patient, and on certain frightful investigations and discoveries which he made toward the last. Those investigations and discoveries have left their mark upon him; so that his voice trembles when he tells them, and his hand trembles when he tries to write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919\u201320 would ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence which culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928; but believes from personal observation that a finer distinction must be made. Granting freely that the boy was always ill-balanced temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to phenomena around him, he refuses to concede that the early alteration marked the actual passage from sanity to madness; crediting instead Ward's own statement that he had discovered or rediscovered something whose effect on human thought was likely to be marvellous and profound. The true madness, he is certain, came with a later change; after the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed; after a trip to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations chanted under strange and secret circumstances; after certain answers to these invocations had been plainly indicated, and a frantic letter penned under agonising and inexplicable conditions; after the wave of vampirism and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip; and after the patient's memory commenced to exclude contemporary images whilst his voice failed and his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification so many subsequently noticed.\n\nIt was only about this time, Willett points out with much acuteness, that the nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward; and the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youth's claim regarding his crucial discovery. In the first place, two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy once shewed Dr. Willett those papers and a page of the Curwen diary, and each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness. The hole where Ward claimed to have found them was long a visible reality, and Willett had a very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings which can scarcely be believed and can never perhaps be proved. Then there were the mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters, and the problem of the Curwen penmanship and of what the detectives brought to light about Dr. Allen; these things, and the terrible message in mediaeval minuscules found in Willett's pocket when he gained consciousness after his shocking experience.\n\nAnd most conclusive of all, there are the two hideous results which the doctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae during his final investigations; results which virtually proved the authenticity of the papers and of their monstrous implications at the same time that those papers were borne forever from human knowledge." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "One must look back at Charles Ward's earlier life as at something belonging as much to the past as the antiquities he loved so keenly. In the autumn of 1918, and with a considerable show of zest in the military training of the period, he had begun his junior year at the Moses Brown School, which lies very near his home. The old main building, erected in 1819, had always charmed his youthful antiquarian sense; and the spacious park in which the academy is set appealed to his sharp eye for landscape. His social activities were few; and his hours were spent mainly at home, in rambling walks, in his classes and drills, and in pursuit of antiquarian and genealogical data at the City Hall, the State House, the Public Library, the Athenaeum, the Historical Society, the John Carter Brown and John Hay Libraries of Brown University, and the newly opened Shepley Library in Benefit Street. One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with studious eyes and a slight stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.\n\nHis walks were always adventures in antiquity, during which he managed to recapture from the myriad relics of a glamorous old city a vivid and connected picture of the centuries before. His home was a great Georgian mansion atop the well-nigh precipitous hill that rises just east of the river; and from the rear windows of its rambling wings he could look dizzily out over all the clustered spires, domes, roofs, and skyscraper summits of the lower town to the purple hills of the countryside beyond. Here he was born, and from the lovely classic porch of the double-bayed brick facade his nurse had first wheeled him in his carriage; past the little white farmhouse of two hundred years before that the town had long ago overtaken, and on toward the stately colleges along the shady, sumptuous street, whose old square brick mansions and smaller wooden houses with narrow, heavy-columned Doric porches dreamed solid and exclusive amidst their generous yards and gardens.\n\nHe had been wheeled, too, along sleepy Congdon Street, one tier lower down on the steep hill, and with all its eastern homes on high terraces. The small wooden houses averaged a greater age here, for it was up this hill that the growing town had climbed; and in these rides he had imbibed something of the colour of a quaint colonial village. The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky.\n\nWhen he was larger his famous walks began; first with his impatiently dragged nurse, and then alone in dreamy meditation. Farther and farther down that almost perpendicular hill he would venture, each time reaching older and quainter levels of the ancient city. He would hesitate gingerly down vertical Jenckes Street with its bank walls and colonial gables to the shady Benefit Street corner, where before him was a wooden antique with an Ionic-pilastered pair of doorways, and beside him a prehistoric gambrel-roofer with a bit of primal farmyard remaining, and the great Judge Durfee house with its fallen vestiges of Georgian grandeur. It was getting to be a slum here; but the titan elms cast a restoring shadow over the place, and the boy used to stroll south past the long lines of the pre-Revolutionary homes with their great central chimneys and classic portals. On the eastern side they were set high over basements with railed double flights of stone steps, and the young Charles could picture them as they were when the street was new, and red heels and periwigs set off the painted pediments whose signs of wear were now becoming so visible.\n\nWestward the hill dropped almost as steeply as above, down to the old \"Town Street\" that the founders had laid out at the river's edge in 1636. Here ran innumerable little lanes with leaning, huddled houses of immense antiquity; and fascinated though he was, it was long before he dared to thread their archaic verticality for fear they would turn out a dream or a gateway to unknown terrors. He found it much less formidable to continue along Benefit Street past the iron fence of St. John's hidden churchyard and the rear of the 1761 Colony House and the mouldering bulk of the Golden Ball Inn where Washington stopped. At Meeting Street\u2014the successive Gaol Lane and King Street of other periods\u2014he would look upward to the east and see the arched flight of steps to which the highway had to resort in climbing the slope, and downward to the west, glimpsing the old brick colonial schoolhouse that smiles across the road at the ancient Sign of Shakespear's Head where the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal was printed before the Revolution. Then came the exquisite First Baptist Church of 1775, luxurious with its matchless Gibbs steeple, and the Georgian roofs and cupolas hovering by. Here and to the southward the neighbourhood became better, flowering at last into a marvellous group of early mansions; but still the little ancient lanes led off down the precipice to the west, spectral in their many-gabled archaism and dipping to a riot of iridescent decay where the wicked old waterfront recalls its proud East India days amidst polyglot vice and squalor, rotting wharves, and blear-eyed ship-chandleries, with such surviving alley names as Packet, Bullion, Gold, Silver, Coin, Doubloon, Sovereign, Guilder, Dollar, Dime, and Cent.\n\nSometimes, as he grew taller and more adventurous, young Ward would venture down into this maelstrom of tottering houses, broken transoms, tumbling steps, twisted balustrades, swarthy faces, and nameless odours; winding from South Main to South Water, searching out the docks where the bay and sound steamers still touched, and returning northward at this lower level past the steep-roofed 1816 warehouses and the broad square at the Great Bridge, where the 1773 Market House still stands firm on its ancient arches. In that square he would pause to drink in the bewildering beauty of the old town as it rises on its eastward bluff, decked with its two Georgian spires and crowned by the vast new Christian Science dome as London is crowned by St. Paul's. He liked mostly to reach this point in the late afternoon, when the slanting sunlight touches the Market House and the ancient hill roofs and belfries with gold, and throws magic around the dreaming wharves where Providence Indiamen used to ride at anchor. After a long look he would grow almost dizzy with a poet's love for the sight, and then he would scale the slope homeward in the dusk past the old white church and up the narrow precipitous ways where yellow gleams would begin to peep out in small-paned windows and through fanlights set high over double flights of steps with curious wrought-iron railings.\n\nAt other times, and in later years, he would seek for vivid contrasts; spending half a walk in the crumbling colonial regions northwest of his home, where the hill drops to the lower eminence of Stampers' Hill with its ghetto and negro quarter clustering round the place where the Boston stage coach used to start before the Revolution, and the other half in the gracious southerly realm about George, Benevolent, Power, and Williams Streets, where the old slope holds unchanged the fine estates and bits of walled garden and steep green lane in which so many fragrant memories linger. These rambles, together with the diligent studies which accompanied them, certainly account for a large amount of the antiquarian lore which at last crowded the modern world from Charles Ward's mind; and illustrate the mental soil upon which fell, in that fateful winter of 1919\u201320, the seeds that came to such strange and terrible fruition.\n\nDr. Willett is certain that, up to this ill-omened winter of first change, Charles Ward's antiquarianism was free from every trace of the morbid. Graveyards held for him no particular attraction beyond their quaintness and historic value, and of anything like violence or savage instinct he was utterly devoid. Then, by insidious degrees, there appeared to develop a curious sequel to one of his genealogical triumphs of the year before; when he had discovered among his maternal ancestors a certain very long-lived man named Joseph Curwen, who had come from Salem in March of 1692, and about whom a whispered series of highly peculiar and disquieting stories clustered.\n\nWard's great-great-grandfather Welcome Potter had in 1785 married a certain \"Ann Tillinghast, daughter of Mrs. Eliza, daughter to Capt. James Tillinghast\", of whose paternity the family had preserved no trace. Late in 1918, whilst examining a volume of original town records in manuscript, the young genealogist encountered an entry describing a legal change of name, by which in 1772 a Mrs. Eliza Curwen, widow of Joseph Curwen, resumed, along with her seven-year-old daughter Ann, her maiden name of Tillinghast; on the ground 'that her Husband's name was become a publick Reproach by Reason of what was knowne after his Decease; the which confirming an antient common Rumour, tho' not to be credited by a loyall Wife till so proven as to be wholely past Doubting'. This entry came to light upon the accidental separation of two leaves which had been carefully pasted together and treated as one by a laboured revision of the page numbers.\n\nIt was at once clear to Charles Ward that he had indeed discovered a hitherto unknown great-great-great-grandfather. The discovery doubly excited him because he had already heard vague reports and seen scattered allusions relating to this person; about whom there remained so few publicly available records, aside from those becoming public only in modern times, that it almost seemed as if a conspiracy had existed to blot him from memory. What did appear, moreover, was of such a singular and provocative nature that one could not fail to imagine curiously what it was that the colonial recorders were so anxious to conceal and forget; or to suspect that the deletion had reasons all too valid.\n\nBefore this, Ward had been content to let his romancing about old Joseph Curwen remain in the idle stage; but having discovered his own relationship to this apparently \"hushed-up\" character, he proceeded to hunt out as systematically as possible whatever he might find concerning him. In this excited quest he eventually succeeded beyond his highest expectations; for old letters, diaries, and sheaves of unpublished memoirs in cobwebbed Providence garrets and elsewhere yielded many illuminating passages which their writers had not thought it worth their while to destroy. One important sidelight came from a point as remote as New York, where some Rhode Island colonial correspondence was stored in the Museum at Fraunces' Tavern. The really crucial thing, though, and what in Dr. Willett's opinion formed the definite source of Ward's undoing, was the matter found in August 1919 behind the panelling of the crumbling house in Olney Court. It was that, beyond a doubt, which opened up those black vistas whose end was deeper than the pit." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Joseph Curwen, as revealed by the rambling legends embodied in what Ward heard and unearthed, was a very astonishing, enigmatic, and obscurely horrible individual. He had fled from Salem to Providence\u2014that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting\u2014at the beginning of the great witchcraft panic; being in fear of accusation because of his solitary ways and queer chemical or alchemical experiments. He was a colourless-looking man of about thirty, and was soon found qualified to become a freeman of Providence; thereafter buying a home lot just north of Gregory Dexter's at about the foot of Olney Street. His house was built on Stampers' Hill west of the Town Street, in what later became Olney Court; and in 1761 he replaced this with a larger one, on the same site, which is still standing.\n\nNow the first odd thing about Joseph Curwen was that he did not seem to grow much older than he had been on his arrival. He engaged in shipping enterprises, purchased wharfage near Mile-End Cove, helped rebuild the Great Bridge in 1713, and in 1723 was one of the founders of the Congregational Church on the hill; but always did he retain the nondescript aspect of a man not greatly over thirty or thirty-five. As decades mounted up, this singular quality began to excite wide notice; but Curwen always explained it by saying that he came of hardy forefathers, and practiced a simplicity of living which did not wear him out. How such simplicity could be reconciled with the inexplicable comings and goings of the secretive merchant, and with the queer gleaming of his windows at all hours of night, was not very clear to the townsfolk; and they were prone to assign other reasons for his continued youth and longevity. It was held, for the most part, that Curwen's incessant mixings and boilings of chemicals had much to do with his condition. Gossip spoke of the strange substances he brought from London and the Indies on his ships or purchased in Newport, Boston, and New York; and when old Dr. Jabez Bowen came from Rehoboth and opened his apothecary shop across the Great Bridge at the Sign of the Unicorn and Mortar, there was ceaseless talk of the drugs, acids, and metals that the taciturn recluse incessantly bought or ordered from him. Acting on the assumption that Curwen possessed a wondrous and secret medical skill, many sufferers of various sorts applied to him for aid; but though he appeared to encourage their belief in a non-committal way, and always gave them odd-coloured potions in response to their requests, it was observed that his ministrations to others seldom proved of benefit. At length, when over fifty years had passed since the stranger's advent, and without producing more than five years' apparent change in his face and physique, the people began to whisper more darkly; and to meet more than half way that desire for isolation which he had always shewn.\n\nPrivate letters and diaries of the period reveal, too, a multitude of other reasons why Joseph Curwen was marvelled at, feared, and finally shunned like a plague. His passion for graveyards, in which he was glimpsed at all hours and under all conditions, was notorious; though no one had witnessed any deed on his part which could actually be termed ghoulish. On the Pawtuxet Road he had a farm, at which he generally lived during the summer, and to which he would frequently be seen riding at various odd times of the day or night. Here his only visible servants, farmers, and caretakers were a sullen pair of aged Narragansett Indians; the husband dumb and curiously scarred, and the wife of a very repulsive cast of countenance, probably due to a mixture of negro blood. In the lean-to of this house was the laboratory where most of the chemical experiments were conducted. Curious porters and teamers who delivered bottles, bags, or boxes at the small rear door would exchange accounts of the fantastic flasks, crucibles, alembics, and furnaces they saw in the low shelved room; and prophesied in whispers that the close-mouthed \"chymist\"\u2014by which they meant alchemist\u2014would not be long in finding the Philosopher's Stone. The nearest neighbours to this farm\u2014the Fenners, a quarter of a mile away\u2014had still queerer things to tell of certain sounds which they insisted came from the Curwen place in the night. There were cries, they said, and sustained howlings; and they did not like the large number of livestock which thronged the pastures, for no such amount was needed to keep a lone old man and a very few servants in meat, milk, and wool. The identity of the stock seemed to change from week to week as new droves were purchased from the Kingstown farmers. Then, too, there was something very obnoxious about a certain great stone outbuilding with only high narrow slits for windows.\n\nGreat Bridge idlers likewise had much to say of Curwen's town house in Olney Court; not so much the fine new one built in 1761, when the man must have been nearly a century old, but the first low gambrel-roofed one with the windowless attic and shingled sides, whose timbers he took the peculiar precaution of burning after its demolition. Here there was less mystery, it is true; but the hours at which lights were seen, the secretiveness of the two swarthy foreigners who comprised the only menservants, the hideous indistinct mumbling of the incredibly aged French housekeeper, the large amounts of food seen to enter a door within which only four persons lived, and the quality of certain voices often heard in muffled conversation at highly unseasonable times, all combined with what was known of the Pawtuxet farm to give the place a bad name.\n\nIn choicer circles, too, the Curwen home was by no means undiscussed; for as the newcomer had gradually worked into the church and trading life of the town, he had naturally made acquaintances of the better sort, whose company and conversation he was well fitted by education to enjoy. His birth was known to be good, since the Curwens or Corwins of Salem needed no introduction in New England. It developed that Joseph Curwen had travelled much in very early life, living for a time in England and making at least two voyages to the Orient; and his speech, when he deigned to use it, was that of a learned and cultivated Englishman. But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for society. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane.\n\nThere seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved among stranger and more potent entities. When Dr. Checkley the famous wit came from Boston in 1738 to be rector of King's Church, he did not neglect calling on one of whom he soon heard so much; but left in a very short while because of some sinister undercurrent he detected in his host's discourse. Charles Ward told his father, when they discussed Curwen one winter evening, that he would give much to learn what the mysterious old man had said to the sprightly cleric, but that all diarists agree concerning Dr. Checkley's reluctance to repeat anything he had heard. The good man had been hideously shocked, and could never recall Joseph Curwen without a visible loss of the gay urbanity for which he was famed.\n\nMore definite, however, was the reason why another man of taste and breeding avoided the haughty hermit. In 1746 Mr. John Merritt, an elderly English gentleman of literary and scientific leanings, came from Newport to the town which was so rapidly overtaking it in standing, and built a fine country seat on the Neck in what is now the heart of the best residence section. He lived in considerable style and comfort, keeping the first coach and liveried servants in town, and taking great pride in his telescope, his microscope, and his well-chosen library of English and Latin books. Hearing of Curwen as the owner of the best library in Providence, Mr. Merritt early paid him a call, and was more cordially received than most other callers at the house had been. His admiration for his host's ample shelves, which besides the Greek, Latin, and English classics were equipped with a remarkable battery of philosophical, mathematical, and scientific works including Paracelsus, Agricola, Van Helmont, Sylvius, Glauber, Boyle, Boerhaave, Becher, and Stahl, led Curwen to suggest a visit to the farmhouse and laboratory whither he had never invited anyone before; and the two drove out at once in Mr. Merritt's coach.\n\nMr. Merritt always confessed to seeing nothing really horrible at the farmhouse, but maintained that the titles of the books in the special library of thaumaturgical, alchemical, and theological subjects which Curwen kept in a front room were alone sufficient to inspire him with a lasting loathing. Perhaps, however, the facial expression of the owner in exhibiting them contributed much of the prejudice. The bizarre collection, besides a host of standard works which Mr. Merritt was not too alarmed to envy, embraced nearly all the cabbalists, daemonologists, and magicians known to man; and was a treasure-house of lore in the doubtful realms of alchemy and astrology. Hermes Trismegistus in Mesnard's edition, the Turba Philosophorum, Geber's Liber Investigationis, and Artephius' Key of Wisdom all were there; with the cabbalistic Zohar, Peter Jammy's set of Albertus Magnus, Raymond Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima in Zetzner's edition, Roger Bacon's Thesaurus Chemicus, Fludd's Clavis Alchimiae, and Trithemius' De Lapide Philosophico crowding them close. Mediaeval Jews and Arabs were represented in profusion, and Mr. Merritt turned pale when, upon taking down a fine volume conspicuously labelled as the Qanoon-e-Islam, he found it was in truth the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, of which he had heard such monstrous things whispered some years previously after the exposure of nameless rites at the strange little fishing village of Kingsport, in the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.\n\nBut oddly enough, the worthy gentleman owned himself most impalpably disquieted by a mere minor detail. On the huge mahogany table there lay face downward a badly worn copy of Borellus, bearing many cryptical marginalia and interlineations in Curwen's hand. The book was open at about its middle, and one paragraph displayed such thick and tremulous pen-strokes beneath the lines of mystic black-letter that the visitor could not resist scanning it through. Whether it was the nature of the passage underscored, or the feverish heaviness of the strokes which formed the underscoring, he could not tell; but something in that combination affected him very badly and very peculiarly. He recalled it to the end of his days, writing it down from memory in his diary and once trying to recite it to his close friend Dr. Checkley till he saw how greatly it disturbed the urbane rector. It read:\n\n\"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated.\"\n\nIt was near the docks along the southerly part of the Town Street, however, that the worst things were muttered about Joseph Curwen. Sailors are superstitious folk; and the seasoned salts who manned the infinite rum, slave, and molasses sloops, the rakish privateers, and the great brigs of the Browns, Crawfords, and Tillinghasts, all made strange furtive signs of protection when they saw the slim, deceptively young-looking figure with its yellow hair and slight stoop entering the Curwen warehouse in Doubloon Street or talking with captains and supercargoes on the long quay where the Curwen ships rode restlessly. Curwen's own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal. It was, in a way, the frequency with which these sailors were replaced which inspired the acutest and most tangible part of the fear in which the old man was held. A crew would be turned loose in the town on shore leave, some of its members perhaps charged with this errand or that; and when reassembled it would be almost sure to lack one or more men. That many of the errands had concerned the farm on the Pawtuxet Road, and that few of the sailors had ever been seen to return from that place, was not forgotten; so that in time it became exceedingly difficult for Curwen to keep his oddly assorted hands. Almost invariably several would desert soon after hearing the gossip of the Providence wharves, and their replacement in the West Indies became an increasingly great problem to the merchant.\n\nIn 1760 Joseph Curwen was virtually an outcast, suspected of vague horrors and daemoniac alliances which seemed all the more menacing because they could not be named, understood, or even proved to exist. The last straw may have come from the affair of the missing soldiers in 1758, for in March and April of that year two Royal regiments on their way to New France were quartered in Providence, and depleted by an inexplicable process far beyond the average rate of desertion. Rumour dwelt on the frequency with which Curwen was wont to be seen talking with the red-coated strangers; and as several of them began to be missed, people thought of the odd conditions among his own seamen. What would have happened if the regiments had not been ordered on, no one can tell.\n\nMeanwhile the merchant's worldly affairs were prospering. He had a virtual monopoly of the town's trade in saltpetre, black pepper, and cinnamon, and easily led any other one shipping establishment save the Browns in his importation of brassware, indigo, cotton, woollens, salt, rigging, iron, paper, and English goods of every kind. Such shopkeepers as James Green, at the Sign of the Elephant in Cheapside, the Russells, at the Sign of the Golden Eagle across the Bridge, or Clark and Nightingale at the Frying-Pan and Fish near the New Coffee-House, depended almost wholly upon him for their stock; and his arrangements with the local distillers, the Narragansett dairymen and horse-breeders, and the Newport candle-makers, made him one of the prime exporters of the Colony.\n\nOstracised though he was, he did not lack for civic spirit of a sort. When the Colony House burned down, he subscribed handsomely to the lotteries by which the new brick one\u2014still standing at the head of its parade in the old main street\u2014was built in 1761. In that same year, too, he helped rebuild the Great Bridge after the October gale. He replaced many of the books of the public library consumed in the Colony House fire, and bought heavily in the lottery that gave the muddy Market Parade and deep-rutted Town Street their pavement of great round stones with a brick footwalk or \"causey\" in the middle. About this time, also, he built the plain but excellent new house whose doorway is still such a triumph of carving. When the Whitefield adherents broke off from Dr. Cotton's hill church in 1743 and founded Deacon Snow's church across the Bridge, Curwen had gone with them; though his zeal and attendance soon abated. Now, however, he cultivated piety once more; as if to dispel the shadow which had thrown him into isolation and would soon begin to wreck his business fortunes if not sharply checked." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "The sight of this strange, pallid man, hardly middle-aged in aspect yet certainly not less than a full century old, seeking at last to emerge from a cloud of fright and detestation too vague to pin down or analyse, was at once a pathetic, a dramatic, and a contemptible thing. Such is the power of wealth and of surface gestures, however, that there came indeed a slight abatement in the visible aversion displayed toward him; especially after the rapid disappearances of his sailors abruptly ceased. He must likewise have begun to practice an extreme care and secrecy in his graveyard expeditions, for he was never again caught at such wanderings; whilst the rumours of uncanny sounds and manoeuvres at his Pawtuxet farm diminished in proportion. His rate of food consumption and cattle replacement remained abnormally high; but not until modern times, when Charles Ward examined a set of his accounts and invoices in the Shepley Library, did it occur to any person\u2014save one embittered youth, perhaps\u2014to make dark comparisons between the large number of Guinea blacks he imported until 1766, and the disturbingly small number for whom he could produce bona fide bills of sale either to slave-dealers at the Great Bridge or to the planters of the Narragansett Country. Certainly, the cunning and ingenuity of this abhorred character were uncannily profound, once the necessity for their exercise had become impressed upon him.\n\nBut of course the effect of all this belated mending was necessarily slight. Curwen continued to be avoided and distrusted, as indeed the one fact of his continued air of youth at a great age would have been enough to warrant; and he could see that in the end his fortunes would be likely to suffer. His elaborate studies and experiments, whatever they may have been, apparently required a heavy income for their maintenance; and since a change of environment would deprive him of the trading advantages he had gained, it would not have profited him to begin anew in a different region just then. Judgment demanded that he patch up his relations with the townsfolk of Providence, so that his presence might no longer be a signal for hushed conversation, transparent excuses of errands elsewhere, and a general atmosphere of constraint and uneasiness. His clerks, being now reduced to the shiftless and impecunious residue whom no one else would employ, were giving him much worry; and he held to his sea-captains and mates only by shrewdness in gaining some kind of ascendancy over them\u2014a mortgage, a promissory note, or a bit of information very pertinent to their welfare. In many cases, diarists have recorded with some awe, Curwen shewed almost the power of a wizard in unearthing family secrets for questionable use. During the final five years of his life it seemed as though only direct talks with the long-dead could possibly have furnished some of the data which he had so glibly at his tongue's end.\n\nAbout this time the crafty scholar hit upon a last desperate expedient to regain his footing in the community. Hitherto a complete hermit, he now determined to contract an advantageous marriage; securing as a bride some lady whose unquestioned position would make all ostracism of his home impossible. It may be that he also had deeper reasons for wishing an alliance; reasons so far outside the known cosmic sphere that only papers found a century and a half after his death caused anyone to suspect them; but of this nothing certain can ever be learned. Naturally he was aware of the horror and indignation with which any ordinary courtship of his would be received, hence he looked about for some likely candidate upon whose parents he might exert a suitable pressure. Such candidates, he found, were not at all easy to discover; since he had very particular requirements in the way of beauty, accomplishments, and social security. At length his survey narrowed down to the household of one of his best and oldest ship-captains, a widower of high birth and unblemished standing named Dutee Tillinghast, whose only daughter Eliza seemed dowered with every conceivable advantage save prospects as an heiress. Capt. Tillinghast was completely under the domination of Curwen; and consented, after a terrible interview in his cupolaed house on Power's Lane hill, to sanction the blasphemous alliance.\n\nEliza Tillinghast was at that time eighteen years of age, and had been reared as gently as the reduced circumstances of her father permitted. She had attended Stephen Jackson's school opposite the Court-House Parade; and had been diligently instructed by her mother, before the latter's death of smallpox in 1757, in all the arts and refinements of domestic life. A sampler of hers, worked in 1753 at the age of nine, may still be found in the rooms of the Rhode Island Historical Society. After her mother's death she had kept the house, aided only by one old black woman. Her arguments with her father concerning the proposed Curwen marriage must have been painful indeed; but of these we have no record. Certain it is that her engagement to young Ezra Weeden, second mate of the Crawford packet Enterprise, was dutifully broken off, and that her union with Joseph Curwen took place on the seventh of March, 1763, in the Baptist church, in the presence of one of the most distinguished assemblages which the town could boast; the ceremony being performed by the younger Samuel Winsor. The Gazette mentioned the event very briefly, and in most surviving copies the item in question seems to be cut or torn out. Ward found a single intact copy after much search in the archives of a private collector of note, observing with amusement the meaningless urbanity of the language:\n\n\"Monday evening last, Mr. Joseph Curwen, of this Town, Merchant, was married to Miss Eliza Tillinghast, Daughter of Capt. Dutee Tillinghast, a young Lady who has real Merit, added to a beautiful Person, to grace the connubial State and perpetuate its Felicity.\"\n\nThe collection of Durfee-Arnold letters, discovered by Charles Ward shortly before his first reputed madness in the private collection of Melville F. Peters, Esq., of George St., and covering this and a somewhat antecedent period, throws vivid light on the outrage done to public sentiment by this ill-assorted match. The social influence of the Tillinghasts, however, was not to be denied; and once more Joseph Curwen found his house frequented by persons whom he could never otherwise have induced to cross his threshold. His acceptance was by no means complete, and his bride was socially the sufferer through her forced venture; but at all events the wall of utter ostracism was somewhat worn down. In his treatment of his wife the strange bridegroom astonished both her and the community by displaying an extreme graciousness and consideration. The new house in Olney Court was now wholly free from disturbing manifestations, and although Curwen was much absent at the Pawtuxet farm which his wife never visited, he seemed more like a normal citizen than at any other time in his long years of residence. Only one person remained in open enmity with him, this being the youthful ship's officer whose engagement to Eliza Tillinghast had been so abruptly broken. Ezra Weeden had frankly vowed vengeance; and though of a quiet and ordinarily mild disposition, was now gaining a hate-bred, dogged purpose which boded no good to the usurping husband.\n\nOn the seventh of May, 1765, Curwen's only child Ann was born; and was christened by the Rev. John Graves of King's Church, of which both husband and wife had become communicants shortly after their marriage, in order to compromise between their respective Congregational and Baptist affiliations. The record of this birth, as well as that of the marriage two years before, was stricken from most copies of the church and town annals where it ought to appear; and Charles Ward located both with the greatest difficulty after his discovery of the widow's change of name had apprised him of his own relationship, and engendered the feverish interest which culminated in his madness. The birth entry, indeed, was found very curiously through correspondence with the heirs of the loyalist Dr. Graves, who had taken with him a duplicate set of records when he left his pastorate at the outbreak of the Revolution. Ward had tried this source because he knew that his great-great-grandmother Ann Tillinghast Potter had been an Episcopalian.\n\nShortly after the birth of his daughter, an event he seemed to welcome with a fervour greatly out of keeping with his usual coldness, Curwen resolved to sit for a portrait. This he had painted by a very gifted Scotsman named Cosmo Alexander, then a resident of Newport, and since famous as the early teacher of Gilbert Stuart. The likeness was said to have been executed on a wall-panel of the library of the house in Olney Court, but neither of the two old diaries mentioning it gave any hint of its ultimate disposition. At this period the erratic scholar shewed signs of unusual abstraction, and spent as much time as he possibly could at his farm on the Pawtuxet Road. He seemed, it was stated, in a condition of suppressed excitement or suspense; as if expecting some phenomenal thing or on the brink of some strange discovery. Chemistry or alchemy would appear to have played a great part, for he took from his house to the farm the greater number of his volumes on that subject.\n\nHis affectation of civic interest did not diminish, and he lost no opportunities for helping such leaders as Stephen Hopkins, Joseph Brown, and Benjamin West in their efforts to raise the cultural tone of the town, which was then much below the level of Newport in its patronage of the liberal arts. He had helped Daniel Jenckes found his bookshop in 1763, and was thereafter his best customer; extending aid likewise to the struggling Gazette that appeared each Wednesday at the Sign of Shakespear's Head. In politics he ardently supported Governor Hopkins against the Ward party whose prime strength was in Newport, and his really eloquent speech at Hacker's Hall in 1765 against the setting off of North Providence as a separate town with a pro-Ward vote in the General Assembly did more than any other one thing to wear down the prejudice against him. But Ezra Weeden, who watched him closely, sneered cynically at all this outward activity; and freely swore it was no more than a mask for some nameless traffick with the blackest gulfs of Tartarus. The revengeful youth began a systematic study of the man and his doings whenever he was in port; spending hours at night by the wharves with a dory in readiness when he saw lights in the Curwen warehouses, and following the small boat which would sometimes steal quietly off and down the bay. He also kept as close a watch as possible on the Pawtuxet farm, and was once severely bitten by the dogs the old Indian couple loosed upon him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "In 1766 came the final change in Joseph Curwen. It was very sudden, and gained wide notice amongst the curious townsfolk; for the air of suspense and expectancy dropped like an old cloak, giving instant place to an ill-concealed exaltation of perfect triumph. Curwen seemed to have difficulty in restraining himself from public harangues on what he had found or learned or made; but apparently the need of secrecy was greater than the longing to share his rejoicing, for no explanation was ever offered by him. It was after this transition, which appears to have come early in July, that the sinister scholar began to astonish people by his possession of information which only their long-dead ancestors would seem to be able to impart.\n\nBut Curwen's feverish secret activities by no means ceased with this change. On the contrary, they tended rather to increase; so that more and more of his shipping business was handled by the captains whom he now bound to him by ties of fear as potent as those of bankruptcy had been. He altogether abandoned the slave trade, alleging that its profits were constantly decreasing. Every possible moment was spent at the Pawtuxet farm; though there were rumours now and then of his presence in places which, though not actually near graveyards, were yet so situated in relation to graveyards that thoughtful people wondered just how thorough the old merchant's change of habits really was. Ezra Weeden, though his periods of espionage were necessarily brief and intermittent on account of his sea voyaging, had a vindictive persistence which the bulk of the practical townsfolk and farmers lacked; and subjected Curwen's affairs to a scrutiny such as they had never had before.\n\nMany of the odd manoeuvres of the strange merchant's vessels had been taken for granted on account of the unrest of the times, when every colonist seemed determined to resist the provisions of the Sugar Act which hampered a prominent traffick. Smuggling and evasion were the rule in Narragansett Bay, and nocturnal landings of illicit cargoes were continuous commonplaces. But Weeden, night after night following the lighters or small sloops which he saw steal off from the Curwen warehouses at the Town Street docks, soon felt assured that it was not merely His Majesty's armed ships which the sinister skulker was anxious to avoid. Prior to the change in 1766 these boats had for the most part contained chained negroes, who were carried down and across the bay and landed at an obscure point on the shore just north of Pawtuxet; being afterward driven up the bluff and across country to the Curwen farm, where they were locked in that enormous stone outbuilding which had only high narrow slits for windows. After that change, however, the whole programme was altered. Importation of slaves ceased at once, and for a time Curwen abandoned his midnight sailings. Then, about the spring of 1767, a new policy appeared. Once more the lighters grew wont to put out from the black, silent docks, and this time they would go down the bay some distance, perhaps as far as Namquit Point, where they would meet and receive cargo from strange ships of considerable size and widely varied appearance. Curwen's sailors would then deposit this cargo at the usual point on the shore, and transport it overland to the farm; locking it in the same cryptical stone building which had formerly received the negroes. The cargo consisted almost wholly of boxes and cases, of which a large proportion were oblong and heavy and disturbingly suggestive of coffins.\n\nWeeden always watched the farm with unremitting assiduity; visiting it each night for long periods, and seldom letting a week go by without a sight except when the ground bore a footprint-revealing snow. Even then he would often walk as close as possible in the travelled road or on the ice of the neighbouring river to see what tracks others might have left. Finding his own vigils interrupted by nautical duties, he hired a tavern companion named Eleazar Smith to continue the survey during his absences; and between them the two could have set in motion some extraordinary rumours. That they did not do so was only because they knew the effect of publicity would be to warn their quarry and make further progress impossible. Instead, they wished to learn something definite before taking any action. What they did learn must have been startling indeed, and Charles Ward spoke many times to his parents of his regret at Weeden's later burning of his notebooks. All that can be told of their discoveries is what Eleazar Smith jotted down in a none too coherent diary, and what other diarists and letter-writers have timidly repeated from the statements which they finally made\u2014and according to which the farm was only the outer shell of some vast and revolting menace, of a scope and depth too profound and intangible for more than shadowy comprehension.\n\nIt is gathered that Weeden and Smith became early convinced that a great series of tunnels and catacombs, inhabited by a very sizeable staff of persons besides the old Indian and his wife, underlay the farm. The house was an old peaked relic of the middle seventeenth century with enormous stack chimney and diamond-paned lattice windows, the laboratory being in a lean-to toward the north, where the roof came nearly to the ground. This building stood clear of any other; yet judging by the different voices heard at odd times within, it must have been accessible through secret passages beneath. These voices, before 1766, were mere mumblings and negro whisperings and frenzied screams, coupled with curious chants or invocations. After that date, however, they assumed a very singular and terrible cast as they ran the gamut betwixt dronings of dull acquiescence and explosions of frantic pain or fury, rumblings of conversation and whines of entreaty, pantings of eagerness and shouts of protest. They appeared to be in different languages, all known to Curwen, whose rasping accents were frequently distinguishable in reply, reproof, or threatening. Sometimes it seemed that several persons must be in the house; Curwen, certain captives, and the guards of those captives. There were voices of a sort that neither Weeden nor Smith had ever heard before despite their wide knowledge of foreign parts, and many that they did seem to place as belonging to this or that nationality. The nature of the conversations seemed always a kind of catechism, as if Curwen were extorting some sort of information from terrified or rebellious prisoners.\n\nWeeden had many verbatim reports of overheard scraps in his notebook, for English, French, and Spanish, which he knew, were frequently used; but of these nothing has survived. He did, however, say that besides a few ghoulish dialogues in which the past affairs of Providence families were concerned, most of the questions and answers he could understand were historical or scientific; occasionally pertaining to very remote places and ages. Once, for example, an alternately raging and sullen figure was questioned in French about the Black Prince's massacre at Limoges in 1370, as if there were some hidden reason which he ought to know. Curwen asked the prisoner\u2014if prisoner it were\u2014whether the order to slay was given because of the Sign of the Goat found on the altar in the ancient Roman crypt beneath the Cathedral, or whether the Dark Man of the Haute Vienne Coven had spoken the Three Words. Failing to obtain replies, the inquisitor had seemingly resorted to extreme means; for there was a terrific shriek followed by silence and muttering and a bumping sound.\n\nNone of these colloquies were ever ocularly witnessed, since the windows were always heavily draped. Once, though, during a discourse in an unknown tongue, a shadow was seen on the curtain which startled Weeden exceedingly; reminding him of one of the puppets in a show he had seen in the autumn of 1764 in Hacker's Hall, when a man from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had given a clever mechanical spectacle advertised as a \"View of the Famous City of Jerusalem, in which are represented Jerusalem, the Temple of Solomon, his Royal Throne, the noted Towers, and Hills, likewise the Sufferings of Our Saviour from the Garden of Gethsemane to the Cross on the Hill of Golgotha; an artful piece of Statuary, Worthy to be seen by the Curious.\" It was on this occasion that the listener, who had crept close to the window of the front room whence the speaking proceeded, gave a start which roused the old Indian pair and caused them to loose the dogs on him. After that no more conversations were ever heard in the house, and Weeden and Smith concluded that Curwen had transferred his field of action to regions below.\n\nThat such regions in truth existed, seemed amply clear from many things. Faint cries and groans unmistakably came up now and then from what appeared to be the solid earth in places far from any structure; whilst hidden in the bushes along the river-bank in the rear, where the high ground sloped steeply down to the valley of the Pawtuxet, there was found an arched oaken door in a frame of heavy masonry, which was obviously an entrance to caverns within the hill. When or how these catacombs could have been constructed, Weeden was unable to say; but he frequently pointed out how easily the place might have been reached by bands of unseen workmen from the river. Joseph Curwen put his mongrel seamen to diverse uses indeed! During the heavy spring rains of 1769 the two watchers kept a sharp eye on the steep river-bank to see if any subterrene secrets might be washed to light, and were rewarded by the sight of a profusion of both human and animal bones in places where deep gullies had been worn in the banks. Naturally there might be many explanations of such things in the rear of a stock farm, and in a locality where old Indian burying-grounds were common, but Weeden and Smith drew their own inferences.\n\nIt was in January 1770, whilst Weeden and Smith were still debating vainly on what, if anything, to think or do about the whole bewildering business, that the incident of the Fortaleza occurred. Exasperated by the burning of the revenue sloop Liberty at Newport during the previous summer, the customs fleet under Admiral Wallace had adopted an increased vigilance concerning strange vessels; and on this occasion His Majesty's armed schooner Cygnet, under Capt. Charles Leslie, captured after a short pursuit one early morning the snow Fortaleza of Barcelona, Spain, under Capt. Manuel Arruda, bound according to its log from Grand Cairo, Egypt, to Providence. When searched for contraband material, this ship revealed the astonishing fact that its cargo consisted exclusively of Egyptian mummies, consigned to \"Sailor A. B. C.\", who would come to remove his goods in a lighter just off Namquit Point and whose identity Capt. Arruda felt himself in honour bound not to reveal. The Vice-Admiralty Court at Newport, at a loss what to do in view of the non-contraband nature of the cargo on the one hand and of the unlawful secrecy of the entry on the other hand, compromised on Collector Robinson's recommendation by freeing the ship but forbidding it a port in Rhode Island waters. There were later rumours of its having been seen in Boston Harbour, though it never openly entered the Port of Boston.\n\nThis extraordinary incident did not fail of wide remark in Providence, and there were not many who doubted the existence of some connexion between the cargo of mummies and the sinister Joseph Curwen. His exotic studies and his curious chemical importations being common knowledge, and his fondness for graveyards being common suspicion; it did not take much imagination to link him with a freakish importation which could not conceivably have been destined for anyone else in the town. As if conscious of this natural belief, Curwen took care to speak casually on several occasions of the chemical value of the balsams found in mummies; thinking perhaps that he might make the affair seem less unnatural, yet stopping just short of admitting his participation. Weeden and Smith, of course, felt no doubt whatsoever of the significance of the thing; and indulged in the wildest theories concerning Curwen and his monstrous labours.\n\nThe following spring, like that of the year before, had heavy rains; and the watchers kept careful track of the river-bank behind the Curwen farm. Large sections were washed away, and a certain number of bones discovered; but no glimpse was afforded of any actual subterranean chambers or burrows. Something was rumoured, however, at the village of Pawtuxet about a mile below, where the river flows in falls over a rocky terrace to join the placid landlocked cove. There, where quaint old cottages climbed the hill from the rustic bridge, and fishing-smacks lay anchored at their sleepy docks, a vague report went round of things that were floating down the river and flashing into sight for a minute as they went over the falls. Of course the Pawtuxet is a long river which winds through many settled regions abounding in graveyards, and of course the spring rains had been very heavy; but the fisherfolk about the bridge did not like the wild way that one of the things stared as it shot down to the still water below, or the way that another half cried out although its condition had greatly departed from that of objects which normally cry out. That rumour sent Smith\u2014for Weeden was just then at sea\u2014in haste to the river-bank behind the farm; where surely enough there remained the evidences of an extensive cave-in. There was, however, no trace of a passage into the steep bank; for the miniature avalanche had left behind a solid wall of mixed earth and shrubbery from aloft. Smith went to the extent of some experimental digging, but was deterred by lack of success\u2014or perhaps by fear of possible success. It is interesting to speculate on what the persistent and revengeful Weeden would have done had he been ashore at the time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "By the autumn of 1770 Weeden decided that the time was ripe to tell others of his discoveries; for he had a large number of facts to link together, and a second eye-witness to refute the possible charge that jealousy and vindictiveness had spurred his fancy. As his first confidant he selected Capt. James Mathewson of the Enterprise, who on the one hand knew him well enough not to doubt his veracity, and on the other hand was sufficiently influential in the town to be heard in turn with respect. The colloquy took place in an upper room of Sabin's Tavern near the docks, with Smith present to corroborate virtually every statement; and it could be seen that Capt. Mathewson was tremendously impressed. Like nearly everyone else in the town, he had had black suspicions of his own anent Joseph Curwen; hence it needed only this confirmation and enlargement of data to convince him absolutely. At the end of the conference he was very grave, and enjoined strict silence upon the two younger men. He would, he said, transmit the information separately to some ten or so of the most learned and prominent citizens of Providence; ascertaining their views and following whatever advice they might have to offer. Secrecy would probably be essential in any case, for this was no matter that the town constables or militia could cope with; and above all else the excitable crowd must be kept in ignorance, lest there be enacted in these already troublous times a repetition of that frightful Salem panic of less than a century before which had first brought Curwen hither.\n\nThe right persons to tell, he believed, would be Dr. Benjamin West, whose pamphlet on the late transit of Venus proved him a scholar and keen thinker; Rev. James Manning, President of the College which had just moved up from Warren and was temporarily housed in the new King Street schoolhouse awaiting the completion of its building on the hill above Presbyterian-Lane; ex-Governor Stephen Hopkins, who had been a member of the Philosophical Society at Newport, and was a man of very broad perceptions; John Carter, publisher of the Gazette; all four of the Brown brothers, John, Joseph, Nicholas, and Moses, who formed the recognised local magnates, and of whom Joseph was an amateur scientist of parts; old Dr. Jabez Bowen, whose erudition was considerable, and who had much first-hand knowledge of Curwen's odd purchases; and Capt. Abraham Whipple, a privateersman of phenomenal boldness and energy who could be counted on to lead in any active measures needed. These men, if favourable, might eventually be brought together for collective deliberation; and with them would rest the responsibility of deciding whether or not to inform the Governor of the Colony, Joseph Wanton of Newport, before taking action.\n\nThe mission of Capt. Mathewson prospered beyond his highest expectations; for whilst he found one or two of the chosen confidants somewhat sceptical of the possible ghastly side of Weeden's tale, there was not one who did not think it necessary to take some sort of secret and co\u00f6rdinated action. Curwen, it was clear, formed a vague potential menace to the welfare of the town and Colony; and must be eliminated at any cost. Late in December 1770 a group of eminent townsmen met at the home of Stephen Hopkins and debated tentative measures. Weeden's notes, which he had given to Capt. Mathewson, were carefully read; and he and Smith were summoned to give testimony anent details. Something very like fear seized the whole assemblage before the meeting was over, though there ran through that fear a grim determination which Capt. Whipple's bluff and resonant profanity best expressed. They would not notify the Governor, because a more than legal course seemed necessary. With hidden powers of uncertain extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town. Nameless reprisals might ensue, and even if the sinister creature complied, the removal would be no more than the shifting of an unclean burden to another place. The times were lawless, and men who had flouted the King's revenue forces for years were not the ones to balk at sterner things when duty impelled. Curwen must be surprised at his Pawtuxet farm by a large raiding-party of seasoned privateersmen and given one decisive chance to explain himself. If he proved a madman, amusing himself with shrieks and imaginary conversations in different voices, he would be properly confined. If something graver appeared, and if the underground horrors indeed turned out to be real, he and all with him must die. It could be done quietly, and even the widow and her father need not be told how it came about.\n\nWhile these serious steps were under discussion there occurred in the town an incident so terrible and inexplicable that for a time little else was mentioned for miles around. In the middle of a moonlight January night with heavy snow underfoot there resounded over the river and up the hill a shocking series of cries which brought sleepy heads to every window; and people around Weybosset Point saw a great white thing plunging frantically along the badly cleared space in front of the Turk's Head. There was a baying of dogs in the distance, but this subsided as soon as the clamour of the awakened town became audible. Parties of men with lanterns and muskets hurried out to see what was happening, but nothing rewarded their search. The next morning, however, a giant, muscular body, stark naked, was found on the jams of ice around the southern piers of the Great Bridge, where the Long Dock stretched out beside Abbott's distil-house, and the identity of this object became a theme for endless speculation and whispering. It was not so much the younger as the older folk who whispered, for only in the patriarchs did that rigid face with horror-bulging eyes strike any chord of memory. They, shaking as they did so, exchanged furtive murmurs of wonder and fear; for in those stiff, hideous features lay a resemblance so marvellous as to be almost an identity\u2014and that identity was with a man who had died full fifty years before.\n\nEzra Weeden was present at the finding; and remembering the baying of the night before, set out along Weybosset Street and across Muddy Dock Bridge whence the sound had come. He had a curious expectancy, and was not surprised when, reaching the edge of the settled district where the street merged into the Pawtuxet Road, he came upon some very curious tracks in the snow. The naked giant had been pursued by dogs and many booted men, and the returning tracks of the hounds and their masters could be easily traced. They had given up the chase upon coming too near the town. Weeden smiled grimly, and as a perfunctory detail traced the footprints back to their source. It was the Pawtuxet farm of Joseph Curwen, as he well knew it would be; and he would have given much had the yard been less confusingly trampled. As it was, he dared not seem too interested in full daylight. Dr. Bowen, to whom Weeden went at once with his report, performed an autopsy on the strange corpse, and discovered peculiarities which baffled him utterly. The digestive tracts of the huge man seemed never to have been in use, whilst the whole skin had a coarse, loosely knit texture impossible to account for. Impressed by what the old men whispered of this body's likeness to the long-dead blacksmith Daniel Green, whose great-grandson Aaron Hoppin was a supercargo in Curwen's employ, Weeden asked casual questions till he found where Green was buried. That night a party of ten visited the old North Burying Ground opposite Herrenden's Lane and opened a grave. They found it vacant, precisely as they had expected.\n\nMeanwhile arrangements had been made with the post riders to intercept Joseph Curwen's mail, and shortly before the incident of the naked body there was found a letter from one Jedediah Orne of Salem which made the co\u00f6perating citizens think deeply. Parts of it, copied and preserved in the private archives of the Smith family where Charles Ward found it, ran as follows:\n\n\"I delight that you continue in ye Gett'g at Olde Matters in your Way, and doe not think better was done at Mr. Hutchinson's in Salem-Village. Certainely, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of. What you sente, did not Worke, whether because of Any Thing miss'g, or because ye Wordes were not Righte from my Speak'g or yr Copy'g. I alone am at a Loss. I have not ye Chymicall art to followe Borellus, and owne my Self confounded by ye VII. Booke of ye Necronomicon that you recommende. But I wou'd have you Observe what was tolde to us aboute tak'g Care whom to calle up, for you are Sensible what Mr. Mather writ in ye Magnalia of \u2014, and can judge how truely that Horrendous thing is reported. I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you. I was frighted when I read of your know'g what Ben Zariatnatmik hadde in his ebony Boxe, for I was conscious who must have tolde you. And againe I ask that you shalle write me as Jedediah and not Simon. In this Community a Man may not live too long, and you knowe my Plan by which I came back as my Son. I am desirous you will Acquaint me with what ye Blacke Man learnt from Sylvanus Cocidius in ye Vault, under ye Roman Wall, and will be oblig'd for ye Lend'g of ye MS. you speak of.\"\n\nAnother and unsigned letter from Philadelphia provoked equal thought, especially for the following passage:\n\n\"I will observe what you say respecting the sending of Accounts only by yr Vessels, but can not always be certain when to expect them. In the Matter spoke of, I require onlie one more thing; but wish to be sure I apprehend you exactly. You inform me, that no Part must be missing if the finest Effects are to be had, but you can not but know how hard it is to be sure. It seems a great Hazard and Burthen to take away the whole Box, and in Town (i.e. St. Peter's, St. Paul's, St. Mary's, or Christ Church) it can scarce be done at all. But I know what Imperfections were in the one I rais'd up October last, and how many live Specimens you were forc'd to imploy before you hit upon the right Mode in the year 1766; so will be guided by you in all Matters. I am impatient for yr Brig, and inquire daily at Mr. Biddle's Wharf.\"\n\nA third suspicious letter was in an unknown tongue and even an unknown alphabet. In the Smith diary found by Charles Ward a single oft-repeated combination of characters is clumsily copied; and authorities at Brown University have pronounced the alphabet Amharic or Abyssinian, although they do not recognise the word. None of these epistles was ever delivered to Curwen, though the disappearance of Jedediah Orne from Salem as recorded shortly afterward shewed that the Providence men took certain quiet steps. The Pennsylvania Historical Society also has some curious letters received by Dr. Shippen regarding the presence of an unwholesome character in Philadelphia. But more decisive steps were in the air, and it is in the secret assemblages of sworn and tested sailors and faithful old privateersmen in the Brown warehouses by night that we must look for the main fruits of Weeden's disclosures. Slowly and surely a plan of campaign was under development which would leave no trace of Joseph Curwen's noxious mysteries.\n\nCurwen, despite all precautions, apparently felt that something was in the wind; for he was now remarked to wear an unusually worried look. His coach was seen at all hours in the town and on the Pawtuxet Road, and he dropped little by little the air of forced geniality with which he had latterly sought to combat the town's prejudice. The nearest neighbours to his farm, the Fenners, one night remarked a great shaft of light shooting into the sky from some aperture in the roof of that cryptical stone building with the high, excessively narrow windows; an event which they quickly communicated to John Brown in Providence. Mr. Brown had become the executive leader of the select group bent on Curwen's extirpation, and had informed the Fenners that some action was about to be taken. This he deemed needful because of the impossibility of their not witnessing the final raid; and he explained his course by saying that Curwen was known to be a spy of the customs officers at Newport, against whom the hand of every Providence shipper, merchant, and farmer was openly or clandestinely raised. Whether the ruse was wholly believed by neighbours who had seen so many queer things is not certain; but at any rate the Fenners were willing to connect any evil with a man of such queer ways. To them Mr. Brown had entrusted the duty of watching the Curwen farmhouse, and of regularly reporting every incident which took place there." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "The probability that Curwen was on guard and attempting unusual things, as suggested by the odd shaft of light, precipitated at last the action so carefully devised by the band of serious citizens. According to the Smith diary a company of about 100 men met at 10 p.m. on Friday, April 12th, 1771, in the great room of Thurston's Tavern at the Sign of the Golden Lion on Weybosset Point across the Bridge. Of the guiding group of prominent men in addition to the leader John Brown there were present Dr. Bowen, with his case of surgical instruments, President Manning without the great periwig (the largest in the Colonies) for which he was noted, Governor Hopkins, wrapped in his dark cloak and accompanied by his seafaring brother Esek, whom he had initiated at the last moment with the permission of the rest, John Carter, Capt. Mathewson, and Capt. Whipple, who was to lead the actual raiding party. These chiefs conferred apart in a rear chamber, after which Capt. Whipple emerged to the great room and gave the gathered seamen their last oaths and instructions. Eleazar Smith was with the leaders as they sat in the rear apartment awaiting the arrival of Ezra Weeden, whose duty was to keep track of Curwen and report the departure of his coach for the farm.\n\nAbout 10:30 a heavy rumble was heard on the Great Bridge, followed by the sound of a coach in the street outside; and at that hour there was no need of waiting for Weeden in order to know that the doomed man had set out for his last night of unhallowed wizardry. A moment later, as the receding coach clattered faintly over the Muddy Dock Bridge, Weeden appeared; and the raiders fell silently into military order in the street, shouldering the firelocks, fowling-pieces, or whaling harpoons which they had with them. Weeden and Smith were with the party, and of the deliberating citizens there were present for active service Capt. Whipple, the leader, Capt. Esek Hopkins, John Carter, President Manning, Capt. Mathewson, and Dr. Bowen; together with Moses Brown, who had come up at the eleventh hour though absent from the preliminary session in the tavern. All these freemen and their hundred sailors began the long march without delay, grim and a trifle apprehensive as they left the Muddy Dock behind and mounted the gentle rise of Broad Street toward the Pawtuxet Road. Just beyond Elder Snow's church some of the men turned back to take a parting look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill across the water, whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College edifice. At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its side, the old town dreamed; Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so monstrous and colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out.\n\nAn hour and a quarter later the raiders arrived, as previously agreed, at the Fenner farmhouse; where they heard a final report on their intended victim. He had reached his farm over half an hour before, and the strange light had soon afterward shot once into the sky, but there were no lights in any visible windows. This was always the case of late. Even as this news was given another great glare arose toward the south, and the party realised that they had indeed come close to the scene of awesome and unnatural wonders. Capt. Whipple now ordered his force to separate into three divisions; one of twenty men under Eleazar Smith to strike across to the shore and guard the landing-place against possible reinforcements for Curwen until summoned by a messenger for desperate service, a second of twenty men under Capt. Esek Hopkins to steal down into the river valley behind the Curwen farm and demolish with axes or gunpowder the oaken door in the high, steep bank, and the third to close in on the house and adjacent buildings themselves. Of this division one third was to be led by Capt. Mathewson to the cryptical stone edifice with high narrow windows, another third to follow Capt. Whipple himself to the main farmhouse, and the remaining third to preserve a circle around the whole group of buildings until summoned by a final emergency signal.\n\nThe river party would break down the hillside door at the sound of a single whistle-blast, then waiting and capturing anything which might issue from the regions within. At the sound of two whistle-blasts it would advance through the aperture to oppose the enemy or join the rest of the raiding contingent. The party at the stone building would accept these respective signals in an analogous manner; forcing an entrance at the first, and at the second descending whatever passage into the ground might be discovered, and joining the general or focal warfare expected to take place within the caverns. A third or emergency signal of three blasts would summon the immediate reserve from its general guard duty; its twenty men dividing equally and entering the unknown depths through both farmhouse and stone building. Capt. Whipple's belief in the existence of catacombs was absolute, and he took no alternative into consideration when making his plans. He had with him a whistle of great power and shrillness, and did not fear any upsetting or misunderstanding of signals. The final reserve at the landing, of course, was nearly out of the whistle's range; hence would require a special messenger if needed for help. Moses Brown and John Carter went with Capt. Hopkins to the river-bank, while President Manning was detailed with Capt. Mathewson to the stone building. Dr. Bowen, with Ezra Weeden, remained in Capt. Whipple's party which was to storm the farmhouse itself. The attack was to begin as soon as a messenger from Capt. Hopkins had joined Capt. Whipple to notify him of the river party's readiness. The leader would then deliver the loud single blast, and the various advance parties would commence their simultaneous attack on three points. Shortly before 1 a.m. the three divisions left the Fenner farmhouse; one to guard the landing, another to seek the river valley and the hillside door, and the third to subdivide and attend to the actual buildings of the Curwen farm.\n\nEleazar Smith, who accompanied the shore-guarding party, records in his diary an uneventful march and a long wait on the bluff by the bay; broken once by what seemed to be the distant sound of the signal whistle and again by a peculiar muffled blend of roaring and crying and a powder blast which seemed to come from the same direction. Later on one man thought he caught some distant gunshots, and still later Smith himself felt the throb of titanic and thunderous words resounding in upper air. It was just before dawn that a single haggard messenger with wild eyes and a hideous unknown odour about his clothing appeared and told the detachment to disperse quietly to their homes and never again think or speak of the night's doings or of him who had been Joseph Curwen. Something about the bearing of the messenger carried a conviction which his mere words could never have conveyed; for though he was a seaman well known to many of them, there was something obscurely lost or gained in his soul which set him for evermore apart. It was the same later on when they met other old companions who had gone into that zone of horror. Most of them had lost or gained something imponderable and indescribable. They had seen or heard or felt something which was not for human creatures, and could not forget it. From them there was never any gossip, for to even the commonest of mortal instincts there are terrible boundaries. And from that single messenger the party at the shore caught a nameless awe which almost sealed their own lips. Very few are the rumours which ever came from any of them, and Eleazar Smith's diary is the only written record which has survived from that whole expedition which set forth from the Sign of the Golden Lion under the stars.\n\nCharles Ward, however, discovered another vague sidelight in some Fenner correspondence which he found in New London, where he knew another branch of the family had lived. It seems that the Fenners, from whose house the doomed farm was distantly visible, had watched the departing columns of raiders; and had heard very clearly the angry barking of the Curwen dogs, followed by the first shrill blast which precipitated the attack. This blast had been followed by a repetition of the great shaft of light from the stone building, and in another moment, after a quick sounding of the second signal ordering a general invasion, there had come a subdued prattle of musketry followed by a horrible roaring cry which the correspondent Luke Fenner had represented in his epistle by the characters \"Waaaahrrrrr\u2014R'waaahrrr\". This cry, however, had possessed a quality which no mere writing could convey, and the correspondent mentions that his mother fainted completely at the sound. It was later repeated less loudly, and further but more muffled evidences of gunfire ensued; together with a loud explosion of powder from the direction of the river. About an hour afterward all the dogs began to bark frightfully, and there were vague ground rumblings so marked that the candlesticks tottered on the mantelpiece. A strong smell of sulphur was noted; and Luke Fenner's father declared that he heard the third or emergency whistle signal, though the others failed to detect it. Muffled musketry sounded again, followed by a deep scream less piercing but even more horrible than those which had preceded it; a kind of throaty, nastily plastic cough or gurgle whose quality as a scream must have come more from its continuity and psychological import than from its actual acoustic value.\n\nThen the flaming thing burst into sight at a point where the Curwen farm ought to lie, and the human cries of desperate and frightened men were heard. Muskets flashed and cracked, and the flaming thing fell to the ground. A second flaming thing appeared, and a shriek of human origin was plainly distinguished. Fenner wrote that he could even gather a few words belched in frenzy: \"Almighty, protect thy lamb!\" Then there were more shots, and the second flaming thing fell. After that came silence for about three-quarters of an hour; at the end of which time little Arthur Fenner, Luke's brother, exclaimed that he saw 'a red fog' going up to the stars from the accursed farm in the distance. No one but the child can testify to this, but Luke admits the significant coincidence implied by the panic of almost convulsive fright which at the same moment arched the backs and stiffened the fur of the three cats then within the room.\n\nFive minutes later a chill wind blew up, and the air became suffused with such an intolerable stench that only the strong freshness of the sea could have prevented its being noticed by the shore party or by any wakeful souls in Pawtuxet village. This stench was nothing which any of the Fenners had ever encountered before, and produced a kind of clutching, amorphous fear beyond that of the tomb or the charnel-house. Close upon it came the awful voice which no hapless hearer will ever be able to forget. It thundered out of the sky like a doom, and windows rattled as its echoes died away. It was deep and musical; powerful as a bass organ, but evil as the forbidden books of the Arabs. What it said no man can tell, for it spoke in an unknown tongue, but this is the writing Luke Fenner set down to portray the daemoniac intonations: \"DEESMEES\u2013JESHET\u2013BONE DOSEFE DUVEMA\u2013ENITEMOSS\". Not till the year 1919 did any soul link this crude transcript with anything else in mortal knowledge, but Charles Ward paled as he recognised what Mirandola had denounced in shudders as the ultimate horror among black magic's incantations.\n\nAn unmistakably human shout or deep chorused scream seemed to answer this malign wonder from the Curwen farm, after which the unknown stench grew complex with an added odour equally intolerable. A wailing distinctly different from the scream now burst out, and was protracted ululantly in rising and falling paroxysms. At times it became almost articulate, though no auditor could trace any definite words; and at one point it seemed to verge toward the confines of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human throats\u2014a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which darkness and silence ruled all things. Spirals of acrid smoke ascended to blot out the stars, though no flames appeared and no buildings were observed to be gone or injured on the following day.\n\nToward dawn two frightened messengers with monstrous and unplaceable odours saturating their clothing knocked at the Fenner door and requested a keg of rum, for which they paid very well indeed. One of them told the family that the affair of Joseph Curwen was over, and that the events of the night were not to be mentioned again. Arrogant as the order seemed, the aspect of him who gave it took away all resentment and lent it a fearsome authority; so that only these furtive letters of Luke Fenner, which he urged his Connecticut relative to destroy, remain to tell what was seen and heard. The non-compliance of that relative, whereby the letters were saved after all, has alone kept the matter from a merciful oblivion. Charles Ward had one detail to add as a result of a long canvass of Pawtuxet residents for ancestral traditions. Old Charles Slocum of that village said that there was known to his grandfather a queer rumour concerning a charred, distorted body found in the fields a week after the death of Joseph Curwen was announced. What kept the talk alive was the notion that this body, so far as could be seen in its burnt and twisted condition, was neither thoroughly human nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Not one man who participated in that terrible raid could ever be induced to say a word concerning it, and every fragment of the vague data which survives comes from those outside the final fighting party. There is something frightful in the care with which these actual raiders destroyed each scrap which bore the least allusion to the matter. Eight sailors had been killed, but although their bodies were not produced their families were satisfied with the statement that a clash with customs officers had occurred. The same statement also covered the numerous cases of wounds, all of which were extensively bandaged and treated only by Dr. Jabez Bowen, who had accompanied the party. Hardest to explain was the nameless odour clinging to all the raiders, a thing which was discussed for weeks. Of the citizen leaders, Capt. Whipple and Moses Brown were most severely hurt, and letters of their wives testify the bewilderment which their reticence and close guarding of their bandages produced. Psychologically every participant was aged, sobered, and shaken. It is fortunate that they were all strong men of action and simple, orthodox religionists, for with more subtle introspectiveness and mental complexity they would have fared ill indeed. President Manning was the most disturbed; but even he outgrew the darkest shadow, and smothered memories in prayers. Every man of those leaders had a stirring part to play in later years, and it is perhaps fortunate that this is so. Little more than a twelvemonth afterward Capt. Whipple led the mob who burnt the revenue ship Gaspee, and in this bold act we may trace one step in the blotting out of unwholesome images.\n\nThere was delivered to the widow of Joseph Curwen a sealed leaden coffin of curious design, obviously found ready on the spot when needed, in which she was told her husband's body lay. He had, it was explained, been killed in a customs battle about which it was not politic to give details. More than this no tongue ever uttered of Joseph Curwen's end, and Charles Ward had only a single hint wherewith to construct a theory. This hint was the merest thread\u2014a shaky underscoring of a passage in Jedediah Orne's confiscated letter to Curwen, as partly copied in Ezra Weeden's handwriting. The copy was found in the possession of Smith's descendants; and we are left to decide whether Weeden gave it to his companion after the end, as a mute clue to the abnormality which had occurred, or whether, as is more probable, Smith had it before, and added the underscoring himself from what he had managed to extract from his friend by shrewd guessing and adroit cross-questioning. The underlined passage is merely this:\n\n\"I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.\"\n\nIn the light of this passage, and reflecting on what last unmentionable allies a beaten man might try to summon in his direst extremity, Charles Ward may well have wondered whether any citizen of Providence killed Joseph Curwen.\n\nThe deliberate effacement of every memory of the dead man from Providence life and annals was vastly aided by the influence of the raiding leaders. They had not at first meant to be so thorough, and had allowed the widow and her father and child to remain in ignorance of the true conditions; but Capt. Tillinghast was an astute man, and soon uncovered enough rumours to whet his horror and cause him to demand that his daughter and granddaughter change their name, burn the library and all remaining papers, and chisel the inscription from the slate slab above Joseph Curwen's grave. He knew Capt. Whipple well, and probably extracted more hints from that bluff mariner than anyone else ever gained respecting the end of the accused sorcerer.\n\nFrom that time on the obliteration of Curwen's memory became increasingly rigid, extending at last by common consent even to the town records and files of the Gazette. It can be compared in spirit only to the hush that lay on Oscar Wilde's name for a decade after his disgrace, and in extent only to the fate of that sinful King of Runazar in Lord Dunsany's tale, whom the Gods decided must not only cease to be, but must cease ever to have been.\n\nMrs. Tillinghast, as the widow became known after 1772, sold the house in Olney Court and resided with her father in Power's Lane till her death in 1817. The farm at Pawtuxet, shunned by every living soul, remained to moulder through the years; and seemed to decay with unaccountable rapidity. By 1780 only the stone and brickwork were standing, and by 1800 even these had fallen to shapeless heaps. None ventured to pierce the tangled shrubbery on the river-bank behind which the hillside door may have lain, nor did any try to frame a definite image of the scenes amidst which Joseph Curwen departed from the horrors he had wrought.\n\nOnly robust old Capt. Whipple was heard by alert listeners to mutter once in a while to himself, \"Pox on that \u2014, but he had no business to laugh while he screamed. 'Twas as though the damn'd \u2014 had some'at up his sleeve. For half a crown I'd burn his \u2014 house.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Charles Ward, as we have seen, first learned in 1918 of his descent from Joseph Curwen. That he at once took an intense interest in everything pertaining to the bygone mystery is not to be wondered at; for every vague rumour that he had heard of Curwen now became something vital to himself, in whom flowed Curwen's blood. No spirited and imaginative genealogist could have done otherwise than begin forthwith an avid and systematic collection of Curwen data.\n\nIn his first delvings there was not the slightest attempt at secrecy; so that even Dr. Lyman hesitates to date the youth's madness from any period before the close of 1919. He talked freely with his family\u2014though his mother was not particularly pleased to own an ancestor like Curwen\u2014and with the officials of the various museums and libraries he visited. In applying to private families for records thought to be in their possession he made no concealment of his object, and shared the somewhat amused scepticism with which the accounts of the old diarists and letter-writers were regarded. He often expressed a keen wonder as to what really had taken place a century and a half before at that Pawtuxet farmhouse whose site he vainly tried to find, and what Joseph Curwen really had been.\n\nWhen he came across the Smith diary and archives and encountered the letter from Jedediah Orne he decided to visit Salem and look up Curwen's early activities and connexions there, which he did during the Easter vacation of 1919. At the Essex Institute, which was well known to him from former sojourns in the glamorous old town of crumbling Puritan gables and clustered gambrel roofs, he was very kindly received, and unearthed there a considerable amount of Curwen data. He found that his ancestor was born in Salem-Village, now Danvers, seven miles from town, on the eighteenth of February (O.S.) 1662\u20133; and that he had run away to sea at the age of fifteen, not appearing again for nine years, when he returned with the speech, dress, and manners of a native Englishman and settled in Salem proper. At that time he had little to do with his family, but spent most of his hours with the curious books he had brought from Europe, and the strange chemicals which came for him on ships from England, France, and Holland. Certain trips of his into the country were the objects of much local inquisitiveness, and were whisperingly associated with vague rumours of fires on the hills at night.\n\nCurwen's only close friends had been one Edward Hutchinson of Salem-Village and one Simon Orne of Salem. With these men he was often seen in conference about the Common, and visits among them were by no means infrequent. Hutchinson had a house well out toward the woods, and it was not altogether liked by sensitive people because of the sounds heard there at night. He was said to entertain strange visitors, and the lights seen from his windows were not always of the same colour. The knowledge he displayed concerning long-dead persons and long-forgotten events was considered distinctly unwholesome, and he disappeared about the time the witchcraft panic began, never to be heard from again. At that time Joseph Curwen also departed, but his settlement in Providence was soon learned of. Simon Orne lived in Salem until 1720, when his failure to grow visibly old began to excite attention. He thereafter disappeared, though thirty years later his precise counterpart and self-styled son turned up to claim his property. The claim was allowed on the strength of documents in Simon Orne's known hand, and Jedediah Orne continued to dwell in Salem till 1771, when certain letters from Providence citizens to the Rev. Thomas Barnard and others brought about his quiet removal to parts unknown.\n\nCertain documents by and about all of these strange characters were available at the Essex Institute, the Court House, and the Registry of Deeds, and included both harmless commonplaces such as land titles and bills of sale, and furtive fragments of a more provocative nature. There were four or five unmistakable allusions to them on the witchcraft trial records; as when one Hepzibah Lawson swore on July 10, 1692, at the Court of Oyer and Terminer under Judge Hathorne, that 'fortie Witches and the Blacke Man were wont to meete in the Woodes behind Mr. Hutchinson's house', and one Amity How declared at a session of August 8th before Judge Gedney that 'Mr. G. B. (Rev. George Burroughs) on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.' Then there was a catalogue of Hutchinson's uncanny library as found after his disappearance, and an unfinished manuscript in his handwriting, couched in a cipher none could read. Ward had a photostatic copy of this manuscript made, and began to work casually on the cipher as soon as it was delivered to him. After the following August his labours on the cipher became intense and feverish, and there is reason to believe from his speech and conduct that he hit upon the key before October or November. He never stated, though, whether or not he had succeeded.\n\nBut of the greatest immediate interest was the Orne material. It took Ward only a short time to prove from identity of penmanship a thing he had already considered established from the text of the letter to Curwen; namely, that Simon Orne and his supposed son were one and the same person. As Orne had said to his correspondent, it was hardly safe to live too long in Salem, hence he resorted to a thirty-year sojourn abroad, and did not return to claim his lands except as a representative of a new generation. Orne had apparently been careful to destroy most of his correspondence, but the citizens who took action in 1771 found and preserved a few letters and papers which excited their wonder. There were cryptic formulae and diagrams in his and other hands which Ward now either copied with care or had photographed, and one extremely mysterious letter in a chirography that the searcher recognised from items in the Registry of Deeds as positively Joseph Curwen's.\n\nThis Curwen letter, though undated as to the year, was evidently not the one in answer to which Orne had written the confiscated missive; and from internal evidence Ward placed it not much later than 1750. It may not be amiss to give the text in full, as a sample of the style of one whose history was so dark and terrible. The recipient is addressed as \"Simon\", but a line (whether drawn by Curwen or Orne Ward could not tell) is run through the word.\n\nProuidence, I. May (Ut. vulgo)\n\nBrother:\u2014\n\nMy honour'd Antient ffriende, due Respects and earnest Wishes to Him whom we serve for yr eternall Power. I am just come upon That which you ought to knowe, concern'g the Matter of the Laste Extremitie and what to doe regard'g yt. I am not dispos'd to followe you in go'g Away on acct. of my Yeares, for Prouidence hath not ye Sharpeness of ye Bay in hunt'g oute uncommon Things and bringinge to Tryall. I am ty'd up in Shippes and Goodes, and cou'd not doe as you did, besides the Whiche my ffarme at Patuxet hath under it What you Knowe, that wou'd not waite for my com'g Backe as an Other.\n\nBut I am not unreadie for harde ffortunes, as I haue tolde you, and haue longe work'd upon ye Way of get'g Backe after ye Laste. I laste Night strucke on ye Wordes that bringe up YOGGE-SOTHOTHE, and sawe for ye firste Time that fface spoke of by Ibn Schacabao in ye \u2014. And IT said, that ye III Psalme in ye Liber-Damnatus holdes ye Clauicle. With Sunne in V House, Saturne in Trine, drawe ye Pentagram of Fire, and saye ye ninth Uerse thrice. This Uerse repeate eache Roodemas and Hallow's Eue; and ye Thing will breede in ye Outside Spheres.\n\nAnd of ye Seede of Olde shal One be borne who shal looke Backe, tho' know'g not what he seekes.\n\nYett will this availe Nothing if there be no Heir, and if the Saltes, or the Way to make the Saltes, bee not Readie for his Hande; and here I will owne, I have not taken needed Stepps nor founde Much. Ye Process is plaguy harde to come neare; and it uses up such a Store of Specimens, I am harde putte to it to get Enough, notwithstand'g the Sailors I have from ye Indies. Ye People aboute are become curious, but I can stande them off. Ye Gentry are worse than the Populace, be'g more Circumstantiall in their Accts. and more believ'd in what they tell. That Parson and Mr. Merritt have talk'd some, I am fearfull, but no Thing soe far is Dangerous. Ye Chymical substances are easie of get'g, there be'g II. goode Chymists in Towne, Dr. Bowen and Sam: Carew. I am foll'g oute what Borellus saith, and haue Helpe in Abdool Al-Hazred his VII. Booke. Whatever I gette, you shal haue. And in ye meane while, do not neglect to make use of ye Wordes I haue here giuen. I haue them Righte, but if you Desire to see HIM, imploy the Writings on ye Piece of \u2014 that I am putt'g in this Packet. Saye ye Uerses every Roodmas and Hallow's Eue; and if yr Line runn out not, one shall bee in yeares to come that shal looke backe and use what Saltes or Stuff for Saltes you shal leaue him. Job XIV. XIV.\n\nI rejoice you are again at Salem, and hope I may see you not longe hence. I have a goode Stallion, and am think'g of get'g a Coach, there be'g one (Mr. Merritt's) in Prouidence already, tho' ye Roades are bad. If you are dispos'd to Travel, doe not pass me bye. From Boston take ye Post Rd. thro' Dedham, Wrentham, and Attleborough, goode Taverns be'g at all these Townes. Stop at Mr. Bolcom's in Wrentham, where ye Beddes are finer than Mr. Hatch's, but eate at ye other House for their Cooke is better. Turne into Prou. by Patucket ffalls, and ye Rd. past Mr. Sayles's Tavern. My House opp. Mr. Epenetus Olney's Tavern off ye Towne Street, Ist on ye N. side of Olney's Court. Distance from Boston Stone abt. XLIV Miles.\n\n\u2002Sir, I am yr olde and true ffriend and Servt. in Almousin-Metraton.\n\n\u2002Josephus C.\n\n\u2002To Mr. Simon Orne,\n\n\u2002William's-Lane, in Salem.\n\nThis letter, oddly enough, was what first gave Ward the exact location of Curwen's Providence home; for none of the records encountered up to that time had been at all specific. The discovery was doubly striking because it indicated as the newer Curwen house built in 1761 on the site of the old, a dilapidated building still standing in Olney Court and well known to Ward in his antiquarian rambles over Stampers' Hill. The place was indeed only a few squares from his own home on the great hill's higher ground, and was now the abode of a negro family much esteemed for occasional washing, housecleaning, and furnace-tending services. To find, in distant Salem, such sudden proof of the significance of this familiar rookery in his own family history, was a highly impressive thing to Ward; and he resolved to explore the place immediately upon his return. The more mystical phases of the letter, which he took to be some extravagant kind of symbolism, frankly baffled him; though he noted with a thrill of curiosity that the Biblical passage referred to\u2014Job 14, 14\u2014was the familiar verse, \"If a man die, shall he live again? All the days of my appointed time will I wait, till my change come.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Young Ward came home in a state of pleasant excitement, and spent the following Saturday in a long and exhaustive study of the house in Olney Court. The place, now crumbling with age, had never been a mansion; but was a modest two-and-a-half story wooden town house of the familiar Providence colonial type, with plain peaked roof, large central chimney, and artistically carved doorway with rayed fanlight, triangular pediment, and trim Doric pilasters. It had suffered but little alteration externally, and Ward felt he was gazing on something very close to the sinister matters of his quest.\n\nThe present negro inhabitants were known to him, and he was very courteously shewn about the interior by old Asa and his stout wife Hannah. Here there was more change than the outside indicated, and Ward saw with regret that fully half of the fine scroll-and-urn overmantels and shell-carved cupboard linings were gone, whilst much of the fine wainscotting and bolection moulding was marked, hacked, and gouged, or covered up altogether with cheap wall-paper. In general, the survey did not yield as much as Ward had somehow expected; but it was at least exciting to stand within the ancestral walls which had housed such a man of horror as Joseph Curwen. He saw with a thrill that a monogram had been very carefully effaced from the ancient brass knocker.\n\nFrom then until after the close of school Ward spent his time on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher and the accumulation of local Curwen data. The former still proved unyielding; but of the latter he obtained so much, and so many clues to similar data elsewhere, that he was ready by July to make a trip to New London and New York to consult old letters whose presence in those places was indicated. This trip was very fruitful, for it brought him the Fenner letters with their terrible description of the Pawtuxet farmhouse raid, and the Nightingale-Talbot letters in which he learned of the portrait painted on a panel of the Curwen library. This matter of the portrait interested him particularly, since he would have given much to know just what Joseph Curwen looked like; and he decided to make a second search of the house in Olney Court to see if there might not be some trace of the ancient features beneath peeling coats of later paint or layers of mouldy wall-paper.\n\nEarly in August that search took place, and Ward went carefully over the walls of every room sizeable enough to have been by any possibility the library of the evil builder. He paid especial attention to the large panels of such overmantels as still remained; and was keenly excited after about an hour, when on a broad area above the fireplace in a spacious ground-floor room he became certain that the surface brought out by the peeling of several coats of paint was sensibly darker than any ordinary interior paint or the wood beneath it was likely to have been. A few more careful tests with a thin knife, and he knew that he had come upon an oil portrait of great extent. With truly scholarly restraint the youth did not risk the damage which an immediate attempt to uncover the hidden picture with the knife might have done, but just retired from the scene of his discovery to enlist expert help. In three days he returned with an artist of long experience, Mr. Walter C. Dwight, whose studio is near the foot of College Hill; and that accomplished restorer of paintings set to work at once with proper methods and chemical substances. Old Asa and his wife were duly excited over their strange visitors, and were properly reimbursed for this invasion of their domestic hearth.\n\nAs day by day the work of restoration progressed, Charles Ward looked on with growing interest at the lines and shades gradually unveiled after their long oblivion. Dwight had begun at the bottom; hence since the picture was a three-quarter-length one, the face did not come out for some time. It was meanwhile seen that the subject was a spare, well-shaped man with dark-blue coat, embroidered waistcoat, black satin small-clothes, and white silk stockings, seated in a carved chair against the background of a window with wharves and ships beyond. When the head came out it was observed to bear a neat Albemarle wig, and to possess a thin, calm, undistinguished face which seemed somehow familiar to both Ward and the artist. Only at the very last, though, did the restorer and his client begin to gasp with astonishment at the details of that lean, pallid visage, and to recognise with a touch of awe the dramatic trick which heredity had played. For it took the final bath of oil and the final stroke of the delicate scraper to bring out fully the expression which centuries had hidden; and to confront the bewildered Charles Dexter Ward, dweller in the past, with his own living features in the countenance of his horrible great-great-great-grandfather.\n\nWard brought his parents to see the marvel he had uncovered, and his father at once determined to purchase the picture despite its execution on stationary panelling. The resemblance to the boy, despite an appearance of rather greater age, was marvellous; and it could be seen that through some trick of atavism the physical contours of Joseph Curwen had found precise duplication after a century and a half. Mrs. Ward's resemblance to her ancestor was not at all marked, though she could recall relatives who had some of the facial characteristics shared by her son and by the bygone Curwen. She did not relish the discovery, and told her husband that he had better burn the picture instead of bringing it home. There was, she averred, something unwholesome about it; not only intrinsically, but in its very resemblance to Charles. Mr. Ward, however, was a practical man of power and affairs\u2014a cotton manufacturer with extensive mills at Riverpoint in the Pawtuxet Valley\u2014and not one to listen to feminine scruples. The picture impressed him mightily with its likeness to his son, and he believed the boy deserved it as a present. In this opinion, it is needless to say, Charles most heartily concurred; and a few days later Mr. Ward located the owner of the house\u2014a small rodent-featured person with a guttural accent\u2014and obtained the whole mantel and overmantel bearing the picture at a curtly fixed priced which cut short the impending torrent of unctuous haggling.\n\nIt now remained to take off the panelling and remove it to the Ward home, where provisions were made for its thorough restoration and installation with an electric mock-fireplace in Charles's third-floor study or library. To Charles was left the task of superintending this removal, and on the twenty-eighth of August he accompanied two expert workmen from the Crooker decorating firm to the house in Olney Court, where the mantel and portrait-bearing overmantel were detached with great care and precision for transportation in the company's motor truck. There was left a space of exposed brickwork marking the chimney's course, and in this young Ward observed a cubical recess about a foot square, which must have lain directly behind the head of the portrait. Curious as to what such a space might mean or contain, the youth approached and looked within; finding beneath the deep coatings of dust and soot some loose yellowed papers, a crude, thick copybook, and a few mouldering textile shreds which may have formed the ribbon binding the rest together. Blowing away the bulk of the dirt and cinders, he took up the book and looked at the bold inscription on its cover. It was in a hand which he had learned to recognise at the Essex Institute, and proclaimed the volume as the \"Journall and Notes of Jos: Curwen, Gent., of Providence-Plantations, Late of Salem.\"\n\nExcited beyond measure by his discovery, Ward shewed the book to the two curious workmen beside him. Their testimony is absolute as to the nature and genuineness of the finding, and Dr. Willett relies on them to help establish his theory that the youth was not mad when he began his major eccentricities. All the other papers were likewise in Curwen's handwriting, and one of them seemed especially portentous because of its inscription: \"To Him Who Shal Come After, & How He May Gett Beyonde Time & ye Spheres.\" Another was in a cipher; the same, Ward hoped, as the Hutchinson cipher which had hitherto baffled him. A third, and here the searcher rejoiced, seemed to be a key to the cipher; whilst the fourth and fifth were addressed respectively to \"Edw: Hutchinson, Armiger\" and \"Jedediah Orne, Esq.\", 'or Their Heir or Heirs, or Those Represent'g Them'. The sixth and last was inscribed: \"Joseph Curwen his Life and Travells Bet'n ye yeares 1678 and 1687: Of Whither He Voyag'd, Where He Stay'd, Whom He Sawe, and What He Learnt.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "We have now reached the point from which the more academic school of alienists date Charles Ward's madness. Upon his discovery the youth had looked immediately at a few of the inner pages of the book and manuscripts, and had evidently seen something which impressed him tremendously. Indeed, in shewing the titles to the workmen he appeared to guard the text itself with peculiar care, and to labour under a perturbation for which even the antiquarian and genealogical significance of the find could hardly account. Upon returning home he broke the news with an almost embarrassed air, as if he wished to convey an idea of its supreme importance without having to exhibit the evidence itself. He did not even shew the titles to his parents, but simply told them that he had found some documents in Joseph Curwen's handwriting, \"mostly in cipher\", which would have to be studied very carefully before yielding up their true meaning. It is unlikely that he would have shewn what he did to the workmen, had it not been for their unconcealed curiosity. As it was he doubtless wished to avoid any display of peculiar reticence which would increase their discussion of the matter.\n\nThat night Charles Ward sat up in his room reading the new-found book and papers, and when day came he did not desist. His meals, on his urgent request when his mother called to see what was amiss, were sent up to him; and in the afternoon he appeared only briefly when the men came to install the Curwen picture and mantelpiece in his study. The next night he slept in snatches in his clothes, meanwhile wrestling feverishly with the unravelling of the cipher manuscript. In the morning his mother saw that he was at work on the photostatic copy of the Hutchinson cipher, which he had frequently shewn her before; but in response to her query he said that the Curwen key could not be applied to it. That afternoon he abandoned his work and watched the men fascinatedly as they finished their installation of the picture with its woodwork above a cleverly realistic electric log, setting the mock-fireplace and overmantel a little out from the north wall as if a chimney existed, and boxing in the sides with panelling to match the room's. The front panel holding the picture was sawn and hinged to allow cupboard space behind it. After the workmen went he moved his work into the study and sat down before it with his eyes half on the cipher and half on the portrait which stared back at him like a year-adding and century-recalling mirror.\n\nHis parents, subsequently recalling his conduct at this period, give interesting details anent the policy of concealment which he practiced. Before servants he seldom hid any paper which he might be studying, since he rightly assumed that Curwen's intricate and archaic chirography would be too much for them. With his parents, however, he was more circumspect; and unless the manuscript in question were a cipher, or a mere mass of cryptic symbols and unknown ideographs (as that entitled \"To Him Who Shal Come After etc.\" seemed to be), he would cover it with some convenient paper until his caller had departed. At night he kept the papers under lock and key in an antique cabinet of his, where he also placed them whenever he left the room. He soon resumed fairly regular hours and habits, except that his long walks and other outside interests seemed to cease. The opening of school, where he now began his senior year, seemed a great bore to him; and he frequently asserted his determination never to bother with college. He had, he said, important special investigations to make, which would provide him with more avenues toward knowledge and the humanities than any university which the world could boast.\n\nNaturally, only one who had always been more or less studious, eccentric, and solitary could have pursued this course for many days without attracting notice. Ward, however, was constitutionally a scholar and a hermit; hence his parents were less surprised than regretful at the close confinement and secrecy he adopted. At the same time, both his father and mother thought it odd that he would shew them no scrap of his treasure-trove, nor give any connected account of such data as he had deciphered. This reticence he explained away as due to a wish to wait until he might announce some connected revelation, but as the weeks passed without further disclosures there began to grow up between the youth and his family a kind of constraint; intensified in his mother's case by her manifest disapproval of all Curwen delvings.\n\nDuring October Ward began visiting the libraries again, but no longer for the antiquarian matter of his former days. Witchcraft and magic, occultism and daemonology, were what he sought now; and when Providence sources proved unfruitful he would take the train for Boston and tap the wealth of the great library in Copley Square, the Widener Library at Harvard, or the Zion Research Library in Brookline, where certain rare works on Biblical subjects are available. He bought extensively, and fitted up a whole additional set of shelves in his study for newly acquired works on uncanny subjects; while during the Christmas holidays he made a round of out-of-town trips including one to Salem to consult certain records at the Essex Institute.\n\nAbout the middle of January, 1920, there entered Ward's bearing an element of triumph which he did not explain, and he was no more found at work upon the Hutchinson cipher. Instead, he inaugurated a dual policy of chemical research and record-scanning; fitting up for the one a laboratory in the unused attic of the house, and for the latter haunting all the sources of vital statistics in Providence. Local dealers in drugs and scientific supplies, later questioned, gave astonishingly queer and meaningless catalogues of the substances and instruments he purchased; but clerks at the State House, the City Hall, and the various libraries agree as to the definite object of his second interest. He was searching intensely and feverishly for the grave of Joseph Curwen, from whose slate slab an older generation had so wisely blotted the name.\n\nLittle by little there grew upon the Ward family the conviction that something was wrong. Charles had had freaks and changes of minor interests before, but this growing secrecy and absorption in strange pursuits was unlike even him. His school work was the merest pretence; and although he failed in no test, it could be seen that the old application had all vanished. He had other concernments now; and when not in his new laboratory with a score of obsolete alchemical books, could be found either poring over old burial records down town or glued to his volumes of occult lore in his study, where the startlingly\u2014one almost fancied increasingly\u2014similar features of Joseph Curwen stared blandly at him from the great overmantel on the north wall.\n\nLate in March Ward added to his archive-searching a ghoulish series of rambles about the various ancient cemeteries of the city. The cause appeared later, when it was learned from City Hall clerks that he had probably found an important clue. His quest had suddenly shifted from the grave of Joseph Curwen to that of one Naphthali Field; and this shift was explained when, upon going over the files that he had been over, the investigators actually found a fragmentary record of Curwen's burial which had escaped the general obliteration, and which stated that the curious leaden coffin had been interred \"10 ft. S. and 5 ft. W. of Naphthali Field's grave in ye\u2014\". The lack of a specified burying-ground in the surviving entry greatly complicated the search, and Naphthali Field's grave seemed as elusive as that of Curwen; but here no systematic effacement had existed, and one might reasonably be expected to stumble on the stone itself even if its record had perished. Hence the rambles\u2014from which St. John's (the former King's) Churchyard and the ancient Congregational burying-ground in the midst of Swan Point Cemetery were excluded, since other statistics had shewn that the only Naphthali Field (obiit 1729) whose grave could have been meant had been a Baptist." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "It was toward May when Dr. Willett, at the request of the senior Ward, and fortified with all the Curwen data which the family had gleaned from Charles in his non-secretive days, talked with the young man. The interview was of little value or conclusiveness, for Willett felt at every moment that Charles was thoroughly master of himself and in touch with matters of real importance; but it at least forced the secretive youth to offer some rational explanation of his recent demeanour. Of a pallid, impassive type not easily shewing embarrassment, Ward seemed quite ready to discuss his pursuits, though not to reveal their object. He stated that the papers of his ancestor had contained some remarkable secrets of early scientific knowledge, for the most part in cipher, of an apparent scope comparable only to the discoveries of Friar Bacon and perhaps surpassing even those. They were, however, meaningless except when correlated with a body of learning now wholly obsolete; so that their immediate presentation to a world equipped only with modern science would rob them of all impressiveness and dramatic significance. To take their vivid place in the history of human thought they must first be correlated by one familiar with the background out of which they evolved, and to this task of correlation Ward was now devoting himself. He was seeking to acquire as fast as possible those neglected arts of old which a true interpreter of the Curwen data must possess, and hoped in time to make a full announcement and presentation of the utmost interest to mankind and to the world of thought. Not even Einstein, he declared, could more profoundly revolutionise the current conception of things.\n\nAs to his graveyard search, whose object he freely admitted, but the details of whose progress he did not relate, he said he had reason to think that Joseph Curwen's mutilated headstone bore certain mystic symbols\u2014carved from directions in his will and ignorantly spared by those who had effaced the name\u2014which were absolutely essential to the final solution of his cryptic system. Curwen, he believed, had wished to guard his secret with care; and had consequently distributed the data in an exceedingly curious fashion. When Dr. Willett asked to see the mystic documents, Ward displayed much reluctance and tried to put him off with such things as photostatic copies of the Hutchinson cipher and Orne formulae and diagrams; but finally shewed him the exteriors of some of the real Curwen finds\u2014the \"Journall and Notes\", the cipher (title in cipher also), and the formula-filled message \"To Him Who Shal Come After\"\u2014and let him glance inside such as were in obscure characters.\n\nHe also opened the diary at a page carefully selected for its innocuousness and gave Willett a glimpse of Curwen's connected handwriting in English. The doctor noted very closely the crabbed and complicated letters, and the general aura of the seventeenth century which clung round both penmanship and style despite the writer's survival into the eighteenth century, and became quickly certain that the document was genuine. The text itself was relatively trivial, and Willett recalled only a fragment:\n\n\"Wedn. 16 Octr. 1754. My Sloope the Wakeful this Day putt in from London with XX newe Men pick'd up in ye Indies, Spaniards from Martineco and 2 Dutch Men from Surinam. Ye Dutch Men are like to Desert from have'g hearde Somewhat ill of these Ventures, but I will see to ye Inducing of them to Staye. ffor Mr. Knight Dexter of ye Boy and Book 120 Pieces Camblets, 100 Pieces Assrtd. Cambleteens, 20 Pieces blue Duffles, 100 Pieces Shalloons, 50 Pieces Calamancoes, 300 Pieces each, Shendsoy and Humhums. ffor Mr. Green at ye Elephant 50 Gallon Cyttles, 20 Warm'g Pannes, 15 Bake Cyttles, 10 pr. Smoke'g Tonges. ffor Mr. Perrigo 1 Sett of Awles, ffor Mr. Nightingale 50 Reames prime Foolscap. Say'd ye SABAOTH thrice last Nighte but None appear'd. I must heare more from Mr. H. in Transylvania, tho' it is Harde reach'g him and exceeding strange he can not give me the Use of what he hath so well us'd these hundred yeares. Simon hath not Writ these V. Weekes, but I expecte soon hear'g from him.\"\n\nWhen upon reaching this point Dr. Willett turned the leaf he was quickly checked by Ward, who almost snatched the book from his grasp. All that the doctor had a chance to see on the newly opened page was a brief pair of sentences; but these, strangely enough, lingered tenaciously in his memory. They ran: \"Ye Verse from Liber-Damnatus be'g spoke V Roodmasses and IV Hallows-Eves, I am Hopeful ye Thing is breed'g Outside ye Spheres. It will drawe One who is to Come, if I can make sure he shal bee, and he shall think on Past thinges and look back thro' all ye yeares, against ye which I must have ready ye Saltes or That to make 'em with.\"\n\nWillett saw no more, but somehow this small glimpse gave a new and vague terror to the painted features of Joseph Curwen which stared blandly down from the overmantel. Ever after that he entertained the odd fancy\u2014which his medical skill of course assured him was only a fancy\u2014that the eyes of the portrait had a sort of wish, if not an actual tendency, to follow young Charles Ward as he moved about the room. He stopped before leaving to study the picture closely, marvelling at its resemblance to Charles and memorising every minute detail of the cryptical, colourless face, even down to a slight scar or pit in the smooth brow above the right eye. Cosmo Alexander, he decided, was a painter worthy of the Scotland that produced Raeburn, and a teacher worthy of his illustrious pupil Gilbert Stuart.\n\nAssured by the doctor that Charles's mental health was in no danger, but that on the other hand he was engaged in researches which might prove of real importance, the Wards were more lenient than they might otherwise have been when during the following June the youth made positive his refusal to attend college. He had, he declared, studies of much more vital importance to pursue; and intimated a wish to go abroad the following year in order to avail himself of certain sources of data not existing in America. The senior Ward, while denying this latter wish as absurd for a boy of only eighteen, acquiesced regarding the university; so that after a none too brilliant graduation from the Moses Brown School there ensued for Charles a three-year period of intensive occult study and graveyard searching. He became recognised as an eccentric, and dropped even more completely from the sight of his family's friends than he had been before; keeping close to his work and only occasionally making trips to other cities to consult obscure records. Once he went south to talk with a strange old mulatto who dwelt in a swamp and about whom a newspaper had printed a curious article. Again he sought a small village in the Adirondacks whence reports of certain odd ceremonial practices had come. But still his parents forbade him the trip to the Old World which he desired.\n\nComing of age in April, 1923, and having previously inherited a small competence from his maternal grandfather, Ward determined at last to take the European trip hitherto denied him. Of his proposed itinerary he would say nothing save that the needs of his studies would carry him to many places, but he promised to write his parents fully and faithfully. When they saw he could not be dissuaded, they ceased all opposition and helped as best they could; so that in June the young man sailed for Liverpool with the farewell blessings of his father and mother, who accompanied him to Boston and waved him out of sight from the White Star pier in Charlestown. Letters soon told of his safe arrival, and of his securing good quarters in Great Russell Street, London; where he proposed to stay, shunning all family friends, till he had exhausted the resources of the British Museum in a certain direction. Of his daily life he wrote but little, for there was little to write. Study and experiment consumed all his time, and he mentioned a laboratory which he had established in one of his rooms. That he said nothing of antiquarian rambles in the glamorous old city with its luring skyline of ancient domes and steeples and its tangles of roads and alleys whose mystic convolutions and sudden vistas alternately beckon and surprise, was taken by his parents as a good index of the degree to which his new interests had engrossed his mind.\n\nIn June, 1924, a brief note told of his departure for Paris, to which he had before made one or two flying trips for material in the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale. For three months thereafter he sent only postal cards, giving an address in the Rue St. Jacques and referring to a special search among rare manuscripts in the library of an unnamed private collector. He avoided acquaintances, and no tourists brought back reports of having seen him. Then came a silence, and in October the Wards received a picture card from Prague, Czecho-Slovakia, stating that Charles was in that ancient town for the purpose of conferring with a certain very aged man supposed to be the last living possessor of some very curious mediaeval information. He gave an address in the Neustadt, and announced no move till the following January; when he dropped several cards from Vienna telling of his passage through that city on the way toward a more easterly region whither one of his correspondents and fellow-delvers into the occult had invited him.\n\nThe next card was from Klausenburg in Transylvania, and told of Ward's progress toward his destination. He was going to visit a Baron Ferenczy, whose estate lay in the mountains east of Rakus; and was to be addressed at Rakus in the care of that nobleman. Another card from Rakus a week later, saying that his host's carriage had met him and that he was leaving the village for the mountains, was his last message for a considerable time; indeed, he did not reply to his parents' frequent letters until May, when he wrote to discourage the plan of his mother for a meeting in London, Paris, or Rome during the summer, when the elder Wards were planning to travel in Europe. His researches, he said, were such that he could not leave his present quarters; while the situation of Baron Ferenczy's castle did not favour visits. It was on a crag in the dark wooded mountains, and the region was so shunned by the country folk that normal people could not help feeling ill at ease. Moreover, the Baron was not a person likely to appeal to correct and conservative New England gentlefolk. His aspect and manners had idiosyncrasies, and his age was so great as to be disquieting. It would be better, Charles said, if his parents would wait for his return to Providence; which could scarcely be far distant.\n\nThat return did not, however, take place until May, 1926, when after a few heralding cards the young wanderer quietly slipped into New York on the Homeric and traversed the long miles to Providence by motor-coach, eagerly drinking in the green rolling hills, the fragrant, blossoming orchards, and the white steepled towns of vernal Connecticut; his first taste of ancient New England in nearly four years. When the coach crossed the Pawcatuck and entered Rhode Island amidst the faery goldenness of a late spring afternoon his heart beat with quickened force, and the entry to Providence along Reservoir and Elmwood avenues was a breathless and wonderful thing despite the depths of forbidden lore to which he had delved. At the high square where Broad, Weybosset, and Empire Streets join, he saw before and below him in the fire of sunset the pleasant, remembered houses and domes and steeples of the old town; and his head swam curiously as the vehicle rolled down the terminal behind the Biltmore, bringing into view the great dome and soft, roof-pierced greenery of the ancient hill across the river, and the tall colonial spire of the First Baptist Church limned pink in the magic evening light against the fresh springtime verdure of its precipitous background.\n\nOld Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long, continuous history which had brought him into being, and which had drawn him back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the case might be, for which all his years of travel and application had been preparing him. A taxicab whirled him through Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river, the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and up the steep curved slope of Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-flushed Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward. Then eight squares past the fine old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint brick sidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little white overtaken farmhouse on the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and stately bayed facade of the great brick house where he was born. It was twilight, and Charles Dexter Ward had come home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "A school of alienists slightly less academic than Dr. Lyman's assign to Ward's European trip the beginning of his true madness. Admitting that he was sane when he started, they believe that his conduct upon returning implies a disastrous change. But even to this claim Dr. Willett refuses to accede. There was, he insists, something later; and the queernesses of the youth at this stage he attributes to the practice of rituals learned abroad\u2014odd enough things, to be sure, but by no means implying mental aberration on the part of their celebrant. Ward himself, though visibly aged and hardened, was still normal in his general reactions; and in several talks with Willett displayed a balance which no madman\u2014even an incipient one\u2014could feign continuously for long. What elicited the notion of insanity at this period were the sounds heard at all hours from Ward's attic laboratory, in which he kept himself most of the time. There were chantings and repetitions, and thunderous declamations in uncanny rhythms; and although these sounds were always in Ward's own voice, there was something in the quality of that voice, and in the accents of the formulae it pronounced, which could not but chill the blood of every hearer. It was noticed that Nig, the venerable and beloved black cat of the household, bristled and arched his back perceptibly when certain of the tones were heard.\n\nThe odours occasionally wafted from the laboratory were likewise exceedingly strange. Sometimes they were very noxious, but more often they were aromatic, with a haunting, elusive quality which seemed to have the power of inducing fantastic images. People who smelled them had a tendency to glimpse momentary mirages of enormous vistas, with strange hills or endless avenues of sphinxes and hippogriffs stretching off into infinite distance. Ward did not resume his old-time rambles, but applied himself diligently to the strange books he had brought home, and to equally strange delvings within his quarters; explaining that European sources had greatly enlarged the possibilities of his work, and promising great revelations in the years to come. His older aspect increased to a startling degree his resemblance to the Curwen portrait in his library; and Dr. Willett would often pause by the latter after a call, marvelling at the virtual identity, and reflecting that only the small pit above the picture's right eye now remained to differentiate the long-dead wizard from the living youth. These calls of Willett's, undertaken at the request of the senior Wards, were curious affairs. Ward at no time repulsed the doctor, but the latter saw that he could never reach the young man's inner psychology. Frequently he noted peculiar things about; little wax images of grotesque design on the shelves or tables, and the half-erased remnants of circles, triangles, and pentagrams in chalk or charcoal on the cleared central space of the large room. And always in the night those rhythms and incantations thundered, till it became very difficult to keep servants or suppress furtive talk of Charles's madness.\n\nIn January, 1927, a peculiar incident occurred. One night about midnight, as Charles was chanting a ritual whose weird cadence echoed unpleasantly through the house below, there came a sudden gust of chill wind from the bay, and a faint, obscure trembling of the earth which everyone in the neighbourhood noted. At the same time the cat exhibited phenomenal traces of fright, while dogs bayed for as much as a mile around. This was the prelude to a sharp thunderstorm, anomalous for the season, which brought with it such a crash that Mr. and Mrs. Ward believed the house had been struck. They rushed upstairs to see what damage had been done, but Charles met them at the door to the attic; pale, resolute, and portentous, with an almost fearsome combination of triumph and seriousness on his face. He assured them that the house had not really been struck, and that the storm would soon be over. They paused, and looking through a window saw that he was indeed right; for the lightning flashed farther and farther off, whilst the trees ceased to bend in the strange frigid gust from the water. The thunder sank to a sort of dull mumbling chuckle and finally died away. Stars came out, and the stamp of triumph on Charles Ward's face crystallised into a very singular expression.\n\nFor two months or more after this incident Ward was less confined than usual to his laboratory. He exhibited a curious interest in the weather, and made odd inquiries about the date of the spring thawing of the ground. One night late in March he left the house after midnight, and did not return till almost morning; when his mother, being wakeful, heard a rumbling motor draw up to the carriage entrance. Muffled oaths could be distinguished, and Mrs. Ward, rising and going to the window, saw four dark figures removing a long, heavy box from a truck at Charles's direction and carrying it within by the side door. She heard laboured breathing and ponderous footfalls on the stairs, and finally a dull thumping in the attic; after which the footfalls descended again, and the four men reappeared outside and drove off in their truck.\n\nThe next day Charles resumed his strict attic seclusion, drawing down the dark shades of his laboratory windows and appearing to be working on some metal substance. He would open the door to no one, and steadfastly refused all proffered food. About noon a wrenching sound followed by a terrible cry and a fall were heard, but when Mrs. Ward rapped at the door her son at length answered faintly, and told her that nothing had gone amiss. The hideous and indescribable stench now welling out was absolutely harmless and unfortunately necessary. Solitude was the one prime essential, and he would appear later for dinner. That afternoon, after the conclusion of some odd hissing sounds which came from behind the locked portal, he did finally appear; wearing an extremely haggard aspect and forbidding anyone to enter the laboratory upon any pretext. This, indeed, proved the beginning of a new policy of secrecy; for never afterward was any other person permitted to visit either the mysterious garret workroom or the adjacent storeroom which he cleaned out, furnished roughly, and added to his inviolably private domain as a sleeping apartment. Here he lived, with books brought up from his library beneath, till the time he purchased the Pawtuxet bungalow and moved to it all his scientific effects.\n\nIn the evening Charles secured the paper before the rest of the family and damaged part of it through an apparent accident. Later on Dr. Willett, having fixed the date from statements by various members of the household, looked up an intact copy at the Journal office and found that in the destroyed section the following small item had occurred:\n\n[ Nocturnal Diggers Surprised in North Burial Ground ]\n\nRobert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, this morning discovered a party of several men with a motor truck in the oldest part of the cemetery, but apparently frightened them off before they had accomplished whatever their object may have been.\n\nThe discovery took place at about four o'clock, when Hart's attention was attracted by the sound of a motor outside his shelter. Investigating, he saw a large truck on the main drive several rods away; but could not reach it before the sound of his feet on the gravel had revealed his approach. The men hastily placed a large box in the truck and drove away toward the street before they could be overtaken; and since no known grave was disturbed, Hart believes that this box was an object which they wished to bury.\n\nThe diggers must have been at work for a long while before detection, for Hart found an enormous hole dug at a considerable distance back from the roadway in the lot of Amasa Field, where most of the old stones have long ago disappeared. The hole, a place as large and deep as a grave, was empty; and did not coincide with any interment mentioned in the cemetery records.\n\nSergt. Riley of the Second Station viewed the spot and gave the opinion that the hole was dug by bootleggers rather gruesomely and ingeniously seeking a safe cache for liquor in a place not likely to be disturbed. In reply to questions Hart said he thought the escaping truck had headed up Rochambeau Avenue, though he could not be sure.\n\nDuring the next few days Ward was seldom seen by his family. Having added sleeping quarters to his attic realm, he kept closely to himself there, ordering food brought to the door and not taking it in until after the servant had gone away. The droning of monotonous formulae and the chanting of bizarre rhythms recurred at intervals, while at other times occasional listeners could detect the sound of tinkling glass, hissing chemicals, running water, or roaring gas flames. Odours of the most unplaceable quality, wholly unlike any before noted, hung at times around the door; and the air of tension observable in the young recluse whenever he did venture briefly forth was such as to excite the keenest speculation. Once he made a hasty trip to the Athenaeum for a book he required, and again he hired a messenger to fetch him a highly obscure volume from Boston. Suspense was written portentously over the whole situation, and both the family and Dr. Willett confessed themselves wholly at a loss what to do or think about it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Then on the fifteenth of April a strange development occurred. While nothing appeared to grow different in kind, there was certainly a very terrible difference in degree; and Dr. Willett somehow attaches great significance to the change. The day was Good Friday, a circumstance of which the servants made much, but which others quite naturally dismiss as an irrelevant coincidence. Late in the afternoon young Ward began repeating a certain formula in a singularly loud voice, at the same time burning some substance so pungent that its fumes escaped over the entire house. The formula was so plainly audible in the hall outside the locked door that Mrs. Ward could not help memorising it as she waited and listened anxiously, and later on she was able to write it down at Dr. Willett's request. It ran as follows, and experts have told Dr. Willett that its very close analogue can be found in the mystic writings of \"Eliphas Levi\", that cryptic soul who crept through a crack in the forbidden door and glimpsed the frightful vistas of the void beyond:\n\n\u2003\"Per Adonai Eloim, Adonai Jehova,\n\n\u2003Adonai Sabaoth, Metraton On Agla Mathon,\n\n\u2003verbum pythonicum, mysterium salamandrae,\n\n\u2003conventus sylvorum, antra gnomorum,\n\n\u2003daemonia Coeli Gad, Almousin, Gibor, Jehosua,\n\n\u2003Evam, Zariatnatmik, veni, veni, veni.\"\n\nThis had been going on for two hours without change or intermission when over all the neighbourhood a pandaemoniac howling of dogs set in. The extent of this howling can be judged from the space it received in the papers the next day, but to those in the Ward household it was overshadowed by the odour which instantly followed it; a hideous, all-pervasive odour which none of them had ever smelt before or have ever smelt since. In the midst of this mephitic flood there came a very perceptible flash like that of lightning, which would have been blinding and impressive but for the daylight around; and then was heard the voice that no listener can ever forget because of its thunderous remoteness, its incredible depth, and its eldritch dissimilarity to Charles Ward's voice. It shook the house, and was clearly heard by at least two neighbours above the howling of the dogs. Mrs. Ward, who had been listening in despair outside her son's locked laboratory, shivered as she recognised its hellish import; for Charles had told her of its evil fame in dark books, and of the manner in which it had thundered, according to the Fenner letters, above the doomed Pawtuxet farmhouse on the night of Joseph Curwen's annihilation. There was no mistaking that nightmare phrase, for Charles had described it too vividly in the old days when he had talked frankly of his Curwen investigations. And yet it was only this fragment of an archaic and forgotten language: \"DIES MIES JESCHET BOENE DOESEF DOUVEMA ENITEMAUS\".\n\nClose upon this thundering there came a momentary darkening of the daylight, though sunset was still an hour distant, and then a puff of added odour different from the first but equally unknown and intolerable. Charles was chanting again now and his mother could hear syllables that sounded like \"Yi-nash-Yog-Sothoth-he-lgeb-fi-throdog\"\u2014ending in a \"Yah!\" whose maniacal force mounted in an earsplitting crescendo. A second later all previous memories were effaced by the wailing scream which burst out with frantic explosiveness and gradually changed form to a paroxysm of diabolic and hysterical laughter. Mrs. Ward, with the mingled fear and blind courage of maternity, advanced and knocked affrightedly at the concealing panels, but obtained no sign of recognition. She knocked again, but paused nervelessly as a second shriek arose, this one unmistakably in the familiar voice of her son, and sounding concurrently with the still bursting cachinnations of that other voice. Presently she fainted, although she is still unable to recall the precise and immediate cause. Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.\n\nMr. Ward returned from the business section at about quarter past six; and not finding his wife downstairs, was told by the frightened servants that she was probably watching at Charles's door, from which the sounds had been far stranger than ever before. Mounting the stairs at once, he saw Mrs. Ward stretched at full length on the floor of the corridor outside the laboratory; and realising that she had fainted, hastened to fetch a glass of water from a set bowl in a neighbouring alcove. Dashing the cold fluid in her face, he was heartened to observe an immediate response on her part, and was watching the bewildered opening of her eyes when a chill shot through him and threatened to reduce him to the very state from which she was emerging. For the seemingly silent laboratory was not as silent as it had appeared to be, but held the murmurs of a tense, muffled conversation in tones too low for comprehension, yet of a quality profoundly disturbing to the soul.\n\nIt was not, of course, new for Charles to mutter formulae; but this muttering was definitely different. It was so palpably a dialogue, or imitation of a dialogue, with the regular alteration of inflections suggesting question and answer, statement and response. One voice was undisguisedly that of Charles, but the other had a depth and hollowness which the youth's best powers of ceremonial mimicry had scarcely approached before. There was something hideous, blasphemous, and abnormal about it, and but for a cry from his recovering wife which cleared his mind by arousing his protective instincts it is not likely that Theodore Howland Ward could have maintained for nearly a year more his old boast that he had never fainted. As it was, he seized his wife in his arms and bore her quickly downstairs before she could notice the voices which had so horribly disturbed him. Even so, however, he was not quick enough to escape catching something himself which caused him to stagger dangerously with his burden. For Mrs. Ward's cry had evidently been heard by others than he, and there had come from behind the locked door the first distinguishable words which that masked and terrible colloquy had yielded. They were merely an excited caution in Charles's own voice, but somehow their implications held a nameless fright for the father who overheard them. The phrase was just this: \"Sshh!\u2014write!\"\n\nMr. and Mrs. Ward conferred at some length after dinner, and the former resolved to have a firm and serious talk with Charles that very night. No matter how important the object, such conduct could no longer be permitted; for these latest developments transcended every limit of sanity and formed a menace to the order and nervous well-being of the entire household. The youth must indeed have taken complete leave of his senses, since only downright madness could have prompted the wild screams and imaginary conversations in assumed voices which the present day had brought forth. All this must be stopped, or Mrs. Ward would be made ill and the keeping of servants become an impossibility.\n\nMr. Ward rose at the close of the meal and started upstairs for Charles's laboratory. On the third floor, however, he paused at the sounds which he heard proceeding from the now disused library of his son. Books were apparently being flung about and papers wildly rustled, and upon stepping to the door Mr. Ward beheld the youth within, excitedly assembling a vast armful of literary matter of every size and shape. Charles's aspect was very drawn and haggard, and he dropped his entire load with a start at the sound of his father's voice. At the elder man's command he sat down, and for some time listened to the admonitions he had so long deserved. There was no scene. At the end of the lecture he agreed that his father was right, and that his noises, mutterings, incantations, and chemical odours were indeed inexcusable nuisances. He agreed to a policy of greater quiet, though insisting on a prolongation of his extreme privacy. Much of his future work, he said, was in any case purely book research; and he could obtain quarters elsewhere for any such vocal rituals as might be necessary at a later stage. For the fright and fainting of his mother he expressed the keenest contrition, and explained that the conversation later heard was part of an elaborate symbolism designed to create a certain mental atmosphere. His use of abstruse technical terms somewhat bewildered Mr. Ward, but the parting impression was one of undeniable sanity and poise despite a mysterious tension of the utmost gravity. The interview was really quite inconclusive, and as Charles picked up his armful and left the room Mr. Ward hardly knew what to make of the entire business. It was as mysterious as the death of poor old Nig, whose stiffening form had been found an hour before in the basement, with staring eyes and fear-distorted mouth.\n\nDriven by some vague detective instinct, the bewildered parent now glanced curiously at the vacant shelves to see what his son had taken up to the attic. The youth's library was plainly and rigidly classified, so that one might tell at a glance the books or at least the kind of books which had been withdrawn. On this occasion Mr. Ward was astonished to find that nothing of the occult or the antiquarian, beyond what had been previously removed, was missing. These new withdrawals were all modern items; histories, scientific treatises, geographies, manuals of literature, philosophic works, and certain contemporary newspapers and magazines. It was a very curious shift from Charles Ward's recent run of reading, and the father paused in a growing vortex of perplexity and an engulfing sense of strangeness. The strangeness was a very poignant sensation, and almost clawed at his chest as he strove to see just what was wrong around him. Something was indeed wrong, and tangibly as well as spiritually so. Ever since he had been in this room he had known that something was amiss, and at last it dawned upon him what it was.\n\nOn the north wall rose still the ancient carved overmantel from the house in Olney Court, but to the cracked and precariously restored oils of the large Curwen portrait disaster had come. Time and unequal heating had done their work at last, and at some time since the room's last cleaning the worst had happened. Peeling clear of the wood, curling tighter and tighter, and finally crumbling into small bits with what must have been malignly silent suddenness, the portrait of Joseph Curwen had resigned forever its staring surveillance of the youth it so strangely resembled, and now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "In the week following that memorable Good Friday Charles Ward was seen more often than usual, and was continually carrying books between his library and the attic laboratory. His actions were quiet and rational, but he had a furtive, hunted look which his mother did not like, and developed an incredibly ravenous appetite as gauged by his demands upon the cook. Dr. Willett had been told of those Friday noises and happenings, and on the following Tuesday had a long conversation with the youth in the library where the picture stared no more. The interview was, as always, inconclusive; but Willett is still ready to swear that the youth was sane and himself at the time. He held out promises of an early revelation, and spoke of the need of securing a laboratory elsewhere. At the loss of the portrait he grieved singularly little considering his first enthusiasm over it, but seemed to find something of positive humour in its sudden crumbling.\n\nAbout the second week Charles began to be absent from the house for long periods, and one day when good old black Hannah came to help with the spring cleaning she mentioned his frequent visits to the old house in Olney Court, where he would come with a large valise and perform curious delvings in the cellar. He was always very liberal to her and to old Asa, but seemed more worried than he used to be; which grieved her very much, since she had watched him grow up from birth. Another report of his doings came from Pawtuxet, where some friends of the family saw him at a distance a surprising number of times. He seemed to haunt the resort and canoe-house of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, and subsequent inquiries by Dr. Willett at that place brought out the fact that his purpose was always to secure access to the rather hedged-in river-bank, along which he would walk toward the north, usually not reappearing for a very long while.\n\nLate in May came a momentary revival of ritualistic sounds in the attic laboratory which brought a stern reproof from Mr. Ward and a somewhat distracted promise of amendment from Charles. It occurred one morning, and seemed to form a resumption of the imaginary conversation noted on that turbulent Good Friday. The youth was arguing or remonstrating hotly with himself, for there suddenly burst forth a perfectly distinguishable series of clashing shouts in differentiated tones like alternate demands and denials which caused Mrs. Ward to run upstairs and listen at the door. She could hear no more than a fragment whose only plain words were \"must have it red for three months\", and upon her knocking all sounds ceased at once. When Charles was later questioned by his father he said that there were certain conflicts of spheres of consciousness which only great skill could avoid, but which he would try to transfer to other realms.\n\nAbout the middle of June a queer nocturnal incident occurred. In the early evening there had been some noise and thumping in the laboratory upstairs, and Mr. Ward was on the point of investigating when it suddenly quieted down. That midnight, after the family had retired, the butler was nightlocking the front door when according to his statement Charles appeared somewhat blunderingly and uncertainly at the foot of the stairs with a large suitcase and made signs that he wished egress. The youth spoke no word, but the worthy Yorkshireman caught one sight of his fevered eyes and trembled causelessly. He opened the door and young Ward went out, but in the morning he presented his resignation to Mrs. Ward. There was, he said, something unholy in the glance Charles had fixed on him. It was no way for a young gentleman to look at an honest person, and he could not possibly stay another night. Mrs. Ward allowed the man to depart, but she did not value his statement highly. To fancy Charles in a savage state that night was quite ridiculous, for as long as she had remained awake she had heard faint sounds from the laboratory above; sounds as if of sobbing and pacing, and of a sighing which told only of despair's profoundest depths. Mrs. Ward had grown used to listening for sounds in the night, for the mystery of her son was fast driving all else from her mind.\n\nThe next evening, much as on another evening nearly three months before, Charles Ward seized the newspaper very early and accidentally lost the main section. The matter was not recalled till later, when Dr. Willett began checking up loose ends and searching out missing links here and there. In the Journal office he found the section which Charles had lost, and marked two items as of possible significance. They were as follows:\n\nIt was this morning discovered by Robert Hart, night watchman at the North Burial Ground, that ghouls were again at work in the ancient portion of the cemetery. The grave of Ezra Weeden, who was born in 1740 and died in 1824, according to his uprooted and savagely splintered slate headstone, was found excavated and rifled, the work being evidently done with a spade stolen from an adjacent tool-shed.\n\nWhatever the contents may have been after more than a century of burial, all was gone except a few slivers of decayed wood. There were no wheel tracks, but the police have measured a single set of footprints which they found in the vicinity, and which indicate the boots of a man of refinement.\n\nHart is inclined to link this incident with the digging discovered last March, when a party in a motor truck were frightened away after making a deep excavation; but Sergt. Riley of the Second Station discounts this theory and points to vital differences in the two cases. In March the digging had been in a spot where no grave was known; but this time a well-marked and cared-for grave had been rifled with every evidence of deliberate purpose, and with a conscious malignity expressed in the splintering of the slab which had been intact up to the day before.\n\nMembers of the Weeden family, notified of the happening, expressed their astonishment and regret; and were wholly unable to think of any enemy who would care to violate the grave of their ancestor. Hazard Weeden of 598 Angell Street recalls a family legend according to which Ezra Weeden was involved in some very peculiar circumstances, not dishonourable to himself, shortly before the Revolution; but of any modern feud or mystery he is frankly ignorant. Inspector Cunningham has been assigned to the case, and hopes to uncover some valuable clues in the near future.\n\nResidents of Pawtuxet were aroused about 3 a.m. today by a phenomenal baying of dogs which seemed to centre near the river just north of Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet. The volume and quality of the howling were unusually odd, according to most who heard it; and Fred Lemdin, night watchman at Rhodes, declares it was mixed with something very like the shrieks of a man in mortal terror and agony. A sharp and very brief thunderstorm, which seemed to strike somewhere near the bank of the river, put an end to the disturbance. Strange and unpleasant odours, probably from the oil tanks along the bay, are popularly linked with this incident; and may have had their share in exciting the dogs.\n\nThe aspect of Charles now became very haggard and hunted, and all agreed in retrospect that he may have wished at this period to make some statement or confession from which sheer terror withheld him. The morbid listening of his mother in the night brought out the fact that he made frequent sallies abroad under cover of darkness, and most of the more academic alienists unite at present in charging him with the revolting cases of vampirism which the press so sensationally reported about this time, but which have not yet been definitely traced to any known perpetrator. These cases, too recent and celebrated to need detailed mention, involved victims of every age and type and seemed to cluster around two distinct localities; the residential hill and the North End, near the Ward home, and the suburban districts across the Cranston line near Pawtuxet. Both late wayfarers and sleepers with open windows were attacked, and those who lived to tell the tale spoke unanimously of a lean, lithe, leaping monster with burning eyes which fastened its teeth in the throat or upper arm and feasted ravenously.\n\nDr. Willett, who refuses to date the madness of Charles Ward as far back as even this, is cautious in attempting to explain these horrors. He has, he declares, certain theories of his own; and limits his positive statements to a peculiar kind of negation. \"I will not,\" he says, \"state who or what I believe perpetrated these attacks and murders, but I will declare that Charles Ward was innocent of them. I have reason to be sure he was ignorant of the taste of blood, as indeed his continued anaemic decline and increasing pallor prove better than any verbal argument. Ward meddled with terrible things, but he has paid for it, and he was never a monster or a villain. As for now\u2014I don't like to think. A change came, and I'm content to believe that the old Charles Ward died with it. His soul did, anyhow, for that mad flesh that vanished from Waite's hospital had another.\"\n\nWillett speaks with authority, for he was often at the Ward home attending Mrs. Ward, whose nerves had begun to snap under the strain. Her nocturnal listening had bred some morbid hallucinations which she confided to the doctor with hesitancy, and which he ridiculed in talking to her, although they made him ponder deeply when alone. These delusions always concerned the faint sounds which she fancied she heard in the attic laboratory and bedroom, and emphasised the occurrence of muffled sighs and sobbings at the most impossible times. Early in July Willett ordered Mrs. Ward to Atlantic City for an indefinite recuperative sojourn, and cautioned both Mr. Ward and the haggard and elusive Charles to write her only cheering letters. It is probably to this enforced and reluctant escape that she owes her life and continued sanity." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Not long after his mother's departure Charles Ward began negotiating for the Pawtuxet bungalow. It was a squalid little wooden edifice with a concrete garage, perched high on the sparsely settled bank of the river slightly above Rhodes, but for some odd reason the youth would have nothing else. He gave the real-estate agencies no peace till one of them secured it for him at an exorbitant price from a somewhat reluctant owner, and as soon as it was vacant he took possession under cover of darkness, transporting in a great closed van the entire contents of his attic laboratory, including the books both weird and modern which he had borrowed from his study. He had this van loaded in the black small hours, and his father recalls only a drowsy realisation of stifled oaths and stamping feet on the night the goods were taken away. After that Charles moved back to his own old quarters on the third floor, and never haunted the attic again.\n\nTo the Pawtuxet bungalow Charles transferred all the secrecy with which he had surrounded his attic realm, save that he now appeared to have two sharers of his mysteries; a villainous-looking Portuguese half-caste from the South Main St. waterfront who acted as a servant, and a thin, scholarly stranger with dark glasses and a stubbly full beard of dyed aspect whose status was evidently that of a colleague. Neighbours vainly tried to engage these odd persons in conversation. The mulatto Gomes spoke very little English, and the bearded man, who gave his name as Dr. Allen, voluntarily followed his example. Ward himself tried to be more affable, but succeeded only in provoking curiosity with his rambling accounts of chemical research. Before long queer tales began to circulate regarding the all-night burning of lights; and somewhat later, after this burning had suddenly ceased, there rose still queerer tales of disproportionate orders of meat from the butcher's and of the muffled shouting, declamation, rhythmic chanting, and screaming supposed to come from some very deep cellar below the place. Most distinctly the new and strange household was bitterly disliked by the honest bourgeoisie of the vicinity, and it is not remarkable that dark hints were advanced connecting the hated establishment with the current epidemic of vampiristic attacks and murders; especially since the radius of that plague seemed now confined wholly to Pawtuxet and the adjacent streets of Edgewood.\n\nWard spent most of his time at the bungalow, but slept occasionally at home and was still reckoned a dweller beneath his father's roof. Twice he was absent from the city on week-long trips, whose destinations have not yet been discovered. He grew steadily paler and more emaciated even than before, and lacked some of his former assurance when repeating to Dr. Willett his old, old story of vital research and future revelations. Willett often waylaid him at his father's house, for the elder Ward was deeply worried and perplexed, and wished his son to get as much sound oversight as could be managed in the case of so secretive and independent an adult. The doctor still insists that the youth was sane even as late as this, and adduces many a conversation to prove his point.\n\nAbout September the vampirism declined, but in the following January Ward almost became involved in serious trouble. For some time the nocturnal arrival and departure of motor trucks at the Pawtuxet bungalow had been commented upon, and at this juncture an unforeseen hitch exposed the nature of at least one item of their contents. In a lonely spot near Hope Valley had occurred one of the frequent sordid waylayings of trucks by \"hi-jackers\" in quest of liquor shipments, but this time the robbers had been destined to receive the greater shock. For the long cases they seized proved upon opening to contain some exceedingly gruesome things; so gruesome, in fact, that the matter could not be kept quiet amongst the denizens of the underworld. The thieves had hastily buried what they discovered, but when the State Police got wind of the matter a careful search was made. A recently arrested vagrant, under promise of immunity from prosecution on any additional charge, at last consented to guide a party of troopers to the spot; and there was found in that hasty cache a very hideous and shameful thing. It would not be well for the national\u2014or even the international\u2014sense of decorum if the public were ever to know what was uncovered by that awestruck party. There was no mistaking it, even by these far from studious officers; and telegrams to Washington ensued with feverish rapidity.\n\nThe cases were addressed to Charles Ward at his Pawtuxet bungalow, and State and Federal officials at once paid him a very forceful and serious call. They found him pallid and worried with his two odd companions, and received from him what seemed to be a valid explanation and evidence of innocence. He had needed certain anatomical specimens as part of a programme of research whose depth and genuineness anyone who had known him in the last decade could prove, and had ordered the required kind and number from agencies which he had thought as reasonably legitimate as such things can be. Of the identity of the specimens he had known absolutely nothing, and was properly shocked when the inspectors hinted at the monstrous effect on public sentiment and national dignity which a knowledge of the matter would produce. In this statement he was firmly sustained by his bearded colleague Dr. Allen, whose oddly hollow voice carried even more conviction than his own nervous tones; so that in the end the officials took no action, but carefully set down the New York name and address which Ward gave them as a basis for a search which came to nothing. It is only fair to add that the specimens were quickly and quietly restored to their proper places, and that the general public will never know of their blasphemous disturbance.\n\nOn February 9, 1928, Dr. Willett received a letter from Charles Ward which he considers of extraordinary importance, and about which he has frequently quarrelled with Dr. Lyman. Lyman believes that this note contains positive proof of a well-developed case of dementia praecox, but Willett on the other hand regards it as the last perfectly sane utterance of the hapless youth. He calls especial attention to the normal character of the penmanship; which though shewing traces of shattered nerves, is nevertheless distinctly Ward's own. The text in full is as follows:\n\n\u2002\"100 Prospect St.\n\n\u2002Providence, R.I.,\n\n\u2002February 8, 1928.\n\n\u2002\"Dear Dr. Willett:\u2014\n\n\u2002\"I feel that at last the time has come for me to make the disclosures which I have so long promised you, and for which you have pressed me so often. The patience you have shewn in waiting, and the confidence you have shewn in my mind and integrity, are things I shall never cease to appreciate.\n\n\u2002\"And now that I am ready to speak, I must own with humiliation that no triumph such as I dreamed of can ever be mine. Instead of triumph I have found terror, and my talk with you will not be a boast of victory but a plea for help and advice in saving both myself and the world from a horror beyond all human conception or calculation. You recall what those Fenner letters said of the old raiding party at Pawtuxet. That must all be done again, and quickly. Upon us depends more than can be put into words\u2014all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe. I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it back into the dark again.\n\n\u2002\"I have left that Pawtuxet place forever, and we must extirpate everything existing there, alive or dead. I shall not go there again, and you must not believe it if you ever hear that I am there. I will tell you why I say this when I see you. I have come home for good, and wish you would call on me at the very first moment that you can spare five or six hours continuously to hear what I have to say. It will take that long\u2014and believe me when I tell you that you never had a more genuine professional duty than this. My life and reason are the very least things which hang in the balance.\n\n\u2002\"I dare not tell my father, for he could not grasp the whole thing. But I have told him of my danger, and he has four men from a detective agency watching the house. I don't know how much good they can do, for they have against them forces which even you could scarcely envisage or acknowledge. So come quickly if you wish to see me alive and hear how you may help to save the cosmos from stark hell.\n\n\u2002\"Any time will do\u2014I shall not be out of the house. Don't telephone ahead, for there is no telling who or what may try to intercept you. And let us pray to whatever gods there be that nothing may prevent this meeting.\n\n\u2002\"In utmost gravity and desperation,\n\n\u2002\"Charles Dexter Ward.\"\n\n\u2002\"P.S. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.\"\n\nDr. Willett received this note about 10:30 a.m., and immediately arranged to spare the whole late afternoon and evening for the momentous talk, letting it extend on into the night as long as might be necessary. He planned to arrive about four o'clock, and through all the intervening hours was so engulfed in every sort of wild speculation that most of his tasks were very mechanically performed. Maniacal as the letter would have sounded to a stranger, Willett had seen too much of Charles Ward's oddities to dismiss it as sheer raving. That something very subtle, ancient, and horrible was hovering about he felt quite sure, and the reference to Dr. Allen could almost be comprehended in view of what Pawtuxet gossip said of Ward's enigmatical colleague. Willett had never seen the man, but had heard much of his aspect and bearing, and could not but wonder what sort of eyes those much-discussed dark glasses might conceal.\n\nPromptly at four Dr. Willett presented himself at the Ward residence, but found to his annoyance that Charles had not adhered to his determination to remain indoors. The guards were there, but said that the young man seemed to have lost part of his timidity. He had that morning done much apparently frightened arguing and protesting over the telephone, one of the detectives said, replying to some unknown voice with phrases such as \"I am very tired and must rest a while\", \"I can't receive anyone for some time, you'll have to excuse me\", \"Please postpone decisive action till we can arrange some sort of compromise\", or \"I am very sorry, but I must take a complete vacation from everything; I'll talk with you later\". Then, apparently gaining boldness through meditation, he had slipped out so quietly that no one had seen him depart or knew that he had gone until he returned about one o'clock and entered the house without a word. He had gone upstairs, where a bit of his fear must have surged back; for he was heard to cry out in a highly terrified fashion upon entering his library, afterward trailing off into a kind of choking gasp. When, however, the butler had gone to inquire what the trouble was, he had appeared at the door with a great show of boldness, and had silently gestured the man away in a manner that terrified him unaccountably. Then he had evidently done some rearranging of his shelves, for a great clattering and thumping and creaking ensued; after which he had reappeared and left at once. Willett inquired whether or not any message had been left, but was told that there was none. The butler seemed queerly disturbed about something in Charles's appearance and manner, and asked solicitously if there was much hope for a cure of his disordered nerves.\n\nFor almost two hours Dr. Willett waited vainly in Charles Ward's library, watching the dusty shelves with their wide gaps where books had been removed, and smiling grimly at the panelled overmantel on the north wall, whence a year before the suave features of old Joseph Curwen had looked mildly down. After a time the shadows began to gather, and the sunset cheer gave place to a vague growing terror which flew shadow-like before the night. Mr. Ward finally arrived, and shewed much surprise and anger at his son's absence after all the pains which had been taken to guard him. He had not known of Charles's appointment, and promised to notify Willett when the youth returned. In bidding the doctor goodnight he expressed his utter perplexity at his son's condition, and urged his caller to do all he could to restore the boy to normal poise. Willett was glad to escape from that library, for something frightful and unholy seemed to haunt it; as if the vanished picture had left behind a legacy of evil. He had never liked that picture; and even now, strong-nerved though he was, there lurked a quality in its vacant panel which made him feel an urgent need to get out into the pure air as soon as possible." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "The next morning Willett received a message from the senior Ward, saying that Charles was still absent. Mr. Ward mentioned that Dr. Allen had telephoned him to say that Charles would remain at Pawtuxet for some time, and that he must not be disturbed. This was necessary because Allen himself was suddenly called away for an indefinite period, leaving the researches in need of Charles's constant oversight. Charles sent his best wishes, and regretted any bother his abrupt change of plans might have caused. In listening to this message Mr. Ward heard Dr. Allen's voice for the first time, and it seemed to excite some vague and elusive memory which could not be actually placed, but which was disturbing to the point of fearfulness.\n\nFaced by these baffling and contradictory reports, Dr. Willett was frankly at a loss what to do. The frantic earnestness of Charles's note was not to be denied, yet what could one think of its writer's immediate violation of his own expressed policy? Young Ward had written that his delvings had become blasphemous and menacing, that they and his bearded colleague must be extirpated at any cost, and that he himself would never return to their final scene; yet according to latest advices he had forgotten all this and was back in the thick of the mystery. Common sense bade one leave the youth alone with his freakishness, yet some deeper instinct would not permit the impression of that frenzied letter to subside. Willett read it over again, and could not make its essence sound as empty and insane as both its bombastic verbiage and its lack of fulfilment would seem to imply. Its terror was too profound and real, and in conjunction with what the doctor already knew evoked too vivid hints of monstrosities from beyond time and space to permit of any cynical explanation. There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought to stand prepared for any sort of action at any time.\n\nFor over a week Dr. Willett pondered on the dilemma which seemed thrust upon him, and became more and more inclined to pay Charles a call at the Pawtuxet bungalow. No friend of the youth had ever ventured to storm this forbidden retreat, and even his father knew of its interior only from such descriptions as he chose to give; but Willett felt that some direct conversation with his patient was necessary. Mr. Ward had been receiving brief and non-committal typed notes from his son, and said that Mrs. Ward in her Atlantic City retirement had had no better word. So at length the doctor resolved to act; and despite a curious sensation inspired by old legends of Joseph Curwen, and by more recent revelations and warnings from Charles Ward, set boldly out for the bungalow on the bluff above the river.\n\nWillett had visited the spot before through sheer curiosity, though of course never entering the house or proclaiming his presence; hence knew exactly the route to take. Driving out Broad Street one early afternoon toward the end of February in his small motor, he thought oddly of the grim party which had taken that selfsame road a hundred and fifty-seven years before on a terrible errand which none might ever comprehend.\n\nThe ride through the city's decaying fringe was short, and trim Edgewood and sleepy Pawtuxet presently spread out ahead. Willett turned to the right down Lockwood Street and drove his car as far along that rural road as he could, then alighted and walked north to where the bluff towered above the lovely bends of the river and the sweep of misty downlands beyond. Houses were still few here, and there was no mistaking the isolated bungalow with its concrete garage on a high point of land at his left. Stepping briskly up the neglected gravel walk he rapped at the door with a firm hand, and spoke without a tremor to the evil Portuguese mulatto who opened it to the width of a crack.\n\nHe must, he said, see Charles Ward at once on vitally important business. No excuse would be accepted, and a repulse would mean only a full report of the matter to the elder Ward. The mulatto still hesitated, and pushed against the door when Willett attempted to open it; but the doctor merely raised his voice and renewed his demands. Then there came from the dark interior a husky whisper which somehow chilled the hearer through and through though he did not know why he feared it. \"Let him in, Tony,\" it said, \"we may as well talk now as ever.\" But disturbing as was the whisper, the greater fear was that which immediately followed. The floor creaked and the speaker hove in sight\u2014and the owner of those strange and resonant tones was seen to be no other than Charles Dexter Ward.\n\nThe minuteness with which Dr. Willett recalled and recorded his conversation of that afternoon is due to the importance he assigns to this particular period. For at last he concedes a vital change in Charles Dexter Ward's mentality, and believes that the youth now spoke from a brain hopelessly alien to the brain whose growth he had watched for six and twenty years. Controversy with Dr. Lyman has compelled him to be very specific, and he definitely dates the madness of Charles Ward from the time the typewritten notes began to reach his parents. Those notes are not in Ward's normal style; not even in the style of that last frantic letter to Willett. Instead, they are strange and archaic, as if the snapping of the writer's mind had released a flood of tendencies and impressions picked up unconsciously through boyhood antiquarianism. There is an obvious effort to be modern, but the spirit and occasionally the language are those of the past.\n\nThe past, too, was evident in Ward's every tone and gesture as he received the doctor in that shadowy bungalow. He bowed, motioned Willett to a seat, and began to speak abruptly in that strange whisper which he sought to explain at the very outset.\n\n\"I am grown phthisical,\" he began, \"from this cursed river air. You must excuse my speech. I suppose you are come from my father to see what ails me, and I hope you will say nothing to alarm him.\"\n\nWillett was studying these scraping tones with extreme care, but studying even more closely the face of the speaker. Something, he felt, was wrong; and he thought of what the family had told him about the fright of that Yorkshire butler one night. He wished it were not so dark, but did not request that any blind be opened. Instead, he merely asked Ward why he had so belied the frantic note of little more than a week before.\n\n\"I was coming to that,\" the host replied. \"You must know, I am in a very bad state of nerves, and do and say queer things I cannot account for. As I have told you often, I am on the edge of great matters; and the bigness of them has a way of making me light-headed. Any man might well be frighted of what I have found, but I am not to be put off for long. I was a dunce to have that guard and stick at home; for having gone this far, my place is here. I am not well spoke of by my prying neighbours, and perhaps I was led by weakness to believe myself what they say of me. There is no evil to any in what I do, so long as I do it rightly. Have the goodness to wait six months, and I'll shew you what will pay your patience well.\n\n\"You may as well know I have a way of learning old matters from things surer than books, and I'll leave you to judge the importance of what I can give to history, philosophy, and the arts by reason of the doors I have access to. My ancestor had all this when those witless peeping Toms came and murdered him. I now have it again, or am coming very imperfectly to have a part of it. This time nothing must happen, and least of all through any idiot fears of my own. Pray forget all I writ you, Sir, and have no fear of this place or any in it. Dr. Allen is a man of fine parts, and I owe him an apology for anything ill I have said of him. I wish I had no need to spare him, but there were things he had to do elsewhere. His zeal is equal to mine in all those matters, and I suppose that when I feared the work I feared him too as my greatest helper in it.\"\n\nWard paused, and the doctor hardly knew what to say or think. He felt almost foolish in the face of this calm repudiation of the letter; and yet there clung to him the fact that while the present discourse was strange and alien and indubitably mad, the note itself had been tragic in its naturalness and likeness to the Charles Ward he knew. Willett now tried to turn the talk on early matters, and recall to the youth some past events which would restore a familiar mood; but in this process he obtained only the most grotesque results. It was the same with all the alienists later on. Important sections of Charles Ward's store of mental images, mainly those touching modern times and his own personal life, had been unaccountably expunged; whilst all the massed antiquarianism of his youth had welled up from some profound subconsciousness to engulf the contemporary and the individual. The youth's intimate knowledge of elder things was abnormal and unholy, and he tried his best to hide it. When Willett would mention some favourite object of his boyhood archaistic studies he often shed by pure accident such a light as no normal mortal could conceivably be expected to possess, and the doctor shuddered as the glib allusion glided by.\n\nIt was not wholesome to know so much about the way the fat sheriff's wig fell off as he leaned over at the play in Mr. Douglass' Histrionick Academy in King Street on the eleventh of February, 1762, which fell on a Thursday; or about how the actors cut the text of Steele's Conscious Lovers so badly that one was almost glad the Baptist-ridden legislature closed the theatre a fortnight later. That Thomas Sabin's Boston coach was \"damn'd uncomfortable\" old letters may well have told; but what healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy crown he set up after he took to calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes of the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?\n\nWard, however, would not be quizzed long in this vein. Modern and personal topics he waved aside quite summarily, whilst regarding antique affairs he soon shewed the plainest boredom. What he wished clearly enough was only to satisfy his visitor enough to make him depart without the intention of returning. To this end he offered to shew Willett the entire house, and at once proceeded to lead the doctor through every room from cellar to attic. Willett looked sharply, but noted that the visible books were far too few and trivial ever to have filled the wide gaps on Ward's shelves at home, and that the meagre so-called \"laboratory\" was the flimsiest sort of a blind. Clearly there were a library and a laboratory elsewhere; but just where, it was impossible to say. Essentially defeated in his quest for something he could not name, Willett returned to town before evening and told the senior Ward everything which had occurred. They agreed that the youth must be definitely out of his mind, but decided that nothing drastic need be done just then. Above all, Mrs. Ward must be kept in as complete an ignorance as her son's own strange typed notes would permit.\n\nMr. Ward now determined to call in person upon his son, making it wholly a surprise visit. Dr. Willett took him in his car one evening, guiding him to within sight of the bungalow and waiting patiently for his return. The session was a long one, and the father emerged in a very saddened and perplexed state. His reception had developed much like Willett's, save that Charles had been an excessively long time in appearing after the visitor had forced his way into the hall and sent the Portuguese away with an imperative demand; and in the bearing of the altered son there was no trace of filial affection. The lights had been dim, yet even so the youth had complained that they dazzled him outrageously. He had not spoken out loud at all, averring that his throat was in very poor condition; but in his hoarse whisper there was a quality so vaguely disturbing that Mr. Ward could not banish it from his mind.\n\nNow definitely leagued together to do all they could toward the youth's mental salvation, Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett set about collecting every scrap of data which the case might afford. Pawtuxet gossip was the first item they studied, and this was relatively easy to glean since both had friends in that region. Dr. Willett obtained the most rumours because people talked more frankly to him than to a parent of the central figure, and from all he heard he could tell that young Ward's life had become indeed a strange one. Common tongues would not dissociate his household from the vampirism of the previous summer, while the nocturnal comings and goings of the motor trucks provided their share of dark speculation. Local tradesmen spoke of the queerness of the orders brought them by the evil-looking mulatto, and in particular of the inordinate amounts of meat and fresh blood secured from the two butcher shops in the immediate neighbourhood. For a household of only three, these quantities were quite absurd.\n\nThen there was the matter of the sounds beneath the earth. Reports of these things were harder to pin down, but all the vague hints tallied in certain basic essentials. Noises of a ritual nature positively existed, and at times when the bungalow was dark. They might, of course, have come from the known cellar; but rumour insisted that there were deeper and more spreading crypts. Recalling the ancient tales of Joseph Curwen's catacombs, and assuming for granted that the present bungalow had been selected because of its situation on the old Curwen site as revealed in one or another of the documents found behind the picture, Willett and Mr. Ward gave this phase of the gossip much attention; and searched many times without success for the door in the river-bank which old manuscripts mentioned. As to popular opinions of the bungalow's various inhabitants, it was soon plain that the Brava Portuguese was loathed, the bearded and spectacled Dr. Allen feared, and the pallid young scholar disliked to a profound extent. During the last week or two Ward had obviously changed much, abandoning his attempts at affability and speaking only in hoarse but oddly repellent whispers on the few occasions that he ventured forth.\n\nSuch were the shreds and fragments gathered here and there; and over these Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett held many long and serious conferences. They strove to exercise deduction, induction, and constructive imagination to their utmost extent; and to correlate every known fact of Charles's later life, including the frantic letter which the doctor now shewed the father, with the meagre documentary evidence available concerning old Joseph Curwen. They would have given much for a glimpse of the papers Charles had found, for very clearly the key to the youth's madness lay in what he had learned of the ancient wizard and his doings." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "And yet, after all, it was from no step of Mr. Ward's or Dr. Willett's that the next move in this singular case proceeded. The father and the physician, rebuffed and confused by a shadow too shapeless and intangible to combat, had rested uneasily on their oars while the typed notes of young Ward to his parents grew fewer and fewer. Then came the first of the month with its customary financial adjustments, and the clerks at certain banks began a peculiar shaking of heads and telephoning from one to the other. Officials who knew Charles Ward by sight went down to the bungalow to ask why every cheque of his appearing at this juncture was a clumsy forgery, and were reassurred less than they ought to have been when the youth hoarsely explained that his hand had lately been so much affected by a nervous shock as to make normal writing impossible. He could, he said, form no written characters at all except with great difficulty; and could prove it by the fact that he had been forced to type all his recent letters, even those to his father and mother, who would bear out the assertion.\n\nWhat made the investigators pause in confusion was not this circumstance alone, for that was nothing unprecedented or fundamentally suspicious; nor even the Pawtuxet gossip, of which one or two of them had caught echoes. It was the muddled discourse of the young man which nonplussed them, implying as it did a virtually total loss of memory concerning important monetary matters which he had had at his fingertips only a month or two before. Something was wrong; for despite the apparent coherence and rationality of his speech, there could be no normal reason for this ill-concealed blankness on vital points. Moreover, although none of these men knew Ward well, they could not help observing the change in his language and manner. They had heard he was an antiquarian, but even the most hopeless antiquarians do not make daily use of obsolete phraseology and gestures. Altogether, this combination of hoarseness, palsied hands, bad memory, and altered speech and bearing must represent some disturbance or malady of genuine gravity, which no doubt formed the basis of the prevailing odd rumours; and after their departure the party of officials decided that a talk with the senior Ward was imperative.\n\nSo on the sixth of March, 1928, there was a long and serious conference in Mr. Ward's office, after which the utterly bewildered father summoned Dr. Willett in a kind of helpless resignation. Willett looked over the strained and awkward signatures of the cheques, and compared them in his mind with the penmanship of that last frantic note. Certainly, the change was radical and profound, and yet there was something damnably familiar about the new writing. It had crabbed and archaic tendencies of a very curious sort, and seemed to result from a type of stroke utterly different from that which the youth had always used. It was strange\u2014but where had he seen it before? On the whole, it was obvious that Charles was insane. Of that there could be no doubt. And since it appeared unlikely that he could handle his property or continue to deal with the outside world much longer, something must quickly be done toward his oversight and possible cure. It was then that the alienists were called in, Drs. Peck and Waite of Providence and Dr. Lyman of Boston, to whom Mr. Ward and Dr. Willett gave the most exhaustive possible history of the case, and who conferred at length in the now unused library of their young patient, examining what books and papers of his were left in order to gain some further notion of his habitual mental cast. After scanning this material and examining the ominous note to Willett they all agreed that Charles Ward's studies had been enough to unseat or at least to warp any ordinary intellect, and wished most heartily that they could see his more intimate volumes and documents; but this latter they knew they could do, if at all, only after a scene at the bungalow itself. Willett now reviewed the whole case with febrile energy; it being at this time that he obtained the statements of the workmen who had seen Charles find the Curwen documents, and that he collated the incidents of the destroyed newspaper items, looking up the latter at the Journal office.\n\nOn Thursday, the eighth of March, Drs. Willett, Peck, Lyman, and Waite, accompanied by Mr. Ward, paid the youth their momentous call; making no concealment of their object and questioning the now acknowledged patient with extreme minuteness. Charles, though he was inordinately long in answering the summons and was still redolent of strange and noxious laboratory odours when he did finally make his agitated appearance, proved a far from recalcitrant subject; and admitted freely that his memory and balance had suffered somewhat from close application to abstruse studies. He offered no resistance when his removal to other quarters was insisted upon; and seemed, indeed, to display a high degree of intelligence as apart from mere memory. His conduct would have sent his interviewers away in bafflement had not the persistently archaic trend of his speech and unmistakable replacement of modern by ancient ideas in his consciousness marked him out as one definitely removed from the normal. Of his work he would say no more to the group of doctors than he had formerly said to his family and to Dr. Willett, and his frantic note of the previous month he dismissed as mere nerves and hysteria. He insisted that this shadowy bungalow possessed no library or laboratory beyond the visible ones, and waxed abstruse in explaining the absence from the house of such odours as now saturated all his clothing. Neighbourhood gossip he attributed to nothing more than the cheap inventiveness of baffled curiosity. Of the whereabouts of Dr. Allen he said he did not feel at liberty to speak definitely, but assured his inquisitors that the bearded and spectacled man would return when needed. In paying off the stolid Brava who resisted all questioning by the visitors, and in closing the bungalow which still seemed to hold such nighted secrets, Ward shewed no sign of nervousness save a barely noticed tendency to pause as though listening for something very faint. He was apparently animated by a calmly philosophic resignation, as if his removal were the merest transient incident which would cause the least trouble if facilitated and disposed of once and for all. It was clear that he trusted to his obviously unimpaired keenness of absolute mentality to overcome all the embarrassments into which his twisted memory, his lost voice and handwriting, and his secretive and eccentric behaviour had led him. His mother, it was agreed, was not to be told of the change; his father supplying typed notes in his name. Ward was taken to the restfully and picturesquely situated private hospital maintained by Dr. Waite on Conanicut Island in the bay, and subjected to the closest scrutiny and questioning by all the physicians connected with the case. It was then that the physical oddities were noticed; the slackened metabolism, the altered skin, and the disproportionate neural reactions. Dr. Willett was the most perturbed of the various examiners, for he had attended Ward all his life and could appreciate with terrible keenness the extent of his physical disorganisation. Even the familiar olive mark on his hip was gone, while on his chest was a great black mole or cicatrice which had never been there before, and which made Willett wonder whether the youth had ever submitted to any of the \"witch markings\" reputed to be inflicted at certain unwholesome nocturnal meetings in wild and lonely places. The doctor could not keep his mind off a certain transcribed witch-trial record from Salem which Charles had shewn him in the old non-secretive days, and which read: \"Mr. G. B. on that Nighte putt ye Divell his Marke upon Bridget S., Jonathan A., Simon O., Deliverance W., Joseph C., Susan P., Mehitable C., and Deborah B.\" Ward's face, too, troubled him horribly, till at length he suddenly discovered why he was horrified. For above the young man's right eye was something which he had never previously noticed\u2014a small scar or pit precisely like that in the crumbled painting of old Joseph Curwen, and perhaps attesting some hideous ritualistic inoculation to which both had submitted at a certain stage of their occult careers.\n\nWhile Ward himself was puzzling all the doctors at the hospital a very strict watch was kept on all mail addressed either to him or to Dr. Allen, which Mr. Ward had ordered delivered at the family home. Willett had predicted that very little would be found, since any communications of a vital nature would probably have been exchanged by messenger; but in the latter part of March there did come a letter from Prague for Dr. Allen which gave both the doctor and the father deep thought. It was in a very crabbed and archaic hand; and though clearly not the effort of a foreigner, shewed almost as singular a departure from modern English as the speech of young Ward himself. It read:" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "And now swiftly followed that hideous experience which has left its indelible mark of fear on the soul of Marinus Bicknell Willett, and has added a decade to the visible age of one whose youth was even then far behind. Dr. Willett had conferred at length with Mr. Ward, and had come to an agreement with him on several points which both felt the alienists would ridicule. There was, they conceded, a terrible movement alive in the world, whose direct connexion with a necromancy even older than the Salem witchcraft could not be doubted. That at least two living men\u2014and one other of whom they dared not think\u2014were in absolute possession of minds or personalities which had functioned as early as 1690 or before was likewise almost unassailably proved even in the face of all known natural laws. What these horrible creatures\u2014and Charles Ward as well\u2014were doing or trying to do seemed fairly clear from their letters and from every bit of light both old and new which had filtered in upon the case. They were robbing the tombs of all the ages, including those of the world's wisest and greatest men, in the hope of recovering from the bygone ashes some vestige of the consciousness and lore which had once animated and informed them.\n\nA hideous traffick was going on among these nightmare ghouls, whereby illustrious bones were bartered with the calm calculativeness of schoolboys swapping books; and from what was extorted from this centuried dust there was anticipated a power and a wisdom beyond anything which the cosmos had ever seen concentrated in one man or group. They had found unholy ways to keep their brains alive, either in the same body or different bodies; and had evidently achieved a way of tapping the consciousness of the dead whom they gathered together. There had, it seems, been some truth in chimerical old Borellus when he wrote of preparing from even the most antique remains certain \"Essential Saltes\" from which the shade of a long-dead living thing might be raised up. There was a formula for evoking such a shade, and another for putting it down; and it had now been so perfected that it could be taught successfully. One must be careful about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not always accurate.\n\nWillett and Mr. Ward shivered as they passed from conclusion to conclusion. Things\u2014presences or voices of some sort\u2014could be drawn down from unknown places as well as from the grave, and in this process also one must be careful. Joseph Curwen had indubitably evoked many forbidden things, and as for Charles\u2014what might one think of him? What forces \"outside the spheres\" had reached him from Joseph Curwen's day and turned his mind on forgotten things? He had been led to find certain directions, and he had used them. He had talked with the man of horror in Prague and stayed long with the creature in the mountains of Transylvania. And he must have found the grave of Joseph Curwen at last. That newspaper item and what his mother had heard in the night were too significant to overlook. Then he had summoned something, and it must have come. That mighty voice aloft on Good Friday, and those different tones in the locked attic laboratory. What were they like, with their depth and hollowness? Was there not here some awful foreshadowing of the dreaded stranger Dr. Allen with his spectral bass? Yes, that was what Mr. Ward had felt with vague horror in his single talk with the man\u2014if man it were\u2014over the telephone!\n\nWhat hellish consciousness or voice, what morbid shade or presence, had come to answer Charles Ward's secret rites behind that locked door? Those voices heard in argument\u2014\"must have it red for three months\"\u2014Good God! Was not that just before the vampirism broke out? The rifling of Ezra Weeden's ancient grave, and the cries later at Pawtuxet\u2014whose mind had planned the vengeance and rediscovered the shunned seat of elder blasphemies? And then the bungalow and the bearded stranger, and the gossip, and the fear. The final madness of Charles neither father nor doctor could attempt to explain, but they did feel sure that the mind of Joseph Curwen had come to earth again and was following its ancient morbidities. Was daemoniac possession in truth a possibility? Allen had something to do with it, and the detectives must find out more about one whose existence menaced the young man's life. In the meantime, since the existence of some vast crypt beneath the bungalow seemed virtually beyond dispute, some effort must be made to find it. Willett and Mr. Ward, conscious of the sceptical attitude of the alienists, resolved during their final conference to undertake a joint secret exploration of unparalleled thoroughness; and agreed to meet at the bungalow on the following morning with valises and with certain tools and accessories suited to architectural search and underground exploration.\n\nThe morning of April 6th dawned clear, and both explorers were at the bungalow by ten o'clock. Mr. Ward had the key, and an entry and cursory survey were made. From the disordered condition of Dr. Allen's room it was obvious that the detectives had been there before, and the later searchers hoped that they had found some clue which might prove of value. Of course the main business lay in the cellar; so thither they descended without much delay, again making the circuit which each had vainly made before in the presence of the mad young owner. For a time everything seemed baffling, each inch of the earthen floor and stone walls having so solid and innocuous an aspect that the thought of a yawning aperture was scarcely to be entertained. Willett reflected that since the original cellar was dug without knowledge of any catacombs beneath, the beginning of the passage would represent the strictly modern delving of young Ward and his associates, where they had probed for the ancient vaults whose rumour could have reached them by no wholesome means.\n\nThe doctor tried to put himself in Charles's place to see how a delver would be likely to start, but could not gain much inspiration from this method. Then he decided on elimination as a policy, and went carefully over the whole subterranean surface both vertical and horizontal, trying to account for every inch separately. He was soon substantially narrowed down, and at last had nothing left but the small platform before the washtubs, which he had tried once before in vain. Now experimenting in every possible way, and exerting a double strength, he finally found that the top did indeed turn and slide horizontally on a corner pivot. Beneath it lay a trim concrete surface with an iron manhole, to which Mr. Ward at once rushed with excited zeal. The cover was not hard to lift, and the father had quite removed it when Willett noticed the queerness of his aspect. He was swaying and nodding dizzily, and in the gust of noxious air which swept up from the black pit beneath the doctor soon recognised ample cause.\n\nIn a moment Dr. Willett had his fainting companion on the floor above and was reviving him with cold water. Mr. Ward responded feebly, but it could be seen that the mephitic blast from the crypt had in some way gravely sickened him. Wishing to take no chances, Willett hastened out to Broad Street for a taxicab and had soon dispatched the sufferer home despite his weak-voiced protests; after which he produced an electric torch, covered his nostrils with a band of sterile gauze, and descended once more to peer into the new-found depths. The foul air had now slightly abated, and Willett was able to send a beam of light down the Stygian hole. For about ten feet, he saw, it was a sheer cylindrical drop with concrete walls and an iron ladder; after which the hole appeared to strike a flight of old stone steps which must originally have emerged to earth somewhat southwest of the present building." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Willett freely admits that for a moment the memory of the old Curwen legends kept him from climbing down alone into that malodorous gulf. He could not help thinking of what Luke Fenner had reported on that last monstrous night. Then duty asserted itself and he made the plunge, carrying a great valise for the removal of whatever papers might prove of supreme importance. Slowly, as befitted one of his years, he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps below. This was ancient masonry, his torch told him; and upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries. Down, down, ran the steps; not spirally, but in three abrupt turns; and with such narrowness that two men could have passed only with difficulty. He had counted about thirty when a sound reached him very faintly; and after that he did not feel disposed to count any more.\n\nIt was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. Was it for this that Ward had seemed to listen on that day he was removed? It was the most shocking thing that Willett had ever heard, and it continued from no determinate point as the doctor reached the bottom of the steps and cast his torchlight around on lofty corridor walls surmounted by Cyclopean vaulting and pierced by numberless black archways. The hall in which he stood was perhaps fourteen feet high to the middle of the vaulting and ten or twelve feet broad. Its pavement was of large chipped flagstones, and its walls and roof were of dressed masonry. Its length he could not imagine, for it stretched ahead indefinitely into the blackness. Of the archways, some had doors of the old six-panelled colonial type, whilst others had none.\n\nOvercoming the dread induced by the smell and the howling, Willett began to explore these archways one by one; finding beyond them rooms with groined stone ceilings, each of medium size and apparently of bizarre uses. Most of them had fireplaces, the upper courses of whose chimneys would have formed an interesting study in engineering. Never before or since had he seen such instruments or suggestions of instruments as here loomed up on every hand through the burying dust and cobwebs of a century and a half, in many cases evidently shattered as if by the ancient raiders. For many of the chambers seemed wholly untrodden by modern feet, and must have represented the earliest and most obsolete phases of Joseph Curwen's experimentation. Finally there came a room of obvious modernity, or at least of recent occupancy. There were oil heaters, bookshelves and tables, chairs and cabinets, and a desk piled high with papers of varying antiquity and contemporaneousness. Candlesticks and oil lamps stood about in several places; and finding a match-safe handy, Willett lighted such as were ready for use.\n\nIn the fuller gleam it appeared that this apartment was nothing less than the latest study or library of Charles Ward. Of the books the doctor had seen many before, and a good part of the furniture had plainly come from the Prospect Street mansion. Here and there was a piece well known to Willett, and the sense of familiarity became so great that he half forgot the noisomeness and the wailing, both of which were plainer here than they had been at the foot of the steps. His first duty, as planned long ahead, was to find and seize any papers which might seem of vital importance; especially those portentous documents found by Charles so long ago behind the picture in Olney Court. As he searched he perceived how stupendous a task the final unravelling would be; for file on file was stuffed with papers in curious hands and bearing curious designs, so that months or even years might be needed for a thorough deciphering and editing. Once he found large packets of letters with Prague and Rakus postmarks, and in writing clearly recognisable as Orne's and Hutchinson's; all of which he took with him as part of the bundle to be removed in his valise.\n\nAt last, in a locked mahogany cabinet once gracing the Ward home, Willett found the batch of old Curwen papers; recognising them from the reluctant glimpse Charles had granted him so many years ago. The youth had evidently kept them together very much as they had been when first he found them, since all the titles recalled by the workmen were present except the papers addressed to Orne and Hutchinson, and the cipher with its key. Willett placed the entire lot in his valise and continued his examination of the files. Since young Ward's immediate condition was the greatest matter at stake, the closest searching was done among the most obviously recent matter; and in this abundance of contemporary manuscript one very baffling oddity was noted. The oddity was the slight amount in Charles's normal writing, which indeed included nothing more recent than two months before. On the other hand, there were literally reams of symbols and formulae, historical notes and philosophical comment, in a crabbed penmanship absolutely identical with the ancient script of Joseph Curwen, though of undeniably modern dating. Plainly, a part of the latter-day programme had been a sedulous imitation of the old wizard's writing, which Charles seemed to have carried to a marvellous state of perfection. Of any third hand which might have been Allen's there was not a trace. If he had indeed come to be the leader, he must have forced young Ward to act as his amanuensis.\n\nIn this new material one mystic formula, or rather pair of formulae, recurred so often that Willett had it by heart before he had half finished his quest. It consisted of two parallel columns, the left-hand one surmounted by the archaic symbol called \"Dragon's Head\" and used in almanacks to indicate the ascending node, and the right-hand one headed by a corresponding sign of \"Dragon's Tail\" or descending node. The appearance of the whole was something like this, and almost unconsciously the doctor realised that the second half was no more than the first written syllabically backward with the exception of the final monosyllables and of the odd name Yog-Sothoth, which he had come to recognise under various spellings from other things he had seen in connexion with this horrible matter. The formulae were as follows\u2014exactly so, as Willett is abundantly able to testify\u2014and the first one struck an odd note of uncomfortable latent memory in his brain, which he recognised later when reviewing the events of that horrible Good Friday of the previous year.\n\n\u2003Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,\n\n\u2003YOG-SOTHOTH\n\n\u2003H'EE\u2014L'GEB\n\n\u2003F'AI THRODOG\n\n\u2003UAAAH\n\n\u2003OGTHROD AI'F\n\n\u2003GEB'L\u2014EE'H\n\n\u2003YOG-SOTHOTH\n\n\u2003'NGAH'NG AI'Y\n\n\u2003ZHRO\n\nSo haunting were these formulae, and so frequently did he come upon them, that before the doctor knew it he was repeating them under his breath. Eventually, however, he felt he had secured all the papers he could digest to advantage for the present; hence resolved to examine no more till he could bring the sceptical alienists en masse for an ampler and more systematic raid. He had still to find the hidden laboratory, so leaving his valise in the lighted room he emerged again into the black noisome corridor whose vaulting echoed ceaselessly with that dull and hideous whine.\n\nThe next few rooms he tried were all abandoned, or filled only with crumbling boxes and ominous-looking leaden coffins; but impressed him deeply with the magnitude of Joseph Curwen's original operations. He thought of the slaves and seamen who had disappeared, of the graves which had been violated in every part of the world, and of what that final raiding party must have seen; and then he decided it was better not to think any more. Once a great stone staircase mounted at his right, and he deduced that this must have reached to one of the Curwen outbuildings\u2014perhaps the famous stone edifice with the high slit-like windows\u2014provided the steps he had descended had led from the steep-roofed farmhouse. Suddenly the walls seemed to fall away ahead, and the stench and the wailing grew stronger. Willett saw that he had come upon a vast open space, so great that his torchlight would not carry across it; and as he advanced he encountered occasional stout pillars supporting the arches of the roof.\n\nAfter a time he reached a circle of pillars grouped like the monoliths of Stonehenge, with a large carved altar on a base of three steps in the centre; and so curious were the carvings on that altar that he approached to study them with his electric light. But when he saw what they were he shrank away shuddering, and did not stop to investigate the dark stains which discoloured the upper surface and had spread down the sides in occasional thin lines. Instead, he found the distant wall and traced it as it swept round in a gigantic circle perforated by occasional black doorways and indented by a myriad of shallow cells with iron gratings and wrist and ankle bonds on chains fastened to the stone of the concave rear masonry. These cells were empty, but still the horrible odour and the dismal moaning continued, more insistent now than ever, and seemingly varied at times by a sort of slippery thumping." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "From that frightful smell and that uncanny noise Willett's attention could no longer be diverted. Both were plainer and more hideous in the great pillared hall than anywhere else, and carried a vague impression of being far below, even in this dark nether world of subterrene mystery. Before trying any of the black archways for steps leading further down, the doctor cast his beam of light about the stone-flagged floor. It was very loosely paved, and at irregular intervals there would occur a slab curiously pierced by small holes in no definite arrangement, while at one point there lay a very long ladder carelessly flung down. To this ladder, singularly enough, appeared to cling a particularly large amount of the frightful odour which encompassed everything. As he walked slowly about it suddenly occurred to Willett that both the noise and the odour seemed strongest directly above the oddly pierced slabs, as if they might be crude trap-doors leading down to some still deeper region of horror. Kneeling by one, he worked at it with his hands, and found that with extreme difficulty he could budge it. At his touch the moaning beneath ascended to a louder key, and only with vast trepidation did he persevere in the lifting of the heavy stone. A stench unnamable now rose up from below, and the doctor's head reeled dizzily as he laid back the slab and turned his torch upon the exposed square yard of gaping blackness.\n\nIf he had expected a flight of steps to some wide gulf of ultimate abomination, Willett was destined to be disappointed; for amidst that foetor and cracked whining he discerned only the brick-faced top of a cylindrical well perhaps a yard and a half in diameter and devoid of any ladder or other means of descent. As the light shone down, the wailing changed suddenly to a series of horrible yelps; in conjunction with which there came again that sound of blind, futile scrambling and slippery thumping. The explorer trembled, unwilling even to imagine what noxious thing might be lurking in that abyss, but in a moment mustered up the courage to peer over the rough-hewn brink; lying at full length and holding the torch downward at arm's length to see what might lie below. For a second he could distinguish nothing but the slimy, moss-grown brick walls sinking illimitably into that half-tangible miasma of murk and foulness and anguished frenzy; and then he saw that something dark was leaping clumsily and frantically up and down at the bottom of the narrow shaft, which must have been from twenty to twenty-five feet below the stone floor where he lay. The torch shook in his hand, but he looked again to see what manner of living creature might be immured there in the darkness of that unnatural well; left starving by young Ward through all the long month since the doctors had taken him away, and clearly only one of a vast number prisoned in the kindred wells whose pierced stone covers so thickly studded in the floor of the great vaulted cavern. Whatever the things were, they could not lie down in their cramped spaces; but must have crouched and whined and waited and feebly leaped all those hideous weeks since their master had abandoned them unheeded.\n\nBut Marinus Bicknell Willett was sorry that he looked again; for surgeon and veteran of the dissecting-room though he was, he has not been the same since. It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measureable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker's perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision. In that second look Willett saw such an outline or entity, for during the next few instants he was undoubtedly as stark mad as any inmate of Dr. Waite's private hospital. He dropped the electric torch from a hand drained of muscular power or nervous co\u00f6rdination, nor heeded the sound of crunching teeth which told of its fate at the bottom of the pit. He screamed and screamed and screamed in a voice whose falsetto panic no acquaintance of his would ever have recognised; and though he could not rise to his feet he crawled and rolled desperately away over the damp pavement where dozens of Tartarean wells poured forth their exhausted whining and yelping to answer his own insane cries. He tore his hands on the rough, loose stones, and many times bruised his head against the frequent pillars, but still he kept on. Then at last he slowly came to himself in the utter blackness and stench, and stopped his ears against the droning wail into which the burst of yelping had subsided. He was drenched with perspiration and without means of producing a light; stricken and unnerved in the abysmal blackness and horror, and crushed with a memory he never could efface. Beneath him dozens of those things still lived, and from one of the shafts the cover was removed. He knew that what he had seen could never climb up the slippery walls, yet shuddered at the thought that some obscure foothold might exist.\n\nWhat the thing was, he would never tell. It was like some of the carvings on the hellish altar, but it was alive. Nature had never made it in this form, for it was too palpably unfinished. The deficiencies were of the most surprising sort, and the abnormalities of proportion could not be described. Willett consents only to say that this type of thing must have represented entities which Ward called up from imperfect salts, and which he kept for servile or ritualistic purposes. If it had not had a certain significance, its image would not have been carved on that damnable stone. It was not the worst thing depicted on that stone\u2014but Willett never opened the other pits. At the time, the first connected idea in his mind was an idle paragraph from some of the old Curwen data he had digested long before; a phrase used by Simon or Jedediah Orne in that portentous confiscated letter to the bygone sorcerer: \"Certainely, there was Noth'g butt ye liveliest Awfulness in that which H. rais'd upp from What he cou'd gather onlie a part of.\"\n\nThen, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumours anent the burned, twisted thing found in the fields a week after the Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of that object; that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.\n\nThese words hummed in the doctor's mind as he rocked to and fro, squatting on the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord's Prayer to himself; eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodge-podge like the modernistic Waste Land of Mr. T. S. Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately found in Ward's underground library: \"Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth\", and so on till the final underlined \"Zhro\". It seemed to soothe him, and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would not; but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library. After a while he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in agonised caution on hands and knees amidst the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered.\n\nOnce his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leading to the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in loathing. At another time he encountered the pierced slab he had removed, and here his caution became almost pitiful. But he did not come upon the dread aperture after all, nor did anything issue from that aperture to detain him. What had been down there made no sound nor stir. Evidently its crunching of the fallen electric torch had not been good for it. Each time Willett's fingers felt a perforated slab he trembled. His passage over it would sometimes increase the groaning below, but generally it would produce no effect at all, since he moved very noiselessly. Several times during his progress the glow ahead diminished perceptibly, and he realised that the various candles and lamps he had left must be expiring one by one. The thought of being lost in utter darkness without matches amidst this underground world of nightmare labyrinths impelled him to rise to his feet and run, which he could safely do now that he had passed the open pit; for he knew that once the light failed, his only hope of rescue and survival would lie in whatever relief party Mr. Ward might send after missing him for a sufficient period. Presently, however, he emerged from the open space into the narrower corridor and definitely located the glow as coming from a door on his right. In a moment he had reached it and was standing once more in young Ward's secret library, trembling with relief, and watching the sputterings of that last lamp which had brought him to safety." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "In another moment he was hastily filling the burned-out lamps from an oil supply he had previously noticed, and when the room was bright again he looked about to see if he might find a lantern for further exploration. For racked though he was with horror, his sense of grim purpose was still uppermost; and he was firmly determined to leave no stone unturned in his search for the hideous facts behind Charles Ward's bizarre madness. Failing to find a lantern, he chose the smallest of the lamps to carry; also filling his pockets with candles and matches, and taking with him a gallon can of oil, which he proposed to keep for reserve use in whatever hidden laboratory he might uncover beyond the terrible open space with its unclean altar and nameless covered wells. To traverse that space again would require his utmost fortitude, but he knew it must be done. Fortunately neither the frightful altar nor the opened shaft was near the vast cell-indented wall which bounded the cavern area, and whose black mysterious archways would form the next goals of a logical search.\n\nSo Willett went back to that great pillared hall of stench and anguished howling; turning down his lamp to avoid any distant glimpse of the hellish altar, or of the uncovered pit with the pierced stone slab beside it. Most of the black doorways led merely to small chambers, some vacant and some evidently used as storerooms; and in several of the latter he saw some very curious accumulations of various objects. One was packed with rotting and dust-draped bales of spare clothing, and the explorer thrilled when he saw that it was unmistakably the clothing of a century and a half before. In another room he found numerous odds and ends of modern clothing, as if gradual provisions were being made to equip a large body of men. But what he disliked most of all were the huge copper vats which occasionally appeared; these, and the sinister incrustations upon them. He liked them even less than the weirdly figured leaden bowls whose rims retained such obnoxious deposits and around which clung repellent odours perceptible above even the general noisomeness of the crypt. When he had completed about half the entire circuit of the wall he found another corridor like that from which he had come, and out of which many doors opened. This he proceeded to investigate; and after entering three rooms of medium size and of no significant contents, he came at last to a large oblong apartment whose business-like tanks and tables, furnaces and modern instruments, occasional books and endless shelves of jars and bottles proclaimed it indeed the long-sought laboratory of Charles Ward\u2014and no doubt of old Joseph Curwen before him.\n\nAfter lighting the three lamps which he found filled and ready, Dr. Willett examined the place and all its appurtenances with the keenest interest; noting from the relative quantities of various reagents on the shelves that young Ward's dominant concern must have been with some branch of organic chemistry. On the whole, little could be learned from the scientific ensemble, which included a gruesome-looking dissecting table; so that the room was really rather a disappointment. Among the books was a tattered old copy of Borellus in black-letter, and it was weirdly interesting to note that Ward had underlined the same passage whose marking had so perturbed good Mr. Merritt at Curwen's farmhouse more than a century and a half before. That older copy, of course, must have perished along with the rest of Curwen's occult library in the final raid. Three archways opened off the laboratory, and these the doctor proceeded to sample in turn. From his cursory survey he saw that two led merely to small storerooms; but these he canvassed with care, remarking the piles of coffins in various stages of damage and shuddering violently at two or three of the few coffin-plates he could decipher. There was much clothing also stored in these rooms, and several new and tightly nailed boxes which he did not stop to investigate. Most interesting of all, perhaps, were some odd bits which he judged to be fragments of old Joseph Curwen's laboratory appliances. These had suffered damage at the hands of the raiders, but were still partly recognisable as the chemical paraphernalia of the Georgian period.\n\nThe third archway led to a very sizeable chamber entirely lined with shelves and having in the centre a table bearing two lamps. These lamps Willett lighted, and in their brilliant glow studied the endless shelving which surrounded him. Some of the upper levels were wholly vacant, but most of the space was filled with small odd-looking leaden jars of two general types; one tall and without handles like a Grecian lekythos or oil-jug, and the other with a single handle and proportioned like a Phaleron jug. All had metal stoppers, and were covered with peculiar-looking symbols moulded in low relief. In a moment the doctor noticed that these jugs were classified with great rigidity; all the lekythoi being on one side of the room with a large wooden sign reading \"Custodes\" above them, and all the Phalerons on the other, correspondingly labelled with a sign reading \"Materia\". Each of the jars or jugs, except some on the upper shelves that turned out to be vacant, bore a cardboard tag with a number apparently referring to a catalogue; and Willett resolved to look for the latter presently. For the moment, however, he was more interested in the nature of the array as a whole; and experimentally opened several of the lekythoi and Phalerons at random with a view to a rough generalisation. The result was invariable. Both types of jar contained a small quantity of a single kind of substance; a fine dusty powder of very light weight and of many shades of dull, neutral colour. To the colours which formed the only point of variation there was no apparent method of disposal; and no distinction between what occurred in the lekythoi and what occurred in the Phalerons. A bluish-grey powder might be by the side of a pinkish-white one, and any one in a Phaleron might have its exact counterpart in a lekythos. The most individual feature about the powders was their non-adhesiveness. Willett would pour one into his hand, and upon returning it to its jug would find that no residue whatever remained on its palm.\n\nThe meaning of the two signs puzzled him, and he wondered why this battery of chemicals was separated so radically from those in glass jars on the shelves of the laboratory proper. \"Custodes\", \"Materia\"; that was the Latin for \"Guards\" and \"Materials\", respectively\u2014and then there came a flash of memory as to where he had seen that word \"Guards\" before in connexion with this dreadful mystery. It was, of course, in the recent letter to Dr. Allen purporting to be from old Edward Hutchinson; and the phrase had read: \"There was no Neede to keep the Guards in Shape and eat'g off their Heads, and it made Much to be founde in Case of Trouble, as you too welle knowe.\" What did this signify? But wait\u2014was there not still another reference to \"guards\" in this matter which he had failed wholly to recall when reading the Hutchinson letter? Back in the old non-secretive days Ward had told him of the Eleazar Smith diary recording the spying of Smith and Weeden on the Curwen farm, and in that dreadful chronicle there had been a mention of conversations overheard before the old wizard betook himself wholly beneath the earth. There had been, Smith and Weeden insisted, terrible colloquies wherein figured Curwen, certain captives of his, and the guards of those captives. Those guards, according to Hutchinson or his avatar, had 'eaten their heads off', so that now Dr. Allen did not keep them in shape. And if not in shape, how save as the \"salts\" to which it appears this wizard band was engaged in reducing as many human bodies or skeletons as they could?\n\nSo that was what these lekythoi contained; the monstrous fruit of unhallowed rites and deeds, presumably won or cowed to such submission as to help, when called up by some hellish incantation, in the defence of their blasphemous master or the questioning of those who were not so willing? Willett shuddered at the thought of what he had been pouring in and out of his hands, and for a moment felt an impulse to flee in panic from that cavern of hideous shelves with their silent and perhaps watching sentinels. Then he thought of the \"Materia\"\u2014in the myriad Phaleron jugs on the other side of the room. Salts too\u2014and if not the salts of \"guards\", then the salts of what? God! Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, 'all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe'? And Marinus Bicknell Willett had sifted their dust through his hands!\n\nThen he noticed a small door at the farther end of the room, and calmed himself enough to approach it and examine the crude sign chiselled above. It was only a symbol, but it filled him with vague spiritual dread; for a morbid, dreaming friend of his had once drawn it on paper and told him a few of the things it means in the dark abyss of sleep. It was the sign of Koth, that dreamers see fixed above the archway of a certain black tower standing alone in twilight\u2014and Willett did not like what his friend Randolph Carter had said of its powers. But a moment later he forgot the sign as he recognised a new acrid odour in the stench-filled air. This was a chemical rather than animal smell, and came clearly from the room beyond the door. And it was, unmistakably, the same odour which had saturated Charles Ward's clothing on the day the doctors had taken him away. So it was here that the youth had been interrupted by the final summons? He was wiser than old Joseph Curwen, for he had not resisted. Willett, boldly determined to penetrate every wonder and nightmare this nether realm might contain, seized the small lamp and crossed the threshold. A wave of nameless fright rolled out to meet him, but he yielded to no whim and deferred to no intuition. There was nothing alive here to harm him, and he would not be stayed in his piercing of the eldritch cloud which engulfed his patient.\n\nThe room beyond the door was of medium size, and had no furniture save a table, a single chair, and two groups of curious machines with clamps and wheels, which Willett recognised after a moment as mediaeval instruments of torture. On one side of the door stood a rack of savage whips, above which were some shelves bearing empty rows of shallow pedestalled cups of lead shaped like Grecian kylikes. On the other side was the table; with a powerful Argand lamp, a pad and pencil, and two of the stoppered lekythoi from the shelves outside set down at irregular places as if temporarily or in haste. Willett lighted the lamp and looked carefully at the pad, to see what notes young Ward might have been jotting down when interrupted; but found nothing more intelligible than the following disjointed fragments in that crabbed Curwen chirography, which shed no light on the case as a whole:\n\n\"B. dy'd not. Escap'd into walls and founde Place below.\n\n\"Saw olde V. saye ye Sabaoth and learnt ye Way.\n\n\"Rais'd Yog-Sothoth thrice and was ye nexte Day deliver'd.\n\n\"F. soughte to wipe out all know'g howe to raise Those from Outside.\"\n\nAs the strong Argand blaze lit up the entire chamber the doctor saw that the wall opposite the door, between the two groups of torturing appliances in the corners, was covered with pegs from which hung a set of shapeless-looking robes of a rather dismal yellowish-white. But far more interesting were the two vacant walls, both of which were thickly covered with mystic symbols and formulae roughly chiselled in the smooth dressed stone. The damp floor also bore marks of carving; and with but little difficulty Willett deciphered a huge pentagram in the centre, with a plain circle about three feet wide half way between this and each corner. In one of these four circles, near where a yellowish robe had been flung carelessly down, there stood a shallow kylix of the sort found on the shelves above the whip-rack; and just outside the periphery was one of the Phaleron jugs from the shelves in the other room, its tag numbered 118. This was unstoppered, and proved upon inspection to be empty; but the explorer saw with a shiver that the kylix was not. Within its shallow area, and saved from scattering only by the absence of wind in this sequestered cavern, lay a small amount of a dry, dull-greenish efflorescent powder which must have belonged in the jug; and Willett almost reeled at the implications that came sweeping over him as he correlated little by little the several elements and antecedents of the scene. The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from the jug of \"Materia\", the two lekythoi from the \"Custodes\" shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of Charles Ward\u2014all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor.\n\nWith an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the formulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in Joseph Curwen's time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognised as what Mrs. Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before, and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs. Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of \"Eliphas Levi\"; but its identity was unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almousin, and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination just around the corner.\n\nThis was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition as he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly speaking, the same; with the ancient symbols of \"Dragon's Head\" and \"Dragon's Tail\" heading them as in Ward's scribblings. But the spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised began \"Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth\", this epigraph started out as \"Aye, engengah, Yogge-Sothotha\"; which to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the second word.\n\nGround as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed him; and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy rang his voice; its accents keyed to a droning singsong either through the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and the darkness.\n\n\u2003\"Y'AI 'NG'NGAH,\n\n\u2003YOG-SOTHOTH\n\n\u2003H'EE\u2014L'GEB\n\n\u2003F'AI THRODOG\n\n\u2003UAAAH!\"\n\nBut what was this cold wind which had sprung into life at the very outset of the chant? The lamps were sputtering woefully, and the gloom grew so dense that the letters on the wall nearly faded from sight. There was smoke, too, and an acrid odour which quite drowned out the stench from the faraway wells; an odour like that he had smelt before, yet infinitely stronger and more pungent. He turned from the inscriptions to face the room with its bizarre contents, and saw that the kylix on the floor, in which the ominous efflorescent powder had lain, was giving forth a cloud of thick, greenish-black vapour of surprising volume and opacity. That powder\u2014Great God! it had come from the shelf of \"Materia\"\u2014what was it doing now, and what had started it? The formula he had been chanting\u2014the first of the pair\u2014Dragon's Head, ascending node\u2014Blessed Saviour, could it be....\n\nThe doctor reeled, and through his head raced wildly disjointed scraps from all he had seen, heard, and read of the frightful case of Joseph Curwen and Charles Dexter Ward. \"I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe.... Have ye Wordes for laying at all times readie, and stopp not to be sure when there is any Doubte of Whom you have.... Three Talkes with What was therein inhum'd....\" Mercy of Heaven, what is that shape behind the parting smoke?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Marinus Bicknell Willett has no hope that any part of his tale will be believed except by certain sympathetic friends, hence he has made no attempt to tell it beyond his most intimate circle. Only a few outsiders have ever heard it repeated, and of these the majority laugh and remark that the doctor surely is getting old. He has been advised to take a long vacation and to shun future cases dealing with mental disturbance. But Mr. Ward knows that the veteran physician speaks only a horrible truth. Did not he himself see the noisome aperture in the bungalow cellar? Did not Willett send him home overcome and ill at eleven o'clock that portentous morning? Did he not telephone the doctor in vain that evening, and again the next day, and had he not driven to the bungalow itself on that following noon, finding his friend unconscious but unharmed on one of the beds upstairs? Willett had been breathing stertorously, and opened his eyes slowly when Mr. Ward gave him some brandy fetched from the car. Then he shuddered and screamed, crying out, \"That beard... those eyes.... God, who are you?\" A very strange thing to say to a trim, blue-eyed, clean-shaven gentleman whom he had known from the latter's boyhood.\n\nIn the bright noon sunlight the bungalow was unchanged since the previous morning. Willett's clothing bore no disarrangement beyond certain smudges and worn places at the knees, and only a faint acrid odour reminded Mr. Ward of what he had smelt on his son that day he was taken to the hospital. The doctor's flashlight was missing, but his valise was safely there, as empty as when he had brought it. Before indulging in any explanations, and obviously with great moral effort, Willett staggered dizzily down to the cellar and tried the fateful platform before the tubs. It was unyielding. Crossing to where he had left his yet unused tool satchel the day before, he obtained a chisel and began to pry up the stubborn planks one by one. Underneath the smooth concrete was still visible, but of any opening or perforation there was no longer a trace. Nothing yawned this time to sicken the mystified father who had followed the doctor downstairs; only the smooth concrete underneath the planks\u2014no noisome well, no world of subterrene horrors, no secret library, no Curwen papers, no nightmare pits of stench and howling, no laboratory or shelves or chiselled formulae, no.... Dr. Willett turned pale, and clutched at the younger man. \"Yesterday,\" he asked softly, \"did you see it here... and smell it?\" And when Mr. Ward, himself transfixed with dread and wonder, found strength to nod an affirmative, the physician gave a sound half a sigh and half a gasp, and nodded in turn. \"Then I will tell you,\" he said.\n\nSo for an hour, in the sunniest room they could find upstairs, the physician whispered his frightful tale to the wondering father. There was nothing to relate beyond the looming up of that form when the greenish-black vapour from the kylix parted, and Willett was too tired to ask himself what had really occurred. There were futile, bewildered head-shakings from both men, and once Mr. Ward ventured a hushed suggestion, \"Do you suppose it would be of any use to dig?\" The doctor was silent, for it seemed hardly fitting for any human brain to answer when powers of unknown spheres had so vitally encroached on this side of the Great Abyss. Again Mr. Ward asked, \"But where did it go? It brought you here, you know, and it sealed up the hole somehow.\" And Willett again let silence answer for him.\n\nBut after all, this was not the final phase of the matter. Reaching for his handkerchief before rising to leave, Dr. Willett's fingers closed upon a piece of paper in his pocket which had not been there before, and which was companioned by the candles and matches he had seized in the vanished vault. It was a common sheet, torn obviously from the cheap pad in that fabulous room of horror somewhere underground, and the writing upon it was that of an ordinary lead pencil\u2014doubtless the one which had lain beside the pad. It was folded very carelessly, and beyond the faint acrid scent of the cryptic chamber bore no print or mark of any world but this. But in the text itself it did indeed reek with wonder; for here was no script of any wholesome age, but the laboured strokes of mediaeval darkness, scarcely legible to the laymen who now strained over it, yet having combinations of symbols which seemed vaguely familiar. The briefly scrawled message was this, and its mystery lent purpose to the shaken pair, who forthwith walked steadily out to the Ward car and gave orders to be driven first to a quiet dining place and then to the John Hay Library on the hill.\n\nAt the library it was easy to find good manuals of palaeography, and over these the two men puzzled till the lights of evening shone out from the great chandelier. In the end they found what was needed. The letters were indeed no fantastic invention, but the normal script of a very dark period. They were the pointed Saxon minuscules of the eighth or ninth century A.D., and brought with them memories of an uncouth time when under a fresh Christian veneer ancient faiths and ancient rites stirred stealthily, and the pale moon of Britain looked sometimes on strange deeds in the Roman ruins of Caerleon and Hexham, and by the towers along Hadrian's crumbling wall. The words were in such Latin as a barbarous age might remember\u2014\"Corvinus necandus est. Cadaver aq(ua) forti dissolvendum, nec aliq(ui)d retinendum. Tace ut potes.\"\u2014which may roughly be translated, \"Curwen must be killed. The body must be dissolved in aqua fortis, nor must anything be retained. Keep silence as best you are able.\"\n\nWillett and Mr. Ward were mute and baffled. They had met the unknown, and found that they lacked emotions to respond to it as they vaguely believed they ought. With Willett, especially, the capacity for receiving fresh impressions of awe was well-nigh exhausted; and both men sat still and helpless till the closing of the library forced them to leave. Then they drove listlessly to the Ward mansion in Prospect Street, and talked to no purpose into the night. The doctor rested toward morning, but did not go home. And he was still there Sunday noon when a telephone message came from the detectives who had been assigned to look up Dr. Allen.\n\nMr. Ward, who was pacing nervously about in a dressing-gown, answered the call in person; and told the men to come up early the next day when he heard their report was almost ready. Both Willett and he were glad that this phase of the matter was taking form, for whatever the origin of the strange minuscule message, it seemed certain that the \"Curwen\" who must be destroyed could be no other than the bearded and spectacled stranger. Charles had feared this man, and had said in the frantic note that he must be killed and dissolved in acid. Allen, moreover, had been receiving letters from the strange wizards in Europe under the name of Curwen, and palpably regarded himself as an avatar of the bygone necromancer. And now from a fresh and unknown source had come a message saying that \"Curwen\" must be killed and dissolved in acid. The linkage was too unmistakable to be factitious; and besides, was not Allen planning to murder young Ward upon the advice of the creature called Hutchinson? Of course, the letter they had seen had never reached the bearded stranger; but from its text they could see that Allen had already formed plans for dealing with the youth if he grew too 'squeamish'. Without doubt, Allen must be apprehended; and even if the most drastic directions were not carried out, he must be placed where he could inflict no harm upon Charles Ward.\n\nThat afternoon, hoping against hope to extract some gleam of information anent the inmost mysteries from the only available one capable of giving it, the father and the doctor went down the bay and called on young Charles at the hospital. Simply and gravely Willett told him all he had found, and noticed how pale he turned as each description made certain the truth of the discovery. The physician employed as much dramatic effect as he could, and watched for a wincing on Charles's part when he approached the matter of the covered pits and the nameless hybrids within. But Ward did not wince. Willett paused, and his voice grew indignant as he spoke of how the things were starving. He taxed the youth with shocking inhumanity, and shivered when only a sardonic laugh came in reply. For Charles, having dropped as useless his pretence that the crypt did not exist, seemed to see some ghastly jest in this affair; and chuckled hoarsely at something which amused him. Then he whispered, in accents doubly terrible because of the cracked voice he used, \"Damn 'em, they do eat, but they don't need to! That's the rare part! A month, you say, without food? Lud, Sir, you be modest! D'ye know, that was the joke on poor old Whipple with his virtuous bluster! Kill everything off, would he? Why, damme, he was half-deaf with the noise from Outside and never saw or heard aught from the wells! He never dreamed they were there at all! Devil take ye, those cursed things have been howling down there ever since Curwen was done for a hundred and fifty-seven years gone!\"\n\nBut no more than this could Willett get from the youth. Horrified, yet almost convinced against his will, he went on with his tale in the hope that some incident might startle his auditor out of the mad composure he maintained. Looking at the youth's face, the doctor could not but feel a kind of terror at the changes which recent months had wrought. Truly, the boy had drawn down nameless horrors from the skies. When the room with the formulae and the greenish dust was mentioned, Charles shewed his first sign of animation. A quizzical look overspread his face as he heard what Willett had read on the pad, and he ventured the mild statement that those notes were old ones, of no possible significance to anyone not deeply initiated in the history of magic. \"But,\" he added, \"had you but known the words to bring up that which I had out in the cup, you had not been here to tell me this. 'Twas Number 118, and I conceive you would have shook had you looked it up in my list in t'other room. 'Twas never raised by me, but I meant to have it up that day you came to invite me hither.\"\n\nThen Willett told of the formula he had spoken and of the greenish-black smoke which had arisen; and as he did so he saw true fear dawn for the first time on Charles Ward's face. \"It came, and you be here alive?\" As Ward croaked the words his voice seemed almost to burst free of its trammels and sink to cavernous abysses of uncanny resonance. Willett, gifted with a flash of inspiration, believed he saw the situation, and wove into his reply a caution from a letter he remembered. \"No. 118, you say? But don't forget that stones are all changed now in nine grounds out of ten. You are never sure till you question!\" And then, without warning, he drew forth the minuscule message and flashed it before the patient's eyes. He could have wished no stronger result, for Charles Ward fainted forthwith.\n\nAll this conversation, of course, had been conducted with the greatest secrecy lest the resident alienists accuse the father and the physician of encouraging a madman in his delusions. Unaided, too, Dr. Willett and Mr. Ward picked up the stricken youth and placed him on the couch. In reviving, the patient mumbled many times of some word which he must get to Orne and Hutchinson at once; so when his consciousness seemed fully back the doctor told him that of those strange creatures at least one was his bitter enemy, and had given Dr. Allen advice for his assassination. This revelation produced no visible effect, and before it was made the visitors could see that their host had already the look of a hunted man. After that he would converse no more, so Willett and the father departed presently; leaving behind a caution against the bearded Allen, to which the youth only replied that this individual was very safely taken care of, and could do no one any harm even if he wished. This was said with an almost evil chuckle very painful to hear. They did not worry about any communications Charles might indite to that monstrous pair in Europe, since they knew that the hospital authorities seized all outgoing mail for censorship and would pass no wild or outr\u00e9-looking missive.\n\nThere is, however, a curious sequel to the matter of Orne and Hutchinson, if such indeed the exiled wizards were. Moved by some vague presentiment amidst the horrors of that period, Willett arranged with an international press-cutting bureau for accounts of notable current crimes and accidents in Prague and in eastern Transylvania; and after six months believed that he had found two very significant things amongst the multifarious items he received and had translated. One was the total wrecking of a house by night in the oldest quarter of Prague, and the disappearance of the evil old man called Josef Nadek, who had dwelt in it alone ever since anyone could remember. The other was a titan explosion in the Transylvanian mountains east of Rakus, and the utter extirpation with all its inmates of the ill-regarded Castle Ferenczy, whose master was so badly spoken of by peasants and soldiery alike that he would shortly have been summoned to Bucharest for serious questioning had not this incident cut off a career already so long as to antedate all common memory. Willett maintains that the hand which wrote those minuscules was able to wield stronger weapons as well; and that while Curwen was left to him to dispose of, the writer felt able to find and deal with Orne and Hutchinson itself. Of what their fate may have been the doctor strives sedulously not to think." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "The following morning Dr. Willett hastened to the Ward home to be present when the detectives arrived. Allen's destruction or imprisonment\u2014or Curwen's, if one might regard the tacit claim to reincarnation as valid\u2014he felt must be accomplished at any cost, and he communicated this conviction to Mr. Ward as they sat waiting for the men to come. They were downstairs this time, for the upper parts of the house were beginning to be shunned because of a peculiar nauseousness which hung indefinitely about; a nauseousness which the older servants connected with some curse left by the vanished Curwen portrait.\n\nAt nine o'clock the three detectives presented themselves and immediately delivered all that they had to say. They had not, regrettably enough, located the Brava Tony Gomes as they had wished, nor had they found the least trace of Dr. Allen's source or present whereabouts; but they had managed to unearth a considerable number of local impressions and facts concerning the reticent stranger. Allen had struck Pawtuxet people as a vaguely unnatural being, and there was an universal belief that his thick sandy beard was either dyed or false\u2014a belief conclusively upheld by the finding of such a false beard, together with a pair of dark glasses, in his room at the fateful bungalow. His voice, Mr. Ward could well testify from his one telephone conversation, had a depth and hollowness that could not be forgotten; and his glance seemed malign even through his smoked and horn-rimmed glasses. One shopkeeper, in the course of negotiations, had seen a specimen of his handwriting and declared it was very queer and crabbed; this being confirmed by pencilled notes of no clear meaning found in his room and identified by the merchant. In connexion with the vampirism rumours of the preceding summer, a majority of the gossips believed that Allen rather than Ward was the actual vampire. Statements were also obtained from the officials who had visited the bungalow after the unpleasant incident of the motor truck robbery. They had felt less of the sinister in Dr. Allen, but had recognised him as the dominant figure in the queer shadowy cottage. The place had been too dark for them to observe him clearly, but they would know him again if they saw him. His beard had looked odd, and they thought he had some slight scar above his dark spectacled right eye. As for the detectives' search of Allen's room, it yielded nothing definite save the beard and glasses, and several pencilled notes in a crabbed writing which Willett at once saw was identical with that shared by the old Curwen manuscripts and by the voluminous recent notes of young Ward found in the vanished catacombs of horror.\n\nDr. Willett and Mr. Ward caught something of a profound, subtle, and insidious cosmic fear from this data as it was gradually unfolded, and almost trembled in following up the vague, mad thought which had simultaneously reached their minds. The false beard and glasses\u2014the crabbed Curwen penmanship\u2014the old portrait and its tiny scar\u2014and the altered youth in the hospital with such a scar\u2014that deep, hollow voice on the telephone\u2014was it not of this that Mr. Ward was reminded when his son barked forth those pitiable tones to which he now claimed to be reduced? Who had ever seen Charles and Allen together? Yes, the officials had once, but who later on? Was it not when Allen left that Charles suddenly lost his growing fright and began to live wholly at the bungalow? Curwen\u2014Allen\u2014Ward\u2014in what blasphemous and abominable fusion had two ages and two persons become involved? That damnable resemblance of the picture to Charles\u2014had it not used to stare and stare, and follow the boy around the room with its eyes? Why, too, did both Allen and Charles copy Joseph Curwen's handwriting, even when alone and off guard? And then the frightful work of those people\u2014the lost crypt of horrors that had aged the doctor overnight; the starved monsters in the noisome pits; the awful formula which had yielded such nameless results; the message in minuscules found in Willett's pocket; the papers and the letters and all the talk of graves and \"salts\" and discoveries\u2014whither did everything lead? In the end Mr. Ward did the most sensible thing. Steeling himself against any realisation of why he did it, he gave the detectives an article to be shewn to such Pawtuxet shopkeepers as had seen the portentous Dr. Allen. That article was a photograph of his luckless son, on which he now carefully drew in ink the pair of heavy glasses and the black pointed beard which the men had brought from Allen's room.\n\nFor two hours he waited with the doctor in the oppressive house where fear and miasma were slowly gathering as the empty panel in the upstairs library leered and leered and leered. Then the men returned. Yes. The altered photograph was a very passable likeness of Dr. Allen. Mr. Ward turned pale, and Willett wiped a suddenly dampened brow with his handkerchief. Allen\u2014Ward\u2014Curwen\u2014it was becoming too hideous for coherent thought. What had the boy called out of the void, and what had it done to him? What, really, had happened from first to last? Who was this Allen who sought to kill Charles as too 'squeamish', and why had his destined victim said in the postscript to that frantic letter that he must be so completely obliterated in acid? Why, too, had the minuscule message, of whose origin no one dared think, said that \"Curwen\" must be likewise obliterated? What was the change, and when had the final stage occurred? That day when his frantic note was received\u2014he had been nervous all the morning, then there was an alteration. He had slipped out unseen and swaggered boldly in past the men hired to guard him. That was the time, when he was out. But no\u2014had he not cried out in terror as he entered his study\u2014this very room? What had he found there? Or wait\u2014what had found him? That simulacrum which brushed boldly in without having been seen to go\u2014was that an alien shadow and a horror forcing itself upon a trembling figure which had never gone out at all? Had not the butler spoken of queer noises?\n\nWillett rang for the man and asked him some low-toned questions. It had, surely enough, been a bad business. There had been noises\u2014a cry, a gasp, a choking, and a sort of clattering or creaking or thumping, or all of these. And Mr. Charles was not the same when he stalked out without a word. The butler shivered as he spoke, and sniffed at the heavy air that blew down from some open window upstairs. Terror had settled definitely upon the house, and only the business-like detectives failed to imbibe a full measure of it. Even they were restless, for this case had held vague elements in the background which pleased them not at all. Dr. Willett was thinking deeply and rapidly, and his thoughts were terrible ones. Now and then he would almost break into muttering as he ran over in his head a new, appalling, and increasingly conclusive chain of nightmare happenings.\n\nThen Mr. Ward made a sign that the conference was over, and everyone save him and the doctor left the room. It was noon now, but shadows as of coming night seemed to engulf the phantom-haunted mansion. Willett began talking very seriously to his host, and urged that he leave a great deal of the future investigation to him. There would be, he predicted, certain obnoxious elements which a friend could bear better than a relative. As family physician he must have a free hand, and the first thing he required was a period alone and undisturbed in the abandoned library upstairs, where the ancient overmantel had gathered about itself an aura of noisome horror more intense than when Joseph Curwen's features themselves glanced slyly down from the painted panel.\n\nMr. Ward, dazed by the flood of grotesque morbidities and unthinkably maddening suggestions that poured in upon him from every side, could only acquiesce; and half an hour later the doctor was locked in the shunned room with the panelling from Olney Court. The father, listening outside, heard fumbling sounds of moving and rummaging as the moments passed; and finally a wrench and a creak, as if a tight cupboard door were being opened. Then there was a muffled cry, a kind of snorting choke, and a hasty slamming of whatever had been opened. Almost at once the key rattled and Willett appeared in the hall, haggard and ghastly, and demanding wood for the real fireplace on the south wall of the room. The furnace was not enough, he said; and the electric log had little practical use. Longing yet not daring to ask questions, Mr. Ward gave the requisite orders and a man brought some stout pine logs, shuddering as he entered the tainted air of the library to place them in the grate. Willett meanwhile had gone up to the dismantled laboratory and brought down a few odds and ends not included in the moving of the July before. They were in a covered basket, and Mr. Ward never saw what they were.\n\nThen the doctor locked himself in the library once more, and by the clouds of smoke which rolled down past the windows from the chimney it was known that he had lighted the fire. Later, after a great rustling of newspapers, that odd wrench and creaking were heard again; followed by a thumping which none of the eavesdroppers liked. Thereafter two suppressed cries of Willett's were heard, and hard upon these came a swishing rustle of indefinable hatefulness. Finally the smoke that the wind beat down from the chimney grew very dark and acrid, and everyone wished that the weather had spared them this choking and venomous inundation of peculiar fumes. Mr. Ward's head reeled, and the servants all clustered together in a knot to watch the horrible black smoke swoop down. After an age of waiting the vapours seemed to lighten, and half-formless sounds of scraping, sweeping, and other minor operations were heard behind the bolted door. And at last, after the slamming of some cupboard within, Willett made his appearance\u2014sad, pale, and haggard, and bearing the cloth-draped basket he had taken from the upstairs laboratory. He had left the window open, and into that once accursed room was pouring a wealth of pure, wholesome air to mix with a queer new smell of disinfectants. The ancient overmantel still lingered; but it seemed robbed of malignity now, and rose as calm and stately in its white panelling as if it had never borne the picture of Joseph Curwen. Night was coming on, yet this time its shadows held no latent fright, but only a gentle melancholy. Of what he had done the doctor would never speak. To Mr. Ward he said, \"I can answer no questions, but I will say that there are different kinds of magic. I have made a great purgation, and those in this house will sleep the better for it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "That Dr. Willett's \"purgation\" had been an ordeal almost as nerve-racking in its way as his hideous wandering in the vanished crypt is shewn by the fact that the elderly physician gave out completely as soon as he reached home that evening. For three days he rested constantly in his room, though servants later muttered something about having heard him after midnight on Wednesday, when the outer door softly opened and closed with phenomenal softness. Servants' imaginations, fortunately, are limited, else comment might have been excited by an item in Thursday's Evening Bulletin which ran as follows:\n\n'North End Ghouls Active Again'\n\nAfter a lull of ten months since the dastardly vandalism in the Weeden lot at the North Burial Ground, a nocturnal prowler was glimpsed early this morning in the same cemetery by Robert Hart, the night watchman. Happening to glance for a moment from his shelter at about 2 a.m., Hart observed the glow of a lantern or pocket torch not far to the northwest, and upon opening the door detected the figure of a man with a trowel very plainly silhouetted against a nearby electric light. At once starting in pursuit, he saw the figure dart hurriedly toward the main entrance, gaining the street and losing himself among the shadows before approach or capture was possible.\n\nLike the first of the ghouls active during the past year, this intruder had done no real damage before detection. A vacant part of the Ward lot shewed signs of a little superficial digging, but nothing even nearly the size of a grave had been attempted, and no previous grave had been disturbed.\n\nHart, who cannot describe the prowler except as a small man probably having a full beard, inclines to the view that all three of the digging incidents have a common source; but police from the Second Station think otherwise on account of the savage nature of the second incident, where an ancient coffin was removed and its headstone violently shattered.\n\nThe first of the incidents, in which it is thought an attempt to bury something was frustrated, occurred a year ago last March, and has been attributed to bootleggers seeking a cache. It is possible, says Sergt. Riley, that this third affair is of similar nature. Officers at the Second Station are taking especial pains to capture the gang of miscreants responsible for these repeated outrages.\n\nAll day Thursday Dr. Willett rested as if recuperating from something past or nerving himself for something to come. In the evening he wrote a note to Mr. Ward, which was delivered the next morning and which caused the half-dazed parent to ponder long and deeply. Mr. Ward had not been able to go down to business since the shock of Monday with its baffling reports and its sinister \"purgation\", but he found something calming about the doctor's letter in spite of the despair it seemed to promise and the fresh mysteries it seemed to evoke.\n\n\u2002\"10 Barnes St.,\n\n\u2002Providence, R.I.,\n\n\u2002April 12, 1928.\n\n\u2002\"Dear Theodore:\u2014I feel that I must say a word to you before doing what I am going to do tomorrow. It will conclude the terrible business we have been going through (for I feel that no spade is ever likely to reach that monstrous place we know of), but I'm afraid it won't set your mind at rest unless I expressly assure you how very conclusive it is.\n\n\u2002\"You have known me ever since you were a small boy, so I think you will not distrust me when I hint that some matters are best left undecided and unexplored. It is better that you attempt no further speculation as to Charles's case, and almost imperative that you tell his mother nothing more than she already suspects. When I call on you tomorrow Charles will have escaped. That is all which need remain in anyone's mind. He was mad, and he escaped. You can tell his mother gently and gradually about the mad part when you stop sending the typed notes in his name. I'd advise you to join her in Atlantic City and take a rest yourself. God knows you need one after this shock, as I do myself. I am going South for a while to calm down and brace up.\n\n\u2002\"So don't ask me any questions when I call. It may be that something will go wrong, but I'll tell you if it does. I don't think it will. There will be nothing more to worry about, for Charles will be very, very safe. He is now\u2014safer than you dream. You need hold no fears about Allen, and who or what he is. He forms as much a part of the past as Joseph Curwen's picture, and when I ring your doorbell you may feel certain that there is no such person. And what wrote that minuscule message will never trouble you or yours.\n\n\u2002\"But you must steel yourself to melancholy, and prepare your wife to do the same. I must tell you frankly that Charles's escape will not mean his restoration to you. He has been afflicted with a peculiar disease, as you must realise from the subtle physical as well as mental changes in him, and you must not hope to see him again. Have only this consolation\u2014that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.\n\n\u2002\"And now comes the matter in which I must ask you to trust me most of all. For there will be, indeed, no uncertainty about Charles's fate. In about a year, say, you can if you wish devise a suitable account of the end; for the boy will be no more. You can put up a stone in your lot at the North Burial Ground exactly ten feet west of your father's and facing the same way, and that will mark the true resting-place of your son. Nor need you fear that it will mark any abnormality or changeling. The ashes in that grave will be those of your own unaltered bone and sinew\u2014of the real Charles Dexter Ward whose mind you watched from infancy\u2014the real Charles with the olive-mark on his hip and without the black witch-mark on his chest or the pit on his forehead. The Charles who never did actual evil, and who will have paid with his life for his 'squeamishness'.\n\n\u2002\"That is all. Charles will have escaped, and a year from now you can put up his stone. Do not question me tomorrow. And believe that the honour of your ancient family remains untainted now, as it has been at all times in the past.\n\n\u2002\"With profoundest sympathy, and exhortations to fortitude, calmness, and resignation, I am ever\n\n\u2002Sincerely your friend,\n\n\u2002Marinus B. Willett\"\n\nSo on the morning of Friday, April 13, 1928, Marinus Bicknell Willett visited the room of Charles Dexter Ward at Dr. Waite's private hospital on Conanicut Island. The youth, though making no attempt to evade his caller, was in a sullen mood; and seemed disinclined to open the conversation which Willett obviously desired. The doctor's discovery of the crypt and his monstrous experience therein had of course created a new source of embarrassment, so that both hesitated perceptibly after the interchange of a few strained formalities. Then a new element of constraint crept in, as Ward seemed to read behind the doctor's mask-like face a terrible purpose which had never been there before. The patient quailed, conscious that since the last visit there had been a change whereby the solicitous family physician had given place to the ruthless and implacable avenger.\n\nWard actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak. \"More,\" he said, \"has been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due.\"\n\n\"Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?\" was the ironic reply. It was evident that the youth meant to shew bravado to the last.\n\n\"No,\" Willett slowly rejoined, \"this time I did not have to dig. We have had men looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and spectacles in the bungalow.\"\n\n\"Excellent,\" commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting, \"and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now have on!\"\n\n\"They would become you very well,\" came the even and studied response, \"as indeed they seem to have done.\"\n\nAs Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun; though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured:\n\n\"And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be twofold?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Willett gravely, \"again you are wrong. It is no business of mine if any man seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space.\"\n\nWard now started violently. \"Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what d'ye want with me?\"\n\nThe doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an effective answer.\n\n\"I have found,\" he finally intoned, \"something in a cupboard behind an ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be.\"\n\nThe madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting:\n\n\"Damn ye, who did ye tell\u2014and who'll believe it was he after these full two months, with me alive? What d'ye mean to do?\"\n\nWillett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture.\n\n\"I have told no one. This is no common case\u2014it is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alienists could ever fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in thinking out this thing. You cannot deceive me, Joseph Curwen, for I know that your accursed magic is true!\n\n\"I know how you wove the spell that brooded outside the years and fastened on your double and descendant; I know how you drew him into the past and got him to raise you up from your detestable grave; I know how he kept you hidden in his laboratory while you studied modern things and roved abroad as a vampire by night, and how you later shewed yourself in beard and glasses that no one might wonder at your godless likeness to him; I know what you resolved to do when he balked at your monstrous rifling of the world's tombs, and at what you planned afterward, and I know how you did it.\n\n\"You left off your beard and glasses and fooled the guards around the house. They thought it was he who went in, and they thought it was he who came out when you had strangled and hidden him. But you hadn't reckoned on the different contents of two minds. You were a fool, Curwen, to fancy that a mere visual identity would be enough. Why didn't you think of the speech and the voice and the handwriting? It hasn't worked, you see, after all. You know better than I who or what wrote that message in minuscules, but I will warn you it was not written in vain. There are abominations and blasphemies which must be stamped out, and I believe that the writer of those words will attend to Orne and Hutchinson. One of those creatures wrote you once, 'do not call up any that you can not put down'. You were undone once before, perhaps in that very way, and it may be that your own evil magic will undo you all again. Curwen, a man can't tamper with Nature beyond certain limits, and every horror you have woven will rise up to wipe you out.\"\n\nBut here the doctor was cut short by a convulsive cry from the creature before him. Hopelessly at bay, weaponless, and knowing that any show of physical violence would bring a score of attendants to the doctor's rescue, Joseph Curwen had recourse to his one ancient ally, and began a series of cabbalistic motions with his forefingers as his deep, hollow voice, now unconcealed by feigned hoarseness, bellowed out the opening words of a terrible formula.\n\n\"PER ADONAI ELOIM, ADONAI JEHOVA, ADONAI SABAOTH, METRATON....\"\n\nBut Willett was too quick for him. Even as the dogs in the yard outside began to howl, and even as a chill wind sprang suddenly up from the bay, the doctor commenced the solemn and measured intonation of that which he had meant all along to recite. An eye for an eye\u2014magic for magic\u2014let the outcome shew how well the lesson of the abyss had been learned! So in a clear voice Marinus Bicknell Willett began the second of that pair of formulae whose first had raised the writer of those minuscules\u2014the cryptic invocation whose heading was the Dragon's Tail, sign of the descending node\u2014\n\n\u2003\"OGTHROD AI'F\n\n\u2003GEB'L\u2014EE'H\n\n\u2003YOG-SOTHOTH\n\n\u2003'NGAH'NG AI'Y\n\n\u2003ZHRO!\"\n\nAt the very first word from Willett's mouth the previously commenced formula of the patient stopped short. Unable to speak, the monster made wild motions with his arms until they too were arrested. When the awful name of Yog-Sothoth was uttered, the hideous change began. It was not merely a dissolution, but rather a transformation or recapitulation; and Willett shut his eyes lest he faint before the rest of the incantation could be pronounced.\n\nBut he did not faint, and that man of unholy centuries and forbidden secrets never troubled the world again. The madness out of time had subsided, and the case of Charles Dexter Ward was closed. Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acids. For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Cats of Ulthar by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIt is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Mero\u00eb and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.\n\nIn Ulthar, before ever the burgesses forbade the killing of cats, there dwelt an old cotter and his wife who delighted to trap and slay the cats of their neighbours. Why they did this I know not; save that many hate the voice of the cat in the night, and take it ill that cats should run stealthily about yards and gardens at twilight. But whatever the reason, this old man and woman took pleasure in trapping and slaying every cat which came near to their hovel; and from some of the sounds heard after dark, many villagers fancied that the manner of slaying was exceedingly peculiar. But the villagers did not discuss such things with the old man and his wife; because of the habitual expression on the withered faces of the two, and because their cottage was so small and so darkly hidden under spreading oaks at the back of a neglected yard. In truth, much as the owners of cats hated these odd folk, they feared them more; and instead of berating them as brutal assassins, merely took care that no cherished pet or mouser should stray toward the remote hovel under the dark trees. When through some unavoidable oversight a cat was missed, and sounds heard after dark, the loser would lament impotently; or console himself by thanking Fate that it was not one of his children who had thus vanished. For the people of Ulthar were simple, and knew not whence it is all cats first came.\n\nOne day a caravan of strange wanderers from the South entered the narrow cobbled streets of Ulthar. Dark wanderers they were, and unlike the other roving folk who passed through the village twice every year. In the market-place they told fortunes for silver, and bought gay beads from the merchants. What was the land of these wanderers none could tell; but it was seen that they were given to strange prayers, and that they had painted on the sides of their wagons strange figures with human bodies and the heads of cats, hawks, rams, and lions. And the leader of the caravan wore a head-dress with two horns and a curious disc betwixt the horns.\n\nThere was in this singular caravan a little boy with no father or mother, but only a tiny black kitten to cherish. The plague had not been kind to him, yet had left him this small furry thing to mitigate his sorrow; and when one is very young, one can find great relief in the lively antics of a black kitten. So the boy whom the dark people called Menes smiled more often than he wept as he sate playing with his graceful kitten on the steps of an oddly painted wagon.\n\nOn the third morning of the wanderers' stay in Ulthar, Menes could not find his kitten; and as he sobbed aloud in the market-place certain villagers told him of the old man and his wife, and of sounds heard in the night. And when he heard these things his sobbing gave place to meditation, and finally to prayer. He stretched out his arms toward the sun and prayed in a tongue no villager could understand; though indeed the villagers did not try very hard to understand, since their attention was mostly taken up by the sky and the odd shapes the clouds were assuming. It was very peculiar, but as the little boy uttered his petition there seemed to form overhead the shadowy, nebulous figures of exotic things; of hybrid creatures crowned with horn-flanked discs. Nature is full of such illusions to impress the imaginative.\n\nThat night the wanderers left Ulthar, and were never seen again. And the householders were troubled when they noticed that in all the village there was not a cat to be found. From each hearth the familiar cat had vanished; cats large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white. Old Kranon, the burgomaster, swore that the dark folk had taken the cats away in revenge for the killing of Menes' kitten; and cursed the caravan and the little boy. But Nith, the lean notary, declared that the old cotter and his wife were more likely persons to suspect; for their hatred of cats was notorious and increasingly bold. Still, no one durst complain to the sinister couple; even when little Atal, the innkeeper's son, vowed that he had at twilight seen all the cats of Ulthar in that accursed yard under the trees, pacing very slowly and solemnly in a circle around the cottage, two abreast, as if in performance of some unheard-of rite of beasts. The villagers did not know how much to believe from so small a boy; and though they feared that the evil pair had charmed the cats to their death, they preferred not to chide the old cotter till they met him outside his dark and repellent yard.\n\nSo Ulthar went to sleep in vain anger; and when the people awaked at dawn\u2014behold! every cat was back at his accustomed hearth! Large and small, black, grey, striped, yellow, and white, none was missing. Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content. The citizens talked with one another of the affair, and marvelled not a little. Old Kranon again insisted that it was the dark folk who had taken them, since cats did not return alive from the cottage of the ancient man and his wife. But all agreed on one thing: that the refusal of all the cats to eat their portions of meat or drink their saucers of milk was exceedingly curious. And for two whole days the sleek, lazy cats of Ulthar would touch no food, but only doze by the fire or in the sun.\n\nIt was fully a week before the villagers noticed that no lights were appearing at dusk in the windows of the cottage under the trees. Then the lean Nith remarked that no one had seen the old man or his wife since the night the cats were away. In another week the burgomaster decided to overcome his fears and call at the strangely silent dwelling as a matter of duty, though in so doing he was careful to take with him Shang the blacksmith and Thul the cutter of stone as witnesses. And when they had broken down the frail door they found only this: two cleanly picked human skeletons on the earthen floor, and a number of singular beetles crawling in the shadowy corners.\n\nThere was subsequently much talk among the burgesses of Ulthar. Zath, the coroner, disputed at length with Nith, the lean notary; and Kranon and Shang and Thul were overwhelmed with questions. Even little Atal, the innkeeper's son, was closely questioned and given a sweetmeat as reward. They talked of the old cotter and his wife, of the caravan of dark wanderers, of small Menes and his black kitten, of the prayer of Menes and of the sky during that prayer, of the doings of the cats on the night the caravan left, and of what was later found in the cottage under the dark trees in the repellent yard.\n\nAnd in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Celepha\u00efs by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward the distant regions where the sea meets the sky. In a dream it was also that he came by his name of Kuranes, for when awake he was called by another name. Perhaps it was natural for him to dream a new name; for he was the last of his family, and alone among the indifferent millions of London, so there were not many to speak to him and remind him who he had been. His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write. The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper. Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.\n\nThere are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.\n\nKuranes came very suddenly upon his old world of childhood. He had been dreaming of the house where he was born; the great stone house covered with ivy, where thirteen generations of his ancestors had lived, and where he had hoped to die. It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night, through the gardens, down the terraces, past the great oaks of the park, and along the long white road to the village. The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death. In the streets were spears of long grass, and the window-panes on either side were either broken or filmily staring. Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal. Then he had been drawn down a lane that led off from the village street toward the channel cliffs, and had come to the end of things\u2014to the precipice and the abyss where all the village and all the world fell abruptly into the unechoing emptiness of infinity, and where even the sky ahead was empty and unlit by the crumbling moon and the peering stars. Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down; past dark, shapeless, undreamed dreams, faintly glowing spheres that may have been partly dreamed dreams, and laughing winged things that seemed to mock the dreamers of all the worlds. Then a rift seemed to open in the darkness before him, and he saw the city of the valley, glistening radiantly far, far below, with a background of sea and sky, and a snow-capped mountain near the shore.\n\nKuranes had awaked the very moment he beheld the city, yet he knew from his brief glance that it was none other than Celepha\u00efs, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where his spirit had dwelt all the eternity of an hour one summer afternoon very long ago, when he had slipt away from his nurse and let the warm sea-breeze lull him to sleep as he watched the clouds from the cliff near the village. He had protested then, when they had found him, waked him, and carried him home, for just as he was aroused he had been about to sail in a golden galley for those alluring regions where the sea meets the sky. And now he was equally resentful of awaking, for he had found his fabulous city after forty weary years.\n\nBut three nights afterward Kuranes came again to Celepha\u00efs. As before, he dreamed first of the village that was asleep or dead, and of the abyss down which one must float silently; then the rift appeared again, and he beheld the glittering minarets of the city, and saw the graceful galleys riding at anchor in the blue harbour, and watched the gingko trees of Mount Aran swaying in the sea-breeze. But this time he was not snatched away, and like a winged being settled gradually over a grassy hillside till finally his feet rested gently on the turf. He had indeed come back to the Valley of Ooth-Nargai and the splendid city of Celepha\u00efs.\n\nDown the hill amid scented grasses and brilliant flowers walked Kuranes, over the bubbling Naraxa on the small wooden bridge where he had carved his name so many years ago, and through the whispering grove to the great stone bridge by the city gate. All was as of old, nor were the marble walls discoloured, nor the polished bronze statues upon them tarnished. And Kuranes saw that he need not tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them. When he entered the city, past the bronze gates and over the onyx pavements, the merchants and camel-drivers greeted him as if he had never been away; and it was the same at the turquoise temple of Nath-Horthath, where the orchid-wreathed priests told him that there is no time in Ooth-Nargai, but only perpetual youth. Then Kuranes walked through the Street of Pillars to the seaward wall, where gathered the traders and sailors, and strange men from the regions where the sea meets the sky. There he stayed long, gazing out over the bright harbour where the ripples sparkled beneath an unknown sun, and where rode lightly the galleys from far places over the water. And he gazed also upon Mount Aran rising regally from the shore, its lower slopes green with swaying trees and its white summit touching the sky.\n\nMore than ever Kuranes wished to sail in a galley to the far places of which he had heard so many strange tales, and he sought again the captain who had agreed to carry him so long ago. He found the man, Athib, sitting on the same chest of spices he had sat upon before, and Athib seemed not to realise that any time had passed. Then the two rowed to a galley in the harbour, and giving orders to the oarsmen, commenced to sail out into the billowy Cerenerian Sea that leads to the sky. For several days they glided undulatingly over the water, till finally they came to the horizon, where the sea meets the sky. Here the galley paused not at all, but floated easily in the blue of the sky among fleecy clouds tinted with rose. And far beneath the keel Kuranes could see strange lands and rivers and cities of surpassing beauty, spread indolently in the sunshine which seemed never to lessen or disappear. At length Athib told him that their journey was near its end, and that they would soon enter the harbour of Serannian, the pink marble city of the clouds, which is built on that ethereal coast where the west wind flows into the sky; but as the highest of the city's carven towers came into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awaked in his London garret.\n\nFor many months after that Kuranes sought the marvellous city of Celepha\u00efs and its sky-bound galleys in vain; and though his dreams carried him to many gorgeous and unheard-of places, no one whom he met could tell him how to find Ooth-Nargai, beyond the Tanarian Hills. One night he went flying over dark mountains where there were faint, lone campfires at great distances apart, and strange, shaggy herds with tinkling bells on the leaders; and in the wildest part of this hilly country, so remote that few men could ever have seen it, he found a hideously ancient wall or causeway of stone zigzagging along the ridges and valleys; too gigantic ever to have risen by human hands, and of such a length that neither end of it could be seen. Beyond that wall in the grey dawn he came to a land of quaint gardens and cherry trees, and when the sun rose he beheld such beauty of red and white flowers, green foliage and lawns, white paths, diamond brooks, blue lakelets, carven bridges, and red-roofed pagodas, that he for a moment forgot Celepha\u00efs in sheer delight. But he remembered it again when he walked down a white path toward a red-roofed pagoda, and would have questioned the people of that land about it, had he not found that there were no people there, but only birds and bees and butterflies. On another night Kuranes walked up a damp stone spiral stairway endlessly, and came to a tower window overlooking a mighty plain and river lit by the full moon; and in the silent city that spread away from the river-bank he thought he beheld some feature or arrangement which he had known before. He would have descended and asked the way to Ooth-Nargai had not a fearsome aurora sputtered up from some remote place beyond the horizon, shewing the ruin and antiquity of the city, and the stagnation of the reedy river, and the death lying upon that land, as it had lain since King Kynaratholis came home from his conquests to find the vengeance of the gods.\n\nSo Kuranes sought fruitlessly for the marvellous city of Celepha\u00efs and its galleys that sail to Serannian in the sky, meanwhile seeing many wonders and once barely escaping from the high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery on the cold desert plateau of Leng. In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist. Kuranes was now very anxious to return to minaret-studded Celepha\u00efs, and increased his doses of drugs; but eventually he had no more money left, and could buy no drugs. Then one summer day he was turned out of his garret, and wandered aimlessly through the streets, drifting over a bridge to a place where the houses grew thinner and thinner. And it was there that fulfilment came, and he met the cortege of knights come from Celepha\u00efs to bear him thither forever.\n\nHandsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour with tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but their leader told him they were sent in his honour; since it was he who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where Kuranes and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villages as Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on horseback with small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers courtesied as the horsemen clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dream. Kuranes had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the east and hid all the landscape in its effulgent draperies. The abyss was now a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible voices sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celepha\u00efs, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.\n\nAnd Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celepha\u00efs and in the cloud-fashioned Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily forever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Challenge from Beyond by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nGeorge Campbell opened sleep-fogged eyes upon darkness and lay gazing out of the tent flap upon the pale August night for some minutes before he roused enough even to wonder what had wakened him. There was in the keen, clear air of these Canadian woods a soporific as potent as any drug. Campbell lay quiet for a moment, sinking slowly back into the delicious borderlands of sleep, conscious of an exquisite weariness, an unaccustomed sense of muscles well used, and relaxed now into perfect ease. These were vacation's most delightful moments, after all\u2014rest, after toil, in the clear, sweet forest night.\n\nLuxuriously, as his mind sank backward into oblivion, he assured himself once more that three long months of freedom lay before him\u2014freedom from cities and monotony, freedom from pedagogy and the University and students with no rudiments of interest in the geology he earned his daily bread by dinning into their obdurate ears. Freedom from\u2014\n\nAbruptly the delightful somnolence crashed about him. Somewhere outside the sound of tin shrieking across tin slashed into his peace. George Campbell sat up jerkily and reached for his flashlight. Then he laughed and put it down again, straining his eyes through the midnight gloom outside where among the tumbling cans of his supplies a dark anonymous little night beast was prowling. He stretched out a long arm and groped about among the rocks at the tent door for a missile. His fingers closed on a large stone, and he drew back his hand to throw.\n\nBut he never threw it. It was such a queer thing he had come upon in the dark. Square, crystal smooth, obviously artificial, with dull rounded corners. The strangeness of its rock surfaces to his fingers was so remarkable that he reached again for his flashlight and turned its rays upon the thing he held.\n\nAll sleepiness left him as he saw what it was he had picked up in his idle groping. It was clear as rock crystal, this queer, smooth cube. Quartz, unquestionably, but not in its usual hexagonal crystallized form. Somehow\u2014he could not guess the method\u2014it had been wrought into a perfect cube, about four inches in measurement over each worn face. For it was incredibly worn. The hard, hard crystal was rounded now until its corners were almost gone and the thing was beginning to assume the outlines of a sphere. Ages and ages of wearing, years almost beyond counting, must have passed over this strange clear thing.\n\nBut the most curious thing of all was that shape he could make out dimly in the heart of the crystal. For imbedded in its center lay a little disc of a pale and nameless substance with characters incised deep upon its quartz-enclosed surface. Wedge-shaped characters, faintly reminiscent of cuneiform writing.\n\nGeorge Campbell wrinkled his brows and bent closer above the little enigma in his hands, puzzling helplessly. How could such a thing as this have imbedded in pure rock crystal? Remotely a memory floated through his mind of ancient legends that called quartz crystals ice which had frozen too hard to melt again. Ice\u2014and wedge-shaped cuneiforms\u2014yes, didn't that sort of writing originate among the Sumerians who came down from the north in history's remotest beginnings to settle in the primitive Mesopotamian valley? Then hard sense regained control and he laughed. Quartz, of course, was formed in the earliest of earth's geological periods, when there was nothing anywhere but heat and heaving rock. Ice had not come for tens of millions of years after this thing must have been formed.\n\nAnd yet\u2014that writing. Man-made, surely, although its characters were unfamiliar save in their faint hinting at cuneiform shapes. Or could there, in a Paleozoic world, have been things with a written language who might have graven these cryptic wedges upon the quartz-enveloped disc he held? Or\u2014might a thing like this have fallen meteor-like out of space into the unformed rock of a still molten world? Could it\u2014\n\nThen he caught himself up sharply and felt his ears going hot at the luridness of his own imagination. The silence and the solitude and the queer thing in his hands were conspiring to play tricks with his common sense. He shrugged and laid the crystal down at the edge of his pallet, switching off the light. Perhaps morning and a clear head would bring him an answer to the questions that seemed so insoluble now.\n\nBut sleep did not come easily. For one thing, it seemed to him as he flashed off the light, that the little cube had shone for a moment as if with sustained light before it faded into the surrounding dark. Or perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps it had been only his dazzled eyes that seemed to see the light forsake it reluctantly, glowing in the enigmatic deeps of the thing with queer persistence.\n\nHe lay there unquietly for a long while, turning the unanswered questions over and over in his mind. There was something about this crystal cube out of the unmeasured past, perhaps from the dawn of all history, that constituted a challenge that would not let him sleep.\n\n[A. Merritt]\n\nHe lay there, it seemed to him, for hours. It had been the lingering light, the luminescence that seemed so reluctant to die, which held his mind. It was as though something in the heart of the cube had awakened, stirred drowsily, become suddenly alert... and intent upon him.\n\nSheer fantasy, this. He stirred impatiently and flashed his light upon his watch. Close to one o'clock; three hours more before the dawn. The beam fell and was focused upon the warm crystal cube. He held it there closely, for minutes. He snapped it out, then watched.\n\nThere was no doubt about it now. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness, he saw that the strange crystal was glimmering with tiny fugitive lights deep within it like threads of sapphire lightnings. They were at its center and they seemed to him to come from the pale disk with its disturbing markings. And the disc itself was becoming larger... the markings shifting shapes... the cube was growing... was it illusion brought about by the tiny lightnings....\n\nHe heard a sound. It was the very ghost of a sound, like the ghosts of harp strings being plucked with ghostly fingers. He bent closer. It came from the cube....\n\nThere was squeaking in the underbrush, a flurry of bodies and an agonized wailing like a child in death throes and swiftly stilled. Some small tragedy of the wilderness, killer and prey. He stepped over to where it had been enacted, but could see nothing. He again snapped off the flash and looked toward his tent. Upon the ground was a pale blue glimmering. It was the cube. He stooped to pick it up; then obeying some obscure warning, drew back his hand.\n\nAnd again, he saw, its glow was dying. The tiny sapphire lightnings flashing fitfully, withdrawing to the disc from which they had come. There was no sound from it.\n\nHe sat, watching the luminescence glow and fade, glow and fade, but steadily becoming dimmer. It came to him that two elements were necessary to produce the phenomenon. The electric ray itself, and his own fixed attention. His mind must travel along the ray, fix itself upon the cube's heart, if its beat were to wax, until... what?\n\nHe felt a chill of spirit, as though from contact with some alien thing. It was alien, he knew it; not of this earth. Not of earth's life. He conquered his shrinking, picked up the cube and took it into the tent. It was neither warm nor cold; except for its weight he would not have known he held it. He put it upon the table, keeping the torch turned from it; then stepped to the flap of the tent and closed it.\n\nHe went back to the table, drew up the camp chair, and turned the flash directly upon the cube, focusing it so far as he could upon its heart. He sent all his will, all his concentration, along it; focusing will and sight upon the disc as he had the light.\n\nAs though at command, the sapphire lightnings burned forth. They burst from the disc into the body of the crystal cube, then beat back, bathing the disc and the markings. Again these began to change, shifting, moving, advancing, and retreating in the blue gleaming. They were no longer cuneiform. They were things... objects.\n\nHe heard the murmuring music, the plucked harp strings. Louder grew the sound and louder, and now all the body of the cube vibrated to their rhythm. The crystal walls were melting, growing misty as though formed of the mist of diamonds. And the disc itself was growing... the shapes shifting, dividing and multiplying as though some door had been opened and into it companies of phantasms were pouring. While brighter, more bright grew the pulsing light.\n\nHe felt swift panic, tried to withdraw sight and will, dropped the flash. The cube had no need now of the ray... and he could not withdraw... could not withdraw? Why, he himself was being sucked into that disc which was now a globe within which unnameable shapes danced to a music that bathed the globe with steady radiance.\n\nThere was no tent. There was only a vast curtain of sparkling mist behind which shone the globe.... He felt himself drawn through that mist, sucked through it as if by a mighty wind, straight for the globe.\n\n[H. P. Lovecraft]\n\nAs the mist-blurred light of the sapphire suns grew more and more intense, the outlines of the globe ahead wavered and dissolved to a churning chaos. Its pallor and its motion and its music all blended themselves with the engulfing mist\u2014bleaching it to a pale steel-colour and setting it undulantly in motion. And the sapphire suns, too, melted imperceptibly into the greying infinity of shapeless pulsation.\n\nMeanwhile the sense of forward, outward motion grew intolerably, incredibly, cosmically swift. Every standard of speed known to earth seemed dwarfed, and Campbell knew that any such flight in physical reality would mean instant death to a human being. Even as it was\u2014in this strange, hellish hypnosis or nightmare\u2014the quasi-visual impression of meteor-like hurtling almost paralyzed his mind. Though there were no real points of reference in the grey, pulsing void, he felt that he was approaching and passing the speed of light itself. Finally his consciousness did go under\u2014and merciful blackness swallowed everything.\n\nIt was very suddenly, and amidst the most impenetrable darkness, that thoughts and ideas again came to George Campbell. Of how many moments\u2014or years\u2014or eternities\u2014had elapsed since his flight through the grey void, he could form no estimate. He knew only that he seemed to be at rest and without pain. Indeed, the absence of all physical sensation was the salient quality of his condition. It made even the blackness seem less solidly black\u2014suggesting as it did that he was rather a disembodied intelligence in a state beyond physical senses, than a corporeal being with senses deprived of their accustomed objects of perception. He could think sharply and quickly\u2014almost preternaturally so\u2014yet could form no idea whatsoever of his situation.\n\nHalf by instinct, he realised that he was not in his own tent. True, he might have awaked there from a nightmare to a world equally black; yet he knew this was not so. There was no camp cot beneath him\u2014he had no hands to feel the blankets and canvas surface and flashlight that ought to be around him\u2014there was no sensation of cold in the air\u2014no flap through which he could glimpse the pale night outside... something was wrong, dreadfully wrong.\n\nHe cast his mind backward and thought of the fluorescent cube which had hypnotised him\u2014of that, and all which had followed. He had known that his mind was going, yet had been unable to draw back. At the last moment there had been a shocking, panic fear\u2014a subconscious fear beyond even that caused by the sensation of daemonic flight. It had come from some vague flash or remote recollection\u2014just what, he could not at once tell. Some cell-group in the back of his head had seemed to find a cloudily familiar quality in the cube\u2014and that familiarity was fraught with dim terror. Now he tried to remember what the familiarity and the terror were.\n\nLittle by little it came to him. Once\u2014long ago, in connection with his geological life-work\u2014he had read of something like that cube. It had to do with those debatable and disquieting clay fragments called the Eltdown Shards, dug up from pre-carboniferous strata in southern England thirty years before. Their shape and markings were so queer that a few scholars hinted at artificiality, and made wild conjectures about them and their origin. They came, clearly, from a time when no human beings could exist on the globe\u2014but their contours and figurings were damnably puzzling. That was how they got their name.\n\nIt was not, however, in the writings of any sober scientist that Campbell had seen that reference to a crystal, disc-holding globe. The source was far less reputable, and infinitely more vivid. About 1912 a deeply learned Sussex clergyman of occultist leanings\u2014the Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall\u2014had professed to identify the markings on the Eltdown Shards with some of the so-called \"pre-human hieroglyphs\" persistently cherished and esoterically handed down in certain mystical circles, and had published at his own expense what purported to be a \"translation\" of the primal and baffling \"inscriptions\"\u2014a \"translation\" still quoted frequently and seriously by occult writers. In this \"translation\"\u2014a surprisingly long brochure in view of the limited number of \"shards\" existing\u2014had occurred the narrative, supposedly of pre-human authorship, containing the now frightening reference.\n\nAs the story went, there dwelt on a world\u2014and eventually on countless other worlds\u2014of outer space a mighty order of worm-like beings whose attainments and whose control of nature surpassed anything within the range of terrestrial imagination. They had mastered the art of interstellar travel early in their career, and had peopled every habitable planet in their own galaxy\u2014killing off the races they found.\n\nBeyond the limits of their own galaxy\u2014which was not ours\u2014they could not navigate in person; but in their quest for knowledge of all space and time they discovered a means of spanning certain transgalactic gulfs with their minds. They devised peculiar objects\u2014strangely energized cubes of a curious crystal containing hypnotic talismen and enclosed in space-resisting spherical envelopes of an unknown substance\u2014which could be forcibly expelled beyond the limits of their universe, and which would respond to the attraction of cool solid matter only.\n\nThese, of which a few would necessarily land on various inhabited worlds in outside universes, formed the ether-bridges needed for mental communication. Atmospheric friction burned away the protecting envelope, leaving the cube exposed and subject to discovery by the intelligent minds of the world where it fell. By its very nature, the cube would attract and rivet attention. This, when coupled with the action of light, was sufficient to set its special properties working.\n\nThe mind that noticed the cube would be drawn into it by the power of the disc, and would be sent on a thread of obscure energy to the place whence the disc had come\u2014the remote world of the worm-like space-explorers across stupendous galactic abysses. Received in one of the machines to which each cube was attuned, the captured mind would remain suspended without body or senses until examined by one of the dominant race. Then it would, by an obscure process of interchange, be pumped of all its contents. The investigator's mind would now occupy the strange machine while the captive mind occupied the interrogator's worm-like body. Then, in another interchange, the interrogator's mind would leap across boundless space to the captive's vacant and unconscious body on the transgalactic world\u2014animating the alien tenement as best it might, and exploring the alien world in the guise of one of its denizens.\n\nWhen done with exploration, the adventurer would use the cube and its disc in accomplishing his return\u2014and sometimes the captured mind would be restored safely to its own remote world. Not always, however, was the dominant race so kind. Sometimes, when a potentially important race capable of space travel was found, the worm-like folk would employ the cube to capture and annihilate minds by the thousands, and would extirpate the race for diplomatic reasons\u2014using the exploring minds as agents of destruction.\n\nIn other cases sections of the worm-folk would permanently occupy a transgalactic planet\u2014destroying the captured minds and wiping out the remaining inhabitants preparatory to settling down in unfamiliar bodies. Never, however, could the parent civilization be quite duplicated in such a case; since the new planet would not contain all the materials necessary for the worm-race's arts. The cubes, for example, could be made only on the home planet.\n\nOnly a few of the numberless cubes sent forth ever found a landing and response on an inhabited world\u2014since there was no such thing as aiming them at goals beyond sight or knowledge. Only three, ran the story, had ever landed on peopled worlds in our own particular universe. One of these had struck a planet near the galactic rim two thousand billion years ago, while another had lodged three billion years ago on a world near the centre of the galaxy. The third\u2014and the only one ever known to have invaded the solar system\u2014had reached our own earth 150,000,000 years ago.\n\nIt was with this latter that Dr. Winters-Hall's \"translation\" chiefly dealt. When the cube struck the earth, he wrote, the ruling terrestrial species was a huge, cone-shaped race surpassing all others before or since in mentality and achievements. This race was so advanced that it had actually sent minds abroad in both space and time to explore the cosmos, hence recognised something of what had happened when the cube fell from the sky and certain individuals had suffered mental change after gazing at it.\n\nRealising that the changed individuals represented invading minds, the race's leaders had them destroyed\u2014even at the cost of leaving the displaced minds exiled in alien space. They had had experience with even stranger transitions. When, through a mental exploration of space and time, they formed a rough idea of what the cube was, they carefully hid the thing from light and sight, and guarded it as a menace. They did not wish to destroy a thing so rich in later experimental possibilities. Now and then some rash, unscrupulous adventurer would furtively gain access to it and sample its perilous powers despite the consequences\u2014but all such cases were discovered, and safely and drastically dealt with.\n\nOf this evil meddling the only bad result was that the worm-like outside race learned from the new exiles what had happened to their explorers on earth, and conceived a violent hatred of the planet and all its life-forms. They would have depopulated it if they could, and indeed sent additional cubes into space in the wild hope of striking it by accident in unguarded places\u2014but that accident never came to pass.\n\nThe cone-shaped terrestrial beings kept the one existing cube in a special shrine as a relique and basis for experiments, till after aeons it was lost amidst the chaos of war and the destruction of the great polar city where it was guarded. When, fifty million years ago, the beings sent their minds ahead into the infinite future to avoid a nameless peril of inner earth, the whereabouts of the sinister cube from space were unknown.\n\nThis much, according to the learned occultist, the Eltdown Shards had said. What now made the account so obscurely frightful to Campbell was the minute accuracy with which the alien cube had been described. Every detail tallied\u2014dimensions, consistency, hieroglyphed central disc, hypnotic effects. As he thought the matter over and over amidst the darkness of his strange situation, he began to wonder whether his whole experience with the crystal cube\u2014indeed, its very existence\u2014were not a nightmare brought on by some freakish subconscious memory of this old bit of extravagant, charlatanic reading. If so, though, the nightmare must still be in force; since his present apparently bodiless state had nothing of normality in it.\n\nOf the time consumed by this puzzled memory and reflection, Campbell could form no estimate. Everything about his state was so unreal that ordinary dimensions and measurements became meaningless. It seemed an eternity, but perhaps it was not really long before the sudden interruption came. What happened was as strange and inexplicable as the blackness it succeeded. There was a sensation\u2014of the mind rather than of the body\u2014and all at once Campbell felt his thoughts swept or sucked beyond his control in tumultuous and chaotic fashion.\n\nMemories arose irresponsibly and irrelevantly. All that he knew\u2014all his personal background, traditions, experiences, scholarship, dreams, ideas, and inspirations\u2014welled up abruptly and simultaneously, with a dizzying speed and abundance which soon made him unable to keep track of any separate concept. The parade of all his mental contents became an avalanche, a cascade, a vortex. It was as horrible and vertiginous as his hypnotic flight through space when the crystal cube pulled him. Finally it sapped his consciousness and brought on fresh oblivion.\n\nAnother measureless blank\u2014and then a slow trickle of sensation. This time it was physical, not mental. Sapphire light, and a low rumble of distant sound. There were tactile impressions\u2014he could realise that he was lying at full length on something, though there was a baffling strangeness about the feel of his posture. He could not reconcile the pressure of the supporting surface with his own outlines\u2014or with the outlines of the human form at all. He tried to move his arms, but found no definite response to the attempt. Instead, there were little, ineffectual nervous twitches all over the area which seemed to mark his body.\n\nHe tried to open his eyes more widely, but found himself unable to control their mechanism. The sapphire light came in a diffused, nebulous manner, and could nowhere be voluntarily focussed into definiteness. Gradually, though, visual images began to trickle in curiously and indecisively. The limits and qualities of vision were not those which he was used to, but he could roughly correlate the sensation with what he had known as sight. As this sensation gained some degree of stability, Campbell realised that he must still be in the throes of nightmare.\n\nHe seemed to be in a room of considerable extent\u2014of medium height, but with a large proportionate area. On every side\u2014and he could apparently see all four sides at once\u2014were high, narrowish slits which seemed to serve as combined doors and windows. There were singular low tables or pedestals, but no furniture of normal nature and proportions. Through the slits streamed floods of sapphire light, and beyond them could be mistily seen the sides and roofs of fantastic buildings like clustered cubes. On the walls\u2014in the vertical panels between the slits\u2014were strange markings of an oddly disquieting character. It was some time before Campbell understood why they disturbed him so\u2014then he saw that they were, in repeated instances, precisely like some of the hieroglyphs on the crystal cube's disc.\n\nThe actual nightmare element, though, was something more than this. It began with the living thing which presently entered through one of the slits, advancing deliberately toward him and bearing a metal box of bizarre proportions and glassy, mirror-like surfaces. For this thing was nothing human\u2014nothing of earth\u2014nothing even of man's myths and dreams. It was a gigantic, pale-grey worm or centipede, as large around as a man and twice as long, with a disc-like, apparently eyeless, cilia-fringed head bearing a purple central orifice. It glided on its rear pairs of legs, with its fore part raised vertically\u2014the legs, or at least two pairs of them, serving as arms. Along its spinal ridge was a curious purple comb, and a fan-shaped tail of some grey membrane ended its grotesque bulk. There was a ring of flexible red spikes around its neck, and from the twistings of these came clicking, twanging sounds in measured, deliberate rhythms.\n\nHere, indeed, was outr\u00e9 nightmare at its height\u2014capricious fantasy at its apex. But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more thing\u2014one final, unbearable touch\u2014to do that. As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet\u2014horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations\u2014it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.\n\nFrom that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster's personality.\n\nHe fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.\n\nWhat was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more\u2014much more.\n\nWith the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.\n\nA lawless exultation rose in him. He was a man without a world, free of all conventions or inhibitions of Earth, or of this strange planet, free of every artificial restraint in the universe. He was a god! With grim amusement he thought of his body moving in earth's business and society, with all the while an alien monster staring out of the windows that were George Campbell's eyes on people who would flee if they knew.\n\nLet him walk the earth slaying and destroying as he would. Earth and its races no longer had any meaning to George Campbell. There he had been one of a billion nonentities, fixed in place by a mountainous accumulation of conventions, laws and manners, doomed to live and die in his sordid niche. But in one blind bound he had soared above the commonplace. This was not death, but rebirth\u2014the birth of a full-grown mentality, with a new-found freedom that made little of physical captivity on Yekub.\n\nHe started. Yekub! It was the name of this planet, but how had he known? Then he knew, as he knew the name of him whose body he occupied\u2014Tothe. Memory, deep grooved in Tothe's brain, was stirring in him\u2014shadows of the knowledge Tothe had. Carved deep in the physical tissues of the brain, they spoke dimly as implanted instincts to George Campbell; and his human consciousness seized them and translated them to show him the way not only to safety and freedom, but to the power his soul, stripped to its primitive impulses, craved. Not as a slave would he dwell on Yekub, but as a king! Just as of old barbarians had sat on the throne of lordly empires.\n\nFor the first time he turned his attention to his surroundings. He still lay on the couch-like thing in the midst of that fantastic room, and the centipede man stood before him, holding the polished metal object, and clashing its neck-spikes. Thus it spoke to him, Campbell knew, and what it said he dimly understood, through the implanted thought processes of Tothe, just as he knew the creature was Yukth, supreme lord of science.\n\nBut Campbell gave no heed, for he had made his desperate plan, a plan so alien to the ways of Yekub that it was beyond Yukth's comprehension and caught him wholly unprepared. Yukth, like Campbell, saw the sharp-pointed metal shard on a nearby table, but to Yukth it was only a scientific implement. He did not even know it could be used as a weapon. Campbell's earthly mind supplied the knowledge and the action that followed, driving Tothe's body into movements no man of Yekub had ever made before.\n\nCampbell snatched the pointed shard and struck, ripping savagely upward. Yukth reared and toppled, his entrails spilling on the floor. In an instant Campbell was streaking for a door. His speed was amazing, exhilarating, first fulfillment of the promise of novel physical sensations.\n\nAs he ran, guided wholly by the instinctive knowledge implanted in Tothe's physical reflexes, it was as if he were borne by a separate consciousness in his legs. Tothe's body was bearing him along a route it had traversed ten thousand times when animated by Tothe's mind.\n\nDown a winding corridor he raced, up a twisted stair, through a carved door, and the same instincts that had brought him there told him he had found what he sought. He was in a circular room with a domed roof from which shone a livid blue light. A strange structure rose in the middle of the rainbow-hued floor, tier on tier, each of a separate, vivid color. The ultimate tier was a purple cone, from the apex of which a blue smoky mist drifted upward to a sphere that poised in mid-air\u2014a sphere that shone like translucent ivory.\n\nThis, the deep-grooved memories of Tothe told Campbell, was the god of Yekub, though why the people of Yekub feared and worshipped it had been forgotten a million years. A worm-priest stood between him and the altar which no hand of flesh had ever touched. That it could be touched was a blasphemy that had never occurred to a man of Yekub. The worm-priest stood in frozen horror until Campbell's shard ripped the life out of him.\n\nOn his centipede-legs Campbell clambered the tiered altar, heedless of its sudden quiverings, heedless of the change that was taking place in the floating sphere, heedless of the smoke that now billowed out in blue clouds. He was drunk with the feel of power. He feared the superstitions of Yekub no more than he feared those of earth. With that globe in his hands he would be king of Yekub. The worm men would dare deny him nothing, when he held their god as hostage. He reached a hand for the ball\u2014no longer ivory-hued, but red as blood....\n\nOut of the tent into the pale August night walked the body of George Campbell. It moved with a slow, wavering gait between the bodies of enormous trees, over a forest path strewed with sweet scented pine needles. The air was crisp and cold. The sky was an inverted bowl of frosted silver flecked with stardust, and far to the north the Aurora Borealis splashed streamers of fire.\n\nThe head of the walking man lolled hideously from side to side. From the corners of his lax mouth drooled thick threads of amber froth, which fluttered in the night breeze. He walked upright at first, as a man would walk, but gradually as the tent receded, his posture altered. His torso began almost imperceptibly to slant, and his limbs to shorten.\n\nIn a far-off world of outer space the centipede creature that was George Campbell clasped to its bosom a god whose lineaments were red as blood, and ran with insect-like quiverings across a rainbow-hued hall and out through massive portals into the bright glow of alien suns.\n\nWeaving between the trees of earth in an attitude that suggested the awkward loping of a werebeast, the body of George Campbell was fulfilling a mindless destiny. Long, claw-tipped fingers dragged leaves from a carpet of odorous pine needles as it moved toward a wide expanse of gleaming water.\n\nIn the far-off, extra-galactic world of the worm people, George Campbell moved between cyclopean blocks of black masonry down long, fern-planted avenues holding aloft the round red god.\n\nThere was a harsh animal cry in the underbrush near the gleaming lake on earth where the mind of a worm creature dwelt in a body swayed by instinct. Human teeth sank into soft animal fur, tore at black animal flesh. A little silver fox sank its fangs in frantic retaliation into a furry human wrist, and thrashed about in terror as its blood spurted. Slowly the body of George Campbell arose, its mouth splashed with fresh blood. With upper limbs swaying oddly it moved towards the waters of the lake.\n\nAs the variform creature that was George Campbell crawled between the black blocks of stone thousands of worm-shapes prostrated themselves in the scintillating dust before it. A godlike power seemed to emanate from its weaving body as it moved with a slow, undulant motion toward a throne of spiritual empire transcending all the sovereignties of earth.\n\nA trapper stumbling wearily through the dense woods of earth near the tent where the worm-creature dwelt in the body of George Campbell came to the gleaming waters of the lake and discerned something dark floating there. He had been lost in the woods all night, and weariness enveloped him like a leaden cloak in the pale morning light.\n\nBut the shape was a challenge that he could not ignore. Moving to the edge of the water he knelt in the soft mud and reached out toward the floating bulk. Slowly he pulled it to the shore.\n\nFar off in outer space the worm-creature holding the glowing red god ascended a throne that gleamed like the constellation Cassiopeia under an alien vault of hyper-suns. The great deity that he held aloft energized his worm tenement, burning away in the white fire of a supermundane spirituality all animal dross.\n\nOn earth the trapper gazed with unutterable horror into the blackened and hairy face of the drowned man. It was a bestial face, repulsively anthropoid in contour, and from its twisted, distorted mouth black ichor poured.\n\n\"He who sought your body in the abysses of Time will occupy an unresponsive tenement,\" said the red god. \"No spawn of Yekub can control the body of a human.\n\n\"On all earth, living creatures rend one another, and feast with unutterable cruelty on their kith and kin. No worm-mind can control a bestial man-body when it yearns to raven. Only man-minds instinctively conditioned through the course of ten thousand generations can keep the human instincts in thrall. Your body will destroy itself on earth, seeking the blood of its animal kin, seeking the cool water where it can wallow at its ease. Seeking eventually destruction, for the death-instinct is more powerful in it than the instincts of life and it will destroy itself in seeking to return to the slime from which it sprang.\"\n\nThus spoke the round red god of Yekub in a far-off segment of the space-time continuum to George Campbell as the latter, with all human desire purged away, sat on a throne and ruled an empire of worms more wisely kindly, and benevolently than any man of earth had ever ruled an empire of men.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Collapsing Cosmoses by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nDam Bor glued each of his six eyes to the lenses of the cosmoscope. His nasal tentacles were orange with fear, and his antennae buzzed hoarsely as he dictated his report to the operator behind him. \"It has come!\" he cried. \"That blur in the ether can be nothing less than a fleet from outside the space-time continuum we know. Nothing like this has ever appeared before. It must be an enemy. Give the alarm to the Inter-Cosmic Chamber of Commerce. There's no time to lose\u2014at this rate they'll be upon us in less than six centuries. Hak Ni must have a chance to get the fleet in action at once.\"\n\nI glanced up from the Windy City Grab-Bag, which had beguiled my inactive peace-time days in the Super-Galactic Patrol. The handsome young vegetable, with whom I shared my bowl of caterpillar custard since earliest infancy, and with whom I had been thrown out of every joint in the intra-dimensional city of Kastor-Ya, had really a worried look upon his lavender face. After he had given the alarm we jumped on our ether-bikes and hastened across to the outer planet on which the Chamber held its sessions.\n\nWithin the Great Council Chamber, which measured twenty-eight square feet (with quite a high ceiling), were gathered delegates from all the thirty-seven galaxies of our immediate universe. Oll Stof, President of the Chamber and representative of the Milliner's Soviet, raised his eyeless snout with dignity and prepared to address the assembled multitude. He was a highly developed protozoan organism from Nov-Kas, and spoke by emitting alternate waves of heat and cold.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he radiated, \"a terrible peril has come upon us which I feel I must bring to your attention.\"\n\nEverybody applauded riotously, as a wave of excitement rippled through the variegated audience; those who were handless slithering their tentacles together.\n\nHe continued: \"Hak Ni, crawl upon the dais!\"\n\nThere was a thunderous silence, during which a faint prompting was heard from the dizzy summit of the platform. [Hak Ni, the yellow-furred and valorous commander of our ranks through numerous installments, ascended to the towering peak inches above the floor.\n\n\"My friends\u2014\" he began, with an eloquent scraping of his posterior limbs, \"these treasured walls and pillars shall not mourn on my account....\" At this point, one of his numerous relatives cheered. \"Well do I remember when...\"\n\nOll Stof interrupted him. \"You have anticipated my thoughts and orders. Go forth and win for dear old Inter-Cosmic.\"\n\nTwo paragraphs later found us soaring out past innumerable stars toward where a faint blur half a million light-years long marked the presence of the hated enemy, whom we had not seen. What monsters of malformed grotesqueness seethed out there among the moons of infinity, we really didn't know, but there was a malign menace in the glow that steadily increased until it spanned the entire heavens. Very soon we made out separate objects in the blur. Before all my horror-stricken vision-areas there spread an endless array of scissors-shaped space-ships of totally unfamiliar form.\n\nThen from the direction of the enemy there came a terrifying sound, which I soon recognised as a hail and a challenge. An answering thrill crept through me as I met with uplifted antennae this threat of battle with a monstrous intrusion upon our fair system from unknown outside abysses.\n\nAt the sound, [which was something like that of a rusty sewing-machine, only more horrible, Hak Ni too raised his snout in defiance, radiating a masterful order to the captains of the fleet. Instantly the huge space-ships swung into battle formation, with only a hundred or two of them many light-years out of line.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Colour out of Space by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWest of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.\n\nThe old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for the imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.\n\nThere was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.\n\nWhen I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name \"blasted heath\" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything besides its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.\n\nIn the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.\n\nBut even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curving road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.\n\nIn the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase \"strange days\" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers, except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely archaic place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal. Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he shewed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now\u2014better under water since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.\n\nIt was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again despite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night\u2014at least, not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.\n\nIt all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious stone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come\u2014the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.\n\nNahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and had dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.\n\nThe day after that\u2014all this was in June of '82\u2014the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and shewing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.\n\nHot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognised some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to shew that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmannst\u00e4tten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.\n\nAll this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.\n\nThey had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule imbedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.\n\nConjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen\u2014which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor had been. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.\n\nThat night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had \"drawn the lightning\", as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep, half-choked with caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.\n\nAs was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot, and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.\n\nThen fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment; for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest of bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.\n\nWinter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family, too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their churchgoing or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Corners. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.\n\nIn February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of the horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.\n\nPeople vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.\n\nOne day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and odour and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses\u2014of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the a\u00ebrolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and a half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shewn by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.\n\nThe trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that \"something was wrong with all Nahum's folks\". When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and shewed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connexion with these saxifrages.\n\nApril brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. The Dutchman's breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbours told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.\n\nIn May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night\u2014watching in all directions at random for something... they could not tell what. It was then that they all owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.\n\nThe grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which the trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.\n\nIt happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away\u2014she was being drained of something\u2014something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be\u2014someone must make it keep off\u2014nothing was ever still in the night\u2014the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.\n\nIt was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.\n\nBy September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not exactly foetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.\n\nThaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about \"the moving colours down there\". Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest playmate.\n\nAlmost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages\u2014and death was always the result\u2014there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease\u2014yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.\n\nOn the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.\n\nThree days later Nahum lurched into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to the door, the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent bail and twisted iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.\n\nFor over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was shocking\u2014greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.\n\nQuestioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing Zenas. \"In the well\u2014he lives in the well\u2014\" was all that the clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. \"Nabby? Why, here she is!\" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys on the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.\n\nIt was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about this horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.\n\nAmmi would give me no added particulars to this scene, but the shape in the corner does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he could be cared for.\n\nCommencing his descent of the dark stairs, Ammi heard a thud below him. He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow steps\u2014and merciful heaven!... the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike!\n\nThen there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash\u2014water\u2014it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy-wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof not later than 1730.\n\nA feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external force, Ammi could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. \"What was it, Nahum\u2014what was it?\" he whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.\n\n\"Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet... but it burns... it lived in the well... I seen it... a kind o' smoke... jest like the flowers last spring... the well shone at night... Thad an' Mernie an' Zenas... everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that stone... it must a' come in that stone... pizened the whole place... dun't know what it wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone... they smashed it... it was that same colour... jest the same, like the flowers an' plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds... seeds... they growed... I seen it the fust time this week... must a' got strong on Zenas... he was a big boy, full o' life... it beats down your mind an' then gits ye... burns ye up... in the well water... you was right about that... evil water... Zenas never come back from the well... can't git away... draws ye... ye know summ'at's comin', but 'tain't no use... I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took... whar's Nabby, Ammi?... my head's no good... dun't know how long senct I fed her... it'll git her ef we ain't keerful... jest a colour... her face is gettin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night... an' it burns an' sucks... it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so... he was right... look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more... sucks the life out....\"\n\nBut that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horse had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all\u2014the splash had been something else\u2014something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum....\n\nWhen Ammi reached his house the horse and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the livestock. He also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.\n\nThe six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them\u2014and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.\n\nAmmi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there\u2014so much so that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of smaller animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting any solid obstruction.\n\nTwilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of livestock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyse it. But what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar\u2014and the fragments shewed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey and brittle?\n\nIt was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that a\u00ebrolite two summers ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him\u2014and then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last\u2014said it was the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well\u2014and now that well was belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same daemoniac tint.\n\nIt does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right\u2014it was against Nature\u2014and he thought of those terrible last words of his stricken friend, \"It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so....\"\n\nAll three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. \"Dun't go out thar,\" he whispered. \"They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from beyond.\"\n\nSo the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous sets of fragments\u2014two from the house and two from the well\u2014in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.\n\nAll at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some alien and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.\n\nNot a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that treetop height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that came down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh; and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which Ammi had come to recognise and dread. All the while the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men a sense of doom and abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining out, it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.\n\nThe veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of a controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they realised that the span of frantic greys had broke their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.\n\nThe shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged. \"It spreads on everything organic that's been around here,\" muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. \"It was awful,\" he added. \"There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking under there.\" Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. \"It come from that stone... it growed down thar... it got everything livin'... it fed itself on 'em, mind and body... Thad an' Mernie, Zenas an' Nabby... Nahum was the last... they all drunk the water... it got strong on 'em... it come from beyond, whar things ain't like they be here... now it's goin' home....\"\n\nAt this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator later described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words could not convey it\u2014when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave that house.\n\nAmmi shewed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open meadows.\n\nWhen they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. All the farm was shining with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn, and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well\u2014seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable chromaticism.\n\nThen without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome was the same, for in one feverish, kaleidoscopic instant there burst up from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling party realised it would be no use waiting for the moon to shew what was left down there at Nahum's.\n\nToo awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the nighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that stricken, faraway spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour\u2014but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognised that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.\n\nAmmi would never go near the place again. It is over half a century now since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very deep\u2014but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it \"the blasted heath\".\n\nThe rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyse the water from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems ever to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion that the blight is spreading\u2014little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighbouring herbage is not quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses\u2014the few that are left in this motor age\u2014grow skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the splotch of greyish dust.\n\nThey say the mental influences are very bad, too. Numbers went queer in the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stores of whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveller has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirit as of the eye. I myself am curious about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.\n\nDo not ask me for my opinion. I do not know\u2014that is all. There was no one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, and all three professors who saw the a\u00ebrolite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules\u2014depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well\u2014I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above that miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever daemon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they ought not to do at night.\n\nWhat it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space\u2014a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.\n\nI doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale was all a freak of madness as the townfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible\u2014though I know not in what proportion\u2014still remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing\u2014and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's\u2014\"can't git away... draws ye... ye know summ'at's comin', but 'tain't no use....\" Ammi is such a good old man\u2014when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Cool Air by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nYou ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of my peculiarity.\n\nIt is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York; and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings, and very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had sampled.\n\nThe place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from the late forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and sullied splendour argued a descent from high levels of tasteful opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with impossible paper and ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery; but the floors were clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water not too often cold or turned off, so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. The landlady, a slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my third-floor front hall room; and my fellow-lodgers were as quiet and uncommunicative as one might desire, being mostly Spaniards a little above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the din of street cars in the thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.\n\nI had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred. One evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor and became suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odour of ammonia for some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping; the soaking apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the street. Anxious to stop the matter at its source, I hastened to the basement to tell the landlady; and was assured by her that the trouble would quickly be set right.\n\n\"Doctair Mu\u00f1oz,\" she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, \"he have speel hees chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself\u2014seecker and seecker all the time\u2014but he weel not have no othair for help. He ees vairy queer in hees seeckness\u2014all day he take funnee-smelling baths, and he cannot get excite or warm. All hees own housework he do\u2014hees leetle room are full of bottles and machines, and he do not work as doctair. But he was great once\u2014my fathair in Barcelona have hear of heem\u2014and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber that get hurt of sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and my boy Esteban he breeng heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals. My Gawd, the sal-ammoniac that man use for keep heem cool!\"\n\nMrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I returned to my room. The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. Dr. Mu\u00f1oz I had never heard, save for certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven mechanism; since his step was soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what the strange affliction of this man might be, and whether his obstinate refusal of outside aid were not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world.\n\nI might never have known Dr. Mu\u00f1oz had it not been for the heart attack that suddenly seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my room. Physicians had told me of the danger of those spells, and I knew there was no time to be lost; so remembering what the landlady had said about the invalid's help of the injured workman, I dragged myself upstairs and knocked feebly at the door above mine. My knock was answered in good English by a curious voice some distance to the right, asking my name and business; and these things being stated, there came an opening of the door next to the one I had sought.\n\nA rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest of late June, I shivered as I crossed the threshold into a large apartment whose rich and tasteful decoration surprised me in this nest of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now filled its diurnal role of sofa, and the mahogany furniture, sumptuous hangings, old paintings, and mellow bookshelves all bespoke a gentleman's study rather than a boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room above mine\u2014the \"leetle room\" of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had mentioned\u2014was merely the laboratory of the doctor; and that his main living quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose convenient alcoves and large contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers and obtrusive utilitarian devices. Dr. Mu\u00f1oz, most certainly, was a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.\n\nThe figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in somewhat formal dress of perfect cut and fit. A highbred face of masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short iron-grey full beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark eyes and surmounted an aquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a physiognomy otherwise dominantly Celtiberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair that argued the punctual calls of a barber was parted gracefully above a high forehead; and the whole picture was one of striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding.\n\nNevertheless, as I saw Dr. Mu\u00f1oz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion and coldness of touch could have afforded a physical basis for this feeling, and even these things should have been excusable considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.\n\nBut repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's extreme skill at once became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to them with a master's deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though oddly hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn enemies to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and mixed a suitable draught of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently he found the society of a well-born man a rare novelty in this dingy environment, and was moved to unaccustomed speech as memories of better days surged over him.\n\nHis voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that he breathed as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract my mind from my own seizure by speaking of his theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully consoling me about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be but originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a scientific enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of nervous animation despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in the battery of specific organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to live\u2014or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence\u2014without any heart at all! For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his habitation\u2014some 55 or 56 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014was maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I had often heard in my own room below.\n\nRelieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a disciple and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent overcoated calls; listening while he told of secret researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a bit when I examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his shelves. I was eventually, I may add, almost cured of my disease for all time by his skilful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments with him through the great illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders proceeded. No sooner had the venerable practitioner saved his colleague than he himself succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been too great; for Dr. Mu\u00f1oz made it whisperingly clear\u2014though not in detail\u2014that the methods of healing had been most extraordinary, involving scenes and processes not welcomed by elderly and conservative Galens.\n\nAs the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was indeed slowly but unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero had suggested. The livid aspect of his countenance was intensified, his voice became more hollow and indistinct, his muscular motions were less perfectly co\u00f6rdinated, and his mind and will displayed less resilience and initiative. Of this sad change he seemed by no means unaware, and little by little his expression and conversation both took on a gruesome irony which restored in me something of the subtle repulsion I had originally felt.\n\nHe developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and Egyptian incense till his room smelled like the vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings. At the same time his demands for cold air increased, and with my aid he amplified the ammonia piping of his room and modified the pumps and feed of his refrigerating machine till he could keep the temperature as low as 34\u00b0 or 40\u00b0 and finally even 28\u00b0; the bathroom and laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order that water might not freeze, and that chemical processes might not be impeded. The tenant adjoining him complained of the icy air from around the connecting door, so I helped him fit heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty. A kind of growing horror, of outr\u00e9 and morbid cast, seemed to possess him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently suggested.\n\nAll in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my gratitude for his healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers around him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to his needs each day, muffled in a heavy ulster which I bought especially for the purpose. I likewise did much of his shopping, and gasped in bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered from druggists and laboratory supply houses.\n\nAn increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around his apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a musty odour; but the smell in his room was worse\u2014and in spite of all the spices and incense, and the pungent chemicals of the now incessant baths which he insisted on taking unaided. I perceived that it must be connected with his ailment, and shuddered when I reflected on what that ailment might be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at him, and gave him up unreservedly to me; not even letting her son Esteban continue to run errands for him. When I suggested other physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain. He evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and driving force waxed rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. The lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery purpose, so that he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death-daemon even as that ancient enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always curiously like a formality with him, he virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to keep him from total collapse.\n\nHe acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he carefully sealed and filled with injunctions that I transmit them after his death to certain persons whom he named\u2014for the most part lettered East Indians, but including a once celebrated French physician now generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all these papers undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly frightful, and his presence almost unbearable. One September day an unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had come to repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed effectively whilst keeping himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been through the terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.\n\nThen, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with stupefying suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Dr. Mu\u00f1oz summoned me by thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the injury while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use; and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night garage we learned that nothing could be done till morning, when a new piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and fear, swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what remained of his failing physique; and once a spasm caused him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again.\n\nThe frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at about 5 a.m. the doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain at all-night drug stores and cafeterias. As I would return from my sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed bathroom door, I could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick voice croaking out the order for \"More\u2014more!\" At length a warm day broke, and the shops opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching whilst I obtained the pump piston, or to order the piston while I continued with the ice; but instructed by his mother, he absolutely refused.\n\nFinally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner of Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little shop where I introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the task of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to install it. The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a breathless, foodless round of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and thither by subway and surface car. About noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at approximately 1:30 p.m. arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia and two sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in time.\n\nBlack terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil, and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice; perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course, have locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow, thick dripping.\n\nBriefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear that gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door; but the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some wire device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms on that hall, and flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed south room which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.\n\nA kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and ended unutterably.\n\nWhat was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out in terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from that hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the nearest police station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible in that yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know. There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a draught of unusually cool air.\n\n\"The end,\" ran that noisome scrawl, \"is here. No more ice\u2014the man looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you know\u2014what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn't stand what he had to do\u2014he had to get me in a strange, dark place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would work again. It had to be done my way\u2014artificial preservation\u2014for you see I died that time eighteen years ago.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Crawling Chaos by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOf the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror, and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. De Quincey was drawn back into Asia, that teeming land of nebulous shadows whose hideous antiquity is so impressive that \"the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual\", but farther than that he dared not go. Those who have gone farther seldom returned; and even when they have, they have been either silent or quite mad. I took opium but once\u2014in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose\u2014my physician was worn out with horror and exertion\u2014and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.\n\nThe pain and pounding in my head had been quite unendurable when the drug was administered. Of the future I had no heed; to escape, whether by cure, unconsciousness, or death, was all that concerned me. I was partly delirious, so that it is hard to place the exact moment of transition, but I think the effect must have begun shortly before the pounding ceased to be painful. As I have said, there was an overdose; so my reactions were probably far from normal. The sensation of falling, curiously dissociated from the idea of gravity or direction, was paramount; though there was a subsidiary impression of unseen throngs in incalculable profusion, throngs of infinitely diverse nature, but all more or less related to me. Sometimes it seemed less as though I were falling, than as though the universe or the ages were falling past me. Suddenly my pain ceased, and I began to associate the pounding with an external rather than internal force. The falling had ceased also, giving place to a sensation of uneasy, temporary rest; and when I listened closely, I fancied the pounding was that of the vast, inscrutable sea as its sinister, colossal breakers lacerated some desolate shore after a storm of titanic magnitude. Then I opened my eyes.\n\nFor a moment my surroundings seemed confused, like a projected image hopelessly out of focus, but gradually I realised my solitary presence in a strange and beautiful room lighted by many windows. Of the exact nature of the apartment I could form no idea, for my thoughts were still far from settled; but I noticed varicoloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness, and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace\u2014not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.\n\nPresently I realised that the direct symbol and excitant of my fear was the hideous pounding whose incessant reverberations throbbed maddeningly against my exhausted brain. It seemed to come from a point outside and below the edifice in which I stood, and to associate itself with the most terrifying mental images. I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand. Perceiving shutters attached to these windows, I closed them all, averting my eyes from the exterior as I did so. Then, employing a flint and steel which I found on one of the small tables, I lit the many candles reposing about the walls in Arabesque sconces. The added sense of security brought by closed shutters and artificial light calmed my nerves to some degree, but I could not shut out the monotonous pounding. Now that I was calmer, the sound became as fascinating as it was fearful, and I felt a contradictory desire to seek out its source despite my still powerful shrinking. Opening a portiere at the side of the room nearest the pounding, I beheld a small and richly draped corridor ending in a carven door and large oriel window. To this window I was irresistibly drawn, though my ill-defined apprehensions seemed almost equally bent on holding me back. As I approached it I could see a chaotic whirl of waters in the distance. Then, as I attained it and glanced out on all sides, the stupendous picture of my surroundings burst upon me with full and devastating force.\n\nI beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land\u2014or what was now a narrow point of land\u2014fully 300 feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.\n\nRecovering at length from the stupor into which this unnatural spectacle had thrown me, I realised that my actual physical danger was acute. Even whilst I gazed the bank had lost many feet, and it could not be long before the house would fall undermined into the awful pit of lashing waves. Accordingly I hastened to the opposite side of the edifice, and finding a door, emerged at once, locking it after me with a curious key which had hung inside. I now beheld more of the strange region about me, and marked a singular division which seemed to exist in the hostile ocean and firmament. On each side of the jutting promontory different conditions held sway. At my left as I faced inland was a gently heaving sea with great green waves rolling peacefully in under a brightly shining sun. Something about that sun's nature and position made me shudder, but I could not then tell, and cannot tell now, what it was. At my right also was the sea, but it was blue, calm, and only gently undulating, while the sky above it was darker and the washed-out bank more nearly white than reddish.\n\nI now turned my attention to the land, and found occasion for fresh surprise; for the vegetation resembled nothing I had ever seen or read about. It was apparently tropical or at least sub-tropical\u2014a conclusion borne out by the intense heat of the air. Sometimes I thought I could trace strange analogies with the flora of my native land, fancying that the well-known plants and shrubs might assume such forms under a radical change of climate; but the gigantic and omnipresent palm trees were plainly foreign. The house I had just left was very small\u2014hardly more than a cottage\u2014but its material was evidently marble, and its architecture was weird and composite, involving a quaint fusion of Western and Eastern forms. At the corners were Corinthian columns, but the red tile roof was like that of a Chinese pagoda. From the door inland there stretched a path of singularly white sand, about four feet wide, and lined on either side with stately palms and unidentifiable flowering shrubs and plants. It lay toward the side of the promontory where the sea was blue and the bank rather whitish. Down this path I felt impelled to flee, as if pursued by some malignant spirit from the pounding ocean. At first it was slightly uphill, then I reached a gentle crest. Behind me I saw the scene I had left; the entire point with the cottage and the black water, with the green sea on one side and the blue sea on the other, and a curse unnamed and unnamable lowering over all. I never saw it again, and often wonder.... After this last look I strode ahead and surveyed the inland panorama before me.\n\nThe path, as I have intimated, ran along the right-hand shore as one went inland. Ahead and to the left I now viewed a magnificent valley comprising thousands of acres, and covered with a swaying growth of tropical grass higher than my head. Almost at the limit of vision was a colossal palm tree which seemed to fascinate and beckon me. By this time wonder and escape from the imperilled peninsula had largely dissipated my fear, but as I paused and sank fatigued to the path, idly digging with my hands into the warm, whitish-golden sand, a new and acute sense of danger seized me. Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, \"Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?\" My mind wandered back to an ancient and classical story of tigers which I had read; I strove to recall the author, but had difficulty. Then in the midst of my fear I remembered that the tale was by Rudyard Kipling; nor did the grotesqueness of deeming him an ancient author occur to me. I wished for the volume containing this story, and had almost started back toward the doomed cottage to procure it when my better sense and the lure of the palm prevented me.\n\nWhether or not I could have resisted the backward beckoning without the counter-fascination of the vast palm tree, I do not know. This attraction was now dominant, and I left the path and crawled on hands and knees down the valley's slope despite my fear of the grass and of the serpents it might contain. I resolved to fight for life and reason as long as possible against all menaces of sea or land, though I sometimes feared defeat as the maddening swish of the uncanny grasses joined the still audible and irritating pounding of the distant breakers. I would frequently pause and put my hands to my ears for relief, but could never quite shut out the detestable sound. It was, as it seemed to me, only after ages that I finally dragged myself to the beckoning palm tree and lay quiet beneath its protecting shade.\n\nThere now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw that an aureola of lambent light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: \"It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe.\" As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, \"Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber and chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of strange and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any sounds heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe of the golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell.\"\n\nAs I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my surroundings. The palm tree, so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was now some distance to my left and considerably below me. I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left. The youths and maidens now chaunted mellifluous choriambics to the accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single sound altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, daemoniac concord, throbbed from gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. And as those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the child and looked back, down upon the doomed scene from which I thought I had escaped.\n\nDown through the aether I saw the accursed earth turning, ever turning, with angry and tempestuous seas gnawing at wild desolate shores and dashing foam against the tottering towers of deserted cities. And under a ghastly moon there gleamed sights I can never describe, sights I can never forget; deserts of corpse-like clay and jungles of ruin and decadence where once stretched the populous plains and villages of my native land, and maelstroms of frothing ocean where once rose the mighty temples of my forefathers. Around the northern pole steamed a morass of noisome growths and miasmal vapours, hissing before the onslaught of the ever-mounting waves that curled and fretted from the shuddering deep. Then a rending report clave the night, and athwart the desert of deserts appeared a smoking rift. Still the black ocean foamed and gnawed, eating away the desert on either side as the rift in the centre widened and widened.\n\nThere was now no land left but the desert, and still the fuming ocean ate and ate. All at once I thought even the pounding sea seemed afraid of something, afraid of dark gods of the inner earth that are greater than the evil god of waters, but even if it was it could not turn back; and the desert had suffered too much from those nightmare waves to help them now. So the ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy, remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with stardust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands.\n\nThere was not any pounding now, but only the unearthly roaring and hissing of waters tumbling into the rift. The smoke of that rift had changed to steam, and almost hid the world as it grew denser and denser. It seared my face and hands, and when I looked to see how it affected my companions I found they had all disappeared. Then very suddenly it ended, and I knew no more till I awaked upon a bed of convalescence. As the cloud of steam from the Plutonic gulf finally concealed the entire surface from my sight, all the firmament shrieked at a sudden agony of mad reverberations which shook the trembling aether. In one delirious flash and burst it happened; one blinding, deafening holocaust of fire, smoke, and thunder that dissolved the wan moon as it sped outward to the void.\n\nAnd when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld against the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale mournful planets searching for their sister.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Curse of Yig by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn 1925 I went into Oklahoma looking for snake lore, and I came out with a fear of snakes that will last me the rest of my life. I admit it is foolish, since there are natural explanations for everything I saw and heard, but it masters me none the less. If the old story had been all there was to it, I would not have been so badly shaken. My work as an American Indian ethnologist has hardened me to all kinds of extravagant legendry, and I know that simple white people can beat the redskins at their own game when it comes to fanciful inventions. But I can't forget what I saw with my own eyes at the insane asylum in Guthrie.\n\nI called at that asylum because a few of the oldest settlers told me I would find something important there. Neither Indians nor white men would discuss the snake-god legends I had come to trace. The oil-boom newcomers, of course, knew nothing of such matters, and the red men and old pioneers were plainly frightened when I spoke of them. Not more than six or seven people mentioned the asylum, and those who did were careful to talk in whispers. But the whisperers said that Dr. McNeill could shew me a very terrible relic and tell me all I wanted to know. He could explain why Yig, the half-human father of serpents, is a shunned and feared object in central Oklahoma, and why old settlers shiver at the secret Indian orgies which make the autumn days and nights hideous with the ceaseless beating of tom-toms in lonely places.\n\nIt was with the scent of a hound on the trail that I went to Guthrie, for I had spent many years collecting data on the evolution of serpent-worship among the Indians. I had always felt, from well-defined undertones of legend and archaeology, that great Quetzalcoatl\u2014benign snake-god of the Mexicans\u2014had had an older and darker prototype; and during recent months I had well-nigh proved it in a series of researches stretching from Guatemala to the Oklahoma plains. But everything was tantalising and incomplete, for above the border the cult of the snake was hedged about by fear and furtiveness.\n\nNow it appeared that a new and copious source of data was about to dawn, and I sought the head of the asylum with an eagerness I did not try to cloak. Dr. McNeill was a small, clean-shaven man of somewhat advanced years, and I saw at once from his speech and manner that he was a scholar of no mean attainments in many branches outside his profession. Grave and doubtful when I first made known my errand, his face grew thoughtful as he carefully scanned my credentials and the letter of introduction which a kindly old ex-Indian agent had given me.\n\n\"So you've been studying the Yig legend, eh?\" he reflected sententiously. \"I know that many of our Oklahoma ethnologists have tried to connect it with Quetzalcoatl, but I don't think any of them have traced the intermediate steps so well. You've done remarkable work for a man as young as you seem to be, and you certainly deserve all the data we can give.\n\n\"I don't suppose old Major Moore or any of the others told you what it is I have here. They don't like to talk about it, and neither do I. It is very tragic and very horrible, but that is all. I refuse to consider it anything supernatural. There's a story about it that I'll tell you after you see it\u2014a devilish sad story, but one that I won't call magic. It merely shews the potency that belief has over some people. I'll admit there are times when I feel a shiver that's more than physical, but in daylight I set all that down to nerves. I'm not a young fellow any more, alas!\n\n\"To come to the point, the thing I have is what you might call a victim of Yig's curse\u2014a physically living victim. We don't let the bulk of the nurses see it, although most of them know it's here. There are just two steady old chaps whom I let feed it and clean out its quarters\u2014used to be three, but good old Stevens passed on a few years ago. I suppose I'll have to break in a new group pretty soon; for the thing doesn't seem to age or change much, and we old boys can't last forever. Maybe the ethics of the near future will let us give it a merciful release, but it's hard to tell.\n\n\"Did you see that single ground-glass basement window over in the east wing when you came up the drive? That's where it is. I'll take you there myself now. You needn't make any comment. Just look through the moveable panel in the door and thank God the light isn't any stronger. Then I'll tell you the story\u2014or as much as I've been able to piece together.\"\n\nWe walked downstairs very quietly, and did not talk as we threaded the corridors of the seemingly deserted basement. Dr. McNeill unlocked a grey-painted steel door, but it was only a bulkhead leading to a further stretch of hallway. At length he paused before a door marked B 116, opened a small observation panel which he could use only by standing on tiptoe, and pounded several times upon the painted metal, as if to arouse the occupant, whatever it might be.\n\nA faint stench came from the aperture as the doctor unclosed it, and I fancied his pounding elicited a kind of low, hissing response. Finally he motioned me to replace him at the peep-hole, and I did so with a causeless and increasing tremor. The barred, ground-glass window, close to the earth outside, admitted only a feeble and uncertain pallor; and I had to look into the malodorous den for several seconds before I could see what was crawling and wriggling about on the straw-covered floor, emitting every now and then a weak and vacuous hiss. Then the shadowed outlines began to take shape, and I perceived that the squirming entity bore some remote resemblance to a human form laid flat on its belly. I clutched at the door-handle for support as I tried to keep from fainting.\n\nThe moving object was almost of human size, and entirely devoid of clothing. It was absolutely hairless, and its tawny-looking back seemed subtly squamous in the dim, ghoulish light. Around the shoulders it was rather speckled and brownish, and the head was very curiously flat. As it looked up to hiss at me I saw that the beady little black eyes were damnably anthropoid, but I could not bear to study them long. They fastened themselves on me with a horrible persistence, so that I closed the panel gaspingly and left the creature to wriggle about unseen in its matted straw and spectral twilight. I must have reeled a bit, for I saw that the doctor was gently holding my arm as he guided me away. I was stuttering over and over again: \"B-but for God's sake, what is it?\"\n\nDr. McNeill told me the story in his private office as I sprawled opposite him in an easy-chair. The gold and crimson of late afternoon changed to the violet of early dusk, but still I sat awed and motionless. I resented every ring of the telephone and every whir of the buzzer, and I could have cursed the nurses and internes whose knocks now and then summoned the doctor briefly to the outer office. Night came, and I was glad my host switched on all the lights. Scientist though I was, my zeal for research was half forgotten amidst such breathless ecstasies of fright as a small boy might feel when whispered witch-tales go the rounds of the chimney-corner.\n\nIt seems that Yig, the snake-god of the central plains tribes\u2014presumably the primal source of the more southerly Quetzalcoatl or Kukulcan\u2014was an odd, half-anthropomorphic devil of highly arbitrary and capricious nature. He was not wholly evil, and was usually quite well-disposed toward those who gave proper respect to him and his children, the serpents; but in the autumn he became abnormally ravenous, and had to be driven away by means of suitable rites. That was why the tom-toms in the Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo country pounded ceaselessly week in and week out in August, September, and October; and why the medicine-men made strange noises with rattles and whistles curiously like those of the Aztecs and Mayas.\n\nYig's chief trait was a relentless devotion to his children\u2014a devotion so great that the redskins almost feared to protect themselves from the venomous rattlesnakes which thronged the region. Frightful clandestine tales hinted of his vengeance upon mortals who flouted him or wreaked harm upon his wriggling progeny; his chosen method being to turn his victim, after suitable tortures, to a spotted snake.\n\nIn the old days of the Indian Territory, the doctor went on, there was not quite so much secrecy about Yig. The plains tribes, less cautious than the desert nomads and Pueblos, talked quite freely of their legends and autumn ceremonies with the first Indian agents, and let considerable of the lore spread out through the neighbouring regions of white settlement. The great fear came in the land-rush days of '89, when some extraordinary incidents had been rumoured, and the rumours sustained, by what seemed to be hideously tangible proofs. Indians said that the new white men did not know how to get on with Yig, and afterward the settlers came to take that theory at face value. Now no old-timer in middle Oklahoma, white or red, could be induced to breathe a word about the snake-god except in vague hints. Yet after all, the doctor added with almost needless emphasis, the only truly authenticated horror had been a thing of pitiful tragedy rather than of bewitchment. It was all very material and cruel\u2014even that last phase which had caused so much dispute.\n\nDr. McNeill paused and cleared his throat before getting down to his special story, and I felt a tingling sensation as when a theatre curtain rises. The thing had begun when Walker Davis and his wife Audrey left Arkansas to settle in the newly opened public lands in the spring of 1889, and the end had come in the country of the Wichitas\u2014north of the Wichita River, in what is at present Caddo County. There is a small village called Binger there now, and the railway goes through; but otherwise the place is less changed than other parts of Oklahoma. It is still a section of farms and ranches\u2014quite productive in these days\u2014since the great oil-fields do not come very close.\n\nWalker and Audrey had come from Franklin County in the Ozarks with a canvas-topped wagon, two mules, an ancient and useless dog called \"Wolf\", and all their household goods. They were typical hillfolk, youngish and perhaps a little more ambitious than most, and looked forward to a life of better returns for their hard work than they had had in Arkansas. Both were lean, raw-boned specimens; the man tall, sandy, and grey-eyed, and the woman short and rather dark, with a black straightness of hair suggesting a slight Indian admixture.\n\nIn general, there was very little of distinction about them, and but for one thing their annals might not have differed from those of thousands of other pioneers who flocked into the new country at that time. That thing was Walker's almost epileptic fear of snakes, which some laid to prenatal causes, and some said came from a dark prophecy about his end with which an old Indian squaw had tried to scare him when he was small. Whatever the cause, the effect was marked indeed; for despite his strong general courage the very mention of a snake would cause him to grow faint and pale, while the sight of even a tiny specimen would produce a shock sometimes bordering on a convulsion seizure.\n\nThe Davises started out early in the year, in the hope of being on their new land for the spring ploughing. Travel was slow; for the roads were bad in Arkansas, while in the Territory there were great stretches of rolling hills and red, sandy barrens without any roads whatever. As the terrain grew flatter, the change from their native mountains depressed them more, perhaps, than they realised; but they found the people at the Indian agencies very affable, while most of the settled Indians seemed friendly and civil. Now and then they encountered a fellow-pioneer, with whom crude pleasantries and expressions of amiable rivalry were generally exchanged.\n\nOwing to the season, there were not many snakes in evidence, so Walker did not suffer from his special temperamental weakness. In the earlier stages of the journey, too, there were no Indian snake-legends to trouble him; for the transplanted tribes from the southeast do not share the wilder beliefs of their western neighbours. As fate would have it, it was a white man at Okmulgee in the Creek country who gave the Davises the first hint of Yig beliefs; a hint which had a curiously fascinating effect on Walker, and caused him to ask questions very freely after that.\n\nBefore long Walker's fascination had developed into a bad case of fright. He took the most extraordinary precautions at each of the nightly camps, always clearing away whatever vegetation he found, and avoiding stony places whenever he could. Every clump of stunted bushes and every cleft in the great, slab-like rocks seemed to him now to hide malevolent serpents, while every human figure not obviously part of a settlement or emigrant train seemed to him a potential snake-god till nearness had proved the contrary. Fortunately no troublesome encounters came at this stage to shake his nerves still further.\n\nAs they approached the Kickapoo country they found it harder and harder to avoid camping near rocks. Finally it was no longer possible, and poor Walker was reduced to the puerile expedient of droning some of the rustic anti-snake charms he had learned in his boyhood. Two or three times a snake was really glimpsed, and these sights did not help the sufferer in his efforts to preserve composure.\n\nOn the twenty-second evening of the journey a savage wind made it imperative, for the sake of the mules, to camp in as sheltered a spot as possible; and Audrey persuaded her husband to take advantage of a cliff which rose uncommonly high above the dried bed of a former tributary of the Canadian River. He did not like the rocky cast of the place, but allowed himself to be overruled this once; leading the animals sullenly toward the protecting slope, which the nature of the ground would not allow the wagon to approach.\n\nAudrey, examining the rocks near the wagon, meanwhile noticed a singular sniffing on the part of the feeble old dog. Seizing a rifle, she followed his lead, and presently thanked her stars that she had forestalled Walker in her discovery. For there, snugly nested in the gap between two boulders, was a sight it would have done him no good to see. Visible only as one convoluted expanse, but perhaps comprising as many as three or four separate units, was a mass of lazy wriggling which could not be other than a brood of new-born rattlesnakes.\n\nAnxious to save Walker from a trying shock, Audrey did not hesitate to act, but took the gun firmly by the barrel and brought the butt down again and again upon the writhing objects. Her own sense of loathing was great, but it did not amount to a real fear. Finally she saw that her task was done, and turned to cleanse the improvised bludgeon in the red sand and dry, dead grass near by. She must, she reflected, cover the nest up before Walker got back from tethering the mules. Old Wolf, tottering relic of mixed shepherd and coyote ancestry that he was, had vanished, and she feared he had gone to fetch his master.\n\nFootsteps at that instant proved her fear well founded. A second more, and Walker had seen everything. Audrey made a move to catch him if he should faint, but he did no more than sway. Then the look of pure fright on his bloodless face turned slowly to something like mingled awe and anger, and he began to upbraid his wife in trembling tones.\n\n\"Gawd's sake, Aud, but why'd ye go for to do that? Hain't ye heerd all the things they've been tellin' about this snake-devil Yig? Ye'd ought to a told me, and we'd a moved on. Don't ye know they's a devil-god what gets even if ye hurts his children? What for d'ye think the Injuns all dances and beats their drums in the fall about? This land's under a curse, I tell ye\u2014nigh every soul we've a-talked to sence we come in's said the same. Yig rules here, an' he comes out every fall for to git his victims and turn 'em into snakes. Why, Aud, they won't none of them Injuns acrost the Canayjin kill a snake for love nor money!\n\n\"Gawd knows what ye done to yourself, gal, a-stompin' out a hull brood o' Yig's chillen. He'll git ye, sure, sooner or later, unlessen I kin buy a charm offen some o' the Injun medicine-men. He'll git ye, Aud, as sure's they's a Gawd in heaven\u2014he'll come outa the night and turn ye into a crawlin' spotted snake!\"\n\nAll the rest of the journey Walker kept up the frightened reproofs and prophecies. They crossed the Canadian near Newcastle, and soon afterward met with the first of the real plains Indians they had seen\u2014a party of blanketed Wichitas, whose leader talked freely under the spell of the whiskey offered him, and taught poor Walker a long-winded protective charm against Yig in exchange for a quart bottle of the same inspiring fluid. By the end of the week the chosen site in the Wichita country was reached, and the Davises made haste to trace their boundaries and perform the spring ploughing before even beginning the construction of a cabin.\n\nThe region was flat, drearily windy, and sparse of natural vegetation, but promised great fertility under cultivation. Occasional outcroppings of granite diversified a soil of decomposed red sandstone, and here and there a great flat rock would stretch along the surface of the ground like a man-made floor. There seemed to be a very few snakes, or possible dens for them; so Audrey at last persuaded Walker to build the one-room cabin over a vast, smooth slab of exposed stone. With such a flooring and with a good-sized fireplace the wettest weather might be defied\u2014though it soon became evident that dampness was no salient quality of the district. Logs were hauled in the wagon from the nearest belt of woods, many miles toward the Wichita Mountains.\n\nWalker built his wide-chimneyed cabin and crude barn with the aid of some of the other settlers, though the nearest one was over a mile away. In turn, he helped his helpers at similar house-raisings, so that many ties of friendship sprang up between the new neighbours. There was no town worthy the name nearer than El Reno, on the railway thirty miles or more to the northeast; and before many weeks had passed, the people of the section had become very cohesive despite the wideness of their scattering. The Indians, a few of whom had begun to settle down on ranches, were for the most part harmless, though somewhat quarrelsome when fired by the liquid stimulation which found its way to them despite all government bans.\n\nOf all the neighbours the Davises found Joe and Sally Compton, who likewise hailed from Arkansas, the most helpful and congenial. Sally is still alive, known now as Grandma Compton; and her son Clyde, then an infant in arms, has become one of the leading men of the state. Sally and Audrey used to visit each other often, for their cabins were only two miles apart; and in the long spring and summer afternoons they exchanged many a tale of old Arkansas and many a rumour about the new country.\n\nSally was very sympathetic about Walker's weakness regarding snakes, but perhaps did more to aggravate than cure the parallel nervousness which Audrey was acquiring through his incessant praying and prophesying about the curse of Yig. She was uncommonly full of gruesome snake stories, and produced a direfully strong impression with her acknowledged masterpiece\u2014the tale of a man in Scott County who had been bitten by a whole horde of rattlers at once, and had swelled so monstrously from poison that his body had finally burst with a pop. Needless to say, Audrey did not repeat this anecdote to her husband, and she implored the Comptons to beware of starting it on the rounds of the countryside. It is to Joe's and Sally's credit that they heeded this plea with the utmost fidelity.\n\nWalker did his corn-planting early, and in midsummer improved his time by harvesting a fair crop of the native grass of the region. With the help of Joe Compton he dug a well which gave a moderate supply of very good water, though he planned to sink an artesian later on. He did not run into many serious snake scares, and made his land as inhospitable as possible for wriggling visitors. Every now and then he rode over to the cluster of thatched, conical huts which formed the main village of the Wichitas, and talked long with the old men and shamans about the snake-god and how to nullify his wrath. Charms were always ready in exchange for whiskey, but much of the information he got was far from reassuring.\n\nYig was a great god. He was bad medicine. He did not forget things. In the autumn his children were hungry and wild, and Yig was hungry and wild, too. All the tribes made medicine against Yig when the corn harvest came. They gave him some corn, and danced in proper regalia to the sound of whistle, rattle, and drum. They kept the drums pounding to drive Yig away, and called down the aid of Tir\u00e1wa, whose children men are, even as the snakes are Yig's children. It was bad that the squaw of Davis killed the children of Yig. Let Davis say the charms many times when the corn harvest comes. Yig is Yig. Yig is a great god.\n\nBy the time the corn harvest did come, Walker had succeeded in getting his wife into a deplorably jumpy state. His prayers and borrowed incantations came to be a nuisance; and when the autumn rites of the Indians began, there was always a distant windborne pounding of tom-toms to lend an added background of the sinister. It was maddening to have the muffled clatter always stealing over the wide red plains. Why would it never stop? Day and night, week on week, it was always going in exhaustless relays, as persistently as the red dusty winds that carried it. Audrey loathed it more than her husband did, for he saw in it a compensating element of protection. It was with this sense of a mighty, intangible bulwark against evil that he got in his corn crop and prepared cabin and stable for the coming winter.\n\nThe autumn was abnormally warm, and except for their primitive cookery the Davises found scant use for the stone fireplace Walker had built with such care. Something in the unnaturalness of the hot dust-clouds preyed on the nerves of all the settlers, but most of all on Audrey's and Walker's. The notions of a hovering snake-curse and the weird, endless rhythm of the distant Indian drums formed a bad combination which any added element of the bizarre went far to render utterly unendurable.\n\nNotwithstanding this strain, several festive gatherings were held at one or another of the cabins after the crops were reaped; keeping naively alive in modernity those curious rites of the harvest-home which are as old as human agriculture itself. Lafayette Smith, who came from southern Missouri and had a cabin about three miles east of Walker's, was a very passable fiddler; and his tunes did much to make the celebrants forget the monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms. Then Hallowe'en drew near, and the settlers planned another frolic\u2014this time, had they but known it, of a lineage older than even agriculture; the dread Witch-Sabbath of the primal pre-Aryans, kept alive through ages in the midnight blackness of secret woods, and still hinting at vague terrors under its latter-day mask of comedy and lightness. Hallowe'en was to fall on a Thursday, and the neighbours agreed to gather for their first revel at the Davis cabin.\n\nIt was on that thirty-first of October that the warm spell broke. The morning was grey and leaden, and by noon the incessant winds had changed from searingness to rawness. People shivered all the more because they were not prepared for the chill, and Walker Davis' old dog Wolf dragged himself wearily indoors to a place beside the hearth. But the distant drums still thumped on, nor were the white citizenry less inclined to pursue their chosen rites. As early as four in the afternoon the wagons began to arrive at Walker's cabin; and in the evening, after a memorable barbecue, Lafayette Smith's fiddle inspired a very fair-sized company to great feats of saltatory grotesqueness in the one good-sized but crowded room. The younger folk indulged in the amiable inanities proper to the season, and now and then old Wolf would howl with doleful and spine-tickling ominousness at some especially spectral strain from Lafayette's squeaky violin\u2014a device he had never heard before. Mostly, though, this battered veteran slept through the merriment; for he was past the age of active interests and lived largely in his dreams. Tom and Jennie Rigby had brought their collie Zeke along, but the canines did not fraternise. Zeke seemed strangely uneasy over something, and nosed around curiously all the evening.\n\nAudrey and Walker made a fine couple on the floor, and Grandma Compton still likes to recall her impression of their dancing that night. Their worries seemed forgotten for the nonce, and Walker was shaved and trimmed into a surprising degree of spruceness. By ten o'clock all hands were healthily tired, and the guests began to depart family by family with many handshakings and bluff assurances of what a fine time everybody had had. Tom and Jennie thought Zeke's eerie howls as he followed them to their wagon were marks of regret at having to go home; though Audrey said it must be the faraway tom-toms which annoyed him, for the distant thumping was surely ghastly enough after the merriment within.\n\nThe night was bitterly cold, and for the first time Walker put a great log in the fireplace and banked it with ashes to keep it smouldering till morning. Old Wolf dragged himself within the ruddy glow and lapsed into his customary coma. Audrey and Walker, too tired to think of charms or curses, tumbled into the rough pine bed and were asleep before the cheap alarm-clock on the mantel had ticked out three minutes. And from far away, the rhythmic pounding of those hellish tom-toms still pulsed on the chill night-wind.\n\nDr. McNeill paused here and removed his glasses, as if a blurring of the objective world might make the reminiscent vision clearer.\n\n\"You'll soon appreciate,\" he said, \"that I had a great deal of difficulty in piecing out all that happened after the guests left. There were times, though\u2014at first\u2014when I was able to make a try at it.\" After a moment of silence he went on with the tale.\n\nAudrey had terrible dreams of Yig, who appeared to her in the guise of Satan as depicted in cheap engravings she had seen. It was, indeed, from an absolute ecstasy of nightmare that she started suddenly awake to find Walker already conscious and sitting up in bed. He seemed to be listening intently to something, and silenced her with a whisper when she began to ask what had roused him.\n\n\"Hark, Aud!\" he breathed. \"Don't ye hear somethin' a-singin' and buzzin' and rustlin'? D'ye reckon it's the fall crickets?\"\n\nCertainly, there was distinctly audible within the cabin such a sound as he had described. Audrey tried to analyse it, and was impressed with some element at once horrible and familiar, which hovered just outside the rim of her memory. And beyond it all, waking a hideous thought, the monotonous beating of the distant tom-toms came incessantly across the black plains on which a cloudy half-moon had set.\n\n\"Walker\u2014s'pose it's\u2014the\u2014the\u2014curse o' Yig?\"\n\nShe could feel him tremble.\n\n\"No, gal, I don't reckon he comes that away. He's shapen like a man, except ye look at him clost. That's what Chief Grey Eagle says. This here's some varmints come in outen the cold\u2014not crickets, I calc'late, but summat like 'em. I'd orter git up and stomp 'em out afore they make much headway or git at the cupboard.\"\n\nHe rose, felt for the lantern that hung within easy reach, and rattled the tin match-box nailed to the wall beside it. Audrey sat up in bed and watched the flare of the match grow into the steady glow of the lantern. Then, as their eyes began to take in the whole of the room, the crude rafters shook with the frenzy of their simultaneous shriek. For the flat, rocky floor, revealed in the new-born illumination, was one seething, brown-speckled mass of wriggling rattlesnakes, slithering toward the fire, and even now turning their loathsome heads to menace the fright-blasted lantern-bearer.\n\nIt was only for an instant that Audrey saw the things. The reptiles were of every size, of uncountable numbers, and apparently of several varieties; and even as she looked, two or three of them reared their heads as if to strike at Walker. She did not faint\u2014it was Walker's crash to the floor that extinguished the lantern and plunged her into blackness. He had not screamed a second time\u2014fright had paralysed him, and he fell as if shot by a silent arrow from no mortal's bow. To Audrey the entire world seemed to whirl about fantastically, mingling with the nightmare from which she had started.\n\nVoluntary motion of any sort was impossible, for will and the sense of reality had left her. She fell back inertly on her pillow, hoping that she would wake soon. No actual sense of what had happened penetrated her mind for some time. Then, little by little, the suspicion that she was really awake began to dawn on her; and she was convulsed with a mounting blend of panic and grief which made her long to shriek out despite the inhibiting spell which kept her mute.\n\nWalker was gone, and she had not been able to help him. He had died of snakes, just as the old witch-woman had predicted when he was a little boy. Poor Wolf had not been able to help, either\u2014probably he had not even awaked from his senile stupor. And now the crawling things must be coming for her, writhing closer and closer every moment in the dark, perhaps even now twining slipperily about the bedposts and oozing up over the coarse woollen blankets. Unconsciously she crept under the clothes and trembled.\n\nIt must be the curse of Yig. He had sent his monstrous children on All-Hallows' Night, and they had taken Walker first. Why was that\u2014wasn't he innocent enough? Why not come straight for her\u2014hadn't she killed those little rattlers alone? Then she thought of the curse's form as told by the Indians. She wouldn't be killed\u2014just turned to a spotted snake. Ugh! So she would be like those things she had glimpsed on the floor\u2014those things which Yig had sent to get her and enroll her among their number! She tried to mumble a charm that Walker had taught her, but found she could not utter a single sound.\n\nThe noisy ticking of the alarm-clock sounded above the maddening beat of the distant tom-toms. The snakes were taking a long time\u2014did they mean to delay on purpose to play on her nerves? Every now and then she thought she felt a steady, insidious pressure on the bedclothes, but each time it turned out to be only the automatic twitchings of her overwrought nerves. The clock ticked on in the dark, and a change came slowly over her thoughts.\n\nThose snakes couldn't have taken so long! They couldn't be Yig's messengers after all, but just natural rattlers that were nested below the rock and had been drawn there by the fire. They weren't coming for her, perhaps\u2014perhaps they had sated themselves on poor Walker. Where were they now? Gone? Coiled by the fire? Still crawling over the prone corpse of their victim? The clock ticked, and the distant drums throbbed on.\n\nAt the thought of her husband's body lying there in the pitch blackness a thrill of purely physical horror passed over Audrey. That story of Sally Compton's about the man back in Scott County! He, too, had been bitten by a whole bunch of rattlesnakes, and what had happened to him? The poison had rotted the flesh and swelled the whole corpse, and in the end the bloated thing had burst horribly\u2014burst horribly with a detestable popping noise. Was that what was happening to Walker down there on the rock floor? Instinctively she felt she had begun to listen for something too terrible even to name to herself.\n\nThe clock ticked on, keeping a kind of mocking, sardonic time with the far-off drumming that the night-wind brought. She wished it were a striking clock, so that she could know how long this eldritch vigil must last. She cursed the toughness of fibre that kept her from fainting, and wondered what sort of relief the dawn could bring, after all. Probably neighbours would pass\u2014no doubt somebody would call\u2014would they find her still sane? Was she still sane now?\n\nMorbidly listening, Audrey all at once became aware of something which she had to verify with every effort of her will before she could believe it; and which, once verified, she did not know whether to welcome or dread. The distant beating of the Indian tom-toms had ceased. They had always maddened her\u2014but had not Walker regarded them as a bulwark against nameless evil from outside the universe? What were some of those things he had repeated to her in whispers after talking with Grey Eagle and the Wichita medicine-men?\n\nShe did not relish this new and sudden silence, after all! There was something sinister about it. The loud-ticking clock seemed abnormal in its new loneliness. Capable at last of conscious motion, she shook the covers from her face and looked into the darkness toward the window. It must have cleared after the moon set, for she saw the square aperture distinctly against the background of stars.\n\nThen without warning came that shocking, unutterable sound\u2014ugh!\u2014that dull, putrid pop of cleft skin and escaping poison in the dark. God!\u2014Sally's story\u2014that obscene stench, and this gnawing, clawing silence! It was too much. The bonds of muteness snapped, and the black night waxed reverberant with Audrey's screams of stark, unbridled frenzy.\n\nConsciousness did not pass away with the shock. How merciful if only it had! Amidst the echoes of her shrieking Audrey still saw the star-sprinkled square of window ahead, and heard the doom-boding ticking of that frightful clock. Did she hear another sound? Was that square window still a perfect square? She was in no condition to weigh the evidence of her senses or distinguish between fact and hallucination.\n\nNo\u2014that window was not a perfect square. Something had encroached on the lower edge. Nor was the ticking of the clock the only sound in the room. There was, beyond dispute, a heavy breathing neither her own nor poor Wolf's. Wolf slept very silently, and his wakeful wheezing was unmistakable. Then Audrey saw against the stars the black, daemoniac silhouette of something anthropoid\u2014the undulant bulk of a gigantic head and shoulders fumbling slowly toward her.\n\n\"Y'aaaah! Y'aaaah! Go away! Go away! Go away, snake-devil! Go 'way, Yig! I didn't mean to kill 'em\u2014I was feared he'd be scairt of 'em. Don't, Yig, don't! I didn't go for to hurt yore chillen\u2014don't come nigh me\u2014don't change me into no spotted snake!\"\n\nBut the half-formless head and shoulders only lurched onward toward the bed, very silently.\n\nEverything snapped at once inside Audrey's head, and in a second she had turned from a cowering child to a raging madwoman. She knew where the axe was\u2014hung against the wall on those pegs near the lantern. It was within easy reach, and she could find it in the dark. Before she was conscious of anything further it was in her hands, and she was creeping toward the foot of the bed\u2014toward the monstrous head and shoulders that every moment groped their way nearer. Had there been any light, the look on her face would not have been pleasant to see.\n\n\"Take that, you! And that, and that, and that!\"\n\nShe was laughing shrilly now, and her cackles mounted higher as she saw that the starlight beyond the window was yielding to the dim prophetic pallor of coming dawn.\n\nDr. McNeill wiped the perspiration from his forehead and put on his glasses again. I waited for him to resume, and as he kept silent I spoke softly.\n\n\"She lived? She was found? Was it ever explained?\"\n\nThe doctor cleared his throat.\n\n\"Yes\u2014she lived, in a way. And it was explained. I told you there was no bewitchment\u2014only cruel, pitiful, material horror.\"\n\nIt was Sally Compton who had made the discovery. She had ridden over to the Davis cabin the next afternoon to talk over the party with Audrey, and had seen no smoke from the chimney. That was queer. It had turned very warm again, yet Audrey was usually cooking something at that hour. The mules were making hungry-sounding noises in the barn, and there was no sign of old Wolf sunning himself in the accustomed spot by the door.\n\nAltogether, Sally did not like the look of the place, so was very timid and hesitant as she dismounted and knocked. She got no answer but waited some time before trying the crude door of split logs. The lock, it appeared, was unfastened; and she slowly pushed her way in. Then, perceiving what was there, she reeled back, gasped, and clung to the jamb to preserve her balance.\n\nA terrible odour had welled out as she opened the door, but that was not what had stunned her. It was what she had seen. For within that shadowy cabin monstrous things had happened and three shocking objects remained on the floor to awe and baffle the beholder.\n\nNear the burned-out fireplace was the great dog\u2014purple decay on the skin left bare by mange and old age, and the whole carcass burst by the puffing effect of rattlesnake poison. It must have been bitten by a veritable legion of the reptiles.\n\nTo the right of the door was the axe-hacked remnant of what had been a man\u2014clad in a nightshirt, and with the shattered bulk of a lantern clenched in one hand. He was totally free from any sign of snake-bite. Near him lay the ensanguined axe, carelessly discarded.\n\nAnd wriggling flat on the floor was a loathsome, vacant-eyed thing that had been a woman, but was now only a mute mad caricature. All that this thing could do was to hiss, and hiss, and hiss.\n\nBoth the doctor and I were brushing cold drops from our foreheads by this time. He poured something from a flask on his desk, took a nip, and handed another glass to me. I could only suggest tremulously and stupidly:\n\n\"So Walker had only fainted that first time\u2014the screams roused him, and the axe did the rest?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Dr. McNeill's voice was low. \"But he met his death from snakes just the same. It was his fear working in two ways\u2014it made him faint, and it made him fill his wife with the wild stories that caused her to strike out when she thought she saw the snake-devil.\"\n\nI thought for a moment.\n\n\"And Audrey\u2014wasn't it queer how the curse of Yig seemed to work itself out on her? I suppose the impression of hissing snakes had been fairly ground into her.\"\n\n\"Yes. There were lucid spells at first, but they got to be fewer and fewer. Her hair came white at the roots as it grew, and later began to fall out. The skin grew blotchy, and when she died\u2014\"\n\nI interrupted with a start.\n\n\"Died? Then what was that\u2014that thing downstairs?\"\n\nMcNeill spoke gravely.\n\n\"That is what was born to her three-quarters of a year afterward. There were three more of them\u2014two were even worse\u2014but this is the only one that lived.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Dagon by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.\n\nIt was in one of the most open and least frequented parts of the broad Pacific that the packet of which I was supercargo fell a victim to the German sea-raider. The great war was then at its very beginning, and the ocean forces of the Hun had not completely sunk to their later degradation; so that our vessel was made a legitimate prize, whilst we of her crew were treated with all the fairness and consideration due us as naval prisoners. So liberal, indeed, was the discipline of our captors, that five days after we were taken I managed to escape alone in a small boat with water and provisions for a good length of time.\n\nWhen I finally found myself adrift and free, I had but little idea of my surroundings. Never a competent navigator, I could only guess vaguely by the sun and stars that I was somewhat south of the equator. Of the longitude I knew nothing, and no island or coastline was in sight. The weather kept fair, and for uncounted days I drifted aimlessly beneath the scorching sun; waiting either for some passing ship, or to be cast on the shores of some habitable land. But neither ship nor land appeared, and I began to despair in my solitude upon the heaving vastnesses of unbroken blue.\n\nThe change happened whilst I slept. Its details I shall never know; for my slumber, though troubled and dream-infested, was continuous. When at last I awaked, it was to discover myself half sucked into a slimy expanse of hellish black mire which extended about me in monotonous undulations as far as I could see, and in which my boat lay grounded some distance away.\n\nThough one might well imagine that my first sensation would be of wonder at so prodigious and unexpected a transformation of scenery, I was in reality more horrified than astonished; for there was in the air and in the rotting soil a sinister quality which chilled me to the very core. The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain. Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.\n\nThe sun was blazing down from a sky which seemed to me almost black in its cloudless cruelty; as though reflecting the inky marsh beneath my feet. As I crawled into the stranded boat I realised that only one theory could explain my position. Through some unprecedented volcanic upheaval, a portion of the ocean floor must have been thrown to the surface, exposing regions which for innumerable millions of years had lain hidden under unfathomable watery depths. So great was the extent of the new land which had risen beneath me, that I could not detect the faintest noise of the surging ocean, strain my ears as I might. Nor were there any sea-fowl to prey upon the dead things.\n\nFor several hours I sat thinking or brooding in the boat, which lay upon its side and afforded a slight shade as the sun moved across the heavens. As the day progressed, the ground lost some of its stickiness, and seemed likely to dry sufficiently for travelling purposes in a short time. That night I slept but little, and the next day I made for myself a pack containing food and water, preparatory to an overland journey in search of the vanished sea and possible rescue.\n\nOn the third morning I found the soil dry enough to walk upon with ease. The odour of the fish was maddening; but I was too much concerned with graver things to mind so slight an evil, and set out boldly for an unknown goal. All day I forged steadily westward, guided by a faraway hummock which rose higher than any other elevation on the rolling desert. That night I encamped, and on the following day still travelled toward the hummock, though that object seemed scarcely nearer than when I had first espied it. By the fourth evening I attained the base of the mound, which turned out to be much higher than it had appeared from a distance; an intervening valley setting it out in sharper relief from the general surface. Too weary to ascend, I slept in the shadow of the hill.\n\nI know not why my dreams were so wild that night; but ere the waning and fantastically gibbous moon had risen far above the eastern plain, I was awake in a cold perspiration, determined to sleep no more. Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again. And in the glow of the moon I saw how unwise I had been to travel by day. Without the glare of the parching sun, my journey would have cost me less energy; indeed, I now felt quite able to perform the ascent which had deterred me at sunset. Picking up my pack, I started for the crest of the eminence.\n\nI have said that the unbroken monotony of the rolling plain was a source of vague horror to me; but I think my horror was greater when I gained the summit of the mound and looked down the other side into an immeasurable pit or canyon, whose black recesses the moon had not yet soared high enough to illumine. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. Through my terror ran curious reminiscences of Paradise Lost, and of Satan's hideous climb through the unfashioned realms of darkness.\n\nAs the moon climbed higher in the sky, I began to see that the slopes of the valley were not quite so perpendicular as I had imagined. Ledges and outcroppings of rock afforded fairly easy footholds for a descent, whilst after a drop of a few hundred feet, the declivity became very gradual. Urged on by an impulse which I cannot definitely analyse, I scrambled with difficulty down the rocks and stood on the gentler slope beneath, gazing into the Stygian deeps where no light had yet penetrated.\n\nAll at once my attention was captured by a vast and singular object on the opposite slope, which rose steeply about an hundred yards ahead of me; an object that gleamed whitely in the newly bestowed rays of the ascending moon. That it was merely a gigantic piece of stone, I soon assured myself; but I was conscious of a distinct impression that its contour and position were not altogether the work of Nature. A closer scrutiny filled me with sensations I cannot express; for despite its enormous magnitude, and its position in an abyss which had yawned at the bottom of the sea since the world was young, I perceived beyond a doubt that the strange object was a well-shaped monolith whose massive bulk had known the workmanship and perhaps the worship of living and thinking creatures.\n\nDazed and frightened, yet not without a certain thrill of the scientist's or archaeologist's delight, I examined my surroundings more closely. The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm, and revealed the fact that a far-flung body of water flowed at the bottom, winding out of sight in both directions, and almost lapping my feet as I stood on the slope. Across the chasm, the wavelets washed the base of the Cyclopean monolith; on whose surface I could now trace both inscriptions and crude sculptures. The writing was in a system of hieroglyphics unknown to me, and unlike anything I had ever seen in books; consisting for the most part of conventionalised aquatic symbols such as fishes, eels, octopi, crustaceans, molluscs, whales, and the like. Several characters obviously represented marine things which are unknown to the modern world, but whose decomposing forms I had observed on the ocean-risen plain.\n\nIt was the pictorial carving, however, that did most to hold me spellbound. Plainly visible across the intervening water on account of their enormous size, were an array of bas-reliefs whose subjects would have excited the envy of a Dor\u00e9. I think that these things were supposed to depict men\u2014at least, a certain sort of men; though the creatures were shewn disporting like fishes in the waters of some marine grotto, or paying homage at some monolithic shrine which appeared to be under the waves as well. Of their faces and forms I dare not speak in detail; for the mere remembrance makes me grow faint. Grotesque beyond the imagination of a Poe or a Bulwer, they were damnably human in general outline despite webbed hands and feet, shockingly wide and flabby lips, glassy, bulging eyes, and other features less pleasant to recall. Curiously enough, they seemed to have been chiselled badly out of proportion with their scenic background; for one of the creatures was shewn in the act of killing a whale represented as but little larger than himself. I remarked, as I say, their grotesqueness and strange size; but in a moment decided that they were merely the imaginary gods of some primitive fishing or seafaring tribe; some tribe whose last descendant had perished eras before the first ancestor of the Piltdown or Neanderthal Man was born. Awestruck at this unexpected glimpse into a past beyond the conception of the most daring anthropologist, I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.\n\nThen suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.\n\nOf my frantic ascent of the slope and cliff, and of my delirious journey back to the stranded boat, I remember little. I believe I sang a great deal, and laughed oddly when I was unable to sing. I have indistinct recollections of a great storm some time after I reached the boat; at any rate, I know that I heard peals of thunder and other tones which Nature utters only in her wildest moods.\n\nWhen I came out of the shadows I was in a San Francisco hospital; brought thither by the captain of the American ship which had picked up my boat in mid-ocean. In my delirium I had said much, but found that my words had been given scant attention. Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.\n\nIt is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm\u2014a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind\u2014of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.\n\nThe end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Descendant by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. His room is filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages. All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there are those who declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him start with staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one feels sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is a decade now since he moved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had been he would say nothing till the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon.\n\nWilliams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the ancient house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey wizened man in the next room. He forced his friendship where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears, and strove every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay, insipid novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison till the last peal died reverberantly away.\n\nBut try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner, but would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of cheerful trifles; his voice every moment rising and thickening till at last it would split in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; and Williams was not surprised to hear that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea, was brought up.\n\nSo matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked up with frightened care by custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an accessible copy but had made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had often bought strange things before, and he almost fancied the gnarled old Levite smiled amidst tangles of beard as the great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brass clasp had been so prominently visible, and the price was so absurdly slight.\n\nThe one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports, and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest and most disquieting recollections in his brain. He felt it was highly necessary to get the ponderous thing home and begin deciphering it, and bore it out of the shop with such precipitate haste that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind him. But when at last it was safe in his room he found the combination of black-letter and debased idiom too much for his powers as a linguist, and reluctantly called on his strange, frightened friend for help with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and started violently when the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and shuddered wildly, and fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was when he regained his senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figment of madness in frantic whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the accursed book and give wide scattering to its ashes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but it would never have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was the nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past\u2014unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were family tales of a descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Cnaeus Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for participation in certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the raths and circles and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course, in the legend that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave and founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the bold companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created Baron of Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in truth the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian's Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older parts of the castle, and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphous scenes and patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking experience. He became a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationships once familiar, yet lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth.\n\nFilled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the known at every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn the founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and limitations of life became more and more maddening to him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to promise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully unvarying laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's chimerical account of Atlantis he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and eternities beyond them.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Diary of Alonzo Typer by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nMr. Typer was educated privately and at Columbia and Heidelberg Universities. All his life was spent as a student; the field of his researches including many obscure and generally feared borderlands of human knowledge. His papers on vampirism, ghouls, and poltergeist phenomena were privately printed after rejection by many publishers. He resigned from the Society for Psychical Research in 1902 after a series of peculiarly bitter controversies.\n\nAt various times Mr. Typer travelled extensively, sometimes dropping out of sight for long periods. He is known to have visited obscure spots in Nepal, India, Thibet, and Indo-China, and passed most of the year 1899 on mysterious Easter Island. The extensive search for Mr. Typer after his disappearance yielded no results, and his estate was divided among distant cousins in New York City.\n\nThe diary herewith presented was allegedly found in the ruins of a large country house near Attica, N.Y., which had borne a curiously sinister reputation for generations before its collapse. The edifice was very old, antedating the general white settlement of the region, and had formed the home of a strange and secretive family named van der Heyl, which had migrated from Albany in 1746 under a curious cloud of witchcraft suspicion. The structure probably dated from about 1760.\n\nOf the history of the van der Heyls very little is known. They remained entirely aloof from their normal neighbours, employed negro servants brought directly from Africa and speaking little English, and educated their children privately and at European colleges. Those of them who went out into the world were soon lost to sight, though not before gaining evil repute for association with Black Mass groups and cults of even darker significance.\n\nAround the dreaded house a straggling village arose, populated by Indians and later by renegades from the surrounding country, which bore the dubious name of Chorazin. Of the singular hereditary strains which afterward appeared in the mixed Chorazin villagers, several monographs have been written by ethnologists. Just behind the village, and in sight of the van der Heyl house, is a steep hill crowned with a peculiar ring of ancient standing stones which the Iroquois always regarded with fear and loathing. The origin and nature of the stones, whose date, according to archaeological and climatological evidence, must be fabulously early, is a problem still unsolved.\n\nFrom about 1795 onward, the legends of the incoming pioneers and later population have much to say about strange cries and chants proceeding at certain seasons from Chorazin and from the great house and hill of standing stones; though there is reason to suppose that the noises ceased about 1872, when the entire van der Heyl household\u2014servants and all\u2014suddenly and simultaneously disappeared.\n\nThenceforward the house was deserted; for other disastrous events\u2014including three unexplained deaths, five disappearances, and four cases of sudden insanity\u2014occurred when later owners and interested visitors attempted to stay in it. The house, village, and extensive rural areas on all sides reverted to the state and were auctioned off in the absence of discoverable van der Heyl heirs. Since about 1890 the owners (successively the late Charles A. Shields and his son Oscar S. Shields, of Buffalo) have left the entire property in a state of absolute neglect, and have warned all inquirers not to visit the region.\n\nOf those known to have approached the house during the last forty years, most were occult students, police officers, newspaper men, and odd characters from abroad. Among the latter was a mysterious Eurasian, probably from Cochin-China, whose later appearance with blank mind and bizarre mutilations excited wide press notice in 1903.\n\nMr. Typer's diary\u2014a book about 6 \u00d7 3\u00bd inches in size, with tough paper and an oddly durable binding of thin sheet metal\u2014was discovered in the possession of one of the decadent Chorazin villagers on Nov. 16, 1935, by a state policeman sent to investigate the rumoured collapse of the deserted van der Heyl mansion. The house had indeed fallen, obviously from sheer age and decrepitude, in the severe gale of Nov. 12. Disintegration was peculiarly complete, and no thorough search of the ruins could be made for several weeks. John Eagle, the swarthy, simian-faced, Indian-like villager who had the diary, said that he found the book quite near the surface of the debris, in what must have been an upper front room.\n\nVery little of the contents of the house could be identified, though an enormous and astonishingly solid brick vault in the cellar (whose ancient iron door had to be blasted open because of the strangely figured and perversely tenacious lock) remained intact and presented several puzzling features. For one thing, the walls were covered with still undeciphered hieroglyphs roughly incised in the brickwork. Another peculiarity was a huge circular aperture in the rear of the vault, blocked by a cave-in evidently caused by the collapse of the house.\n\nBut strangest of all was the apparently recent deposit of some foetid, slimy, pitch-black substance on the flagstoned floor, extending in a yard-broad, irregular line with one end at the blocked circular aperture. Those who first opened the vault declared that the place smelled like the snake-house at a zoo.\n\nThe diary, which was apparently designed solely to cover an investigation of the dreaded van der Heyl house by the vanished Mr. Typer, has been proved by handwriting experts to be genuine. The script shews signs of increasing nervous strain as it progresses toward the end, in places becoming almost illegible. Chorazin villagers\u2014whose stupidity and taciturnity baffle all students of the region and its secrets\u2014admit no recollection of Mr. Typer as distinguished from other rash visitors to the dreaded house.\n\nThe text of the diary is here given verbatim and without comment. How to interpret it, and what, other than the writer's madness, to infer from it, the reader must decide for himself. Only the future can tell what its value may be in solving a generation-old mystery. It may be remarked that genealogists confirm Mr. Typer's belated memory in the matter of Adriaen Sleght.\n\n[ April 17, 1908 ]\n\nArrived here about 6 p.m. Had to walk all the way from Attica in the teeth of an oncoming storm, for no one would rent me a horse or rig, and I can't run an automobile. This place is even worse than I had expected, and I dread what is coming, even though I long at the same time to learn the secret. All too soon will come the night\u2014the old Walpurgis Sabbat horror\u2014and after that time in Wales I know what to look for. Whatever comes, I shall not flinch. Prodded by some unfathomable urge, I have given my whole life to the quest of unholy mysteries. I came here for nothing else, and will not quarrel with fate.\n\nIt was very dark when I got here, though the sun had by no means set. The storm-clouds were the densest I had ever seen, and I could not have found my way but for the lightning flashes. The village is a hateful little backwater, and its few inhabitants no better than idiots. One of them saluted me in a queer way, as if he knew me. I could see very little of the landscape\u2014just a small, swampy valley of strange brown weed-stalks and dead fungi surrounded by scraggly, evilly twisted trees with bare boughs. But behind the village is a dismal-looking hill on whose summit is a circle of great stones with another stone at the centre. That, without question, is the vile primordial thing V\u2014 told me about at the N\u2014 estbat.\n\nThe great house lies in the midst of a park all overgrown with curious-looking briers. I could scarcely break through, and when I did the vast age and decrepitude of the building almost stopped me from entering. The place looked filthy and diseased, and I wondered how so leprous a bulk could hang together. It is wooden; and though its original lines are hidden by a bewildering tangle of wings added at various dates, I think it was first built in the square colonial fashion of New England. Probably that was easier to build than a Dutch stone house\u2014and then, too, I recall that Dirck van der Heyl's wife was from Salem, a daughter of the unmentionable Abaddon Corey. There was a small pillared porch, and I got under it just as the storm burst. It was a fiendish tempest\u2014black as midnight, with rain in sheets, thunder and lightning like the day of general dissolution, and a wind that actually clawed at me. The door was unlocked, so I took out my electric torch and went inside. Dust was inches thick on floor and furniture, and the place smelled like a mould-caked tomb. There was a hall reaching all the way through, and a curving staircase on the right. I ploughed a way upstairs and selected this front room to camp out in. The whole place seems fully furnished, though most of the furniture is breaking down. This is written at eight o'clock, after a cold meal from my travelling-case. After this the village people will bring me supplies\u2014though they won't agree to come any closer than the ruins of the park gate until (as they say) later. I wish I could get rid of an unpleasant feeling of familiarity with this place.\n\nI am conscious of several presences in this house. One in particular is decidedly hostile toward me\u2014a malevolent will which is seeking to break down my own and overcome me. I must not countenance this for an instant, but must use all my forces to resist it. It is appallingly evil, and definitely non-human. I think it must be allied to powers outside earth\u2014powers in the spaces behind time and beyond the universe. It towers like a colossus, bearing out what is said in the Aklo writings. There is such a feeling of vast size connected with it that I wonder these chambers can contain its bulk\u2014and yet it has no visible bulk. Its age must be unutterably vast\u2014shockingly, indescribably so.\n\n[ April 18 ]\n\nSlept very little last night. At 3 a.m. a strange, creeping wind began to pervade the whole region\u2014ever rising until the house rocked as if in a typhoon. As I went down the staircase to see to the rattling front door the darkness took half-visible forms in my imagination. Just below the landing I was pushed violently from behind\u2014by the wind, I suppose, though I could have sworn I saw the dissolving outlines of a gigantic black paw as I turned quickly about. I did not lose my footing, but safely finished the descent and shot the heavy bolt of the dangerously shaking door.\n\nI had not meant to explore the house till dawn; yet now, unable to sleep again and fired with mixed terror and curiosity, I felt reluctant to postpone my search. With my powerful torch I ploughed through the dust to the great south parlour, where I knew the portraits would be. There they were, just as V\u2014 had said, and as I seemed to know from some obscurer source as well. Some were so blackened, mouldy, and dust-clouded that I could make little or nothing of them, but from those I could trace I recognised that they were indeed of the hateful line of the van der Heyls. Some of the paintings seemed to suggest faces I had known; but just what faces, I could not recall.\n\nThe outlines of that frightful hybrid Joris\u2014spawned in 1773 by old Dirck's youngest daughter\u2014were clearest of all, and I could trace the green eyes and the serpent look in his face. Every time I shut off the flashlight that face would seem to glow in the dark until I half fancied it shone with a faint, greenish light of its own. The more I looked, the more evil it seemed, and I turned away to avoid hallucinations of changing expression.\n\nBut that to which I turned was even worse. The long, dour face, small, closely set eyes, and swine-like features identified it at once, even though the artist had striven to make the snout look as human as possible. This was what V\u2014 had whispered about. As I stared in horror, I thought the eyes took on a reddish glow\u2014and for a moment the background seemed replaced by an alien and seemingly irrelevant scene\u2014a lone, bleak moor beneath a dirty yellow sky, whereon grew a wretched-looking blackthorn bush. Fearing for my sanity, I rushed from that accursed gallery to the dust-cleared corner upstairs where I have my \"camp\".\n\nDecided to explore some of the labyrinthine wings of the house by daylight. I cannot get lost, for my footprints are distinct in the ankle-deep dust\u2014and I can trace other identifying marks when necessary. It is curious how easily I learn the intricate windings of the corridors. Followed a long, outflung northerly \"ell\" to its extremity, and came to a locked door, which I forced. Beyond was a very small room quite crowded with furniture, and with the panelling badly worm-eaten. On the outer wall I spied a black space behind the rotting woodwork, and discovered a narrow secret passage leading downward to unknown black depths. It was a steeply inclined chute or tunnel without steps or hand-holds, and I wondered what its use could have been.\n\nAbove the fireplace was a mouldy painting, which I found on close inspection to be that of a young woman in the dress of the late eighteenth century. The face is of classic beauty, yet with the most fiendishly evil expression which I have ever known the human countenance to bear. Not merely callousness, greed, and cruelty, but some quality hideous beyond human comprehension seems to sit upon those finely carved features. And as I looked it seemed to me that the artist\u2014or the slow processes of mould and decay\u2014had imparted to that pallid complexion a sickly greenish cast, and the least suggestion of an almost imperceptibly scaly texture. Later I ascended to the attic, where I found several chests of strange books\u2014many of utterly alien aspect in letters and in physical form alike. One contained variants of the Aklo formulae which I had never known to exist. I have not yet examined the books on the dusty shelves downstairs.\n\n[ April 19 ]\n\nThere are certainly unseen presences here, even though the dust as yet bears no footprints but my own. Cut a path through the briers yesterday to the park gate where my supplies are left, but this morning I found it closed. Very odd, since the bushes are hardly stirring with spring sap. Again I had that feeling of something at hand so colossal that the chambers can scarcely contain it. This time I feel more than one of the presences is of such a size, and I know now that the third Aklo ritual\u2014which I found in that book in the attic yesterday\u2014would make such beings solid and visible. Whether I shall dare to try this materialisation remains to be seen. The perils are great.\n\nLast night I began to glimpse evanescent shadow-faces and forms in the dim corners of the halls and chambers\u2014faces and forms so hideous and loathsome that I dare not describe them. They seem allied in substance to that titanic paw which tried to push me down the stairs night before last\u2014and must of course be phantoms of my disturbed imagination. What I am seeking would not be quite like these things. I have seen the paw again\u2014sometimes alone and sometimes with its mate\u2014but I have resolved to ignore all such phenomena.\n\nEarly this afternoon I explored the cellar for the first time\u2014descending by a ladder found in a storeroom, since the wooden steps had rotted away. The whole place is a mass of nitrous encrustations, with amorphous mounds marking the spots where various objects have disintegrated. At the farther end is a narrow passage which seems to extend under the northerly \"ell\" where I found the little locked room, and at the end of this is a heavy brick wall with a locked iron door. Apparently belonging to a vault of some sort, this wall and door bear evidences of eighteenth-century workmanship and must be contemporary with the oldest additions to the house\u2014clearly pre-Revolutionary. On the lock\u2014which is obviously older than the rest of the ironwork\u2014are engraved certain symbols which I cannot decipher.\n\nV\u2014 had not told me about this vault. It fills me with a greater disquiet than anything else I have seen, for every time I approach it I have an almost irresistible impulse to listen for something. Hitherto no untoward sounds have marked my stay in this malign place. As I left the cellar I wished devoutly that the steps were still there\u2014for my progress up the ladder seemed maddeningly slow. I do not want to go down there again\u2014and yet some evil genius urges me to try it at night if I would learn what is to be learned.\n\n[ April 20 ]\n\nI have sounded the depths of horror\u2014only to be made aware of still lower depths. Last night the temptation was too strong, and in the black small hours I descended once more into that nitrous, hellish cellar with my flashlight\u2014tiptoeing among the amorphous heaps to that terrible brick wall and locked door. I made no sound, and refrained from whispering any of the incantations I knew, but I listened\u2014listened with mad intentness.\n\nAt last I heard the sounds from beyond those barred plates of sheet iron\u2014the menacing padding and muttering, as of gigantic night-things within. Then, too, there was a damnable slithering, as of a vast serpent or sea-beast dragging its monstrous folds over a paved floor. Nearly paralysed with fright, I glanced at the huge rusty lock, and at the alien, cryptic hieroglyphs graven upon it. They were signs I could not recognise, and something in their vaguely Mongoloid technique hinted at a blasphemous and indescribable antiquity. At times I fancied I could see them glowing with a greenish light.\n\nI turned to flee, but found that vision of the titan paws before me\u2014the great talons seeming to swell and become more tangible as I gazed. Out of the cellar's evil blackness they stretched, with shadowy hints of scaly wrists beyond them, and with a waxing, malignant will guiding their horrible gropings. Then I heard from behind me\u2014within that abominable vault\u2014a fresh burst of muffled reverberations which seemed to echo from far horizons like distant thunder. Impelled by this greater fear, I advanced toward the shadowy paws with my flashlight and saw them vanish before the full force of the electric beam. Then up the ladder I raced, torch between my teeth, nor did I rest till I had regained my upstairs \"camp\".\n\nWhat is to be my ultimate end, I dare not imagine. I came as a seeker, but now I know that something is seeking me. I could not leave if I wished. This morning I tried to go to the gate for my supplies, but found the briers twisted tightly in my path. It was the same in every direction\u2014behind and on all sides of the house. In places the brown, barbed vines had uncurled to astonishing heights\u2014forming a steel-like hedge against my egress. The villagers are connected with all this. When I went indoors I found my supplies in the great front hall, though without any clue to how they came there. I am sorry now that I swept the dust away. I shall scatter some more and see what prints are left.\n\nThis afternoon I read some of the books in the great shadowy library at the rear of the ground floor, and formed certain suspicions which I cannot bear to mention. I had never seen the text of Pnakotic Manuscripts or of the Eltdown Shards before, and would not have come here had I known what they contain. I believe it is too late now\u2014for the awful Sabbat is only ten days away. It is for that night of horror that they are saving me.\n\n[ April 21 ]\n\nI have been studying the portraits again. Some have names attached, and I noticed one\u2014of an evil-faced woman, painted some two centuries ago\u2014which puzzled me. It bore the name of Trintje van der Heyl Sleght, and I have a distinct impression that I once met the name of Sleght before, in some significant connexion. It was not horrible then, though it becomes so now. I must rack my brain for the clue.\n\nThe eyes of these pictures haunt me. Is it possible that some of them are emerging more distinctly from their shrouds of dust and decay and mould? The serpent-faced and swine-faced warlocks stare horribly at me from their blackened frames, and a score of other hybrid faces are beginning to peer out of shadowy backgrounds. There is a hideous look of family resemblance in them all\u2014and that which is human is more horrible than that which is non-human. I wish they reminded me less of other faces\u2014faces I have known in the past. They were an accursed line, and Cornelis of Leyden was the worst of them. It was he who broke down the barrier after his father had found that other key. I am sure that V\u2014 knows only a fragment of the horrible truth, so that I am indeed unprepared and defenceless. What of the line before old Claes? What he did in 1591 could never have been done without generations of evil heritage, or some link with the outside. And what of the branches this monstrous line has sent forth? Are they scattered over the world, all awaiting their common heritage of horror? I must recall the place where I once so particularly noticed the name of Sleght.\n\nI wish I could be sure that these pictures stay always in their frames. For several hours now I have been seeing momentary presences like the earlier paws and shadow-faces and forms, but closely duplicating some of the ancient portraits. Somehow I can never glimpse a presence and the portrait it resembles at the same time\u2014the light is always wrong for one or the other, or else the presence and the portrait are in different rooms.\n\nPerhaps, as I have hoped, the presences are mere figments of imagination; but I cannot be sure now. Some are female, and of the same hellish beauty as the picture in the little locked room. Some are like no portrait I have seen, yet make me feel that their painted features lurk unrecognised beneath the mould and soot of canvases I cannot decipher. A few, I desperately fear, have approached materialisation in solid or semi-solid form\u2014and some have a dreadful and unexplained familiarity.\n\nThere is one woman who in fell loveliness excels all the rest. Her poisonous charms are like a honeyed flower growing on the brink of hell. When I look at her closely she vanishes, only to reappear later. Her face has a greenish cast, and now and then I fancy I can spy a suspicion of the squamose in its smooth texture. Who is she? Is she that being who must have dwelt in the little locked room a century and more ago?\n\nMy supplies were again left in the front hall\u2014that, clearly, is to be the custom. I had sprinkled dust about to catch footprints, but this morning the whole hall was swept clean by some unknown agency.\n\n[ April 22 ]\n\nThis has been a day of horrible discovery. I explored the cobwebbed attic again, and found a carved, crumbling chest\u2014plainly from Holland\u2014full of blasphemous books and papers far older than any hitherto encountered here. There was a Greek Necronomicon, a Norman-French Livre d'Eibon, and a first edition of old Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis. But the old bound manuscript was the worst. It was in low Latin, and full of the strange, crabbed handwriting of Claes van der Heyl\u2014being evidently the diary or notebook kept by him between 1560 and 1580. When I unfastened the blackened silver clasp and opened the yellowed leaves a coloured drawing fluttered out\u2014the likeness of a monstrous creature resembling nothing so much as a squid, beaked and tentacled, with great yellow eyes, and with certain abominable approximations to the human form in its contours.\n\nI had never before seen so utterly loathsome and nightmarish a form. On the paws, feet, and head-tentacles were curious claws\u2014reminding me of the colossal shadow-shapes which have groped so horribly in my path\u2014while the entity as a whole sat upon a great throne-like pedestal inscribed with unknown hieroglyphs of vaguely Chinese cast. About both writing and image there hung an air of sinister evil so profound and pervasive that I could not think it the product of any one world or age. Rather must that monstrous shape be a focus for all the evil in unbounded space, throughout the aeons past and to come\u2014and those eldritch symbols be vile sentient eikons endowed with a morbid life of their own and ready to wrest themselves from the parchment for the reader's destruction. To the meaning of that monster and of those hieroglyphs I had no clue, but I knew that both had been traced with a hellish precision and for no namable purpose. As I studied the leering characters, their kinship to the symbols on that ominous lock in the cellar became more and more manifest. I left the picture in the attic, for never could sleep come to me with such a thing nearby.\n\nAll the afternoon and evening I read in the manuscript book of old Claes van der Heyl, and what I read will cloud and make horrible whatever period of life lies ahead of me. The genesis of the world, and of previous worlds, unfolded itself before my eyes. I learned of the city Shamballah, built by the Lemurians fifty million years ago, yet inviolate still behind its walls of psychic force in the eastern desert. I learned of the Book of Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the earth, and which was old when the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilise our planet. And I saw recorded in writing for the first time that name which others had spoken to me in whispers, and which I had known in a closer and more horrible way\u2014the shunned and dreaded name of Yian-Ho.\n\nIn several places I was held up by passages requiring a key. Eventually, from various allusions, I gathered that old Claes had not dared to embody all his knowledge in one book, but had left certain points for another. Neither volume can be wholly intelligible without its fellow; hence I have resolved to find the second one if it lies anywhere within this accursed house. Though plainly a prisoner, I have not lost my lifelong zeal for the unknown; and am determined to probe the cosmos as deeply as possible before doom comes.\n\n[ April 23 ]\n\nSearched all the morning for the second diary, and found it about noon in a desk in the little locked room. Like the first, it is in Claes van der Heyl's barbarous Latin; and it seems to consist of disjointed notes referring to various sections of the other. Glancing through the leaves, I spied at once the abhorred name of Yian-Ho\u2014of Yian-Ho, that lost and hidden city wherein brood aeon-old secrets, and of which dim memories older than the body lurk behind the minds of all men. It was repeated many times, and the text around it was strown with crudely drawn hieroglyphs plainly akin to those on the pedestal in that hellish drawing I had seen. Here, clearly, lay the key to that monstrous tentacled shape and its forbidden message. With this knowledge I ascended the creaking stairs to the attic of cobwebs and horror.\n\nWhen I tried to open the attic door it stuck as never before. Several times it resisted every effort to open it, and when at last it gave way I had a distinct feeling that some colossal, unseen shape had suddenly released it\u2014a shape that soared away on non-material but audibly beating wings. When I found the horrible drawing I felt that it was not precisely where I had left it. Applying the key in the other book, I soon saw that the latter was no instant guide to the secret. It was only a clue\u2014a clue to a secret too black to be left lightly guarded. It would take hours\u2014perhaps days\u2014to extract the awful message.\n\nShall I live long enough to learn the secret? The shadowy black arms and paws haunt my vision more and more now, and seem even more titanic than at first. Nor am I ever long free from those vague, unhuman presences whose nebulous bulk seems too vast for the chambers to contain. And now and then the grotesque, evanescent faces and forms, and the mocking portrait-shapes, troop before me in bewildering confusion.\n\nTruly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth. Likewise are there dread survivals of things older and more potent than man; things that have blasphemously straggled down through the aeons to ages never meant for them; monstrous entities that have lain sleeping endlessly in incredible crypts and remote caverns, outside the laws of reason and causation, and ready to be waked by such blasphemers as shall know their dark forbidden signs and furtive passwords.\n\n[ April 24 ]\n\nStudied the picture and the key all day in the attic. At sunset I heard strange sounds, of a sort not encountered before and seeming to come from far away. Listening, I realised that they must flow from that queer abrupt hill with the circle of standing stones, which lies behind the village and some distance north of the house. I had heard that there was a path from the house leading up that hill to the primal cromlech, and had suspected that at certain seasons the van der Heyls had much occasion to use it; but the whole matter had hitherto lain latent in my consciousness. The present sounds consisted of a shrill piping intermingled with a peculiar and hideous sort of hissing or whistling\u2014a bizarre, alien kind of music, like nothing which the annals of earth describe. It was very faint, and soon faded, but the matter has set me thinking. It is toward the hill that the long, northerly \"ell\" with the secret chute, and the locked brick vault under it, extend. Can there be any connexion which has so far eluded me?\n\n[ April 25 ]\n\nI have made a peculiar and disturbing discovery about the nature of my imprisonment. Drawn toward the hill by a sinister fascination, I found the briers giving way before me, but in that direction only. There is a ruined gate, and beneath the bushes the traces of the old path no doubt exist. The briers extend part way up and all around the hill, though the summit with the standing stones bears only a curious growth of moss and stunted grass. I climbed the hill and spent several hours there, noticing a strange wind which seems always to sweep around the forbidding monoliths and which sometimes seems to whisper in an oddly articulate though darkly cryptic fashion.\n\nThese stones, both in colour and in texture, resemble nothing I have seen elsewhere. They are neither brown nor grey, but rather of a dirty yellow merging into an evil green and having a suggestion of chameleon-like variability. Their texture is queerly like that of a scaled serpent, and is inexplicably nauseous to the touch\u2014being as cold and clammy as the skin of a toad or other reptile. Near the central menhir is a singular stone-rimmed hollow which I cannot explain, but which may possibly form the entrance to a long-choked well or tunnel. When I sought to descend the hill at points away from the house I found the briers intercepting me as before, though the path toward the house was easily retraceable.\n\n[ April 26 ]\n\nUp on the hill again this evening, and found that windy whispering much more distinct. The almost angry humming came close to actual speech\u2014of a vague sibilant sort\u2014and reminded me of the strange piping chant I had heard from afar. After sunset there came a curious flash of premature summer lightning on the northern horizon, followed almost at once by a queer detonation high in the fading sky. Something about this phenomenon disturbed me greatly, and I could not escape the impression that the noise ended in a kind of unhuman hissing speech which trailed off into guttural cosmic laughter. Is my mind tottering at last, or has my unwarranted curiosity evoked unheard-of horrors from the twilight spaces? The Sabbat is close at hand now. What will be the end?\n\n[ April 27 ]\n\nAt last my dreams are to be realised! Whether or not my life or spirit or body will be claimed, I shall enter the gateway! Progress in deciphering those crucial hieroglyphs in the picture has been slow, but this afternoon I hit upon the final clue. By evening I knew their meaning\u2014and that meaning can apply in only one way to the things I have encountered in this house.\n\nThere is beneath this house\u2014sepulchred I know not where\u2014an ancient forgotten One who will shew me the gateway I would enter, and give me the lost signs and words I shall need. How long It has lain buried here\u2014forgotten save by those who reared the stones on the hill, and by those who later sought out this place and built this house\u2014I cannot conjecture. It was in search of this Thing, beyond question, that Hendrik van der Heyl came to New-Netherland in 1638. Men of this earth know It not, save in the secret whispers of the fear-shaken few who have found or inherited the key. No human eye has even yet glimpsed It\u2014unless, perhaps, the vanished wizards of this house delved farther than has been guessed.\n\nWith knowledge of the symbols came likewise a mastery of the Seven Lost Signs of Terror\u2014and a tacit recognition of the hideous and unutterable Words of Fear. All that remains for me to accomplish is the Chant which will transfigure that Forgotten One who is Guardian of the Ancient Gateway. I marvel much at the Chant. It is composed of strange and repellent gutturals and disturbing sibilants resembling no language I have ever encountered\u2014even in the blackest chapters of the Livre d'Eibon. When I visited the hill at sunset I tried to read it aloud, but evoked in response only a vague, sinister rumbling on the far horizon, and a thin cloud of elemental dust that writhed and whirled like some evil living thing. Perhaps I do not pronounce the alien syllables correctly, or perhaps it is only on the Sabbat\u2014that hellish Sabbat for which the Powers in this house are without question holding me\u2014that the great Transfiguration can occur.\n\nHad an odd spell of fright this morning. I thought for a moment that I recalled where I had seen that baffling name of Sleght before, and the prospect of realisation filled me with unutterable horror.\n\n[ April 28 ]\n\nToday dark ominous clouds have hovered intermittently over the circle on the hill. I have noticed such clouds several times before, but their contours and arrangements now hold a fresh significance. They are snake-like and fantastic, and curiously like the evil shadow-shapes I have seen in the house. They float in a circle around the primal cromlech\u2014revolving repeatedly as though endowed with a sinister life and purpose. I could swear, too, that they give forth an angry murmuring. After some fifteen minutes they sail slowly away, ever to the eastward, like the units of a straggling battalion. Are they indeed those dread Ones whom Solomon knew of old\u2014those giant black beings whose number is legion and whose tread doth shake the earth?\n\nI have been rehearsing the Chant that will transfigure the Nameless Thing, yet strange fears assail me even when I utter the syllables under my breath. Piecing all evidence together, I have now discovered that the only way to It is through the locked cellar vault. That vault was built with a hellish purpose, and must cover the hidden burrow leading to the Immemorial Lair. What guardians live endlessly within, flourishing from century to century on an unknown nourishment, only the mad may conjecture. The warlocks of this house, who called them out of inner earth, have known them only too well, as the shocking portraits and memories of the place reveal.\n\nWhat troubles me most is the limited nature of the Chant. It evokes the Nameless One, yet provides no method for the control of That Which is evoked. There are, of course, the general signs and gestures, but whether they will prove effective toward such an One remains to be seen. Still, the rewards are great enough to justify any danger\u2014and I could not retreat if I would, since an unknown force plainly urges me on.\n\nI have discovered one more obstacle. Since the locked cellar vault must be traversed, the key to that place must be found. The lock is infinitely too strong for forcing. That the key is somewhere hereabouts cannot be doubted, but the time before the Sabbat is very short. I must search diligently and thoroughly. It will take courage to unlock that iron door, for what prisoned horrors may not lurk within?\n\nI have been shunning the cellar for the past day or two, but late this afternoon I again descended to those forbidding precincts. At first all was silent, but within five minutes the menacing padding and muttering began once more beyond the iron door. This time it was loud and more terrifying than on any previous occasion, and I likewise recognised the slithering that bespoke some monstrous sea-beast\u2014now swifter and nervously intensified, as if the thing were striving to force its way through the portal to where I stood.\n\nAs the pacing grew louder, more restless, and more sinister, there began to pound through it those hellish and unidentifiable reverberations which I had heard on my second visit to the cellar\u2014those muffled reverberations which seemed to echo from far horizons like distant thunder. Now, however, their volume was magnified an hundredfold, and their timbre freighted with new and terrifying implications. I can compare the sound to nothing more aptly than to the roar of some dread monster of the vanished saurian age, when primal horrors roamed the earth, and Valusia's serpent-men laid the foundation-stones of evil magic. To such a roar\u2014but swelled to deafening heights reached by no known organic throat\u2014was this shocking sound akin. Dare I unlock the door and face the onslaught of what lies beyond?\n\n[ April 29 ]\n\nThe key to the vault is found. I came upon it this noon in the little locked room\u2014buried beneath rubbish in a drawer of the ancient desk, as if some belated effort to conceal it had been made. It was wrapped in a crumbling newspaper dated Oct. 31, 1872; but there was an inner wrapping of dried skin\u2014evidently the hide of some unknown reptile\u2014which bore a Low Latin message in the same crabbed writing as that of the notebooks I found. As I had thought, the lock and key were vastly older than the vault. Old Claes van der Heyl had them ready for something he or his descendants meant to do\u2014and how much older than he they were I could not estimate. Deciphering the Latin message, I trembled in a fresh access of clutching terror and nameless awe.\n\n\"The secrets of the monstrous primal Ones,\" ran the crabbed text, \"whose cryptic words relate the hidden things that were before man; the things no one of earth should learn, lest peace be forever forfeited; shall by me never suffer revelation. To Yian-Ho, that lost and forbidden city of countless aeons whose place may not be told, I have been in the veritable flesh of this body, as none other among the living has been. Therein have I found, and thence have I borne away, that knowledge which I would gladly lose, though I may not. I have learnt to bridge a gap that should not be bridged, and must call out of the earth That Which should not be waked or called. And what is sent to follow me will not sleep till I or those after me have found and done what is to be found and done.\n\n\"That which I have awaked and borne away with me, I may not part with again. So is it written in the Book of Hidden Things. That which I have willed to be has twined its dreadful shape around me, and\u2014if I live not to do the bidding\u2014around those children born and unborn who shall come after me, until the bidding be done. Strange may be their joinings, and awful the aid they may summon till the end be reached. Into lands unknown and dim must the seeking go, and a house must be built for the outer Guardians.\n\n\"This is the key to that lock which was given me in the dreadful, aeon-old, and forbidden city of Yian-Ho; the lock which I or mine must place upon the vestibule of That Which is to be found. And may the Lords of Yaddith succour me\u2014or him\u2014who must set that lock in place or turn the key thereof.\"\n\nSuch was the message\u2014a message which, once I had read it, I seemed to have known before. Now, as I write these words, the key is before me. I gaze on it with mixed dread and longing, and cannot find words to describe its aspect. It is of the same unknown, subtly greenish frosted metal as the lock; a metal best compared to brass tarnished with verdigris. Its design is alien and fantastic, and the coffin-shaped end of the ponderous bulk leaves no doubt of the lock it was meant to fit. The handle roughly forms a strange, non-human image, whose exact outlines and identity cannot now be traced. Upon holding it for any length of time I seem to feel an alien, anomalous life in the cold metal\u2014a quickening or pulsing too feeble for ordinary recognition. Below the eidolon is graven a faint, aeon-worn legend in those blasphemous, Chinese-like hieroglyphs I have come to know so well. I can make out only the beginning\u2014the words \"my vengeance lurks\"\u2014before the text fades to indistinctness. There is some fatality in this timely finding of the key\u2014for tomorrow night comes the hellish Sabbat. But strangely enough, amidst all this hideous expectancy, that question of the Sleght name bothers me more and more. Why should I dread to find it linked with the van der Heyls?\n\n[ Walpurgis-Eve\u2014April 30 ]\n\nThe time has come. I waked last night to see the sky glowing with a lurid greenish radiance\u2014that same morbid green which I have seen in the eyes and skin of certain portraits here, on the shocking lock and key, on the monstrous menhirs of the hill, and in a thousand other recesses of my consciousness. There were strident whispers in the air\u2014sibilant whistlings like those of the wind around that dreadful cromlech. Something spoke to me out of the frore aether of space, and it said, \"The hour falls.\" It is an omen, and I laugh at my own fears. Have I not the dread words and the Seven Lost Signs of Terror\u2014the power coercive of any Dweller in the cosmos or in the unknown darkened spaces? I will no longer hesitate.\n\nThe heavens are very dark, as if a terrific storm were coming on\u2014a storm even greater than that of the night when I reached here, nearly a fortnight ago. From the village\u2014less than a mile away\u2014I hear a queer and unwonted babbling. It is as I thought\u2014these poor degraded idiots are within the secret, and keep the awful Sabbat on the hill. Here in the house the shadows gather densely. In the darkness the key before me almost glows with a greenish light of its own. I have not yet been to the cellar. It is better that I wait, lest the sound of that muttering and padding\u2014those slitherings and muffled reverberations\u2014unnerve me before I can unlock the fateful door.\n\nOf what I shall encounter, and what I must do, I have only the most general idea. Shall I find my task in the vault itself, or must I burrow deeper into the nighted heart of our planet? There are things I do not yet understand\u2014or at least, prefer not to understand\u2014despite a dreadful, increasing, and inexplicable sense of bygone familiarity with this fearsome house. That chute, for instance, leading down from the little locked room. But I think I know why the wing with the vault extends toward the hill.\n\n6 p.m.\n\nLooking out the north windows, I can see a group of villagers on the hill. They seem unaware of the lowering sky, and are digging near the great central menhir. It occurs to me that they are working on that stone-rimmed hollow place which looks like a long-choked tunnel entrance. What is to come? How much of the olden Sabbat rites have these people retained? That key glows horribly\u2014it is not imagination. Dare I use it as it must be used? Another matter has greatly disturbed me. Glancing nervously through a book in the library I came upon an ampler form of the name that has teased my memory so sorely: Trintje, wife of Adriaen Sleght. The Adriaen leads me to the very brink of recollection.\n\n[ Midnight ]\n\nHorror is unleashed, but I must not weaken. The storm has broken with pandaemoniac fury, and lightning has struck the hill three times, yet the hybrid, malformed villagers are gathering within the cromlech. I can see them in the almost constant flashes. The great standing stones loom up shockingly, and have a dull green luminosity that reveals them even when the lightning is not there. The peals of thunder are deafening, and every one seems to be horribly answered from some indeterminate direction. As I write, the creatures on the hill have begun to chant and howl and scream in a degraded, half-simian version of the ancient ritual. Rain pours down like a flood, yet they leap and emit sounds in a kind of diabolic ecstasy.\n\n\"I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!\"\n\nBut the worst thing is within the house. Even at this height, I have begun to hear sounds from the cellar. It is the padding and muttering and slithering and muffled reverberations within the vault....\n\nMemories come and go. That name of Adriaen Sleght pounds oddly at my consciousness. Dirck van der Heyl's son-in-law\u2014his child old Dirck's granddaughter and Abaddon Corey's great-granddaughter....\n\nMerciful God! At last I know where I saw that name. I know, and am transfixed with horror. All is lost....\n\nThe key has begun to feel warm as my left hand nervously clutches it. At times that vague quickening or pulsing is so distinct that I can almost feel the living metal move. It came from Yian-Ho for a terrible purpose, and to me\u2014who all too late know the thin stream of van der Heyl blood that trickles down through the Sleghts into my own lineage\u2014has descended the hideous task of fulfilling that purpose....\n\nMy courage and curiosity wane. I know the horror that lies beyond that iron door. What if Claes van der Heyl was my ancestor\u2014need I expiate his nameless sin? I will not\u2014I swear I will not!...\n\n[Writing here grows indistinct]\n\nToo late\u2014cannot help self\u2014black paws materialise\u2014am dragged away toward the cellar....\n\n[ The Disinterment ]\n\nI awoke abruptly from a horrible dream and stared wildly about. Then, seeing the high, arched ceiling and the narrow stained windows of my friend's room, a flood of uneasy revelation coursed over me; and I knew that all of Andrew's hopes had been realized. I lay supine in a large bed, the posts of which reared upward in dizzy perspective; while on vast shelves about the chamber were the familiar books and antiques I was accustomed to seeing in that secluded corner of the crumbling and ancient mansion which had formed our joint home for many years. On a table by the wall stood a huge candelabrum of early workmanship and design, and the usual light window-curtains had been replaced by hangings of somber black, which took on a faint, ghostly luster in the dying light.\n\nI recalled forcibly the events preceding my confinement and seclusion in this veritable medieval fortress. They were not pleasant, and I shuddered anew when I remembered the couch that had held me before my tenancy of the present one\u2014the couch that everyone supposed would be my last. Memory burned afresh regarding those hideous circumstances which had compelled me to choose between a true death and a hypothetical one\u2014with a later reanimation by therapeutic methods known only to my comrade, Marshall Andrews. The whole thing had begun when I returned from the Orient a year before and discovered, to my utter horror, that I had contracted leprosy while abroad. I had known that I was taking grave chances in caring for my stricken brother in the Philippines, but no hint of my own affliction appeared until I returned to my native land. Andrews himself had made the discovery, and kept it from me as long as possible; but our close acquaintance soon disclosed the awful truth.\n\nAt once I was quartered in our ancient abode atop the crags overlooking crumbling Hampden, from whose musty halls and quaint, arched doorways I was never permitted to go forth. It was a terrible existence, with the yellow shadow hanging constantly over me; yet my friend never faltered in his faith, taking care not to contract the dread scourge, but meanwhile making life as pleasant and comfortable as possible. His widespread though somewhat sinister fame as a surgeon prevented any authority from discovering my plight and shipping me away.\n\nIt was after nearly a year of this seclusion\u2014late in August\u2014that Andrews decided on a trip to the West Indies\u2014to study \"native\" medical methods, he said. I was left in care of venerable Simes, the household factotum. So far no outward signs of the disease had developed, and I enjoyed a tolerable though almost completely private existence during my colleague's absence. It was during this time that I read many of the tomes Andrews had acquired in the course of his twenty years as a surgeon, and learned why his reputation, though locally of the highest, was just a bit shady. For the volumes included any number of fanciful subjects hardly related to modern medical knowledge: treatises and unauthoritative articles on monstrous experiments in surgery; accounts of the bizarre effects of glandular transplantation and rejuvenation in animals and men alike; brochures on attempted brain transference, and a host of other fanatical speculations not countenanced by orthodox physicians. It appeared, too, that Andrews was an authority on obscure medicaments; some of the few books I waded through revealing that he had spent much time in chemistry and in the search for new drugs which might be used as aids in surgery. Looking back at those studies now, I find them hellishly suggestive when associated with his later experiments.\n\nAndrews was gone longer than I expected, returning early in November, almost four months later; and when he did arrive, I was quite anxious to see him, since my condition was at last on the brink of becoming noticeable. I had reached a point where I must seek absolute privacy to keep from being discovered. But my anxiety was slight as compared with his exuberance over a certain new plan he had hatched while in the Indies\u2014a plan to be carried out with the aid of a curious drug he had learned of from a native \"doctor\" in Haiti. When he explained that his idea concerned me, I became somewhat alarmed; though in my position there could be little to make my plight worse. I had, indeed, considered more than once the oblivion that would come with a revolver or a plunge from the roof to the jagged rocks below.\n\nOn the day after his arrival, in the seclusion of the dimly lit study, he outlined the whole grisly scheme. He had found in Haiti a drug, the formula for which he would develop later, which induced a state of profound sleep in anyone taking it; a trance so deep that death was closely counterfeited\u2014with all muscular reflexes, even the respiration and heart-beat, completely stilled for the time being. Andrews had, he said, seen it demonstrated on natives many times. Some of them remained somnolent for days at a time, wholly immobile and as much like death as death itself. This suspended animation, he explained further, would even pass the closest examination of any medical man. He himself, according to all known laws, would have to report as dead a man under the influence of such a drug. He stated, too, that the subject's body assumed the precise appearance of a corpse\u2014even a slight rigor mortis developing in prolonged cases.\n\nFor some time his purpose did not seem wholly clear, but when the full import of his words became apparent I felt weak and nauseated. Yet in another way I was relieved; for the thing meant at least a partial escape from my curse, an escape from the banishment and shame of an ordinary death of the dread leprosy. Briefly, his plan was to administer a strong dose of the drug to me and call the local authorities, who would immediately pronounce me dead, and see that I was buried within a very short while. He felt assured that with their careless examination they would fail to notice my leprosy symptoms, which in truth had hardly appeared. Only a trifle over fifteen months had passed since I had caught the disease, whereas the corruption takes seven years to run its entire course.\n\nLater, he said, would come resurrection. After my interment in the family graveyard\u2014beside my centuried dwelling and barely a quarter-mile from his own ancient pile\u2014the appropriate steps would be taken. Finally, when my estate was settled and my decease widely known, he would secretly open the tomb and bring me to his own abode again, still alive and none the worse for my adventure. It seemed a ghastly and daring plan, but to me it offered the only hope for even a partial freedom; so I accepted his proposition, but not without a myriad of misgivings. What if the effect of the drug should wear off while I was in my tomb? What if the coroner should discover the awful ruse, and fail to inter me? These were some of the hideous doubts which assailed me before the experiment. Though death would have been a release from my curse, I feared it even worse than the yellow scourge; feared it even when I could see its black wings constantly hovering over me.\n\nFortunately I was spared the horror of viewing my own funeral and burial rites. They must, however, have gone just as Andrews had planned, even to the subsequent disinterment; for after the initial dose of the poison from Haiti I lapsed into a semi-paralytic state and from that to a profound, night-black sleep. The drug had been administered in my room, and Andrews had told me before giving it that he would recommend to the coroner a verdict of heart failure due to nerve strain. Of course, there was no embalming\u2014Andrews saw to that\u2014and the whole procedure, leading up to my secret transportation from the graveyard to his crumbling manor, covered a period of three days. Having been buried late in the afternoon of the third day, my body was secured by Andrews that very night. He had replaced the fresh sod just as it had been when the workmen left. Old Simes, sworn to secrecy, had helped Andrews in his ghoulish task.\n\nLater I had lain for over a week in my old familiar bed. Owing to some unexpected effect of the drug, my whole body was completely paralyzed, so that I could move my head only slightly. All my senses, however, were fully alert, and by another week's time I was able to take nourishment in good quantities. Andrews explained that my body would gradually regain its former sensibilities; though owing to the presence of the leprosy it might take considerable time. He seemed greatly interested in analyzing my daily symptoms, and always asked if there was any feeling present in my body.\n\nMany days passed before I was able to control any part of my anatomy, and much longer before the paralysis crept from my enfeebled limbs so that I could feel the ordinary bodily reactions. Lying and staring at my numb hulk was like having it injected with a perpetual anesthetic. There was a total alienation I could not understand, considering that my head and neck were quite alive and in good health.\n\nAndrews explained that he had revived my upper half first and could not account for the complete bodily paralysis; though my condition seemed to trouble him little considering the damnably intent interest he centered upon my reactions and stimuli from the very beginning. Many times during lulls in our conversation I would catch a strange gleam in his eyes as he viewed me on the couch\u2014a glint of victorious exultation which, queerly enough, he never voiced aloud; though he seemed to be quite glad that I had run the gauntlet of death and had come through alive. Still, there was that horror I was to meet in less than six years, which added to my desolation and melancholy during the tedious days in which I awaited the return of normal bodily functions. But I would be up and about, he assured me, before very long, enjoying an existence few men had ever experienced. The words did not, however, impress me with their true and ghastly meaning until many days later.\n\nDuring that awful siege in bed Andrews and I became somewhat estranged. He no longer treated me so much like a friend as like an implement in his skilled and greedy fingers. I found him possessed of unexpected traits\u2014little examples of baseness and cruelty, apparent even to the hardened Simes, which disturbed me in a most unusual manner. Often he would display extraordinary cruelty to live specimens in his laboratory, for he was constantly carrying on various hidden projects in glandular and muscular transplantation on guinea-pigs and rabbits. He had also been employing his newly discovered sleeping-potion in curious experiments with suspended animation. But of these things he told me very little; though old Simes often let slip chance comments which shed some light on the proceedings. I was not certain how much the old servant knew, but he had surely learned considerable, being a constant companion to both Andrews and myself.\n\nWith the passage of time, a slow but consistent feeling began creeping into my disabled body; and at the reviving symptoms Andrews took a fanatical interest in my case. He still seemed more coldly analytical than sympathetic toward me, taking my pulse and heart-beat with more than usual zeal. Occasionally, in his fevered examinations, I saw his hands tremble slightly\u2014an uncommon sight with so skilled a surgeon\u2014but he seemed oblivious of my scrutiny. I was never allowed even a momentary glimpse of my full body, but with the feeble return of the sense of touch, I was aware of a bulk and heaviness which at first seemed awkward and unfamiliar.\n\nGradually I regained the use of my hands and arms; and with the passing of the paralysis came a new and terrible sensation of physical estrangement. My limbs had difficulty in following the commands of my mind, and every movement was jerky and uncertain. So clumsy were my hands, that I had to become accustomed to them all over again. This must, I thought, be due to my disease and the advance of the contagion in my system. Being unaware of how the early symptoms affected the victim (my brother's being a more advanced case), I had no means of judging; and since Andrews shunned the subject, I deemed it better to remain silent.\n\nOne day I asked Andrews\u2014I no longer considered him a friend\u2014if I might try rising and sitting up in bed. At first he objected strenuously, but later, after cautioning me to keep the blankets well up around my chin so that I would not be chilled, he permitted it. This seemed strange, in view of the comfortable temperature. Now that late autumn was slowly turning into winter, the room was always well heated. A growing chilliness at night, and occasional glimpses of a leaden sky through the window, had told me of the changing season; for no calendar was ever in sight upon the dingy walls. With the gentle help of Simes I was eased to a sitting position, Andrews coldly watching from the door to the laboratory. At my success a slow smile spread across his leering features, and he turned to disappear from the darkened doorway. His mood did nothing to improve my condition. Old Simes, usually so regular and consistent, was now often late in his duties, sometimes leaving me alone for hours at a time.\n\nThe terrible sense of alienation was heightened by my new position. It seemed that the legs and arms inside my gown were hardly able to follow the summoning of my mind, and it became mentally exhausting to continue movement for any length of time. My fingers, woefully clumsy, were wholly unfamiliar to my inner sense of touch, and I wondered vaguely if I were to be accursed the rest of my days with an awkwardness induced by my dread malady.\n\nIt was on the evening following my half-recovery that the dreams began. I was tormented not only at night but during the day as well. I would awaken, screaming horribly, from some frightful nightmare I dared not think about outside the realm of sleep. These dreams consisted mainly of ghoulish things; graveyards at night, stalking corpses, and lost souls amid a chaos of blinding light and shadow. The terrible reality of the visions disturbed me most of all: it seemed that some inside influence was inducing the grisly vistas of moonlit tombstones and endless catacombs of the restless dead. I could not place their source; and at the end of a week I was quite frantic with abominable thoughts which seemed to obtrude themselves upon my unwelcome consciousness.\n\nBy that time a slow plan was forming whereby I might escape the living hell into which I had been propelled. Andrews cared less and less about me, seeming intent only on my progress and growth and recovery of normal muscular reactions. I was becoming every day more convinced of the nefarious doings going on in that laboratory across the threshold\u2014the animal cries were shocking, and rasped hideously on my overwrought nerves. And I was gradually beginning to think that Andrews had not saved me from deportation solely for my own benefit, but for some accursed reason of his own. Simes's attention was slowly becoming slighter and slighter, and I was convinced that the aged servitor had a hand in the deviltry somewhere. Andrews no longer eyed me as a friend, but as an object of experimentation; nor did I like the way he fingered his scalpel when he stood in the narrow doorway and stared at me with crafty alertness. I had never before seen such a transformation come over any man. His ordinarily handsome features were now lined and whisker-grown, and his eyes gleamed as if some imp of Satan were staring from them. His cold, calculating gaze made me shudder horribly, and gave me a fresh determination to free myself from his bondage as soon as possible.\n\nI had lost track of time during my dream-orgy, and had no way of knowing how fast the days were passing. The curtains were often drawn in the daytime, the room being lit by waxen cylinders in the large candelabrum. It was a nightmare of living horror and unreality; though through it all I was gradually becoming stronger. I always gave careful responses to Andrews' inquiries concerning my returning physical control, concealing the fact that a new life was vibrating through me with every passing day\u2014an altogether strange sort of strength, but one which I was counting on to serve me in the coming crisis.\n\nFinally, one chilly evening when the candles had been extinguished, and a pale shaft of moonlight fell through the dark curtains upon my bed, I determined to rise and carry out my plan of action. There had been no movement from either of my captors for several hours, and I was confident that both were asleep in adjoining bedchambers. Shifting my cumbersome weight carefully, I rose to a sitting position and crawled cautiously out of bed, down upon the floor. A vertigo gripped me momentarily, and a wave of weakness flooded my entire being. But finally strength returned, and by clutching at a bedpost I was able to stand upon my feet for the first time in many months. Gradually a new strength coursed through me, and I donned the dark robe which I had seen hanging on a nearby chair. It was quite long, but served as a cloak over my nightdress. Again came that feeling of awful unfamiliarity which I had experienced in bed; that sense of alienation, and of difficulty in making my limbs perform as they should. But there was need for haste before my feeble strength might give out. As a last precaution in dressing, I slipped some old shoes over my feet; but though I could have sworn they were my own, they seemed abnormally loose, so that I decided they must belong to the aged Simes.\n\nSeeing no other heavy objects in the room, I seized from the table the huge candelabrum, upon which the moon shone with a pallid glow, and proceeded very quietly toward the laboratory door.\n\nMy first steps came jerkily and with much difficulty, and in the semi-darkness I was unable to make my way very rapidly. When I reached the threshold, a glance within revealed my former friend seated in a large overstuffed chair; while beside him was a smoking-stand upon which were assorted bottles and a glass. He reclined half-way in the moonlight through the large window, and his greasy features were creased in a drunken smirk. An opened book lay in his lap\u2014one of the hideous tomes from his private library.\n\nFor a long moment I gloated over the prospect before me, and then, stepping forward suddenly, I brought the heavy weapon down upon his unprotected head. The dull crunch was followed by a spurt of blood, and the fiend crumpled to the floor, his head laid half open. I felt no contrition at taking the man's life in such a manner. In the hideous, half-visible specimens of his surgical wizardry scattered about the room in various stages of completion and preservation, I felt there was enough evidence to blast his soul without my aid. Andrews had gone too far in his practices to continue living, and as one of his monstrous specimens\u2014of that I was now hideously certain\u2014it was my duty to exterminate him.\n\nSimes, I realized, would be no such easy matter; indeed, only unusual good fortune had caused me to find Andrews unconscious. When I finally reeled up to the servant's bedchamber door, faint from exhaustion, I knew it would take all my remaining strength to complete the ordeal.\n\nThe old man's room was in utmost darkness, being on the north side of the structure, but he must have seen me silhouetted in the doorway as I came in. He screamed hoarsely, and I aimed the candelabrum at him from the threshold. It struck something soft, making a sloughing sound in the darkness; but the screaming continued. From that time on events became hazy and jumbled together, but I remember grappling with the man and choking the life from him little by little. He gibbered a host of awful things before I could lay hands on him\u2014cried and begged for mercy from my clutching fingers. I hardly realized my own strength in that mad moment which left Andrews' associate in a condition like his own.\n\nRetreating from the darkened chamber, I stumbled for the stairway door, sagged through it, and somehow reached the landing below. No lamps were burning, and my only light was a filtering of moonbeams coming from the narrow windows in the hall. But I made my jerky way over the cold, damp slabs of stone, reeling from the terrible weakness of my exertion, and reached the front door after ages of fumbling and crawling about in the darkness.\n\nVague memories and haunting shadows came to taunt me in that ancient hallway; shadows once friendly and understandable, but now grown alien and unrecognizable, so that I stumbled down the worn steps in a frenzy of something more than fear. For a moment I stood in the shadow of the giant stone manor, viewing the moonlit trail down which I must go to reach the home of my forefathers, only a quarter of a mile distant. But the way seemed long, and for a while I despaired of ever traversing the whole of it.\n\nAt last I grasped a piece of dead wood as a cane and set out down the winding road. Ahead, seemingly only a few rods away in the moonlight, stood the venerable mansion where my ancestors had lived and died. Its turrets rose spectrally in the shimmering radiance, and the black shadow cast on the beetling hillside appeared to shift and waver, as if belonging to a castle of unreal substance. There stood the monument of half a century; a haven for all my family old and young, which I had deserted many years ago to live with the fanatical Andrews. It stood empty on that fateful night, and I hope that it may always remain so.\n\nIn some manner I reached the aged place; though I do not remember the last half of the journey at all. It was enough to be near the family cemetery, among whose moss-covered and crumbling stones I would seek the oblivion I had desired. As I approached the moonlit spot the old familiarity\u2014so absent during my abnormal existence\u2014returned to plague me in a wholly unexpected way. I drew close to my own tombstone, and the feeling of homecoming grew stronger; with it came a fresh flood of that awful sense of alienation and disembodiment which I knew so well. I was satisfied that the end was drawing near; nor did I stop to analyze emotions till a little later, when the full horror of my position burst upon me.\n\nIntuitively I knew my own tombstone; for the grass had scarcely begun to grow between the pieces of sod. With feverish haste I began clawing at the mound, and scraping the wet earth from the hole left by the removal of the grass and roots. How long I worked in the nitrous soil before my fingers struck the coffin-lid, I can never say; but sweat was pouring from me and my nails were but useless, bleeding hooks.\n\nAt last I threw out the last bit of loose earth, and with trembling fingers tugged on the heavy lid. It gave a trifle; and I was prepared to lift it completely open when a fetid and nauseous odor assailed my nostrils. I started erect, horrified. Had some idiot placed my tombstone on the wrong grave, causing me to unearth another body? For surely there could be no mistaking that awful stench. Gradually a hideous uncertainty came over me and I scrambled from the hole. One look at the newly made headpiece was enough. This was indeed my own grave... but what fool had buried within it another corpse?\n\nAll at once a bit of the unspeakable truth propelled itself upon my brain. The odor, in spite of its putrescence, seemed somehow familiar\u2014horribly familiar.... Yet I could not credit my senses with such an idea. Reeling and cursing, I fell into the black cavity once more, and by the aid of a hastily lit match, lifted the long lid completely open. Then the light went out, as if extinguished by a malignant hand, and I clawed my way out of that accursed pit, screaming in a frenzy of fear and loathing.\n\nWhen I regained consciousness I was lying before the door of my own ancient manor, where I must have crawled after that hideous rendezvous in the family cemetery. I realized that dawn was close at hand, and rose feebly, opening the aged portal before me and entering the place which had known no footsteps for over a decade. A fever was ravaging my weakened body, so that I was hardly able to stand, but I made my way slowly through the musty, dimly lit chambers and staggered into my own study\u2014the study I had deserted so many years before.\n\nWhen the sun has risen, I shall go to the ancient well beneath the old willow tree by the cemetery and cast my deformed self into it. No other man shall ever view this blasphemy which has survived life longer than it should have. I do not know what people will say when they see my disordered grave, but this will not trouble me if I can find oblivion from that which I beheld amidst the crumbling, moss-crusted stones of the hideous place.\n\nI know now why Andrews was so secretive in his actions; so damnably gloating in his attitude toward me after my artificial death. He had meant me for a specimen all the time\u2014a specimen of his greatest feat of surgery, his masterpiece of unclean witchery... an example of perverted artistry for him alone to see. Where Andrews obtained that other with which I lay accursed in his moldering mansion I shall probably never know; but I am afraid that it was brought from Haiti along with his fiendish medicine. At least these long hairy arms and horrible short legs are alien to me... alien to all natural and sane laws of mankind. The thought that I shall be tortured with that other during the rest of my brief existence is another hell.\n\nNow I can but wish for that which once was mine; that which every man blessed of God ought to have at death; that which I saw in that awful moment in the ancient burial ground when I raised the lid on the coffin\u2014my own shrunken, decayed, and headless body.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Doom That Came to Sarnath by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThere is in the land of Mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream and out of which no stream flows. Ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of Sarnath, but Sarnath stands there no more.\n\nIt is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of Sarnath came to the land of Mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stone city of Ib, which was old as the lake itself, and peopled with beings not pleasing to behold. Very odd and ugly were these beings, as indeed are most beings of a world yet inchoate and rudely fashioned. It is written on the brick cylinders of Kadatheron that the beings of Ib were in hue as green as the lake and the mists that rise above it; that they had bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears, and were without voice. It is also written that they descended one night from the moon in a mist; they and the vast still lake and grey stone city Ib. However this may be, it is certain that they worshipped a sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard; before which they danced horribly when the moon was gibbous. And it is written in the papyrus of Ilarnek, that they one day discovered fire, and thereafter kindled flames on many ceremonial occasions. But not much is written of these beings, because they lived in very ancient times, and man is young, and knows little of the very ancient living things.\n\nAfter many aeons men came to the land of Mnar; dark shepherd folk with their fleecy flocks, who built Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai. And certain tribes, more hardy than the rest, pushed on to the border of the lake and built Sarnath at a spot where precious metals were found in the earth.\n\nNot far from the grey city of Ib did the wandering tribes lay the first stones of Sarnath, and at the beings of Ib they marvelled greatly. But with their marvelling was mixed hate, for they thought it not meet that beings of such aspect should walk about the world of men at dusk. Nor did they like the strange sculptures upon the grey monoliths of Ib, for those sculptures were terrible with great antiquity. Why the beings and the sculptures lingered so late in the world, even until the coming of men, none can tell; unless it was because the land of Mnar is very still, and remote from most other lands both of waking and of dream.\n\nAs the men of Sarnath beheld more of the beings of Ib their hate grew, and it was not less because they found the beings weak, and soft as jelly to the touch of stones and spears and arrows. So one day the young warriors, the slingers and the spearmen and the bowmen, marched against Ib and slew all the inhabitants thereof, pushing the queer bodies into the lake with long spears, because they did not wish to touch them. And because they did not like the grey sculptured monoliths of Ib they cast these also into the lake; wondering from the greatness of the labour how ever the stones were brought from afar, as they must have been, since there is naught like them in all the land of Mnar or in the lands adjacent.\n\nThus of the very ancient city of Ib was nothing spared save the sea-green stone idol chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the water-lizard. This the young warriors took back with them to Sarnath as a symbol of conquest over the old gods and beings of Ib, and a sign of leadership in Mnar. But on the night after it was set up in the temple a terrible thing must have happened, for weird lights were seen over the lake, and in the morning the people found the idol gone, and the high-priest Taran-Ish lying dead, as from some fear unspeakable. And before he died, Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite with coarse shaky strokes the sign of DOOM.\n\nAfter Taran-Ish there were many high-priests in Sarnath, but never was the sea-green stone idol found. And many centuries came and went, wherein Sarnath prospered exceedingly, so that only priests and old women remembered what Taran-Ish had scrawled upon the altar of chrysolite. Betwixt Sarnath and the city of Ilarnek arose a caravan route, and the precious metals from the earth were exchanged for other metals and rare cloths and jewels and books and tools for artificers and all things of luxury that are known to the people who dwell along the winding river Ai and beyond. So Sarnath waxed mighty and learned and beautiful, and sent forth conquering armies to subdue the neighbouring cities; and in time there sate upon a throne in Sarnath the kings of all the land of Mnar and of many lands adjacent.\n\nThe wonder of the world and the pride of all mankind was Sarnath the magnificent. Of polished desert-quarried marble were its walls, in height 300 cubits and in breadth 75, so that chariots might pass each other as men drave them along the top. For full 500 stadia did they run, being open only on the side toward the lake; where a green stone sea-wall kept back the waves that rose oddly once a year at the festival of the destroying of Ib. In Sarnath were fifty streets from the lake to the gates of the caravans, and fifty more intersecting them. With onyx were they paved, save those whereon the horses and camels and elephants trod, which were paved with granite. And the gates of Sarnath were as many as the landward ends of the streets, each of bronze, and flanked by the figures of lions and elephants carven from some stone no longer known among men. The houses of Sarnath were of glazed brick and chalcedony, each having its walled garden and crystal lakelet. With strange art were they builded, for no other city had houses like them; and travellers from Thraa and Ilarnek and Kadatheron marvelled at the shining domes wherewith they were surmounted.\n\nBut more marvellous still were the palaces and the temples, and the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. There were many palaces, the least of which were mightier than any in Thraa or Ilarnek or Kadatheron. So high were they that one within might sometimes fancy himself beneath only the sky; yet when lighted with torches dipt in the oil of Dothur their walls shewed vast paintings of kings and armies, of a splendour at once inspiring and stupefying to the beholder. Many were the pillars of the palaces, all of tinted marble, and carven into designs of surpassing beauty. And in most of the palaces the floors were mosaics of beryl and lapis-lazuli and sardonyx and carbuncle and other choice materials, so disposed that the beholder might fancy himself walking over beds of the rarest flowers. And there were likewise fountains, which cast scented waters about in pleasing jets arranged with cunning art. Outshining all others was the palace of the kings of Mnar and of the lands adjacent. On a pair of golden crouching lions rested the throne, many steps above the gleaming floor. And it was wrought of one piece of ivory, though no man lives who knows whence so vast a piece could have come. In that palace there were also many galleries, and many amphitheatres where lions and men and elephants battled at the pleasure of the kings. Sometimes the amphitheatres were flooded with water conveyed from the lake in mighty aqueducts, and then were enacted stirring sea-fights, or combats betwixt swimmers and deadly marine things.\n\nLofty and amazing were the seventeen tower-like temples of Sarnath, fashioned of a bright multi-coloured stone not known elsewhere. A full thousand cubits high stood the greatest among them, wherein the high-priests dwelt with a magnificence scarce less than that of the kings. On the ground were halls as vast and splendid as those of the palaces; where gathered throngs in worship of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, the chief gods of Sarnath, whose incense-enveloped shrines were as the thrones of monarchs. Not like the eikons of other gods were those of Zo-Kalar and Tamash and Lobon, for so close to life were they that one might swear the graceful bearded gods themselves sate on the ivory thrones. And up unending steps of shining zircon was the tower-chamber, wherefrom the high-priests looked out over the city and the plains and the lake by day; and at the cryptic moon and significant stars and planets, and their reflections in the lake, by night. Here was done the very secret and ancient rite in detestation of Bokrug, the water-lizard, and here rested the altar of chrysolite which bore the DOOM-scrawl of Taran-Ish.\n\nWonderful likewise were the gardens made by Zokkar the olden king. In the centre of Sarnath they lay, covering a great space and encircled by a high wall. And they were surmounted by a mighty dome of glass, through which shone the sun and moon and stars and planets when it was clear, and from which were hung fulgent images of the sun and moon and stars and planets when it was not clear. In summer the gardens were cooled with fresh odorous breezes skilfully wafted by fans, and in winter they were heated with concealed fires, so that in those gardens it was always spring. There ran little streams over bright pebbles, dividing meads of green and gardens of many hues, and spanned by a multitude of bridges. Many were the waterfalls in their courses, and many were the lilied lakelets into which they expanded. Over the streams and lakelets rode white swans, whilst the music of rare birds chimed in with the melody of the waters. In ordered terraces rose the green banks, adorned here and there with bowers of vines and sweet blossoms, and seats and benches of marble and porphyry. And there were many small shrines and temples where one might rest or pray to small gods.\n\nEach year there was celebrated in Sarnath the feast of the destroying of Ib, at which time wine, song, dancing, and merriment of every kind abounded. Great honours were then paid to the shades of those who had annihilated the odd ancient beings, and the memory of those beings and of their elder gods was derided by dancers and lutanists crowned with roses from the gardens of Zokkar. And the kings would look out over the lake and curse the bones of the dead that lay beneath it. At first the high-priests liked not these festivals, for there had descended amongst them queer tales of how the sea-green eikon had vanished, and how Taran-Ish had died from fear and left a warning. And they said that from their high tower they sometimes saw lights beneath the waters of the lake. But as many years passed without calamity even the priests laughed and cursed and joined in the orgies of the feasters. Indeed, had they not themselves, in their high tower, often performed the very ancient and secret rite in detestation of Bokrug, the water-lizard? And a thousand years of riches and delight passed over Sarnath, wonder of the world and pride of all mankind.\n\nGorgeous beyond thought was the feast of the thousandth year of the destroying of Ib. For a decade had it been talked of in the land of Mnar, and as it drew nigh there came to Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants men from Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron, and all the cities of Mnar and the lands beyond. Before the marble walls on the appointed night were pitched the pavilions of princes and the tents of travellers, and all the shore resounded with the song of happy revellers. Within his banquet-hall reclined Nargis-Hei, the king, drunken with ancient wine from the vaults of conquered Pnath, and surrounded by feasting nobles and hurrying slaves. There were eaten many strange delicacies at that feast; peacocks from the isles of Nariel in the Middle Ocean, young goats from the distant hills of Implan, heels of camels from the Bnazic desert, nuts and spices from Cydathrian groves, and pearls from wave-washed Mtal dissolved in the vinegar of Thraa. Of sauces there were an untold number, prepared by the subtlest cooks in all Mnar, and suited to the palate of every feaster. But most prized of all the viands were the great fishes from the lake, each of vast size, and served up on golden platters set with rubies and diamonds.\n\nWhilst the king and his nobles feasted within the palace, and viewed the crowning dish as it awaited them on golden platters, others feasted elsewhere. In the tower of the great temple the priests held revels, and in pavilions without the walls the princes of neighbouring lands made merry. And it was the high-priest Gnai-Kah who first saw the shadows that descended from the gibbous moon into the lake, and the damnable green mists that arose from the lake to meet the moon and to shroud in a sinister haze the towers and the domes of fated Sarnath. Thereafter those in the towers and without the walls beheld strange lights on the water, and saw that the grey rock Akurion, which was wont to rear high above it near the shore, was almost submerged. And fear grew vaguely yet swiftly, so that the princes of Ilarnek and of far Rokol took down and folded their tents and pavilions and departed for the river Ai, though they scarce knew the reason for their departing.\n\nThen, close to the hour of midnight, all the bronze gates of Sarnath burst open and emptied forth a frenzied throng that blackened the plain, so that all the visiting princes and travellers fled away in fright. For on the faces of this throng was writ a madness born of horror unendurable, and on their tongues were words so terrible that no hearer paused for proof. Men whose eyes were wild with fear shrieked aloud of the sight within the king's banquet-hall, where through the windows were seen no longer the forms of Nargis-Hei and his nobles and slaves, but a horde of indescribable green voiceless things with bulging eyes, pouting, flabby lips, and curious ears; things which danced horribly, bearing in their paws golden platters set with rubies and diamonds containing uncouth flames. And the princes and travellers, as they fled from the doomed city of Sarnath on horses and camels and elephants, looked again upon the mist-begetting lake and saw the grey rock Akurion was quite submerged.\n\nThrough all the land of Mnar and the lands adjacent spread the tales of those who had fled from Sarnath, and caravans sought that accursed city and its precious metals no more. It was long ere any traveller went thither, and even then only the brave and adventurous young men of distant Falona dared make the journey; adventurous young men of yellow hair and blue eyes, who are no kin to the men of Mnar. These men indeed went to the lake to view Sarnath; but though they found the vast still lake itself, and the grey rock Akurion which rears high above it near the shore, they beheld not the wonder of the world and pride of all mankind. Where once had risen walls of 300 cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty millions of men now crawled only the detestable green water-lizard. Not even the mines of precious metal remained, for DOOM had come to Sarnath.\n\nBut half buried in the rushes was spied a curious green idol of stone; an exceedingly ancient idol coated with seaweed and chiselled in the likeness of Bokrug, the great water-lizard. That idol, enshrined in the high temple at Ilarnek, was subsequently worshipped beneath the gibbous moon throughout the land of Mnar.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThree times Randolph Carter dreamed of the marvellous city, and three times was he snatched away while still he paused on the high terrace above it. All golden and lovely it blazed in the sunset, with walls, temples, colonnades, and arched bridges of veined marble, silver-basined fountains of prismatic spray in broad squares and perfumed gardens, and wide streets marching between delicate trees and blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows; while on steep northward slopes climbed tiers of red roofs and old peaked gables harbouring little lanes of grassy cobbles. It was a fever of the gods; a fanfare of supernal trumpets and a clash of immortal cymbals. Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of lost things, and the maddening need to place again what once had an awesome and momentous place.\n\nHe knew that for him its meaning must once have been supreme; though in what cycle or incarnation he had known it, or whether in dream or in waking, he could not tell. Vaguely it called up glimpses of a far, forgotten first youth, when wonder and pleasure lay in all the mystery of days, and dawn and dusk alike strode forth prophetick to the eager sound of lutes and song; unclosing faery gates toward further and surprising marvels. But each night as he stood on that high marble terrace with the curious urns and carven rail and looked off over that hushed sunset city of beauty and unearthly immanence, he felt the bondage of dream's tyrannous gods; for in no wise could he leave that lofty spot, or descend the wide marmoreal flights flung endlessly down to where those streets of elder witchery lay outspread and beckoning.\n\nWhen for the third time he awaked with those flights still undescended and those hushed sunset streets still untraversed, he prayed long and earnestly to the hidden gods of dream that brood capricious above the clouds on unknown Kadath, in the cold waste where no man treads. But the gods made no answer and shewed no relenting, nor did they give any favouring sign when he prayed to them in dream, and invoked them sacrificially through the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah, whose cavern-temple with its pillar of flame lies not far from the gates of the waking world. It seemed, however, that his prayers must have been adversely heard, for after even the first of them he ceased wholly to behold the marvellous city; as if his three glimpses from afar had been mere accidents or oversights, and against some hidden plan or wish of the gods.\n\nAt length, sick with longing for those glittering sunset streets and cryptical hill lanes among ancient tiled roofs, nor able sleeping or waking to drive them from his mind, Carter resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark to where unknown Kadath, veiled in cloud and crowned with unimagined stars, holds secret and nocturnal the onyx castle of the Great Ones.\n\nIn light slumber he descended the seventy steps to the cavern of flame and talked of this design to the bearded priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah. And the priests shook their pshent-bearing heads and vowed it would be the death of his soul. They pointed out that the Great Ones had shewn already their wish, and that it is not agreeable to them to be harassed by insistent pleas. They reminded him, too, that not only had no man ever been to unknown Kadath, but no man had ever suspected in what part of space it may lie; whether it be in the dreamlands around our world, or in those surrounding some unguessed companion of Fomalhaut or Aldebaran. If in our dreamland, it might conceivably be reached; but only three fully human souls since time began had ever crossed and recrossed the black impious gulfs to other dreamlands, and of that three two had come back quite mad. There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity\u2014the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.\n\nOf these things was Carter warned by the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame, but still he resolved to find the gods on unknown Kadath in the cold waste, wherever that might be, and to win from them the sight and remembrance and shelter of the marvellous sunset city. He knew that his journey would be strange and long, and that the Great Ones would be against it; but being old in the land of dream he counted on many useful memories and devices to aid him. So asking a farewell blessing of the priests and thinking shrewdly on his course, he boldly descended the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and set out through the enchanted wood.\n\nIn the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the furtive and secretive zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream-world and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands of men, though it would be disastrous to say where. Certain unexplained rumours, events, and vanishments occur among men where the zoogs have access, and it is well that they cannot travel far outside the world of dream. But over the nearer parts of the dream-world they pass freely, flitting small and brown and unseen and bearing back piquant tales to beguile the hours around their hearths in the forest they love. Most of them live in burrows, but some inhabit the trunks of the great trees; and although they live mostly on fungi it is muttered that they have also a slight taste for meat, either physical or spiritual, for certainly many dreamers have entered that wood who have not come out. Carter, however, had no fear; for he was an old dreamer and had learnt their fluttering language and made many a treaty with them; having found through their help the splendid city of Celepha\u00efs in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, where reigns half the year the great King Kuranes, a man he had known by another name in life. Kuranes was the one soul who had been to the star-gulfs and returned free from madness.\n\nThreading now the low phosphorescent aisles between those gigantic trunks, Carter made fluttering sounds in the manner of the zoogs, and listened now and then for responses. He remembered one particular village of the creatures near the centre of the wood, where a circle of great mossy stones in what was once a clearing tells of older and more terrible dwellers long forgotten, and toward this spot he hastened. He traced his way by the grotesque fungi, which always seem better nourished as one approaches the dread circle where elder beings danced and sacrificed. Finally the greater light of those thicker fungi revealed a sinister green and grey vastness pushing up through the roof of the forest and out of sight. This was the nearest of the great ring of stones, and Carter knew he was close to the zoog village. Renewing his fluttering sound, he waited patiently; and was at length rewarded by an impression of many eyes watching him. It was the zoogs, for one sees their weird eyes long before one can discern their small, slippery brown outlines.\n\nOut they swarmed, from hidden burrow and honeycombed tree, till the whole dim-litten region was alive with them. Some of the wilder ones brushed Carter unpleasantly, and one even nipped loathsomely at his ear; but these lawless spirits were soon restrained by their elders. The Council of Sages, recognising the visitor, offered a gourd of fermented sap from a haunted tree unlike the others, which had grown from a seed dropt down by someone on the moon; and as Carter drank it ceremoniously a very strange colloquy began. The zoogs did not, unfortunately, know where the peak of Kadath lies, nor could they even say whether the cold waste is in our dream-world or in another. Rumours of the Great Ones came equally from all points; and one might only say that they were likelier to be seen on high mountain peaks than in valleys, since on such peaks they dance reminiscently when the moon is above and the clouds beneath.\n\nThen one very ancient zoog recalled a thing unheard-of by the others; and said that in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai, there still lingered the last copy of those inconceivably old Pnakotic Manuscripts made by waking men in forgotten boreal kingdoms and borne into the land of dreams when the hairy cannibal Gnophkehs overcame many-templed Olatho\u00eb and slew all the heroes of the land of Lomar. Those manuscripts, he said, told much of the gods; and besides, in Ulthar there were men who had seen the signs of the gods, and even one old priest who had scaled a great mountain to behold them dancing by moonlight. He had failed, though his companion had succeeded and perished namelessly.\n\nSo Randolph Carter thanked the zoogs, who fluttered amicably and gave him another gourd of moon-tree wine to take with him, and set out through the phosphorescent wood for the other side, where the rushing Skai flows down from the slopes of Lerion, and Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar dot the plain. Behind him, furtive and unseen, crept several of the curious zoogs; for they wished to learn what might befall him, and bear back the legend to their people. The vast oaks grew thicker as he pushed on beyond the village, and he looked sharply for a certain spot where they would thin somewhat, standing quite dead or dying among the unnaturally dense fungi and the rotting mould and mushy logs of their fallen brothers. There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the zoogs do not pause near that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab rise slowly and deliberately.\n\nCarter detoured at the proper place, and heard behind him the frightened fluttering of some of the more timid zoogs. He had known they would follow him, so he was not disturbed; for one grows accustomed to the anomalies of these prying creatures. It was twilight when he came to the edge of the wood, and the strengthening glow told him it was the twilight of morning. Over fertile plains rolling down to the Skai he saw the smoke of cottage chimneys, and on every hand were the hedges and ploughed fields and thatched roofs of a peaceful land. Once he stopped at a farmhouse well for a cup of water, and all the dogs barked affrightedly at the inconspicuous zoogs that crept through the grass behind. At another house, where people were stirring, he asked questions about the gods, and whether they danced often upon Lerion; but the farmer and his wife would only make the Elder Sign and tell him the way to Nir and Ulthar.\n\nAt noon he walked through the one broad high street of Nir, which he had once visited and which marked his farthest former travels in this direction; and soon afterward he came to the great stone bridge across the Skai, into whose central pier the masons had sealed a living human sacrifice when they built it thirteen-hundred years before. Once on the other side, the frequent presence of cats (who all arched their backs at the trailing zoogs) revealed the near neighbourhood of Ulthar; for in Ulthar, according to an ancient and significant law, no man may kill a cat. Very pleasant were the suburbs of Ulthar, with their little green cottages and neatly fenced farms; and still pleasanter was the quaint town itself, with its old peaked roofs and overhanging upper stories and numberless chimney-pots and narrow hill streets where one can see old cobbles whenever the graceful cats afford space enough. Carter, the cats being somewhat dispersed by the half-seen zoogs, picked his way directly to the modest Temple of the Elder Ones where the priests and old records were said to be; and once within that venerable circular tower of ivied stone\u2014which crowns Ulthar's highest hill\u2014he sought out the patriarch Atal, who had been up the forbidden peak Hatheg-Kla in the stony desert and had come down again alive.\n\nAtal, seated on an ivory dais in a festooned shrine at the top of the temple, was fully three centuries old; but still very keen of mind and memory. From him Carter learned many things about the gods, but mainly that they are indeed only earth's gods, ruling feebly our own dreamland and having no power or habitation elsewhere. They might, Atal said, heed a man's prayer if in good humour; but one must not think of climbing to their onyx stronghold atop Kadath in the cold waste. It was lucky that no man knew where Kadath towers, for the fruits of ascending it would be very grave. Atal's companion Barzai the Wise had been drawn screaming into the sky for climbing merely the known peak of Hatheg-Kla. With unknown Kadath, if ever found, matters would be much worse; for although earth's gods may sometimes be surpassed by a wise mortal, they are protected by the Other Gods from Outside, whom it is better not to discuss. At least twice in the world's history the Other Gods set their seal upon earth's primal granite; once in antediluvian times, as guessed from a drawing in those parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts too ancient to be read, and once on Hatheg-Kla when Barzai the Wise tried to see earth's gods dancing by moonlight. So, Atal said, it would be much better to let all gods alone except in tactful prayers.\n\nCarter, though disappointed by Atal's discouraging advice and by the meagre help to be found in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan, did not wholly despair. First he questioned the old priest about that marvellous sunset city seen from the railed terrace, thinking that perhaps he might find it without the gods' aid; but Atal could tell him nothing. Probably, Atal said, the place belonged to his especial dream-world and not to the general land of vision that many know; and conceivably it might be on another planet. In that case earth's gods could not guide him if they would. But this was not likely, since the stopping of the dreams shewed pretty clearly that it was something the Great Ones wished to hide from him.\n\nThen Carter did a wicked thing, offering his guileless host so many draughts of the moon-wine which the zoogs had given him that the old man became irresponsibly talkative. Robbed of his reserve, poor Atal babbled freely of forbidden things; telling of a great image reported by travellers as carved on the solid rock of the mountain Ngranek, on the isle of Oriab in the Southern Sea, and hinting that it may be a likeness which earth's gods once wrought of their own features in the days when they danced by moonlight on that mountain. And he hiccoughed likewise that the features of that image are very strange, so that one might easily recognise them, and that they are sure signs of the authentic race of the gods.\n\nNow the use of all this in finding the gods became at once apparent to Carter. It is known that in disguise the younger among the Great Ones often espouse the daughters of men, so that around the borders of the cold waste wherein stands Kadath the peasants must all bear their blood. This being so, the way to find that waste must be to see the stone face on Ngranek and mark the features; then, having noted them with care, to search for such features among living men. Where they are plainest and thickest, there must the gods dwell nearest; and whatever stony waste lies back of the villages in that place must be that wherein stands Kadath.\n\nMuch of the Great Ones might be learnt in such regions, and those with their blood might inherit little memories very useful to a seeker. They might not know their parentage, for the gods so dislike to be known among men that none can be found who has seen their faces wittingly; a thing which Carter realised even as he sought to scale Kadath. But they would have queer lofty thoughts misunderstood by their fellows, and would sing of far places and gardens so unlike any known even in dreamland that common folk would call them fools; and from all this one could perhaps learn old secrets of Kadath, or gain hints of the marvellous sunset city which the gods held secret. And more, one might in certain cases seize some well-loved child of a god as hostage; or even capture some young god himself, disguised and dwelling amongst men with a comely peasant maiden as his bride.\n\nAtal, however, did not know how to find Ngranek on its isle of Oriab; and recommended that Carter follow the singing Skai under its bridges down to the Southern Sea; where no burgess of Ulthar has ever been, but whence the merchants come in boats or with long caravans of mules and two-wheeled carts. There is a great city there, Dylath-Leen, but in Ulthar its reputation is bad because of the black three-banked galleys that sail to it with rubies from no clearly named shore. The traders that come from those galleys to deal with the jewellers are human, or nearly so, but the rowers are never beheld; and it is not thought wholesome in Ulthar that merchants should trade with black ships from unknown places whose rowers cannot be exhibited.\n\nBy the time he had given this information Atal was very drowsy, and Carter laid him gently on a couch of inlaid ebony and gathered his long beard decorously on his chest. As he turned to go, he observed that no suppressed fluttering followed him, and wondered why the zoogs had become so lax in their curious pursuit. Then he noticed all the sleek complacent cats of Ulthar licking their chops with unusual gusto, and recalled the spitting and caterwauling he had faintly heard in lower parts of the temple while absorbed in the old priest's conversation. He recalled, too, the evilly hungry way in which an especially impudent young zoog had regarded a small black kitten in the cobbled street outside. And because he loved nothing on earth more than small black kittens, he stooped and petted the sleek cats of Ulthar as they licked their chops, and did not mourn because those inquisitive zoogs would escort him no farther.\n\nIt was sunset now, so Carter stopped at an ancient inn on a steep little street overlooking the lower town. And as he went out on the balcony of his room and gazed down at the sea of red tiled roofs and cobbled ways and the pleasant fields beyond, all mellow and magical in the slanted light, he swore that Ulthar would be a very likely place to dwell in always, were not the memory of a greater sunset city ever goading one on toward unknown perils. Then twilight fell, and the pink walls of the plastered gables turned violet and mystic, and little yellow lights floated up one by one from old lattice windows. And sweet bells pealed in the temple tower above, and the first star winked softly above the meadows across the Skai. With the night came song, and Carter nodded as the lutanists praised ancient days from beyond the filigreed balconies and tessellated courts of simple Ulthar. And there might have been sweetness even in the voices of Ulthar's many cats, but that they were mostly heavy and silent from strange feasting. Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops, but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant, drowsy herbs.\n\nIn the morning Carter joined a caravan of merchants bound for Dylath-Leen with the spun wool of Ulthar and the cabbages of Ulthar's busy farms. And for six days they rode with tinkling bells on the smooth road beside the Skai; stopping some nights at the inns of little quaint fishing towns, and on other nights camping under the stars while snatches of boatmen's songs came from the placid river. The country was very beautiful, with green hedges and groves and picturesque peaked cottages and octagonal windmills.\n\nOn the seventh day a blur of smoke arose on the horizon ahead, and then the tall black towers of Dylath-Leen, which is built mostly of basalt. Dylath-Leen with its thin angular towers looks in the distance like a bit of the Giants' Causeway, and its streets are dark and uninviting. There are many dismal sea-taverns near the myriad wharves, and all the town is thronged with the strange seamen of every land on earth and of a few which are said to be not on earth. Carter questioned the oddly robed men of that city about the peak of Ngranek on the isle of Oriab, and found that they knew of it well. Ships came from Baharna on that island, one being due to return thither in only a month, and Ngranek is but two days' zebra-ride from that port. But few had seen the stone face of the god, because it is on a very difficult side of Ngranek, which overlooks only sheer crags and a valley of sinister lava. Once the gods were angered with men on that side, and spoke of the matter to the Other Gods.\n\nIt was hard to get this information from the traders and sailors in Dylath-Leen's sea-taverns, because they mostly preferred to whisper of the black galleys. One of them was due in a week with rubies from its unknown shore, and the townsfolk dreaded to see it dock. The mouths of the men who came from it to trade were too wide, and the way their turbans were humped up in two points above their foreheads was in especially bad taste. And their shoes were the shortest and queerest ever seen in the Six Kingdoms. But worst of all was the matter of the unseen rowers. Those three banks of oars moved too briskly and accurately and vigorously to be comfortable, and it was not right for a ship to stay in port for weeks while the merchants traded, yet to give no glimpse of its crew. It was not fair to the tavern-keepers of Dylath-Leen, or to the grocers and butchers, either; for not a scrap of provisions was ever sent aboard. The merchants took only gold and stout black slaves from Parg across the river. That was all they ever took, those unpleasantly featured merchants and their unseen rowers; never anything from the butchers and grocers, but only gold and the fat black men of Parg whom they bought by the pound. And the odours from those galleys which the south wind blew in from the wharves are not to be described. Only by constantly smoking strong thagweed could even the hardiest denizen of the old sea-taverns bear them. Dylath-Leen would never have tolerated the black galleys had such rubies been obtainable elsewhere, but no mine in all earth's dreamland was known to produce their like.\n\nOf these things Dylath-Leen's cosmopolitan folk chiefly gossiped whilst Carter waited patiently for the ship from Baharna, which might bear him to the isle whereon carven Ngranek towers lofty and barren. Meanwhile he did not fail to seek through the haunts of far travellers for any tales they might have concerning Kadath in the cold waste or a marvellous city of marble walls and silver fountains seen below terraces in the sunset. Of these things, however, he learned nothing; though he once thought that a certain old slant-eyed merchant looked queerly intelligent when the cold waste was spoken of. This man was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages on the icy desert plateau of Leng, which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar. He was even rumoured to have dealt with that high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery. That such a person might well have had nibbling traffick with such beings as may conceivably dwell in the cold waste was not to be doubted, but Carter soon found that it was no use questioning him.\n\nThen the black galley slipped into the harbour past the basalt mole and the tall lighthouse, silent and alien, and with a strange stench that the south wind drove into the town. Uneasiness rustled through the taverns along that waterfront, and after a while the dark wide-mouthed merchants with humped turbans and short feet clumped stealthily ashore to seek the bazaars of the jewellers. Carter observed them closely, and disliked them more the longer he looked at them. Then he saw them drive the stout black men of Parg up the gangplank grunting and sweating into that singular galley, and wondered in what lands\u2014or if in any lands at all\u2014those fat pathetic creatures might be destined to serve.\n\nAnd on the third evening of that galley's stay one of the uncomfortable merchants spoke to him, smirking sinfully and hinting of what he had heard in the taverns of Carter's quest. He appeared to have knowledge too secret for public telling; and though the sound of his voice was unbearably hateful, Carter felt that the lore of so far a traveller must not be overlooked. He bade him therefore be his own guest in locked chambers above, and drew out the last of the zoogs' moon-wine to loosen his tongue. The strange merchant drank heavily, but smirked unchanged by the draught. Then he drew forth a curious bottle with wine of his own, and Carter saw that the bottle was a single hollowed ruby, grotesquely carved in patterns too fabulous to be comprehended. He offered his wine to his host, and though Carter took only the least sip, he felt the dizziness of space and the fever of unimagined jungles. All the while the guest had been smiling more and more broadly, and as Carter slipped into blankness the last thing he saw was that dark odious face convulsed with evil laughter, and something quite unspeakable where one of the two frontal puffs of that orange turban had become disarranged with the shakings of that epileptic mirth.\n\nCarter next had consciousness amidst horrible odours beneath a tent-like awning on the deck of a ship, with the marvellous coasts of the Southern Sea flying by in unnatural swiftness. He was not chained, but three of the dark sardonic merchants stood grinning nearby, and the sight of those humps in their turbans made him almost as faint as did the stench that filtered up through the sinister hatches. He saw slip past him the glorious lands and cities of which a fellow-dreamer of earth\u2014a lighthouse-keeper in ancient Kingsport\u2014had often discoursed in the old days, and recognised the templed terraces of Zar, abode of forgotten dreams; the spires of infamous Thalarion, that daemon-city of a thousand wonders where the eidolon Lathi reigns; the charnal gardens of Xura, land of pleasures unattained, and the twin headlands of crystal, meeting above in a resplendent arch, which guard the harbour of Sona-Nyl, blessed land of fancy.\n\nPast all these gorgeous lands the malodorous ship flew unwholesomely, urged by the abnormal strokes of those unseen rowers below. And before the day was done Carter saw that the steersman could have no other goal than the Basalt Pillars of the West, beyond which simple folk say splendid Cathuria lies, but which wise dreamers well know are the gates of a monstrous cataract wherein the oceans of earth's dreamland drop wholly to abysmal nothingness and shoot through the empty spaces toward other worlds and other stars and the awful voids outside the ordered universe where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in chaos amid pounding and piping and the hellish dancing of the Other Gods, blind, voiceless, tenebrous, and mindless, with their soul and messenger Nyarlathotep.\n\nMeanwhile the three sardonic merchants would give no word of their intent, though Carter well knew that they must be leagued with those who wished to hold him from his quest. It is understood in the land of dream that the Other Gods have many agents moving among men; and all these agents, whether wholly human or slightly less than human, are eager to work the will of those blind and mindless things in return for the favour of their hideous soul and messenger, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. So Carter inferred that the merchants of the humped turbans, hearing of his daring search for the Great Ones in their castle on Kadath, had decided to take him away and deliver him to Nyarlathothep for whatever nameless bounty might be offered for such a prize. What might be the land of those merchants, in our known universe or in the eldritch spaces outside, Carter could not guess; nor could he imagine at what hellish trysting-place they would meet the crawling chaos to give him up and claim their reward. He knew, however, that no beings as nearly human as these would dare approach the ultimate nighted throne of the daemon Azathoth in the formless central void.\n\nAt the set of sun the merchants licked their excessively wide lips and glared hungrily, and one of them went below and returned from some hidden and offensive cabin with a pot and basket of plates. Then they squatted close together beneath the awning and ate the smoking meat that was passed around. But when they gave Carter a portion, he found something very terrible in the size and shape of it; so that he turned even paler than before and cast that portion into the sea when no eye was on him. And again he thought of those unseen rowers beneath, and of the suspicious nourishment from which their far too mechanical strength was derived.\n\nIt was dark when the galley passed betwixt the Basalt Pillars of the West and the sound of the ultimate cataract swelled portentous from ahead. And the spray of that cataract rose to obscure the stars, and the deck grew damp, and the vessel reeled in the surging current of the brink. Then with a queer whistle and plunge the leap was taken, and Carter felt the terrors of nightmare as earth fell away and the great boat shot silent and comet-like into planetary space. Never before had he known what shapeless black things lurk and caper and flounder all through the aether, leering and grinning at such voyagers as may pass, and sometimes feeling about with slimy paws when some moving object excites their curiosity. These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.\n\nBut that offensive galley did not aim as far as Carter had feared, for he soon saw that the helmsman was steering a course directly for the moon. The moon was a crescent, shining larger and larger as they approached it, and shewing its singular craters and peaks uncomfortably. The ship made for the edge, and it soon became clear that its destination was that secret and mysterious side which is always turned away from the earth, and which no fully human person, save perhaps the dreamer Snireth-Ko, has ever beheld. The close aspect of the moon as the galley drew near proved very disturbing to Carter, and he did not like the size and shape of the ruins which crumbled here and there. The dead temples on the mountains were so placed that they could have glorified no wholesome or suitable gods, and in the symmetries of the broken columns there seemed to lurk some dark and inner meaning which did not invite solution. And what the structure and proportions of the olden worshippers could have been, Carter steadily refused to conjecture.\n\nWhen the ship rounded the edge, and sailed over those lands unseen by man, there appeared in the queer landscape certain signs of life, and Carter saw many low, broad, round cottages in fields of grotesque whitish fungi. He noticed that these cottages had no windows, and thought that their shape suggested the huts of Esquimaux. Then he glimpsed the oily waves of a sluggish sea, and knew that the voyage was once more to be by water\u2014or at least through some liquid. The galley struck the surface with a peculiar sound, and the odd elastic way the waves received it was very perplexing to Carter. They now slid along at great speed, once passing and hailing another galley of kindred form, but generally seeing nothing but that curious sea and a sky that was black and star-strown even though the sun shone scorchingly in it.\n\nThere presently rose ahead the jagged hills of a leprous-looking coast, and Carter saw the thick unpleasant grey towers of a city. The way they leaned and bent, the manner in which they were clustered, and the fact that they had no windows at all, was very disturbing to the prisoner; and he bitterly mourned the folly which had made him sip the curious wine of that merchant with the humped turban. As the coast drew nearer, and the hideous stench of that city grew stronger, he saw upon the jagged hills many forests, some of whose trees he recognised as akin to that solitary moon-tree in the enchanted wood of earth, from whose sap the small brown zoogs ferment their peculiar wine.\n\nCarter could now distinguish moving figures on the noisome wharves ahead, and the better he saw them the worse he began to fear and detest them. For they were not men at all, or even approximately men, but great greyish-white slippery things which could expand and contract at will, and whose principal shape\u2014though it often changed\u2014was that of a sort of toad without any eyes, but with a curiously vibrating mass of short pink tentacles on the end of its blunt, vague snout. These objects were waddling busily about the wharves, moving bales and crates and boxes with preternatural strength, and now and then hopping on or off some anchored galley with long oars in their fore paws. And now and then one would appear driving a herd of clumping slaves, which indeed were approximate human beings with wide mouths like those merchants who traded in Dylath-Leen; only these herds, being without turbans or shoes or clothing, did not seem so very human after all. Some of these slaves\u2014the fatter ones, whom a sort of overseer would pinch experimentally\u2014were unloaded from ships and nailed in crates which workers pushed into low warehouses or loaded on great lumbering vans.\n\nOnce a van was hitched up and driven off, and the fabulous thing which drew it was such that Carter gasped, even after having seen the other monstrosities of that hateful place. Now and then a small herd of slaves dressed and turbaned like the dark merchants would be driven aboard a galley, followed by a great crew of the slippery grey toad-things as officers, navigators, and rowers. And Carter saw that the almost-human creatures were reserved for the more ignominious kinds of servitude which required no strength, such as steering and cooking, fetching and carrying, and bargaining with men on the earth or other planets where they traded. These creatures must have been convenient on earth, for they were truly not unlike men when dressed and carefully shod and turbaned, and could haggle in the shops of men without embarrassment or curious explanations. But most of them, unless lean and ill-favoured, were unclothed and packed in crates and drawn off in lumbering lorries by fabulous things. Occasionally other beings were unloaded and crated; some very like these semi-humans, some not so similar, and some not similar at all. And he wondered if any of the poor stout black men of Parg were left to be unloaded and crated and shipped inland in those obnoxious drays.\n\nWhen the galley landed at a greasy-looking quay of spongy rock a nightmare horde of toad-things wiggled out of the hatches, and two of them seized Carter and dragged him ashore. The smell and aspect of that city are beyond telling, and Carter held only scattered images of the tiled streets and black doorways and endless precipices of grey vertical walls without windows. At length he was dragged within a low doorway and made to climb infinite steps in pitch blackness. It was, apparently, all one to the toad-things whether it were light or dark. The odour of the place was intolerable, and when Carter was locked into a chamber and left alone he scarcely had strength to crawl around and ascertain its form and dimensions. It was circular, and about twenty feet across.\n\nFrom then on time ceased to exist. At intervals food was pushed in, but Carter would not touch it. What his fate would be, he did not know; but he felt that he was held for the coming of that frightful soul and messenger of infinity's Other Gods, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Finally, after an unguessed span of hours or days, the great stone door swung wide again and Carter was shoved down the stairs and out into the red-litten streets of that fearsome city. It was night on the moon, and all through the town were stationed slaves bearing torches.\n\nIn a detestable square a sort of procession was formed; ten of the toad-things and twenty-four almost-human torch-bearers, eleven on either side, and one each before and behind. Carter was placed in the middle of the line; five toad-things ahead and five behind, and one almost-human torch-bearer on each side of him. Certain of the toad-things produced disgustingly carven flutes of ivory and made loathsome sounds. To that hellish piping the column advanced out of the tiled streets and into nighted plains of obscene fungi, soon commencing to climb one of the lower and more gradual hills that lay behind the city. That on some frightful slope or blasphemous plateau the crawling chaos waited, Carter could not doubt; and he wished that the suspense might soon be over. The whining of those impious flutes was shocking, and he would have given worlds for some even half-normal sound; but these toad-things had no voices, and the slaves did not talk.\n\nThen through that star-specked darkness there did come a normal sound. It rolled from the higher hills, and from all the jagged peaks around it was caught up and echoed in a swelling pandaemoniac chorus. It was the midnight yell of the cat, and Carter knew at last that the old village folk were right when they made low guesses about the cryptical realms which are known only to cats, and to which the elders among cats repair by stealth nocturnally, springing from high housetops. Verily, it is to the moon's dark side that they go to leap and gambol on the hills and converse with ancient shadows, and here amidst that column of foetid things Carter heard their homely, friendly cry, and thought of the steep roofs and warm hearths and little lighted windows of home.\n\nNow much of the speech of cats was known to Randolph Carter, and in this far, terrible place he uttered the cry that was suitable. But that he need not have done, for even as his lips opened he heard the chorus wax and draw nearer, and saw swift shadows against the stars as small graceful shapes leaped from hill to hill in gathering legions. The call of the clan had been given, and before the foul procession had time even to be frightened a cloud of smothering fur and a phalanx of murderous claws were tidally and tempestuously upon it. The flutes stopped, and there were shrieks in the night. Dying almost-humans screamed, and cats spit and yowled and roared, but the toad-things made never a sound as their stinking green ichor oozed fatally upon that porous earth with the obscene fungi.\n\nIt was a stupendous sight while the torches lasted, and Carter had never before seen so many cats. Black, grey, and white; yellow, tiger, and mixed; common, Persian, and Manx; Thibetan, Angora, and Egyptian; all were there in the fury of battle, and there hovered over them some trace of that profound and inviolate sanctity which made their goddess great in the temples of Bubastis. They would leap seven strong at the throat of an almost-human or the pink tentacled snout of a toad-thing and drag it down savagely to the fungous plain, where myriads of their fellows would surge over it and into it with the frenzied claws and teeth of a divine battle-fury. Carter had seized a torch from a stricken slave, but was soon overborne by the surging waves of his loyal defenders. Then he lay in the utter blackness hearing the clangour of war and the shouts of the victors, and feeling the soft paws of his friends as they rushed to and fro over him in the fray.\n\nAt last awe and exhaustion closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was upon a strange scene. The great shining disc of the earth, thirteen times greater than that of the moon as we see it, had risen with floods of weird light over the lunar landscape; and across all those leagues of wild plateau and ragged crest there squatted one endless sea of cats in orderly array. Circle on circle they reached, and two or three leaders out of the ranks were licking his face and purring to him consolingly. Of the dead slaves and toad-things there were not many signs, but Carter thought he saw one bone a little way off in the open space between him and the beginning of the solid circles of the warriors.\n\nCarter now spoke with the leaders in the soft language of cats, and learned that his ancient friendship with the species was well known and often spoken of in the places where cats congregate. He had not been unmarked in Ulthar when he passed through, and the sleek old cats had remembered how he petted them after they had attended to the hungry zoogs who looked evilly at a small black kitten. And they recalled, too, how he had welcomed the very little kitten who came to see him at the inn, and how he had given it a saucer of rich cream in the morning before he left. The grandfather of that very little kitten was the leader of the army now assembled, for he had seen the evil procession from a far hill and recognised the prisoner as a sworn friend of his kind on earth and in the land of dream.\n\nA yowl now came from a farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in his conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest of the mountains to watch the one foe which earth's cats fear; the very large and peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of the charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat grave matter.\n\nAfter a brief consultation of generals, the cats rose and assumed a closer formation, crowding protectingly around Carter and preparing to take the great leap through space back to the housetops of our earth and its dreamland. The old field-marshal advised Carter to let himself be borne along smoothly and passively in the massed ranks of furry leapers, and told him how to spring when the rest sprang and land gracefully when the rest landed. He also offered to deposit him in any spot he desired, and Carter decided on the city of Dylath-Leen whence the black galley had set out; for he wished to sail thence for Oriab and the carven crest of Ngranek, and also to warn the people of the city to have no more traffick with black galleys, if indeed that traffick could be tactfully and judiciously broken off. Then, upon a signal, the cats all leaped gracefully with their friend packed securely in their midst; while in a black cave on a far unhallowed summit of the moon-mountains still vainly waited the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.\n\nThe leap of the cats through space was very swift; and being surrounded by his companions, Carter did not see this time the great black shapelessnesses that lurk and caper and flounder in the abyss. Before he fully realised what had happened he was back in his familiar room at the inn at Dylath-Leen, and the stealthy, friendly cats were pouring out of the window in streams. The old leader from Ulthar was the last to leave, and as Carter shook his paw he said he would be able to get home by cockcrow. When dawn came, Carter went downstairs and learned that a week had elapsed since his capture and leaving. There was still nearly a fortnight to wait for the ship bound toward Oriab, and during that time he said what he could against the black galleys and their infamous ways. Most of the townsfolk believed him; yet so fond were the jewellers of great rubies that none would wholly promise to cease trafficking with the wide-mouthed merchants. If aught of evil ever befalls Dylath-Leen through such traffick, it will not be his fault.\n\nIn about a week the desiderate ship put in by the black mole and tall lighthouse, and Carter was glad to see that she was a barque of wholesome men, with painted sides and yellow lateen sails and a grey captain in silken robes. Her cargo was the fragrant resin of Oriab's inner groves, and the delicate pottery baked by the artists of Baharna, and the strange little figures carved from Ngranek's ancient lava. For this they were paid in the wool of Ulthar and the iridescent textiles of Hatheg and the ivory that the black men carve across the river in Parg. Carter made arrangements with the captain to go to Baharna and was told that the voyage would take ten days. And during his week of waiting he talked much with that captain of Ngranek, and was told that very few had seen the carven face thereon; but that most travellers are content to learn its legends from old people and lava-gatherers and image-makers in Baharna and afterward say in their far homes that they have indeed beheld it. The captain was not even sure that any person now living had beheld that carven face, for the wrong side of Ngranek is very difficult and barren and sinister, and there are rumours of caves near the peak wherein dwell the night-gaunts. But the captain did not wish to say just what a night-gaunt might be like, since such cattle are known to haunt most persistently the dreams of those who think too often of them. Then Carter asked that captain about unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and the marvellous sunset city, but of these the good man could truly tell nothing.\n\nCarter sailed out of Dylath-Leen one early morning when the tide turned, and saw the first rays of sunrise on the thin angular towers of that dismal basalt town. And for two days they sailed eastward in sight of green coasts, and saw often the pleasant fishing towns that climbed up steeply with their red roofs and chimney-pots from old dreaming wharves and beaches where nets lay drying. But on the third day they turned sharply south where the roll of the water was stronger, and soon passed from sight of any land. On the fifth day the sailors were nervous, but the captain apologised for their fears, saying that the ship was about to pass over the weedy walls and broken columns of a sunken city too old for memory, and that when the water was clear one could see so many moving shadows in that deep place that simple folk disliked it. He admitted, moreover, that many ships had been lost in that part of the sea; having been hailed when quite close to it, but never seen again.\n\nThat night the moon was very bright, and one could see a great way down in the water. There was so little wind that the ship could not move much, and the ocean was very calm. Looking over the rail Carter saw many fathoms deep the dome of a great temple, and in front of it an avenue of unnatural sphinxes leading to what was once a public square. Dolphins sported merrily in and out of the ruins, and porpoises revelled clumsily here and there, sometimes coming to the surface and leaping clear out of the sea. As the ship drifted on a little the floor of the ocean rose in hills, and one could clearly mark the lines of ancient climbing streets and the washed-down walls of myriad little houses.\n\nThen the suburbs appeared, and finally a great lone building on a hill, of simpler architecture than the other structures, and in much better repair. It was dark and low and covered four sides of a square, with a tower at each corner, a paved court in the centre, and small curious round windows all over it. Probably it was of basalt, though weeds draped the greater part; and such was its lonely and impressive place on that far hill that it may have been a temple or monastery. Some phosphorescent fish inside it gave the small round windows an aspect of shining, and Carter did not blame the sailors much for their fears. Then by the watery moonlight he noticed an odd high monolith in the middle of that central court, and saw that something was tied to it. And when after getting a telescope from the captain's cabin he saw that that bound thing was a sailor in the silk robes of Oriab, head downward and without any eyes, he was glad that a rising breeze soon took the ship ahead to more healthy parts of the sea.\n\nThe next day they spoke with a ship with violet sails bound for Zar, in the land of forgotten dreams, with bulbs of strange coloured lilies for cargo. And on the evening of the eleventh day they came in sight of the isle of Oriab, with Ngranek rising jagged and snow-crowned in the distance. Oriab is a very great isle, and its port of Baharna a mighty city. The wharves of Baharna are of porphyry, and the city rises in great stone terraces behind them, having streets of steps that are frequently arched over by buildings and the bridges between buildings. There is a great canal which goes under the whole city in a tunnel with granite gates and leads to the inland lake of Yath, on whose farther shore are the vast clay-brick ruins of a primal city whose name is not remembered. As the ship drew into the harbour at evening the twin beacons Thon and Thal gleamed a welcome, and in all the million windows of Baharna's terraces mellow lights peeped out quietly and gradually as the stars peep out overhead in the dusk, till that steep and climbing seaport became a glittering constellation hung between the stars of heaven and the reflections of those stars in the still harbour.\n\nThe captain, after landing, made Carter a guest in his own small house on the shore of Yath where the rear of the town slopes down to it; and his wife and servants brought strange toothsome foods for the traveller's delight. And in the days after that Carter asked for rumours and legends of Ngranek in all the taverns and public places where lava-gatherers and image-makers meet, but could find no one who had been up the higher slopes or seen the carven face. Ngranek was a hard mountain with only an accursed valley behind it, and besides, one could never depend on the certainty that night-gaunts are altogether fabulous.\n\nWhen the captain sailed back to Dylath-Leen Carter took quarters in an ancient tavern opening on an alley of steps in the original part of the town, which is built of brick and resembles the ruins of Yath's farther shore. Here he laid his plans for the ascent of Ngranek, and correlated all that he had learned from the lava-gatherers about the roads thither. The keeper of the tavern was a very old man, and had heard so many legends that he was a great help. He even took Carter to an upper room in that ancient house and shewed him a crude picture which a traveller had scratched on the clay wall in the olden days when men were bolder and less reluctant to visit Ngranek's higher slopes. The old tavern-keeper's great-grandfather had heard from his great-grandfather that the traveller who scratched that picture had climbed Ngranek and seen the carven face, here drawing it for others to behold; but Carter had very great doubts, since the large rough features on the wall were hasty and careless, and wholly overshadowed by a crowd of little companion shapes in the worst possible taste, with horns and wings and claws and curling tails.\n\nAt last, having gained all the information he was likely to gain in the taverns and public places of Baharna, Carter hired a zebra and set out one morning on the road by Yath's shore for those inland parts wherein towers stony Ngranek. On his right were rolling hills and pleasant orchards and neat little stone farmhouses, and he was much reminded of those fertile fields that flank the Skai. By evening he was near the nameless ancient ruins on Yath's farther shore, and though old lava-gatherers had warned him not to camp there at night, he tethered his zebra to a curious pillar before a crumbling wall and laid his blanket in a sheltered corner beneath some carvings whose meaning none could decipher. Around him he wrapped another blanket, for the nights are cold in Oriab; and when upon awaking once he thought he felt the wings of some insect brushing his face he covered his head altogether and slept in peace till roused by the magah birds in distant resin groves.\n\nThe sun had just come up over the great slope whereon leagues of primal brick foundations and worn walls and occasional cracked pillars and pedestals stretched down desolate to the shore of Yath, and Carter looked about for his tethered zebra. Great was his dismay to see that docile beast stretched prostrate beside the curious pillar to which it had been tied, and still greater was he vexed on finding that the steed was quite dead, with its blood all sucked away through a singular wound in its throat. His pack had been disturbed, and several shiny knick-knacks taken away, and all around on the dusty soil were great webbed footprints for which he could not in any way account. The legends and warnings of lava-gatherers occurred to him and he thought of what had brushed his face in the night. Then he shouldered his pack and strode on toward Ngranek, though not without a shiver when he saw close to him as the highway passed through the ruins a great gaping arch low in the wall of an old temple, with steps leading down into darkness farther than he could peer.\n\nHis course now led uphill through wilder and partly wooded country, and he saw only the huts of charcoal-burners and the camps of those who gathered resin from the groves. The whole air was fragrant with balsam, and all the magah birds sang blithely as they flashed their seven colours in the sun. Near sunset he came on a new camp of lava-gatherers returning with laden sacks from Ngranek's lower slopes; and here he also camped, listening to the songs and tales of the men, and overhearing what they whispered about a companion they had lost. He had climbed high to reach a mass of fine lava above him, and at nightfall did not return to his fellows. When they looked for him the next day they found only his turban, nor was there any sign on the crags below that he had fallen. They did not search any more, because the old men among them said it would be of no use. No one ever found what the night-gaunts took, though those beasts themselves were so uncertain as to be almost fabulous. Carter asked them if night-gaunts sucked blood and liked shiny things and left webbed footprints, but they all shook their heads negatively and seemed frightened at his making such an inquiry. When he saw how taciturn they had become he asked them no more, but went to sleep in his blanket.\n\nThe next day he rose with the lava-gatherers and exchanged farewells as they rode west and he rode east on a zebra he had bought of them. Their older men gave him blessings and warnings, and told him he had better not climb too high on Ngranek, but while he thanked them heartily he was in no wise dissuaded. For still did he feel that he must find the gods on unknown Kadath, and win from them a way to that haunting and marvellous city in the sunset. By noon, after a long uphill ride, he came upon some abandoned brick villages of the hill-people who had once dwelt thus close to Ngranek and carved images from its smooth lava. Here they had dwelt till the days of the old tavern-keeper's grandfather, but about that time they felt that their presence was disliked. Their homes had crept even up the mountain's slope, and the higher they built the more people they would miss when the sun rose. At last they decided it would be better to leave altogether, since things were sometimes glimpsed in the darkness which no one could interpret favourably; so in the end all of them went down to the sea and dwelt in Baharna, inhabiting a very old quarter and teaching their sons the old art of image-making which to this day they carry on. It was from these children of the exiled hill-people that Carter had heard the best tales about Ngranek when searching through Baharna's ancient taverns.\n\nAll this time the great gaunt side of Ngranek was looming up higher and higher as Carter approached it. There were sparse trees on the lower slope, and feeble shrubs above them, and then the bare hideous rock rose spectral into the sky to mix with frost and ice and eternal snow. Carter could see the rifts and ruggedness of that sombre stone, and did not welcome the prospect of climbing it. In places there were solid streams of lava, and scoriac heaps that littered slopes and ledges. Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might\u2014if legend spoke truly\u2014hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.\n\nThe ground sloped upward to the foot of Ngranek, thinly covered with scrub oaks and ash trees, and strown with bits of rock, lava, and ancient cinder. There were the charred embers of many camps, where the lava-gatherers were wont to stop, and several rude altars which they had built either to propitiate the Great Ones or to ward off what they dreamed of in Ngranek's high passes and labyrinthine caves. At evening Carter reached the farthermost pile of embers and camped for the night, tethering his zebra to a sapling and wrapping himself well in his blanket before going to sleep. And all through the night a voonith howled distantly from the shore of some hidden pool, but Carter felt no fear of that amphibious terror, since he had been told with certainty that not one of them dares even approach the slopes of Ngranek.\n\nIn the clear sunshine of morning Carter began the long ascent, taking his zebra as far as that useful beast could go, but tying it to a stunted ash tree when the floor of the thin road became too steep. Thereafter he scrambled up alone; first through the forest with its ruins of old villages in overgrown clearings, and then over the tough grass where anaemic shrubs grew here and there. He regretted coming clear of the trees, since the slope was very precipitous and the whole thing rather dizzying. At length he began to discern all the countryside spread out beneath him whenever he looked around; the deserted huts of the image-makers, the groves of resin trees and the camps of those who gathered from them, the woods where prismatic magahs nest and sing, and even a hint very far away of the shores of Yath and of those forbidding ancient ruins whose name is forgotten. He found it best not to look around, and kept on climbing and climbing till the shrubs became very sparse and there was often nothing but the tough grass to cling to.\n\nThen the soil became meagre, with great patches of bare rock cropping out, and now and then the nest of a condor in a crevice. Finally there was nothing at all but the bare rock, and had it not been very rough and weathered, he could scarcely have ascended farther. Knobs, ledges, and pinnacles, however, helped greatly; and it was cheering to see occasionally the sign of some lava-gatherer scratched clumsily in the friable stone, and know that wholesome human creatures had been there before him. After a certain height the presence of man was further shewn by hand-holds and footholds hewn where they were needed, and by little quarries and excavations where some choice vein or stream of lava had been found. In one place a narrow ledge had been chopped artificially to an especially rich deposit far to the right of the main line of ascent. Once or twice Carter dared to look around, and was almost stunned by the spread of landscape below. All the island betwixt him and the coast lay open to his sight, with Baharna's stone terraces and the smoke of its chimneys mystical in the distance. And beyond that the illimitable Southern Sea with all its curious secrets.\n\nThus far there had been much winding around the mountain, so that the farther and carven side was still hidden. Carter now saw a ledge running upward and to the left which seemed to head the way he wished, and this course he took in the hope that it might prove continuous. After ten minutes he saw it was indeed no cul-de-sac, but that it led steeply on in an arc which would, unless suddenly interrupted or deflected, bring him after a few hours' climbing to that unknown southern slope overlooking the desolate crags and the accursed valley of lava. As new country came into view below him he saw that it was bleaker and wilder than those seaward lands he had traversed. The mountain's side, too, was somewhat different; being here pierced by curious cracks and caves not found on the straighter route he had left. Some of these were above him and some beneath him, all opening on sheerly perpendicular cliffs and wholly unreachable by the feet of man. The air was very cold now, but so hard was the climbing that he did not mind it. Only the increasing rarity bothered him, and he thought that perhaps it was this which had turned the heads of other travellers and excited those absurd tales of night-gaunts whereby they explained the loss of such climbers as fell from these perilous paths. He was not much impressed by travellers' tales, but had a good curved scimitar in case of any trouble. All lesser thoughts were lost in the wish to see that carven face which might set him on the track of the gods atop unknown Kadath.\n\nAt last, in the fearsome iciness of upper space, he came round fully to the hidden side of Ngranek and saw in infinite gulfs below him the lesser crags and sterile abysses of lava which marked the olden wrath of the Great Ones. There was unfolded, too, a vast expanse of country to the south; but it was a desert land without fair fields or cottage chimneys, and seemed to have no ending. No trace of the sea was visible on this side, for Oriab is a great island. Black caverns and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt lest it prove impassable. Poised in windy insecurity miles above earth, with only space and death on one side and only slippery walls of rock on the other, he knew for a moment the fear that makes men shun Ngranek's hidden side. He could not turn round, yet the sun was already low. If there were no way aloft, the night would find him crouching there still, and the dawn would not find him at all.\n\nBut there was a way, and he saw it in due season. Only a very expert dreamer could have used those imperceptible footholds, yet to Carter they were sufficient. Surmounting now the outward-hanging rock, he found the slope above much easier than that below, since a great glacier's melting had left a generous space with loam and ledges. To the left a precipice dropped straight from unknown heights to unknown depths, with a cave's dark mouth just out of reach above him. Elsewhere, however, the mountain slanted back strongly, and even gave him space to lean and rest.\n\nHe felt from the chill that he must be near the snow line, and looked up to see what glittering pinnacles might be shining in that late ruddy sunlight. Surely enough, there was the snow uncounted thousands of feet above, and below it a great beetling crag like that he had just climbed; hanging there forever in bold outline, black against the white of the frozen peak. And when he saw that crag he gasped and cried out aloud, and clutched at the jagged rock in awe; for the titan bulge had not stayed as earth's dawn had shaped it, but gleamed red and stupendous in the sunset with the carved and polished features of a god.\n\nStern and terrible shone that face that the sunset lit with fire. How vast it was no mind can ever measure, but Carter knew at once that man could never have fashioned it. It was a god chiselled by the hands of the gods, and it looked down haughty and majestic upon the seeker. Rumour had said it was strange and not to be mistaken, and Carter saw that it was indeed so; for those long narrow eyes and long-lobed ears, and that thin nose and pointed chin, all spoke of a race that is not of men but of gods. He clung overawed in that lofty and perilous eyrie, even though it was this which he had expected and come to find; for there is in a god's face more of marvel than prediction can tell, and when that face is vaster than a great temple and seen looking down at sunset in the cryptic silences of that upper world from whose dark lava it was divinely hewn of old, the marvel is so strong that none may escape it.\n\nHere, too, was the added marvel of recognition; for although he had planned to search all dreamland over for those whose likeness to this face might mark them as the gods' children, he now knew that he need not do so. Certainly, the great face carven on that mountain was of no strange sort, but the kin of such as he had seen often in the taverns of the seaport Celepha\u00efs which lies in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills and is ruled over by that King Kuranes whom Carter once knew in waking life. Every year sailors with such a face came in dark ships from the north to trade their onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celepha\u00efs, and it was clear that these could be no others than the half-gods he sought. Where they dwelt, there must the cold waste lie close, and within it unknown Kadath and its onyx castle for the Great Ones. So to Celepha\u00efs he must go, far distant from the isle of Oriab, and in such parts as would take him back to Dylath-Leen and up the Skai to the bridge by Nir, and again into the enchanted wood of the zoogs, whence the way would bend northward through the garden lands by Oukranos to the gilded spires of Thran, where he might find a galleon bound over the Cerenerian Sea.\n\nBut dusk was now thick, and the great carven face looked down even sterner in shadow. Perched on that ledge night found the seeker; and in the blackness he might neither go down nor go up, but only stand and cling and shiver in that narrow place till the day came, praying to keep awake lest sleep loose his hold and send him down the dizzy miles of air to the crags and sharp rocks of the accursed valley. The stars came out, but save for them there was only black nothingness in his eyes; nothingness leagued with death, against whose beckoning he might do no more than cling to the rocks and lean back away from an unseen brink. The last thing of earth that he saw in the gloaming was a condor soaring close to the westward precipice beside him, and darting screaming away when it came near the cave whose mouth yawned just out of reach.\n\nSuddenly, without a warning sound in the dark, Carter felt his curved scimitar drawn stealthily out of his belt by some unseen hand. Then he heard it clatter down over the rocks below. And between him and the Milky Way he thought he saw a very terrible outline of something noxiously thin and horned and tailed and bat-winged. Other things, too, had begun to blot out patches of stars west of him, as if a flock of vague entities were flapping thickly and silently out of that inaccessible cave in the face of the precipice. Then a sort of cold rubbery arm seized his neck and something else seized his feet, and he was lifted inconsiderately up and swung about in space. Another minute and the stars were gone, and Carter knew that the night-gaunts had got him.\n\nThey bore him breathless into that cliffside cavern and through monstrous labyrinths beyond. When he struggled, as at first he did by instinct, they tickled him with deliberation. They made no sound at all themselves, and even their membraneous wings were silent. They were frightfully cold and damp and slippery, and their paws kneaded one detestably. Soon they were plunging hideously downward through inconceivable abysses in a whirling, giddying, sickening rush of dank, tomb-like air; and Carter felt they were shooting into the ultimate vortex of shrieking and daemonic madness. He screamed again and again, but whenever he did so the black paws tickled him with greater subtlety. Then he saw a sort of grey phosphorescence about, and guessed they were coming even to that inner world of subterrene horror of which dim legends tell, and which is litten only by the pale death-fire wherewith reeks the ghoulish air and the primal mists of the pits at earth's core.\n\nAt last far below him he saw faint lines of grey and ominous pinnacles which he knew must be the fabled Peaks of Thok. Awful and sinister they stand in the haunted dusk of sunless and eternal depths; higher than man may reckon, and guarding terrible valleys where the bholes crawl and burrow nastily. But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces, unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.\n\nAs the band flew lower the Peaks of Thok rose grey and towering on all sides, and one saw clearly that nothing lived on that austere and impassive granite of the endless twilight. At still lower levels the death-fires in the air gave out, and one met only the primal blackness of the void save aloft where the thin peaks stood out goblin-like. Soon the peaks were very far away, and nothing about but great rushing winds with the dankness of nethermost grottoes in them. Then in the end the night-gaunts landed on a floor of unseen things which felt like layers of bones, and left Carter all alone in that black valley. To bring him thither was the duty of the night-gaunts that guard Ngranek; and this done, they flapped away silently. When Carter tried to trace their flight he found he could not, since even the Peaks of Thok had faded out of sight. There was nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence and bones.\n\nNow Carter knew from a certain source that he was in the vale of Pnath, where crawl and burrow the enormous bholes; but he did not know what to expect, because no one has ever seen a bhole or even guessed what such a thing may be like. Bholes are known only by dim rumour, from the rustling they make amongst mountains of bones and the slimy touch they have when they wriggle past one. They cannot be seen because they creep only in the dark. Carter did not wish to meet a bhole, so listened intently for any sound in the unknown depths of bones about him. Even in this fearsome place he had a plan and an objective, for whispers of Pnath and its approaches were not unknown to one with whom he had talked much in the old days. In brief, it seemed fairly likely that this was the spot into which all the ghouls of the waking world cast the refuse of their feastings; and that if he but had good luck he might stumble upon that mighty crag taller even than Thok's peaks which marks the edge of their domain. Showers of bones would tell him where to look, and once found he could call to a ghoul to let down a ladder; for strange to say, he had a very singular link with these terrible creatures.\n\nA man he had known in Boston\u2014a painter of strange pictures with a secret studio in an ancient and unhallowed alley near a graveyard\u2014had actually made friends with the ghouls and had taught him to understand the simpler part of their disgusting meeping and glibbering. This man had vanished at last, and Carter was not sure but that he might find him now, and use for the first time in dreamland that faraway English of his dim waking life. In any case, he felt he could persuade a ghoul to guide him out of Pnath; and it would be better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a bhole, which one cannot see.\n\nSo Carter walked in the dark, and ran when he thought he heard something among the bones underfoot. Once he bumped into a stony slope, and knew it must be the base of one of Thok's peaks. Then at last he heard a monstrous rattling and clatter which reached far up in the air, and became sure he had come nigh the crag of the ghouls. He was not sure he could be heard from this valley miles below, but realised that the inner world has strange laws. As he pondered he was struck by a flying bone so heavy that it must have been a skull, and therefore realising his nearness to the fateful crag he sent up as best he might that meeping cry which is the call of the ghoul.\n\nSound travels slowly, so that it was some time before he heard an answering glibber. But it came at last, and before long he was told that a rope ladder would be lowered. The wait for this was very tense, since there was no telling what might not have been stirred up among those bones by his shouting. Indeed, it was not long before he actually did hear a vague rustling afar off. As this thoughtfully approached, he became more and more uncomfortable; for he did not wish to move away from the spot where the ladder would come. Finally the tension grew almost unbearable, and he was about to flee in panic when the thud of something on the newly heaped bones nearby drew his notice from the other sound. It was the ladder, and after a minute of groping he had it taut in his hands. But the other sound did not cease, and followed him even as he climbed. He had gone fully five feet from the ground when the rattling beneath waxed emphatic, and was a good ten feet up when something swayed the ladder from below. At a height which must have been fifteen or twenty feet he felt his whole side brushed by a great slippery length which grew alternately convex and concave with wriggling, and thereafter he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole whose form no man might see.\n\nFor hours he climbed with aching arms and blistered hands, seeing again the grey death-fire and Thok's uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him the projecting edge of the great crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; and hours later he saw a curious face peering over it as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre Dame. This almost made him lose his hold through faintness, but a moment later he was himself again; for his vanished friend Richard Pickman had once introduced him to a ghoul, and he knew well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So he had himself well under control when that hideous thing pulled him out of the dizzy emptiness over the edge of the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting circles of ghouls who gnawed and watched curiously.\n\nHe was now on a dim-litten plain whose sole topographical features were great boulders and the entrances of burrows. The ghouls were in general respectful, even if one did attempt to pinch him while several others eyed his leanness speculatively. Through patient glibbering he made inquiries regarding his vanished friend, and found he had become a ghoul of some prominence in abysses nearer the waking world. A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman's present habitation, so despite a natural loathing he followed the creature into a capacious burrow and crawled after him for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim plain strown with singular relics of earth\u2014old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque fragments of monuments\u2014and Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably nearer the waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps from the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.\n\nThere, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat the ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that its human origin was already obscure. But it still remembered a little English, and was able to converse with Carter in grunts and monosyllables, helped out now and then by the glibbering of ghouls. When it learned that Carter wished to get to the enchanted wood and from there to the city Celepha\u00efs in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills, it seemed rather doubtful; for these ghouls of the waking world do no business in the graveyards of upper dreamland (leaving that to the web-footed wamps that are spawned in dead cities), and many things intervene betwixt their gulf and the enchanted wood, including the terrible kingdom of the gugs.\n\nThe gugs, hairy and gigantic, once reared stone circles in that wood and made strange sacrifices to the Other Gods and the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, until one night an abomination of theirs reached the ears of earth's gods and they were banished to caverns below. Only a great trap-door of stone with an iron ring connects the abyss of the earth-ghouls with the enchanted wood, and this the gugs are afraid to open because of a curse. That a mortal dreamer could traverse their cavern realm and leave by that door is inconceivable; for mortal dreamers were their former food, and they have legends of the toothsomeness of such dreamers even though banishment has restricted their diet to the ghasts, those repulsive beings which die in the light, and which live in the vaults of Zin and leap on long hind legs like kangaroos.\n\nSo the ghoul that was Pickman advised Carter either to leave the abyss at Sarkomand, that deserted city in the valley below Leng where black nitrous stairways guarded by winged diorite lions lead down from dreamland to the lower gulfs, or to return through a churchyard to the waking world and begin the quest anew down the seventy steps of light slumber to the cavern of flame and the seven hundred steps to the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood. This, however, did not suit the seeker; for he knew nothing of the way from Leng to Ooth-Nargai, and was likewise reluctant to awake lest he forget all he had so far gained in this dream. It were disastrous to his quest to forget the august and celestial faces of those seamen from the north who traded onyx in Celepha\u00efs, and who, being the sons of gods, must point the way to the cold waste and Kadath where the Great Ones dwell.\n\nAfter much persuasion the ghoul consented to guide his guest inside the great wall of the gugs' kingdom. There was one chance that Carter might be able to steal through that twilight realm of circular stone towers at an hour when the giants would be all gorged and snoring indoors, and reach the central tower with the sign of Koth upon it, which has the stairs leading up to that stone trap-door in the enchanted wood. Pickman even consented to lend three ghouls to help with a tombstone lever in raising the stone door; for of ghouls the gugs are somewhat afraid, and they often flee from their own colossal graveyards when they see feasting there.\n\nHe also advised Carter to disguise as a ghoul himself; shaving the beard he had allowed to grow (for ghouls have none), wallowing naked in the mould to get the correct surface, and loping in the usual slumping way, with his clothing carried in a bundle as if it were a choice morsel from a tomb. They would reach the city of the gugs\u2014which is coterminous with the whole kingdom\u2014through the proper burrows, emerging in a cemetery not far from the stair-containing Tower of Koth. They must beware, however, of a large cave near the cemetery; for this is the mouth of the vaults of Zin, and the vindictive ghasts are always on watch there murderously for those denizens of the upper abyss who hunt and prey on them. The ghasts try to come out when the gugs sleep, and they attack ghouls as readily as gugs, for they cannot discriminate. They are very primitive, and eat one another. The gugs have a sentry at a narrow place in the vaults of Zin, but he is often drowsy and is sometimes surprised by a party of ghasts. Though ghasts cannot live in real light, they can endure the grey twilight of the abyss for hours.\n\nSo at length Carter crawled through endless burrows with three helpful ghouls bearing the slate gravestone of Col. Nehemiah Derby, obiit 1719, from the Charter Street Burying Ground in Salem. When they came again into open twilight they were in a forest of vast lichened monoliths reaching nearly as high as the eye could see and forming the modest gravestones of the gugs. On the right of the hole out of which they wriggled, and seen through aisles of monoliths, was a stupendous vista of Cyclopean round towers mounting up illimitable into the grey air of inner earth. This was the great city of the gugs, whose doorways are thirty feet high. Ghouls come here often, for a buried gug will feed a community for almost a year, and even with the added peril it is better to burrow for gugs than to bother with the graves of men. Carter now understood the occasional titan bones he had felt beneath him in the vale of Pnath.\n\nStraight ahead, and just outside the cemetery, rose a sheer perpendicular cliff at whose base an immense and forbidding cavern yawned. This the ghouls told Carter to avoid as much as possible, since it was the entrance to the unhallowed vaults of Zin where gugs hunt ghasts in the darkness. And truly, that warning was soon well justified; for the moment a ghoul began to creep toward the towers to see if the hour of the gugs' resting had been rightly timed, there glowed in the gloom of that great cavern's mouth first one pair of yellowish-red eyes and then another, implying that the gugs were one sentry less, and that ghasts have indeed an excellent sharpness of smell. So the ghoul returned to the burrow and motioned his companions to be silent. It was best to leave the ghasts to their own devices, and there was a possibility that they might soon withdraw, since they must naturally be rather tired after coping with a gug sentry in the black vaults. After a moment something about the size of a small horse hopped out into the grey twilight, and Carter turned sick at the aspect of that scabrous and unwholesome beast, whose face is so curiously human despite the absence of a nose, a forehead, and other important particulars.\n\nPresently three other ghasts hopped out to join their fellow, and a ghoul glibbered softly at Carter that their absence of battle-scars was a bad sign. It proved that they had not fought the gug sentry at all, but merely slipped past him as he slept, so that their strength and savagery were still unimpaired and would remain so till they had found and disposed of a victim. It was very unpleasant to see those filthy and disproportioned animals, which soon numbered about fifteen, grubbing about and making their kangaroo leaps in the grey twilight where titan towers and monoliths arose, but it was still more unpleasant when they spoke among themselves in the coughing gutturals of ghasts. And yet, horrible as they were, they were not so horrible as what presently came out of the cave after them with disconcerting suddenness.\n\nIt was a paw, fully two feet and a half across, and equipped with formidable talons. After it came another paw, and after that a great black-furred arm to which both of the paws were attached by short forearms. Then two pink eyes shone, and the head of the awakened gug sentry, large as a barrel, wobbled into view. The eyes jutted two inches from each side, shaded by bony protuberances overgrown with coarse hairs. But the head was chiefly terrible because of the mouth. That mouth had great yellow fangs and ran from the top to the bottom of the head, opening vertically instead of horizontally.\n\nBut before that unfortunate gug could emerge from the cave and rise to his full twenty feet, the vindictive ghasts were upon him. Carter feared for a moment that he would give an alarm and arouse all his kin, till a ghoul softly glibbered that gugs have no voice, but talk by means of facial expression. The battle which then ensued was truly a frightful one. From all sides the venomous ghasts rushed feverishly at the creeping gug, nipping and tearing with their muzzles, and mauling murderously with their hard pointed hooves. All the time they coughed excitedly, screaming when the great vertical mouth of the gug would occasionally bite into one of their number, so that the noise of the combat would surely have aroused the sleeping city had not the weakening of the sentry begun to transfer the action farther and farther within the cavern. As it was, the tumult soon receded altogether from sight in the blackness, with only occasional evil echoes to mark its continuance.\n\nThen the most alert of the ghouls gave the signal for all to advance, and Carter followed the loping three out of the forest of monoliths and into the dark noisome streets of that awful city whose rounded towers of Cyclopean stone soared up beyond the sight. Silently they shambled over that rough rock pavement, hearing with disgust the abominable muffled snortings from great black doorways which marked the slumber of the gugs. Apprehensive of the ending of the rest hour, the ghouls set a somewhat rapid pace; but even so the journey was no brief one, for distances in that town of giants are on a great scale. At last, however, they came to a somewhat open space before a tower even vaster than the rest, above whose colossal doorway was fixed a monstrous symbol in bas-relief which made one shudder without knowing its meaning. This was the central tower with the sign of Koth, and those huge stone steps just visible through the dusk within were the beginning of the great flight leading to upper dreamland and the enchanted wood.\n\nThere now began a climb of interminable length in utter blackness; made almost impossible by the monstrous size of the steps, which were fashioned for gugs, and were therefore nearly a yard high. Of their number Carter could form no just estimate, for he soon became so worn out that the tireless and elastic ghouls were forced to aid him. All through the endless climb there lurked the peril of detection and pursuit; for though no gug dares lift the stone door to the forest because of the Great Ones' curse, there are no such restraints concerning the tower and the steps, and escaped ghasts are often chased even to the very top. So sharp are the ears of gugs, that the bare feet and hands of the climbers might readily be heard when the city awoke; and it would of course take but little time for the striding giants, accustomed from their ghast-hunts in the vaults of Zin to seeing without light, to overtake their smaller and slower quarry on those Cyclopean steps. It was very depressing to reflect that the silent pursuing gugs would not be heard at all, but would come very suddenly and shockingly in the dark upon the climbers. Nor could the traditional fear of gugs for ghouls be depended upon in that peculiar place where the advantages lay so heavily with the gugs. There was also some peril from the furtive and venomous ghasts, which frequently hopped up into the tower during the sleep hour of the gugs. If the gugs slept long, and the ghasts returned soon from their deed in the cavern, the scent of the climbers might easily be picked up by those loathsome and ill-disposed things; in which case it would almost be better to be eaten by a gug.\n\nThen, after aeons of climbing, there came a cough from the darkness above; and matters assumed a very grave and unexpected turn. It was clear that a ghast, or perhaps even more, had strayed into that tower before the coming of Carter and his guides; and it was equally clear that this peril was very close. After a breathless second the leading ghoul pushed Carter to the wall and arranged his two kinsfolk in the best possible way, with the old slate tombstone raised for a crushing blow whenever the enemy might come in sight. Ghouls can see in the dark, so the party was not as badly off as Carter would have been alone. In another moment the clatter of hooves revealed the downward hopping of at least one beast, and the slab-bearing ghouls poised their weapon for a desperate blow. Presently two yellowish-red eyes flashed into view, and the panting of the ghast became audible above its clattering. As it hopped down to the step just above the ghouls, they wielded the ancient gravestone with prodigious force, so that there was only a wheeze and a choking before the victim collapsed in a noxious heap. There seemed to be only this one animal, and after a moment of listening the ghouls tapped Carter as a signal to proceed again. As before, they were obliged to aid him; and he was glad to leave that place of carnage where the ghast's uncouth remains sprawled invisible in the blackness.\n\nAt last the ghouls brought their companion to a halt; and feeling above him, Carter realised that the great stone trap-door was reached at last. To open so vast a thing completely was not to be thought of, but the ghouls hoped to get it up just enough to slip the gravestone under as a prop, and permit Carter to escape through the crack. They themselves planned to descend again and return through the city of the gugs, since their elusiveness was great, and they did not know the way overland to spectral Sarkomand with its lion-guarded gate to the abyss.\n\nMighty was the straining of those three ghouls at the stone of the door above them, and Carter helped push with as much strength as he had. They judged the edge next the top of the staircase to be the right one, and to this they bent all the force of their disreputably nourished muscles. After a few moments a crack of light appeared; and Carter, to whom that task had been entrusted, slipped the end of the old gravestone in the aperture. There now ensued a mighty heaving; but progress was very slow, and they had of course to return to their first position every time they failed to turn the slab and prop the portal open.\n\nSuddenly their desperation was magnified a thousandfold by a sound on the steps below them. It was only the thumping and rattling of the slain ghast's hooved body as it rolled down to lower levels; but of all the possible causes of that body's dislodgment and rolling, none was in the least reassuring. Therefore, knowing the ways of gugs, the ghouls set to with something of a frenzy; and in a surprisingly short time had the door so high that they were able to hold it still whilst Carter turned the slab and left a generous opening. They now helped Carter through, letting him climb up to their rubbery shoulders and later guiding his feet as he clutched at the blessed soil of the upper dreamland outside. Another second and they were through themselves, knocking away the gravestone and closing the great trap-door while a panting became audible beneath. Because of the Great Ones' curse no gug might ever emerge from that portal, so with a deep relief and sense of repose Carter lay quietly on the thick grotesque fungi of the enchanted wood while his guides squatted near in the manner that ghouls rest.\n\nWeird as was that enchanted wood through which he had fared so long ago, it was verily a haven and a delight after the gulfs he had now left behind. There was no living denizen about, for zoogs shun the mysterious door in fear, and Carter at once consulted with his ghouls about their future course. To return through the tower they no longer dared, and the waking world did not appeal to them when they learned that they must pass the priests Nasht and Kaman-Thah in the cavern of flame. So at length they decided to return through Sarkomand and its gate of the abyss, though of how to get there they knew nothing. Carter recalled that it lies in the valley below Leng, and recalled likewise that he had seen in Dylath-Leen a sinister, slant-eyed old merchant reputed to trade on Leng. Therefore he advised the ghouls to seek out Dylath-Leen, crossing the fields to Nir and the Skai and following the river to its mouth. This they at once resolved to do, and lost no time in loping off, since the thickening of the dusk promised a full night ahead for travel. And Carter shook the paws of those repulsive beasts, thanking them for their help and sending his gratitude to the beast which once was Pickman; but could not help sighing with pleasure when they left. For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man. After that Carter sought a forest pool and cleansed himself of the mud of nether earth, thereupon reassuming the clothes he had so carefully carried.\n\nIt was now night in that redoubtable wood of monstrous trees, but because of the phosphorescence one might travel as well as by day; wherefore Carter set out upon the well-known route toward Celepha\u00efs, in Ooth-Nargai beyond the Tanarian Hills. And as he went he thought of the zebra he had left tethered to an ash tree on Ngranek in faraway Oriab so many aeons ago, and wondered if any lava-gatherer had fed and released it. And he wondered, too, if he would ever return to Baharna and pay for the zebra that was slain by night in those ancient ruins by Yath's shore, and if the old tavern-keeper would remember him. Such were the thoughts that came to him in the air of the regained upper dreamland.\n\nBut presently his progress was halted by a sound from a very large hollow tree. He had avoided the great circle of stones, since he did not care to speak with zoogs just now; but it appeared from the singular fluttering in that huge tree that important councils were in session elsewhere. Upon drawing nearer he made out the accents of a tense and heated discussion; and before long became conscious of matters which he viewed with the greatest concern. For a war on the cats was under debate in that sovereign assembly of zoogs. It all came from the loss of the party which had sneaked after Carter to Ulthar, and which the cats had justly punished for unsuitable intentions. The matter had long rankled; and now, or within at least a month, the marshalled zoogs were about to strike the whole feline tribe in a series of surprise attacks, taking individual cats or groups of cats unawares, and giving not even the myriad cats of Ulthar a proper chance to drill and mobilise. This was the plan of the zoogs, and Carter saw that he must foil it before leaving on his mighty quest.\n\nVery quietly therefore did Randolph Carter steal to the edge of the wood and send the cry of the cat over the starlit fields. And a great grimalkin in a nearby cottage took up the burden and relayed it across leagues of rolling meadow to warriors large and small, black, grey, tiger, white, yellow, and mixed; and it echoed through Nir and beyond the Skai even into Ulthar, and Ulthar's numerous cats called in chorus and fell into a line of march. It was fortunate that the moon was not up, so that all the cats were on earth. Swiftly and silently leaping, they sprang from every hearth and housetop and poured in a great furry sea across the plains to the edge of the wood. Carter was there to greet them, and the sight of shapely, wholesome cats was indeed good for his eyes after the things he had seen and walked with in the abyss. He was glad to see his venerable friend and one-time rescuer at the head of Ulthar's detachment, a collar of rank around his sleek neck, and whiskers bristling at a martial angle. Better still, as a sub-lieutenant in that army was a brisk young fellow who proved to be none other than the very little kitten at the inn to whom Carter had given a saucer of rich cream on that long-vanished morning in Ulthar. He was a strapping and promising cat now, and purred as he shook hands with his friend. His grandfather said he was doing very well in the army, and that he might well expect a captaincy after one more campaign.\n\nCarter now outlined the peril of the cat tribe, and was rewarded by deep-throated purrs of gratitude from all sides. Consulting with the generals, he prepared a plan of instant action which involved marching at once upon the zoog council and other known strongholds of zoogs; forestalling their surprise attacks and forcing them to terms before the mobilisation of their army of invasion. Thereupon without a moment's loss that great ocean of cats flooded the enchanted wood and surged around the council tree and the great stone circle. Flutterings rose to panic pitch as the enemy saw the newcomers, and there was very little resistance among the furtive and curious brown zoogs. They saw that they were beaten in advance, and turned from thoughts of vengeance to thoughts of present self-preservation.\n\nHalf the cats now seated themselves in a circular formation with the captured zoogs in the centre, leaving open a lane down which were marched the additional captives rounded up by the other cats in other parts of the wood. Terms were discussed at length, Carter acting as interpreter, and it was decided that the zoogs might remain a free tribe on condition of rendering to the cats a large annual tribute of grouse, quail, and pheasants from the less fabulous parts of their forest. Twelve young zoogs of noble families were taken as hostages to be kept in the Temple of the Cats at Ulthar, and the victors made it plain that any disappearances of cats on the borders of the zoog domain would be followed by consequences highly disastrous to zoogs. These matters disposed of, the assembled cats broke ranks and permitted the zoogs to slink off one by one to their respective homes, which they hastened to do with many a sullen backward glance.\n\nThe old cat general now offered Carter an escort through the forest to whatever border he wished to reach, deeming it likely that the zoogs would harbour dire resentment against him for the frustration of their warlike enterprise. This offer he welcomed with gratitude; not only for the safety it afforded, but because he liked the graceful companionship of cats. So in the midst of a pleasant and playful regiment, relaxed after the successful performance of its duty, Randolph Carter walked with dignity through that enchanted and phosphorescent wood of titan trees, talking of his quest with the old general and his grandson whilst others of the band indulged in fantastic gambols or chased fallen leaves that the wind drove among the fungi of the primeval floor. And the old cat said that he had heard much of unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but did not know where it was. As for the marvellous sunset city, he had not even heard of that, but would gladly relay to Carter anything he might later learn.\n\nHe gave the seeker some passwords of great value among the cats of dreamland, and commended him especially to the old chief of the cats in Celepha\u00efs, whither he was bound. That old cat, already slightly known to Carter, was a dignified Maltese; and would prove highly influential in any transaction. It was dawn when they came to the proper edge of the wood, and Carter bade his friends a reluctant farewell. The young sub-lieutenant he had met as a small kitten would have followed him had not the old general forbidden it, but that austere patriarch insisted that the path of duty lay with the tribe and the army. So Carter set out alone over the golden fields that stretched mysterious beside a willow-fringed river, and the cats went back into the wood.\n\nWell did the traveller know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood and the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colours of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dingle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.\n\nBy noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he has entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under an enchanted sun.\n\nAll that afternoon the pilgrim wandered on through perfumed meadows and in the lee of gentle riverward hills bearing peaceful thatched cottages and the shrines of amiable gods carven from jasper or chrysoberyl. Sometimes he walked close to the bank of Oukranos and whistled to the sprightly and iridescent fish of that crystal stream, and at other times he paused amidst the whispering rushes and gazed at the great dark wood on the farther side, whose trees came down clear to the water's edge. In former dreams he had seen quaint lumbering buopoths come shyly out of that wood to drink, but now he could not glimpse any. Once in a while he paused to watch a carnivorous fish catch a fishing bird, which it lured to the water by shewing its tempting scales in the sun, and grasped by the beak with its enormous mouth as the winged hunter sought to dart down upon it.\n\nToward evening he mounted a low grassy rise and saw before him flaming in the sunset the thousand gilded spires of Thran. Lofty beyond belief are the alabaster walls of that incredible city, sloping inward toward the top and wrought in one solid piece by what means no man knows, for they are more ancient than memory. Yet lofty as they are with their hundred gates and two hundred turrets, the clustered towers within, all white beneath their golden spires, are loftier still; so that men on the plain around see them soaring into the sky, sometimes shining clear, sometimes caught at the top in tangles of cloud and mist, and sometimes clouded lower down with their utmost pinnacles blazing free above the vapours. And where Thran's gates open on the river are great wharves of marble, with ornate galleons of fragrant cedar and calamander riding gently at anchor, and strange bearded sailors sitting on casks and bales with the hieroglyphs of far places. Landward beyond the walls lies the farm country, where small white cottages dream between little hills, and narrow roads with many stone bridges wind gracefully among streams and gardens.\n\nDown through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvellous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea-tavern he found the captains and seamen he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celepha\u00efs on a great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.\n\nIn the morning Carter boarded the galleon bound for Celepha\u00efs, and sat in the prow as the ropes were cast off and the long sail down to the Cerenerian Sea began. For many leagues the banks were much as they were above Thran, with now and then a curious temple rising on the farther hills toward the right, and a drowsy village on the shore, with steep red roofs and nets spread in the sun. Mindful of his search, Carter questioned all the mariners closely about those whom they had met in the taverns of Celepha\u00efs, asking the names and ways of the strange men with long, narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin noses, and pointed chins who came in dark ships from the north and traded onyx for the carved jade and spun gold and little red singing birds of Celepha\u00efs. Of these men the sailors knew not much, save that they talked but seldom and spread a kind of awe about them.\n\nTheir land, very far away, was called Inganok, and not many people cared to go thither because it was a cold twilight land, and said to be close to unpleasant Leng; although high impassable mountains towered on the side where Leng was thought to lie, so that none might say whether this evil plateau with its horrible stone villages and unmentionable monastery were really there, or whether the rumour were only a fear that timid people felt in the night when those formidable barrier peaks loomed black against a rising moon. Certainly, men reached Leng from very different oceans. Of other boundaries of Inganok those sailors had no notion, nor had they heard of the cold waste and unknown Kadath save from vague unplaced report. And of the marvellous sunset city which Carter sought they knew nothing at all. So the traveller asked no more of far things, but bided his time till he might talk with those strange men from cold and twilight Inganok who are the seed of such gods as carved their features on Ngranek.\n\nLate in the day the galleon reached those bends of the river which traverse the perfumed jungles of Kled. Here Carter wished he might disembark, for in those tropic tangles sleep wondrous palaces of ivory, lone and unbroken, where once dwelt fabulous monarchs of a land whose name is forgotten. Spells of the Elder Ones keep those places unharmed and undecayed, for it is written that there may one day be need of them again; and elephant caravans have glimpsed them from afar by moonlight, though none dares approach them closely because of the guardians to which their wholeness is due. But the ship swept on, and dusk hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked answers to the early fireflies on the banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a memory that it had been. And all through the night that galleon floated on past mysteries unseen and unsuspected. Once a lookout reported fires on the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain said they had better not be looked at too much, since it was highly uncertain just who or what had lit them.\n\nIn the morning the river had broadened out greatly, and Carter saw by the houses along the banks that they were close to the vast trading city of Hlanith on the Cerenerian Sea. Here the walls are of rugged granite, and the houses peakedly fantastic with beamed and plastered gables. The men of Hlanith are more like those of the waking world than any others in dreamland; so that the city is not sought except for barter, but is prized for the solid work of its artisans. The wharves of Hlanith are of oak, and there the galleon made fast while the captain traded in the taverns. Carter also went ashore, and looked curiously upon the rutted streets where wooden ox-carts lumbered and feverish merchants cried their wares vacuously in the bazaars. The sea-taverns were all close to the wharves on cobbled lanes salt with the spray of high tides, and seemed exceedingly ancient with their low black-beamed ceilings and casements of greenish bull's-eye panes. Ancient sailors in those taverns talked much of distant ports, and told many stories of the curious men from twilight Inganok, but had little to add to what the seamen of the galleon had told. Then, at last, after much unloading and loading, the ship set sail once more over the sunset sea, and the high walls and gables of Hlanith grew less as the last golden light of day lent them a wonder and beauty beyond any that men had given them.\n\nTwo nights and two days the galleon sailed over the Cerenerian Sea, sighting no land and speaking but one other vessel. Then near sunset of the second day there loomed up ahead the snowy peak of Aran with its gingko-trees swaying on the lower slopes, and Carter knew that they were come to the land of Ooth-Nargai and the marvellous city of Celepha\u00efs. Swiftly there came into sight the glittering minarets of that fabulous town, and the untarnished marble walls with their bronze statues, and the great stone bridge where Naraxa joins the sea. Then rose the green gentle hills behind the town, with their groves and gardens of asphodels and the small shrines and cottages upon them; and far in the background the purple ridge of the Tanarians, potent and mystical, behind which lay forbidden ways into the waking world and toward other regions of dream.\n\nThe harbour was full of painted galleys, some of which were from the marble cloud-city of Serannian, that lies in ethereal space beyond where the sea meets the sky, and some of which were from more substantial ports on the oceans of dreamland. Among these the steersman threaded his way up to the spice-fragrant wharves, where the galleon made fast in the dusk as the city's million lights began to twinkle out over the water. Ever new seemed this deathless city of vision, for here time has no power to tarnish or destroy. As it has always been is still the turquoise of Nath-Horthath, and the eighty orchid-wreathed priests are the same who builded it ten thousand years ago. Shining still is the bronze of the great gates, nor are the onyx pavements ever worn or broken. And the great bronze statues on the walls look down on merchants and camel drivers older than fable, yet without one grey hair in their forked beards.\n\nCarter did not at once seek out the temple or the palace or the citadel, but stayed by the seaward wall among traders and sailors. And when it was too late for rumours and legends he sought out an ancient tavern he knew well, and rested with dreams of the gods on unknown Kadath whom he sought. The next day he searched all along the quays for some of the strange mariners of Inganok, but was told that none were now in port, their galley not being due from the north for full two weeks. He found, however, one Thorabonian sailor who had been to Inganok and had worked in the onyx quarries of that twilight place; and this sailor said there was certainly a desert to the north of the peopled region, which everybody seemed to fear and shun. The Thorabonian opined that this desert led around the utmost rim of impassable peaks into Leng's horrible plateau, and that this was why men feared it; though he admitted there were other vague tales of evil presences and nameless sentinels. Whether or not this could be the fabled waste wherein unknown Kadath stands he did not know; but it seemed unlikely that those presences and sentinels, if indeed they truly existed, were stationed for naught.\n\nOn the following day Carter walked up the Street of the Pillars to the turquoise temple and talked with the high-priest. Though Nath-Horthath is chiefly worshipped in Celepha\u00efs, all the Great Ones are mentioned in diurnal prayers; and the priest was reasonably versed in their moods. Like Atal in distant Ulthar, he strongly advised against any attempt to see them; declaring that they are testy and capricious, and subject to strange protection from the mindless Other Gods from Outside, whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. Their jealous hiding of the marvellous sunset city shewed clearly that they did not wish Carter to reach it, and it was doubtful how they would regard a guest whose object was to see them and plead before them. No man had ever found Kadath in the past, and it might be just as well if none ever found it in the future. Such rumours as were told about that onyx castle of the Great Ones were not by any means reassuring.\n\nHaving thanked the orchid-crowned high-priest, Carter left the temple and sought the bazaar of the sheep-butchers, where the old chief of Celepha\u00efs' cats dwelt sleek and contented. That grey and dignified being was sunning himself on the onyx pavement, and extended a languid paw as his caller approached. But when Carter repeated the passwords and introductions furnished him by the old cat general of Ulthar, the furry patriarch became very cordial and communicative; and told much of the secret lore known to cats on the seaward slopes of Ooth-Nargai. Best of all, he repeated several things told him furtively by the timid waterfront cats of Celepha\u00efs about the men of Inganok, on whose dark ships no cat will go.\n\nIt seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is not the reason why no cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that Inganok holds shadows which no cat can endure, so that in all that cold twilight realm there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew. Whether it be because of things wafted over the impassable peaks from hypothetical Leng, or because of things filtering down from the chilly desert to the north, none may say; but it remains a fact that in that far land there broods a hint of outer space which cats do not like, and to which they are more sensitive than men. Therefore they will not go on the dark ships that seek the basalt quays of Inganok.\n\nThe old chief of the cats also told him where to find his friend King Kuranes, who in Carter's latter dreams had reigned alternately in the rose-crystal Palace of the Seventy Delights at Celepha\u00efs and in the turreted cloud-castle of sky-floating Serannian. It seems that he could no more find content in those places, but had formed a mighty longing for the English cliffs and downlands of his boyhood; where in little dreaming villages England's old songs hover at evening behind lattice windows, and where grey church towers peep lovely through the verdure of distant valleys. He could not go back to these things in the waking world because his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small tract of such countryside in the region east of the city, where meadows roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot of the Tanarian Hills. There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea, and tried to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and where thirteen generations of his forefathers had first seen the light. And on the coast nearby he had built a little Cornish fishing village with steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had the most English faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear remembered accents of old Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great Norman Abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and with a moss somewhat like Old England's moss. For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstacies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a part.\n\nSo when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek the terraced palace of rose-crystal but walked out the eastern gate and across the daisied fields toward a peaked gable which he glimpsed through the oaks of a park sloping up to the sea-cliffs. And in time he came to a great hedge and a gate with a little brick lodge, and when he rang the bell there hobbled to admit him no robed and anointed lackey of the palace, but a small stubbly old man in a smock who spoke as best he could in the quaint tones of far Cornwall. And Carter walked up the shady path between trees as near as possible to England's trees, and climbed the terraces among gardens set out as in Queen Anne's time. At the door, flanked by stone cats in the old way, he was met by a whiskered butler in suitable livery; and was presently taken to the library where Kuranes, Lord of Ooth-Nargai and the Sky around Serannian, sat pensive in a chair by the window looking on his little sea-coast village and wishing that his old nurse would come in and scold him because he was not ready for that hateful lawn-party at the vicar's, with the carriage waiting and his mother nearly out of patience.\n\nKuranes, clad in a dressing-gown of the sort favoured by London tailors in his youth, rose eagerly to meet his guest; for the sight of an Anglo-Saxon from the waking world was very dear to him, even if it was a Saxon from Boston, Massachusetts, instead of from Cornwall. And for long they talked of old times, having much to say because both were old dreamers and well versed in the wonders of incredible places. Kuranes, indeed, had been out beyond the stars in the ultimate void, and was said to be the only one who had ever returned sane from such a voyage.\n\nAt length Carter brought up the subject of his quest, and asked of his host those questions he had asked of so many others. Kuranes did not know where Kadath was, or the marvellous sunset city; but he did know that the Great Ones were very dangerous creatures to seek out, and that the Other Gods had strange ways of protecting them from impertinent curiosity. He had learned much of the Other Gods in distant parts of space, especially in that region where form does not exist, and coloured gases study the innermost secrets. The violet gas S'ngac had told him terrible things of the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep, and had warned him never to approach the central void where the daemon-sultan Azathoth gnaws hungrily in the dark. Altogether, it was not well to meddle with the Elder Ones; and if they persistently denied all access to the marvellous sunset city, it were better not to seek that city.\n\nKuranes furthermore doubted whether his guest would profit aught by coming to the city even were he to gain it. He himself had dreamed and yearned long years for lovely Celepha\u00efs and the land of Ooth-Nargai, and for the freedom and colour and high experience of life devoid of its chains, conventions, and stupidities. But now that he was come into that city and that land, and was the king thereof, he found the freedom and the vividness all too soon worn out, and monotonous for want of linkage with anything firm in his feelings and memories. He was a king in Ooth-Nargai, but found no meaning therein, and drooped always for the old familiar things of England that had shaped his youth. All his kingdom would he give for the sound of Cornish church bells over the downs, and all the thousand minarets of Celepha\u00efs for the steep homely roofs of the village near his home. So he told his guest that the unknown sunset city might not hold quite the content he sought, and that perhaps it had better remain a glorious and half-remembered dream. For he had visited Carter often in the old waking days, and knew well the lovely New England slopes that had given him birth.\n\nAt the last, he was very certain, the seeker would long only for the early remembered scenes; the glow of Beacon Hill at evening, the tall steeples and winding hill streets of quaint Kingsport, the hoary gambrel roofs of ancient and witch-haunted Arkham, and the blessed miles of meads and valleys where stone walls rambled and white farmhouse gables peeped out from bowers of verdure. These things he told Randolph Carter, but still the seeker held to his purpose. And in the end they parted each with his own conviction, and Carter went back through the bronze gate into Celepha\u00efs and down the Street of the Pillars to the old sea-wall, where he talked more with the mariners of far parts and waited for the dark ship from cold and twilight Inganok, whose strange-faced sailors and onyx-traders had in them the blood of the Great Ones.\n\nOne starlight evening when the Pharos shone splendid over the harbour the longed-for ship put in, and strange-faced sailors and traders appeared one by one and group by group in the ancient taverns along the sea-wall. It was very exciting to see again those living faces so like the godlike features on Ngranek, but Carter did not hasten to speak with the silent seamen. He did not know how much of pride and secrecy and dim supernal memory might fill those children of the Great Ones, and was sure it would not be wise to tell them of his quest or ask too closely of that cold desert stretching north of their twilight land. They talked little with the other folk in those ancient sea-taverns; but would gather in groups in remote corners and sing among themselves the haunting airs of unknown places, or chant long tales to one another in accents alien to the rest of dreamland. And so rare and moving were those airs and tales, that one might guess their wonders from the faces of those who listened, even though the words came to common ears only as strange cadence and obscure melody.\n\nFor a week the strange seamen lingered in the taverns and traded in the bazaars of Celepha\u00efs, and before they sailed Carter had taken passage on their dark ship, telling them that he was an old onyx-miner and wishful to work in their quarries. That ship was very lovely and cunningly wrought, being of teakwood with ebony fittings and traceries of gold, and the cabin in which the traveller lodged had hangings of silk and velvet. One morning at the turn of the tide the sails were raised and the anchor lifted, and as Carter stood on the high stern he saw the sunrise-blazing walls and bronze statues and golden minarets of ageless Celepha\u00efs sink into the distance, and the snowy peak of Mount Aran grow smaller and smaller. By noon there was nothing in sight save the gentle blue of the Cerenerian Sea, with one painted galley afar off bound for that cloud-hung realm of Serannian where the sea meets the sky.\n\nAnd night came with gorgeous stars, and the dark ship steered for Charles' Wain and the Little Bear as they swung slowly round the pole. And the sailors sang strange songs of unknown places, and then stole off one by one to the forecastle while the wistful watchers murmured old chants and leaned over the rail to glimpse the luminous fish playing in bowers beneath the sea. Carter went to sleep at midnight, and rose in the glow of a young morning, marking that the sun seemed farther south than was its wont. And all through that second day he made progress in knowing the men of the ship, getting them little by little to talk of their cold twilight land, of their exquisite onyx city, and of their fear of the high and impassable peaks beyond which Leng was said to be. They told him how sorry they were that no cats would stay in the land of Inganok, and how they thought the hidden nearness of Leng was to blame for it. Only of the stony desert to the north they would not talk. There was something disquieting about that desert, and it was thought expedient not to admit its existence.\n\nOn later days they talked of the quarries in which Carter said he was going to work. There were many of them, for all the city of Inganok was builded of onyx, whilst great polished blocks of it were traded in Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celepha\u00efs, and at home with the merchants of Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron, for the beautiful wares of those fabulous ports. And far to the north, almost in that cold desert whose existence the men of Inganok did not care to admit, there was an unused quarry greater than all the rest; from which had been hewn in forgotten times such prodigious lumps and blocks that the sight of their chiselled vacancies struck terror to all who beheld. Who had mined those incredible blocks, and whither they had been transported, no man might say; but it was thought best not to trouble that quarry, around which such inhuman memories might conceivably cling. So it was left all alone in the twilight, with only the raven and the rumoured shantak-bird to brood on its immensities. When Carter heard of this quarry he was moved to deep thought, for he knew from old tales that the Great Ones' castle atop unknown Kadath is of onyx.\n\nEach day the sun wheeled lower and lower in the sky, and the mists overhead grew thicker and thicker. And in two weeks there was not any sunlight at all, but only a weird grey twilight shining through a dome of eternal cloud by day, and a cold starless phosphorescence from the under side of that cloud by night. On the twentieth day a great jagged rock in the sea was sighted from afar, the first land glimpsed since Aran's snowy peak had dwindled behind the ship. Carter asked the captain the name of that rock, but was told that it had no name and had never been sought by any vessel because of the sounds that came from it at night. And when, after dark, a dull and ceaseless howling arose from that jagged granite place, the traveller was glad that no stop had been made, and that the rock had no name. The seamen prayed and chanted till the noise was out of earshot, and Carter dreamed terrible dreams within dreams in the small hours.\n\nTwo mornings after that there loomed far ahead and to the east a line of great grey peaks whose tops were lost in the changeless clouds of that twilight world. And at the sight of them the sailors sang glad songs, and some knelt down on the deck to pray; so that Carter knew they were come to the land of Inganok and would soon be moored to the basalt quays of the great town bearing that land's name. Toward noon a dark coastline appeared, and before three o'clock there stood out against the north the bulbous domes and fantastic spires of the onyx city. Rare and curious did that archaic city rise above its walls and quays, all of delicate black with scrolls, flutings, and arabesques of inlaid gold. Tall and many-windowed were the houses, and carved on every side with flowers and patterns whose dark symmetries dazzled the eye with a beauty more poignant than light. Some ended in swelling domes that tapered to a point, others in terraced pyramids whereon rose clustered minarets displaying every phase of strangeness and imagination. The walls were low, and pierced by frequent gates, each under a great arch rising high above the general level and capped by the head of a god chiselled with that same skill displayed in the monstrous face on distant Ngranek. On a hill in the centre rose a sixteen-angled tower greater than all the rest and bearing a high pinnacled belfry resting on a flattened dome. This, the seamen said, was the Temple of the Elder Ones, and was ruled by an old high-priest sad with inner secrets.\n\nAt intervals the clang of a strange bell shivered over the onyx city, answered each time by a peal of mystic music made up of horns, viols, and chanting voices. And from a row of tripods on a gallery round the high dome of the temple there burst flares of flame at certain moments; for the priests and people of that city were wise in the primal mysteries, and faithful in keeping the rhythms of the Great Ones as set forth in scrolls older than the Pnakotic Manuscripts. As the ship rode past the great basalt breakwater into the harbour the lesser noises of the city grew manifest, and Carter saw the slaves, sailors, and merchants on the docks. The sailors and merchants were of the strange-faced race of the gods, but the slaves were squat, slant-eyed folk said by rumour to have drifted somehow across or around the impassable peaks from valleys beyond Leng. The wharves reached wide outside the city wall and bore upon them all manner of merchandise from the galleys anchored there, while at one end were great piles of onyx both carved and uncarved awaiting shipment to the far markets of Rinar, Ogrothan, and Celepha\u00efs.\n\nIt was not yet evening when the dark ship anchored beside a jutting quay of stone, and all the sailors and traders filed ashore and through the arched gate into the city. The streets of that city were paved with onyx, and some of them were wide and straight whilst others were crooked and narrow. The houses near the water were lower than the rest, and bore above their curiously arched doorways certain signs of gold said to be in honour of the respective small gods that favoured each. The captain of the ship took Carter to an old sea-tavern where flocked the mariners of quaint countries, and promised that he would next day shew him the wonders of the twilight city, and lead him to the taverns of the onyx-miners by the northern wall. And evening fell, and little bronze lamps were lighted, and the sailors in that tavern sang songs of remote places. But when from its high tower the great bell shivered over the city, and the peal of the horns and viols and voices rose cryptical in answer thereto, all ceased their songs or tales and bowed silent till the last echo died away. For there is a wonder and a strangeness on the twilight city of Inganok, and men fear to be lax in its rites lest a doom and a vengeance lurk unsuspectedly close.\n\nFar in the shadows of that tavern Carter saw a squat form he did not like, for it was unmistakably that of the old slant-eyed merchant he had seen so long before in the taverns of Dylath-Leen, who was reputed to trade with the horrible stone villages of Leng which no healthy folk visit and whose evil fires are seen at night from afar, and even to have dealt with that high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and dwells all alone in a prehistoric stone monastery. This man had seemed to shew a queer gleam of knowing when Carter asked the traders of Dylath-Leen about the cold waste and Kadath; and somehow his presence in dark and haunted Inganok, so close to the wonders of the north, was not a reassuring thing. He slipped wholly out of sight before Carter could speak to him, and sailors later said that he had come with a yak caravan from some point not well determined, bearing the colossal and rich-flavoured eggs of the rumoured shantak-bird to trade for the dexterous jade goblets that merchants brought from Ilarnek.\n\nOn the following morning the ship-captain led Carter through the onyx streets of Inganok, dark under their twilight sky. The inlaid doors and figured house-fronts, carven balconies and crystal-paned oriels, all gleamed with a sombre and polished loveliness; and now and then a plaza would open out with black pillars, colonnades, and the statues of curious beings both human and fabulous. Some of the vistas down long and unbending streets, or through side alleys and over bulbous domes, spires, and arabesqued roofs, were weird and beautiful beyond words; and nothing was more splendid than the massive height of the great central Temple of the Elder Ones with its sixteen carven sides, its flattened dome, and its lofty pinnacled belfry, overtopping all else, and majestic whatever its foreground. And always to the east, far beyond the city walls and the leagues of pasture land, rose the gaunt grey sides of those topless and impassable peaks across which hideous Leng was said to lie.\n\nThe captain took Carter to the mighty temple, which is set with its walled garden in a great round plaza whence the streets go as spokes from a wheel's hub. The seven arched gates of that garden, each having over it a carven face like those on the city's gates, are always open; and the people roam reverently at will down the tiled paths and through the little lanes lined with grotesque termini and the shrines of modest gods. And there are fountains, pools, and basins there to reflect the frequent blaze of the tripods on the high balcony, all of onyx and having in them small luminous fish taken by divers from the lower bowers of ocean. When the deep clang from the temple's belfry shivers over the garden and the city, and the answer of the horns and viols and voices peals out from the seven lodges by the garden gates, there issue from the seven doors of the temple long columns of masked and hooded priests in black, bearing at arm's length before them great golden bowls from which a curious steam rises. And all the seven columns strut peculiarly in single file, legs thrown far forward without bending the knees, down the walks that lead to the seven lodges, wherein they disappear and do not appear again. It is said that subterrene paths connect the lodges with the temple, and that the long files of priests return through them; nor is it unwhispered that deep flights of onyx steps go down to mysteries that are never told. But only a few are those who hint that the priests in the masked and hooded columns are not human priests.\n\nCarter did not enter the temple, because none but the Veiled King is permitted to do that. But before he left the garden the hour of the bell came, and he heard the shivering clang deafeningly above him, and the wailing of the horns and viols and voices loud from the lodges by the gates. And down the seven great walks stalked the long files of bowl-bearing priests in their singular way, giving to the traveller a fear which human priests do not often give. When the last of them had vanished he left that garden, noting as he did so a spot on the pavement over which the bowls had passed. Even the ship-captain did not like that spot, and hurried him on toward the hill whereon the Veiled King's palace rises many-domed and marvellous.\n\nThe ways to the onyx palace are steep and narrow, all but that broad curving one where the king and his companions ride on yaks or in yak-drawn chariots. Carter and his guide climbed up an alley that was all steps, between inlaid walls bearing strange signs in gold, and under balconies and oriels whence sometimes floated soft strains of music or breaths of exotic fragrance. Always ahead loomed those titan walls, mighty buttresses, and clustered and bulbous domes for which the Veiled King's palace is famous; and at length they passed under a great black arch and emerged in the gardens of the monarch's pleasure. There Carter paused in faintness at so much of beauty; for the onyx terraces and colonnaded walks, the gay parterres and delicate flowering trees espaliered to golden lattices, the brazen urns and tripods with cunning bas-reliefs, the pedestalled and almost breathing statues of veined black marble, the basalt-bottomed lagoons and tiled fountains with luminous fish, the tiny temples of iridescent singing birds atop carven columns, the marvellous scrollwork of the great bronze gates, and the blossoming vines trained along every inch of the polished walls all joined to form a sight whose loveliness was beyond reality, and half-fabulous even in the land of dream. There it shimmered like a vision under that grey twilight sky, with the domed and fretted magnificence of the palace ahead, and the fantastic silhouette of the distant impassable peaks on the right. And ever the small birds and the fountains sang, while the perfume of rare blossoms spread like a veil over that incredible garden. No other human presence was there, and Carter was glad it was so. Then they turned and descended again the onyx alley of steps, for the palace itself no visitor may enter; and it is not well to look too long and steadily at the great central dome, since it is said to house the archaic father of all the rumoured shantak-birds, and to send out queer dreams to the curious.\n\nAfter that the captain took Carter to the north quarter of the town, near the Gate of the Caravans, where are the taverns of the yak-merchants and the onyx-miners. And there, in a low-ceiled inn of quarrymen, they said farewell; for business called the captain whilst Carter was eager to talk with miners about the north. There were many men in that inn, and the traveller was not long in speaking to some of them; saying that he was an old miner of onyx, and anxious to know somewhat of Inganok's quarries. But all that he learnt was not much more than he knew before, for the miners were timid and evasive about the cold desert to the north and the quarry that no man visits. They had fears of fabled emissaries from around the mountains where Leng is said to lie, and of evil presences and nameless sentinels far north among the scattered rocks. And they whispered also that the rumoured shantak-birds are no wholesome things; it being indeed for the best that no man has ever truly seen one (for that fabled father of shantaks in the king's dome is fed in the dark).\n\nThe next day, saying that he wished to look over all the various mines for himself and to visit the scattered farms and quaint onyx villages of Inganok, Carter hired a yak and stuffed great leathern saddle-bags for a journey. Beyond the Gate of the Caravans the road lay straight betwixt tilled fields, with many odd farmhouses crowned by low domes. At some of these houses the seeker stopped to ask questions; once finding a host so austere and reticent, and so full of an unplaced majesty like to that in the huge features on Ngranek, that he felt certain he had come at last upon one of the Great Ones themselves, or upon one with full nine-tenths of their blood, dwelling amongst men. And to that austere and reticent cotter he was careful to speak very well of the gods, and to praise all the blessings they had ever accorded him.\n\nThat night Carter camped in a roadside meadow beneath a great lygath-tree to which he tied his yak, and in the morning resumed his northward pilgrimage. At about ten o'clock he reached the small-domed village of Urg, where traders rest and miners tell their tales, and paused in its taverns till noon. It is here that the great caravan road turns west toward Selarn, but Carter kept on north by the quarry road. All the afternoon he followed that rising road, which was somewhat narrower than the great highway, and which now led through a region with more rocks than tilled fields. And by evening the low hills on his left had risen into sizeable black cliffs, so that he knew he was close to the mining country. All the while the great gaunt sides of the impassable mountains towered afar off at his right, and the farther he went, the worse tales he heard of them from the scattered farmers and traders and drivers of lumbering onyx-carts along the way.\n\nOn the second night he camped in the shadow of a large black crag, tethering his yak to a stake driven in the ground. He observed the greater phosphorescence of the clouds at this northerly point, and more than once thought he saw dark shapes outlined against them. And on the third morning he came in sight of the first onyx quarry, and greeted the men who there laboured with picks and chisels. Before evening he had passed eleven quarries; the land being here given over altogether to onyx cliffs and boulders, with no vegetation at all, but only great rocky fragments scattered about a floor of black earth, with the grey impassable peaks always rising gaunt and sinister on his right. The third night he spent in a camp of quarry men whose flickering fires cast weird reflections on the polished cliffs to the west. And they sang many songs and told many tales, shewing such strange knowledge of the olden days and the habits of gods that Carter could see they held many latent memories of their sires the Great Ones. They asked him whither he went, and cautioned him not to go too far to the north; but he replied that he was seeking new cliffs of onyx, and would take no more risks than were common among prospectors. In the morning he bade them adieu and rode on into the darkening north, where they had warned him he would find the feared and unvisited quarry whence hands older than men's hands had wrenched prodigious blocks. But he did not like it when, turning back to wave a last farewell, he thought he saw approaching the camp that squat and evasive old merchant with slanting eyes, whose conjectured traffick with Leng was the gossip of distant Dylath-Leen.\n\nAfter two more quarries the inhabited part of Inganok seemed to end, and the road narrowed to a steeply rising yak-path among forbidding black cliffs. Always on the right towered the gaunt and distant peaks, and as Carter climbed farther and farther into this untraversed realm he found it grew darker and colder. Soon he perceived that there were no prints of feet or hooves on the black path beneath, and realised that he was indeed come into strange and deserted ways of elder time. Once in a while a raven would croak far overhead, and now and then a flapping behind some vast rock would make him think uncomfortably of the rumoured shantak-bird. But in the main he was alone with his shaggy steed, and it troubled him to observe that this excellent yak become more and more reluctant to advance, and more and more disposed to snort affrightedly at any small noise along the route.\n\nThe path now contracted between sable and glistening walls, and began to display an even greater steepness than before. It was a bad footing, and the yak often slipped on the stony fragments strown thickly about. In two hours Carter saw ahead a definite crest, beyond which was nothing but dull grey sky, and blessed the prospect of a level or downward course. To reach this crest, however, was no easy task; for the way had grown nearly perpendicular, and was perilous with loose black gravel and small stones. Eventually Carter dismounted and led his dubious yak; pulling very hard when the animal balked or stumbled, and keeping his own footing as best he might. Then suddenly he came to the top and saw beyond, and gasped at what he saw.\n\nThe path indeed led straight ahead and slightly down, with the same lines of high natural walls as before; but on the left hand there opened out a monstrous space, vast acres in extent, where some archaic power had riven and rent the native cliffs of onyx in the form of a giants' quarry. Far back into the solid precipice ran that Cyclopean gouge, and deep down within earth's bowels its lower delvings yawned. It was no quarry of man, and the concave sides were scarred with great squares yards wide which told of the size of the blocks once hewn by nameless hands and chisels. High over its jagged rim huge ravens flapped and croaked, and vague whirrings in the unseen depths told of bats or urhags or less mentionable presences haunting the endless blackness. There Carter stood in the narrow way amidst the twilight with the rocky path sloping down before him; tall onyx cliffs on his right that led on as far as he could see, and tall cliffs on the left chopped off just ahead to make that terrible and unearthly quarry.\n\nAll at once the yak uttered a cry and burst from his control, leaping past him and darting on in a panic till it vanished down the narrow slope toward the north. Stones kicked by its flying hooves fell over the brink of the quarry and lost themselves in the dark without any sound of striking bottom; but Carter ignored the perils of that scanty path as he raced breathlessly after the flying steed. Soon the left-hand cliffs resumed their course, making the way once more a narrow lane; and still the traveller leaped on after the yak whose great wide prints told of its desperate flight.\n\nOnce he thought he heard the hoofbeats of the frightened beast, and doubled his speed from this encouragement. He was covering miles, and little by little the way was broadening in front till he knew he must soon emerge on the cold and dreaded desert to the north. The gaunt grey flanks of the distant impassable peaks were again visible above the right-hand crags, and ahead were the rocks and boulders of an open space which was clearly a foretaste of the dark and limitless plain. And once more those hoofbeats sounded in his ears, plainer than before, but this time giving terror instead of encouragement because he realised that they were not the frightened hoofbeats of his fleeing yak. These beats were ruthless and purposeful, and they were behind him.\n\nCarter's pursuit of the yak became now a flight from an unseen thing, for though he dared not glance over his shoulder he felt that the presence behind him could be nothing wholesome or mentionable. His yak must have heard or felt it first, and he did not like to ask himself whether it had followed him from the haunts of men or had floundered up out of that black quarry pit. Meanwhile the cliffs had been left behind, so that the oncoming night fell over a great waste of sand and spectral rocks wherein all paths were lost. He could not see the hoofprints of his yak, but always from behind him there came that detestable clopping; mingled now and then with what he fancied were titanic flappings and whirrings. That he was losing ground seemed unhappily clear to him, and he knew he was hopelessly lost in this broken and blasted desert of meaningless rocks and untravelled sands. Only those remote and impassable peaks on the right gave him any sense of direction, and even they were less clear as the grey twilight waned and the sickly phosphorescence of the clouds took its place.\n\nThen dim and misty in the darkling north before him he glimpsed a terrible thing. He had thought it for some moments a range of black mountains, but now he saw it was something more. The phosphorescence of the brooding clouds shewed it plainly, and even silhouetted parts of it as low vapours glowed behind. How distant it was he could not tell, but it must have been very far. It was thousands of feet high, stretching in a great concave arc from the grey impassable peaks to the unimagined westward spaces, and had once indeed been a ridge of mighty onyx hills. But now those hills were hills no more, for some hand greater than man's had touched them. Silent they squatted there atop the world like wolves or ghouls, crowned with clouds and mists and guarding the secrets of the north forever. All in a great half circle they squatted, those dog-like mountains carven into monstrous watching statues, and their right hands were raised in menace against mankind.\n\nIt was only the flickering light of the clouds that made their mitred double heads seem to move, but as Carter stumbled on he saw arise from their shadowy laps great forms whose motions were no delusion. Winged and whirring, those forms grew larger each moment, and the traveller knew his stumbling was at an end. They were not any birds or bats known elsewhere on earth or in dreamland, for they were larger than elephants and had heads like a horse's. Carter knew that they must be the shantak-birds of ill rumour, and wondered no more what evil guardians and nameless sentinels made men avoid the boreal rock desert. And as he stopped in final resignation he dared at last to look behind him; where indeed was trotting the squat slant-eyed trader of evil legend, grinning astride a lean yak and leading on a noxious horde of leering shantaks to whose wings still clung the rime and nitre of the nether pits.\n\nTrapped though he was by fabulous and hippocephalic winged nightmares that pressed around in great unholy circles, Randolph Carter did not lose consciousness. Lofty and horrible those titan gargoyles towered above him, while the slant-eyed merchant leaped down from his yak and stood grinning before the captive. Then the man motioned Carter to mount one of the repugnant shantaks, helping him up as his judgment struggled with his loathing. It was hard work ascending, for the shantak-bird has scales instead of feathers, and those scales are very slippery. Once he was seated, the slant-eyed man hopped up behind him, leaving the lean yak to be led away northward toward the ring of carven mountains by one of the incredible bird colossi.\n\nThere now followed a hideous whirl through frigid space, endlessly up and eastward toward the gaunt grey flanks of those impassable mountains beyond which Leng was said to lie. Far above the clouds they flew, till at last there lay beneath them those fabled summits which the folk of Inganok have never seen, and which lie always in high vortices of gleaming mist. Carter beheld them very plainly as they passed below, and saw upon their topmost peaks strange caves which made him think of those on Ngranek; but he did not question his captor about these things when he noticed that both the man and the horse-headed shantak appeared oddly fearful of them, hurrying past nervously and shewing great tension until they were left far in the rear.\n\nThe shantak now flew lower, revealing beneath the canopy of cloud a grey barren plain whereon at great distances shone little feeble fires. As they descended there appeared at intervals lone huts of granite and bleak stone villages whose tiny windows glowed with pallid light. And there came from those huts and villages a shrill droning of pipes and a nauseous rattle of crotala which proved at once that Inganok's people are right in their geographick rumours. For travellers have heard such sounds before, and know that they float only from the cold desert plateau which healthy folk never visit; that haunted place of evil and mystery which is Leng.\n\nAround the feeble fires dark forms were dancing, and Carter was curious as to what manner of beings they might be; for no healthy folk have ever been to Leng, and the place is known only by its fires and stone huts as seen from afar. Very slowly and awkwardly did those forms leap, and with an insane twisting and bending not good to behold; so that Carter did not wonder at the monstrous evil imputed to them by vague legend, or the fear in which all dreamland holds their abhorrent frozen plateau. As the shantak flew lower, the repulsiveness of the dancers became tinged with a certain hellish familiarity; and the prisoner kept straining his eyes and racking his memory for clues to where he had seen such creatures before.\n\nThey leaped as though they had hooves instead of feet, and seemed to wear a sort of wig or headpiece with small horns. Of other clothing they had none, but most of them were quite furry. Behind they had dwarfish tails, and when they glanced upward he saw the excessive width of their mouths. Then he knew what they were, and that they did not wear any wigs or headpieces after all. For the cryptic folk of Leng were of one race with the uncomfortable merchants of the black galleys that traded rubies at Dylath-Leen; those not quite human merchants who are the slaves of the monstrous moon-things! They were indeed the same dark folk who had shanghaied Carter on their noisome galley so long ago, and whose kith he had seen driven in herds about the unclean wharves of that accursed lunar city, with the leaner ones toiling and the fatter ones taken away in crates for other needs of their polypous and amorphous masters. Now he saw where such ambiguous creatures came from, and shuddered at the thought that Leng must be known to these formless abominations from the moon.\n\nBut the shantak flew on past the fires and the stone huts and the less than human dancers, and soared over sterile hills of grey granite and dim wastes of rock and ice and snow. Day came, and the phosphorescence of low clouds gave place to the misty twilight of that northern world, and still the vile bird winged meaningly through the cold and silence. At times the slant-eyed man talked with his steed in a hateful and guttural language, and the shantak would answer with tittering tones that rasped like the scratching of ground glass. All this while the land was getting higher, and finally they came to a windswept tableland which seemed the very roof of a blasted and tenantless world. There, all alone in the hush and the dusk and the cold, rose the uncouth stones of a squat windowless building, around which a circle of crude monoliths stood. In all this arrangement there was nothing human, and Carter surmised from old tales that he was indeed come to that most dreadful and legendary of all places, the remote and prehistoric monastery wherein dwells uncompanioned the high-priest not to be described, which wears a yellow silken mask over its face and prays to the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.\n\nThe loathsome bird now settled to the ground, and the slant-eyed man hopped down and helped his captive alight. Of the purpose of his seizure Carter now felt very sure; for clearly the slant-eyed merchant was an agent of the darker powers, eager to drag before his masters a mortal whose presumption had aimed at the finding of unknown Kadath and the saying of a prayer before the faces of the Great Ones in their onyx castle. It seemed likely that this merchant had caused his former capture by the slaves of the moon-things in Dylath-Leen, and that he now meant to do what the rescuing cats had baffled; taking the victim to some dread rendezvous with monstrous Nyarlathotep and telling with what boldness the seeking of unknown Kadath had been tried. Leng and the cold waste north of Inganok must be close to the Other Gods, and there the passes to Kadath are well guarded.\n\nThe slant-eyed man was small, but the great hippocephalic bird was there to see he was obeyed; so Carter followed where he led, and passed within the circle of standing rocks and into the low arched doorway of that windowless stone monastery. There were no lights inside, but the evil merchant lit a small clay lamp bearing morbid bas-reliefs and prodded his prisoner on through mazes of narrow winding corridors. On the walls of the corridors were painted frightful scenes older than history, and in a style unknown to the archaeologists of earth. After countless aeons their pigments were brilliant still, for the cold and dryness of hideous Leng keep alive many primal things. Carter saw them fleetingly in the rays of that dim and moving lamp, and shuddered at the tale they told.\n\nThrough those archaic frescoes Leng's annals stalked; and the horned, hooved, and wide-mouthed almost-humans danced evilly amidst forgotten cities. There were scenes of old wars, wherein Leng's almost-humans fought with the bloated purple spiders of the neighbouring vales; and there were scenes also of the coming of the black galleys from the moon, and of the submission of Leng's people to the polypous and amorphous blasphemies that hopped and floundered and wriggled out of them. Those slippery greyish-white blasphemies they worshipped as gods, nor ever complained when scores of their best and fatted males were taken away in the black galleys. The monstrous moon-beasts made their camp on a jagged isle in the sea, and Carter could tell from the frescoes that this was none other than the lone nameless rock he had seen when sailing to Inganok; that grey accursed rock which Inganok's seamen shun, and from which vile howlings reverberate all through the night.\n\nAnd in those frescoes was shewn the great seaport and capital of the almost-humans; proud and pillared betwixt the cliffs and the basalt wharves, and wondrous with high fanes and carven places. Great gardens and columned streets led from the cliffs and from each of the six sphinx-crowned gates to a vast central plaza, and in that plaza was a pair of winged colossal lions guarding the top of a subterrene staircase. Again and again were those huge winged lions shewn, their mighty flanks of diorite glistening in the grey twilight of the day and the cloudy phosphorescence of the night. And as Carter stumbled past their frequent and repeated pictures it came to him at last what indeed they were, and what city it was that the almost-humans had ruled so anciently before the coming of the black galleys. There could be no mistake, for the legends of dreamland are generous and profuse. Indubitably that primal city was no less a place than storied Sarkomand, whose ruins had bleached for a million years before the first true human saw the light, and whose twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead down from dreamland to the Great Abyss.\n\nOther views shewed the gaunt grey peaks dividing Leng from Inganok, and the monstrous shantak-birds that build nests on the ledges half way up. And they shewed likewise the curious caves near the very topmost pinnacles, and how even the boldest of the shantaks fly screaming away from them. Carter had seen those caves when he passed over them, and had noticed their likeness to the caves on Ngranek. Now he knew that the likeness was more than a chance one, for in these pictures were shewn their fearsome denizens; and those bat-wings, curving horns, barbed tails, prehensile paws, and rubbery bodies were not strange to him. He had met those silent, flitting, and clutching creatures before; those mindless guardians of the Great Abyss whom even the Great Ones fear, and who own not Nyarlathotep but hoary Nodens as their lord. For they were the dreaded night-gaunts, who never laugh or smile because they have no faces, and who flop unendingly in the dark betwixt the Vale of Pnath and the passes to the outer world.\n\nThe slant-eyed merchant had now prodded Carter into a great domed space whose walls were carved in shocking bas-reliefs, and whose centre held a gaping circular pit surrounded by six malignly stained stone altars in a ring. There was no light in this vast and evil-smelling crypt, and the small lamp of the sinister merchant shone so feebly that one could grasp details only little by little. At the farther end was a high stone dais reached by five steps; and there on a golden throne sat a lumpish figure robed in yellow silk figured with red and having a yellow silken mask over its face. To this being the slant-eyed man made certain signs with his hands, and the lurker in the dark replied by raising a disgustingly carven flute of ivory in silk-covered paws and blowing certain loathsome sounds from beneath its flowing yellow mask. This colloquy went on for some time, and to Carter there was something sickeningly familiar in the sound of that flute and the stench of the malodorous place. It made him think of a frightful red-litten city and of the revolting procession that once filed through it; of that, and of an awful climb through lunar countryside beyond, before the rescuing rush of earth's friendly cats. He knew that the creature on the dais was without doubt the high-priest not to be described, of which legend whispers such fiendish and abnormal possibilities, but he feared to think just what that abhorred high-priest might be.\n\nThen the figured silk slipped a trifle from one of the greyish-white paws, and Carter knew what the noisome high-priest was. And in that hideous second stark fear drove him to something his reason would never have dared to attempt, for in all his shaken consciousness there was room only for one frantic will to escape from what squatted on that golden throne. He knew that hopeless labyrinths of stone lay betwixt him and the cold tableland outside, and that even on that tableland the noxious shantak still waited; yet in spite of all this there was in his mind only the instant need to get away from that wriggling, silk-robed monstrosity.\n\nThe slant-eyed man had set his curious lamp upon one of the high and wickedly stained altar-stones by the pit, and had moved forward somewhat to talk to the high-priest with his hands. Carter, hitherto wholly passive, now gave that man a terrific push with all the wild strength of fear, so that the victim toppled at once into that gaping well which rumour holds to reach down to the hellish Vaults of Zin where gugs hunt ghasts in the dark. In almost the same second he seized the lamp from the altar and darted out into the frescoed labyrinths, racing this way and that as chance determined and trying not to think of the stealthy padding of shapeless paws on the stones behind him, or of the silent wrigglings and crawlings which must be going on back there in lightless corridors.\n\nAfter a few moments he regretted his thoughtless haste, and wished he had tried to follow backward the frescoes he had passed on the way in. True, they were so confused and duplicated that they could not have done him much good, but he wished none the less he had made the attempt. Those he now saw were even more horrible than those he had seen then, and he knew he was not in the corridors leading outside. In time he became quite sure he was not followed, and slackened his pace somewhat; but scarce had he breathed in half-relief when a new peril beset him. His lamp was waning, and he would soon be in pitch blackness with no means of sight or guidance.\n\nWhen the light was all gone he groped slowly in the dark, and prayed to the Great Ones for such help as they might afford. At times he felt the stone floor sloping up or down, and once he stumbled over a step for which no reason seemed to exist. The farther he went the damper it seemed to be, and when he was able to feel a junction or the mouth of a side passage he always chose the way which sloped downward the least. He believed, though, that his general course was down; and the vault-like smell and incrustations on the greasy walls and floor alike warned him he was burrowing deep in Leng's unwholesome tableland. But there was not any warning of the thing which came at last; only the thing itself with its terror and shock and breath-taking chaos. One moment he was groping slowly over the slippery floor of an almost level place, and the next he was shooting dizzily downward in the dark through a burrow which must have been well-nigh vertical.\n\nOf the length of that hideous sliding he could never be sure, but it seemed to take hours of delirious nausea and ecstatic frenzy. Then he realised he was still, with the phosphorescent clouds of a northern night shining sickly above him. All around were crumbling walls and broken columns, and the pavement on which he lay was pierced by straggling grass and wrenched asunder by frequent shrubs and roots. Behind him a basalt cliff rose topless and perpendicular; its dark side sculptured into repellent scenes, and pierced by an arched and carven entrance to the inner blacknesses out of which he had come. Ahead stretched double rows of pillars, and the fragments and pedestals of pillars, that spoke of a broad and bygone street; and from the urns and basins along the way he knew it had been a great street of gardens. Far off at its end the pillars spread to mark a vast round plaza, and in that open circle there loomed gigantic under the lurid night clouds a pair of monstrous things. Huge winged lions of diorite they were, with blackness and shadow between them. Full twenty feet they reared their grotesque and unbroken heads, and snarled derisive on the ruins around them. And Carter knew right well what they must be, for legend tells of only one such twain. They were the changeless guardians of the Great Abyss, and these dark ruins were in truth primordial Sarkomand.\n\nCarter's first act was to close and barricade the archway in the cliff with fallen blocks and odd debris that lay around. He wished no follower from Leng's hateful monastery, for along the way ahead would lurk enough of other dangers. Of how to get from Sarkomand to the peopled parts of dreamland he knew nothing at all; nor could he gain much by descending to the grottoes of the ghouls, since he knew they were no better informed than he. The three ghouls which had helped him through the city of gugs to the outer world had not known how to reach Sarkomand in their journey back, but had planned to ask old traders in Dylath-Leen. He did not like to think of going again to the subterrene world of gugs and risking once more that hellish tower of Koth with its Cyclopean steps leading to the enchanted wood, yet he felt he might have to try this course if all else failed. Over Leng's plateau past the lone monastery he dared not go unaided; for the high-priest's emissaries must be many, while at the journey's end there would no doubt be the shantaks and perhaps other things to deal with. If he could get a boat he might sail back to Inganok past the jagged and hideous rock in the sea, for the primal frescoes in the monastery labyrinth had shewn that this frightful place lies not far from Sarkomand's basalt quays. But to find a boat in this aeon-deserted city was no probable thing, and it did not appear likely that he could ever make one.\n\nSuch were the thoughts of Randolph Carter when a new impression began beating upon his mind. All this while there had stretched before him the great corpse-like width of fabled Sarkomand with its black broken pillars and crumbling sphinx-crowned gates and titan stones and monstrous winged lions against the sickly glow of those luminous night clouds. Now he saw far ahead and on the right a glow that no clouds could account for, and knew he was not alone in the silence of that dead city. The glow rose and fell fitfully, flickering with a greenish tinge which did not reassure the watcher. And when he crept closer, down the littered street and through some narrow gaps between tumbled walls, he perceived that it was a campfire near the wharves with many vague forms clustered darkly around it, and a lethal odour hanging heavily over all. Beyond was the oily lapping of the harbour water with a great ship riding at anchor, and Carter paused in stark terror when he saw that the ship was indeed one of the dreaded black galleys from the moon.\n\nThen, just as he was about to creep back from that detestable flame, he saw a stirring among the vague dark forms and heard a peculiar and unmistakable sound. It was the frightened meeping of a ghoul, and in a moment it had swelled to a veritable chorus of anguish. Secure as he was in the shadow of monstrous ruins, Carter allowed his curiosity to conquer his fear, and crept forward again instead of retreating. Once in crossing an open street he wriggled worm-like on his stomach, and in another place he had to rise to his feet to avoid making a noise among heaps of fallen marble. But always he succeeded in avoiding discovery, so that in a short time he had found a spot behind a titan pillar whence he could watch the whole green-litten scene of action. There, around a hideous fire fed by the obnoxious stems of lunar fungi, there squatted a stinking circle of the toad-like moon-beasts and their almost-human slaves. Some of these slaves were heating curious iron spears in the leaping flames, and at intervals applying their white-hot points to three tightly trussed prisoners that lay writhing before the leaders of the party. From the motions of their tentacles Carter could see that the blunt-snouted moon-beasts were enjoying the spectacle hugely, and vast was his horror when he suddenly recognised the frantic meeping and knew that the tortured ghouls were none other than the faithful trio which had guided him safely from the abyss and had thereafter set out from the enchanted wood to find Sarkomand and the gate to their native deeps.\n\nThe number of malodorous moon-beasts about that greenish fire was very great, and Carter saw that he could do nothing now to save his former allies. Of how the ghouls had been captured he could not guess; but fancied that the grey toad-like blasphemies had heard them inquire in Dylath-Leen concerning the way to Sarkomand and had not wished them to approach so closely the hateful plateau of Leng and the high-priest not to be described. For a moment he pondered on what he ought to do, and recalled how near he was to the gate of the ghouls' black kingdom. Clearly it was wisest to creep east to the plaza of twin lions and descend at once to the gulf, where assuredly he would meet no horrors worse than those above, and where he might soon find ghouls eager to rescue their brethren and perhaps to wipe out the moon-beasts from the black galley. It occurred to him that the portal, like other gates to the abyss, might be guarded by flocks of night-gaunts; but he did not fear these faceless creatures now. He had learned that they are bound by solemn treaties with the ghouls, and the ghoul which was Pickman had taught him how to glibber a password they understood.\n\nSo Carter began another silent crawl through the ruins, edging slowly toward the great central plaza and the winged lions. It was ticklish work, but the moon-beasts were pleasantly busy and did not hear the slight noises which he twice made by accident among the scattered stones. At last he reached the open space and picked his way among the stunted trees and briers that had grown up therein. The gigantic lions loomed terrible above him in the sickly glow of the phosphorescent night clouds, but he manfully persisted toward them and presently crept round to their faces, knowing it was on that side he would find the mighty darkness which they guard. Ten feet apart crouched the mocking-faced beasts of diorite, brooding on Cyclopean pedestals whose sides were chiselled into fearsome bas-reliefs. Betwixt them was a tiled court with a central space which had once been railed with balusters of onyx. Midway in this space a black well opened, and Carter soon saw that he had indeed reached the yawning gulf whose crusted and mouldy stone steps lead down to the crypts of nightmare.\n\nTerrible is the memory of that dark descent, in which hours wore themselves away whilst Carter wound sightlessly round and round down a fathomless spiral of steep and slippery stairs. So worn and narrow were the steps, and so greasy with the ooze of inner earth, that the climber never quite knew when to expect a breathless fall and hurtling down to the ultimate pits; and he was likewise uncertain just when or how the guardian night-gaunts would suddenly pounce upon him, if indeed there were any stationed in this primeval passage. All about him was a stifling odour of nether gulfs, and he felt that the air of these choking depths was not made for mankind. In time he became very numb and somnolent, moving more from automatic impulse than from reasoned will; nor did he realise any change when he stopped moving altogether as something quietly seized him from behind. He was flying very rapidly through the air before a malevolent tickling told him that the rubbery night-gaunts had performed their duty.\n\nAwaked to the fact that he was in the cold, damp clutch of the faceless flutterers, Carter remembered the password of the ghouls and glibbered it as loudly as he could amidst the wind and chaos of flight. Mindless though night-gaunts are said to be, the effect was instantaneous; for all tickling stopped at once, and the creatures hastened to shift their captive to a more comfortable position. Thus encouraged, Carter ventured some explanations; telling of the seizure and torture of three ghouls by the moon-beasts, and of the need of assembling a party to rescue them. The night-gaunts, though inarticulate, seemed to understand what was said; and shewed greater haste and purpose in their flight. Suddenly the dense blackness gave place to the grey twilight of inner earth, and there opened up ahead one of those flat sterile plains on which ghouls love to squat and gnaw. Scattered tombstones and osseous fragments told of the denizens of that place; and as Carter gave a loud meep of urgent summons, a score of burrows emptied forth their leathery, dog-like tenants. The night-gaunts now flew low and set their passenger upon his feet, afterward withdrawing a little and forming a hunched semicircle on the ground while the ghouls greeted the newcomer.\n\nCarter glibbered his message rapidly and explicitly to the grotesque company, and four of them at once departed through different burrows to spread the news to others and gather such troops as might be available for the rescue. After a long wait a ghoul of some importance appeared, and made significant signs to the night-gaunts, causing two of the latter to fly off into the dark. Thereafter there were constant accessions to the hunched flock of night-gaunts on the plain, till at length the slimy soil was fairly black with them. Meanwhile fresh ghouls crawled out of the burrows one by one, all glibbering excitedly and forming in crude battle array not far from the huddled night-gaunts. In time there appeared that proud and influential ghoul which was once the artist Richard Pickman of Boston, and to him Carter glibbered a very full account of what had occurred. The erstwhile Pickman, surprised to greet his ancient friend again, seemed very much impressed, and held a conference with other chiefs a little apart from the growing throng.\n\nFinally, after scanning the ranks with care, the assembled chiefs all meeped in unison and began glibbering orders to the crowds of ghouls and night-gaunts. A large detachment of the horned flyers vanished at once, while the rest grouped themselves two by two on their knees with extended fore legs, awaiting the approach of the ghouls one by one. As each ghoul reached the pair of night-gaunts to which he was assigned, he was taken up and borne away into the blackness; till at last the whole throng had vanished save for Carter, Pickman, and the other chiefs, and a few pairs of night-gaunts. Pickman explained that night-gaunts are the advance guard and battle steeds of the ghouls, and that the army was issuing forth to Sarkomand to deal with the moon-beasts. Then Carter and the ghoulish chiefs approached the waiting bearers and were taken up by the damp, slippery paws. Another moment and all were whirling in wind and darkness; endlessly up, up, up to the gate of the winged lions and the spectral ruins of primal Sarkomand.\n\nWhen, after a great interval, Carter saw again the sickly light of Sarkomand's nocturnal sky, it was to behold the great central plaza swarming with militant ghouls and night-gaunts. Day, he felt sure, must be almost due; but so strong was the army that no surprise of the enemy would be needed. The greenish flare near the wharves still glimmered faintly, though the absence of ghoulish meeping shewed that the torture of the prisoners was over for the nonce. Softly glibbering directions to their steeds, and to the flock of riderless night-gaunts ahead, the ghouls presently rose in wide whirring columns and swept on over the bleak ruins toward the evil flame. Carter was now beside Pickman in the front rank of ghouls, and saw as they approached the noisome camp that the moon-beasts were totally unprepared. The three prisoners lay bound and inert beside the fire, while their toad-like captors slumped drowsily about in no certain order. The almost-human slaves were asleep, even the sentinels shirking a duty which in this realm must have seemed to them merely perfunctory.\n\nThe final swoop of the night-gaunts and mounted ghouls was very sudden, each of the greyish toad-like blasphemies and their almost-human slaves being seized by a group of night-gaunts before a sound was made. The moon-beasts, of course, were voiceless; and even the slaves had little chance to scream before rubbery paws choked them into silence. Horrible were the writhings of those great jellyish abnormalities as the sardonic night-gaunts clutched them, but nothing availed against the strength of those black prehensile talons. When a moon-beast writhed too violently, a night-gaunt would seize and pull its quivering pink tentacles; which seemed to hurt so much that the victim would cease its struggles. Carter expected to see much slaughter, but found that the ghouls were far subtler in their plans. They glibbered certain simple orders to the night-gaunts which held the captives, trusting the rest to instinct; and soon the hapless creatures were borne silently away into the Great Abyss, to be distributed impartially amongst the bholes, gugs, ghasts, and other dwellers in darkness whose modes of nourishment are not painless to their chosen victims. Meanwhile the three bound ghouls had been released and consoled by their conquering kinsfolk, whilst various parties searched the neighbourhood for possible remaining moon-beasts, and boarded the evil-smelling black galley at the wharf to make sure that nothing had escaped the general defeat. Surely enough, the capture had been thorough; for not a sign of further life could the victors detect. Carter, anxious to preserve a means of access to the rest of dreamland, urged them not to sink the anchored galley; and this request was freely granted out of gratitude for his act in reporting the plight of the captured trio. On the ship were found some very curious objects and decorations, some of which Carter cast at once into the sea.\n\nGhouls and night-gaunts now formed themselves in separate groups, the former questioning their rescued fellows anent past happenings. It appeared that the three had followed Carter's directions and proceeded from the enchanted wood to Dylath-Leen by way of Nir and the Skai, stealing human clothes at a lonely farmhouse and loping as closely as possible in the fashion of a man's walk. In Dylath-Leen's taverns their grotesque ways and faces had aroused much comment; but they had persisted in asking the way to Sarkomand until at last an old traveller was able to tell them. Then they knew that only a ship for Lelag-Leng would serve their purpose, and prepared to wait patiently for such a vessel.\n\nBut evil spies had doubtless reported much; for shortly a black galley put into port, and the wide-mouthed ruby merchants invited the ghouls to drink with them in a tavern. Wine was produced from one of those sinister bottles grotesquely carven from a single ruby, and after that the ghouls found themselves prisoners on the black galley as Carter had once found himself. This time, however, the unseen rowers steered not for the moon but for antique Sarkomand; bent evidently on taking their captives before the high-priest not to be described. They had touched at the jagged rock in the northern sea which Inganok's mariners shun, and the ghouls had there seen for the first time the real masters of the ship; being sickened despite their own callousness by such extremes of malign shapelessness and fearsome odour. There, too, were witnessed the nameless pastimes of the toad-like resident garrison\u2014such pastimes as give rise to the night-howlings which men fear. After that had come the landing at ruined Sarkomand and the beginning of the tortures, whose continuance the present rescue had prevented.\n\nFuture plans were next discussed, the three rescued ghouls suggesting a raid on the jagged rock and the extermination of the toad-like garrison there. To this, however, the night-gaunts objected; since the prospect of flying over water did not please them. Most of the ghouls favoured the design, but were at a loss how to follow it without the help of the winged night-gaunts. Thereupon Carter, seeing that they could not navigate the anchored galley, offered to teach them the use of the great banks of oars; to which proposal they eagerly assented. Grey day had now come, and under that leaden northern sky a picked detachment of ghouls filed into the noisome ship and took their seats on the rowers' benches. Carter found them fairly apt at learning, and before night had risked several experimental trips around the harbour. Not till three days later, however, did he deem it safe to attempt the voyage of conquest. Then, the rowers trained and the night-gaunts safely stowed in the forecastle, the party set sail at last; Pickman and the other chiefs gathering on deck and discussing modes of approach and procedure.\n\nOn the very first night the howlings from the rock were heard. Such was their timbre that all the galley's crew shook visibly; but most of all trembled the three rescued ghouls who knew precisely what those howlings meant. It was not thought best to attempt an attack by night, so the ship lay to under the phosphorescent clouds to wait for the dawn of a greyish day. When the light was ample and the howlings still the rowers resumed their strokes, and the galley drew closer and closer to that jagged rock whose granite pinnacles clawed fantastically at the dull sky. The sides of the rock were very steep; but on ledges here and there could be seen the bulging walls of queer windowless dwellings, and the low railings guarding travelled high roads. No ship of men had ever come so near the place, or at least, had never come so near and departed again; but Carter and the ghouls were void of fear and kept inflexibly on, rounding the eastern face of the rock and seeking the wharves which the rescued trio described as being on the southern side within a harbour formed of steep headlands.\n\nThe headlands were prolongations of the island proper, and came so closely together that only one ship at a time might pass between them. There seemed to be no watchers on the outside, so the galley was steered boldly through the flume-like strait and into the stagnant foetid harbour beyond. Here, however, all was bustle and activity; with several ships lying at anchor along a forbidding stone quay, and scores of almost-human slaves and moon-beasts by the waterfront handling crates and boxes or driving nameless and fabulous horrors hitched to lumbering lorries. There was a small stone town hewn out of the vertical cliff above the wharves, with the start of a winding road that spiralled out of sight toward higher ledges of the rock. Of what lay inside that prodigious peak of granite none might say, but the things one saw on the outside were far from encouraging.\n\nAt sight of the incoming galley the crowds on the wharves displayed much eagerness; those with eyes staring intently, and those without eyes wriggling their pink tentacles expectantly. They did not, of course, realise that the black ship had changed hands; for ghouls look much like the horned and hooved almost-humans, and the night-gaunts were all out of sight below. By this time the leaders had fully formed a plan; which was to loose the night-gaunts as soon as the wharf was touched, and then to sail directly away, leaving matters wholly to the instincts of those almost mindless creatures. Marooned on the rock, the horned flyers would first of all seize whatever living things they found there, and afterward, quite helpless to think except in terms of the homing instinct, would forget their fear of water and fly swiftly back to the abyss; bearing their noisome prey to appropriate destinations in the dark, from which not much would emerge alive.\n\nThe ghoul that was Pickman now went below and gave the night-gaunts their simple instructions, while the ship drew very near to the ominous and malodorous wharves. Presently a fresh stir rose along the waterfront, and Carter saw that the motions of the galley had begun to excite suspicion. Evidently the steersman was not making for the right dock, and probably the watchers had noticed the difference between the hideous ghouls and the almost-human slaves whose places they were taking. Some silent alarm must have been given, for almost at once a horde of the mephitic moon-beasts began to pour from the little black doorways of the windowless houses and down the winding road at the right. A rain of curious javelins struck the galley as the prow hit the wharf, felling two ghouls and slightly wounding another; but at this point all the hatches were thrown open to emit a black cloud of whirring night-gaunts which swarmed over the town like a flock of horned and Cyclopean bats.\n\nThe jellyish moon-beasts had procured a great pole and were trying to push off the invading ship, but when the night-gaunts struck them they thought of such things no more. It was a very terrible spectacle to see those faceless and rubbery ticklers at their pastime, and tremendously impressive to watch the dense cloud of them spreading through the town and up the winding roadway to the reaches above. Sometimes a group of the black flutterers would drop a toad-like prisoner from aloft by mistake, and the manner in which the victim would burst was highly offensive to the sight and smell. When the last of the night-gaunts had left the galley the ghoulish leaders glibbered an order of withdrawal, and the rowers pulled quietly out of the harbour between the grey headlands while still the town was a chaos of battle and conquest.\n\nThe Pickman ghoul allowed several hours for the night-gaunts to make up their rudimentary minds and overcome their fear of flying over the sea, and kept the galley standing about a mile off the jagged rock while he waited and dressed the wounds of the injured men. Night fell, and the grey twilight gave place to the sickly phosphorescence of low clouds, and all the while the leaders watched the high peaks of that accursed rock for signs of the night-gaunts' flight. Toward morning a black speck was seen hovering timidly over the topmost pinnacle, and shortly afterward the speck had become a swarm. Just before daybreak the swarm seemed to scatter, and within a quarter of an hour it had vanished wholly in the distance toward the northeast. Once or twice something seemed to fall from the thinning swarm into the sea; but Carter did not worry, since he knew from observation that the toad-like moon-beasts cannot swim. At length, when the ghouls were satisfied that all the night-gaunts had left for Sarkomand and the Great Abyss with their doomed burdens, the galley put back into the harbour betwixt the grey headlands; and all the hideous company landed and roamed curiously over the denuded rock with its towers and eyries and fortresses chiselled from the solid stone.\n\nFrightful were the secrets uncovered in those evil and windowless crypts; for the remnants of unfinished pastimes were many, and in various stages of departure from their primal state. Carter put out of the way certain things which were after a fashion alive, and fled precipitately from a few other things about which he could not be very positive. The stench-filled houses were furnished mostly with grotesque stools and benches carven from moon-trees, and were painted inside with nameless and frantic designs. Countless weapons, implements, and ornaments lay about; including some large idols of solid ruby depicting singular beings not found on the earth. These latter did not, despite their material, invite either appropriation or long inspection; and Carter took the trouble to hammer five of them into very small pieces. The scattered spears and javelins he collected, and with Pickman's approval distributed among the ghouls. Such devices were new to the dog-like lopers, but their relative simplicity made them easy to master after a few concise hints.\n\nThe upper parts of the rock held more temples than private homes, and in numerous hewn chambers were found terrible carven altars and doubtfully stained fonts and shrines for the worship of things more monstrous than the mild gods atop Kadath. From the rear of one great temple stretched a low black passage which Carter followed far into the rock with a torch till he came to a lightless domed hall of vast proportions, whose vaultings were covered with daemoniac carvings and in whose centre yawned a foul and bottomless well like that in the hideous monastery of Leng where broods alone the high-priest not to be described. On the distant shadowy side, beyond the noisome well, he thought he discerned a small door of strangely wrought bronze; but for some reason he felt an unaccountable dread of opening it or even approaching it, and hastened back through the cavern to his unlovely allies as they shambled about with an ease and abandon he could scarcely feel. The ghouls had observed the unfinished pastimes of the moon-beasts, and had profited in their fashion. They had also found a hogshead of potent moon-wine, and were rolling it down to the wharves for removal and later use in diplomatic dealings, though the rescued trio, remembering its effect on them in Dylath-Leen, had warned their company to taste none of it. Of rubies from lunar mines there was a great store, both rough and polished, in one of the vaults near the water; but when the ghouls found they were not good to eat they lost all interest in them. Carter did not try to carry any away, since he knew too much about those which had mined them.\n\nSuddenly there came an excited meeping from the sentries on the wharves, and all the loathsome foragers turned from their tasks to stare seaward and cluster round the waterfront. Betwixt the grey headlands a fresh black galley was rapidly advancing, and it could be but a moment before the almost-humans on deck would perceive the invasion of the town and give the alarm to the monstrous things below. Fortunately the ghouls still bore the spears and javelins which Carter had distributed amongst them; and at his command, sustained by the being that was Pickman, they now formed a line of battle and prepared to prevent the landing of the ship. Presently a burst of excitement on the galley told of the crew's discovery of the changed state of things, and the instant stoppage of the vessel proved that the superior numbers of the ghouls had been noted and taken into account. After a moment of hesitation the newcomers silently turned and passed out between the headlands again, but not for an instant did the ghouls imagine that the conflict was averted. Either the dark ship would seek reinforcements, or the crew would try to land elsewhere on the island; hence a party of scouts was at once sent up toward the pinnacle to see what the enemy's course would be.\n\nIn a very few minutes a ghoul returned breathless to say that the moon-beasts and almost-humans were landing on the outside of the more easterly of the rugged grey headlands, and ascending by hidden paths and ledges which a goat could scarcely tread in safety. Almost immediately afterward the galley was sighted again through the flume-like strait, but only for a second. Then, a few moments later, a second messenger panted down from aloft to say that another party was landing on the other headland; both being much more numerous than the size of the galley would seem to allow for. The ship itself, moving slowly with only one sparsely manned tier of oars, soon hove in sight betwixt the cliffs, and lay to in the foetid harbour as if to watch the coming fray and stand by for any possible use.\n\nBy this time Carter and Pickman had divided the ghouls into three parties, one to meet each of the two invading columns and one to remain in the town. The first two at once scrambled up the rocks in their respective directions, while the third was subdivided into a land party and a sea party. The sea party, commanded by Carter, boarded the anchored galley and rowed out to meet the undermanned galley of the newcomers; whereat the latter retreated through the strait to the open sea. Carter did not at once pursue it, for he knew he might be needed more acutely near the town.\n\nMeanwhile the frightful detachments of the moon-beasts and almost-humans had lumbered up to the top of the headlands and were shockingly silhouetted on either side against the grey twilight sky. The thin hellish flutes of the invaders had now begun to whine, and the general effect of those hybrid, half-amorphous processions was as nauseating as the actual odour given off by the toad-like lunar blasphemies. Then the two parties of the ghouls swarmed into sight and joined the silhouetted panorama. Javelins began to fly from both sides, and the swelling meeps of the ghouls and the bestial howls of the almost-humans gradually joined the hellish whine of the flutes to form a frantick and indescribable chaos of daemon cacophony. Now and then bodies fell from the narrow ridges of the headlands into the sea outside or the harbour inside, in the latter case being sucked quickly under by certain submarine lurkers whose presence was indicated only by prodigious bubbles.\n\nFor half an hour this dual battle raged in the sky, till upon the west cliff the invaders were completely annihilated. On the east cliff, however, where the leader of the moon-beast party appeared to be present, the ghouls had not fared so well; and were slowly retreating to the slopes of the pinnacle proper. Pickman had quickly ordered reinforcements for this front from the party in the town, and these had helped greatly in the earlier stages of the combat. Then, when the western battle was over, the victorious survivors hastened across to the aid of their hard-pressed fellows; turning the tide and forcing the invaders back again along the narrow ridge of the headland. The almost-humans were by this time all slain, but the last of the toad-like horrors fought desperately with the great spears clutched in their powerful and disgusting paws. The time for javelins was now nearly past, and the fight became a hand-to-hand contest of what few spearmen could meet upon that narrow ridge.\n\nAs fury and recklessness increased, the number falling into the sea became very great. Those striking the harbour met nameless extinction from the unseen bubblers, but of those striking the open sea some were able to swim to the foot of the cliffs and land on tidal rocks, while the hovering galley of the enemy rescued several moon-beasts. The cliffs were unscalable except where the monsters had debarked, so that none of the ghouls on the rocks could rejoin their battle-line. Some were killed by javelins from the hostile galley or from the moon-beasts above, but a few survived to be rescued. When the security of the land parties seemed assured, Carter's galley sallied forth between the headlands and drove the hostile ship far out to sea; pausing to rescue such ghouls as were on the rocks or still swimming in the ocean. Several moon-beasts washed on rocks or reefs were speedily put out of the way.\n\nFinally, the moon-beasts' galley being safely in the distance and the invading land army concentrated in one place, Carter landed a considerable force on the eastern headland in the enemy's rear; after which the fight was short-lived indeed. Attacked from both sides, the noisome flounderers were rapidly cut to pieces or pushed into the sea, till by evening the ghoulish chiefs agreed that the island was again clear of them. The hostile galley, meanwhile, had disappeared; and it was decided that the evil jagged rock had better be evacuated before any overwhelming horde of lunar horrors might be assembled and brought against the victors.\n\nSo by night Pickman and Carter assembled all the ghouls and counted them with care, finding that over a fourth had been lost in the day's battles. The wounded were placed on bunks in the galley, for Pickman always discouraged the old ghoulish custom of killing and eating one's own wounded, and the able-bodied troops were assigned to the oars or to such other places as they might most usefully fill. Under the low phosphorescent clouds of night the galley sailed, and Carter was not sorry to be departing from that island of unwholesome secrets, whose lightless domed hall with its bottomless well and repellent bronze door lingered restlessly in his fancy. Dawn found the ship in sight of Sarkomand's ruined quays of basalt, where a few night-gaunt sentries still waited, squatting like black horned gargoyles on the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of that fearful city which lived and died before the years of man.\n\nThe ghouls made camp amongst the fallen stones of Sarkomand, despatching a messenger for enough night-gaunts to serve them as steeds. Pickman and the other chiefs were effusive in their gratitude for the aid Carter had lent them; and Carter now began to feel that his plans were indeed maturing well, and that he would be able to command the help of these fearsome allies not only in quitting this part of dreamland, but in pursuing his ultimate quest for the gods atop unknown Kadath, and the marvellous sunset city they so strangely withheld from his slumbers. Accordingly he spoke of these things to the ghoulish leaders; telling what he knew of the cold waste wherein Kadath stands and of the monstrous shantaks and the mountains carven into double-headed images which guard it. He spoke of the fear of shantaks for night-gaunts, and of how the vast hippocephalic birds fly screaming from the black burrows high up on the gaunt grey peaks that divide Inganok from hateful Leng. He spoke, too, of the things he had learnt concerning night-gaunts from the frescoes in the windowless monastery of the high-priest not to be described; how even the Great Ones fear them, and how their ruler is not the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep at all, but hoary and immemorial Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss.\n\nAll these things Carter glibbered to the assembled ghouls, and presently outlined that request which he had in mind, and which he did not think extravagant considering the services he had so lately rendered the rubbery, dog-like lopers. He wished very much, he said, for the services of enough night-gaunts to bear him safely through the air past the realm of shantaks and carven mountains, and up into the cold waste beyond the returning tracks of any other mortal. He desired to fly to the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste to plead with the Great Ones for the sunset city they denied him, and felt sure that the night-gaunts could take him thither without trouble; high above the perils of the plain, and over the hideous double heads of those carven sentinel mountains that squat eternally in the grey dusk. For the horned and faceless creatures there could be no danger from aught of earth, since the Great Ones themselves dread them. And even were unexpected things to come from the Other Gods, who are prone to oversee the affairs of earth's milder gods, the night-gaunts need not fear; for the outer hells are indifferent matters to such silent and slippery flyers as own not Nyarlathotep for their master, but bow only to potent and archaic Nodens.\n\nA flock of ten or fifteen night-gaunts, Carter glibbered, would surely be enough to keep any combination of shantaks at a distance; though perhaps it might be well to have some ghouls in the party to manage the creatures, their ways being better known to their ghoulish allies than to men. The party could land him at some convenient point within whatever walls that fabulous onyx citadel might have, waiting in the shadows for his return or his signal whilst he ventured inside the castle to give prayer to the gods of earth. If any ghouls chose to escort him into the throne-room of the Great Ones, he would be thankful, for their presence would add weight and importance to his plea. He would not, however, insist upon this but merely wished transportation to and from the castle atop unknown Kadath; the final journey being either to the marvellous sunset city itself, in case the gods proved favourable, or back to the earthward Gate of Deeper Slumber in the enchanted wood in case his prayers were fruitless.\n\nWhilst Carter was speaking all the ghouls listened with great attention, and as the moments advanced the sky became black with clouds of those night-gaunts for which messengers had been sent. The winged horrors settled in a semicircle around the ghoulish army, waiting respectfully as the dog-like chieftains considered the wish of the earthly traveller. The ghoul that was Pickman glibbered gravely with its fellows, and in the end Carter was offered far more than he had at most expected. As he had aided the ghouls in their conquest of the moon-beasts, so would they aid him in his daring voyage to realms whence none had ever returned; lending him not merely a few of their allied night-gaunts, but their entire army as they encamped, veteran fighting ghouls and newly assembled night-gaunts alike, save only a small garrison for the captured black galley and such spoils as had come from the jagged rock in the sea. They would set out through the air whenever he might wish, and once arrived on Kadath a suitable train of ghouls would attend him in state as he placed his petition before earth's gods in their onyx castle.\n\nMoved by a gratitude and satisfaction beyond words, Carter made plans with the ghoulish leaders for his audacious voyage. The army would fly high, they decided, over hideous Leng with its nameless monastery and wicked stone villages; stopping only at the vast grey peaks to confer with the shantak-frightening night-gaunts whose burrows honeycombed their summits. They would then, according to what advice they might receive from those denizens, choose their final course; approaching unknown Kadath either through the desert of carven mountains north of Inganok, or through the more northerly reaches of repulsive Leng itself. Dog-like and soulless as they are, the ghouls and night-gaunts had no dread of what those untrodden deserts might reveal; nor did they feel any deterring awe at the thought of Kadath towering lone with its onyx castle of mystery.\n\nAbout midday the ghouls and night-gaunts prepared for flight, each ghoul selecting a suitable pair of horned steeds to bear him. Carter was placed well up toward the head of the column beside Pickman, and in front of the whole a double line of riderless night-gaunts was provided as a vanguard. At a brisk meep from Pickman the whole shocking army rose in a nightmare cloud above the broken columns and crumbling sphinxes of primordial Sarkomand; higher and higher, till even the great basalt cliff behind the town was cleared, and the cold, sterile tableland of Leng's outskirts laid open to sight. Still higher flew the black host, till even this tableland grew small beneath them; and as they worked northward over the windswept plateau of horror Carter saw once again with a shudder the circle of crude monoliths and the squat windowless building which he knew held that frightful silken-masked blasphemy from whose clutches he had so narrowly escaped. This time no descent was made as the army swept bat-like over the sterile landscape, passing the feeble fires of the unwholesome stone villages at a great altitude, and pausing not at all to mark the morbid twistings of the hooved, horned almost-humans that dance and pipe eternally therein. Once they saw a shantak-bird flying low over the plain, but when it saw them it screamed noxiously and flapped off to the north in grotesque panic.\n\nAt dusk they reached the jagged grey peaks that form the barrier of Inganok, and hovered about those strange caves near the summits which Carter recalled as so frightful to the shantaks. At the insistent meeping of the ghoulish leaders there issued forth from each lofty burrow a stream of horned black flyers; with which the ghouls and night-gaunts of the party conferred at length by means of ugly gestures. It soon became clear that the best course would be that over the cold waste north of Inganok, for Leng's northward reaches are full of unseen pitfalls that even the night-gaunts dislike; abysmal influences centring in certain white hemispherical buildings on curious knolls, which common folklore associates unpleasantly with the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep.\n\nOf Kadath the flutterers of the peaks knew almost nothing, save that there must be some mighty marvel toward the north, over which the shantaks and the carven mountains stand guard. They hinted at rumoured abnormalities of proportion in those trackless leagues beyond, and recalled vague whispers of a realm where night broods eternally; but of definite data they had nothing to give. So Carter and his party thanked them kindly; and, crossing the topmost granite pinnacles to the skies of Inganok, dropped below the level of the phosphorescent night clouds and beheld in the distance those terrible squatting gargoyles that were mountains till some titan hand carved fright into their virgin rock.\n\nThere they squatted, in a hellish half-circle, their legs on the desert sand and their mitres piercing the luminous clouds; sinister, wolf-like, and double-headed, with faces of fury and right hands raised, dully and malignly watching the rim of man's world and guarding with horror the reaches of a cold northern world that is not man's. From their hideous laps rose evil shantaks of elephantine bulk, but these all fled with insane titters as the vanguard of night-gaunts was sighted in the misty sky. Northward above those gargoyle mountains the army flew, and over leagues of dim desert where never a landmark rose. Less and less luminous grew the clouds, till at length Carter could see only blackness around him; but never did the winged steeds falter, bred as they were in earth's blackest crypts, and seeing not with any eyes, but with the whole dank surface of their slippery forms. On and on they flew, past winds of dubious scent and sounds of dubious import; ever in thickest darkness, and covering such prodigious spaces that Carter wondered whether or not they could still be within earth's dreamland.\n\nThen suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All below was still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a meaning and directiveness they had never possessed elsewhere. It was not that the figures of the constellations were different, but that the same familiar shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain. Everything focussed toward the north; every curve and asterism of the glittering sky became part of a vast design whose function was to hurry first the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal of convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead. Carter looked toward the east where the great ridge of barrier peaks had towered along all the length of Inganok, and saw against the stars a jagged silhouette which told of its continued presence. It was more broken now, with yawning clefts and fantastically erratic pinnacles; and Carter studied closely the suggestive turns and inclinations of that grotesque outline, which seemed to share with the stars some subtle northward urge.\n\nThey were flying past at a tremendous speed, so that the watcher had to strain hard to catch details; when all at once he beheld just above the line of the topmost peaks a dark and moving object against the stars, whose course exactly paralleled that of his own bizarre party. The ghouls had likewise glimpsed it, for he heard their low glibbering all about him, and for a moment he fancied the object was a gigantic shantak, of a size vastly greater than that of the average specimen. Soon, however, he saw that this theory would not hold; for the shape of the thing above the mountains was not that of any hippocephalic bird. Its outline against the stars, necessarily vague as it was, resembled rather some huge mitred head or pair of heads infinitely magnified; and its rapid bobbing flight through the sky seemed most peculiarly a wingless one. Carter could not tell which side of the mountains it was on, but soon perceived that it had parts below the parts he had first seen, since it blotted out all the stars in places where the ridge was deeply cleft.\n\nThen came a wide gap in the range, where the hideous reaches of transmontane Leng were joined to the cold waste on this side by a low pass through which the stars shone wanly. Carter watched this gap with intense care, knowing that he might see outlined against the sky beyond it the lower parts of the vast thing that flew undulantly above the pinnacles. The object had now floated ahead a trifle, and every eye of the party was fixed on the rift where it would presently appear in full-length silhouette. Gradually the huge thing above the peaks neared the gap, slightly slackening its speed as if conscious of having outdistanced the ghoulish army. For another minute suspense was keen, and then the brief instant of full silhouette and revelation came; bringing to the lips of the ghouls an awed and half-choked meep of cosmic fear, and to the soul of the traveller a chill that has never wholly left it. For the mammoth bobbing shape that overtopped the ridge was only a head\u2014a mitred double head\u2014and below it in terrible vastness loped the frightful swollen body that bore it; the mountain-high monstrosity that walked in stealth and silence; the hyaena-like distortion of a giant anthropoid shape that trotted blackly against the sky, its repulsive pair of cone-capped heads reaching half way to the zenith.\n\nCarter did not lose consciousness or even scream aloud, for he was an old dreamer; but he looked behind him in horror and shuddered when he saw that there were other monstrous heads silhouetted above the level of the peaks, bobbing along stealthily after the first one. And straight in the rear were three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing wolf-like and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the air. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle north of Inganok with right hands uplifted. They had duties to perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never even made a sound in walking.\n\nMeanwhile the ghoul that was Pickman had glibbered an order to the night-gaunts, and the whole army soared higher into the air. Up toward the stars the grotesque column shot, till nothing stood out any longer against the sky; neither the grey granite ridge that was still nor the carven and mitred mountains that walked. All was blackness beneath as the fluttering legions surged northward amidst rushing winds and invisible laughter in the aether, and never a shantak or less mentionable entity rose from the haunted wastes to pursue them. The farther they went, the faster they flew, till soon their dizzying speed seemed to pass that of a rifle ball and approach that of a planet in its orbit. Carter wondered how with such speed the earth could still stretch beneath them, but knew that in the land of dream dimensions have strange properties. That they were in a realm of eternal night he felt certain, and he fancied that the constellations overhead had subtly emphasised their northward focus; gathering themselves up as it were to cast the flying army into the void of the boreal pole, as the folds of a bag are gathered up to cast out the last bits of substance therein.\n\nThen he noticed with terror that the wings of the night-gaunts were not flapping any more. The horned and faceless steeds had folded their membraneous appendages, and were resting quite passive in the chaos of wind that whirled and chuckled as it bore them on. A force not of earth had seized on the army, and ghouls and night-gaunts alike were powerless before a current which pulled madly and relentlessly into the north whence no mortal had ever returned. At length a lone pallid light was seen on the skyline ahead, thereafter rising steadily as they approached, and having beneath it a black mass that blotted out the stars. Carter saw that it must be some beacon on a mountain, for only a mountain could rise so vast as seen from so prodigious a height in the air.\n\nHigher and higher rose the light and the blackness beneath it, till half the northern sky was obscured by the rugged conical mass. Lofty as the army was, that pale and sinister beacon rose above it, towering monstrous over all peaks and concernments of earth, and tasting the atomless aether where the cryptical moon and the mad planets reel. No mountain known of man was that which loomed before them. The high clouds far below were but a fringe for its foothills. The gasping dizziness of topmost air was but a girdle for its loins. Scornful and spectral climbed that bridge betwixt earth and heaven, black in eternal night, and crowned with a pshent of unknown stars whose awful and significant outline grew every moment clearer. Ghouls meeped in wonder as they saw it, and Carter shivered in fear lest all the hurtling army be dashed to pieces on the unyielding onyx of that Cyclopean cliff.\n\nHigher and higher rose the light, till it mingled with the loftiest orbs of the zenith and winked down at the flyers with lurid mockery. All the north beneath it was blackness now; dread, stony blackness from infinite depths to infinite heights, with only that pale winking beacon perched unreachably at the top of all vision. Carter studied the light more closely, and saw at last what lines its inky background made against the stars. There were towers on that titan mountain-top; horrible domed towers in noxious and incalculable tiers and clusters beyond any dreamable workmanship of man; battlements and terraces of wonder and menace, all limned tiny and black and distant against the starry pshent that glowed malevolently at the uppermost rim of sight. Capping that most measureless of mountains was a castle beyond all mortal thought, and in it glowed the daemon-light. Then Randolph Carter knew that his quest was done, and that he saw above him the goal of all forbidden steps and audacious visions; the fabulous, the incredible home of the Great Ones atop unknown Kadath.\n\nEven as he realised this thing, Carter noticed a change in the course of the helplessly wind-sucked party. They were rising abruptly now, and it was plain that the focus of their flight was the onyx castle where the pale light shone. So close was the great black mountain that its sides sped by them dizzily as they shot upward, and in the darkness they could discern nothing upon it. Vaster and vaster loomed the tenebrous towers of the nighted castle above, and Carter could see that it was well-nigh blasphemous in its immensity. Well might its stones have been quarried by nameless workmen in that horrible gulf rent out of the rock in the hill pass north of Inganok, for such was its size that a man on its threshold stood even as an ant on the steps of earth's loftiest fortress. The pshent of unknown stars above the myriad domed turrets glowed with a sallow, sickly flare, so that a kind of twilight hung about the murky walls of slippery onyx. The pallid beacon was now seen to be a single shining window high up in one of the loftiest towers, and as the helpless army neared the top of the mountain Carter thought he detected unpleasant shadows flitting across the feebly luminous expanse. It was a strangely arched window, of a design wholly alien to earth.\n\nThe solid rock now gave place to the giant foundations of the monstrous castle, and it seemed that the speed of the party was somewhat abated. Vast walls shot up, and there was a glimpse of a great gate through which the voyagers were swept. All was night in the titan courtyard, and then came the deeper blackness of inmost things as a huge arched portal engulfed the column. Vortices of cold wind surged dankly through sightless labyrinths of onyx, and Carter could never tell what Cyclopean stairs and corridors lay silent along the route of his endless a\u00ebrial twisting. Always upward led the terrible plunge in darkness, and never a sound, touch, or glimpse broke the dense pall of mystery. Large as the army of ghouls and night-gaunts was, it was lost in the prodigious voids of that more than earthly castle. And when at last there suddenly dawned around him the lurid light of that single tower room whose lofty window had served as a beacon, it took Carter long to discern the far walls and high, distant ceiling, and to realise that he was indeed not again in the boundless air outside.\n\nRandolph Carter had hoped to come into the throne-room of the Great Ones with poise and dignity, flanked and followed by impressive lines of ghouls in ceremonial order, and offering his prayer as a free and potent master among dreamers. He had known that the Great Ones themselves are not beyond a mortal's power to cope with, and had trusted to luck that the Other Gods and their crawling chaos Nyarlathotep would not happen to come to their aid at the crucial moment, as they had so often done before when men sought out earth's gods in their home or on their mountains. And with his hideous escort he had half hoped to defy even the Other Gods if need were, knowing as he did that ghouls have no masters, and that night-gaunts own not Nyarlathotep but only archaick Nodens for their lord. But now he saw that supernal Kadath in its cold waste is indeed girt with dark wonders and nameless sentinels, and that the Other Gods are of a surety vigilant in guarding the mild, feeble gods of earth. Void as they are of lordship over ghouls and night-gaunts, the mindless, shapeless blasphemies of outer space can yet control them when they must; so that it was not in state as a free and potent master of dreamers that Randolph Carter came into the Great Ones' throne-room with his ghouls. Swept and herded by nightmare tempests from the stars, and dogged by unseen horrors of the northern waste, all that army floated captive and helpless in the lurid light, dropping numbly to the onyx floor when by some voiceless order the winds of fright dissolved.\n\nBefore no golden dais had Randolph Carter come, nor was there any august circle of crowned and haloed beings with narrow eyes, long-lobed ears, thin nose, and pointed chin whose kinship to the carven face on Ngranek might stamp them as those to whom a dreamer might pray. Save for that one tower room the onyx castle atop Kadath was dark, and the masters were not there. Carter had come to unknown Kadath in the cold waste, but he had not found the gods. Yet still the lurid light glowed in that one tower room whose size was so little less than that of all outdoors, and whose distant walls and roof were so nearly lost to sight in thin, curling mists. Earth's gods were not there, it was true, but of subtler and less visible presences there could be no lack. Where the mild gods are absent, the Other Gods are not unrepresented; and certainly, the onyx castle of castles was far from tenantless. In what outrageous form or forms terror would next reveal itself, Carter could by no means imagine. He felt that his visit had been expected, and wondered how close a watch had all along been kept upon him by the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. It is Nyarlathotep, horror of infinite shapes and dread soul and messenger of the Other Gods, that the fungous moon-beasts serve; and Carter thought of the black galley that had vanished when the tide of battle turned against the toad-like abnormalities on the jagged rock in the sea.\n\nReflecting upon these things, he was staggering to his feet in the midst of his nightmare company when there rang without warning through that pale-litten and limitless chamber the hideous blast of a daemon trumpet. Three times pealed that frightful brazen scream, and when the echoes of the third blast had died chucklingly away Randolph Carter saw that he was alone. Whither, why, and how the ghouls and night-gaunts had been snatched from sight was not for him to divine. He knew only that he was suddenly alone, and that whatever unseen powers lurked mockingly around him were no powers of earth's friendly dreamland. Presently from the chamber's uttermost reaches a new sound came. This, too, was a rhythmic trumpeting; but of a kind far removed from the three raucous blasts which had dissolved his grisly cohorts. In this low fanfare echoed all the wonder and melody of ethereal dream; exotic vistas of unimagined loveliness floating from each strange chord and subtly alien cadence. Odours of incense came to match the golden notes; and overhead a great light dawned, its colours changing in cycles unknown to earth's spectrum, and following the song of the trumpet in weird symphonic harmonies. Torches flared in the distance, and the beat of drums throbbed nearer amidst waves of tense expectancy.\n\nOut of the thinning mists and the cloud of strange incense filed twin columns of giant black slaves with loin-cloths of iridescent silk. Upon their heads were strapped vast helmet-like torches of glittering metal, from which the fragrance of obscure balsams spread in fumous spirals. In their right hands were crystal wands whose tips were carven into leering chimaeras, while their left hands grasped long, thin silver trumpets which they blew in turn. Armlets and anklets of gold they had, and between each pair of anklets stretched a golden chain that held its wearer to a sober gait. That they were true black men of earth's dreamland was at once apparent, but it seemed less likely that their rites and costumes were wholly things of our earth. Ten feet from Carter the columns stopped, and as they did so each trumpet flew abruptly to its bearer's thick lips. Wild and ecstatic was the blast that followed, and wilder still the cry that chorused just after from dark throats somehow made shrill by strange artifice.\n\nThen down the wide lane betwixt the two columns a lone figure strode; a tall, slim figure with the young face of an antique Pharaoh, gay with prismatic robes and crowned with a golden pshent that glowed with inherent light. Close up to Carter strode that regal figure; whose proud carriage and swart features had in them the fascination of a dark god or fallen archangel, and around whose eyes there lurked the languid sparkle of capricious humour. It spoke, and in its mellow tones there rippled the mild music of Lethean streams.\n\n\"Randolph Carter,\" said the voice, \"you have come to see the Great Ones whom it is unlawful for men to see. Watchers have spoken of this thing, and the Other Gods have grunted as they rolled and tumbled mindlessly to the sound of thin flutes in the black ultimate void where broods the daemon-sultan whose name no lips dare speak aloud.\n\n\"When Barzai the Wise climbed Hatheg-Kla to see the Great Ones dance and howl above the clouds in the moonlight he never returned. The Other Gods were there, and they did what was expected. Zenig of Aphorat sought to reach unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and his skull is now set in a ring on the little finger of one whom I need not name.\n\n\"But you, Randolph Carter, have braved all things of earth's dreamland, and burn still with the flame of quest. You came not as one curious, but as one seeking his due, nor have you failed ever in reverence toward the mild gods of earth. Yet have these gods kept you from the marvellous sunset city of your dreams, and wholly through their own small covetousness; for verily, they craved the weird loveliness of that which your fancy had fashioned, and vowed that henceforward no other spot should be their abode.\n\n\"They are gone from their castle on unknown Kadath to dwell in your marvellous city. All through its palaces of veined marble they revel by day, and when the sun sets they go out in the perfumed gardens and watch the golden glory on temples and colonnades, arched bridges and silver-basined fountains, and wide streets with blossom-laden urns and ivory statues in gleaming rows. And when night comes they climb tall terraces in the dew, and sit on carved benches of porphyry scanning the stars, or lean over pale balustrades to gaze at the town's steep northward slopes, where one by one the little windows in old peaked gables shine softly out with the calm yellow light of homely candles.\n\n\"The gods love your marvellous city, and walk no more in the ways of the gods. They have forgotten the high places of earth, and the mountains that knew their youth. The earth has no longer any gods that are gods, and only the Other Ones from outer space hold sway on unremembered Kadath. Far away in a valley of your own childhood, Randolph Carter, play the heedless Great Ones. You have dreamed too well, O wise arch-dreamer, for you have drawn dream's gods away from the world of all men's visions to that which is wholly yours; having builded out of your boyhood's small fancies a city more lovely than all the phantoms that have gone before.\n\n\"It is not well that earth's gods leave their thrones for the spider to spin on, and their realm for the Others to sway in the dark manner of Others. Fain would the powers from outside bring chaos and horror to you, Randolph Carter, who are the cause of their upsetting, but that they know it is by you alone that the gods may be sent back to their world. In that half-waking dreamland which is yours, no power of uttermost night may pursue; and only you can send the selfish Great Ones gently out of your marvellous sunset city, back through the northern twilight to their wonted place atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste.\n\n\"So, Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to serve my will. I charge you to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the dream-world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of lost things awesome and momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for truly, it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes.\n\n\"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth. It is the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily. These things you saw, Randolph Carter, when your nurse first wheeled you out in the springtime, and they will be the last things you will ever see with eyes of memory and of love. And there is antique Salem with its brooding years, and spectral Marblehead scaling its rocky precipices into past centuries, and the glory of Salem's towers and spires seen afar from Marblehead's pastures across the harbour against the setting sun.\n\n\"There is Providence, quaint and lordly on its seven hills over the blue harbour, with terraces of green leading up to steeples and citadels of living antiquity, and Newport climbing wraith-like from its dreaming breakwater. Arkham is there, with its moss-grown gambrel roofs and the rocky rolling meadows behind it; and antediluvian Kingsport hoary with stacked chimneys and deserted quays and overhanging gables, and the marvel of high cliffs and the milky-misted ocean with tolling buoys beyond.\n\n\"Cool vales in Concord, cobbled lanes in Portsmouth, twilight bends of rustic New-Hampshire roads where giant elms half hide white farmhouse walls and creaking well-sweeps. Gloucester's salt wharves and Truro's windy willows. Vistas of distant steepled towns and hills beyond hills along the North Shore, hushed stony slopes and low ivied cottages in the lee of huge boulders in Rhode-Island's back country. Scent of the sea and fragrance of the fields; spell of the dark woods and joy of the orchards and gardens at dawn. These, Randolph Carter, are your city; for they are yourself. New-England bore you, and into your soul she poured a liquid loveliness which cannot die. This loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.\n\n\"Look! through that window shine the stars of eternal night. Even now they are shining above the scenes you have known and cherished, drinking of their charm that they may shine more lovely over the gardens of dream. There is Antares\u2014he is winking at this moment over the roofs of Tremont Street, and you could see him from your window on Beacon Hill. Out beyond those stars yawn the gulfs from whence my mindless masters have sent me. Some day you too may traverse them, but if you are wise you will beware such folly; for of those mortals who have been and returned, only one preserves a mind unshattered by the pounding, clawing horrors of the void. Terrors and blasphemies gnaw at one another for space, and there is more evil in the lesser ones than in the greater; even as you know from the deeds of those who sought to deliver you into my hands, whilst I myself harboured no wish to shatter you, and would indeed have helped you hither long ago had I not been elsewhere busy, and certain that you would yourself find the way. Shun, then, the outer hells, and stick to the calm, lovely things of your youth. Seek out your marvellous city and drive thence the recreant Great Ones, sending them back gently to those scenes which are of their own youth, and which wait uneasy for their return.\n\n\"Easier even than the way of dim memory is the way I will prepare for you. See! There comes hither a monstrous shantak, led by a slave who for your peace of mind had best keep invisible. Mount and be ready\u2014there! Yogash the black will help you on the scaly horror. Steer for that brightest star just south of the zenith\u2014it is Vega, and in two hours will be just above the terrace of your sunset city. Steer for it only till you hear a far-off singing in the high aether. Higher than that lurks madness, so rein your shantak when the first note lures. Look then back to earth, and you will see shining the deathless altar-flame of Ired-Naa from the sacred roof of a temple. That temple is in your desiderate sunset city, so steer for it before you heed the singing and are lost.\n\n\"When you draw nigh the city steer for the same high parapet whence of old you scanned the outspread glory, prodding the shantak till he cry aloud. That cry the Great Ones will hear and know as they sit on their perfumed terraces, and there will come upon them such a homesickness that all of your city's wonders will not console them for the absence of Kadath's grim castle and the pshent of eternal stars that crowns it.\n\n\"Then must you land amongst them with the shantak, and let them see and touch that noisome and hippocephalic bird; meanwhile discoursing to them of unknown Kadath, which you will so lately have left, and telling them how its boundless halls are lonely and unlighted, where of old they used to leap and revel in supernal radiance. And the shantak will talk to them in the manner of shantaks, but it will have no powers of persuasion beyond the recalling of elder days.\n\n\"Over and over must you speak to the wandering Great Ones of their home and youth, till at last they will weep and ask to be shewn the returning path they have forgotten. Thereat can you loose the waiting shantak, sending him skyward with the homing cry of his kind; hearing which the Great Ones will prance and jump with antique mirth, and forthwith stride after the loathly bird in the fashion of gods, through the deep gulfs of heaven to Kadath's familiar towers and domes.\n\n\"Then will the marvellous sunset city be yours to cherish and inhabit forever, and once more will earth's gods rule the dreams of men from their accustomed seat. Go now\u2014the casement is open and the stars await outside. Already your shantak wheezes and titters with impatience. Steer for Vega through the night, but turn when the singing sounds. Forget not this warning, lest horrors unthinkable suck you into the gulf of shrieking and ululant madness. Remember the Other Gods; they are great and mindless and terrible, and lurk in the outer voids. They are good gods to shun.\n\n\"Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos!\"\n\nAnd Randolph Carter, gasping and dizzy on his hideous shantak, shot screamingly into space toward the cold blue glare of boreal Vega; looking but once behind him at the clustered and chaotic turrets of the onyx nightmare wherein still glowed the lone lurid light of that window above the air and the clouds of earth's dreamland. Great polypous horrors slid darkly past, and unseen bat-wings beat multitudinous around him, but still he clung to the unwholesome mane of that loathly and hippocephalic scaled bird. The stars danced mockingly, almost shifting now and then to form pale signs of doom that one might wonder one had not seen and feared before; and ever the winds of aether howled of vague blackness and loneliness beyond the cosmos.\n\nThen through the glittering vault ahead there fell a hush of portent, and all the winds and horrors slunk away as night things slink away before the dawn. Trembling in waves that golden wisps of nebula made weirdly visible, there rose a timid hint of far-off melody, droning in faint chords that our own universe of stars knows not. And as that music grew, the shantak raised its ears and plunged ahead, and Carter likewise bent to catch each lovely strain. It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it, and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.\n\nFaster flew the shantak, and lower bent the rider, drunk with the marvels of strange gulfs, and whirling in the crystal coils of outer magic. Then came too late the warning of the evil one, the sardonic caution of the daemon legate who had bidden the seeker beware the madness of that song. Only to taunt had Nyarlathotep marked out the way to safety and the marvellous sunset city; only to mock had that black messenger revealed the secret of those truant gods whose steps he could so easily lead back at will. For madness and the void's wild vengeance are Nyarlathotep's only gifts to the presumptuous; and frantick though the rider strove to turn his disgusting steed, that leering, tittering shantak coursed on impetuous and relentless, flapping its great slippery wings in malignant joy, and headed for those unhallowed pits whither no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion where bubbles and blasphemes at infinity's centre the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud.\n\nUnswerving and obedient to the foul legate's orders, that hellish bird plunged onward through shoals of shapeless lurkers and caperers in darkness, and vacuous herds of drifting entities that pawed and groped and groped and pawed; the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, that are like them blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.\n\nOnward unswerving and relentless, and tittering hilariously to watch the chuckling and hysterics into which the siren song of night and the spheres had turned, that eldritch scaly monster bore its helpless rider; hurtling and shooting, cleaving the uttermost rim and spanning the outermost abysses; leaving behind the stars and the realms of matter, and darting meteor-like through stark formlessness toward those inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time wherein black Azathoth gnaws shapeless and ravenous amidst the muffled, maddening beat of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes.\n\nOnward\u2014onward\u2014through the screaming, cackling, and blackly populous gulfs\u2014and then from some dim blessed distance there came an image and a thought to Randolph Carter the doomed. Too well had Nyarlathotep planned his mocking and his tantalising, for he had brought up that which no gusts of icy terror could quite efface. Home\u2014New England\u2014Beacon Hill\u2014the waking world.\n\n\"For know you, that your gold and marble city of wonder is only the sum of what you have seen and loved in youth... the glory of Boston's hillside roofs and western windows aflame with sunset; of the flower-fragrant Common and the great dome on the hill and the tangle of gables and chimneys in the violet valley where the many-bridged Charles flows drowsily... this loveliness, moulded, crystallised, and polished by years of memory and dreaming, is your terraced wonder of elusive sunsets; and to find that marble parapet with curious urns and carven rail, and descend at last those endless balustraded steps to the city of broad squares and prismatic fountains, you need only to turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.\"\n\nOnward\u2014onward\u2014dizzily onward to ultimate doom through the blackness where sightless feelers pawed and slimy snouts jostled and nameless things tittered and tittered and tittered. But the image and the thought had come, and Randolph Carter knew clearly that he was dreaming and only dreaming, and that somewhere in the background the world of waking and the city of his infancy still lay. Words came again\u2014\"You need only turn back to the thoughts and visions of your wistful boyhood.\" Turn\u2014turn\u2014blackness on every side, but Randolph Carter could turn.\n\nThick though the rushing nightmare that clutched his senses, Randolph Carter could turn and move. He could move, and if he chose he could leap off the evil shantak that bore him hurtlingly doomward at the orders of Nyarlathotep. He could leap off and dare those depths of night that yawned interminably down, those depths of fear whose terrors yet could not exceed the nameless doom that lurked waiting at chaos' core. He could turn and move and leap\u2014he could\u2014he would\u2014he would\u2014\n\nOff that vast hippocephalic abomination leaped the doomed and desperate dreamer, and down through endless voids of sentient blackness he fell. Aeons reeled, universes died and were born again, stars became nebulae and nebulae became stars, and still Randolph Carter fell through those endless voids of sentient blackness.\n\nThen in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns, and worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to no first beginning.\n\nAnd there was a firmament again, and a wind, and a glare of purple light in the eyes of the falling dreamer. There were gods and presences and wills; beauty and evil, and the shrieking of noxious night robbed of its prey. For through the unknown ultimate cycle had lived a thought and a vision of a dreamer's boyhood, and now there were re-made a waking world and an old cherished city to body and to justify these things. Out of the void S'ngac the violet gas had pointed the way, and archaic Nodens was bellowing his guidance from unhinted deeps.\n\nStars swelled to dawns, and dawns burst into fountains of gold, carmine, and purple, and still the dreamer fell. Cries rent the aether as ribbons of light beat back the fiends from outside. And hoary Nodens raised a howl of triumph when Nyarlathotep, close on his quarry, stopped baffled by a glare that seared his formless hunting-horrors to grey dust. Randolph Carter had indeed descended at last the wide marmoreal flights to his marvellous city, for he was come again to the fair New England world that had wrought him.\n\nSo to the organ chords of morning's myriad whistles, and dawn's blaze thrown dazzling through purple panes by the great gold dome of the State House on the hill, Randolph Carter leaped shoutingly awake within his Boston room. Birds sang in hidden gardens and the perfume of trellised vines came wistful from arbours his grandfather had reared. Beauty and light glowed from classic mantel and carven cornice and walls grotesquely figured, while a sleek black cat rose yawning from hearthside sleep that his master's start and shriek had disturbed. And vast infinities away, past the Gate of Deeper Slumber and the enchanted wood and the garden lands and the Cerenerian Sea and the twilight reaches of Inganok, the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep strode brooding into the onyx castle atop unknown Kadath in the cold waste, and taunted insolently the mild gods of earth whom he had snatched abruptly from their scented revels in the marvellous sunset city.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Dreams in the Witch House by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWhether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound\u2014and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.\n\nHe was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's men in the dark, olden days of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him\u2014for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692\u2014the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.\n\nPossibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.\n\nHe knew his room was in the old Witch House\u2014that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.\n\nGilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure; for the house was unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.\n\nHe studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have practiced her spells. It had been vacant from the first\u2014for no one had ever been willing to stay there long\u2014but the Polish landlord had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's incantations rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not\u2014at least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys\u2014have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.\n\nGilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slanting perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no access\u2014nor any appearance of a former avenue of access\u2014to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall on the house's north side, though a view from the exterior shewed where a window had been boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling\u2014which must have had a slanting floor\u2014was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cobwebbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common in colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.\n\nAs time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding their purpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he was already on.\n\nThe touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute. But the exaggerated sense of hearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds\u2014perhaps from regions beyond life\u2014trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling\u2014and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.\n\nThe dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman felt that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason\u2014guided by some influence past all conjecture\u2014had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed county records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience\u2014and the descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.\n\nThat object\u2014no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople \"Brown Jenkin\"\u2014seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood\u2014which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.\n\nGilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and bafflingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organisation and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected\u2014though not without a certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.\n\nThe abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other categories.\n\nAll the objects\u2014organic and inorganic alike\u2014were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further mystery\u2014the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre, or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.\n\nBut it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room, shewing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face\u2014but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth. Gilman tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole\u2014in making which they pushed or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.\n\nGilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term. It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering\u2014especially the first time, when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams.\n\nThat the influence of the old house was unwholesome, he could not deny; but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.\n\nToward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though other studies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves\u2014or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might\u2014given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement\u2014step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.\n\nSuch a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others\u2014even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar-dimensional phases of other space-time continua\u2014though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.\n\nIt was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions\u2014be they within or outside the given space-time continuum\u2014and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher plane would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity\u2014human or pre-human\u2014whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.\n\nAround the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seemed that he was often absent from his bed, and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house\u2014for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratchings came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonisingly realistic.\n\nHowever, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion, though, had Gilman been there\u2014and when told of the matter he wondered where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night-clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.\n\nAs April advanced Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the whining prayers of a superstitious loomfixer named Joe Mazurewicz, who had a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry, sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing, and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver crucifix\u2014given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus' Church\u2014could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches' Sabbath was drawing near. May-Eve was Walpurgis-Night, when hell's blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad time in Arkham, even though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings\u2014and a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother. It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three months Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul Choynski's room, nor anywhere else\u2014and it meant no good when they held off like that. They must be up to something.\n\nGilman dropped in at a doctor's office on the 16th of the month, and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his activities before, would have made him take a rest\u2014an impossible thing now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?\n\nBut even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of imminence come from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy, imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too, there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism? Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the maddening confusion of identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in those wholly alien abysses of dream.\n\nThe dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos. That was what she said. He must sign in his own blood the book of Azathoth and take a new secret name now that his independent delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name \"Azathoth\" in the Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for description.\n\nThe old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallise at a point closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too, was always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill loathsome tittering stuck more and more in Gilman's head, and he could remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words \"Azathoth\" and \"Nyarlathotep\".\n\nIn the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less irrelevantly moving things\u2014a rather large congeries of iridescent, prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown colours and rapidly shifting surface angles\u2014seemed to take notice of him and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters, and quasi-buildings; and all the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.\n\nDuring the night of April 19\u201320 the new development occurred. Gilman was half-involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead, when he noticed the peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green light. He was barefooted and in his night-clothes, and when he tried to walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank from the thought of the sounds that might surge out of that vapour.\n\nThen he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him\u2014the old woman and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a certain direction with a horribly anthropoid fore paw which it raised with evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old woman's arms and the direction of the small monstrosity's paw, and before he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses. Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of the eldritch old house.\n\nHe was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant spot on the floor. As the day advanced the focus of his unseeing eyes changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at vacancy. About two o'clock he went out for lunch, and as he threaded the narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast. Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.\n\nHe would have to consult a nerve specialist after all\u2014perhaps there was a connexion with his somnambulism\u2014but meanwhile he might at least try to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to walk away from the pull; so with great resolution he headed against it and dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration, and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.\n\nThen he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.\n\nThe southeastward pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs. For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him in the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realised just where the source of the pull lay.\n\nIt was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south but wheeling toward the west. What was the meaning of this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old house.\n\nMazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the witch light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before\u2014it was Patriots' Day in Massachusetts\u2014and had come home after midnight. Looking up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman's window was dark; but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was Keziah's witch light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed loft above the young gentleman's room, but they had all agreed not to talk about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.\n\nAs the man rambled on Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat. He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night before, yet this mention of a violet light in the garret window was of frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly beyond sane harbourage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion? Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No, Joe said, he had not\u2014but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood could tell him something, though he hated to ask.\n\nFever\u2014wild dreams\u2014somnambulism\u2014illusions of sounds\u2014a pull toward a point in the sky\u2014and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he climbed to the second story he paused at Elwood's door but saw that the other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southwest, but he also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.\n\nThat night as Gilman slept the violet light broke upon him with heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing\u2014getting closer than ever before\u2014mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses, though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed above and below him\u2014a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were madly and inextricably blended.\n\nHe was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness\u2014some of stone and some of metal\u2014which glittered gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a polychromatic sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs of flame, each of a different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.\n\nThe pavement from which he easily raised himself was of a veined, polished stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck him as less asymmetrical than based on some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture. They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object with thin horizontal arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring, and with vertical knobs or bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms arranged around it like the arms of a starfish\u2014nearly horizontal, but curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.\n\nWhen Gilman stood up the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half-dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space on the smooth railing.\n\nBut now his oversensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent him unconscious\u2014for they were living entities about eight feet high, shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.\n\nGilman awakened in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a smarting sensation in his face, hands, and feet. Springing to the floor, he washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now he felt that he must go north\u2014infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.\n\nAfter about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth\u2014that ancient, half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance over and over again without paying any attention to it.\n\nAbout nine at night he drifted homeward and stumbled into the ancient house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side\u2014for it could not stand up alone\u2014was the exotic spiky figure which in his monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped centre, the thin, radiating arms, the knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms spreading from those knobs\u2014all were there. In the electric light the colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green, and Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs ended in a jagged break corresponding to its former point of attachment to the dream-railing.\n\nOnly his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed, he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loomfixer were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young gentleman's bed\u2014on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his room\u2014books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly knew nothing about it.\n\nSo Gilman climbed upstairs again in a mental turmoil, convinced that he was either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got this outr\u00e9 thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries\u2014and perhaps see the nerve specialist.\n\nMeanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he had borrowed\u2014with a frank admission as to its purpose\u2014from the landlord. He had stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had found all dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table, and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to undress. From the closed loft above the slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganised even to mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again, though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.\n\nIn the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone's withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place. Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which, after a second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.\n\nThe evilly grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood a figure he had never seen before\u2014a tall, lean man of dead black colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features; wholly devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's right hand. Over everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman lapsed into a faint.\n\nHe awaked on the morning of the 22nd with a pain in his left wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in dreams.\n\nAs he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would crystallise in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker abysses beyond them\u2014abysses in which all fixed suggestions of form were absent. He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of milky, barely luminous mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone on ahead\u2014a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless approximations of form\u2014and he thought that their progress had not been in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast, leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin, monotonous piping of an unseen flute\u2014but that was all. Gilman decided he had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and space from a curiously environed black throne at the centre of Chaos.\n\nWhen the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain\u2014which was very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better, he thought, sprinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door\u2014though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew he did walk\u2014and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.\n\nHe took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself against the whines of the loomfixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears. His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done. He was shocked by his guest's drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past week. There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis-Night, now only a few days off; and were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman. Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal footsteps both shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman's keyhole. He had not dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too\u2014and as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.\n\nElwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the nearness of traditionally feared May-Eve on the other hand. That Gilman talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers' keyhole-listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action\u2014Gilman had better move down to Elwood's room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would, if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking identification and stating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can. Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.\n\nBraced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that day. Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with considerable success. During a free period he shewed the queer image to several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-story room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the loomfixer were an unnerving influence.\n\nDuring the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed no tendency to talk or rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited. Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say\u2014in fact, he insisted that cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first and second nights of Gilman's absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a knob on his host's dresser.\n\nFor three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis, and the result is still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.\n\nOn the morning of April 27 a fresh rat-hole appeared in the room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day. The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in the walls were virtually undiminished. Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not wish to go to sleep in a room alone\u2014especially since he thought he had glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly at him\u2014though perhaps this was merely his imagination.\n\nThe next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason, and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down surprising secrets from elder, forgotten aeons; and it was by no means impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch's motions; and who can say what underlies the old tales of broomstick rides through the night?\n\nWhether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical research alone, was still to be seen. Success, Gilman added, might lead to dangerous and unthinkable situations; for who could foretell the conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such a belt one might preserve one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred during visits to one's own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth's history as young as before.\n\nWhether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside. There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and terrible powers\u2014the \"Black Man\" of the witch-cult, and the \"Nyarlathotep\" of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem of the lesser messengers or intermediaries\u2014the quasi-animals and queer hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars. As Gilman and Elwood retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into the house half-drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his whining prayers.\n\nThat night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame's face was alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily sleeping form of Elwood on the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the infinitude of the shrieking twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.\n\nAhead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeve. There were evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open, motioning to Gilman to wait and disappearing inside the black aperture.\n\nThe youth's oversensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and into the mud outside; halting only when seized and choked by the waiting black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.\n\nOn the morning of the 29th Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing fright that his feet and pajama-bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he could recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings\u2014such as the legs of a large chair or table might make, except that most of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors below.\n\nDescending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and began telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy, furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber, were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were talking Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on the stairs after midnight\u2014though just before midnight he had heard faint footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like. It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman had better be sure to wear the crucifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in the house\u2014especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.\n\nGilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University Spa, picking up a paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him limp, wild-eyed, and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood's room.\n\nThere had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's Gangway, and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis-Night. She had asked her neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child, but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help because he wanted the child out of the way anyhow.\n\nBut what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after midnight. They admitted they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags, and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.\n\nGilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood\u2014who had meanwhile seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them\u2014found him thus when he came home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.\n\nJust what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where\u2014if anywhere\u2014had he been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses\u2014the green hillside\u2014the blistering terrace\u2014the pulls from the stars\u2014the ultimate black vortex\u2014the black man\u2014the muddy alley and the stairs\u2014the old witch and the fanged, furry horror\u2014the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron\u2014the strange sunburn\u2014the wrist wound\u2014the unexplained image\u2014the muddy feet\u2014the throat-marks\u2014the tales and fears of the superstitious foreigners\u2014what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity apply to such a case?\n\nThere was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six o'clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.\n\nLate at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the Necronomicon and the Black Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.\n\nPresently he realised what he was listening for\u2014the hellish chant of the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected? How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master. Had he signed the black man's book after all?\n\nThen his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics\u2014folklore\u2014the house\u2014old Keziah\u2014Brown Jenkin... and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another sound\u2014a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole\u2014the accursed little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah's\u2014and heard the faint fumbling at the door.\n\nThe screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed to know what was coming\u2014the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded periods.\n\nBut all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure\u2014an infant boy, unclothed and unconscious\u2014while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand, but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the Necronomicon.\n\nAs the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the empty bowl across the table\u2014and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach. The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.\n\nIn an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table and wrenched the knife from the old woman's claws; sending it clattering over the brink of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck, and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature. Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.\n\nAt sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and his own hands reached out for the creature's throat. Before she saw what he was doing he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle, and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.\n\nWhether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim's chest, the yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist\u2014and the bowl so lately on the floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.\n\nIn his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the angles which he needed to guide him back to the normal world\u2014alone and unaided for the first time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly. Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house\u2014an abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.\n\nThe passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?\n\nJust before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter blackness. The witch\u2014old Keziah\u2014Nahab\u2014that must have meant her death. And mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz\u2014the prayers against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek\u2014worlds of sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream\u2014I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young....\n\nThey found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and Joe's crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form his friend's sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a \"sign\" he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.\n\nWhen the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's room they sent for Dr. Malkowski\u2014a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove embarrassing\u2014and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.\n\nGilman\u2014whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness\u2014was now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.\n\nElwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.\n\nThe crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest's couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.\n\nElwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.\n\nIt would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body\u2014something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski, frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.\n\nIt seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman's couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet's edge and the base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous\u2014or thought he had, for no one else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.\n\nThe house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord's rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia\u2014but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.\n\nGilman's dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that\u2014notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself\u2014no fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman's death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.\n\nIn March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when Gilman's old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that the gossip began.\n\nAmong the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones\u2014badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human\u2014whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner's physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others\u2014found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish cloth\u2014belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and reflection.\n\nOther objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects\u2014objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffle all conjecture\u2014found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One of these things\u2014which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly\u2014is a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.\n\nArchaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman's old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.\n\nWhen the slanting wall of Gilman's room was torn out, the once sealed triangular space between that partition and the house's north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children\u2014some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design\u2014above which the debris was piled.\n\nIn the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of Miskatonic's department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.\n\nThe bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Dunwich Horror by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras\u2014dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies\u2014may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition\u2014but they were there before. They are transcripts, types\u2014the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body\u2014or without the body, they would have been the same.... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual\u2014that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy\u2014are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.\"\n\n\u2014Charles Lamb: \"Witches and Other Night-Fears\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.\n\nGorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.\n\nAs the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.\n\nOutsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age\u2014since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart\u2014people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason\u2014though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers\u2014is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.\n\nNo one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:\n\n\"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I my self did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou'd raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.\"\n\nMr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.\n\nOther traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard\u2014a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.\n\nThese tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old\u2014older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5 A.M. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might\u2014and did\u2014speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous future.\n\nLavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.\n\nThere was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborn's general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man\u2014an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear\u2014though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all he shewed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his hearers years afterward.\n\n\"I dun't keer what folks think\u2014ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabaouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin'\u2014some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!\"\n\nThe only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle Whateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.\n\nIn the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds shewed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to remove.\n\nIt was somewhat after this time\u2014on Hallowe'en\u2014that a great blaze was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop\u2014of the undecayed Bishops\u2014mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward he could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.\n\nThe next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that \"Lavinny's black brat\" had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking menace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house\u2014a spacious, peaked-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself and his daughter. There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to shew the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool-sheds had been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper story of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania shewed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section\u2014though many declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all. Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for his new grandson\u2014a room which several callers saw, though no one was ever admitted to the closely boarded upper story. This chamber he lined with tall, firm shelving; along which he began gradually to arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously in odd corners of the various rooms.\n\n\"I made some use of 'em,\" he would say as he tried to mend a torn black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, \"but the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well sot as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.\"\n\nWhen Wilbur was a year and seven months old\u2014in September of 1914\u2014his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley would instruct and catechise him through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end, close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this work's completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered\u2014such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.\n\nThe following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May-Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly synchronised with bursts of flame\u2014\"them witch Whateleys' doin's\"\u2014from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine guardians.\n\nThe few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up second story. She would never tell what her father and the boy were doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear when a jocose fish-peddler tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That peddler told the store loungers at Dunwich Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.\n\nIn 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men fit even to be sent to a development camp. The government, alarmed at such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black magic, the shelves of strange books, the sealed second story of the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.\n\nEarl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the tool-shed abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circles on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May-Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely farmhouse. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper story even when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.\n\nAbout 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground story and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stovepipe.\n\nIn the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.\n\n\"They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,\" he said, \"an' I guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.\"\n\nOn Lammas Night, 1924, Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural\u2014too much, thought Dr. Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.\n\nToward one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.\n\n\"More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows\u2014an' that grows faster. It'll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow.\"\n\nHe was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another sentence or two.\n\n\"Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont kin make it multiply an' work.... Only them, the old uns as wants to come back....\"\n\nBut speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr. Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.\n\n\"They didn't git him,\" he muttered in his heavy bass voice.\n\nWilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.\n\nThrough all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May-Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.\n\n\"They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,\" she said, \"an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.\"\n\nThat Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandaemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later. None of the country folk seemed to have died\u2014but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never seen again.\n\nIn the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterward Earl Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about his mother's disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and shewed no signs of ceasing its development." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University of Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborn's general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library\u2014the hideous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chain.\n\nWilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civilly refrain from telling the librarian\u2014the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.\n\n\"Nor is it to be thought,\" ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it, \"that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.\"\n\nDr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind's.\n\n\"Mr. Armitage,\" he said, \"I calc'late I've got to take that book home. They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that I can't git here, an' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it. It wa'n't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is....\"\n\nHe stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsiblity in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.\n\n\"Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard wun't be so fussy as yew be.\" And without saying more he rose and strode out of the building, stooping at each doorway.\n\nArmitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth\u2014or at least not of tri-dimensional earth\u2014rushed foetid and horrible through New England's glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain-tops. Of this he had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. \"As a foulness shall ye know them,\" he quoted. Yes\u2014the odour was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.\n\n\"Inbreeding?\" Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. \"Great God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing\u2014what cursed shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensioned earth\u2014was Wilbur Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas\u2014nine months after May-Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham\u2014 What walked on the mountains that May-Night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?\"\n\nDuring the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and Dr. Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home again, as if he feared the results of being away long.\n\nEarly in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours of the 3d Dr. Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream from a wholly different throat\u2014such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterward\u2014such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.\n\nArmitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library. An open window shewed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man.\n\nThe building was full of a frightful stench which Dr. Armitage knew too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the switch. One of the three\u2014it is not certain which\u2014shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.\n\nThe thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualised by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.\n\nAbove the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.\n\nAs the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr. Armitage made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with any speech of earth, but toward the last there came some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like \"N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah; Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth....\" They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendoes of unholy anticipation.\n\nThen came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.\n\nAll at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the crowd, and Dr. Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and Dr. Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered up.\n\nMeanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the court-house in Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic valley.\n\nAn almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts has yet been discovered.\n\nIt was in the dark of September 9th that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early risers on the 10th noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs. Corey.\n\n\"Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey\u2014they's suthin' ben thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it. An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's prints in the rud, Mis' Corey\u2014great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk daown deep like a elephant had ben along, only they's a sight more nor four feet could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one was covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans\u2014twict or three times as big as any they is\u2014hed of ben paounded daown into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is araound Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse....\"\n\nHere he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him flying home. Mrs. Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally's boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill toward Whateley's, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the pasturage where Mr. Bishop's cows had been left out all night.\n\n\"Yes, Mis' Corey,\" came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire, \"Cha'ncey he just come back a-postin', and couldn't haff talk fer bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's haouse is all blowed up, with the timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o' tar-like stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun' whar the side timbers is blown away. An' they's awful kinder marks in the yard, tew\u2014great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the blowed-up haouse. Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.\n\n\"An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's caows, frighted ez he was; an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em like they's ben on Whateley's cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth he's gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow he wun't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the village.\n\n\"I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be abroad, an' I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad eend he desarved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He wa'n't all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an' Ol' Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as ain't even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich\u2014livin' things\u2014as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.\n\n\"The graoun' was a-talkin' lass night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey he heerd the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't sleep nun. Then he thought he heerd another faint-like saound over towards Wizard Whateley's\u2014a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box er crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an' that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's the matter. He see enough, I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no good, an' I think as all the menfolks ought to git up a party an' do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.\n\n\"Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen, an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air daown thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den.\"\n\nBy that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping over the roads and meadows between the new-made Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadsides. Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterward reproduced by the Associated Press.\n\nThat night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs. Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the womenfolk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of late whippoorwills in the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.\n\nThe next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that hovered about half way between soundness and decadence, made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hilltops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.\n\nDarkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organise for real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.\n\nWhen night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road shewed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upward, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed around to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended\u2014or rather, reversed\u2014there.\n\nIt was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May-Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a plausible explanation.\n\nThursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, \"Help, oh, my Gawd!...\" and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation, had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in languages both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet\u2014this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanscrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr. Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the Middle Ages.\n\nArmitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.\n\nDr. Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the massed lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius' Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta's De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigen\u00e8re's Trait\u00e9 des Chiffres, Falconer's Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys' and Thicknesse's eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, von Marten, and Kl\u00fcber's Kryptographik. He interspersed his study of the books with attacks on the manuscript itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in English.\n\nOn the evening of September 2nd the last major barrier gave way, and Dr. Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly shewing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.\n\n\"Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth,\" it ran, \"which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins' collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May-Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.\"\n\nMorning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.\n\nOn the morning of September 4th Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday\u2014the next day\u2014he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in an easy-chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary, and promising an explanation in due course of time.\n\nThat evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr. Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, \"But what, in God's name, can we do?\"\n\nDr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.\n\n\"Stop them, stop them!\" he would shout. \"Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something\u2014it's a blind business, but I know how to make the powder.... It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate....\"\n\nBut Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's raving.\n\nOpinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police, and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him\u2014the earth-threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror.\n\nMonday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr. Armitage, for the task in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whiskey of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain-top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich; questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like stone on the summit.\n\nAt length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by.\n\n\"Gawd,\" he gasped, \"I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday....\"\n\nA cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambulans in tenebris.... The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had memorised, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorised. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon would be of help.\n\nArmitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.\n\nThere were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the dark.\n\nMorning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the northwest. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.\n\nIt was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form.\n\n\"Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,\" the voice choked out. \"It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout\u2014it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!\"\n\nThe speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.\n\n\"Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the 'phone a-ringin', an' it was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the maouth o' the glen\u2014opposite side ter this\u2014an' smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'. An' she says he says they was a swishin', lappin' saound, more nor what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' underbrush.\n\n\"Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the swishin' saound got very fur off\u2014on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill\u2014Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd it furst an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees had moved, they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen Monday.\"\n\nAt this point the first excited speaker interrupted.\n\n\"But that ain't the trouble naow\u2014that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit ter kill\u2014she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was all barkin' an' whinin' awful.\n\n\"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' we could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin' tew, an' Sally was shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse\u2014not lightnin' nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin the front, that kep' a-launchin' itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nothin' aout the front winders. An' then... an' then...\"\n\nLines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.\n\n\"An' then... Sally she yelled aout, 'O help, the haouse is a-cavin' in'... an' on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin', an' a hull flock o' screamin'... jest like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only wuss....\"\n\nThe man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.\n\n\"That's all\u2014not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' raounded up as many able-bodied menfolks as we could git, at Corey's place, an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it's the Lord's jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside.\"\n\nArmitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.\n\n\"We must follow it, boys.\" He made his voice as reassuring as possible. \"I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards\u2014well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always take a chance. It's invisible\u2014I knew it would be\u2014but there's a powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it shew up for a second. Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer. You'll never know what the world has escaped. Now we've only this one thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.\n\n\"We must follow it\u2014and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way\u2014I don't know your roads very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?\"\n\nThe men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.\n\n\"I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' acrost the lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' and the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's\u2014a leetle t'other side.\"\n\nArmitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to shew the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting; though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay toward the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test.\n\nAt length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks shewed what had passed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just around the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.\n\nAs the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's former route to and from the summit.\n\nArmitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focussed the lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan's had been.\n\n\"Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a-movin'! It's a-goin' up\u2014slow-like\u2014creepin' up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!\"\n\nThen the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right\u2014but suppose they weren't? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "In the end the three men from Arkham\u2014old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan\u2014ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focussing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed around. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.\n\nCurtis Whateley\u2014of the undecayed branch\u2014was holding the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.\n\nThen Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that this sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party's point of vantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.\n\nThose without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey cloud\u2014a cloud about the size of a moderately large building\u2014near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who had held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly,\n\n\"Oh, oh, great Gawd... that... that...\"\n\nThere was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.\n\n\"Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything, with dozens o' legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it\u2014all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an' all a-tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in heaven\u2014that haff face on top!...\"\n\nThis final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running toward the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these\u2014nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.\n\nEarl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. \"I guess he's sayin' the spell,\" whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible ritual.\n\nSuddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.\n\nThe change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had shewed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.\n\nWithout warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud\u2014loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed\u2014yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.\n\n\"Ygnaiih... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha... Yog-Sothoth...\" rang the hideous croaking out of space. \"Y'bthnk... h'ehye\u2014n'grkdl'lh....\"\n\nThe speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.\n\n\"Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah\u2014e'yayayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP!... ff\u2014ff\u2014ff\u2014FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...\"\n\nBut that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning-bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and underbrush were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.\n\nThe stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.\n\n\"The thing has gone forever,\" Armitage said. \"It has been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father\u2014and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.\"\n\nThere was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in upon him again.\n\n\"Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face\u2014that haff face on top of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....\"\n\nHe paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a bewilderment not quite crystallised into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent heretofore, spoke aloud.\n\n\"Fifteen year' gone,\" he rambled, \"I heerd Ol' Whateley say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill....\"\n\nBut Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.\n\n\"What was it anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it aout o' the air it come from?\"\n\nArmitage chose his words very carefully.\n\n\"It was\u2014well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself\u2014enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of\u2014the beings they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.\n\n\"But as to this thing we've just sent back\u2014the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big\u2014but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Electric Executioner by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nFor one who has never faced the danger of legal execution, I have a rather queer horror of the electric chair as a subject. Indeed, I think the topic gives me more of a shudder than it gives many a man who has been on trial for his life. The reason is that I associate the thing with an incident of forty years ago\u2014a very strange incident which brought me close to the edge of the unknown's black abyss.\n\nIn 1889 I was an auditor and investigator connected with the Tlaxcala Mining Company of San Francisco, which operated several small silver and copper properties in the San Mateo Mountains in Mexico. There had been some trouble at Mine No. 3, which had a surly, furtive assistant superintendent named Arthur Feldon; and on August 6th the firm received a telegram saying that Feldon had decamped, taking with him all the stock records, securities, and private papers, and leaving the whole clerical and financial situation in dire confusion.\n\nThis development was a severe blow to the company, and late in the afternoon President McComb called me into his office to give orders for the recovery of the papers at any cost. There were, he knew, grave drawbacks. I had never seen Feldon, and there were only very indifferent photographs to go by. Moreover, my own wedding was set for Thursday of the following week\u2014only nine days ahead\u2014so that I was naturally not eager to be hurried off to Mexico on a man-hunt of indefinite length. The need, however, was so great that McComb felt justified in asking me to go at once; and I for my part decided that the effect on my status with the company would make ready acquiescence eminently worth while.\n\nI was to start that night, using the president's private car as far as Mexico City, after which I would have to take a narrow-gauge railway to the mines. Jackson, the superintendent of No. 3, would give me all details and any possible clues upon my arrival; and then the search would begin in earnest\u2014through the mountains, down to the coast, or among the byways of Mexico City, as the case might be. I set out with a grim determination to get the matter done\u2014and successfully done\u2014as swiftly as possible; and tempered my discontent with pictures of an early return with papers and culprit, and of a wedding which would be almost a triumphal ceremony.\n\nHaving notified my family, fianc\u00e9e, and principal friends, and made hasty preparations for the trip, I met President McComb at eight p.m. at the Southern Pacific depot, received from him some written instructions and a check-book, and left in his car attached to the 8:15 eastbound transcontinental train. The journey that followed seemed destined for uneventfulness, and after a good night's sleep I revelled in the ease of the private car so thoughtfully assigned me; reading my instructions with care, and formulating plans for the capture of Feldon and the recovery of the documents. I knew the Tlaxcala country quite well\u2014probably much better than the missing man\u2014hence had a certain amount of advantage in my search unless he had already used the railway.\n\nAccording to the instructions, Feldon had been a subject of worry to Superintendent Jackson for some time; acting secretively, and working unaccountably in the company's laboratory at odd hours. That he was implicated with a Mexican boss and several peons in some thefts of ore was strongly suspected; but though the natives had been discharged, there was not enough evidence to warrant any positive step regarding the subtle official. Indeed, despite his furtiveness, there seemed to be more of defiance than of guilt in the man's bearing. He wore a chip on his shoulder, and talked as if the company were cheating him instead of his cheating the company. The obvious surveillance of his colleagues, Jackson wrote, appeared to irritate him increasingly; and now he had gone with everything of importance in the office. Of his possible whereabouts no guess could be made; though Jackson's final telegram suggested the wild slopes of the Sierra de Malinche, that tall, myth-surrounded peak with the corpse-shaped silhouette, from whose neighbourhood the thieving natives were said to have come.\n\nAt El Paso, which we reached at two a.m. of the night following our start, my private car was detached from the transcontinental train and joined to an engine specially ordered by telegraph to take it southward to Mexico City. I continued to drowse till dawn, and all the next day grew bored on the flat, desert Chihuahua landscape. The crew had told me we were due in Mexico City at noon Friday, but I soon saw that countless delays were wasting precious hours. There were waits on sidings all along the single-tracked route, and now and then a hot-box or other difficulty would further complicate the schedule.\n\nAt Torre\u00f3n we were six hours late, and it was almost eight o'clock on Friday evening\u2014fully twelve hours behind schedule\u2014when the conductor consented to do some speeding in an effort to make up time. My nerves were on edge, and I could do nothing but pace the car in desperation. In the end I found that the speeding had been purchased at a high cost indeed, for within a half-hour the symptoms of a hot-box had developed in my car itself; so that after a maddening wait the crew decided that all the bearings would have to be overhauled after a quarter-speed limp ahead to the next station with shops\u2014the factory town of Quer\u00e9taro. This was the last straw, and I almost stamped like a child. Actually I sometimes caught myself pushing at my chair-arm as if trying to urge the train forward at a less snail-like pace.\n\nIt was almost ten in the evening when we drew into Quer\u00e9taro, and I spent a fretful hour on the station platform while my car was sidetracked and tinkered at by a dozen native mechanics. At last they told me the job was too much for them, since the forward truck needed new parts which could not be obtained nearer than Mexico City. Everything indeed seemed against me, and I gritted my teeth when I thought of Feldon getting farther and farther away\u2014perhaps to the easy cover of Vera Cruz with its shipping or Mexico City with its varied rail facilities\u2014while fresh delays kept me tied and helpless. Of course Jackson had notified the police in all the cities around, but I knew with sorrow what their efficiency amounted to.\n\nThe best I could do, I soon found out, was to take the regular night express for Mexico City, which ran from Aguas Calientes and made a five-minute stop at Quer\u00e9taro. It would be along at one a.m. if on time, and was due in Mexico City at five o'clock Saturday morning. When I purchased my ticket I found that the train would be made up of European compartment carriages instead of long American cars with rows of two-seat chairs. These had been much used in the early days of Mexican railroading, owing to the European construction interests back of the first lines; and in 1889 the Mexican Central was still running a fair number of them on its shorter trips. Ordinarily I prefer the American coaches, since I hate to have people facing me; but for this once I was glad of the foreign carriage. At such a time of night I stood a good chance of having a whole compartment to myself, and in my tired, nervously hypersensitive state I welcomed the solitude\u2014as well as the comfortably upholstered seat with soft arm-rests and head-cushion, running the whole width of the vehicle. I bought a first-class ticket, obtained my valise from the sidetracked private car, telegraphed both President McComb and Jackson of what had happened, and settled down in the station to wait for the night express as patiently as my strained nerves would let me.\n\nFor a wonder, the train was only half an hour late; though even so, the solitary station vigil had about finished my endurance. The conductor, shewing me into a compartment, told me he expected to make up the delay and reach the capital on time; and I stretched myself comfortably on the forward-facing seat in the expectation of a quiet three-and-a-half-hour run. The light from the overhead oil lamp was soothingly dim, and I wondered whether I could snatch some much-needed sleep in spite of my anxiety and nerve-tension. It seemed, as the train jolted into motion, that I was alone; and I was heartily glad of it. My thoughts leaped ahead to my quest, and I nodded with the accelerating rhythm of the speeding string of carriages.\n\nThen suddenly I perceived that I was not alone after all. In the corner diagonally opposite me, slumped down so that his face was invisible, sat a roughly clad man of unusual size, whom the feeble light had failed to reveal before. Beside him on the seat was a huge valise, battered and bulging, and tightly gripped even in his sleep by one of his incongruously slender hands. As the engine whistled sharply at some curve or crossing, the sleeper started nervously into a kind of watchful half-awakening; raising his head and disclosing a handsome face, bearded and clearly Anglo-Saxon, with dark, lustrous eyes. At sight of me his wakefulness became complete, and I wondered at the rather hostile wildness of his glance. No doubt, I thought, he resented my presence when he had hoped to have the compartment alone all the way; just as I was myself disappointed to find strange company in the half-lighted carriage. The best we could do, however, was to accept the situation gracefully; so I began apologising to the man for my intrusion. He seemed to be a fellow-American, and we could both feel more at ease after a few civilities. Then we could leave each other in peace for the balance of the journey.\n\nTo my surprise, the stranger did not respond to my courtesies with so much as a word. Instead, he kept staring at me fiercely and almost appraisingly, and brushed aside my embarrassed proffer of a cigar with a nervous lateral movement of his disengaged hand. His other hand still tensely clutched the great, worn valise, and his whole person seemed to radiate some obscure malignity. After a time he abruptly turned his face toward the window, though there was nothing to see in the dense blackness outside. Oddly, he appeared to be looking at something as intently as if there really were something to look at. I decided to leave him to his own curious devices and meditations without further annoyance; so settled back in my seat, drew the brim of my soft hat over my face, and closed my eyes in an effort to snatch the sleep I had half counted on.\n\nI could not have dozed very long or very fully when my eyes fell open as if in response to some external force. Closing them again with some determination, I renewed my quest of a nap, yet wholly without avail. An intangible influence seemed bent on keeping me awake; so raising my head, I looked about the dimly lighted compartment to see if anything were amiss. All appeared normal, but I noticed that the stranger in the opposite corner was looking at me very intently\u2014intently, though without any of the geniality or friendliness which would have implied a change from his former surly attitude. I did not attempt conversation this time, but leaned back in my previous sleepy posture; half closing my eyes as if I had dozed off once more, yet continuing to watch him curiously from beneath my down-turned hat brim.\n\nAs the train rattled onward through the night I saw a subtle and gradual metamorphosis come over the expression of the staring man. Evidently satisfied that I was asleep, he allowed his face to reflect a curious jumble of emotions, the nature of which seemed anything but reassuring. Hatred, fear, triumph, and fanaticism flickered compositely over the lines of his lips and the angles of his eyes, while his gaze became a glare of really alarming greed and ferocity. Suddenly it dawned upon me that this man was mad, and dangerously so.\n\nI will not pretend that I was anything but deeply and thoroughly frightened when I saw how things stood. Perspiration started out all over me, and I had hard work to maintain my attitude of relaxation and slumber. Life had many attractions for me just then, and the thought of dealing with a homicidal maniac\u2014possibly armed and certainly powerful to a marvellous degree\u2014was a dismaying and terrifying one. My disadvantage in any sort of struggle was enormous; for the man was a virtual giant, evidently in the best of athletic trim, while I have always been rather frail, and was then almost worn out with anxiety, sleeplessness, and nervous tension. It was undeniably a bad moment for me, and I felt pretty close to a horrible death as I recognised the fury of madness in the stranger's eyes. Events from the past came up into my consciousness as if for a farewell\u2014just as a drowning man's whole life is said to resurrect itself before him at the last moment.\n\nOf course I had my revolver in my coat pocket, but any motion of mine to reach and draw it would be instantly obvious. Moreover, if I did secure it, there was no telling what effect it would have on the maniac. Even if I shot him once or twice he might have enough remaining strength to get the gun from me and deal with me in his own way; or if he were armed himself he might shoot or stab without trying to disarm me. One can cow a sane man by covering him with a pistol, but an insane man's complete indifference to consequences gives him a strength and menace quite superhuman for the time being. Even in those pre-Freudian days I had a common-sense realisation of the dangerous power of a person without normal inhibitions. That the stranger in the corner was indeed about to start some murderous action, his burning eyes and twitching facial muscles did not permit me to doubt for a moment.\n\nSuddenly I heard his breath begin to come in excited gasps, and saw his chest heaving with mounting excitement. The time for a showdown was close, and I tried desperately to think of the best thing to do. Without interrupting my pretence of sleep, I began to slide my right hand gradually and inconspicuously toward the pocket containing my pistol; watching the madman closely as I did so, to see if he would detect any move. Unfortunately he did\u2014almost before he had time to register the fact in his expression. With a bound so agile and abrupt as to be almost incredible in a man of his size, he was upon me before I knew what had happened; looming up and swaying forward like a giant ogre of legend, and pinioning me with one powerful hand while with the other he forestalled me in reaching the revolver. Taking it from my pocket and placing it in his own, he released me contemptuously, well knowing how fully his physique placed me at his mercy. Then he stood up at his full height\u2014his head almost touching the roof of the carriage\u2014and stared down at me with eyes whose fury had quickly turned to a look of pitying scorn and ghoulish calculation.\n\nI did not move, and after a moment the man resumed his seat opposite me; smiling a ghastly smile as he opened his great bulging valise and extracted an article of peculiar appearance\u2014a rather large cage of semi-flexible wire, woven somewhat like a baseball catcher's mask, but shaped more like the helmet of a diving-suit. Its top was connected with a cord whose other end remained in the valise. This device he fondled with obvious affection, cradling it in his lap as he looked at me afresh and licked his bearded lips with an almost feline motion of the tongue. Then, for the first time, he spoke\u2014in a deep, mellow voice of softness and cultivation startlingly at variance with his rough corduroy clothes and unkempt aspect.\n\n\"You are fortunate, sir. I shall use you first of all. You shall go into history as the first fruits of a remarkable invention. Vast sociological consequences\u2014I shall let my light shine, as it were. I'm radiating all the time, but nobody knows it. Now you shall know. Intelligent guinea-pig. Cats and burros\u2014it worked even with a burro....\"\n\nHe paused, while his bearded features underwent a convulsive motion closely synchronised with a vigorous gyratory shaking of the whole head. It was as though he were shaking clear of some nebulous obstructing medium, for the gesture was followed by a clarification or subtilisation of expression which hid the more obvious madness in a look of suave composure through which the craftiness gleamed only dimly. I glimpsed the difference at once, and put in a word to see if I could lead his mind into harmless channels.\n\n\"You seem to have a marvellously fine instrument, if I'm any judge. Won't you tell me how you came to invent it?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Mere logical reflection, dear sir. I consulted the needs of the age and acted upon them. Others might have done the same had their minds been as powerful\u2014that is, as capable of sustained concentration\u2014as mine. I had the sense of conviction\u2014the available will power\u2014that is all. I realised, as no one else has yet realised, how imperative it is to remove everybody from the earth before Quetzalcoatl comes back, and realised also that it must be done elegantly. I hate butchery of any kind, and hanging is barbarously crude. You know last year the New York legislature voted to adopt electric execution for condemned men\u2014but all the apparatus they have in mind is as primitive as Stephenson's 'Rocket' or Davenport's first electric engine. I knew of a better way, and told them so, but they paid no attention to me. God, the fools! As if I didn't know all there is to know about men and death and electricity\u2014student, man, and boy\u2014technologist and engineer\u2014soldier of fortune....\"\n\nHe leaned back and narrowed his eyes.\n\n\"I was in Maximilian's army twenty years and more ago. They were going to make me a nobleman. Then those damned greasers killed him and I had to go home. But I came back\u2014back and forth, back and forth. I live in Rochester, N.Y....\"\n\nHis eyes grew deeply crafty, and he leaned forward, touching me on the knee with the fingers of a paradoxically delicate hand.\n\n\"I came back, I say, and I went deeper than any of them. I hate greasers, but I like Mexicans! A puzzle? Listen to me, young fellow\u2014you don't think Mexico is really Spanish, do you? God, if you knew the tribes I know! In the mountains\u2014in the mountains\u2014Anahuac\u2014Tenochtitlan\u2014the old ones....\"\n\nHis voice changed to a chanting and not unmelodious howl.\n\n\"I\u00e4! Huitzilopotchli!... Nahuatlacatl! Seven, seven, seven... Xochimilca, Chalca, Tepaneca, Acolhua, Tlahuica, Tlascalteca, Azteca!... I\u00e4! I\u00e4! I have been to the Seven Caves of Chicomoztoc, but no one shall ever know! I tell you because you will never repeat it.\n\nHe subsided, and resumed a conversational tone.\n\n\"It would surprise you to know what things are told in the mountains. Huitzilopotchli is coming back... of that there can be no doubt. Any peon south of Mexico City can tell you that. But I meant to do nothing about it. I went home, as I tell you, again and again, and was going to benefit society with my electric executioner when that cursed Albany legislature adopted the other way. A joke, sir, a joke! Grandfather's chair\u2014sit by the fireside\u2014Hawthorne\u2014\"\n\nThe man was chuckling with a morbid parody of good nature.\n\n\"Why, sir, I'd like to be the first man to sit in their damned chair and feel their little two-bit battery current! It wouldn't make a frog's legs dance! And they expect to kill murderers with it\u2014reward of merit\u2014everything! But then, young man, I saw the uselessness\u2014the pointless illogicality, as it were\u2014of killing just a few. Everybody is a murderer\u2014they murder ideas\u2014steal inventions\u2014stole mine by watching, and watching, and watching\u2014\"\n\nThe man choked and paused, and I spoke soothingly.\n\n\"I'm sure your invention was much the better, and probably they'll come to use it in the end.\"\n\nEvidently my tact was not great enough, for his response shewed fresh irritation.\n\n\"'Sure,' are you? Nice, mild, conservative assurance! Cursed lot you care\u2014but you'll soon know! Why, damn you, all the good there ever will be in that electric chair will have been stolen from me. The ghost of Nezahualpilli told me that on the sacred mountain. They watched, and watched, and watched\u2014\"\n\nHe choked again, then gave another of those gestures in which he seemed to shake both his head and his facial expression. That seemed temporarily to steady him.\n\n\"What my invention needs is testing. That is it\u2014here. The wire hood or head-net is flexible, and slips on easily. Neckpiece binds but doesn't choke. Electrodes touch forehead and base of cerebellum\u2014all that's necessary. Stop the head, and what else can go? The fools up at Albany, with their carved oak easy-chair, think they've got to make it a head-to-foot affair. Idiots!\u2014don't they know that you don't need to shoot a man through the body after you've plugged him through the brain? I've seen men die in battle\u2014I know better. And then their silly high-power circuit\u2014dynamos\u2014all that. Why didn't they see what I've done with the storage-battery? Not a hearing\u2014nobody knows\u2014I alone have the secret\u2014that's why I and Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopotchli will rule the world alone\u2014I and they, if I choose to let them.... But I must have experimental subjects\u2014subjects\u2014do you know whom I've chosen for the first?\"\n\nI tried jocoseness, quickly merging into friendly seriousness, as a sedative. Quick thought and apt words might save me yet.\n\n\"Well, there are lots of fine subjects among the politicians of San Francisco, where I come from! They need your treatment, and I'd like to help you introduce it! But really, I think I can help you in all truth. I have some influence in Sacramento, and if you'll go back to the States with me after I'm through with my business in Mexico, I'll see that you get a hearing.\"\n\nHe answered soberly and civilly.\n\n\"No\u2014I can't go back. I swore not to when those criminals at Albany turned down my invention and set spies to watch me and steal from me. But I must have American subjects. Those greasers are under a curse, and would be too easy; and the full-blood Indians\u2014the real children of the feathered serpent\u2014are sacred and inviolate except for proper sacrificial victims... and even those must be slain according to ceremony. I must have Americans without going back\u2014and the first man I choose will be signally honoured. Do you know who he is?\"\n\nI temporised desperately.\n\n\"Oh, if that's all the trouble, I'll find you a dozen first-rate Yankee specimens as soon as we get to Mexico City! I know where there are lots of small mining men who wouldn't be missed for days\u2014\"\n\nBut he cut me short with a new and sudden air of authority which had a touch of real dignity in it.\n\n\"That'll do\u2014we've trifled long enough. Get up and stand erect like a man. You're the subject I've chosen, and you'll thank me for the honour in the other world, just as the sacrificial victim thanks the priest for transferring him to eternal glory. A new principle\u2014no other man alive has dreamed of such a battery, and it might never again be hit on if the world experimented a thousand years. Do you know that atoms aren't what they seem? Fools! A century after this some dolt would be guessing if I were to let the world live!\"\n\nAs I arose at his command, he drew additional feet of cord from the valise and stood erect beside me; the wire helmet outstretched toward me in both hands, and a look of real exaltation on his tanned and bearded face. For an instant he seemed like a radiant Hellenic mystagogue or hierophant.\n\n\"Here, O Youth\u2014a libation! Wine of the cosmos\u2014nectar of the starry spaces\u2014Linos\u2014Iacchus\u2014Ialmenos\u2014Zagreus\u2014Dionysos\u2014Atys\u2014Hylas\u2014sprung from Apollo and slain by the hounds of Argos\u2014seed of Psamathe\u2014child of the sun\u2014Evo\u00eb! Evo\u00eb!\"\n\nHe was chanting again, and this time his mind seemed far back amongst the classic memories of his college days. In my erect posture I noticed the nearness of the signal cord overhead, and wondered whether I could reach it through some gesture of ostensible response to his ceremonial mood. It was worth trying, so with an antiphonal cry of \"Evo\u00eb!\" I put my arms forward and upward toward him in a ritualistic fashion, hoping to give the cord a tug before he could notice the act. But it was useless. He saw my purpose, and moved one hand toward the right-hand coat pocket where my revolver lay. No words were needed, and we stood for a moment like carven figures. Then he quietly said, \"Make haste!\"\n\nAgain my mind rushed frantically about seeking avenues of escape. The doors, I knew, were not locked on Mexican trains; but my companion could easily forestall me if I tried to unlatch one and jump out. Besides, our speed was so great that success in that direction would probably be as fatal as failure. The only thing to do was to play for time. Of the three-and-a-half-hour trip a good slice was already worn away, and once we got to Mexico City the guards and police in the station would provide instant safety.\n\nThere would, I thought, be two distinct times for diplomatic stalling. If I could get him to postpone the slipping on of the hood, that much time would be gained. Of course I had no belief that the thing was really deadly; but I knew enough of madmen to understand what would happen when it failed to work. To his disappointment would be added a mad sense of my responsibility for the failure, and the result would be a red chaos of murderous rage. Therefore the experiment must be postponed as long as possible. Yet the second opportunity did exist, for if I planned cleverly I might devise explanations for the failure which would hold his attention and lead him into more or less extended searches for corrective influences. I wondered just how far his credulity went, and whether I could prepare in advance a prophecy of failure which would make the failure itself stamp me as a seer or initiate, or perhaps a god. I had enough of a smattering of Mexican mythology to make it worth trying; though I would try other delaying influences first and let the prophecy come as a sudden revelation. Would he spare me in the end if I could make him think me a prophet or divinity? Could I \"get by\" as Quetzalcoatl or Huitzilopotchli? Anything to drag matters out till five o'clock, when we were due in Mexico City.\n\nBut my opening \"stall\" was the veteran will-making ruse. As the maniac repeated his command for haste, I told him of my family and intended marriage, and asked for the privilege of leaving a message and disposing of my money and effects. If, I said, he would lend me some paper and agree to mail what I should write, I could die more peacefully and willingly. After some cogitation he gave a favourable verdict and fished in his valise for a pad, which he handed me solemnly as I resumed my seat. I produced a pencil, artfully breaking the point at the outset and causing some delay while he searched for one of his own. When he gave me this, he took my broken pencil and proceeded to sharpen it with a large, horn-handled knife which had been in his belt under his coat. Evidently a second pencil-breaking would not profit me greatly.\n\nWhat I wrote, I can hardly recall at this date. It was largely gibberish, and composed of random scraps of memorised literature when I could think of nothing else to set down. I made my handwriting as illegible as I could without destroying its nature as writing; for I knew he would be likely to look at the result before commencing his experiment, and realised how he would react to the sight of obvious nonsense. The ordeal was a terrible one, and I chafed each second at the slowness of the train. In the past I had often whistled a brisk gallop to the sprightly \"tac\" of wheels on rails, but now the tempo seemed slowed down to that of a funeral march\u2014my funeral march, I grimly reflected.\n\nMy ruse worked till I had covered over four pages, six by nine; when at last the madman drew out his watch and told me I could have but five minutes more. What should I do next? I was hastily going through the form of concluding the will when a new idea struck me. Ending with a flourish and handing him the finished sheets, which he thrust carelessly into his left-hand coat pocket, I reminded him of my influential Sacramento friends who would be so much interested in his invention.\n\n\"Oughtn't I to give you a letter of introduction to them?\" I said \"Oughtn't I to make a signed sketch and description of your executioner so that they'll grant you a cordial hearing? They can make you famous, you know\u2014and there's no question at all but that they'll adopt your method for the state of California if they hear of it through someone like me, whom they know and trust.\"\n\nI was taking this tack on the chance that his thoughts as a disappointed inventor would let him forget the Aztec-religious side of his mania for a while. When he veered to the latter again, I reflected, I would spring the \"revelation\" and \"prophecy\". The scheme worked, for his eyes glowed an eager assent, though he brusquely told me to be quick. He further emptied the valise, lifting out a queer-looking congeries of glass cells and coils to which the wire from the helmet was attached, and delivering a fire of running comment too technical for me to follow yet apparently quite plausible and straightforward. I pretended to note down all he said, wondering as I did so whether the queer apparatus was really a battery after all. Would I get a slight shock when he applied the device? The man surely talked as if he were a genuine electrician. Description of his own invention was clearly a congenial task for him, and I saw he was not as impatient as before. The hopeful grey of dawn glimmered red through the windows before he wound up, and I felt at last that my chance of escape had really become tangible.\n\nBut he, too, saw the dawn, and began glaring wildly again. He knew the train was due in Mexico City at five, and would certainly force quick action unless I could override all his judgment with engrossing ideas. As he rose with a determined air, setting the battery on the seat beside the open valise, I reminded him that I had not made the needed sketch; and asked him to hold the headpiece so that I could draw it near the battery. He complied and resumed his seat, with many admonitions to me to hurry. After another moment I paused for some information, asking him how the victim was placed for execution, and how his presumable struggles were overcome.\n\n\"Why,\" he replied, \"the criminal is securely strapped to a post. It does not matter how much he tosses his head, for the helmet fits tightly and draws even closer when the current comes on. We turn the switch gradually\u2014you see it here, a carefully arranged affair with a rheostat.\"\n\nA new idea for delay occurred to me as the tilled fields and increasingly frequent houses in the dawnlight outside told of our approach to the capital at last.\n\n\"But,\" I said, \"I must draw the helmet in place on a human head as well as beside the battery. Can't you slip it on yourself a moment so that I can sketch you with it? The papers as well as the officials will want all this, and they are strong on completeness.\"\n\nI had, by chance, made a better shot than I had planned; for at my mention of the press the madman's eyes lit up afresh.\n\n\"The papers? Yes\u2014damn them, you can make even the papers give me a hearing! They all laughed at me and wouldn't print a word. Here, you, hurry up! We've not a second to lose!\"\n\nHe had slipped the headpiece on and was watching my flying pencil avidly. The wire mesh gave him a grotesque, comic look as he sat there with nervously twitching hands.\n\n\"Now, curse 'em, they'll print pictures! I'll revise your sketch if you make any blunders\u2014must be accurate at any cost. Police will find you afterward\u2014they'll tell how it works. Associated Press item\u2014back up your letter\u2014immortal fame.... Hurry, I say\u2014hurry, confound you!\"\n\nThe train was lurching over the poorer roadbed near the city and we swayed disconcertingly now and then. With this excuse I managed to break the pencil again, but of course the maniac at once handed me my own which he had sharpened. My first batch of ruses was about used up, and I felt that I should have to submit to the headpiece in a moment. We were still a good quarter-hour from the terminal, and it was about time for me to divert my companion to his religious side and spring the divine prophecy.\n\nMustering up my scraps of Nahuan-Aztec mythology, I suddenly threw down pencil and paper and commenced to chant.\n\n\"I\u00e4! I\u00e4! Tloquenahuaque, Thou Who Art All In Thyself! Thou too, Ipalnemoan, By Whom We Live! I hear, I hear! I see, I see! Serpent-bearing Eagle, hail! A message! A message! Huitzilopotchli, in my soul echoes thy thunder!\"\n\nAt my intonations the maniac stared incredulously through his odd mask, his handsome face shewn in a surprise and perplexity which quickly changed to alarm. His mind seemed to go blank a moment, and then to recrystallise in another pattern. Raising his hands aloft, he chanted as if in a dream.\n\n\"Mictlanteuctli, Great Lord, a sign! A sign from within thy black cave! I\u00e4! Tonatiuh-Metztli! Cthulhutl! Command, and I serve!\"\n\nNow in all this responsive gibberish there was one word which struck an odd chord in my memory. Odd, because it never occurs in any printed account of Mexican mythology, yet had been overheard by me more than once as an awestruck whisper amongst the peons in my own firm's Tlaxcala mines. It seemed to be part of an exceedingly secret and ancient ritual; for there were characteristic whispered responses which I had caught now and then, and which were as unknown as itself to academic scholarship. This maniac must have spent considerable time with the hill peons and Indians, just as he had said; for surely such unrecorded lore could have come from no mere book-learning. Realising the importance he must attach to this doubly esoteric jargon, I determined to strike at his most vulnerable spot and give him the gibberish responses the natives used.\n\n\"Ya-R'lyeh! Ya-R'lyeh!\" I shouted. \"Cthulhutl fhtaghn! Niguratl-Yig! Yog-Sototl\u2014\"\n\nBut I never had a chance to finish. Galvanised into a religious epilepsy by the exact response which his subconscious mind had probably not really expected, the madman scrambled down to a kneeling posture on the floor, bowing his wire-helmeted head again and again, and turning it to the right and left as he did so. With each turn his obeisances became more profound, and I could hear his foaming lips repeating the syllable \"kill, kill, kill,\" in a rapidly swelling monotone. It occurred to me that I had overreached myself, and that my response had unloosed a mounting mania which would rouse him to the slaying-point before the train reached the station.\n\nAs the arc of the madman's turnings gradually increased, the slack in the cord from his headpiece to the battery had naturally been taken up more and more. Now, in an all-forgetting delirium of ecstasy, he began to magnify his turns to complete circles, so that the cord wound round his neck and began to tug at its moorings to the battery on the seat. I wondered what he would do when the inevitable would happen, and the battery would be dragged to presumable destruction on the floor.\n\nThen came the sudden cataclysm. The battery, yanked over the seat's edge by the maniac's last gesture of orgiastic frenzy, did indeed fall; but it did not seem to have wholly broken. Instead, as my eye caught the spectacle in one too-fleeting instant, the actual impact was borne by the rheostat, so that the switch was jerked over instantly to full current. And the marvellous thing is that there was a current. The invention was no mere dream of insanity.\n\nI saw a blinding blue auroral coruscation, heard an ululating shriek more hideous than any of the previous cries of that mad, horrible journey, and smelled the nauseous odour of burning flesh. That was all my overwrought consciousness could bear, and I sank instantly into oblivion.\n\nWhen the train guard at Mexico City revived me, I found a crowd on the station platform around my compartment door. At my involuntary cry the pressing faces became curious and dubious, and I was glad when the guard shut out all but the trim doctor who had pushed his way through to me. My cry was a very natural thing, but it had been prompted by something more than the shocking sight on the carriage floor which I had expected to see. Or should say, by something less, because in truth there was not anything on the floor at all.\n\nNor, said the guard, had there been when he opened the door and found me unconscious within. My ticket was the only one sold for that compartment, and I was the only person found within it. Just myself and my valise, nothing more. I had been alone all the way from Quer\u00e9taro. Guard, doctor, and spectators alike tapped their foreheads significantly at my frantic and insistent questions.\n\nHad it all been a dream, or was I indeed mad? I recalled my anxiety and overwrought nerves, and shuddered. Thanking the guard and doctor, and shaking free of the curious crowd, I staggered into a cab and was taken to the Fonda Nacional, where, after telegraphing Jackson at the mine, I slept till afternoon in an effort to get a fresh grip on myself. I had myself called at one o'clock, in time to catch the narrow-gauge for the mining country, but when I got up I found a telegram under the door. It was from Jackson, and said that Feldon had been found dead in the mountains that morning, the news reaching the mine about ten o'clock. The papers were all safe, and the San Francisco office had been duly notified. So the whole trip, with its nervous haste and harrowing mental ordeal, had been for nothing!\n\nKnowing that McComb would expect a personal report despite the course of events, I sent another wire ahead and took the narrow-gauge after all. Four hours later I was rattled and jolted into the station of Mine No. 3, where Jackson was waiting to give a cordial greeting. He was so full of the affair at the mine that he did not notice my still shaken and seedy appearance.\n\nThe superintendent's story was brief, and he told me it as he led me toward the shack up the hillside above the arrastre, where Feldon's body lay. Feldon, he said, had always been a queer, sullen character, ever since he was hired the year before; working at some secret mechanical device and complaining of constant espionage, and being disgustingly familiar with the native workmen. But he certainly knew the work, the country, and the people. He used to make long trips into the hills where the peons lived, and even to take part in some of their ancient, heathenish ceremonies. He hinted at odd secrets and strange powers as often as he boasted of his mechanical skill. Of late he had disintegrated rapidly; growing morbidly suspicious of his colleagues, and undoubtedly joining his native friends in ore-thieving after his cash got low. He needed unholy amounts of money for something or other\u2014was always having boxes come from laboratories and machine shops in Mexico City or the States.\n\nAs for the final absconding with all the papers\u2014it was only a crazy gesture of revenge for what he called \"spying\". He was certainly stark mad, for he had gone across country to a hidden cave on the wild slope of the haunted Sierra de Malinche, where no white men live, and had done some amazingly queer things. The cave, which would never have been found but for the final tragedy, was full of hideous old Aztec idols and altars; the latter covered with the charred bones of recent burnt-offerings of doubtful nature. The natives would tell nothing\u2014indeed, they swore they knew nothing\u2014but it was easy to see that the cave was an old rendezvous of theirs, and that Feldon had shared their practices to the fullest extent.\n\nThe searchers had found the place only because of the chanting and the final cry. It had been close to five that morning, and after an all-night encampment the party had begun to pack up for its empty-handed return to the mines. Then somebody had heard faint rhythms in the distance, and knew that one of the noxious old native rituals was being howled from some lonely spot up the slope of the corpse-shaped mountain. They heard the same old names\u2014Mictlanteuctli, Tonatiuh-Metzli, Cthulhutl, Ya-R'lyeh, and all the rest\u2014but the queer thing was that some English words were mixed with them. Real white man's English, and no greaser patter. Guided by the sound, they had hastened up the weed-entangled mountainside toward it, when after a spell of quiet the shriek had burst upon them. It was a terrible thing\u2014a worse thing than any of them had ever heard before. There seemed to be some smoke, too, and a morbid acrid smell.\n\nThen they stumbled on the cave, its entrance screened by scrub mesquites, but now emitting clouds of foetid smoke. It was lighted within, the horrible altars and grotesque images revealed flickeringly by candles which must have been changed less than a half-hour before; and on the gravelly floor lay the horror that made all the crowd reel backward. It was Feldon, head burned to a crisp by some odd device he had slipped over it\u2014a kind of wire cage connected with a rather shaken-up battery which had evidently fallen to the floor from a nearby altar-pot. When the men saw it they exchanged glances, thinking of the \"electric executioner\" Feldon had always boasted of inventing\u2014the thing which everyone had rejected, but had tried to steal and copy. The papers were safe in Feldon's open portmanteau which stood close by, and an hour later the column of searchers started back for No. 3 with a grisly burden on an improvised stretcher.\n\nThat was all, but it was enough to make me turn pale and falter as Jackson led me up past the arrastre to the shed where he said the body lay. For I was not without imagination, and knew only too well into what hellish nightmare this tragedy somehow supernaturally dovetailed. I knew what I should see inside that gaping door around which the curious miners clustered, and did not flinch when my eyes took in the giant form, the rough corduroy clothes, the oddly delicate hands, the wisps of burnt beard, and the hellish machine itself\u2014battery slightly broken, and headpiece blackened by the charring of what was inside. The great, bulging portmanteau did not surprise me, and I quailed only at two things\u2014the folded sheets of paper sticking out of the left-hand pocket, and the queer sagging of the corresponding right-hand pocket. In a moment when no one was looking I reached out and seized the too familiar sheets, crushing them in my hand without daring to look at their penmanship. I ought to be sorry now that a kind of panic fear made me burn them that night with averted eyes. They would have been a positive proof or disproof of something\u2014but for that matter I could still have had proof by asking about the revolver the coroner afterward took from that sagging right-hand coat pocket. I never had the courage to ask about that\u2014because my own revolver was missing after the night on the train. My pocket pencil, too, shewed signs of a crude and hasty sharpening unlike the precise pointing I had given it Friday afternoon on the machine in President McComb's private car.\n\nSo in the end I went home still puzzled\u2014mercifully puzzled, perhaps. The private car was repaired when I got back to Quer\u00e9taro, but my greatest relief was crossing the Rio Grande into El Paso and the States. By the next Friday I was in San Francisco again, and the postponed wedding came off the following week.\n\nAs to what really happened that night\u2014as I've said, I simply don't dare to speculate. That chap Feldon was insane to start with, and on top of his insanity he had piled a lot of prehistoric Aztec witch-lore that nobody has any right to know. He was really an inventive genius, and that battery must have been the genuine stuff. I heard later how he had been brushed aside in former years by press, public, and potentates alike. Too much disappointment isn't good for men of a certain kind. Anyhow, some unholy combination of influences was at work. He had really, by the way, been a soldier of Maximilian's.\n\nWhen I tell my story most people call me a plain liar. Others lay it to abnormal psychology\u2014and heaven knows I was overwrought\u2014while still others talk of \"astral projection\" of some sort. My zeal to catch Feldon certainly sent my thoughts ahead toward him, and with all his Indian magic he'd be about the first one to recognise and meet them. Was he in the railway carriage or was I in the cave on the corpse-shaped haunted mountain? What would have happened to me, had I not delayed him as I did? I'll confess I don't know, and I'm not sure that I want to know. I've never been in Mexico since\u2014and as I said at the start, I don't enjoy hearing about electric executions.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Evil Clergyman by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI was shewn into the attic chamber by a grave, intelligent-looking man with quiet clothes and an iron-grey beard, who spoke to me in this fashion:\n\n\"Yes, he lived here\u2014but I don't advise your doing anything. Your curiosity makes you irresponsible. We never come here at night, and it's only because of his will that we keep it this way. You know what he did. That abominable society took charge at last, and we don't know where he is buried. There was no way the law or anything else could reach the society.\n\n\"I hope you won't stay till after dark. And I beg of you to let that thing on the table\u2014the thing that looks like a match box\u2014alone. We don't know what it is, but we suspect it has something to do with what he did. We even avoid looking at it very steadily.\"\n\nAfter a time the man left me alone in the attic room. It was very dingy and dusty, and only primitively furnished, but it had a neatness which shewed it was not a slum-denizen's quarters. There were shelves full of theological and classical books, and another bookcase containing treatises on magic\u2014Paracelsus, Albertus Magnus, Trithemius, Hermes Trismegistus, Borellus, and others in strange alphabets whose titles I could not decipher. The furniture was very plain. There was a door, but it led only into a closet. The only egress was the aperture in the floor up to which the crude, steep staircase led. The windows were of bull's-eye pattern, and the black oak beams bespoke unbelievable antiquity. Plainly, this house was of the old world. I seemed to know where I was, but cannot recall what I then knew. Certainly the town was not London. My impression is of a small seaport.\n\nThe small object on the table fascinated me intensely. I seemed to know what to do with it, for I drew a pocket electric light\u2014or what looked like one\u2014out of my pocket and nervously tested its flashes. The light was not white but violet, and seemed less like true light than like some radio-active bombardment. I recall that I did not regard it as a common flashlight\u2014indeed, I had a common flashlight in another pocket.\n\nIt was getting dark, and the ancient roofs and chimney-pots outside looked very queer through the bull's-eye window-panes. Finally I summoned up courage and propped the small object up on the table against a book\u2014then turned the rays of the peculiar violet light upon it. The light seemed now to be more like a rain or hail of small violet particles than like a continuous beam. As the particles struck the glassy surface at the centre of the strange device, they seemed to produce a crackling noise like the sputtering of a vacuum tube through which sparks are passed. The dark glassy surface displayed a pinkish glow, and a vague white shape seemed to be taking form at its centre. Then I noticed that I was not alone in the room\u2014and put the ray-projector back in my pocket.\n\nBut the newcomer did not speak\u2014nor did I hear any sound whatever during all the immediately following moments. Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a vast distance through some intervening haze\u2014although on the other hand the newcomer and all subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.\n\nThe newcomer was a thin, dark man of medium height attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican church. He was apparently about thirty years old, with a sallow, olive complexion and fairly good features, but an abnormally high forehead. His black hair was well cut and neatly brushed, and he was clean-shaven though blue-chinned with a heavy growth of beard. He wore rimless spectacles with steel bows. His build and lower facial features were like other clergymen I had seen, but he had a vastly higher forehead, and was darker and more intelligent-looking\u2014also more subtly and concealedly evil-looking. At the present moment\u2014having just lighted a faint oil lamp\u2014he looked nervous, and before I knew it he was casting all his magical books into a fireplace on the window side of the room (where the wall slanted sharply) which I had not noticed before. The flames devoured the volumes greedily\u2014leaping up in strange colours and emitting indescribably hideous odours as the strangely hieroglyphed leaves and wormy bindings succumbed to the devastating element. All at once I saw there were others in the room\u2014grave-looking men in clerical costume, one of whom wore the bands and knee-breeches of a bishop. Though I could hear nothing, I could see that they were bringing a decision of vast import to the first-comer. They seemed to hate and fear him at the same time, and he seemed to return these sentiments. His face set itself into a grim expression, but I could see his right hand shaking as he tried to grip the back of a chair. The bishop pointed to the empty case and to the fireplace (where the flames had died down amidst a charred, non-committal mass), and seemed filled with a peculiar loathing. The first-comer then gave a wry smile and reached out with his left hand toward the small object on the table. Everyone then seemed frightened. The procession of clerics began filing down the steep stairs through the trap-door in the floor, turning and making menacing gestures as they left. The bishop was last to go.\n\nThe first-comer now went to a cupboard on the inner side of the room and extracted a coil of rope. Mounting a chair, he attached one end of the rope to a hook in the great exposed central beam of black oak, and began making a noose with the other end. Realising he was about to hang himself, I started forward to dissuade or save him. He saw me and ceased his preparations, looking at me with a kind of triumph which puzzled and disturbed me. He slowly stepped down from the chair and began gliding toward me with a positively wolfish grin on his dark, thin-lipped face.\n\nI felt somehow in deadly peril, and drew out the peculiar ray-projector as a weapon of defence. Why I thought it could help me, I do not know. I turned it on\u2014full in his face, and saw the sallow features glow first with violet and then with pinkish light. His expression of wolfish exultation began to be crowded aside by a look of profound fear\u2014which did not, however, wholly displace the exultation. He stopped in his tracks\u2014then, flailing his arms wildly in the air, began to stagger backward. I saw he was edging toward the open stair-well in the floor, and tried to shout a warning, but he did not hear me. In another instant he had lurched backward through the opening and was lost to view.\n\nI found difficulty in moving toward the stair-well, but when I did get there I found no crushed body on the floor below. Instead there was a clatter of people coming up with lanterns, for the spell of phantasmal silence had broken, and I once more heard sounds and saw figures as normally tri-dimensional. Something had evidently drawn a crowd to this place. Had there been a noise I had not heard? Presently the two people (simply villagers, apparently) farthest in the lead saw me\u2014and stood paralysed. One of them shrieked loudly and reverberently:\n\n\"Ahrrh!... It be 'ee, zur? Again?\"\n\nThen they all turned and fled frantically. All, that is, but one. When the crowd was gone I saw the grave-bearded man who had brought me to this place\u2014standing alone with a lantern. He was gazing at me gaspingly and fascinatedly, but did not seem afraid. Then he began to ascend the stairs, and joined me in the attic. He spoke:\n\n\"So you didn't let it alone! I'm sorry. I know what has happened. It happened once before, but the man got frightened and shot himself. You ought not to have made him come back. You know what he wants. But you mustn't get frightened like the other man he got. Something very strange and terrible has happened to you, but it didn't get far enough to hurt your mind and personality. If you'll keep cool, and accept the need for making certain radical readjustments in your life, you can keep right on enjoying the world, and the fruits of your scholarship. But you can't live here\u2014and I don't think you'll wish to go back to London. I'd advise America.\n\n\"You mustn't try anything more with that\u2014thing. Nothing can be put back now. It would only make matters worse to do\u2014or summon\u2014anything. You are not as badly off as you might be\u2014but you must get out of here at once and stay away. You'd better thank heaven it didn't go further....\n\n\"I'm going to prepare you as bluntly as I can. There's been a certain change\u2014in your personal appearance. He always causes that. But in a new country you can get used to it. There's a mirror up at the other end of the room, and I'm going to take you to it. You'll get a shock\u2014though you will see nothing repulsive.\"\n\nI was now shaking with a deadly fear, and the bearded man almost had to hold me up as he walked me across the room to the mirror, the faint lamp (i.e., that formerly on the table, not the still fainter lantern he had brought) in his free hand. This is what I saw in the glass:\n\nA thin, dark man of medium stature attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican church, apparently about thirty, and with rimless, steel-bowed glasses glistening beneath a sallow, olive forehead of abnormal height.\n\nIt was the silent first-comer who had burned his books.\n\nFor all the rest of my life, in outward form, I was to be that man!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Ex Oblivione by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWhen the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.\n\nOnce when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars.\n\nOnce when the gentle rain fell I glided in a barge down a sunless stream under the earth till I reached another world of purple twilight, iridescent arbours, and undying roses.\n\nAnd once I walked through a golden valley that led to shadowy groves and ruins, and ended in a mighty wall green with antique vines, and pierced by a little gate of bronze.\n\nMany times I walked through that valley, and longer and longer would I pause in the spectral half-light where the giant trees squirmed and twisted grotesquely, and the grey ground stretched damply from trunk to trunk, sometimes disclosing the mould-stained stones of buried temples. And always the goal of my fancies was the mighty vine-grown wall with the little gate of bronze therein.\n\nAfter a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new colours. And as I looked upon the little gate in the mighty wall, I felt that beyond it lay a dream-country from which, once it was entered, there would be no return.\n\nSo each night in sleep I strove to find the hidden latch of the gate in the ivied antique wall, though it was exceedingly well hidden. And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well.\n\nThen one night in the dream-city of Zakarion I found a yellowed papyrus filled with the thoughts of dream-sages who dwelt of old in that city, and who were too wise ever to be born in the waking world. Therein were written many things concerning the world of dream, and among them was lore of a golden valley and a sacred grove with temples, and a high wall pierced by a little bronze gate. When I saw this lore, I knew that it touched on the scenes I had haunted, and I therefore read long in the yellowed papyrus.\n\nSome of the dream-sages wrote gorgeously of the wonders beyond the irrepassable gate, but others told of horror and disappointment. I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. So when I learned of the drug which would unlock the gate and drive me through, I resolved to take it when next I awaked.\n\nLast night I swallowed the drug and floated dreamily into the golden valley and the shadowy groves; and when I came this time to the antique wall, I saw that the small gate of bronze was ajar. From beyond came a glow that weirdly lit the giant twisted trees and the tops of the buried temples, and I drifted on songfully, expectant of the glories of the land from whence I should never return.\n\nBut as the gate swung wider and the sorcery of drug and dream pushed me through, I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hoped to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.\n\n[ Facts concerning the Late ]\n\n[ Arthur Jermyn and His Family ]\n\nLife is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species\u2014if separate species we be\u2014for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night. No one placed the charred fragments in an urn or set a memorial to him who had been; for certain papers and a certain boxed object were found, which made men wish to forget. Some who knew him do not admit that he ever existed.\n\nArthur Jermyn went out on the moor and burned himself after seeing the boxed object which had come from Africa. It was this object, and not his peculiar personal appearance, which made him end his life. Many would have disliked to live if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and scholar and had not minded. Learning was in his blood, for his great-grandfather, Sir Robert Jermyn, Bt., had been an anthropologist of note, whilst his great-great-great-grandfather, Sir Wade Jermyn, was one of the earliest explorers of the Congo region, and had written eruditely of its tribes, animals, and supposed antiquities. Indeed, old Sir Wade had possessed an intellectual zeal amounting almost to a mania; his bizarre conjectures on a prehistoric white Congolese civilisation earning him much ridicule when his book, Observations on the Several Parts of Africa, was published. In 1765 this fearless explorer had been placed in a madhouse at Huntingdon.\n\nMadness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them. The line put forth no branches, and Arthur was the last of it. If he had not been, one cannot say what he would have done when the object came. The Jermyns never seemed to look quite right\u2014something was amiss, though Arthur was the worst, and the old family portraits in Jermyn House shewed fine faces enough before Sir Wade's time. Certainly, the madness began with Sir Wade, whose wild stories of Africa were at once the delight and terror of his few friends. It shewed in his collection of trophies and specimens, which were not such as a normal man would accumulate and preserve, and appeared strikingly in the Oriental seclusion in which he kept his wife. The latter, he had said, was the daughter of a Portuguese trader whom he had met in Africa; and did not like English ways. She, with an infant son born in Africa, had accompanied him back from the second and longest of his trips, and had gone with him on the third and last, never returning. No one had ever seen her closely, not even the servants; for her disposition had been violent and singular. During her brief stay at Jermyn House she occupied a remote wing, and was waited on by her husband alone. Sir Wade was, indeed, most peculiar in his solicitude for his family; for when he returned to Africa he would permit no one to care for his young son save a loathsome black woman from Guinea. Upon coming back, after the death of Lady Jermyn, he himself assumed complete care of the boy.\n\nBut it was the talk of Sir Wade, especially when in his cups, which chiefly led his friends to deem him mad. In a rational age like the eighteenth century it was unwise for a man of learning to talk about wild sights and strange scenes under a Congo moon; of the gigantic walls and pillars of a forgotten city, crumbling and vine-grown, and of damp, silent, stone steps leading interminably down into the darkness of abysmal treasure-vaults and inconceivable catacombs. Especially was it unwise to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city\u2014fabulous creatures which even a Pliny might describe with scepticism; things that might have sprung up after the great apes had overrun the dying city with the walls and the pillars, the vaults and the weird carvings. Yet after he came home for the last time Sir Wade would speak of such matters with a shudderingly uncanny zest, mostly after his third glass at the Knight's Head; boasting of what he had found in the jungle and of how he had dwelt among terrible ruins known only to him. And finally he had spoken of the living things in such a manner that he was taken to the madhouse. He had shewn little regret when shut into the barred room at Huntingdon, for his mind moved curiously. Ever since his son had commenced to grow out of infancy he had liked his home less and less, till at last he had seemed to dread it. The Knight's Head had been his headquarters, and when he was confined he expressed some vague gratitude as if for protection. Three years later he died.\n\nWade Jermyn's son Philip was a highly peculiar person. Despite a strong physical resemblance to his father, his appearance and conduct were in many particulars so coarse that he was universally shunned. Though he did not inherit the madness which was feared by some, he was densely stupid and given to brief periods of uncontrollable violence. In frame he was small, but intensely powerful, and was of incredible agility. Twelve years after succeeding to his title he married the daughter of his gamekeeper, a person said to be of gypsy extraction, but before his son was born joined the navy as a common sailor, completing the general disgust which his habits and mesalliance had begun. After the close of the American war he was heard of as a sailor on a merchantman in the African trade, having a kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing, but finally disappearing one night as his ship lay off the Congo coast.\n\nIn the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a strange and fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird Eastern grace despite certain slight oddities of proportion, Robert Jermyn began life as a scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied scientifically the vast collection of relics which his mad grandfather had brought from Africa, and who made the family name as celebrated in ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir Robert married a daughter of the seventh Viscount Brightholme and was subsequently blessed with three children, the eldest and youngest of whom were never publicly seen on account of deformities in mind and body. Saddened by these family misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and made two long expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a singularly repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer, but was pardoned upon his return in the following year. He came back to Jermyn House a widower with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day to be the father of Arthur Jermyn.\n\nFriends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of Sir Robert Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African folklore which caused the disaster. The elderly scholar had been collecting legends of the Onga tribes near the field of his grandfather's and his own explorations, hoping in some way to account for Sir Wade's wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid creatures. A certain consistency in the strange papers of his ancestor suggested that the madman's imagination might have been stimulated by native myths. On October 19, 1852, the explorer Samuel Seaton called at Jermyn House with a manuscript of notes collected among the Ongas, believing that certain legends of a grey city of white apes ruled by a white god might prove valuable to the ethnologist. In his conversation he probably supplied many additional details; the nature of which will never be known, since a hideous series of tragedies suddenly burst into being. When Sir Robert Jermyn emerged from his library he left behind the strangled corpse of the explorer, and before he could be restrained, had put an end to all three of his children; the two who were never seen, and the son who had run away. Nevil Jermyn died in the successful defence of his own two-year-old son, who had apparently been included in the old man's madly murderous scheme. Sir Robert himself, after repeated attempts at suicide and a stubborn refusal to utter any articulate sound, died of apoplexy in the second year of his confinement.\n\nSir Alfred Jermyn was a baronet before his fourth birthday, but his tastes never matched his title. At twenty he had joined a band of music-hall performers, and at thirty-six had deserted his wife and child to travel with an itinerant American circus. His end was very revolting. Among the animals in the exhibition with which he travelled was a huge bull gorilla of lighter colour than the average; a surprisingly tractable beast of much popularity with the performers. With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars. Eventually Jermyn asked and obtained permission to train the animal, astonishing audiences and fellow-performers alike with his success. One morning in Chicago, as the gorilla and Alfred Jermyn were rehearsing an exceedingly clever boxing match, the former delivered a blow of more than usual force, hurting both the body and dignity of the amateur trainer. Of what followed, members of \"The Greatest Show on Earth\" do not like to speak. They did not expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream, or to see him seize his clumsy antagonist with both hands, dash it to the floor of the cage, and bite fiendishly at its hairy throat. The gorilla was off its guard, but not for long, and before anything could be done by the regular trainer the body which had belonged to a baronet was past recognition." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Arthur Jermyn was the son of Sir Alfred Jermyn and a music-hall singer of unknown origin. When the husband and father deserted his family, the mother took the child to Jermyn House; where there was none left to object to her presence. She was not without notions of what a nobleman's dignity should be, and saw to it that her son received the best education which limited money could provide. The family resources were now sadly slender, and Jermyn House had fallen into woeful disrepair, but young Arthur loved the old edifice and all its contents. He was not like any other Jermyn who had ever lived, for he was a poet and a dreamer. Some of the neighbouring families who had heard tales of old Sir Wade Jermyn's unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin blood must be shewing itself; but most persons merely sneered at his sensitiveness to beauty, attributing it to his music-hall mother, who was socially unrecognised. The poetic delicacy of Arthur Jermyn was the more remarkable because of his uncouth personal appearance. Most of the Jermyns had possessed a subtly odd and repellent cast, but Arthur's case was very striking. It is hard to say just what he resembled, but his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of repulsion to those who met him for the first time.\n\nIt was the mind and character of Arthur Jermyn which atoned for his aspect. Gifted and learned, he took highest honours at Oxford and seemed likely to redeem the intellectual fame of his family. Though of poetic rather than scientific temperament, he planned to continue the work of his forefathers in African ethnology and antiquities, utilising the truly wonderful though strange collection of Sir Wade. With his fanciful mind he thought often of the prehistoric civilisation in which the mad explorer had so implicitly believed, and would weave tale after tale about the silent jungle city mentioned in the latter's wilder notes and paragraphs. For the nebulous utterances concerning a nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids he had a peculiar feeling of mingled terror and attraction; speculating on the possible basis of such a fancy, and seeking to obtain light among the more recent data gleaned by his great-grandfather and Samuel Seaton amongst the Ongas.\n\nIn 1911, after the death of his mother, Sir Arthur Jermyn determined to pursue his investigations to the utmost extent. Selling a portion of his estate to obtain the requisite money, he outfitted an expedition and sailed for the Congo. Arranging with the Belgian authorities for a party of guides, he spent a year in the Onga and Kaliri country, finding data beyond the highest of his expectations. Among the Kaliris was an aged chief called Mwanu, who possessed not only a highly retentive memory, but a singular degree of intelligence and interest in old legends. This ancient confirmed every tale which Jermyn had heard, adding his own account of the stone city and the white apes as it had been told to him.\n\nAccording to Mwanu, the grey city and the hybrid creatures were no more, having been annihilated by the warlike N'bangus many years ago. This tribe, after destroying most of the edifices and killing the live beings, had carried off the stuffed goddess which had been the object of their quest; the white ape-goddess which the strange beings worshipped, and which was held by Congo tradition to be the form of one who had reigned as a princess among those beings. Just what the white ape-like creatures could have been, Mwanu had no idea, but he thought they were the builders of the ruined city. Jermyn could form no conjecture, but by close questioning obtained a very picturesque legend of the stuffed goddess.\n\nThe ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son all three went away. Later the god and the princess had returned, and upon the death of the princess her divine husband had mummified the body and enshrined it in a vast house of stone, where it was worshipped. Then he had departed alone. The legend here seemed to present three variants. According to one story nothing further happened save that the stuffed goddess became a symbol of supremacy for whatever tribe might possess it. It was for this reason that the N'bangus carried it off. A second story told of the god's return and death at the feet of his enshrined wife. A third told of the return of the son, grown to manhood\u2014or apehood or godhood, as the case might be\u2014yet unconscious of his identity. Surely the imaginative blacks had made the most of whatever events might lie behind the extravagant legendry.\n\nOf the reality of the jungle city described by old Sir Wade, Arthur Jermyn had no further doubt; and was hardly astonished when early in 1912 he came upon what was left of it. Its size must have been exaggerated, yet the stones lying about proved that it was no mere negro village. Unfortunately no carvings could be found, and the small size of the expedition prevented operations toward clearing the one visible passageway that seemed to lead down into the system of vaults which Sir Wade had mentioned. The white apes and the stuffed goddess were discussed with all the native chiefs of the region, but it remained for a European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. M. Verhaeren, Belgian agent at a trading-post on the Congo, believed that he could not only locate but obtain the stuffed goddess, of which he had vaguely heard; since the once mighty N'bangus were now the submissive servants of King Albert's government, and with but little persuasion could be induced to part with the gruesome deity they had carried off. When Jermyn sailed for England, therefore, it was with the exultant probability that he would within a few months receive a priceless ethnological relic confirming the wildest of his great-great-great-grandfather's narratives\u2014that is, the wildest which he had ever heard. Countrymen near Jermyn House had perhaps heard wilder tales handed down from ancestors who had listened to Sir Wade around the tables of the Knight's Head.\n\nArthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren, meanwhile studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad ancestor. He began to feel closely akin to Sir Wade, and to seek relics of the latter's personal life in England as well as of his African exploits. Oral accounts of the mysterious and secluded wife had been numerous, but no tangible relic of her stay at Jermyn House remained. Jermyn wondered what circumstance had prompted or permitted such an effacement, and decided that the husband's insanity was the prime cause. His great-great-great-grandmother, he recalled, was said to have been the daughter of a Portuguese trader in Africa. No doubt her practical heritage and superficial knowledge of the Dark Continent had caused her to flout Sir Wade's talk of the interior, a thing which such a man would not be likely to forgive. She had died in Africa, perhaps dragged thither by a husband determined to prove what he had told. But as Jermyn indulged in these reflections he could not but smile at their futility, a century and a half after the death of both of his strange progenitors.\n\nIn June, 1913, a letter arrived from M. Verhaeren, telling of the finding of the stuffed goddess. It was, the Belgian averred, a most extraordinary object; an object quite beyond the power of a layman to classify. Whether it was human or simian only a scientist could determine, and the process of determination would be greatly hampered by its imperfect condition. Time and the Congo climate are not kind to mummies; especially when their preparation is as amateurish as seemed to be the case here. Around the creature's neck had been found a golden chain bearing an empty locket on which were armorial designs; no doubt some hapless traveller's keepsake, taken by the N'bangus and hung upon the goddess as a charm. In commenting on the contour of the mummy's face, M. Verhaeren suggested a whimsical comparison; or rather, expressed a humorous wonder just how it would strike his correspondent, but was too much interested scientifically to waste many words in levity. The stuffed goddess, he wrote, would arrive duly packed about a month after receipt of the letter.\n\nThe boxed object was delivered at Jermyn House on the afternoon of August 3, 1913, being conveyed immediately to the large chamber which housed the collection of African specimens as arranged by Sir Robert and Arthur. What ensued can best be gathered from the tales of servants and from things and papers later examined. Of the various tales that of aged Soames, the family butler, is most ample and coherent. According to this trustworthy man, Sir Arthur Jermyn dismissed everyone from the room before opening the box, though the instant sound of hammer and chisel shewed that he did not delay the operation. Nothing was heard for some time; just how long Soames cannot exactly estimate; but it was certainly less than a quarter of an hour later that the horrible scream, undoubtedly in Jermyn's voice, was heard. Immediately afterward Jermyn emerged from the room, rushing frantically toward the front of the house as if pursued by some hideous enemy. The expression on his face, a face ghastly enough in repose, was beyond description. When near the front door he seemed to think of something, and turned back in his flight, finally disappearing down the stairs to the cellar. The servants were utterly dumbfounded, and watched at the head of the stairs, but their master did not return. A smell of oil was all that came up from the regions below. After dark a rattling was heard at the door leading from the cellar into the courtyard; and a stable-boy saw Arthur Jermyn, glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens. The house of Jermyn no longer existed.\n\nThe reason why Arthur Jermyn's charred fragments were not collected and buried lies in what was found afterward, principally the thing in the box. The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind\u2014quite shockingly so. Detailed description would be rather unpleasant, but two salient particulars must be told, for they fit in revoltingly with certain notes of Sir Wade Jermyn's African expeditions and with the Congolese legends of the white god and the ape-princess. The two particulars in question are these: the arms on the golden locket about the creature's neck were the Jermyn arms, and the jocose suggestion of M. Verhaeren about a certain resemblance as connected with the shrivelled face applied with vivid, ghastly, and unnatural horror to none other than the sensitive Arthur Jermyn, great-great-great-grandson of Sir Wade Jermyn and an unknown wife. Members of the Royal Anthropological Institute burned the thing and threw the locket into a well, and some of them do not admit that Arthur Jermyn ever existed.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Festival by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.\n\nIt was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.\n\nThen beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.\n\nBeside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.\n\nAs the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, but kept on down past the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea-taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted, unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.\n\nI had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green Lane leads off behind the Market house. The old maps still held good, and I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must have lied when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since I saw not a wire overhead. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen to walk, for the white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people, the seventh house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second story, all built before 1650.\n\nThere were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly met the overhanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many houses had high doors reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange to New England I had never known its like before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few windows without drawn curtains.\n\nWhen I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.\n\nHe beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the festive season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing. The high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man's bland face the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on the tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the place of festival.\n\nPointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and mouldy, and that they included old Morryster's wild Marvells of Science, the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvill, published in 1681, the shocking Daemonolatreia of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness. But I disliked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one of which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking up the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over that unmoving face or mask.\n\nWe went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.\n\nAmid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing never a word. Up, up, up the eerie columns slithered, and I saw that all the travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the road's crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on the ghostly spire.\n\nThere was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see over the hill's summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour, though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lanthorn bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last. Then I finally went, the sinister man and the old spinning woman before me. Crossing the threshold into that swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.\n\nThe church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it, for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the aisle between the high white pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the footworn steps and into the dank, suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their pungent odour of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed down through the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous evil.\n\nThen I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an inner world\u2014a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.\n\nFainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire, and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the Stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see. But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone above with a nasty, venomous verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the clamminess of death and corruption.\n\nThe man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semicircle he faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, especially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.\n\nOut of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membraneous wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.\n\nThe old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were patiently standing by. As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it had been decreed I should come back, and that the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.\n\nPresently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly as restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his head. And then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself into that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.\n\nAt the hospital they told me I had been found half frozen in Kingsport Harbour at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say, because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad window shewing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to St. Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their influence in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's objectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University. They said something about a \"psychosis\", and agreed I had better get any harassing obsessions off my mind.\n\nSo I read again that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one\u2014in waking hours\u2014who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.\n\n\"The nethermost caverns,\" wrote the mad Arab, \"are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ From Beyond by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nHorrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and a half before, when he had told me toward what goal his physical and metaphysical researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened remonstrances by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of fanatical rage. I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed or greyed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this there be a repellent unkemptness; a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of pure white beard on a face once clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect of Crawford Tillinghast on the night his half-coherent message brought me to his door after my weeks of exile; such the spectre that trembled as it admitted me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its shoulder as if fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent Street.\n\nThat Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy; but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice.\n\n\"What do we know,\" he had said, \"of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognised sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.\n\nWhen Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely recognise. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in all the shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without telling as tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.\n\nYet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he had some stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I followed the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was for a definite reason.\n\n\"It would be too much... I would not dare,\" he continued to mutter. I especially noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister, violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was not electrical in any sense that I could understand.\n\nHe now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering began, turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed a pale, outr\u00e9 colour or blend of colours which I could neither place nor describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.\n\n\"Do you know what that is?\" he whispered. \"That is ultra-violet.\" He chuckled oddly at my surprise. \"You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is\u2014but you can see that and many other invisible things now.\n\n\"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have seen truth, and I intend to shew it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you.\" Here Tillinghast seated himself directly opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes. \"Your existing sense-organs\u2014ears first, I think\u2014will pick up many of the impressions, for they are closely connected with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-parvenu of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense-organ of organs\u2014I have found out. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you are normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it... I mean get most of the evidence from beyond.\"\n\nI looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by rays which the every-day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows, and the whole place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited the imagination to symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast was silent I fancied myself in some vast and incredible temple of long-dead gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless space. There seemed to be a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I always carried after dark since the night I was held up in East Providence. Then, from the farthermost regions of remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality of surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there developed something like a cold draught, which apparently swept past me from the direction of the distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived that both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a gigantic approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only the man, the glowing machine, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was grinning repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from his expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great deal more. I whispered what I had experienced, and he bade me to remain as quiet and receptive as possible.\n\n\"Don't move,\" he cautioned, \"for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see. I told you the servants left, but I didn't tell you how. It was that thick-witted housekeeper\u2014she turned on the lights downstairs after I had warned her not to, and the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful\u2014I could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another direction, and later it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike's clothes were close to the front hall switch\u2014that's how I know she did it. It got them all. But so long as we don't move we're fairly safe. Remember we're dealing with a hideous world in which we are practically helpless.... Keep still!\"\n\nThe combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a kind of paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions coming from what Tillinghast called \"beyond\". I was now in a vortex of sound and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred outlines of the room, but from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething column of unrecognisable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple-like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an a\u00ebrial ocean of light, which sent down one blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had seen before. After that the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or in some way lose the solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I seemed for an instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with shining, revolving spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed a constellation or galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face of Crawford Tillinghast. At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body, and thought I saw Tillinghast look at them as though his better trained senses could catch them visually. I recalled what he had said of the pineal gland, and wondered what he saw with this preternatural eye.\n\nSuddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar material objects not one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered into the composition of other unknown things, and vice versa. Foremost among the living objects were great inky, jellyish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids. These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the attacker launching itself at its victim and instantaneously obliterating the latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated the unfortunate servants, and could not exclude the things from my mind as I strove to observe other properties of the newly visible world that lies unseen around us. But Tillinghast had been watching me, and was speaking.\n\n\"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?\" I heard him scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably.\n\n\"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud?... Don't know, eh? You'll know soon enough! Look at me\u2014listen to what I say\u2014do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can't picture! I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars.... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.... Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now\u2014the things that devour and dissolve\u2014but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants. Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move. I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still\u2014saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don't worry, they won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants\u2014it was seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are\u2014very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you\u2014but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist! Trembling, eh? Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered? Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't worry, my friend, for they are coming.... Look! Look, curse you, look!... It's just over your left shoulder....\"\n\nWhat remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there\u2014Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the coroner would be sceptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and homicidal madman.\n\nI wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from believing the doctor is this one simple fact\u2014that the police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Green Meadow by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nINTRODUCTORY NOTE: The following very singular narrative or record of impressions was discovered under circumstances so extraordinary that they deserve careful description. On the evening of Wednesday, August 27, 1913, at about 8:30 o'clock, the population of the small seaside village of Potowonket, Maine, U.S.A., was aroused by a thunderous report accompanied by a blinding flash; and persons near the shore beheld a mammoth ball of fire dart from the heavens into the sea but a short distance out, sending up a prodigious column of water. The following Sunday a fishing party composed of John Richmond, Peter B. Carr, and Simon Canfield caught in their trawl and dragged ashore a mass of metallic rock, weighing 360 pounds, and looking (as Mr. Canfield said) like a piece of slag. Most of the inhabitants agreed that this heavy body was none other than the fireball which had fallen from the sky four days before; and Dr. Richmond M. Jones, the local scientific authority, allowed that it must be an aerolite or meteoric stone. In chipping off specimens to send to an expert Boston analyst, Dr. Jones discovered imbedded in the semi-metallic mass the strange book containing the ensuing tale, which is still in his possession.\n\nIn form the discovery resembles an ordinary notebook, about 5 \u00d7 3 inches in size, and containing thirty leaves. In material, however, it presents marked peculiarities. The covers are apparently of some dark stony substance unknown to geologists, and unbreakable by any mechanical means. No chemical reagent seems to act upon them. The leaves are much the same, save that they are lighter in colour, and so infinitely thin as to be quite flexible. The whole is bound by some process not very clear to those who have observed it; a process involving the adhesion of the leaf substance to the cover substance. These substances cannot now be separated, nor can the leaves be torn by any amount of force. The writing is Greek of the purest classical quality, and several students of palaeography declare that the characters are in a cursive hand used about the second century B. C. There is little in the text to determine the date. The mechanical mode of writing cannot be deduced beyond the fact that it must have resembled that of the modern slate and slate-pencil. During the course of analytical efforts made by the late Prof. Chambers of Harvard, several pages, mostly at the conclusion of the narrative, were blurred to the point of utter effacement before being read; a circumstance forming a well-nigh irreparable loss. What remains of the contents was done into modern Greek letters by the palaeographer Rutherford and in this form submitted to the translators.\n\nProf. Mayfield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who examined samples of the strange stone, declares it a true meteorite; an opinion in which Dr. von Winterfeldt of Heidelberg (interned in 1918 as a dangerous enemy alien) does not concur. Prof. Bradley of Columbia College adopts a less dogmatic ground; pointing out that certain utterly unknown ingredients are present in large quantities, and warning that no classification is as yet possible.\n\nThe presence, nature, and message of the strange book form so momentous a problem, that no explanation can even be attempted. The text, as far as preserved, is here rendered as literally as our language permits, in the hope that some reader may eventually hit upon an interpretation and solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of recent years.\n\n\u2014E.N.B.\u2014L.T., Jun.\n\n(THE STORY)\n\nIt was a narrow place, and I was alone. On one side, beyond a margin of vivid waving green, was the sea; blue, bright, and billowy, and sending up vaporous exhalations which intoxicated me. So profuse, indeed, were these exhalations, that they gave me an odd impression of a coalescence of sea and sky; for the heavens were likewise bright and blue. On the other side was the forest, ancient almost as the sea itself, and stretching infinitely inland. It was very dark, for the trees were grotesquely huge and luxuriant, and incredibly numerous. Their giant trunks were of a horrible green which blended weirdly with the narrow green tract whereon I stood. At some distance away, on either side of me, the strange forest extended down to the water's edge; obliterating the shore line and completely hemming in the narrow tract. Some of the trees, I observed, stood in the water itself; as though impatient of any barrier to their progress.\n\nI saw no living thing, nor sign that any living thing save myself had ever existed. The sea and the sky and the wood encircled me, and reached off into regions beyond my imagination. Nor was there any sound save of the wind-tossed wood and of the sea.\n\nAs I stood in this silent place, I suddenly commenced to tremble; for though I knew not how I came there, and could scarce remember what my name and rank had been, I felt that I should go mad if I could understand what lurked about me. I recalled things I had learned, things I had dreamed, things I had imagined and yearned for in some other distant life. I thought of long nights when I had gazed up at the stars of heaven and cursed the gods that my free soul could not traverse the vast abysses which were inaccessible to my body. I conjured up ancient blasphemies, and terrible delvings into the papyri of Democritus; but as memories appeared, I shuddered in deeper fear, for I knew that I was alone\u2014horribly alone. Alone, yet close to sentient impulses of vast, vague kind; which I prayed never to comprehend nor encounter. In the voice of the swaying green branches I fancied I could detect a kind of malignant hatred and daemoniac triumph. Sometimes they struck me as being in horrible colloquy with ghastly and unthinkable things which the scaly green bodies of the trees half hid; hid from sight but not from consciousness. The most oppressive of my sensations was a sinister feeling of alienage. Though I saw about me objects which I could name\u2014trees, grass, sea, and sky; I felt that their relation to me was not the same as that of the trees, grass, sea, and sky I knew in another and dimly remembered life. The nature of the difference I could not tell, yet I shook in stark fright as it impressed itself upon me.\n\nAnd then, in a spot where I had before discerned nothing but the misty sea, I beheld the Green Meadow; separated from me by a vast expanse of blue rippling water with sun-tipped wavelets, yet strangely near. Often I would peep fearfully over my right shoulder at the trees, but I preferred to look at the Green Meadow, which affected me oddly.\n\nIt was while my eyes were fixed upon this singular tract, that I first felt the ground in motion beneath me. Beginning with a kind of throbbing agitation which held a fiendish suggestion of conscious action, the bit of bank on which I stood detached itself from the grassy shore and commenced to float away; borne slowly onward as if by some current of resistless force. I did not move, astonished and startled as I was by the unprecedented phenomenon; but stood rigidly still until a wide lane of water yawned betwixt me and the land of trees. Then I sat down in a sort of daze, and again looked at the sun-tipped water and the Green Meadow.\n\nBehind me the trees and the things they may have been hiding seemed to radiate infinite menace. This I knew without turning to view them, for as I grew more used to the scene I became less and less dependent upon the five senses that once had been my sole reliance. I knew the green scaly forest hated me, yet now I was safe from it, for my bit of bank had drifted far from the shore.\n\nBut though one peril was past, another loomed up before me. Pieces of earth were constantly crumbling from the floating isle which held me, so that death could not be far distant in any event. Yet even then I seemed to sense that death would be death to me no more, for I turned again to watch the Green Meadow, imbued with a curious feeling of security in strange contrast to my general horror.\n\nThen it was that I heard, at a distance immeasurable, the sound of falling water. Not that of any trivial cascade such as I had known, but that which might be heard in the far Scythian lands if all the Mediterranean were poured down an unfathomable abyss. It was toward this sound that my shrinking island was drifting, yet I was content.\n\nFar in the rear were happening weird and terrible things; things which I turned to view, yet shivered to behold. For in the sky dark vaporous forms hovered fantastically, brooding over trees and seeming to answer the challenge of the waving green branches. Then a thick mist arose from the sea to join the sky-forms, and the shore was erased from my sight. Though the sun\u2014what sun I knew not\u2014shone brightly on the water around me, the land I had left seemed involved in a daemoniac tempest where clashed the will of the hellish trees and what they hid, with that of the sky and the sea. And when the mist vanished, I saw only the blue sky and the blue sea, for the land and the trees were no more.\n\nIt was at this point that my attention was arrested by the singing in the Green Meadow. Hitherto, as I have said, I had encountered no sign of human life; but now there arose to my ears a dull chant whose origin and nature were apparently unmistakable. While the words were utterly undistinguishable, the chant awaked in me a peculiar train of associations; and I was reminded of some vaguely disquieting lines I had once translated out of an Egyptian book, which in turn were taken from a papyrus of ancient Mero\u00eb. Through my brain ran lines that I fear to repeat; lines telling of very antique things and forms of life in the days when our earth was exceeding young. Of things which thought and moved and were alive, yet which gods and men would not consider alive. It was a strange book.\n\nAs I listened, I became gradually conscious of a circumstance which had before puzzled me only subconsciously. At no time had my sight distinguished any definite objects in the Green Meadow, an impression of vivid homogeneous verdure being the sum total of my perception. Now, however, I saw that the current would cause my island to pass the shore at but a little distance; so that I might learn more of the land and of the singing thereon. My curiosity to behold the singers had mounted high, though it was mingled with apprehension.\n\nBits of sod continued to break away from the tiny tract which carried me, but I heeded not their loss; for I felt that I was not to die with the body (or appearance of a body) which I seemed to possess. That everything about me, even life and death, was illusory; that I had overleaped the bounds of mortality and corporeal entity, becoming a free, detached thing; impressed me as almost certain. Of my location I knew nothing, save that I felt I could not be on the earth-planet once so familiar to me. My sensations, apart from a kind of haunting terror, were those of a traveller just embarked upon an unending voyage of discovery. For a moment I thought of the lands and persons I had left behind; and of strange ways whereby I might some day tell them of my adventurings, even though I might never return.\n\nI had now floated very near the Green Meadow, so that the voices were clear and distinct; but though I knew many languages I could not quite interpret the words of the chanting. Familiar they indeed were, as I had subtly felt when at a greater distance, but beyond a sensation of vague and awesome remembrance I could make nothing of them. A most extraordinary quality in the voices\u2014a quality which I cannot describe\u2014at once frightened and fascinated me. My eyes could now discern several things amidst the omnipresent verdure\u2014rocks, covered with bright green moss, shrubs of considerable height, and less definable shapes of great magnitude which seemed to move or vibrate amidst the shrubbery in a peculiar way. The chanting, whose authors I was so anxious to glimpse, seemed loudest at points where these shapes were most numerous and most vigorously in motion.\n\nAnd then, as my island drifted closer and the sound of the distant waterfall grew louder, I saw clearly the source of the chanting, and in one horrible instant remembered everything. Of such things I cannot, dare not tell, for therein was revealed the hideous solution of all which had puzzled me; and that solution would drive you mad, even as it almost drove me.... I knew now the change through which I had passed, and through which certain others who once were men had passed! and I knew the endless cycle of the future which none like me may escape.... I shall live forever, be conscious forever, though my soul cries out to the gods for the boon of death and oblivion.... All is before me: beyond the deafening torrent lies the land of Stethelos, where young men are infinitely old.... The Green Meadow... I will send a message across the horrible immeasurable abyss....\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Haunter of the Dark by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nCautious investigators will hesitate to challenge the common belief that Robert Blake was killed by lightning, or by some profound nervous shock derived from an electrical discharge. It is true that the window he faced was unbroken, but Nature has shewn herself capable of many freakish performances. The expression on his face may easily have arisen from some obscure muscular source unrelated to anything he saw, while the entries in his diary are clearly the result of a fantastic imagination aroused by certain local superstitions and by certain old matters he had uncovered. As for the anomalous conditions at the deserted church on Federal Hill\u2014the shrewd analyst is not slow in attributing them to some charlatanry, conscious or unconscious, with at least some of which Blake was secretly connected.\n\nFor after all, the victim was a writer and painter wholly devoted to the field of myth, dream, terror, and superstition, and avid in his quest for scenes and effects of a bizarre, spectral sort. His earlier stay in the city\u2014a visit to a strange old man as deeply given to occult and forbidden lore as he\u2014had ended amidst death and flame, and it must have been some morbid instinct which drew him back from his home in Milwaukee. He may have known of the old stories despite his statements to the contrary in the diary, and his death may have nipped in the bud some stupendous hoax destined to have a literary reflection.\n\nAmong those, however, who have examined and correlated all this evidence, there remain several who cling to less rational and commonplace theories. They are inclined to take much of Blake's diary at its face value, and point significantly to certain facts such as the undoubted genuineness of the old church record, the verified existence of the disliked and unorthodox Starry Wisdom sect prior to 1877, the recorded disappearance of an inquisitive reporter named Edwin M. Lillibridge in 1893, and\u2014above all\u2014the look of monstrous, transfiguring fear on the face of the young writer when he died. It was one of these believers who, moved to fanatical extremes, threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple\u2014the black windowless steeple, and not the tower where Blake's diary said those things originally were. Though widely censured both officially and unofficially, this man\u2014a reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore\u2014averred that he had rid the earth of something too dangerous to rest upon it.\n\nBetween these two schools of opinion the reader must judge for himself. The papers have given the tangible details from a sceptical angle, leaving for others the drawing of the picture as Robert Blake saw it\u2014or thought he saw it\u2014or pretended to see it. Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor.\n\nYoung Blake returned to Providence in the winter of 1934\u20135, taking the upper floor of a venerable dwelling in a grassy court off College Street\u2014on the crest of the great eastward hill near the Brown University campus and behind the marble John Hay Library. It was a cosy and fascinating place, in a little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed. The square Georgian house had a monitor roof, classic doorway with fan carving, small-paned windows, and all the other earmarks of early nineteenth-century workmanship. Inside were six-panelled doors, wide floor-boards, a curving colonial staircase, white Adam-period mantels, and a rear set of rooms three steps below the general level.\n\nBlake's study, a large southwest chamber, overlooked the front garden on one side, while its west windows\u2014before one of which he had his desk\u2014faced off from the brow of the hill and commanded a splendid view of the lower town's outspread roofs and of the mystical sunsets that flamed behind them. On the far horizon were the open countryside's purple slopes. Against these, some two miles away, rose the spectral hump of Federal Hill, bristling with huddled roofs and steeples whose remote outlines wavered mysteriously, taking fantastic forms as the smoke of the city swirled up and enmeshed them. Blake had a curious sense that he was looking upon some unknown, ethereal world which might or might not vanish in dream if ever he tried to seek it out and enter it in person.\n\nHaving sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and paint\u2014living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself. His studio was in a north attic room, where the panes of the monitor roof furnished admirable lighting. During that first winter he produced five of his best-known short stories\u2014\"The Burrower Beneath\", \"The Stairs in the Crypt\", \"Shaggai\", \"In the Vale of Pnath\", and \"The Feaster from the Stars\"\u2014and painted seven canvases; studies of nameless, unhuman monsters, and profoundly alien, non-terrestrial landscapes.\n\nAt sunset he would often sit at his desk and gaze dreamily off at the outspread west\u2014the dark towers of Memorial Hall just below, the Georgian court-house belfry, the lofty pinnacles of the downtown section, and that shimmering, spire-crowned mound in the distance whose unknown streets and labyrinthine gables so potently provoked his fancy. From his few local acquaintances he learned that the far-off slope was a vast Italian quarter, though most of the houses were remnants of older Yankee and Irish days. Now and then he would train his field-glasses on that spectral, unreachable world beyond the curling smoke; picking out individual roofs and chimneys and steeples, and speculating upon the bizarre and curious mysteries they might house. Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake's own tales and pictures. The feeling would persist long after the hill had faded into the violet, lamp-starred twilight, and the court-house floodlights and the red Industrial Trust beacon had blazed up to make the night grotesque.\n\nOf all the distant objects on Federal Hill, a certain huge, dark church most fascinated Blake. It stood out with especial distinctness at certain hours of the day, and at sunset the great tower and tapering steeple loomed blackly against the flaming sky. It seemed to rest on especially high ground; for the grimy facade, and the obliquely seen north side with sloping roof and the tops of great pointed windows, rose boldly above the tangle of surrounding ridgepoles and chimney-pots. Peculiarly grim and austere, it appeared to be built of stone, stained and weathered with the smoke and storms of a century and more. The style, so far as the glass could shew, was that earliest experimental form of Gothic revival which preceded the stately Upjohn period and held over some of the outlines and proportions of the Georgian age. Perhaps it was reared around 1810 or 1815.\n\nAs months passed, Blake watched the far-off, forbidding structure with an oddly mounting interest. Since the vast windows were never lighted, he knew that it must be vacant. The longer he watched, the more his imagination worked, till at length he began to fancy curious things. He believed that a vague, singular aura of desolation hovered over the place, so that even the pigeons and swallows shunned its smoky eaves. Around other towers and belfries his glass would reveal great flocks of birds, but here they never rested. At least, that is what he thought and set down in his diary. He pointed the place out to several friends, but none of them had even been on Federal Hill or possessed the faintest notion of what the church was or had been.\n\nIn the spring a deep restlessness gripped Blake. He had begun his long-planned novel\u2014based on a supposed survival of the witch-cult in Maine\u2014but was strangely unable to make progress with it. More and more he would sit at his westward window and gaze at the distant hill and the black, frowning steeple shunned by the birds. When the delicate leaves came out on the garden boughs the world was filled with a new beauty, but Blake's restlessness was merely increased. It was then that he first thought of crossing the city and climbing bodily up that fabulous slope into the smoke-wreathed world of dream.\n\nLate in April, just before the aeon-shadowed Walpurgis time, Blake made his first trip into the unknown. Plodding through the endless downtown streets and the bleak, decayed squares beyond, he came finally upon the ascending avenue of century-worn steps, sagging Doric porches, and blear-paned cupolas which he felt must lead up to the long-known, unreachable world beyond the mists. There were dingy blue-and-white street signs which meant nothing to him, and presently he noted the strange, dark faces of the drifting crowds, and the foreign signs over curious shops in brown, decade-weathered buildings. Nowhere could he find any of the objects he had seen from afar; so that once more he half fancied that the Federal Hill of that distant view was a dream-world never to be trod by living human feet.\n\nNow and then a battered church facade or crumbling spire came in sight, but never the blackened pile that he sought. When he asked a shopkeeper about a great stone church the man smiled and shook his head, though he spoke English freely. As Blake climbed higher, the region seemed stranger and stranger, with bewildering mazes of brooding brown alleys leading eternally off to the south. He crossed two or three broad avenues, and once thought he glimpsed a familiar tower. Again he asked a merchant about the massive church of stone, and this time he could have sworn that the plea of ignorance was feigned. The dark man's face had a look of fear which he tried to hide, and Blake saw him make a curious sign with his right hand.\n\nThen suddenly a black spire stood out against the cloudy sky on his left, above the tiers of brown roofs lining the tangled southerly alleys. Blake knew at once what it was, and plunged toward it through the squalid, unpaved lanes that climbed from the avenue. Twice he lost his way, but he somehow dared not ask any of the patriarchs or housewives who sat on their doorsteps, or any of the children who shouted and played in the mud of the shadowy lanes.\n\nAt last he saw the tower plain against the southwest, and a huge stone bulk rose darkly at the end of an alley. Presently he stood in a windswept open square, quaintly cobblestoned, with a high bank wall on the farther side. This was the end of his quest; for upon the wide, iron-railed, weed-grown plateau which the wall supported\u2014a separate, lesser world raised fully six feet above the surrounding streets\u2014there stood a grim, titan bulk whose identity, despite Blake's new perspective, was beyond dispute.\n\nThe vacant church was in a state of great decrepitude. Some of the high stone buttresses had fallen, and several delicate finials lay half lost among the brown, neglected weeds and grasses. The sooty Gothic windows were largely unbroken, though many of the stone mullions were missing. Blake wondered how the obscurely painted panes could have survived so well, in view of the known habits of small boys the world over. The massive doors were intact and tightly closed. Around the top of the bank wall, fully enclosing the grounds, was a rusty iron fence whose gate\u2014at the head of a flight of steps from the square\u2014was visibly padlocked. The path from the gate to the building was completely overgrown. Desolation and decay hung like a pall above the place, and in the birdless eaves and black, ivyless walls Blake felt a touch of the dimly sinister beyond his power to define.\n\nThere were very few people in the square, but Blake saw a policeman at the northerly end and approached him with questions about the church. He was a great wholesome Irishman, and it seemed odd that he would do little more than make the sign of the cross and mutter that people never spoke of that building. When Blake pressed him he said very hurriedly that the Italian priests warned everybody against it, vowing that a monstrous evil had once dwelt there and left its mark. He himself had heard dark whispers of it from his father, who recalled certain sounds and rumours from his boyhood.\n\nThere had been a bad sect there in the ould days\u2014an outlaw sect that called up awful things from some unknown gulf of night. It had taken a good priest to exorcise what had come, though there did be those who said that merely the light could do it. If Father O'Malley were alive there would be many the thing he could tell. But now there was nothing to do but let it alone. It hurt nobody now, and those that owned it were dead or far away. They had run away like rats after the threatening talk in '77, when people began to mind the way folks vanished now and then in the neighbourhood. Some day the city would step in and take the property for lack of heirs, but little good would come of anybody's touching it. Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest forever in their black abyss.\n\nAfter the policeman had gone Blake stood staring at the sullen steepled pile. It excited him to find that the structure seemed as sinister to others as to him, and he wondered what grain of truth might lie behind the old tales the bluecoat had repeated. Probably they were mere legends evoked by the evil look of the place, but even so, they were like a strange coming to life of one of his own stories.\n\nThe afternoon sun came out from behind dispersing clouds, but seemed unable to light up the stained, sooty walls of the old temple that towered on its high plateau. It was odd that the green of spring had not touched the brown, withered growths in the raised, iron-fenced yard. Blake found himself edging nearer the raised area and examining the bank wall and rusted fence for possible avenues of ingress. There was a terrible lure about the blackened fane which was not to be resisted. The fence had no opening near the steps, but around on the north side were some missing bars. He could go up the steps and walk around on the narrow coping outside the fence till he came to the gap. If the people feared the place so wildly, he would encounter no interference.\n\nHe was on the embankment and almost inside the fence before anyone noticed him. Then, looking down, he saw the few people in the square edging away and making the same sign with their right hands that the shopkeeper in the avenue had made. Several windows were slammed down, and a fat woman darted into the street and pulled some small children inside a rickety, unpainted house. The gap in the fence was very easy to pass through, and before long Blake found himself wading amidst the rotting, tangled growths of the deserted yard. Here and there the worn stump of a headstone told him that there had once been burials in this field; but that, he saw, must have been very long ago. The sheer bulk of the church was oppressive now that he was close to it, but he conquered his mood and approached to try the three great doors in the facade. All were securely locked, so he began a circuit of the Cyclopean building in quest of some minor and more penetrable opening. Even then he could not be sure that he wished to enter that haunt of desertion and shadow, yet the pull of its strangeness dragged him on automatically.\n\nA yawning and unprotected cellar window in the rear furnished the needed aperture. Peering in, Blake saw a subterrene gulf of cobwebs and dust faintly litten by the western sun's filtered rays. Debris, old barrels, and ruined boxes and furniture of numerous sorts met his eye, though over everything lay a shroud of dust which softened all sharp outlines. The rusted remains of a hot-air furnace shewed that the building had been used and kept in shape as late as mid-Victorian times.\n\nActing almost without conscious initiative, Blake crawled through the window and let himself down to the dust-carpeted and debris-strown concrete floor. The vaulted cellar was a vast one, without partitions; and in a corner far to the right, amid dense shadows, he saw a black archway evidently leading upstairs. He felt a peculiar sense of oppression at being actually within the great spectral building, but kept it in check as he cautiously scouted about\u2014finding a still-intact barrel amid the dust, and rolling it over to the open window to provide for his exit. Then, bracing himself, he crossed the wide, cobweb-festooned space toward the arch. Half choked with the omnipresent dust, and covered with ghostly gossamer fibres, he reached and began to climb the worn stone steps which rose into the darkness. He had no light, but groped carefully with his hands. After a sharp turn he felt a closed door ahead, and a little fumbling revealed its ancient latch. It opened inward, and beyond it he saw a dimly illumined corridor lined with worm-eaten panelling.\n\nOnce on the ground floor, Blake began exploring in a rapid fashion. All the inner doors were unlocked, so that he freely passed from room to room. The colossal nave was an almost eldritch place with its drifts and mountains of dust over box pews, altar, hourglass pulpit, and sounding-board, and its titanic ropes of cobweb stretching among the pointed arches of the gallery and entwining the clustered Gothic columns. Over all this hushed desolation played a hideous leaden light as the declining afternoon sun sent its rays through the strange, half-blackened panes of the great apsidal windows.\n\nThe paintings on those windows were so obscured by soot that Blake could scarcely decipher what they had represented, but from the little he could make out he did not like them. The designs were largely conventional, and his knowledge of obscure symbolism told him much concerning some of the ancient patterns. The few saints depicted bore expressions distinctly open to criticism, while one of the windows seemed to shew merely a dark space with spirals of curious luminosity scattered about in it. Turning away from the windows, Blake noticed that the cobwebbed cross above the altar was not of the ordinary kind, but resembled the primordial ankh or crux ansata of shadowy Egypt.\n\nIn a rear vestry room beside the apse Blake found a rotting desk and ceiling-high shelves of mildewed, disintegrating books. Here for the first time he received a positive shock of objective horror, for the titles of those books told him much. They were the black, forbidden things which most sane people have never even heard of, or have heard of only in furtive, timorous whispers; the banned and dreaded repositories of equivocal secrets and immemorial formulae which have trickled down the stream of time from the days of man's youth, and the dim, fabulous days before man was. He had himself read many of them\u2014a Latin version of the abhorred Necronomicon, the sinister Liber Ivonis, the infamous Cultes des Goules of Comte d'Erlette, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and old Ludvig Prinn's hellish De Vermis Mysteriis. But there were others he had known merely by reputation or not at all\u2014the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Book of Dzyan, and a crumbling volume in wholly unidentifiable characters yet with certain symbols and diagrams shudderingly recognisable to the occult student. Clearly, the lingering local rumours had not lied. This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.\n\nIn the ruined desk was a small leather-bound record-book filled with entries in some odd cryptographic medium. The manuscript writing consisted of the common traditional symbols used today in astronomy and anciently in alchemy, astrology, and other dubious arts\u2014the devices of the sun, moon, planets, aspects, and zodiacal signs\u2014here massed in solid pages of text, with divisions and paragraphings suggesting that each symbol answered to some alphabetical letter.\n\nIn the hope of later solving the cryptogram, Blake bore off this volume in his coat pocket. Many of the great tomes on the shelves fascinated him unutterably, and he felt tempted to borrow them at some later time. He wondered how they could have remained undisturbed so long. Was he the first to conquer the clutching, pervasive fear which had for nearly sixty years protected this deserted place from visitors?\n\nHaving now thoroughly explored the ground floor, Blake ploughed again through the dust of the spectral nave to the front vestibule, where he had seen a door and staircase presumably leading up to the blackened tower and steeple\u2014objects so long familiar to him at a distance. The ascent was a choking experience, for dust lay thick, while the spiders had done their worst in this constricted place. The staircase was a spiral with high, narrow wooden treads, and now and then Blake passed a clouded window looking dizzily out over the city. Though he had seen no ropes below, he expected to find a bell or peal of bells in the tower whose narrow, louver-boarded lancet windows his field-glass had studied so often. Here he was doomed to disappointment; for when he attained the top of the stairs he found the tower chamber vacant of chimes, and clearly devoted to vastly different purposes.\n\nThe room, about fifteen feet square, was faintly lighted by four lancet windows, one on each side, which were glazed within their screening of decayed louver-boards. These had been further fitted with tight, opaque screens, but the latter were now largely rotted away. In the centre of the dust-laden floor rose a curiously angled stone pillar some four feet in height and two in average diameter, covered on each side with bizarre, crudely incised, and wholly unrecognisable hieroglyphs. On this pillar rested a metal box of peculiarly asymmetrical form; its hinged lid thrown back, and its interior holding what looked beneath the decade-deep dust to be an egg-shaped or irregularly spherical object some four inches through. Around the pillar in a rough circle were seven high-backed Gothic chairs still largely intact, while behind them, ranging along the dark-panelled walls, were seven colossal images of crumbling, black-painted plaster, resembling more than anything else the cryptic carven megaliths of mysterious Easter Island. In one corner of the cobwebbed chamber a ladder was built into the wall, leading up to the closed trap-door of the windowless steeple above.\n\nAs Blake grew accustomed to the feeble light he noticed odd bas-reliefs on the strange open box of yellowish metal. Approaching, he tried to clear the dust away with his hands and handkerchief, and saw that the figurings were of a monstrous and utterly alien kind; depicting entities which, though seemingly alive, resembled no known life-form ever evolved on this planet. The four-inch seeming sphere turned out to be a nearly black, red-striated polyhedron with many irregular flat surfaces; either a very remarkable crystal of some sort, or an artificial object of carved and highly polished mineral matter. It did not touch the bottom of the box, but was held suspended by means of a metal band around its centre, with seven queerly designed supports extending horizontally to angles of the box's inner wall near the top. This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed worlds of wonder within. Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses told of the presence of consciousness and will.\n\nWhen he did look away, it was to notice a somewhat singular mound of dust in the far corner near the ladder to the steeple. Just why it took his attention he could not tell, but something in its contours carried a message to his unconscious mind. Ploughing toward it, and brushing aside the hanging cobwebs as he went, he began to discern something grim about it. Hand and handkerchief soon revealed the truth, and Blake gasped with a baffling mixture of emotions. It was a human skeleton, and it must have been there for a very long time. The clothing was in shreds, but some buttons and fragments of cloth bespoke a man's grey suit. There were other bits of evidence\u2014shoes, metal clasps, huge buttons for round cuffs, a stickpin of bygone pattern, a reporter's badge with the name of the old Providence Telegram, and a crumbling leather pocketbook. Blake examined the latter with care, finding within it several bills of antiquated issue, a celluloid advertising calendar for 1893, some cards with the name \"Edwin M. Lillibridge\", and a paper covered with pencilled memoranda.\n\nThis paper held much of a puzzling nature, and Blake read it carefully at the dim westward window. Its disjointed text included such phrases as the following:\n\n\"Prof. Enoch Bowen home from Egypt May 1844\u2014buys old Free-Will Church in July\u2014his archaeological work & studies in occult well known.\"\n\n\"Dr. Drowne of 4th Baptist warns against Starry Wisdom in sermon Dec. 29, 1844.\"\n\n\"Congregation 97 by end of '45.\"\n\n\"1846\u20143 disappearances\u2014first mention of Shining Trapezohedron.\"\n\n\"7 disappearances 1848\u2014stories of blood sacrifice begin.\"\n\n\"Investigation 1853 comes to nothing\u2014stories of sounds.\"\n\n\"Fr. O'Malley tells of devil-worship with box found in great Egyptian ruins\u2014says they call up something that can't exist in light. Flees a little light, and banished by strong light. Then has to be summoned again. Probably got this from deathbed confession of Francis X. Feeney, who had joined Starry Wisdom in '49. These people say the Shining Trapezohedron shews them heaven & other worlds, & that the Haunter of the Dark tells them secrets in some way.\"\n\n\"Story of Orrin B. Eddy 1857. They call it up by gazing at the crystal, & have a secret language of their own.\"\n\n\"200 or more in cong. 1863, exclusive of men at front.\"\n\n\"Irish boys mob church in 1869 after Patrick Regan's disappearance.\"\n\n\"Veiled article in J. March 14, '72, but people don't talk about it.\"\n\n\"6 disappearances 1876\u2014secret committee calls on Mayor Doyle.\"\n\n\"Action promised Feb. 1877\u2014church closes in April.\"\n\n\"Gang\u2014Federal Hill Boys\u2014threaten Dr. \u2014 and vestrymen in May.\"\n\n\"181 persons leave city before end of '77\u2014mention no names.\"\n\n\"Ghost stories begin around 1880\u2014try to ascertain truth of report that no human being has entered church since 1877.\"\n\n\"Ask Lanigan for photograph of place taken 1851...\"\n\nRestoring the paper to the pocketbook and placing the latter in his coat, Blake turned to look down at the skeleton in the dust. The implications of the notes were clear, and there could be no doubt but that this man had come to the deserted edifice forty-two years before in quest of a newspaper sensation which no one else had been bold enough to attempt. Perhaps no one else had known of his plan\u2014who could tell? But he had never returned to his paper. Had some bravely suppressed fear risen to overcome him and bring on sudden heart-failure? Blake stooped over the gleaming bones and noted their peculiar state. Some of them were badly scattered, and a few seemed oddly dissolved at the ends. Others were strangely yellowed, with vague suggestions of charring. This charring extended to some of the fragments of clothing. The skull was in a very peculiar state\u2014stained yellow, and with a charred aperture in the top as if some powerful acid had eaten through the solid bone. What had happened to the skeleton during its four decades of silent entombment here Blake could not imagine.\n\nBefore he realised it, he was looking at the stone again, and letting its curious influence call up a nebulous pageantry in his mind. He saw processions of robed, hooded figures whose outlines were not human, and looked on endless leagues of desert lined with carved, sky-reaching monoliths. He saw towers and walls in nighted depths under the sea, and vortices of space where wisps of black mist floated before thin shimmerings of cold purple haze. And beyond all else he glimpsed an infinite gulf of darkness, where solid and semi-solid forms were known only by their windy stirrings, and cloudy patterns of force seemed to superimpose order on chaos and hold forth a key to all the paradoxes and arcana of the worlds we know.\n\nThen all at once the spell was broken by an access of gnawing, indeterminate panic fear. Blake choked and turned away from the stone, conscious of some formless alien presence close to him and watching him with horrible intentness. He felt entangled with something\u2014something which was not in the stone, but which had looked through it at him\u2014something which would ceaselessly follow him with a cognition that was not physical sight. Plainly, the place was getting on his nerves\u2014as well it might in view of his gruesome find. The light was waning, too, and since he had no illuminant with him he knew he would have to be leaving soon.\n\nIt was then, in the gathering twilight, that he thought he saw a faint trace of luminosity in the crazily angled stone. He had tried to look away from it, but some obscure compulsion drew his eyes back. Was there a subtle phosphorescence of radio-activity about the thing? What was it that the dead man's notes had said concerning a Shining Trapezohedron? What, anyway, was this abandoned lair of cosmic evil? What had been done here, and what might still be lurking in the bird-shunned shadows? It seemed now as if an elusive touch of foetor had arisen somewhere close by, though its source was not apparent. Blake seized the cover of the long-open box and snapped it down. It moved easily on its alien hinges, and closed completely over the unmistakably glowing stone.\n\nAt the sharp click of that closing a soft stirring sound seemed to come from the steeple's eternal blackness overhead, beyond the trap-door. Rats, without question\u2014the only living things to reveal their presence in this accursed pile since he had entered it. And yet that stirring in the steeple frightened him horribly, so that he plunged almost wildly down the spiral stairs, across the ghoulish nave, into the vaulted basement, out amidst the gathering dusk of the deserted square, and down through the teeming, fear-haunted alleys and avenues of Federal Hill toward the sane central streets and the home-like brick sidewalks of the college district.\n\nDuring the days which followed, Blake told no one of his expedition. Instead, he read much in certain books, examined long years of newspaper files downtown, and worked feverishly at the cryptogram in that leather volume from the cobwebbed vestry room. The cipher, he soon saw, was no simple one; and after a long period of endeavour he felt sure that its language could not be English, Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, or German. Evidently he would have to draw upon the deepest wells of his strange erudition.\n\nEvery evening the old impulse to gaze westward returned, and he saw the black steeple as of yore amongst the bristling roofs of a distant and half-fabulous world. But now it held a fresh note of terror for him. He knew the heritage of evil lore it masked, and with the knowledge his vision ran riot in queer new ways. The birds of spring were returning, and as he watched their sunset flights he fancied they avoided the gaunt, lone spire as never before. When a flock of them approached it, he thought, they would wheel and scatter in panic confusion\u2014and he could guess at the wild twitterings which failed to reach him across the intervening miles.\n\nIt was in June that Blake's diary told of his victory over the cryptogram. The text was, he found, in the dark Aklo language used by certain cults of evil antiquity, and known to him in a halting way through previous researches. The diary is strangely reticent about what Blake deciphered, but he was patently awed and disconcerted by his results. There are references to a Haunter of the Dark awaked by gazing into the Shining Trapezohedron, and insane conjectures about the black gulfs of chaos from which it was called. The being is spoken of as holding all knowledge, and demanding monstrous sacrifices. Some of Blake's entries shew fear lest the thing, which he seemed to regard as summoned, stalk abroad; though he adds that the street-lights form a bulwark which cannot be crossed.\n\nOf the Shining Trapezohedron he speaks often, calling it a window on all time and space, and tracing its history from the days it was fashioned on dark Yuggoth, before ever the Old Ones brought it to earth. It was treasured and placed in its curious box by the crinoid things of Antarctica, salvaged from their ruins by the serpent-men of Valusia, and peered at aeons later in Lemuria by the first human beings. It crossed strange lands and stranger seas, and sank with Atlantis before a Minoan fisher meshed it in his net and sold it to swarthy merchants from nighted Khem. The Pharaoh Nephren-Ka built around it a temple with a windowless crypt, and did that which caused his name to be stricken from all monuments and records. Then it slept in the ruins of that evil fane which the priests and the new Pharaoh destroyed, till the delver's spade once more brought it forth to curse mankind.\n\nEarly in July the newspapers oddly supplement Blake's entries, though in so brief and casual a way that only the diary has called general attention to their contribution. It appears that a new fear had been growing on Federal Hill since a stranger had entered the dreaded church. The Italians whispered of unaccustomed stirrings and bumpings and scrapings in the dark windowless steeple, and called on their priests to banish an entity which haunted their dreams. Something, they said, was constantly watching at a door to see if it were dark enough to venture forth. Press items mentioned the long-standing local superstitions, but failed to shed much light on the earlier background of the horror. It was obvious that the young reporters of today are no antiquarians. In writing of these things in his diary, Blake expresses a curious kind of remorse, and talks of the duty of burying the Shining Trapezohedron and of banishing what he had evoked by letting daylight into the hideous jutting spire. At the same time, however, he displays the dangerous extent of his fascination, and admits a morbid longing\u2014pervading even his dreams\u2014to visit the accursed tower and gaze again into the cosmic secrets of the glowing stone.\n\nThen something in the Journal on the morning of July 17 threw the diarist into a veritable fever of horror. It was only a variant of the other half-humorous items about the Federal Hill restlessness, but to Blake it was somehow very terrible indeed. In the night a thunderstorm had put the city's lighting-system out of commission for a full hour, and in that black interval the Italians had nearly gone mad with fright. Those living near the dreaded church had sworn that the thing in the steeple had taken advantage of the street-lamps' absence and gone down into the body of the church, flopping and bumping around in a viscous, altogether dreadful way. Toward the last it had bumped up to the tower, where there were sounds of the shattering of glass. It could go wherever the darkness reached, but light would always send it fleeing.\n\nWhen the current blazed on again there had been a shocking commotion in the tower, for even the feeble light trickling through the grime-blackened, louver-boarded windows was too much for the thing. It had bumped and slithered up into its tenebrous steeple just in time\u2014for a long dose of light would have sent it back into the abyss whence the crazy stranger had called it. During the dark hour praying crowds had clustered round the church in the rain with lighted candles and lamps somehow shielded with folded paper and umbrellas\u2014a guard of light to save the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness. Once, those nearest the church declared, the outer door had rattled hideously.\n\nBut even this was not the worst. That evening in the Bulletin Blake read of what the reporters had found. Aroused at last to the whimsical news value of the scare, a pair of them had defied the frantic crowds of Italians and crawled into the church through the cellar window after trying the doors in vain. They found the dust of the vestibule and of the spectral nave ploughed up in a singular way, with bits of rotted cushions and satin pew-linings scattered curiously around. There was a bad odour everywhere, and here and there were bits of yellow stain and patches of what looked like charring. Opening the door to the tower, and pausing a moment at the suspicion of a scraping sound above, they found the narrow spiral stairs wiped roughly clean.\n\nIn the tower itself a similarly half-swept condition existed. They spoke of the heptagonal stone pillar, the overturned Gothic chairs, and the bizarre plaster images; though strangely enough the metal box and the old mutilated skeleton were not mentioned. What disturbed Blake the most\u2014except for the hints of stains and charring and bad odours\u2014was the final detail that explained the crashing glass. Every one of the tower's lancet windows was broken, and two of them had been darkened in a crude and hurried way by the stuffing of satin pew-linings and cushion-horsehair into the spaces between the slanting exterior louver-boards. More satin fragments and bunches of horsehair lay scattered around the newly swept floor, as if someone had been interrupted in the act of restoring the tower to the absolute blackness of its tightly curtained days.\n\nYellowish stains and charred patches were found on the ladder to the windowless spire, but when a reporter climbed up, opened the horizontally sliding trap-door, and shot a feeble flashlight beam into the black and strangely foetid space, he saw nothing but darkness, and an heterogeneous litter of shapeless fragments near the aperture. The verdict, of course, was charlatanry. Somebody had played a joke on the superstitious hill-dwellers, or else some fanatic had striven to bolster up their fears for their own supposed good. Or perhaps some of the younger and more sophisticated dwellers had staged an elaborate hoax on the outside world. There was an amusing aftermath when the police sent an officer to verify the reports. Three men in succession found ways of evading the assignment, and the fourth went very reluctantly and returned very soon without adding to the account given by the reporters.\n\nFrom this point onward Blake's diary shews a mounting tide of insidious horror and nervous apprehension. He upbraids himself for not doing something, and speculates wildly on the consequences of another electrical breakdown. It has been verified that on three occasions\u2014during thunderstorms\u2014he telephoned the electric light company in a frantic vein and asked that desperate precautions against a lapse of power be taken. Now and then his entries shew concern over the failure of the reporters to find the metal box and stone, and the strangely marred old skeleton, when they explored the shadowy tower room. He assumed that these things had been removed\u2014whither, and by whom or what, he could only guess. But his worst fears concerned himself, and the kind of unholy rapport he felt to exist between his mind and that lurking horror in the distant steeple\u2014that monstrous thing of night which his rashness had called out of the ultimate black spaces. He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk and stare out of the west window at that far-off, spire-bristling mound beyond the swirling smoke of the city. His entries dwell monotonously on certain terrible dreams, and of a strengthening of the unholy rapport in his sleep. There is mention of a night when he awaked to find himself fully dressed, outdoors, and headed automatically down College Hill toward the west. Again and again he dwells on the fact that the thing in the steeple knows where to find him.\n\nThe week following July 30 is recalled as the time of Blake's partial breakdown. He did not dress, and ordered all his food by telephone. Visitors remarked the cords he kept near his bed, and he said that sleep-walking had forced him to bind his ankles every night with knots which would probably hold or else waken him with the labour of untying.\n\nIn his diary he told of the hideous experience which had brought the collapse. After retiring on the night of the 30th he had suddenly found himself groping about in an almost black space. All he could see were short, faint, horizontal streaks of bluish light, but he could smell an overpowering foetor and hear a curious jumble of soft, furtive sounds above him. Whenever he moved he stumbled over something, and at each noise there would come a sort of answering sound from above\u2014a vague stirring, mixed with the cautious sliding of wood on wood.\n\nOnce his groping hands encountered a pillar of stone with a vacant top, whilst later he found himself clutching the rungs of a ladder built into the wall, and fumbling his uncertain way upward toward some region of intenser stench where a hot, searing blast beat down against him. Before his eyes a kaleidoscopic range of phantasmal images played, all of them dissolving at intervals into the picture of a vast, unplumbed abyss of night wherein whirled suns and worlds of an even profounder blackness. He thought of the ancient legends of Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws.\n\nThen a sharp report from the outer world broke through his stupor and roused him to the unutterable horror of his position. What it was, he never knew\u2014perhaps it was some belated peal from the fireworks heard all summer on Federal Hill as the dwellers hail their various patron saints, or the saints of their native villages in Italy. In any event he shrieked aloud, dropped frantically from the ladder, and stumbled blindly across the obstructed floor of the almost lightless chamber that encompassed him.\n\nHe knew instantly where he was, and plunged recklessly down the narrow spiral staircase, tripping and bruising himself at every turn. There was a nightmare flight through a vast cobwebbed nave whose ghostly arches reached up to realms of leering shadow, a sightless scramble through a littered basement, a climb to regions of air and street-lights outside, and a mad racing down a spectral hill of gibbering gables, across a grim, silent city of tall black towers, and up the steep eastward precipice to his own ancient door.\n\nOn regaining consciousness in the morning he found himself lying on his study floor fully dressed. Dirt and cobwebs covered him, and every inch of his body seemed sore and bruised. When he faced the mirror he saw that his hair was badly scorched, while a trace of strange, evil odour seemed to cling to his upper outer clothing. It was then that his nerves broke down. Thereafter, lounging exhaustedly about in a dressing-gown, he did little but stare from his west window, shiver at the threat of thunder, and make wild entries in his diary.\n\nThe great storm broke just before midnight on August 8th. Lightning struck repeatedly in all parts of the city, and two remarkable fireballs were reported. The rain was torrential, while a constant fusillade of thunder brought sleeplessness to thousands. Blake was utterly frantic in his fear for the lighting system, and tried to telephone the company around 1 a.m., though by that time service had been temporarily cut off in the interest of safety. He recorded everything in his diary\u2014the large, nervous, and often undecipherable hieroglyphs telling their own story of growing frenzy and despair, and of entries scrawled blindly in the dark.\n\nHe had to keep the house dark in order to see out the window, and it appears that most of his time was spent at his desk, peering anxiously through the rain across the glistening miles of downtown roofs at the constellation of distant lights marking Federal Hill. Now and then he would fumblingly make an entry in his diary, so that detached phrases such as \"The lights must not go\"; \"It knows where I am\"; \"I must destroy it\"; and \"It is calling to me, but perhaps it means no injury this time\"; are found scattered down two of the pages.\n\nThen the lights went out all over the city. It happened at 2:12 a.m. according to power-house records, but Blake's diary gives no indication of the time. The entry is merely, \"Lights out\u2014God help me.\" On Federal Hill there were watchers as anxious as he, and rain-soaked knots of men paraded the square and alleys around the evil church with umbrella-shaded candles, electric flashlights, oil lanterns, crucifixes, and obscure charms of the many sorts common to southern Italy. They blessed each flash of lightning, and made cryptical signs of fear with their right hands when a turn in the storm caused the flashes to lessen and finally to cease altogether. A rising wind blew out most of the candles, so that the scene grew threateningly dark. Someone roused Father Merluzzo of Spirito Santo Church, and he hastened to the dismal square to pronounce whatever helpful syllables he could. Of the restless and curious sounds in the blackened tower, there could be no doubt whatever.\n\nFor what happened at 2:35 we have the testimony of the priest, a young, intelligent, and well-educated person; of Patrolman William J. Monahan of the Central Station, an officer of the highest reliability who had paused at that part of his beat to inspect the crowd; and of most of the seventy-eight men who had gathered around the church's high bank wall\u2014especially those in the square where the eastward facade was visible. Of course there was nothing which can be proved as being outside the order of Nature. The possible causes of such an event are many. No one can speak with certainty of the obscure chemical processes arising in a vast, ancient, ill-aired, and long-deserted building of heterogeneous contents. Mephitic vapours\u2014spontaneous combustion\u2014pressure of gases born of long decay\u2014any one of numberless phenomena might be responsible. And then, of course, the factor of conscious charlatanry can by no means be excluded. The thing was really quite simple in itself, and covered less than three minutes of actual time. Father Merluzzo, always a precise man, looked at his watch repeatedly.\n\nIt started with a definite swelling of the dull fumbling sounds inside the black tower. There had for some time been a vague exhalation of strange, evil odours from the church, and this had now become emphatic and offensive. Then at last there was a sound of splintering wood, and a large, heavy object crashed down in the yard beneath the frowning easterly facade. The tower was invisible now that the candles would not burn, but as the object neared the ground the people knew that it was the smoke-grimed louver-boarding of that tower's east window.\n\nImmediately afterward an utterly unbearable foetor welled forth from the unseen heights, choking and sickening the trembling watchers, and almost prostrating those in the square. At the same time the air trembled with a vibration as of flapping wings, and a sudden east-blowing wind more violent than any previous blast snatched off the hats and wrenched the dripping umbrellas of the crowd. Nothing definite could be seen in the candleless night, though some upward-looking spectators thought they glimpsed a great spreading blur of denser blackness against the inky sky\u2014something like a formless cloud of smoke that shot with meteor-like speed toward the east.\n\nThat was all. The watchers were half numbed with fright, awe, and discomfort, and scarcely knew what to do, or whether to do anything at all. Not knowing what had happened, they did not relax their vigil; and a moment later they sent up a prayer as a sharp flash of belated lightning, followed by an earsplitting crash of sound, rent the flooded heavens. Half an hour later the rain stopped, and in fifteen minutes more the street-lights sprang on again, sending the weary, bedraggled watchers relievedly back to their homes.\n\nThe next day's papers gave these matters minor mention in connexion with the general storm reports. It seems that the great lightning flash and deafening explosion which followed the Federal Hill occurrence were even more tremendous farther east, where a burst of the singular foetor was likewise noticed. The phenomenon was most marked over College Hill, where the crash awaked all the sleeping inhabitants and led to a bewildered round of speculations. Of those who were already awake only a few saw the anomalous blaze of light near the top of the hill, or noticed the inexplicable upward rush of air which almost stripped the leaves from the trees and blasted the plants in the gardens. It was agreed that the lone, sudden lightning-bolt must have struck somewhere in this neighbourhood, though no trace of its striking could afterward be found. A youth in the Tau Omega fraternity house thought he saw a grotesque and hideous mass of smoke in the air just as the preliminary flash burst, but his observation has not been verified. All of the few observers, however, agree as to the violent gust from the west and the flood of intolerable stench which preceded the belated stroke; whilst evidence concerning the momentary burned odour after the stroke is equally general.\n\nThese points were discussed very carefully because of their probable connexion with the death of Robert Blake. Students in the Psi Delta house, whose upper rear windows looked into Blake's study, noticed the blurred white face at the westward window on the morning of the 9th, and wondered what was wrong with the expression. When they saw the same face in the same position that evening, they felt worried, and watched for the lights to come up in his apartment. Later they rang the bell of the darkened flat, and finally had a policeman force the door.\n\nThe rigid body sat bolt upright at the desk by the window, and when the intruders saw the glassy, bulging eyes, and the marks of stark, convulsive fright on the twisted features, they turned away in sickened dismay. Shortly afterward the coroner's physician made an examination, and despite the unbroken window reported electrical shock, or nervous tension induced by electrical discharge, as the cause of death. The hideous expression he ignored altogether, deeming it a not improbable result of the profound shock as experienced by a person of such abnormal imagination and unbalanced emotions. He deduced these latter qualities from the books, paintings, and manuscripts found in the apartment, and from the blindly scrawled entries in the diary on the desk. Blake had prolonged his frenzied jottings to the last, and the broken-pointed pencil was found clutched in his spasmodically contracted right hand.\n\nThe entries after the failure of the lights were highly disjointed, and legible only in part. From them certain investigators have drawn conclusions differing greatly from the materialistic official verdict, but such speculations have little chance for belief among the conservative. The case of these imaginative theorists has not been helped by the action of superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone\u2014an object certainly self-luminous as seen in the black windowless steeple where it was found\u2014into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay. Excessive imagination and neurotic unbalance on Blake's part, aggravated by knowledge of the evil bygone cult whose startling traces he had uncovered, form the dominant interpretation given those final frenzied jottings. These are the entries\u2014or all that can be made of them.\n\n\"Lights still out\u2014must be five minutes now. Everything depends on lightning. Yaddith grant it will keep up!... Some influence seems beating through it.... Rain and thunder and wind deafen.... The thing is taking hold of my mind....\n\n\"Trouble with memory. I see things I never knew before. Other worlds and other galaxies... Dark... The lightning seems dark and the darkness seems light....\n\n\"It cannot be the real hill and church that I see in the pitch-darkness. Must be retinal impression left by flashes. Heaven grant the Italians are out with their candles if the lightning stops!\n\n\"What am I afraid of? Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man? I remember Yuggoth, and more distant Shaggai, and the ultimate void of the black planets....\n\n\"The long, winging flight through the void... cannot cross the universe of light... recreated by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron... send it through the horrible abysses of radiance....\n\n\"My name is Blake\u2014Robert Harrison Blake of 620 East Knapp Street, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.... I am on this planet....\n\n\"Azathoth have mercy!\u2014the lightning no longer flashes\u2014horrible\u2014I can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight\u2014light is dark and dark is light... those people on the hill... guard... candles and charms... their priests....\n\n\"Sense of distance gone\u2014far is near and near is far. No light\u2014no glass\u2014see that steeple\u2014that tower\u2014window\u2014can hear\u2014Roderick Usher\u2014am mad or going mad\u2014the thing is stirring and fumbling in the tower\u2014I am it and it is I\u2014I want to get out... must get out and unify the forces.... It knows where I am....\n\n\"I am Robert Blake, but I see the tower in the dark. There is a monstrous odour... senses transfigured... boarding at that tower window cracking and giving way.... I\u00e4... ngai... ygg....\n\n\"I see it\u2014coming here\u2014hell-wind\u2014titan blur\u2014black wings\u2014Yog-Sothoth save me\u2014the three-lobed burning eye....\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ He by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.\n\nThe disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flower-like and delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my fancy\u2014narrow, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and panelled coaches\u2014and in the first flush of realisation of these long-wished things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time a poet.\n\nBut success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight shewed only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing, spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village steeples in his heart.\n\nSo instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before\u2014the unwhisperable secret of secrets\u2014the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.\n\nThen, on a sleepless night's walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all the revellers had slunk away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and brood upon the curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept my soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far within me cried out.\n\nThe man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by vague rumour, and realised that they could not be upon any map of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to me, so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind archways, unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practices do not invite publicity or the light of day.\n\nHe spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I studied certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was in shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight, thin almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of one long practiced in these explorations, and possessed of local information profoundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could possibly have gained?\n\nAs he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a solitary attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome, elderly countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its features pleased me\u2014perhaps it was too white, or too expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favour of Fate to fall in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much farther than mine.\n\nSomething in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence, and for a long hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the briefest of comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes, and directing my progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed through interstices, tiptoed through corridors, clambered over brick walls, and once crawled on hands and knees through a low, arched passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced at last every hint of geographical location I had managed to preserve. The things we saw were very old and marvellous, or at least they seemed so in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them, and I shall never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and urn-headed iron fence-posts and flaring-lintelled windows and decorative fanlights that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the deeper we advanced into this inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.\n\nWe met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer and fewer. The street-lights we first encountered had been of oil, and of the ancient lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles; and at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide had to lead with his gloved hand through total blackness to a narrow wooden gate in a high wall, we came upon a fragment of alley lit only by lanterns in front of every seventh house\u2014unbelievably colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the sides. This alley led steeply uphill\u2014more steeply than I thought possible in this part of New York\u2014and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-clad wall of a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops of trees waving against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched gate of nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter blackness over what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a flight of stone steps to the door of the house, which he unlocked and opened for me.\n\nWe entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite mustiness which welled out to meet us, and which must have been the fruit of unwholesome centuries of decay. My host appeared not to notice this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me up a curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room whose door I heard him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three small-paned windows that barely shewed themselves against the lightening sky; after which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and made a gesture enjoining soft-toned speech.\n\nIn this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious, well-furnished, and panelled library dating from the first quarter of the eighteenth century, with splendid doorway pediments, a delightful Doric cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at intervals along the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man who now motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table. Before seating himself across the table from me, my host paused for a moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves, wide-brimmed hat, and cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to eye me intently.\n\nWithout his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely visible before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular longevity were not one of the sources of my original disquiet. When he spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled voice not infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and half-disavowed alarm which grew each instant.\n\n\"You behold, Sir,\" my host began, \"a man of very eccentrical habits, for whose costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and inclinations. Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to ascertain their ways and adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence which offends none if practiced without ostentation. It hath been my good-fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up hither after 1800, then New-York, which joined on near 1830. There were many reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with influences residing in this particular plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest guarding. Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to shew you, under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my judgment of men enough to have no distrust of either your interest or your fidelity.\"\n\nHe paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was alarmed, yet to my soul nothing was more deadly than the material daylight world of New York, and whether this man were a harmless eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts I had no choice save to follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to offer. So I listened.\n\n\"To\u2014my ancestor\u2014\" he softly continued, \"there appeared to reside some very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one's self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more univarsal than Nature herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as space and time, and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These Indians shewed choler when the place was built, and were plaguy pestilent in asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed sartain acts. Then, in '68, the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did; larning that their grandfathers got part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in the time of the States-General. And pox on him, I'm afeared the squire must have sarved them monstrous bad rum\u2014whether or not by intent\u2014for a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me if I'd have risked tampering that much with\u2014the powers\u2014had ye not been so hot after bygone things.\"\n\nI shuddered as the man grew colloquial\u2014and with familiar speech of another day. He went on.\n\n\"But you must know, Sir, that what\u2014the squire\u2014got from those mongrel salvages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don't want, we may sweep away. I won't say that all this is wholly true in body, but 'tis sufficient true to furnish a very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled by a better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I design to shew. Come to the window and be quiet.\"\n\nMy host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the long side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window, the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an insidious motion of my host's hand, a flash of heat-lightning played over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant foliage\u2014foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.\n\n\"That was before my time\u2014before the new squire's time. Pray let us try again.\"\n\nI was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed city had made me.\n\n\"Good God!\" I whispered, \"can you do that for any time?\" And as he nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his insidious gesture.\n\nAgain the lightning flashed\u2014but this time upon a scene not wholly strange. It was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul's and the Brick Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, but not so much from the sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly conjured up.\n\n\"Can you\u2014dare you\u2014go far?\" I spoke with awe, and I think he shared it for a second, but the evil grin returned.\n\n\"Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back, back\u2014forward, forward\u2014look, ye puling lack-wit!\"\n\nAnd as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew; bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandaemoniac sight, and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on a\u00ebrial galleries I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.\n\nI saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind's ear the blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls quivered about me.\n\nThen, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a look of shocking fear half blotting from his face the serpent distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly, like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the feeble candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the mouldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow curtain he clutched.\n\n\"The full moon\u2014damn ye\u2014ye... ye yelping dog\u2014ye called 'em, and they've come for me! Moccasined feet\u2014dead men\u2014Gad sink ye, ye red devils, but I poisoned no rum o' yours\u2014han't I kept your pox-rotted magic safe?\u2014ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs blame the squire\u2014let go, you! Unhand that latch\u2014I've naught for ye here\u2014\"\n\nAt this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of the door, and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the room a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy panelling, sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too, whether from the same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive, dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and dwindled.\n\nThe rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time bore a hint of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal malice. Now swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly panels, and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the rending wood. I did not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in pieces to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and finally flowed under the table and across the room to where the blackened head with the eyes still glared at me. Around that head it closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another moment it had begun to recede; bearing away its invisible burden without touching me, and flowing again out of that black doorway and down the unseen stairs, which creaked as before, though in reverse order.\n\nThen the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the nighted chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half swooning with terror. The green moon, shining through broken windows, shewed me the hall door half open; and as I rose from the plaster-strown floor and twisted myself free from the sagged ceilings, I saw sweep past it an awful torrent of blackness, with scores of baleful eyes glowing in it. It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it found it, it vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been followed by the fall past the west window of something which must have been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I rushed through the hall to the front door; and finding myself unable to open it, seized a chair and broke a window, climbing frenziedly out upon the unkempt lawn where moonlight danced over yard-high grass and weeds. The wall was high, and all the gates were locked; but moving a pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to the great stone urn set there.\n\nAbout me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows and old gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere visible, and the little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that rolled in from the river despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if sharing my own lethal dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging downward to I knew not what fate.\n\nThe man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite my broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared look. The gathering rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I had appeared from a place unknown, at the entrance of a little black court off Perry Street.\n\nI never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors. Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant sea-winds sweep at evening.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Herbert West\u2014Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOf Herbert West, who was my friend in college and in after life, I can speak only with extreme terror. This terror is not due altogether to the sinister manner of his recent disappearance, but was engendered by the whole nature of his life-work, and first gained its acute form more than seventeen years ago, when we were in the third year of our course at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham. While he was with me, the wonder and diabolism of his experiments fascinated me utterly, and I was his closest companion. Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.\n\nThe first horrible incident of our acquaintance was the greatest shock I ever experienced, and it is only with reluctance that I repeat it. As I have said, it happened when we were in the medical school, where West had already made himself notorious through his wild theories on the nature of death and the possibility of overcoming it artificially. His views, which were widely ridiculed by the faculty and his fellow-students, hinged on the essentially mechanistic nature of life; and concerned means for operating the organic machinery of mankind by calculated chemical action after the failure of natural processes. In his experiments with various animating solutions he had killed and treated immense numbers of rabbits, guinea-pigs, cats, dogs, and monkeys, till he had become the prime nuisance of the college. Several times he had actually obtained signs of life in animals supposedly dead; in many cases violent signs; but he soon saw that the perfection of this process, if indeed possible, would necessarily involve a lifetime of research. It likewise became clear that, since the same solution never worked alike on different organic species, he would require human subjects for further and more specialised progress. It was here that he first came into conflict with the college authorities, and was debarred from future experiments by no less a dignitary than the dean of the medical school himself\u2014the learned and benevolent Dr. Allan Halsey, whose work in behalf of the stricken is recalled by every old resident of Arkham.\n\nI had always been exceptionally tolerant of West's pursuits, and we frequently discussed his theories, whose ramifications and corollaries were almost infinite. Holding with Haeckel that all life is a chemical and physical process, and that the so-called \"soul\" is a myth, my friend believed that artificial reanimation of the dead can depend only on the condition of the tissues; and that unless actual decomposition has set in, a corpse fully equipped with organs may with suitable measures be set going again in the peculiar fashion known as life. That the psychic or intellectual life might be impaired by the slight deterioration of sensitive brain-cells which even a short period of death would be apt to cause, West fully realised. It had at first been his hope to find a reagent which would restore vitality before the actual advent of death, and only repeated failures on animals had shewn him that the natural and artificial life-motions were incompatible. He then sought extreme freshness in his specimens, injecting his solutions into the blood immediately after the extinction of life. It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical, for they felt that true death had not occurred in any case. They did not stop to view the matter closely and reasoningly.\n\nIt was not long after the faculty had interdicted his work that West confided to me his resolution to get fresh human bodies in some manner, and continue in secret the experiments he could no longer perform openly. To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly, for at the college we had never procured anatomical specimens ourselves. Whenever the morgue proved inadequate, two local negroes attended to this matter, and they were seldom questioned. West was then a small, slender, spectacled youth with delicate features, yellow hair, pale blue eyes, and a soft voice, and it was uncanny to hear him dwelling on the relative merits of Christchurch Cemetery and the potter's field. We finally decided on the potter's field, because practically every body in Christchurch was embalmed; a thing of course ruinous to West's researches.\n\nI was by this time his active and enthralled assistant, and helped him make all his decisions, not only concerning the source of bodies but concerning a suitable place for our loathsome work. It was I who thought of the deserted Chapman farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill, where we fitted up on the ground floor an operating room and a laboratory, each with dark curtains to conceal our midnight doings. The place was far from any road, and in sight of no other house, yet precautions were none the less necessary; since rumours of strange lights, started by chance nocturnal roamers, would soon bring disaster on our enterprise. It was agreed to call the whole thing a chemical laboratory if discovery should occur. Gradually we equipped our sinister haunt of science with materials either purchased in Boston or quietly borrowed from the college\u2014materials carefully made unrecognisable save to expert eyes\u2014and provided spades and picks for the many burials we should have to make in the cellar. At the college we used an incinerator, but the apparatus was too costly for our unauthorised laboratory. Bodies were always a nuisance\u2014even the small guinea-pig bodies from the slight clandestine experiments in West's room at the boarding-house.\n\nWe followed the local death-notices like ghouls, for our specimens demanded particular qualities. What we wanted were corpses interred soon after death and without artificial preservation; preferably free from malforming disease, and certainly with all organs present. Accident victims were our best hope. Not for many weeks did we hear of anything suitable; though we talked with morgue and hospital authorities, ostensibly in the college's interest, as often as we could without exciting suspicion. We found that the college had first choice in every case, so that it might be necessary to remain in Arkham during the summer, when only the limited summer-school classes were held. In the end, though, luck favoured us; for one day we heard of an almost ideal case in the potter's field; a brawny young workman drowned only the morning before in Sumner's Pond, and buried at the town's expense without delay or embalming. That afternoon we found the new grave, and determined to begin work soon after midnight.\n\nIt was a repulsive task that we undertook in the black small hours, even though we lacked at that time the special horror of graveyards which later experiences brought to us. We carried spades and oil dark lanterns, for although electric torches were then manufactured, they were not as satisfactory as the tungsten contrivances of today. The process of unearthing was slow and sordid\u2014it might have been gruesomely poetical if we had been artists instead of scientists\u2014and we were glad when our spades struck wood. When the pine box was fully uncovered West scrambled down and removed the lid, dragging out and propping up the contents. I reached down and hauled the contents out of the grave, and then both toiled hard to restore the spot to its former appearance. The affair made us rather nervous, especially the stiff form and vacant face of our first trophy, but we managed to remove all traces of our visit. When we had patted down the last shovelful of earth we put the specimen in a canvas sack and set out for the old Chapman place beyond Meadow Hill.\n\nOn an improvised dissecting-table in the old farmhouse, by the light of a powerful acetylene lamp, the specimen was not very spectral looking. It had been a sturdy and apparently unimaginative youth of wholesome plebeian type\u2014large-framed, grey-eyed, and brown-haired\u2014a sound animal without psychological subtleties, and probably having vital processes of the simplest and healthiest sort. Now, with the eyes closed, it looked more asleep than dead; though the expert test of my friend soon left no doubt on that score. We had at last what West had always longed for\u2014a real dead man of the ideal kind, ready for the solution as prepared according to the most careful calculations and theories for human use. The tension on our part became very great. We knew that there was scarcely a chance for anything like complete success, and could not avoid hideous fears at possible grotesque results of partial animation. Especially were we apprehensive concerning the mind and impulses of the creature, since in the space following death some of the more delicate cerebral cells might well have suffered deterioration. I, myself, still held some curious notions about the traditional \"soul\" of man, and felt an awe at the secrets that might be told by one returning from the dead. I wondered what sights this placid youth might have seen in inaccessible spheres, and what he could relate if fully restored to life. But my wonder was not overwhelming, since for the most part I shared the materialism of my friend. He was calmer than I as he forced a large quantity of his fluid into a vein of the body's arm, immediately binding the incision securely.\n\nThe waiting was gruesome, but West never faltered. Every now and then he applied his stethoscope to the specimen, and bore the negative results philosophically. After about three-quarters of an hour without the least sign of life he disappointedly pronounced the solution inadequate, but determined to make the most of his opportunity and try one change in the formula before disposing of his ghastly prize. We had that afternoon dug a grave in the cellar, and would have to fill it by dawn\u2014for although we had fixed a lock on the house we wished to shun even the remotest risk of a ghoulish discovery. Besides, the body would not be even approximately fresh the next night. So taking the solitary acetylene lamp into the adjacent laboratory, we left our silent guest on the slab in the dark, and bent every energy to the mixing of a new solution; the weighing and measuring supervised by West with an almost fanatical care.\n\nThe awful event was very sudden, and wholly unexpected. I was pouring something from one test-tube to another, and West was busy over the alcohol blast-lamp which had to answer for a Bunsen burner in this gasless edifice, when from the pitch-black room we had left there burst the most appalling and daemoniac succession of cries that either of us had ever heard. Not more unutterable could have been the chaos of hellish sound if the pit itself had opened to release the agony of the damned, for in one inconceivable cacophony was centred all the supernal terror and unnatural despair of animate nature. Human it could not have been\u2014it is not in man to make such sounds\u2014and without a thought of our late employment or its possible discovery both West and I leaped to the nearest window like stricken animals; overturning tubes, lamp, and retorts, and vaulting madly into the starred abyss of the rural night. I think we screamed ourselves as we stumbled frantically toward the town, though as we reached the outskirts we put on a semblance of restraint\u2014just enough to seem like belated revellers staggering home from a debauch.\n\nWe did not separate, but managed to get to West's room, where we whispered with the gas up until dawn. By then we had calmed ourselves a little with rational theories and plans for investigation, so that we could sleep through the day\u2014classes being disregarded. But that evening two items in the paper, wholly unrelated, made it again impossible for us to sleep. The old deserted Chapman house had inexplicably burned to an amorphous heap of ashes; that we could understand because of the upset lamp. Also, an attempt had been made to disturb a new grave in the potter's field, as if by futile and spadeless clawing at the earth. That we could not understand, for we had patted down the mould very carefully.\n\nAnd for seventeen years after that West would look frequently over his shoulder, and complain of fancied footsteps behind him. Now he has disappeared." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "I shall never forget that hideous summer sixteen years ago, when like a noxious afrite from the halls of Eblis typhoid stalked leeringly through Arkham. It is by that satanic scourge that most recall the year, for truly terror brooded with bat-wings over the piles of coffins in the tombs of Christchurch Cemetery; yet for me there is a greater horror in that time\u2014a horror known to me alone now that Herbert West has disappeared.\n\nWest and I were doing post-graduate work in summer classes at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and my friend had attained a wide notoriety because of his experiments leading toward the revivification of the dead. After the scientific slaughter of uncounted small animals the freakish work had ostensibly stopped by order of our sceptical dean, Dr. Allan Halsey; though West had continued to perform certain secret tests in his dingy boarding-house room, and had on one terrible and unforgettable occasion taken a human body from its grave in the potter's field to a deserted farmhouse beyond Meadow Hill.\n\nI was with him on that odious occasion, and saw him inject into the still veins the elixir which he thought would to some extent restore life's chemical and physical processes. It had ended horribly\u2014in a delirium of fear which we gradually came to attribute to our own overwrought nerves\u2014and West had never afterward been able to shake off a maddening sensation of being haunted and hunted. The body had not been quite fresh enough; it is obvious that to restore normal mental attributes a body must be very fresh indeed; and a burning of the old house had prevented us from burying the thing. It would have been better if we could have known it was underground.\n\nAfter that experience West had dropped his researches for some time; but as the zeal of the born scientist slowly returned, he again became importunate with the college faculty, pleading for the use of the dissecting-room and of fresh human specimens for the work he regarded as so overwhelmingly important. His pleas, however, were wholly in vain; for the decision of Dr. Halsey was inflexible, and the other professors all endorsed the verdict of their leader. In the radical theory of reanimation they saw nothing but the immature vagaries of a youthful enthusiast whose slight form, yellow hair, spectacled blue eyes, and soft voice gave no hint of the supernormal\u2014almost diabolical\u2014power of the cold brain within. I can see him now as he was then\u2014and I shiver. He grew sterner of face, but never elderly. And now Sefton Asylum has had the mishap and West has vanished.\n\nWest clashed disagreeably with Dr. Halsey near the end of our last undergraduate term in a wordy dispute that did less credit to him than to the kindly dean in point of courtesy. He felt that he was needlessly and irrationally retarded in a supremely great work; a work which he could of course conduct to suit himself in later years, but which he wished to begin while still possessed of the exceptional facilities of the university. That the tradition-bound elders should ignore his singular results on animals, and persist in their denial of the possibility of reanimation, was inexpressibly disgusting and almost incomprehensible to a youth of West's logical temperament. Only greater maturity could help him understand the chronic mental limitations of the \"professor-doctor\" type\u2014the product of generations of pathetic Puritanism; kindly, conscientious, and sometimes gentle and amiable, yet always narrow, intolerant, custom-ridden, and lacking in perspective. Age has more charity for these incomplete yet high-souled characters, whose worst real vice is timidity, and who are ultimately punished by general ridicule for their intellectual sins\u2014sins like Ptolemaism, Calvinism, anti-Darwinism, anti-Nietzscheism, and every sort of Sabbatarianism and sumptuary legislation. West, young despite his marvellous scientific acquirements, had scant patience with good Dr. Halsey and his erudite colleagues; and nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories to these obtuse worthies in some striking and dramatic fashion. Like most youths, he indulged in elaborate day-dreams of revenge, triumph, and final magnanimous forgiveness.\n\nAnd then had come the scourge, grinning and lethal, from the nightmare caverns of Tartarus. West and I had graduated about the time of its beginning, but had remained for additional work at the summer school, so that we were in Arkham when it broke with full daemoniac fury upon the town. Though not as yet licenced physicians, we now had our degrees, and were pressed frantically into public service as the numbers of the stricken grew. The situation was almost past management, and deaths ensued too frequently for the local undertakers fully to handle. Burials without embalming were made in rapid succession, and even the Christchurch Cemetery receiving tomb was crammed with coffins of the unembalmed dead. This circumstance was not without effect on West, who thought often of the irony of the situation\u2014so many fresh specimens, yet none for his persecuted researches! We were frightfully overworked, and the terrific mental and nervous strain made my friend brood morbidly.\n\nBut West's gentle enemies were no less harassed with prostrating duties. College had all but closed, and every doctor of the medical faculty was helping to fight the typhoid plague. Dr. Halsey in particular had distinguished himself in sacrificing service, applying his extreme skill with whole-hearted energy to cases which many others shunned because of danger or apparent hopelessness. Before a month was over the fearless dean had become a popular hero, though he seemed unconscious of his fame as he struggled to keep from collapsing with physical fatigue and nervous exhaustion. West could not withhold admiration for the fortitude of his foe, but because of this was even more determined to prove to him the truth of his amazing doctrines. Taking advantage of the disorganisation of both college work and municipal health regulations, he managed to get a recently deceased body smuggled into the university dissecting-room one night, and in my presence injected a new modification of his solution. The thing actually opened its eyes, but only stared at the ceiling with a look of soul-petrifying horror before collapsing into an inertness from which nothing could rouse it. West said it was not fresh enough\u2014the hot summer air does not favour corpses. That time we were almost caught before we incinerated the thing, and West doubted the advisability of repeating his daring misuse of the college laboratory.\n\nThe peak of the epidemic was reached in August. West and I were almost dead, and Dr. Halsey did die on the 14th. The students all attended the hasty funeral on the 15th, and bought an impressive wreath, though the latter was quite overshadowed by the tributes sent by wealthy Arkham citizens and by the municipality itself. It was almost a public affair, for the dean had surely been a public benefactor. After the entombment we were all somewhat depressed, and spent the afternoon at the bar of the Commercial House; where West, though shaken by the death of his chief opponent, chilled the rest of us with references to his notorious theories. Most of the students went home, or to various duties, as the evening advanced; but West persuaded me to aid him in \"making a night of it\". West's landlady saw us arrive at his room about two in the morning, with a third man between us; and told her husband that we had all evidently dined and wined rather well.\n\nApparently this acidulous matron was right; for about 3 a.m. the whole house was aroused by cries coming from West's room, where when they broke down the door they found the two of us unconscious on the blood-stained carpet, beaten, scratched, and mauled, and with the broken remnants of West's bottles and instruments around us. Only an open window told what had become of our assailant, and many wondered how he himself had fared after the terrific leap from the second story to the lawn which he must have made. There were some strange garments in the room, but West upon regaining consciousness said they did not belong to the stranger, but were specimens collected for bacteriological analysis in the course of investigations on the transmission of germ diseases. He ordered them burnt as soon as possible in the capacious fireplace. To the police we both declared ignorance of our late companion's identity. He was, West nervously said, a congenial stranger whom we had met at some downtown bar of uncertain location. We had all been rather jovial, and West and I did not wish to have our pugnacious companion hunted down.\n\nThat same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror\u2014the horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself. Christchurch Cemetery was the scene of a terrible killing; a watchman having been clawed to death in a manner not only too hideous for description, but raising a doubt as to the human agency of the deed. The victim had been seen alive considerably after midnight\u2014the dawn revealed the unutterable thing. The manager of a circus at the neighbouring town of Bolton was questioned, but he swore that no beast had at any time escaped from its cage. Those who found the body noted a trail of blood leading to the receiving tomb, where a small pool of red lay on the concrete just outside the gate. A fainter trail led away toward the woods, but it soon gave out.\n\nThe next night devils danced on the roofs of Arkham, and unnatural madness howled in the wind. Through the fevered town had crept a curse which some said was greater than the plague, and which some whispered was the embodied daemon-soul of the plague itself. Eight houses were entered by a nameless thing which strewed red death in its wake\u2014in all, seventeen maimed and shapeless remnants of bodies were left behind by the voiceless, sadistic monster that crept abroad. A few persons had half seen it in the dark, and said it was white and like a malformed ape or anthropomorphic fiend. It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry. The number it had killed was fourteen; three of the bodies had been in stricken homes and had not been alive.\n\nOn the third night frantic bands of searchers, led by the police, captured it in a house on Crane Street near the Miskatonic campus. They had organised the quest with care, keeping in touch by means of volunteer telephone stations, and when someone in the college district had reported hearing a scratching at a shuttered window, the net was quickly spread. On account of the general alarm and precautions, there were only two more victims, and the capture was effected without major casualties. The thing was finally stopped by a bullet, though not a fatal one, and was rushed to the local hospital amidst universal excitement and loathing.\n\nFor it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery. They dressed its wound and carted it to the asylum at Sefton, where it beat its head against the walls of a padded cell for sixteen years\u2014until the recent mishap, when it escaped under circumstances that few like to mention. What had most disgusted the searchers of Arkham was the thing they noticed when the monster's face was cleaned\u2014the mocking, unbelievable resemblance to a learned and self-sacrificing martyr who had been entombed but three days before\u2014the late Dr. Allan Halsey, public benefactor and dean of the medical school of Miskatonic University.\n\nTo the vanished Herbert West and to me the disgust and horror were supreme. I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning when West muttered through his bandages,\n\n\"Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh enough!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon. It is, for instance, not often that a young physician leaving college is obliged to conceal the principles which guide his selection of a home and office, yet that was the case with Herbert West. When he and I obtained our degrees at the medical school of Miskatonic University, and sought to relieve our poverty by setting up as general practitioners, we took great care not to say that we chose our house because it was fairly well isolated, and as near as possible to the potter's field.\n\nReticence such as this is seldom without a cause, nor indeed was ours; for our requirements were those resulting from a life-work distinctly unpopular. Outwardly we were doctors only, but beneath the surface were aims of far greater and more terrible moment\u2014for the essence of Herbert West's existence was a quest amid black and forbidden realms of the unknown, in which he hoped to uncover the secret of life and restore to perpetual animation the graveyard's cold clay. Such a quest demands strange materials, among them fresh human bodies; and in order to keep supplied with these indispensable things one must live quietly and not far from a place of informal interment.\n\nWest and I had met in college, and I had been the only one to sympathise with his hideous experiments. Gradually I had come to be his inseparable assistant, and now that we were out of college we had to keep together. It was not easy to find a good opening for two doctors in company, but finally the influence of the university secured us a practice in Bolton\u2014a factory town near Arkham, the seat of the college. The Bolton Worsted Mills are the largest in the Miskatonic Valley, and their polyglot employees are never popular as patients with the local physicians. We chose our house with the greatest care, seizing at last on a rather run-down cottage near the end of Pond Street; five numbers from the closest neighbour, and separated from the local potter's field by only a stretch of meadow land, bisected by a narrow neck of the rather dense forest which lies to the north. The distance was greater than we wished, but we could get no nearer house without going on the other side of the field, wholly out of the factory district. We were not much displeased, however, since there were no people between us and our sinister source of supplies. The walk was a trifle long, but we could haul our silent specimens undisturbed.\n\nOur practice was surprisingly large from the very first\u2014large enough to please most young doctors, and large enough to prove a bore and a burden to students whose real interest lay elsewhere. The mill-hands were of somewhat turbulent inclinations; and besides their many natural needs, their frequent clashes and stabbing affrays gave us plenty to do. But what actually absorbed our minds was the secret laboratory we had fitted up in the cellar\u2014the laboratory with the long table under the electric lights, where in the small hours of the morning we often injected West's various solutions into the veins of the things we dragged from the potter's field. West was experimenting madly to find something which would start man's vital motions anew after they had been stopped by the thing we call death, but had encountered the most ghastly obstacles. The solution had to be differently compounded for different types\u2014what would serve for guinea-pigs would not serve for human beings, and different human specimens required large modifications.\n\nThe bodies had to be exceedingly fresh, or the slight decomposition of brain tissue would render perfect reanimation impossible. Indeed, the greatest problem was to get them fresh enough\u2014West had had horrible experiences during his secret college researches with corpses of doubtful vintage. The results of partial or imperfect animation were much more hideous than were the total failures, and we both held fearsome recollections of such things. Ever since our first daemoniac session in the deserted farmhouse on Meadow Hill in Arkham, we had felt a brooding menace; and West, though a calm, blond, blue-eyed scientific automaton in most respects, often confessed to a shuddering sensation of stealthy pursuit. He half felt that he was followed\u2014a psychological delusion of shaken nerves, enhanced by the undeniably disturbing fact that at least one of our reanimated specimens was still alive\u2014a frightful carnivorous thing in a padded cell at Sefton. Then there was another\u2014our first\u2014whose exact fate we had never learned.\n\nWe had fair luck with specimens in Bolton\u2014much better than in Arkham. We had not been settled a week before we got an accident victim on the very night of burial, and made it open its eyes with an amazingly rational expression before the solution failed. It had lost an arm\u2014if it had been a perfect body we might have succeeded better. Between then and the next January we secured three more; one total failure, one case of marked muscular motion, and one rather shivery thing\u2014it rose of itself and uttered a sound. Then came a period when luck was poor; interments fell off, and those that did occur were of specimens either too diseased or too maimed for use. We kept track of all the deaths and their circumstances with systematic care.\n\nOne March night, however, we unexpectedly obtained a specimen which did not come from the potter's field. In Bolton the prevailing spirit of Puritanism had outlawed the sport of boxing\u2014with the usual result. Surreptitious and ill-conducted bouts among the mill-workers were common, and occasionally professional talent of low grade was imported. This late winter night there had been such a match; evidently with disastrous results, since two timorous Poles had come to us with incoherently whispered entreaties to attend to a very secret and desperate case. We followed them to an abandoned barn, where the remnants of a crowd of frightened foreigners were watching a silent black form on the floor.\n\nThe match had been between Kid O'Brien\u2014a lubberly and now quaking youth with a most un-Hibernian hooked nose\u2014and Buck Robinson, \"The Harlem Smoke\". The negro had been knocked out, and a moment's examination shewed us that he would permanently remain so. He was a loathsome, gorilla-like thing, with abnormally long arms which I could not help calling fore legs, and a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable Congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon. The body must have looked even worse in life\u2014but the world holds many ugly things. Fear was upon the whole pitiful crowd, for they did not know what the law would exact of them if the affair were not hushed up; and they were grateful when West, in spite of my involuntary shudders, offered to get rid of the thing quietly\u2014for a purpose I knew too well.\n\nThere was bright moonlight over the snowless landscape, but we dressed the thing and carried it home between us through the deserted streets and meadows, as we had carried a similar thing one horrible night in Arkham. We approached the house from the field in the rear, took the specimen in the back door and down the cellar stairs, and prepared it for the usual experiment. Our fear of the police was absurdly great, though we had timed our trip to avoid the solitary patrolman of that section.\n\nThe result was wearily anticlimactic. Ghastly as our prize appeared, it was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only. So as the hour grew dangerously near to dawn, we did as we had done with the others\u2014dragged the thing across the meadows to the neck of the woods near the potter's field, and buried it there in the best sort of grave the frozen ground would furnish. The grave was not very deep, but fully as good as that of the previous specimen\u2014the thing which had risen of itself and uttered a sound. In the light of our dark lanterns we carefully covered it with leaves and dead vines, fairly certain that the police would never find it in a forest so dim and dense.\n\nThe next day I was increasingly apprehensive about the police, for a patient brought rumours of a suspected fight and death. West had still another source of worry, for he had been called in the afternoon to a case which ended very threateningly. An Italian woman had become hysterical over her missing child\u2014a lad of five who had strayed off early in the morning and failed to appear for dinner\u2014and had developed symptoms highly alarming in view of an always weak heart. It was a very foolish hysteria, for the boy had often run away before; but Italian peasants are exceedingly superstitious, and this woman seemed as much harassed by omens as by facts. About seven o'clock in the evening she had died, and her frantic husband had made a frightful scene in his efforts to kill West, whom he wildly blamed for not saving her life. Friends had held him when he drew a stiletto, but West departed amidst his inhuman shrieks, curses, and oaths of vengeance. In his latest affliction the fellow seemed to have forgotten his child, who was still missing as the night advanced. There was some talk of searching the woods, but most of the family's friends were busy with the dead woman and the screaming man. Altogether, the nervous strain upon West must have been tremendous. Thoughts of the police and of the mad Italian both weighed heavily.\n\nWe retired about eleven, but I did not sleep well. Bolton had a surprisingly good police force for so small a town, and I could not help fearing the mess which would ensue if the affair of the night before were ever tracked down. It might mean the end of all our local work\u2014and perhaps prison for both West and me. I did not like those rumours of a fight which were floating about. After the clock had struck three the moon shone in my eyes, but I turned over without rising to pull down the shade. Then came the steady rattling at the back door.\n\nI lay still and somewhat dazed, but before long heard West's rap on my door. He was clad in dressing-gown and slippers, and had in his hands a revolver and an electric flashlight. From the revolver I knew that he was thinking more of the crazed Italian than of the police.\n\n\"We'd better both go,\" he whispered. \"It wouldn't do not to answer it anyway, and it may be a patient\u2014it would be like one of those fools to try the back door.\"\n\nSo we both went down the stairs on tiptoe, with a fear partly justified and partly that which comes only from the soul of the weird small hours. The rattling continued, growing somewhat louder. When we reached the door I cautiously unbolted it and threw it open, and as the moon streamed revealingly down on the form silhouetted there, West did a peculiar thing. Despite the obvious danger of attracting notice and bringing down on our heads the dreaded police investigation\u2014a thing which after all was mercifully averted by the relative isolation of our cottage\u2014my friend suddenly, excitedly, and unnecessarily emptied all six chambers of his revolver into the nocturnal visitor.\n\nFor that visitor was neither Italian nor policeman. Looming hideously against the spectral moon was a gigantic misshapen thing not to be imagined save in nightmares\u2014a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood, and having between its glistening teeth a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West which harassed the latter years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid.\n\nHerbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the potter's field. Briefly and brutally stated, West's sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an excitant solution. For this ghastly experimenting it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies; very fresh because even the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human because we found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea-pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed; bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward that mode of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct\u2014the specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead.\n\nThe awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now\u2014he was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme; the results of defective reanimation, when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanised into morbid, unnatural, and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution.\n\nOne thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream; another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness, and run amuck in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars; still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed\u2014West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to shew any trace of reason when reanimated, so had perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two, of our monsters still lived\u2014that thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.\n\nIt was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle\u2014that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well; but until he explained the details I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound could help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognised; creating his embalming compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting to fate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the negro killed in the Bolton prize-fight. At last fate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose decay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could hope for a revival of mind and reason, West did not venture to predict. The experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share the spectacle in accustomed fashion.\n\nWest told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man; a well-dressed stranger just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton Worsted Mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by the time the traveller paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heavensent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Leavitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter's field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established. So without delay West had injected into the body's wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for use after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which to my mind imperiled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at last to obtain what he had never obtained before\u2014a rekindled spark of reason and perhaps a normal, living creature.\n\nSo on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc-light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame which had lain two weeks without stiffening I was moved to seek West's assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough; reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life; since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment; an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralise the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change and a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs, West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last perfunctory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied, and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir, prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days, when our feats were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen\u2014the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss.\n\nWest was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena; consequently he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from gulfs and caverns beyond death's barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers; so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides\u2014I could not extract from my memory that hideous, inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham.\n\nVery little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of colour came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white, and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly; and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body's mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions, and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids, and thought I detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, shewing eyes which were grey, calm, and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious.\n\nIn a moment of fantastic whim I whispered questions to the reddening ears; questions of other worlds of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent terror drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated, was: \"Where have you been?\" I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth; but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables I would have vocalised as \"only now\" if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained; and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph; no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors\u2014not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined.\n\nFor that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life and death struggle with the air; and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain:\n\n\"Help! Keep off, you cursed little tow-head fiend\u2014keep that damned needle away from me!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint, others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark; yet despite the worst of them I believe I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all\u2014the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows.\n\nIn 1915 I was a physician with the rank of First Lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to precede the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army on my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was\u2014the celebrated Boston surgical specialist, Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I would have been glad to let the war separate us; reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more irritating; but when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence secured a medical commission as Major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity.\n\nWhen I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally warlike or anxious for the safety of civilisation. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine; slight, blond, blue-eyed, and spectacled; I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthusiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders; and in order to secure it he had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment.\n\nHerbert West needed fresh bodies because his life-work was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston; but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days in Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals and then on human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula, for each type of organism was found to need a stimulus especially adapted to it. Terror stalked him when he reflected on his partial failures; nameless things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of these failures had remained alive\u2014one was in an asylum while others had vanished\u2014and as he thought of conceivable yet virtually impossible eventualities he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity.\n\nWest had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedients in body-snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration; but as his boldness in methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies; and then there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse; and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened him.\n\nOf his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak. I was held to him by sheer force of fear, and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did\u2014that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment\u2014a languid Elagabalus of the tombs.\n\nDangers he met unflinchingly; crimes he committed unmoved. I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve-tissue separated from natural physiological systems; and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never-dying, artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle\u2014first, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve-centres; and second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what has previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh\u2014and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War.\n\nThe phantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight late in March, 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines at St. Eloi. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a daemoniac dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice, assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There he worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares\u2014I could never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers; but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots\u2014surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West's reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend's chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously.\n\nOn the night of which I speak we had a splendid new specimen\u2014a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who was now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Eloi sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an a\u00ebroplane piloted by the intrepid Lieut. Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful; Hill was unrecognisable afterward, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow-scholar; and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile-tissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture with engrafted skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer's uniform. I knew what he wanted\u2014to see if this highly organised body could exhibit, without its head, any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it.\n\nI can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe\u2014I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.\n\nThe specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system. Much was expected of it; and as a few twitching motions began to appear, I could see the feverish interest on West's face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain\u2014that man has no central connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of writhing. Then the headless thing threw out its arms in a gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation\u2014an intelligent desperation apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West. Certainly, the nerves were recalling the man's last act in life; the struggle to get free of the falling a\u00ebroplane.\n\nWhat followed, I shall never positively know. It may have been wholly an hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shell-fire\u2014who can gainsay it, since West and I were the only proved survivors? West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not; for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied.\n\nThe body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful. And yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message\u2014it had merely screamed, \"Jump, Ronald, for God's sake, jump!\" The awful thing was its source.\n\nFor it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things; but I could not tell them the truth because they would not have believed it. They knew, indeed, that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men; for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit of perfect secrecy; but the final soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of daemoniac phantasy which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw.\n\nI was West's closest friend and only confidential assistant. We had met years before, in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life; a labour demanding an abundance of fresh corpses and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of the experiments\u2014grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain-cells.\n\nThis need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured his specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it to a very fresh corpse, and the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment; but West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear; and after his disappearance used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions.\n\nWest, in reality, was more afraid than I; for his abominable pursuits entailed a life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partly it was the police he feared; but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough. There was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham professor's body which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of\u2014for in later years West's scientific zeal had degenerated to an unhealthy and fantastic mania, and he had spent his chief skill in vitalising not entire human bodies but isolated parts of bodies, or parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared; many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West.\n\nIn saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters, while another part arose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him. Their disappearance added horror to the situation\u2014of them all West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then there was a more subtle fear\u2014a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, D.S.O., a fellow-physician who knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently; and, unbelievable to relate, we were both sickeningly sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful, in a way\u2014but West could never feel as certain as he wished, that we two were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.\n\nWest's last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance, overlooking one of the oldest burying-grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastically aesthetic reasons, since most of the interments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-cellar secretly constructed by imported workmen, and contained a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies, or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies, as might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry; undoubtedly connected with the old burying-ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulchre therein. After a number of calculations West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the Averills, where the last interment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous, dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men, and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of centuried grave-secrets; but for the first time West's new timidity conquered his natural curiosity, and he betrayed his degenerating fibre by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus it remained till that final hellish night; part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West's decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly he was the same to the last\u2014calm, cold, slight, and yellow-haired, with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder; even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at Sefton bars.\n\nThe end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled pages, and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at Sefton Asylum fifty miles away, stunning the neighbourhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning a body of silent men had entered the grounds and their leader had aroused the attendants. He was a menacing military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloquially connected with an immense black case he carried. His expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty, but had shocked the superintendent when the hall light fell on it\u2014for it was a wax face with eyes of painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps; a repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before; and upon being refused, gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled, and bitten every attendant who did not flee; killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the wax-faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and of their mad charge had vanished.\n\nFrom the hour of reading this item until midnight, West sat almost paralysed. At midnight the doorbell rang, startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic, so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street; but only a group of strange-looking figures bearing a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, \"Express\u2014prepaid.\" They filed out of the house with a jerky tread, and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them West came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square, and bore West's correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription, \"From Eric Moreland Clapham-Lee, St. Eloi, Flanders\". Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham-Lee, and upon the detached head which\u2014perhaps\u2014had uttered articulate sounds.\n\nWest was not even excited now. His condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, \"It's the finish\u2014but let's incinerate\u2014this.\" We carried the thing down to the laboratory\u2014listening. I do not remember many particulars\u2014you can imagine my state of mind\u2014but it is a vicious lie to say it was Herbert West's body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door, and started the electricity. Nor did any sound come from the box, after all.\n\nIt was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run, but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind of ice, and smelled the charnel bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the nether world a horde of silent toiling things which only insanity\u2014or worse\u2014could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all\u2014the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West. West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes, bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West's head was carried off by the wax-headed leader, who wore a Canadian officer's uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic, visible emotion.\n\nServants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The Sefton tragedy they will not connect with West; not that, nor the men with the box, whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault, and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am a madman or a murderer\u2014probably I am mad. But I might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The History of the Necronomicon by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOriginal title Al Azif\u2014azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons.\n\nComposed by Abdul Alhazred, a mad poet of Sana\u00e1, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia\u2014the Roba el Khaliyeh or \"Empty Space\" of the ancients\u2014and \"Dahna\" or \"Crimson\" desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years Alhazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told. He is said by Ebn Khallikan (12th cent. biographer) to have been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. Of his madness many things are told. He claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars, and to have found beneath the ruins of a certain nameless desert town the shocking annals and secrets of a race older than mankind. He was only an indifferent Moslem, worshipping unknown entities whom he called Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu.\n\nIn A.D. 950 the Azif, which had gained a considerable tho' surreptitious circulation amongst the philosophers of the age, was secretly translated into Greek by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople under the title Necronomicon. For a century it impelled certain experimenters to terrible attempts, when it was suppressed and burnt by the patriarch Michael. After this it is only heard of furtively, but (1228) Olaus Wormius made a Latin translation later in the Middle Ages, and the Latin text was printed twice\u2014once in the fifteenth century in black-letter (evidently in Germany) and once in the seventeenth (prob. Spanish)\u2014both editions being without identifying marks, and located as to time and place by internal typographical evidence only. The work both Latin and Greek was banned by Pope Gregory IX in 1232, shortly after its Latin translation, which called attention to it. The Arabic original was lost as early as Wormius' time, as indicated by his prefatory note; and no sight of the Greek copy\u2014which was printed in Italy between 1500 and 1550\u2014has been reported since the burning of a certain Salem man's library in 1692. An English translation made by Dr. Dee was never printed, and exists only in fragments recovered from the original manuscript. Of the Latin texts now existing one (15th cent.) is known to be in the British Museum under lock and key, while another (17th cent.) is in the Biblioth\u00e8que Nationale at Paris. A seventeenth-century edition is in the Widener Library at Harvard, and in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. Also in the library of the University of Buenos Ayres. Numerous other copies probably exist in secret, and a fifteenth-century one is persistently rumoured to form part of the collection of a celebrated American millionaire. A still vaguer rumour credits the preservation of a sixteenth-century Greek text in the Salem family of Pickman; but if it was so preserved, it vanished with the artist R.U. Pickman, who disappeared early in 1926. The book is rigidly suppressed by the authorities of most countries, and by all branches of organised ecclesiasticism. Reading leads to terrible consequences. It was from rumours of this book (of which relatively few of the general public know) that R.W. Chambers is said to have derived the idea of his early novel The King in Yellow.\n\nChronology:\n\n\u2002Al Azif written circa 730 A.D. at Damascus by Abdul Alhazred\n\n\u2002Tr. to Greek 950 A.D. as Necronomicon by Theodorus Philetas\n\n\u2002Burnt by Patriarch Michael 1050 (i.e., Greek text). Arabic text now lost.\n\n\u2002Olaus translates Gr. to Latin 1228\n\n\u20021232 Latin ed. (and Gr.) suppr. by Pope Gregory IX\n\n\u200214... Black-letter printed edition (Germany)\n\n\u200215... Gr. text printed in Italy\n\n\u200216... Spanish reprint of Latin text\n\n[ The Hoard of the Wizard-Beast ]\n\nThere had happened in the teeming and many-towered city of Zeth one of those incidents which are prone to take place in all capitals of all worlds. Nor, simply because Zeth lies on a planet of strange beasts and stranger vegetation, did this incident differ greatly from what might have occurred in London or Paris or any of the great governing towns we know. Through the cleverly concealed dishonesty of an aged but shrewd official, the treasury was exhausted. No shining phrulder, as of old, lay stacked about the strong-room; and over empty coffers the sardonic spider wove webs of mocking design. When, at last, the giphath Yalden entered that obscure vault and discovered the thefts, there were left only some phlegmatic rats which peered sharply at him as at an alien intruder.\n\nThere had been no accountings since Kishan the old keeper had died many moon-turns before, and great was Yalden's dismay to find this emptiness instead of the expected wealth. The indifference of the small creatures in the cracks between the flagstones could not spread itself to him. This was a very grave matter, and would have to be met in a very prompt and serious way. Clearly, there was nothing to do but consult Oorn, and Oorn was a highly portentous being.\n\nOorn, though a creature of extremely doubtful nature, was the virtual ruler of Zeth. It obviously belonged somewhere in the outer abyss, but had blundered into Zeth one night and suffered capture by the shamith priests. The coincidence of Its excessively bizarre aspect and Its innate gift of mimicry had impressed the sacred brothers as offering vast possibilities, hence in the end they had set It up as a god and an oracle, organising a new brotherhood to serve It\u2014and incidentally to suggest the edicts it should utter and the replies It should give. Like the Delphi and Dodona of a later world, Oorn grew famous as a giver of judgments and solver of riddles; nor did Its essence differ from them save that It lay infinitely earlier in Time, and upon an elder world where all things might happen. And now Yalden, being not above the credulousness of his day and planet, had set out for the close-guarded and richly-fitted hall wherein Oorn brooded and mimicked the promptings of the priests.\n\nWhen Yalden came within sight of the Hall, with its tower of blue tile, he became properly religious, and entered the building acceptably, in a humble manner which greatly impeded progress. According to custom, the guardians of the deity acknowledged his obeisance and pecuniary offering, and retired behind heavy curtains to ignite the thuribles. After everything was in readiness, Yalden murmured a conventional prayer and bowed low before a curious empty dais studded with exotic jewels. For a moment\u2014as the ritual prescribed\u2014he stayed in this abased position, and when he arose the dais was no longer empty. Unconcernedly munching something the priests had given It was a large pudgy creature very hard to describe, and covered with short grey fur. Whence It had come in so brief a time only the priests might tell, but the suppliant knew that It was Oorn.\n\nHesitantly Yalden stated his unfortunate mission and asked advice; weaving into his discourse the type of flattery which seemed to him most discreet. Then, with anxiety, he awaited the oracle's response. Having tidily finished Its food, Oorn raised three small reddish eyes to Yalden and uttered certain words in a tone of vast decisiveness: \"Gumay ere hfotuol leheht teg.\" After this It vanished suddenly in a cloud of pink smoke which seemed to issue from behind the curtain where the acolytes were. The acolytes then came forth from their hiding-place and spoke to Yalden, saying: \"Since you have pleased the deity with your concise statement of a very deplorable state of affairs, we are honored by interpreting its directions. The aphorism you heard signifies no less than the equally mystic phrase 'Go thou unto thy destination' or more properly speaking, you are to slay the monster-wizard Anathas, and replenish the treasury with its fabled hoard.\"\n\nWith this Yalden was dismissed from the temple. It may not be said in veracity that he was fearless, for in truth, he was openly afraid of the monster Anathas, as were all the inhabitants of Ullathia and the surrounding land. Even those who doubted its actuality would not have chosen to reside in the immediate neighborhood of the Cave of Three Winds wherein it was said to dwell.\n\nBut the prospect was not without romantic appeal, and Yalden was young and consequently unwise. He knew, among other things, that there was always the hope of rescuing some feminine victim of the monster's famed and surprising erotic taste. Of the true aspect of Anathas none could be certain; tales of a widely opposite nature being commonly circulated. Many vowed it had been seen from afar in the form of a giant black shadow peculiarly repugnant to human taste, while others alleged it was a mound of gelatinous substance that oozed hatefully in the manner of putrescent flesh. Still others claimed they had seen it as a monstrous insect with astonishing supernumerary appurtenances. But in one thing all coincided; namely, that it was advisable to have as little traffic as possible with Anathas.\n\nWith due supplications to his gods and to their messenger Oorn, Yalden set out for the Cave of Three Winds. In his bosom were mixed an ingrained, patriotic sense of duty, and a thrill of adventurous expectancy regarding the unknown mysteries he faced. He had not neglected such preparations as a sensible man might make, and a wizard of old repute had furnished him with certain singular accessories. He had, for example, a charm which prevented his thirsting or hungering, and wholly did away with his need for provisions. There was likewise a glistening cape to counteract the evil emanations of a mineral that lay scattered over the rocky ground along his course. Other warnings and safeguards dealt with certain gaudy land-crustaceans, and with the deathly-sweet mists which arise at certain points until dispersed by heliotropism.\n\nThus shielded, Yalden fared without incident until he came to the place of the White Worm. Here of necessity he delayed to make preparations for finding the rest of his way. With patient diligence he captured the small colorless maggot, and surrounded it with a curious mark made with green paint. As was prophesied, the Lord of Worms, whose name was Sarall, made promise of certain things in return for its freedom. Then Yalden released it, and it crawled away after directing him on the course he was to follow.\n\nThe sere and fruitless land through which he now travelled was totally uninhabited. Not even the hardier of the beasts were to be seen beyond the edge of that final plateau which separated him from his goal. Far off, in a purplish haze, rose the mountains amidst which dwelt Anathas. It lived not solitary, despite the lonely region around, for strange pets resided with it\u2014some the fabled elder monsters, and others unique beings created by its own fearful craft.\n\nAt the heart of its cave, legend said, Anathas had concealed an enormous hoard of jewels, gold, and other things of fabulous value. Why so potent a wonder-worker should care for such gauds, or revel in the counting of money, was by no means clear; but many things attested the truth of these tastes. Great numbers of persons of stronger will and wit than Yalden had died in remarkable manners while seeking the hoard of the wizard-beast, and their bones were laid in a strange pattern before the mouth of the cave, as a warning to others.\n\nWhen, after countless vicissitudes, Yalden came at last into sight of the Cave of Winds amid the glistening boulders, he knew indeed that report had not lied concerning the isolation of Anathas' lair. The cavern-mouth was well-concealed, and over everything an ominous quiet lowered. There was no trace of habitation, save of course the ossuary ornamentation in the front yard. With his hand on the sword that had been sanctified by a priest of Oorn, Yalden tremblingly advanced. When he had attained the very opening of the lair, he hesitated no longer, for it was evident that the monster was away.\n\nDeeming this the best of all times to prosecute his business, Yalden plunged at once within the cave. The interior was very cramped and exceedingly dirty, but the roof glittered with an innumerable array of small, varicoloured lights, the source of which was not to be perceived. In the rear yawned another opening, either natural or artificial; and to this black, low-arched burrow Yalden hastened, crawling within it on hands and knees. Before long a faint blue radiance glowed at the farther end, and presently the searcher emerged into an ampler space. Straightening up, he beheld a most singular change in his surroundings. This second cavern was tall and domed as if it had been shapen by supernatural powers, and a soft blue and silver light infused the gloom. Anathas, thought Yalden, lived indeed in comfort; for this room was finer than anything in the Palace of Zeth, or even in the Temple of Oorn, upon which had been lavished unthinkable wealth and beauty. Yalden stood agape, but not for long, since he desired most of all to seek the object of his quest and depart before Anathas should return from wherever it might be. For Yalden did not wish to encounter the monster-sorcerer of which so many tales were told. Leaving therefore this second cave by a narrow cleft which he saw, the seeker followed a devious and unlit way far down through the solid rock of the plateau. This, he felt, would take him to that third and ultimate cavern where his business lay. As he progressed, he glimpsed ahead of him a curious glow; and at last, without warning, the walls receded to reveal a vast open space paved solidly with blazing coals above which flapped and shrieked an obscene flock of wyvern-headed birds. Over the fiery surface green monstrous salamanders slithered, eyeing the intruder with malignant speculation. And on the far side rose the stairs of a metal dais, encrusted with jewels, and piled high with precious objects; the hoard of the wizard-beast.\n\nAt sight of this unattainable wealth, Yalden's fervour well-nigh overcame him; and chaffing at his futility, he searched the sea of flame for some way of crossing. This, he soon perceived, was not readily to be found; for in all that glowing crypt there was only a slight crescent of flooring near the entrance which a mortal man might hope to walk on. Desperation, however, possessed him; so that at last he resolved to risk all and try the fiery pavement. Better to die in the quest than to return empty-handed. With teeth set, he started toward the sea of flame, heedless of what might follow.\n\nAs it was, surprise seared him almost as vehemently as he had expected the flames to do\u2014for with his advance, the glowing floor divided to form a narrow lane of safe cool earth leading straight to the golden throne. Half dazed, and heedless of whatever might underlie such curiously favouring magic, Yalden drew his sword and strode boldly betwixt the walls of flame that rose from the rifted pavement. The heat hurt him not at all, and the wyvern-creatures drew back, hissing, and did not molest him.\n\nThe hoard now glistened close at hand, and Yalden thought of how he would return to Zeth, laden with fabulous spoils and worshipped by throngs as a hero. In his joy he forgot to wonder at Anathas' lax care of its treasures; nor did the very friendly behaviour of the fiery pavement seem in any way remarkable. Even the huge arched opening behind the dais, so oddly invisible from across the cavern, failed to disturb him seriously. Only when he had mounted the broad stair of the dais and stood ankle-deep amid the bizarre golden reliques of other ages and other worlds, and the lovely, luminous gems from unknown mines and of unknown natures and meanings, did Yalden begin to realise that anything was wrong.\n\nBut now he perceived that the miraculous passage through the flaming floor was closing again, leaving him marooned on the dais with the glittering treasure he had sought. And when it had fully closed, and his eyes had circled round vainly for some way of escape, he was hardly reassured by the shapeless jelly-like shadow which loomed colossal and stinking in the great archway behind the dais. He was not permitted to faint, but was forced to observe that this shadow was infinitely more hideous than anything hinted in any popular legend, and that its seven iridescent eyes were regarding him with placid amusement.\n\nThen Anathas the wizard-beast rolled fully out of the archway, mighty in necromantic horror, and jested with the small frightened conqueror before allowing that horde of slavering and peculiarly hungry green salamanders to complete their slow, anticipatory ascent of the dais.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Horror at Martin's Beach by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI have never heard an even approximately adequate explanation of the horror at Martin's Beach. Despite the large number of witnesses, no two accounts agree; and the testimony taken by local authorities contains the most amazing discrepancies.\n\nPerhaps this haziness is natural in view of the unheard-of character of the horror itself, the almost paralytic terror of all who saw it, and the efforts made by the fashionable Wavecrest Inn to hush it up after the publicity created by Prof. Alton's article \"Are Hypnotic Powers Confined to Recognized Humanity?\"\n\nAgainst all these obstacles I am striving to present a coherent version; for I beheld the hideous occurrence, and believe it should be known in view of the appalling possibilities it suggests. Martin's Beach is once more popular as a watering-place, but I shudder when I think of it. Indeed, I cannot look at the ocean at all now without shuddering.\n\nFate is not always without a sense of drama and climax, hence the terrible happening of August 8, 1922, swiftly followed a period of minor and agreeably wonder-fraught excitement at Martin's Beach. On May 17 the crew of the fishing smack Alma of Gloucester, under Capt. James P. Orne, killed, after a battle of nearly forty hours, a marine monster whose size and aspect produced the greatest possible stir in scientific circles and caused certain Boston naturalists to take every precaution for its taxidermic preservation.\n\nThe object was some fifty feet in length, of roughly cylindrical shape, and about ten feet in diameter. It was unmistakably a gilled fish in its major affiliations; but with certain curious modifications, such as rudimentary forelegs and six-toed feet in place of pectoral fins, which prompted the widest speculation. Its extraordinary mouth, its thick and scaly hide, and its single, deep-set eye were wonders scarcely less remarkable than its colossal dimensions; and when the naturalists pronounced it an infant organism, which could not have been hatched more than a few days, public interest mounted to extraordinary heights.\n\nCapt. Orne, with typical Yankee shrewdness, obtained a vessel large enough to hold the object in its hull, and arranged for the exhibition of his prize. With judicious carpentry he prepared what amounted to an excellent marine museum, and, sailing south to the wealthy resort district of Martin's Beach, anchored at the hotel wharf and reaped a harvest of admission fees.\n\nThe intrinsic marvelousness of the object, and the importance which it clearly bore in the minds of many scientific visitors from near and far, combined to make it the season's sensation. That it was absolutely unique\u2014unique to a scientifically revolutionary degree\u2014was well understood. The naturalists had shown plainly that it radically differed from the similarly immense fish caught off the Florida coast; that, while it was obviously an inhabitant of almost incredible depths, perhaps thousands of feet, its brain and principal organs indicated a development startlingly vast, and out of all proportion to anything hitherto associated with the fish tribe.\n\nOn the morning of July 20 the sensation was increased by the loss of the vessel and its strange treasure. In the storm of the preceding night it had broken from its moorings and vanished forever from the sight of man, carrying with it the guard who had slept aboard despite the threatening weather. Capt. Orne, backed by extensive scientific interests and aided by large numbers of fishing boats from Gloucester, made a thorough and exhaustive searching cruise, but with no result other than the prompting of interest and conversation. By August 7 hope was abandoned, and Capt. Orne had returned to the Wavecrest Inn to wind up his business affairs at Martin's Beach and confer with certain of the scientific men who remained there. The horror came on August 8.\n\nIt was in the twilight, when grey sea-birds hovered low near the shore and a rising moon began to make a glittering path across the waters. The scene is important to remember, for every impression counts. On the beach were several strollers and a few late bathers; stragglers from the distant cottage colony that rose modestly on a green hill to the north, or from the adjacent cliff-perched Inn whose imposing towers proclaimed its allegiance to wealth and grandeur.\n\nWell within viewing distance was another set of spectators, the loungers on the Inn's high-ceiled and lantern-lighted veranda, who appeared to be enjoying the dance music from the sumptuous ballroom inside. These spectators, who included Capt. Orne and his group of scientific confreres, joined the beach group before the horror progressed far; as did many more from the Inn. Certainly there was no lack of witnesses, confused though their stories be with fear and doubt of what they saw.\n\nThere is no exact record of the time the thing began, although a majority say that the fairly round moon was \"about a foot\" above the lowlying vapors of the horizon. They mention the moon because what they saw seemed subtly connected with it\u2014a sort of stealthy, deliberate, menacing ripple which rolled in from the far skyline along the shimmering lane of reflected moonbeams, yet which seemed to subside before it reached the shore.\n\nMany did not notice this ripple until reminded by later events; but it seems to have been very marked, differing in height and motion from the normal waves around it. Some called it cunning and calculating. And as it died away craftily by the black reefs afar out, there suddenly came belching up out of the glitter-streaked brine a cry of death; a scream of anguish and despair that moved pity even while it mocked it.\n\nFirst to respond to the cry were the two life guards then on duty; sturdy fellows in white bathing attire, with their calling proclaimed in large red letters across their chests. Accustomed as they were to rescue work, and to the screams of the drowning, they could find nothing familiar in the unearthly ululation; yet with a trained sense of duty they ignored the strangeness and proceeded to follow their usual course.\n\nHastily seizing an air-cushion, which with its attached coil of rope lay always at hand, one of them ran swiftly along the shore to the scene of the gathering crowd; whence, after whirling it about to gain momentum, he flung the hollow disc far out in the direction from which the sound had come. As the cushion disappeared in the waves, the crowd curiously awaited a sight of the hapless being whose distress had been so great; eager to see the rescue made by the massive rope.\n\nBut that rescue was soon acknowledged to be no swift and easy matter; for, pull as they might on the rope, the two muscular guards could not move the object at the other end. Instead, they found that object pulling with equal or even greater force in the very opposite direction, till in a few seconds they were dragged off their feet and into the water by the strange power which had seized on the proffered life-preserver.\n\nOne of them, recovering himself, called immediately for help from the crowd on the shore, to whom he flung the remaining coil of rope; and in a moment the guards were seconded by all the hardier men, among whom Capt. Orne was foremost. More than a dozen strong hands were now tugging desperately at the stout line, yet wholly without avail.\n\nHard as they tugged, the strange force at the other end tugged harder; and since neither side relaxed for an instant, the rope became rigid as steel with the enormous strain. The struggling participants, as well as the spectators, were by this time consumed with curiosity as to the nature of the force in the sea. The idea of a drowning man had long been dismissed; and hints of whales, submarines, monsters, and demons now passed freely around. Where humanity had first led the rescuers, wonder kept them at their task; and they hauled with a grim determination to uncover the mystery.\n\nIt being decided at last that a whale must have swallowed the air-cushion, Capt. Orne, as a natural leader, shouted to those on the shore that a boat must be obtained in order to approach, harpoon, and land the unseen leviathan. Several men at once prepared to scatter in quest of a suitable craft, while others came to supplant the captain at the straining rope, since his place was logically with whatever boat party might be formed. His own idea of the situation was very broad, and by no means limited to whales, since he had to do with a monster so much stranger. He wondered what might be the acts and manifestations of an adult of the species of which the fifty-foot creature had been the merest infant.\n\nAnd now there developed with appalling suddenness the crucial fact which changed the entire scene from one of wonder to one of horror, and dazed with fright the assembled band of toilers and onlookers. Capt. Orne, turning to leave his post at the rope, found his hands held in their place with unaccountable strength; and in a moment he realized that he was unable to let go of the rope. His plight was instantly divined, and as each companion tested his own situation the same condition was encountered. The fact could not be denied\u2014every struggler was irresistibly held in some mysterious bondage to the hempen line which was slowly, hideously, and relentlessly pulling them out to sea.\n\nSpeechless horror ensued; a horror in which the spectators were petrified to utter inaction and mental chaos. Their complete demoralization is reflected in the conflicting accounts they give, and the sheepish excuses they offer for their seemingly callous inertia. I was one of them, and know.\n\nEven the strugglers, after a few frantic screams and futile groans, succumbed to the paralyzing influence and kept silent and fatalistic in the face of unknown powers. There they stood in the pallid moonlight, blindly pulling against a spectral doom and swaying monotonously backward and forward as the water rose first to their knees, then to their hips. The moon went partly under a cloud, and in the half-light the line of swaying men resembled some sinister and gigantic centipede, writhing in the clutch of a terrible creeping death.\n\nHarder and harder grew the rope, as the tug in both directions increased, and the strands swelled with the undisturbed soaking of the rising waves. Slowly the tide advanced, till the sands so lately peopled by laughing children and whispering lovers were now swallowed by the inexorable flow. The herd of panic-stricken watchers surged blindly backward as the water crept above their feet, while the frightful line of strugglers swayed hideously on, half submerged, and now at a substantial distance from their audience. Silence was complete.\n\nThe crowd, having gained a huddling-place beyond reach of the tide, stared in mute fascination; without offering a word of advice or encouragement, or attempting any kind of assistance. There was in the air a nightmare fear of impending evils such as the world had never before known.\n\nMinutes seemed lengthened into hours, and still that human snake of swaying torsos was seen above the fast rising tide. Rhythmically it undulated; slowly, horribly, with the seal of doom upon it. Thicker clouds now passed over the ascending moon, and the glittering path on the waters faded nearly out.\n\nVery dimly writhed the serpentine line of nodding heads, with now and then the livid face of a backward-glancing victim gleaming pale in the darkness. Faster and faster gathered the clouds, till at length their angry rifts shot down sharp tongues of febrile flame. Thunders rolled, softly at first, yet soon increasing to a deafening, maddening intensity. Then came a culminating crash\u2014a shock whose reverberations seemed to shake land and sea alike\u2014and on its heels a cloudburst whose drenching violence overpowered the darkened world as if the heavens themselves had opened to pour forth a vindictive torrent.\n\nThe spectators, instinctively acting despite the absence of conscious and coherent thought, now retreated up the cliff steps to the hotel veranda. Rumors had reached the guests inside, so that the refugees found a state of terror nearly equal to their own. I think a few frightened words were uttered, but cannot be sure.\n\nSome, who were staying at the Inn, retired in terror to their rooms; while others remained to watch the fast sinking victims as the line of bobbing heads showed above the mounting waves in the fitful lightning flashes. I recall thinking of those heads, and the bulging eyes they must contain; eyes that might well reflect all the fright, panic, and delirium of a malignant universe\u2014all the sorrow, sin, and misery, blasted hopes and unfulfilled desires, fear, loathing and anguish of the ages since time's beginning; eyes alight with all the soul-racking pain of eternally blazing infernos.\n\nAnd as I gazed out beyond the heads, my fancy conjured up still another eye; a single eye, equally alight, yet with a purpose so revolting to my brain that the vision soon passed. Held in the clutches of an unknown vise, the line of the damned dragged on; their silent screams and unuttered prayers known only to the demons of the black waves and the night-wind.\n\nThere now burst from the infuriate sky such a mad cataclysm of satanic sound that even the former crash seemed dwarfed. Amidst a blinding glare of descending fire the voice of heaven resounded with the blasphemies of hell, and the mingled agony of all the lost reverberated in one apocalyptic, planet-rending peal of Cyclopean din. It was the end of the storm, for with uncanny suddenness the rain ceased and the moon once more cast her pallid beams on a strangely quieted sea.\n\nThere was no line of bobbing heads now. The waters were calm and deserted, and broken only by the fading ripples of what seemed to be a whirlpool far out in the path of the moonlight whence the strange cry had first come. But as I looked along that treacherous lane of silvery sheen, with fancy fevered and senses overwrought, there trickled upon my ears from some abysmal sunken waste the faint and sinister echoes of a laugh.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Horror at Red Hook by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight. It is possible that man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead.\"\n\n\u2014Arthur Machen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag, Rhode Island, a tall, heavily built, and wholesome-looking pedestrian furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behaviour. He had, it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch of the urban. At this point, without visible provocation, he committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the tallest of the buildings before him, and then, with a series of terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing. Picked up and dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack. He muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had undergone, and with downcast glance turned back up the Chepachet road, trudging out of sight without once looking behind him. It was a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the remarks of a bystander who had recognised him as the boarder of a well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.\n\nHe was, it developed, a New York police detective named Thomas F. Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which accident had made dramatic. There had been a collapse of several old brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his companions, had peculiarly appalled him. As a result, he had acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite period. A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward that quaint hamlet of wooden colonial houses as an ideal spot for the psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone, promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he was put in touch. This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation for his disobedience.\n\nSo much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also, the most learned specialists believed. But Malone had at first told the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter incredulity was his portion. Thereafter he held his peace, protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his nervous equilibrium. He had worked too hard, all said, in trying to clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was the last straw. This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice. To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception\u2014a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds\u2014would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism. He had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian villa near Phoenix Park.\n\nAnd now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of nightmare and eldritch portent. It would not be the first time his sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted\u2014for was not his very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld a freak beyond sensible explanation? What could he tell the prosaic of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene terrors? He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy, and had smiled gently when all the New-Yorkers he knew scoffed at his experiment in police work. They had been very witty and cynical, deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and vulgarity. One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could not\u2014despite many poignant things to his credit in the Dublin Review\u2014even write a truly interesting story of New York low life; and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning. The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story\u2014for like the book cited by Poe's German authority, \"es l\u00e4sst sich nicht lesen\u2014it does not permit itself to be read.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always present. In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dor\u00e9. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.\n\nHe had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice. Red Hook is a maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall. Its houses are mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter to the middle of the nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have that alluring antique flavour which conventional reading leads us to call \"Dickensian\". The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma; Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and negro elements impinging upon one another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not far distant. It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the monstrous organ litanies of the harbour whistles. Here long ago a brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the hill. One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there\u2014a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. The houses are generally in solid blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.\n\nFrom this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky. Hordes of prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares, occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when visitors pick their way through. Policemen despair of order or reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion. The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence, and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative. Visible offences are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most abhorrent guises. That these visible affairs are not more frequent is not to the neighbourhood's credit, unless the power of concealment be an art demanding credit. More people enter Red Hook than leave it\u2014or at least, than leave it by the landward side\u2014and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.\n\nMalone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by priests and philanthropists. He was conscious, as one who united imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and pockmarked young men which wound their way along in the dark small hours of morning. One saw groups of these youths incessantly; sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old houses. They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical, and ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by the police. They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind. Their coherence and definiteness suggested it, and it shewed in the singular suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder. He had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch-Cult in Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions antedating the Aryan world, and appearing in popular legends as Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths. That these hellish vestiges of old Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered tales some of them might really be." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village was little more than a pleasant group of colonial cottages surrounding the steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In his lonely house, set back from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation before, when he had sailed for the old world and remained there out of sight for eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor rooms which he kept in order\u2014a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent aspect. The growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to mean less and less to the town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes, and gold-headed cane earned him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition, and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.\n\nSuydam became a \"case\" when his distant and only relatives sought court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged observation and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn neighbourhoods. He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy, evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical words or names as \"Sephiroth\", \"Ashmodai\", and \"Sama\u00ebl\". The court action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the green blinds of secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow him reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet filtering out from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section. When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to preserve his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen through excessive devotion to study and research. He was, he said, engaged in the investigation of certain details of European tradition which required the closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and folk dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and shewed how sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work. Triumphing with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears, and Van Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.\n\nIt was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone with them, entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam action with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid the private detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants. Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organised cliques which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker Place\u2014since renamed\u2014where Suydam had his basement flat, there had grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.\n\nThese creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays as a dance-hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest part of the waterfront. It was nominally Catholic; but priests throughout Brooklyn denied the place all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when they listened to the noises it emitted at night. Malone used to fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the visible services. Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan\u2014and Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it certain that these unauthorised newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers and harbour police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens of the region. Their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies, grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at length it was deemed necessary to compute their numbers, ascertain their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities. To this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as arch-fiend and adversary." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become so menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology. Such of them as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicenced pedlars, though frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner news stands. Most of them, however, had no visible means of support; and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which smuggling and \"bootlegging\" were the least indescribable. They had come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal to a secret subterranean pool beneath a house. This wharf, canal, and house Malone could not locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the reasons for their systematic importation. They were reticent about the exact spot from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal the agencies which had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed, they developed something like acute fright when asked the reasons for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were equally taciturn, and the most that could be gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.\n\nThe attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three entire houses and permanently harbouring many of his queer companions. He spent but little time now at his Flatbush home, apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books; and his face and manner had attained an appalling pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each time brusquely repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His business was to study undisturbed the folklore of all the immigrants of the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate concern. Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was only momentary. He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of information.\n\nWhat Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on the case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict between city and Federal authority suspended the investigations for several months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments. But at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what began to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity of step and buoyancy of demeanour to match the new tradition, and shewed a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and finally astonished his new friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a series of receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could remember, and extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven relatives who had so lately sought his restraint. Some attended through curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just inherited some property from a half-forgotten European friend, was about to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth which ease, care, and diet had made possible to him. Less and less was he seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to which he was born. Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to congregate at the old stone church and dance-hall instead of at the basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious life.\n\nThen two incidents occurred\u2014wide enough apart, but both of intense interest in the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet announcement in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position, and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second at one of the basement windows. Malone had participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care when inside. Nothing was found\u2014in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited\u2014but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not like\u2014panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he did not relish the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation which he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read, literally translated,\n\n\"O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!\"\n\nWhen he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked bass organ notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on certain nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighbourhood. That organ memory haunted him, and he explored the basement with particular assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?\n\nBy the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young children of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamoured for action from the police, and once more the Butler Street station sent its men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen child was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The paintings were appalling\u2014hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraised Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian decadence:\n\n\"HEL \u2014 HELOYM \u2014 SOTHER \u2014 EMMANVEL \u2014 SABAOTH \u2014 AGLA \u2014 TETRAGRAMMATON \u2014 AGYROS \u2014 OTHEOS \u2014 ISCHYROS \u2014 ATHANATOS \u2014 IEHOVA \u2014 VA \u2014 ADONAI \u2014 SADAY \u2014 HOMOVSION \u2014 MESSIAS \u2014 ESCHEREHEYE.\"\n\nCircles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found\u2014a pile of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics which also adorned the walls. During the raid the police encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing relevant, they had to leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants and prot\u00e9g\u00e9s in view of the growing public clamour." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Then came the June wedding and the great sensation. Flatbush was gay for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the streets near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted bride and groom to the Cunard Pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at least a solid page from the Social Register. At five o'clock adieux were waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for the widening water spaces that led to old world wonders. By night the outer harbour was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling above an unpolluted ocean.\n\nWhether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention, no one can say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad\u2014as it is, he shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward, when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was murder\u2014strangulation\u2014but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word \"LILITH\". One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly\u2014as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no real outline met the eye. As proof, the doctor points to his continued sanity.\n\nThen the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his body\u2014they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message:\n\n\"In case of sudden or unexplained accident or death on my part, please deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer and his associates. Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends on absolute compliance. Explanations can come later\u2014do not fail me now.\n\nROBERT SUYDAM.\"\n\nCaptain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered something to the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and led the way to the Suydam stateroom. The doctor directed the captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily till they filed out with their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it. The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and a ship's undertaker sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform what last services they could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odour in the sink which shewed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents. The pockets of those men\u2014if men they were\u2014had bulged damnably when they left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that it ought to know of the horrible affair." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea, Malone was desperately busy among the alleys of Red Hook. A sudden stir seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprised by \"grapevine telegraph\" of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place. Three children had just disappeared\u2014blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets toward Gowanus\u2014and there were rumours of a mob forming among the sturdy Vikings of that section. Malone had for weeks been urging his colleagues to attempt a general cleanup; and at last, moved by conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke. The unrest and menace of this evening had been the deciding factor, and just about midnight a raiding party recruited from three stations descended upon Parker Place and its environs. Doors were battered in, stragglers arrested, and candlelighted rooms forced to disgorge unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, mitres, and other inexplicable devices. Much was lost in the melee, for objects were thrown hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odours deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent incense. But spattered blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw a brazier or altar from which the smoke was still rising.\n\nHe wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's basement flat only after a messenger had reported the complete emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall church. The flat, he thought, must hold some clue to a cult of which the occult scholar had so obviously become the centre and leader; and it was with real expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their vaguely charnel odour, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and there. Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of a red liquid. The shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat as it scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities. Then came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to break it down. A heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more than enough for the antique panels. A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way\u2014but from the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.\n\nOf course it was a dream. All the specialists have told him so, and he has nothing to prove the contrary. Indeed, he would rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick slums and dark foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul. But at the time it was all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed with madness. Odours of incense and corruption joined in sickening concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes. Somewhere dark sticky water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the background.\n\nAvenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the foetor of hybrid pestilence. Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless moon-calves bleated to the Magna Mater. Goats leaped to the sound of thin accursed flutes, and aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads. Moloch and Ashtaroth were not absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had power to mould. The world and Nature were helpless against such assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer check the Walpurgis-riot of horror which had come when a sage with the hateful key had stumbled on a horde with the locked and brimming coffer of transmitted daemon-lore.\n\nSuddenly a ray of physical light shot through these phantasms, and Malone heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that should be dead. A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight, made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding. They took it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved golden pedestal, and the thing tittered and pawed at the bedding. Then they unswathed it, and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a corpulent old man with stubbly beard and unkempt white hair. The phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.\n\nAll at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there came the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away in quest of the sound\u2014goat, satyr, and aegipan, incubus, succuba, and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and silent strutter in darkness\u2014all led by the abominable naked phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne, and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man. The strange dark men danced in the rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury. Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and doubtful of his place in this or in any world. Then he turned, faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and shivering as the daemon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and tinkling of the mad procession grew fainter and fainter.\n\nVaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors and shocking croakings afar off. Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would float to him through the black arcade, whilst eventually there rose the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had read above the pulpit of that dance-hall church.\n\n\"O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs (here a hideous howl burst forth) and spilt blood (here nameless sounds vied with morbid shriekings), who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs (here a whistling sigh occurred), who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals (short, sharp cries from myriad throats), Gorgo (repeated as response), Mormo (repeated with ecstasy), thousand-faced moon (sighs and flute notes), look favourably on our sacrifices!\"\n\nAs the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds nearly drowned the croaking of the cracked bass organ. Then a gasp as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated words\u2014\"Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!\" More cries, a clamour of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running figure. The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his elbow to look.\n\nThe luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly increased; and in that devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of that which should not flee or feel or breathe\u2014the glassy-eyed, gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support, but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed. After it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men, and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses. The corpse was gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object, straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so great. Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing throng laboured on with more frantic speed. But they were too late, for in one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam achieved its object and its triumph. The push had been tremendous, but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and finally careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below, sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus. In that instant, too, the whole scene of horror faded to nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the evil universe." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some odd realities of the case; though that is no reason why anyone should believe it. The three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in its most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half the raiders and most of the prisoners were inside; and of both the greater number were instantly killed. Only in the basements and cellars was there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to have been deep below the house of Robert Suydam. For he really was there, as no one is disposed to deny. They found him unconscious by the edge of a night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body of Suydam, a few feet away. The case was plain, for it was hither that the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam from the ship had brought him home. They themselves were never found, or at least never identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with the simple certitudes of the police.\n\nSuydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations, for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean channels and tunnels in the neighbourhood. There was a tunnel from this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible things were discovered. The croaking organ was there, as well as a vast arched chapel with wooden benches and a strangely figured altar. The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which\u2014hideous to relate\u2014solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly strange appearance. These infants died soon after exposure to the light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful. Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the sombre question of old Delrio: \"An sint unquam daemones incubi et succubae, et an ex tali congressu proles nasci queat?\"\n\nBefore the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and yielded forth a sensational array of sawed and split bones of all sizes. The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home; though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread be connected with it. These men are now in prison, since they failed of conviction as accessories in the actual murders. The carved golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary occult importance was never brought to light, though at one place under the Suydam house the canal was observed to sink into a well too deep for dredging. It was choked up at the mouth and cemented over when the cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often speculates on what lies beneath. The police, satisfied that they had shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and man-smugglers, turned over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidi clan of devil-worshippers. The tramp ship and its crew remain an elusive mystery, though cynical detectives are once more ready to combat its smuggling and rum-running ventures. Malone thinks these detectives shew a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder at the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of the whole case; though he is just as critical of the newspapers, which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist cult which they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's very heart. But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his terrible experience from the realm of present reality to that of picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.\n\nRobert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery. No funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole. The scholar's connexion with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he would otherwise have faced. His own end is not much mentioned, and the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folklore.\n\nAs for Red Hook\u2014it is always the same. Suydam came and went; a terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses, and prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear. Age-old horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus. The soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook's legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither, pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand. As of old, more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward side, and there are already rumours of new canals running underground to certain centres of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.\n\nThe dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces have appeared at night at the windows. Lately a policeman expressed the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for no simply explainable purpose. Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows of decaying brick.\n\nMalone does not shudder without cause\u2014for only the other day an officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some whispered patois in the shadow of an areaway. He listened, and thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again,\n\n\"O friend and companion of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Horror in the Burying-Ground by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWhen the state highway to Rutland is closed, travellers are forced to take the Stillwater road past Swamp Hollow. The scenery is superb in places, yet somehow the route has been unpopular for years. There is something depressing about it, especially near Stillwater itself. Motorists feel subtly uncomfortable about the tightly shuttered farmhouse on the knoll just north of the village, and about the white-bearded half-wit who haunts the old burying-ground on the south, apparently talking to the occupants of some of the graves.\n\nNot much is left of Stillwater, now. The soil is played out, and most of the people have drifted to the towns across the distant river or to the city beyond the distant hills. The steeple of the old white church has fallen down, and half of the twenty-odd straggling houses are empty and in various stages of decay. Normal life is found only around Peck's general store and filling-station, and it is here that the curious stop now and then to ask about the shuttered house and the idiot who mutters to the dead.\n\nMost of the questioners come away with a touch of distaste and disquiet. They find the shabby loungers oddly unpleasant and full of unnamed hints in speaking of the long-past events brought up. There is a menacing, portentous quality in the tones which they use to describe very ordinary events\u2014a seemingly unjustified tendency to assume a furtive, suggestive, confidential air, and to fall into awesome whispers at certain points\u2014which insidiously disturbs the listener. Old Yankees often talk like that; but in this case the melancholy aspect of the half-mouldering village, and the dismal nature of the story unfolded, give these gloomy, secretive mannerisms an added significance. One feels profoundly the quintessential horror that lurks behind the isolated Puritan and his strange repressions\u2014feels it, and longs to escape precipitately into clearer air.\n\nThe loungers whisper impressively that the shuttered house is that of old Miss Sprague\u2014Sophie Sprague, whose brother Tom was buried on the seventeenth of June, back in '86. Sophie was never the same after that funeral\u2014that and the other thing which happened the same day\u2014and in the end she took to staying in all the time. Won't even be seen now, but leaves notes under the back-door mat and has her things brought from the store by Ned Peck's boy. Afraid of something\u2014the old Swamp Hollow burying-ground most of all. Never could be dragged near there since her brother\u2014and the other one\u2014were laid away. Not much wonder, though, seeing the way crazy Johnny Dow rants. He hangs around the burying-ground all day and sometimes at night, and claims he talks with Tom\u2014and the other. Then he marches by Sophie's house and shouts things at her\u2014that's why she began to keep the shutters closed. He says things are coming from somewhere to get her sometime. Ought to be stopped, but one can't be too hard on poor Johnny. Besides, Steve Barbour always had his opinions.\n\nJohnny does his talking to two of the graves. One of them is Tom Sprague's. The other, at the opposite end of the graveyard, is that of Henry Thorndike, who was buried on the same day. Henry was the village undertaker\u2014the only one in miles\u2014and never liked around Stillwater. A city fellow from Rutland\u2014been to college and full of book learning. Read queer things nobody else ever heard of, and mixed chemicals for no good purpose. Always trying to invent something new\u2014some new-fangled embalming-fluid or some foolish kind of medicine. Some folks said he had tried to be a doctor but failed in his studies and took to the next best profession. Of course, there wasn't much undertaking to do in a place like Stillwater, but Henry farmed on the side.\n\nMean, morbid disposition\u2014and a secret drinker if you could judge by the empty bottles in his rubbish heap. No wonder Tom Sprague hated him and blackballed him from the Masonic lodge, and warned him off when he tried to make up to Sophie. The way he experimented on animals was against Nature and Scripture. Who could forget the state that collie dog was found in, or what happened to old Mrs. Akeley's cat? Then there was the matter of Deacon Leavitt's calf, when Tom had led a band of the village boys to demand an accounting. The curious thing was that the calf came alive after all in the end, though Tom had found it as stiff as a poker. Some said the joke was on Tom, but Thorndike probably thought otherwise, since he had gone down under his enemy's fist before the mistake was discovered.\n\nTom, of course, was half drunk at the time. He was a vicious brute at best, and kept his poor sister half cowed with threats. That's probably why she is such a fear-racked creature still. There were only the two of them, and Tom would never let her leave because that meant splitting the property. Most of the fellows were too afraid of him to shine up to Sophie\u2014he stood six feet one in his stockings\u2014but Henry Thorndike was a sly cuss who had ways of doing things behind folks' backs. He wasn't much to look at, but Sophie never discouraged him any. Mean and ugly as he was, she'd have been glad if anybody could have freed her from her brother. She may not have stopped to wonder how she could get clear of him after he got her clear of Tom.\n\nWell, that was the way things stood in June of '86. Up to this point, the whispers of the loungers at Peck's store are not so unbearably portentous; but as they continue, the element of secretiveness and malign tension grows. Tom Sprague, it appears, used to go to Rutland on periodic sprees, his absences being Henry Thorndike's great opportunities. He was always in bad shape when he got back, and old Dr. Pratt, deaf and half blind though he was, used to warn him about his heart, and about the danger of delirium tremens. Folks could always tell by the shouting and cursing when he was home again.\n\nIt was on the ninth of June\u2014on a Wednesday, the day after young Joshua Goodenough finished building his new-fangled silo\u2014that Tom started out on his last and longest spree. He came back the next Tuesday morning and folks at the store saw him lashing his bay stallion the way he did when whiskey had a hold of him. Then there came shouts and shrieks and oaths from the Sprague house, and the first thing anybody knew Sophie was running over to old Dr. Pratt's at top speed.\n\nThe doctor found Thorndike at Sprague's when he got there, and Tom was on the bed in his room, with eyes staring and foam around his mouth. Old Pratt fumbled around and gave the usual tests, then shook his head solemnly and told Sophie she had suffered a great bereavement\u2014that her nearest and dearest had passed through the pearly gates to a better land, just as everybody knew he would if he didn't let up on his drinking.\n\nSophie kind of sniffled, the loungers whisper, but didn't seem to take on much. Thorndike didn't do anything but smile\u2014perhaps at the ironic fact that he, always an enemy, was now the only person who could be of any use to Thomas Sprague. He shouted something in old Dr. Pratt's half-good ear about the need of having the funeral early on account of Tom's condition. Drunks like that were always doubtful subjects, and any extra delay\u2014with merely rural facilities\u2014would entail consequences, visual and otherwise, hardly acceptable to the deceased's loving mourners. The doctor had muttered that Tom's alcoholic career ought to have embalmed him pretty well in advance, but Thorndike assured him to the contrary, at the same time boasting of his own skill, and of the superior methods he had devised through his experiments.\n\nIt is here that the whispers of the loungers grow acutely disturbing. Up to this point the story is usually told by Ezra Davenport, or Luther Fry, if Ezra is laid up with chilblains, as he is apt to be in winter; but from there on old Calvin Wheeler takes up the thread, and his voice has a damnably insidious way of suggesting hidden horror. If Johnny Dow happens to be passing by there is always a pause, for Stillwater does not like to have Johnny talk too much with strangers.\n\nCalvin edges close to the traveller and sometimes seizes a coat-lapel with his gnarled, mottled hand while he half shuts his watery blue eyes.\n\n\"Well, sir,\" he whispers, \"Henry he went home an' got his undertaker's fixin's\u2014crazy Johnny Dow lugged most of 'em, for he was always doin' chores for Henry\u2014an' says as Doc Pratt an' crazy Johnny should help lay out the body. Doc always did say as how he thought Henry talked too much\u2014a-boastin' what a fine workman he was, an' how lucky it was that Stillwater had a reg'lar undertaker instead of buryin' folks jest as they was, like they do over to Whitby.\n\n\"'Suppose,' says he, 'some fellow was to be took with some of them paralysin' cramps like you read about. How'd a body like it when they lowered him down and begun shovelin' the dirt back? How'd he like it when he was chokin' down there under the new headstone, scratchin' an' tearin' if he chanced to get back the power, but all the time knowin' it wasn't no use? No, sir, I tell you it's a blessin' Stillwater's got a smart doctor as knows when a man's dead and when he ain't, and a trained undertaker who can fix a corpse so he'll stay put without no trouble.'\n\n\"That was the way Henry went on talkin', most like he was talkin' to poor Tom's remains; and old Doc Pratt he didn't like what he was able to catch of it, even though Henry did call him a smart doctor. Crazy Johnny kept watchin' of the corpse, and it didn't make it none too pleasant the way he'd slobber about things like, 'He ain't cold, Doc,' or 'I see his eyelids move,' or 'There's a hole in his arm jest like the ones I git when Henry gives me a syringe full of what makes me feel good.' Thorndike shut him up on that, though we all knowed he'd been givin' poor Johnny drugs. It's a wonder the poor fellow ever got clear of the habit.\n\n\"But the worst thing, accordin' to the doctor, was the way the body jerked up when Henry begun to shoot it full of embalmin'-fluid. He'd been boastin' about what a fine new formula he'd got practicin' on cats and dogs, when all of a sudden Tom's corpse began to double up like it was alive and fixin' to wrassle. Land of Goshen, but Doc says he was scared stiff, though he knowed the way corpses act when the muscles begin to stiffen. Well, sir, the long and short of it is, that the corpse sat up an' grabbed a holt of Thorndike's syringe so that it got stuck in Henry hisself, an' give him as neat a dose of his own embalmin'-fluid as you'd wish to see. That got Henry pretty scared, though he yanked the point out and managed to get the body down again and shot full of the fluid. He kept measurin' more of the stuff out as though he wanted to be sure there was enough, and kept reassurin' himself as not much had got into him, but crazy Johnny begun singin' out, 'That's what you give Lige Hopkins's dog when it got all dead an' stiff an' then waked up agin. Now you're a-going to get dead an' stiff like Tom Sprague be! Remember it don't set to work till after a long spell if you don't get much.'\n\n\"Sophie, she was downstairs with some of the neighbours\u2014my wife Matildy, she that's dead an' gone this thirty year, was one of them. They were all tryin' to find out whether Thorndike was over when Tom came home, and whether findin' him there was what set poor Tom off. I may as well say as some folks thought it mighty funny that Sophie didn't carry on more, nor mind the way Thorndike had smiled. Not as anybody was hintin' that Henry helped Tom off with some of his queer cooked-up fluids and syringes, or that Sophie would keep still if she thought so\u2014but you know how folks will guess behind a body's back. We all knowed the nigh crazy way Thorndike had hated Tom\u2014not without reason, at that\u2014and Emily Barbour says to my Matildy as how Henry was lucky to have ol' Doc Pratt right on the spot with a death certificate as didn't leave no doubt for nobody.\"\n\nWhen old Calvin gets to this point he usually begins to mumble indistinguishably in his straggling, dirty white beard. Most listeners try to edge away from him, and he seldom appears to heed the gesture. It is generally Fred Peck, who was a very small boy at the time of the events, who continues the tale.\n\nThomas Sprague's funeral was held on Thursday, June 17th, only two days after his death. Such haste was thought almost indecent in remote and inaccessible Stillwater, where long distances had to be covered by those who came, but Thorndike had insisted that the peculiar condition of the deceased demanded it. The undertaker had seemed rather nervous since preparing the body, and could be seen frequently feeling his pulse. Old Dr. Pratt thought he must be worrying about the accidental dose of embalming-fluid. Naturally, the story of the \"laying out\" had spread, so that a double zest animated the mourners who assembled to glut their curiosity and morbid interest.\n\nThorndike, though he was obviously upset, seemed intent on doing his professional duty in magnificent style. Sophie and others who saw the body were most startled by its utter lifelikeness, and the mortuary virtuoso made doubly sure of his job by repeating certain injections at stated intervals. He almost wrung a sort of reluctant admiration from the townsfolk and visitors, though he tended to spoil that impression by his boastful and tasteless talk. Whenever he administered to his silent charge he would repeat that eternal rambling about the good luck of having a first-class undertaker. What\u2014he would say as if directly addressing the body\u2014if Tom had had one of those careless fellows who bury their subjects alive? The way he harped on the horrors of premature burial was truly barbarous and sickening.\n\nServices were held in the stuffy best room\u2014opened for the first time since Mrs. Sprague died. The tuneless little parlour organ groaned disconsolately, and the coffin, supported on trestles near the hall door, was covered with sickly-smelling flowers. It was obvious that a record-breaking crowd was assembling from far and near, and Sophie endeavoured to look properly grief-stricken for their benefit. At unguarded moments she seemed both puzzled and uneasy, dividing her scrutiny between the feverish-looking undertaker and the lifelike body of her brother. A slow disgust at Thorndike seemed to be brewing within her, and neighbours whispered freely that she would soon send him about his business now that Tom was out of the way\u2014that is, if she could, for such a slick customer was sometimes hard to deal with. But with her money and remaining looks she might be able to get another fellow, and he'd probably take care of Henry well enough.\n\nAs the organ wheezed into Beautiful Isle of Somewhere the Methodist church choir added their lugubrious voices to the gruesome cacophony, and everyone looked piously at Deacon Leavitt\u2014everyone, that is, except crazy Johnny Dow, who kept his eyes glued to the still form beneath the glass of the coffin. He was muttering softly to himself.\n\nStephen Barbour\u2014from the next farm\u2014was the only one who noticed Johnny. He shivered as he saw that the idiot was talking directly to the corpse, and even making foolish signs with his fingers as if to taunt the sleeper beneath the plate glass. Tom, he reflected, had kicked poor Johnny around on more than one occasion, though probably not without provocation. Something about this whole event was getting on Stephen's nerves. There was a suppressed tension and brooding abnormality in the air for which he could not account. Johnny ought not to have been allowed in the house\u2014and it was curious what an effort Thorndike seemed to be making not to look at the body. Every now and then the undertaker would feel his pulse with an odd air.\n\nThe Reverend Silas Atwood droned on in a plaintive monotone about the deceased\u2014about the striking of Death's sword in the midst of this little family, breaking the earthly tie between this loving brother and sister. Several of the neighbours looked furtively at one another from beneath lowered eyelids, while Sophie actually began to sob nervously. Thorndike moved to her side and tried to reassure her, but she seemed to shrink curiously away from him. His motions were distinctly uneasy, and he seemed to feel acutely the abnormal tension permeating the air. Finally, conscious of his duty as master of ceremonies, he stepped forward and announced in a sepulchral voice that the body might be viewed for the last time.\n\nSlowly the friends and neighbours filed past the bier, from which Thorndike roughly dragged crazy Johnny away. Tom seemed to be resting peacefully. That devil had been handsome in his day. A few genuine sobs\u2014and many feigned ones\u2014were heard, though most of the crowd were content to stare curiously and whisper afterward. Steve Barbour lingered long and attentively over the still face, and moved away shaking his head. His wife, Emily, following after him, whispered that Henry Thorndike had better not boast so much about his work, for Tom's eyes had come open. They had been shut when the services began, for she had been up and looked. But they certainly looked natural\u2014not the way one would expect after two days.\n\nWhen Fred Peck gets this far he usually pauses as if he did not like to continue. The listener, too, tends to feel that something unpleasant is ahead. But Peck reassures his audience with the statement that what happened isn't as bad as folks like to hint. Even Steve never put into words what he may have thought, and crazy Johnny, of course, can't be counted at all.\n\nIt was Luella Morse\u2014the nervous old maid who sang in the choir\u2014who seems to have touched things off. She was filing past the coffin like the rest, but stopped to peer a little closer than anyone else except the Barbours had peered. And then, without warning, she gave a shrill scream and fell in a dead faint.\n\nNaturally, the room was at once a chaos of confusion. Old Dr. Pratt elbowed his way to Luella and called for some water to throw in her face, and others surged up to look at her and at the coffin. Johnny Dow began chanting to himself, \"He knows, he knows, he kin hear all we're a-sayin' and see all we're a-doin', and they'll bury him that way\"\u2014but no one stopped to decipher his mumbling except Steve Barbour.\n\nIn a very few moments Luella began to come out of her faint, and could not tell exactly what had startled her. All she could whisper was, \"The way he looked\u2014the way he looked.\" But to other eyes the body seemed exactly the same. It was a gruesome sight, though, with those open eyes and that high colouring.\n\nAnd then the bewildered crowd noticed something which put both Luella and the body out of their minds for a moment. It was Thorndike\u2014on whom the sudden excitement and jostling crowd seemed to be having a curiously bad effect. He had evidently been knocked down in the general bustle, and was on the floor trying to drag himself to a sitting posture. The expression on his face was terrifying in the extreme, and his eyes were beginning to take on a glazed, fishy expression. He could scarcely speak aloud, but the husky rattle of his throat held an ineffable desperation which was obvious to all.\n\n\"Get me home, quick, and let me be. That fluid I got in my arm by mistake... heart action... this damned excitement... too much... wait... wait... don't think I'm dead if I seem to... only the fluid\u2014just get me home and wait... I'll come to later, don't know how long... all the time I'll be conscious and know what's going on... don't be deceived....\"\n\nAs his words trailed off into nothingness old Dr. Pratt reached him and felt his pulse\u2014watching a long time and finally shaking his head. \"No use doing anything\u2014he's gone. Heart no good\u2014and that fluid he got in his arm must have been bad stuff. I don't know what it is.\"\n\nA kind of numbness seemed to fall on all the company. New death in the chamber of death! Only Steve Barbour thought to bring up Thorndike's last choking words. Was he surely dead, when he himself had said he might falsely seem so? Wouldn't it be better to wait a while and see what would happen? And for that matter, what harm would it do if Doc Pratt were to give Tom Sprague another looking over before burial?\n\nCrazy Johnny was moaning, and had flung himself on Thorndike's body like a faithful dog. \"Don't ye bury him, don't ye bury him! He ain't dead no more nor Lige Hopkins's dog nor Deacon Leavitt's calf was when he shot 'em full. He's got some stuff he puts into ye to make ye seem like dead when ye ain't! Ye seem like dead but ye know everything what's a-goin' on, and the next day ye come to as good as ever. Don't ye bury him\u2014he'll come to under the earth an' he can't scratch up! He's a good man, an' not like Tom Sprague. Hope to Gawd Tom scratches an' chokes for hours an' hours....\"\n\nBut no one save Barbour was paying any attention to poor Johnny. Indeed, what Steve himself had said had evidently fallen on deaf ears. Uncertainty was everywhere. Old Doc Pratt was applying final tests and mumbling about death certificate blanks, and unctuous Elder Atwood was suggesting that something be done about a double interment. With Thorndike dead there was no undertaker this side of Rutland, and it would mean a terrible expense if one were to be brought from there, and if Thorndike were not embalmed in this hot June weather\u2014well, one couldn't tell. And there were no relatives or friends to be critical unless Sophie chose to be\u2014but Sophie was on the other side of the room, staring silently, fixedly, and almost morbidly into her brother's coffin.\n\nDeacon Leavitt tried to restore a semblance of decorum, and had poor Thorndike carried across the hall to the sitting-room, meanwhile sending Zenas Wells and Walter Perkins over to the undertaker's house for a coffin of the right size. The key was in Henry's trousers pocket. Johnny continued to whine and paw at the body, and Elder Atwood busied himself with inquiring about Thorndike's denomination\u2014for Henry had not attended local services. When it was decided that his folks in Rutland\u2014all dead now\u2014had been Baptists, the Reverend Silas decided that Deacon Leavitt had better offer the brief prayer.\n\nIt was a gala day for the funeral-fanciers of Stillwater and vicinity. Even Luella had recovered enough to stay. Gossip, murmured and whispered, buzzed busily while a few composing touches were given to Thorndike's cooling, stiffening form. Johnny had been cuffed out of the house, as most agreed he should have been in the first place, but his distant howls were now and then wafted gruesomely in.\n\nWhen the body was encoffined and laid out beside that of Thomas Sprague, the silent, almost frightening-looking Sophie gazed intently at it as she had gazed at her brother's. She had not uttered a word for a dangerously long time, and the mixed expression on her face was past all describing or interpreting. As the others withdrew to leave her alone with the dead she managed to find a sort of mechanical speech, but no one could make out the words, and she seemed to be talking first to one body and then the other.\n\nAnd now, with what would seem to an outsider the acme of gruesome unconscious comedy, the whole funeral mummery of the afternoon was listlessly repeated. Again the organ wheezed, again the choir screeched and scraped, again a droning incantation arose, and again the morbidly curious spectators filed past a macabre object\u2014this time a dual array of mortuary repose. Some of the more sensitive people shivered at the whole proceeding, and again Stephen Barbour felt an underlying note of eldritch horror and daemoniac abnormality. God, how lifelike both of those corpses were... and how in earnest poor Thorndike had been about not wanting to be judged dead... and how he hated Tom Sprague... but what could one do in the face of common sense\u2014a dead man was a dead man, and there was old Doc Pratt with his years of experience... if nobody else bothered, why should one bother oneself?... Whatever Tom had got he had probably deserved... and if Henry had done anything to him, the score was even now... well, Sophie was free at last....\n\nAs the peering procession moved at last toward the hall and the outer door, Sophie was alone with the dead once more. Elder Atwood was out in the road talking to the hearse-driver from Lee's livery stable, and Deacon Leavitt was arranging for a double quota of pall-bearers. Luckily the hearse would hold two coffins. No hurry\u2014Ed Plummer and Ethan Stone were going ahead with shovels to dig the second grave. There would be three livery hacks and any number of private rigs in the cavalcade\u2014no use trying to keep the crowd away from the graves.\n\nThen came that frantic scream from the parlour where Sophie and the bodies were. Its suddenness almost paralysed the crowd and brought back the same sensation which had surged up when Luella had screamed and fainted. Steve Barbour and Deacon Leavitt started to go in, but before they could enter the house Sophie was bursting forth, sobbing and gasping about \"That face at the window!... that face at the window!...\"\n\nAt the same time a wild-eyed figure rounded the corner of the house, removing all mystery from Sophie's dramatic cry. It was, very obviously, the face's owner\u2014poor crazy Johnny, who began to leap up and down, pointing at Sophie and shrieking, \"She knows! She knows! I seen it in her face when she looked at 'em and talked to 'em! She knows, and she's a-lettin' 'em go down in the earth to scratch an' claw for air.... But they'll talk to her so's she kin hear 'em... they'll talk to her, an' appear to her... and some day they'll come back an' git her!\"\n\nZenas Wells dragged the shrieking half-wit to a woodshed behind the house and bolted him in as best he could. His screams and poundings could be heard at a distance, but nobody paid him any further attention. The procession was made up, and with Sophie in the first hack it slowly covered the short distance past the village to the Swamp Hollow burying-ground.\n\nElder Atwood made appropriate remarks as Thomas Sprague was laid to rest, and by the time he was through, Ed and Ethan had finished Thorndike's grave on the other side of the cemetery\u2014to which the crowd presently shifted. Deacon Leavitt then spoke ornamentally, and the lowering process was repeated. People had begun to drift off in knots, and the clatter of receding buggies and carry-alls was quite universal, when the shovels began to fly again. As the earth thudded down on the coffin-lids, Thorndike's first, Steve Barbour noticed the queer expressions flitting over Sophie Sprague's face. He couldn't keep track of them all, but behind the rest there seemed to lurk a sort of wry, perverse, half-suppressed look of vague triumph. He shook his head.\n\nZenas had run back and let crazy Johnny out of the woodshed before Sophie got home, and the poor fellow at once made frantically for the graveyard. He arrived before the shovelmen were through, and while many of the curious mourners were still lingering about. What he shouted into Tom Sprague's partly filled grave, and how he clawed at the loose earth of Thorndike's freshly finished mound across the cemetery, surviving spectators still shudder to recall. Jotham Blake, the constable, had to take him back to the town farm by force, and his screams waked dreadful echoes.\n\nThis is where Fred Peck usually leaves off the story. What more, he asks, is there to tell? It was a gloomy tragedy, and one can scarcely wonder that Sophie grew queer after that. That is all one hears if the hour is so late that old Calvin Wheeler has tottered home, but when he is still around he breaks in again with that damnably suggestive and insidious whisper. Sometimes those who hear him dread to pass either the shuttered house or the graveyard afterward, especially after dark.\n\n\"Heh, heh... Fred was only a little shaver then, and don't remember no more than half of what was goin' on! You want to know why Sophie keeps her house shuttered, and why crazy Johnny still keeps a-talkin' to the dead and a-shoutin' at Sophie's windows? Well, sir, I don't know's I know all there is to know, but I hear what I hear.\"\n\nHere the old man ejects his cud of tobacco and leans forward to buttonhole the listener.\n\n\"It was that same night, mind ye\u2014toward mornin', and just eight hours after them burials\u2014when we heard the first scream from Sophie's house. Woke us all up\u2014Steve and Emily Barbour and me and Matildy goes over hot-footin', all in night gear, and finds Sophie all dressed and dead fainted on the settin'-room floor. Lucky she hadn't locked the door. When we got her to she was shakin' like a leaf, and wouldn't let on by so much as a word what was ailin' her. Matildy and Emily done what they could to quiet her down, but Steve whispered things to me as didn't make me none too easy. Come about an hour when we allowed we'd be goin' home soon, that Sophie she begun to tip her head on one side like she was a-listenin' to somethin'. Then on a sudden she screamed again, and keeled over in another faint.\n\n\"Well, sir, I'm tellin' what I'm tellin', and won't do no guessin' like Steve Barbour would a done if he dared. He always was the greatest hand for hintin' things... died ten years ago of pneumony....\n\n\"What we heard so faint-like was just poor crazy Johnny, of course. 'Taint more than a mile to the buryin'-ground, and he must a got out of the window where they'd locked him up at the town farm\u2014even if Constable Blake says he didn't get out that night. From that day to this he hangs around them graves a-talkin' to the both of them\u2014cussin' and kickin' at Tom's mound, and puttin' posies and things on Henry's. And when he ain't a-doin' that he's hangin' around Sophie's shuttered windows howlin' about what's a-comin' soon to git her.\n\n\"She wouldn't never go near the buryin'-ground, and now she won't come out of the house at all nor see nobody. Got to sayin' there was a curse on Stillwater\u2014and I'm dinged if she ain't half right, the way things is a-goin' to pieces these days. There certainly was somethin' queer about Sophie right along. Once when Sally Hopkins was a-callin' on her\u2014in '97 or '98, I think it was\u2014there was an awful rattlin' at her winders\u2014and Johnny was safe locked up at the time\u2014at least, so Constable Dodge swore up and down. But I ain't takin' no stock in their stories about noises every seventeenth of June, or about faint shinin' figures a-tryin' Sophie's door and winders every black mornin' about two o'clock.\n\n\"You see, it was about two o'clock in the mornin' that Sophie heard the sounds and keeled over twice that first night after the buryin'. Steve and me, and Matildy and Emily, heard the second lot, faint as it was, just like I told you. And I'm a-tellin' you again as how it must a been crazy Johnny over to the buryin'-ground, let Jotham Blake claim what he will. There ain't no tellin' the sound of a man's voice so far off, and with our heads full of nonsense it ain't no wonder we thought there was two voices\u2014and voices that hadn't ought to be speakin' at all.\n\n\"Steve, he claimed to have heard more than I did. I verily believe he took some stock in ghosts. Matildy and Emily was so scared they didn't remember what they heard. And curious enough, nobody else in town\u2014if anybody was awake at the ungodly hour\u2014never said nothin' about hearin' no sounds at all.\n\n\"Whatever it was, was so faint it might have been the wind if there hadn't been words. I made out a few, but don't want to say as I'd back up all Steve claimed to have caught....\n\n\"'She-devil'... 'all the time'... 'Henry'... and 'alive' was plain... and so was 'you know'... 'said you'd stand by'... 'get rid of him' and 'bury me'... in a kind of changed voice.... Then there was that awful 'comin' again some day'\u2014in a death-like squawk... but you can't tell me Johnny couldn't have made those sounds....\n\n\"Hey, you! What's takin' you off in such a hurry? Mebbe there's more I could tell you if I had a mind....\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Horror in the Museum by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIt was languid curiosity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers' Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud's were shewn, and he had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it. Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were present\u2014Landru, Dr. Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey, endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de Rais and Marquis de Sade\u2014but there were other things which had made him breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the closing bell. The man who had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary mountebank. There was imagination\u2014even a kind of diseased genius\u2014in some of this stuff.\n\nLater he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud staff, but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There were aspersions on his sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret worship\u2014though latterly his success with his own basement museum had dulled the edge of some criticisms while sharpening the insidious point of others. Teratology and the iconography of nightmare were his hobbies, and even he had had the prudence to screen off some of his worst effigies in a special alcove for adults only. It was this alcove which had fascinated Jones so much. There were lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could spawn, moulded with devilish skill, and coloured in a horribly lifelike fashion.\n\nSome were the figures of well-known myth\u2014gorgons, chimaeras, dragons, cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend\u2014black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumoured blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. But the worst were wholly original with Rogers, and represented shapes which no tale of antiquity had ever dared to suggest. Several were hideous parodies on forms of organic life we know, while others seemed taken from feverish dreams of other planets and other galaxies. The wilder paintings of Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few\u2014but nothing could suggest the effect of poignant, loathsome terror created by their great size and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by the diabolically clever lighting conditions under which they were exhibited.\n\nStephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had sought out Rogers himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the vaulted museum chamber\u2014an evil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and horizontal in the brick wall on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden courtyard. It was here that the images were repaired\u2014here, too, where some of them had been made. Waxen arms, legs, heads, and torsos lay in grotesque array on various benches, while on high tiers of shelves matted wigs, ravenous-looking teeth, and glassy, staring eyes were indiscriminately scattered. Costumes of all sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of flesh-coloured wax-cakes and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of every description. In the centre of the room was a large melting-furnace used to prepare the wax for moulding, its fire-box topped by a huge iron container on hinges, with a spout which permitted the pouring of melted wax with the merest touch of a finger.\n\nOther things in the dismal crypt were less describable\u2014isolated parts of problematical entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of delirium. At one end was a door of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock and with a very peculiar symbol painted over it. Jones, who had once had access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered involuntarily as he recognised that symbol. This showman, he reflected, must indeed be a person of disconcertingly wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.\n\nNor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint him. The man was tall, lean, and rather unkempt, with large black eyes which gazed combustively from a pallid and usually stubble-covered face. He did not resent Jones's intrusion, but seemed to welcome the chance of unburdening himself to an interested person. His voice was of singular depth and resonance, and harboured a sort of repressed intensity bordering on the feverish. Jones did not wonder that many had thought him mad.\n\nWith every successive call\u2014and such calls became a habit as the weeks went by\u2014Jones had found Rogers more communicative and confidential. From the first there had been hints of strange faiths and practices on the showman's part, and later on these hints expanded into tales\u2014despite a few odd corroborative photographs\u2014whose extravagance was almost comic. It was some time in June, on a night when Jones had brought a bottle of good whiskey and plied his host somewhat freely, that the really demented talk first appeared. Before that there had been wild enough stories\u2014accounts of mysterious trips to Thibet, the African interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known islands of the South Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous and half-fabulous books as the prehistoric Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants attributed to malign and non-human Leng\u2014but nothing in all this had been so unmistakably insane as what had cropped out that June evening under the spell of the whiskey.\n\nTo be plain, Rogers began making vague boasts of having found certain things in Nature that no one had found before, and of having brought back tangible evidences of such discoveries. According to his bibulous harangue, he had gone farther than anyone else in interpreting the obscure and primal books he studied, and had been directed by them to certain remote places where strange survivals are hidden\u2014survivals of aeons and life-cycles earlier than mankind, and in some cases connected with other dimensions and other worlds, communication with which was frequent in the forgotten pre-human days. Jones marvelled at the fancy which could conjure up such notions, and wondered just what Rogers' mental history had been. Had his work amidst the morbid grotesqueries of Madame Tussaud's been the start of his imaginative flights, or was the tendency innate, so that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations? At any rate, the man's work was very closely linked with his notions. Even now there was no mistaking the trend of his blackest hints about the nightmare monstrosities in the screened-off \"Adults only\" alcove. Heedless of ridicule, he was trying to imply that not all of these daemoniac abnormalities were artificial.\n\nIt was Jones's frank scepticism and amusement at these irresponsible claims which broke up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was clear, took himself very seriously; for he now became morose and resentful, continuing to tolerate Jones only through a dogged urge to break down his wall of urbane and complacent incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of rites and sacrifices to nameless elder gods continued, and now and then Rogers would lead his guest to one of the hideous blasphemies in the screened-off alcove and point out features difficult to reconcile with even the finest human craftsmanship. Jones continued his visits through sheer fascination, though he knew he had forfeited his host's regard. At times he would try to humour Rogers with pretended assent to some mad hint or assertion, but the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived by such tactics.\n\nThe tension came to a head later in September. Jones had casually dropped into the museum one afternoon, and was wandering through the dim corridors whose horrors were now so familiar, when he heard a very peculiar sound from the general direction of Rogers' workroom. Others heard it, too, and started nervously as the echoes reverberated through the great vaulted basement. The three attendants exchanged odd glances; and one of them, a dark, taciturn, foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers as a repairer and assistant designer, smiled in a way which seemed to puzzle his colleagues and which grated very harshly on some facet of Jones's sensibilities. It was the yelp or scream of a dog, and was such a sound as could be made only under conditions of the utmost fright and agony combined. Its stark, anguished frenzy was appalling to hear, and in this setting of grotesque abnormality it held a double hideousness. Jones remembered that no dogs were allowed in the museum.\n\nHe was about to go to the door leading into the workroom, when the dark attendant stopped him with a word and a gesture. Mr. Rogers, the man said in a soft, somewhat accented voice at once apologetic and vaguely sardonic, was out, and there were standing orders to admit no one to the workroom during his absence. As for that yelp, it was undoubtedly something out in the courtyard behind the museum. This neighbourhood was full of stray mongrels, and their fights were sometimes shockingly noisy. There were no dogs in any part of the museum. But if Mr. Jones wished to see Mr. Rogers he might find him just before closing-time.\n\nAfter this Jones climbed the old stone steps to the street outside and examined the squalid neighbourhood curiously. The leaning, decrepit buildings\u2014once dwellings but now largely shops and warehouses\u2014were very ancient indeed. Some of them were of a gabled type seeming to go back to Tudor times, and a faint miasmatic stench hung subtly about the whole region. Beside the dingy house whose basement held the museum was a low archway pierced by a dark cobbled alley, and this Jones entered in a vague wish to find the courtyard behind the workroom and settle the affair of the dog more comfortably in his mind. The courtyard was dim in the late afternoon light, hemmed in by rear walls even uglier and more intangibly menacing than the crumbling street facades of the evil old houses. Not a dog was in sight, and Jones wondered how the aftermath of such a frantic turmoil could have completely vanished so soon.\n\nDespite the assistant's statement that no dog had been in the museum, Jones glanced nervously at the three small windows of the basement workroom\u2014narrow, horizontal rectangles close to the grass-grown pavement, with grimy panes that stared repulsively and incuriously like the eyes of dead fish. To their left a worn flight of steps led to an opaque and heavily bolted door. Some impulse urged him to crouch low on the damp, broken cobblestones and peer in, on the chance that the thick green shades, worked by long cords that hung down to a reachable level, might not be drawn. The outer surfaces were thick with dirt, but as he rubbed them with his handkerchief he saw there was no obscuring curtain in the way of his vision.\n\nSo shadowed was the cellar from the inside that not much could be made out, but the grotesque working paraphernalia now and then loomed up spectrally as Jones tried each of the windows in turn. It seemed evident at first that no one was within; yet when he peered through the extreme right-hand window\u2014the one nearest the entrance alley\u2014he saw a glow of light at the farther end of the apartment which made him pause in bewilderment. There was no reason why any light should be there. It was an inner side of the room, and he could not recall any gas or electric fixture near that point. Another look defined the glow as a large vertical rectangle, and a thought occurred to him. It was in that direction that he had always noticed the heavy plank door with the abnormally large padlock\u2014the door which was never opened, and above which was crudely smeared that hideous cryptic symbol from the fragmentary records of forbidden elder magic. It must be open now\u2014and there was a light inside. All his former speculations as to where that door led, and as to what lay behind it, were now renewed with trebly disquieting force.\n\nJones wandered aimlessly around the dismal locality till close to six o'clock, when he returned to the museum to make the call on Rogers. He could hardly tell why he wished so especially to see the man just then, but there must have been some subconscious misgivings about that terribly unplaceable canine scream of the afternoon, and about the glow of light in that disturbing and usually unopened inner doorway with the heavy padlock. The attendants were leaving as he arrived, and he thought that Orabona\u2014the dark foreign-looking assistant\u2014eyed him with something like sly, repressed amusement. He did not relish that look\u2014even though he had seen the fellow turn it on his employer many times.\n\nThe vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in its desertion, but he strode quickly through it and rapped at the door of the office and workroom. Response was slow in coming, though there were footsteps inside. Finally, in response to a second knock, the lock rattled, and the ancient six-panelled portal creaked reluctantly open to reveal the slouching, feverish-eyed form of George Rogers. From the first it was clear that the showman was in an unusual mood. There was a curious mixture of reluctance and actual gloating in his welcome, and his talk at once veered to extravagances of the most hideous and incredible sort.\n\nSurviving elder gods\u2014nameless sacrifices\u2014the other than artificial nature of some of the alcove horrors\u2014all the usual boasts, but uttered in a tone of peculiarly increasing confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected, the poor fellow's madness was gaining on him. From time to time Rogers would send furtive glances toward the heavy, padlocked inner door at the end of the room, or toward a piece of coarse burlap on the floor not far from it, beneath which some small object appeared to be lying. Jones grew more nervous as the moments passed, and began to feel as hesitant about mentioning the afternoon's oddities as he had formerly been anxious to do so.\n\nRogers' sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitement of his fevered rambling.\n\n\"Do you remember,\" he shouted, \"what I told you about that ruined city in Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit I'd been there when you saw the photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer in darkness out of wax. If you'd seen it writhing in the underground pools as I did....\n\n\"Well, this is bigger still. I never told you about this, because I wanted to work out the later parts before making any claim. When you see the snapshots you'll know the geography couldn't have been faked, and I fancy I have another way of proving that It isn't any waxed concoction of mine. You've never seen it, for the experiments wouldn't let me keep It on exhibition.\"\n\nThe showman glanced queerly at the padlocked door.\n\n\"It all comes from that long ritual in the eighth Pnakotic fragment. When I got it figured out I saw it could have only one meaning. There were things in the north before the land of Lomar\u2014before mankind existed\u2014and this was one of them. It took us all the way to Alaska, and up the Noatak from Fort Morton, but the thing was there as we knew it would be. Great Cyclopean ruins, acres of them. There was less left than we had hoped for, but after three million years what could one expect? And weren't the Esquimau legends all in the right direction? We couldn't get one of the beggars to go with us, and had to sledge all the way back to Nome for Americans. Orabona was no good up in that climate\u2014it made him sullen and hateful.\n\n\"I'll tell you later how we found It. When we got the ice blasted out of the pylons of the central ruin the stairway was just as we knew it would be. Some carvings still there, and it was no trouble keeping the Yankees from following us in. Orabona shivered like a leaf\u2014you'd never think it from the damned insolent way he struts around here. He knew enough of the Elder Lore to be properly afraid. The eternal light was gone, but our torches shewed enough. We saw the bones of others who had been before us\u2014aeons ago, when the climate was warm. Some of these bones were of things you couldn't even imagine. At the third level down we found the ivory throne the fragments said so much about\u2014and I may as well tell you it wasn't empty.\n\n\"The thing on that throne didn't move\u2014and we knew then that It needed the nourishment of sacrifice. But we didn't want to wake It then. Better to get It to London first. Orabona and I went to the surface for the big box, but when we had packed it we couldn't get It up the three flights of steps. These steps weren't made for human beings, and their size bothered us. Anyway, it was devilish heavy. We had to have the Americans down to get It out. They weren't anxious to go into the place, but of course the worst thing was safely inside the box. We told them it was a batch of ivory carvings\u2014archaeological stuff; and after seeing the carved throne they probably believed us. It's a wonder they didn't suspect hidden treasure and demand a share. They must have told queer tales around Nome later on; though I doubt if they ever went back to those ruins, even for the ivory throne.\"\n\nRogers paused, felt around in his desk, and produced an envelope of good-sized photographic prints. Extracting one and laying it face down before him, he handed the rest to Jones. The set was certainly an odd one: ice-clad hills, dog sledges, men in furs, and vast tumbled ruins against a background of snow\u2014ruins whose bizarre outlines and enormous stone blocks could hardly be accounted for. One flashlight view shewed an incredible interior chamber with wild carvings and a curious throne whose proportion could not have been designed for a human occupant. The carvings on the gigantic masonry\u2014high walls and peculiar vaulting overhead\u2014were mainly symbolic, and involved both wholly unknown designs and certain hieroglyphs darkly cited in obscene legends. Over the throne loomed the same dreadful symbol which was now painted on the workroom wall above the padlocked plank door. Jones darted a nervous glance at the closed portal. Assuredly, Rogers had been to strange places and had seen strange things. Yet this mad interior picture might easily be a fraud\u2014taken from a very clever stage setting. One must not be too credulous. But Rogers was continuing:\n\n\"Well, we shipped the box from Nome and got to London without any trouble. That was the first time we'd ever brought back anything that had a chance of coming alive. I didn't put It on display, because there were more important things to do for It. It needed the nourishment of sacrifice, for It was a god. Of course I couldn't get It the sort of sacrifices which It used to have in Its day, for such things don't exist now. But there were other things which might do. The blood is the life, you know. Even the lemurs and elementals that are older than the earth will come when the blood of men or beasts is offered under the right conditions.\"\n\nThe expression on the narrator's face was growing very alarming and repulsive, so that Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair. Rogers seemed to notice his guest's nervousness, and continued with a distinctly evil smile.\n\n\"It was last year that I got It, and ever since then I've been trying rites and sacrifices. Orabona hasn't been much help, for he was always against the idea of waking It. He hates It\u2014probably because he's afraid of what It will come to mean. He carries a pistol all the time to protect himself\u2014fool, as if there were human protection against It! If I ever see him draw that pistol, I'll strangle him. He wanted me to kill It and make an effigy of It. But I've stuck by my plans, and I'm coming out on top in spite of all the cowards like Orabona and damned sniggering sceptics like you, Jones! I've chanted the rites and made certain sacrifices, and last week the transition came. The sacrifice was\u2014received and enjoyed!\"\n\nRogers actually licked his lips, while Jones held himself uneasily rigid. The showman paused and rose, crossing the room to the piece of burlap at which he had glanced so often. Bending down, he took hold of one corner as he spoke again.\n\n\"You've laughed enough at my work\u2014now it's time for you to get some facts. Orabona tells me you heard a dog screaming around here this afternoon. Do you know what that meant?\"\n\nJones started. For all his curiosity he would have been glad to get out without further light on the point which had so puzzled him. But Rogers was inexorable, and began to lift the square of burlap. Beneath it lay a crushed, almost shapeless mass which Jones was slow to classify. Was it a once-living thing which some agency had flattened, sucked dry of blood, punctured in a thousand places, and wrung into a limp, broken-boned heap of grotesqueness? After a moment Jones realised what it must be. It was what was left of a dog\u2014a dog, perhaps of considerable size and whitish colour. Its breed was past recognition, for distortion had come in nameless and hideous ways. Most of the hair was burned off as by some pungent acid, and the exposed, bloodless skin was riddled by innumerable circular wounds or incisions. The form of torture necessary to cause such results was past imagining.\n\nElectrified with a pure loathing which conquered his mounting disgust, Jones sprang up with a cry.\n\n\"You damned sadist\u2014you madman\u2014you do a thing like this and dare to speak to a decent man!\"\n\nRogers dropped the burlap with a malignant sneer and faced his oncoming guest. His words held an unnatural calm.\n\n\"Why, you fool, do you think I did this? Let us admit that the results are unbeautiful from our limited human standpoint. What of it? It is not human and does not pretend to be. To sacrifice is merely to offer. I gave the dog to It. What happened is Its work, not mine. It needed the nourishment of the offering, and took it in Its own way. But let me shew you what It looks like.\"\n\nAs Jones stood hesitating, the speaker returned to his desk and took up the photograph he had laid face down without shewing. Now he extended it with a curious look. Jones took it and glanced at it in an almost mechanical way. After a moment the visitor's glance became sharper and more absorbed, for the utterly satanic force of the object depicted had an almost hypnotic effect. Certainly, Rogers had outdone himself in modelling the eldritch nightmare which the camera had caught. The thing was a work of sheer, infernal genius, and Jones wondered how the public would react when it was placed on exhibition. So hideous a thing had no right to exist\u2014probably the mere contemplation of it, after it was done, had completed the unhinging of its maker's mind and led him to worship it with brutal sacrifices. Only a stout sanity could resist the insidious suggestion that the blasphemy was\u2014or had once been\u2014some morbid and exotic form of actual life.\n\nThe thing in the picture squatted or was balanced on what appeared to be a clever reproduction of the monstrously carved throne in the other curious photograph. To describe it with any ordinary vocabulary would be impossible, for nothing even roughly corresponding to it has ever come within the imagination of sane mankind. It represented something meant perhaps to be roughly connected with the vertebrates of this planet\u2014though one could not be too sure of that. Its bulk was Cyclopean, for even squatted it towered to almost twice the height of Orabona, who was shewn beside it. Looking sharply, one might trace its approximations toward the bodily features of the higher vertebrates.\n\nThere was an almost globular torso, with six long, sinuous limbs terminating in crab-like claws. From the upper end a subsidiary globe bulged forward bubble-like; its triangle of three staring, fishy eyes, its foot-long and evidently flexible proboscis, and a distended lateral system analogous to gills, suggesting that it was a head. Most of the body was covered with what at first appeared to be fur, but which on closer examination proved to be a dense growth of dark, slender tentacles or sucking filaments, each tipped with a mouth suggesting the head of an asp. On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be longer and thicker, and marked with spiral stripes\u2014suggesting the traditional serpent-locks of Medusa. To say that such a thing could have an expression seems paradoxical; yet Jones felt that that triangle of bulging fish-eyes and that obliquely poised proboscis all bespoke a blend of hate, greed, and sheer cruelty incomprehensible to mankind because mixed with other emotions not of the world or this solar system. Into this bestial abnormality, he reflected, Rogers must have poured at once all his malignant insanity and all his uncanny sculptural genius. The thing was incredible\u2014and yet the photograph proved that it existed.\n\nRogers interrupted his reveries.\n\n\"Well\u2014what do you think of It? Now do you wonder what crushed the dog and sucked it dry with a million mouths? It needed nourishment\u2014and It will need more. It is a god, and I am the first priest of Its latter-day hierarchy. I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!\"\n\nJones lowered the photograph in disgust and pity.\n\n\"See here, Rogers, this won't do. There are limits, you know. It's a great piece of work, and all that, but it isn't good for you. Better not see it any more\u2014let Orabona break it up, and try to forget about it. And let me tear this beastly picture up, too.\"\n\nWith a snarl, Rogers snatched the photograph and returned it to the desk.\n\n\"Idiot\u2014you\u2014and you still think It's all a fraud! You still think I made It, and you still think my figures are nothing but lifeless wax! Why, damn you, you're a worse clod than a wax image yourself! But I've got proof this time, and you're going to know! Not just now, for It is resting after the sacrifice\u2014but later. Oh, yes\u2014you will not doubt the power of It then.\"\n\nAs Rogers glanced toward the padlocked inner door Jones retrieved his hat and stick from a nearby bench.\n\n\"Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must be going now, but I'll call around tomorrow afternoon. Think my advice over and see if it doesn't sound sensible. Ask Orabona what he thinks, too.\"\n\nRogers actually bared his teeth in wild-beast fashion.\n\n\"Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all! Afraid, for all your bold talk! You say the effigies are only wax, and yet you run away when I begin to prove that they aren't. You're like the fellows who take my standing bet that they daren't spend the night in the museum\u2014they come boldly enough, but after an hour they shriek and hammer to get out! Want me to ask Orabona, eh? You two\u2014always against me! You want to break down the coming earthly reign of It!\"\n\nJones preserved his calm.\n\n\"No, Rogers\u2014there's nobody against you. And I'm not afraid of your figures, either, much as I admire your skill. But we're both a bit nervous tonight, and I fancy some rest will do us good.\"\n\nAgain Rogers checked his guest's departure.\n\n\"Not afraid, eh?\u2014then why are you so anxious to go? Look here\u2014do you or don't you dare to stay alone here in the dark? What's your hurry if you don't believe in It?\"\n\nSome new idea seemed to have struck Rogers, and Jones eyed him closely.\n\n\"Why, I've no special hurry\u2014but what would be gained by my staying here alone? What would it prove? My only objection is that it isn't very comfortable for sleeping. What good would it do either of us?\"\n\nThis time it was Jones who was struck with an idea. He continued in a tone of conciliation.\n\n\"See here, Rogers\u2014I've just asked you what it would prove if I stayed, when we both know. It would prove that your effigies are just effigies, and that you oughtn't to let your imagination go the way it's been going lately. Suppose I do stay. If I stick it out till morning, will you agree to take a new view of things\u2014go on a vacation for three months or so and let Orabona destroy that new thing of yours? Come, now\u2014isn't that fair?\"\n\nThe expression on the showman's face was hard to read. It was obvious that he was thinking quickly, and that of sundry conflicting emotions, malign triumph was getting the upper hand. His voice held a choking quality as he replied.\n\n\"Fair enough! If you do stick it out, I'll take your advice. But stick you must. We'll go out for dinner and come back. I'll lock you in the display room and go home. In the morning I'll come down ahead of Orabona\u2014he comes half an hour before the rest\u2014and see how you are. But don't try it unless you are very sure of your scepticism. Others have backed out\u2014you have that chance. And I suppose a pounding on the outer door would always bring a constable. You may not like it so well after a while\u2014you'll be in the same building, though not in the same room with It.\"\n\nAs they left the rear door into the dingy courtyard, Rogers took with him the piece of burlap\u2014weighted with a gruesome burden. Near the centre of the court was a manhole, whose cover the showman lifted quietly, and with a shuddersome suggestion of familiarity. Burlap and all, the burden went down to the oblivion of a cloacal labyrinth. Jones shuddered, and almost shrank from the gaunt figure at his side as they emerged into the street.\n\nBy unspoken mutual consent, they did not dine together, but agreed to meet in front of the museum at eleven.\n\nJones hailed a cab, and breathed more freely when he had crossed Waterloo Bridge and was approaching the brilliantly lighted Strand. He dined at a quiet caf\u00e9, and subsequently went to his home in Portland Place to bathe and get a few things. Idly he wondered what Rogers was doing. He had heard that the man had a vast, dismal house in the Walworth Road, full of obscure and forbidden books, occult paraphernalia, and wax images which he did not choose to place on exhibition. Orabona, he understood, lived in separate quarters in the same house.\n\nAt eleven Jones found Rogers waiting by the basement door in Southwark Street. Their words were few, but each seemed taut with a menacing tension. They agreed that the vaulted exhibition room alone should form the scene of the vigil, and Rogers did not insist that the watcher sit in the special adult alcove of supreme horrors. The showman, having extinguished all the lights with switches in the workroom, locked the door of that crypt with one of the keys on his crowded ring. Without shaking hands he passed out the street door, locked it after him, and stamped up the worn steps to the sidewalk outside. As his tread receded, Jones realised that the long, tedious vigil had commenced." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Later, in the utter blackness of the great arched cellar, Jones cursed the childish naivet\u00e9 which had brought him there. For the first half-hour he had kept flashing on his pocket-light at intervals, but now just sitting in the dark on one of the visitors' benches had become a more nerve-racking thing. Every time the beam shot out it lighted up some morbid, grotesque object\u2014a guillotine, a nameless hybrid monster, a pasty-bearded face crafty with evil, a body with red torrents streaming from a severed throat. Jones knew that no sinister reality was attached to these things, but after that first half-hour he preferred not to see them.\n\nWhy he had bothered to humour that madman he could scarcely imagine. It would have been much simpler merely to have let him alone, or to have called in a mental specialist. Probably, he reflected, it was the fellow-feeling of one artist for another. There was so much genius in Rogers that he deserved every possible chance to be helped quietly out of his growing mania. Any man who could imagine and construct the incredibly lifelike things that he had produced was surely not far from actual greatness. He had the fancy of a Sime or a Dor\u00e9 joined to the minute, scientific craftsmanship of a Blatschka. Indeed, he had done for the world of nightmare what the Blatschkas with their marvellously accurate plant models of finely wrought and coloured glass had done for the world of botany.\n\nAt midnight the strokes of a distant clock filtered through the darkness, and Jones felt cheered by the message from a still-surviving outside world. The vaulted museum chamber was like a tomb\u2014ghastly in its utter solitude. Even a mouse would be cheering company; yet Rogers had once boasted that\u2014for \"certain reasons\", as he said\u2014no mice or even insects ever came near the place. That was very curious, yet it seemed to be true. The deadness and silence were virtually complete. If only something would make a sound! He shuffled his feet, and the echoes came spectrally out of the absolute stillness. He coughed, but there was something mocking in the staccato reverberations. He could not, he vowed, begin talking to himself. That meant nervous disintegration. Time seemed to pass with abnormal and disconcerting slowness. He could have sworn that hours had elapsed since he last flashed the light on his watch, yet here was only the stroke of midnight.\n\nHe wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in the darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they responded to faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions pressing on our own. Rogers often speculated about such things.\n\nThe floating specks of light in his blackness-drowned eyes seemed inclined to take on curious symmetries of pattern and motion. He had often wondered about those strange rays from the unplumbed abyss which scintillate before us in the absence of all earthly illumination, but he had never known any that behaved just as these were behaving. They lacked the restful aimlessness of ordinary light-specks\u2014suggesting some will and purpose remote from any terrestrial conception.\n\nThen there was that suggestion of odd stirrings. Nothing was open, yet in spite of the general draughtlessness Jones felt that the air was not uniformly quiet. There were intangible variations in pressure\u2014not quite decided enough to suggest the loathsome pawings of unseen elementals. It was abnormally chilly, too. He did not like any of this. The air tasted salty, as if it were mixed with the brine of dark subterrene waters, and there was a bare hint of some odour of ineffable mustiness. In the daytime he had never noticed that the waxen figures had an odour. Even now that half-received hint was not the way wax figures ought to smell. It was more like the faint smell of specimens in a natural-history museum. Curious, in view of Rogers' claims that his figures were not all artificial\u2014indeed, it was probably that claim which made one's imagination conjure up the olfactory suspicion. One must guard against excesses of the imagination\u2014had not such things driven poor Rogers mad?\n\nBut the utter loneliness of this place was frightful. Even the distant chimes seemed to come from across cosmic gulfs. It made Jones think of that insane picture which Rogers had shewed him\u2014the wildly carved chamber with the cryptic throne which the fellow had claimed was part of a three-million-year-old ruin in the shunned and inaccessible solitudes of the Arctic. Perhaps Rogers had been to Alaska, but that picture was certainly nothing but stage scenery. It couldn't normally be otherwise, with all that carving and those terrible symbols. And that monstrous shape supposed to have been found on that throne\u2014what a flight of diseased fancy! Jones wondered just how far he actually was from the insane masterpiece in wax\u2014probably it was kept behind that heavy, padlocked plank door leading somewhere out of the workroom. But it would never do to brood about a waxen image. Was not the present room full of such things, some of them scarcely less horrible than the dreadful \"IT\"? And beyond a thin canvas screen on the left was the \"Adults only\" alcove with its nameless phantoms of delirium.\n\nThe proximity of the numberless waxen shapes began to get on Jones's nerves more and more as the quarter-hours wore on. He knew the museum so well that he could not get rid of their usual images even in the total darkness. Indeed, the darkness had the effect of adding to the remembered images certain very disturbing imaginative overtones. The guillotine seemed to creak, and the bearded face of Landru\u2014slayer of his fifty wives\u2014twisted itself into expressions of monstrous menace. From the severed throat of Madame Demers a hideous bubbling sound seemed to emanate, while the headless, legless victim of a trunk murder tried to edge closer and closer on its gory stumps. Jones began shutting his eyes to see if that would dim the images, but found it was useless. Besides, when he shut his eyes the strange, purposeful patterns of light-specks became more disturbingly pronounced.\n\nThen suddenly he began trying to keep the hideous images he had formerly been trying to banish. He tried to keep them because they were giving place to still more hideous ones. In spite of himself his memory began reconstructing the utterly non-human blasphemies that lurked in the obscurer corners, and these lumpish hybrid growths oozed and wriggled toward him as though hunting him down in a circle. Black Tsathoggua moulded itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a long, sinuous line with hundreds of rudimentary feet, and a lean, rubbery night-gaunt spread its wings as if to advance and smother the watcher. Jones braced himself to keep from screaming. He knew he was reverting to the traditional terrors of his childhood, and resolved to use his adult reason to keep the phantoms at bay. It helped a bit, he found, to flash the light again. Frightful as were the images it shewed, these were not as bad as what his fancy called out of the utter blackness.\n\nBut there were drawbacks. Even in the light of his torch he could not help suspecting a slight, furtive trembling on the part of the canvas partition screening off the terrible \"Adults only\" alcove. He knew what lay beyond, and shivered. Imagination called up the shocking form of fabulous Yog-Sothoth\u2014only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. What was this accursed mass slowly floating toward him and bumping on the partition that stood in the way? A small bulge in the canvas far to the right suggested the sharp horn of Gnophkeh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice, that walked sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six. To get this stuff out of his head Jones walked boldly toward the hellish alcove with torch burning steadily. Of course, none of his fears was true. Yet were not the long, facial tentacles of great Cthulhu actually swaying, slowly and insidiously? He knew they were flexible, but he had not realised that the draught caused by his advance was enough to set them in motion.\n\nReturning to his former seat outside the alcove, he shut his eyes and let the symmetrical light-specks do their worst. The distant clock boomed a single stroke. Could it be only one? He flashed the light on his watch and saw that it was precisely that hour. It would be hard indeed waiting for morning. Rogers would be down at about eight o'clock, ahead of even Orabona. It would be light outside in the main basement long before that, but none of it could penetrate here. All the windows in this basement had been bricked up but the three small ones facing the court. A pretty bad wait, all told.\n\nHis ears were getting most of the hallucinations now\u2014for he could swear he heard stealthy, plodding footsteps in the workroom beyond the closed and locked door. He had no business thinking of that unexhibited horror which Rogers called \"It\". The thing was a contamination\u2014it had driven its maker mad, and now even its picture was calling up imaginative terrors. It could not be in the workroom\u2014it was very obviously beyond that padlocked door of heavy planking. Those steps were certainly pure imagination.\n\nThen he thought he heard the key turn in the workroom door. Flashing on his torch, he saw nothing but the ancient six-panelled portal in its proper position. Again he tried darkness and closed eyes, but there followed a harrowing illusion of creaking\u2014not the guillotine this time, but the slow, furtive opening of the workroom door. He would not scream. Once he screamed, he would be lost. There was a sort of padding or shuffling audible now, and it was slowly advancing toward him. He must retain command of himself. Had he not done so when the nameless brain-shapes tried to close in on him? The shuffling crept nearer, and his resolution failed. He did not scream but merely gulped out a challenge.\n\n\"Who goes there? Who are you? What do you want?\"\n\nThere was no answer, but the shuffling kept on. Jones did not know which he feared most to do\u2014turn on his flashlight or stay in the dark while the thing crept upon him. This thing was different, he felt profoundly, from the other terrors of the evening. His fingers and throat worked spasmodically. Silence was impossible, and the suspense of utter blackness was beginning to be the most intolerable of all conditions. Again he cried out hysterically\u2014\"Halt! Who goes there?\"\u2014as he switched on the revealing beams of his torch. Then, paralysed by what he saw, he dropped the flashlight and screamed\u2014not once but many times.\n\nShuffling toward him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form of a black thing not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely upon its frame, and its rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed drunkenly from side to side. Its fore paws were extended, with talons spread wide, and its whole body was taut with murderous malignity despite its utter lack of facial expression. After the screams and the final coming of darkness it leaped, and in a moment had Jones pinned to the floor. There was no struggle, for the watcher had fainted.\n\nJones's fainting spell could not have lasted more than a moment, for the nameless thing was apishly dragging him through the darkness when he began recovering consciousness. What started him fully awake were the sounds which the thing was making\u2014or rather, the voice with which it was making them. That voice was human, and it was familiar. Only one living being could be behind the hoarse, feverish accents which were chanting to an unknown horror.\n\n\"I\u00e4! I\u00e4!\" it was howling. \"I am coming, O Rhan-Tegoth, coming with the nourishment. You have waited long and fed ill, but now you shall have what was promised. That and more, for instead of Orabona it will be one of high degree who had doubted you. You shall crush and drain him, with all his doubts, and grow strong thereby. And ever after among men he shall be shewn as a monument to your glory. Rhan-Tegoth, infinite and invincible, I am your slave and high-priest. You are hungry, and I provide. I read the sign and have led you forth. I shall feed you with blood, and you shall feed me with power. I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!\"\n\nIn an instant all the terrors of the night dropped from Jones like a discarded cloak. He was again master of his mind, for he knew the very earthly and material peril he had to deal with. This was no monster of fable, but a dangerous madman. It was Rogers, dressed in some nightmare covering of his own insane designing, and about to make a frightful sacrifice to the devil-god he had fashioned out of wax. Clearly, he must have entered the workroom from the rear courtyard, donned his disguise, and then advanced to seize his neatly trapped and fear-broken victim. His strength was prodigious, and if he was to be thwarted, one must act quickly. Counting on the madman's confidence in his unconsciousness he determined to take him by surprise, while his grasp was relatively lax. The feel of a threshold told him he was crossing into the pitch-black workroom.\n\nWith the strength of mortal fear Jones made a sudden spring from the half-recumbent posture in which he was being dragged. For an instant he was free of the astonished maniac's hands, and in another instant a lucky lunge in the dark had put his own hands at his captor's weirdly concealed throat. Simultaneously Rogers gripped him again, and without further preliminaries the two were locked in a desperate struggle of life and death. Jones's athletic training, without doubt, was his sole salvation; for his mad assailant, freed from every inhibition of fair play, decency, or even self-preservation, was an engine of savage destruction as formidable as a wolf or panther.\n\nGuttural cries sometimes punctured the hideous tussle in the dark. Blood spurted, clothing ripped, and Jones at last felt the actual throat of the maniac, shorn of its spectral mask. He spoke not a word, but put every ounce of energy into the defence of his life. Rogers kicked, gouged, butted, bit, clawed, and spat\u2014yet found strength to yelp out actual sentences at times. Most of his speech was in a ritualistic jargon full of references to \"It\" or \"Rhan-Tegoth\", and to Jones's overwrought nerves it seemed as if the cries echoed from an infinite distance of daemoniac snortings and bayings. Toward the last they were rolling on the floor, overturning benches or striking against the walls and the brick foundations of the central melting-furnace. Up to the very end Jones could not be certain of saving himself, but chance finally intervened in his favour. A jab of his knee against Rogers' chest produced a general relaxation, and a moment later he knew he had won.\n\nThough hardly able to hold himself up, Jones rose and stumbled about the walls seeking the light-switch\u2014for his flashlight was gone, together with most of his clothing. As he lurched along he dragged his limp opponent with him, fearing a sudden attack when the madman came to. Finding the switch-box, he fumbled till he had the right handle. Then, as the wildly disordered workroom burst into sudden radiance, he set about binding Rogers with such cords and belts as he could easily find. The fellow's disguise\u2014or what was left of it\u2014seemed to be made of a puzzlingly queer sort of leather. For some reason it made Jones's flesh crawl to touch it, and there seemed to be an alien, rusty odour about it. In the normal clothes beneath it was Rogers' key-ring, and this the exhausted victor seized as his final passport to freedom. The shades at the small, slit-like windows were all securely drawn, and he let them remain so.\n\nWashing off the blood of battle at a convenient sink, Jones donned the most ordinary-looking and least ill-fitting clothes he could find on the costume hooks. Testing the door to the courtyard, he found it fastened with a spring-lock which did not require a key from the inside. He kept the key-ring, however, to admit him on his return with aid\u2014for plainly, the thing to do was to call in an alienist. There was no telephone in the museum, but it would not take long to find an all-night restaurant or chemist's shop where one could be had. He had almost opened the door to go when a torrent of hideous abuse from across the room told him that Rogers\u2014whose visible injuries were confined to a long, deep scratch down the left cheek\u2014had regained consciousness.\n\n\"Fool! Spawn of Noth-Yidik and effluvium of K'thun! Son of the dogs that howl in the maelstrom of Azathoth! You would have been sacred and immortal, and now you are betraying It and Its priest! Beware\u2014for It is hungry! It would have been Orabona\u2014that damned treacherous dog ready to turn against me and It\u2014but I give you the first honour instead. Now you must both beware, for It is not gentle without Its priest.\n\n\"I\u00e4! I\u00e4! Vengeance is at hand! Do you know you would have been immortal? Look at the furnace! There is a fire ready to light, and there is wax in the kettle. I would have done with you as I have done with other once-living forms. Hei! You, who have vowed all my effigies are waxen, would have become a waxen effigy yourself! The furnace was all ready! When It had had Its fill, and you were like that dog I shewed you, I would have made your flattened, punctured fragments immortal! Wax would have done it. Haven't you said I'm a great artist? Wax in every pore\u2014wax over every square inch of you\u2014I\u00e4! I\u00e4! And ever after the world would have looked at your mangled carcass and wondered how I ever imagined and made such a thing! Hei! And Orabona would have come next, and others after him\u2014and thus would my waxen family have grown!\n\n\"Dog\u2014do you still think I made all my effigies? Why not say preserved? You know by this time the strange places I've been to, and the strange things I've brought back. Coward\u2014you could never face the dimensional shambler whose hide I put on to scare you\u2014the mere sight of it alive, or even the full-fledged thought of it, would kill you instantly with fright! I\u00e4! I\u00e4! It waits hungry for the blood that is the life!\"\n\nRogers, propped against the wall, swayed to and fro in his bonds.\n\n\"See here, Jones\u2014if I let you go will you let me go? It must be taken care of by Its high-priest. Orabona will be enough to keep It alive\u2014and when he is finished I will make his fragments immortal in wax for the world to see. It could have been you, but you have rejected the honour. I won't bother you again. Let me go, and I will share with you the power that It will bring me. I\u00e4! I\u00e4! Great is Rhan-Tegoth! Let me go! Let me go! It is starving down there beyond that door, and if It dies the Old Ones can never come back. Hei! Hei! Let me go!\"\n\nJones merely shook his head, though the hideousness of the showman's imaginings revolted him. Rogers, now staring wildly at the padlocked plank door, thumped his head again and again against the brick wall and kicked with his tightly bound ankles. Jones was afraid he would injure himself, and advanced to bind him more firmly to some stationary object. Writhing, Rogers edged away from him and set up a series of frenetic ululations whose utter, monstrous unhumanness was appalling, and whose sheer volume was almost incredible. It seemed impossible that any human throat could produce noises so loud and piercing, and Jones felt that if this continued there would be no need to telephone for aid. It could not be long before a constable would investigate, even granting that there were no listening neighbours in this deserted warehouse district.\n\n\"Wza-y'ei! Wza-y'ei!\" howled the madman. \"Y'kaa haa bho\u2014ii, Rhan-Tegoth\u2014Cthulhu fhtagn\u2014Ei! Ei! Ei! Ei!\u2014Rhan-Tegoth, Rhan-Tegoth, Rhan-Tegoth!\"\n\nThe tautly trussed creature, who had started squirming his way across the littered floor, now reached the padlocked plank door and commenced knocking his head thunderously against it. Jones dreaded the task of binding him further, and wished he were not so exhausted from the previous struggle. This violent aftermath was getting hideously on his nerves, and he began to feel a return of the nameless qualms he had felt in the dark. Everything about Rogers and his museum was so hellishly morbid and suggestive of black vistas beyond life! It was loathsome to think of the waxen masterpiece of abnormal genius which must at this very moment be lurking close at hand in the blackness beyond the heavy, padlocked door.\n\nAnd now something happened which sent an additional chill down Jones's spine, and caused every hair\u2014even the tiny growth on the backs of his hands\u2014to bristle with a vague fright beyond classification. Rogers had suddenly stopped screaming and beating his head against the stout plank door, and was straining up to a sitting posture, head cocked on one side as if listening intently for something. All at once a smile of devilish triumph overspread his face, and he began speaking intelligibly again\u2014this time in a hoarse whisper contrasting oddly with his former stentorian howling.\n\n\"Listen, fool! Listen hard! It has heard me, and is coming. Can't you hear It splashing out of Its tank down there at the end of the runway? I dug it deep, because there was nothing too good for It. It is amphibious, you know\u2014you saw the gills in the picture. It came to the earth from lead-grey Yuggoth, where the cities are under the warm deep sea. It can't stand up in there\u2014too tall\u2014has to sit or crouch. Let me get my keys\u2014we must let It out and kneel down before It. Then we will go out and find a dog or cat\u2014or perhaps a drunken man\u2014to give It the nourishment It needs.\"\n\nIt was not what the madman said, but the way he said it, that disorganised Jones so badly. The utter, insane confidence and sincerity in that crazed whisper were damnably contagious. Imagination, with such a stimulus, could find an active menace in the devilish wax figure that lurked unseen just beyond the heavy planking. Eyeing the door in unholy fascination, Jones noticed that it bore several distinct cracks, though no marks of violent treatment were visible on this side. He wondered how large a room or closet lay behind it, and how the waxen figure was arranged. The maniac's idea of a tank and runway was as clever as all his other imaginings.\n\nThen, in one terrible instant, Jones completely lost the power to draw a breath. The leather belt he had seized for Rogers' further strapping fell from his limp hands, and a spasm of shivering convulsed him from head to foot. He might have known the place would drive him mad as it had driven Rogers\u2014and now he was mad. He was mad, for he now harboured hallucinations more weird than any which had assailed him earlier that night. The madman was bidding him hear the splashing of a mythical monster in a tank beyond the door\u2014and now, God help him, he did hear it!\n\nRogers saw the spasm of horror reach Jones's face and transform it to a staring mask of fear. He cackled.\n\n\"At last, fool, you believe! At last you know! You hear It and It comes! Get me my keys, fool\u2014we must do homage and serve It!\"\n\nBut Jones was past paying attention to any human words, mad or sane. Phobic paralysis held him immobile and half-conscious, with wild images racing phantasmagorically through his helpless imagination. There was a splashing. There was a padding or shuffling, as of great wet paws on a solid surface. Something was approaching. Into his nostrils, from the cracks in that nightmare plank door, poured a noisome animal stench like and yet unlike that of the mammal cages at the zo\u00f6logical gardens in Regent's Park.\n\nHe did not know now whether Rogers was talking or not. Everything real had faded away, and he was a statue obsessed with dreams and hallucinations so unnatural that they became almost objective and remote from him. He thought he heard a sniffing or snorting from the unknown gulf beyond the door, and when a sudden baying, trumpeting noise assailed his ears he could not feel sure that it came from the tightly bound maniac whose image swam uncertainly in his shaken vision. The photograph of that accursed, unseen wax thing persisted in floating through his consciousness. Such a thing had no right to exist. Had it not driven him mad?\n\nEven as he reflected, a fresh evidence of madness beset him. Something, he thought, was fumbling with the latch of the heavy padlocked door. It was patting and pawing and pushing at the planks. There was a thudding on the stout wood, which grew louder and louder. The stench was horrible. And now the assault on that door from the inside was a malign, determined pounding like the strokes of a battering-ram. There was an ominous cracking\u2014a splintering\u2014a welling foetor\u2014a falling plank\u2014a black paw ending in a crab-like claw....\n\n\"Help! Help! God help me!... Aaaaaaa!...\"\n\nWith intense effort Jones is today able to recall a sudden bursting of his fear-paralysis into the liberation of frenzied automatic flight. What he evidently did must have paralleled curiously the wild, plunging flights of maddest nightmares; for he seems to have leaped across the disordered crypt at almost a single bound, yanked open the outside door, which closed and locked itself after him with a clatter, sprung up the worn stone steps three at a time, and raced frantically and aimlessly out of that dank cobblestoned court and through the squalid streets of Southwark.\n\nHere the memory ends. Jones does not know how he got home, and there is no evidence of his having hired a cab. Probably he raced all the way by blind instinct\u2014over Waterloo Bridge, along the Strand and Charing Cross, and up Haymarket and Regent Street to his own neighbourhood. He still had on the queer m\u00e9lange of museum costumes when he grew conscious enough to call the doctor.\n\nA week later the nerve specialists allowed him to leave his bed and walk in the open air.\n\nBut he had not told the specialists much. Over his whole experience hung a pall of madness and nightmare, and he felt that silence was the only course. When he was up, he scanned intently all the papers which had accumulated since that hideous night, but found no reference to anything queer at the museum. How much, after all, had been reality? Where did reality end and morbid dream begin? Had his mind gone wholly to pieces in that dark exhibition chamber, and had the whole fight with Rogers been a phantasm of fever? It would help to put him on his feet if he could settle some of these maddening points. He must have seen that damnable photograph of the wax image called \"It\", for no brain but Rogers' could ever have conceived such a blasphemy.\n\nIt was a fortnight before he dared to enter Southwark Street again. He went in the middle of the morning, when there was the greatest amount of sane, wholesome activity around the ancient, crumbling shops and warehouses. The museum's sign was still there, and as he approached he saw that the place was open. The gateman nodded in a pleasant recognition as he summoned up the courage to enter, and in the vaulted chamber below an attendant touched his cap cheerfully. Perhaps everything had been a dream. Would he dare to knock at the door of the workroom and look for Rogers?\n\nThen Orabona advanced to greet him. His dark, sleek face was a trifle sardonic, but Jones felt that he was not unfriendly. He spoke with a trace of accent.\n\n\"Good morning, Mr. Jones. It is some time since we have seen you here. Did you wish Mr. Rogers? I'm sorry, but he is away. He had word of business in America, and had to go. Yes, it was very sudden. I am in charge now\u2014here, and at the house. I try to maintain Mr. Rogers' high standard\u2014till he is back.\"\n\nThe foreigner smiled\u2014perhaps from affability alone. Jones scarcely knew how to reply, but managed to mumble out a few inquiries about the day after his last visit. Orabona seemed greatly amused by the questions, and took considerable care in framing his replies.\n\n\"Oh, yes, Mr. Jones\u2014the twenty-eighth of last month. I remember it for many reasons. In the morning\u2014before Mr. Rogers got here, you understand\u2014I found the workroom in quite a mess. There was a great deal of\u2014cleaning up\u2014to do. There had been\u2014late work, you see. Important new specimen given its secondary baking process. I took complete charge when I came.\n\n\"It was a hard specimen to prepare\u2014but of course Mr. Rogers has taught me a great deal. He is, as you know, a very great artist. When he came he helped me complete the specimen\u2014helped very materially, I assure you\u2014but he left soon without even greeting the men. As I tell you, he was called away suddenly. There were important chemical reactions involved. They made loud noises\u2014in fact, some teamsters in the court outside fancy they heard several pistol shots\u2014very amusing idea!\n\n\"As for the new specimen\u2014that matter is very unfortunate. It is a great masterpiece\u2014designed and made, you understand, by Mr. Rogers. He will see about it when he gets back.\"\n\nAgain Orabona smiled.\n\n\"The police, you know. We put it on display a week ago, and there were two or three faintings. One poor fellow had an epileptic fit in front of it. You see, it is a trifle\u2014stronger\u2014than the rest. Larger, for one thing. Of course, it was in the adult alcove. The next day a couple of men from Scotland Yard looked it over and said it was too morbid to be shewn. Said we'd have to remove it. It was a tremendous shame\u2014such a masterpiece of art\u2014but I didn't feel justified in appealing to the courts in Mr. Rogers' absence. He would not like so much publicity with the police now\u2014but when he gets back\u2014when he gets back\u2014\"\n\nFor some reason or other Jones felt a mounting tide of uneasiness and repulsion. But Orabona was continuing.\n\n\"You are a connoisseur, Mr. Jones. I am sure I violate no law in offering you a private view. It may be\u2014subject, of course, to Mr. Rogers' wishes\u2014that we shall destroy the specimen some day\u2014but that would be a crime.\"\n\nJones had a powerful impulse to refuse the sight and flee precipitately, but Orabona was leading him forward by the arm with an artist's enthusiasm. The adult alcove, crowded with nameless horrors, held no visitors. In the farther corner a large niche had been curtained off, and to this the smiling assistant advanced.\n\n\"You must know, Mr. Jones, that the title of this specimen is 'The Sacrifice to Rhan-Tegoth'.\"\n\nJones started violently, but Orabona appeared not to notice.\n\n\"The shapeless, colossal god is a feature in certain obscure legends which Mr. Rogers has studied. All nonsense, of course, as you've so often assured Mr. Rogers. It is supposed to have come from outer space, and to have lived in the Arctic three million years ago. It treated its sacrifices rather peculiarly and horribly, as you shall see. Mr. Rogers had made it fiendishly lifelike\u2014even to the face of the victim.\"\n\nNow trembling violently, Jones clung to the brass railing in front of the curtained niche. He almost reached out to stop Orabona when he saw the curtain beginning to swing aside, but some conflicting impulse held him back. The foreigner smiled triumphantly.\n\n\"Behold!\"\n\nJones reeled in spite of his grip on the railing.\n\n\"God!\u2014great God!\"\n\nFully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of infinite cosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shewn starting forward from a Cyclopean ivory throne covered with grotesque carvings. In the central pair of its six legs it bore a crushed, flattened, distorted, bloodless thing, riddled with a million punctures, and in places seared as with some pungent acid. Only the mangled head of the victim, lolling upside down at one side, revealed that it represented something once human.\n\nThe monster itself needed no title for one who had seen a certain hellish photograph. That damnable print had been all too faithful; yet it could not carry the full horror which lay in the gigantic actuality. The globular torso\u2014the bubble-like suggestion of a head\u2014the three fishy eyes\u2014the foot-long proboscis\u2014the bulging gills\u2014the monstrous capillation of asp-like suckers\u2014the six sinuous limbs with their black paws and crab-like claws\u2014God! the familiarity of that black paw ending in a crab-like claw!...\n\nOrabona's smile was utterly damnable. Jones choked, and stared at the hideous exhibit with a mounting fascination which perplexed and disturbed him. What half-revealed horror was holding and forcing him to look longer and search out details? This had driven Rogers mad... Rogers, supreme artist... said they weren't artificial....\n\nThen he localised the thing that held him. It was the crushed waxen victim's lolling head, and something that it implied. This head was not entirely devoid of a face, and that face was familiar. It was like the mad face of poor Rogers. Jones peered closer, hardly knowing why he was driven to do so. Wasn't it natural for a mad egotist to mould his own features into his masterpiece? Was there anything more that subconscious vision had seized on and suppressed in sheer terror?\n\nThe wax of the mangled face had been handled with boundless dexterity. Those punctures\u2014how perfectly they reproduced the myriad wounds somehow inflicted on that poor dog! But there was something more. On the left cheek one could trace an irregularity which seemed outside the general scheme\u2014as if the sculptor had sought to cover up a defect of his first modelling. The more Jones looked at it, the more mysteriously it horrified him\u2014and then, suddenly, he remembered a circumstance which brought his horror to a head. That night of hideousness\u2014the tussle\u2014the bound madman\u2014and the long, deep scratch down the left cheek of the actual living Rogers....\n\nJones, releasing his desperate clutch on the railing, sank in a total faint.\n\nOrabona continued to smile.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Hound by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint, distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not dream\u2014it is not, I fear, even madness\u2014for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.\n\nMay heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui. The enigmas of the Symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the sombre philosophy of the Decadents could hold us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity\u2014that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.\n\nI cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions, or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless. Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It was a secret room, far, far underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand in hand woven in voluminous black hangings. Through these pipes came at will the odours our moods most craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies, sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of the kingly dead, and sometimes\u2014how I shudder to recall it!\u2014the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered grave.\n\nAround the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured by the taxidermist's art, and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of the world. Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes, and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution. There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen, and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children. Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed by St. John and myself. A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin, held certain unknown and unnamable drawings which it was rumoured Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity. It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak\u2014thank God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying myself.\n\nThe predatory excursions on which we collected our unmentionable treasures were always artistically memorable events. We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical care. An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect, or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous, grinning secret of the earth. Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish and insatiate\u2014St. John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that mocking, that accursed spot which brought us our hideous and inevitable doom.\n\nBy what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland churchyard? I think it was the dark rumour and legendry, the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre. I can recall the scene in these final moments\u2014the pale autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows; the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass and the crumbling slabs; the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral finger at the livid sky; the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under the yews in a distant corner; the odours of mould, vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas; and worst of all, the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we could neither see nor definitely place. As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry; for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some unspeakable beast.\n\nI remembered how we delved in this ghoul's grave with our spades, and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave, the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows, the grotesque trees, the titanic bats, the antique church, the dancing death-fires, the sickening odours, the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard, directionless baying, of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure. Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and feasted our eyes on what it held.\n\nMuch\u2014amazingly much\u2014was left of the object despite the lapse of five hundred years. The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the thing that had killed it, held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once had glowed with a charnel fever like our own. In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design, which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck. It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade. The expression on its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence. Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither St. John nor I could identify; and on the bottom, like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.\n\nImmediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave. Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it, but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly unfamiliar. Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers know, but we recognised it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia. All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments, he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the dead.\n\nSeizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found it. As we hastened from that abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St. John's pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure. So, too, as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen. We lived as recluses; devoid of friends, alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor; so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the visitor. Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be frequent fumblings in the night, not only around the doors but around the windows also, upper as well as lower. Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when the moon was shining against it, and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping sound not far off. On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to imagination alone\u2014that same curiously disturbed imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard. The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum, and sometimes we burned strangely scented candles before it. We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghouls' souls to the objects it symbolised; and were disturbed by what we read. Then terror came.\n\nOn the night of September 24, 19\u2013\u2013, I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying it St. John's, I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by a shrill laugh. There was no one in the corridor. When I aroused St. John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the event, and became as worried as I. It was that night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality. Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum, there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door which led to the secret library staircase. Our alarm was now divided, for besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our grisly collection might be discovered. Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of air, and heard as if receding far away a queer combination of rustling, tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only realised, with the blackest of apprehensions, that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in the Dutch language.\n\nAfter that we lived in growing horror and fascination. Mostly we held to the theory that we were jointly going mad from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatise ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom. Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count. Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled over the windswept moor, always louder and louder. On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to describe. They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing numbers.\n\nThe horror reached a culmination on November 18, when St. John, walking home after dark from the distant railway station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing and torn to ribbons. His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy thing silhouetted against the rising moon. My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently. All he could do was to whisper, \"The amulet\u2014that damned thing\u2014.\" Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.\n\nI buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens, and mumbled over his body one of the devilish rituals he had loved in life. And as I pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound. The moon was up, but I dared not look at it. And when I saw on the dim-litten moor a wide nebulous shadow sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down upon the ground. When I arose trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.\n\nBeing now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying by fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the museum. But after three nights I heard the baying again, and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever it was dark. One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections of the lamps in the water. A wind stronger than the night-wind rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St. John must soon befall me.\n\nThe next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and sailed for Holland. What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent, sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must at least try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it pursued me, were questions still vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event including St. John's dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing of the amulet. Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when, at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me of this sole means of salvation.\n\nThe baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed in the vilest quarter of the city. The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighbourhood. In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night above the usual clamour of drunken voices a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.\n\nSo at last I stood again in that unwholesome churchyard where a pale winter moon cast hideous shadows, and leafless trees drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs, and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from over frozen swamps and frigid seas. The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the ancient grave I had once violated, and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which had been hovering curiously around it.\n\nI know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to the calm white thing that lay within; but, whatever my reason, I attacked the half-frozen sod with a desperation partly mine and partly that of a dominating will outside myself. Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I killed him with a blow of my spade. Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp nitrous cover. This is the last rational act I ever performed.\n\nFor crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a close-packed nightmare retinue of huge, sinewy, sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed; not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly in mockery of my inevitable doom. And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep, sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory, filthy claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade, I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical laughter.\n\nMadness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses... dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial.... Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Hypnos by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.\"\n\n\u2014Baudelaire.\n\nMay the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was\u2014my only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine.\n\nWe met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the centre of a crowd of the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of grey in the thick, waving hair and small full beard which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and breadth almost godlike. I said to myself, with all the ardour of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I knew he would be thenceforth my only friend\u2014the only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before\u2014for I saw that such eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normal consciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be my teacher and leader in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I found that his voice was music\u2014the music of deep viols and of crystalline spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiselled busts of him and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalise his different expressions.\n\nOf our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connexion with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep\u2014those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little, and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in hoary Kent.\n\nAmong the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments\u2014inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told\u2014for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space\u2014things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and present, rushing a\u00ebrially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses, and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds or vapours. In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes together. When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could comprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a species of pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange light and frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burning eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing hair and growth of beard.\n\nOf the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the merest illusion. I know only that there must have been something very singular involved, since we came at length to marvel why we did not grow old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious\u2014no god or daemon could have aspired to discoveries and conquests like those which we planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the window at the spangled night sky. I will hint\u2014only hint\u2014that he had designs which involved the rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his. I affirm\u2014I swear\u2014that I had no share in these extreme aspirations. Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable warfare in unmentionable spheres by which alone one might achieve success.\n\nThere was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known. My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating, luminous, too youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky, clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.\n\nI had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream and opened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner reclined the pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow-dreamer, weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on his marble features. Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may pitying heaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which took place before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I can only say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook me in his phrensy for someone to keep away the horror and desolation.\n\nThat was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within those realms again. What he had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep us awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed. After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend aged with a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hair whiten almost before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally altered. Heretofore a recluse so far as I know\u2014his true name and origin never having passed his lips\u2014my friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of a few persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most general and boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young and the gay were unknown to us. Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented, but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if forced to this condition he would often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the same place in the sky\u2014it seemed to be a different place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning. Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the direction of his glance\u2014a spot roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.\n\nWe now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace. Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing sleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now\u2014the desolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with the rain beating down; the ticking of the lone clock; the fancied ticking of our watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part of the house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and worst of all the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch\u2014a rhythmical breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for his spirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.\n\nThe tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike somewhere\u2014not ours, for that was not a striking clock\u2014and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle wanderings. Clocks\u2014time\u2014space\u2014infinity\u2014and then my fancy reverted to the local as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds\u2014a low and damnably insistent whine from very far away; droning, clamouring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.\n\nBut it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light\u2014a shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret, innermost, and forbidden caverns of nightmare.\n\nAnd as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the rest of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me. No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, but as I followed the memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light to its source, the source whence also the whining came, I too saw for an instant what it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking and epilepsy which brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.\n\nJust what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by the strange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness which can mean nothing if not madness. They have said, I know not for what reason, that I never had a friend, but that art, philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered something to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they found on the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and now a fame which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, greybearded, shrivelled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the object they found.\n\nFor they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy at the thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend; the friend who led me on to madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield, young with the youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting memory-face is modelled from my own, as it was at twenty-five, but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica\u2014'\u03a5\u03a0\u039d\u039f\u03a3.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Ibid by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThe erroneous idea that Ibid is the author of the Lives is so frequently met with, even among those pretending to a degree of culture, that it is worth correcting. It should be a matter of general knowledge that Cf. is responsible for this work. Ibid's masterpiece, on the other hand, was the famous Op. Cit. wherein all the significant undercurrents of Graeco-Roman expression were crystallised once for all\u2014and with admirable acuteness, notwithstanding the surprisingly late date at which Ibid wrote. There is a false report\u2014very commonly reproduced in modern books prior to Von Schweinkopf's monumental Geschichte der Ostrogothen in Italien\u2014that Ibid was a Romanised Visigoth of Ataulf's horde who settled in Placentia about 410 A.D. The contrary cannot be too strongly emphasised; for Von Schweinkopf, and since his time Littlewit1 and B\u00eatenoir,2 have shewn with irrefutable force that this strikingly isolated figure was a genuine Roman\u2014or at least as genuine a Roman as that degenerate and mongrelised age could produce\u2014of whom one might well say what Gibbon said of Boethius, \"that he was the last whom Cato or Tully could have acknowledged for their countryman.\" He was, like Boethius and nearly all the eminent men of his age, of the great Anician family, and traced his genealogy with much exactitude and self-satisfaction to all the heroes of the republic. His full name\u2014long and pompous according to the custom of an age which had lost the trinomial simplicity of classic Roman nomenclature\u2014is stated by Von Schweinkopf3 to have been Caius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus \u00c6milianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus; though Littlewit4 rejects \u00c6milianus and adds Claudius Decius Junianus; whilst B\u00eatenoir5 differs radically, giving the full name as Magnus Furius Camillus Aurelius Antoninus Flavius Anicius Petronius Valentinianus Aegidus Ibidus.\n\nThe eminent critic and biographer was born in the year 486, shortly after the extinction of the Roman rule in Gaul by Clovis. Rome and Ravenna are rivals for the honour of his birth, though it is certain that he received his rhetorical and philosophical training in the schools of Athens\u2014the extent of whose suppression by Theodosius a century before is grossly exaggerated by the superficial. In 512, under the benign rule of the Ostrogoth Theodoric, we behold him as a teacher of rhetoric at Rome, and in 516 he held the consulship together with Pompilius Numantius Bombastes Marcellinus Deodamnatus. Upon the death of Theodoric in 526, Ibidus retired from public life to compose his celebrated work (whose pure Ciceronian style is as remarkable a case of classic atavism as is the verse of Claudius Claudianus, who flourished a century before Ibidus); but he was later recalled to scenes of pomp to act as court rhetorician for Theodatus, nephew of Theodoric.\n\nUpon the usurpation of Vitiges, Ibidus fell into disgrace and was for a time imprisoned; but the coming of the Byzantine-Roman army under Belisarius soon restored him to liberty and honours. Throughout the siege of Rome he served bravely in the army of the defenders, and afterward followed the eagles of Belisarius to Alba, Porto, and Centumcellae. After the Frankish siege of Milan, Ibidus was chosen to accompany the learned Bishop Datius to Greece, and resided with him at Corinth in the year 539. About 541 he removed to Constantinopolis, where he received every mark of imperial favour both from Justinianus and Justinus the Second. The Emperors Tiberius and Maurice did kindly honour to his old age, and contributed much to his immortality\u2014especially Maurice, whose delight it was to trace his ancestry to old Rome notwithstanding his birth at Arabiscus, in Cappadocia. It was Maurice who, in the poet's 101st year, secured the adoption of his work as a textbook in the schools of the empire, an honour which proved a fatal tax on the aged rhetorician's emotions, since he passed away peacefully at his home near the church of St. Sophia on the sixth day before the Kalends of September, A.D. 587, in the 102nd year of his age.\n\nHis remains, notwithstanding the troubled state of Italy, were taken to Ravenna for interment; but being interred in the suburb of Classe, were exhumed and ridiculed by the Lombard Duke of Spoleto, who took his skull to King Autharis for use as a wassail-bowl. Ibid's skull was proudly handed down from king to king of the Lombard line. Upon the capture of Pavia by Charlemagne in 774, the skull was seized from the tottering Desiderius and carried in the train of the Frankish conqueror. It was from this vessel, indeed, that Pope Leo administered the royal unction which made of the hero-nomad a Holy Roman Emperor. Charlemagne took Ibid's skull to his capital at Aix, soon afterward presenting it to his Saxon teacher Alcuin, upon whose death in 804 it was sent to Alcuin's kinsfolk in England.\n\nWilliam the Conqueror, finding it in an abbey niche where the pious family of Alcuin had placed it (believing it to be the skull of a saint6 who had miraculously annihilated the Lombards by his prayers), did reverence to its osseous antiquity; and even the rough soldiers of Cromwell, upon destroying Ballylough Abbey in Ireland in 1650 (it having been secretly transported thither by a devout Papist in 1539, upon Henry VIII's dissolution of the English monasteries), declined to offer violence to a relic so venerable.\n\nIt was captured by the private soldier Read-'em-and-Weep Hopkins, who not long after traded it to Rest-in-Jehovah Stubbs for a quid of new Virginia weed. Stubbs, upon sending forth his son Zerubbabel to seek his fortune in New England in 1661 (for he thought ill of the Restoration atmosphere for a pious young yeoman), gave him St. Ibid's\u2014or rather Brother Ibid's, for he abhorred all that was Popish\u2014skull as a talisman. Upon landing in Salem Zerubbabel set it up in his cupboard beside the chimney, he having built a modest house near the town pump. However, he had not been wholly unaffected by the Restoration influence; and having become addicted to gaming, lost the skull to one Epenetus Dexter, a visiting freeman of Providence.\n\nIt was in the house of Dexter, in the northern part of the town near the present intersection of North Main and Olney Streets, on the occasion of Canonchet's raid of March 30, 1676, during King Philip's War; and the astute sachem, recognising it at once as a thing of singular venerableness and dignity, sent it as a symbol of alliance to a faction of the Pequots in Connecticut with whom he was negotiating. On April 4 he was captured by the colonists and soon after executed, but the austere head of Ibid continued on its wanderings.\n\nThe Pequots, enfeebled by a previous war, could give the now stricken Narragansetts no assistance; and in 1680 a Dutch fur-trader of Albany, Petrus van Schaack, secured the distinguished cranium for the modest sum of two guilders, he having recognised its value from the half-effaced inscription carved in Lombardic minuscules (palaeography, it might be explained, was one of the leading accomplishments of New-Netherland fur-traders of the seventeenth century).\n\nFrom van Schaack, sad to say, the relic was stolen in 1683 by a French trader, Jean Grenier, whose Popish zeal recognised the features of one whom he had been taught at his mother's knee to revere as St. Ibide. Grenier, fired with virtuous rage at the possession of this holy symbol by a Protestant, crushed van Schaack's head one night with an axe and escaped to the north with his booty; soon, however, being robbed and slain by the half-breed voyageur Michel Savard, who took the skull\u2014despite the illiteracy which prevented his recognising it\u2014to add to a collection of similar but more recent material.\n\nUpon his death in 1701 his half-breed son Pierre traded it among other things to some emissaries of the Sacs and Foxes, and it was found outside the chief's tepee a generation later by Charles de Langlade, founder of the trading post at Green Bay, Wisconsin. De Langlade regarded this sacred object with proper veneration and ransomed it at the expense of many glass beads; yet after his time it found itself in many other hands, being traded to settlements at the head of Lake Winnebago, to tribes around Lake Mendota, and finally, early in the nineteenth century, to one Solomon Juneau, a Frenchman, at the new trading post of Milwaukee on the Menominee River and the shore of Lake Michigan.\n\nLater traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home\u2014where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking.\n\nSo for generations did the sainted skull of Caius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus \u00c6milianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus, consul of Rome, favourite of emperors, and saint of the Romish church, lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town. At first worshipped with dark rites by the prairie-dogs, who saw in it a deity sent from the upper world, it afterward fell into dire neglect as the race of simple, artless burrowers succumbed before the onslaught of the conquering Aryan. Sewers came, but they passed by it. Houses went up\u20142303 of them, and more\u2014and at last one fateful night a titan thing occurred. Subtle Nature, convulsed with a spiritual ecstasy, like the froth of that region's quondam beverage, laid low the lofty and heaved high the humble\u2014and behold! In the roseal dawn the burghers of Milwaukee rose to find a former prairie turned to a highland! Vast and far-reaching was the great upheaval. Subterrene arcana, hidden for years, came at last to the light. For there, full in the rifted roadway, lay bleached and tranquil in bland, saintly, and consular pomp the dome-like skull of Ibid!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ In the Vault by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThere is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. Mention a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fibred village undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prosy tale which George Birch's death permits me to tell has in it aspects beside which some of our darkest tragedies are light.\n\nBirch acquired a limitation and changed his business in 1881, yet never discussed the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago. It was generally stated that the affliction and shock were results of an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken delirium toward the last. He confided in me because I was his doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confiding in someone else after Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.\n\nBirch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of Peck Valley; and was a very calloused and primitive specimen even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly \"laying-out\" apparel invisible beneath the casket's lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable; yet I still think he was not an evil man. He was merely crass of fibre and function\u2014thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen within certain limits fixed by taste.\n\nJust where to begin Birch's story I can hardly decide, since I am no practiced teller of tales. I suppose one should start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves till spring. Fortunately the village was small and the death rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch's inanimate charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness. Never did he knock together flimsier and ungainlier caskets, or disregard more flagrantly the needs of the rusty lock on the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such nonchalant abandon.\n\nAt last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother of removal and interment, began his task of transference one disagreeable April morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his horse, after having laid but one mortal tenement to its permanent rest. That was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far from the tomb. Birch decided that he would begin the next day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also near by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever afterward he refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth day of the week. Certainly, the events of that evening greatly changed George Birch.\n\nOn the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of Matthew Fenner. That he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things. He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive horse, which as he drew it viciously up at the tomb neighed and pawed and tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had vexed it. The day was clear, but a high wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter as he unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault. Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber with the eight carelessly placed coffins; but Birch in those days was insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right coffin for the right grave. He had not forgotten the criticism aroused when Hannah Bixby's relatives, wishing to transport her body to the cemetery in the city whither they had moved, found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.\n\nThe light was dim, but Birch's sight was good, and he did not get Asaph Sawyer's coffin by mistake, although it was very similar. He had, indeed, made that coffin for Matthew Fenner; but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and flimsy, in a fit of curious sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy five years before. He gave old Matt the very best his skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man, and many stories were told of his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious memory for wrongs real or fancied. To him Birch had felt no compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffin which he now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner casket.\n\nIt was just as he had recognised old Matt's coffin that the door slammed to in the wind, leaving him in a dusk even deeper than before. The narrow transom admitted only the feeblest of rays, and the overhead ventilation funnel virtually none at all; so that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward the latch. In this funereal twilight he rattled the rusty handles, pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. In this twilight, too, he began to realise the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse outside could do more than neigh an unsympathetic reply. For the long-neglected latch was obviously broken, leaving the careless undertaker trapped in the vault, a victim of his own oversight.\n\nThe thing must have happened at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Birch, being by temperament phlegmatic and practical, did not shout long; but proceeded to grope about for some tools which he recalled seeing in a corner of the tomb. It is doubtful whether he was touched at all by the horror and exquisite weirdness of his position, but the bald fact of imprisonment so far from the daily paths of men was enough to exasperate him thoroughly. His day's work was sadly interrupted, and unless chance presently brought some rambler hither, he might have to remain all night or longer. The pile of tools soon reached, and a hammer and chisel selected, Birch returned over the coffins to the door. The air had begun to be exceedingly unwholesome; but to this detail he paid no attention as he toiled, half by feeling, at the heavy and corroded metal of the latch. He would have given much for a lantern or bit of candle; but lacking these, bungled semi-sightlessly as best he might.\n\nWhen he perceived that the latch was hopelessly unyielding, at least to such meagre tools and under such tenebrous conditions as these, Birch glanced about for other possible points of escape. The vault had been dug from a hillside, so that the narrow ventilation funnel in the top ran through several feet of earth, making this direction utterly useless to consider. Over the door, however, the high, slit-like transom in the brick facade gave promise of possible enlargement to a diligent worker; hence upon this his eyes long rested as he racked his brains for means to reach it. There was nothing like a ladder in the tomb, and the coffin niches on the sides and rear\u2014which Birch seldom took the trouble to use\u2014afforded no ascent to the space above the door. Only the coffins themselves remained as potential stepping-stones, and as he considered these he speculated on the best mode of arranging them. Three coffin-heights, he reckoned, would permit him to reach the transom; but he could do better with four. The boxes were fairly even, and could be piled up like blocks; so he began to compute how he might most stably use the eight to rear a scalable platform four deep. As he planned, he could not but wish that the units of his contemplated staircase had been more securely made. Whether he had imagination enough to wish they were empty, is strongly to be doubted.\n\nFinally he decided to lay a base of three parallel with the wall, to place upon this two layers of two each, and upon these a single box to serve as the platform. This arrangement could be ascended with a minimum of awkwardness, and would furnish the desired height. Better still, though, he would utilise only two boxes of the base to support the superstructure, leaving one free to be piled on top in case the actual feat of escape required an even greater altitude. And so the prisoner toiled in the twilight, heaving the unresponsive remnants of mortality with little ceremony as his miniature Tower of Babel rose course by course. Several of the coffins began to split under the stress of handling, and he planned to save the stoutly built casket of little Matthew Fenner for the top, in order that his feet might have as certain a surface as possible. In the semi-gloom he trusted mostly to touch to select the right one, and indeed came upon it almost by accident, since it tumbled into his hands as if through some odd volition after he had unwittingly placed it beside another on the third layer.\n\nThe tower at length finished, and his aching arms rested by a pause during which he sat on the bottom step of his grim device, Birch cautiously ascended with his tools and stood abreast of the narrow transom. The borders of the space were entirely of brick, and there seemed little doubt but that he could shortly chisel away enough to allow his body to pass. As his hammer blows began to fall, the horse outside whinnied in a tone which may have been encouraging and may have been mocking. In either case it would have been appropriate; for the unexpected tenacity of the easy-looking brickwork was surely a sardonic commentary on the vanity of mortal hopes, and the source of a task whose performance deserved every possible stimulus.\n\nDusk fell and found Birch still toiling. He worked largely by feeling now, since newly gathered clouds hid the moon; and though progress was still slow, he felt heartened at the extent of his encroachments on the top and bottom of the aperture. He could, he was sure, get out by midnight\u2014though it is characteristic of him that this thought was untinged with eerie implications. Undisturbed by oppressive reflections on the time, the place, and the company beneath his feet, he philosophically chipped away the stony brickwork; cursing when a fragment hit him in the face, and laughing when one struck the increasingly excited horse that pawed near the cypress tree. In time the hole grew so large that he ventured to try his body in it now and then, shifting about so that the coffins beneath him rocked and creaked. He would not, he found, have to pile another on his platform to make the proper height; for the hole was on exactly the right level to use as soon as its size might permit.\n\nIt must have been midnight at least when Birch decided he could get through the transom. Tired and perspiring despite many rests, he descended to the floor and sat a while on the bottom box to gather strength for the final wriggle and leap to the ground outside. The hungry horse was neighing repeatedly and almost uncannily, and he vaguely wished it would stop. He was curiously unelated over his impending escape, and almost dreaded the exertion, for his form had the indolent stoutness of early middle age. As he remounted the splitting coffins he felt his weight very poignantly; especially when, upon reaching the topmost one, he heard that aggravated crackle which bespeaks the wholesale rending of wood. He had, it seems, planned in vain when choosing the stoutest coffin for the platform; for no sooner was his full bulk again upon it than the rotting lid gave way, jouncing him two feet down on a surface which even he did not care to imagine. Maddened by the sound, or by the stench which billowed forth even to the open air, the waiting horse gave a scream that was too frantic for a neigh, and plunged madly off through the night, the wagon rattling crazily behind it.\n\nBirch, in his ghastly situation, was now too low for an easy scramble out of the enlarged transom; but gathered his energies for a determined try. Clutching the edges of the aperture, he sought to pull himself up, when he noticed a queer retardation in the form of an apparent drag on both his ankles. In another moment he knew fear for the first time that night; for struggle as he would, he could not shake clear of the unknown grasp which held his feet in relentless captivity. Horrible pains, as of savage wounds, shot through his calves; and in his mind was a vortex of fright mixed with an unquenchable materialism that suggested splinters, loose nails, or some other attribute of a breaking wooden box. Perhaps he screamed. At any rate he kicked and squirmed frantically and automatically whilst his consciousness was almost eclipsed in a half-swoon.\n\nInstinct guided him in his wriggle through the transom, and in the crawl which followed his jarring thud on the damp ground. He could not walk, it appeared, and the emerging moon must have witnessed a horrible sight as he dragged his bleeding ankles toward the cemetery lodge; his fingers clawing the black mould in brainless haste, and his body responding with that maddening slowness from which one suffers when chased by the phantoms of nightmare. There was evidently, however, no pursuer; for he was alone and alive when Armington, the lodge-keeper, answered his feeble clawing at the door.\n\nArmington helped Birch to the outside of a spare bed and sent his little son Edwin for Dr. Davis. The afflicted man was fully conscious, but would say nothing of any consequence; merely muttering such things as \"oh, my ankles!\", \"let go!\", or \"shut in the tomb\". Then the doctor came with his medicine-case and asked crisp questions, and removed the patient's outer clothing, shoes, and socks. The wounds\u2014for both ankles were frightfully lacerated about the Achilles' tendons\u2014seemed to puzzle the old physician greatly, and finally almost to frighten him. His questioning grew more than medically tense, and his hands shook as he dressed the mangled members; binding them as if he wished to get the wounds out of sight as quickly as possible.\n\nFor an impersonal doctor, Davis' ominous and awestruck cross-examination became very strange indeed as he sought to drain from the weakened undertaker every least detail of his horrible experience. He was oddly anxious to know if Birch were sure\u2014absolutely sure\u2014of the identity of that top coffin of the pile; how he had chosen it, how he had been certain of it as the Fenner coffin in the dusk, and how he had distinguished it from the inferior duplicate coffin of vicious Asaph Sawyer. Would the firm Fenner casket have caved in so readily? Davis, an old-time village practitioner, had of course seen both at the respective funerals, as indeed he had attended both Fenner and Sawyer in their last illnesses. He had even wondered, at Sawyer's funeral, how the vindictive farmer had managed to lie straight in a box so closely akin to that of the diminutive Fenner.\n\nAfter a full two hours Dr. Davis left, urging Birch to insist at all times that his wounds were caused entirely by loose nails and splintering wood. What else, he added, could ever in any case be proved or believed? But it would be well to say as little as could be said, and to let no other doctor treat the wounds. Birch heeded this advice all the rest of his life till he told me his story; and when I saw the scars\u2014ancient and whitened as they then were\u2014I agreed that he was wise in so doing. He always remained lame, for the great tendons had been severed; but I think the greatest lameness was in his soul. His thinking processes, once so phlegmatic and logical, had become ineffaceably scarred; and it was pitiful to note his response to certain chance allusions such as \"Friday\", \"tomb\", \"coffin\", and words of less obvious concatenation. His frightened horse had gone home, but his frightened wits never quite did that. He changed his business, but something always preyed upon him. It may have been just fear, and it may have been fear mixed with a queer belated sort of remorse for bygone crudities. His drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate.\n\nWhen Dr. Davis left Birch that night he had taken a lantern and gone to the old receiving tomb. The moon was shining on the scattered brick fragments and marred facade, and the latch of the great door yielded readily to a touch from the outside. Steeled by old ordeals in dissecting rooms, the doctor entered and looked about, stifling the nausea of mind and body that everything in sight and smell induced. He cried aloud once, and a little later gave a gasp that was more terrible than a cry. Then he fled back to the lodge and broke all the rules of his calling by rousing and shaking his patient, and hurling at him a succession of shuddering whispers that seared into the bewildered ears like the hissing of vitriol.\n\n\"It was Asaph's coffin, Birch, just as I thought! I knew his teeth, with the front ones missing on the upper jaw\u2014never, for God's sake, shew those wounds! The body was pretty badly gone, but if ever I saw vindictiveness on any face\u2014or former face.... You know what a fiend he was for revenge\u2014how he ruined old Raymond thirty years after their boundary suit, and how he stepped on the puppy that snapped at him a year ago last August.... He was the devil incarnate, Birch, and I believe his eye-for-an-eye fury could beat old Father Death himself. God, what a rage! I'd hate to have it aimed at me!\n\n\"Why did you do it, Birch? He was a scoundrel, and I don't blame you for giving him a cast-aside coffin, but you always did go too damned far! Well enough to skimp on the thing some way, but you knew what a little man old Fenner was.\n\n\"I'll never get the picture out of my head as long as I live. You kicked hard, for Asaph's coffin was on the floor. His head was broken in, and everything was tumbled about. I've seen sights before, but there was one thing too much here. An eye for an eye! Great heavens, Birch, but you got what you deserved. The skull turned my stomach, but the other was worse\u2014those ankles cut neatly off to fit Matt Fenner's cast-aside coffin!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ In the Walls of Eryx by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nBefore I try to rest I will set down these notes in preparation for the report I must make. What I have found is so singular, and so contrary to all past experience and expectations, that it deserves a very careful description.\n\nI reached the main landing on Venus March 18, terrestrial time; VI, 9 of the planet's calendar. Being put in the main group under Miller, I received my equipment\u2014watch tuned to Venus's slightly quicker rotation\u2014and went through the usual mask drill. After two days I was pronounced fit for duty.\n\nLeaving the Crystal Company's post at Terra Nova around dawn, VI, 12, I followed the southerly route which Anderson had mapped out from the air. The going was bad, for these jungles are always half impassable after a rain. It must be the moisture that gives the tangled vines and creepers that leathery toughness; a toughness so great that a knife has to work ten minutes on some of them. By noon it was dryer\u2014the vegetation getting soft and rubbery so that the knife went through it easily\u2014but even then I could not make much speed. These Carter oxygen masks are too heavy\u2014just carrying one half wears an ordinary man out. A Dubois mask with sponge-reservoir instead of tubes would give just as good air at half the weight.\n\nThe crystal-detector seemed to function well, pointing steadily in a direction verifying Anderson's report. It is curious how that principle of affinity works\u2014without any of the fakery of the old 'divining rods' back home. There must be a great deposit of crystals within a thousand miles, though I suppose those damnable man-lizards always watch and guard it. Possibly they think we are just as foolish for coming to Venus to hunt the stuff as we think they are for grovelling in the mud whenever they see a piece of it, or for keeping that great mass on a pedestal in their temple. I wish they'd get a new religion, for they have no use for the crystals except to pray to. Barring theology, they would let us take all we want\u2014and even if they learned to tap them for power there'd be more than enough for their planet and the earth besides. I for one am tired of passing up the main deposits and merely seeking separate crystals out of jungle river-beds. Sometime I'll urge the wiping out of these scaly beggars by a good stiff army from home. About twenty ships could bring enough troops across to turn the trick. One can't call the damned things men for all their \"cities\" and towers. They haven't any skill except building\u2014and using swords and poison darts\u2014and I don't believe their so-called \"cities\" mean much more than ant-hills or beaver-dams. I doubt if they even have a real language\u2014all the talk about psychological communication through those tentacles down their chests strikes me as bunk. What misleads people is their upright posture; just an accidental physical resemblance to terrestrial man.\n\nI'd like to go through a Venus jungle for once without having to watch out for skulking groups of them or dodge their cursed darts. They may have been all right before we began to take the crystals, but they're certainly a bad enough nuisance now\u2014with their dart-shooting and their cutting of our water pipes. More and more I come to believe that they have a special sense like our crystal-detectors. No one ever knew them to bother a man\u2014apart from long-distance sniping\u2014who didn't have crystals on him.\n\nAround 1 p.m. a dart nearly took my helmet off, and I thought for a second one of my oxygen tubes was punctured. The sly devils hadn't made a sound, but three of them were closing in on me. I got them all by sweeping in a circle with my flame pistol, for even though their colour blended with the jungle, I could spot the moving creepers. One of them was fully eight feet tall, with a snout like a tapir's. The other two were average seven-footers. All that makes them hold their own is sheer numbers\u2014even a single regiment of flame throwers could raise hell with them. It is curious, though, how they've come to be dominant on the planet. Not another living thing higher than the wriggling akmans and skorahs, or the flying tukahs of the other continent\u2014unless of course those holes in the Dionaean Plateau hide something.\n\nAbout two o'clock my detector veered westward, indicating isolated crystals ahead on the right. This checked up with Anderson, and I turned my course accordingly. It was harder going\u2014not only because the ground was rising, but because the animal life and carnivorous plants were thicker. I was always slashing ugrats and stepping on skorahs, and my leather suit was all speckled from the bursting darohs which struck it from all sides. The sunlight was all the worse because of the mist, and did not seem to dry up the mud in the least. Every time I stepped my feet sank down five or six inches, and there was a sucking sort of blup every time I pulled them out. I wish somebody would invent a safe kind of suiting other than leather for this climate. Cloth of course would rot; but some thin metallic tissue that couldn't tear\u2014like the surface of this revolving decay-proof record scroll\u2014ought to be feasible some time.\n\nI ate about 3:30\u2014if slipping these wretched food tablets through my mask can be called eating. Soon after that I noticed a decided change in the landscape\u2014the bright, poisonous-looking flowers shifting in colour and getting wraith-like. The outlines of everything shimmered rhythmically, and bright points of light appeared and danced in the same slow, steady tempo. After that the temperature seemed to fluctuate in unison with a peculiar rhythmic drumming.\n\nThe whole universe seemed to be throbbing in deep, regular pulsations that filled every corner of space and flowed through my body and mind alike. I lost all sense of equilibrium and staggered dizzily, nor did it change things in the least when I shut my eyes and covered my ears with my hands. However, my mind was still clear, and in a very few minutes I realised what had happened.\n\nI had encountered at last one of those curious mirage-plants about which so many of our men told stories. Anderson had warned me of them, and described their appearance very closely\u2014the shaggy stalk, the spiky leaves, and the mottled blossoms whose gaseous, dream-breeding exhalations penetrate every existing make of mask.\n\nRecalling what happened to Bailey three years ago, I fell into a momentary panic, and began to dash and stagger about in the crazy, chaotic world which the plant's exhalations had woven around me. Then good sense came back, and I realised all I need do was retreat from the dangerous blossoms; heading away from the source of the pulsations, and cutting a path blindly\u2014regardless of what might seem to swirl around me\u2014until safely out of the plant's effective radius.\n\nAlthough everything was spinning perilously, I tried to start in the right direction and hack my way ahead. My route must have been far from straight, for it seemed hours before I was free of the mirage-plant's pervasive influence. Gradually the dancing lights began to disappear, and the shimmering spectral scenery began to assume the aspect of solidity. When I did get wholly clear I looked at my watch and was astonished to find that the time was only 4:20. Though eternities had seemed to pass, the whole experience could have consumed little more than a half-hour.\n\nEvery delay, however, was irksome, and I had lost ground in my retreat from the plant. I now pushed ahead in the uphill direction indicated by the crystal-detector, bending every energy toward making better time. The jungle was still thick, though there was less animal life. Once a carnivorous blossom engulfed my right foot and held it so tightly that I had to hack it free with my knife; reducing the flower to strips before it let go.\n\nIn less than an hour I saw that the jungle growths were thinning out, and by five o'clock\u2014after passing through a belt of tree-ferns with very little underbrush\u2014I emerged on a broad mossy plateau. My progress now became rapid, and I saw by the wavering of my detector-needle that I was getting relatively close to the crystal I sought. This was odd, for most of the scattered, egg-like spheroids occurred in jungle streams of a sort not likely to be found on this treeless upland.\n\nThe terrain sloped upward, ending in a definite crest. I reached the top about 5:30, and saw ahead of me a very extensive plain with forests in the distance. This, without question, was the plateau mapped by Matsugawa from the air fifty years ago, and called on our maps \"Eryx\" or the \"Erycinian Highland.\" But what made my heart leap was a smaller detail, whose position could not have been far from the plain's exact centre. It was a single point of light, blazing through the mist and seeming to draw a piercing, concentrated luminescence from the yellowish, vapour-dulled sunbeams. This, without doubt, was the crystal I sought\u2014a thing possibly no larger than a hen's egg, yet containing enough power to keep a city warm for a year. I could hardly wonder, as I glimpsed the distant glow, that those miserable man-lizards worship such crystals. And yet they have not the least notion of the powers they contain.\n\nBreaking into a rapid run, I tried to reach the unexpected prize as soon as possible; and was annoyed when the firm moss gave place to a thin, singularly detestable mud studded with occasional patches of weeds and creepers. But I splashed on heedlessly\u2014scarcely thinking to look around for any of the skulking man-lizards. In this open space I was not very likely to be waylaid. As I advanced, the light ahead seemed to grow in size and brilliancy, and I began to notice some peculiarity in its situation. Clearly, this was a crystal of the very finest quality, and my elation grew with every spattering step.\n\nIt is now that I must begin to be careful in making my report, since what I shall henceforward have to say involves unprecedented\u2014though fortunately verifiable\u2014matters. I was racing ahead with mounting eagerness, and had come within an hundred yards or so of the crystal\u2014whose position on a sort of raised place in the omnipresent slime seemed very odd\u2014when a sudden, overpowering force struck my chest and the knuckles of my clenched fists and knocked me over backward into the mud. The splash of my fall was terrific, nor did the softness of the ground and the presence of some slimy weeds and creepers save my head from a bewildering jarring. For a moment I lay supine, too utterly startled to think. Then I half-mechanically stumbled to my feet and began to scrape the worst of the mud and scum from my leather suit.\n\nOf what I had encountered I could not form the faintest idea. I had seen nothing which could have caused the shock, and I saw nothing now. Had I, after all, merely slipped in the mud? My sore knuckles and aching chest forbade me to think so. Or was this whole incident an illusion brought on by some hidden mirage-plant? It hardly seemed probable, since I had none of the usual symptoms, and since there was no place near by where so vivid and typical a growth could lurk unseen. Had I been on the earth, I would have suspected a barrier of N-force laid down by some government to mark a forbidden zone, but in this humanless region such a notion would have been absurd.\n\nFinally pulling myself together, I decided to investigate in a cautious way. Holding my knife as far as possible ahead of me, so that it might be first to feel the strange force, I started once more for the shining crystal\u2014preparing to advance step by step with the greatest deliberation. At the third step I was brought up short by the impact of the knife-point on an apparently solid surface\u2014a solid surface where my eyes saw nothing.\n\nAfter a moment's recoil I gained boldness. Extending my gloved left hand, I verified the presence of invisible solid matter\u2014or a tactile illusion of solid matter\u2014ahead of me. Upon moving my hand I found that the barrier was of substantial extent, and of an almost glassy smoothness, with no evidence of the joining of separate blocks. Nerving myself for further experiments, I removed a glove and tested the thing with my bare hand. It was indeed hard and glassy, and of a curious coldness as contrasted with the air around. I strained my eyesight to the utmost in an effort to glimpse some trace of the obstructing substance, but could discern nothing whatsoever. There was not even any evidence of refractive power as judged by the aspect of the landscape ahead. Absence of reflective power was proved by the lack of a glowing image of the sun at any point.\n\nBurning curiosity began to displace all other feelings, and I enlarged my investigations as best I could. Exploring with my hands, I found that the barrier extended from the ground to some level higher than I could reach, and that it stretched off indefinitely on both sides. It was, then, a wall of some kind\u2014though all guesses as to its materials and its purpose were beyond me. Again I thought of the mirage-plant and the dreams it induced, but a moment's reasoning put this out of my head.\n\nKnocking sharply on the barrier with the hilt of my knife, and kicking at it with my heavy boots, I tried to interpret the sounds thus made. There was something suggestive of cement or concrete in these reverberations, though my hands had found the surface more glassy or metallic in feel. Certainly, I was confronting something strange beyond all previous experience.\n\nThe next logical move was to get some idea of the wall's dimensions. The height problem would be hard if not insoluble, but the length and shape problem could perhaps be sooner dealt with. Stretching out my arms and pressing close to the barrier, I began to edge gradually to the left\u2014keeping very careful track of the way I faced. After several steps I concluded that the wall was not straight, but that I was following part of some vast circle or ellipse. And then my attention was distracted by something wholly different\u2014something connected with the still-distant crystal which had formed the object of my quest.\n\nI have said that even from a greater distance the shining object's position seemed indefinably queer\u2014on a slight mound rising from the slime. Now\u2014at about an hundred yards\u2014I could see plainly despite the engulfing mist just what that mound was. It was the body of a man in one of the Crystal Company's leather suits, lying on his back, and with his oxygen mask half buried in the mud a few inches away. In his right hand, crushed convulsively against his chest, was the crystal which had led me here\u2014a spheroid of incredible size, so large that the dead fingers could scarcely close over it. Even at the given distance I could see that the body was a recent one. There was little visible decay, and I reflected that in this climate such a thing meant death not more than a day before. Soon the hateful farnoth-flies would begin to cluster about the corpse. I wondered who the man was. Surely no one I had seen on this trip. It must have been one of the old-timers absent on a long roving commission, who had come to this especial region independently of Anderson's survey. There he lay, past all trouble, and with the rays of the great crystal streaming out from between his stiffened fingers.\n\nFor fully five minutes I stood there staring in bewilderment and apprehension. A curious dread assailed me, and I had an unreasonable impulse to run away. It could not have been done by those slinking man-lizards, for he still held the crystal he had found. Was there any connexion with the invisible wall? Where had he found the crystal? Anderson's instrument had indicated one in this quarter well before this man could have perished. I now began to regard the unseen barrier as something sinister, and recoiled from it with a shudder. Yet I knew I must probe the mystery all the more quickly and thoroughly because of this recent tragedy.\n\nSuddenly\u2014wrenching my mind back to the problem I faced\u2014I thought of a possible means of testing the wall's height, or at least of finding whether or not it extended indefinitely upward. Seizing a handful of mud, I let it drain until it gained some coherence and then flung it high in the air toward the utterly transparent barrier. At a height of perhaps fourteen feet it struck the invisible surface with a resounding splash, disintegrating at once and oozing downward in disappearing streams with surprising rapidity. Plainly, the wall was a lofty one. A second handful, hurled at an even sharper angle, hit the surface about eighteen feet from the ground and disappeared as quickly as the first.\n\nI now summoned up all my strength and prepared to throw a third handful as high as I possibly could. Letting the mud drain, and squeezing it to maximum dryness, I flung it up so steeply that I feared it might not reach the obstructing surface at all. It did, however, and this time it crossed the barrier and fell in the mud beyond with a violent spattering. At last I had a rough idea of the height of the wall, for the crossing had evidently occurred some twenty or 21 feet aloft.\n\nWith a nineteen-or twenty-foot vertical wall of glassy flatness, ascent was clearly impossible. I must, then, continue to circle the barrier in the hope of finding a gate, an ending, or some sort of interruption. Did the obstacle form a complete round or other closed figure, or was it merely an arc or semicircle? Acting on my decision, I resumed my slow leftward circling, moving my hands up and down over the unseen surface on the chance of finding some window or other small aperture. Before starting, I tried to mark my position by kicking a hole in the mud, but found the slime too thin to hold any impression. I did, though, gauge the place approximately by noting a tall cycad in the distant forest which seemed just on a line with the gleaming crystal an hundred yards away. If no gate or break existed I could now tell when I had completely circumnavigated the wall.\n\nI had not progressed far before I decided that the curvature indicated a circular enclosure of about an hundred yards' diameter\u2014provided the outline was regular. This would mean that the dead man lay near the wall at a point almost opposite the region where I had started. Was he just inside or just outside the enclosure? This I would soon ascertain.\n\nAs I slowly rounded the barrier without finding any gate, window, or other break, I decided that the body was lying within. On closer view, the features of the dead man seemed vaguely disturbing. I found something alarming in his expression, and in the way the glassy eyes stared. By the time I was very near I believed I recognised him as Dwight, a veteran whom I had never known, but who was pointed out to me at the post last year. The crystal he clutched was certainly a prize\u2014the largest single specimen I had ever seen.\n\nI was so near the body that I could\u2014but for the barrier\u2014have touched it, when my exploring left hand encountered a corner in the unseen surface. In a second I had learned that there was an opening about three feet wide, extending from the ground to a height greater than I could reach. There was no door, nor any evidence of hinge-marks bespeaking a former door. Without a moment's hesitation I stepped through and advanced two paces to the prostrate body\u2014which lay at right angles to the hallway I had entered, in what seemed to be an intersecting doorless corridor. It gave me a fresh curiosity to find that the interior of this vast enclosure was divided by partitions.\n\nBending to examine the corpse, I discovered that it bore no wounds. This scarcely surprised me, since the continued presence of the crystal argued against the pseudo-reptilian natives. Looking about for some possible cause of death, my eyes lit upon the oxygen mask lying close to the body's feet. Here, indeed, was something significant. Without this device no human being could breathe the air of Venus for more than thirty seconds, and Dwight\u2014if it were he\u2014had obviously lost his. Probably it had been carelessly buckled, so that the weight of the tubes worked the straps loose\u2014a thing which could not happen with a Dubois sponge-reservoir mask. The half-minute of grace had been too short to allow the man to stoop and recover his protection\u2014or else the cyanogen content of the atmosphere was abnormally high at the time. Probably he had been busy admiring the crystal\u2014wherever he may have found it. He had, apparently, just taken it from the pouch in his suit, for the flap was unbuttoned.\n\nI now proceeded to extricate the huge crystal from the dead prospector's fingers\u2014a task which the body's stiffness made very difficult. The spheroid was larger than a man's fist, and glowed as if alive in the reddish rays of the westering sun. As I touched the gleaming surface I shuddered involuntarily\u2014as if by taking this precious object I had transferred to myself the doom which had overtaken its earlier bearer. However, my qualms soon passed, and I carefully buttoned the crystal into the pouch of my leather suit. Superstition has never been one of my failings.\n\nPlacing the man's helmet over his dead, staring face, I straightened up and stepped back through the unseen doorway to the entrance hall of the great enclosure. All my curiosity about the strange edifice now returned, and I racked my brain with speculations regarding its material, origin, and purpose. That the hands of men had reared it I could not for a moment believe. Our ships first reached Venus only 72 years ago, and the only human beings on the planet have been those at Terra Nova. Nor does human knowledge include any perfectly transparent, non-refractive solid such as the substance of this building. Prehistoric human invasions of Venus can be pretty well ruled out, so that one must turn to the idea of native construction. Did a forgotten race of highly evolved beings precede the man-lizards as masters of Venus? Despite their elaborately built cities, it seemed hard to credit the pseudo-reptiles with anything of this kind. There must have been another race aeons ago, of which this is perhaps the last relique. Or will other ruins of kindred origin be found by future expeditions? The purpose of such a structure passes all conjecture\u2014but its strange and seemingly non-practical material suggests a religious use.\n\nRealising my inability to solve these problems, I decided that all I could do was to explore the invisible structure itself. That various rooms and corridors extended over the seemingly unbroken plain of mud I felt convinced; and I believed that a knowledge of their plan might lead to something significant. So, feeling my way back through the doorway and edging past the body, I began to advance along the corridor toward those interior regions whence the dead man had presumably come. Later on I would investigate the hallway I had left.\n\nGroping like a blind man despite the misty sunlight, I moved slowly onward. Soon the corridor turned sharply and began to spiral in toward the centre in ever-diminishing curves. Now and then my touch would reveal a doorless intersecting passage, and I several times encountered junctions with two, three, or four diverging avenues. In these latter cases I always followed the inmost route, which seemed to form a continuation of the one I had been traversing. There would be plenty of time to examine the branches after I had reached and returned from the main regions. I can scarcely describe the strangeness of the experience\u2014threading the unseen ways of an invisible structure reared by forgotten hands on an alien planet!\n\nAt last, still stumbling and groping, I felt the corridor end in a sizeable open space. Fumbling about, I found I was in a circular chamber about ten feet across; and from the position of the dead man against certain distant forest landmarks I judged that this chamber lay at or near the centre of the edifice. Out of it opened five corridors besides the one through which I had entered, but I kept the latter in mind by sighting very carefully past the body to a particular tree on the horizon as I stood just within the entrance.\n\nThere was nothing in this room to distinguish it\u2014merely the floor of thin mud which was everywhere present. Wondering whether this part of the building had any roof, I repeated my experiment with an upward-flung handful of mud, and found at once that no covering existed. If there had ever been one, it must have fallen long ago, for not a trace of debris or scattered blocks ever halted my feet. As I reflected, it struck me as distinctly odd that this apparently primordial structure should be so devoid of tumbling masonry, gaps in the walls, and other common attributes of dilapidation.\n\nWhat was it? What had it ever been? Of what was it made? Why was there no evidence of separate blocks in the glassy, bafflingly homogeneous walls? Why were there no traces of doors, either interior or exterior? I knew only that I was in a round, roofless, doorless edifice of some hard, smooth, perfectly transparent, non-refractive, and non-reflective material, an hundred yards in diameter, with many corridors, and with a small circular room at the centre. More than this I could never learn from a direct investigation.\n\nI now observed that the sun was sinking very low in the west\u2014a golden-ruddy disc floating in a pool of scarlet and orange above the mist-clouded trees of the horizon. Plainly, I would have to hurry if I expected to choose a sleeping-spot on dry ground before dark. I had long before decided to camp for the night on the firm, mossy rim of the plateau near the crest whence I had first spied the shining crystal, trusting to my usual luck to save me from an attack by the man-lizards. It has always been my contention that we ought to travel in parties of two or more, so that someone can be on guard during sleeping hours, but the really small number of night attacks makes the Company careless about such things. Those scaly wretches seem to have difficulty in seeing at night, even with curious glow-torches.\n\nHaving picked out again the hallway through which I had come, I started to return to the structure's entrance. Additional exploration could wait for another day. Groping a course as best I could through the spiral corridor\u2014with only general sense, memory, and a vague recognition of some of the ill-defined weed patches on the plain as guides\u2014I soon found myself once more in close proximity to the corpse. There were now one or two farnoth-flies swooping over the helmet-covered face, and I knew that decay was setting in. With a futile instinctive loathing I raised my hand to brush away this vanguard of the scavengers\u2014when a strange and astonishing thing became manifest. An invisible wall, checking the sweep of my arm, told me that\u2014notwithstanding my careful retracing of the way\u2014I had not indeed returned to the corridor in which the body lay. Instead, I was in a parallel hallway, having no doubt taken some wrong turn or fork among the intricate passages behind.\n\nHoping to find a doorway to the exit hall ahead, I continued my advance, but presently came to a blank wall. I would, then, have to return to the central chamber and steer my course anew. Exactly where I had made my mistake I could not tell. I glanced at the ground to see if by any miracle guiding footprints had remained, but at once realised that the thin mud held impressions only for a very few moments. There was little difficulty in finding my way to the centre again, and once there I carefully reflected on the proper outward course. I had kept too far to the right before. This time I must take a more leftward fork somewhere\u2014just where, I could decide as I went.\n\nAs I groped ahead a second time I felt quite confident of my correctness, and diverged to the left at a junction I was sure I remembered. The spiralling continued, and I was careful not to stray into any intersecting passages. Soon, however, I saw to my disgust that I was passing the body at a considerable distance; this passage evidently reached the outer wall at a point much beyond it. In the hope that another exit might exist in the half of the wall I had not yet explored, I pressed forward for several paces, but eventually came once more to a solid barrier. Clearly, the plan of the building was even more complicated than I had thought.\n\nI now debated whether to return to the centre again or whether to try some of the lateral corridors extending toward the body. If I chose this second alternative, I would run the risk of breaking my mental pattern of where I was; hence I had better not attempt it unless I could think of some way of leaving a visible trail behind me. Just how to leave a trail would be quite a problem, and I ransacked my mind for a solution. There seemed to be nothing about my person which could leave a mark on anything, nor any material which I could scatter\u2014or minutely subdivide and scatter.\n\nMy pen had no effect on the invisible wall, and I could not lay a trail of my precious food tablets. Even had I been willing to spare the latter, there would not have been even nearly enough\u2014besides which the small pellets would have instantly sunk from sight in the thin mud. I searched my pockets for an old-fashioned notebook\u2014often used unofficially on Venus despite the quick rotting-rate of paper in the planet's atmosphere\u2014whose pages I could tear up and scatter, but could find none. It was obviously impossible to tear the tough, thin metal of this revolving decay-proof record scroll, nor did my clothing offer any possibilities. In Venus's peculiar atmosphere I could not safely spare my stout leather suit, and underwear had been eliminated because of the climate.\n\nI tried to smear mud on the smooth, invisible walls after squeezing it as dry as possible, but found that it slipped from sight as quickly as did the height-testing handfuls I had previously thrown. Finally I drew out my knife and attempted to scratch a line on the glassy, phantom surface\u2014something I could recognise with my hand, even though I would not have the advantage of seeing it from afar. It was useless, however, for the blade made not the slightest impression on the baffling, unknown material.\n\nFrustrated in all attempts to blaze a trail, I again sought the round central chamber through memory. It seemed easier to get back to this room than to steer a definite, predetermined course away from it, and I had little difficulty in finding it anew. This time I listed on my record scroll every turn I made\u2014drawing a crude hypothetical diagram of my route, and marking all diverging corridors. It was, of course, maddeningly slow work when everything had to be determined by touch, and the possibilities of error were infinite; but I believed it would pay in the long run.\n\nThe long twilight of Venus was thick when I reached the central room, but I still had hopes of gaining the outside before dark. Comparing my fresh diagram with previous recollections, I believed I had located my original mistake, so once more set out confidently along the invisible hallways. I veered further to the left than during my previous attempts, and tried to keep track of my turnings on the record scroll in case I was still mistaken. In the gathering dusk I could see the dim line of the corpse, now the centre of a loathsome cloud of farnoth-flies. Before long, no doubt, the mud-dwelling sificlighs would be oozing in from the plain to complete the ghastly work. Approaching the body with some reluctance, I was preparing to step past it when a sudden collision with a wall told me I was again astray.\n\nI now realised plainly that I was lost. The complications of this building were too much for offhand solution, and I would probably have to do some careful checking before I could hope to emerge. Still, I was eager to get to dry ground before total darkness set in; hence I returned once more to the centre and began a rather aimless series of trials and errors\u2014making notes by the light of my electric lamp. When I used this device I noticed with interest that it produced no reflection\u2014not even the faintest glistening\u2014in the transparent walls around me. I was, however, prepared for this; since the sun had at no time formed a gleaming image in the strange material.\n\nI was still groping about when the dusk became total. A heavy mist obscured most of the stars and planets, but the earth was plainly visible as a glowing, bluish-green point in the southeast. It was just past opposition, and would have been a glorious sight in a telescope. I could even make out the moon beside it whenever the vapours momentarily thinned. It was now impossible to see the corpse\u2014my only landmark\u2014so I blundered back to the central chamber after a few false turns. After all, I would have to give up hope of sleeping on dry ground. Nothing could be done till daylight, and I might as well make the best of it here. Lying down in the mud would not be pleasant, but in my leather suit it could be done. On former expeditions I had slept under even worse conditions, and now sheer exhaustion would help to conquer repugnance.\n\nSo here I am, squatting in the slime of the central room and making these notes on my record scroll by the light of the electric lamp. There is something almost humorous in my strange, unprecedented plight. Lost in a building without doors\u2014a building which I cannot see! I shall doubtless get out early in the morning, and ought to be back at Terra Nova with the crystal by late afternoon. It certainly is a beauty\u2014with surprising lustre even in the feeble light of this lamp. I have just had it out examining it. Despite my fatigue, sleep is slow in coming, so I find myself writing at great length. I must stop now. Not much danger of being bothered by those cursed natives in this place. The thing I like least is the corpse\u2014but fortunately my oxygen mask saves me from the worst effects. I am using the chlorate cubes very sparingly. Will take a couple of food tablets now and turn in. More later.\n\n[ Later\u2014Afternoon, VI, 13 ]\n\nThere has been more trouble than I expected. I am still in the building, and will have to work quickly and wisely if I expect to rest on dry ground tonight. It took me a long time to get to sleep, and I did not wake till almost noon today. As it was, I would have slept longer but for the glare of the sun through the haze. The corpse was a rather bad sight\u2014wriggling with sificlighs, and with a cloud of farnoth-flies around it. Something had pushed the helmet away from the face, and it was better not to look at it. I was doubly glad of my oxygen mask when I thought of the situation.\n\nAt length I shook and brushed myself dry, took a couple of food tablets, and put a new potassium chlorate cube in the electrolyser of the mask. I am using these cubes slowly, but wish I had a larger supply. I felt much better after my sleep, and expected to get out of the building very shortly.\n\nConsulting the notes and sketches I had jotted down, I was impressed by the complexity of the hallways, and by the possibility that I had made a fundamental error. Of the six openings leading out of the central space, I had chosen a certain one as that by which I had entered\u2014using a sighting-arrangement as a guide. When I stood just within the opening, the corpse fifty yards away was exactly in line with a particular lepidodendron in the far-off forest. Now it occurred to me that this sighting might not have been of sufficient accuracy\u2014the distance of the corpse making its difference of direction in relation to the horizon comparatively slight when viewed from the openings next to that of my first ingress. Moreover, the tree did not differ as distinctly as it might from other lepidodendra on the horizon.\n\nPutting the matter to a test, I found to my chagrin that I could not be sure which of three openings was the right one. Had I traversed a different set of windings at each attempted exit? This time I would be sure. It struck me that despite the impossibility of trailblazing there was one marker I could leave. Though I could not spare my suit, I could\u2014because of my thick head of hair\u2014spare my helmet; and this was large and light enough to remain visible above the thin mud. Accordingly I removed the roughly hemispherical device and laid it at the entrance of one of the corridors\u2014the right-hand one of the three I must try.\n\nI would follow this corridor on the assumption that it was correct; repeating what I seemed to recall as the proper turns, and constantly consulting and making notes. If I did not get out, I would systematically exhaust all possible variations; and if these failed, I would proceed to cover the avenues extending from the next opening in the same way\u2014continuing to the third opening if necessary. Sooner or later I could not avoid hitting the right path to the exit, but I must use patience. Even at worst, I could scarcely fail to reach the open plain in time for a dry night's sleep.\n\nImmediate results were rather discouraging, though they helped me eliminate the right-hand opening in little more than an hour. Only a succession of blind alleys, each ending at a great distance from the corpse, seemed to branch from this hallway; and I saw very soon that it had not figured at all in the previous afternoon's wanderings. As before, however, I always found it relatively easy to grope back to the central chamber.\n\nAbout 1 p.m. I shifted my helmet marker to the next opening and began to explore the hallways beyond it. At first I thought I recognised the turnings, but soon found myself in a wholly unfamiliar set of corridors. I could not get near the corpse, and this time seemed cut off from the central chamber as well, even though I thought I had recorded every move I made. There seemed to be tricky twists and crossings too subtle for me to capture in my crude diagrams, and I began to develop a kind of mixed anger and discouragement. While patience would of course win in the end, I saw that my searching would have to be minute, tireless, and long-continued.\n\nTwo o'clock found me still wandering vainly through strange corridors\u2014constantly feeling my way, looking alternately at my helmet and at the corpse, and jotting data on my scroll with decreasing confidence. I cursed the stupidity and idle curiosity which had drawn me into this tangle of unseen walls\u2014reflecting that if I had let the thing alone and headed back as soon as I had taken the crystal from the body, I would even now be safe at Terra Nova.\n\nSuddenly it occurred to me that I might be able to tunnel under the invisible walls with my knife, and thus effect a short cut to the outside\u2014or to some outward-leading corridor. I had no means of knowing how deep the building's foundations were, but the omnipresent mud argued the absence of any floor save the earth. Facing the distant and increasingly horrible corpse, I began a course of feverish digging with the broad, sharp blade.\n\nThere was about six inches of semi-liquid mud, below which the density of the soil increased sharply. This lower soil seemed to be of a different colour\u2014a greyish clay rather like the formations near Venus's north pole. As I continued downward close to the unseen barrier I saw that the ground was getting harder and harder. Watery mud rushed into the excavation as fast as I removed the clay, but I reached through it and kept on working. If I could bore any kind of a passage beneath the wall, the mud would not stop my wriggling out.\n\nAbout three feet down, however, the hardness of the soil halted my digging seriously. Its tenacity was beyond anything I had encountered before, even on this planet, and was linked with an anomalous heaviness. My knife had to split and chip the tightly packed clay, and the fragments I brought up were like solid stones or bits of metal. Finally even this splitting and chipping became impossible, and I had to cease my work with no lower edge of wall in reach.\n\nThe hour-long attempt was a wasteful as well as futile one, for it used up great stores of my energy and forced me both to take an extra food tablet, and to put an additional chlorate cube in the oxygen mask. It has also brought a pause in the day's gropings, for I am still much too exhausted to walk. After cleaning my hands and arms of the worst of the mud I sat down to write these notes\u2014leaning against an invisible wall and facing away from the corpse.\n\nThat body is simply a writhing mass of vermin now\u2014the odour has begun to draw some of the slimy akmans from the far-off jungle. I notice that many of the efjeh-weeds on the plain are reaching out necrophagous feelers toward the thing; but I doubt if any are long enough to reach it. I wish some really carnivorous organisms like the skorahs would appear, for then they might scent me and wriggle a course through the building toward me. Things like that have an odd sense of direction. I could watch them as they came, and jot down their approximate route if they failed to form a continuous line. Even that would be a great help. When I met any the pistol would make short work of them.\n\nBut I can hardly hope for as much as that. Now that these notes are made I shall rest a while longer, and later will do some more groping. As soon as I get back to the central chamber\u2014which ought to be fairly easy\u2014I shall try the extreme left-hand opening. Perhaps I can get outside by dusk after all.\n\n[ Night\u2014VI, 13 ]\n\nNew trouble. My escape will be tremendously difficult, for there are elements I had not suspected. Another night here in the mud, and a fight on my hands tomorrow. I cut my rest short and was up and groping again by four o'clock. After about fifteen minutes I reached the central chamber and moved my helmet to mark the last of the three possible doorways. Starting through this opening, I seemed to find the going more familiar, but was brought up short in less than five minutes by a sight that jolted me more than I can describe.\n\nIt was a group of four or five of those detestable man-lizards emerging from the forest far off across the plain. I could not see them distinctly at that distance, but thought they paused and turned toward the trees to gesticulate, after which they were joined by fully a dozen more. The augmented party now began to advance directly toward the invisible building, and as they approached I studied them carefully. I had never before had a close view of the things outside the steamy shadows of the jungle.\n\nThe resemblance to reptiles was perceptible, though I knew it was only an apparent one, since these beings have no point of contact with terrestrial life. When they drew nearer they seemed less truly reptilian\u2014only the flat head and the green, slimy, frog-like skin carrying out the idea. They walked erect on their odd, thick stumps, and their suction-discs made curious noises in the mud. These were average specimens, about seven feet in height, and with four long, ropy pectoral tentacles. The motions of those tentacles\u2014if the theories of Fogg, Ekberg, and Janat are right, which I formerly doubted but am now more ready to believe\u2014indicated that the things were in animated conversation.\n\nI drew my flame pistol and was ready for a hard fight. The odds were bad, but the weapon gave me a certain advantage. If the things knew this building they would come through it after me, and in this way would form a key to getting out, just as carnivorous skorahs might have done. That they would attack me seemed certain; for even though they could not see the crystal in my pouch, they could divine its presence through that special sense of theirs.\n\nYet, surprisingly enough, they did not attack me. Instead they scattered and formed a vast circle around me\u2014at a distance which indicated that they were pressing close to the unseen wall. Standing there in a ring, the beings stared silently and inquisitively at me, waving their tentacles and sometimes nodding their heads and gesturing with their upper limbs. After a while I saw others issue from the forest, and these advanced and joined the curious crowd. Those near the corpse looked briefly at it but made no move to disturb it. It was a horrible sight, yet the man-lizards seemed quite unconcerned. Now and then one of them would brush away the farnoth-flies with its limbs or tentacles, or crush a wriggling sificligh or akman, or an outreaching efjeh-weed, with the suction discs on its stumps.\n\nStaring back at these grotesque and unexpected intruders, and wondering uneasily why they did not attack me at once, I lost for the time being the will power and nervous energy to continue my search for a way out. Instead I leaned limply against the invisible wall of the passage where I stood, letting my wonder merge gradually into a chain of the wildest speculations. An hundred mysteries which had previously baffled me seemed all at once to take on a new and sinister significance, and I trembled with an acute fear unlike anything I had experienced before.\n\nI believed I knew why these repulsive beings were hovering expectantly around me. I believed, too, that I had the secret of the transparent structure at last. The alluring crystal which I had seized, the body of the man who had seized it before me\u2014all these things began to acquire a dark and threatening meaning.\n\nIt was no common series of mischances which had made me lose my way in this roofless, unseen tangle of corridors. Far from it. Beyond doubt, the place was a genuine maze\u2014a labyrinth deliberately built by these hellish beings whose craft and mentality I had so badly underestimated. Might I not have suspected this before, knowing of their uncanny architectural skill? The purpose was all too plain. It was a trap\u2014a trap set to catch human beings, and with the crystal spheroid as bait. These reptilian things, in their war on the takers of crystals, had turned to strategy and were using our own cupidity against us.\n\nDwight\u2014if this rotting corpse were indeed he\u2014was a victim. He must have been trapped some time ago, and had failed to find his way out. Lack of water had doubtless maddened him, and perhaps he had run out of chlorate cubes as well. Probably his mask had not slipped accidentally after all. Suicide was a likelier thing. Rather than face a lingering death he had solved the issue by removing the mask deliberately and letting the lethal atmosphere do its work at once. The horrible irony of his fate lay in his position\u2014only a few feet from the saving exit he had failed to find. One minute more of searching and he would have been safe.\n\nAnd now I was trapped as he had been. Trapped, and with this circling herd of curious starers to mock at my predicament. The thought was maddening, and as it sank in I was seized with a sudden flash of panic which set me running aimlessly through the unseen hallways. For several moments I was essentially a maniac\u2014stumbling, tripping, bruising myself on the invisible walls, and finally collapsing in the mud as a panting, lacerated heap of mindless, bleeding flesh.\n\nThe fall sobered me a bit, so that when I slowly struggled to my feet I could notice things and exercise my reason. The circling watchers were swaying their tentacles in an odd, irregular way suggestive of sly, alien laughter, and I shook my fist savagely at them as I rose. My gesture seemed to increase their hideous mirth\u2014a few of them clumsily imitating it with their greenish upper limbs. Shamed into sense, I tried to collect my faculties and take stock of the situation.\n\nAfter all, I was not as badly off as Dwight had been. Unlike him, I knew what the situation was\u2014and forewarned is forearmed. I had proof that the exit was attainable in the end, and would not repeat his tragic act of impatient despair. The body\u2014or skeleton, as it would soon be\u2014was constantly before me as a guide to the sought-for aperture, and dogged patience would certainly take me to it if I worked long and intelligently enough.\n\nI had, however, the disadvantage of being surrounded by these reptilian devils. Now that I realised the nature of the trap\u2014whose invisible material argued a science and technology beyond anything on earth\u2014I could no longer discount the mentality and resources of my enemies. Even with my flame pistol I would have a bad time getting away\u2014though boldness and quickness would doubtless see me through in the long run.\n\nBut first I must reach the exterior\u2014unless I could lure or provoke some of the creatures to advance toward me. As I prepared my pistol for action and counted over my generous supply of ammunition it occurred to me to try the effect of its blasts on the invisible walls. Had I overlooked a feasible means of escape? There was no clue to the chemical composition of the transparent barrier, and conceivably it might be something which a tongue of fire could cut like cheese. Choosing a section facing the corpse, I carefully discharged the pistol at close range and felt with my knife where the blast had been aimed. Nothing was changed. I had seen the flame spread when it struck the surface, and now I realised that my hope had been vain. Only a long, tedious search for the exit would ever bring me to the outside.\n\nSo, swallowing another food tablet and putting another cube in the electrolyser of my mask, I recommenced the long quest; retracing my steps to the central chamber and starting out anew. I constantly consulted my notes and sketches, and made fresh ones\u2014taking one false turn after another, but staggering on in desperation till the afternoon light grew very dim. As I persisted in my quest I looked from time to time at the silent circle of mocking starers, and noticed a gradual replacement in their ranks. Every now and then a few would return to the forest, while others would arrive to take their places. The more I thought of their tactics the less I liked them, for they gave me a hint of the creatures' possible motives. At any time these devils could have advanced and fought me, but they seemed to prefer watching my struggles to escape. I could not but infer that they enjoyed the spectacle\u2014and this made me shrink with double force from the prospect of falling into their hands.\n\nWith the dark I ceased my searching, and sat down in the mud to rest. Now I am writing in the light of my lamp, and will soon try to get some sleep. I hope tomorrow will see me out; for my canteen is low, and lacol tablets are a poor substitute for water. I would hardly dare to try the moisture in this slime, for none of the water in the mud-regions is potable except when distilled. That is why we run such long pipe lines to the yellow clay regions\u2014or depend on rain-water when those devils find and cut our pipes. I have none too many chlorate cubes either, and must try to cut down my oxygen consumption as much as I can. My tunnelling attempt of the early afternoon, and my later panic flight, burned up a perilous amount of air. Tomorrow I will reduce physical exertion to the barest minimum until I meet the reptiles and have to deal with them. I must have a good cube supply for the journey back to Terra Nova. My enemies are still on hand; I can see a circle of their feeble glow-torches around me. There is a horror about those lights which will keep me awake.\n\n[ Night\u2014VI, 14 ]\n\nAnother full day of searching and still no way out! I am beginning to be worried about the water problem, for my canteen went dry at noon. In the afternoon there was a burst of rain, and I went back to the central chamber for the helmet which I had left as a marker\u2014using this as a bowl and getting about two cupfuls of water. I drank most of it, but have put the slight remainder in my canteen. Lacol tablets make little headway against real thirst, and I hope there will be more rain in the night. I am leaving my helmet bottom up to catch any that falls. Food tablets are none too plentiful, but not dangerously low. I shall halve my rations from now on. The chlorate cubes are my real worry, for even without violent exercise the day's endless tramping burned a dangerous number. I feel weak from my forced economies in oxygen, and from my constantly mounting thirst. When I reduce my food I suppose I shall feel still weaker.\n\nThere is something damnable\u2014something uncanny\u2014about this labyrinth. I could swear that I had eliminated certain turns through charting, and yet each new trial belies some assumption I had thought established. Never before did I realise how lost we are without visual landmarks. A blind man might do better\u2014but for most of us sight is the king of the senses. The effect of all these fruitless wanderings is one of profound discouragement. I can understand how poor Dwight must have felt. His corpse is now just a skeleton, and the sificlighs and akmans and farnoth-flies are gone. The efjeh-weeds are nipping the leather clothing to pieces, for they were longer and faster-growing than I had expected. And all the while those relays of tentacled starers stand gloatingly around the barrier laughing at me and enjoying my misery. Another day and I shall go mad if I do not drop dead from exhaustion.\n\nHowever, there is nothing to do but persevere. Dwight would have got out if he had kept on a minute longer. It is just possible that somebody from Terra Nova will come looking for me before long, although this is only my third day out. My muscles ache horribly, and I can't seem to rest at all lying down in this loathsome mud. Last night, despite my terrific fatigue, I slept only fitfully, and tonight I fear will be no better. I live in an endless nightmare\u2014poised between waking and sleeping, yet neither truly awake nor truly asleep. My hand shakes, I can write no more for the time being. That circle of feeble glow-torches is hideous.\n\n[ Late Afternoon\u2014VI, 15 ]\n\nSubstantial progress! Looks good. Very weak, and did not sleep much till daylight. Then I dozed till noon, though without being at all rested. No rain, and thirst leaves me very weak. Ate an extra food tablet to keep me going, but without water it didn't help much. I dared to try a little of the slime water just once, but it made me violently sick and left me even thirstier than before. Must save chlorate cubes, so am nearly suffocating for lack of oxygen. Can't walk much of the time, but manage to crawl in the mud. About 2 p.m. I thought I recognised some passages, and got substantially nearer to the corpse\u2014or skeleton\u2014than I had been since the first day's trials. I was sidetracked once in a blind alley, but recovered the main trail with the aid of my chart and notes. The trouble with these jottings is that there are so many of them. They must cover three feet of the record scroll, and I have to stop for long periods to untangle them.\n\nMy head is weak from thirst, suffocation, and exhaustion, and I cannot understand all I have set down. Those damnable green things keep staring and laughing with their tentacles, and sometimes they gesticulate in a way that makes me think they share some terrible joke just beyond my perception.\n\nIt was three o'clock when I really struck my stride. There was a doorway which, according to my notes, I had not traversed before; and when I tried it I found I could crawl circuitously toward the weed-twined skeleton. The route was a sort of spiral, much like that by which I had first reached the central chamber. Whenever I came to a lateral doorway or junction I would keep to the course which seemed best to repeat that original journey. As I circled nearer and nearer to my gruesome landmark, the watchers outside intensified their cryptic gesticulations and sardonic silent laughter. Evidently they saw something grimly amusing in my progress\u2014perceiving no doubt how helpless I would be in any encounter with them. I was content to leave them to their mirth; for although I realised my extreme weakness, I counted on the flame pistol and its numerous extra magazines to get me through the vile reptilian phalanx.\n\nHope now soared high, but I did not attempt to rise to my feet. Better to crawl now, and save my strength for the coming encounter with the man-lizards. My advance was very slow, and the danger of straying into some blind alley very great, but none the less I seemed to curve steadily toward my osseous goal. The prospect gave me new strength, and for the nonce I ceased to worry about my pain, my thirst, and my scant supply of cubes. The creatures were now all massing around the entrance\u2014gesturing, leaping, and laughing with their tentacles. Soon, I reflected, I would have to face the entire horde\u2014and perhaps such reinforcements as they would receive from the forest.\n\nI am now only a few yards from the skeleton, and am pausing to make this entry before emerging and breaking through the noxious band of entities. I feel confident that with my last ounce of strength I can put them to flight despite their numbers, for the range of this pistol is tremendous. Then a camp on the dry moss at the plateau's edge, and in the morning a weary trip through the jungle to Terra Nova. I shall be glad to see living men and the buildings of human beings again. The teeth of that skull gleam and grin horribly.\n\n[ Toward Night\u2014VI, 15 ]\n\nHorror and despair. Baffled again! After making the previous entry I approached still closer to the skeleton, but suddenly encountered an intervening wall. I had been deceived once more, and was apparently back where I had been three days before, on my first futile attempt to leave the labyrinth Whether I screamed aloud I do not know\u2014perhaps I was too weak to utter a sound. I merely lay dazed in the mud for a long period, while the greenish things outside leaped and laughed and gestured.\n\nAfter a time I became more fully conscious. My thirst and weakness and suffocation were fast gaining on me, and with my last bit of strength I put a new cube in the electrolyser\u2014recklessly, and without regard for the needs of my journey to Terra Nova. The fresh oxygen revived me slightly, and enabled me to look about more alertly.\n\nIt seemed as if I were slightly more distant from poor Dwight than I had been at that first disappointment, and I dully wondered if I could be in some other corridor a trifle more remote. With this faint shadow of hope I laboriously dragged myself forward\u2014but after a few feet encountered a dead end as I had on the former occasion.\n\nThis, then, was the end. Three days had taken me nowhere, and my strength was gone. I would soon go mad from thirst, and I could no longer count on cubes enough to get me back. I feebly wondered why the nightmare things had gathered so thickly around the entrance as they mocked me. Probably this was part of the mockery\u2014to make me think I was approaching an egress which they knew did not exist.\n\nI shall not last long, though I am resolved not to hasten matters as Dwight did. His grinning skull has just turned toward me, shifted by the groping of one of the efjeh-weeds that are devouring his leather suit. The ghoulish stare of those empty eye-sockets is worse than the staring of those lizard horrors. It lends a hideous meaning to that dead, white-toothed grin.\n\nI shall lie very still in the mud and save all the strength I can. This record\u2014which I hope may reach and warn those who come after me\u2014will soon be done. After I stop writing I shall rest a long while. Then, when it is too dark for those frightful creatures to see, I shall muster up my last reserves of strength and try to toss the record scroll over the wall and the intervening corridor to the plain outside. I shall take care to send it toward the left, where it will not hit the leaping band of mocking beleaguerers. Perhaps it will be lost forever in the thin mud\u2014but perhaps it will land in some widespread clump of weeds and ultimately reach the hands of men.\n\nIf it does survive to be read, I hope it may do more than merely warn men of this trap. I hope it may teach our race to let those shining crystals stay where they are. They belong to Venus alone. Our planet does not truly need them, and I believe we have violated some obscure and mysterious law\u2014some law buried deep in the arcana of the cosmos\u2014in our attempts to take them. Who can tell what dark, potent, and widespread forces spur on these reptilian things who guard their treasure so strangely? Dwight and I have paid, as others have paid and will pay. But it may be that these scattered deaths are only the prelude of greater horrors to come. Let us leave to Venus that which belongs only to Venus." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "I am very near death now, and fear I may not be able to throw the scroll when dusk comes. If I cannot, I suppose the man-lizards will seize it, for they will probably realise what it is. They will not wish anyone to be warned of the labyrinth\u2014and they will not know that my message holds a plea in their own behalf. As the end approaches I feel more kindly toward the things. In the scale of cosmic entity who can say which species stands higher, or more nearly approaches a space-wide organic norm\u2014theirs or mine?\n\nI have just taken the great crystal out of my pouch to look at in my last moments. It shines fiercely and menacingly in the red rays of the dying day. The leaping horde have noticed it, and their gestures have changed in a way I cannot understand. I wonder why they keep clustered around the entrance instead of concentrating at a still closer point in the transparent wall." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "I am growing numb and cannot write much more. Things whirl around me, yet I do not lose consciousness. Can I throw this over the wall? That crystal glows so, yet the twilight is deepening.\n\nDark. Very weak. They are still laughing and leaping around the doorway, and have started those hellish glow-torches." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Are they going away? I dreamed I heard a sound... light in the sky.\n\n\u2002REPORT OF WESLEY P. MILLER, SUPT. GROUP A,\n\n\u2002VENUS CRYSTAL CO.\n\n(Terra Nova on Venus\u2014VI, 16)\n\nOur Operative A-49, Kenton J. Stanfield of 5317 Marshall Street, Richmond, Va., left Terra Nova early on VI, 12, for a short-term trip indicated by detector. Due back 13th or 14th. Did not appear by evening of 15th, so Scouting Plane FR-58 with five men under my command set out at 8 p.m. to follow route with detector. Needle shewed no change from earlier readings.\n\nFollowed needle to Erycinian Highland, played strong searchlights all the way. Triple-range flame-guns and D-radiation-cylinders could have dispersed any ordinary hostile force of natives, or any dangerous aggregation of carnivorous skorahs.\n\nWhen over the open plain on Eryx we saw a group of moving lights which we knew were native glow-torches. As we approached, they scattered into the forest. Probably 75 to 100 in all. Detector indicated crystal on spot where they had been. Sailing low over this spot, our lights picked out objects on the ground. Skeleton tangled in efjeh-weeds, and complete body ten feet from it. Brought plane down near bodies, and corner of wing crashed on unseen obstruction.\n\nApproaching bodies on foot, we came up short against a smooth, invisible barrier which puzzled us enormously. Feeling along it near the skeleton, we struck an opening, beyond which was a space with another opening leading to the skeleton. The latter, though robbed of clothing by weeds, had one of the company's numbered metal helmets beside it. It was Operative B-9, Frederick N. Dwight of Koenig's division, who had been out of Terra Nova for two months on a long commission.\n\nBetween this skeleton and the complete body there seemed to be another wall, but we could easily identify the second man as Stanfield. He had a record scroll in his left hand and a pen in his right, and seemed to have been writing when he died. No crystal was visible, but the detector indicated a huge specimen near Stanfield's body.\n\nWe had great difficulty in getting at Stanfield, but finally succeeded. The body was still warm, and a great crystal lay beside it, covered by the shallow mud. We at once studied the record scroll in the left hand, and prepared to take certain steps based on its data. The contents of the scroll forms the long narrative prefixed to this report; a narrative whose main descriptions we have verified, and which we append as an explanation of what was found. The later parts of this account shew mental decay, but there is no reason to doubt the bulk of it. Stanfield obviously died of a combination of thirst, suffocation, cardiac strain, and psychological depression. His mask was in place, and freely generating oxygen despite an alarmingly low cube supply.\n\nOur plane being damaged, we sent a wireless and called out Anderson with Repair Plane FG-7, a crew of wreckers, and a set of blasting materials. By morning FR-58 was fixed, and went back under Anderson carrying the two bodies and the crystal. We shall bury Dwight and Stanfield in the company graveyard, and ship the crystal to Chicago on the next earth-bound liner. Later, we shall adopt Stanfield's suggestion\u2014the sound one in the saner, earlier part of his report\u2014and bring across enough troops to wipe out the natives altogether. With a clear field, there can be scarcely any limit to the amount of crystal we can secure.\n\nIn the afternoon we studied the invisible building or trap with great care, exploring it with the aid of long guiding cords, and preparing a complete chart for our archives. We were much impressed by the design, and shall keep specimens of the substance for chemical analysis. All such knowledge will be useful when we take over the various cities of the natives. Our type C diamond drills were able to bite into the unseen material, and wreckers are now planting dynamite preparatory to a thorough blasting. Nothing will be left when we are done. The edifice forms a distinct menace to a\u00ebrial and other possible traffic.\n\n[ In considering the plan of the labyrinth one is impressed not only with the irony of Dwight's fate, but with that of Stanfield's as well. When trying to reach the second body from the skeleton, we could find no access on the right, but Markheim found a doorway from the first inner space some fifteen feet past Dwight and four or five past Stanfield. Beyond this was a long hall which we did not explore till later, but on the right-hand side of that hall was another doorway leading directly to the body. Stanfield could have reached the outside entrance by walking 22 or 23 feet if he had found the opening which lay directly behind him\u2014an opening which he overlooked in his exhaustion and despair ]\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Last Test by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nFew persons know the inside of the Clarendon story, or even that there is an inside not reached by the newspapers. It was a San Francisco sensation in the days before the fire, both because of the panic and menace that kept it company, and because of its close linkage with the governor of the state. Governor Dalton, it will be recalled, was Clarendon's best friend, and later married his sister. Neither Dalton nor Mrs. Dalton would ever discuss the painful affair, but somehow the facts have leaked out to a limited circle. But for that and for the years which have given a sort of vagueness and impersonality to the actors, one would still pause before probing into secrets so strictly guarded at the time.\n\nThe appointment of Dr. Alfred Clarendon as medical director of San Quentin Penitentiary in 189-was greeted with the keenest enthusiasm throughout California. San Francisco had at last the honour of harbouring one of the greatest biologists and physicians of the period, and solid pathological leaders from all over the world might be expected to flock thither to study his methods, profit by his advice and researches, and learn how to cope with their own local problems. California, almost over night, would become a centre of medical scholarship with earthwide influence and reputation.\n\nGovernor Dalton, anxious to spread the news in its fullest significance, saw to it that the press carried ample and dignified accounts of his new appointee. Pictures of Dr. Clarendon and his new home near old Goat Hill, sketches of his career and manifold honours, and popular accounts of his salient scientific discoveries were all presented in the principal California dailies, till the public soon felt a sort of reflected pride in the man whose studies of pyemia in India, of the pest in China, and of every sort of kindred disorder elsewhere would soon enrich the world of medicine with an antitoxin of revolutionary importance\u2014a basic antitoxin combating the whole febrile principle at its very source, and ensuring the ultimate conquest and extirpation of fever in all its diverse forms.\n\nBack of the appointment stretched an extended and not wholly unromantic history of early friendship, long separation, and dramatically renewed acquaintance. James Dalton and the Clarendon family had been friends in New York ten years before\u2014friends and more than friends, since the doctor's only sister, Georgina, was the sweetheart of Dalton's youth, while the doctor himself had been his closest associate and almost his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 in the days of school and college. The father of Alfred and Georgina, a Wall Street pirate of the ruthless elder breed, had known Dalton's father well; so well, indeed, that he had finally stripped him of all he possessed in a memorable afternoon's fight on the stock exchange. Dalton Senior, hopeless of recuperation and wishing to give his one adored child the benefit of his insurance, had promptly blown out his brains; but James had not sought to retaliate. It was, as he viewed it, all in the game; and he wished no harm to the father of the girl he meant to marry and of the budding young scientist whose admirer and protector he had been throughout their years of fellowship and study. Instead, he turned to the law, established himself in a small way, and in due course of time asked \"Old Clarendon\" for Georgina's hand.\n\nOld Clarendon had refused very firmly and loudly, vowing that no pauper and upstart lawyer was fit to be his son-in-law; and a scene of considerable violence had occurred. James, telling the wrinkled freebooter at last what he ought to have been told long before, had left the house and the city in a high temper; and was embarked within a month upon the California life which was to lead him to the governorship through many a fight with ring and politician. His farewells to Alfred and Georgina had been brief, and he had never known the aftermath of that scene in the Clarendon library. Only by a day did he miss the news of Old Clarendon's death from apoplexy, and by so missing it, changed the course of his whole career. He had not written Georgina in the decade that followed; knowing her loyalty to her father, and waiting till his own fortune and position might remove all obstacles to the match. Nor had he sent any word to Alfred, whose calm indifference in the face of affection and hero-worship had always savoured of conscious destiny and the self-sufficiency of genius. Secure in the ties of a constancy rare even then, he had worked and risen with thoughts only of the future; still a bachelor, and with a perfect intuitive faith that Georgina also was waiting.\n\nIn this faith Dalton was not deceived. Wondering perhaps why no message ever came, Georgina found no romance save in her dreams and expectations; and in the course of time became busy with the new responsibilities brought by her brother's rise to greatness. Alfred's growth had not belied the promise of his youth, and the slim boy had darted quietly up the steps of science with a speed and permanence almost dizzying to contemplate. Lean and ascetic, with steel-rimmed pince-nez and pointed brown beard, Dr. Alfred Clarendon was an authority at twenty-five and an international figure at thirty. Careless of worldly affairs with the negligence of genius, he depended vastly on the care and management of his sister, and was secretly thankful that her memories of James had kept her from other and more tangible alliances.\n\nGeorgina conducted the business and household of the great bacteriologist, and was proud of his strides toward the conquest of fever. She bore patiently with his eccentricities, calmed his occasional bursts of fanaticism, and healed those breaches with his friends which now and then resulted from his unconcealed scorn of anything less than a single-minded devotion to pure truth and its progress. Clarendon was undeniably irritating at times to ordinary folk; for he never tired of depreciating the service of the individual as contrasted with the service of mankind as a whole, and in censuring men of learning who mingled domestic life or outside interests with their pursuit of abstract science. His enemies called him a bore; but his admirers, pausing before the white heat of ecstasy into which he would work himself, became almost ashamed of ever having any standards or aspirations outside the one divine sphere of unalloyed knowledge.\n\nThe doctor's travels were extensive and Georgina generally accompanied him on the shorter ones. Three times, however, he had taken long, lone jaunts to strange and distant places in his studies of exotic fevers and half-fabulous plagues; for he knew that it is out of the unknown lands of cryptic and immemorial Asia that most of the earth's diseases spring. On each of these occasions he had brought back curious mementoes which added to the eccentricity of his home, not least among which was the needlessly large staff of Thibetan servants picked up somewhere in U-tsang during an epidemic of which the world never heard, but amidst which Clarendon had discovered and isolated the germ of black fever. These men, taller than most Thibetans and clearly belonging to a stock but little investigated in the outside world, were of a skeletonic leanness which made one wonder whether the doctor had sought to symbolise in them the anatomical models of his college years. Their aspect, in the loose black silk robes of Bonpa priests which he chose to give them, was grotesque in the highest degree; and there was an unsmiling silence and stiffness in their motions which enhanced their air of fantasy and gave Georgina a queer, awed feeling of having stumbled into the pages of Vathek or the Arabian Nights.\n\nBut queerest of all was the general factotum or clinic-man, whom Clarendon addressed as Surama, and whom he had brought back with him after a long stay in Northern Africa, during which he had studied certain odd intermittent fevers among the mysterious Saharan Tuaregs, whose descent from the primal race of lost Atlantis is an old archaeological rumour. Surama, a man of great intelligence and seemingly inexhaustible erudition, was as morbidly lean as the Thibetan servants; with swarthy, parchment-like skin drawn so tightly over his bald pate and hairless face that every line of the skull stood out in ghastly prominence\u2014this death's-head effect being heightened by lustrelessly burning black eyes set with a depth which left to common visibility only a pair of dark, vacant sockets. Unlike the ideal subordinate, he seemed despite his impassive features to spend no effort in concealing such emotions as he possessed. Instead, he carried about an insidious atmosphere of irony or amusement, accompanied at certain moments by a deep, guttural chuckle like that of a giant turtle which has just torn to pieces some furry animal and is ambling away toward the sea. His race appeared to be Caucasian, but could not be classified more closely than that. Some of Clarendon's friends thought he looked like a high-caste Hindoo notwithstanding his accentless speech, while many agreed with Georgina\u2014who disliked him\u2014when she gave her opinion that a Pharaoh's mummy, if miraculously brought to life, would form a very apt twin for this sardonic skeleton.\n\nDalton, absorbed in his uphill political battles and isolated from Eastern interests through the peculiar self-sufficiency of the old West, had not followed the meteoric rise of his former comrade; Clarendon had actually heard nothing of one so far outside his chosen world of science as the governor. Being of independent and even of abundant means, the Clarendons had for many years stuck to their old Manhattan mansion in East Nineteenth Street, whose ghosts must have looked sorely askance at the bizarrerie of Surama and the Thibetans. Then, through the doctor's wish to transfer his base of medical observation, the great change had suddenly come, and they had crossed the continent to take up a secluded life in San Francisco; buying the gloomy old Bannister place near Goat Hill, overlooking the bay, and establishing their strange household in a rambling, French-roofed relic of mid-Victorian design and gold-rush parvenu display, set amidst high-walled grounds in a region still half suburban.\n\nDr. Clarendon, though better satisfied than in New York, still felt cramped for lack of opportunities to apply and test his pathological theories. Unworldly as he was, he had never thought of using his reputation as an influence to gain public appointment; though more and more he realised that only the medical directorship of a government or a charitable institution\u2014a prison, almshouse, or hospital\u2014would give him a field of sufficient width to complete his researches and make his discoveries of the greatest use to humanity and science at large.\n\nThen he had run into James Dalton by sheer accident one afternoon in Market Street as the governor was swinging out of the Royal Hotel. Georgina had been with him, and an almost instant recognition had heightened the drama of the reunion. Mutual ignorance of one another's progress had bred long explanation and histories, and Clarendon was pleased to find that he had so important an official for a friend. Dalton and Georgina, exchanging many a glance, felt more than a trace of their youthful tenderness; and a friendship was then and there revived which led to frequent calls and a fuller and fuller exchange of confidences.\n\nJames Dalton learned of his old prot\u00e9g\u00e9's need for political appointment, and sought, true to his protective role of school and college days, to devise some means of giving \"Little Alf\" the needed position and scope. He had, it is true, wide appointive powers; but the legislature's constant attacks and encroachments forced him to exercise these with the utmost discretion. At length, however, scarcely three months after the sudden reunion, the foremost institutional medical office in the state fell vacant. Weighing all the elements with care, and conscious that his friend's achievements and reputation would justify the most substantial rewards, the governor felt at last able to act. Formalities were few, and on the eighth of November, 189-, Dr. Alfred Schuyler Clarendon became medical director of the California State Penitentiary at San Quentin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "In scarcely more than a month the hopes of Dr. Clarendon's admirers were amply fulfilled. Sweeping changes in methods brought to the prison's medical routine an efficiency never before dreamed of; and though the subordinates were naturally not without jealousy, they were obliged to admit the magical results of a really great man's superintendence. Then came a time where mere appreciation might well have grown to devout thankfulness at a providential conjunction of time, place, and man; for one morning Dr. Jones came to his new chief with a grave face to announce his discovery of a case which he could not but identify as that selfsame black fever whose germ Clarendon had found and classified.\n\nDr. Clarendon shewed no surprise, but kept on at the writing before him.\n\n\"I know,\" he said evenly; \"I came across that case yesterday. I'm glad you recognised it. Put the man in a separate ward, though I don't believe this fever is contagious.\"\n\nDr. Jones, with his own opinion of the malady's contagiousness, was glad of this deference to caution; and hastened to execute the order. Upon his return Clarendon rose to leave, declaring that he would himself take charge of the case alone. Disappointed in his wish to study the great man's methods and technique, the junior physician watched his chief stride away toward the lone ward where he had placed the patient, more critical of the new regime than at any time since admiration had displaced his first jealous pangs.\n\nReaching the ward, Clarendon entered hastily, glancing at the bed and stepping back to see how far Dr. Jones's obvious curiosity might have led him. Then, finding the corridor still vacant, he shut the door and turned to examine the sufferer. The man was a convict of a peculiarly repulsive type, and seemed to be racked by the keenest throes of agony. His features were frightfully contracted, and his knees drawn sharply up in the mute desperation of the stricken. Clarendon studied him closely, raising his tightly shut eyelids, took his pulse and temperature, and finally dissolving a tablet in water, forced the solution between the sufferer's lips. Before long the height of the attack abated, as shewn by the relaxing body and returning normality of expression, and the patient began to breathe more easily. Then, by a soft rubbing of the ears, the doctor caused the man to open his eyes. There was life in them, for they moved from side to side, though they lacked the fine fire which we are wont to deem the image of the soul. Clarendon smiled as he surveyed the peace his help had brought, feeling behind him the power of an all-capable science. He had long known of this case, and had snatched the victim from death with the work of a moment. Another hour and this man would have gone\u2014yet Jones had seen the symptoms for days before discovering them, and having discovered them, did not know what to do.\n\nMan's conquest of disease, however, cannot be perfect. Clarendon, assuring the dubious trusty-nurses that the fever was not contagious, had had the patient bathed, sponged in alcohol, and put to bed; but was told the next morning that the case was lost. The man had died after midnight in the most intense agony, and with such cries and distortions of face that the nurses were driven almost to panic. The doctor took this news with his usual calm, whatever his scientific feelings may have been, and ordered the burial of the patient in quicklime. Then, with a philosophic shrug of the shoulders, he made the usual rounds of the penitentiary.\n\nTwo days later the prison was hit again. Three men came down at once this time, and there was no concealing the fact that a black fever epidemic was under way. Clarendon, having adhered so firmly to his theory of non-contagiousness, suffered a distinct loss of prestige, and was handicapped by the refusal of the trusty-nurses to attend the patients. Theirs was not the soul-free devotion of those who sacrifice themselves to science and humanity. They were convicts, serving only because of the privileges they could not otherwise buy, and when the price became too great they preferred to resign the privileges.\n\nBut the doctor was still master of the situation. Consulting with the warden and sending urgent messages to his friend the governor, he saw to it that special rewards in cash and in reduced terms were offered to the convicts for the dangerous nursing service; and by this method succeeded in getting a very fair quota of volunteers. He was steeled for action now, and nothing could shake his poise and determination. Additional cases brought only a curt nod, and he seemed a stranger to fatigue as he hastened from bedside to bedside all over the vast stone home of sadness and evil. More than forty cases developed within another week, and nurses had to be brought from the city. Clarendon went home very seldom at this stage, often sleeping on a cot in the warden's quarters, and always giving himself up with typical abandon to the service of medicine and of mankind.\n\nThen came the first mutterings of that storm which was soon to convulse San Francisco. News will out, and the menace of black fever spread over the town like a fog from the bay. Reporters trained in the doctrine of \"sensation first\" used their imagination without restraint, and gloried when at last they were able to produce a case in the Mexican quarter which a local physician\u2014fonder perhaps of money than of truth or civic welfare\u2014pronounced black fever.\n\nThat was the last straw. Frantic at the thought of the crawling death so close upon them, the people of San Francisco went mad en masse, and embarked upon that historic exodus of which all the country was soon to hear over busy wires. Ferries and rowboats, excursion steamers and launches, railways and cable cars, bicycles and carriages, moving-vans and work carts, all were pressed into instant and frenzied service. Sausalito and Tamalpais, as lying in the direction of San Quentin, shared in the flight; while housing space in Oakland, Berkeley, and Alameda rose to fabulous prices. Tent colonies sprang up, and improvised villages lined the crowded southward highways from Millbrae to San Jose. Many sought refuge with friends in Sacramento, while the fright-shaken residue forced by various causes to stay behind could do little more than maintain the basic necessities of a nearly dead city.\n\nBusiness, save for quack doctors with \"sure cures\" and \"preventives\" for use against the fever, fell rapidly to the vanishing-point. At first the saloons offered \"medicated drinks\", but soon found that the populace preferred to be duped by charlatans of more professional aspect. In strangely noiseless streets persons peered into one another's faces to glimpse possible plague symptoms, and shopkeepers began more and more to refuse admission to their clientele, each customer seeming to them a fresh fever menace. Legal and judicial machinery began to disintegrate as attorneys and county clerks succumbed one by one to the urge for flight. Even the doctors deserted in large numbers, many of them pleading the need of vacations among the mountains and the lakes in the northern part of the state. Schools and colleges, theatres and caf\u00e9s, restaurants and saloons, all gradually closed their doors; and in a single week San Francisco lay prostrate and inert with only its light, power, and water service even half normal, with newspapers in skeletonic form, and with a crippled parody on transportation maintained by the horse and cable cars.\n\nThis was the lowest ebb. It could not last long, for courage and observation are not altogether dead in mankind; and sooner or later the non-existence of any widespread black fever epidemic outside San Quentin became too obvious a fact to deny, notwithstanding several actual cases and the undeniable spread of typhoid in the unsanitary suburban tent colonies. The leaders and editors of the community conferred and took action, enlisting in their service the very reporters whose energies had done so much to bring on the trouble, but now turning their \"sensation first\" avidity into more constructive channels. Editorials and fictitious interviews appeared, telling of Dr. Clarendon's complete control of the disease, and of the absolute impossibility of its diffusion beyond the prison walls. Reiteration and circulation slowly did their work, and gradually a slim backward trickle of urbanites swelled into a vigorous refluent stream. One of the first healthy symptoms was the start of a newspaper controversy of the approved acrimonious kind, attempting to fix blame for the panic wherever the various participants thought it belonged. The returning doctors, jealously strengthened by their timely vacations, began striking at Clarendon, assuring the public that they as well as he would keep the fever in leash, and censuring him for not doing even more to check its spread within San Quentin.\n\nClarendon had, they averred, permitted far more deaths than were necessary. The veriest tyro in medicine knew how to check fever contagion; and if this renowned savant did not do it, it was clearly because he chose for scientific reasons to study the final effects of the disease, rather than to prescribe properly and save the victims. This policy, they insinuated, might be proper enough among convicted murderers in a penal institution, but it would not do in San Francisco, where life was still a precious and sacred thing. Thus they went on, and the papers were glad to publish all they wrote, since the sharpness of the campaign, in which Dr. Clarendon would doubtless join, would help to obliterate confusion and restore confidence among the people.\n\nBut Clarendon did not reply. He only smiled, while his singular clinic-man Surama indulged in many a deep, testudinous chuckle. He was at home more nowadays, so that reporters began besieging the gate of the great wall the doctor had built around his house, instead of pestering the warden's office at San Quentin. Results, though, were equally meagre; for Surama formed an impassable barrier between the doctor and the outer world\u2014even after the reporters had got into the grounds. The newspaper men getting access to the front hall had glimpses of Clarendon's singular entourage and made the best they could in a \"write-up\" of Surama and the queer skeletonic Thibetans. Exaggeration, of course, occurred in every fresh article, and the net effect of the publicity was distinctly adverse to the great physician. Most persons hate the unusual, and hundreds who could have excused heartlessness or incompetence stood ready to condemn the grotesque taste manifested in the chuckling attendant and the eight black-robed Orientals.\n\nEarly in January an especially persistent young man from the Observer climbed the moated eight-foot brick wall in the rear of the Clarendon grounds and began a survey of the varied outdoor appearances which trees concealed from the front walk. With quick, alert brain he took in everything\u2014the rose-arbour, the aviaries, the animal cages where all sorts of mammalia from monkeys to guinea-pigs might be seen and heard, the stout wooden clinic building with barred windows in the northwest corner of the yard\u2014and bent searching glances throughout the thousand square feet of intramural privacy. A great article was brewing, and he would have escaped unscathed but for the barking of Dick, Georgina Clarendon's gigantic and beloved St. Bernard. Surama, instant in his response, had the youth by the collar before a protest could be uttered, and was presently shaking him as a terrier shakes a rat, and dragging him through the trees to the front yard and the gate.\n\nBreathless explanations and quavering demands to see Dr. Clarendon were useless. Surama only chuckled and dragged his victim on. Suddenly a positive fright crept over the dapper scribe, and he began to wish desperately that this unearthly creature would speak if only to prove that he really was a being of honest flesh and blood belonging to this planet. He became deathly sick, and strove not to glimpse the eyes which he knew must lie at the base of those gaping black sockets. Soon he heard the gate open and felt himself propelled violently through; in another moment waking rudely to the things of earth as he landed wetly and muddily in the ditch which Clarendon had had dug around the entire length of the wall. Fright gave a place to rage as he heard the massive gate slam shut, and he rose dripping to shake his fist at the forbidding portal. Then, as he turned to go, a soft sound grated behind him, and through a small wicket in the gate he felt the sunken eyes of Surama and heard the echoes of a deep-voiced, blood-freezing chuckle.\n\nThis young man, feeling perhaps justly that his handling had been rougher than he deserved, resolved to revenge himself upon the household responsible for his treatment. Accordingly he prepared a fictitious interview with Dr. Clarendon, supposed to be held in the clinic building, during which he was careful to describe the agonies of a dozen black fever patients whom his imagination ranged on orderly rows of couches. His master-stroke was the picture of one especially pathetic sufferer gasping for water, while the doctor held a glass of the sparkling fluid just out of his reach, in a scientific attempt to determine the effect of a tantalising emotion on the course of the disease. This invention was followed by paragraphs of insinuating comment so outwardly respectful that it bore a double venom. Dr. Clarendon was, the article ran, undoubtedly the greatest and most single-minded scientist in the world; but science is no friend to individual welfare, and one would not like to have one's gravest ills drawn out and aggravated merely to satisfy an investigator on some point of abstract truth. Life is too short for that.\n\nAltogether, the article was diabolically skilful, and succeeded in horrifying nine readers out of ten against Dr. Clarendon and his supposed methods. Other papers were quick to copy and enlarge upon its substance, taking the cue it offered, and commencing a series of \"faked\" interviews which fairly ran the gamut of derogatory fantasy. In no case, however, did the doctor condescend to offer a contradiction. He had no time to waste on fools and liars, and cared little for the esteem of a thoughtless rabble he despised. When James Dalton telegraphed his regrets and offered aid, Clarendon replied with an almost boorish curtness. He did not heed the barking of dogs, and could not bother to muzzle them. Nor would he thank anyone for messing with a matter wholly beneath notice. Silent and contemptuous, he continued his duties with tranquil evenness.\n\nBut the young reporter's spark had done its work. San Francisco was insane again, and this time as much with rage as with fear. Sober judgment became a lost art; and though no second exodus occurred, there ensued a reign of vice and recklessness born of desperation, and suggesting parallel phenomena in mediaeval times of pestilence. Hatred ran riot against the man who had found the disease and was struggling to restrain it, and a light-headed public forgot his great services to knowledge in their efforts to fan the flames of resentment. They seemed, in their blindness, to hate him in person, rather than the plague which had come to their breeze-cleaned and usually healthy city.\n\nThen the young reporter, playing in the Neronic fire he had kindled, added a crowning personal touch of his own. Remembering the indignities he had suffered at the hands of the cadaverous clinic-man, he prepared a masterly article on the home and environment of Dr. Clarendon, giving especial prominence to Surama, whose very aspect he declared sufficient to scare the healthiest person into any sort of fever. He tried to make the gaunt chuckler appear equally ridiculous and terrible, succeeding best, perhaps, in the latter half of his intention, since a tide of horror always welled up whenever he thought of his brief proximity to the creature. He collected all the rumours current about the man, elaborated on the unholy depth of his reputed scholarship, and hinted darkly that it could have been no godly realm of secret and aeon-weighted Africa wherein Dr. Clarendon had found him.\n\nGeorgina, who followed the papers closely, felt crushed and hurt by these attacks upon her brother, but James Dalton, who called often at the house, did his best to comfort her. In this he was warm and sincere; for he wished not only to console the woman he loved, but to utter some measure of the reverence he had always felt for the starward-bound genius who had been his youth's closest comrade. He told Georgina how greatness can never be exempted from the shafts of envy, and cited the long, sad list of splendid brains crushed beneath vulgar heels. The attacks, he pointed out, formed the truest of all proofs of Alfred's solid eminence.\n\n\"But they hurt just the same,\" she rejoined, \"and all the more because I know that Al really suffers from them, no matter how indifferent he tries to be.\"\n\nDalton kissed her hand in a manner not then obsolete among well-born persons.\n\n\"And it hurts me a thousand times more, knowing that it hurts you and Alf. But never mind, Georgie, we'll stand together and pull through it!\"\n\nThus it came about that Georgina came more and more to rely on the strength of the steel-firm, square-jawed governor who had been her youthful swain, and more and more to confide in him the things she feared. The press attacks and the epidemic were not quite all. There were aspects of the household which she did not like. Surama, cruel in equal measure to man and beast, filled her with the most unnamable repulsion; and she could not but feel that he meant some vague, indefinable harm to Alfred. She did not like the Thibetans, either, and thought it very peculiar that Surama was able to talk with them. Alfred would not tell her who or what Surama was, but had once explained rather haltingly that he was a much older man than would be commonly thought credible, and that he had mastered secrets and been through experiences calculated to make him a colleague of phenomenal value for any scientist seeking Nature's hidden mysteries.\n\nUrged by her uneasiness, Dalton became a still more frequent visitor at the Clarendon home, though he saw that his presence was deeply resented by Surama. The bony clinic-man formed the habit of glaring peculiarly from those spectral sockets when admitting him, and would often, after closing the gate when he left, chuckle monotonously in a manner that made his flesh creep. Meanwhile Dr. Clarendon seemed oblivious of everything save his work at San Quentin, whither he went each day in his launch\u2014alone save for Surama, who managed the wheel while the doctor read or collated his notes. Dalton welcomed these regular absences, for they gave him constant opportunities to renew his suit for Georgina's hand. When he would overstay and meet Alfred, however, the latter's greeting was always friendly despite his habitual reserve. In time the engagement of James and Georgina grew to be a definite thing, and the two awaited only a favourable chance to speak to Alfred.\n\nThe governor, whole-souled in everything and firm in his protective loyalty, spared no pains in spreading propaganda on his old friend's behalf. Press and officialdom both felt his influence, and he even succeeded in interesting scientists in the East, many of whom came to California to study the plague and investigate the anti-fever bacillus which Clarendon was so rapidly isolating and perfecting. These doctors and biologists, however, did not obtain the information they wished; so that several of them left with a very unfortunate impression. Not a few prepared articles hostile to Clarendon, accusing him of an unscientific and fame-seeking attitude, and intimating that he concealed his methods through a highly unprofessional desire for ultimate personal profit.\n\nOthers, fortunately, were more liberal in their judgments, and wrote enthusiastically of Clarendon and his work. They had seen the patients, and could appreciate how marvellously he held the dread disease in leash. His secrecy regarding the antitoxin they deemed quite justifiable, since its public diffusion in unperfected form could not but do more harm than good. Clarendon himself, whom many of their number had met before, impressed them more profoundly than ever, and they did not hesitate to compare him with Jenner, Lister, Koch, Pasteur, Metchnikoff, and the rest of those whose whole lives have served pathology and humanity. Dalton was careful to save for Alfred all the magazines that spoke well of him, bringing them in person as an excuse to see Georgina. They did not, however, produce much effect save a contemptuous smile; and Clarendon would generally throw them to Surama, whose deep, disturbing chuckle upon reading formed a close parallel to the doctor's own ironic amusement.\n\nOne Monday evening early in February Dalton called with the definite intention of asking Clarendon for his sister's hand. Georgina herself admitted him to the grounds, and as they walked toward the house he stopped to pat the great dog which rushed up and laid friendly fore paws on his breast. It was Dick, Georgina's cherished St. Bernard, and Dalton was glad to feel that he had the affection of a creature which meant so much to her.\n\nDick was excited and glad, and turned the governor nearly half about with his vigorous pressure as he gave a soft quick bark and sprang off through the trees toward the clinic. He did not vanish, though, but presently stopped and looked back, softly barking again as if he wished Dalton to follow. Georgina, fond of obeying her huge pet's playful whims, motioned to James to see what he wanted; and they both walked slowly after him as he trotted relievedly to the rear of the yard where the top of the clinic building stood silhouetted against the stars above the great brick wall.\n\nThe outline of lights within shewed around the edges of the dark window-curtains so they knew that Alfred and Surama were at work. Suddenly from the interior came a thin, subdued sound like a cry of a child\u2014a plaintive call of \"Mamma! Mamma!\" at which Dick barked, while James and Georgina started perceptibly. Then Georgina smiled, remembering the parrots that Clarendon always kept for experimental uses, and patted Dick on the head either to forgive him for having fooled her and Dalton, or to console him for having been fooled himself.\n\nAs they turned slowly toward the house Dalton mentioned his resolve to speak to Alfred that evening about their engagement, and Georgina supplied no objection. She knew that her brother would not relish the loss of a faithful manager and companion, but believed his affection would place no barrier in the way of her happiness.\n\nLater that evening Clarendon came into the house with a springy step and aspect less grim than usual. Dalton, seeing a good omen in this easy buoyancy, took heart as the doctor wrung his hand with a jovial \"Ah, Jimmy, how's politics this year?\" He glanced at Georgina, and she quietly excused herself, while the two men settled down to a chat on general subjects. Little by little, amidst many reminders of their old youthful days, Dalton worked toward his point; till at last he came out plainly with the crucial query.\n\n\"Alf, I want to marry Georgina. Have we your blessing?\"\n\nKeenly watching his old friend, Dalton saw a shadow steal over his face. The dark eyes flashed for a moment, then veiled themselves as wonted placidity returned. So science or selfishness was at work after all!\n\n\"You're asking an impossibility, James. Georgina isn't the aimless butterfly she was years ago. She has a place in the service of truth and mankind now, and that place is here. She's decided to devote her life to my work\u2014to the household that makes my work possible\u2014and there's no room for desertion or personal caprice.\"\n\nDalton waited to see if he had finished. The same old fanaticism\u2014humanity versus the individual\u2014and the doctor was going to let it spoil his sister's life! Then he tried to answer.\n\n\"But look here, Alf, do you mean to say that Georgina, in particular, is so necessary to your work that you must make a slave and martyr of her? Use your sense of proportion, man! If it were a question of Surama or somebody in the utter thick of your experiments it might be different; but after all, Georgina is only a housekeeper to you in the last analysis. She has promised to be my wife and says that she loves me. Have you the right to cut her off from the life that belongs to her? Have you the right\u2014\"\n\n\"That'll do, James!\" Clarendon's face was set and white. \"Whether or not I have the right to govern my own family is no business of an outsider.\"\n\n\"Outsider\u2014you can say that to a man who\u2014\" Dalton almost choked as the steely voice of the doctor interrupted him again.\n\n\"An outsider to my family, and from now on an outsider to my home. Dalton, your presumption goes just a little too far! Good evening, Governor!\"\n\nAnd Clarendon strode from the room without extending his hand.\n\nDalton hesitated for a moment, almost at a loss what to do, when presently Georgina entered. Her face shewed that she had spoken with her brother, and Dalton took both her hands impetuously.\n\n\"Well, Georgie, what do you say? I'm afraid it's a choice between Alf and me. You know how I feel\u2014you know how I felt before, when it was your father I was up against. What's your answer this time?\"\n\nHe paused as she responded slowly.\n\n\"James, dear, do you believe that I love you?\"\n\nHe nodded and pressed her hands expectantly.\n\n\"Then, if you love me, you'll wait a while. Don't think of Al's rudeness. He's to be pitied. I can't tell you the whole thing now, but you know how worried I am\u2014what with the strain of his work, the criticisms, and the staring and cackling of that horrible creature Surama! I'm afraid he'll break down\u2014he shews the strain more than anyone outside the family could tell. I can see it, for I've watched him all my life. He's changing\u2014slowly bending under his burdens\u2014and he puts on his extra brusqueness to hide it. You can see what I mean, can't you, dear?\"\n\nShe paused, and Dalton nodded again, pressing one of her hands to his breast. Then she concluded.\n\n\"So promise me, dear, to be patient. I must stand by him; I must! I must!\"\n\nDalton did not speak for a while, but his head inclined in what was almost a bow of reverence. There was more of Christ in this devoted woman than he had thought any human being possessed; and in the face of such love and loyalty he could do no urging.\n\nWords of sadness and parting were brief; and James, whose blue eyes were misty, scarcely saw the gaunt clinic-man as the gate to the street was at last opened to him. But when it slammed to behind him he heard that blood-curdling chuckle he had come to recognise so well, and knew that Surama was there\u2014Surama, whom Georgina had called her brother's evil genius. Walking away with a firm step, Dalton resolved to be watchful, and to act at the first sign of trouble." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Meanwhile San Francisco, the epidemic still on the lips of all, seethed with anti-Clarendon feeling. Actually the cases outside the penitentiary were very few, and confined almost wholly to the lower Mexican element whose lack of sanitation was a standing invitation to disease of every kind; but politicians and the people needed no more than this to confirm the attacks made by the doctor's enemies. Seeing that Dalton was immovable in his championship of Clarendon, the malcontents, medical dogmatists, and ward-heelers turned their attention to the state legislature; lining up the anti-Clarendonists and the governor's old enemies with great shrewdness, and preparing to launch a law\u2014with a veto-proof majority\u2014transferring the authority for minor institutional appointments from the chief executive to the various boards or commissions concerned.\n\nIn the furtherance of this measure no lobbyist was more active than Clarendon's chief assistant, Dr. Jones. Jealous of his superior from the first, he now saw an opportunity for turning matters to his liking; and he thanked fate for the circumstance\u2014responsible indeed for his present position\u2014of his relationship to the chairman of the prison board. The new law, if passed, would certainly mean the removal of Clarendon and the appointment of himself in his stead; so, mindful of his own interest, he worked hard for it. Jones was all that Clarendon was not\u2014a natural politician and sycophantic opportunist who served his own advancement first and science only incidentally. He was poor, and avid for salaried position, quite in contrast to the wealthy and independent savant he sought to displace. So with a rat-like cunning and persistence he laboured to undermine the great biologist above him, and was one day rewarded by the news that the new law was passed. Thenceforward the governor was powerless to make appointments to the state institutions, and the medical directorship of San Quentin lay at the disposal of the prison board.\n\nOf all this legislative turmoil Clarendon was singularly oblivious. Wrapped wholly in matters of administration and research, he was blind to the treason of \"that ass Jones\" who worked by his side, and deaf to all the gossip of the warden's office. He had never in his life read the newspapers, and the banishment of Dalton from his house cut off his last real link with the world of outside events. With the naivet\u00e9 of a recluse, he at no time thought of his position as insecure. In view of Dalton's loyalty, and of his forgiveness of even the greatest wrongs, as shewn in his dealings with the elder Clarendon who had crushed his father to death on the stock exchange, the possibility of a gubernatorial dismissal was, of course, out of the question; nor could the doctor's political ignorance envisage a sudden shift of power which might place the matter of retention or dismissal in very different hands. Thereupon he merely smiled with satisfaction when Dalton left for Sacramento; convinced that his place in San Quentin and his sister's place in his household were alike secure from disturbance. He was accustomed to having what he wanted, and fancied his luck was still holding out.\n\nThe first week in March, a day or so after the enactment of the new law, the chairman of the prison board called at San Quentin. Clarendon was out, but Dr. Jones was glad to shew the august visitor\u2014his own uncle, incidentally\u2014through the great infirmary, including the fever ward made so famous by press and panic. By this time converted against his will to Clarendon's belief in the fever's non-contagiousness, Jones smilingly assured his uncle that nothing was to be feared, and encouraged him to inspect the patients in detail\u2014especially a ghastly skeleton, once a very giant of bulk and vigour, who was, he insinuated, slowly and painfully dying because Clarendon would not administer the proper medicine.\n\n\"Do you mean to say,\" cried the chairman, \"that Dr. Clarendon refuses to let the man have what he needs, knowing his life could be saved?\"\n\n\"Just that,\" snapped Dr. Jones, pausing as the door opened to admit none other than Clarendon himself. Clarendon nodded coldly to Jones and surveyed the visitor, whom he did not know, with disapproval.\n\n\"Dr. Jones, I thought you knew this case was not to be disturbed at all. And haven't I said that visitors aren't to be admitted except by special permission?\"\n\nBut the chairman interrupted before his nephew could introduce him.\n\n\"Pardon me, Dr. Clarendon, but am I to understand that you refuse to give this man the medicine that would save him?\"\n\nClarendon glared coldly, and rejoined with steel in his voice.\n\n\"That's an impertinent question, sir. I am in authority here, and visitors are not allowed. Please leave the room at once.\"\n\nThe chairman, his sense of drama secretly tickled, answered with greater pomp and hauteur than were necessary.\n\n\"You mistake me, sir! I, not you, am master here. You are addressing the chairman of the prison board. I must say, moreover, that I deem your activity a menace to the welfare of the prisoners, and must request your resignation. Henceforth Dr. Jones will be in charge, and if you wish to remain until your formal dismissal you will take your orders from him.\"\n\nIt was Wilfred Jones's great moment. Life never gave him another such climax, and we need not grudge him this one. After all, he was a small rather than a bad man, and he had only obeyed a small man's code of looking to himself at all costs. Clarendon stood still, gazing at the speaker as if he thought him mad, till in another second the look of triumph on Dr. Jones's face convinced him that something important was indeed afoot. He was icily courteous as he replied.\n\n\"No doubt you are what you claim to be, sir. But fortunately my appointment came from the governor of the state, and can therefore be revoked only by him.\"\n\nThe chairman and his nephew both stared perplexedly, for they had not realised to what lengths unworldly ignorance can go. Then the older man, grasping the situation, explained at some length.\n\n\"Had I found that the current reports did you an injustice,\" he concluded, \"I would have deferred action; but the case of this poor man and your own arrogant manner left me no choice. As it is\u2014\"\n\nBut Dr. Clarendon interrupted with a new razor-sharpness in his voice.\n\n\"As it is, I am the director in charge at present, and I ask you to leave this room at once.\"\n\nThe chairman reddened and exploded.\n\n\"Look here, sir, who do you think you're talking to? I'll have you chucked out of here\u2014damn your impertinence!\"\n\nBut he had time only to finish the sentence. Transformed by the insult to a sudden dynamo of hate, the slender scientist launched out with both fists in a burst of preternatural strength of which no one would have thought him capable. And if his strength was preternatural, his accuracy of aim was no less so; for not even a champion of the ring could have wrought a neater result. Both men\u2014the chairman and Dr. Jones\u2014were squarely hit; the one full in the face and the other on the point of the chin. Going down like felled trees, they lay motionless and unconscious on the floor; while Clarendon, now clear and completely master of himself, took his hat and cane and went out to join Surama in the launch. Only when seated in the moving boat did he at last give audible vent to the frightful rage that consumed him. Then, with face convulsed, he called down imprecations from the stars and the gulfs beyond the stars; so that even Surama shuddered, made an elder sign that no book of history records, and forgot to chuckle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Georgina soothed her brother's hurt as best she could. He had come home mentally and physically exhausted and thrown himself on the library lounge; and in that gloomy room, little by little, the faithful sister had taken in the almost incredible news. Her consolations were instantaneous and tender, and she made him realise how vast, though unconscious, a tribute to his greatness the attacks, persecution, and dismissal all were. He had tried to cultivate the indifference she preached, and could have done so had personal dignity alone been involved. But the loss of scientific opportunity was more than he could calmly bear, and he sighed again and again as he repeated how three months more of study in the prison might have given him at last the long-sought bacillus which would make all fever a thing of the past.\n\nThen Georgina tried another mode of cheering, and told him that surely the prison board would send for him again if the fever did not abate, or if it broke out with increased force. But even this was ineffective, and Clarendon answered only in a string of bitter, ironic, and half-meaningless little sentences whose tone shewed all too clearly how deeply despair and resentment had bitten.\n\n\"Abate? Break out again? Oh, it'll abate all right! At least, they'll think it has abated. They'd think anything, no matter what happens! Ignorant eyes see nothing, and bunglers are never discoverers. Science never shews her face to that sort. And they call themselves doctors! Best of all, fancy that ass Jones in charge!\"\n\nCeasing with a quick sneer, he laughed so daemoniacally that Georgina shivered.\n\nThe days that followed were dismal ones indeed at the Clarendon mansion Depression, stark and unrelieved, had taken hold of the doctor's usually tireless mind; and he would even have refused food had not Georgina forced it upon him. His great notebook of observations lay unopened on the library table, and his little gold syringe of anti-fever serum\u2014a clever device of his own, with a self-contained reservoir, attached to a broad gold finger ring, and single-pressure action peculiar to itself\u2014rested idly in a small leather case beside it. Vigour, ambition, and the desire for study and observation seemed to have died within him; and he made no inquiries about his clinic, where hundreds of germ cultures stood in their orderly phials awaiting his attention.\n\nThe countless animals held for experiments played, lively and well fed, in the early spring sunshine; and as Georgina strolled out through the rose-arbour to the cages she felt a strangely incongruous sense of happiness about her. She knew, though, how tragically transient that happiness must be; since the start of new work would soon make all these small creatures unwilling martyrs to science. Knowing this, she glimpsed a sort of compensating element in her brother's inaction, and encouraged him to keep on in a rest he needed so badly. The eight Thibetan servants moved noiselessly about, each as impeccably effective as usual; and Georgina saw to it that the order of the household did not suffer because of the master's relaxation.\n\nStudy and starward ambition laid aside in slippered and dressing-gowned indifference, Clarendon was content to let Georgina treat him as an infant. He met her maternal fussiness with a slow, sad smile, and always obeyed her multitude of orders and precepts. A kind of faint, wistful felicity came over the languid household, amidst which the only dissenting note was supplied by Surama. He indeed was miserable, and looked often with sullen and resentful eyes at the sunny serenity in Georgina's face. His only joy had been the turmoil of experiment, and he missed the routine of seizing the fated animals, bearing them to the clinic in clutching talons, and watching them with hot brooding gaze and evil chuckles as they gradually fell into the final coma with wide-opened, red-rimmed eyes, and swollen tongue lolling from froth-covered mouth.\n\nNow he was seemingly driven to desperation by the sight of the carefree creatures in their cages, and frequently came to ask Clarendon if there were any orders. Finding the doctor apathetic and unwilling to begin work, he would go away muttering under his breath and glaring curses upon everything; stealing with cat-like tread to his own quarters in the basement, where his voice would sometimes ascend in deep, muffled rhythms of blasphemous strangeness and uncomfortably ritualistic suggestion.\n\nAll this wore on Georgina's nerves, but not by any means so gravely as her brother's continued lassitude itself. The duration of the state alarmed her, and little by little she lost the air of cheerfulness which had so provoked the clinic-man. Herself skilled in medicine, she found the doctor's condition highly unsatisfactory from an alienist's point of view; and she now feared as much from his absence of interest and activity as she had formerly feared from his fanatical zeal and overstudy. Was lingering melancholy about to turn the once brilliant man of intellect into an innocuous imbecile?\n\nThen, toward the end of May, came the sudden change. Georgina always recalled the smallest details connected with it; details as trivial as the box delivered to Surama the day before, postmarked Algiers, and emitting a most unpleasant odour; and the sharp, sudden thunderstorm, rare in the extreme for California, which sprang up that night as Surama chanted his rituals behind his locked basement door in a droning chest-voice louder and more intense than usual.\n\nIt was a sunny day, and she had been in the garden gathering flowers for the dining-room. Re-entering the house, she glimpsed her brother in the library, fully dressed and seated at the table, alternately consulting the notes in his thick observation book, and making fresh entries with brisk assured strokes of the pen. He was alert and vital, and there was a satisfying resilience about his movements as he now and then turned a page, or reached for a book from the rear of the great table. Delighted and relieved, Georgina hastened to deposit her flowers in the dining-room and return; but when she reached the library again she found that her brother was gone.\n\nShe knew, of course, that he must be in the clinic at work, and rejoiced to think that his old mind and purpose had snapped back into place. Realising it would be of no use to delay the luncheon for him, she ate alone and set aside a bite to be kept warm in case of his return at an odd moment. But he did not come. He was making up for lost time, and was still in the great stout-planked clinic when she went for a stroll through the rose-arbour.\n\nAs she walked among the fragrant blossoms she saw Surama fetching animals for the test. She wished she could notice him less, for he always made her shudder; but her very dread had sharpened her eyes and ears where he was concerned. He always went hatless around the yard, and the total hairlessness of his head enhanced his skeleton-like aspect horribly. Now she heard a faint chuckle as he took a small monkey from its cage against the wall and carried it to the clinic, his long, bony fingers pressing so cruelly into its furry sides that it cried out in frightened anguish. The sight sickened her, and brought her walk to an end. Her inmost soul rebelled at the ascendancy this creature had gained over her brother, and she reflected bitterly that the two had almost changed places as master and servant.\n\nNight came without Clarendon's return to the house, and Georgina concluded that he was absorbed in one of his very longest sessions, which meant total disregard of time. She hated to retire without a talk with him about his sudden recovery; but finally, feeling it would be futile to wait up, she wrote a cheerful note and propped it before his chair on the library table; then started resolutely for bed.\n\nShe was not quite asleep when she heard the outer door open and shut. So it had not been an all-night session after all! Determined to see that her brother had a meal before retiring she rose, slipped on a robe, and descended to the library, halting only when she heard voices from behind the half-opened door. Clarendon and Surama were talking, and she waited till the clinic-man might go.\n\nSurama, however, shewed no inclination to depart; and indeed, the whole heated tenor of the discourse seemed to bespeak absorption and promise length. Georgina, though she had not meant to listen, could not help catching a phrase now and then, and presently became aware of a sinister undercurrent which frightened her very much without being wholly clear to her. Her brother's voice, nervous, incisive, held her notice with disquieting persistence.\n\n\"But anyway,\" he was saying, \"we haven't enough animals for another day, and you know how hard it is to get a decent supply at short notice. It seems silly to waste so much effort on comparative trash when human specimens could be had with just a little extra care.\"\n\nGeorgina sickened at the possible implication, and caught at the hall rack to steady herself. Surama was replying in that deep, hollow tone which seemed to echo with the evil of a thousand ages and a thousand planets.\n\n\"Steady, steady\u2014what a child you are with your haste and impatience! You crowd things so! When you've lived as I have, so that a whole life will seem only an hour, you won't be so fretful about a day or week or month! You work too fast. You've plenty of specimens in the cages for a full week if you'll only go at a sensible rate. You might even begin on the older material if you'd be sure not to overdo it.\"\n\n\"Never mind my haste!\" the reply was snapped out sharply; \"I have my own methods. I don't want to use our material if I can help it, for I prefer them as they are. And you'd better be careful of them anyway\u2014you know the knives those sly dogs carry.\"\n\nSurama's deep chuckle came.\n\n\"Don't worry about that. The brutes eat, don't they? Well, I can get you one any time you need it. But go slow\u2014with the boy gone, there are only eight, and now that you've lost San Quentin it'll be hard to get new ones by the wholesale. I'd advise you to start in on Tsanpo\u2014he's the least use to you as he is, and\u2014\"\n\nBut that was all Georgina heard. Transfixed by a hideous dread from the thoughts this talk excited, she nearly sank to the floor where she stood, and was scarcely able to drag herself up the stairs and into her room. What was the evil monster Surama planning? Into what was he guiding her brother? What monstrous circumstances lay behind these cryptic sentences? A thousand phantoms of darkness and menace danced before her eyes, and she flung herself upon the bed without hope of sleep. One thought above the rest stood out with fiendish prominence, and she almost screamed aloud as it beat itself into her brain with renewed force. Then Nature, kinder than she expected, intervened at last. Closing her eyes in a dead faint, she did not awake till morning, nor did any fresh nightmare come to join the lasting one which the overheard words had brought.\n\nWith the morning sunshine came a lessening of the tension. What happens in the night when one is tired often reaches the consciousness in distorted forms, and Georgina could see that her brain must have given strange colour to scraps of common medical conversation. To suppose her brother\u2014only son of the gentle Frances Schuyler Clarendon\u2014guilty of savage sacrifices in the name of science would be to do an injustice to their blood, and she decided to omit all mention of her trip downstairs, lest Alfred ridicule her fantastic notions.\n\nWhen she reached the breakfast table she found that Clarendon was already gone, and regretted that not even this second morning had given her a chance to congratulate him on his revived activity. Quietly taking the breakfast served by stone-deaf old Margarita, the Mexican cook, she read the morning paper and seated herself with some needlework by the sitting-room window overlooking the great yard. All was silent out there, and she could see that the last of the animal cages had been emptied. Science was served, and the lime-pit held all that was left of the once pretty and lively little creatures. This slaughter had always grieved her, but she had never complained, since she knew it was all for humanity. Being a scientist's sister, she used to say to herself, was like being the sister of a soldier who kills to save his countrymen from their foes.\n\nAfter luncheon Georgina resumed her post by the window, and had been busily sewing for some time when the sound of a pistol shot from the yard caused her to look out in alarm. There, not far from the clinic, she saw the ghastly form of Surama, a revolver in his hand, and his skull-face twisted into a strange expression as he chuckled at a cowering figure robed in black silk and carrying a long Thibetan knife. It was the servant Tsanpo, and as she recognised the shrivelled face Georgina remembered horribly what she had overheard the night before. The sun flashed on the polished blade, and suddenly Surama's revolver spat once more. This time the knife flew from the Mongol's hand, and Surama glanced greedily at his shaking and bewildered prey.\n\nThen Tsanpo, glancing quickly at his unhurt hand and at the fallen knife, sprang nimbly away from the stealthily approaching clinic-man and made a dash for the house. Surama, however, was too swift for him, and caught him in a single leap, seizing his shoulder and almost crushing him. For a moment the Thibetan tried to struggle, but Surama lifted him like an animal by the scruff of the neck and bore him off toward the clinic. Georgina heard him chuckling and taunting the man in his own tongue, and saw the yellow face of the victim twist and quiver with fright. Suddenly realising against her own will what was taking place, a great horror mastered her and she fainted for the second time within twenty-four hours.\n\nWhen consciousness returned, the golden light of late afternoon was flooding the room. Georgina, picking up her fallen work-basket and scattered materials, was lost in a daze of doubt; but finally felt convinced that the scene which had overcome her must have been all too tragically real. Her worst fears, then, were horrible truths. What to do about it, nothing in her experience could tell her; and she was vaguely thankful that her brother did not appear. She must talk to him, but not now. She could not talk to anybody now. And, thinking shudderingly of the monstrous happening behind those barred clinic windows, she crept into bed for a long night of anguished sleeplessness.\n\nRising haggardly on the following day, Georgina saw the doctor for the first time since his recovery. He was bustling about preoccupiedly, circulating between the house and the clinic, and paying little attention to anything besides his work. There was no chance for the dreaded interview, and Clarendon did not even notice his sister's worn-out aspect and hesitant manner.\n\nIn the evening she heard him in the library, talking to himself in a fashion most unusual for him, and she felt that he was under a great strain which might culminate in the return of his apathy. Entering the room, she tried to calm him without referring to any trying subject, and forced a steadying cup of bouillon upon him. Finally she asked gently what was distressing him, and waited anxiously for his reply, hoping to hear that Surama's treatment of the poor Thibetan had horrified and outraged him.\n\nThere was a note of fretfulness in his voice as he responded.\n\n\"What's distressing me? Good God, Georgina, what isn't? Look at the cages and see if you have to ask again! Cleaned out\u2014milked dry\u2014not a cursed specimen left; and a line of the most important bacterial cultures incubating in their tubes without a chance to do an ounce of good! Days' work wasted\u2014whole programme set back\u2014it's enough to drive a man mad! How shall I ever get anywhere if I can't scrape up some decent subjects?\"\n\nGeorgina stroked his forehead.\n\n\"I think you ought to rest a while, Al dear.\"\n\nHe moved away.\n\n\"Rest? That's good! That's damn good! What else have I been doing but resting and vegetating and staring blankly into space for the last fifty or a hundred or a thousand years? Just as I manage to shake off the clouds, I have to run short of material\u2014and then I'm told to lapse back again into drooling stupefaction! God! And all the while some sneaking thief is probably working with my data and getting ready to come out ahead of me with the credit for my own work. I'll lose by a neck\u2014some fool with the proper specimens will get the prize, when one week more with even half-adequate facilities would see me through with flying colours!\"\n\nHis voice rose querulously, and there was an overtone of mental strain which Georgina did not like. She answered softly, yet not so softly as to hint at the soothing of a psychopathic case.\n\n\"But you're killing yourself with this worry and tension, and if you're dead, how can you do your work?\"\n\nHe gave a smile that was almost a sneer.\n\n\"I guess a week or a month\u2014all the time I need\u2014wouldn't quite finish me, and it doesn't much matter what becomes of me or any other individual in the end. Science is what must be served\u2014science\u2014the austere cause of human knowledge. I'm like the monkeys and birds and guinea-pigs I use\u2014just a cog in the machine, to be used to the advantage of the whole. They had to be killed\u2014I may have to be killed\u2014what of it? Isn't the cause we serve worth that and more?\"\n\nGeorgina sighed. For a moment she wondered whether, after all, this ceaseless round of slaughter really was worth while.\n\n\"But are you absolutely sure your discovery will be enough of a boon to humanity to warrant these sacrifices?\"\n\nClarendon's eyes flashed dangerously.\n\n\"Humanity! What the deuce is humanity? Science! Dolts! Just individuals over and over again! Humanity is made for preachers to whom it means the blindly credulous. Humanity is made for the predatory rich to whom it speaks in terms of dollars and cents. Humanity is made for the politician to whom it signifies collective power to be used to his advantage. What is humanity? Nothing! Thank God that crude illusion doesn't last! What a grown man worships is truth\u2014knowledge\u2014science\u2014light\u2014the rending of the veil and the pushing back of the shadow. Knowledge, the juggernaut! There is death in our own ritual. We must kill\u2014dissect\u2014destroy\u2014and all for the sake of discovery\u2014the worship of the ineffable light. The goddess Science demands it. We test a doubtful poison by killing. How else? No thought for self\u2014just knowledge\u2014the effect must be known.\"\n\nHis voice trailed off in a kind of temporary exhaustion, and Georgina shuddered slightly.\n\n\"But this is horrible, Al! You shouldn't think of it that way!\"\n\nClarendon cackled sardonically, in a manner which stirred odd and repugnant associations in his sister's mind.\n\n\"Horrible? You think what I say is horrible? You ought to hear Surama! I tell you, things were known to the priests of Atlantis that would have you drop dead of fright if you heard a hint of them. Knowledge was knowledge a hundred thousand years ago, when our especial forbears were shambling about Asia as speechless semi-apes! They know something of it in the Hoggar region\u2014there are rumours in the farther uplands of Thibet\u2014and once I heard an old man in China calling on Yog-Sothoth\u2014\"\n\nHe turned pale, and made a curious sign in the air with his extended forefinger. Georgina felt genuinely alarmed, but became somewhat calmer as his speech took a less fantastic form.\n\n\"Yes, it may be horrible, but it's glorious too. The pursuit of knowledge, I mean. Certainly, there's no slovenly sentiment connected with it. Doesn't Nature kill\u2014constantly and remorselessly\u2014and are any but fools horrified at the struggle? Killings are necessary. They are the glory of science. We learn something from them, and we can't sacrifice learning to sentiment. Hear the sentimentalists howl against vaccination! They fear it will kill the child. Well, what if it does? How else can we discover the laws of disease concerned? As a scientist's sister you ought to know better than to prate sentiment. You ought to help my work instead of hindering it!\"\n\n\"But, Al,\" protested Georgina, \"I haven't the slightest intention of hindering your work. Haven't I always tried to help as much as I could? I am ignorant, I suppose, and can't help very actively; but at least I'm proud of you\u2014proud for my own sake and for the family's sake\u2014and I've always tried to smooth the way. You've given me credit for that many a time.\"\n\nClarendon looked at her keenly.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said jerkily as he rose and strode from the room, \"you're right. You've always tried to help as best you knew. You may yet have a chance to help still more.\"\n\nGeorgina, seeing him disappear through the front door, followed him into the yard. Some distance away a lantern was shining through the trees, and as they approached it they saw Surama bending over a large object stretched on the ground. Clarendon, advancing, gave a short grunt; but when Georgina saw what it was she rushed up with a shriek. It was Dick, the great St. Bernard, and he was lying still with reddened eyes and protruding tongue.\n\n\"He's sick, Al!\" she cried. \"Do something for him, quick!\"\n\nThe doctor looked at Surama, who had uttered something in a tongue unknown to Georgina.\n\n\"Take him to the clinic,\" he ordered; \"I'm afraid Dick's caught the fever.\"\n\nSurama took up the dog as he had taken poor Tsanpo the day before, and carried him silently to the building near the wall. He did not chuckle this time, but glanced at Clarendon with what appeared to be real anxiety. It almost seemed to Georgina that Surama was asking the doctor to save her pet.\n\nClarendon, however, made no move to follow, but stood still for a moment and then sauntered slowly toward the house. Georgina, astonished at such callousness, kept up a running fire of entreaties on Dick's behalf, but it was of no use. Without paying the slightest attention to her pleas he made directly for the library and began to read in a large old book which had lain face down on the table. She put her hand on his shoulder as he sat there, but he did not speak or turn his head. He only kept on reading, and Georgina, glancing curiously over his shoulder, wondered in what strange alphabet this brass-bound tome was written.\n\nIn the cavernous parlour across the hall, sitting alone in the dark a quarter of an hour later, Georgina came to her decision. Something was gravely wrong\u2014just what, and to what extent, she scarcely dared formulate to herself\u2014and it was time that she called in some stronger force to help her. Of course it must be James. He was powerful and capable, and his sympathy and affection would shew him the right thing to do. He had known Al always, and would understand.\n\nIt was by this time rather late, but Georgina had resolved on action. Across the hall the light still shone from the library, and she looked wistfully at the doorway as she quietly donned a hat and left the house. Outside the gloomy mansion and forbidding grounds, it was only a short walk to Jackson Street, where by good luck she found a carriage to take her to the Western Union telegraph office. There she carefully wrote out a message to James Dalton in Sacramento, asking him to come at once to San Francisco on a matter of the greatest importance to them all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Dalton was frankly perplexed by Georgina's sudden message. He had had no word from the Clarendons since that stormy February evening when Alfred had declared him an outsider to his home; and he in turn had studiously refrained from communicating, even when he had longed to express sympathy after the doctor's summary ousting from office. He had fought hard to frustrate the politicians and keep the appointive power, and was bitterly sorry to watch the unseating of a man who, despite recent estrangements, still represented to him the ultimate ideal of scientific competence.\n\nNow, with this clearly frightened summons before him, he could not imagine what had happened. He knew, though, that Georgina was not one to lose her head or send forth a needless alarm; hence he wasted no time, but took the Overland which left Sacramento within the hour, going at once to his club and sending word to Georgina by a messenger that he was in town and wholly at her service.\n\nMeanwhile things had been quiescent at the Clarendon home, notwithstanding the doctor's continued taciturnity and his absolute refusal to report on the dog's condition. Shadows of evil seemed omnipresent and thickening, but for the moment there was a lull. Georgina was relieved to get Dalton's message and learn that he was close at hand, and sent back word that she would call him when necessity arose. Amidst all the gathering tension some faint compensating element seemed manifest, and Georgina finally decided that it was the absence of the lean Thibetans, whose stealthy, sinuous ways and disturbing exotic aspect had always annoyed her. They had vanished all at once; and old Margarita, the sole visible servant left in the house, told her they were helping their master and Surama at the clinic.\n\nThe following morning\u2014the twenty-eighth of May\u2014long to be remembered\u2014was dark and lowering, and Georgina felt the precarious calm wearing thin. She did not see her brother at all, but knew he was in the clinic hard at work at something despite the lack of specimens he had bewailed. She wondered how poor Tsanpo was getting along, and whether he had really been subjected to any serious inoculation, but it must be confessed that she wondered more about Dick. She longed to know whether Surama had done anything for the faithful dog amidst his master's oddly callous indifference. Surama's apparent solicitude on the night of Dick's seizure had impressed her greatly, giving her perhaps the kindliest feeling she had ever had for the detested clinic-man. Now, as the day advanced, she found herself thinking more and more of Dick; till at last her harassed nerves, finding in this one detail a sort of symbolic summation of the whole horror that lay upon the household, could stand the suspense no longer.\n\nUp to that time she had always respected Alfred's imperious wish that he be never approached or disturbed at the clinic; but as this fateful afternoon advanced, her resolution to break through the barrier grew stronger and stronger. Finally she set out with determined face, crossing the yard and entering the unlocked vestibule of the forbidden structure with the fixed intention of discovering how the dog was or of knowing the reason for her brother's secrecy.\n\nThe inner door, as usual, was locked; and behind it she heard voices in heated conversation. When her knocking brought no response she rattled the knob as loudly as possible, but still the voices argued on unheeding. They belonged, of course, to Surama and her brother; and as she stood there trying to attract attention she could not help catch something of their drift. Fate had made her for the second time an eavesdropper, and once more the matter she overheard seemed likely to tax her mental poise and nervous endurance to their ultimate bounds. Alfred and Surama were plainly quarrelling with increasing violence, and the purport of their speech was enough to arouse the wildest fears and confirm the gravest apprehensions. Georgina shivered as her brother's voice mounted shrilly to dangerous heights of fanatical tension.\n\n\"You, damn you\u2014you're a fine one to talk defeat and moderation to me! Who started all this, anyway? Did I have any idea of your cursed devil-gods and elder world? Did I ever in my life think of your damned spaces beyond the stars and your crawling chaos Nyarlathotep? I was a normal scientific man, confound you, till I was fool enough to drag you out of the vaults with your devilish Atlantean secrets. You egged me on, and now you want to cut me off! You loaf around doing nothing and telling me to go slow when you might just as well as not be going out and getting material. You know damn well that I don't know how to go about such things, whereas you must have been an old hand at it before the earth was made. It's like you, you damned walking corpse, to start something you won't or can't finish!\"\n\nSurama's evil chuckle came.\n\n\"You're insane, Clarendon. That's the only reason I let you rave on when I could send you to hell in three minutes. Enough is enough, and you've certainly had enough material for any novice at your stage. You've had all I'm going to get you, anyhow! You're only a maniac on the subject now\u2014what a cheap, crazy thing to sacrifice even your poor sister's pet dog, when you could have spared him as well as not! You can't look at any living thing now without wanting to jab that gold syringe into it. No\u2014Dick had to go where the Mexican boy went\u2014where Tsanpo and the other seven went\u2014where all the animals went! What a pupil! You're no fun any more\u2014you've lost your nerve. You set out to control things, and they're controlling you. I'm about done with you, Clarendon. I thought you had the stuff in you, but you haven't. It's about time I tried somebody else. I'm afraid you'll have to go!\"\n\nIn the doctor's shouted reply there was both fear and frenzy.\n\n\"Be careful, you \u2014! There are powers against your powers\u2014I didn't go to China for nothing, and there are things in Alhazred's Azif which weren't known in Atlantis! We've both meddled in dangerous things, but you needn't think you know all my resources. How about the Nemesis of Flame? I talked in Yemen with an old man who had come back alive from the Crimson Desert\u2014he had seen Irem, the City of Pillars, and had worshipped at the underground shrines of Nug and Yeb\u2014I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath!\"\n\nThrough Clarendon's shrieking falsetto cut the deep chuckle of the clinic-man.\n\n\"Shut up, you fool! Do you suppose your grotesque nonsense has any weight with me? Words and formulae\u2014words and formulae\u2014what do they all mean to one who has the substance behind them? We're in a material sphere now, and subject to material laws. You have your fever; I have my revolver. You'll get no specimens, and I'll get no fever so long as I have you in front of me with this gun between!\"\n\nThat was all Georgina could hear. She felt her senses reeling, and staggered out of the vestibule for a saving breath of the lowering outside air. She saw that the crisis had come at last, and that help must now arrive quickly if her brother was to be saved from the unknown gulfs of madness and mystery. Summoning up all her reserve energy, she managed to reach the house and get to the library, where she scrawled a hasty note for Margarita to take to James Dalton.\n\nWhen the old woman had gone, Georgina had just strength enough to cross to the lounge and sink weakly down into a sort of semi-stupor. There she lay for what seemed like years, conscious only of the fantastic creeping up of the twilight from the lower corners of the great, dismal room, and plagued by a thousand shadowy shapes of terror which filed with phantasmal, half-limned pageantry through her tortured and stifled brain. Dusk deepened into darkness, and still the spell held. Then a firm tread sounded in the hall, and she heard someone enter the room and fumble at the match-safe. Her heart almost stopped beating as the gas-jets of the chandelier flared up one by one, but then she saw that the arrival was her brother. Relieved to the bottom of her heart that he was still alive, she gave vent to an involuntary sigh, profound, long-drawn, and tremulous, and lapsed at last into kindly oblivion.\n\nAt the sound of that sigh Clarendon turned in alarm toward the lounge, and was inexpressibly shocked to see the pale and unconscious form of his sister there. Her face had a death-like quality that frightened his inmost spirit, and he flung himself on his knees by her side, awake to a realisation of what her passing away would mean to him. Long unused to private practice amidst his ceaseless quest for truth, he had lost the physician's instinct of first aid, and could only call out her name and chafe her wrists mechanically as fear and grief possessed him. Then he thought of water, and ran to the dining-room for a carafe. Stumbling about in a darkness which seemed to harbour vague terrors, he was some time in finding what he sought; but at last he clutched it in shaking hand and hastened back to dash the cold fluid in Georgina's face. The method was crude but effective. She stirred, sighed a second time, and finally opened her eyes.\n\n\"You are alive!\" he cried, and put his cheek to hers as she stroked his head maternally. She was almost glad she fainted, for the circumstance seemed to have dispelled the strange Alfred and brought her own brother back to her. She sat up slowly and tried to reassure him.\n\n\"I'm all right, Al. Just give me a glass of water. It's a sin to waste it this way\u2014to say nothing of spoiling my waist! Is that the way to behave every time your sister drops off for a nap? You needn't think I'm going to be sick, for I haven't time for such nonsense!\"\n\nAlfred's eyes shewed that her cool, common-sense speech had had its effect. His brotherly panic dissolved in an instant, and instead there came into his face a vague, calculating expression, as if some marvellous possibility had just dawned upon him. As she watched the subtle waves of cunning and appraisal pass fleetingly over his countenance she became less and less certain that her mode of reassurance had been a wise one, and before he spoke she found herself shivering at something she could not define. A keen medical instinct almost told her that his moment of sanity had passed, and that he was now once more the unrestrained fanatic for scientific research. There was something morbid in the quick narrowing of his eyes at her casual mention of good health. What was he thinking? To what unnatural extreme was his passion for experiment about to be pushed? Wherein lay the special significance of her pure blood and absolutely flawless organic state? None of these misgivings, however, troubled Georgina for more than a second, and she was quite natural and unsuspicious as she felt her brother's steady fingers at her pulse.\n\n\"You're a bit feverish, Georgie,\" he said in a precise, elaborately restrained voice as he looked professionally into her eyes.\n\n\"Why, nonsense, I'm all right,\" she replied. \"One would think you were on the watch for fever patients just for the sake of shewing off your discovery! It would be poetic, though, if you could make your final proof and demonstration by curing your own sister!\"\n\nClarendon started violently and guiltily. Had she suspected his wish? Had he muttered anything aloud? He looked at her closely, and saw that she had no inkling of the truth. She smiled up sweetly into his face and patted his hand as he stood by the side of the lounge. Then he took a small oblong leather case from his vest pocket, and taking out a little gold syringe, he began fingering it thoughtfully, pushing the piston speculatively in and out of the empty cylinder.\n\n\"I wonder,\" he began with suave sententiousness, \"whether you would really be willing to help science in\u2014something like that way\u2014if the need arose? Whether you would have the devotion to offer yourself to the cause of medicine as a sort of Jephthah's daughter if you knew it meant the absolute perfection and completion of my work?\"\n\nGeorgina, catching the odd and unmistakable glitter in her brother's eyes, knew at last that her worst fears were true. There was nothing to do now but keep him quiet at all hazards and to pray that Margarita had found James Dalton at his club.\n\n\"You look tired, Al dear,\" she said gently. \"Why not take a little morphia and get some of the sleep you need so badly?\"\n\nHe replied with a kind of crafty deliberation.\n\n\"Yes, you're right. I'm worn out, and so are you. Each of us needs a good sleep. Morphine is just the thing\u2014wait till I go and fill the syringe and we'll both take a proper dose.\"\n\nStill fingering the empty syringe, he walked softly out of the room. Georgina looked about her with the aimlessness of desperation, ears alert for any sign of possible help. She thought she heard Margarita again in the basement kitchen, and rose to ring the bell, in an effort to learn of the fate of her message. The old servant answered her summons at once, and declared she had given the message at the club hours ago. Governor Dalton had been out, but the clerk had promised to deliver the note at the very moment of his arrival.\n\nMargarita waddled below stairs again, but still Clarendon did not reappear. What was he doing? What was he planning? She had heard the outer door slam, so knew he must be at the clinic. Had he forgotten his original intention with the vacillating mind of madness? The suspense grew almost unbearable, and Georgina had to keep her teeth clenched tightly to avoid screaming.\n\nIt was the gate bell, which rang simultaneously in house and clinic, that broke the tension at last. She heard the cat-like tread of Surama on the walk as he left the clinic to answer it; and then, with an almost hysterical sigh of relief, she caught the firm, familiar accents of Dalton in conversation with the sinister attendant. Rising, she almost tottered to meet him as he loomed up in the library doorway; and for a moment no word was spoken while he kissed her hand in his courtly, old-school fashion. Then Georgina burst forth into a torrent of hurried explanation, telling all that had happened, all she had glimpsed and overheard, and all she feared and suspected.\n\nDalton listened gravely and comprehendingly, his first bewilderment gradually giving place to astonishment, sympathy, and resolution. The message, held by a careless clerk, had been slightly delayed, and had found him appropriately enough in the midst of a warm lounging-room discussion about Clarendon. A fellow-member, Dr. MacNeil, had brought in a medical journal with an article well calculated to disturb the devoted scientist, and Dalton had just asked to keep the paper for future reference when the message was handed him at last. Abandoning his half-formed plan to take Dr. MacNeil into his confidence regarding Alfred, he called at once for his hat and stick, and lost not a moment in getting a cab for the Clarendon home.\n\nSurama, he thought, appeared alarmed at recognising him; though he had chuckled as usual when striding off again toward the clinic. Dalton always recalled Surama's stride and chuckle on this ominous night, for he was never to see the unearthly creature again. As the chuckler entered the clinic vestibule his deep, guttural gurgles seemed to blend with some low mutterings of thunder which troubled the far horizon.\n\nWhen Dalton had heard all Georgina had to say, and learned that Alfred was expected back at any moment with an hypodermic dose of morphine, he decided he had better talk with the doctor alone. Advising Georgina to retire to her room and await developments, he walked about the gloomy library, scanning the shelves and listening for Clarendon's nervous footstep on the clinic path outside. The vast room's corners were dismal despite the chandelier, and the closer Dalton looked at his friend's choice of books the less he liked them. It was not the balanced collection of a normal physician, biologist, or man of general culture. There were too many volumes on doubtful borderland themes; dark speculations and forbidden rituals of the Middle Ages, and strange exotic mysteries in alien alphabets both known and unknown.\n\nThe great notebook of observations on the table was unwholesome, too. The handwriting had a neurotic cast, and the spirit of the entries was far from reassuring. Long passages were inscribed in crabbed Greek characters, and as Dalton marshalled his linguistic memory for their translation he gave a sudden start, and wished his college struggles with Xenophon and Homer had been more conscientious. There was something wrong\u2014something hideously wrong\u2014here, and the governor sank limply into the chair by the table as he pored more and more closely over the doctor's barbarous Greek. Then a sound came, startlingly near, and he jumped nervously at a hand laid sharply on his shoulder.\n\n\"What, may I ask, is the cause of this intrusion? You might have stated your business to Surama.\"\n\nClarendon was standing icily by the chair, the little gold syringe in one hand. He seemed very calm and rational, and Dalton fancied for a moment that Georgina must have exaggerated his condition. How, too, could a rusty scholar be absolutely sure about these Greek entries? The governor decided to be very cautious in his interview, and thanked the lucky chance which had placed a specious pretext in his coat pocket. He was very cool and assured as he rose to reply.\n\n\"I didn't think you'd care to have things dragged before a subordinate, but I thought you ought to see this article at once.\"\n\nHe drew forth the magazine given him by Dr. MacNeil and handed it to Clarendon.\n\nOn page 542\u2014you see the heading, 'Black Fever Conquered by New Serum It's by Dr. Miller of Philadelphia\u2014and he thinks he's got ahead of you with your cure. They were discussing it at the club, and MacNeil thought the exposition very convincing. I, as a layman, couldn't pretend to judge; but at all events I thought you oughtn't to miss a chance to digest the thing while it's fresh. If you're busy, of course, I won't disturb you\u2014\"\n\nClarendon cut in sharply.\n\n\"I'm going to give my sister an hypodermic\u2014she's not quite well\u2014but I'll look at what that quack has to say when I get back. I know Miller\u2014a damn sneak and incompetent\u2014and I don't believe he has the brains to steal my methods from the little he's seen of them.\"\n\nDalton suddenly felt a wave of intuition warning him that Georgina must not receive that intended dose. There was something sinister about it. From what she had said, Alfred must have been inordinately long preparing it, far longer than was needed for the dissolving of a morphine tablet. He decided to hold his host as long as possible, meanwhile testing his attitude in a more or less subtle way.\n\n\"I'm sorry Georgina isn't well. Are you sure that the injection will do her good? That it won't do her any harm?\"\n\nClarendon's spasmodic start shewed that something had been struck home.\n\n\"Do her harm?\" he cried. \"Don't be absurd! You know Georgina must be in the best of health\u2014the very best, I say\u2014in order to serve science as a Clarendon should serve it. She, at least, appreciates the fact that she is my sister. She deems no sacrifice too great in my service. She is a priestess of truth and discovery, as I am a priest.\"\n\nHe paused in his shrill tirade, wild-eyed, and somewhat out of breath. Dalton could see that his attention had been momentarily shifted.\n\n\"But let me see what this cursed quack has to say,\" he continued. \"If he thinks his pseudo-medical rhetoric can take a real doctor in, he is even simpler than I thought!\"\n\nClarendon nervously found the right page and began reading as he stood there clutching his syringe. Dalton wondered what the real facts were. MacNeil had assured him that the author was a pathologist of the highest standing, and that whatever errors the article might have, the mind behind it was powerful, erudite, and absolutely honourable and sincere.\n\nWatching the doctor as he read, Dalton saw the thin, bearded face grow pale. The great eyes blazed, and the pages crackled in the tenser grip of the long, lean fingers. A perspiration broke out on the high, ivory-white forehead where the hair was already thinning. and the reader sank gaspingly into the chair his visitor had vacated as he kept on with his devouring of the text. Then came a wild scream as from a haunted beast, and Clarendon lurched forward on the table, his outflung arms sweeping books and paper before them as consciousness went dark like a wind-quenched candle-flame.\n\nDalton, springing to help his stricken friend, raised the slim form and tilted it back in the chair. Seeing the carafe on the floor near the lounge, he dashed some water into the twisted face, and was rewarded by seeing the large eyes slowly open. They were sane eyes now\u2014deep and sad and unmistakably sane\u2014and Dalton felt awed in the presence of a tragedy whose ultimate depth he could never hope or dare to plumb.\n\nThe golden hypodermic was still clutched in the lean left hand, and as Clarendon drew a deep, shuddering breath he unclosed his fingers and studied the glittering thing that rolled about on his palm. Then he spoke\u2014slowly, and with the ineffable sadness of utter, absolute despair.\n\n\"Thanks, Jimmy, I'm quite all right. But there's much to be done. You asked me a while back if this shot of morphia would do Georgie any harm. I'm in a position now to tell you that it won't.\"\n\nHe turned a small screw in the syringe and laid a finger on the piston, at the same time pulling with his left hand at the skin of his own neck. Dalton cried out in alarm as a lightning motion of his right hand injected the contents of the cylinder into the ridge of distended flesh.\n\n\"Good Lord, Al, what have you done?\"\n\nClarendon smiled gently\u2014a smile almost of peace and resignation, different indeed from the sardonic sneer of the past few weeks.\n\n\"You ought to know, Jimmy, if you've still the judgment that made you a governor. You must have pieced together enough from my notes to realise that there's nothing else to do. With your marks in Greek back at Columbia I guess you couldn't have missed much. All I can say is that it's true.\n\n\"James, I don't like to pass blame along, but it's only right to tell you that Surama got me into this. I can't tell you who or what he is, for I don't fully know myself, and what I do know is stuff that no sane person ought to know; but I will say that I don't consider him a human being in the fullest sense, and that I'm not sure whether or not he's alive as we know life.\n\n\"You think I'm talking nonsense. I wish I were, but the whole hideous mess is damnably real. I started out in life with a clean mind and purpose. I wanted to rid the world of fever. I tried and failed\u2014and I wish to God I had been honest enough to say that I'd failed. Don't let my old talk of science deceive you, James\u2014I found no antitoxin and was never even half on the track of one!\n\n\"Don't look so shaken up, old fellow! A veteran politician-fighter like you must have seen plenty of unmaskings before. I tell you, I never had even the start of a fever cure. But my studies had taken me into some queer places, and it was just my damned luck to listen to the stories of some still queerer people. James, if you ever wish any man well, tell him to keep clear of the ancient, hidden places of the earth. Old backwaters are dangerous\u2014things are handed down there that don't do healthy people any good. I talked too much with old priests and mystics, and got to hoping I might achieve things in dark ways that I couldn't achieve in lawful ways.\n\n\"I shan't tell you just what I mean, for if I did I'd be as bad as the old priests that were the ruin of me. All I need say is that after what I've learned I shudder at the thought of the world and what it's been through. The world is cursed old, James, and there have been whole chapters lived and closed before the dawn of our organic life and the geologic eras connected with it. It's an awful thought\u2014whole forgotten cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases\u2014all lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the tropic seas geology tells us about.\n\n\"I said gone, but I didn't quite mean that. It would have been better that way, but it wasn't quite so. In places traditions have kept on\u2014I can't tell you how\u2014and certain archaic life-forms have managed to struggle thinly down the aeons in hidden spots. There were cults, you know\u2014bands of evil priests in lands now buried under the sea. Atlantis was the hotbed. That was a terrible place. If heaven is merciful, no one will ever drag up that horror from the deep.\n\n\"It had a colony, though, that didn't sink; and when you get too confidential with one of the Tuareg priests in Africa, he's likely to tell you wild tales about it\u2014tales that connect up with whispers you'll hear among the mad lamas and flighty yak-drivers on the secret tablelands of Asia. I'd heard all the common tales and whispers when I came on the big one. What that was, you'll never know\u2014but it pertained to somebody or something that had come down from a blasphemously long time ago, and could be made to live again\u2014or seem alive again\u2014through certain processes that weren't very clear to the man who told me.\n\n\"Now, James, in spite of my confession about the fever, you know I'm not bad as a doctor. I plugged hard at medicine, and soaked up about as much as the next man\u2014maybe a little more, because down there in the Hoggar country I did something no priest had ever been able to do. They led me blindfolded to a place that had been sealed up for generations\u2014and I came back with Surama.\n\n\"Easy, James! I know what you want to say. How does he know all he knows?\u2014why does he speak English\u2014or any other language, for that matter\u2014without an accent?\u2014why did he come away with me?\u2014and all that. I can't tell you altogether, but I can say that he takes in ideas and images and impressions with something besides his brain and senses. He had a use for me and my science. He told me things, and opened up vistas. He taught me to worship ancient, primordial, and unholy gods, and mapped out a road to a terrible goal which I can't even hint to you. Don't press me, James\u2014it's for the sake of your sanity and the world's sanity!\n\n\"The creature is beyond all bounds. He's in league with the stars and all the forces of Nature. Don't think I'm still crazy, James\u2014I swear to you I'm not! I've had too many glimpses to doubt. He gave me new pleasures that were forms of his palaeogean worship, and the greatest of those was the black fever.\n\n\"God, James! Haven't you seen through the business by this time? Do you still believe the black fever came out of Thibet, and that I learned about it there? Use your brains, man! Look at Miller's article here! He's found a basic antitoxin that will end all fever within half a century, when other men learn how to modify it for the different forms. He's cut the ground of my youth from under me\u2014done what I'd have given my life to do\u2014taken the wind out of all the honest sails I ever flung to the breeze of science! Do you wonder his article gave me a turn? Do you wonder it shocks me out of my madness back to the old dreams of my youth? Too late! Too late! But not too late to save others!\n\n\"I guess I'm rambling a bit now, old man. You know\u2014the hypodermic. I asked you why you didn't tumble to the facts about black fever. How could you, though? Doesn't Miller say he's cured seven cases with his serum? A matter of diagnosis, James. He only thinks it is black fever. I can read between his lines. Here, old chap, on page 551, is the key to the whole thing. Read it again.\n\n\"You see, don't you? The fever cases from the Pacific Coast didn't respond to his serum. They puzzled him. They didn't even seem like any true fever he knew. Well, those were my cases! Those were the real black fever cases! And there can't ever be an antitoxin on earth that'll cure black fever!\n\n\"How do I know? Because black fever isn't of this earth! It's from somewhere else, James\u2014and Surama alone knows where, because he brought it here. He brought it and I spread it! That's the secret, James! That's all I wanted the appointment for\u2014that's all I ever did\u2014just spread the fever that I carried in this gold syringe and in the deadlier finger-ring-pump-syringe you see on my index finger! Science? A blind! I wanted to kill, and kill, and kill! A single pressure on my finger, and the black fever was inoculated. I wanted to see living things writhe and squirm, scream and froth at the mouth. A single pressure of the pump-syringe and I could watch them as they died, and I couldn't live or think unless I had plenty to watch. That's why I jabbed everything in sight with the accursed hollow needle. Animals, criminals, children, servants\u2014and the next would have been\u2014\"\n\nClarendon's voice broke, and he crumpled up perceptibly in his chair.\n\n\"That\u2014that, James\u2014was\u2014my life. Surama made it so\u2014he taught me, and kept me at it till I couldn't stop. Then\u2014then it got too much even for him. He tried to check me. Fancy\u2014he trying to check anybody in that line! But now I've got my last specimen. That is my last test. Good subject, James\u2014I'm healthy\u2014devilish healthy. Deuced ironic, though\u2014the madness has gone now, so there won't be any fun watching the agony! Can't be\u2014can't\u2014\"\n\nA violent shiver of fever racked the doctor, and Dalton mourned amidst his horror-stupefaction that he could give no grief. How much of Alfred's story was sheer nonsense, and how much nightmare truth he could not say; but in any case he felt that the man was a victim rather than a criminal, and above all, he was a boyhood comrade and Georgina's brother. Thoughts of the old days came back kaleidoscopically. \"Little Alf\"\u2014the yard at Phillips Exeter\u2014the quadrangle at Columbia\u2014the fight with Tom Cortland when he saved Alf from a pommeling....\n\nHe helped Clarendon to the lounge and asked gently what he could do. There was nothing. Alfred could only whisper now, but he asked forgiveness for all his offences, and commended his sister to the care of his friend.\n\n\"You\u2014you'll\u2014make her happy,\" he gasped. \"She deserves it. Martyr\u2014to\u2014a myth! Make it up to her, James. Don't\u2014let\u2014her\u2014know\u2014more\u2014than she has to!\"\n\nHis voice trailed off in a mumble, and he fell into a stupor. Dalton rang the bell, but Margarita had gone to bed, so he called up the stairs for Georgina. She was firm of step, but very pale. Alfred's scream had tried her sorely, but she had trusted James. She trusted him still as he shewed her the unconscious form on the lounge and asked her to go back to her room and rest, no matter what sounds she might hear. He did not wish her to witness the awful spectacle of delirium certain to come, but bade her kiss her brother a final farewell as he lay there calm and still, very like the delicate boy he had once been. So she left him\u2014the strange, moonstruck, star-reading genius she had mothered so long\u2014and the picture she carried away was a very merciful one.\n\nDalton must bear to his grave a sterner picture. His fears of delirium were not vain, and all through the black midnight hours his giant strength restrained the frenzied contortions of the mad sufferer. What he heard from those swollen, blackening lips he will never repeat. He has never been quite the same man since, and he knows that no one who hears such things can ever be wholly as he was before. So, for the world's good, he dares not speak, and he thanks God that his layman's ignorance of certain subjects makes many of the revelations cryptic and meaningless to him.\n\nToward morning Clarendon suddenly woke to a sane consciousness and began to speak in a firm voice.\n\n\"James, I didn't tell you what must be done\u2014about everything. Blot out these entries in Greek and send my notebook to Dr. Miller. All my other notes, too, that you'll find in the files. He's the big authority today\u2014his article proves it. Your friend at the club was right.\n\n\"But everything in the clinic must go. Everything without exception, dead or alive or\u2014otherwise. All the plagues of hell are in those bottles on the shelves. Burn them\u2014burn it all\u2014if one thing escapes, Surama will spread black death throughout the world. And above all burn Surama! That\u2014that thing\u2014must not breathe the wholesome air of heaven. You know now\u2014what I told you\u2014you know why such an entity can't be allowed on earth. It won't be murder\u2014Surama isn't human\u2014if you're as pious as you used to be, James, I shan't have to urge you. Remember the old text\u2014'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live'\u2014or something of the sort.\n\n\"Burn him, James! Don't let him chuckle again over the torture of mortal flesh! I say, burn him\u2014the Nemesis of Flame\u2014that's all that can reach him, James, unless you can catch him asleep and drive a stake through his heart.... Kill him\u2014extirpate him\u2014cleanse the decent universe of its primal taint\u2014the taint I recalled from its age-long sleep....\"\n\nThe doctor had risen on his elbow, and his voice was a piercing shriek toward the last. The effort was too much, however, and he lapsed very suddenly into a deep, tranquil coma. Dalton, himself fearless of fever, since he knew the dread germ to be non-contagious, composed Alfred's arms and legs on the lounge and threw a light afghan over the fragile form. After all, mightn't much of this horror be exaggeration and delirium? Mightn't old Doc MacNeil pull him through on a long chance? The governor strove to keep awake, and walked briskly up and down the room, but his energies had been taxed too deeply for such measures. A second's rest in the chair by the table took matters out of his hands, and he was presently sleeping soundly despite his best intentions.\n\nDalton started up as a fierce light shone in his eyes, and for a moment he thought the dawn had come. But it was not the dawn, and as he rubbed his heavy lids he saw that it was the glare of the burning clinic in the yard, whose stout planks flamed and roared and crackled heavenward in the most stupendous holocaust he had ever seen. It was indeed the \"Nemesis of Flame\" that Clarendon had wished, and Dalton felt that some strange combustibles must be involved in a blaze so much wilder than anything normal pine or redwood could afford. He glanced alarmedly at the lounge, but Alfred was not there. Starting up, he went to call Georgina, but met her in the hall, roused as he was by the mountain of living fire.\n\n\"The clinic's burning down!\" she cried. \"How is Al now?\"\n\n\"He's disappeared\u2014disappeared while I dropped asleep!\" replied Dalton, reaching out a steadying arm to the form which faintness had begun to sway.\n\nGently leading her upstairs toward her room, he promised to search at once for Alfred, but Georgina slowly shook her head as the flames from outside cast a weird glow through the window on the landing.\n\n\"He must be dead, James\u2014he could never live, sane and knowing what he did. I heard him quarrelling with Surama, and know that awful things were going on. He is my brother, but\u2014it is best as it is.\"\n\nHer voice had sunk to a whisper.\n\nSuddenly through the open window came the sound of a deep, hideous chuckle, and the flames of the burning clinic took fresh contours till they half resembled some nameless, Cyclopean creatures of nightmare. James and Georgina paused hesitant, and peered out breathlessly through the landing window. Then from the sky came a thunderous peal, as a forked bolt of lightning shot down with terrible directness into the very midst of the blazing ruin. The deep chuckle ceased, and in its place came a frantic, ululant yelp as of a thousand ghouls and werewolves in torment. It died away with long, reverberant echoes, and slowly the flames resumed their normal shape.\n\nThe watchers did not move, but waited till the pillar of fire had shrunk to a smouldering glow. They were glad of a half-rusticity which had kept the firemen from trooping out, and of the wall that excluded the curious. What had happened was not for vulgar eyes\u2014it involved too much of the universe's inner secrets for that.\n\nIn the pale dawn, James spoke softly to Georgina, who could do no more than put her head on his breast and sob.\n\n\"Sweetheart, I think he has atoned. He must have set the fire, you know, while I was asleep. He told me it ought to be burned\u2014the clinic, and everything in it, Surama, too. It was the only way to save the world from the unknown horrors he had loosed upon it. He knew, and he did what was best.\n\n\"He was a great man, Georgie. Let's never forget that. We must always be proud of him, for he started out to help mankind, and was titanic even in his sins. I'll tell you more sometime. What he did, be it good or evil, was what no man ever did before. He was the first and last to break through certain veils, and even Apollonius of Tyana takes second place beside him. But we mustn't talk about that. We must remember him only as the Little Alf we knew\u2014as the boy who wanted to master medicine and conquer fever.\"\n\nIn the afternoon the leisurely firemen overhauled the ruins and found two skeletons with bits of blackened flesh adhering\u2014only two, thanks to the undisturbed lime-pits. One was of a man; the other is still a subject of debate among the biologists of the coast. It was not exactly an ape's or a saurian's skeleton, but it had disturbing suggestions of lines of evolution of which palaeontology has revealed no trace. The charred skull, oddly enough, was very human, and reminded people of Surama; but the rest of the bones were beyond conjecture. Only well-cut clothing could have made such a body look like a man.\n\nBut the human bones were Clarendon's. No one disputed this, and the world at large still mourns the untimely death of the greatest doctor of his age; the bacteriologist whose universal fever serum would have far eclipsed Dr. Miller's kindred antitoxin had he lived to bring it to perfection. Much of Miller's late success, indeed, is credited to the notes bequeathed him by the hapless victim of the flames. Of the old rivalry and hatred almost none survived, and even Dr. Wilfred Jones has been known to boast of his association with the vanished leader.\n\nJames Dalton and his wife Georgina have always preserved a reticence which modesty and family grief might well account for. They published certain notes as a tribute to the great man's memory, but have never confirmed or contradicted either the popular estimate or the rare hints of marvels that a very few keen thinkers have been known to whisper. It was very subtly and slowly that the facts filtered out. Dalton probably gave Dr. MacNeil an inkling of the truth, and that good soul had not many secrets from his son.\n\nThe Daltons have led, on the whole, a very happy life; for their cloud of terror lies far in the background, and a strong mutual love has kept the world fresh for them. But there are things which disturb them oddly\u2014little things, of which one would scarcely ever think of complaining. They cannot bear persons who are lean or deep-voiced beyond certain limits, and Georgina turns pale at the sound of any guttural chuckling. Senator Dalton has a mixed horror of occultism, travel, hypodermics, and strange alphabets which most find hard to unify, and there are still those who blame him for the vast proportion of the doctor's library that he destroyed with such painstaking completeness.\n\nMacNeil, though, seemed to realise. He was a simple man, and he said a prayer as the last of Alfred Clarendon's strange books crumbled to ashes. Nor would anyone who had peered understandingly within those books wish a word of that prayer unsaid.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Little Glass Bottle by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"Heave to, there's something floating to the leeward\" the speaker was a short stockily built man whose name was William Jones. he was the captain of a small cat boat in which he & a party of men were sailing at the time the story opens.\n\n\"Aye aye sir\" answered John Towers & the boat was brought to a stand still Captain Jones reached out his hand for the object which he now discerned to be a glass bottle \"Nothing but a rum flask that the men on a passing boat threw over\" he said but from an impulse of curiosity he reached out for it. it was a rum flask & he was about to throw it away when he noticed a piece of paper in it. He pulled it out & on it read the following:\n\n[ Jan 1 1864 ]\n\n\u2002I am John Jones who writes this letter my ship is fast sinking with a treasure on board I am where it is marked * on the enclosed chart\n\n\u2002Captain Jones turned the sheet over & the other side was a chart\n\n\u2002on the edge were written these words\n\n\u2002dotted lines represent course we took\n\n\"Towers\" Said Capt. Jones exitedly \"read this\" Towers did as he was directed \"I think it would pay to go\" said Capt. Jones \"do you\"? \"Just as you say\" replied Towers. \"We'll charter a schooner this very day\" said the exited captain \"All right\" said Towers so they hired a boat and started off govnd by the dotted lines of they chart in 4 weeks the reached the place where directed & the divers went down and came up with an iron bottle they found in it the following lines scribbled on a piece of brown paper.\n\n[ Dec 3 1880 ]\n\nDear Searcher excuse me for the practical joke I have played on you but it serves you right to find nothing for your foolish act\u2014\n\n\"Well it does\" said Capt Jones \"go on\"\n\nHowever I will defray your expenses to & from the place you found your bottle I think it will be $25.0.00 so that amount you will find in an Iron box I know where you found the bottle because I put this bottle here & the iron box & then found a good place to put the second bottle hoping the enclosed money will defray your expenses some I close\u2014Anonymus\"\n\n\"I'd like to kick his head off\" said Capt Jones \"Here diver go & get the $25.0.00 in a minute the diver came up bearing an iron box inside it was found $25.0.00 It defrayed their expenses but I hardly think that they will ever go to a mysterious place as directed by a mysterious bottle.\n\n[ The Lurking Fear ]\n\n[ I. The Shadow on the Chimney ]\n\nThere was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.\n\nWe had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before\u2014the nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I did not want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the daemon implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and desolate mountain.\n\nIn a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill until the wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect more than usually sinister as we viewed it by night and without the accustomed crowds of investigators, so that we were often tempted to use the acetylene headlight despite the attention it might attract. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none\u2014they are wise when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men's skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.\n\nFear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learned at once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world's notice. The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilisation once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition throughout the neighbouring villages; since it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade hand-woven baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot shoot, raise, or make.\n\nThe lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion, which crowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a daemon which seized lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they whispered of blood-trails toward the distant mansion. Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.\n\nNo one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting stories, with their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the half-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted that the Martense mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade such a doubt, although no ghostly evidence was ever found by such investigators as had visited the building after some especially vivid tale of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense spectre; myths concerning the Martense family itself, its queer hereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long, unnatural annals, and the murder which had cursed it.\n\nThe terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentous confirmation of the mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer night, after a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence, the countryside was aroused by a squatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The pitiful throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror which had descended upon them, and they were not doubted. They had not seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that they knew a creeping death had come.\n\nIn the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering mountaineers to the place where they said the death had come. Death was indeed there. The ground under one of the squatters' villages had caved in after a lightning stroke, destroying several of the malodorous shanties; but upon this property damage was superimposed an organic devastation which paled it to insignificance. Of a possible 75 natives who had inhabited this spot, not one living specimen was visible. The disordered earth was covered with blood and human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of daemon teeth and talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. That some hideous animal must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any tongue now revive the charge that such cryptic deaths formed merely the sordid murders common in decadent communities. That charge was revived only when about 25 of the estimated population were found missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the murder of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained that on a summer night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead village whose corpses were horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.\n\nThe excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the haunted Martense mansion, though the localities were over three miles apart. The troopers were more sceptical; including the mansion only casually in their investigations, and dropping it altogether when they found it thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however, canvassed the place with infinite care; overturning everything in the house, sounding ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking the nearby forests. All was in vain; the death that had come had left no trace save destruction itself.\n\nBy the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the newspapers, whose reporters overran Tempest Mountain. They described it in much detail, and with many interviews to elucidate the horror's history as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidly at first, for I am a connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I detected an atmosphere which stirred me oddly, so that on August 5th, 1921, I registered among the reporters who crowded the hotel at Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest Mountain and acknowledged headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks more, and the dispersal of the reporters left me free to begin a terrible exploration based on the minute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile busied myself.\n\nSo on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent motor-car and tramped with two armed companions up the last mound-covered reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on the spectral grey walls that began to appear through giant oaks ahead. In this morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination, the vast box-like pile displayed obscure hints of terror which day could not uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce resolution to test an idea. I believed that the thunder called the death-daemon out of some fearsome secret place; and be that daemon solid entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it.\n\nI had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well; choosing as the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose murder looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the apartment of this ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber, measuring about twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some rubbish which had once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on the southeast corner of the house, and had an immense east window and narrow south window, both devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the large window was an enormous Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles representing the prodigal son, and opposite the narrow window was a spacious bed built into the wall.\n\nAs the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details. First I fastened side by side to the ledge of the large window three rope ladders which I had brought with me. I knew they reached a suitable spot on the grass outside, for I had tested them. Then the three of us dragged from another room a wide four-poster bedstead, crowding it laterally against the window. Having strown it with fir boughs, all now rested on it with drawn automatics, two relaxing while the third watched. From whatever direction the daemon might come, our potential escape was provided. If it came from within the house, we had the window ladders; if from outside, the door and the stairs. We did not think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far even at worst.\n\nI watched from midnight to one o'clock, when in spite of the sinister house, the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and lightning, I felt singularly drowsy. I was between my two companions, George Bennett being toward the window and William Tobey toward the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the same anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I designated Tobey for the next watch although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I had been watching that fireplace.\n\nThe increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief time I slept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly awaked, probably because the sleeper toward the window had restlessly flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see whether Tobey was attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a distinct anxiety on that score. Never before had the presence of evil so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must have dropped asleep again, for it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when the night grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or imagination.\n\nIn that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and reverberated. There was no light, but I knew from the empty space at my right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.\n\nThen came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the daemon flash of a monstrous fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond the window threw his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the fireplace from which my eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive and sane, is a marvel I cannot fathom. I cannot fathom it, for the shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or of any other human creature, but a blasphemous abnormality from hell's nethermost craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and William Tobey had left no trace, not even of a struggle. They were never heard of again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion I lay nervously exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do not remember exactly how I managed to reach the motor-car, start it, and slip unobserved back to the village; for I retain no distinct impression save of wild-armed titan trees, daemoniac mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the low mounds that dotted and streaked the region.\n\nAs I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors\u2014one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint daemon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen, I hardly dared to analyse or identify. Something had lain between me and the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed, or laughed titteringly\u2014even that would have relieved the abysmal hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or fore leg on my chest.... Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic.... Jan Martense, whose room I had invaded, was buried in the graveyard near the mansion.... I must find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived... why had it picked them, and left me for the last?... Drowsiness is so stifling, and dreams are so horrible....\n\nIn a short time I realised that I must tell my story to someone or break down completely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest for the lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter might prove to be. Accordingly I resolved in my mind the best course to pursue; whom to select for my confidences, and how to track down the thing which had obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow.\n\nMy chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable reporters, of whom several still remained to collect final echoes of the tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a colleague, and the more I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one Arthur Munroe, a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education, taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not bound to conventional ideas and experiences.\n\nOn an afternoon in early September Arthur Munroe listened to my story. I saw from the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic, and when I had finished he analysed and discussed the thing with the greatest shrewdness and judgment. His advice, moreover, was eminently practical; for he recommended a postponement of operations at the Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family, and discovered a man who possessed a marvellously illuminating ancestral diary. We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels as had not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and arranged to precede our culminating task\u2014the exhaustive and definitive examination of the mansion in the light of its detailed history\u2014with an equally exhaustive and definitive examination of spots associated with the various tragedies of squatter legend.\n\nThe results of this examination were not at first very enlightening, though our tabulation of them seemed to reveal a fairly significant trend; namely, that the number of reported horrors was by far the greatest in areas either comparatively near the avoided house or connected with it by stretches of the morbidly overnourished forest. There were, it is true, exceptions; indeed, the horror which had caught the world's ear had happened in a treeless space remote alike from the mansion and from any connecting woods.\n\nAs to the nature and appearance of the lurking fear, nothing could be gained from the scared and witless shanty-dwellers. In the same breath they called it a snake and a giant, a thunder-devil and a bat, a vulture and a walking tree. We did, however, deem ourselves justified in assuming that it was a living organism highly susceptible to electrical storms; and although certain of the stories suggested wings, we believed that its aversion for open spaces made land locomotion a more probable theory. The only thing really incompatible with the latter view was the rapidity with which the creature must have travelled in order to perform all the deeds attributed to it.\n\nWhen we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously likeable in many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending the evolutionary scale because of their unfortunate ancestry and stultifying isolation. They feared outsiders, but slowly grew accustomed to us; finally helping vastly when we beat down all the thickets and tore out all the partitions of the mansion in our search for the lurking fear. When we asked them to help us find Bennett and Tobey they were truly distressed; for they wanted to help us, yet knew that these victims had gone as wholly out of the world as their own missing people. That great numbers of them had actually been killed and removed, just as the wild animals had long been exterminated, we were of course thoroughly convinced; and we waited apprehensively for further tragedies to occur.\n\nBy the middle of October we were puzzled by our lack of progress. Owing to the clear nights no daemoniac aggressions had taken place, and the completeness of our vain searches of house and country almost drove us to regard the lurking fear as a non-material agency. We feared that the cold weather would come on and halt our explorations, for all agreed that the daemon was generally quiet in winter. Thus there was a kind of haste and desperation in our last daylight canvass of the horror-visited hamlet; a hamlet now deserted because of the squatters' fears.\n\nThe illfated squatter hamlet had borne no name, but had long stood in a sheltered though treeless cleft between two elevations called respectively Cone Mountain and Maple Hill. It was closer to Maple Hill than to Cone Mountain, some of the crude abodes indeed being dugouts on the side of the former eminence. Geographically it lay about two miles northwest of the base of Tempest Mountain, and three miles from the oak-girt mansion. Of the distance between the hamlet and the mansion, fully two miles and a quarter on the hamlet's side was entirely open country; the plain being of fairly level character save for some of the low snake-like mounds, and having as vegetation only grass and scattered weeds. Considering this topography, we had finally concluded that the daemon must have come by way of Cone Mountain, a wooded southern prolongation of which ran to within a short distance of the westernmost spur of Tempest Mountain. The upheaval of ground we traced conclusively to a landslide from Maple Hill, a tall lone splintered tree on whose side had been the striking point of the thunderbolt which summoned the fiend.\n\nAs for the twentieth time or more Arthur Munroe and I went minutely over every inch of the violated village, we were filled with a certain discouragement coupled with vague and novel fears. It was acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common, to encounter so blankly clueless a scene after such overwhelming occurrences; and we moved about beneath the leaden, darkening sky with that tragic directionless zeal which results from a combined sense of futility and necessity of action. Our care was gravely minute; every cottage was again entered, every hillside dugout again searched for bodies, every thorny foot of adjacent slope again scanned for dens and caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague new fears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons squatted invisibly on the mountain-tops and leered with Abaddon-eyes that had looked on trans-cosmic gulfs.\n\nAs the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and we heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain. This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than it would have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the storm would last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from our aimless hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to gather a body of squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as they were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently inspired by our protective leadership to promise such help.\n\nWe had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a blinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble sadly, but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin of the lot; an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still existing door and single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in place the crude window shutter which our frequent searches had taught us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning through the cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so incredibly dark that each flash was extremely vivid.\n\nThe stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on Tempest Mountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I wondered why the daemon, approaching the three watchers either from the window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side and left the middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it away. Why had it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself second, from whichever direction it had approached? With what manner of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the leader, and save me for a fate worse than that of my companions?\n\nIn the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to intensify them, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish wind rose to daemoniac crescendoes of ululation. We were sure that the lone tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose from his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he took down the shutter the wind and rain howled deafeningly in, so that I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out and tried to fathom Nature's pandemonium.\n\nGradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness told of the storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night to help our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we had better get some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and opened the crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I saw nothing to justify the interest which kept my companion silently leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his shoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.\n\nFor Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "On the tempest-racked night of November 8, 1921, with a lantern which cast charnel shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had burst above the maniacally thick foliage I was glad.\n\nI believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th; the daemon shadow in the mansion, the general strain and disappointment, and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October storm. After that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death I could not understand. I knew that others could not understand either, so let them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They searched, but found nothing. The squatters might have understood, but I dared not frighten them more. I myself seemed strangely callous. That shock at the mansion had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for a horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and solitary.\n\nThe scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve any ordinary man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting but little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the background, illumined by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, foetid, overnourished vegetation that never saw full daylight. And nearest of all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what lay below. Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the sinister outlines of some of those low mounds which characterised the lightning-pierced region.\n\nHistory had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed that the lurking fear was no material thing, but a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses of local tradition I had unearthed in my search with Arthur Munroe, that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. That is why I was digging idiotically in his grave.\n\nThe Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy New-Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British rule, and had constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote woodland summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased him. The only substantial disappointment encountered in this site was that which concerned the prevalence of violent thunderstorms in summer. When selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer Martense had laid these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the year; but in time he perceived that the locality was especially liable to such phenomena. At length, having found these storms injurious to his health, he fitted up a cellar into which he could retreat from their wildest pandemonium.\n\nOf Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since they were all reared in hatred of the English civilisation, and trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life was exceedingly secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made them heavy of speech and comprehension. In appearance all were marked by a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being blue and the other brown. Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer, till at last they took to intermarrying with the numerous menial class about the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to produce the pitiful squatters. The rest had stuck sullenly to their ancestral mansion, becoming more and more clannish and taciturn, yet developing a nervous responsiveness to the frequent thunderstorms.\n\nMost of this information reached the outside world through young Jan Martense, who from some kind of restlessness joined the colonial army when news of the Albany Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He was the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world; and when he returned in 1760 after six years of campaigning, he was hated as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his dissimilar Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms failed to intoxicate him as they had before. Instead, his surroundings depressed him; and he frequently wrote to a friend in Albany of plans to leave the paternal roof.\n\nIn the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan Martense, became worried by his correspondent's silence; especially in view of the conditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion. Determined to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountains on horseback. His diary states that he reached Tempest Mountain on September 20, finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken gutturals that Jan was dead. He had, they insisted, been struck by lightning the autumn before; and now lay buried behind the neglected sunken gardens. They shewed the visitor the grave, barren and devoid of markers. Something in the Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of repulsion and suspicion, and a week later he returned with spade and mattock to explore the sepulchral spot. He found what he expected\u2014a skull crushed cruelly as if by savage blows\u2014so returning to Albany he openly charged the Martenses with the murder of their kinsman.\n\nLegal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly round the countryside; and from that time the Martenses were ostracised by the world. No one would deal with them, and their distant manor was shunned as an accursed place. Somehow they managed to live on independently by the products of their estate, for occasional lights glimpsed from faraway hills attested their continued presence. These lights were seen as late as 1810, but toward the last they became very infrequent.\n\nMeanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of diabolic legendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness, and invested with every whispered myth tradition could supply. It remained unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence of lights was noticed by the squatters. At that time a party made investigations, finding the house deserted and partly in ruins.\n\nThere were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death was inferred. The clan seemed to have left several years before, and improvised penthouses shewed how numerous it had grown prior to its migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by decaying furniture and scattered silverware which must have been long abandoned when its owners left. But though the dreaded Martenses were gone, the fear of the haunted house continued; and grew very acute when new and strange stories arose among the mountain decadents. There it stood; deserted, feared, and linked with the vengeful ghost of Jan Martense. There it still stood on the night I dug in Jan Martense's grave.\n\nI have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed was in object and method. The coffin of Jan Martense had soon been unearthed\u2014it now held only dust and nitre\u2014but in my fury to exhume his ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had lain. God knows what I expected to find\u2014I only felt that I was digging in the grave of a man whose ghost stalked by night.\n\nIt is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my spade, and soon my feet, broke through the ground beneath. The event, under the circumstances, was tremendous; for in the existence of a subterranean space here, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric pocket lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away indefinitely in both directions. It was amply large enough for a man to wriggle through; and though no sane person would have tried it at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my single-minded fever to unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the house, I scrambled recklessly into the narrow burrow; squirming ahead blindly and rapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.\n\nWhat language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time, safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in it, but that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded to a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted depths. Indeed, it was only by accident that after interminable writhings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shone eerily along the burrow of caked loam that stretched and curved ahead.\n\nI had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery had burned very low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply upward, altering my mode of progress. And as I raised my glance it was without preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two daemoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overhead I heard a faint crashing which I recognised. It was the wild thunder of the mountain, raised to hysteric fury\u2014I must have been crawling upward for some time, so that the surface was now quite near. And as the muffled thunder clattered, those eyes still stared with vacuous viciousness.\n\nThank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died. But I was saved by the very thunder that had summoned it, for after a hideous wait there burst from the unseen outside sky one of those frequent mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed here and there as gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes. With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit, blinding and deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma.\n\nIn the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered helplessly till the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I had come to the surface in a familiar spot; a steep unforested place on the southwest slope of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightnings illumed the tumbled ground and the remains of the curious low hummock which had stretched down from the wooded higher slope, but there was nothing in the chaos to shew my place of egress from the lethal catacomb. My brain was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red glare burst on the landscape from the south I hardly realised the horror I had been through.\n\nBut when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare meant, I felt more horror than that which the mould-burrow and the claw and eyes had given; more horror because of the overwhelming implications. In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had followed the bolt which brought me above ground, and a nameless thing had dropped from an overhanging tree into a weak-roofed cabin. It had done a deed, but the squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it could escape. It had been doing that deed at the very moment the earth caved in on the thing with the claw and eyes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I knew of the horrors of Tempest Mountain, would seek alone for the fear that lurked there. That at least two of the fear's embodiments were destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety in this Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with even greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous.\n\nWhen, two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes and claw, I learned that a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles away at the same instant the eyes were glaring at me, I experienced virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed with wonder and alluring grotesqueness, that it was almost a pleasant sensation. Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was with the waking nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that two monsters had haunted the spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the very earth of the accursed region, and with bare hands dig out the death that leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.\n\nAs soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly where I had dug before. Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all trace of the underground passage, while the rain had washed so much earth back into the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had dug that other day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant hamlet where the death-creature had been burnt, and was little repaid for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several bones, but apparently none of the monster's. The squatters said the thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate, since besides the complete skull of a human being, there was another bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull at some time. Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no one could say just what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed it called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree where it had lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find some trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpent-like roots that twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth.\n\nMy next step was to re-examine with microscopic care the deserted hamlet where death had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe had seen something he never lived to describe. Though my vain previous searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for my horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases of the monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time, on the fourteenth of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate hamlet, and I gave particular attention to the loose earth of the landslide region on the latter eminence.\n\nThe afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came as I stood on Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the valley to Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the plain, the distant mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it hid I hated it. I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the festering mountain, and those sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers.\n\nPresently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye became attracted by something singular in the nature and arrangement of a certain topographical element. Without having any exact knowledge of geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds and hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty widely distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on the plain than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation had doubtless found feebler opposition to its striking and fantastic caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird shadows, it struck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the mound system had a peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain. That summit was undeniably a centre from which the lines or rows of points radiated indefinitely and irregularly, as if the unwholesome Martense mansion had thrown visible tentacles of terror. The idea of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to analyse my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.\n\nThe more I analysed the less I believed, and against my newly opened mind there began to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the earth. Before I knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself: \"My God!... Molehills... the damned place must be honeycombed... how many... that night at the mansion... they took Bennett and Tobey first... on each side of us....\" Then I was digging frantically into the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately, shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking aloud with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like the one through which I had crawled on that other daemoniac night.\n\nAfter that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across moon-litten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping, screaming, panting, bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging unreasoningly in all parts of the brier-choked cellar; digging to find the core and centre of that malignant universe of mounds. And then I recall how I laughed when I stumbled on the passageway; the hole at the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast queer shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to have with me. What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for the thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that had finished it. But still there remained that burning determination to reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to deem definite, material, and organic.\n\nMy indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and immediately with my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of squatters for the quest, was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush of wind from outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark blackness. The moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and significant rumble of approaching thunder. A confusion of associated ideas possessed my brain, leading me to grope back toward the farthest corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned away from the horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to get glimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows of lightning penetrated the woods outside and illumined the chinks in the upper wall. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear and curiosity. What would the storm call forth\u2014or was there anything left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself down behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the opening without being seen.\n\nIf heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I cannot sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a daemon, rat-like scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life\u2014a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of egress\u2014streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests and strew fear, madness, and death.\n\nGod knows how many there were\u2014there must have been thousands. To see the stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking. When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms, I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes\u2014monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously silent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers turned with the skill of long practice to make a meal in accustomed fashion on a weaker companion. Others snapped up what it left and ate with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust, my morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities oozed up alone from that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my automatic pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.\n\nShrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation.... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.\n\nI had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of men to blow up the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest Mountain with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable mound-burrows, and destroy certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemed an insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but true rest will never come as long as I remember that nameless secret of the lurking fear. The thing will haunt me, for who can say the extermination is complete, and that analogous phenomena do not exist all over the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I cannot see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering... why cannot the doctors give me something to make me sleep, or truly calm my brain when it thunders?\n\nWhat I saw in the glow of my flashlight after I shot the unspeakable straggling object was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before I understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, and its eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of the old legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless horror what had become of that vanished family; the terrible and thunder-crazed house of Martense.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Man of Stone by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nBen Hayden was always a stubborn chap, and once he had heard about those strange statues in the upper Adirondacks, nothing could keep him from going to see them. I had been his closest acquaintance for years, and our Damon and Pythias friendship made us inseparable at all times. So when Ben firmly decided to go\u2014well, I had to trot along too, like a faithful collie.\n\n\"Jack,\" he said, \"you know Henry Jackson, who was up in a shack beyond Lake Placid for that beastly spot in his lung? Well, he came back the other day nearly cured, but had a lot to say about some devilish queer conditions up there. He ran into the business all of a sudden and can't be sure yet that it's anything more than a case of bizarre sculpture; but just the same his uneasy impression sticks.\n\n\"It seems he was out hunting one day, and came across a cave with what looked like a dog in front of it. Just as he was expecting the dog to bark he looked again, and saw that the thing wasn't alive at all. It was a stone dog\u2014such a perfect image, down to the smallest whisker, that he couldn't decide whether it was a supernaturally clever statue or a petrified animal. He was almost afraid to touch it, but when he did he realised it was surely made of stone.\n\n\"After a while he nerved himself up to go into the cave\u2014and there he got a still bigger jolt. Only a little way in there was another stone figure\u2014or what looked like it\u2014but this time it was a man's. It lay on the floor, on its side, wore clothes, and had a peculiar smile on its face. This time Henry didn't stop to do any touching, but beat it straight for the village, Mountain Top, you know. Of course he asked questions\u2014but they did not get him very far. He found he was on a ticklish subject, for the natives only shook their heads, crossed their fingers, and muttered something about a 'Mad Dan'\u2014whoever he was.\n\n\"It was too much for Jackson, so he came home weeks ahead of his planned time. He told me all about it because he knows how fond I am of strange things\u2014and oddly enough, I was able to fish up a recollection that dovetailed pretty neatly with his yarn. Do you remember Arthur Wheeler, the sculptor who was such a realist that people began calling him nothing but a solid photographer? I think you knew him slightly. Well, as a matter of fact, he ended up in that part of the Adirondacks himself. Spent a lot of time there, and then dropped out of sight. Never heard from again. Now if stone statues that look like men and dogs are turning up around there, it looks to me as if they might be his work\u2014no matter what the rustics say, or refuse to say, about them. Of course a fellow with Jackson's nerves might easily get flighty and disturbed over things like that; but I'd have done a lot of examining before running away.\n\n\"In fact, Jack, I'm going up there now to look things over\u2014and you're coming along with me. It would mean a lot to find Wheeler\u2014or any of his work. Anyhow, the mountain air will brace us both up.\"\n\nSo less than a week later, after a long train ride and a jolting bus trip through breathlessly exquisite scenery, we arrived at Mountain Top in the late, golden sunlight of a June evening. The village comprised only a few small houses, a hotel, and the general store at which our bus drew up; but we knew that the latter would probably prove a focus for such information. Surely enough, the usual group of idlers was gathered around the steps; and when we represented ourselves as health-seekers in search of lodgings they had many recommendations to offer.\n\nThough we had not planned to do any investigating till the next day, Ben could not resist venturing some vague, cautious questions when he noticed the senile garrulousness of one of the ill-clad loafers. He felt, from Jackson's previous experience, that it would be useless to begin with references to the queer statues; but decided to mention Wheeler as one whom we had known, and in whose fate we consequently had a right to be interested.\n\nThe crowd seemed uneasy when Sam stopped his whittling and started talking, but they had slight occasion for alarm. Even this barefoot old mountain decadent tightened up when he heard Wheeler's name, and only with difficulty could Ben get anything coherent out of him.\n\n\"Wheeler?\" he had finally wheezed. \"Oh, yeh\u2014that feller as was all the time blastin' rocks and cuttin' 'em up into statues. So yew knowed him, hey? Wal, they ain't much we kin tell ye, and mebbe that's too much. He stayed out to Mad Dan's cabin in the hills\u2014but not so very long. Got so he wa'nt wanted no more... by Dan, that is. Kinder soft-spoken and got around Dan's wife till the old devil took notice. Pretty sweet on her, I guess. But he took the trail sudden, and nobody's seen hide nor hair of him since. Dan must a told him sumthin' pretty plain\u2014bad feller to get agin ye, Dan is! Better keep away from thar, boys, for they ain't no good in that part of the hills. Dan's ben workin' up a worse and worse mood, and ain't seen about no more. Nor his wife, neither. Guess he's penned her up so's nobody else kin make eyes at her!\"\n\nAs Sam resumed his whittling after a few more observations, Ben and I exchanged glances. Here, surely, was a new lead which deserved intensive following up. Deciding to lodge at the hotel, we settled ourselves as quickly as possible; planning for a plunge into the wild hilly country on the next day.\n\nAt sunrise we made our start, each bearing a knapsack laden with provisions and such tools as we thought we might need. The day before us had an almost stimulating air of invitation\u2014through which only a faint undercurrent of the sinister ran. Our rough mountain road quickly became steep and winding, so that before long our feet ached considerably.\n\nAfter about two miles we left the road\u2014crossing a stone wall on our right near a great elm and striking off diagonally toward a steeper slope according to the chart and directions which Jackson had prepared for us. It was rough and briery travelling, but we knew that the cave could not be far off. In the end we came upon the aperture quite suddenly\u2014a black, bush-grown crevice where the ground shot abruptly upward, and beside it, near a shallow rock pool, a small, still figure stood rigid\u2014as if rivalling its own uncanny petrification.\n\nIt was a grey dog\u2014or a dog's statue\u2014and as our simultaneous gasp died away we scarcely knew what to think. Jackson had exaggerated nothing, and we could not believe that any sculptor's hand had succeeded in producing such perfection. Every hair of the animal's magnificent coat seemed distinct, and those on the back were bristled up as if some unknown thing had taken him unaware. Ben, at last half-kindly touching the delicate stony fur, gave vent to an exclamation.\n\n\"Good God, Jack, but this can't be any statue! Look at it\u2014all the little details, and the way the hair lies! None of Wheeler's technique here! This is a real dog\u2014though heaven only knows how he ever got in this state. Just like stone\u2014feel for yourself. Do you suppose there's any strange gas that sometimes comes out of the cave and does this to animal life? We ought to have looked more into the local legends. And if this is a real dog\u2014or was a real dog\u2014then that man inside must be the real thing too.\"\n\nIt was with a good deal of genuine solemnity\u2014almost dread\u2014that we finally crawled on hands and knees through the cave-mouth, Ben leading. The narrowness looked hardly three feet, after which the grotto expanded in every direction to form a damp, twilight chamber floored with rubble and detritus. For a time we could make out very little, but as we rose to our feet and strained our eyes we began slowly to descry a recumbent figure amidst the greater darkness ahead. Ben fumbled with his flashlight, but hesitated for a moment before turning it on the prostrate figure. We had little doubt that the stony thing was what had once been a man, and something in the thought unnerved us both.\n\nWhen Ben at last sent forth the electric beam we saw that the object lay on its side, back toward us. It was clearly of the same material as the dog outside, but was dressed in the mouldering and unpetrified remains of rough sport clothing. Braced as we were for a shock, we approached quite calmly to examine the thing; Ben going around to the other side to glimpse the averted face. Neither could possibly have been prepared for what Ben saw when he flashed the light on those stony features. His cry was wholly excusable, and I could not help echoing it as I leaped to his side and shared the sight. Yet it was nothing hideous or intrinsically terrifying. It was merely a matter of recognition, for beyond the least shadow of a doubt this chilly rock figure with its half-frightened, half-bitter expression had at one time been our old acquaintance, Arthur Wheeler.\n\nSome instinct sent us staggering and crawling out of the cave, and down the tangled slope to a point whence we could not see the ominous stone dog. We hardly knew what to think, for our brains were churning with conjectures and apprehensions. Ben, who had known Wheeler well, was especially upset; and seemed to be piecing together some threads I had overlooked.\n\nAgain and again as we paused on the green slope he repeated \"Poor Arthur, poor Arthur!\" but not till he muttered the name \"Mad Dan\" did I recall the trouble into which, according to old Sam Poole, Wheeler had run just before his disappearance. Mad Dan, Ben implied, would doubtless be glad to see what had happened. For a moment it flashed over both of us that the jealous host might have been responsible for the sculptor's presence in this evil cave, but the thought went as quickly as it came.\n\nThe thing that puzzled us most was to account for the phenomenon itself. What gaseous emanation or mineral vapour could have wrought this change in so relatively short a time was utterly beyond us. Normal petrification, we know, is a slow chemical replacement process requiring vast ages for completion; yet here were two stone images which had been living things\u2014or at least Wheeler had\u2014only a few weeks before. Conjecture was useless. Clearly, nothing remained but to notify the authorities and let them guess what they might; and yet at the back of Ben's head that notion about Mad Dan still persisted. Anyhow, we clawed our way back to the road, but Ben did not turn toward the village, but looked along upward toward where old Sam had said Dan's cabin lay. It was the second house from the village, the ancient loafer had wheezed, and lay on the left far back from the road in a thick copse of scrub oaks. Before I knew it Ben was dragging me up the sandy highway past a dingy farmstead and into a region of increasing wildness.\n\nIt did not occur to me to protest, but I felt a certain sense of mounting menace as the familiar marks of agriculture and civilisation grew fewer and fewer. At last the beginning of a narrow, neglected path opened up on our left, while the peaked roof of a squalid, unpainted building shewed itself beyond a sickly growth of half-dead trees. This, I knew, must be Mad Dan's cabin; and I wondered that Wheeler had ever chosen so unprepossessing a place for his headquarters. I dreaded to walk up that weedy, uninviting path, but could not lag behind when Ben strode determinedly along and began a vigorous rapping at the rickety, musty-smelling door.\n\nThere was no response to the knock, and something in its echoes sent a series of shivers through one. Ben, however, was quite unperturbed; and at once began to circle the house in quest of unlocked windows. The third that he tried\u2014in the rear of the dismal cabin\u2014proved capable of opening, and after a boost and a vigorous spring he was safely inside and helping me after him.\n\nThe room in which we landed was full of limestone and granite blocks, chiselling tools and clay models, and we realised at once that it was Wheeler's erstwhile studio. So far we had not met with any sign of life, but over everything hovered a damnably ominous dusty odour. On our left was an open door evidently leading to a kitchen on the chimney side of the house, and through this Ben started, intent on finding anything he could concerning his friend's last habitat. He was considerably ahead of me when he crossed the threshold, so that I could not see at first what brought him up short and wrung a low cry of horror from his lips.\n\nIn another moment, though, I did see\u2014and repeated his cry as instinctively as I had done in the cave. For here in this cabin\u2014far from any subterranean depths which could breed strange gases and work strange mutations\u2014were two stony figures which I knew at once were no products of Arthur Wheeler's chisel. In a rude armchair before the fireplace, bound in position by the lash of a long rawhide whip, was the form of a man\u2014unkempt, elderly, and with a look of fathomless horror on its evil, petrified face.\n\nOn the floor beside it lay a woman's figure; graceful, and with a face betokening considerable youth and beauty. Its expression seemed to be one of sardonic satisfaction, and near its outflung right hand was a large tin pail, somewhat stained on the inside, as with a darkish sediment.\n\nWe made no move to approach those inexplicably petrified bodies, nor did we exchange any but the simplest conjectures. That this stony couple had been Mad Dan and his wife we could not well doubt, but how to account for their present condition was another matter. As we looked horrifiedly around we saw the suddenness with which the final development must have come\u2014for everything about us seemed, despite a heavy coating of dust, to have been left in the midst of commonplace household activities.\n\nThe only exception to this rule of casualness was on the kitchen table; in whose cleared centre, as if to attract attention, lay a thin, battered, blank-book weighted down by a sizeable tin funnel. Crossing to read the thing, Ben saw that it was a kind of diary or set of dated entries, written in a somewhat cramped and none too practiced hand. The very first words riveted my attention, and before ten seconds had elapsed he was breathlessly devouring the halting text\u2014I avidly following as I peered over his shoulder. As we read on\u2014moving as we did so into the less loathsome atmosphere of the adjoining room\u2014many obscure things became terribly clear to us, and we trembled with a mixture of complex emotions.\n\nThis is what we read\u2014and what the coroner read later on. The public has seen a highly twisted and sensationalised version in the cheap newspapers, but not even that has more than a fraction of the genuine terror which the simple original held for us as we puzzled it out alone in that musty cabin among the wild hills, with two monstrous stone abnormalities lurking in the death-like silence of the next room. When we had finished Ben pocketed the book with a gesture half of repulsion, and his first words were \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nSilently and nervously we stumbled to the front of the house, unlocked the door, and began the long tramp back to the village. There were many statements to make and questions to answer in the days that followed, and I do not think that either Ben or I can ever shake off the effects of the whole harrowing experience. Neither can some of the local authorities and city reporters who flocked around\u2014even though they burned a certain book and many papers found in attic boxes, and destroyed considerable apparatus in the deepest part of that sinister hillside cave. But here is the text itself:\n\n\"Nov. 5\u2014My name is Daniel Morris. Around here they call me 'Mad Dan' because I believe in powers that nobody else believes in nowadays. When I go up on Thunder Hill to keep the Feast of the Foxes they think I am crazy\u2014all except the back country folks that are afraid of me. They try to stop me from sacrificing the Black Goat at Hallow Eve, and always prevent my doing the Great Rite that would open the gate. They ought to know better, for they know I am a Van Kauran on my mother's side, and anybody this side of the Hudson can tell what the Van Kaurans have handed down. We come from Nicholas Van Kauran, the wizard, who was hanged in Wijtgaart in 1587, and everybody knows he had made the bargain with the Black Man.\n\n\"The soldiers never got his Book of Eibon when they burned his house, and his grandson, William Van Kauran, brought it over when he came to Rensselaerwyck and later crossed the river to Esopus. Ask anybody in Kingston or Hurley about what the William Van Kauran line could do to people that got in their way. Also, ask them if my Uncle Hendrik didn't manage to keep hold of the Book of Eibon when they ran him out of town and he went up the river to this place with his family.\n\n\"I am writing this\u2014and am going to keep writing this\u2014because I want people to know the truth after I am gone. Also, I am afraid I shall really go mad if I don't set things down in plain black and white. Everything is going against me, and if it keeps up I shall have to use the secrets in the Book and call in certain Powers. Three months ago that sculptor Arthur Wheeler came to Mountain Top, and they sent him up to me because I am the only man in the place who knows anything except farming, hunting, and fleecing summer boarders. The fellow seemed to be interested in what I had to say, and made a deal to stop here for $13.00 a week with meals. I gave him the back room beside the kitchen for his lumps of stone and his chiselling, and arranged with Nate Williams to tend to his rock blasting and haul his big pieces with a drag and yoke of oxen.\n\n\"That was three months ago. Now I know why that cursed son of hell took so quick to the place. It wasn't my talk at all, but the looks of my wife Rose, that is Osborne Chandler's oldest girl. She is sixteen years younger than I am, and is always casting sheep's eyes at the fellows in town. But we always managed to get along fine enough till this dirty rat shewed up, even if she did balk at helping me with the Rites on Roodmas and Hallowmass. I can see now that Wheeler is working on her feelings and getting her so fond of him that she hardly looks at me, and I suppose he'll try to elope with her sooner or later.\n\n\"But he works slow like all sly, polished dogs, and I've got plenty of time to think up what to do about it. They don't either of them know I suspect anything, but before long they'll both realise it doesn't pay to break up a Van Kauran's home. I promise them plenty of novelty in what I'll do.\n\n\"Nov. 25\u2014Thanksgiving Day! That's a pretty good joke! But at that I'll have something to be thankful for when I finish what I've started. No question but that Wheeler is trying to steal my wife. For the time being, though, I'll let him keep on being a star boarder. Got the Book of Eibon down from Uncle Hendrik's old trunk in the attic last week, and am looking up something good which won't require sacrifices that I can't make around here. I want something that'll finish these two sneaking traitors, and at the same time get me into no trouble. If it has a twist of drama in it, so much the better. I've thought of calling in the emanation of Yoth, but that needs a child's blood and I must be careful about the neighbours. The Green Decay looks promising, but that would be a bit unpleasant for me as well as for them. I don't like certain sights and smells.\n\n\"Dec. 10\u2014Eureka! I've got the very thing at last! Revenge is sweet\u2014and this is the perfect climax! Wheeler, the sculptor\u2014this is too good! Yes, indeed, that damned sneak is going to produce a statue that will sell quicker than any of the things he's been carving these past weeks! A realist, eh? Well\u2014the new statuary won't lack any realism! I found the formula in a manuscript insert opposite page 679 of the Book. From the handwriting I judge it was put there by my great-grandfather Bareut Picterse Van Kauran\u2014the one who disappeared from New Paltz in 1839. I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!\n\n\"To be plain, I've found a way to turn those wretched rats into stone statues. It's absurdly simple, and really depends more on plain chemistry than on the Outer Powers. If I can get hold of the right stuff I can brew a drink that'll pass for home-made wine, and one swig ought to finish any ordinary being short of an elephant. What it amounts to is a kind of petrification infinitely speeded up. Shoots the whole system full of calcium and barium salts and replaces living cells with mineral matter so fast that nothing can stop it. It must have been one of those things great-grandfather got at the Great Sabbat on Sugar-Loaf in the Catskills. Queer things used to go on there. Seems to me I heard of a man in New Paltz\u2014Squire Hasbrouck\u2014turned to stone or something like that in 1834. He was an enemy of the Van Kaurans. First thing I must do is order the five chemicals I need from Albany and Montreal. Plenty of time later to experiment. When everything is over I'll round up all the statues and sell them as Wheeler's work to pay for his overdue board bill! He always was a realist and an egoist\u2014wouldn't it be natural for him to make a self-portrait in stone, and to use my wife for another model\u2014as indeed he's really been doing for the past fortnight? Trust the dull public not to ask what quarry the queer stone came from!\n\n\"Dec. 25\u2014Christmas. Peace on earth, and so forth! These two swine are goggling at each other as if I didn't exist. They must think I'm deaf, dumb, and blind! Well, the barium sulphate and calcium chloride came from Albany last Thursday, and the acids, catalytics, and instruments are due from Montreal any day now. The mills of the gods\u2014and all that! I'll do the work in Allen's Cave near the lower wood lot, and at the same time will be openly making some wine in the cellar here. There ought to be some excuse for offering a new drink\u2014though it won't take much planning to fool those moonstruck nincompoops. The trouble will be to make Rose take wine, for she pretends not to like it. Any experiments that I make on animals will be down at the cave, and nobody ever thinks of going there in winter. I'll do some wood-cutting to account for my time away. A small load or two brought in will keep him off the track.\n\n\"Jan. 20\u2014It's harder work than I thought. A lot depends on the exact proportions. The stuff came from Montreal, but I had to send again for some better scales and an acetylene lamp. They're getting curious down at the village. Wish the express office weren't in Steenwyck's store. Am trying various mixtures on the sparrows that drink and bathe in the pool in front of the cave\u2014when it's melted. Sometimes it kills them, but sometimes they fly away. Clearly, I've missed some important reaction. I suppose Rose and that upstart are making the most of my absence\u2014but I can afford to let them. There can be no doubt of my success in the end.\n\n\"Feb. 11\u2014Have got it at last! Put a fresh lot in the little pool\u2014which is well melted today\u2014and the first bird that drank toppled over as if he were shot. I picked him up a second later, and he was a perfect piece of stone, down to the smallest claws and feather. Not a muscle changed since he was poised for drinking, so he must have died the instant any of the stuff got to his stomach. I didn't expect the petrification to come so soon. But a sparrow isn't a fair test of the way the thing would act with a large animal. I must get something bigger to try it on, for it must be the right strength when I give it to those swine. I guess Rose's dog Rex will do. I'll take him along the next time and say a timber wolf got him. She thinks a lot of him, and I shan't be sorry to give her something to sniffle over before the big reckoning. I must be careful where I keep this book. Rose sometimes pries around in the queerest places.\n\n\"Feb. 15\u2014Getting warm! Tried it on Rex and it worked like a charm with only double the strength. I fixed the rock pool and got him to drink. He seemed to know something queer had hit him, for he bristled and growled, but he was a piece of stone before he could turn his head. The solution ought to have been stronger, and for a human being ought to be very much stronger. I think I'm getting the hang of it now, and am about ready for that cur Wheeler. The stuff seems to be tasteless, but to make sure I'll flavour it with the new wine I'm making up at the house. Wish I were surer about the tastelessness, so I could give it to Rose in water without trying to urge wine on her. I'll get the two separately\u2014Wheeler out here and Rose at home. Have just fixed a strong solution and cleared away all strange objects in front of the cave. Rose whimpered like a puppy when I told her a wolf had got Rex, and Wheeler gurgled a lot of sympathy.\n\n\"March 1\u2014I\u00e4 R'lyeh! Praise the Lord Tsathoggua! I've got the son of hell at last! Told him I'd found a new ledge of friable limestone down this way, and he trotted after me like the yellow cur he is! I had the wine-flavoured stuff in a bottle on my hip, and he was glad of a swig when we got here. Gulped it down without a wink\u2014and dropped in his tracks before you could count three. But he knows I've had my vengeance, for I made a face at him that he couldn't miss. I saw the look of understanding come into his face as he keeled over. In two minutes he was solid stone.\n\n\"I dragged him into the cave and put Rex's figure outside again. That bristling dog shape will help to scare people off. It's getting time for the spring hunters, and besides, there's a damned 'lunger' named Jackson in a cabin over the hill who does a lot of snooping around in the snow. I wouldn't want my laboratory and storeroom to be found just yet! When I got home I told Rose that Wheeler had found a telegram at the village summoning him suddenly home. I don't know whether she believed me or not but it doesn't matter. For form's sake, I packed Wheeler's things and took them down the hill, telling her I was going to ship them after him. I put them in the dry well at the abandoned Rapelye place. Now for Rose!\n\n\"March 3\u2014Can't get Rose to drink any wine. I hope that stuff is tasteless enough to go unnoticed in water. I tried it in tea and coffee, but it forms a precipitate and can't be used that way. If I use it in water I'll have to cut down the dose and trust to a more gradual action. Mr. and Mrs. Hoog dropped in this noon, and I had hard work keeping the conversation away from Wheeler's departure. It mustn't get around that we say he was called back to New York when everybody at the village knows no telegram came, and that he didn't leave on the bus. Rose is acting damned queer about the whole thing. I'll have to pick a quarrel with her and keep her locked in the attic. The best way is to try to make her drink that doctored wine\u2014and if she does give in, so much better.\n\n\"March 7\u2014Have started in on Rose. She wouldn't drink the wine so I took a whip to her and drove her up in the attic. She'll never come down alive. I pass her a platter of salty bread and salt meat, and a pail of slightly doctored water, twice a day. The salt food ought to make her drink a lot, and it can't be long before the action sets in. I don't like the way she shouts about Wheeler when I'm at the door. The rest of the time she is absolutely silent.\n\n\"March 9\u2014It's damned peculiar how slow that stuff is in getting hold of Rose. I'll have to make it stronger\u2014probably she'll never taste it with all the salt I've been feeding her. Well, if it doesn't get her there are plenty of other ways to fall back on. But I would like to carry this neat statue plan through! Went to the cave this morning and all is well there. I sometimes hear Rose's steps on the ceiling overhead, and I think they're getting more and more dragging. The stuff is certainly working, but it's too slow. Not strong enough. From now on I'll rapidly stiffen up the dose.\n\n\"March 11\u2014It is very queer. She is still alive and moving. Tuesday night I heard her piggling with a window, so went up and gave her a rawhiding. She acts more sullen than frightened, and her eyes look swollen. But she could never drop to the ground from that height and there's nowhere she could climb down. I have had dreams at night, for her slow, dragging pacing on the floor above gets on my nerves. Sometimes I think she works at the lock on the door.\n\n\"March 15\u2014Still alive, despite all the strengthening of the dose. There's something queer about it. She crawls now, and doesn't pace very often. But the sound of her crawling is horrible. She rattles the windows, too, and fumbles with the door. I shall have to finish her off with the rawhide if this keeps up. I'm getting very sleepy. Wonder if Rose has got on her guard somehow. But she must be drinking the stuff. This sleepiness is abnormal\u2014I think the strain is telling on me. I'm sleepy....\"\n\n(Here the cramped handwriting trails out in a vague scrawl, giving place to a note in a firmer, evidently feminine handwriting, indicative of great emotional tension.)\n\n\"March 16\u20144 a.m.\u2014This is added by Rose C. Morris, about to die. Please notify my father, Osborne E. Chandler, Route 2, Mountain Top, N.Y. I have just read what the beast has written. I felt sure he had killed Arthur Wheeler, but did not know how till I read this terrible notebook. Now I know what I escaped. I noticed the water tasted queer, so took none of it after the first sip. I threw it all out of the window. That one sip has half paralysed me, but I can still get about. The thirst was terrible, but I ate as little as possible of the salty food and was able to get a little water by setting some old pans and dishes that were up here under places where the roof leaked.\n\n\"There were two great rains. I thought he was trying to poison me, though I didn't know what the poison was like. What he has written about himself and me is a lie. We were never happy together and I think I married him only under one of those spells that he was able to lay on people. I guess he hypnotised both my father and me, for he was always hated and feared and suspected of dark dealings with the devil. My father once called him The Devil's Kin, and he was right.\n\n\"No one will ever know what I went through as his wife. It was not simply common cruelty\u2014though God knows he was cruel enough, and beat me often with a leather whip. It was more\u2014more than anyone in this age can ever understand. He was a monstrous creature, and practiced all sorts of hellish ceremonies handed down by his mother's people. He tried to make me help in the rites\u2014and I don't dare even hint what they were. I would not, so he beat me. It would be blasphemy to tell what he tried to make me do. I can say he was a murderer even then, for I know what he sacrificed one night on Thunder Hill. He was surely the Devil's Kin. I tried four times to run away, but he always caught and beat me. Also, he had a sort of hold over my mind, and even over my father's mind.\n\n\"About Arthur Wheeler I have nothing to be ashamed of. We did come to love each other, but only in an honourable way. He gave me the first kind treatment I had ever had since leaving my father's, and meant to help me get out of the clutches of that fiend. He had several talks with my father, and was going to help me get out west. After my divorce we would have been married.\n\n\"Ever since that brute locked me in the attic I have planned to get out and finish him. I always kept the poison overnight in case I could escape and find him asleep and give it to him somehow. At first he waked easily when I worked on the lock of the door and tested the conditions at the windows, but later he began to get more tired and sleep sounder. I could always tell by his snoring when he was asleep.\n\n\"Tonight he was so fast asleep I forced the lock without waking him. It was hard work getting downstairs with my partial paralysis, but I did. I found him here with the lamp burning\u2014asleep at the table, where he had been writing in this book. In the corner was the long rawhide whip he had so often beaten me with. I used it to tie him to the chair so he could not move a muscle. I lashed his neck so that I could pour anything down his throat without his resisting.\n\n\"He waked up just as I was finishing and I guess he saw right off that he was done for. He shouted frightful things and tried to chant mystical formulas, but I choked him off with a dish towel from the sink. Then I saw this book he had been writing in, and stopped to read it. The shock was terrible, and I almost fainted four or five times. My mind was not ready for such things. After that I talked to that fiend for two or three hours steady. I told him everything I had wanted to tell him through all the years I had been his slave, and a lot of other things that had to do with what I had read in this awful book.\n\n\"He looked almost purple when I was through, and I think he was half delirious. Then I got a funnel from the cupboard and jammed it into his mouth after taking out the gag. He knew what I was going to do, but was helpless. I had brought down the pail of poisoned water, and without a qualm, I poured a good half of it into the funnel.\n\n\"It must have been a very strong dose, for almost at once I saw that brute begin to stiffen and turn a dull stony grey. In ten minutes I knew he was solid stone. I could not bear to touch him, but the tin funnel clinked horribly when I pulled it out of his mouth. I wish I could have given that Kin of the Devil a more painful, lingering death, but surely this was the most appropriate he could have had.\n\n\"There is not much more to say. I am half-paralysed, and with Arthur murdered I have nothing to live for. I shall make things complete by drinking the rest of the poison after placing this book where it will be found. In a quarter of an hour I shall be a stone statue. My only wish is to be buried beside the statue that was Arthur\u2014when it is found in that cave where the fiend left it. Poor trusting Rex ought to lie at our feet. I do not care what becomes of the stone devil tied in the chair....\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Medusa's Coil by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThe drive toward Cape Girardeau had been through unfamiliar country; and as the late afternoon light grew golden and half-dreamlike I realised that I must have directions if I expected to reach the town before night. I did not care to be wandering about these bleak southern Missouri lowlands after dark, for roads were poor and the November cold rather formidable in an open roadster. Black clouds, too, were massing on the horizon; so I looked about among the long, grey and blue shadows that streaked the flat, brownish fields, hoping to glimpse some house where I might get the needed information.\n\nIt was a lonely and deserted country, but at last I spied a roof among a clump of trees near the small river on my right; perhaps a full half-mile from the road, and probably reachable by some path or drive which I would presently come upon. In the absence of any nearer dwelling, I resolved to try my luck there; and was glad when the bushes by the roadside revealed the ruin of a carved stone gateway, covered with dry, dead vines and choked with undergrowth which explained why I had not been able to trace the path across the fields in my first distant view. I saw that I could not drive the car in, so I parked it very carefully near the gate\u2014where a thick evergreen would shield it in case of rain\u2014and got out for the long walk to the house.\n\nTraversing that brush-grown path in the gathering twilight I was conscious of a distinct sense of foreboding, probably induced by the air of sinister decay hovering about the gate and the former driveway. From the carvings on the old stone pillars I inferred that this place was once an estate of manorial dignity; and I could clearly see that the driveway had originally boasted guardian lines of linden trees, some of which had died, while others had lost their special identity among the wild scrub growths of the region.\n\nAs I ploughed onward, cockleburrs and stickers clung to my clothes, and I began to wonder whether the place could be inhabited after all. Was I tramping on a vain errand? For a moment I was tempted to go back and try some farm farther along the road, when a view of the house ahead aroused my curiosity and stimulated my venturesome spirit.\n\nThere was something provocatively fascinating in the tree-girt, decrepit pile before me, for it spoke of the graces and spaciousness of a bygone era and a far more southerly environment. It was a typical wooden plantation house of the classic, early nineteenth-century pattern, with two and a half stories and a great Ionic portico whose pillars reached up as far as the attic and supported a triangular pediment. Its state of decay was extreme and obvious; one of the vast columns having rotted and fallen to the ground, while the upper piazza or balcony had sagged dangerously low. Other buildings, I judged, had formerly stood near it.\n\nAs I mounted the broad stone steps to the low porch and the carved and fanlighted doorway I felt distinctly nervous, and started to light a cigarette\u2014desisting when I saw how dry and inflammable everything about me was. Though now convinced that the house was deserted, I nevertheless hesitated to violate its dignity without knocking; so tugged at the rusty iron knocker until I could get it to move, and finally set up a cautious rapping which seemed to make the whole place shake and rattle. There was no response, yet once more I plied the cumbrous, creaking device\u2014as much to dispel the sense of unholy silence and solitude as to arouse any possible occupant of the ruin.\n\nSomewhere near the river I heard the mournful note of a dove, and it seemed as if the coursing water itself were faintly audible. Half in a dream, I seized and rattled the ancient latch, and finally gave the great six-panelled door a frank trying. It was unlocked, as I could see in a moment; and though it stuck and grated on its hinges I began to push it open, stepping through it into a vast shadowy hall as I did so.\n\nBut the moment I took this step I regretted it. It was not that a legion of spectres confronted me in that dim and dusty hall with the ghostly Empire furniture; but that I knew all at once that the place was not deserted at all. There was a creaking on the great curved staircase, and the sound of faltering footsteps slowly descending. Then I saw a tall, bent figure silhouetted for an instant against the great Palladian window on the landing.\n\nMy first start of terror was soon over, and as the figure descended the final flight I was ready to greet the householder whose privacy I had invaded. In the semi-darkness I could see him reach in his pocket for a match. There came a flare as he lighted a small kerosene lamp which stood on a rickety console table near the foot of the stairs. In the feeble glow was revealed the stooping figure of a very tall, emaciated old man; disordered as to dress and unshaved as to face, yet for all that with the bearing and expression of a gentleman.\n\nI did not wait for him to speak, but at once began to explain my presence.\n\n\"You'll pardon my coming in like this, but when my knocking didn't raise anybody I concluded that no one lived here. What I wanted originally was to know the right road to Cape Girardeau\u2014the shortest road, that is. I wanted to get there before dark, but now, of course\u2014\"\n\nAs I paused, the man spoke; in exactly the cultivated tone I had expected, and with a mellow accent as unmistakably Southern as the house he inhabited.\n\n\"Rather, you must pardon me for not answering your knock more promptly. I live in a very retired way, and am not usually expecting visitors. At first I thought you were a mere curiosity-seeker. Then when you knocked again I started to answer, but I am not well and have to move very slowly. Spinal neuritis\u2014very troublesome case.\n\n\"But as for your getting to town before dark\u2014it's plain you can't do that. The road you are on\u2014for I suppose you came from the gate\u2014isn't the best or shortest way. What you must do is to take your first left after you leave the gate\u2014that is, the first real road to your left. There are three or four cart paths you can ignore, but you can't mistake the real road because of the extra large willow tree on the right just opposite it. Then when you've turned, keep on past two roads and turn to the right along the third. After that\u2014\"\n\nPerplexed by these elaborate directions\u2014confusing things indeed to a total stranger\u2014I could not help interrupting.\n\n\"Please wait a moment! How can I follow all these clues in pitch darkness, without ever having been near here before, and with only an indifferent pair of headlights to tell me what is and what isn't a road? Besides, I think it's going to storm pretty soon, and my car is an open one. It looks as if I were in a bad fix if I want to get to Cape Girardeau tonight. The fact is, I don't think I'd better try to make it. I don't like to impose burdens, or anything like that\u2014but in view of the circumstances, do you suppose you could put me up for the night? I won't be any trouble\u2014no meals or anything. Just let me have a corner to sleep in till daylight, and I'm all right. I can leave the car in the road where it is\u2014a bit of wet weather won't hurt it if worst comes to worst.\"\n\nAs I made my sudden request I could see the old man's face lose its former expression of quiet resignation and take on an odd, surprised look.\n\n\"Sleep\u2014here?\"\n\nHe seemed so astonished at my request that I repeated it.\n\n\"Yes, why not? I assure you I won't be any trouble. What else can I do? I'm a stranger hereabouts, these roads are a labyrinth in the dark, and I'll wager it'll be raining torrents outside of an hour\u2014\"\n\nThis time it was my host's turn to interrupt, and as he did so I could feel a peculiar quality in his deep, musical voice.\n\n\"A stranger\u2014of course you must be, else you wouldn't think of sleeping here; wouldn't think of coming here at all. People don't come here nowadays.\"\n\nHe paused, and my desire to stay was increased a thousandfold by the sense of mystery his laconic words seemed to evoke. There was surely something alluringly queer about this place, and the pervasive musty smell seemed to cloak a thousand secrets. Again I noticed the extreme decrepitude of everything about me; manifest even in the feeble rays of the single small lamp. I felt woefully chilly, and saw with regret that no heating seemed to be provided; yet so great was my curiosity that I still wished most ardently to stay and learn something of the recluse and his dismal abode.\n\n\"Let that be as it may,\" I replied. \"I can't help about other people. But I surely would like to have a spot to stop till daylight. Still\u2014if people don't relish this place, mayn't it be because it's getting so run-down? Of course I suppose it would take a fortune to keep such an estate up, but if the burden's too great why don't you look for smaller quarters? Why try to stick it out here in this way\u2014with all the hardships and discomforts?\"\n\nThe man did not seem offended, but answered me very gravely.\n\n\"Surely you may stay if you really wish to\u2014you can come to no harm that I know of. But others claim there are certain peculiarly undesirable influences here. As for me\u2014I stay here because I have to. There is something I feel it a duty to guard\u2014something that holds me. I wish I had the money and health and ambition to take decent care of the house and grounds.\"\n\nWith my curiosity still more heightened, I prepared to take my host at his word; and followed him slowly upstairs when he motioned me to do so. It was very dark now, and a faint pattering outside told me that the threatened rain had come. I would have been glad of any shelter, but this was doubly welcome because of the hints of mystery about the place and its master. For an incurable lover of the grotesque, no more fitting haven could have been provided." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "There was a second-floor corner room in less unkempt shape than the rest of the house, and into this my host led me; setting down his small lamp and lighting a somewhat larger one. From the cleanliness and contents of the room, and from the books ranged along the walls, I could see that I had not guessed amiss in thinking the man a gentleman of taste and breeding. He was a hermit and eccentric, no doubt, but he still had standards and intellectual interests. As he waved me to a seat I began a conversation on general topics, and was pleased to find him not at all taciturn. If anything, he seemed glad of someone to talk to, and did not even attempt to swerve the discourse from personal topics.\n\nHe was, I learned, one Antoine de Russy, of an ancient, powerful, and cultivated line of Louisiana planters. More than a century ago his grandfather, a younger son, had migrated to southern Missouri and founded a new estate in the lavish ancestral manner; building this pillared mansion and surrounding it with all the accessories of a great plantation. There had been, at one time, as many as 200 negroes in the cabins which stood on the flat ground in the rear\u2014ground that the river had now invaded\u2014and to hear them singing and laughing and playing the banjo at night was to know the fullest charm of a civilisation and social order now sadly extinct. In front of the house, where the great guardian oaks and willows stood, there had been a lawn like a broad green carpet, always watered and trimmed and with flagstoned, flower-bordered walks curving through it. \"Riverside\"\u2014for such the place was called\u2014had been a lovely and idyllic homestead in its day; and my host could recall it when many traces of its best period still lingered.\n\nIt was raining hard now, with dense sheets of water beating against the insecure roof, walls, and windows, and sending in drops through a thousand chinks and crevices. Moisture trickled down to the floor from unsuspected places, and the mounting wind rattled the rotting, loose-hinged shutters outside. But I minded none of this, nor even thought of my roadster outside beneath the trees, for I saw that a story was coming. Incited to reminiscence, my host made a move to shew me to sleeping-quarters; but kept on recalling the older, better days. Soon, I saw, I would receive an inkling of why he lived alone in that ancient place, and why his neighbours thought it full of undesirable influences. His voice was very musical as he spoke on, and his tale soon took a turn which left me no chance to grow drowsy.\n\n\"Yes\u2014Riverside was built in 1816, and my father was born here in 1828. He'd be over a century old now if he were alive, but he died young\u2014so young I can just barely remember him. In '64 that was\u2014he was killed in the war, Seventh Louisiana Infantry C.S.A., for he went back to the old home to enlist. My grandfather was too old to fight, yet he lived on to be ninety-five, and helped my mother bring me up. A good bringing-up, too\u2014I'll give them credit. We always had strong traditions\u2014high notions of honour\u2014and my grandfather saw to it that I grew up the way de Russys have grown up, generation after generation, ever since the Crusades. We weren't quite wiped out financially, but managed to get on very comfortably after the war. I went to a good school in Louisiana, and later to Princeton. Later on I was able to get the plantation on a fairly profitable basis\u2014though you see what it's come to now.\n\n\"My mother died when I was twenty, and my grandfather two years later. It was rather lonely after that; and in '85 I married a distant cousin in New Orleans. Things might have been different if she'd lived, but she died when my son Denis was born. Then I had only Denis. I didn't try marriage again, but gave all my time to the boy. He was like me\u2014like all the de Russys\u2014darkish and tall and thin, and with the devil of a temper. I gave him the same training my grandfather had given me, but he didn't need much training when it came to points of honour. It was in him, I reckon. Never saw such high spirit\u2014all I could do to keep him from running away to the Spanish War when he was eleven! Romantic young devil, too\u2014full of high notions\u2014you'd call 'em Victorian, now\u2014no trouble at all to make him let the nigger wenches alone. I sent him to the same school I'd gone to, and to Princeton, too. He was Class of 1909.\n\n\"In the end he decided to be a doctor, and went a year to the Harvard Medical School. Then he hit on the idea of keeping to the old French tradition of the family, and argued me into sending him across to the Sorbonne. I did\u2014and proudly enough, though I knew how lonely I'd be with him so far off. Would to God I hadn't! I thought he was the safest kind of a boy to be in Paris. He had a room in the Rue St. Jacques\u2014that's near the University in the 'Latin Quarter'\u2014but according to his letters and his friends he didn't cut up with the gayer dogs at all. The people he knew were mostly young fellows from home\u2014serious students and artists who thought more of their work than of striking attitudes and painting the town red.\n\n\"But of course there were lots of fellows who were on a sort of dividing line between serious studies and the devil. The aesthetes\u2014the decadents, you know. Experimenters in life and sensation\u2014the Baudelaire kind of a chap. Naturally Denis ran up against a good many of these, and saw a good deal of their life. They had all sorts of crazy circles and cults\u2014imitation devil-worship, fake Black Masses, and the like. Doubt if it did them much harm on the whole\u2014probably most of 'em forgot all about it in a year or two. One of the deepest in this queer stuff was a fellow Denis had known at school\u2014for that matter, whose father I'd known myself. Frank Marsh, of New Orleans. Disciple of Lafcadio Hearn and Gauguin and Van Gogh\u2014regular epitome of the yellow 'nineties. Poor devil\u2014he had the makings of a great artist, at that.\n\n\"Marsh was the oldest friend Denis had in Paris, so as a matter of course they saw a good deal of each other\u2014to talk over old times at St. Clair Academy, and all that. The boy wrote me a good deal about him, and I didn't see any especial harm when he spoke of the group of mystics Marsh ran with. It seems there was some cult of prehistoric Egyptian and Carthaginian magic having a rage among the Bohemian element on the left bank\u2014some nonsensical thing that pretended to reach back to forgotten sources of hidden truth in lost African civilisations\u2014the great Zimbabwe, the dead Atlantean cities in the Hoggar region of the Sahara\u2014and that had a lot of gibberish connected with snakes and human hair. At least, I called it gibberish, then. Denis used to quote Marsh as saying odd things about the veiled facts behind the legend of Medusa's snaky locks\u2014and behind the later Ptolemaic myth of Berenice, who offered up her hair to save her husband-brother, and had it set in the sky as the constellation Coma Berenices.\n\n\"I don't think this business made much impression on Denis until the night of the queer ritual at Marsh's rooms when he met the priestess. Most of the devotees of this cult were young fellows, but the head of it was a young woman who called herself 'Tanit-Isis'\u2014letting it be known that her real name\u2014her name in this latest incarnation, as she put it\u2014was Marceline Bedard. She claimed to be the left-handed daughter of Marquis de Chameaux, and seemed to have been both a petty artist and an artist's model before adopting this more lucrative magical game. Someone said she had lived for a time in the West Indies\u2014Martinique, I think\u2014but she was very reticent about herself. Part of her pose was a great show of austerity and holiness, but I don't think the more experienced students took that very seriously.\n\n\"Denis, though, was far from experienced, and wrote me fully ten pages of slush about the goddess he had discovered. If I'd only realised his simplicity I might have done something, but I never thought a puppy infatuation like that could mean much. I felt absurdly sure that Denis' touchy personal honour and family pride would always keep him out of the most serious complications.\n\n\"As time went on, though, his letters began to make me nervous. He mentioned this Marceline more and more, and his friends less and less; and began talking about the 'cruel and silly way' they declined to introduce her to their mothers and sisters. He seems to have asked her no questions about herself, and I don't doubt but that she filled him full of romantic legendry concerning her origin and divine revelations and the way people slighted her. At length I could see that Denis was altogether cutting his own crowd and spending the bulk of his time with this alluring priestess. At her especial request he never told the old crowd of their continual meetings; so nobody over there tried to break the affair up.\n\n\"I suppose she thought he was fabulously rich; for he had the air of a patrician, and people of a certain class think all aristocratic Americans are wealthy. In any case, she probably thought this a rare chance to contract a genuine right-handed alliance with a really eligible young man. By the time my nervousness burst into open advice, it was too late. The boy had lawfully married her, and wrote that he was dropping his studies and bringing the woman home to Riverside. He said she had made a great sacrifice and resigned her leadership of the magical cult, and that henceforward she would be merely a private gentlewoman\u2014the future mistress of Riverside, and mother of de Russys to come.\n\n\"Well, sir, I took it the best way I could. I knew that sophisticated Continentals have different standards from our old American ones\u2014and anyway, I really knew nothing against the woman. A charlatan, perhaps, but why necessarily any worse? I suppose I tried to keep as naive as possible about such things in those days, for the boy's sake. Clearly, there was nothing for a man of sense to do but to let Denis alone so long as his new wife conformed to de Russy ways. Let her have a chance to prove herself\u2014perhaps she wouldn't hurt the family as much as some might fear. So I didn't raise any objections or ask any penitence. The thing was done, and I stood ready to welcome the boy back, whatever he brought with him.\n\n\"They got here three weeks after the telegram telling of the marriage. Marceline was beautiful\u2014there was no denying that\u2014and I could see how the boy might very well get foolish about her. She did have an air of breeding, and I think to this day she must have had some strains of good blood in her. She was apparently not much over twenty; of medium size, fairly slim, and as graceful as a tigress in posture and motions. Her complexion was a deep olive\u2014like old ivory\u2014and her eyes were large and very dark. She had small, classically regular features\u2014though not quite clean-cut enough to suit my taste\u2014and the most singular head of jet black hair that I ever saw.\n\n\"I didn't wonder that she had dragged the subject of hair into her magical cult, for with that heavy profusion of it the idea must have occurred to her naturally. Coiled up, it made her look like some Oriental princess in a drawing of Aubrey Beardsley's. Hanging down her back, it came well below her knees and shone in the light as if it had possessed some separate, unholy vitality of its own. I would almost have thought of Medusa or Berenice myself\u2014without having such things suggested to me\u2014upon seeing and studying that hair.\n\n\"Sometimes I thought it moved slightly of itself, and tended to arrange itself in distinct ropes or strands, but this may have been sheer illusion. She brushed it incessantly, and seemed to use some sort of preparation on it. I got the notion once\u2014a curious, whimsical notion\u2014that it was a living thing which she had to feed in some strange way. All nonsense\u2014but it added to my feeling of constraint about her and her hair.\n\n\"For I can't deny that I failed to like her wholly, no matter how hard I tried. I couldn't tell what the trouble was, but it was there. Something about her repelled me very subtly, and I could not help weaving morbid and macabre associations about everything connected with her. Her complexion called up thoughts of Babylon, Atlantis, Lemuria, and the terrible forgotten dominations of an elder world; her eyes struck me sometimes as the eyes of some unholy forest creature or animal-goddess too immeasurably ancient to be fully human; and her hair\u2014that dense, exotic, overnourished growth of oily inkiness\u2014made one shiver as a great black python might have done. There was no doubt but that she realised my involuntary attitude\u2014though I tried to hide it, and she tried to hide the fact that she noticed it.\n\n\"Yet the boy's infatuation lasted. He positively fawned on her, and overdid all the little gallantries of daily life to a sickening degree. She appeared to return the feeling, though I could see it took a conscious effort to make her duplicate his enthusiasms and extravagances. For one thing, I think she was piqued to learn that we weren't as wealthy as she had expected.\n\n\"It was a bad business all told. I could see that sad undercurrents were arising. Denis was half-hypnotised with puppy-love, and began to grow away from me as he felt my shrinking from his wife. This kind of thing went on for months, and I saw that I was losing my only son\u2014the boy who had formed the centre of all my thoughts and acts for the past quarter century. I'll own that I felt bitter about it\u2014what father wouldn't? And yet I could do nothing.\n\n\"Marceline seemed to be a good wife enough in those early months, and our friends received her without any quibbling or questioning. I was always nervous, though, about what some of the young fellows in Paris might write home to their relatives after the news of the marriage spread around. Despite the woman's love of secrecy, it couldn't remain hidden forever\u2014indeed, Denis had written a few of his closest friends, in strict confidence, as soon as he was settled with her at Riverside.\n\n\"I got to staying alone in my room more and more, with my failing health as an excuse. It was about that time that my present spinal neuritis began to develop\u2014which made the excuse a pretty good one. Denis didn't seem to notice the trouble, or take any interest in me and my habits and affairs; and it hurt me to see how callous he was getting. I began to get sleepless, and often racked my brain in the night to try to find out what really was the matter\u2014what it really was that made my new daughter-in-law so repulsive and even dimly horrible to me. It surely wasn't her old mystical nonsense, for she had left all the past behind her and never mentioned it once. She didn't even do any painting, although I understood that she had once dabbled in art.\n\n\"Oddly, the only ones who seemed to share my uneasiness were the servants. The darkies around the house seemed very sullen in their attitude toward her, and in a few weeks all save the few who were strongly attached to our family had left. These few\u2014old Scipio and his wife Sarah, the cook Delilah, and Mary, Scipio's daughter\u2014were as civil as possible; but plainly revealed that their new mistress commanded their duty rather than their affection. They stayed in their own remote part of the house as much as possible. McCabe, our white chauffeur, was insolently admiring rather than hostile; and another exception was a very old Zulu woman said to have come from Africa over a hundred years before, who had been a sort of leader in her small cabin as a kind of family pensioner. Old Sophonisba always shewed reverence whenever Marceline came near her, and one time I saw her kiss the ground where her mistress had walked. Blacks are superstitious animals, and I wondered whether Marceline had been talking any of her mystical nonsense to our hands in order to overcome their evident dislike.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "\"Well, that's how we went on for nearly half a year. Then, in the summer of 1916, things began to happen. Toward the middle of June Denis got a note from his old friend Frank Marsh, telling of a sort of nervous breakdown which made him want to take a rest in the country. It was postmarked New Orleans\u2014for Marsh had gone home from Paris when he felt the collapse coming on\u2014and seemed a very plain though polite bid for an invitation from us. Marsh, of course, knew that Marceline was here; and asked very courteously after her. Denis was sorry to hear of his trouble and told him at once to come along for an indefinite visit.\n\n\"Marsh came\u2014and I was shocked to notice how he had changed since I had seen him in his earlier days. He was a smallish, lightish fellow, with blue eyes and an undecided chin; and now I could see the effects of drink and I don't know what else in his puffy eyelids, enlarged nose-pores, and heavy lines around the mouth. I reckon he had taken his pose of decadence pretty seriously, and set out to be as much of a Rimbaud, Baudelaire, or Lautr\u00e9amont as he could. And yet he was delightful to talk to\u2014for like all decadents he was exquisitely sensitive to the colour and atmosphere and names of things; admirably, thoroughly alive, and with whole records of conscious experience in obscure, shadowy fields of living and feeling which most of us pass over without knowing they exist. Poor young devil\u2014if only his father had lived longer and taken him in hand! There was great stuff in the boy!\n\n\"I was glad of the visit, for I felt it would help to set up a normal atmosphere in the house again. And that's what it really seemed to do at first; for as I said, Marsh was a delight to have around. He was as sincere and profound an artist as I ever saw in my life, and I certainly believe that nothing on earth mattered to him except the perception and expression of beauty. When he saw an exquisite thing, or was creating one, his eyes would dilate until the light irises went nearly out of sight\u2014leaving two mystical black pits in that weak, delicate, chalk-like face; black pits opening on strange worlds which none of us could guess about.\n\n\"When he reached here, though, he didn't have many chances to shew this tendency; for he had, as he told Denis, gone quite stale. It seems he had been very successful as an artist of a bizarre kind\u2014like Fuseli or Goya or Sime or Clark Ashton Smith\u2014but had suddenly become played out. The world of ordinary things around him had ceased to hold anything he could recognise as beauty\u2014beauty, that is, of enough force and poignancy to arouse his creative faculty. He had often been this way before\u2014all decadents are\u2014but this time he could not invent any new, strange, or outr\u00e9 sensation or experience which would supply the needed illusion of fresh beauty or stimulatingly adventurous expectancy. He was like a Durtal or a des Esseintes at the most jaded point of his curious orbit.\n\n\"Marceline was away when Marsh arrived. She hadn't been enthusiastic about his coming, and had refused to decline an invitation from some of our friends in St. Louis which came about that time for her and Denis. Denis, of course, stayed to receive his guest; but Marceline had gone on alone. It was the first time they had ever been separated, and I hoped the interval would help to dispel the sort of daze that was making such a fool of the boy. Marceline shewed no hurry to get back, but seemed to me to prolong her absence as much as she could. Denis stood it better than one would have expected from such a doting husband, and seemed more like his old self as he talked over other days with Marsh and tried to cheer the listless aesthete up.\n\n\"It was Marsh who seemed most impatient to see the woman; perhaps because he thought her strange beauty, or some phase of the mysticism which had gone into her one-time magical cult, might help to reawaken his interest in things and give him another start toward artistic creation. That there was no baser reason, I was absolutely certain from what I knew of Marsh's character. With all his weaknesses, he was a gentleman\u2014and it had indeed relieved me when I first learned that he wanted to come here because his willingness to accept Denis' hospitality proved that there was no reason why he shouldn't.\n\n\"When, at last, Marceline did return, I could see that Marsh was tremendously affected. He did not attempt to make her talk of the bizarre thing which she had so definitely abandoned, but was unable to hide a powerful admiration which kept his eyes\u2014now dilated in that curious way for the first time during his visit\u2014riveted to her every moment she was in the room. She, however, seemed uneasy rather than pleased by his steady scrutiny\u2014that is, she seemed so at first, though this feeling of hers wore away in a few days, and left the two on a basis of the most cordial and voluble congeniality. I could see Marsh studying her constantly when he thought no one was watching; and I wondered how long it would be that only the artist, and not the primitive man, would be aroused by her mysterious graces.\n\n\"Denis naturally felt some irritation at this turn of affairs; though he realised that his guest was a man of honour and that, as kindred mystics and aesthetes, Marceline and Marsh would naturally have things and interests to discuss in which a more or less conventional person could have no part. He didn't hold anything against anybody, but merely regretted that his own imagination was too limited and traditional to let him talk with Marceline as Marsh talked. At this stage of things I began to see more of the boy. With his wife otherwise busy, he had time to remember that he had a father\u2014and a father who was ready to help him in any sort of perplexity or difficulty.\n\n\"We often sat together on the veranda watching Marsh and Marceline as they rode up or down the drive on horseback, or played tennis on the court that used to stretch south of the house. They talked mostly in French, which Marsh, though he hadn't more than a quarter-portion of French blood, handled more glibly than either Denis or I could speak it. Marceline's English, always academically correct, was rapidly improving in accent; but it was plain that she relished dropping back into her mother-tongue. As we looked at the congenial couple they made, I could see the boy's cheek and throat muscles tighten\u2014though he wasn't a whit less ideal a host to Marsh, or a whit less considerate a husband to Marceline.\n\n\"All this was generally in the afternoon; for Marceline rose very late, had breakfast in bed, and took an immense amount of time preparing to come downstairs. I never knew of anyone so wrapped up in cosmetics, beauty exercises, hair-oils, unguents, and everything of that kind. It was in these morning hours that Denis and Marsh did their real visiting, and exchanged the close confidences which kept their friendship up despite the strain that jealousy imposed.\n\n\"Well, it was in one of those morning talks on the veranda that Marsh made the proposition which brought on the end. I was laid up with some of my neuritis, but had managed to get downstairs and stretch out on the front parlour sofa near the long window. Denis and Marsh were just outside; so I couldn't help hearing all they said. They had been talking about art, and the curious, capricious environmental elements needed to jolt an artist into producing the real article, when Marsh suddenly swerved from abstractions to the personal application he must have had in mind from the start.\n\n\"'I suppose,' he was saying, 'that nobody can tell just what it is in some scenes or objects that makes them aesthetic stimuli for certain individuals. Basically, of course, it must have some reference to each man's background of stored-up mental associations, for no two people have the same scale of sensitiveness and responses. We decadents are artists for whom all ordinary things have ceased to have any emotional or imaginative significance, but no one of us responds in the same way to exactly the same extraordinary thing. Now take me, for instance....'\n\n\"He paused and resumed.\n\n\"'I know, Denny, that I can say these things to you because you have such a preternaturally unspoiled mind\u2014clean, fine, direct, objective, and all that. You won't misunderstand as an oversubtilised, effete man of the world might.'\n\n\"He paused once more.\n\n\"'The fact is, I think I know what's needed to set my imagination working again. I've had a dim idea of it ever since we were in Paris, but I'm sure now. It's Marceline, old chap\u2014that face and that hair, and the train of shadowy images they bring up. Not merely visible beauty\u2014though God knows there's enough of that\u2014but something peculiar and individualised, that can't exactly be explained. Do you know, in the last few days I've felt the existence of such a stimulus so keenly that I honestly think I could outdo myself\u2014break into the real masterpiece class if I could get hold of paint and canvas at just the time when her face and hair set my fancy stirring and weaving. There's something weird and other-worldly about it\u2014something joined up with the dim ancient thing Marceline represents. I don't know how much she's told you about that side of her, but I can assure you there's plenty of it. She has some marvellous links with the outside....\"\n\n\"Some change in Denis' expression must have halted the speaker here, for there was a considerable spell of silence before the words went on. I was utterly taken aback, for I'd expected no such overt development like this; and I wondered what my son could be thinking. My heart began to pound violently, and I strained my ears in the frankest of intentional eavesdropping. Then Marsh resumed.\n\n\"'Of course you're jealous\u2014I know how a speech like mine must sound\u2014but I can swear to you that you needn't be.'\n\n\"Denis did not answer, and Marsh went on.\n\n\"'To tell the truth, I could never be in love with Marceline\u2014I couldn't even be a cordial friend of hers in the warmest sense. Why, damn it all, I felt like a hypocrite talking with her these days as I've been doing.\n\n\"'The case simply is, that one phase of her half hypnotises me in a certain way\u2014a very strange, fantastic, and dimly terrible way\u2014just as another phase half hypnotises you in a much more normal way. I see something in her\u2014or to be psychologically exact, something through her or beyond her\u2014that you don't see at all. Something that brings up a vast pageantry of shapes from forgotten abysses, and makes me want to paint incredible things whose outlines vanish the instant I try to envisage them clearly. Don't mistake, Denny, your wife is a magnificent being, a splendid focus of cosmic forces who has a right to be called divine if anything on earth has!'\n\n\"I felt a clearing of the situation at this point, for the abstract strangeness of Marsh's expressed statement, plus the flattery he was now heaping on Marceline, could not fail to disarm and mollify one as fondly proud of his consort as Denis always was. Marsh evidently caught the change himself, for there was more confidence in his tone as he continued.\n\n\"'I must paint her, Denny\u2014must paint that hair\u2014and you won't regret it. There's something more than mortal about that hair\u2014something more than beautiful\u2014'\n\n\"He paused, and I wondered what Denis could be thinking. I wondered, indeed, what I was really thinking myself. Was Marsh's interest actually that of the artist alone, or was he merely infatuated as Denis had been? I had thought, in their schooldays, that he had envied my boy; and I dimly felt that it might be the same now. On the other hand, something in that talk of artistic stimulus had rung amazingly true; so that the more I pondered, the more I was inclined to take the stuff at face value. Denis seemed to do so, too, for although I could not catch his low-spoken reply, I could tell by the effect it produced that it must have been affirmative.\n\n\"There was a sound of someone slapping another on the back, and then a grateful speech from Marsh that I was long to remember.\n\n\"'That's great, Denny; and just as I told you, you'll never regret it. In a sense, I'm half doing it for you. You'll be a different man when you see it. I'll put you back where you used to be\u2014give you a waking-up and a sort of salvation\u2014but you can't see what I mean as yet. Just remember old friendship, and don't get the idea that I'm not the same old bird!'\n\n\"I rose perplexedly as I saw the two stroll off across the lawn, arm in arm, and smoking in unison. What could Marsh have meant by his strange and almost ominous reassurance? The more my fears were quieted in one direction, the more they were aroused in another. Look at it in any way I could, it seemed to be rather a bad business.\n\n\"But matters got started just the same. Denis fixed up an attic room with skylights, and Marsh sent for all sorts of painting equipment. Everyone was rather excited about the new venture, and I was at least glad that something was on foot to break the brooding tension. Soon the sittings began, and we all took them quite seriously\u2014for we could see that Marsh regarded them as important artistic events. Denny and I used to go quietly about the house as though something sacred were occurring, and we knew that it was sacred so far as Marsh was concerned.\n\n\"With Marceline, though, it was a different matter, as I began to see at once. Whatever Marsh's reactions to the sittings may have been, hers were painfully obvious. Every possible way she betrayed a frank and commonplace infatuation for the artist, and would repulse Denis' marks of affection whenever she dared. Oddly, I noticed this more vividly than Denis himself, and tried to devise some plan for keeping the boy's mind easy until the matter could be straightened out. There was no use in having him excited about it if it could be helped.\n\n\"In the end I decided that Denis had better be away while the disagreeable situation existed. I could represent his interests well enough at this end, and sooner or later Marsh would finish the picture and go. My view of Marsh's honour was such that I did not look for any worse developments. When the matter had blown over, and Marceline had forgotten about her new infatuation, it would be time enough to have Denis on hand again.\n\n\"So I wrote a long letter to my marketing and financial agent in New York, and cooked up a plan to have the boy summoned there for an indefinite time. I had the agent write him that our affairs absolutely required one of us to go East, and of course my illness made it clear that I could not be the one. It was arranged that when Denis got to New York he would find enough plausible matters to keep him busy as long as I thought he ought to be away.\n\n\"The plan worked perfectly, and Denis started for New York without the least suspicion; Marceline and Marsh going with him in the car to Cape Girardeau, where he caught the afternoon train to St. Louis. They returned about dark, and as McCabe drove the car back to the stables I could hear them talking on the veranda\u2014in those same chairs near the long parlour window where Marsh and Denis had sat when I overheard them talk about the portrait. This time I resolved to do some intentional eavesdropping, so quietly went down to the front parlour and stretched out on the sofa near the window.\n\n\"At first I could not hear anything, but very shortly there came a sound as of a chair being shifted, followed by a short, sharp breath and a sort of inarticulately hurt exclamation from Marceline. Then I heard Marsh speaking in a strained, almost formal voice.\n\n\"'I'd enjoy working tonight if you're not too tired.'\n\n\"Marceline's reply was in the same hurt tone which had marked her exclamation. She used English as he had done.\n\n\"'Oh, Frank, is that really all you care about? Forever working! Can't we just sit out in this glorious moonlight?'\n\n\"He answered impatiently, his voice shewing a certain contempt beneath the dominant quality of artistic enthusiasm.\n\n\"'Moonlight! Good God, what cheap sentimentality! For a supposedly sophisticated person you surely do hang on to some of the crudest claptrap that ever escaped from the dime novels! With art at your elbow, you have to think of the moon\u2014cheap as a spotlight at the varieties! Or perhaps it makes you think of the Roodmas dance around the stone pillars at Auteuil. Hell, how you used to make those goggle-eyed yaps stare! But no\u2014I suppose you've dropped all that now. No more Atlantean magic or hair-snake rites for Madame de Russy! I'm the only one to remember the old things\u2014the things that came down through the temples of Tanit and echoed on the ramparts of Zimbabwe. But I won't be cheated of that remembrance\u2014all that is weaving itself into the thing on my canvas\u2014the thing that is going to capture wonder and crystallise the secrets of 75,000 years....'\n\n\"Marceline interrupted in a voice full of mixed emotions.\n\n\"'It's you who are cheaply sentimental now! You know well that the old things had better be let alone. All of you had better look out if ever I chant the old rites or try to call up what lies hidden in Yuggoth, Zimbabwe, and R'lyeh. I thought you had more sense!\n\n\"'You lack logic. You want me to be interested in this precious painting of yours, yet you never let me see what you're doing. Always that black cloth over it! It's of me\u2014I shouldn't think it would matter if I saw it....'\n\n\"Marsh was interrupting this time, his voice curiously hard and strained.\n\n\"'No. Not now. You'll see it in due course of time. You say it's of you\u2014yes, it's that, but it's more. If you knew, you mightn't be so impatient. Poor Denis! My God, it's a shame!'\n\n\"My throat went suddenly dry as the words rose to an almost febrile pitch. What could Marsh mean? Suddenly I saw that he had stopped and was entering the house alone. I heard the front door slam, and listened as his footsteps ascended the stairs. Outside on the veranda I could still hear Marceline's heavy, angry breathing. I crept away sick at heart, feeling that there were grave things to ferret out before I could safely let Denis come back.\n\n\"After that evening the tension around the place was even worse than before. Marceline had always lived on flattery and fawning, and the shock of those few blunt words from Marsh was too much for her temperament. There was no living in the house with her any more, for with poor Denis gone she took out her abusiveness on everybody. When she could find no one indoors to quarrel with she would go out to Sophonisba's cabin and spend hours talking with the queer old Zulu woman. Aunt Sophy was the only person who would fawn abjectly enough to suit her, and when I tried once to overhear their conversation I found Marceline whispering about 'elder secrets' and 'unknown Kadath' while the negress rocked to and fro in her chair, making inarticulate sounds of reverence and admiration every now and then.\n\n\"But nothing could break her dog-like infatuation for Marsh. She would talk bitterly and sullenly to him, yet was getting more and more obedient to his wishes. It was very convenient for him, since he now became able to make her pose for the picture whenever he felt like painting. He tried to shew gratitude for this willingness, but I thought I could detect a kind of contempt or even loathing beneath his careful politeness. For my part, I frankly hated Marceline! There was no use in calling my attitude anything as mild as mere dislike these days. Certainly, I was glad Denis was away. His letters, not nearly so frequent as I wished, shewed signs of strain and worry.\n\n\"As the middle of August went by I gathered from Marsh's remarks that the portrait was nearly done. His mood seemed increasingly sardonic, though Marceline's temper improved a bit as the prospect of seeing the thing tickled her vanity. I can still recall the day when Marsh said he'd have everything finished within a week. Marceline brightened up perceptibly, though not without a venomous look at me. It seemed as if her coiled hair visibly tightened about her head.\n\n\"'I'm to be the first to see it!' she snapped. Then, smiling at Marsh, she said, 'And if I don't like it I shall slash it to pieces!'\n\n\"Marsh's face took on the most curious look I have ever seen it wear as he answered her.\n\n\"'I can't vouch for your taste, Marceline, but I swear it will be magnificent! Not that I want to take much credit\u2014art creates itself\u2014and this thing had to be done. Just wait!'\n\n\"During the next few days I felt a queer sense of foreboding, as if the completion of the picture meant a kind of catastrophe instead of a relief. Denis, too, had not written me, and my agent in New York said he was planning some trip to the country. I wondered what the outcome of the whole thing would be. What a queer mixture of elements\u2014Marsh and Marceline, Denis and I! How would all these ultimately react on one another? When my fears grew too great I tried to lay them all to my infirmity, but that explanation never quite satisfied me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "\"Well, the thing exploded on Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of August. I had risen at my usual time and had breakfast, but was not good for much because of the pain in my spine. It had been troubling me badly of late, and forcing me to take opiates when it got too unbearable; nobody else was downstairs except the servants, though I could hear Marceline moving about in her room. Marsh slept in the attic next his studio, and had begun to keep such late hours that he was seldom up till noon. About ten o'clock the pain got the better of me, so that I took a double dose of my opiate and lay down on the parlour sofa. The last I heard was Marceline's pacing overhead. Poor creature\u2014if I had known! She must have been walking before the long mirror admiring herself. That was like her. Vain from start to finish\u2014revelling in her own beauty, just as she revelled in all the little luxuries Denis was able to give her.\n\n\"I didn't wake up till near sunset, and knew instantly how long I had slept from the golden light and long shadows outside the long window. Nobody was about, and a sort of unnatural stillness seemed to be hovering over everything. From afar, though, I thought I could sense a faint howling, wild and intermittent, whose quality had a slight but baffling familiarity about it. I'm not much for psychic premonitions, but I was frightfully uneasy from the start. There had been dreams\u2014even worse than the ones I had been dreaming in the weeks before\u2014and this time they seemed hideously linked to some black and festering reality. The whole place had a poisonous air. Afterward I reflected that certain sounds must have filtered through to my unconscious brain during those hours of drugged sleep. My pain, though, was very much eased; and I rose and walked without difficulty.\n\n\"Soon enough I began to see that something was wrong. Marsh and Marceline might have been riding, but someone ought to have been getting dinner in the kitchen. Instead, there was only silence, except for that faint distant howl or wail; and nobody answered when I pulled the old-fashioned bell-cord to summon Scipio. Then, chancing to look up, I saw the spreading stain on the ceiling\u2014the bright red stain, that must have come through the floor of Marceline's room.\n\n\"In an instant I forgot my crippled back and hurried upstairs to find out the worst. Everything under the sun raced through my mind as I struggled with the dampness-warped door of that silent chamber, and most hideous of all was a terrible sense of malign fulfilment and fatal expectedness. I had, it struck me, known all along that nameless horrors were gathering; that something profoundly and cosmically evil had gained a foothold under my roof from which only blood and tragedy could result.\n\n\"The door gave at last, and I stumbled into the large room beyond\u2014all dim from the branches of the great trees outside the windows. For a moment I could do nothing but flinch at the faint evil odour that immediately struck my nostrils. Then, turning on the electric light and glancing around, I glimpsed a nameless blasphemy on the yellow and blue rug.\n\n\"It lay face down in a great pool of dark, thickened blood, and had the gory print of a shod human foot in the middle of its naked back. Blood was spattered everywhere\u2014on the walls, furniture, and floor. My knees gave way as I took in the sight, so that I had to stumble to a chair and slump down. The thing had obviously been a human being, though its identity was not easy to establish at first; since it was without clothes, and had most of its hair hacked and torn from the scalp in a very crude way. It was of a deep ivory colour, and I knew that it must have been Marceline. The shoe-print on the back made the thing seem all the more hellish. I could not even picture the strange, loathsome tragedy which must have taken place while I slept in the room below. When I raised my hand to wipe my dripping forehead I saw that my fingers were sticky with blood. I shuddered, then realised that it must have come from the knob of the door which the unknown murderer had forced shut behind him as he left. He had taken his weapon with him, it seemed, for no instrument of death was visible here.\n\n\"As I studied the floor I saw that a line of sticky footprints like the one on the body led away from the horror to the door. There was another blood-trail, too, and of a less easily explainable kind; a broadish, continuous line, as if marking the path of some huge snake. At first I concluded it must be due to something the murderer had dragged after him. Then, noting the way some of the footprints seemed to be superimposed on it, I was forced to believe that it had been there when the murderer left. But what crawling entity could have been in that room with the victim and her assassin, leaving before the killer when the deed was done? As I asked myself this question I thought I heard fresh bursts of that faint, distant wailing.\n\n\"Finally, rousing myself from a lethargy of horror, I got on my feet again and began following the footprints. Who the murderer was, I could not even faintly guess, nor could I try to explain the absence of the servants. I vaguely felt that I ought to go up to Marsh's attic quarters, but before I had fully formulated the idea I saw that the bloody trail was indeed taking me there. Was he himself the murderer? Had he gone mad under the strain of the morbid situation and suddenly run amok?\n\n\"In the attic corridor the trail became faint, the prints almost ceasing as they merged with the dark carpet. I could still, however, discern the strange single path of the entity who had gone first; and this led straight to the closed door of Marsh's studio, disappearing beneath it at a point about half way from side to side. Evidently it had crossed the threshold at a time when the door was wide open.\n\n\"Sick at heart, I tried the knob and found the door unlocked. Opening it, I paused in the waning north light to see what fresh nightmare might be awaiting me. There was certainly something human on the floor, and I reached for the switch to turn on the chandelier.\n\n\"But as the light flashed up my gaze left the floor and its horror\u2014that was Marsh, poor devil\u2014to fix itself frantically and incredulously upon the living thing that cowered and stared in the open doorway leading to Marsh's bedroom. It was a tousled, wild-eyed thing, crusted with dried blood and carrying in its hand a wicked machete which had been one of the ornaments of the studio wall. Yet even in that awful moment I recognised it as one whom I had thought more than a thousand miles away. It was my own boy Denis\u2014or the maddened wreck which had once been Denis.\n\n\"The sight of me seemed to bring back a trifle of sanity\u2014or at least of memory\u2014in the poor boy. He straightened up and began to toss his head about as if trying to shake free from some enveloping influence. I could not speak a word, but moved my lips in an effort to get back my voice. My eyes wandered for a moment to the figure on the floor in front of the heavily draped easel\u2014the figure toward which the strange blood-trail led, and which seemed to be tangled in the coils of some dark, ropy object. The shifting of my glance apparently produced some impression in the twisted brain of the boy, for suddenly he began to mutter in a hoarse whisper whose purport I was soon able to catch.\n\n\"'I had to exterminate her\u2014she was the devil\u2014the summit and high-priestess of all evil\u2014the spawn of the pit\u2014Marsh knew, and tried to warn me. Good old Frank\u2014I didn't kill him, though I was ready to before I realised. But I went down there and killed her\u2014then that cursed hair\u2014'\n\n\"I listened in horror as Denis choked, paused, and began again.\n\n\"'You didn't know\u2014her letters got queer and I knew she was in love with Marsh. Then she nearly stopped writing. He never mentioned her\u2014I felt something was wrong, and thought I ought to come back and find out. Couldn't tell you\u2014your manner would have given it away. Wanted to surprise them. Got here about noon today\u2014came in a cab and sent the house-servants all off\u2014let the field hands alone, for their cabins are all out of earshot. Told McCabe to get me some things in Cape Girardeau and not bother to come back till tomorrow. Had all the niggers take the old car and let Mary drive them to Bend Village for a vacation\u2014told 'em we were all going on some sort of outing and wouldn't need help. Said they'd better stay all night with Uncle Scip's cousin, who keeps that nigger boarding-house.'\n\n\"Denis was getting very incoherent now, and I strained my ears to grasp every word. Again I thought I heard that wild, far-off wail, but the story had first place for the present.\n\n\"'Saw you sleeping in the parlour, and took a chance you wouldn't wake up. Then went upstairs on the quiet to hunt up Marsh and... that woman!'\n\n\"The boy shuddered as he avoided pronouncing Marceline's name. At the same time I saw his eyes dilate in unison with a bursting of the distant crying, whose vague familiarity had now become very great.\n\n\"'She was not in her room, so I went up to the studio. Door was shut, and I could hear voices inside. Didn't knock\u2014just burst in and found her posing for the picture. Nude, but with that hellish hair all draped around her. And making all sorts of sheep's eyes at Marsh. He had the easel turned half away from the door, so I couldn't see the picture. Both of them were pretty well jolted when I shewed up, and Marsh dropped his brush. I was in a rage and told him he'd have to shew me the portrait, but he got calmer every minute. Told me it wasn't quite done, but would be in a day or two\u2014said I could see it then\u2014she\u2014hadn't seen it.\n\n\"'But that didn't go with me. I stepped up, and he dropped a velvet curtain over the thing before I could see it. He was ready to fight before letting me see it, but that\u2014that\u2014she\u2014stepped up and sided with me. Said we ought to see it. Frank got horribly worked up, and gave me a punch when I tried to get at the curtain. I punched back and seemed to have knocked him out. Then I was almost knocked out myself by the shriek that\u2014that creature\u2014gave. She'd drawn aside the hangings herself, and had caught a look at what Marsh had been painting. I wheeled around and saw her rushing like mad out of the room\u2014then I saw the picture.'\n\n\"Madness flared up in the boy's eyes again as he got to this place, and I thought for a minute he was going to spring at me with his machete. But after a pause he partly steadied himself.\n\n\"'Oh, God\u2014that thing! Don't ever look at it! Burn it with the hangings around it and throw the ashes into the river! Marsh knew\u2014and was warning me. He knew what it was\u2014what that woman\u2014that leopardess, or gorgon, or lamia, or whatever she was\u2014actually represented. He'd tried to hint to me ever since I met her in his Paris studio, but it couldn't be told in words. I thought they all wronged her when they whispered horrors about her\u2014she had me hypnotised so that I couldn't believe the plain facts\u2014but this picture has caught the whole secret\u2014the whole monstrous background!\n\n\"'God, but Frank is an artist! That thing is the greatest piece of work any living soul has produced since Rembrandt! It's a crime to burn it\u2014but it would be a greater crime to let it exist\u2014just as it would have been an abhorrent sin to let\u2014that she-daemon\u2014exist any longer. The minute I saw it I understood what\u2014she\u2014was, and what part she played in the frightful secret that has come down from the days of Cthulhu and the Elder Ones\u2014the secret that was nearly wiped out when Atlantis sank, but that kept half alive in hidden traditions and allegorical myths and furtive, midnight cult-practices. For you know she was the real thing. It wasn't any fake. It would have been merciful if it had been a fake. It was the old, hideous shadow that philosophers never dared mention\u2014the thing hinted at in the Necronomicon and symbolised in the Easter Island colossi.\n\n\"'She thought we couldn't see through\u2014that the false front would hold till we had bartered away our immortal souls. And she was half right\u2014she'd have got me in the end. She was only\u2014waiting. But Frank\u2014good old Frank\u2014was too much for me. He knew what it all meant, and painted it. I don't wonder she shrieked and ran off when she saw it. It wasn't quite done, but God knows enough was there.\n\n\"'Then I knew I'd got to kill her\u2014kill her, and everything connected with her. It was a taint that wholesome human blood couldn't bear. There was something else, too\u2014but you'll never know that if you burn the picture without looking. I staggered down to her room with this machete that I got off the wall here, leaving Frank still knocked out. He was breathing, though, and I knew and thanked heaven that I hadn't killed him.\n\n\"'I found her in front of the mirror braiding that accursed hair. She turned on me like a wild beast, and began spitting out her hatred of Marsh. The fact that she'd been in love with him\u2014and I knew she had\u2014only made it worse. For a minute I couldn't move, and she came within an ace of completely hypnotising me. Then I thought of the picture, and the spell broke. She saw the breaking in my eyes, and must have noticed the machete, too. I never saw anything give such a wild jungle beast look as she did then. She sprang for me with claws out like a leopard's, but I was too quick. I swung the machete, and it was all over.'\n\n\"Denis had to stop again there, and I saw the perspiration running down his forehead through the spattered blood. But in a moment he hoarsely resumed.\n\n\"'I said it was all over\u2014but God! some of it had only just begun! I felt I had fought the legions of Satan, and put my foot on the back of the thing I had annihilated. Then I saw that blasphemous braid of coarse black hair begin to twist and squirm of itself.\n\n\"'I might have known it. It was all in the old tales. That damnable hair had a life of its own, that couldn't be ended by killing the creature itself. I knew I'd have to burn it, so I started to hack it off with the machete. God, but it was devilish work! Tough\u2014like iron wires\u2014but I managed to do it. And it was loathsome the way the big braid writhed and struggled in my grasp.\n\n\"'About the time I had the last strand cut or pulled off I heard that eldritch wailing from behind the house. You know\u2014it's still going off and on. I don't know what it is, but it must be something springing from this hellish business. It half seems like something I ought to know but can't quite place. It got my nerves the first time I heard it, and I dropped the severed braid in my fright. Then, I got a worse fright\u2014for in another second the braid had turned on me and began to strike venomously with one of its ends which had knotted itself up like a sort of grotesque head. I struck out with the machete, and it turned away. Then, when I had my breath again, I saw that the monstrous thing was crawling along the floor by itself like a great black snake. I couldn't do anything for a while, but when it vanished through the door I managed to pull myself together and stumble after it. I could follow the broad, bloody trail, and I saw it led upstairs. It brought me here\u2014and may heaven curse me if I didn't see it through the doorway, striking at poor dazed Marsh like a maddened rattler as it had struck at me, finally coiling around him as a python would. He had begun to come to, but that abominable serpent thing got him before he was on his feet. I knew that all of that woman's hatred was behind it, but I hadn't the power to pull it off. I tried, but it was too much for me. Even the machete was no good\u2014I couldn't swing it freely or it would have slashed Frank to pieces. So I saw those monstrous coils tighten\u2014saw poor Frank crushed to death before my eyes\u2014and all the time that awful faint howling came from somewhere beyond the fields.\n\n\"'That's all. I pulled the velvet cloth over the picture and hope it'll never be lifted. The thing must be burnt. I couldn't pry the coils off poor, dead Frank\u2014they cling to him like a leach, and seem to have lost their motion altogether. It's as if that snaky rope of hair has a kind of perverse fondness for the man it killed\u2014it's clinging to him\u2014embracing him. You'll have to burn poor Frank with it\u2014but for God's sake don't forget to see it in ashes. That and the picture. They must both go. The safety of the world demands that they go.'\n\n\"Denis might have whispered more, but a fresh burst of distant wailing cut us short. For the first time we knew what it was, for a westerly veering wind brought articulate words at last. We ought to have known long before, since sounds much like it had often come from the same source. It was wrinkled Sophonisba, the ancient Zulu witch-woman who had fawned on Marceline, keening from her cabin in a way which crowned the horrors of this nightmare tragedy. We could both hear some of the things she howled, and knew that secret and primordial bonds linked this savage sorceress with that other inheritor of elder secrets who had just been extirpated. Some of the words she used betrayed her closeness to daemonic and palaeogean traditions.\n\n\"'I\u00e4! I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! Ya-R'lyeh! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! Ya, yo, pore Missy Tanit, pore Missy Isis! Marse Clooloo, come up outen de water an' git yo chile\u2014she done daid! She done daid! De hair ain' got no missus no mo', Marse Clooloo. Ol' Sophy, she know! Ol' Sophy, she done got de black stone outen Big Zimbabwe in ol' Affriky! Ol' Sophy, she done dance in de moonshine roun' de crocodile-stone befo' de N'bangus cotch her and sell her to de ship folks! No mo' Tanit! No mo' Isis! No mo' witch-woman to keep de fire a-goin' in de big stone place! Ya, yo! N'gagi n'bulu bwana n'lolo! I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! She daid! Ol' Sophy know!'\n\n\"That wasn't the end of the wailing, but it was all I could pay attention to. The expression on my boy's face shewed that it had reminded him of something frightful, and the tightening of his hand on the machete boded no good. I knew he was desperate, and sprang to disarm him if possible before he could do anything more.\n\n\"But I was too late. An old man with a bad spine doesn't count for much physically. There was a terrible struggle, but he had done for himself before many seconds were over. I'm not sure yet but that he tried to kill me, too. His last panting words were something about the need of wiping out everything that had been connected with Marceline, either by blood or marriage.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "\"I wonder to this day that I didn't go stark mad in that instant\u2014or in the moments and hours afterward. In front of me was the slain body of my boy\u2014the only human being I had to cherish\u2014and ten feet away, in front of that shrouded easel, was the body of his best friend, with a nameless coil of horror wound around it. Below was the scalped corpse of that she-monster, about whom I was half-ready to believe anything. I was too dazed to analyse the probability of the hair story\u2014and even if I had not been, that dismal howling from Aunt Sophy's cabin would have been enough to quiet doubt for the nonce.\n\n\"If I'd been wise, I'd have done just what poor Denis told me to\u2014burned the picture and the body-grasping hair at once and without curiosity\u2014but I was too shaken to be wise. I suppose I muttered foolish things over my boy\u2014and then I remembered that the night was wearing on and that the servants would be back in the morning. It was plain that a matter like this could never be explained, and I knew that I must cover things up and invent a story.\n\n\"That coil of hair around Marsh was a monstrous thing. As I poked at it with a sword which I took from the wall I almost thought I felt it tighten its grip on the dead man. I didn't dare touch it\u2014and the longer I looked at it the more horrible things I noticed about it. One thing gave me a start. I won't mention it\u2014but it partly explained the need for feeding the hair with queer oils as Marceline had always done.\n\n\"In the end I decided to bury all three bodies in the cellar\u2014with quicklime, which I knew we had in the storehouse. It was a night of hellish work. I dug three graves\u2014my boy's a long way from the other two, for I didn't want him to be near either the woman's body or her hair. I was sorry I couldn't get the coil from around poor Marsh. It was terrible work getting them all down to the cellar. I used blankets in carting the woman and the poor devil with the coil around him. Then I had to get two barrels of lime from the storehouse. God must have given me strength, for I not only moved them both but filled all three graves without a hitch.\n\n\"Some of the lime I made into whitewash. I had to take a stepladder and fix over the parlour ceiling where the blood had oozed through. And I burned nearly everything in Marceline's room, scrubbing the walls and floor and heavy furniture. I washed up the attic studio, too, and the trail and footprints that led there. And all the time I could hear old Sophy's wailing in the distance. The devil must have been in that creature to let her voice go on like that. But she always was howling queer things. That's why the field niggers didn't get scared or curious that night. I locked the studio door and took the key to my room. Then I burned all my stained clothes in the fireplace. By dawn the whole house looked quite normal so far as any casual eye could tell. I hadn't dared touch the covered easel, but meant to attend to that later.\n\n\"Well, the servants came back next day, and I told them all the young folks had gone to St. Louis. None of the field hands seemed to have seen or heard anything, and old Sophonisba's wailing had stopped at the instant of sunrise. She was like a sphinx after that, and never let out a word of what had been on her brooding witch-brain the day and night before.\n\n\"Later on I pretended that Denis and Marsh and Marceline had gone back to Paris and had a certain discreet agency mail me letters from there\u2014letters I had fixed up in forged handwriting. It took a good deal of deceit and reticence to explain things to various friends, and I know people have secretly suspected me of holding something back. I had the deaths of Marsh and Denis reported during the war, and later said Marceline had entered a convent. Fortunately Marsh was an orphan whose eccentric ways had alienated him from his people in Louisiana. Things might have been patched up a good deal better for me if I had had the sense to burn the picture, sell the plantation, and give up trying to manage things with a shaken and overstrained mind. You see what my folly has brought me to. Failing crops\u2014hands discharged one by one\u2014place falling to ruin\u2014and myself a hermit and a target for dozens of queer countryside stories. Nobody will come around here after dark nowadays\u2014or any other time if it can be helped. That's why I knew you must be a stranger.\n\n\"And why do I stay here? I can't wholly tell you that. It's bound up too closely with things at the very rim of sane reality. It wouldn't have been so, perhaps, if I hadn't looked at the picture. I ought to have done as poor Denis told me. I honestly meant to burn it when I went up to that locked studio a week after the horror, but I looked first\u2014and that changed everything.\n\n\"No\u2014there's no use telling what I saw. You can, in a way, see for yourself presently; though time and dampness have done their work. I don't think it can hurt you if you want to take a look, but it was different with me. I knew too much of what it all meant.\n\n\"Denis had been right\u2014it was the greatest triumph of human art since Rembrandt, even though still unfinished. I grasped that at the start, and knew that poor Marsh had justified his decadent philosophy. He was to painting what Baudelaire was to poetry\u2014and Marceline was the key that had unlocked his inmost stronghold of genius.\n\n\"The thing almost stunned me when I pulled aside the hangings\u2014stunned me before I half knew what the whole thing was. You know, it's only partly a portrait. Marsh had been pretty literal when he hinted that he wasn't painting Marceline alone, but what he saw through her and beyond her.\n\n\"Of course she was in it\u2014was the key to it, in a sense\u2014but her figure only formed one point in a vast composition. She was nude except for that hideous web of hair spun around her, and was half-seated, half-reclining on a sort of bench or divan, carved in patterns unlike those of any known decorative tradition. There was a monstrously shaped goblet in one hand, from which was spilling fluid whose colour I haven't been able to place or classify to this day\u2014I don't know where Marsh even got the pigments.\n\n\"The figure and the divan were in the left-hand foreground of the strangest sort of scene I ever saw in my life. I think there was a faint suggestion of its all being a kind of emanation from the woman's brain, yet there was also a directly opposite suggestion\u2014as if she were just an evil image or hallucination conjured up by the scene itself.\n\n\"I can't tell you now whether it's an exterior or an interior\u2014whether those hellish Cyclopean vaultings are seen from the outside or the inside, or whether they are indeed carven stone and not merely a morbid fungous arborescence. The geometry of the whole thing is crazy\u2014one gets the acute and obtuse angles all mixed up.\n\n\"And God! The shapes of nightmare that float around in that perpetual daemon twilight! The blasphemies that lurk and leer and hold a Witches' Sabbat with that woman as a high-priestess! The black shaggy entities that are not quite goats\u2014the crocodile-headed beast with three legs and a dorsal row of tentacles\u2014and the flat-nosed aegipans dancing in a pattern that Egypt's priests knew and called accursed!\n\n\"But the scene wasn't Egypt\u2014it was behind Egypt; behind even Atlantis; behind fabled Mu, and myth-whispered Lemuria. It was the ultimate fountain-head of all horror on this earth, and the symbolism shewed only too clearly how integral a part of it Marceline was. I think it must be the unmentionable R'lyeh, that was not built by any creatures of this planet\u2014the thing Marsh and Denis used to talk about in the shadows with hushed voices. In the picture it appears that the whole scene is deep under water\u2014though everybody seems to be breathing freely.\n\n\"Well\u2014I couldn't do anything but look and shudder, and finally I saw that Marceline was watching me craftily out of those monstrous, dilated eyes on the canvas. It was no mere superstition\u2014Marsh had actually caught something of her horrible vitality in his symphonies of line and colour, so that she still brooded and stared and hated, just as if most of her weren't down in the cellar under quicklime. And it was worst of all when some of those Hecate-born snaky strands of hair began to lift themselves up from the surface and grope out into the room toward me.\n\n\"Then it was that I knew the last final horror, and realised I was a guardian and a prisoner forever. She was the thing from which the first dim legends of Medusa and the Gorgons had sprung, and something in my shaken will had been captured and turned to stone at last. Never again would I be safe from those coiling snaky strands\u2014the strands in the picture, and those that lay brooding under the lime near the wine casks. All too late I recalled the tales of the virtual indestructibility, even through centuries of burial, of the hair of the dead.\n\n\"My life since has been nothing but horror and slavery. Always there had lurked the fear of what broods down in the cellar. In less than a month the niggers began whispering about the great black snake that crawled around near the wine casks after dark, and about the curious way its trail would lead to another spot six feet away. Finally I had to move everything to another part of the cellar, for not a darky could be induced to go near the place where the snake was seen.\n\n\"Then the field hands began talking about the black snake that visited old Sophonisba's cabin every night after midnight. One of them shewed me its trail\u2014and not long afterward I found out that Aunt Sophy herself had begun to pay strange visits to the cellar of the big house, lingering and muttering for hours in the very spot where none of the other blacks would go near. God, but I was glad when that old witch died! I honestly believe she had been a priestess of some ancient and terrible tradition back in Africa. She must have lived to be almost a hundred and fifty years old.\n\n\"Sometimes I think I hear something gliding around the house at night. There will be a queer noise on the stairs, where the boards are loose, and the latch of my room will rattle as if with an inward pressure. I always keep my door locked, of course. Then there are certain mornings when I seem to catch a sickish musty odour in the corridors, and notice a faint, ropy trail through the dust of the floors. I know I must guard the hair in the picture, for if anything were to happen to it, there are entities in this house which would take a sure and terrible revenge. I don't even dare to die\u2014for life and death are all one to those in the clutch of what came out of R'lyeh. Something would be on hand to punish my neglect. Medusa's coil has got me, and it will always be the same. Never mix up with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your immortal soul.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "As the old man finished his story I saw that the small lamp had long since burned dry, and that the large one was nearly empty. It must, I knew, be near dawn; and my ears told me that the storm was over. The tale had held me in a half-daze, and I almost feared to glance at the door lest it reveal an inward pressure from some unnamable source. It would be hard to say which had the greatest hold on me\u2014stark horror, incredulity, or a kind of morbid fantastic curiosity. I was wholly beyond speech and had to wait for my strange host to break the spell.\n\n\"Do you want to see\u2014the thing?\"\n\nHis voice was very low and hesitant, and I saw he was tremendously in earnest. Of my various emotions, curiosity gained the upper hand; and I nodded silently. He rose, lighting a candle on a nearby table and holding it high before him as he opened the door.\n\n\"Come with me\u2014upstairs.\"\n\nI dreaded to brave those musty corridors again, but fascination downed all my qualms. The boards creaked beneath our feet, and I trembled once when I thought I saw a faint, rope-like line traced in the dust near the staircase.\n\nThe steps of the attic were noisy and rickety, with several of the treads missing. I was just glad of the need of looking sharply to my footing, for it gave me an excuse not to glance about. The attic corridor was pitch-black and heavily cobwebbed, and inch-deep with dust except where a beaten trail led to a door on the left at the farther end. As I noticed the rotting remains of a thick carpet I thought of the other feet which had pressed it in bygone decades\u2014of these, and of one thing which did not have feet.\n\nThe old man took me straight to the door at the end of the beaten path, and fumbled a second with the rusty latch. I was acutely frightened now that I knew the picture was so close, yet dared not retreat at this stage. In another moment my host was ushering me into the deserted studio.\n\nThe candle light was very faint, yet served to shew most of the principal features. I noticed the low, slanting roof, the huge enlarged dormer, the curios and trophies hung on the walls\u2014and most of all, the great shrouded easel in the centre of the floor. To that easel de Russy now walked, drawing aside the dusty velvet hangings on the side turned away from me, and motioning me silently to approach. It took a good deal of courage to make me obey, especially when I saw how my guide's eyes dilated in the wavering candle light as he looked at the unveiled canvas. But again curiosity conquered everything, and I walked around to where de Russy stood. Then I saw the damnable thing.\n\nI did not faint\u2014though no reader can possibly realise the effort it took to keep me from doing so. I did cry out, but stopped short when I saw the frightened look on the old man's face. As I had expected, the canvas was warped, mouldy, and scabrous from dampness and neglect; but for all that I could trace the monstrous hints of evil cosmic outsideness that lurked all through the nameless scene's morbid content and perverted geometry.\n\nIt was as the old man had said\u2014a vaulted, columned hell of mingled Black Masses and Witches' Sabbaths\u2014and what perfect completion could have added to it was beyond my power to guess. Decay had only increased the utter hideousness of its wicked symbolism and diseased suggestion, for the parts most affected by time were just those parts of the picture which in Nature\u2014or in that extra-cosmic realm that mocked Nature\u2014would be apt to decay or disintegrate.\n\nThe utmost horror of all, of course, was Marceline\u2014and as I saw the bloated, discoloured flesh I formed the odd fancy that perhaps the figure on the canvas had some obscure, occult linkage with the figure which lay in quicklime under the cellar floor. Perhaps the lime had preserved the corpse instead of destroying it\u2014but could it have preserved those black, malign eyes that glared and mocked at me from their painted hell?\n\nAnd there was something else about the creature which I could not fail to notice\u2014something which de Russy had not been able to put into words, but which perhaps had something to do with Denis' wish to kill all those of his blood who had dwelt under the same roof with her. Whether Marsh knew, or whether the genius in him painted it without his knowing, none could say. But Denis and his father could not have known till they saw the picture.\n\nSurpassing all in horror was the streaming black hair\u2014which covered the rotting body, but which was itself not even slightly decayed. All I had heard of it was amply verified. It was nothing human, this ropy, sinuous, half-oily, half-crinkly flood of serpent darkness. Vile, independent life proclaimed itself at every unnatural twist and convolution, and the suggestion of numberless reptilian heads at the out-turned ends was far too marked to be illusory or accidental.\n\nThe blasphemous thing held me like a magnet. I was helpless, and did not wonder at the myth of the gorgon's glance which turned all beholders to stone. Then I thought I saw a change come over the thing. The leering features perceptibly moved, so that the rotting jaw fell, allowing the thick, beast-like lips to disclose a row of pointed yellow fangs. The pupils of the fiendish eyes dilated, and the eyes themselves seemed to bulge outward. And the hair\u2014that accursed hair! It had begun to rustle and wave perceptibly, the snake-heads all turning toward de Russy and vibrating as if to strike!\n\nReason deserted me altogether, and before I knew what I was doing I drew my automatic and sent a shower of twelve steel-jacketed bullets through the shocking canvas. The whole thing at once fell to pieces, even the frame toppling from the easel and clattering to the dust-covered floor. But though this horror was shattered, another had risen before me in the form of de Russy himself, whose maddened shrieks as he saw the picture vanish were almost as terrible as the picture itself had been.\n\nWith a half-articulate scream of \"God, now you've done it!\" the frantic old man seized me violently by the arm and commenced to drag me out of the room and down the rickety stairs. He had dropped the candle in his panic; but dawn was near, and some faint grey light was filtering in through the dust-covered windows. I tripped and stumbled repeatedly, but never for a moment would my guide slacken his pace.\n\n\"Run!\" he shrieked, \"run for your life! You don't know what you've done! I never told you the whole thing! There were things I had to do\u2014the picture talked to me and told me. I had to guard and keep it\u2014now the worst will happen! She and that hair will come up out of their graves, for God knows what purpose!\n\n\"Hurry, man! For God's sake let's get out of here while there's time. If you have a car take me along to Cape Girardeau with you. It may get me in the end, anywhere, but I'll give it a run for its money. Out of here\u2014quick!\"\n\nAs we reached the ground floor I became aware of a slow, curious thumping from the rear of the house, followed by a sound of a door shutting. De Russy had not heard the thumping, but the other noise caught his ear and drew from him the most terrible shriek that ever sounded in human throat.\n\n\"Oh, God\u2014great God\u2014that was the cellar door\u2014she's coming\u2014\"\n\nBy this time I was desperately wrestling with the rusty latch and sagging hinges of the great front door\u2014almost as frantic as my host now that I heard the slow, thumping tread approaching from the unknown rear rooms of the accursed mansion. The night's rain had warped the oaken planks, and the heavy door stuck and resisted even more strongly than it had when I forced an entrance the evening before.\n\nSomewhere a plank creaked beneath the foot of whatever was walking, and the sound seemed to snap the last cord of sanity in the poor old man. With a roar like that of a maddened bull he released his grip on me and made a plunge to the right, through the open door of a room which I judged had been a parlour. A second later, just as I got the front door open and was making my own escape, I heard the tinkling clatter of broken glass and knew he had leapt through a window. And as I bounded off the sagging porch to commence my mad race down the long, weed-grown drive I thought I could catch the thud of dead, dogged footfalls which did not follow me, but which kept leadenly on through the door of the cobwebbed parlour.\n\nI looked backward only twice as I plunged heedlessly through the burrs and briers of that abandoned drive, past the dying lindens and grotesque scrub-oaks, in the grey pallor of a cloudy November dawn. The first time was when an acrid smell overtook me, and I thought of the candle de Russy had dropped in the attic studio. By then I was comfortably near the road, on the high place from which the roof of the distant house was clearly visible above its encircling trees; and just as I expected, thick clouds of smoke were billowing out of the attic dormers and curling upward into the leaden heavens. I thanked the powers of creation that an immemorial curse was about to be purged by fire and blotted from the earth.\n\nBut in the next instant came that second backward look in which I glimpsed two other things\u2014things that cancelled most of the relief and gave me a supreme shock from which I shall never recover. I have said that I was on a high part of the drive, from which much of the plantation behind me was visible. This vista included not only the house and its trees but some of the abandoned and partly flooded flat land beside the river, and several bends of the weed-choked drive I had been so hastily traversing. In both of these latter places I now beheld sights\u2014or suspicions of sights\u2014which I wish devoutly I could deny.\n\nIt was a faint, distant scream which made me turn back again, and as I did so I caught a trace of motion on the dull grey marshy plain behind the house. At that distance human figures are very small, yet I thought the motion resolved itself into two of these\u2014pursuer and pursued. I even thought I saw the dark-clothed leading figure overtaken and seized by the bald, naked figure in the rear\u2014overtaken, seized, and dragged violently in the direction of the now burning house.\n\nBut I could not watch the outcome, for at once a nearer sight obtruded itself\u2014a suggestion of motion among the underbrush at a point some distance back along the deserted drive. Unmistakably, the weeds and bushes and briers were swaying as no wind could sway them; swaying as if some large, swift serpent were wriggling purposefully along on the ground in pursuit of me.\n\nThat was all I could stand. I scrambled along madly for the gate, heedless of torn clothing and bleeding scratches, and jumped into the roadster parked under the great evergreen tree. It was a bedraggled, rain-drenched sight; but the works were unharmed and I had no trouble in starting the thing. I went on blindly in the direction the car was headed for; nothing was in my mind but to get away from that frightful region of nightmares and cacodaemons\u2014to get away as quickly and as far as gasoline could take me.\n\nAbout three or four miles along the road a farmer hailed me\u2014a kindly, drawling fellow of middle age and considerable native intelligence. I was glad to slow down and ask directions, though I knew I must present a strange enough aspect. The man readily told me the way to Cape Girardeau, and inquired where I had come from in such a state at such an early hour. Thinking it best to say little, I merely mentioned that I had been caught in the night's rain and had taken shelter at a nearby farmhouse, afterward losing my way in the underbrush trying to find my car.\n\n\"At a farmhouse, eh? Wonder whose it could a ben. Ain't nothin' standin' this side o' Jim Ferris' place acrost Barker's Crick, an' that's all o' twenty miles by the rud.\"\n\nI gave a start, and wondered what fresh mystery this portended. Then I asked my informant if he had overlooked the large ruined plantation house whose ancient gate bordered the road not far back.\n\n\"Funny ye sh'd recolleck that, stranger! Must a ben here afore some time. But that house ain't there now. Burnt down five or six years ago\u2014and they did tell some queer stories about it.\"\n\nI shuddered.\n\n\"You mean Riverside\u2014ol' man de Russy's place. Queer goin's on there fifteen or twenty years ago. Ol' man's boy married a gal from abroad, and some folks thought she was a mighty odd sort. Didn't like the looks of her. Then she and the boy went off sudden, and later on the ol' man said he was kilt in the war. But some o' the niggers hinted queer things. Got around at last that the ol' fellow fell in love with the gal himself and kilt her and the boy. That place was sure enough haunted by a black snake, mean that what it may.\n\n\"Then five or six years ago the ol' man disappeared and the house burned down. Some do say he was burnt up in it. It was a mornin' after a rainy night just like this, when lots o' folks heard an awful yellin' acrost the fields in old de Russy's voice. When they stopped and looked, they see the house goin' up in smoke quick as a wink\u2014that place was all like tinder anyhow, rain or no rain. Nobody never seen the ol' man agin, but onct in a while they tell of the ghost of that big black snake glidin' aroun'.\n\n\"What d'ye make of it, anyhow? You seem to hev knowed the place. Didn't ye ever hear tell of the de Russys? What d'ye reckon was the trouble with that gal young Denis married? She kinder made everybody shiver and feel hateful, though ye couldn't never tell why.\"\n\nI was trying to think, but that process was almost beyond me now. The house burned down years ago? Then where, and under what conditions, had I passed the night? And why did I know what I knew of these things? Even as I pondered I saw a hair on my coat sleeve\u2014the short, grey hair of an old man.\n\nIn the end I drove on without telling anything. But I did hint that gossip was wronging the poor old planter who had suffered so much. I made it clear\u2014as if from distant but authentic reports wafted among friends\u2014that if anyone was to blame for the trouble at Riverside it was the woman, Marceline. She was not suited to Missouri ways, I said, and it was too bad that Denis had ever married her.\n\nMore I did not intimate, for I felt that the de Russys, with their proudly cherished honour and high, sensitive spirits, would not wish me to say more. They had borne enough, God knows, without the countryside guessing what a daemon of the pit\u2014what a gorgon of the elder blasphemies\u2014had come to flaunt their ancient and stainless name.\n\nNor was it right that the neighbours should know that other horror which my strange host of the night could not bring himself to tell me\u2014that horror which he must have learned, as I learned it, from details in the lost masterpiece of poor Frank Marsh.\n\nIt would be too hideous if they knew that the one-time heiress of Riverside\u2014the accursed gorgon or lamia whose hateful crinkly coil of serpent-hair must even now be brooding and twining vampirically around an artist's skeleton in a lime-packed grave beneath a charred foundation\u2014was faintly, subtly, yet to the eyes of genius unmistakably the scion of Zimbabwe's most primal grovellers. No wonder she owned a link with that old witch-woman Sophonisba\u2014for, though in deceitfully slight proportion, Marceline was a negress.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Memory by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within the depths of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meet to be beheld. Rank is the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants crawl amidst the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths, and heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten hands. And in trees that grow gigantic in crumbling courtyards leap little apes, while in and out of deep treasure-vaults writhe poison serpents and scaly things without a name.\n\nVast are the stones which sleep beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the grey toad makes his habitation.\n\nAt the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled with weeds. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that the Daemon of the Valley knows not why its waters are red, nor whither they are bound.\n\nThe Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, \"I am old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of stone.\" And the Daemon replied, \"I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.\"\n\nSo the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Moon-Bog by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nSomewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has gone. I was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard his screams when the thing came to him; but all the peasants and police in County Meath could never find him, or the others, though they searched long and far. And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places.\n\nI had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and had congratulated him when he bought back the old castle by the bog at sleepy Kilderry. It was from Kilderry that his father had come, and it was there that he wished to enjoy his wealth among ancestral scenes. Men of his blood had once ruled over Kilderry and built and dwelt in the castle, but those days were very remote, so that for generations the castle had been empty and decaying. After he went to Ireland Barry wrote me often, and told me how under his care the grey castle was rising tower by tower to its ancient splendour; how the ivy was climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so many centuries ago, and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the old days with his gold from over the sea. But in time there came troubles, and the peasants ceased to bless him, and fled away instead as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and asked me to visit him, for he was lonely in the castle with no one to speak to save the new servants and labourers he had brought from the north.\n\nThe bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night I came to the castle. I had reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as the gold of the sky lighted the green of the hills and groves and the blue of the bog, where on a far islet a strange olden ruin glistened spectrally. That sunset was very beautiful, but the peasants at Ballylough had warned me against it and said that Kilderry had become accursed, so that I almost shuddered to see the high turrets of the castle gilded with fire. Barry's motor had met me at the Ballylough station, for Kilderry is off the railway. The villagers had shunned the car and the driver from the north, but had whispered to me with pale faces when they saw I was going to Kilderry. And that night, after our reunion, Barry told me why.\n\nThe peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain the great bog. For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up. The legends and superstitions of Kilderry did not move him, and he laughed when the peasants first refused to help, and then cursed him and went away to Ballylough with their few belongings as they saw his determination. In their place he sent for labourers from the north, and when the servants left he replaced them likewise. But it was lonely among strangers, so Barry had asked me to come.\n\nWhen I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry I laughed as loudly as my friend had laughed, for these fears were of the vaguest, wildest, and most absurd character. They had to do with some preposterous legend of the bog, and of a grim guardian spirit that dwelt in the strange olden ruin on the far islet I had seen in the sunset. There were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and of chill winds when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters, and of an imagined city of stone deep down below the swampy surface. But foremost among the weird fancies, and alone in its absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare to touch or drain the vast reddish morass. There were secrets, said the peasants, which must not be uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden since the plague came to the children of Partholan in the fabulous years beyond history. In the Book of Invaders it is told that these sons of the Greeks were all buried at Tallaght, but old men in Kilderry said that one city was overlooked save by its patron moon-goddess; so that only the wooded hills buried it when the men of Nemed swept down from Scythia in their thirty ships.\n\nSuch were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry, and when I heard them I did not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to listen. He had, however, a great interest in antiquities; and proposed to explore the bog thoroughly when it was drained. The white ruins on the islet he had often visited, but though their age was plainly great, and their contour very little like that of most ruins in Ireland, they were too dilapidated to tell the days of their glory. Now the work of drainage was ready to begin, and the labourers from the north were soon to strip the forbidden bog of its green moss and red heather, and kill the tiny shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed with rushes.\n\nAfter Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels of the day had been wearying and my host had talked late into the night. A manservant shewed me to my room, which was in a remote tower overlooking the village, and the plain at the edge of the bog, and the bog itself; so that I could see from my windows in the moonlight the silent roofs from which the peasants had fled and which now sheltered the labourers from the north, and too, the parish church with its antique spire, and far out across the brooding bog the remote olden ruin on the islet gleaming white and spectral. Just as I dropped to sleep I fancied I heard faint sounds from the distance; sounds that were wild and half musical, and stirred me with a weird excitement which coloured my dreams. But when I awaked next morning I felt it had all been a dream, for the visions I had seen were more wonderful than any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced by the legends that Barry had related, my mind had in slumber hovered around a stately city in a green valley, where marble streets and statues, villas and temples, carvings and inscriptions, all spoke in certain tones the glory that was Greece. When I told this dream to Barry we both laughed; but I laughed the louder, because he was perplexed about his labourers from the north. For the sixth time they had all overslept, waking very slowly and dazedly, and acting as if they had not rested, although they were known to have gone early to bed the night before.\n\nThat morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded village and talked now and then with idle labourers, for Barry was busy with the final plans for beginning his work of drainage. The labourers were not as happy as they might have been, for most of them seemed uneasy over some dream which they had had, yet which they tried in vain to remember. I told them of my dream, but they were not interested till I spoke of the weird sounds I thought I had heard. Then they looked oddly at me, and said that they seemed to remember weird sounds, too.\n\nIn the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin the drainage in two days. I was glad, for although I disliked to see the moss and the heather and the little streams and lakes depart, I had a growing wish to discern the ancient secrets the deep-matted peat might hide. And that night my dreams of piping flutes and marble peristyles came to a sudden and disquieting end; for upon the city in the valley I saw a pestilence descend, and then a frightful avalanche of wooded slopes that covered the dead bodies in the streets and left unburied only the temple of Artemis on the high peak, where the aged moon-priestess Cleis lay cold and silent with a crown of ivory on her silver head.\n\nI have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could not tell whether I was waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes still rang shrilly in my ears; but when I saw on the floor the icy moonbeams and the outlines of a latticed Gothic window I decided I must be awake and in the castle at Kilderry. Then I heard a clock from some remote landing below strike the hour of two, and I knew I was awake. Yet still there came that monotonous piping from afar; wild, weird airs that made me think of some dance of fauns on distant Maenalus. It would not let me sleep, and in impatience I sprang up and paced the floor. Only by chance did I go to the north window and look out upon the silent village and the plain at the edge of the bog. I had no wish to gaze abroad, for I wanted to sleep; but the flutes tormented me, and I had to do or see something. How could I have suspected the thing I was to behold?\n\nThere in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle which no mortal, having seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of reedy pipes that echoed over the bog there glided silently and eerily a mixed throng of swaying figures, reeling through such a revel as the Sicilians may have danced to Demeter in the old days under the harvest moon beside the Cyane. The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms, and above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced an effect which almost paralysed me; yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these tireless, mechanical dancers were the labourers whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy beings in white, half indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of the bog. I do not know how long I gazed at this sight from the lonely turret window before I dropped suddenly in a dreamless swoon, out of which the high sun of morning aroused me.\n\nMy first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and observations to Denys Barry, but as I saw the sunlight glowing through the latticed east window I became sure that there was no reality in what I thought I had seen. I am given to strange phantasms, yet am never weak enough to believe in them; so on this occasion contented myself with questioning the labourers, who slept very late and recalled nothing of the previous night save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This matter of the spectral piping harassed me greatly, and I wondered if the crickets of autumn had come before their time to vex the night and haunt the visions of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in the library poring over his plans for the great work which was to begin on the morrow, and for the first time felt a touch of the same kind of fear that had driven the peasants away. For some unknown reason I dreaded the thought of disturbing the ancient bog and its sunless secrets, and pictured terrible sights lying black under the unmeasured depth of age-old peat. That these secrets should be brought to light seemed injudicious, and I began to wish for an excuse to leave the castle and the village. I went so far as to talk casually to Barry on the subject, but did not dare continue after he gave his resounding laugh. So I was silent when the sun set fulgently over the far hills, and Kilderry blazed all red and gold in a flame that seemed a portent.\n\nWhether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall never ascertain. Certainly they transcend anything we dream of in Nature and the universe; yet in no normal fashion can I explain those disappearances which were known to all men after it was over. I retired early and full of dread, and for a long time could not sleep in the uncanny silence of the tower. It was very dark, for although the sky was clear the moon was now well in the wane, and would not rise till the small hours. I thought as I lay there of Denys Barry, and of what would befall that bog when the day came, and found myself almost frantic with an impulse to rush out into the night, take Barry's car, and drive madly to Ballylough out of the menaced lands. But before my fears could crystallise into action I had fallen asleep, and gazed in dreams upon the city in the valley, cold and dead under a shroud of hideous shadow.\n\nProbably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was not what I noticed first when I opened my eyes. I was lying with my back to the east window overlooking the bog, where the waning moon would rise, and therefore expected to see light cast on the opposite wall before me; but I had not looked for such a sight as now appeared. Light indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not any light that the moon gives. Terrible and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence that streamed through the Gothic window, and the whole chamber was brilliant with a splendour intense and unearthly. My immediate actions were peculiar for such a situation, but it is only in tales that a man does the dramatic and foreseen thing. Instead of looking out across the bog toward the source of the new light, I kept my eyes from the window in panic fear, and clumsily drew on my clothing with some dazed idea of escape. I remember seizing my revolver and hat, but before it was over I had lost them both without firing the one or donning the other. After a time the fascination of the red radiance overcame my fright, and I crept to the east window and looked out whilst the maddening, incessant piping whined and reverberated through the castle and over all the village.\n\nOver the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring from the strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I cannot describe\u2014I must have been mad, for it seemed to rise majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured, the flame-reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex of a temple on a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked and drums began to beat, and as I watched in awe and terror I thought I saw dark saltant forms silhouetted grotesquely against the vision of marble and effulgence. The effect was titanic\u2014altogether unthinkable\u2014and I might have stared indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow stronger at my left. Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy I crossed the circular room to the north window from which I could see the village and the plain at the edge of the bog. There my eyes dilated again with a wild wonder as great as if I had not just turned from a scene beyond the pale of Nature, for on the ghastly red-litten plain was moving a procession of beings in such a manner as none ever saw before save in nightmares.\n\nHalf gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly retreating toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations suggesting some ancient and solemn ceremonial dance. Their waving translucent arms, guided by the detestable piping of those unseen flutes, beckoned in uncanny rhythm to a throng of lurching labourers who followed dog-like with blind, brainless, floundering steps as if dragged by a clumsy but resistless daemon-will. As the naiads neared the bog, without altering their course, a new line of stumbling stragglers zigzagged drunkenly out of the castle from some door far below my window, groped sightlessly across the courtyard and through the intervening bit of village, and joined the floundering column of labourers on the plain. Despite their distance below me I at once knew they were the servants brought from the north, for I recognised the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The flutes piped horribly, and again I heard the beating of the drums from the direction of the island ruin. Then silently and gracefully the naiads reached the water and melted one by one into the ancient bog; while the line of followers, never checking their speed, splashed awkwardly after them and vanished amidst a tiny vortex of unwholesome bubbles which I could barely see in the scarlet light. And as the last pathetic straggler, the fat cook, sank heavily out of sight in that sullen pool, the flutes and the drums grew silent, and the blinding red rays from the ruins snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village of doom lone and desolate in the wan beams of a new-risen moon.\n\nMy condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I was mad or sane, sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful numbness. I believe I did ridiculous things such as offering prayers to Artemis, Latona, Demeter, Persephone, and Plouton. All that I recalled of a classic youth came to my lips as the horrors of the situation roused my deepest superstitions. I felt that I had witnessed the death of a whole village, and knew I was alone in the castle with Denys Barry, whose boldness had brought down a doom. As I thought of him new terrors convulsed me, and I fell to the floor; not fainting, but physically helpless. Then I felt the icy blast from the east window where the moon had risen, and began to hear the shrieks in the castle far below me. Soon those shrieks had attained a magnitude and quality which cannot be written of, and which make me faint as I think of them. All I can say is that they came from something I had known as a friend.\n\nAt some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the screaming must have roused me, for my next impression is of racing madly through inky rooms and corridors and out across the courtyard into the hideous night. They found me at dawn wandering mindless near Ballylough, but what unhinged me utterly was not any of the horrors I had seen or heard before. What I muttered about as I came slowly out of the shadows was a pair of fantastic incidents which occurred in my flight; incidents of no significance, yet which haunt me unceasingly when I am alone in certain marshy places or in the moonlight.\n\nAs I fled from that accursed castle along the bog's edge I heard a new sound; common, yet unlike any I had heard before at Kilderry. The stagnant waters, lately quite devoid of animal life, now teemed with a horde of slimy enormous frogs which piped shrilly and incessantly in tones strangely out of keeping with their size. They glistened bloated and green in the moonbeams, and seemed to gaze up at the fount of light. I followed the gaze of one very fat and ugly frog, and saw the second of the things which drove my senses away.\n\nStretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the waning moon, my eyes seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance having no reflection in the waters of the bog. And upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen daemons. Crazed as I was, I saw in that awful shadow a monstrous resemblance\u2014a nauseous, unbelievable caricature\u2014a blasphemous effigy of him who had been Denys Barry.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Mound by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIt is only within the last few years that most people have stopped thinking of the West as a new land. I suppose the idea gained ground because our own especial civilisation happens to be new there; but nowadays explorers are digging beneath the surface and bringing up whole chapters of life that rose and fell among these plains and mountains before recorded history began. We think nothing of a Pueblo village 2500 years old, and it hardly jolts us when archaeologists put the sub-pedregal culture of Mexico back to 17,000 or 18,000 B. C. We hear rumours of still older things, too\u2014of primitive man contemporaneous with extinct animals and known today only through a few fragmentary bones and artifacts\u2014so that the idea of newness is fading out pretty rapidly. Europeans usually catch the sense of immemorial ancientness and deep deposits from successive life-streams better than we do. Only a couple of years ago a British author spoke of Arizona as a \"moon-dim region, very lovely in its way, and stark and old\u2014an ancient, lonely land\".\n\nYet I believe I have a deeper sense of the stupefying\u2014almost horrible\u2014ancientness of the West than any European. It all comes from an incident that happened in 1928; an incident which I'd greatly like to dismiss as three-quarters hallucination, but which has left such a frightfully firm impression on my memory that I can't put it off very easily. It was in Oklahoma, where my work as an American Indian ethnologist constantly takes me and where I had come upon some devilishly strange and disconcerting matters before. Make no mistake\u2014Oklahoma is a lot more than a mere pioneers' and promoters' frontier. There are old, old tribes with old, old memories there; and when the tom-toms beat ceaselessly over brooding plains in the autumn the spirits of men are brought dangerously close to primal, whispered things. I am white and Eastern enough myself, but anybody is welcome to know that the rites of Yig, Father of Snakes, can get a real shudder out of me any day. I have heard and seen too much to be \"sophisticated\" in such matters. And so it is with this incident of 1928. I'd like to laugh it off\u2014but I can't.\n\nI had gone into Oklahoma to track down and correlate one of the many ghost tales which were current among the white settlers, but which had strong Indian corroboration, and\u2014I felt sure\u2014an ultimate Indian source. They were very curious, these open-air ghost tales; and though they sounded flat and prosaic in the mouths of the white people, they had earmarks of linkage with some of the richest and obscurest phases of native mythology. All of them were woven around the vast, lonely, artificial-looking mounds in the western part of the state, and all of them involved apparitions of exceedingly strange aspect and equipment.\n\nThe commonest, and among the oldest, became quite famous in 1892, when a government marshal named John Willis went into the mound region after horse-thieves and came out with a wild yarn of nocturnal cavalry horses in the air between great armies of invisible spectres\u2014battles that involved the rush of hooves and feet, the thud of blows, the clank of metal on metal, the muffled cries of warriors, and the fall of human and equine bodies. These things happened by moonlight, and frightened his horse as well as himself. The sounds persisted an hour at a time; vivid, but subdued as if brought from a distance by a wind, and unaccompanied by any glimpse of the armies themselves. Later on Willis learned that the seat of the sounds was a notoriously haunted spot, shunned by settlers and Indians alike. Many had seen, or half seen, the warring horsemen in the sky, and had furnished dim, ambiguous descriptions. The settlers described the ghostly fighters as Indians, though of no familiar tribe, and having the most singular costumes and weapons. They even went so far as to say that they could not be sure the horses were really horses.\n\nThe Indians, on the other hand, did not seem to claim the spectres as kinsfolk. They referred to them as \"those people\", \"the old people\", or \"they who dwell below\", and appeared to hold them in too great a frightened veneration to talk much about them. No ethnologist had been able to pin any tale-teller down to a specific description of the beings, and apparently nobody had ever had a very clear look at them. The Indians had one or two old proverbs about these phenomena, saying that \"men very old, make very big spirit; not so old, not so big; older than all time, then spirit he so big he near flesh; those old people and spirits they mix up\u2014get all the same\".\n\nNow all of this, of course, is \"old stuff\" to an ethnologist\u2014of a piece with the persistent legends of rich hidden cities and buried races which abound among the Pueblo and plains Indians, and which lured Coronado centuries ago on his vain search for the fabled Quivira. What took me into western Oklahoma was something far more definite and tangible\u2014a local and distinctive tale which, though really old, was wholly new to the outside world of research, and which involved the first clear descriptions of the ghosts which it treated of. There was an added thrill in the fact that it came from the remote town of Binger, in Caddo County, a place I had long known as the scene of a very terrible and partly inexplicable occurrence connected with the snake-god myth.\n\nThe tale, outwardly, was an extremely naive and simple one, and centred in a huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a mile west of the village\u2014a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but which others believed to be a burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagers said, was constantly haunted by two Indian figures which appeared in alternation; an old man who paced back and forth along the top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and with only brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night with a blue-flamed torch that glimmered quite continuously till morning. When the moon was bright the squaw's peculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly, and over half the villagers agreed that the apparition was headless.\n\nLocal opinion was divided as to the motives and relative ghostliness of the two visions. Some held that the man was not a ghost at all, but a living Indian who had killed and beheaded a squaw for gold and buried her somewhere on the mound. According to these theorists he was pacing the eminence through sheer remorse, bound by the spirit of his victim which took visible shape after dark. But other theorists, more uniform in their spectral beliefs, held that both man and woman were ghosts; the man having killed the squaw and himself as well at some very distant period. These and minor variant versions seemed to have been current ever since the settlement of the Wichita country in 1889, and were, I was told, sustained to an astonishing degree by still-existing phenomena which anyone might observe for himself. Not many ghost tales offer such free and open proof, and I was very eager to see what bizarre wonders might be lurking in this small, obscure village so far from the beaten path of crowds and from the ruthless searchlight of scientific knowledge. So, in the late summer of 1928 I took a train for Binger and brooded on strange mysteries as the cars rattled timidly along their single track through a lonelier and lonelier landscape.\n\nBinger is a modest cluster of frame houses and stores in the midst of a flat windy region full of clouds of red dust. There are about 500 inhabitants besides the Indians on a neighbouring reservation; the principal occupation seeming to be agriculture. The soil is decently fertile, and the oil boom has not reached this part of the state. My train drew in at twilight, and I felt rather lost and uneasy\u2014cut off from wholesome and every-day things\u2014as it puffed away to the southward without me. The station platform was filled with curious loafers, all of whom seemed eager to direct me when I asked for the man to whom I had letters of introduction. I was ushered along a commonplace main street whose rutted surface was red with the sandstone soil of the country, and finally delivered at the door of my prospective host. Those who had arranged things for me had done well; for Mr. Compton was a man of high intelligence and local responsibility, while his mother\u2014who lived with him and was familiarly known as \"Grandma Compton\"\u2014was one of the first pioneer generation, and a veritable mine of anecdote and folklore.\n\nThat evening the Comptons summed up for me all the legends current among the villagers, proving that the phenomenon I had come to study was indeed a baffling and important one. The ghosts, it seems, were accepted almost as a matter of course by everyone in Binger. Two generations had been born and grown up within sight of that queer, lone tumulus and its restless figures. The neighbourhood of the mound was naturally feared and shunned, so that the village and the farms had not spread toward it in all four decades of settlement; yet venturesome individuals had several times visited it. Some had come back to report that they saw no ghosts at all when they neared the dreaded hill; that somehow the lone sentinel had stepped out of sight before they reached the spot, leaving them free to climb the steep slope and explore the flat summit. There was nothing up there, they said\u2014merely a rough expanse of underbrush. Where the Indian watcher could have vanished to, they had no idea. He must, they reflected, have descended the slope and somehow managed to escape unseen along the plain; although there was no convenient cover within sight. At any rate, there did not appear to be any opening into the mound; a conclusion which was reached after considerable exploration of the shrubbery and tall grass on all sides. In a few cases some of the more sensitive searchers declared that they felt a sort of invisible restraining presence; but they could describe nothing more definite than that. It was simply as if the air thickened against them in the direction they wished to move. It is needless to mention that all these daring surveys were conducted by day. Nothing in the universe could have induced any human being, white or red, to approach that sinister elevation after dark; and indeed, no Indian would have thought of going near it even in the brightest sunlight.\n\nBut it was not from the tales of these sane, observant seekers that the chief terror of the ghost-mound sprang; indeed, had their experience been typical, the phenomenon would have bulked far less prominently in the local legendry. The most evil thing was the fact that many other seekers had come back strangely impaired in mind and body, or had not come back at all. The first of these cases had occurred in 1891, when a young man named Heaton had gone with a shovel to see what hidden secrets he could unearth. He had heard curious tales from the Indians, and had laughed at the barren report of another youth who had been out to the mound and had found nothing. Heaton had watched the mound with a spy glass from the village while the other youth made his trip; and as the explorer neared the spot, he saw the sentinel Indian walk deliberately down into the tumulus as if a trap-door and staircase existed on the top. The other youth had not noticed how the Indian disappeared, but had merely found him gone upon arriving at the mound.\n\nWhen Heaton made his own trip he resolved to get to the bottom of the mystery, and watchers from the village saw him hacking diligently at the shrubbery atop the mound. Then they saw his figure melt slowly into invisibility; not to reappear for long hours, till after the dusk drew on, and the torch of the headless squaw glimmered ghoulishly on the distant elevation. About two hours after nightfall he staggered into the village minus his spade and other belongings, and burst into a shrieking monologue of disconnected ravings. He howled of shocking abysses and monsters, of terrible carvings and statues, of inhuman captors and grotesque tortures, and of other fantastic abnormalities too complex and chimerical even to remember. \"Old! Old! Old!\" he would moan over and over again, \"great God, they are older than the earth, and came here from somewhere else\u2014they know what you think, and make you know what they think\u2014they're half-man, half-ghost\u2014crossed the line\u2014melt and take shape again\u2014getting more and more so, yet we're all descended from them in the beginning\u2014children of Tulu\u2014everything made of gold\u2014monstrous animals, half-human\u2014dead slaves\u2014madness\u2014I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath!\u2014that white man\u2014oh, my God, what they did to him!...\"\n\nHeaton was the village idiot for about eight years, after which he died in an epileptic fit. Since his ordeal there had been two more cases of mound-madness, and eight of total disappearance. Immediately after Heaton's mad return, three desperate and determined men had gone out to the lone hill together; heavily armed, and with spades and pickaxes. Watching villagers saw the Indian ghost melt away as the explorers drew near, and afterward saw the men climb the mound and begin scouting around through the underbrush. All at once they faded into nothingness, and were never seen again. One watcher, with an especially powerful telescope, thought he saw other forms dimly materialise beside the hapless men and drag them down into the mound; but this account remained uncorroborated. It is needless to say that no searching-party went out after the lost ones, and that for many years the mound was wholly unvisited. Only when the incidents of 1891 were largely forgotten did anybody dare to think of further explorations. Then, about 1910, a fellow too young to recall the old horrors made a trip to the shunned spot and found nothing at all.\n\nBy 1915 the acute dread and wild legendry of '91 had largely faded into the commonplace and unimaginative ghost-tales at present surviving\u2014that is, had so faded among the white people. On the nearby reservation were old Indians who thought much and kept their own counsel. About this time a second wave of active curiosity and adventuring developed, and several bold searchers made the trip to the mound and returned. Then came a trip of two Eastern visitors with spades and other apparatus\u2014a pair of amateur archaeologists connected with a small college, who had been making studies among the Indians. No one watched this trip from the village, but they never came back. The searching-party that went out after them\u2014among whom was my host Clyde Compton\u2014found nothing whatsoever amiss at the mound.\n\nThe next trip was the solitary venture of old Capt. Lawton, a grizzled pioneer who had helped to open up the region in 1889, but who had never been there since. He had recalled the mound and its fascination all through the years; and being now in comfortable retirement, resolved to have a try at solving the ancient riddle. Long familiarity with Indian myth had given him ideas rather stranger than those of the simple villagers, and he had made preparations for some extensive delving. He ascended the mound on the morning of Thursday, May 11, 1916, watched through spy glasses by more than twenty people in the village and on the adjacent plain. His disappearance was very sudden, and occurred as he was hacking at the shrubbery with a brush-cutter. No one could say more than that he was there one moment and absent the next. For over a week no tidings of him reached Binger, and then\u2014in the middle of the night\u2014there dragged itself into the village the object about which dispute still rages.\n\nIt said it was\u2014or had been\u2014Capt. Lawton, but it was definitely younger by as much as forty years than the old man who had climbed the mound. Its hair was jet black, and its face\u2014now distorted with nameless fright\u2014free from wrinkles. But it did remind Grandma Compton most uncannily of the captain as he had looked back in '89. Its feet were cut off neatly at the ankles, and the stumps were smoothly healed to an extent almost incredible if the being really were the man who had walked upright a week before. It babbled of incomprehensible things, and kept repeating the name \"George Lawton, George E. Lawton\" as if trying to reassure itself of its own identity. The things it babbled of, Grandma Compton thought, were curiously like the hallucinations of poor young Heaton in '91; though there were minor differences. \"The blue light!\u2014the blue light!...\" muttered the object, \"always down there, before there were any living things\u2014older than the dinosaurs\u2014always the same, only weaker\u2014never death\u2014brooding and brooding and brooding\u2014the same people, half-man and half-gas\u2014the dead that walk and work\u2014oh, those beasts, those half-human unicorns\u2014houses and cities of gold\u2014old, old, old, older than time\u2014came down from the stars\u2014Great Tulu\u2014Azathoth\u2014Nyarlathotep\u2014waiting, waiting....\" The object died before dawn.\n\nOf course there was an investigation, and the Indians at the reservation were grilled unmercifully. But they knew nothing, and had nothing to say. At least, none of them had anything to say except old Grey Eagle, a Wichita chieftain whose more than a century of age put him above common fears. He alone deigned to grunt some advice.\n\n\"You let um 'lone, white man. No good\u2014those people. All under here, all under there, them old ones. Yig, big father of snakes, he there. Yig is Yig. Tir\u00e1wa, big father of men, he there. Tir\u00e1wa is Tir\u00e1wa. No die. No get old. Just same like air. Just live and wait. One time they come out here, live and fight. Build um dirt tepee. Bring up gold\u2014they got plenty. Go off and make new lodges. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. You let um 'lone, you have no bad medicine. Red man know, he no get catch. White man meddle, he no come back. Keep 'way little hills. No good. Grey Eagle say this.\"\n\nIf Joe Norton and Rance Wheelock had taken the old chief's advice, they would probably be here today; but they didn't. They were great readers and materialists, and feared nothing in heaven or earth; and they thought that some Indian fiends had a secret headquarters inside the mound. They had been to the mound before, and now they went again to avenge old Capt. Lawton\u2014boasting that they'd do it if they had to tear the mound down altogether. Clyde Compton watched them with a pair of prism binoculars and saw them round the base of the sinister hill. Evidently they meant to survey their territory very gradually and minutely. Minutes passed, and they did not reappear. Nor were they ever seen again.\n\nOnce more the mound was a thing of panic fright, and only the excitement of the Great War served to restore it to the farther background of Binger folklore. It was unvisited from 1916 to 1919, and would have remained so but for the daredeviltry of some of the youths back from service in France. From 1919 to 1920, however, there was a veritable epidemic of mound-visiting among the prematurely hardened young veterans\u2014an epidemic that waxed as one youth after another returned unhurt and contemptuous. By 1920\u2014so short is human memory\u2014the mound was almost a joke; and the tame story of the murdered squaw began to displace darker whispers on everybody's tongues. Then two reckless young brothers\u2014the especially unimaginative and hard-boiled Clay boys\u2014decided to go and dig up the buried squaw and the gold for which the old Indian had murdered her.\n\nThey went out on a September afternoon\u2014about the time the Indian tom-toms begin their incessant annual beating over the flat, red-dusty plains. Nobody watched them, and their parents did not become worried at their non-return for several hours. Then came an alarm and a searching-party, and another resignation to the mystery of silence and doubt.\n\nBut one of them came back after all. It was Ed, the elder, and his straw-coloured hair and beard had turned an albino white for two inches from the roots. On his forehead was a queer scar like a branded hieroglyph. Three months after he and his brother Walker had vanished he skulked into his house at night, wearing nothing but a queerly patterned blanket which he thrust into the fire as soon as he had got into a suit of his own clothes. He told his parents that he and Walker had been captured by some strange Indians\u2014not Wichitas or Caddos\u2014and held prisoners somewhere toward the west. Walker had died under torture, but he himself had managed to escape at a high cost. The experience had been particularly terrible, and he could not talk about it just then. He must rest\u2014and anyway, it would do no good to give an alarm and try to find and punish the Indians. They were not of a sort that could be caught or punished, and it was especially important for the good of Binger\u2014for the good of the world\u2014that they be not pursued into their secret lair. As a matter of fact, they were not altogether what one could call real Indians\u2014he would explain about that later. Meanwhile he must rest. Better not to rouse the village with the news of his return\u2014he would go upstairs and sleep. Before he climbed the rickety flight to his room he took a pad and pencil from the living-room table, and an automatic pistol from his father's desk drawer.\n\nThree hours later the shot rang out. Ed Clay had put a bullet neatly through his temples with a pistol clutched in his left hand, leaving a sparsely written sheet of paper on the rickety table near his bed. He had, it later appeared from the whittled pencil-stub and stove full of charred paper, originally written much more; but had finally decided not to tell what he knew beyond vague hints. The surviving fragment was only a mad warning scrawled in a curiously backhanded script\u2014the ravings of a mind obviously deranged by hardships\u2014and it read thus; rather surprisingly for the utterance of one who had always been stolid and matter-of-fact:\n\nFor gods sake never go nere that mound it is part of some kind of a world so devilish and old it cannot be spoke about me and Walker went and was took into the thing just melted at times and made up agen and the whole world outside is helpless alongside of what they can do\u2014they what live forever young as they like and you cant tell if they are really men or just gostes\u2014and what they do cant be spoke about and this is only 1 entrance\u2014you cant tell how big the whole thing is\u2014after what we seen I dont want to live aney more France was nothing besides this\u2014and see that people always keep away o god they wood if they see poor walker like he was in the end.\n\n[ Yrs truely ]\n\n[ Ed Clay ]\n\nAt the autopsy it was found that all of young Clay's organs were transposed from right to left within his body, as if he had been turned inside out. Whether they had always been so, no one could say at the time, but it was later learned from army records that Ed had been perfectly normal when mustered out of the service in May, 1919. Whether there was a mistake somewhere, or whether some unprecedented metamorphosis had indeed occurred, is still an unsettled question, as is also the origin of the hieroglyph-like scar on the forehead.\n\nThat was the end of the explorations of the mound. In the eight intervening years no one had been near the place, and few indeed had even cared to level a spy glass at it. From time to time people continued to glance nervously at the lone hill as it rose starkly from the plain against the western sky, and to shudder at the small dark speck that paraded by day and the glimmering will-o'-the-wisp that danced by night. The thing was accepted at face value as a mystery not to be probed, and by common consent the village shunned the subject. It was, after all, quite easy to avoid the hill; for space was unlimited in every direction, and community life always follows beaten trails. The mound side of the village was simply kept trailless, as if it had been water or swampland or desert. And it is a curious commentary on the stolidity and imaginative sterility of the human animal that the whispers with which children and strangers were warned away from the mound quickly sank once more into the flat tale of a murderous Indian ghost and his squaw victim. Only the tribesmen on the reservation, and thoughtful old-timers like Grandma Compton, remembered the overtones of unholy vistas and deep cosmic menace which clustered around the ravings of those who had come back changed and shattered.\n\nIt was very late, and Grandma Compton had long since gone upstairs to bed, when Clyde finished telling me this. I hardly knew what to think of the frightful puzzle, yet rebelled at any notion to conflict with sane materialism. What influence had brought madness, or the impulse of flight and wandering, to so many who had visited the mound? Though vastly impressed, I was spurred on rather than deterred. Surely I must get to the bottom of this matter, as well I might if I kept a cool head and an unbroken determination. Compton saw my mood and shook his head worriedly. Then he motioned me to follow him outdoors.\n\nWe stepped from the frame house to the quiet side street or lane, and walked a few paces in the light of a waning August moon to where the houses were thinner. The half-moon was still low, and had not blotted many stars from the sky; so that I could see not only the westering gleams of Altair and Vega, but the mystic shimmering of the Milky Way, as I looked out over the vast expanse of earth and sky in the direction that Compton pointed. Then all at once I saw a spark that was not a star\u2014a bluish spark that moved and glimmered against the Milky Way near the horizon, and that seemed in a vague way more evil and malevolent than anything in the vault above. In another moment it was clear that this spark came from the top of a long distant rise in the outspread and faintly litten plain; and I turned to Compton with a question.\n\n\"Yes,\" he answered, \"it's the blue ghost-light\u2014and that is the mound. There's not a night in history that we haven't seen it\u2014and not a living soul in Binger that would walk out over that plain toward it. It's a bad business, young man, and if you're wise you'll let it rest where it is. Better call your search off, son, and tackle some of the other Injun legends around here. We've plenty to keep you busy, heaven knows!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "But I was in no mood for advice; and though Compton gave me a pleasant room, I could not sleep a wink through eagerness for the next morning with its chances to see the daytime ghost and to question the Indians at the reservation. I meant to go about the whole thing slowly and thoroughly, equipping myself with all available data both white and red before I commenced any actual archaeological investigations. I rose and dressed at dawn, and when I heard others stirring I went downstairs. Compton was building the kitchen fire while his mother was busy in the pantry. When he saw me he nodded, and after a moment invited me out into the glamorous young sunlight. I knew where we were going, and as we walked along the lane I strained my eyes westward over the plains.\n\nThere was the mound\u2014far away and very curious in its aspect of artificial regularity. It must have been from thirty to forty feet high, and all of a hundred yards from north to south as I looked at it. It was not as wide as that from east to west, Compton said, but had the contour of a rather thinnish ellipse. He, I knew, had been safely out to it and back several times. As I looked at the rim silhouetted against the deep blue of the west I tried to follow its minor irregularities, and became impressed with a sense of something moving upon it. My pulse mounted a bit feverishly, and I seized quickly on the high-powered binoculars which Compton had quietly offered me. Focussing them hastily, I saw at first only a tangle of underbrush on the distant mound's rim\u2014and then something stalked into the field.\n\nIt was unmistakably a human shape, and I knew at once that I was seeing the daytime \"Indian ghost\" I did not wonder at the description, for surely the tall, lean, darkly robed being with the filleted black hair and seamed, coppery, expressionless, aquiline face looked more like an Indian than anything else in my previous experience. And yet my trained ethnologist's eye told me at once that this was no redskin of any sort hitherto known to history, but a creature of vast racial variation and of a wholly different culture-stream. Modern Indians are brachycephalic\u2014round-headed\u2014and you can't find any dolichocephalic or long-headed skulls except in ancient Pueblo deposits dating back 2500 years or more; yet this man's long-headedness was so pronounced that I recognised it at once, even at his vast distance and in the uncertain field of the binoculars. I saw, too, that the pattern of his robe represented a decorative tradition utterly remote from anything we recognise in southwestern native art. There were shining metal trappings, likewise, and a short sword or kindred weapon at his side, all wrought in a fashion wholly alien to anything I had ever heard of.\n\nAs he paced back and forth along the top of the mound I followed him for several minutes with the glass, noting the kinaesthetic quality of his stride and the poised way he carried his head; and there was borne in upon me the strong, persistent conviction that this man, whoever or whatever he might be, was certainly not a savage. He was the product of a civilisation, I felt instinctively, though of what civilisation I could not guess. At length he disappeared beyond the farther edge of the mound, as if descending the opposite and unseen slope; and I lowered the glass with a curious mixture of puzzled feelings. Compton was looking quizzically at me, and I nodded non-committally, \"What do you make of that?\" he ventured. \"This is what we've seen here in Binger every day of our lives.\"\n\nThat noon found me at the Indian reservation talking with old Grey Eagle\u2014who, through some miracle, was still alive; though he must have been close to a hundred and fifty years old. He was a strange, impressive figure\u2014this stern, fearless leader of his kind who had talked with outlaws and traders in fringed buckskin and French officials in knee-breeches and three-cornered hats\u2014and I was glad to see that, because of my air of deference toward him, he appeared to like me. His liking, however, took an unfortunately obstructive form as soon as he learned what I wanted; for all he would do was to warn me against the search I was about to make.\n\n\"You good boy\u2014you no bother that hill. Bad medicine. Plenty devil under there\u2014catchum when you dig. No dig, no hurt. Go and dig, no come back. Just same when me boy, just same when my father and he father boy. All time buck he walk in day, squaw with no head she walk in night. All time since white man with tin coats they come from sunset and below big river\u2014long way back\u2014three, four times more back than Grey Eagle\u2014two times more back than Frenchmen\u2014all same after then. More back than that, nobody go near little hills nor deep valleys with stone caves. Still more back, those old ones no hide, come out and make villages. Bring plenty gold. Me them. You them. Then big waters come. All change. Nobody come out, let nobody in. Get in, no get out. They no die\u2014no get old like Grey Eagle with valleys in face and snow on head. Just same like air\u2014some man, some spirit. Bad medicine. Sometimes at night spirit come out on half-man\u2013half-horse-with-horn and fight where men once fight. Keep 'way them place. No good. You good boy\u2014go 'way and let them old ones 'lone.\"\n\nThat was all I could get out of the ancient chief, and the rest of the Indians would say nothing at all. But if I was troubled, Grey Eagle was clearly more so; for he obviously felt a real regret at the thought of my invading the region he feared so abjectly. As I turned to leave the reservation he stopped me for a final ceremonial farewell, and once more tried to get my promise to abandon my search. When he saw that he could not, he produced something half-timidly from a buckskin pouch he wore, and extended it toward me very solemnly. It was a worn but finely minted metal disc about two inches in diameter, oddly figured and perforated, and suspended from a leathern cord.\n\n\"You no promise, then Grey Eagle no can tell what get you. But if anything help um, this good medicine. Come from my father\u2014he get from he father\u2014he get from he father\u2014all way back, close to Tir\u00e1wa, all men's father. My father say, 'You keep 'way from those old ones, keep 'way from little hills and valleys with stone caves. But if old ones they come out to get you, then you shew um this medicine. They know. They make him long way back. They look, then they no do such bad medicine maybe. But no can tell. You keep 'way, just same. Them no good. No tell what they do.'\"\n\nAs he spoke, Grey Eagle was hanging the thing around my neck, and I saw it was a very curious object indeed. The more I looked at it, the more I marvelled; for not only was its heavy, darkish, lustrous, and richly mottled substance an absolutely strange metal to me, but what was left of its design seemed to be of a marvellously artistic and utterly unknown workmanship. One side, so far as I could see, had borne an exquisitely modelled serpent design; whilst the other side had depicted a kind of octopus or other tentacled monster. There were some half-effaced hieroglyphs, too, of a kind which no archaeologist could identify or even place conjecturally. With Grey Eagle's permission I later had expert historians, anthropologists, geologists, and chemists pass carefully upon the disc, but from them I obtained only a chorus of bafflement. It defied either classification or analysis. The chemists called it an amalgam of unknown metallic elements of heavy atomic weight, and one geologist suggested that the substance must be of meteoric origin, shot from unknown gulfs of interstellar space. Whether it really saved my life or sanity or existence as a human being I cannot attempt to say, but Grey Eagle is sure of it. He has it again, now, and I wonder if it has any connexion with his inordinate age. All his fathers who had it lived far beyond the century mark, perishing only in battle. Is it possible that Grey Eagle, if kept from accidents, will never die? But I am ahead of my story.\n\nWhen I returned to the village I tried to secure more mound-lore, but found only excited gossip and opposition. It was really flattering to see how solicitous the people were about my safety, but I had to set their almost frantic remonstrances aside. I shewed them Grey Eagle's charm, but none of them had ever heard of it before, or seen anything even remotely like it. They agreed that it could not be an Indian relic, and imagined that the old chief's ancestors must have obtained it from some trader.\n\nWhen they saw they could not deter me from my trip, the Binger citizens sadly did what they could to aid my outfitting. Having known before my arrival the sort of work to be done, I had most of my supplies already with me\u2014machete and trench-knife for shrub-clearing and excavating, electric torches for any underground phase which might develop, rope, field-glasses, tape-measure, microscope, and incidentals for emergencies\u2014as much, in fact, as might be comfortably stowed in a convenient handbag. To this equipment I added only the heavy revolver which the sheriff forced upon me, and the pick and shovel which I thought might expedite my work.\n\nI decided to carry these latter things slung over my shoulder with a stout cord\u2014for I soon saw that I could not hope for any helpers or fellow-explorers. The village would watch me, no doubt, with all its available telescopes and field-glasses; but it would not send any citizen so much as a yard over the flat plain toward the lone hillock. My start was timed for early the next morning, and all the rest of that day I was treated with the awed and uneasy respect which people give to a man about to set out for certain doom.\n\nWhen morning came\u2014a cloudy though not a threatening morning\u2014the whole village turned out to see me start across the dustblown plain. Binoculars shewed the lone man at his usual pacing on the mound, and I resolved to keep him in sight as steadily as possible during my approach. At the last moment a vague sense of dread oppressed me, and I was just weak and whimsical enough to let Grey Eagle's talisman swing on my chest in full view of any beings or ghosts who might be inclined to heed it. Bidding au revoir to Compton and his mother, I started off at a brisk stride despite the bag in my left hand and the clanking pick and shovel strapped to my back; holding my field-glass in my right hand and taking a glance at the silent pacer from time to time. As I neared the mound I saw the man very clearly, and fancied I could trace an expression of infinite evil and decadence on his seamed, hairless features. I was startled, too, to see that his goldenly gleaming weapon-case bore hieroglyphs very similar to those on the unknown talisman I wore. All the creature's costume and trappings bespoke exquisite workmanship and cultivation. Then, all too abruptly, I saw him start down the farther side of the mound and out of sight. When I reached the place, about ten minutes after I set out, there was no one there.\n\nThere is no need of relating how I spent the early part of my search in surveying and circumnavigating the mound, taking measurements, and stepping back to view the thing from different angles. It had impressed me tremendously as I approached it, and there seemed to be a kind of latent menace in its too regular outlines. It was the only elevation of any sort on the wide, level plain; and I could not doubt for a moment that it was an artificial tumulus. The steep sides seemed wholly unbroken, and without marks of human tenancy or passage. There were no signs of a path toward the top; and, burdened as I was, I managed to scramble up only with considerable difficulty. When I reached the summit I found a roughly level elliptical plateau about 300 by 50 feet in dimensions; uniformly covered with rank grass and dense underbrush, and utterly incompatible with the constant presence of a pacing sentinel. This condition gave me a real shock, for it shewed beyond question that the \"Old Indian\", vivid though he seemed, could not be other than a collective hallucination.\n\nI looked about with considerable perplexity and alarm, glancing wistfully back at the village and the mass of black dots which I knew was the watching crowd. Training my glass upon them, I saw that they were studying me avidly with their glasses; so to reassure them I waved my cap in the air with a show of jauntiness which I was far from feeling. Then, settling to my work I flung down pick, shovel, and bag; taking my machete from the latter and commencing to clear away underbrush. It was a weary task, and now and then I felt a curious shiver as some perverse gust of wind arose to hamper my motion with a skill approaching deliberateness. At times it seemed as if a half-tangible force were pushing me back as I worked\u2014almost as if the air thickened in front of me, or as if formless hands tugged at my wrists. My energy seemed used up without producing adequate results, yet for all that I made some progress.\n\nBy afternoon I had clearly perceived that, toward the northern end of the mound, there was a slight bowl-like depression in the root-tangled earth. While this might mean nothing, it would be a good place to begin when I reached the digging stage, and I made a mental note of it. At the same time I noticed another and very peculiar thing\u2014namely, that the Indian talisman swinging from my neck seemed to behave oddly at a point about seventeen feet southeast of the suggested bowl. Its gyrations were altered whenever I happened to stoop around that point, and it tugged downward as if attracted by some magnetism in the soil. The more I noticed this, the more it struck me, till at length I decided to do a little preliminary digging there without further delay.\n\nAs I turned up the soil with my trench-knife I could not help wondering at the relative thinness of the reddish regional layer. The country as a whole was all red sandstone earth, but here I found a strange black loam less than a foot down. It was such soil as one finds in the strange, deep valleys farther west and south, and must surely have been brought from a considerable distance in the prehistoric age when the mound was reared. Kneeling and digging, I felt the leathern cord around my neck tugged harder and harder, as something in the soil seemed to draw the heavy metal talisman more and more. Then I felt my implements strike a hard surface, and wondered if a rock layer rested beneath. Prying about with the trench-knife, I found that such was not the case. Instead, to my intense surprise and feverish interest, I brought up a mould-clogged, heavy object of cylindrical shape\u2014about a foot long and four inches in diameter\u2014to which my hanging talisman clove with glue-like tenacity. As I cleared off the black loam my wonder and tension increased at the bas-reliefs revealed by that process. The whole cylinder, ends and all, was covered with figures and hieroglyphs; and I saw with growing excitement that these things were in the same unknown tradition as those on Grey Eagle's charm and on the yellow metal trappings of the ghost I had seen through my binoculars.\n\nSitting down, I further cleaned the magnetic cylinder against the rough corduroy of my knickerbockers, and observed that it was made of the same heavy, lustrous unknown metal as the charm\u2014hence, no doubt, the singular attraction. The carvings and chasings were very strange and very horrible\u2014nameless monsters and designs fraught with insidious evil\u2014and all were of the highest finish and craftsmanship. I could not at first make head or tail of the thing, and handled it aimlessly until I spied a cleavage near one end. Then I sought eagerly for some mode of opening, discovering at last that the end simply unscrewed.\n\nThe cap yielded with difficulty, but at last it came off, liberating a curious aromatic odour. The sole contents was a bulky roll of a yellowish, paper-like substance inscribed in greenish characters, and for a second I had the supreme thrill of fancying that I held a written key to unknown elder worlds and abysses beyond time. Almost immediately, however, the unrolling of one end shewed that the manuscript was in Spanish\u2014albeit the formal, pompous Spanish of a long-departed day. In the golden sunset light I looked at the heading and the opening paragraph, trying to decipher the wretched and ill-punctuated script of the vanished writer. What manner of relic was this? Upon what sort of a discovery had I stumbled? The first words set me in a new fury of excitement and curiosity, for instead of diverting me from my original quest they startlingly confirmed me in that very effort.\n\nThe yellow scroll with the green script began with a bold, identifying caption and a ceremoniously desperate appeal for belief in incredible revelations to follow:\n\n\u2002RELACI\u00d3N DE P\u00c1NFILO DE ZAMACONA Y NU\u00d1EZ, HIDALGO DE LUARCA EN ASTURIAS, TOCANTE AL MUNDO SOTERR\u00c1NEO DE XINAI\u00c1N, A. D. MDXLV\n\nEn el nombre de la sant\u00edsima Trinidad, Padre, Hijo, y Esp\u00edritu-Santo, tres personas distintas y un solo. Dios verdadero, y de la sant\u00edsima Virgen muestra Se\u00f1ora, YO, P\u00c1NFILO DE ZAMACONA, HIJO DE PEDRO GUZMAN Y ZAMACONA, HIDALGO, Y DE LA DO\u00d1A YN\u00c9S ALVARADO Y NU\u00d1EZ, DE LUARCA EN ASTURIAS, juro para que todo que deco est\u00e1 verdadero como sacramento....\n\nI paused to reflect on the portentous significance of what I was reading. \"The Narrative of P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona y Nu\u00f1ez, gentleman, of Luarca in Asturias, Concerning the Subterranean World of Xinai\u00e1n, A. D. 1545\"...Here, surely, was too much for any mind to absorb all at once. A subterranean world\u2014again that persistent idea which filtered through all the Indian tales and through all the utterances of those who had come back from the mound. And the date\u20141545\u2014what could this mean? In 1540 Coronado and his men had gone north from Mexico into the wilderness, but had they not turned back in 1542! My eye ran questingly down the opened part of the scroll, and almost at once seized on the name Francisco V\u00e1squez de Coronado. The writer of this thing, clearly, was one of Coronado's men\u2014but what had he been doing in this remote realm three years after his party had gone back? I must read further, for another glance told me that what was now unrolled was merely a summary of Coronado's northward march, differing in no essential way from the account known to history.\n\nIt was only the waning light which checked me before I could unroll and read more, and in my impatient bafflement I almost forgot to be frightened at the onrush of night in this sinister place. Others, however, had not forgotten the lurking terror, for I heard a loud distant hallooing from a knot of men who had gathered at the edge of the town. Answering the anxious hail, I restored the manuscript to its strange cylinder\u2014to which the disc around my neck still clung until I pried it off and packed it and my smaller implements for departure. Leaving the pick and shovel for the next day's work, I took up my handbag, scrambled down the steep side of the mound, and in another quarter-hour was back in the village explaining and exhibiting my curious find. As darkness drew on, I glanced back at the mound I had so lately left, and saw with a shudder that the faint bluish torch of the nocturnal squaw-ghost had begun to glimmer.\n\nIt was hard work waiting to get at the bygone Spaniard's narrative; but I knew I must have quiet and leisure for a good translation, so reluctantly saved the task for the later hours of night. Promising the townsfolk a clear account of my findings in the morning, and giving them an ample opportunity to examine the bizarre and provocative cylinder, I accompanied Clyde Compton home and ascended to my room for the translating process as soon as I possibly could. My host and his mother were intensely eager to hear the tale, but I thought they had better wait till I could thoroughly absorb the text myself and give them the gist concisely and unerringly.\n\nOpening my handbag in the light of a single electric bulb, I again took out the cylinder and noted the instant magnetism which pulled the Indian talisman to its carven surface. The designs glimmered evilly on the richly lustrous and unknown metal, and I could not help shivering as I studied the abnormal and blasphemous forms that leered at me with such exquisite workmanship. I wish now that I had carefully photographed all these designs\u2014though perhaps it is just as well that I did not. Of one thing I am really glad, and that is that I could not then identify the squatting octopus-headed thing which dominated most of the ornate cartouches, and which the manuscript called \"Tulu\". Recently I have associated it, and the legends in the manuscript connected with it, with some new-found folklore of monstrous and unmentioned Cthulhu, a horror which seeped down from the stars while the young earth was still half-formed; and had I known of the connexion then, I could not have stayed in the same room with the thing. The secondary motif, a semi-anthropomorphic serpent, I did quite readily place as a prototype of the Yig, Quetzalcoatl, and Kukulcan conceptions. Before opening the cylinder I tested its magnetic powers on metals other than that of Grey Eagle's disc, but found that no attraction existed. It was no common magnetism which pervaded this morbid fragment of unknown worlds and linked it to its kind.\n\nAt last I took out the manuscript and began translating\u2014jotting down a synoptic outline in English as I went, and now and then regretting the absence of a Spanish dictionary when I came upon some especially obscure or archaic word or construction. There was a sense of ineffable strangeness in thus being thrown back nearly four centuries in the midst of my continuous quest\u2014thrown back to a year when my own forbears were settled, homekeeping gentlemen of Somerset and Devon under Henry the Eighth, with never a thought of the adventure that was to take their blood to Virginia and the New World; yet when that new world possessed, even as now, the same brooding mystery of the mound which formed my present sphere and horizon. The sense of a throwback was all the stronger because I felt instinctively that the common problem of the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal timelessness\u2014of such unholy and unearthly eternity\u2014that the scant four hundred years between us bulked as nothing in comparison. It took no more than a single look at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realise the dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the primal mysteries it represented. Before that gulf P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona and I stood side by side; just as Aristotle and I, or Cheops and I, might have stood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "Of his youth in Luarca, a small, placid port on the Bay of Biscay, Zamacona told little. He had been wild, and a younger son, and had come to New Spain in 1532, when only twenty years old. Sensitively imaginative, he had listened spellbound to the floating rumours of rich cities and unknown worlds to the north\u2014and especially to the tale of the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, who came back from a trip in 1539 with glowing accounts of fabulous C\u00edbola and its great walled towns with terraced stone houses. Hearing of Coronado's contemplated expedition in search of these wonders\u2014and of the greater wonders whispered to lie beyond them in the land of buffaloes\u2014young Zamacona managed to join the picked party of 300, and started north with the rest in 1540.\n\nHistory knows the story of that expedition\u2014how C\u00edbola was found to be merely the squalid Pueblo village of Zu\u00f1i, and how de Niza was sent back to Mexico in disgrace for his florid exaggerations; how Coronado first saw the Grand Canyon, and how at Cicuy\u00e9, on the Pecos, he heard from the Indian called El Turco of the rich and mysterious land of Quivira, far to the northeast, where gold, silver, and buffaloes abounded, and where there flowed a river two leagues wide. Zamacona told briefly of the winter camp at Tiguex on the Pecos, and of the northward start in April, when the native guide proved false and led the party astray amidst a land of prairie-dogs, salt pools, and roving, bison-hunting tribes.\n\nWhen Coronado dismissed his larger force and made his final forty-two-day march with a very small and select detachment, Zamacona managed to be included in the advancing party. He spoke of the fertile country and of the great ravines with trees visible only from the edge of their steep banks; and of how all the men lived solely on buffalo-meat. And then came mention of the expedition's farthest limit\u2014of the presumable but disappointing land of Quivira with its villages of grass houses, its brooks and rivers, its good black soil, its plums, nuts, grapes, and mulberries, and its maize-growing and copper-using Indians. The execution of El Turco, the false native guide, was casually touched upon, and there was a mention of the cross which Coronado raised on the bank of a great river in the autumn of 1541\u2014a cross bearing the inscription, \"Thus far came the great general, Francisco V\u00e1squez de Coronado\".\n\nThis supposed Quivira lay at about the fortieth parallel of north latitude, and I see that quite lately the New York archaeologist Dr. Hodge has identified it with the course of the Arkansas River through Barton and Rice Counties, Kansas. It is the old home of the Wichitas, before the Sioux drove them south into what is now Oklahoma, and some of the grass-house village sites have been found and excavated for artifacts. Coronado did considerable exploring hereabouts, led hither and thither by the persistent rumours of rich cities and hidden worlds which floated fearfully around on the Indians' tongues. These northerly natives seemed more afraid and reluctant to talk about the rumoured cities and worlds than the Mexican Indians had been; yet at the same time seemed as if they could reveal a good deal more than the Mexicans had they been willing or dared to do so. Their vagueness exasperated the Spanish leader, and after many disappointing searches he began to be very severe toward those who brought him stories. Zamacona, more patient than Coronado, found the tales especially interesting; and learned enough of the local speech to hold long conversations with a young buck named Charging Buffalo, whose curiosity had led him into much stranger places than any of his fellow-tribesmen had dared to penetrate.\n\nIt was Charging Buffalo who told Zamacona of the queer stone doorways, gates, or cave-mouths at the bottom of some of those deep, steep, wooded ravines which the party had noticed on the northward march. These openings, he said, were mostly concealed by shrubbery; and few had entered them for untold aeons. Those who went to where they led, never returned\u2014or in a few cases returned mad or curiously maimed. But all this was legend, for nobody was known to have gone more than a limited distance inside any of them within the memory of the grandfathers of the oldest living men. Charging Buffalo himself had probably been farther than anyone else, and he had seen enough to curb both his curiosity and his greed for the rumoured gold below.\n\nBeyond the aperture he had entered there was a long passage running crazily up and down and round about, and covered with frightful carvings of monsters and horrors that no man had ever seen. At last, after untold miles of windings and descents, there was a glow of terrible blue light; and the passage opened upon a shocking nether world. About this the Indian would say no more, for he had seen something that had sent him back in haste. But the golden cities must be somewhere down there, he added, and perhaps a white man with the magic of the thunder-stick might succeed in getting to them. He would not tell the big chief Coronado what he knew, for Coronado would not listen to Indian talk any more. Yes\u2014he could shew Zamacona the way if the white man would leave the party and accept his guidance. But he would not go inside the opening with the white man. It was bad in there.\n\nThe place was about a five days' march to the south, near the region of great mounds. These mounds had something to do with the evil world down there\u2014they were probably ancient closed-up passages to it, for once the Old Ones below had had colonies on the surface and had traded with men everywhere, even in the lands that had sunk under the big waters. It was when those lands had sunk that the Old Ones closed themselves up below and refused to deal with surface people. The refugees from the sinking places had told them that the gods of outer earth were against men, and that no men could survive on the outer earth unless they were daemons in league with the evil gods. That is why they shut out all surface folk, and did fearful things to any who ventured down where they dwelt. There had been sentries once at the various openings, but after ages they were no longer needed. Not many people cared to talk about the hidden Old Ones, and the legends about them would probably have died out but for certain ghostly reminders of their presence now and then. It seemed that the infinite ancientness of these creatures had brought them strangely near to the borderline of spirit, so that their ghostly emanations were more commonly frequent and vivid. Accordingly the region of the great mounds was often convulsed with spectral nocturnal battles reflecting those which had been fought in the days before the openings were closed.\n\nThe Old Ones themselves were half-ghost\u2014indeed, it was said that they no longer grew old or reproduced their kind, but flickered eternally in a state between flesh and spirit. The change was not complete, though, for they had to breathe. It was because the underground world needed air that the openings in the deep valleys were not blocked up as the mound-openings on the plains had been. These openings, Charging Buffalo added, were probably based on natural fissures in the earth. It was whispered that the Old Ones had come down from the stars to the world when it was very young, and had gone inside to build their cities of solid gold because the surface was not then fit to live on. They were the ancestors of all men, yet none could guess from what star\u2014or what place beyond the stars\u2014they came. Their hidden cities were still full of gold and silver, but men had better let them alone unless protected by very strong magic.\n\nThey had frightful beasts with a faint strain of human blood, on which they rode, and which they employed for other purposes. The things, so people hinted, were carnivorous, and like their masters, preferred human flesh; so that although the Old Ones themselves did not breed, they had a sort of half-human slave-class which also served to nourish the human and animal population. This had been very oddly recruited, and was supplemented by a second slave-class of reanimated corpses. The Old Ones knew how to make a corpse into an automaton which would last almost indefinitely and perform any sort of work when directed by streams of thought. Charging Buffalo said that the people had all come to talk by means of thought only; speech having been found crude and needless, except for religious devotions and emotional expression, as aeons of discovery and study rolled by. They worshipped Yig, the great father of serpents, and Tulu, the octopus-headed entity that had brought them down from the stars; appeasing both of these hideous monstrosities by means of human sacrifices offered up in a very curious manner which Charging Buffalo did not care to describe.\n\nZamacona was held spellbound by the Indian's tale, and at once resolved to accept his guidance to the cryptic doorway in the ravine. He did not believe the accounts of strange ways attributed by legend to the hidden people, for the experiences of the party had been such as to disillusion one regarding native myths of unknown lands; but he did feel that some sufficiently marvellous field of riches and adventure must indeed lie beyond the weirdly carved passages in the earth. At first he thought of persuading Charging Buffalo to tell his story to Coronado\u2014offering to shield him against any effects of the leader's testy scepticism\u2014but later he decided that a lone adventure would be better. If he had no aid, he would not have to share anything he found; but might perhaps become a great discoverer and owner of fabulous riches. Success would make him a greater figure than Coronado himself\u2014perhaps a greater figure than anyone else in New Spain, including even the mighty viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza.\n\nOn October 7, 1541, at an hour close to midnight, Zamacona stole out of the Spanish camp near the grass-house village and met Charging Buffalo for the long southward journey. He travelled as lightly as possible, and did not wear his heavy helmet and breastplate. Of the details of the trip the manuscript told very little, but Zamacona records his arrival at the great ravine on October 13th. The descent of the thickly wooded slope took no great time; and though the Indian had trouble in locating the shrubbery-hidden stone door again amidst the twilight of that deep gorge, the place was finally found. It was a very small aperture as doorways go, formed of monolithic sandstone jambs and lintel, and bearing signs of nearly effaced and now undecipherable carvings. Its height was perhaps seven feet, and its width not more than four. There were drilled places in the jambs which argued the bygone presence of a hinged door or gate, but all other traces of such a thing had long since vanished.\n\nAt sight of this black gulf Charging Buffalo displayed considerable fear, and threw down his pack of supplies with signs of haste. He had provided Zamacona with a good stock of resinous torches and provisions, and had guided him honestly and well; but refused to share in the venture that lay ahead. Zamacona gave him the trinkets he had kept for such an occasion, and obtained his promise to return to the region in a month; afterward shewing the way southward to the Pecos Pueblo villages. A prominent rock on the plain above them was chosen as a meeting-place; the one arriving first to pitch camp until the other should arrive.\n\nIn the manuscript Zamacona expressed a wistful wonder as to the Indian's length of waiting at the rendezvous\u2014for he himself could never keep that tryst. At the last moment Charging Buffalo tried to dissuade him from his plunge into the darkness, but soon saw it was futile, and gestured a stoical farewell. Before lighting his first torch and entering the opening with his ponderous pack, the Spaniard watched the lean form of the Indian scrambling hastily and rather relievedly upward among the trees. It was the cutting of his last link with the world; though he did not know that he was never to see a human being\u2014in the accepted sense of that term\u2014again.\n\nZamacona felt no immediate premonition of evil upon entering that ominous doorway, though from the first he was surrounded by a bizarre and unwholesome atmosphere. The passage, slightly taller and wider than the aperture, was for many yards a level tunnel of Cyclopean masonry, with heavily worn flagstones under foot, and grotesquely carved granite and sandstone blocks in sides and ceiling. The carvings must have been loathsome and terrible indeed, to judge from Zamacona's description; according to which most of them revolved around the monstrous beings Yig and Tulu. They were unlike anything the adventurer had ever seen before, though he added that the native architecture of Mexico came closest to them of all things in the outer world. After some distance the tunnel began to dip abruptly, and irregular natural rock appeared on all sides. The passage seemed only partly artificial, and decorations were limited to occasional cartouches with shocking bas-reliefs.\n\nFollowing an enormous descent, whose steepness at times produced an acute danger of slipping and tobogganing, the passage became exceedingly uncertain in its direction and variable in its contour. At times it narrowed almost to a slit or grew so low that stooping and even crawling were necessary, while at other times it broadened out into sizeable caves or chains of caves. Very little human construction, it was plain, had gone into this part of the tunnel; though occasionally a sinister cartouche or hieroglyphic on the wall, or a blocked-up lateral passageway, would remind Zamacona that this was in truth the aeon-forgotten highroad to a primal and unbelievable world of living things.\n\nFor three days, as best he could reckon, P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona scrambled down, up, along, and around, but always predominately downward, through this dark region of palaeogean night. Once in a while he heard some secret being of darkness patter or flap out of his way, and on just one occasion he half glimpsed a great, bleached thing that set him trembling. The quality of the air was mostly very tolerable; though foetid zones were now and then met with, while one great cavern of stalactites and stalagmites afforded a depressing dampness. This latter, when Charging Buffalo had come upon it, had quite seriously barred the way; since the limestone deposits of ages had built fresh pillars in the path of the primordial abyss-denizens. The Indian, however, had broken through these; so that Zamacona did not find his course impeded. It was an unconscious comfort to him to reflect that someone else from the outside world had been there before\u2014and the Indian's careful descriptions had removed the element of surprise and unexpectedness. More\u2014Charging Buffalo's knowledge of the tunnel had led him to provide so good a torch supply for the journey in and out, that there would be no danger of becoming stranded in darkness. Zamacona camped twice, building a fire whose smoke seemed well taken care of by the natural ventilation.\n\nAt what he considered the end of the third day\u2014though his cocksure guesswork chronology is not at any time to be given the easy faith that he gave it\u2014Zamacona encountered the prodigious descent and subsequent prodigious climb which Charging Buffalo had described as the tunnel's last phase. As at certain earlier points, marks of artificial improvement were here discernible; and several times the steep gradient was eased by a flight of rough-hewn steps. The torch shewed more and more of the monstrous carvings on the walls, and finally the resinous flare seemed mixed with a fainter and more diffusive light as Zamacona climbed up and up after the last downward stairway. At length the ascent ceased, and a level passage of artificial masonry with dark, basaltic blocks led straight ahead. There was no need for a torch now, for all the air was glowing with a bluish, quasi-electric radiance that flickered like an aurora. It was the strange light of the inner world that the Indian had described\u2014and in another moment Zamacona emerged from the tunnel upon a bleak, rocky hillside which climbed above him to a seething, impenetrable sky of bluish coruscations, and descended dizzily below him to an apparently illimitable plain shrouded in bluish mist.\n\nHe had come to the unknown world at last, and from his manuscript it is clear that he viewed the formless landscape as proudly and exaltedly as ever his fellow-countryman Balboa viewed the new-found Pacific from that unforgettable peak in Darien. Charging Buffalo had turned back at this point, driven by fear of something which he would only describe vaguely and evasively as a herd of bad cattle, neither horse nor buffalo, but like the things the mound-spirits rode at night\u2014but Zamacona could not be deterred by any such trifle. Instead of fear, a strange sense of glory filled him; for he had imagination enough to know what it meant to stand alone in an inexplicable nether world whose existence no other white man suspected.\n\nThe soil of the great hill that surged upward behind him and spread steeply downward below him was dark grey, rock-strown, without vegetation, and probably basaltic in origin; with an unearthly cast which made him feel like an intruder on an alien planet. The vast distant plain, thousands of feet below, had no features he could distinguish; especially since it appeared to be largely veiled in a curling, bluish vapour. But more than hill or plain or cloud, the bluely luminous, coruscating sky impressed the adventurer with a sense of supreme wonder and mystery. What created this sky within a world he could not tell; though he knew of the northern lights, and had even seen them once or twice. He concluded that this subterraneous light was something vaguely akin to the aurora; a view which moderns may well endorse, though it seems likely that certain phenomena of radio-activity may also enter in.\n\nAt Zamacona's back the mouth of the tunnel he had traversed yawned darkly; defined by a stone doorway very like the one he had entered in the world above, save that it was of greyish-black basalt instead of red sandstone. There were hideous sculptures, still in good preservation and perhaps corresponding to those on the outer portal which time had largely weathered away. The absence of weathering here argued a dry, temperate climate; indeed, the Spaniard already began to note the delightfully spring-like stability of temperature which marks the air of the north's interior. On the stone jambs were works proclaiming the bygone presence of hinges, but of any actual door or gate no trace remained. Seating himself for rest and thought, Zamacona lightened his pack by removing an amount of food and torches sufficient to take him back through the tunnel. These he proceeded to cache at the opening, under a cairn hastily formed of the rock fragments which everywhere lay around. Then, readjusting his lightened pack, he commenced his descent toward the distant plain; preparing to invade a region which no living thing of outer earth had penetrated in a century or more, which no white man had ever penetrated, and from which, if legend were to be believed, no organic creature had ever returned sane.\n\nZamacona strode briskly along down the steep, interminable slope; his progress checked at times by the bad walking that came from loose rock fragments, or by the excessive precipitousness of the grade. The distance of the mist-shrouded plain must have been enormous, for many hours' walking brought him apparently no closer to it than he had been before. Behind him was always the great hill stretching upward into a bright a\u00ebrial sea of bluish coruscations. Silence was universal; so that his own footsteps, and the fall of stones that he dislodged, struck on his ears with startling distinctness. It was at what he regarded as about noon that he first saw the abnormal footprints which set him to thinking of Charging Buffalo's terrible hints, precipitate flight, and strangely abiding terror.\n\nThe rock-strown nature of the soil gave few opportunities for tracks of any kind, but at one point a rather level interval had caused the loose detritus to accumulate in a ridge, leaving a considerable area of dark-grey loam absolutely bare. Here, in a rambling confusion indicating a large herd aimlessly wandering, Zamacona found the abnormal prints. It is to be regretted that he could not describe them more exactly, but the manuscript displayed far more vague fear than accurate observation. Just what it was that so frightened the Spaniard can only be inferred from his later hints regarding the beasts. He referred to the prints as 'not hooves, nor hands, nor feet, nor precisely paws\u2014nor so large as to cause alarm on that account'. Just why or how long ago the things had been there, was not easy to guess. There was no vegetation visible, hence grazing was out of the question; but of course if the beasts were carnivorous they might well have been hunting smaller animals, whose tracks their own would tend to obliterate.\n\nGlancing backward from this plateau to the heights above, Zamacona thought he detected traces of a great winding road which had once led from the tunnel downward to the plain. One could get the impression of this former highway only from a broad panoramic view, since a trickle of loose rock fragments had long ago obscured it; but the adventurer felt none the less certain that it had existed. It had not, probably, been an elaborately paved trunk route; for the small tunnel it reached seemed scarcely like a main avenue to the outer world. In choosing a straight path of descent Zamacona had not followed its curving course, though he must have crossed it once or twice. With his attention now called to it, he looked ahead to see if he could trace it downward toward the plain; and this he finally thought he could do. He resolved to investigate its surface when next he crossed it, and perhaps to pursue its line for the rest of the way if he could distinguish it.\n\nHaving resumed his journey, Zamacona came some time later upon what he thought was a bend of the ancient road. There were signs of grading and of some primal attempt at rock-surfacing, but not enough was left to make the route worth following. While rummaging about in the soil with his sword, the Spaniard turned up something that glittered in the eternal blue daylight, and was thrilled at beholding a kind of coin or medal of a dark, unknown, lustrous metal, with hideous designs on each side. It was utterly and bafflingly alien to him, and from his description I have no doubt but that it was a duplicate of the talisman given me by Grey Eagle almost four centuries afterward. Pocketing it after a long and curious examination, he strode onward; finally pitching camp at an hour which he guessed to be the evening of the outer world.\n\nThe next day Zamacona rose early and resumed his descent through this blue-litten world of mist and desolation and preternatural silence. As he advanced, he at last became able to distinguish a few objects on the distant plain below\u2014trees, bushes, rocks, and a small river that came into view from the right and curved forward at a point to the left of his contemplated course. This river seemed to be spanned by a bridge connected with the descending roadway, and with care the explorer could trace the route of the road beyond it in a straight line over the plain. Finally he even thought he could detect towns scattered along the rectilinear ribbon; towns whose left-hand edges reached the river and sometimes crossed it. Where such crossings occurred, he saw as he descended, there were always signs of bridges either ruined or surviving. He was now in the midst of a sparse grassy vegetation, and saw that below him the growth became thicker and thicker. The road was easier to define now, since its surface discouraged the grass which the looser soil supported. Rock fragments were less frequent, and the barren upward vista behind him looked bleak and forbidding in contrast to his present milieu.\n\nIt was on this day that he saw the blurred mass moving over the distant plain. Since his first sight of the sinister footprints he had met with no more of these, but something about that slowly and deliberately moving mass peculiarly sickened him. Nothing but a herd of grazing animals could move just like that, and after seeing the footprints he did not wish to meet the things which had made them. Still, the moving mass was not near the road\u2014and his curiosity and greed for fabled gold were great. Besides, who could really judge things from vague, jumbled footprints or from the panic-twisted hints of an ignorant Indian?\n\nIn straining his eyes to view the moving mass Zamacona became aware of several other interesting things. One was that certain parts of the now unmistakable towns glittered oddly in the misty blue light. Another was that, besides the towns, several similarly glittering structures of a more isolated sort were scattered here and there along the road and over the plain. They seemed to be embowered in clumps of vegetation, and those off the road had small avenues leading to the highway. No smoke or other signs of life could be discerned about any of the towns or buildings. Finally Zamacona saw that the plain was not infinite in extent, though the half-concealing blue mists had hitherto made it seem so. It was bounded in the remote distance by a range of low hills, toward a gap in which the river and roadway seemed to lead. All this\u2014especially the glittering of certain pinnacles in the towns\u2014had become very vivid when Zamacona pitched his second camp amidst the endless blue day. He likewise noticed the flocks of high-soaring birds, whose nature he could not clearly make out.\n\nThe next afternoon\u2014to use the language of the outer world as the manuscript did at all times\u2014Zamacona reached the silent plain and crossed the soundless, slow-running river on a curiously carved and fairly well-preserved bridge of black basalt. The water was clear, and contained large fishes of a wholly strange aspect. The roadway was now paved and somewhat overgrown with weeds and creeping vines, and its course was occasionally outlined by small pillars bearing obscure symbols. On every side the grassy level extended, with here and there a clump of trees or shrubbery, and with unidentifiable bluish flowers growing irregularly over the whole area. Now and then some spasmodic motion of the grass indicated the presence of serpents. In the course of several hours the traveller reached a grove of old and alien-looking evergreen-trees which he knew, from distant viewing, protected one of the glittering-roofed isolated structures. Amidst the encroaching vegetation he saw the hideously sculptured pylons of a stone gateway leading off the road, and was presently forcing his way through briers above a moss-crusted tessellated walk lined with huge trees and low monolithic pillars.\n\nAt last, in this hushed green twilight, he saw the crumbling and ineffably ancient facade of the building\u2014a temple, he had no doubt. It was a mass of nauseous bas-reliefs; depicting scenes and beings, objects and ceremonies, which could certainly have no place on this or any sane planet. In hinting of these things Zamacona displays for the first time that shocked and pious hesitancy which impairs the informative value of the rest of his manuscript. We cannot help regretting that the Catholic ardour of Renaissance Spain had so thoroughly permeated his thought and feeling. The door of the place stood wide open, and absolute darkness filled the windowless interior. Conquering the repulsion which the mural sculptures had excited, Zamacona took out flint and steel, lighted a resinous torch, pushed aside curtaining vines, and sallied boldly across the ominous threshold.\n\nFor a moment he was quite stupefied by what he saw. It was not the all-covering dust and cobwebs of immemorial aeons, the fluttering winged things, the shriekingly loathsome sculptures on the walls, the bizarre form of the many basins and braziers, the sinister pyramidal altar with the hollow top, or the monstrous, octopus-headed abnormality in some strange, dark metal leering and squatting broodingly on its hieroglyphed pedestal, which robbed him of even the power to give a startled cry. It was nothing so unearthly as this\u2014but merely the fact that, with the exception of the dust, the cobwebs, the winged things, and the gigantic emerald-eyed idol, every particle of substance in sight was composed of pure and evidently solid gold.\n\nEven the manuscript, written in retrospect after Zamacona knew that gold is the most common structural metal of a nether world containing limitless lodes and veins of it, reflects the frenzied excitement which the traveller felt upon suddenly finding the real source of all the Indian legends of golden cities. For a time the power of detailed observation left him, but in the end his faculties were recalled by a peculiar tugging sensation in the pocket of his doublet. Tracing the feeling, he realised that the disc of strange metal he had found in the abandoned road was being attracted strongly by the vast octopus-headed, emerald-eyed idol on the pedestal, which he now saw to be composed of the same unknown exotic metal. He was later to learn that this strange magnetic substance\u2014as alien to the inner world as to the outer world of men\u2014is the one precious metal of the blue-lighted abyss. None knows what it is or where it occurs in Nature, and the amount of it on this planet came down from the stars with the people when great Tulu, the octopus-headed god, brought them for the first time to this earth. Certainly, its only known source was a stock of pre-existing artifacts, including multitudes of Cyclopean idols. It could never be placed or analysed, and even its magnetism was exerted only on its own kind. It was the supreme ceremonial metal of the hidden people, its use being regulated by custom in such a way that its magnetic properties might cause no inconvenience. A very weakly magnetic alloy of it with such base metals as iron, gold, silver, copper, or zinc, had formed the sole monetary standard of the hidden people at one period of their history.\n\nZamacona's reflections on the strange idol and its magnetism were disturbed by a tremendous wave of fear as, for the first time in this silent world, he heard a rumble of very definite and obviously approaching sound. There was no mistaking its nature. It was a thunderously charging herd of large animals; and, remembering the Indian's panic, the footprints, and the moving mass distantly seen, the Spaniard shuddered in terrified anticipation. He did not analyse his position, or the significance of this onrush of great lumbering beings, but merely responded to an elemental urge toward self-protection. Charging herds do not stop to find victims in obscure places, and on the outer earth Zamacona would have felt little or no alarm in such a massive, grove-girt edifice. Some instinct, however, now bred a deep and peculiar terror in his soul; and he looked about frantically for any means of safety.\n\nThere being no available refuge in the great, gold-patined interior, he felt that he must close the long-disused door; which still hung on its ancient hinges, doubled back against the inner wall. Soil, vines, and moss had entered the opening from outside, so that he had to dig a path for the great gold portal with his sword; but he managed to perform this work very swiftly under the frightful stimulus of the approaching noise. The hoofbeats had grown still louder and more menacing by the time he began tugging at the heavy door itself; and for a while his fears reached a frantic height, as hope of starting the age-clogged metal grew faint. Then, with a creak, the thing responded to his youthful strength, and a frenzied siege of pulling and pushing ensued. Amidst the roar of unseen stampeding feet success came at last, and the ponderous golden door clanged shut, leaving Zamacona in darkness but for the single lighted torch he had wedged between the pillars of a basin-tripod. There was a latch, and the frightened man blessed his patron saint that it was still effective.\n\nSound alone told the fugitive the sequel. When the roar grew very near it resolved itself into separate footfalls, as if the evergreen grove had made it necessary for the herd to slacken speed and disperse. But feet continued to approach, and it became evident that the beasts were advancing among the trees and circling the hideously carven temple walls. In the curious deliberation of their tread Zamacona found something very alarming and repulsive, nor did he like the scuffling sounds which were audible even through the thick stone walls and heavy golden door. Once the door rattled ominously on its archaic hinges, as if under a heavy impact, but fortunately it still held. Then, after a seemingly endless interval, he heard retreating steps and realised that his unknown visitors were leaving. Since the herds did not seem to be very numerous, it would have perhaps been safe to venture out within a half-hour or less; but Zamacona took no chances. Opening his pack, he prepared his camp on the golden tiles of the temple's floor, with the great door still securely latched against all comers; drifting eventually into a sounder sleep than he could have known in the blue-litten spaces outside. He did not even mind the hellish, octopus-headed bulk of great Tulu, fashioned of unknown metal and leering with fishy, sea-green eyes, which squatted in the blackness above him on its monstrously hieroglyphed pedestal.\n\nSurrounded by darkness for the first time since leaving the tunnel, Zamacona slept profoundly and long. He must have more than made up the sleep he had lost at his two previous camps, when the ceaseless glare of the sky had kept him awake despite his fatigue, for much distance was covered by other living feet while he lay in his healthily dreamless rest. It is well that he rested deeply, for there were many strange things to be encountered in his next period of consciousness." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "What finally roused Zamacona was a thunderous rapping at the door. It beat through his dreams and dissolved all the lingering mists of drowsiness as soon as he knew what it was. There could be no mistake about it\u2014it was a definite, human, and peremptory rapping; performed apparently with some metallic object, and with all the measured quality of conscious thought or will behind it. As the awakening man rose clumsily to his feet, a sharp vocal note was added to the summons\u2014someone calling out, in a not unmusical voice, a formula which the manuscript tries to represent as \"oxi, oxi, giathc\u00e1n yc\u00e1 relex\". Feeling sure that his visitors were men and not daemons, and arguing that they could have no reason for considering him an enemy, Zamacona decided to face them openly and at once; and accordingly fumbled with the ancient latch till the golden door creaked open from the pressure of those outside.\n\nAs the great portal swung back, Zamacona stood facing a group of about twenty individuals of an aspect not calculated to give him alarm. They seemed to be Indians; though their tasteful robes and trappings and swords were not such as he had seen among any of the tribes of the outer world, while their faces had many subtle differences from the Indian type. That they did not mean to be irresponsibly hostile, was very clear; for instead of menacing him in any way they merely probed him attentively and significantly with their eyes, as if they expected their gaze to open up some sort of communication. The longer they gazed, the more he seemed to know about them and their mission; for although no one had spoken since the vocal summons before the opening of the door, he found himself slowly realising that they had come from the great city beyond the low hills, mounted on animals, and that they had been summoned by animals who had reported his presence; that they were not sure what kind of person he was or just where he had come from, but that they knew he must be associated with that dimly remembered outer world which they sometimes visited in curious dreams. How he read all this in the gaze of the two or three leaders he could not possibly explain; though he learned why a moment later.\n\nAs it was, he attempted to address his visitors in the Wichita dialect he had picked up from Charging Buffalo; and after this failed to draw a vocal reply he successively tried the Aztec, Spanish, French, and Latin tongues\u2014adding as many scraps of lame Greek, Galician, and Portuguese, and of the Bable peasant patois of his native Asturias, as his memory could recall. But not even this polyglot array\u2014his entire linguistic stock\u2014could bring a reply in kind. When, however, he paused in perplexity, one of the visitors began speaking in an utterly strange and rather fascinating language whose sounds the Spaniard later had much difficulty in representing on paper. Upon his failure to understand this, the speaker pointed first to his own eyes, then to his forehead, and then to his eyes again, as if commanding the other to gaze at him in order to absorb what he wanted to transmit.\n\nZamacona, obeying, found himself rapidly in possession of certain information. The people, he learned, conversed nowadays by means of unvocal radiations of thought; although they had formerly used a spoken language which still survived as the written tongue, and into which they still dropped orally for tradition's sake, or when strong feeling demanded a spontaneous outlet. He could understand them merely by concentrating his attention upon their eyes; and could reply by summoning up a mental image of what he wished to say, and throwing the substance of this into his glance. When the thought-speaker paused, apparently inviting a response, Zamacona tried his best to follow the prescribed pattern, but did not appear to succeed very well. So he nodded, and tried to describe himself and his journey by signs. He pointed upward, as if to the outer world, then closed his eyes and made signs as of a mole burrowing. Then he opened his eyes again and pointed downward, in order to indicate his descent of the great slope. Experimentally he blended a spoken word or two with his gestures\u2014for example, pointing successively to himself and to all of his visitors and saying \"un hombre\", and then pointing to himself alone and very carefully pronouncing his individual name, P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona.\n\nBefore the strange conversation was over, a good deal of data had passed in both directions. Zamacona had begun to learn how to throw his thoughts, and had likewise picked up several words of the region's archaic spoken language. His visitors, moreover, had absorbed many beginnings of an elementary Spanish vocabulary. Their own old language was utterly unlike anything the Spaniard had ever heard, though there were times later on when he was to fancy an infinitely remote linkage with the Aztec, as if the latter represented some far stage of corruption, or some very thin infiltration of loan-words. The underground world, Zamacona learned, bore an ancient name which the manuscript records as \"Xinai\u00e1n\", but which, from the writer's supplementary explanations and diacritical marks, could probably be best represented to Anglo-Saxon ears by the phonetic arrangement K'n-yan.\n\nIt is not surprising that this preliminary discourse did not go beyond the merest essentials, but those essentials were highly important. Zamacona learned that the people of K'n-yan were almost infinitely ancient, and that they had come from a distant part of space where physical conditions are much like those of the earth. All this, of course, was legend now; and one could not say how much truth was in it, or how much worship was really due to the octopus-headed being Tulu who had traditionally brought them hither and whom they still reverenced for aesthetic reasons. But they knew of the outer world, and were indeed the original stock who had peopled it as soon as its crust was fit to live on. Between glacial ages they had had some remarkable surface civilisations, especially one at the South Pole near the mountain Kadath.\n\nAt some time infinitely in the past most of the outer world had sunk beneath the ocean, so that only a few refugees remained to bear the news to K'n-yan. This was undoubtedly due to the wrath of space-devils hostile alike to men and to men's gods\u2014for it bore out rumours of a primordially earlier sinking which had submerged the gods themselves, including great Tulu, who still lay prisoned and dreaming in the watery vaults of the half-cosmic city Relex. No man not a slave of the space-devils, it was argued, could live long on the outer earth; and it was decided that all beings who remained there must be evilly connected. Accordingly traffic with the lands of sun and starlight abruptly ceased. The subterraneous approaches to K'n-yan, or such as could be remembered, were either blocked up or carefully guarded; and all encroachers were treated as dangerous spies and enemies.\n\nBut this was long ago. With the passing of ages fewer and fewer visitors came to K'n-yan, and eventually sentries ceased to be maintained at the unblocked approaches. The mass of the people forgot, except through distorted memories and myths and some very singular dreams, that an outer world existed; though educated folk never ceased to recall the essential facts. The last visitors ever recorded\u2014centuries in the past\u2014had not even been treated as devil-spies; faith in the old legendry having long before died out. They had been questioned eagerly about the fabulous outer regions; for scientific curiosity in K'n-yan was keen, and the myths, memories, dreams, and historical fragments relating to the earth's surface had often tempted scholars to the brink of an external expedition which they had not quite dared to attempt. The only thing demanded of such visitors was that they refrain from going back and informing the outer world of K'n-yan's positive existence; for after all, one could not be sure about these outer lands. They coveted gold and silver, and might prove highly troublesome intruders. Those who had obeyed the injunction had lived happily, though regrettably briefly, and had told all they could about their world\u2014little enough, however, since their accounts were all so fragmentary and conflicting that one could hardly tell what to believe and what to doubt. One wished that more of them would come. As for those who disobeyed and tried to escape\u2014it was very unfortunate about them. Zamacona himself was very welcome, for he appeared to be a higher-grade man, and to know much more about the outer world, than anyone else who had come down within memory. He could tell them much\u2014and they hoped he would be reconciled to his lifelong stay.\n\nMany things which Zamacona learned about K'n-yan in that first colloquy left him quite breathless. He learned, for instance, that during the past few thousand years the phenomena of old age and death had been conquered; so that men no longer grew feeble or died except through violence or will. By regulating the system, one might be as physiologically young and immortal as he wished; and the only reason why any allowed themselves to age, was that they enjoyed the sensation in a world where stagnation and commonplaceness reigned. They could easily become young again when they felt like it. Births had ceased, except for experimental purposes, since a large population had been found needless by a master-race which controlled Nature and organic rivals alike. Many, however, chose to die after a while; since despite the cleverest efforts to invent new pleasures, the ordeal of consciousness became too dull for sensitive souls\u2014especially those in whom time and satiation had blinded the primal instincts and emotions of self-preservation. All the members of the group before Zamacona were from 500 to 1500 years old; and several had seen surface visitors before, though time had blurred the recollection. These visitors, by the way, had often tried to duplicate the longevity of the underground race; but had been able to do so only fractionally, owing to evolutionary differences developing during the million or two years of cleavage.\n\nThese evolutionary differences were even more strikingly shewn in another particular\u2014one far stranger than the wonder of immortality itself. This was the ability of the people of K'n-yan to regulate the balance between matter and abstract energy, even where the bodies of living organic beings were concerned, by the sheer force of the technically trained will. In other words, with suitable effort a learned man of K'n-yan could dematerialise and rematerialise himself\u2014or, with somewhat greater effort and subtler technique, any other object he chose; reducing solid matter to free external particles and recombining the particles again without damage. Had not Zamacona answered his visitors' knock when he did, he would have discovered this accomplishment in a highly puzzling way; for only the strain and bother of the process prevented the twenty men from passing bodily through the golden door without pausing for a summons. This art was much older than the art of perpetual life; and it could be taught to some extent, though never perfectly, to any intelligent person. Rumours of it had reached the outer world in past aeons; surviving in secret traditions and ghostly legendry. The men of K'n-yan had been amused by the primitive and imperfect spirit tales brought down by outer-world stragglers. In practical life this principle had certain industrial applications, but was generally suffered to remain neglected through lack of any particular incentive to its use. Its chief surviving form was in connexion with sleep, when for excitement's sake many dream-connoisseurs resorted to it to enhance the vividness of their visionary wanderings. By the aid of this method certain dreamers even paid half-material visits to a strange, nebulous realm of mounds and valleys and varying light which some believed to be the forgotten outer world. They would go thither on their beasts, and in an age of peace live over the old, glorious battles of their forefathers. Some philosophers thought that in such cases they actually coalesced with immaterial forces left behind by these warlike ancestors themselves.\n\nThe people of K'n-yan all dwelt in the great, tall city of Tsath beyond the mountains. Formerly several races of them had inhabited the entire underground world, which stretched down to unfathomable abysses and which included besides the blue-litten region a red-litten region called Yoth, where relics of a still older and non-human race were found by archaeologists. In the course of time, however, the men of Tsath had conquered and enslaved the rest; interbreeding them with certain horned and four-footed animals of the red-litten region, whose semi-human leanings were very peculiar, and which, though containing a certain artificially created element, may have been in part the degenerate descendants of those peculiar entities who had left the relics. As aeons passed, and mechanical discoveries made the business of life extremely easy, a concentration of the people of Tsath took place; so that all the rest of K'n-yan became relatively deserted.\n\nIt was easier to live in one place, and there was no object in maintaining a population of overflowing proportions. Many of the old mechanical devices were still in use, though others had been abandoned when it was seen that they failed to give pleasure, or that they were not necessary for a race of reduced numbers whose mental force could govern an extensive array of inferior and semi-human industrial organisms. This extensive slave-class was highly composite, being bred from ancient conquered enemies, from outer-world stragglers, from dead bodies curiously galvanised into effectiveness, and from the naturally inferior members of the ruling race of Tsath. The ruling type itself had become highly superior through selective breeding and social evolution\u2014the nation having passed through a period of idealistic industrial democracy which gave equal opportunities to all, and thus, by raising the naturally intelligent to power, drained the masses of all their brains and stamina. Industry, being found fundamentally futile except for the supplying of basic needs and the gratification of inescapable yearnings, had become very simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an urban mechanisation of standardised and easily maintained pattern, and other elemental needs were supplied by scientific agriculture and stock-raising. Long travel was abandoned, and people went back to using the horned, half-human beasts instead of maintaining the profusion of gold, silver, and steel transportation machines which had once threaded land, water, and air. Zamacona could scarcely believe that such things had ever existed outside dreams, but was told he could see specimens of them in museums. He could also see the ruins of other vast magical devices by travelling a day's journey to the valley of Do-Hna, to which the race had spread during its period of greatest numbers. The cities and temples of this present plain were of a far more archaic period, and had never been other than religious and antiquarian shrines during the supremacy of the men of Tsath.\n\nIn government, Tsath was a kind of communistic or semi-anarchical state; habit rather than law determining the daily order of things. This was made possible by the age-old experience and paralysing ennui of the race, whose wants and needs were limited to physical fundamentals and to new sensations. An aeon-long tolerance not yet undermined by growing reaction had abolished all illusions of values and principles, and nothing but an approximation to custom was ever sought or expected. To see that the mutual encroachments of pleasure-seeking never crippled the mass life of the community\u2014this was all that was desired. Family organisation had long ago perished, and the civil and social distinction of the sexes had disappeared. Daily life was organised in ceremonial patterns; with games, intoxication, torture of slaves, day-dreaming, gastronomic and emotional orgies, religious exercises, exotic experiments, artistic and philosophical discussions, and the like, as the principal occupations. Property\u2014chiefly land, slaves, animals, shares in the common city enterprise of Tsath, and ingots of magnetic Tulu-metal, the former universal money standard\u2014was allocated on a very complex basis which included a certain amount equally divided among all the freemen. Poverty was unknown, and labour consisted only of certain administrative duties imposed by an intricate system of testing and selection. Zamacona found difficulty in describing conditions so unlike anything he had previously known; and the text of his manuscript proved unusually puzzling at this point.\n\nArt and intellect, it appeared, had reached very high levels in Tsath; but had become listless and decadent. The dominance of machinery had at one time broken up the growth of normal aesthetics, introducing a lifelessly geometrical tradition fatal to sound expression. This had soon been outgrown, but had left its mark upon all pictorial and decorative attempts; so that except for conventionalised religious designs, there was little depth or feeling in any later work. Archaistic reproductions of earlier work had been found much preferable for general enjoyment. Literature was all highly individual and analytical, so much so as to be wholly incomprehensible to Zamacona. Science had been profound and accurate, and all-embracing save in the one direction of astronomy. Of late, however, it was falling into decay, as people found it increasingly useless to tax their minds by recalling its maddening infinitude of details and ramifications. It was thought more sensible to abandon the deepest speculations and to confine philosophy to conventional forms. Technology, of course, could be carried on by rule of thumb. History was more and more neglected, but exact and copious chronicles of the past existed in the libraries. It was still an interesting subject, and there would be a vast number to rejoice at the fresh outer-world knowledge brought in by Zamacona. In general, though, the modern tendency was to feel rather than to think; so that men were now more highly esteemed for inventing new diversions than for preserving old facts or pushing back the frontier of cosmic mystery.\n\nReligion was a leading interest in Tsath, though very few actually believed in the supernatural. What was desired was the aesthetic and emotional exaltation bred by the mystical moods and sensuous rites which attended the colourful ancestral faith. Temples to Great Tulu, a spirit of universal harmony anciently symbolised as the octopus-headed god who had brought all men down from the stars, were the most richly constructed objects in all K'n-yan; while the cryptic shrines of Yig, the principle of life symbolised as the Father of all Serpents, were almost as lavish and remarkable. In time Zamacona learned much of the orgies and sacrifices connected with this religion, but seemed piously reluctant to describe them in his manuscript. He himself never participated in any of the rites save those which he mistook for perversions of his own faith; nor did he ever lose an opportunity to try to convert the people to that faith of the Cross which the Spaniards hoped to make universal.\n\nProminent in the contemporary religion of Tsath was a revived and almost genuine veneration for the rare, sacred metal of Tulu\u2014that dark, lustrous, magnetic stuff which was nowhere found in Nature, but which had always been with men in the form of idols and hieratic implements. From the earliest times any sight of it in its unalloyed form had impelled respect, while all the sacred archives and litanies were kept in cylinders wrought of its purest substance. Now, as the neglect of science and intellect was dulling the critically analytical spirit, people were beginning to weave around the metal once more that same fabric of awestruck superstition which had existed in primitive times.\n\nAnother function of religion was the regulation of the calendar, born of a period when time and speed were regarded as prime fetiches in man's emotional life. Periods of alternate waking and sleeping, prolonged, abridged, and inverted as mood and convenience dictated, and timed by the tail-beats of Great Yig, the Serpent, corresponded very roughly to terrestrial days and nights; though Zamacona's sensations told him they must actually be almost twice as long. The year-unit, measured by Yig's annual shedding of his skin, was equal to about a year and a half of the outer world. Zamacona thought he had mastered this calendar very well when he wrote his manuscript, whence the confidently given date of 1545; but the document failed to suggest that his assurance in this matter was fully justified.\n\nAs the spokesman of the Tsath party proceeded with his information, Zamacona felt a growing repulsion and alarm. It was not only what was told, but the strange, telepathic manner of telling, and the plain inference that return to the outer world would be impossible, that made the Spaniard wish he had never descended to this region of magic, abnormality, and decadence. But he knew that nothing but friendly acquiescence would do as a policy, hence decided to co\u00f6perate in all his visitors' plans and furnish all the information they might desire. They, on their part, were fascinated by the outer-world data which he managed haltingly to convey.\n\nIt was really the first draught of reliable surface information they had had since the refugees straggled back from Atlantis and Lemuria aeons before, for all their subsequent emissaries from outside had been members of narrow and local groups without any knowledge of the world at large\u2014Mayas, Toltecs, and Aztecs at best, and mostly ignorant tribes of the plains. Zamacona was the first European they had ever seen, and the fact that he was a youth of education and brilliancy made him of still more emphatic value as a source of knowledge. The visiting party shewed their breathless interest in all he contrived to convey, and it was plain that his coming would do much to relieve the flagging interest of weary Tsath in matters of geography and history.\n\nThe only thing which seemed to displease the men of Tsath was the fact that curious and adventurous strangers were beginning to pour into those parts of the upper world where the passages to K'n-yan lay. Zamacona told them of the founding of Florida and New Spain, and made it clear that a great part of the world was stirring with the zest of adventure\u2014Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. Sooner or later Mexico and Florida must meet in one great colonial empire\u2014and then it would be hard to keep outsiders from the rumoured gold and silver of the abyss. Charging Buffalo knew of Zamacona's journey into the earth. Would he tell Coronado, or somehow let a report get to the great viceroy, when he failed to find the traveller at the promised meeting-place? Alarm for the continued secrecy and safety of K'n-yan shewed in the faces of the visitors, and Zamacona absorbed from their minds the fact that from now on sentries would undoubtedly be posted once more at all the unblocked passages to the outside world which the men of Tsath could remember." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "The long conversation of Zamacona and his visitors took place in the green-blue twilight of the grove just outside the temple door. Some of the men reclined on the weeds and moss beside the half-vanished walk, while others, including the Spaniard and the chief spokesman of the Tsath party, sat on the occasional low monolithic pillars that lined the temple approach. Almost a whole terrestrial day must have been consumed in the colloquy, for Zamacona felt the need of food several times, and ate from his well-stocked pack while some of the Tsath party went back for provisions to the roadway, where they had left the animals on which they had ridden. At length the prime leader of the party brought the discourse to a close, and indicated that the time had come to proceed to the city.\n\nThere were, he affirmed, several extra beasts in the cavalcade, upon one of which Zamacona could ride. The prospect of mounting one of those ominous hybrid entities whose fabled nourishment was so alarming, and a single sight of which had set Charging Buffalo into such a frenzy of flight, was by no means reassuring to the traveller. There was, moreover, another point about the things which disturbed him greatly\u2014the apparently preternatural intelligence with which some members of the previous day's roving pack had reported his presence to the men of Tsath and brought out the present expedition. But Zamacona was not a coward, hence followed the men boldly down the weed-grown walk toward the road where the things were stationed.\n\nAnd yet he could not refrain from crying out in terror at what he saw when he passed through the great vine-draped pylons and emerged upon the ancient road. He did not wonder that the curious Wichita had fled in panic, and had to close his eyes a moment to retain his sanity. It is unfortunate that some sense of pious reticence prevented him from describing fully in his manuscript the nameless sight he saw. As it is, he merely hinted at the shocking morbidity of these great floundering white things, with black fur on their backs, a rudimentary horn in the centre of their foreheads, and an unmistakable trace of human or anthropoid blood in their flat-nosed, bulging-lipped faces. They were, he declared later in his manuscript, the most terrible objective entities he ever saw in his life, either in K'n-yan or in the outer world. And the specific quality of their supreme terror was something apart from any easily recognisable or describable feature. The main trouble was that they were not wholly products of Nature.\n\nThe party observed Zamacona's fright, and hastened to reassure him as much as possible. The beasts or gyaa-yothn, they explained, surely were curious things; but were really very harmless. The flesh they ate was not that of intelligent people of the master-race, but merely that of a special slave-class which had for the most part ceased to be thoroughly human, and which indeed was the principal meat stock of K'n-yan. They\u2014or their principal ancestral element\u2014had first been found in a wild state amidst the Cyclopean ruins of the deserted red-litten world of Yoth which lay below the blue-litten world of K'n-yan. That part of them was human, seemed quite clear; but men of science could never decide whether they were actually the descendants of the bygone entities who had lived and reigned in the strange ruins. The chief ground for such a supposition was the well-known fact that the vanished inhabitants of Yoth had been quadrupedal. This much was known from the very few manuscripts and carvings found in the vaults of Zin, beneath the largest ruined city of Yoth. But it was also known from these manuscripts that the beings of Yoth had possessed the art of synthetically creating life, and had made and destroyed several efficiently designed races of industrial and transportational animals in the course of their history\u2014to say nothing of concocting all manner of fantastic living shapes for the sake of amusement and new sensations during the long period of decadence. The beings of Yoth had undoubtedly been reptilian in affiliations, and most physiologists of Tsath agreed that the present beasts had been very much inclined toward reptilianism before they had been crossed with the mammal slave-class of K'n-yan.\n\nIt argues well for the intrepid fire of those Renaissance Spaniards who conquered half the unknown world, that P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona y Nu\u00f1ez actually mounted one of the morbid beasts of Tsath and fell into place beside the leader of the cavalcade\u2014the man named Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn, who had been most active in the previous exchange of information. It was a repulsive business; but after all, the seat was very easy, and the gait of the clumsy gyaa-yoth surprisingly even and regular. No saddle was necessary, and the animal appeared to require no guidance whatever. The procession moved forward at a brisk gait, stopping only at certain abandoned cities and temples about which Zamacona was curious, and which Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn was obligingly ready to display and explain. The largest of these towns, B'graa, was a marvel of finely wrought gold, and Zamacona studied the curiously ornate architecture with avid interest. Buildings tended toward height and slenderness, with roofs bursting into a multitude of pinnacles. The streets were narrow, curving, and occasionally picturesquely hilly, but Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn said that the later cities of K'n-yan were far more spacious and regular in design. All these old cities of the plain shewed traces of levelled walls\u2014reminders of the archaic days when they had been successively conquered by the now dispersed armies of Tsath.\n\nThere was one object along the route which Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn exhibited on his own initiative, even though it involved a detour of about a mile along a vine-tangled side path. This was a squat, plain temple of black basalt blocks without a single carving, and containing only a vacant onyx pedestal. The remarkable thing about it was its story, for it was a link with a fabled elder world compared to which even cryptic Yoth was a thing of yesterday. It had been built in imitation of certain temples depicted in the vaults of Zin, to house a very terrible black toad-idol found in the red-litten world and called Tsathoggua in the Yothic manuscripts. It had been a potent and widely worshipped god, and after its adoption by the people of K'n-yan had lent its name to the city which was later to become dominant in that region. Yothic legend said that it had come from a mysterious inner realm beneath the red-litten world\u2014a black realm of peculiar-sensed beings which had no light at all, but which had had great civilisations and mighty gods before ever the reptilian quadrupeds of Yoth had come into being. Many images of Tsathoggua existed in Yoth, all of which were alleged to have come from the black inner realm, and which were supposed by Yothic archaeologists to represent the aeon-extinct race of that realm. The black realm called N'kai in the Yothic manuscripts had been explored as thoroughly as possible by these archaeologists, and singular stone troughs or burrows had excited infinite speculation.\n\nWhen the men of K'n-yan discovered the red-litten world and deciphered its strange manuscripts, they took over the Tsathoggua cult and brought all the frightful toad images up to the land of blue light\u2014housing them in shrines of Yoth-quarried basalt like the one Zamacona now saw. The cult flourished until it almost rivalled the ancient cults of Yig and Tulu, and one branch of the race even took it to the outer world, where the smallest of the images eventually found a shrine at Olatho\u00eb, in the land of Lomar near the earth's north pole. It was rumoured that this outer-world cult survived even after the great ice-sheet and the hairy Gnophkehs destroyed Lomar, but of such matters not much was definitely known in K'n-yan. In that world of blue light the cult came to an abrupt end, even though the name of Tsath was suffered to remain.\n\nWhat ended the cult was the partial exploration of the black realm of N'kai beneath the red-litten world of Yoth. According to the Yothic manuscripts, there was no surviving life in N'kai, but something must have happened in the aeons between the days of Yoth and the coming of men to the earth; something perhaps not unconnected with the end of Yoth. Probably it had been an earthquake, opening up lower chambers of the lightless world which had been closed against the Yothic archaeologists; or perhaps some more frightful juxtaposition of energy and electrons, wholly inconceivable to any sort of vertebrate minds, had taken place. At any rate, when the men of K'n-yan went down into N'kai's black abyss with their great atom-power searchlights they found living things\u2014living things that oozed along stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse\u2014they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes. The explorers of K'n-yan did not pause for detailed observations, and those who escaped alive sealed the passage leading from red-litten Yoth down into the gulfs of nether horror. Then all the images of Tsathoggua in the land of K'n-yan were dissolved into the ether by disintegrating rays, and the cult was abolished forever.\n\nAeons later, when naive fears were outgrown and supplanted by scientific curiosity, the old legends of Tsathoggua and N'kai were recalled, and a suitably armed and equipped exploring party went down to Yoth to find the closed gate of the black abyss and see what might still lie beneath. But they could not find the gate, nor could any man ever do so in all the ages that followed. Nowadays there were those who doubted that any abyss had ever existed, but the few scholars who could still decipher the Yothic manuscripts believed that the evidence for such a thing was adequate, even though the middle records of K'n-yan, with accounts of the one frightful expedition into N'kai, were more open to question. Some of the later religious cults tried to suppress remembrance of N'kai's existence, and attached severe penalties to its mention; but these had not begun to be taken seriously at the time of Zamacona's advent to K'n-yan.\n\nAs the cavalcade returned to the old highway and approached the low range of mountains, Zamacona saw that the river was very close on the left. Somewhat later, as the terrain rose, the stream entered a gorge and passed through the hills, while the road traversed the gap at a rather higher level close to the brink. It was about this time that light rainfall came. Zamacona noticed the occasional drops and drizzle, and looked up at the coruscating blue air, but there was no diminution of the strange radiance. Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn then told him that such condensations and precipitations of water-vapour were not uncommon, and that they never dimmed the glare of the vault above. A kind of mist, indeed, always hung about the lowlands of K'n-yan, and compensated for the complete absence of true clouds.\n\nThe slight rise of the mountain pass enabled Zamacona, by looking behind, to see the ancient and deserted plain in panorama as he had seen it from the other side. He seems to have appreciated its strange beauty, and to have vaguely regretted leaving it; for he speaks of being urged by Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn to drive his beast more rapidly. When he faced frontward again he saw that the crest of the road was very near; the weed-grown way leading starkly up and ending against a blank void of blue light. The scene was undoubtedly highly impressive\u2014a steep green mountain wall on the right, a deep river-chasm on the left with another green mountain wall beyond it, and ahead, the churning sea of bluish coruscations into which the upward path dissolved. Then came the crest itself, and with it the world of Tsath outspread in a stupendous forward vista.\n\nZamacona caught his breath at the great sweep of peopled landscape, for it was a hive of settlement and activity beyond anything he had ever seen or dreamed of. The downward slope of the hill itself was relatively thinly strown with small farms and occasional temples; but beyond it lay an enormous plain covered like a chess board with planted trees, irrigated by narrow canals cut from the river, and threaded by wide, geometrically precise roads of gold or basalt blocks. Great silver cables borne aloft on golden pillars linked the low, spreading buildings and clusters of buildings which rose here and there, and in some places one could see lines of partly ruinous pillars without cables. Moving objects shewed the fields to be under tillage, and in some cases Zamacona saw that men were ploughing with the aid of the repulsive, half-human quadrupeds.\n\nBut most impressive of all was the bewildering vision of clustered spires and pinnacles which rose afar off across the plain and shimmered flower-like and spectral in the coruscating blue light. At first Zamacona thought it was a mountain covered with houses and temples, like some of the picturesque hill cities of his own Spain, but a second glance shewed him that it was not indeed such. It was a city of the plain, but fashioned of such heaven-reaching towers that its outline was truly that of a mountain. Above it hung a curious greyish haze, through which the blue light glistened and took added overtones of radiance from the million golden minarets. Glancing at Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn, Zamacona knew that this was the monstrous, gigantic, and omnipotent city of Tsath.\n\nAs the road turned downward toward the plain, Zamacona felt a kind of uneasiness and sense of evil. He did not like the beast he rode, or the world that could provide such a beast, and he did not like the atmosphere that brooded over the distant city of Tsath. When the cavalcade began to pass occasional farms, the Spaniard noticed the forms that worked in the fields; and did not like their motions and proportions, or the mutilations he saw on most of them. Moreover, he did not like the way that some of these forms were herded in corrals, or the way they grazed on the heavy verdure. Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn indicated that these beings were members of the slave-class, and that their acts were controlled by the master of the farm, who gave them hypnotic impressions in the morning of all they were to do during the day. As semi-conscious machines, their industrial efficiency was nearly perfect. Those in the corrals were inferior specimens, classified merely as livestock.\n\nUpon reaching the plain, Zamacona saw the larger farms and noted the almost human work performed by the repulsive horned gyaa-yothn. He likewise observed the more manlike shapes that toiled along the furrows, and felt a curious fright and disgust toward certain of them whose motions were more mechanical than those of the rest. These, Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn explained, were what men called the y'm-bhi\u2014organisms which had died, but which had been mechanically reanimated for industrial purposes by means of atomic energy and thought-power. The slave-class did not share the immortality of the freemen of Tsath, so that with time the number of y'm-bhi had become very large. They were dog-like and faithful, but not so readily amenable to thought-commands as were living slaves. Those which most repelled Zamacona were those whose mutilations were greatest; for some were wholly headless, while others had suffered singular and seemingly capricious subtractions, distortions, transpositions, and graftings in various places. The Spaniard could not account for this condition, but Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn made it clear that these were slaves who had been used for the amusement of the people in some of the vast arenas; for the men of Tsath were connoisseurs of delicate sensation, and required a constant supply of fresh and novel stimuli for their jaded impulses. Zamacona, though by no means squeamish, was not favourably impressed by what he saw and heard.\n\nApproached more closely, the vast metropolis became dimly horrible in its monstrous extent and inhuman height. Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn explained that the upper parts of the great towers were no longer used, and that many had been taken down to avoid the bother of maintenance. The plain around the original urban area was covered with newer and smaller dwellings, which in many cases were preferred to the ancient towers. From the whole mass of gold and stone a monotonous roar of activity droned outward over the plain, while cavalcades and streams of wagons were constantly entering and leaving over the great gold-or stone-paved roads.\n\nSeveral times Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn paused to shew Zamacona some particular object of interest, especially the temples of Yig, Tulu, Nug, Yeb, and the Not-to-Be-Named One which lined the road at infrequent intervals, each in its embowering grove according to the custom of K'n-yan. These temples, unlike those of the deserted plain beyond the mountains, were still in active use; large parties of mounted worshippers coming and going in constant streams. Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn took Zamacona into each of them, and the Spaniard watched the subtle orgiastic rites with fascination and repulsion. The ceremonies of Nug and Yeb sickened him especially\u2014so much, indeed, that he refrained from describing them in his manuscript. One squat, black temple of Tsathoggua was encountered, but it had been turned into a shrine of Shub-Niggurath, the All-Mother and wife of the Not-to-Be-Named One. This deity was a kind of sophisticated Astarte, and her worship struck the pious Catholic as supremely obnoxious. What he liked least of all were the emotional sounds emitted by the celebrants\u2014jarring sounds in a race that had ceased to use vocal speech for ordinary purposes.\n\nClose to the compact outskirts of Tsath, and well within the shadow of its terrifying towers, Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn pointed out a monstrous circular building before which enormous crowds were lined up. This, he indicated, was one of the many amphitheatres where curious sports and sensations were provided for the weary people of K'n-yan. He was about to pause and usher Zamacona inside the vast curved facade, when the Spaniard, recalling the mutilated forms he had seen in the fields, violently demurred. This was the first of those friendly clashes of taste which were to convince the people of Tsath that their guest followed strange and narrow standards.\n\nTsath itself was a network of strange and ancient streets; and despite a growing sense of horror and alienage, Zamacona was enthralled by its intimations of mystery and cosmic wonder. The dizzy giganticism of its overawing towers, the monstrous surge of teeming life through its ornate avenues, the curious carvings on its doorways and windows, the odd vistas glimpsed from balustraded plazas and tiers of titan terraces, and the enveloping grey haze which seemed to press down on the gorge-like streets in low ceiling-fashion, all combined to produce such a sense of adventurous expectancy as he had never known before. He was taken at once to a council of executives which held forth in a gold-and-copper palace behind a gardened and fountained park, and was for some time subjected to close, friendly questioning in a vaulted hall frescoed with vertiginous arabesques. Much was expected of him, he could see, in the way of historical information about the outside earth; but in return all the mysteries of K'n-yan would be unveiled to him. The one great drawback was the inexorable ruling that he might never return to the world of sun and stars and Spain which was his.\n\nA daily programme was laid down for the visitor, with time apportioned judiciously among several kinds of activities. There were to be conversations with persons of learning in various places, and lessons in many branches of Tsathic lore. Liberal periods of research were allowed for, and all the libraries of K'n-yan both secular and sacred were to be thrown open to him as soon as he might master the written languages. Rites and spectacles were to be attended\u2014except when he might especially object\u2014and much time would be left for the enlightened pleasure-seeking and emotional titillation which formed the goal and nucleus of daily life. A house in the suburbs or an apartment in the city would be assigned him, and he would be initiated into one of the large affection-groups, including many noblewomen of the most extreme and art-enhanced beauty, which in latter-day K'n-yan took the place of family units. Several horned gyaa-yothn would be provided for his transportation and errand-running, and ten living slaves of intact body would serve to conduct his establishment and protect him from thieves and sadists and religious orgiasts on the public highways. There were many mechanical devices which he must learn to use, but Gll'-Hthaa-Ynn would instruct him immediately regarding the principal ones.\n\nUpon his choosing an apartment in preference to a suburban villa, Zamacona was dismissed by the executives with great courtesy and ceremony, and was led through several gorgeous streets to a cliff-like carven structure of some seventy or eighty floors. Preparations for his arrival had already been instituted, and in a spacious ground-floor suite of vaulted rooms slaves were busy adjusting hangings and furniture. There were lacquered and inlaid tabourets, velvet and silk reclining-corners and squatting-cushions, and infinite rows of teakwood and ebony pigeon-holes with metal cylinders containing some of the manuscripts he was soon to read\u2014standard classics which all urban apartments possessed. Desks with great stacks of membrane-paper and pots of the prevailing green pigment were in every room\u2014each with graded sets of pigment brushes and other odd bits of stationery. Mechanical writing devices stood on ornate golden tripods, while over all was shed a brilliant blue light from energy-globes set in the ceiling. There were windows, but at this shadowy ground-level they were of scant illuminating value. In some of the rooms were elaborate baths, while the kitchen was a maze of technical contrivances. Supplies were brought, Zamacona was told, through the network of underground passages which lay beneath Tsath, and which had once accommodated curious mechanical transports. There was a stable on that underground level for the beasts, and Zamacona would presently be shewn how to find the nearest runway to the street. Before his inspection was finished, the permanent staff of slaves arrived and were introduced; and shortly afterward there came some half-dozen freemen and noblewomen of his future affection-group, who were to be his companions for several days, contributing what they could to his instruction and amusement. Upon their departure, another party would take their place, and so onward in rotation through a group of about fifty members." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Thus was P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona y Nu\u00f1ez absorbed for four years into the life of the sinister city of Tsath in the blue-litten nether world of K'n-yan. All that he learned and saw and did is clearly not told in his manuscript; for a pious reticence overcame him when he began to write in his native Spanish tongue, and he dared not set down everything. Much he consistently viewed with repulsion, and many things he steadfastly refrained from seeing or doing or eating. For other things he atoned by frequent countings of the beads of his rosary. He explored the entire world of K'n-yan, including the deserted machine-cities of the middle period on the gorse-grown plain of Nith, and made one descent into the red-litten world of Yoth to see the Cyclopean ruins. He witnessed prodigies of craft and machinery which left him breathless, and beheld human metamorphoses, dematerialisations, rematerialisations, and reanimations which made him cross himself again and again. His very capacity for astonishment was blunted by the plethora of new marvels which every day brought him.\n\nBut the longer he stayed, the more he wished to leave, for the inner life of K'n-yan was based on impulses very plainly outside his radius. As he progressed in historical knowledge, he understood more; but understanding only heightened his distaste. He felt that the people of Tsath were a lost and dangerous race\u2014more dangerous to themselves than they knew\u2014and that their growing frenzy of monotony-warfare and novelty-quest was leading them rapidly toward a precipice of disintegration and utter horror. His own visit, he could see, had accelerated their unrest; not only by introducing fears of outside invasion, but by exciting in many a wish to sally forth and taste the diverse external world he described. As time progressed, he noticed an increasing tendency of the people to resort to dematerialisation as an amusement; so that the apartments and amphitheatres of Tsath became a veritable Witches' Sabbath of transmutations, age-adjustments, death-experiments, and projections. With the growth of boredom and restlessness, he saw, cruelty and subtlety and revolt were growing apace. There was more and more cosmic abnormality, more and more curious sadism, more and more ignorance and superstition, and more and more desire to escape out of physical life into a half-spectral state of electronic dispersal.\n\nAll his efforts to leave, however, came to nothing. Persuasion was useless, as repeated trials proved; though the mature disillusion of the upper classes at first prevented them from resenting their guest's open wish for departure. In a year which he reckoned as 1543 Zamacona made an actual attempt to escape through the tunnel by which he had entered K'n-yan, but after a weary journey across the deserted plain he encountered forces in the dark passage which discouraged him from future attempts in that direction. As a means of sustaining hope and keeping the image of home in mind, he began about this time to make rough draughts of the manuscript relating his adventures; delighting in the loved, old Spanish words and the familiar letters of the Roman alphabet. Somehow he fancied he might get the manuscript to the outer world; and to make it convincing to his fellows he resolved to enclose it in one of the Tulu-metal cylinders used for sacred archives. That alien, magnetic substance could not but support the incredible story he had to tell.\n\nBut even as he planned, he had little real hope of ever establishing contact with the earth's surface. Every known gate, he knew, was guarded by persons or forces that it were better not to oppose. His attempt at escape had not helped matters, for he could now see a growing hostility to the outer world he represented. He hoped that no other European would find his way in; for it was possible that later comers might not fare as well as he. He himself had been a cherished fountain of data, and as such had enjoyed a privileged status. Others, deemed less necessary, might receive rather different treatment. He even wondered what would happen to him when the sages of Tsath considered him drained dry of fresh facts; and in self-defence began to be more gradual in his talks on earth-lore, conveying whenever he could the impression of vast knowledge held in reserve.\n\nOne other thing which endangered Zamacona's status in Tsath was his persistent curiosity regarding the ultimate abyss of N'kai, beneath red-litten Yoth, whose existence the dominant religious cults of K'n-yan were more and more inclined to deny. When exploring Yoth he had vainly tried to find the blocked-up entrance; and later on he experimented in the arts of dematerialisation and projection, hoping that he might thereby be able to throw his consciousness downward into the gulfs which his physical eyes could not discover. Though never becoming truly proficient in these processes, he did manage to achieve a series of monstrous and portentous dreams which he believed included some elements of actual projection into N'kai; dreams which greatly shocked and perturbed the leaders of Yig and Tulu-worship when he related them, and which he was advised by friends to conceal rather than exploit. In time those dreams became very frequent and maddening; containing things which he dared not record in his main manuscript, but of which he prepared a special record for the benefit of certain learned men in Tsath.\n\nIt may have been unfortunate\u2014or it may have been mercifully fortunate\u2014that Zamacona practiced so many reticences and reserved so many themes and descriptions for subsidiary manuscripts. The main document leaves one to guess much about the detailed manners, customs, thoughts, language, and history of K'n-yan, as well as to form any adequate picture of the visual aspect and daily life of Tsath. One is left puzzled, too, about the real motivations of the people; their strange passivity and craven unwarlikeness, and their almost cringing fear of the outer world despite their possession of atomic and dematerialising powers which would have made them unconquerable had they taken the trouble to organise armies as in the old days. It is evident that K'n-yan was far along in its decadence\u2014reacting with mixed apathy and hysteria against the standardised and time-tabled life of stultifying regularity which machinery had brought it during its middle period. Even the grotesque and repulsive customs and modes of thought and feeling can be traced to this source; for in his historical research Zamacona found evidence of bygone eras in which K'n-yan had held ideas much like those of the classic and renaissance outer world, and had possessed a national character and art full of what Europeans regard as dignity, kindness, and nobility.\n\nThe more Zamacona studied these things, the more apprehensive about the future he became; because he saw that the omnipresent moral and intellectual disintegration was a tremendously deep-seated and ominously accelerating movement. Even during his stay the signs of decay multiplied. Rationalism degenerated more and more into fanatical and orgiastic superstition, centring in a lavish adoration of the magnetic Tulu-metal, and tolerance steadily dissolved into a series of frenzied hatreds, especially toward the outer world of which the scholars were learning so much from him. At times he almost feared that the people might some day lose their age-long apathy and brokenness and turn like desperate rats against the unknown lands above them, sweeping all before them by virtue of their singular and still-remembered scientific powers. But for the present they fought their boredom and sense of emptiness in other ways; multiplying their hideous emotional outlets and increasing the mad grotesqueness and abnormality of their diversions. The arenas of Tsath must have been accursed and unthinkable places\u2014Zamacona never went near them. And what they would be in another century, or even in another decade, he did not dare to think. The pious Spaniard crossed himself and counted his beads more often than usual in those days.\n\nIn the year 1545, as he reckoned it, Zamacona began what may well be accepted as his final series of attempts to leave K'n-yan. His fresh opportunity came from an unexpected source\u2014a female of his affection-group who conceived for him a curious individual infatuation based on some hereditary memory of the days of monogamous wedlock in Tsath. Over this female\u2014a noblewoman of moderate beauty and of at least average intelligence named T'la-yub\u2014Zamacona acquired the most extraordinary influence; finally inducing her to help him in an escape, under the promise that he would let her accompany him. Chance proved a great factor in the course of events, for T'la-yub came of a primordial family of gate-lords who had retained oral traditions of at least one passage to the outer world which the mass of people had forgotten even at the time of the great closing; a passage to a mound on the level plains of earth which had, in consequence, never been sealed up or guarded. She explained that the primordial gate-lords were not guards or sentries, but merely ceremonial and economic proprietors, half-feudal and baronial in status, of an era preceding the severance of surface-relations. Her own family had been so reduced at the time of the closing that their gate had been wholly overlooked; and they had ever afterward preserved the secret of its existence as a sort of hereditary secret\u2014a source of pride, and of a sense of reserve power, to offset the feeling of vanished wealth and influence which so constantly irritated them.\n\nZamacona, now working feverishly to get his manuscript into final form in case anything should happen to him, decided to take with him on his outward journey only five beast-loads of unalloyed gold in the form of the small ingots used for minor decorations\u2014enough, he calculated, to make him a personage of unlimited power in his own world. He had become somewhat hardened to the sight of the monstrous gyaa-yothn during his four years of residence in Tsath, hence did not shrink from using the creatures; yet he resolved to kill and bury them, and cache the gold, as soon as he reached the outer world, since he knew that even a glimpse of one of the things would drive any ordinary Indian mad. Later he could arrange for a suitable expedition to transport the treasure to Mexico. T'la-yub he would perhaps allow to share his fortunes, for she was by no means unattractive; though possibly he would arrange for her sojourn amongst the plains Indians, since he was not overanxious to preserve links with the manner of life in Tsath. For a wife, of course, he would choose a lady of Spain\u2014or at worst, an Indian princess of normal outer-world descent and a regular and approved past. But for the present T'la-yub must be used as a guide. The manuscript he would carry on his own person, encased in a book-cylinder of the sacred and magnetic Tulu-metal.\n\nThe expedition itself is described in the addendum to Zamacona's manuscript, written later, and in a hand shewing signs of nervous strain. It set out amidst the most careful precautions, choosing a rest-period and proceeding as far as possible along the faintly lighted passages beneath the city. Zamacona and T'la-yub, disguised in slaves' garments, bearing provision-knapsacks, and leading the five laden beasts on foot, were readily taken for commonplace workers; and they clung as long as possible to the subterranean way\u2014using a long and little-frequented branch which had formerly conducted the mechanical transports to the now ruined suburb of L'thaa. Amidst the ruins of L'thaa they came to the surface, thereafter passing as rapidly as possible over the deserted, blue-litten plain of Nith toward the Grh-yan range of low hills. There, amidst the tangled underbrush, T'la-yub found the long disused and half-fabulous entrance to the forgotten tunnel; a thing she had seen but once before\u2014aeons in the past, when her father had taken her thither to shew her this monument to their family pride. It was hard work getting the laden gyaa-yothn to scrape through the obstructing vines and briers, and one of them displayed a rebelliousness destined to bear dire consequences\u2014bolting away from the party and loping back toward Tsath on its detestable pads, golden burden and all.\n\nIt was nightmare work burrowing by the light of blue-ray torches upward, downward, forward, and upward again through a dank, choked tunnel that no foot had trodden since ages before the sinking of Atlantis; and at one point T'la-yub had to practice the fearsome art of dematerialisation on herself, Zamacona, and the laden beasts in order to pass a point wholly clogged by shifting earth-strata. It was a terrible experience for Zamacona; for although he had often witnessed dematerialisation in others, and even practiced it himself to the extent of dream-projection, he had never been fully subjected to it before. But T'la-yub was skilled in the arts of K'n-yan, and accomplished the double metamorphosis in perfect safety.\n\nThereafter they resumed the hideous burrowing through stalactited crypts of horror where monstrous carvings leered at every turn; alternately camping and advancing for a period which Zamacona reckoned as about three days, but which was probably less. At last they came to a very narrow place where the natural or only slightly hewn cave-walls gave place to walls of wholly artificial masonry, carved into terrible bas-reliefs. These walls, after about a mile of steep ascent, ended with a pair of vast niches, one on each side, in which monstrous, nitre-encrusted images of Yig and Tulu squatted, glaring at each other across the passage as they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world. At this point the passage opened into a prodigious vaulted and circular chamber of human construction; wholly covered with horrible carvings, and revealing at the farther end an arched passageway with the foot of a flight of steps. T'la-yub knew from family tales that this must be very near the earth's surface, but she could not tell just how near. Here the party camped for what they meant to be their last rest-period in the subterraneous world.\n\nIt must have been hours later that the clank of metal and the padding of beasts' feet awakened Zamacona and T'la-yub. A bluish glare was spreading from the narrow passage between the images of Yig and Tulu, and in an instant the truth was obvious. An alarm had been given at Tsath\u2014as was later revealed, by the returning gyaa-yoth which had rebelled at the brier-choked tunnel-entrance\u2014and a swift party of pursuers had come to arrest the fugitives. Resistance was clearly useless, and none was offered. The party of twelve beast-riders proved studiously polite, and the return commenced almost without a word or thought-message on either side.\n\nIt was an ominous and depressing journey, and the ordeal of dematerialisation and rematerialisation at the choked place was all the more terrible because of the lack of that hope and expectancy which had palliated the process on the outward trip. Zamacona heard his captors discussing the imminent clearing of this choked place by intensive radiations, since henceforward sentries must be maintained at the hitherto unknown outer portal. It would not do to let outsiders get within the passage, for then any who might escape without due treatment would have a hint of the vastness of the inner world and would perhaps be curious enough to return in greater strength. As with the other passages since Zamacona's coming, sentries must be stationed all along, as far as the very outermost gate; sentries drawn from amongst all the slaves, the dead-alive y'm-bhi, or the class of discredited freemen. With the overrunning of the American plains by thousands of Europeans, as the Spaniard had predicted, every passage was a potential source of danger; and must be rigorously guarded until the technologists of Tsath could spare the energy to prepare an ultimate and entrance-hiding obliteration as they had done for many passages in earlier and more vigorous times.\n\nZamacona and T'la-yub were tried before three gn'agn of the supreme tribunal in the gold-and-copper palace behind the gardened and fountained park, and the Spaniard was given his liberty because of the vital outer-world information he still had to impart. He was told to return to his apartment and to his affection-group; taking up his life as before, and continuing to meet deputations of scholars according to the latest schedule he had been following. No restrictions would be imposed upon him so long as he might remain peacefully in K'n-yan\u2014but it was intimated that such leniency would not be repeated after another attempt at escape. Zamacona had felt that there was an element of irony in the parting words of the chief gn'ag\u2014an assurance that all of his gyaa-yothn, including the one which had rebelled, would be returned to him.\n\nThe fate of T'la-yub was less happy. There being no object in retaining her, and her ancient Tsathic lineage giving her act a greater aspect of treason than Zamacona's had possessed, she was ordered to be delivered to the curious diversions of the amphitheatre; and afterward, in a somewhat mutilated and half-dematerialised form, to be given the functions of a y'm-bhi or animated corpse-slave and stationed among the sentries guarding the passage whose existence she had betrayed. Zamacona soon heard, not without many pangs of regret he could scarcely have anticipated, that poor T'la-yub had emerged from the arena in a headless and otherwise incomplete state, and had been set as an outermost guard upon the mound in which the passage had been found to terminate. She was, he was told, a night-sentinel, whose automatic duty was to warn off all comers with a torch; sending down reports to a small garrison of twelve dead slave y'm-bhi and six living but partly dematerialised freemen in the vaulted, circular chamber if the approachers did not heed her warning. She worked, he was told, in conjunction with a day-sentinel\u2014a living freeman who chose this post in preference to other forms of discipline for other offences against the state. Zamacona, of course, had long known that most of the chief gate-sentries were such discredited freemen.\n\nIt was now made plain to him, though indirectly, that his own penalty for another escape-attempt would be service as a gate-sentry\u2014but in the form of a dead-alive y'm-bhi slave, and after amphitheatre-treatment even more picturesque than that which T'la-yub was reported to have undergone. It was intimated that he\u2014or parts of him\u2014would be reanimated to guard some inner section of the passage; within sight of others, where his abridged person might serve as a permanent symbol of the rewards of treason. But, his informants always added, it was of course inconceivable that he would ever court such a fate. So long as he remained peaceably in K'n-yan, he would continue to be a free, privileged, and respected personage.\n\nYet in the end P\u00e1nfilo de Zamacona did court the fate so direfully hinted to him. True, he did not really expect to encounter it; but the nervous latter part of his manuscript makes it clear that he was prepared to face its possibility. What gave him a final hope of scatheless escape from K'n-yan was his growing mastery of the art of dematerialisation. Having studied it for years, and having learned still more from the two instances in which he had been subjected to it, he now felt increasingly able to use it independently and effectively. The manuscript records several notable experiments in this art\u2014minor successes accomplished in his apartment\u2014and reflects Zamacona's hope that he might soon be able to assume the spectral form in full, attaining complete invisibility and preserving that condition as long as he wished.\n\nOnce he reached this stage, he argued, the outward way lay open to him. Of course he could not bear away any gold, but mere escape was enough. He would, though, dematerialise and carry away with him his manuscript in the Tulu-metal cylinder, even though it cost additional effort; for this record and proof must reach the outer world at all hazards. He now knew the passage to follow; and if he could thread it in an atom-scattered state, he did not see how any person or force could detect or stop him. The only trouble would be if he failed to maintain his spectral condition at all times. That was the one ever-present peril, as he had learned from his experiments. But must one not always risk death and worse in a life of adventure? Zamacona was a gentleman of Old Spain; of the blood that faced the unknown and carved out half the civilisation of the New World.\n\nFor many nights after his ultimate resolution Zamacona prayed to St. Pamphilus and other guardian saints, and counted the beads of his rosary. The last entry in the manuscript, which toward the end took the form of a diary more and more, was merely a single sentence\u2014\"Es m\u00e1s tarde de lo que pensaba\u2014tengo que marcharme\".... \"It is later than I thought; I must go.\" After that, only silence and conjecture\u2014and such evidence as the presence of the manuscript itself, and what that manuscript could lead to, might provide." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "When I looked up from my half-stupefied reading and note-taking the morning sun was high in the heavens. The electric bulb was still burning, but such things of the real world\u2014the modern outer world\u2014were far from my whirling brain. I knew I was in my room at Clyde Compton's at Binger\u2014but upon what monstrous vista had I stumbled? Was this thing a hoax or a chronicle of madness? If a hoax, was it a jest of the sixteenth century or of today? The manuscript's age looked appallingly genuine to my not wholly unpracticed eyes, and the problem presented by the strange metal cylinder I dared not even think about.\n\nMoreover, what a monstrously exact explanation it gave of all the baffling phenomena of the mound\u2014of the seemingly meaningless and paradoxical actions of diurnal and nocturnal ghosts, and of the queer cases of madness and disappearance! It was even an accursedly plausible explanation\u2014evilly consistent\u2014if one could adopt the incredible. It must be a shocking hoax devised by someone who knew all the lore of the mound. There was even a hint of social satire in the account of that unbelievable nether world of horror and decay. Surely this was the clever forgery of some learned cynic\u2014something like the leaden crosses in New Mexico, which a jester once planted and pretended to discover as a relique of some forgotten Dark Age colony from Europe.\n\nUpon going down to breakfast I hardly knew what to tell Compton and his mother, as well as the curious callers who had already begun to arrive. Still in a daze, I cut the Gordian Knot by giving a few points from the notes I had made, and mumbling my belief that the thing was a subtle and ingenious fraud left there by some previous explorer of the mound\u2014a belief in which everybody seemed to concur when told of the substance of the manuscript. It is curious how all that breakfast group\u2014and all the others in Binger to whom the discussion was repeated\u2014seemed to find a great clearing of the atmosphere in the notion that somebody was playing a joke on somebody. For the time we all forgot that the known, recent history of the mound presented mysteries as strange as any in the manuscript, and as far from acceptable solution as ever.\n\nThe fears and doubts began to return when I asked for volunteers to visit the mound with me. I wanted a larger excavating party\u2014but the idea of going to that uncomfortable place seemed no more attractive to the people of Binger than it had seemed on the previous day. I myself felt a mounting horror upon looking toward the mound and glimpsing the moving speck which I knew was the daylight sentinel; for in spite of all my scepticism the morbidities of that manuscript stuck by me and gave everything connected with the place a new and monstrous significance. I absolutely lacked the resolution to look at the moving speck with my binoculars. Instead, I set out with the kind of bravado we display in nightmares\u2014when, knowing we are dreaming, we plunge desperately into still thicker horrors, for the sake of having the whole thing over the sooner. My pick and shovel were already out there, so I had only my handbag of smaller paraphernalia to take. Into this I put the strange cylinder and its contents, feeling vaguely that I might possibly find something worth checking up with some part of the green-lettered Spanish text. Even a clever hoax might be founded on some actual attribute of the mound which a former explorer had discovered\u2014and that magnetic metal was damnably odd! Grey Eagle's cryptic talisman still hung from its leathern cord around my neck.\n\nI did not look very sharply at the mound as I walked toward it, but when I reached it there was nobody in sight. Repeating my upward scramble of the previous day, I was troubled by thoughts of what might lie close at hand if, by any miracle, any part of the manuscript were actually half-true. In such a case, I could not help reflecting, the hypothetical Spaniard Zamacona must have barely reached the outer world when overtaken by some disaster\u2014perhaps an involuntary rematerialisation. He would naturally, in that event, have been seized by whichever sentry happened to be on duty at the time\u2014either the discredited freeman, or, as a matter of supreme irony, the very T'la-yub who had planned and aided his first attempt at escape\u2014and in the ensuing struggle the cylinder with the manuscript might well have been dropped on the mound's summit, to be neglected and gradually buried for nearly four centuries. But, I added, as I climbed over the crest, one must not think of extravagant things like that. Still, if there were anything in the tale, it must have been a monstrous fate to which Zamacona had been dragged back... the amphitheatre... mutilation... duty somewhere in the dank, nitrous tunnel as a dead-alive slave... a maimed corpse-fragment as an automatic interior sentry....\n\nIt was a very real shock which chased this morbid speculation from my head, for upon glancing around the elliptical summit I saw at once that my pick and shovel had been stolen. This was a highly provoking and disconcerting development; baffling, too, in view of the seeming reluctance of all the Binger folk to visit the mound. Was this reluctance a pretended thing, and had the jokers of the village been chuckling over my coming discomfiture as they solemnly saw me off ten minutes before? I took out my binoculars and scanned the gaping crowd at the edge of the village. No\u2014they did not seem to be looking for any comic climax; yet was not the whole affair at bottom a colossal joke in which all the villagers and reservation people were concerned\u2014legends, manuscript, cylinder, and all? I thought of how I had seen the sentry from a distance, and then found him unaccountably vanished; thought also of the conduct of old Grey Eagle, of the speech and expressions of Compton and his mother, and of the unmistakable fright of most of the Binger people. On the whole, it could not very well be a village-wide joke. The fear and the problem were surely real, though obviously there were one or two jesting daredevils in Binger who had stolen out to the mound and made off with the tools I had left.\n\nEverything else on the mound was as I had left it\u2014brush cut by my machete, slight, bowl-like depression toward the north end, and the hole I had made with my trench-knife in digging up the magnetism-revealed cylinder. Deeming it too great a concession to the unknown jokers to return to Binger for another pick and shovel, I resolved to carry out my programme as best I could with the machete and trench-knife in my handbag; so extracting these, I set to work excavating the bowl-like depression which my eye had picked as the possible site of a former entrance to the mound. As I proceeded, I felt again the suggestion of a sudden wind blowing against me which I had noticed the day before\u2014a suggestion which seemed stronger, and still more reminiscent of unseen, formless, opposing hands laid on my wrists, as I cut deeper and deeper through the root-tangled red soil and reached the exotic black loam beneath. The talisman around my neck appeared to twitch oddly in the breeze\u2014not in any one direction, as when attracted by the buried cylinder, but vaguely and diffusely, in a manner wholly unaccountable.\n\nThen, quite without warning, the black, root-woven earth beneath my feet began to sink cracklingly, while I heard a faint sound of sifting, falling matter far below me. The obstructing wind, or forces, or hands now seemed to be operating from the very seat of the sinking, and I felt that they aided me by pushing as I leaped back out of the hole to avoid being involved in any cave-in. Bending down over the brink and hacking at the mould-caked root-tangle with my machete, I felt that they were against me again\u2014but at no time were they strong enough to stop my work. The more roots I severed, the more falling matter I heard below. Finally the hole began to deepen of itself toward the centre, and I saw that the earth was sifting down into some large cavity beneath, so as to leave a good-sized aperture when the roots that had bound it were gone. A few more hacks of the machete did the trick, and with a parting cave-in and uprush of curiously chill and alien air the last barrier gave way. Under the morning sun yawned a huge opening at least three feet square, and shewing the top of a flight of stone steps down which the loose earth of the collapse was still sliding. My quest had come to something at last! With an elation of accomplishment almost overbalancing fear for the nonce, I replaced the trench-knife and machete in my handbag, took out my powerful electric torch, and prepared for a triumphant, lone, and utterly rash invasion of the fabulous nether world I had uncovered.\n\nIt was rather hard getting down the first few steps, both because of the fallen earth which had choked them and because of a sinister up-pushing of a cold wind from below. The talisman around my neck swayed curiously, and I began to regret the disappearing square of daylight above me. The electric torch shewed dank, water-stained, and salt-encrusted walls fashioned of huge basalt blocks, and now and then I thought I descried some trace of carving beneath the nitrous deposits. I gripped my handbag more tightly, and was glad of the comforting weight of the sheriff's heavy revolver in my right-hand coat pocket. After a time the passage began to wind this way and that, and the staircase became free from obstructions. Carvings on the walls were now definitely traceable, and I shuddered when I saw how clearly the grotesque figures resembled the monstrous bas-reliefs on the cylinder I had found. Winds and forces continued to blow malevolently against me, and at one or two bends I half fancied the torch gave glimpses of thin, transparent shapes not unlike the sentinel on the mound as my binoculars had shewed him. When I reached this stage of visual chaos I stopped for a moment to get a grip on myself. It would not do to let my nerves get the better of me at the very outset of what would surely be a trying experience, and the most important archaeological feat of my career.\n\nBut I wished I had not stopped at just that place, for the act fixed my attention on something profoundly disturbing. It was only a small object lying close to the wall on one of the steps below me, but that object was such as to put my reason to a severe test, and bring up a line of the most alarming speculations. That the opening above me had been closed against all material forms for generations was utterly obvious from the growth of shrub-roots and accumulation of drifting soil; yet the object before me was most distinctly not many generations old. For it was an electric torch much like the one I now carried\u2014warped and encrusted in the tomb-like dampness, but none the less perfectly unmistakable. I descended a few steps and picked it up, wiping off the evil deposits on my rough coat. One of the nickel bands bore an engraved name and address, and I recognised it with a start the moment I made it out. It read \"Jas. C. Williams, 17 Trowbridge St., Cambridge, Mass.\"\u2014and I knew that it had belonged to one of the two daring college instructors who had disappeared on June 28, 1915. Only thirteen years ago, and yet I had just broken through the sod of centuries! How had the thing got there? Another entrance\u2014or was there something after all in this mad idea of dematerialisation and rematerialisation?\n\nDoubt and horror grew upon me as I wound still farther down the seemingly endless staircase. Would the thing never stop? The carvings grew more and more distinct, and assumed a narrative pictorial quality which brought me close to panic as I recognised many unmistakable correspondences with the history of K'n-yan as sketched in the manuscript now resting in my handbag. For the first time I began seriously to question the wisdom of my descent, and to wonder whether I had not better return to the upper air before I came upon something which would never let me return as a sane man. But I did not hesitate long, for as a Virginian I felt the blood of ancestral fighters and gentlemen-adventurers pounding a protest against retreat from any peril known or unknown.\n\nMy descent became swifter rather than slower, and I avoided studying the terrible bas-reliefs and intaglios that had unnerved me. All at once I saw an arched opening ahead, and realised that the prodigious staircase had ended at last. But with that realisation came horror in mounting magnitude, for before me there yawned a vast vaulted crypt of all-too-familiar outline\u2014a great circular space answering in every least particular to the carving-lined chamber described in the Zamacona manuscript.\n\nIt was indeed the place. There could be no mistake. And if any room for doubt yet remained, that room was abolished by what I saw directly across the great vault. It was a second arched opening, commencing a long, narrow passage and having at its mouth two huge opposite niches bearing loathsome and titanic images of shockingly familiar pattern. There in the dark unclean Yig and hideous Tulu squatted eternally, glaring at each other across the passage as they had glared since the earliest youth of the human world.\n\nFrom this point onward I ask no credence for what I tell\u2014for what I think I saw. It is too utterly unnatural, too utterly monstrous and incredible, to be any part of sane human experience or objective reality. My torch, though casting a powerful beam ahead, naturally could not furnish any general illumination of the Cyclopean crypt; so I now began moving it about to explore the giant walls little by little. As I did so, I saw to my horror that the space was by no means vacant, but was instead littered with odd furniture and utensils and heaps of packages which bespoke a populous recent occupancy\u2014no nitrous reliques of the past, but queerly shaped objects and supplies in modern, every-day use. As my torch rested on each article or group of articles, however, the distinctness of the outlines soon began to grow blurred; until in the end I could scarcely tell whether the things belonged to the realm of matter or to the realm of spirit.\n\nAll this while the adverse winds blew against me with increasing fury, and the unseen hands plucked malevolently at me and snatched at the strange magnetic talisman I wore. Wild conceits surged through my mind. I thought of the manuscript and what it said about the garrison stationed in this place\u2014twelve dead slave y'm-bhi and six living but partly dematerialised freemen\u2014that was in 1545\u2014three hundred and eighty-three years ago.... What since then? Zamacona had predicted change... subtle disintegration... more dematerialisation... weaker and weaker... was it Grey Eagle's talisman that held them at bay\u2014their sacred Tulu-metal\u2014and were they feebly trying to pluck it off so that they might do to me what they had done to those who had come before?... It occurred to me with shuddering force that I was building my speculations out of a full belief in the Zamacona manuscript\u2014this must not be\u2014I must get a grip on myself\u2014\n\nBut, curse it, every time I tried to get a grip I saw some fresh sight to shatter my poise still further. This time, just as my will power was driving the half-seen paraphernalia into obscurity, my glance and torch-beam had to light on two things of very different nature; two things of the eminently real and sane world; yet they did more to unseat my shaky reason than anything I had seen before\u2014because I knew what they were, and knew how profoundly, in the course of Nature, they ought not to be there. They were my own missing pick and shovel, side by side, and leaning neatly against the blasphemously carved wall of that hellish crypt. God in heaven\u2014and I had babbled to myself about daring jokers from Binger!\n\nThat was the last straw. After that the cursed hypnotism of the manuscript got at me, and I actually saw the half-transparent shapes of the things that were pushing and plucking; pushing and plucking\u2014those leprous palaeogean things with something of humanity still clinging to them\u2014the complete forms, and the forms that were morbidly and perversely incomplete... all these, and hideous other entities\u2014the four-footed blasphemies with ape-like face and projecting horn... and not a sound so far in all that nitrous hell of inner earth....\n\nThen there was a sound\u2014a flopping; a padding; a dull, advancing sound which heralded beyond question a being as structurally material as the pickaxe and the shovel\u2014something wholly unlike the shadow-shapes that ringed me in, yet equally remote from any sort of life as life is understood on the earth's wholesome surface. My shattered brain tried to prepare me for what was coming, but could not frame any adequate image. I could only say over and over again to myself, \"It is of the abyss, but it is not dematerialised.\" The padding grew more distinct, and from the mechanical cast of the tread I knew it was a dead thing that stalked in the darkness. Then\u2014oh, God, I saw it in the full beam of my torch; saw it framed like a sentinel in the narrow passage between the nightmare idols of the serpent Yig and the octopus Tulu....\n\nLet me collect myself enough to hint at what I saw; to explain why I dropped torch and handbag and fled empty-handed in the utter blackness, wrapped in a merciful unconsciousness which did not wear off until the sun and the distant yelling and the shouting from the village roused me as I lay gasping on the top of the accursed mound. I do not yet know what guided me again to the earth's surface. I only know that the watchers in Binger saw me stagger up into sight three hours after I had vanished; saw me lurch up and fall flat on the ground as if struck by a bullet. None of them dared to come out and help me; but they knew I must be in a bad state, so tried to rouse me as best they could by yelling in chorus and firing off revolvers.\n\nIt worked in the end, and when I came to I almost rolled down the side of the mound in my eagerness to get away from that black aperture which still yawned open. My torch and tools, and the handbag with the manuscript, were all down there; but it is easy to see why neither I nor anyone else ever went after them. When I staggered across the plain and into the village I dared not tell what I had seen. I only muttered vague things about carvings and statues and snakes and shaken nerves. And I did not faint again until somebody mentioned that the ghost-sentinel had reappeared about the time I had staggered half way back to town. I left Binger that evening, and have never been there since, though they tell me the ghosts still appear on the mound as usual.\n\nBut I have resolved to hint here at last what I dared not hint to the people of Binger on that terrible August afternoon. I don't know yet just how I can go about it\u2014and if in the end you think my reticence strange, just remember that to imagine such a horror is one thing, but to see it is another thing. I saw it. I think you'll recall my citing early in this tale the case of a bright young man named Heaton who went out to that mound one day in 1891 and came back at night as the village idiot, babbling for eight years about horrors and then dying in an epileptic fit. What he used to keep moaning was \"That white man\u2014oh, my God, what they did to him....\"\n\nWell, I saw the same thing that poor Heaton saw\u2014and I saw it after reading the manuscript, so I know more of its history than he did. That makes it worse\u2014for I know all that it implies; all that must be still brooding and festering and waiting down there. I told you it had padded mechanically toward me out of the narrow passage and had stood sentry-like at the entrance between the frightful eidola of Yig and Tulu. That was very natural and inevitable\u2014because the thing was a sentry. It had been made a sentry for punishment, and it was quite dead\u2014besides lacking head, arms, lower legs, and other customary parts of a human being. Yes\u2014it had been a very human being once; and what is more, it had been white. Very obviously, if that manuscript was as true as I think it was, this being had been used for the diversions of the amphitheatre before its life had become wholly extinct and supplanted by automatic impulses controlled from outside.\n\nOn its white and only slightly hairy chest some letters had been gashed or branded\u2014I had not stopped to investigate, but had merely noted that they were in an awkward and fumbling Spanish; an awkward Spanish implying a kind of ironic use of the language by an alien inscriber familiar neither with the idiom nor the Roman letters used to record it. The inscription had read \"Secuestrado a la voluntad de Xinai\u00e1n en el cuerpo decapitado de Tlay\u00fab\"\u2014\"Seized by the will of K'n-yan in the headless body of T'la-yub.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Music of Erich Zann by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d'Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place; and have personally explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d'Auseil. But despite all I have done it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.\n\nThat my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d'Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within a half-hour's walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d'Auseil.\n\nThe Rue d'Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighbouring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognise them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue d'Auseil was reached.\n\nI have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d'Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.\n\nThe inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d'Auseil, kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.\n\nMy room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann's desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.\n\nThereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man's acquaintance.\n\nOne night, as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking, and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.\n\nMotioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his viol from its moth-eaten covering, and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.\n\nThose haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled inaccurately to myself; so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and seemed to shew the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognised the whistled air his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder\u2014a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at the summit.\n\nThe old man's glance brought Blandot's remark to my mind, and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in the Rue d'Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even greater than before the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly manner; forcing me into a chair, then with an appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil in the laboured French of a foreigner.\n\nThe note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.\n\nAs I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window\u2014the shutter must have rattled in the night-wind\u2014and for some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend. The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.\n\nIt was not long before I found that Zann's eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at night\u2014in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.\n\nWhat I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread\u2014the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.\n\nThen one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking viol swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real\u2014the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother's skirts.\n\nShaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man's pencil flew.\n\nIt was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old musician's feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighbouring houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for dropping his pencil suddenly he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.\n\nIt would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and could realise that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out\u2014what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognised the air\u2014it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.\n\nLouder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the west.\n\nAt this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night-wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann's screaming viol now outdid itself, emitting sounds I had never thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy, and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could even suggest.\n\nA sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d'Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city's lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.\n\nI staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light, crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of Zann's chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses.\n\nHe did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why\u2014knew not why till I felt of the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.\n\nLeaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.\n\nDespite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been able to find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Nameless City by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWhen I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.\n\nRemote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:\n\n\u2002\"That is not dead which can eternal lie,\n\n\u2002And with strange aeons even death may die.\"\n\nI should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the nameless city, the city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, yet I defied them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it, and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine; why no other man shivers so horribly when the night-wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look I forgot my triumph at finding it, and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn.\n\nFor hours I waited, till the east grew grey and the stars faded, and the grey turned to roseal light edged with gold. I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of the desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal stone place; that place too old for Egypt and Mero\u00eb to remember; that place which I alone of living men had seen.\n\nIn and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and palaces I wandered, finding never a carving or inscription to tell of those men, if men they were, who built the city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome, and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools, and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices; but progress was slow, and nothing significant was revealed. When night and the moon returned I felt a chill wind which brought new fear, so that I did not dare to remain in the city. And as I went outside the antique walls to sleep, a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me, blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still.\n\nI awaked just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams, my ears ringing as from some metallic peal. I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested, and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls, and the bygone streets, and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the splendours of an age so distant that Chaldaea could not recall it, and thought of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.\n\nAll at once I came upon a place where the bed-rock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff; and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people. Hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small, squat rock houses or temples; whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation, though sandstorms had long since effaced any carvings which may have been outside.\n\nVery low and sand-choked were all of the dark apertures near me, but I cleared one with my spade and crawled through it, carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern was indeed a temple, and beheld plain signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars, and niches, all curiously low, were not absent; and though I saw no sculptures nor frescoes, there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiselled chamber was very strange, for I could hardly more than kneel upright; but the area was so great that my torch shewed only part at a time. I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting, and inexplicable nature, and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained, I crawled out again, avid to find what the other temples might yield.\n\nNight had now approached, yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear, so that I did not flee from the long moon-cast shadows that had daunted me when first I saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it, finding more vague stones and symbols, though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as low, but much less broad, ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and of my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast.\n\nThe moon was gleaming vividly over the primeval ruins, lighting a dense cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel, and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again, but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset, and judged it was a normal thing. I decided that it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave, and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source; soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me, almost out of sight. Against the choking sand-cloud I plodded toward this temple, which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest, and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door, sighing uncannily as it ruffled the sand and spread about the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still, till finally all was at rest again; but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city, and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder; so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come.\n\nThis temple, as I had fancied from the outside, was larger than either of those I had visited before; and was presumably a natural cavern, since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright, but saw that the stones and altars were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race, curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away; and on two of the altars I saw with rising excitement a maze of well-fashioned curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.\n\nThen a brighter flare of the fantastic flame shewed me that for which I had been seeking, the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown; and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiselled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small, numerous, and steeply descending steps. I shall always see those steps in my dreams, for I came to learn what they meant. At the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent. My mind was whirling with mad thoughts, and the words and warnings of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the lands that men know to the nameless city that men dare not know. Yet I hesitated only a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage, feet first, as though on a ladder.\n\nIt is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have had such a descent as mine. The narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well, and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling. I lost track of the hours and forgot to consult my watch, though I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must be traversing. There were changes of direction and of steepness, and once I came to a long, low, level passage where I had to wriggle feet first along the rocky floor, holding my torch at arm's length beyond my head. The place was not high enough for kneeling. After that were more of the steep steps, and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out. I do not think I noticed it at the time, for when I did notice it I was still holding it high above me as if it were ablaze. I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which has made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.\n\nIn the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemoniac lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany's tales\u2014\"the unreverberate blackness of the abyss\". Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in singsong from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:\n\n\u2003\"A reservoir of darkness, black\n\n\u2003As witches' cauldrons are, when fill'd\n\n\u2003With moon-drugs in th' eclipse distill'd.\n\n\u2003Leaning to look if foot might pass\n\n\u2003Down thro' that chasm, I saw, beneath,\n\n\u2003As far as vision could explore,\n\n\u2003The jetty sides as smooth as glass,\n\n\u2003Looking as if just varnish'd o'er\n\n\u2003With that dark pitch the Sea of Death\n\n\u2003Throws out upon its slimy shore.\"\n\nTime had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor, and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head. I could not quite stand, but could kneel upright, and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random. I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts. As in that Palaeozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications. The cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals, and were oblong and horizontal, hideously like coffins in shape and size. When I tried to move two or three for further examination, I found they were firmly fastened.\n\nI saw that the passage was a long one, so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness; crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure the walls and rows of cases still stretched on. Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. And then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it.\n\nJust when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell; but there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of the corridor and the cases, revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence. For a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it, since the glow was very faint; but as I mechanically kept on stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realised that my fancy had been but feeble. This hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art. Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colours were beyond description. The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and contained the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man.\n\nTo convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible. They were of the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile, sometimes the seal, but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the palaeontologist ever heard. In size they approximated a small man, and their fore legs bore delicate and evidently flexible feet curiously like human hands and fingers. But strangest of all were their heads, which presented a contour violating all known biological principles. To nothing can such things be well compared\u2014in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic Satyr, and the human being. Not Jove himself had so colossal and protuberant a forehead, yet the horns and the noselessness and the alligator-like jaw placed the things outside all established categories. I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies, half suspecting they were artificial idols; but soon decided they were indeed some palaeogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive. To crown their grotesqueness, most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics, and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals.\n\nThe importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast, for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling. With matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own, wherein they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions; and I could not but think that their pictured history was allegorical, perhaps shewing the progress of the race that worshipped them. These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.\n\nHolding this view, I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it. I saw its wars and triumphs, its troubles and defeats, and afterward its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people\u2014here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles\u2014were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world whereof their prophets had told them. It was all vividly weird and realistic, and its connexion with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable. I even recognised the passages.\n\nAs I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw later stages of the painted epic\u2014the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years; the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long, where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth, hewing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they never ceased to worship. Now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely, and, remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men, pondered upon the customs of the nameless city. Many things were peculiar and inexplicable. The civilisation, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilisations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions. I could, for example, find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs, save such as were related to wars, violence, and plagues; and I wondered at the reticence shewn concerning natural death. It was as though an ideal of earthly immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.\n\nStill nearer the end of the passage were painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance; contrasted views of the nameless city in its desertion and growing ruin, and of the strange new realm or paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone. In these views the city and the desert valley were shewn always by moonlight, a golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls and half revealing the splendid perfection of former times, shewn spectrally and elusively by the artist. The paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed; portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys. At the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax. The paintings were less skilful, and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes. They seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock, coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert. The forms of the people\u2014always represented by the sacred reptiles\u2014appeared to be gradually wasting away, though their spirit as shewn hovering about the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion. Emaciated priests, displayed as reptiles in ornate robes, cursed the upper air and all who breathed it; and one terrible final scene shewed a primitive-looking man, perhaps a pioneer of ancient Irem, the City of Pillars, torn to pieces by members of the elder race. I remembered how the Arabs fear the nameless city, and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare.\n\nAs I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely the end of the low-ceiled hall, and was aware of a great gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence. Creeping up to it, I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what lay beyond; for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance, such as one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist. Behind me was a passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it; before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence.\n\nReaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps\u2014small numerous steps like those of the black passages I had traversed\u2014but after a few feet the glowing vapours concealed everything. Swung back open against the left-hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass, incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bas-reliefs, which could if closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock. I looked at the steps, and for the nonce dared not try them. I touched the open brass door, and could not move it. Then I sank prone to the stone floor, my mind aflame with prodigious reflections which not even a death-like exhaustion could banish.\n\nAs I lay still with closed eyes, free to ponder, many things I had lightly noted in the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance\u2014scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday, the vegetation of the valley around it, and the distant lands with which its merchants traded. The allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence, and I wondered that it should be so closely followed in a pictured history of such importance. In the frescoes the nameless city had been shewn in proportions fitted to the reptiles. I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been, and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins. I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor, which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honoured; though it perforce reduced the worshippers to crawling. Perhaps the very rites had involved a crawling in imitation of the creatures. No religious theory, however, could easily explain why the level passage in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples\u2014or lower, since one could not even kneel in it. As I thought of the crawling creatures, whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me, I felt a new throb of fear. Mental associations are curious, and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting, mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of primordial life.\n\nBut as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer. That a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt, and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give. The frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities, hills, and valleys in this lower realm, and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me.\n\nMy fears, indeed, concerned the past rather than the future. Not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes, miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eerie light and mist, could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul. An ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples in the nameless city, while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shewed oceans and continents that man has forgotten, with only here and there some vaguely familiar outline. Of what could have happened in the geological aeons since the paintings ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay, no man might say. Life had once teemed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond; now I was alone with vivid relics, and I trembled to think of the countless ages through which these relics had kept a silent and deserted vigil.\n\nSuddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world. My sensations were much like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night, and were as inexplicable as they were poignant. In another moment, however, I received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound\u2014the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths. It was a deep, low moaning, as of a distant throng of condemned spirits, and came from the direction in which I was staring. Its volume rapidly grew, till soon it reverberated frightfully through the low passage, and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of cold air, likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above. The touch of this air seemed to restore my balance, for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise, one of which had indeed served to reveal the hidden tunnels to me. I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near, so braced myself to resist the gale which was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening. My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.\n\nMore and more madly poured the shrieking, moaning night-wind into that gulf of the inner earth. I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss. Such fury I had not expected, and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination. The malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies; once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only other human image in that frightful corridor, the man who was torn to pieces by the nameless race, for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide a vindictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent. I think I screamed frantically near the last\u2014I was almost mad\u2014but if I did so my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent, but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world. Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:\n\n\"That is not dead which can eternal lie,\n\nAnd with strange aeons even death may die.\"\n\nOnly the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place\u2014what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what Abaddon guided me back to life, where I must always remember and shiver in the night-wind till oblivion\u2014or worse\u2014claims me. Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing\u2014too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours when one cannot sleep.\n\nI have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal\u2014cacodaemoniacal\u2014and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities. Presently those voices, while still chaotic before me, seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me; and down there in the grave of unnumbered aeon-dead antiquities, leagues below the dawn-lit world of men, I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor\u2014a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent; devils of a race no man might mistake\u2014the crawling reptiles of the nameless city.\n\nAnd as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-peopled blackness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Night Ocean by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI went to Ellston Beach not only for the pleasures of sun and ocean, but to rest a weary mind. Since I knew no person in the little town, which thrives on summer vacationists and presents only blank windows during most of the year, there seemed no likelihood that I might be disturbed. This pleased me, for I did not wish to see anything but the expanse of pounding surf and the beach lying before my temporary home.\n\nMy long work of the summer was completed when I left the city, and the large mural design produced by it had been entered in the contest. It had taken me the bulk of the year to finish the painting, and when the last brush was cleaned I was no longer reluctant to yield to the claims of health and find rest and seclusion for a time. Indeed, when I had been a week on the beach I recalled only now and then the work whose success had so recently seemed all-important. There was no longer the old concern with a hundred complexities of colour and ornament; no longer the fear and mistrust of my ability to render a mental image actual, and turn by my own skill alone the dim-conceived idea into the careful draught of a design. And yet that which later befell me by the lonely shore may have grown solely from the mental constitution behind such concern and fear and mistrust. For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming; and who can say that such a nature does not open latent eyes sensitive to unsuspected worlds and orders of being?\n\nNow that I am trying to tell what I saw I am conscious of a thousand maddening limitations. Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which come as we drift into the blankness of sleep, are more vivid and meaningful to us in that form than when we have sought to weld them with reality. Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are hastily stifled when we would translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue. Forgotten scenes, and lands more obscure than the golden world of childhood, spring into the sleeping mind to reign until awakening puts them to rout. Amid these may be attained something of the glory and contentment for which we yearn; some adumbration of sharp beauties suspected but not before revealed, which are to us as the Grail to holy spirits of the mediaeval world. To shape these things on the wheel of art, to seek to bring some faded trophy from that intangible realm of shadow and gossamer, requires equal skill and memory. For although dreams are in all of us, few hands may grasp their moth-wings without tearing them.\n\nSuch skill this narrative does not have. If I might, I would reveal to you the hinted events which I perceived dimly, like one who peers into an unlit realm and glimpses forms whose motion is concealed. In my mural design, which then lay with a multitude of others in the building for which they were planned, I had striven equally to catch a trace of this elusive shadow-world, and had perhaps succeeded better than I shall now succeed. My stay in Ellston was to await the judging of that design; and when days of unfamiliar leisure had given me perspective, I discovered that\u2014in spite of those weaknesses which a creator always detects most clearly\u2014I had indeed managed to retain in line and colour some fragments snatched from the endless world of imagining. The difficulties of the process, and the resulting strain on all my powers, had undermined my health and brought me to the beach during this period of waiting.\n\nSince I wished to be wholly alone, I rented (to the delight of the incredulous owner) a small house some distance from the village of Ellston\u2014which, because of the waning season, was alive with a moribund bustle of tourists, uniformly uninteresting to me. The house, dark from the sea-wind though it had not been painted, was not even a satellite of the village; but swung below it on the coast like a pendulum beneath a still clock, quite alone upon a hill of weed-grown sand. Like a solitary warm animal it crouched facing the sea, and its inscrutable dirty windows stared upon a lonely realm of earth and sky and enormous sea. It will not do to use too much imagining in a narrative whose facts, could they be augmented and fitted into a mosaic, would be strange enough in themselves; but I thought the little house was lonely when I saw it, and that like myself, it was conscious of its meaningless nature before the great sea.\n\nI took the place in late August, arriving a day before I was expected, and encountering a van and two workingmen unloading the furniture provided by the owner. I did not know then how long I would stay, and when the truck that brought the goods had left I settled my small luggage and locked the door (feeling very proprietary about having a house after months of a rented room) to go down the weedy hill and on the beach. Since it was quite square and had but one room, the house required little exploration. Two windows in each side provided a great quantity of light, and somehow a door had been squeezed in as an afterthought on the oceanward wall. The place had been built about ten years previously, but on account of its distance from Ellston village was difficult to rent even during the active summer season. There being no fireplace, it stood empty and alone from October until far into spring. Though actually less than a mile below Ellston, it seemed more remote; since a bend in the coast caused one to see only grassy dunes in the direction of the village.\n\nThe first day, half-gone when I was installed, I spent in the enjoyment of sun and restless water\u2014things whose quiet majesty made the designing of murals seem distant and tiresome. But this was the natural reaction to a long concern with one set of habits and activities. I was through with my work and my vacation was begun. This fact, while elusive for the moment, showed in everything which surrounded me that afternoon of my arrival; and in the utter change from old scenes. There was an effect of bright sun upon a shifting sea of waves whose mysteriously impelled curves were strewn with what appeared to be rhinestones. Perhaps a watercolour might have caught the solid masses of intolerable light which lay upon the beach where the sea mingled with the sand. Although the ocean bore her own hue, it was dominated wholly and incredibly by the enormous glare. There was no other person near me, and I enjoyed the spectacle without the annoyance of any alien object upon the stage. Each of my senses was touched in a different way, but sometimes it seemed that the roar of the sea was akin to that great brightness, or as if the waves were glaring instead of the sun, each of these being so vigorous and insistent that impressions coming from them were mingled. Curiously, I saw no one bathing near my little square house during that or succeeding afternoons, although the curving shore included a wide beach even more inviting than that at the village, where the surf was dotted with random figures. I supposed that this was because of the distance and because there had never been other houses below the town. Why this unbuilt stretch existed, I could not imagine; since many dwellings straggled along the northward coast, facing the sea with aimless eyes.\n\nI swam until the afternoon had gone, and later, having rested, walked into the little town. Darkness hid the sea from me as I entered, and I found in the dingy lights of the streets tokens of a life which was not even conscious of the great, gloom-shrouded thing lying so close. There were painted women in tinsel adornments, and bored men who were no longer young\u2014a throng of foolish marionettes perched on the lip of the ocean-chasm; unseeing, unwilling to see what lay above them and about, in the multitudinous grandeur of the stars and the leagues of the night ocean. I walked along that darkened sea as I went back to the bare little house, sending the beams of my flashlight out upon the naked and impenetrable void. In the absence of the moon, this light made a solid bar athwart the walls of the uneasy tide; and I felt an indescribable emotion born of the noise of the waters and the perception of my inconceivable smallness as I cast that tiny beam upon a realm immense in itself, yet only the black border of the earthly deep. That nighted deep, upon which ships were moving alone in the darkness where I could not see them, gave off the murmur of a distant, angry rabble.\n\nWhen I reached my high residence I knew that I had passed no one during the mile's walk from the village, and yet there somehow lingered an impression that I had been all the while accompanied by the spirit of the lonely sea. It was, I thought, personified in a shape which was not revealed to me, but which moved quietly about beyond my range of comprehension. It was like those actors who wait behind darkened scenery in readiness for the lines which will shortly call them before our eyes to move and speak in the sudden revelation of the footlights. At last I shook off this fancy and sought my key to enter the place, whose bare walls gave a sudden feeling of security.\n\nMy cottage was entirely free of the village, as if it had wandered down the coast and was unable to return; and there I heard nothing of the disturbing clamour when I returned each night after supper. I generally stayed but a short while upon the streets of Ellston, though sometimes I went into the place for the sake of the walk it provided. There were all the multitude of curio-shops and falsely regal theater-fronts that clutter vacation towns, but I never went into these; and the place seemed useful only for its restaurants. It was astonishing the number of useless things people found to do.\n\nThere was a succession of sun-filled days at first. I rose early, and beheld the grey sky agleam with promise of sunrise; a prophecy fulfilled as I stood witness. Those dawns were cold, and their colours faint in comparison to that uniform radiance of day which gives to every hour the quality of white noon. That great light, so apparent the first day, made each succeeding day a yellow page in the book of time. I noticed that many of the beach-people were displeased by the inordinate sun, whereas I sought it. After grey months of toil the lethargy induced by a physical existence in a region governed by the simple things\u2014the wind and light and water\u2014had a prompt effect upon me; and since I was anxious to continue this healing process, I spent all my time outdoors in the sunlight. This induced a state at once impassive and submissive, and gave me a feeling of security against the ravenous night. As darkness is akin to death, so is light to vitality. Through the heritage of a million years ago, when men were closer to the mother sea, and when the creatures of which we are born lay languid in the shallow, sun-pierced water, we still seek the primal things when we are tired, steeping ourselves within their lulling security like those early half-mammals which had not yet ventured upon the oozy land.\n\nThe monotony of the waves gave repose, and I had no other occupation than witnessing a myriad ocean moods. There is a ceaseless change in the waters\u2014colours and shades pass over them like the insubstantial expressions of a well-known face; and these are at once communicated to us by half-recognized senses. When the sea is restless, remembering old ships that have gone over her chasms, there comes up silently in our hearts the longing for a vanished horizon. But when she forgets, we forget also. Though we know her a lifetime, she must always hold an alien air, as if something too vast to have shape were lurking in the universe to which she is a door. The morning ocean, glimmering with a reflected mist of blue-white cloud and expanding diamond foam, has the eyes of one who ponders on strange things, and her intricately woven webs, through which dart a myriad coloured fishes, hold the air of some great idle thing which will arise presently from the hoary immemorial chasms and stride upon the land.\n\nI was content for many days, and glad that I had chosen the lonely house which sat like a small beast upon those rounded cliffs of sand. Among the pleasantly aimless amusements fostered by such a life, I took to following the edge of the tide (where the waves left a damp irregular outline rimmed with evanescent foam) for long distances; and sometimes I found curious bits of shell in the chance litter of the sea. There was an astonishing lot of debris on that inward-curving coast which my bare little house overlooked, and I judged that currents whose courses diverge from the village beach must reach that spot. At any rate, my pockets\u2014when I had any\u2014generally held vast stores of trash; most of which I threw away an hour or two after picking it up, wondering why I had kept it. Once, however, I found a small bone whose nature I could not identify, save that it was certainly nothing out of a fish; and I kept this, along with a large metal bead whose minutely carven design was rather unusual. This latter depicted a fishy thing against a patterned background of seaweed instead of the usual floral or geometrical designs, and was still clearly traceable though worn with years of tossing in the surf. Since I had never seen anything like it, I judged that it represented some fashion, now forgotten, of a previous year at Ellston, where similar fads were common.\n\nI had been there perhaps a week when the weather began a gradual change. Each stage of this progressive darkening was followed by another subtly intensified, so that in the end the entire atmosphere surrounding me had shifted from day to evening. This was more obvious to me in a series of mental impressions than in what I actually witnessed, for the small house was lonely under the grey skies, and there was sometimes a beating wind that came out of the ocean bearing moisture. The sun was displaced by long intervals of cloudiness\u2014layers of grey mist beyond whose unknown depth the sun lay cut off. Though it might glare with the old intensity above that enormous veil, it could not penetrate. The beach was a prisoner in a hueless vault for hours at a time, as if something of the night were welling into other hours.\n\nAlthough the wind was invigorating and the ocean whipped into little churning spirals of activity by the vagrant flapping, I found the water growing chill, so that I could not stay in it as long as I had done previously, and thus I fell into the habit of long walks, which\u2014when I was unable to swim\u2014provided the exercise that I was so careful to obtain. These walks covered a greater range of sea-edge than my previous wanderings, and since the beach extended in a stretch of miles beyond the tawdry village, I often found myself wholly isolated upon an endless area of sand as evening drew close. When this occurred, I would stride hastily along the whispering sea-border, following the outline so that I should not wander inland and lose my way. And sometimes, when these walks were late (as they grew increasingly to be) I would come upon the crouching house that looked like a harbinger of the village. Insecure upon the wind-gnawed cliffs, a dark blot upon the morbid hues of the ocean sunset, it was more lonely than by the full light of either orb; and seemed to my imagination like a mute, questioning face turned toward me expectant of some action. That the place was isolated I have said, and this at first pleased me; but in that brief evening hour when the sun left a gore-splattered decline and darkness lumbered on like an expanding shapeless blot, there was an alien presence about the place: a spirit, a mood, an impression that came from the surging wind, the gigantic sky, and that sea which drooled blackening waves upon a beach grown abruptly strange. At these times I felt an uneasiness which had no very definite cause, although my solitary nature had made me long accustomed to the ancient silence and the ancient voice of nature. These misgivings, to which I could have put no sure name, did not affect me long, yet I think now that all the while a gradual consciousness of the ocean's immense loneliness crept upon me, a loneliness that was made subtly horrible by intimations\u2014which were never more than such\u2014of some animation or sentience preventing me from being wholly alone.\n\nThe noisy, yellow streets of the town, with their curiously unreal activity, were very far away, and when I went there for my evening meal (mistrusting a diet entirely of my own ambiguous cooking) I took increasing and quite unreasonable care that I should return to the cottage before the late darkness, although I was often abroad until ten or so.\n\nYou will say that such action is unreasonable; that if I had feared the darkness in some childish way, I would have entirely avoided it. You will ask me why I did not leave the place since its loneliness was depressing me. To all this I have no reply, save that whatever unrest I felt, whatever of remote disturbance there was to me in brief aspects of the darkening sun or in the eager salt-brittle wind or in the robe of the dark sea that lay crumpled like an enormous garment so close to me, was something which had an origin half in my own heart, which showed itself only at fleeting moments, and which had no very long effect upon me. In the recurrent days of diamond light, with sportive waves flinging blue peaks at the basking shore, the memory of dark moods seemed rather incredible, yet only an hour or two afterward I might again experience those moods, and descend to a dim region of despair.\n\nPerhaps these inward emotions were only a reflection of the sea's own mood; for although half of what we see is coloured by the interpretation placed upon it by our minds, many of our feelings are shaped quite distinctly by external, physical things. The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always, she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse. Since I was doing no work, seeing no person that I knew, I was perhaps susceptible to shades of her cryptic meaning which would have been overlooked by another. The ocean ruled my life during the whole of that late summer; demanding it as recompense for the healing she had brought me.\n\nThere were drownings at the beach that year, and while I heard of these only casually (such is our indifference to a death which does not concern us, and to which we are not witness), I knew that their details were unsavoury. The people who died\u2014some of them swimmers of a skill beyond the average\u2014were sometimes not found until many days had elapsed, and the hideous vengeance of the deep had scourged their rotten bodies. It was as if the sea had dragged them into a chasm-lair and had mulled them about in the darkness until, satisfied that they were no longer of any use, she had floated them ashore in a ghastly state. No one seemed to know what had caused these deaths. Their frequency excited alarm among the timid, since the undertow at Ellston was not strong, and since there were known to be no sharks at hand. Whether the bodies showed marks of any attacks I did not learn, but the dread of a death which moves among the waves and comes on lone people from a lightless, motionless place is a dread which men know and do not like. They must quickly find a reason for such a death, even if there are no sharks. Since sharks formed only a suspected cause, and one never to my knowledge confirmed, the swimmers who continued during the rest of the season were on guard against treacherous tides rather than against any possible sea-animal.\n\nAutumn, indeed, was not a great distance off, and some people used this as an excuse for leaving the sea, where men were snared by death, and going to the security of inland fields, where one cannot even hear the ocean. So August ended, and I had been at the beach many days.\n\nThere had been a threat of a storm since the fourth of the new month, and on the sixth, when I set out for a walk in the damp wind, there was a mass of formless cloud, colourless and oppressive, above the ruffled leaden sea. The motion of the wind, directed toward no especial goal but stirring uneasily, provided a sensation of coming animation\u2014a hint of life in the elements which might be the long-expected storm. I had eaten my luncheon at Ellston, and though the heavens seemed the closing lid of a great casket, I ventured far down the beach and away from both the town and my no-longer-to-be-seen house. As the universal grey became spotted with a carrion purple\u2014curiously brilliant despite its sombre hue\u2014I found that I was several miles from any possible shelter. This, however, did not seem very important; for despite the dark skies with their added glow of unknown presage I was in a curious mood of detachment paralleling that glow\u2014a mood which flashed through a body grown suddenly alert and sensitive to the outline of shapes and meanings that were previously dim. Obscurely, a memory came to me; suggested by the likeness of the scene to one I had imagined when a story was read to me in childhood. That tale\u2014of which I had not thought for many years\u2014concerned a woman who was loved by the dark-bearded king of an underwater realm of blurred cliffs where fish-things lived, and who was taken from the golden-haired youth of her troth by a dark being crowned with a priest-like mitre and having the features of a withered ape. What had remained in the corner of my fancy was the image of cliffs beneath the water against the hueless, dusky no-sky of such a realm; and this, though I had forgotten most of the story, was recalled quite unexpectedly by the same pattern of cliff and sky which I then beheld. The sight was similar to what I had imagined in a year now lost save for random, incomplete impressions. Suggestions of this story may have lingered behind certain irritating unfinished memories, and in certain values hinted to my senses by scenes whose actual worth was bafflingly small. Frequently, in flashes of momentary perception (the conditions more than the object being significant), we feel that certain isolated scenes and arrangements\u2014a feathery landscape, a woman's dress along the curve of a road by afternoon, or the solidity of a century-defying tree against the pale morning sky\u2014hold something precious, some golden virtue that we must grasp. And yet when such a scene or arrangement is viewed later, or from another point, we find that it has lost its value and meaning for us. Perhaps this is because the thing we see does not hold that elusive quality, but only suggests to the mind some very different thing which remains unremembered. The baffled mind, not wholly sensing the cause of its flashing appreciation, seizes on the object exciting it, and is surprised when there is nothing of worth therein. Thus it was when I beheld the purpling clouds. They held the stateliness and mystery of old monastery towers at twilight, but their aspect was also that of the cliffs in the old fairy-tale. Suddenly reminded of this lost image, I half expected to see, in the fine-spun dirty foam and among the waves which were now as if they had been poured of flawed black glass, the horrid figure of that ape-faced creature, wearing a mitre old with verdigris, advancing from its kingdom in some lost gulf to which those waves were sky.\n\nI did not see any such creature from the realm of imagining, but as the chill wind veered, slitting the heavens like a rustling knife, there lay in the gloom of merging cloud and water only a grey object, like a piece of driftwood, tossing obscurely on the foam. This was a considerable distance out, and since it vanished shortly, may not have been wood, but a porpoise coming to the troubled surface.\n\nI soon found that I had stayed too long contemplating the rising storm and linking my early fancies with its grandeur, for an icy rain began spotting down, bringing a more uniform gloom upon a scene already too dark for the hour. Hurrying along the grey sand, I felt the impact of cold drops upon my back, and before many moments my clothing was soaked throughout. At first I had run, put to flight by the colourless drops whose pattern hung in long linking strands from an unseen sky, but after I saw that refuge was too far to reach in anything like a dry state, I slackened my pace, and returned home as if I had walked under clear skies. There was not much reason to hurry, although I did not idle as upon previous occasions. The constraining wet garments were cold upon me; and with the gathering darkness, and the wind that rose endlessly from the ocean, I could not repress a shiver. Yet there was, beside the discomfort of the precipitous rain, an exhilaration latent in the purplish ravelled masses of cloud and the stimulated reactions of my body. In a mood half of exultant pleasure from resisting the rain (which streamed from me now, and filled my shoes and pockets) and half of strange appreciation of those morbid, dominant skies which hovered with dark wings above the shifting eternal sea, I tramped along the grey corridor of Ellston Beach. More rapidly than I had expected the crouching house showed in the oblique, flapping rain, and all the weeds of the sand cliff writhed in accompaniment to the frantic wind, as if they would uproot themselves to join the far-travelling element. Sea and sky had altered not at all, and the scene was that which had accompanied me, save that there was now painted upon it the hunching roof that seemed to bend from the assailing rain. I hurried up the insecure steps, and let myself into a dry room, where, unconsciously surprised that I was free of the nagging wind, I stood for a moment with water rilling from every inch of me.\n\nThere are two windows in the front of that house, one on each side, and these face nearly straight upon the ocean; which I now saw half obscured by the combined veils of the rain and of the imminent night. From these windows I looked as I dressed myself in a motley array of dry garments seized from convenient hangers and from a chair too laden to sit upon. I was prisoned on all sides by an unnaturally increased dusk which had filtered down at some undefined hour under cover of the storm. How long I had been on the reaches of wet grey sand, or what the real time was, I could not tell, though a moment's search produced my watch\u2014fortunately left behind and thus avoiding the uniform wetness of my clothing. I half guessed the hour from the dimly seen hands, which were only slightly less indecipherable than the surrounding figures. In another moment my sight penetrated the gloom (greater in the house than beyond the bleared window) and saw that it was 6:45.\n\nThere had been no one upon the beach as I came in, and naturally I expected to see no further swimmers that night. Yet when I looked again from the window there appeared surely to be figures blotting the grime of the wet evening. I counted three moving about in some incomprehensible manner, and close to the house another\u2014which may not have been a person, but a wave-ejected log, for the surf was now pounding fiercely. I was startled to no little degree, and wondered for what purpose those hardy persons stayed out in such a storm. And then I thought that perhaps like myself they had been caught unintentionally in the rain and had surrendered to the watery gusts. In another moment, prompted by a certain civilised hospitality which overcame my love of solitude, I stepped to the door and emerged momentarily (at the cost of another wetting, for the rain promptly descended upon me in exultant fury) on the small porch, gesticulating toward the people. But whether they did not see me, or did not understand, they made no returning signal. Dim in the evening, they stood as if half-surprised, or as if they awaited some other action from me. There was in their attitude something of that cryptic blankness, signifying anything or nothing, which the house wore about itself as seen in the morbid sunset. Abruptly there came to me a feeling that a sinister quality lurked about those unmoving figures who chose to stay in the rainy night upon a beach deserted by all people, and I closed the door with a surge of annoyance which sought all too vainly to disguise a deeper emotion of fear; a consuming fright that welled up from the shadows of my consciousness. A moment later, when I had stepped to the window, there seemed to be nothing outside but the portentous night. Vaguely puzzled, and even more vaguely frightened\u2014like one who has seen no alarming thing, but is apprehensive of what may be found in the dark street he is soon compelled to cross\u2014I decided that I had very possibly seen no one, and that the murky air had deceived me.\n\nThe aura of isolation about the place increased that night, though just out of sight on the northward beach a hundred houses rose in the rainy darkness, their light bleared and yellow above streets of polished glass, like goblin-eyes reflected in an oily forest pool. Yet because I could not see them, or even reach them in bad weather\u2014since I had no car nor any way to leave the crouching house except by walking in the figure-haunted darkness\u2014I realized quite suddenly that I was, to all intents, alone with the dreary sea that rose and subsided unseen, unkenned, in the mist. And the voice of the sea had become a hoarse groan, like that of something wounded which shifts about before trying to rise.\n\nFighting away the prevalent gloom with a soiled lamp\u2014for the darkness crept in at my windows and sat peering obscurely at me from the corners like a patient animal\u2014I prepared my food, since I had no intention of going to the village. The hour seemed incredibly advanced, though it was not yet nine o'clock when I went to bed. Darkness had come early and furtively, and throughout the remainder of my stay lingered evasively over each scene and action which I beheld. Something had settled out of the night\u2014something forever undefined, but stirring a latent sense within me, so that I was like a beast expecting the momentary rustle of an enemy.\n\nThere were hours of wind, and sheets of the downpour flapped endlessly on the meagre walls barring it from me. Lulls came in which I heard the mumbling sea, and I could guess that large formless waves jostled one another in the pallid whine of the winds, and flung on the beach a spray bitter with salt. Yet in the very monotony of the restless elements I found a lethargic note, a sound that beguiled me, after a time, into slumber grey and colourless as the night. The sea continued its mad monologue, and the wind her nagging, but these were shut out by the walls of unconsciousness, and for a time the night ocean was banished from a sleeping mind.\n\nMorning brought an enfeebled sun\u2014a sun like that which men will see when the earth is old, if there are any men left: a sun more weary than the shrouded, moribund sky. Faint echo of its old image, Phoebus strove to pierce the ragged, ambiguous clouds as I awoke, at moments sending a wash of pale gold rippling across the northwestern interior of my house, at others waning till it was only a luminous ball, like some incredible plaything forgotten on the celestial lawn. After a while the falling rain\u2014which must have continued throughout the previous night\u2014succeeded in washing away those vestiges of purple cloud which had been like the ocean-cliffs in an old fairy-tale. Cheated alike of the setting and rising sun, that day merged with the day before, as if the intervening storm had not ushered a long darkness into the world, but had swollen and subsided into one long afternoon. Gaining heart, the furtive sun exerted all his force in dispelling the old mist, streaked now like a dirty window, and cast it from his realm. The shallow blue day advanced as those grimy wisps retreated, and the loneliness which had encircled me welled back into a watchful place of retreat, whence it went no farther, but crouched and waited.\n\nThe ancient brightness was now once more upon the sun, and the old glitter on the waves, whose playful blue shapes had flocked upon that coast ere man was born, and would rejoice unseen when he was forgotten in the sepulchre of time. Influenced by these thin assurances, like one who believes the smile of friendship on an enemy's features, I opened my door, and as it swung outward, a black spot upon the inward burst of light, I saw the beach washed clean of any track, as if no foot before mine had disturbed the smooth sand. With the quick lift of spirit that follows a period of uneasy depression, I felt\u2014in a purely yielding fashion and without volition\u2014that my own memory was washed clean of all the mistrust and suspicion and disease-like fear of a lifetime, just as the filth of the water's edge succumbs to a particularly high tide, and is carried out of sight. There was a scent of soaked, brackish grass, like the mouldy pages of a book, commingled with a sweet odour born of the hot sunlight upon inland meadows, and these were borne into me like an exhilarating drink, seeping and tingling through my veins as if they would convey to me something of their own impalpable nature, and float me dizzily in the aimless breeze. And conspiring with these things, the sun continued to shower upon me, like the rain of yesterday, an incessant array of bright spears; as if it also wished to hide that suspected background presence which moved beyond my sight and was betrayed only by a careless rustle on the borders of my consciousness, or by the aspect of blank figures staring out of an ocean void. That sun, a fierce ball solitary in the whirlpool of infinity, was like a horde of golden moths against my upturned face. A bubbling white grail of fire divine and incomprehensible, it withheld from me a thousand promised mirages where it granted one. For the sun did actually seem to indicate realms, secure and fanciful, where if I but knew the path I might wander in this curious exultation. Such things come of our own natures, for life has never yielded for one moment her secrets; and it is only in our interpretation of their hinted images that we may find ecstasy or dullness, according to a deliberately induced mood. Yet ever and again we must succumb to her deceptions, believing for the moment that we may this time find the withheld joy. And in this way the fresh sweetness of the wind, on a morning following the haunted darkness (whose evil intimations had given me a greater uneasiness than any menace to my body), whispered to me of ancient mysteries only half-linked with earth, and of pleasures that were the sharper because I felt that I might experience only a part of them. The sun and wind and that scent that rose upon them told me of festivals of gods whose senses are a millionfold more poignant than man's and whose joys are a millionfold more subtle and prolonged. These things, they hinted, could be mine if I gave myself wholly into their bright deceptive power. And the sun, a crouching god with naked celestial flesh, an unknown, too-mighty furnace upon which eye might not look, seemed almost sacred in the glow of my newly sharpened emotions. The ethereal thunderous light it gave was something before which all things must worship astonished. The slinking leopard in his green-chasmed forest must have paused briefly to consider its leaf-scattered rays, and all things nurtured by it must have cherished its bright message on such a day. For when it is absent in the far reaches of eternity, earth will be lost and black against an illimitable void. That morning, in which I shared the fire of life, and whose brief moment of pleasure is secure against the ravenous years, was astir with the beckoning of strange things whose elusive names can never be written.\n\nAs I made my way toward the village, wondering how it might look after a long-needed scrubbing by the industrious rain, I saw, tangled in a glimmer of sunlit moisture that was poured over it like a yellow vintage, a small object like a hand, some twenty feet ahead of me, and touched by the repetitious foam. The shock and disgust born in my startled mind when I saw that it was indeed a piece of rotten flesh overcame my new contentment and engendered a shocked suspicion that it might actually be a hand. Certainly, no fish, or part of one, could assume that look, and I thought I saw mushy fingers wed in decay. I turned the thing over with my foot, not wishing to touch so foul an object, and it adhered stickily to the leather shoe, as if clutching with the grasp of corruption. The thing, whose shape was nearly lost, held too much resemblance to what I feared it might be; and I pushed it into the willing grasp of a seething wave, which took it from sight with an alacrity not often shown by those ravelled edges of the sea.\n\nPerhaps I should have reported my find, yet its nature was too ambiguous to make action natural. Since it had been partly eaten by some ocean-dwelling monstrousness, I did not think it identifiable enough to form evidence of an unknown but possible tragedy. The numerous drownings, of course, came into my mind\u2014as well as other things lacking in wholesomeness, some of which remained only as possibilities. Whatever the storm-dislodged fragment may have been, and whether it were fish or some animal akin to man, I have never spoken of it until now. After all, there was no proof that it had not merely been distorted by rottenness into that shape.\n\nI approached the town, sickened by the presence of such an object amidst the apparent beauty of the clean beach, though it was horribly typical of the indifference of death in a nature which mingles rottenness with beauty, and perhaps loves the former more. In Ellston I heard of no recent drowning or other mishap of the sea, and found no reference to such in the columns of the local paper\u2014the only one I read during my stay.\n\nIt is difficult to describe the mental state in which succeeding days found me. Always susceptible to morbid emotions whose dark anguish might be induced by things outside myself, or might spring from the abysses of my own spirit, I was ridden by a feeling which was not of fear or despair, or anything akin to these, but was rather a perception of the brief hideousness and underlying filth of life\u2014a feeling partly a reflection of my internal nature and partly a result of broodings induced by that gnawed rotten object which may have been a hand. In those days my mind was a place of shadowed cliffs and dark moving figures, like the ancient unsuspected realm which the fairy-tale recalled to me. I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing. The hours I had previously spent in something of regained health, contentment and physical well-being were given now (as if those days of the previous week were something definitely ended) to an indolence like that of a man who no longer cares to live. I was engulfed by a piteous lethargic fear of some ineluctable doom which would be, I felt, the completed hate of the peering stars and of the black enormous waves that hoped to clasp my bones within them\u2014the vengeance of all the indifferent, horrendous majesty of the night ocean.\n\nSomething of the darkness and restlessness of the sea had penetrated my heart, so that I lived in an unreasoning, unperceiving torment, a torment none the less acute because of the subtlety of its origin and the strange, unmotivated quality of its vampiric existence. Before my eyes lay the phantasmagoria of the purpling clouds, the strange silver bauble, the recurrent stagnant foam, the loneliness of that bleak-eyed house, and the mockery of the puppet town. I no longer went to the village, for it seemed only a travesty of life. Like my own soul, it stood upon a dark, enveloping sea\u2014a sea grown slowly hateful to me. And among these images, corrupt and festering, dwelt that of an object whose human contours left ever smaller the doubt of what it once had been.\n\nThese scribbled words can never tell of the hideous loneliness (something I did not even wish assuaged, so deeply was it embedded in my heart) which had insinuated itself within me, mumbling of terrible and unknown things stealthily circling nearer. It was not a madness: rather it was a too clear and naked perception of the darkness beyond this frail existence, lit by a momentary sun no more secure than ourselves: a realization of futility that few can experience and ever again touch the life about them: a knowledge that turn as I might, battle as I might with all the remaining power of my spirit, I could neither win an inch of ground from the inimical universe, nor hold for even a moment the life entrusted to me. Fearing death as I did life, burdened with a nameless dread yet unwilling to leave the scenes evoking it, I awaited whatever consummating horror was shifting itself in the immense region beyond the walls of consciousness.\n\nThus autumn found me, and what I had gained from the sea was lost back into it. Autumn on the beaches\u2014a drear time betokened by no scarlet leaf nor any other accustomed sign. A frightening sea which changes not, though man changes. There was only a chilling of the waters, in which I no longer cared to enter\u2014a further darkening of the pall-like sky, as if eternities of snow were waiting to descend upon the ghastly waves. Once that descent began, it would never cease, but would continue beneath the white and the yellow and the crimson sun and beneath that ultimate small ruby which shall yield only to the futilities of night. The once friendly waters babbled meaningfully at me, and eyed me with a strange regard; yet whether the darkness of the scene were a reflection of my own broodings, or whether the gloom within me were caused by what lay without, I could not have told. Upon the beach and me alike had fallen a shadow, like that of a bird which flies silently overhead\u2014a bird whose watching eyes we do not suspect till the image on the ground repeats the image in the sky, and we look suddenly upward to find that something has been circling above us hitherto unseen.\n\nThe day was in late September, and the town had closed the resorts where mad frivolity ruled empty, fear-haunted lives, and where raddled puppets performed their summer antics. The puppets were cast aside, smeared with the painted smiles and frowns they had last assumed, and there were not a hundred people left in the town. Again the gaudy, stucco-fronted buildings lining the shore were permitted to crumble undisturbed in the wind. As the month advanced to the day of which I speak, there grew in me the light of a grey, infernal dawn, wherein I felt some dark thaumaturgy would be completed. Since I feared such a thaumaturgy less than a continuance of my horrible suspicions\u2014less than the too-elusive hints of something monstrous lurking behind the great stage\u2014it was with more speculation than actual fear that I waited unendingly for the day of horror which seemed to be nearing. The day, I repeat, was late in September, though whether the 22nd or 23rd I am uncertain. Such details have fled before the recollection of those uncompleted happenings\u2014episodes with which no orderly existence should be plagued, because of the damnable suggestions (and only suggestions) they contain. I knew the time with an intuitive distress of spirit\u2014a recognition too deep for me to explain. Throughout those daylight hours I was expectant of the night; impatient, perhaps, so that the sunlight passed like a half-glimpsed reflection in rippled water\u2014a day of whose events I recall nothing.\n\nIt was long since that portentous storm had cast a shadow over the beach, and I had determined, after hesitations caused by nothing tangible, to leave Ellston, since the year was chilling and there was no return to my earlier contentment. When a telegram came for me (lying two days in the Western Union office before I was located, so little was my name known) saying that my design had been accepted\u2014winning above all others in the contest\u2014I set a date for leaving. This news, which earlier in the year would have affected me strongly, I now received with a curious apathy. It seemed as unrelated to the unreality about me, as little pertinent to me, as if it were directed to another person whom I did not know, and whose message had come to me through some accident. None the less, it was that which forced me to complete my plans and leave the cottage by the shore.\n\nThere were only four nights of my stay remaining when there occurred the last of those events whose meaning lies more in the darkly sinister impression surrounding them than in anything obviously threatening. Night had settled over Ellston and the coast, and a pile of soiled dishes attested both to my recent meal and to my lack of industry. Darkness came as I sat with a cigarette before the seaward window, and it was a liquid which gradually filled the sky, washing in a floating moon, monstrously elevated. The flat sea bordering upon the gleaming sand, the utter absence of tree or figure or life of any sort, and the regard of that high moon made the vastness of my surroundings abruptly clear. There were only a few stars pricking through, as if to accentuate by their smallness the majesty of the lunar orb and of the restless, shifting tide.\n\nI had stayed indoors, fearing somehow to go out before the sea on such a night of shapeless portent, but I heard it mumbling secrets of an incredible lore. Borne to me on a wind out of nowhere was the breath of some strange and palpitant life\u2014the embodiment of all I had felt and of all I had suspected\u2014stirring now in the chasms of the sky or beneath the mute waves. In what place this mystery turned from an ancient, horrible slumber I could not tell, but like one who stands by a figure lost in sleep, knowing that it will awake in a moment, I crouched by the windows, holding a nearly burnt-out cigarette, and faced the rising moon.\n\nGradually there passed into that never-stirring landscape a brilliance intensified by the overhead glimmerings, and I seemed more and more under some compulsion to watch whatever might follow. The shadows were draining from the beach, and I felt that they took with were all which might have been a harbour for my thoughts when the hinted thing should come. Where any of them did remain they were ebon and blank: still lumps of darkness sprawling beneath the cruel brilliant rays. The endless tableau of the lunar orb\u2014dead now, whatever her past was, and cold as the unhuman sepulchres she bears amid the ruin of dusty centuries older than man\u2014and the sea\u2014astir, perhaps, with some unkenned life, some forbidden sentience\u2014confronted me with a horrible vividness. I arose and shut the window; partly because of an inward prompting, but mostly, I think, as an excuse for transferring momentarily the stream of thought. No sound came to me now as I stood before the closed panes. Minutes or eternities were alike. I was waiting, like my own fearing heart and the motionless scene beyond, for the token of some ineffable life. I had set the lamp upon a box in the western corner of the room, but the moon was brighter, and her bluish rays invaded places where the lamplight was faint. The ancient glow of the round silent orb lay upon the beach as it had lain for aeons, and I waited in a torment of expectancy made doubly acute by the delay in fulfillment, and the uncertainty of what strange completion was to come.\n\nOutside the crouching hut a white illumination suggested vague spectral forms whose unreal, phantasmal motions seemed to taunt my blindness, just as unheard voices mocked my eager listening. For countless moments I was still, as if Time and the tolling of her great bell were hushed into nothingness. And yet there was nothing which I might fear: the moon-chiselled shadows were unnatural in no contour, and veiled nothing from my eyes. The night was silent\u2014I knew that despite my closed window\u2014and all the stars were fixed mournfully in a listening heaven of dark grandeur. No motion from me then, or word now, could reveal my plight, or tell of the fear-racked brain imprisoned in flesh which dared not break the silence, for all the torture it brought. As if expectant of death, and assured that nothing could serve to banish the soul-peril I confronted, I crouched with a forgotten cigarette in my hand. A silent world gleamed beyond the cheap, dirty windows, and in one corner of the room a pair of dirty oars, placed there before my arrival, shared the vigil of my spirit. The lamp burned endlessly, yielding a sick light hued like a corpse's flesh. Glancing at it now and again, for the desperate distraction it gave, I saw that many bubbles unaccountably rose and vanished in the kerosene-filled base. Curiously enough, there was no heat from the wick. And suddenly I became aware that the night as a whole was neither warm nor cold, but strangely neutral\u2014as if all physical forces were suspended, and all the laws of a calm existence disrupted.\n\nThen, with an unheard splash which sent from the silver water to the shore a line of ripples echoed in fear by my heart, a swimming thing emerged beyond the breakers. The figure may have been that of a dog, a human being, or something more strange. It could not have known that I watched\u2014perhaps it did not care\u2014but like a distorted fish it swam across the mirrored stars and dived beneath the surface. After a moment it came up again, and this time, since it was closer, I saw that it was carrying something across its shoulder. I knew, then, that it could be no animal, and that it was a man or something like a man, which came toward the land from a dark ocean. But it swam with a horrible ease.\n\nAs I watched, dread-filled and passive, with the fixed stare of one who awaits death in another yet knows he cannot avert it, the swimmer approached the shore\u2014though too far down the southward beach for me to discern its outlines or features. Obscurely loping, with sparks of moonlit foam scattered by its quick gait, it emerged and was lost among the inland dunes.\n\nNow I was possessed by a sudden recurrence of fear, which had died away in the previous moments. There was a tingling coldness all over me\u2014though the room, whose window I dared not open now, was stuffy. I thought it would be very horrible if something were to enter a window which was not closed.\n\nNow that I could no longer see the figure, I felt that it lingered somewhere in the close shadows, or peered hideously at me from whatever window I did not watch. And so I turned my gaze, eagerly and frantically, to each successive pane; dreading that I might indeed behold an intrusive regarding face, yet unable to keep myself from the terrifying inspection. But though I watched for hours, there was no longer anything upon the beach.\n\nSo the night passed, and with it began the ebbing of that strangeness\u2014a strangeness which had surged up like an evil brew within a pot, had mounted to the very rim in a breathless moment, had paused uncertainly there, and had subsided, taking with it whatever unknown message it had borne. Like the stars that promise the revelation of terrible and glorious memories, goad us into worship by this deception, and then impart nothing. I had come frighteningly near to the capture of an old secret which ventured close to man's haunts and lurked cautiously just beyond the edge of the known. Yet in the end I had nothing, I was given only a glimpse of the furtive thing; a glimpse made obscure by the veils of ignorance. I cannot even conceive what might have shown itself had I been too close to that swimmer who went shoreward instead of into the ocean. I do not know what might have come if the brew had passed the rim of the pot and poured outward in a swift cascade of revelation. The night ocean withheld whatever it had nurtured. I shall know nothing more.\n\nEven yet I do not know why the ocean holds such a fascination for me. But then, perhaps none of us can solve those things\u2014they exist in defiance of all explanation. There are men, and wise men, who do not like the sea and its lapping surf on yellow shores; and they think us strange who love the mystery of the ancient and unending deep. Yet for me there is a haunting and inscrutable glamour in all the ocean's moods. It is in the melancholy silver foam beneath the moon's waxen corpse; it hovers over the silent and eternal waves that beat on naked shores; it is there when all is lifeless save for unknown shapes that glide through sombre depths. And when I behold the awesome billows surging in endless strength, there comes upon me an ecstasy akin to fear; so that I must abase myself before this mightiness, that I may not hate the clotted waters and their overwhelming beauty.\n\nVast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters. And these shall beat on dark shores in thunderous foam, though none shall remain in that dying world to watch the cold light of the enfeebled moon playing on the swirling tides and coarse-grained sand. On the deep's margin shall rest only a stagnant foam, gathering about the shells and bones of perished shapes that dwelt within the waters. Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish life extinct. Then all shall be dark, for at last even the white moon on the distant waves shall wink out. Nothing shall be left, neither above nor below the sombre waters. And until that last millennium, as after it, the sea will thunder and toss throughout the dismal night.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Nyarlathotep by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nNyarlathotep... the crawling chaos... I am the last... I will tell the audient void....\n\nI do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons\u2014the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.\n\nAnd it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences\u2014of electricity and psychology\u2014and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges, and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky.\n\nI remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city\u2014the great, the old, the terrible city of unnumbered crimes. My friend had told me of him, and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations, and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries. My friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings; that what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nyarlathotep dared prophesy, and that in the sputter of his sparks there was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes. And I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.\n\nIt was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowds to see Nyarlathotep; through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room. And shadowed on a screen, I saw hooded forms amidst ruins, and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments. And I saw the world battling against blackness; against the waves of destruction from ultimate space; whirling, churning; struggling around the dimming, cooling sun. Then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators, and hair stood up on end whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads. And when I, who was colder and more scientific than the rest, mumbled a trembling protest about \"imposture\" and \"static electricity\", Nyarlathotep drave us all out, down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets. I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We sware to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive; and when the electric lights began to fade we cursed the company over and over again, and laughed at the queer faces we made.\n\nI believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon, for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them. Once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass, with scarce a line of rusted metal to shew where the tramways had run. And again we saw a tram-car, lone, windowless, dilapidated, and almost on its side. When we gazed around the horizon, we could not find the third tower by the river, and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top. Then we split up into narrow columns, each of which seemed drawn in a different direction. One disappeared in a narrow alley to the left, leaving only the echo of a shocking moan. Another filed down a weed-choked subway entrance, howling with a laughter that was mad. My own column was sucked toward the open country, and presently felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn; for as we stalked out on the dark moor, we beheld around us the hellish moon-glitter of evil snows. Trackless, inexplicable snows, swept asunder in one direction only, where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls. The column seemed very thin indeed as it plodded dreamily into the gulf. I lingered behind, for the black rift in the green-litten snow was frightful, and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting wail as my companions vanished; but my power to linger was slight. As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.\n\nScreamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods\u2014the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Old Bugs by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nSheehan's Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago's stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as Coleridge may have found at Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun; but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day and night. But the popularity of Sheehan's remains unimpaired; and for this there is a reason\u2014a reason obvious to anyone who will take the trouble to analyse the mixed stenches prevailing there. Over and above the fumes and sickening closeness rises an aroma once familiar throughout the land, but now happily banished to the back streets of life by the edict of a benevolent government\u2014the aroma of strong, wicked whiskey\u2014a precious kind of forbidden fruit indeed in this year of grace 1950.\n\nSheehan's is the acknowledged centre to Chicago's subterranean traffic in liquor and narcotics, and as such has a certain dignity which extends even to the unkempt attach\u00e9s of the place; but there was until lately one who lay outside the pale of that dignity\u2014one who shared the squalor and filth, but not the importance, of Sheehan's. He was called \"Old Bugs\", and was the most disreputable object in a disreputable environment. What he had once been, many tried to guess; for his language and mode of utterance when intoxicated to a certain degree were such as to excite wonderment; but what he was, presented less difficulty\u2014for \"Old Bugs\", in superlative degree, epitomised the pathetic species known as the \"bum\" or the \"down-and-outer\". Whence he had come, no one could tell. One night he had burst wildly into Sheehan's, foaming at the mouth and screaming for whiskey and hasheesh; and having been supplied in exchange for a promise to perform odd jobs, had hung about ever since, mopping floors, cleaning cuspidors and glasses, and attending to an hundred similar menial duties in exchange for the drink and drugs which were necessary to keep him alive and sane.\n\nHe talked but little, and usually in the common jargon of the underworld; but occasionally, when inflamed by an unusually generous dose of crude whiskey, would burst forth into strings of incomprehensible polysyllables and snatches of sonorous prose and verse which led certain habitu\u00e9s to conjecture that he had seen better days. One steady patron\u2014a bank defaulter under cover\u2014came to converse with him quite regularly, and from the tone of his discourse ventured the opinion that he had been a writer or professor in his day. But the only tangible clue to Old Bugs' past was a faded photograph which he constantly carried about with him\u2014the photograph of a young woman of noble and beautiful features. This he would sometimes draw from his tattered pocket, carefully unwrap from its covering of tissue paper, and gaze upon for hours with an expression of ineffable sadness and tenderness. It was not the portrait of one whom an underworld denizen would be likely to know, but of a lady of breeding and quality, garbed in the quaint attire of thirty years before. Old Bugs himself seemed also to belong to the past, for his nondescript clothing bore every hallmark of antiquity. He was a man of immense height, probably more than six feet, though his stooping shoulders sometimes belied this fact. His hair, a dirty white and falling out in patches, was never combed; and over his lean face grew a mangy stubble of coarse beard which seemed always to remain at the bristling stage\u2014never shaven\u2014yet never long enough to form a respectable set of whiskers. His features had perhaps been noble once, but were now seamed with the ghastly effects of terrible dissipation. At one time\u2014probably in middle life\u2014he had evidently been grossly fat; but now he was horribly lean, the purple flesh hanging in loose pouches under his bleary eyes and upon his cheeks. Altogether, Old Bugs was not pleasing to look upon.\n\nThe disposition of Old Bugs was as odd as his aspect. Ordinarily he was true to the derelict type\u2014ready to do anything for a nickel or a dose of whiskey or hasheesh\u2014but at rare intervals he shewed the traits which earned him his name. Then he would try to straighten up, and a certain fire would creep into the sunken eyes. His demeanour would assume an unwonted grace and even dignity; and the sodden creatures around him would sense something of superiority\u2014something which made them less ready to give the usual kicks and cuffs to the poor butt and drudge. At these times he would shew a sardonic humour and make remarks which the folk of Sheehan's deemed foolish and irrational. But the spells would soon pass, and once more Old Bugs would resume his eternal floor-scrubbing and cuspidor-cleaning. But for one thing Old Bugs would have been an ideal slave to the establishment\u2014and that one thing was his conduct when young men were introduced for their first drink. The old man would then rise from the floor in anger and excitement, muttering threats and warnings, and seeking to dissuade the novices from embarking upon their course of \"seeing life as it is\". He would sputter and fume, exploding into sesquipedalian admonitions and strange oaths, and animated by a frightful earnestness which brought a shudder to more than one drug-racked mind in the crowded room. But after a time his alcohol-enfeebled brain would wander from the subject, and with a foolish grin he would turn once more to his mop or cleaning-rag.\n\nI do not think that many of Sheehan's regular patrons will ever forget the day that young Alfred Trever came. He was rather a \"find\"\u2014a rich and high-spirited youth who would \"go the limit\" in anything he undertook\u2014at least, that was the verdict of Pete Schultz, Sheehan's \"runner\", who had come across the boy at Lawrence College, in the small town of Appleton, Wisconsin. Trever was the son of prominent parents in Appleton. His father, Karl Trever, was an attorney and citizen of distinction, whilst his mother had made an enviable reputation as a poetess under her maiden name of Eleanor Wing. Alfred was himself a scholar and poet of distinction, though cursed with a certain childish irresponsibility which made him an ideal prey for Sheehan's runner. He was blond, handsome, and spoiled; vivacious and eager to taste the several forms of dissipation about which he had read and heard. At Lawrence he had been prominent in the mock-fraternity of \"Tappa Tappa Keg\", where he was the wildest and merriest of the wild and merry young roysterers; but this immature, collegiate frivolity did not satisfy him. He knew deeper vices through books, and he now longed to know them at first hand. Perhaps this tendency toward wildness had been stimulated somewhat by the repression to which he had been subjected at home; for Mrs. Trever had particular reason for training her only child with rigid severity. She had, in her own youth, been deeply and permanently impressed with the horror of dissipation by the case of one to whom she had for a time been engaged.\n\nYoung Galpin, the fianc\u00e9 in question, had been one of Appleton's most remarkable sons. Attaining distinction as a boy through his wonderful mentality, he won vast fame at the University of Wisconsin, and at the age of twenty-three returned to Appleton to take up a professorship at Lawrence and to slip a diamond upon the finger of Appleton's fairest and most brilliant daughter. For a season all went happily, till without warning the storm burst. Evil habits, dating from a first drink taken years before in woodland seclusion, made themselves manifest in the young professor; and only by a hurried resignation did he escape a nasty prosecution for injury to the habits and morals of the pupils under his charge. His engagement broken, Galpin moved east to begin life anew; but before long, Appletonians heard of his dismissal in disgrace from New York University, where he had obtained an instructorship in English. Galpin now devoted his time to the library and lecture platform, preparing volumes and speeches on various subjects connected with belles lettres, and always shewing a genius so remarkable that it seemed as if the public must sometime pardon him for his past mistakes. His impassioned lectures in defence of Villon, Poe, Verlaine, and Oscar Wilde were applied to himself as well, and in the short Indian summer of his glory there was talk of a renewed engagement at a certain cultured home on Park Avenue. But then the blow fell. A final disgrace, compared to which the others had been as nothing, shattered the illusions of those who had come to believe in Galpin's reform; and the young man abandoned his name and disappeared from public view. Rumour now and then associated him with a certain \"Consul Hasting\" whose work for the stage and for motion-picture companies attracted a certain degree of attention because of its scholarly breadth and depth; but Hasting soon disappeared from the public eye, and Galpin became only a name for parents to quote in warning accents. Eleanor Wing soon celebrated her marriage to Karl Trever, a rising young lawyer, and of her former admirer retained only enough memory to dictate the naming of her only son, and the moral guidance of that handsome and headstrong youth. Now, in spite of all that guidance, Alfred Trever was at Sheehan's and about to take his first drink.\n\n\"Boss,\" cried Schultz, as he entered the vile-smelling room with his young victim, \"meet my friend Al Trever, bes' li'l' sport up at Lawrence\u2014thas' 'n Appleton, Wis., y' know. Some swell guy, too\u2014's father's a big corp'ration lawyer up in his burg, 'n' 's mother's some lit'ry genius. He wants to see life as she is\u2014wants to know what the real lightnin' juice tastes like\u2014so jus' remember he's me friend an' treat 'im right.\"\n\nAs the names Trever, Lawrence, and Appleton fell on the air, the loafers seemed to sense something unusual. Perhaps it was only some sound connected with the clicking balls of the pool tables or the rattling glasses that were brought from the cryptic regions in the rear\u2014perhaps only that, plus some strange rustling of the dirty draperies at the one dingy window\u2014but many thought that someone in the room had gritted his teeth and drawn a very sharp breath.\n\n\"Glad to know you, Sheehan,\" said Trever in a quiet, well-bred tone. \"This is my first experience in a place like this, but I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know\u2014or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.\"\n\n\"Young feller,\" responded the proprietor, \"ya come tuh th' right place tuh see life. We got all kinds here\u2014reel life an' a good time. The damn' government can try tuh make folks good ef it wants tuh, but it can't stop a feller from hittin' 'er up when he feels like it. Whaddya want, feller\u2014booze, coke, or some other sorta dope? Yuh can't ask for nothin' we ain't got.\"\n\nHabitu\u00e9s say that it was at this point they noticed a cessation in the regular, monotonous strokes of the mop.\n\n\"I want whiskey\u2014good old-fashioned rye!\" exclaimed Trever enthusiastically. \"I'll tell you, I'm good and tired of water after reading of the merry bouts fellows used to have in the old days. I can't read an Anacreontic without watering at the mouth\u2014and it's something a lot stronger than water that my mouth waters for!\"\n\n\"Anacreontic\u2014what 'n hell's that?\" several hangers-on looked up as the young man went slightly beyond their depth. But the bank defaulter under cover explained to them that Anacreon was a gay old dog who lived many years ago and wrote about the fun he had when all the world was just like Sheehan's.\n\n\"Let me see, Trever,\" continued the defaulter, \"didn't Schultz say your mother is a literary person, too?\"\n\n\"Yes, damn it,\" replied Trever, \"but nothing like the old Teian! She's one of those dull, eternal moralisers that try to take all the joy out of life. Namby-pamby sort\u2014ever heard of her? She writes under her maiden name of Eleanor Wing.\"\n\nHere it was that Old Bugs dropped his mop.\n\n\"Well, here's yer stuff,\" announced Sheehan jovially as a tray of bottles and glasses was wheeled into the room. \"Good old rye, an' as fiery as ya kin find anyw'eres in Chi'.\"\n\nThe youth's eyes glistened and his nostrils curled at the fumes of the brownish fluid which an attendant was pouring out for him. It repelled him horribly, and revolted all his inherited delicacy; but his determination to taste life to the full remained with him, and he maintained a bold front. But before his resolution was put to the test, the unexpected intervened. Old Bugs, springing up from the crouching position in which he had hitherto been, leaped at the youth and dashed from his hands the uplifted glass, almost simultaneously attacking the tray of bottles and glasses with his mop, and scattering the contents upon the floor in a confusion of odoriferous fluid and broken bottles and tumblers. Numbers of men, or things which had been men, dropped to the floor and began lapping at the puddles of spilled liquor, but most remained immovable, watching the unprecedented actions of the barroom drudge and derelict. Old Bugs straightened up before the astonished Trever, and in a mild and cultivated voice said, \"Do not do this thing. I was like you once, and I did it. Now I am like\u2014this.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, you damned old fool?\" shouted Trever. \"What do you mean by interfering with a gentleman in his pleasures?\"\n\nSheehan, now recovering from his astonishment, advanced and laid a heavy hand on the old waif's shoulder.\n\n\"This is the last time for you, old bird!\" he exclaimed furiously. \"When a gen'l'man wants tuh take a drink here, by God, he shall, without you interferin'. Now get th' hell outa here afore I kick hell outa ya.\"\n\nBut Sheehan had reckoned without scientific knowledge of abnormal psychology and the effects of nervous stimulus. Old Bugs, obtaining a firmer hold on his mop, began to wield it like the javelin of a Macedonian hoplite, and soon cleared a considerable space around himself, meanwhile shouting various disconnected bits of quotation, among which was prominently repeated, \"...the sons of Belial, blown with insolence and wine.\"\n\nThe room became pandemonium, and men screamed and howled in fright at the sinister being they had aroused. Trever seemed dazed in the confusion, and shrank to the wall as the strife thickened. \"He shall not drink! He shall not drink!\" Thus roared Old Bugs as he seemed to run out of\u2014or rise above\u2014quotations. Policemen appeared at the door, attracted by the noise, but for a time they made no move to intervene. Trever, now thoroughly terrified and cured forever of his desire to see life via the vice route, edged closer to the bluecoated newcomers. Could he but escape and catch a train for Appleton, he reflected, he would consider his education in dissipation quite complete.\n\nThen suddenly Old Bugs ceased to wield his javelin and stopped still\u2014drawing himself up more erectly than any denizen of the place had ever seen him before. \"Ave, Caesar, moriturus te saluto!\" he shouted, and dropped to the whiskey-reeking floor, never to rise again.\n\nSubsequent impressions will never leave the mind of young Trever. The picture is blurred, but ineradicable. Policemen ploughed a way through the crowd, questioning everyone closely both about the incident and about the dead figure on the floor. Sheehan especially did they ply with inquiries, yet without eliciting any information of value concerning Old Bugs. Then the bank defaulter remembered the picture, and suggested that it be viewed and filed for identification at police headquarters. An officer bent reluctantly over the loathsome glassy-eyed form and found the tissue-wrapped cardboard, which he passed around among the others.\n\n\"Some chicken!\" leered a drunken man as he viewed the beautiful face, but those who were sober did not leer, looking with respect and abashment at the delicate and spiritual features. No one seemed able to place the subject, and all wondered that the drug-degraded derelict should have such a portrait in his possession\u2014that is, all but the bank defaulter, who was meanwhile eyeing the intruding bluecoats rather uneasily. He had seen a little deeper beneath Old Bugs' mask of utter degradation.\n\nThen the picture was passed to Trever, and a change came over the youth. After the first start, he replaced the tissue wrapping around the portrait, as if to shield it from the sordidness of the place. Then he gazed long and searchingly at the figure on the floor, noting its great height, and the aristocratic cast of features which seemed to appear now that the wretched flame of life had flickered out. No, he said hastily, as the question was put to him, he did not know the subject of the picture. It was so old, he added, that no one now could be expected to recognise it.\n\nBut Alfred Trever did not speak the truth, as many guessed when he offered to take charge of the body and secure its interment in Appleton. Over the library mantel in his home hung the exact replica of that picture, and all his life he had known and loved its original.\n\nFor the gentle and noble features were those of his own mother.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Other Gods by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nAtop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer no man to tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they left their older peaks they took with them all signs of themselves; save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called Ngranek.\n\nBut now they have betaken themselves to unknown Kadath in the cold waste where no man treads, and are grown stern, having no higher peak whereto to flee at the coming of men. They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come, or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste, else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.\n\nSometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes. Men have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, though they have thought it rain; and have heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-winds of Lerion. In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.\n\nIn Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, once dwelt an old man avid to behold the gods of earth; a man deeply learned in the seven cryptical books of Hsan, and familiar with the Pnakotic Manuscripts of distant and frozen Lomar. His name was Barzai the Wise, and the villagers tell of how he went up a mountain on the night of the strange eclipse.\n\nBarzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself. It was he who wisely advised the burgesses of Ulthar when they passed their remarkable law against the slaying of cats, and who first told the young priest Atal where it is that black cats go at midnight on St. John's Eve. Barzai was learned in the lore of earth's gods, and had gained a desire to look upon their faces. He believed that his great secret knowledge of gods could shield him from their wrath, so resolved to go up to the summit of high and rocky Hatheg-Kla on a night when he knew the gods would be there.\n\nHatheg-Kla is far in the stony desert beyond Hatheg, for which it is named, and rises like a rock statue in a silent temple. Around its peak the mists play always mournfully, for mists are the memories of the gods, and the gods loved Hatheg-Kla when they dwelt upon it in the old days. Often the gods of earth visit Hatheg-Kla in their ships of cloud, casting pale vapours over the slopes as they dance reminiscently on the summit under a clear moon. The villagers of Hatheg say it is ill to climb Hatheg-Kla at any time, and deadly to climb it by night when pale vapours hide the summit and the moon; but Barzai heeded them not when he came from neighbouring Ulthar with the young priest Atal, who was his disciple. Atal was only the son of an innkeeper, and was sometimes afraid; but Barzai's father had been a landgrave who dwelt in an ancient castle, so he had no common superstition in his blood, and only laughed at the fearful cotters.\n\nBarzai and Atal went out of Hatheg into the stony desert despite the prayers of peasants, and talked of earth's gods by their campfires at night. Many days they travelled, and from afar saw lofty Hatheg-Kla with his aureole of mournful mist. On the thirteenth day they reached the mountain's lonely base, and Atal spoke of his fears. But Barzai was old and learned and had no fears, so led the way boldly up the slope that no man had scaled since the time of Sansu, who is written of with fright in the mouldy Pnakotic Manuscripts.\n\nThe way was rocky, and made perilous by chasms, cliffs, and falling stones. Later it grew cold and snowy; and Barzai and Atal often slipped and fell as they hewed and plodded upward with staves and axes. Finally the air grew thin, and the sky changed colour, and the climbers found it hard to breathe; but still they toiled up and up, marvelling at the strangeness of the scene and thrilling at the thought of what would happen on the summit when the moon was out and the pale vapours spread around. For three days they climbed higher, higher, and higher toward the roof of the world; then they camped to wait for the clouding of the moon.\n\nFor four nights no clouds came, and the moon shone down cold through the thin mournful mists around the silent pinnacle,. Then on the fifth night, which was the night of the full moon, Barzai saw some dense clouds far to the north, and stayed up with Atal to watch them draw near. Thick and majestic they sailed, slowly and deliberately onward; ranging themselves round the peak high above the watchers, and hiding the moon and the summit from view. For a long hour the watchers gazed, whilst the vapours swirled and the screen of clouds grew thicker and more restless. Barzai was wise in the lore of earth's gods, and listened hard for certain sounds, but Atal felt the chill of the vapours and the awe of the night, and feared much. And when Barzai began to climb higher and beckon eagerly, it was long before Atal would follow.\n\nSo thick were the vapours that the way was hard, and though Atal followed on at last, he could scarce see the grey shape of Barzai on the dim slope above in the clouded moonlight. Barzai forged very far ahead, and seemed despite his age to climb more easily than Atal; fearing not the steepness that began to grow too great for any save a strong and dauntless man, nor pausing at wide black chasms that Atal scarce could leap. And so they went up wildly over rocks and gulfs, slipping and stumbling, and sometimes awed at the vastness and horrible silence of bleak ice pinnacles and mute granite steeps.\n\nVery suddenly Barzai went out of Atal's sight, scaling a hideous cliff that seemed to bulge outward and block the path for any climber not inspired of earth's gods. Atal was far below, and planning what he should do when he reached the place, when curiously he noticed that the light had grown strong, as if the cloudless peak and moonlit meeting-place of the gods were very near. And as he scrambled on toward the bulging cliff and litten sky he felt fears more shocking than any he had known before. Then through the high mists he heard the voice of unseen Barzai shouting wildly in delight:\n\n\"I have heard the gods! I have heard earth's gods singing in revelry on Hatheg-Kla! The voices of earth's gods are known to Barzai the Prophet! The mists are thin and the moon is bright, and I shall see the gods dancing wildly on Hatheg-Kla that they loved in youth! The wisdom of Barzai hath made him greater than earth's gods, and against his will their spells and barriers are as naught; Barzai will behold the gods, the proud gods, the secret gods, the gods of earth who spurn the sight of men!\"\n\nAtal could not hear the voices Barzai heard, but he was now close to the bulging cliff and scanning it for footholds. Then he heard Barzai's voice grow shriller and louder:\n\n\"The mists are very thin, and the moon casts shadows on the slope; the voices of earth's gods are high and wild, and they fear the coming of Barzai the Wise, who is greater than they.... The moon's light flickers, as earth's gods dance against it; I shall see the dancing forms of the gods that leap and howl in the moonlight.... The light is dimmer and the gods are afraid....\"\n\nWhilst Barzai was shouting these things Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws; for though the way was steeper than ever, the upward path was now grown fearsomely easy, and the bulging cliff proved scarce an obstacle when he reached it and slid perilously up its convex face. The light of the moon had strangely failed, and as Atal plunged upward through the mists he heard Barzai the Wise shrieking in the shadows:\n\n\"The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods.... There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging.... Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!\"\n\nAnd now Atal, slipping dizzily up over inconceivable steeps, heard in the dark a loathsome laughing, mixed with such a cry as no man else ever heard save in the Phlegethon of unrelatable nightmares; a cry wherein reverberated the horror and anguish of a haunted lifetime packed into one atrocious moment:\n\n\"The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!... Look away!... Go back!... Do not see!... Do not see!... The vengeance of the infinite abysses... That cursed, that damnable pit... Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!\"\n\nAnd as Atal shut his eyes and stopped his ears and tried to jump downward against the frightful pull from unknown heights, there resounded on Hatheg-Kla that terrible peal of thunder which awaked the good cotters of the plains and the honest burgesses of Hatheg and Nir and Ulthar, and caused them to behold through the clouds that strange eclipse of the moon that no book ever predicted. And when the moon came out at last Atal was safe on the lower snows of the mountain without sight of earth's gods, or of the other gods.\n\nNow it is told in the mouldy Pnakotic Manuscripts that Sansu found naught but wordless ice and rock when he climbed Hatheg-Kla in the youth of the world. Yet when the men of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg crushed their fears and scaled that haunted steep by day in search of Barzai the Wise, they found graven in the naked stone of the summit a curious and Cyclopean symbol fifty cubits wide, as if the rock had been riven by some titanic chisel. And the symbol was like to one that learned men have discerned in those frightful parts of the Pnakotic Manuscripts which are too ancient to be read. This they found.\n\nBarzai the Wise they never found, nor could the holy priest Atal ever be persuaded to pray for his soul's repose. Moreover, to this day the people of Ulthar and Nir and Hatheg fear eclipses, and pray by night when pale vapours hide the mountain-top and the moon. And above the mists on Hatheg-Kla earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of cloud and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Out of the Aeons by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n(Ms. found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass.)\n\nIt is not likely that anyone in Boston\u2014or any alert reader elsewhere\u2014will ever forget the strange affair of the Cabot Museum. The newspaper publicity given to that hellish mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of interest and cult activities during 1932, and the frightful fate of the two intruders on December 1st of that year, all combined to form one of those classic mysteries which go down for generations as folklore and become the nuclei of whole cycles of horrific speculation.\n\nEveryone seems to realise, too, that something very vital and unutterably hideous was suppressed in the public accounts of the culminant horrors. Those first disquieting hints as to the condition of one of the two bodies were dismissed and ignored too abruptly\u2014nor were the singular modifications in the mummy given the following-up which their news value would normally prompt. It also struck people as queer that the mummy was never restored to its case. In these days of expert taxidermy the excuse that its disintegrating condition made exhibition impracticable seemed a peculiarly lame one.\n\nAs curator of the museum I am in a position to reveal all the suppressed facts, but this I shall not do during my lifetime. There are things about the world and universe which it is better for the majority not to know, and I have not departed from the opinion in which all of us\u2014museum staff, physicians, reporters, and police\u2014concurred at the period of the horror itself. At the same time it seems proper that a matter of such overwhelming scientific and historic importance should not remain wholly unrecorded\u2014hence this account which I have prepared for the benefit of serious students. I shall place it among various papers to be examined after my death, leaving its fate to the discretion of my executors. Certain threats and unusual events during the past weeks have led me to believe that my life\u2014as well as that of other museum officials\u2014is in some peril through the enmity of several widespread secret cults of Asiatics, Polynesians, and heterogeneous mystical devotees; hence it is possible that the work of the executors may not be long postponed. [Executor's note: Dr. Johnson died suddenly and rather mysteriously of heart-failure on April 22, 1933. Wentworth Moore, taxidermist of the museum, disappeared around the middle of the preceding month. On February 18 of the same year Dr. William Minot, who superintended a dissection connected with the case, was stabbed in the back, dying the following day.]\n\nThe real beginning of the horror, I suppose, was in 1879\u2014long before my term as curator\u2014when the museum acquired that ghastly, inexplicable mummy from the Orient Shipping Company. Its very discovery was monstrous and menacing, for it came from a crypt of unknown origin and fabulous antiquity on a bit of land suddenly upheaved from the Pacific's floor.\n\nOn May 11, 1878, Capt. Charles Weatherbee of the freighter Eridanus, bound from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, had sighted a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin. It projected quite boldly out of the sea in the form of a truncated cone. A landing-party under Capt. Weatherbee noted evidences of long submersion on the rugged slopes which they climbed, while at the summit there were signs of recent destruction, as by an earthquake. Among the scattered rubble were massive stones of manifestly artificial shaping, and a little examination disclosed the presence of some of that prehistoric Cyclopean masonry found on certain Pacific islands and forming a perpetual archaeological puzzle.\n\nFinally the sailors entered a massive stone crypt\u2014judged to have been part of a much larger edifice, and to have originally lain far underground\u2014in one corner of which the frightful mummy crouched. After a short period of virtual panic, caused partly by certain carvings on the walls, the men were induced to move the mummy to the ship, though it was only with fear and loathing that they touched it. Close to the body, as if once thrust into its clothes, was a cylinder of an unknown metal containing a roll of thin, bluish-white membrane of equally unknown nature, inscribed with peculiar characters in a greyish, indeterminable pigment. In the centre of the vast stone floor was a suggestion of a trap-door, but the party lacked apparatus sufficiently powerful to move it.\n\nThe Cabot Museum, then newly established, saw the meagre reports of the discovery and at once took steps to acquire the mummy and the cylinder. Curator Pickman made a personal trip to Valparaiso and outfitted a schooner to search for the crypt where the thing had been found, though meeting with failure in this matter. At the recorded position of the island nothing but the sea's unbroken expanse could be discerned, and the seekers realised that the same seismic forces which had suddenly thrust the island up had carried it down again to the watery darkness where it had brooded for untold aeons. The secret of that immovable trap-door would never be solved. The mummy and the cylinder, however, remained\u2014and the former was placed on exhibition early in November, 1879, in the museum's hall of mummies.\n\nThe Cabot Museum of Archaeology, which specialises in such remnants of ancient and unknown civilisations as do not fall within the domain of art, is a small and scarcely famous institution, though one of high standing in scientific circles. It stands in the heart of Boston's exclusive Beacon Hill district\u2014in Mt. Vernon Street, near Joy\u2014housed in a former private mansion with an added wing in the rear, and was a source of pride to its austere neighbours until the recent terrible events brought it an undesirable notoriety.\n\nThe hall of mummies on the western side of the original mansion (which was designed by Bulfinch and erected in 1819), on the second floor, is justly esteemed by historians and anthropologists as harbouring the greatest collection of its kind in America. Here may be found typical examples of Egyptian embalming from the earliest Sakkarah specimens to the last Coptic attempts of the eighth century; mummies of other cultures, including the prehistoric Indian specimens recently found in the Aleutian Islands; agonised Pompeian figures moulded in plaster from tragic hollows in the ruin-choking ashes; naturally mummified bodies from mines and other excavations in all parts of the earth\u2014some surprised by their terrible entombment in the grotesque postures caused by their last, tearing death-throes\u2014everything, in short, which any collection of the sort could well be expected to contain. In 1879, of course, it was much less ample than it is now; yet even then it was remarkable. But that shocking thing from the primal Cyclopean crypt on an ephemeral sea-spawned island was always its chief attraction and most impenetrable mystery.\n\nThe mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright so hideous that few spectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony, forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to the object.\n\nJust what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter alienage which affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness\u2014but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.\n\nAmong the discriminating few who frequented the Cabot Museum this relic of an elder, forgotten world soon acquired an unholy fame, though the institution's seclusion and quiet policy prevented it from becoming a popular sensation of the \"Cardiff Giant\" sort. In the last century the art of vulgar ballyhoo had not invaded the field of scholarship to the extent it has now succeeded in doing. Naturally, savants of various kinds tried their best to classify the frightful object, though always without success. Theories of a bygone Pacific civilisation, of which the Easter Island images and the megalithic masonry of Ponape and Nan-Matol are conceivable vestiges, were freely circulated among students, and learned journals carried varied and often conflicting speculations on a possible former continent whose peaks survive as the myriad islands of Melanesia and Polynesia. The diversity in dates assigned to the hypothetical vanished culture\u2014or continent\u2014was at once bewildering and amusing; yet some surprisingly relevant allusions were found in certain myths of Tahiti and other islands.\n\nMeanwhile the strange cylinder and its baffling scroll of unknown hieroglyphs, carefully preserved in the museum library, received their due share of attention. No question could exist as to their association with the mummy; hence all realised that in the unravelling of their mystery the mystery of the shrivelled horror would in all probability be unravelled as well. The cylinder, about four inches long by seven-eighths of an inch in diameter, was of a queerly iridescent metal utterly defying chemical analysis and seemingly impervious to all reagents. It was tightly fitted with a cap of the same substance, and bore engraved figurings of an evidently decorative and possibly symbolic nature\u2014conventional designs which seemed to follow a peculiarly alien, paradoxical, and doubtfully describable system of geometry.\n\nNot less mysterious was the scroll it contained\u2014a neat roll of some thin, bluish-white, unanalysable membrane, coiled round a slim rod of metal like that of the cylinder, and unwinding to a length of some two feet. The large, bold hieroglyphs, extending in a narrow line down the centre of the scroll and penned or painted with a grey pigment defying analysis, resembled nothing known to linguists and palaeographers, and could not be deciphered despite the transmission of photographic copies to every living expert in the given field.\n\nIt is true that a few scholars, unusually versed in the literature of occultism and magic, found vague resemblances between some of the hieroglyphs and certain primal symbols described or cited in two or three very ancient, obscure, and esoteric texts such as the Book of Eibon, reputed to descend from forgotten Hyperborea; the Pnakotic fragments, alleged to be pre-human; and the monstrous and forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. None of these resemblances, however, was beyond dispute; and because of the prevailing low estimation of occult studies, no effort was made to circulate copies of the hieroglyphs among mystical specialists. Had such circulation occurred at this early date, the later history of the case might have been very different; indeed, a glance at the hieroglyphs by any reader of von Junzt's horrible Nameless Cults would have established a linkage of unmistakable significance. At this period, however, the readers of that monstrous blasphemy were exceedingly few; copies having been incredibly scarce in the interval between the suppression of the original D\u00fcsseldorf edition (1839) and of the Bridewell translation (1845) and the publication of the expurgated reprint by the Golden Goblin Press in 1909. Practically speaking, no occultist or student of the primal past's esoteric lore had his attention called to the strange scroll until the recent outburst of sensational journalism which precipitated the horrible climax." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Thus matters glided along for a half-century following the installation of the frightful mummy at the museum. The gruesome object had a local celebrity among cultivated Bostonians, but no more than that; while the very existence of the cylinder and scroll\u2014after a decade of futile research\u2014was virtually forgotten. So quiet and conservative was the Cabot Museum that no reporter or feature writer ever thought of invading its uneventful precincts for rabble-tickling material.\n\nThe invasion of ballyhoo commenced in the spring of 1931, when a purchase of somewhat spectacular nature\u2014that of the strange objects and inexplicably preserved bodies found in crypts beneath the almost vanished and evilly famous ruins of Ch\u00e2teau Faussesflammes, in Averoigne, France\u2014brought the museum prominently into the news columns. True to its \"hustling\" policy, the Boston Pillar sent a Sunday feature writer to cover the incident and pad it with an exaggerated general account of the institution itself; and this young man\u2014Stuart Reynolds by name\u2014hit upon the nameless mummy as a potential sensation far surpassing the recent acquisitions nominally forming his chief assignment. A smattering of theosophical lore, and a fondness for the speculations of such writers as Colonel Churchward and Lewis Spence concerning lost continents and primal forgotten civilisations, made Reynolds especially alert toward any aeonian relic like the unknown mummy.\n\nAt the museum the reporter made himself a nuisance through constant and not always intelligent questionings and endless demands for the movement of encased objects to permit photographs from unusual angles. In the basement library room he pored endlessly over the strange metal cylinder and its membraneous scroll, photographing them from every angle and securing pictures of every bit of the weird hieroglyphed text. He likewise asked to see all books with any bearing whatever on the subject of primal cultures and sunken continents\u2014sitting for three hours taking notes, and leaving only in order to hasten to Cambridge for a sight (if permission were granted) of the abhorred and forbidden Necronomicon at the Widener Library.\n\nOn April 5th the article appeared in the Sunday Pillar, smothered in photographs of mummy, cylinder, and hieroglyphed scroll, and couched in the peculiarly simpering, infantile style which the Pillar affects for the benefit of its vast and mentally immature clientele. Full of inaccuracies, exaggerations, and sensationalism, it was precisely the sort of thing to stir the brainless and fickle interest of the herd\u2014and as a result the once quiet museum began to be swarmed with chattering and vacuously staring throngs such as its stately corridors had never known before.\n\nThere were scholarly and intelligent visitors, too, despite the puerility of the article\u2014the pictures had spoken for themselves\u2014and many persons of mature attainments sometimes see the Pillar by accident. I recall one very strange character who appeared during November\u2014a dark, turbaned, and bushily bearded man with a laboured, unnatural voice, curiously expressionless face, clumsy hands covered with absurd white mittens, who gave a squalid West End address and called himself \"Swami Chandraputra\". This fellow was unbelievably erudite in occult lore and seemed profoundly and solemnly moved by the resemblance of the hieroglyphs on the scroll to certain signs and symbols of a forgotten elder world about which he professed vast intuitive knowledge.\n\nBy June, the fame of the mummy and scroll had leaked far beyond Boston, and the museum had inquiries and requests for photographs from occultists and students of arcana all over the world. This was not altogether pleasing to our staff, since we are a scientific institution without sympathy for fantastic dreamers; yet we answered all questions with civility. One result of these catechisms was a highly learned article in The Occult Review by the famous New Orleans mystic Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, in which was asserted the complete identity of some of the odd geometrical designs on the iridescent cylinder, and of several of the hieroglyphs on the membraneous scroll, with certain ideographs of horrible significance (transcribed from primal monoliths or from the secret rituals of hidden bands of esoteric students and devotees) reproduced in the hellish and suppressed Black Book or Nameless Cults of von Junzt.\n\nDe Marigny recalled the frightful death of von Junzt in 1840, a year after the publication of his terrible volume at D\u00fcsseldorf, and commented on his blood-curdling and partly suspected sources of information. Above all, he emphasised the enormous relevance of the tales with which von Junzt linked most of the monstrous ideographs he had reproduced. That these tales, in which a cylinder and scroll were expressly mentioned, held a remarkable suggestion of relationship to the things at the museum, no one could deny; yet they were of such breath-taking extravagance\u2014involving such unbelievable sweeps of time and such fantastic anomalies of a forgotten elder world\u2014that one could much more easily admire than believe them.\n\nAdmire them the public certainly did, for copying in the press was universal. Illustrated articles sprang up everywhere, telling or purporting to tell the legends in the Black Book, expatiating on the horror of the mummy, comparing the cylinder's designs and the scroll's hieroglyphs with the figures reproduced by von Junzt, and indulging in the wildest, most sensational, and most irrational theories and speculations. Attendance at the museum was trebled, and the widespread nature of the interest was attested by the plethora of mail on the subject\u2014most of it inane and superfluous\u2014received at the museum. Apparently the mummy and its origin formed\u2014for imaginative people\u2014a close rival to the depression as chief topic of 1931 and 1932. For my own part, the principal effect of the furore was to make me read von Junzt's monstrous volume in the Golden Goblin edition\u2014a perusal which left me dizzy and nauseated, yet thankful that I had not seen the utter infamy of the unexpurgated text." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "The archaic whispers reflected in the Black Book, and linked with designs and symbols so closely akin to what the mysterious scroll and cylinder bore, were indeed of a character to hold one spellbound and not a little awestruck. Leaping an incredible gulf of time\u2014behind all the civilisations, races, and lands we know\u2014they clustered round a vanished nation and a vanished continent of the misty, fabulous dawn-years... that to which legend has given the name of Mu, and which old tablets in the primal Naacal tongue speak of as flourishing 200,000 years ago, when Europe harboured only hybrid entities, and lost Hyperborea knew the nameless worship of black amorphous Tsathoggua.\n\nThere was mention of a kingdom or province called K'naa in a very ancient land where the first human people had found monstrous ruins left by those who had dwelt there before\u2014vague waves of unknown entities which had filtered down from the stars and lived out their aeons on a forgotten, nascent world. K'naa was a sacred place, since from its midst the bleak basalt cliffs of Mount Yaddith-Gho soared starkly into the sky, topped by a gigantic fortress of Cyclopean stone, infinitely older than mankind and built by the alien spawn of the dark planet Yuggoth, which had colonised the earth before the birth of terrestrial life.\n\nThe spawn of Yuggoth had perished aeons before, but had left behind them one monstrous and terrible living thing which could never die\u2014their hellish god or patron daemon Ghatanothoa, which lowered and brooded eternally though unseen in the crypts beneath that fortress on Yaddith-Gho. No human creature had ever climbed Yaddith-Gho or seen that blasphemous fortress except as a distant and geometrically abnormal outline against the sky; yet most agreed that Ghatanothoa was still there, wallowing and burrowing in unsuspected abysses beneath the megalithic walls. There were always those who believed that sacrifices must be made to Ghatanothoa, lest it crawl out of its hidden abysses and waddle horribly through the world of men as it had once waddled through the primal world of the Yuggoth-spawn.\n\nPeople said that if no victims were offered, Ghatanothoa would ooze up to the light of day and lumber down the basalt cliffs of Yaddith-Gho bringing doom to all it might encounter. For no living thing could behold Ghatanothoa, or even a perfect graven image of Ghatanothoa, however small, without suffering a change more horrible than death itself. Sight of the god, or its image, as all the legends of the Yuggoth-spawn agreed, meant paralysis and petrifaction of a singularly shocking sort, in which the victim was turned to stone and leather on the outside, while the brain within remained perpetually alive\u2014horribly fixed and prisoned through the ages, and maddeningly conscious of the passage of interminable epochs of helpless inaction till chance and time might complete the decay of the petrified shell and leave it exposed to die. Most brains, of course, would go mad long before this aeon-deferred release could arrive. No human eyes, it was said, had ever glimpsed Ghatanothoa, though the danger was as great now as it had been for the Yuggoth-spawn.\n\nAnd so there was a cult in K'naa which worshipped Ghatanothoa and each year sacrificed to it twelve young warriors and twelve young maidens. These victims were offered up on flaming altars in the marble temple near the mountain's base, for none dared climb Yaddith-Gho's basalt cliffs or draw near to the Cyclopean pre-human stronghold on its crest. Vast was the power of the priests of Ghatanothoa, since upon them alone depended the preservation of K'naa and of all the land of Mu from the petrifying emergence of Ghatanothoa out of its unknown burrows.\n\nThere were in the land an hundred priests of the Dark God, under Imash-Mo the High-Priest, who walked before King Thabon at the Nath-feast, and stood proudly whilst the King knelt at the Dhoric shrine. Each priest had a marble house, a chest of gold, two hundred slaves, and an hundred concubines, besides immunity from civil law and the power of life and death over all in K'naa save the priests of the King. Yet in spite of these defenders there was ever a fear in the land lest Ghatanothoa slither up from the depths and lurch viciously down the mountain to bring horror and petrification to mankind. In the latter years the priests forbade men even to guess or imagine what its frightful aspect might be.\n\nIt was in the Year of the Red Moon (estimated as B. C. 173,148 by von Junzt) that a human being first dared to breathe defiance against Ghatanothoa and its nameless menace. This bold heretic was T'yog, High-Priest of Shub-Niggurath and guardian of the copper temple of the Goat with a Thousand Young. T'yog had thought long on the powers of the various gods, and had had strange dreams and revelations touching the life of this and earlier worlds. In the end he felt sure that the gods friendly to man could be arrayed against the hostile gods, and believed that Shub-Niggurath, Nug, and Yeb, as well as Yig the Serpent-god, were ready to take sides with man against the tyranny and presumption of Ghatanothoa.\n\nInspired by the Mother Goddess, T'yog wrote down a strange formula in the hieratic Naacal of his order, which he believed would keep the possessor immune from the Dark God's petrifying power. With this protection, he reflected, it might be possible for a bold man to climb the dreaded basalt cliffs and\u2014first of all human beings\u2014enter the Cyclopean fortress beneath which Ghatanothoa reputedly brooded. Face to face with the god, and with the power of Shub-Niggurath and her sons on his side, T'yog believed that he might be able to bring it to terms and at last deliver mankind from its brooding menace. With humanity freed through his efforts, there would be no limits to the honours he might claim. All the honours of the priests of Ghatanothoa would perforce be transferred to him; and even kingship or godhood might conceivably be within his reach.\n\nSo T'yog wrote his protective formula on a scroll of pthagon membrane (according to von Junzt, the inner skin of the extinct yakith-lizard) and enclosed it in a carven cylinder of lagh metal\u2014the metal brought by the Elder Ones from Yuggoth, and found in no mine of earth. This charm, carried in his robe, would make him proof against the menace of Ghatanothoa\u2014it would even restore the Dark God's petrified victims if that monstrous entity should ever emerge and begin its devastations. Thus he proposed to go up the shunned and man-untrodden mountain, invade the alien-angled citadel of Cyclopean stone, and confront the shocking devil-entity in its lair. Of what would follow, he could not even guess; but the hope of being mankind's saviour lent strength to his will.\n\nHe had, however, reckoned without the jealousy and self-interest of Ghatanothoa's pampered priests. No sooner did they hear of his plan than\u2014fearful for their prestige and privilege in case the Daemon-God should be dethroned\u2014they set up a frantic clamour against the so-called sacrilege, crying that no man might prevail against Ghatanothoa, and that any effort to seek it out would merely provoke it to a hellish onslaught against mankind which no spell or priestcraft could hope to avert. With those cries they hoped to turn the public mind against T'yog; yet such was the people's yearning for freedom from Ghatanothoa, and such their confidence in the skill and zeal of T'yog, that all the protestations came to naught. Even the King, usually a puppet of the priests, refused to forbid T'yog's daring pilgrimage.\n\nIt was then that the priests of Ghatanothoa did by stealth what they could not do openly. One night Imash-Mo, the High-Priest, stole to T'yog in his temple chamber and took from his sleeping form the metal cylinder; silently drawing out the potent scroll and putting in its place another scroll of great similitude, yet varied enough to have no power against any god or daemon. When the cylinder was slipped back into the sleeper's cloak Imash-Mo was content, for he knew T'yog was little likely to study that cylinder's contents again. Thinking himself protected by the true scroll, the heretic would march up the forbidden mountain and into the Evil Presence\u2014and Ghatanothoa, unchecked by any magic, would take care of the rest.\n\nIt would no longer be needful for Ghatanothoa's priests to preach against the defiance. Let T'yog go his way and meet his doom. And secretly, the priests would always cherish the stolen scroll\u2014the true and potent charm\u2014handing it down from one High-Priest to another for use in any dim future when it might be needful to contravene the Devil-God's will. So the rest of the night Imash-Mo slept in great peace, with the true scroll in a new cylinder fashioned for its harbourage.\n\nIt was dawn on the Day of the Sky-Flames (nomenclature undefined by von Junzt) that T'yog, amidst the prayers and chanting of the people and with King Thabon's blessing on his head, started up the dreaded mountain with a staff of tlath-wood in his right hand. Within his robe was the cylinder holding what he thought to be the true charm\u2014for he had indeed failed to find out the imposture. Nor did he see any irony in the prayers which Imash-Mo and the other priests of Ghatanothoa intoned for his safety and success.\n\nAll that morning the people stood and watched as T'yog's dwindling form struggled up the shunned basalt slope hitherto alien to men's footsteps, and many stayed watching long after he had vanished where a perilous ledge led round to the mountain's hidden side. That night a few sensitive dreamers thought they heard a faint tremor convulsing the hated peak; though most ridiculed them for the statement. Next day vast crowds watched the mountain and prayed, and wondered how soon T'yog would return. And so the next day, and the next. For weeks they hoped and waited, and then they wept. Nor did anyone ever see T'yog, who would have saved mankind from fears, again.\n\nThereafter men shuddered at T'yog's presumption, and tried not to think of the punishment his impiety had met. And the priests of Ghatanothoa smiled to those who might resent the god's will or challenge its right to the sacrifices. In later years the ruse of Imash-Mo became known to the people; yet the knowledge availed not to change the general feeling that Ghatanothoa were better left alone. None ever dared to defy it again. And so the ages rolled on, and King succeeded King, and High-Priest succeeded High-Priest, and nations rose and decayed, and lands rose above the sea and returned into the sea. And with many millennia decay fell upon K'naa\u2014till at last on a hideous day of storm and thunder, terrific rumbling, and mountain-high waves, all the land of Mu sank into the sea forever.\n\nYet down the later aeons thin streams of ancient secrets trickled. In distant lands there met together grey-faced fugitives who had survived the sea-fiend's rage, and strange skies drank the smoke of altars reared to vanished gods and daemons. Though none knew to what bottomless deep the sacred peak and Cyclopean fortress of dreaded Ghatanothoa had sunk, there were still those who mumbled its name and offered to it nameless sacrifices lest it bubble up through leagues of ocean and shamble among men spreading horror and petrifaction.\n\nAround the scattered priests grew the rudiments of a dark and secret cult\u2014secret because the people of the new lands had other gods and devils, and thought only evil of elder and alien ones\u2014and within that cult many hideous things were done, and many strange objects cherished. It was whispered that a certain line of elusive priests still harboured the true charm against Ghatanothoa which Imash-Mo stole from the sleeping T'yog; though none remained who could read or understand the cryptic syllables, or who could even guess in what part of the world the lost K'naa, the dreaded peak of Yaddith-Gho, and the titan fortress of the Devil-God had lain.\n\nThough it flourished chiefly in those Pacific regions around which Mu itself had once stretched, there were rumours of the hidden and detested cult of Ghatanothoa in illfated Atlantis, and on the abhorred plateau of Leng. Von Junzt implied its presence in the fabled subterrene kingdom of K'n-yan, and gave clear evidence that it had penetrated Egypt, Chaldaea, Persia, China, the forgotten Semite empires of Africa, and Mexico and Peru in the New World. That it had a strong connexion with the witchcraft movement in Europe, against which the bulls of popes were vainly directed, he more than strongly hinted. The West, however, was never favourable to its growth; and public indignation\u2014aroused by glimpses of hideous rites and nameless sacrifices\u2014wholly stamped out many of its branches. In the end it became a hunted, doubly furtive underground affair\u2014yet never could its nucleus be quite exterminated. It always survived somehow, chiefly in the Far East and on the Pacific Islands, where its teachings became merged into the esoteric lore of the Polynesian Areoi.\n\nVon Junzt gave subtle and disquieting hints of actual contact with the cult; so that as I read I shuddered at what was rumoured about his death. He spoke of the growth of certain ideas regarding the appearance of the Devil-God\u2014a creature which no human being (unless it were the too-daring T'yog, who had never returned) had ever seen\u2014and contrasted this habit of speculation with the taboo prevailing in ancient Mu against any attempt to imagine what the horror looked like. There was a peculiar fearfulness about the devotees' awed and fascinated whispers on this subject\u2014whispers heavy with morbid curiosity concerning the precise nature of what T'yog might have confronted in that frightful pre-human edifice on the dreaded and now-sunken mountains before the end (if it was an end) finally came\u2014and I felt oddly disturbed by the German scholar's oblique and insidious references to this topic.\n\nScarcely less disturbing were von Junzt's conjectures on the whereabouts of the stolen scroll of cantrips against Ghatanothoa, and on the ultimate uses to which this scroll might be put. Despite all my assurance that the whole matter was purely mythical, I could not help shivering at the notion of a latter-day emergence of the monstrous god, and at the picture of an humanity turned suddenly to a race of abnormal statues, each encasing a living brain doomed to inert and helpless consciousness for untold aeons of futurity. The old D\u00fcsseldorf savant had a poisonous way of suggesting more than he stated, and I could understand why his damnable book was suppressed in so many countries as blasphemous, dangerous, and unclean.\n\nI writhed with repulsion, yet the thing exerted an unholy fascination; and I could not lay it down till I had finished it. The alleged reproductions of designs and ideographs from Mu were marvellously and startlingly like the markings on the strange cylinder and the characters on the scroll, and the whole account teemed with details having vague, irritating suggestions of resemblance to things connected with the hideous mummy. The cylinder and scroll\u2014the Pacific setting\u2014the persistent notion of old Capt. Weatherbee that the Cyclopean crypt where the mummy was found had once lain under a vast building... somehow I was vaguely glad that the volcanic island had sunk before that massive suggestion of a trap-door could be opened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "What I read in the Black Book formed a fiendishly apt preparation for the news items and closer events which began to force themselves upon me in the spring of 1932. I can scarcely recall just when the increasingly frequent reports of police action against the odd and fantastical religious cults in the Orient and elsewhere commenced to impress me; but by May or June I realised that there was, all over the world, a surprising and unwonted burst of activity on the part of bizarre, furtive, and esoteric mystical organisations ordinarily quiescent and seldom heard from.\n\nIt is not likely that I would have connected these reports with either the hints of von Junzt or the popular furore over the mummy and cylinder in the museum, but for certain significant syllables and persistent resemblances\u2014sensationally dwelt upon by the press\u2014in the rites and speeches of the various secret celebrants brought to public attention. As it was, I could not help remarking with disquiet the frequent recurrence of a name\u2014in various corrupt forms\u2014which seemed to constitute a focal point of all the cult worship, and which was obviously regarded with a singular mixture of reverence and terror. Some of the forms quoted were G'tanta, Tanotah, Than-Tha, Gatan, and Ktan-Tah\u2014and it did not require the suggestions of my now numerous occultist correspondents to make me see in these variants a hideous and suggestive kinship to the monstrous name rendered by von Junzt as Ghatanothoa.\n\nThere were other disquieting features, too. Again and again the reports cited vague, awestruck references to a \"true scroll\"\u2014something on which tremendous consequences seemed to hinge, and which was mentioned as being in the custody of a certain \"Nagob\", whoever and whatever he might be. Likewise, there was an insistent repetition of a name which sounded like Tog, Tiok, Yog, Zob, or Yob, and which my more and more excited consciousness involuntarily linked with the name of the hapless heretic T'yog as given in the Black Book. This name was usually uttered in connexion with such cryptical phrases as \"It is none other than he\", \"He had looked upon its face\", \"He knows all, though he can neither see nor feel\", \"He has brought the memory down through the aeons\", \"The true scroll will release him\", \"Nagob has the true scroll\", \"He can tell where to find it\".\n\nSomething very queer was undoubtedly in the air, and I did not wonder when my occultist correspondents, as well as the sensational Sunday papers, began to connect the new abnormal stirrings with the legends of Mu on the one hand, and with the frightful mummy's recent exploitation on the other hand. The widespread articles in the first wave of press publicity, with their insistent linkage of the mummy, cylinder, and scroll with the tale in the Black Book, and their crazily fantastic speculations about the whole matter, might very well have roused the latent fanaticism in hundreds of those furtive groups of exotic devotees with which our complex world abounds. Nor did the papers cease adding fuel to the flames\u2014for the stories on the cult-stirrings were even wilder than the earlier series of yarns.\n\nAs the summer drew on, attendants noticed a curious new element among the throngs of visitors which\u2014after a lull following the first burst of publicity\u2014were again drawn to the museum by the second furore. More and more frequently there were persons of strange and exotic aspect\u2014swarthy Asiatics, long-haired nondescripts, and bearded brown men who seemed unused to European clothes\u2014who would invariably inquire for the hall of mummies and would subsequently be found staring at the hideous Pacific specimen in a veritable ecstasy of fascination. Some quiet, sinister undercurrent in this flood of eccentric foreigners seemed to impress all the guards, and I myself was far from undisturbed. I could not help thinking of the prevailing cult-stirrings among just such exotics as these\u2014and the connexion of those stirrings with myths all too close to the frightful mummy and its cylinder scroll.\n\nAt times I was half tempted to withdraw the mummy from exhibition\u2014especially when an attendant told me that he had several times glimpsed strangers making odd obeisances before it, and had overheard singsong mutterings which sounded like chants or rituals addressed to it at hours when the visiting throngs were somewhat thinned. One of the guards acquired a queer nervous hallucination about the petrified horror in the lone glass case, alleging that he could see from day to day certain vague, subtle, and infinitely slight changes in the frantic flexion of the bony claws, and in the fear-crazed expression of the leathery face. He could not get rid of the loathsome idea that those horrible, bulging eyes were about to pop suddenly open.\n\nIt was early in September, when the curious crowds had lessened and the hall of mummies was sometimes vacant, that the attempt to get at the mummy by cutting the glass of its case was made. The culprit, a swarthy Polynesian, was spied in time by a guard, and was overpowered before any damage occurred. Upon investigation the fellow turned out to be an Hawaiian notorious for his activity in certain underground religious cults, and having a considerable police record in connexion with abnormal and inhuman rites and sacrifices. Some of the papers found in his room were highly puzzling and disturbing, including many sheets covered with hieroglyphs closely resembling those on the scroll at the museum and in the Black Book of von Junzt; but regarding these things he could not be prevailed upon to speak.\n\nScarcely a week after this incident, another attempt to get at the mummy\u2014this time by tampering with the lock of his case\u2014resulted in a second arrest. The offender, a Cingalese, had as long and unsavoury a record of loathsome cult activities as the Hawaiian had possessed, and displayed a kindred unwillingness to talk to the police. What made this case doubly and darkly interesting was that a guard had noticed this man several times before, and had heard him addressing to the mummy a peculiar chant containing unmistakable repetitions of the word \"T'yog\". As a result of this affair I doubled the guards in the hall of mummies, and ordered them never to leave the now notorious specimen out of sight, even for a moment.\n\nAs may well be imagined, the press made much of these two incidents, reviewing its talk of primal and fabulous Mu, and claiming boldly that the hideous mummy was none other than the daring heretic T'yog, petrified by something he had seen in the pre-human citadel he had invaded, and preserved intact through 175,000 years of our planet's turbulent history. That the strange devotees represented cults descended from Mu, and that they were worshipping the mummy\u2014or perhaps even seeking to awaken it to life by spells and incantations\u2014was emphasised and reiterated in the most sensational fashion.\n\nWriters exploited the insistence of the old legends that the brain of Ghatanothoa's petrified victims remained conscious and unaffected\u2014a point which served as a basis for the wildest and most improbable speculations. The mention of a \"true scroll\" also received due attention\u2014it being the prevailing popular theory that T'yog's stolen charm against Ghatanothoa was somewhere in existence, and that cult-members were trying to bring it into contact with T'yog himself for some purpose of their own. One result of this exploitation was that a third wave of gaping visitors began flooding the museum and staring at the hellish mummy which served as a nucleus for the whole strange and disturbing affair.\n\nIt was among this wave of spectators\u2014many of whom made repeated visits\u2014that talk of the mummy's vaguely changing aspect first began to be widespread. I suppose\u2014despite the disturbing notion of the nervous guard some months before\u2014that the museum's personnel was too well used to the constant sight of odd shapes to pay close attention to details; in any case, it was the excited whispers of visitors which at length aroused the guards to the subtle mutation which was apparently in progress. Almost simultaneously the press got hold of it\u2014with blatant results which can well be imagined.\n\nNaturally, I gave the matter my most careful observation, and by the middle of October decided that a definite disintegration of the mummy was under way. Through some chemical or physical influence in the air, the half-stony, half-leathery fibres seemed to be gradually relaxing, causing distinct variations in the angles of the limbs and in certain details of the fear-twisted facial expression. After a half-century of perfect preservation this was a highly disconcerting development, and I had the museum's taxidermist, Dr. Moore, go carefully over the gruesome object several times. He reported a general relaxation and softening, and gave the thing two or three astringent sprayings, but did not dare to attempt anything drastic lest there be a sudden crumbling and accelerated decay.\n\nThe effect of all this upon the gaping crowds was curious. Heretofore each new sensation sprung by the press had brought fresh waves of staring and whispering visitors, but now\u2014though the papers blathered endlessly about the mummy's changes\u2014the public seemed to have acquired a definite sense of fear which outranked even its morbid curiosity. People seemed to feel that a sinister aura hovered over the museum, and from a high peak the attendance fell to a level distinctly below normal. This lessened attendance gave added prominence to the stream of freakish foreigners who continued to infest the place, and whose numbers seemed in no way diminished.\n\nOn November 18th a Peruvian of Indian blood suffered a strange hysterical or epileptic seizure in front of the mummy, afterward shrieking from his hospital cot, \"It tried to open its eyes!\u2014T'yog tried to open his eyes and stare at me!\" I was by this time on the point of removing the object from exhibition, but permitted myself to be overruled at a meeting of our very conservative directors. However, I could see that the museum was beginning to acquire an unholy reputation in its austere and quiet neighbourhood. After this incident I gave instructions that no one be allowed to pause before the monstrous Pacific relic for more than a few minutes at a time.\n\nIt was on November 24th, after the museum's five o'clock closing, that one of the guards noticed a minute opening of the mummy's eyes. The phenomenon was very slight\u2014nothing but a thin crescent of cornea being visible in either eye\u2014but it was none the less of the highest interest. Dr. Moore, having been summoned hastily, was about to study the exposed bits of eyeball with a magnifier when his handling of the mummy caused the leathery lids to fall tightly shut again. All gentle efforts to open them failed, and the taxidermist did not dare to apply drastic measures. When he notified me of all this by telephone I felt a sense of mounting dread hard to reconcile with the apparently simple event concerned. For a moment I could share the popular impression that some evil, amorphous blight from unplumbed deeps of time and space hung murkily and menacingly over the museum.\n\nTwo nights later a sullen Filipino was trying to secrete himself in the museum at closing time. Arrested and taken to the station, he refused even to give his name, and was detained as a suspicious person. Meanwhile the strict surveillance of the mummy seemed to discourage the odd hordes of foreigners from haunting it. At least, the number of exotic visitors distinctly fell off after the enforcement of the \"move along\" order.\n\nIt was during the early morning hours of Thursday, December 1st, that a terrible climax developed. At about one o'clock horrible screams of mortal fright and agony were heard issuing from the museum, and a series of frantic telephone calls from neighbours brought to the scene quickly and simultaneously a squad of police and several museum officials, including myself. Some of the policemen surrounded the building while others, with the officials, cautiously entered. In the main corridor we found the night watchman strangled to death\u2014a bit of East Indian hemp still knotted around his neck\u2014and realised that despite all precautions some darkly evil intruder or intruders had gained access to the place. Now, however, a tomb-like silence enfolded everything and we almost feared to advance upstairs to the fateful wing where we knew the core of the trouble must lurk. We felt a bit more steadied after flooding the building with light from the central switches in the corridor, and finally crept reluctantly up the curving staircase and through a lofty archway to the hall of mummies." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "It is from this point onward that reports of the hideous case have been censored\u2014for we have all agreed that no good can be accomplished by a public knowledge of those terrestrial conditions implied by the further developments. I have said that we flooded the whole building with light before our ascent. Now beneath the beams that beat down on the glistening cases and their gruesome contents, we saw outspread a mute horror whose baffling details testified to happenings utterly beyond our comprehension. There were two intruders\u2014who we afterward agreed must have hidden in the building before closing time\u2014but they would never be executed for the watchman's murder. They had already paid the penalty.\n\nOne was a Burmese and the other a Fiji-Islander\u2014both known to the police for their share in frightful and repulsive cult activities. They were dead, and the more we examined them the more utterly monstrous and unnamable we felt their manner of death to be. On both faces was a more wholly frantic and inhuman look of fright than even the oldest policeman had ever seen before; yet in the state of the two bodies there were vast and significant differences.\n\nThe Burmese lay collapsed close to the nameless mummy's case, from which a square of glass had been neatly cut. In his right hand was a scroll of bluish membrane which I at once saw was covered with greyish hieroglyphs\u2014almost a duplicate of the scroll in the strange cylinder in the library downstairs, though later study brought out subtle differences. There was no mark of violence on the body, and in view of the desperate, agonised expression on the twisted face we could only conclude that the man died of sheer fright.\n\nIt was the closely adjacent Fijian, though, that gave us the profoundest shock. One of the policemen was the first to feel of him, and the cry of fright he emitted added another shudder to that neighbourhood's night of terror. We ought to have known from the lethal greyness of the once-black, fear-twisted face, and of the bony hands\u2014one of which still clutched an electric torch\u2014that something was hideously wrong; yet every one of us was unprepared for what that officer's hesitant touch disclosed. Even now I can think of it only with a paroxysm of dread and repulsion. To be brief\u2014the hapless invader, who less than an hour before had been a sturdy living Melanesian bent on unknown evils, was now a rigid, ash-grey figure of stony, leathery petrification, in every respect identical with the crouching, aeon-old blasphemy in the violated glass case.\n\nYet that was not the worst. Crowning all other horrors, and indeed seizing our shocked attention before we turned to the bodies on the floor, was the state of the frightful mummy. No longer could its changes be called vague and subtle, for it had now made radical shifts of posture. It had sagged and slumped with a curious loss of rigidity; its bony claws had sunk until they no longer even partly covered its leathery, fear-crazed face; and\u2014God help us!\u2014its hellish bulging eyes had popped wide open, and seemed to be staring directly at the two intruders who had died of fright or worse.\n\nThat ghastly, dead-fish stare was hideously mesmerising, and it haunted us all the time we were examining the bodies of the invaders. Its effect on our nerves was damnably queer, for we somehow felt a curious rigidity creeping over us and hampering our simplest motions\u2014a rigidity which later vanished very oddly when we passed the hieroglyphed scroll around for inspection. Every now and then I felt my gaze drawn irresistibly toward those horrible bulging eyes in the case, and when I returned to study them after viewing the bodies I thought I detected something very singular about the glassy surface of the dark and marvellously well-preserved pupils. The more I looked, the more fascinated I became; and at last I went down to the office\u2014despite that strange stiffness in my limbs\u2014and brought up a strong multiple magnifying glass. With this I commenced a very close and careful survey of the fishy pupils, while the others crowded expectantly around.\n\nI had always been rather sceptical of the theory that scenes and objects become photographed on the retina of the eye in cases of death or coma; yet no sooner did I look through the lens than I realised the presence of some sort of image other than the room's reflection in the glassy, bulging optics of this nameless spawn of the aeons. Certainly, there was a dimly outlined scene on the age-old retinal surface, and I could not doubt that it formed the last thing on which those eyes had looked in life\u2014countless millennia ago. It seemed to be steadily fading, and I fumbled with the magnifier in order to shift another lens into place. Yet it must have been accurate and clear-cut, even if infinitesimally small, when\u2014in response to some evil spell or act connected with their visit\u2014it had confronted those intruders who were frightened to death. With the extra lens I could make out many details formerly invisible, and the awed group around me hung on the flood of words with which I tried to tell what I saw.\n\nFor here, in the year 1932, a man in the city of Boston was looking on something which belonged to an unknown and utterly alien world\u2014a world that vanished from existence and normal memory aeons ago. There was a vast room\u2014a chamber of Cyclopean masonry\u2014and I seemed to be viewing it from one of its corners. On the walls were carvings so hideous that even in this imperfect image their stark blasphemousness and bestiality sickened me. I could not believe that the carvers of these things were human, or that they had ever seen human beings when they shaped the frightful outlines which leered at the beholder. In the centre of the chamber was a colossal trap-door of stone, pushed upward to permit the emergence of some object from below. The object should have been clearly visible\u2014indeed, must have been when the eyes first opened before the fear-stricken intruders\u2014though under my lenses it was merely a monstrous blur.\n\nAs it happened, I was studying the right eye only when I brought the extra magnification into play. A moment later I wished fervently that my search had ended there. As it was, however, the zeal of discovery and revelation was upon me, and I shifted my powerful lenses to the mummy's left eye in the hope of finding the image less faded on that retina. My hands, trembling with excitement and unnaturally stiff from some obscure influence, were slow in bringing the magnifier into focus, but a moment later I realised that the image was less faded than in the other eye. I saw in a morbid flash of half-distinctness the insufferable thing which was welling up through the prodigious trap-door in that Cyclopean, immemorially archaic crypt of a lost world\u2014and fell fainting with an inarticulate shriek of which I am not even ashamed.\n\nBy the time I revived there was no distinct image of anything in either eye of the monstrous mummy. Sergeant Keefe of the police looked with my glass, for I could not bring myself to face that abnormal entity again. And I thanked all the powers of the cosmos that I had not looked earlier than I did. It took all my resolution, and a great deal of solicitation, to make me relate what I had glimpsed in the hideous moment of revelation. Indeed, I could not speak till we had all adjourned to the office below, out of sight of that daemoniac thing which could not be. For I had begun to harbour the most terrible and fantastic notions about the mummy and its glassy, bulging eyes\u2014that it had a kind of hellish consciousness, seeing all that occurred before it and trying vainly to communicate some frightful message from the gulfs of time. That meant madness\u2014but at last I thought I might be better off if I told what I had half seen.\n\nAfter all, it was not a long thing to tell. Oozing and surging up out of that yawning trap-door in the Cyclopean crypt I had glimpsed such an unbelievable behemothic monstrosity that I could not doubt the power of its original to kill with its mere sight. Even now I cannot begin to suggest it with any words at my command. I might call it gigantic\u2014tentacled\u2014proboscidian\u2014octopus-eyed\u2014semi-amorphous\u2014plastic\u2014partly squamous and partly rugose\u2014ugh! But nothing I could say could even adumbrate the loathsome, unholy, non-human, extra-galactic horror and hatefulness and unutterable evil of that forbidden spawn of black chaos and illimitable night. As I write these words the associated mental image causes me to lean back faint and nauseated. As I told of the sight to the men around me in the office, I had to fight to preserve the consciousness I had regained.\n\nNor were my hearers much less moved. Not a man spoke above a whisper for a full quarter-hour, and there were awed, half-furtive references to the frightful lore in the Black Book, to the recent newspaper tales of cult-stirrings, and to the sinister events in the museum. Ghatanothoa... Even its smallest perfect image could petrify\u2014T'yog\u2014the false scroll\u2014he never came back\u2014the true scroll which could fully or partly undo the petrification\u2014did it survive?\u2014the hellish cults\u2014the phrases overheard\u2014\"It is none other than he\"\u2014\"He had looked upon its face\"\u2014\"He knows all, though he can neither see nor feel\"\u2014\"He had brought the memory down through the aeons\"\u2014\"The true scroll will release him\"\u2014\"Nagob has the true scroll\"\u2014\"He can tell where to find it.\" Only the healing greyness of the dawn brought us back to sanity; a sanity which made of that glimpse of mine a closed topic\u2014something not to be explained or thought of again.\n\nWe gave out only partial reports to the press, and later on co\u00f6perated with the papers in making other suppressions. For example, when the autopsy shewed the brain and several other internal organs of the petrified Fijian to be fresh and unpetrified, though hermetically sealed by the petrification of the exterior flesh\u2014an anomaly about which physicians are still guardedly and bewilderedly debating\u2014we did not wish a furore to be started. We knew too well what the yellow journals, remembering what was said of the intact-brained and still-conscious state of Ghatanothoa's stony-leathery victims, would make of this detail.\n\nAs matters stood, they pointed out that the man who had held the hieroglyphed scroll\u2014and who had evidently thrust it at the mummy through the opening in the case\u2014was not petrified, while the man who had not held it was. When they demanded that we make certain experiments\u2014applying the scroll both to the stony-leathery body of the Fijian and to the mummy itself\u2014we indignantly refused to abet such superstitious notions. Of course, the mummy was withdrawn from public view and transferred to the museum laboratory awaiting a really scientific examination before some suitable medical authority. Remembering past events, we kept it under a strict guard; but even so, an attempt was made to enter the museum at 2:25 a.m. on December 5th. Prompt working of the burglar alarm frustrated the design, though unfortunately the criminal or criminals escaped.\n\nThat no hint of anything further ever reached the public, I am profoundly thankful. I wish devoutly that there were nothing more to tell. There will, of course, be leaks, and if anything happens to me I do not know what my executors will do with this manuscript; but at least the case will not be painfully fresh in the multitude's memory when the revelation comes. Besides, no one will believe the facts when they are finally told. That is the curious thing about the multitude. When their yellow press makes hints, they are ready to swallow anything; but when a stupendous and abnormal revelation is actually made, they laugh it aside as a lie. For the sake of general sanity it is probably better so.\n\nI have said that a scientific examination of the frightful mummy was planned. This took place on December 8th, exactly a week after the hideous culmination of events, and was conducted by the eminent Dr. William Minot, in conjunction with Wentworth Moore, Sc.D., taxidermist of the museum. Dr. Minot had witnessed the autopsy of the oddly petrified Fijian the week before. There were also present Messrs. Lawrence Cabot and Dudley Saltonstall of the museum's trustees, Drs. Mason, Wells, and Carver of the museum staff, two representatives of the press, and myself. During the week the condition of the hideous specimen had not visibly changed, though some relaxation of its fibres caused the position of the glassy, open eyes to shift slightly from time to time. All of the staff dreaded to look at the thing\u2014for its suggestion of quiet, conscious watching had become intolerable\u2014and it was only with an effort that I could bring myself to attend the examination.\n\nDr. Minot arrived shortly after 1:00 p.m., and within a few minutes began his survey of the mummy. Considerable disintegration took place under his hands, and in view of this\u2014and of what we told him concerning the gradual relaxation of the specimen since the first of October\u2014he decided that a thorough dissection ought to be made before the substance was further impaired. The proper instruments being present in the laboratory equipment, he began at once; exclaiming aloud at the odd, fibrous nature of the grey, mummified substance.\n\nBut his exclamation was still louder when he made the first deep incision, for out of that cut there slowly trickled a thick crimson stream whose nature\u2014despite the infinite ages dividing this hellish mummy's lifetime from the present\u2014was utterly unmistakable. A few more deft strokes revealed various organs in astonishing degrees of non-petrified preservation\u2014all, indeed, being intact except where injuries to the petrified exterior had brought about malformation or destruction. The resemblance of this condition to that found in the fright-killed Fiji-Islander was so strong that the eminent physician gasped in bewilderment. The perfection of those ghastly bulging eyes was uncanny, and their exact state with respect to petrification was very difficult to determine.\n\nAt 3:30 p.m. the brain-case was opened\u2014and ten minutes later our stunned group took an oath of secrecy which only such guarded documents as this manuscript will ever modify. Even the two reporters were glad to confirm the silence. For the opening had revealed a pulsing, living brain.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Outsider by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThat night the Baron dreamt of many a woe;\n\n[ And all his warrior-guests, with shade and form ]\n\nOf witch, and demon, and large coffin-worm,\n\nWere long be-nightmared.\n\n\u2014Keats.\n\nUnhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me\u2014to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.\n\nI know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible; full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled-up corpses of dead generations. It was never light, so that I used sometimes to light candles and gaze steadily at them for relief; nor was there any sun outdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower. There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky, but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall, stone by stone.\n\nI must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time. Beings must have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself; or anything alive but the noiseless rats and bats and spiders. I think that whoever nursed me must have been shockingly aged, since my first conception of a living person was that of something mockingly like myself, yet distorted, shrivelled, and decaying like the castle. To me there was nothing grotesque in the bones and skeletons that strowed some of the stone crypts deep down among the foundations. I fantastically associated these things with every-day events, and thought them more natural than the coloured pictures of living beings which I found in many of the mouldy books. From such books I learned all that I know. No teacher urged or guided me, and I do not recall hearing any human voice in all those years\u2014not even my own; for although I had read of speech, I had never thought to try to speak aloud. My aspect was a matter equally unthought of, for there were no mirrors in the castle, and I merely regarded myself by instinct as akin to the youthful figures I saw drawn and painted in the books. I felt conscious of youth because I remembered so little.\n\nOutside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forest. Once I tried to escape from the forest, but as I went farther from the castle the shade grew denser and the air more filled with brooding fear; so that I ran frantically back lest I lose my way in a labyrinth of nighted silence.\n\nSo through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.\n\nIn the dank twilight I climbed the worn and aged stone stairs till I reached the level where they ceased, and thereafter clung perilously to small footholds leading upward. Ghastly and terrible was that dead, stairless cylinder of rock; black, ruined, and deserted, and sinister with startled bats whose wings made no noise. But more ghastly and terrible still was the slowness of my progress; for climb as I might, the darkness overhead grew no thinner, and a new chill as of haunted and venerable mould assailed me. I shivered as I wondered why I did not reach the light, and would have looked down had I dared. I fancied that night had come suddenly upon me, and vainly groped with one free hand for a window embrasure, that I might peer out and above, and try to judge the height I had attained.\n\nAll at once, after an infinity of awesome, sightless crawling up that concave and desperate precipice, I felt my head touch a solid thing, and I knew I must have gained the roof, or at least some kind of floor. In the darkness I raised my free hand and tested the barrier, finding it stone and immovable. Then came a deadly circuit of the tower, clinging to whatever holds the slimy wall could give; till finally my testing hand found the barrier yielding, and I turned upward again, pushing the slab or door with my head as I used both hands in my fearful ascent. There was no light revealed above, and as my hands went higher I knew that my climb was for the nonce ended; since the slab was the trap-door of an aperture leading to a level stone surface of greater circumference than the lower tower, no doubt the floor of some lofty and capacious observation chamber. I crawled through carefully, and tried to prevent the heavy slab from falling back into place; but failed in the latter attempt. As I lay exhausted on the stone floor I heard the eerie echoes of its fall, but hoped when necessary to pry it open again.\n\nBelieving I was now at a prodigious height, far above the accursed branches of the wood, I dragged myself up from the floor and fumbled about for windows, that I might look for the first time upon the sky, and the moon and stars of which I had read. But on every hand I was disappointed; since all that I found were vast shelves of marble, bearing odious oblong boxes of disturbing size. More and more I reflected, and wondered what hoary secrets might abide in this high apartment so many aeons cut off from the castle below. Then unexpectedly my hands came upon a doorway, where hung a portal of stone, rough with strange chiselling. Trying it, I found it locked; but with a supreme burst of strength I overcame all obstacles and dragged it open inward. As I did so there came to me the purest ecstasy I have ever known; for shining tranquilly through an ornate grating of iron, and down a short stone passageway of steps that ascended from the newly found doorway, was the radiant full moon, which I had never before seen save in dreams and in vague visions I dared not call memories.\n\nFancying now that I had attained the very pinnacle of the castle, I commenced to rush up the few steps beyond the door; but the sudden veiling of the moon by a cloud caused me to stumble, and I felt my way more slowly in the dark. It was still very dark when I reached the grating\u2014which I tried carefully and found unlocked, but which I did not open for fear of falling from the amazing height to which I had climbed. Then the moon came out.\n\nMost daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable. Nothing I had before undergone could compare in terror with what I now saw; with the bizarre marvels that sight implied. The sight itself was as simple as it was stupefying, for it was merely this: instead of a dizzying prospect of treetops seen from a lofty eminence, there stretched around me on a level through the grating nothing less than the solid ground, decked and diversified by marble slabs and columns, and overshadowed by an ancient stone church, whose ruined spire gleamed spectrally in the moonlight.\n\nHalf unconscious, I opened the grating and staggered out upon the white gravel path that stretched away in two directions. My mind, stunned and chaotic as it was, still held the frantic craving for light; and not even the fantastic wonder which had happened could stay my course. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. I knew not who I was or what I was, or what my surroundings might be; though as I continued to stumble along I became conscious of a kind of fearsome latent memory that made my progress not wholly fortuitous. I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road. Once I swam across a swift river where crumbling, mossy masonry told of a bridge long vanished.\n\nOver two hours must have passed before I reached what seemed to be my goal, a venerable ivied castle in a thickly wooded park; maddeningly familiar, yet full of perplexing strangeness to me. I saw that the moat was filled in, and that some of the well-known towers were demolished; whilst new wings existed to confuse the beholder. But what I observed with chief interest and delight were the open windows\u2014gorgeously ablaze with light and sending forth sound of the gayest revelry. Advancing to one of these I looked in and saw an oddly dressed company, indeed; making merry, and speaking brightly to one another. I had never, seemingly, heard human speech before; and could guess only vaguely what was said. Some of the faces seemed to hold expressions that brought up incredibly remote recollections; others were utterly alien.\n\nI now stepped through the low window into the brilliantly lighted room, stepping as I did so from my single bright moment of hope to my blackest convulsion of despair and realisation. The nightmare was quick to come; for as I entered, there occurred immediately one of the most terrifying demonstrations I had ever conceived. Scarcely had I crossed the sill when there descended upon the whole company a sudden and unheralded fear of hideous intensity, distorting every face and evoking the most horrible screams from nearly every throat. Flight was universal, and in the clamour and panic several fell in a swoon and were dragged away by their madly fleeing companions. Many covered their eyes with their hands, and plunged blindly and awkwardly in their race to escape; overturning furniture and stumbling against the walls before they managed to reach one of the many doors.\n\nThe cries were shocking; and as I stood in the brilliant apartment alone and dazed, listening to their vanishing echoes, I trembled at the thought of what might be lurking near me unseen. At a casual inspection the room seemed deserted, but when I moved toward one of the alcoves I thought I detected a presence there\u2014a hint of motion beyond the golden-arched doorway leading to another and somewhat similar room. As I approached the arch I began to perceive the presence more clearly; and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered\u2014a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause\u2014I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives.\n\nI cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and desolation; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation; the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide. God knows it was not of this world\u2014or no longer of this world\u2014yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty on the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.\n\nI was almost paralysed, but not too much so to make a feeble effort toward flight; a backward stumble which failed to break the spell in which the nameless, voiceless monster held me. My eyes, bewitched by the glassy orbs which stared loathsomely into them, refused to close; though they were mercifully blurred, and shewed the terrible object but indistinctly after the first shock. I tried to raise my hand to shut out the sight, yet so stunned were my nerves that my arm could not fully obey my will. The attempt, however, was enough to disturb my balance; so that I had to stagger forward several steps to avoid falling. As I did so I became suddenly and agonisingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.\n\nI did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. I knew in that second all that had been; I remembered beyond the frightful castle and the trees, and recognised the altered edifice in which I now stood; I recognised, most terrible of all, the unholy abomination that stood leering before me as I withdrew my sullied fingers from its own.\n\nBut in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe. In the supreme horror of that second I forgot what had horrified me, and the burst of black memory vanished in a chaos of echoing images. In a dream I fled from that haunted and accursed pile, and ran swiftly and silently in the moonlight. When I returned to the churchyard place of marble and went down the steps I found the stone trap-door immovable; but I was not sorry, for I had hated the antique castle and the trees. Now I ride with the mocking and friendly ghouls on the night-wind, and play by day amongst the catacombs of Nephren-Ka in the sealed and unknown valley of Hadoth by the Nile. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.\n\nFor although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Pickman's Model by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nYou needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot\u2014plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don't you laugh at Oliver's grandfather, who won't ride in a motor? If I don't like that damned subway, it's my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We'd have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we'd taken the car.\n\nI know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you don't need to hold a clinic over it. There's plenty of reason, God knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be sane at all. Why the third degree? You didn't use to be so inquisitive.\n\nWell, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you ought to, anyhow, for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when you heard I'd begun to cut the Art Club and keep away from Pickman. Now that he's disappeared I go around to the club once in a while, but my nerves aren't what they were.\n\nNo, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess. You might have surmised I had some inside information when I dropped him\u2014and that's why I don't want to think where he's gone. Let the police find what they can\u2014it won't be much, judging from the fact that they don't know yet of the old North End place he hired under the name of Peters. I'm not sure that I could find it again myself\u2014not that I'd ever try, even in broad daylight! Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know, why he maintained it. I'm coming to that. And I think you'll understand before I'm through why I don't tell the police. They would ask me to guide them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the way. There was something there\u2014and now I can't use the subway or (and you may as well have your laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.\n\nI should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same silly reasons that fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or Bosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the genius Pickman had I feel it an honour to know him, no matter what direction his work takes. Boston never had a greater painter than Richard Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I never swerved an inch, either, when he shewed that \"Ghoul Feeding\". That, you remember, was when Minot cut him.\n\nYou know, it takes profound art and profound insight into Nature to turn out stuff like Pickman's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or a Witches' Sabbath or a portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear\u2014the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don't have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There's something those fellows catch\u2014beyond life\u2014that they're able to make us catch for a second. Dor\u00e9 had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or\u2014I hope to heaven\u2014ever will again.\n\nDon't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there's all the difference in the world between the vital, breathing things drawn from Nature or models and the artificial truck that commercial small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ from the pretender's mince-pie dreams in just about the same way that the life painter's results differ from the concoctions of a correspondence-school cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman saw\u2014but no! Here, let's have a drink before we get any deeper. Gad, I wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen what that man\u2014if he was a man\u2014saw!\n\nYou recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the mediaeval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimaeras on Notre Dame and Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things\u2014and maybe they saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious phases. I remember your asking Pickman yourself once, the year before you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions. Wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was partly because of that laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up comparative pathology, and was full of pompous \"inside stuff\" about the biological or evolutionary significance of this or that mental or physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him more and more every day, and almost frightened him toward the last\u2014that the fellow's features and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a way that wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and said Pickman must be abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told Reid, if you and he had any correspondence over it, that he'd let Pickman's paintings get on his nerves or harrow up his imagination. I know I told him that myself\u2014then.\n\nBut keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this. On the contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that \"Ghoul Feeding\" was a tremendous achievement. As you know, the club wouldn't exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine Arts wouldn't accept it as a gift; and I can add that nobody would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his house till he went. Now his father has it in Salem\u2014you know Pickman comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.\n\nI got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially after I began making notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it was his work which put the idea into my head, and anyhow, I found him a mine of data and suggestions when I came to develop it. He shewed me all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some pen-and-ink sketches that would, I verily believe, have got him kicked out of the club if many of the members had seen them. Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact that people generally were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made him get very confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if I were fairly close-mouthed and none too squeamish, he might shew me something rather unusual\u2014something a bit stronger than anything he had in the house.\n\n\"You know,\" he said, \"there are things that won't do for Newbury Street\u2014things that are out of place here, and that can't be conceived here, anyhow. It's my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won't find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn't Boston\u2014it isn't anything yet, because it's had no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they're the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts\u2014the ghosts of beings highly organised enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw.\n\n\"The place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he'd put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don't you realise that places like that weren't merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't afraid to live and feel and die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650? I can shew you houses that have stood two centuries and a half and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house crumble into powder. What do moderns know of life and the forces behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I'll wage my four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on. Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of this accursed cage of monotony\u2014I wish someone had laid a spell on him or sucked his blood in the night!\n\n\"I can shew you a house he lived in, and I can shew you another one he was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things he didn't dare put into that stupid Magnalia or that puerile Wonders of the Invisible World. Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other's houses, and the burying-ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute and persecute above ground\u2014things went on every day that they couldn't reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn't place!\n\n\"Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not moved since I'll wager that in eight I can shew you something queer in the cellar. There's hardly a month that you don't read of workmen finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old place as it comes down\u2014you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. There were witches and what their spells summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers\u2014and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old times! This wasn't the only world a bold and wise man could know\u2014faugh! And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!\n\n\"The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely. What do maps and records and guidebooks really tell of the North End? Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren't suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them. And what do those Dagoes know of their meaning? No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace, and yet there's not a living soul to understand or profit by them. Or rather, there's only one living soul\u2014for I haven't been digging around in the past for nothing!\n\n\"See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told you that I've got another studio up there, where I can catch the night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn't even think of in Newbury Street? Naturally I don't tell those cursed old maids at the club\u2014with Reid, damn him, whispering even as it is that I'm a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution. Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as beauty from life, so I did some exploring in places where I had reason to know terror lives.\n\n\"I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides myself have ever seen. It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul goes. I took it because of the queer old brick well in the cellar\u2014one of the sort I told you about. The shack's almost tumbling down, so that nobody else would live there, and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it. The windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better, since I don't want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground floor. A Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.\n\n\"Now if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy the pictures, for as I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no vast tour\u2014I sometimes do it on foot, for I don't want to attract attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't much.\"\n\nWell, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to keep myself from running instead of walking for the first vacant cab we could sight. We changed to the elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o'clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.\n\nWhen we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the oldest and dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking gables, broken small-paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood out half-disintegrated against the moonlit sky. I don't believe there were three houses in sight that hadn't been standing in Cotton Mather's time\u2014certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre-gambrel type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.\n\nFrom that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into an equally silent and still narrower alley with no light at all; and in a minute made what I think was an obtuse-angled bend toward the right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight and revealed an antediluvian ten-panelled door that looked damnably worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what was once splendid dark-oak panelling\u2014simple, of course, but thrillingly suggestive of the times of Andros and Phipps and the Witchcraft. Then he took me through a door on the left, lighted an oil lamp, and told me to make myself at home.\n\nNow, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly \"hard-boiled\", but I'll confess that what I saw on the walls of that room gave me a bad turn. They were his pictures, you know\u2014the ones he couldn't paint or even shew in Newbury Street\u2014and he was right when he said he had \"let himself go\". Here\u2014have another drink\u2014I need one anyhow!\n\nThere's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness and moral foetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of words to classify. There was none of the exotic technique you see in Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The backgrounds were mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels, ancient panelled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.\n\nThe madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground\u2014for Pickman's morbid art was pre\u00ebminently one of daemoniac portraiture. These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached humanity in varying degree. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal, had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now! Their occupations\u2014well, don't ask me to be too precise. They were usually feeding\u2014I won't say on what. They were sometimes shewn in groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be in battle over their prey\u2014or rather, their treasure-trove. And what damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shewn leaping through open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying at their throats. One canvas shewed a ring of them baying about a hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to theirs.\n\nBut don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme and setting which struck me faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and I'd seen much like this before. It was the faces, Eliot, those accursed faces, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were alive! That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!\n\nThere was one thing called \"The Lesson\"\u2014heaven pity me, that I ever saw it! Listen\u2014can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless dog-like things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose\u2014you know the old myth about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange for the human babes they steal. Pickman was shewing what happens to those stolen babes\u2014how they grow up\u2014and then I began to see a hideous relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was, in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution. The dog-things were developed from mortals!\n\nAnd no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan interior\u2014a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and clumsy seventeenth-century furniture, with the family sitting about while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one shewed nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the unclean things. It was their changeling\u2014and in a spirit of supreme irony Pickman had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to his own.\n\nBy this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was politely holding open the door for me; asking me if I would care to see his \"modern studies\". I hadn't been able to give him much of my opinions\u2014I was too speechless with fright and loathing\u2014but I think he fully understood and felt highly complimented. And now I want to assure you again, Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to scream at anything which shews a bit of departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and decently sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I'm not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that I'd just about recovered my wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which turned colonial New England into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all this, that next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at the doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber had shewn a pack of ghouls and witches overrunning the world of our forefathers, but this one brought the horror right into our own daily life!\n\nGad, how that man could paint! There was a study called \"Subway Accident\", in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another shewed a dance on Copp's Hill among the tombs with the background of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with monsters creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim to descend the stairs.\n\nOne disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon Hill, with ant-like armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves through burrows that honeycombed the ground. Dances in the modern cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest\u2014a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guidebook and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title of the picture was, \"Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount Auburn\".\n\nAs I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room of deviltry and morbidity, I began to analyse some of the points in my sickening loathing. In the first place, I said to myself, these things repelled because of the utter inhumanity and callous cruelty they shewed in Pickman. The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified because of their very greatness. Their art was the art that convinced\u2014when we saw the pictures we saw the daemons themselves and were afraid of them. And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the use of selectiveness or bizarrerie. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or conventionalised; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were almost painfully defined. And the faces!\n\nIt was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was pandemonium itself, crystal clear in stark objectivity. That was it, by heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all\u2014he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been, or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images, one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense\u2014in conception and in execution\u2014a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific realist.\n\nMy host was now leading the way down cellar to his actual studio, and I braced myself for some hellish effects among the unfinished canvases. As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he turned his flashlight to a corner of the large open space at hand, revealing the circular brick curb of what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with walls a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground level\u2014solid work of the seventeenth century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about\u2014an aperture of the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disc of wood formed the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have been connected with if Pickman's wild hints had not been mere rhetoric, I shivered slightly; then turned to follow him up a step and through a narrow door into a room of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary for work.\n\nThe unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were as ghastly as the finished ones upstairs, and shewed the painstaking methods of the artist. Scenes were blocked out with extreme care, and pencilled guide lines told of the minute exactitude which Pickman used in getting the right perspective and proportions. The man was great\u2014I say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A large camera on a table excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in the studio instead of carting his outfit around the town for this or that view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.\n\nThere was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and half-finished monstrosities that leered around from every side of the room, and when Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away from the light I could not for my life keep back a loud scream\u2014the second I had emitted that night. It echoed and echoed through the dim vaultings of that ancient and nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a flood of reaction that threatened to burst out as hysterical laughter. Merciful Creator! Eliot, but I don't know how much was real and how much was feverish fancy. It doesn't seem to me that earth can hold a dream like that!\n\nIt was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch, and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present prey and seek a juicier morsel. But damn it all, it wasn't even the fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-head of all panic\u2014not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body nor the half-hooved feet\u2014none of these, though any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.\n\nIt was the technique, Eliot\u2014the cursed, the impious, the unnatural technique! As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual breath of life so fused into a canvas. The monster was there\u2014it glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared\u2014and I knew that only a suspension of Nature's laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a model\u2014without some glimpse of the nether world which no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever had.\n\nPinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of paper now badly curled up\u2014probably, I thought, a photograph from which Pickman meant to paint a background as hideous as the nightmare it was to enhance. I reached out to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly I saw Pickman start as if shot. He had been listening with peculiar intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked unaccustomed echoes in the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright which, though not comparable to my own, had in it more of the physical than of the spiritual. He drew a revolver and motioned me to silence, then stepped out into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.\n\nI think I was paralysed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening, I fancied I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or bleats in a direction I couldn't determine. I thought of huge rats and shuddered. Then there came a subdued sort of clatter which somehow set me all in gooseflesh\u2014a furtive, groping kind of clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean in words. It was like heavy wood falling on stone or brick\u2014wood on brick\u2014what did that make me think of?\n\nIt came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen farther than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp grating noise, a shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening discharge of all six chambers of a revolver, fired spectacularly as a lion-tamer might fire in the air for effect. A muffled squeal or squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a pause, and the opening of the door\u2014at which I'll confess I started violently. Pickman reappeared with his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats that infested the ancient well.\n\n\"The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber,\" he grinned, \"for those archaic tunnels touched graveyard and witch-den and sea-coast. But whatever it is, they must have run short, for they were devilish anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred them up, I fancy. Better be cautious in these old places\u2014our rodent friends are the one drawback, though I sometimes think they're a positive asset by way of atmosphere and colour.\"\n\nWell, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had promised to shew me the place, and heaven knows he had done it. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that walk. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again.\n\nWhy did I drop him? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee. We've had enough of the other stuff, but I for one need something. No\u2014it wasn't the paintings I saw in that place; though I'll swear they were enough to get him ostracised in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs of Boston, and I guess you won't wonder now why I have to steer clear of subways and cellars. It was\u2014something I found in my coat the next morning. You know, the curled-up paper tacked to that frightful canvas in the cellar; the thing I thought was a photograph of some scene he meant to use as a background for that monster. That last scare had come while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly crumpled it into my pocket. But here's the coffee\u2014take it black, Eliot, if you're wise.\n\nYes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton Pickman, the greatest artist I have ever known\u2014and the foulest being that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness. Eliot\u2014old Reid was right. He wasn't strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. It's all the same now, for he's gone\u2014back into the fabulous darkness he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.\n\nDon't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. You know how damned lifelike Pickman's paintings were\u2014how we all wondered where he got those faces.\n\nWell\u2014that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What it shewed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful canvas. It was the model he was using\u2014and its background was merely the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, it was a photograph from life.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Picture in the House by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nSearchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous.\n\nMost horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses remote from travelled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping of rock. Two hundred years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow; but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory of unutterable things.\n\nIn such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished free from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds. Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.\n\nIt was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious, and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town, and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge leafless elms near the foot of a rocky hill. Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, the house none the less impressed me unfavourably the very moment I espied it. Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a century before which biassed me against places of this kind. Yet the force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.\n\nI had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too well to argue complete desertion. Therefore instead of trying the door I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain. As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I glanced at the neighbouring windows and the panes of the transom above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect. However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling, and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odour. I entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leading to rooms on the ground floor.\n\nLeaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely post-revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the place would have been a collector's paradise.\n\nAs I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten. I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about examining the various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an antediluvian aspect that I marvelled at beholding it outside a museum or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare than Pigafetta's account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598. I had often heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers De Bry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet. What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume tended to fall open of itself at Plate XII, which represented in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connexion with some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.\n\nI had turned to a neighbouring shelf and was examining its meagre literary contents\u2014an eighteenth-century Bible, a Pilgrim's Progress of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana, and a few other books of evidently equal age\u2014when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking in the room overhead. At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that the walker had just awakened from a sound sleep; and listened with less surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy. When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the panelled portal swing open again.\n\nIn the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old, white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was stout and powerful in proportion. His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks, seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness the man would have been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness, however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his lack of cleanliness surpassed description.\n\nThe appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious, an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.\n\n\"Ketched in the rain, be ye?\" he greeted. \"Glad ye was nigh the haouse en' hed the sense ta come right in. I calc'late I was asleep, else I'd a heerd ye\u2014I ain't as young as I uster be, an' I need a paowerful sight o' naps naowadays. Trav'lin' fur? I hain't seed many folks 'long this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage.\"\n\nI replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologised for my rude entry into his domicile, whereupon he continued.\n\n\"Glad ta see ye, young Sir\u2014new faces is scurce arount here, an' I hain't got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting, don't ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see 'im\u2014we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in 'eighty-four, but he quit suddent an' no one never heerd on 'im sence\u2014\" Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humour, yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book as Pigafetta's Regnum Congo. The effect of this volume had not left me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem an awkward one; for the old man answered freely and volubly.\n\n\"Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap'n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in 'sixty-eight\u2014him as was kilt in the war.\" Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply. I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task at which I was labouring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He continued.\n\n\"Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman for years, an' picked up a sight o' queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess\u2014he uster like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct, on the hill, tradin' hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so he give it in on a swap. 'Tis a queer book\u2014here, leave me git on my spectacles\u2014\" The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows. Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the pages lovingly.\n\n\"Ebenezer cud read a leetle o' this\u2014'tis Latin\u2014but I can't. I hed two er three schoolmasters read me a bit, and Passon Clark, him they say got draownded in the pond\u2014kin yew make anything outen it?\" I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:\n\n\"Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin'. Take this un here near the front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a-floppin' over an' daown? And them men\u2014them can't be niggers\u2014they dew beat all. Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o' these here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an' half men, but I never heerd o' nothing like this un.\" Here he pointed to a fabulous creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon with the head of an alligator.\n\n\"But naow I'll shew ye the best un\u2014over here nigh the middle\u2014\" The old man's speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before, were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place, to the repellent twelfth plate shewing a butcher's shop amongst the Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made his Africans look like white men\u2014the limbs and quarters hanging about the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as I disliked it.\n\n\"What d'ye think o' this\u2014ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh? When I see this I telled Eb Holt, 'That's suthin' ta stir ye up an' make yer blood tickle!' When I read in Scripter about slayin'\u2014like them Midianites was slew\u2014I kinder think things, but I ain't got no picter of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it\u2014I s'pose 'tis sinful, but ain't we all born an' livin' in sin?\u2014Thet feller bein' chopped up gives me a tickle every time I look at 'im\u2014I hev ta keep lookin' at 'im\u2014see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar's his head on thet bench, with one arm side of it, an' t'other arm's on the graound side o' the meat block.\"\n\nAs the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.\n\n\"As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'. D'ye know, young Sir, I'm right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster look at it a lot, especial when I'd heerd Passon Clark rant o' Sundays in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin' funny\u2014here, young Sir, don't git skeert\u2014all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep for market\u2014killin' sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin' at it\u2014\" The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer seemed not to notice it.\n\n\"Killin' sheep was kinder more fun\u2014but d'ye know, 'twan't quite satisfyin'. Queer haow a cravin' gits a holt on ye\u2014 As ye love the Almighty, young man, don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy\u2014here, set still, what's ailin' ye?\u2014I didn't do nothin', only I wondered haow 'twud be ef I did\u2014 They say meat makes blood an' flesh, an' gives ye new life, so I wondered ef 'twudn't make a man live longer an' longer ef 'twas more the same\u2014\" But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not produced by my fright, nor by the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It was produced by a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.\n\nThe open book lay flat between us, with the picture staring repulsively upward. As the old man whispered the words \"more the same\" a tiny spattering impact was heard, and something shewed on the yellowed paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the rain and of a leaky roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher's shop of the Anzique cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes. A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts; blasting that accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion which alone saved my mind.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Poetry and the Gods by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nA damp, gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War, when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes; unheard-of yearnings which floated out of the spacious twentieth-century drawing-room, up the misty deeps of the air, and eastward to far olive-groves in Arcady which she had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing and delicious as moonlight through the foliage about an antique shrine. Attired simply, in a low-cut evening dress of black, she appeared outwardly a typical product of modern civilisation; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived; that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in Time and Space, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonise with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapour of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.\n\nListlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor. An observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of vers libre, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, and who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the wild harmony of winged, spontaneous words; a harmony missing from the formal, convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream; the purple, star-strown mists beyond Time, where only gods and dreamers walk.\n\n\u2003\"Moon over Japan,\n\n\u2003White butterfly moon!\n\n\u2003Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream\n\n\u2003To the sound of the cuckoo's call....\n\n\u2003The white wings of moon-butterflies\n\n\u2003Flicker down the streets of the city,\n\n\u2003Blushing into silence the useless wicks of round lanterns in the hands of girls.\n\n\u2003Moon over the tropics,\n\n\u2003A white-curved bud\n\n\u2003Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven....\n\n\u2003The air is full of odours\n\n\u2003And languorous warm sounds....\n\n\u2003A flute drones its insect music to the night\n\n\u2003Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.\n\n\u2003Moon over China,\n\n\u2003Weary moon on the river of the sky,\n\n\u2003The stir of light in the willows is like the flashing of a thousand silver minnows\n\n\u2003Through dark shoals;\n\n\u2003The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples,\n\n\u2003The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon.\"\n\n\u2003Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars,\n\n\u2003of her delight at the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan.\n\n\u2003Half closing her eyes, she repeated words whose melody lay hid\n\n\u2003like crystals at the bottom of a stream before the dawn;\n\n\u2003hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.\n\n\u2003\"Moon over Japan,\n\n\u2003White butterfly moon!\n\n\u2003Moon over the tropics,\n\n\u2003A white-curved bud\n\n\u2003Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.\n\n\u2003The air is full of odours\n\n\u2003And languorous warm sounds... languorous warm sounds.\n\n\u2003Moon over China,\n\n\u2003Weary moon on the river of the sky... weary moon!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "Out of the mists gleamed godlike the form of a youth in winged helmet and sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth. Before the face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded shell of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke:\n\n\"O Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyane or the sky-inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the Gods, which lieth in beauty and song. O Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of Cumae when Apollo first knew her, though hast truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to awake and behold about him the little rose-crowned Fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal else, saving only a few whom the world rejects, remembereth; that the Gods were never dead, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of Gods in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awaking, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight with the shimmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The Gods are patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the Gods forever. In Tartarus the Titans writhe, and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Uranus and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for centuries of denial, but in sleeping the Gods have grown kind, and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of Gods. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy, and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to shew that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of the Gods, and in each age someone hath sung unknowing the message and the promise from the lotos-gardens beyond the sunset.\"\n\nThen in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies. Gentle breezes from the tower of Aiolos wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till suddenly they came upon Zeus holding court on the double-headed Parnassus; his golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure-flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much of splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its radiance did her no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in this lesser court the Father of Gods had tempered his glories for the sight of mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six noble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of Gods. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe, and the Musaean Keats. These were those messengers whom the Gods had sent to tell men that Pan had passed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that Gods speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer:\n\n\"O Daughter\u2014for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter\u2014behold upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers that Gods have sent down, that in the words and writings of men there may be still some trace of divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who have spoken the language of the Gods. Long have we dreamed in lotos-gardens beyond the West, and spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awaking and of change. Once more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the streams. In Gaul lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have gone forth with the madness of Gods, and have returned, Deimos and Phobos glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moans with grief, and the faces of men are as the faces of the Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of our bidding encompassed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos, prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our latest-born messenger, in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers have dreamed before him. He it is that we have chosen to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is who shall proclaim our return, and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shalt know the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to thee here. Each note shalt thou hear again in the poetry which is to come; the poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it through bleak years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soul of Hellas, appears as the crystal Arethusa in remote Sicilia.\"\n\nThen arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chaunted his hymn to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message not fall vainly upon her ears; for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all mortals and Gods, and needed no interpreter.\n\nSo too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words clave the ether with melodies easy to read and to adore. But at last remembered accents resounded before the listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a God among men, and still a God among Gods:\n\n\u2003\"Write, write, that from the bloody course of war,\n\n\u2003My dearest master, your dear son, may hie;\n\n\u2003Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far,\n\n\u2003His name with zealous fervour sanctify.\"\n\n\u2003Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal harmony:\n\n\u2003\"Or let thy lamp at midnight hour\n\n\u2003Be seen in some high lonely tower,\n\n\u2003Where I might oft outwatch the Bear\n\n\u2003With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere\n\n\u2003The spirit of Plato, to unfold\n\n\u2003What worlds or what vast regions hold\n\n\u2003Th' immortal mind, that hath forsook\n\n\u2003Her mansion in this fleshly nook." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "\u2003Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy\n\n\u2003In sceptred pall come sweeping by,\n\n\u2003Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line,\n\n\u2003Or the tale of Troy divine.\"\n\n\u2003Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the beauteous faun-folk:\n\n\u2003\"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard\n\n\u2003Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on...." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "\u2003When old age shall this generation waste,\n\n\u2003Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe\n\n\u2003Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,\n\n\u2003'Beauty is truth\u2014truth beauty'\u2014that is all\n\n\u2003Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.\"\n\nAs the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain son Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer flew the rosy-fingered Goddess, and kneeling, cried, \"Master, it is time I unlocked the gates of the East.\" And Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to the golden car of day. So Zeus descended from his carven throne and placed his hand upon the head of Marcia, saying:\n\n\"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the awaking of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow of false faiths will soon be gone, and the Gods shall once more walk among men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth.\" As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the fading stars; up, and westward over unseen seas." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "Many years have passed since Marcia dreamt of the Gods and of their Parnassian conclave. Tonight she sits in the same spacious drawing-room, but she is not alone. Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is luminous with celebrity; the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world. He is reading from a manuscript words which none has ever heard before, but which when heard will bring to men the dreams and fancies they lost so many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to doze in Arcady, and the greater Gods withdrew to sleep in lotos-gardens beyond the lands of the Hesperides. In the subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of the maiden has found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus; notes that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus' banks. The singer ceases, and with eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is \"fit for the Gods\"?\n\nAnd as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parnassus and the far-off sound of a mighty voice saying, \"By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth.\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Polaris by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nInto the north window of my chamber glows the Pole Star with uncanny light. All through the long hellish hours of blackness it shines there. And in the autumn of the year, when the winds from the north curse and whine, and the red-leaved trees of the swamp mutter things to one another in the small hours of the morning under the horned waning moon, I sit by the casement and watch that star. Down from the heights reels the glittering Cassiopeia as the hours wear on, while Charles' Wain lumbers up from behind the vapour-soaked swamp trees that sway in the night-wind. Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east; but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey. Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.\n\nWell do I remember the night of the great Aurora, when over the swamp played the shocking coruscations of the daemon-light. After the beams came clouds, and then I slept.\n\nAnd it was under a horned waning moon that I saw the city for the first time. Still and somnolent did it lie, on a strange plateau in a hollow betwixt strange peaks. Of ghastly marble were its walls and its towers, its columns, domes, and pavements. In the marble streets were marble pillars, the upper parts of which were carven into the images of grave bearded men. The air was warm and stirred not. And overhead, scarce ten degrees from the zenith, glowed that watching Pole Star. Long did I gaze on the city, but the day came not. When the red Aldebaran, which blinked low in the sky but never set, had crawled a quarter of the way around the horizon, I saw light and motion in the houses and the streets. Forms strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad, and under the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it was unlike any language I had ever known. And when the red Aldebaran had crawled more than half way around the horizon, there were again darkness and silence.\n\nWhen I awaked, I was not as I had been. Upon my memory was graven the vision of the city, and within my soul had arisen another and vaguer recollection, of whose nature I was not then certain. Thereafter, on the cloudy nights when I could sleep, I saw the city often; sometimes under that horned waning moon, and sometimes under the hot yellow rays of a sun which did not set, but which wheeled low around the horizon. And on the clear nights the Pole Star leered as never before.\n\nGradually I came to wonder what might be my place in that city on the strange plateau betwixt strange peaks. At first content to view the scene as an all-observant uncorporeal presence, I now desired to define my relation to it, and to speak my mind amongst the grave men who conversed each day in the public squares. I said to myself, \"This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of the sinister swamp and the cemetery on the low hillock, where the Pole Star peers into my north window each night?\"\n\nOne night as I listened to the discourse in the large square containing many statues, I felt a change; and perceived that I had at last a bodily form. Nor was I a stranger in the streets of Olatho\u00eb, which lies on the plateau of Sarkis, betwixt the peaks Noton and Kadiphonek. It was my friend Alos who spoke, and his speech was one that pleased my soul, for it was the speech of a true man and patriot. That night had the news come of Daikos' fall, and of the advance of the Inutos; squat, hellish, yellow fiends who five years ago had appeared out of the unknown west to ravage the confines of our kingdom, and finally to besiege our towns. Having taken the fortified places at the foot of the mountains, their way now lay open to the plateau, unless every citizen could resist with the strength of ten men. For the squat creatures were mighty in the arts of war, and knew not the scruples of honour which held back our tall, grey-eyed men of Lomar from ruthless conquest.\n\nAlos, my friend, was commander of all the forces on the plateau, and in him lay the last hope of our country. On this occasion he spoke of the perils to be faced, and exhorted the men of Olatho\u00eb, bravest of the Lomarians, to sustain the traditions of their ancestors, who when forced to move southward from Zobna before the advance of the great ice-sheet (even as our descendants must some day flee from the land of Lomar), valiantly and victoriously swept aside the hairy, long-armed, cannibal Gnophkehs that stood in their way. To me Alos denied a warrior's part, for I was feeble and given to strange faintings when subjected to stress and hardships. But my eyes were the keenest in the city, despite the long hours I gave each day to the study of the Pnakotic manuscripts and the wisdom of the Zobnarian Fathers; so my friend, desiring not to doom me to inaction, rewarded me with that duty which was second to nothing in importance. To the watch-tower of Thapnen he sent me, there to serve as the eyes of our army. Should the Inutos attempt to gain the citadel by the narrow pass behind the peak Noton, and thereby surprise the garrison, I was to give the signal of fire which would warn the waiting soldiers and save the town from immediate disaster.\n\nAlone I mounted the tower, for every man of stout body was needed in the passes below. My brain was sore dazed with excitement and fatigue, for I had not slept in many days; yet was my purpose firm, for I loved my native land of Lomar, and the marble city of Olatho\u00eb that lies betwixt the peaks of Noton and Kadiphonek.\n\nBut as I stood in the tower's topmost chamber, I beheld the horned waning moon, red and sinister, quivering through the vapours that hovered over the distant valley of Banof. And through an opening in the roof glittered the pale Pole Star, fluttering as if alive, and leering like a fiend and tempter. Methought its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over:\n\n\u2003\"Slumber, watcher, till the spheres\n\n\u2003Six and twenty thousand years\n\n\u2003Have revolv'd, and I return\n\n\u2003To the spot where now I burn.\n\n\u2003Other stars anon shall rise\n\n\u2003To the axis of the skies;\n\n\u2003Stars that soothe and stars that bless\n\n\u2003With a sweet forgetfulness:\n\n\u2003Only when my round is o'er\n\n\u2003Shall the past disturb thy door.\"\n\nVainly did I struggle with my drowsiness, seeking to connect these strange words with some lore of the skies which I had learnt from the Pnakotic manuscripts. My head, heavy and reeling, drooped to my breast, and when next I looked up it was in a dream; with the Pole Star grinning at me through a window from over the horrible swaying trees of a dream-swamp. And I am still dreaming.\n\nIn my shame and despair I sometimes scream frantically, begging the dream-creatures around me to waken me ere the Inutos steal up the pass behind the peak Noton and take the citadel by surprise; but these creatures are daemons, for they laugh at me and tell me I am not dreaming. They mock me whilst I sleep, and whilst the squat yellow foe may be creeping silently upon us. I have failed in my duty and betrayed the marble city of Olatho\u00eb; I have proven false to Alos, my friend and commander. But still these shadows of my dream deride me. They say there is no land of Lomar, save in my nocturnal imaginings; that in those realms where the Pole Star shines high and red Aldebaran crawls low around the horizon, there has been naught save ice and snow for thousands of years, and never a man save squat yellow creatures, blighted by the cold, whom they call \"Esquimaux\".\n\nAnd as I writhe in my guilty agony, frantic to save the city whose peril every moment grows, and vainly striving to shake off this unnatural dream of a house of stone and brick south of a sinister swamp and a cemetery on a low hillock; the Pole Star, evil and monstrous, leers down from the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.\n\n[ The Quest of Iranon ]\n\nInto the granite city of Teloth wandered the youth, vine-crowned, his yellow hair glistening with myrrh and his purple robe torn with briers of the mountain Sidrak that lies across the antique bridge of stone. The men of Teloth are dark and stern, and dwell in square houses, and with frowns they asked the stranger whence he had come and what were his name and fortune. So the youth answered:\n\n\"I am Iranon, and come from Aira, a far city that I recall only dimly but seek to find again. I am a singer of songs that I learned in the far city, and my calling is to make beauty with the things remembered of childhood. My wealth is in little memories and dreams, and in hopes that I sing in gardens when the moon is tender and the west wind stirs the lotos-buds.\"\n\nWhen the men of Teloth heard these things they whispered to one another; for though in the granite city there is no laughter or song, the stern men sometimes look to the Karthian hills in the spring and think of the lutes of distant Oonai whereof travellers have told. And thinking thus, they bade the stranger stay and sing in the square before the Tower of Mlin, though they liked not the colour of his tattered robe, nor the myrrh in his hair, nor his chaplet of vine-leaves, nor the youth in his golden voice. At evening Iranon sang, and while he sang an old man prayed and a blind man said he saw a nimbus over the singer's head. But most of the men of Teloth yawned, and some laughed and some went away to sleep; for Iranon told nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his hopes.\n\n\"I remember the twilight, the moon, and soft songs, and the window where I was rocked to sleep. And through the window was the street where the golden lights came, and where the shadows danced on houses of marble. I remember the square of moonlight on the floor, that was not like any other light, and the visions that danced in the moonbeams when my mother sang to me. And too, I remember the sun of morning bright above the many-coloured hills in summer, and the sweetness of flowers borne on the south wind that made the trees sing.\n\n\"O Aira, city of marble and beryl, how many are thy beauties! How loved I the warm and fragrant groves across the hyaline Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra that flowed through the verdant valley! In those groves and in that vale the children wove wreaths for one another, and at dusk I dreamed strange dreams under the yath-trees on the mountain as I saw below me the lights of the city, and the curving Nithra reflecting a ribbon of stars.\n\n\"And in the city were palaces of veined and tinted marble, with golden domes and painted walls, and green gardens with cerulean pools and crystal fountains. Often I played in the gardens and waded in the pools, and lay and dreamed among the pale flowers under the trees. And sometimes at sunset I would climb the long hilly street to the citadel and the open place, and look down upon Aira, the magic city of marble and beryl, splendid in a robe of golden flame.\n\n\"Long have I missed thee, Aira, for I was but young when we went into exile; but my father was thy King and I shall come again to thee, for it is so decreed of Fate. All through seven lands have I sought thee, and some day shall I reign over thy groves and gardens, thy streets and palaces, and sing to men who shall know whereof I sing, and laugh not nor turn away. For I am Iranon, who was a Prince in Aira.\"\n\nThat night the men of Teloth lodged the stranger in a stable, and in the morning an archon came to him and told him to go to the shop of Athok the cobbler, and be apprenticed to him.\n\n\"But I am Iranon, a singer of songs,\" he said, \"and have no heart for the cobbler's trade.\"\n\n\"All in Teloth must toil,\" replied the archon, \"for that is the law.\" Then said Iranon,\n\n\"Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?\" But the archon was sullen and did not understand, and rebuked the stranger.\n\n\"Thou art a strange youth, and I like not thy face nor thy voice. The words thou speakest are blasphemy, for the gods of Teloth have said that toil is good. Our gods have promised us a haven of light beyond death, where there shall be rest without end, and crystal coldness amidst which none shall vex his mind with thought or his eyes with beauty. Go thou then to Athok the cobbler or be gone out of the city by sunset. All here must serve, and song is folly.\"\n\nSo Iranon went out of the stable and walked over the narrow stone streets between the gloomy square houses of granite, seeking something green in the air of spring. But in Teloth was nothing green, for all was of stone. On the faces of men were frowns, but by the stone embankment along the sluggish river Zuro sate a young boy with sad eyes gazing into the waters to spy green budding branches washed down from the hills by the freshets. And the boy said to him:\n\n\"Art thou not indeed he of whom the archons tell, who seekest a far city in a fair land? I am Romnod, and born of the blood of Teloth, but am not old in the ways of the granite city, and yearn daily for the warm groves and the distant lands of beauty and song. Beyond the Karthian hills lieth Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing, which men whisper of and say is both lovely and terrible. Thither would I go were I old enough to find the way, and thither shouldst thou go an thou wouldst sing and have men listen to thee. Let us leave the city Teloth and fare together among the hills of spring. Thou shalt shew me the ways of travel and I will attend thy songs at evening when the stars one by one bring dreams to the minds of dreamers. And peradventure it may be that Oonai the city of lutes and dancing is even the fair Aira thou seekest, for it is told that thou hast not known Aira since old days, and a name often changeth. Let us go to Oonai, O Iranon of the golden head, where men shall know our longings and welcome us as brothers, nor ever laugh or frown at what we say.\" And Iranon answered:\n\n\"Be it so, small one; if any in this stone place yearn for beauty he must seek the mountains and beyond, and I would not leave thee to pine by the sluggish Zuro. But think not that delight and understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day's, or a year's, or a lustrum's journey. Behold, when I was small like thee I dwelt in the valley of Narthos by the frigid Xari, where none would listen to my dreams; and I told myself that when older I would go to Sinara on the southern slope, and sing to smiling dromedary-men in the market-place. But when I went to Sinara I found the dromedary-men all drunken and ribald, and saw that their songs were not as mine, so I travelled in a barge down the Xari to onyx-walled Jaren. And the soldiers at Jaren laughed at me and drave me out, so that I wandered to many other cities. I have seen Stethelos that is below the great cataract, and have gazed on the marsh where Sarnath once stood. I have been to Thraa, Ilarnek, and Kadatheron on the winding river Ai, and have dwelt long in Olatho\u00eb in the land of Lomar. But though I have had listeners sometimes, they have ever been few, and I know that welcome shall await me only in Aira, the city of marble and beryl where my father once ruled as King. So for Aira shall we seek, though it were well to visit distant and lute-blessed Oonai across the Karthian hills, which may indeed be Aira, though I think not. Aira's beauty is past imagining, and none can tell of it without rapture, whilst of Oonai the camel-drivers whisper leeringly.\"\n\nAt the sunset Iranon and small Romnod went forth from Teloth, and for long wandered amidst the green hills and cool forests. The way was rough and obscure, and never did they seem nearer to Oonai the city of lutes and dancing; but in the dusk as the stars came out Iranon would sing of Aira and its beauties and Romnod would listen, so that they were both happy after a fashion. They ate plentifully of fruit and red berries, and marked not the passing of time, but many years must have slipped away. Small Romnod was now not so small, and spoke deeply instead of shrilly, though Iranon was always the same, and decked his golden hair with vines and fragrant resins found in the woods. So it came to pass one day that Romnod seemed older than Iranon, though he had been very small when Iranon had found him watching for green budding branches in Teloth beside the sluggish stone-banked Zuro.\n\nThen one night when the moon was full the travellers came to a mountain crest and looked down upon the myriad lights of Oonai. Peasants had told them they were near, and Iranon knew that this was not his native city of Aira. The lights of Oonai were not like those of Aira; for they were harsh and glaring, while the lights of Aira shine as softly and magically as shone the moonlight on the floor by the window where Iranon's mother once rocked him to sleep with song. But Oonai was a city of lutes and dancing, so Iranon and Romnod went down the steep slope that they might find men to whom songs and dreams would bring pleasure. And when they were come into the town they found rose-wreathed revellers bound from house to house and leaning from windows and balconies, who listened to the songs of Iranon and tossed him flowers and applauded when he was done. Then for a moment did Iranon believe he had found those who thought and felt even as he, though the town was not an hundredth as fair as Aira.\n\nWhen dawn came Iranon looked about with dismay, for the domes of Oonai were not golden in the sun, but grey and dismal. And the men of Oonai were pale with revelling and dull with wine, and unlike the radiant men of Aira. But because the people had thrown him blossoms and acclaimed his songs Iranon stayed on, and with him Romnod, who liked the revelry of the town and wore in his dark hair roses and myrtle. Often at night Iranon sang to the revellers, but he was always as before, crowned only with the vine of the mountains and remembering the marble streets of Aira and the hyaline Nithra. In the frescoed halls of the Monarch did he sing, upon a crystal dais raised over a floor that was a mirror, and as he sang he brought pictures to his hearers till the floor seemed to reflect old, beautiful, and half-remembered things instead of the wine-reddened feasters who pelted him with roses. And the King bade him put away his tattered purple, and clothed him in satin and cloth-of-gold, with rings of green jade and bracelets of tinted ivory, and lodged him in a gilded and tapestried chamber on a bed of sweet carven wood with canopies and coverlets of flower-embroidered silk. Thus dwelt Iranon in Oonai, the city of lutes and dancing.\n\nIt is not known how long Iranon tarried in Oonai, but one day the King brought to the palace some wild whirling dancers from the Liranian desert, and dusky flute-players from Drinen in the East, and after that the revellers threw their roses not so much at Iranon as at the dancers and the flute-players. And day by day that Romnod who had been a small boy in granite Teloth grew coarser and redder with wine, till he dreamed less and less, and listened with less delight to the songs of Iranon. But though Iranon was sad he ceased not to sing, and at evening told again his dreams of Aira, the city of marble and beryl. Then one night the red and fattened Romnod snorted heavily amidst the poppied silks of his banquet-couch and died writhing, whilst Iranon, pale and slender, sang to himself in a far corner. And when Iranon had wept over the grave of Romnod and strown it with green budding branches, such as Romnod used to love, he put aside his silks and gauds and went forgotten out of Oonai the city of lutes and dancing clad only in the ragged purple in which he had come, and garlanded with fresh vines from the mountains.\n\nInto the sunset wandered Iranon, seeking still for his native land and for men who would understand and cherish his songs and dreams. In all the cities of Cydathria and in the lands beyond the Bnazic desert gay-faced children laughed at his olden songs and tattered robe of purple; but Iranon stayed ever young, and wore wreaths upon his golden head whilst he sang of Aira, delight of the past and hope of the future.\n\nSo came he one night to the squalid cot of an antique shepherd, bent and dirty, who kept lean flocks on a stony slope above a quicksand marsh. To this man Iranon spoke, as to so many others:\n\n\"Canst thou tell me where I may find Aira, the city of marble and beryl, where flows the hyaline Nithra and where the falls of the tiny Kra sing to verdant valleys and hills forested with yath trees?\" And the shepherd, hearing, looked long and strangely at Iranon, as if recalling something very far away in time, and noted each line of the stranger's face, and his golden hair, and his crown of vine-leaves. But he was old, and shook his head as he replied:\n\n\"O stranger, I have indeed heard the name of Aira, and the other names thou hast spoken, but they come to me from afar down the waste of long years. I heard them in my youth from the lips of a playmate, a beggar's boy given to strange dreams, who would weave long tales about the moon and the flowers and the west wind. We used to laugh at him, for we knew him from his birth though he thought himself a King's son. He was comely, even as thou, but full of folly and strangeness; and he ran away when small to find those who would listen gladly to his songs and dreams. How often hath he sung to me of lands that never were, and things that never can be! Of Aira did he speak much; of Aira and the river Nithra, and the falls of the tiny Kra. There would he ever say he once dwelt as a Prince, though here we knew him from his birth. Nor was there ever a marble city of Aira, nor those who could delight in strange songs, save in the dreams of mine old playmate Iranon who is gone.\"\n\nAnd in the twilight, as the stars came out one by one and the moon cast on the marsh a radiance like that which a child sees quivering on the floor as he is rocked to sleep at evening, there walked into the lethal quicksands a very old man in tattered purple, crowned with withered vine-leaves and gazing ahead as if upon the golden domes of a fair city where dreams are understood. That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Rats in the Walls by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOn July 16, 1923, I moved into Exham Priory after the last workman had finished his labours. The restoration had been a stupendous task, for little had remained of the deserted pile but a shell-like ruin; yet because it had been the seat of my ancestors I let no expense deter me. The place had not been inhabited since the reign of James the First, when a tragedy of intensely hideous, though largely unexplained, nature had struck down the master, five of his children, and several servants; and driven forth under a cloud of suspicion and terror the third son, my lineal progenitor and the only survivor of the abhorred line. With this sole heir denounced as a murderer, the estate had reverted to the crown, nor had the accused man made any attempt to exculpate himself or regain his property. Shaken by some horror greater than that of conscience or the law, and expressing only a frantic wish to exclude the ancient edifice from his sight and memory, Walter de la Poer, eleventh Baron Exham, fled to Virginia and there founded the family which by the next century had become known as Delapore.\n\nExham Priory had remained untenanted, though later allotted to the estates of the Norrys family and much studied because of its peculiarly composite architecture; an architecture involving Gothic towers resting on a Saxon or Romanesque substructure, whose foundation in turn was of a still earlier order or blend of orders\u2014Roman, and even Druidic or native Cymric, if legends speak truly. This foundation was a very singular thing, being merged on one side with the solid limestone of the precipice from whose brink the priory overlooked a desolate valley three miles west of the village of Anchester. Architects and antiquarians loved to examine this strange relic of forgotten centuries, but the country folk hated it. They had hated it hundreds of years before, when my ancestors lived there, and they hated it now, with the moss and mould of abandonment on it. I had not been a day in Anchester before I knew I came of an accursed house. And this week workmen have blown up Exham Priory, and are busy obliterating the traces of its foundations.\n\nThe bare statistics of my ancestry I had always known, together with the fact that my first American forbear had come to the colonies under a strange cloud. Of details, however, I had been kept wholly ignorant through the policy of reticence always maintained by the Delapores. Unlike our planter neighbours, we seldom boasted of crusading ancestors or other mediaeval and Renaissance heroes; nor was any kind of tradition handed down except what may have been recorded in the sealed envelope left before the Civil War by every squire to his eldest son for posthumous opening. The glories we cherished were those achieved since the migration; the glories of a proud and honourable, if somewhat reserved and unsocial Virginia line.\n\nDuring the war our fortunes were extinguished and our whole existence changed by the burning of Carfax, our home on the banks of the James. My grandfather, advanced in years, had perished in that incendiary outrage, and with him the envelope that bound us all to the past. I can recall that fire today as I saw it then at the age of seven, with the Federal soldiers shouting, the women screaming, and the negroes howling and praying. My father was in the army, defending Richmond, and after many formalities my mother and I were passed through the lines to join him. When the war ended we all moved north, whence my mother had come; and I grew to manhood, middle age, and ultimate wealth as a stolid Yankee. Neither my father nor I ever knew what our hereditary envelope had contained, and as I merged into the greyness of Massachusetts business life I lost all interest in the mysteries which evidently lurked far back in my family tree. Had I suspected their nature, how gladly I would have left Exham Priory to its moss, bats, and cobwebs!\n\nMy father died in 1904, but without any message to leave me, or to my only child, Alfred, a motherless boy of ten. It was this boy who reversed the order of family information; for although I could give him only jesting conjectures about the past, he wrote me of some very interesting ancestral legends when the late war took him to England in 1917 as an aviation officer. Apparently the Delapores had a colourful and perhaps sinister history, for a friend of my son's, Capt. Edward Norrys of the Royal Flying Corps, dwelt near the family seat at Anchester and related some peasant superstitions which few novelists could equal for wildness and incredibility. Norrys himself, of course, did not take them seriously; but they amused my son and made good material for his letters to me. It was this legendry which definitely turned my attention to my transatlantic heritage, and made me resolve to purchase and restore the family seat which Norrys shewed to Alfred in its picturesque desertion, and offered to get for him at a surprisingly reasonable figure, since his own uncle was the present owner.\n\nI bought Exham Priory in 1918, but was almost immediately distracted from my plans of restoration by the return of my son as a maimed invalid. During the two years that he lived I thought of nothing but his care, having even placed my business under the direction of partners. In 1921, as I found myself bereaved and aimless, a retired manufacturer no longer young, I resolved to divert my remaining years with my new possession. Visiting Anchester in December, I was entertained by Capt. Norrys, a plump, amiable young man who had thought much of my son, and secured his assistance in gathering plans and anecdotes to guide in the coming restoration. Exham Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks' nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.\n\nAs I gradually recovered the image of the edifice as it had been when my ancestor left it over three centuries before, I began to hire workmen for the reconstruction. In every case I was forced to go outside the immediate locality, for the Anchester villagers had an almost unbelievable fear and hatred of the place. This sentiment was so great that it was sometimes communicated to the outside labourers, causing numerous desertions; whilst its scope appeared to include both the priory and its ancient family.\n\nMy son had told me that he was somewhat avoided during his visits because he was a de la Poer, and I now found myself subtly ostracised for a like reason until I convinced the peasants how little I knew of my heritage. Even then they sullenly disliked me, so that I had to collect most of the village traditions through the mediation of Norrys. What the people could not forgive, perhaps, was that I had come to restore a symbol so abhorrent to them; for, rationally or not, they viewed Exham Priory as nothing less than a haunt of fiends and werewolves.\n\nPiecing together the tales which Norrys collected for me, and supplementing them with the accounts of several savants who had studied the ruins, I deduced that Exham Priory stood on the site of a prehistoric temple; a Druidical or ante-Druidical thing which must have been contemporary with Stonehenge. That indescribable rites had been celebrated there, few doubted; and there were unpleasant tales of the transference of these rites into the Cybele-worship which the Romans had introduced. Inscriptions still visible in the sub-cellar bore such unmistakable letters as \"DIV... OPS... MAGNA. MAT... \" sign of the Magna Mater whose dark worship was once vainly forbidden to Roman citizens. Anchester had been the camp of the third Augustan legion, as many remains attest, and it was said that the temple of Cybele was splendid and thronged with worshippers who performed nameless ceremonies at the bidding of a Phrygian priest. Tales added that the fall of the old religion did not end the orgies at the temple, but that the priests lived on in the new faith without real change. Likewise was it said that the rites did not vanish with the Roman power, and that certain among the Saxons added to what remained of the temple, and gave it the essential outline it subsequently preserved, making it the centre of a cult feared through half the heptarchy. About 1000 A.D. the place is mentioned in a chronicle as being a substantial stone priory housing a strange and powerful monastic order and surrounded by extensive gardens which needed no walls to exclude a frightened populace. It was never destroyed by the Danes, though after the Norman Conquest it must have declined tremendously; since there was no impediment when Henry the Third granted the site to my ancestor, Gilbert de la Poer, First Baron Exham, in 1261.\n\nOf my family before this date there is no evil report, but something strange must have happened then. In one chronicle there is a reference to a de la Poer as \"cursed of God\" in 1307, whilst village legendry had nothing but evil and frantic fear to tell of the castle that went up on the foundations of the old temple and priory. The fireside tales were of the most grisly description, all the ghastlier because of their frightened reticence and cloudy evasiveness. They represented my ancestors as a race of hereditary daemons beside whom Gilles de Retz and the Marquis de Sade would seem the veriest tyros, and hinted whisperingly at their responsibility for the occasional disappearance of villagers through several generations.\n\nThe worst characters, apparently, were the barons and their direct heirs; at least, most was whispered about these. If of healthier inclinations, it was said, an heir would early and mysteriously die to make way for another more typical scion. There seemed to be an inner cult in the family, presided over by the head of the house, and sometimes closed except to a few members. Temperament rather than ancestry was evidently the basis of this cult, for it was entered by several who married into the family. Lady Margaret Trevor from Cornwall, wife of Godfrey, the second son of the fifth baron, became a favourite bane of children all over the countryside, and the daemon heroine of a particularly horrible old ballad not yet extinct near the Welsh border. Preserved in balladry, too, though not illustrating the same point, is the hideous tale of Lady Mary de la Poer, who shortly after her marriage to the Earl of Shrewsfield was killed by him and his mother, both of the slayers being absolved and blessed by the priest to whom they confessed what they dared not repeat to the world.\n\nThese myths and ballads, typical as they were of crude superstition, repelled me greatly. Their persistence, and their application to so long a line of my ancestors, were especially annoying; whilst the imputations of monstrous habits proved unpleasantly reminiscent of the one known scandal of my immediate forbears\u2014the case of my cousin, young Randolph Delapore of Carfax, who went among the negroes and became a voodoo priest after he returned from the Mexican War.\n\nI was much less disturbed by the vaguer tales of wails and howlings in the barren, windswept valley beneath the limestone cliff; of the graveyard stenches after the spring rains; of the floundering, squealing white thing on which Sir John Clave's horse had trod one night in a lonely field; and of the servant who had gone mad at what he saw in the priory in the full light of day. These things were hackneyed spectral lore, and I was at that time a pronounced sceptic. The accounts of vanished peasants were less to be dismissed, though not especially significant in view of mediaeval custom. Prying curiosity meant death, and more than one severed head had been publicly shewn on the bastions\u2014now effaced\u2014around Exham Priory.\n\nA few of the tales were exceedingly picturesque, and made me wish I had learnt more of comparative mythology in my youth. There was, for instance, the belief that a legion of bat-winged devils kept Witches' Sabbath each night at the priory\u2014a legion whose sustenance might explain the disproportionate abundance of coarse vegetables harvested in the vast gardens. And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats\u2014the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion\u2014the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. Around that unforgettable rodent army a whole separate cycle of myths revolves, for it scattered among the village homes and brought curses and horrors in its train.\n\nSuch was the lore that assailed me as I pushed to completion, with an elderly obstinacy, the work of restoring my ancestral home. It must not be imagined for a moment that these tales formed my principal psychological environment. On the other hand, I was constantly praised and encouraged by Capt. Norrys and the antiquarians who surrounded and aided me. When the task was done, over two years after its commencement, I viewed the great rooms, wainscotted walls, vaulted ceilings, mullioned windows, and broad staircases with a pride which fully compensated for the prodigious expense of the restoration. Every attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced, and the new parts blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations. The seat of my fathers was complete, and I looked forward to redeeming at last the local fame of the line which ended in me. I would reside here permanently, and prove that a de la Poer (for I had adopted again the original spelling of the name) need not be a fiend. My comfort was perhaps augmented by the fact that, although Exham Priory was mediaevally fitted, its interior was in truth wholly new and free from old vermin and old ghosts alike.\n\nAs I have said, I moved in on July 16, 1923. My household consisted of seven servants and nine cats, of which latter species I am particularly fond. My eldest cat, \"Nigger-Man\", was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts; the others I had accumulated whilst living with Capt. Norrys' family during the restoration of the priory. For five days our routine proceeded with the utmost placidity, my time being spent mostly in the codification of old family data. I had now obtained some very circumstantial accounts of the final tragedy and flight of Walter de la Poer, which I conceived to be the probable contents of the hereditary paper lost in the fire at Carfax. It appeared that my ancestor was accused with much reason of having killed all the other members of his household, except four servant confederates, in their sleep, about two weeks after a shocking discovery which changed his whole demeanour, but which, except by implication, he disclosed to no one save perhaps the servants who assisted him and afterward fled beyond reach.\n\nThis deliberate slaughter, which included a father, three brothers, and two sisters, was largely condoned by the villagers, and so slackly treated by the law that its perpetrator escaped honoured, unharmed, and undisguised to Virginia; the general whispered sentiment being that he had purged the land of an immemorial curse. What discovery had prompted an act so terrible, I could scarcely even conjecture. Walter de la Poer must have known for years the sinister tales about his family, so that this material could have given him no fresh impulse. Had he, then, witnessed some appalling ancient rite, or stumbled upon some frightful and revealing symbol in the priory or its vicinity? He was reputed to have been a shy, gentle youth in England. In Virginia he seemed not so much hard or bitter as harassed and apprehensive. He was spoken of in the diary of another gentleman-adventurer, Francis Harley of Bellview, as a man of unexampled justice, honour, and delicacy.\n\nOn July 22 occurred the first incident which, though lightly dismissed at the time, takes on a preternatural significance in relation to later events. It was so simple as to be almost negligible, and could not possibly have been noticed under the circumstances; for it must be recalled that since I was in a building practically fresh and new except for the walls, and surrounded by a well-balanced staff of servitors, apprehension would have been absurd despite the locality. What I afterward remembered is merely this\u2014that my old black cat, whose moods I know so well, was undoubtedly alert and anxious to an extent wholly out of keeping with his natural character. He roved from room to room, restless and disturbed, and sniffed constantly about the walls which formed part of the old Gothic structure. I realise how trite this sounds\u2014like the inevitable dog in the ghost story, which always growls before his master sees the sheeted figure\u2014yet I cannot consistently suppress it.\n\nThe following day a servant complained of restlessness among all the cats in the house. He came to me in my study, a lofty west room on the second story, with groined arches, black oak panelling, and a triple Gothic window overlooking the limestone cliff and desolate valley; and even as he spoke I saw the jetty form of Nigger-Man creeping along the west wall and scratching at the new panels which overlaid the ancient stone. I told the man that there must be some singular odour or emanation from the old stonework, imperceptible to human senses, but affecting the delicate organs of cats even through the new woodwork. This I truly believed, and when the fellow suggested the presence of mice or rats, I mentioned that there had been no rats there for three hundred years, and that even the field mice of the surrounding country could hardly be found in these high walls, where they had never been known to stray. That afternoon I called on Capt. Norrys, and he assured me that it would be quite incredible for field mice to infest the priory in such a sudden and unprecedented fashion.\n\nThat night, dispensing as usual with a valet, I retired in the west tower chamber which I had chosen as my own, reached from the study by a stone staircase and short gallery\u2014the former partly ancient, the latter entirely restored. This room was circular, very high, and without wainscotting, being hung with arras which I had myself chosen in London. Seeing that Nigger-Man was with me, I shut the heavy Gothic door and retired by the light of the electric bulbs which so cleverly counterfeited candles, finally switching off the light and sinking on the carved and canopied four-poster, with the venerable cat in his accustomed place across my feet. I did not draw the curtains, but gazed out at the narrow north window which I faced. There was a suspicion of aurora in the sky, and the delicate traceries of the window were pleasantly silhouetted.\n\nAt some time I must have fallen quietly asleep, for I recall a distinct sense of leaving strange dreams, when the cat started violently from his placid position. I saw him in the faint auroral glow, head strained forward, fore feet on my ankles, and hind feet stretched behind. He was looking intensely at a point on the wall somewhat west of the window, a point which to my eye had nothing to mark it, but toward which all my attention was now directed. And as I watched, I knew that Nigger-Man was not vainly excited. Whether the arras actually moved I cannot say. I think it did, very slightly. But what I can swear to is that behind it I heard a low, distinct scurrying as of rats or mice. In a moment the cat had jumped bodily on the screening tapestry, bringing the affected section to the floor with his weight, and exposing a damp, ancient wall of stone; patched here and there by the restorers, and devoid of any trace of rodent prowlers. Nigger-Man raced up and down the floor by this part of the wall, clawing the fallen arras and seemingly trying at times to insert a paw between the wall and the oaken floor. He found nothing, and after a time returned wearily to his place across my feet. I had not moved, but I did not sleep again that night.\n\nIn the morning I questioned all the servants, and found that none of them had noticed anything unusual, save that the cook remembered the actions of a cat which had rested on her windowsill. This cat had howled at some unknown hour of the night, awaking the cook in time for her to see him dart purposefully out of the open door down the stairs. I drowsed away the noontime, and in the afternoon called again on Capt. Norrys, who became exceedingly interested in what I told him. The odd incidents\u2014so slight yet so curious\u2014appealed to his sense of the picturesque, and elicited from him a number of reminiscences of local ghostly lore. We were genuinely perplexed at the presence of rats, and Norrys lent me some traps and Paris green, which I had the servants place in strategic localities when I returned.\n\nI retired early, being very sleepy, but was harassed by dreams of the most horrible sort. I seemed to be looking down from an immense height upon a twilit grotto, knee-deep with filth, where a white-bearded daemon swineherd drove about with his staff a flock of fungous, flabby beasts whose appearance filled me with unutterable loathing. Then, as the swineherd paused and nodded over his task, a mighty swarm of rats rained down on the stinking abyss and fell to devouring beasts and man alike.\n\nFrom this terrific vision I was abruptly awaked by the motions of Nigger-Man, who had been sleeping as usual across my feet. This time I did not have to question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound\u2014the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats. There was now no aurora to shew the state of the arras\u2014the fallen section of which had been replaced\u2014but I was not too frightened to switch on the light.\n\nAs the bulbs leapt into radiance I saw a hideous shaking all over the tapestry, causing the somewhat peculiar designs to execute a singular dance of death. This motion disappeared almost at once, and the sound with it. Springing out of bed, I poked at the arras with the long handle of a warming-pan that rested near, and lifted one section to see what lay beneath. There was nothing but the patched stone wall, and even the cat had lost his tense realisation of abnormal presences. When I examined the circular trap that had been placed in the room, I found all of the openings sprung, though no trace remained of what had been caught and had escaped.\n\nFurther sleep was out of the question, so, lighting a candle, I opened the door and went out in the gallery toward the stairs to my study, Nigger-Man following at my heels. Before we had reached the stone steps, however, the cat darted ahead of me and vanished down the ancient flight. As I descended the stairs myself, I became suddenly aware of sounds in the great room below; sounds of a nature which could not be mistaken. The oak-panelled walls were alive with rats, scampering and milling, whilst Nigger-Man was racing about with the fury of a baffled hunter. Reaching the bottom, I switched on the light, which did not this time cause the noise to subside. The rats continued their riot, stampeding with such force and distinctness that I could finally assign to their motions a definite direction. These creatures, in numbers apparently inexhaustible, were engaged in one stupendous migration from inconceivable heights to some depth conceivably, or inconceivably, below.\n\nI now heard steps in the corridor, and in another moment two servants pushed open the massive door. They were searching the house for some unknown source of disturbance which had thrown all the cats into a snarling panic and caused them to plunge precipitately down several flights of stairs and squat, yowling, before the closed door to the sub-cellar. I asked them if they had heard the rats, but they replied in the negative. And when I turned to call their attention to the sounds in the panels, I realised that the noise had ceased. With the two men, I went down to the door of the sub-cellar, but found the cats already dispersed. Later I resolved to explore the crypt below, but for the present I merely made a round of the traps. All were sprung, yet all were tenantless. Satisfying myself that no one had heard the rats save the felines and me, I sat in my study till morning; thinking profoundly, and recalling every scrap of legend I had unearthed concerning the building I inhabited.\n\nI slept some in the forenoon, leaning back in the one comfortable library chair which my mediaeval plan of furnishing could not banish. Later I telephoned to Capt. Norrys, who came over and helped me explore the sub-cellar. Absolutely nothing untoward was found, although we could not repress a thrill at the knowledge that this vault was built by Roman hands. Every low arch and massive pillar was Roman\u2014not the debased Romanesque of the bungling Saxons, but the severe and harmonious classicism of the age of the Caesars; indeed, the walls abounded with inscriptions familiar to the antiquarians who had repeatedly explored the place\u2014things like \"P.GETAE. PROP... TEMP... DONA...\" and \"L. PRAEC... VS... PONTIFI... ATYS...\"\n\nThe reference to Atys made me shiver, for I had read Catullus and knew something of the hideous rites of the Eastern god, whose worship was so mixed with that of Cybele. Norrys and I, by the light of lanterns, tried to interpret the odd and nearly effaced designs on certain irregularly rectangular blocks of stone generally held to be altars, but could make nothing of them. We remembered that one pattern, a sort of rayed sun, was held by students to imply a non-Roman origin, suggesting that these altars had merely been adopted by the Roman priests from some older and perhaps aboriginal temple on the same site. On one of these blocks were some brown stains which made me wonder. The largest, in the centre of the room, had certain features on the upper surface which indicated its connexion with fire\u2014probably burnt offerings.\n\nSuch were the sights in that crypt before whose door the cats had howled, and where Norrys and I now determined to pass the night. Couches were brought down by the servants, who were told not to mind any nocturnal actions of the cats, and Nigger-Man was admitted as much for help as for companionship. We decided to keep the great oak door\u2014a modern replica with slits for ventilation\u2014tightly closed; and, with this attended to, we retired with lanterns still burning to await whatever might occur.\n\nThe vault was very deep in the foundations of the priory, and undoubtedly far down on the face of the beetling limestone cliff overlooking the waste valley. That it had been the goal of the scuffling and unexplainable rats I could not doubt, though why, I could not tell. As we lay there expectantly, I found my vigil occasionally mixed with half-formed dreams from which the uneasy motions of the cat across my feet would rouse me. These dreams were not wholesome, but horribly like the one I had had the night before. I saw again the twilit grotto, and the swineherd with his unmentionable fungous beasts wallowing in filth, and as I looked at these things they seemed nearer and more distinct\u2014so distinct that I could almost observe their features. Then I did observe the flabby features of one of them\u2014and awaked with such a scream that Nigger-Man started up, whilst Capt. Norrys, who had not slept, laughed considerably. Norrys might have laughed more\u2014or perhaps less\u2014had he known what it was that made me scream. But I did not remember myself till later. Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.\n\nNorrys waked me when the phenomena began. Out of the same frightful dream I was called by his gentle shaking and his urging to listen to the cats. Indeed, there was much to listen to, for beyond the closed door at the head of the stone steps was a veritable nightmare of feline yelling and clawing, whilst Nigger-Man, unmindful of his kindred outside, was running excitedly around the bare stone walls, in which I heard the same babel of scurrying rats that had troubled me the night before.\n\nAn acute terror now rose within me, for here were anomalies which nothing normal could well explain. These rats, if not the creatures of a madness which I shared with the cats alone, must be burrowing and sliding in Roman walls I had thought to be of solid limestone blocks... unless perhaps the action of water through more than seventeen centuries had eaten winding tunnels which rodent bodies had worn clear and ample.... But even so, the spectral horror was no less; for if these were living vermin why did not Norrys hear their disgusting commotion? Why did he urge me to watch Nigger-Man and listen to the cats outside, and why did he guess wildly and vaguely at what could have aroused them?\n\nBy the time I had managed to tell him, as rationally as I could, what I thought I was hearing, my ears gave me the last fading impression of the scurrying; which had retreated still downward, far underneath this deepest of sub-cellars till it seemed as if the whole cliff below were riddled with questing rats. Norrys was not as sceptical as I had anticipated, but instead seemed profoundly moved. He motioned to me to notice that the cats at the door had ceased their clamour, as if giving up the rats for lost; whilst Nigger-Man had a burst of renewed restlessness, and was clawing frantically around the bottom of the large stone altar in the centre of the room, which was nearer Norrys' couch than mine.\n\nMy fear of the unknown was at this point very great. Something astounding had occurred, and I saw that Capt. Norrys, a younger, stouter, and presumably more naturally materialistic man, was affected fully as much as myself\u2014perhaps because of his lifelong and intimate familiarity with local legend. We could for the moment do nothing but watch the old black cat as he pawed with decreasing fervour at the base of the altar, occasionally looking up and mewing to me in that persuasive manner which he used when he wished me to perform some favour for him.\n\nNorrys now took a lantern close to the altar and examined the place where Nigger-Man was pawing; silently kneeling and scraping away the lichens of centuries which joined the massive pre-Roman block to the tessellated floor. He did not find anything, and was about to abandon his effort when I noticed a trivial circumstance which made me shudder, even though it implied nothing more than I had already imagined. I told him of it, and we both looked at its almost imperceptible manifestation with the fixedness of fascinated discovery and acknowledgment. It was only this\u2014that the flame of the lantern set down near the altar was slightly but certainly flickering from a draught of air which it had not before received, and which came indubitably from the crevice between floor and altar where Norrys was scraping away the lichens.\n\nWe spent the rest of the night in the brilliantly lighted study, nervously discussing what we should do next. The discovery that some vault deeper than the deepest known masonry of the Romans underlay this accursed pile\u2014some vault unsuspected by the curious antiquarians of three centuries\u2014would have been sufficient to excite us without any background of the sinister. As it was, the fascination became twofold; and we paused in doubt whether to abandon our search and quit the priory forever in superstitious caution, or to gratify our sense of adventure and brave whatever horrors might await us in the unknown depths. By morning we had compromised, and decided to go to London to gather a group of archaeologists and scientific men fit to cope with the mystery. It should be mentioned that before leaving the sub-cellar we had vainly tried to move the central altar which we now recognised as the gate to a new pit of nameless fear. What secret would open the gate, wiser men than we would have to find.\n\nDuring many days in London Capt. Norrys and I presented our facts, conjectures, and legendary anecdotes to five eminent authorities, all men who could be trusted to respect any family disclosures which future explorations might develop. We found most of them little disposed to scoff, but instead intensely interested and sincerely sympathetic. It is hardly necessary to name them all, but I may say that they included Sir William Brinton, whose excavations in the Troad excited most of the world in their day. As we all took the train for Anchester I felt myself poised on the brink of frightful revelations, a sensation symbolised by the air of mourning among the many Americans at the unexpected death of the President on the other side of the world.\n\nOn the evening of August 7th we reached Exham Priory, where the servants assured me that nothing unusual had occurred. The cats, even old Nigger-Man, had been perfectly placid; and not a trap in the house had been sprung. We were to begin exploring on the following day, awaiting which I assigned well-appointed rooms to all my guests. I myself retired in my own tower chamber, with Nigger-Man across my feet. Sleep came quickly, but hideous dreams assailed me. There was a vision of a Roman feast like that of Trimalchio, with a horror in a covered platter. Then came that damnable, recurrent thing about the swineherd and his filthy drove in the twilit grotto. Yet when I awoke it was full daylight, with normal sounds in the house below. The rats, living or spectral, had not troubled me; and Nigger-Man was quietly asleep. On going down, I found that the same tranquillity had prevailed elsewhere; a condition which one of the assembled savants\u2014a fellow named Thornton, devoted to the psychic\u2014rather absurdly laid to the fact that I had now been shewn the thing which certain forces had wished to shew me.\n\nAll was now ready, and at 11 a.m. our entire group of seven men, bearing powerful electric searchlights and implements of excavation, went down to the sub-cellar and bolted the door behind us. Nigger-Man was with us, for the investigators found no occasion to despise his excitability, and were indeed anxious that he be present in case of obscure rodent manifestations. We noted the Roman inscriptions and unknown altar designs only briefly, for three of the savants had already seen them, and all knew their characteristics. Prime attention was paid to the momentous central altar, and within an hour Sir William Brinton had caused it to tilt backward, balanced by some unknown species of counterweight.\n\nThere now lay revealed such a horror as would have overwhelmed us had we not been prepared. Through a nearly square opening in the tiled floor, sprawling on a flight of stone steps so prodigiously worn that it was little more than an inclined plane at the centre, was a ghastly array of human or semi-human bones. Those which retained their collocation as skeletons shewed attitudes of panic fear, and over all were the marks of rodent gnawing. The skulls denoted nothing short of utter idiocy, cretinism, or primitive semi-apedom. Above the hellishly littered steps arched a descending passage seemingly chiselled from the solid rock, and conducting a current of air. This current was not a sudden and noxious rush as from a closed vault, but a cool breeze with something of freshness in it. We did not pause long, but shiveringly began to clear a passage down the steps. It was then that Sir William, examining the hewn walls, made the odd observation that the passage, according to the direction of the strokes, must have been chiselled from beneath.\n\nI must be very deliberate now, and choose my words.\n\nAfter ploughing down a few steps amidst the gnawed bones we saw that there was light ahead; not any mystic phosphorescence, but a filtered daylight which could not come except from unknown fissures in the cliff that overlooked the waste valley. That such fissures had escaped notice from outside was hardly remarkable, for not only is the valley wholly uninhabited, but the cliff is so high and beetling that only an a\u00ebronaut could study its face in detail. A few steps more, and our breaths were literally snatched from us by what we saw; so literally that Thornton, the psychic investigator, actually fainted in the arms of the dazed man who stood behind him. Norrys, his plump face utterly white and flabby, simply cried out inarticulately; whilst I think that what I did was to gasp or hiss, and cover my eyes. The man behind me\u2014the only one of the party older than I\u2014croaked the hackneyed \"My God!\" in the most cracked voice I ever heard. Of seven cultivated men, only Sir William Brinton retained his composure; a thing more to his credit because he led the party and must have seen the sight first.\n\nIt was a twilit grotto of enormous height, stretching away farther than any eye could see; a subterraneous world of limitless mystery and horrible suggestion. There were buildings and other architectural remains\u2014in one terrified glance I saw a weird pattern of tumuli, a savage circle of monoliths, a low-domed Roman ruin, a sprawling Saxon pile, and an early English edifice of wood\u2014but all these were dwarfed by the ghoulish spectacle presented by the general surface of the ground. For yards about the steps extended an insane tangle of human bones, or bones at least as human as those on the steps. Like a foamy sea they stretched, some fallen apart, but others wholly or partly articulated as skeletons; these latter invariably in postures of daemoniac frenzy, either fighting off some menace or clutching other forms with cannibal intent.\n\nWhen Dr. Trask, the anthropologist, stooped to classify the skulls, he found a degraded mixture which utterly baffled him. They were mostly lower than the Piltdown man in the scale of evolution, but in every case definitely human. Many were of higher grade, and a very few were the skulls of supremely and sensitively developed types. All the bones were gnawed, mostly by rats, but somewhat by others of the half-human drove. Mixed with them were many tiny bones of rats\u2014fallen members of the lethal army which closed the ancient epic.\n\nI wonder that any man among us lived and kept his sanity through that hideous day of discovery. Not Hoffmann or Huysmans could conceive a scene more wildly incredible, more frenetically repellent, or more Gothically grotesque than the twilit grotto through which we seven staggered; each stumbling on revelation after revelation, and trying to keep for the nonce from thinking of the events which must have taken place there three hundred years, or a thousand, or two thousand, or ten thousand years ago. It was the antechamber of hell, and poor Thornton fainted again when Trask told him that some of the skeleton things must have descended as quadrupeds through the last twenty or more generations.\n\nHorror piled on horror as we began to interpret the architectural remains. The quadruped things\u2014with their occasional recruits from the biped class\u2014had been kept in stone pens, out of which they must have broken in their last delirium of hunger or rat-fear. There had been great herds of them, evidently fattened on the coarse vegetables whose remains could be found as a sort of poisonous ensilage at the bottom of huge stone bins older than Rome. I knew now why my ancestors had had such excessive gardens\u2014would to heaven I could forget! The purpose of the herds I did not have to ask.\n\nSir William, standing with his searchlight in the Roman ruin, translated aloud the most shocking ritual I have ever known; and told of the diet of the antediluvian cult which the priests of Cybele found and mingled with their own. Norrys, used as he was to the trenches, could not walk straight when he came out of the English building. It was a butcher shop and kitchen\u2014he had expected that\u2014but it was too much to see familiar English implements in such a place, and to read familiar English graffiti there, some as recent as 1610. I could not go in that building\u2014that building whose daemon activities were stopped only by the dagger of my ancestor Walter de la Poer.\n\nWhat I did venture to enter was the low Saxon building, whose oaken door had fallen, and there I found a terrible row of ten stone cells with rusty bars. Three had tenants, all skeletons of high grade, and on the bony forefinger of one I found a seal ring with my own coat-of-arms. Sir William found a vault with far older cells below the Roman chapel, but these cells were empty. Below them was a low crypt with cases of formally arranged bones, some of them bearing terrible parallel inscriptions carved in Latin, Greek, and the tongue of Phrygia. Meanwhile, Dr. Trask had opened one of the prehistoric tumuli, and brought to light skulls which were slightly more human than a gorilla's, and which bore indescribable ideographic carvings. Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.\n\nHaving grasped to some slight degree the frightful revelations of this twilit area\u2014an area so hideously foreshadowed by my recurrent dream\u2014we turned to that apparently boundless depth of midnight cavern where no ray of light from the cliff could penetrate. We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went, for it was decided that such secrets are not good for mankind. But there was plenty to engross us close at hand, for we had not gone far before the searchlights shewed that accursed infinity of pits in which the rats had feasted, and whose sudden lack of replenishment had driven the ravenous rodent army first to turn on the living herds of starving things, and then to burst forth from the priory in that historic orgy of devastation which the peasants will never forget.\n\nGod! those carrion black pits of sawed, picked bones and opened skulls! Those nightmare chasms choked with the pithecanthropoid, Celtic, Roman, and English bones of countless unhallowed centuries! Some of them were full, and none can say how deep they had once been. Others were still bottomless to our searchlights, and peopled by unnamable fancies. What, I thought, of the hapless rats that stumbled into such traps amidst the blackness of their quests in this grisly Tartarus?\n\nOnce my foot slipped near a horribly yawning brink, and I had a moment of ecstatic fear. I must have been musing a long time, for I could not see any of the party but the plump Capt. Norrys. Then there came a sound from that inky, boundless, farther distance that I thought I knew; and I saw my old black cat dart past me like a winged Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the unknown. But I was not far behind, for there was no doubt after another second. It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.\n\nMy searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying; gently rising, rising, as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black, putrid sea. Something bumped into me\u2014something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living.... Why shouldn't rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?... The war ate my boy, damn them all... and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret... No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys' fat face on that flabby, fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died!... Shall a Norrys hold the lands of a de la Poer?... It's voodoo, I tell you... that spotted snake... Curse you, Thornton, I'll teach you to faint at what my family do!... 'Sblood, thou stinkard, I'll learn ye how to gust... wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?... Magna Mater! Magna Mater!... Atys... Dia ad aghaidh 's ad aodann... agus bas dunach ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!... Ungl... ungl... rrrlh... chchch...\n\nThat is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat. Now they have blown up Exham Priory, taken my Nigger-Man away from me, and shut me into this barred room at Hanwell with fearful whispers about my heredity and experiences. Thornton is in the next room, but they prevent me from talking to him. They are trying, too, to suppress most of the facts concerning the priory. When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThe Privilege of Reminiscence, however rambling or tiresome, is one generally allow'd to the very aged; indeed, 'tis frequently by means of such Recollections that the obscure occurrences of History, and the lesser Anecdotes of the Great, are transmitted to Posterity.\n\nTho' many of my readers have at times observ'd and remark'd a Sort of antique Flow in my Stile of Writing, it hath pleased me to pass amongst the Members of this Generation as a young Man, giving out the Fiction that I was born in 1890, in America. I am now, however, resolv'd to unburthen myself of a Secret which I have hitherto kept thro' Dread of Incredulity; and to impart to the Publick a true knowledge of my long years, in order to gratifie their taste for authentick Information of an Age with whose famous Personages I was on familiar Terms. Be it then known that I was born on the family Estate in Devonshire, of the 10th day of August, 1690 (or in the new Gregorian Stile of Reckoning, the 20th of August), being therefore now in my 228th year. Coming early to London, I saw as a Child many of the celebrated Men of King William's Reign, including the lamented Mr. Dryden, who sat much at the Tables of Will's Coffee-House. With Mr. Addison and Dr. Swift I later became very well acquainted, and was an even more familiar Friend to Mr. Pope, whom I knew and respected till the Day of his Death. But since it is of my more recent Associate, the late Dr. Johnson, that I am at this time desir'd to write; I will pass over my Youth for the present.\n\nI had first Knowledge of the Doctor in May of the year 1738, tho' I did not at that Time meet him. Mr. Pope had just compleated his Epilogue to his Satires (the Piece beginning: \"Not twice a Twelvemonth you appear in Print.\"), and had arrang'd for its Publication. On the very Day it appear'd, there was also publish'd a Satire in Imitation of Juvenal, intitul'd \"London\", by the then unknown Johnson; and this so struck the Town, that many Gentlemen of Taste declared, it was the Work of a greater Poet than Mr. Pope. Notwithstanding what some Detractors have said of Mr. Pope's petty Jealousy, he gave the Verses of his new Rival no small Praise; and having learnt thro' Mr. Richardson who the Poet was, told me 'that Mr. Johnson wou'd soon be deterr\u00e9.'\n\nI had no personal Acquaintance with the Doctor till 1763, when I was presented to him at the Mitre Tavern by Mr. James Boswell, a young Scotchman of excellent Family and great Learning, but small Wit, whose metrical Effusions I had sometimes revis'd.\n\nDr. Johnson, as I beheld him, was a full, pursy Man, very ill drest, and of slovenly Aspect. I recall him to have worn a bushy Bob-Wig, untyed and without Powder, and much too small for his Head. His cloaths were of rusty brown, much wrinkled, and with more than one Button missing. His Face, too full to be handsom, was likewise marred by the Effects of some scrofulous Disorder; and his Head was continually rolling about in a sort of convulsive way. Of this Infirmity, indeed, I had known before; having heard of it from Mr. Pope, who took the Trouble to make particular Inquiries.\n\nBeing nearly seventy-three, full nineteen Years older than Dr. Johnson (I say Doctor, tho' his Degree came not till two Years afterward), I naturally expected him to have some Regard for my Age; and was therefore not in that Fear of him, which others confess'd. On my asking him what he thought of my favourable Notice of his Dictionary in The Londoner, my periodical Paper, he said: \"Sir, I possess no Recollection of having perus'd your Paper, and have not a great Interest in the Opinions of the less thoughtful Part of Mankind.\" Being more than a little piqued at the Incivility of one whose Celebrity made me solicitous of his Approbation, I ventur'd to retaliate in kind, and told him, I was surpris'd that a Man of Sense shou'd judge the Thoughtfulness of one whose Productions he admitted never having read. \"Why, Sir,\" reply'd Johnson, \"I do not require to become familiar with a Man's Writings in order to estimate the Superficiality of his Attainments, when he plainly shews it by his Eagerness to mention his own Productions in the first Question he puts to me.\" Having thus become Friends, we convers'd on many Matters. When, to agree with him, I said I was distrustful of the Authenticity of Ossian's Poems, Mr. Johnson said: \"That, Sir, does not do your Understanding particular Credit; for what all the Town is sensible of, is no great Discovery for a Grub-Street Critick to make. You might as well say, you have a strong Suspicion that Milton wrote Paradise Lost!\"\n\nI thereafter saw Johnson very frequently, most often at Meetings of THE LITERARY CLUB, which was founded the next Year by the Doctor, together with Mr. Burke, the parliamentary Orator, Mr. Beauclerk, a Gentleman of Fashion, Mr. Langton, a pious Man and Captain of Militia, Sir J. Reynolds, the widely known Painter, Dr. Goldsmith, the prose and poetick Writer, Dr. Nugent, father-in-law to Mr. Burke, Sir John Hawkins, Mr. Anthony Chamier, and my self. We assembled generally at seven o'clock of an Evening, once a Week, at the Turk's-Head, in Gerrard-Street, Soho, till that Tavern was sold and made into a private Dwelling; after which Event we mov'd our Gatherings successively to Prince's in Sackville-Street, Le Tellier's in Dover-Street, and Parsloe's and The Thatched House in St. James's-Street. In these Meetings we preserv'd a remarkable Degree of Amity and Tranquillity, which contrasts very favourably with some of the Dissensions and Disruptions I observe in the literary and amateur Press Associations of today. This Tranquillity was the more remarkable, because we had amongst us Gentlemen of very opposed Opinions. Dr. Johnson and I, as well as many others, were high Tories; whilst Mr. Burke was a Whig, and against the American War, many of his Speeches on that Subject having been widely publish'd. The least congenial Member was one of the Founders, Sir John Hawkins, who hath since written many misrepresentations of our Society. Sir John, an eccentrick Fellow, once declin'd to pay his part of the Reckoning for Supper, because 'twas his Custom at Home to eat no Supper. Later he insulted Mr. Burke in so intolerable a Manner, that we all took Pains to shew our Disapproval; after which Incident he came no more to our Meetings. However, he never openly fell out with the Doctor, and was the Executor of his Will; tho' Mr. Boswell and others have Reason to question the genuineness of his Attachment. Other and later Members of the CLUB were Mr. David Garrick, the Actor and early Friend of Dr. Johnson, Messieurs Tho. and Jos. Warton, Dr. Adam Smith, Dr. Percy, Author of the \"Reliques\", Mr. Edw. Gibbon, the Historian, Dr. Burney, the Musician, Mr. Malone, the Critick, and Mr. Boswell. Mr. Garrick obtain'd Admittance only with Difficulty; for the Doctor, notwithstanding his great Friendship, was for ever affecting to decry the Stage and all Things connected with it. Johnson, indeed, had a most singular Habit of speaking for Davy when others were against him, and of arguing against him, when others were for him. I have no Doubt but that he sincerely lov'd Mr. Garrick, for he never alluded to him as he did to Foote, who was a very coarse Fellow despite his comick Genius. Mr. Gibbon was none too well lik'd, for he had an odious sneering Way which offended even those of us who most admir'd his historical Productions. Mr. Goldsmith, a little Man very vain of his Dress and very deficient in Brilliancy of Conversation, was my particular Favourite; since I was equally unable to shine in the Discourse. He was vastly jealous of Dr. Johnson, tho' none the less liking and respecting him. I remember that once a Foreigner, a German, I think, was in our Company; and that whilst Goldsmith was speaking, he observ'd the Doctor preparing to utter something. Unconsciously looking upon Goldsmith as a meer Encumbrance when compar'd to the greater Man, the Foreigner bluntly interrupted him and incurr'd his lasting Hostility by crying, \"Hush, Toctor Shonson iss going to speak!\"\n\nIn this luminous Company I was tolerated more because of my Years than for my Wit or Learning; being no Match at all for the rest. My Friendship for the celebrated Monsieur Voltaire was ever a Cause of Annoyance to the Doctor; who was deeply orthodox, and who us'd to say of the French Philosopher: \"Vir est acerrimi Ingenii et paucarum Literarum.\"\n\nMr. Boswell, a little teazing Fellow whom I had known for some Time previously, us'd to make Sport of my aukward Manners and old-fashion'd Wig and Cloaths. Once coming in a little the worse for Wine (to which he was addicted) he endeavour'd to lampoon me by means of an Impromptu in verse, writ on the Surface of the Table; but lacking the Aid he usually had in his Composition, he made a bad grammatical Blunder. I told him, he shou'd not try to pasquinade the Source of his Poesy. At another Time Bozzy (as we us'd to call him) complain'd of my Harshness toward new Writers in the Articles I prepar'd for The Monthly Review. He said, I push'd every Aspirant off the Slopes of Parnassus. \"Sir,\" I reply'd, \"you are mistaken. They who lose their Hold do so from their own Want of Strength; but desiring to conceal their Weakness, they attribute the Absence of Success to the first Critick that mentions them.\" I am glad to recall that Dr. Johnson upheld me in this Matter.\n\nDr. Johnson was second to no Man in the Pains he took to revise the bad Verses of others; indeed, 'tis said that in the book of poor blind old Mrs. Williams, there are scarce two lines which are not the Doctor's. At one Time Johnson recited to me some lines by a Servant to the Duke of Leeds, which had so amus'd him, that he had got them by Heart. They are on the Duke's Wedding, and so much resemble in Quality the Work of other and more recent poetick Dunces, that I cannot forbear copying them:\n\n\u2003\"When the Duke of Leeds shall marry'd be\n\n\u2003To a fine young Lady of high Quality\n\n\u2003How happy will that Gentlewoman be\n\n\u2003In his Grace of Leeds' good Company.\"\n\n\u2003I ask'd the Doctor, if he had ever try'd making\n\n\u2003Sense of this Piece; and upon his saying he had not,\n\n\u2003I amus'd myself with the following Amendment of it:\n\n\u2003When Gallant LEEDS auspiciously shall wed\n\n\u2003The virtuous Fair, of antient Lineage bred,\n\n\u2003How must the Maid rejoice with conscious Pride\n\n\u2003To win so great an Husband to her Side!\n\nOn shewing this to Dr. Johnson, he said, \"Sir, you have straightened out the Feet, but you have put neither Wit nor Poetry into the Lines.\"\n\nIt wou'd afford me Gratification to tell more of my Experiences with Dr. Johnson and his circle of Wits; but I am an old Man, and easily fatigued. I seem to ramble along without much Logick or Continuity when I endeavour to recall the Past; and fear I light upon but few Incidents which others have not before discuss'd. Shou'd my present Recollections meet with Favour, I might later set down some further Anecdotes of old Times of which I am the only Survivor. I recall many things of Sam Johnson and his Club, having kept up my Membership in the Latter long after the Doctor's Death, at which I sincerely mourn'd. I remember how John Burgoyne, Esq., the General, whose Dramatick and Poetical Works were printed after his Death, was blackballed by three Votes; probably because of his unfortunate Defeat in the American War, at Saratoga. Poor John! His Son fared better, I think, and was made a Baronet. But I am very tired. I am old, very old, and it is Time for my Afternoon Nap.\n\n[ The Secret Cave ]\n\n\"Now be good children\" Said Mrs. Lee \"While I am away & dont get into mischief\". Mr. & Mrs. Lee were going off for the day & To leave The Two children John 10 yrs old & Alice 2 yrs old \"Yes\" replied John.\n\nAs Soon as The Elder Lees were away the younger Lees went down cellar & began to rummage among the rubbish little alice leaned against the wall watching John. As John was making a boat of barrel staves the Little girl gave a piercing cry as the bricks behind her crumbled away he rushed up to her & Lifted her out screaming loudly as soon as her screams subsided she said \"the wall went away\" John went up & saw that there was a passage he said to the little girl \"lets come & see what this is\" \"Yes\" she said.\n\nThe place they could stand up it the passag was farther than they could see they John went back upstairs & went to the kitchen drawer & got 2 candles & some matches & then they went back to the cellar passage. the two once more entered there was plastering on the walls ceiling & floor nothing was visible but a box this was for a seat nevertheless they examined it & found it to contain nothing the walked on farther & pretty soon the plastering left off & they were in a cave Little alice was frightened at first but at her brothers assurance that it was \"all right\" she allayed her fears. soon they came to a small box which John took up & carried within pretty soon they came on a boat in it were two oars he dragged it with difficulty along with him soon they found the passage came to an abrupt stop he pulled the obstacle away & to his dismay water rushed in in torrents John was an expert swimmer & long breathede he had Just taken a breath so he tried to rise but with the box & his sister he found it quite impossible then he caught sight of the boat rising he grasped it....\n\nThe next he knew he was on the surface clinging tightly to the body of his sister & the mysterious box he could not imagine how the water got in but a new peril menaced them if the water continued rising it would rise to the top suddenly a thought presented itself. he could shut off the water he speedily did this & lifting the now lifeless body of his sister into the boat he himself climed in & sailed down the passage it was gruesome & uncanny absolutely dark his candle being put out by the flood & a dead body lying near he did not gaze about him but rowed for his life when he did look up he was floating in his own cellar he quickly rushed up stairs with the body, to find his parents had come home He told them the story.\n\nThe funeral of alice occupied so much time that John quite forgot about the box\u2014but when they did open it they found it to be a solid gold chunk worth about $10,000 enough to pay for any thing but the death of his sister.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Shadow out of Time by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nAfter twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17\u201318, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination\u2014for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.\n\nAssuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would\u2014if real and brought out of that noxious abyss\u2014have formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone\u2014and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement\u2014not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.\n\nThese pages\u2014much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press\u2014are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University\u2014the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account\u2014shewing it, with suitable comment, to any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.\n\nMy name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back\u2014or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago\u2014will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908\u201313, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows\u2014though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else\u2014where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.\n\nI am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill\u2014at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill\u2014and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard, and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.\n\nIt was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous\u2014chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented\u2014must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling\u2014altogether new to me\u2014that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.\n\nThe collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI\u2014history and present tendencies of economics\u2014for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.\n\nIt is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.\n\nEven my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very potently\u2014even terrifiedly\u2014recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency\u2014first in England and then in the United States\u2014and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.\n\nPhysical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore\u2014some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple\u2014which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.\n\nAt the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost unknown sorts of knowledge\u2014a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the range of accepted history\u2014passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three times caused actual fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.\n\nAs soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European universities, which evoked so much comment during the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality\u2014even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.\n\nOf real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in everyone I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent. My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return to normalcy in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.\n\nOnly my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I do not wonder at the horror I caused\u2014for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.\n\nI will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean all the outward essentials\u2014as I largely had to do\u2014from files of old newspapers and scientific journals. I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the extreme; involving long visits to remote and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn. During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing signs of disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia\u2014black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.\n\nMy sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.\n\nOther ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading\u2014for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly. There is tangible proof\u2014in the form of marginal notes\u2014that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.\n\nIn the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life\u2014though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers. About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my long-closed house in Crane St. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight of anyone intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it\u2014a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper\u2014say that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be located.\n\nOn the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen. At 2:15 a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the stranger's motor still at the curb. By four o'clock the motor was certainly gone. It was at six that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call\u2014a long-distance one\u2014was later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever unearthed.\n\nWhen the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting-room\u2014in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished table-top were scratches shewing where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the library grate were abundant ashes evidently left from the burning of every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after an hypodermic injection it became more regular.\n\nAt 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some very curious syllables\u2014syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just after noon\u2014the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned\u2014I began to mutter in English.\n\n\"...of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of...\"\n\nNathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back\u2014a spirit in whose time-scale it was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on the platform." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted. What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last regaining custody of my second son Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching\u2014my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.\n\nI began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane\u2014I hoped\u2014and with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the oddest possible fashion. My conception of time\u2014my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness\u2014seemed subtly disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one's mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages.\n\nThe war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences\u2014as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity\u2014then discussed only in learned circles\u2014which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.\n\nBut the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an annoying shape\u2014giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and frightful speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines. Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonise terribly with some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark years.\n\nNot all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams\u2014and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or non-typical such visions might be among amnesia victims. My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the days of daemoniac-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than they consoled me.\n\nI soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine; one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories. It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginning of man's annals. Some centuries might contain one, two, or three cases; others none\u2014or at least none whose record survived.\n\nThe essence was always the same\u2014a person of keen thoughtfulness seized with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out. And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own\u2014even in some of the smallest particulars\u2014left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my house before the second change.\n\nAnother thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less\u2014some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force\u2014then a backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman horrors.\n\nThere had been at least three such cases during the past half century\u2014one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless speculations of my weaker hours\u2014fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.\n\nOf the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered. They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and analyse it, instead of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my possession by the other personality.\n\nMy first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the barber's.\n\nIt was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.\n\nThe glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were colossal round windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be writing materials\u2014oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was the waving tops of singular fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and hangings were entirely lacking.\n\nLater I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.\n\nStill later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher levels, and wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve this impression into details.\n\nIn certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of a totally unique nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings\u2014all crumbling with the weathering of aeons\u2014which resembled these dark cylindrical towers in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.\n\nThe omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness, with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites, whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more evidences of the topiary art.\n\nThe skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would be glimpses of the sun\u2014which looked abnormally large\u2014and of the moon, whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could never quite fathom. When\u2014very rarely\u2014the night sky was clear to any extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition. Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and from the position of the few groups I could recognise, I felt I must be in the earth's southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never resolved.\n\nBy the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled, fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I saw an area of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea\u2014a boundless steamy expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed intrinsically stranger things\u2014things compounded of unrelated scraps of daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to reflect a common textbook knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago\u2014the world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course of some months, however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract disturbances\u2014the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary personality of 1908\u201313, and, considerably later, the inexplicable loathing of my own person.\n\nAs certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror increased a thousandfold\u2014until by October, 1915, I felt I must do something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby objectivise my trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to admit of any geological knowledge\u2014and therefore of any idea of primitive landscapes\u2014on the subjects' part. What is more, many of these accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in connexion with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens\u2014and other things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.\n\nI studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus my son Wingate did the same\u2014his studies leading eventually to his present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical, and anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly unhuman.\n\nThese markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though obviously academic facility. One note appended to von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of the German corrections, but following no recognised human pattern. And these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters constantly met with in my dreams\u2014characters whose meaning I would sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of recalling. To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.\n\nPiecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern, anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed. Only one thing consoled me\u2014the fact that the myths were of such early existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could not even guess, but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no doubt created the general myth-pattern\u2014but afterward the fanciful accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the early tales during my memory lapse\u2014my quest had amply proved that. Was it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially those Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part of the lore of modern theosophists.\n\nPrimal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one\u2014perhaps the least\u2014of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet's long and largely unknown career. Things of inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago. Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves. Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.\n\nBut most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all; because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth, through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.\n\nIn its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth's annals\u2014histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognised senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future.\n\nIn the latter case the course was easier and more material. With suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time, feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best discoverable representative of the highest of that period's life-forms; entering the organism's brain and setting up therein its own vibrations while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the displacer, remaining in the latter's body till a reverse process was set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future, would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore; learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen age and its massed information and techniques.\n\nMeanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer's age and body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when previous quests into the future had brought back records of that language. If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. The Great Race's members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast ten-foot bases.\n\nWhen the captive mind's amazement and resentment had worn off, and when (assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great Race's) it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions, and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boat-like atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet's past and future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden mysteries of earth\u2014closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own natural ages\u2014forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled, the supreme experience of life.\n\nNow and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive minds seized from the future\u2014to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed in the great central archives.\n\nIt may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its love of life\u2014especially among those superior minds capable of projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later history\u2014including mankind's.\n\nAs for the ordinary cases of exploration\u2014when the displacing mind had learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like that which had started its flight and reverse the process of projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to which it properly belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such cases, of course, the exploring mind had\u2014like those of the death-escapers\u2014to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else the captive mind\u2014like the dying permanent exiles\u2014had to end its days in the form and past age of the Great Race.\n\nThis fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the Great Race\u2014a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight\u2014largely because of the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race minds by the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future bodies\u2014and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex cases of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In every age since the discovery of mind-projection, a minute but well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.\n\nWhen a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had learned in the Great Race's age\u2014this because of certain troublesome consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it was largely in consequence of two cases of the kind (said the old myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race. Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic Manuscripts.\n\nThus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure. All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden past to future ages. There probably never was a time when groups or cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was suggested\u2014a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the aeons from the days of the Great Race.\n\nAnd meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far space whence its own mental heritage had come\u2014for the mind of the Great Race was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them\u2014the cone-shaped things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.\n\nSuch was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When, around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight lessening of the tension which their earlier stages had increased. After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia\u2014and then I read the forbidden legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but laid at my door by librarians\u2014I might easily have picked up a smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain points through conversation with known cult-leaders, but never succeeded in establishing the right connexions.\n\nAt times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages continued to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I reflected that the excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims whose cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these victims had lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of their household myths\u2014the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men's minds\u2014and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the conventional myth-pattern.\n\nDespite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came finally to supersede all others in my mind\u2014largely because of the greater weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in the end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too, were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual significance.\n\nFortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous equilibrium, even though the visions (rather than the abstract impressions) steadily became more frequent and more disturbingly detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of political economy had long been adequately filled\u2014besides which, methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outr\u00e9 dreams which crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued, was of genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.\n\nOf my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller accounts and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation. Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I saw tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever exercised in the visionary world.\n\nThe real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things. This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and case histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease. They seemed to be enormous iridescent cones, about ten feet high and ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible, cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole entity through expansion and contraction.\n\nTheir actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their appearance\u2014for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing what one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing diligently with a peculiar rod gripped in the greenish head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in conversation\u2014speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to rest downward on the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet each, when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously greater than man's.\n\nAfterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of their environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be manifest, and a few appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity of gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority, but very largely from one another. They wrote a great deal in what seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters\u2014never the typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than the general mass of the entities.\n\nAll this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a disembodied consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal; floating freely about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was a purely abstract though infinitely terrible association of my previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my visions. For a while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large mirrors in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that I always saw the great tables\u2014whose height could not be under ten feet\u2014from a level not below that of their surfaces.\n\nAnd then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.\n\nOnly after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head. Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages. Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures, both inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.\n\nI learned\u2014even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang\u2014that the entities around me were of the world's greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds. I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.\n\nThere was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth's last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.\n\nI talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000; with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi; with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land 100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who had been a quaestor in Sulla's time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep; with that of a priest of Atlantis' middle kingdom; with that of a Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day, James Woodville; with that of a court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman of Louis XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I learned from them.\n\nI awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects, and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth. What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here. After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space\u2014to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.\n\nMeanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own age which I was preparing\u2014half voluntarily and half through promises of increased library and travel opportunities\u2014for the Great Race's central archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near the city's centre, which I came to know well through frequent labours and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand the fiercest of earth's convulsions, this titan repository surpassed all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its construction.\n\nThe records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously tenacious cellulose fabric, were bound into books that opened from the top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and bearing the title in the Great Race's curvilinear hieroglyphs. These cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults\u2014like closed, locked shelves\u2014wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level\u2014the section devoted to the culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately preceding it in terrestrial dominance.\n\nBut none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All were the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that these fragments were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have, for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads, sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear. There were also long sea-voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed, projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion. Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror. Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene. Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic forces.\n\nOf the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many forms\u2014dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts, rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like\u2014made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could discern.\n\nThe ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod, coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.\n\nOf the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the Great Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the scattered points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming. For in time, of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams in many phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in advance, and formed verifications of what I had learned. This consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research, accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.\n\nThe period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than 150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no surviving\u2014or even scientifically known\u2014line of terrestrial evolution, but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state. Cell-action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing animals. The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise\u2014sight and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages on the grey stalks above their heads\u2014but of other and incomprehensible senses (not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting their bodies) they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for the growth of their young\u2014which were, however, reared only in small numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five thousand years being the common life span.\n\nMarkedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar tenement.\n\nThe Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league, with major institutions in common, though there were four definite divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents.\n\nResemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the future and copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts. The sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic upheavals of those primal days.\n\nCrime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching, and were never administered without a careful study of the criminal's motivations. Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes waged against reptilian and octopodic invaders, or against the winged, star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterrene levels.\n\nThis fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of unspoken suggestion\u2014or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The vague old myths avoided it\u2014or perhaps all allusions had for some reason been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the more sharply observant captive minds.\n\nAccording to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred million years ago. They were only partly material\u2014as we understand matter\u2014and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange, non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas containing it; and they required housing\u2014albeit of a peculiar kind. Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could wholly destroy them. They had the power of a\u00ebrial motion despite the absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by the Great Race.\n\nWhen these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across the void from that obscure transgalactic world known in the disturbing and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they had sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference, boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.\n\nBut as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder Things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled\u2014places where the paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed for ever\u2014though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected places; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.\n\nThe irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of the creatures was left unmentioned\u2014at no time was I able to gain a clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them.\n\nIt was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great Race\u2014the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future\u2014had to do with a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the outer world, they knew from the planet's later history\u2014for their projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled by the monstrous entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer earth's inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance, with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible quality\u2014the sharp sense of pseudo-memory\u2014that such feelings mainly depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence against these feelings, in the form of rational psychological explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the subtle touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.\n\nIn the course of years I began to feel that my experience\u2014together with the kindred cases and the related folklore\u2014ought to be definitely summarised and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground and illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes, decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention. Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast proportions.\n\nOn July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia, and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the photographs had upon me.\n\nI was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had often thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of the legends which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost world remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the photographs\u2014for here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-ridged, storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is the letter, which speaks for itself:\n\nProf. N. W. Peaslee,\n\nc/o Am. Psychological Society,\n\n30, E. 41st Str.,\n\nN. Y. City, U.S.A.\n\nMy dear Sir:\u2014\n\nA recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers with your articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon something very important.\n\nThe blackfellows have always been full of talk about \"great stones with marks on them\", and seem to have a terrible fear of such things. They connect them in some way with their common racial legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake and eat up the world. There are some very old and half-forgotten tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there usually isn't much in what these natives say.\n\nBut what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 \u00d7 2 \u00d7 2 feet in size, and weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn't find any of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks, some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile's diameter.\n\nWhen I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a careful reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks, and will enclose the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them. Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to mention the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed. Meanwhile he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I saw at once from your drawings and descriptions that my stones are certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.\n\nNow I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and come up again after long ages\u2014all since these blocks were made and used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years\u2014or heaven knows how much more. I don't like to think about it.\n\nIn view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends and everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to co\u00f6perate in such work if you\u2014or organisations known to you\u2014can furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging\u2014the blacks would be of no use, for I've found that they have an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have precedence in any discoveries or credit.\n\nThe place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor tractor\u2014which we'd need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and south of Warburton's path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead of starting from Pilbarra\u2014but all that can be talked over later. Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22\u00b0 3\u2032 14\u2033 South Latitude, 125\u00b0 0\u2032 39\u2033 East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in winter\u2014June or July or August. I shall welcome further correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist in any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr. Boyle will write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable to Perth can be relayed by wireless.\n\nHoping profoundly for an early message,\n\nBelieve me,\n\nMost faithfully yours,\n\nRobert B. F. Mackenzie.\n\nOf the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to chronicle our various preparatory steps.\n\nProfessors William Dyer of the college's geology department (leader of the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930\u201331), Ferdinand C. Ashley of the department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the department of anthropology\u2014together with my son Wingate\u2014accompanied me. My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar with all the conditions of Australian travel. He had tractors waiting at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently light draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its original situation.\n\nSailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal. I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent\u2014and his knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son and me.\n\nDiscomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind the legends\u2014a terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.\n\nIt was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched\u2014in objective reality\u2014a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct trace of carving\u2014and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.\n\nA month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying stages of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter, plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut\u2014like those of the floors and pavements in my dreams\u2014while a few were singularly massive and curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. The deeper\u2014and the farther north and east\u2014we dug, the more blocks we found; though we still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.\n\nWe had an a\u00ebroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim, large-scale outlines\u2014either differences of level or trails of scattered blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial\u2014a result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They seemed, after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a terrible pseudo-familiarity about them\u2014which somehow made me look furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain toward the north and northeast.\n\nAround the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and there was curiosity\u2014but more than that, there was a persistent and perplexing illusion of memory. I tried all sorts of psychological expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night\u2014usually to the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses seemed subtly to pull me.\n\nSometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into fantastic temporary hillocks\u2014exposing some traces of the elder stones while it covered other traces. I was queerly anxious to have the excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded what might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state\u2014all the worse because I could not account for it.\n\nAn indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response to an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was on the evening of July 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch. Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut, with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.\n\nSuddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a wholly unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry. It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the fabled Great Race held in such fear\u2014the tall, windowless ruins left by those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in earth's nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.\n\nI remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had been to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened, I should have had a discoverer's enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had formed no clear idea of the stone's location, and a late wind had wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative\u2014all the more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and it is this feeling\u2014in view of the stupendous implications which the objective truth of my experience would raise\u2014which impels me to make this record. My son\u2014a trained psychologist with the fullest and most sympathetic knowledge of my whole case\u2014shall be the primary judge of what I have to tell.\n\nFirst let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp know them. On the night of July 17\u201318, after a windy day, I retired early but could not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain, I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting only one person\u2014an Australian miner named Tupper\u2014as I left our precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last saw me walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the northeast.\n\nAbout 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and felling three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men\u2014all Australians\u2014seemed to feel something sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof. Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow folklore\u2014the natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky. Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the ground where terrible things have happened\u2014and are never felt except near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills in new and unfamiliar shapes.\n\nIt was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west, when I staggered into camp\u2014hatless, tattered, features scratched and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle, and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son, roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to lie still and attempt sleep.\n\nBut there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very extraordinary\u2014different from anything I had previously suffered. After a time I insisted upon talking\u2014nervously and elaborately explaining my condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than usual\u2014and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect. I must have slept long\u2014hence the hours of my absence.\n\nOf anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely nothing\u2014exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition, and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My reasoning was patently weak\u2014for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant. Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes\u2014not even my son, whose concern for my health was very obvious.\n\nThe next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son promise to fly me in the plane to Perth\u2014a thousand miles to the southwest\u2014as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If, I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing of what I had found remained in sight. It was the case of the anomalous basalt block all over again\u2014the shifting sand had wiped out every trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome object in my stark fright\u2014but now I know that the loss was merciful. I can still believe my whole experience an illusion\u2014especially if, as I devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.\n\nWingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am pondering long and frantically on the entire matter, and have decided that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether to diffuse the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I have prepared this summary of my background\u2014as already known in a scattered way to others\u2014and will now tell as briefly as possible what seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.\n\nNerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that inexplicable, dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before, and I could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.\n\nAnd yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous\u2014more and more assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred.\n\nThe night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of the Great Race. At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient conical horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.\n\nI do not know how long or how far\u2014or indeed, in just what direction\u2014I had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day's wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had so far seen, and so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet high.\n\nFrom the very outset I realised that there was some utterly unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number of them quite without parallel, but something in the sand-worn traces of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the earlier specimens we had found. It was something subtler than that. The impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks were closely related\u2014parts of one vast decorative conception. For the first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry in its old position\u2014tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the less existing in a very definite sense.\n\nMounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here and there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower depths.\n\nI started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was more in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know that this level should have been far underground? How did I know that the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie on the left one level above me? How did I know that the room of machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives, ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.\n\nThen, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream of cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For that stream of air could argue but one thing\u2014a hidden gulf of great size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.\n\nMy first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast underground huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.\n\nI seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert's dry air. A black rift began to yawn, and at length\u2014when I had pushed away every fragment small enough to budge\u2014the leprous moonlight blazed on an aperture of ample width to admit me.\n\nI drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below me was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the north at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and the ground level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared, the desert's sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of earth's youth\u2014how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.\n\nIn retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a doubtful abyss\u2014and at a time when one's whereabouts were unknown to any living soul\u2014seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was\u2014yet that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister, Cyclopean incline below the opening\u2014sometimes facing forward as I found good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two directions beside me, distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only unbroken blackness.\n\nI kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and sand and detritus of every kind. On either side\u2014perhaps thirty feet apart\u2014rose massive walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively for the first time.\n\nBehind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant moonlit world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return. I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of carving were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one place I heaved aside some blocks and kicked away the detritus to see what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still held roughly together.\n\nReaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight slowly and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while there were curious incrustations which I could not explain. In places the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of form amidst earth's heavings.\n\nBut it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range; and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of cryptic lore which, somehow coming to my notice during the amnesic period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how could I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently, exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?\n\nFor this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and devastations of uncounted ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive certainty. What in God's name could all this mean? How had I come to know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial stone?\n\nWords can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me, and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth's crust?\n\nHad I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S'gg'ha, a captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica, had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds, be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an incredible entity\u2014a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future\u2014had kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.\n\nI shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast chain of aeon-dead black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I recalled them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those rectangular vaults of rustless metal.\n\nThere, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum\u2014written by captive minds from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of course\u2014but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? I thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level! Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths below." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied on\u2014indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form parts of some daemoniac dream\u2014or illusion born of delirium. A fever raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of haze\u2014sometimes only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged, grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex of nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness, as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.\n\nOnward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and staggered\u2014often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed; others were bare or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal\u2014some fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered\u2014which I recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they could in truth have been, I dared not guess.\n\nI found the downward incline and began its descent\u2014though after a time halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be much less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through, revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I knew there were two more cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be no guards now\u2014for what had lurked beneath had long since done its hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of the native legends, I trembled anew.\n\nIt cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the littered floor prevented a running start\u2014but madness drove me on. I chose a place close to the left-hand wall\u2014where the rift was least wide and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris\u2014and after one frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last gaining the lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines, within which were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to the central archives.\n\nEndless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along that debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings on the age-stained walls\u2014some familiar, others seemingly added since the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the lower levels of various buildings. At some of these intersections I turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes from what I had dreamed of\u2014and in one of these cases I could trace the sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.\n\nI shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I steered a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of those great windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand, and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were no stairs or inclines\u2014indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay open\u2014black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air. Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think.\n\nLater, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting. This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.\n\nI found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones, but after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. It was sheer madness that impelled and guided me\u2014if, indeed, my whole underground adventure was not\u2014as I hope\u2014a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did make\u2014or dream that I made\u2014a passage that I could squirm through. As I wriggled over the mound of debris\u2014my torch, switched continuously on, thrust deeply within my mouth\u2014I felt myself torn by the fantastic stalactites of the jagged floor above me.\n\nI was now close to the great underground archival structure which seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low, circular crypt with arches\u2014still in a marvellous state of preservation\u2014opening off on every side. The walls, or such parts of them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols\u2014some added since the period of my dreams.\n\nThis, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once through a familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and strength to last as long as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the planet's rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours; the vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so dominant.\n\nThe relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway. I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by earth-tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.\n\nOnce I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust. Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters of the text\u2014symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs or any alphabet known to human scholarship\u2014with a haunting, half-aroused memory. It came to me that this was the language used by a captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams\u2014a mind from a large asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the non-terrestrial planets.\n\nAs I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light of my torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and corridors\u2014recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo incongruously in these catacombs of aeon-long death and silence. The very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth, had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint. There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will and buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at random.\n\nI came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths. Floors flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them. In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do it. It would be like a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream\u2014or scrap of unconsciously absorbed legend\u2014could have taught me a detail so minute, so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience\u2014this shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps of myth could have suggested\u2014a horror beyond all reason? Probably it was my basic conviction then\u2014as it is now during my saner moments\u2014that I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment of febrile hallucination.\n\nEventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of the incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even though I lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I recalled what thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. I felt a current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular course I was taking, I did not know.\n\nWhen I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open. Ahead the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so violently.\n\nNot the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was troubling me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were not as even as it ought to be\u2014there were places where it looked thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough; yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight close to one of the queer places I did not like what I saw\u2014for the illusion of regularity became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite impressions\u2014impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one in advance of the other four.\n\nThese possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were of course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses past imagination." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 102", + "text": "That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find. Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess. Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be undamaged and workable? And what would I do\u2014what dare I do\u2014with what (as I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?\n\nThe next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still, staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward these shelves cannot be described\u2014so utter and insistent was the sense of old acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would not scrape or creak\u2014and that my hand could work it properly.\n\nEven as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and begun to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first; but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the memory-rhythm was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the intricate secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in every detail\u2014for after less than five minutes of trying there came a click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.\n\nDazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and felt a tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright. Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief. In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to inspect my prize.\n\nKneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within almost as much as I longed\u2014and felt compelled\u2014to do so. It had very gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there\u2014and if I were not dreaming\u2014the implications would be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was hideous\u2014and again becomes so as I recall the scene.\n\nAt length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and terrible access of abnormal memory. I do not know how long it was before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised and made excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to save the battery. Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage\u2014finally lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all I did indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page\u2014steeling myself in advance to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.\n\nI looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth, however, I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a mockery. I must be dreaming\u2014but I would test the horror by carrying this thing back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality. My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of the starkest terror\u2014excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up\u2014began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.\n\nI thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the light and looked at the page as a serpent's victim may look at his destroyer's eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers in the dark, I closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the curious hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer world if it truly existed\u2014if the whole abyss truly existed\u2014if I, and the world itself, truly existed.\n\nJust when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be certain. It comes to me oddly\u2014as a measure of my sense of separation from the normal world\u2014that I did not even once look at my watch during those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension which I had not felt on the downward journey.\n\nI dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared, and of what might still be lurking\u2014be it ever so weak and dying\u2014down there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my dreams had told me of such prints\u2014and of strange winds and whistling noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.\n\nI knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at last\u2014after passing that other book I had examined\u2014to the great circular space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every sort.\n\nThen I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was infinite; for my first passage had made some noise, and I now\u2014after seeing those possible prints\u2014dreaded sound above all things. The case, too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through myself\u2014my back torn as before by stalactites. As I tried to grasp the case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it without further noise\u2014but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.\n\nThe din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination. If so, what followed has a grim irony\u2014since, save for the panic of this thing, the second thing might never have happened.\n\nAs it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.\n\nI have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary fragment of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour\u2014case and torch still with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt about it\u2014and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead of me.\n\nProbably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too\u2014not merely a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling came.\n\nThere are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me. Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp\u2014perhaps I was at home in Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the incline to the higher level.\n\nI knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to recross, yet was too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy\u2014but could I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright, exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment, and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the black abysses below the chasm.\n\nMy wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling in front of me\u2014tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.\n\nNow, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity departed\u2014and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline's debris as if no gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm's edge, leaped frenziedly with every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible blackness.\n\nThis is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium. Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and teeming cities of windowless basalt towers upon which no light ever shone.\n\nSecrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched and picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of darkness around.\n\nAfterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams\u2014not in ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful momentary flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind, an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling over fallen masonry.\n\nOnce there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight\u2014a faint, diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling\u2014of wriggling into a blaze of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil, monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.\n\nI was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on our planet's surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly, and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and delirious dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks, an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a nightmare horror at the end\u2014but how much of this was real? My flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered. Had there been such a case\u2014or any abyss\u2014or any mound? Raising my head, I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the waste.\n\nThe daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real\u2014and its blasphemous reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.\n\nHad I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and space, learned the universe's secrets past and to come, and written the annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And were those others\u2014those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and daemon pipings\u2014in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their multimillennial courses on the planet's age-racked surface?\n\nI do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.\n\nI have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those Cyclopean buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course it lay in that book within the metal case\u2014the case which I pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth's youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Shadow over Innsmouth by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nDuring the winter of 1927\u201328 officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting\u2014under suitable precautions\u2014of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront. Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor.\n\nKeener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges, were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular gaols of the nation. There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Innsmouth itself was left almost depopulated, and is even now only beginning to shew signs of a sluggishly revived existence.\n\nComplaints from many liberal organisations were met with long confidential discussions, and representatives were taken on trips to certain camps and prisons. As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to co\u00f6perate with the government in the end. Only one paper\u2014a tabloid always discounted because of its wild policy\u2014mentioned the deep-diving submarine that discharged torpedoes downward in the marine abyss just beyond Devil Reef. That item, gathered by chance in a haunt of sailors, seemed indeed rather far-fetched; since the low, black reef lies a full mile and a half out from Innsmouth Harbour.\n\nPeople around the country and in the nearby towns muttered a great deal among themselves, but said very little to the outer world. They had talked about dying and half-deserted Innsmouth for nearly a century, and nothing new could be wilder or more hideous than what they had whispered and hinted years before. Many things had taught them secretiveness, and there was now no need to exert pressure on them. Besides, they really knew very little; for wide salt marshes, desolate and unpeopled, keep neighbours off from Innsmouth on the landward side.\n\nBut at last I am going to defy the ban on speech about this thing. Results, I am certain, are so thorough that no public harm save a shock of repulsion could ever accrue from a hinting of what was found by those horrified raiders at Innsmouth. Besides, what was found might possibly have more than one explanation. I do not know just how much of the whole tale has been told even to me, and I have many reasons for not wishing to probe deeper. For my contact with this affair has been closer than that of any other layman, and I have carried away impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.\n\nIt was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode. I was willing enough to stay mute while the affair was fresh and uncertain; but now that it is an old story, with public interest and curiosity gone, I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.\n\nI never heard of Innsmouth till the day before I saw it for the first and\u2014so far\u2014last time. I was celebrating my coming of age by a tour of New England\u2014sightseeing, antiquarian, and genealogical\u2014and had planned to go directly from ancient Newburyport to Arkham, whence my mother's family was derived. I had no car, but was travelling by train, trolley, and motor-coach, always seeking the cheapest possible route. In Newburyport they told me that the steam train was the thing to take to Arkham; and it was only at the station ticket-office, when I demurred at the high fare, that I learned about Innsmouth. The stout, shrewd-faced agent, whose speech shewed him to be no local man, seemed sympathetic toward my efforts at economy, and made a suggestion that none of my other informants had offered.\n\n\"You could take that old bus, I suppose,\" he said with a certain hesitation, \"but it ain't thought much of hereabouts. It goes through Innsmouth\u2014you may have heard about that\u2014and so the people don't like it. Run by an Innsmouth fellow\u2014Joe Sargent\u2014but never gets any custom from here, or Arkham either, I guess. Wonder it keeps running at all. I s'pose it's cheap enough, but I never see more'n two or three people in it\u2014nobody but those Innsmouth folks. Leaves the Square\u2014front of Hammond's Drug Store\u2014at 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. unless they've changed lately. Looks like a terrible rattletrap\u2014I've never ben on it.\"\n\nThat was the first I ever heard of shadowed Innsmouth. Any reference to a town not shewn on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the agent's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. If it came before Arkham I would stop off there\u2014and so I asked the agent to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.\n\n\"Innsmouth? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Manuxet. Used to be almost a city\u2014quite a port before the War of 1812\u2014but all gone to pieces in the last hundred years or so. No railroad now\u2014B. & M. never went through, and the branch line from Rowley was given up years ago.\n\n\"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except fishing and lobstering. Everybody trades mostly here or in Arkham or Ipswich. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one gold refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.\n\n\"That refinery, though, used to be a big thing, and Old Man Marsh, who owns it, must be richer'n Croesus. Queer old duck, though, and sticks mighty close in his home. He's supposed to have developed some skin disease or deformity late in life that makes him keep out of sight. Grandson of Captain Obed Marsh, who founded the business. His mother seems to've ben some kind of foreigner\u2014they say a South Sea islander\u2014so everybody raised Cain when he married an Ipswich girl fifty years ago. They always do that about Innsmouth people, and folks here and hereabouts always try to cover up any Innsmouth blood they have in 'em. But Marsh's children and grandchildren look just like anyone else so far's I can see. I've had 'em pointed out to me here\u2014though, come to think of it, the elder children don't seem to be around lately. Never saw the old man.\n\n\"And why is everybody so down on Innsmouth? Well, young fellow, you mustn't take too much stock in what people around here say. They're hard to get started, but once they do get started they never let up. They've ben telling things about Innsmouth\u2014whispering 'em, mostly\u2014for the last hundred years, I guess, and I gather they're more scared than anything else. Some of the stories would make you laugh\u2014about old Captain Marsh driving bargains with the devil and bringing imps out of hell to live in Innsmouth, or about some kind of devil-worship and awful sacrifices in some place near the wharves that people stumbled on around 1845 or thereabouts\u2014but I come from Panton, Vermont, and that kind of story don't go down with me.\n\n\"You ought to hear, though, what some of the old-timers tell about the black reef off the coast\u2014Devil Reef, they call it. It's well above water a good part of the time, and never much below it, but at that you could hardly call it an island. The story is that there's a whole legion of devils seen sometimes on that reef\u2014sprawled about, or darting in and out of some kind of caves near the top. It's a rugged, uneven thing, a good bit over a mile out, and toward the end of shipping days sailors used to make big detours just to avoid it.\n\n\"That is, sailors that didn't hail from Innsmouth. One of the things they had against old Captain Marsh was that he was supposed to land on it sometimes at night when the tide was right. Maybe he did, for I dare say the rock formation was interesting, and it's just barely possible he was looking for pirate loot and maybe finding it; but there was talk of his dealing with daemons there. Fact is, I guess on the whole it was really the Captain that gave the bad reputation to the reef.\n\n\"That was before the big epidemic of 1846, when over half the folks in Innsmouth was carried off. They never did quite figure out what the trouble was, but it was probably some foreign kind of disease brought from China or somewhere by the shipping. It surely was bad enough\u2014there was riots over it, and all sorts of ghastly doings that I don't believe ever got outside of town\u2014and it left the place in awful shape. Never came back\u2014there can't be more'n 300 or 400 people living there now.\n\n\"But the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice\u2014and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it. I hate those Innsmouth folks myself, and I wouldn't care to go to their town. I s'pose you know\u2014though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk\u2014what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod.\n\n\"Well, there must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people. The place always was badly cut off from the rest of the country by marshes and creeks, and we can't be sure about the ins and outs of the matter; but it's pretty clear that old Captain Marsh must have brought home some odd specimens when he had all three of his ships in commission back in the twenties and thirties. There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today\u2014I don't know how to explain it, but it sort of makes you crawl. You'll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of 'em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, stary eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain't quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of their necks are all shrivelled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst\u2014fact is, I don't believe I've ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate 'em\u2014they used to have lots of horse trouble before autos came in.\n\n\"Nobody around here or in Arkham or Ipswich will have anything to do with 'em, and they act kind of offish themselves when they come to town or when anyone tries to fish on their grounds. Queer how fish are always thick off Innsmouth Harbour when there ain't any anywhere else around\u2014but just try to fish there yourself and see how the folks chase you off! Those people used to come here on the railroad\u2014walking and taking the train at Rowley after the branch was dropped\u2014but now they use that bus.\n\n\"Yes, there's a hotel in Innsmouth\u2014called the Gilman House\u2014but I don't believe it can amount to much. I wouldn't advise you to try it. Better stay over here and take the ten o'clock bus tomorrow morning; then you can get an evening bus there for Arkham at eight o'clock. There was a factory inspector who stopped at the Gilman a couple of years ago, and he had a lot of unpleasant hints about the place. Seems they get a queer crowd there, for this fellow heard voices in other rooms\u2014though most of 'em was empty\u2014that gave him the shivers. It was foreign talk, he thought, but he said the bad thing about it was the kind of voice that sometimes spoke. It sounded so unnatural\u2014slopping-like, he said\u2014that he didn't dare undress and go to sleep. Just waited up and lit out the first thing in the morning. The talk went on most all night.\n\n\"This fellow\u2014Casey, his name was\u2014had a lot to say about how the Innsmouth folks watched him and seemed kind of on guard. He found the Marsh refinery a queer place\u2014it's in an old mill on the lower falls of the Manuxet. What he said tallied up with what I'd heard. Books in bad shape, and no clear account of any kind of dealings. You know it's always ben a kind of mystery where the Marshes get the gold they refine. They've never seemed to do much buying in that line, but years ago they shipped out an enormous lot of ingots.\n\n\"Used to be talk of a queer foreign kind of jewellery that the sailors and refinery men sometimes sold on the sly, or that was seen once or twice on some of the Marsh womenfolks. People allowed maybe old Captain Obed traded for it in some heathen port, especially since he was always ordering stacks of glass beads and trinkets such as seafaring men used to get for native trade. Others thought and still think he'd found an old pirate cache out on Devil Reef. But here's a funny thing. The old Captain's ben dead these sixty years, and there ain't ben a good-sized ship out of the place since the Civil War; but just the same the Marshes still keep on buying a few of those native trade things\u2014mostly glass and rubber gewgaws, they tell me. Maybe the Innsmouth folks like 'em to look at themselves\u2014Gawd knows they've gotten to be about as bad as South Sea cannibals and Guinea savages.\n\n\"That plague of '46 must have taken off the best blood in the place. Anyway, they're a doubtful lot now, and the Marshes and the other rich folks are as bad as any. As I told you, there probably ain't more'n 400 people in the whole town in spite of all the streets they say there are. I guess they're what they call 'white trash' down South\u2014lawless and sly, and full of secret doings. They get a lot of fish and lobsters and do exporting by truck. Queer how the fish swarm right there and nowhere else.\n\n\"Nobody can ever keep track of these people, and state school officials and census men have a devil of a time. You can bet that prying strangers ain't welcome around Innsmouth. I've heard personally of more'n one business or government man that's disappeared there, and there's loose talk of one who went crazy and is out at Danvers now. They must have fixed up some awful scare for that fellow.\n\n\"That's why I wouldn't go at night if I was you. I've never ben there and have no wish to go, but I guess a daytime trip couldn't hurt you\u2014even though the people hereabouts will advise you not to make it. If you're just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you.\"\n\nAnd so I spent part of that evening at the Newburyport Public Library looking up data about Innsmouth. When I had tried to question the natives in the shops, the lunch room, the garages, and the fire station, I had found them even harder to get started than the ticket-agent had predicted; and realised that I could not spare the time to overcome their first instinctive reticences. They had a kind of obscure suspiciousness, as if there were something amiss with anyone too much interested in Innsmouth. At the Y.M.C.A., where I was stopping, the clerk merely discouraged my going to such a dismal, decadent place; and the people at the library shewed much the same attitude. Clearly, in the eyes of the educated, Innsmouth was merely an exaggerated case of civic degeneration.\n\nThe Essex County histories on the library shelves had very little to say, except that the town was founded in 1643, noted for shipbuilding before the Revolution, a seat of great marine prosperity in the early nineteenth century, and later a minor factory centre using the Manuxet as power. The epidemic and riots of 1846 were very sparsely treated, as if they formed a discredit to the county.\n\nReferences to decline were few, though the significance of the later record was unmistakable. After the Civil War all industrial life was confined to the Marsh Refining Company, and the marketing of gold ingots formed the only remaining bit of major commerce aside from the eternal fishing. That fishing paid less and less as the price of the commodity fell and large-scale corporations offered competition, but there was never a dearth of fish around Innsmouth Harbour. Foreigners seldom settled there, and there was some discreetly veiled evidence that a number of Poles and Portuguese who had tried it had been scattered in a peculiarly drastic fashion.\n\nMost interesting of all was a glancing reference to the strange jewellery vaguely associated with Innsmouth. It had evidently impressed the whole countryside more than a little, for mention was made of specimens in the museum of Miskatonic University at Arkham, and in the display room of the Newburyport Historical Society. The fragmentary descriptions of these things were bald and prosaic, but they hinted to me an undercurrent of persistent strangeness. Something about them seemed so odd and provocative that I could not put them out of my mind, and despite the relative lateness of the hour I resolved to see the local sample\u2014said to be a large, queerly proportioned thing evidently meant for a tiara\u2014if it could possibly be arranged.\n\nThe librarian gave me a note of introduction to the curator of the Society, a Miss Anna Tilton, who lived nearby, and after a brief explanation that ancient gentlewoman was kind enough to pilot me into the closed building, since the hour was not outrageously late. The collection was a notable one indeed, but in my present mood I had eyes for nothing but the bizarre object which glistened in a corner cupboard under the electric lights.\n\nIt took no excessive sensitiveness to beauty to make me literally gasp at the strange, unearthly splendour of the alien, opulent phantasy that rested there on a purple velvet cushion. Even now I can hardly describe what I saw, though it was clearly enough a sort of tiara, as the description had said. It was tall in front, and with a very large and curiously irregular periphery, as if designed for a head of almost freakishly elliptical outline. The material seemed to be predominantly gold, though a weird lighter lustrousness hinted at some strange alloy with an equally beautiful and scarcely identifiable metal. Its condition was almost perfect, and one could have spent hours in studying the striking and puzzlingly untraditional designs\u2014some simply geometrical, and some plainly marine\u2014chased or moulded in high relief on its surface with a craftsmanship of incredible skill and grace.\n\nThe longer I looked, the more the thing fascinated me; and in this fascination there was a curiously disturbing element hardly to be classified or accounted for. At first I decided that it was the queer other-worldly quality of the art which made me uneasy. All other art objects I had ever seen either belonged to some known racial or national stream, or else were consciously modernistic defiances of every recognised stream. This tiara was neither. It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any\u2014Eastern or Western, ancient or modern\u2014which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.\n\nHowever, I soon saw that my uneasiness had a second and perhaps equally potent source residing in the pictorial and mathematical suggestions of the strange designs. The patterns all hinted of remote secrets and unimaginable abysses in time and space, and the monotonously aquatic nature of the reliefs became almost sinister. Among these reliefs were fabulous monsters of abhorrent grotesqueness and malignity\u2014half ichthyic and half batrachian in suggestion\u2014which one could not dissociate from a certain haunting and uncomfortable sense of pseudo-memory, as if they called up some image from deep cells and tissues whose retentive functions are wholly primal and awesomely ancestral. At times I fancied that every contour of these blasphemous fish-frogs was overflowing with the ultimate quintessence of unknown and inhuman evil.\n\nIn odd contrast to the tiara's aspect was its brief and prosy history as related by Miss Tilton. It had been pawned for a ridiculous sum at a shop in State Street in 1873, by a drunken Innsmouth man shortly afterward killed in a brawl. The Society had acquired it directly from the pawnbroker, at once giving it a display worthy of its quality. It was labelled as of probable East-Indian or Indo-Chinese provenance, though the attribution was frankly tentative.\n\nMiss Tilton, comparing all possible hypotheses regarding its origin and its presence in New England, was inclined to believe that it formed part of some exotic pirate hoard discovered by old Captain Obed Marsh. This view was surely not weakened by the insistent offers of purchase at a high price which the Marshes began to make as soon as they knew of its presence, and which they repeated to this day despite the Society's unvarying determination not to sell.\n\nAs the good lady shewed me out of the building she made it clear that the pirate theory of the Marsh fortune was a popular one among the intelligent people of the region. Her own attitude toward shadowed Innsmouth\u2014which she had never seen\u2014was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that the rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.\n\nIt was called, she said, \"The Esoteric Order of Dagon\", and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the East a century before, at a time when the Innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. Its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, and it soon came to be the greatest influence on the town, replacing Freemasonry altogether and taking up headquarters in the old Masonic Hall on New Church Green.\n\nAll this, to the pious Miss Tilton, formed an excellent reason for shunning the ancient town of decay and desolation; but to me it was merely a fresh incentive. To my architectural and historical anticipations was now added an acute anthropological zeal, and I could scarcely sleep in my small room at the \"Y\" as the night wore away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "Shortly before ten the next morning I stood with one small valise in front of Hammond's Drug Store in old Market Square waiting for the Innsmouth bus. As the hour for its arrival drew near I noticed a general drift of the loungers to other places up the street, or to the Ideal Lunch across the square. Evidently the ticket-agent had not exaggerated the dislike which local people bore toward Innsmouth and its denizens. In a few moments a small motor-coach of extreme decrepitude and dirty grey colour rattled down State Street, made a turn, and drew up at the curb beside me. I felt immediately that it was the right one; a guess which the half-illegible sign on the windshield\u2014\"Arkham-Innsmouth-Newb'port\"\u2014soon verified.\n\nThere were only three passengers\u2014dark, unkempt men of sullen visage and somewhat youthful cast\u2014and when the vehicle stopped they clumsily shambled out and began walking up State Street in a silent, almost furtive fashion. The driver also alighted, and I watched him as he went into the drug store to make some purchase. This, I reflected, must be the Joe Sargent mentioned by the ticket-agent; and even before I noticed any details there spread over me a wave of spontaneous aversion which could be neither checked nor explained. It suddenly struck me as very natural that the local people should not wish to ride on a bus owned and driven by this man, or to visit any oftener than possible the habitat of such a man and his kinsfolk.\n\nWhen the driver came out of the store I looked at him more carefully and tried to determine the source of my evil impression. He was a thin, stoop-shouldered man not much under six feet tall, dressed in shabby blue civilian clothes and wearing a frayed grey golf cap. His age was perhaps thirty-five, but the odd, deep creases in the sides of his neck made him seem older when one did not study his dull, expressionless face. He had a narrow head, bulging, watery blue eyes that seemed never to wink, a flat nose, a receding forehead and chin, and singularly undeveloped ears. His long, thick lip and coarse-pored, greyish cheeks seemed almost beardless except for some sparse yellow hairs that straggled and curled in irregular patches; and in places the surface seemed queerly irregular, as if peeling from some cutaneous disease. His hands were large and heavily veined, and had a very unusual greyish-blue tinge. The fingers were strikingly short in proportion to the rest of the structure, and seemed to have a tendency to curl closely into the huge palm. As he walked toward the bus I observed his peculiarly shambling gait and saw that his feet were inordinately immense. The more I studied them the more I wondered how he could buy any shoes to fit them.\n\nA certain greasiness about the fellow increased my dislike. He was evidently given to working or lounging around the fish docks, and carried with him much of their characteristic smell. Just what foreign blood was in him I could not even guess. His oddities certainly did not look Asiatic, Polynesian, Levantine, or negroid, yet I could see why the people found him alien. I myself would have thought of biological degeneration rather than alienage.\n\nI was sorry when I saw that there would be no other passengers on the bus. Somehow I did not like the idea of riding alone with this driver. But as leaving time obviously approached I conquered my qualms and followed the man aboard, extending him a dollar bill and murmuring the single word \"Innsmouth\". He looked curiously at me for a second as he returned forty cents change without speaking. I took a seat far behind him, but on the same side of the bus, since I wished to watch the shore during the journey.\n\nAt length the decrepit vehicle started with a jerk, and rattled noisily past the old brick buildings of State Street amidst a cloud of vapour from the exhaust. Glancing at the people on the sidewalks, I thought I detected in them a curious wish to avoid looking at the bus\u2014or at least a wish to avoid seeming to look at it. Then we turned to the left into High Street, where the going was smoother; flying by stately old mansions of the early republic and still older colonial farmhouses, passing the Lower Green and Parker River, and finally emerging into a long, monotonous stretch of open shore country.\n\nThe day was warm and sunny, but the landscape of sand, sedge-grass, and stunted shrubbery became more and more desolate as we proceeded. Out the window I could see the blue water and the sandy line of Plum Island, and we presently drew very near the beach as our narrow road veered off from the main highway to Rowley and Ipswich. There were no visible houses, and I could tell by the state of the road that traffic was very light hereabouts. The small, weather-worn telephone poles carried only two wires. Now and then we crossed crude wooden bridges over tidal creeks that wound far inland and promoted the general isolation of the region.\n\nOnce in a while I noticed dead stumps and crumbling foundation-walls above the drifting sand, and recalled the old tradition quoted in one of the histories I had read, that this was once a fertile and thickly settled countryside. The change, it was said, came simultaneously with the Innsmouth epidemic of 1846, and was thought by simple folk to have a dark connexion with hidden forces of evil. Actually, it was caused by the unwise cutting of woodlands near the shore, which robbed the soil of its best protection and opened the way for waves of wind-blown sand.\n\nAt last we lost sight of Plum Island and saw the vast expanse of the open Atlantic on our left. Our narrow course began to climb steeply, and I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead where the rutted roadway met the sky. It was as if the bus were about to keep on in its ascent, leaving the sane earth altogether and merging with the unknown arcana of upper air and cryptical sky. The smell of the sea took on ominous implications, and the silent driver's bent, rigid back and narrow head became more and more hateful. As I looked at him I saw that the back of his head was almost as hairless as his face, having only a few straggling yellow strands upon a grey scabrous surface.\n\nThen we reached the crest and beheld the outspread valley beyond, where the Manuxet joins the sea just north of the long line of cliffs that culminate in Kingsport Head and veer off toward Cape Ann. On the far, misty horizon I could just make out the dizzy profile of the Head, topped by the queer ancient house of which so many legends are told; but for the moment all my attention was captured by the nearer panorama just below me. I had, I realised, come face to face with rumour-shadowed Innsmouth.\n\nIt was a town of wide extent and dense construction, yet one with a portentous dearth of visible life. From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, and the three tall steeples loomed stark and unpainted against the seaward horizon. One of them was crumbling down at the top, and in that and another there were only black gaping holes where clock-dials should have been. The vast huddle of sagging gambrel roofs and peaked gables conveyed with offensive clearness the idea of wormy decay, and as we approached along the now descending road I could see that many roofs had wholly caved in. There were some large square Georgian houses, too, with hipped roofs, cupolas, and railed \"widow's walks\". These were mostly well back from the water, and one or two seemed to be in moderately sound condition. Stretching inland from among them I saw the rusted, grass-grown line of the abandoned railway, with leaning telegraph-poles now devoid of wires, and the half-obscured lines of the old carriage roads to Rowley and Ipswich.\n\nThe decay was worst close to the waterfront, though in its very midst I could spy the white belfry of a fairly well-preserved brick structure which looked like a small factory. The harbour, long clogged with sand, was enclosed by an ancient stone breakwater; on which I could begin to discern the minute forms of a few seated fishermen, and at whose end were what looked like the foundations of a bygone lighthouse. A sandy tongue had formed inside this barrier, and upon it I saw a few decrepit cabins, moored dories, and scattered lobster-pots. The only deep water seemed to be where the river poured out past the belfried structure and turned southward to join the ocean at the breakwater's end.\n\nHere and there the ruins of wharves jutted out from the shore to end in indeterminate rottenness, those farthest south seeming the most decayed. And far out at sea, despite a high tide, I glimpsed a long, black line scarcely rising above the water yet carrying a suggestion of odd latent malignancy. This, I knew, must be Devil Reef. As I looked, a subtle, curious sense of beckoning seemed superadded to the grim repulsion; and oddly enough, I found this overtone more disturbing than the primary impression.\n\nWe met no one on the road, but presently began to pass deserted farms in varying stages of ruin. Then I noticed a few inhabited houses with rags stuffed in the broken windows and shells and dead fish lying about the littered yards. Once or twice I saw listless-looking people working in barren gardens or digging clams on the fishy-smelling beach below, and groups of dirty, simian-visaged children playing around weed-grown doorsteps. Somehow these people seemed more disquieting than the dismal buildings, for almost every one had certain peculiarities of face and motions which I instinctively disliked without being able to define or comprehend them. For a second I thought this typical physique suggested some picture I had seen, perhaps in a book, under circumstances of particular horror or melancholy; but this pseudo-recollection passed very quickly.\n\nAs the bus reached a lower level I began to catch the steady note of a waterfall through the unnatural stillness. The leaning, unpainted houses grew thicker, lined both sides of the road, and displayed more urban tendencies than did those we were leaving behind. The panorama ahead had contracted to a street scene, and in spots I could see where a cobblestone pavement and stretches of brick sidewalk had formerly existed. All the houses were apparently deserted, and there were occasional gaps where tumbledown chimneys and cellar walls told of buildings that had collapsed. Pervading everything was the most nauseous fishy odour imaginable.\n\nSoon cross streets and junctions began to appear; those on the left leading to shoreward realms of unpaved squalor and decay, while those on the right shewed vistas of departed grandeur. So far I had seen no people in the town, but there now came signs of a sparse habitation\u2014curtained windows here and there, and an occasional battered motor-car at the curb. Pavement and sidewalks were increasingly well defined, and though most of the houses were quite old\u2014wood and brick structures of the early nineteenth century\u2014they were obviously kept fit for habitation. As an amateur antiquarian I almost lost my olfactory disgust and my feeling of menace and repulsion amidst this rich, unaltered survival from the past.\n\nBut I was not to reach my destination without one very strong impression of poignantly disagreeable quality. The bus had come to a sort of open concourse or radial point with churches on two sides and the bedraggled remains of a circular green in the centre, and I was looking at a large pillared hall on the right-hand junction ahead. The structure's once white paint was now grey and peeling, and the black and gold sign on the pediment was so faded that I could only with difficulty make out the words \"Esoteric Order of Dagon\". This, then, was the former Masonic Hall now given over to a degraded cult. As I strained to decipher this inscription my notice was distracted by the raucous tones of a cracked bell across the street, and I quickly turned to look out the window on my side of the coach.\n\nThe sound came from a squat-towered stone church of manifestly later date than most of the houses, built in a clumsy Gothic fashion and having a disproportionately high basement with shuttered windows. Though the hands of its clock were missing on the side I glimpsed, I knew that those hoarse strokes were telling the hour of eleven. Then suddenly all thoughts of time were blotted out by an onrushing image of sharp intensity and unaccountable horror which had seized me before I knew what it really was. The door of the church basement was open, revealing a rectangle of blackness inside. And as I looked, a certain object crossed or seemed to cross that dark rectangle; burning into my brain a momentary conception of nightmare which was all the more maddening because analysis could not shew a single nightmarish quality in it.\n\nIt was a living object\u2014the first except the driver that I had seen since entering the compact part of the town\u2014and had I been in a steadier mood I would have found nothing whatever of terror in it. Clearly, as I realised a moment later, it was the pastor; clad in some peculiar vestments doubtless introduced since the Order of Dagon had modified the ritual of the local churches. The thing which had probably caught my first subconscious glance and supplied the touch of bizarre horror was the tall tiara he wore; an almost exact duplicate of the one Miss Tilton had shewn me the previous evening. This, acting on my imagination, had supplied namelessly sinister qualities to the indeterminate face and robed, shambling form beneath it. There was not, I soon decided, any reason why I should have felt that shuddering touch of evil pseudo-memory. Was it not natural that a local mystery cult should adopt among its regimentals an unique type of head-dress made familiar to the community in some strange way\u2014perhaps as treasure-trove?\n\nA very thin sprinkling of repellent-looking youngish people now became visible on the sidewalks\u2014lone individuals, and silent knots of two or three. The lower floors of the crumbling houses sometimes harboured small shops with dingy signs, and I noticed a parked truck or two as we rattled along. The sound of waterfalls became more and more distinct, and presently I saw a fairly deep river-gorge ahead, spanned by a wide, iron-railed highway bridge beyond which a large square opened out. As we clanked over the bridge I looked out on both sides and observed some factory buildings on the edge of the grassy bluff or part way down. The water far below was very abundant, and I could see two vigorous sets of falls upstream on my right and at least one downstream on my left. From this point the noise was quite deafening. Then we rolled into the large semicircular square across the river and drew up on the right-hand side in front of a tall, cupola-crowned building with remnants of yellow paint and with a half-effaced sign proclaiming it to be the Gilman House.\n\nI was glad to get out of that bus, and at once proceeded to check my valise in the shabby hotel lobby. There was only one person in sight\u2014an elderly man without what I had come to call the \"Innsmouth look\"\u2014and I decided not to ask him any of the questions which bothered me; remembering that odd things had been noticed in this hotel. Instead, I strolled out on the square, from which the bus had already gone, and studied the scene minutely and appraisingly.\n\nOne side of the cobblestoned open space was the straight line of the river; the other was a semicircle of slant-roofed brick buildings of about the 1800 period, from which several streets radiated away to the southeast, south, and southwest. Lamps were depressingly few and small\u2014all low-powered incandescents\u2014and I was glad that my plans called for departure before dark, even though I knew the moon would be bright. The buildings were all in fair condition, and included perhaps a dozen shops in current operation; of which one was a grocery of the First National chain, others a dismal restaurant, a drug store, and a wholesale fish-dealer's office, and still another, at the eastern extremity of the square near the river, an office of the town's only industry\u2014the Marsh Refining Company. There were perhaps ten people visible, and four or five automobiles and motor trucks stood scattered about. I did not need to be told that this was the civic centre of Innsmouth. Eastward I could catch blue glimpses of the harbour, against which rose the decaying remains of three once beautiful Georgian steeples. And toward the shore on the opposite bank of the river I saw the white belfry surmounting what I took to be the Marsh refinery.\n\nFor some reason or other I chose to make my first inquiries at the chain grocery, whose personnel was not likely to be native to Innsmouth. I found a solitary boy of about seventeen in charge, and was pleased to note the brightness and affability which promised cheerful information. He seemed exceptionally eager to talk, and I soon gathered that he did not like the place, its fishy smell, or its furtive people. A word with any outsider was a relief to him. He hailed from Arkham, boarded with a family who came from Ipswich, and went back home whenever he got a moment off. His family did not like him to work in Innsmouth, but the chain had transferred him there and he did not wish to give up his job.\n\nThere was, he said, no public library or chamber of commerce in Innsmouth, but I could probably find my way about. The street I had come down was Federal. West of that were the fine old residence streets\u2014Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams\u2014and east of it were the shoreward slums. It was in these slums\u2014along Main Street\u2014that I would find the old Georgian churches, but they were all long abandoned. It would be well not to make oneself too conspicuous in such neighbourhoods\u2014especially north of the river\u2014since the people were sullen and hostile. Some strangers had even disappeared.\n\nCertain spots were almost forbidden territory, as he had learned at considerable cost. One must not, for example, linger much around the Marsh refinery, or around any of the still used churches, or around the pillared Order of Dagon Hall at New Church Green. Those churches were very odd\u2014all violently disavowed by their respective denominations elsewhere, and apparently using the queerest kind of ceremonials and clerical vestments. Their creeds were heterodox and mysterious, involving hints of certain marvellous transformations leading to bodily immortality\u2014of a sort\u2014on this earth. The youth's own pastor\u2014Dr. Wallace of Asbury M. E. Church in Arkham\u2014had gravely urged him not to join any church in Innsmouth.\n\nAs for the Innsmouth people\u2014the youth hardly knew what to make of them. They were as furtive and seldom seen as animals that live in burrows, and one could hardly imagine how they passed the time apart from their desultory fishing. Perhaps\u2014judging from the quantities of bootleg liquor they consumed\u2014they lay for most of the daylight hours in an alcoholic stupor. They seemed sullenly banded together in some sort of fellowship and understanding\u2014despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. Their appearance\u2014especially those staring, unwinking eyes which one never saw shut\u2014was certainly shocking enough; and their voices were disgusting. It was awful to hear them chanting in their churches at night, and especially during their main festivals or revivals, which fell twice a year on April 30th and October 31st.\n\nThey were very fond of the water, and swam a great deal in both river and harbour. Swimming races out to Devil Reef were very common, and everyone in sight seemed well able to share in this arduous sport. When one came to think of it, it was generally only rather young people who were seen about in public, and of these the oldest were apt to be the most tainted-looking. When exceptions did occur, they were mostly persons with no trace of aberrancy, like the old clerk at the hotel. One wondered what became of the bulk of the older folk, and whether the \"Innsmouth look\" were not a strange and insidious disease-phenomenon which increased its hold as years advanced.\n\nOnly a very rare affliction, of course, could bring about such vast and radical anatomical changes in a single individual after maturity\u2014changes involving osseous factors as basic as the shape of the skull\u2014but then, even this aspect was no more baffling and unheard-of than the visible features of the malady as a whole. It would be hard, the youth implied, to form any real conclusions regarding such a matter; since one never came to know the natives personally no matter how long one might live in Innsmouth.\n\nThe youth was certain that many specimens even worse than the worst visible ones were kept locked indoors in some places. People sometimes heard the queerest kind of sounds. The tottering waterfront hovels north of the river were reputedly connected by hidden tunnels, being thus a veritable warren of unseen abnormalities. What kind of foreign blood\u2014if any\u2014these beings had, it was impossible to tell. They sometimes kept certain especially repulsive characters out of sight when government agents and others from the outside world came to town.\n\nIt would be of no use, my informant said, to ask the natives anything about the place. The only one who would talk was a very aged but normal-looking man who lived at the poorhouse on the north rim of the town and spent his time walking about or lounging around the fire station. This hoary character, Zadok Allen, was ninety-six years old and somewhat touched in the head, besides being the town drunkard. He was a strange, furtive creature who constantly looked over his shoulder as if afraid of something, and when sober could not be persuaded to talk at all with strangers. He was, however, unable to resist any offer of his favourite poison; and once drunk would furnish the most astonishing fragments of whispered reminiscence.\n\nAfter all, though, little useful data could be gained from him; since his stories were all insane, incomplete hints of impossible marvels and horrors which could have no source save in his own disordered fancy. Nobody ever believed him, but the natives did not like him to drink and talk with strangers; and it was not always safe to be seen questioning him. It was probably from him that some of the wildest popular whispers and delusions were derived.\n\nSeveral non-native residents had reported monstrous glimpses from time to time, but between old Zadok's tales and the malformed denizens it was no wonder such illusions were current. None of the non-natives ever stayed out late at night, there being a widespread impression that it was not wise to do so. Besides, the streets were loathsomely dark.\n\nAs for business\u2014the abundance of fish was certainly almost uncanny, but the natives were taking less and less advantage of it. Moreover, prices were falling and competition was growing. Of course the town's real business was the refinery, whose commercial office was on the square only a few doors east of where we stood. Old Man Marsh was never seen, but sometimes went to the works in a closed, curtained car.\n\nThere were all sorts of rumours about how Marsh had come to look. He had once been a great dandy, and people said he still wore the frock-coated finery of the Edwardian age, curiously adapted to certain deformities. His sons had formerly conducted the office in the square, but latterly they had been keeping out of sight a good deal and leaving the brunt of affairs to the younger generation. The sons and their sisters had come to look very queer, especially the elder ones; and it was said that their health was failing.\n\nOne of the Marsh daughters was a repellent, reptilian-looking woman who wore an excess of weird jewellery clearly of the same exotic tradition as that to which the strange tiara belonged. My informant had noticed it many times, and had heard it spoken of as coming from some secret hoard, either of pirates or of daemons. The clergymen\u2014or priests, or whatever they were called nowadays\u2014also wore this kind of ornament as a head-dress; but one seldom caught glimpses of them. Other specimens the youth had not seen, though many were rumoured to exist around Innsmouth.\n\nThe Marshes, together with the other three gently bred families of the town\u2014the Waites, the Gilmans, and the Eliots\u2014were all very retiring. They lived in immense houses along Washington Street, and several were reputed to harbour in concealment certain living kinsfolk whose personal aspect forbade public view, and whose deaths had been reported and recorded.\n\nWarning me that many of the street signs were down, the youth drew for my benefit a rough but ample and painstaking sketch map of the town's salient features. After a moment's study I felt sure that it would be of great help, and pocketed it with profuse thanks. Disliking the dinginess of the single restaurant I had seen, I bought a fair supply of cheese crackers and ginger wafers to serve as a lunch later on. My programme, I decided, would be to thread the principal streets, talk with any non-natives I might encounter, and catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham. The town, I could see, formed a significant and exaggerated example of communal decay; but being no sociologist I would limit my serious observations to the field of architecture.\n\nThus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed oddly free from the noise of industry. This building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic centre, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square.\n\nRecrossing the gorge on the Main Street bridge, I struck a region of utter desertion which somehow made me shudder. Collapsing huddles of gambrel roofs formed a jagged and fantastic skyline, above which rose the ghoulish, decapitated steeple of an ancient church. Some houses along Main Street were tenanted, but most were tightly boarded up. Down unpaved side streets I saw the black, gaping windows of deserted hovels, many of which leaned at perilous and incredible angles through the sinking of part of the foundations. Those windows stared so spectrally that it took courage to turn eastward toward the waterfront. Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.\n\nFish Street was as deserted as Main, though it differed in having many brick and stone warehouses still in excellent shape. Water Street was almost its duplicate, save that there were great seaward gaps where wharves had been. Not a living thing did I see, except for the scattered fishermen on the distant breakwater, and not a sound did I hear save the lapping of the harbour tides and the roar of the falls in the Manuxet. The town was getting more and more on my nerves, and I looked behind me furtively as I picked my way back over the tottering Water Street bridge. The Fish Street bridge, according to the sketch, was in ruins.\n\nNorth of the river there were traces of squalid life\u2014active fish-packing houses in Water Street, smoking chimneys and patched roofs here and there, occasional sounds from indeterminate sources, and infrequent shambling forms in the dismal streets and unpaved lanes\u2014but I seemed to find this even more oppressive than the southerly desertion. For one thing, the people were more hideous and abnormal than those near the centre of the town; so that I was several times evilly reminded of something utterly fantastic which I could not quite place. Undoubtedly the alien strain in the Innsmouth folk was stronger here than farther inland\u2014unless, indeed, the \"Innsmouth look\" were a disease rather than a blood strain, in which case this district might be held to harbour the more advanced cases.\n\nOne detail that annoyed me was the distribution of the few faint sounds I heard. They ought naturally to have come wholly from the visibly inhabited houses, yet in reality were often strongest inside the most rigidly boarded-up facades. There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. Suddenly I found myself wondering what the voices of those denizens would be like. I had heard no speech so far in this quarter, and was unaccountably anxious not to do so.\n\nPausing only long enough to look at two fine but ruinous old churches at Main and Church Streets, I hastened out of that vile waterfront slum. My next logical goal was New Church Green, but somehow or other I could not bear to repass the church in whose basement I had glimpsed the inexplicably frightening form of that strangely diademed priest or pastor. Besides, the grocery youth had told me that the churches, as well as the Order of Dagon Hall, were not advisable neighbourhoods for strangers.\n\nAccordingly I kept north along Main to Martin, then turning inland, crossing Federal Street safely north of the Green, and entering the decayed patrician neighbourhood of northern Broad, Washington, Lafayette, and Adams Streets. Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. Mansion after mansion claimed my gaze, most of them decrepit and boarded up amidst neglected grounds, but one or two in each street shewing signs of occupancy. In Washington Street there was a row of four or five in excellent repair and with finely tended lawns and gardens. The most sumptuous of these\u2014with wide terraced parterres extending back the whole way to Lafayette Street\u2014I took to be the home of Old Man Marsh, the afflicted refinery owner.\n\nIn all these streets no living thing was visible, and I wondered at the complete absense of cats and dogs from Innsmouth. Another thing which puzzled and disturbed me, even in some of the best-preserved mansions, was the tightly shuttered condition of many third-story and attic windows. Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.\n\nI shivered as the cracked stroke of three sounded from a belfry on my left. Too well did I recall the squat church from which those notes came. Following Washington Street toward the river, I now faced a new zone of former industry and commerce; noting the ruins of a factory ahead, and seeing others, with the traces of an old railway station and covered railway bridge beyond, up the gorge on my right.\n\nThe uncertain bridge now before me was posted with a warning sign, but I took the risk and crossed again to the south bank where traces of life reappeared. Furtive, shambling creatures stared cryptically in my direction, and more normal faces eyed me coldly and curiously. Innsmouth was rapidly becoming intolerable, and I turned down Paine Street toward the Square in the hope of getting some vehicle to take me to Arkham before the still-distant starting-time of that sinister bus.\n\nIt was then that I saw the tumbledown fire station on my left, and noticed the red-faced, bushy-bearded, watery-eyed old man in nondescript rags who sat on a bench in front of it talking with a pair of unkempt but not abnormal-looking firemen. This, of course, must be Zadok Allen, the half-crazed, liquorish nonagenarian whose tales of old Innsmouth and its shadow were so hideous and incredible." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "It must have been some imp of the perverse\u2014or some sardonic pull from dark, hidden sources\u2014which made me change my plans as I did. I had long before resolved to limit my observations to architecture alone, and I was even then hurrying toward the Square in an effort to get quick transportation out of this festering city of death and decay; but the sight of old Zadok Allen set up new currents in my mind and made me slacken my pace uncertainly.\n\nI had been assured that the old man could do nothing but hint at wild, disjointed, and incredible legends, and I had been warned that the natives made it unsafe to be seen talking to him; yet the thought of this aged witness to the town's decay, with memories going back to the early days of ships and factories, was a lure that no amount of reason could make me resist. After all, the strangest and maddest of myths are often merely symbols or allegories based upon truth\u2014and old Zadok must have seen everything which went on around Innsmouth for the last ninety years. Curiosity flared up beyond sense and caution, and in my youthful egotism I fancied I might be able to sift a nucleus of real history from the confused, extravagant outpouring I would probably extract with the aid of raw whiskey.\n\nI knew that I could not accost him then and there, for the firemen would surely notice and object. Instead, I reflected, I would prepare by getting some bootleg liquor at a place where the grocery boy had told me it was plentiful. Then I would loaf near the fire station in apparent casualness, and fall in with old Zadok after he had started on one of his frequent rambles. The youth said that he was very restless, seldom sitting around the station for more than an hour or two at a time.\n\nA quart bottle of whiskey was easily, though not cheaply, obtained in the rear of a dingy variety-store just off the Square in Eliot Street. The dirty-looking fellow who waited on me had a touch of the staring \"Innsmouth look\", but was quite civil in his way; being perhaps used to the custom of such convivial strangers\u2014truckmen, gold-buyers, and the like\u2014as were occasionally in town.\n\nRe\u00ebntering the Square I saw that luck was with me; for\u2014shuffling out of Paine Street around the corner of the Gilman House\u2014I glimpsed nothing less than the tall, lean, tattered form of old Zadok Allen himself. In accordance with my plan, I attracted his attention by brandishing my newly purchased bottle; and soon realised that he had begun to shuffle wistfully after me as I turned into Waite Street on my way to the most deserted region I could think of.\n\nI was steering my course by the map the grocery boy had prepared, and was aiming for the wholly abandoned stretch of southern waterfront which I had previously visited. The only people in sight there had been the fishermen on the distant breakwater; and by going a few squares south I could get beyond the range of these, finding a pair of seats on some abandoned wharf and being free to question old Zadok unobserved for an indefinite time. Before I reached Main Street I could hear a faint and wheezy \"Hey, Mister!\" behind me, and I presently allowed the old man to catch up and take copious pulls from the quart bottle.\n\nI began putting out feelers as we walked along to Water Street and turned southward amidst the omnipresent desolation and crazily tilted ruins, but found that the aged tongue did not loosen as quickly as I had expected. At length I saw a grass-grown opening toward the sea between crumbling brick walls, with the weedy length of an earth-and-masonry wharf projecting beyond. Piles of moss-covered stones near the water promised tolerable seats, and the scene was sheltered from all possible view by a ruined warehouse on the north. Here, I thought, was the ideal place for a long secret colloquy; so I guided my companion down the lane and picked out spots to sit in among the mossy stones. The air of death and desertion was ghoulish, and the smell of fish almost insufferable; but I was resolved to let nothing deter me.\n\nAbout four hours remained for conversation if I were to catch the eight o'clock coach for Arkham, and I began to dole out more liquor to the ancient tippler; meanwhile eating my own frugal lunch. In my donations I was careful not to overshoot the mark, for I did not wish Zadok's vinous garrulousness to pass into a stupor. After an hour his furtive taciturnity shewed signs of disappearing, but much to my disappointment he still sidetracked my questions about Innsmouth and its shadow-haunted past. He would babble of current topics, revealing a wide acquaintance with newspapers and a great tendency to philosophise in a sententious village fashion.\n\nToward the end of the second hour I feared my quart of whiskey would not be enough to produce results, and was wondering whether I had better leave old Zadok and go back for more. Just then, however, chance made the opening which my questions had been unable to make; and the wheezing ancient's rambling took a turn that caused me to lean forward and listen alertly. My back was toward the fishy-smelling sea, but he was facing it, and something or other had caused his wandering gaze to light on the low, distant line of Devil Reef, then shewing plainly and almost fascinatingly above the waves. The sight seemed to displease him, for he began a series of weak curses which ended in a confidential whisper and a knowing leer. He bent toward me, took hold of my coat lapel, and hissed out some hints that could not be mistaken.\n\n\"Thar's whar it all begun\u2014that cursed place of all wickedness whar the deep water starts. Gate o' hell\u2014sheer drop daown to a bottom no saoundin'-line kin tech. Ol' Cap'n Obed done it\u2014him that faound aout more'n was good fer him in the Saouth Sea islands.\n\n\"Everybody was in a bad way them days. Trade fallin' off, mills losin' business\u2014even the new ones\u2014an' the best of our menfolks kilt a-privateerin' in the War of 1812 or lost with the Elizy brig an' the Ranger snow\u2014both of 'em Gilman venters. Obed Marsh he had three ships afloat\u2014brigantine Columby, brig Hetty, an' barque Sumatry Queen. He was the only one as kep' on with the East-Injy an' Pacific trade, though Esdras Martin's barkentine Malay Pride made a venter as late as 'twenty-eight.\n\n\"Never was nobody like Cap'n Obed\u2014old limb o' Satan! Heh, heh! I kin mind him a-tellin' abaout furren parts, an' callin' all the folks stupid fer goin' to Christian meetin' an' bearin' their burdens meek an' lowly. Says they'd orter git better gods like some o' the folks in the Injies\u2014gods as ud bring 'em good fishin' in return for their sacrifices, an' ud reely answer folks's prayers.\n\n\"Matt Eliot, his fust mate, talked a lot, too, only he was agin' folks's doin' any heathen things. Told abaout an island east of Otaheit\u00e9 whar they was a lot o' stone ruins older'n anybody knew anything abaout, kind o' like them on Ponape, in the Carolines, but with carvin's of faces that looked like the big statues on Easter Island. They was a little volcanic island near thar, too, whar they was other ruins with diff'rent carvin's\u2014ruins all wore away like they'd ben under the sea onct, an' with picters of awful monsters all over 'em.\n\n\"Wal, Sir, Matt he says the natives araound thar had all the fish they cud ketch, an' sported bracelets an' armlets an' head rigs made aout of a queer kind o' gold an' covered with picters o' monsters jest like the ones carved over the ruins on the little island\u2014sorter fish-like frogs or frog-like fishes that was drawed in all kinds o' positions like they was human bein's. Nobody cud git aout o' them whar they got all the stuff, an' all the other natives wondered haow they managed to find fish in plenty even when the very next islands had lean pickin's. Matt he got to wonderin' too, an' so did Cap'n Obed. Obed he notices, besides, that lots of the han'some young folks ud drop aout o' sight fer good from year to year, an' that they wa'n't many old folks araound. Also, he thinks some of the folks looks durned queer even fer Kanakys.\n\n\"It took Obed to git the truth aout o' them heathen. I dun't know haow he done it, but he begun by tradin' fer the gold-like things they wore. Ast 'em whar they come from, an' ef they cud git more, an' finally wormed the story aout o' the old chief\u2014Walakea, they called him. Nobody but Obed ud ever a believed the old yeller devil, but the Cap'n cud read folks like they was books. Heh, heh! Nobody never believes me naow when I tell 'em, an' I dun't s'pose you will, young feller\u2014though come to look at ye, ye hev kind o' got them sharp-readin' eyes like Obed had.\"\n\nThe old man's whisper grew fainter, and I found myself shuddering at the terrible and sincere portentousness of his intonation, even though I knew his tale could be nothing but drunken phantasy.\n\n\"Wal, Sir, Obed he larnt that they's things on this arth as most folks never heerd abaout\u2014an' wouldn't believe ef they did hear. It seems these Kanakys was sacrificin' heaps o' their young men an' maidens to some kind o' god-things that lived under the sea, an' gittin' all kinds o' favour in return. They met the things on the little islet with the queer ruins, an' it seems them awful picters o' frog-fish monsters was supposed to be picters o' these things. Mebbe they was the kind o' critters as got all the mermaid stories an' sech started. They had all kinds o' cities on the sea-bottom, an' this island was heaved up from thar. Seems they was some of the things alive in the stone buildin's when the island come up sudden to the surface. That's haow the Kanakys got wind they was daown thar. Made sign-talk as soon as they got over bein' skeert, an' pieced up a bargain afore long.\n\n\"Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world arter a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say, an' I guess Obed wa'n't none too sharp abaout askin'. But it was all right with the heathens, because they'd ben havin' a hard time an' was desp'rate abaout everything. They give a sarten number o' young folks to the sea-things twict every year\u2014May-Eve an' Hallowe'en\u2014reg'lar as cud be. Also give some o' the carved knick-knacks they made. What the things agreed to give in return was plenty o' fish\u2014they druv 'em in from all over the sea\u2014an' a few gold-like things naow an' then.\n\n\"Wal, as I says, the natives met the things on the little volcanic islet\u2014goin' thar in canoes with the sacrifices et cet'ry, and bringin' back any of the gold-like jools as was comin' to 'em. At fust the things didn't never go onto the main island, but arter a time they come to want to. Seems they hankered arter mixin' with the folks, an' havin' j'int ceremonies on the big days\u2014May-Eve an' Hallowe'en. Ye see, they was able to live both in an' aout o' water\u2014what they call amphibians, I guess. The Kanakys told 'em as haow folks from the other islands might wanta wipe 'em aout ef they got wind o' their bein' thar, but they says they dun't keer much, because they cud wipe aout the hull brood o' humans ef they was willin' to bother\u2014that is, any as didn't hev sarten signs sech as was used onct by the lost Old Ones, whoever they was. But not wantin' to bother, they'd lay low when anybody visited the island.\n\n\"When it come to matin' with them toad-lookin' fishes, the Kanakys kind o' balked, but finally they larnt something as put a new face on the matter. Seems that human folks has got a kind o' relation to sech water-beasts\u2014that everything alive come aout o' the water onct, an' only needs a little change to go back agin. Them things told the Kanakys that ef they mixed bloods there'd be children as ud look human at fust, but later turn more'n more like the things, till finally they'd take to the water an' jine the main lot o' things daown thar. An' this is the important part, young feller\u2014them as turned into fish things an' went into the water wouldn't never die. Them things never died excep' they was kilt violent.\n\n\"Wal, Sir, it seems by the time Obed knowed them islanders they was all full o' fish blood from them deep-water things. When they got old an' begun to shew it, they was kep' hid until they felt like takin' to the water an' quittin' the place. Some was more teched than others, an' some never did change quite enough to take to the water; but mostly they turned aout jest the way them things said. Them as was born more like the things changed arly, but them as was nearly human sometimes stayed on the island till they was past seventy, though they'd usually go daown under fer trial trips afore that. Folks as had took to the water gen'rally come back a good deal to visit, so's a man ud often be a-talkin' to his own five-times-great-grandfather, who'd left the dry land a couple o' hundred years or so afore.\n\n\"Everybody got aout o' the idee o' dyin'\u2014excep' in canoe wars with the other islanders, or as sacrifices to the sea-gods daown below, or from snake-bite or plague or sharp gallopin' ailments or somethin' afore they cud take to the water\u2014but simply looked forrad to a kind o' change that wa'n't a bit horrible arter a while. They thought what they'd got was well wuth all they'd had to give up\u2014an' I guess Obed kind o' come to think the same hisself when he'd chewed over old Walakea's story a bit. Walakea, though, was one of the few as hadn't got none of the fish blood\u2014bein' of a royal line that intermarried with royal lines on other islands.\n\n\"Walakea he shewed Obed a lot o' rites an' incantations as had to do with the sea-things, an' let him see some o' the folks in the village as had changed a lot from human shape. Somehaow or other, though, he never would let him see one of the reg'lar things from right aout o' the water. In the end he give him a funny kind o' thingumajig made aout o' lead or something, that he said ud bring up the fish things from any place in the water whar they might be a nest of 'em. The idee was to drop it daown with the right kind o' prayers an' sech. Walakea allaowed as the things was scattered all over the world, so's anybody that looked abaout cud find a nest an' bring 'em up ef they was wanted.\n\n\"Matt he didn't like this business at all, an' wanted Obed shud keep away from the island; but the Cap'n was sharp fer gain, an' faound he cud git them gold-like things so cheap it ud pay him to make a specialty of 'em. Things went on that way fer years, an' Obed got enough o' that gold-like stuff to make him start the refinery in Waite's old run-daown fullin' mill. He didn't dass sell the pieces like they was, fer folks ud be all the time askin' questions. All the same his crews ud git a piece an' dispose of it naow and then, even though they was swore to keep quiet; an' he let his womenfolks wear some o' the pieces as was more human-like than most.\n\n\"Wal, come abaout 'thutty-eight\u2014when I was seven year' old\u2014Obed he faound the island people all wiped aout between v'yages. Seems the other islanders had got wind o' what was goin' on, an' had took matters into their own hands. S'pose they musta had, arter all, them old magic signs as the sea-things says was the only things they was afeard of. No tellin' what any o' them Kanakys will chance to git a holt of when the sea-bottom throws up some island with ruins older'n the deluge. Pious cusses, these was\u2014they didn't leave nothin' standin' on either the main island or the little volcanic islet excep' what parts of the ruins was too big to knock daown. In some places they was little stones strewed abaout\u2014like charms\u2014with somethin' on 'em like what ye call a swastika naowadays. Prob'ly them was the Old Ones' signs. Folks all wiped aout, no trace o' no gold-like things, an' none o' the nearby Kanakys ud breathe a word abaout the matter. Wouldn't even admit they'd ever ben any people on that island.\n\n\"That naturally hit Obed pretty hard, seein' as his normal trade was doin' very poor. It hit the whole of Innsmouth, too, because in seafarin' days what profited the master of a ship gen'lly profited the crew proportionate. Most o' the folks araound the taown took the hard times kind o' sheep-like an' resigned, but they was in bad shape because the fishin' was peterin' aout an' the mills wa'n't doin' none too well.\n\n\"Then's the time Obed he begun a-cursin' at the folks fer bein' dull sheep an' prayin' to a Christian heaven as didn't help 'em none. He told 'em he'd knowed of folks as prayed to gods that give somethin' ye reely need, an' says ef a good bunch o' men ud stand by him, he cud mebbe git a holt o' sarten paowers as ud bring plenty o' fish an' quite a bit o' gold. O' course them as sarved on the Sumatry Queen an' seed the island knowed what he meant, an' wa'n't none too anxious to git clost to sea-things like they'd heerd tell on, but them as didn't know what 'twas all abaout got kind o' swayed by what Obed had to say, an' begun to ast him what he cud do to set 'em on the way to the faith as ud bring 'em results.\"\n\nHere the old man faltered, mumbled, and lapsed into a moody and apprehensive silence; glancing nervously over his shoulder and then turning back to stare fascinatedly at the distant black reef. When I spoke to him he did not answer, so I knew I would have to let him finish the bottle. The insane yarn I was hearing interested me profoundly, for I fancied there was contained within it a sort of crude allegory based upon the strangenesses of Innsmouth and elaborated by an imagination at once creative and full of scraps of exotic legend. Not for a moment did I believe that the tale had any really substantial foundation; but none the less the account held a hint of genuine terror, if only because it brought in references to strange jewels clearly akin to the malign tiara I had seen at Newburyport. Perhaps the ornaments had, after all, come from some strange island; and possibly the wild stories were lies of the bygone Obed himself rather than of this antique toper.\n\nI handed Zadok the bottle, and he drained it to the last drop. It was curious how he could stand so much whiskey, for not even a trace of thickness had come into his high, wheezy voice. He licked the nose of the bottle and slipped it into his pocket, then beginning to nod and whisper softly to himself. I bent close to catch any articulate words he might utter, and thought I saw a sardonic smile behind the stained, bushy whiskers. Yes\u2014he was really forming words, and I could grasp a fair proportion of them.\n\n\"Poor Matt\u2014Matt he allus was agin' it\u2014tried to line up the folks on his side, an' had long talks with the preachers\u2014no use\u2014they run the Congregational parson aout o' taown, an' the Methodist feller quit\u2014never did see Resolved Babcock, the Baptist parson, agin\u2014Wrath o' Jehovy\u2014I was a mighty little critter, but I heerd what I heerd an' seen what I seen\u2014Dagon an' Ashtoreth\u2014Belial an' Be\u00eblzebub\u2014Golden Caff an' the idols o' Canaan an' the Philistines\u2014Babylonish abominations\u2014Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped again, and from the look in his watery blue eyes I feared he was close to a stupor after all. But when I gently shook his shoulder he turned on me with astonishing alertness and snapped out some more obscure phrases.\n\n\"Dun't believe me, hey? Heh, heh, heh\u2014then jest tell me, young feller, why Cap'n Obed an' twenty odd other folks used to row aout to Devil Reef in the dead o' night an' chant things so laoud ye cud hear 'em all over taown when the wind was right? Tell me that, hey? An' tell me why Obed was allus droppin' heavy things daown into the deep water t'other side o' the reef whar the bottom shoots daown like a cliff lower'n ye kin saound? Tell me what he done with that funny-shaped lead thingumajig as Walakea give him? Hey, boy? An' what did they all haowl on May-Eve, an' agin the next Hallowe'en? An' why'd the new church parsons\u2014fellers as used to be sailors\u2014wear them queer robes an' cover theirselves with them gold-like things Obed brung? Hey?\"\n\nThe watery blue eyes were almost savage and maniacal now, and the dirty white beard bristled electrically. Old Zadok probably saw me shrink back, for he had begun to cackle evilly.\n\n\"Heh, heh, heh, heh! Beginnin' to see, hey? Mebbe ye'd like to a ben me in them days, when I seed things at night aout to sea from the cupalo top o' my haouse. Oh, I kin tell ye, little pitchers hev big ears, an' I wa'n't missin' nothin' o' what was gossiped abaout Cap'n Obed an' the folks aout to the reef! Heh, heh, heh! Haow abaout the night I took my pa's ship's glass up to the cupalo an' seed the reef a-bristlin' thick with shapes that dove off quick soon's the moon riz? Obed an' the folks was in a dory, but them shapes dove off the far side into the deep water an' never come up.... Haow'd ye like to be a little shaver alone up in a cupalo a-watchin' shapes as wa'n't human shapes?... Hey?... Heh, heh, heh, heh....\"\n\nThe old man was getting hysterical, and I began to shiver with a nameless alarm. He laid a gnarled claw on my shoulder, and it seemed to me that its shaking was not altogether that of mirth.\n\n\"S'pose one night ye seed somethin' heavy heaved offen Obed's dory beyond the reef, an' then larned nex' day a young feller was missin' from home? Hey? Did anybody ever see hide or hair o' Hiram Gilman agin? Did they? An' Nick Pierce, an' Luelly Waite, an' Adoniram Saouthwick, an' Henry Garrison? Hey? Heh, heh, heh, heh.... Shapes talkin' sign language with their hands... them as had reel hands....\n\n\"Wal, Sir, that was the time Obed begun to git on his feet agin. Folks see his three darters a-wearin' gold-like things as nobody'd never see on 'em afore, an' smoke started comin' aout o' the refin'ry chimbly. Other folks were prosp'rin', too\u2014fish begun to swarm into the harbour fit to kill, an' heaven knows what sized cargoes we begun to ship aout to Newb'ryport, Arkham, an' Boston. 'Twas then Obed got the ol' branch railrud put through. Some Kingsport fishermen heerd abaout the ketch an' come up in sloops, but they was all lost. Nobody never see 'em agin. An' jest then our folks organised the Esoteric Order o' Dagon, an' bought Masonic Hall offen Calvary Commandery for it... heh, heh, heh! Matt Eliot was a Mason an' agin' the sellin', but he dropped aout o' sight jest then.\n\n\"Remember, I ain't sayin' Obed was set on hevin' things jest like they was on that Kanaky isle. I dun't think he aimed at fust to do no mixin', nor raise no younguns to take to the water an' turn into fishes with eternal life. He wanted them gold things, an' was willin' to pay heavy, an' I guess the others was satisfied fer a while....\n\n\"Come in 'forty-six the taown done some lookin' an' thinkin' fer itself. Too many folks missin'\u2014too much wild preachin' at meetin' of a Sunday\u2014too much talk abaout that reef. I guess I done a bit by tellin' Selectman Mowry what I see from the cupalo. They was a party one night as follered Obed's craowd aout to the reef, an' I heerd shots betwixt the dories. Nex' day Obed an' thutty-two others was in gaol, with everbody a-wonderin' jest what was afoot an' jest what charge agin' 'em cud be got to holt. God, ef anybody'd look'd ahead... a couple o' weeks later, when nothin' had ben throwed into the sea fer that long....\"\n\nZadok was shewing signs of fright and exhaustion, and I let him keep silence for a while, though glancing apprehensively at my watch. The tide had turned and was coming in now, and the sound of the waves seemed to arouse him. I was glad of that tide, for at high water the fishy smell might not be so bad. Again I strained to catch his whispers.\n\n\"That awful night... I seed 'em... I was up in the cupalo... hordes of 'em... swarms of 'em... all over the reef an' swimmin' up the harbour into the Manuxet.... God, what happened in the streets of Innsmouth that night... they rattled our door, but pa wouldn't open... then he clumb aout the kitchen winder with his musket to find Selectman Mowry an' see what he cud do.... Maounds o' the dead an' the dyin'... shots an' screams... shaoutin' in Ol' Squar an' Taown Squar an' New Church Green... gaol throwed open... proclamation... treason... called it the plague when folks come in an' faound haff our people missin'... nobody left but them as ud jine in with Obed an' them things or else keep quiet... never heerd o' my pa no more....\"\n\nThe old man was panting, and perspiring profusely. His grip on my shoulder tightened.\n\n\"Everything cleaned up in the mornin'\u2014but they was traces.... Obed he kinder takes charge an' says things is goin' to be changed... others'll worship with us at meetin'-time, an' sarten haouses hez got to entertain guests... they wanted to mix like they done with the Kanakys, an' he fer one didn't feel baound to stop 'em. Far gone, was Obed... jest like a crazy man on the subjeck. He says they brung us fish an' treasure, an' shud hev what they hankered arter....\n\n\"Nothin' was to be diff'runt on the aoutside, only we was to keep shy o' strangers ef we knowed what was good fer us. We all hed to take the Oath o' Dagon, an' later on they was secon' an' third Oaths that some on us took. Them as ud help special, ud git special rewards\u2014gold an' sech\u2014 No use balkin', fer they was millions of 'em daown thar. They'd ruther not start risin' an' wipin' aout humankind, but ef they was gave away an' forced to, they cud do a lot toward jest that. We didn't hev them old charms to cut 'em off like folks in the Saouth Sea did, an' them Kanakys wudn't never give away their secrets.\n\n\"Yield up enough sacrifices an' savage knick-knacks an' harbourage in the taown when they wanted it, an' they'd let well enough alone. Wudn't bother no strangers as might bear tales aoutside\u2014that is, withaout they got pryin'. All in the band of the faithful\u2014Order o' Dagon\u2014an' the children shud never die, but go back to the Mother Hydra an' Father Dagon what we all come from onct\u2014I\u00e4! I\u00e4! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn\u2014\"\n\nOld Zadok was fast lapsing into stark raving, and I held my breath. Poor old soul\u2014to what pitiful depths of hallucination had his liquor, plus his hatred of the decay, alienage, and disease around him, brought that fertile, imaginative brain! He began to moan now, and tears were coursing down his channelled cheeks into the depths of his beard.\n\n\"God, what I seen senct I was fifteen year' old\u2014Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!\u2014the folks as was missin', an' them as kilt theirselves\u2014them as told things in Arkham or Ipswich or sech places was all called crazy, like you're a-callin' me right naow\u2014but God, what I seen\u2014 They'd a kilt me long ago fer what I know, only I'd took the fust an' secon' Oaths o' Dagon offen Obed, so was pertected unlessen a jury of 'em proved I told things knowin' an' delib'rit... but I wudn't take the third Oath\u2014I'd a died ruther'n take that\u2014\n\n\"It got wuss araound Civil War time, when children born senct 'forty-six begun to grow up\u2014some of 'em, that is. I was afeard\u2014never did no pryin' arter that awful night, an' never see one of\u2014them\u2014clost to in all my life. That is, never no full-blooded one. I went to the war, an' ef I'd a had any guts or sense I'd a never come back, but settled away from here. But folks wrote me things wa'n't so bad. That, I s'pose, was because gov'munt draft men was in taown arter 'sixty-three. Arter the war it was jest as bad agin. People begun to fall off\u2014mills an' shops shet daown\u2014shippin' stopped an' the harbour choked up\u2014railrud give up\u2014but they... they never stopped swimmin' in an' aout o' the river from that cursed reef o' Satan\u2014an' more an' more attic winders got aboarded up, an' more an' more noises was heerd in haouses as wa'n't s'posed to hev nobody in 'em....\n\n\"Folks aoutside hev their stories abaout us\u2014s'pose you've heerd a plenty on 'em, seein' what questions ye ast\u2014stories abaout things they've seed naow an' then, an' abaout that queer joolry as still comes in from somewhars an' ain't quite all melted up\u2014but nothin' never gits def'nite. Nobody'll believe nothin'. They call them gold-like things pirate loot, an' allaow the Innsmouth folks hez furren blood or is distempered or somethin'. Besides, them that lives here shoo off as many strangers as they kin, an' encourage the rest not to git very cur'ous, specially raound night time. Beasts balk at the critters\u2014hosses wuss'n mules\u2014but when they got autos that was all right.\n\n\"In 'forty-six Cap'n Obed took a second wife that nobody in the taown never see\u2014some says he didn't want to, but was made to by them as he'd called in\u2014had three children by her\u2014two as disappeared young, but one gal as looked like anybody else an' was eddicated in Europe. Obed finally got her married off by a trick to an Arkham feller as didn't suspect nothin'. But nobody aoutside'll hev nothin' to do with Innsmouth folks naow. Barnabas Marsh that runs the refin'ry naow is Obed's grandson by his fust wife\u2014son of Onesiphorus, his eldest son, but his mother was another o' them as wa'n't never seed aoutdoors.\n\n\"Right naow Barnabas is abaout changed. Can't shet his eyes no more, an' is all aout o' shape. They say he still wears clothes, but he'll take to the water soon. Mebbe he's tried it already\u2014they do sometimes go daown fer little spells afore they go fer good. Ain't ben seed abaout in public fer nigh on ten year'. Dun't know haow his poor wife kin feel\u2014she come from Ipswich, an' they nigh lynched Barnabas when he courted her fifty odd year' ago. Obed he died in 'seventy-eight, an' all the next gen'ration is gone naow\u2014the fust wife's children dead, an' the rest... God knows....\"\n\nThe sound of the incoming tide was now very insistent, and little by little it seemed to change the old man's mood from maudlin tearfulness to watchful fear. He would pause now and then to renew those nervous glances over his shoulder or out toward the reef, and despite the wild absurdity of his tale, I could not help beginning to share his vague apprehensiveness. Zadok now grew shriller, and seemed to be trying to whip up his courage with louder speech.\n\n\"Hey, yew, why dun't ye say somethin'? Haow'd ye like to be livin' in a taown like this, with everything a-rottin' an' a-dyin', an' boarded-up monsters crawlin' an' bleatin' an' barkin' an' hoppin' araoun' black cellars an' attics every way ye turn? Hey? Haow'd ye like to hear the haowlin' night arter night from the churches an' Order o' Dagon Hall, an' know what's doin' part o' the haowlin'? Haow'd ye like to hear what comes from that awful reef every May-Eve an' Hallowmass? Hey? Think the old man's crazy, eh? Wal, Sir, let me tell ye that ain't the wust!\"\n\nZadok was really screaming now, and the mad frenzy of his voice disturbed me more than I care to own.\n\n\"Curse ye, dun't set thar a-starin' at me with them eyes\u2014I tell Obed Marsh he's in hell, an' hez got to stay thar! Heh, heh... in hell, I says! Can't git me\u2014I hain't done nothin' nor told nobody nothin'\u2014\n\n\"Oh, you, young feller? Wal, even ef I hain't told nobody nothin' yet, I'm a-goin' to naow! You jest set still an' listen to me, boy\u2014this is what I ain't never told nobody.... I says I didn't do no pryin' arter that night\u2014but I faound things aout jest the same!\n\n\"Yew want to know what the reel horror is, hey? Wal, it's this\u2014it ain't what them fish devils hez done, but what they're a-goin' to do! They're a-bringin' things up aout o' whar they come from into the taown\u2014ben doin' it fer years, an' slackenin' up lately. Them haouses north o' the river betwixt Water an' Main Streets is full of 'em\u2014them devils an' what they brung\u2014an' when they git ready.... I say, when they git ready... ever hear tell of a shoggoth?...\n\n\"Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be\u2014I seen 'em one night when... EH\u2014AHHHH\u2014AH! E'YAAHHHH....\"\n\nThe hideous suddenness and inhuman frightfulness of the old man's shriek almost made me faint. His eyes, looking past me toward the malodorous sea, were positively starting from his head; while his face was a mask of fear worthy of Greek tragedy. His bony claw dug monstrously into my shoulder, and he made no motion as I turned my head to look at whatever he had glimpsed.\n\nThere was nothing that I could see. Only the incoming tide, with perhaps one set of ripples more local than the long-flung line of breakers. But now Zadok was shaking me, and I turned back to watch the melting of that fear-frozen face into a chaos of twitching eyelids and mumbling gums. Presently his voice came back\u2014albeit as a trembling whisper.\n\n\"Git aout o' here! Git aout o' here! They seen us\u2014git aout fer your life! Dun't wait fer nothin'\u2014they know naow\u2014 Run fer it\u2014quick\u2014aout o' this taown\u2014\"\n\nAnother heavy wave dashed against the loosening masonry of the bygone wharf, and changed the mad ancient's whisper to another inhuman and blood-curdling scream.\n\n\"E\u2014YAAHHHH!... YHAAAAAAA!...\"\n\nBefore I could recover my scattered wits he had relaxed his clutch on my shoulder and dashed wildly inland toward the street, reeling northward around the ruined warehouse wall.\n\nI glanced back at the sea, but there was nothing there. And when I reached Water Street and looked along it toward the north there was no remaining trace of Zadok Allen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "I can hardly describe the mood in which I was left by this harrowing episode\u2014an episode at once mad and pitiful, grotesque and terrifying. The grocery boy had prepared me for it, yet the reality left me none the less bewildered and disturbed. Puerile though the story was, old Zadok's insane earnestness and horror had communicated to me a mounting unrest which joined with my earlier sense of loathing for the town and its blight of intangible shadow.\n\nLater I might sift the tale and extract some nucleus of historic allegory; just now I wished to put it out of my head. The hour had grown perilously late\u2014my watch said 7:15, and the Arkham bus left Town Square at eight\u2014so I tried to give my thoughts as neutral and practical a cast as possible, meanwhile walking rapidly through the deserted streets of gaping roofs and leaning houses toward the hotel where I had checked my valise and would find my bus.\n\nThough the golden light of late afternoon gave the ancient roofs and decrepit chimneys an air of mystic loveliness and peace, I could not help glancing over my shoulder now and then. I would surely be very glad to get out of malodorous and fear-shadowed Innsmouth, and wished there were some other vehicle than the bus driven by that sinister-looking fellow Sargent. Yet I did not hurry too precipitately, for there were architectural details worth viewing at every silent corner; and I could easily, I calculated, cover the necessary distance in a half-hour.\n\nStudying the grocery youth's map and seeking a route I had not traversed before, I chose Marsh Street instead of State for my approach to Town Square. Near the corner of Fall Street I began to see scattered groups of furtive whisperers, and when I finally reached the Square I saw that almost all the loiterers were congregated around the door of the Gilman House. It seemed as if many bulging, watery, unwinking eyes looked oddly at me as I claimed my valise in the lobby, and I hoped that none of these unpleasant creatures would be my fellow-passengers on the coach.\n\nThe bus, rather early, rattled in with three passengers somewhat before eight, and an evil-looking fellow on the sidewalk muttered a few indistinguishable words to the driver. Sargent threw out a mail-bag and a roll of newspapers, and entered the hotel; while the passengers\u2014the same men whom I had seen arriving in Newburyport that morning\u2014shambled to the sidewalk and exchanged some faint guttural words with a loafer in a language I could have sworn was not English. I boarded the empty coach and took the same seat I had taken before, but was hardly settled before Sargent reappeared and began mumbling in a throaty voice of peculiar repulsiveness.\n\nI was, it appeared, in very bad luck. There had been something wrong with the engine, despite the excellent time made from Newburyport, and the bus could not complete the journey to Arkham. No, it could not possibly be repaired that night, nor was there any other way of getting transportation out of Innsmouth, either to Arkham or elsewhere. Sargent was sorry, but I would have to stop over at the Gilman. Probably the clerk would make the price easy for me, but there was nothing else to do. Almost dazed by this sudden obstacle, and violently dreading the fall of night in this decaying and half-unlighted town, I left the bus and re\u00ebntered the hotel lobby; where the sullen, queer-looking night clerk told me I could have Room 428 on next the top floor\u2014large, but without running water\u2014for a dollar.\n\nDespite what I had heard of this hotel in Newburyport, I signed the register, paid my dollar, let the clerk take my valise, and followed that sour, solitary attendant up three creaking flights of stairs past dusty corridors which seemed wholly devoid of life. My room, a dismal rear one with two windows and bare, cheap furnishings, overlooked a dingy courtyard otherwise hemmed in by low, deserted brick blocks, and commanded a view of decrepit westward-stretching roofs with a marshy countryside beyond. At the end of the corridor was a bathroom\u2014a discouraging relique with ancient marble bowl, tin tub, faint electric light, and musty wooden panelling around all the plumbing fixtures.\n\nIt being still daylight, I descended to the Square and looked around for a dinner of some sort; noticing as I did so the strange glances I received from the unwholesome loafers. Since the grocery was closed, I was forced to patronise the restaurant I had shunned before; a stooped, narrow-headed man with staring, unwinking eyes, and a flat-nosed wench with unbelievably thick, clumsy hands being in attendance. The service was of the counter type, and it relieved me to find that much was evidently served from cans and packages. A bowl of vegetable soup with crackers was enough for me, and I soon headed back for my cheerless room at the Gilman; getting an evening paper and a flyspecked magazine from the evil-visaged clerk at the rickety stand beside his desk.\n\nAs twilight deepened I turned on the one feeble electric bulb over the cheap, iron-framed bed, and tried as best I could to continue the reading I had begun. I felt it advisable to keep my mind wholesomely occupied, for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. The insane yarn I had heard from the aged drunkard did not promise very pleasant dreams, and I felt I must keep the image of his wild, watery eyes as far as possible from my imagination.\n\nAlso, I must not dwell on what that factory inspector had told the Newburyport ticket-agent about the Gilman House and the voices of its nocturnal tenants\u2014not on that, nor on the face beneath the tiara in the black church doorway; the face for whose horror my conscious mind could not account. It would perhaps have been easier to keep my thoughts from disturbing topics had the room not been so gruesomely musty. As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town's general fishy odour and persistently focussed one's fancy on death and decay.\n\nAnother thing that disturbed me was the absence of a bolt on the door of my room. One had been there, as marks clearly shewed, but there were signs of recent removal. No doubt it had become out of order, like so many other things in this decrepit edifice. In my nervousness I looked around and discovered a bolt on the clothes-press which seemed to be of the same size, judging from the marks, as the one formerly on the door. To gain a partial relief from the general tension I busied myself by transferring this hardware to the vacant place with the aid of a handy three-in-one device including a screw-driver which I kept on my key-ring. The bolt fitted perfectly, and I was somewhat relieved when I knew that I could shoot it firmly upon retiring. Not that I had any real apprehension of its need, but that any symbol of security was welcome in an environment of this kind. There were adequate bolts on the two lateral doors to connecting rooms, and these I proceeded to fasten.\n\nI did not undress, but decided to read till I was sleepy and then lie down with only my coat, collar, and shoes off. Taking a pocket flashlight from my valise, I placed it in my trousers, so that I could read my watch if I woke up later in the dark. Drowsiness, however, did not come; and when I stopped to analyse my thoughts I found to my disquiet that I was really unconsciously listening for something\u2014listening for something which I dreaded but could not name. That inspector's story must have worked on my imagination more deeply than I had suspected. Again I tried to read, but found that I made no progress.\n\nAfter a time I seemed to hear the stairs and corridors creak at intervals as if with footsteps, and wondered if the other rooms were beginning to fill up. There were no voices, however, and it struck me that there was something subtly furtive about the creaking. I did not like it, and debated whether I had better try to sleep at all. This town had some queer people, and there had undoubtedly been several disappearances. Was this one of those inns where travellers were slain for their money? Surely I had no look of excessive prosperity. Or were the townsfolk really so resentful about curious visitors? Had my obvious sightseeing, with its frequent map-consultations, aroused unfavourable notice? It occurred to me that I must be in a highly nervous state to let a few random creakings set me off speculating in this fashion\u2014but I regretted none the less that I was unarmed.\n\nAt length, feeling a fatigue which had nothing of drowsiness in it, I bolted the newly outfitted hall door, turned off the light, and threw myself down on the hard, uneven bed\u2014coat, collar, shoes, and all. In the darkness every faint noise of the night seemed magnified, and a flood of doubly unpleasant thoughts swept over me. I was sorry I had put out the light, yet was too tired to rise and turn it on again. Then, after a long, dreary interval, and prefaced by a fresh creaking of stairs and corridor, there came that soft, damnably unmistakable sound which seemed like a malign fulfilment of all my apprehensions. Without the least shadow of a doubt, the lock on my hall door was being tried\u2014cautiously, furtively, tentatively\u2014with a key.\n\nMy sensations upon recognising this sign of actual peril were perhaps less rather than more tumultuous because of my previous vague fears. I had been, albeit without definite reason, instinctively on my guard\u2014and that was to my advantage in the new and real crisis, whatever it might turn out to be. Nevertheless the change in the menace from vague premonition to immediate reality was a profound shock, and fell upon me with the force of a genuine blow. It never once occurred to me that the fumbling might be a mere mistake. Malign purpose was all I could think of, and I kept deathly quiet, awaiting the would-be intruder's next move.\n\nAfter a time the cautious rattling ceased, and I heard the room to the north entered with a pass-key. Then the lock of the connecting door to my room was softly tried. The bolt held, of course, and I heard the floor creak as the prowler left the room. After a moment there came another soft rattling, and I knew that the room to the south of me was being entered. Again a furtive trying of a bolted connecting door, and again a receding creaking. This time the creaking went along the hall and down the stairs, so I knew that the prowler had realised the bolted condition of my doors and was giving up his attempt for a greater or lesser time, as the future would shew.\n\nThe readiness with which I fell into a plan of action proves that I must have been subconsciously fearing some menace and considering possible avenues of escape for hours. From the first I felt that the unseen fumbler meant a danger not to be met or dealt with, but only to be fled from as precipitately as possible. The one thing to do was to get out of that hotel alive as quickly as I could, and through some channel other than the front stairs and lobby.\n\nRising softly and throwing my flashlight on the switch, I sought to light the bulb over my bed in order to choose and pocket some belongings for a swift, valiseless flight. Nothing, however, happened; and I saw that the power had been cut off. Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale\u2014just what, I could not say. As I stood pondering with my hand on the now useless switch I heard a muffled creaking on the floor below, and thought I could barely distinguish voices in conversation. A moment later I felt less sure that the deeper sounds were voices, since the apparent hoarse barkings and loose-syllabled croakings bore so little resemblance to recognised human speech. Then I thought with renewed force of what the factory inspector had heard in the night in this mouldering and pestilential building.\n\nHaving filled my pockets with the flashlight's aid, I put on my hat and tiptoed to the windows to consider chances of descent. Despite the state's safety regulations there was no fire escape on this side of the hotel, and I saw that my windows commanded only a sheer three-story drop to the cobbled courtyard. On the right and left, however, some ancient brick business blocks abutted on the hotel; their slant roofs coming up to a reasonable jumping distance from my fourth-story level. To reach either of these lines of buildings I would have to be in a room two doors from my own\u2014in one case on the north and in the other case on the south\u2014and my mind instantly set to work calculating what chances I had of making the transfer.\n\nI could not, I decided, risk an emergence into the corridor; where my footsteps would surely be heard, and where the difficulties of entering the desired room would be insuperable. My progress, if it was to be made at all, would have to be through the less solidly built connecting doors of the rooms; the locks and bolts of which I would have to force violently, using my shoulder as a battering-ram whenever they were set against me. This, I thought, would be possible owing to the rickety nature of the house and its fixtures; but I realised I could not do it noiselessly. I would have to count on sheer speed, and the chance of getting to a window before any hostile forces became co\u00f6rdinated enough to open the right door toward me with a pass-key. My own outer door I reinforced by pushing the bureau against it\u2014little by little, in order to make a minimum of sound.\n\nI perceived that my chances were very slender, and was fully prepared for any calamity. Even getting to another roof would not solve the problem, for there would then remain the task of reaching the ground and escaping from the town. One thing in my favour was the deserted and ruinous state of the abutting buildings, and the number of skylights gaping blackly open in each row.\n\nGathering from the grocery boy's map that the best route out of town was southward, I glanced first at the connecting door on the south side of the room. It was designed to open in my direction, hence I saw\u2014after drawing the bolt and finding other fastenings in place\u2014it was not a favourable one for forcing. Accordingly abandoning it as a route, I cautiously moved the bedstead against it to hamper any attack which might be made on it later from the next room. The door on the north was hung to open away from me, and this\u2014though a test proved it to be locked or bolted from the other side\u2014I knew must be my route. If I could gain the roofs of the buildings in Paine Street and descend successfully to the ground level, I might perhaps dart through the courtyard and the adjacent or opposite buildings to Washington or Bates\u2014or else emerge in Paine and edge around southward into Washington. In any case, I would aim to strike Washington somehow and get quickly out of the Town Square region. My preference would be to avoid Paine, since the fire station there might be open all night.\n\nAs I thought of these things I looked out over the squalid sea of decaying roofs below me, now brightened by the beams of a moon not much past full. On the right the black gash of the river-gorge clove the panorama; abandoned factories and railway station clinging barnacle-like to its sides. Beyond it the rusted railway and the Rowley road led off through a flat, marshy terrain dotted with islets of higher and dryer scrub-grown land. On the left the creek-threaded countryside was nearer, the narrow road to Ipswich gleaming white in the moonlight. I could not see from my side of the hotel the southward route toward Arkham which I had determined to take.\n\nI was irresolutely speculating on when I had better attack the northward door, and on how I could least audibly manage it, when I noticed that the vague noises underfoot had given place to a fresh and heavier creaking of the stairs. A wavering flicker of light shewed through my transom, and the boards of the corridor began to groan with a ponderous load. Muffled sounds of possible vocal origin approached, and at length a firm knock came at my outer door.\n\nFor a moment I simply held my breath and waited. Eternities seemed to elapse, and the nauseous fishy odour of my environment seemed to mount suddenly and spectacularly. Then the knocking was repeated\u2014continuously, and with growing insistence. I knew that the time for action had come, and forthwith drew the bolt of the northward connecting door, bracing myself for the task of battering it open. The knocking waxed louder, and I hoped that its volume would cover the sound of my efforts. At last beginning my attempt, I lunged again and again at the thin panelling with my left shoulder, heedless of shock or pain. The door resisted even more than I had expected, but I did not give in. And all the while the clamour at the outer door increased.\n\nFinally the connecting door gave, but with such a crash that I knew those outside must have heard. Instantly the outside knocking became a violent battering, while keys sounded ominously in the hall doors of the rooms on both sides of me. Rushing through the newly opened connexion, I succeeded in bolting the northerly hall door before the lock could be turned; but even as I did so I heard the hall door of the third room\u2014the one from whose window I had hoped to reach the roof below\u2014being tried with a pass-key.\n\nFor an instant I felt absolute despair, since my trapping in a chamber with no window egress seemed complete. A wave of almost abnormal horror swept over me, and invested with a terrible but unexplainable singularity the flashlight-glimpsed dust prints made by the intruder who had lately tried my door from this room. Then, with a dazed automatism which persisted despite hopelessness, I made for the next connecting door and performed the blind motion of pushing at it in an effort to get through and\u2014granting that fastenings might be as providentially intact as in this second room\u2014bolt the hall door beyond before the lock could be turned from outside.\n\nSheer fortunate chance gave me my reprieve\u2014for the connecting door before me was not only unlocked but actually ajar. In a second I was through, and had my right knee and shoulder against a hall door which was visibly opening inward. My pressure took the opener off guard, for the thing shut as I pushed, so that I could slip the well-conditioned bolt as I had done with the other door. As I gained this respite I heard the battering at the two other doors abate, while a confused clatter came from the connecting door I had shielded with the bedstead. Evidently the bulk of my assailants had entered the southerly room and were massing in a lateral attack. But at the same moment a pass-key sounded in the next door to the north, and I knew that a nearer peril was at hand.\n\nThe northward connecting door was wide open, but there was no time to think about checking the already turning lock in the hall. All I could do was to shut and bolt the open connecting door, as well as its mate on the opposite side\u2014pushing a bedstead against the one and a bureau against the other, and moving a washstand in front of the hall door. I must, I saw, trust to such makeshift barriers to shield me till I could get out the window and on the roof of the Paine Street block. But even in this acute moment my chief horror was something apart from the immediate weakness of my defences. I was shuddering because not one of my pursuers, despite some hideous pantings, gruntings, and subdued barkings at odd intervals, was uttering an unmuffled or intelligible vocal sound.\n\nAs I moved the furniture and rushed toward the windows I heard a frightful scurrying along the corridor toward the room north of me, and perceived that the southward battering had ceased. Plainly, most of my opponents were about to concentrate against the feeble connecting door which they knew must open directly on me. Outside, the moon played on the ridgepole of the block below, and I saw that the jump would be desperately hazardous because of the steep surface on which I must land.\n\nSurveying the conditions, I chose the more southerly of the two windows as my avenue of escape; planning to land on the inner slope of the roof and make for the nearest skylight. Once inside one of the decrepit brick structures I would have to reckon with pursuit; but I hoped to descend and dodge in and out of yawning doorways along the shadowed courtyard, eventually getting to Washington Street and slipping out of town toward the south.\n\nThe clatter at the northerly connecting door was now terrific, and I saw that the weak panelling was beginning to splinter. Obviously, the besiegers had brought some ponderous object into play as a battering-ram. The bedstead, however, still held firm; so that I had at least a faint chance of making good my escape. As I opened the window I noticed that it was flanked by heavy velour draperies suspended from a pole by brass rings, and also that there was a large projecting catch for the shutters on the exterior. Seeing a possible means of avoiding the dangerous jump, I yanked at the hangings and brought them down, pole and all; then quickly hooking two of the rings in the shutter catch and flinging the drapery outside. The heavy folds reached fully to the abutting roof, and I saw that the rings and catch would be likely to bear my weight. So, climbing out of the window and down the improvised rope ladder, I left behind me forever the morbid and horror-infested fabric of the Gilman House.\n\nI landed safely on the loose slates of the steep roof, and succeeded in gaining the gaping black skylight without a slip. Glancing up at the window I had left, I observed it was still dark, though far across the crumbling chimneys to the north I could see lights ominously blazing in the Order of Dagon Hall, the Baptist church, and the Congregational church which I recalled so shiveringly. There had seemed to be no one in the courtyard below, and I hoped there would be a chance to get away before the spreading of a general alarm. Flashing my pocket lamp into the skylight, I saw that there were no steps down. The distance was slight, however, so I clambered over the brink and dropped; striking a dusty floor littered with crumbling boxes and barrels.\n\nThe place was ghoulish-looking, but I was past minding such impressions and made at once for the staircase revealed by my flashlight\u2014after a hasty glance at my watch, which shewed the hour to be 2 a.m. The steps creaked, but seemed tolerably sound; and I raced down past a barn-like second story to the ground floor. The desolation was complete, and only echoes answered my footfalls. At length I reached the lower hall, at one end of which I saw a faint luminous rectangle marking the ruined Paine Street doorway. Heading the other way, I found the back door also open; and darted out and down five stone steps to the grass-grown cobblestones of the courtyard.\n\nThe moonbeams did not reach down here, but I could just see my way about without using the flashlight. Some of the windows on the Gilman House side were faintly glowing, and I thought I heard confused sounds within. Walking softly over to the Washington Street side I perceived several open doorways, and chose the nearest as my route out. The hallway inside was black, and when I reached the opposite end I saw that the street door was wedged immovably shut. Resolved to try another building, I groped my way back toward the courtyard, but stopped short when close to the doorway.\n\nFor out of an opened door in the Gilman House a large crowd of doubtful shapes was pouring\u2014lanterns bobbing in the darkness, and horrible croaking voices exchanging low cries in what was certainly not English. The figures moved uncertainly, and I realised to my relief that they did not know where I had gone; but for all that they sent a shiver of horror through my frame. Their features were indistinguishable, but their crouching, shambling gait was abominably repellent. And worst of all, I perceived that one figure was strangely robed, and unmistakably surmounted by a tall tiara of a design altogether too familiar. As the figures spread throughout the courtyard, I felt my fears increase. Suppose I could find no egress from this building on the street side? The fishy odour was detestable, and I wondered I could stand it without fainting. Again groping toward the street, I opened a door off the hall and came upon an empty room with closely shuttered but sashless windows. Fumbling in the rays of my flashlight, I found I could open the shutters; and in another moment had climbed outside and was carefully closing the aperture in its original manner.\n\nI was now in Washington Street, and for the moment saw no living thing nor any light save that of the moon. From several directions in the distance, however, I could hear the sound of hoarse voices, of footsteps, and of a curious kind of pattering which did not sound quite like footsteps. Plainly I had no time to lose. The points of the compass were clear to me, and I was glad that all the street-lights were turned off, as is often the custom on strongly moonlit nights in unprosperous rural regions. Some of the sounds came from the south, yet I retained my design of escaping in that direction. There would, I knew, be plenty of deserted doorways to shelter me in case I met any person or group who looked like pursuers.\n\nI walked rapidly, softly, and close to the ruined houses. While hatless and dishevelled after my arduous climb, I did not look especially noticeable; and stood a good chance of passing unheeded if forced to encounter any casual wayfarer. At Bates Street I drew into a yawning vestibule while two shambling figures crossed in front of me, but was soon on my way again and approaching the open space where Eliot Street obliquely crosses Washington at the intersection of South. Though I had never seen this space, it had looked dangerous to me on the grocery youth's map; since the moonlight would have free play there. There was no use trying to evade it, for any alternative course would involve detours of possibly disastrous visibility and delaying effect. The only thing to do was to cross it boldly and openly; imitating the typical shamble of the Innsmouth folk as best I could, and trusting that no one\u2014or at least no pursuer of mine\u2014would be there.\n\nJust how fully the pursuit was organised\u2014and indeed, just what its purpose might be\u2014I could form no idea. There seemed to be unusual activity in the town, but I judged that the news of my escape from the Gilman had not yet spread. I would, of course, soon have to shift from Washington to some other southward street; for that party from the hotel would doubtless be after me. I must have left dust prints in that last old building, revealing how I had gained the street.\n\nThe open space was, as I had expected, strongly moonlit; and I saw the remains of a park-like, iron-railed green in its centre. Fortunately no one was about, though a curious sort of buzz or roar seemed to be increasing in the direction of Town Square. South Street was very wide, leading directly down a slight declivity to the waterfront and commanding a long view out at sea; and I hoped that no one would be glancing up it from afar as I crossed in the bright moonlight.\n\nMy progress was unimpeded, and no fresh sound arose to hint that I had been spied. Glancing about me, I involuntarily let my pace slacken for a second to take in the sight of the sea, gorgeous in the burning moonlight at the street's end. Far out beyond the breakwater was the dim, dark line of Devil Reef, and as I glimpsed it I could not help thinking of all the hideous legends I had heard in the last thirty-four hours\u2014legends which portrayed this ragged rock as a veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality.\n\nThen, without warning, I saw the intermittent flashes of light on the distant reef. They were definite and unmistakable, and awaked in my mind a blind horror beyond all rational proportion. My muscles tightened for panic flight, held in only by a certain unconscious caution and half-hypnotic fascination. And to make matters worse, there now flashed forth from the lofty cupola of the Gilman House, which loomed up to the northeast behind me, a series of analogous though differently spaced gleams which could be nothing less than an answering signal.\n\nControlling my muscles, and realising afresh how plainly visible I was, I resumed my brisker and feignedly shambling pace; though keeping my eyes on that hellish and ominous reef as long as the opening of South Street gave me a seaward view. What the whole proceeding meant, I could not imagine; unless it involved some strange rite connected with Devil Reef, or unless some party had landed from a ship on that sinister rock. I now bent to the left around the ruinous green; still gazing toward the ocean as it blazed in the spectral summer moonlight, and watching the cryptical flashing of those nameless, unexplainable beacons.\n\nIt was then that the most horrible impression of all was borne in upon me\u2014the impression which destroyed my last vestige of self-control and set me running frantically southward past the yawning black doorways and fishily staring windows of that deserted nightmare street. For at a closer glance I saw that the moonlit waters between the reef and the shore were far from empty. They were alive with a teeming horde of shapes swimming inward toward the town; and even at my vast distance and in my single moment of perception I could tell that the bobbing heads and flailing arms were alien and aberrant in a way scarcely to be expressed or consciously formulated.\n\nMy frantic running ceased before I had covered a block, for at my left I began to hear something like the hue and cry of organised pursuit. There were footsteps and guttural sounds, and a rattling motor wheezed south along Federal Street. In a second all my plans were utterly changed\u2014for if the southward highway were blocked ahead of me, I must clearly find another egress from Innsmouth. I paused and drew into a gaping doorway, reflecting how lucky I was to have left the moonlit open space before these pursuers came down the parallel street.\n\nA second reflection was less comforting. Since the pursuit was down another street, it was plain that the party was not following me directly. It had not seen me, but was simply obeying a general plan of cutting off my escape. This, however, implied that all roads leading out of Innsmouth were similarly patrolled; for the denizens could not have known what route I intended to take. If this were so, I would have to make my retreat across country away from any road; but how could I do that in view of the marshy and creek-riddled nature of all the surrounding region? For a moment my brain reeled\u2014both from sheer hopelessness and from a rapid increase in the omnipresent fishy odour.\n\nThen I thought of the abandoned railway to Rowley, whose solid line of ballasted, weed-grown earth still stretched off to the northwest from the crumbling station on the edge of the river-gorge. There was just a chance that the townsfolk would not think of that; since its brier-choked desertion made it half-impassable, and the unlikeliest of all avenues for a fugitive to choose. I had seen it clearly from my hotel window, and knew about how it lay. Most of its earlier length was uncomfortably visible from the Rowley road, and from high places in the town itself; but one could perhaps crawl inconspicuously through the undergrowth. At any rate, it would form my only chance of deliverance, and there was nothing to do but try it.\n\nDrawing inside the hall of my deserted shelter, I once more consulted the grocery boy's map with the aid of the flashlight. The immediate problem was how to reach the ancient railway; and I now saw that the safest course was ahead to Babson Street, then west to Lafayette\u2014there edging around but not crossing an open space homologous to the one I had traversed\u2014and subsequently back northward and westward in a zigzagging line through Lafayette, Bates, Adams, and Bank Streets\u2014the latter skirting the river-gorge\u2014to the abandoned and dilapidated station I had seen from my window. My reason for going ahead to Babson was that I wished neither to recross the earlier open space nor to begin my westward course along a cross street as broad as South.\n\nStarting once more, I crossed the street to the right-hand side in order to edge around into Babson as inconspicuously as possible. Noises still continued in Federal Street, and as I glanced behind me I thought I saw a gleam of light near the building through which I had escaped. Anxious to leave Washington Street, I broke into a quiet dogtrot, trusting to luck not to encounter any observing eye. Next the corner of Babson Street I saw to my alarm that one of the houses was still inhabited, as attested by curtains at the window; but there were no lights within, and I passed it without disaster.\n\nIn Babson Street, which crossed Federal and might thus reveal me to the searchers, I clung as closely as possible to the sagging, uneven buildings; twice pausing in a doorway as the noises behind me momentarily increased. The open space ahead shone wide and desolate under the moon, but my route would not force me to cross it. During my second pause I began to detect a fresh distribution of the vague sounds; and upon looking cautiously out from cover beheld a motor-car darting across the open space, bound outward along Eliot Street, which there intersects both Babson and Lafayette.\n\nAs I watched\u2014choked by a sudden rise in the fishy odour after a short abatement\u2014I saw a band of uncouth, crouching shapes loping and shambling in the same direction; and knew that this must be the party guarding the Ipswich road, since that highway forms an extension of Eliot Street. Two of the figures I glimpsed were in voluminous robes, and one wore a peaked diadem which glistened whitely in the moonlight. The gait of this figure was so odd that it sent a chill through me\u2014for it seemed to me the creature was almost hopping.\n\nWhen the last of the band was out of sight I resumed my progress; darting around the corner into Lafayette Street, and crossing Eliot very hurriedly lest stragglers of the party be still advancing along that thoroughfare. I did hear some croaking and clattering sounds far off toward Town Square, but accomplished the passage without disaster. My greatest dread was in recrossing broad and moonlit South Street\u2014with its seaward view\u2014and I had to nerve myself for the ordeal. Someone might easily be looking, and possible Eliot Street stragglers could not fail to glimpse me from either of two points. At the last moment I decided I had better slacken my trot and make the crossing as before in the shambling gait of an average Innsmouth native.\n\nWhen the view of the water again opened out\u2014this time on my right\u2014I was half-determined not to look at it at all. I could not, however, resist; but cast a sidelong glance as I carefully and imitatively shambled toward the protecting shadows ahead. There was no ship visible, as I had half expected there would be. Instead, the first thing which caught my eye was a small rowboat pulling in toward the abandoned wharves and laden with some bulky, tarpaulin-covered object. Its rowers, though distantly and indistinctly seen, were of an especially repellent aspect. Several swimmers were still discernible; while on the far black reef I could see a faint, steady glow unlike the winking beacon visible before, and of a curious colour which I could not precisely identify. Above the slant roofs ahead and to the right there loomed the tall cupola of the Gilman House, but it was completely dark. The fishy odour, dispelled for a moment by some merciful breeze, now closed in again with maddening intensity.\n\nI had not quite crossed the street when I heard a muttering band advancing along Washington from the north. As they reached the broad open space where I had had my first disquieting glimpse of the moonlit water I could see them plainly only a block away\u2014and was horrified by the bestial abnormality of their faces and the dog-like sub-humanness of their crouching gait. One man moved in a positively simian way, with long arms frequently touching the ground; while another figure\u2014robed and tiaraed\u2014seemed to progress in an almost hopping fashion. I judged this party to be the one I had seen in the Gilman's courtyard\u2014the one, therefore, most closely on my trail. As some of the figures turned to look in my direction I was transfixed with fright, yet managed to preserve the casual, shambling gait I had assumed. To this day I do not know whether they saw me or not. If they did, my stratagem must have deceived them, for they passed on across the moonlit space without varying their course\u2014meanwhile croaking and jabbering in some hateful guttural patois I could not identify.\n\nOnce more in shadow, I resumed my former dogtrot past the leaning and decrepit houses that stared blankly into the night. Having crossed to the western sidewalk I rounded the nearest corner into Bates Street, where I kept close to the buildings on the southern side. I passed two houses shewing signs of habitation, one of which had faint lights in upper rooms, yet met with no obstacle. As I turned into Adams Street I felt measurably safer, but received a shock when a man reeled out of a black doorway directly in front of me. He proved, however, too hopelessly drunk to be a menace; so that I reached the dismal ruins of the Bank Street warehouses in safety.\n\nNo one was stirring in that dead street beside the river-gorge, and the roar of the waterfalls quite drowned my footsteps. It was a long dogtrot to the ruined station, and the great brick warehouse walls around me seemed somehow more terrifying than the fronts of private houses. At last I saw the ancient arcaded station\u2014or what was left of it\u2014and made directly for the tracks that started from its farther end.\n\nThe rails were rusty but mainly intact, and not more than half the ties had rotted away. Walking or running on such a surface was very difficult; but I did my best, and on the whole made very fair time. For some distance the line kept on along the gorge's brink, but at length I reached the long covered bridge where it crossed the chasm at a dizzy height. The condition of this bridge would determine my next step. If humanly possible, I would use it; if not, I would have to risk more street wandering and take the nearest intact highway bridge.\n\nThe vast, barn-like length of the old bridge gleamed spectrally in the moonlight, and I saw that the ties were safe for at least a few feet within. Entering, I began to use my flashlight, and was almost knocked down by the cloud of bats that flapped past me. About half way across there was a perilous gap in the ties which I feared for a moment would halt me; but in the end I risked a desperate jump which fortunately succeeded.\n\nI was glad to see the moonlight again when I emerged from that macabre tunnel. The old tracks crossed River Street at grade, and at once veered off into a region increasingly rural and with less and less of Innsmouth's abhorrent fishy odour. Here the dense growth of weeds and briers hindered me and cruelly tore my clothes, but I was none the less glad that they were there to give me concealment in case of peril. I knew that much of my route must be visible from the Rowley road.\n\nThe marshy region began very shortly, with the single track on a low, grassy embankment where the weedy growth was somewhat thinner. Then came a sort of island of higher ground, where the line passed through a shallow open cut choked with bushes and brambles. I was very glad of this partial shelter, since at this point the Rowley road was uncomfortably near according to my window view. At the end of the cut it would cross the track and swerve off to a safer distance; but meanwhile I must be exceedingly careful. I was by this time thankfully certain that the railway itself was not patrolled.\n\nJust before entering the cut I glanced behind me, but saw no pursuer. The ancient spires and roofs of decaying Innsmouth gleamed lovely and ethereal in the magic yellow moonlight, and I thought of how they must have looked in the old days before the shadow fell. Then, as my gaze circled inland from the town, something less tranquil arrested my notice and held me immobile for a second.\n\nWhat I saw\u2014or fancied I saw\u2014was a disturbing suggestion of undulant motion far to the south; a suggestion which made me conclude that a very large horde must be pouring out of the city along the level Ipswich road. The distance was great, and I could distinguish nothing in detail; but I did not at all like the look of that moving column. It undulated too much, and glistened too brightly in the rays of the now westering moon. There was a suggestion of sound, too, though the wind was blowing the other way\u2014a suggestion of bestial scraping and bellowing even worse than the muttering of the parties I had lately overheard.\n\nAll sorts of unpleasant conjectures crossed my mind. I thought of those very extreme Innsmouth types said to be hidden in crumbling, centuried warrens near the waterfront. I thought, too, of those nameless swimmers I had seen. Counting the parties so far glimpsed, as well as those presumably covering other roads, the number of my pursuers must be strangely large for a town as depopulated as Innsmouth.\n\nWhence could come the dense personnel of such a column as I now beheld? Did those ancient, unplumbed warrens teem with a twisted, uncatalogued, and unsuspected life? Or had some unseen ship indeed landed a legion of unknown outsiders on that hellish reef? Who were they? Why were they there? And if such a column of them was scouring the Ipswich road, would the patrols on the other roads be likewise augmented?\n\nI had entered the brush-grown cut and was struggling along at a very slow pace when that damnable fishy odour again waxed dominant. Had the wind suddenly changed eastward, so that it blew in from the sea and over the town? It must have, I concluded, since I now began to hear shocking guttural murmurs from that hitherto silent direction. There was another sound, too\u2014a kind of wholesale, colossal flopping or pattering which somehow called up images of the most detestable sort. It made me think illogically of that unpleasantly undulating column on the far-off Ipswich road.\n\nAnd then both stench and sounds grew stronger, so that I paused shivering and grateful for the cut's protection. It was here, I recalled, that the Rowley road drew so close to the old railway before crossing westward and diverging. Something was coming along that road, and I must lie low till its passage and vanishment in the distance. Thank heaven these creatures employed no dogs for tracking\u2014though perhaps that would have been impossible amidst the omnipresent regional odour. Crouched in the bushes of that sandy cleft I felt reasonably safe, even though I knew the searchers would have to cross the track in front of me not much more than a hundred yards away. I would be able to see them, but they could not, except by a malign miracle, see me.\n\nAll at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types\u2014something one would not care to remember.\n\nThe stench waxed overpowering, and the noises swelled to a bestial babel of croaking, baying, and barking without the least suggestion of human speech. Were these indeed the voices of my pursuers? Did they have dogs after all? So far I had seen none of the lower animals in Innsmouth. That flopping or pattering was monstrous\u2014I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sounds receded toward the west. The horde was very close now\u2014the air foul with their hoarse snarlings, and the ground almost shaking with their alien-rhythmed footfalls. My breath nearly ceased to come, and I put every ounce of will power into the task of holding my eyelids down.\n\nI am not even yet willing to say whether what followed was a hideous actuality or only a nightmare hallucination. The later action of the government, after my frantic appeals, would tend to confirm it as a monstrous truth; but could not an hallucination have been repeated under the quasi-hypnotic spell of that ancient, haunted, and shadowed town? Such places have strange properties, and the legacy of insane legend might well have acted on more than one human imagination amidst those dead, stench-cursed streets and huddles of rotting roofs and crumbling steeples. Is it not possible that the germ of an actual contagious madness lurks in the depths of that shadow over Innsmouth? Who can be sure of reality after hearing things like the tale of old Zadok Allen? The government men never found poor Zadok, and have no conjectures to make as to what became of him. Where does madness leave off and reality begin? Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?\n\nBut I must try to tell what I thought I saw that night under the mocking yellow moon\u2014saw surging and hopping down the Rowley road in plain sight in front of me as I crouched among the wild brambles of that desolate railway cut. Of course my resolution to keep my eyes shut had failed. It was foredoomed to failure\u2014for who could crouch blindly while a legion of croaking, baying entities of unknown source flopped noisomely past, scarcely more than a hundred yards away?\n\nI thought I was prepared for the worst, and I really ought to have been prepared considering what I had seen before. My other pursuers had been accursedly abnormal\u2014so should I not have been ready to face a strengthening of the abnormal element; to look upon forms in which there was no mixture of the normal at all? I did not open my eyes until the raucous clamour came loudly from a point obviously straight ahead. Then I knew that a long section of them must be plainly in sight where the sides of the cut flattened out and the road crossed the track\u2014and I could no longer keep myself from sampling whatever horror that leering yellow moon might have to shew.\n\nIt was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind. Nothing that I could have imagined\u2014nothing, even, that I could have gathered had I credited old Zadok's crazy tale in the most literal way\u2014would be in any way comparable to the daemoniac, blasphemous reality that I saw\u2014or believe I saw. I have tried to hint what it was in order to postpone the horror of writing it down baldly. Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?\n\nAnd yet I saw them in a limitless stream\u2014flopping, hopping, croaking, bleating\u2014surging inhumanly through the spectral moonlight in a grotesque, malignant saraband of fantastic nightmare. And some of them had tall tiaras of that nameless whitish-gold metal... and some were strangely robed... and one, who led the way, was clad in a ghoulishly humped black coat and striped trousers, and had a man's felt hat perched on the shapeless thing that answered for a head....\n\nI think their predominant colour was a greyish-green, though they had white bellies. They were mostly shiny and slippery, but the ridges of their backs were scaly. Their forms vaguely suggested the anthropoid, while their heads were the heads of fish, with prodigious bulging eyes that never closed. At the sides of their necks were palpitating gills, and their long paws were webbed. They hopped irregularly, sometimes on two legs and sometimes on four. I was somehow glad that they had no more than four limbs. Their croaking, baying voices, clearly used for articulate speech, held all the dark shades of expression which their staring faces lacked.\n\nBut for all of their monstrousness they were not unfamiliar to me. I knew too well what they must be\u2014for was not the memory of that evil tiara at Newburyport still fresh? They were the blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design\u2014living and horrible\u2014and as I saw them I knew also of what that humped, tiaraed priest in the black church basement had so fearsomely reminded me. Their number was past guessing. It seemed to me that there were limitless swarms of them\u2014and certainly my momentary glimpse could have shewn only the least fraction. In another instant everything was blotted out by a merciful fit of fainting; the first I had ever had." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "It was a gentle daylight rain that awaked me from my stupor in the brush-grown railway cut, and when I staggered out to the roadway ahead I saw no trace of any prints in the fresh mud. The fishy odour, too, was gone. Innsmouth's ruined roofs and toppling steeples loomed up greyly toward the southeast, but not a living creature did I spy in all the desolate salt marshes around. My watch was still going, and told me that the hour was past noon.\n\nThe reality of what I had been through was highly uncertain in my mind, but I felt that something hideous lay in the background. I must get away from evil-shadowed Innsmouth\u2014and accordingly I began to test my cramped, wearied powers of locomotion. Despite weakness, hunger, horror, and bewilderment I found myself after a long time able to walk; so started slowly along the muddy road to Rowley. Before evening I was in the village, getting a meal and providing myself with presentable clothes. I caught the night train to Arkham, and the next day talked long and earnestly with government officials there; a process I later repeated in Boston. With the main result of these colloquies the public is now familiar\u2014and I wish, for normality's sake, there were nothing more to tell. Perhaps it is madness that is overtaking me\u2014yet perhaps a greater horror\u2014or a greater marvel\u2014is reaching out.\n\nAs may well be imagined, I gave up most of the foreplanned features of the rest of my tour\u2014the scenic, architectural, and antiquarian diversions on which I had counted so heavily. Nor did I dare look for that piece of strange jewellery said to be in the Miskatonic University Museum. I did, however, improve my stay in Arkham by collecting some genealogical notes I had long wished to possess; very rough and hasty data, it is true, but capable of good use later on when I might have time to collate and codify them. The curator of the historical society there\u2014Mr. E. Lapham Peabody\u2014was very courteous about assisting me, and expressed unusual interest when I told him I was a grandson of Eliza Orne of Arkham, who was born in 1867 and had married James Williamson of Ohio at the age of seventeen.\n\nIt seemed that a maternal uncle of mine had been there many years before on a quest much like my own; and that my grandmother's family was a topic of some local curiosity. There had, Mr. Peabody said, been considerable discussion about the marriage of her father, Benjamin Orne, just after the Civil War; since the ancestry of the bride was peculiarly puzzling. That bride was understood to have been an orphaned Marsh of New Hampshire\u2014a cousin of the Essex County Marshes\u2014but her education had been in France and she knew very little of her family. A guardian had deposited funds in a Boston bank to maintain her and her French governess; but that guardian's name was unfamiliar to Arkham people, and in time he dropped out of sight, so that the governess assumed his role by court appointment. The Frenchwoman\u2014now long dead\u2014was very taciturn, and there were those who said she could have told more than she did.\n\nBut the most baffling thing was the inability of anyone to place the recorded parents of the young woman\u2014Enoch and Lydia (Meserve) Marsh\u2014among the known families of New Hampshire. Possibly, many suggested, she was the natural daughter of some Marsh of prominence\u2014she certainly had the true Marsh eyes. Most of the puzzling was done after her early death, which took place at the birth of my grandmother\u2014her only child. Having formed some disagreeable impressions connected with the name of Marsh, I did not welcome the news that it belonged on my own ancestral tree; nor was I pleased by Mr. Peabody's suggestion that I had the true Marsh eyes myself. However, I was grateful for data which I knew would prove valuable; and took copious notes and lists of book references regarding the well-documented Orne family.\n\nI went directly home to Toledo from Boston, and later spent a month at Maumee recuperating from my ordeal. In September I entered Oberlin for my final year, and from then till the next June was busy with studies and other wholesome activities\u2014reminded of the bygone terror only by occasional official visits from government men in connexion with the campaign which my pleas and evidence had started. Around the middle of July\u2014just a year after the Innsmouth experience\u2014I spent a week with my late mother's family in Cleveland; checking some of my new genealogical data with the various notes, traditions, and bits of heirloom material in existence there, and seeing what kind of connected chart I could construct.\n\nI did not exactly relish the task, for the atmosphere of the Williamson home had always depressed me. There was a strain of morbidity there, and my mother had never encouraged my visiting her parents as a child, although she always welcomed her father when he came to Toledo. My Arkham-born grandmother had seemed strange and almost terrifying to me, and I do not think I grieved when she disappeared. I was eight years old then, and it was said that she had wandered off in grief after the suicide of my uncle Douglas, her eldest son. He had shot himself after a trip to New England\u2014the same trip, no doubt, which had caused him to be recalled at the Arkham Historical Society.\n\nThis uncle had resembled her, and I had never liked him either. Something about the staring, unwinking expression of both of them had given me a vague, unaccountable uneasiness. My mother and uncle Walter had not looked like that. They were like their father, though poor little cousin Lawrence\u2014Walter's son\u2014had been an almost perfect duplicate of his grandmother before his condition took him to the permanent seclusion of a sanitarium at Canton. I had not seen him in four years, but my uncle once implied that his state, both mental and physical, was very bad. This worry had probably been a major cause of his mother's death two years before.\n\nMy grandfather and his widowed son Walter now comprised the Cleveland household, but the memory of older times hung thickly over it. I still disliked the place, and tried to get my researches done as quickly as possible. Williamson records and traditions were supplied in abundance by my grandfather; though for Orne material I had to depend on my uncle Walter, who put at my disposal the contents of all his files, including notes, letters, cuttings, heirlooms, photographs, and miniatures.\n\nIt was in going over the letters and pictures on the Orne side that I began to acquire a kind of terror of my own ancestry. As I have said, my grandmother and uncle Douglas had always disturbed me. Now, years after their passing, I gazed at their pictured faces with a measurably heightened feeling of repulsion and alienation. I could not at first understand the change, but gradually a horrible sort of comparison began to obtrude itself on my unconscious mind despite the steady refusal of my consciousness to admit even the least suspicion of it. It was clear that the typical expression of these faces now suggested something it had not suggested before\u2014something which would bring stark panic if too openly thought of.\n\nBut the worst shock came when my uncle shewed me the Orne jewellery in a downtown safe-deposit vault. Some of the items were delicate and inspiring enough, but there was one box of strange old pieces descended from my mysterious great-grandmother which my uncle was almost reluctant to produce. They were, he said, of very grotesque and almost repulsive design, and had never to his knowledge been publicly worn; though my grandmother used to enjoy looking at them. Vague legends of bad luck clustered around them, and my great-grandmother's French governess had said they ought not to be worn in New England, though it would be quite safe to wear them in Europe.\n\nAs my uncle began slowly and grudgingly to unwrap the things he urged me not to be shocked by the strangeness and frequent hideousness of the designs. Artists and archaeologists who had seen them pronounced the workmanship superlatively and exotically exquisite, though no one seemed able to define their exact material or assign them to any specific art tradition. There were two armlets, a tiara, and a kind of pectoral; the latter having in high relief certain figures of almost unbearable extravagance.\n\nDuring this description I had kept a tight rein on my emotions, but my face must have betrayed my mounting fears. My uncle looked concerned, and paused in his unwrapping to study my countenance. I motioned to him to continue, which he did with renewed signs of reluctance. He seemed to expect some demonstration when the first piece\u2014the tiara\u2014became visible, but I doubt if he expected quite what actually happened. I did not expect it, either, for I thought I was thoroughly forewarned regarding what the jewellery would turn out to be. What I did was to faint silently away, just as I had done in that brier-choked railway cut a year before.\n\nFrom that day on my life has been a nightmare of brooding and apprehension, nor do I know how much is hideous truth and how much madness. My great-grandmother had been a Marsh of unknown source whose husband lived in Arkham\u2014and did not old Zadok say that the daughter of Obed Marsh by a monstrous mother was married to an Arkham man through a trick? What was it the ancient toper had muttered about the likeness of my eyes to Captain Obed's? In Arkham, too, the curator had told me I had the true Marsh eyes. Was Obed Marsh my own great-great-grandfather? Who\u2014or what\u2014then, was my great-great-grandmother? But perhaps this was all madness. Those whitish-gold ornaments might easily have been bought from some Innsmouth sailor by the father of my great-grandmother, whoever he was. And that look in the staring-eyed faces of my grandmother and self-slain uncle might be sheer fancy on my part\u2014sheer fancy, bolstered up by the Innsmouth shadow which had so darkly coloured my imagination. But why had my uncle killed himself after an ancestral quest in New England?\n\nFor more than two years I fought off these reflections with partial success. My father secured me a place in an insurance office, and I buried myself in routine as deeply as possible. In the winter of 1930\u201331, however, the dreams began. They were very sparse and insidious at first, but increased in frequency and vividness as the weeks went by. Great watery spaces opened out before me, and I seemed to wander through titanic sunken porticos and labyrinths of weedy Cyclopean walls with grotesque fishes as my companions. Then the other shapes began to appear, filling me with nameless horror the moment I awoke. But during the dreams they did not horrify me at all\u2014I was one with them; wearing their unhuman trappings, treading their aqueous ways, and praying monstrously at their evil sea-bottom temples.\n\nThere was much more than I could remember, but even what I did remember each morning would be enough to stamp me as a madman or a genius if ever I dared write it down. Some frightful influence, I felt, was seeking gradually to drag me out of the sane world of wholesome life into unnamable abysses of blackness and alienage; and the process told heavily on me. My health and appearance grew steadily worse, till finally I was forced to give up my position and adopt the static, secluded life of an invalid. Some odd nervous affliction had me in its grip, and I found myself at times almost unable to shut my eyes.\n\nIt was then that I began to study the mirror with mounting alarm. The slow ravages of disease are not pleasant to watch, but in my case there was something subtler and more puzzling in the background. My father seemed to notice it, too, for he began looking at me curiously and almost affrightedly. What was taking place in me? Could it be that I was coming to resemble my grandmother and uncle Douglas?\n\nOne night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed\u2014as those who take to the water change\u2014and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders\u2014destined for him as well\u2014he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too\u2014I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth.\n\nI met also that which had been her grandmother. For eighty thousand years Pth'thya-l'yi had lived in Y'ha-nthlei, and thither she had gone back after Obed Marsh was dead. Y'ha-nthlei was not destroyed when the upper-earth men shot death into the sea. It was hurt, but not destroyed. The Deep Ones could never be destroyed, even though the palaeogean magic of the forgotten Old Ones might sometimes check them. For the present they would rest; but some day, if they remembered, they would rise again for the tribute Great Cthulhu craved. It would be a city greater than Innsmouth next time. They had planned to spread, and had brought up that which would help them, but now they must wait once more. For bringing the upper-earth men's death I must do a penance, but that would not be heavy. This was the dream in which I saw a shoggoth for the first time, and the sight set me awake in a frenzy of screaming. That morning the mirror definitely told me I had acquired the Innsmouth look.\n\nSo far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. I\u00e4-R'lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! I\u00e4! I\u00e4! No, I shall not shoot myself\u2014I cannot be made to shoot myself!\n\nI shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton madhouse, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Shunned House by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nFrom even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit Street\u2014the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette\u2014and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of eighteenth-century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.\n\nNow the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side-hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.\n\nThe house was\u2014and for that matter still is\u2014of a kind to attract the attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle eighteenth century\u2014the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit Street\u2014at first called Back Street\u2014was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots.\n\nAt the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space, exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made, giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and two windows above ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed; and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull grey brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.\n\nThe farm-like grounds extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walls, and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.\n\nWhat I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people died there in alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the original owners had moved out some twenty years after building the place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and fungous growth in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the draughts of the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump water. These things were bad enough, and these were all that gained belief among the persons whom I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Dr. Elihu Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises which formed an undercurrent of folklore among old-time servants and humble folk; surmises which never travelled far, and which were largely forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern population.\n\nThe general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part of the community as in any real sense \"haunted\". There were no widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house was \"unlucky\", but that is as far as even they went. What was really beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings over sixty years ago the building had become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to weakness he may have naturally had. And those who did not die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption, and sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.\n\nThis much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to shew me the notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled, and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass, and nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.\n\nBut after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For one thing, the bad odour of the house was strongest there; and for another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside, were truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools and Indian pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation. They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnal passersby sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.\n\nWe never\u2014even in our wildest Hallowe'en moods\u2014visited this cellar by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There was also a subtler thing we often thought we detected\u2014a very strange thing which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor\u2014a vague, shifting deposit of mould or nitre which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen. Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed, and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of the wild ancient tales of the common folk\u2014a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Dr. Whipple was a sane, conservative physician of the old school, and for all his interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realised that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations.\n\nThe doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one manservant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on a steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather\u2014a cousin of that celebrated privateersman, Capt. Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner Gaspee in 1772\u2014had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp, low-ceiled library with the musty white panelling, heavy carved overmantel, and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics and records of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusions to the shunned house in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far distant\u2014for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court-house along the precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.\n\nWhen, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate. The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and after a certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul whose long years were filled only with honour, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard\u2014the place that Poe loved\u2014the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and headstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.\n\nThe history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace of the sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who built it. Yet from the first a taint of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was apparent. My uncle's carefully compiled record began with the building of the structure in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After Brown's death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Co. made him master of the brig Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his marriage.\n\nThe site he had chosen\u2014a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside\u2014was all that could be wished, and the building did justice to the location. It was the best that moderate means could afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half.\n\nThe next April sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and Ruth died before the month was over. Dr. Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following June. Eli Liddeason, the other servant, constantly complained of weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed Hannah. He died the next year\u2014a sad year indeed, since it marked the death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade.\n\nThe widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation\u2014or at least, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years' space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumour which later became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named Zenas Low.\n\nIt was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.\n\nMeanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian-Lane near the new college building. The boy would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.\n\nUpon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris, despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a Captain in Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell, he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to Providence upon his honourable discharge in the following year.\n\nThe young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay, so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and disconcerting pallor\u2014qualities shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.\n\nWilliam Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and closing it forever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.\n\nRathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house despite William's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulphur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic. They said the place had a febrile smell.\n\nDutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a privateersman, and served with distinction on the Vigilant under Capt. Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in 1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815, when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman's son.\n\nWelcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to rent\u2014perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odour of unkempt old age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque centre of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in Nature as I had known it; an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of miscellaneous data\u2014legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the papers, copies of death-certificates by fellow-physicians, and the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house; but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous and malodorous cellar of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence. There had been servants\u2014Ann White especially\u2014who would not use the cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches of mould in that region. These latter narratives interested me profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.\n\nAnn White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires\u2014the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living\u2014whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.\n\nHer tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain other things\u2014the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something \"sucked his breath\" at night; the death-certificates of fever victims of 1804, issued by Dr. Chad Hopkins, and shewing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.\n\nFree from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house\u2014one from the Providence Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript and Chronicle of October 27, 1845\u2014each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a school-teacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horrible way; glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house\u2014a series of anaemia deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.\n\nThis was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practice; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims\u2014ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others\u2014would babble maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return from the war, to the first-hand account of Drs. Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest\u2014an open-minded and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and macabre.\n\nFor my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what connexion with France or its language the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the legend; but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird significance to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris, which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had soon forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my experience.\n\nHaving exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shewn in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement in 1636\u2014or even before, if any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street was later run. It had, a rumour indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.\n\nThen suddenly I came\u2014by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main body of records and might easily have been missed\u2014upon something which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in 1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last the French element had appeared\u2014that, and another deeper element of horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading\u2014and I feverishly studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had half expected, that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local door which the name Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness.\n\nThe Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much opposition before the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and rumour said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism\u2014too ardent, some whispered\u2014and their evident distress when virtually driven from the village down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers had been granted a haven; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on\u2014perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet's death\u2014and no one seemed to hear of the family after that.\n\nFor a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legends realised that additional link with the terrible which my wide reading had given me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned to death as a daemoniac but afterward saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and frightened action\u2014indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the Roulets from the town?\n\nI now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground floor hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts\u2014only the same depressing mustiness and faint suggestions of noxious odours and nitrous outlines on the floor\u2014and I fancy that many pedestrians must have watched me curiously through the broken panes.\n\nAt length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot nocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the mouldy floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw\u2014or thought I saw\u2014amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the \"huddled form\" I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented\u2014and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy afternoon so many years before.\n\nAbove the anthropomorphic patch of mould by the fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapour which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a foetor in its wake. It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I watched it fade\u2014and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he insisted that we both test\u2014and if possible destroy\u2014the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington Harris which did not include surmises as to what we expected to find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned house two camp chairs and a folding camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight and intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the windows with paper and planning to return in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, we were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus\u2014which we had obtained secretly and at great cost\u2014as many days as our vigils might need to be protracted. It was our design to sit up together till very late, and then watch singly till dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; the inactive member resting on the cot.\n\nThe natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from the laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armoury, and instinctively assumed direction of our venture, was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws he had preached as a physician, and but for what happened later would be here in full vigour today. Only two persons suspect what did happen\u2014Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because he owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it. Then too, we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my uncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to help me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.\n\nTo declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.\n\nIn short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array of facts pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house; traceable to one or another of the ill-favoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity\u2014dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror\u2014their recorded history seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of them\u2014notably the sinister Paul Roulet\u2014which obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob, and continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the encroaching community?\n\nSuch a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissues and fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world's life, health, and sanity.\n\nWhat baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might encounter the thing. No sane person had even seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely. It might be pure energy\u2014a form ethereal and outside the realm of substance\u2014or it might be partly material; some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled states. The anthropomorphic patch of mould on the floor, the form of the yellowish vapour, and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connexion with the human shape; but how representative or permanent that similarity might be, none could say with any kind of certainty.\n\nWe had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted Crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the world-war, in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction\u2014for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould had taken strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by the way, was only faintly visible when we placed our furniture and instruments, and when we returned that evening for the actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted that I had ever seen it in the more definitely limned form\u2014but then I thought of the legends.\n\nOur cellar vigil began at 10 p.m., daylight saving time, and as it continued we found no promise of pertinent developments. A weak, filtered glow from the rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, shewed the dripping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, foetid, and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven\u2014these things, and our austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate destructive machinery we had brought.\n\nWe had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street unlocked; so that a direct and practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond our power to deal with. It was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity lurked there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the thing with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we had recognised and observed it sufficiently. How long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing, we had no notion. It occurred to us, too, that our venture was far from safe; for in what strength the thing might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the hazard, and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked\u2014far into the night, till my uncle's growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two-hour sleep.\n\nSomething like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone\u2014I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. My uncle breathed heavily, his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside, and punctuated by another nerve-racking sound of distant dripping water within\u2014for the house was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in this storm positively swamp-like. I studied the loose, antique masonry of the walls in the fungus-light and the feeble rays which stole in from the street through the screened windows; and once, when the noisome atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and looked up and down the street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on the wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to reward my watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension.\n\nThen the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was breathing with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities of a choking moan. I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face averted, so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial expression, disturbed no doubt by the strange dreams which our situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed not at all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was one of kindly and well-bred calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling within him. I think, on the whole, that it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in increasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one but many men, and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.\n\nAll at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and teeth as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable, and then\u2014with a tremendous start\u2014I recognised something about them which filled me with icy fear till I recalled the breadth of my uncle's education and the interminable translations he had made from anthropological and antiquarian articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering in French, and the few phrases I could distinguish seemed connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous Paris magazine.\n\nSuddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he leaped abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in English, and the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, \"My breath, my breath!\" Then the awakening became complete, and with a subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only surmise with a kind of awe.\n\nHe had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it\u2014a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots, if one might use the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.\n\nOnce my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats frowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of a house\u2014an old house, apparently\u2014but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the more presumably mobile objects. It was queer\u2014damnably queer\u2014and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes. I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were by eighty-one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid; but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable visions could be, at most, no more than my uncle's reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else.\n\nConversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and in time I yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face came to me with less pleasant associations than in waking hours, and I recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in which every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair, so that in this sudden flash of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the more northerly window, and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the north of the room, all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong enough to read an average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place. My mind, as alert as my senses, recognised the gravely unusual; and almost automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had left trained on the mouldy spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for the scream had been in my uncle's voice, and I knew not against what menace I should have to defend him and myself.\n\nYet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half-human and half-monstrous, through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes\u2014wolfish and mocking\u2014and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form. At the time it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object to which all my attention was focussed. That object was my uncle\u2014the venerable Elihu Whipple\u2014who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought.\n\nIt was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled myself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved me. Recognising the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and focussed toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest ether radiations which man's art can arouse from the spaces and fluids of Nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness was only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had no effect whatever.\n\nThen, in the midst of that daemoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering toward that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all description, and in which there played across his vanishing face such changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen\u2014a score\u2014a hundred\u2014aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and yet not strange.\n\nI saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and infantile, and other features old and young, coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen in the School of Design Museum, and another time I thought I caught the raw-boned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in Carrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception; toward the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against themselves, and strove to form contours like those of my uncle's kindly face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccoughed a farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.\n\nThe rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking street, and in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then grey dawn unfolded wetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I dared not speak.\n\nThe grease was gone, for the mouldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form in nitre. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic emanation; some vampirish vapour such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the floor before the fireplace where the mould and nitre had taken strange forms. In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for home, where I bathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pickaxe, a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulphuric acid, all to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my mood.\n\nAt 11 a.m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather, and I was glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever so little toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.\n\nMy hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in the large hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look like\u2014what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys of acid around and near two sides, so that when necessary I might empty them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.\n\nSuddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered, and made a motion as if to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then courage returned, and I scraped away more dirt in the light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy\u2014a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter. Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and away from the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents one after another down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan elbow I had seen.\n\nThe blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapour which surged tempestuously up from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will never leave my memory. All along the hill people tell of the yellow day, when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factory waste dumped in the Providence River, but I know how mistaken they are as to the source. They tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came from some disordered water-pipe or gas main underground\u2014but again I could correct them if I dared. It was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see how I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth carboy, which I had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask; but when I recovered I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapours.\n\nThe two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and after a time I felt it safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I was done, but fear had gone out of the place. The dampness was less foetid, and all the strange fungi had withered to a kind of harmless greyish powder which blew ash-like along the floor. One of earth's nethermost terrors had perished forever; and if there be a hell, it had received at last the daemon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last spadeful of mould, I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle's memory.\n\nThe next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned house's terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It is still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Silver Key by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWhen Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.\n\nHe had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.\n\nThey had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.\n\nSo Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.\n\nOnce in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.\n\nIn the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.\n\nBut when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of licence and anarchy.\n\nCarter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realise that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.\n\nAmidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they could not have understood his mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher could, and they were long dead.\n\nThen he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfilment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humour dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.\n\nIt was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon shewed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above their level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.\n\nOnce he heard of a man in the South who was shunned and feared for the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged where two had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dream.\n\nHaving perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bothered to keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in his early boyhood\u2014purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.\n\nWith the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years those slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome immanence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.\n\nThen one night his grandfather reminded him of a key. The grey old scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt wild secrets of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver key handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.\n\nIn the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel no person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That it held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's father had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood that he would find within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told him nothing.\n\nAn old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any legible explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an antique reed. Carter recognised the characters as those he had seen on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had vanished one midnight in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered now.\n\nBut he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though shewing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.\n\nIn the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across the road at the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthest background.\n\nThen came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seen in over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and at the bend half way up he paused to scan the outspread countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured out by a western sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, the clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted roots.\n\nSomething made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed him utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared the trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it had been left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death of his strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his boyhood he had revelled through long visits there, and had found weird marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.\n\nShadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the trees opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple on Central Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the little round windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in deep shadow again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have come from childish memory alone, since the old white church had long been torn down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had read of it with interest, for the paper had told about some strange burrows or passages found in the rocky hill beneath.\n\nThrough his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its familiarity after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times of his boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping voice could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To think that \"Old Benijy\" should still be alive!\n\n\"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Whar be ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt Marthy plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoon an' git back afur dark? Randy! Ran... dee!... He's the beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time a-settin' moonin' raound that snake-den in the upper timber-lot!... Hey, yew, Ran... dee!\"\n\nRandolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across his eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be; had strayed very far away to places where he had not belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on the Kingsport steeple, though he could easily have made it out with his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness was something very strange and unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope with him, and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was not there, but there was the big silver key he had found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to tell a child whose head was already too full of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where he had found the key, but something seemed very confused. He guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing Parks with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very strangely, as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk little Cockney.\n\n\"Ran... dee! Ran... dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!\"\n\nA swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.\n\n\"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye can't answer a body? I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me long ago! Dun't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over yer bein' off arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he gits hum! Ye'd orta know these here woods ain't no fitten place to be traipsin' this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do nobody no good, as my gran'sir' knowed afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wun't keep supper no longer!\"\n\nSo Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmered through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not scold too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle Chris well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood. Randolph did not shew his key, but ate his supper in silence and protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes dreamed better when awake, and he wanted to use that key.\n\nIn the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the upper timber-lot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently around the low-pitched room with the rag carpet and exposed beams and corner-posts, and smiled only when the orchard boughs scratched at the leaded panes of the rear window. The trees and the hills were close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which was his true country.\n\nThen, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and being reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless knoll. The floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great lichened rocks rose vaguely here and there in the dim light like Druid monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little way off sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipans and dryads.\n\nThen he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded \"snake-den\" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond\u2014a haunting sepulchral place whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious artifice. On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way with matches filched from the sitting-room match-safe, and edging through the final crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to himself. He could not tell why he approached the farther wall so confidently, or why he instinctively drew forth the great silver key as he did so. But on he went, and when he danced back to the house that night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noontide dinner-horn altogether.\n\nNow it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that something occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his senior; and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of 1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which he shewed in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to have picked up an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things which, though at the time without meaning, were later found to justify the singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions, new names, and new events appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now and then recall wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless word of undoubted connexion with what was then far in the future. He did not himself understand these words, or know why certain things made him feel certain emotions; but fancied that some unremembered dream must be responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when some traveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it when he was almost mortally wounded there in 1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion in the Great War.\n\nCarter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately disappeared. His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently with his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove off alone in his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the key from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he could not name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his old ancestral country around Arkham.\n\nHalf way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place, they found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist or palaeographer has been able to decipher or identify. Rain had long effaced any possible footprints, though Boston investigators had something to say about evidences of disturbances among the fallen timbers of the Carter place. It was, they averred, as though someone had groped about the ruins at no distant period. A common white handkerchief found among forest rocks on the hillside beyond cannot be identified as belonging to the missing man.\n\nThere is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs, but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.\n\nI shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne in Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Slaying of the Monster by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nGreat was the clamour in Laen; for smoke had been spied in the Hills of the Dragon. That surely meant the Stirrings of the Monster\u2014the Monster who spat lava and shook the earth as he writhed in its depths. And when the men of Laen spoke together they swore to slay the Monster and keep his fiery breath from searing their minaret-studded city and toppling their alabaster domes.\n\nSo it was that by torchlight gathered fully a hundred of the little people, prepared to battle the Evil One in his hidden fast-hold. With the coming of night they began marching in ragged columns into the foothills beneath the fulgent lunar rays. Ahead a burning cloud shone clearly through the purple dusk, a guide to their goal.\n\nFor the sake of truth it is to be recorded that their spirits sank low long ere they sighted the foe, and as the moon grew dim and the coming of the dawn was heralded by gaudy clouds they wished themselves more than ever at home, dragon or no dragon. But as the sun rose they cheered up slightly, and shifting their spears, resolutely trudged the remaining distance.\n\nClouds of sulphurous smoke hung pall-like over the world, darkening even the new-risen sun, and always replenished by sullen puffs from the mouth of the Monster. Little tongues of hungry flame made the Laenians move swiftly over the hot stones. \"But where is the dragon??\" whispered one\u2014fearfully and hoping it would not accept the query as an invitation. In vain they looked\u2014there was nothing solid enough to slay.\n\nSo shouldering their weapons, they wearily returned home and there set up a stone tablet graven to this effect\u2014\"BEING TROUBLED BY A FIERCE MONSTER THE BRAVE CITIZENS OF LAEN DID SET UPON IT AND SLAY IT IN ITS FEARFUL LAIR SAVING THE LAND FROM A DREADFUL DOOM.\"\n\nThese words were hard to read when we dug that stone from its deep, ancient layers of encrusting lava.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Statement of Randolph Carter by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. Detain me here forever if you will; confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice; but I can say no more than I have said already. Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour. Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind\u2014that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.\n\nAgain I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think\u2014almost hope\u2014that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I know nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been\u2014vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was\u2014yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade\u2014or some nameless thing I cannot describe\u2014alone can tell.\n\nAs I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end\u2014the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world\u2014was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies\u2014must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.\n\nOnce more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him\u2014that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before\u2014but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past eleven on the Gainesville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.\n\nThe place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapours that seemed to emanate from unheard-of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation. My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half-obliterated sepulchre, and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulchre, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.\n\nThe removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with nitre. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.\n\n\"I'm sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface,\" he said, \"but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can't imagine, even from what you have read and from what I've told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It's fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don't wish to offend you, and heaven knows I'd be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn't drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can't imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move\u2014you see I've enough wire here to reach to the centre of the earth and back!\"\n\nI can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had secured my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discoloured gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary. For a moment I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.\n\nIn the lone silence of that hoary and deserted city of the dead, my mind conceived the most ghastly phantasies and illusions; and the grotesque shrines and monoliths seemed to assume a hideous personality\u2014a half-sentience. Amorphous shadows seemed to lurk in the darker recesses of the weed-choked hollow and to flit as in some blasphemous ceremonial procession past the portals of the mouldering tombs in the hillside; shadows which could not have been cast by that pallid, peering crescent moon. I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:\n\n\"God! If you could see what I am seeing!\"\n\nI could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:\n\n\"Carter, it's terrible\u2014monstrous\u2014unbelievable!\"\n\nThis time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, \"Warren, what is it? What is it?\"\n\nOnce more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:\n\n\"I can't tell you, Carter! It's too utterly beyond thought\u2014I dare not tell you\u2014no man could know it and live\u2014Great God! I never dreamed of THIS!\" Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:\n\n\"Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!\u2014leave everything else and make for the outside\u2014it's your only chance! Do as I say, and don't ask me to explain!\"\n\nI heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:\n\n\"Beat it! For God's sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!\"\n\nSomething in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, \"Warren, brace up! I'm coming down!\" But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:\n\n\"Don't! You can't understand! It's too late\u2014and my own fault. Put back the slab and run\u2014there's nothing else you or anyone can do now!\" The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.\n\n\"Quick\u2014before it's too late!\" I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.\n\n\"Carter\u2014hurry! It's no use\u2014you must go\u2014better one than two\u2014the slab\u2014\" A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:\n\n\"Nearly over now\u2014don't make it harder\u2014cover up those damned steps and run for your life\u2014you're losing time\u2014 So long, Carter\u2014won't see you again.\" Here Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages\u2014\n\n\"Curse these hellish things\u2014legions\u2014 My God! Beat it! Beat it! Beat it!\"\n\nAfter that was silence. I know not how many interminable aeons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those aeons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, \"Warren! Warren! Answer me\u2014are you there?\"\n\nAnd then there came to me the crowning horror of all\u2014the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that aeons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, \"Warren, are you there?\", and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing\u2014that voice\u2014nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more. Heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapours. Heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulchre as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon. And this is what it said:\n\n\"YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Strange High House in the Mist by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn the morning mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And later, in still summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those dreams, that men shall not live without rumour of old, strange secrets, and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.\n\nNow north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a grey frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of New England's hills. The sea-folk in Kingsport look up at that cliff as other sea-folk look up at the pole-star, and time the night's watches by the way it hides or shews the Great Bear, Cassiopeia, and the Dragon. Among them it is one with the firmament, and truly, it is hidden from them when the mist hides the stars or the sun. Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call Father Neptune, or that whose pillared steps they term The Causeway; but this one they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors coming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the old Yankees believe it would be much graver matter than death to climb it, if indeed that were possible. Nevertheless there is an ancient house on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned windows.\n\nThe ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells therein who talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular things oceanward at those times when the cliff's rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in the white aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbidding crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never seen more than the grey primeval roof, peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the grey foundations, and the dim yellow light of the little windows peeping out from under those eaves in the dusk. These summer people do not believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house for hundreds of years, but cannot prove their heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.\n\nThen one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with seeing the same things for many years, and thinking the same well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at the mists from the diadem of Father Neptune, and tried to walk into their white world of mystery along the titan steps of The Causeway. Morning after morning he would lie on the cliffs and look over the world's rim at the cryptical aether beyond, listening to spectral bells and the wild cries of what might have been gulls. Then, when the mist would lift and the sea stand out prosy with the smoke of steamers, he would sigh and descend to the town, where he loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down hill, and study the crazy tottering gables and odd pillared doorways which had sheltered so many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old Man, who was not fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely archaic cottage where low ceilings and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies in the dark small hours.\n\nOf course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the grey unvisited cottage in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament. Always over Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport's crooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had told him, of lightning that shot one night up from that peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and Granny Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked over something her grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that flapped out of the eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of that unreachable place\u2014for the door is set close to the edge of the crag toward the ocean, and glimpsed only from ships at sea.\n\nAt length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither the Kingsporter's fear nor the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney made a very terrible resolve. Despite a conservative training\u2014or because of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown\u2014he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique grey cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued that the place must be tenanted by people who reached it from inland along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic's estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport liked their habitation, or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport side. Olney walked out along the lesser cliffs to where the great crag leaped insolently up to consort with celestial things, and became very sure that no human feet could mount it or descend it on that beetling southern slope. East and north it rose thousands of feet vertically from the water, so only the western side, inland and toward Arkham, remained.\n\nOne early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessible pinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper's Pond and the old brick powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of Arkham's white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found a shady road to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he wished. Woods and fields crowded up to the high bank of the river's mouth, and bore not a sign of man's presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but only the tall grass and giant trees and tangles of briers that the first Indian might have seen. As he climbed slowly east, higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the sea, he found the way growing in difficulty; till he wondered how ever the dwellers in that disliked place managed to reach the world outside, and whether they came often to market in Arkham.\n\nThen the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills and antique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf from this height, and he could just make out the ancient graveyard by the Congregational Hospital, beneath which rumour said some terrible caves or burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry bushes, and beyond them the naked rock of the crag and the thin peak of the dreaded grey cottage. Now the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness in the sky. South of him the frightful precipice above Kingsport, north of him the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the river's mouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep, so that he had to let himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this was the way the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth and sky!\n\nWhen he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as grey as the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward vapours. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull's-eye panes leaded in seventeenth-century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he could see nothing below but the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff's edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.\n\nAs the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and west and south sides, trying them but finding them all locked. He was vaguely glad they were locked, because the more he saw of that house the less he wished to get in. Then a sound halted him. He heard a lock rattle and bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as if a heavy door were slowly and cautiously opened. This was on the oceanward side that he could not see, where the narrow portal opened on blank space thousands of feet in the misty sky above the waves.\n\nThen there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney heard the windows opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then on the west just around the corner. Next would come the south windows, under the great low eaves on the side where he stood; and it must be said that he was more than uncomfortable as he thought of the detestable house on one side and the vacancy of upper air on the other. When a fumbling came in the nearer casements he crept around to the west again, flattening himself against the wall beside the now opened windows. It was plain that the owner had come home; but he had not come from the land, nor from any balloon or airship that could be imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney edged round to the north; but before he could find a haven a voice called softly, and he knew he must confront his host.\n\nStuck out of a west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes shone phosphorescently with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice was gentle, and of a quaint olden kind, so that Olney did not shudder when a brown hand reached out to help him over the sill and into that low room of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man was clad in very ancient garments, and had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore and dreams of tall galleons. Olney does not recall many of the wonders he told, or even who he was; but says that he was strange and kindly, and filled with the magic of unfathomed voids of time and space. The small room seemed green with a dim aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far windows to the east were not open, but shut against the misty aether with dull thick panes like the bottoms of old bottles.\n\nThat bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the elder mysteries; and from the tales of marvellous ancient things he related, it must be guessed that the village folk were right in saying he had communed with the mists of the sea and the clouds of the sky ever since there was any village to watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain below. And the day wore on, and still Olney listened to rumours of old times and far places, and heard how the Kings of Atlantis fought with the slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor, and how the pillared and weedy temple of Poseidonis is still glimpsed at midnight by lost ships, who know by its sight that they are lost. Years of the Titans were recalled, but the host grew timid when he spoke of the dim first age of chaos before the gods or even the Elder Ones were born, and when only the other gods came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kla in the stony desert near Ulthar, beyond the river Skai.\n\nIt was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient door of nail-studded oak beyond which lay only the abyss of white cloud. Olney started in fright, but the bearded man motioned him to be still, and tiptoed to the door to look out through a very small peep-hole. What he saw he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and tiptoed around to shut and lock all the windows before returning to the ancient settle beside his guest. Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent squares of each of the little dim windows in succession a queer black outline as the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; and he was glad his host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in the great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up or meet the wrong ones.\n\nThen the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table, and then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners. And the bearded man made enigmatical gestures of prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously wrought brass candlesticks. Frequently he would glance at the door as if he expected someone, and at length his glance seemed answered by a singular rapping which must have followed some very ancient and secret code. This time he did not even glance through the peep-hole, but swung the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatching the heavy door and flinging it wide to the stars and the mist.\n\nAnd then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that room from the deep all the dreams and memories of earth's sunken Mighty Ones. And golden flames played about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled as he did them homage. Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss. And the conches of the tritons gave weird blasts, and the nereids made strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers in black sea-caves. Then hoary Nodens reached forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell, whereat the conches and the gongs set up a wild and awesome clamour. And out into the limitless aether reeled that fabulous train, the noise of whose shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.\n\nAll night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm and the mists gave them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the little dim windows went dark they whispered of dread and disaster. And Olney's children and stout wife prayed to the bland proper god of Baptists, and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella and rubbers unless the rain stopped by morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-wreathed out of the sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in vortices of white aether. And at noon elfin horns rang over the ocean as Olney, dry and light-footed, climbed down from the cliffs to antique Kingsport with the look of far places in his eyes. He could not recall what he had dreamed in the sky-perched hut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he had crept down that crag untraversed by other feet. Nor could he talk of these matters at all save with the Terrible Old Man, who afterward mumbled queer things in his long white beard; vowing that the man who came down from that crag was not wholly the man who went up, and that somewhere under that grey peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney.\n\nAnd ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination. His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion calls for it. In his glance there is not any restless light, and if he ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin horns it is only at night when old dreams are wandering. He has never seen Kingsport again, for his family disliked the funny old houses, and complained that the drains were impossibly bad. They have a trim bungalow now at Bristol Highlands, where no tall crags tower, and the neighbours are urban and modern.\n\nBut in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man admits a thing untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps boisterous out of the north past the high ancient house that is one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous brooding silence ever before the bane of Kingsport's maritime cotters. And old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth's joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly. They say, too, that the fierce aurora comes oftener to that spot, shining blue in the north with visions of frozen worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and fantastic against wild coruscations. And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors are not quite so sure that all the muffled seaward ringing is that of the solemn buoys.\n\nWorst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of Kingsport's young men, who grow prone to listen at night to the north wind's faint distant sounds. They swear no harm or pain can inhabit that high peaked cottage, for in the new voices gladness beats, and with them the tinkle of laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists may bring to that haunted and northernmost pinnacle they do not know, but they long to extract some hint of the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door when clouds are thickest. And patriarchs dread lest some day one by one they seek out that inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn what centuried secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof which is part of the rocks and the stars and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome youths will come back they do not doubt, but they think a light may be gone from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. And they do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger and wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea to the skies.\n\nThey do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant hearths and gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the laughter and song in that high rocky place to grow louder. For as the voice which has come has brought fresh mists from the sea and from the north fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices will bring more mists and more lights, till perhaps the olden gods (whose existence they hint only in whispers for fear the Congregational parson shall hear) may come out of the deep and from unknown Kadath in the cold waste and make their dwelling on that evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentle hills and valleys of quiet simple fisherfolk. This they do not wish, for to plain people things not of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney said about a knock that the lone dweller feared, and a shape seen black and inquisitive against the mist through those queer translucent windows of leaded bull's-eyes.\n\nAll these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the morning mist still comes up by that lonely vertiginous peak with the steep ancient house, that grey low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange revels. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And when tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy on its lesser cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Street by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThere be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.\n\nMen of strength and honour fashioned that Street; good, valiant men of our blood who had come from the Blessed Isles across the sea. At first it was but a path trodden by bearers of water from the woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Then, as more men came to the growing cluster of houses and looked about for places to dwell, they built cabins along the north side; cabins of stout oaken logs with masonry on the side toward the forest, for many Indians lurked there with fire-arrows. And in a few years more, men built cabins on the south side of The Street.\n\nUp and down The Street walked grave men in conical hats, who most of the time carried muskets or fowling pieces. And there were also their bonneted wives and sober children. In the evening these men with their wives and children would sit about gigantic hearths and read and speak. Very simple were the things of which they read and spoke, yet things which gave them courage and goodness and helped them by day to subdue the forest and till the fields. And the children would listen, and learn of the laws and deeds of old, and of that dear England which they had never seen, or could not remember.\n\nThere was war, and thereafter no more Indians troubled The Street. The men, busy with labour, waxed prosperous and as happy as they knew how to be. And the children grew up comfortably, and more families came from the Mother Land to dwell on The Street. And the children's children, and the newcomers' children, grew up. The town was now a city, and one by one the cabins gave place to houses; simple, beautiful houses of brick and wood, with stone steps and iron railings and fanlights over the doors. No flimsy creations were these houses, for they were made to serve many a generation. Within there were carven mantels and graceful stairs, and sensible, pleasing furniture, china, and silver, brought from the Mother Land.\n\nSo The Street drank in the dreams of a young people, and rejoiced as its dwellers became more graceful and happy. Where once had been only strength and honour, taste and learning now abode as well. Books and paintings and music came to the houses, and the young men went to the university which rose above the plain to the north. In the place of conical hats and muskets there were three-cornered hats and small-swords, and lace and snowy periwigs. And there were cobblestones over which clattered many a blooded horse and rumbled many a gilded coach; and brick sidewalks with horse blocks and hitching-posts.\n\nThere were in that Street many trees; elms and oaks and maples of dignity; so that in the summer the scene was all soft verdure and twittering bird-song. And behind the houses were walled rose-gardens with hedged paths and sundials, where at evening the moon and stars would shine bewitchingly while fragrant blossoms glistened with dew.\n\nSo The Street dreamed on, past wars, calamities, and changes. Once most of the young men went away, and some never came back. That was when they furled the Old Flag and put up a new Banner of Stripes and Stars. But though men talked of great changes, The Street felt them not; for its folk were still the same, speaking of the old familiar things in the old familiar accents. And the trees still sheltered singing birds, and at evening the moon and stars looked down upon dewy blossoms in the walled rose-gardens.\n\nIn time there were no more swords, three-cornered hats, or periwigs in The Street. How strange seemed the denizens with their walking-sticks, tall beavers, and cropped heads! New sounds came from the distance\u2014first strange puffings and shrieks from the river a mile away, and then, many years later, strange puffings and shrieks and rumblings from other directions. The air was not quite so pure as before, but the spirit of the place had not changed. The blood and soul of the people were as the blood and soul of their ancestors who had fashioned The Street. Nor did the spirit change when they tore open the earth to lay down strange pipes, or when they set up tall posts bearing weird wires. There was so much ancient lore in that Street, that the past could not easily be forgotten.\n\nThen came days of evil, when many who had known The Street of old knew it no more; and many knew it, who had not known it before. And those who came were never as those who went away; for their accents were coarse and strident, and their mien and faces unpleasing. Their thoughts, too, fought with the wise, just spirit of The Street, so that The street pined silently as its houses fell into decay, and its trees died one by one, and its rose-gardens grew rank with weeds and waste. But it felt a stir of pride one day when again marched forth young men, some of whom never came back. These young men were clad in blue.\n\nWith the years worse fortune came to The Street. Its trees were all gone now, and its rose-gardens were displaced by the backs of cheap, ugly new buildings on parallel streets. Yet the houses remained, despite the ravages of the years and the storms and worms, for they had been made to serve many a generation. New kinds of faces appeared in The Street; swarthy, sinister faces with furtive eyes and odd features, whose owners spoke unfamiliar words and placed signs in known and unknown characters upon most of the musty houses. Push-carts crowded the gutters. A sordid, undefinable stench settled over the place, and the ancient spirit slept.\n\nGreat excitement once came to The Street. War and revolution were raging across the seas; a dynasty had collapsed, and its degenerate subjects were flocking with dubious intent to the Western Land. Many of these took lodgings in the battered houses that had once known the songs of birds and the scent of roses. Then the Western Land itself awoke, and joined the Mother Land in her titanic struggle for civilisation. Over the cities once more floated the Old Flag, companioned by the New Flag and by a plainer yet glorious Tri-colour. But not many flags floated over The Street, for therein brooded only fear and hatred and ignorance. Again young men went forth, but not quite as did the young men of those other days. Something was lacking. And the sons of those young men of other days, who did indeed go forth in olive-drab with the true spirit of their ancestors, went from distant places and knew not The Street and its ancient spirit.\n\nOver the seas there was a great victory, and in triumph most of the young men returned. Those who had lacked something lacked it no longer, yet did fear and hatred and ignorance still brood over The Street; for many had stayed behind, and many strangers had come from distant places to the ancient houses. And the young men who had returned dwelt there no longer. Swarthy and sinister were most of the strangers, yet among them one might find a few faces like those who fashioned The Street and moulded its spirit. Like and yet unlike, for there was in the eyes of all a weird, unhealthy glitter as of greed, ambition, vindictiveness, or misguided zeal. Unrest and treason were abroad amongst an evil few who plotted to strike the Western Land its death-blow, that they might mount to power over its ruins; even as assassins had mounted in that unhappy, frozen land from whence most of them had come. And the heart of that plotting was in The Street, whose crumbling houses teemed with alien makers of discord and echoed with the plans and speeches of those who yearned for the appointed day of blood, flame, and crime.\n\nOf the various odd assemblages in The Street, the law said much but could prove little. With great diligence did men of hidden badges linger and listen about such places as Petrovitch's Bakery, the squalid Rifkin School of Modern Economics, the Circle Social Club, and the Liberty Caf\u00e9. There congregated sinister men in great numbers, yet always was their speech guarded or in a foreign tongue. And still the old houses stood, with their forgotten lore of nobler, departed centuries; of sturdy colonial tenants and dewy rose-gardens in the moonlight. Sometimes a lone poet or traveller would come to view them, and would try to picture them in their vanished glory; yet of such travellers and poets there were not many.\n\nThe rumour now spread widely that these houses contained the leaders of a vast band of terrorists, who on a designated day were to launch an orgy of slaughter for the extermination of America and of all the fine old traditions which The Street had loved. Handbills and papers fluttered about filthy gutters; handbills and papers printed in many tongues and in many characters, yet all bearing messages of crime and rebellion. In these writings the people were urged to tear down the laws and virtues that our fathers had exalted; to stamp out the soul of the old America\u2014the soul that was bequeathed through a thousand and a half years of Anglo-Saxon freedom, justice, and moderation. It was said that the swart men who dwelt in The Street and congregated in its rotting edifices were the brains of a hideous revolution; that at their word of command many millions of brainless, besotted beasts would stretch forth their noisome talons from the slums of a thousand cities, burning, slaying, and destroying till the land of our fathers should be no more. All this was said and repeated, and many looked forward in dread to the fourth day of July, about which the strange writings hinted much; yet could nothing be found to place the guilt. None could tell just whose arrest might cut off the damnable plotting at its source. Many times came bands of bluecoated police to search the shaky houses, though at last they ceased to come; for they too had grown tired of law and order, and had abandoned all the city to its fate. Then men in olive-drab came, bearing muskets; till it seemed as if in its sad sleep The Street must have some haunting dreams of those other days, when musket-bearing men in conical hats walked along it from the woodland spring to the cluster of houses by the beach. Yet could no act be performed to check the impending cataclysm; for the swart, sinister men were old in cunning.\n\nSo The Street slept uneasily on, till one night there gathered in Petrovitch's Bakery and the Rifkin School of Modern Economics, and the Circle Social Club, and Liberty Caf\u00e9, and in other places as well, vast hordes of men whose eyes were big with horrible triumph and expectation. Over hidden wires strange messages travelled, and much was said of still stranger messages yet to travel; but most of this was not guessed till afterward, when the Western Land was safe from the peril. The men in olive-drab could not tell what was happening, or what they ought to do; for the swart, sinister men were skilled in subtlety and concealment.\n\nAnd yet the men in olive-drab will always remember that night, and will speak of The Street as they tell of it to their grandchildren; for many of them were sent there toward morning on a mission unlike that which they had expected. It was known that this nest of anarchy was old, and that the houses were tottering from the ravages of the years and the storms and the worms; yet was the happening of that summer night a surprise because of its very queer uniformity. It was, indeed, an exceedingly singular happening; though after all a simple one. For without warning, in one of the small hours beyond midnight, all the ravages of the years and the storms and the worms came to a tremendous climax; and after the crash there was nothing left standing in The Street save two ancient chimneys and part of a stout brick wall. Nor did anything that had been alive come alive from the ruins.\n\nA poet and a traveller, who came with the mighty crowd that sought the scene, tell odd stories. The poet says that all through the hours before dawn he beheld sordid ruins but indistinctly in the glare of the arc-lights; that there loomed above the wreckage another picture wherein he could descry moonlight and fair houses and elms and oaks and maples of dignity. And the traveller declares that instead of the place's wonted stench there lingered a delicate fragrance as of roses in full bloom. But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?\n\nThere be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I have told you of The Street.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Sweet Ermengarde Or, the Heart of a Country Girl by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nErmengarde Stubbs was the beauteous blonde daughter of Hiram Stubbs, a poor but honest farmer-bootlegger of Hogton, Vt. Her name was originally Ethyl Ermengarde, but her father persuaded her to drop the praenomen after the passage of the 18th Amendment, averring that it made him thirsty by reminding him of ethyl alcohol, C2H5OH. His own products contained mostly methyl or wood alcohol, CH3OH. Ermengarde confessed to sixteen summers, and branded as mendacious all reports to the effect that she was thirty. She had large black eyes, a prominent Roman nose, light hair which was never dark at the roots except when the local drug store was short on supplies, and a beautiful but inexpensive complexion. She was about 5ft 5.33...in tall, weighed 115.47 lbs. on her father's copy scales\u2014also off them\u2014and was adjudged most lovely by all the village swains who admired her father's farm and liked his liquid crops.\n\nErmengarde's hand was sought in matrimony by two ardent lovers. 'Squire Hardman, who had a mortgage on the old home, was very rich and elderly. He was dark and cruelly handsome, and always rode horseback and carried a riding-crop. Long had he sought the radiant Ermengarde, and now his ardour was fanned to fever heat by a secret known to him alone\u2014for upon the humble acres of Farmer Stubbs he had discovered a vein of rich GOLD!! \"Aha!\" said he, \"I will win the maiden ere her parent knows of his unsuspected wealth, and join to my fortune a greater fortune still!\" And so he began to call twice a week instead of once as before.\n\nBut alas for the sinister designs of a villain\u2014'Squire Hardman was not the only suitor for the fair one. Close by the village dwelt another\u2014the handsome Jack Manly, whose curly yellow hair had won the sweet Ermengarde's affection when both were toddling youngsters at the village school. Jack had long been too bashful to declare his passion, but one day while strolling along a shady lane by the old mill with Ermengarde, he had found courage to utter that which was within his heart.\n\n\"O light of my life,\" said he, \"my soul is so overburdened that I must speak! Ermengarde, my ideal [he pronounced it i-deel!], life has become an empty thing without you. Beloved of my spirit, behold a suppliant kneeling in the dust before thee. Ermengarde\u2014oh, Ermengarde, raise me to an heaven of joy and say that you will some day be mine! It is true that I am poor, but have I not youth and strength to fight my way to fame? This I can do only for you, dear Ethyl\u2014pardon me, Ermengarde\u2014my only, my most precious\u2014\" but here he paused to wipe his eyes and mop his brow, and the fair responded:\n\n\"Jack\u2014my angel\u2014at last\u2014I mean, this is so unexpected and quite unprecedented! I had never dreamed that you entertained sentiments of affection in connexion with one so lowly as Farmer Stubbs' child\u2014for I am still but a child! Such is your natural nobility that I had feared\u2014I mean thought\u2014you would be blind to such slight charms as I possess, and that you would seek your fortune in the great city; there meeting and wedding one of those more comely damsels whose splendour we observe in fashion books.\n\n\"But, Jack, since it is really I whom you adore, let us waive all needless circumlocution. Jack\u2014my darling\u2014my heart has long been susceptible to your manly graces. I cherish an affection for thee\u2014consider me thine own and be sure to buy the ring at Perkins' hardware store where they have such nice imitation diamonds in the window.\"\n\n\"Ermengarde, me love!\"\n\n\"Jack\u2014my precious!\"\n\n\"My darling!\"\n\n\"My own!\"\n\n\"My Gawd!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ And the Villain Still Pursued Her by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nBut these tender passages, sacred though their fervour, did not pass unobserved by profane eyes; for crouched in the bushes and gritting his teeth was the dastardly 'Squire Hardman! When the lovers had finally strolled away he leapt out into the lane, viciously twirling his moustache and riding-crop, and kicking an unquestionably innocent cat who was also out strolling.\n\n\"Curses!\" he cried\u2014Hardman, not the cat\u2014\"I am foiled in my plot to get the farm and the girl! But Jack Manly shall never succeed! I am a man of power\u2014and we shall see!\"\n\nThereupon he repaired to the humble Stubbs' cottage, where he found the fond father in the still-cellar washing bottles under the supervision of the gentle wife and mother, Hannah Stubbs. Coming directly to the point, the villain spoke:\n\n\"Farmer Stubbs, I cherish a tender affection of long standing for your lovely offspring, Ethyl Ermengarde. I am consumed with love, and wish her hand in matrimony. Always a man of few words, I will not descend to euphemism. Give me the girl or I will foreclose the mortgage and take the old home!\"\n\n\"But, Sir,\" pleaded the distracted Stubbs while his stricken spouse merely glowered, \"I am sure the child's affections are elsewhere placed.\"\n\n\"She must be mine!\" sternly snapped the sinister 'squire. \"I will make her love me\u2014none shall resist my will! Either she becomes muh wife or the old homestead goes!\"\n\nAnd with a sneer and flick of his riding-crop 'Squire Hardman strode out into the night.\n\nScarce had he departed, when there entered by the back door the radiant lovers, eager to tell the senior Stubbses of their new-found happiness. Imagine the universal consternation which reigned when all was known! Tears flowed like white ale, till suddenly Jack remembered he was the hero and raised his head, declaiming in appropriately virile accents:\n\n\"Never shall the fair Ermengarde be offered up to this beast as a sacrifice while I live! I shall protect her\u2014she is mine, mine, mine\u2014and then some! Fear not, dear father and mother to be\u2014I will defend you all! You shall have the old home still [adverb, not noun\u2014although Jack was by no means out of sympathy with Stubbs' kind of farm produce] and I shall lead to the altar the beauteous Ermengarde, loveliest of her sex! To perdition with the crool 'squire and his ill-gotten gold\u2014the right shall always win, and a hero is always in the right! I will go to the great city and there make a fortune to save you all ere the mortgage fall due! Farewell, my love\u2014I leave you now in tears, but I shall return to pay off the mortgage and claim you as my bride!\"\n\n\"Jack, my protector!\"\n\n\"Ermie, my sweet roll!\"\n\n\"Dearest!\"\n\n\"Darling!\u2014and don't forget that ring at Perkins'.\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Happy Ever Afterward by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOne day the wealthy heiress Ermengarde S. Van Itty hired a new second assistant chauffeur. Struck by something familiar in his face, she looked again and gasped. Lo! it was none other than the perfidious Algernon Reginald Jones, whom she had pushed from a car window on that fateful day! He had survived\u2014this much was almost immediately evident. Also, he had wed the other woman, who had run away with the milkman and all the money in the house. Now wholly humbled, he asked forgiveness of our heroine, and confided to her the whole tale of the gold on her father's farm. Moved beyond words, she raised his salary a dollar a month and resolved to gratify at last that always unquenchable anxiety to relieve the worry of the old folks. So one bright day Ermengarde motored back to Hogton and arrived at the farm just as 'Squire Hardman was foreclosing the mortgage and ordering the old folks out.\n\n\"Stay, villain!\" she cried, flashing a colossal roll of bills. \"You are foiled at last! Here is your money\u2014now go, and never darken our humble door again!\"\n\nThen followed a joyous reunion, whilst the 'squire twisted his moustache and riding-crop in bafflement and dismay. But hark! What is this? Footsteps sound on the old gravel walk, and who should appear but our hero, Jack Manly\u2014worn and seedy, but radiant of face. Seeking at once the downcast villain, he said:\n\n\"'Squire\u2014lend me a ten-spot, will you? I have just come back from the city with my beauteous bride, the fair Bridget Goldstein, and need something to start things on the old farm.\" Then turning to the Stubbses, he apologised for his inability to pay off the mortgage as agreed.\n\n\"Don't mention it,\" said Ermengarde, \"prosperity has come to us, and I will consider it sufficient payment if you will forget forever the foolish fancies of our childhood.\"\n\nAll this time Mrs. Van Itty had been sitting in the motor waiting for Ermengarde; but as she lazily eyed the sharp-faced Hannah Stubbs a vague memory started from the back of her brain. Then it all came to her, and she shrieked accusingly at the agrestic matron.\n\n\"You\u2014you\u2014Hannah Smith\u2014I know you now! Twenty-eight years ago you were my baby Maude's nurse and stole her from the cradle!! Where, oh, where is my child?\" Then a thought came as the lightning in a murky sky. \"Ermengarde\u2014you say she is your daughter.... She is mine! Fate has restored to me my old chee-ild\u2014my tiny Maudie!\u2014Ermengarde\u2014Maude\u2014come to your mother's loving arms!!!\"\n\nBut Ermengarde was doing some tall thinking. How could she get away with the sixteen-year-old stuff if she had been stolen twenty-eight years ago? And if she was not Stubbs' daughter the gold would never be hers. Mrs. Van Itty was rich, but 'Squire Hardman was richer. So, approaching the dejected villain, she inflicted upon him the last terrible punishment.\n\n\"'Squire, dear,\" she murmured, \"I have reconsidered all. I love you and your naive strength. Marry me at once or I will have you prosecuted for that kidnapping last year. Foreclose your mortgage and enjoy with me the gold your cleverness discovered. Come, dear!\" And the poor dub did.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Temple by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n(Manuscript found on the coast of Yucatan.)\n\nOn August 20, 1917, I, Karl Heinrich, Graf von Altberg-Ehrenstein, Lieutenant-Commander in the Imperial German Navy and in charge of the submarine U-29, deposit this bottle and record in the Atlantic Ocean at a point to me unknown but probably about N. Latitude 20\u00b0, W. Longitude 35\u00b0, where my ship lies disabled on the ocean floor. I do so because of my desire to set certain unusual facts before the public; a thing I shall not in all probability survive to accomplish in person, since the circumstances surrounding me are as menacing as they are extraordinary, and involve not only the hopeless crippling of the U-29, but the impairment of my iron German will in a manner most disastrous.\n\nOn the afternoon of June 18, as reported by wireless to the U-61, bound for Kiel, we torpedoed the British freighter Victory, New York to Liverpool, in N. Latitude 45\u00b0 16\u2032, W. Longitude 28\u00b0 34\u2032; permitting the crew to leave in boats in order to obtain a good cinema view for the admiralty records. The ship sank quite picturesquely, bow first, the stern rising high out of the water whilst the hull shot down perpendicularly to the bottom of the sea. Our camera missed nothing, and I regret that so fine a reel of film should never reach Berlin. After that we sank the lifeboats with our guns and submerged.\n\nWhen we rose to the surface about sunset a seaman's body was found on the deck, hands gripping the railing in curious fashion. The poor fellow was young, rather dark, and very handsome; probably an Italian or Greek, and undoubtedly of the Victory's crew. He had evidently sought refuge on the very ship which had been forced to destroy his own\u2014one more victim of the unjust war of aggression which the English pig-dogs are waging upon the Fatherland. Our men searched him for souvenirs, and found in his coat pocket a very odd bit of ivory carved to represent a youth's head crowned with laurel. My fellow-officer, Lieut. Klenze, believed that the thing was of great age and artistic value, so took it from the men for himself. How it had ever come into the possession of a common sailor, neither he nor I could imagine.\n\nAs the dead man was thrown overboard there occurred two incidents which created much disturbance amongst the crew. The fellow's eyes had been closed; but in the dragging of his body to the rail they were jarred open, and many seemed to entertain a queer delusion that they gazed steadily and mockingly at Schmidt and Zimmer, who were bent over the corpse. The Boatswain M\u00fcller, an elderly man who would have known better had he not been a superstitious Alsatian swine, became so excited by this impression that he watched the body in the water; and swore that after it sank a little it drew its limbs into a swimming position and sped away to the south under the waves. Klenze and I did not like these displays of peasant ignorance, and severely reprimanded the men, particularly M\u00fcller.\n\nThe next day a very troublesome situation was created by the indisposition of some of the crew. They were evidently suffering from the nervous strain of our long voyage, and had had bad dreams. Several seemed quite dazed and stupid; and after satisfying myself that they were not feigning their weakness, I excused them from their duties. The sea was rather rough, so we descended to a depth where the waves were less troublesome. Here we were comparatively calm, despite a somewhat puzzling southward current which we could not identify from our oceanographic charts. The moans of the sick men were decidedly annoying; but since they did not appear to demoralise the rest of the crew, we did not resort to extreme measures. It was our plan to remain where we were and intercept the liner Dacia, mentioned in information from agents in New York.\n\nIn the early evening we rose to the surface, and found the sea less heavy. The smoke of a battleship was on the northern horizon, but our distance and ability to submerge made us safe. What worried us more was the talk of Boatswain M\u00fcller, which grew wilder as night came on. He was in a detestably childish state, and babbled of some illusion of dead bodies drifting past the undersea portholes; bodies which looked at him intensely, and which he recognised in spite of bloating as having seen dying during some of our victorious German exploits. And he said that the young man we had found and tossed overboard was their leader. This was very gruesome and abnormal, so we confined M\u00fcller in irons and had him soundly whipped. The men were not pleased at his punishment, but discipline was necessary. We also denied the request of a delegation headed by Seaman Zimmer, that the curious carved ivory head be cast into the sea.\n\nOn June 20, Seamen Bohm and Schmidt, who had been ill the day before, became violently insane. I regretted that no physician was included in our complement of officers, since German lives are precious; but the constant ravings of the two concerning a terrible curse were most subversive of discipline, so drastic steps were taken. The crew accepted the event in a sullen fashion, but it seemed to quiet M\u00fcller; who thereafter gave us no trouble. In the evening we released him, and he went about his duties silently.\n\nIn the week that followed we were all very nervous, watching for the Dacia. The tension was aggravated by the disappearance of M\u00fcller and Zimmer, who undoubtedly committed suicide as a result of the fears which had seemed to harass them, though they were not observed in the act of jumping overboard. I was rather glad to be rid of M\u00fcller, for even his silence had unfavourably affected the crew. Everyone seemed inclined to be silent now, as though holding a secret fear. Many were ill, but none made a disturbance. Lieut. Klenze chafed under the strain, and was annoyed by the merest trifles\u2014such as the school of dolphins which gathered about the U-29 in increasing numbers, and the growing intensity of that southward current which was not on our chart.\n\nIt at length became apparent that we had missed the Dacia altogether. Such failures are not uncommon, and we were more pleased than disappointed; since our return to Wilhelmshaven was now in order. At noon June 28 we turned northeastward, and despite some rather comical entanglements with the unusual masses of dolphins were soon under way.\n\nThe explosion in the engine room at 2 P.M. was wholly a surprise. No defect in the machinery or carelessness in the men had been noticed, yet without warning the ship was racked from end to end with a colossal shock. Lieut. Klenze hurried to the engine room, finding the fuel-tank and most of the mechanism shattered, and Engineers Raabe and Schneider instantly killed. Our situation had suddenly become grave indeed; for though the chemical air regenerators were intact, and though we could use the devices for raising and submerging the ship and opening the hatches as long as compressed air and storage batteries might hold out, we were powerless to propel or guide the submarine. To seek rescue in the lifeboats would be to deliver ourselves into the hands of enemies unreasonably embittered against our great German nation, and our wireless had failed ever since the Victory affair to put us in touch with a fellow U-boat of the Imperial Navy.\n\nFrom the hour of the accident till July 2 we drifted constantly to the south, almost without plans and encountering no vessel. Dolphins still encircled the U-29, a somewhat remarkable circumstance considering the distance we had covered. On the morning of July 2 we sighted a warship flying American colours, and the men became very restless in their desire to surrender. Finally Lieut. Klenze had to shoot a seaman named Traube, who urged this un-German act with especial violence. This quieted the crew for the time, and we submerged unseen.\n\nThe next afternoon a dense flock of sea-birds appeared from the south, and the ocean began to heave ominously. Closing our hatches, we awaited developments until we realised that we must either submerge or be swamped in the mounting waves. Our air pressure and electricity were diminishing, and we wished to avoid all unnecessary use of our slender mechanical resources; but in this case there was no choice. We did not descend far, and when after several hours the sea was calmer, we decided to return to the surface. Here, however, a new trouble developed; for the ship failed to respond to our direction in spite of all that the mechanics could do. As the men grew more frightened at this undersea imprisonment, some of them began to mutter again about Lieut. Klenze's ivory image, but the sight of an automatic pistol calmed them. We kept the poor devils as busy as we could, tinkering at the machinery even when we knew it was useless.\n\nKlenze and I usually slept at different times; and it was during my sleep, about 5 A.M., July 4, that the general mutiny broke loose. The six remaining pigs of seamen, suspecting that we were lost, had suddenly burst into a mad fury at our refusal to surrender to the Yankee battleship two days before; and were in a delirium of cursing and destruction. They roared like the animals they were, and broke instruments and furniture indiscriminately; screaming about such nonsense as the curse of the ivory image and the dark dead youth who looked at them and swam away. Lieut. Klenze seemed paralysed and inefficient, as one might expect of a soft, womanish Rhinelander. I shot all six men, for it was necessary, and made sure that none remained alive.\n\nWe expelled the bodies through the double hatches and were alone in the U-29. Klenze seemed very nervous, and drank heavily. It was decided that we remain alive as long as possible, using the large stock of provisions and chemical supply of oxygen, none of which had suffered from the crazy antics of those swine-hound seamen. Our compasses, depth gauges, and other delicate instruments were ruined; so that henceforth our only reckoning would be guesswork, based on our watches, the calendar, and our apparent drift as judged by any objects we might spy through the portholes or from the conning tower. Fortunately we had storage batteries still capable of long use, both for interior lighting and for the searchlight. We often cast a beam around the ship, but saw only dolphins, swimming parallel to our own drifting course. I was scientifically interested in those dolphins; for though the ordinary Delphinus delphis is a cetacean mammal, unable to subsist without air, I watched one of the swimmers closely for two hours, and did not see him alter his submerged condition.\n\nWith the passage of time Klenze and I decided that we were still drifting south, meanwhile sinking deeper and deeper. We noted the marine fauna and flora, and read much on the subject in the books I had carried with me for spare moments. I could not help observing, however, the inferior scientific knowledge of my companion. His mind was not Prussian, but given to imaginings and speculations which have no value. The fact of our coming death affected him curiously, and he would frequently pray in remorse over the men, women, and children we had sent to the bottom; forgetting that all things are noble which serve the German state. After a time he became noticeably unbalanced, gazing for hours at his ivory image and weaving fanciful stories of the lost and forgotten things under the sea. Sometimes, as a psychological experiment, I would lead him on in these wanderings, and listen to his endless poetical quotations and tales of sunken ships. I was very sorry for him, for I dislike to see a German suffer; but he was not a good man to die with. For myself I was proud, knowing how the Fatherland would revere my memory and how my sons would be taught to be men like me.\n\nOn August 9, we espied the ocean floor, and sent a powerful beam from the searchlight over it. It was a vast undulating plain, mostly covered with seaweed, and strown with the shells of small molluscs. Here and there were slimy objects of puzzling contour, draped with weeds and encrusted with barnacles, which Klenze declared must be ancient ships lying in their graves. He was puzzled by one thing, a peak of solid matter, protruding above the ocean bed nearly four feet at its apex; about two feet thick, with flat sides and smooth upper surfaces which met at a very obtuse angle. I called the peak a bit of outcropping rock, but Klenze thought he saw carvings on it. After a while he began to shudder, and turned away from the scene as if frightened; yet could give no explanation save that he was overcome with the vastness, darkness, remoteness, antiquity, and mystery of the oceanic abysses. His mind was tired, but I am always a German, and was quick to notice two things; that the U-29 was standing the deep-sea pressure splendidly, and that the peculiar dolphins were still about us, even at a depth where the existence of high organisms is considered impossible by most naturalists. That I had previously overestimated our depth, I was sure; but none the less we must still be deep enough to make these phenomena remarkable. Our southward speed, as gauged by the ocean floor, was about as I had estimated from the organisms passed at higher levels.\n\nIt was at 3:15 P.M., August 12, that poor Klenze went wholly mad. He had been in the conning tower using the searchlight when I saw him bound into the library compartment where I sat reading, and his face at once betrayed him. I will repeat here what he said, underlining the words he emphasised: \"He is calling! He is calling! I hear him! We must go!\" As he spoke he took his ivory image from the table, pocketed it, and seized my arm in an effort to drag me up the companionway to the deck. In a moment I understood that he meant to open the hatch and plunge with me into the water outside, a vagary of suicidal and homicidal mania for which I was scarcely prepared. As I hung back and attempted to soothe him he grew more violent, saying: \"Come now\u2014do not wait until later; it is better to repent and be forgiven than to defy and be condemned.\" Then I tried the opposite of the soothing plan, and told him he was mad\u2014pitifully demented. But he was unmoved, and cried: \"If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! Come and be mad whilst he still calls with mercy!\"\n\nThis outburst seemed to relieve a pressure in his brain; for as he finished he grew much milder, asking me to let him depart alone if I would not accompany him. My course at once became clear. He was a German, but only a Rhinelander and a commoner; and he was now a potentially dangerous madman. By complying with his suicidal request I could immediately free myself from one who was no longer a companion but a menace. I asked him to give me the ivory image before he went, but this request brought from him such uncanny laughter that I did not repeat it. Then I asked him if he wished to leave any keepsake or lock of hair for his family in Germany in case I should be rescued, but again he gave me that strange laugh. So as he climbed the ladder I went to the levers, and allowing proper time-intervals operated the machinery which sent him to his death. After I saw that he was no longer in the boat I threw the searchlight around the water in an effort to obtain a last glimpse of him; since I wished to ascertain whether the water-pressure would flatten him as it theoretically should, or whether the body would be unaffected, like those extraordinary dolphins. I did not, however, succeed in finding my late companion, for the dolphins were massed thickly and obscuringly about the conning tower.\n\nThat evening I regretted that I had not taken the ivory image surreptitiously from poor Klenze's pocket as he left, for the memory of it fascinated me. I could not forget the youthful, beautiful head with its leafy crown, though I am not by nature an artist. I was also sorry that I had no one with whom to converse. Klenze, though not my mental equal, was much better than no one. I did not sleep well that night, and wondered exactly when the end would come. Surely, I had little enough chance of rescue.\n\nThe next day I ascended to the conning tower and commenced the customary searchlight explorations. Northward the view was much the same as it had been all the four days since we had sighted the bottom, but I perceived that the drifting of the U-29 was less rapid. As I swung the beam around to the south, I noticed that the ocean floor ahead fell away in a marked declivity, and bore curiously regular blocks of stone in certain places, disposed as if in accordance with definite patterns. The boat did not at once descend to match the greater ocean depth, so I was soon forced to adjust the searchlight to cast a sharply downward beam. Owing to the abruptness of the change a wire was disconnected, which necessitated a delay of many minutes for repairs; but at length the light streamed on again, flooding the marine valley below me.\n\nI am not given to emotion of any kind, but my amazement was very great when I saw what lay revealed in that electrical glow. And yet as one reared in the best Kultur of Prussia I should not have been amazed, for geology and tradition alike tell us of great transpositions in oceanic and continental areas. What I saw was an extended and elaborate array of ruined edifices; all of magnificent though unclassified architecture, and in various stages of preservation. Most appeared to be of marble, gleaming whitely in the rays of the searchlight, and the general plan was of a large city at the bottom of a narrow valley, with numerous isolated temples and villas on the steep slopes above. Roofs were fallen and columns were broken, but there still remained an air of immemorially ancient splendour which nothing could efface.\n\nConfronted at last with the Atlantis I had formerly deemed largely a myth, I was the most eager of explorers. At the bottom of that valley a river once had flowed; for as I examined the scene more closely I beheld the remains of stone and marble bridges and sea-walls, and terraces and embankments once verdant and beautiful. In my enthusiasm I became nearly as idiotic and sentimental as poor Klenze, and was very tardy in noticing that the southward current had ceased at last, allowing the U-29 to settle slowly down upon the sunken city as an a\u00ebroplane settles upon a town of the upper earth. I was slow, too, in realising that the school of unusual dolphins had vanished.\n\nIn about two hours the boat rested in a paved plaza close to the rocky wall of the valley. On one side I could view the entire city as it sloped from the plaza down to the old river-bank; on the other side, in startling proximity, I was confronted by the richly ornate and perfectly preserved facade of a great building, evidently a temple, hollowed from the solid rock. Of the original workmanship of this titanic thing I can only make conjectures. The facade, of immense magnitude, apparently covers a continuous hollow recess; for its windows are many and widely distributed. In the centre yawns a great open door, reached by an impressive flight of steps, and surrounded by exquisite carvings like the figures of Bacchanals in relief. Foremost of all are the great columns and frieze, both decorated with sculptures of inexpressible beauty; obviously portraying idealised pastoral scenes and processions of priests and priestesses bearing strange ceremonial devices in adoration of a radiant god. The art is of the most phenomenal perfection, largely Hellenic in idea, yet strangely individual. It imparts an impression of terrible antiquity, as though it were the remotest rather than the immediate ancestor of Greek art. Nor can I doubt that every detail of this massive product was fashioned from the virgin hillside rock of our planet. It is palpably a part of the valley wall, though how the vast interior was ever excavated I cannot imagine. Perhaps a cavern or series of caverns furnished the nucleus. Neither age nor submersion has corroded the pristine grandeur of this awful fane\u2014for fane indeed it must be\u2014and today after thousands of years it rests untarnished and inviolate in the endless night and silence of an ocean chasm.\n\nI cannot reckon the number of hours I spent in gazing at the sunken city with its buildings, arches, statues, and bridges, and the colossal temple with its beauty and mystery. Though I knew that death was near, my curiosity was consuming; and I threw the searchlight's beam about in eager quest. The shaft of light permitted me to learn many details, but refused to shew anything within the gaping door of the rock-hewn temple; and after a time I turned off the current, conscious of the need of conserving power. The rays were now perceptibly dimmer than they had been during the weeks of drifting. And as if sharpened by the coming deprivation of light, my desire to explore the watery secrets grew. I, a German, should be the first to tread those aeon-forgotten ways!\n\nI produced and examined a deep-sea diving suit of joined metal, and experimented with the portable light and air regenerator. Though I should have trouble in managing the double hatches alone, I believed I could overcome all obstacles with my scientific skill and actually walk about the dead city in person.\n\nOn August 16 I effected an exit from the U-29, and laboriously made my way through the ruined and mud-choked streets to the ancient river. I found no skeletons or other human remains, but gleaned a wealth of archaeological lore from sculptures and coins. Of this I cannot now speak save to utter my awe at a culture in the full noon of glory when cave-dwellers roamed Europe and the Nile flowed unwatched to the sea. Others, guided by this manuscript if it shall ever be found, must unfold the mysteries at which I can only hint. I returned to the boat as my electric batteries grew feeble, resolved to explore the rock temple on the following day.\n\nOn the 17th, as my impulse to search out the mystery of the temple waxed still more insistent, a great disappointment befell me; for I found that the materials needed to replenish the portable light had perished in the mutiny of those pigs in July. My rage was unbounded, yet my German sense forbade me to venture unprepared into an utterly black interior which might prove the lair of some indescribable marine monster or a labyrinth of passages from whose windings I could never extricate myself. All I could do was to turn on the waning searchlight of the U-29, and with its aid walk up the temple steps and study the exterior carvings. The shaft of light entered the door at an upward angle, and I peered in to see if I could glimpse anything, but all in vain. Not even the roof was visible; and though I took a step or two inside after testing the floor with a staff, I dared not go farther. Moreover, for the first time in my life I experienced the emotion of dread. I began to realise how some of poor Klenze's moods had arisen, for as the temple drew me more and more, I feared its aqueous abysses with a blind and mounting terror. Returning to the submarine, I turned off the lights and sat thinking in the dark. Electricity must now be saved for emergencies.\n\nSaturday the 18th I spent in total darkness, tormented by thoughts and memories that threatened to overcome my German will. Klenze had gone mad and perished before reaching this sinister remnant of a past unwholesomely remote, and had advised me to go with him. Was, indeed, Fate preserving my reason only to draw me irresistibly to an end more horrible and unthinkable than any man has dreamed of? Clearly, my nerves were sorely taxed, and I must cast off these impressions of weaker men.\n\nI could not sleep Saturday night, and turned on the lights regardless of the future. It was annoying that the electricity should not last out the air and provisions. I revived my thoughts of euthanasia, and examined my automatic pistol. Toward morning I must have dropped asleep with the lights on, for I awoke in darkness yesterday afternoon to find the batteries dead. I struck several matches in succession, and desperately regretted the improvidence which had caused us long ago to use up the few candles we carried.\n\nAfter the fading of the last match I dared to waste, I sat very quietly without a light. As I considered the inevitable end my mind ran over preceding events, and developed a hitherto dormant impression which would have caused a weaker and more superstitious man to shudder. The head of the radiant god in the sculptures on the rock temple is the same as that carven bit of ivory which the dead sailor brought from the sea and which poor Klenze carried back into the sea.\n\nI was a little dazed by this coincidence, but did not become terrified. It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive short cut of supernaturalism. The coincidence was strange, but I was too sound a reasoner to connect circumstances which admit of no logical connexion, or to associate in any uncanny fashion the disastrous events which had led from the Victory affair to my present plight. Feeling the need of more rest, I took a sedative and secured some more sleep. My nervous condition was reflected in my dreams, for I seemed to hear the cries of drowning persons, and to see dead faces pressing against the portholes of the boat. And among the dead faces was the living, mocking face of the youth with the ivory image.\n\nI must be careful how I record my awaking today, for I am unstrung, and much hallucination is necessarily mixed with fact. Psychologically my case is most interesting, and I regret that it cannot be observed scientifically by a competent German authority. Upon opening my eyes my first sensation was an overmastering desire to visit the rock temple; a desire which grew every instant, yet which I automatically sought to resist through some emotion of fear which operated in the reverse direction. Next there came to me the impression of light amidst the darkness of dead batteries, and I seemed to see a sort of phosphorescent glow in the water through the porthole which opened toward the temple. This aroused my curiosity, for I knew of no deep-sea organism capable of emitting such luminosity. But before I could investigate there came a third impression which because of its irrationality caused me to doubt the objectivity of anything my senses might record. It was an aural delusion; a sensation of rhythmic, melodic sound as of some wild yet beautiful chant or choral hymn, coming from the outside through the absolutely sound-proof hull of the U-29. Convinced of my psychological and nervous abnormality, I lighted some matches and poured a stiff dose of sodium bromide solution, which seemed to calm me to the extent of dispelling the illusion of sound. But the phosphorescence remained, and I had difficulty in repressing a childish impulse to go to the porthole and seek its source. It was horribly realistic, and I could soon distinguish by its aid the familiar objects around me, as well as the empty sodium bromide glass of which I had had no former visual impression in its present location. The last circumstance made me ponder, and I crossed the room and touched the glass. It was indeed in the place where I had seemed to see it. Now I knew that the light was either real or part of an hallucination so fixed and consistent that I could not hope to dispel it, so abandoning all resistance I ascended to the conning tower to look for the luminous agency. Might it not actually be another U-boat, offering possibilities of rescue?\n\nIt is well that the reader accept nothing which follows as objective truth, for since the events transcend natural law, they are necessarily the subjective and unreal creations of my overtaxed mind. When I attained the conning tower I found the sea in general far less luminous than I had expected. There was no animal or vegetable phosphorescence about, and the city that sloped down to the river was invisible in blackness. What I did see was not spectacular, not grotesque or terrifying, yet it removed my last vestige of trust in my consciousness. For the door and windows of the undersea temple hewn from the rocky hill were vividly aglow with a flickering radiance, as from a mighty altar-flame far within.\n\nLater incidents are chaotic. As I stared at the uncannily lighted door and windows, I became subject to the most extravagant visions\u2014visions so extravagant that I cannot even relate them. I fancied that I discerned objects in the temple\u2014objects both stationary and moving\u2014and seemed to hear again the unreal chant that had floated to me when first I awaked. And over all rose thoughts and fears which centred in the youth from the sea and the ivory image whose carving was duplicated on the frieze and columns of the temple before me. I thought of poor Klenze, and wondered where his body rested with the image he had carried back into the sea. He had warned me of something, and I had not heeded\u2014but he was a soft-headed Rhinelander who went mad at troubles a Prussian could bear with ease.\n\nThe rest is very simple. My impulse to visit and enter the temple has now become an inexplicable and imperious command which ultimately cannot be denied. My own German will no longer controls my acts, and volition is henceforward possible only in minor matters. Such madness it was which drove Klenze to his death, bareheaded and unprotected in the ocean; but I am a Prussian and a man of sense, and will use to the last what little will I have. When first I saw that I must go, I prepared my diving suit, helmet, and air regenerator for instant donning; and immediately commenced to write this hurried chronicle in the hope that it may some day reach the world. I shall seal the manuscript in a bottle and entrust it to the sea as I leave the U-29 forever.\n\nI have no fear, not even from the prophecies of the madman Klenze. What I have seen cannot be true, and I know that this madness of my own will at most lead only to suffocation when my air is gone. The light in the temple is a sheer delusion, and I shall die calmly, like a German, in the black and forgotten depths. This daemoniac laughter which I hear as I write comes only from my own weakening brain. So I will carefully don my diving suit and walk boldly up the steps into that primal shrine; that silent secret of unfathomed waters and uncounted years.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Terrible Old Man by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIt was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the Terrible Old Man. This old man dwells all alone in a very ancient house on Water Street near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than robbery.\n\nThe inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things about the Terrible Old Man which generally keep him safe from the attention of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his colleagues, despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude somewhere about his musty and venerable abode. He is, in truth, a very strange person, believed to have been a captain of East India clipper ships in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. Among the gnarled trees in the front yard of his aged and neglected place he maintains a strange collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they resemble the idols in some obscure Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of the small boys who love to taunt the Terrible Old Man about his long white hair and beard, or to break the small-paned windows of his dwelling with wicked missiles; but there are other things which frighten the older and more curious folk who sometimes steal up to the house to peer in through the dusty panes. These folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a small piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer. Those who have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations, do not watch him again. But Angelo Ricci and Joe Czanek and Manuel Silva were not of Kingsport blood; they were of that new and heterogeneous alien stock which lies outside the charmed circle of New England life and traditions, and they saw in the Terrible Old Man merely a tottering, almost helpless greybeard, who could not walk without the aid of his knotted cane, and whose thin, weak hands shook pitifully. They were really quite sorry in their way for the lonely, unpopular old fellow, whom everybody shunned, and at whom all the dogs barked singularly. But business is business, and to a robber whose soul is in his profession, there is a lure and a challenge about a very old and very feeble man who has no account at the bank, and who pays for his few necessities at the village store with Spanish gold and silver minted two centuries ago.\n\nMessrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva selected the night of April 11th for their call. Mr. Ricci and Mr. Silva were to interview the poor old gentleman, whilst Mr. Czanek waited for them and their presumable metallic burden with a covered motor-car in Ship Street, by the gate in the tall rear wall of their host's grounds. Desire to avoid needless explanations in case of unexpected police intrusions prompted these plans for a quiet and unostentatious departure.\n\nAs prearranged, the three adventurers started out separately in order to prevent any evil-minded suspicions afterward. Messrs. Ricci and Silva met in Water Street by the old man's front gate, and although they did not like the way the moon shone down upon the painted stones through the budding branches of the gnarled trees, they had more important things to think about than mere idle superstition. They feared it might be unpleasant work making the Terrible Old Man loquacious concerning his hoarded gold and silver, for aged sea-captains are notably stubborn and perverse. Still, he was very old and very feeble, and there were two visitors. Messrs. Ricci and Silva were experienced in the art of making unwilling persons voluble, and the screams of a weak and exceptionally venerable man can be easily muffled. So they moved up to the one lighted window and heard the Terrible Old Man talking childishly to his bottles with pendulums. Then they donned masks and knocked politely at the weather-stained oaken door.\n\nWaiting seemed very long to Mr. Czanek as he fidgeted restlessly in the covered motor-car by the Terrible Old Man's back gate in Ship Street. He was more than ordinarily tender-hearted, and he did not like the hideous screams he had heard in the ancient house just after the hour appointed for the deed. Had he not told his colleagues to be as gentle as possible with the pathetic old sea-captain? Very nervously he watched that narrow oaken gate in the high and ivy-clad stone wall. Frequently he consulted his watch, and wondered at the delay. Had the old man died before revealing where his treasure was hidden, and had a thorough search become necessary? Mr. Czanek did not like to wait so long in the dark in such a place. Then he sensed a soft tread or tapping on the walk inside the gate, heard a gentle fumbling at the rusty latch, and saw the narrow, heavy door swing inward. And in the pallid glow of the single dim street-lamp he strained his eyes to see what his colleagues had brought out of that sinister house which loomed so close behind. But when he looked, he did not see what he had expected; for his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of that man's eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.\n\nLittle things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. And some people even spoke of things as trivial as the deserted motor-car found in Ship Street, or certain especially inhuman cries, probably of a stray animal or migratory bird, heard in the night by wakeful citizens. But in this idle village gossip the Terrible Old Man took no interest at all. He was by nature reserved, and when one is aged and feeble one's reserve is doubly strong. Besides, so ancient a sea-captain must have witnessed scores of things much more stirring in the far-off days of his unremembered youth.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ H.P. Lovecraft's \"The Thing in the Moonlight\" by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nMy dreams occasionally approach'd the phantastical in character, tho' falling somewhat short of coherence. One scene is especially stamp'd upon my recollection\u2014that of a dank, f\u0153tid, reed-choak'd marsh under a grey autumn sky, with a rugged cliff of lichen-crusted stone rising to the north. Impell'd by some obscure quest, I ascended a rift or cleft in this beetling precipice, noting as I did so the black mouths of many fearsome burrows extending from both walls into the depths of the stony plateau. Morgan is not a literary man; in fact he cannot speak English with any degree of coherency. That is what makes me wonder about the words he wrote, though others have laughed.\n\nHe was alone the evening it happened. Suddenly an unconquerable urge to write came over him, and taking pen in hand he wrote the following:\n\nMy name is Howard Phillips. I live at 66 College Street, in Providence, Rhode Island. On November 24, 1927\u2014for I know not even what the year may be now\u2014, I fell asleep and dreamed, since when I have been unable to awaken.\n\nMy dream began in a dank, reed-choked marsh that lay under a gray autumn sky, with a rugged cliff of lichen-crusted stone rising to the north. Impelled by some obscure quest, I ascended a rift or cleft in this beetling precipice, noting as I did so the black mouths of many fearsome burrows extending from both walls into the depths of the stony plateau.\n\nAt several points the passage was roof'd over by the choaking of the upper parts of the narrow fissure; these places being exceedingly dark, & forbidding the perception of such burrows as may have existed there. In one such dark space I felt conscious of a singular accession of fright, as if some subtile & bodiless emanation from the abyss were ingulphing my spirit; but the blackness was too great for me to perceive the source of my alarm. At several points the passage was roofed over by the choking of the upper parts of the narrow fissure; these places being exceeding dark, and forbidding the perception of such burrows as may have existed there. In one such dark space I felt conscious of a singular accession of fright, as if some subtle and bodiless emanation from the abyss were engulfing my spirit; but the blackness was too great for me to perceive the source of my alarm.\n\nAt length I emerg'd upon a tableland of moss-grown rock & scanty soil, lit up by a faint moonlight which had replac'd the expiring orb of day. Casting my eyes about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately quitted. At length I emerged upon a tableland of moss-grown rock and scanty soil, lit by a faint moonlight which had replaced the expiring orb of day. Casting my eyes about, I beheld no living object; but was sensible of a very peculiar stirring far below me, amongst the whispering rushes of the pestilential swamp I had lately quitted.\n\nAfter walking for some distance, I encounter'd the rusty tracks of a street-railway, & the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp & sagging trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car numbered 1852\u2014of a plain, double-trucked type common from 1900 to 1910. It was untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire & the air-brake pump now and then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it & looked vainly about for the light switch\u2014noting as I did so the absence of controller handle which implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat down in one of the cross seats toward the middle, awaiting the arrival of the crew & the starting of the vehicle. Presently I heard a swishing in the sparce grass toward the left, & saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, & I could not doubt but that they were the conductor & motorman. Then one of them sniffed with singular sharpness, & raised his face to howl to the moon. The other dropped on all fours to run toward the car. After walking for some distance, I encountered the rusty tracks of a street railway, and the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp and sagging trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car numbered 1852\u2014of a plain, double-trucked type common from 1900 to 1910. It was untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire and the air-brake now and then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it and looked vainly about for the light switch\u2014noting as I did so the absence of the controller handle, which thus implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat down in one of the cross seats of the vehicle. Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse grass toward the left, and saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, and I could not doubt but that they were conductor and motorman. Then one of them sniffed with singular sharpness, and raised his face to howl to the moon. The other dropped on all fours to run toward the car.\n\nI leaped up at once & raced madly out of that car & away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked me\u2014doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapering to one bloodred tentacle.... I leaped up at once and raced madly out of that car and across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion forced me to stop\u2014doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapering to one bloodred-tentacle....\n\nI was aware that I only dreamed, but the very awareness was not pleasant.\n\nSince that fearful night, I have prayed only for awakening\u2014it has not come!\n\nInstead I have found myself an inhabitant of this terrible dream-world! That first night gave way to dawn, and I wandered aimlessly over the lonely swamplands. When night came, I still wandered, hoping for awakening. But suddenly I parted the weeds and saw before me the ancient railway car\u2014and to one side a cone-faced thing lifted its head and in the streaming moonlight howled strangely!\n\nIt has been the same each day. Night takes me always to that place of horror. I have tried not moving, with the coming of nightfall, but I must walk in my slumber, for always I awaken with the thing of dread howling before me in the pale moonlight, and I turn and flee madly.\n\nGod! when will I awaken?\n\nThat is what Morgan wrote. I would go to 66 College Street in Providence, but I fear for what I might find there.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Thing on the Doorstep by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIt is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman\u2014madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror\u2014that thing on the doorstep.\n\nUntil then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I ask myself whether I was misled\u2014or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know\u2014but others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid police are at their wits' ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.\n\nSo I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.\n\nI have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I sixteen. He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other children. All this doubtless fostered a strange, secretive inner life in the boy, with imagination as his one avenue of freedom.\n\nAt any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and subtly fearsome town in which we lived\u2014witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.\n\nAs time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of Edward's daemoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby's odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.\n\nIn self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were fostered by overcareful parents; so that he never travelled alone, made independent decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempts to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light, and his pampered, unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face would have made him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.\n\nDerby's parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitivenesses and yearnings were half-aroused in him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in a Boston architect's office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practice my profession\u2014settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall St. since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his constantly growing library.\n\nDerby went through Miskatonic University in Arkham, since his parents would not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though looking enviously at the \"daring\" or \"Bohemian\" set\u2014whose superficially \"smart\" language and meaninglessly ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he dared adopt.\n\nWhat he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore, for which Miskatonic's library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton, after him.\n\nBy the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a fairly well-known poet and fantaisiste, though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and overbookish. I was perhaps his closest friend\u2014finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his parents. He remained single\u2014more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness than through inclination\u2014and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went to Plattsburg for a commission, but never got overseas.\n\nSo the years wore on. Edward's mother died when he was thirty-four, and for months he was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe, however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen bondage. He began to mingle in the more \"advanced\" college set despite his middle age, and was present at some extremely wild doings\u2014on one occasion paying heavy blackmail (which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father's notice. Some of the whispered rumours about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond credibility." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before\u2014in the Hall School at Kingsport\u2014and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of a strange element \"not quite human\" in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port\u2014tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.\n\nAsenath's case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite's daughter\u2014the child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane\u2014under rather queer circumstances\u2014just before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.\n\nThe friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many curious things when the news of Edward's acquaintance with her began to spread about. Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of knowledge and language very singular\u2014and very shocking\u2014for a young girl; when she would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would seem to extract an obscene and zestful irony from her present situation.\n\nMost unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons. She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality\u2014as if the subject were placed momentarily in the magician's body and able to stare half across the room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression. Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its independence of the physical frame\u2014or at least from the life-processes of the physical frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man's brain, she declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces.\n\nEdward met Asenath at a gathering of \"intelligentsia\" held in one of the students' rooms, and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.\n\nIn the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now remarked Edward's autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow's feet which come from the exercise of an intense will.\n\nAbout this time Edward brought the girl to call on me, and I at once saw that his interest was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually with an almost predatory air, and I perceived that their intimacy was beyond untangling. Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr. Derby, whom I had always admired and respected. He had heard the tales of his son's new friendship, and had wormed the whole truth out of \"the boy\". Edward meant to marry Asenath, and had even been looking at houses in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence with his son, the father wondered if I could help to break the ill-advised affair off; but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This time it was not a question of Edward's weak will but of the woman's strong will. The perennial child had transferred his dependence from the parental image to a new and stronger image, and nothing could be done about it.\n\nThe wedding was performed a month later\u2014by a justice of the peace, according to the bride's request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered no opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and I attended the brief ceremony\u2014the other guests being wild young people from the college. Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place in the country at the end of High Street, and they proposed to settle there after a short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants and some books and household goods were to be brought. It was probably not so much consideration for Edward and his father as a personal wish to be near the college, its library, and its crowd of \"sophisticates\", that made Asenath settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently home.\n\nWhen Edward called on me after the honeymoon I thought he looked slightly changed. Asenath had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache, but there was more than that. He looked soberer and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of childish rebelliousness being exchanged for a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled to decide whether I liked or disliked the change. Certainly, he seemed for the moment more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps the marriage was a good thing\u2014might not the change of dependence form a start toward actual neutralisation, leading ultimately to responsible independence? He came alone, for Asenath was very busy. She had brought a vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth (Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield house and grounds.\n\nHer home in\u2014that town\u2014was a rather disquieting place, but certain objects in it had taught him some surprising things. He was progressing fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath's guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed were very daring and radical\u2014he did not feel at liberty to describe them\u2014but he had confidence in her powers and intentions. The three servants were very queer\u2014an incredibly aged couple who had been with old Ephraim and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath's dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy young wench who had marked anomalies of feature and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "For the next two years I saw less and less of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip by without the familiar three-and-two strokes at the front door; and when he did call\u2014or when, as happened with increasing infrequency, I called on him\u2014he was very little disposed to converse on vital topics. He had become secretive about those occult studies which he used to describe and discuss so minutely, and preferred not to talk of his wife. She had aged tremendously since her marriage, till now\u2014oddly enough\u2014she seemed the elder of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly determined expression I had ever seen, and her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it as much as I, and we all ceased gradually to call on her\u2014for which, Edward admitted in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the Derbys would go on long trips\u2014ostensibly to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted at obscurer destinations.\n\nIt was after the first year that people began talking about the change in Edward Derby. It was very casual talk, for the change was purely psychological; but it brought up some interesting points. Now and then, it seemed, Edward was observed to wear an expression and to do things wholly incompatible with his usual flabby nature. For example\u2014although in the old days he could not drive a car, he was now seen occasionally to dash into or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with Asenath's powerful Packard, handling it like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements with a skill and determination utterly alien to his accustomed nature. In such cases he seemed always to be just back from some trip or just starting on one\u2014what sort of trip, no one could guess, although he mostly favoured the Innsmouth road.\n\nOddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether pleasing. People said he looked too much like his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself, in these moments\u2014or perhaps these moments seemed unnatural because they were so rare. Sometimes, hours after starting out in this way, he would return listlessly sprawled on the rear seat of the car while an obviously hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his preponderant aspect on the streets during his decreasing round of social contacts (including, I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time indecisive one\u2014its irresponsible childishness even more marked than in the past. While Asenath's face aged, Edward's\u2014aside from those exceptional occasions\u2014actually relaxed into a kind of exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace of the new sadness or understanding would flash across it. It was really very puzzling. Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of the gay college circle\u2014not through their own disgust, we heard, but because something about their present studies shocked even the most callous of the other decadents.\n\nIt was in the third year of the marriage that Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall remarks about things 'going too far', and would talk darkly about the need of 'saving his identity'. At first I ignored such references, but in time I began to question him guardedly, remembering what my friend's daughter had said about Asenath's hypnotic influence over the other girls at school\u2014the cases where students had thought they were in her body looking across the room at themselves. This questioning seemed to make him at once alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled something about having a serious talk with me later.\n\nAbout this time old Mr. Derby died, for which I was afterward very thankful. Edward was badly upset, though by no means disorganised. He had seen astonishingly little of his parent since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated in herself all his vital sense of family linkage. Some called him callous in his loss\u2014especially since those jaunty and confident moods in the car began to increase. He now wished to move back into the old Derby mansion, but Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield house, to which she had become well adjusted.\n\nNot long afterward my wife heard a curious thing from a friend\u2014one of the few who had not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to the end of High St. to call on the couple, and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the drive with Edward's oddly confident and almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing the bell, she had been told by the repulsive wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced to look up at the house in leaving. There, at one of Edward's library windows, she had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face\u2014a face whose expression of pain, defeat, and wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description. It was\u2014incredibly enough in view of its usual domineering cast\u2014Asenath's; yet the caller had vowed that in that instant the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were gazing out from it.\n\nEdward's calls now grew a trifle more frequent, and his hints occasionally became concrete. What he said was not to be believed, even in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity and convincingness which made one fear for his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases lead down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that lead through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.\n\nHe would now and then back up certain crazy hints by exhibiting objects which utterly nonplussed me\u2014elusively coloured and bafflingly textured objects like nothing ever heard of on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces answered no conceivable purpose and followed no conceivable geometry. These things, he said, came 'from outside'; and his wife knew how to get them. Sometimes\u2014but always in frightened and ambiguous whispers\u2014he would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite, whom he had seen occasionally at the college library in the old days. These adumbrations were never specific, but seemed to revolve around some especially horrible doubt as to whether the old wizard were really dead\u2014in a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.\n\nAt times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism\u2014some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away\u2014'away in her own body', as he once oddly put it. She always found out later\u2014the servants watched his goings and comings\u2014but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got the telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away \"on business\". Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossips declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward\u2014and he had been just able to recall his own name and my name and address.\n\nChesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction.\n\n\"Dan\u2014for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps... the abomination of abominations... I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there.... I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath!... The shape rose up from the altar, and there were 500 that howled.... The Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!'\u2014that was old Ephraim's secret name in the coven.... I was there, where she promised she wouldn't take me.... A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body\u2014in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate.... I saw a shoggoth\u2014it changed shape.... I can't stand it.... I won't stand it.... I'll kill her if she ever sends me there again.... I'll kill that entity... her, him, it... I'll kill it! I'll kill it with my own hands!\"\n\nIt took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided at last. The next day I got him decent clothes in the village, and set out with him for Arkham. His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was inclined to be silent; though he began muttering darkly to himself when the car passed through Augusta\u2014as if the sight of a city aroused unpleasant memories. It was clear that he did not wish to go home; and considering the fantastic delusions he seemed to have about his wife\u2014delusions undoubtedly springing from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which he had been subjected\u2014I thought it would be better if he did not. I would, I resolved, put him up myself for a time; no matter what unpleasantness it would make with Asenath. Later I would help him get a divorce, for most assuredly there were mental factors which made this marriage suicidal for him. When we struck open country again Derby's muttering faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on the seat beside me as I drove.\n\nDuring our sunset dash through Portland the muttering commenced again, more distinctly than before, and as I listened I caught a stream of utterly insane drivel about Asenath. The extent to which she had preyed on Edward's nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole set of hallucinations around her. His present predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only one of a long series. She was getting hold of him, and he knew that some day she would never let go. Even now she probably let him go only when she had to, because she couldn't hold on long at a time. She constantly took his body and went to nameless places for nameless rites, leaving him in her body and locking him upstairs\u2014but sometimes she couldn't hold on, and he would find himself suddenly in his own body again in some far-off, horrible, and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she'd get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn't. Often he was left stranded somewhere as I had found him... time and again he had to find his way home from frightful distances, getting somebody to drive the car after he found it.\n\nThe worst thing was that she was holding on to him longer and longer at a time. She wanted to be a man\u2014to be fully human\u2014that was why she got hold of him. She had sensed the mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will in him. Some day she would crowd him out and disappear with his body\u2014disappear to become a great magician like her father and leave him marooned in that female shell that wasn't even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth blood now. There had been traffick with things from the sea\u2014it was horrible.... And old Ephraim\u2014he had known the secret, and when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep alive... he wanted to live forever... Asenath would succeed\u2014one successful demonstration had taken place already.\n\nAs Derby muttered on I turned to look at him closely, verifying the impression of change which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically, he seemed in better shape than usual\u2014harder, more normally developed, and without the trace of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent habits. It was as if he had been really active and properly exercised for the first time in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath's force must have pushed him into unwonted channels of motion and alertness. But just now his mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling wild extravagances about his wife, about black magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation which would convince even me. He repeated names which I recognised from bygone browsings in forbidden volumes, and at times made me shudder with a certain thread of mythological consistency\u2014of convincing coherence\u2014which ran through his maundering. Again and again he would pause, as if to gather courage for some final and terrible disclosure.\n\n\"Dan, Dan, don't you remember him\u2014the wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never turned white? He glared at me once, and I never forgot it. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon\u2014the formula. I don't dare tell you the page yet, but when I do you can read and understand. Then you will know what has engulfed me. On, on, on, on\u2014body to body to body\u2014he means never to die. The life-glow\u2014he knows how to break the link... it can flicker on a while even when the body is dead. I'll give you hints, and maybe you'll guess. Listen, Dan\u2014do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of old Ephraim's? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down?\n\n\"Asenath... is there such a person? Why did they half think there was poison in old Ephraim's stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper about the way he shrieked\u2014like a frightened child\u2014when he went mad and Asenath locked him up in the padded attic room where\u2014the other\u2014had been? Was it old Ephraim's soul that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did he curse that his daughter wasn't a son? Tell me, Daniel Upton\u2014what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy? Didn't he make it permanent\u2014as she'll do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing that calls itself Asenath writes differently when off guard, so that you can't tell its script from...\"\n\nThen the thing happened. Derby's voice was rising to a thin treble scream as he raved, when suddenly it was shut off with an almost mechanical click. I thought of those other occasions at my home when his confidences had abruptly ceased\u2014when I had half fancied that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath's mental force was intervening to keep him silent. This, though, was something altogether different\u2014and, I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion\u2014as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.\n\nJust where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion\u2014such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality\u2014that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space\u2014some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.\n\nI had faltered only a moment, but before another moment was over my companion had seized the wheel and forced me to change places with him. The dusk was now very thick, and the lights of Portland far behind, so I could not see much of his face. The blaze of his eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that he must now be in that queerly energised state\u2014so unlike his usual self\u2014which so many people had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible that listless Edward Derby\u2014he who could never assert himself, and who had never learned to drive\u2014should be ordering me about and taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was precisely what had happened. He did not speak for some time, and in my inexplicable horror I was glad he did not.\n\nIn the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the blaze of his eyes. The people were right\u2014he did look damnably like his wife and like old Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder that the moods were disliked\u2014there was certainly something unnatural and diabolic in them, and I felt the sinister element all the more because of the wild ravings I had been hearing. This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger\u2014an intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.\n\nHe did not speak until we were on a dark stretch of road, and when he did his voice seemed utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer, and more decisive than I had ever known it to be; while its accent and pronunciation were altogether changed\u2014though vaguely, remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling something I could not quite place. There was, I thought, a trace of very profound and very genuine irony in the timbre\u2014not the flashy, meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow \"sophisticate\", which Derby had habitually affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive, and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering.\n\n\"I hope you'll forget my attack back there, Upton,\" he was saying. \"You know what my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse such things. I'm enormously grateful, of course, for this lift home.\n\n\"And you must forget, too, any crazy things I may have been saying about my wife\u2014and about things in general. That's what comes from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. I shall take a rest from now on\u2014you probably won't see me for some time, and you needn't blame Asenath for it.\n\n\"This trip was a bit queer, but it's really very simple. There are certain Indian relics in the north woods\u2014standing stones, and all that\u2014which mean a good deal in folklore, and Asenath and I are following that stuff up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have gone off my head. I must send somebody for the car when I get home. A month's relaxation will put me back on my feet.\"\n\nI do not recall just what my own part of the conversation was, for the baffling alienage of my seatmate filled all my consciousness. With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic horror increased, till at length I was in a virtual delirium of longing for the end of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by.\n\nAt the junction where the main highway runs inland and avoids Innsmouth I was half afraid my driver would take the bleak shore road that goes through that damnable place. He did not, however, but darted rapidly past Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination. We reached Arkham before midnight, and found the lights still on at the old Crowninshield house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition of his thanks, and I drove home alone with a curious feeling of relief. It had been a terrible drive\u2014all the more terrible because I could not quite tell why\u2014and I did not regret Derby's forecast of a long absence from my company." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "The next two months were full of rumours. People spoke of seeing Derby more and more in his new energised state, and Asenath was scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had only one visit from Edward, when he called briefly in Asenath's car\u2014duly reclaimed from wherever he had left it in Maine\u2014to get some books he had lent me. He was in his new state, and paused only long enough for some evasively polite remarks. It was plain that he had nothing to discuss with me when in this condition\u2014and I noticed that he did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely deep horror which I could not explain; so that his swift departure was a prodigious relief.\n\nIn mid-September Derby was away for a week, and some of the decadent college set talked knowingly of the matter\u2014hinting at a meeting with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled from England, who had established headquarters in New York. For my part I could not get that strange ride from Maine out of my head. The transformation I had witnessed had affected me profoundly, and I caught myself again and again trying to account for the thing\u2014and for the extreme horror it had inspired in me.\n\nBut the oddest rumours were those about the sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The voice seemed to be a woman's, and some of the younger people thought it sounded like Asenath's. It was heard only at rare intervals, and would sometimes be choked off as if by force. There was talk of an investigation, but this was dispelled one day when Asenath appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly way with a large number of acquaintances\u2014apologising for her recent absences and speaking incidentally about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen, but Asenath's appearance left nothing to be said. And then someone complicated matters by whispering that the sobs had once or twice been in a man's voice.\n\nOne evening in mid-October I heard the familiar three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and saw in a moment that his personality was the old one which I had not encountered since the day of his ravings on that terrible ride from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked furtively over his shoulder as I closed the door behind him.\n\nFollowing me clumsily to the study, he asked for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore to question him, but waited till he felt like beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length he ventured some information in a choking voice.\n\n\"Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk last night while the servants were out, and I made her promise to stop preying on me. Of course I had certain\u2014certain occult defences I never told you about. She had to give in, but got frightfully angry. Just packed up and started for New York\u2014walked right out to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. I suppose people will talk, but I can't help that. You needn't mention that there was any trouble\u2014just say she's gone on a long research trip.\n\n\"She's probably going to stay with one of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope she'll go west and get a divorce\u2014anyhow, I've made her promise to keep away and let me alone. It was horrible, Dan\u2014she was stealing my body\u2014crowding me out\u2014making a prisoner of me. I laid low and pretended to let her do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could plan if I was careful, for she can't read my mind literally, or in detail. All she could read of my planning was a sort of general mood of rebellion\u2014and she always thought I was helpless. Never thought I could get the best of her... but I had a spell or two that worked.\"\n\nDerby looked over his shoulder and took some more whiskey.\n\n\"I paid off those damned servants this morning when they got back. They were ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. They're her kind\u2014Innsmouth people\u2014and were hand and glove with her. I hope they'll let me alone\u2014I didn't like the way they laughed when they walked away. I must get as many of Dad's old servants again as I can. I'll move back home now.\n\n\"I suppose you think I'm crazy, Dan\u2014but Arkham history ought to hint at things that back up what I've told you\u2014and what I'm going to tell you. You've seen one of the changes, too\u2014in your car after I told you about Asenath that day coming home from Maine. That was when she got me\u2014drove me out of my body. The last thing of the ride I remember was when I was all worked up trying to tell you what that she-devil is. Then she got me, and in a flash I was back at the house\u2014in the library where those damned servants had me locked up\u2014and in that cursed fiend's body... that isn't even human.... You know, it was she you must have ridden home with... that preying wolf in my body.... You ought to have known the difference!\"\n\nI shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had known the difference\u2014yet could I accept an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted caller was growing even wilder.\n\n\"I had to save myself\u2014I had to, Dan! She'd have got me for good at Hallowmass\u2014they hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook, and the sacrifice would have clinched things. She'd have got me for good... she'd have been I, and I'd have been she... forever... too late.... My body'd have been hers for good.... She'd have been a man, and fully human, just as she wanted to be.... I suppose she'd have put me out of the way\u2014killed her own ex-body with me in it, damn her, just as she did before\u2014just as she, he, or it did before....\"\n\nEdward's face was now atrociously distorted, and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine as his voice fell to a whisper.\n\n\"You must know what I hinted in the car\u2014that she isn't Asenath at all, but really old Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and a half ago, but I know it now. Her handwriting shews it when she's off guard\u2014sometimes she jots down a note in writing that's just like her father's manuscripts, stroke for stroke\u2014and sometimes she says things that nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say. He changed forms with her when he felt death coming\u2014she was the only one he could find with the right kind of brain and a weak enough will\u2014he got her body permanently, just as she almost got mine, and then poisoned the old body he'd put her into. Haven't you seen old Ephraim's soul glaring out of that she-devil's eyes dozens of times... and out of mine when she had control of my body?\"\n\nThe whisperer was panting, and paused for breath. I said nothing, and when he resumed his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected, was a case for the asylum, but I would not be the one to send him there. Perhaps time and freedom from Asenath would do its work. I could see that he would never wish to dabble in morbid occultism again.\n\n\"I'll tell you more later\u2014I must have a long rest now. I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into\u2014something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do. I've been in it up to my neck, but that's the end. Today I'd burn that damned Necronomicon and all the rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.\n\n\"But she can't get me now. I must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down at home. You'll help me, I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants, you know... and if people should get too inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can't give them her address.... Then there are certain groups of searchers\u2014certain cults, you know\u2014that might misunderstand our breaking up... some of them have damnably curious ideas and methods. I know you'll stand by me if anything happens\u2014even if I have to tell you a lot that will shock you....\"\n\nI had Edward stay and sleep in one of the guest-chambers that night, and in the morning he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible arrangements for his moving back into the Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no time in making the change. He did not call the next evening, but I saw him frequently during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little as possible about strange and unpleasant things, but discussed the renovation of the old Derby house, and the travels which Edward promised to take with my son and me the following summer.\n\nOf Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that was no novelty in connexion with the strange m\u00e9nage at the old Crowninshield house. One thing I did not like was what Derby's banker let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic Club\u2014about the cheques Edward was sending regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked as if those evil-faced servants were extorting some kind of tribute from him\u2014yet he had not mentioned the matter to me.\n\nI wished that the summer\u2014and my son's Harvard vacation\u2014would come, so that we could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped he would; for there was something a bit hysterical in his occasional exhilaration, while his moods of fright and depression were altogether too frequent. The old Derby house was ready by December, yet Edward constantly put off moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear the Crowninshield place, he was at the same time queerly enslaved by it. He could not seem to begin dismantling things, and invented every kind of excuse to postpone action. When I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably frightened. His father's old butler\u2014who was there with other reacquired family servants\u2014told me one day that Edward's occasional prowlings about the house, and especially down cellar, looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters, but the butler said there was no mail which could have come from her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "It was about Christmas that Derby broke down one evening while calling on me. I was steering the conversation toward next summer's travels when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable fright\u2014a cosmic panic and loathing such as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could bring to any sane mind.\n\n\"My brain! My brain! God, Dan\u2014it's tugging\u2014from beyond\u2014knocking\u2014clawing\u2014that she-devil\u2014even now\u2014Ephraim\u2014Kamog! Kamog!\u2014The pit of the shoggoths\u2014I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!...\n\n\"The flame\u2014the flame... beyond body, beyond life... in the earth... oh, God!...\"\n\nI pulled him back to his chair and poured some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept his lips moving as if talking to himself. Presently I realised that he was trying to talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to catch the feeble words.\n\n\"...again, again... she's trying... I might have known... nothing can stop that force; not distance, nor magic, nor death... it comes and comes, mostly in the night... I can't leave... it's horrible... oh, God, Dan, if you only knew as I do just how horrible it is....\"\n\nWhen he had slumped down into a stupor I propped him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what would be said of his sanity, and wished to give nature a chance if I possibly could. He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had let himself quietly out of the house\u2014and his butler, when called on the wire, said he was at home pacing restlessly about the library.\n\nEdward went to pieces rapidly after that. He did not call again, but I went daily to see him. He would always be sitting in his library, staring at nothing and having an air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked rationally, but always on trivial topics. Any mention of his trouble, of future plans, or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy. His butler said he had frightful seizures at night, during which he might eventually do himself harm.\n\nI had a long talk with his doctor, banker, and lawyer, and finally took the physician with two specialist colleagues to visit him. The spasms that resulted from the first questions were violent and pitiable\u2014and that evening a closed car took his poor struggling body to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian and called on him twice weekly\u2014almost weeping to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers, and dreadful, droning repetitions of such phrases as \"I had to do it\u2014I had to do it... it'll get me... it'll get me... down there... down there in the dark.... Mother, mother! Dan! Save me... save me....\"\n\nHow much hope of recovery there was, no one could say; but I tried my best to be optimistic. Edward must have a home if he emerged, so I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion, which would surely be his sane choice. What to do about the Crowninshield place with its complex arrangements and collections of utterly inexplicable objects I could not decide, so left it momentarily untouched\u2014telling the Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chief rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace man to have a fire on those days.\n\nThe final nightmare came before Candlemas\u2014heralded, in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope. One morning late in January the sanitarium telephoned to report that Edward's reason had suddenly come back. His continuous memory, they said, was badly impaired; but sanity itself was certain. Of course he must remain some time for observation, but there could be little doubt of the outcome. All going well, he would surely be free in a week.\n\nI hastened over in a flood of delight, but stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward's room. The patient rose to greet me, extending his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in an instant that he bore the strangely energised personality which had seemed so foreign to his own nature\u2014the competent personality I had found so vaguely horrible, and which Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding soul of his wife. There was the same blazing vision\u2014so like Asenath's and old Ephraim's\u2014and the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his voice\u2014the deep irony so redolent of potential evil. This was the person who had driven my car through the night five months before\u2014the person I had not seen since that brief call when he had forgotten the old-time doorbell signal and stirred such nebulous fears in me\u2014and now he filled me with the same dim feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable cosmic hideousness.\n\nHe spoke affably of arrangements for release\u2014and there was nothing for me to do but assent, despite some remarkable gaps in his recent memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly, inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were horrors in this thing that I could not reach. This was a sane person\u2014but was it indeed the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who or what was it\u2014and where was Edward? Ought it to be free or confined... or ought it to be extirpated from the face of the earth? There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic in everything the creature said\u2014the Asenath-like eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to certain words about the 'early liberty earned by an especially close confinement'. I must have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad to beat a retreat.\n\nAll that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward's face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse\u2014a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 116", + "text": "It was in the night\u2014after that second evening\u2014that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise\u2014\"glub... glub... glub\"\u2014which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, \"Who is it?\" But the only answer was \"glub-glub... glub-glub.\" I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, \"I can't hear you. Better hang up and try Information.\" Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.\n\nThis, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid's day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house\u2014the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants\u2014who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward's best friend and adviser.\n\nIdiots!\u2014do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward's? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim\u2014Asenath\u2014that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.\n\nCan I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day\u2014in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently\u2014I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward's and the world's sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors\u2014but I say he must be cremated. He must be cremated\u2014he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak\u2014and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life\u2014Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward\u2014who now? I will not be driven out of my body... I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!\n\nBut let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored\u2014the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o'clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me\u2014doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward's old signal of three-and-two strokes.\n\nRoused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door\u2014and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it... was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!\n\nWhen I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward's, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.\n\nThe caller had on one of Edward's overcoats\u2014its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone\u2014\"glub... glub...\"\u2014and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.\n\nBeyond question, it was in Edward's script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring\u2014and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door's threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.\n\nThen, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.\n\n\"Dan\u2014go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn't Edward Derby any more. She got me\u2014it's Asenath\u2014and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.\n\n\"I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they\u2014and others of the cult\u2014will do.\n\n\"I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was\u2014I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers\u2014or Ephraim's\u2014is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me\u2014making me change bodies with her\u2014seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.\n\n\"I knew what was coming\u2014that's why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came\u2014I found myself choked in the dark\u2014in Asenath's rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium\u2014permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there\u2014sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.\n\n\"I'm too far gone to talk\u2014I couldn't manage to telephone\u2014but I can still write. I'll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don't, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can't tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it's the devil's business. Goodbye\u2014you've been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they'll believe\u2014and I'm damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I'll be at peace before long\u2014this thing won't hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing\u2014kill it.\n\nYours\u2014Ed.\"\n\nIt was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.\n\nThe butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the\u2014other mass\u2014lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.\n\nWhat they finally found inside Edward's oddly assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror. There were bones, too\u2014and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath's.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Through the Gates of the Silver Key by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIn a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bokhara rugs of impressive age and workmanship four men were sitting around a document-strown table. From the far corners, where odd tripods of wrought-iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged negro in sombre livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there ticked a curious coffin-shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet. It was a singular and disturbing room, but well fitted to the business now at hand. For here, in the New Orleans home of this continent's greatest mystic, mathematician, and orientalist, there was being settled at last the estate of a scarcely less great mystic, scholar, author, and dreamer who had vanished from the face of the earth four years before.\n\nRandolph Carter, who had all his life sought to escape from the tedium and limitations of waking reality in the beckoning vistas of dreams and fabled avenues of other dimensions, disappeared from the sight of man on the seventh of October, 1928, at the age of fifty-four. His career had been a strange and lonely one, and there were those who inferred from his curious novels many episodes more bizarre than any in his recorded history. His association with Harley Warren, the South Carolina mystic whose studies in the primal Naacal language of the Himalayan priests had led to such outrageous conclusions, had been close. Indeed, it was he who\u2014one mist-mad, terrible night in an ancient graveyard\u2014had seen Warren descend into a dank and nitrous vault, never to emerge. Carter lived in Boston, but it was from the wild, haunted hills behind hoary and witch-accursed Arkham that all his forbears had come. And it was amid those ancient, cryptically brooding hills that he had ultimately vanished.\n\nHis old servant Parks\u2014who died early in 1930\u2014had spoken of the strangely aromatic and hideously carven box he had found in the attic, and of the undecipherable parchments and queerly figured silver key which that box had contained; matters of which Carter had also written to others. Carter, he said, had told him that this key had come down from his ancestors, and that it would help him to unlock the gate to his lost boyhood, and to strange dimensions and fantastic realms which he had hitherto visited only in vague, brief, and elusive dreams. Then one day Carter took the box and its contents and rode away in his car, never to return.\n\nLater on people found the car at the side of an old, grass-grown road in the hills behind crumbling Arkham\u2014the hills where Carter's forbears had once dwelt, and where the ruined cellar of the great Carter homestead still gaped to the sky. It was in a grove of tall elms near by that another of the Carters had mysteriously vanished in 1781, and not far away was the half-rotted cottage where Goody Fowler the witch had brewed her ominous potions still earlier. The region had been settled in 1692 by fugitives from the witchcraft trials in Salem, and even now it bore a name for vaguely ominous things scarcely to be envisaged. Edmund Carter had fled from the shadow of Gallows Hill just in time, and the tales of his sorceries were many. Now, it seemed, his lone descendant had gone somewhere to join him.\n\nIn the car they found the hideously carved box of fragrant wood, and the parchment which no man could read. The Silver Key was gone\u2014presumably with Carter. Further than that there was no certain clue. Detectives from Boston said that the fallen timbers of the old Carter place seemed oddly disturbed, and somebody found a handkerchief on the rock-ridged, sinisterly wooded slope behind the ruins near the dreaded cave called the \"Snake-Den\". It was then that the country legends about the Snake-Den gained a new vitality. Farmers whispered of the blasphemous uses to which old Edmund Carter the wizard had put that horrible grotto, and added later tales about the fondness which Randolph Carter himself had had for it when a boy. In Carter's boyhood the venerable gambrel-roofed homestead was still standing and tenanted by his great-uncle Christopher. He had visited there often, and had talked singularly about the Snake-Den. People remembered what he had said about a deep fissure and an unknown inner cave beyond, and speculated on the change he had shewn after spending one whole memorable day in the cavern when he was nine. That was in October, too\u2014and ever after that he had seemed to have an uncanny knack at prophesying future events.\n\nIt had rained late in the night that Carter vanished, and no one was quite able to trace his footprints from the car. Inside the Snake-Den all was amorphous liquid mud owing to copious seepage. Only the ignorant rustics whispered about the prints they thought they spied where the great elms overhang the road, and on the sinister hillside near the Snake-Den, where the handkerchief was found. Who could pay attention to whispers that spoke of stubby little tracks like those which Randolph Carter's square-toed boots made when he was a small boy? It was as crazy a notion as that other whisper\u2014that the tracks of old Benijah Corey's peculiar heel-less boots had met the stubby little tracks in the road. Old Benijah had been the Carters' hired man when Randolph was young\u2014but he had died thirty years ago.\n\nIt must have been these whispers\u2014plus Carter's own statement to Parks and others that the queerly arabesqued Silver Key would help him unlock the gate of his lost boyhood\u2014which caused a number of mystical students to declare that the missing man had actually doubled back on the trail of time and returned through forty-five years to that other October day in 1883 when he had stayed in the Snake-Den as a small boy. When he came out that night, they argued, he had somehow made the whole trip to 1928 and back\u2014for did he not thereafter know of things which were to happen later? And yet he had never spoken of anything to happen after 1928.\n\nOne student\u2014an elderly eccentric of Providence, Rhode Island, who had enjoyed a long and close correspondence with Carter\u2014had a still more elaborate theory, and believed that Carter had not only returned to boyhood, but achieved a further liberation, roving at will through the prismatic vistas of boyhood dream. After a strange vision this man published a tale of Carter's vanishing, in which he hinted that the lost one now reigned as king on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths.\n\nIt was this old man, Ward Phillips, who pleaded most loudly against the apportionment of Carter's estate to his heirs\u2014all distant cousins\u2014on the ground that he was still alive in another time-dimension and might well return some day. Against him was arrayed the legal talent of one of the cousins, Ernest B. Aspinwall of Chicago, a man ten years Carter's senior, but keen as a youth in forensic battles. For four years the contest had raged, but now the time for apportionment had come, and this vast, strange room in New Orleans was to be the scene of the arrangements.\n\nIt was the home of Carter's literary and financial executor\u2014the distinguished Creole student of mysteries and Eastern antiquities, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny. Carter had met de Marigny during the war, when they both served in the French Foreign Legion, and had at once cleaved to him because of their similar tastes and outlook. When, on a memorable joint furlough, the learned young Creole had taken the wistful Boston dreamer to Bayonne, in the south of France, and had shewn him certain terrible secrets in the nighted and immemorial crypts that burrow beneath that brooding, aeon-weighted city, the friendship was forever sealed. Carter's will had named de Marigny as executor, and now that vivid scholar was reluctantly presiding over the settlement of the estate. It was sad work for him, for like the old Rhode-Islander he did not believe that Carter was dead. But what weight have the dreams of mystics against the harsh wisdom of the world?\n\nAround the table in that strange room in the old French quarter sat the men who claimed an interest in the proceedings. There had been the usual legal advertisements of the conference in papers wherever Carter heirs were thought to live, yet only four now sat listening to the abnormal ticking of that coffin-shaped clock which told no earthly time, and to the bubbling of the courtyard fountain beyond half-curtained, fanlighted windows. As the hours wore on the faces of the four were half-shrouded in the curling fumes from the tripods, which, piled recklessly with fuel, seemed to need less and less attention from the silently gliding and increasingly nervous old negro.\n\nThere was Etienne de Marigny himself\u2014slim, dark, handsome, moustached, and still young. Aspinwall, representing the heirs, was white-haired, apoplectic-faced, side-whiskered, and portly. Phillips, the Providence mystic, was lean, grey, long-nosed, clean-shaven, and stoop-shouldered. The fourth man was non-committal in age\u2014lean, and with a dark, bearded, singularly immobile face of very regular contour, bound with the turban of a high-caste Brahmin and having night-black, burning, almost irisless eyes which seemed to gaze out from a vast distance behind the features. He had announced himself as the Swami Chandraputra, an adept from Benares with important information to give; and both de Marigny and Phillips\u2014who had corresponded with him\u2014had been quick to recognise the genuineness of his mystical pretensions. His speech had an oddly forced, hollow, metallic quality, as if the use of English taxed his vocal apparatus; yet his language was as easy, correct, and idiomatic as any native Anglo-Saxon's. In general attire he was the normal European civilian, but his loose clothes sat peculiarly badly on him, while his bushy black beard, Eastern turban, and large white mittens gave him an air of exotic eccentricity.\n\nDe Marigny, fingering the parchment found in Carter's car, was speaking.\n\n\"No, I have not been able to make anything of the parchment. Mr. Phillips, here, also gives it up. Col. Churchward declares it is not Naacal, and it looks nothing at all like the hieroglyphs on that Easter Island wooden club. The carvings on that box, though, do strongly suggest Easter Island images. The nearest thing I can recall to these parchment characters\u2014notice how all the letters seem to hang down from horizontal word-bars\u2014is the writing in a book poor Harley Warren once had. It came from India while Carter and I were visiting him in 1919, and he never would tell us anything about it. Said it would be better if we didn't know, and hinted that it might have come originally from some place other than the earth. He took it with him in December when he went down into the vault in that old graveyard\u2014but neither he nor the book ever came to the surface again. Some time ago I sent our friend here\u2014the Swami Chandraputra\u2014a memory-sketch of some of those letters, and also a photostatic copy of the Carter parchment. He believes he may be able to shed light on them after certain references and consultations.\n\n\"But the key\u2014Carter sent me a photograph of that. Its curious arabesques were not letters, but seem to have belonged to the same culture-tradition as the hieroglyphs on the parchment. Carter always spoke of being on the point of solving the mystery, though he never gave details. Once he grew almost poetic about the whole business. That antique Silver Key, he said, would unlock the successive doors that bar our free march down the mighty corridors of space and time to the very Border which no man has crossed since Shaddad with his terrific genius built and concealed in the sands of Arabia Petraea the prodigious domes and uncounted minarets of thousand-pillared Irem. Half-starved dervishes\u2014wrote Carter\u2014and thirst-crazed nomads have returned to tell of that monumental portal, and of the Hand that is sculptured above the keystone of the arch, but no man has passed and returned to say that his footprints on the garnet-strown sands within bear witness to his visit. The key, he surmised, was that for which the Cyclopean sculptured Hand vainly grasps.\n\n\"Why Carter didn't take the parchment as well as the key, we cannot say. Perhaps he forgot it\u2014or perhaps he forbore to take it through recollection of one who had taken a book of like characters into a vault and never returned. Or perhaps it was really immaterial to what he wished to do.\"\n\nAs de Marigny paused, old Mr. Phillips spoke in a harsh, shrill voice.\n\n\"We can know of Randolph Carter's wandering only what we dream. I have been to many strange places in dreams, and have heard many strange and significant things in Ulthar, beyond the river Skai. It does not appear that the parchment was needed, for certainly Carter re\u00ebntered the world of his boyhood dreams, and is now a king in Ilek-Vad.\"\n\nMr. Aspinwall grew doubly apoplectic-looking as he sputtered.\n\n\"Can't somebody shut that old fool up? We've had enough of these moonings. The problem is to divide the property, and it's about time we got to it.\"\n\nFor the first time Swami Chandraputra spoke in his queerly alien voice.\n\n\"Gentlemen, there is more to this matter than you think. Mr. Aspinwall does not do well to laugh at the evidence of dreams. Mr. Phillips has taken an incomplete view\u2014perhaps because he has not dreamed enough. I, myself, have done much dreaming\u2014we in India have always done that, just as all the Carters seem to have done it. You, Mr. Aspinwall, as a maternal cousin, are naturally not a Carter. My own dreams, and certain other sources of information, have told me a great deal which you still find obscure. For example, Randolph Carter forgot that parchment\u2014which he couldn't then decipher\u2014yet it would have been well for him had he remembered to take it. You see, I have really learned pretty much what happened to Carter after he left his car with the Silver Key at sunset on that seventh of October, four years ago.\"\n\nAspinwall audibly sneered, but the others sat up with heightened interest. The smoke from the tripods increased, and the crazy ticking of that coffin-shaped clock seemed to fall into bizarre patterns like the dots and dashes of some alien and insoluble telegraph message from outer space. The Hindoo leaned back, half closed his eyes, and continued in that oddly laboured yet idiomatic voice, while before his audience there began to float a picture of what had happened to Randolph Carter." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 117", + "text": "The hills behind Arkham are full of a strange magic\u2014something, perhaps, which the old wizard Edmund Carter called down from the stars and up from the crypts of nether earth when he fled there from Salem in 1692. As soon as Randolph Carter was back among them he knew that he was close to one of the gates which a few audacious, abhorred, and alien-souled men have blasted through titan walls betwixt the world and the outside absolute. Here, he felt, and on this day of the year, he could carry out with success the message he had deciphered months before from the arabesques of that tarnished and incredibly ancient Silver Key. He knew now how it must be rotated, how it must be held up to the setting sun, and what syllables of ceremony must be intoned into the void at the ninth and last turning. In a spot as close to a dark polarity and induced gate as this, it could not fail in its primary function. Certainly, he would rest that night in the lost boyhood for which he had never ceased to mourn.\n\nHe got out of the car with the key in his pocket, walking uphill deeper and deeper into the shadowy core of that brooding, haunted countryside of winding road, vine-grown stone wall, black woodland, gnarled, neglected orchard, gaping-windowed, deserted farmhouse, and nameless ruin. At the sunset hour, when the distant spires of Kingsport gleamed in the ruddy blaze, he took out the key and made the needed turnings and intonations. Only later did he realise how soon the ritual had taken effect.\n\nThen in the deepening twilight he had heard a voice out of the past. Old Benijah Corey, his great-uncle's hired man. Had not old Benijah been dead for thirty years? Thirty years before when? What was time? Where had he been? Why was it strange that Benijah should be calling him on this seventh of October, 1883? Was he not out later than Aunt Martha had told him to stay? What was this key in his blouse pocket, where his little telescope\u2014given him by his father on his ninth birthday two months before\u2014ought to be? Had he found it in the attic at home? Would it unlock the mystic pylon which his sharp eye had traced amidst the jagged rocks at the back of that inner cave behind the Snake-Den on the hill? That was the place they always coupled with old Edmund Carter the wizard. People wouldn't go there, and nobody but him had ever noticed or squirmed through the root-choked fissure to that great black inner chamber with the pylon. Whose hands had carved that hint of a pylon out of the living rock? Old Wizard Edmund's\u2014or others that he had conjured up and commanded? That evening little Randolph ate supper with Uncle Chris and Aunt Martha in the old gambrel-roofed farmhouse.\n\nNext morning he was up early, and out through the twisted-boughed apple orchard to the upper timber-lot where the mouth of the Snake-Den lurked black and forbidding amongst grotesque, overnourished oaks. A nameless expectancy was upon him, and he did not even notice the loss of his handkerchief as he fumbled in his blouse pocket to see if the queer Silver Key was safe. He crawled through the dark orifice with tense, adventurous assurance, lighting his way with matches taken from the sitting-room. In another moment he had wriggled through the root-choked fissure at the farther end, and was in the vast, unknown inner grotto whose ultimate rock wall seemed half like a monstrous and consciously shapen pylon. Before that dank, dripping wall he stood silent and awestruck, lighting one match after another as he gazed. Was that stony bulge above the keystone of the imagined arch really a gigantic sculptured hand? Then he drew forth the Silver Key, and made motions and intonations whose source he could only dimly remember. Was anything forgotten? He knew only that he wished to cross the barrier to the untrammelled land of his dreams and the gulfs where all dimensions dissolve in the absolute." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 118", + "text": "What happened then is scarcely to be described in words. It is full of those paradoxes, contradictions, and anomalies which have no place in waking life, but which fill our more fantastic dreams, and are taken as matters of course till we return to our narrow, rigid, objective world of limited causation and tri-dimensional logic. As the Hindoo continued his tale, he had difficulty in avoiding what seemed\u2014even more than the notion of a man transferred through the years to boyhood\u2014an air of trivial, puerile extravagance. Mr. Aspinwall, in disgust, gave an apoplectic snort and virtually stopped listening.\n\nFor the rite of the Silver Key, as practiced by Randolph Carter in that black, haunted cave within a cave, did not prove unavailing. From the first gesture and syllable an aura of strange, awesome mutation was apparent\u2014a sense of incalculable disturbance and confusion in time and space, yet one which held no hint of what we recognise as motion and duration. Imperceptibly, such things as age and location ceased to have any significance whatever. The day before, Randolph Carter had miraculously leaped a gulf of years. Now there was no distinction between boy and man. There was only the entity Randolph Carter, with a certain store of images which had lost all connexion with terrestrial scenes and circumstances of acquisition. A moment before, there had been an inner cave with vague suggestions of a monstrous arch and gigantic sculptured hand on the farther wall. Now there was neither cave nor absence of cave; neither wall nor absence of wall. There was only a flux of impressions not so much visual as cerebral, amidst which the entity that was Randolph Carter experienced perceptions or registrations of all that his mind revolved on, yet without any clear consciousness of the way in which he received them.\n\nBy the time the rite was over Carter knew that he was in no region whose place could be told by earth's geographers, and in no age whose date history could fix. For the nature of what was happening was not wholly unfamiliar to him. There were hints of it in the cryptical Pnakotic fragments, and a whole chapter in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred had taken on significance when he had deciphered the designs graven on the Silver Key. A gate had been unlocked\u2014not indeed the Ultimate Gate, but one leading from earth and time to that extension of earth which is outside time, and from which in turn the Ultimate Gate leads fearsomely and perilously to the Last Void which is outside all earths, all universes, and all matter.\n\nThere would be a Guide\u2014and a very terrible one; a Guide who had been an entity of earth millions of years before, when man was undreamed of, and when forgotten shapes moved on a steaming planet building strange cities among whose last, crumbling ruins the earliest mammals were to play. Carter remembered what the monstrous Necronomicon had vaguely and disconcertingly adumbrated concerning that Guide.\n\n\"And while there are those,\" the mad Arab had written, \"who have dared to seek glimpses beyond the Veil, and to accept HIM as a Guide, they would have been more prudent had they avoided commerce with HIM; for it is written in the Book of Thoth how terrific is the price of a single glimpse. Nor may those who pass ever return, for in the Vastnesses transcending our world are Shapes of darkness that seize and bind. The Affair that shambleth about in the night, the Evil that defieth the Elder Sign, the Herd that stand watch at the secret portal each tomb is known to have, and that thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants within\u2014all these Blacknesses are lesser than HE Who guardeth the Gateway; HE Who will guide the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable Devourers. For HE is'UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE.\"\n\nMemory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of earth may grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs outside time and the dimensions we know.\n\nThere floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which he somehow linked with earth's primal, aeon-forgotten past. Monstrous living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into space or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position as his whirling fancy supplied.\n\nHe had wished to find the enchanted regions of his boyhood dreams, where galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, and elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled beyond forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns that sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon. Now, intoxicated with wider visions, he scarcely knew what he sought. Thoughts of infinite and blasphemous daring rose in his mind, and he knew he would face the dreaded Guide without fear, asking monstrous and terrible things of him.\n\nAll at once the pageant of impressions seemed to achieve a vague kind of stabilisation. There were great masses of towering stone, carven into alien and incomprehensible designs and disposed according to the laws of some unknown, inverse geometry. Light filtered down from a sky of no assignable colour in baffling, contradictory directions, and played almost sentiently over what seemed to be a curved line of gigantic hieroglyphed pedestals more hexagonal than otherwise and surmounted by cloaked, ill-defined Shapes.\n\nThere was another Shape, too, which occupied no pedestal, but which seemed to glide or float over the cloudy, floor-like lower level. It was not exactly permanent in outline, but held transient suggestions of something remotely preceding or paralleling the human form, though half as large again as an ordinary man. It seemed to be heavily cloaked, like the Shapes on the pedestals, with some neutral-coloured fabric; and Carter could not detect any eye-holes through which it might gaze. Probably it did not need to gaze, for it seemed to belong to an order of being far outside the merely physical in organisation and faculties.\n\nA moment later Carter knew that this was so, for the Shape had spoken to his mind without sound or language. And though the name it uttered was a dreaded and terrible one, Randolph Carter did not flinch in fear. Instead, he spoke back, equally without sound or language, and made those obeisances which the hideous Necronomicon had taught him to make. For this Shape was nothing less than that which all the world has feared since Lomar rose out of the sea and the Winged Ones came to earth to teach the Elder Lore to man. It was indeed the frightful Guide and Guardian of the Gate\u2014'Umr at-Tawil, the ancient one, which the scribe rendereth the Prolonged of Life.\n\nThe Guide knew, as he knew all things, of Carter's quest and coming, and that this seeker of dreams and secrets stood before him unafraid. There was no horror or malignity in what he radiated, and Carter wondered for a moment whether the mad Arab's terrific blasphemous hints, and extracts from the Book of Thoth, might not have come from envy and a baffled wish to do what was now about to be done. Or perhaps the Guide reserved his horror and malignity for those who feared. As the radiations continued, Carter mentally interpreted them in the form of words.\n\n\"I am indeed that Most Ancient One,\" said the Guide, \"of whom you know. We have awaited you\u2014the Ancient Ones and I. You are welcome, even though long delayed. You have the Key, and have unlocked the First Gate. Now the Ultimate Gate is ready for your trial. If you fear, you need not advance. You may still go back unharmed the way you came. But if you choose to advance...\"\n\nThe pause was ominous, but the radiations continued to be friendly. Carter hesitated not a moment, for a burning curiosity drove him on.\n\n\"I will advance,\" he radiated back, \"and I accept you as my Guide.\"\n\nAt this reply the Guide seemed to make a sign by certain motions of his robe which may or may not have involved the lifting of an arm or some homologous member. A second sign followed, and from his well-learnt lore Carter knew that he was at last very close to the Ultimate Gate. The light now changed to another inexplicable colour, and the Shapes on the quasi-hexagonal pedestals became more clearly defined. As they sat more erect, their outlines became more like those of men, though Carter knew that they could not be men. Upon their cloaked heads there now seemed to rest tall, uncertainly coloured mitres, strangely suggestive of those on certain nameless figures chiselled by a forgotten sculptor along the living cliffs of a high, forbidden mountain in Tartary; while grasped in certain folds of their swathings were long sceptres whose carven heads bodied forth a grotesque and archaic mystery.\n\nCarter guessed what they were, whence they came, and Whom they served; and guessed, too, the price of their service. But he was still content, for at one mighty venture he was to learn all. Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye. He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the malignant Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a wrath upon mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic vengeance on an angleworm. Now the whole assemblage on the vaguely hexagonal pillars was greeting him with a gesture of those oddly carven sceptres, and radiating a message which he understood:\n\n\"We salute you, Most Ancient One, and you, Randolph Carter, whose daring has made you one of us.\"\n\nCarter saw now that one of the pedestals was vacant, and a gesture of the Most Ancient One told him it was reserved for him. He saw also another pedestal, taller than the rest, and at the centre of the oddly curved line (neither semicircle nor ellipse, parabola nor hyperbola) which they formed. This, he guessed, was the Guide's own throne. Moving and rising in a manner hardly definable, Carter took his seat; and as he did so he saw that the Guide had likewise seated himself.\n\nGradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something\u2014some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere or apparent sphere of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of earth. There was a suggestion of chanting\u2014or what human imagination might interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable colour Carter saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all the mitred, sceptre-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight, curious swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiable light\u2014resembling that of the quasi-sphere\u2014played round their shrouded heads.\n\nThe Hindoo paused in his tale and looked curiously at the tall, coffin-shaped clock with the four hands and hieroglyphed dial, whose crazy ticking followed no known rhythm of earth.\n\n\"You, Mr. de Marigny,\" he suddenly said to his learned host, \"do not need to be told the particular alien rhythm to which those cowled Shapes on the hexagonal pillars chanted and nodded. You are the only one else\u2014in America\u2014who has had a taste of the Outer Extension. That clock\u2014I suppose it was sent you by the Yogi poor Harley Warren used to talk about\u2014the seer who said that he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, the hidden legacy of sinister, aeon-old Leng, and had borne certain things away from that dreadful and forbidden city. I wonder how many of its subtler properties you know? If my dreams and readings be correct, it was made by those who knew much of the First Gateway. But let me go on with my tale.\"\n\nAt last, continued the Swami, the swaying and the suggestion of chanting ceased, the lambent nimbuses around the now drooping and motionless heads faded away, while the cloaked Shapes slumped curiously on their pedestals. The quasi-sphere, however, continued to pulsate with inexplicable light. Carter felt that the Ancient Ones were sleeping as they had been when he first saw them, and he wondered out of what cosmic dreams his coming had wakened them. Slowly there filtered into his mind the truth that this strange chanting ritual had been one of instruction, and that the Companions had been chanted by the Most Ancient One into a new and peculiar kind of sleep, in order that their dreams might open the Ultimate Gate to which the Silver Key was a passport. He knew that in the profundity of this deep sleep they were contemplating unplumbed vastnesses of utter and absolute Outsideness with which the earth had nothing to do, and that they were to accomplish that which his presence had demanded.\n\nThe Guide did not share this sleep, but seemed still to be giving instructions in some subtle, soundless way. Evidently he was implanting images of those things which he wished the Companions to dream; and Carter knew that as each of the Ancient Ones pictured the prescribed thought, there would be born the nucleus of a manifestation visible to his own earthly eyes. When the dreams of all the Shapes had achieved a oneness, that manifestation would occur, and everything he required be materialised, through concentration. He had seen such things on earth\u2014in India, where the combined, projected will of a circle of adepts can make a thought take tangible substance, and in hoary Atlaan\u00e2t, of which few men dare speak.\n\nJust what the Ultimate Gate was, and how it was to be passed, Carter could not be certain; but a feeling of tense expectancy surged over him. He was conscious of having a kind of body, and of holding the fateful Silver Key in his hand. The masses of towering stone opposite him seemed to possess the evenness of a wall, toward the centre of which his eyes were irresistibly drawn. And then suddenly he felt the mental currents of the Most Ancient One cease to flow forth.\n\nFor the first time Carter realised how terrific utter silence, mental and physical, may be. The earlier moments had never failed to contain some perceptible rhythm, if only the faint, cryptical pulse of the earth's dimensional extension, but now the hush of the abyss seemed to fall upon everything. Despite his intimations of body, he had no audible breath; and the glow of 'Umr at-Tawil's quasi-sphere had grown petrifiedly fixed and unpulsating. A potent nimbus, brighter than those which had played round the heads of the Shapes, blazed frozenly over the shrouded skull of the terrible Guide.\n\nA dizziness assailed Carter, and his sense of lost orientation waxed a thousandfold. The strange lights seemed to hold the quality of the most impenetrable blacknesses heaped upon blacknesses, while about the Ancient Ones, so close on their pseudo-hexagonal thrones, there hovered an air of the most stupefying remoteness. Then he felt himself wafted into immeasurable depths, with waves of perfumed warmth lapping against his face. It was as if he floated in a torrid, rose-tinctured sea; a sea of drugged wine whose waves broke foaming against shores of brazen fire. A great fear clutched him as he half saw that vast expanse of surging sea lapping against its far-off coast. But the moment of silence was broken\u2014the surgings were speaking to him in a language that was not of physical sound or articulate words.\n\n\"The man of Truth is beyond good and evil,\" intoned a voice that was not a voice. \"The man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.\"\n\nAnd now, in that rise of masonry to which his eyes had been so irresistibly drawn, there appeared the outline of a titanic arch not unlike that which he thought he had glimpsed so long ago in that cave within a cave, on the far, unreal surface of the three-dimensioned earth. He realised that he had been using the Silver Key\u2014moving it in accord with an unlearnt and instinctive ritual closely akin to that which had opened the Inner Gate. That rose-drunken sea which lapped his cheeks was, he realised, no more or less than the adamantine mass of the solid wall yielding before his spell, and the vortex of thought with which the Ancient Ones had aided his spell. Still guided by instinct and blind determination, he floated forward\u2014and through the Ultimate Gate." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 119", + "text": "Randolph Carter's advance through that Cyclopean bulk of abnormal masonry was like a dizzy precipitation through the measureless gulfs between the stars. From a great distance he felt triumphant, godlike surges of deadly sweetness, and after that the rustling of great wings, and impressions of sound like the chirpings and murmurings of objects unknown on earth or in the solar system. Glancing backward, he saw not one gate alone, but a multiplicity of gates, at some of which clamoured Forms he strove not to remember.\n\nAnd then, suddenly, he felt a greater terror than that which any of the Forms could give\u2014a terror from which he could not flee because it was connected with himself. Even the First Gateway had taken something of stability from him, leaving him uncertain about his bodily form and about his relationship to the mistily defined objects around him, but it had not disturbed his sense of unity. He had still been Randolph Carter, a fixed point in the dimensional seething. Now, beyond the Ultimate Gateway, he realised in a moment of consuming fright that he was not one person, but many persons.\n\nHe was in many places at the same time. On earth, on October 7, 1883, a little boy named Randolph Carter was leaving the Snake-Den in the hushed evening light and running down the rocky slope and through the twisted-boughed orchard toward his Uncle Christopher's house in the hills beyond Arkham\u2014yet at that same moment, which was also somehow in the earthly year of 1928, a vague shadow not less Randolph Carter was sitting on a pedestal among the Ancient Ones in earth's trans-dimensional extension. Here, too, was a third Randolph Carter in the unknown and formless cosmic abyss beyond the Ultimate Gate. And elsewhere, in a chaos of scenes whose infinite multiplicity and monstrous diversity brought him close to the brink of madness, were a limitless confusion of beings which he knew were as much himself as the local manifestation now beyond the Ultimate Gate.\n\nThere were \"Carters\" in settings belonging to every known and suspected age of earth's history, and to remoter ages of earthly entity transcending knowledge, suspicion, and credibility. \"Carters\" of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were \"Carters\" having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua. Spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself. Some of the glimpses recalled dreams\u2014both faint and vivid, single and persistent\u2014which he had had through the long years since he first began to dream, and a few possessed a haunting, fascinating, and almost horrible familiarity which no earthly logic could explain.\n\nFaced with this realisation, Randolph Carter reeled in the clutch of supreme horror\u2014horror such as had not been hinted even at the climax of that hideous night when two had ventured into an ancient and abhorred necropolis under a waning moon and only one had emerged. No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings\u2014that one no longer has a self\u2014that is the nameless summit of agony and dread.\n\nHe knew that there had been a Randolph Carter of Boston, yet could not be sure whether he\u2014the fragment or facet of an earthly entity beyond the Ultimate Gate\u2014had been that one or some other. His self had been annihilated; and yet he\u2014if indeed there could, in view of that utter nullity of individual existence, be such a thing as he\u2014was equally aware of being in some inconceivable way a legion of selves. It was as though his body had been suddenly transformed into one of those many-limbed and many-headed effigies sculptured in Indian temples, and he contemplated the aggregation in a bewildered attempt to discern which was the original and which the additions\u2014if indeed (supremely monstrous thought) there were any original as distinguished from other embodiments.\n\nThen, in the midst of these devastating reflections, Carter's beyond-the-gate fragment was hurled from what had seemed the nadir of horror to black, clutching pits of a horror still more profound. This time it was largely external\u2014a force or personality which at once confronted and surrounded and pervaded him, and which in addition to its local presence, seemed also to be a part of himself, and likewise to be coexistent with all time and coterminous with all space. There was no visual image, yet the sense of entity and the awful concept of combined localism, identity, and infinity lent a paralysing terror beyond anything which any Carter-fragment had hitherto deemed capable of existing.\n\nIn the face of that awful wonder, the quasi-Carter forgot the horror of destroyed individuality. It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self\u2014not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep\u2014the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign\u2014yet in a flash the Carter-facet realised how slight and fractional all these conceptions are.\n\nAnd now the BEING was addressing the Carter-facet in prodigious waves that smote and burned and thundered\u2014a concentration of energy that blasted its recipient with well-nigh unendurable violence, and that followed, with certain definite variations, the singular unearthly rhythm which had marked the chanting and swaying of the Ancient Ones, and the flickering of the monstrous lights, in that baffling region beyond the First Gate. It was as though suns and worlds and universes had converged upon one point whose very position in space they had conspired to annihilate with an impact of resistless fury. But amidst the greater terror one lesser terror was diminished; for the searing waves appeared somehow to isolate the beyond-the-gate Carter from his infinity of duplicates\u2014to restore, as it were, a certain amount of the illusion of identity. After a time the hearer began to translate the waves into speech-forms known to him, and his sense of horror and oppression waned. Fright became pure awe, and what had seemed blasphemously abnormal seemed now only ineffably majestic.\n\n\"Randolph Carter,\" IT seemed to say, \"MY manifestations on your planet's extension, the Ancient Ones, have sent you as one who would lately have returned to small lands of dream which he had lost, yet who with greater freedom has risen to greater and nobler desires and curiosities. You wished to sail up golden Oukranos, to search out forgotten ivory cities in orchid-heavy Kled, and to reign on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, whose fabulous towers and numberless domes rise mighty toward a single red star in a firmament alien to your earth and to all matter. Now, with the passing of two Gates, you wish loftier things. You would not flee like a child from a scene disliked to a dream beloved, but would plunge like a man into that last and inmost of secrets which lies behind all scenes and dreams.\n\n\"What you wish, I have found good; and I am ready to grant that which I have granted eleven times only to beings of your planet\u2014five times only to those you call men, or those resembling them. I am ready to shew you the Ultimate Mystery, to look on which is to blast a feeble spirit. Yet before you gaze full at that last and first of secrets you may still wield a free choice, and return if you will through the two Gates with the Veil still unrent before your eyes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 120", + "text": "A sudden shutting-off of the waves left Carter in a chilling and awesome silence full of the spirit of desolation. On every hand pressed the illimitable vastness of the void, yet the seeker knew that the BEING was still there. After a moment he thought of words whose mental substance he flung into the abyss:\n\n\"I accept. I will not retreat.\"\n\nThe waves surged forth again, and Carter knew that the BEING had heard. And now there poured from that limitless MIND a flood of knowledge and explanation which opened new vistas to the seeker, and prepared him for such a grasp of the cosmos as he had never hoped to possess. He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shewn the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little gods of earth, with their petty, human interests and connexions\u2014their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature.\n\nWhile most of the impressions translated themselves to Carter as words, there were others to which other senses gave interpretation. Perhaps with eyes and perhaps with imagination he perceived that he was in a region of dimensions beyond those conceivable to the eye and brain of man. He saw now, in the brooding shadows of that which had been first a vortex of power and then an illimitable void, a sweep of creation that dizzied his senses. From some inconceivable vantage-point he looked upon prodigious forms whose multiple extensions transcended any conception of being, size, and boundaries which his mind had hitherto been able to hold, despite a lifetime of cryptical study. He began to understand dimly why there could exist at the same time the little boy Randolph Carter in the Arkham farmhouse in 1883, the misty form on the vaguely hexagonal pillar beyond the First Gate, the fragment now facing the PRESENCE in the limitless abyss, and all the other \"Carters\" his fancy or perception envisaged.\n\nThen the waves increased in strength, and sought to improve his understanding, reconciling him to the multiform entity of which his present fragment was an infinitesimal part. They told him that every figure of space is but the result of the intersection by a plane of some corresponding figure of one more dimension\u2014as a square is cut from a cube or a circle from a sphere. The cube and sphere, of three dimensions, are thus cut from corresponding forms of four dimensions that men know only through guesses and dreams; and these in turn are cut from forms of five dimensions, and so on up to the dizzy and reachless heights of archetypal infinity. The world of men and of the gods of men is merely an infinitesimal phase of an infinitesimal thing\u2014the three-dimensional phase of that small wholeness reached by the First Gate, where 'Umr at-Tawil dictates dreams to the Ancient Ones. Though men hail it as reality and brand thoughts of its many-dimensioned original as unreality, it is in truth the very opposite. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.\n\nTime, the waves went on, is motionless, and without beginning or end. That it has motion, and is the cause of change, is an illusion. Indeed, it is itself really an illusion, for except to the narrow sight of beings in limited dimensions there are no such things as past, present, and future. Men think of time only because of what they call change, yet that too is illusion. All that was, and is, and is to be, exists simultaneously.\n\nThese revelations came with a godlike solemnity which left Carter unable to doubt. Even though they lay almost beyond his comprehension, he felt that they must be true in the light of that final cosmic reality which belies all local perspectives and narrow partial views; and he was familiar enough with profound speculations to be free from the bondage of local and partial conceptions. Had his whole quest not been based upon a faith in the unreality of the local and partial?\n\nAfter an impressive pause the waves continued, saying that what the denizens of few-dimensioned zones call change is merely a function of their consciousness, which views the external world from various cosmic angles. As the shapes produced by the cutting of a cone seem to vary with the angles of cutting\u2014being circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola according to that angle, yet without any change in the cone itself\u2014so do the local aspects of an unchanged and endless reality seem to change with the cosmic angle of regarding. To this variety of angles of consciousness the feeble beings of the inner worlds are slaves, since with rare exceptions they cannot learn to control them. Only a few students of forbidden things have gained inklings of this control, and have thereby conquered time and change. But the entities outside the Gates command all angles, and view the myriad parts of the cosmos in terms of fragmentary, change-involving perspective, or of the changeless totality beyond perspective, in accordance with their will.\n\nAs the waves paused again, Carter began to comprehend, vaguely and terrifiedly, the ultimate background of that riddle of lost individuality which had at first so horrified him. His intuition pieced together the fragments of revelation, and brought him closer and closer to a grasp of the secret. He understood that much of the frightful revelation would have come upon him\u2014splitting up his ego amongst myriads of earthly counterparts\u2014inside the First Gate, had not the magic of 'Umr at-Tawil kept it from him in order that he might use the Silver Key with precision for the Ultimate Gate's opening. Anxious for clearer knowledge, he sent out waves of thought, asking more of the exact relationship between his various facets\u2014the fragment now beyond the Ultimate Gate, the fragment still on the quasi-hexagonal pedestal beyond the First Gate, the boy of 1883, the man of 1928, the various ancestral beings who had formed his heritage and the bulwark of his ego, and the nameless denizens of the other aeons and other worlds which that first hideous flash of ultimate perception had identified with him. Slowly the waves of the BEING surged out in reply, trying to make plain what was almost beyond the reach of an earthly mind.\n\nAll descended lines of beings of the finite dimensions, continued the waves, and all stages of growth in each one of these beings, are merely manifestations of one archetypal and eternal being in the space outside dimensions. Each local being\u2014son, father, grandfather, and so on\u2014and each stage of individual being\u2014infant, child, boy, young man, old man\u2014is merely one of the infinite phases of that same archetypal and eternal being, caused by a variation in the angle of the consciousness-plane which cuts it. Randolph Carter at all ages; Randolph Carter and all his ancestors both human and pre-human, terrestrial and pre-terrestrial; all these were only phases of one ultimate, eternal \"Carter\" outside space and time\u2014phantom projections differentiated only by the angle at which the plane of consciousness happened to cut the eternal archetype in each case.\n\nA slight change of angle could turn the student of today into the child of yesterday; could turn Randolph Carter into that wizard Edmund Carter who fled from Salem to the hills behind Arkham in 1692, or that Pickman Carter who in the year 2169 would use strange means in repelling the Mongol hordes from Australia; could turn a human Carter into one of those earlier entities which had dwelt in primal Hyperborea and worshipped black, plastic Tsathoggua after flying down from Kythanil, the double planet that once revolved around Arcturus; could turn a terrestrial Carter to a remotely ancestral and doubtfully shaped dweller on Kythanil itself, or a still remoter creature of transgalactic Shonhi, or a four-dimensioned gaseous consciousness in an older space-time continuum, or a vegetable brain of the future on a dark radio-active comet of inconceivable orbit\u2014and so on, in the endless cosmic circle.\n\nThe archetypes, throbbed the waves, are the people of the ultimate abyss\u2014formless, ineffable, and guessed at only by rare dreamers on the low-dimensioned worlds. Chief among such was this informing BEING itself... which indeed was Carter's own archetype. The glutless zeal of Carter and all his forbears for forbidden cosmic secrets was a natural result of derivation from the SUPREME ARCHETYPE. On every world all great wizards, all great thinkers, all great artists, are facets of IT.\n\nAlmost stunned with awe, and with a kind of terrifying delight, Randolph Carter's consciousness did homage to that transcendent ENTITY from which it was derived. As the waves paused again he pondered in the mighty silence, thinking of strange tributes, stranger questions, and still stranger requests. Curious concepts flowed conflictingly through a brain dazed with unaccustomed vistas and unforeseen disclosures. It occurred to him that, if those disclosures were literally true, he might bodily visit all those infinitely distant ages and parts of the universe which he had hitherto known only in dreams, could he but command the magic to change the angle of his consciousness-plane. And did not the Silver Key supply that magic? Had it not first changed him from a man in 1928 to a boy in 1883, and then to something quite outside time? Oddly, despite his present apparent absence of body, he knew that the Key was still with him.\n\nWhile the silence still lasted, Randolph Carter radiated forth the thoughts and questions which assailed him. He knew that in this ultimate abyss he was equidistant from every facet of his archetype\u2014human or non-human, earthly or extra-earthly, galactic or transgalactic; and his curiosity regarding the other phases of his being\u2014especially those phases which were farthest from an earthly 1928 in time and space, or which had most persistently haunted his dreams throughout life\u2014was at fever heat. He felt that his archetypal ENTITY could at will send him bodily to any of these phases of bygone and distant life by changing his consciousness-plane, and despite the marvels he had undergone he burned for the further marvel of walking in the flesh through those grotesque and incredible scenes which visions of the night had fragmentarily brought him.\n\nWithout definite intention he was asking the PRESENCE for access to a dim, fantastic world whose five multi-coloured suns, alien constellations, dizzy black crags, clawed, tapir-snouted denizens, bizarre metal towers, unexplained tunnels, and cryptical floating cylinders had intruded again and again upon his slumbers. That world, he felt vaguely, was in all the conceivable cosmos the one most freely in touch with others; and he longed to explore the vistas whose beginnings he had glimpsed, and to embark through space to those still remoter worlds with which the clawed, snouted denizens trafficked. There was no time for fear. As at all crises of his strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity triumphed over everything else.\n\nWhen the waves resumed their awesome pulsing Carter knew that his terrible request was granted. The BEING was telling him of the nighted gulfs through which he would have to pass, of the unknown quintuple star in an unsuspected galaxy around which the alien world revolved, and of the burrowing inner horrors against which the clawed, snouted race of that world perpetually fought. IT told him, too, of how the angle of his personal consciousness-plane, and the angle of his consciousness-plane regarding the space-time elements of the sought-for world, would have to be tilted simultaneously in order to restore to that world the Carter-facet which had dwelt there.\n\nThe PRESENCE warned him to be sure of his symbols if he wished ever to return from the remote and alien world he had chosen, and he radiated back an impatient affirmation; confident that the Silver Key, which he felt was with him and which he knew had tilted both world and personal planes in throwing him back to 1883, contained those symbols which were meant. And now the BEING, grasping his impatience, signified Its readiness to accomplish the monstrous precipitation. The waves abruptly ceased, and there supervened a momentary stillness tense with nameless and dreadful expectancy.\n\nThen, without warning, came a whirring and drumming that swelled to a terrific thundering. Once again Carter felt himself the focal point of an intense concentration of energy which smote and hammered and seared unbearably in the now-familiar alien rhythm of outer space, and which he could not classify as either the blasting heat of a blazing star or the all-petrifying cold of the ultimate abyss. Bands and rays of colour utterly foreign to any spectrum of our universe played and wove and interlaced before him, and he was conscious of a frightful velocity of motion. He caught one fleeting glimpse of a figure sitting alone upon a cloudy throne more hexagonal than otherwise...." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 121", + "text": "As the Hindoo paused in his story he saw that de Marigny and Phillips were watching him absorbedly. Aspinwall pretended to ignore the narrative, and kept his eyes ostentatiously on the papers before him. The alien-rhythmed ticking of the coffin-shaped clock took on a new and portentous meaning, while the fumes from the choked, neglected tripods wove themselves into fantastic and inexplicable shapes, and formed disturbing combinations with the grotesque figures of the draught-swayed tapestries. The old negro who had tended them was gone\u2014perhaps some growing tension had frightened him out of the house. An almost apologetic hesitancy hampered the speaker as he resumed in his oddly laboured yet idiomatic voice.\n\n\"You have found these things of the abyss hard to believe,\" he said, \"but you will find the tangible and material things ahead still harder. That is the way of our minds. Marvels are doubly incredible when brought into three dimensions from the vague regions of possible dream. I shall not try to tell you much\u2014that would be another and very different story. I will tell only what you absolutely have to know.\"\n\nCarter, after that final vortex of alien and polychromatic rhythm, had found himself in what for a moment he thought was his old insistent dream. He was, as many a night before, walking amidst throngs of clawed, snouted beings through the streets of a labyrinth of inexplicably fashioned metal under a blaze of diverse solar colour; and as he looked down he saw that his body was like those of the others\u2014rugose, partly squamous, and curiously articulated in a fashion mainly insect-like yet not without a caricaturish resemblance to the human outline. The Silver Key was still in his grasp\u2014though held by a noxious-looking claw.\n\nIn another moment the dream-sense vanished, and he felt rather as one just awaked from a dream. The ultimate abyss\u2014the BEING\u2014an entity of absurd, outlandish race called \"Randolph Carter\" on a world of the future not yet born\u2014some of these things were parts of the persistent, recurrent dreams of the wizard Zkauba on the planet Yaddith. They were too persistent\u2014they interfered with his duties in weaving spells to keep the frightful bholes in their burrows, and became mixed up with his recollections of the myriad real worlds he had visited in his light-beam envelope. And now they had become quasi-real as never before. This heavy, material Silver Key in his right upper claw, exact image of one he had dreamt about, meant no good. He must rest and reflect, and consult the Tablets of Nhing for advice on what to do. Climbing a metal wall in a lane off the main concourse, he entered his apartment and approached the rack of tablets.\n\nSeven day-fractions later Zkauba squatted on his prism in awe and half-despair, for the truth had opened up a new and conflicting set of memories. Nevermore could he know the peace of being one entity. For all time and space he was two: Zkauba the Wizard of Yaddith, disgusted with the thought of the repellent earth-mammal Carter that he was to be and had been, and Randolph Carter, of Boston on the earth, shivering with fright at the clawed, snouted thing which he had once been, and had become again.\n\nThe time-units spent on Yaddith, croaked the Swami\u2014whose laboured voice was beginning to shew signs of fatigue\u2014made a tale in themselves which could not be related in brief compass. There were trips to Shonhi and Mthura and Kath, and other worlds in the twenty-eight galaxies accessible to the light-beam envelopes of the creatures of Yaddith, and trips back and forth through aeons of time with the aid of the Silver Key and various other symbols known to Yaddith's wizards. There were hideous struggles with the bleached, viscous bholes in the primal tunnels that honeycombed the planet. There were awed sessions in libraries amongst the massed lore of ten thousand worlds living and dead. There were tense conferences with other minds of Yaddith, including that of the Arch-Ancient Buo. Zkauba told no one of what had befallen his personality, but when the Randolph Carter facet was uppermost he would study furiously every possible means of returning to the earth and to human form, and would desperately practice human speech with the buzzing, alien throat-organs so ill adapted to it.\n\nThe Carter-facet had soon learned with horror that the Silver Key was unable to effect his return to human form. It was, as he deduced too late from things he remembered, things he dreamed, and things he inferred from the lore of Yaddith, a product of Hyperborea on earth; with power over the personal consciousness-angles of human beings alone. It could, however, change the planetary angle and send the user at will through time in an unchanged body. There had been an added spell which gave it limitless powers it otherwise lacked; but this, too, was a human discovery\u2014peculiar to a spatially unreachable region, and not to be duplicated by the wizards of Yaddith. It had been written on the undecipherable parchment in the hideously carven box with the Silver Key, and Carter bitterly lamented that he had left it behind. The now inaccessible BEING of the abyss had warned him to be sure of his symbols, and had doubtless thought he lacked nothing.\n\nAs time wore on he strove harder and harder to utilise the monstrous lore of Yaddith in finding a way back to the abyss and the omnipotent ENTITY. With his new knowledge he could have done much toward reading the cryptic parchment; but that power, under present conditions, was merely ironic. There were times, however, when the Zkauba-facet was uppermost, and when he strove to erase the conflicting Carter-memories which troubled him.\n\nThus long spaces of time wore on\u2014ages longer than the brain of man could grasp, since the beings of Yaddith die only after prolonged cycles. After many hundred revolutions the Carter-facet seemed to gain on the Zkauba-facet, and would spend vast periods calculating the distance of Yaddith in space and time from the human earth that was to be. The figures were staggering\u2014aeons of light-years beyond counting\u2014but the immemorial lore of Yaddith fitted Carter to grasp such things. He cultivated the power of dreaming himself momentarily earthward, and learned many things about our planet that he had never known before. But he could not dream the needed formula on the missing parchment.\n\nThen at last he conceived a wild plan of escape from Yaddith\u2014which began when he found a drug that would keep his Zkauba-facet always dormant, yet without dissolution of the knowledge and memories of Zkauba. He thought that his calculations would let him perform a voyage with a light-wave envelope such as no being of Yaddith had ever performed\u2014a bodily voyage through nameless aeons and across incredible galactic reaches to the solar system and the earth itself. Once on earth, though in the body of a clawed, snouted thing, he might be able somehow to find\u2014and finish deciphering\u2014the strangely hieroglyphed parchment he had left in the car at Arkham; and with its aid\u2014and the Key's\u2014resume his normal terrestrial semblance.\n\nHe was not blind to the perils of the attempt. He knew that when he had brought the planet-angle to the right aeon (a thing impossible to do while hurtling through space), Yaddith would be a dead world dominated by triumphant bholes, and that his escape in the light-wave envelope would be a matter of grave doubt. Likewise was he aware of how he must achieve suspended animation, in the manner of an adept, to endure the aeon-long flight through fathomless abysses. He knew, too, that\u2014assuming his voyage succeeded\u2014he must immunise himself to the bacterial and other earthly conditions hostile to a body from Yaddith. Furthermore, he must provide a way of feigning human shape on earth until he might recover and decipher the parchment and resume that shape in truth. Otherwise he would probably be discovered and destroyed by the people in horror as a thing that should not be. And there must be some gold\u2014luckily obtainable on Yaddith\u2014to tide him over that period of quest.\n\nSlowly Carter's plans went forward. He provided a light-wave envelope of abnormal toughness, able to stand both the prodigious time-transition and the unexampled flight through space. He tested all his calculations, and sent forth his earthward dreams again and again, bringing them as close as possible to 1928. He practiced suspended animation with marvellous success. He discovered just the bacterial agent he needed, and worked out the varying gravity-stress to which he must become used. He artfully fashioned a waxen mask and loose costume enabling him to pass among men as a human being of a sort, and devised a doubly potent spell with which to hold back the bholes at the moment of his starting from the black, dead Yaddith of the inconceivable future. He took care, too, to assemble a large supply of the drugs\u2014unobtainable on earth\u2014which would keep his Zkauba-facet in abeyance till he might shed the Yaddith body, nor did he neglect a small store of gold for earthly use.\n\nThe starting-day was a time of doubt and apprehension. Carter climbed up to his envelope-platform, on the pretext of sailing for the triple star Nython, and crawled into the sheath of shining metal. He had just room to perform the ritual of the Silver Key, and as he did so he slowly started the levitation of his envelope. There was an appalling seething and darkening of the day, and a hideous racking of pain. The cosmos seemed to reel irresponsibly, and the other constellations danced in a black sky.\n\nAll at once Carter felt a new equilibrium. The cold of interstellar gulfs gnawed at the outside of his envelope, and he could see that he floated free in space\u2014the metal building from which he had started having decayed ages before. Below him the ground was festering with gigantic bholes; and even as he looked, one reared up several hundred feet and levelled a bleached, viscous end at him. But his spells were effective, and in another moment he was falling away from Yaddith unharmed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 122", + "text": "In that bizarre room in New Orleans, from which the old black servant had instinctively fled, the odd voice of Swami Chandraputra grew hoarser still.\n\n\"Gentlemen,\" he continued, \"I will not ask you to believe these things until I have shewn you special proof. Accept it, then, as a myth, when I tell you of the thousands of light-years\u2014thousands of years of time, and uncounted billions of miles\u2014that Randolph Carter hurtled through space as a nameless, alien entity in a thin envelope of electron-activated metal. He timed his period of suspended animation with utmost care, planning to have it end only a few years before the time of landing on the earth in or near 1928.\n\n\"He will never forget that awakening. Remember, gentlemen, that before that aeon-long sleep he had lived consciously for thousands of terrestrial years amidst the alien and horrible wonders of Yaddith. There was a hideous gnawing of cold, a cessation of menacing dreams, and a glance through the eye-plates of the envelope. Stars, clusters, nebulae, on every hand\u2014and at last their outlines bore some kinship to the constellations of earth that he knew.\n\n\"Some day his descent into the solar system may be told. He saw Kynarth and Yuggoth on the rim, passed close to Neptune and glimpsed the hellish white fungi that spot it, learned an untellable secret from the close-glimpsed mists of Jupiter and saw the horror on one of the satellites, and gazed at the Cyclopean ruins that sprawl over Mars' ruddy disc. When the earth drew near he saw it as a thin crescent which swelled alarmingly in size. He slackened speed, though his sensations of homecoming made him wish to lose not a moment. I will not try to tell you of those sensations as I learned them from Carter.\n\n\"Well, toward the last Carter hovered about in the earth's upper air waiting till daylight came over the western hemisphere. He wanted to land where he had left\u2014near the Snake-Den in the hills behind Arkham. If any of you have been away from home long\u2014and I know one of you has\u2014I leave it to you how the sight of New England's rolling hills and great elms and gnarled orchards and ancient stone walls must have affected him.\n\n\"He came down at dawn in the lower meadow of the old Carter place, and was thankful for the silence and solitude. It was autumn, as when he had left, and the smell of the hills was balm to his soul. He managed to drag the metal envelope up the slope of the timber-lot into the Snake-Den, though it would not go through the weed-choked fissure to the inner cave. It was there also that he covered his alien body with the human clothing and waxen mask which would be necessary. He kept the envelope here for over a year, till certain circumstances made a new hiding-place necessary.\n\n\"He walked to Arkham\u2014incidentally practicing the management of his body in human posture and against terrestrial gravity\u2014and got his gold changed to money at a bank. He also made some inquiries\u2014posing as a foreigner ignorant of much English\u2014and found that the year was 1930, only two years after the goal he had aimed at.\n\n\"Of course, his position was horrible. Unable to assert his identity, forced to live on guard every moment, with certain difficulties regarding food, and with a need to conserve the alien drug which kept his Zkauba-facet dormant, he felt that he must act as quickly as possible. Going to Boston and taking a room in the decaying West End, where he could live cheaply and inconspicuously, he at once established inquiries concerning Randolph Carter's estate and effects. It was then that he learned how anxious Mr. Aspinwall, here, was to have the estate divided, and how valiantly Mr. de Marigny and Mr. Phillips strove to keep it intact.\"\n\nThe Hindoo bowed, though no expression crossed his dark, tranquil, and thickly bearded face.\n\n\"Indirectly,\" he continued, \"Carter secured a good copy of the missing parchment and began work on its deciphering. I am glad to say that I was able to help in all this\u2014for he appealed to me quite early, and through me came in touch with other mystics throughout the world. I went to live with him in Boston\u2014a wretched place in Chambers St. As for the parchment\u2014I am pleased to help Mr. de Marigny in his perplexity. To him let me say that the language of those hieroglyphics is not Naacal but R'lyehian, which was brought to earth by the spawn of Cthulhu countless cycles ago. It is, of course, a translation\u2014there was an Hyperborean original millions of years earlier in the primal tongue of Tsath-yo.\n\n\"There was more to decipher than Carter had looked for, but at no time did he give up hope. Early this year he made great strides through a book he imported from Nepal, and there is no question but that he will win before long. Unfortunately, however, one handicap has developed\u2014the exhaustion of the alien drug which keeps the Zkauba-facet dormant. This is not, however, as great a calamity as was feared. Carter's personality is gaining in the body, and when Zkauba comes uppermost\u2014for shorter and shorter periods, and now only when evoked by some unusual excitement\u2014he is generally too dazed to undo any of Carter's work. He cannot find the metal envelope that would take him back to Yaddith, for although he almost did, once, Carter hid it anew at a time when the Zkauba-facet was wholly latent. All the harm he has done is to frighten a few people and create certain nightmare rumours among the Poles and Lithuanians of Boston's West End. So far, he has never injured the careful disguise prepared by the Carter-facet, though he sometimes throws it off so that parts have to be replaced. I have seen what lies beneath\u2014and it is not good to see.\n\n\"A month ago Carter saw the advertisement of this meeting, and knew that he must act quickly to save his estate. He could not wait to decipher the parchment and resume his human form. Consequently he deputed me to act for him, and in that capacity I am here.\n\n\"Gentlemen, I say to you that Randolph Carter is not dead; that he is temporarily in an anomalous condition, but that within two or three months at the outside he will be able to appear in proper form and demand the custody of his estate. I am prepared to offer proof if necessary. Therefore I beg that you adjourn this meeting for an indefinite period.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 123", + "text": "De Marigny and Phillips stared at the Hindoo as if hypnotised, while Aspinwall emitted a series of snorts and bellows. The old attorney's disgust had by now surged into open rage, and he pounded the table with an apoplectically veined fist. When he spoke, it was in a kind of bark.\n\n\"How long is this foolery to be borne? I've listened an hour to this madman\u2014this faker\u2014and now he has the damned effrontery to say that Randolph Carter is alive\u2014to ask us to postpone the settlement for no good reason! Why don't you throw the scoundrel out, de Marigny? Do you mean to make us all the butts of a charlatan or idiot?\"\n\nDe Marigny quietly raised his hands and spoke softly.\n\n\"Let us think slowly and clearly. This has been a very singular tale, and there are things in it which I, as a mystic not altogether ignorant, recognise as far from impossible. Furthermore\u2014since 1930 I have received letters from the Swami which tally with his account.\"\n\nAs he paused, old Mr. Phillips ventured a word.\n\n\"Swami Chandraputra spoke of proofs. I, too, recognise much that is significant in this story, and I have myself had many oddly corroborative letters from the Swami during the last two years; but some of these statements are very extreme. Is there not something tangible which can be shewn?\"\n\nAt last the impassive-faced Swami replied, slowly and hoarsely, and drawing an object from the pocket of his loose coat as he spoke.\n\n\"While none of you here has ever seen the Silver Key itself, Messrs. de Marigny and Phillips have seen photographs of it. Does this look familiar to you?\"\n\nHe fumblingly laid on the table, with his large, white-mittened hand, a heavy key of tarnished silver\u2014nearly five inches long, of unknown and utterly exotic workmanship, and covered from end to end with hieroglyphs of the most bizarre description. De Marigny and Phillips gasped.\n\n\"That's it!\" cried de Marigny. \"The camera doesn't lie. I couldn't be mistaken!\"\n\nBut Aspinwall had already launched a reply.\n\n\"Fools! What does it prove? If that's really the key that belonged to my cousin, it's up to this foreigner\u2014this damned nigger\u2014to explain how he got it! Randolph Carter vanished with the key four years ago. How do we know he wasn't robbed and murdered? He was half-crazy himself, and in touch with still crazier people.\n\n\"Look here, you nigger\u2014where did you get that key? Did you kill Randolph Carter?\"\n\nThe Swami's features, abnormally placid, did not change; but the remote, irisless black eyes behind them blazed dangerously. He spoke with great difficulty.\n\n\"Please control yourself, Mr. Aspinwall. There is another form of proof that I could give, but its effect upon everybody would not be pleasant. Let us be reasonable. Here are some papers obviously written since 1930, and in the unmistakable style of Randolph Carter.\"\n\nHe clumsily drew a long envelope from inside his loose coat and handed it to the sputtering attorney as de Marigny and Phillips watched with chaotic thoughts and a dawning feeling of supernal wonder.\n\n\"Of course the handwriting is almost illegible\u2014but remember that Randolph Carter now has no hands well adapted to forming human script.\"\n\nAspinwall looked through the papers hurriedly, and was visibly perplexed, but he did not change his demeanour. The room was tense with excitement and nameless dread, and the alien rhythm of the coffin-shaped clock had an utterly diabolic sound to de Marigny and Phillips\u2014though the lawyer seemed affected not at all. Aspinwall spoke again.\n\n\"These look like clever forgeries. If they aren't, they may mean that Randolph Carter has been brought under the control of people with no good purpose. There's only one thing to do\u2014have this faker arrested. De Marigny, will you telephone for the police?\"\n\n\"Let us wait,\" answered their host. \"I do not think this case calls for the police. I have a certain idea. Mr. Aspinwall, this gentleman is a mystic of real attainments. He says he is in the confidence of Randolph Carter. Will it satisfy you if he can answer certain questions which could be answered only by one in such confidence? I know Carter, and can ask such questions. Let me get a book which I think will make a good test.\"\n\nHe turned toward the door to the library, Phillips dazedly following in a kind of automatic way. Aspinwall remained where he was, studying closely the Hindoo who confronted him with abnormally impassive face. Suddenly, as Chandraputra clumsily restored the Silver Key to his pocket, the lawyer emitted a guttural shout which stopped de Marigny and Phillips in their tracks.\n\n\"Hey, by God, I've got it! This rascal is in disguise. I don't believe he's an East Indian at all. That face\u2014it isn't a face, but a mask! I guess his story put that into my head, but it's true. It never moves, and that turban and beard hide the edges. This fellow's a common crook! He isn't even a foreigner\u2014I've been watching his language. He's a Yankee of some sort. And look at those mittens\u2014he knows his fingerprints could be spotted. Damn you, I'll pull that thing off\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop!\" The hoarse, oddly alien voice of the Swami held a tone beyond all mere earthly fright. \"I told you there was another form of proof which I could give if necessary, and I warned you not to provoke me to it. This red-faced old meddler is right\u2014I'm not really an East Indian. This face is a mask, and what it covers is not human. You others have guessed\u2014I felt that minutes ago. It wouldn't be pleasant if I took that mask off\u2014let it alone, Ernest. I may as well tell you that I am Randolph Carter.\"\n\nNo one moved. Aspinwall snorted and made vague motions. De Marigny and Phillips, across the room, watched the workings of his red face and studied the back of the turbaned figure that confronted him. The clock's abnormal ticking was hideous, and the tripod fumes and swaying arras danced a dance of death. The half-choking lawyer broke the silence.\n\n\"No you don't, you crook\u2014you can't scare me! You've reasons of your own for not wanting that mask off. Maybe we'd know who you are. Off with it\u2014\"\n\nAs he reached forward, the Swami seized his hand with one of his own clumsily mittened members, evoking a curious cry of mixed pain and surprise. De Marigny started toward the two, but paused confused as the pseudo-Hindoo's shout of protest changed to a wholly inexplicable rattling and buzzing sound. Aspinwall's red face was furious, and with his free hand he made another lunge at his opponent's bushy beard. This time he succeeded in getting a hold, and at his frantic tug the whole waxen visage came loose from the turban and clung to the lawyer's apoplectic fist.\n\nAs it did so, Aspinwall uttered a frightful gurgling cry, and Phillips and de Marigny saw his face convulsed with a wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than ever they had seen on human countenance before. The pseudo-Swami had meanwhile released his other hand and was standing as if dazed, making buzzing noises of a most abnormal quality. Then the turbaned figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock that ticked out its cosmic and abnormal rhythm. His now uncovered face was turned away, and de Marigny and Phillips could not see what the lawyer's act had disclosed. Then their attention was turned to Aspinwall, who was sinking ponderously to the floor. The spell was broken\u2014but when they reached the old man he was dead.\n\nTurning quickly to the shuffling Swami's receding back, de Marigny saw one of the great white mittens drop listlessly off a dangling arm. The fumes of the olibanum were thick, and all that could be glimpsed of the revealed hand was something long and black. Before the Creole could reach the retreating figure, old Mr. Phillips laid a restraining hand on his shoulder.\n\n\"Don't!\" he whispered. \"We don't know what we're up against\u2014that other facet, you know\u2014Zkauba, the wizard of Yaddith....\"\n\nThe turbaned figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.\n\nDe Marigny could no longer be restrained, but when he reached and opened the clock it was empty. The abnormal ticking went on, beating out the dark cosmic rhythm which underlies all mystical gate-openings. On the floor the great white mitten, and the dead man with a bearded mask clutched in his hand, had nothing further to reveal.\n\nA year has passed, and nothing has been heard of Randolph Carter. His estate is still unsettled. The Boston address from which one \"Swami Chandraputra\" sent inquiries to various mystics in 1930\u201331\u201332 was indeed tenanted by a strange Hindoo, but he left shortly before the date of the New Orleans conference and has never been seen since. He was said to be dark, expressionless, and bearded, and his landlord thinks the swarthy mask\u2014which was duly exhibited\u2014looks very much like him. He was never, however, suspected of any connexion with the nightmare apparitions whispered of by local Slavs. The hills behind Arkham were searched for the \"metal envelope\", but nothing of the sort was ever found. However, a clerk in Arkham's First National Bank does recall a queer turbaned man who cashed an odd bit of gold bullion in October, 1930.\n\nDe Marigny and Phillips scarcely know what to make of the business. After all, what was proved? There was a story. There was a key which might have been forged from one of the pictures Carter had freely distributed in 1928. There were papers\u2014all indecisive. There was a masked stranger, but who now living saw behind the mask? Amidst the strain and the olibanum fumes that act of vanishing in the clock might easily have been a dual hallucination. Hindoos know much of hypnotism. Reason proclaims the \"Swami\" a criminal with designs on Randolph Carter's estate. But the autopsy said that Aspinwall had died of shock. Was it rage alone which caused it? And some things in that story...\n\nIn a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and filled with olibanum fumes, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny often sits listening with vague sensations to the abnormal rhythm of that hieroglyphed, coffin-shaped clock.\n\n\"Till A' the Seas\"\n\nUpon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus, he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion. Nothing stirred the dusty plain, the disintegrated sand of long-dry river-beds, where once coursed the gushing streams of Earth's youth. There was little greenery in this ultimate world, this final stage of mankind's prolonged presence upon the planet. For unnumbered aeons the drought and sandstorms had ravaged all the lands. The trees and bushes had given way to small, twisted shrubs that persisted long through their sturdiness; but these, in turn, perished before the onslaught of coarse grasses and stringy, tough vegetation of strange evolution.\n\nThe ever-present heat, as Earth drew nearer to the sun, withered and killed with pitiless rays. It had not come at once; long aeons had gone before any could feel the change. And all through those first ages man's adaptable form had followed the slow mutation and modelled itself to fit the more and more torrid air. Then the day had come when men could bear their hot cities but ill, and a gradual recession began, slow yet deliberate. Those towns and settlements closest to the equator had been first, of course, but later there were others. Man, softened and exhausted, could cope no longer with the ruthlessly mounting heat. It seared him as he was, and evolution was too slow to mould new resistances in him.\n\nYet not at first were the great cities of the equator left to the spider and the scorpion. In the early years there were many who stayed on, devising curious shields and armours against the heat and the deadly dryness. These fearless souls, screening certain buildings against the encroaching sun, made miniature worlds of refuge wherein no protective armour was needed. They contrived marvellously ingenious things, so that for a while men persisted in the rusting towers, hoping thereby to cling to old lands till the searing should be over. For many would not believe what the astronomers said, and looked for a coming of the mild olden world again. But one day the men of Dath, from the new city of Niyara, made signals to Yuanario, their immemorially ancient capital, and gained no answer from the few who remained therein. And when explorers reached that millennial city of bridge-linked towers they found only silence. There was not even the horror of corruption, for the scavenger lizards had been swift.\n\nOnly then did the people fully realize that these cities were lost to them; know that they must forever abandon them to nature. The other colonists in the hot lands fled from their brave posts, and total silence reigned within the high basalt walls of a thousand empty towns. Of the dense throngs and multitudinous activities of the past, nothing finally remained. There now loomed against the rainless deserts only the blistered towers of vacant houses, factories, and structures of every sort, reflecting the sun's dazzling radiance and parching in the more and more intolerable heat.\n\nMany lands, however, had still escaped the scorching blight, so that the refugees were soon absorbed in the life of a newer world. During strangely prosperous centuries the hoary deserted cities of the equator grew half-forgotten and entwined with fantastic fables. Few thought of those spectral, rotting towers... those huddles of shabby walls and cactus-choked streets, darkly silent and abandoned....\n\nWars came, sinful and prolonged, but the times of peace were greater. Yet always the swollen sun increased its radiance as Earth drew closer to its fiery parent. It was as if the planet meant to return to that source whence it was snatched, aeons ago, through the accidents of cosmic growth.\n\nAfter a time the blight crept outward from the central belt. Southern Yarat burned as a tenantless desert\u2014and then the north. In Perath and Baling, those ancient cities where brooding centuries dwelt, there moved only the scaly shapes of the serpent and the salamander, and at last Loton echoed only to the fitful falling of tottering spires and crumbling domes.\n\nSteady, universal, and inexorable was the great eviction of man from the realms he had always known. No land within the widening stricken belt was spared; no people left unrouted. It was an epic, a titan tragedy whose plot was unrevealed to the actors\u2014this wholesale desertion of the cities of men. It took not years or even centuries, but millennia of ruthless change. And still it kept on\u2014sullen, inevitable, savagely devastating.\n\nAgriculture was at a standstill, the world fast became too arid for crops. This was remedied by artificial substitutes, soon universally used. And as the old places that had known the great things of mortals were left, the loot salvaged by the fugitives grew smaller and smaller. Things of the greatest value and importance were left in dead museums\u2014lost amid the centuries\u2014and in the end the heritage of the immemorial past was abandoned. A degeneracy both physical and cultural set in with the insidious heat. For man had so long dwelt in comfort and security that this exodus from past scenes was difficult. Nor were these events received phlegmatically; their very slowness was terrifying. Degradation and debauchery were soon common; government was disorganized, and the civilizations aimlessly slid back toward barbarism.\n\nWhen, forty-nine centuries after the blight from the equatorial belt, the whole western hemisphere was left unpeopled, chaos was complete. There was no trace of order or decency in the last scenes of this titanic, wildly impressive migration. Madness and frenzy stalked through them, and fanatics screamed of an Armageddon close at hand.\n\nMankind was now a pitiful remnant of the elder races, a fugitive not only from the prevailing conditions, but from his own degeneracy. Into the northland and the antarctic went those who could; the rest lingered for years in an incredible saturnalia, vaguely doubting the forthcoming disasters. In the city of Borligo a wholesale execution of the new prophets took place, after months of unfulfilled expectations. They thought the flight to the northland unnecessary, and looked no longer for the threatened ending.\n\nHow they perished must have been terrible indeed\u2014those vain, foolish creatures who thought to defy the universe. But the blackened, scorched towns are mute....\n\nThese events, however, must not be chronicled\u2014for there are larger things to consider than this complex and unhastening downfall of a lost civilization. During a long period morale was at lowest ebb among the courageous few who settled upon the alien arctic and antarctic shores, now mild as were those of southern Yarat in the long-dead past. But here there was respite. The soil was fertile, and forgotten pastoral arts were called into use anew. There was, for a long time, a contented little epitome of the lost lands; though here were no vast throngs or great buildings. Only a sparse remnant of humanity survived the aeons of change and peopled those scattered villages of the later world.\n\nHow many millennia this continued is not known. The sun was slow in invading this last retreat; and as the eras passed there developed a sound, sturdy race, bearing no memories or legends of the old, lost lands. Little navigation was practiced by this new people, and the flying machine was wholly forgotten. Their devices were of the simplest type, and their culture was simple and primitive. Yet they were contented, and accepted the warm climate as something natural and accustomed.\n\nBut unknown to these simple peasant-folk, still further rigours of nature were slowly preparing themselves. As the generations passed, the waters of the vast and unplumbed ocean wasted slowly away; enriching the air and the desiccated soil, but sinking lower and lower each century. The splashing surf still glistened bright, and the swirling eddies were still there, but a doom of dryness hung over the whole watery expanse. However, the shrinkage could not have been detected save by instruments more delicate than any then known to the race. Even had the people realized the ocean's contraction, it is not likely that any vast alarm or great disturbance would have resulted, for the losses were so slight, and the seas so great.... Only a few inches during many centuries\u2014but in many centuries; increasing\u2014" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 124", + "text": "So at last the oceans went, and water became a rarity on a globe of sun-baked drought. Man had slowly spread over all the arctic and antarctic lands; the equatorial cities, and many of later habitation, were forgotten even to legend.\n\nAnd now again the peace was disturbed, for water was scarce, and found only in deep caverns. There was little enough, even of this; and men died of thirst wandering in far places. Yet so slow were these deadly changes, that each new generation of man was loath to believe what it heard from its parents. None would admit that the heat had been less or the water more plentiful in the old days, or take warning that days of bitterer burning and drought were to come. Thus it was even at the end, when only a few hundred human creatures panted for breath beneath the cruel sun; a piteous huddled handful out of all the unnumbered millions who had once dwelt on the doomed planet.\n\nAnd the hundreds became small, till man was to be reckoned only in tens. These tens clung to the shrinking dampness of the caves, and knew at last that the end was near. So slight was their range that none had ever seen the tiny, fabled spots of ice left close to the planet's poles\u2014if such indeed remained. Even had they existed and been known to man, none could have reached them across the trackless and formidable deserts. And so the last pathetic few dwindled....\n\nIt cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture or encompass. Of the people of Earth's fortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madmen could have conceived that which was to come\u2014could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things...." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 125", + "text": "When he had eased the dying pangs of the old woman, Ull wandered in a fearful daze out into the dazzling sands. She had been a fearsome thing, shrivelled and so dry; like withered leaves. Her face had been the colour of the sickly yellow grasses that rustled in the hot wind, and she was loathsomely old.\n\nBut she had been a companion; someone to stammer out vague fears to, to talk to about this incredible thing; a comrade to share one's hopes for succour from those silent other colonies beyond the mountains. He could not believe none lived elsewhere, for Ull was young, and not certain as are the old.\n\nFor many years he had known none but the old woman\u2014her name was Mladdna. She had come that day in his eleventh year, when all the hunters went to seek food, and did not return. Ull had no mother that he could remember, and there were few women in the tiny group. When the men vanished, those three women, the young one and the two old, had screamed fearfully, and moaned long. Then the young one had gone mad, and killed herself with a sharp stick. The old ones buried her in a shallow hole dug with their nails, so Ull had been alone when this still older Mladdna came.\n\nShe walked with the aid of a knotty pole, a priceless relique of the old forests, hard and shiny with years of use. She did not say whence she came, but stumbled into the cabin while the young suicide was being buried. There she waited till the two returned, and they accepted her incuriously.\n\nThat was the way it had been for many weeks, until the two fell sick, and Mladdna could not cure them. Strange that those younger two should have been stricken, while she, infirm and ancient, lived on. Mladdna had cared for them many days, and at length they died, so that Ull was left with only the stranger. He screamed all the night, so she became at length out of patience, and threatened to die too. Then, hearkening, he became quiet at once; for he was not desirous of complete solitude. After that he lived with Mladdna and they gathered roots to eat.\n\nMladdna's rotten teeth were ill suited to the food they gathered, but they contrived to chop it up till she could manage it. This weary routine of seeking and eating was Ull's childhood.\n\nNow he was strong, and firm, in his nineteenth year, and the old woman was dead. There was naught to stay for, so he determined at once to seek out those fabled huts beyond the mountains, and live with the people there. There was nothing to take on the journey. Ull closed the door of his cabin\u2014why, he could not have told, for no animals had been there for many years\u2014and left the dead woman within. Half-dazed, and fearful at his own audacity, he walked long hours in the dry grasses, and at length reached the first of the foothills. The afternoon came, and he climbed until he was weary, and lay down on the grasses. Sprawled there, he thought of many things. He wondered at the strange life, passionately anxious to seek out the lost colony beyond the mountains; but at last he slept.\n\nWhen he awoke there was starlight on his face, and he felt refreshed. Now that the sun was gone for a time, he travelled more quickly, eating little, and determining to hasten before the lack of water became difficult to bear. He had brought none; for the last people, dwelling in one place and never having occasion to bear their precious water away, made no vessels of any kind. Ull hoped to reach his goal within a day, and thus escape thirst; so he hurried on beneath the bright stars, running at times in the warm air, and at other times lapsing into a dogtrot.\n\nSo he continued until the sun arose, yet still he was within the small hills, with three great peaks looming ahead. In their shade he rested again. Then he climbed all the morning, and at mid-day surmounted the first peak, where he lay for a time, surveying the space before the next range.\n\nUpon an eroded cliff-top rested the man, gazing far across the valley. Lying thus he could see a great distance, but in all the sere expanse there was no visible motion....\n\nThe second night came, and found Ull amid the rough peaks, the valley and the place where he had rested far behind. He was nearly out of the second range now, and hurrying still. Thirst had come upon him that day, and he regretted his folly. Yet he could not have stayed there with the corpse, alone in the grasslands. He sought to convince himself thus, and hastened ever on, tiredly straining.\n\nAnd now there were only a few steps before the cliff wall would part and allow a view of the land beyond. Ull stumbled wearily down the stony way, tumbling and bruising himself even more. It was nearly before him, this land where men were rumoured to have dwelt; this land of which he had heard tales in his youth. The way was long, but the goal was great. A boulder of giant circumference cut off his view; upon this he scrambled anxiously. Now at last he could behold by the sinking orb his long-sought destination, and his thirst and aching muscles were forgotten as he saw joyfully that a small huddle of buildings clung to the base of the farther cliff.\n\nUll rested not; but, spurred on by what he saw, ran and staggered and crawled the half mile remaining. He fancied that he could detect forms among the rude cabins. The sun was nearly gone; the hateful, devastating sun that had slain humanity. He could not be sure of details, but soon the cabins were near.\n\nThey were very old, for clay blocks lasted long in the still dryness of the dying world. Little, indeed, changed but the living things\u2014the grasses and these last men.\n\nBefore him an open door swung upon rude pegs. In the fading light Ull entered, weary unto death, seeking painfully the expected faces.\n\nThen he fell upon the floor and wept, for at the table was propped a dry and ancient skeleton." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 126", + "text": "He rose at last, crazed by thirst, aching unbearably, and suffering the greatest disappointment any mortal could know. He was, then, the last living thing upon the globe. His the heritage of the Earth... all the lands, and all to him equally useless. He staggered up, not looking at the dim white form in the reflected moonlight, and went through the door. About the empty village he wandered, searching for water and sadly inspecting this long-empty place so spectrally preserved by the changeless air. Here there was a dwelling, there a rude place where things had been made\u2014clay vessels holding only dust, and nowhere any liquid to quench his burning thirst.\n\nThen, in the centre of the little town, Ull saw a well-curb. He knew what it was, for he had heard tales of such things from Mladdna. With pitiful joy, he reeled forward and leaned upon the edge. There, at last, was the end of his search. Water\u2014slimy, stagnant, and shallow, but water\u2014before his sight.\n\nUll cried out in the voice of a tortured animal, groping for the chain and bucket. His hand slipped on the slimy edge; and he fell upon his chest across the brink. For a moment he lay there\u2014then soundlessly his body was precipitated down the black shaft.\n\nThere was a slight splash in the murky shallowness as he struck some long-sunken stone, dislodged aeons ago from the massive coping. The disturbed water subsided into quietness.\n\nAnd now at last the Earth was dead. The final, pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form\u2014and how titanically meaningless it all had been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity\u2014how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools of the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions\u2014or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever.\n\nThe stars whirred on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns new-born, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led.\n\nBut when the deadly sun's first rays darted across the valley, a light found its way to the weary face of a broken figure that lay in the slime.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Tomb by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"Sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam.\"\n\n\u2014Virgil.\n\nIn relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.\n\nMy name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.\n\nI have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon\u2014but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.\n\nThe vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call \"divine wrath\" in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.\n\nI shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.\n\nThe months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. With the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The odour of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.\n\nThe year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch's Lives in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. This legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.\n\nAccordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.\n\nBut the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favourite hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small clearing in the thicket before the mould-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.\n\nThe night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of those tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think I was either astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.\n\nIt was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air. Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well-preserved and untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which brought to me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.\n\nIn the grey light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marvelled at the signs of ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.\n\nHenceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal. My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness and recklessness came into my demeanour, till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered the flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and rimesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of eighteenth-century Bacchanalian mirth; a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like this:\n\n\u2003Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,\n\n\u2003And drink to the present before it shall fail;\n\n\u2003Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,\n\n\u2003For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:\n\n\u2003So fill up your glass,\n\n\u2003For life will soon pass;\n\n\u2003When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!\n\n\u2003Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;\n\n\u2003But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay?\n\n\u2003Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here,\n\n\u2003Than white as a lily\u2014and dead half a year!\n\n\u2003So Betty, my miss,\n\n\u2003Come give me a kiss;\n\n\u2003In hell there's no innkeeper's daughter like this!\n\n\u2003Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able,\n\n\u2003Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table;\n\n\u2003But fill up your goblets and pass 'em around\u2014\n\n\u2003Better under the table than under the ground!\n\n\u2003So revel and chaff\n\n\u2003As ye thirstily quaff:\n\n\u2003Under six feet of dirt 'tis less easy to laugh!\n\n\u2003The fiend strike me blue! I'm scarce able to walk,\n\n\u2003And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!\n\n\u2003Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;\n\n\u2003I'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!\n\n\u2003So lend me a hand;\n\n\u2003I'm not able to stand,\n\n\u2003But I'm gay whilst I linger on top of the land!\n\nAbout this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house whenever the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favourite haunt of mine during the day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow sub-cellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen and forgotten for many generations.\n\nAt last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulchre any of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.\n\nOne morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower was discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform my parent in a cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the bower outside the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heavensent circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that no one could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full the joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing happened, and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.\n\nI should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, and a hellish phosphorescence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whose presiding daemon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove upon the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a century, once more reared its stately height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with the splendour of many candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot came a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from the neighbouring mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than with the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on every hand. Several faces I recognised; though I should have known them better had they been shrivelled or eaten away by death and decomposition. Amidst a wild and reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from my lips, and in my shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, Man, or Nature. Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the house; and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity which seemed to transcend the bounds of unguided Nature, fled shrieking into the night. I alone remained, riveted to my seat by a grovelling fear which I had never felt before. And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes, my body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb of the Hydes! Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of death, even though my soul go seeking through the ages for another corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!\n\nAs the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon the southern horizon were flashes of the lightning that had so lately passed over our heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands to be laid within the tomb; frequently admonishing my captors to treat me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of the ruined cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a group of curious villagers with lanterns were prying a small box of antique workmanship which the thunderbolt had brought to light. Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched the spectators as they viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted to share in their discoveries. The box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which had unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value; but I had eyes for one thing alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly curled bag-wig, and bore the initials \"J. H.\" The face was such that as I gazed, I might well have been studying my mirror.\n\nOn the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows, but I have been kept informed of certain things through an aged and simple-minded servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who like me loves the churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within the vault has brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently, declares that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and swears that the rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he examined it. He even says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that I was often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-open eyes fixed on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against these assertions I have no tangible proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in the struggle on that night of horrors. The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness.\n\nBut Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done that which impels me to make public at least a part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and descended with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single word \"Jervas\". In that coffin and in that vault they have promised me I shall be buried.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Transition of Juan Romero by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nOf the events which took place at the Norton Mine on October 18th and 19th, 1894, I have no desire to speak. A sense of duty to science is all that impels me to recall, in these last years of my life, scenes and happenings fraught with a terror doubly acute because I cannot wholly define it. But I believe that before I die I should tell what I know of the\u2014shall I say transition\u2014of Juan Romero.\n\nMy name and origin need not be related to posterity; in fact, I fancy it is better that they should not be, for when a man suddenly migrates to the States or the Colonies, he leaves his past behind him. Besides, what I once was is not in the least relevant to my narrative; save perhaps the fact that during my service in India I was more at home amongst white-bearded native teachers than amongst my brother-officers. I had delved not a little into odd Eastern lore when overtaken by the calamities which brought about my new life in America's vast West\u2014a life wherein I found it well to accept a name\u2014my present one\u2014which is very common and carries no meaning.\n\nIn the summer and autumn of 1894 I dwelt in the drear expanses of the Cactus Mountains, employed as a common labourer at the celebrated Norton Mine; whose discovery by an aged prospector some years before had turned the surrounding region from a nearly unpeopled waste to a seething cauldron of sordid life. A cavern of gold, lying deep below a mountain lake, had enriched its venerable finder beyond his wildest dreams, and now formed the seat of extensive tunnelling operations on the part of the corporation to which it had finally been sold. Additional grottoes had been found, and the yield of yellow metal was exceedingly great; so that a mighty and heterogeneous army of miners toiled day and night in the numerous passages and rock hollows. The Superintendent, a Mr. Arthur, often discussed the singularity of the local geological formations; speculating on the probable extent of the chain of caves, and estimating the future of the titanic mining enterprise. He considered the auriferous cavities the result of the action of water, and believed the last of them would soon be opened.\n\nIt was not long after my arrival and employment that Juan Romero came to the Norton Mine. One of a large herd of unkempt Mexicans attracted thither from the neighbouring country, he at first commanded attention only because of his features; which though plainly of the Red Indian type, were yet remarkable for their light colour and refined conformation, being vastly unlike those of the average \"Greaser\" or Piute of the locality. It is curious that although he differed so widely from the mass of Hispanicised and tribal Indians, Romero gave not the least impression of Caucasian blood. It was not the Castilian conquistador or the American pioneer, but the ancient and noble Aztec, whom imagination called to view when the silent peon would rise in the early morning and gaze in fascination at the sun as it crept above the eastern hills, meanwhile stretching out his arms to the orb as if in the performance of some rite whose nature he did not himself comprehend. But save for his face, Romero was not in any way suggestive of nobility. Ignorant and dirty, he was at home amongst the other brown-skinned Mexicans; having come (so I was afterward told) from the very lowest sort of surroundings. He had been found as a child in a crude mountain hut, the only survivor of an epidemic which had stalked lethally by. Near the hut, close to a rather unusual rock fissure, had lain two skeletons, newly picked by vultures, and presumably forming the sole remains of his parents. No one recalled their identity, and they were soon forgotten by the many. Indeed, the crumbling of the adobe hut and the closing of the rock fissure by a subsequent avalanche had helped to efface even the scene from recollection. Reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juan differed little from his fellows.\n\nThe attachment which Romero manifested toward me was undoubtedly commenced through the quaint and ancient Hindoo ring which I wore when not engaged in active labour. Of its nature, and manner of coming into my possession, I cannot speak. It was my last link with a chapter of life forever closed, and I valued it highly. Soon I observed that the odd-looking Mexican was likewise interested; eyeing it with an expression that banished all suspicion of mere covetousness. Its hoary hieroglyphs seemed to stir some faint recollection in his untutored but active mind, though he could not possibly have beheld their like before. Within a few weeks after his advent, Romero was like a faithful servant to me; this notwithstanding the fact that I was myself but an ordinary miner. Our conversation was necessarily limited. He knew but a few words of English, while I found my Oxonian Spanish was something quite different from the patois of the peon of New Spain.\n\nThe event which I am about to relate was unheralded by long premonitions. Though the man Romero had interested me, and though my ring had affected him peculiarly, I think that neither of us had any expectation of what was to follow when the great blast was set off. Geological considerations had dictated an extension of the mine directly downward from the deepest part of the subterranean area; and the belief of the Superintendent that only solid rock would be encountered, had led to the placing of a prodigious charge of dynamite. With this work Romero and I were not connected, wherefore our first knowledge of extraordinary conditions came from others. The charge, heavier perhaps than had been estimated, had seemed to shake the entire mountain. Windows in shanties on the slope outside were shattered by the shock, whilst miners throughout the nearer passages were knocked from their feet. Jewel Lake, which lay above the scene of action, heaved as in a tempest. Upon investigation it was seen that a new abyss yawned indefinitely below the seat of the blast; an abyss so monstrous that no handy line might fathom it, nor any lamp illuminate it. Baffled, the excavators sought a conference with the Superintendent, who ordered great lengths of rope to be taken to the pit, and spliced and lowered without cessation till a bottom might be discovered.\n\nShortly afterward the pale-faced workmen apprised the Superintendent of their failure. Firmly though respectfully they signified their refusal to revisit the chasm, or indeed to work further in the mine until it might be sealed. Something beyond their experience was evidently confronting them, for so far as they could ascertain, the void below was infinite. The Superintendent did not reproach them. Instead, he pondered deeply, and made many plans for the following day. The night shift did not go on that evening.\n\nAt two in the morning a lone coyote on the mountain began to howl dismally. From somewhere within the works a dog barked in answer; either to the coyote\u2014or to something else. A storm was gathering around the peaks of the range, and weirdly shaped clouds scudded horribly across the blurred patch of celestial light which marked a gibbous moon's attempts to shine through many layers of cirro-stratus vapours. It was Romero's voice, coming from the bunk above, that awakened me; a voice excited and tense with some vague expectation I could not understand:\n\n\"\u00a1Madre de Dios!\u2014el sonido\u2014ese sonido\u2014\u00a1oiga Vd! \u00bflo oye Vd?\u2014Se\u00f1or, THAT SOUND!\"\n\nI listened, wondering what sound he meant. The coyote, the dog, the storm, all were audible; the last named now gaining ascendancy as the wind shrieked more and more frantically. Flashes of lightning were visible through the bunkhouse window. I questioned the nervous Mexican, repeating the sounds I had heard:\n\n\"\u00bfEl coyote?\u2014\u00bfel perro?\u2014\u00bfel viento?\"\n\nBut Romero did not reply. Then he commenced whispering as in awe:\n\n\"El ritmo, Se\u00f1or\u2014el ritmo de la tierra\u2014THAT THROB DOWN IN THE GROUND!\"\n\nAnd now I also heard; heard and shivered and without knowing why. Deep, deep, below me was a sound\u2014a rhythm, just as the peon had said\u2014which, though exceedingly faint, yet dominated even the dog, the coyote, and the increasing tempest. To seek to describe it were useless\u2014for it was such that no description is possible. Perhaps it was like the pulsing of the engines far down in a great liner, as sensed from the deck, yet it was not so mechanical; not so devoid of the element of life and consciousness. Of all its qualities, remoteness in the earth most impressed me. To my mind rushed fragments of a passage in Joseph Glanvill which Poe has quoted with tremendous effect\u2014\n\n\"\u2014the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.\"\n\nSuddenly Romero leaped from his bunk; pausing before me to gaze at the strange ring on my hand, which glistened queerly in every flash of lightning, and then staring intently in the direction of the mine shaft. I also rose, and both stood motionless for a time, straining our ears as the uncanny rhythm seemed more and more to take on a vital quality. Then without apparent volition we began to move toward the door, whose rattling in the gale held a comforting suggestion of earthly reality. The chanting in the depths\u2014for such the sound now seemed to be\u2014grew in volume and distinctness; and we felt irresistibly urged out into the storm and thence to the gaping blackness of the shaft.\n\nWe encountered no living creature, for the men of the night shift had been released from duty, and were doubtless at the Dry Gulch settlement pouring sinister rumours into the ear of some drowsy bartender. From the watchman's cabin, however, gleamed a small square of yellow light like a guardian eye. I dimly wondered how the rhythmic sound had affected the watchman; but Romero was moving more swiftly now, and I followed without pausing.\n\nAs we descended the shaft, the sound beneath grew definitely composite. It struck me as horribly like a sort of Oriental ceremony, with beating of drums and chanting of many voices. I have, as you are aware, been much in India. Romero and I moved without material hesitancy through drifts and down ladders; ever toward the thing that allured us, yet ever with a pitifully helpless fear and reluctance. At one time I fancied I had gone mad\u2014this was when, on wondering how our way was lighted in the absence of lamp or candle, I realised that the ancient ring on my finger was glowing with eerie radiance, diffusing a pallid lustre through the damp, heavy air around.\n\nIt was without warning that Romero, after clambering down one of the many rude ladders, broke into a run and left me alone. Some new and wild note in the drumming and chanting, perceptible but slightly to me, had acted on him in startling fashion; and with a wild outcry he forged ahead unguided in the cavern's gloom. I heard his repeated shrieks before me, as he stumbled awkwardly along the level places and scrambled madly down the rickety ladders. And frightened as I was, I yet retained enough of perception to note that his speech, when articulate, was not of any sort known to me. Harsh but impressive polysyllables had replaced the customary mixture of bad Spanish and worse English, and of these only the oft repeated cry \"Huitzilopotchli\" seemed in the least familiar. Later I definitely placed that word in the works of a great historian\u2014and shuddered when the association came to me.\n\nThe climax of that awful night was composite but fairly brief, beginning just as I reached the final cavern of the journey. Out of the darkness immediately ahead burst a final shriek from the Mexican, which was joined by such a chorus of uncouth sound as I could never hear again and survive. In that moment it seemed as if all the hidden terrors and monstrosities of earth had become articulate in an effort to overwhelm the human race. Simultaneously the light from my ring was extinguished, and I saw a new light glimmering from lower space but a few yards ahead of me. I had arrived at the abyss, which was now redly aglow, and which had evidently swallowed up the unfortunate Romero. Advancing, I peered over the edge of that chasm which no line could fathom, and which was now a pandemonium of flickering flame and hideous uproar. At first I beheld nothing but a seething blur of luminosity; but then shapes, all infinitely distant, began to detach themselves from the confusion, and I saw\u2014was it Juan Romero?\u2014but God! I dare not tell you what I saw!... Some power from heaven, coming to my aid, obliterated both sights and sounds in such a crash as may be heard when two universes collide in space. Chaos supervened, and I knew the peace of oblivion.\n\nI hardly know how to continue, since conditions so singular are involved; but I will do my best, not even trying to differentiate betwixt the real and the apparent. When I awaked, I was safe in my bunk and the red glow of dawn was visible at the window. Some distance away the lifeless body of Juan Romero lay upon a table, surrounded by a group of men, including the camp doctor. The men were discussing the strange death of the Mexican as he lay asleep; a death seemingly connected in some way with the terrible bolt of lightning which had struck and shaken the mountain. No direct cause was evident, and an autopsy failed to shew any reason why Romero should not be living. Snatches of conversation indicated beyond a doubt that neither Romero nor I had left the bunkhouse during the night; that neither had been awake during the frightful storm which had passed over the Cactus range. That storm, said men who had ventured down the mine shaft, had caused extensive caving in, and had completely closed the deep abyss which had created so much apprehension the day before. When I asked the watchman what sounds he had heard prior to the mighty thunderbolt, he mentioned a coyote, a dog, and the snarling mountain wind\u2014nothing more. Nor do I doubt his word.\n\nUpon the resumption of work Superintendent Arthur called on some especially dependable men to make a few investigations around the spot where the gulf had appeared. Though hardly eager, they obeyed; and a deep boring was made. Results were very curious. The roof of the void, as seen whilst it was open, was not by any means thick; yet now the drills of the investigators met what appeared to be a limitless extent of solid rock. Finding nothing else, not even gold, the Superintendent abandoned his attempts; but a perplexed look occasionally steals over his countenance as he sits thinking at his desk.\n\nOne other thing is curious. Shortly after waking on that morning after the storm, I noticed the unaccountable absence of my Hindoo ring from my finger. I had prized it greatly, yet nevertheless felt a sensation of relief at its disappearance. If one of my fellow-miners appropriated it, he must have been quite clever in disposing of his booty, for despite advertisements and a police search the ring was never seen again. Somehow I doubt if it was stolen by mortal hands, for many strange things were taught me in India.\n\nMy opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestion of rhythmical throbbing... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Trap by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nIt was on a certain Thursday morning in December that the whole thing began with that unaccountable motion I thought I saw in my antique Copenhagen mirror. Something, it seemed to me, stirred\u2014something reflected in the glass, though I was alone in my quarters. I paused and looked intently, then, deciding that the effect must be a pure illusion, resumed the interrupted brushing of my hair.\n\nI had discovered the old mirror, covered with dust and cobwebs, in an outbuilding of an abandoned estate-house in Santa Cruz's sparsely settled Northside territory, and had brought it to the United States from the Virgin Islands. The venerable glass was dim from more than two hundred years' exposure to a tropical climate, and the graceful ornamentation along the top of the gilt frame had been badly smashed. I had had the detached pieces set back into the frame before placing it in storage with my other belongings.\n\nNow, several years later, I was staying half as a guest and half as a tutor at the private school of my old friend Browne on a windy Connecticut hillside\u2014occupying an unused wing in one of the dormitories, where I had two rooms and a hallway to myself. The old mirror, stowed securely in mattresses, was the first of my possessions to be unpacked on my arrival; and I had set it up majestically in the living-room, on top of an old rosewood console which had belonged to my great-grandmother.\n\nThe door of my bedroom was just opposite that of the living-room, with a hallway between; and I had noticed that by looking into my chiffonier glass I could see the larger mirror through the two doorways\u2014which was exactly like glancing down an endless, though diminishing, corridor. On this Thursday morning I thought I saw a curious suggestion of motion down that normally empty corridor\u2014but, as I have said, soon dismissed the notion.\n\nWhen I reached the dining-room I found everyone complaining of the cold, and learned that the school's heating-plant was temporarily out of order. Being especially sensitive to low temperatures, I was myself an acute sufferer; and at once decided not to brave any freezing schoolroom that day. Accordingly I invited my class to come over to my living-room for an informal session around my grate-fire\u2014a suggestion which the boys received enthusiastically.\n\nAfter the session one of the boys, Robert Grandison, asked if he might remain; since he had no appointment for the second morning period. I told him to stay, and welcome. He sat down to study in front of the fireplace in a comfortable chair.\n\nIt was not long, however, before Robert moved to another chair somewhat farther away from the freshly replenished blaze, this change bringing him directly opposite the old mirror. From my own chair in another part of the room I noticed how fixedly he began to look at the dim, cloudy glass, and, wondering what so greatly interested him, was reminded of my own experience earlier that morning. As time passed he continued to gaze, a slight frown knitting his brows.\n\nAt last I quietly asked him what had attracted his attention. Slowly, and still wearing the puzzled frown, he looked over and replied rather cautiously:\n\n\"It's the corrugations in the glass\u2014or whatever they are, Mr. Canevin. I was noticing how they all seem to run from a certain point. Look\u2014I'll show you what I mean.\"\n\nThe boy jumped up, went over to the mirror, and placed his finger on a point near its lower left-hand corner.\n\n\"It's right here, sir,\" he explained, turning to look toward me and keeping his finger on the chosen spot.\n\nHis muscular action in turning may have pressed his finger against the glass. Suddenly he withdrew his hand as though with some slight effort, and with a faintly muttered \"Ouch.\" Then he looked at the glass in obvious mystification.\n\n\"What happened?\" I asked, rising and approaching.\n\n\"Why\u2014it\u2014\" He seemed embarrassed. \"It\u2014I\u2014felt\u2014well, as though it were pulling my finger into it. Seems\u2014er\u2014perfectly foolish, sir, but\u2014well\u2014it was a most peculiar sensation.\" Robert had an unusual vocabulary for his fifteen years.\n\nI came over and had him show me the exact spot he meant.\n\n\"You'll think I'm rather a fool, sir,\" he said shamefacedly, \"but\u2014well, from right here I can't be absolutely sure. From the chair it seemed to be clear enough.\"\n\nNow thoroughly interested, I sat down in the chair Robert had occupied and looked at the spot he selected on the mirror. Instantly the thing \"jumped out at me.\" Unmistakably, from that particular angle, all the many whorls in the ancient glass appeared to converge like a large number of spread strings held in one hand and radiating out in streams.\n\nGetting up and crossing to the mirror, I could no longer see the curious spot. Only from certain angles, apparently, was it visible. Directly viewed, that portion of the mirror did not even give back a normal reflection\u2014for I could not see my face in it. Manifestly I had a minor puzzle on my hands.\n\nPresently the school gong sounded, and the fascinated Robert Grandison departed hurriedly, leaving me alone with my odd little problem in optics. I raised several window-shades, crossed the hallway, and sought for the spot in the chiffonier mirror's reflection. Finding it readily, I looked very intently and thought I again detected something of the \"motion.\" I craned my neck, and at last, at a certain angle of vision, the thing again \"jumped out at me.\"\n\nThe vague \"motion\" was now positive and definite\u2014an appearance of torsional movement, or of whirling; much like a minute yet intense whirlwind or waterspout, or a huddle of autumn leaves dancing circularly in an eddy of wind along a level lawn. It was, like the earth's, a double motion\u2014around and around, and at the same time inward, as if the whorls poured themselves endlessly toward some point inside the glass. Fascinated, yet realizing that the thing must be an illusion, I grasped an impression of quite distinct suction, and thought of Robert's embarrassed explanation: \"I felt as though it were pulling my finger into it.\"\n\nA kind of slight chill ran suddenly up and down my backbone. There was something here distinctly worth looking into. And as the idea of investigation came to me, I recalled the rather wistful expression of Robert Grandison when the gong called him to class. I remembered how he had looked back over his shoulder as he walked obediently out into the hallway, and resolved that he should be included in whatever analysis I might make of this little mystery.\n\nExciting events connected with that same Robert, however, were soon to chase all thoughts of the mirror from my consciousness for a time. I was away all that afternoon, and did not return to the school until the five-fifteen \"Call-Over\"\u2014a general assembly at which the boys' attendance was compulsory. Dropping in at this function with the idea of picking Robert up for a session with the mirror, I was astonished and pained to find him absent\u2014a very unusual and unaccountable thing in his case. That evening Browne told me that the boy had actually disappeared, a search in his room, in the gymnasium, and in all other accustomed places being unavailing, though all his belongings\u2014including his outdoor clothing\u2014were in their proper places.\n\nHe had not been encountered on the ice or with any of the hiking groups that afternoon, and telephone calls to all the school-catering merchants of the neighborhood were in vain. There was, in short, no record of his having been seen since the end of the lesson periods at two-fifteen; when he had turned up the stairs toward his room in Dormitory Number Three.\n\nWhen the disappearance was fully realized, the resulting sensation was tremendous throughout the school. Browne, as headmaster, had to bear the brunt of it; and such an unprecedented occurrence in his well-regulated, highly organized institution left him quite bewildered. It was learned that Robert had not run away to his home in western Pennsylvania, nor did any of the searching-parties of boys and masters find any trace of him in the snowy countryside around the school. So far as could be seen, he had simply vanished.\n\nRobert's parents arrived on the afternoon of the second day after his disappearance. They took their trouble quietly, though, of course, they were staggered by this unexpected disaster. Browne looked ten years older for it, but there was absolutely nothing that could be done. By the fourth day the case had settled down in the opinion of the school as an insoluble mystery. Mr. and Mrs. Grandison went reluctantly back to their home, and on the following morning the ten days' Christmas vacation began.\n\nBoys and masters departed in anything but the usual holiday spirit; and Browne and his wife were left, along with the servants, as my only fellow-occupants of the big place. Without the masters and boys it seemed a very hollow shell indeed.\n\nThat afternoon I sat in front of my grate-fire thinking about Robert's disappearance and evolving all sorts of fantastic theories to account for it. By evening I had acquired a bad headache, and ate a light supper accordingly. Then, after a brisk walk around the massed buildings, I returned to my living-room and took up the burden of thought once more.\n\nA little after ten o'clock I awakened in my armchair, stiff and chilled, from a doze during which I had let the fire go out. I was physically uncomfortable, yet mentally aroused by a peculiar sensation of expectancy and possible hope. Of course it had to do with the problem that was harassing me. For I had started from that inadvertent nap with a curious, persistent idea\u2014the odd idea that a tenuous, hardly recognizable Robert Grandison had been trying desperately to communicate with me. I finally went to bed with one conviction unreasoningly strong in my mind. Somehow I was sure that young Robert Grandison was still alive.\n\nThat I should be receptive of such a notion will not seem strange to those who know my long residence in the West Indies and my close contact with unexplained happenings there. It will not seem strange, either, that I fell asleep with an urgent desire to establish some sort of mental communication with the missing boy. Even the most prosaic scientists affirm, with Freud, Jung, and Adler, that the subconscious mind is most open to external impressions in sleep; though such impressions are seldom carried over intact into the waking state.\n\nGoing a step further and granting the existence of telepathic forces, it follows that such forces must act most strongly on a sleeper; so that if I were ever to get a definite message from Robert, it would be during a period of profoundest slumber. Of course, I might lose the message in waking; but my aptitude for retaining such things has been sharpened by types of mental discipline picked up in various obscure corners of the globe.\n\nI must have dropped asleep instantaneously, and from the vividness of my dreams and the absence of wakeful intervals I judge that my sleep was a very deep one. It was six-forty-five when I awakened, and there still lingered with me certain impressions which I knew were carried over from the world of somnolent cerebration. Filling my mind was the vision of Robert Grandison strangely transformed to a boy of a dull greenish dark-blue color; Robert desperately endeavoring to communicate with me by means of speech, yet finding some almost insuperable difficulty in so doing. A wall of curious spatial separation seemed to stand between him and me\u2014a mysterious, invisible wall which completely baffled us both.\n\nI had seen Robert as though at some distance, yet queerly enough he seemed at the same time to be just beside me. He was both larger and smaller than in real life, his apparent size varying directly, instead of inversely, with the distance as he advanced and retreated in the course of conversation. That is, he grew larger instead of smaller to my eye when he stepped away or backwards, and vice versa; as if the laws of perspective in his case had been wholly reversed. His aspect was misty and uncertain\u2014as if he lacked sharp or permanent outlines; and the anomalies of his coloring and clothing baffled me utterly at first.\n\nAt some point in my dream Robert's vocal efforts had finally crystallized into audible speech\u2014albeit speech of an abnormal thickness and dullness. I could not for a time understand anything he said, and even in the dream racked my brain for a clue to where he was, what he wanted to tell, and why his utterance was so clumsy and unintelligible. Then little by little I began to distinguish words and phrases, the very first of which sufficed to throw my dreaming self into the wildest excitement and to establish a certain mental connection which had previously refused to take conscious form because of the utter incredibility of what it implied.\n\nI do not know how long I listened to those halting words amidst my deep slumber, but hours must have passed while the strangely remote speaker struggled on with his tale. There was revealed to me such a circumstance as I cannot hope to make others believe without the strongest corroborative evidence, yet which I was quite ready to accept as truth\u2014both in the dream and after waking\u2014because of my former contacts with uncanny things. The boy was obviously watching my face\u2014mobile in receptive sleep\u2014as he choked along; for about the time I began to comprehend him, his own expression brightened and gave signs of gratitude and hope.\n\nAny attempt to hint at Robert's message, as it lingered in my ears after a sudden awakening in the cold, brings this narrative to a point where I must choose my words with the greatest care. Everything involved is so difficult to record that one tends to flounder helplessly. I have said that the revelation established in my mind a certain connection which reason had not allowed me to formulate consciously before. This connection, I need no longer hesitate to hint, had to do with the old Copenhagen mirror whose suggestions of motion had so impressed me on the morning of the disappearance, and whose whorl-like contours and apparent illusions of suction had later exerted such a disquieting fascination on both Robert and me.\n\nResolutely, though my outer consciousness had previously rejected what my intuition would have liked to imply, it could reject that stupendous conception no longer. What was fantasy in the tale of \"Alice\" now came to me as a grave and immediate reality. That looking-glass had indeed possessed a malign, abnormal suction; and the struggling speaker in my dream made clear the extent to which it violated all the known precedents of human experience and all the age-old laws of our three sane dimensions. It was more than a mirror\u2014it was a gate; a trap; a link with spatial recesses not meant for the denizens of our visible universe, and realizable only in terms of the most intricate non-Euclidean mathematics. And in some outrageous fashion Robert Grandison had passed out of our ken into the glass and was there immured, waiting for release.\n\nIt is significant that upon awakening I harbored no genuine doubt of the reality of the revelation. That I had actually held conversation with a trans-dimensional Robert, rather than evoked the whole episode from my broodings about his disappearance and about the old illusions of the mirror, was as certain to my utmost instincts as any of the instinctive certainties commonly recognized as valid.\n\nThe tale thus unfolded to me was of the most incredibly bizarre character. As had been clear on the morning of his disappearance, Robert was intensely fascinated by the ancient mirror. All through the hours of school, he had it in mind to come back to my living-room and examine it further. When he did arrive, after the close of the school day, it was somewhat later than two-twenty, and I was absent in town. Finding me out and knowing that I would not mind, he had come into my living-room and gone straight to the mirror; standing before it and studying the place where, as we had noted, the whorls appeared to converge.\n\nThen, quite suddenly, there had come to him an overpowering urge to place his hand upon this whorl-center. Almost reluctantly, against his better judgment, he had done so; and upon making the contact had felt at once the strange, almost painful suction which had perplexed him that morning. Immediately thereafter\u2014quite without warning, but with a wrench which seemed to twist and tear every bone and muscle in his body and to bulge and press and cut at every nerve\u2014he had been abruptly drawn through and found himself inside.\n\nOnce through, the excruciatingly painful stress upon his entire system was suddenly released. He felt, he said, as though he had just been born\u2014a feeling that made itself evident every time he tried to do anything; walk, stoop, turn his head, or utter speech. Everything about his body seemed a misfit.\n\nThese sensations wore off after a long while, Robert's body becoming an organized whole rather than a number of protesting parts. Of all the forms of expression, speech remained the most difficult; doubtless because it is complicated, bringing into play a number of different organs, muscles, and tendons. Robert's feet, on the other hand, were the first members to adjust themselves to the new conditions within the glass.\n\nDuring the morning hours I rehearsed the whole reason-defying problem; correlating everything I had seen and heard, dismissing the natural scepticism of a man of sense, and scheming to devise possible plans for Robert's release from his incredible prison. As I did so a number of originally perplexing points became clear\u2014or at least, clearer\u2014to me.\n\nThere was, for example, the matter of Robert's coloring. His face and hands, as I have indicated, were a kind of dull greenish dark-blue; and I may add that his familiar blue Norfolk jacket had turned to a pale lemon-yellow while his trousers remained a neutral gray as before. Reflecting on this after waking, I found the circumstance closely allied to the reversal of perspective which made Robert seem to grow larger when receding and smaller when approaching. Here, too, was a physical reversal\u2014for every detail of his coloring in the unknown dimension was the exact reverse or complement of the corresponding color detail in normal life. In physics the typical complementary colors are blue and yellow, and red and green. These pairs are opposites, and when mixed yield gray. Robert's natural color was a pinkish-buff, the opposite of which is the greenish-blue I saw. His blue coat had become yellow, while the gray trousers remained gray. This latter point baffled me until I remembered that gray is itself a mixture of opposites. There is no opposite for gray\u2014or rather, it is its own opposite.\n\nAnother clarified point was that pertaining to Robert's curiously dulled and thickened speech\u2014as well as to the general awkwardness and sense of misfit bodily parts of which he complained. This, at the outset, was a puzzle indeed; though after long thought the clue occurred to me. Here again was the same reversal which affected perspective and coloration. Anyone in the fourth dimension must necessarily be reversed in just this way\u2014hands and feet, as well as colors and perspectives, being changed about. It would be the same with all the other dual organs, such as nostrils, ears, and eyes. Thus Robert had been talking with a reversed tongue, teeth, vocal cords, and kindred speech-apparatus; so that his difficulties in utterance were little to be wondered at.\n\nAs the morning wore on, my sense of the stark reality and maddening urgency of the dream-disclosed situation increased rather than decreased. More and more I felt that something must be done, yet realized that I could not seek advice or aid. Such a story as mine\u2014a conviction based upon mere dreaming\u2014could not conceivably bring me anything but ridicule or suspicions as to my mental state. And what, indeed, could I do, aided or unaided, with as little working data as my nocturnal impressions had provided? I must, I finally recognized, have more information before I could even think of a possible plan for releasing Robert. This could come only through the receptive conditions of sleep, and it heartened me to reflect that according to every probability my telepathic contact would be resumed the moment I fell into deep slumber again.\n\nI accomplished sleeping that afternoon, after a midday dinner at which, through rigid self-control, I succeeded in concealing from Browne and his wife the tumultuous thoughts that crashed through my mind. Hardly had my eyes closed when a dim telepathic image began to appear; and I soon realized to my infinite excitement that it was identical with what I had seen before. If anything, it was more distinct; and when it began to speak I seemed able to grasp a greater proportion of the words.\n\nDuring this sleep I found most of the morning's deductions confirmed, though the interview was mysteriously cut off long prior to my awakening. Robert had seemed apprehensive just before communication ceased, but had already told me that in his strange fourth-dimensional prison colors and spatial relationships were indeed reversed\u2014black being white, distance increasing apparent size, and so on.\n\nHe had also intimated that, notwithstanding his possession of full physical form and sensations, most human vital properties seemed curiously suspended. Nutriment, for example, was quite unnecessary\u2014a phenomenon really more singular than the omnipresent reversal of objects and attributes, since the latter was a reasonable and mathematically indicated state of things. Another significant piece of information was that the only exit from the glass to the world was the entrance-way, and that this was permanently barred and impenetrably sealed, so far as egress was concerned.\n\nThat night I had another visitation from Robert; nor did such impressions, received at odd intervals while I slept receptively minded, cease during the entire period of his incarceration. His efforts to communicate were desperate and often pitiful; for at times the telepathic bond would weaken, while at other times fatigue, excitement, or fear of interruption would hamper and thicken his speech.\n\nI may as well narrate as a continuous whole all that Robert told me throughout the whole series of transient mental contacts\u2014perhaps supplementing it at certain points with facts directly related after his release. The telepathic information was fragmentary and often nearly inarticulate, but I studied it over and over during the waking intervals of three intense days; classifying and cogitating with feverish diligence, since it was all that I had to go upon if the boy were to be brought back into our world.\n\nThe fourth-dimensional region in which Robert found himself was not, as in scientific romance, an unknown and infinite realm of strange sights and fantastic denizens; but was rather a projection of certain limited parts of our own terrestrial sphere within an alien and normally inaccessible aspect or direction of space. It was a curiously fragmentary, intangible, and heterogeneous world\u2014a series of apparently dissociated scenes merging indistinctly one into the other; their constituent details having an obviously different status from that of an object drawn into the ancient mirror as Robert had been drawn. These scenes were like dream-vistas or magic-lantern images\u2014elusive visual impressions of which the boy was not really a part, but which formed a sort of panoramic background or ethereal environment against which or amidst which he moved.\n\nHe could not touch any of the parts of these scenes\u2014walls, trees, furniture, and the like\u2014but whether this was because they were truly non-material, or because they always receded at his approach, he was singularly unable to determine. Everything seemed fluid, mutable, and unreal. When he walked, it appeared to be on whatever lower surface the visible scene might have\u2014floor, path, greensward, or such; but upon analysis he always found that the contact was an illusion. There was never any difference in the resisting force met by his feet\u2014and by his hands when he would stoop experimentally\u2014no matter what changes of apparent surface might be involved. He could not describe this foundation or limiting plane on which he walked as anything more definite than a virtually abstract pressure balancing his gravity. Of definite tactile distinctiveness it had none, and supplementing it there seemed to be a kind of restricted levitational force which accomplished transfers of altitude. He could never actually climb stairs, yet would gradually walk up from a lower level to a higher.\n\nPassage from one definite scene to another involved a sort of gliding through a region of shadow or blurred focus where the details of each scene mingled curiously. All the vistas were distinguished by the absence of transient objects, and the indefinite or ambiguous appearance of such semi-transient objects as furniture or details of vegetation. The lighting of every scene was diffuse and perplexing, and of course the scheme of reversed colors\u2014bright red grass, yellow sky with confused black and gray cloud-forms, white tree-trunks, and green brick walls\u2014gave to everything an air of unbelievable grotesquerie. There was an alteration of day and night, which turned out to be a reversal of the normal hours of light and darkness at whatever point on the earth the mirror might be hanging.\n\nThis seemingly irrelevant diversity of the scenes puzzled Robert until he realized that they comprised merely such places as had been reflected for long continuous periods in the ancient glass. This also explained the odd absence of transient objects, the generally arbitrary boundaries of vision, and the fact that all exteriors were framed by the outlines of doorways or windows. The glass, it appeared, had power to store up these intangible scenes through long exposure; though it could never absorb anything corporeally, as Robert had been absorbed, except by a very different and particular process.\n\nBut\u2014to me at least\u2014the most incredible aspect of the mad phenomenon was the monstrous subversion of our known laws of space involved in the relation of various illusory scenes to the actual terrestrial regions represented. I have spoken of the glass as storing up the images of these regions, but this is really an inexact definition. In truth, each of the mirror scenes formed a true and quasi-permanent fourth-dimensional projection of the corresponding mundane region; so that whenever Robert moved to a certain part of a certain scene, as he moved into the image of my room when sending his telepathic messages, he was actually in that place itself, on earth\u2014though under spatial conditions which cut off all sensory communication, in either direction, between him and the present tri-dimensional aspect of the place.\n\nTheoretically speaking, a prisoner in the glass could in a few moments go anywhere on our planet\u2014into any place, that is, which had ever been reflected in the mirror's surface. This probably applied even to places where the mirror had not hung long enough to produce a clear illusory scene; the terrestrial region being then represented by a zone of more or less formless shadow. Outside the definite scenes was a seemingly limitless waste of neutral gray shadow about which Robert could never be certain, and into which he never dared stray far lest he become hopelessly lost to the real and mirror worlds alike.\n\nAmong the earliest particulars which Robert gave, was the fact that he was not alone in his confinement. Various others, all in antique garb, were in there with him\u2014a corpulent middle-aged gentleman with tied queue and velvet knee-breeches who spoke English fluently though with a marked Scandinavian accent; a rather beautiful small girl with very blonde hair which appeared a glossy dark blue; two apparently mute Negroes whose features contrasted grotesquely with the pallor of their reversed-colored skins; three young men; one young woman; a very small child, almost an infant; and a lean, elderly Dane of extremely distinctive aspect and a kind of half-malign intellectuality of countenance.\n\nThis last-named individual\u2014Axel Holm, who wore the satin small-clothes, flared-skirted coat, and voluminous full-bottomed periwig of an age more than two centuries in the past\u2014was notable among the little band as being the one responsible for the presence of them all. He it was who, skilled equally in the arts of magic and glass working, had long ago fashioned this strange dimensional prison in which himself, his slaves, and those whom he chose to invite or allure thither were immured unchangingly for as long as the mirror might endure.\n\nHolm was born early in the seventeenth century, and had followed with tremendous competence and success the trade of a glass-blower and molder in Copenhagen. His glass, especially in the form of large drawing-room mirrors, was always at a premium. But the same bold mind which had made him the first glazier of Europe also served to carry his interests and ambitions far beyond the sphere of mere material craftsmanship. He had studied the world around him, and chafed at the limitations of human knowledge and capability. Eventually he sought for dark ways to overcome those limitations, and gained more success than is good for any mortal.\n\nHe had aspired to enjoy something like eternity, the mirror being his provision to secure this end. Serious study of the fourth dimension was far from beginning with Einstein in our own era; and Holm, more than erudite in all the methods of his day, knew that a bodily entrance into that hidden phase of space would prevent him from dying in the ordinary physical sense. Research showed him that the principle of reflection undoubtedly forms the chief gate to all dimensions beyond our familiar three; and chance placed in his hands a small and very ancient glass whose cryptic properties he believed he could turn to advantage. Once \"inside\" this mirror according to the method he had envisaged, he felt that \"life\" in the sense of form and consciousness would go on virtually forever, provided the mirror could be preserved indefinitely from breakage or deterioration.\n\nHolm made a magnificent mirror, such as would be prized and carefully preserved; and in it deftly fused the strange whorl-configured relic he had acquired. Having thus prepared his refuge and his trap, he began to plan his mode of entrance and conditions of tenancy. He would have with him both servitors and companions; and as an experimental beginning he sent before him into the glass two dependable Negro slaves brought from the West Indies. What his sensations must have been upon beholding this first concrete demonstration of his theories, only imagination can conceive.\n\nUndoubtedly a man of his knowledge realized that absence from the outside world, if deferred beyond the natural span of life of those within, must mean instant dissolution at the first attempt to return to that world. But, barring that misfortune or accidental breakage, those within would remain forever as they were at the time of entrance. They would never grow old, and would need neither food nor drink.\n\nTo make his prison tolerable he sent ahead of him certain books and writing materials, a chair and table of stoutest workmanship, and a few other accessories. He knew that the images which the glass would reflect or absorb would not be tangible, but would merely extend around him like a background of dream. His own transition in 1687 was a momentous experience; and must have been attended by mixed sensations of triumph and terror. Had anything gone wrong, there were frightful possibilities of being lost in dark and inconceivable multiple dimensions.\n\nFor over fifty years he had been unable to secure any additions to the little company of himself and slaves, but later on he had perfected his telepathic method of visualizing small sections of the outside world close to the glass, and attracting certain individuals in those areas through the mirror's strange entrance. Thus Robert, influenced into a desire to press upon the \"door,\" had been lured within. Such visualizations depended wholly on telepathy, since no one inside the mirror could see out into the world of men.\n\nIt was, in truth, a strange life that Holm and his company had lived inside the glass. Since the mirror had stood for fully a century with its face to the dusty stone wall of the shed where I found it, Robert was the first being to enter this limbo after all that interval. His arrival was a gala event, for he brought news of the outside world which must have been of the most startling impressiveness to the more thoughtful of those within. He, in his turn\u2014young though he was\u2014felt overwhelmingly the weirdness of meeting and talking with persons who had been alive in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.\n\nThe deadly monotony of life for the prisoners can only be vaguely conjectured. As mentioned, its extensive spatial variety was limited to localities which had been reflected in the mirror for long periods; and many of these had become dim and strange as tropical climates had made inroads on the surface. Certain localities were bright and beautiful, and in these the company usually gathered. But no scene could be fully satisfying; since the visible objects were all unreal and intangible, and often of perplexingly indefinite outline. When the tedious periods of darkness came, the general custom was to indulge in memories, reflections, or conversations. Each one of that strange, pathetic group had retained his or her personality unchanged and unchangeable, since becoming immune to the time effects of outside space.\n\nThe number of inanimate objects within the glass, aside from the clothing of the prisoners, was very small; being largely limited to the accessories Holm had provided for himself. The rest did without even furniture, since sleep and fatigue had vanished along with most other vital attributes. Such inorganic things as were present, seemed as exempt from decay as the living beings. The lower forms of animal life were wholly absent.\n\nRobert derived most of his information from Herr Thiele, the gentleman who spoke English with a Scandinavian accent. This portly Dane had taken a fancy to him, and talked at considerable length. The others, too, had received him with courtesy and goodwill; Holm himself, seeming well-disposed, had told him about various matters including the door of the trap.\n\nThe boy, as he told me later, was sensible enough never to attempt communication with me when Holm was nearby. Twice, while thus engaged, he had seen Holm appear; and had accordingly ceased at once. At no time could I see the world behind the mirror's surface. Robert's visual image, which included his bodily form and the clothing connected with it, was\u2014like the aural image of his halting voice and like his own visualization of myself\u2014a case of purely telepathic transmission; and did not involve true interdimensional sight. However, had Robert been as trained a telepathist as Holm, he might have transmitted a few strong images apart from his immediate person.\n\nThroughout this period of revelation I had, of course, been desperately trying to devise a method for Robert's release. On the fourth day\u2014the ninth after the disappearance\u2014I hit on a solution. Everything considered, my laboriously formulated process was not a very complicated one; though I could not tell beforehand how it would work, while the possibility of ruinous consequences in case of a slip was appalling. This process depended, basically, on the fact that there was no possible exit from inside the glass. If Holm and his prisoners were permanently sealed in, then release must come wholly from outside. Other considerations included the disposal of the other prisoners, if any survived, and especially of Axel Holm. What Robert had told me of him was anything but reassuring; and I certainly did not wish him loose in my apartment, free once more to work his evil will upon the world. The telepathic messages had not made fully clear the effect of liberation on those who had entered the glass so long ago.\n\nThere was, too, a final though minor problem in case of success\u2014that of getting Robert back into the routine of school life without having to explain the incredible. In case of failure, it was highly inadvisable to have witnesses present at the release operations\u2014and lacking these, I simply could not attempt to relate the actual facts if I should succeed. Even to me the reality seemed a mad one whenever I let my mind turn from the data so compellingly presented in that tense series of dreams.\n\nWhen I had thought these problems through as far as possible, I procured a large magnifying-glass from the school laboratory and studied minutely every square millimeter of that whorl-center which presumably marked the extent of the original ancient mirror used by Holm. Even with this aid I could not quite trace the exact boundary between the old area and the surface added by the Danish wizard; but after a long study decided on a conjectural oval boundary which I outlined very precisely with a soft blue pencil. I then made a trip to Stamford, where I procured a heavy glass-cutting tool; for my primary idea was to remove the ancient and magically potent mirror from its later setting.\n\nMy next step was to figure out the best time of day to make the crucial experiment. I finally settled on two-thirty a.m.\u2014both because it was a good season for uninterrupted work, and because it was the \"opposite\" of two-thirty p.m., the probable moment at which Robert had entered the mirror. This form of \"oppositeness\" may or may not have been relevant, but I knew at least that the chosen hour was as good as any\u2014and perhaps better than most.\n\nI finally set to work in the early morning of the eleventh day after the disappearance, having drawn all the shades of my living-room and closed and locked the door into the hallway. Following with breathless care the elliptical line I had traced, I worked around the whorl-section with my steel-wheeled cutting tool. The ancient glass, half an inch thick, crackled crisply under the firm, uniform pressure; and upon completing the circuit I cut around it a second time, crunching the roller more deeply into the glass.\n\nThen, very carefully indeed, I lifted the heavy mirror down from its console and leaned it face-inward against the wall; prying off two of the thin, narrow boards nailed to the back. With equal caution I smartly tapped the cut-around space with the heavy wooden handle of the glass-cutter.\n\nAt the very first tap the whorl-containing section of glass dropped out on the Bokhara rug beneath. I did not know what might happen, but was keyed up for anything, and took a deep involuntary breath. I was on my knees for convenience at the moment, with my face quite near the newly made aperture; and as I breathed there poured into my nostrils a powerful dusty odor\u2014a smell not comparable to any other I have ever encountered. Then everything within my range of vision suddenly turned to a dull gray before my failing eyesight as I felt myself overpowered by an invisible force which robbed my muscles of their power to function.\n\nI remember grasping weakly and futilely at the edge of the nearest window drapery and feeling it rip loose from its fastening. Then I sank slowly to the floor as the darkness of oblivion passed over me.\n\nWhen I regained consciousness I was lying on the Bokhara rug with my legs held unaccountably up in the air. The room was full of that hideous and inexplicable dusty smell\u2014and as my eyes began to take in definite images I saw that Robert Grandison stood in front of me. It was he\u2014fully in the flesh and with his coloring normal\u2014who was holding my legs aloft to bring the blood back to my head as the school's first-aid course had taught him to do with persons who had fainted. For a moment I was struck mute by the stifling odor and by a bewilderment which quickly merged into a sense of triumph. Then I found myself able to move and speak collectedly.\n\nI raised a tentative hand and waved feebly at Robert.\n\n\"All right, old man,\" I murmured, \"you can let my legs down now. Many thanks. I'm all right again, I think. It was the smell\u2014I imagine\u2014that got me. Open that farthest window, please\u2014wide\u2014from the bottom. That's it\u2014thanks. No\u2014leave the shade down the way it was.\"\n\nI struggled to my feet, my disturbed circulation adjusting itself in waves, and stood upright hanging to the back of a big chair. I was still \"groggy,\" but a blast of fresh, bitterly cold air from the window revived me rapidly. I sat down in the big chair and looked at Robert, now walking toward me.\n\n\"First,\" I said hurriedly, \"tell me, Robert\u2014those others\u2014Holm? What happened to them, when I\u2014opened the exit?\"\n\nRobert paused half-way across the room and looked at me very gravely.\n\n\"I saw them fade away\u2014into nothingness\u2014Mr. Canevin,\" he said with solemnity; \"and with them\u2014everything. There isn't any more 'inside,' sir\u2014thank God, and you, sir!\"\n\nAnd young Robert, at last yielding to the sustained strain which he had borne through all those terrible eleven days, suddenly broke down like a little child and began to weep hysterically in great, stifling, dry sobs.\n\nI picked him up and placed him gently on my davenport, threw a rug over him, sat down by his side, and put a calming hand on his forehead.\n\n\"Take it easy, old fellow,\" I said soothingly.\n\nThe boy's sudden and very natural hysteria passed as quickly as it had come on as I talked to him reassuringly about my plans for his quiet restoration to the school. The interest of the situation and the need of concealing the incredible truth beneath a rational explanation took hold of his imagination as I had expected; and at last he sat up eagerly, telling the details of his release and listening to the instructions I had thought out. He had, it seems, been in the \"projected area\" of my bedroom when I opened the way back, and had emerged in that actual room\u2014hardly realizing that he was \"out.\" Upon hearing a fall in the living-room he had hastened thither, finding me on the rug in my fainting spell.\n\nI need mention only briefly my method of restoring Robert in a seemingly normal way\u2014how I smuggled him out of the window in an old hat and sweater of mine, took him down the road in my quietly started car, coached him carefully in a tale I had devised, and returned to arouse Browne with the news of his discovery. He had, I explained, been walking alone on the afternoon of his disappearance; and had been offered a motor ride by two young men who, as a joke and over his protests that he could go no farther than Stamford and back, had begun to carry him past that town. Jumping from the car during a traffic stop with the intention of hitch-hiking back before Call-Over, he had been hit by another car just as the traffic was released\u2014awakening ten days later in the Greenwich home of the people who had hit him. On learning the date, I added, he had immediately telephoned the school; and I, being the only one awake, had answered the call and hurried after him in my car without stopping to notify anyone.\n\nBrowne, who at once telephoned to Robert's parents, accepted my story without question; and forbore to interrogate the boy because of the latter's manifest exhaustion. It was arranged that he should remain at the school for a rest, under the expert care of Mrs. Browne, a former trained nurse. I naturally saw a good deal of him during the remainder of the Christmas vacation, and was thus enabled to fill in certain gaps in his fragmentary dream-story.\n\nNow and then we would almost doubt the actuality of what had occurred; wondering whether we had not both shared some monstrous delusion born of the mirror's glittering hypnotism, and whether the tale of the ride and accident were not after all the real truth. But whenever we did so we would be brought back to belief by some monstrous and haunting memory; with me, of Robert's dream-figure and its thick voice and inverted colors; with him, of the whole fantastic pageantry of ancient people and dead scenes that he had witnessed. And then there was that joint recollection of that damnable dusty odor.... We knew what it meant: the instant dissolution of those who had entered an alien dimension a century and more ago.\n\nThere are, in addition, at least two lines of rather more positive evidence; one of which comes through my researches in Danish annals concerning the sorcerer, Axel Holm. Such a person, indeed, left many traces in folklore and written records; and diligent library sessions, plus conferences with various learned Danes, have shed much more light on his evil fame. At present I need say only that the Copenhagen glass-blower\u2014born in 1612\u2014was a notorious Luciferian whose pursuits and final vanishing formed a matter of awed debate over two centuries ago. He had burned with a desire to know all things and to conquer every limitation of mankind\u2014to which end he had delved deeply into occult and forbidden fields ever since he was a child.\n\nHe was commonly held to have joined a coven of the dreaded witch-cult, and the vast lore of ancient Scandinavian myth\u2014with its Loki the Sly One and the accursed Fenris-Wolf\u2014was soon an open book to him. He had strange interests and objectives, few of which were definitely known, but some of which were recognized as intolerably evil. It is recorded that his two Negro helpers, originally slaves from the Danish West Indies, had become mute soon after their acquisition by him; and that they had disappeared not long before his own disappearance from the ken of mankind.\n\nNear the close of an already long life the idea of a glass of immortality appears to have entered his mind. That he had acquired an enchanted mirror of inconceivable antiquity was a matter of common whispering; it being alleged that he had purloined it from a fellow-sorcerer who had entrusted it to him for polishing.\n\nThis mirror\u2014according to popular tales a trophy as potent in its way as the better-known Aegis of Minerva or Hammer of Thor\u2014was a small oval object called \"Loki's Glass,\" made of some polished fusible mineral and having magical properties which included the divination of the immediate future and the power to show the possessor his enemies. That it had deeper potential properties, realizable in the hands of an erudite magician, none of the common people doubted; and even educated persons attached much fearful importance to Holm's rumored attempts to incorporate it in a larger glass of immortality. Then had come the wizard's disappearance in 1687, and the final sale and dispersal of his goods amidst a growing cloud of fantastic legendry. It was, altogether, just such a story as one would laugh at if possessed of no particular key; yet to me, remembering those dream messages and having Robert Grandison's corroboration before me, it formed a positive confirmation of all the bewildering marvels that had been unfolded.\n\nBut as I have said, there is still another line of rather positive evidence\u2014of a very different character\u2014at my disposal. Two days after his release, as Robert, greatly improved in strength and appearance, was placing a log on my living-room fire, I noticed a certain awkwardness in his motions and was struck by a persistent idea. Summoning him to my desk I suddenly asked him to pick up an ink-stand\u2014and was scarcely surprised to note that, despite lifelong right-handedness, he obeyed unconsciously with his left hand. Without alarming him, I then asked that he unbutton his coat and let me listen to his cardiac action. What I found upon placing my ear to his chest\u2014and what I did not tell him for some time afterward\u2014was that his heart was beating on his right side.\n\nHe had gone into the glass right-handed and with all organs in their normal positions. Now he was left-handed and with organs reversed, and would doubtless continue so for the rest of his life. Clearly, the dimensional transition had been no illusion\u2014for this physical change was tangible and unmistakable. Had there been a natural exit from the glass, Robert would probably have undergone a thorough re-reversal and emerged in perfect normality\u2014as indeed the color-scheme of his body and clothing did emerge. The forcible nature of his release, however, undoubtedly set something awry; so that dimensions no longer had a chance to right themselves as chromatic wave-frequencies still did.\n\nI had not merely opened Holm's trap; I had destroyed it; and at the particular stage of destruction marked by Robert's escape some of the reversing properties had perished. It is significant that in escaping Robert had felt no pain comparable to that experienced in entering. Had the destruction been still more sudden, I shiver to think of the monstrosities of color the boy would always have been forced to bear. I may add that after discovering Robert's reversal I examined the rumpled and discarded clothing he had worn in the glass, and found, as I had expected, a complete reversal of pockets, buttons, and all other corresponding details.\n\nAt this moment Loki's Glass, just as it fell on my Bokhara rug from the now patched and harmless mirror, weighs down a sheaf of papers on my writing-table here in St. Thomas, venerable capital of the Danish West Indies\u2014now the American Virgin Islands. Various collectors of old Sandwich glass have mistaken it for an odd bit of that early American product\u2014but I privately realize that my paper-weight is an antique of far subtler and more paleogean craftsmanship. Still, I do not disillusion such enthusiasts.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Tree by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\"Fata viam invenient.\"\n\nOn a verdant slope of Mount Maenalus, in Arcadia, there stands an olive grove about the ruins of a villa. Close by is a tomb, once beautiful with the sublimest sculptures, but now fallen into as great decay as the house. At one end of that tomb, its curious roots displacing the time-stained blocks of Pentelic marble, grows an unnaturally large olive tree of oddly repellent shape; so like to some grotesque man, or death-distorted body of a man, that the country folk fear to pass it at night when the moon shines faintly through the crooked boughs. Mount Maenalus is a chosen haunt of dreaded Pan, whose queer companions are many, and simple swains believe that the tree must have some hideous kinship to these weird Panisci; but an old bee-keeper who lives in the neighbouring cottage told me a different story.\n\nMany years ago, when the hillside villa was new and resplendent, there dwelt within it the two sculptors Kalos and Musides. From Lydia to Neapolis the beauty of their work was praised, and none dared say that the one excelled the other in skill. The Hermes of Kalos stood in a marble shrine in Corinth, and the Pallas of Musides surmounted a pillar in Athens, near the Parthenon. All men paid homage to Kalos and Musides, and marvelled that no shadow of artistic jealousy cooled the warmth of their brotherly friendship.\n\nBut though Kalos and Musides dwelt in unbroken harmony, their natures were not alike. Whilst Musides revelled by night amidst the urban gaieties of Tegea, Kalos would remain at home; stealing away from the sight of his slaves into the cool recesses of the olive grove. There he would meditate upon the visions that filled his mind, and there devise the forms of beauty which later became immortal in breathing marble. Idle folk, indeed, said that Kalos conversed with the spirits of the grove, and that his statues were but images of the fauns and dryads he met there\u2014for he patterned his work after no living model.\n\nSo famous were Kalos and Musides, that none wondered when the Tyrant of Syracuse sent to them deputies to speak of the costly statue of Tych\u00e9 which he had planned for his city. Of great size and cunning workmanship must the statue be, for it was to form a wonder of nations and a goal of travellers. Exalted beyond thought would be he whose work should gain acceptance, and for this honour Kalos and Musides were invited to compete. Their brotherly love was well known, and the crafty Tyrant surmised that each, instead of concealing his work from the other, would offer aid and advice; this charity producing two images of unheard-of beauty, the lovelier of which would eclipse even the dreams of poets.\n\nWith joy the sculptors hailed the Tyrant's offer, so that in the days that followed their slaves heard the ceaseless blows of chisels. Not from each other did Kalos and Musides conceal their work, but the sight was for them alone. Saving theirs, no eyes beheld the two divine figures released by skilful blows from the rough blocks that had imprisoned them since the world began.\n\nAt night, as of yore, Musides sought the banquet halls of Tegea whilst Kalos wandered alone in the olive grove. But as time passed, men observed a want of gaiety in the once sparkling Musides. It was strange, they said amongst themselves, that depression should thus seize one with so great a chance to win art's loftiest reward. Many months passed, yet in the sour face of Musides came nothing of the sharp expectancy which the situation should arouse.\n\nThen one day Musides spoke of the illness of Kalos, after which none marvelled again at his sadness, since the sculptors' attachment was known to be deep and sacred. Subsequently many went to visit Kalos, and indeed noticed the pallor of his face; but there was about him a happy serenity which made his glance more magical than the glance of Musides\u2014who was clearly distracted with anxiety, and who pushed aside all the slaves in his eagerness to feed and wait upon his friend with his own hands. Hidden behind heavy curtains stood the two unfinished figures of Tych\u00e9, little touched of late by the sick man and his faithful attendant.\n\nAs Kalos grew inexplicably weaker and weaker despite the ministrations of puzzled physicians and of his assiduous friend, he desired to be carried often to the grove which he so loved. There he would ask to be left alone, as if wishing to speak with unseen things. Musides ever granted his requests, though his eyes filled with visible tears at the thought that Kalos should care more for the fauns and the dryads than for him. At last the end drew near, and Kalos discoursed of things beyond this life. Musides, weeping, promised him a sepulchre more lovely than the tomb of Mausolus; but Kalos bade him speak no more of marble glories. Only one wish now haunted the mind of the dying man; that twigs from certain olive trees in the grove be buried by his resting-place\u2014close to his head. And one night, sitting alone in the darkness of the olive grove, Kalos died.\n\nBeautiful beyond words was the marble sepulchre which stricken Musides carved for his beloved friend. None but Kalos himself could have fashioned such bas-reliefs, wherein were displayed all the splendours of Elysium. Nor did Musides fail to bury close to Kalos' head the olive twigs from the grove.\n\nAs the first violence of Musides' grief gave place to resignation, he laboured with diligence upon his figure of Tych\u00e9. All honour was now his, since the Tyrant of Syracuse would have the work of none save him or Kalos. His task proved a vent for his emotion, and he toiled more steadily each day, shunning the gaieties he once had relished. Meanwhile his evenings were spent beside the tomb of his friend, where a young olive tree had sprung up near the sleeper's head. So swift was the growth of this tree, and so strange was its form, that all who beheld it exclaimed in surprise; and Musides seemed at once fascinated and repelled.\n\nThree years after the death of Kalos, Musides despatched a messenger to the Tyrant, and it was whispered in the agora at Tegea that the mighty statue was finished. By this time the tree by the tomb had attained amazing proportions, exceeding all other trees of its kind, and sending out a singularly heavy branch above the apartment in which Musides laboured. As many visitors came to view the prodigious tree, as to admire the art of the sculptor, so that Musides was seldom alone. But he did not mind his multitude of guests; indeed, he seemed to dread being alone now that his absorbing work was done. The bleak mountain wind, sighing through the olive grove and the tomb-tree, had an uncanny way of forming vaguely articulate sounds.\n\nThe sky was dark on the evening that the Tyrant's emissaries came to Tegea. It was definitely known that they had come to bear away the great image of Tych\u00e9 and bring eternal honour to Musides, so their reception by the proxenoi was of great warmth. As the night wore on, a violent storm of wind broke over the crest of Maenalus, and the men from far Syracuse were glad that they rested snugly in the town. They talked of their illustrious Tyrant, and of the splendour of his capital; and exulted in the glory of the statue which Musides had wrought for him. And then the men of Tegea spoke of the goodness of Musides, and of his heavy grief for his friend; and how not even the coming laurels of art could console him in the absence of Kalos, who might have worn those laurels instead. Of the tree which grew by the tomb, near the head of Kalos, they also spoke. The wind shrieked more horribly, and both the Syracusans and the Arcadians prayed to Aiolos.\n\nIn the sunshine of the morning the proxenoi led the Tyrant's messengers up the slope to the abode of the sculptor, but the night-wind had done strange things. Slaves' cries ascended from a scene of desolation, and no more amidst the olive grove rose the gleaming colonnades of that vast hall wherein Musides had dreamed and toiled. Lone and shaken mourned the humble courts and the lower walls, for upon the sumptuous greater peristyle had fallen squarely the heavy overhanging bough of the strange new tree, reducing the stately poem in marble with odd completeness to a mound of unsightly ruins. Strangers and Tegeans stood aghast, looking from the wreckage to the great, sinister tree whose aspect was so weirdly human and whose roots reached so queerly into the sculptured sepulchre of Kalos. And their fear and dismay increased when they searched the fallen apartment; for of the gentle Musides, and of the marvellously fashioned image of Tych\u00e9, no trace could be discovered. Amidst such stupendous ruin only chaos dwelt, and the representatives of two cities left disappointed; Syracusans that they had no statue to bear home, Tegeans that they had no artist to crown. However, the Syracusans obtained after a while a very splendid statue in Athens, and the Tegeans consoled themselves by erecting in the agora a marble temple commemorating the gifts, virtues, and brotherly piety of Musides.\n\nBut the olive grove still stands, as does the tree growing out of the tomb of Kalos, and the old bee-keeper told me that sometimes the boughs whisper to one another in the night-wind, saying over and over again, \"\u039f\u1f36\u03b4\u03b1! \u039f\u1f36\u03b4\u03b1!\u2014I know! I know!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Tree on the Hill by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nSoutheast of Hampden, near the tortuous Salmon River gorge, is a range of steep, rocky hills which have defied all efforts of sturdy homesteaders. The canyons are too deep and the slopes too precipitous to encourage anything save seasonal livestock grazing. The last time I visited Hampden the region\u2014known as Hell's Acres\u2014was part of the Blue Mountain Forest Reserve. There are no roads linking this inaccessible locality with the outside world, and the hillfolk will tell you that it is indeed a spot transplanted from his Satanic Majesty's front yard. There is a local superstition that the area is haunted\u2014but by what or by whom no one seems to know. Natives will not venture within its mysterious depths, for they believe the stories handed down to them by the Nez Perce Indians, who have shunned the region for untold generations, because, according to them, it is a playground of certain giant devils from the Outside. These suggestive tales made me very curious.\n\nMy first excursion\u2014and my last, thank God!\u2014into those hills occurred while Constantine Theunis and I were living in Hampden the summer of 1938. He was writing a treatise on Egyptian mythology, and I found myself alone much of the time, despite the fact that we shared a modest cabin on Beacon Street, within sight of the infamous Pirate House, built by Exer Jones over sixty years ago.\n\nThe morning of June 23rd found me walking in those oddly shaped hills, which had, since seven o'clock, seemed very ordinary indeed. I must have been about seven miles south of Hampden before I noticed anything unusual. I was climbing a grassy ridge overlooking a particularly deep canyon, when I came upon an area totally devoid of the usual bunch-grass and greaseweed. It extended southward, over numerous hills and valleys. At first I thought the spot had been burned over the previous fall, but upon examining the turf, I found no signs of a blaze. The nearby slopes and ravines looked terribly scarred and seared, as if some gigantic torch had blasted them, wiping away all vegetation. And yet there was no evidence of fire....\n\nI moved on over rich, black soil in which no grass flourished. As I headed for the approximate center of this desolate area, I began to notice a strange silence. There were no larks, no rabbits, and even the insects seemed to have deserted the place. I gained the summit of a lofty knoll and tried to guess at the size of that bleak, inexplicable region. Then I saw the lone tree.\n\nIt stood on a hill somewhat higher than its companions, and attracted the eye because it was so utterly unexpected. I had seen no trees for miles: thorn and hackberry bushes clustered the shallower ravines, but there had been no mature trees. Strange to find one standing on the crest of the hill.\n\nI crossed two steep canyons before I came to it; and a surprise awaited me. It was not a pine tree, nor a fir tree, nor a hackberry tree. I had never, in all my life, seen one to compare with it\u2014and I never have to this day, for which I am eternally thankful!\n\nMore than anything it resembled an oak. It had a huge, twisted trunk, fully a yard in diameter, and the large limbs began spreading outward scarcely seven feet from the ground. The leaves were round, and curiously alike in size and design. It might have been a tree painted on a canvas, but I will swear that it was real. I shall always know that it was real, despite what Theunis said later.\n\nI recall that I glanced at the sun and judged the time to be about ten o'clock a.m., although I did not look at my watch. The day was becoming warm, and I sat for a while in the welcome shade of the huge tree. Then I regarded the rank grass that flourished beneath it\u2014another singular phenomenon when I remembered the bleak terrain through which I had passed. A wild maze of hills, ravines, and bluffs hemmed me in on all sides, although the rise on which I sat was rather higher than any other within miles. I looked far to the east\u2014and I jumped to my feet, startled and amazed. Shimmering through a blue haze of distance were the Bitterroot Mountains! There is no other range of snow-capped peaks within three hundred miles of Hampden; and I knew\u2014at this altitude\u2014that I shouldn't be seeing them at all. For several minutes I gazed at the marvel; then I became drowsy. I lay in the rank grass, beneath the tree. I unstrapped my camera, took off my hat, and relaxed, staring skyward through the green leaves. I closed my eyes.\n\nThen a curious phenomenon began to assail me\u2014a vague, cloudy sort of vision\u2014glimpsing or day-dreaming seemingly without relevance to anything familiar. I thought I saw a great temple by a sea of ooze, where three suns gleamed in a pale red sky. The vast tomb, or temple, was an anomalous color\u2014a nameless blue-violet shade. Large beasts flew in the cloudy sky, and I seemed to hear the pounding of their scaly wings. I went nearer the stone temple, and a huge doorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal were swirling shadows that seemed to dart and leer and try to snatch me inside that awful darkness. I thought I saw three flaming eyes in the shifting void of a doorway, and I screamed with mortal fear. In that noisome depth, I knew, lurked utter destruction\u2014a living hell even worse than death. I screamed again. The vision faded.\n\nI saw the round leaves and the sane earthly sky. I struggled to rise. I was trembling; cold perspiration beaded my brow. I had a mad impulse to flee; run insanely from that sinister tree on the hill\u2014but I checked the absurd intuition and sat down, trying to collect my senses. Never had I dreamed anything so realistic; so horrifying. What had caused the vision? I had been reading several of Theunis' tomes on ancient Egypt.... I mopped my forehead, and decided that it was time for lunch. But I did not feel like eating.\n\nThen I had an inspiration. I would take a few snapshots of the tree, for Theunis. They might shock him out of his habitual air of unconcern. Perhaps I would tell him about the dream.... Opening my camera, I took half a dozen shots of the tree, and every aspect of the landscape as seen from the tree. Also, I included one of the gleaming, snow-crested peaks. I might want to return, and these photos would help....\n\nFolding the camera, I returned to my cushion of soft grass. Had that spot beneath the tree a certain alien enchantment? I know that I was reluctant to leave it....\n\nI gazed upward at the curious round leaves. I closed my eyes. A breeze stirred the branches, and their whispered music lulled me into tranquil oblivion. And suddenly I saw again the pale red sky and the three suns. The land of three shadows! Again the great temple came into view. I seemed to be floating on the air\u2014a disembodied spirit exploring the wonders of a mad, multi-dimensional world! The temple's oddly angled cornices frightened me, and I knew that this place was one that no man on earth had ever seen in his wildest dreams.\n\nAgain the vast doorway yawned before me; and I was sucked within that black, writhing cloud. I seemed to be staring at space unlimited. I saw a void beyond my vocabulary to describe; a dark, bottomless gulf teeming with nameless shapes and entities\u2014things of madness and delirium, as tenuous as a mist from Shamballah.\n\nMy soul shrank. I was terribly afraid. I screamed and screamed, and felt that I would soon go mad. Then in my dream I ran and ran in a fever of utter terror, but I did not know what I was running from.... I left that hideous temple and that hellish void, yet I knew I must, barring some miracle, return....\n\nAt last my eyes flew open. I was not beneath the tree. I was sprawled on a rocky slope, my clothing torn and disordered. My hands were bleeding. I stood up, pain stabbing through me. I recognized the spot\u2014the ridge where I had first seen the blasted area! I must have walked miles\u2014unconscious! The tree was not in sight, and I was glad.... Even the knees of my trousers were torn, as if I had crawled part of the way....\n\nI glanced at the sun. Late afternoon! Where had I been? I snatched out my watch. It had stopped at 10:34...." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 127", + "text": "\"So you have the snapshots?\" Theunis drawled. I met his gray eyes across the breakfast table. Three days had slipped by since my return from Hell's Acres. I had told him about the dream beneath the tree, and he had laughed.\n\n\"Yes,\" I replied. \"They came last night. Haven't had a chance to open them yet. Give 'em a good, careful study\u2014if they aren't all failures. Perhaps you'll change your mind.\"\n\nTheunis smiled; sipped his coffee. I gave him the unopened envelope and he quickly broke the seal and withdrew the pictures. He glanced at the first one, and the smile faded from his leonine face. He crushed out his cigarette.\n\n\"My God, man! Look at this!\"\n\nI seized the glossy rectangle. It was the first picture of the tree, taken at a distance of fifty feet or so. The cause of Theunis' excitement escaped me. There it was, standing boldly on the hill, while below it grew the jungle of grass where I had lain. In the distance were my snow-capped mountains!\n\n\"There you are,\" I cried. \"The proof of my story\u2014\"\n\n\"Look at it!\" Theunis snapped. \"The shadows\u2014there are three for every rock, bush, and tree!\"\n\n\"He was right.... Below the tree, spread in fanlike incongruity, lay three overlapping shadows. Suddenly I realized that the picture held an abnormal and inconsistent element. The leaves on the thing were too lush for the work of sane nature, while the trunk was bulged and knotted in the most abhorrent shapes. Theunis dropped the picture on the table.\n\n\"There is something wrong,\" I muttered. \"The tree I saw didn't look as repulsive as that\u2014\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Theunis grated. \"The fact is, you may have seen many things not recorded on this film.\"\n\n\"It shows more than I saw!\"\n\n\"That's the point. There is something damnably out of place in this landscape; something I can't understand. The tree seems to suggest a thought\u2014beyond my grasp.... It is too misty; too uncertain; too unreal to be natural!\" He rapped nervous fingers on the table. He snatched the remaining films and shuffled through them, rapidly.\n\nI reached for the snapshot he had dropped, and sensed a touch of bizarre uncertainty and strangeness as my eyes absorbed its every detail. The flowers and weeds pointed at varying angles, while some of the grass grew in the most bewildering fashion. The tree seemed too veiled and clouded to be readily distinguished, but I noted the huge limbs and the half-bent flower stems that were ready to fall over, yet did not fall. And the many, overlapping shadows.... They were, altogether, very disquieting shadows\u2014too long or short when compared to the stems they fell below to give one a feeling of comfortable normality. The landscape hadn't shocked me the day of my visit.... There was a dark familiarity and mocking suggestion in it; something tangible, yet distant as the stars beyond the galaxy.\n\nTheunis came back to earth. \"Did you mention three suns in your dreaming orgy?\"\n\nI nodded, frankly puzzled. Then it dawned on me. My fingers trembled slightly as I stared at the picture again. My dream! Of course\u2014\n\n\"The others are just like it,\" Theunis said. \"That same uncertainness; that suggestion. I should be able to catch the mood of the thing; see it in its real light, but it is too.... Perhaps later I shall find out, if I look at it long enough.\"\n\nWe sat in silence for some time. A thought came to me, suddenly, prompted by a strange, inexplicable longing to visit the tree again. \"Let's make an excursion. I think I can take you there in half a day.\"\n\n\"You'd better stay away,\" replied Theunis, thoughtfully. \"I doubt if you could find the place again if you wanted to.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" I replied. \"Surely, with these photos to guide us\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you see any familiar landmarks in them?\"\n\nHis observation was uncanny. After looking through the remaining snaps carefully, I had to admit that there were none.\n\nTheunis muttered under his breath and drew viciously on his cigarette. \"A perfectly normal\u2014or nearly so\u2014picture of a spot apparently dropped from nowhere. Seeing mountains at this low altitude is preposterous... but wait!\"\n\nHe sprang from the chair as a hunted animal and raced from the room. I could hear him moving about in our makeshift library, cursing volubly. Before long he reappeared with an old, leather-bound volume. Theunis opened it reverently, and peered over the odd characters.\n\n\"What do you call that?\" I inquired.\n\n\"This is an early English translation of the Chronicle of Nath, written by Rudolf Yergler, a German mystic and alchemist who borrowed some of his lore from Hermes Trismegistus, the ancient Egyptian sorcerer. There is a passage here that might interest you\u2014might make you understand why this business is even further from the natural than you suspect. Listen.\"\n\n\"So in the year of the Black Goat there came unto Nath a shadow that should not be on Earth, and that had no form known to the eyes of Earth. And it fed on the souls of men; they that it gnawed being lured and blinded with dreams till the horror and the endless night lay upon them. Nor did they see that which gnawed them; for the shadow took false shapes that men know or dream of, and only freedom seemed waiting in the Land of the Three Suns. But it was told by priests of the Old Book that he who could see the shadow's true shape, and live after the seeing, might shun its doom and send it back to the starless gulf of its spawning. This none could do save through the Gem; wherefore did Ka-Nefer the High-Priest keep that gem sacred in the temple. And when it was lost with Phrenes, he who braved the horror and was never seen more, there was weeping in Nath. Yet did the Shadow depart sated at last, nor shall it hunger again till the cycles roll back to the year of the Black Goat.\"\n\nTheunis paused while I stared, bewildered. Finally he spoke. \"Now, Single, I suppose you can guess how all this links up. There is no need of going deep into the primal lore behind this business, but I may as well tell you that according to the old legends this is the so-called 'Year of the Black Goat'\u2014when certain horrors from the fathomless Outside are supposed to visit the earth and do infinite harm. We don't know how they'll be manifest, but there's reason to think that strange mirages and hallucinations will be mixed up in the matter. I don't like the thing you've run up against\u2014the story or the pictures. It may be pretty bad, and I warn you to look out. But first I must try to do what old Yergler says\u2014to see if I can glimpse the matter as it is. Fortunately the old Gem he mentions has been rediscovered\u2014I know where I can get at it. We must use it on the photographs and see what we see.\n\n\"It's more or less like a lens or prism, though one can't take photographs with it. Someone of peculiar sensitiveness might look through and sketch what he sees. There's a bit of danger, and the looker may have his consciousness shaken a trifle; for the real shape of the shadow isn't pleasant and doesn't belong on this earth. But it would be a lot more dangerous not to do anything about it. Meanwhile, if you value your life and sanity, keep away from that hill\u2014and from the thing you think is a tree on it.\"\n\nI was more bewildered than ever. \"How can there be organized beings from the Outside in our midst?\" I cried. \"How do we know that such things exist?\"\n\n\"You reason in terms of this tiny earth,\" Theunis said. \"Surely you don't think that the world is a rule for measuring the universe. There are entities we never dream of floating under our very noses. Modern science is thrusting back the borderland of the unknown and proving that the mystics were not so far off the track\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly I knew that I did not want to look at the picture again; I wanted to destroy it. I wanted to run from it. Theunis was suggesting something beyond.... A trembling, cosmic fear gripped me and drew me away from the hideous picture, for I was afraid I would recognize some object in it....\n\nI glanced at my friend. He was poring over the ancient book, a strange expression on his face. He sat up straight. \"Let's call the thing off for today. I'm tired of this endless guessing and wondering. I must get the loan of the gem from the museum where it is, and do what is to be done.\"\n\n\"As you say,\" I replied. \"Will you have to go to Croydon?\"\n\nHe nodded.\n\n\"Then we'll both go home,\" I said decisively." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 128", + "text": "I need not chronicle the events of the fortnight that followed. With me they formed a constant and enervating struggle between a mad longing to return to the cryptic tree of dreams and freedom, and a frenzied dread of that selfsame thing and all connected with it. That I did not return is perhaps less a matter of my own will than a matter of pure chance. Meanwhile I knew that Theunis was desperately active in some investigation of the strangest nature\u2014something which included a mysterious motor trip and a return under circumstances of the greatest secrecy. By hints over the telephone I was made to understand that he had somewhere borrowed the obscure and primal object mentioned in the ancient volume as \"The Gem,\" and that he was busy devising a means of applying it to the photographs I had left with him. He spoke fragmentarily of \"refraction,\" \"polarization,\" and \"unknown angles of space and time,\" and indicated that he was building a kind of box or camera obscura for the study of the curious snapshots with the gem's aid.\n\nIt was on the sixteenth day that I received the startling message from the hospital in Croydon. Theunis was there, and wanted to see me at once. He had suffered some odd sort of seizure; being found prone and unconscious by friends who found their way into his house after hearing certain cries of mortal agony and fear. Though still weak and helpless, he had now regained his senses and seemed frantic to tell me something and have me perform certain important duties. This much the hospital informed me over the wire; and within half an hour I was at my friend's bedside, marveling at the inroads which worry and tension had made on his features in so brief a time. His first act was to move away the nurses in order to speak in utter confidence.\n\n\"Single\u2014I saw it!\" His voice was strained and husky. \"You must destroy them all\u2014those pictures. I sent it back by seeing it, but the pictures had better go. That tree will never be seen on the hill again\u2014at least, I hope not\u2014till thousands of eons bring back the Year of the Black Goat. You are safe now\u2014mankind is safe.\" He paused, breathing heavily, and continued.\n\n\"Take the Gem out of the apparatus and put it in the safe\u2014you know the combination. It must go back where it came from, for there's a time when it may be needed to save the world. They won't let me leave here yet, but I can rest if I know it's safe. Don't look through the box as it is\u2014it would fix you as it's fixed me. And burn those damned photographs... the one in the box and the others.....\" But Theunis was exhausted now, and the nurses advanced and motioned me away as he leaned back and closed his eyes.\n\nIn another half-hour I was at his house and looking curiously at the long black box on the library table beside the overturned chair. Scattered papers blew about in a breeze from the open window, and close to the box I recognized with a queer sensation the envelope of pictures I had taken. It required only a moment for me to examine the box and detach at one end my earliest picture of the tree, and at the other end a strange bit of amber-colored crystal, cut in devious angles impossible to classify. The touch of the glass fragment seemed curiously warm and electric, and I could scarcely bear to put it out of sight in Theunis' wall safe. The snapshot I handled with a disconcerting mixture of emotions. Even after I had replaced it in the envelope with the rest I had a morbid longing to save it and gloat over it and rush out and up the hill toward its original. Peculiar line-arrangements sprang out of its details to assault and puzzle my memory... pictures behind pictures... secrets lurking in half-familiar shapes.... But a saner contrary instinct, operating at the same time, gave me the vigor and avidity of unplaceable fear as I hastily kindled a fire in the grate and watched the problematic envelope burn to ashes. Somehow I felt that the earth had been purged of a horror on whose brink I had trembled, and which was none the less monstrous because I did not know what it was.\n\nOf the source of Theunis' terrific shock I could form no coherent guess, nor did I dare to think too closely about it. It is notable that I did not at any time have the least impulse to look through the box before removing the gem and photograph. What was shown in the picture by the antique crystal's lens or prism-like power was not, I felt curiously certain, anything that a normal brain ought to be called upon to face. Whatever it was, I had myself been close to it\u2014had been completely under the spell of its allurement\u2014as it brooded on that remote hill in the form of a tree and an unfamiliar landscape. And I did not wish to know what I had so narrowly escaped.\n\nWould that my ignorance might have remained complete! I could sleep better at night. As it was, my eye was arrested before I left the room by the pile of scattered papers rustling on the table beside the black box. All but one were blank, but that one bore a crude drawing in pencil. Suddenly recalling what Theunis had once said about sketching the horror revealed by the gem, I strove to turn away; but sheer curiosity defeated my sane design. Looking again almost furtively, I observed the nervous haste of the strokes, and the unfinished edge left by the sketcher's terrified seizure. Then, in a burst of perverse boldness, I looked squarely at the dark and forbidden design\u2014and fell in a faint.\n\nI shall never describe fully what I saw. After a time I regained my senses, thrust the sheet into the dying fire, and staggered out through the quiet streets to my home. I thanked God that I had not looked through the crystal at the photograph, and prayed fervently that I might forget the drawing's terrible hint of what Theunis had beheld. Since then I have never been quite the same. Even the fairest scenes have seemed to hold some vague, ambiguous hint of the nameless blasphemies which may underlie them and form their masquerading essence. And yet the sketch was so slight\u2014so little indicative of all that Theunis, to judge from his guarded accounts later on, must have discerned!\n\nOnly a few basic elements of the landscape were in the thing. For the most part a cloudy, exotic-looking vapor dominated the view. Every object that might have been familiar was seen to be part of something vague and unknown and altogether un-terrestrial\u2014something infinitely vaster than any human eye could grasp, and infinitely alien, monstrous, and hideous as guessed from the fragment within range.\n\nWhere I had, in the landscape itself, seen the twisted, half-sentient tree, there was here visible only a gnarled, terrible hand or talon with fingers or feelers shockingly distended and evidently groping toward something on the ground or in the spectator's direction. And squarely below the writhing, bloated digits I thought I saw an outline in the grass where a man had lain. But the sketch was hasty, and I could not be sure.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Two Black Bottles by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nNot all of the few remaining inhabitants of Daalbergen, that dismal little village in the Ramapo Mountains, believe that my uncle, old Dominie Vanderhoof, is really dead. Some of them believe he is suspended somewhere between heaven and hell because of the old sexton's curse. If it had not been for that old magician, he might still be preaching in the little damp church across the moor.\n\nAfter what has happened to me in Daalbergen, I can almost share the opinion of the villagers. I am not sure that my uncle is dead, but I am very sure that he is not alive upon this earth. There is no doubt that the old sexton buried him once, but he is not in that grave now. I can almost feel him behind me as I write, impelling me to tell the truth about those strange happenings in Daalbergen so many years ago.\n\nIt was the fourth day of October when I arrived at Daalbergen in answer to a summons. The letter was from a former member of my uncle's congregation, who wrote that the old man had passed away and that there should be some small estate which I, as his only living relative, might inherit. Having reached the secluded little hamlet by a wearying series of changes on branch railways, I found my way to the grocery store of Mark Haines, writer of the letter, and he, leading me into a stuffy back room, told me a peculiar tale concerning Dominie Vanderhoof's death.\n\n\"Y' should be careful, Hoffman,\" Haines told me, \"when y' meet that old sexton, Abel Foster. He's in league with the devil, sure's you're alive. 'Twa'n't two weeks ago Sam Pryor, when he passed the old graveyard, heared him mumblin 't' the dead there. 'Twa'n't right he should talk that way\u2014an' Sam does vow that there was a voice answered him\u2014a kind o' half-voice, hollow and muffled-like, as though it come out o' th' ground. There's others, too, as could tell y' about seein' him standin' afore old Dominie Slott's grave\u2014that one right agin' the church wall\u2014a-wringin' his hands an' a-talkin' t' th' moss on th' tombstone as though it was the old Dominie himself.\"\n\nOld Foster, Haines said, had come to Daalbergen about ten years before, and had been immediately engaged by Vanderhoof to take care of the damp stone church at which most of the villagers worshipped. No one but Vanderhoof seemed to like him, for his presence brought a suggestion almost of the uncanny. He would sometimes stand by the door when the people came to church, and the men would coldly return his servile bow while the women brushed past in haste, holding their skirts aside to avoid touching him. He could be seen on week days cutting the grass in the cemetery and tending the flowers around the graves, now and then crooning and muttering to himself. And few failed to notice the particular attention he paid to the grave of the Reverend Guilliam Slott, first pastor of the church in 1701.\n\nIt was not long after Foster's establishment as a village fixture that disaster began to lower. First came the failure of the mountain mine where most of the men worked. The vein of iron had given out, and many of the people moved away to better localities, while those who had large holdings of land in the vicinity took to farming and managed to wrest a meager living from the rocky hillsides. Then came the disturbances in the church. It was whispered about that the Reverend Johannes Vanderhoof had made a compact with the devil, and was preaching his word in the house of God. His sermons had become weird and grotesque\u2014redolent with sinister things which the ignorant people of Daalbergen did not understand. He transported them back over ages of fear and superstition to regions of hideous, unseen spirits, and peopled their fancy with night-haunting ghouls. One by one the congregation dwindled, while the elders and deacons vainly pleaded with Vanderhoof to change the subject of his sermons. Though the old man continually promised to comply, he seemed to be enthralled by some higher power which forced him to do its will.\n\nA giant in stature, Johannes Vanderhoof was known to be weak and timid at heart, yet even when threatened with expulsion he continued his eerie sermons, until scarcely a handful of people remained to listen to him on Sunday morning. Because of weak finances, it was found impossible to call a new pastor, and before long not one of the villagers dared venture near the church or the parsonage which adjoined it. Everywhere there was fear of those spectral wraiths with whom Vanderhoof was apparently in league.\n\nMy uncle, Mark Haines told me, had continued to live in the parsonage because there was no one with sufficient courage to tell him to move out of it. No one ever saw him again, but lights were visible in the parsonage at night, and were even glimpsed in the church from time to time. It was whispered about the town that Vanderhoof preached regularly in the church every Sunday morning, unaware that his congregation was no longer there to listen. He had only the old sexton, who lived in the basement of the church, to take care of him, and Foster made a weekly visit to what remained of the business section of the village to buy provisions. He no longer bowed servilely to everyone he met, but instead seemed to harbor a demoniac and ill-concealed hatred. He spoke to no one except as was necessary to make his purchases, and glanced from left to right out of evil-filled eyes as he walked the street with his cane tapping the uneven pavements. Bent and shriveled with extreme age, his presence could actually be felt by anyone near him, so powerful was that personality which, said the townspeople, had made Vanderhoof accept the devil as his master. No person in Daalbergen doubted that Abel Foster was at the bottom of all the town's ill luck, but not a one dared lift a finger against him, or could even approach him without a tremor of fear. His name, as well as Vanderhoof's, was never mentioned aloud. Whenever the matter of the church across the moor was discussed, it was in whispers; and if the conversation chanced to be nocturnal, the whisperers would keep glancing over their shoulders to make sure that nothing shapeless or sinister crept out of the darkness to bear witness to their words.\n\nThe churchyard continued to be kept just as green and beautiful as when the church was in use, and the flowers near the graves in the cemetery were tended just as carefully as in times gone by. The old sexton could occasionally be seen working there, as if still being paid for his services, and those who dared venture near said that he maintained a continual conversation with the devil and with those spirits which lurked within the graveyard walls.\n\nOne morning, Haines went on to say, Foster was seen digging a grave where the steeple of the church throws its shadow in the afternoon, before the sun goes down behind the mountain and puts the entire village in semi-twilight. Later, the church bell, silent for months, tolled solemnly for a half-hour. And at sundown those who were watching from a distance saw Foster bring a coffin from the parsonage on a wheelbarrow, dump it into the grave with slender ceremony, and replace the earth in the hole.\n\nThe sexton came to the village the next morning, ahead of his usual weekly schedule, and in much better spirits than was customary. He seemed willing to talk, remarking that Vanderhoof had died the day before, and that he had buried his body beside that of Dominie Slott near the church wall. He smiled from time to time, and rubbed his hands in an untimely and unaccountable glee. It was apparent that he took a perverse and diabolic delight in Vanderhoof's death. The villagers were conscious of an added uncanniness in his presence, and avoided him as much as they could. With Vanderhoof gone they felt more insecure than ever, for the old sexton was now free to cast his worst spells over the town from the church across the moor. Muttering something in a tongue which no one understood, Foster made his way back along the road over the swamp.\n\nIt was then, it seems, that Mark Haines remembered having heard Dominie Vanderhoof speak of me as his nephew. Haines accordingly sent for me, in the hope that I might know something which would clear up the mystery of my uncle's last years. I assured my summoner, however, that I knew nothing about my uncle or his past, except that my mother had mentioned him as a man of gigantic physique but with little courage or power of will.\n\nHaving heard all that Haines had to tell me, I lowered the front legs of my chair to the floor and looked at my watch. It was late afternoon.\n\n\"How far is it out to the church?\" I inquired. \"Think I can make it before sunset?\"\n\n\"Sure, lad, y' ain't goin' out there t'night! Not t' that place!\" The old man trembled noticeably in every limb and half rose from his chair, stretching out a lean, detaining hand. \"Why, it's plumb foolishness!\" he exclaimed.\n\nI laughed aside his fears and informed him that, come what may, I was determined to see the old sexton that evening and get the whole matter over as soon as possible. I did not intend to accept the superstitions of ignorant country folk as truth, for I was convinced that all I had just heard was merely a chain of events which the over-imaginative people of Daalbergen had happened to link with their ill-luck. I felt no sense of fear or horror whatever.\n\nSeeing that I was determined to reach my uncle's house before nightfall, Haines ushered me out of his office and reluctantly gave me the few required directions, pleading from time to time that I change my mind. He shook my hand when I left, as though he never expected to see me again.\n\n\"Take keer that old devil, Foster, don't git ye!\" he warned, again and again. \"I wouldn't go near him after dark fer love n'r money. No siree!\" He re-entered his store, solemnly shaking his head, while I set out along a road leading to the outskirts of the town.\n\nI had walked barely two minutes before I sighted the moor of which Haines had spoken. The road, flanked by a whitewashed fence, passed over the great swamp, which was overgrown with clumps of underbrush dipping down into the dank, slimy ooze. An odor of deadness and decay filled the air, and even in the sunlit afternoon little wisps of vapor could be seen rising from the unhealthful spot.\n\nOn the opposite side of the moor I turned sharply to the left, as I had been directed, branching from the main road. There were several houses in the vicinity, I noticed; houses which were scarcely more than huts, reflecting the extreme poverty of their owners. The road here passed under the drooping branches of enormous willows which almost completely shut out the rays of the sun. The miasmal odor of the swamp was still in my nostrils, and the air was damp and chilly. I hurried my pace to get out of that dismal tunnel as soon as possible.\n\nPresently I found myself in the light again. The sun, now hanging like a red ball upon the crest of the mountain, was beginning to dip low, and there, some distance ahead of me, bathed in its bloody iridescence, stood the lonely church. I began to sense that uncanniness which Haines had mentioned; that feeling of dread which made all Daalbergen shun the place. The squat, stone hulk of the church itself, with its blunt steeple, seemed like an idol to which the tombstones that surrounded it bowed down and worshipped, each with an arched top like the shoulders of a kneeling person, while over the whole assemblage the dingy, gray parsonage hovered like a wraith.\n\nI had slowed my pace a trifle as I took in the scene. The sun was disappearing behind the mountain very rapidly now, and the damp air chilled me. Turning my coat collar up about my neck, I plodded on. Something caught my eye as I glanced up again. In the shadow of the church wall was something white\u2014a thing which seemed to have no definite shape. Straining my eyes as I came nearer, I saw that it was a cross of new timber, surmounting a mound of freshly turned earth. The discovery sent a new chill through me. I realized that this must be my uncle's grave, but something told me that it was not like the other graves near it. It did not seem like a dead grave. In some intangible way it appeared to be living, if a grave can be said to live. Very close to it, I saw as I came nearer, was another grave; an old mound with a crumbling stone about it. Dominie Slott's tomb, I though, remembering Haines's story.\n\nThere was no sign of life anywhere about the place. In the semi-twilight I climbed the low knoll upon which the parsonage stood, and hammered upon the door. There was no answer. I skirted the house and peered into the windows. The whole place seemed deserted.\n\nThe lowering mountains had made night fall with disarming suddenness the minute the sun was fully hidden. I realized that I could see scarcely more than a few feet ahead of me. Feeling my way carefully, I rounded a corner of the house and paused, wondering what to do next.\n\nEverything was quiet. There was not a breath of wind, nor were there even the usual noises made by animals in their nocturnal ramblings. All dread had been forgotten for a time, but in the presence of that sepulchral calm my apprehensions returned. I imagined the air peopled with ghastly spirits that pressed around me, making the air almost unbreathable. I wondered, for the hundredth time, where the old sexton might be.\n\nAs I stood there, half expecting some sinister demon to creep from the shadows, I noticed two lighted windows glaring from the belfry of the church. I then remembered what Haines had told me about Foster's living in the basement of the building. Advancing cautiously through the blackness, I found a side door of the church ajar.\n\nThe interior had a musty and mildewed odor. Everything I touched was covered with a cold, clammy moisture. I struck a match and began to explore, to discover, if I could, how to get into the belfry. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks.\n\nA snatch of song, loud and obscene, sung in a voice that was guttural and thick with drink, came from above me. The match burned my fingers, and I dropped it. Two pin-points of light pierced the darkness of the farther wall of the church, and below them, to one side, I could see a door outlined where light filtered through its cracks. The song stopped as abruptly as it had commenced, and there was absolute silence again. My heart was thumping and blood racing through my temples. Had I not been petrified with fear, I should have fled immediately.\n\nNot caring to light another match, I felt my way among the pews until I stood in front of the door. So deep was the feeling of depression which had come over me that I felt as though I were acting in a dream. My actions were almost involuntary.\n\nThe door was locked, as I found when I turned the knob. I hammered upon it for some time, but there was no answer. The silence was as complete as before. Feeling around the edge of the door, I found the hinges, removed the pins from them, and allowed the door to fall toward me. Dim light flooded down a steep flight of steps. There was a sickening odor of whisky. I could now hear someone stirring in the belfry room above. Venturing a low halloo, I thought I heard a groan in reply, and cautiously climbed the stairs.\n\nMy first glance into that unhallowed place was indeed startling. Strewn about the little room were old and dusty books and manuscripts\u2014strange things that bespoke almost unbelievable age. On rows of shelves which reached to the ceiling were horrible things in glass jars and bottles\u2014snakes and lizards and bats. Dust and mold and cobwebs encrusted everything. In the center, behind a table upon which was a lighted candle, a nearly empty bottle of whisky, and a glass, was a motionless figure with a thin, scrawny, wrinkled face and wild eyes that stared blankly through me. I recognized Abel Foster, the old sexton, in an instant. He did not move or speak as I came slowly and fearfully toward him.\n\n\"Mr. Foster?\" I asked, trembling with unaccountable fear when I heard my voice echo within the close confines of the room. There was no reply, and no movement from the figure behind the table. I wondered if he had not drunk himself to insensibility, and went behind the table to shake him.\n\nAt the mere touch of my arm upon his shoulder, the strange old man started from his chair as though terrified. His eyes, still having in them that same blank stare, were fixed upon me. Swinging his arms like flails, he backed away.\n\n\"Don't!\" he screamed. \"Don't touch me! Go back\u2014go back!\"\n\nI saw that he was both drunk and struck with some kind of a nameless terror. Using a soothing tone, I told him who I was and why I had come. He seemed to understand vaguely and sank back into his chair, sitting limp and motionless.\n\n\"I thought ye was him,\" he mumbled. \"I thought ye was him come back fer it. He's been a-tryin' t' get out\u2014a-tryin' t' get out sence I put him in there.\" His voice again rose to a scream and he clutched his chair. \"Maybe he's got out now! Maybe he's out!\"\n\nI looked about, half expecting to see some spectral shape coming up the stairs.\n\n\"Maybe who's out?\" I inquired.\n\n\"Vanderhoof!\" he shrieked. \"Th' cross over his grave keeps fallin' down in th' night! Every morning the earth is loose, and gets harder t' pat down. He'll come out an' I won't be able t' do nothin'.\"\n\nForcing him back into the chair, I seated myself on a box near him. He was trembling in mortal terror, with the saliva dripping from the corners of his mouth. From time to time I felt that sense of horror which Haines had described when he told me of the old sexton. Truly, there was something uncanny about the man. His head had now sunk forward upon his breast, and he seemed calmer, mumbling to himself.\n\nI quietly arose and opened a window to let out the fumes of whisky and the musty odor of dead things. Light from a dim moon, just risen, made objects below barely visible. I could just see Dominie Vanderhoof's grave from my position in the belfry, and blinked my eyes as I gazed at it. That cross was tilted! I remembered that it had been vertical an hour ago. Fear took possession of me again. I turned quickly. Foster sat in his chair watching me. His glance was saner than before.\n\n\"So ye're Vanderhoof's nephew,\" he mumbled in a nasal tone. \"Waal, ye might's well know it all. He'll be back arter me afore long, he will\u2014jus' as soon as he can get out o' that there grave. Ye might's well know all about it now.\"\n\nHis terror appeared to have left him. He seemed resigned to some horrible fate which he expected any minute. His head dropped down upon his chest again, and he went on muttering in that nasal monotone.\n\n\"Ye see all them there books and papers? Waal, they was once Dominie Slott's\u2014Dominie Slott, who was here years ago. All them things is got t' do with magic\u2014black magic that th' old Dominie knew afore he come t' this country. They used t' burn 'em an' boil 'em in oil fer knowin' that over there, they did. But old Slott knew, and he didn't go fer t' tell nobody. No sir, old Slott used to preach here generations ago, an' he used to come up here an' study them books, an' use all them dead things in jars, an' pronounce magic curses an' things, but he didn't let nobody know it. No, nobody knowed it but Dominie Slott an' me.\"\n\n\"You?\" I ejaculated, leaning across the table toward him.\n\n\"That is, me after I learned it.\" His face showed lines of trickery as he answered me. \"I found all this stuff here when I come t' be church sexton, an' I used t' read it when I wa'n't at work. An' I soon got t' know all about it.\"\n\nThe old man droned on, while I listened, spellbound. He told about learning the difficult formulae of demonology, so that, by means of incantations, he could cast spells over human beings. He had performed horrible occult rites of his hellish creed, calling down anathema upon the town and its inhabitants. Crazed by his desires, he tried to bring the church under his spell, but the power of God was too strong. Finding Johannes Vanderhoof very weak-willed, he bewitched him so that he preached strange and mystic sermons which struck fear into the simple hearts of the country folk. From his position in the belfry room, he said, behind a painting of the temptation of Christ which adorned the rear wall of the church, he would glare at Vanderhoof while he was preaching, through holes which were the eyes of the Devil in the picture. Terrified by the uncanny things which were happening in their midst, the congregation left one by one, and Foster was able to do what he pleased with the church and with Vanderhoof.\n\n\"But what did you do with him?\" I asked in a hollow voice as the old sexton paused in his confession. He burst into a cackle of laughter, throwing back his head in drunken glee.\n\n\"I took his soul!\" he howled in a tone that set me trembling. \"I took his soul and put it in a bottle\u2014in a little black bottle! And I buried him! But he ain't got his soul, an' he cain't go neither t' heaven n'r hell! But he's a-comin' back after it. He's atrying' t' get out o' his grave now. I can hear him pushin' his way up through the ground, he's that strong!\"\n\nAs the old man had proceeded with his story, I had become more and more convinced that he must be telling me the truth, and not merely gibbering in drunkenness. Every detail fitted what Haines had told me. Fear was growing upon me by degrees. With the old wizard now shouting with demoniac laughter, I was tempted to bolt down the narrow stairway and leave that accursed neighborhood. To calm myself, I rose and again looked out of the window. My eyes nearly started from their sockets when I saw that the cross above Vanderhoof's grave had fallen perceptibly since I had last looked at it. It was now tilted to an angle of forty-five degrees!\n\n\"Can't we dig up Vanderhoof and restore his soul?\" I asked almost breathlessly, feeling that something must be done in a hurry. The old man rose from his chair in terror.\n\n\"No, no, no!\" he screamed. \"He'd kill me! I've fergot th' formula, an' if he gets out he'll be alive, without a soul. He'd kill us both!\"\n\n\"Where is the bottle that contains his soul?\" I asked, advancing threateningly toward him. I felt that some ghastly thing was about to happen, which I must do all in my power to prevent.\n\n\"I won't tell ye, ye young whelp!\" he snarled. I felt, rather than saw, a queer light in his eyes as he backed into a corner. \"An' don't ye touch me, either, or ye'll wish ye hadn't!\"\n\nI moved a step forward, noticing that on a low stool behind him there were two black bottles. Foster muttered some peculiar words in a low singsong voice. Everything began to turn gray before my eyes, and something within me seemed to be dragged upward, trying to get out at my throat. I felt my knees become weak.\n\nLurching forward, I caught the old sexton by the throat, and with my free arm reached for the bottles on the stool. But the old man fell backward, striking the stool with his foot, and one bottle fell to the floor as I snatched the other. There was a flash of blue flame, and a sulfurous smell filled the room. From the little heap of broken glass a white vapor rose and followed the draft out the window.\n\n\"Curse ye, ye rascal!\" sounded a voice that seemed faint and far away. Foster, whom I had released when the bottle broke, was crouching against the wall, looking smaller and more shriveled than before. His face was slowly turning greenish-black.\n\n\"Curse ye!\" said the voice again, hardly sounding as though it came from his lips. \"I'm done fer! That one in there was mine! Dominie Slott took it out two hundred years ago!\"\n\nHe slid slowly toward the floor, gazing at me with hatred in eyes that were rapidly dimming. His flesh changed from white to black, and then to yellow. I saw with horror that his body seemed to be crumbling away and his clothing falling into limp folds.\n\nThe bottle in my hand was growing warm. I glanced at it, fearfully. It glowed with a faint phosphorescence. Stiff with fright, I set it upon the table, but could not keep my eyes from it. There was an ominous moment of silence as its glow became brighter, and then there came distinctly to my ears the sound of sliding earth. Gasping for breath, I looked out of the window. The moon was now well up in the sky, and by its light I could see that the fresh cross above Vanderhoof's grave had completely fallen. Once again there came the sound of trickling gravel, and no longer able to control myself, I stumbled down the stairs and found my way out of doors. Falling now and then as I raced over the uneven ground, I ran on in abject terror. When I had reached the foot of the knoll, at the entrance to that gloomy tunnel beneath the willows, I heard a horrible roar behind me. Turning, I glanced back toward the church. Its wall reflected the light of the moon, and silhouetted against it was a gigantic, loathsome, black shadow climbing from my uncle's grave and floundering gruesomely toward the church.\n\nI told my story to a group of villagers in Haines's store the next morning. They looked from one to the other with little smiles during my tale, I noticed, but when I suggested that they accompany me to the spot, gave various excuses for not caring to go. Though there seemed to be a limit to their credulity, they cared to run no risks. I informed them that I would go alone, though I must confess that the project did not appeal to me.\n\nAs I left the store, one old man with a long, white beard hurried after me and caught my arm.\n\n\"I'll go wi' ye, lad,\" he said. \"It do seem that I once heared my gran'pap tell o' su'thin' o' the sort concernin' old Dominie Slott. A queer old man I've heared he were, but Vanderhoof's been worse.\"\n\nDominie Vanderhoof's grave was open and deserted when we arrived. Of course it could have been grave-robbers, the two of us agreed, and yet.... In the belfry the bottle which I had left upon the table was gone, though the fragments of the broken one were found on the floor. And upon the heap of yellow dust and crumpled clothing that had once been Abel Foster were certain immense footprints.\n\nAfter glancing at some of the books and papers strewn about the belfry room, we carried them down the stairs and burned them, as something unclean and unholy. With a spade which we found in the church basement we filled in the grave of Johannes Vanderhoof, and, as an afterthought, flung the fallen cross upon the flames.\n\nOld wives say that now, when the moon is full, there walks about the churchyard a gigantic and bewildered figure clutching a bottle and seeking some unremembered goal.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Under the Pyramids by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nMystery attracts mystery. Ever since the wide appearance of my name as a performer of unexplained feats, I have encountered strange narratives and events which my calling has led people to link with my interests and activities. Some of these have been trivial and irrelevant, some deeply dramatic and absorbing, some productive of weird and perilous experiences, and some involving me in extensive scientific and historical research. Many of these matters I have told and shall continue to tell freely; but there is one of which I speak with great reluctance, and which I am now relating only after a session of grilling persuasion from the publishers of this magazine, who had heard vague rumours of it from other members of my family.\n\nThe hitherto guarded subject pertains to my non-professional visit to Egypt fourteen years ago, and has been avoided by me for several reasons. For one thing, I am averse to exploiting certain unmistakably actual facts and conditions obviously unknown to the myriad tourists who throng about the pyramids and apparently secreted with much diligence by the authorities at Cairo, who cannot be wholly ignorant of them. For another thing, I dislike to recount an incident in which my own fantastic imagination must have played so great a part. What I saw\u2014or thought I saw\u2014certainly did not take place; but is rather to be viewed as a result of my then recent readings in Egyptology, and of the speculations anent this theme which my environment naturally prompted. These imaginative stimuli, magnified by the excitement of an actual event terrible enough in itself, undoubtedly gave rise to the culminating horror of that grotesque night so long past.\n\nIn January, 1910, I had finished a professional engagement in England and signed a contract for a tour of Australian theatres. A liberal time being allowed for the trip, I determined to make the most of it in the sort of travel which chiefly interests me; so accompanied by my wife I drifted pleasantly down the Continent and embarked at Marseilles on the P. & O. Steamer Malwa, bound for Port Said. From that point I proposed to visit the principal historical localities of lower Egypt before leaving finally for Australia.\n\nThe voyage was an agreeable one, and enlivened by many of the amusing incidents which befall a magical performer apart from his work. I had intended, for the sake of quiet travel, to keep my name a secret; but was goaded into betraying myself by a fellow-magician whose anxiety to astound the passengers with ordinary tricks tempted me to duplicate and exceed his feats in a manner quite destructive of my incognito. I mention this because of its ultimate effect\u2014an effect I should have foreseen before unmasking to a shipload of tourists about to scatter throughout the Nile Valley. What it did was to herald my identity wherever I subsequently went, and deprive my wife and me of all the placid inconspicuousness we had sought. Travelling to seek curiosities, I was often forced to stand inspection as a sort of curiosity myself!\n\nWe had come to Egypt in search of the picturesque and the mystically impressive, but found little enough when the ship edged up to Port Said and discharged its passengers in small boats. Low dunes of sand, bobbing buoys in shallow water, and a drearily European small town with nothing of interest save the great De Lesseps statue, made us anxious to get on to something more worth our while. After some discussion we decided to proceed at once to Cairo and the Pyramids, later going to Alexandria for the Australian boat and for whatever Graeco-Roman sights that ancient metropolis might present.\n\nThe railway journey was tolerable enough, and consumed only four hours and a half. We saw much of the Suez Canal, whose route we followed as far as Ismailiya, and later had a taste of Old Egypt in our glimpse of the restored fresh-water canal of the Middle Empire. Then at last we saw Cairo glimmering through the growing dusk; a twinkling constellation which became a blaze as we halted at the great Gare Centrale.\n\nBut once more disappointment awaited us, for all that we beheld was European save the costumes and the crowds. A prosaic subway led to a square teeming with carriages, taxicabs, and trolley-cars, and gorgeous with electric lights shining on tall buildings; whilst the very theatre where I was vainly requested to play, and which I later attended as a spectator, had recently been renamed the \"American Cosmograph\". We stopped at Shepherd's Hotel, reached in a taxi that sped along broad, smartly built-up streets; and amidst the perfect service of its restaurant, elevators, and generally Anglo-American luxuries the mysterious East and immemorial past seemed very far away.\n\nThe next day, however, precipitated us delightfully into the heart of the Arabian Nights atmosphere; and in the winding ways and exotic skyline of Cairo, the Bagdad of Haroun-al-Raschid seemed to live again. Guided by our Baedeker, we had struck east past the Ezbekiyeh Gardens along the Mouski in quest of the native quarter, and were soon in the hands of a clamorous cicerone who\u2014notwithstanding later developments\u2014was assuredly a master at his trade. Not until afterward did I see that I should have applied at the hotel for a licenced guide. This man, a shaven, peculiarly hollow-voiced, and relatively cleanly fellow who looked like a Pharaoh and called himself \"Abdul Reis el Drogman\", appeared to have much power over others of his kind; though subsequently the police professed not to know him, and to suggest that reis is merely a name for any person in authority, whilst \"Drogman\" is obviously no more than a clumsy modification of the word for a leader of tourist parties\u2014dragoman.\n\nAbdul led us among such wonders as we had before only read and dreamed of. Old Cairo is itself a story-book and a dream\u2014labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic secrets; Arabesque balconies and oriels nearly meeting above the cobbled streets; maelstroms of Oriental traffic with strange cries, cracking whips, rattling carts, jingling money, and braying donkeys; kaleidoscopes of polychrome robes, veils, turbans, and tarbushes; water-carriers and dervishes, dogs and cats, soothsayers and barbers; and over all the whining of blind beggars crouched in alcoves, and the sonorous chanting of muezzins from minarets limned delicately against a sky of deep, unchanging blue.\n\nThe roofed, quieter bazaars were hardly less alluring. Spice, perfume, incense, beads, rugs, silks, and brass\u2014old Mahmoud Suleiman squats cross-legged amidst his gummy bottles while chattering youths pulverise mustard in the hollowed-out capital of an ancient classic column\u2014a Roman Corinthian, perhaps from neighbouring Heliopolis, where Augustus stationed one of his three Egyptian legions. Antiquity begins to mingle with exoticism. And then the mosques and the museum\u2014we saw them all, and tried not to let our Arabian revel succumb to the darker charm of Pharaonic Egypt which the museum's priceless treasures offered. That was to be our climax, and for the present we concentrated on the mediaeval Saracenic glories of the Caliphs whose magnificent tomb-mosques form a glittering faery necropolis on the edge of the Arabian Desert.\n\nAt length Abdul took us along the Sharia Mohammed Ali to the ancient mosque of Sultan Hassan, and the tower-flanked Bab-el-Azab, beyond which climbs the steep-walled pass to the mighty citadel that Saladin himself built with the stones of forgotten pyramids. It was sunset when we scaled that cliff, circled the modern mosque of Mohammed Ali, and looked down from the dizzying parapet over mystic Cairo\u2014mystic Cairo all golden with its carven domes, its ethereal minarets, and its flaming gardens. Far over the city towered the great Roman dome of the new museum; and beyond it\u2014across the cryptic yellow Nile that is the mother of aeons and dynasties\u2014lurked the menacing sands of the Libyan Desert, undulant and iridescent and evil with older arcana. The red sun sank low, bringing the relentless chill of Egyptian dusk; and as it stood poised on the world's rim like that ancient god of Heliopolis\u2014Re-Harakhte, the Horizon-Sun\u2014we saw silhouetted against its vermeil holocaust the black outlines of the Pyramids of Gizeh\u2014the palaeogean tombs there were hoary with a thousand years when Tut-Ankh-Amen mounted his golden throne in distant Thebes. Then we knew that we were done with Saracen Cairo, and that we must taste the deeper mysteries of primal Egypt\u2014the black Khem of Re and Amen, Isis and Osiris.\n\nThe next morning we visited the pyramids, riding out in a Victoria across the great Nile bridge with its bronze lions, the island of Ghizereh with its massive lebbakh trees, and the smaller English bridge to the western shore. Down the shore road we drove, between great rows of lebbakhs and past the vast Zo\u00f6logical Gardens to the suburb of Gizeh, where a new bridge to Cairo proper has since been built. Then, turning inland along the Sharia-el-Haram, we crossed a region of glassy canals and shabby native villages till before us loomed the objects of our quest, cleaving the mists of dawn and forming inverted replicas in the roadside pools. Forty centuries, as Napoleon had told his campaigners there, indeed looked down upon us.\n\nThe road now rose abruptly, till we finally reached our place of transfer between the trolley station and the Mena House Hotel. Abdul Reis, who capably purchased our pyramid tickets, seemed to have an understanding with the crowding, yelling, and offensive Bedouins who inhabited a squalid mud village some distance away and pestiferously assailed every traveller; for he kept them very decently at bay and secured an excellent pair of camels for us, himself mounting a donkey and assigning the leadership of our animals to a group of men and boys more expensive than useful. The area to be traversed was so small that camels were hardly needed, but we did not regret adding to our experience this troublesome form of desert navigation.\n\nThe pyramids stand on a high rock plateau, this group forming next to the northernmost of the series of regal and aristocratic cemeteries built in the neighbourhood of the extinct capital Memphis, which lay on the same side of the Nile, somewhat south of Gizeh, and which flourished between 3400 and 2000 B. C. The greatest pyramid, which lies nearest the modern road, was built by King Cheops or Khufu about 2800 B. C., and stands more than 450 feet in perpendicular height. In a line southwest from this are successively the Second Pyramid, built a generation later by King Khephren, and though slightly smaller, looking even larger because set on higher ground, and the radically smaller Third Pyramid of King Mycerinus, built about 2700 B. C. Near the edge of the plateau and due east of the Second Pyramid, with a face probably altered to form a colossal portrait of Khephren, its royal restorer, stands the monstrous Sphinx\u2014mute, sardonic, and wise beyond mankind and memory.\n\nMinor pyramids and the traces of ruined minor pyramids are found in several places, and the whole plateau is pitted with the tombs of dignitaries of less than royal rank. These latter were originally marked by mastabas, or stone bench-like structures about the deep burial shafts, as found in other Memphian cemeteries and exemplified by Perneb's Tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of New York. At Gizeh, however, all such visible things have been swept away by time and pillage; and only the rock-hewn shafts, either sand-filled or cleared out by archaeologists, remain to attest their former existence. Connected with each tomb was a chapel in which priests and relatives offered food and prayer to the hovering ka or vital principle of the deceased. The small tombs have their chapels contained in their stone mastabas or superstructures, but the mortuary chapels of the pyramids, where regal Pharaohs lay, were separate temples, each to the east of its corresponding pyramid, and connected by a causeway to a massive gate-chapel or propylon at the edge of the rock plateau.\n\nThe gate-chapel leading to the Second Pyramid, nearly buried in the drifting sands, yawns subterraneously southeast of the Sphinx. Persistent tradition dubs it the \"Temple of the Sphinx\"; and it may perhaps be rightly called such if the Sphinx indeed represents the Second Pyramid's builder Khephren. There are unpleasant tales of the Sphinx before Khephren\u2014but whatever its elder features were, the monarch replaced them with his own that men might look at the colossus without fear. It was in the great gateway-temple that the life-size diorite statue of Khephren now in the Cairo Museum was found; a statue before which I stood in awe when I beheld it. Whether the whole edifice is now excavated I am not certain, but in 1910 most of it was below ground, with the entrance heavily barred at night. Germans were in charge of the work, and the war or other things may have stopped them. I would give much, in view of my experience and of certain Bedouin whisperings discredited or unknown in Cairo, to know what has developed in connexion with a certain well in a transverse gallery where statues of the Pharaoh were found in curious juxtaposition to the statues of baboons.\n\nThe road, as we traversed it on our camels that morning, curved sharply past the wooden police quarters, post-office, drug-store, and shops on the left, and plunged south and east in a complete bend that scaled the rock plateau and brought us face to face with the desert under the lee of the Great Pyramid. Past Cyclopean masonry we rode, rounding the eastern face and looking down ahead into a valley of minor pyramids beyond which the eternal Nile glistened to the east, and the eternal desert shimmered to the west. Very close loomed the three major pyramids, the greatest devoid of outer casing and shewing its bulk of great stones, but the others retaining here and there the neatly fitted covering which had made them smooth and finished in their day.\n\nPresently we descended toward the Sphinx, and sat silent beneath the spell of those terrible unseeing eyes. On the vast stone breast we faintly discerned the emblem of Re-Harakhte, for whose image the Sphinx was mistaken in a late dynasty; and though sand covered the tablet between the great paws, we recalled what Thutmosis IV inscribed thereon, and the dream he had when a prince. It was then that the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath the monstrous creature, leading down, down, to depths none might dare hint at\u2014depths connected with mysteries older than the dynastic Egypt we excavate, and having a sinister relation to the persistence of abnormal, animal-headed gods in the ancient Nilotic pantheon. Then, too, it was I asked myself an idle question whose hideous significance was not to appear for many an hour.\n\nOther tourists now began to overtake us, and we moved on to the sand-choked Temple of the Sphinx, fifty yards to the southeast, which I have previously mentioned as the great gate of the causeway to the Second Pyramid's mortuary chapel on the plateau. Most of it was still underground, and although we dismounted and descended through a modern passageway to its alabaster corridor and pillared hall, I felt that Abdul and the local German attendant had not shewn us all there was to see. After this we made the conventional circuit of the pyramid plateau, examining the Second Pyramid and the peculiar ruins of its mortuary chapel to the east, the Third Pyramid and its miniature southern satellites and ruined eastern chapel, the rock tombs and the honeycombings of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, and the famous Campell's Tomb whose shadowy shaft sinks precipitously for 53 feet to a sinister sarcophagus which one of our camel-drivers divested of the cumbering sand after a vertiginous descent by rope.\n\nCries now assailed us from the Great Pyramid, where Bedouins were besieging a party of tourists with offers of guidance to the top, or of displays of speed in the performance of solitary trips up and down. Seven minutes is said to be the record for such an ascent and descent, but many lusty sheiks and sons of sheiks assured us they could cut it to five if given the requisite impetus of liberal baksheesh. They did not get this impetus, though we did let Abdul take us up, thus obtaining a view of unprecedented magnificence which included not only remote and glittering Cairo with its crowned citadel and background of gold-violet hills, but all the pyramids of the Memphian district as well, from Abu Roash on the north to the Dashur on the south. The Sakkara step-pyramid, which marks the evolution of the low mastaba into the true pyramid, shewed clearly and alluringly in the sandy distance. It is close to this transition-monument that the famed Tomb of Perneb was found\u2014more than 400 miles north of the Theban rock valley where Tut-Ankh-Amen sleeps. Again I was forced to silence through sheer awe. The prospect of such antiquity, and the secrets each hoary monument seemed to hold and brood over, filled me with a reverence and sense of immensity nothing else ever gave me.\n\nFatigued by our climb, and disgusted with the importunate Bedouins whose actions seemed to defy every rule of taste, we omitted the arduous detail of entering the cramped interior passages of any of the pyramids, though we saw several of the hardiest tourists preparing for the suffocating crawl through Cheops' mightiest memorial. As we dismissed and overpaid our local bodyguard and drove back to Cairo with Abdul Reis under the afternoon sun, we half regretted the omission we had made. Such fascinating things were whispered about lower pyramid passages not in the guidebooks; passages whose entrances had been hastily blocked up and concealed by certain uncommunicative archaeologists who had found and begun to explore them. Of course, this whispering was largely baseless on the face of it; but it was curious to reflect how persistently visitors were forbidden to enter the pyramids at night, or to visit the lowest burrows and crypt of the Great Pyramid. Perhaps in the latter case it was the psychological effect which was feared\u2014the effect on the visitor of feeling himself huddled down beneath a gigantic world of solid masonry; joined to the life he has known by the merest tube, in which he may only crawl, and which any accident or evil design might block. The whole subject seemed so weird and alluring that we resolved to pay the pyramid plateau another visit at the earliest possible opportunity. For me this opportunity came much earlier than I expected.\n\nThat evening, the members of our party feeling somewhat tired after the strenuous programme of the day, I went alone with Abdul Reis for a walk through the picturesque Arab quarter. Though I had seen it by day, I wished to study the alleys and bazaars in the dusk, when rich shadows and mellow gleams of light would add to their glamour and fantastic illusion. The native crowds were thinning, but were still very noisy and numerous when we came upon a knot of revelling Bedouins in the Suken-Nahhasin, or bazaar of the coppersmiths. Their apparent leader, an insolent youth with heavy features and saucily cocked tarbush, took some notice of us; and evidently recognised with no great friendliness my competent but admittedly supercilious and sneeringly disposed guide. Perhaps, I thought, he resented that odd reproduction of the Sphinx's half-smile which I had often remarked with amused irritation; or perhaps he did not like the hollow and sepulchral resonance of Abdul's voice. At any rate, the exchange of ancestrally opprobrious language became very brisk; and before long Ali Ziz, as I heard the stranger called when called by no worse name, began to pull violently at Abdul's robe, an action quickly reciprocated, and leading to a spirited scuffle in which both combatants lost their sacredly cherished headgear and would have reached an even direr condition had I not intervened and separated them by main force.\n\nMy interference, at first seemingly unwelcome on both sides, succeeded at last in effecting a truce. Sullenly each belligerent composed his wrath and his attire; and with an assumption of dignity as profound as it was sudden, the two formed a curious pact of honour which I soon learned is a custom of great antiquity in Cairo\u2014a pact for the settlement of their difference by means of a nocturnal fist fight atop the Great Pyramid, long after the departure of the last moonlight sightseer. Each duellist was to assemble a party of seconds, and the affair was to begin at midnight, proceeding by rounds in the most civilised possible fashion. In all this planning there was much which excited my interest. The fight itself promised to be unique and spectacular, while the thought of the scene on that hoary pile overlooking the antediluvian plateau of Gizeh under the wan moon of the pallid small hours appealed to every fibre of imagination in me. A request found Abdul exceedingly willing to admit me to his party of seconds; so that all the rest of the early evening I accompanied him to various dens in the most lawless regions of the town\u2014mostly northeast of the Ezbekiyeh\u2014where he gathered one by one a select and formidable band of congenial cutthroats as his pugilistic background.\n\nShortly after nine our party, mounted on donkeys bearing such royal or tourist-reminiscent names as \"Rameses\", \"Mark Twain\", \"J. P. Morgan\", and \"Minnehaha\", edged through street labyrinths both Oriental and Occidental, crossed the muddy and mast-forested Nile by the bridge of the bronze lions, and cantered philosophically between the lebbakhs on the road to Gizeh. Slightly over two hours were consumed by the trip, toward the end of which we passed the last of the returning tourists, saluted the last in-bound trolley-car, and were alone with the night and the past and the spectral moon.\n\nThen we saw the vast pyramids at the end of the avenue, ghoulish with a dim atavistical menace which I had not seemed to notice in the daytime. Even the smallest of them held a hint of the ghastly\u2014for was it not in this that they had buried Queen Nitokris alive in the Sixth Dynasty; subtle Queen Nitokris, who once invited all her enemies to a feast in a temple below the Nile, and drowned them by opening the water-gates? I recalled that the Arabs whisper things about Nitokris, and shun the Third Pyramid at certain phases of the moon. It must have been over her that Thomas Moore was brooding when he wrote a thing muttered about by Memphian boatmen\u2014\n\n\u2003\"The subterranean nymph that dwells\n\n\u2003'Mid sunless gems and glories hid\u2014\n\n\u2003The lady of the Pyramid!\"\n\nEarly as we were, Ali Ziz and his party were ahead of us; for we saw their donkeys outlined against the desert plateau at Kafr-el-Haram; toward which squalid Arab settlement, close to the Sphinx, we had diverged instead of following the regular road to the Mena House, where some of the sleepy, inefficient police might have observed and halted us. Here, where filthy Bedouins stabled camels and donkeys in the rock tombs of Khephren's courtiers, we were led up the rocks and over the sand to the Great Pyramid, up whose time-worn sides the Arabs swarmed eagerly, Abdul Reis offering me the assistance I did not need.\n\nAs most travellers know, the actual apex of this structure has long been worn away, leaving a reasonably flat platform twelve yards square. On this eerie pinnacle a squared circle was formed, and in a few moments the sardonic desert moon leered down upon a battle which, but for the quality of the ringside cries, might well have occurred at some minor athletic club in America. As I watched it, I felt that some of our less desirable institutions were not lacking; for every blow, feint, and defence bespoke \"stalling\" to my not inexperienced eye. It was quickly over, and despite my misgivings as to methods I felt a sort of proprietary pride when Abdul Reis was adjudged the winner.\n\nReconciliation was phenomenally rapid, and amidst the singing, fraternising, and drinking which followed, I found it difficult to realise that a quarrel had ever occurred. Oddly enough, I myself seemed to be more of a centre of notice than the antagonists; and from my smattering of Arabic I judged that they were discussing my professional performances and escapes from every sort of manacle and confinement, in a manner which indicated not only a surprising knowledge of me, but a distinct hostility and scepticism concerning my feats of escape. It gradually dawned on me that the elder magic of Egypt did not depart without leaving traces, and that fragments of a strange secret lore and priestly cult-practices have survived surreptitiously amongst the fellaheen to such an extent that the prowess of a strange \"hahwi\" or magician is resented and disputed. I thought of how much my hollow-voiced guide Abdul Reis looked like an old Egyptian priest or Pharaoh or smiling Sphinx... and wondered.\n\nSuddenly something happened which in a flash proved the correctness of my reflections and made me curse the denseness whereby I had accepted this night's events as other than the empty and malicious \"frameup\" they now shewed themselves to be. Without warning, and doubtless in answer to some subtle sign from Abdul, the entire band of Bedouins precipitated itself upon me; and having produced heavy ropes, soon had me bound as securely as I was ever bound in the course of my life, either on the stage or off. I struggled at first, but soon saw that one man could make no headway against a band of over twenty sinewy barbarians. My hands were tied behind my back, my knees bent to their fullest extent, and my wrists and ankles stoutly linked together with unyielding cords. A stifling gag was forced into my mouth, and a blindfold fastened tightly over my eyes. Then, as the Arabs bore me aloft on their shoulders and began a jouncing descent of the pyramid, I heard the taunts of my late guide Abdul, who mocked and jeered delightedly in his hollow voice, and assured me that I was soon to have my \"magic powers\" put to a supreme test which would quickly remove any egotism I might have gained through triumphing over all the tests offered by America and Europe. Egypt, he reminded me, is very old; and full of inner mysteries and antique powers not even conceivable to the experts of today, whose devices had so uniformly failed to entrap me.\n\nHow far or in what direction I was carried, I cannot tell; for the circumstances were all against the formation of any accurate judgment. I know, however, that it could not have been a great distance; since my bearers at no point hastened beyond a walk, yet kept me aloft a surprisingly short time. It is this perplexing brevity which makes me feel almost like shuddering whenever I think of Gizeh and its plateau\u2014for one is oppressed by hints of the closeness to every-day tourist routes of what existed then and must exist still.\n\nThe evil abnormality I speak of did not become manifest at first. Setting me down on a surface which I recognised as sand rather than rock, my captors passed a rope around my chest and dragged me a few feet to a ragged opening in the ground, into which they presently lowered me with much rough handling. For apparent aeons I bumped against the stony irregular sides of a narrow hewn well which I took to be one of the numerous burial shafts of the plateau until the prodigious, almost incredible depth of it robbed me of all bases of conjecture.\n\nThe horror of the experience deepened with every dragging second. That any descent through the sheer solid rock could be so vast without reaching the core of the planet itself, or that any rope made by man could be so long as to dangle me in these unholy and seemingly fathomless profundities of nether earth, were beliefs of such grotesqueness that it was easier to doubt my agitated senses than to accept them. Even now I am uncertain, for I know how deceitful the sense of time becomes when one or more of the usual perceptions or conditions of life is removed or distorted. But I am quite sure that I preserved a logical consciousness that far; that at least I did not add any full-grown phantoms of imagination to a picture hideous enough in its reality, and explicable by a type of cerebral illusion vastly short of actual hallucination.\n\nAll this was not the cause of my first bit of fainting. The shocking ordeal was cumulative, and the beginning of the later terrors was a very perceptible increase in my rate of descent. They were paying out that infinitely long rope very swiftly now, and I scraped cruelly against the rough and constricted sides of the shaft as I shot madly downward. My clothing was in tatters, and I felt the trickle of blood all over, even above the mounting and excruciating pain. My nostrils, too, were assailed by a scarcely definable menace; a creeping odour of damp and staleness curiously unlike anything I had ever smelt before, and having faint overtones of spice and incense that lent an element of mockery.\n\nThen the mental cataclysm came. It was horrible\u2014hideous beyond all articulate description because it was all of the soul, with nothing of detail to describe. It was the ecstasy of nightmare and the summation of the fiendish. The suddenness of it was apocalyptic and daemoniac\u2014one moment I was plunging agonisingly down that narrow well of million-toothed torture, yet the next moment I was soaring on bat-wings in the gulfs of hell; swinging free and swoopingly through illimitable miles of boundless, musty space; rising dizzily to measureless pinnacles of chilling ether, then diving gaspingly to sucking nadirs of ravenous, nauseous lower vacua.... Thank God for the mercy that shut out in oblivion those clawing Furies of consciousness which half unhinged my faculties, and tore Harpy-like at my spirit! That one respite, short as it was, gave me the strength and sanity to endure those still greater sublimations of cosmic panic that lurked and gibbered on the road ahead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 129", + "text": "It was very gradually that I regained my senses after that eldritch flight through Stygian space. The process was infinitely painful, and coloured by fantastic dreams in which my bound and gagged condition found singular embodiment. The precise nature of these dreams was very clear while I was experiencing them, but became blurred in my recollection almost immediately afterward, and was soon reduced to the merest outline by the terrible events\u2014real or imaginary\u2014which followed. I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy, five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt. In the dream I looked back at the events of the preceding weeks, and saw myself lured and enmeshed little by little, subtly and insidiously, by some hellish ghoul-spirit of the elder Nile sorcery; some spirit that was in Egypt before ever man was, and that will be when man is no more.\n\nI saw the horror and unwholesome antiquity of Egypt, and the grisly alliance it has always had with the tombs and temples of the dead. I saw phantom processions of priests with the heads of bulls, falcons, cats, and ibises; phantom processions marching interminably through subterraneous labyrinths and avenues of titanic propylaea beside which a man is as a fly, and offering unnamable sacrifices to indescribable gods. Stone colossi marched in endless night and drove herds of grinning androsphinxes down to the shores of illimitable stagnant rivers of pitch. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation. In my sleeping brain there took shape a melodrama of sinister hatred and pursuit, and I saw the black soul of Egypt singling me out and calling me in inaudible whispers; calling and luring me, leading me on with the glitter and glamour of a Saracenic surface, but ever pulling me down to the age-mad catacombs and horrors of its dead and abysmal pharaonic heart.\n\nThen the dream-faces took on human resemblances, and I saw my guide Abdul Reis in the robes of a king, with the sneer of the Sphinx on his features. And I knew that those features were the features of Khephren the Great, who raised the Second Pyramid, carved over the Sphinx's face in the likeness of his own, and built that titanic gateway temple whose myriad corridors the archaeologists think they have dug out of the cryptical sand and the uninformative rock. And I looked at the long, lean, rigid hand of Khephren; the long, lean, rigid hand as I had seen it on the diorite statue in the Cairo Museum\u2014the statue they had found in the terrible gateway temple\u2014and wondered that I had not shrieked when I saw it on Abdul Reis.... That hand! It was hideously cold, and it was crushing me; it was the cold and cramping of the sarcophagus... the chill and constriction of unrememberable Egypt.... It was nighted, necropolitan Egypt itself... that yellow paw... and they whisper such things of Khephren....\n\nBut at this juncture I began to awake\u2014or at least, to assume a condition less completely that of sleep than the one just preceding. I recalled the fight atop the pyramid, the treacherous Bedouins and their attack, my frightful descent by rope through endless rock depths, and my mad swinging and plunging in a chill void redolent of aromatic putrescence. I perceived that I now lay on a damp rock floor, and that my bonds were still biting into me with unloosened force. It was very cold, and I seemed to detect a faint current of noisome air sweeping across me. The cuts and bruises I had received from the jagged sides of the rock shaft were paining me woefully, their soreness enhanced to a stinging or burning acuteness by some pungent quality in the faint draught, and the mere act of rolling over was enough to set my whole frame throbbing with untold agony. As I turned I felt a tug from above, and concluded that the rope whereby I was lowered still reached to the surface. Whether or not the Arabs still held it, I had no idea; nor had I any idea how far within the earth I was. I knew that the darkness around me was wholly or nearly total, since no ray of moonlight penetrated my blindfold; but I did not trust my senses enough to accept as evidence of extreme depth the sensation of vast duration which had characterised my descent.\n\nKnowing at least that I was in a space of considerable extent reached from the surface directly above by an opening in the rock, I doubtfully conjectured that my prison was perhaps the buried gateway chapel of old Khephren\u2014the Temple of the Sphinx\u2014perhaps some inner corridor which the guides had not shewn me during my morning visit, and from which I might easily escape if I could find my way to the barred entrance. It would be a labyrinthine wandering, but no worse than others out of which I had in the past found my way. The first step was to get free of my bonds, gag, and blindfold; and this I knew would be no great task, since subtler experts than these Arabs had tried every known species of fetter upon me during my long and varied career as an exponent of escape, yet had never succeeded in defeating my methods.\n\nThen it occurred to me that the Arabs might be ready to meet and attack me at the entrance upon any evidence of my probable escape from the binding cords, as would be furnished by any decided agitation of the rope which they probably held. This, of course, was taking for granted that my place of confinement was indeed Khephren's Temple of the Sphinx. The direct opening in the roof, wherever it might lurk, could not be beyond easy reach of the ordinary modern entrance near the Sphinx; if in truth it were any great distance at all on the surface, since the total area known to visitors is not at all enormous. I had not noticed any such opening during my daytime pilgrimage, but knew that these things are easily overlooked amidst the drifting sands. Thinking these matters over as I lay bent and bound on the rock floor, I nearly forgot the horrors of the abysmal descent and cavernous swinging which had so lately reduced me to a coma. My present thought was only to outwit the Arabs, and I accordingly determined to work myself free as quickly as possible, avoiding any tug on the descending line which might betray an effective or even problematical attempt at freedom.\n\nThis, however, was more easily determined than effected. A few preliminary trials made it clear that little could be accomplished without considerable motion; and it did not surprise me when, after one especially energetic struggle, I began to feel the coils of falling rope as they piled up about me and upon me. Obviously, I thought, the Bedouins had felt my movements and released their end of the rope; hastening no doubt to the temple's true entrance to lie murderously in wait for me. The prospect was not pleasing\u2014but I had faced worse in my time without flinching, and would not flinch now. At present I must first of all free myself of bonds, then trust to ingenuity to escape from the temple unharmed. It is curious how implicitly I had come to believe myself in the old temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, only a short distance below the ground.\n\nThat belief was shattered, and every pristine apprehension of preternatural depth and daemoniac mystery revived, by a circumstance which grew in horror and significance even as I formulated my philosophical plan. I have said that the falling rope was piling up about and upon me. Now I saw that it was continuing to pile, as no rope of normal length could possibly do. It gained in momentum and became an avalanche of hemp, accumulating mountainously on the floor, and half burying me beneath its swiftly multiplying coils. Soon I was completely engulfed and gasping for breath as the increasing convolutions submerged and stifled me. My senses tottered again, and I vainly tried to fight off a menace desperate and ineluctable. It was not merely that I was tortured beyond human endurance\u2014not merely that life and breath seemed to be crushed slowly out of me\u2014it was the knowledge of what those unnatural lengths of rope implied, and the consciousness of what unknown and incalculable gulfs of inner earth must at this moment be surrounding me. My endless descent and swinging flight through goblin space, then, must have been real; and even now I must be lying helpless in some nameless cavern world toward the core of the planet. Such a sudden confirmation of ultimate horror was insupportable, and a second time I lapsed into merciful oblivion.\n\nWhen I say oblivion, I do not imply that I was free from dreams. On the contrary, my absence from the conscious world was marked by visions of the most unutterable hideousness. God!... If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror! This second spell of fainting filled my sleeping mind anew with shivering realisation of the country and its archaic secrets, and through some damnable chance my dreams turned to the ancient notions of the dead and their sojournings in soul and body beyond those mysterious tombs which were more houses than graves. I recalled, in dream-shapes which it is well that I do not remember, the peculiar and elaborate construction of Egyptian sepulchres; and the exceedingly singular and terrific doctrines which determined this construction.\n\nAll these people thought of was death and the dead. They conceived of a literal resurrection of the body which made them mummify it with desperate care, and preserve all the vital organs in canopic jars near the corpse; whilst besides the body they believed in two other elements, the soul, which after its weighing and approval by Osiris dwelt in the land of the blest, and the obscure and portentous ka or life-principle which wandered about the upper and lower worlds in a horrible way, demanding occasional access to the preserved body, consuming the food offerings brought by priests and pious relatives to the mortuary chapel, and sometimes\u2014as men whispered\u2014taking its body or the wooden double always buried beside it and stalking noxiously abroad on errands peculiarly repellent.\n\nFor thousands of years those bodies rested gorgeously encased and staring glassily upward when not visited by the ka, awaiting the day when Osiris should restore both ka and soul, and lead forth the stiff legions of the dead from the sunken houses of sleep. It was to have been a glorious rebirth\u2014but not all souls were approved, nor were all tombs inviolate, so that certain grotesque mistakes and fiendish abnormalities were to be looked for. Even today the Arabs murmur of unsanctified convocations and unwholesome worship in forgotten nether abysses, which only winged invisible kas and soulless mummies may visit and return unscathed.\n\nPerhaps the most leeringly blood-congealing legends are those which relate to certain perverse products of decadent priestcraft\u2014composite mummies made by the artificial union of human trunks and limbs with the heads of animals in imitation of the elder gods. At all stages of history the sacred animals were mummified, so that consecrated bulls, cats, ibises, crocodiles, and the like might return some day to greater glory. But only in the decadence did they mix the human and animal in the same mummy\u2014only in the decadence, when they did not understand the rights and prerogatives of the ka and the soul. What happened to those composite mummies is not told of\u2014at least publicly\u2014and it is certain that no Egyptologist ever found one. The whispers of Arabs are very wild, and cannot be relied upon. They even hint that old Khephren\u2014he of the Sphinx, the Second Pyramid, and the yawning gateway temple\u2014lives far underground wedded to the ghoul-queen Nitokris and ruling over the mummies that are neither of man nor of beast.\n\nIt was of these\u2014of Khephren and his consort and his strange armies of the hybrid dead\u2014that I dreamed, and that is why I am glad the exact dream-shapes have faded from my memory. My most horrible vision was connected with an idle question I had asked myself the day before when looking at the great carven riddle of the desert and wondering with what unknown depths the temple so close to it might be secretly connected. That question, so innocent and whimsical then, assumed in my dream a meaning of frenetic and hysterical madness... what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent?\n\nMy second awakening\u2014if awakening it was\u2014is a memory of stark hideousness which nothing else in my life\u2014save one thing which came after\u2014can parallel; and that life has been full and adventurous beyond most men's. Remember that I had lost consciousness whilst buried beneath a cascade of falling rope whose immensity revealed the cataclysmic depth of my present position. Now, as perception returned, I felt the entire weight gone; and realised upon rolling over that although I was still tied, gagged, and blindfolded, some agency had removed completely the suffocating hempen landslide which had overwhelmed me. The significance of this condition, of course, came to me only gradually; but even so I think it would have brought unconsciousness again had I not by this time reached such a state of emotional exhaustion that no new horror could make much difference. I was alone... with what?\n\nBefore I could torture myself with any new reflection, or make any fresh effort to escape from my bonds, an additional circumstance became manifest. Pains not formerly felt were racking my arms and legs, and I seemed coated with a profusion of dried blood beyond anything my former cuts and abrasions could furnish. My chest, too, seemed pierced by an hundred wounds, as though some malign, titanic ibis had been pecking at it. Assuredly the agency which had removed the rope was a hostile one, and had begun to wreak terrible injuries upon me when somehow impelled to desist. Yet at the time my sensations were distinctly the reverse of what one might expect. Instead of sinking into a bottomless pit of despair, I was stirred to a new courage and action; for now I felt that the evil forces were physical things which a fearless man might encounter on an even basis.\n\nOn the strength of this thought I tugged again at my bonds, and used all the art of a lifetime to free myself as I had so often done amidst the glare of lights and the applause of vast crowds. The familiar details of my escaping process commenced to engross me, and now that the long rope was gone I half regained my belief that the supreme horrors were hallucinations after all, and that there had never been any terrible shaft, measureless abyss, or interminable rope. Was I after all in the gateway temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx, and had the sneaking Arabs stolen in to torture me as I lay helpless there? At any rate, I must be free. Let me stand up unbound, ungagged, and with eyes open to catch any glimmer of light which might come trickling from any source, and I could actually delight in the combat against evil and treacherous foes!\n\nHow long I took in shaking off my encumbrances I cannot tell. It must have been longer than in my exhibition performances, because I was wounded, exhausted, and enervated by the experiences I had passed through. When I was finally free, and taking deep breaths of a chill, damp, evilly spiced air all the more horrible when encountered without the screen of gag and blindfold edges, I found that I was too cramped and fatigued to move at once. There I lay, trying to stretch a frame bent and mangled, for an indefinite period, and straining my eyes to catch a glimpse of some ray of light which would give a hint as to my position.\n\nBy degrees my strength and flexibility returned, but my eyes beheld nothing. As I staggered to my feet I peered diligently in every direction, yet met only an ebony blackness as great as that I had known when blindfolded. I tried my legs, blood-encrusted beneath my shredded trousers, and found that I could walk; yet could not decide in what direction to go. Obviously I ought not to walk at random, and perhaps retreat directly from the entrance I sought; so I paused to note the direction of the cold, foetid, natron-scented air-current which I had never ceased to feel. Accepting the point of its source as the possible entrance to the abyss, I strove to keep track of this landmark and to walk consistently toward it.\n\nI had had a match box with me, and even a small electric flashlight; but of course the pockets of my tossed and tattered clothing were long since emptied of all heavy articles. As I walked cautiously in the blackness, the draught grew stronger and more offensive, till at length I could regard it as nothing less than a tangible stream of detestable vapour pouring out of some aperture like the smoke of the genie from the fisherman's jar in the Eastern tale. The East... Egypt... truly, this dark cradle of civilisation was ever the well-spring of horrors and marvels unspeakable! The more I reflected on the nature of this cavern wind, the greater my sense of disquiet became; for although despite its odour I had sought its source as at least an indirect clue to the outer world, I now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture or connexion whatsoever with the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower down. I had, then, been walking in the wrong direction!\n\nAfter a moment's reflection I decided not to retrace my steps. Away from the draught I would have no landmarks, for the roughly level rock floor was devoid of distinctive configurations. If, however, I followed up the strange current, I would undoubtedly arrive at an aperture of some sort, from whose gate I could perhaps work round the walls to the opposite side of this Cyclopean and otherwise unnavigable hall. That I might fail, I well realised. I saw that this was no part of Khephren's gateway temple which tourists know, and it struck me that this particular hall might be unknown even to archaeologists, and merely stumbled upon by the inquisitive and malignant Arabs who had imprisoned me. If so, was there any present gate of escape to the known parts or to the outer air?\n\nWhat evidence, indeed, did I now possess that this was the gateway temple at all? For a moment all my wildest speculations rushed back upon me, and I thought of that vivid m\u00e9lange of impressions\u2014descent, suspension in space, the rope, my wounds, and the dreams that were frankly dreams. Was this the end of life for me? Or indeed, would it be merciful if this moment were the end? I could answer none of my own questions, but merely kept on till Fate for a third time reduced me to oblivion. This time there were no dreams, for the suddenness of the incident shocked me out of all thought either conscious or subconscious. Tripping on an unexpected descending step at a point where the offensive draught became strong enough to offer an actual physical resistance, I was precipitated headlong down a black flight of huge stone stairs into a gulf of hideousness unrelieved.\n\nThat I ever breathed again is a tribute to the inherent vitality of the healthy human organism. Often I look back to that night and feel a touch of actual humour in those repeated lapses of consciousness; lapses whose succession reminded me at the time of nothing more than the crude cinema melodramas of that period. Of course, it is possible that the repeated lapses never occurred; and that all the features of that underground nightmare were merely the dreams of one long coma which began with the shock of my descent into that abyss and ended with the healing balm of the outer air and of the rising sun which found me stretched on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic and dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.\n\nI prefer to believe this latter explanation as much as I can, hence was glad when the police told me that the barrier to Khephren's gateway temple had been found unfastened, and that a sizeable rift to the surface did actually exist in one corner of the still buried part. I was glad, too, when the doctors pronounced my wounds only those to be expected from my seizure, blindfolding, lowering, struggling with bonds, falling some distance\u2014perhaps into a depression in the temple's inner gallery\u2014dragging myself to the outer barrier and escaping from it, and experiences like that... a very soothing diagnosis. And yet I know that there must be more than appears on the surface. That extreme descent is too vivid a memory to be dismissed\u2014and it is odd that no one has ever been able to find a man answering the description of my guide Abdul Reis el Drogman\u2014the tomb-throated guide who looked and smiled like King Khephren.\n\nI have digressed from my connected narrative\u2014perhaps in the vain hope of evading the telling of that final incident; that incident which of all is most certainly an hallucination. But I promised to relate it, and do not break promises. When I recovered\u2014or seemed to recover\u2014my senses after that fall down the black stone stairs, I was quite as alone and in darkness as before. The windy stench, bad enough before, was now fiendish; yet I had acquired enough familiarity by this time to bear it stoically. Dazedly I began to crawl away from the place whence the putrid wind came, and with my bleeding hands felt the colossal blocks of a mighty pavement. Once my head struck against a hard object, and when I felt of it I learned that it was the base of a column\u2014a column of unbelievable immensity\u2014whose surface was covered with gigantic chiselled hieroglyphics very perceptible to my touch. Crawling on, I encountered other titan columns at incomprehensible distances apart; when suddenly my attention was captured by the realisation of something which must have been impinging on my subconscious hearing long before the conscious sense was aware of it.\n\nFrom some still lower chasm in earth's bowels were proceeding certain sounds, measured and definite, and like nothing I had ever heard before. That they were very ancient and distinctly ceremonial, I felt almost intuitively; and much reading in Egyptology led me to associate them with the flute, the sambuke, the sistrum, and the tympanum. In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling, and beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth\u2014a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors as must lie beyond these aegipanic cacophonies. The sounds increased in volume, and I felt that they were approaching. Then\u2014and may all the gods of all pantheons unite to keep the like from my ears again\u2014I began to hear, faintly and afar off, the morbid and millennial tramping of the marching things.\n\nIt was hideous that footfalls so dissimilar should move in such perfect rhythm. The training of unhallowed thousands of years must lie behind that march of earth's inmost monstrosities... padding, clicking, walking, stalking, rumbling, lumbering, crawling... and all to the abhorrent discords of those mocking instruments. And then... God keep the memory of those Arab legends out of my head! The mummies without souls... the meeting-place of the wandering kas... the hordes of the devil-cursed pharaonic dead of forty centuries... the composite mummies led through the uttermost onyx voids by King Khephren and his ghoul-queen Nitokris....\n\nThe tramping drew nearer\u2014heaven save me from the sound of those feet and paws and hooves and pads and talons as it commenced to acquire detail! Down limitless reaches of sunless pavement a spark of light flickered in the malodorous wind, and I drew behind the enormous circumference of a Cyclopic column that I might escape for a while the horror that was stalking million-footed toward me through gigantic hypostyles of inhuman dread and phobic antiquity. The flickers increased, and the tramping and dissonant rhythm grew sickeningly loud. In the quivering orange light there stood faintly forth a scene of such stony awe that I gasped from a sheer wonder that conquered even fear and repulsion. Bases of columns whose middles were higher than human sight... mere bases of things that must each dwarf the Eiffel Tower to insignificance... hieroglyphics carved by unthinkable hands in caverns where daylight can be only a remote legend....\n\nI would not look at the marching things. That I desperately resolved as I heard their creaking joints and nitrous wheezing above the dead music and the dead tramping. It was merciful that they did not speak... but God! their crazy torches began to cast shadows on the surface of those stupendous columns. Heaven take it away! Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches... men should not have the heads of crocodiles....\n\nI tried to turn away, but the shadows and the sounds and the stench were everywhere. Then I remembered something I used to do in half-conscious nightmares as a boy, and began to repeat to myself, \"This is a dream! This is a dream!\" But it was of no use, and I could only shut my eyes and pray... at least, that is what I think I did, for one is never sure in visions\u2014and I know this can have been nothing more. I wondered whether I should ever reach the world again, and at times would furtively open my eyes to see if I could discern any feature of the place other than the wind of spiced putrefaction, the topless columns, and the thaumatropically grotesque shadows of abnormal horror. The sputtering glare of multiplying torches now shone, and unless this hellish place were wholly without walls, I could not fail to see some boundary or fixed landmark soon. But I had to shut my eyes again when I realised how many of the things were assembling\u2014and when I glimpsed a certain object walking solemnly and steadily without any body above the waist.\n\nA fiendish and ululant corpse-gurgle or death-rattle now split the very atmosphere\u2014the charnel atmosphere poisonous with naphtha and bitumen blasts\u2014in one concerted chorus from the ghoulish legion of hybrid blasphemies. My eyes, perversely shaken open, gazed for an instant upon a sight which no human creature could even imagine without panic fear and physical exhaustion. The things had filed ceremonially in one direction, the direction of the noisome wind, where the light of their torches shewed their bended heads... or the bended heads of such as had heads.... They were worshipping before a great black foetor-belching aperture which reached up almost out of sight, and which I could see was flanked at right angles by two giant staircases whose ends were far away in shadow. One of these was indubitably the staircase I had fallen down.\n\nThe dimensions of the hole were fully in proportion with those of the columns\u2014an ordinary house would have been lost in it, and any average public building could easily have been moved in and out. It was so vast a surface that only by moving the eye could one trace its boundaries... so vast, so hideously black, and so aromatically stinking.... Directly in front of this yawning Polyphemus-door the things were throwing objects\u2014evidently sacrifices or religious offerings, to judge by their gestures. Khephren was their leader; sneering King Khephren or the guide Abdul Reis, crowned with a golden pshent and intoning endless formulae with the hollow voice of the dead. By his side knelt beautiful Queen Nitokris, whom I saw in profile for a moment, noting that the right half of her face was eaten away by rats or other ghouls. And I shut my eyes again when I saw what objects were being thrown as offerings to the foetid aperture or its possible local deity.\n\nIt occurred to me that judging from the elaborateness of this worship, the concealed deity must be one of considerable importance. Was it Osiris or Isis, Horus or Anubis, or some vast unknown God of the Dead still more central and supreme? There is a legend that terrible altars and colossi were reared to an Unknown One before ever the known gods were worshipped....\n\nAnd now, as I steeled myself to watch the rapt and sepulchral adorations of those nameless things, a thought of escape flashed upon me. The hall was dim, and the columns heavy with shadow. With every creature of that nightmare throng absorbed in shocking raptures, it might be barely possible for me to creep past to the faraway end of one of the staircases and ascend unseen; trusting to Fate and skill to deliver me from the upper reaches. Where I was, I neither knew nor seriously reflected upon\u2014and for a moment it struck me as amusing to plan a serious escape from that which I knew to be a dream. Was I in some hidden and unsuspected lower realm of Khephren's gateway temple\u2014that temple which generations have persistently called the Temple of the Sphinx? I could not conjecture, but I resolved to ascend to life and consciousness if wit and muscle could carry me.\n\nWriggling flat on my stomach, I began the anxious journey toward the foot of the left-hand staircase, which seemed the more accessible of the two. I cannot describe the incidents and sensations of that crawl, but they may be guessed when one reflects on what I had to watch steadily in that malign, wind-blown torchlight in order to avoid detection. The bottom of the staircase was, as I have said, far away in shadow; as it had to be to rise without a bend to the dizzy parapeted landing above the titanic aperture. This placed the last stages of my crawl at some distance from the noisome herd, though the spectacle chilled me even when quite remote at my right.\n\nAt length I succeeded in reaching the steps and began to climb; keeping close to the wall, on which I observed decorations of the most hideous sort, and relying for safety on the absorbed, ecstatic interest with which the monstrosities watched the foul-breezed aperture and the impious objects of nourishment they had flung on the pavement before it. Though the staircase was huge and steep, fashioned of vast porphyry blocks as if for the feet of a giant, the ascent seemed virtually interminable. Dread of discovery and the pain which renewed exercise had brought to my wounds combined to make that upward crawl a thing of agonising memory. I had intended, on reaching the landing, to climb immediately onward along whatever upper staircase might mount from there; stopping for no last look at the carrion abominations that pawed and genuflected some seventy or eighty feet below\u2014yet a sudden repetition of that thunderous corpse-gurgle and death-rattle chorus, coming as I had nearly gained the top of the flight and shewing by its ceremonial rhythm that it was not an alarm of my discovery, caused me to pause and peer cautiously over the parapet.\n\nThe monstrosities were hailing something which had poked itself out of the nauseous aperture to seize the hellish fare proffered it. It was something quite ponderous, even as seen from my height; something yellowish and hairy, and endowed with a sort of nervous motion. It was as large, perhaps, as a good-sized hippopotamus, but very curiously shaped. It seemed to have no neck, but five separate shaggy heads springing in a row from a roughly cylindrical trunk; the first very small, the second good-sized, the third and fourth equal and largest of all, and the fifth rather small, though not so small as the first. Out of these heads darted curious rigid tentacles which seized ravenously on the excessively great quantities of unmentionable food placed before the aperture. Once in a while the thing would leap up, and occasionally it would retreat into its den in a very odd manner. Its locomotion was so inexplicable that I stared in fascination, wishing it would emerge further from the cavernous lair beneath me.\n\nThen it did emerge... it did emerge, and at the sight I turned and fled into the darkness up the higher staircase that rose behind me; fled unknowingly up incredible steps and ladders and inclined planes to which no human sight or logic guided me, and which I must ever relegate to the world of dreams for want of any confirmation. It must have been dream, or the dawn would never have found me breathing on the sands of Gizeh before the sardonic dawn-flushed face of the Great Sphinx.\n\nThe Great Sphinx! God!\u2014that idle question I asked myself on that sun-blest morning before... what huge and loathsome abnormality was the Sphinx originally carven to represent? Accursed is the sight, be it in dream or not, that revealed to me the supreme horror\u2014the Unknown God of the Dead, which licks its colossal chops in the unsuspected abyss, fed hideous morsels by soulless absurdities that should not exist. The five-headed monster that emerged... that five-headed monster as large as a hippopotamus... the five-headed monster\u2014and that of which it is the merest fore paw....\n\nBut I survived, and I know it was only a dream.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Unnamable by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nWe were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about \"unnamable\" and \"unmentionable\" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology\u2014preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.\n\nWith this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs. Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really \"unnamable\". It didn't sound sensible to him.\n\nThough I well realised the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defence of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy's own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives' superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes\u2014or absences of shapes\u2014which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly \"unnamable\"? \"Common sense\" in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.\n\nTwilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on about the \"unnamable\", and after my friend had finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.\n\nMy tale had been called \"The Attic Window\", and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic\u2014that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people's windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't describe what it was that turned his hair grey. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor's chest and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.\n\nIt had been an eldritch thing\u2014no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface\u2014so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom\u2014we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron strait-jacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.\n\nCotton Mather, in that daemoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man\u2014the thing with the blemished eye\u2014and of the screaming drunken wretch that they hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell\u2014there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.\n\nIt is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of ape-like claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With the years the legends take on a spectral character\u2014I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously\u2014all the more hideous because it was so secret.\n\nDuring this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.\n\nManton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations\u2014perhaps dying for lack of being thought about. Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature? Moulded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?\n\nThe hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.\n\n\"But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" I answered. \"I have seen it.\"\n\n\"And did you find anything there\u2014in the attic or anywhere else?\"\n\n\"There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw\u2014if he was sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don't think I was a fool\u2014you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine.\"\n\nAt last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his curiosity was undeterred.\n\n\"And what about the window-panes?\"\n\n\"They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in the other there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind\u2014the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don't believe they've had any glass for an hundred years or more\u2014maybe the boy broke 'em if he got that far; the legend doesn't say.\"\n\nManton was reflecting again.\n\n\"I'd like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an inscription\u2014the whole thing must be a bit terrible.\"\n\n\"You did see it\u2014until it got dark.\"\n\nMy friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that daemoniac attic window.\n\nThen came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mould of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant.\n\nManton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary's Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying-ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull\u2014though the animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.\n\nAfter the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question:\n\n\"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars\u2014was it like that?\"\n\nAnd I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected\u2014\n\n\"No\u2014it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere\u2014a gelatin\u2014a slime\u2014yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes\u2014and a blemish. It was the pit\u2014the maelstrom\u2014the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!\"\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Very Old Folk by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\u2002Dear Melmoth:\u2013\n\n\u2002... So you are busy delving into the shady past of that insufferable young Asiatic Varius Avitus Bassianus? Ugh! There are few persons I loathe more than that cursed little Syrian rat!\n\n\u2002I have myself been carried back to Roman times by my recent perusal of James Rhoades' \u00c6neid, a translation never before read by me, and more faithful to P. Maro than any other versified version I have ever seen\u2014including that of my late uncle Dr. Clark, which did not attain publication. This Virgilian diversion, together with the spectral thoughts incident to All Hallows' Eve with its Witch-Sabbaths on the hills, produced in me last Monday night a Roman dream of such supernal clearness and vividness, and such titanic adumbrations of hidden horror, that I verily believe I shall some day employ it in fiction. Roman dreams were no uncommon features of my youth\u2014I used to follow the Divine Julius all over Gallia as a Tribunus Militum o'nights\u2014but I had so long ceased to experience them, that the present one impressed me with extraordinary force.\n\n\u2002It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of Pompelo, at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have been in the late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial proconsul instead of a pr\u00e6torian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens\u2014broad-browed Roman colonists and coarse-haired Romanised natives, together with obvious hybrids of the two strains, alike clad in cheap woollen togas\u2014and sprinklings of helmeted legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient Vascones\u2014all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and ill-defined uneasiness.\n\n\u2002I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to have brought in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward. It appeared that I was a provincial qu\u00e6stor named L. C\u00e6lius Rufus, and that I had been summoned by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from Tarraco some days before. The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth legion, under the military tribune Sex. Asellius; and the legatus of the whole region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come from Calagurris, where the permanent station was.\n\n\u2002The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the townsfolk were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from Calagurris. It was the Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in the mountains were preparing for the frightful ceremonies which only rumour told of in the towns. They were the very old folk who dwelt higher up in the hills and spoke a choppy language which the Vascones could not understand. One seldom saw them; but a few times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the merchants by means of gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always the same\u2014the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the Kalends of November. Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would never be heard of again. And there were whispers that the native shepherds and farmers were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk\u2014that more than one thatched hut was vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.\n\n\u2002This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the very old folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little squint-eyed traders had come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three of them had been killed. The remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their mountains\u2014and this autumn not a single villager had disappeared. There was menace in this immunity. It was not like the very old folk to spare their victims at the Sabbath. It was too good to be normal, and the villagers were afraid.\n\n\u2002For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the \u00e6dile Tib. Ann\u00e6us Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at Calagurris for a cohort to stamp out the Sabbath on the terrible night. Balbutius had carelessly refused, on the ground that the villagers' fears were empty, and that the loathsome rites of hill folk were of no concern to the Roman People unless our own citizens were menaced. I, however, who seemed to be a close friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with him; averring that I had studied deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I believed the very old folk capable of visiting almost any nameless doom upon the town, which after all was a Roman settlement and contained a great number of our citizens. The complaining \u00e6dile's own mother Helvia was a pure Roman, the daughter of M. Helvius Cinna, who had come over with Scipio's army. Accordingly I had sent a slave\u2014a nimble little Greek called Antipater\u2014to the proconsul with letters, and Scribonius had heeded my plea and ordered Balbutius to send his fifth cohort, under Asellius, to Pompelo; entering the hills at dusk on the eve of November's Kalends and stamping out whatever nameless orgies he might find\u2014bringing such prisoners as he might take to Tarraco for the next propr\u00e6tor's court. Balbutius, however, had protested, so that more correspondence had ensued. I had written so much to the proconsul that he had become gravely interested, and had resolved to make a personal inquiry into the horror.\n\n\u2002He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there hearing enough rumours to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing firmly by his order for the Sabbath's extirpation. Desirous of conferring with one who had studied the subject, he ordered me to accompany Asellius' cohort\u2014and Balbutius had also come along to press his adverse advice, for he honestly believed that drastic military action would stir up a dangerous sentiment of unrest amongst the Vascones both tribal and settled.\n\n\u2002So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills\u2014old Scribonius Libo in his toga pr\u00e6texta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants. I myself seemed to wear a common toga, and to have no especially distinguishing characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The town and country folk scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who had been there nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless dread. Old Scribonius himself looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us later comers seemed to hold something of curious inappropriateness, as in a place of death or the temple of some mystic god.\n\n\u2002We entered the pr\u00e6torium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his objections, and was sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives in extreme contempt while at the same time deeming it inadvisable to excite them. Both soldiers maintained that we could better afford to antagonise the minority of colonists and civilised natives by inaction, than to antagonise a probable majority of tribesmen and cottagers by stamping out the dread rites.\n\n\u2002I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany the cohort on any expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the barbarous Vascones were at best turbulent and uncertain, so that skirmishes with them were inevitable sooner or later whichever course we might take; that they had not in the past proved dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that it would ill become the representatives of the Roman People to suffer barbarians to interfere with a course which the justice and prestige of the Republic demanded. That, on the other hand, the successful administration of a province depended primarily upon the safety and goodwill of the civilised element in whose hands the local machinery of commerce and prosperity reposed, and in whose veins a large mixture of our own Italian blood coursed. These, though in numbers they might form a minority, were the stable element whose constancy might be relied on, and whose cooperation would most firmly bind the province to the Imperium of the Senate and the Roman People. It was at once a duty and an advantage to afford them the protection due to Roman citizens; even (and here I shot a sarcastic look at Balbutius and Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and activity, and of a slight interruption of the draught-playing and cock-fighting at the camp in Calagurris. That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real one, I could not from my studies doubt. I had read many scrolls out of Syria and \u00c6gyptus, and the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length with the bloodthirsty priest of Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods bordering Lacus Nemorensis. There were shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on the Sabbaths; dooms which ought not to exist within the territories of the Roman People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to prevail at Sabbaths would be but little in consonance with the customs of those whose forefathers, A. Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman citizens for the practice of the Bacchanalia\u2014a matter kept ever in memory by the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set open to every eye. Checked in time, before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with which the iron of a Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would not be too much for the powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be apprehended, and the sparing of a great number of mere spectators would considerably lessen the resentment which any of the sympathising country folk might feel. In short, both principle and policy demanded stern action; and I could not doubt but that Publius Scribonius, bearing in mind the dignity and obligations of the Roman People, would adhere to his plan of despatching the cohort, me accompanying, despite such objections as Balbutius and Asellius\u2014speaking indeed more like provincials than Romans\u2014might see fit to offer and multiply.\n\n\u2002The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped in an unreal and malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his approval of my words, and stationed me with the cohort in the provisional capacity of a centurio primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius assenting, the former with better grace than the latter. As twilight fell on the wild autumnal slopes, a measured, hideous beating of strange drums floated down from afar in terrible rhythm. Some few of the legionarii shewed timidity, but sharp commands brought them into line, and the whole cohort was soon drawn up on the open plain east of the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius, insisted on accompanying the cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a native guide to point out the paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named Vercellius, the son of pure Roman parents, agreed to take us at least past the foothills. We began to march in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of a young moon trembling over the woods on our left. That which disquieted us most was the fact that the Sabbath was to be held at all. Reports of the coming cohort must have reached the hills, and even the lack of a final decision could not make the rumour less alarming\u2014yet there were the sinister drums as of yore, as if the celebrants had some peculiar reason to be indifferent whether or not the forces of the Roman People marched against them. The sound grew louder as we entered a rising gap in the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing us narrowly on either side, and displaying curiously fantastic tree-trunks in the light of our bobbing torches. All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius, Asellius, two or three of the centuriones, and myself, and at length the way became so steep and narrow that those who had horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left to guard them, though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night of terror. Once in a while it seemed as though we detected a skulking form in the woods nearby, and after a half-hour's climb the steepness and narrowness of the way made the advance of so great a body of men\u2014over 300, all told\u2014exceedingly cumbrous and difficult. Then with utter and horrifying suddenness we heard a frightful sound from below. It was from the tethered horses\u2014they had screamed, not neighed, but screamed... and there was no light down there, nor the sound of any human thing, to shew why they had done so. At the same moment bonfires blazed out on all the peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to lurk equally well before and behind us. Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found only a crumpled heap weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short sword snatched from the belt of D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was such a look of terror that the stoutest veterans turned pale at the sight. He had killed himself when the horses screamed... he, who had been born and lived all his life in that region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by terrible undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge wings. The whole cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the torches faded I watched what I thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by the spectral luminosity of the Via Lactea as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia, Cepheus, and Cygnus. Then suddenly all the stars were blotted from the sky\u2014even bright Deneb and Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind us. And as the torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and shrieking cohort only the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering peaks; hellish and red, and now silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal forms of such nameless beasts as had never a Phrygian priest or Campanian grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales. And above the nighted screaming of men and horses that d\u00e6monic drumming rose to louder pitch, whilst an ice-cold wind of shocking sentience and deliberateness swept down from those forbidden heights and coiled about each man separately, till all the cohort was struggling and screaming in the dark, as if acting out the fate of Laoco\u00f6n and his sons. Only old Scribonius Libo seemed resigned. He uttered words amidst the screaming, and they echo still in my ears. \"Malitia vetus\u2014malitia vetus est... venit... tandem venit...\"\n\n\u2002And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of the subconscious long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no record exists, but the town at least was saved\u2014for encyclop\u00e6dias tell of the survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pompelona....\n\n\u2002Yrs for Gothick Supremacy\u2013\n\n\u2002C \u00b7 IVLIVS \u00b7 VERVS \u00b7 MAXIMINVS.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ What the Moon Brings by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI hate the moon\u2014I am afraid of it\u2014for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.\n\nIt was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.\n\nAnd as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea.\n\nUpon that sea the hateful moon shone, and over its unvocal waves weird perfumes brooded. And as I saw therein the lotos-faces vanish, I longed for nets that I might capture them and learn from them the secrets which the moon had brought upon the night. But when the moon went over to the west and the still tide ebbed from the sullen shore, I saw in that light old spires that the waves almost uncovered, and white columns gay with festoons of green seaweed. And knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces.\n\nYet when I saw afar out in the sea a black condor descend from the sky to seek rest on a vast reef, I would fain have questioned him, and asked him of those whom I had known when they were alive. This I would have asked him had he not been so far away, but he was very far, and could not be seen at all when he drew nigh that gigantic reef.\n\nSo I watched the tide go out under that sinking moon, and saw gleaming the spires, the towers, and the roofs of that dead, dripping city. And as I watched, my nostrils tried to close against the perfume-conquering stench of the world's dead; for truly, in this unplaced and forgotten spot had all the flesh of the churchyards gathered for puffy sea-worms to gnaw and glut upon.\n\nOver those horrors the evil moon now hung very low, but the puffy worms of the sea need no moon to feed by. And as I watched the ripples that told of the writhing of worms beneath, I felt a new chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it.\n\nNor had my flesh trembled without cause, for when I raised my eyes I saw that the waters had ebbed very low, shewing much of the vast reef whose rim I had seen before. And when I saw that this reef was but the black basalt crown of a shocking eikon whose monstrous forehead now shone in the dim moonlight and whose vile hooves must paw the hellish ooze miles below, I shrieked and shrieked lest the hidden face rise above the waters, and lest the hidden eyes look at me after the slinking away of that leering and treacherous yellow moon.\n\nAnd to escape this relentless thing I plunged gladly and unhesitatingly into the stinking shallows where amidst weedy walls and sunken streets fat sea-worms feast upon the world's dead.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Whisperer in Darkness by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nBear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred\u2014that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night\u2014is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, Akeley's disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.\n\nThe whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.\n\nThe tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved\u2014one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.\n\nWhat people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses\u2014in every case naive and simple backwoods folk\u2014had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.\n\nThe ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarised, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills\u2014in the deep woods of the highest peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned.\n\nThere were queer footprints or claw-prints in the mud of brook-margins and barren patches, and curious circles of stones, with the grass around them worn away, which did not seem to have been placed or entirely shaped by Nature. There were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than an average quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from them\u2014if indeed the direction of these prints could be justly estimated. And worst of all, there were the things which adventurous people had seen very rarely in the twilight of the remotest valleys and the dense perpendicular woods above the limits of normal hill-climbing.\n\nIt would have been less uncomfortable if the stray accounts of these things had not agreed so well. As it was, nearly all the rumours had several points in common; averring that the creatures were a sort of huge, light-red crab with many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying\u2014launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon.\n\nThese things seemed content, on the whole, to let mankind alone; though they were at times held responsible for the disappearance of venturesome individuals\u2014especially persons who built houses too close to certain valleys or too high up on certain mountains. Many localities came to be known as inadvisable to settle in, the feeling persisting long after the cause was forgotten. People would look up at some of the neighbouring mountain-precipices with a shudder, even when not recalling how many settlers had been lost, and how many farmhouses burnt to ashes, on the lower slopes of those grim, green sentinels.\n\nBut while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to have harmed only those trespassing on their privacy; there were later accounts of their curiosity respecting men, and of their attempts to establish secret outposts in the human world. There were tales of the queer claw-prints seen around farmhouse windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions outside the obviously haunted areas. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to lone travellers on roads and cart-paths in the deep woods, and of children frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard where the primal forest pressed close upon their dooryards. In the final layer of legends\u2014the layer just preceding the decline of superstition and the abandonment of close contact with the dreaded places\u2014there are shocked references to hermits and remote farmers who at some period of life appeared to have undergone a repellent mental change, and who were shunned and whispered about as mortals who had sold themselves to the strange beings. In one of the northeastern counties it seemed to be a fashion about 1800 to accuse eccentric and unpopular recluses of being allies or representatives of the abhorred things.\n\nAs to what the things were\u2014explanations naturally varied. The common name applied to them was \"those ones\", or \"the old ones\", though other terms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed theological speculation. Those with Celtic legendry in their heritage\u2014mainly the Scotch-Irish element of New Hampshire, and their kindred who had settled in Vermont on Governor Wentworth's colonial grants\u2014linked them vaguely with the malign fairies and \"little people\" of the bogs and raths, and protected themselves with scraps of incantation handed down through many generations. But the Indians had the most fantastic theories of all. While different tribal legends differed, there was a marked consensus of belief in certain vital particulars; it being unanimously agreed that the creatures were not native to this earth.\n\nThe Pennacook myths, which were the most consistent and picturesque, taught that the Winged Ones came from the Great Bear in the sky, and had mines in our earthly hills whence they took a kind of stone they could not get on any other world. They did not live here, said the myths, but merely maintained outposts and flew back with vast cargoes of stone to their own stars in the north. They harmed only those earth-people who got too near them or spied upon them. Animals shunned them through instinctive hatred, not because of being hunted. They could not eat the things and animals of earth, but brought their own food from the stars. It was bad to get near them, and sometimes young hunters who went into their hills never came back. It was not good, either, to listen to what they whispered at night in the forest with voices like a bee's that tried to be like the voices of men. They knew the speech of all kinds of men\u2014Pennacooks, Hurons, men of the Five Nations\u2014but did not seem to have or need any speech of their own. They talked with their heads, which changed colour in different ways to mean different things.\n\nAll the legendry, of course, white and Indian alike, died down during the nineteenth century, except for occasional atavistical flareups. The ways of the Vermonters became settled; and once their habitual paths and dwellings were established according to a certain fixed plan, they remembered less and less what fears and avoidances had determined that plan, and even that there had been any fears or avoidances. Most people simply knew that certain hilly regions were considered as highly unhealthy, unprofitable, and generally unlucky to live in, and that the farther one kept from them the better off one usually was. In time the ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and the haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design. Save during infrequent local scares, only wonder-loving grandmothers and retrospective nonagenarians ever whispered of beings dwelling in those hills; and even such whisperers admitted that there was not much to fear from those things now that they were used to the presence of houses and settlements, and now that human beings let their chosen territory severely alone.\n\nAll this I had known from my reading, and from certain folktales picked up in New Hampshire; hence when the flood-time rumours began to appear, I could easily guess what imaginative background had evolved them. I took great pains to explain this to my friends, and was correspondingly amused when several contentious souls continued to insist on a possible element of truth in the reports. Such persons tried to point out that the early legends had a significant persistence and uniformity, and that the virtually unexplored nature of the Vermont hills made it unwise to be dogmatic about what might or might not dwell among them; nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and determined by early phases of imaginative experience which always produced the same type of delusion.\n\nIt was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzari of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers. No use, either, to point out the even more startlingly similar belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or \"Abominable Snow-Men\" who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits. When I brought up this evidence, my opponents turned it against me by claiming that it must imply some actual historicity for the ancient tales; that it must argue the real existence of some queer elder earth-race, driven to hiding after the advent and dominance of mankind, which might very conceivably have survived in reduced numbers to relatively recent times\u2014or even to the present.\n\nThe more I laughed at such theories, the more these stubborn friends asseverated them; adding that even without the heritage of legend the recent reports were too clear, consistent, detailed, and sanely prosaic in manner of telling, to be completely ignored. Two or three fanatical extremists went so far as to hint at possible meanings in the ancient Indian tales which gave the hidden beings a non-terrestrial origin; citing the extravagant books of Charles Fort with their claims that voyagers from other worlds and outer space have often visited earth. Most of my foes, however, were merely romanticists who insisted on trying to transfer to real life the fantastic lore of lurking \"little people\" made popular by the magnificent horror-fiction of Arthur Machen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 130", + "text": "As was only natural under the circumstances, this piquant debating finally got into print in the form of letters to the Arkham Advertiser; some of which were copied in the press of those Vermont regions whence the flood-stories came. The Rutland Herald gave half a page of extracts from the letters on both sides, while the Brattleboro Reformer reprinted one of my long historical and mythological summaries in full, with some accompanying comments in \"The Pendrifter's\" thoughtful column which supported and applauded my sceptical conclusions. By the spring of 1928 I was almost a well-known figure in Vermont, notwithstanding the fact that I had never set foot in the state. Then came the challenging letters from Henry Akeley which impressed me so profoundly, and which took me for the first and last time to that fascinating realm of crowded green precipices and muttering forest streams.\n\nMost of what I now know of Henry Wentworth Akeley was gathered by correspondence with his neighbours, and with his only son in California, after my experience in his lonely farmhouse. He was, I discovered, the last representative on his home soil of a long, locally distinguished line of jurists, administrators, and gentlemen-agriculturists. In him, however, the family mentally had veered away from practical affairs to pure scholarship; so that he had been a notable student of mathematics, astronomy, biology, anthropology, and folklore at the University of Vermont. I had never previously heard of him, and he did not give many autobiographical details in his communications; but from the first I saw he was a man of character, education, and intelligence, albeit a recluse with very little worldly sophistication.\n\nDespite the incredible nature of what he claimed, I could not help at once taking Akeley more seriously than I had taken any of the other challengers of my views. For one thing, he was really close to the actual phenomena\u2014visible and tangible\u2014that he speculated so grotesquely about; and for another thing, he was amazingly willing to leave his conclusions in a tentative state like a true man of science. He had no personal preferences to advance, and was always guided by what he took to be solid evidence. Of course I began by considering him mistaken, but gave him credit for being intelligently mistaken; and at no time did I emulate some of his friends in attributing his ideas, and his fear of the lonely green hills, to insanity. I could see that there was a great deal to the man, and knew that what he reported must surely come from strange circumstances deserving investigation, however little it might have to do with the fantastic causes he assigned. Later on I received from him certain material proofs which placed the matter on a somewhat different and bewilderingly bizarre basis.\n\nI cannot do better than transcribe in full, so far as is possible, the long letter in which Akeley introduced himself, and which formed such an important landmark in my own intellectual history. It is no longer in my possession, but my memory holds almost every word of its portentous message; and again I affirm my confidence in the sanity of the man who wrote it. Here is the text\u2014a text which reached me in the cramped, archaic-looking scrawl of one who had obviously not mingled much with the world during his sedate, scholarly life.\n\n\u2002R.F.D. #2,\n\n\u2002Townshend, Windham Co.,\n\n\u2002Vermont.\n\n\u2002May 5, 1928.\n\n\u2002Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,\n\n\u2002118 Saltonstall St.,\n\n\u2002Arkham, Mass.,\n\n\u2002My dear Sir:\u2014\n\n\u2002I have read with great interest the Brattleboro Reformer's reprint (Apr. 23, '28) of your letter on the recent stories of strange bodies seen floating in our flooded streams last fall, and on the curious folklore they so well agree with. It is easy to see why an outlander would take the position you take, and even why \"Pendrifter\" agrees with you. That is the attitude generally taken by educated persons both in and out of Vermont, and was my own attitude as a young man (I am now 57) before my studies, both general and in Davenport's book, led me to do some exploring in parts of the hills hereabouts not usually visited.\n\n\u2002I was directed toward such studies by the queer old tales I used to hear from elderly farmers of the more ignorant sort, but now I wish I had let the whole matter alone. I might say, with all proper modesty, that the subject of anthropology and folklore is by no means strange to me. I took a good deal of it at college, and am familiar with most of the standard authorities such as Tylor, Lubbock, Frazer, Quatrefages, Murray, Osborn, Keith, Boule, G. Elliot Smith, and so on. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind. I have seen the reprints of letters from you, and those arguing with you, in the Rutland Herald, and guess I know about where your controversy stands at the present time.\n\n\u2002What I desire to say now is, that I am afraid your adversaries are nearer right than yourself, even though all reason seems to be on your side. They are nearer right than they realise themselves\u2014for of course they go only by theory, and cannot know what I know. If I knew as little of the matter as they, I would not feel justified in believing as they do. I would be wholly on your side.\n\n\u2002You can see that I am having a hard time getting to the point, probably because I really dread getting to the point; but the upshot of the matter is that I have certain evidence that monstrous things do indeed live in the woods on the high hills which nobody visits. I have not seen any of the things floating in the rivers, as reported, but I have seen things like them under circumstances I dread to repeat. I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them nearer my own home (I live in the old Akeley place south of Townshend Village, on the side of Dark Mountain) than I dare tell you now. And I have overheard voices in the woods at certain points that I will not even begin to describe on paper.\n\n\u2002At one place I heard them so much that I took a phonograph there\u2014with a dictaphone attachment and wax blank\u2014and I shall try to arrange to have you hear the record I got. I have run it on the machine for some of the old people up here, and one of the voices had nearly scared them paralysed by reason of its likeness to a certain voice (that buzzing voice in the woods which Davenport mentions) that their grandmothers have told about and mimicked for them. I know what most people think of a man who tells about \"hearing voices\"\u2014but before you draw conclusions just listen to this record and ask some of the older backwoods people what they think of it. If you can account for it normally, very well; but there must be something behind it. Ex nihilo nihil fit, you know.\n\n\u2002Now my object in writing you is not to start an argument, but to give you information which I think a man of your tastes will find deeply interesting. This is private. Publicly I am on your side, for certain things shew me that it does not do for people to know too much about these matters. My own studies are now wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to attract people's attention and cause them to visit the places I have explored. It is true\u2014terribly true\u2014that there are non-human creatures watching us all the time; with spies among us gathering information. It is from a wretched man who, if he was sane (as I think he was), was one of those spies, that I got a large part of my clues to the matter. He later killed himself, but I have reason to think there are others now.\n\n\u2002The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space and fly through it on clumsy, powerful wings which have a way of resisting the ether but which are too poor at steering to be of much use in helping them about on earth. I will tell you about this later if you do not dismiss me at once as a madman. They come here to get metals from mines that go deep under the hills, and I think I know where they come from. They will not hurt us if we let them alone, but no one can say what will happen if we get too curious about them. Of course a good army of men could wipe out their mining colony. That is what they are afraid of. But if that happened, more would come from outside\u2014any number of them. They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because they have not needed to. They would rather leave things as they are to save bother.\n\n\u2002I think they mean to get rid of me because of what I have discovered. There is a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill, east of here; and after I took it home everything became different. If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from. They like to take away men of learning once in a while, to keep informed on the state of things in the human world.\n\n\u2002This leads me to my secondary purpose in addressing you\u2014namely, to urge you to hush up the present debate rather than give it more publicity. People must be kept away from these hills, and in order to effect this, their curiosity ought not to be aroused any further. Heaven knows there is peril enough anyway, with promoters and real estate men flooding Vermont with herds of summer people to overrun the wild places and cover the hills with cheap bungalows.\n\n\u2002I shall welcome further communication with you, and shall try to send you that phonograph record and black stone (which is so worn that photographs don't shew much) by express if you are willing. I say \"try\" because I think those creatures have a way of tampering with things around here. There is a sullen, furtive fellow named Brown, on a farm near the village, who I think is their spy. Little by little they are trying to cut me off from our world because I know too much about their world.\n\n\u2002They have the most amazing way of finding out what I do. You may not even get this letter. I think I shall have to leave this part of the country and go to live with my son in San Diego, Cal., if things get any worse, but it is not easy to give up the place you were born in, and where your family has lived for six generations. Also, I would hardly dare sell this house to anybody now that the creatures have taken notice of it. They seem to be trying to get the black stone back and destroy the phonograph record, but I shall not let them if I can help it. My great police dogs always hold them back, for there are very few here as yet, and they are clumsy in getting about. As I have said, their wings are not much use for short flights on earth. I am on the very brink of deciphering that stone\u2014in a very terrible way\u2014and with your knowledge of folklore you may be able to supply missing links enough to help me. I suppose you know all about the fearful myths antedating the coming of man to the earth\u2014the Yog-Sothoth and Cthulhu cycles\u2014which are hinted at in the Necronomicon. I had access to a copy of that once, and hear that you have one in your college library under lock and key.\n\n\u2002To conclude, Mr. Wilmarth, I think that with our respective studies we can be very useful to each other. I don't wish to put you in any peril, and suppose I ought to warn you that possession of the stone and the record won't be very safe; but I think you will find any risks worth running for the sake of knowledge. I will drive down to Newfane or Brattleboro to send whatever you authorise me to send, for the express offices there are more to be trusted. I might say that I live quite alone now, since I can't keep hired help any more. They won't stay because of the things that try to get near the house at night, and that keep the dogs barking continually. I am glad I didn't get as deep as this into the business while my wife was alive, for it would have driven her mad.\n\n\u2002Hoping that I am not bothering you unduly, and that you will decide to get in touch with me rather than throw this letter into the waste basket as a madman's raving, I am\n\n\u2002Yrs. very truly,\n\n\u2002HENRY W. AKELEY\n\n\u2002P.S. I am making some extra prints of certain photographs taken by me, which I think will help to prove a number of the points I have touched on. The old people think they are monstrously true. I shall send you these very soon if you are interested. H.W.A.\n\nIt would be difficult to describe my sentiments upon reading this strange document for the first time. By all ordinary rules, I ought to have laughed more loudly at these extravagances than at the far milder theories which had previously moved me to mirth; yet something in the tone of the letter made me take it with paradoxical seriousness. Not that I believed for a moment in the hidden race from the stars which my correspondent spoke of; but that, after some grave preliminary doubts, I grew to feel oddly sure of his sanity and sincerity, and of his confrontation by some genuine though singular and abnormal phenomenon which he could not explain except in this imaginative way. It could not be as he thought it, I reflected, yet on the other hand it could not be otherwise than worthy of investigation. The man seemed unduly excited and alarmed about something, but it was hard to think that all cause was lacking. He was so specific and logical in certain ways\u2014and after all, his yarn did fit in so perplexingly well with some of the old myths\u2014even the wildest Indian legends.\n\nThat he had really overheard disturbing voices in the hills, and had really found the black stone he spoke about, was wholly possible despite the crazy inferences he had made\u2014inferences probably suggested by the man who had claimed to be a spy of the outer beings and had later killed himself. It was easy to deduce that this man must have been wholly insane, but that he probably had a streak of perverse outward logic which made the naive Akeley\u2014already prepared for such things by his folklore studies\u2014believe his tale. As for the latest developments\u2014it appeared from his inability to keep hired help that Akeley's humbler rustic neighbours were as convinced as he that his house was besieged by uncanny things at night. The dogs really barked, too.\n\nAnd then the matter of that phonograph record, which I could not but believe he had obtained in the way he said. It must mean something; whether animal noises deceptively like human speech, or the speech of some hidden, night-haunting human being decayed to a state not much above that of lower animals. From this my thoughts went back to the black hieroglyphed stone, and to speculations upon what it might mean. Then, too, what of the photographs which Akeley said he was about to send, and which the old people had found so convincingly terrible?\n\nAs I re-read the cramped handwriting I felt as never before that my credulous opponents might have more on their side than I had conceded. After all, there might be some queer and perhaps hereditarily misshapen outcasts in those shunned hills, even though no such race of star-born monsters as folklore claimed. And if there were, then the presence of strange bodies in the flooded streams would not be wholly beyond belief. Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the old legends and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them? But even as I harboured these doubts I felt ashamed that so fantastic a piece of bizarrerie as Henry Akeley's wild letter had brought them up.\n\nIn the end I answered Akeley's letter, adopting a tone of friendly interest and soliciting further particulars. His reply came almost by return mail; and contained, true to promise, a number of kodak views of scenes and objects illustrating what he had to tell. Glancing at these pictures as I took them from the envelope, I felt a curious sense of fright and nearness to forbidden things; for in spite of the vagueness of most of them, they had a damnably suggestive power which was intensified by the fact of their being genuine photographs\u2014actual optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal transmitting process without prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.\n\nThe more I looked at them, the more I saw that my serious estimate of Akeley and his story had not been unjustified. Certainly, these pictures carried conclusive evidence of something in the Vermont hills which was at least vastly outside the radius of our common knowledge and belief. The worst thing of all was the footprint\u2014a view taken where the sun shone on a mud patch somewhere in a deserted upland. This was no cheaply counterfeited thing, I could see at a glance; for the sharply defined pebbles and grass-blades in the field of vision gave a clear index of scale and left no possibility of a tricky double exposure. I have called the thing a \"footprint\", but \"claw-print\" would be a better term. Even now I can scarcely describe it save to say that it was hideously crab-like, and that there seemed to be some ambiguity about its direction. It was not a very deep or fresh print, but seemed to be about the size of an average man's foot. From a central pad, pairs of saw-toothed nippers projected in opposite directions\u2014quite baffling as to function, if indeed the whole object were exclusively an organ of locomotion.\n\nAnother photograph\u2014evidently a time-exposure taken in deep shadow\u2014was of the mouth of a woodland cave, with a boulder of rounded regularity choking the aperture. On the bare ground in front of it one could just discern a dense network of curious tracks, and when I studied the picture with a magnifier I felt uneasily sure that the tracks were like the one in the other view. A third picture shewed a druid-like circle of standing stones on the summit of a wild hill. Around the cryptic circle the grass was very much beaten down and worn away, though I could not detect any footprints even with the glass. The extreme remoteness of the place was apparent from the veritable sea of tenantless mountains which formed the background and stretched away toward a misty horizon.\n\nBut if the most disturbing of all the views was that of the footprint, the most curiously suggestive was that of the great black stone found in the Round Hill woods. Akeley had photographed it on what was evidently his study table, for I could see rows of books and a bust of Milton in the background. The thing, as nearly as one might guess, had faced the camera vertically with a somewhat irregularly curved surface of one by two feet; but to say anything definite about that surface, or about the general shape of the whole mass, almost defies the power of language. What outlandish geometrical principles had guided its cutting\u2014for artificially cut it surely was\u2014I could not even begin to guess; and never before had I seen anything which struck me as so strangely and unmistakably alien to this world. Of the hieroglyphics on the surface I could discern very few, but one or two that I did see gave me rather a shock. Of course they might be fraudulent, for others besides myself had read the monstrous and abhorred Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred; but it nevertheless made me shiver to recognise certain ideographs which study had taught me to link with the most blood-curdling and blasphemous whispers of things that had had a kind of mad half-existence before the earth and the other inner worlds of the solar system were made.\n\nOf the five remaining pictures, three were of swamp and hill scenes which seemed to bear traces of hidden and unwholesome tenancy. Another was of a queer mark in the ground very near Akeley's house, which he said he had photographed the morning after a night on which the dogs had barked more violently than usual. It was very blurred, and one could really draw no certain conclusions from it; but it did seem fiendishly like that other mark or claw-print photographed on the deserted upland. The final picture was of the Akeley place itself; a trim white house of two stories and attic, about a century and a quarter old, and with a well-kept lawn and stone-bordered path leading up to a tastefully carved Georgian doorway. There were several huge police dogs on the lawn, squatting near a pleasant-faced man with a close-cropped grey beard whom I took to be Akeley himself\u2014his own photographer, one might infer from the tube-connected bulb in his right hand.\n\nFrom the pictures I turned to the bulky, closely written letter itself; and for the next three hours was immersed in a gulf of unutterable horror. Where Akeley had given only outlines before, he now entered into minute details; presenting long transcripts of words overheard in the woods at night, long accounts of monstrous pinkish forms spied in thickets at twilight on the hills, and a terrible cosmic narrative derived from the application of profound and varied scholarship to the endless bygone discourses of the mad self-styled spy who had killed himself. I found myself faced by names and terms that I had heard elsewhere in the most hideous of connexions\u2014Yuggoth, Great Cthulhu, Tsathoggua, Yog-Sothoth, R'lyeh, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Hastur, Yian, Leng, the Lake of Hali, Bethmoora, the Yellow Sign, L'mur-Kathulos, Bran, and the Magnum Innominandum\u2014and was drawn back through nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions to worlds of elder, outer entity at which the crazed author of the Necronomicon had only guessed in the vaguest way. I was told of the pits of primal life, and of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the tiny rivulet from one of those streams which had become entangled with the destinies of our own earth.\n\nMy brain whirled; and where before I had attempted to explain things away, I now began to believe in the most abnormal and incredible wonders. The array of vital evidence was damnably vast and overwhelming; and the cool, scientific attitude of Akeley\u2014an attitude removed as far as imaginable from the demented, the fanatical, the hysterical, or even the extravagantly speculative\u2014had a tremendous effect on my thought and judgment. By the time I laid the frightful letter aside I could understand the fears he had come to entertain, and was ready to do anything in my power to keep people away from those wild, haunted hills. Even now, when time has dulled the impression and made me half question my own experience and horrible doubts, there are things in that letter of Akeley's which I would not quote, or even form into words on paper. I am almost glad that the letter and record and photographs are gone now\u2014and I wish, for reasons I shall soon make clear, that the new planet beyond Neptune had not been discovered.\n\nWith the reading of that letter my public debating about the Vermont horror permanently ended. Arguments from opponents remained unanswered or put off with promises, and eventually the controversy petered out into oblivion. During late May and June I was in constant correspondence with Akeley; though once in a while a letter would be lost, so that we would have to retrace our ground and perform considerable laborious copying. What we were trying to do, as a whole, was to compare notes in matters of obscure mythological scholarship and arrive at a clearer correlation of the Vermont horrors with the general body of primitive world legend.\n\nFor one thing, we virtually decided that these morbidities and the hellish Himalayan Mi-Go were one and the same order of incarnated nightmare. There were also absorbing zo\u00f6logical conjectures, which I would have referred to Professor Dexter in my own college but for Akeley's imperative command to tell no one of the matter before us. If I seem to disobey that command now, it is only because I think that at this stage a warning about those farther Vermont hills\u2014and about those Himalayan peaks which bold explorers are more and more determined to ascend\u2014is more conducive to public safety than silence would be. One specific thing we were leading up to was a deciphering of the hieroglyphics on that infamous black stone\u2014a deciphering which might well place us in possession of secrets deeper and more dizzying than any formerly known to man." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 131", + "text": "Toward the end of June the phonograph record came\u2014shipped from Brattleboro, since Akeley was unwilling to trust conditions on the branch line north of there. He had begun to feel an increased sense of espionage, aggravated by the loss of some of our letters; and said much about the insidious deeds of certain men whom he considered tools and agents of the hidden beings. Most of all he suspected the surly farmer Walter Brown, who lived alone on a run-down hillside place near the deep woods, and who was often seen loafing around corners in Brattleboro, Bellows Falls, Newfane, and South Londonderry in the most inexplicable and seemingly unmotivated way. Brown's voice, he felt convinced, was one of those he had overheard on a certain occasion in a very terrible conversation; and he had once found a footprint or claw-print near Brown's house which might possess the most ominous significance. It had been curiously near some of Brown's own footprints\u2014footprints that faced toward it.\n\nSo the record was shipped from Brattleboro, whither Akeley drove in his Ford car along the lonely Vermont back roads. He confessed in an accompanying note that he was beginning to be afraid of those roads, and that he would not even go into Townshend for supplies now except in broad daylight. It did not pay, he repeated again and again, to know too much unless one were very remote from those silent and problematical hills. He would be going to California pretty soon to live with his son, though it was hard to leave a place where all one's memories and ancestral feelings centred.\n\nBefore trying the record on the commercial machine which I borrowed from the college administration building I carefully went over all the explanatory matter in Akeley's various letters. This record, he had said, was obtained about 1 a.m. on the first of May, 1915, near the closed mouth of a cave where the wooded west slope of Dark Mountain rises out of Lee's Swamp. The place had always been unusually plagued with strange voices, this being the reason he had brought the phonograph, dictaphone, and blank in expectation of results. Former experience had told him that May-Eve\u2014the hideous Sabbat-night of underground European legend\u2014would probably be more fruitful than any other date, and he was not disappointed. It was noteworthy, though, that he never again heard voices at that particular spot.\n\nUnlike most of the overheard forest voices, the substance of the record was quasi-ritualistic, and included one palpably human voice which Akeley had never been able to place. It was not Brown's, but seemed to be that of a man of greater cultivation. The second voice, however, was the real crux of the thing\u2014for this was the accursed buzzing which had no likeness to humanity despite the human words which it uttered in good English grammar and a scholarly accent.\n\nThe recording phonograph and dictaphone had not worked uniformly well, and had of course been at a great disadvantage because of the remote and muffled nature of the overheard ritual; so that the actual speech secured was very fragmentary. Akeley had given me a transcript of what he believed the spoken words to be, and I glanced through this again as I prepared the machine for action. The text was darkly mysterious rather than openly horrible, though a knowledge of its origin and manner of gathering gave it all the associative horror which any words could well possess. I will present it here in full as I remember it\u2014and I am fairly confident that I know it correctly by heart, not only from reading the transcript, but from playing the record itself over and over again. It is not a thing which one might readily forget!\n\n(INDISTINGUISHABLE SOUNDS)\n\n(A CULTIVATED MALE HUMAN VOICE)\n\n...is the Lord of the Woods, even to... and the gifts of the men of Leng... so from the wells of night to the gulfs of space, and from the gulfs of space to the wells of night, ever the praises of Great Cthulhu, of Tsathoggua, and of Him Who is not to be Named. Ever Their praises, and abundance to the Black Goat of the Woods. I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!\n\n(A BUZZING IMITATION OF HUMAN SPEECH)\n\nI\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!\n\n(HUMAN VOICE)\n\nAnd it has come to pass that the Lord of the Woods, being... seven and nine, down the onyx steps... (tri)butes to Him in the Gulf, Azathoth, He of Whom Thou hast taught us marv(els)... on the wings of night out beyond space, out beyond th... to That whereof Yuggoth is the youngest child, rolling alone in black aether at the rim....\n\n(BUZZING VOICE)\n\n...go out among men and find the ways thereof, that He in the Gulf may know. To Nyarlathotep, Mighty Messenger, must all things be told. And He shall put on the semblance of men, the waxen mask and the robe that hides, and come down from the world of Seven Suns to mock....\n\n(HUMAN VOICE)\n\n...(Nyarl)athotep, Great Messenger, bringer of strange joy to Yuggoth through the void, Father of the Million Favoured Ones, Stalker among....\n\n(SPEECH CUT OFF BY END OF RECORD)\n\nSuch were the words for which I was to listen when I started the phonograph. It was with a trace of genuine dread and reluctance that I pressed the lever and heard the preliminary scratching of the sapphire point, and I was glad that the first faint, fragmentary words were in a human voice\u2014a mellow, educated voice which seemed vaguely Bostonian in accent, and which was certainly not that of any native of the Vermont hills. As I listened to the tantalisingly feeble rendering, I seemed to find the speech identical with Akeley's carefully prepared transcript. On it chanted, in that mellow Bostonian voice... \"I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!...\"\n\nAnd then I heard the other voice. To this hour I shudder retrospectively when I think of how it struck me, prepared though I was by Akeley's accounts. Those to whom I have since described the record profess to find nothing but cheap imposture or madness in it; but could they have heard the accursed thing itself, or read the bulk of Akeley's correspondence (especially that terrible and encyclopaedic second letter), I know they would think differently. It is, after all, a tremendous pity that I did not disobey Akeley and play the record for others\u2014a tremendous pity, too, that all of his letters were lost. To me, with my first-hand impression of the actual sounds, and with my knowledge of the background and surrounding circumstances, the voice was a monstrous thing. It swiftly followed the human voice in ritualistic response, but in my imagination it was a morbid echo winging its way across unimaginable abysses from unimaginable outer hells. It is more than two years now since I last ran off that blasphemous waxen cylinder; but at this moment, and at all other moments, I can still hear that feeble, fiendish buzzing as it reached me for the first time.\n\n\"I\u00e4! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!\"\n\nBut though that voice is always in my ears, I have not even yet been able to analyse it well enough for a graphic description. It was like the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species, and I am perfectly certain that the organs producing it can have no resemblance to the vocal organs of man, or indeed to those of any of the mammalia. There were singularities in timbre, range, and overtones which placed this phenomenon wholly outside the sphere of humanity and earth-life. Its sudden advent that first time almost stunned me, and I heard the rest of the record through in a sort of abstracted daze. When the longer passage of buzzing came, there was a sharp intensification of that feeling of blasphemous infinity which had struck me during the shorter and earlier passage. At last the record ended abruptly, during an unusually clear speech of the human and Bostonian voice; but I sat stupidly staring long after the machine had automatically stopped.\n\nI hardly need say that I gave that shocking record many another playing, and that I made exhaustive attempts at analysis and comment in comparing notes with Akeley. It would be both useless and disturbing to repeat here all that we concluded; but I may hint that we agreed in believing we had secured a clue to the source of some of the most repulsive primordial customs in the cryptic elder religions of mankind. It seemed plain to us, also, that there were ancient and elaborate alliances between the hidden outer creatures and certain members of the human race. How extensive these alliances were, and how their state today might compare with their state in earlier ages, we had no means of guessing; yet at best there was room for a limitless amount of horrified speculation. There seemed to be an awful, immemorial linkage in several definite stages betwixt man and nameless infinity. The blasphemies which appeared on earth, it was hinted, came from the dark planet Yuggoth, at the rim of the solar system; but this was itself merely the populous outpost of a frightful interstellar race whose ultimate source must lie far outside even the Einsteinian space-time continuum or greatest known cosmos.\n\nMeanwhile we continued to discuss the black stone and the best way of getting it to Arkham\u2014Akeley deeming it inadvisable to have me visit him at the scene of his nightmare studies. For some reason or other, Akeley was afraid to trust the thing to any ordinary or expected transportation route. His final idea was to take it across county to Bellows Falls and ship it on the Boston and Maine system through Keene and Winchendon and Fitchburg, even though this would necessitate his driving along somewhat lonelier and more forest-traversing hill roads than the main highway to Brattleboro. He said he had noticed a man around the express office at Brattleboro when he had sent the phonograph record, whose actions and expression had been far from reassuring. This man had seemed too anxious to talk with the clerks, and had taken the train on which the record was shipped. Akeley confessed that he had not felt strictly at ease about that record until he heard from me of its safe receipt.\n\nAbout this time\u2014the second week in July\u2014another letter of mine went astray, as I learned through an anxious communication from Akeley. After that he told me to address him no more at Townshend, but to send all mail in care of the General Delivery at Brattleboro; whither he would make frequent trips either in his car or on the motor-coach line which had lately replaced passenger service on the lagging branch railway. I could see that he was getting more and more anxious, for he went into much detail about the increased barking of the dogs on moonless nights, and about the fresh claw-prints he sometimes found in the road and in the mud at the back of his farmyard when morning came. Once he told about a veritable army of prints drawn up in a line facing an equally thick and resolute line of dog-tracks, and sent a loathsomely disturbing kodak picture to prove it. That was after a night on which the dogs had outdone themselves in barking and howling.\n\nOn the morning of Wednesday, July 18, I received a telegram from Bellows Falls, in which Akeley said he was expressing the black stone over the B. & M. on Train No. 5508, leaving Bellows Falls at 12:15 p.m., standard time, and due at the North Station in Boston at 4:12 p.m. It ought, I calculated, to get up to Arkham at least by the next noon; and accordingly I stayed in all Thursday morning to receive it. But noon came and went without its advent, and when I telephoned down to the express office I was informed that no shipment for me had arrived. My next act, performed amidst a growing alarm, was to give a long-distance call to the express agent at the Boston North Station; and I was scarcely surprised to learn that my consignment had not appeared. Train No. 5508 had pulled in only 35 minutes late on the day before, but had contained no box addressed to me. The agent promised, however, to institute a searching inquiry; and I ended the day by sending Akeley a night-letter outlining the situation.\n\nWith commendable promptness a report came from the Boston office on the following afternoon, the agent telephoning as soon as he learned the facts. It seemed that the railway express clerk on No. 5508 had been able to recall an incident which might have much bearing on my loss\u2014an argument with a very curious-voiced man, lean, sandy, and rustic-looking, when the train was waiting at Keene, N.H., shortly after one o'clock standard time.\n\nThe man, he said, was greatly excited about a heavy box which he claimed to expect, but which was neither on the train nor entered on the company's books. He had given the name of Stanley Adams, and had had such a queerly thick droning voice, that it made the clerk abnormally dizzy and sleepy to listen to him. The clerk could not remember quite how the conversation had ended, but recalled starting into a fuller awakeness when the train began to move. The Boston agent added that this clerk was a young man of wholly unquestioned veracity and reliability, of known antecedents and long with the company.\n\nThat evening I went to Boston to interview the clerk in person, having obtained his name and address from the office. He was a frank, prepossessing fellow, but I saw that he could add nothing to his original account. Oddly, he was scarcely sure that he could even recognise the strange inquirer again. Realising that he had no more to tell, I returned to Arkham and sat up till morning writing letters to Akeley, to the express company, and to the police department and station agent in Keene. I felt that the strange-voiced man who had so queerly affected the clerk must have a pivotal place in the ominous business, and hoped that Keene station employees and telegraph-office records might tell something about him and about how he happened to make his inquiry when and where he did.\n\nI must admit, however, that all my investigations came to nothing. The queer-voiced man had indeed been noticed around the Keene station in the early afternoon of July 18, and one lounger seemed to couple him vaguely with a heavy box; but he was altogether unknown, and had not been seen before or since. He had not visited the telegraph office or received any message so far as could be learned, nor had any message which might justly be considered a notice of the black stone's presence on No. 5508 come through the office for anyone. Naturally Akeley joined with me in conducting these inquiries, and even made a personal trip to Keene to question the people around the station; but his attitude toward the matter was more fatalistic than mine. He seemed to find the loss of the box a portentous and menacing fulfilment of inevitable tendencies, and had no real hope at all of its recovery. He spoke of the undoubted telepathic and hypnotic powers of the hill creatures and their agents, and in one letter hinted that he did not believe the stone was on this earth any longer. For my part, I was duly enraged, for I had felt there was at least a chance of learning profound and astonishing things from the old, blurred hieroglyphs. The matter would have rankled bitterly in my mind had not Akeley's immediate subsequent letters brought up a new phase of the whole horrible hill problem which at once seized all my attention." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 132", + "text": "The unknown things, Akeley wrote in a script grown pitifully tremulous, had begun to close in on him with a wholly new degree of determination. The nocturnal barking of the dogs whenever the moon was dim or absent was hideous now, and there had been attempts to molest him on the lonely roads he had to traverse by day. On the second of August, while bound for the village in his car, he had found a tree-trunk laid in his path at a point where the highway ran through a deep patch of woods; while the savage barking of the two great dogs he had with him told all too well of the things which must have been lurking near. What would have happened had the dogs not been there, he did not dare guess\u2014but he never went out now without at least two of his faithful and powerful pack. Other road experiences had occurred on August 5th and 6th; a shot grazing his car on one occasion, and the barking of the dogs telling of unholy woodland presences on the other.\n\nOn August 15th I received a frantic letter which disturbed me greatly, and which made me wish Akeley could put aside his lonely reticence and call in the aid of the law. There had been frightful happenings on the night of the 12-13th, bullets flying outside the farmhouse, and three of the twelve great dogs being found shot dead in the morning. There were myriads of claw-prints in the road, with the human prints of Walter Brown among them. Akeley had started to telephone to Brattleboro for more dogs, but the wire had gone dead before he had a chance to say much. Later he went to Brattleboro in his car, and learned there that linemen had found the main telephone cable neatly cut at a point where it ran through the deserted hills north of Newfane. But he was about to start home with four fine new dogs, and several cases of ammunition for his big-game repeating rifle. The letter was written at the post office in Brattleboro, and came through to me without delay.\n\nMy attitude toward the matter was by this time quickly slipping from a scientific to an alarmedly personal one. I was afraid for Akeley in his remote, lonely farmhouse, and half afraid for myself because of my now definite connexion with the strange hill problem. The thing was reaching out so. Would it suck me in and engulf me? In replying to his letter I urged him to seek help, and hinted that I might take action myself if he did not. I spoke of visiting Vermont in person in spite of his wishes, and of helping him explain the situation to the proper authorities. In return, however, I received only a telegram from Bellows Falls which read thus:\n\n\u2002APPRECIATE YOUR POSITION BUT CAN DO NOTHING. TAKE NO ACTION YOURSELF FOR IT COULD ONLY HARM BOTH. WAIT FOR EXPLANATION.\n\n\u2002HENRY AKELY\n\nBut the affair was steadily deepening. Upon my replying to the telegram I received a shaky note from Akeley with the astonishing news that he had not only never sent the wire, but had not received the letter from me to which it was an obvious reply. Hasty inquiries by him at Bellows Falls had brought out that the message was deposited by a strange sandy-haired man with a curiously thick, droning voice, though more than this he could not learn. The clerk shewed him the original text as scrawled in pencil by the sender, but the handwriting was wholly unfamiliar. It was noticeable that the signature was misspelled\u2014A-K-E-L-Y, without the second \"E\". Certain conjectures were inevitable, but amidst the obvious crisis he did not stop to elaborate upon them.\n\nHe spoke of the death of more dogs and the purchase of still others, and of the exchange of gunfire which had become a settled feature each moonless night. Brown's prints, and the prints of at least one or two more shod human figures, were now found regularly among the claw-prints in the road, and at the back of the farmyard. It was, Akeley admitted, a pretty bad business; and before long he would probably have to go to live with his California son whether or not he could sell the old place. But it was not easy to leave the only spot one could really think of as home. He must try to hang on a little longer; perhaps he could scare off the intruders\u2014especially if he openly gave up all further attempts to penetrate their secrets.\n\nWriting Akeley at once, I renewed my offers of aid, and spoke again of visiting him and helping him convince the authorities of his dire peril. In his reply he seemed less set against that plan than his past attitude would have led one to predict, but said he would like to hold off a little while longer\u2014long enough to get his things in order and reconcile himself to the idea of leaving an almost morbidly cherished birthplace. People looked askance at his studies and speculations, and it would be better to get quietly off without setting the countryside in a turmoil and creating widespread doubts of his own sanity. He had had enough, he admitted, but he wanted to make a dignified exit if he could.\n\nThis letter reached me on the twenty-eighth of August, and I prepared and mailed as encouraging a reply as I could. Apparently the encouragement had effect, for Akeley had fewer terrors to report when he acknowledged my note. He was not very optimistic, though, and expressed the belief that it was only the full moon season which was holding the creatures off. He hoped there would not be many densely cloudy nights, and talked vaguely of boarding in Brattleboro when the moon waned. Again I wrote him encouragingly, but on September 5th there came a fresh communication which had obviously crossed my letter in the mails; and to this I could not give any such hopeful response. In view of its importance I believe I had better give it in full\u2014as best I can do from memory of the shaky script. It ran substantially as follows:\n\nMonday.\n\n\u2002Dear Wilmarth\u2014\n\n\u2002A rather discouraging P.S. to my last. Last night was thickly cloudy\u2014though no rain\u2014and not a bit of moonlight got through. Things were pretty bad, and I think the end is getting near, in spite of all we have hoped. After midnight something landed on the roof of the house, and the dogs all rushed up to see what it was. I could hear them snapping and tearing around, and then one managed to get on the roof by jumping from the low ell. There was a terrible fight up there, and I heard a frightful buzzing which I'll never forget. And then there was a shocking smell. About the same time bullets came through the window and nearly grazed me. I think the main line of the hill creatures had got close to the house when the dogs divided because of the roof business. What was up there I don't know yet, but I'm afraid the creatures are learning to steer better with their space wings. I put out the light and used the windows for loopholes, and raked all around the house with rifle fire aimed just high enough not to hit the dogs. That seemed to end the business, but in the morning I found great pools of blood in the yard, beside pools of a green sticky stuff that had the worst odour I have ever smelled. I climbed up on the roof and found more of the sticky stuff there. Five of the dogs were killed\u2014I'm afraid I hit one by aiming too low, for he was shot in the back. Now I am setting the panes the shots broke, and am going to Brattleboro for more dogs. I guess the men at the kennels think I am crazy. Will drop another note later. Suppose I'll be ready for moving in a week or two, though it nearly kills me to think of it.\n\n\u2002Hastily\u2014\n\n\u2002AKELEY\n\nBut this was not the only letter from Akeley to cross mine. On the next morning\u2014September 6th\u2014still another came; this time a frantic scrawl which utterly unnerved me and put me at a loss what to say or do next. Again I cannot do better than quote the text as faithfully as memory will let me.\n\nTuesday.\n\nClouds didn't break, so no moon again\u2014and going into the wane anyhow. I'd have the house wired for electricity and put in a searchlight if I didn't know they'd cut the cables as fast as they could be mended.\n\nI think I am going crazy. It may be that all I have ever written you is a dream or madness. It was bad enough before, but this time it is too much. They talked to me last night\u2014talked in that cursed buzzing voice and told me things that I dare not repeat to you. I heard them plainly over the barking of the dogs, and once when they were drowned out a human voice helped them. Keep out of this, Wilmarth\u2014it is worse than either you or I ever suspected. They don't mean to let me get to California now\u2014they want to take me off alive, or what theoretically and mentally amounts to alive\u2014not only to Yuggoth, but beyond that\u2014away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of space. I told them I wouldn't go where they wish, or in the terrible way they propose to take me, but I'm afraid it will be no use. My place is so far out that they may come by day as well as by night before long. Six more dogs killed, and I felt presences all along the wooded parts of the road when I drove to Brattleboro today.\n\nIt was a mistake for me to try to send you that phonograph record and black stone. Better smash the record before it's too late. Will drop you another line tomorrow if I'm still here. Wish I could arrange to get my books and things to Brattleboro and board there. I would run off without anything if I could, but something inside my mind holds me back. I can slip out to Brattleboro, where I ought to be safe, but I feel just as much a prisoner there as at the house. And I seem to know that I couldn't get much farther even if I dropped everything and tried. It is horrible\u2014don't get mixed up in this.\n\n\u2002Yrs\u2014AKELEY\n\n\u2002I did not sleep at all the night after receiving this terrible thing, and was utterly baffled as to Akeley's remaining degree of sanity. The substance of the note was wholly insane, yet the manner of expression\u2014in view of all that had gone before\u2014had a grimly potent quality of convincingness. I made no attempt to answer it, thinking it better to wait until Akeley might have time to reply to my latest communication. Such a reply indeed came on the following day, though the fresh material in it quite overshadowed any of the points brought up by the letter it nominally answered. Here is what I recall of the text, scrawled and blotted as it was in the course of a plainly frantic and hurried composition.\n\n\u2002Wednesday.\n\n\u2002W\u2014\n\nYr letter came, but it's no use to discuss anything any more. I am fully resigned. Wonder that I have even enough will power left to fight them off. Can't escape even if I were willing to give up everything and run. They'll get me.\n\nHad a letter from them yesterday\u2014R.F.D. man brought it while I was at Brattleboro. Typed and postmarked Bellows Falls. Tells what they want to do with me\u2014I can't repeat it. Look out for yourself, too! Smash that record. Cloudy nights keep up, and moon waning all the time. Wish I dared to get help\u2014it might brace up my will power\u2014but everyone who would dare to come at all would call me crazy unless there happened to be some proof. Couldn't ask people to come for no reason at all\u2014am all out of touch with everybody and have been for years.\n\nBut I haven't told you the worst, Wilmarth. Brace up to read this, for it will give you a shock. I am telling the truth, though. It is this\u2014I have seen and touched one of the things, or part of one of the things. God, man, but it's awful! It was dead, of course. One of the dogs had it, and I found it near the kennel this morning. I tried to save it in the woodshed to convince people of the whole thing, but it all evaporated in a few hours. Nothing left. You know, all those things in the rivers were seen only on the first morning after the flood. And here's the worst. I tried to photograph it for you, but when I developed the film there wasn't anything visible except the woodshed. What can the thing have been made of? I saw it and felt it, and they all leave footprints. It was surely made of matter\u2014but what kind of matter? The shape can't be described. It was a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with feelers where a man's head would be. That green sticky stuff is its blood or juice. And there are more of them due on earth any minute.\n\nWalter Brown is missing\u2014hasn't been seen loafing around any of his usual corners in the villages hereabouts. I must have got him with one of my shots, though the creatures always seem to try to take their dead and wounded away.\n\nGot into town this afternoon without any trouble, but am afraid they're beginning to hold off because they're sure of me. Am writing this in Brattleboro P.O. This may be goodbye\u2014if it is, write my son George Goodenough Akeley, 176 Pleasant St., San Diego, Cal., but don't come up here. Write the boy if you don't hear from me in a week, and watch the papers for news.\n\nI'm going to play my last two cards now\u2014if I have the will power left. First to try poison gas on the things (I've got the right chemicals and have fixed up masks for myself and the dogs) and then if that doesn't work, tell the sheriff. They can lock me in a madhouse if they want to\u2014it'll be better than what the other creatures would do. Perhaps I can get them to pay attention to the prints around the house\u2014they are faint, but I can find them every morning. Suppose, though, police would say I faked them somehow; for they all think I'm a queer character.\n\nMust try to have a state policeman spend a night here and see for himself\u2014though it would be just like the creatures to learn about it and hold off that night. They cut my wires whenever I try to telephone in the night\u2014the linemen think it is very queer, and may testify for me if they don't go and imagine I cut them myself. I haven't tried to keep them repaired for over a week now.\n\nI could get some of the ignorant people to testify for me about the reality of the horrors, but everybody laughs at what they say, and anyway, they have shunned my place for so long that they don't know any of the new events. You couldn't get one of those run-down farmers to come within a mile of my house for love or money. The mail-carrier hears what they say and jokes me about it\u2014God! If I only dared tell him how real it is! I think I'll try to get him to notice the prints, but he comes in the afternoon and they're usually about gone by that time. If I kept one by setting a box or pan over it, he'd think surely it was a fake or joke.\n\nWish I hadn't gotten to be such a hermit, so folks don't drop around as they used to. I've never dared shew the black stone or the kodak pictures, or play that record, to anybody but the ignorant people. The others would say I faked the whole business and do nothing but laugh. But I may yet try shewing the pictures. They give those claw-prints clearly, even if the things that made them can't be photographed. What a shame nobody else saw that thing this morning before it went to nothing!\n\nBut I don't know as I care. After what I've been through, a madhouse is as good a place as any. The doctors can help me make up my mind to get away from this house, and that is all that will save me.\n\nWrite my son George if you don't hear soon. Goodbye, smash that record, and don't mix up in this.\n\n\u2002Yrs\u2014AKELEY\n\n\u2002The letter frankly plunged me into the blackest of terror. I did not know what to say in answer, but scratched off some incoherent words of advice and encouragement and sent them by registered mail. I recall urging Akeley to move to Brattleboro at once, and place himself under the protection of the authorities; adding that I would come to that town with the phonograph record and help convince the courts of his sanity. It was time, too, I think I wrote, to alarm the people generally against this thing in their midst. It will be observed that at this moment of stress my own belief in all Akeley had told and claimed was virtually complete, though I did think his failure to get a picture of the dead monster was due not to any freak of Nature but to some excited slip of his own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 133", + "text": "Then, apparently crossing my incoherent note and reaching me Saturday afternoon, September 8th, came that curiously different and calming letter neatly typed on a new machine; that strange letter of reassurance and invitation which must have marked so prodigious a transition in the whole nightmare drama of the lonely hills. Again I will quote from memory\u2014seeking for special reasons to preserve as much of the flavour of the style as I can. It was postmarked Bellows Falls, and the signature as well as the body of the letter was typed\u2014as is frequent with beginners in typing. The text, though, was marvellously accurate for a tyro's work; and I concluded that Akeley must have used a machine at some previous period\u2014perhaps in college. To say that the letter relieved me would be only fair, yet beneath my relief lay a substratum of uneasiness. If Akeley had been sane in his terror, was he now sane in his deliverance? And the sort of \"improved rapport\" mentioned... what was it? The entire thing implied such a diametrical reversal of Akeley's previous attitude! But here is the substance of the text, carefully transcribed from a memory in which I take some pride.\n\n\u2002Townshend, Vermont,\n\n\u2002Thursday, Sept. 6, 1928.\n\n\u2002My dear Wilmarth:\u2014\n\n\u2002It gives me great pleasure to be able to set you at rest regarding all the silly things I've been writing you. I say \"silly\", although by that I mean my frightened attitude rather than my descriptions of certain phenomena. Those phenomena are real and important enough; my mistake had been in establishing an anomalous attitude toward them.\n\n\u2002I think I mentioned that my strange visitors were beginning to communicate with me, and to attempt such communication. Last night this exchange of speech became actual. In response to certain signals I admitted to the house a messenger from those outside\u2014a fellow-human, let me hasten to say. He told me much that neither you nor I had even begun to guess, and shewed clearly how totally we had misjudged and misinterpreted the purpose of the Outer Ones in maintaining their secret colony on this planet.\n\n\u2002It seems that the evil legends about what they have offered to men, and what they wish in connexion with the earth, are wholly the result of an ignorant misconception of allegorical speech\u2014speech, of course, moulded by cultural backgrounds and thought-habits vastly different from anything we dream of. My own conjectures, I freely own, shot as widely past the mark as any of the guesses of illiterate farmers and savage Indians. What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious\u2014my previous estimate being merely a phase of man's eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.\n\n\u2002Now I regret the harm I have inflicted upon these alien and incredible beings in the course of our nightly skirmishes. If only I had consented to talk peacefully and reasonably with them in the first place! But they bear me no grudge, their emotions being organised very differently from ours. It is their misfortune to have had as their human agents in Vermont some very inferior specimens\u2014the late Walter Brown, for example. He prejudiced me vastly against them. Actually, they have never knowingly harmed men, but have often been cruelly wronged and spied upon by our species. There is a whole secret cult of evil men (a man of your mystical erudition will understand me when I link them with Hastur and the Yellow Sign) devoted to the purpose of tracking them down and injuring them on behalf of monstrous powers from other dimensions. It is against these aggressors\u2014not against normal humanity\u2014that the drastic precautions of the Outer Ones are directed. Incidentally, I learned that many of our lost letters were stolen not by the Outer Ones but by the emissaries of this malign cult.\n\n\u2002All that the Outer Ones wish of man is peace and non-molestation and an increasing intellectual rapport. This latter is absolutely necessary now that our inventions and devices are expanding our knowledge and motions, and making it more and more impossible for the Outer Ones' necessary outposts to exist secretly on this planet. The alien beings desire to know mankind more fully, and to have a few of mankind's philosophic and scientific leaders know more about them. With such an exchange of knowledge all perils will pass, and a satisfactory modus vivendi be established. The very idea of any attempt to enslave or degrade mankind is ridiculous.\n\n\u2002As a beginning of this improved rapport, the Outer Ones have naturally chosen me\u2014whose knowledge of them is already so considerable\u2014as their primary interpreter on earth. Much was told me last night\u2014facts of the most stupendous and vista-opening nature\u2014and more will be subsequently communicated to me both orally and in writing. I shall not be called upon to make any trip outside just yet, though I shall probably wish to do so later on\u2014employing special means and transcending everything which we have hitherto been accustomed to regard as human experience. My house will be besieged no longer. Everything has reverted to normal, and the dogs will have no further occupation. In place of terror I have been given a rich boon of knowledge and intellectual adventure which few other mortals have ever shared.\n\n\u2002The Outer Beings are perhaps the most marvellous organic things in or beyond all space and time\u2014members of a cosmos-wide race of which all other life-forms are merely degenerate variants. They are more vegetable than animal, if these terms can be applied to the sort of matter composing them, and have a somewhat fungoid structure; though the presence of a chlorophyll-like substance and a very singular nutritive system differentiate them altogether from true cormophytic fungi. Indeed, the type is composed of a form of matter totally alien to our part of space\u2014with electrons having a wholly different vibration-rate. That is why the beings cannot be photographed on the ordinary camera films and plates of our known universe, even though our eyes can see them. With proper knowledge, however, any good chemist could make a photographic emulsion which would record their images.\n\n\u2002The genus is unique in its ability to traverse the heatless and airless interstellar void in full corporeal form, and some of its variants cannot do this without mechanical aid or curious surgical transpositions. Only a few species have the ether-resisting wings characteristic of the Vermont variety. Those inhabiting certain remote peaks in the Old World were brought in other ways. Their external resemblance to animal life, and to the sort of structure we understand as material, is a matter of parallel evolution rather than of close kinship. Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form, although the winged types of our hill country are by no means the most highly developed. Telepathy is their usual means of discourse, though they have rudimentary vocal organs which, after a slight operation (for surgery is an incredibly expert and every-day thing among them), can roughly duplicate the speech of such types of organism as still use speech.\n\n\u2002Their main immediate abode is a still undiscovered and almost lightless planet at the very edge of our solar system\u2014beyond Neptune, and the ninth in distance from the sun. It is, as we have inferred, the object mystically hinted at as \"Yuggoth\" in certain ancient and forbidden writings; and it will soon be the scene of a strange focussing of thought upon our world in an effort to facilitate mental rapport. I would not be surprised if astronomers became sufficiently sensitive to these thought-currents to discover Yuggoth when the Outer Ones wish them to do so. But Yuggoth, of course, is only the stepping-stone. The main body of the beings inhabits strangely organised abysses wholly beyond the utmost reach of any human imagination. The space-time globule which we recognise as the totality of all cosmic entity is only an atom in the genuine infinity which is theirs. And as much of this infinity as any human brain can hold is eventually to be opened up to me, as it has been to not more than fifty other men since the human race has existed.\n\n\u2002You will probably call this raving at first, Wilmarth, but in time you will appreciate the titanic opportunity I have stumbled upon. I want you to share as much of it as is possible, and to that end must tell you thousands of things that won't go on paper. In the past I have warned you not to come to see me. Now that all is safe, I take pleasure in rescinding that warning and inviting you.\n\n\u2002Can't you make a trip up here before your college term opens? It would be marvellously delightful if you could. Bring along the phonograph record and all my letters to you as consultative data\u2014we shall need them in piecing together the whole tremendous story. You might bring the kodak prints, too, since I seem to have mislaid the negatives and my own prints in all this recent excitement. But what a wealth of facts I have to add to all this groping and tentative material\u2014and what a stupendous device I have to supplement my additions!\n\n\u2002Don't hesitate\u2014I am free from espionage now, and you will not meet anything unnatural or disturbing. Just come along and let my car meet you at the Brattleboro station\u2014prepare to stay as long as you can, and expect many an evening of discussion of things beyond all human conjecture. Don't tell anyone about it, of course\u2014for this matter must not get to the promiscuous public.\n\n\u2002The train service to Brattleboro is not bad\u2014you can get a time-table in Boston. Take the B. & M. to Greenfield, and then change for the brief remainder of the way. I suggest your taking the convenient 4:10 p.m.\u2014standard\u2014from Boston. This gets into Greenfield at 7:35, and at 9:19 a train leaves there which reaches Brattleboro at 10:01. That is week-days. Let me know the date and I'll have my car on hand at the station.\n\n\u2002Pardon this typed letter, but my handwriting has grown shaky of late, as you know, and I don't feel equal to long stretches of script. I got this new Corona in Brattleboro yesterday\u2014it seems to work very well.\n\n\u2002Awaiting word, and hoping to see you shortly with the phonograph record and all my letters\u2014and the kodak prints\u2014\n\n\u2002I am\n\n\u2002Yours in anticipation,\n\n\u2002HENRY W. AKELEY.\n\n\u2002To Albert N. Wilmarth, Esq.,\n\n\u2002Miskatonic University,\n\n\u2002Arkham, Mass.\n\nThe complexity of my emotions upon reading, re-reading, and pondering over this strange and unlooked-for letter is past adequate description. I have said that I was at once relieved and made uneasy, but this expresses only crudely the overtones of diverse and largely subconscious feelings which comprised both the relief and the uneasiness. To begin with, the thing was so antipodally at variance with the whole chain of horrors preceding it\u2014the change of mood from stark terror to cool complacency and even exultation was so unheralded, lightning-like, and complete! I could scarcely believe that a single day could so alter the psychological perspective of one who had written that final frenzied bulletin of Wednesday, no matter what relieving disclosures that day might have brought. At certain moments a sense of conflicting unrealities made me wonder whether this whole distantly reported drama of fantastic forces were not a kind of half-illusory dream created largely within my own mind. Then I thought of the phonograph record and gave way to still greater bewilderment.\n\nThe letter seemed so unlike anything which could have been expected! As I analysed my impression, I saw that it consisted of two distinct phases. First, granting that Akeley had been sane before and was still sane, the indicated change in the situation itself was so swift and unthinkable. And secondly, the change in Akeley's own manner, attitude, and language was so vastly beyond the normal or the predictable. The man's whole personality seemed to have undergone an insidious mutation\u2014a mutation so deep that one could scarcely reconcile his two aspects with the supposition that both represented equal sanity. Word-choice, spelling\u2014all were subtly different. And with my academic sensitiveness to prose style, I could trace profound divergences in his commonest reactions and rhythm-responses. Certainly, the emotional cataclysm or revelation which could produce so radical an overturn must be an extreme one indeed! Yet in another way the letter seemed quite characteristic of Akeley. The same old passion for infinity\u2014the same old scholarly inquisitiveness. I could not a moment\u2014or more than a moment\u2014credit the idea of spuriousness or malign substitution. Did not the invitation\u2014the willingness to have me test the truth of the letter in person\u2014prove its genuineness?\n\nI did not retire Saturday night, but sat up thinking of the shadows and marvels behind the letter I had received. My mind, aching from the quick succession of monstrous conceptions it had been forced to confront during the last four months, worked upon this startling new material in a cycle of doubt and acceptance which repeated most of the steps experienced in facing the earlier wonders; till long before dawn a burning interest and curiosity had begun to replace the original storm of perplexity and uneasiness. Mad or sane, metamorphosed or merely relieved, the chances were that Akeley had actually encountered some stupendous change of perspective in his hazardous research; some change at once diminishing his danger\u2014real or fancied\u2014and opening dizzy new vistas of cosmic and superhuman knowledge. My own zeal for the unknown flared up to meet his, and I felt myself touched by the contagion of the morbid barrier-breaking. To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law\u2014to be linked with the vast outside\u2014to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate\u2014surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and sanity! And Akeley had said there was no longer any peril\u2014he had invited me to visit him instead of warning me away as before. I tingled at the thought of what he might now have to tell me\u2014there was an almost paralysing fascination in the thought of sitting in that lonely and lately beleaguered farmhouse with a man who had talked with actual emissaries from outer space; sitting there with the terrible record and the pile of letters in which Akeley had summarised his earlier conclusions.\n\nSo late Sunday morning I telegraphed Akeley that I would meet him in Brattleboro on the following Wednesday\u2014September 12th\u2014if that date were convenient for him. In only one respect did I depart from his suggestions, and that concerned the choice of a train. Frankly, I did not feel like arriving in that haunted Vermont region late at night; so instead of accepting the train he chose I telephoned the station and devised another arrangement. By rising early and taking the 8:07 a.m. (standard) into Boston, I could catch the 9:25 for Greenfield; arriving there at 12:22 noon. This connected exactly with a train reaching Brattleboro at 1:08 p.m.\u2014a much more comfortable hour than 10:01 for meeting Akeley and riding with him into the close-packed, secret-guarding hills.\n\nI mentioned this choice in my telegram, and was glad to learn in the reply which came toward evening that it had met with my prospective host's endorsement. His wire ran thus:\n\n\u2002ARRANGEMENT SATISFACTORY. WILL MEET 1:08 TRAIN Wednesday. DON'T FORGET RECORD AND LETTERS AND PRINTS. KEEP DESTINATION QUIET. EXPECT GREAT REVELATIONS.\n\n\u2002AKELEY.\n\nReceipt of this message in direct response to one sent to Akeley\u2014and necessarily delivered to his house from the Townshend station either by official messenger or by a restored telephone service\u2014removed any lingering subconscious doubts I may have had about the authorship of the perplexing letter. My relief was marked\u2014indeed, it was greater than I could account for at that time; since all such doubts had been rather deeply buried. But I slept soundly and long that night, and was eagerly busy with preparations during the ensuing two days." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 134", + "text": "On Wednesday I started as agreed, taking with me a valise full of simple necessities and scientific data, including the hideous phonograph record, the kodak prints, and the entire file of Akeley's correspondence. As requested, I had told no one where I was going; for I could see that the matter demanded utmost privacy, even allowing for its most favourable turns. The thought of actual mental contact with alien, outside entities was stupefying enough to my trained and somewhat prepared mind; and this being so, what might one think of its effect on the vast masses of uninformed laymen? I do not know whether dread or adventurous expectancy was uppermost in me as I changed trains in Boston and began the long westward run out of familiar regions into those I knew less thoroughly. Waltham\u2014Concord\u2014Ayer\u2014Fitchburg\u2014Gardner\u2014Athol\u2014\n\nMy train reached Greenfield seven minutes late, but the northbound connecting express had been held. Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape\u2014the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs.\n\nNow and then I saw the blue Connecticut River gleaming in the sun, and after leaving Northfield we crossed it. Ahead loomed green and cryptical hills, and when the conductor came around I learned that I was at last in Vermont. He told me to set my watch back an hour, since the northern hill country will have no dealings with new-fangled daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to me that I was likewise turning the calendar back a century.\n\nThe train kept close to the river, and across in New Hampshire I could see the approaching slope of steep Wantastiquet, about which singular old legends cluster. Then streets appeared on my left, and a green island shewed in the stream on my right. People rose and filed to the door, and I followed them. The car stopped, and I alighted beneath the long train-shed of the Brattleboro station.\n\nLooking over the line of waiting motors I hesitated a moment to see which one might turn out to be the Akeley Ford, but my identity was divined before I could take the initiative. And yet it was clearly not Akeley himself who advanced to meet me with an outstretched hand and a mellowly phrased query as to whether I was indeed Mr. Albert N. Wilmarth of Arkham. This man bore no resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urban person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache. His cultivated voice held an odd and almost disturbing hint of vague familiarity, though I could not definitely place it in my memory.\n\nAs I surveyed him I heard him explaining that he was a friend of my prospective host's who had come down from Townshend in his stead. Akeley, he declared, had suffered a sudden attack of some asthmatic trouble, and did not feel equal to making a trip in the outdoor air. It was not serious, however, and there was to be no change in plans regarding my visit. I could not make out just how much this Mr. Noyes\u2014as he announced himself\u2014knew of Akeley's researches and discoveries, though it seemed to me that his casual manner stamped him as a comparative outsider. Remembering what a hermit Akeley had been, I was a trifle surprised at the ready availability of such a friend; but did not let my puzzlement deter me from entering the motor to which he gestured me. It was not the small ancient car I had expected from Akeley's descriptions, but a large and immaculate specimen of recent pattern\u2014apparently Noyes's own, and bearing Massachusetts licence plates with the amusing \"sacred codfish\" device of that year. My guide, I concluded, must be a summer transient in the Townshend region.\n\nNoyes climbed into the car beside me and started it at once. I was glad that he did not overflow with conversation, for some peculiar atmospheric tensity made me feel disinclined to talk. The town seemed very attractive in the afternoon sunlight as we swept up an incline and turned to the right into the main street. It drowsed like the older New England cities which one remembers from boyhood, and something in the collocation of roofs and steeples and chimneys and brick walls formed contours touching deep viol-strings of ancestral emotion. I could tell that I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up.\n\nAs we passed out of Brattleboro my sense of constraint and foreboding increased, for a vague quality in the hill-crowded countryside with its towering, threatening, close-pressing green and granite slopes hinted at obscure secrets and immemorial survivals which might or might not be hostile to mankind. For a time our course followed a broad, shallow river which flowed down from unknown hills in the north, and I shivered when my companion told me it was the West River. It was in this stream, I recalled from newspaper items, that one of the morbid crab-like beings had been seen floating after the floods.\n\nGradually the country around us grew wilder and more deserted. Archaic covered bridges lingered fearsomely out of the past in pockets of the hills, and the half-abandoned railway track paralleling the river seemed to exhale a nebulously visible air of desolation. There were awesome sweeps of vivid valley where great cliffs rose, New England's virgin granite shewing grey and austere through the verdure that scaled the crests. There were gorges where untamed streams leaped, bearing down toward the river the unimagined secrets of a thousand pathless peaks. Branching away now and then were narrow, half-concealed roads that bored their way through solid, luxuriant masses of forest among whose primal trees whole armies of elemental spirits might well lurk. As I saw these I thought of how Akeley had been molested by unseen agencies on his drives along this very route, and did not wonder that such things could be.\n\nThe quaint, sightly village of Newfane, reached in less than an hour, was our last link with that world which man can definitely call his own by virtue of conquest and complete occupancy. After that we cast off all allegiance to immediate, tangible, and time-touched things, and entered a fantastic world of hushed unreality in which the narrow, ribbon-like road rose and fell and curved with an almost sentient and purposeful caprice amidst the tenantless green peaks and half-deserted valleys. Except for the sound of the motor, and the faint stir of the few lonely farms we passed at infrequent intervals, the only thing that reached my ears was the gurgling, insidious trickle of strange waters from numberless hidden fountains in the shadowy woods.\n\nThe nearness and intimacy of the dwarfed, domed hills now became veritably breath-taking. Their steepness and abruptness were even greater than I had imagined from hearsay, and suggested nothing in common with the prosaic objective world we know. The dense, unvisited woods on those inaccessible slopes seemed to harbour alien and incredible things, and I felt that the very outline of the hills themselves held some strange and aeon-forgotten meaning, as if they were vast hieroglyphs left by a rumoured titan race whose glories live only in rare, deep dreams. All the legends of the past, and all the stupefying imputations of Henry Akeley's letters and exhibits, welled up in my memory to heighten the atmosphere of tension and growing menace. The purpose of my visit, and the frightful abnormalities it postulated, struck me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly overbalanced my ardour for strange delvings.\n\nMy guide must have noticed my disturbed attitude; for as the road grew wilder and more irregular, and our motion slower and more jolting, his occasional pleasant comments expanded into a steadier flow of discourse. He spoke of the beauty and weirdness of the country, and revealed some acquaintance with the folklore studies of my prospective host. From his polite questions it was obvious that he knew I had come for a scientific purpose, and that I was bringing data of some importance; but he gave no sign of appreciating the depth and awfulness of the knowledge which Akeley had finally reached.\n\nHis manner was so cheerful, normal, and urbane that his remarks ought to have calmed and reassured me; but oddly enough, I felt only the more disturbed as we bumped and veered onward into the unknown wilderness of hills and woods. At times it seemed as if he were pumping me to see what I knew of the monstrous secrets of the place, and with every fresh utterance that vague, teasing, baffling familiarity in his voice increased. It was not an ordinary or healthy familiarity despite the thoroughly wholesome and cultivated nature of the voice. I somehow linked it with forgotten nightmares, and felt that I might go mad if I recognised it. If any good excuse had existed, I think I would have turned back from my visit. As it was, I could not well do so\u2014and it occurred to me that a cool, scientific conversation with Akeley himself after my arrival would help greatly to pull me together.\n\nBesides, there was a strangely calming element of cosmic beauty in the hypnotic landscape through which we climbed and plunged fantastically. Time had lost itself in the labyrinths behind, and around us stretched only the flowering waves of faery and the recaptured loveliness of vanished centuries\u2014the hoary groves, the untainted pastures edged with gay autumnal blossoms, and at vast intervals the small brown farmsteads nestling amidst huge trees beneath vertical precipices of fragrant brier and meadow-grass. Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching.\n\nSuddenly, after rounding an obtuse angle at the top of a sharp ascent, the car came to a standstill. On my left, across a well-kept lawn which stretched to the road and flaunted a border of whitewashed stones, rose a white, two-and-a-half-story house of unusual size and elegance for the region, with a congeries of contiguous or arcade-linked barns, sheds, and windmill behind and to the right. I recognised it at once from the snapshot I had received, and was not surprised to see the name of Henry Akeley on the galvanised-iron mail-box near the road. For some distance back of the house a level stretch of marshy and sparsely wooded land extended, beyond which soared a steep, thickly forested hillside ending in a jagged leafy crest. This latter, I knew, was the summit of Dark Mountain, half way up which we must have climbed already.\n\nAlighting from the car and taking my valise, Noyes asked me to wait while he went in and notified Akeley of my advent. He himself, he added, had important business elsewhere, and could not stop for more than a moment. As he briskly walked up the path to the house I climbed out of the car myself, wishing to stretch my legs a little before settling down to a sedentary conversation. My feeling of nervousness and tension had risen to a maximum again now that I was on the actual scene of the morbid beleaguering described so hauntingly in Akeley's letters, and I honestly dreaded the coming discussions which were to link me with such alien and forbidden worlds.\n\nClose contact with the utterly bizarre is often more terrifying than inspiring, and it did not cheer me to think that this very bit of dusty road was the place where those monstrous tracks and that foetid green ichor had been found after moonless nights of fear and death. Idly I noticed that none of Akeley's dogs seemed to be about. Had he sold them all as soon as the Outer Ones made peace with him? Try as I might, I could not have the same confidence in the depth and sincerity of that peace which appeared in Akeley's final and queerly different letter. After all, he was a man of much simplicity and with little worldly experience. Was there not, perhaps, some deep and sinister undercurrent beneath the surface of the new alliance?\n\nLed by my thoughts, my eyes turned downward to the powdery road surface which had held such hideous testimonies. The last few days had been dry, and tracks of all sorts cluttered the rutted, irregular highway despite the unfrequented nature of the district. With a vague curiosity I began to trace the outline of some of the heterogeneous impressions, trying meanwhile to curb the flights of macabre fancy which the place and its memories suggested. There was something menacing and uncomfortable in the funereal stillness, in the muffled, subtle trickle of distant brooks, and in the crowding green peaks and black-wooded precipices that choked the narrow horizon.\n\nAnd then an image shot into my consciousness which made those vague menaces and flights of fancy seem mild and insignificant indeed. I have said that I was scanning the miscellaneous prints in the road with a kind of idle curiosity\u2014but all at once that curiosity was shockingly snuffed out by a sudden and paralysing gust of active terror. For though the dust tracks were in general confused and overlapping, and unlikely to arrest any casual gaze, my restless vision had caught certain details near the spot where the path to the house joined the highway; and had recognised beyond doubt or hope the frightful significance of those details. It was not for nothing, alas, that I had pored for hours over the kodak views of the Outer Ones' claw-prints which Akeley had sent. Too well did I know the marks of those loathsome nippers, and that hint of ambiguous direction which stamped the horrors as no creatures of this planet. No chance had been left me for merciful mistake. Here, indeed, in objective form before my own eyes, and surely made not many hours ago, were at least three marks which stood out blasphemously among the surprising plethora of blurred footprints leading to and from the Akeley farmhouse. They were the hellish tracks of the living fungi from Yuggoth.\n\nI pulled myself together in time to stifle a scream. After all, what more was there than I might have expected, assuming that I had really believed Akeley's letters? He had spoken of making peace with the things. Why, then, was it strange that some of them had visited his house? But the terror was stronger than the reassurance. Could any man be expected to look unmoved for the first time upon the claw-marks of animate beings from outer depths of space? Just then I saw Noyes emerge from the door and approach with a brisk step. I must, I reflected, keep command of myself, for the chances were this genial friend knew nothing of Akeley's profoundest and most stupendous probings into the forbidden.\n\nAkeley, Noyes hastened to inform me, was glad and ready to see me; although his sudden attack of asthma would prevent him from being a very competent host for a day or two. These spells hit him hard when they came, and were always accompanied by a debilitating fever and general weakness. He never was good for much while they lasted\u2014had to talk in a whisper, and was very clumsy and feeble in getting about. His feet and ankles swelled, too, so that he had to bandage them like a gouty old beef-eater. Today he was in rather bad shape, so that I would have to attend very largely to my own needs; but he was none the less eager for conversation. I would find him in the study at the left of the front hall\u2014the room where the blinds were shut. He had to keep the sunlight out when he was ill, for his eyes were very sensitive.\n\nAs Noyes bade me adieu and rode off northward in his car I began to walk slowly toward the house. The door had been left ajar for me; but before approaching and entering I cast a searching glance around the whole place, trying to decide what had struck me as so intangibly queer about it. The barns and sheds looked trimly prosaic enough, and I noticed Akeley's battered Ford in its capacious, unguarded shelter. Then the secret of the queerness reached me. It was the total silence. Ordinarily a farm is at least moderately murmurous from its various kinds of livestock, but here all signs of life were missing. What of the hens and the hogs? The cows, of which Akeley had said he possessed several, might conceivably be out to pasture, and the dogs might possibly have been sold; but the absence of any trace of cackling or grunting was truly singular.\n\nI did not pause long on the path, but resolutely entered the open house door and closed it behind me. It had cost me a distinct psychological effort to do so, and now that I was shut inside I had a momentary longing for precipitate retreat. Not that the place was in the least sinister in visual suggestion; on the contrary, I thought the graceful late-colonial hallway very tasteful and wholesome, and admired the evident breeding of the man who had furnished it. What made me wish to flee was something very attenuated and indefinable. Perhaps it was a certain odd odour which I thought I noticed\u2014though I well knew how common musty odours are in even the best of ancient farmhouses." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 135", + "text": "Refusing to let these cloudy qualms overmaster me, I recalled Noyes's instructions and pushed open the six-panelled, brass-latched white door on my left. The room beyond was darkened, as I had known before; and as I entered it I noticed that the queer odour was stronger there. There likewise appeared to be some faint, half-imaginary rhythm or vibration in the air. For a moment the closed blinds allowed me to see very little, but then a kind of apologetic hacking or whispering sound drew my attention to a great easy-chair in the farther, darker corner of the room. Within its shadowy depths I saw the white blur of a man's face and hands; and in a moment I had crossed to greet the figure who had tried to speak. Dim though the light was, I perceived that this was indeed my host. I had studied the kodak picture repeatedly, and there could be no mistake about this firm, weather-beaten face with the cropped, grizzled beard.\n\nBut as I looked again my recognition was mixed with sadness and anxiety; for certainly, this face was that of a very sick man. I felt that there must be something more than asthma behind that strained, rigid, immobile expression and unwinking glassy stare; and realised how terribly the strain of his frightful experiences must have told on him. Was it not enough to break any human being\u2014even a younger man than this intrepid delver into the forbidden? The strange and sudden relief, I feared, had come too late to save him from something like a general breakdown. There was a touch of the pitiful in the limp, lifeless way his lean hands rested in his lap. He had on a loose dressing-gown, and was swathed around the head and high around the neck with a vivid yellow scarf or hood.\n\nAnd then I saw that he was trying to talk in the same hacking whisper with which he had greeted me. It was a hard whisper to catch at first, since the grey moustache concealed all movements of the lips, and something in its timbre disturbed me greatly; but by concentrating my attention I could soon make out its purport surprisingly well. The accent was by no means a rustic one, and the language was even more polished than correspondence had led me to expect.\n\n\"Mr. Wilmarth, I presume? You must pardon my not rising. I am quite ill, as Mr. Noyes must have told you; but I could not resist having you come just the same. You know what I wrote in my last letter\u2014there is so much to tell you tomorrow when I shall feel better. I can't say how glad I am to see you in person after all our many letters. You have the file with you, of course? And the kodak prints and record? Noyes put your valise in the hall\u2014I suppose you saw it. For tonight I fear you'll have to wait on yourself to a great extent. Your room is upstairs\u2014the one over this\u2014and you'll see the bathroom door open at the head of the staircase. There's a meal spread for you in the dining-room\u2014right through this door at your right\u2014which you can take whenever you feel like it. I'll be a better host tomorrow\u2014but just now weakness leaves me helpless.\n\n\"Make yourself at home\u2014you might take out the letters and pictures and record and put them on the table here before you go upstairs with your bag. It is here that we shall discuss them\u2014you can see my phonograph on that corner stand.\n\n\"No, thanks\u2014there's nothing you can do for me. I know these spells of old. Just come back for a little quiet visiting before night, and then go to bed when you please. I'll rest right here\u2014perhaps sleep here all night as I often do. In the morning I'll be far better able to go into the things we must go into. You realise, of course, the utterly stupendous nature of the matter before us. To us, as to only a few men on this earth, there will be opened up gulfs of time and space and knowledge beyond anything within the conception of human science and philosophy.\n\n\"Do you know that Einstein is wrong, and that certain objects and forces can move with a velocity greater than that of light? With proper aid I expect to go backward and forward in time, and actually see and feel the earth of remote past and future epochs. You can't imagine the degree to which those beings have carried science. There is nothing they can't do with the mind and body of living organisms. I expect to visit other planets, and even other stars and galaxies. The first trip will be to Yuggoth, the nearest world fully peopled by the beings. It is a strange dark orb at the very rim of our solar system\u2014unknown to earthly astronomers as yet. But I must have written you about this. At the proper time, you know, the beings there will direct thought-currents toward us and cause it to be discovered\u2014or perhaps let one of their human allies give the scientists a hint.\n\n\"There are mighty cities on Yuggoth\u2014great tiers of terraced towers built of black stone like the specimen I tried to send you. That came from Yuggoth. The sun shines there no brighter than a star, but the beings need no light. They have other, subtler senses, and put no windows in their great houses and temples. Light even hurts and hampers and confuses them, for it does not exist at all in the black cosmos outside time and space where they came from originally. To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad\u2014yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges\u2014things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids\u2014ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.\n\n\"But remember\u2014that dark world of fungoid gardens and windowless cities isn't really terrible. It is only to us that it would seem so. Probably this world seemed just as terrible to the beings when they first explored it in the primal age. You know they were here long before the fabulous epoch of Cthulhu was over, and remember all about sunken R'lyeh when it was above the waters. They've been inside the earth, too\u2014there are openings which human beings know nothing of\u2014some of them in these very Vermont hills\u2014and great worlds of unknown life down there; blue-litten K'n-yan, red-litten Yoth, and black, lightless N'kai. It's from N'kai that frightful Tsathoggua came\u2014you know, the amorphous, toad-like god-creature mentioned in the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon and the Commoriom myth-cycle preserved by the Atlantean high-priest Klarkash-Ton.\n\n\"But we will talk of all this later on. It must be four or five o'clock by this time. Better bring the stuff from your bag, take a bite, and then come back for a comfortable chat.\"\n\nVery slowly I turned and began to obey my host; fetching my valise, extracting and depositing the desired articles, and finally ascending to the room designated as mine. With the memory of that roadside claw-print fresh in my mind, Akeley's whispered paragraphs had affected me queerly; and the hints of familiarity with this unknown world of fungous life\u2014forbidden Yuggoth\u2014made my flesh creep more than I cared to own. I was tremendously sorry about Akeley's illness, but had to confess that his hoarse whisper had a hateful as well as pitiful quality. If only he wouldn't gloat so about Yuggoth and its black secrets!\n\nMy room proved a very pleasant and well-furnished one, devoid alike of the musty odour and disturbing sense of vibration; and after leaving my valise there I descended again to greet Akeley and take the lunch he had set out for me. The dining-room was just beyond the study, and I saw that a kitchen ell extended still farther in the same direction. On the dining-table an ample array of sandwiches, cake, and cheese awaited me, and a Thermos-bottle beside a cup and saucer testified that hot coffee had not been forgotten. After a well-relished meal I poured myself a liberal cup of coffee, but found that the culinary standard had suffered a lapse in this one detail. My first spoonful revealed a faintly unpleasant acrid taste, so that I did not take more. Throughout the lunch I thought of Akeley sitting silently in the great chair in the darkened next room. Once I went in to beg him to share the repast, but he whispered that he could eat nothing as yet. Later on, just before he slept, he would take some malted milk\u2014all he ought to have that day.\n\nAfter lunch I insisted on clearing the dishes away and washing them in the kitchen sink\u2014incidentally emptying the coffee which I had not been able to appreciate. Then returning to the darkened study I drew up a chair near my host's corner and prepared for such conversation as he might feel inclined to conduct. The letters, pictures, and record were still on the large centre-table, but for the nonce we did not have to draw upon them. Before long I forgot even the bizarre odour and curious suggestions of vibration.\n\nI have said that there were things in some of Akeley's letters\u2014especially the second and most voluminous one\u2014which I would not dare to quote or even form into words on paper. This hesitancy applies with still greater force to the things I heard whispered that evening in the darkened room among the lonely haunted hills. Of the extent of the cosmic horrors unfolded by that raucous voice I cannot even hint. He had known hideous things before, but what he had learned since making his pact with the Outside Things was almost too much for sanity to bear. Even now I absolutely refuse to believe what he implied about the constitution of ultimate infinity, the juxtaposition of dimensions, and the frightful position of our known cosmos of space and time in the unending chain of linked cosmos-atoms which makes up the immediate super-cosmos of curves, angles, and material and semi-material electronic organisation.\n\nNever was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity\u2014never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry. I learned whence Cthulhu first came, and why half the great temporary stars of history had flared forth. I guessed\u2014from hints which made even my informant pause timidly\u2014the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao. The nature of the Doels was plainly revealed, and I was told the essence (though not the source) of the Hounds of Tindalos. The legend of Yig, Father of Serpents, remained figurative no longer, and I started with loathing when told of the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth. It was shocking to have the foulest nightmares of secret myth cleared up in concrete terms whose stark, morbid hatefulness exceeded the boldest hints of ancient and mediaeval mystics. Ineluctably I was led to believe that the first whisperers of these accursed tales must have had discourse with Akeley's Outer Ones, and perhaps have visited outer cosmic realms as Akeley now proposed visiting them.\n\nI was told of the Black Stone and what it implied, and was glad that it had not reached me. My guesses about those hieroglyphics had been all too correct! And yet Akeley now seemed reconciled to the whole fiendish system he had stumbled upon; reconciled and eager to probe farther into the monstrous abyss. I wondered what beings he had talked with since his last letter to me, and whether many of them had been as human as that first emissary he had mentioned. The tension in my head grew insufferable, and I built up all sorts of wild theories about the queer, persistent odour and those insidious hints of vibration in the darkened room.\n\nNight was falling now, and as I recalled what Akeley had written me about those earlier nights I shuddered to think there would be no moon. Nor did I like the way the farmhouse nestled in the lee of that colossal forested slope leading up to Dark Mountain's unvisited crest. With Akeley's permission I lighted a small oil lamp, turned it low, and set it on a distant bookcase beside the ghostly bust of Milton; but afterward I was sorry I had done so, for it made my host's strained, immobile face and listless hands look damnably abnormal and corpse-like. He seemed half-incapable of motion, though I saw him nod stiffly once in a while.\n\nAfter what he had told, I could scarcely imagine what profounder secrets he was saving for the morrow; but at last it developed that his trip to Yuggoth and beyond\u2014and my own possible participation in it\u2014was to be the next day's topic. He must have been amused by the start of horror I gave at hearing a cosmic voyage on my part proposed, for his head wabbled violently when I shewed my fear. Subsequently he spoke very gently of how human beings might accomplish\u2014and several times had accomplished\u2014the seemingly impossible flight across the interstellar void. It seemed that complete human bodies did not indeed make the trip, but that the prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill of the Outer Ones had found a way to convey human brains without their concomitant physical structure.\n\nThere was a harmless way to extract a brain, and a way to keep the organic residue alive during its absence. The bare, compact cerebral matter was then immersed in an occasionally replenished fluid within an ether-tight cylinder of a metal mined in Yuggoth, certain electrodes reaching through and connecting at will with elaborate instruments capable of duplicating the three vital faculties of sight, hearing, and speech. For the winged fungus-beings to carry the brain-cylinders intact through space was an easy matter. Then, on every planet covered by their civilisation, they would find plenty of adjustable faculty-instruments capable of being connected with the encased brains; so that after a little fitting these travelling intelligences could be given a full sensory and articulate life\u2014albeit a bodiless and mechanical one\u2014at each stage of their journeying through and beyond the space-time continuum. It was as simple as carrying a phonograph record about and playing it wherever a phonograph of the corresponding make exists. Of its success there could be no question. Akeley was not afraid. Had it not been brilliantly accomplished again and again?\n\nFor the first time one of the inert, wasted hands raised itself and pointed to a high shelf on the farther side of the room. There, in a neat row, stood more than a dozen cylinders of a metal I had never seen before\u2014cylinders about a foot high and somewhat less in diameter, with three curious sockets set in an isosceles triangle over the front convex surface of each. One of them was linked at two of the sockets to a pair of singular-looking machines that stood in the background. Of their purport I did not need to be told, and I shivered as with ague. Then I saw the hand point to a much nearer corner where some intricate instruments with attached cords and plugs, several of them much like the two devices on the shelf behind the cylinders, were huddled together.\n\n\"There are four kinds of instruments here, Wilmarth,\" whispered the voice. \"Four kinds\u2014three faculties each\u2014makes twelve pieces in all. You see there are four different sorts of beings presented in those cylinders up there. Three humans, six fungoid beings who can't navigate space corporeally, two beings from Neptune (God! if you could see the body this type has on its own planet!), and the rest entities from the central caverns of an especially interesting dark star beyond the galaxy. In the principal outpost inside Round Hill you'll now and then find more cylinders and machines\u2014cylinders of extra-cosmic brains with different senses from any we know\u2014allies and explorers from the uttermost Outside\u2014and special machines for giving them impressions and expression in the several ways suited at once to them and to the comprehensions of different types of listeners. Round Hill, like most of the beings' main outposts all through the various universes, is a very cosmopolitan place! Of course, only the more common types have been lent to me for experiment.\n\n\"Here\u2014take the three machines I point to and set them on the table. That tall one with the two glass lenses in front\u2014then the box with the vacuum tubes and sounding-board\u2014and now the one with the metal disc on top. Now for the cylinder with the label 'B-67' pasted on it. Just stand in that Windsor chair to reach the shelf. Heavy? Never mind! Be sure of the number\u2014B-67. Don't bother that fresh, shiny cylinder joined to the two testing instruments\u2014the one with my name on it. Set B-67 on the table near where you've put the machines\u2014and see that the dial switch on all three machines is jammed over to the extreme left.\n\n\"Now connect the cord of the lens machine with the upper socket on the cylinder\u2014there! Join the tube machine to the lower left-hand socket, and the disc apparatus to the outer socket. Now move all the dial switches on the machines over to the extreme right\u2014first the lens one, then the disc one, and then the tube one. That's right. I might as well tell you that this is a human being\u2014just like any of us. I'll give you a taste of some of the others tomorrow.\"\n\nTo this day I do not know why I obeyed those whispers so slavishly, or whether I thought Akeley was mad or sane. After what had gone before, I ought to have been prepared for anything; but this mechanical mummery seemed so like the typical vagaries of crazed inventors and scientists that it struck a chord of doubt which even the preceding discourse had not excited. What the whisperer implied was beyond all human belief\u2014yet were not the other things still farther beyond, and less preposterous only because of their remoteness from tangible concrete proof?\n\nAs my mind reeled amidst this chaos, I became conscious of a mixed grating and whirring from all three machines lately linked to the cylinder\u2014a grating and whirring which soon subsided into a virtual noiselessness. What was about to happen? Was I to hear a voice? And if so, what proof would I have that it was not some cleverly concocted radio device talked into by a concealed but closely watching speaker? Even now I am unwilling to swear just what I heard, or just what phenomenon really took place before me. But something certainly seemed to take place.\n\nTo be brief and plain, the machine with the tubes and sound-box began to speak, and with a point and intelligence which left no doubt that the speaker was actually present and observing us. The voice was loud, metallic, lifeless, and plainly mechanical in every detail of its production. It was incapable of inflection or expressiveness, but scraped and rattled on with a deadly precision and deliberation.\n\n\"Mr. Wilmarth,\" it said, \"I hope I do not startle you. I am a human being like yourself, though my body is now resting safely under proper vitalising treatment inside Round Hill, about a mile and a half east of here. I myself am here with you\u2014my brain is in that cylinder and I see, hear, and speak through these electronic vibrators. In a week I am going across the void as I have been many times before, and I expect to have the pleasure of Mr. Akeley's company. I wish I might have yours as well; for I know you by sight and reputation, and have kept close track of your correspondence with our friend. I am, of course, one of the men who have become allied with the outside beings visiting our planet. I met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped them in various ways. In return they have given me experiences such as few men have ever had.\n\n\"Do you realise what it means when I say I have been on thirty-seven different celestial bodies\u2014planets, dark stars, and less definable objects\u2014including eight outside our galaxy and two outside the curved cosmos of space and time? All this has not harmed me in the least. My brain has been removed from my body by fissions so adroit that it would be crude to call the operation surgery. The visiting beings have methods which make these extractions easy and almost normal\u2014and one's body never ages when the brain is out of it. The brain, I may add, is virtually immortal with its mechanical faculties and a limited nourishment supplied by occasional changes of the preserving fluid.\n\n\"Altogether, I hope most heartily that you will decide to come with Mr. Akeley and me. The visitors are eager to know men of knowledge like yourself, and to shew them the great abysses that most of us have had to dream about in fanciful ignorance. It may seem strange at first to meet them, but I know you will be above minding that. I think Mr. Noyes will go along, too\u2014the man who doubtless brought you up here in his car. He has been one of us for years\u2014I suppose you recognised his voice as one of those on the record Mr. Akeley sent you.\"\n\nAt my violent start the speaker paused a moment before concluding.\n\n\"So, Mr. Wilmarth, I will leave the matter to you; merely adding that a man with your love of strangeness and folklore ought never to miss such a chance as this. There is nothing to fear. All transitions are painless, and there is much to enjoy in a wholly mechanised state of sensation. When the electrodes are disconnected, one merely drops off into a sleep of especially vivid and fantastic dreams.\n\n\"And now, if you don't mind, we might adjourn our session till tomorrow. Good night\u2014just turn all the switches back to the left; never mind the exact order, though you might let the lens machine be last. Good night, Mr. Akeley\u2014treat our guest well! Ready now with those switches?\"\n\nThat was all. I obeyed mechanically and shut off all three switches, though dazed with doubt of everything that had occurred. My head was still reeling as I heard Akeley's whispering voice telling me that I might leave all the apparatus on the table just as it was. He did not essay any comment on what had happened, and indeed no comment could have conveyed much to my burdened faculties. I heard him telling me I could take the lamp to use in my room, and deduced that he wished to rest alone in the dark. It was surely time he rested, for his discourse of the afternoon and evening had been such as to exhaust even a vigorous man. Still dazed, I bade my host good night and went upstairs with the lamp, although I had an excellent pocket flashlight with me.\n\nI was glad to be out of that downstairs study with the queer odour and vague suggestions of vibration, yet could not of course escape a hideous sense of dread and peril and cosmic abnormality as I thought of the place I was in and the forces I was meeting. The wild, lonely region, the black, mysteriously forested slope towering so close behind the house, the footprints in the road, the sick, motionless whisperer in the dark, the hellish cylinders and machines, and above all the invitations to strange surgery and stranger voyagings\u2014these things, all so new and in such sudden succession, rushed in on me with a cumulative force which sapped my will and almost undermined my physical strength.\n\nTo discover that my guide Noyes was the human celebrant in that monstrous bygone Sabbat-ritual on the phonograph record was a particular shock, though I had previously sensed a dim, repellent familiarity in his voice. Another special shock came from my own attitude toward my host whenever I paused to analyse it; for much as I had instinctively liked Akeley as revealed in his correspondence, I now found that he filled me with a distinct repulsion. His illness ought to have excited my pity; but instead, it gave me a kind of shudder. He was so rigid and inert and corpse-like\u2014and that incessant whispering was so hateful and unhuman!\n\nIt occurred to me that this whispering was different from anything else of the kind I had ever heard; that, despite the curious motionlessness of the speaker's moustache-screened lips, it had a latent strength and carrying-power remarkable for the wheezings of an asthmatic. I had been able to understand the speaker when wholly across the room, and once or twice it had seemed to me that the faint but penetrant sounds represented not so much weakness as deliberate repression\u2014for what reason I could not guess. From the first I had felt a disturbing quality in their timbre. Now, when I tried to weigh the matter, I thought I could trace this impression to a kind of subconscious familiarity like that which had made Noyes's voice so hazily ominous. But when or where I had encountered the thing it hinted at, was more than I could tell.\n\nOne thing was certain\u2014I would not spend another night here. My scientific zeal had vanished amidst fear and loathing, and I felt nothing now but a wish to escape from this net of morbidity and unnatural revelation. I knew enough now. It must indeed be true that cosmic linkages do exist\u2014but such things are surely not meant for normal human beings to meddle with.\n\nBlasphemous influences seemed to surround me and press chokingly upon my senses. Sleep, I decided, would be out of the question; so I merely extinguished the lamp and threw myself on the bed fully dressed. No doubt it was absurd, but I kept ready for some unknown emergency; gripping in my right hand the revolver I had brought along, and holding the pocket flashlight in my left. Not a sound came from below, and I could imagine how my host was sitting there with cadaverous stiffness in the dark.\n\nSomewhere I heard a clock ticking, and was vaguely grateful for the normality of the sound. It reminded me, though, of another thing about the region which disturbed me\u2014the total absence of animal life. There were certainly no farm beasts about, and now I realised that even the accustomed night-noises of wild living things were absent. Except for the sinister trickle of distant unseen waters, that stillness was anomalous\u2014interplanetary\u2014and I wondered what star-spawned, intangible blight could be hanging over the region. I recalled from old legends that dogs and other beasts had always hated the Outer Ones, and thought of what those tracks in the road might mean." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 136", + "text": "Do not ask me how long my unexpected lapse into slumber lasted, or how much of what ensued was sheer dream. If I tell you that I awaked at a certain time, and heard and saw certain things, you will merely answer that I did not wake then; and that everything was a dream until the moment when I rushed out of the house, stumbled to the shed where I had seen the old Ford, and seized that ancient vehicle for a mad, aimless race over the haunted hills which at last landed me\u2014after hours of jolting and winding through forest-threatened labyrinths\u2014in a village which turned out to be Townshend.\n\nYou will also, of course, discount everything else in my report; and declare that all the pictures, record-sounds, cylinder-and-machine sounds, and kindred evidences were bits of pure deception practiced on me by the missing Henry Akeley. You will even hint that he conspired with other eccentrics to carry out a silly and elaborate hoax\u2014that he had the express shipment removed at Keene, and that he had Noyes make that terrifying wax record. It is odd, though, that Noyes has not even yet been identified; that he was unknown at any of the villages near Akeley's place, though he must have been frequently in the region. I wish I had stopped to memorise the licence-number of his car\u2014or perhaps it is better after all that I did not. For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills\u2014and that those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men. To keep as far as possible from such influences and such emissaries is all that I ask of life in future.\n\nWhen my frantic story sent a sheriff's posse out to the farmhouse, Akeley was gone without leaving a trace. His loose dressing-gown, yellow scarf, and foot-bandages lay on the study floor near his corner easy-chair, and it could not be decided whether any of his other apparel had vanished with him. The dogs and livestock were indeed missing, and there were some curious bullet-holes both on the house's exterior and on some of the walls within; but beyond this nothing unusual could be detected. No cylinders or machines, none of the evidences I had brought in my valise, no queer odour or vibration-sense, no footprints in the road, and none of the problematical things I glimpsed at the very last.\n\nI stayed a week in Brattleboro after my escape, making inquiries among people of every kind who had known Akeley; and the results convince me that the matter is no figment of dream or delusion. Akeley's queer purchases of dogs and ammunition and chemicals, and the cutting of his telephone wires, are matters of record; while all who knew him\u2014including his son in California\u2014concede that his occasional remarks on strange studies had a certain consistency. Solid citizens believe he was mad, and unhesitatingly pronounce all reported evidences mere hoaxes devised with insane cunning and perhaps abetted by eccentric associates; but the lowlier country folk sustain his statements in every detail. He had shewed some of these rustics his photographs and black stone, and had played the hideous record for them; and they all said the footprints and buzzing voice were like those described in ancestral legends.\n\nThey said, too, that suspicious sights and sounds had been noticed increasingly around Akeley's house after he found the black stone, and that the place was now avoided by everybody except the mail man and other casual, tough-minded people. Dark Mountain and Round Hill were both notoriously haunted spots, and I could find no one who had ever closely explored either. Occasional disappearances of natives throughout the district's history were well attested, and these now included the semi-vagabond Walter Brown, whom Akeley's letters had mentioned. I even came upon one farmer who thought he had personally glimpsed one of the queer bodies at flood-time in the swollen West River, but his tale was too confused to be really valuable.\n\nWhen I left Brattleboro I resolved never to go back to Vermont, and I feel quite certain I shall keep my resolution. Those wild hills are surely the outpost of a frightful cosmic race\u2014as I doubt all the less since reading that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing \"Pluto\". I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth\u2014and I shiver when I try to figure out the real reason why its monstrous denizens wish it to be known in this way at this especial time. I vainly try to assure myself that these daemoniac creatures are not gradually leading up to some new policy hurtful to the earth and its normal inhabitants.\n\nBut I have still to tell of the ending of that terrible night in the farmhouse. As I have said, I did finally drop into a troubled doze; a doze filled with bits of dream which involved monstrous landscape-glimpses. Just what awaked me I cannot yet say, but that I did indeed awake at this given point I feel very certain. My first confused impression was of stealthily creaking floor-boards in the hall outside my door, and of a clumsy, muffled fumbling at the latch. This, however, ceased almost at once; so that my really clear impressions began with the voices heard from the study below. There seemed to be several speakers, and I judged that they were controversially engaged.\n\nBy the time I had listened a few seconds I was broad awake, for the nature of the voices was such as to make all thought of sleep ridiculous. The tones were curiously varied, and no one who had listened to that accursed phonograph record could harbour any doubts about the nature of at least two of them. Hideous though the idea was, I knew that I was under the same roof with nameless things from abysmal space; for those two voices were unmistakably the blasphemous buzzings which the Outside Beings used in their communication with men. The two were individually different\u2014different in pitch, accent, and tempo\u2014but they were both of the same damnable general kind.\n\nA third voice was indubitably that of a mechanical utterance-machine connected with one of the detached brains in the cylinders. There was as little doubt about that as about the buzzings; for the loud, metallic, lifeless voice of the previous evening, with its inflectionless, expressionless scraping and rattling, and its impersonal precision and deliberation, had been utterly unforgettable. For a time I did not pause to question whether the intelligence behind the scraping was the identical one which had formerly talked to me; but shortly afterward I reflected that any brain would emit vocal sounds of the same quality if linked to the same mechanical speech-producer; the only possible differences being in language, rhythm, speed, and pronunciation. To complete the eldritch colloquy there were two actually human voices\u2014one the crude speech of an unknown and evidently rustic man, and the other the suave Bostonian tones of my erstwhile guide Noyes.\n\nAs I tried to catch the words which the stoutly fashioned floor so bafflingly intercepted, I was also conscious of a great deal of stirring and scratching and shuffling in the room below; so that I could not escape the impression that it was full of living beings\u2014many more than the few whose speech I could single out. The exact nature of this stirring is extremely hard to describe, for very few good bases of comparison exist. Objects seemed now and then to move across the room like conscious entities; the sound of their footfalls having something about it like a loose, hard-surfaced clattering\u2014as of the contact of ill-co\u00f6rdinated surfaces of horn or hard rubber. It was, to use a more concrete but less accurate comparison, as if people with loose, splintery wooden shoes were shambling and rattling about on the polished board floor. On the nature and appearance of those responsible for the sounds, I did not care to speculate.\n\nBefore long I saw that it would be impossible to distinguish any connected discourse. Isolated words\u2014including the names of Akeley and myself\u2014now and then floated up, especially when uttered by the mechanical speech-producer; but their true significance was lost for want of continuous context. Today I refuse to form any definite deductions from them, and even their frightful effect on me was one of suggestion rather than of revelation. A terrible and abnormal conclave, I felt certain, was assembled below me; but for what shocking deliberations I could not tell. It was curious how this unquestioned sense of the malign and the blasphemous pervaded me despite Akeley's assurances of the Outsiders' friendliness.\n\nWith patient listening I began to distinguish clearly between voices, even though I could not grasp much of what any of the voices said. I seemed to catch certain typical emotions behind some of the speakers. One of the buzzing voices, for example, held an unmistakable note of authority; whilst the mechanical voice, notwithstanding its artificial loudness and regularity, seemed to be in a position of subordination and pleading. Noyes's tones exuded a kind of conciliatory atmosphere. The others I could make no attempt to interpret. I did not hear the familiar whisper of Akeley, but well knew that such a sound could never penetrate the solid flooring of my room.\n\nI will try to set down some of the few disjointed words and other sounds I caught, labelling the speakers of the words as best I know how. It was from the speech-machine that I first picked up a few recognisable phrases.\n\n(THE SPEECH-MACHINE)\n\n\"...brought it on myself... sent back the letters and the record... end on it... taken in... seeing and hearing... damn you... impersonal force, after all... fresh, shiny cylinder... great God....\"\n\n(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)\n\n\"...time we stopped... small and human... Akeley... brain... saying...\"\n\n(SECOND BUZZING VOICE)\n\n\"...Nyarlathotep... Wilmarth... records and letters... cheap imposture....\"\n\n(NOYES)\n\n\"...(an unpronounceable word or name, possibly N'gah-Kthun)... harmless... peace... couple of weeks... theatrical... told you that before....\"\n\n(FIRST BUZZING VOICE)\n\n\"...no reason... original plan... effects... Noyes can watch... Round Hill... fresh cylinder... Noyes's car....\"\n\n(NOYES)\n\n\"...well... all yours... down here... rest... place....\"\n\n(SEVERAL VOICES AT ONCE IN INDISTINGUISHABLE SPEECH)\n\n(MANY FOOTSTEPS, INCLUDING THE PECULIAR LOOSE STIRRING OR CLATTERING)\n\n(A CURIOUS SORT OF FLAPPING SOUND)\n\n(THE SOUND OF AN AUTOMOBILE STARTING AND RECEDING)\n\n(SILENCE)\n\nThat is the substance of what my ears brought me as I lay rigid upon that strange upstairs bed in the haunted farmhouse among the daemoniac hills\u2014lay there fully dressed, with a revolver clenched in my right hand and a pocket flashlight gripped in my left. I became, as I have said, broad awake; but a kind of obscure paralysis nevertheless kept me inert till long after the last echoes of the sounds had died away. I heard the wooden, deliberate ticking of the ancient Connecticut clock somewhere far below, and at last made out the irregular snoring of a sleeper. Akeley must have dozed off after the strange session, and I could well believe that he needed to do so.\n\nJust what to think or what to do was more than I could decide. After all, what had I heard beyond things which previous information might have led me to expect? Had I not known that the nameless Outsiders were now freely admitted to the farmhouse? No doubt Akeley had been surprised by an unexpected visit from them. Yet something in that fragmentary discourse had chilled me immeasurably, raised the most grotesque and horrible doubts, and made me wish fervently that I might wake up and prove everything a dream. I think my subconscious mind must have caught something which my consciousness has not yet recognised. But what of Akeley? Was he not my friend, and would he not have protested if any harm were meant me? The peaceful snoring below seemed to cast ridicule on all my suddenly intensified fears.\n\nWas it possible that Akeley had been imposed upon and used as a lure to draw me into the hills with the letters and pictures and phonograph record? Did those beings mean to engulf us both in a common destruction because we had come to know too much? Again I thought of the abruptness and unnaturalness of that change in the situation which must have occurred between Akeley's penultimate and final letters. Something, my instinct told me, was terribly wrong. All was not as it seemed. That acrid coffee which I refused\u2014had there not been an attempt by some hidden, unknown entity to drug it? I must talk to Akeley at once, and restore his sense of proportion. They had hypnotised him with their promises of cosmic revelations, but now he must listen to reason. We must get out of this before it would be too late. If he lacked the will power to make the break for liberty, I would supply it. Or if I could not persuade him to go, I could at least go myself. Surely he would let me take his Ford and leave it in a garage at Brattleboro. I had noticed it in the shed\u2014the door being left unlocked and open now that peril was deemed past\u2014and I believed there was a good chance of its being ready for instant use. That momentary dislike of Akeley which I had felt during and after the evening's conversation was all gone now. He was in a position much like my own, and we must stick together. Knowing his indisposed condition, I hated to wake him at this juncture, but I knew that I must. I could not stay in this place till morning as matters stood.\n\nAt last I felt able to act, and stretched myself vigorously to regain command of my muscles. Arising with a caution more impulsive than deliberate, I found and donned my hat, took my valise, and started downstairs with the flashlight's aid. In my nervousness I kept the revolver clutched in my right hand, being able to take care of both valise and flashlight with my left. Why I exerted these precautions I do not really know, since I was even then on my way to awaken the only other occupant of the house.\n\nAs I half tiptoed down the creaking stairs to the lower hall I could hear the sleeper more plainly, and noticed that he must be in the room on my left\u2014the living-room I had not entered. On my right was the gaping blackness of the study in which I had heard the voices. Pushing open the unlatched door of the living-room I traced a path with the flashlight toward the source of the snoring, and finally turned the beams on the sleeper's face. But in the next second I hastily turned them away and commenced a cat-like retreat to the hall, my caution this time springing from reason as well as from instinct. For the sleeper on the couch was not Akeley at all, but my quondam guide Noyes.\n\nJust what the real situation was, I could not guess; but common sense told me that the safest thing was to find out as much as possible before arousing anybody. Regaining the hall, I silently closed and latched the living-room door after me; thereby lessening the chances of awaking Noyes. I now cautiously entered the dark study, where I expected to find Akeley, whether asleep or awake, in the great corner chair which was evidently his favourite resting-place. As I advanced, the beams of my flashlight caught the great centre-table, revealing one of the hellish cylinders with sight and hearing machines attached, and with a speech-machine standing close by, ready to be connected at any moment. This, I reflected, must be the encased brain I had heard talking during the frightful conference; and for a second I had a perverse impulse to attach the speech-machine and see what it would say.\n\nIt must, I thought, be conscious of my presence even now; since the sight and hearing attachments could not fail to disclose the rays of my flashlight and the faint creaking of the floor beneath my feet. But in the end I did not dare meddle with the thing. I idly saw that it was the fresh, shiny cylinder with Akeley's name on it, which I had noticed on the shelf earlier in the evening and which my host had told me not to bother. Looking back at that moment, I can only regret my timidity and wish that I had boldly caused the apparatus to speak. God knows what mysteries and horrible doubts and questions of identity it might have cleared up! But then, it may be merciful that I let it alone.\n\nFrom the table I turned my flashlight to the corner where I thought Akeley was, but found to my perplexity that the great easy-chair was empty of any human occupant asleep or awake. From the seat to the floor there trailed voluminously the familiar old dressing-gown, and near it on the floor lay the yellow scarf and the huge foot-bandages I had thought so odd. As I hesitated, striving to conjecture where Akeley might be, and why he had so suddenly discarded his necessary sickroom garments, I observed that the queer odour and sense of vibration were no longer in the room. What had been their cause? Curiously it occurred to me that I had noticed them only in Akeley's vicinity. They had been strongest where he sat, and wholly absent except in the room with him or just outside the doors of that room. I paused, letting the flashlight wander about the dark study and racking my brain for explanations of the turn affairs had taken.\n\nWould to heaven I had quietly left the place before allowing that light to rest again on the vacant chair. As it turned out, I did not leave quietly; but with a muffled shriek which must have disturbed, though it did not quite awake, the sleeping sentinel across the hall. That shriek, and Noyes's still-unbroken snore, are the last sounds I ever heard in that morbidity-choked farmhouse beneath the black-wooded crest of a haunted mountain\u2014that focus of trans-cosmic horror amidst the lonely green hills and curse-muttering brooks of a spectral rustic land.\n\nIt is a wonder that I did not drop flashlight, valise, and revolver in my wild scramble, but somehow I failed to lose any of these. I actually managed to get out of that room and that house without making any further noise, to drag myself and my belongings safely into the old Ford in the shed, and to set that archaic vehicle in motion toward some unknown point of safety in the black, moonless night. The ride that followed was a piece of delirium out of Poe or Rimbaud or the drawings of Dor\u00e9, but finally I reached Townshend. That is all. If my sanity is still unshaken, I am lucky. Sometimes I fear what the years will bring, especially since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered.\n\nAs I have implied, I let my flashlight return to the vacant easy-chair after its circuit of the room; then noticing for the first time the presence of certain objects in the seat, made inconspicuous by the adjacent loose folds of the empty dressing-gown. These are the objects, three in number, which the investigators did not find when they came later on. As I said at the outset, there was nothing of actual visual horror about them. The trouble was in what they led one to infer. Even now I have my moments of half-doubt\u2014moments in which I half accept the scepticism of those who attribute my whole experience to dream and nerves and delusion.\n\nThe three things were damnably clever constructions of their kind, and were furnished with ingenious metallic clamps to attach them to organic developments of which I dare not form any conjecture. I hope\u2014devoutly hope\u2014that they were the waxen products of a master artist, despite what my inmost fears tell me. Great God! That whisperer in darkness with its morbid odour and vibrations! Sorcerer, emissary, changeling, outsider... that hideous repressed buzzing... and all the time in that fresh, shiny cylinder on the shelf... poor devil... \"prodigious surgical, biological, chemical, and mechanical skill\"...\n\nFor the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance\u2014or identity\u2014were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The White Ship by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nI am Basil Elton, keeper of the North Point light that my father and grandfather kept before me. Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.\n\nFrom far shores came those white-sailed argosies of old; from far Eastern shores where warm suns shine and sweet odours linger about strange gardens and gay temples. The old captains of the sea came often to my grandfather and told him of these things, which in turn he told to my father, and my father told to me in the long autumn evenings when the wind howled eerily from the East. And I have read more of these things, and of many things besides, in the books men gave me when I was young and filled with wonder.\n\nBut more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time. Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.\n\nOut of the South it was that the White Ship used to come when the moon was full and high in the heavens. Out of the South it would glide very smoothly and silently over the sea. And whether the sea was rough or calm, and whether the wind was friendly or adverse, it would always glide smoothly and silently, its sails distant and its long strange tiers of oars moving rhythmically. One night I espied upon the deck a man, bearded and robed, and he seemed to beckon me to embark for fair unknown shores. Many times afterward I saw him under the full moon, and ever did he beckon me.\n\nVery brightly did the moon shine on the night I answered the call, and I walked out over the waters to the White Ship on a bridge of moonbeams. The man who had beckoned now spoke a welcome to me in a soft language I seemed to know well, and the hours were filled with soft songs of the oarsmen as we glided away into a mysterious South, golden with the glow of that full, mellow moon.\n\nAnd when the day dawned, rosy and effulgent, I beheld the green shore of far lands, bright and beautiful, and to me unknown. Up from the sea rose lordly terraces of verdure, tree-studded, and shewing here and there the gleaming white roofs and colonnades of strange temples. As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of ocean. There too were forms and fantasies more splendid than any I had ever known; the visions of young poets who died in want before the world could learn of what they had seen and dreamed. But we did not set foot upon the sloping meadows of Zar, for it is told that he who treads them may nevermore return to his native shore.\n\nAs the White Ship sailed silently away from the templed terraces of Zar, we beheld on the distant horizon ahead the spires of a mighty city; and the bearded man said to me: \"This is Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, wherein reside all those mysteries that man has striven in vain to fathom.\" And I looked again, at closer range, and saw that the city was greater than any city I had known or dreamed of before. Into the sky the spires of its temples reached, so that no man might behold their peaks; and far back beyond the horizon stretched the grim, grey walls, over which one might spy only a few roofs, weird and ominous, yet adorned with rich friezes and alluring sculptures. I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel; but he gently denied my wish, saying: \"Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied bones of those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the city.\" So the White Ship sailed on past the walls of Thalarion, and followed for many days a southward-flying bird, whose glossy plumage matched the sky out of which it had appeared.\n\nThen came we to a pleasant coast gay with blossoms of every hue, where as far inland as we could see basked lovely groves and radiant arbours beneath a meridian sun. From bowers beyond our view came bursts of song and snatches of lyric harmony, interspersed with faint laughter so delicious that I urged the rowers onward in my eagerness to reach the scene. And the bearded man spoke no word, but watched me as we approached the lily-lined shore. Suddenly a wind blowing from over the flowery meadows and leafy woods brought a scent at which I trembled. The wind grew stronger, and the air was filled with the lethal, charnel odour of plague-stricken towns and uncovered cemeteries. And as we sailed madly away from that damnable coast the bearded man spoke at last, saying: \"This is Xura, the Land of Pleasures Unattained.\"\n\nSo once more the White Ship followed the bird of heaven, over warm blessed seas fanned by caressing, aromatic breezes. Day after day and night after night did we sail, and when the moon was full we would listen to soft songs of the oarsmen, sweet as on that distant night when we sailed away from my far native land. And it was by moonlight that we anchored at last in the harbour of Sona-Nyl, which is guarded by twin headlands of crystal that rise from the sea and meet in a resplendent arch. This is the Land of Fancy, and we walked to the verdant shore upon a golden bridge of moonbeams.\n\nIn the Land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor death; and there I dwelt for many aeons. Green are the groves and pastures, bright and fragrant the flowers, blue and musical the streams, clear and cool the fountains, and stately and gorgeous the temples, castles, and cities of Sona-Nyl. Of that land there is no bound, for beyond each vista of beauty rises another more beautiful. Over the countryside and amidst the splendour of cities rove at will the happy folk, of whom all are gifted with unmarred grace and unalloyed happiness. For the aeons that I dwelt there I wandered blissfully through gardens where quaint pagodas peep from pleasing clumps of bushes, and where the white walks are bordered with delicate blossoms. I climbed gentle hills from whose summits I could see entrancing panoramas of loveliness, with steepled towns nestling in verdant valleys, and with the golden domes of gigantic cities glittering on the infinitely distant horizon. And I viewed by moonlight the sparkling sea, the crystal headlands, and the placid harbour wherein lay anchored the White Ship.\n\nIt was against the full moon one night in the immemorial year of Tharp that I saw outlined the beckoning form of the celestial bird, and felt the first stirrings of unrest. Then I spoke with the bearded man, and told him of my new yearnings to depart for remote Cathuria, which no man hath seen, but which all believe to lie beyond the basalt pillars of the West. It is the Land of Hope, and in it shine the perfect ideals of all that we know elsewhere; or at least so men relate. But the bearded man said to me: \"Beware of those perilous seas wherein men say Cathuria lies. In Sona-Nyl there is no pain nor death, but who can tell what lies beyond the basalt pillars of the West?\" Natheless at the next full moon I boarded the White Ship, and with the reluctant bearded man left the happy harbour for untravelled seas.\n\nAnd the bird of heaven flew before, and led us toward the basalt pillars of the West, but this time the oarsmen sang no soft songs under the full moon. In my mind I would often picture the unknown Land of Cathuria with its splendid groves and palaces, and would wonder what new delights there awaited me. \"Cathuria,\" I would say to myself, \"is the abode of gods and the land of unnumbered cities of gold. Its forests are of aloe and sandalwood, even as the fragrant groves of Camorin, and among the trees flutter gay birds sweet with song. On the green and flowery mountains of Cathuria stand temples of pink marble, rich with carven and painted glories, and having in their courtyards cool fountains of silver, where purl with ravishing music the scented waters that come from the grotto-born river Narg. And the cities of Cathuria are cinctured with golden walls, and their pavements also are of gold. In the gardens of these cities are strange orchids, and perfumed lakes whose beds are of coral and amber. At night the streets and the gardens are lit with gay lanthorns fashioned from the three-coloured shell of the tortoise, and here resound the soft notes of the singer and the lutanist. And the houses of the cities of Cathuria are all palaces, each built over a fragrant canal bearing the waters of the sacred Narg. Of marble and porphyry are the houses, and roofed with glittering gold that reflects the rays of the sun and enhances the splendour of the cities as blissful gods view them from the distant peaks. Fairest of all is the palace of the great monarch Dorieb, whom some say to be a demigod and others a god. High is the palace of Dorieb, and many are the turrets of marble upon its walls. In its wide halls many multitudes assemble, and here hang the trophies of the ages. And the roof is of pure gold, set upon tall pillars of ruby and azure, and having such carven figures of gods and heroes that he who looks up to those heights seems to gaze upon the living Olympus. And the floor of the palace is of glass, under which flow the cunningly lighted waters of the Narg, gay with gaudy fish not known beyond the bounds of lovely Cathuria.\"\n\nThus would I speak to myself of Cathuria, but ever would the bearded man warn me to turn back to the happy shores of Sona-Nyl; for Sona-Nyl is known of men, while none hath ever beheld Cathuria.\n\nAnd on the thirty-first day that we followed the bird, we beheld the basalt pillars of the West. Shrouded in mist they were, so that no man might peer beyond them or see their summits\u2014which indeed some say reach even to the heavens. And the bearded man again implored me to turn back, but I heeded him not; for from the mists beyond the basalt pillars I fancied there came the notes of singer and lutanist; sweeter than the sweetest songs of Sona-Nyl, and sounding mine own praises; the praises of me, who had voyaged far under the full moon and dwelt in the Land of Fancy.\n\nSo to the sound of melody the White Ship sailed into the mist betwixt the basalt pillars of the West. And when the music ceased and the mist lifted, we beheld not the Land of Cathuria, but a swift-rushing resistless sea, over which our helpless barque was borne toward some unknown goal. Soon to our ears came the distant thunder of falling waters, and to our eyes appeared on the far horizon ahead the titanic spray of a monstrous cataract, wherein the oceans of the world drop down to abysmal nothingness. Then did the bearded man say to me with tears on his cheek: \"We have rejected the beautiful Land of Sona-Nyl, which we may never behold again. The gods are greater than men, and they have conquered.\" And I closed my eyes before the crash that I knew would come, shutting out the sight of the celestial bird which flapped its mocking blue wings over the brink of the torrent.\n\nOut of that crash came darkness, and I heard the shrieking of men and of things which were not men. From the East tempestuous winds arose, and chilled me as I crouched on the slab of damp stone which had risen beneath my feet. Then as I heard another crash I opened my eyes and beheld myself upon the platform of that lighthouse from whence I had sailed so many aeons ago. In the darkness below there loomed the vast blurred outlines of a vessel breaking up on the cruel rocks, and as I glanced out over the waste I saw that the light had failed for the first time since my grandfather had assumed its care.\n\nAnd in the later watches of the night, when I went within the tower, I saw on the wall a calendar which still remained as when I had left it at the hour I sailed away. With the dawn I descended the tower and looked for wreckage upon the rocks, but what I found was only this: a strange dead bird whose hue was as of the azure sky, and a single shattered spar, of a whiteness greater than that of the wave-tips or of the mountain snow.\n\nAnd thereafter the ocean told me its secrets no more; and though many times since has the moon shone full and high in the heavens, the White Ship from the South came never again.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Winged Death by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThe Orange Hotel stands in High Street near the railway station in Bloemfontein, South Africa. On Sunday, January 24, 1932, four men sat shivering from terror in a room on its third floor. One was George C. Titteridge, proprietor of the hotel; another was police constable Ian De Witt of the Central Station; a third was Johannes Bogaert, the local coroner; the fourth, and apparently the least disorganised of the group, was Dr. Cornelius Van Keulen, the coroner's physician.\n\nOn the floor, uncomfortably evident amidst the stifling summer heat, was the body of a dead man\u2014but this was not what the four were afraid of. Their glances wandered from the table, on which lay a curious assortment of things, to the ceiling overhead, across whose smooth whiteness a series of huge, faltering alphabetical characters had somehow been scrawled in ink; and every now and then Dr. Van Keulen would glance half-furtively at a worn leather blank-book which he held in his left hand. The horror of the four seemed about equally divided among the blank-book, the scrawled words on the ceiling, and a dead fly of peculiar aspect which floated in a bottle of ammonia on the table. Also on the table were an open inkwell, a pen and writing-pad, a physician's medical case, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, and a tumbler about a quarter full of black oxide of manganese.\n\nThe worn leather book was the journal of the dead man on the floor, and had at once made it clear that the name \"Frederick N. Mason, Mining Properties, Toronto, Canada\", signed in the hotel register, was a false one. There were other things\u2014terrible things\u2014which it likewise made clear; and still other things of far greater terror at which it hinted hideously without making them clear or even fully believable. It was the half-belief of the four men, fostered by lives spent close to the black, settled secrets of brooding Africa, which made them shiver so violently in spite of the searing January heat.\n\nThe blank-book was not a large one, and the entries were in a fine handwriting, which, however, grew careless and nervous-looking toward the last. It consisted of a series of jottings at first rather irregularly spaced, but finally becoming daily. To call it a diary would not be quite correct, for it chronicled only one set of its writer's activities. Dr. Van Keulen recognised the name of the dead man the moment he opened the cover, for it was that of an eminent member of his own profession who had been largely connected with African matters. In another moment he was horrified to find this name linked with a dastardly crime, officially unsolved, which had filled the newspapers some four months before. And the farther he read, the deeper grew his horror, awe, and sense of loathing and panic.\n\nHere, in essence, is the text which the doctor read aloud in that sinister and increasingly noisome room while the three men around him breathed hard, fidgeted in their chairs, and darted frightened glances at the ceiling, the table, the thing on the floor, and one another:\n\nJOURNAL OF THOMAS SLAUENWITE, M.D.\n\nTouching punishment of Henry Sargent Moore, Ph.D., of Brooklyn, New York, Professor of Invertebrate Biology in Columbia University, New York, N.Y. Prepared to be read after my death, for the satisfaction of making public the accomplishment of my revenge, which may otherwise never be imputed to me even if it succeeds.\n\nJanuary 5, 1929\u2014I have now fully resolved to kill Dr. Henry Moore, and a recent incident has shewn me how I shall do it. From now on, I shall follow a consistent line of action; hence the beginning of this journal.\n\nIt is hardly necessary to repeat the circumstances which have driven me to this course, for the informed part of the public is familiar with all the salient facts. I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on April 12, 1885, the son of Dr. Paul Slauenwite, formerly of Pretoria, Transvaal, South Africa. Studying medicine as part of my family tradition, I was led by my father (who died in 1916, while I was serving in France in a South African regiment) to specialise in African fevers; and after my graduation from Columbia spent much time in researches which took me from Durban, in Natal, up to the equator itself.\n\nIn Mombasa I worked out my new theory of the transmission and development of remittent fever, aided only slightly by the papers of the late government physician, Sir Norman Sloane, which I found in the house I occupied. When I published my results I became at a single stroke a famous authority. I was told of the probability of an almost supreme position in the South African health service, and even a probable knighthood, in the event of my becoming a naturalised citizen, and accordingly I took the necessary steps.\n\nThen occurred the incident for which I am about to kill Henry Moore. This man, my classmate and friend of years in America and Africa, chose deliberately to undermine my claim to my own theory; alleging that Sir Norman Sloane had anticipated me in every essential detail, and implying that I had probably found more of his papers than I had stated in my account of the matter. To buttress this absurd accusation he produced certain personal letters from Sir Norman which indeed shewed that the older man had been over my ground, and that he would have published his results very soon but for his sudden death. This much I could only admit with regret. What I could not excuse was the jealous suspicion that I had stolen the theory from Sir Norman's papers. The British government, sensibly enough, ignored these aspersions, but withheld the half-promised appointment and knighthood on the ground that my theory, while original with me, was not in fact new.\n\nI could soon see that my career in Africa was perceptibly checked; though I had placed all my hopes on such a career, even to the point of resigning American citizenship. A distinct coolness toward me had arisen among the Government set in Mombasa, especially among those who had known Sir Norman. It was then that I resolved to be even with Moore sooner or later, though I did not know how. He had been jealous of my early celebrity, and had taken advantage of his old correspondence with Sir Norman to ruin me. This from the friend whom I had myself led to take an interest in Africa\u2014whom I had coached and inspired till he achieved his present moderate fame as an authority on African entomology. Even now, though, I will not deny that his attainments are profound. I made him, and in return he has ruined me. Now\u2014some day\u2014I shall destroy him.\n\nWhen I saw myself losing ground in Mombasa, I applied for my present situation in the interior\u2014at M'gonga, only fifty miles from the Uganda line. It is a cotton and ivory trading-post, with only eight white men besides myself. A beastly hole, almost on the equator, and full of every sort of fever known to mankind. Poisonous snakes and insects everywhere, and niggers with diseases nobody ever heard of outside medical college. But my work is not hard, and I have always had plenty of time to plan things to do to Henry Moore. It amuses me to give his Diptera of Central and Southern Africa a prominent place on my shelf. I suppose it actually is a standard manual\u2014they use it at Columbia, Harvard, and the U. of Wis.\u2014but my own suggestions are really responsible for half its strong points.\n\nLast week I encountered the thing which decided me how to kill Moore. A party from Uganda brought in a black with a queer illness which I can't yet diagnose. He was lethargic, with a very low temperature, and shuffled in a peculiar way. Most of the others were afraid of him and said he was under some kind of witch-doctor spell; but Gobo, the interpreter, said he had been bitten by an insect. What it was, I can't imagine\u2014for there is only a slight puncture on the arm. It is bright red, though, with a purple ring around it. Spectral-looking\u2014I don't wonder the boys lay it to black magic. They seem to have seen cases like it before, and say there's really nothing to do about it.\n\nOld N'Kuru, one of the Galla boys at the post, says it must be the bite of a devil-fly, which makes its victim waste away gradually and die, and then takes hold of his soul and personality if it is still alive itself\u2014flying around with all his likes, dislikes, and consciousness. A queer legend\u2014and I don't know of any local insect deadly enough to account for it. I gave this sick black\u2014his name is Mevana\u2014a good shot of quinine and took a sample of his blood for testing, but haven't made much progress. There is certainly a strange germ present, but I can't even remotely identify it. The nearest thing to it is the bacillus one finds in oxen, horses, and dogs that the tsetse-fly has bitten; but tsetse-flies don't infect human beings, and this is too far north for them anyway.\n\nHowever\u2014the important thing is that I've decided how to kill Moore. If this interior region has insects as poisonous as the natives say, I'll see that he gets a shipment of them from a source he won't suspect, and with plenty of assurances that they are harmless. Trust him to throw overboard all caution when it comes to studying an unknown species\u2014and then we'll see how Nature takes its course! It ought not to be hard to find an insect that scares the blacks so much. First to see how poor Mevana turns out\u2014and then to find my envoy of death.\n\nJan. 7\u2014Mevana is no better, though I have injected all the antitoxins I know of. He has fits of trembling, in which he rants affrightedly about the way his soul will pass when he dies into the insect that bit him, but between them he remains in a kind of half-stupor. Heart action still strong, so I may pull him through. I shall try to, for he can probably guide me better than anyone else to the region where he was bitten.\n\nMeanwhile I'll write to Dr. Lincoln, my predecessor here, for Allen, the head factor, says he had a profound knowledge of the local sicknesses. He ought to know about the death-fly if any white man does. He's at Nairobi now, and a black runner ought to get me a reply in a week\u2014using the railway for half the trip.\n\nJan. 10\u2014Patient unchanged, but I have found what I want! It was in an old volume of the local health records, which I've been going over diligently while waiting to hear from Lincoln. Thirty years ago there was an epidemic that killed off thousands of natives in Uganda, and it was definitely traced to a rare fly called Glossina palpalis\u2014a sort of cousin of the Glossina marsitans, or tsetse. It lives in the bushes on the shores of lakes and rivers, and feeds on the blood of crocodiles, antelopes, and large mammals. When these food animals have the germ of trypanosomiasis, or sleeping-sickness, it picks it up and develops acute infectivity after an incubation period of thirty-one days. Then for seventy-five days it is sure death to anyone or anything it bites.\n\nWithout doubt, this must be the \"devil-fly\" the niggers talk about. Now I know what I'm heading for. Hope Mevana pulls through. Ought to hear from Lincoln in four or five days\u2014he has a great reputation for success in things like this. My worst problem will be to get the flies to Moore without his recognising them. With his cursed plodding scholarship it would be just like him to know all about them since they're actually on record.\n\nJan. 15\u2014Just heard from Lincoln, who confirms all that the records say about Glossina palpalis. He has a remedy for sleeping-sickness which has succeeded in a great number of cases when not given too late. Intermuscular injections of tryparsamide. Since Mevana was bitten about two months ago, I don't know how it will work\u2014but Lincoln says that cases have been known to drag on eighteen months, so possibly I'm not too late. Lincoln sent over some of his stuff, so I've just given Mevana a stiff shot. In a stupor now. They've brought his principal wife from the village, but he doesn't even recognise her. If he recovers, he can certainly shew me where the flies are. He's a great crocodile hunter, according to report, and knows all Uganda like a book. I'll give him another shot tomorrow.\n\nJan. 16\u2014Mevana seems a little brighter today, but his heart action is slowing up a bit. I'll keep up the injections, but not overdo them.\n\nJan. 17\u2014Recovery really pronounced today. Mevana opened his eyes and shewed signs of actual consciousness, though dazed, after the injection. Hope Moore doesn't know about tryparsamide. There's a good chance he won't, since he never leaned much toward medicine. Mevana's tongue seemed paralysed, but I fancy that will pass off if I can only wake him up. Wouldn't mind a good sleep myself, but not of this kind!\n\nJan. 25\u2014Mevana nearly cured! In another week I can let him take me into the jungle. He was frightened when he first came to\u2014about having the fly take his personality after he died\u2014but brightened up finally when I told him he was going to get well. His wife, Ugowe, takes good care of him now, and I can rest a bit. Then for the envoys of death!\n\nFeb. 3\u2014Mevana is well now, and I have talked with him about a hunt for flies. He dreads to go near the place where they got him, but I am playing on his gratitude. Besides, he has an idea that I can ward off disease as well as cure it. His pluck would shame a white man\u2014there's no doubt that he'll go. I can get off by telling the head factor the trip is in the interest of local health work.\n\nMarch 12\u2014In Uganda at last! Have five boys besides Mevana, but they are all Gallas. The local blacks couldn't be hired to come near the region after the talk of what had happened to Mevana. This jungle is a pestilential place\u2014steaming with miasmal vapours. All the lakes look stagnant. In one spot we came upon a trace of Cyclopean ruins which made even the Gallas run past in a wide circle. They say these megaliths are older than man, and that they used to be a haunt or outpost of \"The Fishers from Outside\"\u2014whatever that means\u2014and of the evil gods Tsadogwa and Clulu. To this day they are said to have a malign influence, and to be connected somehow with the devil-flies.\n\nMarch 15\u2014Struck Lake Mlolo this morning\u2014where Mevana was bitten. A hellish, green-scummed affair, full of crocodiles. Mevana has fixed up a fly-trap of fine wire netting baited with crocodile meat. It has a small entrance, and once the quarry get in, they don't know enough to get out. As stupid as they are deadly, and ravenous for fresh meat or a bowl of blood. Hope we can get a good supply. I've decided that I must experiment with them\u2014finding a way to change their appearance so that Moore won't recognise them. Possibly I can cross them with some other species, producing a strange hybrid whose infection-carrying capacity will be undiminished. We'll see. I must wait, but am in no hurry now. When I get ready I'll have Mevana get me some infected meat to feed my envoys of death\u2014and then for the post-office. Ought to be no trouble getting infection, for this country is a veritable pest-hole.\n\nMarch 16\u2014Good luck. Two cages full. Five vigorous specimens with wings glistening like diamonds. Mevana is emptying them into a large can with a tightly meshed top, and I think we caught them in the nick of time. We can get them to M'gonga without trouble. Taking plenty of crocodile meat for their food. Undoubtedly all or most of it is infected.\n\nApril 20\u2014Back at M'gonga and busy in the laboratory. Have sent to Dr. Joost in Pretoria for some tsetse-flies for hybridisation experiments. Such a crossing, if it will work at all, ought to produce something pretty hard to recognise yet at the same time just as deadly as the palpalis. If this doesn't work, I shall try certain other diptera from the interior, and I have sent to Dr. Vandervelde at Nyangwe for some of the Congo types. I shan't have to send Mevana for more tainted meat after all; for I find I can keep cultures of the germ Trypanosoma gambiense, taken from the meat we got last month, almost indefinitely in tubes. When the time comes, I'll taint some fresh meat and feed my winged envoys a good dose\u2014then bon voyage to them!\n\nJune 18\u2014My tsetse-flies from Joost came today. Cages for breeding were all ready long ago, and I am now making selections. Intend to use ultra-violet rays to speed up the life-cycle. Fortunately I have the needed apparatus in my regular equipment. Naturally I tell no one what I'm doing. The ignorance of the few men here makes it easy for me to conceal my aims and pretend to be merely studying existing species for medical reasons.\n\nJune 29\u2014The crossing is fertile! Good deposits of eggs last Wednesday, and now I have some excellent larvae. If the mature insects look as strange as these do, I need do nothing more. Am preparing separate numbered cages for the different specimens.\n\nJuly 7\u2014New hybrids are out! Disguise is excellent as to shape, but sheen of wings still suggests palpalis. Thorax has faint suggestions of the stripes of the tsetse. Slight variation in individuals. Am feeding them all on tainted crocodile meat, and after infectivity develops will try them on some of the blacks\u2014apparently, of course, by accident. There are so many mildly venomous flies around here that it can easily be done without exciting suspicion. I shall loose an insect in my tightly screened dining-room when Batta, my house-boy, brings in breakfast\u2014keeping well on guard myself. When it has done its work I'll capture or swat it\u2014an easy thing because of its stupidity\u2014or asphyxiate it by filling the room with chlorine gas. If it doesn't work the first time, I'll try again until it does. Of course, I'll have the tryparsamide handy in case I get bitten myself\u2014but I shall be careful to avoid biting, for no antidote is really certain.\n\nAug. 10\u2014Infectivity mature, and managed to get Batta stung in fine shape. Caught the fly on him, returning it to its cage. Eased up the pain with iodine, and the poor devil is quite grateful for the service. Shall try a variant specimen on Gamba, the factor's messenger, tomorrow. That will be all the tests I shall dare to make here, but if I need more I shall take some specimens to Ukala and get additional data.\n\nAug. 11\u2014Failed to get Gamba, but recaptured the fly alive. Batta still seems as well as usual, and has no pain in the back where he was stung. Shall wait before trying to get Gamba again.\n\nAug. 14\u2014Shipment of insects from Vandervelde at last. Fully seven distinct species, some more or less poisonous. Am keeping them well fed in case the tsetse crossing doesn't work. Some of these fellows look very unlike the palpalis, but the trouble is that they may not make a fertile cross with it.\n\nAug. 17\u2014Got Gamba this afternoon, but had to kill the fly on him. It nipped him in the left shoulder. I dressed the bite, and Gamba is as grateful as Batta was. No change in Batta.\n\nAug. 20\u2014Gamba unchanged so far\u2014Batta too. Am experimenting with a new form of disguise to supplement the hybridisation\u2014some sort of dye to change the telltale glitter of the palpalis' wings. A bluish tint would be best\u2014something I could spray on a whole batch of insects. Shall begin by investigating things like Prussian and Turnbull's blue\u2014iron and cyanogen salts.\n\nAug. 25\u2014Batta complained of a pain in his back today\u2014things may be developing.\n\nSept. 3\u2014Have made fair progress in my experiments. Batta shews signs of lethargy, and says his back aches all the time. Gamba beginning to feel uneasy in his bitten shoulder.\n\nSept. 24\u2014Batta worse and worse, and beginning to get frightened about his bite. Thinks it must be a devil-fly, and entreated me to kill it\u2014for he saw me cage it\u2014until I pretended to him that it had died long ago. Said he didn't want his soul to pass into it upon his death. I give him shots of plain water with a hypodermic to keep his morale up. Evidently the fly retains all the properties of the palpalis. Gamba down, too, and repeating all of Batta's symptoms. I may decide to give him a chance with tryparsamide, for the effect of the fly is proved well enough. I shall let Batta go on, however, for I want a rough idea of how long it takes to finish a case.\n\nDye experiments coming along finely. An isomeric form of ferrous ferrocyanide, with some admixture of potassium salts, can be dissolved in alcohol and sprayed on the insects with splendid effect. It stains the wings blue without affecting the dark thorax much, and doesn't wear off when I sprinkle the specimens with water. With this disguise, I think I can use the present tsetse hybrids and avoid bothering with any more experiments. Sharp as he is, Moore couldn't recognise a blue-winged fly with a half-tsetse thorax. Of course, I keep all this dye business strictly under cover. Nothing must ever connect me with the blue flies later on.\n\nOct. 9\u2014Batta is lethargic and has taken to his bed. Have been giving Gamba tryparsamide for two weeks, and fancy he'll recover.\n\nOct. 25\u2014Batta very low, but Gamba nearly well.\n\nNov. 18\u2014Batta died yesterday, and a curious thing happened which gave me a real shiver in view of the native legends and Batta's own fears. When I returned to the laboratory after the death I heard the most singular buzzing and thrashing in cage 12, which contained the fly that bit Batta. The creature seemed frantic, but stopped still when I appeared\u2014lighting on the wire netting and looking at me in the oddest way. It reached its legs through the wires as if it were bewildered. When I came back from dining with Allen, the thing was dead. Evidently it had gone wild and beaten its life out on the sides of the cage.\n\nIt certainly is peculiar that this should happen just as Batta died. If any black had seen it, he'd have laid it at once to the absorption of the poor devil's soul. I shall start my blue-stained hybrids on their way before long now. The hybrid's rate of killing seems a little ahead of the pure palpalis' rate, if anything. Batta died three months and eight days after infection\u2014but of course there is always a wide margin of uncertainty. I almost wish I had let Gamba's case run on.\n\nDec. 5\u2014Busy planning how to get my envoys to Moore. I must have them appear to come from some disinterested entomologist who has read his Diptera of Central and Southern Africa and believes he would like to study this \"new and unidentifiable species\". There must also be ample assurances that the blue-winged fly is harmless, as proved by the natives' long experience. Moore will be off his guard, and one of the flies will surely get him sooner or later\u2014though one can't tell just when.\n\nI'll have to rely on the letters of New York friends\u2014they still speak of Moore from time to time\u2014to keep me informed of early results, though I dare say the papers will announce his death. Above all, I must shew no interest in his case. I shall mail the flies while on a trip, but must not be recognised when I do it. The best plan will be to take a long vacation in the interior, grow a beard, mail the package at Ukala while passing as a visiting entomologist, and return here after shaving off the beard.\n\nApril 12, 1930\u2014Back in M'gonga after my long trip. Everything has come off finely\u2014with clockwork precision. Have sent the flies to Moore without leaving a trace. Got a Christmas vacation Dec. 15th, and set out at once with the proper stuff. Made a very good mailing container with room to include some germ-tainted crocodile meat as food for the envoys. By the end of February I had beard enough to shape into a close Vandyke.\n\nShewed up at Ukala March 9th and typed a letter to Moore on the trading-post machine. Signed it \"Nevil Wayland-Hall\"\u2014supposed to be an entomologist from London. Think I took just the right tone\u2014interest of a brother-scientist, and all that. Was artistically casual in emphasising the \"complete harmlessness\" of the specimens. Nobody suspected anything. Shaved the beard as soon as I hit the bush, so that there wouldn't be any uneven tanning by the time I got back here. Dispensed with native bearers except for one small stretch of swamp\u2014I can do wonders with one knapsack, and my sense of direction is good. Lucky I'm used to such travelling. Explained my protracted absence by pleading a touch of fever and some mistakes in direction when going through the bush.\n\nBut now comes the hardest part psychologically\u2014waiting for news of Moore without shewing the strain. Of course, he may possibly escape a bite until the venom is played out\u2014but with his recklessness the chances are one hundred to one against him. I have no regrets; after what he did to me, he deserves this and more.\n\nJune 30, 1930\u2014Hurrah! The first step worked! Just heard casually from Dyson of Columbia that Moore had received some new blue-winged flies from Africa, and that he is badly puzzled over them! No word of any bite\u2014but if I know Moore's slipshod ways as I think I do, there'll be one before long!\n\nAugust 27, 1930\u2014Letter from Morton in Cambridge. He says Moore writes of feeling very run-down, and tells of an insect bite on the back of his neck\u2014from a curious new specimen that he received about the middle of June. Have I succeeded? Apparently Moore doesn't connect the bite with his weakness. If this is the real stuff, then Moore was bitten well within the insect's period of infectivity.\n\nSept. 12, 1930\u2014Victory! Another line from Dyson says that Moore is really in an alarming shape. He now traces his illness to the bite, which he received around noon on June 19, and is quite bewildered about the identity of the insect. Is trying to get in touch with the \"Nevil Wayland-Hall\" who sent him the shipment. Of the hundred-odd that I sent, about twenty-five seem to have reached him alive. Some escaped at the time of the bite, but several larvae have appeared from eggs laid since the time of mailing. He is, Dyson says, carefully incubating these larvae. When they mature I suppose he'll identify the tsetse-palpalis hybridisation\u2014but that won't do him much good now. He'll wonder, though, why the blue wings aren't transmitted by heredity!\n\nNov. 8, 1930\u2014Letters from half a dozen friends tell of Moore's serious illness. Dyson's came today. He says Moore is utterly at sea about the hybrids that came from the larvae and is beginning to think that the parents got their blue wings in some artificial way. Has to stay in bed most of the time now. No mention of using tryparsamide.\n\nFeb. 13, 1931\u2014Not so good! Moore is sinking, and seems to know no remedy, but I think he suspects me. Had a very chilly letter from Morton last month, which told nothing of Moore; and now Dyson writes\u2014also rather constrainedly\u2014that Moore is forming theories about the whole matter. He's been making a search for \"Wayland-Hall\" by telegraph\u2014at London, Ukala, Nairobi, Mombasa, and other places\u2014and of course finds nothing. I judge that he's told Dyson whom he suspects, but that Dyson doesn't believe it yet. Fear Morton does believe it.\n\nI see that I'd better lay plans for getting out of here and effacing my identity for good. What an end to a career that started out so well! More of Moore's work\u2014but this time he's paying for it in advance! Believe I'll go back to South Africa\u2014and meanwhile will quietly deposit funds there to the credit of my new self\u2014\"Frederick Nasmyth Mason of Toronto, Canada, broker in mining properties\". Will establish a new signature for identification. If I never have to take the step, I can easily re-transfer the funds to my present self.\n\nAug. 15, 1931\u2014Half a year gone, and still suspense. Dyson and Morton\u2014as well as several other friends\u2014seem to have stopped writing me. Dr. James of San Francisco hears from Moore's friends now and then, and says Moore is in an almost continuous coma. He hasn't been able to walk since May. As long as he could talk he complained of being cold. Now he can't talk, though it is thought he still has glimmers of consciousness. His breathing is short and quick, and can be heard some distance away. No question but that Trypanosoma gambiense is feeding on him\u2014but he holds out better than the niggers around here. Three months and eight days finished Batta, and here Moore is alive over a year after his biting. Heard rumours last month of an intensive search around Ukala for \"Wayland-Hall\". Don't think I need to worry yet, though, for there's absolutely nothing in existence to link me with this business.\n\nOct. 7, 1931\u2014It's over at last! News in the Mombasa Gazette. Moore died September 20 after a series of trembling fits and with a temperature vastly below normal. So much for that! I said I'd get him, and I did! The paper had a three-column report of his long illness and death, and of the futile search for \"Wayland-Hall\". Obviously, Moore was a bigger character in Africa than I had realised. The insect that bit him has now been fully identified from the surviving specimens and developed larvae, and the wing-staining is also detected. It is universally realised that the flies were prepared and shipped with intent to kill. Moore, it appears, communicated certain suspicions to Dyson, but the latter\u2014and the police\u2014are maintaining secrecy because of absence of proof. All of Moore's enemies are being looked up, and the Associated Press hints that \"an investigation, possibly involving an eminent physician now abroad, will follow\".\n\nOne thing at the very end of the report\u2014undoubtedly, the cheap romancing of a yellow journalist\u2014gives me a curious shudder in view of the legends of the blacks and the way the fly happened to go wild when Batta died. It seems that an odd incident occurred on the night of Moore's death; Dyson having been aroused by the buzzing of a blue-winged fly\u2014which immediately flew out the window\u2014just before the nurse telephoned the death news from Moore's home, miles away in Brooklyn.\n\nBut what concerns me most is the African end of the matter. People at Ukala remember the bearded stranger who typed the letter and sent the package, and the constabulary are combing the country for any blacks who may have carried him. I didn't use many, but if officers question the Ubandes who took me through N'Kini jungle belt I'll have more to explain than I like. It looks as if the time has come for me to vanish; so tomorrow I believe I'll resign and prepare to start for parts unknown.\n\nNov. 9, 1931\u2014Hard work getting my resignation acted on, but release came today. I didn't want to aggravate suspicion by decamping outright. Last week I heard from James about Moore's death\u2014but nothing more than is in the papers. Those around him in New York seem rather reticent about details, though they all talk about a searching investigation. No word from any of my friends in the East. Moore must have spread some dangerous suspicions around before he lost consciousness\u2014but there isn't an iota of proof he could have adduced.\n\nStill, I am taking no chances. On Thursday I shall start for Mombasa, and when there will take a steamer down the coast to Durban. After that I shall drop from sight\u2014but soon afterward the mining properties' broker Frederick Nasmyth Mason, from Toronto, will turn up in Johannesburg.\n\nLet this be the end of my journal. If in the end I am not suspected, it will serve its original purpose after my death and reveal what would otherwise not be known. If, on the other hand, these suspicions do materialise and persist, it will confirm and clarify the vague charges, and fill in many important and puzzling gaps. Of course, if danger comes my way I shall have to destroy it.\n\nWell, Moore is dead\u2014as he amply deserves to be. Now Dr. Thomas Slauenwite is dead, too. And when the body formerly belonging to Thomas Slauenwite is dead, the public may have this record." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 137", + "text": "Jan. 15, 1932\u2014A new year\u2014and a reluctant reopening of this journal. This time I am writing solely to relieve my mind, for it would be absurd to fancy that the case is not definitely closed. I am settled in the Vaal Hotel, Johannesburg, under my new name, and no one has so far challenged my identity. Have had some inconclusive business talks to keep up my part as a mine broker, and believe I may actually work myself into that business. Later I shall go to Toronto and plant a few evidences for my fictitious past.\n\nBut what is bothering me is an insect that invaded my room around noon today. Of course I have had all sorts of nightmares about blue flies of late, but those were only to be expected in view of my prevailing nervous strain. This thing, however, was a waking actuality, and I am utterly at a loss to account for it. It buzzed around my bookshelf for fully a quarter of an hour, and eluded every attempt to catch or kill it. The queerest thing was its colour and aspect\u2014for it had blue wings and was in every way a duplicate of my hybrid envoys of death. How it could possibly be one of these, in fact, I certainly don't know. I disposed of all the hybrids\u2014stained and unstained\u2014that I didn't send to Moore, and can't recall any instance of escape.\n\nCan this be wholly an hallucination? Or could any of the specimens that escaped in Brooklyn when Moore was bitten have found their way back to Africa? There was that absurd story of the blue fly that waked Dyson when Moore died\u2014but after all, the survival and return of some of the things is not impossible. It is perfectly plausible that the blue should stick to their wings, too, for the pigment I devised was almost as good as tattooing for permanence. By elimination, that would seem to be the only rational explanation for this thing; though it is very curious that the fellow has come as far south as this. Possibly it's some hereditary homing instinct inherent in the tsetse strain. After all, that side of him belongs to South Africa.\n\nI must be on my guard against a bite. Of course the original venom\u2014if this is actually one of the flies that escaped from Moore\u2014was worn out ages ago; but the fellow must have fed as he flew back from America, and he may well have come through Central Africa and picked up a fresh infectivity. Indeed, that's more probable than not; for the palpalis half of his heredity would naturally take him back to Uganda, and all the trypanosomiasis germs. I still have some of the tryparsamide left\u2014I couldn't bear to destroy my medicine case, incriminating though it may be\u2014but since reading up on the subject I am not so sure about the drug's action as I was. It gives one a fighting chance\u2014certainly it saved Gamba\u2014but there's always a large probability of failure.\n\nIt's devilish queer that this fly should have happened to come into my room\u2014of all places in the wide expanse of Africa! Seems to strain coincidence to the breaking-point. I suppose that if it comes again, I shall certainly kill it. I'm surprised that it escaped me today, for ordinarily these fellows are extremely stupid and easy to catch. Can it be a pure illusion after all? Certainly the heat is getting me of late as it never did before\u2014even up around Uganda.\n\nJan. 16\u2014Am I going insane? The fly came again this noon, and acted so anomalously that I can't make head or tail of it. Only delusion on my part could account for what that buzzing pest seemed to do. It appeared from nowhere, and went straight to my bookshelf\u2014circling again and again to front a copy of Moore's Diptera of Central and Southern Africa. Now and then it would light on top or back of the volume, and occasionally it would dart forward toward me and retreat before I could strike at it with a folded paper. Such cunning is unheard of among the notoriously stupid African diptera. For nearly half an hour I tried to get the cursed thing, but at last it darted out the window through a hole in the screen that I hadn't noticed. At times I fancied it deliberately mocked me by coming within reach of my weapon and then skilfully sidestepping as I struck out. I must keep a tight hold of my consciousness.\n\nJan. 17\u2014Either I am mad or the world is in the grip of some sudden suspension of the laws of probability as we know them. That damnable fly came in from somewhere just before noon and commenced buzzing around the copy of Moore's Diptera on my shelf. Again I tried to catch it, and again yesterday's experience was repeated. Finally the pest made for the open inkwell on my table and dipped itself in\u2014just the legs and thorax, keeping its wings clear. Then it sailed up to the ceiling and lit\u2014beginning to crawl around in a curved patch and leaving a trail of ink. After a time it hopped a bit and made a single ink spot unconnected with the trail\u2014then it dropped squarely in front of my face, and buzzed out of sight before I could get it.\n\nSomething about this whole business struck me as monstrously sinister and abnormal\u2014more so than I could explain to myself. When I looked at the ink-trail on the ceiling from different angles, it seemed more and more familiar to me, and it dawned on me suddenly that it formed an absolutely perfect question-mark. What device could be more malignly appropriate? It is a wonder that I did not faint. So far the hotel attendants have not noticed it. Have not seen the fly this afternoon and evening, but am keeping my inkwell securely closed. I think my extermination of Moore must be preying on me, and giving me morbid hallucinations. Perhaps there is no fly at all.\n\nJan. 18\u2014Into what strange hell of living nightmare am I plunged? What occurred today is something which could not normally happen\u2014and yet an hotel attendant has seen the marks on the ceiling and concedes their reality. About eleven o'clock this morning, as I was writing on a manuscript, something darted down to the inkwell for a second and flashed aloft again before I could see what it was. Looking up, I saw that hellish fly on the ceiling as it had been before\u2014crawling along and tracing another trail of curves and turns. There was nothing I could do, but I folded a newspaper in readiness to get the creature if it should fly near enough. When it had made several turns on the ceiling it flew into a dark corner and disappeared, and as I looked upward at the doubly defaced plastering I saw that the new ink-trail was that of a huge and unmistakable figure 5!\n\nFor a time I was almost unconscious from a wave of nameless menace for which I could not fully account. Then I summoned up my resolution and took an active step. Going out to a chemist's shop I purchased some gum and other things necessary for preparing a sticky trap\u2014also a duplicate inkwell. Returning to my room, I filled the new inkwell with the sticky mixture and set it where the old one had been, leaving it open. Then I tried to concentrate my mind on some reading. About three o'clock I heard the accursed insect again, and saw it circling around the new inkwell. It descended to the sticky surface but did not touch it, and afterward sailed straight toward me\u2014retreating before I could hit it. Then it went to the bookshelf and circled around Moore's treatise. There is something profound and diabolic about the way the intruder hovers near that book.\n\nThe worst part was the last. Leaving Moore's book, the insect flew over to the open window and began beating itself rhythmically against the wire screen. There would be a series of beats and then a series of equal length and another pause, and so on. Something about this performance held me motionless for a couple of moments, but after that I went over to the window and tried to kill the noxious thing. As usual, no use. It merely flew across the room to a lamp and began beating the same tattoo on the stiff cardboard shade. I felt a vague desperation, and proceeded to shut all the doors as well as the window whose screen had the imperceptible hole. It seemed very necessary to kill this persistent being, whose hounding was rapidly unseating my mind. Then, unconsciously counting, I began to notice that each of its series of beatings contained just five strokes.\n\nFive\u2014the same number that the thing had traced in ink on the ceiling in the morning! Could there be any conceivable connexion? The notion was maniacal, for that would argue a human intellect and a knowledge of written figures in the hybrid fly. A human intellect\u2014did not that take one back to the most primitive legends of the Uganda blacks? And yet there was that infernal cleverness in eluding me as contrasted with the normal stupidity of the breed. As I laid aside my folded paper and sat down in growing horror, the insect buzzed aloft and disappeared through a hole in the ceiling where the radiator pipe went to the room above.\n\nThe departure did not soothe me, for my mind had started on a train of wild and terrible reflections. If this fly had a human intelligence, where did that intelligence come from? Was there any truth in the native notion that these creatures acquire the personality of their victims after the latter's death? If so, whose personality did this fly bear? I had reasoned out that it must be one of those which escaped from Moore at the time he was bitten. Was this the envoy of death which had bitten Moore? If so, what did it want with me? What did it want with me anyway? In a cold perspiration I remembered the actions of the fly that had bitten Batta when Batta died. Had its own personality been displaced by that of its dead victim? Then there was that sensational news account of the fly that waked Dyson when Moore died. As for that fly that was hounding me\u2014could it be that a vindictive human personality drove it on? How it hovered around Moore's book!\u2014I refused to think any farther than that. All at once I began to feel sure that the creature was indeed infected, and in the most virulent way. With a malign deliberation so evident in every act, it must surely have charged itself on purpose with the deadliest bacilli in all Africa. My mind, thoroughly shaken, was now taking the thing's human qualities for granted.\n\nI now telephoned the clerk and asked for a man to stop up the radiator pipehole and other possible chinks in my room. I spoke of being tormented by flies, and he seemed to be quite sympathetic. When the man came, I shewed him the ink-marks on the ceiling, which he recognised without difficulty. So they are real! The resemblance to a question-mark and a figure 5 puzzled and fascinated him. In the end he stopped up all the holes he could find, and mended the window-screen, so that I can now keep both windows open. He evidently thought me a bit eccentric, especially since no insects were in sight while he was here. But I am past minding that. So far the fly has not appeared this evening. God knows what it is, what it wants, or what will become of me!\n\nJan. 19\u2014I am utterly engulfed in horror. The thing has touched me. Something monstrous and daemoniac is at work around me, and I am a helpless victim. In the morning, when I returned from breakfast, that winged fiend from hell brushed into the room over my head, and began beating itself against the window-screen as it did yesterday. This time, though, each series of beats contained only four strokes. I rushed to the window and tried to catch it, but it escaped as usual and flew over to Moore's treatise, where it buzzed around mockingly. Its vocal equipment is limited, but I noticed that its spells of buzzing came in groups of four.\n\nBy this time I was certainly mad, for I called out to it, \"Moore, Moore, for God's sake, what do you want?\" When I did so, the creature suddenly ceased its circling, flew toward me, and made a low, graceful dip in the air, somehow suggestive of a bow. Then it flew back to the book. At least, I seemed to see it do all this\u2014though I am trusting my senses no longer.\n\nAnd then the worst thing happened. I had left my door open, hoping the monster would leave if I could not catch it; but about 11:30 I shut the door, concluding it had gone. Then I settled down to read. Just at noon I felt a tickling on the back of my neck, but when I put my hand up nothing was there. In a moment I felt the tickling again\u2014and before I could move, that nameless spawn of hell sailed into view from behind, did another of those mocking, graceful dips in the air, and flew out through the keyhole\u2014which I had never dreamed was large enough to allow its passage.\n\nThat the thing had touched me, I could not doubt. It had touched me without injuring me\u2014and then I remembered in a sudden cold fright that Moore had been bitten on the back of the neck at noon. No invasion since then\u2014but I have stuffed all the keyholes with paper and shall have a folded paper ready for use whenever I open the door to leave or enter.\n\nJan. 20\u2014I cannot yet believe fully in the supernatural, yet I fear none the less that I am lost. The business is too much for me. Just before noon today that devil appeared outside the window and repeated its beating operations; but this time in series of three. When I went to the window it flew off out of sight. I still have resolution enough to take one more defensive step. Removing both window-screens, I coated them with my sticky preparation\u2014the one I used in the inkwell\u2014outside and inside, and set them back in place. If that creature attempts another tattoo, it will be its last!\n\nRest of the day in peace. Can I weather this experience without becoming a maniac?\n\nJan. 21\u2014On board train for Bloemfontein.\n\nI am routed. The thing is winning. It has a diabolic intelligence against which all my devices are powerless. It appeared outside the window this morning, but did not touch the sticky screen. Instead, it sheered off without lighting and began buzzing around in circles\u2014two at a time, followed by a pause in the air. After several of these performances it flew off out of sight over the roofs of the city. My nerves are just about at the breaking-point, for these suggestions of numbers are capable of a hideous interpretation. Monday the thing dwelt on the figure five; Tuesday it was four; Wednesday it was three; and now today it is two. Five, four, three, two\u2014what can this be save some monstrous and unthinkable counting-off of days? For what purpose, only the evil powers of the universe can know. I spent all the afternoon packing and arranging about my trunks, and now I have taken the night express for Bloemfontein. Flight may be useless, but what else can one do?\n\nJan. 22\u2014Settled at the Orange Hotel, Bloemfontein\u2014a comfortable and excellent place\u2014but the horror followed me. I had shut all the doors and windows, stopped all the keyholes, looked for any possible chinks, and pulled down all the shades\u2014but just before noon I heard a dull tap on one of the window-screens. I waited\u2014and after a long pause another tap came. A second pause, and still another single tap. Raising the shade, I saw that accursed fly, as I had expected. It described one large, slow circle in the air, and then flew out of sight. I was left as weak as a rag, and had to rest on the couch. One! This was clearly the burden of the monster's present message. One tap, one circle. Did this mean one more day for me before some unthinkable doom? Ought I to flee again, or entrench myself here by sealing up the room?\n\nAfter an hour's rest I felt able to act, and ordered a large reserve supply of canned and packaged food\u2014also linen and towels\u2014sent in. Tomorrow I shall not under any circumstances open any crevice of door or window. When the food and linen came the black looked at me queerly, but I no longer care how eccentric\u2014or insane\u2014I may appear. I am hounded by powers worse than the ridicule of mankind. Having received my supplies, I went over every square millimeter of the walls, and stopped up every microscopic opening I could find. At last I feel able to get real sleep.\n\n[Handwriting here becomes irregular, nervous, and very difficult to decipher.]\n\nJan. 23\u2014It is just before noon, and I feel that something very terrible is about to happen. Didn't sleep as late as I expected, even though I got almost no sleep on the train the night before. Up early, and have had trouble getting concentrated on anything\u2014reading or writing. That slow, deliberate counting-off of days is too much for me. I don't know which has gone wild\u2014Nature or my head. Until about eleven I did very little except walk up and down the room.\n\nThen I heard a rustle among the food packages brought in yesterday, and that daemoniac fly crawled out before my eyes. I grabbed something flat and made passes at the thing despite my panic fear, but with no more effect than usual. As I advanced, that blue-winged horror retreated as usual to the table where I had piled my books, and lit for a second on Moore's Diptera of Central and Southern Africa. Then as I followed, it flew over to the mantel clock and lit on the dial near the figure 12. Before I could think up another move it had begun to crawl around the dial very slowly and deliberately\u2014in the direction of the hands. It passed under the minute hand, curved down and up, passed under the hour hand, and finally came to a stop exactly at the figure 12. As it hovered there it fluttered its wings with a buzzing noise.\n\nIs this a portent of some sort? I am getting as superstitious as the blacks. The hour is now a little after eleven. Is twelve the end? I have just one last resort, brought to my mind through utter desperation. Wish I had thought of it before. Recalling that my medicine case contains both of the substances necessary to generate chlorine gas, I have resolved to fill the room with that lethal vapour\u2014asphyxiating the fly while protecting myself with an ammonia-sealed handkerchief tied over my face. Fortunately I have a good supply of ammonia. This crude mask will probably neutralise the acrid chlorine fumes till the insect is dead\u2014or at least helpless enough to crush. But I must be quick. How can I be sure that the thing will not suddenly dart for me before my preparations are complete? I ought not to be stopping to write in this journal.\n\nLater\u2014Both chemicals\u2014hydrochloric acid and manganese dioxide\u2014on the table all ready to mix. I've tied the handkerchief over my nose and mouth, and have a bottle of ammonia ready to keep it soaked until the chlorine is gone. Have battened down both windows. But I don't like the actions of that hybrid daemon. It stays on the clock, but is very slowly crawling around backward from the 12 mark to meet the gradually advancing minute-hand.\n\nIs this to be my last entry in this journal? It would be useless to try to deny what I suspect. Too often a grain of incredible truth lurks behind the wildest and most fantastic of legends. Is the personality of Henry Moore trying to get at me through this blue-winged devil? Is this the fly that bit him, and that in consequence absorbed his consciousness when he died? If so, and if it bites me, will my own personality displace Moore's and enter that buzzing body when I die of the bite later on? Perhaps, though, I need not die even if it gets me. There is always a chance with tryparsamide. And I regret nothing. Moore had to die, be the outcome what it will.\n\nSlightly later.\n\nThe fly has paused on the clock-dial near the 45-minute mark. It is now 11:30. I am saturating the handkerchief over my face with ammonia, and keeping the bottle handy for further applications. This will be the final entry before I mix the acid and manganese and liberate the chlorine. I ought not to be losing time, but it steadies me to get things down on paper. But for this record, I'd have lost all my reason long ago. The fly seems to be getting restless, and the minute-hand is approaching it. Now for the chlorine....\n\n[End of the journal]\n\nOn Sunday, Jan. 24, 1932, after repeated knocking had failed to gain any response from the eccentric man in Room 303 of the Orange Hotel, a black attendant entered with a pass key and at once fled shrieking downstairs to tell the clerk what he had found. The clerk, after notifying the police, summoned the manager; and the latter accompanied Constable De Witt, Coroner Bogaert, and Dr. Van Keulen to the fatal room.\n\nThe occupant lay dead on the floor\u2014his face upward, and bound with a handkerchief which smelled strongly of ammonia. Under this covering the features shewed an expression of stark, utter fear which transmitted itself to the observers On the back of the neck Dr. Van Keulen found a virulent insect bite\u2014dark red, with a purple ring around it\u2014which suggested a tsetse-fly or something less innocuous. An examination indicated that death must be due to heart-failure induced by sheer fright rather than to the bite\u2014though a subsequent autopsy indicated that the germ of trypanosomiasis had been introduced into the system.\n\nOn the table were several objects\u2014a worn leather blank-book containing the journal just described, a pen, writing-pad, and open inkwell, a doctor's medicine case with the initials \"T. S.\" marked in gold, bottles of ammonia and hydrochloric acid, and a tumbler about a quarter full of black manganese dioxide. The ammonia bottle demanded a second look because something besides the fluid seemed to be in it. Looking closer, Coroner Bogaert saw that the alien occupant was a fly.\n\nIt seemed to be some sort of hybrid with vague tsetse affiliations, but its wings\u2014shewing faintly blue despite the action of the strong ammonia\u2014were a complete puzzle. Something about it waked a faint memory of newspaper reading in Dr. Van Keulen\u2014a memory which the journal was soon to confirm. Its lower parts seemed to have been stained with ink, so thoroughly that even the ammonia had not bleached them. Possibly it had fallen at one time into the inkwell, though the wings were untouched. But how had it managed to fall into the narrow-necked ammonia bottle? It was as if the creature had deliberately crawled in and committed suicide!\n\nBut the strangest thing of all was what Constable De Witt noticed on the smooth white ceiling overhead as his eyes roved about curiously. At his cry the other three followed his gaze\u2014even Dr. Van Keulen, who had for some time been thumbing through the worn leather book with an expression of mixed horror, fascination, and incredulity. The thing on the ceiling was a series of shaky, straggling ink-tracks, such as might have been made by the crawling of some ink-drenched insect. At once everyone thought of the stains on the fly so oddly found in the ammonia bottle.\n\nBut these were no ordinary ink-tracks. Even a first glance revealed something hauntingly familiar about them, and closer inspection brought gasps of startled wonder from all four observers. Coroner Bogaert instinctively looked around the room to see if there were any conceivable instrument or arrangement of piled-up furniture which could make it possible for those straggling marks to have been drawn by human agency. Finding nothing of the sort, he resumed his curious and almost awestruck upward glance.\n\nFor beyond a doubt these inky smudges formed definite letters of the alphabet\u2014letters coherently arranged in English words. The doctor was the first to make them out clearly, and the others listened breathlessly as he recited the insane-sounding message so incredibly scrawled in a place no human hand could reach:\n\n\"SEE MY JOURNAL\u2014IT GOT ME FIRST\u2014I DIED\u2014THEN I SAW I WAS IN IT\u2014THE BLACKS ARE RIGHT\u2014STRANGE POWERS IN NATURE\u2014NOW I WILL DROWN WHAT IS LEFT\u2014\"\n\nPresently, amidst the puzzled hush that followed, Dr. Van Keulen commenced reading aloud from the worn leather journal.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Poetry An American to Mother England by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\u2003conquering\n\n\u2003Mother! by thy mighty hand\n\n\u2003Was carv'd from savage wilds my native land:\n\n\u2003Thy matchless sons the firm foundation laid;\n\n\u2003Thy matchless arts the nascent nation made:\n\n\u2003By thy just laws the young republic grew,\n\n\u2003And thro' thy greatness, kindred greatness knew:\n\n\u2003What man that springs from thy untainted line\n\n\u2003But sees Columbia's virtues all as thine?\n\n\u2003Whilst nameless multitudes upon our shore\n\n\u2003From the dim corners of creation pour,\n\n\u2003Whilst mongrel slaves crawl hither to partake\n\n\u2003Of Saxon liberty they could not make,\n\n\u2003From such an alien crew in grief I turn,\n\n\u2003And for the mother's voice of Britain burn.\n\n\u2003England! Can aught remove the cherish'd chain\n\n\u2003That binds my spirit to thy blest domain?\n\n\u2003Can Revolution's bitter precepts sway\n\n\u2003The soul that must the ties of race obey?\n\n\u2003Create a new Columbia if ye will;\n\n\u2003The flesh that forms me is Britannic still!\n\n\u2003Hail! oaken shades, and meads of dewy green,\n\n\u2003So oft in sleep, yet ne'er in waking seen.\n\n\u2003Peal out, ye ancient chimes, from vine-clad tow'r\n\n\u2003Where pray'd my fathers in a vanish'd hour:\n\n\u2003What countless years of rev'rence can ye claim\n\n\u2003From bygone worshippers that bore my name!\n\n\u2003Their forms are crumbling in the vaults around,\n\n\u2003Whilst I, across the sea, but dream the sound.\n\n\u2003Return, Sweet Vision! Let me glimpse again\n\n\u2003The stone-built abbey, rising o'er the plain;\n\n\u2003The neighb'ring village with its sun-show'r'd square;\n\n\u2003The shaded mill-stream, and the forest fair,\n\n\u2003The hedge-lin'd lane, that leads to rustic cot\n\n\u2003Where sweet contentment is the peasant's lot;\n\n\u2003The mystic grove, by Druid wraiths possess'd,\n\n\u2003The flow'ring fields, with fairy-castles blest:\n\n\u2003And the old manor-house, sedate and dark,\n\n\u2003Set in the shadows of the wooded park.\n\n\u2003Can this be dreaming? Must my eyelids close\n\n\u2003That I may catch the fragrance of the rose?\n\n\u2003Is it in fancy that the midnight vale\n\n\u2003Thrills with the warblings of the nightingale?\n\n\u2003A golden moon bewitching radiance yields,\n\n\u2003And England's fairies trip o'er England's fields.\n\n\u2003England! Old England! in my love for thee\n\n\u2003No dream is mine, but blessed memory;\n\n\u2003Such haunting images and hidden fires\n\n\u2003Course with the bounding blood of British sires:\n\n\u2003From British bodies, minds, and souls I come,\n\n\u2003And from them draw the vision of their home.\n\n\u2003Awake, Columbia! scorn the vulgar age\n\n\u2003That bids thee slight thy lordly heritage.\n\n\u2003Let not the wide Atlantic's wildest wave\n\n\u2003Burst the blest bonds that fav'ring Nature gave:\n\n\u2003Connecting surges 'twixt the nations run,\n\n\u2003Our Saxon souls dissolving into one!\n\n\u2003The Ancient Track\n\n\u2003There was no hand to hold me back\n\n\u2003That night I found the ancient track\n\n\u2003Over the hill, and strained to see\n\n\u2003The fields that teased my memory.\n\n\u2003This tree, that wall\u2014I knew them well,\n\n\u2003And all the roofs and orchards fell\n\n\u2003Familiarly upon my mind\n\n\u2003As from a past not far behind.\n\n\u2003I knew what shadows would be cast\n\n\u2003When the late moon came up at last\n\n\u2003From back of Zaman's Hill, and how\n\n\u2003The vale would shine three hours from now.\n\n\u2003And when the path grew steep and high,\n\n\u2003And seemed to end against the sky,\n\n\u2003I had no fear of what might rest\n\n\u2003Beyond that silhouetted crest.\n\n\u2003Straight on I walked, while all the night\n\n\u2003Grew pale with phosphorescent light,\n\n\u2003And wall and farmhouse gable glowed\n\n\u2003Unearthly by the climbing road.\n\n\u2003There was the milestone that I knew\u2014\n\n\u2003\"Two miles to Dunwich\"\u2014now the view\n\n\u2003Of distant spire and roofs would dawn\n\n\u2003With ten more upward paces gone....\n\n\u2003There was no hand to hold me back\n\n\u2003That night I found the ancient track,\n\n\u2003And reached the crest to see outspread\n\n\u2003A valley of the lost and dead:\n\n\u2003And over Zaman's Hill the horn\n\n\u2003Of a malignant moon was born,\n\n\u2003To light the weeds and vines that grew\n\n\u2003On ruined walls I never knew.\n\n\u2003The fox-fire glowed in field and bog,\n\n\u2003And unknown waters spewed a fog\n\n\u2003Whose curling talons mocked the thought\n\n\u2003That I had ever known this spot.\n\n\u2003Too well I saw from the mad scene\n\n\u2003That my loved past had never been\u2014\n\n\u2003Nor was I now upon the trail\n\n\u2003Descending to that long-dead vale.\n\n\u2003Around was fog\u2014ahead, the spray\n\n\u2003Of star-streams in the Milky Way....\n\n\u2003There was no hand to hold me back\n\n\u2003That night I found the ancient track.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Arcadia by Head Balledup ]\n\n\u2003O give me the life of the village,\n\n\u2003Uninhibited, free, and sweet;\n\n\u2003The place where the arts all flourish,\n\n\u2003Grove Court and Christopher Street.\n\n\u2003I am sick of the old conventions,\n\n\u2003And critics who will not praise,\n\n\u2003So sing ho for the open spaces,\n\n\u2003And aesthetes with kindly ways.\n\n\u2003Here every bard is a genius,\n\n\u2003And artists are Raphaels,\n\n\u2003And above the roofs of Patchin Place\n\n\u2003The Muse of Talent dwells.\n\n\u2003Astrophobos\n\n\u2003In the midnight heavens burning\n\n\u2003Thro' ethereal deeps afar,\n\n\u2003Once I watch'd with restless yearning\n\n\u2003An alluring, aureate star;\n\n\u2003Ev'ry eye aloft returning,\n\n\u2003Gleaming nigh the Arctic car.\n\n\u2003Mystic waves of beauty blended\n\n\u2003With the gorgeous golden rays;\n\n\u2003Phantasies of bliss descended\n\n\u2003In a myrrh'd Elysian haze;\n\n\u2003And in lyre-born chords extended\n\n\u2003Harmonies of Lydian lays.\n\n\u2003There (thought I) lies scenes of pleasure,\n\n\u2003Where the free and blessed dwell,\n\n\u2003And each moment bears a treasure\n\n\u2003Freighted with a lotus-spell,\n\n\u2003And there floats a liquid measure\n\n\u2003From the lute of Israfel.\n\n\u2003There (I told myself) were shining\n\n\u2003Worlds of happiness unknown,\n\n\u2003Peace and Innocence entwining\n\n\u2003By the Crowned Virtue's throne;\n\n\u2003Men of light, their thoughts refining\n\n\u2003Purer, fairer, than our own.\n\n\u2003Thus I mus'd, when o'er the vision\n\n\u2003Crept a red delirious change;\n\n\u2003Hope dissolving to derision,\n\n\u2003Beauty to distortion strange;\n\n\u2003Hymnic chords in weird collision,\n\n\u2003Spectral sights in endless range.\n\n\u2003Crimson burn'd the star of sadness\n\n\u2003As behind the beams I peer'd;\n\n\u2003All was woe that seem'd but gladness\n\n\u2003Ere my gaze with truth was sear'd;\n\n\u2003Cacodaemons, mir'd with madness,\n\n\u2003Thro' the fever'd flick'ring leer'd.\n\n\u2003Now I know the fiendish fable\n\n\u2003That the golden glitter bore;\n\n\u2003Now I shun the spangled sable\n\n\u2003That I watch'd and lov'd before;\n\n\u2003But the horror, set and stable,\n\n\u2003Haunts my soul for evermore.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ The Cats ]\n\n\u2003Babels of blocks to the high heavens tow'ring,\n\n\u2003Flames of futility swirling below;\n\n\u2003Poisonous fungi in brick and stone flow'ring,\n\n\u2003Lanterns that shudder and death-lights that glow.\n\n\u2003Black monstrous bridges across oily rivers,\n\n\u2003Cobwebs of cable by nameless things spun;\n\n\u2003Catacomb deeps whose dank chaos delivers\n\n\u2003Streams of live foetor, that rots in the sun.\n\n\u2003Colour and splendour, disease and decaying,\n\n\u2003Shrieking and ringing and scrambling insane,\n\n\u2003Rabbles exotic to stranger-gods praying,\n\n\u2003Jumbles of odour that stifle the brain.\n\n\u2003Legions of cats from the alleys nocturnal,\n\n\u2003Howling and lean in the glare of the moon,\n\n\u2003Screaming the future with mouthings infernal,\n\n\u2003Yelling the burden of Pluto's red rune.\n\n\u2003Tall tow'rs and pyramids ivy'd and crumbling,\n\n\u2003Bats that swoop low in the weed-cumber'd streets;\n\n\u2003Bleak broken bridges o'er rivers whose rumbling\n\n\u2003Joins with no voice as the thick tide retreats.\n\n\u2003Belfries that blackly against the moon totter,\n\n\u2003Caverns whose mouths are by mosses effac'd,\n\n\u2003And living to answer the wind and the water,\n\n\u2003Only the lean cats that howl in the waste!\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Christmas ]\n\n\u2003The cottage hearth beams warm and bright,\n\n\u2003The candles gaily glow;\n\n\u2003The stars emit a kinder light\n\n\u2003Above the drifted snow.\n\n\u2003Down from the sky a magic steals\n\n\u2003To glad the passing year,\n\n\u2003And belfries sing with joyous peals,\n\n\u2003For Christmastide is here!\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings\n\n\u2003to Annie E. P. Gamwell\n\n\u2003As when a pigeon, loos'd in realms remote,\n\n\u2003Takes instant wing, and seeks his native cote,\n\n\u2003So speed my blessings from a barb'rous clime\n\n\u2003To thee and Providence at Christmas time!\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings\n\n\u2003to Eugene B. Kuntz et al.\n\n\u2003May good St. Nick, like as a bird of night,\n\n\u2003Bring thee rich blessings in his annual flight;\n\n\u2003Long by thy chimney rest his pond'rous pack,\n\n\u2003And leave with lessen'd weight upon his back!\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings to Felis\n\n\u2003(Frank Belknap Long's cat)\n\n\u2003Little Tiger, burning bright\n\n\u2003With a subtle Blakeish light,\n\n\u2003Tell what visions have their home\n\n\u2003In those eyes of flame and chrome!\n\n\u2003Children vex thee\u2014thoughtless, gay\u2014\n\n\u2003Holding when thou wouldst away:\n\n\u2003What dark lore is that which thou,\n\n\u2003Spitting, mixest with thy meow?\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings to Felis\n\n\u2003(Frank Belknap Long's cat)\n\n\u2003Haughty Sphinx, whose amber eyes\n\n\u2003Hold the secrets of the skies,\n\n\u2003As thou ripplest in thy grace,\n\n\u2003Round the chairs and chimney-place,\n\n\u2003Scorn on thy patrician face:\n\n\u2003Hiss not harsh, nor use thy claws\n\n\u2003On the hand that gives applause\u2014\n\n\u2003Goodwill only doth abide\n\n\u2003In these lines at Christmastide!\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings to Laurie A. Sawyer\n\n\u2003As Christmas snows (as yet a poet's trope)\n\n\u2003Call back one's bygone days of youth and hope,\n\n\u2003Four metrick lines I send\u2014they're quite enough\u2014\n\n\u2003Tho' once I fancy'd I could write the stuff!\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings to Rheinhart Kleiner\n\n\u2003St. John, whose art sublimely shines\n\n\u2003In liquid odes and melting lines,\n\n\u2003Let Theobald his regard express\n\n\u2003In verse of lesser loveliness.\n\n\u2003As now in regal state appear\n\n\u2003The festive hours of Yuletide cheer,\n\n\u2003My strongest wish is that you may\n\n\u2003Feel ev'ry blessing of the day!\n\n\u2003Christmas Greetings to Sonia H. Greene\n\n\u2003Once more the ancient feast returns,\n\n\u2003And the bright hearth domestic burns\n\n\u2003With Yuletide's added blaze;\n\n\u2003So, too, may all your joys increase\n\n\u2003Midst floods of mem'ry, love, and peace,\n\n\u2003And dreams of Halcyon days.\n\n[ The City ]\n\n\u2003It was golden and splendid,\n\n\u2003That City of light;\n\n\u2003A vision suspended\n\n\u2003In deeps of the night;\n\n\u2003A region of wonder and glory, whose temples were marble and white.\n\n\u2003I remember the season\n\n\u2003It dawn'd on my gaze;\n\n\u2003The mad time of unreason,\n\n\u2003The brain-numbing days\n\n\u2003When Winter, white-sheeted and ghastly, stalks onward to torture and craze.\n\n\u2003More lovely than Zion\n\n\u2003It shone in the sky,\n\n\u2003When the beams of Orion\n\n\u2003Beclouded my eye,\n\n\u2003Bringing sleep that was fill'd with dim mem'ries of moments obscure and gone by.\n\n\u2003Its mansions were stately\n\n\u2003With carvings made fair,\n\n\u2003Each rising sedately\n\n\u2003On terraces rare,\n\n\u2003And the gardens were fragrant and bright with strange miracles blossoming there.\n\n\u2003The avenues lur'd me\n\n\u2003With vistas sublime;\n\n\u2003Tall arches assur'd me\n\n\u2003That once on a time\n\n\u2003I had wander'd in rapture beneath them, and bask'd in the Halcyon clime.\n\n\u2003On the plazas were standing\n\n\u2003A sculptur'd array;\n\n\u2003Long-bearded, commanding,\n\n\u2003Grave men in their day\u2014\n\n\u2003But one stood dismantled and broken, its bearded face batter'd away.\n\n\u2003In that city effulgent\n\n\u2003No mortal I saw;\n\n\u2003But my fancy, indulgent\n\n\u2003To memory's law,\n\n\u2003Linger'd long on the forms in the plazas, and eyed their stone features with awe.\n\n\u2003I fann'd the faint ember\n\n\u2003That glow'd in my mind,\n\n\u2003And strove to remember\n\n\u2003The aeons behind;\n\n\u2003To rove thro' infinity freely, and visit the past unconfin'd.\n\n\u2003Then the horrible warning\n\n\u2003Upon my soul sped\n\n\u2003Like the ominous morning\n\n\u2003That rises in red,\n\n\u2003And in panic I flew from the knowledge of terrors forgotten and dead.\n\n\u2003The Conscript\n\n\u2003I am a peaceful working man\u2014\n\n\u2003I am not wise or strong\u2014\n\n\u2003But I can follow Nature's plan\n\n\u2003In labour, rest, and song.\n\n\u2003One day the men that rule us all\n\n\u2003Decided we must die,\n\n\u2003Else pride and freedom surely fall\n\n\u2003In the dim bye and bye.\n\n\u2003They told me I must write my name\n\n\u2003Upon a scroll of death;\n\n\u2003That some day I should rise to fame\n\n\u2003By giving up my breath.\n\n\u2003I do not know what I have done\n\n\u2003That I should thus be bound\n\n\u2003To wait for tortures one by one,\n\n\u2003And then an unmark'd mound.\n\n\u2003I hate no man, and yet they say\n\n\u2003That I must fight and kill;\n\n\u2003That I must suffer day by day\n\n\u2003To please a master's will.\n\n\u2003I used to have a conscience free,\n\n\u2003But now they bid it rest;\n\n\u2003They've made a number out of me,\n\n\u2003And I must ne'er protest.\n\n\u2003They tell of trenches, long and deep,\n\n\u2003Fill'd with the mangled slain;\n\n\u2003They talk till I can scarcely sleep,\n\n\u2003So reeling is my brain.\n\n\u2003They tell of filth, and blood, and woe;\n\n\u2003Of things beyond belief;\n\n\u2003Of things that make me tremble so\n\n\u2003With mingled fright and grief.\n\n\u2003I do not know what I shall do\u2014\n\n\u2003Is not the law unjust?\n\n\u2003I can't do what they want me to,\n\n\u2003And yet they say I must!\n\n\u2003Each day my doom doth nearer bring;\n\n\u2003Each day the State prepares;\n\n\u2003Sometimes I feel a watching thing\n\n\u2003That stares, and stares, and stares.\n\n\u2003I never seem to sleep\u2014my head\n\n\u2003Whirls in the queerest way.\n\n\u2003Why am I chosen to be dead\n\n\u2003Upon some fateful day?\n\n\u2003Yet hark\u2014some fibre is o'erwrought\u2014\n\n\u2003A giddying wine I quaff\u2014\n\n\u2003Things seem so odd, I can do naught\n\n\u2003But laugh, and laugh, and laugh!\n\n\u2003Dead Passion's Flame\n\n\u2003A Poem by Blank Frailty\n\n\u2003Ah, Passion, like a voice\u2014that buds!\n\n\u2003With many thorns... that sharply stick:\n\n\u2003Recalls to me the longing of our bloods...\n\n\u2003And\u2014makes my wearied heart requick...!\n\n[ Despair ]\n\n\u2003O'er the midnight moorlands crying,\n\n\u2003Thro' the cypress forests sighing,\n\n\u2003In the night-wind madly flying,\n\n\u2003Hellish forms with streaming hair;\n\n\u2003In the barren branches creaking,\n\n\u2003By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking,\n\n\u2003Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking;\n\n\u2003Damn'd daemons of despair.\n\n\u2003Once, I think I half remember,\n\n\u2003Ere the grey skies of November\n\n\u2003Quench'd my youth's aspiring ember,\n\n\u2003Liv'd there such a thing as bliss;\n\n\u2003Skies that now are dark were beaming,\n\n\u2003Gold and azure, splendid seeming\n\n\u2003Till I learn'd it all was dreaming\u2014\n\n\u2003Deadly drowsiness of Dis.\n\n\u2003But the stream of Time, swift flowing,\n\n\u2003Brings the torment of half-knowing\u2014\n\n\u2003Dimly rushing, blindly going\n\n\u2003Past the never-trodden lea;\n\n\u2003And the voyager, repining,\n\n\u2003Sees the wicked death-fires shining,\n\n\u2003Hears the wicked petrel's whining\n\n\u2003As he helpless drifts to sea.\n\n\u2003Evil wings in ether beating;\n\n\u2003Vultures at the spirit eating;\n\n\u2003Things unseen forever fleeting\n\n\u2003Black against the leering sky.\n\n\u2003Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,\n\n\u2003Clawing fiends of future sadness,\n\n\u2003Mingle in a cloud of madness\n\n\u2003Ever on the soul to lie.\n\n\u2003Thus the living, lone and sobbing,\n\n\u2003In the throes of anguish throbbing,\n\n\u2003With the loathsome Furies robbing\n\n\u2003Night and noon of peace and rest.\n\n\u2003But beyond the groans and grating\n\n\u2003Of abhorrent Life, is waiting\n\n\u2003Sweet Oblivion, culminating\n\n\u2003All the years of fruitless quest.\n\n[ Fact and Fancy ]\n\n\u2003How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind\n\n\u2003Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind;\n\n\u2003Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude,\n\n\u2003And wreck the solace of the poet's mood!\n\n\u2003Young Zeno, practic'd in the Stoic's art,\n\n\u2003Rejects the language of the glowing heart;\n\n\u2003Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws;\n\n\u2003Condemns th' effect whilst looking for the cause;\n\n\u2003Freezes poor Ovid in an ic'd review,\n\n\u2003And sneers because his fables are untrue!\n\n\u2003In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,\n\n\u2003But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!\n\n\u2003Stay! vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast\n\n\u2003The graceful legends of the story'd past;\n\n\u2003Whose tongue in censure flays th' embellish'd page,\n\n\u2003And scolds the comforts of a dreary age:\n\n\u2003Would'st strip the foliage from the vital bough\n\n\u2003Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou?\n\n\u2003Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye\n\n\u2003Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky;\n\n\u2003Finds Sylphs and Dryads in the waving trees,\n\n\u2003And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze;\n\n\u2003For whom the stream a cheering carol sings,\n\n\u2003While reedy music by the fountain rings;\n\n\u2003To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide\n\n\u2003Till friendly presence fills the rising tide.\n\n\u2003Happy is he, who void of learning's woes,\n\n\u2003Th' ethereal life of body'd Nature knows:\n\n\u2003I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems,\n\n\u2003And flout his gravity in sunlit dreams!\n\n[ Festival ]\n\n\u2003There is snow on the ground,\n\n\u2003And the valleys are cold,\n\n\u2003And a midnight profound\n\n\u2003Blackly squats o'er the wold;\n\n\u2003But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feastings unhallow'd and old.\n\n\u2003There is death in the clouds,\n\n\u2003There is fear in the night,\n\n\u2003For the dead in their shrouds\n\n\u2003Hail the sun's turning flight,\n\n\u2003And chant wild in the woods as they dance round a Yule-altar fungous and white.\n\n\u2003To no gale of earth's kind\n\n\u2003Sways the forest of oak,\n\n\u2003Where the sick boughs entwin'd\n\n\u2003By mad mistletoes choke,\n\n\u2003For these pow'rs are the pow'rs of the dark, from the graves of the lost Druid-folk.\n\n\u2003And mayst thou to such deeds\n\n\u2003Be an abbot and priest,\n\n\u2003Singing cannibal greeds\n\n\u2003At each devil-wrought feast,\n\n\u2003And to all the incredulous world shewing dimly the sign of the beast.\n\n[ Fungi from Yuggoth ]\n\n\u2003The place was dark and dusty and half-lost\n\n\u2003In tangles of old alleys near the quays,\n\n\u2003Reeking of strange things brought in from the seas,\n\n\u2003And with queer curls of fog that west winds tossed.\n\n\u2003Small lozenge panes, obscured by smoke and frost,\n\n\u2003Just shewed the books, in piles like twisted trees,\n\n\u2003Rotting from floor to roof\u2014congeries\n\n\u2003Of crumbling elder lore at little cost.\n\n\u2003I entered, charmed, and from a cobwebbed heap\n\n\u2003Took up the nearest tome and thumbed it through,\n\n\u2003Trembling at curious words that seemed to keep\n\n\u2003Some secret, monstrous if one only knew.\n\n\u2003Then, looking for some seller old in craft,\n\n\u2003I could find nothing but a voice that laughed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 138", + "text": "\u2003I held the book beneath my coat, at pains\n\n\u2003To hide the thing from sight in such a place;\n\n\u2003Hurrying through the ancient harbor lanes\n\n\u2003With often-turning head and nervous pace.\n\n\u2003Dull, furtive windows in old tottering brick\n\n\u2003Peered at me oddly as I hastened by,\n\n\u2003And thinking what they sheltered, I grew sick\n\n\u2003For a redeeming glimpse of clean blue sky.\n\n\u2003No one had seen me take the thing\u2014but still\n\n\u2003A blank laugh echoed in my whirling head,\n\n\u2003And I could guess what nighted worlds of ill\n\n\u2003Lurked in that volume I had coveted.\n\n\u2003The way grew strange\u2014the walls alike and madding\u2014\n\n\u2003And far behind me, unseen feet were padding." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 139", + "text": "\u2003I do not know what windings in the waste\n\n\u2003Of those strange sea-lanes brought me home once more,\n\n\u2003But on my porch I trembled, white with haste\n\n\u2003To get inside and bolt the heavy door.\n\n\u2003I had the book that told the hidden way\n\n\u2003Across the void and through the space-hung screens\n\n\u2003That hold the undimensioned worlds at bay,\n\n\u2003And keep lost aeons to their own demesnes.\n\n\u2003At last the key was mine to those vague visions\n\n\u2003Of sunset spires and twilight woods that brood\n\n\u2003Dim in the gulfs beyond this earth's precisions,\n\n\u2003Lurking as memories of infinitude.\n\n\u2003The key was mine, but as I sat there mumbling,\n\n\u2003The attic window shook with a faint fumbling." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 140", + "text": "\u2003The day had come again, when as a child\n\n\u2003I saw\u2014just once\u2014that hollow of old oaks,\n\n\u2003Grey with a ground-mist that enfolds and chokes\n\n\u2003The slinking shapes which madness has defiled.\n\n\u2003It was the same\u2014an herbage rank and wild\n\n\u2003Clings round an altar whose carved sign invokes\n\n\u2003That Nameless One to whom a thousand smokes\n\n\u2003Rose, aeons gone, from unclean towers up-piled.\n\n\u2003I saw the body spread on that dank stone,\n\n\u2003And knew those things which feasted were not men;\n\n\u2003I knew this strange, grey world was not my own,\n\n\u2003But Yuggoth, past the starry voids\u2014and then\n\n\u2003The body shrieked at me with a dead cry,\n\n\u2003And all too late I knew that it was I!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 141", + "text": "\u2003The daemon said that he would take me home\n\n\u2003To the pale, shadowy land I half recalled\n\n\u2003As a high place of stair and terrace, walled\n\n\u2003With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,\n\n\u2003While miles below a maze of dome on dome\n\n\u2003And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled.\n\n\u2003Once more, he told me, I would stand enthralled\n\n\u2003On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.\n\n\u2003All this he promised, and through sunset's gate\n\n\u2003He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame,\n\n\u2003And red-gold thrones of gods without a name\n\n\u2003Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.\n\n\u2003Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:\n\n\u2003\"Here was your home,\" he mocked, \"when you had sight!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 142", + "text": "\u2003We found the lamp inside those hollow cliffs\n\n\u2003Whose chiseled sign no priest in Thebes could read,\n\n\u2003And from whose caverns frightened hieroglyphs\n\n\u2003Warned every creature of earth's breed.\n\n\u2003No more was there\u2014just that one brazen bowl\n\n\u2003With traces of a curious oil within;\n\n\u2003Fretted with some obscurely patterned scroll,\n\n\u2003And symbols hinting vaguely of strange sin.\n\n\u2003Little the fears of forty centuries meant\n\n\u2003To us as we bore off our slender spoil,\n\n\u2003And when we scanned it in our darkened tent\n\n\u2003We struck a match to test the ancient oil.\n\n\u2003It blazed\u2014great God!... But the vast shapes we saw\n\n\u2003In that mad flash have seared our lives with awe." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 143", + "text": "\u2003The great hill hung close over the old town,\n\n\u2003A precipice against the main street's end;\n\n\u2003Green, tall, and wooded, looking darkly down\n\n\u2003Upon the steeple at the highway bend.\n\n\u2003Two hundred years the whispers had been heard\n\n\u2003About what happened on the man-shunned slope\u2014\n\n\u2003Tales of an oddly mangled deer or bird,\n\n\u2003Or of lost boys whose kin had ceased to hope.\n\n\u2003One day the mail-man found no village there,\n\n\u2003Nor were its folk or houses seen again;\n\n\u2003People came out from Aylesbury to stare\u2014\n\n\u2003Yet they all told the mail-man it was plain\n\n\u2003That he was mad for saying he had spied\n\n\u2003The great hill's gluttonous eyes, and jaws stretched wide." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 144", + "text": "\u2003Ten miles from Arkham I had struck the trail\n\n\u2003That rides the cliff-edge over Boynton Beach,\n\n\u2003And hoped that just at sunset I could reach\n\n\u2003The crest that looks on Innsmouth in the vale.\n\n\u2003Far out at sea was a retreating sail,\n\n\u2003White as hard years of ancient winds could bleach,\n\n\u2003But evil with some portent beyond speech,\n\n\u2003So that I did not wave my hand or hail.\n\n\u2003Sails out of lnnsmouth! echoing old renown\n\n\u2003Of long-dead times. But now a too-swift night\n\n\u2003Is closing in, and I have reached the height\n\n\u2003Whence I so often scan the distant town.\n\n\u2003The spires and roofs are there\u2014but look! The gloom\n\n\u2003Sinks on dark lanes, as lightless as the tomb!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 145", + "text": "\u2003It was the city I had known before;\n\n\u2003The ancient, leprous town where mongrel throngs\n\n\u2003Chant to strange gods, and beat unhallowed gongs\n\n\u2003In crypts beneath foul alleys near the shore.\n\n\u2003The rotting, fish-eyed houses leered at me\n\n\u2003From where they leaned, drunk and half-animate,\n\n\u2003As edging through the filth I passed the gate\n\n\u2003To the black courtyard where the man would be.\n\n\u2003The dark walls closed me in, and loud I cursed\n\n\u2003That ever I had come to such a den,\n\n\u2003When suddenly a score of windows burst\n\n\u2003Into wild light, and swarmed with dancing men:\n\n\u2003Mad, soundless revels of the dragging dead\u2014\n\n\u2003And not a corpse had either hands or head!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 146", + "text": "\u2003They took me slumming, where gaunt walls of brick\n\n\u2003Bulge outward with a viscous stored-up evil,\n\n\u2003And twisted faces, thronging foul and thick,\n\n\u2003Wink messages to alien god and devil.\n\n\u2003A million fires were blazing in the streets,\n\n\u2003And from flat roofs a furtive few would fly\n\n\u2003Bedraggled birds into the yawning sky\n\n\u2003While hidden drums droned on with measured beats.\n\n\u2003I knew those fires were brewing monstrous things,\n\n\u2003And that those birds of space had been Outside\u2014\n\n\u2003I guessed to what dark planet's crypts they plied,\n\n\u2003And what they brought from Thog beneath their wings.\n\n\u2003The others laughed\u2014till struck too mute to speak\n\n\u2003By what they glimpsed in one bird's evil beak." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 147", + "text": "\u2003Farmer Seth Atwood was past eighty when\n\n\u2003He tried to sink that deep well by his door,\n\n\u2003With only Eb to help him bore and bore.\n\n\u2003We laughed, and hoped he'd soon be sane again.\n\n\u2003And yet, instead, young Eb went crazy, too,\n\n\u2003So that they shipped him to the county farm.\n\n\u2003Seth bricked the well-mouth up as tight as glue\u2014\n\n\u2003Then hacked an artery in his gnarled left arm.\n\n\u2003After the funeral we felt bound to get\n\n\u2003Out to that well and rip the bricks away,\n\n\u2003But all we saw were iron hand-holds set\n\n\u2003Down a black hole deeper than we could say.\n\n\u2003And yet we put the bricks back\u2014for we found\n\n\u2003The hole too deep for any line to sound." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 148", + "text": "\u2003They told me not to take the Briggs' Hill path\n\n\u2003That used to be the highroad through to Zoar,\n\n\u2003For Goody Watkins, hanged in seventeen-four,\n\n\u2003Had left a certain monstrous aftermath.\n\n\u2003Yet when I disobeyed, and had in view\n\n\u2003The vine-hung cottage by the great rock slope,\n\n\u2003I could not think of elms or hempen rope,\n\n\u2003But wondered why the house still seemed so new.\n\n\u2003Stopping a while to watch the fading day,\n\n\u2003I heard faint howls, as from a room upstairs,\n\n\u2003When through the ivied panes one sunset ray\n\n\u2003Struck in, and caught the howler unawares.\n\n\u2003I glimpsed\u2014and ran in frenzy from the place,\n\n\u2003And from a four-pawed thing with human face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 149", + "text": "\u2003The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires\n\n\u2003And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,\n\n\u2003Opens great gates to some forgotten year\n\n\u2003Of elder splendours and divine desires.\n\n\u2003Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,\n\n\u2003Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;\n\n\u2003A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear\n\n\u2003Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.\n\n\u2003It is the land where beauty's meaning flowers;\n\n\u2003Where every unplaced memory has a source;\n\n\u2003Where the great river Time begins its course\n\n\u2003Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.\n\n\u2003Dreams bring us close\u2014but ancient lore repeats\n\n\u2003That human tread has never soiled these streets." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 150", + "text": "\u2003It is a certain hour of twilight glooms,\n\n\u2003Mostly in autumn, when the star-wind pours\n\n\u2003Down hilltop streets, deserted out-of-doors,\n\n\u2003But shewing early lamplight from snug rooms.\n\n\u2003The dead leaves rush in strange, fantastic twists,\n\n\u2003And chimney-smoke whirls round with alien grace,\n\n\u2003Heeding geometries of outer space,\n\n\u2003While Fomalhaut peers in through southward mists.\n\n\u2003This is the hour when moonstruck poets know\n\n\u2003What fungi sprout in Yuggoth, and what scents\n\n\u2003And tints of flowers fill Nithon's continents,\n\n\u2003Such as in no poor earthly garden blow.\n\n\u2003Yet for each dream these winds to us convey,\n\n\u2003A dozen more of ours they sweep away!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 151", + "text": "\u2003Deep in my dream the great bird whispered queerly\n\n\u2003Of the black cone amid the polar waste;\n\n\u2003Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,\n\n\u2003By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.\n\n\u2003Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,\n\n\u2003And only pale auroras and faint suns\n\n\u2003Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources\n\n\u2003Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.\n\n\u2003If men should glimpse it, they would merely wonder\n\n\u2003What tricky mound of Nature's build they spied;\n\n\u2003But the bird told of vaster parts, that under\n\n\u2003The mile-deep ice-shroud crouch and brood and bide.\n\n\u2003God help the dreamer whose mad visions shew\n\n\u2003Those dead eyes set in crystal gulfs below!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 152", + "text": "\u2003The house was old, with tangled wings outthrown,\n\n\u2003Of which no one could ever half keep track,\n\n\u2003And in a small room somewhat near the back\n\n\u2003Was an odd window sealed with ancient stone.\n\n\u2003There, in a dream-plagued childhood, quite alone\n\n\u2003I used to go, where night reigned vague and black;\n\n\u2003Parting the cobwebs with a curious lack\n\n\u2003Of fear, and with a wonder each time grown.\n\n\u2003One later day I brought the masons there\n\n\u2003To find what view my dim forbears had shunned,\n\n\u2003But as they pierced the stone, a rush of air\n\n\u2003Burst from the alien voids that yawned beyond.\n\n\u2003They fled\u2014but I peered through and found unrolled\n\n\u2003All the wild worlds of which my dreams had told." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 153", + "text": "\u2003There were great steppes, and rocky tablelands\n\n\u2003Stretching half-limitless in starlit night,\n\n\u2003With alien campfires shedding feeble light\n\n\u2003On beasts with tinkling bells, in shaggy bands.\n\n\u2003Far to the south the plain sloped low and wide\n\n\u2003To a dark zigzag line of wall that lay\n\n\u2003Like a huge python of some primal day\n\n\u2003Which endless time had chilled and petrified.\n\n\u2003I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air,\n\n\u2003And wondered where I was and how I came,\n\n\u2003When a cloaked form against a campfire's glare\n\n\u2003Rose and approached, and called me by my name.\n\n\u2003Staring at that dead face beneath the hood,\n\n\u2003I ceased to hope\u2014because I understood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 154", + "text": "\u2003Beyond that wall, whose ancient masonry\n\n\u2003Reached almost to the sky in moss-thick towers,\n\n\u2003There would be terraced gardens, rich with flowers,\n\n\u2003And flutter of bird and butterfly and bee.\n\n\u2003There would be walks, and bridges arching over\n\n\u2003Warm lotos-pools reflecting temple eaves,\n\n\u2003And cherry-trees with delicate boughs and leaves\n\n\u2003Against a pink sky where the herons hover.\n\n\u2003All would be there, for had not old dreams flung\n\n\u2003Open the gate to that stone-lanterned maze\n\n\u2003Where drowsy streams spin out their winding ways,\n\n\u2003Trailed by green vines from bending branches hung?\n\n\u2003I hurried\u2014but when the wall rose, grim and great,\n\n\u2003I found there was no longer any gate." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 155", + "text": "\u2003Year after year I heard that faint, far ringing\n\n\u2003Of deep-toned bells on the black midnight wind;\n\n\u2003Peals from no steeple I could ever find,\n\n\u2003But strange, as if across some great void winging.\n\n\u2003I searched my dreams and memories for a clue,\n\n\u2003And thought of all the chimes my visions carried;\n\n\u2003Of quiet Innsmouth, where the white gulls tarried\n\n\u2003Around an ancient spire that once I knew.\n\n\u2003Always perplexed I heard those far notes falling,\n\n\u2003Till one March night the bleak rain splashing cold\n\n\u2003Beckoned me back through gateways of recalling\n\n\u2003To elder towers where the mad clappers tolled.\n\n\u2003They tolled\u2014but from the sunless tides that pour\n\n\u2003Through sunken valleys on the sea's dead floor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 156", + "text": "\u2003Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,\n\n\u2003But every night I see the rubbery things,\n\n\u2003Black, horned, and slender, with membraneous wings,\n\n\u2003And tails that bear the bifid barb of hell.\n\n\u2003They come in legions on the north wind's swell,\n\n\u2003With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,\n\n\u2003Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings\n\n\u2003To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare's well.\n\n\u2003Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,\n\n\u2003Heedless of all the cries I try to make,\n\n\u2003And down the nether pits to that foul lake\n\n\u2003Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.\n\n\u2003But oh! If only they would make some sound,\n\n\u2003Or wear a face where faces should be found!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 157", + "text": "\u2003And at the last from inner Egypt came\n\n\u2003The strange dark One to whom the fellahs bowed;\n\n\u2003Silent and lean and cryptically proud,\n\n\u2003And wrapped in fabrics red as sunset flame.\n\n\u2003Throngs pressed around, frantic for his commands,\n\n\u2003But leaving, could not tell what they had heard;\n\n\u2003While through the nations spread the awestruck word\n\n\u2003That wild beasts followed him and licked his hands.\n\n\u2003Soon from the sea a noxious birth began;\n\n\u2003Forgotten lands with weedy spires of gold;\n\n\u2003The ground was cleft, and mad auroras rolled\n\n\u2003Down on the quaking citadels of man.\n\n\u2003Then, crushing what he chanced to mould in play,\n\n\u2003The idiot Chaos blew Earth's dust away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 158", + "text": "\u2003Out in the mindless void the daemon bore me,\n\n\u2003Past the bright clusters of dimensioned space,\n\n\u2003Till neither time nor matter stretched before me,\n\n\u2003But only Chaos, without form or place.\n\n\u2003Here the vast Lord of All in darkness muttered\n\n\u2003Things he had dreamed but could not understand,\n\n\u2003While near him shapeless bat-things flopped and fluttered\n\n\u2003In idiot vortices that ray-streams fanned.\n\n\u2003They danced insanely to the high, thin whining\n\n\u2003Of a cracked flute clutched in a monstrous paw,\n\n\u2003Whence flow the aimless waves whose chance combining\n\n\u2003Gives each frail cosmos its eternal law.\n\n\u2003\"I am His Messenger,\" the daemon said,\n\n\u2003As in contempt he struck his Master's head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 159", + "text": "\u2003I do not know if ever it existed\u2014\n\n\u2003That lost world floating dimly on Time's stream\u2014\n\n\u2003And yet I see it often, violet-misted,\n\n\u2003And shimmering at the back of some vague dream.\n\n\u2003There were strange towers and curious lapping rivers,\n\n\u2003Labyrinths of wonder, and low vaults of light,\n\n\u2003And bough-crossed skies of flame, like that which quivers\n\n\u2003Wistfully just before a winter's night.\n\n\u2003Great moors led off to sedgy shores unpeopled,\n\n\u2003Where vast birds wheeled, while on a windswept hill\n\n\u2003There was a village, ancient and white-steepled,\n\n\u2003With evening chimes for which I listen still.\n\n\u2003I do not know what land it is\u2014or dare\n\n\u2003Ask when or why I was, or will be, there." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 160", + "text": "\u2003Somewhere in dream there is an evil place\n\n\u2003Where tall, deserted buildings crowd along\n\n\u2003A deep, black, narrow channel, reeking strong\n\n\u2003Of frightful things whence oily currents race.\n\n\u2003Lanes with old walls half meeting overhead\n\n\u2003Wind off to streets one may or may not know,\n\n\u2003And feeble moonlight sheds a spectral glow\n\n\u2003Over long rows of windows, dark and dead.\n\n\u2003There are no footfalls, and the one soft sound\n\n\u2003Is of the oily water as it glides\n\n\u2003Under stone bridges, and along the sides\n\n\u2003Of its deep flume, to some vague ocean bound.\n\n\u2003None lives to tell when that stream washed away\n\n\u2003Its dream-lost region from the world of clay." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 161", + "text": "\u2003\"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!\" I heard him scream\n\n\u2003As I plunged into those mad lanes that wind\n\n\u2003In labyrinths obscure and undefined\n\n\u2003South of the river where old centuries dream.\n\n\u2003He was a furtive figure, bent and ragged,\n\n\u2003And in a flash had staggered out of sight,\n\n\u2003So still I burrowed onward in the night\n\n\u2003Toward where more roof-lines rose, malign and jagged.\n\n\u2003No guidebook told of what was lurking here\u2014\n\n\u2003But now I heard another old man shriek:\n\n\u2003\"Beware St.Toad's cracked chimes!\" And growing weak,\n\n\u2003I paused, when a third greybeard croaked in fear:\n\n\u2003\"Beware St. Toad's cracked chimes!\" Aghast, I fled\u2014\n\n\u2003Till suddenly that black spire loomed ahead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 162", + "text": "\u2003John Whateley lived about a mile from town,\n\n\u2003Up where the hills began to huddle thick;\n\n\u2003We never thought his wits were very quick,\n\n\u2003Seeing the way he let his farm run down.\n\n\u2003He used to waste his time on some queer books\n\n\u2003He'd found around the attic of his place,\n\n\u2003Till funny lines got creased into his face,\n\n\u2003And folks all said they didn't like his looks.\n\n\u2003When he began those night-howls we declared\n\n\u2003He'd better be locked up away from harm,\n\n\u2003So three men from the Aylesbury town farm\n\n\u2003Went for him\u2014but came back alone and scared.\n\n\u2003They'd found him talking to two crouching things\n\n\u2003That at their step flew off on great black wings." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 163", + "text": "\u2003From Leng, where rocky peaks climb bleak and bare\n\n\u2003Under cold stars obscure to human sight,\n\n\u2003There shoots at dusk a single beam of light\n\n\u2003Whose far blue rays make shepherds whine in prayer.\n\n\u2003They say (though none has been there) that it comes\n\n\u2003Out of a pharos in a tower of stone,\n\n\u2003Where the last Elder One lives on alone,\n\n\u2003Talking to Chaos with the beat of drums.\n\n\u2003The Thing, they whisper, wears a silken mask\n\n\u2003Of yellow, whose queer folds appear to hide\n\n\u2003A face not of this earth, though none dares ask\n\n\u2003Just what those features are, which bulge inside.\n\n\u2003Many, in man's first youth, sought out that glow,\n\n\u2003But what they found, no one will ever know." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 164", + "text": "\u2003I cannot tell why some things hold for me\n\n\u2003A sense of unplumbed marvels to befall,\n\n\u2003Or of a rift in the horizon's wall\n\n\u2003Opening to worlds where only gods can be.\n\n\u2003There is a breathless, vague expectancy,\n\n\u2003As of vast ancient pomps I half recall,\n\n\u2003Or wild adventures, uncorporeal,\n\n\u2003Ecstasy-fraught, and as a day-dream free.\n\n\u2003It is in sunsets and strange city spires,\n\n\u2003Old villages and woods and misty downs,\n\n\u2003South winds, the sea, low hills, and lighted towns,\n\n\u2003Old gardens, half-heard songs, and the moon's fires.\n\n\u2003But though its lure alone makes life worth living,\n\n\u2003None gains or guesses what it hints at giving." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 165", + "text": "\u2003Once every year, in autumn's wistful glow,\n\n\u2003The birds fly out over an ocean waste,\n\n\u2003Calling and chattering in a joyous haste\n\n\u2003To reach some land their inner memories know.\n\n\u2003Great terraced gardens where bright blossoms blow,\n\n\u2003And lines of mangoes luscious to the taste,\n\n\u2003And temple-groves with branches interlaced\n\n\u2003Over cool paths\u2014all these their vague dreams shew.\n\n\u2003They search the sea for marks of their old shore\u2014\n\n\u2003For the tall city, white and turreted\u2014\n\n\u2003But only empty waters stretch ahead,\n\n\u2003So that at last they turn away once more.\n\n\u2003Yet sunken deep where alien polyps throng,\n\n\u2003The old towers miss their lost, remembered song." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 166", + "text": "\u2003I never can be tied to raw, new things,\n\n\u2003For I first saw the light in an old town,\n\n\u2003Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down\n\n\u2003To a quaint harbour rich with visionings.\n\n\u2003Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams\n\n\u2003Flooded old fanlights and small window-panes,\n\n\u2003And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes\u2014\n\n\u2003These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.\n\n\u2003Such treasures, left from times of cautious leaven,\n\n\u2003Cannot but loose the hold of flimsier wraiths\n\n\u2003That flit with shifting ways and muddled faiths\n\n\u2003Across the changeless walls of earth and heaven.\n\n\u2003They cut the moment's thongs and leave me free\n\n\u2003To stand alone before eternity." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 167", + "text": "\u2003It had been old when Babylon was new;\n\n\u2003None knows how long it slept beneath that mound,\n\n\u2003Where in the end our questing shovels found\n\n\u2003Its granite blocks and brought it back to view.\n\n\u2003There were vast pavements and foundation-walls,\n\n\u2003And crumbling slabs and statues, carved to shew\n\n\u2003Fantastic beings of some long ago\n\n\u2003Past anything the world of man recalls.\n\n\u2003And then we saw those stone steps leading down\n\n\u2003Through a choked gate of graven dolomite\n\n\u2003To some black haven of eternal night\n\n\u2003Where elder signs and primal secrets frown.\n\n\u2003We cleared a path\u2014but raced in mad retreat\n\n\u2003When from below we heard those clumping feet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 168", + "text": "\u2003His solid flesh had never been away,\n\n\u2003For each dawn found him in his usual place,\n\n\u2003But every night his spirit loved to race\n\n\u2003Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.\n\n\u2003He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,\n\n\u2003And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,\n\n\u2003When one still night across curved space was thrown\n\n\u2003That beckoning piping from the voids behind.\n\n\u2003He waked that morning as an older man,\n\n\u2003And nothing since has looked the same to him.\n\n\u2003Objects around float nebulous and dim\u2014\n\n\u2003False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.\n\n\u2003His folk and friends are now an alien throng\n\n\u2003To which he struggles vainly to belong." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 169", + "text": "\u2003Over old roofs and past decaying spires\n\n\u2003The harbour whistles chant all through the night;\n\n\u2003Throats from strange ports, and beaches far and white,\n\n\u2003And fabulous oceans, ranged in motley choirs.\n\n\u2003Each to the other alien and unknown,\n\n\u2003Yet all, by some obscurely focussed force\n\n\u2003From brooding gulfs beyond the Zodiac's course,\n\n\u2003Fused into one mysterious cosmic drone.\n\n\u2003Through shadowy dreams they send a marching line\n\n\u2003Of still more shadowy shapes and hints and views;\n\n\u2003Echoes from outer voids, and subtle clues\n\n\u2003To things which they themselves cannot define.\n\n\u2003And always in that chorus, faintly blent,\n\n\u2003We catch some notes no earth-ship ever sent." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 170", + "text": "\u2003The way led down a dark, half-wooded heath\n\n\u2003Where moss-grey boulders humped above the mould,\n\n\u2003And curious drops, disquieting and cold,\n\n\u2003Sprayed up from unseen streams in gulfs beneath.\n\n\u2003There was no wind, nor any trace of sound\n\n\u2003In puzzling shrub, or alien-featured tree,\n\n\u2003Nor any view before\u2014till suddenly,\n\n\u2003Straight in my path, I saw a monstrous mound.\n\n\u2003Half to the sky those steep sides loomed upspread,\n\n\u2003Rank-grassed, and cluttered by a crumbling flight\n\n\u2003Of lava stairs that scaled the fear-topped height\n\n\u2003In steps too vast for any human tread.\n\n\u2003I shrieked\u2014and knew what primal star and year\n\n\u2003Had sucked me back from man's dream-transient sphere!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 171", + "text": "\u2003I saw it from that hidden, silent place\n\n\u2003Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.\n\n\u2003It shone through all the sunset's glories\u2014thin\n\n\u2003At first, but with a slowly brightening face.\n\n\u2003Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,\n\n\u2003Beat on my sight as never it did of old;\n\n\u2003The evening star\u2014but grown a thousandfold\n\n\u2003More haunting in this hush and solitude.\n\n\u2003It traced strange pictures on the quivering air\u2014\n\n\u2003Half-memories that had always filled my eyes\u2014\n\n\u2003Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies\n\n\u2003Of some dim life\u2014I never could tell where.\n\n\u2003But now I knew that through the cosmic dome\n\n\u2003Those rays were calling from my far, lost home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 172", + "text": "\u2003There is in certain ancient things a trace\n\n\u2003Of some dim essence\u2014more than form or weight;\n\n\u2003A tenuous aether, indeterminate,\n\n\u2003Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.\n\n\u2003A faint, veiled sign of continuities\n\n\u2003That outward eyes can never quite descry;\n\n\u2003Of locked dimensions harbouring years gone by,\n\n\u2003And out of reach except for hidden keys.\n\n\u2003It moves me most when slanting sunbeams glow\n\n\u2003On old farm buildings set against a hill,\n\n\u2003And paint with life the shapes which linger still\n\n\u2003From centuries less a dream than this we know.\n\n\u2003In that strange light I feel I am not far\n\n\u2003From the fixt mass whose sides the ages are." + }, + { + "title": "A Garden", + "text": "\u2003There's an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams,\n\n\u2003Where the very Maytime sunlight plays and glows with spectral gleams;\n\n\u2003Where the gaudy-tinted blossoms seem to wither into grey,\n\n\u2003And the crumbling walls and pillars waken thoughts of yesterday.\n\n\u2003There are vines in nooks and crannies, and there's moss about the pool,\n\n\u2003And the tangled weedy thicket chokes the arbour dark and cool:\n\n\u2003In the silent sunken pathways springs an herbage sparse and spare,\n\n\u2003Where the musty scent of dead things dulls the fragrance of the air.\n\n\u2003There is not a living creature in the lonely space around,\n\n\u2003And the hedge-encompass'd quiet never echoes to a sound.\n\n\u2003As I walk, and wait, and listen, I will often seek to find\n\n\u2003When it was I knew that garden in an age long left behind;\n\n\u2003I will oft conjure a vision of a day that is no more,\n\n\u2003As I gaze upon the grey, grey scenes I feel I knew before.\n\n\u2003Then a sadness settles o'er me, and a tremor seems to start:\n\n\u2003For I know the flow'rs are shrivell'd hopes\u2014the garden is my heart!\n\n[ Hallowe'en in a Suburb ]\n\n\u2003The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,\n\n\u2003And the trees have a silver glare;\n\n\u2003Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,\n\n\u2003And the harpies of upper air,\n\n\u2003That flutter and laugh and stare.\n\n\u2003For the village dead to the moon outspread\n\n\u2003Never shone in the sunset's gleam,\n\n\u2003But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep\n\n\u2003Where the rivers of madness stream\n\n\u2003Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.\n\n\u2003A chill wind weaves thro' the rows of sheaves\n\n\u2003In the meadows that shimmer pale,\n\n\u2003And comes to twine where the headstones shine\n\n\u2003And the ghouls of the churchyard wail\n\n\u2003For harvests that fly and fail.\n\n\u2003Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change\n\n\u2003That tore from the past its own\n\n\u2003Can quicken this hour, when a spectral pow'r\n\n\u2003Spreads sleep o'er the cosmic throne\n\n\u2003And looses the vast unknown.\n\n\u2003So here again stretch the vale and plain\n\n\u2003That moons long-forgotten saw,\n\n\u2003And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,\n\n\u2003Sprung out of the tomb's black maw\n\n\u2003To shake all the world with awe.\n\n\u2003And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,\n\n\u2003The ugliness and the pest\n\n\u2003Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,\n\n\u2003Shall some day be with the rest,\n\n\u2003And brood with the shades unblest.\n\n\u2003Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,\n\n\u2003And the leprous spires ascend;\n\n\u2003For new and old alike in the fold\n\n\u2003Of horror and death are penn'd,\n\n\u2003For the hounds of Time to rend." + }, + { + "title": "The House", + "text": "\u2003'Tis a grove-circled dwelling\n\n\u2003Set close to a hill,\n\n\u2003Where the branches are telling\n\n\u2003Strange legends of ill;\n\n\u2003Over timbers so old\n\n\u2003That they breathe of the dead,\n\n\u2003Crawl the vines, green and cold,\n\n\u2003By strange nourishment fed;\n\n\u2003And no man knows the juices they suck from the depths of their dank slimy bed.\n\n\u2003In the gardens are growing\n\n\u2003Tall blossoms and fair,\n\n\u2003Each pallid bloom throwing\n\n\u2003Perfume on the air;\n\n\u2003But the afternoon sun\n\n\u2003With its shining red rays\n\n\u2003Makes the picture loom dun\n\n\u2003On the curious gaze,\n\n\u2003And above the sween scent of the the blossoms rise odours of numberless days.\n\n\u2003The rank grasses are waving\n\n\u2003On terrace and lawn,\n\n\u2003Dim memories sav'ring\n\n\u2003Of things that have gone;\n\n\u2003The stones of the walks\n\n\u2003Are encrusted and wet,\n\n\u2003And a strange spirit stalks\n\n\u2003When the red sun has set,\n\n\u2003And the soul of the watcher is fill'd with faint pictures he fain would forget.\n\n\u2003It was in the hot Junetime\n\n\u2003I stood by that scene,\n\n\u2003When the gold rays of noontime\n\n\u2003Beat bright on the green.\n\n\u2003But I shiver'd with cold,\n\n\u2003Groping feebly for light,\n\n\u2003As a picture unroll'd\u2014\n\n\u2003And my age-spanning sight\n\n\u2003Saw the time I had been there before flash like fulgury out of the night.\n\n\u2003In a Sequester'd Providence Churchyard" + }, + { + "title": "Where Once Poe Walk'd", + "text": "\u2003Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,\n\n\u2003Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;\n\n\u2003Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,\n\n\u2003Arch'd high above a hidden world of yore.\n\n\u2003Round all the scene a light of memory plays,\n\n\u2003And dead leaves whisper of departed days,\n\n\u2003Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.\n\n\u2003Lonely and sad, a spectre glides along\n\n\u2003Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;\n\n\u2003No common glance discerns him, tho' his song\n\n\u2003Peals down thro' time with a mysterious spell:\n\n\u2003Only the few who sorcery's secret know\n\n\u2003Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe." + }, + { + "title": "Laeta; a Lament", + "text": "\u2003Respectfully Dedicated to Rheinhart Kleiner, Esq.\n\n\u2003With Compliments of the Author\n\n\u2003How sad droop the willows by Zulal's fair side,\n\n\u2003Where so lately I stray'd with my raven-hair'd bride:\n\n\u2003Ev'ry light-floating lily, each flow'r on the shore,\n\n\u2003Folds in sorrow since Laeta can see them no more!\n\n\u2003Oh, blest were the days when in childhood and hope\n\n\u2003With my Laeta I rov'd o'er the blossom-clad slope,\n\n\u2003Plucking white meadow-daisies and ferns by the stream,\n\n\u2003As we laugh'd at the ripples that twinkle and gleam.\n\n\u2003Not a bloom deck'd the mead that could rival in grace\n\n\u2003The dear innocent charms of my Laeta's fair face;\n\n\u2003Not a thrush thrill'd the grove with a carol so choice\n\n\u2003As the silvery strains of my Laeta's sweet voice.\n\n\u2003The shy Nymphs of the woodland, the fount and the plain,\n\n\u2003Strove to equal her beauty, but strove all in vain;\n\n\u2003Yet no envy they bore her, while fruitless they strove,\n\n\u2003For so pure was my Laeta, they could only love!\n\n\u2003When the warm breath of Auster play'd soft o'er the flow'rs,\n\n\u2003And young Zephyrus rustled the gay scented bow'rs,\n\n\u2003Ev'ry breeze seem'd to pause as it drew near the fair,\n\n\u2003Too much aw'd at her sweetness to tumble her hair.\n\n\u2003How fond were our dreams on the day when we stood\n\n\u2003In the ivy-grown temple beside the dark wood;\n\n\u2003When our pledges we seal'd at the sanctify'd shrine,\n\n\u2003And I knew that my Laeta forever was mine!\n\n\u2003How blissful our thoughts when the wild autumn came,\n\n\u2003And the forests with scarlet and gold were aflame;\n\n\u2003Yet how heavy my heart when I first felt the fear\n\n\u2003That my starry-eyed Laeta would fade with the year!\n\n\u2003The pastures were sere and the heavens were grey\n\n\u2003When I laid my lov'd Laeta forever away,\n\n\u2003And the river god pity'd, as weeping I pac'd\n\n\u2003Mingling hot bitter tears with his cold frozen waste.\n\n\u2003Now the flow'rs have return'd, but they bloom not so sweet\n\n\u2003As in days when they blossom'd round Laeta's dear feet;\n\n\u2003And the willows complain to the answering hill,\n\n\u2003And the thrushes that once were so happy are still.\n\n\u2003The green meadows and groves in their loneliness pine,\n\n\u2003Whilst the Dryads no more in their madrigals join,\n\n\u2003The breeze once so joyous now murmurs and sighs,\n\n\u2003And blows soft o'er the spot where my lov'd Laeta lies.\n\n\u2003So pensive I roam o'er the desolate lawn\n\n\u2003Where we wander'd and lov'd in the days that are gone,\n\n\u2003And I yearn for the autumn, when Zulal's blue tide\n\n\u2003Shall sing low by my grave at the lov'd Laeta's side." + }, + { + "title": "Life's Mystery", + "text": "\u2003Life! Ah, Life!\n\n\u2003What may this fluorescent pageant mean?\n\n\u2003Who can the evanescent object glean?\n\n\u2003He that is dead is the key of Life\u2014\n\n\u2003Gone is the symbol, deep is the grave!\n\n\u2003Man is a breath, and Life is the fire;\n\n\u2003Birth is death, and silence the choir.\n\n\u2003Wrest from the aeons the heart of gold!\n\n\u2003Tear from the fabric the threads that are old!\n\n\u2003Life! Ah, Life!\n\n[ Lines on Gen. Robert Edward Lee ]\n\n\u2003\"Si veris magna paratur\n\n\u2003Fama bonis, et si successu nuda remoto\n\n\u2003Inspicitur virtus, quicquid laudamus in ullo\n\n\u2003Majorum, fortuna fuit.\"\n\n\u2003\u2014Lucan.\n\n\u2003Whilst martial echoes o'er the wave resound,\n\n\u2003And Europe's gore incarnadines the ground;\n\n\u2003Today no foreign hero we bemoan,\n\n\u2003But count the glowing virtues of our own!\n\n\u2003Illustrious LEE! around whose honour'd name\n\n\u2003Entwines a patriot's and a Christian's fame;\n\n\u2003With whose just praise admiring nations ring,\n\n\u2003And whom repenting foes contritely sing!\n\n\u2003When first our land fraternal fury bore,\n\n\u2003And Sumter's guns alarm'd the anxious shore;\n\n\u2003When Faction's reign ancestral rights o'erthrew,\n\n\u2003And sunder'd States a mutual hatred knew;\n\n\u2003Then clash'd contending chiefs of kindred line,\n\n\u2003In flesh to suffer and in fame to shine.\n\n\u2003But o'er them all, majestic in his might,\n\n\u2003Rose LEE, unrivall'd, to sublimest height:\n\n\u2003With torturing choice defy'd opposing Fate,\n\n\u2003And shunn'd Temptation for his native State!\n\n\u2003Thus Washington his monarch's rule o'erturn'd\n\n\u2003When young Columbia with rebellion burn'd.\n\n\u2003And what in Washington the world reveres,\n\n\u2003In LEE with equal magnitude appears.\n\n\u2003Our nation's Father, crown'd with vict'ry's bays,\n\n\u2003Enjoys a loving land's eternal praise:\n\n\u2003Let, then, our hearts with equal rev'rence greet\n\n\u2003His proud successor, rising o'er defeat!\n\n\u2003Around his greatness pour disheartening woes,\n\n\u2003But still he tow'rs above his conqu'ring foes.\n\n\u2003Silence! ye jackal herd that vainly blame\n\n\u2003Th' unspotted leader by a traitor's name:\n\n\u2003If such was LEE, let blushing Justice mourn,\n\n\u2003And trait'rous Liberty endure our scorn!\n\n\u2003As Philopoemen once sublimely strove,\n\n\u2003And earn'd declining Hellas' thankful love;\n\n\u2003So follow'd LEE the purest patriot's part,\n\n\u2003And wak'd the worship of the grateful heart:\n\n\u2003The South her soul in body'd form discerns;\n\n\u2003The North from LEE a nobler freedom learns!\n\n\u2003Attend! ye sons of Albion's ancient race,\n\n\u2003Whate'er your country, and whate'er your place:\n\n\u2003LEE'S valiant deeds, tho' dear to Southern song,\n\n\u2003To all our Saxon strain as well belong.\n\n\u2003Courage like his the parent Island won,\n\n\u2003And led an Empire past the setting sun;\n\n\u2003To realms unknown our laws and language bore;\n\n\u2003Rais'd England's banner on the desert shore;\n\n\u2003Crush'd the proud rival, and subdu'd the sea\n\n\u2003For ages past, and aeons yet to be!\n\n\u2003From Scotia's hilly bounds the paean rolls,\n\n\u2003And Afric's distant Cape great LEE extols;\n\n\u2003The sainted soul and manly mien combine\n\n\u2003To grace Britannia's and Virginia's line!\n\n\u2003As dullards now in thoughtless fervour prate\n\n\u2003Of shameful peace, and sing th' unmanly State;\n\n\u2003As churls their piping reprobations shriek,\n\n\u2003And damn the heroes that protect the weak;\n\n\u2003Let LEE'S brave shade the timid throng accost,\n\n\u2003And give them back the manhood they have lost!\n\n\u2003What kindlier spirit, breathing from on high,\n\n\u2003Can teach us how to live and how to die?\n\n[ The Messenger ]\n\n\u2003To Bertrand K. Hart, Esq.\n\n\u2003The thing, he said, would come that night at three\n\n\u2003From the old churchyard on the hill below;\n\n\u2003But crouching by an oak fire's wholesome glow,\n\n\u2003I tried to tell myself it could not be.\n\n\u2003Surely, I mused, it was a pleasantry\n\n\u2003Devised by one who did not truly know\n\n\u2003The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,\n\n\u2003That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.\n\n\u2003He had not meant it\u2014no\u2014but still I lit\n\n\u2003Another lamp as starry Leo climbed\n\n\u2003Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed\n\n\u2003Three\u2014and the firelight faded, bit by bit.\n\n\u2003Then at the door that cautious rattling came\u2014\n\n\u2003And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!\n\n[ Nathicana ]\n\n\u2003It was in the pale garden of Za\u00efs;\n\n\u2003The mist-shrouded gardens of Za\u00efs,\n\n\u2003Where blossoms the white nephalot\u00eb,\n\n\u2003The redolent herald of midnight.\n\n\u2003There slumber the still lakes of crystal,\n\n\u2003And streamlets that flow without murm'ring;\n\n\u2003Smooth streamlets from caverns of Kathos\n\n\u2003Where brood the calm spirits of twilight.\n\n\u2003And over the lakes and the streamlets\n\n\u2003Are bridges of pure alabaster,\n\n\u2003White bridges all cunningly carven\n\n\u2003With figures of fairies and daemons.\n\n\u2003Here glimmer strange suns and strange planets,\n\n\u2003And strange is the crescent Banapis\n\n\u2003That sets 'yond the ivy-grown ramparts\n\n\u2003Where thickens the dust of the evening.\n\n\u2003Here fall the white vapours of Yabon;\n\n\u2003And here in the swirl of vapours\n\n\u2003I saw the divine Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The garlanded, white Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The slender, black-hair'd Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The sloe-ey'd, red-lipp'd Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The silver-voic'd, sweet Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The pale-rob'd, belov'd Nathicana.\n\n\u2003And ever was she my belov\u00e8d,\n\n\u2003From ages when Time was unfashion'd;\n\n\u2003From days when the stars were not fashion'd\n\n\u2003Nor any thing fashion'd but Yabon.\n\n\u2003And here dwelt we ever and ever,\n\n\u2003The innocent children of Za\u00efs,\n\n\u2003At peace in the paths and the arbours,\n\n\u2003White-crown'd with the blest nephalot\u00eb.\n\n\u2003How oft would we float in the twilight\n\n\u2003O'er flow'r-cover'd pastures and hillsides\n\n\u2003All white with the lowly astalthon;\n\n\u2003The lowly yet lovely astalthon,\n\n\u2003And dream in a world made of dreaming\n\n\u2003The dreams that are fairer than Aidenn;\n\n\u2003Bright dreams that are truer than reason!\n\n\u2003So dream'd and so lov'd we thro' ages,\n\n\u2003Till came the curs'd season of Dzannin;\n\n\u2003The daemon-damn'd season of Dzannin;\n\n\u2003When red shone the suns and the planets,\n\n\u2003And red gleamed the crescent Banapis,\n\n\u2003And red fell the vapours of Yabon.\n\n\u2003Then redden'd the blossoms and streamlets\n\n\u2003And lakes that lay under the bridges,\n\n\u2003And even the calm alabaster\n\n\u2003Glow'd pink with uncanny reflections\n\n\u2003Till all the carv'd fairies and daemons\n\n\u2003Leer'd redly from the backgrounds of shadow.\n\n\u2003Now redden'd my vision, and madly\n\n\u2003I strove to peer thro' the dense curtain\n\n\u2003And glimpse the divine Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The pure, ever-pale Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The lov'd, the unchang'd Nathicana.\n\n\u2003But vortex on vortex of madness\n\n\u2003Beclouded my labouring vision;\n\n\u2003My damnable, reddening vision\n\n\u2003That built a new world for my seeing;\n\n\u2003A new world of redness and darkness,\n\n\u2003A horrible coma call'd living.\n\n\u2003So now in this coma call'd living\n\n\u2003I view the bright phantons of beauty;\n\n\u2003The false, hollow phantoms of beauty\n\n\u2003That cloak all the evils of Dzannin.\n\n\u2003I view them with infinite longing,\n\n\u2003So like do they seem to my lov'd one;\n\n\u2003So shapely and fair like my lov'd one;\n\n\u2003Yet foul from their eyes shines their evil;\n\n\u2003Their cruel and pitiless evil,\n\n\u2003More evil than Thaphron and Latgoz,\n\n\u2003Twice ill for its gorgeous concealment.\n\n\u2003And only in slumbers of midnight\n\n\u2003Appears the lost maid Nathicana,\n\n\u2003The pallid, the pure Nathicana,\n\n\u2003Who fades at the glance of the dreamer.\n\n\u2003Again and again do I seek her;\n\n\u2003I woo with deep draughts of Plathotis,\n\n\u2003Deep draughts brew'd in wine of Astarte\n\n\u2003And strengthen'd with tears of long weeping.\n\n\u2003I yearn for the gardens of Za\u00efs;\n\n\u2003The lovely lost garden of Za\u00efs\n\n\u2003Where blossoms the white nephalot\u00eb,\n\n\u2003The redolent herald of midnight.\n\n\u2003The last potent draught I am brewing;\n\n\u2003A draught that the daemons delight in;\n\n\u2003A draught that will banish the redness;\n\n\u2003The horrible coma call'd living.\n\n\u2003Soon, soon, if I fail not in brewing,\n\n\u2003The redness and madness will vanish,\n\n\u2003And deep in the worm-peopled darkness\n\n\u2003Will rot the base chains that hav bound me.\n\n\u2003Once more shall the gardens of Za\u00efs\n\n\u2003Dawn white on my long-tortur'd vision,\n\n\u2003And there midst the vapours of Yabon\n\n\u2003Will stand the divine Nathicana;\n\n\u2003The deathless, restor'd Nathicana\n\n\u2003Whose like is not met with in living.\n\n[ Nemesis ]\n\n\u2003Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,\n\n\u2003Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,\n\n\u2003I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,\n\n\u2003I have sounded all things with my sight;\n\n\u2003And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright.\n\n\u2003I have whirl'd with the earth at the dawning,\n\n\u2003When the sky was a vaporous flame;\n\n\u2003I have seen the dark universe yawning,\n\n\u2003Where the black planets roll without aim;\n\n\u2003Where they roll in their horror unheeded, without knowledge or lustre or name.\n\n\u2003I had drifted o'er seas without ending,\n\n\u2003Under sinister grey-clouded skies\n\n\u2003That the many-fork'd lightning is rending,\n\n\u2003That resound with hysterical cries;\n\n\u2003With the moans of invisible daemons that out of the green waters rise.\n\n\u2003I have plung'd like a deer thro' the arches\n\n\u2003Of the hoary primoridal grove,\n\n\u2003Where the oaks feel the presence that marches\n\n\u2003And stalks on where no spirit dares rove;\n\n\u2003And I flee from a thing that surrounds me, and leers thro' dead branches above.\n\n\u2003I have stumbled by cave-ridden mountains\n\n\u2003That rise barren and bleak from the plain,\n\n\u2003I have drunk of the fog-foetid fountains\n\n\u2003That ooze down to the marsh and the main;\n\n\u2003And in hot cursed tarns I have seen things I care not to gaze on again.\n\n\u2003I have scann'd the vast ivy-clad palace,\n\n\u2003I have trod its untenanted hall,\n\n\u2003Where the moon writhing up from the valleys\n\n\u2003Shews the tapestried things on the wall;\n\n\u2003Strange figures discordantly woven, which I cannot endure to recall.\n\n\u2003I have peer'd from the casement in wonder\n\n\u2003At the mouldering meadows around,\n\n\u2003At the many-roof'd village laid under\n\n\u2003The curse of a grave-girdled ground;\n\n\u2003And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.\n\n\u2003I have haunted the tombs of the ages,\n\n\u2003I have flown on the pinions of fear\n\n\u2003Where the smoke-belching Erebus rages,\n\n\u2003Where the jokulls loom snow-clad and drear:\n\n\u2003And in realms where the sun of the desert consumes what it never can cheer.\n\n\u2003I was old when the Pharaohs first mounted\n\n\u2003The jewel-deck'd throne by the Nile;\n\n\u2003I was old in those epochs uncounted\n\n\u2003When I, and I only, was vile;\n\n\u2003And Man, yet untainted and happy, dwelt in bliss on the far Arctic isle.\n\n\u2003Oh, great was the sin of my spirit,\n\n\u2003And great is the reach of its doom;\n\n\u2003Not the pity of Heaven can cheer it,\n\n\u2003Nor can respite be found in the tomb:\n\n\u2003Down the infinite aeons come beating the wings of unmerciful gloom.\n\n\u2003Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,\n\n\u2003Past the wan-moon'd abysses of night,\n\n\u2003I have liv'd o'er my lives without number,\n\n\u2003I have sounded all things with my sight;\n\n\u2003And I struggle and shriek ere the daybreak, being driven to madness with fright." + }, + { + "title": "The Nightmare Lake", + "text": "\u2003There is a lake in distant Zan,\n\n\u2003Beyond the wonted haunts of man,\n\n\u2003Where broods alone in a hideous state\n\n\u2003A spirit dead and desolate;\n\n\u2003A spirit ancient and unholy,\n\n\u2003Heavy with fearsome melancholy,\n\n\u2003Which from the waters dull and dense\n\n\u2003Draws vapors cursed with pestilence.\n\n\u2003Around the banks, a mire of clay,\n\n\u2003Sprawl things offensive in decay,\n\n\u2003And curious birds that reach that shore\n\n\u2003Are seen by mortals nevermore.\n\n\u2003Here shines by day the searing sun\n\n\u2003On glassy wastes beheld by none,\n\n\u2003And here by night pale moonbeams flow\n\n\u2003Into the deeps that yawn below.\n\n\u2003In nightmares only is it told\n\n\u2003What scenes beneath those beams unfold;\n\n\u2003What scenes, too old for human sight,\n\n\u2003Lie sunken there in endless night;\n\n\u2003For in those depths there only pace\n\n\u2003The shadows of a voiceless race.\n\n\u2003One midnight, redolent of ill,\n\n\u2003I saw that lake, asleep and still;\n\n\u2003While in the lurid sky there rode\n\n\u2003A gibbous moon that glow'd and glow'd.\n\n\u2003I saw the stretching marshy shore,\n\n\u2003And the foul things those marshes bore:\n\n\u2003Lizards and snakes convuls'd and dying;\n\n\u2003Ravens and vampires putrefying;\n\n\u2003All these, and hov'ring o'er the dead,\n\n\u2003Narcophagi that on them fed.\n\n\u2003And as the dreadful moon climb'd high,\n\n\u2003Fright'ning the stars from out the sky,\n\n\u2003I saw the lake's dull water glow\n\n\u2003Till sunken things appear'd below.\n\n\u2003There shone unnumber'd fathoms down,\n\n\u2003The tow'rs of a forgotten town;\n\n\u2003The tarnish'd domes and mossy walls;\n\n\u2003Weed-tangled spires and empty halls;\n\n\u2003Deserted fanes and vaults of dread,\n\n\u2003And streets of gold uncoveted.\n\n\u2003These I beheld, and saw beside\n\n\u2003A horde of shapeless shadows glide;\n\n\u2003A noxious horde which to my glance\n\n\u2003Seem'd moving in a hideous dance\n\n\u2003Round slimy sepulchres that lay\n\n\u2003Beside a never-travell'd way.\n\n\u2003Straight from those tombs a heaving rose\n\n\u2003That vex'd the waters' dull repose,\n\n\u2003While lethal shades of upper space\n\n\u2003Howl'd at the moon's sardonic face.\n\n\u2003Then sank the lake within its bed,\n\n\u2003Suck'd down to caverns of the dead,\n\n\u2003Till from the reeking, new-stript earth\n\n\u2003Curl'd foetid fumes of noisome birth.\n\n\u2003About the city, nigh uncover'd,\n\n\u2003The monstrous dancing shadows hover'd,\n\n\u2003When lo! there oped with sudden stir\n\n\u2003The portal of each sepulchre!\n\n\u2003No ear may learn, no tongue may tell\n\n\u2003What nameless horror then befell.\n\n\u2003I see that lake\u2014that moon agrin\u2014\n\n\u2003That city and the things within\u2014\n\n\u2003Waking, I pray that on that shore\n\n\u2003The nightmare lake may sink no more!\n\n\u2003Ode for July Fourth, 1917\n\n\u2003As Columbia's brave scions, in anger array'd,\n\n\u2003Once defy'd a proud monarch and built a new nation;\n\n\u2003'Gainst their brothers of Britain unsheath'd the sharp blade\n\n\u2003That hath ne'er met defeat nor endur'd desecration;\n\n\u2003So must we in this hour\n\n\u2003Show our valour and pow'r,\n\n\u2003And dispel the black perils that over us low'r:\n\n\u2003Whilst the sons of Britannia, no longer our foes,\n\n\u2003Will rejoice in our triumphs and strengthen our blows!\n\n\u2003See the banners of Liberty float in the breeze\n\n\u2003That plays light o'er the regions our fathers defended;\n\n\u2003Hear the voice of the million resound o'er the leas,\n\n\u2003As the deeds of the past are proclaim'd and commended;\n\n\u2003And in splendour on high\n\n\u2003Where our flags proudly fly,\n\n\u2003See the folds we tore down flung again to the sky:\n\n\u2003For the Emblem of England, in kinship unfurl'd,\n\n\u2003Shall divide with Old Glory the praise of the world!\n\n\u2003Bury'd now are the hatreds of subject and King,\n\n\u2003And the strife that once sunder'd an Empire hath vanish'd.\n\n\u2003With the fame of the Saxon the heavens shall ring\n\n\u2003As the vultures of darkness are baffled and banish'd;\n\n\u2003And the broad British sea,\n\n\u2003Of her enemies free,\n\n\u2003Shall in tribute bow gladly, Columbia to thee:\n\n\u2003For the friends of the Right, in the field side by side,\n\n\u2003Form a fabric of Freedom no hand can divide!\n\n\u2003On Reading Lord Dunsany's\n\n\u2003Book of Wonder\n\n\u2003The hours of night unheeded fly,\n\n\u2003And in the grate the embers fade;\n\n\u2003Vast shadows one by one pass by\n\n\u2003In silent daemon cavalcade.\n\n\u2003But still the magic volume holds\n\n\u2003The raptur'd eye in realms apart,\n\n\u2003And fulgent sorcery enfolds\n\n\u2003The willing mind and eager heart.\n\n\u2003The lonely room no more is there\u2014\n\n\u2003For to the sight in pomp appear\n\n\u2003Temples and cities pois'd in air\n\n\u2003And blazing glories\u2014sphere on sphere.\n\n\u2003On Receiving a Picture of Swans\n\n\u2003With pensive grace the melancholy Swan\n\n\u2003Mourns o'er the tomb of luckless Pha\u00ebton;\n\n\u2003On grassy banks the weeping poplars wave,\n\n\u2003And guard with tender care the wat'ry grave.\n\n\u2003Would that I might, should I too proudly claim\n\n\u2003An Heav'nly parent, or a Godlike fame,\n\n\u2003When flown too high, and dash'd to depths below,\n\n\u2003Receive such tribute as a Cygnus' woe!\n\n\u2003The faithful bird, that dumbly floats along,\n\n\u2003Sighs all the deeper for his want of song." + }, + { + "title": "The Outpost", + "text": "\u2003When evening cools the yellow stream,\n\n\u2003And shadows stalk the jungle's ways,\n\n\u2003Zimbabwe's palace flares ablaze\n\n\u2003For a great King who fears to dream.\n\n\u2003For he alone of all mankind\n\n\u2003Waded the swamp that serpents shun;\n\n\u2003And struggling toward the setting sun,\n\n\u2003Came on the veldt that lies behind.\n\n\u2003No other eyes had vented there\n\n\u2003Since eyes were lent for human sight\u2014\n\n\u2003But there, as sunset turned to night,\n\n\u2003He found the Elder Secret's lair.\n\n\u2003Strange turrets rose beyond the plain,\n\n\u2003And walls and bastions spread around\n\n\u2003The distant domes that fouled the ground\n\n\u2003Like leprous fungi after rain.\n\n\u2003A grudging moon writhed up to shine\n\n\u2003Past leagues where life can have no home;\n\n\u2003And paling far-off tower and dome,\n\n\u2003Shewed each unwindowed and malign.\n\n\u2003Then he who in his boyhood ran\n\n\u2003Through vine-hung ruins free of fear,\n\n\u2003Trembled at what he saw\u2014for here\n\n\u2003Was no dead, ruined seat of man.\n\n\u2003Inhuman shapes, half-seen, half-guessed,\n\n\u2003Half solid and half ether-spawned,\n\n\u2003Seethed down from starless voids that yawned\n\n\u2003In heav'n, to these blank walls of pest.\n\n\u2003And voidward from that pest-mad zone\n\n\u2003Amorphous hordes seethed darkly back,\n\n\u2003Their dim claws laden with the wrack\n\n\u2003Of things that men have dreamed and known.\n\n\u2003The ancient Fishers from Outside\u2014\n\n\u2003Were there not tales the high-priest told,\n\n\u2003Of how they found the worlds of old,\n\n\u2003And took what pelf their fancy spied?\n\n\u2003Their hidden, dread-ringed outposts brood\n\n\u2003Upon a million worlds of space;\n\n\u2003Abhorred by every living race,\n\n\u2003Yet scatheless in their solitude.\n\n\u2003Sweating with fright, the watcher crept\n\n\u2003Back to the swamp that serpents shun,\n\n\u2003So that he lay, by rise of sun,\n\n\u2003Safe in the palace where he slept.\n\n\u2003None saw him leave, or come at dawn,\n\n\u2003Nor does his flesh bear any mark\n\n\u2003Of what he met in that curst dark\u2014\n\n\u2003Yet from his sleep all peace has gone.\n\n\u2003When evening cools the yellow stream,\n\n\u2003And shadows stalk the jungle's ways,\n\n\u2003Zimbabwe's palace flares ablaze,\n\n\u2003For a great King who fears to dream.\n\n\u2003Pacifist War Song\u20141917\n\n\u2003We are the valiant Knights of Peace\n\n\u2003Who prattle for the Right:\n\n\u2003Our banner is of snowy fleece,\n\n\u2003Inscribed: \"TOO PROUD TO FIGHT!\"\n\n\u2003By sweet Chautauqua's flow'ry banks\n\n\u2003We love to sing and play,\n\n\u2003But should we spy a foeman's ranks,\n\n\u2003We'd proudly run away!\n\n\u2003When Prussian fury sweeps the main\n\n\u2003Our freedom to deny;\n\n\u2003Of tyrant laws we ne'er complain,\n\n\u2003But gladsomely comply!\n\n\u2003We do not fear the submarines\n\n\u2003That plough the troubled foam;\n\n\u2003We scorn the ugly old machines\u2014\n\n\u2003And safely stay at home!\n\n\u2003They say our country's close to war,\n\n\u2003And soon must man the guns;\n\n\u2003But we see naught to struggle for\u2014\n\n\u2003We love the gentle Huns!\n\n\u2003What tho' their hireling Greaser bands\n\n\u2003Invade our southern plains?\n\n\u2003We well can spare those boist'rous lands,\n\n\u2003Content with what remains!\n\n\u2003Our fathers were both rude and bold,\n\n\u2003And would not live like brothers;\n\n\u2003But we are of a finer mould\u2014\n\n\u2003We're much more like our mothers!\n\n\u2003The Peace Advocate\n\n\u2003(Supposed to be a \"pome,\" but cast strictly in modern metre.)\n\n\u2003The vicar sat in the firelight's glow,\n\n\u2003A volume in his hand;\n\n\u2003And a tear he shed for the widespread woe,\n\n\u2003And the anguish brought by the vicious foe\n\n\u2003That overran the land.\n\n\u2003But ne'er a hand for his King rais'd he,\n\n\u2003For he was a man of peace;\n\n\u2003And he car'd not a whit for the victory\n\n\u2003That must come to preserve his nation free,\n\n\u2003And the world from fear release.\n\n\u2003His son had buckled on his sword,\n\n\u2003The first at the front was he;\n\n\u2003But the vicar his valiant child ignor'd,\n\n\u2003And his noble deeds in the field deplor'd,\n\n\u2003For he knew not bravery.\n\n\u2003On his flock he strove to fix his will,\n\n\u2003And lead them to scorn the fray.\n\n\u2003He told them that conquest brings but ill;\n\n\u2003That meek submission would serve them still\n\n\u2003To keep the foe away.\n\n\u2003In vain did he hear the bugle's sound\n\n\u2003That strove to avert the fall.\n\n\u2003The land, quoth he, is all men's ground,\n\n\u2003What matter if friend or foe be found\n\n\u2003As master of us all?\n\n\u2003One day from the village green hard by\n\n\u2003The vicar heard a roar\n\n\u2003Of cannon that rivall'd the anguish'd cry\n\n\u2003Of the hundreds that liv'd, but wish'd to die\n\n\u2003As the enemy rode them o'er.\n\n\u2003Now he sees his own cathedral shake\n\n\u2003At the foeman's wanton aim.\n\n\u2003The ancient tow'rs with the bullets quake;\n\n\u2003The steeples fall, the foundations break,\n\n\u2003And the whole is lost in flame.\n\n\u2003Up the vicarage lane file the cavalcade,\n\n\u2003And the vicar, and daughter, and wife\n\n\u2003Scream out in vain for the needed aid\n\n\u2003That only a regiment might have made\n\n\u2003Ere they lose what is more than life.\n\n\u2003Then quick to his brain came manhood's thought,\n\n\u2003As he saw his erring course;\n\n\u2003And the vicar his dusty rifle brought\n\n\u2003That the foe might at least by one be fought,\n\n\u2003And force repaid with force.\n\n\u2003One shot\u2014the enemy's blasting fire\n\n\u2003A breach in the wall cuts thro',\n\n\u2003But the vicar replies with his waken'd ire;\n\n\u2003Fells one arm'd brute for each fallen spire,\n\n\u2003And in blood is born anew.\n\n\u2003Two shots\u2014the wife and daughter sink,\n\n\u2003Each with a mortal wound;\n\n\u2003And the vicar, too madden'd by far to think,\n\n\u2003Rushes boldly on to death's vague brink,\n\n\u2003With the manhood he has found.\n\n\u2003Three shots\u2014but shots of another kind\n\n\u2003The smoky regions rend;\n\n\u2003And upon the foeman with rage gone blind,\n\n\u2003Like a ceaseless, resistless, avenging wind,\n\n\u2003The rescuing troops descend.\n\n\u2003The smoke-pall clears, and the vicar's son\n\n\u2003His father's life has sav'd;\n\n\u2003And the vicar looks o'er the ruin done,\n\n\u2003Ere the vict'ry by his child was won,\n\n\u2003His face with care engrav'd.\n\n\u2003The vicar sat in the firelight's glow,\n\n\u2003The volume in his hand,\n\n\u2003That brought to his hearth the bitter woe\n\n\u2003Which only a husband and father can know,\n\n\u2003And truly understand.\n\n\u2003With a chasten'd mien he flung the book\n\n\u2003To the leaping flames before;\n\n\u2003And a breath of sad relief he took\n\n\u2003As the pages blacken'd beneath his look\u2014\n\n\u2003The fool of Peace no more!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 180", + "text": "\u2003The rev'rend parson, wak'd to man's estate,\n\n\u2003Laments his wife's and daughter's common fate.\n\n\u2003His martial son in warm embrace enfolds,\n\n\u2003And clings the tighter to the child he holds.\n\n\u2003His peaceful notions, banish'd in an hour,\n\n\u2003Will nevermore his wit or sense devour;\n\n\u2003But steep'd in truth, 'tis now his nobler plan\n\n\u2003To cure, yet recognise, the faults of man.\n\n\u2003The Poe-et's Nightmare" + }, + { + "title": "A Fable", + "text": "\u2003Luxus tumultus semper causa est.\n\n\u2003Lucullus Languish, student of the skies,\n\n\u2003And connoisseur of rarebits and mince pies,\n\n\u2003A bard by choice, a grocer's clerk by trade,\n\n\u2003(Grown pessimist thro' honours long delay'd),\n\n\u2003A secret yearning bore, that he might shine\n\n\u2003In breathing numbers, and in song divine.\n\n\u2003Each day his fountain pen was wont to drop\n\n\u2003An ode or dirge or two about the shop,\n\n\u2003Yet naught could strike the chord within his heart\n\n\u2003That throbb'd for poesy, and cry'd for art.\n\n\u2003Each eve he sought his bashful Muse to wake\n\n\u2003With overdoses of ice-cream and cake;\n\n\u2003But thou' th' ambitious youth a dreamer grew,\n\n\u2003Th' Aonian Nymph declin'd to come to view.\n\n\u2003Sometimes at dusk he scour'd the heav'ns afar,\n\n\u2003Searching for raptures in the evening star;\n\n\u2003One night he strove to catch a tale untold\n\n\u2003In crystal deeps\u2014but only caught a cold.\n\n\u2003So pin'd Lucullus with his lofty woe,\n\n\u2003Till one drear day he bought a set of Poe:\n\n\u2003Charm'd with the cheerful horrors there display'd,\n\n\u2003He vow'd with gloom to woo the Heav'nly Maid.\n\n\u2003Of Auber's tarn and Yaanek's slope he dreams,\n\n\u2003And weaves an hundred Ravens in his schemes.\n\n\u2003Not far from our young hero's peaceful home\n\n\u2003Lies the fair grove wherein he loves to roam.\n\n\u2003Tho' but a stunted copse in vacant lot,\n\n\u2003He dubs it Tempe, and adores the spot;\n\n\u2003When shallow puddles dot the wooded plain,\n\n\u2003And brim o'er muddy banks with muddy rain,\n\n\u2003He calls them limpid lakes or poison pools\n\n\u2003(Depending on which bard his fancy rules).\n\n\u2003'Tis here he comes with Heliconian fire\n\n\u2003On Sundays when he smites the Attic lyre;\n\n\u2003And here one afternoon he brought his gloom,\n\n\u2003Resolv'd to chant a poet's lay of doom.\n\n\u2003Roget's Thesaurus, and a book of rhymes,\n\n\u2003Provide the rungs whereon his spirit climbs:\n\n\u2003With this grave retinue he trod the grove\n\n\u2003And pray'd the Fauns he might a Poe-et prove.\n\n\u2003But sad to tell, ere Pegasus flew high,\n\n\u2003The not unrelish'd supper hour drew nigh;\n\n\u2003Our tuneful swain th' imperious call attends,\n\n\u2003And soon above the groaning table bends.\n\n\u2003Tho' it were too prosaic to relate\n\n\u2003Th' exact particulars of what he ate\n\n\u2003(Such long-drawn lists the hasty reader skips,\n\n\u2003Like Homer's well-known catalogue of ships),\n\n\u2003This much we swear: that as adjournment near'd,\n\n\u2003A monstrous lot of cake had disappear'd!\n\n\u2003Soon to his chamber the young bard repairs,\n\n\u2003And courts soft Somnus with sweet Lydian airs;\n\n\u2003Thro' open casement scans the star-strown deep,\n\n\u2003And 'neath Orion's beams sinks off to sleep.\n\n\u2003Now start from airy dell the elfin train\n\n\u2003That dance each midnight o'er the sleeping plain,\n\n\u2003To bless the just, or cast a warning spell\n\n\u2003On those who dine not wisely, but too well.\n\n\u2003First Deacon Smith they plague, whose nasal glow\n\n\u2003Comes from what Holmes hath call'd \"Elixir Pro\";\n\n\u2003Group'd round the couch his visage they deride,\n\n\u2003Whilst thro' his dreams unnumber'd serpents glide.\n\n\u2003Next troop the little folk into the room\n\n\u2003Where snores our young Endymion, swath'd in gloom:\n\n\u2003A smile lights up his boyish face, whilst he\n\n\u2003Dreams of the moon\u2014or what he ate at tea.\n\n\u2003The chieftain elf th' unconscious youth surveys,\n\n\u2003And on his form a strange enchantment lays:\n\n\u2003Those lips, that lately thrill'd with frosted cake,\n\n\u2003Uneasy sounds in slumbrous fashion make;\n\n\u2003At length their owner's fancies they rehearse,\n\n\u2003And lisp this awesome Poe-em in blank verse:" + }, + { + "title": "Aletheia Phrikodes", + "text": "\u2003Omnia risus et omnia pulvis et omnia nihil.\n\n\u2003Demoniac clouds, up-pil'd in chasmy reach\n\n\u2003Of soundless heav'n, smother'd the brooding night;\n\n\u2003Nor came the wonted whisp'rings of the swamp,\n\n\u2003Nor voice of autumn wind along the moor,\n\n\u2003Nor mutter'd noises of th' insomnious grove\n\n\u2003Whose black recesses never saw the sun.\n\n\u2003Within that grove a hideous hollow lies,\n\n\u2003Half bare of trees; a pool in centre lurks\n\n\u2003That none dares sound; a tarn of murky face\n\n\u2003(Tho' naught can prove its hue, since light of day,\n\n\u2003Affrighted, shuns the forest-shadow'd banks).\n\n\u2003Hard by, a yawning hillside grotto breathes,\n\n\u2003From deeps unvisited, a dull, dank air\n\n\u2003That sears the leaves on certain stunted trees\n\n\u2003Which stand about, clawing the spectral gloom\n\n\u2003With evil boughs. To this accursed dell\n\n\u2003Come woodland creatures, seldom to depart:\n\n\u2003Once I behold, upon a crumbling stone\n\n\u2003Set altar-like before the cave, a thing\n\n\u2003I saw not clearly, yet from glimpsing, fled.\n\n\u2003In this half-dusk I meditate alone\n\n\u2003At many a weary noontide, when without\n\n\u2003A world forgets me in its sun-blest mirth.\n\n\u2003Here howl by night the werewolves, and the souls\n\n\u2003Of those that knew me well in other days.\n\n\u2003Yet on this night the grove spake not to me;\n\n\u2003Nor spake the swamp, nor wind along the moor,\n\n\u2003Nor moan'd the wind about the lonely eaves\n\n\u2003Of the bleak, haunted pile wherein I lay.\n\n\u2003I was afraid to sleep, or quench the spark\n\n\u2003Of the low-burning taper by my couch.\n\n\u2003I was afraid when thro' the vaulted space\n\n\u2003Of the old tow'r, the clock-ticks died away\n\n\u2003Into a silence so profound and chill\n\n\u2003That my teeth chatter'd\u2014giving yet no sound.\n\n\u2003Then flicker'd low the light, and all dissolv'd,\n\n\u2003Leaving me floating in the hellish grasp\n\n\u2003Of body'd blackness, from whose beating wings\n\n\u2003Came ghoulish blasts of charnel-scented mist.\n\n\u2003Things vague, unseen, unfashion'd, and unnam'd\n\n\u2003Jostled each other in the seething void\n\n\u2003That gap'd, chaotic, downward to a sea\n\n\u2003Of speechless horror, foul with writhing thoughts.\n\n\u2003All this I felt, and felt the mocking eyes\n\n\u2003Of the curs'd universe upon my soul;\n\n\u2003Yet naught I saw nor heard, till flash'd a beam\n\n\u2003Of lurid lustre thro' the rotting heav'ns,\n\n\u2003Playing on scenes I labour'd not to see.\n\n\u2003Methought the nameless tarn, alight at last,\n\n\u2003Reflected shapes, and more reveal'd within\n\n\u2003Those shocking depths than ne'er were seen before;\n\n\u2003Methought from out the cave a demon train,\n\n\u2003Grinning and smirking, reel'd in fiendish rout;\n\n\u2003Bearing within their reeking paws a load\n\n\u2003Of carrion viands for an impious feast.\n\n\u2003Methought the stunted trees with hungry arms\n\n\u2003Grop'd greedily for things I dare not name;\n\n\u2003The while a stifling, wraith-like noisomeness\n\n\u2003Fill'd all the dale, and spoke a larger life\n\n\u2003Of uncorporeal hideousness awake\n\n\u2003In the half-sentient wholeness of the spot.\n\n\u2003Now glow'd the ground, and tarn, and cave, and trees,\n\n\u2003And moving forms, and things not spoken of,\n\n\u2003With such a phosphorescence as men glimpse\n\n\u2003In the putrescent thickets of the swamp\n\n\u2003Where logs decaying lie, and rankness reigns.\n\n\u2003Methought a fire-mist drap'd with lucent fold\n\n\u2003The well-remember'd features of the grove,\n\n\u2003Whilst whirling ether bore in eddying streams\n\n\u2003The hot, unfinish'd stuff of nascent worlds\n\n\u2003Hither and thither thro' infinities\n\n\u2003Of light and darkness, strangely intermix'd;\n\n\u2003Wherein all entity had consciousness,\n\n\u2003Without th' accustom'd outward shape of life.\n\n\u2003Of these swift-circling currents was my soul,\n\n\u2003Free from the flesh, a true constituent part;\n\n\u2003Nor felt I less myself, for want of form.\n\n\u2003Then clear'd the mist, and o'er a star-strown scene,\n\n\u2003Divine and measureless, I gaz'd in awe.\n\n\u2003Alone in space, I view'd a feeble fleck\n\n\u2003Of silvern light, marking the narrow ken\n\n\u2003Which mortals call the boundless universe.\n\n\u2003On ev'ry side, each as a tiny star,\n\n\u2003Shone more creations, vaster than our own,\n\n\u2003And teeming with unnumber'd forms of life;\n\n\u2003Tho' we as life would recognise it not,\n\n\u2003Being bound to earthy thoughts of human mould.\n\n\u2003As on a moonless night the Milky Way\n\n\u2003In solid sheen displays its countless orbs\n\n\u2003To weak terrestrial eyes, each orb a sun;\n\n\u2003So beam'd the prospect on my wond'ring soul:\n\n\u2003A spangled curtain, rich with twinkling gems,\n\n\u2003Yet each a mighty universe of suns.\n\n\u2003But as I gaz'd, I sens'd a spirit voice\n\n\u2003In speech didactic, tho' no voice it was,\n\n\u2003Save as it carried thought. It bade me mark\n\n\u2003That all the universes in my view\n\n\u2003Form'd but an atom in infinity;\n\n\u2003Whose reaches pass the ether-laden realms\n\n\u2003Of heat and light, extending to far fields\n\n\u2003Where flourish worlds invisible and vague,\n\n\u2003Fill'd with strange wisdom and uncanny life,\n\n\u2003And yet beyond; to myriad spheres of light,\n\n\u2003To spheres of darkness, to abysmal voids\n\n\u2003That know the pulses of disorder'd force.\n\n\u2003Big with these musings, I survey'd the surge\n\n\u2003Of boundless being, yet I us'd not eyes,\n\n\u2003For spirit leans not on the props of sense.\n\n\u2003The docent presence swell'd my strength of soul;\n\n\u2003All things I knew, but knew with mind alone.\n\n\u2003Time's endless vista spread before my thought\n\n\u2003With its vast pageant of unceasing change\n\n\u2003And sempiternal strife of force and will;\n\n\u2003I saw the ages flow in stately stream\n\n\u2003Past rise and fall of universe and life;\n\n\u2003I saw the birth of suns and worlds, their death,\n\n\u2003Their transmutation into limpid flame,\n\n\u2003Their second birth and second death, their course\n\n\u2003Perpetual thro' the aeons' termless flight,\n\n\u2003Never the same, yet born again to serve\n\n\u2003The varying purpose of omnipotence.\n\n\u2003And whilst I watch'd, I knew each second's space\n\n\u2003Was greater than the lifetime of our world.\n\n\u2003Then turn'd my musings to that speck of dust\n\n\u2003Whereon my form corporeal took its rise;\n\n\u2003That speck, born but a second, which must die\n\n\u2003In one brief second more; that fragile earth;\n\n\u2003That crude experiment; that cosmic sport\n\n\u2003Which holds our proud, aspiring race of mites\n\n\u2003And moral vermin; those presuming mites\n\n\u2003Whom ignorance with empty pomp adorns,\n\n\u2003And misinstructs in specious dignity;\n\n\u2003Those mites who, reas'ning outward, vaunt themselves\n\n\u2003As the chief work of Nature, and enjoy\n\n\u2003In fatuous fancy the particular care\n\n\u2003Of all her mystic, super-regnant pow'r.\n\n\u2003And as I strove to vision the sad sphere\n\n\u2003Which lurk'd, lost in ethereal vortices,\n\n\u2003Methough my soul, tun'd to the infinite,\n\n\u2003Refus'd to glimpse that poor atomic blight;\n\n\u2003That misbegotten accident of space;\n\n\u2003That globe of insignificance, whereon\n\n\u2003(My guide celestial told me) dwells no part\n\n\u2003Of empyrean virtue, but where breed\n\n\u2003The coarse corruptions of divine disease;\n\n\u2003The fest'ring ailments of infinity;\n\n\u2003The morbid matter by itself call'd man:\n\n\u2003Such matter (said my guide) as oft breaks forth\n\n\u2003On broad Creation's fabric, to annoy\n\n\u2003For a brief instant, ere assuaging death\n\n\u2003Heal up the malady its birth provok'd.\n\n\u2003Sicken'd, I turn'd my heavy thoughts away.\n\n\u2003Then spake th' ethereal guide with mocking mien,\n\n\u2003Upbraiding me for searching after Truth;\n\n\u2003Visiting on my mind the searing scorn\n\n\u2003Of mind superior; laughing at the woe\n\n\u2003Which rent the vital essence of my soul.\n\n\u2003Methought he brought remembrance of the time\n\n\u2003When from my fellows to the grove I stray'd,\n\n\u2003In solitude and dusk to meditate\n\n\u2003On things forbidden, and to pierce the veil\n\n\u2003Of seeming good and seeming beauteousness\n\n\u2003That covers o'er the tragedy of Truth,\n\n\u2003Helping mankind forget his sorry lot,\n\n\u2003And raising Hope where Truth would crush it down.\n\n\u2003He spake, and as he ceas'd, methought the flames\n\n\u2003Of fuming Heav'n resolv'd in torments dire;\n\n\u2003Whirling in maelstroms of rebellious might,\n\n\u2003Yet ever bound by laws I fathom'd not.\n\n\u2003Cycles and epicycles, of such girth\n\n\u2003That each a cosmos seem'd, dazzled my gaze\n\n\u2003Till all a wild phantasmal glow became.\n\n\u2003Now burst athwart the fulgent formlessness\n\n\u2003A rift of purer sheen, a sight supernal,\n\n\u2003Broader that all the void conceiv'd by man,\n\n\u2003Yet narrow here. A glimpse of heav'ns beyond;\n\n\u2003Of weird creations so remote and great\n\n\u2003That ev'n my guide assum'd a tone of awe.\n\n\u2003Borne on the wings of stark immensity,\n\n\u2003A touch of rhythm celestial reach'd my soul;\n\n\u2003Thrilling me more with horror than with joy.\n\n\u2003Again the spirit mock'd my human pangs,\n\n\u2003And deep revil'd me for presumptuous thoughts:\n\n\u2003Yet changing now his mien, he bade me scan\n\n\u2003The wid'ning rift that clave the walls of space;\n\n\u2003He bade me search it for the ultimate;\n\n\u2003He bade me find the Truth I sought so long;\n\n\u2003He bade me brave th' unutterable Thing,\n\n\u2003The final Truth of moving entity.\n\n\u2003All this he bade and offer'd\u2014but my soul,\n\n\u2003Clinging to life, fled without aim or knowledge,\n\n\u2003Shrieking in silence thro' the gibbering deeps.\n\n\u2003Thus shriek'd the young Lucullus, as he fled\n\n\u2003Thro' gibbering deeps\u2014and tumbled out of bed;\n\n\u2003Within the room the morning sunshine gleams,\n\n\u2003Whilst the poor youth recalls his troubled dreams.\n\n\u2003He feels his aching limbs, whose woeful pain\n\n\u2003Informs his soul his body lives again,\n\n\u2003And thanks his stars\u2014or cosmoses\u2014or such\n\n\u2003That he survives the noxious nightmare's clutch.\n\n\u2003Thrill'd with the music of th' eternal spheres\n\n\u2003(Or is it the alarm-clock that he hears?),\n\n\u2003He vows to all the Pantheon, high and low,\n\n\u2003No more to feed on cake, or pie, or Poe.\n\n\u2003And now his gloomy spirits seem to rise,\n\n\u2003As he the world beholds with clearer eyes;\n\n\u2003The cup he thought too full of dregs to quaff\n\n\u2003Affords him wine enough to raise a laugh.\n\n\u2003(All this is metaphor\u2014you must not think\n\n\u2003Our late Endymion prone to stronger drink!)\n\n\u2003With brighter visage and with lighter heart,\n\n\u2003He turns his fancies to the grocer's mart;\n\n\u2003And strange to say, at last he seems to find\n\n\u2003His daily duties worthy of his mind.\n\n\u2003Since Truth prov'd such a high and dang'rous goal,\n\n\u2003Our bard seeks one less trying to his soul;\n\n\u2003With deep-drawn breath he flouts his dreary woes,\n\n\u2003And a good clerk from a bad poet grows!\n\n\u2003Now close attend my lay, ye scribbling crew\n\n\u2003That bay the moon in numbers strange and new;\n\n\u2003That madly for the spark celestial bawl\n\n\u2003In metres short or long, or none at all:\n\n\u2003Curb your rash force, in numbers or at tea,\n\n\u2003Nor overzealous for high fancies be;\n\n\u2003Reflect, ere ye the draught Pierian take,\n\n\u2003What worthy clerks or plumbers ye might make;\n\n\u2003Wax not too frenzied in the leaping line\n\n\u2003That neither sense nor measure can confine,\n\n\u2003Lest ye, like young Lucullus Launguish, groan\n\n\u2003Beneath Poe-etic nightmares of your own!\n\n\u2003Poemata Minora, Volume II\n\n\u2003Ode to Selene or Diana\n\n\u2003Immortal Moon, in maiden splendour shine.\n\n\u2003Dispense thy beams, divine Latona's child.\n\n\u2003Thy silver rays all grosser things define,\n\n\u2003And hide harsh truth in sweet illusion mild.\n\n\u2003In thy soft light, the city of unrest\n\n\u2003That stands so squalid in thy brother's glare\n\n\u2003Throws off its habit, and in silence blest\n\n\u2003Becomes a vision, sparkling bright and fair.\n\n\u2003The modern world, with all it's care & pain,\n\n\u2003The smoky streets, the hideous clanging mills,\n\n\u2003Face 'neath thy beams, Selene, and again\n\n\u2003We dream like shepherds on Chald\u00e6a's hills.\n\n\u2003Take heed, Diana, of my humble plea.\n\n\u2003Convey me where my happiness may last.\n\n\u2003Draw me against the tide of time's rough sea\n\n\u2003And let my sprirt rest amid the past.\n\n\u2003To the Old Pagan Religion\n\n\u2003Olympian gods! How can I let ye go\n\n\u2003And pin my faith to this new Christian creed?\n\n\u2003Can I resign the deities I know\n\n\u2003For him who on a cross for man did bleed?\n\n\u2003How in my weakness can my hopes depend\n\n\u2003On one lone God, though mighty be his pow'r?\n\n\u2003Why can Jove's host no more assistance lend,\n\n\u2003To soothe my pain, and cheer my troubled hour?\n\n\u2003Are there no Dryads on these wooded mounts\n\n\u2003O'er which I oft in desolation roam?\n\n\u2003Are there no Naiads in these crystal founts?\n\n\u2003Nor Nereids upon the Ocean foam?\n\n\u2003Fast spreads the new; the older faith declines.\n\n\u2003The name of Christ resounds upon the air.\n\n\u2003But my wrack'd soul in solitude repines\n\n\u2003And gives the Gods their last-receiv\u00e8d pray'r.\n\n\u2003On the Ruin of Rome\n\n\u2003Low dost thou lie, O Rome, neath the foot of the Teuton\n\n\u2003Slaves are thy men, and bent to the will of thy conqueror:\n\n\u2003Wither hath gone, great city, the race that gave law to all nations,\n\n\u2003Subdu'd the east and the west, and made them bow down to thy consuls.\n\n\u2003Knew not defeat, but gave it to all who attack'd thee?\n\n\u2003Dead! and replac'd by these wretches who cower in confusion\n\n\u2003Dead! They who gave us this empire to guard and to live in\n\n\u2003Rome, thou didst fall from thy pow'r with the proud race that made thee,\n\n\u2003And we, base Italians, enjoy'd what we could not have builded.\n\n[ To Pan ]\n\n\u2003Seated in a woodland glen\n\n\u2003By a shallow reedy stream\n\n\u2003Once I fell amusing, when\n\n\u2003I was lull'd into a dream.\n\n\u2003From the brook a shape arose\n\n\u2003Half a man and half a goat.\n\n\u2003Hoofs it had instead of toes\n\n\u2003And a beard adorn'd its throat\n\n\u2003On a set of rustic reeds\n\n\u2003Sweetly play'd this hybrid man\n\n\u2003Naught car'd I for earthly needs,\n\n\u2003For I knew that this was Pan\n\n\u2003Nymphs & Satyrs gather'd 'round\n\n\u2003To enjoy the lively sound.\n\n\u2003All to soon I woke in pain\n\n\u2003And return'd to haunts of men.\n\n\u2003But in rural vales I'd fain\n\n\u2003Live and hear Pan's pipes again.\n\n\u2003On the Vanity of Human Ambition\n\n\u2003Apollo, chasing Daphne, gain'd his prize\n\n\u2003But lo! she turn'd to wood before his eyes.\n\n\u2003More modern swains at golden prizes aim,\n\n\u2003And ever strive some worldly thing to claim.\n\n\u2003Yet 'tis the same as in Apollo's case,\n\n\u2003For, once attain'd, the purest gold seems base.\n\n\u2003All that men seek 's unworthy of the quest,\n\n\u2003Yet seek they will, and never pause for rest.\n\n\u2003True bliss, methinks, a man can only find\n\n\u2003In virtuous life, & cultivated mind." + }, + { + "title": "Providence", + "text": "\u2003Where bay and river tranquil blend,\n\n\u2003And leafy hillsides rise,\n\n\u2003The spires of Providence ascend\n\n\u2003Against the ancient skies.\n\n\u2003Here centuried domes of shining gold\n\n\u2003Salute the morning's glare,\n\n\u2003While slanting gables, odd and old,\n\n\u2003Are scatter'd here and there.\n\n\u2003And in the narrow winding ways\n\n\u2003That climb o'er slope and crest,\n\n\u2003The magic of forgotten days\n\n\u2003May still be found to rest.\n\n\u2003A fanlight's gleam, a knocker's blow,\n\n\u2003A glimpse of Georgian brick\u2014\n\n\u2003The sights and sounds of long ago\n\n\u2003Where fancies cluster thick.\n\n\u2003A flight of steps with iron rail,\n\n\u2003A belfry looming tall,\n\n\u2003A slender steeple, carv'd and pale,\n\n\u2003A moss-grown garden wall.\n\n\u2003A hidden churchyard's crumbling proofs\n\n\u2003Of man's mortality,\n\n\u2003A rotting wharf where gambrel roofs\n\n\u2003Keep watch above the sea.\n\n\u2003Square and parade, whose walls have tower'd\n\n\u2003Full fifteen decades long\n\n\u2003By cobbled ways 'mid trees embower'd,\n\n\u2003And slighted by the throng.\n\n\u2003Stone bridges spanning languid streams,\n\n\u2003Houses perch'd on the hill,\n\n\u2003And courts where mysteries and dreams\n\n\u2003The brooding spirit fill.\n\n\u2003Steep alley steps by vines conceal'd,\n\n\u2003Where small-pan'd windows glow\n\n\u2003At twilight on a bit of field\n\n\u2003That chance has left below.\n\n\u2003My Providence! What airy hosts\n\n\u2003Turn still thy gilded vanes;\n\n\u2003What winds of elf that with grey ghosts\n\n\u2003People thine ancient lanes!\n\n\u2003The chimes of evening as of old\n\n\u2003Above thy valleys sound,\n\n\u2003While thy stern fathers 'neath the mould\n\n\u2003Make blest thy sacred ground.\n\n\u2003Thou dream'st beside the waters there,\n\n\u2003Unchang'd by cruel years;\n\n\u2003A spirit from an age more fair\n\n\u2003That shines behind our tears.\n\n\u2003Thy twinkling lights each night I see,\n\n\u2003Tho' time and space divide;\n\n\u2003For thou art of the soul of me,\n\n\u2003And always at my side!\n\n\u2003Psychopompos: A Tale in Rhyme\n\n\u2003I am He who howls in the night;\n\n\u2003I am He who moans in the snow;\n\n\u2003I am He who hath never seen light;\n\n\u2003I am He who mounts from below.\n\n\u2003My car is the car of Death;\n\n\u2003My wings are the wings of dread;\n\n\u2003My breath is the north wind's breath;\n\n\u2003My prey are the cold and the dead.\n\n\u2003In old Auvergne, when schools were poor and few,\n\n\u2003And peasants fancy'd what they scarcely knew,\n\n\u2003When lords and gentry shunn'd their Monarch's throne\n\n\u2003For solitary castles of their own,\n\n\u2003There dwelt a man of rank, whose fortress stood\n\n\u2003In the hush'd twilight of a hoary wood.\n\n\u2003De Blois his name; his lineage high and vast,\n\n\u2003A proud memorial of an honour'd past;\n\n\u2003But curious swains would whisper now and then\n\n\u2003That Sieur De Blois was not as other men.\n\n\u2003In person dark and lean, with glossy hair,\n\n\u2003And gleaming teeth that he would often bare,\n\n\u2003With piercing eye, and stealthy roving glance,\n\n\u2003And tongue that clipt the soft, sweet speech of France;\n\n\u2003The Sieur was little lov'd and seldom seen,\n\n\u2003So close he kept within his own demesne.\n\n\u2003The castle servants, few, discreet, and old,\n\n\u2003Full many a tale of strangeness might have told;\n\n\u2003But bow'd with years, they rarely left the door\n\n\u2003Wherein their sires and grandsires serv'd before.\n\n\u2003Thus gossip rose, as gossip rises best,\n\n\u2003When mystery imparts a keener zest;\n\n\u2003Seclusion oft the poison tongue attracts,\n\n\u2003And scandal prospers on a dearth of facts.\n\n\u2003'Twas said, the Sieur had more than once been spy'd\n\n\u2003Alone at midnight by the river's side,\n\n\u2003With aspect so uncouth, and gaze so strange,\n\n\u2003That rustics cross'd themselves to see the change;\n\n\u2003Yet none, when press'd, could clearly say or know\n\n\u2003Just what it was, or why they trembled so.\n\n\u2003De Blois, as rumour whisper'd, fear'd to pray,\n\n\u2003Nor us'd his chapel on the Sabbath day;\n\n\u2003Howe'er this may have been, 'twas known at least\n\n\u2003His household had no chaplain, monk, or priest.\n\n\u2003But if the Master liv'd in dubious fame,\n\n\u2003Twice fear'd and hated was his noble Dame;\n\n\u2003As dark as he, in features wild and proud,\n\n\u2003And with a weird supernal grace endow'd,\n\n\u2003The haughty mistress scorn'd the rural train\n\n\u2003Who sought to learn her source, but sought in vain.\n\n\u2003Old women call'd her eyes too bright by half,\n\n\u2003And nervous children shiver'd at her laugh;\n\n\u2003Richard, the dwarf (whose word had little weight),\n\n\u2003Vow'd she was like a serpent in her gait,\n\n\u2003Whilst ancient Pierre (the aged often err)\n\n\u2003Laid all her husband's mystery to her.\n\n\u2003Still more absurd were those odd mutter'd things\n\n\u2003That calumny to curious list'ners brings;\n\n\u2003Those subtle slanders, told with downcast face,\n\n\u2003And muffled voice\u2014those tales no man may trace;\n\n\u2003Tales that the faith of old wives can command,\n\n\u2003Tho' always heard at sixth or seventh hand.\n\n\u2003Thus village legend darkly would imply\n\n\u2003That Dame De Blois possess'd an evil eye;\n\n\u2003Or going further, furtively suggest\n\n\u2003A lurking spark of sorcery in her breast;\n\n\u2003Old M\u00e8re Allard (herself half witch) once said\n\n\u2003The lady's glance work'd strangely on the dead.\n\n\u2003So liv'd the pair, like many another two\n\n\u2003That shun the crowd, and shrink from public view.\n\n\u2003They scorn'd the doubts by ev'ry peasant shewn,\n\n\u2003And ask'd but one thing\u2014to be let alone!\n\n\u2003'Twas Candlemas, the dreariest time of year,\n\n\u2003With fall long gone, and spring too far to cheer,\n\n\u2003When little Jean, the bailiff's son and heir,\n\n\u2003Fell sick and threw the doctors in despair.\n\n\u2003A child so stout and strong that few would think\n\n\u2003An hour might carry him to death's dark brink,\n\n\u2003Yet pale he lay, tho' hidden was the cause,\n\n\u2003And Galens search'd in vain thro' Nature's laws.\n\n\u2003But stricken sadness could not quite suppress\n\n\u2003The roving thought, or wrinkled grandam's guess:\n\n\u2003Tho' spoke by stealth, 'twas known to half a score\n\n\u2003That Dame De Blois rode by the day before;\n\n\u2003She had (they said) with glances weird and wild\n\n\u2003Paus'd by the gate to view the prattling child,\n\n\u2003Nor did they like the smile which seem'd to trace\n\n\u2003New lines of evil on her proud, dark face.\n\n\u2003These things they whisper'd, when the mother's cry\n\n\u2003Told of the end\u2014the gentle soul gone by;\n\n\u2003In genuine grief the kindly watcher wept,\n\n\u2003Whilst the lov'd babe with saints and angels slept.\n\n\u2003The village priest his simple rites went thro',\n\n\u2003And good Michel nail'd up the box of yew;\n\n\u2003Around the corpse the holy candles burn'd,\n\n\u2003The mourners sighed, the parents dumbly yearn'd.\n\n\u2003Then one by one each sought his humble bed,\n\n\u2003And left the lonely mother with her dead.\n\n\u2003Late in the night it was, when o'er the vale\n\n\u2003The storm-king swept with pandemoniac gale;\n\n\u2003Deep pil'd the cruel snow, yet strange to tell,\n\n\u2003The lightning sputter'd while the white flakes fell;\n\n\u2003A hideous presence seem'd abroad to steal,\n\n\u2003And terror sounded in the thunder's peal.\n\n\u2003Within the house of grief the tapers glow'd\n\n\u2003Whilst the poor mother bow'd beneath her load;\n\n\u2003Her salty eyes too tired now to weep,\n\n\u2003Too pain'd to see, too sad to close in sleep.\n\n\u2003The clock struck three, above the tempest heard,\n\n\u2003When something near the lifeless infant stirr'd;\n\n\u2003Some slipp'ry thing, that flopp'd in awkward way,\n\n\u2003And climb'd the table where the coffin lay;\n\n\u2003With scaly convolutions strove to find\n\n\u2003The cold, still clay that death had left behind.\n\n\u2003The nodding mother hears\u2014starts broad awake\u2014\n\n\u2003Empower'd to reason, yet too stunn'd to shake;\n\n\u2003The pois'nous thing she sees, and nimbly foils\n\n\u2003The ghoulish purpose of the quiv'ring coils:\n\n\u2003With ready axe the serpent's head she cleaves,\n\n\u2003And thrills with savage triumph whilst she grieves.\n\n\u2003The injur'd reptile hissing glides from sight,\n\n\u2003And hides its cloven carcass in the night.\n\n\u2003The weeks slipp'd by, and gossip's tongue began\n\n\u2003To call the Sieur De Blois an alter'd man;\n\n\u2003With curious mien he oft would pace along\n\n\u2003The village street, and eye the gaping throng.\n\n\u2003Yet whilst he shew'd himself as ne'er before,\n\n\u2003His wild-eyed lady was observ'd no more.\n\n\u2003In course of time, 'twas scarce thought odd or ill\n\n\u2003That he his ears with village lore should fill;\n\n\u2003Nor was the town with special rumour rife\n\n\u2003When he sought out the bailiff and his wife:\n\n\u2003Their tale of sorrow, with its ghastly end,\n\n\u2003Was told, indeed, by ev'ry wond'ring friend.\n\n\u2003The Sieur heard all, and low'ring rode away,\n\n\u2003Nor was he seen again for many a day.\n\n\u2003When vernal sunshine shed its cheering glow,\n\n\u2003And genial zephyrs blew away the snow,\n\n\u2003To frighten'd swains a horror was reveal'd\n\n\u2003In the damp herbage of a melting field.\n\n\u2003There (half preserv'd by winter's frigid bed)\n\n\u2003Lay the dark Dame De Blois, untimely dead;\n\n\u2003By some assassin's stroke most foully slain,\n\n\u2003Her shapely brow and temples cleft in twain.\n\n\u2003Reluctant hands the dismal burden bore\n\n\u2003To the stone arches of the husband's door,\n\n\u2003Where silent serfs the ghastly thing receiv'd,\n\n\u2003Trembling with fright, but less amaz'd than griev'd;\n\n\u2003The Sieur his dame beheld with blazing eyes,\n\n\u2003And shook with anger, more than with surprise.\n\n\u2003(At least 'tis thus the stupid peasants told\n\n\u2003Their wide-mouth'd wives when they the tale unroll'd.)\n\n\u2003The village wonder'd why De Blois had kept\n\n\u2003His spouse's loss unmention'd and unwept,\n\n\u2003Nor were there lacking sland'rous tongues to claim\n\n\u2003That the dark master was himself to blame.\n\n\u2003But village talk could scarcely hope to solve\n\n\u2003A crime so deep, and thus the months revolve:\n\n\u2003The rural train repeat the gruesome tale,\n\n\u2003And gape and marvel more than they bewail.\n\n\u2003Swift flew the sun, and winter once again\n\n\u2003With icy talons gripp'd the frigid plain.\n\n\u2003December brought its store of Christmas cheer,\n\n\u2003And grateful peasants hail'd the op'ning year;\n\n\u2003But by the hearth as Candlemas drew nigh,\n\n\u2003The whisp'ring ancients spoke of things gone by.\n\n\u2003Few had forgot the dark demoniac lore\n\n\u2003Of things that came the Candlemas before,\n\n\u2003And many a crone intently eyed the house\n\n\u2003Where dwelt the sadden'd bailiff and his spouse.\n\n\u2003At last the day arriv'd, the sky o'erspread\n\n\u2003With dark'ning messengers and clouds of lead;\n\n\u2003Each neighb'ring grove Aeolian warnings sigh'd,\n\n\u2003And thick'ning terrors broadcast seem'd to bide.\n\n\u2003The good folk, tho' they knew not why, would run\n\n\u2003Swift past the bailiff's door, the scene to shun;\n\n\u2003Within the house the grieving couple wept,\n\n\u2003And mourn'd the child who now forever slept.\n\n\u2003On rush'd the dusk in doubly hideous form,\n\n\u2003Borne on the pinions of the gath'ring storm;\n\n\u2003Unusual murmurs fill'd the rainless wind,\n\n\u2003The rising river lash'd the troubled shore;\n\n\u2003Black thro' the night the awful storm-god prowl'd,\n\n\u2003And froze the list'ners' life-blood as he howl'd;\n\n\u2003Gigantic trees like supple rushes sway'd,\n\n\u2003Whilst for his home the trembling cotter pray'd.\n\n\u2003Now falls a sudden lull amidst the gale;\n\n\u2003With less'ning force the circling currents wail;\n\n\u2003Far down the stream that laves the neighb'ring mead\n\n\u2003Burst a new ululation, wildly key'd;\n\n\u2003The peasant train a frantic mien assume,\n\n\u2003And huddle closer in the spectral gloom:\n\n\u2003To each strain'd ear the truth too well is known,\n\n\u2003For that dread sound can come from wolves alone!\n\n\u2003The rustics close attend, when ere they think,\n\n\u2003A lupine army swarms the river's brink;\n\n\u2003From out the waters leap a howling train\n\n\u2003That rend the air, and scatter o'er the plain:\n\n\u2003With flaming orbs the frothing creatures fly,\n\n\u2003And chant with hellish voice their hungry cry.\n\n\u2003First of the pack a mighty monster leaps\n\n\u2003With fearless tread, and martial order keeps;\n\n\u2003Th' attendant wolves his yelping tones obey,\n\n\u2003And form in columns for the coming fray:\n\n\u2003No frighten'd swain they harm, but silent bound\n\n\u2003With a fix'd purpose o'er the frozen ground.\n\n\u2003Straight course the monsters thro' the village street,\n\n\u2003Unholy vigour in their flying feet;\n\n\u2003Thro' half-shut blinds the shelter'd peasants peer,\n\n\u2003And wax in wonder as they lose in fear.\n\n\u2003Th' excited pack at last their goal perceive,\n\n\u2003And the vex'd air with deaf'ning clamour cleave;\n\n\u2003The churls, astonish'd, watch th' unnatural herd\n\n\u2003Flock round a cottage at the leader's word:\n\n\u2003Quick spreads the fearsome fact, by rumour blown,\n\n\u2003That the doom'd cottage is the bailiff's own!\n\n\u2003Round and around the howling daemons glide,\n\n\u2003Whilst the fierce leader scales the vine-clad side;\n\n\u2003The frantic wind its horrid wail renews,\n\n\u2003And mutters madly thro' the lifeless yews.\n\n\u2003In the frail house the bailiff calmly waits\n\n\u2003The rav'ning horde, and trusts th' impartial Fates,\n\n\u2003But the wan wife revives with curious mien\n\n\u2003Another monster and an older scene;\n\n\u2003Amidst th' increasing wind that rocks the walls,\n\n\u2003The dame to him the serpent's deed recalls:\n\n\u2003Then as a nameless thought fills both their minds,\n\n\u2003The bare-fang'd leader crashes thro' the blinds.\n\n\u2003Across the room, with murd'rous fury rife,\n\n\u2003Leaps the mad wolf, and seizes on the wife;\n\n\u2003With strange intent he drags his shrieking prey\n\n\u2003Close to the spot where once the coffin lay.\n\n\u2003Wilder and wilder roars the mounting gale\n\n\u2003That sweeps the hills and hurtles thro' the vale;\n\n\u2003The ill-made cottage shakes, the pack without\n\n\u2003Dance with new fury in demoniac rout.\n\n\u2003Quick as his thought, the valiant bailiff stands\n\n\u2003Above the wolf, a weapon in his hands;\n\n\u2003The ready axe that serv'd a year before,\n\n\u2003Now serves as well to slay one monster more.\n\n\u2003The creature drops inert, with shatter'd head,\n\n\u2003Full on the floor, and silent as the dead;\n\n\u2003The rescu'd wife recalls the dire alarms,\n\n\u2003And faints from terror in her husband's arms.\n\n\u2003But as he holds her, all the cottage quakes,\n\n\u2003And with full force the titan tempest breaks:\n\n\u2003Down crash the walls, and o'er their shrinking forms\n\n\u2003Burst the mad revels of the storm of storms.\n\n\u2003Th' encircling wolves advance with ghastly pace,\n\n\u2003Hunger and murder in each gleaming face,\n\n\u2003But as they close, from out the hideous night\n\n\u2003Flashes a bolt of unexpected light:\n\n\u2003The vivid scene to ev'ry eye appears,\n\n\u2003And peasants shiver with returning fears.\n\n\u2003Above the wreck the scatheless chimney stays,\n\n\u2003Its outline glimm'ring in the fitful rays,\n\n\u2003Whilst o'er the hearth still hangs the household shrine,\n\n\u2003The Saviour's image and the Cross divine!\n\n\u2003Round the blest spot a lambent radiance glows,\n\n\u2003And shields the cotters from their stealthy foes:\n\n\u2003Each monstrous creature marks the wondrous glare,\n\n\u2003Drops, fades, and vanishes in empty air!\n\n\u2003The village train with startled eyes adore,\n\n\u2003And count their beads in rev'rence o'er and o'er.\n\n\u2003Now fades the light, and dies the raging blast,\n\n\u2003The hour of dread and reign of horror past.\n\n\u2003Pallid and bruis'd, from out his toppled walls\n\n\u2003The panting bailiff with his good wife crawls:\n\n\u2003Kind hands attend them, whilst o'er all the town\n\n\u2003A strange sweet peace of spirit settles down.\n\n\u2003Wonder and fear are still'd in soothing sleep,\n\n\u2003As thro' the breaking clouds the moon rays peep.\n\n\u2003Here paus'd the prattling grandam in her speech,\n\n\u2003Confus'd with age, the tale half out of reach;\n\n\u2003The list'ning guest, impatient for a clue,\n\n\u2003Fears 'tis not one tale, but a blend of two;\n\n\u2003He fain would know how far'd the widow'd lord\n\n\u2003Whose eerie ways th' initial theme afford,\n\n\u2003And marvels that the crone so quick should slight\n\n\u2003His fate, to babble of the wolf-wrack'd night.\n\n\u2003The old wife, press'd, for greater clearness strives,\n\n\u2003Nods wisely, and her scatter'd wits revives;\n\n\u2003Yet strangely lingers on her latter tale\n\n\u2003Of wolf and bailiff, miracle and gale.\n\n\u2003When (quoth the crone) the dawn's bright radiance bath'd\n\n\u2003Th' eventful scene, so late in terror swath'd,\n\n\u2003The chatt'ring churls that sought the ruin'd cot\n\n\u2003Found a new marvel in the gruesome spot.\n\n\u2003From fallen walls a trail of gory red,\n\n\u2003As of the stricken wolf, erratic led;\n\n\u2003O'er road and mead the new-dript crimson wound,\n\n\u2003Till lost amidst the neighb'ring swampy ground:\n\n\u2003With wonder unappeas'd the peasants burn'd,\n\n\u2003For what the quicksand takes is ne'er return'd.\n\n\u2003Once more the grandam, with a knowing eye,\n\n\u2003Stops in her tale, to watch a hawk soar by;\n\n\u2003The weary list'ner, baffled, seeks anew\n\n\u2003For some plain statement, or enlight'ning clue.\n\n\u2003Th' indulgent crone attends the puzzled plea,\n\n\u2003Yet strangely mutters o'er the mystery.\n\n\u2003The Sieur? Ah, yes\u2014that morning all in vain\n\n\u2003His shaking servants scour'd the frozen plain;\n\n\u2003No man had seen him since he rode away\n\n\u2003In silence on the dark preceding day.\n\n\u2003His horse, wild-eyed with some unusual fright,\n\n\u2003Came wand'ring from the river-bank that night.\n\n\u2003His hunting-hound, that mourn'd with piteous woe,\n\n\u2003Howl'd by the quicksand swamp, his grief to shew.\n\n\u2003The village folk thought much, but utter'd less;\n\n\u2003The servants' search wore out in emptiness:\n\n\u2003For Sieur De Blois (the old wife's tale is o'er)\n\n\u2003Was lost to mortal sight for evermore." + }, + { + "title": "Revelation", + "text": "\u2003In a vale of light and laughter,\n\n\u2003Shining 'neath the friendly sun,\n\n\u2003Where fulfilment follow'd after\n\n\u2003Ev'ry hope or dream begun;\n\n\u2003Where an Aidenn gay and glorious,\n\n\u2003Beckon'd down the winsome way;\n\n\u2003There my soul, o'er pain victorious,\n\n\u2003Laugh'd and lingered\u2014yesterday.\n\n\u2003Green and narrow was my valley,\n\n\u2003Temper'd with a verdant shade;\n\n\u2003Sun-deck'd brooklets musically\n\n\u2003Sparkled thro' each glorious glade;\n\n\u2003And at night the stars serenely\n\n\u2003Glow'd betwixt the boughs o'erhead,\n\n\u2003While Astarte, calm and queenly,\n\n\u2003Floods of fairy radiance shed.\n\n\u2003There amid the tinted bowers,\n\n\u2003Raptur'd with the opiate spell\n\n\u2003Of the grasses, ferns, and flowers,\n\n\u2003Poppy, phlox and pimpernel,\n\n\u2003Long I lay, entranc'd and dreaming,\n\n\u2003Pleas'd with Nature's bounteous store,\n\n\u2003Till I mark'd the shaded gleaming\n\n\u2003Of the sky, and yearn'd for more.\n\n\u2003Eagerly the branches tearing,\n\n\u2003Clear'd I all the space above,\n\n\u2003Till the bolder gaze, high faring,\n\n\u2003Scann'd the naked skies of Jove;\n\n\u2003Deeps unguess'd now shone before me,\n\n\u2003Splendid beam'd the solar car;\n\n\u2003Wings of fervid fancy bore me\n\n\u2003Out beyond the farthest star.\n\n\u2003Reaching, gasping, wishing, longing\n\n\u2003For the pageant brought to sight,\n\n\u2003Vain I watch'd the gold orbs thronging\n\n\u2003Round celestial poles of light.\n\n\u2003Madly on a moonbeam ladder\n\n\u2003Heav'n's abyss I sought to scale,\n\n\u2003Ever wiser, ever sadder,\n\n\u2003As the fruitless task would fail.\n\n\u2003Then, with futile striving sated,\n\n\u2003Veer'd my soul to earth again,\n\n\u2003Well content that I was fated\n\n\u2003For a fair, yet low domain;\n\n\u2003Pleasing thoughts of glad tomorrows,\n\n\u2003Like the blissful moments past,\n\n\u2003Lull'd to rest my transient sorrows,\n\n\u2003Still'd my godless greed at last.\n\n\u2003But my downward glance, returning,\n\n\u2003Shrank in fright from what it spy'd;\n\n\u2003Slopes in hideous torment burning,\n\n\u2003Terror in the brooklet's tide:\n\n\u2003For the dell, of shade denuded\n\n\u2003By my desecrating hand,\n\n\u2003'Neath the bare sky blaz'd and brooded\n\n\u2003As a lost, accursed land.\n\n\u2003The Rose of England\n\n\u2003At morn the rosebud greets the sun\n\n\u2003And sheds the evening dew,\n\n\u2003Expanding ere the day is done,\n\n\u2003In bloom of radiant hue;\n\n\u2003And when the sun his rest hath found,\n\n\u2003Rose-petals strow the garden round!\n\n\u2003Thus that blest Isle that owns the Rose\n\n\u2003From mist and darkness came,\n\n\u2003A million glories to disclose,\n\n\u2003And spread BRITANNIA'S name;\n\n\u2003And ere Life's Sun shall leave the blue,\n\n\u2003ENGLAND shall reign the whole world thro'!\n\n[ Sunset ]\n\n\u2003The cloudless day is richer at its close;\n\n\u2003A golden glory settles on the lea;\n\n\u2003Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose\n\n\u2003To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.\n\n\u2003And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,\n\n\u2003The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines;\n\n\u2003Freed form the noonday glare, the favour'd sight\n\n\u2003Increasing grace in earth and sky divines.\n\n\u2003But ere the purest radiance crowns the green,\n\n\u2003Or fairest lustre fills th' expectant grove,\n\n\u2003The twilight thickens, and the fleeting scene\n\n\u2003Leaves but a hallow'd memory of love!\n\n\u2003To Clark Ashton Smith, Esq.,\n\n\u2003upon His Phantastick Tales,\n\n\u2003Verses, Pictures, and Sculptures\n\n\u2003A time-black tower against dim banks of cloud;\n\n\u2003Around its base the pathless, pressing wood.\n\n\u2003Shadow and silence, moss and mould, enshroud\n\n\u2003Grey, age-fell'd slabs that once as cromlechs stood.\n\n\u2003No fall of foot, no song of bird awakes\n\n\u2003The lethal aisles of sempiternal night,\n\n\u2003Tho' oft with stir of wings the dense air shakes,\n\n\u2003As in the tower there glows a pallid light.\n\n\u2003For here, apart, dwells one whose hands have wrought\n\n\u2003Strange eidola that chill the world with fear;\n\n\u2003Whose graven runes in tones of dread have taught\n\n\u2003What things beyond the star-gulfs lurk and leer.\n\n\u2003Dark Lord of Averoigne\u2014whose windows stare\n\n\u2003On pits of dream no other gaze could bear!\n\n\u2003To Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett,\n\n\u2003Eighteenth Baron Dunsany\n\n\u2003As when the sun above a dusky wold\n\n\u2003Springs into sight, and turns the gloom to gold,\n\n\u2003Lights with his magic beams the dew-deck'd bow'rs,\n\n\u2003And wakes to life the gay responsive flow'rs;\n\n\u2003So now o'er realms where dark'ning dulness lies,\n\n\u2003In solar state see shining Plunkett rise!\n\n\u2003Monarch of Fancy! whose ethereal mind\n\n\u2003Mounts fairy peaks, and leaves the throng behind;\n\n\u2003Whose soul untainted bursts the bounds of space,\n\n\u2003And leads to regions of supernal grace;\n\n\u2003Can any praise thee with too strong a tone,\n\n\u2003Who in this age of folly gleam'st alone?\n\n\u2003Thy quill, Dunsany, with an art divine\n\n\u2003Recalls the gods to each deserted shrine;\n\n\u2003From mystic air a novel pantheon makes,\n\n\u2003And with new spirits fills the meads and brakes;\n\n\u2003With thee we wander thro' primeval bow'rs,\n\n\u2003For thou hast brought earth's childhood back, and ours!\n\n\u2003How leaps the soul, with sudden bliss increas'd,\n\n\u2003When led by thee to lands beyond the East!\n\n\u2003Sick of this sphere, in crime and conflict old,\n\n\u2003We yearn for wonders distant and untold;\n\n\u2003O'er Homer's page a second time we pore,\n\n\u2003And rack our brains for gleams of infant lore:\n\n\u2003But all in vain\u2014for valiant tho' we strive\n\n\u2003No common means these pictures can revive.\n\n\u2003Then dawns Dunsany with celestial light,\n\n\u2003And fulgent visions break upon our sight:\n\n\u2003His barque enchanted each sad spirit bears\n\n\u2003To shores of gold, beyond the reach of cares.\n\n\u2003No earthly trammels now our thoughts may chain;\n\n\u2003For childhood's fancy hath come back again!\n\n\u2003What glitt'ring worlds now wait our eager eyes!\n\n\u2003What roads untrodden beckon thro' the skies!\n\n\u2003Wonders on wonders line the gorgeous ways,\n\n\u2003And glorious vistas greet the ravish'd gaze;\n\n\u2003Mountains of clouds, castles of crystal dreams,\n\n\u2003Ethereal cities and Elysian streams;\n\n\u2003Temples of blue, where myriad stars adore\n\n\u2003Forgotten gods of aeons gone before!\n\n\u2003Such are thine arts, Dunsany, such thy skill,\n\n\u2003That scarce terrestrial seems thy moving quill;\n\n\u2003Can man, and man alone, successful draw\n\n\u2003Such scenes of wonder and domains of awe?\n\n\u2003Our hearts, enraptur'd, fix thy mind's abode\n\n\u2003In high Peg\u0101na; hail thee as a god;\n\n\u2003And sure, can aught more high or godlike be\n\n\u2003Than such a fancy as resides in thee?\n\n\u2003Delighted Pan a friend and peer perceives\n\n\u2003As thy sweet music stirs the sylvan leaves;\n\n\u2003The Nine, transported, bless thy golden lyre,\n\n\u2003Approve thy fancy, and applaud thy fire;\n\n\u2003Whilst Jove himself assumes a brother's tone,\n\n\u2003And vows the pantheon equal to his own.\n\n\u2003Dunsany, may thy days be glad and long;\n\n\u2003Replete with visions, and atune with song;\n\n\u2003May thy rare notes increasing millions cheer,\n\n\u2003Thy name beloved, and thy mem'ry dear!\n\n\u2003'Tis thou who hast in hours of dulness brought\n\n\u2003New charms of language, and new gems of thought;\n\n\u2003Hast with a poet's grace enrich'd the earth\n\n\u2003With aureate dreams as noble as thy birth.\n\n\u2003Grateful we name thee, bright with fix'd renown,\n\n\u2003The fairest jewel in Hibernia's crown.\n\n[ Unda; or, The Bride of the Sea ]\n\nRespectfully Dedicated with Permission to MAURICE WINTER MOE, Esq.\n\nA Dull, Dark, Drear, Dactylic Delirium in Sixteen Silly, Senseless, Sickly Stanzas\n\n\"Ego, canus, lunam cano.\"\n\n\u2014Maevius Bavianus\n\n\u2003Black loom the crags of the uplands behind me;\n\n\u2003Dark are the sands of the far-stretching shore.\n\n\u2003Dim are the pathways and rocks that remind me\n\n\u2003Sadly of years in the lost nevermore.\n\n\u2003Soft laps the ocean on wave-polish'd boulder;\n\n\u2003Sweet is the sound and familiar to me.\n\n\u2003Here, with her head gently bent to my shoulder,\n\n\u2003Walk'd I with Unda, the Bride of the Sea.\n\n\u2003Bright was the morn of my youth when I met her,\n\n\u2003Sweet as the breeze that blew in o'er the brine.\n\n\u2003Swift was I captur'd in Love's strongest fetter,\n\n\u2003Glad to be hers, and she glad to be mine.\n\n\u2003Never a question ask'd I where she wander'd,\n\n\u2003Never a question ask'd she of my birth:\n\n\u2003Happy as children, we thought not nor ponder'd,\n\n\u2003Glad with the bounty of ocean and earth.\n\n\u2003Once when the moonlight play'd soft 'mid the billows,\n\n\u2003High on the cliff o'er the waters we stood,\n\n\u2003Bound was her hair with a garland of willows,\n\n\u2003Pluck'd by the fount in the bird-haunted wood.\n\n\u2003Strangely she gaz'd on the surges beneath her,\n\n\u2003Charm'd by the sound or entranc'd by the light.\n\n\u2003Then did the waves a wild aspect bequeath her,\n\n\u2003Stern as the ocean and weird as the night.\n\n\u2003Coldly she left me, astonish'd and weeping,\n\n\u2003Standing alone 'mid the regions she bless'd:\n\n\u2003Down, ever downward, half gliding, half creeping,\n\n\u2003Stole the sweet Unda in oceanward quest.\n\n\u2003Calm grew the sea, and tumultuous beating\n\n\u2003Turn'd to a ripple, as Unda the fair\n\n\u2003Trod the wet sands in affectionate greeting,\n\n\u2003Beckon'd to me, and no longer was there!\n\n\u2003Long did I pace by the banks where she vanish'd:\n\n\u2003High climb'd the moon, and descended again.\n\n\u2003Grey broke the dawn till the sad night was banish'd,\n\n\u2003Still ach'd my soul with its infinite pain.\n\n\u2003All the wide world have I search'd for my darling,\n\n\u2003Scour'd the far deserts and sail'd distant seas.\n\n\u2003Once on the wave while the tempest was snarling,\n\n\u2003Flash'd a fair face that brought quiet and ease.\n\n\u2003Ever in restlessness onward I stumble,\n\n\u2003Seeking and pining, scarce heeding my way.\n\n\u2003Now have I stray'd where the wide waters rumble,\n\n\u2003Back to the scene of the lost yesterday.\n\n\u2003Lo! the red moon from the ocean's low hazes\n\n\u2003Rises in ominous grandeur to view.\n\n\u2003Strange is its face as my tortur'd eye gazes\n\n\u2003O'er the vast reaches of sparkle and blue.\n\n\u2003Straight from the moon to the shore where I'm sighing\n\n\u2003Grows a bright bridge, made of wavelets and beams.\n\n\u2003Frail may it be, yet how simple the trying;\n\n\u2003Wand'ring from earth to the orb of sweet dreams.\n\n\u2003What is yon face in the moonlight appearing;\n\n\u2003Have I at last found the maiden that fled?\n\n\u2003Out on the beam-bridge my footsteps are nearing\n\n\u2003Her whose sweet beckoning hastens my tread.\n\n\u2003Currents surround me, and drowsily swaying,\n\n\u2003Far on the moon-path I seek the sweet face.\n\n\u2003Eagerly hasting, half panting, half praying,\n\n\u2003Forward I reach for the vision of grace.\n\n\u2003Murmuring waters about me are closing,\n\n\u2003Soft the sweet vision advances to me:\n\n\u2003Done are my trials; my heart is reposing\n\n\u2003Safe with my Unda, the Bride of the Sea." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 185", + "text": "\u2003As the rash fool, a prey of Unda's art,\n\n\u2003Drown thro' the passion of his fever'd heart,\n\n\u2003So are our youth, inflam'd by tempters fair,\n\n\u2003Bereft of reason and the manly air.\n\n\u2003How sad the sight of Strephon's virile grace\n\n\u2003Turn'd to confusion at his Chlo\u00eb's face,\n\n\u2003And e'er Pelides, dear to Grecian eyes,\n\n\u2003Sulking for loss of his thrice-cherish'd prize.\n\n\u2003Brothers, attend! If cares too sharply vex,\n\n\u2003Gain rest by shunning the destructive sex!" + }, + { + "title": "Waste Paper", + "text": "[ A Poem of Profound Insignificance ]\n\n\u2003\u03a0\u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1 \u03b3\u1f10\u03bb\u03c9\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f31 \u03c0\u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1 \u03ba\u1f40\u03bd\u03b9\u03c2 \u03ba\u03b1\u1f31 \u03c0\u1f00\u03bd\u03c4\u03b1 \u03c4\u1f41 \u03bc\u03b7\u03b4\u1f10\u03bd\n\n\u2003Out of the reaches of illimitable light\n\n\u2003The blazing planet grew, and forc'd to life\n\n\u2003Unending cycles of progressive strife\n\n\u2003And strange mutations of undying light\n\n\u2003And boresome books, than hell's own self more trite\n\n\u2003And thoughts repeated and become a blight,\n\n\u2003And cheap rum-hounds with moonshine hootch made tight,\n\n\u2003And quite contrite to see the flight of fright so bright\n\n\u2003I used to ride my bicycle in the night\n\n\u2003With a dandy acetylene lantern that cost $3.00\n\n\u2003In the evening, by the moonlight, you can hear those darkies singing\n\n\u2003Meet me tonight in dreamland... BAH\n\n\u2003I used to sit on the stairs of the house where I was born\n\n\u2003After we left it but before it was sold\n\n\u2003And play on a zobo with two other boys.\n\n\u2003We called ourselves the Blackstone Military Band\n\n\u2003Won't you come home, Bill Bailey, won't you come home?\n\n\u2003In the spring of the year, in the silver rain\n\n\u2003When petal by petal the blossoms fall\n\n\u2003And the mocking birds call\n\n\u2003And the whippoorwill sings, Marguerite.\n\n\u2003The first cinema show in our town opened in 1906\n\n\u2003At the old Olympic, which was then call'd Park,\n\n\u2003And moving beams shot weirdly thro' the dark\n\n\u2003And spit tobacco seldom hit the mark.\n\n\u2003Have you read Dickens' American Notes?\n\n\u2003My great-great-grandfather was born in a white house\n\n\u2003Under green trees in the country\n\n\u2003And he used to believe in religion and the weather.\n\n\u2003\"Shantih, shantih, shantih\"...Shanty House\n\n\u2003Was the name of a novel by I forget whom\n\n\u2003Published serially in the All-Story Weekly\n\n\u2003Before it was a weekly. Advt.\n\n\u2003Disillusion is wonderful, I've been told,\n\n\u2003And I take quinine to stop a cold\n\n\u2003But it makes my ears ring... always ring...\n\n\u2003Always ringing in my ears...\n\n\u2003It is the ghost of the Jew I murdered that Christmas day\n\n\u2003Because he played \"Three O'Clock in the Morning\" in the flat above me.\n\n\u2003Three O'Clock in the morning, I've danc'd the whole night through,\n\n\u2003Dancing on the graves in the graveyard\n\n\u2003Where life is buried; life and beauty\n\n\u2003Life and art and love and duty\n\n\u2003Ah, there, sweet cutie.\n\n\u2003Stung!\n\n\u2003Out of the night that covers me\n\n\u2003Black as the pit from pole to pole\n\n\u2003I never quote things straight except by accident.\n\n\u2003Sophistication! Sophistication!\n\n\u2003You are the idol of our nation\n\n\u2003Each fellow has\n\n\u2003Fallen for jazz\n\n\u2003And we'll give the past a merry razz\n\n\u2003Thro' the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber\n\n\u2003And fellow-guestship with the glutless worm.\n\n\u2003Next stop is 57th St.\u201457th St. the next stop.\n\n\u2003Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring,\n\n\u2003And the Governor-General of Canada is Lord Byng\n\n\u2003Whose ancestor was shot or hung,\n\n\u2003I forget which, the good die young.\n\n\u2003Here's to your ripe old age,\n\n\u2003Copyright, 1847, by Joseph Miller,\n\n\u2003Entered according to act of Congress\n\n\u2003In the office of the librarian of Congress\n\n\u2003America was discovered in 1492\n\n\u2003This way out.\n\n\u2003No, lady, you gotta change at Washington St. to the Everett train.\n\n\u2003Out in the rain on the elevated\n\n\u2003Crated, sated, all mismated.\n\n\u2003Twelve seats on this bench,\n\n\u2003How quaint.\n\n\u2003In a shady nook, beside a brook, two lovers stroll along.\n\n\u2003Express to Park Ave., Car Following.\n\n\u2003No, we had it cleaned with the sand blast.\n\n\u2003I know it ought to be torn down.\n\n\u2003Before the bar of a saloon there stood a reckless crew,\n\n\u2003When one said to another, \"Jack, this message came for you.\"\n\n\u2003\"It may be from a sweetheart, boys,\" said someone in the crowd,\n\n\u2003And here the words are missing... but Jack cried out aloud:\n\n\u2003\"It's only a message from home, sweet home,\n\n\u2003From loved ones down on the farm\n\n\u2003Fond wife and mother, sister and brother....\"\n\n\u2003Bootleggers all and you're another\n\n\u2003In the shade of the old apple tree\n\n\u2003'Neath the old cherry tree sweet Marie\n\n\u2003The Conchologist's First Book\n\n\u2003By Edgar Allan Poe\n\n\u2003Stubbed his toe\n\n\u2003On a broken brick that didn't shew\n\n\u2003Or a banana peel\n\n\u2003In the fifth reel\n\n\u2003By George Creel\n\n\u2003It is to laugh\n\n\u2003And quaff\n\n\u2003It makes you stout and hale,\n\n\u2003And all my days I'll sing the praise\n\n\u2003Of Ivory Soap\n\n\u2003Have you a little T. S. Eliot in your home?\n\n\u2003The stag at eve had drunk his fill\n\n\u2003The thirsty hart look'd up the hill\n\n\u2003And craned his neck just as a feeler\n\n\u2003To advertise the Double-Dealer.\n\n\u2003William Congreve was a gentleman\n\n\u2003O art what sins are committed in thy name\n\n\u2003For tawdry fame and fleeting flame\n\n\u2003And everything, ain't dat a shame?\n\n\u2003Mah Creole Belle, ah lubs yo' well;\n\n\u2003Aroun' mah heart you hab cast a spell\n\n\u2003But I can't learn to spell pseudocracy\n\n\u2003Because there ain't no such word.\n\n\u2003And I says to Lizzie, if Joe was my feller\n\n\u2003I'd teach him to go to dances with that\n\n\u2003Rat, bat, cat, hat, flat, plat, fat\n\n\u2003Fry the fat, fat the fry\n\n\u2003You'll be a drug-store by and by.\n\n\u2003Get the hook!\n\n\u2003Above the lines of brooding hills\n\n\u2003Rose spires that reeked of nameless ills,\n\n\u2003And ghastly shone upon the sight\n\n\u2003In ev'ry flash of lurid light\n\n\u2003To be continued.\n\n\u2003No smoking.\n\n\u2003Smoking on four rear seats.\n\n\u2003Fare win return to 5\u00a2 after August 1st\n\n\u2003Except outside the Cleveland city limits.\n\n\u2003In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir\n\n\u2003Strangers pause to shed a tear;\n\n\u2003Henry Fielding wrote Tom Jones.\n\n\u2003And cursed be he that moves my bones.\n\n\u2003Good night, good night, the stars are bright\n\n\u2003I saw the Leonard-Tendler fight\n\n\u2003Farewell, farewell, O go to hell.\n\n\u2003Nobody home\n\n\u2003In the shantih." + }, + { + "title": "The Wood", + "text": "\u2003They cut it down, and where the pitch-black aisles\n\n\u2003Of forest night had hid eternal things,\n\n\u2003They scal'd the sky with tow'rs and marble piles\n\n\u2003To make a city for their revellings.\n\n\u2003White and amazing to the lands around\n\n\u2003That wondrous wealth of domes and turrets rose;\n\n\u2003Crystal and ivory, sublimely crown'd\n\n\u2003With pinnacles that bore unmelting snows.\n\n\u2003And through its halls the pipe and sistrum rang,\n\n\u2003While wine and riot brought their scarlet stains;\n\n\u2003Never a voice of elder marvels sang,\n\n\u2003Nor any eye call'd up the hills and plains.\n\n\u2003Thus down the years, till on one purple night\n\n\u2003A drunken minstrel in his careless verse\n\n\u2003Spoke the vile words that should not see the light,\n\n\u2003And stirr'd the shadows of an ancient curse.\n\n\u2003Forests may fall, but not the dusk they shield;\n\n\u2003So on the spot where that proud city stood,\n\n\u2003The shuddering dawn no single stone reveal'd,\n\n\u2003But fled the blackness of a primal wood.\n\n\u2042\n\n[ Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nThe oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. Against it are discharged all the shafts of a materialistic sophistication which clings to frequently felt emotions and external events, and of a naively insipid idealism which deprecates the aesthetic motive and calls for a didactic literature to uplift the reader toward a suitable degree of smirking optimism. But in spite of all this opposition the weird tale has survived, developed, and attained remarkable heights of perfection; founded as it is on a profound and elementary principle whose appeal, if not always universal, must necessarily be poignant and permanent to minds of the requisite sensitiveness.\n\nThe appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. But the sensitive are always with us, and sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. There is here involved a psychological pattern or tradition as real and as deeply grounded in mental experience as any other pattern or tradition of mankind; coeval with the religious feeling and closely related to many aspects of it, and too much a part of our inmost biological heritage to lose keen potency over a very important, though not numerically great, minority of our species.\n\nMan's first instincts and emotions formed his response to the environment in which he found himself. Definite feelings based on pleasure and pain grew up around the phenomena whose causes and effects he understood, whilst around those which he did not understand\u2014and the universe teemed with them in the early days\u2014were naturally woven such personifications, marvellous interpretations, and sensations of awe and fear as would be hit upon by a race having few and simple ideas and limited experience. The unknown, being likewise the unpredictable, became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. The phenomenon of dreaming likewise helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. That saturation must, as a matter of plain scientific fact, be regarded as virtually permanent so far as the subconscious mind and inner instincts are concerned; for though the area of the unknown has been steadily contracting for thousands of years, an infinite reservoir of mystery still engulfs most of the outer cosmos, whilst a vast residuum of powerful inherited associations clings around all the objects and processes that were once mysterious, however well they may now be explained. And more than this, there is an actual physiological fixation of the old instincts in our nervous tissue, which would make them obscurely operative even were the conscious mind to be purged of all sources of wonder.\n\nBecause we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.\n\nWith this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would otherwise haunt them. Thus Dickens wrote several eerie narratives; Browning, the hideous poem \"Childe Roland\"; Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel Elsie Venner; F. Marion Crawford, \"The Upper Berth\" and a number of other examples; Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, \"The Yellow Wall Paper\"; whilst the humourist W. W. Jacobs produced that able melodramatic bit called \"The Monkey's Paw\".\n\nThis type of fear-literature must not be confounded with a type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome. Such writing, to be sure, has its place, as has the conventional or even whimsical or humorous ghost story where formalism or the author's knowing wink removes the true sense of the morbidly unnatural; but these things are not the literature of cosmic fear in its purest sense. The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain\u2014a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space.\n\nNaturally we cannot expect all weird tales to conform absolutely to any theoretical model. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. Moreover, much of the choicest weird work is unconscious; appearing in memorable fragments scattered through material whose massed effect may be of a very different cast. Atmosphere is the all-important thing, for the final criterion of authenticity is not the dovetailing of a plot but the creation of a given sensation. We may say, as a general thing, that a weird story whose intent is to teach or produce a social effect, or one in which the horrors are finally explained away by natural means, is not a genuine tale of cosmic fear; but it remains a fact that such narratives often possess, in isolated sections, atmospheric touches which fulfil every condition of true supernatural horror-literature. Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point. If the proper sensations are excited, such a \"high spot\" must be admitted on its own merits as weird literature, no matter how prosaically it is later dragged down. The one test of the really weird is simply this\u2014whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. And of course, the more completely and unifiedly a story conveys this atmosphere, the better it is as a work of art in the given medium.\n\nAs may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves.\n\nCosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races, and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings. It was, indeed, a prominent feature of the elaborate ceremonial magic, with its rituals for the evocation of daemons and spectres, which flourished from prehistoric times, and which reached its highest development in Egypt and the Semitic nations. Fragments like the Book of Enoch and the Claviculae of Solomon well illustrate the power of the weird over the ancient Eastern mind, and upon such things were based enduring systems and traditions whose echoes extend obscurely even to the present time. Touches of this transcendental fear are seen in classic literature, and there is evidence of its still greater emphasis in a ballad literature which paralleled the classic stream but vanished for lack of a written medium. The Middle Ages, steeped in fanciful darkness, gave it an enormous impulse toward expression; and East and West alike were busy preserving and amplifying the dark heritage, both of random folklore and of academically formulated magic and cabbalism, which had descended to them. Witch, werewolf, vampire, and ghoul brooded ominously on the lips of bard and grandam, and needed but little encouragement to take the final step across the boundary that divides the chanted tale or song from the formal literary composition. In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy. In the West, where the mystical Teuton had come down from his black Boreal forests and the Celt remembered strange sacrifices in Druidic groves, it assumed a terrible intensity and convincing seriousness of atmosphere which doubled the force of its half-told, half-hinted horrors.\n\nMuch of the power of Western horror-lore was undoubtedly due to the hidden but often suspected presence of a hideous cult of nocturnal worshippers whose strange customs\u2014descended from pre-Aryan and pre-agricultural times when a squat race of Mongoloids roved over Europe with their flocks and herds\u2014were rooted in the most revolting fertility-rites of immemorial antiquity. This secret religion, stealthily handed down amongst peasants for thousands of years despite the outward reign of the Druidic, Graeco-Roman, and Christian faiths in the regions involved, was marked by wild \"Witches' Sabbaths\" in lonely woods and atop distant hills on Walpurgis-Night and Hallowe'en, the traditional breeding-seasons of the goats and sheep and cattle; and became the source of vast riches of sorcery-legend, besides provoking extensive witchcraft-prosecutions of which the Salem affair forms the chief American example. Akin to it in essence, and perhaps connected with it in fact, was the frightful secret system of inverted theology or Satan-worship which produced such horrors as the famous \"Black Mass\"; whilst operating toward the same end we may note the activities of those whose aims were somewhat more scientific or philosophical\u2014the astrologers, cabbalists, and alchemists of the Albertus Magnus or Raymond Lully type, with whom such rude ages invariably abound. The prevalence and depth of the mediaeval horror-spirit in Europe, intensified by the dark despair which waves of pestilence brought, may be fairly gauged by the grotesque carvings slyly introduced into much of the finest later Gothic ecclesiastical work of the time; the daemoniac gargoyles of Notre Dame and Mont St. Michel being among the most famous specimens. And throughout the period, it must be remembered, there existed amongst educated and uneducated alike a most unquestioning faith in every form of the supernatural; from the gentlest of Christian doctrines to the most monstrous morbidities of witchcraft and black magic. It was from no empty background that the Renaissance magicians and alchemists\u2014Nostradamus, Trithemius, Dr. John Dee, Robert Fludd, and the like\u2014were born.\n\nIn this fertile soil were nourished types and characters of sombre myth and legend which persist in weird literature to this day, more or less disguised or altered by modern technique. Many of them were taken from the earliest oral sources, and form part of mankind's permanent heritage. The shade which appears and demands the burial of its bones, the daemon lover who comes to bear away his still living bride, the death-fiend or psychopomp riding the night-wind, the man-wolf, the sealed chamber, the deathless sorcerer\u2014all these may be found in that curious body of mediaeval lore which the late Mr. Baring-Gould so effectively assembled in book form. Wherever the mystic Northern blood was strongest, the atmosphere of the popular tales became most intense; for in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies to even their strangest superstitions many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings.\n\nJust as all fiction first found extensive embodiment in poetry, so is it in poetry that we first encounter the permanent entry of the weird into standard literature. Most of the ancient instances, curiously enough, are in prose; as the werewolf incident in Petronius, the gruesome passages in Apuleius, the brief but celebrated letter of Pliny the Younger to Sura, and the odd compilation On Wonderful Events by the Emperor Hadrian's Greek freedman, Phlegon. It is in Phlegon that we first find that hideous tale of the corpse-bride, \"Philinnion and Machates\", later related by Proclus and in modern times forming the inspiration of Goethe's \"Bride of Corinth\" and Washington Irving's \"German Student\". But by the time the old Northern myths take literary form, and in that later time when the weird appears as a steady element in the literature of the day, we find it mostly in metrical dress; as indeed we find the greater part of the strictly imaginative writing of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The Scandinavian Eddas and Sagas thunder with cosmic horror, and shake with the stark fear of Ymir and his shapeless spawn; whilst our own Anglo-Saxon Beowulf and the later Continental Nibelung tales are full of eldritch weirdness. Dante is a pioneer in the classic capture of macabre atmosphere, and in Spenser's stately stanzas will be seen more than a few touches of fantastic terror in landscape, incident, and character. Prose literature gives us Malory's Morte d'Arthur, in which are presented many ghastly situations taken from early ballad sources\u2014the theft of the sword and silk from the corpse in Chapel Perilous by Sir Launcelot, the ghost of Sir Gawaine, and the tomb-fiend seen by Sir Galahad\u2014whilst other and cruder specimens were doubtless set forth in the cheap and sensational \"chapbooks\" vulgarly hawked about and devoured by the ignorant. In Elizabethan drama, with its Dr. Faustus, the witches in Macbeth, the ghost in Hamlet, and the horrible gruesomeness of Webster, we may easily discern the strong hold of the daemoniac on the public mind; a hold intensified by the very real fear of living witchcraft, whose terrors, first wildest on the Continent, begin to echo loudly in English ears as the witch-hunting crusades of James the First gain headway. To the lurking mystical prose of the ages is added a long line of treatises on witchcraft and daemonology which aid in exciting the imagination of the reading world.\n\nThrough the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century we behold a growing mass of fugitive legendry and balladry of darksome cast; still, however, held down beneath the surface of polite and accepted literature. Chapbooks of horror and weirdness multiplied, and we glimpse the eager interest of the people through fragments like Defoe's \"Apparition of Mrs. Veal\", a homely tale of a dead woman's spectral visit to a distant friend, written to advertise covertly a badly selling theological disquisition on death. The upper orders of society were now losing faith in the supernatural, and indulging in a period of classic rationalism. Then, beginning with the translations of Eastern tales in Queen Anne's reign and taking definite form toward the middle of the century, comes the revival of romantic feeling\u2014the era of new joy in Nature, and in the radiance of past times, strange scenes, bold deeds, and incredible marvels. We feel it first in the poets, whose utterances take on new qualities of wonder, strangeness, and shuddering. And finally, after the timid appearance of a few weird scenes in the novels of the day\u2014such as Smollett's Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom\u2014the released instinct precipitates itself in the birth of a new school of writing; the \"Gothic\" school of horrible and fantastic prose fiction, long and short, whose literary posterity is destined to become so numerous, and in many cases so resplendent in artistic merit. It is, when one reflects upon it, genuinely remarkable that weird narration as a fixed and academically recognised literary form should have been so late of final birth. The impulse and atmosphere are as old as man, but the typical weird tale of standard literature is a child of the eighteenth century.\n\nThe shadow-haunted landscapes of \"Ossian\", the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch-dances in Burns's \"Tam O'Shanter\", the sinister daemonism of Coleridge's Christabel and Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's \"Kilmeny\", and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the Continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and B\u00fcrger's \"Wild Huntsman\" and the even more famous daemon-bridegroom ballad of \"Lenore\"\u2014both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was always great\u2014are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper M\u00e9rim\u00e9e in \"The Venus of Ille\", and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of \"The Ring\"; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose.\n\nBut it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman\u2014none other than Horace Walpole himself\u2014to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediaeval romance and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a translation by one \"William Marshal, Gent.\" from the Italian of a mythical \"Onuphrio Muralto\", the author later acknowledged his connexion with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity\u2014a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatisation, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.\n\nThe story\u2014tedious, artificial, and melodramatic\u2014is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth\u2014the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from this design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in divers ways; fragments of gigantic armour being discovered here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the ruins to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death\u2014for she is slain by her father by mistake\u2014is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred\u2014whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own supernatural harassings\u2014retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.\n\nSuch is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogether devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror\u2014the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and ramblings, deserted or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, longpersecuted, and generally insipid heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the reader's sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.\n\nGerman romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called \"Sir Bertrand\", in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto\u2014The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatisation, and ultimate translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately unpublished and lost.\n\nThe Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, written in 1785 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of wholly superior order\u2014Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764\u20131823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaborations of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches\u2014always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close detail\u2014as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of the characters.\n\nMrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels; The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be taken as a type of the early Gothic tale at its best. It is the chronicle of Emily, a young Frenchwoman transplanted to an ancient and portentous castle in the Apennines through the death of her parents and the marriage of her aunt to the lord of the castle\u2014the scheming nobleman Montoni. Mysterious sounds, opened doors, frightful legends, and a nameless horror in a niche behind a black veil all operate in quick succession to unnerve the heroine and her faithful attendant Annette; but finally, after the death of her aunt, she escapes with the aid of a fellow-prisoner whom she has discovered. On the way home she stops at a chateau filled with fresh horrors\u2014the abandoned wing where the departed chatelaine dwelt, and the bed of death with the black pall\u2014but is finally restored to security and happiness with her lover Valancourt, after the clearing-up of a secret which seemed for a time to involve her birth in mystery. Clearly, this is only the familiar material reworked; but it is so well reworked that Udolpho will always be a classic. Mrs. Radcliffe's characters are puppets, but they are less markedly so than those of her forerunners. And in atmospheric creation she stands pre\u00ebminent among those of her time.\n\nOf Mrs. Radcliffe's countless imitators, the American novelist Charles Brockden Brown stands the closest in spirit and method. Like her, he injured his creations by natural explanations; but also like her, he had an uncanny atmospheric power which gives his horrors a frightful vitality as long as they remain unexplained. He differed from her in contemptuously discarding the external Gothic paraphernalia and properties and choosing modern American scenes for his mysteries; but this repudiation did not extend to the Gothic spirit and type of incident. Brown's novels involve some memorably frightful scenes, and excel even Mrs. Radcliffe's in describing the operations of the perturbed mind. Edgar Huntly starts with a sleep-walker digging a grave, but is later impaired by touches of Godwinian didacticism. Ormond involves a member of a sinister secret brotherhood. That and Arthur Mervyn both describe the plague of yellow fever, which the author had witnessed in Philadelphia and New York. But Brown's most famous book is Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798), in which a Pennsylvania German, engulfed by a wave of religious fanaticism, hears voices and slays his wife and children as a sacrifice. His sister Clara, who tells the story, narrowly escapes. The scene, laid at the woodland estate of Mittingen on the Schuylkill's remote reaches, is drawn with extreme vividness; and the terrors of Clara, beset by spectral tones, gathering fears, and the sound of strange footsteps in the lonely house, are all shaped with truly artistic force. In the end a lame ventriloquial explanation is offered, but the atmosphere is genuine while it lasts. Carwin, the malign ventriloquist, is a typical villain of the Manfred or Montoni type.\n\nHorror in literature attains a new malignity in the work of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775\u20131818), whose novel The Monk (1796) achieved marvellous popularity and earned him the nickname of \"Monk\" Lewis. This young author, educated in Germany and saturated with a body of wild Teuton lore unknown to Mrs. Radcliffe, turned to terror in forms more violent than his gentle predecessor had ever dared to think of; and produced as a result a masterpiece of active nightmare whose general Gothic cast is spiced with added stores of ghoulishness. The story is one of a Spanish monk, Ambrosio, who from a state of overproud virtue is tempted to the very nadir of evil by a fiend in the guise of the maiden Matilda; and who is finally, when awaiting death at the Inquisition's hands, induced to purchase escape at the price of his soul from the Devil, because he deems both body and soul already lost. Forthwith the mocking Fiend snatches him to a lonely place, tells him he has sold his soul in vain since both pardon and a chance for salvation were approaching at the moment of his hideous bargain, and completes the sardonic betrayal by rebuking him for his unnatural crimes, and casting his body down a precipice whilst his soul is borne off for ever to perdition. The novel contains some appalling descriptions such as the incantation in the vaults beneath the convent cemetery, the burning of the convent, and the final end of the wretched abbot. In the sub-plot where the Marquis de las Cisternas meets the spectre of his erring ancestress, The Bleeding Nun, there are many enormously potent strokes; notably the visit of the animated corpse to the Marquis's bedside, and the cabbalistic ritual whereby the Wandering Jew helps him to fathom and banish his dead tormentor. Nevertheless The Monk drags sadly when read as a whole. It is too long and too diffuse, and much of its potency is marred by flippancy and by an awkwardly excessive reaction against those canons of decorum which Lewis at first despised as prudish. One great thing may be said of the author; that he never ruined his ghostly visions with a natural explanation. He succeeded in breaking up the Radcliffian tradition and expanding the field of the Gothic novel. Lewis wrote much more than The Monk. His drama, The Castle Spectre, was produced in 1798, and he later found time to pen other fictions in ballad form\u2014Tales of Terror (1799), Tales of Wonder (1801), and a succession of translations from the German.\n\nGothic romances, both English and German, now appeared in multitudinous and mediocre profusion. Most of them were merely ridiculous in the light of mature taste, and Miss Austen's famous satire Northanger Abbey was by no means an unmerited rebuke to a school which had sunk far toward absurdity. This particular school was petering out, but before its final subordination there arose its last and greatest figure in the person of Charles Robert Maturin (1782\u20131824), an obscure and eccentric Irish clergyman. Out of an ample body of miscellaneous writing which includes one confused Radcliffian imitation called Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio (1807), Maturin at length evolved the vivid horror-masterpiece of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), in which the Gothic tale climbed to altitudes of sheer spiritual fright which it had never known before.\n\nMelmoth is the tale of an Irish gentleman who, in the seventeenth century, obtained a preternaturally extended life from the Devil at the price of his soul. If he can persuade another to take the bargain off his hands, and assume his existing state, he can be saved; but this he can never manage to effect, no matter how assiduously he haunts those whom despair has made reckless and frantic. The framework of the story is very clumsy; involving tedious length, digressive episodes, narratives within narratives, and laboured dovetailing and coincidences; but at various points in the endless rambling there is felt a pulse of power undiscoverable in any previous work of this kind\u2014a kinship to the essential truth of human nature, an understanding of the profoundest sources of actual cosmic fear, and a white heat of sympathetic passion on the writer's part which makes the book a true document of aesthetic self-expression rather than a mere clever compound of artifice. No unbiassed reader can doubt that with Melmoth an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale is represented. Fear is taken out of the realm of the conventional and exalted into a hideous cloud over mankind's very destiny. Maturin's shudders, the work of one capable of shuddering himself, are of the sort that convince. Mrs. Radcliffe and Lewis are fair game for the parodist, but it would be difficult to find a false note in the feverishly intensified action and high atmospheric tension of the Irishman whose less sophisticated emotions and strain of Celtic mysticism gave him the finest possible natural equipment for his task. Without a doubt Maturin is a man of authentic genius, and he was so recognised by Balzac, who grouped Melmoth with Moli\u00e8re's Don Juan, Goethe's Faust, and Byron's Manfred as the supreme allegorical figures of modern European literature, and wrote a whimsical piece called \"Melmoth Reconciled\", in which the Wanderer succeeds in passing his infernal bargain on to a Parisian bank defaulter, who in turn hands it along a chain of victims until a revelling gambler dies with it in his possession, and by his damnation ends the curse. Scott, Rossetti, Thackeray, and Baudelaire are the other titans who gave Maturin their unqualified admiration, and there is much significance in the fact that Oscar Wilde, after his disgrace and exile, chose for his last days in Paris the assumed name of \"Sebastian Melmoth\".\n\nMelmoth contains scenes which even now have not lost their power to evoke dread. It begins with a deathbed\u2014an old miser is dying of sheer fright because of something he has seen, coupled with a manuscript he has read and a family portrait which hangs in an obscure closet of his centuried home in County Wicklow. He sends to Trinity College, Dublin, for his nephew John; and the latter upon arriving notes many uncanny things. The eyes of the portrait in the closet glow horribly, and twice a figure strangely resembling the portrait appears momentarily at the door. Dread hangs over that house of the Melmoths, one of whose ancestors, \"J. Melmoth, 1646\", the portrait represents. The dying miser declares that this man\u2014at a date slightly before 1800\u2014is alive. Finally the miser dies, and the nephew is told in the will to destroy both the portrait and a manuscript to be found in a certain drawer. Reading the manuscript, which was written late in the seventeenth century by an Englishman named Stanton, young John learns of a terrible incident in Spain in 1677, when the writer met a horrible fellow-countryman and was told of how he had stared to death a priest who tried to denounce him as one filled with fearsome evil. Later, after meeting the man again in London, Stanton is cast into a madhouse and visited by the stranger, whose approach is heralded by spectral music and whose eyes have a more than mortal glare. Melmoth the Wanderer\u2014for such is the malign visitor\u2014offers the captive freedom if he will take over his bargain with the Devil; but like all others whom Melmoth has approached, Stanton is proof against temptation. Melmoth's description of the horrors of a life in a madhouse, used to tempt Stanton, is one of the most potent passages of the book. Stanton is at length liberated, and spends the rest of his life tracking down Melmoth, whose family and ancestral abode he discovers. With the family he leaves the manuscript, which by young John's time is sadly ruinous and fragmentary. John destroys both portrait and manuscript, but in sleep is visited by his horrible ancestor, who leaves a black and blue mark on his wrist.\n\nYoung John soon afterward receives as a visitor a shipwrecked Spaniard, Alonzo de Mon\u00e7ada, who has escaped from compulsory monasticism and from the perils of the Inquisition. He has suffered horribly\u2014and the descriptions of his experiences under torment and in the vaults through which he once essays escape are classic\u2014but had the strength to resist Melmoth the Wanderer when approached at his darkest hour in prison. At the house of a Jew who sheltered him after his escape he discovers a wealth of manuscript relating other exploits of Melmoth including his wooing of an Indian island maiden, Immalee, who later comes to her birthright in Spain and is known as Donna Isidora; and of his horrible marriage to her by the corpse of a dead anchorite at midnight in the ruined chapel of a shunned and abhorred monastery. Mon\u00e7ada's narrative to young John takes up the bulk of Maturin's four-volume book; this disproportion being considered one of the chief technical faults of the composition.\n\nAt last the colloquies of John and Mon\u00e7ada are interrupted by the entrance of Melmoth the Wanderer himself, his piercing eyes now fading, and decrepitude swiftly overtaking him. The term of his bargain has approached its end, and he has come home after a century and a half to meet his fate. Warning all others from the room, no matter what sounds they may hear in the night, he awaits the end alone. Young John and Mon\u00e7ada hear frightful ululations, but do not intrude till silence comes toward morning. They then find the room empty. Clayey footprints lead out a rear door to a cliff overlooking the sea, and near the edge of the precipice is a track indicating the forcible dragging of some heavy body. The Wanderer's scarf is found on a crag some distance below the brink, but nothing further is ever seen or heard of him.\n\nSuch is the story, and none can fail to notice the difference between this modulated, suggestive, and artistically moulded horror and\u2014to use the words of Professor George Saintsbury\u2014\"the artful but rather jejune rationalism of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the too often puerile extravagance, the bad taste, and the sometimes slipshod style of Lewis.\" Maturin's style in itself deserves particular praise, for its forcible directness and vitality lift it altogether above the pompous artificialities of which his predecessors are guilty. Professor Edith Birkhead, in her history of the Gothic novel, justly observes that with all his faults Maturin was the greatest as well as the last of the Goths. Melmoth was widely read and eventually dramatised, but its late date in the evolution of the Gothic tale deprived it of the tumultuous popularity of Udolpho and The Monk." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 188", + "text": "Meanwhile other hands had not been idle, so that above the dreary plethora of trash like Marquis von Grosse's Horrid Mysteries (1796), Mrs. Roche's Children of the Abbey (1796), Miss Dacre's Zofloya; or, The Moor (1806), and the poet Shelley's schoolboy effusions Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) (both imitations of Zofloya ) there arose many memorable weird works both in English and German. Classic in merit, and markedly different from its fellows because of its foundation in the Oriental tale rather than the Walpolesque Gothic novel, is the celebrated History of the Caliph Vathek by the wealthy dilettante William Beckford, first written in the French language but published in an English translation before the appearance of the original. Eastern tales, introduced to European literature early in the eighteenth century through Galland's French translation of the inexhaustibly opulent Arabian Nights, had become a reigning fashion; being used both for allegory and for amusement. The sly humour which only the Eastern mind knows how to mix with weirdness had captivated a sophisticated generation, till Bagdad and Damascus names became as freely strown through popular literature as dashing Italian and Spanish ones were soon to be. Beckford, well read in Eastern romance, caught the atmosphere with unusual receptivity; and in his fantastic volume reflected very potently the haughty luxury, sly disillusion, bland cruelty, urbane treachery, and shadowy spectral horror of the Saracen spirit. His seasoning of the ridiculous seldom mars the force of his sinister theme, and the tale marches onward with a phantasmagoric pomp in which the laughter is that of skeletons feasting under Arabesque domes. Vathek is a tale of the grandson of the Caliph Haroun, who, tormented by that ambition for super-terrestrial power, pleasure, and learning which animates the average Gothic villain or Byronic hero (essentially cognate types), is lured by an evil genius to seek the subterranean throne of the mighty and fabulous pre-Adamite sultans in the fiery halls of Eblis, the Mahometan Devil. The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis and her witch-tower with the fifty one-eyed negresses, of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar (Persepolis) and of the impish bride Nouronihar whom he treacherously acquired on the way, of Istakhar's primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terrible Cyclopean halls of Eblis, where, lured by glittering promises, each victim is compelled to wander in anguish for ever, his right hand upon his blazingly ignited and eternally burning heart, are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters. No less notable are the three Episodes of Vathek, intended for insertion in the tale as narratives of Vathek's fellow-victims in Eblis' infernal halls, which remained unpublished throughout the author's lifetime and were discovered as recently as 1909 by the scholar Lewis Melville whilst collecting material for his Life and Letters of William Beckford. Beckford, however, lacks the essential mysticism which marks the acutest form of the weird; so that his tales have a certain knowing Latin hardness and clearness preclusive of sheer panic fright.\n\nBut Beckford remained alone in his devotion to the Orient. Other writers, closer to the Gothic tradition and to European life in general, were content to follow more faithfully in the lead of Walpole. Among the countless producers of terror-literature in these times may be mentioned the Utopian economic theorist William Godwin, who followed his famous but non-supernatural Caleb Williams (1794) with the intendedly weird St. Leon (1799), in which the theme of the elixir of life, as developed by the imaginary secret order of \"Rosicrucians\", is handled with ingeniousness if not with atmospheric convincingness. This element of Rosicrucianism, fostered by a wave of popular magical interest exemplified in the vogue of the charlatan Cagliostro and the publication of Francis Barrett's The Magus (1801), a curious and compendious treatise on occult principles and ceremonies, of which a reprint was made as lately as 1896, figures in Bulwer-Lytton and in many late Gothic novels, especially that remote and enfeebled posterity which straggled far down into the nineteenth century and was represented by George W. M. Reynolds' Faust and the Demon and Wagner, the Wehr-wolf. Caleb Williams, though non-supernatural, has many authentic touches of terror. It is the tale of a servant persecuted by a master whom he has found guilty of murder, and displays an invention and skill which have kept it alive in a fashion to this day. It was dramatised as The Iron Chest, and in that form was almost equally celebrated. Godwin, however, was too much the conscious teacher and prosaic man of thought to create a genuine weird masterpiece.\n\nHis daughter, the wife of Shelley, was much more successful; and her inimitable Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is one of the horror-classics of all time. Composed in competition with her husband, Lord Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori in an effort to prove supremacy in horror-making, Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein was the only one of the rival narratives to be brought to an elaborate completion; and criticism has failed to prove that the best parts are due to Shelley rather than to her. The novel, somewhat tinged but scarcely marred by moral didacticism, tells of the artificial human being moulded from charnel fragments by Victor Frankenstein, a young Swiss medical student. Created by its designer \"in the mad pride of intellectuality\", the monster possesses full intelligence but owns a hideously loathsome form. It is rejected by mankind, becomes embittered, and at length begins the successive murder of all whom young Frankenstein loves best, friends and family. It demands that Frankenstein create a wife for it; and when the student finally refuses in horror lest the world be populated with such monsters, it departs with a hideous threat 'to be with him on his wedding night'. Upon that night the bride is strangled, and from that time on Frankenstein hunts down the monster, even into the wastes of the Arctic. In the end, whilst seeking shelter on the ship of the man who tells the story, Frankenstein himself is killed by the shocking object of his search and creation of his presumptuous pride. Some of the scenes in Frankenstein are unforgettable, as when the newly animated monster enters its creator's room, parts the curtains of his bed, and gazes at him in the yellow moonlight with watery eyes\u2014\"if eyes they may be called\". Mrs. Shelley wrote other novels, including the fairly notable Last Man; but never duplicated the success of her first effort. It has the true touch of cosmic fear, no matter how much the movement may lag in places. Dr. Polidori developed his competing idea as a long short story, \"The Vampyre\"; in which we behold a suave villain of the true Gothic or Byronic type, and encounter some excellent passages of stark fright, including a terrible nocturnal experience in a shunned Grecian wood.\n\nIn this same period Sir Walter Scott frequently concerned himself with the weird, weaving it into many of his novels and poems, and sometimes producing such independent bits of narration as \"The Tapestried Chamber\" or \"Wandering Willie's Tale\" in Redgauntlet, in the latter of which the force of the spectral and the diabolic is enhanced by a grotesque homeliness of speech and atmosphere. In 1830 Scott published his Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, which still forms one of our best compendia of European witch-lore. Washington Irving is another famous figure not unconnected with the weird; for though most of his ghosts are too whimsical and humorous to form genuinely spectral literature, a distinct inclination in this direction is to be noted in many of his productions. \"The German Student\" in Tales of a Traveller (1824) is a slyly concise and effective presentation of the old legend of the dead bride, whilst woven into the comic tissue of \"The Money-Diggers\" in the same volume is more than one hint of piratical apparitions in the realms which Captain Kidd once roamed. Thomas Moore also joined the ranks of the macabre artists in the poem Alciphron, which he later elaborated into the prose novel of The Epicurean (1827). Though merely relating the adventures of a young Athenian duped by the artifice of cunning Egyptian priests, Moore manages to infuse much genuine horror into his account of subterranean frights and wonders beneath the primordial temples of Memphis. De Quincey more than once revels in grotesque and arabesque terrors, though with a desultoriness and learned pomp which deny him the rank of specialist.\n\nThis era likewise saw the rise of William Harrison Ainsworth, whose romantic novels teem with the eerie and the gruesome. Capt. Marryat, besides writing such short tales as \"The Werewolf\", made a memorable contribution in The Phantom Ship (1839), founded on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, whose spectral and accursed vessel sails for ever near the Cape of Good Hope. Dickens now rises with occasional weird bits like \"The Signalman\", a tale of ghostly warning conforming to a very common pattern and touched with a verisimilitude which allies it as much with the coming psychological school as with the dying Gothic school. At this time a wave of interest in spiritualistic charlatanry, mediumism, Hindoo theosophy, and such matters, much like that of the present day, was flourishing; so that the number of weird tales with a \"psychic\" or pseudo-scientific basis became very considerable. For a number of these the prolific and popular Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton was responsible; and despite the large doses of turgid rhetoric and empty romanticism in his products, his success in the weaving of a certain kind of bizarre charm cannot be denied.\n\n\"The House and the Brain\", which hints of Rosicrucianism and at a malign and deathless figure perhaps suggested by Louis XV's mysterious courtier St. Germain, yet survives as one of the best short haunted-house tales ever written. The novel Zanoni (1842) contains similar elements more elaborately handled, and introduces a vast unknown sphere of being pressing on our own world and guarded by a horrible \"Dweller of the Threshold\" who haunts those who try to enter and fail. Here we have a benign brotherhood kept alive from age to age till finally reduced to a single member, and as a hero an ancient Chaldaean sorcerer surviving in the pristine bloom of youth to perish on the guillotine of the French Revolution. Though full of the conventional spirit of romance, marred by a ponderous network of symbolic and didactic meanings, and left unconvincing through lack of perfect atmospheric realisation of the situations hinging on the spectral world, Zanoni is really an excellent performance as a romantic novel; and can be read with genuine interest today by the not too sophisticated reader. It is amusing to note that in describing an attempted initiation into the ancient brotherhood the author cannot escape using the stock Gothic castle of Walpolian lineage.\n\nIn A Strange Story (1862) Bulwer-Lytton shews a marked improvement in the creation of weird images and moods. The novel, despite enormous length, a highly artificial plot bolstered up by opportune coincidences, and an atmosphere of homiletic pseudo-science designed to please the matter-of-fact and purposeful Victorian reader, is exceedingly effective as a narrative; evoking instantaneous and unflagging interest, and furnishing many potent\u2014if somewhat melodramatic\u2014tableaux and climaxes. Again we have the mysterious user of life's elixir in the person of the soulless magician Margrave, whose dark exploits stand out with dramatic vividness against the modern background of a quiet English town and of the Australian bush; and again we have shadowy intimations of a vast spectral world of the unknown in the very air about us\u2014this time handled with much greater power and vitality than in Zanoni. One of the two great incantation passages, where the hero is driven by a luminous evil spirit to rise at night in his sleep, take a strange Egyptian wand, and evoke nameless presences in the haunted and mausoleum-facing pavilion of a famous Renaissance alchemist, truly stands among the major terror scenes of literature. Just enough is suggested, and just little enough is told. Unknown words are twice dictated to the sleep-walker, and as he repeats them the ground trembles, and all the dogs of the countryside begin to bay at half-seen amorphous shadows that stalk athwart the moonlight. When a third set of unknown words is prompted, the sleep-walker's spirit suddenly rebels at uttering them, as if the soul could recognise ultimate abysmal horrors concealed from the mind; and at last an apparition of an absent sweetheart and good angel breaks the malign spell. This fragment well illustrates how far Lord Lytton was capable of progressing beyond his usual pomp and stock romance toward that crystalline essence of artistic fear which belongs to the domain of poetry. In describing certain details of incantations, Lytton was greatly indebted to his amusingly serious occult studies, in the course of which he came in touch with that odd French scholar and cabbalist Alphonse-Louis Constant (\"Eliphas L\u00e9vi\"), who claimed to possess the secrets of ancient magic, and to have evoked the spectre of the old Grecian wizard Apollonius of Tyana, who lived in Nero's time.\n\nThe romantic, semi-Gothic, quasi-moral tradition here represented was carried far down the nineteenth century by such authors as Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, Thomas Preskett Prest with his famous Varney, the Vampyre (1847), Wilkie Collins, the late Sir H. Rider Haggard (whose She is really remarkably good), Sir A. Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson\u2014the latter of whom, despite an atrocious tendency toward jaunty mannerisms, created permanent classics in \"Markheim\", \"The Body-Snatcher\", and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, we may say that this school still survives; for to it clearly belong such of our contemporary horror-tales as specialise in events rather than atmospheric details, address the intellect rather than the impressionistic imagination, cultivate a luminous glamour rather than a malign tensity or psychological verisimilitude, and take a definite stand in sympathy with mankind and its welfare. It has its undeniable strength, and because of its \"human element\" commands a wider audience than does the sheer artistic nightmare. If not quite so potent as the latter, it is because a diluted product can never achieve the intensity of a concentrated essence.\n\nQuite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bront\u00eb, with its mad vista of bleak, windswept Yorkshire moors and the violent, distorted lives they foster. Though primarily a tale of life, and of human passions in agony and conflict, its epically cosmic setting affords room for horror of the most spiritual sort. Heathcliff, the modified Byronic villain-hero, is a strange dark waif found in the streets as a small child and speaking only a strange gibberish till adopted by the family he ultimately ruins. That he is in truth a diabolic spirit rather than a human being is more than once suggested, and the unreal is further approached in the experience of the visitor who encounters a plaintive child-ghost at a bough-brushed upper window. Between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw is a tie deeper and more terrible than human love. After her death he twice disturbs her grave, and is haunted by an impalpable presence which can be nothing less than her spirit. The spirit enters his life more and more, and at last he becomes confident of some imminent mystical reunion. He says he feels a strange change approaching, and ceases to take nourishment. At night he either walks abroad or opens the casement by his bed. When he dies the casement is still swinging open to the pouring rain, and a queer smile pervades the stiffened face. They bury him in a grave beside the mound he has haunted for eighteen years, and small shepherd boys say that he yet walks with his Catherine in the churchyard and on the moor when it rains. Their faces, too, are sometimes seen on rainy nights behind that upper casement at Wuthering Heights. Miss Bront\u00eb's eerie terror is no mere Gothic echo, but a tense expression of man's shuddering reaction to the unknown. In this respect, Wuthering Heights becomes the symbol of a literary transition, and marks the growth of a new and sounder school." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 189", + "text": "On the Continent literary horror fared well. The celebrated short tales and novels of Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (1776\u20131822) are a byword for mellowness of background and maturity of form, though they incline to levity and extravagance, and lack the exalted moments of stark, breathless terror which a less sophisticated writer might have achieved. Generally they convey the grotesque rather than the terrible. Most artistic of all the Continental weird tales is the German classic Undine (1811), by Friedrich Heinrich Karl, Baron de la Motte Fouqu\u00e9. In this story of a water-spirit who married a mortal and gained a human soul there is a delicate fineness of craftsmanship which makes it notable in any department of literature, and an easy naturalness which places it close to the genuine folk-myth. It is, in fact, derived from a tale told by the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus in his Treatise on Elemental Sprites.\n\nUndine, daughter of a powerful water-prince, was exchanged by her father as a small child for a fisherman's daughter, in order that she might acquire a soul by wedding a human being. Meeting the noble youth Huldbrand at the cottage of her foster-father by the sea at the edge of a haunted wood, she soon marries him, and accompanies him to his ancestral castle of Ringstetten. Huldbrand, however, eventually wearies of his wife's supernatural affiliations, and especially of the appearances of her uncle, the malicious woodland waterfall-spirit K\u00fchleborn; a weariness increased by his growing affection for Bertalda, who turns out to be the fisherman's child for whom Undine was exchanged. At length, on a voyage down the Danube, he is provoked by some innocent act of his devoted wife to utter the angry words which consign her back to her supernatural element; from which she can, by the laws of her species, return only once\u2014to kill him, whether she will or no, if ever he prove unfaithful to her memory. Later, when Huldbrand is about to be married to Bertalda, Undine returns for her sad duty, and bears his life away in tears. When he is buried among his fathers in the village churchyard a veiled, snow-white female figure appears among the mourners, but after the prayer is seen no more. In her place is seen a little silver spring, which murmurs its way almost completely around the new grave, and empties into a neighbouring lake. The villagers shew it to this day, and say that Undine and her Huldbrand are thus united in death. Many passages and atmospheric touches in this tale reveal Fouqu\u00e9 as an accomplished artist in the field of the macabre; especially the descriptions of the haunted wood with its gigantic snow-white man and various unnamed terrors, which occur early in the narrative.\n\nNot so well known as Undine, but remarkable for its convincing realism and freedom from Gothic stock devices, is the Amber Witch of Wilhelm Meinhold, another product of the German fantastic genius of the earlier nineteenth century. This tale, which is laid in the time of the Thirty Years' War, purports to be a clergyman's manuscript found in an old church at Coserow, and centres round the writer's daughter, Maria Schweidler, who is wrongly accused of witchcraft. She has found a deposit of amber which she keeps secret for various reasons, and the unexplained wealth obtained from this lends colour to the accusation; an accusation instigated by the malice of the wolf-hunting nobleman Wittich Appelmann, who has vainly pursued her with ignoble designs. The deeds of a real witch, who afterward comes to a horrible supernatural end in prison, are glibly imputed to the hapless Maria; and after a typical witchcraft trial with forced confessions under torture she is about to be burned at the stake when saved just in time by her lover, a noble youth from a neighbouring district. Meinhold's great strength is in his air of casual and realistic verisimilitude, which intensifies our suspense and sense of the unseen by half persuading us that the menacing events must somehow be either the truth or very close to the truth. Indeed, so thorough is this realism that a popular magazine once published the main points of The Amber Witch as an actual occurrence of the seventeenth century!\n\nIn the present generation German horror-fiction is most notably represented by Hanns Heinz Ewers, who brings to bear on his dark conceptions an effective knowledge of modern psychology. Novels like The Sorcerer's Apprentice and Alraune, and short stories like \"The Spider\", contain distinctive qualities which raise them to a classic level.\n\nBut France as well as Germany has been active in the realm of weirdness. Victor Hugo, in such tales as Hans of Iceland, and Balzac, in The Wild Ass's Skin, S\u00e9raph\u00eeta, and Louis Lambert, both employ supernaturalism to a greater or less extent; though generally only as a means to some more human end, and without the sincere and daemonic intensity which characterises the born artist in shadows. It is in Th\u00e9ophile Gautier that we first seem to find an authentic French sense of the unreal world, and here there appears a spectral mastery which, though not continuously used, is recognisable at once as something alike genuine and profound. Short tales like \"Avatar\", \"The Foot of the Mummy\", and \"Clarimonde\" display glimpses of forbidden visits that allure, tantalise, and sometimes horrify; whilst the Egyptian visions evoked in \"One of Cleopatra's Nights\" are of the keenest and most expressive potency. Gautier captured the inmost soul of aeon-weighted Egypt, with its cryptic life and Cyclopean architecture, and uttered once and for all the eternal horror of its nether world of catacombs, where to the end of time millions of stiff, spiced corpses will stare up in the blackness with glassy eyes, awaiting some awesome and unrelatable summons. Gustave Flaubert ably continued the tradition of Gautier in orgies of poetic phantasy like The Temptation of St. Anthony, and but for a strong realistic bias might have been an arch-weaver of tapestried terrors. Later on we see the stream divide, producing strange poets and fantaisistes of the Symbolist and Decadent schools whose dark interests really centre more in abnormalities of human thought and instinct than in the actual supernatural, and subtle story-tellers whose thrills are quite directly derived from the night-black wells of cosmic unreality. Of the former class of \"artists in sin\" the illustrious poet Baudelaire, influenced vastly by Poe, is the supreme type; whilst the psychological novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, a true child of the eighteen-nineties, is at once the summation and finale. The latter and purely narrative class is continued by Prosper M\u00e9rim\u00e9e, whose \"Venus of Ille\" presents in terse and convincing prose the same ancient statue-bride theme which Thomas Moore cast in ballad form in \"The Ring\".\n\nThe horror-tales of the powerful and cynical Guy de Maupassant, written as his final madness gradually overtook him, present individualities of their own; being rather the morbid outpourings of a realistic mind in a pathological state than the healthy imaginative products of a vision naturally disposed toward phantasy and sensitive to the normal illusions of the unseen. Nevertheless they are of the keenest interest and poignancy; suggesting with marvellous force the imminence of nameless terrors, and the relentless dogging of an ill-starred individual by hideous and menacing representatives of the outer blackness. Of these stories \"The Horla\" is generally regarded as the masterpiece. Relating the advent to France of an invisible being who lives on water and milk, sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extra-terrestrial organisms arrived on earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind, this tense narrative is perhaps without a peer in its particular department; notwithstanding its indebtedness to a tale by the American Fitz-James O'Brien for details in describing the actual presence of the unseen monster. Other potently dark creations of de Maupassant are \"Who Knows?\", \"The Spectre\", \"He?\", \"The Diary of a Madman\", \"The White Wolf\", \"On the River\", and the grisly verses entitled \"Horror\".\n\nThe collaborators Erckmann-Chatrian enriched French literature with many spectral fancies like The Man-Wolf, in which a transmitted curse works toward its end in a traditional Gothic-castle setting. Their power of creating a shuddering midnight atmosphere was tremendous despite a tendency toward natural explanations and scientific wonders; and few short tales contain greater horror than \"The Invisible Eye\", where a malignant old hag weaves nocturnal hypnotic spells which induce the successive occupants of a certain inn chamber to hang themselves on a cross-beam. \"The Owl's Ear\" and \"The Waters of Death\" are full of engulfing darkness and mystery, the latter embodying the familiar overgrown-spider theme so frequently employed by weird fictionists. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam likewise followed the macabre school; his \"Torture by Hope\", the tale of a stake-condemned prisoner permitted to escape in order to feel the pangs of recapture, being held by some to constitute the most harrowing short story in literature. This type, however, is less a part of the weird tradition than a class peculiar to itself\u2014the so-called conte cruel, in which the wrenching of the emotions is accomplished through dramatic tantalisations, frustrations, and gruesome physical horrors. Almost wholly devoted to this form is the living writer Maurice Level, whose very brief episodes have lent themselves so readily to theatrical adaptation in the \"thrillers\" of the Grand Guignol. As a matter of fact, the French genius is more naturally suited to this dark realism than to the suggestion of the unseen; since the latter process requires, for its best and most sympathetic development on a large scale, the inherent mysticism of the Northern mind.\n\nA very flourishing, though till recently quite hidden, branch of weird literature is that of the Jews, kept alive and nourished in obscurity by the sombre heritage of early Eastern magic, apocalyptic literature, and cabbalism. The Semitic mind, like the Celtic and Teutonic, seems to possess marked mystical inclinations; and the wealth of underground horror-lore surviving in ghettoes and synagogues must be much more considerable than is generally imagined. Cabbalism itself, so prominent during the Middle Ages, is a system of philosophy explaining the universe as emanations of the Deity, and involving the existence of strange spiritual realms and beings apart from the visible world, of which dark glimpses may be obtained through certain secret incantations. Its ritual is bound up with mystical interpretations of the Old Testament, and attributes an esoteric significance to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet\u2014a circumstance which has imparted to Hebrew letters a sort of spectral glamour and potency in the popular literature of magic. Jewish folklore has preserved much of the terror and mystery of the past, and when more thoroughly studied is likely to exert considerable influence on weird fiction. The best examples of its literary use so far are the German novel The Golem, by Gustav Meyrink, and the drama The Dybbuk, by the Jewish writer using the pseudonym \"Ansky\". The former, with its haunting shadowy suggestions of marvels and horrors just beyond reach, is laid in Prague, and describes with singular mastery that city's ancient ghetto with its spectral, peaked gables. The name is derived from a fabulous artificial giant supposed to be made and animated by mediaeval rabbis according to a certain cryptic formula. The Dybbuk, translated and produced in America in 1925, and more recently produced as an opera, describes with singular power the possession of a living body by the evil soul of a dead man. Both golems and dybbuks are fixed types, and serve as frequent ingredients of later Jewish tradition." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 190", + "text": "In the eighteen-thirties occurred a literary dawn directly affecting not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole; and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great European aesthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the \"advanced intelligentsia\" to minimise his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the pervasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realised its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.\n\nBefore Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or less of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove\u2014good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing\u2014with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathiser, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as subject-matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feeling, and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquillity, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.\n\nPoe's spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors, and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before; whereby Poe studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction, and worked with an analytical knowledge of terror's true sources which doubled the force of his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in merely conventional shudder-coining. This example having been set, later authors were naturally forced to conform to it in order to compete at all; so that in this way a definite change began to affect the main stream of macabre writing. Poe, too, set a fashion in consummate craftsmanship; and although today some of his own work seems slightly melodramatic and unsophisticated, we can constantly trace his influence in such things as the maintenance of a single mood and achievement of a single impression in a tale, and the rigorous paring down of incidents to such as have a direct bearing on the plot and will figure prominently in the climax. Truly may it be said that Poe invented the short story in its present form. His elevation of disease, perversity, and decay to the level of artistically expressible themes was likewise infinitely far-reaching in effect; for avidly seized, sponsored, and intensified by his eminent French admirer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, it became the nucleus of the principal aesthetic movements in France, thus making Poe in a sense the father of the Decadents and the Symbolists.\n\nPoet and critic by nature and supreme attainment, logician and philosopher by taste and mannerism, Poe was by no means immune from defects and affectations. His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. Verses and tales alike sustain the burthen of cosmic panic. The raven whose noisome beak pierces the heart, the ghouls that toll iron bells in pestilential steeples, the vault of Ulalume in the black October night, the shocking spires and domes under the sea, the \"wild, weird clime that lieth, sublime, out of Space\u2014out of Time\"\u2014all these things and more leer at us amidst maniacal rattlings in the seething nightmare of the poetry. And in the prose there yawn open for us the very jaws of the pit\u2014inconceivable abnormalities slyly hinted into a horrible half-knowledge by words whose innocence we scarcely doubt till the cracked tension of the speaker's hollow voice bids us fear their nameless implications; daemoniac patterns and presences slumbering noxiously till waked for one phobic instant into a shrieking revelation that cackles itself to sudden madness or explodes in memorable and cataclysmic echoes. A Witches' Sabbath of horror flinging off decorous robes is flashed before us\u2014a sight the more monstrous because of the scientific skill with which every particular is marshalled and brought into an easy apparent relation to the known gruesomeness of material life.\n\nPoe's tales, of course, fall into several classes; some of which contain a purer essence of spiritual horror than others. The tales of logic and ratiocination, forerunners of the modern detective story, are not to be included at all in weird literature; whilst certain others, probably influenced considerably by Hoffmann, possess an extravagance which relegates them to the borderline of the grotesque. Still a third group deal with abnormal psychology and monomania in such a way as to express terror but not weirdness. A substantial residuum, however, represent the literature of supernatural horror in its acutest form; and give their author a permanent and unassailable place as deity and fountain-head of all modern diabolic fiction. Who can forget the terrible swollen ship poised on the billow-chasm's edge in \"MS. Found in a Bottle\"\u2014the dark intimations of her unhallowed age and monstrous growth, her sinister crew of unseeing greybeards, and her frightful southward rush under full sail through the ice of the Antarctic night, sucked onward by some resistless devil-current toward a vortex of eldritch enlightenment which must end in destruction? Then there is the unutterable \"M. Valdemar\", kept together by hypnotism for seven months after his death, and uttering frantic sounds but a moment before the breaking of the spell leaves him \"a nearly liquid mass of loathsome\u2014of detestable putrescence\". In the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym the voyagers reach first a strange south polar land of murderous savages where nothing is white and where vast rocky ravines have the form of titanic Egyptian letters spelling terrible primal arcana of earth; and thereafter a still more mysterious realm where everything is white, and where shrouded giants and snowy-plumed birds guard a cryptic cataract of mist which empties from immeasurable celestial heights into a torrid milky sea. \"Metzengerstein\" horrifies with its malign hints of a monstrous metempsychosis\u2014the mad nobleman who burns the stable of his hereditary foe; the colossal unknown horse that issues from the blazing building after the owner has perished therein; the vanishing bit of ancient tapestry where was shewn the giant horse of the victim's ancestor in the Crusades; the madman's wild and constant riding on the great horse, and his fear and hatred of the steed; the meaningless prophecies that brood obscurely over the warring houses; and finally, the burning of the madman's palace and the death therein of the owner, borne helpless into the flames and up the vast staircases astride the beast he has ridden so strangely. Afterward the rising smoke of the ruins takes the form of a gigantic horse. \"The Man of the Crowd\", telling of one who roams day and night to mingle with streams of people as if afraid to be alone, has quieter effects, but implies nothing less of cosmic fear. Poe's mind was never far from terror and decay, and we see in every tale, poem, and philosophical dialogue a tense eagerness to fathom unplumbed wells of night, to pierce the veil of death, and to reign in fancy as lord of the frightful mysteries of time and space.\n\nCertain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. Poe could, when he wished, give to his prose a richly poetic cast; employing that archaic and Orientalised style with jewelled phrase, quasi-Biblical repetition, and recurrent burthen so successfully used by later writers like Oscar Wilde and Lord Dunsany; and in the cases where he has done this we have an effect of lyrical phantasy almost narcotic in essence\u2014an opium pageant of dream in the language of dream, with every unnatural colour and grotesque image bodied forth in a symphony of corresponding sound. \"The Masque of the Red Death\", \"Silence\u2014A Fable\", and \"Shadow\u2014A Parable\" are assuredly poems in every sense of the word save the metrical one, and owe as much of their power to aural cadence as to visual imagery. But it is in two of the less openly poetic tales, \"Ligeia\" and \"The Fall of the House of Usher\"\u2014especially the latter\u2014that one finds those very summits of artistry whereby Poe takes his place at the head of fictional miniaturists. Simple and straightforward in plot, both of these tales owe their supreme magic to the cunning development which appears in the selection and collocation of every least incident. \"Ligeia\" tells of a first wife of lofty and mysterious origin, who after death returns through a preternatural force of will to take possession of the body of a second wife; imposing even her physical appearance on the temporary reanimated corpse of her victim at the last moment. Despite a suspicion of prolixity and topheaviness, the narrative reaches its terrific climax with relentless power. \"Usher\", whose superiority in detail and proportion is very marked, hints shudderingly of obscure life in inorganic things, and displays an abnormally linked trinity of entities at the end of a long and isolated family history\u2014a brother, his twin sister, and their incredibly ancient house all sharing a single soul and meeting one common dissolution at the same moment.\n\nThese bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskilful hands, become under Poe's spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness\u2014the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous denouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired illusion\u2014principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be\u2014we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation\u2014but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.\n\nLike most fantaisistes, Poe excels in incidents and broad narrative effects rather than in character drawing. His typical protagonist is generally a dark, handsome, proud, melancholy, intellectual, highly sensitive, capricious, introspective, isolated, and sometimes slightly mad gentleman of ancient family and opulent circumstances; usually deeply learned in strange lore, and darkly ambitious of penetrating to forbidden secrets of the universe. Aside from a high-sounding name, this character obviously derives little from the early Gothic novel; for he is clearly neither the wooden hero nor the diabolical villain of Radcliffian or Ludovician romance. Indirectly, however, he does possess a sort of genealogical connexion; since his gloomy, ambitious, and anti-social qualities savour strongly of the typical Byronic hero, who in turn is definitely an offspring of the Gothic Manfreds, Montonis, and Ambrosios. More particular qualities appear to be derived from the psychology of Poe himself, who certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 191", + "text": "The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt. America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral legends had already been recognised as fruitful subject-matter for literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund proceeded, as Paul Elmer More has pointed out, from the keen spiritual and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged. The vast and gloomy virgin forests in whose perpetual twilight all terrors might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday; and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for survival\u2014all these things conspired to produce an environment in which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem nightmare.\n\nPoe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school\u2014the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical\u2014was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in American letters\u2014the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.\n\nHawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground. In The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory, anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the late D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose idea was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called \"The Ancestral Footstep\" shew what Hawthorne would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition\u2014that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they walked\u2014which appears incidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr. Grimshawe's Secret.\n\nMany of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. \"Edward Randolph's Portrait\", in Legends of the Province House, has its diabolic moments. \"The Minister's Black Veil\" (founded on an actual incident) and \"The Ambitious Guest\" imply much more than they state, whilst \"Ethan Brand\"\u2014a fragment of a longer work never completed\u2014rises to genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic \"unpardonable sinner\", whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer\u2014an especially vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and then in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from a very ancient grave.\n\nBut foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in which the relentless working out of an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the sinister background of a very ancient Salem house\u2014one of those peaked Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New England coast towns, but which gave way after the seventeenth century to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known as \"Colonial\". Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are to be seen today in their original condition throughout the United States, but one well known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street, Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks, its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an object well calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as a witchcraft judge in 1692.\n\nFrom this setting came the immortal tale\u2014New England's greatest contribution to weird literature\u2014and we can feel in an instant the authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed, and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that its builder\u2014old Colonel Pyncheon\u2014snatched the land with peculiar ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule died cursing old Pyncheon\u2014\"God will give him blood to drink\"\u2014and the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's carpenter son consented to build the great gabled house for his father's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died strangely on the day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes, with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and peculiar and sometimes terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.\n\nThe overshadowing malevolence of the ancient house\u2014almost as alive as Poe's House of Usher, though in a subtler way\u2014pervades the tale as a recurrent motif pervades an operatic tragedy; and when the main story is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; child-like, unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment; sly and treacherous Judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel all over again\u2014all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well matched by the stunted vegetation and anaemic fowls in the garden. It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union of sprightly Phoebe, cousin and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of the Maules. This union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of diction or movement, and keeps his implications of terror well in the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like the bewitching of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century, and the spectral music of her harpsichord which precedes a death in the family\u2014the latter a variant of an immemorial type of Aryan myth\u2014link the action directly with the supernatural; whilst the dead nocturnal vigil of old Judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, with his frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and genuine sort. The way in which the Judge's death is first adumbrated by the motions and sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, long before the fact is suspected either by the reader or by any of the characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed. Later the strange cat watches intently outside that same window in the night and on the next day, for\u2014something. It is clearly the psychopomp of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite deftness to its latter-day setting.\n\nBut Hawthorne left no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe\u2014who so clearly and realistically understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct mechanics of its achievement\u2014which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz-James O'Brien (1828\u20131862), who became naturalised as an American and perished honourably in the Civil War. It is he who gave us \"What Was It?\", the first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and the prototype of de Maupassant's \"Horla\"; he also who created the inimitable \"Diamond Lens\", in which a young microscopist falls in love with a maiden of an infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a drop of water. O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though his genius was not, properly speaking, of the same titan quality which characterised Poe and Hawthorne.\n\nCloser to real greatness was the eccentric and saturnine journalist Ambrose Bierce, born in 1842; who likewise entered the Civil War, but survived to write some immortal tales and to disappear in 1913 in as great a cloud of mystery as any he ever evoked from his nightmare fancy. Bierce was a satirist and pamphleteer of note, but the bulk of his artistic reputation must rest upon his grim and savage short stories; a large number of which deal with the Civil War and form the most vivid and realistic expression which that conflict has yet received in fiction. Virtually all of Bierce's tales are tales of horror; and whilst many of them treat only of the physical and psychological horrors within Nature, a substantial proportion admit the malignly supernatural and form a leading element in America's fund of weird literature. Mr. Samuel Loveman, a living poet and critic who was personally acquainted with Bierce, thus sums up the genius of the great shadow-maker in the preface to some of his letters:\n\n\"In Bierce, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time, not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation. In Poe one finds it a tour de force, in Maupassant a nervous engagement of the flagellated climax. To Bierce, simply and sincerely, diabolism held in its tormented depth, a legitimate and reliant means to the end. Yet a tacit confirmation with Nature is in every instance insisted upon.\n\n\"In 'The Death of Halpin Frayser', flowers, verdure, and the boughs and leaves of trees are magnificently placed as an opposing foil to unnatural malignity. Not the accustomed golden world, but a world pervaded with the mystery of blue and the breathless recalcitrance of dreams, is Bierce's. Yet, curiously, inhumanity is not altogether absent.\"\n\nThe \"inhumanity\" mentioned by Mr. Loveman finds vent in a rare strain of sardonic comedy and graveyard humour, and a kind of delight in images of cruelty and tantalising disappointment. The former quality is well illustrated by some of the subtitles in the darker narratives; such as \"One does not always eat what is on the table\", describing a body laid out for a coroner's inquest, and \"A man though naked may be in rags\", referring to a frightfully mangled corpse.\n\nBierce's work is in general somewhat uneven. Many of the stories are obviously mechanical, and marred by a jaunty and commonplacely artificial style derived from journalistic models; but the grim malevolence stalking through all of them is unmistakable, and several stand out as permanent mountain-peaks of American weird writing. \"The Death of Halpin Frayser\", called by Frederic Taber Cooper the most fiendishly ghastly tale in the literature of the Anglo-Saxon race, tells of a body skulking by night without a soul in a weird and horribly ensanguined wood, and of a man beset by ancestral memories who met death at the claws of that which had been his fervently loved mother. \"The Damned Thing\", frequently copied in popular anthologies, chronicles the hideous devastations of an invisible entity that waddles and flounders on the hills and in the wheatfields by night and day. \"The Suitable Surroundings\" evokes with singular subtlety yet apparent simplicity a piercing sense of the terror which may reside in the written word. In the story the weird author Colston says to his friend Marsh, \"You are brave enough to read me in a street-car, but\u2014in a deserted house\u2014alone\u2014in the forest\u2014at night! Bah! I have a manuscript in my pocket that would kill you!\" Marsh reads the manuscript in \"the suitable surroundings\"\u2014and it does kill him. \"The Middle Toe of the Right Foot\" is clumsily developed, but has a powerful climax. A man named Manton has horribly killed his two children and his wife, the latter of whom lacked the middle toe of the right foot. Ten years later he returns much altered to the neighbourhood; and, being secretly recognised, is provoked into a bowie-knife duel in the dark, to be held in the now abandoned house where his crime was committed. When the moment of the duel arrives a trick is played upon him; and he is left without an antagonist, shut in a night-black ground floor room of the reputedly haunted edifice, with the thick dust of a decade on every hand. No knife is drawn against him, for only a thorough scare is intended; but on the next day he is found crouched in a corner with distorted face, dead of sheer fright at something he has seen. The only clue visible to the discoverers is one having terrible implications: \"In the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor\u2014leading from the door by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of Manton's crouching corpse\u2014were three parallel lines of footprints\u2014light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones those of small children, the inner a woman's. From the point at which they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way.\" And, of course, the woman's prints shewed a lack of the middle toe of the right foot. \"The Spook House\", told with a severely homely air of journalistic verisimilitude, conveys terrible hints of shocking mystery. In 1858 an entire family of seven persons disappears suddenly and unaccountably from a plantation house in eastern Kentucky, leaving all its possessions untouched\u2014furniture, clothing, food supplies, horses, cattle, and slaves. About a year later two men of high standing are forced by a storm to take shelter in the deserted dwelling, and in so doing stumble into a strange subterranean room lit by an unaccountable greenish light and having an iron door which cannot be opened from within. In this room lie the decayed corpses of all the missing family; and as one of the discoverers rushes forward to embrace a body he seems to recognise, the other is so overpowered by a strange foetor that he accidentally shuts his companion in the vault and loses consciousness. Recovering his senses six weeks later, the survivor is unable to find the hidden room; and the house is burned during the Civil War. The imprisoned discoverer is never seen or heard of again.\n\nBierce seldom realises the atmospheric possibilities of his themes as vividly as Poe; and much of his work contains a certain touch of naivet\u00e9, prosaic angularity, or early-American provincialism which contrasts somewhat with the efforts of later horror-masters. Nevertheless the genuineness and artistry of his dark intimations are always unmistakable, so that his greatness is in no danger of eclipse. As arranged in his definitively collected works, Bierce's weird tales occur mainly in two volumes, Can Such Things Be? and In the Midst of Life. The former, indeed, is almost wholly given over to the supernatural.\n\nMuch of the best in American horror-literature has come from pens not mainly devoted to that medium. Oliver Wendell Holmes's historic Elsie Venner suggests with admirable restraint an unnatural ophidian element in a young woman prenatally influenced, and sustains the atmosphere with finely discriminating landscape touches. In The Turn of the Screw Henry James triumphs over his inevitable pomposity and prolixity sufficiently well to create a truly potent air of sinister menace; depicting the hideous influence of two dead and evil servants, Peter Quint and the governess Miss Jessel, over a small boy and girl who had been under their care. James is perhaps too diffuse, too unctuously urbane, and too much addicted to subtleties of speech to realise fully all the wild and devastating horror in his situations; but for all that there is a rare and mounting tide of fright, culminating in the death of the little boy, which gives the novelette a permanent place in its special class.\n\nF. Marion Crawford produced several weird tales of varying quality, now collected in a volume entitled Wandering Ghosts. \"For the Blood Is the Life\" touches powerfully on a case of moon-cursed vampirism near an ancient tower on the rocks of the lonely South Italian sea-coast. \"The Dead Smile\" treats of family horrors in an old house and an ancestral vault in Ireland, and introduces the banshee with considerable force. \"The Upper Berth\", however, is Crawford's weird masterpiece; and is one of the most tremendous horror-stories in all literature. In this tale of a suicide-haunted stateroom such things as the spectral salt-water dampness, the strangely open porthole, and the nightmare struggle with the nameless object are handled with incomparable dexterity.\n\nVery genuine, though not without the typical mannered extravagance of the eighteen-nineties, is the strain of horror in the early work of Robert W. Chambers, since renowned for products of a very different quality. The King in Yellow, a series of vaguely connected short stories having as a background a monstrous and suppressed book whose perusal brings fright, madness, and spectral tragedy, really achieves notable heights of cosmic fear in spite of uneven interest and a somewhat trivial and affected cultivation of the Gallic studio atmosphere made popular by Du Maurier's Trilby. The most powerful of its tales, perhaps, is \"The Yellow Sign\", in which is introduced a silent and terrible churchyard watchman with a face like a puffy grave-worm's. A boy, describing a tussle he has had with this creature, shivers and sickens as he relates a certain detail. \"Well, sir, it's Gawd's truth that when I 'it 'im 'e grabbed me wrists, sir, and when I twisted 'is soft, mushy fist one of 'is fingers come off in me 'and.\" An artist, who after seeing him has shared with another a strange dream of a nocturnal hearse, is shocked by the voice with which the watchman accosts him. The fellow emits a muttering sound that fills the head like thick oily smoke from a fat-rendering vat or an odour of noisome decay. What he mumbles is merely this: \"Have you found the Yellow Sign?\"\n\nA weirdly hieroglyphed onyx talisman, picked up in the street by the sharer of his dream, is shortly given the artist; and after stumbling queerly upon the hellish and forbidden book of horrors the two learn, among other hideous things which no sane mortal should know, that this talisman is indeed the nameless Yellow Sign handed down from the accursed cult of Hastur\u2014from primordial Carcosa, whereof the volume treats, and some nightmare memory of which seems to lurk latent and ominous at the back of all men's minds. Soon they hear the rumbling of the black-plumed hearse driven by the flabby and corpse-faced watchman. He enters the night-shrouded house in quest of the Yellow Sign, all bolts and bars rotting at his touch. And when the people rush in, drawn by a scream that no human throat could utter, they find three forms on the floor\u2014two dead and one dying. One of the dead shapes is far gone in decay. It is the churchyard watchman, and the doctor exclaims, \"That man must have been dead for months.\" It is worth observing that the author derives most of the names and allusions connected with his eldritch land of primal memory from the tales of Ambrose Bierce. Other early works of Mr. Chambers displaying the outr\u00e9 and macabre element are The Maker of Moons and In Search of the Unknown. One cannot help regretting that he did not further develop a vein in which he could so easily have become a recognised master.\n\nHorror material of authentic force may be found in the work of the New England realist Mary E. Wilkins; whose volume of short tales, The Wind in the Rose-Bush, contains a number of noteworthy achievements. In \"The Shadows on the Wall\" we are shewn with consummate skill the response of a staid New England household to uncanny tragedy; and the sourceless shadow of the poisoned brother well prepares us for the climactic moment when the shadow of the secret murderer, who has killed himself in a neighbouring city, suddenly appears beside it. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in \"The Yellow Wall Paper\", rises to a classic level in subtly delineating the madness which crawls over a woman dwelling in the hideously papered room where a madwoman was once confined.\n\nIn \"The Dead Valley\" the eminent architect and mediaevalist Ralph Adams Cram achieves a memorably potent degree of vague regional horror through subtleties of atmosphere and description.\n\nStill further carrying on our spectral tradition is the gifted and versatile humourist Irvin S. Cobb, whose work both early and recent contains some finely weird specimens. \"Fishhead\", an early achievement, is banefully effective in its portrayal of unnatural affinities between a hybrid idiot and the strange fish of an isolated lake, which at the last avenge their biped kinsman's murder. Later work of Mr. Cobb introduces an element of possible science, as in the tale of hereditary memory where a modern man with a negroid strain utters words in African jungle speech when run down by a train under visual and aural circumstances recalling the maiming of his black ancestor by a rhinoceros a century before.\n\nExtremely high in artistic stature is the novel The Dark Chamber (1927), by the late Leonard Cline. This is the tale of a man who\u2014with the characteristic ambition of the Gothic or Byronic hero-villain\u2014seeks to defy Nature and recapture every moment of his past life through the abnormal stimulation of memory. To this end he employs endless notes, records, mnemonic objects, and pictures\u2014and finally odours, music, and exotic drugs. At last his ambition goes beyond his personal life and reaches toward the black abysses of hereditary memory\u2014even back to pre-human days amidst the steaming swamps of the Carboniferous age, and to still more unimaginable deeps of primal time and entity. He calls for madder music and takes stronger drugs, and finally his great dog grows oddly afraid of him. A noxious animal stench encompasses him, and he grows vacant-faced and sub-human. In the end he takes to the woods, howling at night beneath windows. He is finally found in a thicket, mangled to death. Beside him is the mangled corpse of his dog. They have killed each other. The atmosphere of this novel is malevolently potent, much attention being paid to the central figure's sinister home and household.\n\nA less subtle and well-balanced but nevertheless highly effective creation is Herbert S. Gorman's novel, The Place Called Dagon, which relates the dark history of a western Massachusetts backwater where the descendants of refugees from the Salem witchcraft still keep alive the morbid and degenerate horrors of the Black Sabbat.\n\nSinister House, by Leland Hall, has touches of magnificent atmosphere but is marred by a somewhat mediocre romanticism.\n\nVery notable in their way are some of the weird conceptions of the novelist and short-story writer Edward Lucas White, most of whose themes arise from actual dreams. \"The Song of the Sirens\" has a very pervasive strangeness, while such things as \"Lukundoo\" and \"The Snout\" rouse darker apprehensions. Mr. White imparts a very peculiar quality to his tales\u2014an oblique sort of glamour which has its own distinctive type of convincingness.\n\nOf younger Americans, none strikes the note of cosmic terror so well as the California poet, artist, and fictionist Clark Ashton Smith, whose bizarre writings, drawings, paintings, and stories are the delight of a sensitive few. Mr. Smith has for his background a universe of remote and paralysing fright\u2014jungles of poisonous and iridescent blossoms on the moons of Saturn, evil and grotesque temples in Atlantis, Lemuria, and forgotten elder worlds, and dank morasses of spotted death-fungi in spectral countries beyond earth's rim. His longest and most ambitious poem, The Hashish-Eater, is in pentameter blank verse; and opens up chaotic and incredible vistas of kaleidoscopic nightmare in the spaces between the stars. In sheer daemonic strangeness and fertility of conception, Mr. Smith is perhaps unexcelled by any other writer dead or living. Who else has seen such gorgeous, luxuriant, and feverishly distorted visions of infinite spheres and multiple dimensions and lived to tell the tale? His short stories deal powerfully with other galaxies, worlds, and dimensions, as well as with strange regions and aeons on the earth. He tells of primal Hyperborea and its black amorphous god Tsathoggua; of the lost continent Zothique, and of the fabulous, vampire-curst land of Averoigne in mediaeval France. Some of Mr. Smith's best work can be found in the brochure entitled The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies (1933)." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 192", + "text": "Recent British literature, besides including the three or four greatest fantaisistes of the present age, has been gratifyingly fertile in the element of the weird. Rudyard Kipling has often approached it; and has, despite the omnipresent mannerisms, handled it with indubitable mastery in such tales as \"The Phantom 'Rickshaw\", \" 'The Finest Story in the World' \", \"The Recrudescence of Imray\", and \"The Mark of the Beast\". This latter is of particular poignancy; the pictures of the naked leper-priest who mewed like an otter, of the spots which appeared on the chest of the man that priest cursed, of the growing carnivorousness of the victim and of the fear which horses began to display toward him, and of the eventually half-accomplished transformation of that victim into a leopard, being things which no reader is ever likely to forget. The final defeat of the malignant sorcery does not impair the force of the tale or the validity of its mystery.\n\nLafcadio Hearn, strange, wandering, and exotic, departs still farther from the realm of the real; and with the supreme artistry of a sensitive poet weaves phantasies impossible to an author of the solid roast-beef type. His Fantastics, written in America, contains some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature; whilst his Kwaidan, written in Japan, crystallises with matchless skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful nation. Still more of Hearn's weird wizardry of language is shewn in some of his translations from the French, especially from Gautier and Flaubert. His version of the latter's Temptation of St. Anthony is a classic of fevered and riotous imagery clad in the magic of singing words.\n\nOscar Wilde may likewise be given a place amongst weird writers, both for certain of his exquisite fairy tales, and for his vivid Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a marvellous portrait for years assumes the duty of ageing and coarsening instead of its original, who meanwhile plunges into every excess of vice and crime without the outward loss of youth, beauty, and freshness. There is a sudden and potent climax when Dorian Gray, at last become a murderer, seeks to destroy the painting whose changes testify to his moral degeneracy. He stabs it with a knife, and a hideous cry and crash are heard; but when the servants enter they find it in all its pristine loveliness. \"Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.\"\n\nMatthew Phipps Shiel, author of many weird, grotesque, and adventurous novels and tales, occasionally attains a high level of horrific magic. \"X\u00e9lucha\" is a noxiously hideous fragment, but is excelled by Mr. Shiel's undoubted masterpiece, \"The House of Sounds\", floridly written in the \"yellow 'nineties\", and re-cast with more artistic restraint in the early twentieth century. This story, in final form, deserves a place among the foremost things of its kind. It tells of a creeping horror and menace trickling down the centuries on a sub-arctic island off the coast of Norway; where, amidst the sweep of daemon winds and the ceaseless din of hellish waves and cataracts, a vengeful dead man built a brazen tower of terror. It is vaguely like, yet infinitely unlike, Poe's \"Fall of the House of Usher\". In the novel The Purple Cloud Mr. Shiel describes with tremendous power a curse which came out of the arctic to destroy mankind, and which for a time appears to have left but a single inhabitant on our planet. The sensations of this lone survivor as he realises his position, and roams through the corpse-littered and treasure-strown cities of the world as their absolute master, are delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty. Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct \"letdown\".\n\nBetter known than Shiel is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile. The Jewel of Seven Stars, touching on a strange Egyptian resurrection, is less crudely written. But best of all is the famous Dracula, which has become almost the standard modern exploitation of the frightful vampire myth. Count Dracula, a vampire, dwells in a horrible castle in the Carpathians; but finally migrates to England with the design of populating the country with fellow vampires. How an Englishman fares within Dracula's stronghold of terrors, and how the dead fiend's plot for domination is at last defeated, are elements which unite to form a tale now justly assigned a permanent place in English letters. Dracula evoked many similar novels of supernatural horror, among which the best are perhaps The Beetle, by Richard Marsh, Brood of the Witch-Queen, by \"Sax Rohmer\" (Arthur Sarsfield Ward), and The Door of the Unreal, by Gerald Biss. The latter handles quite dexterously the standard werewolf superstition. Much subtler and more artistic, and told with singular skill through the juxtaposed narratives of the several characters, is the novel Cold Harbour, by Francis Brett Young, in which an ancient house of strange malignancy is powerfully delineated. The mocking and well-nigh omnipotent fiend Humphrey Furnival holds echoes of the Manfred-Montoni type of early Gothic \"villain\", but is redeemed from triteness by many clever individualities. Only the slight diffuseness of explanation at the close, and the somewhat too free use of divination as a plot factor, keep this tale from approaching absolute perfection.\n\nIn the novel Witch Wood John Buchan depicts with tremendous force a survival of the evil Sabbat in a lonely district of Scotland. The description of the black forest with the evil stone, and of the terrible cosmic adumbrations when the horror is finally extirpated, will repay one for wading through the very gradual action and plethora of Scottish dialect. Some of Mr. Buchan's short stories are also extremely vivid in their spectral intimations; \"The Green Wildebeest\", a tale of African witchcraft, \"The Wind in the Portico\", with its awakening of dead Britanno-Roman horrors, and \"Skule Skerry\", with its touches of sub-arctic fright, being especially remarkable.\n\nClemence Housman, in the brief novelette \"The Werewolf\", attains a high degree of gruesome tension and achieves to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore. In The Elixir of Life Arthur Ransome attains some darkly excellent effects despite a general naivet\u00e9 of plot, while H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing summons up strange and terrible vistas. George Macdonald's Lilith has a compelling bizarrerie all its own; the first and simpler of the two versions being perhaps the more effective.\n\nDeserving of distinguished notice as a forceful craftsman to whom an unseen mystic world is ever a close and vital reality is the poet Walter de la Mare, whose haunting verse and exquisite prose alike bear consistent traces of a strange vision reaching deeply into veiled spheres of beauty and terrible and forbidden dimensions of being. In the novel The Return we see the soul of a dead man reach out of its grave of two centuries and fasten itself upon the flesh of the living, so that even the face of the victim becomes that which had long ago returned to dust. Of the shorter tales, of which several volumes exist, many are unforgettable for their command of fear's and sorcery's darkest ramifications; notably \"Seaton's Aunt\", in which there lowers a noxious background of malignant vampirism; \"The Tree\", which tells of a frightful vegetable growth in the yard of a starving artist; \"Out of the Deep\", wherein we are given leave to imagine what thing answered the summons of a dying wastrel in a dark lonely house when he pulled a long-feared bell-cord in the attic chamber of his dread-haunted boyhood; \"A Recluse\", which hints at what sent a chance guest flying from a house in the night; \"Mr. Kempe\", which shews us a mad clerical hermit in quest of the human soul, dwelling in a frightful sea-cliff region beside an archaic abandoned chapel; and \"All-Hallows\", a glimpse of daemoniac forces besieging a lonely mediaeval church and miraculously restoring the rotting masonry. De la Mare does not make fear the sole or even the dominant element of most of his tales, being apparently more interested in the subtleties of character involved. Occasionally he sinks to sheer whimsical phantasy of the Barrie order. Still, he is among the very few to whom unreality is a vivid, living presence; and as such he is able to put into his occasional fear-studies a keen potency which only a rare master can achieve. His poem \"The Listeners\" restores the Gothic shudder to modern verse.\n\nThe weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose \"The Man Who Went Too Far\" breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably \"Negotium Perambulans\", whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and \"The Horror-Horn\", through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks. \"The Face\", in another collection, is lethally potent in its relentless aura of doom. H. R. Wakefield, in his collections They Return at Evening and Others Who Return, manages now and then to achieve great heights of horror despite a vitiating air of sophistication. The most notable stories are \"The Red Lodge\" with its slimy aqueous evil, \"'He Cometh and He Passeth By'\", \"'And He Shall Sing...'\", \"The Cairn\", \"'Look Up There!'\", \"Blind Man's Buff\", and that bit of lurking millennial horror, \"The Seventeenth Hole at Duncaster\". Mention has been made of the weird work of H. G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle. The former, in \"The Ghost of Fear\", reaches a very high level; while all the items in Thirty Strange Stories have strong fantastic implications. Doyle now and then struck a powerfully spectral note, as in \"The Captain of the 'Pole-Star' \", a tale of arctic ghostliness, and \"Lot No. 249\", wherein the reanimated mummy theme is used with more than ordinary skill. Hugh Walpole, of the same family as the founder of Gothic fiction, has sometimes approached the bizarre with much success; his short story \"Mrs. Lunt\" carrying a very poignant shudder. John Metcalfe, in the collection published as The Smoking Leg, attains now and then a rare pitch of potency; the tale entitled \"The Bad Lands\" containing graduations of horror that strongly savour of genius. More whimsical and inclined toward the amiable and innocuous phantasy of Sir J. M. Barrie are the short tales of E. M. Forster, grouped under the title of The Celestial Omnibus. Of these only one, dealing with a glimpse of Pan and his aura of fright, may be said to hold the true element of cosmic horror. Mrs. H. D. Everett, though adhering to very old and conventional models, occasionally reaches singular heights of spiritual terror in her collection of short stories. L. P. Hartley is notable for his incisive and extremely ghastly tale, \"A Visitor from Down Under\". May Sinclair's Uncanny Stories contain more of traditional occultism than of that creative treatment of fear which marks mastery in this field, and are inclined to lay more stress on human emotions and psychological delving than upon the stark phenomena of a cosmos utterly unreal. It may be well to remark here that occult believers are probably less effective than materialists in delineating the spectral and the fantastic, since to them the phantom world is so commonplace a reality that they tend to refer to it with less awe, remoteness, and impressiveness than do those who see in it an absolute and stupendous violation of the natural order.\n\nOf rather uneven stylistic quality, but vast occasional power in its suggestion of lurking worlds and beings behind the ordinary surface of life, is the work of William Hope Hodgson, known today far less than it deserves to be. Despite a tendency toward conventionally sentimental conceptions of the universe, and of man's relation to it and to his fellows, Mr. Hodgson is perhaps second only to Algernon Blackwood in his serious treatment of unreality. Few can equal him in adumbrating the nearness of nameless forces and monstrous besieging entities through casual hints and insignificant details, or in conveying feelings of the spectral and the abnormal in connexion with regions or buildings.\n\nIn The Boats of the \"Glen Carrig\" (1907) we are shewn a variety of malign marvels and accursed unknown lands as encountered by the survivors of a sunken ship. The brooding menace in the earlier parts of the book is impossible to surpass, though a letdown in the direction of ordinary romance and adventure occurs toward the end. An inaccurate and pseudo-romantic attempt to reproduce eighteenth-century prose detracts from the general effect, but the really profound nautical erudition everywhere displayed is a compensating factor.\n\nThe House on the Borderland (1908)\u2014perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson's works\u2014tells of a lonely and evilly regarded house in Ireland which forms a focus for hideous other-world forces and sustains a siege by blasphemous hybrid anomalies from a hidden abyss below. The wanderings of the narrator's spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity, and its witnessing of the solar system's final destruction, constitute something almost unique in standard literature. And everywhere there is manifest the author's power to suggest vague, ambushed horrors in natural scenery. But for a few touches of commonplace sentimentality this book would be a classic of the first water.\n\nThe Ghost Pirates (1909), regarded by Mr. Hodgson as rounding out a trilogy with the two previously mentioned works, is a powerful account of a doomed and haunted ship on its last voyage, and of the terrible sea-devils (of quasi-human aspect, and perhaps the spirits of bygone buccaneers) that besiege it and finally drag it down to an unknown fate. With its command of maritime knowledge, and its clever selection of hints and incidents suggestive of latent horrors in Nature, this book at times reaches enviable peaks of power.\n\nThe Night Land (1912) is a long-extended (583 pp.) tale of the earth's infinitely remote future\u2014billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality, and an attempt at archaic language even more grotesque and absurd than that in \"Glen Carrig\".\n\nAllowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget. Shapes and entities of an altogether non-human and inconceivable sort\u2014the prowlers of the black, man-forsaken, and unexplored world outside the pyramid\u2014are suggested and partly described with ineffable potency; while the night-bound landscape with its chasms and slopes and dying volcanism takes on an almost sentient terror beneath the author's touch.\n\nMidway in the book the central figure ventures outside the pyramid on a quest through death-haunted realms untrod by man for millions of years\u2014and in his slow, minutely described, day-by-day progress over unthinkable leagues of immemorial blackness there is a sense of cosmic alienage, breathless mystery, and terrified expectancy unrivalled in the whole range of literature. The last quarter of the book drags woefully, but fails to spoil the tremendous power of the whole.\n\nMr. Hodgson's later volume, Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, consists of several longish short stories published many years before in magazines. In quality it falls conspicuously below the level of the other books. We here find a more or less conventional stock figure of the \"infallible detective\" type\u2014the progeny of M. Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and the close kin of Algernon Blackwood's John Silence\u2014moving through scenes and events badly marred by an atmosphere of professional \"occultism\". A few of the episodes, however, are of undeniable power; and afford glimpses of the peculiar genius characteristic of the author.\n\nNaturally it is impossible in a brief sketch to trace out all the classic modern uses of the terror element. The ingredient must of necessity enter into all work both prose and verse treating broadly of life; and we are therefore not surprised to find a share in such writers as the poet Browning, whose \"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came \" is instinct with hideous menace, or the novelist Joseph Conrad, who often wrote of the dark secrets within the sea, and of the daemoniac driving power of Fate as influencing the lives of lonely and maniacally resolute men. Its trail is one of infinite ramifications; but we must here confine ourselves to its appearance in a relatively unmixed state, where it determines and dominates the work of art containing it.\n\nSomewhat separate from the main British stream is that current of weirdness in Irish literature which came to the fore in the Celtic Renaissance of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ghost and fairy lore have always been of great prominence in Ireland, and for over an hundred years have been recorded by a line of such faithful transcribers and translators as William Carleton, T. Crofton Croker, Lady Wilde\u2014mother of Oscar Wilde\u2014Douglas Hyde, and W. B. Yeats. Brought to notice by the modern movement, this body of myth has been carefully collected and studied; and its salient features reproduced in the work of later figures like Yeats, J. M. Synge, \"A. E.\", Lady Gregory, Padraic Colum, James Stephens, and their colleagues.\n\nWhilst on the whole more whimsically fantastic than terrible, such folklore and its consciously artistic counterparts contain much that falls truly within the domain of cosmic horror. Tales of burials in sunken churches beneath haunted lakes, accounts of death-heralding banshees and sinister changelings, ballads of spectres and \"the unholy creatures of the raths\"\u2014all these have their poignant and definite shivers, and mark a strong and distinctive element in weird literature. Despite homely grotesqueness and absolute naivet\u00e9, there is genuine nightmare in the class of narrative represented by the yarn of Teig O'Kane, who in punishment for his wild life was ridden all night by a hideous corpse that demanded burial and drove him from churchyard to churchyard as the dead rose up loathsomely in each one and refused to accommodate the newcomer with a berth. Yeats, undoubtedly the greatest figure of the Irish revival if not the greatest of all living poets, has accomplished notable things both in original work and in the codification of old legends." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 193", + "text": "The best horror-tales of today, profiting by the long evolution of the type, possess a naturalness, convincingness, artistic smoothness, and skilful intensity of appeal quite beyond comparison with anything in the Gothic work of a century or more ago. Technique, craftsmanship, experience, and psychological knowledge have advanced tremendously with the passing years, so that much of the older work seems naive and artificial; redeemed, when redeemed at all, only by a genius which conquers heavy limitations. The tone of jaunty and inflated romance, full of false motivation and investing every conceivable event with a counterfeit significance and carelessly inclusive glamour, is now confined to lighter and more whimsical phases of supernatural writing. Serious weird stories are either made realistically intense by close consistency and perfect fidelity to Nature except in the one supernatural direction which the author allows himself, or else cast altogether in the realm of phantasy, with atmosphere cunningly adapted to the visualisation of a delicately exotic world of unreality beyond space and time, in which almost anything may happen if it but happen in true accord with certain types of imagination and illusion normal to the sensitive human brain. This, at least, is the dominant tendency; though of course many great contemporary writers slip occasionally into some of the flashy postures of immature romanticism, or into bits of the equally empty and absurd jargon of pseudo-scientific \"occultism\", now at one of its periodic high tides.\n\nOf living creators of cosmic fear raised to its most artistic pitch, few if any can hope to equal the versatile Arthur Machen; author of some dozen tales long and short, in which the elements of hidden horror and brooding fright attain an almost incomparable substance and realistic acuteness. Mr. Machen, a general man of letters and master of an exquisitely lyrical and expressive prose style, has perhaps put more conscious effort into his picaresque Chronicle of Clemendy, his refreshing essays, his vivid autobiographical volumes, his fresh and spirited translations, and above all his memorable epic of the sensitive aesthetic mind, The Hill of Dreams, in which the youthful hero responds to the magic of that ancient Welsh environment which is the author's own, and lives a dream-life in the Roman city of Isca Silurum, now shrunk to the relic-strown village of Caerleon-on-Usk. But the fact remains that his powerful horror-material of the 'nineties and earlier nineteen-hundreds stands alone in its class, and marks a distinct epoch in the history of this literary form.\n\nMr. Machen, with an impressionable Celtic heritage linked to keen youthful memories of the wild domed hills, archaic forests, and cryptical Roman ruins of the Gwent countryside, has developed an imaginative life of rare beauty, intensity, and historic background. He has absorbed the mediaeval mystery of dark woods and ancient customs, and is a champion of the Middle Ages in all things\u2014including the Catholic faith. He has yielded, likewise, to the spell of the Britanno-Roman life which once surged over his native region; and finds strange magic in the fortified camps, tessellated pavements, fragments of statues, and kindred things which tell of the day when classicism reigned and Latin was the language of the country. A young American poet, Frank Belknap Long, Jun., has well summarised this dreamer's rich endowments and wizardry of expression in the sonnet \"On Reading Arthur Machen\":\n\n\u2003\"There is a glory in the autumn wood;\n\n\u2003The ancient lanes of England wind and climb\n\n\u2003Past wizard oaks and gorse and tangled thyme\n\n\u2003To where a fort of mighty empire stood:\n\n\u2003There is a glamour in the autumn sky;\n\n\u2003The reddened clouds are writhing in the glow\n\n\u2003Of some great fire, and there are glints below\n\n\u2003Of tawny yellow where the embers die.\n\n\u2003I wait, for he will show me, clear and cold,\n\n\u2003High-rais'd in splendour, sharp against the North,\n\n\u2003The Roman eagles, and thro' mists of gold\n\n\u2003The marching legions as they issue forth:\n\n\u2003I wait, for I would share with him again\n\n\u2003The ancient wisdom, and the ancient pain.\"\n\nOf Mr. Machen's horror-tales the most famous is perhaps \"The Great God Pan\" (1894), which tells of a singular and terrible experiment and its consequences. A young woman, through surgery of the brain-cells, is made to see the vast and monstrous deity of Nature, and becomes an idiot in consequence, dying less than a year later. Years afterward a strange, ominous, and foreign-looking child named Helen Vaughan is placed to board with a family in rural Wales, and haunts the woods in unaccountable fashion. A little boy is thrown out of his mind at sight of someone or something he spies with her, and a young girl comes to a terrible end in similar fashion. All this mystery is strangely interwoven with the Roman rural deities of the place, as sculptured in antique fragments. After another lapse of years, a woman of strangely exotic beauty appears in society, drives her husband to horror and death, causes an artist to paint unthinkable paintings of Witches' Sabbaths, creates an epidemic of suicide among the men of her acquaintance, and is finally discovered to be a frequenter of the lowest dens of vice in London, where even the most callous degenerates are shocked at her enormities. Through the clever comparing of notes on the part of those who have had word of her at various stages of her career, this woman is discovered to be the girl Helen Vaughan; who is the child\u2014by no mortal father\u2014of the young woman on whom the brain experiment was made. She is a daughter of hideous Pan himself, and at the last is put to death amidst horrible transmutations of form involving changes of sex and a descent to the most primal manifestations of the life-principle.\n\nBut the charm of the tale is in the telling. No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror with which every paragraph abounds without following fully the precise order in which Mr. Machen unfolds his gradual hints and revelations. Melodrama is undeniably present, and coincidence is stretched to a length which appears absurd upon analysis; but in the malign witchery of the tale as a whole these trifles are forgotten, and the sensitive reader reaches the end with only an appreciative shudder and a tendency to repeat the words of one of the characters: \"It is too incredible, too monstrous; such things can never be in this quiet world.... Why, man, if such a case were possible, our earth would be a nightmare.\"\n\nLess famous and less complex in plot than \"The Great God Pan\", but definitely finer in atmosphere and general artistic value, is the curious and dimly disquieting chronicle called \"The White People\", whose central portion purports to be the diary or notes of a little girl whose nurse has introduced her to some of the forbidden magic and soul-blasting traditions of the noxious witch-cult\u2014the cult whose whispered lore was handed down long lines of peasantry throughout Western Europe, and whose members sometimes stole forth at night, one by one, to meet in black woods and lonely places for the revolting orgies of the Witches' Sabbath. Mr. Machen's narrative, a triumph of skilful selectiveness and restraint, accumulates enormous power as it flows on in a stream of innocent childish prattle; introducing allusions to strange \"nymphs\", \"D\u00f4ls\", \"voolas\", \"White, Green, and Scarlet Ceremonies\", \"Aklo letters\", \"Chian language\", \"Mao games\", and the like. The rites learned by the nurse from her witch grandmother are taught to the child by the time she is three years old, and her artless accounts of the dangerous secret revelations possess a lurking terror generously mixed with pathos. Evil charms well known to anthropologists are described with juvenile naivet\u00e9, and finally there comes a winter afternoon journey into the old Welsh hills, performed under an imaginative spell which lends to the wild scenery an added weirdness, strangeness, and suggestion of grotesque sentience. The details of this journey are given with marvellous vividness, and form to the keen critic a masterpiece of fantastic writing, with almost unlimited power in the intimation of potent hideousness and cosmic aberration. At length the child\u2014whose age is then thirteen\u2014comes upon a cryptic and banefully beautiful thing in the midst of a dark and inaccessible wood. She flees in awe, but is permanently altered and repeatedly revisits the wood. In the end horror overtakes her in a manner deftly prefigured by an anecdote in the prologue, but she poisons herself in time. Like the mother of Helen Vaughan in The Great God Pan, she has seen that frightful deity. She is discovered dead in the dark wood beside the cryptic thing she found; and that thing\u2014a whitely luminous statue of Roman workmanship about which dire mediaeval rumours had clustered\u2014is affrightedly hammered into dust by the searchers.\n\nIn the episodic novel of The Three Impostors, a work whose merit as a whole is somewhat marred by an imitation of the jaunty Stevenson manner, occur certain tales which perhaps represent the high-water mark of Machen's skill as a terror-weaver. Here we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the \"little people\", and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange dark \"changelings\" for normal infants. This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled \"The Novel of the Black Seal\"; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which leads him to unknown and terrible things. A queer passage in the ancient geographer Solinus, a series of mysterious disappearances in the lonely reaches of Wales, a strange idiot son born to a rural mother after a fright in which her inmost faculties were shaken; all these things suggest to the professor a hideous connexion and a condition revolting to any friend and respecter of the human race. He hires the idiot boy, who jabbers strangely at times in a repulsive hissing voice, and is subject to odd epileptic seizures. Once, after such a seizure in the professor's study by night, disquieting odours and evidences of unnatural presences are found; and soon after that the professor leaves a bulky document and goes into the weird hills with feverish expectancy and strange terror in his heart. He never returns, but beside a fantastic stone in the wild country are found his watch, money, and ring, done up with catgut in a parchment bearing the same terrible characters as those on the black Babylonish seal and the rock in the Welsh mountains.\n\nThe bulky document explains enough to bring up the most hideous vistas. Professor Gregg, from the massed evidence presented by the Welsh disappearances, the rock inscription, the accounts of ancient geographers, and the black seal, has decided that a frightful race of dark primal beings of immemorial antiquity and wide former diffusion still dwells beneath the hills of unfrequented Wales. Further research has unriddled the message of the black seal, and proved that the idiot boy, a son of some father more terrible than mankind, is the heir of monstrous memories and possibilities. That strange night in the study the professor invoked 'the awful transmutation of the hills' by the aid of the black seal, and aroused in the hybrid idiot the horrors of his shocking paternity. He \"saw his body swell and become distended as a bladder, while the face blackened....\" And then the supreme effects of the invocation appeared, and Professor Gregg knew the stark frenzy of cosmic panic in its darkest form. He knew the abysmal gulfs of abnormality that he had opened, and went forth into the wild hills prepared and resigned. He would meet the unthinkable 'Little People'\u2014and his document ends with a rational observation: \"If I unhappily do not return from my journey, there is no need to conjure up here a picture of the awfulness of my fate.\"\n\nAlso in The Three Impostors is the \"Novel of the White Powder\", which approaches the absolute culmination of loathsome fright. Francis Leicester, a young law student nervously worn out by seclusion and overwork, has a prescription filled by an old apothecary none too careful about the state of his drugs. The substance, it later turns out, is an unusual salt which time and varying temperature have accidentally changed to something very strange and terrible; nothing less, in short, than the mediaeval Vinum Sabbati, whose consumption at the horrible orgies of the Witches' Sabbath gave rise to shocking transformations and\u2014if injudiciously used\u2014to unutterable consequences. Innocently enough, the youth regularly imbibes the powder in a glass of water after meals; and at first seems substantially benefited. Gradually, however, his improved spirits take the form of dissipation; he is absent from home a great deal, and appears to have undergone a repellent psychological change. One day an odd livid spot appears on his right hand, and he afterward returns to his seclusion; finally keeping himself shut within his room and admitting none of the household. The doctor calls for an interview, and departs in a palsy of horror, saying that he can do no more in that house. Two weeks later the patient's sister, walking outside, sees a monstrous thing at the sickroom window; and servants report that food left at the locked door is no longer touched. Summons at the door bring only a sound of shuffling and a demand in a thick gurgling voice to be let alone. At last an awful happening is reported by a shuddering housemaid. The ceiling of the room below Leicester's is stained with a hideous black fluid, and a pool of viscid abomination has dripped to the bed beneath. Dr. Haberden, now persuaded to return to the house, breaks down the young man's door and strikes again and again with an iron bar at the blasphemous semi-living thing he finds there. It is \"a dark and putrid mass, seething with corruption and hideous rottenness, neither liquid nor solid, but melting and changing\". Burning points like eyes shine out of its midst, and before it is despatched it tries to lift what might have been an arm. Soon afterward the physician, unable to endure the memory of what he has beheld, dies at sea while bound for a new life in America.\n\nMr. Machen returns to the daemoniac \"Little People\" in \"The Red Hand\" and \"The Shining Pyramid\"; and in The Terror, a wartime story, he treats with very potent mystery the effect of man's modern repudiation of spirituality on the beasts of the world, which are thus led to question his supremacy and to unite for his extermination. Of utmost delicacy, and passing from mere horror into true mysticism, is The Great Return, a story of the Graal, also a product of the war period. Too well known to need description here is the tale of \"The Bowmen\"; which, taken for authentic narration, gave rise to the widespread legend of the \"Angels of Mons\"\u2014ghosts of the old English archers of Cr\u00e9cy and Agincourt who fought in 1914 beside the hard-pressed ranks of England's glorious \"Old Contemptibles\".\n\nLess intense than Mr. Machen in delineating the extremes of stark fear, yet infinitely more closely wedded to the idea of an unreal world constantly pressing upon ours, is the inspired and prolific Algernon Blackwood, amidst whose voluminous and uneven work may be found some of the finest spectral literature of this or any age. Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination.\n\nMr. Blackwood's lesser work is marred by several defects such as ethical didacticism, occasional insipid whimsicality, the flatness of benignant supernaturalism, and a too free use of the trade jargon of modern \"occultism\". A fault of his more serious efforts is that diffuseness and long-windedness which results from an excessively elaborate attempt, under the handicap of a somewhat bald and journalistic style devoid of intrinsic magic, colour, and vitality, to visualise precise sensations and nuances of uncanny suggestion. But in spite of all this, the major products of Mr. Blackwood attain a genuinely classic level, and evoke as does nothing else in literature an awed and convinced sense of the immanence of strange spiritual spheres or entities.\n\nThe well-nigh endless array of Mr. Blackwood's fiction includes both novels and shorter tales, the latter sometimes independent and sometimes arrayed in series. Foremost of all must be reckoned \"The Willows\", in which the nameless presences on a desolate Danube island are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. Another amazingly potent though less artistically finished tale is \"The Wendigo\", where we are confronted by horrible evidences of a vast forest daemon about which North Woods lumbermen whisper at evening. The manner in which certain footprints tell certain unbelievable things is really a marked triumph in craftsmanship. In \"An Episode in a Lodging House\" we behold frightful presences summoned out of black space by a sorcerer, and \"The Listener\" tells of the awful psychic residuum creeping about an old house where a leper died. In the volume titled Incredible Adventures occur some of the finest tales which the author has yet produced, leading the fancy to wild rites on nocturnal hills, to secret and terrible aspects lurking behind stolid scenes, and to unimaginable vaults of mystery below the sands and pyramids of Egypt; all with a serious finesse and delicacy that convince where a cruder or lighter treatment would merely amuse. Some of these accounts are hardly stories at all, but rather studies in elusive impressions and half-remembered snatches of dream. Plot is everywhere negligible, and atmosphere reigns untrammelled.\n\nJohn Silence\u2014Physician Extraordinary is a book of five related tales, through which a single character runs his triumphant course. Marred only by traces of the popular and conventional detective-story atmosphere\u2014for Dr. Silence is one of those benevolent geniuses who employ their remarkable powers to aid worthy fellow-men in difficulty\u2014these narratives contain some of the author's best work, and produce an illusion at once emphatic and lasting. The opening tale, \"A Psychical Invasion\", relates what befell a sensitive author in a house once the scene of dark deeds, and how a legion of fiends was exorcised. \"Ancient Sorceries\", perhaps the finest tale in the book, gives an almost hypnotically vivid account of an old French town where once the unholy Sabbath was kept by all the people in the form of cats. In \"The Nemesis of Fire\" a hideous elemental is evoked by new-spilt blood, whilst \"Secret Worship\" tells of a German school where Satanism held sway, and where long afterward an evil aura remained. \"The Camp of the Dog\" is a werewolf tale, but is weakened by moralisation and professional \"occultism\".\n\nToo subtle, perhaps, for definite classification as horror-tales, yet possibly more truly artistic in an absolute sense, are such delicate phantasies as Jimbo or The Centaur. Mr. Blackwood achieves in these novels a close and palpitant approach to the inmost substance of dream, and works enormous havock with the conventional barriers between reality and imagination.\n\nUnexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of iridescently exotic vision, is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Eighteenth Baron Dunsany, whose tales and short plays form an almost unique element in our literature. Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty, and pledged to eternal warfare against the coarseness and ugliness of diurnal reality. His point of view is the most truly cosmic of any held in the literature of any period. As sensitive as Poe to dramatic values and the significance of isolated words and details, and far better equipped rhetorically through a simple lyric style based on the prose of the King James Bible, this author draws with tremendous effectiveness on nearly every body of myth and legend within the circle of European culture; producing a composite or eclectic cycle of phantasy in which Eastern colour, Hellenic form, Teutonic sombreness, and Celtic wistfulness are so superbly blended that each sustains and supplements the rest without sacrifice of perfect congruity and homogeneity. In most cases Dunsany's lands are fabulous\u2014\"beyond the East\", or \"at the edge of the world\". His system of original personal and place names, with roots drawn from classical, Oriental, and other sources, is a marvel of versatile inventiveness and poetic discrimination; as one may see from such specimens as \"Argim\u0113n\u0113s\", \"Bethmoora\", \"Poltarnees\", \"Camorak\", \"Illuriel\", or \"Sardathrion\".\n\nBeauty rather than terror is the keynote of Dunsany's work. He loves the vivid green of jade and of copper domes, and the delicate flush of sunset on the ivory minarets of impossible dream-cities. Humour and irony, too, are often present to impart a gentle cynicism and modify what might otherwise possess a naive intensity. Nevertheless, as is inevitable in a master of triumphant unreality, there are occasional touches of cosmic fright which come well within the authentic tradition. Dunsany loves to hint slyly and adroitly of monstrous things and incredible dooms, as one hints in a fairy tale. In The Book of Wonder we read of Hlo-hlo, the gigantic spider-idol which does not always stay at home; of what the Sphinx feared in the forest; of Slith, the thief who jumps over the edge of the world after seeing a certain light lit and knowing who lit it; of the anthropophagous Gibbelins, who inhabit an evil tower and guard a treasure; of the Gnoles, who live in the forest and from whom it is not well to steal; of the City of Never, and the eyes that watch in the Under Pits; and of kindred things of darkness. A Dreamer's Tales tells of the mystery that sent forth all men from Bethmoora in the desert; of the vast gate of Perd\u00f3ndaris, that was carved from a single piece of ivory; and of the voyage of poor old Bill, whose captain cursed the crew and paid calls on nasty-looking isles new-risen from the sea, with low thatched cottages having evil, obscure windows.\n\nMany of Dunsany's short plays are replete with spectral fear. In The Gods of the Mountain seven beggars impersonate the seven green idols on a distant hill, and enjoy ease and honour in a city of worshippers until they hear that the real idols are missing from their wonted seats. A very ungainly sight in the dusk is reported to them\u2014\"rock should not walk in the evening\"\u2014and at last, as they sit awaiting the arrival of a troop of dancers, they note that the approaching footsteps are heavier than those of good dancers ought to be. Then things ensue, and in the end the presumptuous blasphemers are turned to green jade statues by the very walking statues whose sanctity they outraged. But mere plot is the very least merit of this marvellously effective play. The incidents and developments are those of a supreme master, so that the whole forms one of the most important contributions of the present age not only to drama, but to literature in general. A Night at an Inn tells of four thieves who have stolen the emerald eye of Klesh, a monstrous Hindoo god. They lure to their room and succeed in slaying the three priestly avengers who are on their track, but in the night Klesh comes gropingly for his eye; and having gained it and departed, calls each of the despoilers out into the darkness for an unnamed punishment. In The Laughter of the Gods there is a doomed city at the jungle's edge, and a ghostly lutanist heard only by those about to die (cf. Alice's spectral harpsichord in Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables); whilst The Queen's Enemies retells the anecdote of Herodotus in which a vengeful princess invites her foes to a subterranean banquet and lets in the Nile to drown them.\n\nBut no amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm. His prismatic cities and unheard-of rites are touched with a sureness which only mastery can engender, and we thrill with a sense of actual participation in his secret mysteries. To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream and fragmentary memory; so that we may think of him not only as a poet, but as one who makes each reader a poet as well.\n\nAt the opposite pole of genius from Lord Dunsany, and gifted with an almost diabolic power of calling horror by gentle steps from the midst of prosaic daily life, is the scholarly Montague Rhodes James, Provost of Eton College, antiquary of note, and recognised authority on mediaeval manuscripts and cathedral history. Dr. James, long fond of telling spectral tales at Christmastide, has become by slow degrees a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank; and has developed a distinctive style and method likely to serve as models for an enduring line of disciples.\n\nThe art of Dr. James is by no means haphazard, and in the preface to one of his collections he has formulated three very sound rules for macabre composition. A ghost story, he believes, should have a familiar setting in the modern period, in order to approach closely the reader's sphere of experience. Its spectral phenomena, moreover, should be malevolent rather than beneficent; since fear is the emotion primarily to be excited. And finally, the technical patois of \"occultism\" or pseudo-science ought carefully to be avoided; lest the charm of casual verisimilitude be smothered in unconvincing pedantry.\n\nDr. James, practicing what he preaches, approaches his themes in a light and often conversational way. Creating the illusion of every-day events, he introduces his abnormal phenomena cautiously and gradually; relieved at every turn by touches of homely and prosaic detail, and sometimes spiced with a snatch or two of antiquarian scholarship. Conscious of the close relation between present weirdness and accumulated tradition, he generally provides remote historical antecedents for his incidents; thus being able to utilise very aptly his exhaustive knowledge of the past, and his ready and convincing command of archaic diction and colouring. A favourite scene for a James tale is some centuried cathedral, which the author can describe with all the familiar minuteness of a specialist in that field.\n\nSly humorous vignettes and bits of lifelike genre portraiture and characterisation are often to be found in Dr. James's narratives, and serve in his skilled hands to augment the general effect rather than to spoil it, as the same qualities would tend to do with a lesser craftsman. In inventing a new type of ghost, he has departed considerably from the conventional Gothic tradition; for where the older stock ghosts were pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight, the average James ghost is lean, dwarfish, and hairy\u2014a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man\u2014and usually touched before it is seen. Sometimes the spectre is of still more eccentric composition; a roll of flannel with spidery eyes, or an invisible entity which moulds itself in bedding and shews a face of crumpled linen. Dr. James has, it is clear, an intelligent and scientific knowledge of human nerves and feelings; and knows just how to apportion statement, imagery, and subtle suggestions in order to secure the best results with his readers. He is an artist in incident and arrangement rather than in atmosphere, and reaches the emotions more often through the intellect than directly. This method, of course, with its occasional absences of sharp climax, has its drawbacks as well as its advantages; and many will miss the thorough atmospheric tension which writers like Machen are careful to build up with words and scenes. But only a few of the tales are open to the charge of tameness. Generally the laconic unfolding of abnormal events in adroit order is amply sufficient to produce the desired effect of cumulative horror.\n\nThe short stories of Dr. James are contained in four small collections, entitled respectively Ghost-Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Others, and A Warning to the Curious. There is also a delightful juvenile phantasy, The Five Jars, which has its spectral adumbrations. Amidst this wealth of material it is hard to select a favourite or especially typical tale, though each reader will no doubt have such preferences as his temperament may determine.\n\n\"Count Magnus\" is assuredly one of the best, forming as it does a veritable Golconda of suspense and suggestion. Mr. Wraxall is an English traveller of the middle nineteenth century, sojourning in Sweden to secure material for a book. Becoming interested in the ancient family of De la Gardie, near the village of R\u00e5b\u00e4ck, he studies its records; and finds particular fascination in the builder of the existing manor-house, one Count Magnus, of whom strange and terrible things are whispered. The Count, who flourished early in the seventeenth century, was a stern landlord, and famous for his severity toward poachers and delinquent tenants. His cruel punishments were bywords, and there were dark rumours of influences which even survived his interment in the great mausoleum he built near the church\u2014as in the case of the two peasants who hunted on his preserves one night a century after his death. There were hideous screams in the woods, and near the tomb of Count Magnus an unnatural laugh and the clang of a great door. Next morning the priest found the two men; one a maniac, and the other dead, with the flesh of his face sucked from the bones.\n\nMr. Wraxall hears all these tales, and stumbles on more guarded references to a Black Pilgrimage once taken by the Count; a pilgrimage to Chorazin in Palestine, one of the cities denounced by Our Lord in the Scriptures, and in which old priests say that Antichrist is to be born. No one dares to hint just what that Black Pilgrimage was, or what strange being or thing the Count brought back as a companion. Meanwhile Mr. Wraxall is increasingly anxious to explore the mausoleum of Count Magnus, and finally secures permission to do so, in the company of a deacon. He finds several monuments and three copper sarcophagi, one of which is the Count's. Round the edge of this latter are several bands of engraved scenes, including a singular and hideous delineation of a pursuit\u2014the pursuit of a frantic man through a forest by a squat muffled figure with a devil-fish's tentacle, directed by a tall cloaked man on a neighbouring hillock. The sarcophagus has three massive steel padlocks, one of which is lying open on the floor, reminding the traveller of a metallic clash he heard the day before when passing the mausoleum and wishing idly that he might see Count Magnus.\n\nHis fascination augmented, and the key being accessible, Mr. Wraxall pays the mausoleum a second and solitary visit and finds another padlock unfastened. The next day, his last in R\u00e5b\u00e4ck, he again goes alone to bid the long-dead Count farewell. Once more queerly impelled to utter a whimsical wish for a meeting with the buried nobleman, he now sees to his disquiet that only one of the padlocks remains on the great sarcophagus. Even as he looks, that last lock drops noisily to the floor, and there comes a sound as of creaking hinges. Then the monstrous lid appears very slowly to rise, and Mr. Wraxall flees in panic fear without refastening the door of the mausoleum.\n\nDuring his return to England the traveller feels a curious uneasiness about his fellow-passengers on the canal-boat which he employs for the earlier stages. Cloaked figures make him nervous, and he has a sense of being watched and followed. Of twenty-eight persons whom he counts, only twenty-six appear at meals; and the missing two are always a tall cloaked man and a shorter muffled figure. Completing his water travel at Harwich, Mr. Wraxall takes frankly to flight in a closed carriage, but sees two cloaked figures at a crossroad. Finally he lodges at a small house in a village and spends the time making frantic notes. On the second morning he is found dead, and during the inquest seven jurors faint at sight of the body. The house where he stayed is never again inhabited, and upon its demolition half a century later his manuscript is discovered in a forgotten cupboard.\n\nIn \"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas\" a British antiquary unriddles a cipher on some Renaissance painted windows, and thereby discovers a centuried hoard of gold in a niche half way down a well in the courtyard of a German abbey. But the crafty depositor had set a guardian over that treasure, and something in the black well twines its arms around the searcher's neck in such a manner that the quest is abandoned, and a clergyman sent for. Each night after that the discoverer feels a stealthy presence and detects a horrible odour of mould outside the door of his hotel room, till finally the clergyman makes a daylight replacement of the stone at the mouth of the treasure-vault in the well\u2014out of which something had come in the dark to avenge the disturbing of old Abbot Thomas's gold. As he completes his work the cleric observes a curious toad-like carving on the ancient well-head, with the Latin motto \"Depositum custodi\u2014keep that which is committed to thee.\"\n\nOther notable James tales are \"The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral\", in which a grotesque carving comes curiously to life to avenge the secret and subtle murder of an old Dean by his ambitious successor; \"'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'\", which tells of the horror summoned by a strange metal whistle found in a mediaeval church ruin; and \"An Episode of Cathedral History\", where the dismantling of a pulpit uncovers an archaic tomb whose lurking daemon spreads panic and pestilence. Dr. James, for all his light touch, evokes fright and hideousness in their most shocking forms; and will certainly stand as one of the few really creative masters in his darksome province.\n\nFor those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field. Combated by a mounting wave of plodding realism, cynical flippancy, and sophisticated disillusionment, it is yet encouraged by a parallel tide of growing mysticism, as developed both through the fatigued reaction of \"occultists\" and religious fundamentalists against materialistic discovery and through the stimulation of wonder and fancy by such enlarged vistas and broken barriers as modern science has given us with its intra-atomic chemistry, advancing astrophysics, doctrines of relativity, and probings into biology and human thought. At the present moment the favouring forces would appear to have somewhat of an advantage; since there is unquestionably more cordiality shewn toward weird writings than when, thirty years ago, the best of Arthur Machen's work fell on the stony ground of the smart and cocksure 'nineties. Ambrose Bierce, almost unknown in his own time, has now reached something like general recognition.\n\nStartling mutations, however, are not to be looked for in either direction. In any case an approximate balance of tendencies will continue to exist; and while we may justly expect a further subtilisation of technique, we have no reason to think that the general position of the spectral in literature will be altered. It is a narrow though essential branch of human expression, and will chiefly appeal as always to a limited audience with keen special sensibilities. Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 194", + "text": "\u2042\n\n[ Letter to the Gallomo by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\n\u2003I hear the bells from yon imposing tower;\n\n\u2003The bells of Yuletide o'er a troubled night;\n\n\u2003Pealing with mock'ry in a dismal hour\n\n\u2003Upon a world upheav'd with greed and fright.\n\n\u2003Their mellow tones on myriad roofs resound;\n\n\u2003A million restless souls attend the chime;\n\n\u2003Yet falls their message on a stony ground\u2014\n\n\u2003Their spirit slaughter'd with the sword of Time.\n\n\u2003Why ring in counterfeit of happy years\n\n\u2003When calm and quiet rul'd the placid plain?\n\n\u2003Why with familiar strains arouse the tears\n\n\u2003Of those who ne'er may know content again?\n\n\u2003How well I knew ye once\u2014so long ago\u2014\n\n\u2003When slept the ancient village on the slope;\n\n\u2003Then rang your accents o'er the starlit snow\n\n\u2003In gladness, peace, and sempiternal hope.\n\n\u2003In fancy yet I view the modest spire;\n\n\u2003The peaked roof, cast dark against the moon;\n\n\u2003The Gothic windows, glowing with a fire\n\n\u2003That lent enchantment to the brazen tune.\n\n\u2003Lovely each snow-drap'd hedge beneath the beams\n\n\u2003That added silver to the silver there;\n\n\u2003Graceful each col, each lane, and all the streams,\n\n\u2003And glad the spirit of the pine-ting'd air.\n\n\u2003A simple creed the rural swains profess'd;\n\n\u2003In simple bliss among the hills they dwelt;\n\n\u2003Their hearts were light, their honest souls at rest,\n\n\u2003Cheer'd with the joys by reas'ning mortals felt.\n\n\u2003But on the scene a hideous blight intrudes;\n\n\u2003A lurid nimbus hovers o'er the land;\n\n\u2003Demoniac shapes low'r black above the woods,\n\n\u2003And by each door malignant shadows stand.\n\n\u2003The jester Time stalks darkly thro' the mead;\n\n\u2003Beneath his tread contentment dies away.\n\n\u2003Hearts that were light with causeless anguish bleed,\n\n\u2003And restless souls proclaim his evil sway.\n\n\u2003Conflict and change beset the tott'ring world;\n\n\u2003Wild thoughts and fancies fill the common mind;\n\n\u2003Confusion on a senile race is hurl'd,\n\n\u2003And crime and folly wander unconfin'd.\n\n\u2003I HEAR THE BELLS\u2014THE MOCKING, CURSED BELLS\n\n\u2003THAT WAKE DIM MEMORIES TO HAUNT AND CHILL;\n\n\u2003RINGING AND RINGING O'ER A THOUSAND HELLS\u2014\n\n\u2003FIENDS OF THE NIGHT\u2014WHY CAN YE NOT BE STILL?\n\n\u2014H. PAGET LOWE\n\nBefore quitting the subject of Loveman and horror stories, I must relate the frightful dream I had the night after I received S.L.'s latest letter. We have lately been discussing weird tales at length, and he has recommended several hair-raising books to me; so that I was in the mood to connect him with any thought of hideousness or supernatural terror. I do not recall how this dream began, or what it was really all about. There remains in my mind only one damnably blood-curdling fragment whose ending haunts me yet.\n\nWe were, for some terrible yet unknown reason, in a very strange and very ancient cemetery\u2014which I could not identify. I suppose no Wisconsinite can picture such a thing\u2014but we have them in New-England; horrible old places where the slate stones are graven with odd letters and grotesque designs such as a skull and crossbones. In some of these places one can walk a long way without coming upon any grave less than an hundred and fifty years old. Some day, when Cook issues that promised MONADNOCK, you will see my tale \"The Tomb\", which was inspired by one of these places. Such was the scene of my dream\u2014a hideous hollow whose surface was covered with a coarse, repulsive sort of long grass, above which peeped the shocking stones and markers of decaying slate. In a hillside were several tombs whose facades were in the last stages of decrepitude. I had an odd idea that no living thing had trodden that ground for many centuries till Loveman and I arrived. It was very late in the night\u2014probably in the small hours, since a waning crescent moon had attained considerable height in the east. Loveman carried, slung over his shoulder, a portable telephone outfit; whilst I bore two spades. We proceeded directly to a flat sepulchre near the centre of the horrible place, and began to clear away the moss-grown earth which had been washed down upon it by the rains of innumerable years. Loveman, in the dream, looked exactly like the snapshots of himself which he has sent me\u2014a large, robust young man, not the least Semitic in features (albeit dark), and very handsome save for a pair of protruding ears. We did not speak as he laid down his telephone outfit, took a shovel, and helped me clear away the earth and weeds. We both seemed very much impressed with something\u2014almost awestruck. At last we completed these preliminaries, and Loveman stepped back to survey the sepulchre. He seemed to know exactly what he was about to do, and I also had an idea\u2014though I cannot now remember what it was! All I recall is that we were following up some idea which Loveman had gained as the result of extensive reading in some old rare books, of which he possessed the only existing copies. (Loveman, you may know, has a vast library of rare first editions and other treasures precious to the bibliophile's heart.) After some mental estimates, Loveman took up his shovel again, and using it as a lever, sought to pry up a certain slab which formed the top of the sepulchre. He did not succeed, so I approached and helped him with my own shovel. Finally we loosened the stone, lifted it with our combined strength, and heaved it away. Beneath was a black passageway with a flight of stone steps; but so horrible were the miasmic vapours which poured up from the pit, that we stepped back for a while without making further observations. Then Loveman picked up the telephone output and began to uncoil the wire\u2014speaking for the first time as he did so.\n\n\"I'm really sorry\", he said in a mellow, pleasant voice; cultivated, and not very deep, \"to have to ask you to stay above ground, but I couldn't answer for the consequences if you were to go down with me. Honestly, I doubt if anyone with a nervous system like yours could see it through. You can't imagine what I shall have to see and do\u2014not even from what the book said and from what I have told you\u2014and I don't think anyone without ironclad nerves could ever go down and come out of that place alive and sane. At any rate, this is no place for anybody who can't pass an army physical examination. I discovered this thing, and I am responsible in a way for anyone who goes with me\u2014so I would not for a thousand dollars let you take the risk. But I'll keep you informed of every move I make by the telephone\u2014you see I've enough wire to reach to the centre of the earth and back!\"\n\nI argued with him, but he replied that if I did not agree, he would call the thing off and get another fellow-explorer\u2014he mentioned a \"Dr. Burke,\" a name altogether unfamiliar to me. He added, that it would be of no use for me to descend alone, since he was sole possessor of the real key to the affair. Finally I assented, and seated myself upon a marble bench close by the open grave, telephone in hand. He produced an electric lantern, prepared the telephone wire for unreeling, and disappeared down the damp stone steps, the insulated wire rustling as it uncoiled. For a moment I kept track of the glow of his lantern, but suddenly it faded out, as if there were a turn in the stone staircase. Then all was still. After this came a period of dull fear and anxious waiting. The crescent moon climbed higher, and the mist or fog about the hollow seemed to thicken. Everything was horribly damp and bedewed, and I thought I saw an owl flitting somewhere in the shadows. Then a clicking sounded in the telephone receiver.\n\n\"Lovecraft\u2014I think I'm finding it\"\u2014the words came in a tense, excited tone. Then a brief pause, followed by more words in a tone of ineffable awe and horror.\n\n\"God, Lovecraft! If you could see what I am seeing!\" I now asked in great excitement what had happened. Loveman answered in a trembling voice:\n\n\"I can't tell you\u2014I don't dare\u2014I never dreamed of this\u2014I can't tell\u2014It's enough to unseat any mind\u2014wait\u2014what's this?\" Then a pause, a clicking in the receiver, and a sort of despairing groan. Speech again\u2014\n\n\"Lovecraft\u2014for God's sake\u2014it's all up\u2014Beat it! Beat it! Don't lose a second!\" I was now thoroughly alarmed, and frantically asked Loveman to tell what the matter was. He replied only \"Never mind! Hurry!\" Then I felt a sort of offence through my fear\u2014it irked me that anyone should assume that I would be willing to desert a companion in peril. I disregarded his advice and told him I was coming down to his aid. But he cried:\n\n\"Don't be a fool\u2014it's too late\u2014there's no use\u2014nothing you or anyone can do now.\" He seemed calmer\u2014with a terrible, resigned calm, as if he had met and recognised an inevitable, inescapable doom. Yet he was obviously anxious that I should escape some unknown peril.\n\n\"For God's sake get out of this, if you can find the way! I'm not joking\u2014So long, Lovecraft, won't see you again\u2014God! Beat it! Beat it!\" As he shrieked out the last words, his tone was a frenzied crescendo. I have tried to recall the wording as nearly as possible, but I cannot reproduce the tone. There followed a long\u2014hideously long\u2014period of silence. I tried to move to assist Loveman, but was absolutely paralysed. The slightest motion was an impossibility. I could speak, however, and kept calling excitedly into the telephone\u2014\"Loveman! Loveman! What is it? What's the trouble?\" But he did not reply. And then came the unbelievably frightful thing\u2014the awful, unexplainable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that Loveman was now silent, but after a vast interval of terrified waiting another clicking came into the receiver. I called \"Loveman\u2014are you there?\" And in reply came a voice\u2014a thing which I cannot describe by any words I know. Shall I say that it was hollow\u2014very deep\u2014fluid\u2014gelatinous\u2014indefinitely distant\u2014unearthly\u2014guttural\u2014thick? What shall I say? In that telephone I heard it; heard it as I sat on a marble bench in that very ancient unknown cemetery with the crumbling stones and tombs and long grass and dampness and the owl and the waning crescent moon. Up from the sepulchre it came, and this is what it said:\n\n\"YOU FOOL, LOVEMAN IS DEAD!\"\n\nWell, that's the whole damn thing! I fainted in the dream, and the next I knew I was awake\u2014and with a prize headache! I don't know yet what it was all about\u2014what on (or under) earth we were looking for, or what that hideous voice at the last was supposed to be. I have read of ghouls\u2014mould shades\u2014but hell\u2014the headache I had was worse than the dream! Loveman will laugh when I tell him about that dream! In due time, I intend to weave this picture into a story, as I wove another dream-picture into \"The Doom that Came to Sarnath\". I wonder, though, if I have a right to claim authorship of things I dream? I hate to take credit, when I did not really think out the picture with my own conscious wits. Yet if I do not take credit, who'n Heaven will I give credit tuh? Coleridge claimed \"Kubla Khan\", so I guess I'll claim the thing an' let it go at that. But believe muh, that was some dream!!\n\nWell, God rest you, Merry Gentlemen, may nothing you dismay.\n\nYour affectionate Grandfather,\n\nM. LOLLIVS. TIBALDVS\n\n\u2002Letter to Clark Ashton Smith,\n\n\u200227 November 1927\n\n\u2002Novr. 27\n\n\u2002Dear C A S:\u2014\n\n\u2002I received both your letter & the Overland with a great deal of pleasure. I don't yet know whether or not the latter is to be returned\u2014if it is, I can assure you that the copy remains safe & secure awaiting instructions. Sterling certainly proves his worth & fascination by the multitude of tributes he continues to evoke\u2014nearly all of them graceful, but your own standing out, to my mind, as especially apt & distinguished. I told you last year that your misgivings regarding its merit were wholly unwarranted. The portrait of Sterling surely has the atmosphere of authenticity\u2014not many poets are graced with such an appropriate & classical physiognomy.\n\n\u2002Your Verlaine translation seems to me marvellously fresh, graceful, & delicate, & I trust you will follow it with others from the same source. I don't know of any good English version of Verlaine\u2014that, as well as an English Baudelaire, would form a task well worthy of your spare moments. The French verses, in their amended versions, are now doubtless up to the full standard of Galpininan accuracy\u2014I'll show them to Galpin the next time I get in touch with him, & shall meanwhile be glad to see the others. I've come across a real Frenchman through correspondence lately\u2014a bright young native of Southern France named Jean Re\u00e7ois, who now resides in New York & has aspirations toward fantastic authorship in English. I shall show him your French poetry shortly\u2014& meanwhile you may hear from him, since I've given him your address.\n\n\u2002You certainly ought to have a new volume by this time, & I cannot be too emphatic in advising you to get in touch with W. Paul Cook about it. That is just the sort of thing he is interested in at present\u2014publishing small volumes of unusual merit & unique distinction\u2014& I am certain he would be willing to assume the financial risk, as he did in the case of Loveman's \"Hermaphrodite\". He is very reasonable about this detail\u2014if the author is able to bear the risk, well & good; but if not, he will do so himself. It is only in this way that he can ever publish my \"Shunned House\", as he keeps threatening to do. Open up correspondence with him on the subject\u2014I am really avid to see something of yours published in a manner befitting its merit, a thing so far true only of your \"Star Treader\" & \"Odes & Sonnets\". Cook can turn out a really fine job when he tries\u2014& I would guarantee to help with the proofreading myself. I suppose you are aware that he is now printing a book for Wandrei\u2014of which I expect to see page-proofs very shortly.\n\n\u2002Dwyer was as enthusiastic as all the rest concerning your pictures, as he has probably informed you directly ere now. Like me, he bitterly regrets his financial inability to invest in some of them\u2014especially the black & white \"Dreamland\" illustrations, which also exercised a powerful imaginative influence over me. He has now sent them on to Long & the gang in N.Y., & I suppose Loveman will see that they reach the eye of De Casseres. You might drop him a line asking him not to overlook De C. or the Miss Turner you mention\u2014or I'll do so myself, to save time. Now my curiosity is sharpened by that fresh sheet tacked to your drawing-board. May I behold it ere long, made blasphemous by the visions of daemoniac genius!\n\n\u2002I thought you'd find The Recluse rather enjoyable, & hope that later issues will maintain the same standard. Your prose-poem, as the first contribution to be accepted, forms a favourable augury. By the way\u2014a correspondent tells me that a new professional weird magazine has just been established\u2014Tales of Magic & Mystery, edited by Walter Gibson, 931 Drexel Bldg., Philadelphia Pa.\u2014& I've sent in a batch of the stuff rejected by Wright. You might try them with some poems or sketches\u2014or \"The Abominations of Yondo\"\u2014& see what your luck is; though I don't know anything about the magazine, or even whether it is a present or future proposition.\n\n\u2002I'm not surprised that you're discovering your indebtedness to the Auburn landscape, for sooner or later we all learn that our thoughts & impressions are basically reflections of what we have picked up visually & by long association at one time or another. I emphasised that point in the conclusion of one of those probably-never-to-be-typed novelettes which I ground out last winter. It's all right to travel, but one needs the old familiar scenes to come home to! So far as I'm concerned, Providence with its mellow, ancient life & skyline of old roofs & Georgian steeples will last me amply well for the rest of my days. It's the mould that shaped me\u2014& the space I most naturally fit into. Our autumn, unlike yours, has been phenomenally & genially warm; giving me an opportunity for several rural excursions. The northern & western parts of the state felt something of the floods that hit N.E. early this month, but Providence was absolutely untouched.\n\n\u2002I have had no chance to produce new material this autumn, but have been classifying notes & synopses in preparation for some monstrous tales later on. In particular I have drawn up some data on the celebrated & unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred! It seems that this shocking blasphemy was produced by a native of Sana\u00e1, in Yemen, who flourished about 700 A.D. & made many mysterious pilgrimages to Babylon's ruins, Memphis's catacombs, & the devil-haunted & untrodden wastes of the great southern deserts of Arabia\u2014the Roba el Khaliyeh, where he claimed to have found records of things other than mankind, & to have learnt the worship of Yog-Sothoth & Cthulhu. The book was a product of Abdul's old age, which was spent in Damascus, & the original title was Al Azif\u2014azif (cf. Henley's notes to \"Vathek\") being the name applied to those strange night noises (of insects) which the Arabs attribute to the howling of daemons. Alhazred died\u2014or disappeared\u2014under terrible circumstances in the year 738. In 950 Al Azif was translated into Greek by the Byzantine Theodorus Philetas under the title Necronomicon, & a century later it was burnt at the order of Michael, Patriarch of Constantinople. It was translated into Latin by Olaus in 1228, but placed on the \"Index Expurgatorius\" by Pope Gregory IX in 1232. The original Arabic was lost before Olaus' time, & the last known Greek copy perished in Salem in 1692. The work was printed in the 15th, 16th, & 17th centuries, but few copies are extant. Wherever existing, it is carefully guarded for the sake of the world's welfare & sanity. Once a man read through the copy in the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham\u2014read it through & fled wild-eyed into the hills...... but that is another story!\n\n\u2002With best wishes from all the local afreets & djinns\u2014\n\n\u2002Yr obt\n\n\u2002H P L\n\n\u2002P.S. Heard a lecture by Sir Rennell Rodd last Monday on survivals of classic myth in modern Greek folklore. I was quite astonished\u2014it seems that satyrs, nymphs, the Fates, Charon, &c. are still believed in; & many of the old gods worshipped under thin saintly disguises. Much of the satyr folklore is of extreme weirdness\u2014recalling Machen's \"little people\".\n\n\u2042\n\n[ LEADING A BOOK CLUB by H. P. Lovecraft ]\n\nSo you want to lead a book club discussion or you want some questions to make you ponder the deeper meaning of this book. Congratulations.\n\nAt Xist Publishing, we are dedicated encouraging the love of reading and the pursuit of a deeper knowledge of these classical works by providing discussion questions, thoughts, and ideas to inspire you to discuss the greatest works of classic literature of all time.\n\nOk so you are taking the leap to be in a book club or lead a book club. Let's get started.\n\nBefore the Book Club Begins:\n\nThe first and most important thing you must do is read the book. This is the best place to start and you will get the most out of your discussion if you read the whole book.\n\nCome up with a list of friends or people who you know that might be interested in the book and invite them to join the book club. We have found that book clubs are either growing or dying so always be thinking about who you can invite that would like the book being discussed and invite them.\n\nPick a place and a start time and end time to meet that will be most conducive to people being able to join your club. (You may consider getting a babysitter if lots of your members have kids.)\n\nThe next thing to do is give people time to read the book. You should give everyone at least two weeks to read the book. (If the book is long give more time.)\n\nWrite down a list of open-ended questions and specific questions from your reading of the book. You should have at least 10 questions to get the discussion going and keep it going.(See our exhaustive list at the end of this guide.) Print them out or write them down make sure and bring them with you to the discussion.\n\nThe day of the Book Club:\n\nBefore the club starts make sure you are there early and have the room set up to your liking. Fun tip: Some people who are fans of a certain author or genre will decorate the room to match the theme or era of the book.\n\nIf you are planning to provide food make sure you have enough food and beverages to go around. It is always great to be a host and drinks and light snacks will make people more comfortable to engage in discussion.\n\nStart reasonably on time. It's okay to let people chat for a bit or to wait for someone who is running a few minutes late, but let the group know that you value their time by starting promptly.\n\nMake sure everyone introduces themselves. A great icebreaker question to have everyone answer when they introduce themselves is, \"What is your favorite book / author?\"\n\nStart the discussion with your first question (use an open ended one to get things started). Note: sometimes people want time to think about your question and their answer. Part of being a good leader is being comfortable with some silence. Don't jump in right away if no one answers. If need be, clarify or rephrase your question.\n\nMake connections between comments if someone makes a great point that leads to another question on your list that is not in the order you have them skip down and keep the discussion going. It will be more natural than sticking to a strict flow of questions.\n\nMake sure you included everyone in the questions if there is someone who is shy or quiet make sure that they are included in the discussion. Sometimes a few talkative people can dominate the discussion a good leader makes sure everyone gets a chance to talk. Engage silent readers by posing open-ended questions directly. But don't badger the participants who really don't want to participate. They may not have finished the book and don't want to admit it. Try asking, \"What did you like/dislike about the book, David?\"\n\nKeep control--stop tangents - Book clubs are popular with people who love to read and also those who love to talk. If people get off topic you need to rein them in. People came to talk about the book at hand not the person's personal philosophical, religious, political or favorite sports team. Comments such as, \"Let's get back to the end of chapter 6. What did you think at this point?\" \"I have a question about the situation on page 221. What's really happening with this scene?\"\n\nInterruptions \u2014 There will always be someone who breaks in while another person is speaking. Most interruptions happen due to enthusiasm rather than rudeness. Control the interruptions by saying, \"Hold that thought, Jacob. We'll want to hear it again once Jennifer has finished.\"\n\nMonopolizing Conversation \u2014 Cut in on group member that is long winded with, \"That's an interesting point Bob. Did anyone else get the same impression or a different one?\" \"You've made some interesting points, Bob. Let's hear from another reader. Caitlin? What did you think?\" You don't want to offend the long winded person so be patient, but you do need to think of the others in the group so keep the conversation moving around.\n\nKeeping the group on the topic of the book \u2014 Try not to let readers wander and bring them back if they do. Comments such as, \"Let's get back to the end of chapter 4. What did you think at this point?\" \"I have a question about the situation on page 125. What's really happening here?\"\n\nBe an active listener: Rephrase a reader's comments or question to be sure you and others understand what was meant. This is an especially necessary technique when dealing with a fast talking member.\n\nEnd on time, if this club is an on going club ,not a one time book discussion, then end on time. People want their time respected and if they have a babysitter or work the next day they will appreciate you ending on time. This may mean you don't get through all your questions and that's okay.\n\nWhen you are getting to the end of your time, wrap up the discussion. One good way to do this is to ask people to rate the book on a scale of 1 to 10." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Hard SF.json b/Hard SF.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..9b330e5b99dc915b4db39142fc3e1d393dfbd37d --- /dev/null +++ b/Hard SF.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:d6678b1959a157f21d058b7753a9d10db543b88ac6bbb52f927c46a05add638d +size 33128571 diff --git a/History.json b/History.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..284744431a9ab0e55a4291c41670a43c28a5ddb3 --- /dev/null +++ b/History.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:eca5abb652b00ed354e24712fe4222f45718d430ee208569d7a0fb3327a6b5fe +size 53137103 diff --git a/Horror.json b/Horror.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..b6e82f2b136196ea10fa8972a0929f586eca1e49 --- /dev/null +++ b/Horror.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ 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Kingdoms.json @@ -0,0 +1,490 @@ +[ + { + "title": "Luo Guanzhong, 1330_", + "author": "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", + "text": "Three Heroes Swear Brotherhood In The Peach Garden; One Victory Shatters The Rebels In Battlegrounds.\n\nThe world under heaven, after a long period of division, tends to unite; after a long period of union, tends to divide. This has been so since antiquity. When the rule of the Zhou Dynasty weakened, seven contending kingdoms sprang up, warring one with another until the kingdom of Qin prevailed and possessed the empire. But when Qin's destiny had been fulfilled, arose two opposing kingdoms, Chu and Han, to fight for the mastery. And Han was the victor.\n\nThe rise of the fortunes of Han began when Liu Bang the Supreme Ancestor slew a white serpent to raise the banners of uprising, which only ended when the whole empire belonged to Han (BC 202). This magnificent heritage was handed down in successive Han emperors for two hundred years, till the rebellion of Wang Mang caused a disruption. But soon Liu Xiu the Latter Han Founder restored the empire, and Han emperors continued their rule for another two hundred years till the days of Emperor Xian, which were doomed to see the beginning of the empire's division into three parts, known to history as The Three Kingdoms.\n\nBut the descent into misrule hastened in the reigns of the two predecessors of Emperor Xian \u2014 Emperors Huan and Ling \u2014 who sat in the dragon throne about the middle of the second century.\n\nEmperor Huan paid no heed to the good people of his court, but gave his confidence to the Palace eunuchs. He lived and died, leaving the scepter to Emperor Ling, whose advisers were Regent Marshal Dou Wu and Imperial Guardian Chen Fan. Dou Wu and Chen Fan, disgusted with the abuses of the eunuchs in the affairs of the state, plotted the destruction for the power-abusing eunuchs. But Chief Eunuch Cao Jie was not to be disposed of easily. The plot leaked out, and the honest Dou Wu and Chen Fan were put to death, leaving the eunuchs stronger than before.\n\nIt fell upon the day of full moon of the fourth month, the second year, in the era of Established Calm (AD 168), that Emperor Ling went in state to the Hall of Virtue. As he drew near the throne, a rushing whirlwind arose in the corner of the hall and, lo! from the roof beams floated down a monstrous black serpent that coiled itself up on the very seat of majesty. The Emperor fell in a swoon. Those nearest him hastily raised and bore him to his palace, while the courtiers scattered and fled. The serpent disappeared.\n\nBut there followed a terrific tempest, thunder, hail, and torrents of rain, lasting till midnight and working havoc on all sides. Two years later the earth quaked in Capital Luoyang, while along the coast a huge tidal wave rushed in which, in its recoil, swept away all the dwellers by the sea. Another evil omen was recorded ten years later, when the reign title was changed to Radiant Harmony (AD 178): Certain hens suddenly crowed. At the new moon of the sixth month, a long wreath of murky cloud wound its way into the Hall of Virtue, while in the following month a rainbow was seen in the Dragon Chamber. Away from the capital, a part of the Yuan Mountains collapsed, leaving a mighty rift in the flank.\n\nSuch were some of various omens. Emperor Ling, greatly moved by these signs of the displeasure of Heaven, issued an edict asking his ministers for an explanation of the calamities and marvels.\n\nCourt Counselor Cai Yong replied bluntly: \"Falling rainbows and changes of fowls' sexes are brought about by the interference of empresses and eunuchs in state affairs.\"\n\nThe Emperor read this memorial with deep sighs, and Chief Eunuch Cao Jie, from his place behind the throne, anxiously noted these signs of grief. An opportunity offering, Cao Jie informed his fellows, and a charge was trumped up against Cai Yong, who was driven from the court and forced to retire to his country house.\n\nWith this victory the eunuchs grew bolder. Ten of them, rivals in wickedness and associates in evil deeds, formed a powerful party known as the Ten Regular Attendants \u2014 Zhang Rang, Zhao Zhong, Cheng Kuang, Duan Gui, Feng Xu, Guo Sheng, Hou Lan, Jian Shuo, Cao Jie, and Xia Yun.\n\nOne of them, Zhang Rang, won such influence that he became the Emperor's most honored and trusted adviser. The Emperor even called him \"Foster Father\". So the corrupt state administration went quickly from bad to worse, till the country was ripe for rebellion and buzzed with brigandage.\n\nAt this time in the county of Julu was a certain Zhang family, of whom three brothers bore the name of Zhang Jue, Zhang Ba, and Zhang Lian, respectively. The eldest Zhang Jue was an unclassed graduate, who devoted himself to medicine. One day, while culling simples in the woods, Zhang Jue met a venerable old gentleman with very bright, emerald eyes and fresh complexion, who walked with an oak-wood staff. The old man beckoned Zhang Jue into a cave and there gave him three volumes of The Book of Heaven.\n\n\"This book,\" said the old gentleman, \"is the Essential Arts of Peace. With the aid of these volumes, you can convert the world and rescue humankind. But you must be single-minded, or, rest assured, you will greatly suffer.\"\n\nWith a humble obeisance, Zhang Jue took the book and asked the name of his benefactor.\n\n\"I am Saint Hermit of the Southern Land,\" was the reply, as the old gentleman disappeared in thin air.\n\nZhang Jue studied the wonderful book eagerly and strove day and night to reduce its precepts to practice. Before long, he could summon the winds and command the rain, and he became known as the Mystic of the Way of Peace.\n\nIn the first month of the first year of Central Stability (AD 184), there was a terrible pestilence that ran throughout the land, whereupon Zhang Jue distributed charmed remedies to the afflicted. The godly medicines brought big successes, and soon he gained the tittle of the Wise and Worthy Master. He began to have a following of disciples whom he initiated into the mysteries and sent abroad throughout all the land. They, like their master, could write charms and recite formulas, and their fame increased his following.\n\nZhang Jue began to organize his disciples. He established thirty-six circuits, the larger with ten thousand or more members, the smaller with about half that number. Each circuit had its chief who took the military title of General. They talked wildly of the death of the blue heaven and the setting up of the golden one; they said a new cycle was beginning and would bring universal good fortune to all members; and they persuaded people to chalk the symbols for the first year of the new cycle on the main door of their dwellings.\n\nWith the growth of the number of his supporters grew also the ambition of Zhang Jue. The Wise and Worthy Master dreamed of empire. One of his partisans, Ma Yuanyi, was sent bearing gifts to gain the support of the eunuchs within the Palace.\n\nTo his brothers Zhang Jue said, \"For schemes like ours always the most difficult part is to gain the popular favor. But that is already ours. Such an opportunity must not pass.\"\n\nAnd they began to prepare. Many yellow flags and banners were made, and a day was chosen for the uprising. Then Zhang Jue wrote letters to Feng Xu and sent them by one of his followers, Tang Zhou, who alas! betrayed his trust and reported the plot to the court. The Emperor summoned the trusty Regent Marshal He Jin and bade him look to the issue. Ma Yuanyi was at once taken and beheaded. Feng Xu and many others were cast into prison.\n\nThe plot having thus become known, the Zhang brothers were forced at once to take the field. They took up grandiose titles: Zhang Jue the Lord of Heaven, Zhang Ba the Lord of Earth, and Zhang Lian the Lord of Human. And in these names they put forth this manifesto:\n\n\"The good fortune of the Han is exhausted, and the Wise and Worthy Man has appeared. Discern the will of Heaven, O ye people, and walk in the way of righteousness, whereby alone ye may attain to peace.\"\n\nSupport was not lacking. On every side people bound their heads with yellow scarves and joined the army of the rebel Zhang Jue, so that soon his strength was nearly half a million strong, and the official troops melted away at a whisper of his coming.\n\nRegent Marshal and Imperial Guardian, He Jin, memorialized for general preparations against the Yellow Scarves, and an edict called upon everyone to fight against the rebels. In the meantime, three Imperial Commanders \u2014 Lu Zhi, Huangfu Song, and Zhu Jun \u2014 marched against them in three directions with veteran soldiers.\n\nMeanwhile Zhang Jue led his army into Youzhou, the northeastern region of the empire. The Imperial Protector of Youzhou was Liu Yan, a scion of the Imperial House. Learning of the approach of the rebels, Liu Yan called in Commander Zhou Jing to consult over the position.\n\nZhou Jing said, \"They are many and we few. We must enlist more troops to oppose them.\"\n\nLiu Yan agreed, and he put out notices calling for volunteers to serve against the rebels. One of these notices was posted up in the county of Zhuo, where lived one man of high spirit.\n\nThis man was no mere bookish scholar, nor found he any pleasure in study. But he was liberal and amiable, albeit a man of few words, hiding all feeling under a calm exterior. He had always cherished a yearning for high enterprise and had cultivated the friendship of humans of mark. He was tall of stature. His ears were long, the lobes touching his shoulders, and his hands hung down below his knees. His eyes were very big and prominent so that he could see backward past his ears. His complexion was as clear as jade, and he had rich red lips.\n\nHe was a descendant of Prince Sheng of Zhongshan whose father was the Emperor Jing (reigned BC 157-141), the fourth emperor of the Han Dynasty. His name was Liu Bei. Many years before, one of his forbears had been the governor of that very county, but had lost his rank for remissness in ceremonial offerings. However, that branch of the family had remained on in the place, gradually becoming poorer and poorer as the years rolled on. His father Liu Hong had been a scholar and a virtuous official but died young. The widow and orphan were left alone, and Liu Bei as a lad won a reputation for filial piety.\n\nAt this time the family had sunk deep in poverty, and Liu Bei gained his living by selling straw sandals and weaving grass mats. The family home was in a village near the chief city of Zhuo. Near the house stood a huge mulberry tree, and seen from afar its curved profile resembled the canopy of a wagon. Noting the luxuriance of its foliage, a soothsayer had predicted that one day a man of distinction would come forth from the family.\n\nAs a child, Liu Bei played with the other village children beneath this tree, and he would climb up into it, saying, \"I am the Son of Heaven, and this is my chariot!\" His uncle, Liu Yuanqi, recognized that Liu Bei was no ordinary boy and saw to it that the family did not come to actual want.\n\nWhen Liu Bei was fifteen, his mother sent him traveling for his education. For a time he served Zheng Xuan and Lu Zhi as masters. And he became great friends with Gongsun Zan.\n\nLiu Bei was twenty-eight when the outbreak of the Yellow Scarves called for soldiers. The sight of the notice saddened him, and he sighed as he read it.\n\nSuddenly a rasping voice behind him cried, \"Sir, why sigh if you do nothing to help your country?\"\n\nTurning quickly he saw standing there a man about his own height, with a bullet head like a leopard's, large eyes, a swallow pointed chin, and whiskers like a tiger's . He spoke in a loud bass voice and looked as irresistible as a dashing horse. At once Liu Bei saw he was no ordinary man and asked who he was.\n\n\"Zhang Fei is my name,\" replied the stranger. \"I live near here where I have a farm; and I am a wine seller and a butcher as well; and I like to become acquainted with worthy people. Your sighs as you read the notice drew me toward you.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I am of the Imperial Family, Liu Bei is my name. And I wish I could destroy these Yellow Scarves and restore peace to the land, but alas! I am helpless.\"\n\n\"I have the means,\" said Zhang Fei. \"Suppose you and I raised some troops and tried what we could do.\"\n\nThis was happy news for Liu Bei, and the two betook themselves to the village inn to talk over the project. As they were drinking, a huge, tall fellow appeared pushing a hand-cart along the road. At the threshold he halted and entered the inn to rest awhile and he called for wine.\n\n\"And be quick!\" added he. \"For I am in haste to get into the town and offer myself for the army.\"\n\nLiu Bei looked over the newcomer, item by item, and he noted the man had a huge frame, a long beard, a vivid face like an apple, and deep red lips. He had eyes like a phoenix's and fine bushy eyebrows like silkworms. His whole appearance was dignified and awe-inspiring. Presently, Liu Bei crossed over, sat down beside him and asked his name.\n\n\"I am Guan Yu,\" replied he. \"I am a native of the east side of the river, but I have been a fugitive on the waters for some five years, because I slew a ruffian who, since he was wealthy and powerful, was a bully. I have come to join the army here.\"\n\nThen Liu Bei told Guan Yu his own intentions, and all three went away to Zhang Fei's farm where they could talk over the grand project.\n\nSaid Zhang Fei, \"The peach trees in the orchard behind the house are just in full flower. Tomorrow we will institute a sacrifice there and solemnly declare our intention before Heaven and Earth, and we three will swear brotherhood and unity of aims and sentiments: Thus will we enter upon our great task.\"\n\nBoth Liu Bei and Guan Yu gladly agreed.\n\nAll three being of one mind, next day they prepared the sacrifices, a black ox, a white horse, and wine for libation. Beneath the smoke of the incense burning on the altar, they bowed their heads and recited this oath:\n\n\"We three \u2014 Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei \u2014 though of different families, swear brotherhood, and promise mutual help to one end. We will rescue each other in difficulty; we will aid each other in danger. We swear to serve the state and save the people. We ask not the same day of birth, but we seek to die together. May Heaven, the all-ruling, and Earth, the all-producing, read our hearts. If we turn aside from righteousness or forget kindliness, may Heaven and Human smite us!\"\n\nThey rose from their knees. The two others bowed before Liu Bei as their elder brother, and Zhang Fei was to be the youngest of the trio. This solemn ceremony performed, they slew other oxen and made a feast to which they invited the villagers. Three hundred joined them, and all feasted and drank deep in the Peach Garden.\n\nThe next day weapons were mustered. But there were no horses to ride. This was a real grief. But soon they were cheered by the arrival of two horse dealers with a drove of horses.\n\n\"Thus does Heaven help us!\" said Liu Bei.\n\nAnd the three brothers went forth to welcome the merchants. They were Zhang Shiping and Su Shuang from Zhongshan. They went northwards every year to buy horses. They were now on their way home because of the Yellow Scarves. The brothers invited them to the farm, where wine was served before them. Then Liu Bei told them of the plan to strive for tranquillity. Zhang Shiping and Su Shuang were glad and at once gave the brothers fifty good steeds, and beside, five hundred ounces of gold and silver and one thousand five hundred pounds of steel fit for the forging of weapons.\n\nThe brothers expressed their gratitude, and the merchants took their leave. Then blacksmiths were summoned to forge weapons. For Liu Bei they made a pair of ancient swords; for Guan Yu they fashioned a long-handled, curve blade called Green-Dragon Saber, which weighed a full one hundred pounds; and for Zhang Fei they created a ten-foot spear called Serpent Halberd. Each too had a helmet and full armor.\n\nWhen weapons were ready, the troop, now five hundred strong, marched to Commander Zhou Jing, who presented them to Imperial Protector Liu Yan. When the ceremony of introduction was over, Liu Bei declared his ancestry, and Liu Yan at once accorded him the esteem due to a relation.\n\nBefore many days it was announced that the rebellion had actually broken out, and a Yellow Scarves chieftain, Cheng Yuanzhi, had invaded the region with a body of fifty thousand rebels. Liu Yan bade Zhou Jing and the three brothers to go out to oppose them with the five hundred troops. Liu Bei joyfully undertook to lead the van and marched to the foot of the Daxing Hills where they saw the rebels. The rebels wore their hair flying about their shoulders, and their foreheads were bound with yellow scarves.\n\nWhen the two armies had been drawn up opposite each other, Liu Bei rode to the front, Guan Yu to his left, Zhang Fei to his right.\n\nFlourishing his whip, Liu Bei began to hurl reproaches at the rebels, crying, \"O malcontents! Why not dismount and be bound?\"\n\nTheir leader Cheng Yuanzhi, full of rage, sent out one general, Deng Mao, to begin the battle. At once rode forward Zhang Fei, his serpent halberd poised to strike. One thrust and Deng Mao rolled off his horse, pierced through the heart. At this Cheng Yuanzhi himself whipped up his steed and rode forth with sword raised ready to slay Zhang Fei. But Guan Yu swung up his ponderous green-dragon saber and rode at Cheng Yuanzhi. At the sight, fear seized upon Cheng Yuanzhi, and before he could defend himself, the great saber fell, cutting him in halves.\n\n\u2003Two heroes new to war's alarms,\n\n\u2003Ride boldly forth to try their arms.\n\n\u2003Their doughty deeds three kingdoms tell,\n\n\u2003And poets sing how these befell.\n\nTheir leader fallen, the rebels threw away their weapons and fled. The official soldiers dashed in among them. Many thousands surrendered and the victory was complete. Thus this part of the rebellion was broken up.\n\nOn their return, Liu Yan personally met them and distributed rewards. But the next day, letters came from Imperial Protector Gong Jing of Qingzhou Region saying that the rebels were laying siege to the chief city and it was near falling. Help was needed quickly.\n\n\"I will go,\" said Liu Bei as soon as he heard the news.\n\nAnd he set out at once with his own soldiers, reinforced by a body of five thousand under Zhou Jing. The rebels, seeing help coming, at once attacked most fiercely. The relieving force being comparatively small could not prevail and retired some ten miles, where they made a camp.\n\n\"They are many and we but few,\" said Liu Bei to his brothers. \"We can only beat them by superior strategy.\"\n\nSo they prepared an ambush. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, each with a goodly party, went behind the hills, right and left, and there hid. When the gongs beat they were to move out to support the main army.\n\nThese preparations made, the drums rolled noisily for Liu Bei to advance. The rebels also came forward. But Liu Bei suddenly retired. Thinking this was their chance, the rebels pressed forward and were led over the hills. Then suddenly the gongs sounded for the ambush. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei poured out from right and left as Liu Bei faced around to meet the rebels. Under three-side attack, the rebels lost heavily and fled to the walls of Qingzhou City. But Imperial Protector Gong Jing led out an armed body to attack them, and the rebels were entirely defeated and many slain. Qingzhou was no longer in danger.\n\n\u2003Though fierce as tigers soldiers be,\n\n\u2003Battles are won by strategy.\n\n\u2003A hero comes; he gains renown,\n\n\u2003Already destined for a crown.\n\nAfter the celebrations in honor of victory were over, Commander Zhou Jing proposed to return to Youzhou.\n\nBut Liu Bei said, \"We are informed that Imperial Commander Lu Zhi has been struggling with a horde of rebels led by Zhang Jue at Guangzong. Lu Zhi was once my teacher, and I want to go help him.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei and Zhou Jing separated, and the three brothers with their troops made their way to Guangzong. They found Lu Zhi's camp, were admitted to his presence, and declared the reason of their coming. The Commander received them with great joy, and they remained with him while he made his plans.\n\nAt that time Zhang Jue's one hundred fifty thousand troops and Lu Zhi's fifty thousand troops were facing each other. Neither had had any success.\n\nLu Zhi said to Liu Bei, \"I am able to surround these rebels here. But the other two brothers, Zhang Ba and Zhang Lian, are strongly entrenched opposite Huangfu Song and Zhu Jun at Yingchuan. I will give you a thousand more troops, and with these you can go to find out what is happening, and we can then settle the moment for concerted attack.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei set off and marched as quickly as possible to Yingchuan. At that time the imperial troops were attacking with success, and the rebels had retired upon Changshe. They had encamped among the thick grass.\n\nSeeing this, Huangfu Song said to Zhu Jun, \"The rebels are camping in the field. We can attack them by fire.\"\n\nSo the Imperial Commanders bade every man cut a bundle of dry grass and laid an ambush. That night the wind blew a gale, and at the second watch they started a blaze. At the same time Huangfu Song and Zhu Jun's troops attacked the rebels and set their camp on fire. The flames rose to the very heaven. The rebels were thrown into great confusion. There was no time to saddle horses or don armor: They fled in all directions.\n\nThe battle continued until dawn. Zhang Lian and Zhang Ba, with a group of flying rebels, found a way of escape. But suddenly a troop of soldiers with crimson banners appeared to oppose them. Their leader was a man of medium stature with small eyes and a long beard. He was Cao Cao, a Beijuo man, holding the rank of Cavalry Commander. His father was Cao Song, but he was not really a Cao. Cao Song had been born to the Xiahou family, but he had been brought up by Eunuch Cao Teng and had taken this family name.\n\nAs a young man Cao Cao had been fond of hunting and delighted in songs and dancing. He was resourceful and full of guile. An uncle, seeing the young fellow so unsteady, used to get angry with him and told his father of his misdeeds. His father remonstrated with him.\n\nBut Cao Cao made equal to the occasion. One day, seeing his uncle coming, he fell to the ground in a pretended fit. The uncle alarmed ran to tell his father, who came, and there was the youth in most perfect health.\n\n\"But your uncle said you were in a fit. Are you better?\" said his father.\n\n\"I have never suffered from fits or any such illness,\" said Cao Cao. \"But I have lost my uncle's affection, and he has deceived you.\"\n\nThereafter, whatever the uncle might say of his faults, his father paid no heed. So the young man grew up licentious and uncontrolled.\n\nA man of the time named Qiao Xuan said to Cao Cao, \"Rebellion is at hand, and only a man of the greatest ability can succeed in restoring tranquillity. That man is yourself.\"\n\nAnd He Yong of Nanyang said of him, \"The dynasty of Han is about to fall. He who can restore peace is this man and only he.\"\n\nCao Cao went to inquire his future of a wise man of Runan named Xu Shao.\n\n\"What manner of man am I?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nThe seer made no reply, and again and again Cao Cao pressed the question.\n\nThen Xu Shao replied, \"In peace you are an able subject; in chaos you are a crafty hero!\"\n\nCao Cao greatly rejoiced to hear this.\n\nCao Cao graduated at twenty and earned a reputation of piety and integrity. He began his career as Commanding Officer in a county within the Capital District. In the four gates of the city he guarded, he hung up clubs of various sorts, and he would punish any breach of the law whatever the rank of the offender. Now an uncle of Eunuch Jian Shuo was found one night in the streets with a sword and was arrested. In due course he was beaten. Thereafter no one dared to offend again, and Cao Cao's name became heard. Soon he became a magistrate of Dunqiu.\n\nAt the outbreak of the Yellow Scarves, Cao Cao held the rank of General and was given command of five thousand horse and foot to help fight at Yingchuan. He just happened to fall in with the newly defeated rebels whom he cut to pieces. Thousands were slain and endless banners and drums and horses were captured, together with huge sums of money. However, Zhang Ba and Zhang Lian got away; and after an interview with Huangfu Song, Cao Cao went in pursuit of them.\n\nMeanwhile Liu Bei and his brothers were hastening toward Yingchuan, when they heard the din of battle and saw flames rising high toward the sky. But they arrived too late for the fighting. They saw Huangfu Song and Zhu Jun to whom they told the intentions of Lu Zhi.\n\n\"The rebel power is quite broken here,\" said the commanders, \"but they will surely make for Guangzong to join Zhang Jue. You can do nothing better than hasten back.\"\n\nThe three brothers thus retraced their steps. Half way along the road they met a party of soldiers escorting a prisoner in a cage-cart. When they drew near, they saw the prisoner was no other than Lu Zhi, the man they were going to help. Hastily dismounting, Liu Bei asked what had happened.\n\nLu Zhi explained, \"I had surrounded the rebels and was on the point of smashing them, when Zhang Jue employed some of his supernatural powers and prevented my victory. The court sent down Eunuch Zhuo Feng to inquire into my failure, and that official demanded a bribe. I told him how hard pressed we were and asked him where, in the circumstances, I could find a gift for him. He went away in wrath and reported that I was hiding behind my ramparts and would not give battle and that I disheartened my army. So I was superseded by Dong Zhuo, and I have to go to the capital to answer the charge.\"\n\nThis story put Zhang Fei into a rage. He was for slaying the escort and setting free Lu Zhi. But Liu Bei checked him.\n\n\"The government will take the due course,\" said Liu Bei. \"You must not act hastily!\"\n\nAnd the escort and the three brothers went two ways.\n\nIt was useless to continue on that road to Guangzong, so Guan Yu proposed to go back to Zhuo, and they retook the road. Two days later they heard the thunder of battle behind some hills. Hastening to the top, they beheld the government soldiers suffering great loss, and they saw the countryside was full of Yellow Scarves. On the rebels' banners were the words Zhang Jue the Lord of Heaven written large.\n\n\"We will attack this Zhang Jue!\" said Liu Bei to his brothers, and they galloped out to join in the battle.\n\nZhang Jue had worsted Dong Zhuo and was following up his advantage. He was in hot pursuit when the three brothers dashed into his army, threw his ranks into confusion, and drove him back fifteen miles. Then the brothers returned with the rescued general to his camp.\n\n\"What offices have you?\" asked Dong Zhuo, when he had leisure to speak to the brothers.\n\n\"None,\" replied they.\n\nAnd Dong Zhuo treated them with disrespect. Liu Bei retired calmly, but Zhang Fei was furious.\n\n\"We have just rescued this menial in a bloody fight,\" cried Zhang Fei, \"and now he is rude to us! Nothing but his death can slake my anger.\"\n\nZhang Fei stamped toward Dong Zhuo's tent, holding firmly a sharp sword.\n\n\u2003As it was in olden time so it is today,\n\n\u2003The simple wight may merit well,\n\n\u2003Officialdom holds sway;\n\n\u2003Zhang Fei, the blunt and hasty,\n\n\u2003Where can you find his peer?\n\n\u2003But slaying the ungrateful would\n\n\u2003Mean many deaths a year." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Zhang Fei Whips The Government Officer; He Jin Plots To Kill The Eunuchs.\n\nDong Zhuo was born in the far northwest at Lintao in the West Valley Land. As the Governor of Hedong, Dong Zhuo himself was arrogant and overbearing. But the day he had treated Liu Bei with contumely had been his last, had not Liu Bei and Guan Yu restrained their wrathful brother Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Remember he has the government commission,\" said Liu Bei. \"Who are we to judge and slay?\"\n\n\"It is bitter to take orders from such a wretch. I would rather slay him! You may stay here if you wish to, but I will seek some other place,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"We three are one in life and in death; there is no parting for us. We will all go hence.\"\n\nSo spoke Liu Bei, and his brother was satisfied. Wherefore all three set out and lost no time in traveling until they came to Zhu Jun, who received them well and accepted their aid in attacking Zhang Ba. At this time Cao Cao had joined himself to Huangfu Song, and they were trying to destroy Zhang Lian, and there was a great battle at Quyang.\n\nZhang Ba was commanding some eighty thousand troops. The rebel had led his army to a strong position in the rear of the hills. An attack being decided upon, Liu Bei was the van leader. On the rebel side a general of Zhang Ba, Gao Sheng, came out to offer battle. Liu Bei sent Zhang Fei to smite Gao Sheng. Out rode Zhang Fei at full speed, his spear ready set. After a few bouts Zhang Fei wounded Gao Sheng, who was unhorsed. At this Liu Bei signaled the main army to advance.\n\nThen Zhang Ba, while still mounted, loosened his hair, grasped his sword, and uttered his incantations. Thereupon began the wind to howl and the thunder to roll, while a dense black cloud from the heavens settled upon the field. And therein seemed to be horsemen and footmen innumerable, who swept to attack the imperial troops. Fear came upon them, and Liu Bei led off his troops, but they were in disorder and returned defeated.\n\nZhu Jun and Liu Bei considered the matter.\n\n\"Zhang Ba uses magic,\" said Zhu Jun. \"Tomorrow, then, will I prepare counter magic in the shape of the blood of slaughtered swine and goats. This blood shall be sprinkled upon their hosts from the precipices above by soldiers in ambush. Thus shall we be able to break the power of their shamanic art.\"\n\nSo it was done. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei took each a thousand troops and hid them on the high cliffs behind the hills, and they had a plentiful supply of the blood of swine and goats and all manners of filthy things. And so next day, when the rebels with fluttering banners and rolling drums came out to challenge, Liu Bei rode forth to meet them. At the same moment that the armies met, again Zhang Ba began his magic and again the elements began to struggle together. Sand flew in clouds, pebbles were swept along the ground, black masses of vapor filled the sky, and rolling masses of foot and horse descended from on high. Liu Bei turned, as before, to flee and the rebels rushed on. But as they pressed through the hills, the trumpets blared, and the hidden soldiers exploded bombs, threw down filth and spattered blood. The masses of soldiers and horses in the air fluttered to the earth as fragments of torn paper, the wind ceased to blow, the thunder subsided, the sand sank, and the pebbles lay still upon the ground.\n\nZhang Ba quickly saw his magic had been countered and turned to retire. Then he was attacked on the flanks by Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and in rear by Liu Bei and Zhu Jun. The rebels were routed. Liu Bei, seeing from afar the banner of Zhang Ba The Lord of Earth, galloped toward it but only succeeded in wounding Zhang Ba with an arrow in the left arm. Wounded though he was, Zhang Ba got away into the city of Yangcheng, where he fortified himself and was besieged by Zhu Jun.\n\nScouts, sent out to get news of Huangfu Song, reported: \"Commander Huangfu Song had been very successful, and Dong Zhuo had suffered many reverses. Therefore the court put Huangfu Song in the latter's place. Zhang Jue had died before Huangfu Song's arrival. Zhang Lian had added his brother's army to his own, but no headway could be made against Huangfu Song, whose army gained seven successive victories. And Zhang Lian was slain at Quyang. Beside this, Zhang Jue's coffin was exhumed, the corpse beheaded, and the head, after exposure, was sent to Capital Luoyang. The common crowd had surrendered. For these services Huangfu Song was promoted to General of the Flying Chariots and the Imperial Protector of Jizhou.\n\n\"Huangfu Song did not forget his friends. His first act after he had attained to power was to memorialize the Throne concerning the case of Lu Zhi, who was then restored to his former rank for his meritorious conduct. Cao Cao also received advancement for his services and is preparing to go to Jinan to his new post.\"\n\nHearing these things Zhu Jun pressed harder yet upon Yangcheng, and the approaching break-up of the rebellion became evident. Then one of Zhang Ba's officers, Yan Zheng, killed his leader and brought the head in token of submission. Thus rebellion in that part of the country was stamped out, and Zhu Jun made his report to the government.\n\nHowever, the embers of the Yellow Scarves still smoldered. Three other rebels, Zhao Hong, Han Zhong, and Sun Zhong, gathered some thirty thousand rebels and began to murder and rob and burn, calling themselves the avengers of Master Zhang Jue.\n\nThe court commanded the successful Zhu Jun to lead his veteran and successful troops to destroy the rebels. He at once marched toward the city of Wancheng which the rebels were holding. When Zhu Jun arrived, Han Zhong went to oppose him. Zhu Jun sent Liu Bei and his brothers to attack the southwest corner of the city. Han Zhong at once led the best of his troops to defend the city. Meanwhile Zhu Jun himself led two thousand of armored horsemen to attack the opposite corner. The rebels, thinking the city being lost, abandoned the southwest and turned back into the city to help the defenders. Liu Bei pressed hotly in their rear, and they were utterly routed. They took refuge in the city which was then invested. When famine pressed upon the besieged, they sent a messenger to offer to surrender, but Zhu Jun refused the offer.\n\nSaid Liu Bei to Zhu Jun, \"Seeing that the founder of the Han Dynasty, Liu Bang the Supreme Ancestor, could welcome the submissive and receive the favorable, why reject these?\"\n\n\"The conditions are different,\" replied Zhu Jun. \"In those old days disorder was universal and the people had no fixed lord. Wherefore submission was welcomed and support rewarded to encourage people to come over. Now the empire is united, and the Yellow Scarves are the only malcontents. To receive their surrender is not to encourage the good. To allow brigands, when successful, is to give way to every license, and to let them surrender when they fail is to encourage brigandage. Your plan is not a good one.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"Not to let brigands surrender is well. But the city is surrounded as by an iron barrel. If the rebels' request be refused, they will be desperate and fight to the death, and we can hardly withstand a myriad of such men. Moreover, in the city there are many times that number, all doomed to death. Let us withdraw from one corner and only attack the opposite. They will all assuredly flee and have no desire to fight. We shall take them.\"\n\nZhu Jun saw that the advice was good and followed it. As predicted the rebels ran out, led by Han Zhong. The besiegers fell upon them as they fled, and Han Zhong was slain. The rebels scattered in all directions. But the other two rebel chieftains, Zhao Hong and Sun Zhong, came with large reinforcements, and as they appeared very strong, the imperial soldiers retired, and the new body of rebels reentered Wancheng.\n\nZhu Jun encamped three miles from the city and prepared to attack. Just then there arrived a body of horse and foot from the east. At the lead was one general with a broad open face, a body as an alert tiger's, and a torso as a lofty bear's . His name was Sun Jian. He was a native of Fuchun in the old state of Wu, a descendant of the famous Sun Zi the Strategist.\n\nWhen he was seventeen, Sun Jian was with his father on the River Qiantang and saw a party of pirates, who had been plundering a merchant, dividing their booty on the river bank.\n\n\"We can capture these!\" said he to his father.\n\nSo, gripping his sword, he ran boldly up the bank and cried out to this side and that as if he was calling his men to come on. This made the pirates believe the soldiers were on them and they fled, leaving their booty behind them. He actually killed one of the pirates. In this way be became known and was recommended for office.\n\nThen, in collaboration with the local officials, he raised a band of one thousand and helped to quell the rebellion of one Xu Chang, who called himself the Sun Emperor and had ten thousand supporters. The rebel's son Xu Hao was also slain with his father. For this Sun Jian was commended by Imperial Protector Zang Min in a memorial to the Throne, and he received further promotion to the post of magistrate of Yandu, then of Xuyi, and then of Xiapi.\n\nWhen the Yellow Scarves rebellion began, Sun Jian gathered together the youths of his village, some of the merchant class, got a troop of one thousand five hundred of veteran soldiers and took the field. Now he had reached the fighting area.\n\nZhu Jun welcomed Sun Jian gladly and ordered him to attack the south gate of Wancheng. The north and the west gates were simultaneously attacked by Liu Bei and Zhu Jun, but the east gate was left free to give the rebels a chance of exit. Sun Jian was the first to mount the wall and cut down more than twenty rebels with his own sword. The rebels ran, but the leader Zhao Hong rode directly at Sun Jian with his spear ready to thrust. Sun Jian leaped down from the wall, snatched away the spear and with it knocked Zhao Hong from the horse. Then Sun Jian, mounting Zhao Hong's horse, rode hither and thither, slaying as he went.\n\nThe rebels fled north. Meeting Liu Bei, they declined to fight and scattered. But Liu Bei drew his bow, fitted an arrow, and shot their leader Sun Zhong, who fell to the ground. The main army of Zhu Jun came up, and after tremendous slaughter, the rebels surrendered. Thus was peace brought to the ten counties about the Nanyang area.\n\nZhu Jun returned to Capital Luoyang, was promoted to the General of the Flying Cavalry, and received the governorship of Henan. He did not forget those who had helped him to win victory. Thus he reported the merits of Liu Bei and Sun Jian to the Throne.\n\nSun Jian, having influential friends and connections to support him, quickly got an appointment to a post of Commander of Changsha and went to assume the new office. But Liu Bei, in spite of Zhu Jun's memorial, waited in vain for preferment, and the three brothers became very sad.\n\nWalking along one day in the capital, Liu Bei met a court official, Zhang Jun, to whom he related his services and told his sorrows. Zhang Jun was much surprised at this neglect and one day at court spoke to the Emperor about it.\n\nSaid he, \"The Yellow Scarves rebelled because the eunuchs sold offices and bartered ranks. There was employment only for their friends, punishment only for their enemies. This led to rebellion. Wherefore it would be well to slay the Ten Eunuchs and expose their heads and proclaim what had been done throughout the whole empire. Then reward the worthy. Thereby the land would be wholly tranquil.\"\n\nBut the eunuchs fiercely opposed this and said Zhang Jun was insulting the Emperor, and the Emperor bade the guards thrust Zhang Jun out.\n\nHowever, the eunuchs took counsel together and one said, \"Surely someone who rendered some service against rebels resents being passed over.\"\n\nSo they caused a list of unimportant people to be prepared for preferment by and by. Among them was Liu Bei, who received the post of magistrate of the county of Anxi, to which he proceeded without delay after disbanding his army and sending them home to their villages. He retained two dozens or so as escort.\n\nThe three brothers reached Anxi, and soon the administration of the county was so reformed and the rule so wise that in a month there was no law-breaking. The three brothers lived in harmony, eating at the same table and sleeping on the same couch. But when Liu Bei was in public sessions or in company of others, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei would stand in attendance, were it even a whole day.\n\nFour months after their arrival, there came out a general order for the reduction of the number of military officers holding civil posts, and Liu Bei began to fear that he would be among those thrown out. In due course the inspecting official, Du Biao by name, arrived and was met at the boundary. But to the polite obeisance of Liu Bei, he made no return, save a wave of his whip as he sat on his horse. This made Guan Yu and Zhang Fei furious. But worse was to follow.\n\nWhen the inspector had arrived at his lodging, he took his seat on the dais, leaving Liu Bei standing below. After a long time he addressed Liu Bei.\n\n\"Magistrate, what was your origin?\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I am descended from Prince Sheng of Zhongshan. Since my first fight with the Yellow Scarves rebels at Zhuo County, I have been in some thirty battles, wherein I gained some trifling merit. My reward was this office.\"\n\n\"You lie about your descent, and your statement of services is false!\" roared the inspector. \"Now the court has ordered the reduction of your sort of low class and corrupt officials.\"\n\nLiu Bei muttered to himself and withdrew. On his return to the magistracy, he took council with his secretaries.\n\n\"This pompous attitude only means the inspector wants a bribe,\" said they.\n\n\"I have never wronged the people to the value of a single coin: Then where is a bribe to come from?\"\n\nNext day the inspector had the minor officials before him and forced them to bear witness that their master had oppressed the people. Liu Bei time after time went to rebut this charge, but the doorkeepers drove him away and he could not enter.\n\nNow Zhang Fei had been all day drowning his sorrow in wine and had drunk far too much. Calling for his horse he rode out past the lodging of the inspector, and at the gate saw a small crowd of white-haired people weeping bitterly. He asked why.\n\nThey said, \"The inspector has compelled the underlings to bear false witness against our magistrate, with the desire to injure the virtuous Liu Bei. We came to beg mercy for him but are not permitted to enter. Moreover, we have been beaten by the doorkeepers.\"\n\nThis provoked the irascible and half intoxicated Zhang Fei to fury. His eyes opened wide until they became circles; he ground his teeth; in a moment he was off his steed, had forced his way past the scared doorkeepers into the building, and was in the rear apartments. There he saw Imperial Inspector Du Biao sitting on high with the official underlings in bonds at his feet.\n\n\"Oppressor of the people, robber!\" cried Zhang Fei. \"Do you know me?\"\n\nBut before the inspector could reply, Zhang Fei had had him by the hair and had dragged him down. Another moment he was outside and firmly lashed to the hitching post in front of the building. Then breaking off a switch from a willow tree, Zhang Fei gave his victim a severe thrashing, only staying his hand when the tenth switch was too short to strike with.\n\nLiu Bei was sitting alone, communing with his sorrow, when he heard a shouting before his door. He asked what the matter was.\n\nThey told him, \"General Zhang Fei had bound somebody to a post and was thrashing him!\"\n\nHastily going outside, Liu Bei saw who the unhappy victim was and asked Zhang Fei the reason.\n\n\"If we do not beat this sort of wretch to death, what may we expect?\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Noble Sir, save me!\" cried the inspector.\n\nNow Liu Bei had always been kindly and gracious, wherefore he bade his brother release the officer and go his way.\n\nThen Guan Yu came up, saying, \"Brother, after your magnificent services you only got this petty post, and even here you have been insulted by this fellow. A thorn bush is no place for a phoenix. Let us slay this fellow, leave here, and go home till we can evolve a bigger scheme.\"\n\nLiu Bei contented himself with hanging the official seal about the inspector's neck, saying, \"If I hear that you injure the people, I will assuredly kill you. I now spare your life, and I return to you the seal. We are going.\"\n\nThe inspector went to the Governor of Dingzhou and complained, and orders were issued for the arrest of the brothers, but they got away to Daizhou and sought refuge with Liu Hu, who sheltered them because of Liu Bei's noble birth.\n\nBy this time the Ten Regular Attendants had everything in their hands, and they put to death all who did not stand in with them. From every officer who had helped to put down the rebels they demanded presents; and if these were not forthcoming, he was removed from office. Imperial Commanders Huangfu Song and Zhu Jun both fell victims to these intrigues and were deprived from offices, while on the other hand the eunuchs received the highest honors and rewards. Thirteen eunuchs were ennobled, including Zhao Zhong who was added to the rank of General of the Flying Cavalry. The government grew worse and worse, and everyone was irritated.\n\nRebellions broke out in Changsha led by Ou Xing, and in Yuyang led by Zhang Ju and Zhang Chun. Memorials were sent up in number as snow flakes in winter, but the Ten suppressed them all. One day the Emperor was at a feast in one of the gardens with the Ten, when Court Counselor Liu Tao suddenly appeared showing very great distress. The Emperor asked what the matter was.\n\n\"Sire, how can you be feasting with these when the empire is at the last gasp?\" said Liu Tao.\n\n\"All is well,\" said the Emperor. \"Where is anything wrong?\"\n\nSaid Liu Tao, \"Robbers swarm on all sides and plunder the cities. And all is the fault of the Ten Eunuchs who sell offices and injure the people, oppress loyal officials and deceive their superiors. All virtuous ones have left the services and returned to their places. Misfortune is before our very eyes!\"\n\nAt this the eunuchs pulled off their hats and threw themselves at their master's feet.\n\n\"If Minister Liu Tao disapproves of us,\" they said, \"we are in danger. We pray that our lives be spared and we may go to our farms. We yield our property to help defray military expenses.\"\n\nAnd they wept bitterly.\n\nThe Emperor turned angrily to Liu Tao, saying, \"You also have servants: Why can't you bear with mine?\"\n\nAnd thereupon the Emperor called to the guards to eject Liu Tao and put him to death.\n\nLiu Tao cried aloud, \"My death matters nothing. The pity is that Han Dynasty, after four centuries of reign, is falling fast!\"\n\nThe guards hustled him away and were just about to carry out the Emperor's order when a minister stopped them, shouting, \"Strike not! Wait till I have spoken with His Majesty.\"\n\nIt was the Minister of the Interior, Chen Dan. He went in to the Emperor, to whom he said, \"For what fault is Counselor Liu Tao to be put to death?\"\n\n\"He has vilified my servants and has insulted me,\" said the Emperor.\n\n\"All the empire would eat the flesh of the eunuchs if they could, and yet, Sire, you respect them as if they were your parents. They have no merit, but they are created nobles. Moreover, Feng Xu was in league with the Yellow Scarves. Unless Your Majesty looks to it, the state will crumble!\"\n\n\"There was no proof against Feng Xu,\" replied the Emperor. \"About the Ten Eunuchs, are there none faithful among them?\"\n\nChen Dan beat his forehead on the steps of the throne and did not desist from remonstrance. Then the Emperor grew angry and commanded his removal and imprisonment with Liu Tao. That night Liu Tao and Chen Dan were murdered.\n\nThen the eunuchs sent a forged edict to Sun Jian making him Governor of Changsha, with orders to suppress the rebellion of Ou Xing. In less than two months Sun Jian reported the county all tranquil. For this he was created Lord of Wucheng.\n\nFurther, Liu Yu was made Imperial Protector of Youzhou to move against Yuyang and suppress Zhang Ju and Zhang Chun. Liu Hu of Daizhou recommended Liu Bei to Liu Yu. Liu Yu welcomed Liu Bei and gave him rank of Commander and sent him against the rebels. He fought with and worsted them and entirely broke their spirit. Zhang Chun was cruel, and his leaders turned against him. One of his officers then slew him and brought in his head, after which the others submitted. The other leader Zhang Ju saw that all was lost and killed himself.\n\nYuyang being now tranquil, Liu Bei's services were reported to the Throne, and he received full pardon for the insult to the imperial inspector. He was made Deputy Magistrate of Xiami, then Commanding Officer of Gaotang. Then Gongsun Zan praised Liu Bei's former services, and he was promoted to Magistrate of Pingyuan. This place was very prosperous, and Liu Bei recovered something of his old manner before the days of adversity. Liu Yu also received preferment and was promoted to Grand Commander.\n\nIn the summer of the six year of Central Stability (AD 189), Emperor Ling became seriously ill and summoned He Jin into the Palace to arrange for the future. He Jin had sprung from a humble family of butchers, but his sister had become a concubine of rank and borne a son to the Emperor, named Liu Bian. After this she became Empress He, and He Jin became the powerful Regent Marshal.\n\nThe Emperor had also greatly loved a beautiful girl, Lady Wang, who had borne him a son named Liu Xian. Empress He had poisoned Lady Wang from jealousy, and the baby had been given into the care of Empress Dong, who was the mother of Emperor Ling. Lady Dong was the wife of Liu Chang, Lord of Jiedu. As time went on and the Emperor Huan had no son of his own, he adopted the son of Liu Chang, who succeeded as the Emperor Ling. After his accession, Emperor Ling had taken his own mother into the Palace to live and had conferred upon her the title of Empress Dowager.\n\nEmpress Dong had always tried to persuade her son to name Liu Xian as the Heir Apparent, and in fact the Emperor greatly loved the boy and was disposed to do as his mother desired.\n\nWhen his end was near, one of the eunuchs, Jian Shuo, said, \"If Liu Xian is to succeed, He Jin must be killed to prevent any countermeasure.\"\n\nThe Emperor saw this too. And he summoned He Jin to come to him.\n\nBut at the very gate of the Forbidden City, He Jin was warned of his danger by Commander Pan Yin who said, \"This must be a trap of Jian Shuo to destroy you!\"\n\nHe Jin rushed back to his quarters and called many of the ministers to his side, and they met to consider how to put the eunuchs to death.\n\nAt this assembly a man spoke against the plot, \"The influence of the eunuchs dates back a century and a half, during the reigns of Emperors Chong and Zhi. It has spread like a noxious weed in all directions. How can we hope to destroy it? Above all keep this plot secret, or our whole clans will be exterminated.\"\n\nHe Jin eyed down and saw General of Military Standards Cao Cao.\n\nHe Jin was very angry at this speech and cried, \"What do inferiors like you know of the ways of government?\"\n\nAnd in the midst of the confusion Pan Yin came to say: \"The Emperor is no more. The eunuchs have decided to keep the death a secret and forge a command to the Regent Marshal to come into the Palace to settle the succession. Meanwhile to prevent trouble they have inscribed the name of Prince Xian on the roll.\"\n\nAnd as Pan Yin finished speaking, the edict arrived summoning He Jin.\n\n\"The matter for the moment is to set up the rightful heir,\" said Cao Cao. \"We can deal with the traitors later.\"\n\n\"Who dare to join me in supporting the rightful heir \u2014 Prince Bian?\" asked He Jin, the Regent Marshal.\n\nAt once one stood forward, crying, \"Give me five thousand veterans, and we will break into the Palace, set up the true heir, slay the eunuchs, and sweep clean the government! Then peace will come to the empire.\"\n\nThe energetic speaker was Yuan Shao, son of the former Minister of the Interior Yuan Feng and nephew of Imperial Guardian Yuan Wei. Yuan Shao then held the rank of Imperial Commander.\n\nHe Jin mustered five thousand royal guards. Yuan Shao put on complete armor and took command. He Jin, supported by He Yong, Xun You, Zheng Tai, and more than thirty other ministers and high-rank officials, went into the Palace. In the hall where lay the coffin of the late Emperor, they placed Liu Bian on the throne. After the ceremony was over and all had bowed before the new Emperor, Yuan Shao went in to arrest Eunuch Jian Shuo. Jian Shuo in terror fled into the Palace garden and hid among the shrubs, where he was discovered and murdered by Guo Sheng, one of the Ten Eunuchs. The guards under Jian Shuo's command all surrendered.\n\nYuan Shao said, \"Their gangs have broken. The most opportune moment is now to slay all the eunuchs!\"\n\nBut Zhang Rang and the eunuchs of the Ten scented the danger and rushed to see Empress He.\n\nThey said, \"The originator of the plan to injure your brother was Jian Shuo: Only he was concerned and no other. Now the Regent Marshal, on Yuan Shao's advice, wishes to slay everyone of us. We implore your pity, O Your Majesty!\"\n\n\"Fear not!\" said Empress He, whose son had just become Emperor, \"I will protect you.\"\n\nShe sent for her brother, and said, \"You and I are of lowly origin, and we owe our good fortune to the eunuchs. The misguided Jian Shuo is now dead, and need you really put all the others to death as Yuan Shao advises?\"\n\nAnd He Jin obeyed her wish. He explained to his party, saying, \"The real offender, Jian Shuo, has met his fate, and his clan will be punished. But we need not exterminate the whole party nor injure his colleagues.\"\n\n\"Slay them, root and branch,\" cried Yuan Shao, \"or they will ruin you!\"\n\n\"I have decided,\" said He Jin, coldly. \"Say no more.\"\n\nWithin a few days He Jin became Chair of the Secretariat, and his associates received high offices.\n\nNow Empress Dong summoned the eunuch Zhang Rang and his party to a council.\n\nSaid she, \"It was I who first brought forward the sister of He Jin. Today her son is on the throne, and all the officials are her friends, and her influence is enormous. What can we do?\"\n\nZhang Rang replied, \"Your Highness should administer the state from 'behind the veil'; create the late Emperor's son Liu Xian a prince; give your brother, the Imperial Uncle Dong Chong, a high rank, and place him over the army; and use us. That will do it.\"\n\nEmpress Dong approved. Next day she held a court and issued an edict in the sense proposed. She made Liu Xian Prince of Chenliu and Dong Chong General of the Flying Cavalry, and she allowed the eunuchs again to participate state affairs.\n\nWhen Empress He saw this, she prepared a banquet to which she invited her rival Empress Dong.\n\nIn the middle of the feast, when all were well warmed with wine, Empress He rose and offered a cup to her guest, saying, \"It is not fitting that we two should meddle in state affairs. In the beginning of the Han Dynasty, when Empress Lu laid hands upon the government, all her clans were put to death. We ought to remain content, immured in our palaces, and leave state affairs to the state officials. That would be well for the country, and I trust you will act thus.\"\n\nBut Empress Dong only got angry, saying, \"You poisoned Lady Wang out of jealousy. Now, relying upon the fact that your son sits on the throne and that your brother is powerful, you speak these wild words. I will command that your brother be beheaded, and that can be done as easily as I turn my hand!\"\n\nEmpress He in her turn became wroth and said, \"I tried to persuade you with fair words. Why get so angry?\"\n\n\"You low born daughter of a butcher, what do you know of offices?\" cried Empress Dong.\n\nAnd the quarrel waxed hot.\n\nThe eunuchs persuaded the ladies to retire. But in the night Empress He summoned her brother into the Palace and told him what had occurred. He went out and took counsel with the principal officers of state. Next morning a court was held and a memorial was presented, saying:\n\n\"Empress Dong, being the foster mother of Liu Xian, Prince of Chenliu, a regional prince \u2014 only a collateral \u2014 cannot properly occupy any part of the Palace. She is to be removed into her original fief of Hejian and is to depart immediately.\"\n\nAnd while they sent an escort to remove Empress Dong, a strong guard was placed about the Imperial Uncle Dong Chong's dwelling. They took away his seal of office and he, knowing this was the end, killed himself in his private apartments. His dependents, who wailed his death, were driven off by the guards.\n\nThe eunuchs Zhang Rang and Duan Gui, having lost their patroness, sent large gifts to He Jin's younger brother, He Miao, and his mother, Lady Wuyang, and thus got them to put in a good word to Empress He so as to gain her protection. And so they gained favor once more at court.\n\nIn the sixth month of that year, the secret emissaries of He Jin poisoned Empress Dong in her residence in the country. Her remains were brought to the capital and buried in Wen Tombs. He Jin feigned illness and did not attend the funeral.\n\nCommander Yuan Shao went one day to see He Jin, saying, \"The two eunuchs, Zhang Rang and Duan Gui, are spreading the report outside that you have caused the death of the late empress and is aiming at the throne. This is an excuse for you to destroy them. Do not spare them this time, or you will pay like Dou Wu and Chen Fan, who in the previous reign missed their chance because the secret had not been kept, and they paid by their own deaths. Now you and your brother have many commanders and officers behind, so that the destruction of the eunuchs can be but an ease. It is a heavensent opportunity. Delay no further!\"\n\nBut He Jin replied, \"Let me think it over.\"\n\nHe Jin's servants overheard the discussion and secretly informed the intended victims, who sent further gifts to the younger brother He Miao.\n\nCorrupted by these, He Miao went in to speak with his sister Empress He and said, \"The General is the chief support of the new Emperor, yet he is not gracious and merciful but thinks wholly of slaughter. If he slays the eunuchs without cause, it may bring about revolution.\"\n\nSoon after He Jin entered and told her of his design to put the eunuchs to death.\n\nShe argued with him, \"Those officials look after palace affairs and are old servants. To kill the old servants just after the death of their master would appear disrespectful to the dynasty's ancestral temple.\"\n\nAnd as He Jin was of a vacillating mind, he murmured assent and left her.\n\n\"What about it?\" said Yuan Shao on meeting him.\n\n\"She will not consent. What can be done?\"\n\n\"Call up an army and slay them. It is imperative. Never mind her consent!\"\n\n\"That is an excellent plan,\" said He Jin. And he sent orders all round to march soldiers to the capital.\n\nBut Secretary Chen Lin objected, \"Nay! Do not act without due consideration. The proverb says 'To cover the eyes and snatch at swallows is to fool oneself.' If in so small a matter you cannot attain your wish, what of great affairs? Now by virtue of the emperor and with the army under your hand, you are like prancing tiger and soaring dragon: You may do as you please. To use such enormous powers against the eunuchs would bring victory as easily as lighting up a furnace to burn a hair. You only need to act promptly: Use your powers and smite at once, and all the empire will be with you. But to summon forces to the capital, to gather many bold warlords into one spot, each with different schemes, is to turn our weapons against our own person, to place ourselves in the power of another. Nothing but failure can come of it, and havoc will ensue.\"\n\n\"The view of a mere book-worm,\" said He Jin with a smile.\n\nThen one of those about He Jin suddenly clapped his hands, laughing, \"Solving this issue is as easy as turning over one's hand! Why so much talk?\"\n\nThe speaker was Cao Cao.\n\n\u2003Wouldst thou withdraw wicked people from thy prince's side,\n\n\u2003Then seek counsel of the wise people of the state." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "In Wenming Garden, Dong Zhuo Denounces Ding Yuan; With Red Hare, Li Su Bribes Lu Bu.\n\nWhat Cao Cao said was this: \"The eunuch evil is of very old standing, but the real cause of the present trouble is in the improper influence allowed them by the emperors and the misplaced favoritism they have enjoyed. But a gaoler would be ample force to employ against this kind of evil, and getting rid of the main culprits is quite enough. Why increase confusion by summoning troops from the regions? Any desire to slay all of them will speedily become known, and the plan will fail.\"\n\n\"Then, Cao Cao, you have some scheme of your own to further,\" said He Jin with a sneer.\n\nCao Cao left the meeting, proclaiming, \"The one who throws the world into chaos is He Jin!\"\n\nThen He Jin sent swift, secret letters far and wide to several bases.\n\nIt must be recalled that Dong Zhuo had failed in his attempt to destroy the Yellow Scarves rebellion. He would have been punished if he had not bribed the Ten Eunuchs heavily for their protection. Later, through connections in the capital, he obtained rapid promotions from General to General of the Front Army, to Lord of Aoxiang, to Imperial Protector in the western region of Xizhou and Commander of an army of two hundred thousand troops. But Dong Zhuo was treacherous and disloyal at heart. So when he received the summons to the capital, he rejoiced greatly and lost no time in obeying it. He left a son-in-law, Imperial Commander Niu Fu, to look after the affairs of Xizhou and set out for Luoyang. Dong Zhuo took with him a huge army and four generals \u2014 Li Jue, Guo Si, Zhang Ji, and Fan Chou.\n\nDong Zhuo's adviser and son-in-law, Li Ru, said, \"Though a formal summons has come, there are many obscurities in it. It would be well to send up a memorial stating plainly our aims and intentions. Then we can proceed.\"\n\nSo Dong Zhuo composed something like this:\n\n\"Thy servant knows that the continual rebellions owe their origin to Zhang Rang and the Regular Attendants of the Inner Bureau, who act counter to all recognized precepts. Now to stop the ebullition of a pot the best way is to withdraw the fire; to cut out an abscess, though painful, is better than to nourish the evil. I have dared undertake a military advance on the capital, with thy permission, and now pray that Zhang Rang and the other eunuchs be removed for the happiness of the dynasty and of the empire.\"\n\nHe Jin read this memorial and showed it to his partisans.\n\nThen said Minister Zheng Tai, \"A fierce wild beast: If he comes, his prey will be humans!\"\n\nHe Jin replied, \"You are too timorous: You are unequal to great schemes.\"\n\nBut Lu Zhi also said, \"Long have I known this man. In appearance innocent, he is a very wolf at heart. Let him in, and calamity enters with him. Stop him, do not let him come, and thus will you avoid upheaval.\"\n\nHe Jin was obstinate, and both Zheng Tai and Lu Zhi gave up their posts and retired, as did more than half the ministers of state, while He Jin sent a warm welcome to Dong Zhuo, who soon camped at Shengchi Lake and stationed there without further action.\n\nZhang Rang and the eunuchs knew this move was directed against them and said, \"This is He Jin's plot. If we do not strike first, our whole clans shall be exterminated.\"\n\nSo they hid a band of fifty armed ruffians at the Gate of Grand Virtue in the Palace of Happiness, where the Empress lived, then they went in to see her.\n\nThey said, \"The General, feigning to act under command, has called up armies to the capital to destroy us. We pray you, Your Majesty, pity and save us!\"\n\n\"Go to the General and confess your faults,\" said the Empress.\n\n\"If we did, then should we be cut to mincemeat! Rather summon the General into your presence and command him to cease. If he will not, then we pray but die in your presence.\"\n\nEmpress He issued the requisite command.\n\nHe Jin was just going to her when Secretary Chen Lin advised him not to enter, saying, \"The eunuchs are certainly behind the order and mean your harm.\"\n\nBut He Jin could only see the command of the Empress and was oblivious to all else. Said he, \"Clearly, this is an edict from the Empress. What harm?\"\n\n\"Our plot is no longer a secret,\" said Yuan Shao. \"Still you may go if you are ready to fight your way in.\"\n\n\"Get the eunuchs out first!\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Silly children!\" said He Jin. \"What can they do against the man who holds the forces of the empire in his palm?\"\n\nYuan Shao said, \"If you will go, then we will come as a guard, just as a precaution.\"\n\nWhereupon both Yuan Shao and Cao Cao chose five hundred best men under their command, at whose head they placed Yuan Shu, a brother of Yuan Shao. Yuan Shu, clad in mail, drew up his troops outside the Forbidden City's entrance, while Yuan Shao and Cao Cao, holding swords, went as escort.\n\nWhen He Jin neared the Palace of Happiness, the officers from the Inner Bureau said, \"The orders are to admit the Regent Marshal and none other.\"\n\nSo the escort was detained outside. He Jin went in proudly. At the Gate of Grand Virtue, he was met by Zhang Rang and Duan Gui, and their followers quickly closed in around him. He Jin began to feel alarmed.\n\nThen Zhang Rang in a harsh voice began to revile him: \"What crime had Empress Dong committed that she should have been put to death? And when the Mother of the Country was buried, who feigned sickness and did not attend? We raised you and your paltry, huckstering family to all the dignity and wealth you have, and this is your gratitude! You would slay us. You call us sordid and dirty: Who is the cleaner?\"\n\nHe Jin was panic stricken and looked about for a way to escape, but all gates had been shut. The eunuchs closed him in, and then the assassins appeared and cut He Jin into halves.\n\n\u2003Closing the days of the Hans, and the years of their rule were near spent,\n\n\u2003Stupid and tactless was He Jin, yet stood he highest in office,\n\n\u2003Many were they who advised him, but he was deaf as he heard not,\n\n\u2003Wherefore fell he a victim under the swords of the eunuchs.\n\nSo He Jin died. Yuan Shao and Cao Cao waited long. By and by, impatient at the delay, they called through the gate, \"Thy carriage awaits, O General!\"\n\nFor reply the head of He Jin was flung over the wall. A decree was proclaimed:\n\n\"He Jin has contemplated treachery and therefore has been slain! It pardons his adherents.\"\n\nYuan Shao shouted, \"The eunuchs have slain the High Minister. Let those who will slay this wicked party come and help me!\"\n\nThen one of He Jin's generals, Wu Kuang, set fire to the gate. Yuan Shu at the head of his guards burst in and fell to slaying the eunuchs without regard to age or rank. Yuan Shao and Cao Cao broke into the inner part of the Palace. Four of the eunuchs \u2014 Zhao Zhong, Cheng Kuang, Xia Yun, and Guo Sheng \u2014 fled to the Blue Flower Lodge where they were hacked to pieces. Fire raged, destroying the buildings.\n\nFour of the Ten Regular Attendants \u2014 Zhang Rang, Duan Gui, Cao Jie, and Hou Lan \u2014 led by Zhang Rang carried off the Empress, Emperor Bian, and Prince Xian of Chenliu toward the North Palace.\n\nLu Zhi, since he had resigned office, was at home, but hearing of the revolution in the Palace he donned his armor, took his spear, and prepared to fight.\n\nHe saw Eunuch Duan Gui hurrying the Empress along and called out, \"You rebel, how dare you abduct the Empress?\"\n\nThe eunuch fled. The Empress leaped out of a window and was taken to a place of safety.\n\nGeneral Wu Kuang burst into one of the inner halls where he found He Miao, sword in hand.\n\n\"You also were in the plot to slay your own brother,\" cried Wu Kuang. \"You shall die with the others!\"\n\n\"Let us kill the plotter against his elder brother!\" cried many.\n\nHe Miao looked around: His enemies hemmed him in on every side. He was hacked to pieces.\n\nYuan Shu bade his soldiers scatter and seek out all the families of the eunuchs, sparing none. In that slaughter many beardless men were killed in error.\n\nCao Cao set himself to extinguish the fires. He then begged Empress He to undertake the direction of affairs, and soldiers were sent to pursue Zhang Rang and rescue the young Emperor and the young Prince of Chenliu.\n\nMeanwhile, Zhang Rang and Duan Gui had hustled away the Emperor and the Prince. They burst through the smoke and fire and traveled without stopping till they reached the Beimang Hills. It was then the third watch. They heard a great shouting behind them and saw soldiers in pursuit. Their leader, Min Gong, a commander in Henan, was shouting, \"Traitors, stop, stop!\"\n\nZhang Rang, seeing that he was lost, jumped into the river, where he was drowned.\n\nThe two boys ignorant of the meaning of all this confusion and terrified out of their senses, dared not utter a cry. They crept in among the rank grass on the river bank and hid. The soldiers scattered in all directions but failed to find them. So they remained till the fourth watch, shivering with cold from the drenching dew and very hungry. They lay down in the thick grass and wept in each other's arms, silently, lest anyone should discover them.\n\n\"This is no a place to stay in,\" said Prince Xian. \"We must find some way out.\"\n\nSo the two children knotted their clothes together and managed to crawl up the bank. They were in a thicket of thorn bushes, and it was quite dark. They could not see any path. They were in despair when, all at once, millions of fireflies sprang up all about them and circled in the air in front of the Emperor.\n\n\"God is helping us,\" said Prince Xian.\n\nThey followed whither the fireflies led and gradually got into a road. They walked till their feet were too sore to go further, when, seeing a heap of straw near the road, they crept to it and lay down.\n\nThis heap of straw was close to a farm house. In the night, as the farmer was sleeping, he saw in a vision two bright red suns drop behind his dwelling. Alarmed by the portent, he hastily dressed and went forth to look about him. Then he saw a bright light shooting up from a heap of straw. He hastened thither and then saw two youths lying behind it.\n\n\"To what household do you belong, young gentlemen?\" asked the farmer.\n\nThe Emperor was too frightened to reply, but his companion said, \"He is the Emperor. There was a revolution in the Forbidden City, and we ran away. I am his brother, Prince of Chenliu.\"\n\nThe farmer bowed again and again and said, \"My name is Cui Yi. My brother Cui Lie is the former Minister of the Interior. My brother was disgusted with the behavior of the eunuchs and so resigned and hid away here.\"\n\nThe two lads were taken into the farm, and their host on his knees served them with refreshment.\n\nIt has been said that Min Gong had gone in pursuit of Eunuch Duan Gui. By and by Min Gong overtook Duan Gui and cried, \"Where is the Emperor?\"\n\n\"He disappeared! I do not know where he is!\"\n\nMin Gong slew Duan Gui and hung the bleeding head on his horse's neck. Then he sent his troops searching in all directions, and he rode off by himself on the same quest. Presently he came to the farm. Cui Yi, seeing what hung on his horse's neck, questioned him and, satisfied with his story, led him to the Emperor. The meeting was affecting. All were moved to tears.\n\n\"The state cannot be without its ruler,\" said Min Gong. \"I pray Your Majesty return to the city.\"\n\nAt the farm they had but one sorry nag and this they saddled for the Emperor. The young Prince was taken on Min Gong's charger. And thus they left the farm. Not beyond one mile from the farm, they fell in with other officials and several hundred guards and soldiers made up an imposing cavalcade. In the cavalcade were Wang Yun, Minister of the Interior; Yang Biao, Grand Commander; Chunyu Qiong, Commander of the Left Army; Zhao Meng, Commander of the Right Army; Bao Xin, Commander of the Rear Army; and Yuan Shao, Commander of the Center Army. Tears were shed freely as the ministers met their Emperor.\n\nA man was sent on in front to the capital there to expose the head of Eunuch Duan Gui.\n\nAs soon as they could, they placed the Emperor on a better steed and the young Prince had a horse to himself. Thus the Emperor returned to Luoyang, and so it happened after all as the street children's ditty ran:\n\n\u2003Though the emperor doesn't rule, though the prince no office fills,\n\n\u2003Yet a brilliant cavalcade comes along from Beimang Hills.\n\nThe cavalcade had not proceeded far when they saw coming towards them a large body of soldiers with fluttering banners hiding the sun and raising a huge cloud of dust. The officials turned pale, and the Emperor was greatly alarmed. Yuan Shao rode out in advance.\n\n\"Who are you?\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nFrom under the shade of an embroidered banner rode out a leader, saying, \"Do you have the Emperor?\"\n\nThe Emperor was too panic stricken to respond, but the Prince of Chenliu rode to the front and cried, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Dong Zhuo, Imperial Protector of Xizhou Region.\"\n\n\"Have you come to protect the Chariot or to steal it?\" said Prince Xian.\n\n\"I have come to protect,\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"If that is so, the Emperor is here: Why do you not dismount?\"\n\nDong Zhuo hastily dismounted and made obeisance on the left of the road. Then Prince Xian spoke graciously to him. From first to last the Prince had carried himself most perfectly so that Dong Zhuo in his heart admired his behavior, and then arose the first desire to set aside the Emperor in favor of the Prince of Chenliu.\n\nThey reached the Palace the same day, and there was an affecting interview with Empress He.\n\nBut when they had restored order in the Palace, the Imperial Hereditary Seal, the special seal of the Emperor, was missing.\n\nDong Zhuo camped without the walls, but every day he was to be seen in the streets with an escort of mailed soldiers so that the common people were in a state of constant trepidation. He also went in and out of the Palace careless of all the rules of propriety.\n\nCommander of the Rear Army Bao Xin spoke of Dong Zhuo's behavior to Yuan Shao, saying, \"This man harbors some evil design and should be removed.\"\n\n\"Nothing can be done till the government is more settled,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nThen Bao Xin saw Minister of the Interior Wang Yun and asked what he thought.\n\n\"Let us talk it over,\" was the reply.\n\nBao Xin said no more but he left the capital and retired to the Taishan Mountains.\n\nDong Zhuo induced the soldiers of the two brothers He Jin and He Miao to join his command, and privately spoke to his adviser Li Ru about deposing the Emperor in favor of the Prince of Chenliu.\n\n\"The government is really without a head. There can be no better time than this to carry out your plan. Delay will spoil all. Tomorrow assemble the officials in the Wenming Garden and address them on the subject. Put all opponents to death, and your prestige is settled.\"\n\nSo spoke Li Ru, and the words pleased Dong Zhuo mightily.\n\nSo the next day Dong Zhuo spread a feast and invited many guests. As all the officers went in terror of him, no one dared be absent. Dong Zhuo himself rode up to the garden last of all and took his place with his sword girded on. When the wine had gone round several times, Dong Zhuo stopped the service and the music and began to speak.\n\n\"I have something to say. Listen quietly all of you!\"\n\nAll turned towards him.\n\n\"The emperor is lord of all. If he lacks dignity and behaves in an unseemly manner, he is no fitting inheritor of the ancestral prerogatives. He who is now on the throne is a weakling, inferior to the Prince of Chenliu in intelligence and love of learning. The Prince is in every way fitted for the throne. I desire to depose the Emperor and set up the Prince in his place. What think you?\"\n\nThe assembly listened in perfect silence, none daring at first to utter a word of dissent. But one dared; for suddenly a guest stood up in his place, smote the table and cried.\n\n\"No! No! Who are you that you dare utter such bold words? The Emperor is son of the late Emperor and has done no wrong. Why then should he be deposed? Are you a rebel?\"\n\nThe speaker was Ding Yuan, Imperial Protector of Bingzhou.\n\nDong Zhuo glared at Ding Yuan, roaring, \"There is life for those who are with me, death for those against!\"\n\nDong Zhuo drew his sword and made for the objector. But the watchful Li Ru had noticed standing behind Ding Yuan a particularly dangerous looking henchman of his, who was now handling his halberd threateningly, and whose eyes were blazing with anger.\n\nSo Li Ru hastily interposed, saying, \"But this is the banquet chamber, and state affairs should be left outside. The matters can be fully discussed tomorrow.\"\n\nHis fellow guests persuaded Ding Yuan to leave, and after his departure Dong Zhuo said, \"Is what I said just and reasonable?\"\n\n\"You are mistaken, Illustrious Sir,\" said Lu Zhi. \"Of old Emperor Tai Jia of the Shang Dynasty was unenlightened. Wherefore the sage Minister Yi Yin immured him in the Tong Palace till he reformed. Later the Prince of Changyi ascended the throne, and in twenty-seven days he committed more than three thousand categorical faults. Wherefore Regent Marshal Huo Guang declared in the ancestral temple that the Prince of Changyi was deposed. Our present Emperor is young, but he is intelligent, benevolent, and wise. He has not committed a single fault. You, Sir, are an imperial protector of a frontier region and not a metropolitan official and have had no experience in state administration. Neither have you the pure intentions of Yi Yin and Huo Guang which qualified their actions. The Teacher said: 'Only with Yi Yin's purpose can one act like Yi Yin. Otherwise, such a deed is treason.'\"\n\nDong Zhuo angrily drew his sword to slay the bold Lu Zhi, but two other officials remonstrated.\n\n\"Minister Lu Zhi is the cynosure of the whole country, and his violent death would stir the hearts of all people!\" said Court Counselors Cai Yong and Peng Bo.\n\nDong Zhuo then stayed his hand.\n\nThen said Wang Yun, \"A great question like the deposition and substitution of emperors is not one to be decided after a wine party. Let it be put off till another time.\"\n\nSo the guests dispersed. Dong Zhuo stood at the gate with drawn sword watching them depart. Standing thus, Dong Zhuo noticed a spearman galloping to and fro on a fiery steed and asked Li Ru who that was.\n\n\"That is Lu Bu, the adopted son of Ding Yuan. You must keep out of his way, my lord.\"\n\nDong Zhuo went inside the gate so that he could not be seen. But next day they reported to him that Ding Yuan had come out of the city with a small army and was challenging to a battle. Dong Zhuo, with his army, went forth to accept the challenge. And the two armies were drawn up in proper array.\n\nLu Bu was a conspicuous figure in the forefront. His hair was arranged under a handsome headdress of gold, and he had donned a embroidered thousand-flower fighting robe, a pheasant-tailed helmet, and breast plate, and round his waist was a gleaming jade belt with a lion's head clasp. With spear set he rode close behind his master Ding Yuan.\n\nDing Yuan, riding forth, pointing his finger at Dong Zhuo, began to revile him.\n\n\"Unhappy indeed was this state when the eunuchs became so powerful that the people were as if trodden into the mire under their feet. Now you, devoid of the least merit, dare to talk of deposing the rightful emperor and setting up another. This is to desire rebellion and no less!\"\n\nDong Zhuo could not reply for Lu Bu, eager for the fight, rode straight at him. Dong Zhuo fled and Ding Yuan's army came on. The battle went in Ding Yuan's favor, and the beaten troops retired ten miles and made another camp. Here Dong Zhuo called his officers to a council.\n\n\"This Lu Bu is a marvel,\" said Dong Zhuo. \"If he were only on my side, I would defy the whole world!\"\n\nAt this a man advanced saying, \"Be content, O my lord! I am a fellow villager of his and know him well: He is valorous, but not crafty; he will let go principles, when he sees advantages. With this little, blarneying tongue of mine, I can persuade him to put up his hands and come over to your side.\"\n\nDong Zhuo was delighted and gazed admiringly at the speaker. It was Li Su, a general in the Imperial Tiger Army.\n\n\"What arguments will you use with him?\" asked Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"You have a fine horse, Red Hare, one of the best ever bred. I must have this steed, and gold and pearls to win his heart. Then will I go and persuade him. He will certainly abandon Ding Yuan's service for yours.\"\n\n\"What think you?\" said Dong Zhuo to his adviser Li Ru.\n\n\"One cannot grudge a horse to win an empire,\" was the reply.\n\nSo they gave Li Su what he demanded \u2014 a thousand ounces of gold, ten strings of beautiful pearls, a jeweled belt, and Red Hare \u2014 and these accompanied Li Su on his visit to his fellow villager.\n\nLi Su reached the camp and said to the guard, \"Please tell General Lu Bu that a very old friend has come to visit him.\"\n\nHe was admitted forthwith.\n\n\"Worthy brother, have you been well since we last met?\" greeted Li Su while bowing.\n\n\"How long it is since we last saw each other!\" replied Lu Bu, bowing in return. \"And where are you now?\"\n\n\"I am a general in the Imperial Tiger Army. When I learned you were a strong supporter of the Throne, I could not say how I rejoiced. I have come now to present to you a really fine horse, a three-hundred-mile-a-day horse, one that crosses rivers and goes up mountains as if they were the level plain. Its name is Red Hare. It will be a fitting aid to your valor.\"\n\nLu Bu bade his guards lead out the horse. It was of a uniform color like glowing-sun red \u2014 not a hair of another color. It measured ten spans from head to tail and from hoof to neck eight spans. When it neighed, the sound filled the empyrean and shook the ocean.\n\n\u2003Mark ye the steed swift and tireless, see the dust, spurned by his hoofs, rising in clouds,\n\n\u2003Now it swims the river, anon climbs the hill, rending the purple mist asunder,\n\n\u2003Scornful it breaks the rein, shakes from its head the jeweled bridle,\n\n\u2003It is as a fiery dragon descending from the highest heaven.\n\nLu Bu was delighted with the horse and said, \"What return can I hope to make for such a creature?\"\n\n\"What return can I hope for? I came to you out of a sense of what is right,\" replied Li Su.\n\nWine was brought in and they drank.\n\n\"We have seen very little of each other, but I am constantly meeting your honorable father,\" said Li Su.\n\n\"You are drunk,\" said Lu Bu. \"My father has been dead for years.\"\n\n\"Not so; I spoke of Ding Yuan, the man of the day.\"\n\nLu Bu started. \"Yes, I am with him, but only because I can do no better.\"\n\n\"Sir, your talent is higher than the heavens, deeper than the seas. Who in all the world does not bow before your name? Fame and riches and honors are yours for the taking. And you say you can do no better than remain a subordinate!\"\n\n\"If I could only find a master to serve,\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"The clever bird chooses the branch whereon to perch; the wise servant selects the master to serve. Seize the chance when it comes, for repentance ever comes too late.\"\n\n\"Now you are in the government. Who think you is really the bravest of all?\", asked Lu Bu.\n\n\"I despise the whole lot except Dong Zhuo. He is one who respects wisdom and reveres scholarship; he is discriminating in his rewards and punishments. Surely he is destined to be a really great man.\"\n\nLu Bu said, \"I wish that I could serve him, but there is no way, I fear.\"\n\nThen Li Su produced his pearls and gold and the jeweled belt and laid them out before his host.\n\n\"What is this? What does it mean?\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"Send away the attendants,\" requested Li Su. And he went on, \"Dong Zhuo has long respected your bravery and sent these by my hand. Red Hare was also from him.\"\n\n\"But, if he loves me like this, what can I do in return?\"\n\nLi Su said, \"If a stupid fellow like me can be a general in the Imperial Tiger Army, it is impossible to say what honors await you.\"\n\n\"I am sorry I can offer him no service worth mentioning.\"\n\nLi Su said, \"There is one service you can do, and an extremely easy one to perform; but you would not render that.\"\n\nLu Bu pondered long in silence, then he said, \"I might slay Ding Yuan and bring over his soldiers to Dong Zhuo's side. What think you of that?\"\n\n\"If you would do that, there could be no greater service. But such a thing must be done quickly.\"\n\nAnd Lu Bu promised his friend that he would do the deed and come over on the morrow.\n\nSo Li Su took his leave. That very night, at the second watch, Lu Bu entered, sword in hand, into his master's tent. He found Ding Yuan reading by the light of a solitary candle.\n\nSeeing who came in, Ding Yuan said, \"My son, what is afoot?\"\n\n\"I am a bold hero,\" said Lu Bu. \"Do not think I am willing to be a son of yours!\"\n\n\"Why this change, Lu Bu?\"\n\nAs a reply Lu Bu made one cut, and Ding Yuan's head fell to the earth.\n\nThen Lu Bu called the attendants and said, \"He was an unjust man, and I have slain him. Let those who back me stay. The others may depart.\"\n\nMost ran away. Next day, with the head of the murdered man as his gift, Lu Bu betook himself to Li Su, who led him to Dong Zhuo. Dong Zhuo received him with a warm welcome and had wine set before him.\n\n\"Your coming is welcome as the gentle dew to the parched grass,\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nLu Bu made Dong Zhuo seat himself and then made an obeisance, saying, \"Pray let me bow to you as my adopted father!\"\n\nDong Zhuo gave his newly won ally gold armor and silken robes and spread the feast of welcome. They then separated.\n\nThence Dong Zhuo's power and influence increased rapidly. He gave the lordship of Hu (an ancient state) and the rank Commander of the Left Army to his brother Dong Min. He appointed Lu Bu Lord of Luoyang, Commander of Capital District, and Cavalry Commander. Dong Zhuo made himself Minister of Works, Grand Commander, and Commander of the Front Army.\n\nThe adviser Li Ru never ceased from urging him to carry out the design of deposing the young Emperor.\n\nThe now all-powerful Dong Zhuo prepared a banquet in the capital at which all the officers of state were guests. He also bade Lu Bu post a company of armed men right and left ready for action. The feast began and several courses were served with nothing to distinguish that banquet from any other.\n\nThen suddenly the host arose and drew his sword, saying, \"He who is above us being weak and irresolute is unfit for the duties of his high place. Wherefore I, as of old did Yi Yin and Huo Guang, will set aside this Emperor giving him the title of Prince of Hongnong, and I will place on the throne the present Prince of Chenliu. And those who do not support me will suffer death.\"\n\nFear seized them in its grip and they were silent, all but Yuan Shao who said, \"The Emperor was innocent of any fault, and to set him aside in favor of a commoner was rebellion and nothing else!\"\n\n\"The empire is in my hands!\" cried Dong Zhuo. \"When I choose to do this thing, who will dare to say nay? Think you my sword lacks an edge?\"\n\n\"If your sword is sharp, mine is never blunt!\" said Yuan Shao as his sword flashed out of the sheath.\n\nThe two men stood face to face amid the feasters.\n\n\u2003When Ding Yuan by treacherous murder died,\n\n\u2003The loss was great to Yuan Shao's side." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Deposition Of The Emperor: The Prince Of Chenliu Gets The Throne; Schemes Against Dong Zhuo: Cao Cao Presents A Sword.\n\nDong Zhuo was on the point of slaying Yuan Shao, but Li Ru checked him, saying, \"You must not kill rashly while the business hangs in the balance.\"\n\nYuan Shao, his sword still unsheathed, left the assembly. He hung up the seals of his office at the east gate and went to Jizhou Region.\n\nDong Zhuo said to Imperial Guardian Yuan Wei, \"Your nephew behaved improperly, but I pardon him for your sake. What think you of my scheme?\"\n\n\"What you think is right,\" was the reply.\n\n\"If anyone opposes the great scheme, he will be dealt with by military law!\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nThe ministers, thoroughly dreaded, promised obedience, and the feast came to an end.\n\nDong Zhuo asked Counselor Zhou Bi and Commander Wu Qiong what they thought of the flight of Yuan Shao.\n\nZhou Bi said, \"He left in a state of great anger. In such a state of excitement much harm may ensue to the present state of affairs, especially as the Yuan family have been noted for their high offices for four generations, and their proteges and dependents are everywhere. If they assemble bold people and call up their clients, all the valiant warriors will be in arms, and the whole Shandong Mountains will be lost. You had better pardon Yuan Shao and give him a post. He will be glad at being forgiven and will do no harm.\"\n\nWu Qiong said, \"Yuan Shao is fond of scheming, but he fails in decision and so is not to be feared. But it would be well to give him rank and thus win popular favor.\"\n\nDong Zhuo followed this advice, and within that day sent a messenger to offer Yuan Shao the governorship of Bohai.\n\nOn the first day of the ninth month, the Emperor was invited to proceed to the Hall of Virtue where was a great assembly of officials.\n\nThere Dong Zhuo, sword in hand, faced the gathering and said, \"The Emperor is a weakling unequal to the burden of ruling this land. Now listen ye to the document I have prepared!\"\n\nAnd Li Ru read as follows:\n\n\"The dutiful Emperor Ling too soon left his people. The emperor is the cynosure of all the people of this land. Upon the present Emperor Bian, Heaven has conferred but small gifts: In dignity and deportment he is deficient, and in mourning he is remiss. Only the most complete virtue can grace imperial dignity. Empress He has trained him improperly, and the whole state administration has fallen into confusion. Empress Dong died suddenly and no one knew why. The doctrine of the three bonds \u2014 Heaven, Earth, and Human \u2014 and the continuity of Heaven and Earth interdependence have both been injured.\n\n\"But Liu Xian, Prince of Chenliu, is sage and virtuous beside being of handsome exterior. He conforms to all the rules of propriety: His mourning is sincere, and his speech is always correct. Eulogies of him fill the empire. He is well fitted for the great duty of consolidating the rule of Han.\n\n\"Now therefore the Emperor is deposed and created Prince of Hongnong, and Empress He retires from the administration.\n\n\"I pray the Prince of Chenliu to accept the throne in conformity with the decrees of Heaven and Earth, the desires of people, and the fulfillment of the hopes of humankind.\"\n\nThis having been read, Dong Zhuo bade the officials lead the Emperor down from the throne, remove his seal, and cause him to kneel facing the north, styling himself faithful servant of the Throne and requesting commands. Moreover Dong Zhuo bade Empress He strip off her royal dress of ceremony and await the imperial command. Both victims of this oppression wept bitterly, and every minister present was deeply affected.\n\nOne minister put his discontent into words, crying, \"The false Dong Zhuo is the author of this insult, which I will risk my life to wipe away!\"\n\nAnd with this he rushed at Dong Zhuo threatening with his ivory baton of office.\n\nIt was Chair of the Secretariat Ding Guan. Dong Zhuo had Ding Guan removed and summarily put to death. Before his death, Ding Guan ceased not to rail at the oppressor, nor was he frightened at death.\n\n\u2003The rebel Dong Zhuo conceived the foul design\n\n\u2003To thrust the King aside and wrong his line.\n\n\u2003With folded arms the courtiers stood, save one\n\n\u2003Ding Guan, who dared to cry that wrong was done.\n\nThen the emperor designate, Prince of Chenliu, went to the upper part of the hall to receive congratulations. After this the former Emperor \u2014 now Prince of Hongnong \u2014 , his mother, and the Imperial Consort, Lady Tang, were removed to the Palace of Forever Calm. The entrance gates were locked against all comers.\n\nIt was pitiful! There was the young emperor, after reigning less than half a year, deposed and another put in his place. The new Emperor was Liu Xian, the second son of the late Emperor Ling. He was nine years of age, five years younger than his deposed brother. The new reign-style was changed to Inauguration of Tranquillity, the first year (AD 190).\n\nBecoming the Prime Minister, Dong Zhuo was most powerful and arrogant. When he bowed before the throne, he did not declare his name. In going to court he did not hasten. Booted and armed he entered the reception halls. He amassed a wealth exceeding any other's .\n\nHis adviser, Li Ru, impressed upon Dong Zhuo constantly to employ people of reputation so that he should gain public esteem. Therefore, Dong Zhuo restored many offices of those who had been victims of the eunuchs. For those who had died, he gave ranks and positions to their progeny. When they told him Cai Yong was a man of talent, Dong Zhuo summoned him. But Cai Yong would not go. Dong Zhuo sent a message to him that if he did not come, he and his whole clan should be exterminated. Then Cai Yong gave in and appeared. Dong Zhuo was very gracious to him and promoted him thrice in a month. Cai Yong became Court Counselor. Such was the generosity of the Prime Minister.\n\nMeanwhile the deposed ruler, his mother, and his consort were immured in the Palace of Forever Calm and found their daily supplies gradually diminishing. The deposed Emperor wept incessantly. One day a pair of swallows gliding to and fro moved him to verse:\n\n\u2003\"Spring and the green of the tender grass,\n\n\u2003Flushes with joy as the swallows pass;\n\n\u2003The wayfarers pause by the rippling stream,\n\n\u2003And their eyes will new born gladness gleam;\n\n\u2003With lingering gaze the roofs I see\n\n\u2003Of the Palace that one time sheltered me.\n\n\u2003But those whom I sheltered in all righteousness,\n\n\u2003Let's not stay in silence when the days pass useless?\"\n\nThe messenger, sent by Dong Zhuo from time to time to the palace for news of the prisoners, got hold of this poem and showed it to his master.\n\n\"So he shows his resentment by writing poems, eh! A fair excuse to put them all out of the way,\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nLi Ru was sent with ten men into the palace to consummate the deed. The three were in one of the upper rooms when Li Ru arrived. The Emperor shuddered when the maid announced the visitor's name.\n\nPresently Li Ru entered and offered a cup of poisoned wine to the Emperor. The Emperor asked what this meant.\n\n\"Spring is the season of blending and harmonious interchange, and the Prime Minister sends a wine cup of longevity,\" said Li Ru.\n\n\"If it be the wine of longevity, you may share it too,\" said Empress He.\n\nThen Li Ru became brutally frank.\n\n\"You will not drink?\" asked he.\n\nHe called the men with daggers and cords and bade the Emperor look at them.\n\n\"The cup, or these?\" said he.\n\nThen said Lady Tang, \"Let the handmaid drink in place of her lord. Spare the mother and her son, I pray!\"\n\n\"And who may you be to die for a prince?\" said Li Ru.\n\nThen he presented the cup to the Empress once more and bade her drink.\n\nShe railed against her brother, the feckless He Jin, the author of all this trouble. She would not drink.\n\nNext Li Ru approached the Emperor.\n\n\"Let me say farewell to my mother,\" begged he, and he did so in these lines:\n\n\u2003\"The heaven and earth are changed,\n\n\u2003Alas! the sun and the moon leave their courses,\n\n\u2003I, once the center of all eyes, am driven to the farthest confines,\n\n\u2003Oppressed by an arrogant minister my life nears its end,\n\n\u2003Everything fails me and vain are my falling tears.\"\n\nLady Tang sang:\n\n\u2003\"Heaven is to be rent asunder, Earth to fall away,\n\n\u2003I, handmaid of an emperor, would grieve if I followed him not.\n\n\u2003We have come to the parting of ways, the quick and the dead walk not together;\n\n\u2003Alas! I am left alone with the grief in my heart.\"\n\nWhen they had sung these lines, they fell weeping into each others' arms.\n\n\"The Prime Minister is awaiting my report,\" said Li Ru, \"and you delay too long. Think you that there is any hope of succor?\"\n\nThe Empress broke into another fit of railing, \"The rebel forces us to death, mother and son, and Heaven has abandoned us. But you, the tool of his crime, will assuredly perish!\"\n\nThereupon Li Ru grew more angry, laid hands on the Empress and threw her out of the window. Then he bade the soldiers strangle Lady Tang and forced the lad to swallow the wine of death.\n\nLi Ru reported the achievement to his master who bade them bury the victims without the city. After this Dong Zhuo's behavior was more atrocious than before. He spent his nights in the Palace, defiled the imperial concubines there, and even slept on the Dragon Couch.\n\nOnce he led his soldiers out of the city to Yangcheng when the villagers, men and women, were assembled from all sides for the annual spring festival. His troops surrounded the place and plundered it. They took away booty by the cart loads, and women prisoners and more than one thousand severed heads. The procession returned to Capital Luoyang and published a story that they had obtained a great victory over some rebels. They burned the heads beneath the walls, and the women and jewelry were shared out among the soldiers.\n\nA general named Wu Fu was disgusted at this ferocity and sought a chance to slay Dong Zhuo. Wu Fu constantly wore a breastplate underneath his court dress and carried in conceal a sharp dagger. One day when Dong Zhuo came to court, Wu Fu met him on the steps and tried to stab him. But Dong Zhuo was a very powerful man and held Wu Fu off till Lu Bu came to his help. Lu Bu struck down the assailant.\n\n\"Who told you to rebel?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nWu Fu glared at him and cried, \"You are not my prince, I am not your minister: Where is the rebellion? Your crimes fill the heavens, and every person would slay you. I am sorry I cannot tear you asunder with chariots to appease the wrath of the world!\"\n\nDong Zhuo bade the guards take him out and hack him to pieces. Wu Fu only ceased railing as he ceased to live.\n\nThat loyal servant of the latter days of Han.\n\nHis valor was high as the heavens, in all ages unequaled;\n\nIn the court itself would he slay the rebel, great is his fame!\n\nThroughout all time will people call him a hero.\n\nThereafter Dong Zhuo always went well guarded.\n\nAt Bohai, Yuan Shao heard of Dong Zhuo's misuse of power and sent a secret letter to Minister of the Interior Wang Yun:\n\n\"That rebel Dong Zhuo outrages Heaven and has deposed his ruler. Common people dare not speak of him: That is understandable. Yet you suffer his aggressions as if you knew naught of them. How then are you a dutiful and loyal minister? I have assembled an army and desire to sweep clean the royal habitation, but I dare not lightly begin the task. If you are willing, then find an opportunity to plot against this man. If you would use force, I am at your command.\"\n\nThe letter arrived but Wang Yun could see no chance to plot against Dong Zhuo.\n\nOne day while among the throng in attendance, mostly people of long service, Wang Yun said to his colleagues, \"This is my birthday, I pray you come to a little party in my humble cot this evening.\"\n\n\"We certainly will,\" they cried, \"and wish you long life.\"\n\nThat night the tables were spread in an inner room, and his friends gathered there. When the wine had made a few rounds, the host suddenly covered his face and began to weep.\n\nThe guests were aghast.\n\n\"Sir, on your birthday too, why do you weep?\" said they.\n\n\"It is not my birthday,\" replied Wang Yun. \"But I wished to call you together, and I feared lest Dong Zhuo should suspect, so I made that the excuse. This man insults the Emperor and does as he wishes so that the imperial prerogatives are in imminent peril. I think of the days when our illustrious founder destroyed the Qin, annihilated Chu, and obtained the empire. Who could have foreseen this day when that Dong Zhuo has subjugated all to his will? That is why I weep.\"\n\nThen they all wept with him.\n\nSeated among the guests, however, was Cao Cao, who did not join in the weeping but clapped his hands and laughed aloud.\n\n\"If all the officers of the government weep till dawn, and from dawn weep till dark, will that slay Dong Zhuo?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nWang Yun turned on him angrily.\n\n\"Your forbears ate the bounty of the Hans. Do you feel no gratitude? You can laugh?\"\n\n\"I laughed at the absurdity of an assembly like this being unable to compass the death of one man. Foolish and incapable as I am, I will cut off his head and hang it at the gate as an offering to the people.\"\n\nWang Yun left his seat and went over to Cao Cao.\n\n\"These later days,\" Cao Cao continued, \"I have bowed my head to Dong Zhuo with the sole desire of finding a chance to destroy him. Now he begins to trust me, and so I can approach him sometimes. You have a sword with seven precious jewels which I would borrow, and I will go into his palace and kill him. I care not if I die for it.\"\n\n\"What good fortune for the world that this is so!\" said Wang Yun.\n\nWith this Wang Yun himself poured out a goblet for Cao Cao who drained it and swore an oath. After this the treasured sword was brought out and given to Cao Cao who hid it under his dress. He finished his wine, took leave of the guests, and left the hall. Before long the others dispersed.\n\nThe next day Cao Cao, with this short sword girded on, came to the palace of the Prime Minister.\n\n\"Where is the Prime Minister?\" asked he.\n\n\"In the small guest room,\" replied the attendants.\n\nSo Cao Cao went in and found his host seated on a couch. Lu Bu was at his side.\n\n\"Why so late, Cao Cao?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"My horse is out of condition and slow,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nDong Zhuo turned to his henchman Lu Bu.\n\n\"Some good horses have come in from the west. You go and pick out a good one as a present for him.\"\n\nAnd Lu Bu left.\n\n\"This traitor is doomed!\" thought Cao Cao. He ought to have struck then, but Cao Cao knew Dong Zhuo was very powerful, and he was afraid to act. He wanted to make sure of his blow.\n\nNow Dong Zhuo's corpulence was such that he could not remain long sitting, so he rolled over couch and lay face inwards.\n\n\"Now is the time,\" thought the assassin, and he gripped the good sword firmly.\n\nBut just as Cao Cao was going to strike, Dong Zhuo happened to look up and in a mirror he saw the reflection of Cao Cao behind him with a sword in the hand.\n\n\"What are you doing, Cao Cao?\" said Dong Zhuo turning suddenly. And at that moment Lu Bu came along leading a horse.\n\nCao Cao in a flurry dropped on his knees and said, \"I have a precious sword here which I wish to present to Your Benevolence.\"\n\nDong Zhuo took it. It was a fine blade, over a foot in length, inlaid with the seven precious signs and very keen \u2014 a fine sword in very truth. Dong Zhuo handed the weapon to Lu Bu while Cao Cao took off the sheath which he also gave to Lu Bu.\n\nThen they went out to look at the horse. Cao Cao was profuse in his thanks and said he would like to try the horse. So Dong Zhuo bade the guards bring saddle and bridle. Cao Cao led the creature outside, leapt into the saddle, laid on his whip vigorously, and galloped away eastward.\n\nLu Bu said, \"Just as I was coming up, it seemed to me as if that fellow was going to stab you, only a sudden panic seized him and he presented the weapon instead.\"\n\n\"I suspected him too!\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nJust then Li Ru came in and they told him.\n\n\"Cao Cao has no family here in the capital but lodges quite alone and not far away,\" said Li Ru. \"Send for him. If he comes forthwith, the sword was meant as a gift. But if he makes any excuses, he had bad intentions. And you can arrest him.\"\n\nThey sent four prison warders to call Cao Cao.\n\nThey were absent a long time and then came back, saying, \"Cao Cao had not returned to his lodging but rode in hot haste out of the eastern gate. To the gate commander's questions he replied that he was on a special message for the Prime Minister. He went off at full speed.\"\n\n\"His conscience pricked him and so he fled. There is no doubt that he meant assassination!\" said Li Ru.\n\n\"And I trusted him so well!\" said Dong Zhuo in a rage.\n\n\"There must be a conspiracy afoot. When we catch him, we shall know all about it,\" said Li Ru.\n\nLetters and pictures of the fugitive Cao Cao were sent everywhere with orders to catch him. A large reward in money was offered and a patent of nobility, while those who sheltered him would be held to share his guilt.\n\nCao Cao traveled in hot haste toward Qiao, his home county. On the road at Zhongmou, he was recognized by the guards at the gate and made prisoner. They took him to the Magistrate. Cao Cao declared he was a merchant, named Huang Fu. The Magistrate scanned his face most closely and remained in deep thought.\n\nPresently the Magistrate said, \"When I was at the capital seeking a post, I knew you as Cao Cao. Why do you try to conceal your identity?\"\n\nThe Magistrate ordered Cao Cao to the prison till the morrow when he could send Cao Cao to the capital and claim the reward. He gave the soldiers wine and food as a reward.\n\nAbout midnight the Magistrate sent a trusty servant to bring the prisoner into his private rooms for interrogation.\n\n\"They say the Prime Minister treated you well. Why did you try to harm him?\" said Magistrate.\n\n\"How can swallows and sparrows understand the flight of the crane and the wild goose? I am your prisoner and to be sent to the capital for a reward. Why so many questions?\"\n\nThe Magistrate sent away the attendants and turning to the prisoner said, \"Do not despise me. I am no mere hireling; only I have not yet found the lord to serve.\"\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"My ancestors enjoyed the bounty of Han, and should I differ from a bird or a beast if I did not desire to repay them with gratitude? I have bowed the knee to Dong Zhuo that thereby I might find an opportunity against him, and so remove this evil from the state. I have failed for this time. Such is the will of Heaven.\"\n\n\"And where are you going?\"\n\n\"Home to my county. Thence I shall issue a summons calling all the bold people to come with forces to kill the tyrant. This is my desire.\"\n\nThereupon the Magistrate himself loosened the bonds of the prisoner, led him to the upper seat, and bowed, saying, \"I am called Chen Gong. My aged mother and family are in the east county of Dongjun. I am deeply affected by your loyalty and uprightness, and I will abandon my office and follow you!\"\n\nCao Cao was delighted with this turn of affairs. Chen Gong at once collected some money for the expenses of their journey and gave Cao Cao a different dress. Then each took a sword and rode away toward Qiao.\n\nThree days later at eventide they reached Chenggao. Cao Cao pointed with his whip to a hamlet deep in the woods and said, \"There lives my uncle, Lu Boshe, a sworn-brother of my father. Suppose we go and ask news of my family and seek shelter for the night?\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said his companion Chen Gong, and they rode over, dismounted at the farm gate and entered.\n\nLu Boshe greeted them and said to Cao Cao, \"I hear the government has sent stringent orders on all sides to arrest you. Your father has gone into hiding to Chenliu. How has this all come about?\"\n\nCao Cao told him and said, \"Had it not been for this man here with me, I should have been already hacked to pieces.\"\n\nLu Boshe bowed low to Chen Gong, saying, \"You are the salvation of the Cao family. But be at ease and rest, I will find you a bed in my humble cottage.\"\n\nLu Boshe then rose and went into the inner chamber where he stayed a long time. When he came out, he said, \"There is no good wine in the house. I am going over to the village to get some for you.\"\n\nAnd he hastily mounted his donkey and rode away. The two travelers sat a long time. Suddenly they heard at the back of the house the sound of sharpening a knife.\n\nCao Cao said to Chen Gong, \"He is not my real uncle. I am beginning to doubt the meaning of his going off. Let us listen.\"\n\nSo they silently stepped out into a straw hut at the back.\n\nPresently someone said, \"Bind before killing, eh?\"\n\n\"As I thought,\" said Cao Cao. \"Now unless we strike first, we shall be taken!\"\n\nSuddenly Cao Cao and Chen Gong dashed in, sword in hand, and slew the whole household male and female, in all eight persons.\n\nAfter this they searched the house. In the kitchen they found a pig bound ready to kill.\n\n\"You were too suspicious,\" said Chen Gong, \"and we have slain honest folks!\"\n\nCao Cao and Chen Gong at once mounted and rode away. Soon they met their host Lu Boshe coming home, and over the saddle in front of him they saw two vessels of wine. In his hands he carried fruits and vegetables.\n\n\"Why are you going, Sirs?\" Lu Boshe called to them.\n\n\"Wanted people dare not linger,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"But I have bidden them kill a pig! Why do you refuse my poor hospitality? I pray you ride back with me.\"\n\nCao Cao paid no heed, urging his horse forward. But he suddenly drew his sword and rode back after Lu Boshe.\n\n\"Who is that coming along?\" called Cao Cao.\n\nLu Boshe turned and looked back, and Cao Cao at the same instant cut Lu Boshe down.\n\nChen Gong was frightened.\n\n\"We were wrong enough before,\" cried Chen Gong. \"What now is this?\"\n\n\"When he got home and saw his family killed, think you he would bear it patiently? If he had raised an alarm and followed us, we should have been killed.\"\n\n\"To kill deliberately is very wrong,\" said Chen Gong.\n\n\"Rather we let down the world than the world let us down!\" was the reply.\n\nChen Gong only thought. They rode on some distance by moonlight and presently knocked up an inn for shelter. Having first fed their horses, Cao Cao was soon asleep, but Chen Gong lay thinking.\n\n\"I took him for a true man and left all to follow him, but he is as cruel as a wolf. If I spare him, he will do more harm later,\" thought Chen Gong.\n\nAnd Chen Gong rose intending to kill his companion.\n\nIn his heart lie cruelty and venom, he is no true man;\n\nIn nought does he differ from his enemy Dong Zhuo." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Cao Cao Appeals To The Powerful Lords; The Three Brothers Fight Against Lu Bu.\n\nAt the close of the last chapter, Chen Gong was about to slay Cao Cao. But Chen Gong reflected, \"I joined him to do righteous things. Now if I killed him, I would only do unrighteousness, and the people would condemn me. I rather leave in silence.\"\n\nRising from his bed before the sunrise, Chen Gong mounted his horse and rode away eastward to his home county of Dongjun.\n\nCao Cao awoke with the day and missed his companion. Thought he, \"Chen Gong thinks me brutal because of a couple of egoistic phrases I used, and so he has gone. I ought to push on too and not linger here.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao traveled as quickly as possible toward Qiao. When he saw his father, he related what had happened and said he wanted to dispose of all the family property and enlist soldiers with the money.\n\n\"Our possessions are but small,\" said his father, \"and not enough to do anything with. However, there is a graduate here, one Wei Hong, careless of wealth but careful of virtue, whose family is very rich. With his help we might hope for success.\"\n\nA feast was prepared, and Wei Hong was invited.\n\nCao Cao made him a speech: \"The Hans have lost their lordship, and Dong Zhuo is really a tyrant. He flouts his prince and is cruel to the people, who gnash their teeth with rage. I would restore the Hans, but my means are insufficient. Sir, I appeal to your loyalty and public spirit.\"\n\nWei Hong replied, \"I have long desired this but, so far, have not found a person fit to undertake the task. Since you, Cao Cao, have so noble a desire, I willingly devote all my property to the cause.\"\n\nThis was joyful news, and the call to arms was forthwith prepared and sent far and near. So they established a corps of volunteers and set up a large white recruiting banner with the words Loyalty and Honor inscribed thereon. The response was rapid, and volunteers came in like rain drops in number.\n\nOne day came a certain Yue Jing from Yangping and another Li Dian from Julu. These two were appointed to Cao Cao's personal staff. Another was one Xiahou Dun from Qiao. He was descended from Xiahou Ying of old. Xiahou Dun had been trained from his early boyhood to use the spear and the club. When only fourteen he had been attached to a certain master-in-arms. One day one person spoke disrespectfully of his master, and Xiahou Dun killed that person. For this deed, however, he had to flee and had been an exile for some time. Now he came to offer his services, accompanied by his cousin Xiahou Yuan. Each brought a thousand trained soldiers. Really these two were brothers of Cao Cao by birth, since Cao Cao's father was originally of the Xiahou family, and had only been adopted into the Cao family.\n\nA few days later came Cao Cao's two cousins, Cao Ren and Cao Hong, each with one thousand followers. These two were accomplished horsemen and trained in the use of arms.\n\nThen drill began, and Wei Hong spent his treasure freely in buying clothing, armor, flags, and banners. From all sides poured in gifts of grain.\n\nWhen Yuan Shao received Cao Cao's call to arms, he collected all those under his command to the number of thirty thousand. Then he marched from Bohai to Qiao to take the oath to Cao Cao. Next a manifesto was issued:\n\n\"Cao Cao and his associates, moved by a sense of duty, now make this proclamation. Dong Zhuo defies Heaven and Earth. He is destroying the state and injuring his prince. He pollutes the Palace and oppresses the people. He is vicious and cruel. His crimes are heaped up. Now we have received a secret command to call up soldiers, and we are pledged to cleanse the empire and destroy the evil-doers. We will raise a volunteer army and exert all our efforts to maintain the dynasty and succor the people. Respond to this, O Nobles, by mustering your soldiers.\"\n\nMany from every side answered the summons as the following list shows:\n\n1. Governor of Nanyang \u2014 Yuan Shu\n\n2. Imperial Protector of Jizhou Region \u2014 Han Fu\n\n3. Imperial Protector of Yuzhou Region \u2014 Kong Zhou\n\n4. Imperial Protector of Yanzhou Region \u2014 Liu Dai\n\n5. Governor of Henei \u2014 Wang Kuang\n\n6. Governor of Chenliu \u2014 Zhang Miao\n\n7. Governor of Dongjun \u2014 Qiao Mao\n\n8. Governor of Shanyang \u2014 Yuan Yi\n\n9. Lord of Jibei \u2014 Bao Xin\n\n10. Governor of Beihai \u2014 Kong Rong\n\n11. Governor of Guangling \u2014 Zhang Chao\n\n12. Imperial Protector of Xuzhou Region \u2014 Tao Qian\n\n13. Governor of Xiliang \u2014 Ma Teng\n\n14. Governor of Beiping \u2014 Gongsun Zan\n\n15. Governor of Shangdang \u2014 Zhang Yang\n\n16. Governor of Changsha \u2014 Sun Jian\n\n17. Governor of Bohai \u2014 Yuan Shao\n\nThese contingents varied in size, from ten thousand to thirty thousand, but each was complete in itself with its officers, civil and military, and battle-leaders. They were heading for Capital Luoyang.\n\nThe Governor of Beiping, Gongsun Zan, while on his way with his force of fifteen thousand, passed through the county of Pingyuan. There he saw among the mulberry trees a yellow flag under which marched a small company. When they drew nearer, he saw the leader was Liu Bei.\n\n\"Good brother, what do you here?\" asked Gongsun Zan.\n\n\"You were kind to me once, and on your recommendation I was made the magistrate of this county. I heard you were passing through and came to salute you. May I pray you, my elder brother, enter into the city and rest your steed?\"\n\n\"Who are these two?\" said Gongsun Zan, pointing to Liu Bei's brothers.\n\n\"These are Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, my sworn brothers.\"\n\n\"Were they fighting with you against the Yellow Scarves?\" asked Gongsun Zan.\n\n\"All my success was due to their efforts,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"And what offices do they fill?\"\n\n\"Guan Yu is a mounted archer; Zhang Fei is a foot archer.\"\n\n\"Thus are able people buried!\" said Gongsun Zan, sighing. Then he continued. \"All the highest in the land are now going to destroy the rebellious Dong Zhuo. My brother, you would do better to abandon this petty place and join us in restoring the House of Han. Why not?\"\n\n\"I should like to go,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If you had let me kill him that other time, you would not have this trouble today,\" said Zhang Fei to Liu Bei and Guan Yu.\n\n\"Since things are so, let us pack and go,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nSo without more ado, the three brothers, with a few horsemen, joined Gongsun Zan and marched with him to join the great army.\n\nOne after another the feudal lords came up and encamped. Their camps extended over seventy miles and more. When all had arrived, Cao Cao, as the head, prepared sacrificial bullocks and horses and called all the lords to a great assembly to decide upon their plan of attack.\n\nThen spoke the Governor of Henei, Wang Kuang, \"We have been moved by a noble sense of right to assemble here. Now must we first choose a chief and bind ourselves to obedience.\"\n\nThen said Cao Cao, \"For four generations the highest offices of state have been filled by members of the Yuan family, and their clients and supporters are everywhere. As a descendant of ancient ministers of Han, Yuan Shao is a suitable man to be our chief lord.\"\n\nYuan Shao again and again declined this honor. But they all said, \"It must be he! There is no other!\"\n\nAnd then he agreed.\n\nSo the next day a three-story altar was built, and they planted about it the banners of all parties in five directions of space. And they set up white yaks' tails and golden axes and emblems of military authority and the seals of leadership round about.\n\nAll being ready, the chief lord was invited to ascend the altar. Clad in ceremonial robes and girded with a sword, Yuan Shao reverently ascended. There he burned incense, made obeisance and recited the oath:\n\n\"The House of Han has fallen upon evil days, the bands of imperial authority are loosened. The rebel minister, Dong Zhuo, takes advantage of the discord to work evil, and calamity falls upon honorable families. Cruelty overwhelms simple folks. We, Yuan Shao and his confederates, fearing for the safety of the imperial prerogatives, have assembled military forces to rescue the state. We now pledge ourselves to exert our whole strength and act in concord to the utmost limit of our powers. There must be no disconcerted or selfish action. Should any depart from this pledge, may he lose his life and leave no posterity. Almighty Heaven and Universal Earth and the enlightened spirits of our forebears, be ye our witnesses!\"\n\nThe reading finished, Yuan Shao smeared the blood of the sacrifice upon his lips and upon the lips of those who shared the pledge. All were deeply affected by the ceremony and many shed tears.\n\nThis done, the chief lord was supported down from the high place and led to his tent, where he took the highest place and the others arranged themselves according to rank and age. Here wine was served.\n\nPresently Cao Cao said, \"It behooves us all to obey the chief we have this day set up, and support the state. There must be no feeling of rivalry or superiority based upon numbers.\"\n\nYuan Shao replied, \"Unworthy as I am, yet as elected chief I must impartially reward merit and punish offenses. Let each see to it that he obeys the national laws and the army precepts. These must not be broken.\"\n\n\"Only thy commands are to be obeyed!\" cried all.\n\nThen Yuan Shao said, \"My brother, Yuan Shu, is appointed Chief of the Commissariat. He must see to it that the whole camp is well supplied. But the need of the moment is a van leader who shall go to River Si Pass and provoke a battle. The other forces must take up strategic positions in support.\"\n\nThen the Governor of Changsha, Sun Jian, offered himself for this service.\n\n\"You are valiant and fierce, and equal to this service!\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nThe force under Sun Jian set out and presently came to River Si Pass. The guard there sent a swift rider to the capital to announce to the Prime Minister the urgency of the situation.\n\nEver since Dong Zhuo had secured his position, he had given himself up to luxury without stint. When the urgent news reached Adviser Li Ru, he at once went to his master, who much alarmed called a great council.\n\nLu Bu stood forth and said, \"Do not fear, my father. I look upon all the lords beyond the Pass as so much stubble. And with the warriors of our fierce army, I will put everyone of them to death and hang their heads at the gates of the capital!\"\n\n\"With your aid I can sleep secure!\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nBut someone behind Lu Bu broke in upon his speech, saying, \"An ox-cleaver to kill a chicken! There is no need for the General to go: I will cut off their heads as easily as I would take a thing out of my pocket!\"\n\nDong Zhuo looked up and his eyes rested on a stalwart man of fierce mien, lithe and supple as a beast. He had round head like a leopard and shoulders like an ape's . His name was Hua Xiong of Guanxi. Dong Zhuo rejoiced at Hua Xiong's bold words and at once appointed him Commander of the Valiant Cavalry and gave him fifty thousand of horse and foot. Hua Xiong and three other generals \u2014 Li Su, Hu Zhen, and Zhao Cen \u2014 hastily moved toward River Si Pass.\n\nAmong the feudal lords, Bao Xin, the Lord of Jibei, was jealous lest the chosen Van Leader Sun Jian should win too great honors. Wherefore Bao Xin endeavored to meet the foe first, and so he secretly dispatched his brother, Bao Zhong, with three thousand by a bye road. As soon as this small force reached the Pass, they offered battle.\n\nFast reacting, Hua Xiong at the head of five hundred armored horsemen swept down from the Pass, crying, \"Flee not, rebel!\"\n\nBut Bao Zhong was afraid and turned back. Hua Xiong came on, his arm rose, the sword fell, and Bao Zhong was cut down from his horse. Most of Bao Zhong's company were captured. Bao Zhong's head was sent to the Prime Minister's palace. Hua Xiong was promoted to Commander-in-Chief.\n\nSun Jian presently approached the Pass. He had four generals: Cheng Pu of Tuyin whose weapon was an iron-spined lance with snake-headed blade; Huang Gai of Lingling who wielded an iron whip; Han Dang of Lingzhi using a heavy saber; and Zu Mao of Wujun who fought with a pair of swords.\n\nCommander Sun Jian wore a helmet of fine silver wrapped round with a purple turban. He carried across his body his sword of ancient ingot iron and rode a dappled horse with flowing mane.\n\nSun Jian advanced to the Pass and hailed the defenders, crying, \"Helpers of a villain! Be quick to surrender!\"\n\nHua Xiong bade Hu Zhen lead five thousand out against Sun Jian. Cheng Pu with the snaky lance rode out from Sun Jian's side and engaged. After a very few bouts, Cheng Pu killed Hu Zhen on the spot by a thrust through the throat. Then Sun Jian gave the signal for the main army to advance. But from the Pass, Hua Xiong's troops rained down showers of stones, which proved too much for the assailants, and they retired into camp at Liangdong. Sun Jian sent the report of victory to Yuan Shao.\n\nSun Jian also sent an urgent message for supplies to the commissary.\n\nBut a counselor said to the Controller Yuan Shu, \"This Sun Jian is a very tiger in the east. Should he take the capital and destroy Dong Zhuo, we should have a tiger in place of a wolf. Do not send him grain. Starve his troops, and that will decide the fate of that army.\"\n\nAnd Yuan Shu gave ears to the detractor and sent no grain or forage. Soon Sun Jian's hungry soldiers showed their disaffection by indiscipline, and the spies bore the news to the defenders of the Pass.\n\nLi Su made a plot with Hua Xiong, saying, \"We will launch tonight a speedy attack against Sun Jian in front and rear so that we can capture him.\"\n\nHua Xiong agreed and prepared for the attack. So the soldiers of the attacking force were told off and given a full meal. At dark they left the Pass and crept by secret paths to the rear of Sun Jian's camp. The moon was bright and the wind cool. They arrived about midnight and the drums beat an immediate attack. Sun Jian hastily donned his fighting gear and rode out. He ran straight into Hua Xiong and the two warriors engaged. But before they had exchanged many passes, Li Su's army came up from behind and set fire to whatever would burn.\n\nSun Jian's army were thrown into confusion and fled in disorder. A melee ensued, and soon only Zu Mao was left at Sun Jian's side. These two broke through the Pass and fled. Hua Xiong coming in hot pursuit, Sun Jian took his bow and let fly two arrows in quick succession, but both missed. He fitted a third arrow to the string, but drew the bow so fiercely that it snapped. He cast the bow to the earth and set off at full gallop.\n\nThen spoke Zu Mao, \"My lord's purple turban is a mark that the rebels will too easily recognize. Give it to me, and I will wear it!\"\n\nSo Sun Jian exchanged his silver helmet with the turban for his general's headpiece, and the two men parted, riding different ways. The pursuers looking only for the purple turban went after its wearer, and Sun Jian escaped along a by-road.\n\nZu Mao, hotly pursued, then tore off the headdress which he hung on the post of a half-burned house as he passed and dashed into the thick woods. Hua Xiong's troops seeing the purple turban standing motionless dared not approach, but they surrounded it on every side and shot at it with arrows. Presently they discovered the trick, went up and seized it.\n\nThis was the moment that Zu Mao awaited. At once he rushed forth, his two swords whirling about, and dashed at the leader. But Hua Xiong was too quick. With a loud yell, Hua Xiong slashed at Zu Mao and cut him down the horse. Hua Xiong and Li Su continued the slaughter till the day broke, and they led their troops back to the Pass.\n\nCheng Pu, Huang Gai, and Han Dang in time found their chief and the soldiers gathered. Sun Jian was much grieved at the loss of Zu Mao.\n\nWhen news of the disaster reached Yuan Shao, he was greatly chagrined and called all the lords to a council. They assembled and Gongsun Zan was the last to arrive.\n\nWhen all were seated in the tent Yuan Shao said, \"The brother of General Bao Xin, disobeying the rules we made for our guidance, rashly went to attack the enemy: He was slain and with him many of our soldiers. Now Sun Jian has been defeated. Thus our fighting spirit has suffered and what is to be done?\"\n\nEveryone was silent. Lifting his eyes, Yuan Shao looked round from one to another till he came to Gongsun Zan, and then he remarked three men who stood behind Gongsun Zan's seat. They were of striking appearance as they stood there, all three smiling cynically.\n\n\"Who are those men behind you?\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nGongsun Zan told Liu Bei to come forward, and said, \"This is Liu Bei, Magistrate of Pingyuan and a brother of mine who shared my humble cottage when we were students.\"\n\n\"It must be the Liu Bei who broke up the Yellow Scarves rebellion,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"It is he,\" said Gongsun Zan, and he ordered Liu Bei to make his obeisance to the assembly, to whom Liu Bei then related his services and his origin, all in full detail.\n\n\"Since he is of the Han line, he should be seated,\" said Yuan Shao, and he bade Liu Bei sit.\n\nLiu Bei modestly thanked him, declining.\n\nSaid Yuan Shao, \"This consideration is not for your fame and office. I respect you as a scion of the imperial family.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei took his seat in the lowest place of the long line of lords. And his two brothers with folded arms took their stations behind him.\n\nEven as they were at this meeting came in a scout to say that Hua Xiong with a company of mail-clad horsemen was coming down from the Pass. They were flaunting Sun Jian's captured purple turban on the end of a bamboo pole. The enemy was soon hurling insults at those within the stockade and challenging them to fight.\n\n\"Who dares go out to give battle?\" said Yuan Shao.\n\n\"I will go,\" said Yu She, a renown general of Yuan Shu, stepping forward.\n\nSo Yu She went, and almost immediately one came back to say that Yu She had fallen in the third bout of Hua Xiong.\n\nFear began to lay its cold hand on the assembly.\n\nThen Imperial Protector Han Fu said, \"I have a brave warrior among my army. Pan Feng is his name, and he could slay this Hua Xiong.\"\n\nSo Pan Feng was ordered out to meet the foe. With his great battle-ax in his hand, Pan Feng mounted and rode forth. But soon came the direful tidings that General Pan Feng too had fallen. The faces of the gathering paled at this.\n\n\"What a pity my two able generals, Yan Liang and Wen Chou, are not here! Then should we have someone who would not fear this Hua Xiong,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nHe had not finished when from the lower end a voice tolled, \"I will go, take Hua Xiong's head, and lay it before you here!\"\n\nAll turned to look at the speaker. He was tall and had a long beard. His eyes were those of a phoenix and his eyebrows thick and bushy like silkworms. His face was a swarthy red and his voice deep as the sound of a great bell.\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked Yuan Shao.\n\nGongsun Zan told them it was Guan Yu, brother of Liu Bei.\n\n\"And what is he?\" asked Yuan Shao.\n\n\"He is in the train of Liu Bei as a mounted archer.\"\n\n\"What! An insult to us all!\" roared Yuan Shu from his place. \"Have we no leader? How dare an archer speak thus before us? Let us beat him forth!\"\n\nBut Cao Cao intervened. \"Peace, O Yuan Shu! Since this man speaks great words, he is certainly valiant. Let him try. If he fails, then we may reproach him.\"\n\n\"Hua Xiong will laugh at us if we send a mere archer to fight him,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\n\"This man looks no common person. And how can the enemy know he is but a bowman?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"If I fail, then can you take my head,\" spoke Guan Yu.\n\nCao Cao bade them heat some wine and offered a cup to Guan Yu as he went out.\n\n\"Pour it out,\" said Guan Yu. \"I shall return in a little space.\"\n\nGuan Yu went with his weapon in his hand and vaulted into the saddle. Those in the tent heard the fierce roll of the drums and then a mighty sound as if skies were falling and earth rising, hills trembling and mountains tearing asunder. And they were sore afraid. And while they were listening with ears intent, lo! the gentle tinkle of horse bells, and Guan Yu returned, throwing at their feet the head of the slain leader, their enemy Hua Xiong.\n\nThe wine was still warm!\n\nThis doughty deed has been celebrated in verse:\n\n\u2003The power of the man stands first in all the world,\n\n\u2003At the gate of the camp was heard the rolling of the battle drums;\n\n\u2003Then Guan Yu set aside the wine cup till he should have displayed his valor,\n\n\u2003And the wine was still warm when Hua Xiong had been slain.\n\nCao Cao was greatly excited at this success.\n\nBut Zhang Fei's voice was heard, shouting, \"My brother has slain Hua Xiong. What are we waiting for? Why not break through the Pass and seize Dong Zhuo? Could there have been a better time?\"\n\nAgain arose the angry voice of Yuan Shu, \"We high officials are too meek and yielding. Here is the petty follower of a small magistrate daring to flaunt his prowess before us! Expel him from the tent, I say.\"\n\nBut again Cao Cao interposed, \"Shall we consider the station of him who has done a great service?\"\n\n\"If you hold a mere magistrate in such honor, then I simply withdraw,\" said Yuan Shu.\n\n\"Is a word enough to defeat a grand enterprise?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he told Gongsun Zan to lead the three brothers back to their own camp, and the other chiefs then dispersed. That night Cao Cao secretly sent presents of meat and wine to soothe the three after this adventure.\n\nWhen Hua Xiong's troops straggled back and told the story of defeat and death, Li Ru was greatly distressed. He wrote urgent letters to his master who called in his trusted advisers to a council.\n\nLi Ru summed up the situation, saying, \"We have lost our best leader, and the rebel power has thereby become very great. Yuan Shao is at the head of this confederacy, and his uncle, Yuan Wei, is holder of the office of Imperial Guardianship. If those in the capital combine with those in the country, we may suffer. Therefore we must remove them. So I request you, Sir Prime Minister, to place yourself at the head of your army and break this confederation.\"\n\nDong Zhuo agreed and at once ordered his two generals, Li Jue and Guo Si, to take five hundred troops and surround the residence of Imperial Guardian Yuan Wei, slay every soul regardless of age, and hang the head of Yuan Wei outside the gate as trophy. And Dong Zhuo commanded two hundred thousand troops to advance in two armies. The first fifty thousand were under Li Jue and Guo Si, and they were to hold River Si Pass. They should not necessarily fight. The other one hundred fifty thousand under Dong Zhuo himself went to Tiger Trap Pass. His counselors and commanders \u2014 Li Ru, Lu Bu, Fan Chou, Zhang Ji, and others \u2014 marched with the main army.\n\nTiger Trap Pass is fifteen miles from Capital Luoyang. As soon as they arrived, Dong Zhuo bade Lu Bu take thirty thousand soldiers and make a strong stockade on the outside of the Pass. The main body with Dong Zhuo would occupy the Pass.\n\nNews of this movement reaching the confederate lords. Yuan Shao summoned a council.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"The occupation of the Pass would cut our armies in two; therefore, we must oppose Dong Zhuo's army on the way.\"\n\nSo eight of the commanders \u2014 Wang Kuang, Qiao Mao, Bao Xin, Yuan Yi, Kong Rong, Zhang Yang, Tao Qian, and Gongsun Zan \u2014 were ordered to go in the direction of the Tiger Trap Pass to oppose their enemy. Cao Cao and his troops moved among them as reserve to render help where needed.\n\nOf the eight, Wang Kuang, the Governor of Henei, was the first to arrive, and Lu Bu went to give battle with three thousand armored horsemen. When Wang Kuang had ordered his army, horse and foot, in battle array, he took his station under the great banner and looked over at his foe.\n\nLu Bu was a conspicuous figure in front of the line. On his head was a triple curved headdress of ruddy gold with pheasant tails. He wore a warring velvet-red robe of Xichuan silk embroidered with thousand flowers, which was overlapped by golden mail adorned with a gaping animal's head, joined by rings at the sides and girt to his waist with a belt fastened by a beautiful lion-head clasp. His bow and arrows were slung on his shoulders, and he carried a long heavy trident halberd. He was seated on his snorting steed Red Hare. Indeed Lu Bu was the man among humans, as Red Hare was the horse among horses.\n\n\"Who dares go out to fight him?\" asked Wang Kuang turning to those behind him.\n\nIn response a valiant general from Henei named Fang Yue spurred to the front, his spear set ready for battle. Lu Bu and Fang Yue met: Before the fifth bout Fang Yue fell under a thrust of the trident halberd, and Lu Bu dashed forward. Wang Kuang's troops could not stand and scattered in all directions. Lu Bu went to and fro slaying all he met. He was irresistible.\n\nLuckily, two other troops led by Qiao Mao and Yuan Yi came up and rescued the wounded Wang Kuang, and Lu Bu pulled back. The three, having lost many troops, withdrew ten miles and made a stockade. And before long the remaining five commanders came up and joined them. They held a council and agreed Lu Bu was a hero no one could match.\n\nAnd while they sat there anxious and uncertain, it was announced that Lu Bu had returned to challenge them. They mounted their horses and placed themselves at the heads of eight forces, each body in its station on the high ground. Around them was the opposing army in formation, commanded by Lu Bu, innumerable horse and foot, with splendid embroidered banners waving in the breeze.\n\nThey attacked Lu Bu. Mu Shun, a general of Governor Zhang Yang, rode out with his spear set, but soon fell at the first encounter with Lu Bu. This frightened the others. Then galloped forth Wu Anguo, a general under Governor Kong Rong. Wu Anguo raised his iron mace ready at his rival. Lu Bu whirling his halberd and urging on his steed came to meet Wu Anguo. The two fought, well matched for ten bouts, when a blow from the trident halberd broke Wu Anguo's wrist. Letting his mace fall to the ground he fled. Then all eight of the lords led forth their armies to his rescue, and Lu Bu retired to his line.\n\nThe fighting then ceased, and after their return to camp another council met.\n\nCao Cao said, \"No one can stand against the prowess of Lu Bu. Let us call up all the lords and evolve some good plan. If only Lu Bu were taken, Dong Zhuo could easily be killed.\"\n\nWhile the council was in progress again came Lu Bu to challenge them, and again the commanders moved out against him. This time Gongsun Zan, flourishing his spear, went to meet the enemy. After a very few bouts Gongsun Zan turned and fled; Lu Bu following at the topmost speed of Red Hare. Red Hare was a three-hundred-mile-a-day horse, swift as the wind. The lords watched Red Hare gained rapidly upon the flying horseman, and Lu Bu's halberd was poised ready to strike Gongsun Zan just behind the heart. Just then dashed in a third rider with round glaring eyes and a bristling mustache, and armed with a ten-foot serpent halberd.\n\n\"Stay, O twice bastard!\" roared he, \"I, Zhang Fei of Yan, await you!\"\n\nSeeing this opponent, Lu Bu left the pursuit of Gongsun Zan and engaged the new adversary. Zhang Fei was elated, and he rode forth with all his energies. They two were worthily matched, and they exchanged half a hundred bouts with no advantage to either side. Then Guan Yu, impatient, rode out with his huge and weighty green-dragon saber and attacked Lu Bu on the other flank. The three steeds formed a triangle and their riders battered away at each other for thirty bouts, yet still Lu Bu stood firm.\n\nThen Liu Bei rode out to his brothers' aid, his double swords raised ready to strike. The steed with the flowing mane was urged in at an angle, and now Lu Bu had to contend with three surrounding warriors at whom he struck one after another, and they at him, the flashing of the warriors' weapons looking like the revolving lamps suspended at the new year. And the warriors of the eight armies gazed rapt with amazement at such a battle.\n\nBut Lu Bu's guard began to weaken and fatigue seized him. Looking hard in the face of Liu Bei, Lu Bu feigned a fierce thrust thus making Liu Bei suddenly draw back. Then, lowering his halberd, Lu Bu dashed through the angle thus opened and got away.\n\nBut was it likely they would allow him to escape? They whipped their steeds and followed hard. The soldiers of the eight armies cracked their throats with thunderous cheers and all dashed forward, pressing after Lu Bu as he made for the shelter of the Tiger Trap Pass. And first among his pursuers were the three brothers.\n\nAn ancient poet has told of this famous fight in these lines:\n\n\u2003The fateful day of Han came in the reigns of Huan and Ling,\n\n\u2003Their glory declined as the sun sinks at the close of day.\n\n\u2003Dong Zhuo, infamous minister of state, pulled down the youthful Bian.\n\n\u2003It is true the new Xian was a weakling, too timid for his times.\n\n\u2003Then Cao Cao proclaimed abroad these wicked deeds,\n\n\u2003And the great lords, moved with anger, assembled their forces.\n\n\u2003In council met they and chose as their oath-chief Yuan Shao,\n\n\u2003Pledged themselves to maintain the ruling house and tranquillity.\n\n\u2003Of the warriors of that time matchless Lu Bu was the boldest.\n\n\u2003His valor and prowess are sung by all within the four seas.\n\n\u2003He clothed his body in silver armor like the scales of a dragon,\n\n\u2003On his head was a golden headdress with pheasant tails,\n\n\u2003About his waist a shaggy belt, the clasp, two wild beasts' heads with gripping jaws,\n\n\u2003His flowing, embroidered robe fluttered about his form,\n\n\u2003His swift courser bounded over the plain, a mighty wind following,\n\n\u2003His terrible trident halberd flashed in the sunlight, bright as a placid lake.\n\n\u2003Who dared face him as he rode forth to challenge?\n\n\u2003The bowels of the confederate lords were torn with fear and their hearts trembled.\n\n\u2003Then leaped forth Zhang Fei, the valiant warrior of the north,\n\n\u2003Gripped in his mighty hand the long serpent halberd,\n\n\u2003His mustache bristled with anger, standing stiff like wire.\n\n\u2003His round eyes glared, lightning flashes darted from them.\n\n\u2003Neither quailed in the fight, but the issue was undecided.\n\n\u2003Guan Yu stood out in front, his soul vexed within him,\n\n\u2003His green-dragon saber shone white as frost in the sunlight,\n\n\u2003His bright colored fighting robe fluttered like butterfly wings,\n\n\u2003Demons and angels shrieked at the thunder of his horse hoofs,\n\n\u2003In his eyes was fierce anger, a fire to be quenched only in blood.\n\n\u2003Next Liu Bei joined the battle, gripping his twin sword blades,\n\n\u2003The heavens themselves trembled at the majesty of his wrath.\n\n\u2003These three closely beset Lu Bu and long drawn out was the battle,\n\n\u2003Always he warded their blows, never faltering a moment.\n\n\u2003The noise of their shouting rose to the sky, and the earth reechoed it,\n\n\u2003The heat of battle ranged to the frozen pole star.\n\n\u2003Worn out, feeling his strength fast ebbing, Lu Bu thought to flee,\n\n\u2003He glanced at the hills around and thither would fly for shelter,\n\n\u2003Then, reversing his halberd and lowering its lofty point,\n\n\u2003Hastily he fled, loosing himself from the battle;\n\n\u2003With head low bent, he gave the rein to his courser,\n\n\u2003Turned his face away and fled to Tiger Trap Pass.\n\nThe three brothers maintained the pursuit to the Pass. Looking up they saw an immense umbrella of black gauze fluttering in the west wind.\n\n\"Certainly there is Dong Zhuo,\" cried Zhang Fei. \"What is the use of pursuing Lu Bu? Better far seize the chiefest rebel and so pluck up the evil by the roots!\"\n\n\u2003And he whipped up his steed toward the Pass.\n\n\u2003To quell rebellion seize the leader if you can;\n\n\u2003If you need a wondrous service then first find a wondrous man." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Burning The Capital, Dong Zhuo Commits An Atrocity; Hiding The Imperial Hereditary Seal, Sun Jian Breaks Faith.\n\nZhang Fei rode hard up to the Pass, but the defenders sent down stones and arrows like rain so that he could not enter, and he returned. The eight lords all joined in felicitations to the three brothers for their services, and the story of victory was sent to Yuan Shao, who ordered Sun Jian to make an immediate advance.\n\nThereupon Sun Jian with two trusty generals, Cheng Pu and Huang Gai, went over to the camp of Yuan Shu.\n\nTracing figures on the ground with his staff, Sun Jian said, \"Dong Zhuo and I had no personal quarrel. Yet now I have thrown myself into the battle regardless of consequences, exposed my person to the risk of wounds and fought bloody battles to their bitter end. And why? That I might be the means of ridding my country of a rebel and \u2014 for the private advantage of your family. Yet you, heeding the slanderous tongue of certain counselor, formerly withheld the supplies absolutely necessary to me, and so I suffered defeat. How can you explain, General?\"\n\nYuan Shu, confused and frightened, had no word to reply. He ordered the death of the slanderer to placate Sun Jian.\n\nThen suddenly they told Sun Jian, \"Some officer has come riding down from the Pass to see you, General. He is in the camp.\"\n\nSun Jian therefore took his leave and returned to his own camp, where he found the visitor was Li Jue, one of the much trusted commanders of Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"Wherefore come you?\" said Sun Jian.\n\nLi Jue replied, \"You are the one person for whom my master has respect and admiration, and he sends me to arrange a matrimonial alliance between the two families. He wishes that his daughter may become the wife of your son.\"\n\n\"What! Dong Zhuo, that rebel and renegade, that subverter of the Throne! I wish I could destroy his nine generations as a thank-offering to the empire! Think you I would be willing to have an alliance with such a family? I will not slay you as I ought, but go, and go quickly! Yield the Pass and I may spare your lives. If you delay, I will grind your bones to powder and make mincemeat of your flesh!\"\n\nLi Jue threw his arms over his head and ran out. He returned to his master and told him what a rude reception he had met with. Dong Zhuo asked his adviser Li Ru how to reply to this.\n\nLi Ru said, \"Lu Bu's late defeat had somewhat blunted the edge of our army's desire for battle. It would be well to return to the capital and remove the Emperor to Changan, as the street children had been lately singing:\n\n\"A Han on the west, a Han on the east.\n\nThe deer (emperor) in Changan shall worry least.\"\n\nLi Ru continued, \"If you think out this couplet, it applies to the present juncture. Half the first line refers to the founder of the dynasty, Liu Bang the Supreme Ancestor, who became ruler in the western city of Changan, which was the capital during twelve reigns. The other half corresponds to Liu Xiu the Latter Han Founder who ruled from Luoyang, the eastern capital during twelve latter reigns. The revolution of the heavens brings us back to this starting moment. Thus if you remove to Changan, there will be no need for anxiety.\"\n\nDong Zhuo was exceedingly pleased and said, \"Had you not spoken thus, I should not have understood!\"\n\nThen taking Lu Bu with him, Dong Zhuo started at once for Capital Luoyang.\n\nHere he called all the officials to a great council in the Palace and addressed them, \"After two centuries of rule here, the royal fortune has been exhausted, and I perceive that the aura of rule has migrated to Changan, whither I now desire to move the court. All you had better pack up for the journey.\"\n\nYang Biao, Minister of the Interior, said, \"I pray you reflect. The Land Within the Passes is all destruction. There is no reason to renounce the ancestral temples and abandon the imperial tombs here. I fear the people will be alarmed. It is easy to alarm them but difficult to pacify them.\"\n\n\"Do you oppose the state plans?\" said Dong Zhuo angrily.\n\nAnother official, Grand Commander Huang Wan, supported his colleague, \"In the era of Recommencement (AD 23-25), Fan Chong of the Red Eyebrows rebels burned Changan to the ground and reduced the place to broken tiles. The inhabitants scattered all but a few. It is wrong to abandon these palaces here for a wasteland.\"\n\nDong Zhuo replied, \"The East of the Passes is full of sedition, and all the empire is in rebellion. The city of Changan is protected by the Yaohan Mountains and the Hangu Pass. Moreover, it is near Longyou, whence can be easily brought timber, stone, brick, and building materials. In a month or so palaces can be erected. So an end to your wild words!\"\n\nYet Minister of Works Xun Shuang raised another protest against disturbing the people, but Dong Zhuo overbore him also.\n\n\"How can I stop to consider a few common people when my scheme affects the empire?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nThat day the three objectors \u2014 Yang Biao, Huang Wan, and Xun Shuang \u2014 were removed from their offices and reduced to the rank of commoners.\n\nAs Dong Zhuo went out to get into his coach, he met two other officers who made obeisance. They were the Chair of the Secretariat, Zhou Bi, and the Commander of the City Gates, Wu Qiong. Dong Zhuo stopped and asked them what they wanted.\n\nSaid Zhou Bi, \"We venture to try to dissuade you from moving the capital to Changan.\"\n\nDong Zhuo replied, \"You two persuaded me to give Yuan Shao office. Now he has already turned traitor, and you are of the same party!\"\n\nAnd without more ado he bade his guards take both outside the city and put them to death. The command to remove to the new capital immediately was issued.\n\nSpeaking to Dong Zhuo, Li Ru pointed out, \"We are short of money and food, and the rich people of Luoyang could be easily plundered. This is a good occasion to link them to the rebels and to confiscate their properties.\"\n\nDong Zhuo sent five thousand troops out to plunder and slay. They captured many thousand wealthy householders and, having stuck flags on their heads saying they were Traitors and Rebels, drove them out of the city and put them to death. Their properties were all seized.\n\nThe task of driving forth the inhabitants, some millions, was given to two of Dong Zhuo's commanders, Li Jue and Guo Si. The people were sent off in bands, each band between two parties of soldiers, who drove them torward Changan. Enormous numbers fell by the road side and died in the ditches, and the escort plundered the fugitives and defiled the women. A wail of sorrow arose to the very sky.\n\nDong Zhuo's final orders as he left Capital Luoyang were to burn the whole city: Houses, palaces, temples, and everything were devoured by the flames. The capital became but a patch of scorched earth.\n\nDong Zhuo sent Lu Bu to desecrate the tombs of the emperors and their consorts for the jewels therein, and the common soldiers took the occasion to dig up the graves of officials and plunder the cemeteries of the wealthy. The spoil of the city, gold and silver, pearls and silks, and beautiful ornaments, filled several thousand carts. With these and the persons of the Emperor and his household, Dong Zhuo moved off to the new capital in the first year of Inauguration of Tranquillity (AD 190).\n\nLuoyang being thus abandoned, the general of Dong Zhuo at River Si Pass, Zhao Cen, evacuated that post of vantage, which Sun Jian at once occupied. Liu Bei and his brothers took Tiger Trap Pass and the confederate lords advanced.\n\nSun Jian hastened to the late capital which was still in flames. When he arrived, dense smoke hung all over it and spread for miles around. No living thing, not a fowl, or a dog, or a human being, remained. Sun Jian told off his soldiers to extinguish the fires and set out camping places for the confederate lords.\n\nCao Cao went to see Yuan Shao and said, \"Dong Zhuo has gone west. We ought to follow and attack his rear without loss of time. Why do you remain inactive?\"\n\n\"All our colleagues are worn out, and there is nothing to be gained by attack,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nCao Cao said, \"This moment was most propitious in the utter confusion that reigned \u2014 palaces burned, the Emperor abducted, the whole world upset, and no one knowing whither to turn. The villain will soon be ended, and a single blow could exterminate Dong Zhuo. Why not pursue?\"\n\nBut all the confederate lords seemed of one mind, and that mind was to postpone action. So they did nothing.\n\n\"Those unworthy people cannot discuss worthy thing!\" cried Cao Cao.\n\nThen, he and his six generals \u2014 Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Cao Ren, Cao Hong, Li Dian, and Yue Jing \u2014 and ten thousand troops started in pursuit.\n\nThe road to the new capital led through Yingyang. When Dong Zhuo reached it, Governor Xu Rong went to welcome the cavalcade.\n\nLi Ru said, \"As there is some danger of pursuit, it would be well to order the Governor of this place to lay an ambush outside the city. He is to let the pursuers pass and be ready to cut off their retreat, when our army beats them off. That will teach any others not to follow.\"\n\nThen Dong Zhuo ordered Lu Bu to command the rear guard. Very soon they saw Cao Cao coming up, and Lu Bu laughed at his colleague's foresight. He set out his troops in fighting order.\n\nCao Cao rode forward, crying, \"Rebels, abductors, drovers of the people, where are you going?\"\n\nLu Bu replied, \"Treacherous simpleton, what mad words are these?\"\n\nThen from Cao Cao army rode forth Xiahou Dun with his spear set, and Lu Bu and Xiahou Dun engaged. The combat had hardly begun when Li Ru with a cohort came in from the left. Cao Cao bade Xiahou Yuan meet this onslaught. However, on the other side appeared Guo Si and his company. Cao Cao sent Cao Ren against Guo Si. The onrush on three sides was too much to withstand, and Lu Bu's army was overwhelming, so Xiahou Dun had to retire to the main line. Thereupon Lu Bu's armored troops attacked and completed the defeat. The beaten army of Cao Cao turned toward Yingyang.\n\nThey got as far as the foot of a hill in the evening about the second watch, and the moon made it as light as day. Here they halted to reform. Just as they were burying the boilers to prepare a meal, there arose a great noise of shouting on all sides and out came the troops of Governor Xu Rong from the ambush fresh to attack.\n\nCao Cao, thrown into a flurry, mounted and fled. He ran right in the way of the waiting Xu Rong. Then he dashed off in another direction, but Xu Rong shot an arrow after him which struck him in the shoulder. The arrow still in the wound, Cao Cao fled for his life. As he went over the hill, two soldiers lying in wait among the grass suddenly dashed out and wounded his horse, which fell and rolled over. And as he slipped from the saddle, he was seized and made prisoner.\n\nJust then a horseman came, riding at full speed and whirling his sword up, cut down both the captors, and rescued Cao Cao. It was Cao Hong.\n\nCao Cao said, \"I am doomed, good brother. Go and save yourself!\"\n\n\"My lord, mount my horse quickly! I will go afoot,\" said Cao Hong.\n\n\"If those wretches come up, what then?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"The world can do without Cao Hong, but not without you, my lord!\"\n\n\"If I live, I shall owe you my life,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSo he mounted. Cao Hong tore off his own breastplate, gripped his sword, and went on foot after the horse. Thus they proceeded till the fourth watch when they saw before them a broad stream, and behind they still heard the shouts of pursuers drawing nearer and nearer.\n\n\"This is my fate,\" said Cao Cao. \"I am really doomed!\"\n\nCao Hong helped Cao Cao down from his horse. Then taking off his fighting robe and helmet, Cao Hong took the wounded man on his back and waded into the stream. When they reached the further side, the pursuers had already gained the bank whence they shot arrows.\n\nCao Cao all wet pushed on. Dawn was near. They went on another ten miles and then sat down to rest under a precipice. Suddenly loud shouting was heard and a party of horse appeared. It was Governor Xu Rong who had forded the river higher up. Just at this moment Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan, with several dozens men, came along.\n\n\"Hurt not my lord!\" cried Xiahou Dun to Xu Rong, who at once rushed at him.\n\nBut the combat was short. Xu Rong speedily fell under a spear thrust of Xiahou Dun, and his troops were driven off. Before long Cao Cao's other generals arrived. Sadness and joy mingled in the greetings. They gathered together the few hundreds of soldiers left and then returned to Luoyang.\n\nWhen the confederate lords entered Luoyang, Sun Jian, after extinguishing the fires, camped within the walls, his own tent being set up near the Dynastic Temple. His people cleared away the debris and closed the rifted tombs. The gates were barred. On the site of the Dynastic Temple he put up a mat shed containing three apartments, and here he begged the lords to meet and replace the sacred tablets, with solemn sacrifices and prayers.\n\nThis ceremony over, the others left and Sun Jian returned to his camp. That night the stars and moon vied with each other in brightness. As Sun Jian sat in the open air looking up at the heavens, he noticed a mist spreading over the stars of the Constellation Draco.\n\n\"The Emperor's star is dulled,\" said Sun Jian with a sigh. \"No wonder a rebellious minister disturbs the state, the people sit in dust and ashes, and the capital is a waste.\"\n\nAnd his tears began to fall.\n\nThen a soldier pointing to the south said, \"There is a beam of colored light rising from a well!\"\n\nSun Jian bade his people light torches and descend into the well. Soon they brought up the corpse of a woman, not in the least decayed although it had been there many days. She was dressed in Palace clothing and from her neck hung an embroidered bag. Opening this a red box was found, with a golden lock, and when the box was opened, they saw a jade seal, square in shape, four inches each way. On it were delicately engraved five dragons intertwined. One corner had been broken off and repaired with gold. There were eight characters in the seal style of engraving which interpreted read:\n\nI have received the command from Heaven: May my time be always long and prosperous.\n\nSun Jian showed this to his adviser, General Cheng Pu, who at once recognized it as the Imperial Hereditary Seal of the Emperor.\n\nCheng Pu said, \"This seal has a history. In olden days Bian He saw a phoenix sitting on a certain stone at the foot of the Jing Mountains. He offered the stone at court. The King of Chu split open the stone and found a piece of jade. In the twenty-sixth year of Qin Dynasty (BC 221), a jade cutter made a seal from it, and Li Si, the First Emperor's Prime Minister, engraved the characters. Two years later, while the First Emperor was sailing in Dongting Lake, a terrific storm arrived. The Emperor threw the seal to the water as a propitiatory offering, and the storm immediately ceased. Ten years later again, when the First Emperor was making a progress and had reached Huaying, an old man by the road side handed a seal to one of the attendants saying, 'This is now restored to the ancestral dragon!' and had then disappeared. Thus the jewel returned to Qin.\n\n\"The next year the First Emperor died. Later Zi Ying, the last Emperor of Qin and grandson of the First Emperor, presented the seal to Liu Bang the Supreme Ancestor, the founder of Han Dynasty. Two hundred years later, in Wang Mang's rebellion, the Emperor's mother, Lady Yuan, struck two of the rebels, Wang Xun and Su Xian, with the seal and broke off a corner, which was repaired with gold. Liu Xiu the Latter Han Founder got possession of it at Yiyang, and it has been regularly bequeathed hereafter.\n\n\"I heard this treasured seal had been lost during the trouble in the Palace when the Ten Regular Attendants hurried off the Emperor. It was missed on His Majesty's return. Now my lord has it and certainly will come to the imperial dignity. But you must not remain here in the north. Quickly go home to the south of the Great River, where you can lay plans for the accomplishment of the great design.\"\n\n\"Your words exactly accord with my thoughts,\" said Sun Jian. \"Tomorrow I will make an excuse that I am unwell and get away.\"\n\nThe soldiers were told to keep the discovery a secret. But one among them was a compatriot of the elected chief of the confederacy \u2014 Yuan Shao. He thought this might be of great advantage to him, so he stole away out of the camp and betrayed his master. He went to Yuan Shao's camp, informed the secret, and received a liberal reward. Yuan Shao kept the informant in his own camp.\n\nNext morning Sun Jian came to take leave, saying, \"I am rather unwell and wish to return to Changsha.\"\n\nYuan Shao laughed, saying, \"I know what you are suffering from: It is called the Imperial Hereditary Seal!\"\n\nThis was a shock to Sun Jian, and he paled but said, \"Whence these words?\"\n\nYuan Shao said, \"The armies were raised for the good of the state and to relieve it from oppression. The seal is state property; and since you have got hold of it, you should publicly hand it over to me as chief. When Dong Zhuo has been slain, it must go back to the government. What do you mean by concealing it and going away?\"\n\n\"How could the seal get into my hands?\" said Sun Jian.\n\n\"Where is the article out of the well near the Hall of Paragons?\"\n\n\"I have it not: Why harass me thus?\"\n\n\"Quickly produce it, or it will be the worst for you!\"\n\nSun Jian pointing toward the heavens as an oath said, \"If I have this jewel and am hiding it myself, may my end be unhappy and my death violent!\"\n\nThe lords all said, \"After an oath like this, we think he cannot have it.\"\n\nThen Yuan Shao called out his informant.\n\n\"When you pulled that thing out of the well, was this man there?\" asked he of Sun Jian.\n\nSun Jian's anger burst forth, and he sprang forward to kill the man.\n\nYuan Shao also drew his sword, saying, \"You touch that soldier and it is an insult to me!\"\n\nBehind Sun Jian, Generals Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, and Han Dang stepped forth; behind Yuan Shao, Generals Yan Liang and Wen Chou were ready to act. In a moment on all sides swords flew from their scabbards. But the confusion was stayed by the efforts of the others, and Sun Jian left the assembly. Soon he broke up his camp and marched to his own place.\n\nYuan Shao was not satisfied. He wrote to Jingzhou Region and sent the letter by a trusty hand to tell Imperial Protector Liu Biao to stop Sun Jian and take away the seal.\n\nJust after this came the news of the defeat and misfortune of Cao Cao, and when he was coming home, Yuan Shao sent out to welcome him and conduct him into camp. They also prepared a feast to console him.\n\nDuring the feast Cao Cao said sadly, \"My object was for the public good, and all you gentlemen nobly supported me. My plan was to get Yuan Shao with his Henei troops to approach Mengching; and my force at Qiao to keep Chenggao; while the others of you to hold Suanzao, to close the passes of Huanyuan and Daigu, and to take possession of the granaries, to control the points of vantage, and thus to secure the Capital District. I planned for Yuan Shu with his Nanyang army to occupy the counties of Danshi and Xilin and go into Wu Pass to help the three support areas. All were to fortify their positions and not to fight. Advantage lay in a diverse military coalition that could show the empire a possibility of dealing with the rebellion. We could have convinced the people to side with us against Dong Zhuo. Victory would have been ours at once. But then came delays and doubts and inaction, and the confidence of the people was lost, and I am ashamed.\"\n\nNo reply was possible and the guests dispersed. Cao Cao saw that the others mistrusted him, and in his heart knew that nothing could be accomplished. So he led off his force to Yanzhou Region.\n\nThen Gongsun Zan said to Liu Bei, \"This Yuan Shao is an incapable, and things will turns chaotic. We had better go too.\"\n\nSo he broke camp and went north. At Pingyuan he left Liu Bei in command and went to strengthen his own position and refresh his troops.\n\nThe Imperial Protector of Yanzhou, Liu Dai, wished to borrow grain of the Governor of Dongjun, Qiao Mao. Being denied, Liu Dai attacked the camp, killed Qiao Mao and took over all his army. Yuan Shao seeing the confederacy breaking up also marched away and went east.\n\nOn the way home, Sun Jian was passing through Jingzhou Region. The Imperial Protector of Jingzhou, Liu Biao, was a scion of the imperial house and a native of Shanyang. As a young man he had made friends with many famous people, and he and his companions were called the Eight Wise Ones. The other seven were:\n\n.1. Chen Xiang from Runan\n\n.2. Fan Pang from Runan\n\n.3. Kong Yu from Luting\n\n.4. Fan Kang from Bohai\n\n.5. Tan Fu from Shanyang\n\n.6. Zhang Jian from Shanyang\n\n.7. Cen Zhi from Nanyang\n\nLiu Biao was friends with all these. He had three famous persons who helped him in the government of his region. They were Kuai Liang and Kuai Yue from Yanping, and Cai Mao from Xiangyang.\n\nWhen Yuan Shao's letter detailing the fault of Sun Jian arrived, Liu Biao ordered Kuai Yue and Cai Mao with ten thousand soldiers to bar the way. When Sun Jian drew near, the force was arranged in fighting order and the leaders were in the front.\n\n\"Why are you thus barring the road with armed troops?\" asked Sun Jian.\n\n\"Why do you, a servant of Han, secrete the Emperor's special seal? Leave it with me at once and you go free,\" said Kuai Yue.\n\nSun Jian angrily ordered out General Huang Gai. On the other side Cai Mao rode forth with his sword set to strike. But after a few bouts Huang Gai dealt Cai Mao a blow with the iron whip on the armor just over the heart. Cai Mao turned his steed and fled, and Sun Jian got through with a sudden rush.\n\nHowever, there arose the sound of gongs and drums on the hills behind, and there was Liu Biao in person with a large army.\n\nSun Jian rode straight up to him and bowing low spoke, \"Why did you, on the faith of a letter from Yuan Shao, try to coerce the chief of a neighboring region?\"\n\n\"You have concealed the state jewel, and I want you to restore it,\" was Liu Biao's reply.\n\n\"If I have this thing, may I die a violent death!\"\n\n\"If you want me to believe you, let me search your baggage.\"\n\n\"What force have you that you dare come to flout me thus?\"\n\nAnd only Liu Biao's prompt retirement prevented a battle. Sun Jian proceeded on his way. But from the rear of the second hill an ambush suddenly discovered itself, and Kuai Yue and Cai Mao were still pursuing. Sun Jian seemed entirely hemmed in.\n\n\u2003What does a man to hold the state jewel for,\n\n\u2003If its possession lead to strife?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Yuan Shao Fights Gongsun Zan At The River Pan; Sun Jian Attacks Liu Biao Across The Great River.\n\nAt the close of the last chapter Sun Jian was surrounded. However, aided by Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, and Han Dang, he eventually fought his way through, though with the loss of more than half his troops. Sun Jian returned to the South Land, the territories southeast of the Great River. Henceforward Sun Jian and Liu Biao were open enemies.\n\nYuan Shao was in Henei. Being short of supplies, he sent to borrow from the Imperial Protector of Jizhou, Han Fu, whence he obtained the wherewithal to support his army.\n\nThen one of Yuan Shao's advisers, Peng Ji, said to him, \"You are really the strongest power here about. Why then depend upon another for food? Jizhou Region is rich and wide. Why not seize it?\"\n\n\"I have no good plan,\" replied Yuan Shao.\n\n\"You could secretly send a letter to Gongsun Zan, asking him to attack, promising him your support. Imperial Protector Han Fu of Jizhou, being incapable, must ask you to take over his region, and you will get it without lifting a finger.\"\n\nSo the letter was sent. When Gongsun Zan saw therein the proposal to make a joint attack and divide the territory, he agreed to give his help. In the meantime Yuan Shao had sent to warn Han Fu of Gongsun Zan's threat. Han Fu sought advice from Counselors Xun Chang and Xin Ping.\n\nXun Chang said, \"Governor Gongsun Zan of Beiping is commanding a huge and strong army. If he came to attack us, we could not stand against him, especially if he had the help of Liu Bei and his brothers. At present, Yuan Shao is bolder than most, and he has many able and famous leaders under him. You cannot do better than ask him to assist in administering this region. Yuan Shao will certainly treat you with generosity, and you need have no fear from Gongsun Zan.\"\n\nHan Fu agreed and sent a message to Yuan Shao by the hand of Guan Chun.\n\nBut Commander Geng Wu remonstrated with his master, saying, \"Yuan Shao is a needy man with a hungry army and as dependent on us for existence as an infant in the arms of its mother. Stop the flow of milk and the infant dies. Why should you hand the region over to him? It is nothing less than letting a tiger into the sheepfold!\"\n\nHan Fu replied, \"I am one of the clients of the Yuan family, and I know the abilities of Yuan Shao, which is far better than mine! Why are you all so jealous? The ancients counseled yielding to the sage.\"\n\nGeng Wu sighed, \"Jizhou is lost!\"\n\nWhen the news got abroad, more than thirty officers of Jizhou left their employment and the city. However, Geng Wu and Guan Chun hid in the suburbs to await the arrival of Yuan Shao.\n\nThey had not long to wait. Some days later, Yuan Shao with his soldiers came, and Geng Wu and Guan Chun tried to assassinate him with knives. This attempt failed. Yuan Shao's generals, Yan Liang and Wen Chou, beheaded Geng Wu and Guan Chun instantly. Thus both of them died, and the object of their hatred entered Jizhou City.\n\nYuan Shao's first act was to confer on Han Fu a high sounding title \u2014 General Who Demonstrates Grand and Vigor Courage in Arms \u2014 , but the administration was entrusted to four of Yuan Shao's confidants \u2014 Tian Feng, Ju Shou, Xu You, and Peng Ji \u2014 who speedily deprived the Imperial Protector of all power. Full of chagrin, Han Fu soon abandoned all, even his family, and rode alone to take refuge with the Governor of Chenliu, Zhang Miao.\n\nHearing of Yuan Shao's invasion, Gongsun Zan sent his brother, Gongsun Yue, to see the usurper and demand his share of the region.\n\n\"I want to see your elder brother himself. He and I have things to discuss,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nThus Gongsun Yue was sent back. But after traveling some fifteen miles on the homeward road, Gongsun Yue saw a group of soldiers appear.\n\n\"We are guards of Prime Minister Dong Zhuo!\" cried the soldiers.\n\nInstantly, Gongsun Yue was killed by a flight of arrows. Those of Gongsun Yue's followers who escaped carried the news to their late master's brother.\n\nGongsun Zan was very angry and said, \"Yuan Shao prevailed on me to attack, and now he has taken possession! Also he pretends the murderers of my brother were not his people! Shall I not avenge my brother's injury?\"\n\nGongsun Zan brought up all his force to the attack. Learning the movement, Yuan Shao sent out his army, and they met at River Pan. They halted on opposite sides of the river, over which was a bridge.\n\nGongsun Zan took his station on the bridge and cried to his enemy, \"Renegade, how dared you mislead me?\"\n\nYuan Shao rode to the other end of the bridge and, pointing at Gongsun Zan, replied, \"Han Fu yielded place to me because he was unequal to the rule! What concern is it of yours?\"\n\nGongsun Zan replied, \"Formerly you were regarded as loyal and public spirited, and we chose you chief of the confederacy. Now your deeds prove you cruel and base and wolf-hearted in behavior! How can you look the world in the face?\"\n\n\"Who will capture him?\" cried Yuan Shao in a rage.\n\nAt once Wen Chou rode out with his spear set. Gongsun Zan rode down the bridge to the enemy's side, where the two engaged. Ten bouts showed Gongsun Zan the terrible power of Wen Chou, and so he drew off. The enemy came on. Gongsun Zan took refuge within his formation, but Wen Chou cut his way in and rode this way and that, slaying right and left. The four best of Gongsun Zan's generals offered joint battle, but one fell under the first stroke of the doughty warrior, and the other three fled. Wen Chou followed, clearing through to the rear of the army. Gongsun Zan made for the mountains.\n\nWen Chou forced his horse to its utmost pace, crying hoarsely, \"Down! Dismount and surrender!\"\n\nGongsun Zan fled for life. His bow and quiver dropped from his shoulders, his helmet fell off, and his hair streamed straight behind him as he rode in and out between the sloping hills. Then his steed stumbled and he was thrown, rolling over and over to the foot of the slope.\n\nWen Chou was now very near and poising his spear for the thrust. Then suddenly came out from the shelter of a grassy mound on the left a general of youthful mien, but sitting his steed bravely and holding a sturdy spear. He rode directly at Wen Chou, and Gongsun Zan crawled up the slope to look on.\n\nThe new warrior was of middle height with bushy eyebrows and large eyes, a broad face and a heavy jowl, a youth of commanding presence. The two exchanged some fifty bouts and yet neither had the advantage. Then Gongsun Zan's rescue force came along, and Wen Chou turned and rode away. The warrior did not pursue.\n\nGongsun Zan hurried down the hill and asked the young fellow who he was.\n\nHe bowed low and replied, \"My name is Zhao Zilong from Changshan. I first served Yuan Shao; but when I saw that he was disloyal to his prince and careless of the welfare of the people, I left him and I was on my way to offer service to you. This meeting in this place is most unexpected.\"\n\nGongsun Zan was very pleased, and the two went together to the camp, where they at once busied themselves with preparations for a new battle.\n\nNext day Gongsun Zan prepared for fight by dividing his army into two wings. He had five thousand cavalry in the center, all mounted on white horses. Gongsun Zan had formerly seen service against the northern frontier tribes, the Qiang Peoples, where he always placed his white horses in the van of his army, and thus he had won the sobriquet of General Who Commands White Horses. The tribes held him so much in fear that they always fled as soon as the white horses, their sacred creatures, appeared.\n\nOn Yuan Shao's side Yan Liang and Wen Chou were Leaders of the Van. Each had one thousand of archers and crossbowmen. They were set out half on either side, those on the left to shoot at Gongsun Zan's right and those on the right to shoot at his left. In the center was Qu Yi with eight hundred bowmen and ten thousand of foot and horse. Yuan Shao took command of the reserve force in the rear.\n\nIn this fight Gongsun Zan employed his new adherent Zhao Zilong for the first time and, as Gongsun Zan did not feel assured of Zhao Zilong's good faith, put him in command of a company at the rear. The Van Leader was Yan Guang, and Gongsun Zan himself commanded the center. He took his place on horseback on the bridge beside an enormous red standard on which was displayed the words Commanding General in gold embroidery.\n\nFrom sunrise to noon the drums rolled for the attack, but Yuan Shao's army made no move. Qu Yi made his bowmen hide under their shields. They heard the roar of explosions, the whistling of arrows, and the rattle of the drums, as Yan Guang approached from the other side, but Qu Yi and his men lay closer than ever and never stirred. They waited till Yan Guang had got close on them and then, as the sound of a bomb rent the air, the whole eight hundred men let fly their arrows in a cloud. Yan Guang was quite taken aback and would have retired, but Qu Yi rode furiously toward him, whirled up his sword and cut him down.\n\nSo Gongsun Zan's army lost that battle. The two wings that should have come to the rescue were kept back by the bowmen under Yan Liang and Wen Chou. Yuan Shao's troops advanced right up to the bridge. Then Qu Yi rode forward, slew the standard bearer, and hacked through the staff of the embroidered banner. Seeing this, Gongsun Zan turned his steed and galloped away.\n\nQu Yi followed. But just as he caught up the fugitive, there came prancing forth Zhao Zilong, who rode directly at him with spear ready to strike. After a few bouts Qu Yi was laid in the dust. Then Zhao Zilong attacked the soldiers and turned the tide. Plunging forward on this side, dashing in on that, he went through as if there were no antagonists and, seeing this, Gongsun Zan turned and came again into the fight. The final victory was on his side.\n\nFrom the scouts sent to find out how the battle went, Yuan Shao heard the good news of Qu Yi's success in slaying the standard bearer, capturing the flag, and his pursuit. So Yuan Shao took no further care but rode out with Tian Feng and a few guards to look on at the enemy and enjoy his victory.\n\n\"Ha ha!\" Yuan Shao laughed. \"Gongsun Zan is an incapable!\"\n\nBut even as Yuan Shao spoke, he saw in front the redoubtable Zhao Zilong. His guards hastened to prepare their bows, but before they could shoot, Zhao Zilong was in their midst, and men were falling before him wherever he went. The others fled. Gongsun Zan's army then gathered round and hemmed in Yuan Shao.\n\nTian Feng then said to his master, \"Sir, take refuge in this empty building here!\"\n\nBut Yuan Shao dashed his helmet to the ground, crying, \"The brave person rather faces death in the battle than seeks safety behind a wall!\"\n\nThis bold speech gave new courage to his soldiers who now fought fiercely and with such success that Zhao Zilong could nowhere force his way in. Yuan Shao was soon reinforced by the arrival of his main body and Yan Liang, and the two armies pressed forward. Zhao Zilong could only just get Gongsun Zan safe out of the press. Then they fought their way back to the bridge. But Yuan Shao's troops still came on and fought their way across the bridge, forcing multitudes of their adversaries into the water, where many were drowned.\n\nYuan Shao was leading in person and his troops still advanced. But not more than two miles, for soon a great shouting was heard behind some hills, whence suddenly burst out a body of troops led by Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei.\n\nAt Pingyuan they had heard of the struggle between their protector and his enemy, Yuan Shao, and had at once set out to help. Now the three riders, each with his peculiar weapon, flew straight at Yuan Shao, who was so frightened that his soul seemed to leave his body and fly beyond the confines of heaven.\n\nHis sword fell from his hand and he fled for his life. He was chased across the bridge when Gongsun Zan called in his army, and they returned to camp.\n\nAfter the usual greetings Gongsun Zan said, \"If you had not come to our help, we should have been in very bad case.\"\n\nLiu Bei and Zhao Zilong were made acquainted with each other, and a warm affection sprang up from the very first so that they were always together.\n\nYuan Shao had lost that battle, and Gongsun Zan would not risk another. They strengthened their defenses, and the armies lay inactive for over a month. In the meantime news of the fighting had reached Capital Changan, and Dong Zhuo was told.\n\nHis adviser, Li Ru, went to see his master and said, \"The two active leaders of today are Yuan Shao and Gongsun Zan, who are at grips at River Pan. Pretend you have an imperial command to make peace between them, and both will support you out of gratitude for your intervention.\"\n\n\"Good!\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nSo he sent Imperial Guardian Ma Midi and Court Administrator Zhao Qi on the mission. When these men were arriving at the North of Yellow River, Yuan Shao sent out to welcome them thirty miles from his headquarters and received the imperial command with the greatest respect. Then the two officers went to Gongsun Zan and made known their errand. Gongsun Zan sent letters to his adversary proposing friendship. The two emissaries returned to report their task accomplished. Gongsun Zan drew off his army. He also sent up a memorial eulogizing Liu Bei, who was raised to the rank of Governor of Pingyuan.\n\nThe farewell between Liu Bei and Zhao Zilong was affecting. They held each other's hands a long time, their eyes streaming with tears, and could not tear themselves apart.\n\nZhao Zilong said with a sob, \"I used to think Gongsun Zan a true hero, but I see now that he is no different from Yuan Shao. They are both alike.\"\n\n\"But you are now in his service. We shall surely meet again,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nBoth men wept freely as they separated.\n\nNow Yuan Shu in Nanyang, hearing that his brother had come into Jizhou, sent to beg a thousand horses. The request was refused and enmity sprang up between the brothers. Yuan Shu also sent to Jingzhou to borrow grain, which Imperial Protector Liu Biao would not send. In his resentment, Yuan Shu wrote to Sun Jian, Governor of Changsha, trying to get him to attack Liu Biao. The letter ran like this:\n\n\"When Liu Biao stopped you on your way home, it was at the instigation of my brother. Now the same two have planned to fall upon your territories in the South Land, wherefore you should at once strike at Liu Biao. I will capture my brother for you and both resentments will be appeased. You will get Jingzhou, and I shall have Jizhou.\"\n\n\"I cannot bear Liu Biao,\" said Sun Jian as he finished reading this letter. \"He certainly did bar my way home, and I may wait many years for my revenge if I let slip this chance!\"\n\nHe called a council.\n\n\"You may not trust Yuan Shu. He is very deceitful,\" said Cheng Pu.\n\n\"I want revenge on my own part. What care I for his help?\" said Sun Jian.\n\nHe dispatched Huang Gai to prepare a river fleet, arm and provision them. Big warships were to take horses on board. The force soon set out.\n\nNews of these preparations came to Liu Biao, and he hastily summoned his advisers and commanders.\n\nKuai Liang told him to be free from anxiety, and said, \"Put General Huang Zu at the head of the Jiangxia army to make the first attack and you, Sir, support him with the forces from Xiangyang. Let Sun Jian come riding the rivers and straddling the lakes: What strength will he have left after arriving here?\"\n\nSo Liu Biao bade Huang Zu prepare to march, and a great army was assembled.\n\nHere it may be said that Sun Jian had four sons, all the issue of his wife who was of the Wu family. Their names in order were Sun Ce, Sun Quan, Sun Yi, and Sun Kuang. Sun Jian had a second wife who was the sister of his first wife. And the second wife bore him a son and a daughter, the former called Sun Lang, the latter Sun Ren. Sun Jian had also adopted a son from a Yu family and named him Sun Hu. And he had a younger brother named Sun Jing.\n\nAs Sun Jian was leaving on this expedition, his brother Sun Jing with all his six sons stood in front of his steed and dissuaded him, saying, \"Dong Zhuo is the real ruler of the state, for the Emperor is a weakling. The whole country is in rebellion, everyone is scrambling for territory. Our area is comparatively peaceful, and it is wrong to begin a war merely for the sake of a little resentment. I pray you, brother, think before you start.\"\n\nSun Jian replied, \"Brother, say no more. I desire to make my strength felt throughout the empire, and shall I not avenge my injuries?\"\n\n\"Then Father, if you must go, let me accompany you,\" said the eldest son Sun Ce.\n\nThis request was granted, and father and son embarked to go to ravage the city of Fankou.\n\nNow Huang Zu had placed archers and crossbowmen along the river bank. When the ships approached, a flight of arrows met them. Sun Jian ordered his troops to remain under cover in the ships, which then sailed to and fro, drawing the fire for three days. Several times the ships pretended to land, and this drew showers of arrows from the bank. At last the arrows of the defenders were all shot away and Sun Jian, who collected them, found he had many myriads. Then with a fair wind Sun Jian's troops shot them back to the enemy. Those on the bank were thrown into great disorder and retired. The army then landed. Two divisions led by Cheng Pu and Huang Gai set out for Huang Zu's camp along different roads, and between them marched Han Dang. Under this triple attack Huang Zu was worsted. He left Fankou and hastened to Dengcheng.\n\nLeaving the ships under the command of Huang Gai, Sun Jian led the pursuing force. Huang Zu came out of his city and drew up for battle in the open country. When Sun Jian had disposed his army, he rode out to the standard. Sun Ce, clad in armor, placed himself beside his father.\n\nHuang Zu rode out with two generals \u2014 Zhang Hui from Jiangxia and Chen Sheng from Xiangyang.\n\nFlourishing his whip, Huang Zu abused his enemy, \"You swarm of rebels from the south! Why do you invade the land of a scion of the ruling house?\"\n\nZhang Hui challenged to combat, and Han Dang went out to accept. The two champions fought thirty bouts, and then Chen Sheng, seeing his fellow general becoming exhausted, rode to his aid. Sun Jian saw Chen Sheng coming, laid aside his spear, reached for his bow, and shot an arrow wounding Chen Sheng in the face. He fell from his horse. Panic seized upon Zhang Hui at the fall of his comrade, and he could no longer defend himself. Then Han Dang with a slash of his sword clove Zhang Hui's skull in twain.\n\nBoth having fallen, Cheng Pu galloped up to make prisoner of Huang Zu, who threw off his helmet, slipped from his steed, and mingled for safety among his troops. Sun Jian led on the attack and drove the enemy to the Han River where he ordered Huang Gai to move the fleet upriver and moor there.\n\nHuang Zu led his defeated troops back and told Liu Biao, saying, \"Sun Jian was too strong for my army!\"\n\nKuai Liang was called in to advise, and he said, \"Our newly defeated soldiers have no heart for fighting now. Therefore we must fortify our position, while we seek help from Yuan Shao. Then we can extricate ourselves.\"\n\n\"A stupid move!\" said Cai Mao. \"The enemy is at the city gates: Shall we fold our hands and wait to be slain? Give me troops and I will go out and fight to the finish!\"\n\nSo Cai Mao was placed in command of ten thousand troops and went out to the Xian Hills where he drew up his battle line. Sun Jian led the invaders, now flushed with success.\n\nWhen Cai Mao approached, Sun Jian looked at him and said, \"He is brother-in-law to Liu Biao. Who will capture him?\"\n\nCheng Pu set his iron-spined lance and rode out. After a few bouts Cai Mao turned and fled. Sun Jian's army rode in and slaughtered till corpses filled the countryside, and Cai Mao rushed back and took refuge in Xiangyang.\n\nKuai Liang said, \"Cai Mao ought to be put to death by military law! This defeat was due to his obstinacy.\"\n\nBut Liu Biao was unwilling to punish the brother of his newly wedded wife.\n\nSun Jian surrounded Xiangyang and assailed the walls daily. One day a fierce gale sprang up, and the pole bearing his standard was broken.\n\n\"Very inauspicious!\" said Han Dang. \"We ought to go back.\"\n\nSun Jian said, \"I have won every battle and the city is on the point of falling. Shall I return because the wind felled a flagstaff?\"\n\nHe flouted the advice and attacked the walls still more vigorously.\n\nWithin the city the defenders had seen an omen.\n\nKuai Liang told Liu Biao, \"Last night I saw that a great star fall into the sky corresponding to Sun Jian's territory. I calculated that it inferred the fall of Sun Jian.\"\n\nThen Kuai Liang advised Liu Biao to seek help from Yuan Shao as quickly as possible.\n\nSo Liu Biao wrote. Then he asked who would undertake to fight his way through the blockade with the letter. One Lu Gong, a warrior of great strength, offered himself for this service.\n\nKuai Liang said, \"If you undertake this service, listen to my advice. You will have five hundred soldiers: Choose good bowmen. Dash through the enemy's formation and make for Xian Hills. You will be pursued; but send a hundred soldiers up the hill to prepare large stones, and place a hundred archers in ambush in the woods. These are not to flee from the pursuers but to beguile them along devious ways round to the place where the boulders have been prepared. There stones will be rolled down and arrows shot. If you succeed, fire off a series of bombs as a signal, and the armies in the city will come out to help. If you are not pursued, get away as fast as possible. Tonight will be suitable as there is very little moon. Start at dusk.\"\n\nLu Gong having received these directions, prepared his force to carry them out. As soon as day began to close in, he went quietly out at the east gate.\n\nSun Jian was in his tent when he heard shouting, and a soldier came to report: \"There was a group of horsemen going out from the city!\"\n\nSun Jian at once mounted and rode out with thirty horsemen to discover the cause. Lu Gong's troops had already hidden themselves in the thick woods. Sun Jian rode ahead of his escort, and soon he found himself alone and close to the enemy. He called out to them to halt. Lu Gong at once turned back and came as if to fight. But they had only exchanged a single pass when Lu Gong again fled, taking the road among the hills. Sun Jian followed but soon lost sight of his foe.\n\nSun Jian turned up the hill. Then the gongs clanged and down the hills fell showers of stones, while from among the trees the arrows flew in clouds. Sun Jian was hit by several arrows and a huge stone crushed in his head. Both he and his steed were killed. Sun Jian was only thirty-seven years old at his death.\n\nHis escort was overpowered and every man of them slain. Then Lu Gong let off a series of bombs, the sign of success, as agreed. At this signal Huang Zu, Kuai Yue, and Cai Mao led three armies out of the city and fell upon the South Land troops, throwing them into the utmost confusion.\n\nWhen Huang Gai heard the sound of battle, he led up the troops from the ships. He met Huang Zu and took Huang Zu prisoner after a brief fight.\n\nCheng Pu set out to bear the sad news to Sun Ce. While he was seeking a way out, he came across Lu Gong. Cheng Pu at once put his horse at full speed and engaged Lu Gong. After a few bouts Lu Gong went down under a spear thrust. The battle became chaotic and continued till daylight broke, when each drew off his army. Liu Biao withdrew into the city.\n\nWhen Sun Ce returned to the river, he heard that his father had perished in the fight, and his body had been carried within the enemy's walls. He uttered a great cry, and the army joined him with wailing and tears.\n\n\"How can I return home leaving my father's corpse with them?\" cried Sun Ce.\n\nHuang Gai said, \"We have Huang Zu as our prisoner. Let one enter the city and discuss peace, giving up our prisoner for our lord's body.\"\n\nHe had barely finished speaking when an officer in the army, Huan Ji, offered himself as messenger, saying, \"I am an old friend of Liu Biao. I volunteer to take the mission.\"\n\nSun Ce agreed. So Huan Ji went and peace was discussed.\n\nLiu Biao told Huan Ji, saying, \"The body is already laid in a coffin and ready to be delivered as soon as Huang Zu returned. Let us both cease fighting and never again invade each other's territories.\"\n\nHuan Ji thanked him and took his leave.\n\nBut as Huan Ji went down the steps, Kuai Liang suddenly broke in, saying, \"No, no! Let me speak and I will see to it that not a single enemy can survive. I pray you first put this man to death and then to employ my means.\"\n\nPursuing his enemy, Sun Jian dies;\n\nOn a peaceful mission, Huan Ji is threatened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Wang Yun Prepares The Chaining Scheme; Dong Zhuo Rages At Phoenix Pavilion.\n\nThis is what Kuai Liang said, \"Sun Jian is now gone, and his children are but youths. Seize this moment of weakness to break into the South Land, and it is yours in one beat of the drum. If you return the corpse and make peace, you give them time to grow powerful, and evil will ensue to Jingzhou.\"\n\n\"How can I leave Huang Zu in their hands?\" said Liu Biao.\n\n\"Why not sacrifice this blundering warrior for a region?\"\n\n\"But he is my dear friend, and to abandon him is wrong.\"\n\nSo Huan Ji was allowed to return to his own side with the understanding that Sun Jian's dead body should be given in exchange. Sun Ce freed his prisoner, brought away his father's coffin, and the fighting ceased. Sun Jian was interred in the plains of Que. When the ceremonies were over, Sun Ce led his army home again.\n\nIn Changsha, one of the territories south of the Great River, Sun Ce set himself to the task of ruling well. Being humble and generous, he invited to his side humans of wisdom and valor and so bore himself that all the best and bravest of the country gathered about him.\n\nMeanwhile, Dong Zhuo at Capital Changan, when he heard of the death of the turbulent Sun Jian, said, \"An evil that pressed hard upon my heart has been removed!\"\n\nHe asked what children Sun Jian had left, and when they told him the eldest was but seventeen, he dismissed all anxiety from his thoughts.\n\nFrom this time forward his arrogance and domineering spirit waxed worse and worse. He styled himself \"Imperial Rector\", a name full of honor, and in all his behavior aped imperial state. He created his younger brother, Dong Min, Lord of Huazhou and made him Commander of the Left Army. A nephew, Dong Huang, was made Court Counselor and placed in command of the Palace Guard, and everyone of his clan, young or old, was ennobled. Eighty miles from the capital Dong Zhuo laid out a city called Meiwo, an exact replica of Changan, with its palaces, granaries, treasuries, and magazines, and employed a quarter of a million people to build it. Here he accumulated supplies sufficient for twenty years. He selected eight hundred of the most beautiful maidens and sent them to dwell in his new city. The stores of wealth in every form were incalculable. All his family and retainers found quarters in this city.\n\nDong Zhuo visited his city at intervals of a month or so, and every visit was like an imperial progress, with booths by the roadside to refresh the officials and courtiers who attended him to the northwest Royal Gate and saw him start.\n\nOn one occasion Dong Zhuo spread a great feast for all those assembled to witness his departure; and while it was in progress, there arrived a large number of rebels from the north who had voluntarily surrendered. Dong Zhuo had them brought before him as he sat at table and meted out to them wanton cruelties. The hands of this one were lopped off, the feet of that; one had his eyes gouged out; another lost his tongue. Some were boiled to death. Shrieks of agony arose to the very heavens, and the courtiers were faint with terror. But the author of the misery ate and drank, chatted and smiled as if nothing was going on.\n\nAnother day Dong Zhuo was presiding at a great gathering of officials who were seated in two long rows. After the wine had gone up and down several times, Lu Bu entered and whispered a few words in his master's ear.\n\nDong Zhuo smiled and said, \"He was always so. Take Minister of Works Zhang Wan outside!\"\n\nThe others all turned pale. In a little time a serving man brought the head of their fellow guest on a red dish and showed it to their host. They nearly died with fright.\n\n\"Do not fear,\" said Dong Zhuo smiling. \"Minister Zhang Wan was in league with Yuan Shu to assassinate me. A letter he wrote fell by mistake into the hands of my son, so I have had him put to death. You gentlemen, who have no reason, need have no fear.\"\n\nThe officials hastened to disperse. One of them, Minister of the Interior Wang Yun, who had witnessed all this, returned to his palace very pensive and much distressed. The same evening, a bright moonlight night, he took his staff and went strolling in his private garden. Standing near one of the creeper trellises, he gazed up at the sky and the tears rolled down his cheeks. Suddenly he heard a rustle in the Peony Pavilion and someone sighing deeply. Stealthily creeping near, he saw there one of the household singing girls named Diao Chan.\n\nThis maiden had been brought up in his palace, where she had been taught to sing and dance. At twenty-one, she was a pretty and clever girl whom Wang Yun regarded more as a daughter than a dependant.\n\nAfter listening for some time, Wang Yun suddenly called out, \"What mischief are you up to there, you naughty girl?\"\n\nThe maiden dropped on her knees in terror, saying, \"Would thy unworthy handmaid dare to do anything wrong?\"\n\n\"Then what are you sighing about out here in the darkness?\"\n\n\"May thy handmaid speak from the bottom of her heart?\"\n\n\"Tell me the whole truth. Do not conceal anything.\"\n\nAnd the girl said, \"Thy handmaid has been the recipient of bountiful kindness. She has been taught to sing and dance and been treated so kindly that were she torn in pieces for her lord's sake, it would not repay a thousandth part. She has noticed lately that her lord's brows have been knit in distress and knows it is on account of the state troubles. But she has not dared to ask. This evening he seemed sadder than ever, and she was miserable on her lord's account. But she did not know she would be seen. Could she be of any use, she would not shrink from a myriad deaths.\"\n\nA sudden idea came to Wang Yun, and he stuck the ground with his staff. And he said, \"Who would think that the fate of Han lay in your palm? Come with me!\"\n\nThe girl followed him into the house. There he dismissed all the waiting attendants, placed Diao Chan on a chair, and bowed before her. She was frightened and threw herself on the ground, asking in terror what it all meant.\n\nSaid Wang Yun, \"You can sympathize with the people of Han!\"\n\nAnd the fount of his tears opened afresh.\n\n\"My lord, as thy handmaid said just now, use her in any way: Thy handmaid will never shrink,\" said the girl.\n\nWang Yun knelt, saying, \"The people are on the brink of destruction, the prince and his officers are in jeopardy, and you, you are the only savior. That wretch Dong Zhuo wants to depose the Emperor, and not a person among us can find means to stop him. Now he has a son, a bold warrior it is true, but both father and son have a weakness for beauty, and I am going to use what I may call the 'chaining plan'. I shall first propose you in marriage to Lu Bu and then, after you are betrothed, I shall present you to Dong Zhuo, and you will take every opportunity to force them asunder and turn sway their countenances from each other, cause the son to kill his adopted father and so put an end to the great evil. Thus you may restore the altars of the land that it may live again. All this lies within your power: Will you do it?\"\n\n\"Thy handmaid has promised not to recoil from death itself. You may use my poor self in any way, and I must do my best.\"\n\n\"But if this gets abroad then we are all lost!\"\n\n\"Fear not,\" said she. \"If thy handmaid does not show gratitude, may she perish beneath a myriad swords!\"\n\n\"Thank you, thank you!\" said Wang Yun.\n\nThen Wang Yun took from the family treasury many pearls and bade a cunning jeweler make therewith a fine golden headdress, which was sent as a present to Lu Bu. He was delighted and came to thank the donor. When Lu Bu arrived, he was met at the gate by Wang Yun himself and within found a table full of dainties for his delectation. He was conducted into a private apartment and placed in the seat of honor.\n\nLu Bu said, \"I am but a simple officer in the palace of a minister. You are an exalted officer of state. Why am I treated thus?\"\n\n\"Because in the whole land there is no hero your equal. Poor I bow not to an officer's rank; poor I bow to his ability.\"\n\nThis gratified Lu Bu mightily, and his host continued to praise and flatter and ply him with wine and to talk of the virtues of the Prime Minister and his henchman.\n\nLu Bu laughed and drank huge goblets.\n\nPresently most of the attendants were sent away, only a few kept to press the guest to drink.\n\nWhen the guest was very mellow, Wang Yun suddenly said, \"Let her come in!\"\n\nSoon appeared two attendants, dressed in white, leading between them the exquisite and fascinating Diao Chan.\n\n\"Who is this?\" said Lu Bu startled into sobriety.\n\n\"This is my little girl, Diao Chan. You will not be annoyed at my familiarity, will you? But you have been so very friendly, I thought you would like to see her.\"\n\nWang Yun bade Diao Chan present a goblet of wine, and her eyes met those of the warrior.\n\nWang Yun feigning intoxication said, \"My child begs you, General, to take a cup or two. We all depend upon you, all our house.\"\n\nLu Bu begged Diao Chan to sit down. She pretended to wish to retire.\n\nHer master pressed her to remain, saying, \"The General is a dear friend. You may stay.\"\n\nSo she took a seat modestly near her master.\n\nLu Bu kept his gaze fixed upon the maid, while he swallowed cup after cup of wine.\n\n\"I should like to present her to you as a handmaid: Would you accept?\" said Wang Yun.\n\nThe guest started up.\n\n\"If that is so, you may rely upon my abject gratitude,\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"We will choose a propitious day ere long and send her to the palace.\"\n\nLu Bu was overjoyed. He could not keep his eyes off Diao Chan, and loving glances flashed from her liquid eyes.\n\nHowever the time came for the guest to leave, and Wang Yun said, \"I would ask you to remain the night, but the Prime Minister might suspect something.\"\n\nLu Bu thanked him again and again and departed.\n\nSome few days later when Wang Yun was at court and Lu Bu was absent, Wang Yun bowed low before Dong Zhuo and said, \"I wish that you would deign to come to dine at my lowly cottage: Could your noble thought bend that way?\"\n\n\"Should you invite me, I would certainly hasten,\" was the reply.\n\nWang Yun thanked him. Then Wang Yun went home and prepared in the reception hall a feast in which figured every delicacy from land and sea. Beautiful embroideries surrounded the chief seat in the center, and elegant curtains were hung within and without. At noon next day, when Dong Zhuo arrived, Wang Yun met him at the gate in full court costume. Wang Yun stood by while Dong Zhuo stepped out of his chariot, and Dong Zhuo and a host of one hundred armed guards crowded into the hall. Dong Zhuo took his seat at the top, his suite fell into two lines right and left, while Wang Yun stood humbly at the lower end. Dong Zhuo bade his people conduct Wang Yun to a place beside himself.\n\nSaid Wang Yun, \"The great Prime Minister's abundant virtue is as the high mountains. Neither the ancient sages \u2014 Yi Yin and the Duke of Zhou \u2014 could attain thereto.\"\n\nDong Zhuo smiled. They bore in the dishes and the wine, and the music began. Wang Yun plied his guest with assiduous flattery and studied deference. When it grew late and the wine had done its work, Dong Zhuo was invited to the inner chamber. So he sent away his guards and went.\n\nHere the host raised a goblet and drank to his guest, saying, \"From my youth up I have understood something of astrology and have been studying the aspect of the heavens. I read that the days of Han are numbered, and that the great Prime Minister's merits command the regard of all the world, as when King Shun succeeded King Yao, and King Yu continued the work of King Shun, all by the strength of their own merits, conforming to the mind of Heaven and the desire of people.\"\n\n\"How dare I expect this?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"From the days of old, those who walk in the way have replaced those who deviate therefrom; those who lack virtue have fallen before those who possess it. Can one escape fate?\"\n\n\"If indeed the decree of Heaven devolves on me, you shall be held the first in merit!\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nWang Yun bowed. Then lights were brought in and all the attendants were dismissed, save the serving maids to hand the wine. So the evening went on.\n\nPresently Wang Yun said, \"The music of these everyday musicians is too commonplace for your ear, but there happens to be in the house a little maid that might please you.\"\n\n\"Excellent!\" said the guest.\n\nThen a curtain was lowered. The shrill tones of reed instruments rang through the room, and presently some attendants led forward Diao Chan, who then danced on the outside of the curtain.\n\nA poem praises her:\n\n\u2003For a palace this maiden was born,\n\n\u2003So timid, so graceful, so slender,\n\n\u2003Like a tiny bird flitting at morn\n\n\u2003Over the dew-laden lily buds tender.\n\n\u2003Were this exquisite maid only mine,\n\n\u2003For never a mansion I'd pine.\n\nAnother poem runs thus:\n\n\u2003The music falls, the dancer comes, a swallow gliding in,\n\n\u2003A dainty little damsel, soft as silk;\n\n\u2003Her beauty captivates the guest yet saddens him within,\n\n\u2003For he must soon depart and leave her there.\n\n\u2003She smiles; no gold could buy that smile, no other smiled so,\n\n\u2003No need to deck her form with jewels rare.\n\n\u2003But when the dance is over and coy glances come and go,\n\n\u2003Then who shall be the chosen of the fair?\n\nThe dance ended. Dong Zhuo bade them lead the maiden in, and she came, bowing low as she approached him. He was much taken with her beauty and modest grace.\n\n\"Who is she?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"A singing girl. Her name is Diao Chan.\"\n\n\"Then can she sing?\"\n\nThe master bade her sing, and she did so to the accompaniment of castanets. There is a measure describing her youthful beauty:\n\n\u2003You stand, a dainty maiden,\n\n\u2003Your cherry lips so bright,\n\n\u2003Your teeth so pearly white,\n\n\u2003Your fragrant breath love-laden;\n\n\u2003Yet is your tongue a sword;\n\n\u2003Cold death is the reward\n\n\u2003Of loving thee, O maiden!\n\nDong Zhuo was delighted and praised her warmly. She was told to present a goblet of wine to the guest which he took from her hands and then asked her age.\n\nShe replied, \"Thy unworthy handmaid is twenty-one.\"\n\n\"A perfect fairy!\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nThen Wang Yun rose and said, \"If the Prime Minister would not mind, I should like to offer him this little maid.\"\n\n\"How could I be grateful enough for such a kindness!\"\n\n\"She would be most fortunate if she could be your servant,\" said Wang Yun.\n\nDong Zhuo thanked his host warmly.\n\nThen the orders were given to prepare a closed carriage and convey Diao Chan to the Prime Minister's palace.\n\nSoon after Dong Zhuo took his leave, and Wang Yun accompanied him the whole way.\n\nAfter he had taken leave, Wang Yun mounted to ride homeward. Half way he met two lines of guards with red lamps who were escorting Lu Bu who was on horseback and armed with his trident halberd.\n\nSeeing Wang Yun, Lu Bu at once reined in, stopped, seized him by the sleeve, and said angrily, \"You promised Diao Chan to me, and now you have given her to the Prime Minister: What foolery is this?\"\n\nWang Yun checked him, saying, \"This is no place to talk. I pray you come to my house.\"\n\nSo they went together, and Wang Yun led Lu Bu into a private room.\n\nAfter the usual exchange of polite greetings, Wang Yun said, \"Why do you find fault with me, General?\"\n\n\"Somebody told me that you had sent Diao Chan to the Prime Minister's palace in a covered carriage: What does it mean?\"\n\n\"Of course you do not understand. Yesterday when I was at court, the Prime Minister told me he had something to talk to me about in my own house. So naturally I prepared for his coming, and while we were at dinner he said, 'I have heard something of a girl named Diao Chan whom you have promised to my son Lu Bu. I thought it was mere rumor so I wanted to ask if it was true. Beside I should like to see her.' I could not say no, so she came in and made her bow to the lord of lords. Then he said that it was a lucky day and he would take her away with him and betroth her to you. Just think, Sir: When the Prime Minister had come himself, could I stop him?\"\n\n\"You were not so very wrong,\" said Lu Bu. \"But for a time I had misunderstood you. I owe you an apology.\"\n\n\"The girl has a small trousseau, which I will send as soon as she has gone over to your dwelling.\"\n\nLu Bu thanked him and went away. Next day he went into the palace to find out the truth, but could hear nothing. Then he made his way into the private quarters and questioned the maids. Presently one told him that the Imperial Rector had brought home a new bedfellow the night before and was not up yet. Lu Bu was very angry. Next he crept round behind his master's sleeping apartment.\n\nBy this time Diao Chan had risen and was dressing her hair at the window. Looking out she saw a long shadow fall across the little lake. She recognized the headdress, and peeping around she saw it was indeed no other than Lu Bu. Thereupon she contracted her eyebrows, simulating the deepest grief, and with her dainty handkerchief she wiped her eyes again and again. Lu Bu stood watching her a long time.\n\nSoon after he went in to give morning greeting. Dong Zhuo was sitting in the reception room.\n\nSeeing his henchman, Dong Zhuo asked, \"Is there anything new?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" was the reply.\n\nLu Bu waited while Dong Zhuo took his morning meal. As he stood beside his master, he glanced over at the curtain and saw a woman there behind the screen showing a half face from time to time and throwing amorous glances at him. He felt it was his beloved, and his thoughts flew to her. Presently Dong Zhuo noticed his expression and began to feel suspicious.\n\n\"If there is nothing, you may go,\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nLu Bu sulkily withdrew.\n\nDong Zhuo now thought of nothing but his new mistress and for more than a month neglected all affairs, devoting himself entirely to pleasure. Once he was a little indisposed, and Diao Chan was constantly at his side, never even undressing to show her solicitude. She gratified his every whim. Dong Zhuo grew more and more fond of her.\n\nOne day Lu Bu went to inquire after his father's health. Dong Zhuo was asleep, and Diao Chan was sitting at the head of his couch. Leaning forward she gazed at the visitor, with one hand pointed to her heart, the other at Dong Zhuo asleep, and her tears fell. Lu Bu felt heartbroken. Dong Zhuo drowsily opened his eyes; and seeing his son's gaze fixed on something behind him, he turned over and saw who it was.\n\nHe angrily rebuked his son, saying, \"Dare you make love to my beauty?\"\n\nHe told the servants to turn Lu Bu out, shouting, \"Never let him enter here again!\"\n\nLu Bu went off home very wrath. Meeting Li Ru, he told Li Ru the cause of his anger.\n\nThe adviser hastened to see his master and said, \"Sir, you aspire to be ruler of the empire. Why then for a small fault do you blame the General? If he turns against you, it is all over.\"\n\n\"Then what can I do?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"Recall him tomorrow; treat him well; overwhelm him with gifts and fair words; and all will be well.\"\n\nSo Dong Zhuo did so. He sent for Lu Bu and was very gracious and said, \"I was irritable and hasty yesterday owing to my illness and I wronged you, I know. Forgive me.\"\n\nHe gave Lu Bu three hundred ounces of gold and twenty rolls of brocade. And so the quarrel was made up. But though Lu Bu's body was with his adopted father Dong Zhuo, his heart was with his promised bride Diao Chan.\n\nDong Zhuo having quite recovered went to court again, and Lu Bu followed him as usual. One day, seeing Dong Zhuo deep in conversation with the Emperor, Lu Bu, armed as he was, went out of the Palace and rode off to his chief's residence. He tied up his steed at the entrance and, halberd in hand, went to the private apartment to seek his love. He found Diao Chan, and she told him to go out into the garden where she would join him soon. He went, taking his halberd with him, and he leaned against the rail of the Phoenix Pavilion to wait for Diao Chan.\n\nAfter a long time she appeared, swaying gracefully as she made her way under the drooping willows and parting the flowers as she passed. She was exquisite, a perfect fairy from the Palace of the Moon.\n\nTears were in her eyes as she came up and said, \"Though I am not the Minister's real daughter, yet he treated me as his own child. The desire of my life was fulfilled when he plighted me to you. But oh! to think of the wickedness of the Prime Minister, stealing my poor self as he did. I suffered so much. I longed to die, only that I had not told you the real truth. So I lived on, bearing my shame as best as I could. Now that I have seen you, I can end it all. My poor sullied body is no longer fit to serve a hero. I can die before your eyes and so prove how true I am!\"\n\nThus speaking she seized the curving rail and started into the lily pond. Lu Bu caught her in his strong arms and wept as he held her close.\n\n\"I knew it: I always knew your heart!\" he sobbed. \"Only we never had a chance to speak.\"\n\nShe threw her arms about Lu Bu.\n\n\"If I cannot be your wife in this life, I will in the ages to come,\" she whispered.\n\n\"If I do not marry you in this life, I am no hero,\" said he.\n\n\"Every day is a year long. O pity me! Rescue me! My lord!\"\n\n\"I have only stolen away for a brief moment, and I am afraid that old rebel will suspect something, so I must not stay too long,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nDiao Chan clung to his robe, saying, \"If you fear the old thief so much, I shall never see another sunrise!\"\n\nLu Bu stopped.\n\n\"Give me a little time to think,\" said he.\n\nAnd he picked up his halberd to go.\n\n\"In the deep seclusion of the harem, I heard the stories of your prowess. You were the one man who excelled all others. Little did I think that you of all heroes would rest content under the dominion of another.\"\n\nAnd tears rained again!\n\nA wave of shame flooded his face. Leaning his halberd against the railing, he turned and clasped the girl to his breast, soothing her with fond words. The lovers held each other close, swaying to and fro with emotion. They could not bring themselves to say farewell.\n\nIn the meantime Dong Zhuo missed his henchman, and doubt filled his heart. Hastily taking leave of the Emperor, he mounted his chariot and returned to his palace. There at the gate stood Lu Bu's well known steed Red Hare, riderless. Dong Zhuo questioned the doorkeepers, and they told him the general was within. He sent away his attendants and went alone to the private apartments. Lu Bu was not there. He called Diao Chan, but there was no reply. He asked where she was, and the waiting maids told him she was in the garden among the flowers.\n\nSo Dong Zhuo went into the garden, and there he saw the lovers in the pavilion in most tender talk. Lu Bu's trident halberd was leaning on the railing beside him.\n\nA howl of rage escaped Dong Zhuo and startled the lovers. Lu Bu turned, saw who it was, and ran away. Dong Zhuo caught up the halberd and ran in pursuit. But Lu Bu was fleet of foot while his master was very stout. Seeing no hope of catching the runaway, Dong Zhuo hurled the halberd. Lu Bu fended it off and it fell to the ground. Dong Zhuo picked it up and ran on. But by this time Lu Bu was far ahead. Just as Dong Zhuo was running out at the garden gate, he dashed full tilt against another man running in, and down he went.\n\nSurged up his wrath within him as the billows heavenward leap.\n\nCrashed his unwieldy body to earth in a shapeless heap." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Lu Bu Kills Dong Zhuo For Wang Yun; Li Jue Attacks The Capital On Jia Xu's Advice.\n\nThe person who collided with the irate Dong Zhuo was his most trusty adviser Li Ru. Li Ru had not fallen in spite of the shock and at once scrambled to help Dong Zhuo to regain his feet and led him inside to the library, where they sat down.\n\n\"What were you coming about?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"Happening to be passing your gates, I heard that you had gone into your private garden to look for your adopted son. Then came Lu Bu running and crying out that you wanted to kill him, and I was coming in as fast as I could to intercede for him when I accidentally collided with you. I am very sorry! I deserve death.\"\n\n\"The wretch! How could I bear to see him toying with my fair one? I will be the death of his yet!\"\n\n\"Your Graciousness is making a mistake. It is the 'plucked tassel' story over again. But if you remember the banquet of old time where all guests were to tear the tassels of their hats. In that banquet, King Zhuang of Chu made no fuss about the liberties taken with his queen, although the hat-tassel in her hand betrayed the culprit Jiang Xiong. His restraint stood him good stead, for the same Jiang Xiong saved his life when he was hemmed in by the soldiers of Qin. After all Diao Chan is only a handmaid, but Lu Bu is your trustiest friend and most dreaded commander. If you took this chance of making the girl over to him, your kindness would win his undying gratitude. I beg you, Sir, to think over it well.\"\n\nDong Zhuo hesitated a long time. He sat murmuring to himself. Presently he said, \"What you say is right. I must think over it.\"\n\nLi Ru felt satisfied. He took leave of his master and went away. Dong Zhuo went to his private rooms and called Diao Chan.\n\n\"What were you doing there with Lu Bu?\" said he.\n\nShe began to weep, saying, \"Thy handmaid was in the garden among the flowers, when he rushed in on me. I was frightened and ran away. He asked why I ran away from a son of the family and pursued me right to the Phoenix Pavilion, where you saw us. He had that halberd in his hand all the time. I felt he was a vicious man and would force me to his will, so I tried to throw myself into the lily pond, but he caught me in his arms and held me so that I was helpless. Luckily just at that moment you came and saved my life!\"\n\n\"Suppose I send you to him,\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nStunned, she wailed profusely, \"What have thy handmaid done? My honor of serving Your Highness could not bear to be given to a mere underling! Never! I would rather die!\"\n\nAnd with this she snatched down a dagger hanging on the wall to kill herself.\n\nDong Zhuo plucked it from her hand and, throwing his arms about her, and cried, \"I was only joking!\"\n\nShe lay back on his breast hiding her face and sobbing bitterly.\n\n\"This is the doing of that Li Ru,\" said she. \"He is much too thick with Lu Bu. He suggested that, I know. Little he cares for the Imperial Rector's reputation or my life. Oh! I could eat him alive!\"\n\n\"Do you think I could bear to lose you?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"Though you love me yet I must not stay here. That Lu Bu will try to ruin me if I do. I fear him!\"\n\n\"We will go to Meiwo tomorrow, you and I, and we will be happy together and have no cares.\"\n\nShe dried her tears and thanked him. Next day Li Ru came again to persuade Dong Zhuo to send the damsel to Lu Bu.\n\n\"This is a propitious day,\" said Li Ru.\n\n\"He and I standing in the relation of father and son. I cannot very well do that,\" said Dong Zhuo. \"But I will say no more about his fault. You may tell him so and soothe him as well as you can.\"\n\n\"You are not being beguiled by the woman, are you?\" said Li Ru.\n\nDong Zhuo colored, saying, \"Would you like to give your wife to some body else? Do not talk about this any further. It would be better not to!\"\n\nLi Ru left the chamber. When he got outside, he cast his eyes up to heaven, saying, \"We are dead people \u2014 slain by the hand of this girl!\"\n\nWhen a scholar of history reached this episode he wrote a verse or two:\n\n\u2003Just introduce a woman,\n\n\u2003Conspiracies succeed;\n\n\u2003Of soldiers, or their weapons,\n\n\u2003There really is no need.\n\n\u2003They fought their bloody battles,\n\n\u2003And doughty deeds were done;\n\n\u2003But in a garden summer house\n\n\u2003The victory was won.\n\nThe order was given to journey to Meiwo, and the whole body of officers assembled to add luster to the start. Diao Chan, from her carriage, saw Lu Bu among the crowd. She at once dropped her eyes and assumed an appearance of deepest melancholy. After the cavalcade started and when her carriage had almost disappeared in the distance, the disappointed lover reined in his steed on a mount whence he could watch the dust that rose around it. Unutterable sadness filled his heart.\n\nSuddenly a voice said, \"Why do you not accompany the Prime Minister, General, instead of standing here and sighing?\"\n\nIt was Wang Yun.\n\n\"I have been confined to the house by illness these few days,\" continued he, \"so I have not seen you. But I had to struggle out today to see the Prime Minister set off. This meeting is most fortunate. But why were you sighing?\"\n\n\"Just on account of that daughter of yours,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nFeigning great astonishment, Wang Yun said, \"So long a time and yet not given to you!\"\n\n\"The old ruffian has fallen in love with her himself!\"\n\n\"Surely this cannot be true.\"\n\nLu Bu related the whole story while Wang Yun listened, silent, but stamping on the ground as with irritation and perplexity.\n\nAfter a long time Wang Yun said, \"I did not think he was such a beast!\"\n\nTaking Lu Bu by the hand, Wang Yun said, \"Come to my house, and we will talk it over.\"\n\nSo they went away together to the house and retired to a secret room. After some refreshments, Lu Bu told the whole story of the episode in Phoenix Pavilion just as it happened.\n\nWang Yun said, \"He seems to have corrupted my little girl and has stolen your wife. He will be an object of shame and ridicule to the whole world. And those who do not laugh at him will laugh at you and me. Alas! I am old and powerless and can do nothing. More pitied than blamed! But you, General, you are a warrior, the greatest hero in the world. Yet you have been put to this shame and exposed to this contempt!\"\n\nA wave of fierce wrath rolled up in Lu Bu. Banging the table he shouted and roared.\n\nHis host ostentatiously tried to calm him, saying, \"I forgot myself. I should not have spoken like that. Do not be so angry, I pray!\"\n\n\"I will kill the wretch, I swear it! In no other way can I wash away my shame.\"\n\n\"No, no! Do not say such a thing,\" said Wang Yun, putting his hand over the other's mouth. \"You will bring trouble on poor me and my family!\"\n\n\"When one is born great, one cannot be patient for long under another person's domination!\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"It needs someone greater than the Prime Minister to limit the scope of such talents as yours.\"\n\nLu Bu said, \"I would not mind killing the old wretch were it not for the relation in which we stand. I fear to provoke the hostile criticism of posterity.\"\n\nWang Yun shook his head, saying, \"Your name is Lu Bu; his is Dong Zhuo. Where was the paternal feeling when he threw the halberd at you?\"\n\n\"I would have been misled, had you not said that!\" said Lu Bu hotly.\n\nWang Yun saw the effect of his words and continued, \"It would be a loyal deed to restore the House of Han, and history would hand down your name to posterity perpetually fragrant. If you lend your aid to Dong Zhuo, you will be a traitor and your name will be tainted through all ages.\"\n\nLu Bu rose from his place and bowed to Wang Yun.\n\n\"I have decided,\" said he. \"You need not fear, Sir.\"\n\n\"But yet you may fail and bring upon yourself misfortune,\" said Wang Yun.\n\nLu Bu drew his dagger, pricking his arm, and swearing by the blood that flowed.\n\nWang Yun fell on his knees and thanked him.\n\n\"Then the Han sacrifices will not be cut off, and you will be their savior. But this must remain a secret, and I will tell you how the plot shall be worked out.\"\n\nLu Bu took leave with great emotion.\n\nWang Yun took into his confidence two colleagues, Court Administrator Shisun Rui and Imperial Commander Huang Wan.\n\nShisun Rui said, \"The moment is favorable. The Emperor has just recovered from his illness, and we can dispatch an able talker to Meiwo to persuade Dong Zhuo to come here to discuss affairs. Meanwhile we will obtain a secret decree as authority for Lu Bu to lay an ambush just inside the Palace gates to kill Dong Zhuo as he enters. This is the best plan to adopt.\"\n\n\"But who would dare to go?\" said Huang Wan.\n\n\"Li Su, General of the Imperial Tiger Army, would go. He belongs to the same region as Lu Bu and is very angry with the Prime Minister for not advancing him. His going would assure us the plan would be completed.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Wang Yun. \"Let us see what Lu Bu thinks of it.\"\n\nWhen Lu Bu was consulted, he told them that this Li Su's persuasion had led him to kill Ding Yuan, his former benefactor.\n\n\"If Li Su refuses this mission, I will kill him,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nSo they sent for Li Su.\n\nWhen Li Su arrived, Lu Bu said, \"Formerly you talked me into killing Ding Yuan and going over to Dong Zhuo. Now we find Dong Zhuo means evil for the Emperor and is an oppressor of the people. His iniquities are many, and he is hated by gods and humans. You go to Meiwo, say you have a command from the Emperor to summon the Prime Minister to the Palace. He will come, and he will be put to death. You will have the credit of being loyal and restoring the Hans. Will you undertake this?\"\n\n\"I also wish to slay him,\" was the reply. \"But I could not find anyone to assist me. How can I hesitate? Your intervention is directly from Heaven!\"\n\nAnd Li Su snapped an arrow in twain as register of his oath.\n\n\"If this succeeds, what glorious rank will be yours!\" said Wang Yun.\n\nNext day Li Su, with a small escort, set out for Meiwo and announced himself as bearer of a decree. He was conducted into Dong Zhuo's presence. After he had made his obeisance, Dong Zhuo asked what the decree was.\n\n\"His Majesty has recovered and wishes his ministers to meet him in the Palace to consider the question of his abdication in your favor. That is what this summons means.\"\n\n\"What does Wang Yun think of the scheme?\"\n\n\"Wang Yun has already begun the construction of the Terrace of Abdication and only awaits my lord's arrival.\"\n\n\"Last night I dreamed a dragon coiled round my body,\" said Dong Zhuo greatly pleased, \"and now I get this happy tidings! I must not neglect the opportunity.\"\n\nSo Dong Zhuo gave instructions to his four trusted generals for the safekeeping of his city. Li Jue, Guo Si, Fan Chou, and Zhang Ji were to guard Meiwo with three thousand troops of the Flying Bear Army. Then Dong Zhuo announced his intention of starting on the morrow.\n\n\"When I am Emperor, you shall be Commander of Capital District,\" said he.\n\n\"Your minister thanks you,\" said Li Su.\n\nDong Zhuo went to bid farewell to his ninety-year-old mother.\n\n\"Whither are you going, my son?\" asked she.\n\n\"I go to receive the abdication of Han; soon you will be the Empress Dowager!\"\n\n\"I have been feeling nervous and creepy these few days. It is a bad sign.\"\n\n\"Anyone about to become the Mother of the State must have premonitions,\" said her son.\n\nHe left her with these words.\n\nJust before starting, he said to Diao Chan, \"When I am Emperor, you shall be Lady of the Palace.\"\n\nShe bowed low thanking him, but she knew and inwardly rejoiced.\n\nDong Zhuo went out, mounted his carriage, and began his journey to Capital Changan with an imposing escort. Less than ten miles the wheel of his carriage broke. He left it and mounted a horse. Another ten miles the horse snorted and neighed, threw up his head and snapped the reins.\n\nDong Zhuo turned to Li Su and asked what these things portended.\n\n\"It means that you are going to receive the abdication of the Hans, which is to renew all things: To mount the jeweled chariot and sit in the golden saddle.\"\n\nAnd Dong Zhuo was pleased and convinced with this answer. During the second day's journey a violent gale sprang up, and the sky became covered with a thick mist.\n\n\"What does this mean?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nThe wily Li Su had an interpretation for this also, saying, \"You are ascending to the place of the dragon: There must be bright light and lurid vapor to dignify your majestic approach.\"\n\nDong Zhuo had no more doubts. He presently arrived and found many officials waiting without the city gate to receive him, all but Li Ru who was ill and unable to leave his chamber. He entered and proceeded to his own palace, where Lu Bu came to congratulate him.\n\n\"When I sit on the throne, you shall command the whole armies of the empire, horse and foot,\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\nThat night Dong Zhuo slept in the midst of his escort. In the suburbs that evening some children at play were singing a little ditty, and the words drifted into the bedchamber on the wind.\n\n\u2003\"The grass in the meadow looks fresh now and green,\n\n\u2003Yet wait but ten days, not a blade will be seen.\"\n\nThe song sounded ominous, but Li Su was again prepared with a happy interpretation: \"It only means that the Lius are about to disappear, and the Dongs to be exalted!\"\n\nNext morning at the first streak of dawn, Dong Zhuo prepared for his appearance at court. On the way he saw a Daoist, dressed in a black robe and wearing a white turban, who carried in his hand a tall staff with a long strip of white cloth attached. At each end of the cloth was drawn a mouth.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" said Dong Zhuo.\n\n\"He is a madman,\" said Li Su, and he told the guards to drive the fellow away.\n\nDong Zhuo went in and found all the officials in court dress lining the road. Li Su walked beside his carriage, a sword in his hand. When Li Su reached the north gate of the Forbidden City, he found the soldiers of Dong Zhuo drawn up outside and only the pushers of the Palace carriage, a twenty or so, were allowed to proceed further.\n\nWhen Dong Zhuo arrived near the Reception Hall, he saw that Wang Yun and all the other officials standing at the door were armed.\n\n\"Why are they all armed?\" said Dong Zhuo to Li Su.\n\nLi Su was silent as he helped push the carriage forward swiftly to the entrance.\n\nSuddenly Wang Yun shouted, \"The rebel is here! Where are the executioners?\"\n\nAt this call sprang from both sides soldiers armed with halberds and spears who attacked Dong Zhuo. But the breastplate he usually wore protected him, and spears could not penetrate it.\n\nHe sank down in the carriage, wounded in the arms, calling loudly for his son, \"Where is Lu Bu?\"\n\n\"Here, and with a decree to deal with a rebel!\" said Lu Bu, as he appeared in front of his \"father\".\n\nThereupon he thrust his trident halberd through the victim's throat. Then Li Su hacked off the head and held it up.\n\nLu Bu, his left hand holding his halberd, thrust his right hand into his bosom whence he drew the decree, crying, \"The decree was to slay the rebel Dong Zhuo \u2014 no other!\"\n\nThe whole assembly shouted, \"Wan shui! Live forever! O Emperor!\"\n\nA sympathetic poet has written a few lines in pity:\n\n\u2003Await the time, O noble, and be king,\n\n\u2003Or failing, reap the solace riches bring;\n\n\u2003Heaven never is partial, but severely just,\n\n\u2003Meiwo stood strong, yet now it lies in dust.\n\nThe lust of blood awakened, Lu Bu urged further slaughter, crying, \"Li Ru has been the main initiator for Dong Zhuo in many crimes! Who shall go and kill him?\"\n\nLi Su volunteered to go in search of him. But just then a shouting was heard at the gates, and it was told them that a household servant had brought Li Ru in bonds. Wang Yun ordered his immediate execution in the market place.\n\nDong Zhuo's head was exposed in a crowded thoroughfare (AD 192). He was very fat, and the guards made torches by sticking splints into the body, spilling the corpse's grease over the ground. The passers-by pelted the head and spurned the body with their feet.\n\nWang Yun ordered a force of fifty thousand under Lu Bu, Huangfu Song, and Li Su to destroy Meiwo. Learning the news of their master, Li Jue, Guo Si, Fan Chou, and Zhang Ji fled west swiftly through the night with their Flying Bear Army to Liangzhou Region.\n\nWhen arriving Meiwo, Lu Bu's first deed was to take Diao Chan into his charge. Then they slew every member of the Dong family, sparing none, not even Dong Zhuo's aged mother. The heads of Dong Zhuo's brother Dong Min and his nephew Dong Huang were publicly displayed in the market place. In Meiwo were hidden many young ladies of good families. These were set free. All properties were confiscated. The wealth was enormous \u2014 several hundred thousand ounces of gold, millions of silver coins, pearls, gems, silks, velvets, furs, grain stores.\n\nWhen they returned to report success, Wang Yun rewarded and feasted the soldiers. Banquets were held in the Ministry Hall to which all the officials were invited. They drank and congratulated each other. While the feasting was in progress it was announced that someone had come and was wailing over Dong Zhuo's corpse exposed in the market place.\n\n\"Dong Zhuo has been put to death,\" said Wang Yun, angrily. \"Every body is glad to be rid of him, and yet one is found to lament over him. Who is this?\"\n\nSo Wang Yun gave orders to arrest the mourner and bring him in. Soon he was brought in, and when they saw him all were startled. For he was no other than Court Counselor Cai Yong.\n\nWang Yun spoke to Cai Yong angrily, \"Dong Zhuo has been put to death as a rebel, and all the land rejoices. You, a Han minister, instead of rejoicing, weep for him. Why?\"\n\nCai Yong confessed his fault, saying, \"I am without talent, yet know what is right. I am not the man who turns my back on the dynasty and toward Dong Zhuo. Yet once I experienced his kindness, and I could not help mourning for him. I know my fault is grave, but I pray you regard the reasons. If you will leave my head and only cut off my feet, you may use me to continue the History of Han, whereby I may have the good fortune to be allowed to expiate my fault.\"\n\nAll were sorry for Cai Yong, for he was a man of great talents, and they begged that he might be spared.\n\nThe Imperial Guardian, Ma Midi, secretly interceded for him, saying, \"Cai Yong is famous as a scholar, and he can write glorious history, and it is inadvisable to put to death a man renowned for rectitude without consideration.\"\n\nBut in vain, for the High Minister was now strong and obdurate.\n\nWang Yun said, \"Centuries ago, Emperor Wu spared Sima Qian and employed him on the annals, with the result that many slanderous stories have been handed down to us. This is a trying period of great perplexity, and we dare not let a specious fellow like this wield his pen in criticism of those about the court of a youthful prince and abuse us as he will.\"\n\nRemonstrance and appeal being vain, Ma Midi retired.\n\nBut he said to his colleagues, \"Is Wang Yun then careless of the future? Worthy people are the mainstay of the state; laws are the canons of action. To destroy the mainstay and nullify the laws is to hasten destruction!\"\n\nAs was just said Wang Yun was obdurate. Cai Yong whose offense was an expression of gratitude was thrown into prison and there strangled. The people of that day wept for Cai Yong, for they refused to see any offense in what he had done, and death was a harsh punishment.\n\n\u2003Dong Zhuo, the dictator,\n\n\u2003Tyrannized the state,\n\n\u2003Fell and his sole mourner\n\n\u2003Shared his direful fate.\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang in seclusion\n\n\u2003Was content to dream,\n\n\u2003Felt his worth and never\n\n\u2003Helped a traitor's scheme.\n\nThose generals \u2014 Li Jue, Guo Si, Fan Chou, and Zhang Ji \u2014 whom Dong Zhuo had left to guard Meiwo fled when their master was slain and went west into the county of Shanxi in Liangzhou Region. Thence they sent in a memorial entreating amnesty. But Wang Yun would not hear of it.\n\n\"Four of them were the chief instruments of Dong Zhuo's aggressions. Now though a general amnesty were proclaimed, these men should be excluded from its benefit,\" said Wang Yun.\n\nThe messenger returned and told the four there was no hope of pardon and they could only flee.\n\nThen their adviser, Jia Xu, said, \"If we throw away our arms and flee singly, then we shall fall easy victims to any village magistrate who may seize us. Rather let us cajole the people of Shanxi to throw in their lot with us and make a sudden onslaught on the capital and so avenge Dong Zhuo. If we succeed, we control the court and the empire. There will be enough time to run away if we fail.\"\n\nThe plan was adopted, and they spread abroad the story that Wang Yun intended to massacre the region.\n\nHaving thus thrown the people into a state of terror, they went a step farther and said, \"There is no advantage in dying for nothing. Revolt and join us!\"\n\nSo they cajoled the people into joining them and gathered a host equal to one hundred thousand. This horde was divided into four parts, and they all set out to raid Capital Changan. On the way they fell in with a son-in-law of their late chief, Imperial Commander Niu Fu, who marched five thousand troops from Xiliang. Niu Fu had set out to avenge his father-in-law, and he became the Van Leader of the horde.\n\nAs the Liangzhou troops advanced, the news came to Wang Yun, and he consulted Lu Bu.\n\n\"They are a lot of rats!\" said Lu Bu. \"Never mind how many there are of them. Be not in the least anxious!\"\n\nSo Lu Bu and Li Su went to oppose them. The latter was in advance and met Niu Fu. They fought. Niu Fu was outmatched and retired after suffering a slaughter. But unexpectedly Niu Fu returned in a night attack, found Li Su quite unprepared and drove Li Su's force some ten miles, slaying many.\n\nLi Su reported the defeat, and Lu Bu raged at him, saying, \"You have sullied my reputation as a warrior and destroyed our fighting spirit!\"\n\nAnd Lu Bu put Li Su to death, exposing his head at the camp gate.\n\nNext day Lu Bu advanced his own force and engaged Niu Fu. He overwhelmed Niu Fu and drove him off. That night Niu Fu called in his most trusted man, Hu Chier, to advise him.\n\nHu Chier said, \"Lu Bu is too doughty a fighter for us to hope to overcome him. Our case is hopeless. Our best course is to desert these four generals, secrete their valuables, and leave the army with just a few of our followers.\"\n\nThe plan of Hu Chier was adopted, and the two traitors and some others that very night packed up and made their way out of camp. They were only half a dozen. They came to a river and, while crossing, Hu Chier, tempted by the lust of wealth, slew his companion. Then he went to offer the head of Niu Fu to Lu Bu. Lu Bu inquired into the matter, and when a follower told him the truth, he put the double traitor Hu Chier to death.\n\nThen Lu Bu advanced against the rebels and fell in with Li Jue's force. Without giving them time to form in battle, Lu Bu attacked. Horses curvetting and spears set, the army dashed in irresistibly, and Li Jue, making no stand, fell back a long way. Li Jue took up a position under a hill fifteen miles away and thence sent to call his fellows to council.\n\nLi Jue said, \"Lu Bu though brave in battle is no strategist and so not really formidable. I will lead my troops to hold the mouth of the gorge, and every day I will incite him to attack; and when he comes toward me, General Guo Si can smite his rear, after the manner of Peng Yue when he fought against Chu. While thus I am alternating attack and retreat, Generals Fan Chou and Zhang Ji will march off in different directions toward Changan. Such an attack at two points must end both Wang Yun and Lu Bu.\"\n\nThey set themselves to carry out this scheme. As soon as Lu Bu reached the hills, a force of Li Jue came out to attack him. Lu Bu made an angry dash toward the enemy who retired up the hills, whence they shot arrows and hurled stones like rain. Lu Bu's troops halted. At this moment the report came that the rear was being attacked and there appeared Guo Si. At once Lu Bu wheeled toward the new enemy, but immediately the rolling drums gave the signal to retire, and Lu Bu could not come to blows with them. As he called in his army, the gongs clanged on the other side and his former opponent Li Jue came to attack his front. But before Lu Bu could join battle, his rear was again assaulted by Guo Si, who in his turn drew off immediately.\n\nThus Lu Bu was baited till his bosom was near bursting with rage. The same tactics continued for several days. He could neither strike his enemies nor escape them. His troops had no rest.\n\nIn the midst of these distracting maneuver, a messenger rode up in hot haste to report: \"The capital is in imminent danger from a double attack of Fan Chou and Zhang Ji!\"\n\nLu Bu at once ordered a march to save the capital, which became a rout when both his opponents Li Jue and Guo Si came in pursuit. His loss was heavy.\n\nHe soon reached Changan and found the rebels there in enormous numbers and the city quite surrounded. Lu Bu's attack had but little effect, and as his temper became more savage under defeat, many of his soldiers went over to the rebels. He fell into deep melancholy.\n\nThen a remnant of Dong Zhuo's adherents still in the city, led by Li Meng and Wang Fang, began to lend aid to the attackers; and a few days later they secretly opened the city gate and the besiegers poured in. Lu Bu exerted himself to the utmost but could not stem the tide. At the head of some hundred horse, he dashed over to the Black Lock Gate and called out to Wang Yun, who was on the other side.\n\n\"The case is desperate now. Ride with me to a place of safety!\"\n\nWang Yun replied, \"If I am gifted with the spirit of the state, I shall succeed in restoring the tranquillity which I desire. But if I have it not, then I offer my body as a sacrifice. I will not quail before dangers. Send my thanks to the noble supporters beyond the Pass for their efforts, and bid them remember their country!\"\n\nLu Bu urged Wang Yun again and again, but Wang Yun would not leave. Soon flames started up all over the city, and Lu Bu had to leave, abandoning his family to their fate. He fled to seek refuge with Yuan Shu.\n\nLi Jue, Guo Si, and his fellow leaders gave full license to their ruffians, who robbed and murdered their fill. Many high officers perished. Ministers Chong Fu, Lu Kui, and Zhou Huan, Imperial Commanders Cui Lie and Wang Qin all died in the fighting.\n\nIn time the rebels penetrated to the inner part of the Palace, and the courtiers begged the Emperor to proceed to the Gate of Pervading Peace to try to quell the rioting.\n\nAt sight of the yellow umbrella, Li Jue and Fan Chou checked their armies, and they all shouted, \"Wan shui! Long life! O Emperor!\"\n\nThe Emperor stood by the tower and addressed them, \"Nobles, what means it that you enter the capital in this unruly manner and without my summons?\"\n\nThe two leaders looked up and said, \"Dong Zhuo, Your Majesty's Prime Minister, has been slain by Wang Yun, and we are here to avenge him. We are no rebels, Sire. Let us only have Wang Yun, and we draw off our troops.\"\n\nWang Yun was actually among the courtiers and at the Emperor's side.\n\nHearing this demand, Wang Yun said, \"The plan was made for the benefit of the Throne. But as this evil has grown therefrom, Your Majesty will not grudge losing me. I have brought about evil, and I will go down to these rebels.\"\n\nThe Emperor was torn with sorrow and wavered. But the faithful minister leaped from the wall, crying, \"Wang Yun is here!\"\n\nThe two leaders drew their swords, crying, \"For what crime was our master slain?\"\n\n\"His crimes filled the heavens and covered the earth: No tongue can tell them. The day he died was a day of rejoicing in the whole city as you well know,\" said Wang Yun.\n\n\"And if he was guilty of some crime, what had we done not to be forgiven?\"\n\n\u2003\"Seditious rebels, why bandy words? I am ready to die.\"\n\n\u2003And Wang Yun was slain at the foot of the tower.\n\n\u2003Moved by the people's sufferings,\n\n\u2003Vexed at his prince's grief,\n\n\u2003Wang Yun compassed the traitor's death,\n\n\u2003That they might find relief.\n\n\u2003Everyone knows him a hero,\n\n\u2003Leal to the state always:\n\n\u2003Living he guarded the princely towers,\n\n\u2003His soul keeps guard today.\n\nHaving done the loyal minister to death at the Emperor's feet, they proceeded to exterminate also his whole family. Everyone mourned.\n\nThen said the ruffians to each other, \"Having gone so far, what could be better than to make away with the Emperor and complete our scheme?\"\n\n\u2003The traitor condoned his crime,\n\n\u2003Rebellion ought to cease;\n\n\u2003But his licentious followers\n\n\u2003Disturb the empire's peace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Gathering Arms, Ma Teng Moves To Rescue The Emperor; Commanding A Force, Cao Cao Marches To Avenge His Father.\n\nIn the last chapter the two arch rebels, Li Jue and Guo Si, proposed to murder Emperor Xian, but their followers Zhang Ji and Fan Chou opposed this.\n\n\"No. The people will not approve of his death now. Restore him to power, and get the leaguers inside Changan's control. Remove his supporters, and then we can compass his death. And the empire shall be in our hands.\"\n\nSo they ceased the attack.\n\nThe Emperor again spoke from the tower, saying, \"Why do you still remain? You have slain Wang Yun: Now withdraw these soldiers.\"\n\nThen Li Jue and Guo Si replied, \"Your servants desire rank rewards for their good service to the dynasty.\"\n\n\"And what ranks, Sirs?\"\n\nAll four wrote their wishes and handed them up to the Emperor who had no choice but to accede to the request, and they were created:\n\nLi Jue was appointed General of the Flying Chariots, Lord of Chiyang, Commander of Capital District, Court Administrator, and granted Military Insignia.\n\nGuo Si was appointed General of the Rear Army, Lord of Meiyang, Court Administrator, and granted Military Insignia.\n\nFan Chou was appointed General of the Right Army and Lord of Wanian.\n\nZhang Ji was appointed General of the Flying Cavalry and Lord of Pingyan.\n\nLi Meng and Wang Fang, for opening the city gates, were appointed Imperial Commanders.\n\nAfter receiving ranks of nobility, Li Jue and Guo Si thanked the Emperor, and went away to camp at Xunung, the suburb of Changan. Other rebel leaders also were gratified with ranks. And once more the capital was free of troops.\n\nDong Zhuo's followers, having so far succeeded, did not forget their late leader. They sought his corpse for burial, but only a few fragments were discoverable. Then they had sculptors engrave a statue of fragrant wood in his likeness, laid that out in proper form, and instituted a noble's sacrifices and prayers. The remains were dressed in the robes of a prince, laid in a princely coffin for burial. They selected Meiwo for his tomb and having found an auspicious day conveyed the coffin thither.\n\nBut a terrific thunder storm came on at the time of inhumation, and the ground was flooded. The coffin was rived asunder, and the poor remains knocked out by thunders. A second time they buried the coffin, but a similar thing happened in the night. And yet a third time in another place but the earth rejected the remains. Meanwhile the thunder-fire had entirely consumed them. So it may be said justly that Heaven was exceedingly angry with Dong Zhuo.\n\nSo now Li Jue and Guo Si wielded the real power of the scepter, and they were hard upon the people. They also removed the attendants from the Palace and replaced them by their own creatures, who maintained a most perfect watch over every movement of the Emperor so that he was greatly hampered and embarrassed. All appointments and demotions were made by the two rebels. For the sake of popularity they especially summoned the veteran general Zhu Jun to court, made him Court Administrator and associated him with the government.\n\nOne day came a report that the Governor of Xiliang, Ma Teng, and the Imperial Protector of Bingzhou, Han Sui, with one hundred thousand troops, were rapidly approaching the capital with the intention of attacking the rebels in the name of the Emperor.\n\nNow these leaders from the west had laid careful plans. Ma Teng and Han Sui had sent trusty friends to the capital to find out who would support them. They had conspired with three officials \u2014 Court Counselors Ma Yu and Chong Shao, and Imperial Commander Liu Fan \u2014 to be their inside allies and plot against the rebels. These three obtained from the Throne two secret edicts conferring the ranks of Commander Who Conquers the West on Ma Teng and Commander Who Guards the West on Han Sui. With these powers the two commanders joined forces and began their march.\n\nThe four leaders of the party in power \u2014 Li Jue, Guo Si, Fan Chou, and Zhang Ji \u2014 held a consultation with their generals as to how to meet the attack.\n\nAdviser Jia Xu said, \"Since the attackers are coming from a distance, our plan is to fortify and wait till shortage of food shall work for us. In a hundred days their supplies will be consumed, and they must retire. We can pursue, and we shall capture them.\"\n\nLi Meng and Wang Fang rose and said, \"This plan is bad. Give us ten thousand troops, and we will put an end to both of them and offer their heads before your ensign!\"\n\n\"To fight forthwith means defeat,\" said Jia Xu.\n\nLi Meng and Wang Fang cried with one voice, \"If we fail, we are willing to lose our heads! But if we win, then your head is forfeit.\"\n\nJia Xu then suggested to Li Jue and Guo Si, saying, \"Seventy miles west of the capital stand the Zhouzhi Hills. The passes are narrow and difficult. Send Generals Zhang Ji and Fan Chou to occupy this point of vantage and fortify themselves so that they may support Li Meng and Wang Fang.\"\n\nLi Jue and Guo Si accepted this advice. They told off fifteen thousand horse and foot, and Li Meng and Wang Fang left in high spirit. They made a camp ninety miles from Changan.\n\nThe force from the west arrived. Ma Teng and Han Sui led out their troops to the attack. They found their opponents Li Meng and Wang Fang in battle array.\n\nMa Teng and Han Sui rode to the front side by side. Pointing to the rebel leaders, the commanders abused them, crying, \"Those are traitors! Who will capture them?\"\n\nHardly were the words spoken when there came out a youth general with a clear, white complexion as jade, eyes like shooting stars, lithe of body and strong of limb. He was armed with a long spear and bestrode an excellent steed. This young leader was Ma Chao, son of Ma Teng, then seventeen years of age.\n\nThough young he was a supreme valiance. Wang Fang, despising him on account of his youth, galloped forth to fight him. Before they had exchanged many passes Wang Fang was disabled and fell to a thrust of Ma Chao's spear. The victor turned to retire into the formation, but Li Meng rode after Ma Chao to avenge his fallen colleague.\n\nMa Chao did not see Li Meng, but his father called out: \"You are followed!\"\n\nHardly had Ma Teng spoken when he saw that the pursuer was a prisoner seated on his son's steed. Now Ma Chao had known he was followed, but pretended not to see, waiting till his enemy should have come close and lifted his spear to strike. Then Ma Chao suddenly wheeled about. The spear thrust met only empty air; and as the horses passed, Ma Chao's powerful arm shot out and pulled Li Meng from the saddle. Thus Li Meng and Wang Fang's soldiers were left leaderless and fled in all directions. The army of Ma Teng and Han Sui dashed in pursuit, and a complete victory was scored. They pressed into one of the passes and made a camp. Then they decapitated Li Meng and exposed his head.\n\nWhen Li Jue and Guo Si heard that both the boastful generals had fallen under the hand of one young leader, they knew that Jia Xu had given good advice and was gifted with clear prescience. So they valued his plans the more highly and decided to act on the defensive. They refused all challenges to combat.\n\nSurely enough after a couple of months the supplies of the Xiliang force were all exhausted and the leaders began to consider retreat.\n\nJust at this juncture a household servant of Ma Yu's family betrayed his master and told of the conspiracy of the three court officials to assist the attackers. The two chiefs Li Jue and Guo Si in revenge seized the three conspirators \u2014 Ma Yu, Chong Shao, and Liu Fan \u2014 , with every member of their households, and beheaded them in the market place. The heads of the three were exposed at the front gate of the capital.\n\nBeing short of food and hearing of the destruction of their three adherents in the city, the only course for Ma Teng and Han Sui was to retreat. At once Zhang Ji went in pursuit of Ma Teng, and Fan Chou followed Han Sui. The retreating army under Ma Teng was beaten, and only by Ma Chao's desperate efforts were the pursuers driven off.\n\nFan Chou pursued the other army. When he had come close, Han Sui rode boldly up and addressed him, saying, \"You and I, Sir, are fellow villagers. Why then behave so unfriendly?\"\n\nFan Chou replied, \"I must obey the commands of my chief.\"\n\n\"I am here for the service of the state. Why do you press me so hard?\" said Han Sui.\n\nAt this Fan Chou turned his horse, called in his troops, and left Han Sui in peace. Unwittingly a nephew of Li Jue had been a witness of this scene; and when he saw the enemy allowed to go free, he returned and told his uncle. Angry that his enemy had escaped, Li Jue would have sent an army to wreak vengeance on his general.\n\nBut his adviser Jia Xu again came in, saying, \"The people are yet unsettled: It is dangerous to provoke another war. Instead, invite Fan Chou to a banquet and, while the feast was in progress, executing him for dereliction of duty.\"\n\nThis seemed good to Li Jue, so the banquet was prepared. Zhang Ji and Fan Chou accepted their invitations and went cheerfully.\n\nToward the latter part of the entertainment a sudden change came over their host Li Jue, and he suddenly asked Fan Chou, \"Why have you been intriguing with Han Sui? You are turning traitor, eh?\"\n\nThe unhappy guest was taken aback. Before he could frame his words to reply, he saw the assassins rush out with swords and axes. In a moment all was over, and Fan Chou's head lay beneath the table.\n\nScared beyond measure, his fellow-guest Zhang Ji groveled on the floor.\n\n\"Fan Chou was a traitor,\" said the host, raising Zhang Ji by the arm, \"and he has his deserts. You are my friend and need not fear.\"\n\nLi Jue gave Zhang Ji command of Fan Chou's army with which Zhang Ji returned to his headquarters garrison in Hongnong.\n\nNo one of the leaders among the leaguers dared attempt an attack on the party newly risen from Dong Zhuo's disaffection, while on the other hand Jia Xu never ceased to urge his masters to exert themselves for the welfare of the people and thus to tempt wise people to join them. And by these means the government began to prosper, and the court to reassert its authority.\n\nHowever, a new trouble arose in the shape of a resurgence of Yellow Scarves in Qingzhou. They came, under numerous chieftains, in the number of hundreds of thousand and plundered any place they reached.\n\nCourt Administrator Zhu Jun said he knew of one who could destroy this sedition, and when asked who was the man he proposed, Zhu Jun said, \"You want to destroy this horde of rebels: You will fail unless you get the service of Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"And where is he?\" asked Li Jue.\n\n\"He is Governor of Dongjun. He has a large army, and you have only to order him to act. The rising will be broken.\"\n\nA messenger went post haste with a command for Cao Cao and Bao Xin, Lord of Jibei, to act together in quelling the rebellion. As soon as Cao Cao received the court command, he arranged with his colleagues first to attack the rebels at Shouyang. Bao Xin made a dash right into their midst and inflicting damage wherever he could, but he was killed in battlefield. Cao Cao pursued the rebels as they fled to Jibei. Ten thousand surrendered. Then Cao Cao put his former enemies in the van. When his army reached any place, many more surrendered and joined him. After one hundred days, he had won over three hundred thousand troops and more than one million ordinary folks.\n\nOf these new adherents the strongest and boldest were made the Qingzhou Army, and the others were sent home to their fields. In consequence of these successes Cao Cao's prestige and fame became very great and increased daily. He reported his success to Capital Changan and was rewarded with the title of General Who Guards the East.\n\nLiu Dai then submitted; he and his officials sent to Dongjun and invited Cao Cao to take over Yanzhou.\n\nAt his new headquarters, Cao Cao welcomed wise counselors and bold warriors, and many gathered around him. Two clever persons, uncle and nephew, came at the same time, both from Yingchuan, named Xun Yu and Xun You. The uncle had once been in the service of Yuan Shao.\n\nCao Cao rejoiced when he had won the elder Xun to his side, saying, \"Xun Yu is my Zhang Liang!\"\n\nHe made Xun Yu a Field Commander. The nephew Xun You was famed for his ability and had been in the court service when it was in Luoyang, but he had abandoned that career in the Inner Bureau and retired to his village. Cao Cao made him a Military Instructor.\n\nXun Yu said to Cao Cao, \"There is a certain wise person of Yanzhou somewhere, but I do not know in whose service he is.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"Cheng Yu. He belongs to the eastern part of Yanzhou.\"\n\n\"Yes, I have heard of him,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSo a messenger was sent to his native place to inquire. Cheng Yu was away in the hills engaged in study. Cao Cao sent the messenger to the hills, and Cheng Yu came at the invitation.\n\n\"I shall prove unworthy of your recommendation,\" said Cheng Yu to his friend Xun Yu, \"for I am rough and ignorant. But have you forgotten a fellow villager of yours, Guo Jia? He is really able. Why not spread the net to catch him?\"\n\n\"I had nearly forgotten!\" said Xun Yu suddenly.\n\nSo he told Cao Cao of this man, who was at once invited.\n\nGuo Jia, discussing the world at large with Cao Cao, recommended Liu Ye from Henan, who was a descendant of Liu Xiu the Founder of Latter Han. When Liu Ye had arrived, he was the means of inviting two more: Man Chong from Shanyang and Lu Qian from Wucheng, who were already known to Cao Cao by reputation. These two brought to their new master's notice the name of Mao Jie from Chenliu, who also came and was given office. Then a famous leader, with his troop of some hundreds, arrived to offer service. This was Yu Jin of Taishan, an expert horseman and archer, and skilled beyond his fellows in every form of military exercise. He was made an Army Inspector.\n\nThen another day Xiahou Dun brought a fellow to present to Cao Cao.\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"He is from Chenliu and is named Dian Wei. He is the boldest of the bold, the strongest of the strong. He was one of Zhang Miao's people, but quarreled with his tent companions and killed some dozens of them with his fists. Then he fled to the mountains where I found him. I was out shooting and saw him follow a tiger across a stream. I persuaded him to join my troop, and I recommend him.\"\n\n\"I see he is no ordinary man,\" said Cao Cao. \"He is fine and straight and looks very powerful and bold.\"\n\n\"He is! He killed a man once to avenge a friend and carried his head through the whole market place. Hundreds saw him, but dared not come near. The weapon he uses now is a couple of spears, each weighs a hundred and twenty pounds, and he vaults into the saddle with these under his arm.\"\n\nCao Cao bade the man give proof of his skill. So Dian Wei galloped to and fro carrying the spears. Then he saw away among the tents a huge banner swaying dangerously with the force of the wind and on the point of falling. A crowd of soldiers were vainly struggling to keep it steady. Down he leaped, shouted to the men to clear out and held the staff quite steady with one hand, keeping it perfectly upright in spite of the strong wind.\n\n\"This is old E Lai again!\" said Cao Cao.\n\nHe gave Dian Wei a post of Commander of the Headquarters Guards and besides made Dian Wei presents of an embroidered robe he was wearing and a swift steed with a handsome saddle.\n\nCao Cao encouraged able people to assist him, and he had advisers on the civil side and valiant generals in the army. He became famous throughout the East of the Passes.\n\nNow Cao Cao's father, Cao Song, was living at Langye, whither he had gone as a hidden place free from the turmoil of the partisan struggles. Cao Cao wished to be united with him. As a dutiful son, Cao Cao sent the Governor of Taishan, Ying Shao, to escort his father to Yanzhou. Old Cao Song read the letter with joy, and the family prepared to move. They were some forty in all, with a train of a hundred servants and many carts.\n\nTheir road led through Xuzhou Region where the Imperial Protector, Tao Qian, was a sincere and upright man who had long wished to get on good terms with Cao Cao but, hitherto, had found no means of effecting a bond of union. Hearing that Cao Cao's family was passing through his region, Tao Qian went to welcome them, treated them with great cordiality, feasting and entertaining them for two days; and when they left, he escorted them to his boundary. Further he sent with them General Zhang Kai with a special escort of five hundred.\n\nThe whole party reached the county of Huafei. It was the end of summer, just turning into autumn, and at this place they were stopped by a tremendous storm of rain. The only shelter was an old temple and thither they went. The family occupied the main rooms and the escort the two side wings. The men of the escort were drenched, angry, and discontented.\n\nThen Zhang Kai called some of his petty officers to a secret spot and said, \"We are old Yellow Scarves and only submitted to Tao Qian because there was no other choice. We have never got much out of it. Now here is the Cao family with no end of gear, and we can be rich very easily. We will make a sudden onslaught tonight at the third watch and slay the whole lot. Then we shall have plenty of treasure, and we will get away to the mountains.\"\n\nThey all agreed. The storm continued into the night; and as Cao Song sat waiting anxiously for signs of clearing, he suddenly heard a hubbub at the west end of the temple. His brother, Cao De, drawing his sword, went out to see what it was about, and Cao De was at once cut down. Cao Song seized one of the concubines by the hand, rushed with her through the passage toward the back of the temple so that they might escape. But the lady was stout and could not get through the narrow doors, so the two hid in one of the small outhouses at the side. However, they were seen and slain.\n\nThe unhappy Governor Ying Shao fled for his life to Yuan Shao. The murderers fled into the South of River Huai with their plunder after having set fire to the old temple.\n\n\u2003Cao Cao, whom the ages praise,\n\n\u2003Slew his hosts on his former flight;\n\n\u2003Nemesis never turns aside,\n\n\u2003Murdered too his family died.\n\nSome of the escort escaped and took the evil tidings to Cao Cao. When he heard it he fell to the earth with a great cry. They raised him.\n\nWith set teeth he muttered, \"Tao Qian's people have slain my father: No longer can the same sky cover us! I will sweep Xuzhou off the face of the earth. Only thus can I satisfy my vengeance.\"\n\nCao Cao left one small army of thirty thousand under Xun Yu and Cheng Yu to guard the east headquarters and the three counties of Juancheng, Fanxia, and Dongjun. Then he set forth with all the remainder to destroy Xuzhou and avenge his father. Xiahou Dun, Yu Jin, and Dian Wei were Van Leaders with Cao Cao's orders to slaughter all the inhabitants of each captured city.\n\nNow the Governor of Jiujiang, Bian Rang, was a close friend of Tao Qian. Hearing Xuzhou was threatened, Bian Rang set out with five thousand troops to his friend's aid. Angered by this move, Cao Cao sent Xiahou Dun to stop and kill Bian Rang while still on the march.\n\nAt this time Chen Gong was in office in Dongjun, and he was also on friendly terms with Tao Qian. Hearing of Cao Cao's design to destroy the whole population, Chen Gong came in haste to see his former companion. Cao Cao, knowing Chen Gong's errand, put him off at first and would not see him. But then Cao Cao could not forget the kindness he had formerly received from Chen Gong, and presently the visitor was called to his tent.\n\nChen Gong said, \"They say you go to avenge your father's death on Xuzhou, to destroy its people. I have come to say a word. Imperial Protector Tao Qian is humane and a good man. He is not looking out for his own advantage, careless of the means and of others. Your worthy father met his unhappy death at the hands of Zhang Kai. Tao Qian is guiltless. Still more innocent are the people, and to slay them would be an evil. I pray you think over it.\"\n\nCao Cao retorted angrily, \"You once abandoned me, and now you have the impudence to come to see me! Tao Qian slew my whole family, and I will tear his heart out in revenge. I swear it! You may speak for your friend and say what you will. I shall be as if I heard not.\"\n\nIntercession had failed. Chen Gong sighed and took his leave.\n\nHe said, \"Alas! I cannot go to Tao Qian and look upon his face.\"\n\nSo Chen Gong rode off to the county of Chenliu to give service to Governor Zhang Miao.\n\nCao Cao's army of revenge laid waste whatever place it passed through, slaying the people and desecrating their cemeteries (AD 193).\n\nWhen Tao Qian heard the terrible tidings, he looked up to heaven, saying, \"I must be guilty of some fault before Heaven to have brought this evil upon my people!\"\n\nHe called together his officials to consult.\n\nOne of them, Cao Bao, said, \"Now the enemy is upon us: We cannot sit and await death with folded hands. I for one will help you to make a fight.\"\n\nTao Qian reluctantly sent the army out. From a distance he saw Cao Cao's army spread abroad like frost and rushed far and wide like snow. In their midst was a large white flag and on both sides was written Vengeance.\n\nWhen he had ranged his troops, Cao Cao rode out dressed in mourning white and abused Tao Qian.\n\nBut Tao Qian advanced, and from beneath his ensign he bowed low and said, \"I wished to make friends with you, Illustrious Sir, and so I sent Zhang Kai to escort your family. I knew not that his rebel heart was still unchanged. The fault does not lie at my door as you must see.\"\n\n\"You old wretch! You killed my father, and now you dare mumble this nonsense!\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he asked who would go out and seize Tao Qian.\n\nXiahou Dun undertook this service and rode out. Tao Qian fled to the inner portion of his array; and as Xiahou Dun came on, Cao Bao went to meet him. But just as the two horses met, a hurricane burst over the spot, and the flying dust and pebbles threw both sides into the utmost confusion. Both drew off.\n\nTao Qian retired into the city and called his officers to council.\n\n\"The force against us is too strong,\" said he. \"I will give myself up as a prisoner and let him wreak his vengeance on me. I may save the people.\"\n\nBut a voice was heard saying, \"You have long ruled here, and the people love you. Strong as the enemy are, they are not necessarily able to break down our walls, especially when defended by you and your people. I have a scheme to suggest that I think will make Cao Cao die in a place where he will not find burial.\"\n\nThese bold words startled the assembly, and they eagerly asked what the scheme was.\n\nMaking overtures for friendship, Tao Qian encountered deadly hate.\n\nBut, where danger seemed most threatening, he discovered safety's gate." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Liu Bei Rescues Kong Rong At Beihai; Lu Bu Defeats Cao Cao Near Puyang.\n\nIt was one Mi Zhu who said he knew how to defeat Cao Cao utterly. Mi Zhu came of a wealthy family of merchants in Donghai and trading in Luoyang. One day traveling homeward from that city in a carriage, he met an exquisitely beautiful lady trudging along the road, who asked him to let her ride. He stopped and yielded his place to her. She invited him to share the seat with her. He mounted, but sat rigidly upright, never even glancing in her direction. They traveled thus for some miles when she thanked him and alighted.\n\nJust as she left she said, \"I am the Goddess of Fire from the Southern Land. I am on my way to execute a decree of the Supreme God to burn your dwelling, but your extreme courtesy has so deeply touched me that I now warn you. Hasten homeward, remove your valuables, for I must arrive tonight.\"\n\nThereupon she disappeared. Mi Zhu hastily finished his journey and, as soon as he arrived, moved everything out of his house. Sure enough that night a fire started in the kitchen and involved the whole house. After this he devoted his wealth to relieving the poor and comforting the afflicted. Tao Qian gave him the magistracy office he then held.\n\nThe plan Mi Zhu proposed was this: \"I will go to Beihai and beg Governor Kong Rong to help. Another should go to Qingzhou on a similar mission to get the help from Imperial Protector Tian Kai. If the armies of these two places march on Cao Cao, he will certainly retire.\"\n\nTao Qian accepted the plan and wrote two letters. He asked for a volunteer to go to Qingzhou, and a certain Chen Deng of Guangling offered himself and, after he had left, Mi Zhu was formally entrusted with the mission to the north. Meanwhile Tao Qian and his generals would hold the city as they could.\n\nKong Rong was a native of Qufu in the old state of Lu. He was one of the twentieth generation in descent from the great Teacher Confucius (Kong Fuzi). Kong Rong had been noted as a very intelligent lad, somewhat precocious. When ten years old he had gone to see Li Ying, the Governor of Henan, but the doorkeeper demurred to letting him in.\n\nBut when Kong Rong said, \"I am Minister Li Ying's intimate friend,\" he was admitted.\n\nLi Ying asked Kong Rong what relations had existed between their families that might justify the term intimate.\n\nThe boy replied, \"Of old my ancestor Confucius questioned your ancestor, the Daoist sage Laozi, concerning ceremonies. So our families have known each other for many generations.\"\n\nLi Ying was astonished at the boy's ready wit.\n\nPresently High Minister Chen Wei visited, to whom Li Ying told the story of his youthful guest. \"He is a wonder, this boy,\" said Li Ying, pointing to Kong Rong.\n\nChen Wei replied, \"It does not follow that a clever boy grows up into a clever man.\"\n\nThe lad took him up at once, saying, \"By what you say, Sir, you were certainly one of the clever boys.\"\n\nThe Minister and the Governor all laughed, saying, \"The boy is going to be a noble vessel.\"\n\nThus from boyhood Kong Rong was famous. As a man he rose to be an Imperial Commander and was sent as Governor to Beihai, where he was renowned for hospitality. He used to quote the lines:\n\n\u2003\"Let the rooms be full of friends,\n\n\u2003And the cups be full of wine.\n\n\u2003That is what I like.\"\n\nAfter six years at Beihai the people were devoted to him. The day that Mi Zhu arrived, Kong Rong was, as usual, seated among his guests, and the messenger was ushered in without delay. In reply to a question about the reason of the visit, Mi Zhu presented Tao Qian's letter which said that Cao Cao was pressing on Xuzhou City and the Imperial Protector prayed for help.\n\nThen said Kong Rong, \"Your master and I are good friends, and your presence here constrains me to go to his aid. However, I have no quarrel with Cao Cao either, so I will first write to him to try to make peace. If he refuses my offer, then I must set the army in motion.\"\n\n\"Cao Cao will not listen to proposals of peace: He is too certain of his strength,\" said Mi Zhu.\n\nKong Rong wrote his letter and also gave orders to muster his troops. Just at this moment happened another rising of the Yellow Scarves, ten thousand of them, and the ruffians began to rob and murder at Beihai. It was necessary to deal with them first, and Kong Rong led his army outside the city.\n\nThe rebel leader, Guan Hai, rode out to the front, saying, \"I know this county is fruitful and can well spare ten thousand carts of grain. Give me that and we retire; refuse, and we will batter down the city walls and destroy every soul!\"\n\nKong Rong shouted back, \"I am a servant of the great Hans, entrusted with the safety of their land. Think you I will feed rebels?\"\n\nGuan Hai whipped his steed, whirled his sword around his head, and rode forward. Zong Bao, one of Kong Rong's generals, set his spear and rode out to give battle, but after a very few bouts Zong Bao was cut down. Soon the soldiers fell into panic and rushed pell-mell into the city for protection. The rebels then laid siege to the city on all sides. Kong Rong was very down-hearted; and Mi Zhu, who now saw no hope for the success of his mission, was grieved beyond words.\n\nThe sight from the city wall was exceeding sad, for the rebels were there in enormous numbers. One day standing on the wall, Kong Rong saw afar a man armed with a spear riding hard in among the Yellow Scarves and scattering them before him like chaff before the wind.\n\nBefore long the man had reached the foot of the wall and called out, \"Open the gate!\"\n\nBut the defenders would not open to an unknown man, and in the delay a crowd of rebels gathered round the rider along the edge of the moat. Suddenly wheeling about, the warrior dashed in among them and bowled over a dozen at which the others fell back. At this Kong Rong ordered the wardens to open the gates and let the stranger enter. As soon as he was inside, he dismounted, laid aside his spear, ascended the wall, and made humble obeisance to the Governor.\n\n\"My name is Taishi Ci, and I am from the county of Laihuang. I only returned home yesterday from the north to see my mother, and then I heard that your city was in danger from a rebel attack. My mother said you had been very kind to her and told me I should try to help. So I set out all alone, and here I am.\"\n\nThis was cheering. Kong Rong already knew Taishi Ci by reputation as a valiant fighting man, although they two had never met. The son being far away from his home, Kong Rong had taken his mother, who dwelt a few miles from the city, under his especial protection and saw that she did not suffer from want. This had won the old lady's heart and she had sent her son to show her gratitude.\n\nKong Rong showed his appreciation by treating his guest with the greatest respect, making him presents of clothing and armor, saddles and horses.\n\nPresently said Taishi Ci, \"Give me a thousand soldiers, and I will go out and drive off these fellows.\"\n\n\"You are a bold warrior, but they are very numerous. It is a serious matter to go out among them,\" said Kong Rong.\n\n\"My mother sent me because of your goodness to her. How shall I be able to look her in the face if I do not raise the siege? I would prefer to conquer or perish.\"\n\n\"I have heard Liu Bei is one of the heroes in the world. If we could get his help, there would be no doubt of the result. But there is no one to send.\"\n\n\"I will go as soon as I have received your letter!\"\n\nSo Kong Rong wrote letters and gave them to his helper.\n\nTaishi Ci put on his armor, mounted his steed, attached his bow and quiver to his girdle, took his spear in his hand, tied his packed haversack firmly to his saddle bow, and rode out at the city gate. He went quite alone.\n\nAlong the moat a large party of the besiegers were gathered, and they came to intercept the solitary rider. But Taishi Ci dashed in among them and cut down several and so finally fought his way through.\n\nGuan Hai, hearing that a rider had left the city, guessed what his errand would be and followed Taishi Ci with a party of horsemen. Guan Hai spread them out so that the messenger rider was entirely surrounded. Then Taishi Ci laid aside his spear, took his bow, adjusted his arrows one by one and shot all round him. And as a rider fell from his steed with every twang of Taishi Ci's bowstring, the pursuers dared not close in.\n\nThus he got clear away and rode in hot haste to Liu Bei. Taishi Ci reached Pingyuan, and after greeting his host in proper form he told how Kong Rong was surrounded and had sent him for help. Then he presented the letter which Liu Bei read.\n\n\"And who are you?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"I am Taishi Ci, a fellow from Laihuang. I am not related by ties of kin to Kong Rong, nor even by ties of neighborhood, but I am by the bonds of sentiment and I share his sorrows and misfortunes. The Yellow Scarves have invested his city, and he is distressed with none to turn to, and destruction is very near. You are known as humane, righteous, and eager to help the distressed. Therefore at his command I have braved all dangers and fought my way through his enemies to pray you save him.\"\n\nLiu Bei smiled and sighed, saying, \"And does he know there is a Liu Bei in this world?\"\n\nSo Liu Bei, together with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, told off three thousand troops and set out to help raise the siege. When the rebel leader Guan Hai saw these new forces arriving, he led out his army to fight them, thinking he could easily dispose of so small a force.\n\nThe brothers and Taishi Ci with them sat on their horses in the forefront of their array. Guan Hai hastened forward. Taishi Ci was ready to fight, but Guan Yu had opened the combat. He rode forth and the two steeds met. The soldiers set up a great noise. After a few bouts Guan Yu's green-dragon saber rose and fell, and with the stroke fell the rebel leader.\n\nThis was the signal for Zhang Fei and Taishi Ci to take a share, and they advanced side by side. With their spears ready they dashed in, and Liu Bei urged forward his force. The besieged Governor saw his doughty rescuers laying low the rebels as tigers among a flock of sheep. None could withstand them, and he then sent out his own troops to join in the battle so that the rebels were between two armies. The rebels' force was completely broken and many troops surrendered, while the remainder scattered in all directions.\n\nThe victors were welcomed into the city, and as soon as possible a banquet was prepared in their honor. Mi Zhu was presented to Liu Bei. Mi Zhu related the story of the murder of Cao Song by Zhang Kai, Cao Cao's vengeful attack on Xuzhou, and his coming to beg for assistance.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Imperial Protector Tao Qian is a kindly man of high character, and it is a pity that he should suffer this wrong for no fault of his own.\"\n\n\"You are a scion of the imperial family,\" said Governor Kong Rong, \"and this Cao Cao is injuring the people, a strong man abusing his strength. Why not go with me to rescue the sufferers?\"\n\n\"I dare not refuse, but my force is weak and I must act cautiously,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Though my desire to help arises from an old friendship, yet it is a righteous act as well. I do not think your heart is not inclined toward the right,\" said Kong Rong.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"This being so, you go first and give me time to see Gongsun Zan from whom I may borrow more troops and horses. I will come anon.\"\n\n\"You surely will not break your promise?\" said the Governor.\n\n\"What manner of man think you that I am?\" said Liu Bei. \"The Sage said, 'Death is common to all; the person without truth cannot maintain the self.' Whether I get the troops or not, certainly I shall come myself.\"\n\nSo the plan was agreed to. Mi Zhu set out to return forthwith while Kong Rong prepared for his expedition.\n\nTaishi Ci took his leave, saying, \"My mother bade me come to your aid, and now happily you are safe. Letters have come from my fellow townsman, Liu Yao, Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, calling me thither and I must go. I will see you again.\"\n\nKong Rong pressed rewards upon Taishi Ci, but he would accept nothing and departed.\n\nWhen his mother saw him, she was pleased at his success, saying, \"I rejoice that you have been able to prove your gratitude!\"\n\nAfter this he departed for Yangzhou.\n\nLiu Bei went away to his friend Gongsun Zan and laid before Gongsun Zan his design to help Xuzhou.\n\n\"Cao Cao and you are not enemies. Why do you spend yourself for the sake of another?\" said Gongsun Zan.\n\n\"I have promised,\" Liu Bei replied, \"and dare not break faith.\"\n\n\"I will lend you two thousand horse and foot,\" said Gongsun Zan.\n\n\"Also, I wish to have the services of Zhao Zilong,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nGongsun Zan agreed to this also. They marched away, Liu Bei's own troops being in the front, and Zhao Zilong, with the borrowed troops, being in rear.\n\nIn due course Mi Zhu returned saying that Kong Rong had also obtained the services of Liu Bei. The other messenger, Chen Deng, came back and reported that Tian Kai would also bring help. Then was Tao Qian's heart set at ease.\n\nBut both the leaders, though they had promised aid, greatly dreaded their antagonist and camped among the hills at a great distance, fearful of coming too close to Cao Cao's quarters. Cao Cao knew of their coming and divided his army into parts to meet them, so postponing the attack on the city itself.\n\nPresently Liu Bei came up and went to see Kong Rong, who said, \"The enemy is very powerful, and Cao Cao handles his army skillfully. We must be cautious. Let us make most careful observations before we strike a blow.\"\n\n\"What I fear is famine in the city,\" said Liu Bei. \"They cannot hold out very long. I will put my troops with yours under your command, while I with Zhang Fei make a dash through to see Tao Qian and consult with him.\"\n\nKong Rong approved of this, so he and Tian Kai took up positions on the ox-horn formation, with Guan Yu and Zhao Zilong on either side to support them.\n\nWhen Liu Bei and Zhang Fei leading one thousand troops made their dash to get through Cao Cao's army, they got as far as the flank of his camp when there arose a great beating of drums, and horse and foot rolled out like billows on the ocean. The leader was Yu Jin.\n\nYu Jin checked his steed and called out, \"You mad men from somewhere, where are you going?\"\n\nZhang Fei heard Yu Jin but deigned no reply. He only rode straight to attack the speaker. After they had fought a few bouts, Liu Bei waved his double swords as signal for his troops to come on, and they drove Yu Jin before them. Zhang Fei led the pursuit and in this way they reached the city wall.\n\nFrom the city wall, the besieged saw a huge banner embroidered in white Liu Bei of Pingyuan, and the Imperial Protector bade them open the gate for the rescuers to enter. Liu Bei was made very welcome, conducted to the residency, and a banquet prepared in his honor. The soldiers also were feasted.\n\nTao Qian was delighted with Liu Bei, admiring his high-spirited appearance and clear speech. Tao Qian bade Mi Zhu offer Liu Bei the seal and insignia of the protectorship office. But Liu Bei shrank back startled.\n\n\"What does this mean?\" said Liu Bei.\n\nTao Qian said, \"There is trouble on every side, and the kingly rule is no longer maintained. You, Sir, are a member of the family and eminently fitted to support them and their prerogatives. I am verging on senility, and I wish to retire in your favor. I pray you not to decline, and I will report my action to the court.\"\n\nLiu Bei started up from his seat and bowed before his host, saying, \"Scion of the family I may be, but my merit is small and my virtue meager. I doubt my fitness even for my present post, and only a feeling of doing right sent me to your assistance. To hear such speech makes me doubt. Surely you think I came with greed in my heart. May God help me no more if I cherished such a thought!\"\n\n\"It is a poor old man's real sentiment,\" said Tao Qian.\n\nTime after time Tao Qian renewed his offer to entrust the region of Xuzhou to Liu Bei, but Liu Bei kept refusing.\n\nIn the midst of this came Mi Zhu, saying, \"The enemies had reached the wall, and something must be done to drive them off. The present matter could await a more tranquil time.\"\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"I ought to write to Cao Cao to press him to raise the siege. If he refuses, we will attack forthwith.\"\n\nOrders were sent to the camps outside to remain quiescent till the letter could reach Cao Cao.\n\nIt happened that Cao Cao was holding a council when a messenger with a war letter was announced. The letter was brought in and handed to him and, when he had opened and looked at it, he found it was from Liu Bei.\n\nThis is the letter, very nearly:\n\n\"Since meeting you outside the pass, fate has assigned us to different quarters of the world, and I have not been able to pay my respects to you. Touching the death of your noble father, it was owing to the vicious nature of Zhang Kai and due to no fault of Tao Qian. Now while the remnant of the Yellow Scarves is disturbing the lands, and Dong Zhuo's partisans have the upper hand in the capital, I wish that you, Illustrious Sir, would regard the critical position of the court rather than your personal grievances, and so divert your forces from the attack on Xuzhou to the rescue of the state. Such would be for the happiness of this city and the whole empire.\"\n\nCao Cao gave vent to a torrent of abuse: \"Who is this Liu Bei that he dares write and exhort me? Beside, he means to be satirical.\"\n\nCao Cao issued orders to put the bearer of the letter to death and to press on the siege.\n\nBut Guo Jia remonstrated, saying, \"Liu Bei has come from afar to help Tao Qian, and he is trying the effect of politeness before resorting to arms. I pray you, my lord, reply with fair words that his heart may be lulled with a feeling of safety. Then attack with vigor and the city will fall.\"\n\nCao Cao found this advice good, so he spared the messenger, telling him to wait to carry back his reply.\n\nWhile this was going on, a horseman came with news of misfortune: \"Lu Bu has invaded Yanzhou, now holding Puyang. The three counties left \u2014 Juancheng, Fanxia, and Dongjun \u2014 are under severe attacks!\"\n\nWhen Li Jue and Guo Si, the two partisans of Dong Zhuo, succeeded in their attack on the capital, Lu Bu had fled to Yuan Shu. However, Yuan Shu looked askance at him for his instability and refused to receive him. Then Lu Bu went to try Yuan Shao, who was a brother of Yuan Shu. Yuan Shao accepted the warrior and made use of him in an attack upon Zhang Yan in Changshan. But Lu Bu's success filled him with pride, and his arrogant demeanor so annoyed the other commanders that Yuan Shao was on the point of putting him to death. To escape this Lu Bu had gone away to Zhang Yang, Governor of Shangdang, who accepted his services.\n\nAbout this time Pang Shu, who had been hiding and protecting Lu Bu's family in Changan since his disappearance, restored them to him. This deed angered Li Jue and Guo Si so that they put Pang Shu to death and wrote to Lu Bu's protector to serve him the same. To escape this Lu Bu once again had to flee and this time joined himself to Zhang Miao, the Governor of Chenliu.\n\nLu Bu arrived just as Zhang Miao's brother, Zhang Chao, was introducing Chen Gong.\n\nChen Gong said to Zhang Miao, \"The rupture of the empire has begun, and warlords are seizing what they can. It is strange that you, with all the advantages of population and provisions you enjoy, do not strike for independence. Cao Cao has gone on an expedition against the east, leaving his own territory defenseless. Lu Bu is one of the warriors of the day. If you and he together attacked and got Yanzhou, you could then proceed to the dominion.\"\n\nZhang Miao was pleased and resolved to try. He ordered an attack, and soon Lu Bu was in possession of Yanzhou and its neighborhood, all but three small counties of Juancheng, Fanxia, and Dongjun, which were vigorously and desperately defended by Xun Yu and Cheng Yu in concert. Cao Cao's cousin, Cao Ren, had fought many battles but was repeatedly defeated, and the messenger with the evil tidings had come from him asking prompt help.\n\nCao Cao was greatly disturbed by this and said, \"If my own region be lost, I have no home to return to! I must do something at once.\"\n\n\"The best thing would be to become friends with Liu Bei at any cost and return to Yanzhou,\" said Guo Jia.\n\nThen Cao Cao wrote to Liu Bei, gave the letter to the waiting messenger and broke camp. The news that the enemy had left was very gratifying to Tao Qian, who then invited his various defenders into Xuzhou City and prepared banquets and feasts in token of his gratitude.\n\nAt one of these, when the feasting was over, he proceeded with his wish of retirement in favor of Liu Bei.\n\nPlacing Liu Bei in the seat of highest honor, Tao Qian bowed before him and then addressed the assembly, \"I am old and feeble, and my two sons lack the ability to hold so important an office as this. The noble Liu Bei is a descendant of the imperial house. He is of lofty virtue and great talent. Let him then take over the rule of this region, and only too willingly I shall retire to have leisure to nurse my health.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I came at the request of Governor Kong Rong, because it was the right thing to do. Xuzhou is saved; but if I take it, surely the world will say I am a wicked man.\"\n\nMi Zhu said, \"You may not refuse. The House of Han is falling, their realm is crumbling, and now is the time for doughty deeds and signal services. This is a fertile region, well populated and rich, and you are the man to rule over it.\"\n\n\"But I cannot accept,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Imperial Protector Tao Qian is a great sufferer,\" said Chen Deng, \"and cannot see to matters. You may not decline, Sir.\"\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"Yuan Shu belongs to a family of rulers, who have held the highest offices of state four times in three generations. The multitude people respects him. Why not invite him to this task?\"\n\n\"Because Yuan Shu is a drying skeleton in a dark tomb: Not worth talking about. This opportunity is a gift from Heaven, and you will never cease to regret its loss,\" said Kong Rong.\n\nSo spoke Kong Rong, but still Liu Bei obstinately refused.\n\nTao Qian besought him with tears, saying, \"I shall die if you leave me, and there will be none to close my eyes.\"\n\n\"Brother, you should accept the offer thus made,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"Why so much fuss?\" said Zhang Fei. \"We have not taken the place. It is he who wishes to give it to you.\"\n\n\"You all persuade me to do what is wrong,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSeeing he could not persuade Liu Bei, Tao Qian then said, \"As you are set in determination, perhaps you will consent to encamp at Xiaopei. It is only a little town, but thence you can keep watch and ward over the region.\"\n\nThey all with one voice prayed Liu Bei to consent, so he gave in. The feast of victory being now ended, the time came to say farewell. When Zhao Zilong took his leave, Liu Bei held his hands alternately while dashing away the falling tears. Kong Rong and Tian Kai went home to their own places.\n\nWhen Liu Bei and his brothers took up their abode in Xiaopei, they first repaired the defenses, and then they put out proclamations in order to calm the inhabitants.\n\nIn the meantime Cao Cao had marched toward his own region (AD 194).\n\nCao Ren met and told him, \"Lu Bu is very powerful, and he has Chen Gong as Adviser. Yanzhou is as good as lost, with the exception of three counties which Xun Yu and Cheng Yu are vigorously defending together.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"I own that Lu Bu is a bold fighter but nothing more: He has no craft. So we need not fear him seriously.\"\n\nThen he gave orders to make a strong camp till they could think out some victorious plan.\n\nLu Bu, knowing of Cao Cao's return, called two of his subordinate generals, Xue Lan and Li Fang, to him and assigned to them the task of holding the city of Yanzhou, saying, \"I have long waited for opportunity to employ your skill. Now I give you ten thousand soldiers, and you are to hold the city while I go forth to attack Cao Cao.\"\n\nThey accepted.\n\nBut Chen Gong, the strategist, came in hastily, saying, \"General, you are going away. Whither?\"\n\n\"I am going to camp my troops at Puyang, to establish an ox-horn vantage.\"\n\n\"You are making a mistake,\" said Chen Gong. \"The two you have chosen to defend this city are unequal to the task. For this expedition remember that about sixty miles due south, on the treacherous road to the Taishan Mountains, is a very advantageous position where you should place your best men in ambush. Cao Cao will hasten homeward by double marches when he hears what has happened. If you strike when half his troops have gone past this point, you may seize him.\"\n\nSaid Lu Bu, \"I am going to occupy Puyang and see what develops. How can you guess my big plan?\"\n\nSo Lu Bu left Xue Lan in command at Yanzhou and went away.\n\nNow when Cao Cao approached the dangerous part of the road near the Taishan Mountains, Guo Jia warned him, saying, \"Do not advance hastily, my lord. There is doubtless an ambush.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao laughed, saying, \"We know all Lu Bu's dispositions. Xue Lan is keeping the city, while Lu Bu is massing his troops at Puyang. Do you think Lu Bu has laid an ambush? I shall tell Cao Ren to besiege Yanzhou, and I shall go to Puyang.\"\n\nIn Puyang, when Chen Gong heard of the enemy's approach, he spoke, saying, \"The enemy will be fatigued with long marches, so attack quickly before they have time to recover.\"\n\nLu Bu replied, \"I, a single horseman, am afraid of none. I come and go as I will. Think you I fear this Cao Cao? Let him settle his camp; I will take him after that.\"\n\nNow Cao Cao neared Puyang, and he made a camp. The next day he led out his commanders, and they arrayed their armies in open country. Cao Cao took up his station on horseback between the two standards, watching while his opponents arrived and formed up in a circular area.\n\nLu Bu was in front, followed by eight of his generals, all strong men: Zhang Liao of Mayi, backed by Hao Meng, Cao Xing, and Cheng Lian; Zang Ba of Huaying, backed by Wei Xu, Song Xian, and Hou Cheng. They led an army of fifty thousand in total.\n\nThe drums began their thunderous roll, and Cao Cao, pointing to his opponent, said, \"You and I had no quarrel, why then did you invade my land?\"\n\n\"The cities of Han are the possession of all. What is your special claim?\" said Lu Bu.\n\nSo saying, Lu Bu ordered Zang Ba to ride forth and challenge. From Cao Cao's side the challenge was accepted by Yue Jing. The two steeds approached each other; two spears were lifted both together, and they exchanged near thirty blows with no advantage to either. Then Xiahou Dun rode out to help his colleague and, in reply, out went Zhang Liao from Lu Bu's side. And they four fought.\n\nThen fierce anger seized upon Lu Bu. Setting his trident halberd, he urged his Red Hare forward to where the fight was waging. Seeing him approach, Xiahou Dun and Yue Jing both fled, but Lu Bu pressed on after them, and Cao Cao's army lost the day. Retiring ten miles, they made a new camp. Lu Bu called in and mustered his troops.\n\nThe day having gone against him, Cao Cao called a council, and Yu Jin said, \"From the hill tops today I saw a camp of our enemies on the west of Puyang. They were but few men therein, and tonight after today's victory, it will not be defended. Let us attack; and if we can take the camp, we shall strike fear into the heart of Lu Bu. This is our best plan.\"\n\nCao Cao thought so too. He and six of his generals \u2014 Cao Hong, Li Dian, Mao Jie, Lu Qian, Yu Jin, and Dian Wei \u2014 and twenty thousand horse and foot left that night by a secret road for the camp.\n\nIn his camp Lu Bu was rejoicing for that day's victory, when Chen Gong reminded him, saying, \"The western camp is importance point, and it might be attacked.\"\n\nBut Lu Bu replied, \"The enemy will not dare approach after today's defeat.\"\n\n\"Cao Cao is a very able commander,\" replied Chen Gong. \"You must keep a good lookout for him lest he attack our weak spot.\"\n\nSo arrangements were made for defense. Generals Gao Shun, Wei Xu, and Hou Cheng were ordered to march there.\n\nAt dusk Cao Cao reached the camp and began an immediate attack on all four sides. The defenders could not hold him off. They ran in all directions, and the camp was captured. Near the fourth watch, when the defending party came, Cao Cao sallied forth to meet them and met Gao Shun. Another battle then began and waged till dawn. About that time a rolling of drums was heard in the west, and they told Cao Cao that Lu Bu himself was at hand. Thereupon Cao Cao abandoned the attack and fled.\n\nGao Shun, Wei Xu, and Hou Cheng pursued him, while Lu Bu blocked his escape route. Cao Cao's two generals, Yu Jin and Yue Jing, attacked Lu Bu's troops but could not break them. Cao Cao went away north. But from behind some hills came out Zhang Liao and Zang Ba to attack. Lu Qian and Cao Hong were sent to stop the attackers, but Lu Qian and Cao Hong were both defeated. Cao Cao sought safety in the west. Here again his retreat was met by Lu Bu's four generals, Hao Meng, Cao Xing, Cheng Lian, and Song Xian.\n\nThe fight became desperate. Cao Cao dashed at the enemy's array. The din was terrible. Arrows fell like pelting rain upon them, and they could make no headway.\n\nCao Cao was desperate and cried out in fear, \"Who can save me?\"\n\nThen from the crush dashed out Dian Wei with his double spears, crying, \"Fear not, my lord!\"\n\nDian Wei leapt from his steed, put aside his double spears, and laid hold of a handful of battle-axes. Turning to his followers he said, \"When the ruffians are at ten paces, call out to me.\"\n\nThen he set off with mighty strides, plunging forward, careless of the flying arrows. Lu Bu's horsemen followed, and when they got near, Dian Wei's followers shouted, \"Ten paces!\"\n\n\"Five, then call!\" shouted back Dian Wei, and went on.\n\nPresently, \"Five paces!\"\n\nThen Dian Wei spun round and flung the battle-axes. With every fling a man fell from the saddle and never a battle-ax missed.\n\nHaving thus slain ten or so the remainder fled, and Dian Wei quickly remounted his steed, set his twin spears and rushed again into the fight with a vigor that none could withstand. One by one his opponents yielded, and he was able to lead Cao Cao safely out of the press of battle. Cao Cao and his commanders went to their camp.\n\nBut as evening fell, the noise of pursuit fell on their ears, and soon appeared Lu Bu himself.\n\n\"Cao Cao, you rebel, do not flee!\" shouted Lu Bu as he approached with his halberd ready for a thrust.\n\nAll stopped and looked in each others' faces: The soldiers were weary, their steeds spent. Fear smote them, and they looked around for some place of refuge.\n\n\u2003You may lead your lord safely out of the press,\n\n\u2003But what if the enemy follow?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Tao Qian Thrice Offers Xuzhou To Liu Bei; Cao Cao Retakes Yanzhou From Lu Bu.\n\nThe last chapter closed with Cao Cao in great danger. However, help came. Xiahou Dun with a body of soldiers found his chief, checked the pursuit, and fought with Lu Bu till dusk. Rain fell in torrents swamping everything; and as the daylight waned, they drew off and Cao Cao reached camp. He rewarded Dian Wei generously and advanced him in rank.\n\nWhen Lu Bu reached his camp, he called in his adviser Chen Gong. Then Chen Gong proposed a new stratagem.\n\nHe said, \"In Puyang there is a rich, leading family, Tian by name, who number thousands, enough to populate a whole county in themselves. Make one of these people go to Cao Cao's camp with a pretended secret letter about your ferocity, and the hatred of the people, and their desire to be rid of you. And spread the news that only Gao Shun is left to guard the city, and they would help anyone who would come to save them. Thus our enemy Cao Cao will be inveigled into the city, and we will destroy him either by fire or ambush. His skill may be equal to encompassing the universe, but he will not escape.\"\n\nLu Bu thought this trick might be tried, and they arranged for the Tian family letter to be sent.\n\nComing soon after the defeat, when Cao Cao felt uncertain what step to take next, the secret letter was read with joy:\n\n\"Lu Bu has marched to Liyang. The city's defense is weak: You must attack immediately, and we will render interior help. Follow the sign of a white flag with the word Rectitude written thereon.\"\n\n\"Heaven is going to give me Puyang!\" said Cao Cao joyfully.\n\nSo he rewarded the messenger very liberally and began to prepare for the expedition.\n\nThen came Liu Ye, saying, \"Lu Bu is no strategist, but Chen Gong is full of guile. I fear treachery in this letter, and you must be careful. If you will go, then enter with only one third your army, leaving the others outside the city as a reserve.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed to take this precaution. He went to Puyang, which he found gay with fluttering flags. Looking carefully he saw among them, at the west gate, the white flag with the looked-for inscription. His heart rejoiced.\n\nThat day, just about noon, the city gates opened, and two bodies of soldiers appeared as if to fight. Gao Shun was the Front Commander, and Hou Cheng the Rear Commander. Cao Cao told off his general, Dian Wei, to oppose them. Neither body, however, came on to full engagement but fell back into the city. By this move Dian Wei and his troops had been drawn close up to the drawbridge. From within the city several soldiers were seen taking any chance of confusion to escape and come outside.\n\nTo Cao Cao they said, \"We are clients of the Tian family,\" and they gave him secret letters stating:\n\n\"The signal will be given about the first watch setting by beating a gong. That will be the time to attack. The gates will be opened.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao ordered Xiahou Dun to march to the left and Cao Hong to the right. Cao Cao led the main army \u2014 together with Xiahou Yuan, Li Dian, and Yue Jing \u2014 into the city.\n\nLi Dian pressed upon his master the precaution, saying, \"My lord should stay outside the city. Let us go in first.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao bade him be silent, saying, \"If I do not go, who will advance?\"\n\nAnd so at the first watch Cao Cao led the way. The moon had not yet arisen. As he drew near the west gate, they heard a crackling sound, then a loud shouting, and then torches moved hither and thither. Next the gates were thrown wide open, and Cao Cao, whipping up his steed, galloped in.\n\nBut when he reached the state residence, he noticed the streets were quite deserted, and then he knew he had been tricked. Wheeling round his horse, he shouted to his followers to retire. This was the signal for another move. An explosion of a signal bomb was heard close at hand, and it was echoed from every side in a deafening roar. Gongs and drums beat all around with a roar like rivers rushing backward to their source, and the ocean boiling up from its depths. From two sides east and west came bodies of soldiers eager to attack, led by Lu Bu's generals Zhang Liao and Zang Ba.\n\nCao Cao dashed off toward the north only to find his way barred by Hao Meng and Cao Xing. Cao Cao tried for the south gate, but met enemies led by Gao Shun and Hou Cheng. Cao Cao's trusty commander Dian Wei, with fierce eyes and gritting teeth, at last burst through and got out, with the enemy close after him.\n\nBut when Dian Wei reached the drawbridge, he glanced behind him and missed his master. Immediately Dian Wei turned back and cut an alley inside. Just within he met Li Dian.\n\n\"Where is our lord?\" cried Dian Wei.\n\n\"I am looking for him!\" said Li Dian.\n\n\"Quick! Get help from outside,\" shouted Dian Wei. \"I will seek him!\"\n\nSo Li Dian hastened for aid, and Dian Wei slashed his way in, looking on every side for Cao Cao. He was not to be found. Dashing out of the city, Dian Wei ran up against Yue Jing, who asked where their lord was.\n\n\"I have entered the city twice in search of him, but cannot find him!\" said Dian Wei.\n\n\"Let us go in together.\" said Yue Jing.\n\nThey rode up to the gate. But the noise of bombs and the pouring fire from the gate tower frightened Yue Jing's horse so that it refused to pass. Wherefore Dian Wei alone went in, butting through the smoke and dashing through the flames. But he got in and searched on every side.\n\nWhen Cao Cao saw his sturdy protector Dian Wei cut his way out and disappear leaving him surrounded, he again made an attempt to reach the north gate. On the way, sharply silhouetted against the glow, he saw the figure of Lu Bu coming toward him with his trident halberd ready to kill. Cao Cao covered his face with his hand, whipped up his steed and galloped past.\n\nBut Lu Bu came galloping up behind him and tapping him on the helmet with the halberd cried, \"Where is Cao Cao?\"\n\nCao Cao turned and, pointing to a dun horse well ahead, cried, \"There: On that dun! That is he!\"\n\nHearing this Lu Bu left pursuing Cao Cao to gallop after the rider of the dun.\n\nThus relieved Cao Cao set off for the east gate. Then he fell in with Dian Wei, who took him under his protection and fought through the press, leaving a trail of death behind till they reached the gate. Here the fire was raging fiercely, and burning beams were falling on all sides. The earth element seemed to have interchanged with the fire element. Dian Wei warded off the burning pieces of wood with his lance and rode into the smoke making a way for his lord. Just as they were passing through the gate a flaming beam fell from the gate tower. Cao Cao just warded it off with his arm, but it struck his steed on the quarters and knocked the steed down. Cao Cao's hand and arm were badly burned and his hair and beard singed. Dian Wei turned back to his rescue. Luckily Xiahou Yuan came along just then, and the two raised Cao Cao and set him on Xiahou Yuan's horse. And thus they got him out of the burning city. But they had to go through heavy fighting till daybreak.\n\nCao Cao returned to his camp. His officers crowded about his tent, anxious for news of his health. He soon recovered and laughed when he thought of his escape.\n\n\"I blundered into that fool's trap, but I will have my revenge,\" said he.\n\n\"Let us have a new plan soon,\" said Guo Jia.\n\n\"I will turn his trick to my own use. I will spread the false report that I was burned in the fire, and that I died at the fifth watch. He will come to attack as soon as the news gets abroad, and I will have an ambush ready for him in Maling Hills. I will get him this time.\"\n\n\"Really a fine stratagem!\" said Guo Jia.\n\nSo the soldiers were put into mourning, and the report went everywhere that Cao Cao was dead. And soon Lu Bu heard it, and he assembled his army at once to make a surprise attack, taking the road by the Maling Hills to his enemy's camp.\n\nAs he was passing the hills, he heard the drums beating for an advance, and the ambushing soldiers leapt out all round him. Only by desperate fighting did he get out of the melee and with a sadly diminished force returned to his camp at Puyang. There he strengthened the fortifications and could not be tempted forth to battle.\n\nThis year locusts suddenly appeared, and they consumed every green blade. There was a famine, and in the northeast grain rose to fifty strings of copper coins a cart. People even took to cannibalism. Cao Cao's army suffered from want, and he marched them to Juancheng. Lu Bu took his troops to Shanyang. Perforce therefore the fighting ceased.\n\nIn Xuzhou. Imperial Protector Tao Qian, over sixty years of age, suddenly fell seriously ill, and he summoned his confident, Mi Zhu, to his chamber to make arrangements for the future.\n\nAs to the situation the adviser said, \"Cao Cao abandoned his attack on this place because of his enemy's seizure of Yanzhou; and now they are both keeping the peace solely because of the famine. But Cao Cao will surely renew the attack in the spring. When Liu Bei refused to allow you to vacate office in his favor, you were in full vigor. Now you are ill and weak, and you can make this a reason for retirement. He will not refuse again.\"\n\nSo a message was sent to the little garrison town Xiaopei calling Liu Bei to a counsel on military affairs. This brought him with his brothers and a slender escort. He was at once called in to the sick man's chamber. Quickly disposing of the inquiries about his health, Tao Qian soon came to the real object of his call for Liu Bei.\n\n\"Sir, I asked you to come for the sole reason that I am dangerously ill and likely to die at any time. I look to you, Illustrious Sir, to consider the Hans and their empire as more important than anything else, and so to take over the symbols of office of this region, the commission and the seal, that I may close my eyes in peace.\"\n\n\"You have two sons, why not depute them to relieve you?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Both lack the requisite talents. I trust you will instruct them after I have gone, but do not let them have the guidance of affairs.\"\n\n\"But I am unequal to so great a charge.\"\n\n\"I will recommend to you one who could assist you. He is Sun Qian from Beihai who could be appointed to some post.\"\n\nTurning to Mi Zhu, Tao Qian said, \"The noble Liu Bei here is the most prominent man of the time, and you should serve him well.\"\n\nStill would Liu Bei have put from him such a post, but just then the Imperial Protector, pointing to his heart to indicate his sincerity, passed away.\n\nWhen the ceremonial wailing of the officials was over, the insignia of office were brought to Liu Bei. But he would have none of them. The following days the inhabitants of the town and country around crowded into the state residence, bowing and with tears, calling upon Liu Bei to receive the charge.\n\n\"If you do not, we cannot live in peace!\" said they.\n\nTo these requests his brothers added their persuasion, till at length he consented to assume the administrative duties. He forthwith appointed Sun Qian and Mi Zhu as his Advisers, and Chen Deng his Secretary. He moved his army from Xiaopei to Xuzhou City, and he put forth proclamations to reassure the people.\n\nHe also attended to the burial ceremonies; he and all his army dressing in mourning. After the fullest sacrifices and ceremonies, a burial place for the late Imperial Protector was found close to the source of the Yellow River. The dead man's testament was forwarded to court.\n\nThe news of the events in Xuzhou duly reached the ears of Cao Cao, then in Juancheng.\n\nSaid he, angrily, \"I have missed my revenge. This Liu Bei has simply stepped into command of the region without expending half an arrow: He sat still and attained his desire. But I will put him to death and then dig up Tao Qian's corpse in revenge for the death of my noble father!\"\n\nOrders were issued for the army to prepare for a new campaign against Xuzhou.\n\nBut Adviser Xun Yu remonstrated with Cao Cao, saying, \"The Supreme Ancestor secured the Land Within the Passes and his illustrious successor on the throne, Liu Xiu, took Henei. They both first consolidated their position whereby they could command the entire empire. Their whole progress was from success to success. Hence they accomplished their great designs in spite of difficulties.\n\n\"Illustrious Sir, your Land Within the Passes and your Henei are Yanzhou and the Yellow River, which you had first, and which is of the utmost strategic point of the empire. If you undertake this expedition against Xuzhou leaving many troops here for defense, you will not accomplish your design; if you leave too few, Lu Bu will fall upon us. And finally if you lose this and fail to gain Xuzhou, whither will you retire? That region is not vacant. Although Tao Qian has gone, Liu Bei holds it; and since the people support him, they will fight to the death for him. To abandon this place for that is to exchange the great for the small, to barter the trunk for the branches, to leave safety and run into danger. I would implore you to reflect well.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"It is not a good plan to keep soldiers idle here during such scarcity.\"\n\n\"If that is so, it would be more advantageous to attack the eastern counties of Chencheng, Yingchuan, and Runan, and feed your army on their supplies. The remnants of the Yellow Scarves, He Yi and Huang Shao, are there with stores and treasures of all kinds that they have amassed by plundering wherever they could. Rebels of their stamp are easily broken. Break them, and you can feed your army with their grain. Moreover, both the court and the common people will join in blessing you.\"\n\nThis new design appealed strongly to Cao Cao, and he quickly began his preparations to carry it out. He left Xiahou Dun and Cao Ren to guard Juancheng, while his main body, under his own command, marched to seize Chencheng. This done they went to Runan and Yingchuan.\n\nNow when the Yellow Scarves leaders, He Yi and Huang Shao, knew that Cao Cao was approaching. They came out in a great body to oppose him. They met at Goat Hill. Though the rebels were numerous, they were a poor lot, a mere pack of beasts without organization and lacking discipline. Cao Cao ordered his strong archers and vigorous crossbowmen to keep them in check.\n\nDian Wei was sent out to challenge. The rebel leaders chose a Second-in-Command champion for their side, who rode out and was vanquished in the third bout. Then Cao Cao's army pushed forward, and they made a camp at Goat Hill.\n\nThe following day the rebel Huang Shao himself led forth his army and made his battle array along a circle. A leader advanced on foot to offer combat. He wore a yellow turban on his head and a green robe. His weapon was an iron mace.\n\nHe shouted, \"I am He Man, the devil who shoots across the sky. Who dare fight with me?\"\n\nCao Hong uttered a great shout and jumped from the saddle to accept the challenge. Sword in hand he advanced on foot and the two engaged in fierce combat in the face of both armies. They exchanged some fifty blows, neither gaining the advantage. Then Cao Hong feigned defeat and ran away. He Man went after him. Just as he closed, Cao Hong tried a feint and then suddenly wheeling about, wounded his adversary. Another slash, and He Man lay dead.\n\nAt once Li Dian dashed forward into the midst of the Yellow Scarves and laid hands on the rebel chief Huang Shao whom he carried off captive. Cao Cao's troops then set on and scattered the rebels. The spoil of treasure and food was immense.\n\nThe other rebel leader, He Yi, fled with a few hundred horsemen toward Gepei Hills. But while on their road thither there suddenly appeared a force led by a certain swashbuckler. This bravo was a well-built man, thickset and stout. With a waist ten spans in girth. He used a long sword.\n\nHe barred the way of retreat. He Yi set his spear and rode toward him. But at the first encounter the bravo caught He Yi under his arm and bore He Yi off a prisoner. All the rebels were terror-stricken, dropped from their horses and allowed themselves to be bound. Then the victor drove them like cattle into an enclosure with high banks.\n\nPresently Dian Wei, still pursuing the rebels, reached Gepei Hills. The swashbuckler went out to meet him.\n\n\"Are you also a Yellow Scarves rebel?\" said Dian Wei.\n\n\"I have some hundreds of them prisoners in an enclosure here.\"\n\n\"Why not bring them out?\" said Dian Wei.\n\n\"I will if you win this sword from my hand.\"\n\nThis annoyed Dian Wei who attacked him. They engaged and the combat lasted for two long hours and then was still undecided. Both rested a while. The swashbuckler was the first to recover and renewed the challenge. They fought till dusk and then, as their horses were quite spent, the combat was once more suspended.\n\nIn the meantime some of Dian Wei's men had run off to tell the story of this wondrous fight to Cao Cao who hastened in amazement, followed by many officers to watch it and see the result.\n\nNext day the unknown warrior rode out again, and Cao Cao saw him. In Cao Cao's heart he rejoiced to see such a doughty hero and desired to gain his services. So Cao Cao bade Dian Wei feign defeat.\n\nDian Wei rode out in answer to the challenge, and some thirty bouts were fought. Then Dian Wei turned and fled toward his own side. The bravo followed and came quite close. But a flight of arrows drove him away.\n\nCao Cao hastily drew off his men for one and a half miles and then secretly sent a certain number to dig a pitfall and sent troops armed with hooks to lie in ambush.\n\nThe following day Dian Wei was sent out with one hundred horse. His adversary nothing loath came to meet Dian Wei.\n\n\"Why does the defeated leader venture forth again?\" cried he laughing.\n\nThe swashbuckler spurred forward to join battle, but Dian Wei, after a faint show of fighting, turned his horse and rode away. His adversary intent upon capture, took no care, and he and his horse all blundered into the pitfall. The hookmen took him captive, bound him, and carried him before Cao Cao.\n\nAs soon as he saw the prisoner, Cao Cao advanced from his tent, sent away the soldiers, and with his own hands loosened the leader's bonds. Then he brought out clothing and dressed him, bade him be seated and asked who he was and whence he came.\n\n\"I am named Xu Chu. I am from Qiao. When the rebellion broke out, my relatives and I, numbered some hundreds, built a stronghold within a rampart for protection. One day the robbers came, but I had stones ready for them. I told my relatives to keep on bringing them up to me and I threw them, hitting somebody every time I threw. This drove off the robbers. Another day they came, and we were short of grain. So I agreed with them to an exchange of plow oxen against grain. They delivered the grain and were driving away the oxen when the beasts took fright and tore off to their pens. I seized two of oxen by the tail, one with each hand, and hauled them backwards a hundred or so paces. The robbers were so amazed that they thought no more about oxen but went their way. So they never troubled us again.\"\n\n\"I have heard of your mighty exploits,\" said Cao Cao. \"Will you join my army?\"\n\n\"That is my strongest desire,\" said Xu Chu.\n\nSo Xu Chu called up his clan, some hundreds in all, and they formally submitted to Cao Cao. Xu Chu received the rank of General and got ample rewards. The two rebel leaders, He Yi and Huang Shao, were executed. Runan and Yingchuan were now perfectly pacified.\n\nCao Cao withdrew his army and went back to Juancheng.\n\nXiahou Dun and Cao Ren came out to welcome him, and they told him, \"Scouts report that Yanzhou City has been left defenseless. Lu Bu's generals, Xue Lan and Li Fang, have given up all its garrison to plundering the surrounding country. We must act without loss of time. With our soldiers fresh from victory, the city will fall at a tap of the drum.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao marched the army straight to the city. An attack was quite unexpected but the two leaders, Xue Lan and Li Fang, hurried out their few soldiers to fight.\n\nXu Chu, the latest recruit, said, \"I wish to capture these two and make them an introductory gift!\"\n\nThe task was given him, and he rode forth. Li Fang with his halberd advanced to meet Xu Chu. The combat was brief as Li Fang fell in the second bout. His colleague Xue Lan retired with his troops. But he found the drawbridge had been seized by Li Dian, so that he could not get shelter within the city. Xue Lan led his men toward Juye. But Lu Qian pursued and killed him with an arrow. His soldiers scattered to the four directions. And thus Yanzhou was recaptured.\n\nNext Cheng Yu proposed an expedition to take Puyang. Cao Cao marched his army out in perfect order. The Van Leaders were Dian Wei and Xu Chu; Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan led the left wing; Li Dian and Yue Jing led the right wing; Yu Jin and Lu Qian guarded the rear. Cao Cao himself commanded the center.\n\nWhen they approached Puyang, Lu Bu wished to go out in person and alone to attack, but his adviser Chen Gong protested, saying, \"General, you should not go out until the arrival of the other officers.\"\n\n\"Whom do I fear?\" said Lu Bu.\n\nSo he threw caution to the winds and went out of the city. He met his foes and began to revile them. The redoubtable Xu Chu went to fight with him, but after twenty bouts neither combatant was any the worse.\n\n\"He is not the sort that one man can overcome,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he sent Dian Wei to attack Lu Bu from another direction. Lu Bu stood the double onslaught. Soon after the flank commanders joined in \u2014 Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan attacking the left; Li Dian and Yue Jing surrounding the right. Lu Bu had six opponents. These proved really too many for him so he turned his horse and rode back to the city.\n\nBut when the members of the Tian family saw him coming back beaten, they raised the drawbridge.\n\nLu Bu shouted, \"Open the gates! Let me in!\"\n\nBut the Tians said, \"We have gone over to Cao Cao!\"\n\nThis was hard to hear and the beaten man abused them roundly before he left. Chen Gong got away through the east gate taking with him the general's family.\n\nThus Puyang came into Cao Cao's hands, and for their present services the Tian family were pardoned their previous fault.\n\nHowever, Liu Ye said, \"Lu Bu is a savage beast. If let alive, he will be a great danger. Hunt him down!\"\n\nLiu Ye was ordered to keep Puyang. Wherefore Cao Cao determined to follow Lu Bu to Dingtao whither he had gone for refuge.\n\nLu Bu, Zhang Miao, and Zhang Chao were assembled in the city. Gao Shun and other generals were out foraging. Cao Cao army arrived but did not attack for many days, and presently he withdrew fifteen miles and made a stockade. It was the time of harvest, and he set his soldiers to cut the wheat for food. The spies reported this to Lu Bu who came over to see. But when he saw that Cao Cao's stockade lay near a thick wood, he feared an ambush and retired. Cao Cao heard that Lu Bu had come and gone and guessed the reason.\n\n\"He fears an ambush in the wood,\" said Cao Cao. \"We will set up flags there and deceive him. There is a long embankment near the camp, but behind it there is no water. There we will lay an ambush to fall upon Lu Bu when he comes to burn the wood.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao hid all his soldiers behind the embankment except half a hundred drummers, and he got together many peasants to loiter within the stockade as though it was not empty.\n\nLu Bu rode back and told Chen Gong what he had seen.\n\n\"This Cao Cao is very crafty and full of wiles,\" said the adviser. \"Do not act.\"\n\n\"I will use fire this time and burn out his ambush,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nNext morning Lu Bu rode out, and there he saw flags flying everywhere in the wood. He ordered his troops forward to set fire on all sides. But to his surprise no one rushed out to make for the stockade. Still he heard the beating of drums and doubt filled his mind. Suddenly he saw a party of soldiers move out from the shelter of the stockade. He galloped over to see what it meant.\n\nThen the signal-bombs exploded: Out rushed the troops and all their leaders dashed forward. Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Xu Chu, Dian Wei, Li Dian, and Yue Jing all attacked at once. Lu Bu was at a loss and fled into the open country. One of his generals, Cheng Lian, was killed by an arrow of Yue Jing. Two thirds of his troops were lost, and the beaten remainder went to tell Chen Gong what had come to pass.\n\n\"We had better leave,\" said Chen Gong. \"An empty city cannot be held.\"\n\nSo Chen Gong and Gao Shun, taking their chief's family with them, abandoned Dingtao. When Cao Cao's soldiers got into the city, they met with no resistance. Zhang Chao committed suicide by burning himself. Zhang Miao fled to Yuan Shu.\n\nThus the whole northeast fell under the power of Cao Cao. He immediately tranquilized the people and rebuilt the cities and their defenses (AD 195).\n\nLu Bu in his retreat fell in with his generals, and Chen Gong also rejoined him, so that he was by no means broken.\n\n\"I have but a small army,\" said Lu Bu, \"but still enough to break Cao Cao!\"\n\nAnd so he retook the backward road. Indeed:\n\n\u2003Thus does fortune alternate, victory and defeat,\n\n\u2003The happy conqueror today, tomorrow must retreat?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Li Jue and Guo Si Duel In Changan; The Emperor Establishes Anyi The New Capital.\n\nThe last chapter told of the defeat of Lu Bu, and his gathering the remnant of his army at Dingtao. When all his generals had joined him, he began to feel strong enough to try conclusions with Cao Cao once again.\n\nSaid Chen Gong, who was opposed to this course, \"Cao Cao is too strong right now. Seek some place where we can rest a time before trying.\"\n\n\"Suppose I went to Yuan Shao,\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"Send first to make inquiries.\"\n\nLu Bu agreed.\n\nThe news of the fighting between Cao Cao and Lu Bu had reached Jizhou, and one of Yuan Shao's advisers, Shen Pei, warned him, saying, \"Lu Bu is a savage beast. If he gets possession of Yanzhou, he will certainly attempt to add this region to it. For your own safety you should help to crush him.\"\n\nWherefore Yuan Shao sent Yan Liang with fifty thousand troops to destroy Lu Bu. The spies heard this and at once told Lu Bu, who was greatly disturbed and called in Chen Gong.\n\n\"Go over to Liu Bei, who has lately succeeded to Xuzhou,\" said Chen Gong.\n\nHence Lu Bu went thither.\n\nHearing this, Liu Bei said, \"Lu Bu is a hero, and we will receive him with honor.\"\n\nBut Mi Zhu was strongly against receiving him, saying, \"He was a cruel, bloodthirsty beast!\"\n\nBut Liu Bei replied, \"How would misfortune have been averted from Xuzhou, if he had not attacked Yanzhou? He cannot have bad intention, now that he comes seeking an asylum.\"\n\n\"Brother, your heart is really too good. Although it may be as you say, yet it would be well to prepare,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Bei with a great following met Lu Bu ten miles outside the city gates, and the two chiefs rode in side by side. They proceeded to the residence and there, after the elaborate ceremonies of reception were over, they sat down to converse.\n\nSaid Lu Bu, \"After Minister of the Interiror Wang Yun and I plotted to slay Dong Zhuo and my misfortune in the Li Jue and Guo Si's sedition, I drifted about from one place to another, and none of the nobles in the East of Huashan Mountains seemed willing to receive me. When Cao Cao with wicked ambition invaded this region and you, Sir, came to its rescue, I aided you by attacking Yanzhou and thus diverting a portion of his force. I did not think then that I should be the victim of a vile plot and lose my leaders and my soldiers. But now if you will, I offer myself to you that we may together accomplish great designs.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"When the late Imperial Protector Tao Qian died, there was no one to administer Xuzhou, and so I assumed that task for a time. Now since you are here, General, it is most suitable that I step down in your favor.\"\n\nWhereupon Liu Bei took the insignia and the seal of authority and handed them to Lu Bu. Lu Bu was on the point of accepting them, when he saw Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, who stood behind Liu Bei, glaring at him with angry eyes.\n\nSo Lu Bu put on a smile and said, \"I may be something of a fighting man, but I could not rule a great region like this.\"\n\nLiu Bei repeated his offer.\n\nBut Chen Gong said, \"The strong guest does not oppress his host. You need not fear, my lord!\"\n\nThen Liu Bei desisted. Banquets were held and dwelling places prepared for the guest and his retinue.\n\nAs soon as convenient, Lu Bu returned the feast. Liu Bei went with his two brothers. Half through the banquet Lu Bu requested Liu Bei to retire to one of the inner private rooms, whither Guan Yu and Zhang Fei followed him. There Lu Bu bade his wife and daughter bow as to their benefactor. Here also Liu Bei showed excessive modesty.\n\nLu Bu said, \"Good younger brother, you need not be so very modest.\"\n\nZhang Fei heard what Lu Bu said, and his eyes glared, shouting, \"What sort of a man are you that dares call our brother 'younger brother'? He is one of the ruling family \u2014 a jade leaf on a golden branch. Come out, and I will fight you three hundred bouts for the insult!\"\n\nLiu Bei hastily checked the impulsive one, and Guan Yu persuaded him to go away.\n\nThen Liu Bei apologized, saying, \"My poor brother talks wildly after he has been drinking. I hope you will not blame him.\"\n\nLu Bu nodded, but said nothing. Soon after the guests departed. But as the host escorted Liu Bei to his carriage, he saw Zhang Fei galloping up armed as for a fray.\n\n\"Lu Bu, you and I will fight that duel of three hundred bouts!\" shouted Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Bei bade Guan Yu check him. Next day Lu Bu came to take leave of his host.\n\n\"You, O Lord, kindly received me, but I fear your brothers and I cannot agree. So I will seek some other asylum.\"\n\n\"General, if you go, the blame is mine. My rude brother has offended and must eventually apologize. In the meantime what think you of a temporary sojourn at the town where I was encamped for some time, Xiaopei? The place is small and mean, but it is near, and I will see to it that you are supplied with all you need.\"\n\nLu Bu thanked him and accepted this offer. He led his troops there and took up residence. After he had gone, Liu Bei reproved Zhang Fei for what he did, and Zhang Fei did not again refer to the matter.\n\nThat Cao Cao had subdued the region around Shandong Mountains has been stated before. He memorialized the Throne and was rewarded with the title of General Who Exhibits Firm Virtue and Lord of Feiting.\n\nAt this time Li Jue and Guo Si were commanding the court. Li Jue had made himself Regent Marshal, and his colleague Guo Si styled himself Grand Commander. Their conduct was abominable but no one dared to criticize them.\n\nImperial Guardian Yang Biao and Minister Zhu Jun privately talked with Emperor Xian and said, \"Cao Cao has over two hundred thousand troops and many capable advisers and leaders. It would be well for the empire if he would lend his support to the imperial family and help to rid the government of this evil party.\"\n\nHis Majesty wept, \"I am weary of the insults and contempt of these wretches and should be very glad to have them removed.\"\n\n\"I have thought of a plan to estrange Li Jue and Guo Si and so make them destroy each other. Then Cao Cao could come and cleanse the court,\" said Yang Biao.\n\n\"How will you manage it?\" asked the Emperor.\n\n\"Guo Si's wife, Lady Qiong, is very jealous, and we can take advantage of her weakness to bring about a quarrel.\"\n\nSo Yang Biao received instruction to act, with a secret edict to support him.\n\nSo Yang Biao's wife, Lady Kai, made an excuse to visit Lady Qiong at her palace and, in the course of conversation, said \"There is talk of secret liaison between the General, your husband, and the wife of Minister Li Jue. It is a great secret, but if Minister Li Jue knew it, he might try to harm your husband. I think you ought to have very little to do with that family.\"\n\nLady Qiong was surprised but said, \"I have wondered why he has been sleeping away from home lately, but I did not think there was anything shameful connected with it. I should never have known if you had not spoken. I must put a stop to it.\"\n\nBy and by, when Lady Kai took her leave, Lady Qiong thanked her warmly for the information she had given.\n\nSome days passed, and Guo Si was going over to the dwelling of Li Jue to a dinner.\n\nLady Qiong did not wish him to go and she said, \"This Li Jue is very deep, and one cannot fathom his designs. You two are not of equal rank, and if he made away with you, what would become of your poor handmaid?\"\n\nGuo Si paid no attention, and his wife could not prevail on him to stay at home. Late in the afternoon some presents arrived from Li Jue's palace, and Lady Qiong secretly put poison into the delicacies before she set them before her lord.\n\nGuo Si was going to taste at once but she said, \"It is unwise to consume things that come from outside. Let us try on a dog first.\"\n\nThey did, and the dog died. This incident made Guo Si doubt the kindly intentions of his colleague.\n\nOne day, at the close of business at court, Li Jue invited Guo Si to his palace. After Guo Si arrived home in the evening, rather the worse for too much wine, he was seized with a colic. His wife said she suspected poison and hastily administered an emetic, which relieved the pain.\n\nGuo Si began to feel angry, saying, \"We did everything together and helped each other always. Now he wants to injure me! If I do not get in the first blow, I shall suffer some injury.\"\n\nSo Guo Si began to prepare his guards for any sudden emergency.\n\nThis was told to Li Jue, and he in turn grew angry, saying, \"So Guo Si is doing so and so!\"\n\nThen Li Jue got his guards under way and came to attack Guo Si. Both houses had ten thousand, and the quarrel became so serious that they fought a pitched battle under the city walls. When that was over both sides turned to plunder the people.\n\nThen a nephew of Li Jue, Li Xian, suddenly surrounded the Palace, put the Emperor and Empress in two carriages, and assigned Jia Xu and Zuo Ling to carry them off. The Palace attendants were made to follow on foot. As they went out of the rear gate, they met Guo Si's army who began to shoot at the cavalcade with arrows. They killed many attendants before Li Jue's army came up and forced them to retire.\n\nThe carriages got out of the Palace and eventually reached Li Jue's camp, while Guo Si's soldiers plundered the Palace and carried off all the women left there to their camp. Then the Palace was set on fire.\n\nAs soon as Guo Si heard of the whereabouts of the Emperor, he came over to attack the camp of Li Jue. The Emperor between these two opposing factions was greatly alarmed. Indeed:\n\n\u2003Slowly the Hans had declined but renewed their vigor with Liu Xiu,\n\n\u2003Twelve were the rulers before him, followed him also twelve others.\n\n\u2003Foolish were two of the latest, dangers surrounded the altars,\n\n\u2003These were degenerate days, with authority given to eunuchs.\n\n\u2003Then did He Jin the simple, the inept, who commanded the army,\n\n\u2003Warriors call to the capital, wishing to drive out the vermin;\n\n\u2003Though they drove out the leopards, tigers and wolves quickly entered.\n\n\u2003All kinds of evil were wrought by a low class creature from Xizhou.\n\n\u2003Wang Yun, honest of heart, beguiled this wretch with a woman,\n\n\u2003Much desired of his henchman, thus sowing seeds of dissension.\n\n\u2003Strife resulted, and peace no longer dwelt in the empire.\n\n\u2003No one suspected that Li Jue and Guo Si would continue the evil,\n\n\u2003Much to the sorrow of the Middle Kingdom; yet they stove for a trifle.\n\n\u2003Famine stalked in the Palace, grief for the clashing of weapons;\n\n\u2003Why did the warlords strive? Why was the land thus partitioned?\n\n\u2003They had turned aside from the way appointed of Heaven.\n\n\u2003Kings must ponder these things; heavy the burden lies on them,\n\n\u2003Chiefest in all the realm theirs is no common appointment,\n\n\u2003Should the King falter or fail, calamities fall on the multitude people,\n\n\u2003The empire is drenched with their blood, grisly ruin surrounds them.\n\n\u2003Steeped in sorrow and sad, read you the ancient records;\n\n\u2003Long is the tale of years; the tale of sorrow is longer.\n\n\u2003Wherefore one who would rule, chiefly must exercise forethought.\n\n\u2003This and a keen-edged blade, these must suffice to maintain one.\n\nGuo Si's army arrived, and Li Jue went out to give battle. Guo Si's troops had no success and retired. Then Li Jue removed the imperial captives to Meiwo with his nephew Li Xian as gaoler. Supplies were reduced, and famine showed itself on the faces of the eunuchs. The Emperor sent to Li Jue to request five carts of rice and five sets of bullock bones for his attendants.\n\nLi Jue angrily replied, \"The court gets food morning and evening. Why do they ask for more?\"\n\nHe sent putrid meat and rotten grain.\n\nThe Emperor was very vexed at the new insult, uttering, \"How dare the rebels do that to me?\"\n\nCourt Counselor Yang Qi advised patience, saying, \"Li Jue is a base creature but, under the present circumstances, Your Majesty must put up with it. You may not provoke him.\"\n\nThe Emperor bowed and was silent, but the tears fell on his garments.\n\nSuddenly someone came in with the tidings: \"A force of cavalry, their sabers glittering in the sun, are approaching to rescue the Chariot!\"\n\nThen they heard the gongs beat and the roll of the drums. The Emperor sent to find out who it was. But it was Guo Si, and the sadness fell again.\n\nPresently arose a great din. For Li Jue had gone out to do battle with Guo Si, whom he abused by name.\n\n\"I treated you well, and why did you try to kill me?\" said Li Jue.\n\n\"You are a rebel, why should I not slay you?\" cried Guo Si.\n\n\"You call me rebel when I am guarding the Emperor?\"\n\n\"You have abducted him: Do you call that guarding?\"\n\n\"Why so many words? Let us forgo a battle and settle the matter in single combat, the winner to take the Emperor and go.\"\n\nThe two generals fought in front of their armies, but neither could prevail over the other.\n\nThen they saw Yang Biao come riding up to them, crying, \"Rest a while, O Commanders! For I have invited a party of officers to arrange a peace.\"\n\nWherefore the two leaders retired to their camps. Soon Yang Biao, Zhu Jun, and sixty other officials came up and went to Guo Si's camp. They were all thrown into confinement.\n\n\"We came with good intentions,\" they moaned, \"and we are treated like this!\"\n\n\"Li Jue has run off with the Emperor; I have to have the officers,\" said Guo Si.\n\n\"What does it mean? One has the Emperor, the other his officers. What do you want?\" said Yang Biao.\n\nGuo Si lost patience and drew his sword, but General Yang Mi persuaded him not to slay the speaker. Then Guo Si released Yang Biao and Zhu Jun but kept the others in the camp.\n\n\"Here we are \u2014 two officers of the Throne \u2014 , and we cannot help our lord. We have been born in vain!\" said Yang Biao to Zhu Jun.\n\nThrowing their arms about each other, they wept and fell swooning to the earth. Zhu Jun went home, fell seriously ill and died.\n\nThereafter the two adversaries fought every day for nearly three months, each losing many soldiers.\n\nNow Li Jue was irreligious and practiced magic. He often called witches to beat drums and summon spirits, even when in camp. Jia Xu used to remonstrate with him, but quite uselessly.\n\nYang Qi said to the Emperor, \"That Jia Xu, although a friend of Li Jue, never seems to have lost the sense of loyalty to Your Majesty.\"\n\nSoon after Jia Xu himself arrived.\n\nThe Emperor sent away his attendants and said to Jia Xu, weeping the while, \"Can you not pity the Hans and help me?\"\n\nJia Xu prostrated himself, saying, \"That is my dearest wish. But, Sire, say no more: Let thy servant work out a plan.\"\n\nThe Emperor dried his tears, and soon Li Jue came in. He wore a sword by his side and strode straight up to the Emperor, whose face became the color of clay.\n\nThen Li Jue spoke, \"Guo Si has failed in his duty and imprisoned the court officers. He wished to slay Your Majesty, and you would have been captured but for me.\"\n\nThe Emperor joined his hands together in salute and thanked Li Jue. Li Jue went away.\n\nBefore long Huangfu Li entered. The Emperor, knowing him as a man of persuasive tongue and that he came from the same county as Li Jue, bade him go to both factions to try to arrange peace.\n\nHuangfu Li accepted the mission and first went to Guo Si, who said, \"I would release the officers if Li Jue would restore the Emperor to full liberty.\"\n\nHuangfu Li then went to the other side.\n\nTo Li Jue he said, \"Since I am a Xiliang man, the Emperor and the officers have selected me to make peace between you and your adversary. Guo Si has consented to cease the quarrel. Will you agree to peace?\"\n\n\"I overthrew Lu Bu, have upheld the government for four years, and have many great services to my credit as all the world knows. That other fellow, that horse-thief, has dared to seize the officers of state and to set himself up against me. I have sworn to slay him. Look around you. Do you not think my army large enough to break him?\"\n\n\"It does not follow,\" said Huangfu Li. \"In ancient days in Youqiong, Hou Yi, proud of and confident in his archer's skill, gave no thought to others and governed alone, and he so perished. Lately you yourself have seen the powerful Dong Zhuo betrayed by Lu Bu, who had received many benefits at his hands. In no time Dong Zhuo's head was hanging over the gate. So you see mere force is not enough to ensure safety. Now you are a general, with the axes and whips and all the symbols of rank and high office; your descendants and all your clan occupy distinguished positions. You must confess that the state has rewarded you liberally. True, Guo Si has seized the officers of state, but you have done the same to the 'Most Revered'. Who is worse than the other?\"\n\nLi Jue angrily drew his sword and shouted, \"Did the Son of Heaven send you to mock and shame me?\"\n\nBut his commander, Yang Feng, checked him.\n\n\"Guo Si is still alive,\" said Yang Feng, \"and to slay the imperial messenger would be giving him a popular excuse to raise an army against you. And all the nobles would join him.\"\n\nJia Xu also persuaded Li Jue, and gradually his wrath cooled down. Huangfu Li was urged to go away.\n\nBut Huangfu Li would not be satisfied with failure. As he went out of the camp, he cried loudly, \"Li Jue will not obey the Emperor's command. He will kill his prince to set up himself!\"\n\nCounselor Hu Miao tried to shut Huangfu Li's mouth, saying, \"Do not utter such words. You will only bring hurt upon yourself!\"\n\nBut Huangfu Li shrieked at him also, saying, \"You also are an officer of state, and yet you even back up the rebel. When the prince is put to shame, the minister dies. That is our code. If it be my lot to suffer death at the hands of Li Jue, so be it!\"\n\nAnd Huangfu Li maintained a torrent of abuse. The Emperor heard of the incident, called in Huangfu Li and sent him away to his own country Xiliang.\n\nNow more than half Li Jue's troops were from Xiliang, and he had also the assistance of the Qiangs, the northern tribespeople beyond the border. When Huangfu Li spread that Li Jue was a rebel and so were those who helped him, and that there would be a day of heavy reckoning, those stories disturbed the soldiers.\n\nLi Jue sent one of his officers, General Wang Chan of the Tiger Army, to arrest Huangfu Li. But Wang Chan had a sense of right and esteemed Huangfu Li as an honorable man. Instead of carrying out the orders, Wang Chan returned to say Huangfu Li could not be found.\n\nMeanwhile Jia Xu tried to work on the feelings of the tribespeople.\n\nHe said to them, \"The Son of Heaven knows you are loyal to him and have bravely fought and suffered. He has issued a secret command for you to go home, and then he will reward you.\"\n\nThe tribesmen had a grievance against Li Jue for not paying them, so they listened readily to the insidious persuasions of Jia Xu and deserted.\n\nThen Jia Xu advised the Emperor, \"Li Jue is covetous in nature. He is deserted and enfeebled. A high office should be granted to him to lead him astray.\"\n\nSo the Emperor officially appointed Li Jue Regent Marshal. This delighted him greatly, and he ascribed his promotion to the potency of his wise witches' prayers and incantations. He rewarded those people most liberally.\n\nBut his army was forgotten. Wherefore his commander, Yang Feng, was angry.\n\nYang Feng said to General Song Guo, \"We have taken all the risks and exposed ourselves to stones and arrows in his service, yet instead of giving us any reward he ascribes all the credit to those witches of his.\"\n\n\"Let us put him out of the way and rescue the Emperor,\" said Song Guo.\n\n\"You explode a bomb within as signal, and I will attack from outside.\"\n\nSo the two agreed to act together that very night in the second watch. But they had been overheard, and the eavesdropper told Li Jue. Song Guo was seized and put to death. That night Yang Feng waited outside for the signal and while waiting, out came Li Jue himself. Then a melee began, which lasted till the fourth watch. But Yang Feng got away and fled to Xian.\n\nBut from this time Li Jue's army began to fall away, and he felt more than ever the losses caused by Guo Si's frequent attacks. Then came news that Zhang Ji, at the head of a large army, was coming down from Shanxi to make peace between the two factions. Zhang Ji vowed he would attack the one who was recalcitrant. Li Jue tried to gain favor by hastening to send to tell Zhang Ji he was ready to make peace. So did Guo Si.\n\nSo the strife of the rival factions ended at last, and Zhang Ji memorialized asking the Emperor to go to Hongnong near Luoyang.\n\nThe Emperor was delighted, saying, \"I have longed to go back to the east.\"\n\nZhang Ji was rewarded with the title of Commander of the Flying Cavalry and was highly honored. Zhang Ji saw to it that the Emperor and the court had good supplies of necessaries. Guo Si set free all his captive officers, and Li Jue prepared transport for the court to move to the east. Li Jue told off companies of his Royal Guard to escort the cavalcade.\n\nThe progress had been without incident as far as Xinfeng. Near Baling Bridge the west wind of autumn came on to blow with great violence, but soon above the howling of the gale was heard the trampling of a force of several hundred. They stopped at a bridge and barred the way.\n\n\"Who comes?\" cried a voice.\n\n\"The Imperial Chariot is passing, and who dares stop it?\" said Court Counselor Yang Qi, riding forward.\n\nTwo generals of the barring party advanced to Yang Qi, saying, \"General Guo Si has ordered us to guard the bridge and stop all spies. You say the Emperor is here: We must see him, and then we will let you pass.\"\n\nSo the pearl curtain was raised, and the Emperor said, \"I, the Emperor, am here. Why do you not retire to let me pass, gentlemen?\"\n\nThey all shouted, \"Wan shui! Long Life! Long Life!\" and fell away to allow the cortege through.\n\nBut when they reported what they had done, Guo Si was very angry, saying, \"I meant to outwit Zhang Ji, seize the Emperor, and hold him in Meiwo. Why have you let him get away?\"\n\nHe put the two officers to death, set out to pursue the cavalcade, and overtook it just at the county of Huaying.\n\nThe noise of a great shouting arose behind the travelers, and a loud voice commanded, \"Stop the train!\"\n\nThe Emperor burst into tears.\n\n\"Out of the wolf's den into the tiger's mouth!\" said he.\n\nNo one knew what to do: They were all too frightened. But when the rebel army was just upon them, they heard the beating of drums and from behind some hills came into the open a cohort of more than one thousand soldiers preceded by a great flag bearing the name Han General Yang Feng.\n\nHaving defeated by Li Jue, Yang Feng fled to the foothills of Xian; and he came up to offer his services as soon as he heard the Emperor's journey. Seeing it was necessary to fight now, he drew up his line of battle.\n\nGuo Si's general, Cui Yong, rode out and began a volley of abuse.\n\nYang Feng turned and said, \"Where is Xu Huang?\"\n\nIn response out came a valiant warrior gripping a heavy battle-ax. He galloped up on his fleet bay, making directly for Cui Yong, whom he felled at the first blow. At this the whole force dashed forward and routed Guo Si. The defeated army went back some seven miles.\n\nYang Feng rode forward to see the Emperor, who graciously said, \"It is a great service you have rendered: You have saved my life.\"\n\nYang Feng bowed and thanked him, and the Emperor asked to see the actual slayer of the rebel leader. So Xu Huang was led to the chariot, where he bowed and was presented as Xu Huang of Hedong.\n\nThe Emperor recognized the achievement of the warrior.\n\nThen the cavalcade went forward, Yang Feng acting as escort as far as the city of Huaying, the halting place for the night. The commander of the place, Duan Wei, supplied them with clothing and food. And the Emperor passed the night in Yang Feng's camp.\n\nNext day Guo Si, having mustered his troops, appeared in front of the camp, and Xu Huang rode out to engage. But Guo Si threw his army out so that they entirely surrounded the camp, and the Emperor was in the middle. The position was very critical, when help appeared in the person of a galloping general from the southeast, and the rebels fell away at his assault. Then Xu Huang smote them and so scored a victory.\n\nWhen they had time to see their helper, they found him to be Dong Cheng, the uncle of the Emperor or the \"State Uncle\". The Emperor wept as he related his sorrows and dangers.\n\nSaid Dong Cheng, \"Be of good courage, Sire. General Yang Feng and I have pledged ourselves to kill both the rebels Li Jue and Guo Si and so purify the world.\"\n\nThe Emperor bade them travel east as soon as possible, and so they went on night and day till they reached their destination Hongnong.\n\nGuo Si led his defeated army back. Meeting Li Jue, he told Li Jue of the rescue of the Emperor and whither they was going.\n\n\"If they reach the Huashan Mountains and get settled in the east, they will send out proclamations to the whole country, calling up the nobles to attack us, and we and our whole clans will be in danger,\" said Guo Si.\n\n\"Zhang Ji is holding Changan, and we must be careful. There is nothing to prevent a joint attack on Hongnong, when we can kill the Emperor and divide the empire between us,\" said Li Jue.\n\nGuo Si found this a suitable scheme, so their armies came together again in one place and united in plundering the countryside. As they proceeded to Hongnong, they left destruction behind them.\n\nYang Feng and Dong Cheng heard of the rebels' approach when they were yet a long way off, so Yang Feng and Dong Cheng turned back and decided to meet them at Dongjian.\n\nLi Jue and Guo Si had previously made their plan. Since the loyal troops were few as compared with their own horde, they would overwhelm the loyal troops like a flood. So when the day of battle came, they poured out covering the hills and filling the plains. Yang Feng and Dong Cheng devoted themselves solely to the protection of the Emperor and Empress. The officials, the attendants, the archives and records, and all the paraphernalia of the court were left to care for themselves. The rebels ravaged Hongnong, but the two protectors got the Emperor safely away into Shanbei.\n\nWhen the rebel generals showed signs of pursuit, Yang Feng and Dong Cheng had to play a double-edged sword. They sent to offer to discuss terms of peace with Li Jue and Guo Si; at the same time they sent a secret edict to enlist help from the leaders of the White Wave rebels \u2014 Han Xian, Li Yue, and Hu Cai. The White Wave was a branch of the Yellow Scarves, and Li Yue was actually a brigand and had ravaged throughout the woods and hills. But the need for help was so desperate.\n\nThese three, being promised pardon for their faults and crimes and a grant of official rank, naturally responded to the call, and thus the loyal side was strengthened so that Hongnong was recaptured. But meanwhile Li Jue and Guo Si laid waste whatever place they reached, slaying the aged and weakly, forcing the strong to join their ranks. When going into a fight they forced these people-soldiers to the front, and they called them the \"Dare-to-Die\" soldiers.\n\nLi Jue and Guo Si's force was overwhelming. When Li Yue, the White Wave leader, approached with his army, Guo Si bade his soldiers scatter clothing and valuables along the road. The late robbers could not resist the temptation, so a scramble began. Then Guo Si's soldiers fell upon the disordered ranks and did much damage. Yang Feng and Dong Cheng had to take the Emperor away to the north.\n\nLi Jue and Guo Si pursued.\n\nLi Yue said, \"The danger is grave. I pray Your Majesty mount a horse and go in advance!\"\n\nThe Emperor replied, \"I cannot bear to abandon my officers.\"\n\nThey wept and struggled on as best they could. The White Wave leader Hu Cai was killed in one attack.\n\nThe enemy came very near, and the Emperor left his carriage and went on foot. Yang Feng and Dong Cheng escorted him to the bank of the Yellow River. Li Yue sought a boat to ferry him to the other side. The weather was very cold, and the Emperor and Empress cuddled up close to each other shivering. They reached the river but the banks were too high, and they could not get down into the boat.\n\nSo Yang Feng proposed, \"Fasten together the horses' bridles and lower down His Majesty slung by the waist.\"\n\nHowever, the Empress' brother, Fu De, said, \"I found some ten rolls of plain silk from dead soldiers, and we can use them instead.\"\n\nAnd they rolled up the two imperial personages in the silk, and thus they lowered them down near the boat. Then Li Yue took up his position in the prow leaning on his sword. Fu De carried the Empress on his back into the boat.\n\nThe boat was too small to carry everybody, and those unable to get on board clung to the cable, but Li Yue cut them down, and they fell into the water. They ferried over the Emperor and then sent back the boat for the others. There was a great scramble to get on board, and they had to chop off the fingers and hands of those who persisted in clinging to the boat. The lamentation rose to the heavens.\n\nWhen they mustered on the farther bank, many were missing, only a dozen of the Emperor's suite were left. Yang Feng found a bullock cart and transported the Emperor and Empress to Dayang. They had no food and at night sought shelter in a poor, tile-roofed house. Some old country folks offered them boiled millet, but it was too coarse to be swallowed.\n\nNext day the Emperor conferred titles on those who had protected him. Li Yue was made General Who Conquers the North, and Han Xian was appointed General Who Conquers the East.\n\nThe flight continued. Soon two officers of rank came up with the cortege, and they bowed before His Majesty with many tears. They were Imperial Guardian Yang Biao and Court Administrator Han Rong. The Emperor and Empress lifted up their voices and wept with them.\n\nSaid Han Rong to his colleague, \"The rebels have confidence in my words. You stay as guard of the Emperor, and I will take my life in my hands and try to bring about peace.\"\n\nAfter Han Rong had gone, the Emperor rested for a time in Yang Feng's camp. But Yang Biao requested the Emperor to head for Anyi and make the capital there. When the train reached the town, they found it containing not a single lofty building, and the court lived in grass huts devoid even of doors. They surrounded these with a fence of thorns as a protection, and within this the Emperor held counsel with his ministers. The soldiers camped round the fence.\n\nNow Li Yue and his fellow ruffians showed their true colors. They wielded the powers of the Emperor as they wished, and officials who offended them were beaten or abused even in the presence of the Emperor. They purposely provided thick wine and coarse food for the Emperor's consumption. He struggled to swallow what they sent. Li Yue and Han Xian joined in recommending to the Throne the names of convicts, common soldiers, sorcerers, leeches, and such people who thus obtained official ranks. There were more than two hundred of such people. As seals could not be engraved, pieces of wood were hammered into some sort of a shape. Court affairs had never degraded to such a low point.\n\nNow Han Rong went to see Li Jue and Guo Si. After listening to his vigorous persuasions, the two rebel generals agreed to set free the officials and Palace people.\n\nA famine occurred that same year and people were reduced to eating grass from the roadside. Starving, they wandered hither and thither. But food and clothing were sent to the Emperor from the Governor of Henei, Zhang Yang, and the Governor of Hedong, Wang Yi, and the court began to enjoy a little repose.\n\nDong Cheng and Yang Feng sent laborers to restore the palaces in Luoyang with the intention of moving the court thither. Li Yue was opposed to this.\n\nDong Cheng argued, \"Luoyang is the original capital as opposed to the paltry town of Anyi. Removal would be but reasonable.\"\n\nLi Yue wound up by saying, \"You may get the court to remove, but I shall remain here.\"\n\nBut when the consent of the Emperor had been given and a start made by Dong Cheng and Yang Feng, Li Yue secretly sent to arrange with Li Jue and Guo Si to capture the Emperor. However, this plot leaked out, and the escort so arranged as to prevent such a thing, and they pressed on to the pass at Gu Hills as rapidly as possible. Li Yue heard this and, without waiting for his rebel colleagues to join him, set out to act alone.\n\nAbout the fourth watch, just as the cavalcade was passing Gu Hills, a voice was heard shouting, \"Stop those carriages! Li Jue and Guo Si are here!\"\n\nThis frightened the Emperor greatly, and his terror increased when he saw the whole mountain side suddenly light up. Indeed:\n\n\u2003The rebel party, erstwhile split in twain,\n\n\u2003To work their wicked will now join three again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Cao Cao Moves The Court To Xuchang; Lu Bu Leads A Night Raid Against Xuzhou.\n\nThe last chapter closed with the arrival of Li Yue who shouted out falsely that the army was that of the two arch rebels Li Jue and Guo Si come to capture the imperial cavalcade.\n\nBut Yang Feng recognized the voice of Li Yue and said, \"This is only the cohort of Li Yue!\"\n\nHe bade Xu Huang go out to fight him. Xu Huang went and in the first bout the traitor fell. The White Wave rebels scattered.\n\nThe travelers got safely through Gu Pass. Here the Governor of Henei, Zhang Yang, supplied them plentifully with food and other necessaries and escorted the Emperor to Zhidao. For his timely help, the Emperor conferred upon Zhang Yang the rank of a Regent General. Yang Feng moved his army to the northeast of Luoyang and camped at Yewang.\n\nCapital Luoyang was presently entered. Within the walls all was destruction. The palaces and halls had been burned, the streets were overgrown with grass and brambles and obstructed by heaps of ruins. The palaces and courts were represented by broken roofs and toppling walls. A small \"palace\" however was soon built, and therein the officers of court presented their congratulations, standing in the open air among thorn bushes and brambles. The reign style was changed from Prosperous Stability to Rebuilt Tranquillity, the first year (AD 196).\n\nThe year was grievous with famine. The Luoyang people, even reduced in numbers as they were to a few hundred families, had not enough to eat and they prowled about stripping the bark off trees and grubbing up the roots of plants to satisfy their starving hunger. Officers of the government of all but the highest ranks went out into the country to gather fuel. Many people were crushed by the falling walls of burned houses. At no time during the decadence of Han did misery press harder than at this period.\n\nA poem written in pity for the sufferings of that time says:\n\n\u2003Mortally wounded, the white serpent poured forth its life blood at Mangdang Hills;\n\n\u2003Blood-red pennons of war waved then in every quarter,\n\n\u2003Chieftain with chieftain strove and raided each other's borders,\n\n\u2003Midst the turmoil and strife the Kingship even was threatened.\n\n\u2003Wickedness stalks in a country when the King is a weakling,\n\n\u2003Brigandage always is rife, when a dynasty's failing,\n\n\u2003Had one a heart of iron, wholly devoid of feeling,\n\n\u2003Yet would one surely grieve at the sight of such desolation.\n\nImperial Guardian Yang Biao memorialized the Throne, saying, \"The decree issued to me some time ago has never been acted upon. Now Cao Cao is very strong in the Shandong Mountains, and it would be well to associate him in the government that he might support the ruling house.\"\n\nThe Emperor replied, \"There was no need to refer to the matter again. Send a messenger when you will.\"\n\nSo the decree went forth and a messenger bore it into the Shandong Mountains. Now when Cao Cao had heard that the court had returned to Capital Luoyang, he called together his advisers to consult.\n\nXun Yu laid the matter before Cao Cao and the council thus: \"Eight hundred years ago, Duke Wen of Jin supported Prince Xiang of the declining Zhou Dynasty, and all the feudal lords backed Duke Wen. The Founder of the Hans, Liu Bang, won the popular favor by wearing mourning for Emperor Yi of Chu. Now Emperor Xian has been a fugitive on the dusty roads. To take the lead in offering an army to restore him to honor is to have an unrivaled opportunity to win universal regard. But you must act quickly, or someone will get in before you!\"\n\nCao Cao understood and at once prepared his army to move. Just at this moment an imperial messenger was announced with the very command Cao Cao wanted, and Cao Cao immediately set out.\n\nAt Luoyang everything was desolate. The walls had fallen, and there were no means of rebuilding them, while rumors and reports of the coming of Li Jue and Guo Si kept up a state of constant anxiety.\n\nThe frightened Emperor spoke with Yang Feng, saying, \"What can be done? There is no answer from the East of Huashan, and our enemies are near!\"\n\nThen Yang Feng and Han Xian said, \"We, your ministers, will fight to the death for you!\"\n\nBut Dong Cheng said, \"The fortifications are weak and our military resources small, so that we cannot hope for victory, and what does defeat mean? I see nothing better to propose than a move into the East of Huashan Mountains.\"\n\nThe Emperor agreed to this, and the journey began without further preparation. There being few horses, the officers of the court had to march afoot. Hardly a bowshot outside the gate they saw a thick cloud of dust out of which came all the clash and clamor of an advancing army. The Emperor and his Consort were dumb with fear. Then appeared a horseman; he was the messenger returning from the East of Huashan Mountains.\n\nHe rode up to the chariot, made an obeisance, and said, \"General Cao Cao, as commanded, is coming with all the military force of the East of Huashan; but hearing that Li Jue and Guo Si had again approached the capital, he has sent Xiahou Dun in advance. With Xiahou Dun are ten capable leaders and fifty thousand cavalry. They will guard Your Majesty.\"\n\nAll fear was swept away. Soon after Xiahou Dun and his staff arrived. Xiahou Dun, Xu Chu, and Dian Wei were presented to the Emperor, who graciously addressed them. Then one came to say a large army was approaching from the east, and at the Emperor's command Xiahou Dun went to ascertain who these were. He soon returned saying they were Cao Cao's infantry.\n\nIn a short time Cao Hong, Li Dian, and Yue Jing came to the imperial chariot and their names having been duly communicated.\n\nCao Hong said, \"When my brother, Cao Cao, heard of the approach of the rebels, he feared that the advance guard he had sent might be too weak, so he sent me to march quickly for reinforcement.\"\n\n\"General Cao Cao is indeed a trusty servant!\" said the Emperor.\n\nOrders were given to advance, Cao Hong leading the escort. By and by scouts came to say that the rebels were coming up very quickly. The Emperor bade Xiahou Dun divide his force into two parts to oppose them. Xiahou Dun and Cao Hong's armies threw out two wings with cavalry in front and foot behind. They attacked with vigor and beat off Li Jue and Guo Si's cohorts with a severe loss of ten thousand. Then Xiahou Dun and Cao Hong begged the Emperor to return to Luoyang, and Xiahou Dun guarded the city.\n\nNext day Cao Cao came with his great army, and having got them duly camped he went into the city to audience. He knelt at the foot of the steps, but was called up hither to stand beside the Emperor and be thanked.\n\nCao Cao replied, \"Having been the recipient of great bounty, thy servant owes the state much gratitude. The measure of evil of the two rebels is full, but I have two hundred thousand of good soldiers to oppose them, and those soldiers are fully equal to securing the safety of Your Majesty and the Throne. The preservation of the state sacrifice is the matter of real moment.\"\n\nHigh honors were conferred on Cao Cao. He was appointed Commander of Capital District, Minister of War, and granted Military Insignia.\n\nThe two rebels, Li Jue and Guo Si, wished to attack Cao Cao's army while fatigued from its long march.\n\nBut their adviser, Jia Xu, opposed this, saying, \"There was no hope of victory. He has both strong soldiers and brave leaders. Submission may bring us amnesty.\"\n\nLi Jue was angry at the suggestion, crying, \"Do you wish to dishearten the army?\"\n\nAnd he drew his sword on Jia Xu. But the other officers interceded and saved the adviser. That same night Jia Xu stole out of the camp and, quite alone, took his way home to his native village.\n\nSoon the rebels decided to offer battle. In reply, Cao Cao sent out Xu Chu, Cao Ren, and Dian Wei with three hundred horse. These three leaders dashed into the rebels army but quickly retired. This maneuver was repeated, and again repeated before the real battle array was formed.\n\nThen Li Xian and Li Bie, nephews of Li Jue, rode out. At once from Cao Cao's side dashed out Xu Chu and cut down Li Xian. Li Bie was so startled that he fell out of the saddle. He too was slain. The victor Xu Chu rode back to his own side with the two heads.\n\nWhen Xu Chu offered them to the chief, Cao Cao patted him on the back, crying, \"You are really my Fan Kuai!\"\n\nNext a general move forward was made, Xiahou Dun and Cao Hong leading the two wings and Cao Cao in the center. They advanced to the roll of the drum. The rebels fell back before them and presently fled. They pursued, Cao Cao himself leading, sword in hand. The slaughter went on till night. Ten thousands were killed and many more surrendered. Li Jue and Guo Si went west, flying in panic like dogs from a falling house. Having no place of refuge they took to the hills and hid among the brushwood.\n\nCao Cao's army returned and camped again near the capital.\n\nThen Yang Feng and Han Xian said one to another, \"This Cao Cao has done a great service, and he will be the man in power. There will be no place for us.\"\n\nSo they represented to the Emperor that they wished to pursue the rebels, and under this excuse withdrew their army and camped at Daliang.\n\nOne day the Emperor sent to summon Cao Cao to audience. The messenger was called in. Cao Cao noticed that the messenger looked remarkably well and could not understand it seeing that everyone else looked hungry and famine stricken.\n\nSo Cao Cao said, \"You look plump and well, Sir, how do you manage it?\"\n\n\"Only this: I have lived meager for thirty years.\"\n\nCao Cao nodded, \"What office do you hold?\"\n\n\"I am a graduate recommended for filial piety and honesty. I had offices under Yuan Shao and Zhang Yang, but came here when the Emperor returned. Now I am one of the secretaries. I am a native of Dingtao, and my name is Dong Zhao.\"\n\nCao Cao got up from his place and crossed over, saying, \"I have heard of you. How happy I am to meet you!\"\n\nThen wine was brought into the tent, and Xun Yu was called in and introduced. While they were talking, a man came in to report that a party was moving eastward. Cao Cao ordered to find out whose people these were, but Dong Zhao knew at once.\n\n\"They are old leaders under the rebels, Yang Feng and the White Wave General Han Xian. They are running off because you have come, Illustrious Sir!\"\n\n\"Do they mistrust me?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"They are not worthy of your attention. They are a poor lot.\"\n\n\"What of this departure of Li Jue and Guo Si?\"\n\n\"Tigers without claws, birds without wings \u2014 they will not escape you very long. They are not worth thinking about.\"\n\nCao Cao saw that he and his guest had much in common, so he began to talk of affairs of state.\n\nSaid Dong Zhao, \"You, Illustrious Sir, with your noble army have swept away rebellion and have become the mainstay of the Throne, an achievement worthy of the ancient Five Protectors. But the officials will look at it in very different ways and not all favorably to you. I think you would not be wise to remain here, and I advise a change of capital to Xuchang. However, it must be remembered that the restoration of the capital has been published far and wide and the attention of all the people is concentrated on Luoyang, hoping for a period of rest and tranquillity. Another move will displease many. However, the performance of extraordinary deed may mean the acquisition of extraordinary merit. It is for you to decide.\"\n\n\"Exactly my own inclination!\" said Cao Cao, seizing his guest's hand. \"But are there not dangers? Yang Feng at Daliang and the court officials!\"\n\n\"That is easily managed. Write to Yang Feng and set his mind at rest. Then say to the high officials plainly that there is no food in the capital here, and so you are going to another place where there is, and where there is no danger of scarcity. When they hear it, they will approve.\"\n\nCao Cao had now decided; and as his guest took leave, Cao Cao seized his hands once more, saying, \"I shall need your advice in future affairs.\"\n\nDong Zhao thanked and left. Thereafter Cao Cao and his advisers secretly discussed the change of capital.\n\nNow Court Counselor Wang Li, who was an astrologer, said to Liu Cai, Royal Clan Recorder, \"I have been studying the stars. Since last spring Venus has been nearing the Guard star in the neighborhood of the Measure, and the Cowherd (the Great Bear and Vega) crossing the River of Heaven. Mars has been retrograding and came into conjunction with Venus in the Gate of Heaven, so that metal (Venus) and fire (Mars) are mingled. Thence must emerge a new ruler. The aura of the Hans is exhausted, and the ancient states of Jin and Wei must increase.\"\n\nA secret memorial was presented to the Emperor, saying:\n\n\"The Mandate of Heaven has its course, and the five elements \u2014 metal, wood, water, fire, and earth \u2014 are out of proportion. Earth attacking fire is Wei attacking Han, and the successor to the empire of Han is in Wei.\"\n\nCao Cao heard of these sayings and memorials and sent a man to the astrologer to say, \"Your loyalty is well known, but the ways of Heaven are past finding out. The less said the better.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao discussed with Xun Yu.\n\nThe adviser expounded the meaning thus: \"The virtue of Han was fire; your element is earth. Xuchang is under the influence of earth, and so your fortune depends on getting there. Fire can overcome earth, as earth can multiply wood. Dong Zhao and Wang Li agree, and you have only to hide your time.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao made up his mind.\n\nNext day at court he said, \"Luoyang is deserted and cannot be restored, nor can it be supplied easily with food. Xuchang is a noble city, resourceful and close to Luyang, which is a grain basin. It is everything that a capital should be. I venture to request that the court move thither.\"\n\nThe Emperor dared not oppose and the officials were too overawed to have any independent opinion, so they chose a day to set out. Cao Cao commanded the escort, and the officials all followed. When they had traveled a few stages, they saw before them a high mound and from behind this there arose the beating of drums.\n\nThen Yang Feng and Han Xian came out and barred the way. In front of all stood Xu Huang, who shouted, \"Cao Cao is stealing away the Emperor!\"\n\nCao Cao rode out and took a good look at this man. He seemed a fine fellow; and in his secret soul Cao Cao greatly admired him, although he was an enemy. Then Cao Cao ordered Xu Chu to go and fight Xu Huang. The combat was battle-ax against broadsword, and the two men fought more than half a hundred bouts without advantage to either side. Cao Cao then beat the gongs and drew off his troops.\n\nIn the camp a council was called. Cao Cao said, \"The two rebels themselves need not be discussed; but Xu Huang is a fine general, and I was unwilling to use any great force against him. I want to win him over to our side.\"\n\nThen stepped out Man Chong, replying, \"Do not let that trouble you. I will have a word with him. I shall disguise myself as a soldier this evening and steal over to the enemy's camp to talk to him. I shall incline his heart toward you.\"\n\nThat night Man Chong, duly disguised, got over to the other side and made his way to the tent of Xu Huang, who sat there by the light of a candle. Xu Huang was still wearing his coat of mail.\n\nSuddenly Man Chong ran out in front and saluted, saying, \"You have been well since we parted, old friend?\"\n\nXu Huang jumped up in surprise, gazed into the face of the speaker a long time, and presently said, \"What! You are Man Chong of Shanyang? What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I am an officer in General Cao Cao's army. Seeing my old friend out in front of the army today, I wanted to say a word to him. So I took the risk of stealing in this evening, and here I am.\"\n\nXu Huang invited Man Chong in, and they sat down.\n\nThen said Man Chong, \"There are very few as bold as you on earth. Why then do you serve such as your present chiefs, Yang Feng and Han Xian? My master is the most prominent man in the world \u2014 a man who delights in wise people and appreciates soldiers as everyone knows. Your valor today won his entire admiration, and so he took care that the attack was not vigorous enough to sacrifice you. Now he has sent me to invite you to join him. Will you not leave darkness for light and help him in his magnificent task?\"\n\nXu Huang sat a long time pondering over the offer.\n\nThen he said, with a sigh, \"I know my masters are doomed to failure, but I have followed their fortunes a long time and do not like to leave them.\"\n\n\"But you know the prudent bird selects its tree, and the wise servant chooses his master. When one meets a worthy master and lets him go, one is very reckless.\"\n\n\"I am willing to do what you say,\" said Xu Huang, rising.\n\n\"Why not put these two to death as an introductory gift?\" said Man Chong.\n\n\"It is very wrong for a servant to slay his master. I will not do that.\"\n\n\"True. You are really a good man.\"\n\nThen Xu Huang, taking only a few horsemen of his own men with him, left that night and deserted to Cao Cao. Soon someone took the news to Yang Feng, who at the head of a thousand strong horsemen, set out to capture the deserter.\n\nAs they drew close, Yang Feng called out, \"Betrayer! Stop there!\"\n\nBut Yang Feng fell into an ambush. Suddenly the whole mountain side was lit up with torches and out sprang Cao Cao's troops, he himself being in command.\n\n\"I have been waiting here a long time. Do not run away!\" cried Cao Cao.\n\nYang Feng was completely surprised and tried to draw off, but was quickly surrounded. Then Han Xian came to his rescue, and a confused battle began. Yang Feng succeeded in escaping, while Cao Cao kept up the attack on the two disordered armies. A great number of the rebels gave in, and the leaders found they had too few men left to maintain their independence, so they betook themselves to Yuan Shu.\n\nWhen Cao Cao returned to camp, the newly surrendered general was presented and well received. Then again the cavalcade set out for the new capital. In due time they reached Xuchang, and they built palaces and halls, an ancestral temple and an altar, terraces and public offices. The walls were repaired, storehouses built and all put in order.\n\nThen came the rewards for Cao Cao's adherents and others. Dong Cheng and thirteen others were raised to rank of lordship. All good service was rewarded; certain others again, who deserved it, were punished, all according to Cao Cao's sole decision.\n\nCao Cao made himself Prime Minister, Regent Marshal, and Lord of Wuping. Xun Yu was made Imperial Counselor and Chair of the Secretariat; Xun You, Minister of War; Guo Jia, Minister of Rites and Religion; Liu Ye, Minister of Works; Mao Jie, Minister of Agriculture, and together with Ren Jun, they were put over the supervision of military farms and stores. Cheng Yu was appointed Lord of Dongping; Dong Zhao, Magistrate of Luoyang; Man Chong, Magistrate of Xuchang. Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Cao Ren, Cao Hong, Lu Qian, Li Dian, Yue Jing, Yu Jin, and Xu Huang were made Commanders; Xu Chu and Dian Wei, Commanders of Capital District. All good service received full recognition.\n\nCao Cao was then the one man of the court. All memorials went first to him and were then submitted to the Throne.\n\nWhen state matters were in order, Cao Cao gave a great banquet in his private quarters to all his advisers, and affairs outside the capital were the subject of discussion.\n\nThen Cao Cao said, \"Liu Bei has his army at Xuzhou, and he carries on the administration of the region. Lu Bu fled to Liu Bei when defeated, and Liu Bei gave Lu Bu Xiaopei to live in. If these two agreed to join forces and attack, my position would be most serious. What precautions can be taken?\"\n\nThen rose Xu Chu, saying, \"Give me fifty thousand of picked soldiers, and I will give the Prime Minister both their heads!\"\n\nXun Yu said, \"O Leader, you are brave, but we must consider the present circumstance. We cannot start a sudden war just as the capital has been changed. However, there is a certain ruse known as 'Rival Tigers and One Prey'. Liu Bei has no decree authorizing him to govern the region. You, Sir Prime Minister, can procure one for him, and when sending it, and so conferring upon him the right in addition to his might, you can enclose a private note telling him to get rid of Lu Bu. If he does, then he will have lost a vigorous warrior from his side, and he could be dealt with as occasions serve. Should he fail, then Lu Bu will slay him. This is the 'Rival Tigers and One Prey' ruse: They wrangle and bite each other.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed that this was a good plan, so he memorialized for the formal appointment, which he sent to Liu Bei. Liu Bei was created General Who Conquers the East, Lord of Yicheng, and Imperial Protector of Xuzhou as well. At the same time a private note was enclosed.\n\nIn Xuzhou, when Liu Bei heard of the change of capital, he began to prepare a congratulatory address. In the midst of this an imperial messenger was announced and was met which all ceremony outside the gate. When the epistle had been reverently received, a banquet was prepared for the messenger.\n\nThe messenger said, \"This decree was obtained for you by Prime Minister Cao Cao.\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him. Then the messenger drew forth his secret letter.\n\nAfter reading it, Liu Bei said, \"This matter can be easily arranged.\"\n\nThe banquet over and the messenger conducted to his lodging to seek repose. Liu Bei, before going to rest, called in his councilors to consider the letter.\n\n\"There need be no compunction about putting him to death,\" said Zhang Fei. \"Lu Bu is a bad man.\"\n\n\"But he came to me for protection in his weakness: How can I put him to death? That would be immoral,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If he was a good man, it would be difficult,\" replied Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Bei would not consent.\n\nNext day, when Lu Bu came to offer congratulations, he was received as usual. He said, \"I have come to felicitate you on the receipt of the imperial bounty.\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him in due form. But then he saw Zhang Fei draw his sword and come up the hall as if to slay Lu Bu. Liu Bei hastily interfered and stopped Zhang Fei.\n\nLu Bu was surprised and said, \"Why do you wish to slay me, Zhang Fei?\"\n\n\"Cao Cao says you are immoral and tells my brother to kill you,\" shouted Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Bei shouted again and again to Zhang Fei to go away, and he led Lu Bu into the private apartments out of the way. Then he told Lu Bu the whole story and showed him the secret letter.\n\nLu Bu wept as he finished reading, \"This is that miscreant's scheme for sowing discord between us.\"\n\n\"Be not anxious, elder brother,\" said Liu Bei. \"I pledge myself not to be guilty of such an infamous crime.\"\n\nLu Bu again and again expressed his gratitude, and Liu Bei kept him for a time. They remained talking and drinking wine till late.\n\nAsked Guan Yu and Zhang Fei later, \"Why not kill him?\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Because Cao Cao fears that Lu Bu and I may attack him, he is trying to separate us and get us to swallow each other, while he steps in and takes the advantage. Is there any other reason?\"\n\nGuan Yu nodded assent, but Zhang Fei said, \"I want to get him out of the way, lest he would trouble us later.\"\n\n\"That is not what a noble man should do,\" said his elder brother.\n\nSoon the messenger was dismissed and returned to the capital with a the reply from Liu Bei. The letter only said the instruction would take time to plan and implement. But the messenger, when he saw Cao Cao, told him the story of Liu Bei's pledge to Lu Bu.\n\nThen said Cao Cao, \"The plan has failed. What next?\"\n\nXun Yu replied, \"I have another trick called 'Tiger against Wolf' in which the tiger is made to gobble up the wolf.\"\n\n\"Let us hear it,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Send to Yuan Shu to say that Liu Bei has sent up a secret memorial to the Throne that he wishes to subdue the southern regions around the Huai River. Yuan Shu will be angry and attack him. Then you will order Liu Bei to dispose of Yuan Shu and so set them destroying each other. Lu Bu will certainly think that is his chance and turn traitor. This is the 'Tiger against Wolf' trick.\"\n\nCao Cao thought this good and sent the messenger and also sent a false edict to Liu Bei. When this came, the messenger was received with all the ceremonies, and the edict ordered the capture of Yuan Shu. After the departure of the bearer, Liu Bei called Mi Zhu who pronounced it a ruse.\n\n\"It may be,\" said Liu Bei, \"but the royal command is not to be disobeyed.\"\n\nSo the army was prepared and the day fixed.\n\nSun Qian said, \"A trusty man must be left on guard of the city.\"\n\nAnd Liu Bei asked which of his brothers would undertake this task.\n\n\"I will guard the city,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"I am constantly in need of your advice, so how can we part?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"I will guard the city,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"You will fail,\" said Liu Bei. \"After one of your drinking bouts, you will get savage and flog the soldiers. Beside you are rash and will not listen to anyone's advice. I shall be uneasy all the time.\"\n\n\"Henceforth I will drink no more wine, I will not beat the soldiers, and I will always listen to advice,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"I fear the mouth does not correspond to the heart,\" said Mi Zhu.\n\n\"I have followed my elder brother these many years and never broken faith. Why should you be contemptuous?\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Though you say this, I do not feel quite satisfied. I will order Adviser Chen Deng to help you and keep you sober. Then you will not make any mistake.\"\n\nChen Deng was willing to undertake this duty, and the final orders were given. The army of thirty thousand, horse and foot, left Xuzhou and marched toward Nanyang.\n\nWhen Yuan Shu heard that a memorial had been presented proposing to take possession of his territories, he broke out into abuse of Liu Bei.\n\n\"You weaver of mats! You plaiter of straw shoes! You have been smart enough to get possession of a large region and elbow your way into the ranks of the nobles. I was just going to attack you, and now you dare to scheme against me! How I detest you!\"\n\nSo Yuan Shu at once gave orders to prepare an army of one hundred thousand, under Ji Ling, to attack Xuzhou. The two armies met at Xuyi, where Liu Bei was encamped in a plain with hills behind and a stream on his flank, for his army was small.\n\nJi Ling was a native of the East of Huashan Mountains. He used a very heavy three-edged sword.\n\nAfter he had made his camp, he rode out and began abusing his opponents, shouting, \"Liu Bei, you rustic bumpkin, how dare you invade this land?\"\n\n\"I have a decree ordering me to destroy the Governor who behaves improperly. If you oppose, you will be assuredly punished,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nJi Ling angrily rode out brandishing his weapon.\n\nBut Guan Yu cried, \"Fool, do not attempt to fight!\"\n\nAnd Guan Yu rode out to meet him. Then they two fought and after thirty bouts neither had an advantage. Then Ji Ling cried out for a rest. So Guan Yu turned his horse away, rode back to his own array and waited for Ji Ling.\n\nWhen the moment came to renew the combat, Ji Ling sent out one of his officers, Xun Zheng, to take his place.\n\nBut Guan Yu said, \"Tell Ji Ling to come. I must settle with him who shall be tiger and who shall be deer!\"\n\n\"You \u2014 a reputationless leader and unworthy to fight with our general!\" replied Xun Zheng.\n\nThis reply angered Guan Yu, who made just one attack on Xun Zheng and brought him to the ground. At this success Liu Bei urged on the army, and Ji Ling's troops were defeated.\n\nThey retired to the mouth of River Huaiyin and declined all challenges. However, many of their troops were sent into Liu Bei's camp for harassment, and many of them were slain. The two armies thus stood facing each other.\n\nIn Xuzhou, after Liu Bei had started on his expedition, Zhang Fei placed his colleague and helper, Chen Deng, in charge of the administration of the region, keeping military affairs under his own supervision. After thinking over the matter or some time, he gave a banquet to all the military officers.\n\nWhen they were all seated, he made a speech: \"Before my brother left, he bade me keep clear of the wine cup for fear of accidents. Now, gentlemen, you may drink deep today. But from tomorrow wine is forbidden, for we must keep the city safe. So take your fill.\"\n\nAnd with this he and all his guests rose to drink together.\n\nThe wine bearer came to Cao Bao who declined it, saying, \"I never drink as I am forbidden by religion.\"\n\n\"What! A fighting man does not drink wine!\" said the host. \"I want you to take just one cup.\"\n\nCao Bao was afraid to offend, so he drank.\n\nNow Zhang Fei drank huge goblets with all his guests on every hand and so swallowed a huge quantity of liquor. He became quite intoxicated. Yet he would drink more and insisted on a cup with every guest. It came to the turn of Cao Bao who declined.\n\n\"Really, I cannot drink,\" said Cao Bao.\n\n\"You drank just now: Why refuse this time?\"\n\nZhang Fei pressed him, but still Cao Bao resisted.\n\nThen Zhang Fei in his drunken madness lost control of his temper and said, \"If you disobey the orders of your general, you shall be beaten one hundred strokes!\"\n\nAnd he called in his guards.\n\nHere Chen Deng interfered, saying, \"Do you remember the strict injunctions of your brother before he left?\"\n\n\"You civilians attend to your civil business and leave us alone,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nThe only way of escape for the guest was to beg remission, and Cao Bao did so, saying, \"Sir, if you saw my son-in-law's face, you would pardon me.\"\n\n\"Who is your son-in-law?\"\n\n\"Lu Bu.\"\n\n\"I did not mean to have you really beaten; but if you think to frighten me with Lu Bu, I will! I will beat you as if I were beating him!\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nThe guests interposed to beg him off, but their drunken host was obdurate, and the unhappy guest received fifty blows. Then at the earnest prayers of the others the remainder of the punishment was remitted.\n\nThe banquet came to an end, and the beaten Cao Bao went away burning with resentment. That night he sent a letter to Xiaopei relating the insults he had received from Zhang Fei. The letter told Lu Bu of Liu Bei's absence and proposed that a sudden raid should be made that very night before Zhang Fei had recovered from his drunken fit. Lu Bu at once summoned Chen Gong and told him.\n\n\"Xiaopei is only a place to occupy temporarily,\" said Chen Gong. \"If you can seize Xuzhou, do so. It is a good chance.\"\n\nLu Bu got ready at once and soon on the way with five hundred cavalrymen, ordering Chen Gong and Gao Shun to follow him with the main body.\n\nXiaopei being only about fifteen miles away, Lu Bu was under the walls at the fourth watch. It was clear moonlight. No one on the ramparts saw him.\n\nLu Bu came up close to the wall and called out, \"Liu Bei's secret messenger has arrived!\"\n\nThe guards on the wall were Cao Bao's people, and they called him. Cao Bao came, and when he saw who was there, he ordered the gates to be opened. Lu Bu gave the secret signal, and the soldiers entered shouting.\n\nZhang Fei was in his apartment sleeping off the fumes of wine. His servants hastened to arouse him and told him an enemy had got the gates open.\n\nThey said, \"Lu Bu got in, and there is fighting in the city!\"\n\nZhang Fei savagely got into his armor and laid hold of his mighty serpent halberd. But as he was mounting his horse at the gate, the attacking soldiers came up. He rushed at them but being still half intoxicated made but a poor fight. Lu Bu knowing Zhang Fei's prowess did not press him hard, and Zhang Fei made his way, with eighteen leading guards of Yan, to the east gate, and there went out, leaving Liu Bei's family to their fate.\n\nCao Bao, seeing Zhang Fei had but a very small force and was still half drunk as well, came in pursuit. Zhang Fei saw who it was and was mad with rage. He galloped toward Cao Bao and drove him off after a few passes. He followed Cao Bao to the moat and wounded him in the back. Cao Bao's frightened steed carried its master into the moat, and he was drowned.\n\nOnce well outside the city Zhang Fei collected his troops, and they rode off toward the south direction.\n\nLu Bu having surprised the city set himself to restore order. He put guards over the residence of Liu Bei so that no one should disturb the family.\n\nZhang Fei with his few followers went to his brother's camp at Xuyi and told his story of treachery and surprise. All were greatly distressed.\n\n\"Success is not worth rejoicing; failure is not worth grieving,\" said Liu Bei with a sigh.\n\n\"Where are our sisters?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"They shared the fate of the city.\"\n\nLiu Bei nodded his head and was silent.\n\nGuan Yu with an effort controlled his reproaches and said, \"What did you say when you promised to guard the city, and what orders did our brother give you? Now the city is lost and therewith our sisters-in-law. Have you done well?\"\n\nZhang Fei was overwhelmed by remorse. He drew his sword to kill himself.\n\n\u2003He raised the cup in pledge,\n\n\u2003None might say nay;\n\n\u2003Remorseful, drew the sword,\n\n\u2003Himself to slay." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Taishi Ci Fights With The Young Overlord; Sun Ce Cuts Short The White Tiger King.\n\nIn the last chapter it was recorded that Zhang Fei was about to end his life with his own weapon in Xuyi.\n\nBut Liu Bei rushed forward and caught Zhang Fei in his arms, snatched away the sword, and threw it on the earth.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"The ancient had a saying: 'Brothers are as hands and feet; wives and children are as clothing. You may mend your torn dress, but who can reattach a lost limb?' We three, by the Oath of the Peach Garden, swore to seek the same death day. The city is lost, it is true, and my wives and little ones, but I could not bear that we should die ere our course be run. Beside, Xuzhou was not really ours, and Lu Bu will not harm my family but will rather seek to preserve them. You made a mistake, worthy brother, but is it the one deserving of death?\"\n\nAnd Liu Bei wept. His brothers were much affected, and their tears fell in sympathy.\n\nAs soon as the news of Lu Bu's successful seizure of his protector's region reached Yuan Shu, Yuan Shu sent promises of valuable presents to Lu Bu to induce him to join in a further attack on Liu Bei. The presents are said to have been fifty thousand carts of grain, five hundred horses, ten thousand ounces of gold and silver, and a thousand rolls of colored silk.\n\nLu Bu swallowed the bait and ordered Gao Shun to lead forth fifty thousand troops. But Liu Bei heard of the threatened attack, so he made inclement weather an excuse to moved his few soldiers out of Xuyi for Guangling, before the attacking force came up.\n\nHowever, Gao Shun demanded the promised reward through Ji Ling, who put Gao Shun off, saying, \"My lord has gone away. I will settle this as soon as I can see him and get his decision.\"\n\nWith this answer Gao Shun returned to Lu Bu, who could not decide what to do.\n\nThen came a letter from Yuan Shu:\n\n\"Although Gao Shun had gone to attack Liu Bei, yet Liu Bei had not been destroyed, and no reward could be given till he was actually taken.\"\n\nLu Bu railed at what he called the breach of faith and was inclined to attack Yuan Shu himself.\n\nHowever, his adviser, Chen Gong, opposed this course, saying, \"You should not. Yuan Shu is in possession of Shouchun and has a large army, well supplied. You are no match for him. Rather ask Liu Bei to take up his quarters at Xiaopei as one of your wings and, when the time comes, let him lead the attack, both south and north. Then Yuan Shu and Yuan Shao will fall before you, and you will be very powerful.\"\n\nFinding this advice good, Lu Bu sent letters to Liu Bei asking him to return.\n\nAfter the flight of Liu Bei, Yuan Shu attacked Guangling and reduced Liu Bei's force by half. When the messenger from Lu Bu came, Liu Bei read the letter. He was quite content with the offer, but his brothers were not inclined to trust Lu Bu.\n\n\"Such a dishonorable man must have a motive,\" said Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Since he treats me kindly, I cannot but trust him,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nSo Liu Bei went back to Xuzhou. Lu Bu, fearing that Liu Bei might doubt his sincerity, restored Liu Bei's family; and when Lady Gan and Lady Mi saw their lord, they told him that they had been kindly treated and guarded by soldiers against any intrusion, and provisions had never been wanting.\n\n\"I knew he would not harm my family,\" said Liu Bei to Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.\n\nHowever, Zhang Fei was not pleased and would not accompany his brothers into the city when they went to express their thanks. He went to escort the two ladies to Xiaopei.\n\nAt the interview Lu Bu said, \"I did not wish to take the city, but your brother behaved very badly, drinking and flogging the soldiers, and I came to guard it lest some evil should befall.\"\n\n\"But I had long wished to yield it to you,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThereupon Lu Bu wished to retire in favor of Liu Bei who, however, would not hear of it. Liu Bei returned and took up his quarters in Xiaopei, but his two brothers would not take the situation kindly and were very discontented.\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"One must bow to one's lot. It is the will of Heaven, and one cannot struggle against fate.\"\n\nLu Bu sent presents of food and stuffs, and peace reigned between the two houses.\n\nIn Shouchun, Yuan Shu prepared a great banquet for his soldiers when it was announced that Sun Ce had subdued Lu Gang, the Governor of Lujiang. Yuan Shu summoned the victor, who made obeisance at the foot of the hall of audience. Yuan Shu, sitting in state, asked for details of the campaign and then invited Sun Ce to the banquet.\n\nAfter the unhappy death of his father Sun Jian, Sun Ce had returned to the lower region of the Great River, where he had devoted himself to peaceful ends, inviting to his side good people and able scholars. Afterwards, when a quarrel broke out between his mother's brother, Governor Wu Jing of Dangyang, and the late Imperial Protector of Xuzhou, Tao Qian, Sun Ce removed his mother with all the family to Que, he himself taking service under Yuan Shu, who admired and loved him greatly.\n\n\"If I had a son like Sun Ce,\" said Yuan Shu, \"I should die without regret.\"\n\nYuan Shu appointed Sun Ce Commander and sent him on various expeditions, all of which were successful. After this banquet to celebrate the victory over Lu Gang, Sun Ce returned to his camp very bitter over the arrogant and patronizing airs of his patron. Instead of retiring to his tent, Sun Ce walked up and down by the light of the moon.\n\n\"Here am I, a mere nobody, and yet my father was such a hero!\"\n\nAnd he cried out and wept in spite of himself.\n\nThen suddenly appeared one who said, laughing loudly, \"What is this, Sun Ce? While your noble father enjoyed the light of the sun, he made free use of me. If his son has any difficulty to resolve, why does he not refer it to me also instead of weeping here alone?\"\n\nLooking at the speaker Sun Ce saw it was Zhu Zhi, a native of Dangyang, who had been in Sun Jian's service. Sun Ce then ceased weeping, and they two sat down.\n\n\"I was weeping from regret at being unable to continue my father's work,\" said Sun Ce.\n\n\"Why stay here bound to the service of a master? The Governor of Dangyang is in distress. Why not get command of an army under the pretense of an expedition to relieve Wu Jing? Escape the shadow of Yuan Shu and take control of Dangyang, then you can accomplish great things.\"\n\nWhile these two were talking, another man suddenly entered, saying, \"I know what you two are planning, Noble Sirs. Under my hand is a band of one hundred bold fellows ready to help Sun Ce in whatever he wishes to do.\"\n\nThe speaker was one of Yuan Shu's advisers named Lu Fan, from Runan. They three then sat and discussed schemes.\n\n\"The one fear is that Yuan Shu will refuse to give you the troops,\" said Lu Fan.\n\n\"I still have the Imperial Hereditary Seal that my father left me: That should be good security.\"\n\n\"Yuan Shu earnestly desires that jewel,\" said Zhu Zhi. \"He will certainly lend you troops on that pledge.\"\n\nThe three talked over their plans, gradually settling the details. Not many days after Sun Ce obtained an interview with his patron.\n\nAssuming the appearance of deep grief Sun Ce said, \"I have been unable to avenge my father. Now the Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, Liu Yao, is opposing my mother's brother, and my mother and her family are in danger in Que. Wherefore I would borrow a few thousands of fighting men to rescue them. As perhaps, Illustrious Sir, you may lack confidence in me, I am willing to deposit the Imperial Hereditary Seal, left me by my late father, as a pledge.\"\n\n\"Let me see it if you have it,\" said Yuan Shu. \"I do not want the jewel really, but you may as well leave it with me. I will lend you three thousand troops and five hundred horses. Return as soon as peace can be made. As your rank is hardly sufficient for such powers, I will memorialize to obtain for you higher rank with the title of General Who Exterminates Brigands, and you can soon start.\"\n\nSun Ce thanked his patron most humbly and soon put the army in motion, taking with him his two new advisers and his father's generals \u2014 Zhu Zhi, Lu Fan, Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, Han Dang, and others.\n\nWhen Sun Ce reached Linyang, he saw a body of troops in front of him, at their head a dashing leader of handsome and refined mien. As soon as this commander saw Sun Ce, he dismounted and made obeisance. It was Zhou Yu from Shucheng.\n\nWhen Sun Jian was opposing the tyrant Dong Zhuo, he moved his family to Shucheng where the Zhou family had lived. And as Zhou Yu and Sun Ce were of the same age all but two months, they became exceedingly good friends and sworn brothers, Sun Ce being the elder in virtue of his two months' seniority. Zhou Yu was on his way to visit Sun Ce's uncle, Governor Wu Jing of Dangyang, when the happy meeting took place.\n\nNaturally Sun Ce confided his projects and inmost ideas to his friend, who at once said, \"I shall put my whole life and energy to serve you to reach that grand goal.\"\n\n\"Now that you have come, the design is as good as accomplished,\" said Sun Ce.\n\nZhou Yu was introduced to Zhu Zhi and Lu Fan.\n\nZhou Yu said, \"Do you know of the two Zhangs of Guangling? They would be most useful people in working out your schemes.\"\n\n\"Who are they, the two Zhangs?\" said Sun Ce.\n\n\"They are men of transcendent genius who are living near here for the sake of tranquillity in these turbulent times. Their names are Zhang Zhao and Zhang Hong. Why not invite them to help you, brother?\"\n\nSun Ce lost no time in sending letters and gifts, but they both declined. Then he visited them in person, was greatly pleased with their speech and by dint of large gifts and much persuasion, got them to promise to join him. Sun Ce appointed them both Counselors and Generals.\n\nThe plan of the attack upon Yangzhou Region was the next matter for discussion. The Imperial Protector, Liu Yao, was of Donglai, a scion of the imperial family and brother of the Imperial Protector of Yanzhou, Liu Dai. Liu Yao had long ruled in Yangzhou and headquartered in Shouchun. But Yuan Shu had forced him to flee to the southeast of the Great River. He retired to Que and now was battling with Wu Jing in Linyang.\n\nHearing of the meditated attack on him, Liu Yao summoned his generals to take counsel.\n\nSaid General Zhang Ying, \"I will take an army and entrench at Niuzhu. No army can get past that, whatever its strength.\"\n\nZhang Ying was interrupted by another who shouted, \"And let me lead the van!\"\n\nAll eyes turned to this man. It was Taishi Ci who, after helping Kong Rong raise the siege of Beihai, had come to serve Liu Yao.\n\nHearing him offer to undertake the hazardous post of van leader, Liu Yao said, \"But you are still young and not yet equal to such a charge. Rather stay by my side and await my orders.\"\n\nTaishi Ci withdrew in disappointment.\n\nSoon Zhang Ying led his army to Niuzhu, where the stores of grain located. When Sun Ce approached, Zhang Ying went to meet him, and the two armies faced each other above the Bullock Rapid. Zhang Ying roundly abused his opponent, and Huang Gai rode out to attack him. But before the combat had proceeded far, there arose an alarm of fire in Zhang Ying's camp. Zhang Ying turned back, and then Sun Ce advanced in full force, compelling the enemy to abandon their possession. The defeated general fled to the hills.\n\nNow the incendiaries who had brought about this result were two, named Jiang Qin from Shouchun and Zhou Tai from Jiujiang, who in these turbulent times had got together a band of kindred spirits and lived by plundering the country along the Great River. They knew Sun Ce by reputation as a man who treated able people very liberally and wished to join him. So they came with their band, three hundred strong, and helped him in this way as an introduction. Sun Ce welcomed them and gave the leaders rank. After taking possession of the stores of all kinds abandoned by the runaways, and enlisting four thousand of those who surrendered into his own ranks, Sun Ce moved forward to attack Shenting.\n\nAfter his defeat Zhang Ying returned to his master and told his misfortune. Liu Yao was going to punish his failure by death, but listened to his advisers, who asked for mercy for the unfortunate man, and sent him to command the garrison in Lingling. Liu Yao himself set out to meet the invaders. He camped south of the Sacred Hills. Sun Ce camped on the opposite side of the hills.\n\nSun Ce inquired the natives, \"Is there a temple of Liu Xiu the Founder of Latter Han in the vicinity?\"\n\nThey said, \"There is a temple to the south on the summit of the hills.\"\n\n\"I dreamed last night that Liu Xiu called me, so I will go and pray there,\" said Sun Ce.\n\nBut Counselor Zhang Zhao advised, \"My lord, you should not go as the enemy is on the other side, and you may fall into an ambush.\"\n\n\"The spirit will help me: What need I fear?\"\n\nSo Sun Ce put on his armor, took his spear and mounted, taking with him twelve of his commanders as an escort. They rode up the hills, dismounted, burned incense, and they all bowed in the shrine.\n\nThen Sun Ce knelt and made a vow, saying, \"If I, Sun Ce, succeed in my task and restore the authority of my late father, then will I restore this temple and order sacrifices at the four seasons.\"\n\nWhen they had remounted, Sun Ce said, \"I am going to ride along the ridge and reconnoiter the enemy's position.\"\n\nHis commanders begged him to refrain, but he was obstinate, and they rode there together, noting the villages below.\n\nA soldier of the other side going along a bye road quickly reported the presence of horsemen on the ridge, and Liu Yao said, \"It is certainly Sun Ce trying to inveigle us to battle. But do not go out.\"\n\nTaishi Ci jumped up, saying, \"What better chance to capture him?\"\n\nSo, without orders he armed himself and rode through the camp, crying, \"If there be any valiant men among you, follow me!\"\n\nNo one moved save a low-ranking commander who said, \"He is a brave man, and I will go with him.\"\n\nSo he also went. The others only laughed at the pair.\n\nNow having seen all he wished, Sun Ce thought it time to return and wheeled round his horse. But when he was going over the summit, someone shouted, \"Stay, Sun Ce!\"\n\nSun Ce turned. Two horsemen were coming at full speed down the next hill. Sun Ce halted and drew up his little escort right and left, he himself with his spear ready.\n\n\"Which is Sun Ce?\" shouted Taishi Ci.\n\n\"Who are you?\" was the reply.\n\n\"I, Taishi Ci of Laihuang, come to take him prisoner!\"\n\n\"Then I am he!\" said Sun Ce, laughing. \"Come both of you together. I am not afraid of you. If I were, I should not be Sun Ce!\"\n\n\"You and all your crowd come on, and I will not blench!\" cried Taishi Ci putting his horse at a gallop and setting his spear.\n\nSun Ce braced himself for the shock, and the battle began. Fifty bouts were fought and still neither combatant had the advantage. Sun Ce's commanders whispered to each other their admiration and amazement. Taishi Ci saw that the spearmanship of his opponent showed no weak point whereby he could gain the advantage, so he decided to resort to guile. Feigning defeat he would lead Sun Ce to pursue. Taishi Ci however did not retire along the road by which he had come, but took a path leading around the hill instead of over it.\n\nHis antagonist followed, shouting, \"He who retreats is no worthy soldier!\"\n\nBut Taishi Ci thought within himself, \"He has twelve others at his back and I only one. If I capture him, the others will retake him. I will inveigle him into some secret spot and then try.\"\n\nSo flying and fighting by turns he led Sun Ce, an eager pursuer, down to the plain. Here Taishi Ci suddenly wheeled about and attacked. Again they exchanged half a hundred bouts, without result. Then Sun Ce made a fierce thrust, which his opponent evaded by gripping the spear under his arm, while he himself did the same with his opponent's spear. Neither was wounded but each exerting his utmost strength to pull the other out of the saddle, and they both came to the ground.\n\nTheir steeds galloped off they knew not whither, while the two men, each dropping his spear, began a hand to hand struggle. Soon their fighting robes were in tatters. Sun Ce gripped the short lance that Taishi Ci carried at his back, while Taishi Ci tore off Sun Ce's helmet. Sun Ce tried to stab with the short lance but Taishi Ci fended off the blow with the helmet as a shield.\n\nThen arose a great shouting. Liu Yao had come up with a thousand soldiers. Sun Ce seemed now in sore straits. His twelve followers came up, and each combatant let go his hold. Taishi Ci quickly found another steed, seized a spear, and mounted. Sun Ce, whose horse had been caught by Cheng Pu, also mounted, and a confused battle began between the handful of men on one side and a whole thousand troops on the other. It swayed and drifted down the hill side. However, soon Zhou Yu leading his troops came to the rescue, and as evening drew on a tempest put an end to the fight. Both sides drew off and returned to camp.\n\nNext day Sun Ce led his army to the front of Liu Yao's camp, and the challenge was accepted. The armies were drawn up.\n\nSun Ce hung the short lance he had seized from Taishi Ci at the end of his spear, waved it in front of the line of battle, and ordered his soldiers to shout, \"If the owner of this had not fled, he would have been stabbed to death!\"\n\nOn the other side they hung out Sun Ce's helmet, and the soldiers shouted back, \"Sun Ce's head is here already!\"\n\nBoth sides thus yelled defiance at each other, one side boasting, the other bragging. Then Taishi Ci rode out challenging Sun Ce to a duel to the death, and Sun Ce would have accepted.\n\nBut Cheng Pu said, \"My lord should not trouble himself. I will take him.\"\n\nAnd Cheng Pu rode forth.\n\n\"You are no antagonist for me,\" said Taishi Ci. \"Tell your master to come out!\"\n\nThis incensed Cheng Pu, who rode at his opponent, and they two fought thirty bouts. The duel was stopped by the gongs of Liu Yao.\n\n\"Why did you sound the retreat?\" said Taishi Ci. \"I was just going to capture the wretch.\"\n\n\"Because I have just heard that Que has been captured. Zhou Yu led a surprise force thither, and Chen Wu was in league with him to betray the city. We have no home now. I will hasten to Moling to get the help of Xue Li and Ze Rong to retake the city.\"\n\nThe army retired, Taishi Ci with it, without being pursued.\n\nOn the other side Zhang Zhao said to Sun Ce, \"Zhou Yu's attack is the cause of this move; they are in no mood to fight. A night raid on their camp would finish them.\"\n\nThe army was divided into five divisions for the night surprise and hastened toward the camp where they scored a victory. Their opponents scattered in all directions. Taishi Ci alone made a determined stand, and as he could not withstand a whole army, he fled with ten horsemen to Jingxian.\n\nNow Sun Ce acquired a new adherent in the person of Chen Wu. He was a fighter of seven-span height, sallow of complexion and red eye, an odd looking man. But Sun Ce held him in high esteem, appointed him Commander, and put him in the van of the attack on Xue Li. As Van Leader, Chen Wu and a dozen horsemen made a dash into the enemy's formation, where they slew half a hundred men. So Xue Li would not fight but remained within his defenses.\n\nWhen Sun Ce was attacking the city, a spy came in with the news that Liu Yao and Ze Rong had gone to attack Niuzhu, which made Sun Ce move thither in haste. His two opponents were ready for battle.\n\n\"I am here!\" said Sun Ce, \"You had better give in!\"\n\nA general came out from behind Liu Yao to accept the challenge. It was Yu Mi. But in the third bout Sun Ce made him prisoner and carried him off to the other side. Seeing his colleague thus captured, Fan Neng rode out to the rescue and got quite close. But just as he was going to thrust, all Sun Ce's soldiers shouted, \"There is a man behind you going to strike secretly!\"\n\nAt this Sun Ce turned and shouted so thunderously loud that Fan Neng fell out of his saddle from mere fright. He split his skull and died. When Sun Ce reached his standard, he threw his prisoner to the ground. And Yu Mi was also dead, crushed to death between the arm and the body of his captor. So in a few moments Sun Ce had disposed of two enemies, one crushed to death and one frightened to death. Thereafter Sun Ce was called the Young Overlord.\n\nLiu Yao had a defeat. The greater portion of his force surrendered, and the number of those slain exceeded ten thousand. Liu Yao himself fled to Yuzhang and sought safety with Liu Biao, Imperial Protector of Jingzhou.\n\nAn attack on Moling was the next move. As soon as Sun Ce arrived at the moat, he summoned Commander Xue Li to surrender. Someone let fly a furtive arrow from the wall which wounded Sun Ce in the left thigh so severely that he fell from his steed. Hastily his officers picked up their wounded chief and returned to the camp where the arrow was pulled out and the wound dressed with the medicines suitable for injuries by metals.\n\nBy Sun Ce's command the story was spread abroad that the hurt had been fatal, and all the soldiers set up cries of lamentation. The camp was broken up. Xue Li, Zhang Ying, and Chen Heng made a night sortie but fell into a carefully prepared ambush.\n\nPresently Sun Ce himself appeared on horseback, shouting: \"Sun Ce is here still!\"\n\nHis sudden appearance created such a panic that the soldiers dropped their weapons and fell on their faces. Sun Ce gave orders not to kill them. But their leaders fell: Zhang Ying from Chen Wu's spear thrust as he turned to run away; Chen Heng was killed by Jiang Qin's arrow; and Commander Xue Li was slain in the turbulence. Thus Sun Ce got possession of Moling. Having calmed the people, he sent his soldiers away to Jingxian, where Taishi Ci was in command.\n\nTaishi Ci had assembled two thousand recruits in addition to his own troops for the purpose of avenging his master. Sun Ce and Zhou Yu on the other hand consulted how to capture him alive.\n\nZhou Yu planned, \"Attack the city on three sides, leaving the east gate free for flight. Some distance off an ambush shall be prepared, when Taishi Ci, his men fatigued and horses spent, shall fall an easy victim.\"\n\nThe latest recruits under Taishi Ci's banner were mostly hillmen and unaccustomed to discipline. Beside, the walls of the city were pitiably low. One night Sun Ce ordered Chen Wu to strip off his long dress, leave his arms save a dagger, clamber up the ramparts, and set fire to the city. Seeing the flames spreading, Taishi Ci made for the east gate and, as soon as he got outside, Sun Ce followed in pursuit. The pursuit was maintained for some fifteen miles when the pursuers stopped.\n\nTaishi Ci went on as long as possible, finally halting to rest in a spot surrounded by reeds. Suddenly a tremendous shouting arose. Taishi Ci was just starting when tripping ropes arose all round, his horse was thrown and he found himself a prisoner.\n\nTaishi Ci was taken back to camp. As soon as Sun Ce heard the news, he himself rode out to order the guards to leave the prisoner, whose bonds he loosened with his own hands. Then he took off his own embroidered robe and put it on the captive. They entered the camp together.\n\n\"I knew you were a real hero,\" said Sun Ce. \"That worm Liu Yao had no use for such as you, and so he got beaten.\"\n\nTaishi Ci, overcome by this kindness and good treatment, then formally surrendered.\n\nSun Ce seized his hand and said, laughing, \"If you had taken me at that fight we had near the shrine, would you have killed me?\"\n\n\"Who can say?\" said Taishi Ci smiling.\n\nSun Ce laughed also and they entered his tent, where Taishi Ci was placed in the seat of honor at a banquet.\n\nTaishi Ci said, \"Can you trust me so far as to let me go to muster as many as I can of the soldiers of my late master? Under the smart of this defeat they will turn against him, and they would be a great help to you.\"\n\n\"Exactly what I most desire. I will make an agreement with you that at midday tomorrow you will return.\"\n\nTaishi Ci agreed and went off. All the generals said he would never return.\n\n\"He is trustworthy and will not break his word,\" said the chief.\n\nNone of the officers believed he would come back. But the next day they set up a bamboo rod in the gate of the camp, and just as the shadow marked noon Taishi Ci returned, bringing with him about a thousand troops. Sun Ce was pleased, and his officers had to confess that he had rightly judged his man.\n\nSun Ce thus marched his army to the South Land, and his enemies fled or surrendered before his force. He had now several legions and the southeast of the Great River was his. He improved the conditions of the people and maintained order so that his adherents and supporters daily increased. He was called Sun Ce the Bright.\n\nWhen Sun Ce's army approached, the people used to flee in terror; but when it had arrived and they saw that no one was permitted to loot and not the least attempt was made on their houses, they rejoiced and presented the soldiers with oxen and wine, for which they were in turn duly rewarded. Gladness filled the country side. The soldiers who had followed Liu Yao were kindly treated. Those who wished to join Sun Ce's army did so; those who preferred not to be soldiers were sent home with presents. And thus Sun Ce won the respect and praise of everyone and became very powerful.\n\nSun Ce then settled his mother and the remainder of the family in Que, setting his brother, Sun Quan, and Zhou Tai over the city of Xuancheng. Then he headed an expedition to the south to reduce Wujun.\n\nAt that time there was a certain Yan Baihu, or the White Tiger, who styled himself King of East Wu and ruled over Wujun. His armies stationed at Wucheng and Jiaxing. Hearing of Sun Ce's approach, Yan Baihu sent his brother, Yan Yu, with an army against Sun Ce, and they met at Maple Bridge.\n\nYan Yu, sword in hand, took his stand on the bridge, and this was reported to Sun Ce, who prepared to accept the challenge.\n\nZhang Hong tried to dissuade him, saying, \"For as much as my lord's fate is bound up with that of the army, he should not risk a conflict with a mere robber. I wish that you should remember your own value.\"\n\n\"Your words, O Wise One, are as gold and precious stones, but I fear that my soldiers will not carry out my commands unless I myself share their dangers.\"\n\nHowever, Sun Ce sent forth Han Dang to take up the challenge. Just as Han Dang reached the bridge, Jiang Qin and Chen Wu, who had dropped down the river in a small boat, passed under the bridge. Though the arrows fell in clouds on the bank, the two men rushed up and fiercely attacked Yan Yu as he stood on the bridge. Yan Yu fled and Han Dang went in pursuit. But Yan Yu smote up to the west gate of the city into which he entered.\n\nSun Ce laid siege to Wujun both by land and water. For three days no one came out to offer battle. Then at the head of his army, Sun Ce came to the west gate and summoned the warden. An officer of inconsiderable rank came out and stood with one hand resting on a beam while with the other he gave point to his abuse of those below. Quickly Taishi Ci's hands sought his bow and an arrow was on the string.\n\n\"See me hit that fellow's hand,\" said he, turning to his companions.\n\nEven as the sound of his voice died away, the bowstring twanged, the arrow sped and lodged in the beam, firmly pinning thereto the officer's hand. Both sides, those on the wall and those below it, marveled and acclaimed at such marksmanship.\n\nThe wounded man was taken away.\n\nWhen Yan Baihu the White Tiger heard of the exploit, he said, \"How can we hope to withstand an army with such leaders as this in it?\"\n\nAnd his thoughts turned toward a peace. He sent his brother Yan Yu out to see Sun Ce, who received him civilly, invited him into the tent, and set wine before him.\n\n\"And what does your brother propose?\" said Sun Ce.\n\n\"He is willing to share this region with you,\" was the reply.\n\n\"The rat! How dare he put himself on a level with me?\" cried Sun Ce.\n\nSun Ce commanded to put the messenger to death. Yan Yu started up and drew his sword; but out flew Sun Ce's blade, and the unhappy messenger fell to the ground. His head was hacked off and sent into the city to his brother.\n\nThis had its effect. Yan Baihu saw resistance was hopeless, so he abandoned Wujun and fled. Sun Ce pressed the attack. Huang Gai captured Jiaxing, and Taishi Ci took Wucheng. Several other southern cities were fallen. The territory was quickly subdued. Yan Baihu rushed off toward Yuhang in the east, plundering on all sides, till a band of villagers under the leadership of one Ling Cao checked his career of robbery there. Yan Baihu then fled toward Kuaiji.\n\nLing Cao and his son then went to meet Sun Ce, who took them into his service, and appointed them Commanders as a reward for their service, and the joint forces crossed the Great River.\n\nThe White Tiger, Yan Baihu, gathered his scattered forces and took up a position at Western Ford, but Cheng Pu attacked him there and scattered the defenders, chasing them as far as Kuaiji. The Governor of the place, Wang Lang, was on Yan Baihu's side and inclined to support him actively.\n\nBut, when Wang Lang proposed this, one of his officers stood forth, saying, \"No! No! Sun Ce as a leader is humane and upright, while the White Tiger is a savage ruffian. Rather capture him and offer his person as a peace offering to Sun Ce.\"\n\nThe Governor turned angrily toward the speaker, who was an official named Yu Fan from Kuaiji, and bade him be silent. Yu Fan withdrew sighing deeply. And the Governor went to the help of the White Tiger with whom he joined forces at Shanyin.\n\nSun Ce came up. When both sides were arrayed, Sun Ce rode out and addressed Wang Lang, saying, \"Mine is an army of good soldiers, and my aim is to restore peace to this region, but you give your support to a rebel!\"\n\nWang Lang replied, \"Your greed is insatiable. Having got possession of Wujun, you want also my territory. I shall revenge for the Yans!\"\n\nThis response greatly angered Sun Ce. Just as battle was to be joined, Taishi Ci advanced and Wang Lang came toward him waving a sword. Before they had exchanged many passes, Zhou Xin dashed out to help Wang Lang. Thereupon Huang Gai rode out to make the sides more equal. These latter two were just engaging when the drums rolled on both sides, and a general battle began.\n\nSuddenly confusion was caused in the rear of Wang Lang's army by the sudden onslaught of a small army. Wang Lang galloped off to see the attackers were Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu. Then an attack was made on his flank, so that he was in a hopeless position, and he and Yan Baihu and Zhou Xin, fighting desperately to cut an alley out, only just managed to reach the shelter of the city. The drawbridges were raised, the gates closed, and preparations made to sustain a siege.\n\nSun Ce followed right up to the walls and then divided his troops so as to attack all four gates. Seeing that the city was being fiercely attacked, Wang Lang was for making a sortie, but Yan Baihu opposed this as hopeless against so strong a force outside.\n\n\"We can only strengthen our position and remain behind the shelter of the ramparts until hunger forces the besiegers to retire,\" said Yan Baihu.\n\nWang Lang agreed, and the siege went on. For several days a vigorous attack was maintained, but with little success.\n\nIn a council, Sun Jing, who was the uncle of Sun Ce, said, \"Since they are holding the city with such resolution, it will be difficult to dislodge them. But the bulk of their supplies is stored at Chadu, distant only some ten miles. Our best plan is to seize this place, thus attacking where the enemy is unprepared, and doing what they do not expect.\"\n\nSun Ce approved, saying, \"My uncle's plan is admirable and will crush the rebels.\"\n\nSo he issued orders to kindle watch fires at all the gates, and leave the flags standing to maintain the appearance of soldiers in position while the expedition went south.\n\nZhou Yu came to utter a warning, \"When you, my lord, go away, the besieged will surely come out and follow you. We might prepare a surprise for them.\"\n\nSun Ce replied, \"My preparations are complete, and the city will be captured tonight.\"\n\nSo the army set out. Wang Lang heard that the besiegers had gone, and he went up to the tower to reconnoiter. He saw the fires blazing, the smoke rising, and the pennons fluttering in the breeze as usual and hesitated.\n\nZhou Xin said, \"He has gone and this is only a strategy. Let us go out and smite them.\"\n\nYan Baihu said, \"If he has gone, it is to attack Chadu. Let us pursue.\"\n\n\"The place is our base of supply,\" said Wang Lang, \"and must be defended. You two lead the way, and I will follow with reserves.\"\n\nSo Yan Baihu and Zhou Xin went forth with five thousand soldiers and drew near their enemy about the first watch, at seven miles from the city. The road led through dense forest. Then suddenly the drums beat and lighted torches sprang up on all sides. Yan Baihu was frightened, turned his horse and started to retreat. At once a leader appeared in front in whom, by the glare of the torches, he recognized Sun Ce. Zhou Xin made a rush at him but fell under Sun Ce's spear. The men surrendered. However, Yan Baihu managed to cut his way out and fled to Yuhang.\n\nWang Lang soon heard of the loss and, not daring to return to the city, fled in all haste to the coastal regions. And so Sun Ce got possession of the city of Kuaiji.\n\nHaving restored order, a few days later a man came bringing the head of the White Tiger as an offering to Sun Ce. This man was a native of the county. He was of eight-span height, with a square face and wide mouth. He was named Dong Xi. Sun Ce appointed him Commander. After this, peace reigned in all the southeast. Sun Ce placed his uncle Sun Jing in command of the city and made Zhu Zhi Governor of Wujun. Then Sun Ce returned to his own place, south of the Great River.\n\nWhile Sun Ce was absent, a band of brigands suddenly attacked Xuancheng, left in the care of his brother Sun Quan and the leader Zhou Tai. As the onslaught was made on all sides at once, and in the night, the brigands got the upper hand. Zhou Tai took the youth in his arms and mounted a horse; but when the robbers came on with swords to attack him, he dismounted, and though without mail, met the robbers on foot and slew them as they came up. Then came a horseman armed with a spear, but Zhou Tai laid hold of his spear and pulled him to the earth. Next Zhou Tai mounted the robber's horse, and thrusting this way and that with the spear fought his way out. So Sun Quan was preserved, but his savior had received more than a dozen wounds. However, the bandits went away.\n\nThese wounds being due to metal would not heal but swelled enormously, and the brave soldier's life hung in the balance. Sun Ce returned and was deeply grieved.\n\nThen Dong Xi said, \"Once in an engagement with some coastal pirates, I received many spear wounds, but a certain wise man named Yu Fan recommended a surgeon who cured me in half a month.\"\n\n\"Surely this must be Yu Fan of Kuaiji,\" replied Sun Ce. \"That is he; he is so called.\"\n\n\"Yes, truly a wise man. I would employ him.\"\n\nSo Sun Ce sent two officers to invite Yu Fan, and he came at once. He was treated in most friendly fashion and appointed an official forthwith. Then the question of treating the wounded man was brought up.\n\n\"The surgeon is one Hua Tuo from Qiao, who has perfectly marvelous medicine skill. I will get him to come,\" said Yu Fan.\n\nShortly the famous Hua Tuo arrived, a man with the complexion of a youth and a snowy beard. He looked more like a saint who had passed the gates of this life. He was treated very warmly and taken to see the sick general's wounds.\n\n\"The case is not difficult,\" said the surgeon.\n\nAnd he prepared certain drugs that healed the wounds within a month. Sun Ce suitably acknowledged his care and skill, and he was allowed to leave with rich rewards.\n\nNext Sun Ce attacked the brigands and destroyed them, so restoring complete tranquillity to the South Land. After this he set garrisons at all the strategic points in the old state of Wu, and this done, memorialized what he had achieved to the Throne. He came to an understanding with Cao Cao and sent letters to Yuan Shu demanding the return of the Imperial Hereditary Seal he had left in pledge.\n\nBut Yuan Shu, secretly cherishing the most ambitious designs, wrote excuses and did not return the state jewel. In his own place Yuan Shu hastily summoned about thirty of his officers to a council. Among them were Adviser Yang Dajiang and Generals Zhang Xun, Ji Ling, Qiao Rui, Lei Bo, and Chen Lan.\n\nYuan Shu said, \"Sun Ce borrowed an army from me and set out on an expedition which has made him master of the South Land. Now he says nothing of repayment but demands the token of his pledge. Truly he is a boor, and what steps can I take to destroy him?\"\n\nYang Dajiang replied, \"You cannot do any thing against him, for he is too strongly placed, the Great River as the shield. You must first remove Liu Bei in revenge for having attacked you without cause, and then you may think about Sun Ce. I have a scheme to put the former into your hands in a very short time.\"\n\n\u2003Yuan Shu went not to destroy the tiger, but instead\n\n\u2003Against a dragon forth his army led." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "In The Camp Gate, Lu Bu Shoots The Halberd; At River Yu, Cao Cao Suffers A Defeat.\n\nAdviser Yang Dajiang knew how to remove Liu Bei.\n\n\"What is your plan of attack on Liu Bei?\" said Yuan Shu.\n\nYang Dajiang replied, \"Though Liu Bei, now camped at Xiaopei, could easily be taken, yet Lu Bu is strongly posted at the chief city near. And I think Lu Bu would help Liu Bei if it was only for the grudge he bears against you for not having given him the gold and studs, grain and horses you promised. First of all you should send Lu Bu a present whereby to engage his affections and keep him quiet while you deal with Liu Bei. You can see to Lu Bu after this is done, and Xuzhou is yours.\"\n\nThereupon two hundred thousand carts of millet was sent, with letters, by the hand of Han Yin. The gift pleased Lu Bu greatly, and he treated the messenger with great cordiality. Feeling sure of no trouble from that quarter, Yuan Shu told off one hundred thousand troops against Xiaopei. The army was led by Ji Ling as commanding general, and Lei Bo and Chen Lan as generals.\n\nWhen Liu Bei heard these things he called his officers to take counsel. Zhang Fei was for open war forthwith.\n\nBut Sun Qian said, \"Our resources were too small; therefore, we must lay the position before Lu Bu and ask help.\"\n\n\"Do you think that fellow will do anything?\" said Zhang Fei cynically.\n\nLiu Bei decided in favor of Sun Qian's proposal and wrote as follows:\n\n\"Humbly I venture to remind you that I am here by your orders and enjoy repose as the result of your kindness, extensive as the heavens. Now Yuan Shu, moved by a desire for revenge, is sending a force against this place, and its destruction is imminent unless you intervene to save it. I trust you will send an army quickly to protect the town, and our happiness will be inexpressible.\"\n\nReceiving this Lu Bu called in Chen Gong to whom he said, \"I have just received gifts from Yuan Shu and a letter, with the intent of restraining me from helping Liu Bei. Now comes a letter from Liu Bei asking help. It seems to me that Liu Bei where he is can do me no harm; but if Yuan Shu overcomes Liu Bei and comes to an understanding with the leaders around the Huashan Mountains, then the power of the north is so much nearer, and I should be unable to resist the attacks of so many leaders and should never sleep secure. I will aid Liu Bei: That is the better course for me.\"\n\nNow Yuan Shu's force sent against Xiaopei went thither as quickly as possible, and soon the country to the southeast fluttered with pennons by day and blazed with watch fires by night, while the rolling of the drums reverberated from heaven to earth.\n\nThe five thousand troops at Liu Bei's disposal were led out of the city and arranged to make a brave show, but it was good news to him to hear that Lu Bu had arrived and was quite near. Lu Bu camped only half a mile away to the southwest. When Yuan Shu's general, Ji Ling, heard of his arrival, he wrote letters reproaching Lu Bu for his treachery. Lu Bu smiled as he read them.\n\n\"I know how to make both of them love me,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nSo he sent invitations to both Liu Bei and Ji Ling to come to a banquet.\n\nLiu Bei was for accepting the invitation and going, but his brothers dissuaded him, saying, \"There is some treachery in his heart.\"\n\n\"I have treated him too well for him to do me any harm,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSo he mounted and rode away, the two brothers following. They came to the camp.\n\nThe host said, \"Now by a special effort I have got you out of danger. I hope you will not forget that when you come into your own.\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him heartily and was invited to take a seat. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei took up their usual place as guards.\n\nBut when Ji Ling was announced, Liu Bei felt a spasm of fear and got up to go away.\n\n\"You two are invited for the particular purpose of a discussion,\" said the host. \"Do not take it amiss.\"\n\nLiu Bei, being quite ignorant of his intentions, was very uneasy. Presently his fellow guest entered. Seeing Liu Bei in the tent, and in the seat of honor, Ji Ling was puzzled, hesitated and tried to withdraw. But the attendants prevented this and Lu Bu, advancing, laid hold of him and drew him into the tent as if he had been a child.\n\n\"Do you wish to slay me?\" asked Ji Ling.\n\n\"Not at all,\" replied Lu Bu.\n\n\"Then you are going to slay Long-Ears?\"\n\n\"No, not that.\"\n\n\"Then what does it mean?\"\n\n\"Liu Bei and I are brothers. Now, General, you are besieging him, and so I have come to the rescue.\"\n\n\"Then slay me,\" said Ji Ling.\n\n\"There would be no sense in that. All my life I have disliked fighting and quarrels, but have loved making peace. And now I want to settle the quarrel between you two.\"\n\n\"May I ask how you think of doing so?\"\n\n\"I have a means and one approved of Heaven itself.\"\n\nThen Lu Bu drew Ji Ling within the tent and led him up to Liu Bei. The two men faced each other, full of mutual suspicion, but their host placed himself between them and they took their seats, Liu Bei on the right hand of the host.\n\nThe banquet began. After a number of courses almost in silence, Lu Bu spoke, saying, \"I wish you two gentlemen to listen to me and put an end to your strife.\"\n\nLiu Bei made no reply, but Ji Ling said, \"I have come with an army of one hundred thousand at the express bidding of my master to take Liu Bei. How can I cease the strife? I must fight.\"\n\n\"What!\" exclaimed Zhang Fei drawing his sword. \"Few as we are, we regard you no more than a lot of children. What are you compared with a million Yellow Scarves? You dare hurt our brother!\"\n\nGuan Yu urged him to be silent, saying, \"Let us see what General Lu Bu has to say first. After that there will be time to go to our tents and fight.\"\n\n\"I beg you both to come to an understanding. I cannot let you fight,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nNow on one side Ji Ling was discontented and angry; on the other Zhang Fei was dying for a fight; and neither of the two chiefly concerned would signify assent.\n\nThen suddenly the host turned to his attendants, saying, \"Bring my trident halberd!\"\n\nThey did so, and he sat there gripping that graceful but effective weapon in his right hand. Both guests felt very ill at ease and turned pale.\n\nLu Bu went on, saying, \"I have tried to persuade you to make peace, for that is the command of the Most High. It shall be put to the test.\"\n\nHe then bade his servants take the halberd outside beyond the gate and set it up.\n\nThen speaking to his two guests, he said, \"That gate is one hundred and fifty paces distant. If I can hit that left branch of the halberd-head with an arrow, you will both withdraw your armies. If I miss, you can go away and prepare for immediate battle. I shall stand against either of you who does not abide by what I say.\"\n\nJi Ling thought to himself, \"That small mark at that distance! How could anyone hit it?\"\n\nSo he assented, thinking he would have plenty of fighting after his host had missed the mark. Of course Liu Bei was willing.\n\nThey all sat down again and wine was served. When this had been drunk, the host called for his bow and arrows. Liu Bei silently prayed that Lu Bu would hit the mark.\n\nLu Bu turned back his sleeves, carefully fitted an arrow to the string and pulled the bow to its utmost stretch. A slight exclamation escaped him as the bow curved like the harvest moon sailing through the sky. \"Twang!\" went the bowstring, and the arrow sped like a falling star. And it struck the slender tongue of the halberd head full and square. A roar of acclamation from all sides greeted the exploit.\n\nThe multitude people often hail their praise:\n\n\u2003O Lu Bu was a wonderful archer,\n\n\u2003And the arrow he shot sped straight;\n\n\u2003By hitting the mark he saved his friend\n\n\u2003That day at his camp gate.\n\n\u2003Hou Yi, the archer of ancient days,\n\n\u2003Brought down each mocking sun,\n\n\u2003And the apes that gibbered to fright Yang Youji\n\n\u2003Were slain by him, one by one.\n\n\u2003But we sing of Lu Bu that drew the bow,\n\n\u2003And his feathered shaft that flew;\n\n\u2003For one hundred thousand soldiers could doff their mails\n\n\u2003When he hit the mark so true.\n\nLu Bu laughed loud at the success of his shot.\n\nDropping his bow he seized his guests by the hands, saying, \"The command of Heaven indeed! And now you cease from fighting!\"\n\nHe ordered the soldier attendants to pour out great goblets of wine and each drank. Liu Bei in his inmost heart felt rather lucky; his fellow guest sat silent, nodding his head.\n\nPresently Ji Ling said, \"I cannot disobey your command, General, but let me depart. What will my master say and will he believe me?\"\n\n\"I will write a letter and confirm it,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nAfter a few more rounds of the wine, Ji Ling asked that he might have the letter and after that departed.\n\nWhen the brothers took their leave, Lu Bu again reminded Liu Bei, saying, \"Do not forget I have delivered you today!\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him and departed. Next day the leaders broke camps, and the soldiers were gone.\n\nWhen Ji Ling had got back to the South of River Huai and told the story of the feat of archery and the peace making that followed, and had presented the letter, his lord was very wroth.\n\n\"Lu Bu repays me for all my grain with this bit of play acting!\" cried Yuan Shu. \"He has saved Liu Bei, but I will lead a large army myself and settle both Liu Bei and him.\"\n\n\"Be careful, my lord,\" said Ji Ling. \"Lu Bu is braver and stronger than most leaders and has a wide territory. He and Liu Bei together make a powerful combination, not easy to break. But there is another course. I have found out that his wife, Lady Yan, has a daughter just of marriageable age; and as you have a son, you could arrange a marriage alliance with Lu Bu. If his daughter wedded your son, Lu Bu would certainly slay your enemy for you. This is called 'Relative-above-Stranger' plan.\"\n\nThis scheme appealed to Yuan Shu, who soon set about its accomplishment. He sent presents by the hand of Han Yin, who was to discuss the question.\n\nWhen Han Yin saw Lu Bu, he said, \"My master has an immense respect for you, Illustrious Sir, and he desires to ensure perpetual alliance between the two families by a marriage, an alliance such as existed between the ancient states of Qin and Jin.\"\n\nLu Bu was well disposed toward the scheme, but went in to consult his wife. Now Lu Bu had two wives and one concubine. He first married a lady of the Yan family, and she was the legal wife. Then he took Diao Chan as a concubine. And while he was living at Xiaopei, he had married a secondary wife, a daughter of Cao Bao. Lady Cao had died quite young leaving no issue. Neither had Diao Chan borne any children. So that Lu Bu had but one child, this daughter, of whom he was dotingly fond.\n\nWhen he broached the subject, his wife said, \"The Yuans have dominated the regions around the River Huai these many years. They have a large army and are very prosperous. One day a Yuan will become emperor, and our daughter may hope to be an empress. But how many sons has Yuan Shu?\"\n\n\"Only this one.\"\n\n\"Then we should accept the offer. Even if our daughter does not become Empress, Xuzhou has a new ally.\"\n\nLu Bu decided to accept and so treated the messenger with extreme generosity. Han Yin went back with a favorable answer. The wedding gifts were then prepared ready for Han Yin to take to the bride's family. They were received and banquets and merry-making filled all the time.\n\nNext day Chen Gong went to see the messenger in his lodging, and when the usual ceremonies and greetings had been exchanged, the two men sat down to talk.\n\nWhen the servants had been sent out of earshot, Chen Gong said, \"Who originated this scheme by which Yuan Shu and Lu Bu are to become connections by this marriage so that Liu Bei's head may fall?\"\n\nHan Yin was terrified. \"I pray you not to let it get abroad,\" said he.\n\n\"I certainly shall keep it secret. But if there be any delay, some other person will find it out and that spells failure,\" said Chen Gong.\n\n\"What would best be done?\"\n\n\"I will see Lu Bu and get him to send the girl immediately so that the marriage may be concluded quickly.\"\n\n\"If it happened thus, my master would indeed hold you in high respect.\"\n\nWith this Chen Gong took his leave and sought an interview with Lu Bu.\n\n\"I hear your daughter is to be married to Yuan Shu's son. That is capital, but no one knows when.\"\n\n\"That has yet to be considered,\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"There were certain fixed rules as to the period between sending presents and consummation of the marriage: Emperors, a year; nobles, half a year; high officers, three months; and common people, one month.\"\n\nLu Bu replied, \"As to Yuan Shu, Heaven has already put into his hands the Imperial Hereditary Seal, and he will surely arrive at the dignity one day. So, I should think the imperial rule would apply.\"\n\n\"No, it will not.\"\n\n\"The nobles' rule, then?\"\n\n\"No, nor that.\"\n\n\"The high officers'?\"\n\n\"Not even that.\"\n\nLu Bu laughed, saying, \"Then you mean me to go by the rule for common people.\"\n\n\"Nor that either.\"\n\n\"Then what do you mean?\"\n\nChen Gong said, \"In the midst of the present troubles, when there is great rivalry among the nobles, do you not see that the others will be exceedingly jealous of your marriage alliance with such a high family as the Yuans? Suppose you postpone the choice of the day, most likely when your fine morning arrives, the wedding party will fall into an ambush on the road and the bride be carried off. Then what could be done? My opinion is that you would have done better to refuse. But since you have consented, then carry out the plan at once before the lords hear of it, and so send the girl over without delay to Shouchun. You can hire a lodging there till you have selected the wedding day, and the odds are greatly against any failure.\"\n\n\"What you say is quite to the point,\" replied Lu Bu.\n\nHe went into the private apartments to see his wife and told her the bride elect would set out immediately and the trousseau was to be prepared as far as it could be. On his side he chose some good horses and had a wedding carriage got ready. The escort consisted of Han Yin and two of Lu Bu's generals, Song Xian and Wei Xu. The procession went out of the city to the sound of music.\n\nNow at this time Chen Gui, father of Chen Deng, was placidly waiting till the evening of his life passed into night. Hearing this burst of music he inquired the occasion, and the servants told him.\n\n\"They are working on the 'Relative-above-Stranger' device, then,\" said Chen Gui. \"Liu Bei is in danger.\"\n\nThereupon in spite of his many infirmities, he went to see Lu Bu.\n\n\"Noble Sir, what brings you here?\" asked Lu Bu.\n\n\"I heard you were dead, and I came to mourn,\" quavered the old man.\n\n\"Who said that?\" exclaimed his host.\n\n\"Once upon a time you received grand presents from Yuan Shu that you might slay Liu Bei, but you got out by that clever shot at your halberd. Now they suddenly seek a marriage alliance thinking to get hold of your daughter as a pledge. The next move will be an attack on Xiaopei and, that gone, where are you? Whatever they ask in future, grain or troops or anything else, and you yield, will bring your own end nearer, and make you hated all round. If you refuse, then you are false to the duties of a relative, and that will be an excuse to attack you openly. Beside this Yuan Shu intends to call himself emperor, which would be rebellion, and you would be of the rebel's family: Something abominable, which the multitude people would not suffer.\"\n\nLu Bu was much disturbed to hear this.\n\n\"I have been misled by Chen Gong!\" cried he.\n\nSo he hurriedly sent Zhang Liao to bring the wedding party, which had been ten miles away, back to the city. When they had come, Lu Bu threw Han Yin into prison and sent a reply to Yuan Shu saying curtly that the girl's trousseau was not ready and she could not be married till it was.\n\nChen Gui wanted Han Yin to be sent to Capital Xuchang. But Lu Bu was hesitating what course to adopt, when he heard that Liu Bei was enlisting soldiers and buying horses for no apparent reason.\n\n\"He is simply doing his duty. There is nothing to be surprised at,\" said Lu Bu at first.\n\nThen came two officers, Song Xian and Wei Xu, saying, \"As you ordered us, we went into the Huashan Mountains to purchase horses. We had got three hundred when, on our way back, on the borders of Xiaopei some robbers stole half of them. We hear that the real robbers were Zhang Fei and his soldiers, who took on the guise of brigands.\"\n\nLu Bu was very angry at this and began to prepare an expedition against Xiaopei. When Liu Bei heard that an attack threatened, he led out his army to oppose it, and the two armies were arrayed.\n\nLiu Bei rode to the front and said, \"Elder brother, why have you brought an army against me?\"\n\nLu Bu began abusing him, saying, \"That shot of mine at the Archery Feast saved you from grave danger. Why then did you steal my horses?\"\n\n\"I wanted horses and I sent out to buy them. Should I dare to take yours?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"You stole a hundred and fifty in the person of your brother Zhang Fei. You only used another man's hand.\"\n\nThereupon Zhang Fei, with his spear set, rode out, saying, \"Yes! I stole your good horses, and what more do you expect?\"\n\nLu Bu replied, \"You goggled-eyed thief! You are always treating me with contempt!\"\n\n\"Yes! I took your horses and you get angry. You did not say any thing when you stole my brother's Xuzhou!\"\n\nLu Bu rode forward to give battle, and Zhang Fei advanced. A reckless fight began, and the two warriors kept it up for a hundred bouts without a decisive stroke. Then Liu Bei, fearing some accident to his brother, hastily beat the gongs as a signal to retire and led his army into the city. Lu Bu then invested it.\n\nLiu Bei called his brother and chided him as the cause of all this misfortune.\n\n\"Where are the horses?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"In some of the temples and courts,\" replied Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Bei sent a messenger out to speak softly and offer to restore the stolen horses if hostilities were to cease. Lu Bu was disposed to agree but Chen Gong opposed.\n\n\"You will suffer by and by if you do not remove this Liu Bei.\"\n\nUnder Chen Gong's influence the request for peace was rejected, and the attackers on the city pressed harder.\n\nLiu Bei called Mi Zhu and Sun Qian to him to ask advice.\n\nSaid Sun Qian, \"The one person that Cao Cao detests is Lu Bu. Let us then abandon the city and take refuge with Cao Cao, from whom we may borrow troops to destroy him.\"\n\n\"If we try to get away, who will lead the van?\"\n\n\"I will do my best,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nSo Zhang Fei led the way; Guan Yu was rearguard; and in the center was Liu Bei with the non-fighting portion. The cavalcade started and went out at the north gate under the bright moon. They met opposition from Song Xian and Wei Xu's men, but the soldiers were driven off by Zhang Fei, and the besieging force was passed without difficulty. Zhang Liao pursued, but was held off by Guan Yu's rearguard. It seemed Lu Bu was not dissatisfied at the flight, for he took no personal trouble to prevent it. He made formal entry into the city, settled local affairs, and appointed Gao Shun as Governor.\n\nLiu Bei approached Xuchang and encamped outside the city, whence he sent Sun Qian to see Cao Cao and relate the events that brought him there.\n\nCao Cao was very friendly and said, \"Liu Bei is as my brother.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao invited Liu Bei to enter the city.\n\nLeaving his brothers at the camp, Liu Bei, with Sun Qian and Mi Zhu, went to Cao Cao, who received him with the greatest respect. The story of Lu Bu's perfidy was again related.\n\n\"He has no sense of right,\" said Cao Cao. \"You and I, my brother, will attack him together.\"\n\nLiu Bei was very grateful. A banquet was then prepared, and it was late evening before the visitor left for his own camp.\n\nXun Yu then had an interview with his master and said, \"If you are not on your guard, Liu Bei will be your undoing. You ought to destroy him. He is too much of a hero.\"\n\nCao Cao made no reply and his adviser retired.\n\nPresently Guo Jia came, and Cao Cao said, \"I have been advised to kill Liu Bei: What of such a scheme?\"\n\n\"A bad scheme,\" said Guo Jia. \"You are the popular champion, pledged to relieve the people from oppression, and only by truth and rectitude can you secure the support of the noble-minded. Your only fear is lest they stay away. Now Liu Bei is a clear hero. He has come to you for help and protection, and to put him to death would be to alienate all good people and put fear into the hearts of all the able advisers. Hampered by these difficulties, where will you find those whose help you need? To remove the dangers represented by one man and thereby injure yourself in the eyes of all humankind is a sure means of destruction. These conditions need careful consideration.\"\n\n\"What you say exactly fits in with what I think,\" said Cao Cao, greatly pleased with these remarks.\n\nHis next step was to memorialize the Emperor to give Liu Bei the imperial protectorship of Yuzhou.\n\nAgain Cheng Yu said, \"Liu Bei is certain to rise to the top. He will never remain in a subordinate position. You had better remove him.\"\n\nCao Cao answered, \"Now is just the time to make use of good people. I will not forfeit the regard of the world for the sake of removing one individual. Guo Jia and I both see this in the same light.\"\n\nWherefore Cao Cao rejected all persuasion to work against Liu Bei but sent him three thousand soldiers and ten thousand carts of grain, and set him on his way to Yuzhou. Liu Bei was to march to Xiaopei, occupy it, call together his former soldiers, and attack Lu Bu.\n\nWhen Liu Bei reached Yuzhou, he sent to inform Cao Cao, who prepared to march an army to subjugate Lu Bu. But just then hasty news came that Zhang Ji, who had gone to the attack of Nanyang, had been wounded by a stray arrow and had died. His nephew, Zhang Xiu, had succeeded to the command of his army; and with Jia Xu as strategist, Zhang Xiu had joined Liu Biao and camped at Wancheng. They intended to attack the capital and get possession of the Emperor's person.\n\nCao Cao was placed in a quandary. He would go to attack this combination, but he feared lest Lu Bu would attack the capital if he left it. So he sought the advice of Xun Yu.\n\nSaid the Adviser, \"Lu Bu has no notion of a policy. He is led astray by any little advantage that presents itself to his eyes. All you need do is to obtain promotion for him, giving him some additional title, and tell him to make peace with Liu Bei, and he will do it. Lu Bu is no threat then.\"\n\n\"Good,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he acted upon the hint and sent an Imperial Legate, Wang Ze, to Xuzhou with the official announcement and a letter urging peace, while he went on with preparations to meet the other danger from Zhang Xiu.\n\nWhen ready Cao Cao marched out with one hundred fifty thousand troops in three divisions. Xiahou Dun was the Van Leader, and they went to River Yu and camped there.\n\nJia Xu succeeded in persuading Zhang Xiu of the hopelessness of resistance.\n\n\"You would do well to surrender, since Cao Cao's army is too large for you to oppose,\" said Jia Xu.\n\nSeeing the truth of this, Zhang Xiu sent his adviser to propose sub mission. Cao Cao was greatly pleased with the messenger, admiring his ready and fluent repartee, and tried to win him to his service.\n\n\"I was formerly with Li Jue and was guilty with him. Now I am with Zhang Xiu who esteems my advice, and I should not like to abandon him,\" said Jia Xu.\n\nJia Xu left and next day conducted his master into Cao Cao's presence. Cao Cao was very generous. Then he entered Wancheng with a small force, the greater part of the army being put in camp outside where the lines extended some three miles. Great banquets were given every day by Zhang Xiu, and Cao Cao was always being entertained.\n\nOne day, when Cao Cao returned to his quarters in a more than usual merry mood, he asked the attendants, \"Are there singing girls in the city?\"\n\nHis nephew, Cao Amin, heard the question and said, \"Peeping through one of the partitions last evening, I saw a perfectly beautiful woman in one of the courts. They told me she was the wife of Zhang Ji, Zhang Xiu's uncle. She is very lovely.\"\n\nCao Cao, inflamed by the description given him of the beauty, told his nephew to go and bring her to visit him. Cao Amin did so, supported by an armed escort, and very soon the woman stood before Cao Cao.\n\nShe was a beauty indeed, and Cao Cao asked her name.\n\nShe replied, \"Thy handmaid was wife to Zhang Ji; I was born of the Zhou family.\"\n\n\"Do you know who I am?\"\n\n\"I have known the Prime Minister by reputation a long time. I am happy to see him and be permitted to bow before him,\" said she.\n\n\"It was for your sake that I allowed Zhang Xiu to submit; otherwise I would have slain him and cut him off root and branch,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Indeed, then, I owe my very life to you; I am very grateful,\" said she.\n\n\"To see you is a glimpse of paradise, but there is one thing I should like better. I hope, this night, we can share the same pillow together, and tomorrow go with me to the capital where we can enjoy all the luxuries of life. What do you say to that, my lady?\"\n\nShe could but thank him.\n\n\"But Zhang Xiu will greatly wonder at my prolonged absence, and gossips will begin to talk,\" said she.\n\n\"If you like, you can leave the city tomorrow.\"\n\nShe did so; but instead of going at once to the capital, she stayed with him among the tents, where Dian Wei was appointed as a special guard over her apartments. Cao Cao was the only person whom she saw, and he passed the days in idle dalliance with the lady, quite content to let time flow by.\n\nBut people told Zhang Xiu what had gone amiss, and he was angry at the shame brought upon the family.\n\nHe confided his trouble to Jia Xu who said, \"Keep this secret, wait till he appears again to carry on business, and then do so and so.\"\n\nA plan was arranged quite secretly.\n\nNext day Zhang Xiu went into Cao Cao's tent, saying, \"Since the surrendered troops are deserting in great number, it would be well to camp them in the center of your camp to prevent this.\"\n\nCao Cao gave the permission, and Zhang Xiu moved and placed his army in four camps.\n\nBut Dian Wei, the especial guard of Cao Cao's tent, was a man to be feared, being both brave and powerful. It was hard to know how to attack him. So counsel was taken with Hu Juer, the commander of one camp and a man of enormous strength and activity. He could carry a burden of six hundred pounds and two hundred miles in a day. Hu Juer proposed a plan.\n\nHe said, \"The fearsome thing about Dian Wei is his double halberds. But get him to come to a party and make him quite drunk before you send him back. I will mingle among his escort and so get into his tent and steal away his weapons. One needs not fear him then.\"\n\nSo the necessary arms were prepared and orders given in the various camps. This done Zhang Xiu gave a banquet, and the intended victim was invited and plied vigorously with wine so that he was quite intoxicated when he left. And, as arranged, Hu Juer mingled with his escort and made away with his weapons.\n\nThat night, when Cao Cao was at supper with Lady Zhou, he heard the voices of men and neighing of horses and sent out to ask what it meant. They told him it was the night patrol going the rounds, and he was satisfied.\n\nNear the second watch of the night again was heard some noise in the rear of his tent, and one of the fodder carts was reported to be burning.\n\n\"One of the soldiers has dropped a spark; there is nothing to be alarmed at,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nBut very soon the fire spread on all sides and became alarming. Cao Cao called Dian Wei. But he, usually so alert, was lying down quite intoxicated.\n\nHowever, the beating of gongs and rolling of drums mingling with his dreams awoke Dian Wei, and he jumped up. His trusty halberds had disappeared. The enemy was near. He hastily snatched up an infantryman's sword and rushed out. At the gate he saw a crowd of spearmen just bursting in. Dian Wei rushed at them slashing all around him, and twenty or more fell beneath his blows. The others drew back. But the spears stood around him like reeds on the river bank. Being totally without mail, he was soon wounded in several places. He fought desperately till his sword snapped and was no longer of any use. Throwing it aside he seized a couple of soldiers and with their bodies as weapons felled ten of his opponents. The others dared not approach, but they shot arrows at him. These fell thick as rain, but he still maintained the gate against the assailants.\n\nHowever, the mutineers got in by the rear of the camp, and they wounded Dian Wei in the back with spear thrusts. Uttering a loud cry he fell. The blood gushed from the wound in torrents, and he died. Even after he was dead not a man dared to come in by the main gate.\n\nCao Cao, relying on Dian Wei to hold the main gate, had fled in haste by the rear gate. Cao Amin accompanied him on foot. Then Cao Cao was wounded by an arrow in the arm, and three arrows struck his horse. However, fortunately, the horse was a fine Dawan beast full of spirit and, in spite of its wounds, it bore its master swiftly and well as far as the bank of River Yu.\n\nHere some of the pursuers came up, and Cao Amin was hacked to pieces. Cao Cao dashed into the river and reached the further side, but there an arrow struck his steed in the eye and it fell. Cao Cao's eldest son, Cao Ang, dismounted and yielded his horse to his father, who galloped on. Cao Ang was killed by arrows, but Cao Cao himself got away. Soon after he met several of his officers who had rallied a few troops.\n\nThe soldiers of Qingzhou under Xiahou Dun seized the occasion to plunder the people. Yu Jin took his army, fell upon them, and slew many. Thus he protected and appeased the people. The plunderers, meeting Cao Cao on the road, knelt down howling and said Yu Jin had mutinied and attacked them. Cao Cao was surprised, and he gave order to Xiahou Dun, Xu Chu, Li Dian, and Yue Jing to attack Yu Jin.\n\nNow when Yu Jin saw his master and a great company approaching, he at once stopped the attack and set his troops to make a camp.\n\nAn officer asked him, \"The Qingzhou soldiers say you have turned traitor. Why do you not explain now that the Prime Minister has arrived? Why first make a camp?\"\n\nYu Jin replied, \"Our enemies are coming up in our rear and are very close. It is necessary to prepare for defense or we shall not withstand them. Explanation is a small matter, but defense is very important.\"\n\nSoon after the camp was finished, Zhang Xiu fell upon them. Yu Jin himself rode out to face them. Zhang Xiu drew back. The other generals of Yu Jin, seeing he advance thus boldly, also attacked, and Zhang Xiu was overcome. They pursued him a great distance until his force was almost annihilated. With the miserable remnant he finally fled to Liu Biao.\n\nCao Cao's army reformed, and the commanders mustered. Then Yu Jin went to see his master and told him of the conduct of the Qingzhou soldiers and their looting and why he had attacked them.\n\n\"Why did you not tell me before you made the camp?\"\n\nYu Jin related what had occurred.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"When the first thought of a leader in the time of greatest stress is to maintain order and to strengthen his defenses, giving no thought to slander but shouldering his burdens bravely, and when he thereby turns a defeat into a victory, who, even of the ancient leaders, can excel Yu Jin?\"\n\nCao Cao rewarded Yu Jin with a golden armor and the lordship of Yishou. But Cao Cao reprimanded Xiahou Dun for the lack of discipline among his soldiers.\n\nSacrifices in honor of the dead warrior Dian Wei were instituted. Cao Cao himself led the wailing and paid due honors.\n\nTurning to his officers he said, \"I have lost my first born son, but I grieve not so heavily for him as for Dian Wei. I weep for him!\"\n\nAll were sad at the loss of this general. Then orders were issued to return to the capital.\n\nWhen Imperial Legate Wang Ze, bearing the imperial decree, reached Xuzhou, he was met by Lu Bu, who conducted him into the residence where the decree was read. It conferred Lu Bu the title General Who Pacifies the East, and a special seal accompanied the mandate. The private mediating letter was also handed over and the messenger detailed the high appreciation in which Lu Bu was held by the Chief Minister of State. Lu Bu was greatly pleased.\n\nNext came news that a messenger from Yuan Shu had arrived.\n\nWhen he had been introduced, he said, \"My master's project of declaring himself emperor is advancing. He has already built a Palace and will speedily choose Empress and concubines and would come to the South of River Huai. He is looking forward to receiving the fiancee of the Heir Apparent.\"\n\n\"Has the rebel gone so far?\" cried Lu Bu in a rage.\n\nHe put the messenger to death and Han Yin into the cage. He drafted a memorial of thanks and sent it to the capital, at the same time sending, too, Han Yin, the unfortunate agent who had arranged the marriage alliance. He also replied to Cao Cao's private meditating letter asking to be confirmed in his protectorship of Xuzhou. The letter was sent by the hand of Chen Deng.\n\nCao Cao was pleased to hear of the rupture of the marriage arrangement between the houses of Yuans and Lus, and forthwith put Han Yin to death in the market place.\n\nHowever, Chen Deng secretly told Cao Cao, saying, \"Lu Bu is cruel, stupid, and facile. The longer he remains, the worse.\"\n\n\"I know Lu Bu quite well,\" replied Cao Cao. \"He is a wolf with a savage heart, and it will be hard to feed him for long. If it had not been for you and your father, I should not have known all the circumstances and you must help me to get rid of him.\"\n\n\"Anything the Prime Minister wishes to do shall have my assistance,\" was the reply.\n\nAs a reward Cao Cao obtained an annually grant of two thousand carts of grain for Chen Gui and the governorship of Guangling for Chen Deng, who then took his leave.\n\nAs he was saying farewell, Cao Cao took him by the hand, saying, \"I shall depend upon you in the eastern affairs.\"\n\nChen Deng nodded acquiescence. Then he returned to Lu Bu, who asked him how the visit was.\n\nChen Deng told him, \"My father received a generous annuity, and I was made Governor of Guangling.\"\n\nLu Bu enraged, saying, \"You did not ask Xuzhou for me, but you got something for yourself. Your father advised me to help Cao Cao by breaking off the marriage, and now I get nothing at all of what I asked, while you and your father get everything. I have been victimized by your father.\"\n\nHe threatened Chen Deng with his sword.\n\nChen Deng only laughed, saying, \"O General, how unwary you are!\"\n\n\"I, unwary?\"\n\n\"When I saw Cao Cao, I said that to keep you going was like feeding a tiger. The tiger must be kept fully fed or he would eat humans. But Cao Cao laughed and replied, 'No, not that. One must treat the Commander like a falcon. Not feed it till the foxes and hares are done. Hungry, the bird is of use; full fed it flies away.' I asked who were the quarry. He replied, 'Yuan Shu of the South of River Huai, Sun Ce of the South Land, Yuan Shao of Jizhou, Liu Biao of Jingzhou, Liu Zhang of Yizhou, and Zhang Lu of Hanzhong; these are the foxes and hares.'\"\n\nLu Bu threw aside his sword and laughed, saying, \"Yes, he understands me!\"\n\nBut just about that time came news of the advance of Yuan Shu on Xuzhou, and that frightened Lu Bu.\n\n\u2003When discord rose between Qin and Jin,\n\n\u2003They were attacked by Yue and Wu,\n\n\u2003And when a promised bride never came,\n\n\u2003An army marched to enforce the claim." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Yuan Shu Marches Out Seven Armies; Cao Cao And Three Generals Join Forces.\n\nThe south of River Huai was very fruitful, and Yuan Shu, as governor of such a large territory, was very influential. He was not a little puffed up. The possession of the Imperial Hereditary Seal, pledged by Sun Ce, added to his pride. And he seriously thought of assuming the full style.\n\nAs a preliminary he assembled all his officers and addressed them thus: \"The Supreme Ancestor, the Founder of Han Dynasty, was only a very minor official, and yet he became ruler of the empire. The dynasty has endured four centuries, and its measure of fortune has run out. It no longer possesses authority; the cauldron is on the point of boiling over. My family has held the highest offices of state for four generations and is universally respected. Wherefore I wish, in response to the will of Heaven and the desire of the people, to assume the Imperial Dignity. What think ye of the proposal, my officers?\"\n\nSecretary Yan Xiang rose in opposition at once, saying, \"You may not do this. King Wen, the Ancestor of the Zhou, was of distinguished virtue and held many offices. Till the last years of Shang Dynasty, he had two thirds of the empire. Still he served and was loyal to the ruling house. Your house is honorable, but it is not so glorious as that of Zhou. The Hans may be reduced, but they are not so abominably cruel as those of the Shang Dynasty that they are to be overthrown. Indeed this should not be done.\"\n\nYuan Shu did not hear this with pleasure.\n\nSaid he, \"We Yuans came from the Chen family, the same ancestry with King Shun. By the rule of interpreting the signs of fate, the day has come when earth (Chen) receives fire (Liu). Beside there is an oracle saying, 'One who replaces the Hans must wade through deep mire.' My name means 'the high road.' It fits exactly. Further than this, I possess the Imperial Hereditary Seal and must become lord of all, or I turn from Heaven's own way. Finally, I have made up my mind, so if anyone says too much, that person will simply suffer death.\"\n\nYuan Shu arrogated himself the insignia of royalty and assigned Second Glory the reign title. He set up officials with titles only given by an emperor, and rode in a chariot decorated with the dragon and phoenix, and offered sacrifices after the manner of an emperor in the north and south suburbs. Also he appointed the daughter of Feng Fang his Empress and his son Heir Apparent, and he pressed for the early wedding of Lu Bu's daughter with his son so that the Palace entourage might be complete.\n\nBut when Yuan Shu heard of the fate of his marriage ambassador, Han Yin, who was sent to the capital and was executed, Yuan Shu was very angry and began at once to plan for revenge. He made Zhang Xun his Grand Commander and gave Zhang Xun the command of more than two hundred thousand soldiers with the instruction to invade Xuzhou. The army consisted of seven divisions under seven commanders: Zhang Xun led the Center Army; Qiao Rui, the First Left Army; Lei Bo, the Second Left Army; Han Xian, the Third Left Army; Chen Ji, First Right Army; Chen Lan, Second Right Army; and Yang Feng, the Third Right Army. Each commander was instructed to make a certain town his objective.\n\nThe Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, Jin Shang, was ordered to superintend the commissariat, but he declined the office. And so Yuan Shu put Jin Shang to death. Ji Ling was in command of the reserves to help wherever he was required. Yuan Shu led thirty thousand troops, and he appointed three generals, Li Deng, Liang Gang, and Yue Jiu, to go up and down and coordinate the grand march.\n\nLu Bu found out from his scouts that his own Xuzhou City was the objective of Zhang Xun; the other towns to be first attacked being Xiaopei, Yidu, Langye, Jieshi, Xiapi, and Junshan. The invading armies were marching twenty miles a day, and plundering the countryside as they advanced.\n\nLu Bu summoned his advisers to a council to which came Chen Gong, Chen Deng, and Chen Gui.\n\nWhen all had assembled, Chen Gong said, \"This misfortune that has come to us is due to the two Chens, who fawned upon the central government in order to obtain ranks and appointments. Now remove the evil by putting these two to death and sending their heads to Yuan Shu. Then he will retire and leave us in peace.\"\n\nLu Bu acquiesced and had the two arrested.\n\nBut the son, Chen Deng, only laughed, saying, \"What is this anxiety about? These seven armies are no more to me than so many heaps of rotting straw. They are not worth thinking about.\"\n\n\"If you can show us how to overcome them, I will spare your life,\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"General, if you will listen to poor me, the region will be perfectly safe.\"\n\n\"Let us hear what you have to say.\"\n\n\"Yuan Shu's troops are numerous but they are only a flock of crows; they are not an army under a leader. There is no mutual confidence. I can keep them at bay with the ordinary guards of the place and could overcome them by some unsuspected stratagem. If I should fail, I have another plan by which I can not only protect the region but capture our enemy.\"\n\n\"Let us have it.\"\n\nChen Deng said, \"Han Xian and Yang Feng, two of the leaders of our enemies, are old servants of the Han Dynasty who fled from fear of Cao Cao and, being homeless, sought refuge with Yuan Shu. He despises them, and they are dissatisfied with his service. A little letter from the court will secure their help as our allies, and with Liu Bei to help us on the outside, we can certainly overcome Yuan Shu.\"\n\n\"You shall take the letters yourself,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nChen Deng agreed, and a memorial detailing his intentions was sent to the capital, letters to Yuzhou to Liu Bei, and finally Chen Deng was sent, with a small escort, to wait for Han Xian on the road to Xiapi.\n\nWhen Han Xian's army had halted and pitched camp, Chen Deng went to see Han Xian who said, \"What are you here for? You belong to Lu Bu.\"\n\n\"I am an official of the court of the great Hans. Why do you call me a Lu Bu's man? If you, General, hitherto a minister of state, now serve a traitor, you will nullify the grand services you rendered in protecting the Emperor in the flight from Changan. Beside, the suspicious Yuan Shu will assuredly do you some harm, and you will regret not having taken this opportunity to work against him.\"\n\nHan Xian sighed, saying, \"I would return to my allegiance if there should be any opportunity.\"\n\nThereupon Chen Deng gave him Lu Bu's letter asking for cooperation.\n\nHan Xian read it and said, \"Yes, I know. You may return to your master and say General Yang Feng and I will turn our weapons and smite Yuan Shu. Look out for a signal flare, and let your master come to our aid.\"\n\nAs soon as Chen Deng had got back and reported his success, Lu Bu divided his troops into five divisions, each of ten thousand, and sent them to five threatened towns to meet his enemies. Gao Shun led one army to Xiaopei against Qiao Rui; Chen Gong to Yidu against Chen Ji; Zhang Liao and Zang Ba to Langye against Lei Bo; Song Xian and Wei Xu to Jieshi against Chen Lan. Lu Bu himself led against the main body under Zhang Xun, leaving a small guard in Xuzhou City.\n\nLu Bu camped ten miles from the walls. When the enemy came up, Zhang Xun thought Lu Bu too strong to attack with the force he had, so he retired seven miles to await reinforcements.\n\nThat night, in the second watch, Han Xian and Yang Feng arrived, and soon the flare was lighted as arranged. Lu Bu's troops were admitted to the camp and caused great confusion. Then Lu Bu gave a full attack, and Zhang Xun was routed and fled. Lu Bu pursued till daylight, when he fell in with one of the other bodies led by Ji Ling. Both sides faced each other; but at the very beginning of the engagement Yang Feng and Han Xian also attacked, and Ji Ling was forced to fly.\n\nLu Bu went in pursuit but soon another force came out from the rear of some hills. These looked very imposing. As the ranks opened Lu Bu saw a leader's guard with flags bearing dragons and phoenixes and representations of the sun and moon, the stars in the four groups of the Great Bear Constellation, the five directions of the Earth, golden gourds, silver axes, yellow halberds, white yaks' tails, all imperial emblems. And beneath a yellow silken parasol sat Yuan Shu on horseback, clad in silver mail with a sword handle showing at each wrist.\n\nStanding out in front of the array, Yuan Shu railed at his opponent calling him traitor and bastard. Lu Bu said nothing but rode forward ready for battle, and Li Deng, one of Yuan Shu's leaders, advanced to take the challenge. They met, but at the third bout, Li Deng was wounded in the hand, whereupon his spear fell to the ground, and he fled. Lu Bu waved on the advance, and his men prevailed. The other side fled, leaving much spoil, clothing, mail, and horses.\n\nYuan Shu's defeated troops had not gone far when a strong army, led by Guan Yu, appeared barring his way.\n\n\"Traitor! Why have they not slain you?\" cried Guan Yu.\n\nWhereat Yuan Shu fled in great trepidation, and his army melted into fugitives in all directions. The new army fell upon them with great slaughter. Yuan Shu and the remnant of his army retreated into the below regions of River Huai.\n\nVictory being now secure, Lu Bu, in company with Guan Yu, Yang Feng, and Han Xian returned to Xuzhou, where there were banquets and feasting and rewards for the soldiers and generals of five divisions. These over, Guan Yu took his leave and returned to Yuzhou, while Han Xian was appointed Governor of Yidu, and Yang Feng Governor of Langye.\n\nThere had been a question of keeping these two in Xuzhou City, but Chen Gui opposed it, saying, \"Let them hold those places in Huashan Mountains, which will be all yours within a year.\"\n\nSo Han Xian and Yang Feng were sent to these two cities in the meantime to await orders.\n\n\"Why not retain them here?\" asked Chen Deng secretly of his father. \"They would be a basis for our conspiracy against Lu Bu.\"\n\n\"But if they helped him, on the other hand, we should lengthen the tiger's claws and teeth,\" said Chen Gui.\n\nSo Chen Deng could only approve of his father's precautions.\n\nYuan Shu returned home burning to avenge his defeat, so he sent to the South Land to ask a loan of troops from Sun Ce.\n\nBut Sun Ce said, \"On the strength of holding the State Seal, he secretly calls himself emperor and rebels against the Hans. I would rather punish such a renegade than help him.\"\n\nSo Sun Ce rejected. The letter refusing help added to Yuan Shu's anger.\n\n\"What next from this callow youth?\" cried Yuan Shu. \"I will smite him before I deal with the others.\"\n\nBut his adviser, Yang Dajiang, dissuaded him from this course.\n\nHaving refused help to his powerful rival, Sun Ce thought it wise to take measures for his own safety. So he stationed an army at Jiangkou. Soon after came a messenger from Cao Cao bearing Sun Ce's appointment as Governor of Kuaiji with orders to raise an army and reduce Yuan Shu.\n\nSun Ce was inclined to carry out these orders, but he called a council at which Zhang Zhao opposed this course.\n\nSaid he, \"Although recently defeated, Yuan Shu has large army and ample supplies. He is not to be attacked lightly. You had better write to Cao Cao persuading him to attack the South of River Huai and we will be auxiliaries. Between the two armies, Yuan Shu must certainly be defeated. If by the remotest chance we lose, we have Cao Cao to come to our rescue.\"\n\nThis plan was adopted, and a messenger was sent to lay it before Cao Cao. In the meantime, after the defeat at River Yu, Cao Cao had reached Xuchang where his first thought was to institute sacrifices to his beloved lost leader, Dian Wei. He conferred rank upon his son Dian Man and took him into his own palace to be cared for.\n\nPresently arrived Sun Ce's messenger with letters, and next came a report that Yuan Shu, being short of food, had made a raid on Chenliu. Cao Cao thought the moment opportune, so he issued orders for the south expedition, leaving Cao Ren to hold the capital. The army marched, horse and foot, one hundred seventy thousand, with commissariat wagons of food to the number of over a thousand. Messages were sent to summon Sun Ce, Liu Bei, and Lu Bu.\n\nLiu Bei was the first to welcome the grand army at his Yuzhou borders, and he was called in to the Prime Minister's tent. After the usual salutations, two human heads were produced by Liu Bei.\n\n\"Whose are these?\" asked Cao Cao in surprise.\n\n\"The heads of Han Xian and Yang Feng.\"\n\n\"Why did this happen?\"\n\n\"They were sent to control Yidu and Langye, but they allowed their soldiers to plunder the people. Bitter complaints arose, so I invited them to a banquet and my brothers dispatched them when I gave the signal by dropping a cup. Their armies gave in at once. Now I have to apologize for my fault.\"\n\n\"You have removed an evil, which is a grand service: Why talk of a fault?\"\n\nAnd Cao Cao praised Liu Bei's action.\n\nWhen the joint army reached Lu Bu's Xuzhou borders, he came to meet it. Cao Cao spoke graciously to him and conferred upon him the title of General of the Left Army, promising him an official seal as soon as he returned to the capital. Lu Bu was very pleased.\n\nThen the three armies were made into one force, Cao Cao being in the center, Lu Bu to the left wing, and Liu Bei to the right wing. Xiahou Dun and Yu Jin were Leaders of the Van.\n\nOn Yuan Shu's side, General Qiao Rui with fifty thousand troops was appointed Van Leader. The armies met on the confines of the city of Shouchun. Qiao Rui and Xiahou Dun rode out and opened battle. But Qiao Rui fell in the third bout, and his troops fled into the city.\n\nThen came news that Sun Ce's fleet was near and would attack on the west. The other three land corps took each one face \u2014 Cao Cao on the north, Lu Bu on the east, and Liu Bei on the south. The city of Shouchun was in a parlous state.\n\nAt this juncture Yuan Shu summoned his officers.\n\nYang Dajiang explained the case, \"Shouchun has suffered from drought for several years, and the people are on the verge of famine. Sending an army would add to the distress and anger the people, and victory would be uncertain. I advise not to send any more soldiers there, but to hold on till the besiegers are conquered by lack of supplies. Meanwhile, Your Highness, with regiment of guards, will move over to the other side of River Huai, which is quite ready, and we shall also escape the enemy's ferocity.\"\n\nSo due arrangements was made. One hundred thousand troops under Li Deng, Yue Jiu, Liang Gang, and Chen Ji were appointed to guard Shouchun. Then a general move was made to the other side of the River Huai. Not only the remained army went over, but all the accumulated wealth of the Yuan family, gold and silver, jewels and precious stones, were moved also.\n\nCao Cao's army of one hundred seventy thousand needed daily a considerable quantity of food; and as the country around had been famine-stricken for several years, nothing could be got there. So he tried to hasten the military operations and capture the city. On the other hand, the defenders knew the value of delay and simply held on. After a month's vigorous siege, the fall of Shouchun seemed as far off as it was at first, and supplies were very short. Letters were sent to Sun Ce who sent a hundred thousand carts of grain. When the usual distribution became impossible, the Chief of the Commissariat, Ren Jun, and the Controller of the Granaries, Wang Hou, presented a statement asking what was to be done.\n\n\"Serve out with a smaller measure,\" said Cao Cao. \"That will save us for a time.\"\n\n\"But if the soldiers murmur, what then?\"\n\n\"I shall have another device.\"\n\nAs ordered the controller issued grain in a short measure. Cao Cao sent secretly to find out how the army took this; and when he found that complaints were general and the soldiers were saying that the Prime Minister was fooling them, he sent a secret summons to the controller.\n\nWhen Wang Hou came, Cao Cao said, \"I want to ask you to lend me something to pacify the soldiers with. You must not refuse.\"\n\n\"What does the Prime Minister wish?\"\n\n\"I want the loan of your head to expose to the soldiery.\"\n\n\"But I have done nothing wrong!\" exclaimed the unhappy man.\n\n\"I know that, but if I do not put you to death, there will be a mutiny. After you are gone, your wife and children shall be my care. So you need not grieve on their account.\"\n\nWang Hou was about to remonstrate further, but Cao Cao gave a signal. The executioners hustled Wang Hou out, and he was beheaded. His head was exposed on a tall pole, and a notice said:\n\n\"In accordance with military law, Wang Hou had been put to death for peculation and the use of a short measure in issuing grain.\"\n\nThis appeased the discontent. Next followed a general order threatening death to all commanders if the city was not taken within three days. Cao Cao in person went up to the very walls to superintend the work of filling up the moat. The defenders kept up constant showers of stones and arrows. Two inferior officers, who left their stations in fear, were slain by Cao Cao himself. Thereafter he went on foot to work with his soldiers and to see that work went on continuously and no one dared be a laggard. Thus encouraged, the army became invincible, and no defense could withstand their onslaught. In a very short time the walls were scaled, the gates battered in, and the besiegers were in possession. The officers of the garrison \u2014 Li Deng, Yue Jiu, Liang Gang, and Chen Ji \u2014 were captured alive and were executed in the market place. All the paraphernalia of imperial state were burned, and the whole city wrecked.\n\nWhen the question of crossing the river in pursuit of Yuan Shu came up, Xun Yu opposed it, saying, \"The country has suffered from short crops for years, and we should be unable to get grain. An advance would weary the army, harm the people, and possibly end in disaster. I advise a return to the capital to wait there till the spring wheat shall have been harvested and we have plenty of food.\"\n\nCao Cao hesitated.\n\nBefore he had made up his mind, there came an urgent message: \"Zhang Xiu, with the support of Liu Biao, was ravaging the country all round. There were rebellions in Nanyang and Jiangling, and Cao Hong could not cope with it. Cao Hong had been worsted already in several engagements and was in sore straits.\"\n\nCao Cao at once wrote to Sun Ce to command the Great River so as to prevent any move on the part of Liu Biao, while he prepared his army to go to deal with Zhang Xiu. Before marching Cao Cao directed Liu Bei to station at Xiaopei, as he and Lu Bu being as brothers might help each other.\n\nWhen Lu Bu had left for Xuzhou, Cao Cao said secretly to Liu Bei, \"I am leaving you at Xiaopei to dig a 'pitfall for the tiger.' You will only take advice from Chen Deng and Chen Gui, and there can be no mishap. You will find so-and-so your ally when needed.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao marched to Xuchang where he heard that Duan Wei had slain Li Jue and Wu Xi killed Guo Si, and they presented the heads of these two. Beside the whole clan of Li Jue, more than two hundred, had been arrested and brought to the capital. They were all put to death at various gates and their heads exposed as warning. The people cheered the end of those two rebels.\n\nIn the Emperor's palace a large number of officials were assembled at a peace banquet. The Emperor rewarded the two successful leaders, Duan Wei with the title of General Who Destroys Rebellion and Wu Xi General Who Wrecks Villainy, and sent to guard Changan. They came to audience to express their gratitude and marched away.\n\nThen Cao Cao sent in a memorial that Zhang Xiu was in rebellion, and an army must be sent against him. The Emperor in person arranged the chariot and escorted Cao Cao out of the city when he went to take command of the expedition. It was the summer, the fourth month of the third year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 198). Xun Yu was in chief military command in Xuchang.\n\nThe army marched away. In the course of the march they passed through a wheat region, and the grain was ready for harvesting but the peasants had fled for fear, and the corn was uncut. Cao Cao sent proclamations to all villages and towns:\n\n\"I am sent on the expedition by command of the Emperor to capture a rebel and save the people. I cannot avoid moving in the harvest season; but if anyone trample down the corn, he shall be put to death. Military law is strict without exception, and the people need fear no damage.\"\n\nThe people were very pleased and lined the road, wishing success to the expedition. When the soldiers passed wheat fields, they dismounted and pushed aside the stalks so that none were trampled down.\n\nOne day, when Cao Cao was riding through the fields, a dove suddenly got up, startling the horse so that it swerved into the standing grain, and a large patch was trampled down. Cao Cao at once called the Provost Marshal and bade him decree the sentence for the crime of trampling down corn.\n\n\"How can I deal with your crime?\" asked the Provost Marshal.\n\n\"I made the rule, and I have broken it. Can I otherwise satisfy public opinion?\"\n\nCao Cao laid hold of the sword by his side and made to take his own life. All hastened to prevent him.\n\nGuo Jia said, \"In ancient days, the days of the Spring and Autumn history, the laws were not applied to those of the most important. You are the supreme leader of a mighty army and must not wound yourself.\"\n\nCao Cao pondered for a long time. At last he said, \"Since there exists the reason just quoted, I may perhaps escape the death penalty.\"\n\nThen with his sword he cut off his hair and threw it on the ground, saying, \"I cut off the hair as touching the head.\"\n\nThen he sent messengers to exhibit the hair throughout the whole army, saying, \"The Prime Minister, having trodden down some corn, ought to have lost his head by the terms of the order; now here is his hair cut off as an attack on the head.\"\n\nThis deed was a stimulus to discipline all through the army so that not a person dared be disobedient. A poet wrote:\n\n\u2003A myriad soldiers march along and all are brave and bold,\n\n\u2003And their myriad inclinations by one leader are controlled.\n\n\u2003That crafty leader shore his locks when forfeit was his head,\n\n\u2003O full of guile were thou, Cao Cao, as everyone has said.\n\nOn the first news of the approach of Cao Cao with an army, Zhang Xiu wrote to Liu Biao for help. Then Zhang Xiu led out his troops, with his two generals, Lei Xu and Zhang Xian.\n\nWhen the array was complete Zhang Xiu took his station in front and pointing at Cao Cao railed at him, saying, \"O false and pretended supporter of benevolence and justice! O shameless one! You are just a beast of the forest, and absolutely devoid of humanity.\"\n\nThis annoyed Cao Cao who sent out Xu Chu against the insulter. Zhang Xian came to meet him and fell in the third bout. Thence Zhang Xiu's troops fled and were pursued to the very walls of Nanyang, only managing to get within just before the pursuit came up. The city was then closely besieged.\n\nSeeing the moat was so wide and deep that approach to the wall would be difficult, Cao Cao's commanders began to fill up the ditch with earth. Then with sand bags, brushwood, and bundles of grass they built a great mound near the wall and on this erected steps so that they could look over into the city.\n\nCao Cao rode round the city closely inspecting the defenses. Three days later he issued an order to make a mound of earth and brushwood at the northwest corner, as he would mount the walls at that point. He was observed from within the city by Jia Xu.\n\nJia Xu went to Zhang Xiu and said, \"I know what Cao Cao intends, and I can defeat him by a countermove.\"\n\n\u2003Even amongst the very foremost\n\n\u2003There is one who leads the way;\n\n\u2003Someone sees through your devices,\n\n\u2003Be as crafty as ye may." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Giving Counsels, Jia Xu Directs A Great Victory; Braving Battlefield, Xiahou Dun Loses An Eye.\n\nJia Xu, as he had guessed the enemy's intention, had also devised a countermove. So he went to his chief and said, \"I saw Cao Cao very carefully reconnoitering round about the city. He certainly noticed that the southeast corner of the wall had been lately restored with mud bricks of a different kind, and that the fencing barrier is badly out of repair. He will try to effect an entrance there. Wherefore he is making a feint attack at the opposite point. He is piling up straw and making ostentatious preparations whereby to cajole us into withdrawing from the real point of attack to defend the northwest. His troops will scale the walls in the darkness and try to enter at the southeast.\"\n\n\"Supposing your surmise correct, what do you advise?\" asked Zhang Xiu.\n\n\"The countermove is plain. You issue an order for our best and bravest soldiers to fill their bellies, to take only the lightest outfit and conceal themselves in the houses near the southeast corner. Then disguise the townspeople as soldiers and send them to pretend to defend the northwest. Tonight we will let the enemy climb up the walls and enter the city and, once they are fairly within, give the signal and the concealed soldiers will rush out upon them. We may even capture Cao Cao himself.\"\n\nThe stratagem was decided upon.\n\nSoon the scouts told Cao Cao: \"The defenders of the city have moved to the northwest where noisy preparations for defense are going on. The opposite corner is left undefended.\"\n\n\"They have fallen into my trap!\" said Cao Cao gleefully.\n\nHe ordered his troops to prepare shovels and hooks and all the gear needed for scaling walls, and all day they kept up the attack on the northwest angle.\n\nBut at the second watch they dispatched the veterans to the opposite corner, where they climbed the wall, broke up the fencing barrier, and got into the city apparently without disturbing any of the guards. There was no sign of life anywhere as they entered. But just as they were leaving the wall, suddenly a bomb exploded and they found themselves in an ambush. They turned to retire, but Zhang Xiu immediately fell on the rear and began a slaughter. Cao Cao's troops were totally defeated and fled out of the gate into the country. Zhang Xiu kept up the pursuit till daybreak, when he retired into the city again.\n\nCao Cao then rallied his army and mustered his soldiers. He had lost fifty thousand and much baggage, while two of his generals, Lu Qian and Yu Jin were wounded.\n\nCao Cao being thus worsted, Jia Xu advised Zhang Xiu to write off to Liu Biao to cut off Cao Cao's retreat so that he might be utterly destroyed.\n\nLiu Biao was preparing an army for this purpose, when a scout came to say that Sun Ce had encamped in the river at Hukou.\n\nKuai Liang said, \"This move of Sun Ce in the river is part of Cao Cao's strategy, and there will be never-ending regret if Cao Cao is allowed to escape. An immediate expedition is necessary.\"\n\nWherefore Liu Biao moved out with his army to Anzhong to block Cao Cao, leaving Huang Zu to hold Jingzhou's points of vantage. Zhang Xiu, having been informed of the movement of Liu Biao, went with Jia Xu to smite Cao Cao on the rear.\n\nIn the meantime Cao Cao's army, marching very leisurely, had arrived at Xiangyang.\n\nWalking one day beside River Yu, he suddenly uttered a great cry, and when his officers asked the reason thereof, he replied, \"I remembered that here, only a year ago, I lost my great general: Dian Wei. Is that not a reason to grieve?\"\n\nThereupon Cao Cao gave orders to halt, while he should make a great sacrifice and mourn for his lost leader. At the ceremony he himself burned incense and wailed and prostrated himself. The army was much affected by his devotion. After the sacrifices to the lost hero, he sacrificed to the names of his nephew Cao Amin and his eldest son Cao Ang, both of whom had died at the same time. He also sacrificed to his lost soldiers and even to his Dawan steed which had been killed by an arrow.\n\nNext day Xun Yu wrote to tell Cao Cao that Liu Biao had gone to help Zhang Xiu and was camped at Anzhong, thereby cutting his road of retreat.\n\nCao Cao replied to the letter, saying, \"I have been marching only a short distance each day and of course knew of the pursuit. But my plans are laid and, as I am near Anzhong, my enemy will be broken. You need not have any fears.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao hastened his march till he came near where Liu Biao had taken position. Zhang Xiu still shortened the distance. Cao Cao ordered his men during the night to open a secret way through a pass, where he laid an ambush.\n\nWith the first light of dawn Liu Biao and Zhang Xiu met. As Cao Cao's force looked small, they thought he had retired so they boldly advanced into the pass to smite him. Then the ambush was opened, and both the attackers' forces were cut up. The fighting ended; Cao Cao's soldiers went outside the pass and encamped.\n\nThe two leaders on the other side restored order among their beaten troops and then held a conference.\n\n\"How could we have foreseen such a wicked ruse?\" said Liu Biao.\n\n\"Let us try again,\" said Zhang Xiu.\n\nWherefore they joined forces at Anzhong.\n\nBut Xun Yu discovered through his spies that Yuan Shao was preparing an attack on Capital Xuchang, so he at once wrote to Cao Cao who, much disturbed by this news, set out homeward right away. When Zhang Xiu heard this through his scouts, he wished to follow the retreating army.\n\nJia Xu opposed it and said, \"It will lead to a defeat.\"\n\nHowever, Liu Biao said, \"It is wrong to lose such a chance.\"\n\nAnd so finally pursuit was decided upon. They had not marched more than four miles before they came upon Cao Cao's rearguard, who fought with great vigor and bravery so that the pursuers were beaten off and went home discomfited.\n\nZhang Xiu said to Jia Xu, \"This defeat comes from my not following your advice.\"\n\n\"Now set your army in order and pursue,\" said Jia Xu.\n\n\"But we have just suffered defeat!\" cried both leaders. \"Do you now counsel pursuit?\"\n\n\"Yes, and the result will be a great victory if you go now. I will venture my head on that,\" said Jia Xu.\n\nZhang Xiu had confidence, but Liu Biao was afraid and would not accompany him. So one army only started in pursuit.\n\nHowever, this was enough. Cao Cao's rearguard was thoroughly routed and abandoned their wagons and their baggage in their hasty flight. Zhang Xiu pursued, but suddenly a troop came out from the shelter of some hills and checked him. Fearful to try further, he hastened back to Anzhong.\n\nThe other general, Liu Biao, asked the adviser to explain his apparent inconsistency, saying, \"When our veteran and brave soldiers were going to pursue those who retreated, you said our men would lose the day; and when defeated men pursued the victors, you foretold victory. You were right in both cases, but we wish you would enlighten us.\"\n\n\"It is easy to explain. You, Generals, although skilled leaders, are not a match for our enemy. Though Cao Cao had lost a battle, he had able generals to keep the rear and guard against pursuit. Our soldiers are good, but not a match for them. That is how I knew. For as much as Cao Cao's hurried retreat was due to trouble in the capital, and he had beaten off our attack, I knew he would retire at his utmost speed and not take his usual precautions. I ventured to take advantage of his laxity.\"\n\nLiu Biao and Zhang Xiu could not but affirm his complete understanding of the conditions. On the advice of Jia Xu then Liu Biao returned to Jingzhou, while Zhang Xiu took up his position at Xiangyang so that each strengthened the other as the lips protect the teeth from cold.\n\nWhen Cao Cao, during his retreat, heard that his army was being pursued, he hastily turned back to support the rearguard. Then he saw the pursuing army draw off.\n\nThe soldiers of the beaten rearguard said, \"Had it not been for the troops that came out of the hills, we should all have been lost.\"\n\n\"What troops?\" asked Cao Cao in surprise.\n\nThe leader of the troops then advanced, slung his spear and, dismounting, made a low obeisance. He was Li Tong, Imperial Commander, from Jiangxia.\n\nCao Cao asked him why he had come.\n\nLi Tong replied, \"I was in command at Runan when I heard of the struggle going on, so I came to lend you any help I could.\"\n\nTo show his gratitude, Cao Cao conferred upon Li Tong the title Lord Who Renders High Services, and confirmed him in his command as the defense of Runan against Liu Biao and Zhang Xiu. Then Li Tong expressed his thanks and took his leave.\n\nOn his return to the capital, Cao Cao presented a memorial on the good services rendered by Sun Ce, and the Emperor made him Lord of Wu with the title General Who Destroys Rebels. The messenger bearing the decree bore also the order to repress Liu Biao.\n\nCao Cao went to his palace and there received the ceremonial calls of congratulation. These finished, Xun Yu asked, saying, \"You, Sir, marched very leisurely to Anzhong: How came it that you felt certain of victory?\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"My soldiers, who retire and find their retreat cut off, fight vigorously and desperately. I retired slowly to entice the enemy into following whereby I could do as I wished with them. Basing my movements on these considerations I felt secure.\"\n\nXun Yu bowed his head in admiration.\n\nWhen Guo Jia entered, Cao Cao said, \"Why so late, Sir?\"\n\nThe visitor drew a letter from his sleeve, saying to his master, \"Yuan Shao sends this expressing he desires to send an army to attack Gongsun Zan and wishes you to lend provisions and troops.\"\n\n\"I heard Yuan Shao was going to attack Xuchang. I suppose my return has made him change his intention,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he opened the letter and read it. It was couched in very arrogant terms.\n\n\"Yuan Shao is so exceedingly rude that I will attack him,\" said Cao Cao. \"Only I think I am not quite strong enough. What should be done?\"\n\nGuo Jia said, \"My lord, you know well who lost, and why, in the conflict between Liu Bang, the Supreme Ancestor, and Xiang Yu, his rival. The former won only by superior wisdom. Xiang Yu was the stronger, but in the end he was overcome. Your rival has ten weak points whereas you have ten strong ones, and, though his army is large, it is not terrible.\"\n\nThen Guo Jia continued, \"Yuan Shao is overmuch devoted to ceremony and deportment; while you are sympathetic and natural; this is an excellence in conduct. He is antagonistic and drives; you are conciliatory and lead; so you have the advantage of popular approval. For many years the government has been lax, and he makes it more so; you strive vigorously after efficiency; this is the excellence of able administration. He is outwardly liberal but grudging at heart, and too given to nepotism; you appear exacting, but you understand and use people after their ability; this is the advantage of correct appreciation. He is a visionary but lacking in decision; you are a man of prompt decision and direct action; this is an advantage in policy. He loves to gather about him people of renown; you treat people as you find them regardless of their reputation; this is where you excel in moral virtue. He is compassionate to those at hand, but careless about those out of sight; your care is all-embracing; this is where you excel in humanity. He lends a ready ear to calumny and is misled; you may be flooded with evil counsel, but you preserve independence; this is where you excel in perspicacity. His sense of right and wrong is confused; your appreciation is accurate and clear; this is where you excel in administrative capacity. He loves the make-believe force, but is ignorant of military essentials; you would overcome with far inferior numbers as you possess military genius; this is where you excel in war. With your ten superiorities, you will have no difficulty in overcoming Yuan Shao.\"\n\n\"How can I be worth as much as you say?\" said Cao Cao, smiling.\n\n\"What Guo Jia has said about the ten points in your favor agrees exactly with what I think,\" said Xun Yu. \"Yuan Shao's army is not formidable in spite of its size.\"\n\n\"The real and dangerous enemy is Lu Bu,\" said Guo Jia. \"When Yuan Shao has gone north to destroy Gongsun Zan, we ought to sweep away Lu Bu and so clear away our danger from that side; for if this is not done, our attack on Yuan Shao will be the signal for an attempt on the capital. That would be most serious.\"\n\nCao Cao saw things in the same light as his advisers and began to discuss plans for an attack on Lu Bu. Xun Yu was of opinion that they should first secure the fidelity and aid of Liu Bei. So letters were written, and they waited his assurance before moving a soldier. Then, in order to reassure Yuan Shao, his emissary was treated with great kindness, and a memorial presented to the Emperor asking extra honors for him. Yuan Shao was made Imperial Protector of the four northern regions \u2014 Jizhou, Qingzhou, Youzhou, and Bingzhou. With all this a private letter was written by Cao Cao urging upon him to attack Gongsun Zan and promising assistance. So Yuan Shao's army started.\n\nIn the meantime the two Chen Deng and Chen Gui were playing their game. At every feast and gathering in Xuzhou, they uttered the most fulsome praises of Lu Bu. Chen Gong was greatly displeased and took an opportunity to talk about them to his master.\n\n\"They flatter you to your face, but what is in their hearts? You ought to be most carefully on your guard.\"\n\n\"Hold your tongue!\" was the angry reply. \"You are simply slandering them without the slightest excuse. You want to harm good people.\"\n\n\"No ears for loyal words,\" said Chen Gong, as he went away sad at heart, \"and we shall suffer.\"\n\nHe thought seriously of abandoning Lu Bu, but that would be too painful a wrench. Beside he feared people would laugh at him.\n\nSo the days passed sorrowfully for him. One day, with a few horsemen, he rode out to the country near Xiaopei to hunt. On the high road he saw a messenger galloping along in hot haste and began to wonder what it might mean. He left the hunt, rode across country, and intercepted the rider.\n\n\"Where are you from? Who sent you?\" asked Chen Gong.\n\nThe messenger made no reply for he knew to what party his captors belonged. But they searched him and found a letter, the secret reply to Cao Cao's letter from Liu Bei. The messenger and the letter were both taken straight to Lu Bu.\n\nLu Bu questioned the man, who said, \"The Prime Minister sent me to bear a letter to Imperial Protector Liu Bei. I was now taking back the reply. I know nothing more, and I am ignorant of the contents of the letters.\"\n\nSo Lu Bu tore it open and read:\n\n\"I have received your commands concerning the destruction of Lu Bu, and dare I for a moment venture to disregard them? But my force is weak and I must act with extreme circumspection. If you move your main body, then I will hasten forward, and in the meantime my army shall be got ready and weapons prepared. I await your command.\"\n\nLu Bu was really alarmed.\n\n\"The wretches!\" cried he. \"To dare to act thus!\"\n\nThe unhappy messenger was put to death and countermoves planned. Chen Gong and Zang Ba went to enlist the help of the Taishan Mountains bandits \u2014 Sun Guan, Wu Dun, Yin Li, and Chang Xi \u2014 so that they would take Yanzhou in the East of Huashan Mountains. Gao Shun and Zhang Liao went to attack Liu Bei in Xiaopei. Song Xian and Wei Xu went west to attack Runan and Yingchuan. And Lu Bu took command of a large body of troops ready to afford help wherever needed.\n\nThe departure of the army under Gao Shun against Xiaopei was reported to Liu Bei, who assembled his officers at a council.\n\nSun Qian advised sending a message to the capital to inform Cao Cao of their danger. In response to the chief's call, Jian Yong, a fellow townsman of Liu Bei, offered to take the message. Up to that moment Jian Yong had served as a secretary. So a letter was written, and Jian Yong set out at once on his journey.\n\nThen preparations were made for defense: Liu Bei commanding at the south gate; Sun Qian at the north gate; Guan Yu at the west gate; and Zhang Fei at the east gate. Mi Zhu and his brother Mi Fang commanded the family guard in the center.\n\nThe two Mis were put in command of the house guard because they were Liu Bei's brothers-in-law; Liu Bei had taken a sister of Mi Zhu as a second wife. Hence they were suitable men to guard the family.\n\nIn due course Gao Shun came to the south gate. Liu Bei ascended the tower and said, \"I have no quarrel with your master, why do you come here with an army?\"\n\n\"You have plotted with Cao Cao to injure my master as we know now: Why should I not bind you?\"\n\nSo saying Gao Shun gave the signal to attack. But Liu Bei did not go out to repulse Gao Shun; he only kept the gate fast closed.\n\nSoon after, Zhang Liao led an attack on the west gate, then kept by Guan Yu, who addressed Zhang Liao from the wall.\n\n\"You are too good a man to waste yourself on rebels,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nZhang Liao hung his head and made no reply. Guan Yu knew that Zhang Liao had a sound heart and high principles and said no more, as he was unwilling to wound Zhang Liao. Nor did he go out to attack.\n\nZhang Liao then drew off and proceeded to the east gate, and Zhang Fei went out to give battle. Soon it was told Guan Yu, who came over quickly. He saw Zhang Fei going out, but Zhang Liao was already withdrawing. Zhang Fei wished to pursue, but his brother held him back.\n\n\"He is afraid and so has gone away. It would be best to pursue,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"No,\" said Guan Yu. \"As a warrior he is not inferior to either of us, but I have spoken a few straight words, and he has sunk deep. He is repentant and that is why he will not meet us.\"\n\nSo Zhang Fei understood, and the gates were shut and orders given for careful defense. When Jian Yong, Liu Bei's messenger, reached the capital, he saw Cao Cao and told him what had happened. The advisers were called to discuss a plan.\n\nCao Cao said, \"I wish to attack Lu Bu. I fear not Yuan Shao, but Liu Biao and Zhang Xiu may attack me in the rear.\"\n\nXun You, the nephew of Xun Yu, replied, \"Both these latter have been too recently defeated to do anything so rash. But Lu Bu is a bold fighting man, and if he joined forces with Yuan Shu and they set themselves to conquer River Huai and River Si, the problem would he difficult.\"\n\nThen spoke Guo Jia, \"Let us take advantage of the moment before they have fully made up their mind. Smite before they are fully prepared.\"\n\nAnd Cao Cao did so. An army of fifty thousand were sent in advance with four commanders \u2014 Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Lu Qian, and Li Dian. Cao Cao commanded the Center Army, which marched by divisions, and Jian Yong brought up the rear.\n\nSoon the scouts informed Gao Shun. He sent flying messengers to Lu Bu, who detached two hundred horse with Hou Cheng, Cao Xing, and He Meng to assist him. Gao Shun posted this reinforcement and his army about ten miles from Xiaopei to meet Cao Cao's army. Lu Bu and the main army also followed close.\n\nWhen Liu Bei saw the enemy retiring from the city, he knew Cao Cao's army was close at hand. So, making arrangements for guarding the city within, he and his two brothers marched their troops out of the city and made a camp, that they might be ready to assist.\n\nNow the division of Cao Cao's army under Xiahou Dun, having marched out in advance, first came into touch with Gao Shun. Xiahou Dun at once rode out with spear set and offered a challenge. It was accepted and the two leaders fought half a hundred bouts. Then Gao Shun began to weaken and had to turn back. He rode round to the rear of his array. Xiahou Dun was not the man to quail, so he followed right into the enemy's country. Then Cao Xing, one of Lu Bu's generals, secretly strung his bow, fitted an arrow and, when Xiahou Dun had come quite near, shot at him. The arrow hit Xiahou Dun full in the left eye. He shrieked, and putting up his head, pulled out the arrow and with it the eye.\n\n\"Essence of my father, blood of my mother, I cannot throw this away!\" cried Xiahou Dun, and he put the eye into his mouth and swallowed it.\n\nThen resuming his firm grip of his spear, Xiahou Dun went after this new enemy. There was no escape for Cao Xing. He was overtaken and fell with a fatal spear wound full in the face. Both sides were stricken dumb with amazement.\n\nHaving thus slain the man who had wounded him, Xiahou Dun rode back toward his own side. Gao Shun went in pursuit and, waving on his army, attacked so vigorously that he won the day. Xiahou Yuan defended for his elder brother as they fled. Lu Qian and Li Dian led various divisions back to Jibei and made a camp.\n\nGao Shun, having scored this victory, returned to attack Liu Bei; and as Lu Bu opportunely arrived with Zhang Liao, these three arranged their forces so that each attacked one of the brothers.\n\n\u2003Dauntless was Xiahou Dun, that warrior bold,\n\n\u2003His courage had been proved of old;\n\n\u2003But smitten sore one hapless day,\n\n\u2003He might not in the battle stay." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Cao Cao Makes Flood In Xiapi; Lu Bu Perishes At The White Gate Tower.\n\nAs was stated before, Gao Shun and Zhang Liao together went to smite Guan Yu, while Lu Bu attacked Zhang Fei. Both brothers went out to give battle, while Liu Bei force was held in reserve. But then Lu Bu suddenly attacked both Guan Yu and Zhang Fei from the rear, and the brothers were forced to flee. Liu Bei with a few score of horsemen rushed back to Xiaopei. As he approached the gate with Lu Bu pressing him close, he shouted to the soldiers on the wall to lower the drawbridge. Lu Bu was so close behind that the archers on the wall feared to shoot lest they should wound their lord, and so Lu Bu got into the gate. The gate guards could not force him back so they scattered in all directions. Lu Bu led his force into the city.\n\nLiu Bei saw the position was too desperate for him to reach his residence, and he must abandon all his family. So he hastened through the city and left by the west gate out at which he and his scanty following fled for very life.\n\nWhen Lu Bu reached the residence, he was met by Mi Zhu who said, \"The hero does not destroy a person's family. Your rival for the empire is Cao Cao, and my master, always mindful of the good turn you did him at the Archery Feast, would not be ungrateful. But he could not help going to Cao Cao, and I think you will pity him.\"\n\nLu Bu replied, \"We two are old friends. How could I bear to harm his wives and children?\"\n\nWhereupon he sent the family to Xuzhou with Mi Zhu to take care of them. Next Lu Bu led his army into Huashan Mountains to Yanzhou, leaving Gao Shun and Zhang Liao to guard Xiaopei.\n\nDuring these troubles Sun Qian had also fled out of the city. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, each with a handful of soldiers, had got away to the hills. As Liu Bei with his few horsemen was making the best of their way from the scene of his defeat, he heard someone coming up behind him. When he got closer the person proved to be Sun Qian.\n\n\"Alas! I know not the fate of my brothers, whether they be alive or dead, and my wife and children are lost to me! What can I do?\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSun Qian replied, \"I see nothing better than getting away to Cao Cao, whence we may be able to plan our future moves.\"\n\nLiu Bei had no better plan to propose, and the two men directed their way to Xuchang, choosing by-roads rather than highways. When their small supplies ran out, they entered a village to beg. But when the people of any place heard that Liu Bei of Yuzhou was the man who needed help, they vied with each other in offering all that was required.\n\nOne day they sought shelter at a house whence a youth came out and made a low obeisance. They asked his name and he gave it as Liu An, of a well known family of hunters. Hearing who the visitor was, the hunter wished to lay before him a dish of game, but though he sought for a long time, nothing could be found for the table. So Liu An came home, killed his wife and prepared a portion for his guest.\n\nWhile eating Liu Bei asked, \"What flesh is it?\"\n\nLiu An told him: \"Wolf.\"\n\nLiu Bei knew no better and ate his fill. Next day at daylight, just as Liu Bei was leaving, he went to the stables in the rear to get his horse and passing through the kitchen; he saw the dead body of a woman lying on the table. The flesh of one arm had been cut away. Quite startled he asked what this meant, and then he knew what he had eaten the night before. He was deeply sorry at this proof of his host's regard and the tears rained down as he mounted his steed at the gate.\n\n\"I wish I could go with you,\" said Liu An, \"but as my mother still lives, I cannot go so far from home.\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him and went his way. The party took the road by Liangcheng, and as they were going out, they saw not far off a thick cloud of dust. When the troop came nearer, they found the troops were of Cao Cao's army, and with them they traveled to the main camp where they found Cao Cao himself. Cao Cao shed tears at the sad story of Liu Bei's distress, the loss of the city, his brothers and wives and children. When Liu Bei told him of the hunter who had sacrificed his wife to feed them, Cao Cao sent the hunter a present of a hundred ounces of silver as a reward.\n\nThe march then was continued to Jibei, where Xiahou Yuan welcomed them. They heard that his brother Xiahou Dun was still ill from the wound he had received in the eye. Cao Cao went to the sick man's bedside to see him and had him removed to Xuchang for skilled treatment.\n\nPresently scouts, sent out particularly for tidings of Lu Bu, returned, saying, \"Lu Bu has allied himself with the bandits in the east, and they are attacking Yanzhou.\"\n\nAt this Cao Cao dispatched Cao Ren with three thousand soldiers to take Xiaopei, while he, in conjunction with Liu Bei, moved against Lu Bu.\n\nThey went east. As they reached the Mangdang Hills near Xiao Pass, they met the a band of thirty thousand Taishan Mountains brigands barring their road. The chieftains of the bandits were Sun Guan, Wu Dun, Yin Li, and Chang Xi who rode out with their spears set. However, Xu Chu plunged into the battle and easily beat them back and chased them right up to the pass.\n\nThe scouts told Lu Bu, who was then in Xuzhou, whither he had gone to start an expedition to save Xiaopei. He left the protection of Xuzhou to Chen Gui and set out with Chen Deng.\n\nAs Chen Deng was starting, Chen Gui said to him, \"Remember the words of Cao Cao, that the business of the east is in our hands. Now is our moment, for Lu Bu is about to suffer defeat.\"\n\n\"Father, I can look after the outside. But when Lu Bu returns beaten, you must arrange with Mi Zhu to keep him out of the city. I shall find a means of escape,\" said Chen Deng.\n\n\"His family is here, and he has many friends. How about them?\"\n\n\"I also have a scheme to settle them.\"\n\nThen Chen Deng went to see Lu Bu, to whom he said, \"Xuzhou is surrounded, and this city will be fiercely attacked. We ought to provide for possible retreat, and I advise storing grain and money in Xiapi. We could retreat there if the day went adversely. Why not see about this in good time?\"\n\n\"Your words are indeed wise. I will also send my wives and little ones thither,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nThe family left under escort of Wei Xu and Song Xian, and with them was sent much grain and treasures and coins.\n\nAnd then the soldiers marched to the relief of the pass. About half way there Chen Deng said, \"Let me go first to reconnoiter so that you, my lord, may advance with confidence.\"\n\nThus Chen Deng parted company with his chief and preceded him to the pass where he was received by Chen Gong.\n\nChen Deng said, \"The General greatly wonders why you do not advance. He is going to inquire into it.\"\n\n\"The enemy is in great force, and we cannot be too careful,\" said Chen Gong. \"We are holding the pass, and you should persuade our master to take steps to guard Xiaopei.\"\n\nChen Deng said, \"Your words are true.\"\n\nThat evening he went up to the heights from which he could see Cao Cao's army, which was quite close to the pass. Then he wrote three notes, tied them to arrows, and shot them into Cao Cao's camp.\n\nNext day he left and hastened back to Lu Bu and said, \"Those bandits are about to give up the pass to the enemy, but I have left Chen Gong to hold it. You had better make an attack tonight and hold him.\"\n\n\"Had it not been for you, the pass would have been lost,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nThen he sent Chen Deng back to arrange a fire signal with Chen Gong for simultaneous action.\n\nSo Chen Deng returned to Chen Gong to whom he said, \"Cao Cao's troops have found a secret way through the pass, and I fear Xuzhou is already lost. You ought to go back at once.\"\n\nAt this the pass was abandoned, and Chen Gong began to retreat. Then Chen Deng gave the prearranged signal.\n\nLu Bu saw the fire and advanced in the darkness to the relief of the pass. Presently he met Chen Gong's army; and as neither recognized the other in the darkness, a fierce battle ensued. Nor was the trick discovered till daylight came.\n\nWhile these things were going on, Cao Cao had noted the signal and advanced as fast as possible. The bandits, who alone remained to hold the pass, were easily driven out and scattered in all directions.\n\nWhen daylight came and the trick was discovered, Lu Bu and Chen Gong set off together for Xuzhou. But when they arrived and summoned the gate, instead of opening the doors, the guards on the wall saluted them with a thick flight of arrows.\n\nAt the same time Mi Zhu appeared on the defense tower and shouted, \"You stole our master's city, and now we are going to give it back to him. You will not enter here again!\"\n\n\"Where is Chen Gui?\" cried Lu Bu, angrily.\n\n\"We have slain him!\" was the reply.\n\n\"Where is Chen Deng?\" said Lu Bu turning to Chen Gong.\n\n\"Do you still hold to your delusion, General, that you ask where this specious rogue is?\"\n\nLu Bu bade them search through all the ranks, but Chen Deng was not to be found. Then they decided to go to Xiaopei. But ere they had got half way there, suddenly appeared the troops under the command of Gao Shun and Zhang Liao.\n\nThey said, \"Chen Deng came to us saying you, General, was surrounded and wanted help, so we came at once.\"\n\n\"Another trick of that false rogue!\" said Lu Bu. \"Surely he shall die for this.\"\n\nThey went with all speed to Xiaopei, only to see as they drew near, the ensigns of the enemy displayed all along the walls, for the city had been taken by Cao Ren.\n\nWhile Lu Bu stood at the foot of the rampart reviling the traitor, Chen Deng himself appeared on the wall and pointing to Lu Bu cried, \"Did you think that I, a minister of the dynasty, would serve a rebel like you?\"\n\nLu Bu in his wrath was about to make a desperate attack, but suddenly a great noise was heard, and an army came up behind him. It was led by no other than Zhang Fei. Gao Shun went to engage him, but he had no chance of success. Lu Bu then joined in the fray. Then another army appeared, and the leader this time was Cao Cao himself, and his army rushed to the attack. Seeing that he had no hope of victory, Lu Bu went away toward the east, with Cao Cao in pursuit. Lu Bu's army marched till they were worn out.\n\nThen appeared a new force under Guan Yu. Holding his sword ready to strike, Guan Yu called out, \"Do not flee, O Lu Bu! Guan Yu is waiting for you.\"\n\nLu Bu joined battle. He was flurried and scarcely knew what was happening. And soon Zhang Fei came up once more. By desperate efforts Lu Bu and his troops cut an alley through the press and got free. After this they started for Xiapi as fast as they could travel, and Hou Cheng helped to keep the pursuers at bay and welcomed them into the city.\n\nSo the two brothers, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, were together again after their separation. Both shed tears of joy as they told each other what they had seen and suffered.\n\n\"I was on the Haizhou Road when I heard of you,\" said Guan Yu. \"I lost no time in starting.\"\n\n\"And I had been camped in the Mangdang Hills for a long time. It is happiness to be together again.\"\n\nSo they talked. Then they marched off together to find their elder brother, and made their salutations with tears. In Liu Bei's heart, sadness and joy intermingled. Next they were presented to Cao Cao, and with him they went into the captured Xuzhou City.\n\nMi Zhu soon came with the welcome news of the safety of the family. And Chen Gui and Chen Deng came to present their salutations. A grand banquet was prepared for the officers at which Cao Cao presided as host, and Chen Gui and Liu Bei occupied the seats of honor to his right and left. At the close of the banquet, Cao Cao paid the two Chens the highest compliments on their success and rewarded them with the revenues of ten counties beside giving the son the title of General Who Quells the Waves.\n\nCao Cao was very pleased with his success and at once began to scheme for the taking of Xiapi, the sole place now left to Lu Bu, where he had taken refuge.\n\nCheng Yu said the course was inadvisable.\n\n\"If Lu Bu be pressed too hard, he may get clear by a desperate effort and throw himself into the arms of our especial enemy, Yuan Shu. These two as allies would be difficult to overcome. Rather send a capable man to guard the South of River Huai, one able to secure you against Lu Bu on one hand and to hold Yuan Shu on the other. Moreover the bandits are in Huashan Mountains and still our enemies. They must be watched.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"I can keep the whole of Huashan Mountains, and I will request Liu Bei to take the south.\"\n\n\"Could I dare withstand your command?\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSo forthwith Liu Bei, leaving Mi Zhu and Jian Yong at Xuzhou, went south, taking in his train Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Sun Qian. And Cao Cao led his army to Xiapi.\n\nLu Bu felt very secure in his refuge. He had good store of grain, and he had the protection of River Si, so he sat quiet, satisfied that he could maintain his defense. So he allowed Cao Cao's army to approach without molestation.\n\n\"You ought to attack Cao Cao's army as they come up, before they have time to make camps and defenses. They will only have a fatigued army to oppose to your fresh troops, and you will certainly defeat them.\"\n\nSo said Chen Gong, but Lu Bu replied, \"I have suffered too many defeats lately to take any risk. Wait till they actually attack, and you will see them floating away on the waters.\"\n\nSo Lu Bu neglected the confidant's advice and waited till the enemy had settled into their camp. This done, the attackers advanced against the city. From the foot of the wall, Cao Cao called to Lu Bu to listen while he spoke. Lu Bu ascended to the wall where he stood.\n\nCao Cao addressed him, saying, \"When I heard that your family and that of Yuan Shu were likely to be united by marriage, I sent an army against you. Yuan Shu was guilty of treason, while you had to your credit on the destruction of Dong Zhuo. For what reason have you sacrificed all your merits to throw in your lot with a rebel? It will be over late to regret when this city shall have fallen. But if you surrender and help me to support the ruling house, you shall not lose your rank.\"\n\nLu Bu replied, \"If the Prime Minister will retire, we may be able to discuss the matter.\"\n\nBut Chen Gong, standing near his master, began to rail at Cao Cao for a rebel and shot an arrow that struck his plumed helmet.\n\n\"My oath, but I will slay you at least!\" cried Cao Cao, pointing his finger at Chen Gong.\n\nThen the attack on the walls began.\n\n\"They have come from far and cannot maintain this for long,\" said Chen Gong. \"General, go out with your horse and foot and take up a position outside, leaving me to maintain the defense with the remainder of our troops. If he engages you, I will come out and strike at his rear ranks; if he attacks the city, you can come to our aid. In ten days their stores will fail, and we can beat them off. This will place them between the ox-horns.\"\n\n\"The advice seems good,\" said Lu Bu.\n\nLu Bu went back to his palace and prepared his weapons. As it was the depth of winter, he made his army take plenty of wadded clothing to keep them warm. Lady Yan, his wife, heard of it and came to ask whither he was going. He told her of Chen Gong's plan.\n\nShe said, \"My lord, you are leaving an undamaged city, abandoning your wife and little ones, and going with a paltry force. Should any untoward event happen, will your handmaid and her lord ever meet again?\"\n\nLu Bu hesitated and for three days made no move.\n\nThen Chen Gong came to see him again and said, \"The enemy are all round the city; and unless you go out soon, you will be quite hemmed in.\"\n\n\"I am thinking it would be better to maintain a stubborn defense,\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"Our enemies are short of food and have sent for supplies to Xuchang. These will soon arrive, and you should go out with some veterans and intercept the convoy. That loss would be a heavy blow.\"\n\nLu Bu agreed and went in to tell his wife the new plan.\n\nShe wept saying, \"If you go, do you think Chen Gong and others equal to the defense of the city? Should anything go wrong, you would be very sorry. You abandoned me at Changan, and it was only through the fortunate kindness of Pang Shu that I was hidden from our enemies and rejoined you. Who would have thought you would leave me again? But go, go your way as far as you wish, and do not mind your wife.\"\n\nAnd she wept bitterly.\n\nLu Bu very sadly went to take leave of Diao Chan who said, \"You are my lord and my life. You must not be careless and ride out alone.\"\n\n\"You need not fear. With my mighty trident halberd and Red Hare, who dare come near me?\"\n\nHe went out. But when he met Chen Gong, he said, \"That story about supplies for Cao Cao is all false, one of his many ruses. I am not going to stir.\"\n\nChen Gong sighed. He felt all was lost.\n\n\"We shall die, and no one shall know our burial place,\" said he.\n\nThereupon Lu Bu remained in his own quarters with his ladies, drinking freely to dissipate his sorrows.\n\nTwo of his advisers, Xu Si and Wang Kai, went in and proposed, \"Yuan Shu in the South of River Huai is very powerful. Why not write to him to renew the marriage alliance? Yuan Shu can hardly refuse to rescue the affianced bride of his son.\"\n\nSo Lu Bu wrote and bade these two take the letter.\n\nXu Si said, \"You ought to send a strong escort with us to force a way through.\"\n\nSo Lu Bu told off one thousand troops and two of his generals, Zhang Liao and He Meng, to conduct his messenger beyond the pass. They started that same night at the second watch, Zhang Liao leading and He Meng bringing up the rear. They got out of the city, crept past Liu Bei's camp, and got beyond the danger zone. Then half the escort went on, and Zhang Liao led the remainder back toward the city. At the pass he found Guan Yu waiting. However, at that moment Gao Shun came to his help, and they all returned and reentered the gates.\n\nThe two messengers presently reached Shouchun, saw Yuan Shu, and presented the letter.\n\n\"How is this?\" said Yuan Shu. \"Formerly he slew my messenger and repudiated the marriage. Now he sends to ask for it.\"\n\n\"It is all due to the vile plans of that monster Cao Cao. If pray you, Illustrious Sir, consider it carefully,\" replied Xu Si.\n\n\"But if your master was not hemmed in by his enemy and in imminent danger, he would never have thought of renewing this proposal of marriage.\"\n\nThe messengers said, \"You may decide not to help him, but the teeth are cold when the lips are gone. It will not make for your happiness and comfort.\"\n\nSaid Yuan Shu, \"Lu Bu is unreliable. Tell him that I will send soldiers after the girl has arrived here.\"\n\nThis was final, and the two messengers took leave and headed back to Xiapi.\n\nWhen the party reached Liu Bei's camp, Xu Si decided, \"We must wait the night falls, and Wang Kai and I will try to get through in the darkness. The escort of He Meng remaining behind to protect our rear.\"\n\nThey tried that very night, and the two messengers crept across without discovery. But the escort found themselves faced by Zhang Fei. He Meng tried to fight but was captured in the very first bout, and the five hundred troops of his half company were either killed or they fled.\n\nThe prisoner was taken to Liu Bei, who forwarded him to the main camp. There he told the story of the marriage and the scheme to save the city. Cao Cao was angry and ordered the execution of He Meng at the main gate.\n\nThen Cao Cao sent orders to each camp to exercise the greatest diligence with threats of rigorous punishment of the officers of any corps that permitted any communication between the besieged and the outer world.\n\nEvery soldier felt mightily afraid.\n\nLiu Bei returned to camp and cautioned his brothers, saying, \"We are in the most important place with regard to the South of River Huai, and you must be very careful not to allow any breach of this command.\"\n\nZhang Fei was inclined to grumble, saying, \"We have just captured one of the enemy's leaders, and there is no word of praise or reward for us: Nothing but new orders and threats. What do you make of that?\"\n\n\"You are wrong to complain,\" said Liu Bei. \"These are orders of the Commander-in-Chief, and what would happen were there no orders? Do not disobey them, brother.\"\n\nThey promised obedience and withdrew. In the meantime Xu Si and Wang Kai had got back to Lu Bu and told him what Yuan Shu had said, that if the girl came the soldiers should go.\n\n\"But how can she be sent?\" said Lu Bu.\n\nXu Si said, \"That is the difficulty. He Meng's capture means that Cao Cao knows the whole plan of getting help from the South of River Huai. I do not see how anyone but you yourself could hope to get through the close siege.\"\n\n\"Suppose we tried, today?\" said Lu Bu.\n\n\"This is an ill-omened day. You must not try today. Tomorrow is a very lucky day, especially in the evening, for any military action.\"\n\nThen Lu Bu ordered Zhang Liao and Gao Shun, \"Get ready three thousand troops for the venture, and prepare a light carriage. I will lead the first seventy miles, thence you can escort the bride-elect the remainder of the way to her new home.\"\n\nNext evening toward the second watch, Lu Bu wrapped up his daughter in soft wadded garments, bound her about with a mailed coat, and took her on his back. Then with his mighty trident halberd in hand, he mounted Red Hare and rode at the head of the cavalcade out of the city gate. Zhang Liao and Gao Shun followed.\n\nIn this order they approached Liu Bei's camp. The drums at once beat the alarm, and Guan Yu and Zhang Fei barred the way.\n\n\"Stop!\" they shouted.\n\nLu Bu had no desire to fight; all he wished was to get through, so he made for a side road. Liu Bei came in pursuit and the two parties engaged. Brave as he might be, Lu Bu was almost helpless now that he was hampered by a girl on his shoulders, whom he was desperately anxious to preserve from hurt. Beside other parties came up all shouting and attacking, and he had no alternative but to give up his project and return into the city of Xiapi. He reached his palace very sad at heart. The besiegers returned to camp well pleased that no one had got beyond their lines.\n\nLu Bu found consolation in the wine cup. The siege had gone on for two months, and still the city stood. Then they heard that Zhang Yang, Governor of Henei, had been inclined to come to the help of Lu Bu. But one of his subordinates, Yang Chou, had assassinated him and was bringing his head as an offering to Cao Cao, when Yang Chou had also been slain by Kui Gu, one of the Governor's adherents. Kui Gu had then led the force to Daicheng.\n\nIn the camp of the besiegers, there now arose much murmuring. Cao Cao sent Shi Huan to intercept and kill Kui Gu.\n\nThen he called a counsel, saying, \"Though Zhang Yang, who meant to hurt us, is happily no more, yet we are threatened on the north by Yuan Shao, and on the west Liu Biao and Zhang Xiu are a menace. Here we meet with no success against the city of Xiapi. We are for leaving Lu Bu to his fate and returning home. What do you think?\"\n\nAmong them Xun You fought against the idea, saying, \"You must not act like this. Lu Bu has lost much, and his spirit is broken. The spirit of the leader expresses that of his army; and when the leader fails, his soldiers do not fight. Chen Gong is clever, but nothing is done. Lu Bu broken, Chen Gong without decision, it only needs a sharp attack, and we shall succeed.\"\n\n\"I have a plan to propose,\" said Guo Jia, \"a plan to overcome the city at once. It is better than two hundred thousand troops.\"\n\n\"I suppose you mean drowning the city by River Si and River Yi,\" said Xun Yu.\n\n\"That is it,\" said Guo Jia, smiling.\n\nCao Cao accepted the suggestion with joy and set his troops to cut the banks of River Yi and River Si, and moved his army to the high ground whence they watched the drowning out of Xiapi. Only the east gate remained clear of water.\n\nThe besieged soldiers hastened to their leader.\n\nLu Bu said, \"Why should I fear? My good horse can go as well through the water as over the land.\"\n\nAnd he again returned to the wine cup for consolation, drinking deeply with his wife and concubine.\n\nThe continual drinking bouts told at last, and Lu Bu began to look dissipated. Seeing himself in a mirror one day, he was startled at the change and said to himself, \"I am injuring myself with wine. No more from this day forward!\"\n\nHe then issued an order that no one should drink wine under penalty of death.\n\nNow one of his generals, Hou Cheng, lost fifteen horses, stolen by one of his subordinates, Hou Cao, who intended to resell them to Liu Bei. Hou Cheng found out where the horses were, went out after them, and recovered them after killing Hou Cao. And Hou Cheng's colleagues congratulated him on his success. To celebrate the occasion, Hou Cheng brewed a few barrels of wine to be drunk at the feast.\n\nBut thinking his chief might find him in fault, Hou Cheng sent the bottles of wine to Lu Bu's palace with a petition explaining, \"By your virtue of warlike renown, I have recovered my horses; and as my comrades come with their congratulations, I brew some bottles of wine, first to offer Your Lordship and second to ask your permission to have a little wine at the feast.\"\n\nLu Bu took it very angrily, saying, \"When I have forbidden all wine, you brew some and begin to give feasts: You are simply defying me!\"\n\nWhereupon he ordered the officer to instant execution. However, Song Xian, Wei Xu, and other officers came in and interceded, and after a time Lu Bu softened.\n\n\"You ought to lose your head for this disobedience. But for the sake of your colleagues, the punishment shall be reduced to a hundred strokes.\"\n\nThey tried to beg him off this, but only succeeded in reducing the number of blows to one half.\n\nWhen the sentence had been carried out and Hou Cheng was permitted to return home, his colleagues came sadly to console him.\n\n\"Had it not been for you, I should have been put to death,\" said Hou Cheng.\n\nSong Xian replied, \"All Lu Bu cares for is his family. There is no pity for anyone else. We are no more than the weeds by the roadside.\"\n\nWei Xu said, \"The city is besieged; the water is drowning us out. There will not be much more of this, for we may die any day.\"\n\n\"He is a beast, with neither a sense of humanity nor of right. Let us leave him,\" said Song Xian.\n\n\"He is not worth fighting for. The best we could do would be to seize him and hand him over to Cao Cao,\" said Wei Xu.\n\n\"I was punished because I got my horses back again, yet all he trusts in is his own Red Hare. If you two will betray the gate and seize Lu Bu, I will steal the horse and go out to Cao Cao's camp.\"\n\nThey settled how to carry out the plot, and that very night Hou Cheng sneaked into the stables and got Red Hare away. He hastened to the east gate which was opened to let him through. The guard made a pretense of pursuing him but only a pretense.\n\nHou Cheng reached the besiegers' camp, presented the horse and told Cao Cao what had been arranged. They would show a white flag and open the gates to his army. Hearing this Cao Cao had a few notifications written out, which were attached to arrows and shot over the walls. This is one of them:\n\n\"Regent Marshal Cao Cao has received a command from the Emperor to destroy Lu Bu. Those who interfere with the operations of his grand army, whatever their rank, shall be put to death in the gate on the day that the city shall be captured. Should anyone capture Lu Bu or bring his head, he shall be well rewarded. Let all take note of this.\"\n\nNext day at daylight a tremendous hubbub was heard without the city and Lu Bu, halberd in hand, hasted to the wall to see what it meant. As he went from gate to gate inspecting the defenses and guards, he censured Wei Xu for letting Hou Cheng escape and get away with his horse. Lu Bu threatened to punish Wei Xu. But just then the besiegers began a fierce attack as the white flag had just appeared, and Lu Bu had to turn all his energies to defense. The assault lasted till noon, when the attacking force drew off for a time.\n\nLu Bu was taking a rest in the tower and fell asleep in his chair. Song Xian sent away Lu Bu's attendants. When they had gone, he stole Lu Bu's weapon, the trident halberd in which he trusted. Then Song Xian and Wei Xu fell upon Lu Bu together and before he was well awake had bound him with cords, trussing him so that he could not move. Lu Bu shouted for his guards, but they were driven off by the two traitor generals and could not come near. Then a white flag was shown, and the besiegers again approached the city.\n\nThe traitors shouted out, \"Lu Bu has been captured alive!\"\n\nBut Xiahou Yuan could hardly believe it till they threw down the famous halberd. The gates were flung open, and the enemy entered the city. Gao Shun and Zhang Liao, who were at the opposite gate, were surrounded and cut off by the water and helpless. They were captured. Chen Gong made a dash to the south gate but was also taken by Xu Huang. Presently Cao Cao entered and at once gave orders to turn the streams back into their usual courses. He put out proclamations to sooth the people.\n\nCao Cao and Liu Bei, with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei behind, seated themselves side by side in the White Gate Tower. The captives were brought before them. Lu Bu looked a pitiable object. Although a very tall man, he was tied up in a veritable ball.\n\n\"The bonds are very tight,\" cried he, \"I beseech you to loosen them!\"\n\n\"Binding a tiger must bind tight, of course,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nSeeing Hou Cheng, Song Xian, and Wei Xu standing there looking pleased at their success, Lu Bu said, \"I treated you all well enough: How could you turn against me?\"\n\nSaid Song Xian, \"You listened to the words of your women, but rejected the advice of your generals. Was not that mean?\"\n\nLu Bu was silent. Then Gao Shun was brought forward.\n\n\"What have you to say?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nGao Shun sulkily held his tongue. He was ordered out to execution.\n\nNext Chen Gong was led in.\n\n\"I hope you have been well since we last saw each other, Chen Gong?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Your ways were crooked, and so I left you,\" said Chen Gong.\n\n\"You say I was crooked; and what of your serving Lu Bu?\"\n\n\"Though he was a fool, he did not resemble you in deceit and wickedness.\"\n\n\"You say you are able enough and clever, but what about your position today?\"\n\nTurning toward Lu Bu, Chen Gong said, \"This man would not follow my advice. Had he done so, he would not now be a captive.\"\n\n\"What think you ought to be done about this day's work?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"There is death for me today, and that is the end!\" said Chen Gong undauntedly.\n\n\"Very well for you; but what of your mother and wife and children?\"\n\n\"It is said that one who rules with due regard to filial piety does not harm a person's family; one who would show benevolence does not cut off the sacrifices at a person's tomb. My mother and wife and children are in your hands. But since I am your prisoner, I pray you slay me quickly and not to try to harrow my feelings.\"\n\nCao Cao's heart still leaned toward mercy, but Chen Gong turned and walked away, repulsing the attendants who would stop him. Cao Cao rose from his place and walked with Chen Gong, the tears falling from his eyes. Chen Gong never looked at him.\n\nTurning to his guards Cao Cao said, \"Let his mother and family be taken to Xuchang and looked after immediately. Any postponement will be punished!\"\n\nThe condemned man heard him but uttered no word. He stretched out his neck for the blow. Tears sprang to the eyes of all present. His remains were honorably coffined and buried in Xuchang.\n\nA poem pitying Chen Gong's fate says:\n\n\u2003Neither hope of life nor fear of death moved him.\n\n\u2003How brave was he, a hero indeed!\n\n\u2003But his lord heeded not his words,\n\n\u2003Wherefore in vain possessed he great talents.\n\n\u2003Nevertheless, in that he stood by his master.\n\n\u2003To parting with wife and mother,\n\n\u2003He merits our pity and profound respect.\n\n\u2003Who would resemble Chen Gong\n\n\u2003That day he died at the White Gate Tower?\n\nWhile Cao Cao sadly escorted Chen Gong on the way to death, Lu Bu appealed to Liu Bei, \"Noble Sir, you sit there an honored guest while poor I lie bound at your feet. Will you not utter one word to alleviate my lot?\"\n\nLiu Bei nodded.\n\nAs Cao Cao returned to his place, Lu Bu called out, \"Your only trouble, Illustrious Sir, is myself, and I am on your side now. You take the lead, I will help you, and together the world is at our feet.\"\n\n\"What do you think?\" said Cao Cao turning to Liu Bei.\n\n\"You are willing to forget the episodes of Ding Yuan and Dong Zhuo?\"\n\n\"Truly the lout is not to be trusted!\" said Lu Bu, looking at Liu Bei.\n\n\"Strangle and expose!\" ordered Cao Cao.\n\nAs he was led away, Lu Bu turned once more to Liu Bei, \"You long-eared lout, you forget now the service I rendered you that day at my camp gate, when my arrow hit the mark!\"\n\nJust then someone shouted, \"Lu Bu, O fool! Death is but death, and why are you scared at it?\"\n\nEveryone turned to look: The guards were hustling Zhang Liao to the place of judgment. Cao Cao ordered Lu Bu's execution.\n\nA poet has written upon the death of Lu Bu:\n\n\u2003The flood spreads wide, the city drowns,\n\n\u2003Its lord is captive. Nought avails\n\n\u2003His courser's speed or halberd's thrust.\n\n\u2003The tiger erstwhile fierce, now whines\n\n\u2003For mercy. Cao Cao had meted him\n\n\u2003Full well, a falcon flown at will\n\n\u2003And hungry kept. Poor fool! He let\n\n\u2003Chen Gong's advice be overborne\n\n\u2003By harem tattle; vainly now\n\n\u2003He rails against the Long-Ears' faith.\n\nAnd another poem says:\n\n\u2003Round is the hungry tiger, eater of men, for whom is no pity,\n\n\u2003Since the blood of his victims is fresh and not yet dry.\n\n\u2003Liu Bei spoke no word in favor of Lu Bu,\n\n\u2003To whom even a father's life was not sacred.\n\nIt was recorded earlier that the executioners were hustling Zhang Liao forward.\n\nPointing to him from above, Cao Cao said, \"He has a familiar face.\"\n\n\"You were not likely to forget me: You saw me before in Puyang,\" said Zhang Liao.\n\n\"O, so you remember me, eh?\"\n\n\"Yes. More is the pity.\"\n\n\"Pity for what?\"\n\n\"That the fire that day was not fierce enough to burn you up, rebel that you are!\"\n\nCao Cao began to get angry.\n\n\"How dare you insult me?\" cried he and lifted his sword to kill the bold speaker.\n\nThe undaunted Zhang Liao never changed color, but stretched out his neck for the blow. Then a man behind Cao Cao caught his arm, and in front of him another dropped on his knees, saying, \"O Prime Minister, I pray thee stay thy hand!\"\n\n\u2003Lu Bu whining was not spared,\n\n\u2003Railing Zhang Liao far better fared." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Cao Cao Organizes A Hunting Expedition In Xutian; Dong Cheng Receives A Secret Command In The Palace.\n\nThe last chapter said that Cao Cao was checked in his angry attack upon Zhang Liao. They were Liu Bei who held his arm and Guan Yu who knelt before him.\n\n\"A man as generous-hearted as he is should be saved,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nGuan Yu said, \"I know him well as loyal and righteous. I will vouch for him with my own life!\"\n\nCao Cao threw aside his sword and smiled.\n\n\"I also know Zhang Liao to be loyal and good. I was just testing him,\" said he.\n\nCao Cao loosed the prisoner's bonds with his own hands, had a change of dress brought in, and clothed him therewith. Then he was led to a seat of honor. This kindly treatment sank deep into Zhang Liao's heart, and he hastened to declare formally that he yielded. And then he was given the rank of Imperial Commander and the title of Lordship.\n\nZhang Liao was sent on a mission to win over the bandit leader Zang Ba, who hearing what had happened, came forthwith and gave in his submission. He was graciously received, and his former colleagues \u2014 Sun Guan, Wu Dun, and Yin Li \u2014 also yielded, with the exception of Chang Xi, who remained obdurate. All these former enemies who came over were kindly treated and given posts of responsibility wherein they might prove the reality of their conversion. Lu Bu's family were sent to the capital.\n\nAfter the soldiers had been rewarded with feasting, the camp was broken up and the army moved away to Xuchang. Passing through Xuzhou the people lined the roads and burned incense in honor of the victors. They also petitioned that Liu Bei should be their protector.\n\nCao Cao replied, \"Liu Bei has rendered great services. You must wait till he has been received in audience and obtained his reward. After that he shall be sent here.\"\n\nThe people bowed low to the ground to express their thanks. Che Zhou, General of the Flying Cavalry, was given command of Xuzhou for the moment.\n\nAfter the army had arrived at the capital, rewards were granted to all the officers who had been in the expedition. Liu Bei was retained in the capital, lodging in an annex to the Prime Minister's palace.\n\nNext day a court was held, and Cao Cao memorialized the services of Liu Bei who was presented to Emperor Xian. Dressed in court robes, Liu Bei bowed at the lower end of the audience arena. The Emperor called him to the Hall and asked his ancestry.\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"Thy servant is the son of Liu Hong, grandson of Liu Xiong, who was a direct descendant of Prince Sheng of Zhongshan, who was the son of His Majesty the Emperor Jing (reigned BC 157-141).\"\n\nThe Emperor bade them bring forth the Books of the Genealogies, and therefrom a secretary read:\n\n\"Liu Jing the Filial Emperor begot fourteen sons of whom the seventh was Liu Sheng, Prince of Zhongshan. Sheng begot Liu Zhen, Lord of Luchang. Zhen begot Liu Ang, Lord of Pei. Ang begot Liu Lu, Lord of Zhang. Lu begot Liu Lian, Lord of Yishui. Lian begot Liu Ying, Lord of Qinyang. Ying begot Liu Jian, Lord of Anguo. Jian begot Liu Ai, Lord of Guangling. Ai begot Liu Xia, Lord of Jiaoshui. Xia begot Liu Shu, Lord of Zuyi. Shu begot Liu Yi, Lord of Qiyang. Yi begot Liu Bi, Lord of Yuanze. Bi begot Liu Da, Lord of Yingchuan. Da begot Liu Buyi, Lord of Fengling. Buyi begot Liu Hui, Lord of Jichuan. Hui begot Liu Xiong, Governor of Zhuo. Xiong begot Liu Hong, who held no office or rank; and Liu Bei is his son.\"\n\nThe Emperor compared this with the registers of the Imperial House and found by them that Liu Bei was his uncle by descent. The Emperor seemed greatly pleased and requested Liu Bei to go into one of the side chambers where he might perform the ceremonial obeisance prescribed for a nephew to his uncle. In his heart he rejoiced to have this heroic warrior uncle as a powerful supporter against Cao Cao who really held all the power in his own hands. The Emperor knew himself to be a mere puppet. He conferred upon his uncle the rank of General of the Left Army and the title of Lord of Yicheng.\n\nWhen the banquet was concluded, Liu Bei thanked the Emperor and went out of the Palace. And from this time he was very generally styled the \"Imperial Uncle.\"\n\nWhen Cao Cao returned to his palace, Xun Yu and his fellow advisers went in to see him.\n\nXun Yu said, \"It is no advantage to you, Illustrious Sir, that the Emperor recognizes Liu Bei as an uncle.\"\n\n\"Liu Bei may be recognized as uncle, but he is under my orders since I control the decrees of the Throne. He will be all the more ready to obey. Beside I will keep him here under the pretense of having him near his sovereign, and he will be entirely in my hands. I have nothing to fear. The man I fear is Yang Biao, who is a relative of the two Yuan brothers. Should Yang Biao conspire with them, he is an enemy within and might do much harm. He will have to be removed.\"\n\nHence Cao Cao sent a secret emissary to say that Imperial Guardian Yang Biao was intriguing with Yuan Shu, and on this charge Yang Biao was arrested and imprisoned. And his death would have been compassed had his enemy dared.\n\nBut just then the Governor of Beihai, Kong Rong, was at the capital, and he remonstrated with Cao Cao, saying, \"Yang Biao comes from a family famed for virtue for at least four generations. You cannot trump up so foolish a charge as that against him.\"\n\n\"It is the wish of His Majesty!\" retorted Cao Cao.\n\n\"If the child Emperor Cheng of Zhou Dynasty had put Duke Chao to death, could the people have believed Duke Zhou, the Regent Marshal, had nothing to do with it?\"\n\nSo Cao Cao had to relinquish the attempt, but he took away Yang Biao's offices and banished him to his family estate in the country.\n\nCourt Counselor Zhao Yan, an opponent of the Prime Minister, sent up a memorial impeaching Cao Cao for having removed a minister of state from office without a decree. Cao Cao's reply to this was the arrest of Zhao Yan and his execution, a bold stroke which terrified the bulk of officers and reduced them to silence.\n\nCheng Yu advised Cao Cao to assume a more definite position. He said, \"Illustrious Sir, your prestige grows daily. Why not seize the opportunity to take the position of Chief of the Feudatory Princes?\"\n\n\"There are still too many supporters of the court,\" was the reply. \"I must be careful. I am going to propose a royal hunt to try to find out the best line to follow.\"\n\nThis expedition being decided upon they got together fleet horses, famous falcons, and pedigree hounds, and prepared bows and arrows in readiness. They mustered a strong force of guards outside the city.\n\nWhen the Prime Minister proposed the hunting expedition, the Emperor said he feared it was an improper thing to do.\n\nCao Cao replied, \"In ancient times rulers made four expeditions yearly at each of the four seasons in order to show their strength. They were called Sou, Miao, Xien, and Shou, in the order of spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Now that the whole country is in confusion, it would be wise to inaugurate a hunt in order to train the army. I am sure Your Majesty will approve.\"\n\nSo the Emperor with the full paraphernalia for an imperial hunt joined the expedition. He rode a saddled horse, carried an inlaid bow, and his quiver was filled with gold-tipped arrows. His chariot followed behind. Liu Bei and his brothers were in the imperial train, each with his bow and quiver. Each party member wore a breastplate under the outer robe and held his especial weapon, while their escort followed them. Cao Cao rode a dun horse called \"Flying-Lightning,\" and the army was one hundred thousand strong.\n\nThe hunt took place in Xutian, and the legions spread out as guards round the hunting arena which extended over some one hundred square miles. Cao Cao rode even with the Emperor, the horses' heads alternating in the lead. The imperial attendants immediately following were all in Cao Cao's confidence. The other officers, civil and military, lagged behind, for they dared not press forward into the midst of Cao Cao's partisans.\n\nOne day the Emperor was riding toward the hunting grounds and noticed his newly found uncle respectfully standing by the roadside.\n\n\"I should like to see my uncle display his hunting skill,\" said the Emperor.\n\nLiu Bei mounted his steed at once. Just then a hare started from its form. Liu Bei shot and hit it with the first arrow.\n\nThe Emperor, much struck by this display, rode away over a slope. Suddenly a deer broke out of the thicket. He shot three arrows at it but all missed.\n\n\"You try,\" said the Emperor turning to Cao Cao.\n\n\"Lend me Your Majesty's bow,\" Cao Cao replied.\n\nTaking the inlaid bow and the golden-tipped arrows, Cao Cao pulled the bow and hit the deer in the shoulder at the first shot. It fell in the grass and could not run.\n\nNow the crowd of officers seeing the golden-barbed arrow sticking in the wound concluded at once that the shot was the Emperor's, so they rushed up and shouted \"Wan shui! O Son of Heaven! Live forever!\"\n\nCao Cao rode out pushing past the Emperor and acknowledged the congratulations.\n\nThey all turned pale. Guan Yu, who was behind Liu Bei, was especially angry. The silkworm eyebrows stood up fiercely, and the red phoenix eyes glared as, sword in hand, he rode hastily forth to cut down the audacious Prime Minister for his impertinence.\n\nHowever, Liu Bei hastily waved him back and shot at him a meaning glance so that Guan Yu stopped and made no further move.\n\nLiu Bei bowing toward Cao Cao said, \"Most sincere felicitations! A truly supernatural shot, such as few have achieved!\"\n\n\"It is only the enormous good fortune of the Son of Heaven!\" said Cao Cao with a smile.\n\nThen he turned his steed and felicitated the Emperor. But he did not return the bow; he hung it over his own shoulder instead.\n\nThe hunt finished with banqueting; and when the entertainments were over, they returned to the capital, all glad of some repose after the expedition.\n\nGuan Yu was still angry of the Prime Minister's breach of decorum.\n\nOne day Guan Yu said to Liu Bei, \"Brother, why did you prevent me from killing that rebel and so ridding the world of a scoundrel? He insults the Emperor and ignores everybody else.\"\n\n\"When you throw stones at a rat, beware of the vase,\" quoted Liu Bei. \"Cao Cao was only a horse's head away from Our Lord, and in the midst of a crowd of his partisans. In that momentary burst of anger, if you had struck and failed, and harm had come to the Emperor, what an awful crime would have been laid to us!\"\n\n\"If we do not rid the world of him today, a worse evil will come of it,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"But be discreet, my brother. Such matters cannot be lightly discussed.\"\n\nThe Emperor sadly returned to his palace. With tears in his eyes, he related what had occurred in the hunt to his consort, Empress Fu.\n\n\"Alas for me!\" said he. \"From the first days of my accession, one vicious minister has succeeded another. I was the victim of Dong Zhuo's evil machinations. Then followed the rebellion of Li Jue and Guo Si. You and I had to bear sorrows such as no others have borne. Then came this Cao Cao as one who would maintain the imperial dignity, but he has seized upon all real authority and does as he wishes. He works continually for his own glorification, and I never see him but my back pricks. These last few days in the hunting field, he went in front of me and acknowledged the cheers of the crowd. He is so extremely rude that I feel sure he has sinister designs against me. Alas, my wife, we know not when our end may come!\"\n\n\"In a whole court full of nobles, who have eaten the bread of Han, is there not one who will save his country?\" said she.\n\nThus spoke the Empress, and at the same moment there stepped in a man who said, \"Grieve not, O Imperial Pair! I can find a savior for the country.\"\n\nIt was none other than the father of the Empress, Fu Wan.\n\n\"Have you heard of Cao Cao's wanton and perverse behavior?\" said the Emperor, drying his eyes.\n\n\"You mean the deer shooting? Who did not see that, indeed? But the whole court is full of his clan or his creatures. With the exception of the relatives of your Consort, there is not one loyal enough to deal with a rebel. I have no authority and can do nothing, but there is General Dong Cheng, the State Uncle, who could do it.\"\n\n\"Could Uncle Dong Cheng come in to consult about this? I know he has had much experience of state troubles.\"\n\nFu Wan replied, \"Everyone of your attendants is a partisan of Cao Cao, and this sort of thing must be kept most profoundly secret or the consequence will be most serious.\"\n\n\"Then what can be done?\" said the Emperor.\n\n\"The only plan I can think of is to send gifts of a robe and a jade girdle to Dong Cheng, and in the lining of the girdle hide a secret edict authorizing him to take certain steps. When he gets home and has read the edict, he can elaborate plans as quickly as possible, and neither the spirits above nor the demons below will know anything about them.\"\n\nThe Emperor approved, and Fu Wan went out. The Emperor then with his own hand drew up a decree, writing it with blood drawn by biting his finger. He gave the document to Empress Fu to sew into the purple lining of the girdle. When all was done, he put on the robe and girded it with the girdle. Next he bade one of the attendants summon State Uncle Dong Cheng to the Palace.\n\nDong Cheng came; and after the ceremonies were finished, the Emperor said, \"A few nights ago I was talking with the Empress of the terrible days of the rebellion, and we thought of your good services then, therefore we have called you in to reward you.\"\n\nThe minister bowed his head in thanks. Then the Emperor led Dong Cheng out of the Reception Hall to the Temple of Ancestors, and they went to the gallery of Worthy Ministers, where the Emperor burned incense and performed the usual ceremonies. After this they went to see the portraits, and among them was one of the founder of the dynasty, Liu Bang the Supreme Ancestor.\n\n\"Whence sprang our great ancestor, and how did he begin his great achievement?\" said the Emperor.\n\n\"Your Majesty is pleased to joke with thy servant,\" said Dong Cheng, rather startled at the question. \"Who does not know the deeds of the Sacred Ancestor? He began life as a minor official in Sishang. There gripping his sword, he slew a white serpent, the beginning of his struggle for the right. Speedily he mastered the empire: In three years had destroyed Qin and, in five, also Chu. Thus he set up a dynasty that shall endure forever!\"\n\n\"Such heroic forefathers! Such weakling descendants! How sad it is!\" said the Emperor.\n\nPointing to the portraits right and left, he continued, \"Are not these two Zhang Liang, Lord of Liu, and Xiao He, Lord of Cuo?\"\n\n\"Certainly. The Supreme Ancestor was greatly assisted by these two.\"\n\nThe Emperor glanced right and left. His attendants were rather far away. Then he whispered to Dong Cheng, \"You, like these two, must stand by me.\"\n\n\"My poor services are of no worth. I do not compare with those men,\" said the Uncle.\n\n\"I remember that you saved me at the western capital, Changan. I have never forgotten, and I could never reward you properly.\"\n\nThen pointing to his own robe, the Emperor continued, \"You must wear this robe of mine, girded with my own girdle, and it will be as though you are always near your Emperor.\"\n\nDong Cheng bowed his gratitude while the Emperor, taking off the robe, presented it to his faithful minister. At the same time he whispered, \"Examine it closely when you get home, and help your Emperor carry out his intention.\"\n\nDong Cheng understood. He put on the robe and the girdle, took leave and left the chamber.\n\nThe news of the audience for Dong Cheng had been taken to the Prime Minister, who at once went to the Palace and arrived as Dong Cheng was passing out at the Donghua Gate. They met face to face, and Dong Cheng could in nowise avoid him. Dong Cheng went to the side of the road and made his obeisance.\n\n\"Where are you from, State Uncle?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"His Majesty summoned me into the Palace and has given me this robe and beautiful girdle.\"\n\n\"Why did he give you these?\"\n\n\"He had not forgotten that I saved his life in the old days.\"\n\n\"Take it off and let me see it.\"\n\nDong Cheng who knew that a secret decree was hidden away somewhere in the garments was afraid Cao Cao would notice a breach somewhere in the material, so he hesitated and did not obey. But Cao Cao called his guards, and they took off the girdle. Then Cao Cao looked it over carefully.\n\n\"It certainly is a very handsome girdle,\" said he. \"Now take off the robe and let me look at that.\"\n\nDong Cheng's heart was melting with fear, but he dared not disobey. So he handed over the robe. Cao Cao took it and held it up against the sun with his own hand and minutely examined every part of it.\n\nWhen he had done this, he put it on, girded it with the girdle and turning to his attendants said, \"How is it for length?\"\n\n\"Beautiful!\" they chorused.\n\nTurning to Dong Cheng, he said, \"Will you give these to me?\"\n\n\"My Prince's presents to me I dare not give to another. Let me give you another robe in its stead,\" said Dong Cheng.\n\n\"Is there not some intrigue connected with these presents? I am sure there is,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"How could I dare?\" said Dong Cheng, trembling. \"If you are so set upon it, then I must give it up.\"\n\n\"How could I take away what our Prince has given you? It was all a joke,\" said the Prime Minister.\n\nCao Cao returned both robe and girdle, and their owner made the best of his way home. When night came and he was alone in his library, he took out the robe and looked over every inch of it most carefully. He found nothing.\n\n\"He gave me a robe and a girdle and bade me look at them carefully. That means there is something to be looked for but I can find no trace of it. What does it mean?\" he soliloquized.\n\nThen he lifted the girdle and examined that. The jade plates were carved into the semblance of small dragons interlaced among flowers. The lining was of purple silk. All was sewn together most carefully and neatly, and he could find nothing out of the common. He was puzzled. He laid the belt on the table. Presently he picked it up and looked at it again. He spent long hours over it but in vain. He leaned over on the small table, his head resting on his hands and was almost asleep, when a candle snuff fell down upon the girdle and burned a hole in the lining. He hastily shook it off, but the mischief was done: A small hole had been burned in the silken lining, and through this there appeared something white with blood red marks. He hastily ripped it open and drew out the decree written by the hand of the Emperor himself in characters of blood. It read:\n\n\"Of human relationships, that between parents and children stands first. Of the various social ties that between prince and minister stands highest. Today Cao Cao, the wicked, is a real tyrant, treating even his Prince with indignity. With the support of his faction and his army, he has destroyed the principles of government. By conferring rewards and inflicting punishments, he has reduced the Emperor to a nonentity. I have grieved over this day and night. I have feared the empire would be ruined.\n\n\"You are a high minister of state and my own relative. You must recall the difficulties of the Great Founder's early days and draw together the loyal and right-minded to destroy this evil faction and restore the prerogatives of the Throne. Such a deed would be indeed an extreme joy to the spirits of my ancestors.\n\n\"This decree, written in blood drawn from my own veins, is confided to a noble who is to be most careful not to fail in executing his Emperor's design.\n\n\"Given in the era of Rebuilt Tranquillity, fourth year and the third month of spring.\" (AD 199)\n\nSo ran the decree, and Dong Cheng read it with streaming eyes. There was no sleep for him that night. Early in the morning he returned to his library and reread it. No plan suggested itself. He laid the decree down on the table and sought in the depths of his mind for some scheme to destroy Cao Cao, but could not decide upon any. And he fell asleep leaning over his table.\n\nIt happened that Minister Wang Zifu, with whom Dong Cheng was on terms of great intimacy, came to visit him and, as usual, walked into the house unannounced and went straight to the library. His host did not wake, and Wang Zifu noticed, hardly hidden by his sleeve, the Emperor's writing.\n\nWondering what this might be, Wang Zifu drew it out, read it, and put it in his own sleeve.\n\nThen he called out loud, \"Uncle Dong Cheng, are you not well? Why are you asleep at this time of day?\"\n\nDong Cheng started up and at once missed the decree. He was aghast; he almost fell to the ground.\n\n\"So you want to make away with Cao Cao? I shall have to tell him,\" said Wang Zifu.\n\n\"Then, brother, that is the end of the Hans,\" said his host, with tears.\n\n\"I was joking,\" said Wang Zifu. \"My forefathers also served the Hans and ate of their bounty. Am I devoid of loyalty? I would help you, brother, as far as lies in my power.\"\n\n\"It is well for the country that you think like this,\" said Dong Cheng.\n\n\"But we ought to have a more private place than this to talk over such plans and pledge ourselves to sacrifice all in the cause of Han.\"\n\nDong Cheng began to feel very satisfied. He produced a roll of white silk and wrote his own name at the top and signed it, and Wang Zifu followed suit.\n\nThen the visitor said, \"General Wu Zilan is one of my best friends. He ought to be allowed to come in.\"\n\nDong Cheng replied, \"Of all the officials of the court, Commander Chong Ji and Court Counselor Wu Shi are my best friends. Certainly they would back me up.\"\n\nSo the discussion proceeded. Presently a servant announced no other than these very two men Dong Cheng just mentioned.\n\n\"This is providential,\" said Dong Cheng, and he told Wang Zifu to hide behind a screen.\n\nThe two guests were led into the library, and after the exchange of the ordinary civilities and a cup of tea, Chong Ji referred to the incident at the hunt and the shooting of the stag.\n\n\"Were you not angry at that?\" said Chong Ji.\n\nDong Cheng answered, \"Though we be angry, what can we do?\"\n\nWu Shi struck in, saying, \"I would slay this fellow, I swear, but I cannot get anyone to back me up.\"\n\n\"One should perish for one's country; one should not mind,\" said Chong Ji.\n\nAt this moment Wang Zifu appeared from behind the screen, saying, \"You two want to kill Cao Cao! I shall have to let him know this. And Uncle Dong Cheng is my witness.\"\n\n\"A loyal minister does not mind death. If we are killed, we will be Han ghosts, which is better than being sycophants of a traitor,\" said Chong Ji, angrily.\n\nDong Cheng said, \"We were just saying we wanted to see you two on this matter. Wang Zifu is only joking.\"\n\nThen he drew forth the decree and showed it to the two newcomers, who also wept as they read it. They were asked to add their names to the silk roll.\n\nWang Zifu said, \"Wait here a few moments till I get Wu Zilan to come.\"\n\nHe left the room and very soon returned with his friend, who also wrote his name in the presence of all the others.\n\nAfter this they went into one of the inner chambers to drink success to the new plot. While there, a new visitor, Ma Teng, Governor of Xiliang, was announced.\n\n\"Say I am indisposed,\" said the host, \"and cannot receive visitors.\"\n\nThe doorkeeper took the message, whereat Ma Teng angrily said, \"Last night at the Donghua Gate, I saw him come out in robe and girdle. How can he pretend illness today? I am not come from mere idleness, why does he refuse to see me?\"\n\nThe doorkeeper went in again and told his master what the visitor had said and that he was very angry. Then Dong Cheng rose, excused himself saying he would soon return, and went to receive Ma Teng.\n\nAfter the visitor had saluted and they were both seated, Ma Teng said, \"I have just come from a farewell audience and wished to bid you good bye. Why did you want to put me off?\"\n\n\"My poor body was taken suddenly ill. That is why I was not waiting to welcome you,\" said Dong Cheng.\n\n\"You do not look as if you were ill. Your face wears the very bloom of health,\" said Ma Teng bluntly.\n\nHis host could say no more and was silent. The visitor shook out his sleeves and rose to depart.\n\nHe sighed deeply as he walked down the steps, saying to himself, \"Not one of them is any good. There is no one to save the country.\"\n\nThis speech sank deeply into Dong Cheng's heart. He stopped his guest, saying, \"Who is no good to save the country? Whom do you mean?\"\n\n\"That incident at the hunt the other day, the shooting of the stag, filled my breast with anger. But if you, a near relative of the Emperor, can pass your time in wine and idle dalliance without a thought of doing away with rebellion, where can anyone be found who will save the dynasty?\"\n\nHowever, Dong Cheng doubts were not set at rest. Pretending great surprise, he replied, \"The Prime Minister is of high rank and has the confidence of the court. Why then do you utter such things?\"\n\n\"So you find that wretch Cao Cao a good man, eh?\"\n\n\"Pray speak lower: There are eyes and ears very near us.\"\n\n\"The sort of people who covet life and fear death are not those to discuss any great undertaking.\"\n\nSo saying, Ma Teng rose to go sway. By this time his host's doubts were set at rest. He felt that Ma Teng was loyal.\n\nSo Dong Cheng said, \"Do not be angry any more. I will show you something.\"\n\nWhereupon he invited Ma Teng to go into the room where the others were seated and then showed him the decree. As Ma Teng read it, his hair stood on end; he ground his teeth and bit his lips till the blood came.\n\n\"When you move, remember the whole force of my army is ready to help,\" said Ma Teng.\n\nDong Cheng introduced him to the other conspirators, and then the pledge was produced, and Ma Teng was told to sign his name. He did so, at the same time smearing the blood as a sign of the oath and saying, \"I swear to die rather than betray this pledge!\"\n\nPointing to the five he said, \"We require ten for this business, and we can accomplish our design.\"\n\n\"We cannot get many true and loyal people. One of the wrong sort will spoil all,\" said Dong Cheng.\n\nMa Teng told them to bring in the list of officials. He read on till he came to the name Liu, of the imperial clan, when clapping his hands he cried, \"Why not consult him?\"\n\n\"Whom?\" cried they altogether.\n\nMa Teng very slowly and deliberately spoke his name.\n\n\u2003To a very trusty servant comes an Emperor's decree,\n\n\u2003And a scion of the ruling house can prove his loyalty." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "In A Plum Garden, Cao Cao Discusses Heroes; Using The Host's Forces, Guan Yu Takes Xuzhou.\n\n\"Who is it?\" was the question on the lips of the conspirators.\n\nMa Teng's reply was, \"The Imperial Protector of Yuzhou, Liu Bei. He is here and we will ask him to help.\"\n\n\"Though he is an uncle of the Emperor, he is at present a partisan of our enemy, and he will not join,\" said Dong Cheng.\n\n\"But I saw something at the hunt,\" said Ma Teng. \"When Cao Cao advanced to acknowledge the congratulations due to the Emperor, Liu Bei's sworn brother Guan Yu was behind him, and grasped his sword as if to cut down Cao Cao. However, Liu Bei signed to him to hold his hand and Guan Yu did. Liu Bei would willingly destroy Cao Cao, only he thinks Cao Cao's teeth and claws are too many. You must ask Liu Bei, and he will surely consent.\"\n\nHere Wu Shi urged caution, saying, \"Do not go too fast. Let us consider the thing most carefully.\"\n\nThey dispersed. Next day after dark Dong Cheng went to Liu Bei's lodging taking with him the decree. As soon as Dong Cheng was announced, Liu Bei came to greet him and led him into a private room where they could talk freely. The two younger brothers were there as well.\n\n\"It must be something unusually important that has brought Uncle Dong Cheng here tonight,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If I had ridden forth by daylight, Cao Cao might have suspected something, so I came by night.\"\n\nWine was brought in, and while they were drinking, Dong Cheng said, \"Why did you check your brother the other day at the hunt, when he was going to attack Cao Cao?\"\n\nLiu Bei was startled and said, \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"Nobody noticed but I saw.\"\n\nLiu Bei could not prevaricate and said, \"It was the presumption of the man that made my brother so angry. Guan Yu could not help it.\"\n\nThe visitor covered his face and wept.\n\n\"Ah,\" said he, \"if all the court ministers were like Guan Yu, there would be no sighs for lack of tranquillity.\"\n\nNow Liu Bei felt that possibly Cao Cao had sent his visitor to try him, so he cautiously replied, \"Where are the sighs for lack of tranquillity while Cao Cao is at the head of affairs?\"\n\nDong Cheng changed color and rose from his seat.\n\n\"You, Sir, are a relative of His Majesty, and so I showed you my inmost feelings. Why did you mislead me?\"\n\nBut Liu Bei said, \"Because I feared you might be misleading me, and I wanted to find out.\"\n\nAt this Dong Cheng drew out the decree he had received and showed it. His host was deeply moved. Then Dong Cheng produced the pledge. There were only six names to it, and these were Dong Cheng, Wang Zifu, Chong Ji, Wu Shi, Wu Zilan, and Ma Teng.\n\n\"Since you have a decree like this, I cannot but do my share,\" said Liu Bei, and at Dong Cheng's request he added his name and signature to the others and handed it back.\n\n\"Now let us but get three more, which will make ten, and we shall be ready to act.\"\n\n\"But you must move with great caution and not let this get abroad,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThe two remained talking till an early hour in the morning when the visitor left.\n\nNow in order to put Cao Cao quite off the scent that any plot against him was in progress, Liu Bei began to devote himself to gardening, planting vegetables, and watering them with his own hands. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei ventured to remonstrate with him for taking to such an occupation when great matters needed attention.\n\n\"The reason for this you may not know,\" replied he.\n\nAnd they said no more.\n\nOne day when the two brothers were absent, and Liu Bei was busy in his garden, two generals of Cao Cao, Xu Chu and Zhang Liao, with an escort came from Cao Cao, saying, \"The command of the Prime Minister is that you come at once.\"\n\n\"What important affair is afoot?\" asked Liu Bei nervously.\n\n\"We know nothing. We were ordered to come and request your presence.\"\n\nAll he could do was to follow.\n\nWhen Liu Bei arrived, Cao Cao met him and laughingly said, \"That is a big business you have in hand at home.\"\n\nThis remark made Liu Bei turn the color of clay. Cao Cao took him by the hand and led him straight to the private garden, saying, \"The growth of vegetables that you are trying to learn is very difficult.\"\n\nLiu Bei breathed again. He said, \"That is hardly a business. It is only a solace.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"I happened to notice the green plums on the trees today, and suddenly my thoughts went back to a year ago when we were thrashing Zhang Xiu. We were marching through a parched county, and everyone was suffering from thirst. Suddenly I lifted my whip, and pointing at something in the distance I said, 'Look at those fruitful plum trees in the forest ahead.' The soldiers heard it, and it made their mouths water. Seeing the plums kindles my appreciation. I owe something to the plums, and we will repay it today. I ordered the servants to heat some wine very hot and sent to invite you to share it.\"\n\nLiu Bei was quite composed by this time and no longer suspected any sinister design. He went with his host to a small spring pavilion in a plum garden, where the wine cups were already laid out and green plums filled the dishes. They sat down to a confidential talk and free enjoyment of their wine.\n\nAs they drank, the weather gradually changed, clouds gathering and threatening rain. The servants pointed out a mass of cloud that looked like a dragon hung in the sky. Both host and guest leaned over the balcony looking at it.\n\n\"Do you understand the evolution of dragons?\" asked Cao Cao of the guest.\n\n\"Not in detail.\"\n\n\"A dragon can assume any size, can rise in glory or hide from sight. Bulky, it generates clouds and evolves mist; attenuated, it can scarcely hide a mustard stalk or conceal a shadow. Mounting, it can soar to the empyrean; subsiding, it lurks in the uttermost depths of the ocean. This is the midspring season, and the dragon chooses this moment for its transformations like a person realizing his own desires and overrunning the world. The dragon among animals compares with the hero among people. You, General, have traveled all lakes and rivers. You must know who are the heroes of the present day, and I wish you would say who they are.\"\n\n\"I am just a common dullard. How can I know such things?\"\n\n\"Do not be so modest,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Thanks to your kindly protection I have a post at court. But as to heroes I really do not know who they are.\"\n\n\"You may not have looked upon their faces, but you must have heard their names.\"\n\n\"Yuan Shu of the South of River Huai, with his strong army and abundant resources: Is he one?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\nHis host laughed, \"A rotting skeleton in a graveyard. I shall put him out of the way shortly.\"\n\n\"Well, Yuan Shao then. The highest offices of state have been held in his family for four generations, and his clients are many in the empire. He is firmly posted in Jizhou, and he commands the services of many able people. Surely he is one.\"\n\n\"A bully, but a coward. He is fond of grandiose schemes, but is devoid of decision. He makes for great things but grudges the necessary sacrifice. He loses sight of everything else in view of a little present advantage. He is not one.\"\n\n\"There is Liu Biao of Jingzhou. He is renowned as a man of perfection, whose fame has spread on all sides. Surely he is a hero.\"\n\n\"He is a mere semblance, a man of vain reputation. No, not he.\"\n\n\"Sun Ce is a sturdy sort, the chief of all in the South Land. Is he a hero?\"\n\n\"He has profited by the reputation of his father Sun Jian. Sun Ce is not a real hero.\"\n\n\"What of Liu Zhang of Yizhou?\"\n\n\"Though he is of the reigning family, he is nothing more than a watch dog. How could you make a hero of him?\"\n\n\"What about Zhang Xiu, Zhang Lu, Han Sui, and all those leaders?\"\n\nCao Cao clapped his hands and laughed very loudly, saying, \"Paltry people like them are not worth mentioning.\"\n\n\"With these exceptions I really know none.\"\n\n\"Now heroes are the ones who cherish lofty designs in their bosoms and have plans to achieve them. They have all-embracing schemes, and the whole world is at their mercy.\"\n\n\"Who is such a person?\" said Liu Bei.\n\nCao Cao pointed his finger first at his guest and then at himself, saying, \"The only heroes in the world are you and I.\"\n\nLiu Bei gasped, and the spoon and chopsticks rattled to the floor. Now just at that moment the storm burst with a tremendous peal of thunder and rush of rain.\n\nLiu Bei stooped down to recover the fallen articles, saying, \"What a shock! And it was quite close.\"\n\n\"What! Are you afraid of thunder?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"The Sage One paled at a sudden peal of thunder or fierce gust of wind. Why should one not fear?\"\n\nThus he glossed over the real fact, that it was the words he had heard that had so startled him.\n\n\u2003Constrained to lodge in a tiger's lair,\n\n\u2003He played a waiting part,\n\n\u2003But when Cao Cao talked of breaking humans,\n\n\u2003Then terror gripped his heart.\n\n\u2003But he cleverly used the thunder peal\n\n\u2003As excuse for turning pale;\n\n\u2003O quick to seize occasions thus!\n\n\u2003He surely must prevail.\n\nThe shower had passed, and there appeared two men rushing through the garden, both armed. In spite of the attendants, they forced their way to the pavilion where sat the two friends. They were Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.\n\nThe two brothers had been outside the city at archery practice when Cao Cao's invitation had come so peremptorily. On their return they heard that two officers had arrived and led away Liu Bei to the Prime Minister. They hastened to his palace and were told their brother was with his host in the grounds, and they feared something had happened. So they rushed in.\n\nNow when they saw their brother quietly talking with Cao Cao and enjoying a cup of wine, they took up their usual places and meekly stood waiting.\n\n\"Why did you come?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"We heard that you, Sir, had invited our brother to a wine party, and we came to amuse you with a little sword play,\" said they.\n\n\"This is not a Hongmen Banquet,\" replied Cao Cao. \"What use have we for Xiang Chang and Xiang Ba of old?\"\n\nLiu Bei smiled. The host ordered wine to be served to the two \"Fan Kuais\" to allay their anxiety and, soon after, the three took their leave and returned homeward.\n\n\"We were nearly frightened to death,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nThe story of the dropped chopsticks was told. The two asked what their brother intended by his actions.\n\n\"My learning gardening was to convince Cao Cao of my perfect simplicity and the absence of any ambition. But when he suddenly pointed to me as one of the heroes, I was startled, for I thought he had some suspicions. Happily the thunder at that moment supplied the excuse I wanted.\"\n\n\"Really you are very clever,\" said they.\n\nNext day Cao Cao again invited Liu Bei and while the two were drinking, Man Chong, who had been dispatched to find out what Yuan Shao was doing, came to present his report.\n\nMan Chong said, \"Gongsun Zan has been completely defeated by Yuan Shao.\"\n\n\"Do you know the details? I should like to know how,\" interrupted Liu Bei.\n\n\"They were at war, and Gongsun Zan got the worst of it, so he acted on the defensive, building a high wall about his army and on that erecting a high tower, which he called the Yijing Tower. Therein he placed all his grain, one hundred thousand carts total, and took up his own quarters. His fighting troops passed in and out without ceasing, some going out to give battle, others returning to rest. One of them was surrounded and sent to ask Gongsun Zan to rescue him. Gongsun Zan said, 'If I rescue him, hereafter everyone will want to be helped and will not exert himself.' So Gongsun Zan did not go. This disgusted his soldiers, and many deserted to the enemy so that his army diminished. He sent letters to the capital to crave help, but the messenger was captured. He sent to Zhang Yan to arrange with him for a two-pronged joint attack, and those letters with the plans also fell into Yuan Shao's hands. The plans were adopted by Yuan Shao, who gave the signals agreed upon. Thus Gongsun Zan fell into an ambush, lost heavily, and retreated into the city. There he was besieged, and a subterranean passage was pierced into the tower where he lodged. The tower was set on fire, and Gongsun Zan could not escape. So he slew his wife and little ones and hanged himself. The flames destroyed the bodies of the whole family.\n\n\"Yuan Shao has added the remnants of the vanquished army to his own and so become yet stronger. His brother Yuan Shu in the South of River Huai, however, has become so arrogant and cruel that the people have turned against him. Then Yuan Shu had sent to say he would yield the title of Emperor, which he had assumed, in favor of Yuan Shao. Yuan Shao demanded the Imperial Hereditary Seal also, and Yuan Shu promised to bring it in person. Now Yuan Shu has abandoned River Huai and is about to move to the North of Yellow River. If he succeeded, the two brothers will control adjoining regions and be dangerous.\"\n\nIt was a sad story, and Liu Bei remembered with sorrow that, in the days of success and prosperity, the dead chieftain, Gongsun Zan, had pushed his interest and shown him much kindness. Moreover he was anxious to know the fate of Zhao Zilong.\n\nIn his heart he thought, \"What better chance am I likely to get of setting myself free?\"\n\nSo Liu Bei rose and said to Cao Cao, \"If Yuan Shu goes over to join his brother, he will surely pass through Xuzhou. I beg you to give me an army with which to smite him on the way. That will finish Yuan Shu.\"\n\n\"Memorialize the Emperor tomorrow, and I will give you an army,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSo next day Liu Bei went to an audience, and Cao Cao gave him command of fifty thousand horse and foot, and sent Generals Zhu Ling and Lu Zhao with him.\n\nAt parting with Liu Bei, the Emperor shed tears.\n\nAs soon as Liu Bei reached his lodging, he set about preparations for immediate departure, taking his seal as General and preparing his weapons. Dong Cheng went three miles away from the city to bid him farewell.\n\n\"You must not mind my going. This journey will assuredly help on the scheme,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Keep your mind fixed on that,\" said Dong Cheng, \"and never forget what His Majesty requires of us.\"\n\nThey parted. Presently his brothers asked him why he was in such a hurry to get away.\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I have been a bird in a cage, a fish in a net. This is like the fish regaining the open sea and the bird soaring into the blue sky. I suffered much from the confinement.\"\n\nThen he ordered Zhu Ling and Lu Zhao to march the troops faster.\n\nNow Guo Jia and Cheng Yu had been absent inspecting stores and supplies when Liu Bei left. As soon as they heard of his expedition, they went in to see their master, asking him why he had let Liu Bei go in command of an army.\n\n\"He is going to cut off Yuan Shu,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\n\"Formerly, when he was Imperial Protector of Yuzhou, we recommended that he should be put to death, but you would not hear of it. Now you have given him an army. You have allowed the dragon to reach the sea, the tiger to return to the mountains. What control will you have in future?\"\n\nSo spoke Cheng Yu, and Guo Jia followed in the same strain, saying, \"Even if you would not put him to death, you need not have let him go. As the proverb says, 'Relax opposition for one day and age-long harm ensues.' You must admit the truth of this.\"\n\nCao Cao recognized that these were prudent counsels, so he sent Xu Chu with five hundred horsemen and imperative orders to bring Liu Bei back again.\n\nLiu Bei was marching as rapidly as possible when he noticed a cloud of dust in the rear and remarked to his brothers, \"Surely they are pursuing us.\"\n\nHe halted and made a stockade, and ordered his brothers to be in readiness, one on each flank. Presently the messenger arrived and found himself in the midst of an army ready for battle. Xu Chu dismounted and entered the camp to speak with Liu Bei.\n\n\"Sir, on what business have you come?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"The Prime Minister has sent me to request you to return as he has further matters to discuss with you.\"\n\n\"When a general has once taken the field, even the royal command is of no effect. I bade farewell to the Emperor, I received the Prime Minister's commands, and there can be nothing further to talk about. You may return forthwith and take that as my reply.\"\n\nXu Chu was undecided what action to take. He thought, \"The Prime Minister cherishes a friendship with Liu Bei, and I have no orders to kill. I can only return with this reply and ask further instructions.\"\n\nSo Xu Chu left. When he related what had occurred, Cao Cao still hesitated to take any action.\n\n\"This refusal to return means enmity,\" said Cheng Yu and Guo Jia.\n\n\"Still, two of my people are with him,\" said Cao Cao. \"He will not dare do anything unfriendly, I think. Beside, I sent him and I cannot go back on my own orders.\"\n\n\u2003So Liu Bei was not pursued.\n\n\u2003He took his arms, he fed his steed,\n\n\u2003And fared forth willingly,\n\n\u2003Intent to accomplish his King's behest\n\n\u2003Deep graven on his memory.\n\n\u2003At least he had broken out of his cage,\n\n\u2003He heard not the tiger's roar,\n\n\u2003He had shaken the shackles from his feet,\n\n\u2003As a dragon on high could soar.\n\nAs soon as Ma Teng heard that Liu Bei had set forth, he reported that pressing business called him and marched back to his own region, Xiliang.\n\nWhen Liu Bei reached Xuzhou, the Deputy Imperial Protector, Che Zhou, came to meet him. When the official banquet was over, Sun Qian and Mi Zhu paid their visit to Che Zhou. Then Liu Bei proceeded to his residence to greet his family.\n\nScouts were sent out to see what Yuan Shu was doing. They came back with the intelligence: \"Yuan Shu's arrogance had driven away his generals, Lei Bo and Chen Lan, who had returned to their mountain fastness in Mount Song. His forces thus reduced, he wrote resigning the imperial style he had assumed in favor of his brother Yuan Shao, who at once commanded his presence. Thereupon he packed up the Palace fittings he had made, got the remnants of his army in order, and marched west.\"\n\nWhen Yuan Shu neared Xuzhou, Liu Bei led out his force of fifty thousand soldiers and four generals \u2014 Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhu Ling, and Lu Zhao. Yuan Shu sent out Ji Ling to force a way through. But Zhang Fei opposed him and attacked without a parley. In the tenth bout Zhang Fei cut down Ji Ling. The defeated troops fled in all directions.\n\nThen Yuan Shu came up with his own army. Liu Bei placed Zhu Ling and Lu Zhao in command of the left wing, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei the right wing, and himself in the center, and so met Yuan Shu.\n\nAs soon as the enemy came near, Liu Bei began to abuse him, crying, \"O rebellious one, and wicked, I have a command to destroy you! Yield, then, with good grace and so escape your punishment!\"\n\n\"Base weaver of mats and mean maker of straw sandals! How dare you make light of me?\" replied Yuan Shu, and he gave the signal for an attack.\n\nLiu Bei retired, and his generals from the flanks closed in. They smote the army of Yuan Shu till corpses littered the plain and blood flowed in streams. At the same time Yuan Shu's former generals, Lei Bo and Chen Lan from Mount Song, attacked the baggage train and completed the destruction. Yuan Shu tried to retreat to Shouchun, but Lei Bo and Chen Lan barred the road.\n\nYuan Shu sought refuge in Jiangling, with one thousand troops left of all his army. And these were the weakly ones, able neither to fight nor flee. It was then the height of summer, and their food was nearly exhausted. The whole provision consisted of thirty carts of wheat. This was made over to the soldiers, and the members of his household went hungry. Many died of actual starvation. Yuan Shu could not swallow the coarse food that the soldiers lived on. One day he bade his cook bring him some honeyed water to quench his thirst.\n\n\"There is no water, save that tainted with blood,\" replied the cook. \"Where can I get honeyed water?\"\n\nThis was the last straw. Yuan Shu sat up on his couch and rolled out on the floor with a loud cry. Blood gushed from his mouth and thus he died. It was the sixth month of the fourth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 199).\n\n\u2003The last days of Han approached and weapons clashed in every quarter,\n\n\u2003The misguided Yuan Shu, lost to all sense of honor,\n\n\u2003Forgetful of his forefathers, who had filled the state's highest offices,\n\n\u2003Madly aspired to become himself Emperor,\n\n\u2003Resting his outrageous claim on the possession of the Seal,\n\n\u2003And arrogantly boasting that thus he fulfilled the design of Heaven.\n\n\u2003Alas! Sick unto death he vainly begged for a little honeyed water;\n\n\u2003He died, alone.\n\nYuan Shu being dead, his nephew, Yuan Yin, taking his coffin and his wife and children, sought shelter in Lujiang. There the Magistrate, Xu Liu, slew all the survivors. Among the possessions Xu Liu found the Imperial Hereditary Seal, which he at once took to the capital and presented to Cao Cao, for which service he was made Governor of Gaoling. Since then the Imperial Hereditary Seal belonged to Cao Cao.\n\nWhen Liu Bei heard that Yuan Shu was dead, he prepared a report to the Throne, and sent it to Cao Cao. He sent the two generals deputed by Cao Cao, Zhu Ling and Lu Zhao, back to the capital, keeping the army to defend Xuzhou. He also personally went through the countryside commanding the people to resume their ordinary avocations.\n\nCao Cao was angry when his two officers returned without their man and was going to put them to death. Xun Yu reasoned with him.\n\n\"The power was in Liu Bei's hands, and so these two had no alternative,\" said Xun Yu.\n\nSo they were pardoned.\n\n\"You should instruct Che Zhou, the Deputy Imperial Protector, to try to destroy him,\" said Xun Yu.\n\nAccordingly he sent secret orders to Che Zhou, who took Chen Deng into his confidence and asked his advice.\n\nChen Deng said, \"That is easy. Liu Bei is outside the city, and an ambush in the city gate to attack him on his return from the country will be final. I will attack the escort with arrows from the city walls.\"\n\nChe Zhou agreed to try this.\n\nThen Chen Deng went to his father to tell him. Chen Gui bade him go and warn the intended victim. Chen Deng at once rode away to do so. Before long he met Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, to whom he told his story.\n\nNow Liu Bei was following some distance behind. As soon as Zhang Fei heard of the plot, he wanted to attack the ambush, but Guan Yu proposed another plan.\n\nSaid he, \"Attacking the ambush will be a failure, since we are without the walls. And I think we can compass the death of Che Zhou. In the night we will pretend to be some of Cao Cao's soldiers and entice him out to meet us. We will slay him.\"\n\nZhang Fei approved of the plan. Now the soldiers still had some of Cao Cao's army banners and wore similar armor. About the third watch they came to the city wall and hailed the gate. Those on guard asked who they were. The men replied that they were Zhang Liao's troops sent from the capital. This was told Che Zhou who sent hastily for Chen Deng to ask his advice.\n\n\"If I do not receive them, they will suspect my loyalty,\" said Che Zhou. \"Yet if I go out, I may be victim of a ruse.\"\n\nSo he went up on the wall and said, \"It is too dark to distinguish friends from foes. You must wait till daylight.\"\n\n\"If Liu Bei know our presence, he will attack,\" shouted back the soldiers.\n\nAnd they begged him to let them in. Still Che Zhou hesitated. They shouted louder than ever to open the gate.\n\nPresently Che Zhou girded on his armor, placed himself at the head of one thousand cavalry and went out. He galloped over the bridge, shouting, \"Where is Zhang Liao?\"\n\nThen lights blazed around, and he recognized Guan Yu with his sword drawn.\n\n\"Wretch!\" cried Guan Yu. \"You would plot to slay my brother, would you?\"\n\nChe Zhou was too frightened to make good defense, and he turned to reenter the gate. But as he reached the drawbridge, Chen Deng shot out flights of arrows, wherefore Che Zhou turned aside and galloped along under the wall. But Guan Yu came quickly in pursuit. His sword was raised aloft, and as it came down, Che Zhou fell to the earth.\n\nGuan Yu cut off his head and returned, shouting, \"I have slain the traitor. You others need not fear if you only surrender!\"\n\nThey threw aside their spears and gave in. As soon as the excitement had calmed, Guan Yu took the head to show Liu Bei and told him the story of the plot.\n\n\"But what will Cao Cao think of this?\" said Liu Bei. \"And he may come.\"\n\n\"If he does, we can meet him,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nBut Liu Bei was grieved beyond measure. When he entered the city, the elders of the people knelt in the road to welcome him. When he reached his residence, he found that Zhang Fei had already exterminated the family of Che Zhou.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"We have slain one of Cao Cao's best officers, and how will he stand that?\"\n\n\"Never mind!\" cried Chen Deng. \"I have a plan.\"\n\n\u2003Just from grave danger extricated,\n\n\u2003A looming war must be placated." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Yuan Shao And Cao Cao Both Take The Field; Guan Yu And Zhang Fei Captures Two Generals.\n\nThis was the plan Chen Deng proposed to Liu Bei, \"Yuan Shao is Cao Cao's terror. He is strongly posted in an extensive territory of four regions \u2014 Jizhou, Qingzhou, Youzhou, and Bingzhou \u2014 with one million fighting soldiers and numerous able officers. Write letters and pray him rescue you.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"But we have never had any dealings with each other, and he is unlikely to do such a thing for a person who has just destroyed his brother.\"\n\n\"There is someone here whose family have been on intimate terms with the Yuans for a hundred years. Yuan Shao would surely come, if he wrote.\"\n\n\"And who is this?\"\n\n\"A man you know well and respect greatly. Can you not guess?\"\n\n\"You surely mean Zheng Xuan,\" said Liu Bei suddenly.\n\n\"That is he,\" said Chen Deng smiling.\n\nNow Zheng Xuan was a student and a man of great talent, who had long studied under the famed teacher Ma Rong, whose knowledge of the Book of Odes was universally recognized. Whenever Ma Rong lectured, he let fall a curtain behind which were a circle of singing girls. The students were assembled in front of this curtain. Zheng Xuan attended these lectures for three years and never once let his eyes wander to the curtain.\n\nNaturally the master admired his pupil. After Zheng Xuan had finished his studies and gone home, Ma Rong praised him to the others, saying, \"Only one man has penetrated the inner meaning of my instructions, and that one is Zheng Xuan.\"\n\nIn Zheng Xuan's household, the waiting maids were familiar with the Book of Odes. Once one of the maids opposed Zheng Xuan's wishes, so as punishment she was made to kneel in front of the steps. Another girl made fun of her, quoting from an ode:\n\n\"What are you doing there in the mire?\"\n\nThe kneeling girl capped the verse from another ode, quoted she:\n\n\u2003\"That was but a simple word I said,\n\n\u2003Yet brought it wrath upon my head.\"\n\nSuch was the family in which Zheng Xuan had been born. In the reign of the Emperor Huan, he rose to the rank of Chair of the Secretariat. But when the Ten Eunuchs began to control the government, he gave up office and retired into the country to Xuzhou. Liu Bei had known him before, had consulted him on many occasions, and greatly respected him.\n\nLiu Bei was glad that he had remembered this man, and without loss of time, in company with Chen Deng, he went to Zheng Xuan's house to ask him to draft this letter, which Zheng Xuan generously consented to do.\n\nSun Qian was entrusted with the task of delivery and set out at once. Yuan Shao read it and considered the matter long before speaking.\n\n\"Liu Bei destroyed my brother, and I ought not to help him, but out of consideration for the writer of this letter I must.\"\n\nThereupon Yuan Shao assembled his officers to consider an attack upon Cao Cao.\n\nAdviser Tian Feng said, \"Do not raise an army. The people are worn out, and the granaries are empty with these constant wars. Let us rather report the recent victory of Gongsun Zan to the Throne. If that does not reach the Emperor, then memorialize that Cao Cao is hindering the government. Then raise an army, occupy Liyang, assemble a Yellow River fleet in Henan, prepare weapons, send out your various divisions, and within three years you will win all round.\"\n\nAdviser Shen Pei replied, \"I do not agree. The military genius of our illustrious lord having overcome the hordes of the north, to dispose of Cao Cao is as simple as turning one's hand. It is not a matter of months.\"\n\nAdviser Ju Shou said, \"Victory is not always to the many. Cao Cao's discipline is excellent; his soldiers are brave and well drilled. He will not sit down quietly waiting to be surrounded as Gongsun Zan did. Now you abandon the intention to inform the Throne of our success, which I find a good plan, but you intend to send out an army without any valid excuse. Our lord should not do that.\"\n\nThen followed adviser Guo Tu, saying, \"You are wrong. No expedition against Cao Cao can lack excuse. But if our master would take the chance now offering itself of coming into his own, he will accede to the request in the letter of Zheng Xuan and ally himself with Liu Bei for the destruction of Cao Cao. This would win the approval of Heaven and the affections of the people, a double blessing.\"\n\nThus the four advisers differed and wrangled, and Yuan Shao could not decide which to follow.\n\nThen there came two others, Xu You and Xun Shen, and, seeing them, Yuan Shao said, \"You two have wide experience, how would you decide?\"\n\nThe two made their obeisance, and Yuan Shao said, \"A letter from Zheng Xuan the Chair has arrived, counseling me to support Liu Bei in an attack on Cao Cao. Now am I to send an army or not send an army?\"\n\nThey both cried with one voice, \"Send! Your armies are numerous enough and strong enough. You will destroy a traitor and help the dynasty.\"\n\n\"Your words just express my desire,\" said Yuan Shao and thenceforward the discussion turned on the expedition.\n\nFirst, Liu Bei's legate, Sun Qian, was sent back with Yuan Shao's consent and instructions for Liu Bei to make ready to cooperate. Second, Yuan Shao assigned Shen Pei and Peng Ji as Commanding Generals; Tian Feng, Xun Shen, and Xu You as Military Advisers; Yan Liang and Wen Chou as Generals. The army was to be composed of three hundred thousand, horse and foot in equal numbers. They were to march on Liyang.\n\nWhen the arrangements were complete, Guo Tu went to his chief, saying, \"In order to manifest the righteousness of your attack on Cao Cao, it would be well to issue a manifesto with a summary of his various crimes.\"\n\nYuan Shao approved of this, and Chen Lin, well known as a scholar, was entrusted to compose such a document. Chen Lin had been the Court Secretary in the reign of the late Emperor Ling. When Dong Zhuo unseated Regent Marshal He Jin, Chen Lin sought safety in Jizhou. This is the manifesto:\n\n\"A perspicacious ruler wisely provides against political vicissitudes; a loyal minister carefully foresees the difficulties in the assertion of authority. Wherefore a person of unusual parts precedes an extraordinary situation, and of such a person the achievements will be extraordinary. For indeed the ordinary person is quite unequal to an extraordinary situation.\n\n\"In former days, after having gained ascendancy over a weakling emperor of the powerful Qin Dynasty, Prime Minister Zhao Gao wielded the whole authority of the Throne, overruling the government. All dignity and fortune came through him, and his contemporaries were restrained so that none dared to speak openly. Slowly but surely evolved the tragedy of the Wangyi Palace, when the Emperor was slain and the Imperial Tablets perished in the flames. Zhao Gao, the author of these crimes, has ever since been held up to obloquy as the arch example of an evil doer.\n\n\"In the later days of Empress Lu of the Hans, after the death of the Supreme Ancestor, the world saw Lu Chan and Lu Lu, brothers of the Empress and fellows in wickedness, monopolizing the powers of government. Within the capital, they commanded two armies, and without they ruled the feudal states of Liang and Zhao. They arbitrarily controlled all state affairs and decided all questions in the council chamber and the court. This dominance of the base and declension of the noble continued till the hearts of the people grew cold within them.\n\n\"Thereupon Zhou Bo, Lord of Jiang, and Liu Zhan, Lord of Zhuxu, asserted their dignity and let loose their wrath. They destroyed the contumacious ministers and restored their ruler to his royal state. Thus they enabled the kingly way to be reestablished and the glory to be manifested. Here are two instances where ministers asserted their authority.\n\n\"This Cao Cao, now Minister of Works, forsooth, had for ancestor a certain eunuch named Cao Teng, fitting companion of Xu Huan and Zuo Guan. All three were prodigies of wickedness and insatiably avaricious and, let loose on the world, they hindered ethical progress and preyed upon the populace. This Cao Teng begged for and adopted Cao Cao's father who, by wholesale bribery, wagons of gold and cartloads of jewels presented at the gates of the influential, contrived to sneak his way into considerable office where he could subvert authority. Thus Cao Cao is the depraved bantling of a monstrous excrescence, devoid of all virtue in himself, ferocious and cunning, delighting in disorder and reveling in public calamity.\n\n\"Now I, Yuan Shao, a man of war, have mustered my armies and displayed my might that I may sweep away and destroy the evil opponents of government. I have already had to deal with Dong Zhuo, the ruffian who invaded the official circle and wrested the government. At that time I grasped my sword and beat the drums to restore order in the east. I assembled warriors, selected the best, and took them into my service. In this matter I came into relations with this Cao Cao and conferred with him to further my scheme. I gave him command of a subordinate force and looked to him to render such petty service as he was equal to. I suffered his stupidities and condoned his shortcomings, his rash attacks and facile retreats, his losses and shameful defeats, his repeated destruction of whole armies. Again and again I sent him more troops and filled the gaps in his depleted ranks. I even addressed a memorial to the Throne for him to be appointed Imperial Protector of Yanzhou. I made him feel as he were a tiger. I added to his honors and increased his authority, hoping that eventually he would justify himself by a victory against Dong Zhuo such as Qin used Meng Ming against Jin.\n\n\"But Cao Cao availed himself of the opportunity to overstep all bounds, to give free rein to violence and evil. He stripped the common people, outraged the good, and injured the virtuous. Bian Rang, Governor of Jiujiang, was a man of conspicuous talent and of world-wide reputation. He was honest in speech and correct in demeanor. He spoke without flattery. Cao Cao put him to death and his head was exposed, and his family utterly destroyed. From that day to this scholars have deeply mourned, and popular resentment has steadily grown. One person raised his arm in anger, and the whole countryside followed him. Whereupon Cao Cao was smitten at Xuzhou, and his territory was snatched by Lu Bu. He fled eastward without shelter or refuge.\n\n\"My policy is a strong trunk and weak branches, a commanding central government and obedient feudal lords. Also I am no partisan. Therefore I again raised my banners, donned my armor, and moved forward to attack. My drums rolled for an assault on Lu Bu, and his multitudes incontinently fled. I saved Cao Cao from destruction and restored him to a position of authority. Wherein I must confess to showing no kindness to the people of Yanzhou, although it was a great matter for Cao Cao.\n\n\"Later it happened that the imperial cortege moved east, and a horde of rebels of Dong Zhuo's faction rose and attacked. The course of government was hindered. At that moment my territory was threatened from the north, and I could not leave it. Wherefore I sent one of my officers, Xu Xun, to Cao Cao to see to the repair of the dynastic temples and the protection of the youthful sovereign. Thereupon Cao Cao gave the rein to his inclinations. He arbitrarily ordered the removal of the court to Xuchang. He brought shame upon the Ruling House and subverted the laws. He engrossed the chairmanship of the three highest offices and monopolized the control of the administration. Offices and rewards were conferred according to his will; punishment was at his word. He glorified whole families of those he loved; he exterminated whole clans of those he hated. Open critics were executed; secret opponents were assassinated. Officials locked their lips; wayfarers only exchanged glances. Chairs of boards recorded levies, and every government official held a sinecure.\n\n\"The late Yang Biao, a man who had filled two of the highest offices of state as Chairs of two boards, because of some petty grudge was, though guiltless, charged with a crime. He was beaten and suffered every form of cruelty. This arbitrary and impulsive act was a flagrant disregard of constitutional rules.\n\n\"Another victim was the Counselor Zhao Yan. He was faithful in remonstrance, honest in speech, endowed with the highest principles of rectitude. He was listened to at court. His words carried enough weight with the Emperor to cause him to modify his intention and confer reward for outspokenness. Desirous of diverting all power into his own hands and stifle all criticism, Cao Cao presumed to arrest and put to death this censor, in defiance of all legal procedures.\n\n\"Another evil deed was the destruction of the tomb of Prince Xiao of Liang, the brother of the late Emperor. His tomb should certainly have been respected, even its mulberries and sweetgum trees, its cypresses and its pines. Cao Cao led soldiers to the cemetery and stood by while it was desecrated, the coffin destroyed and the poor corpse exposed. They stole the gold and jewels of the dead. This deed brought tears to the eyes of the Emperor and rent the hearts of all people. Cao Cao also appointed new offices \u2014 Commander Who Opens Grave Mounds and General Who Seeks for Gold \u2014 whose tracks were marked by desecrated graves and exhumed bodies. Indeed, while assuming the position of the highest officer of state, he indulged the inclination of a bandit, polluting the empire, oppressing the people, a bane to gods and humans.\n\n\"He added to this by setting up minute and vexatious prohibitions so that there were nets and snares spread in every pathway, traps and pitfalls laid in every road. A hand raised was caught in a net, a foot advanced was taken in an entanglement. Wherefore the people of his regions, Yanzhou and Yuzhou, waxed desperate and the inhabitants of the metropolis groaned and murmured in anger.\n\n\u2003\"Read down the names through all the years,\n\n\u2003Of ministers that all people curse,\n\n\u2003For greed and cruelty and lust,\n\n\u2003Than Cao Cao you will not find a worse.\n\n\"I have investigated the cases of evil deeds in the regions, but I have been unable to reform him. I have given him repeated opportunities hoping that he would repent. But he has the heart of a wolf, the nature of a wild beast. He nourishes evil in his bosom and desires to pull down the pillars of the state, to weaken the House of Han, to destroy the loyal and true, and to stand himself conspicuous as the chiefest of criminals.\n\n\"Formerly, when I attacked the north, Gongsun Zan, that obstinate bandit and perverse brave, resisted my might for a year. Before Gongsun Zan could be destroyed, this Cao Cao wrote to him that, under the pretense of assisting my loyal armies, he would covertly lead them to destruction. The plot was discovered through his messengers, and Gongsun Zan also perished. This blunted Cao Cao's ardor, and his plans failed.\n\n\"Now he is camped at the Ao Granaries, with the Yellow River to strengthen his position. Like the mantis in the story, who threatened the chariot with its forelegs, he thinks himself terrible. But with the dignity and prestige of Han to support me, I confront the whole world. I have spearmen by millions, horsemen by hundreds of thousands, fierce and vigorous warriors strong as Chong Huang and Wu Huo, those heroes of antiquity. I have enlisted expert archers and strong bowmen. In Bingzhou my armies have crossed the Taihang Range, and in Qingzhou they have forded River Ji and River Ta. They have coasted down the Yellow River to attack his van, and from Jingzhou the armies of Liu Biao have descended to Wancheng and Wangye to smite his rearguard. Thunder-like in the weight of their march, tiger-like in the alertness of their advance, they are as flames let loose among light grass, as the blue ocean poured on glowing embers. Is there any hope that he escape destruction?\n\n\"Of the hordes of Cao Cao, those who can fight are from the north or from other camps, and they all desire to return home. They weep whenever they look to the north. The others belong to Yanzhou or Yuzhou, being remnants of the armies of Lu Bu and Zhang Yang. Beaten, stern necessity forced them to accept service, but they take it only as a temporary expedient. They who have been wounded hate each other. If I give the signal to return and send my drums to the mountain tops, and wave the white flag to show them they may surrender, they will melt away like dew before the sun, and no blood will be shed. The victory will be mine.\n\n\"Now the Hans are failing and the bonds of empire are relaxed. The sacred dynasty has no supporter, the ministers are not strong enough to cope with the difficulties. Within the capital the responsible ministers are crestfallen and helpless. There is no one to rely upon. Such loyal and high principled people as are left are browbeaten by a tyrannical minister. How can they manifest their virtue?\n\n\"Cao Cao has surrounded the Palace with seven hundred veterans, the ostensible object being to guard the Emperor, but the covert design being to hold him prisoner. I fear this is but the first step in usurpation, and so I take my part. Now is the time for loyal ministers to sacrifice their lives, the opportunity for officers to perform meritorious deeds. Can I fail to urge you?\n\n\"Cao Cao has forged commands to himself to undertake the control of government affairs and, in the name of the state, sends out calls for military assistance. I fear lest distant regions may obey his behest and send troops to help him, to the detriment of the multitude and their everlasting shame. No wise person will do so.\n\n\"The forces of four regions \u2014 Bingzhou, Jizhou, Qingzhou, and Youzhou \u2014 are moving out simultaneously. When this call reaches Jingzhou, you will see their forces cooperate with those of Liu Biao. All regions and counties ought to organize volunteers and set them along their borders to demonstrate their force and prove their loyal support of the dynasty. Will not this be rendering extraordinary service?\n\n\"The rank of lordship, with feudal rights over five thousand households and a money reward of five millions, will be the reward of the one who brings the head of Cao Cao. No questions will be asked of those who surrender. I publish abroad this notice of my bounty and the rewards offered that you may realize that the dynasty is in real danger.\"\n\nYuan Shao read this effusion with great joy. He at once ordered copies to be posted everywhere, in towns and cities, at gates, tax stations, ferries, and passes. Copies found their way to the capital, and one got into Cao Cao's palace. That day he happened to be in bed with a bad headache. The servants took the paper to the sick man's room. He read it and was frightened from the tips of his hair to the marrow of his very bones. He broke out into a cold perspiration, and his headache vanished.\n\nCao Cao bounded out of bed and said to Cao Hong, \"Who wrote this?\"\n\n\"They say it is Chen Lin's brush,\" replied he.\n\nCao Cao laughed, \"They have the literary gift; they would rather have the military too to back it up. This fellow may be a very elegant writer, but what if Yuan Shao's fighting capacity falls short?\"\n\nCao Cao called his advisers together to consider the next move.\n\nKong Rong heard of the summons and went to Cao Cao, saying, \"You should not fight with Yuan Shao: He is too strong. Make peace.\"\n\nXun Yu said, \"He is despicable. Do not make peace.\"\n\nKong Rong replied, \"His land is wide and his people strong. He has many skillful strategists like Guo Tu, Xu You, Peng Ji, and Shen Pei; loyal leaders like Tian Feng and Ju Shou; and formidable generals like Yan Liang and Wen Chou; able commanders like Gao Lan, Zhang He, Han Meng, and Chunyu Qiong. You cannot say he is despicable.\"\n\nXun Yu laughed, saying, \"His army is a rabble. One general, Tian Feng, is bold but treacherous; another, Xu You, is greedy and ignorant; Shen Pei is devoted but stupid; Peng Ji is steady but useless. And these four of such different temperaments, mutually incompatible, will make for confusion rather than efficiency. The brave Yan Liang and Wen Chou are worthless and can be disposed of in the first battle; and the others such as Gao Lan, Zhang He, Han Meng, and Chunyu Qiong are poor, rough stuff. What is the use even of their hundred thousands?\"\n\nKong Rong was silent, and Cao Cao smiled.\n\n\"They are even as Xun Yu describes,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen Cao Cao issued orders. Generals Liu Dai and Wang Zhong were to lead an army of fifty thousand troops, displaying the Prime Minister's banners, and march against Xuzhou to attack Liu Bei.\n\nThis Liu Dai had been Imperial Protector of Yanzhou but had surrendered to Cao Cao and entered Cao Cao's service after the fall of his region. Cao Cao had given him a rank as Supernumerary Leader and now was disposed to make use of him.\n\nCao Cao himself took command of a large army of two hundred thousand troops for a simultaneous attack on Yuan Shao at Liyang.\n\nAdviser Cheng Yu said, \"The two Liu Dai and Wang Zhong sent against Liu Bei are unequal to their task.\"\n\n\"I know,\" said Cao Cao. \"They are not meant to fight Liu Bei. It is merely a feint. They have orders not to make any real attack till I have overcome Yuan Shao. Then Liu Bei will be next.\"\n\nLiu Dai and Wang Zhong went their way, and Cao Cao marched out his grand army, which came into touch with the enemy, then thirty miles distant, at Liyang. Both sides made fortified camps and waited watching each other. This went on for two months of the autumn.\n\nThere was dissension in Yuan Shao's camp. Xu You was at enmity with his colleague, Shen Pei, who was in commanding position; and the strategist Ju Shou resented the rejection of his plan. So they would not attack. Yuan Shao also could not make up his mind.\n\nTired of this state of inaction, Cao Cao then gave orders to his commanders: Zang Ba was to continue the pressure on Qingzhou and Xuzhou; Yu Jin and Li Dian to deploy troops along the Yellow River; Cao Ren to quarter the main force at Guandu. Then Cao Cao with an army marched back to Capital Xuchang.\n\nThe five legions sent against Liu Bei went into camp thirty-five miles from Xuzhou. The camp made an imposing display of the banners of the Prime Minister, but no attacks followed. Their spies were very busy north of the river to get news of Cao Cao's movement. On the defensive side, Liu Bei, as he was uncertain of the strength of the force against him, dared not move.\n\nSuddenly orders came for the Cao Cao's army to attack, and then discord showed itself.\n\nLiu Dai said, \"The Prime Minister orders an attack: You advance.\"\n\nWang Zhong replied, \"You were named first.\"\n\n\"I am the Commander-in-Chief. It is not my place to go first.\"\n\n\"I will go with you in joint command,\" said Wang Zhong.\n\n\"Let us cast lots, and he upon whom the lot falls must go,\" said Liu Dai.\n\nThey drew lots, and it fell to Wang Zhong, who advanced toward Xuzhou with half the force.\n\nWhen Liu Bei heard of the threatened attack, he called Chen Deng to consult.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"There is dissension in Yuan Shao's camp at Liyang, so they do not advance. We do not know where Cao Cao is, but his own banner is not displayed in his Liyang's camp. Why then is it shown here?\"\n\nChen Deng replied, \"His tricks take a hundred forms. It must be that he regards the north as more important and has gone there to look after its defense. He dares not show his flag there, and I feel sure it is only meant to mislead us. He is not here.\"\n\nLiu Bei then asked whether one of his brothers would find out the truth, and Zhang Fei volunteered to go.\n\n\"I fear you are unsuited for this,\" said Liu Bei. \"You are too impetuous.\"\n\n\"If Cao Cao is there, I will haul him over here,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Let me go first and find out,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"If you go, I shall feel more at ease,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSo Guan Yu set out with three thousand soldiers to reconnoiter. It was then early winter, and snow was falling from a gloomy sky. They marched regardless of the snow and came near Wang Zhong's camp with arms all ready to attack. Guan Yu summoned Wang Zhong to a parley.\n\n\"The Prime Minister is here. Why do you not surrender?\" said Wang Zhong.\n\n\"Beg him to come to the front, for I would speak with him,\" replied Guan Yu.\n\n\"Is he likely to come out to see such as you,\" said Wang Zhong.\n\nGuan Yu angrily dashed forward, and Wang Zhong set his spear to meet him. Guan Yu rode till he came close to his antagonist, then suddenly wheeled away. Wang Zhong went after him and followed up a slope. Just as they passed the crest, Guan Yu suddenly wheeled again, shouted, and came on flourishing the mighty sword. Wang Zhong could not withstand that and fled. But Guan Yu, changing the huge sword to his left hand, with his right laid hold of his victim by the straps of his breastplate, lifted him out of the saddle, and rode away to his own lines with the captive laid across the pommel of his saddle. Wang Zhong's army scattered.\n\nThe captive was sent to Xuzhou, where he was summoned into the presence of Liu Bei.\n\n\"Who are you? What office do you hold? How dare you falsely display the ensigns of the Prime Minister?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"What do you mean by falsely when I simply obeyed my orders?\" said Wang Zhong. \"My master wanted to produce the impression that he was present. Really he was not there.\"\n\nLiu Bei treated him kindly, giving him food and clothing, but put him in prison till his colleague could be captured.\n\nGuan Yu said to Liu Bei, \"I knew you had peaceful intentions in your mind; therefore, I captured Wang Zhong instead of slaying him.\"\n\n\"I was afraid of Zhang Fei's hasty and impulsive temper,\" said Liu Bei. \"He would have slain this man. So I could not send him. There is no advantage in killing people of this sort, and while alive they are often useful in amicable settlements.\"\n\nHere Zhang Fei said, \"You have got this Wang Zhong; now I will go and get the other man.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" said Liu Bei. \"Liu Dai was once Imperial Protector of Yanzhou, and he was one of the nobles who met at Tiger Trap Pass to destroy Dong Zhuo. He is not to be despised.\"\n\n\"I do not think him worth talking about so much. I will bring him in alive just as Second Brother did this other.\"\n\n\"I fear that if his life be lost, it may upset our designs,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If I kill him, I will forfeit my own life,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nSo he was given three thousand soldiers and went off quickly.\n\nThe capture of his colleague made Liu Dai careful. He strengthened his defenses and kept behind them. He took no notice of the daily challenges and continual insults which began with Zhang Fei's arrival.\n\nAfter some days Zhang Fei evolved a ruse. He issued orders to prepare to rush the enemy's camp at night, but he himself spent the day drinking. Pretending to be very intoxicated, he held a court-martial, and one soldier was severely flogged for a breach of discipline.\n\nThe man was left bound in the midst of the camp, Zhang Fei saying, \"Wait till I am ready to start tonight: You shall be sacrificed to the flag.\"\n\nAt the same time he gave secret orders to the custodians to let the man escape. The man found his opportunity, crept out of camp, and went over to the enemy, to whom he betrayed the plan of a night attack. As the man bore signs of savage punishment, Liu Dai was the more disposed to credit his desertion and tale. So Liu Dai made his arrangements, putting the greater part of his troops in ambush outside his camp so that it was empty.\n\nThat night, having divided his army into three parties, Zhang Fei went to attack the camp. A few men were ordered to advance directly, dash in and set fire going. Two larger bodies of troops were to go round to the rear of the camp and attack when they saw the fire well started. At the third watch, Zhang Fei, with his veterans, went to cut off Liu Dai's road to the rear.\n\nThe thirty men told off to start a conflagration made their way into the camp and were successful. When the flames arose, the ambushing troops rushed out but only to find themselves attacked on both sides. This confused them, and as they knew nothing of the number of their assailants, they were panic stricken and scattered.\n\nLiu Dai, with a company of footmen got clear of the fight and fled, but he went straight toward Zhang Fei. Escape was impossible, and the two men rode up each to attack the other. Zhang Fei captured his opponent, and the men surrendered. Zhang Fei sent news of this success to his brothers.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Hitherto Zhang Fei has been rather violent, but this time he has acted wisely, and I am very pleased.\"\n\nThey rode out to welcome Zhang Fei.\n\n\"You said I was too rough. How now?\" said Zhang Fei to his brothers.\n\n\"If I had not put you on your mettle, you would not have evolved this stratagem,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nZhang Fei laughed. Then appeared the captive Liu Dai, in bonds.\n\nLiu Bei at once dismounted and loosed the cords, saying, \"My young brother was rather hasty, but you must pardon him.\"\n\nSo Liu Dai was freed. He was taken into the city, his colleague was released, and both were cared for.\n\nLiu Bei said to them, \"I could not help putting Deputy Imperial Protector Che Zhou to death when he tried to kill me, but Cao Cao took it as disaffection and sent you two generals to punish me. I have received much kindness from him and certainly would not show ingratitude by killing you. I wish you to speak for me and explain when you get back.\"\n\n\"We are deeply grateful that you spare our lives, and we will certainly do so in gratitude for what our wives and children owe you.\"\n\nNext day the two leaders and their army were allowed to depart unscathed. But before they had got three miles from the boundary, they heard a mighty shouting and there appeared Zhang Fei barring the road.\n\n\"My brother made a mistake in letting you go. He did not understand. How could he give freedom to two rebels?\"\n\nThis made the two men quake with fear, but as the fierce eyed warrior with uplifted sword was bearing down upon them, they heard another man galloping up and shouting, \"Do not behave so disgracefully!\"\n\nThe newcomer was Guan Yu, and his appearance relieved the unhappy men of all fear.\n\n\"Why do you stop them since our brother set them free?\" cried Guan Yu.\n\n\"If they are let go today, they will surely come back,\" cried Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Wait till they do, then you may kill them,\" replied Guan Yu.\n\nThe two leaders with one voice cried, \"Even if the Prime Minister slay our whole clans, we will never come again. We pray you pardon us.\"\n\nSaid Zhang Fei, \"If Cao Cao himself had come, I would have slain him. Not a breastplate should have gone back. But for this time I leave you your heads.\"\n\nClapping their hands to their heads the two men scuttled off while the two brothers returned to the city.\n\n\"Cao Cao will certainly come,\" said Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.\n\nSun Qian said, \"This is not a city that can hold out for long. We should send part of our forces to Xiaopei and guard Xiapi as a corner stone of our position.\"\n\nLiu Bei agreed and told off Guan Yu to guard Xiapi whither he also sent his two wives, Lady Gan and Lady Mi. The former was a native of Xiapi; the latter was Mi Zhu's younger sister.\n\nSun Qian, Jian Yong, Mi Zhu, and Mi Fang were left to defend Xuzhou, and Liu Bei with Zhang Fei went to Xiaopei.\n\nThe two released leaders, Liu Dai and Wang Zhong, hastened home to Cao Cao and explained to him that Liu Bei was not disaffected.\n\nBut their master was exceeding angry with them, crying, \"You shameful traitors, what use are you?\"\n\nHe roared to the guards to take them away to instant execution.\n\n\u2003How can a hare or a deer expect\n\n\u2003To conquer in tiger strife?\n\n\u2003Minnows and shrimps that with dragons contend\n\n\u2003Already have done with life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Mi Heng Slips His Garment And Rails At Traitors; Ji Ping Pledges To Kill The Prime Minister.\n\nAt the close of the last chapter the two unsuccessful leaders, Liu Dai and Wang Zhong, were in danger of death.\n\nHowever, Kong Rong remonstrated with Cao Cao, saying, \"You knew these two were no match for Liu Bei, and if you put them to death because they failed, you will lose the hearts of your people.\"\n\nWherefore the death sentence was not executed, but they were deprived of rank and status.\n\nCao Cao next proposed to lead an army himself to attack Liu Bei, but Kong Rong advised, \"The weather is too inclement. We must wait the return of spring. In the interval, we better use the time to arrange peace with Zhang Xiu and Liu Biao, before launching an expedition against Xuzhou.\"\n\nWherefore Liu Ye was sent to Zhang Xiu and in due time reached Xiangyang. He first had an interview with Jia Xu, Zhang Xiu's adviser, whereat he dwelt upon Cao Cao's virtues so that Jia Xu was impressed. Jia Xu kept Liu Ye as a guest and undertook to smooth his way.\n\nSoon after Liu Ye saw Zhang Xiu and spoke of the advantages of coming to terms with Cao Cao. While the discussion was in progress, a messenger from Yuan Shao was announced, and he was called in. He presented letters and, when they also proposed terms of peace, Jia Xu asked what their success had been lately against Cao Cao.\n\n\"The war had ceased for the moment on account of the winter,\" replied the messenger. \"As you, General, and Liu Biao are both well reputed officers of the state, I have been sent to request your help.\"\n\nJia Xu laughed, \"You can return to your master and say that as he could not brook rivalry of his brother, he certainly would be sorely put to it with that of all the officers of the state.\"\n\nThe letter was torn into fragments before the messenger's face, and he was angrily bidden be gone.\n\n\"But his master, Yuan Shao, is stronger than Cao Cao,\" protested Zhang Xiu. \"You have torn up his letter and are dismissing his man. What shall we say about such an insult should Yuan Shao come?\"\n\n\"Better join hands with Cao Cao,\" said Jia Xu.\n\n\"But there is still between us an unavenged enmity. We could not suffer each other.\"\n\nJia Xu said, \"There are three advantages in joining hands with Cao Cao. First, he has a command from the Emperor to restore peace. Second, as Yuan Shao is so strong, our little help to him will be despised, while we shall loom large and be well treated by Cao Cao. Third, Cao Cao is going to be Chief of the Feudal Lords, and he will ignore all private feuds in order to show his magnanimity to all the world. I hope, General, you will see these things clearly and hesitate no longer.\"\n\nZhang Xiu, now convinced, became more reasonable and recalled Liu Ye, who, at the interview, extolled the many virtues of his master.\n\n\"If the Prime Minister had any thought of the old quarrel, he would hardly have sent me to make friendly engagements, would he?\" said Liu Ye at the last.\n\nSo Zhang Xiu and his adviser proceeded to the capital where formal submission was made. At the interview Zhang Xiu bowed low at the steps, but Cao Cao, hastening forward, took him by the hand and raised him, saying, \"Forget that little fault of mine, I pray you, General!\"\n\nZhang Xiu received the title of General Who Possesses Prowess, and Jia Xu was appointed Counselor.\n\nCao Cao then directed his secretaries to draft letters inviting the support of Liu Biao.\n\nJia Xu said, \"Liu Biao loves to have to do with famous people. If some famous scholar should be sent to him, he would submit forthwith.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao inquired of Xun You who was the best person to go as a messenger, and he recommended Kong Rong. Cao Cao agreed and sent Xun You to speak with this officer.\n\nXun You went to Kong Rong, saying, \"A scholar of reputation is required to aid as a messenger of state. Can you undertake this task?\"\n\nKong Rong replied, \"I have a certain friend, Mi Heng, whose talents are ten times mine. He ought to be constantly at the court of the Emperor and not merely be sent as a state messenger. I will recommend him to the Emperor.\"\n\nSo Kong Rong wrote the following memorial:\n\n\"In ancient days, when the great waters were abroad, the emperor pondered over their regulation and he sought out people of talent from all directions. In old time, when Emperor Wu of the Hans desired to enlarge his borders, crowds of scholars responded to his call.\n\n\"Intelligent and holy, Your Majesty ascended the throne. You have fallen upon evil days, but have been diligent, modest, and untiring in your efforts. Now the great mountains have sent forth spirits, and people of genius appear.\n\n\"I, your humble servant, know of a certain simple scholar, Mi Heng by name, of Pingyuan, a young man of twenty-four. His moral character is excellent, his talents eminent. As a youth he took a high place in study and penetrated the most secret arcane of learning. What he glanced at he could repeat, what he heard once he never forgot. He is naturally high principled, and his thoughts are divine. Sang Hongyang's mental calculations and Zhang Anshi's memorial feats compared with Mi Heng's powers are no longer wonderful. Loyal, sincere, correct, and straight-forward, his ambition is unsullied. He regards the good with trembling respect; he detests the evil with uncompromising hatred. Ren Zuo in unflinching candor, Shi Yu in severe rectitude, never surpassed him.\n\n\"Hundreds of hawks are not worth one osprey. If Mi Heng be given a court appointment, notable results must follow. Ready in debate, rapid in utterance, his overwhelming intelligence wells up in profusion. In the solution of doubts and the unraveling of difficulties he has no peer.\n\n\"In former days of Han, Jia Yi begged to be sent on trial to a vassal state for the control of the Xiongnu tribespeople; Zhong Jun offered to bring back the Prince of Nanyue to do homage to the emperor. The generous conduct of these youths has been much admired.\n\n\"In our day Lu Cui and Yan Xiang, remarkable for their talents, have been appointed among the secretaries. And Mi Heng is no less capable. Should he be got, then all possibilities may be realized: The dragon may curvet through the celestial streets and soar along the Milky Way; fame will extend to the poles of the universe and hang in the firmament with rainbow glory. He would be the glory of all the present Ministers and enhance the majesty of the Palace itself. The Music will acquire new beauties, and the Palace will contain an excellent treasure. People like Mi Heng are but few. As in the recitation of 'Ji Chu Songs' and the singing of 'Yang E Poems', the most skillful performers are sought; and such fleet horses as 'Fei Tu Broncos' and 'Yao Niao Mustangs' were looked for by the famous judges of horses, Wang Liang and Bo Le.\n\n\"So I, the humble one, dare not conceal this man. Your Majesty is careful in the selection of servants and should try him. Let him be summoned as he is, simply clad in his serge dress; and should he not appear worthy, then may I be punished for the fault of deception.\"\n\nThe Emperor read the memorial and passed it to his Prime Minister, who duly summoned Mi Heng. He came, but after his formal salutations were over, he was left standing and not invited to sit down.\n\nLooking up to heaven, Mi Heng sighed deeply, saying, \"Wide as is the universe, it cannot produce the person.\"\n\n\"Under my orders are scores of people whom the world call heroes. What do you mean by saying there is not the person,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I should be glad to hear who they are,\" said Mi Heng.\n\n\"Xun Yu, Xun You, Guo Jia, and Cheng Yu are all people of profound skill and long views, superior to Xiao He and Chen Ping. Zhang Liao, Xu Chu, Li Dian, and Yue Jing are bravest of the brave, better than Cen Peng and Ma Wu. Lu Qian and Man Chong are my secretaries; Yu Jin and Xu Huang are my van leaders; Xiahou Dun is one of the world's marvels, Cao Ren is the most successful leader of the age. Now say you there are not the people?\"\n\n\"Sir, you are quite mistaken,\" said Mi Heng with a smile. \"I know all these things you call people. Xun Yu is qualified to pose at a funeral or ask after a sick man; Xun You is fit to be a tomb guardian; Cheng Yu might be sent to shut doors and bolt windows; and Guo Jia is a reciter of poems; Zhang Liao might beat drums and clang gongs; Xu Chu might lead cattle to pasture; Yue Jing would make a fair reader of elegy; Li Dian could carry dispatches and notices; Lu Qian would be a fair armorer; Man Chong could be sent to drink wine and eat brewers' grains; Yu Jin might be of use to carry planks and build walls; Xu Huang might be employed to kill pigs and slay dogs; Xiahou Dun should be styled 'Whole Body General,' and Cao Ren should be called 'Money-grubbing Governor.' As for the remainder, they are mere clothes shelves, rice sacks, wine vases, flesh bags.\"\n\n\"And what special gifts have you?\" said Cao Cao angrily.\n\n\"I know everything in heaven above and the earth beneath. I am conversant with the Three Religions and the Nine Systems of Philosophy. I could make my prince the rival of Kings Yao and Shun, and I myself could compare in virtue with Confucius and Mencius. Can I discuss on even terms with common people?\"\n\nNow Zhang Liao was present, and he raised his sword to strike down the impudent visitor who spoke thus to his master, but Cao Cao said, \"I want another drummer boy to play on occasions of congratulation in the court. I will confer this office upon him.\"\n\nInstead of indignantly declining this, Mi Heng accepted the position and went out.\n\n\"He spoke very impertinently,\" said Zhang Liao. \"Why did you not put him to death?\"\n\n\"He has something of a reputation; empty, but people have heard of him and so, if I put him to death, they would say I was intolerant. As he thinks he has ability, I have made him a drummer to mortify him.\"\n\nSoon after Cao Cao instituted a banquet in the capital at which the guests were many. The drums were to be played, and the old drummers were ordered to wear new clothes. But the new drummer Mi Heng took his place with the other musicians clad in old and worn garments. The piece chosen was the \"Tolling of Yuyang,\" and from the earliest taps on the drum the effect was exquisite, profound as the notes from metal and stone. The performance stirred deeply the emotions of every guest; some even shed tears.\n\nSeeing all eyes turned on the shabby performer, the attendants said, \"Why did you not put on your new uniform?\"\n\nMi Heng turned to them, slipped off his frayed and torn robe and stood there in full view, naked as he was born. The assembled guests covered their faces. Then the drummer composedly drew on his nether garments.\n\n\"Why do you behave so rudely at court?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"To flout one's prince and insult one's superiors is the real rudeness,\" cried Mi Heng. \"I bare my natural body as an emblem of my purity.\"\n\n\"So you are pure! And who is foul?\"\n\n\"You do not distinguish between the wise and the foolish, which is to have foul vision. You have never read the Odes or the Histories, which is to have foul speech. You are deaf to honest words, which is to have foul ears. You are unable to reconcile antiquity with today, which is to be foul without. You cannot tolerate the vassals, which is to be foul within. You harbor thoughts of rebellion, which is to have a foul heart. I am one of the most famous scholars in the empire, and you make me a drummer boy, that is as Yang Huo belittling Confucius or Zang Cang vilifying Mencius. You desire to be chief and arbitrator of the great nobles, yet you treat me thus!\"\n\nNow Kong Rong who had recommended Mi Heng for employment was among the guests, and he feared for the life of his friend. Wherefore he tried to calm the storm.\n\n\"Mi Heng is only guilty of a misdemeanor,\" said Kong Rong. \"He is not a man likely to disturb your dreams like Fu Yue, Illustrious Sir.\"\n\nPointing to Mi Heng, the Prime Minister said, \"I will send you to Jingzhou as my messenger; and if Liu Biao surrenders to me, I will give you a post at court.\"\n\nBut Mi Heng was unwilling to go. So Cao Cao bade two of his men prepare three horses, and they set Mi Heng on the middle one and dragged him along the road between them.\n\nIt is also related that a great number of officers of all ranks assembled at the East Gate to see the messenger start.\n\nXun Yu said, \"When Mi Heng comes, we will not rise to salute him.\"\n\nSo when Mi Heng came, dismounted, and entered the waiting room, they all sat stiff and silent. Mi Heng uttered a loud cry.\n\n\"What is that for?\" said Xun Yu.\n\n\"Should not one cry out when one enters a coffin?\" said Mi Heng.\n\n\"We may be corpses,\" shouted they altogether, \"but you are a wandering headless ghost.\"\n\n\"I am a minister of Han and not a partisan of Cao Cao's,\" cried Mi Heng. \"You cannot say I have no head.\"\n\nThey were angry enough to kill him, but Xun Yu checked them, saying, \"He is a paltry fellow. It is not worth soiling your blades with his blood.\"\n\n\"I am paltry, and yet I have the soul of a man, and you are mere worms,\" said Mi Heng.\n\nThey went their ways, all very angry. Mi Heng went on his journey and presently reached Jingzhou, where he saw Liu Biao. After that, under pretense of extolling Liu Biao's virtue, he lampooned Liu Biao who was annoyed and sent him to Jiangxia to see Huang Zu.\n\n\"Why did you not put the fellow to death for lampooning you?\" said one to Liu Biao.\n\n\"You see he shamed Cao Cao, but Cao Cao did not kill him as Cao Cao feared to lose popular favor. So Cao Cao sent him to me, thinking to borrow my hand to slay him and so suffer the loss of my good name. I have sent him on to Huang Zu to let Cao Cao see that I understood.\"\n\nLiu Biao's clever caution met with general praise. At that time a messenger from Yuan Shao was also there with certain proposals for an alliance, and it was necessary to decide which aide to espouse. All the advisers came together to consider the question.\n\nThen Commander Han Song said, \"As you have now two offers, you can please yourself and choose your own way to destroy your enemies; for if one refuses, you can follow the other. Now Cao Cao is an able general and has many capable officers in his train. It looks as though he may destroy Yuan Shao and then move his armies across the river. I fear, my lord, you would be unable then to withstand him. That being so, it would be wise to support Cao Cao, who will treat you with respect.\"\n\nLiu Biao replied, \"You go to the capital and see how things tend. That will help me to decide.\"\n\nHan Song said, \"The positions of master and servant are clearly defined. Now I am your man prepared to go all lengths for you and obey you to the last, whether in serving the Emperor or in following Cao Cao. But lest there should be any doubt you must remember that if the Emperor gives me any office, then I shall become his servant and shall not be ready to face death for you.\"\n\n\"You go and find out what you can. I have ideas in my mind.\"\n\nSo Han Song took his leave and went to the capital, where he saw Cao Cao. Cao Cao gave him rank and made him Governor of Lingling.\n\nAdviser Xun Yu remonstrated, saying, \"This man came to spy out how things were moving. He has done nothing to deserve reward, and yet you give him an office like this. There were no such suspicious rumors connected with poor Mi Heng, and yet you sent him off and would never test his power.\"\n\n\"Mi Heng shamed me too deeply before all the world. I am going to borrow Liu Biao's hand to remove him. And you need say no more,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen Cao Cao sent Han Song back to his former master to tell him what had happened. Han Song came and was full of praise for the virtues of the court and was keen on persuading Liu Biao to espouse that side.\n\nThen Liu Biao suddenly turned angry, charged him with treachery, put him in prison, and threatened him with death.\n\n\"You turn your back on me,\" cried Han Song. \"I did not betray you.\"\n\nKuai Liang remarked, \"Han Song had foretold this possibility before he left. It is only what he expected.\"\n\nLiu Biao, who was just and reasonable, went no further.\n\nPresently came the news that Mi Heng had been put to death by Huang Zu on account of a quarrel begun over the wine cups. Both being worse for liquor they had begun to discuss the worth of people.\n\n\"You were in Xuchang,\" said Huang Zu. \"Who was there of worth?\"\n\n\"The big boy was Kong Rong and the little one Yang Xiu. There was no one else to count.\"\n\n\"What am I like?\" said Huang Zu.\n\n\"You are like a god in a temple: You sit still and receive sacrifice, but the lack of intelligence is pitiful.\"\n\n\"Do you regard me as a mere image?\" cried Huang Zu, angrily.\n\nSo Huang Zu put the impudent speaker to death. Even at the very point of death, Mi Heng never ceased his railing and abuse.\n\n\"Alas!\" sighed Liu Biao when he heard Mi Heng's fate. Then Liu Biao had the victim honorably interred near Yingwu, on Parrot Island.\n\nAnd a later poet wrote of Mi Heng:\n\n\u2003Huang Zu could brook no rival; at his word\n\n\u2003Mi Heng met death, beneath the cruel sword.\n\n\u2003His grave on Parrot Isle may yet be seen,\n\n\u2003The river flowing past it, coldly green.\n\nCao Cao heard of the young man's death with pleasure.\n\n\"The putrid bookworm has just cut himself up with his own sharp tongue,\" said he.\n\nAs there was no sign of Liu Biao coming to join him, Cao Cao began to think of coercion. Xun Yu dissuaded him from this course.\n\nSaid he, \"Yuan Shao is not subjugated; Liu Bei is not destroyed. To attack Liu Biao would be to neglect the vital to care for the immaterial. Destroy the two chief enemies first, and the Han River is yours at one blow.\"\n\nAnd Cao Cao took the advice.\n\nAfter the departure of Liu Bei, Dong Cheng and his fellow conspirators did nothing else day or night but try to evolve plans for the destruction of Cao Cao. But they could see no chance to attack. At the new year audience Cao Cao was odiously arrogant and overweening, and the chief conspirator's disgust was so intense that he fell ill.\n\nHearing of the State Uncle's indisposition, the Emperor sent the Court Physician to see him. The Court Physician at this time was a native of Luoyang, named Ji Ping. A very famous physician, Ji Ping devoted himself wholly to the treatment of his court patient. Living in Dong Cheng's palace and seeing Dong Cheng at all times, Ji Ping soon found that some secret grief was sorely troubling him. But Ji Ping dared not ask questions.\n\nOne evening of the full moon festival, when the physician was just taking his leave, Dong Cheng kept him, and the two men had supper together. They eat talking for some time, and Dong Cheng by and by dropped off to sleep dressed as he was.\n\nPresently Wang Zifu and the others were announced. As they were coming in, Wang Zifu cried, \"Our business is settled!\"\n\n\"I should be glad to hear how,\" said Dong Cheng.\n\n\"Liu Biao has joined Yuan Shao, and five hundred thousand troops in fifty legions are on their way here by different routes. More than this, Ma Teng and Han Sui are coming from the northwest with seven hundred thousand Xiliang troops. Cao Cao has moved every soldier outside Xuchang to meet the combined armies. There is a great banquet in his palace tonight. If we get together our young men and servants, we can muster more than a thousand, and we can surround the palace, while Cao Cao is at the banquet, and finish him off. We must not miss this.\"\n\nDong Cheng was more than delighted. He called his servants and armed them, put on his own armor and mounted his horse. The conspirators met, as they had arranged, just at the inner gate of the Prime Minister's palace. It was the first watch. The small army marched straight in, Dong Cheng leading with his treasured sword drawn. His intended victim was at table in one of the private rooms. Dong Cheng rushed in, crying, \"Cao Cao, you rebel, stay!\" and dashed at Cao Cao who fell at the first blow.\n\nAnd just then he woke up and found it was all a dream, but his mouth was still full of curses.\n\n\"Do you really wish to destroy Cao Cao?\" said Ji Ping, going forward to his half awakened patient.\n\nThis brought Dong Cheng to his senses. He stopped, terror stricken, and made no reply.\n\n\"Do not be frightened, O Uncle,\" said the doctor. \"Although I am a physician, I am also a man, and I never forget my emperor. You have seemed sad for many days, but I have never ventured to ask the reason. Now you have shown it in your dream, and I know your real feelings. If I can be of any use, I will help. Nothing can daunt me.\"\n\nDong Cheng covered his face and wept.\n\n\"I fear you may not be true to me,\" cried he.\n\nJi Ping at once bit off a finger as a pledge of his faith. And then his host and patient brought forth the decree he had received in the girdle.\n\n\"I am afraid our schemes will come to nought,\" said Dong Cheng. \"Liu Bei and Ma Teng are gone, and there is nothing we can do. That was the real reason I fell ill.\"\n\n\"It is not worth troubling you gentlemen with, for Cao Cao's life lies in these hands of mine,\" said Ji Ping.\n\n\"How can that be?\"\n\n\"Because he is often ill with deep-seated pain in his head. When this comes on, he sends for me. When next he calls me, I only have to give him one dose and he will certainly die. We do not want any weapons.\"\n\n\"If only you could do it! You would be the savior of the dynasty. It depends upon you.\"\n\nThen Ji Ping went away leaving his late patient a happy man. Dong Cheng strolled into the garden and there he saw one of his servants, Quin Quington, whispering with one of the concubines, Yun Ying, in a dark corner. This annoyed him, and he called his attendants to seize them. He would have put them to death but for the intervention of his wife. At her request he spared their lives, but both were beaten forty canes, and the lad was thrown into a dungeon. Sulky at this treatment, Quin Quington broke out of the cell in the night, climbed over the wall, and went straight to Cao Cao's palace, where he betrayed the conspiracy.\n\nCao Cao at once had him taken into a secret chamber and questioned him.\n\nQuin Quington gave the names of the conspirators, saying, \"Wang Zifu, Wu Zilan, Chong Ji, Wu Shi, Ma Teng, and my master have been meeting secretly. My master has a roll of white silk, with writing on it, but I do not know what it means. Yesterday, Ji Ping bit off one of his fingers as a pledge of fidelity. I saw that.\"\n\nQuin Quington was kept in a secret part of the palace, while his late master, Dong Cheng, only knowing that he had run away, took no special means to find him.\n\nSoon after this Cao Cao feigned a headache and sent for Ji Ping as usual.\n\n\"The rebel is done for,\" thought Ji Ping, and he made a secret package of poison which he took with him to the palace of the Prime Minister. He found Cao Cao in bed. The patient bade the doctor prepare a potion for him.\n\n\"One draught will cure this disease,\" said Ji Ping.\n\nHe bade them bring him a pot, and he prepared the potion in the room. When it had simmered for some time and was half finished, the poison was added, and soon after the physician presented the draught. Cao Cao, knowing it was poisoned, made excuses and would not swallow it.\n\n\"You should take it hot,\" said the doctor. \"Then there will be a gentle perspiration, and you will be better.\"\n\n\"You are a scholar,\" said Cao Cao, sitting up, \"and know what is the correct thing to do. When the master is ill and takes drugs, the attendant first tastes them; when a man is ill, his son first tastes the medicine. You are my confidant and should drink first. Then I will swallow the remainder.\"\n\n\"Medicine is to treat disease. What is the use of anyone's tasting it?\" said Ji Ping.\n\nBut he guessed now the conspiracy had been discovered, so he dashed forward, seized Cao Cao by the ear, and tried to pour the potion down his throat. Cao Cao pushed it away, and it spilt. The bricks upon which it fell were split asunder. Before Cao Cao could speak, his servants had already seized the assailant.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"I am not ill. I only wanted to test you. So you really thought to poison me!\"\n\nHe sent for a score of sturdy gaolers who carried off the prisoner to the inner apartments to be interrogated. Cao Cao took his seat in a pavilion, and the hapless physician, tightly bound, was thrown to the ground before him. The prisoner maintained a bold front.\n\nCao Cao said, \"I thought you were a physician. How dared you try to poison me? Someone incited you to this crime. If you tell me, I will pardon you.\"\n\n\"You are a rebel. You flout your Prince and injure your betters. The whole empire wishes to kill you. Do you think I am the only one?\"\n\nCao Cao again and again pressed the prisoner to tell what he knew, but he only replied that no one had sent him and it was his own desire.\n\n\"I have failed, and I can but die,\" added Ji Ping.\n\nCao Cao angrily bade the gaolers give him a severe beating, and they dogged him for two watches. His skin hung in tatters, the flesh was battered, and the blood from his wounds ran down the steps. Then fearing he might die and his evidence be lost, Cao Cao bade them cease and remove him. They took him off to a quiet place where he might recover somewhat.\n\nHaving issued orders to prepare a banquet for next day, Cao Cao invited all the courtiers thereto. Dong Cheng was the only one who excused himself, saying he was unwell. The other conspirators dared not stay away as they felt they would be suspected.\n\nTables were laid in the private apartments, and after several courses the host said, \"There is not much to amuse us today, but I have a man to show you that will sober you.\"\n\n\"Bring him in!\" Cao Cao said, turning to the gaolers, and the hapless Ji Ping appeared, securely fastened in a wooden collar. He was placed where all could see him.\n\n\"You officials do not know that this man is connected with a gang of evil doers who desire to overturn the government and even injure me. However, Heaven has defeated their plans, but I desire that you should hear his evidence.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao ordered the gaolers to beat their prisoner. They did so till Ji Ping lay unconscious, when they revived him by spraying water over his face. As soon as he came to, he glared at his oppressor and ground his teeth.\n\n\"Cao Cao, you rebel! What are you waiting for? Why not kill me?\" cried Ji Ping.\n\nCao Cao replied, \"The conspirators were only six at first; you made the seventh. Is that true?\"\n\nHere the prisoner broke in with more abuse, while Wang Zifu and the other three conspirators exchanged glances, looking as though they were sitting on a rug full of needles. Cao Cao continued his torture of the prisoner, beating him into unconsciousness and reviving him with cold water, the victim disdaining to ask mercy. Finally Cao Cao realized he would incriminate none of his accomplices, and so he told the gaolers to remove Ji Ping.\n\nAt the close of the banquet, when the guests were dispersing, four of them, the four conspirators, were invited to remain behind to supper. They were terrified so that their souls seemed no longer to inhabit their bodies, but there was no saying nay to the invitation.\n\nPresently Cao Cao said, \"Still there is something I want to speak about, so I have asked you to stay for a time longer. I do not know what you four have been arranging with Dong Cheng.\"\n\n\"Nothing at all,\" said Wang Zifu.\n\n\"And what is written on the white silk?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nThey all said they knew nothing about it.\n\nThen Cao Cao ordered the runaway servant to be brought in. As soon as Quin Quington came, Wang Zifu said, \"Well, what have you seen and where?\"\n\nQuin Quington replied, \"You five very carefully chose retired places to talk in, and you secretly signed a white roll. You cannot deny that.\"\n\nWang Zifu replied, \"This miserable creature was punished for misbehavior with one of Uncle Dong Cheng's maids, and now because of that he slanders his master. You must not listen to him.\"\n\n\"Ji Ping tried to pour poison down my throat. Who told him to do that if it was not Dong Cheng?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThey all said they knew nothing about who it was.\n\n\"So far,\" said Cao Cao, \"matters are only beginning, and there is a chance of forgiveness. But if the thing grows, it will be difficult not to take notice of it.\"\n\nThe whole four vigorously denied that any plot existed. However Cao Cao called up his henchmen, and the four men were put into confinement.\n\nNext day Cao Cao with a large following went to the State Uncle's palace to ask after his health.\n\nDong Cheng came out to receive his visitor, who at once said, \"Why did you not come last night?\"\n\n\"I am not quite well yet and have to be very careful about going out,\" replied Dong Cheng.\n\n\"One might say you were suffering from national sorrow, eh?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nDong Cheng started. Cao Cao continued, \"Have you heard of the Ji Ping affair?\"\n\n\"No. What is it?\"\n\nCao Cao smiled coldly, saying, \"How can it be you do not know?\"\n\nHe turned to his attendants and told them to bring in the prisoner, while he went on talking to his host about national illness.\n\nDong Cheng was much put about and knew not what to do. Soon the gaolers led in the physician to the steps of the hall. At once the bound man began to rail at Cao Cao as rebel and traitor.\n\n\"This man,\" said Cao Cao, pointing to Ji Ping, \"has implicated Wang Zifu and three others, all of whom are now under arrest. There is one more whom I have not caught yet.\"\n\n\"Who sent you to poison me?\" continued Cao Cao, turning toward the physician. \"Quick, tell me!\"\n\n\"Heaven sent me to slay a traitor!\"\n\nCao Cao angrily ordered them to beat Ji Ping again, but there was no part of his body that could be beaten. Dong Cheng sat looking at him, his heart feeling as if transfixed with a dagger.\n\n\"You were born with ten fingers. How is it you have now only nine?\"\n\nJi Ping replied, \"I bit off one as a pledge when I swore to slay a traitor.\"\n\nCao Cao told them to bring a knife, and they lopped off his other nine fingers.\n\n\"Now they are all off. That will teach you to make pledges.\"\n\n\"Still I have a mouth that can swallow a traitor and a tongue that can curse him,\" said Ji Ping.\n\nCao Cao told them to cut out his tongue.\n\nJi Ping said, \"Do not. I cannot endure any more punishment, I shall have to speak out. Loosen my bonds.\"\n\n\"Loose them. There is no reason why not,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThey loosed him. As soon as he was free, Ji Ping stood up, turned his face toward the Emperor's palace and bowed, saying, \"It is Heaven's will that thy servant has been unable to remove the evil.\"\n\nThen he turned and smashed his head into the steps and died.\n\nHis body was quartered and exposed. This happened in the first month of the fifth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 200), and a certain historian wrote a poem:\n\nThere lived in Han a simple physician.\n\n\u2003No warrior, yet brave\n\n\u2003Enough to risk his very life\n\n\u2003His Emperor to save.\n\n\u2003Alas! He failed; but lasting fame\n\n\u2003Is his; he feared not death;\n\n\u2003He cursed the traitorous Prime Minister\n\n\u2003Unto his latest breath.\n\nSeeing his victim had passed beyond the realm of punishment, Cao Cao had Quin Quington led in.\n\n\"Do you know this man, Uncle?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" cried Dong Cheng. \"So the runaway servant is here. He ought to be put to death!\"\n\n\"He just told me of your treachery. He is my witness,\" said Cao Cao. \"Who would dare kill him?\"\n\n\"How can you, the First Minister of State, heed the unsupported tale of an absconding servant?\"\n\n\"But I have Wang Zifu and the others in prison,\" said Cao Cao. \"And how can you rebut their evidence?\"\n\nHe then called in the remainder of his followers and ordered them to search Dong Cheng's bedroom. They did so and found the decree that had been given him in the girdle and the pledge signed by the conspirators.\n\n\"You mean rat!\" cried Cao Cao. \"You dared do this?\"\n\nHe gave orders to arrest the whole household without exception. Then he returned to his palace with the incriminating documents and called all his advisers together to discuss the dethronement of the Emperor and the setting up of a successor.\n\n\u2003Many decrees, blood written, have issued, accomplishing nothing,\n\n\u2003One inscribed pledge was fraught with mountains of sorrow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Cao Cao Murdered The Consort Dong; Liu Bei Flees To Yuan Shao.\n\nThe last chapter closed with the discovery of the \"girdle\" decree and the assembly of Cao Cao's advisers to consider the deposition of Emperor Xian.\n\nCheng Yu spoke strongly against this, saying, \"Illustrious Sir, the means by which you impress the world and direct the government is the command of the House of Han. In these times of turmoil and rivalry among the nobles, such a step as the deposition of the ruler will certainly bring about civil war and is much to be deprecated.\"\n\nAfter reflection Cao Cao abandoned the project. But Dong Cheng's plot was not to go unpunished. All five of the conspirators with every member of their households, seven hundred at least, were taken and put to death at one or another of the gates of the city. The people wept at such merciless and wholesale slaughter.\n\n\u2003A secret decree in a girdle sewn,\n\n\u2003In red blood written, the Emperor's own,\n\n\u2003To the staunch and faithful Dong Cheng addressed,\n\n\u2003Who had saved him once when enemies pressed.\n\n\u2003And who, sore grieved at his Sovereign's fate,\n\n\u2003Expressed in dreams his ceaseless hate,\n\n\u2003Carried misfortune and death in its train,\n\n\u2003But glory to him who died in vain.\n\nAnother poet wrote of the sad fate of Wang Zifu and his friends:\n\n\u2003Greatheartedly these signed the silken roll,\n\n\u2003And pledged themselves to save their king from shame.\n\n\u2003Alas! Black death of them took heavy toll,\n\n\u2003To write their names upon the roll of fame.\n\nBut the slaughter of the conspirators and their whole households did not appease the wrath of the Prime Minister. The Emperor's consort was a sister of Dong Cheng; and, sword in hand, Cao Cao went into the Forbidden City determined to slay her also. The Emperor cherished her tenderly, the more so as she was then in the fifth month of pregnancy. That day, as they often did, the Emperor, Consort Dong, and Empress Fu were sitting in their private apartment secretly talking of the decree entrusted to Dong Cheng and asking each other why nothing seemed to have been done. The sudden appearance of the angry Prime Minister, armed as he was, frightened them greatly.\n\n\"Does Your Majesty know that Dong Cheng conspired against me?\" said he.\n\n\"Dong Zhuo died long ago,\" replied the Emperor.\n\n\"Not Dong Zhuo \u2014 Dong Cheng!\" roared Cao Cao.\n\nThe Emperor's heart trembled, but he gasped out, \"Really I did not know!\"\n\n\"So the cut finger and the blood written decree are all forgotten, eh?\"\n\nThe Emperor was silent. Cao Cao bade his lictors seize Consort Dong. The Emperor interposed asking pity for her condition.\n\nBut Cao Cao said, \"If Heaven had not interposed and defeated the plot, I should be a dead man. How could I leave this woman to work evil to me by and by?\"\n\nSaid the Emperor, \"Immure her in one of the palaces till her confinement. Do not harm her now!\"\n\n\"Do you wish me to spare her offspring to avenge the mother?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I pray that my body may be spared mutilation and not put to shame,\" said Consort Dong.\n\nCao Cao bade his men show her the white silk cord. The Emperor wept bitterly.\n\n\"Do not hate me in the below realms of the Nine Golden Springs,\" said the Emperor to her.\n\nHis tears fell like rain. Empress Fu also joined in the lament, but Cao Cao said, \"You are behaving like a lot of children.\"\n\nAnd he told the lictors to take Consort Dong away and strangle her in the courtyard.\n\nIn vain had the fair girl found favor in the sight of her lord.\n\nShe died, and the fruit of her womb perished.\n\nStern and calm her lord sat, powerless to save.\n\nHiding his face while tears gushed forth.\n\nWhen leaving the Palace, Cao Cao gave strict orders to the keepers, saying \"Anyone of the imperial relatives by marriage who enter the Palace will be put to death, and the guards will share the same punishment for lack of zeal.\"\n\nTo make more sure he appointed three thousand Imperial Guards from his own troops and appointed Cao Hong to the command.\n\nThen said Cao Cao to his counselor Cheng Yu, \"The conspirators in the capital have been removed, it is true, but there are yet two others, Ma Teng and Liu Bei. These must not be left.\"\n\nCheng Yu replied, \"Ma Teng is strong in the west and would not be easily captured. He might be enticed to the capital by suave words and kindly praises, when he would be at your mercy. Liu Bei is at Xuzhou, strongly posted in an ox-horn formation, and not to be lightly attacked. More than this, Yuan Shao is at Guandu, and his one desire is to attack you. Any attempt on the east will send Liu Bei to Yuan Shao for help, and Yuan Shao will come here at once. Then what will you do?\"\n\n\"You are at fault,\" replied Cao Cao. \"Liu Bei is a bold warrior. If we wait till he is fully fledged and winged, he will be more difficult to deal with. Yuan Shao may be strong, but he is not to be feared. He is too undeciding to act.\"\n\nAs they were discussing these things, Guo Jia came in, and Cao Cao suddenly referred the matter to him.\n\n\"If I attack Liu Bei, then Yuan Shao is to be feared. What do you think of it?\"\n\nGuo Jia said, \"Yuan Shao by nature is dilatory and hesitating, and his various advisers are jealous of each other. He is not to be feared. Liu Bei is getting together a new army and has not yet won their hearts. You could settle the east in one battle.\"\n\n\"This advice is in harmony with my thinking,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he prepared an army of two hundred thousand troops, to move in five divisions against Xuzhou.\n\nScouts took the news of these preparations to Xuzhou. Sun Qian first went to Xiapi to tell Guan Yu and then went to Xiaopei to tell Liu Bei. The two discussed the position and decided that help must be sought. So letters were written to Yuan Shao and given to Sun Qian, who went north, sought Tian Feng, and asked him to arrange an interview with Yuan Shao. Sun Qian was introduced and presented his letters.\n\nBut Yuan Shao was of melancholy countenance, and his dress was all awry. Tian Feng said, \"Why this disarray, my lord?\"\n\n\"I am about to die,\" replied Yuan Shao.\n\n\"But why do you utter such words?\"\n\n\"I have three sons, but only the youngest is clever enough to understand my ideas. Now he is suffering from scabies which places his life in jeopardy. Think you that I have any heart to talk over any other affairs?\"\n\n\"But,\" said Tian Feng, \"the present combination of circumstances is unparalleled. Cao Cao is going to attack the east, and Xuchang will be empty. You can enter it with a few volunteers and so perform good service to the Emperor and save the people from sorrow. You have only to make up your mind to act.\"\n\n\"I know the chance is excellent, but I am worried and distressed and fear failure.\"\n\n\"What are you distressed about?\" said Tian Feng.\n\n\"Among my sons only this special one is remarkable; and if anything happens, I am done.\"\n\nThus it became evident that no army would be dispatched.\n\nIn confirmation of this, Yuan Shao said to Sun Qian, \"Go home and tell Liu Bei the real reason, and say that if anything untoward happen, he can come over to me, and I will find some means of helping him.\"\n\nTian Feng struck the ground with his staff.\n\n\"It is such a pity!\" cried he. \"Just as a unique opportunity presents itself, everything is spoiled by the illness of a child.\"\n\nHe went out. Sun Qian saw that no help could be hoped for and set out to return. When he had arrived and related what he had seen, Liu Bei was quite alarmed and asked what could be done.\n\n\"Do not be troubled, brother,\" said Zhang Fei. \"We can destroy Cao Cao merely by a sudden attack before his army shall have time to camp.\"\n\n\"That would be according to the rules of war,\" said Liu Bei. \"You have always been a bold warrior, and that move against Liu Dai shows that you are becoming a strategist too.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei gave Zhang Fei command of enough soldiers to carry out this plan.\n\nNow while Cao Cao was in the midst of his march toward Xiaopei, a tornado sprang up and the howling gale tore down one of the banners and broke the staff. Cao Cao called together his advisers and leaders to ask them what this portended.\n\nXun Yu said, \"From what direction was the wind at the time, and what was the color of the flag?\"\n\n\"The wind was from the southeast, and the flag was blue and red.\"\n\n\"There is only one interpretation: A raid on the camp will occur tonight.\"\n\nCao Cao nodded. At that moment Mao Jie entered and reported a similar incident. Cao Cao asked him the portent.\n\n\"My thinking tells me it means a night raid,\" replied he.\n\nAlas for the weakness of this descendant of kings!\n\nHe placed his faith on a night raid.\n\nBut the broken staff of a banner warned his enemy.\n\nWhy should the ancient of days favor the wicked?\n\n\"This is evidently providence,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he began to make preparations. He told off nine bodies of troops to take stations, leaving only one of them as if camped while he placed the others in ambush at eight points.\n\nThere was but little moonlight as Liu Bei and Zhang Fei marched their respective armies toward Cao Cao's camp. They had left Sun Qian to guard Xiaopei. Zhang Fei, since he was the originator of the stratagem, led the way with some light horse. As they drew near, everything seemed very quiet and no one seemed moving. Then suddenly lights flashed out all about them, and Zhang Fei saw he had fallen into a trap. At once from all the eight directions came out the ambushing troops. From east, west, north, south were Zhang Liao, Xu Chu, Li Dian, and Yu Jin. From northeast, northwest, southeast, southwest were Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Xu Huang, and Yue Jing.\n\nZhang Fei, dashing this way and rushing that, guarding his van and protecting his rear, vainly tried to clear himself. The soldiers he had, being originally Cao Cao's troops, soon gave in and returned to their old leader. The position became very desperate.\n\nZhang Fei met Xu Huang and engaged him, but his rear was also attacked by Yue Jing. At length he cut an alley out and with a half score of his troops started to return to Xiaopei. The retreat was cut off. He thought to make for Xuzhou but felt certain that way was also barred. No other way seemed open, and so he made for the Mangdang Hills.\n\nAs Liu Bei drew near the camp, he intended to attack when he heard the din of battle. Then he was attacked in the rear and very soon had lost half his force. Next Xiahou Dun came to attack. Thereupon Liu Bei bolted. He was pursued by Xiahou Yuan. Presently Liu Bei looked about him and found he had less than half a hundred soldiers following him. He set his face in the direction of Xiaopei.\n\nBut before long Liu Bei saw that place was in flames. So he changed his plan and went toward Xiapi. However he found the whole countryside full of the enemy, and he could not get through. So he bethought himself of the promise of Yuan Shao, that he would find refuge if things went unfavorable, and determined to go to Yuan Shao till he could form some other plan. Wherefore he took the Qingzhou road. But it also was blocked, and he went into the open country and made his way north, not without being pursued and losing the remainder of his few followers.\n\nHe hastened toward Qingzhou City, traveling one hundred miles a day. When he reached the city and summoned the gate, the guards asked who he was and they told the Governor, who was Yuan Shao's eldest son, Yuan Tan. Yuan Tan was greatly surprised, but he opened the gates and went to meet Liu Bei, whom he treated with due consideration.\n\nLiu Bei told the story of his defeat and said he wished for harbor. He was given suitable quarters and hospitably entertained, while the young man wrote to inform his father. Then Yuan Tan provided an escort and sent Liu Bei on his journey as far as the boundary of Pingyuan.\n\nAt the city of Yejun, Liu Bei was met by Yuan Shao in person ten miles outside the city, with a great escort. Liu Bei made a humble obeisance which Yuan Shao hastened to return and said, \"I have been very distressed that, on account of my son's illness, I did not come to your aid. It is a great joy to see you; the one desire of my life is satisfied.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"The poor Liu Bei you see here has long desired to take refuge with you, but fate has hitherto denied him that privilege. Now attacked by Cao Cao, my family lost, I remembered that you, General, would receive good people from all sides. Wherefore I put my pride in my pocket. I trust that I may be found worthy and one day I will prove my gratitude.\"\n\nYuan Shao received him with much pleasure and treated him exceedingly well. And they both lived in Yuan Shao's home region Jizhou.\n\nAfter the capture of Xiaopei, Cao Cao pressed on toward Xuzhou City, which, after a short defense and the flight of Mi Zhu and Jian Yong, was surrendered by Chen Deng. Cao Cao led his army into the city, restored order, and pacified the people. Next he wanted to press on to Xiapi, where Guan Yu was holding out and keeping guard of Liu Bei's family.\n\nXun Yu said, \"Guan Yu is there, in charge of his brother's family, and he will defend the city to the last. If you do not take it quickly, Yuan Shao will get it.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"I have always loved Guan Yu, both for his warlike abilities and his principles. I would engage him to enter my service. I would rather send someone to talk him into surrender.\"\n\n\"He will not do that,\" said Guo Jia. \"His sense of right is too solid. I fear anyone who went to speak with him would suffer.\"\n\nThen suddenly a man stepped out, saying, \"I know him slightly, and I will go.\"\n\nThe speaker was Zhang Liao.\n\nCheng Yu looked at him and said, \"Though you are an old acquaintance, I do not think you are equal to talking over Guan Yu. But I have a scheme that will so entangle him that he will have no alternative. He will have to enter the service of the Prime Minister.\"\n\n\u2003They set the fatal spring beside the lordly tiger's trail,\n\n\u2003They hide the hook with fragrant bait to catch the mighty whale." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Besieged In Tushan, Guan Yu Makes Three Conditions; Relieved At Baima, Cao Cao Beholds A Marvel.\n\nThe plan to seduce Guan Yu from allegiance to his brothers was now announced by Cheng Yu, \"Since Guan Yu is far braver than ordinary warriors, he can only be overreached by superior cunning. Now send some of the captured soldiers who have lately been of Liu Bei's army into Xiapi, where they shall say they have come back. They shall thus be our allies on the inside. Then an attack and a feigned defeat will entice Guan Yu to a distance from the city. And his return road shall be cut.\"\n\nCao Cao accepted the scheme, and a few score of the troops who had lately been in Xuzhou were sent to the city. Guan Yu believed the story they told and trusted them. So they were suffered to remain.\n\nAfter this part of the game had been played, Xiahou Dun led forward five thousand troops against the city. At first, Guan Yu would not accept the challenge. But provoked by men sent to hurl insults at him from the foot of the wall, his wrath got the better of him, and he moved out with three thousand troops. After the leaders had exchanged some ten bouts, Xiahou Dun made to run away. Guan Yu pursued. Xiahou Dun stopped and made a stand, then he fled again. Thus alternately fighting and retiring, he enticed Guan Yu seven miles from Xiapi. Then Guan Yu suddenly remembering the risk to the city drew off his army to return homeward.\n\nSoon, at the sound of a signal bomb, from the left and right out moved two bodies of troops led by Xu Huang and Xu Chu who barred his way. Guan Yu hastened along a road that seemed to offer retreat, but from both sides his ambushing enemies shot their crossbows, and the arrows flew like locusts on the wing. No way past was found, and he turned back. Then both bodies joined in attacking him. He drove them off and got into the road to his own city, but soon Xiahou Dun came up again and attacked fiercely as before. Evening came and still Guan Yu was hemmed in, so he went up on a low hill of Tushan Mountains upon which he encamped for a rest.\n\nGuan Yu was surrounded on all sides by enemies. By and by, looking toward his city, he saw the glow of fire. It meant that the traitors, who had come in to surrender, had opened the gate, and the enemy had gone in force. They had made the fires in order to perplex and distress Guan Yu, and indeed the sight saddened him.\n\nIn the night he made efforts to escape from the hill, but every attempt was checked by flights of arrows. At daybreak he prepared for one more effort, but before moving he saw a horseman riding up at full speed and presently discerned Zhang Liao.\n\nWhen within speaking distance, Guan Yu said, \"Are you come to fight me, Zhang Liao?\"\n\n\"No,\" replied Zhang Liao. \"I am come to see you because of our old friendship.\"\n\nWherefore Zhang Liao threw aside his sword, dismounted, and came forward saluting. And the two sat down.\n\n\"Then naturally you have come to talk me over,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"Not so!\" said Zhang Liao. \"Sometime ago you saved me. Can I help saving you?\"\n\n\"Then you desire to help me.\"\n\n\"Not exactly that,\" replied Zhang Liao.\n\n\"Then what are you doing here if you have not come to help me?\"\n\n\"Nothing is known of the fate of your elder brother, nor whether your younger brother is alive or dead. Last night your city fell into the hands of Cao Cao, but neither soldiers nor people were harmed, and a special guard was set over the family of Liu Bei lest they should be alarmed. I came to tell you how well they had been treated.\"\n\n\"This is certainly talking me over,\" said Guan Yu. \"Though escape is impossible, yet I am not perturbed. I look upon death as going home. You had better depart quickly and let me go down and begin the struggle again.\"\n\n\"Surely you must know everybody will ridicule you when they hear of this,\" said Zhang Liao.\n\n\"I shall die for loyalty and righteousness. Who will laugh?\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"You would be guilty of three faults if you died.\"\n\n\"Tell me them,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"First of all, you and your elder brother pledged yourselves in the Peach Garden to die or to live together. Now your brother has been defeated, and you want to fight to the death. Therefore, if your brother appears again by and by and wants your help, he will seek it in vain. Is this anything else than betraying the Peach Garden Oath? Secondly, you are in charge of your brother's family and, if you fought and died, the two women would be left forlorn and without a protector. That would be a betrayal of trust. Thirdly, your military skill stands out conspicuous and will go down in history. If you do not aid your brother in his noble attempt to maintain the dynasty, then all your labors and sufferings will have been spent to win a worthless reputation as a valiant fool. Where is the sense in that? I feel it my duty to point out these three faults to you.\"\n\nGuan Yu remained silent and thought for some time.\n\nThen he said, \"You have spoken of my three faults. What do you desire?\"\n\n\"You are surrounded with the certainty of death if you do not yield. There is no advantage in a useless death. Wherefore your best course is to yield to Cao Cao till you hear news of Liu Bei and can rejoin him. Thus you will ensure the safety of the two ladies and also keep inviolate the Peach Garden compact. You will preserve a useful life. Brother, you must reflect on these things.\"\n\n\"Brother, you have spoken of three advantages; now I have three conditions. If the Prime Minister concede these, then will I doff my armor. If he refuses, then I prefer to be guilty of the three faults and die.\"\n\n\"Why should the Prime Minister not concede them? He is most liberal and large minded. I pray you let me hear your conditions.\"\n\n\"The first is that as I and the Imperial Uncle have sworn to support the Hans, I now submit to the Emperor and not to His Prime Minister Cao Cao. The second condition is that suitable provision be made for the two ladies under my care and that no one shall be allowed to approach them. The third is that I shall be allowed to set off to rejoin Uncle Liu Bei so soon as I shall hear where he is, whether it be far or near. I require all these to be satisfied. Failing a single one, I will not submit. Wherefore, Zhang Liao, I pray you hasten back and announce them.\"\n\nZhang Liao lost no time but rode back to Cao Cao. When he spoke of Guan Yu's intention to submit to the Hans but not to Cao Cao, the latter laughed, saying, \"As I am a minister of Han, so am I Han. I grant that.\"\n\nZhang Liao then spoke of provision due to their rank and security from molestation for the ladies, to which Cao Cao replied, \"I will give them twice the regular amount for an Uncle of the Emperor. As for securing them from molestation, that is simple. The ordinary domestic law is enough. Why should there be any doubt?\"\n\nThen said Zhang Liao, \"Whenever he shall get news of the whereabouts of Liu Bei, he must go to him.\"\n\nAt this Cao Cao shook his head, saying, \"Then I am merely to feed Guan Yu. What is the use of this? I cannot consent.\"\n\nZhang Liao replied, \"You must know of Yu Rang's saying: The difference in behavior brought about by difference of treatment? Liu Bei treats Guan Yu just kindly and liberally. You can surely engage Guan Yu's heart and support by being kinder and more liberal.\"\n\n\"What you say is much to the point. I will grant the three conditions,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nWhereupon Zhang Liao left to carry the news to Guan Yu, still on the summit of the Tushan Mountains.\n\nSaid Guan Yu, \"Now I expect the army to withdraw so that I may enter the city to tell the two ladies what has been arranged. After that I submit at once.\"\n\nZhang Liao rode back once more with this request, and the order was given for the army to retire three miles.\n\n\"Do not do this,\" said Xun Yu. \"I fear treachery.\"\n\n\"He will certainly not break faith,\" said Cao Cao. \"He is too high principled.\"\n\nThe army retired, and Guan Yu with his force reentered the city of Xiapi, where he saw that the people were following their ordinary avocations in tranquillity. He came to the palace and went in to see the two ladies, who hastened to meet him.\n\nHe bowed to them below the steps and said, \"I apologize for having caused you to feel alarmed.\"\n\n\"Where is the Uncle?\" asked they.\n\n\"I know not whither he has gone.\"\n\n\"What do you intend to do, brother-in-law?\"\n\n\"I went out of the city to try a last battle. I was surrounded on a hill top, and Zhang Liao has urged me to yield. I proposed three conditions, all of which were conceded, and the enemy drew off to allow me to return to the city. Unless I have your decision, sisters-in-law, I scarcely dare to take any final step.\"\n\nThey asked what were the conditions and were told.\n\nLady Gan said, \"When Cao Cao's army came in, we took it to mean certain death. But it is scarcely credible that not a hair of our heads has been disturbed. Not a soldier has dared enter our doors. You have accepted the conditions, brother-in-law, and there is no need to ask our consent. Our only fear is that he will not let you go by and by to search for the Uncle.\"\n\n\"Sisters-in-law, you need not be anxious. I will see to that.\"\n\n\"You must decide everything and need not ask us.\"\n\nGuan Yu withdrew and then, with a small escort, went to his interview with Cao Cao. Cao Cao came to the outermost gate to welcome him, and Guan Yu dismounted and made obeisance. Cao Cao returned his salute with the greatest cordiality.\n\n\"The leader of a defeated army is grateful for the graciousness that has preserved his life,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"I have so long admired your loyalty and high principles that this happy meeting gratifies the desire of my whole life,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\n\"As the Prime Minister has granted the three requests which my friend petitioned for on my behalf, there is now but little to discuss,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"As I have spoken, so be it. I could not break faith,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\n\"Whenever I hear where Uncle Liu Bei is, I must certainly go to him, even if through fire and water. It may be that there will be no time nor opportunity of saying farewell. I trust you will understand the reason.\"\n\n\"If Liu Bei should prove to be alive, you must certainly be allowed to go to him. But I fear that in the confusion he may have lost his life. You may set your mind at rest and let me make inquiries.\"\n\nGuan Yu thanked him. Then a banquet was prepared in Guan Yu's honor. Next day the army started on its homeward march.\n\nFor the journey to the capital, a carriage was prepared for the two ladies, and Guan Yu was its guard. On the road they rested at a certain post station, and Cao Cao, anxious to compromise Guan Yu by beguiling him into forgetfulness of his duty, assigned Guan Yu to the same apartment as his sisters-in-law. Guan Yu stood the whole night before the door with a lighted candle in his hand. Not once did he yield to fatigue. Cao Cao's respect for him could not but increase.\n\nAt the capital the Prime Minister assigned a dignified residence to Guan Yu, which he immediately divided into two enclosures, the inner one for the two ladies and the other for himself. He placed a guard of eighteen of his veterans over the women's quarters.\n\nGuan Yu was presented to Emperor Xian who conferred upon him the rank of General Who Serves the Hans. Guan Yu expressed his thanks to the Emperor. Next day Cao Cao made a great banquet, inviting all his advisers and officers, solely in honor of Guan Yu, who sat in the seat of honor. Beside this Guan Yu received presents of silks and gold and silver vessels, all of which Guan Yu sent into the ladies' quarters for their use and keeping. In fact from the day of arrival in the capital, Guan Yu was treated with marked respect and distinction, small banquets following each other in each three days, and large banquets held in each five days.\n\nCao Cao also presented him with ten most lovely serving girls. Guan Yu sent these also within to wait upon his two sisters-in-law.\n\nEvery third day Guan Yu went to the door of the women's quarters to inquire after their welfare, and then they asked if any news of the wanderer had come. This ceremony closed with the words: \"Brother-in-law, you may retire when you wish.\"\n\nCao Cao heard of this extremely correct behavior and thought all the more of the man for it.\n\nOne day Cao Cao noticed that the robe Guan Yu was wearing was old and frayed. Taking his measurements, Cao Cao had a new one made of fine brocade and presented it to him. Guan Yu took it and put it on under the old robe, so that the latter covered it.\n\n\"Why so very thrifty?\" laughed Cao Cao.\n\n\"It is not thrift,\" was his reply. \"The old robe was a gift from my brother, and I wear it because it reminds me of him. I could not allow the new gift to eclipse his old one.\"\n\n\"How very high principled!\" said Cao Cao, sighing.\n\nOne day when Guan Yu was at home, there came a messenger to say that the two women had thrown themselves on the ground and were weeping. They would not say why.\n\nGuan Yu set his dress in order, went over, and knelt by the door, saying, \"Why this grief, sisters-in-law?\"\n\nLady Gan replied, \"In the night I dreamed that the Uncle had fallen into a pit. I woke up and told Lady Mi, and we think he must be dead. So we weep.\"\n\n\"Dreams are not to be credited,\" he replied. \"You dreamed of him because you were thinking of him. Pray do not grieve.\"\n\nJust then Guan Yu was invited to another banquet, so he took leave of the ladies and went. Seeing Guan Yu looked sad and tearful, his host asked the reason.\n\n\"My sisters-in-law have been weeping for my brother, and I cannot help being sad in sympathy.\"\n\nCao Cao smiled and tried to cheer up his guest. Cao Cao plied Guan Yu with wine so that Guan Yu became quite intoxicated and sat stroking his beard and saying, \"What a useless thing am I! I could do no service for my country, and I have parted from my elder brother.\"\n\n\"How many hairs in your beard?\" suddenly asked his host.\n\n\"Some hundreds, perhaps. In the autumn a few fall out, but in the winter it is fullest. Then I use a black silk bag to keep the hairs from being broken,\" replied Guan Yu.\n\nCao Cao had a bag made for him to protect his beard. Soon after when they were at court, the Emperor asked what was the bag he saw on Guan Yu's breast.\n\n\"My beard is rather long, Your Majesty,\" said Guan Yu. \"So the Prime Minister gave me a bag to protect it.\"\n\nThe Emperor bade him take off the bag and show his beard in all its fullness and it fell in rippling waves below his breast.\n\n\"Really a most beautiful beard!\" said the Emperor.\n\nThis is why people call him: \"The Man with the Beautiful Beard.\"\n\nAnother time, after a banquet, Cao Cao was seeing his guest start from the gate of his palace when he noticed that his charger was very thin.\n\n\"Why is it so thin?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"My worthless body is rather heavy and really too much for it. It is always out of condition.\"\n\nCao Cao at once told his attendants to bring out a certain steed, and before long it appeared. It was red, like glowing charcoal, and a handsome creature in every way.\n\n\"Do you recognize it?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"Why, it is no other than Red Hare!\" cried Guan Yu.\n\n\"Yes, it is Red Hare,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he presented the horse, all fully caparisoned, to his guest.\n\nGuan Yu bowed many times and thanked him again and again, till Cao Cao began to feel displeased and said, \"I have given you many things, lovely handmaids and gold and silks and never won a bow of gratitude from you before. This horse seems to please you better than all the rest. Why do you think so poorly of the damsels and so much of the steed?\"\n\n\"I know the horse: It can travel three hundred miles a day, and I am very lucky to get him. Now as soon as I find out where my brother is, I can get to him in a single day,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nCao Cao grumbled to himself and began to repent of his gift.\n\nFortune dealt a stunning blow, still he played his part;\n\nPartitioning his dwelling proved his purity of heart.\n\n\u2003The crafty minister desired to win him to his side,\n\n\u2003But felt that failure was foredoomed however much he tried.\n\nSaid Cao Cao to Zhang Liao, \"I have treated Guan Yu pretty liberally, but he still cherishes the desire to leave me. Do you know if it is really so?\"\n\n\"I will try to find out,\" was the reply.\n\nSo Zhang Liao took an early opportunity of seeing Guan Yu, and when the politeness of the visit were over, Zhang Liao said, \"I recommended you to the Prime Minister, and you have not lost much by that.\"\n\n\"I am deeply affected by his kindness and bounty,\" said Guan Yu, \"but, though my body is here, yet I am always thinking of my brother.\"\n\n\"Your words do not express present conditions quite correctly. One who lives in the world without discrimination and consideration of his relations with others is not the most admirable type of person. Even Liu Bei never treated you better than does the Prime Minister. Why then do you maintain this desire to get away?\"\n\n\"I know only too well that he has been most kind, but I have also received great kindness from Uncle Liu Bei. Beside we have sworn to die together, and I cannot remain here. But before I go, I must try to render the Prime Minister some signal service to prove my gratitude.\"\n\n\"Supposing Liu Bei should have left the world, whither will you go?\" said Zhang Liao.\n\n\"I will follow him to the below realms of Nine Golden Springs.\"\n\nThere could no longer be the least doubt as to Guan Yu's intentions, and Zhang Liao told Cao Cao just how matters stood. Cao Cao sighed.\n\n\"To serve one's chief with unswerving fidelity is a proof of the highest principle of all,\" said he.\n\nSaid Xun Yu, \"He spoke of performing some act of service before leaving. If he gets no chance of such a thing, he will not be able to go.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed that this was so.\n\nLiu Bei went to Yuan Shao for refuge. Here Liu Bei was always sorrowful and, when asked the reason, said he did not know where his brothers were nor what had happened to his family since they fell into the hands of Cao Cao.\n\n\"Why should I not be sad when I have failed towards my country and my family?\" said he.\n\n\"I have long wished to attack Xuchang,\" said Yuan Shao. \"Now it is autumn and just the time for an expedition, so let us discuss plans for the destruction of Cao Cao.\"\n\nTian Feng at once opposed this.\n\n\"When Cao Cao attacked Xuzhou and Xuchang was undefended, you let the chance slip by. Now that Xuzhou has been captured, and their soldiers are flushed with victory, it would be madness to attempt it. It is necessary to await another chance.\"\n\n\"Let me think about it,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nHe asked advice from Liu Bei whether to attack or to hold on.\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"Cao Cao is a rebel. I think you are failing in your duty if you do not attack him.\"\n\n\"Your words are good,\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nHe made up his mind to move. But again the adviser Tian Feng intervened.\n\nThen Yuan Shao grew angry, saying, \"You fellows who cultivate literature and despise war have made me miss a lot!\"\n\nTian Feng bowed his head and said, \"Neglect your servant's wise words, and you will fail in the field.\"\n\nYuan Shao was so angry that he wanted to put Tian Feng to death. However, Liu Bei begged him off and he was only imprisoned.\n\nSeeing the fate of his colleague, another adviser, Ju Shou, assembled his clan and distributed among them all his possessions, saying, \"I go with the army. If we succeed, then nothing can exceed our glory; but if we are defeated, the risk I run is great.\"\n\nHis friends wept as they said farewell.\n\nGeneral Yan Liang was appointed to the command of the advance guard, to go to attack Baima.\n\nThen Ju Shou first protested, \"His mind is too narrow for such a post. He is brave but unequal to such a trust.\"\n\n\"You are not the sort of man to measure my best generals,\" replied Yuan Shao.\n\nThe army marched to Liyang, and Governor Liu Yue of Dongjun sent an urgent call to Xuchang for aid. Cao Cao moved his armies hastily.\n\nAs soon as the news of battle got about, Guan Yu went to see the Prime Minister and said, \"Illustrious Sir, the army is mobilized. I volunteer for the van leader.\"\n\n\"I scarcely dare put you to such inconvenience, but presently, if need arises, I will call upon you.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu retired, and one hundred fifty thousand soldiers marched out in three directions. On the road the letters from Liu Yue arrived praying for help, and Cao Cao marched the first fifty thousand troops to Baima and took up a position supported by the hills. In the wide plains in front of them, Yan Liang was encamped with one hundred thousand veterans.\n\nCao Cao was frightened at the force opposed to him and, returning to camp, spoke to Song Xian, who had once served under Lu Bu, saying, \"You are one of Lu Bu's famous veteran generals. Can you give battle to this Yan Liang?\"\n\nSong Xian agreed to try. He armed himself, mounted, and rode to the front. Yan Liang was there on horseback, his sword lying crossways. Seeing an opponent approaching, he uttered a loud shout and galloped toward Song Xian. The two met, but after only three bouts, Song Xian fell under a mighty slash from Yan Liang's sword.\n\n\"What a terrible leader!\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"He has slain my comrade, I want to go and avenge him,\" then cried Wei Xu.\n\nCao Cao bade him go and he rode out, spear set, and in front of the army railed at Yan Liang.\n\nYan Liang replied not a word, but their two steeds came together; and at the first blow from Yan Liang's sword, Wei Xu's forehead was halved.\n\n\"Now, who again dares face him?\" cried Cao Cao.\n\nXu Huang took up the challenge and he went out. The combat endured twenty bouts, and then Xu Huang fled back to his own side. The other generals were now greatly depressed at their failure. Cao Cao withdrew his army, feeling very sad at the loss of two generals in quick succession. Yan Liang also marched off his force.\n\nThen Cheng Yu went to see his chief, saying, \"I can produce a man the equal of Yan Liang.\"\n\n\"Who?\" cried Cao Cao.\n\n\"No other than Guan Yu.\"\n\n\"I am afraid that if he is given an opportunity to perform that return service he spoke of, he will leave me.\"\n\n\"If Liu Bei is still alive, he is with Yuan Shao. If you get Guan Yu to defeat Yuan Shao's army, Yuan Shao will look askance at Liu Bei and put him to death. Liu Bei gone, where can Guan Yu go?\"\n\nThis argument appealed to Cao Cao at once, and he sent to request Guan Yu to come.\n\nPrevious to obeying the call, Guan Yu went to say farewell to his sisters-in-law.\n\n\"You may get news of the Uncle on the journey,\" said they.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Guan Yu and left them.\n\nArmed with his green-dragon saber, riding on the swift steed Red Hare, and having but a slender following, Guan Yu was not long in arriving at Baima. He saw Cao Cao, who told him what had happened. Yan Liang was too valiant for any to face.\n\n\"Let me look at him,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nThen wine was served for his refreshment, and while they were drinking, it was reported that Yan Liang once again offered a challenge. So Cao Cao and his guest and staff went to the summit of a hill whence the enemy could be seen. Cao Cao and Guan Yu sat on the hill top, and the commanders stood about them. Cao Cao pointed out Yan Liang's troops arrayed on the plains below. The ensigns and banners waving fresh and bright amid the forest of spears and swords made a grand and imposing spectacle.\n\n\"See how formidable these soldiers of the North of Yellow River are,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I regard them as so many clay fowls and mud dogs,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nCao Cao pointed out Yan Liang, saying, \"There under that grand umbrella, in that embroidered robe and that silver breastplate and riding on horseback and gripping that huge sword is Yan Liang.\"\n\n\"His head looks as though it was stuck on a pole for sale,\" said Guan Yu, just glancing over the army at his feet.\n\n\"He is very terrible. You must not despise him,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nGuan Yu rose, saying, \"I am a poor thing, but I will go over and bring you his head if you like.\"\n\n\"Joking is not allowed in this army,\" interposed Zhang Liao. \"Please be careful what you say, General.\"\n\nGuan Yu quickly mounted, turned down his mighty weapon, and galloped down the hill, his phoenix eyes rounded, and his silkworm eyebrows fiercely bristling. He dashed straight into the enemy's array, and the northern soldiers opened like falling waves and dissolving storms. He made directly for the commander.\n\nNow Yan Liang sitting there in state saw a horseman rushing toward him, and just as he began to ask who the rider of the red horse was, lo! the horseman was there. Taken utterly by surprise, the leader could make no defense. Guan Yu's arm rose and the mighty weapon fell. And with it fell Yan Liang.\n\nLeaping from the saddle, Guan Yu cut off his victim's head and hung it to his horse's neck. Then he mounted and rode out, just as if there was no army there.\n\nThe northern troops, panic stricken, made no fight. Cao Cao's army attacked with full force and slew great numbers of them. They captured many horses and weapons and much military gear. Guan Yu rode quickly back up the hill and laid the proof of his prowess at the feet of the Prime Minister.\n\n\"You are more than human, General!\" cried Cao Cao.\n\n\"What have I done to talk about?\" said Guan Yu. \"My brother, Zhang Fei, did the same thing in an army of a hundred legions, and did it as easily as picking something from his own pocket.\"\n\nCao Cao marveled at the statement and turning to those about him said, \"If you meet this Zhang Fei, be careful.\"\n\nAnd he bade them make a note on the overlap of their robes so that they should remember.\n\nThe beaten army returning northward met Yuan Shao on the road and told their story.\n\n\"A red-faced warrior with a long beard, wielding a huge, long-handled sword, broke into the army, cut off the General's head and bore it off,\" said they.\n\n\"Who was this?\" asked Yuan Shao.\n\nJu Shou said, \"It must have been Liu Bei's brother, Guan Yu. It could be nobody else.\"\n\nYuan Shao was very angry and, pointing to Liu Bei, he said, \"Your brother has slain my beloved leader. You are in the plot too. Why should I save you alive?\"\n\nHe bade the lictors take Liu Bei away and behead him.\n\nMorning saw him guest on high.\n\nEvening, prisoner, doomed to die." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Yuan Shao Loses Another Leader; Guan Yu Abandons Rank And Wealth.\n\nAs the last chapter closed, Liu Bei had been condemned to die.\n\nLiu Bei spoke up, however, and said, \"Pray hear one word, Illustrious Sir, before you decide. I have lost sight of my brother since my misfortune at Xuzhou and know not whether Guan Yu be dead or alive. There are many men in the world who resemble him. Is every red-faced man with a beard named Guan Yu? Should you not rather seek some evidence?\"\n\nNow Yuan Shao was impulsive and facile by nature, and when Liu Bei spoke thus, he suddenly turned upon Ju Shou, saying, \"By wrongly regarding what you said, I nearly killed an innocent person.\"\n\nThen Yuan Shao requested Liu Bei once more to resume his seat in the tent and give advice on how to avenge Yan Liang.\n\nSoon from the lower end a voice was heard, saying, \"Yan Liang and I were as brothers, and can I allow any other to avenge his death?\"\n\nThe speaker was a man of eight-span height with a face like a jilin, a famous leader from the North of Yellow River, named Wen Chou.\n\nYuan Shao was pleased and said, \"You are the only man who can do it. I will give you one hundred thousand troops, and you can cross the Yellow River, and quickly smite that rebel Cao Cao.\n\n\"You cannot do it. Wen Chou will fail,\" said Ju Shou. \"The proper course is to hold Yenjin and detach a force to Guandu. If you rashly cross the river and anything goes wrong, not a soul will return.\"\n\nYuan Shao said, \"That is always the way with you fellows, always delaying and taking the dash out of the army. You put off today and postpone tomorrow till success has become impossible. Do you forget that promptitude is what each soldier honors?\"\n\nThe adviser withdrew sadly, saying, \"Superiors do not curb their ambitions; inferiors crave for achievements; things are undone. Eternal is the course of Yellow River, shall I change it?\"\n\nThereafter Ju Shou feigned illness and went no more to the council.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"I have received much kindness at your hands and have been unable to show my gratitude. I would accompany General Wen Chou that I may repay your bounty and also that I may hear news of my brother.\"\n\nYuan Shao gladly consented and ordered Wen Chou to share his command with Liu Bei.\n\nBut the former objected, saying, \"Liu Bei has been so often defeated that it will augur ill for success this time. Since you wish, I will give Liu Bei command of the rear guard of thirty thousand soldiers.\"\n\nAnd this being approved, three legions were told off under Liu Bei's special command to follow the main body.\n\nThe prowess displayed by Guan Yu in the bold attack on Yan Liang redoubled Cao Cao's respect for him, and Cao Cao memorialized the Throne that Guan Yu receive the title of Lord of Hanshou, and a seal was cast for him.\n\nJust then came the unexpected news that Yuan Shao's army had moved toward the Yellow River and was in position above Yenjin. Cao Cao first sent to transfer the inhabitants to the west bank and then led out an army to oppose Yuan Shao. He issued an order to face about, thus placing the rear companies in front. The commissariat wagons were also placed in the van.\n\n\"What is this reversal for?\" asked Lu Qian.\n\nCao Cao replied, \"When the supplies are in rear, they are liable to be plundered. So I have put them first.\"\n\n\"But if you meet the enemy and they steal them?\"\n\n\"Wait till the enemy appears. I shall know what to do.\"\n\nLu Qian was much exercised at this new move of the Prime Minister. In the meantime the supply train moved along the river toward Yenjin. Presently the foremost troops raised a great shout, and Cao Cao sent to see what it meant.\n\nThe messenger came back, saying, \"Wen Chou's army is approaching, and the supply train has been abandoned and is at the mercy of the enemy. The main body is still far behind. What to do next?\"\n\nThereupon Cao Cao pointed to two mounds, saying, \"We will take refuge here for the present.\"\n\nAll those near him hastened to the mounds. There Cao Cao ordered them all to loosen their dress, lay aside their breastplates, and rest a time. The horsemen turned their steeds loose.\n\nWen Chou's soldiers approached under cover. As they drew near, the officers told Cao Cao, saying, \"The rebels are near. We ought to catch the horses and go back to Baima.\"\n\nBut Adviser Xun You checked them, saying, \"These are a bait for the enemy. Why retire?\"\n\nCao Cao glanced across at him and said, \"He understands. Do not say anything.\"\n\nNow having got possession of the supply carts, the enemy next came to seize the horses. By this time they had all broken ranks and were scattered, each soldier going his own way. Then suddenly Cao Cao gave the order to go down from the mounds and smite them.\n\nThe surprise was complete. Wen Chou's army was in confusion, and Cao Cao's army surrounded them. Wen Chou made a stand, but those about him trampled each other down, and he could do nothing but flee. And he fled.\n\nThen standing on the top of a mound Cao Cao pointed to the flying leader, calling out, \"There is one of the most famous generals of the north. Who can capture him?\"\n\nZhang Liao and Xu Huang both mounted and dashed after him, crying, \"Wen Chou, do not run away!\"\n\nLooking round, the fugitive saw two pursuers, and then he set aside his spear, took his bow and adjusted an arrow, which he shot at Zhang Liao.\n\n\"Cease shooting, you rebel!\" shouted Xu Huang.\n\nZhang Liao ducked his head, and the shaft went harmlessly by, save that it carried away the tassel of his cap. He only pressed harder in pursuit. The next arrow however struck his horse in the head, and the animal stumbled and fell, throwing its rider to the earth.\n\nThen Wen Chou turned to come back. Xu Huang, whirling his battle-ax, stood in his way to stop Wen Chou. But Xu Huang saw behind Wen Chou several more horsemen coming to help; and as they would have been too many for him, he fled. Wen Chou pursued along the river bank. Suddenly he saw coming toward him with banners fluttering in the breeze, a small party of horse, and the leader carried a great sword.\n\n\"Stop!\" cried Guan Yu, for it was he, and he attacked at once.\n\nAt the third bout Wen Chou's heart failed him, and he wheeled and fled, following the windings of the river. But Guan Yu's steed was fast and soon caught up. One blow, and the hapless Wen Chou fell.\n\nWhen Cao Cao saw from the mound that the leader of the enemy had fallen, he gave the signal for a general onset, and half of the northern army were drowned in the river. And the carts with supplies and all the horses were quickly recovered.\n\nNow Guan Yu, at the head of a few horsemen, was thrusting here and striking there at the moment when Liu Bei, with the thirty thousand reserve troops, appeared on the battle field on the other bank of the river. At once they told him that the red-faced, long-bearded warrior was there and had slain Wen Chou. Liu Bei hastily pressed forward to try to get a look at the warrior. He saw across the river a body of horse and the banners bore the words Guan Yu, Lord of Hanshou.\n\n\"Then it is my brother, and he is really with Cao Cao,\" said Liu Bei, secretly thanking God that Guan Yu was safe.\n\nLiu Bei made an attempt to wait about till he could call to Guan Yu, but a great mass of Cao Cao's soldiers came rushing down, and he was forced to retire.\n\nYuan Shao, bringing reinforcements, reached Guandu and built a stockade.\n\nTwo advisers, Guo Tu and Shen Pei, went in to see him and said, \"Again that fellow Guan Yu has been in the battle. He killed Wen Chou. Liu Bei pretends ignorance of him.\"\n\nTheir master was angry and railed at Liu Bei, \"The long-eared rebel! How dare he do such a thing?\"\n\nSoon Liu Bei appeared. Again Yuan Shao ordered him out to instant execution.\n\n\"What crime have I committed?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"You sent your brother to slay one of my generals. Is that no crime?\"\n\n\"Pray let me explain before I die. Cao Cao hated me and has always done so. Now he has found out where I am and, fearing that I may help you, has got my brother to destroy your two generals, feeling sure that when you heard of it, you would be angry and put me to death. You cannot fail to see this.\"\n\n\"What he says is sense,\" said Yuan Shao, turning to his advisers, \"and you two nearly brought on me the reproach of injuring the good.\"\n\nYuan Shao ordered his attendants to retire and asked Liu Bei to come and sit by him.\n\nLiu Bei came, saying, \"I am deeply thankful, Illustrious Sir, for your great kindness, for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. Now I desire to send some confidential messenger with a secret letter to my brother to tell him where I am, and I am sure he will come without a moment's delay. He will help you to destroy Cao Cao to make up for having destroyed your two officers. Do you approve of this?\"\n\n\"If I got Guan Yu, he would be ten times better than the Yan Liang and Wen Chou that I have lost,\" replied Yuan Shao.\n\nSo Liu Bei prepared a letter. But there was no one to take it. Yuan Shao ordered the army to withdraw to Wuyang, where they made a large camp. For some time nothing was done.\n\nThen Cao Cao sent Xiahou Dun to defend the strategic points at Guandu while he led the bulk of the army back to the capital. There he gave many banquets in honor of the services of Guan Yu, and then he told Lu Qian that putting the supplies in the front of the army had been meant as a bait to draw the enemy to destruction.\n\n\"Only Xun You understood that,\" said Cao Cao in conclusion.\n\nEveryone present praised his ingenuity. Even while the banquet was proceeding, there arrived news of a rising of Yellow Scarves rebels at Runan led by Liu Pi and Gong Du. They were very strong, and Cao Hong had been defeated in several engagements. Now he begged for help.\n\nGuan Yu hearing this said, \"I should like to have the opportunity of performing some service by destroying these rebels.\"\n\n\"You have already rendered noble services for which you have not been properly requited. I could hardly trouble you again,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I have been idle too long. I shall get ill,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nCao Cao then let him to go and gave him fifty thousand troops with Yu Jin and Yue Jing as generals under him. They were to leave soon.\n\nThen Xun Yu said privily to his master, \"He always cherishes the idea of returning to Liu Bei. He will leave you if he hears any news. Do not let him go on this expedition.\"\n\n\"If he does well this time, I will not let him go into battle again,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nIn due time the force led by Guan Yu drew near the rebels in Runan and made their camp. One night, just outside his camp, two spies were caught and taken in to Guan Yu who in one of them recognized Sun Qian. The attendants being dismissed, Guan Yu questioned Sun Qian.\n\n\"After we lost sight of each other, I have heard not a word of you. What are you doing here?\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"After I escaped, I drifted hither and thither till I had the good fortune to reach Runan, and Liu Pi and Gong Du, the Yellow Scarves leaders, took me in. But why are you with Cao Cao, General? And where are your sisters-in-law? Are they well?\"\n\nGuan Yu told him all that had happened.\n\n\"I have heard lately that Liu Bei is with Yuan Shao. I would have liked to go and join him, but I have not found a convenient opportunity. Now the two men I am with have taken the side of Yuan Shao against Cao Cao. By good luck you were coming here, so I got command of a small party of scouts to be able to see you and tell you. Presently our two leaders will pretend to be defeated and you, and the two ladies, can go over to Yuan Shao. And you will see your brother.\"\n\n\"Since he is there, I certainly must go at once to see him. But it is a misfortune that I have slain two of Yuan Shao's generals. I fear things are not in my favor,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"Let me go first and see how the land lies. I will come back and tell you.\"\n\n\"I would risk a myriad deaths to see my brother,\" said Guan Yu. \"But I must go to say farewell to Cao Cao.\"\n\nSun Qian was sent away that night, and next day Guan Yu led out his army to offer battle. Gong Du, in armor, went out to the front of the line of battle, and Guan Yu said, \"You people, why have you risen against the government?\"\n\n\"Why do you blame us when you have turned your back on your own lord?\" replied Gong Du.\n\n\"How have I turned my back on my lord?\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is with Yuan Shao, and you are with Cao Cao. What is that?\"\n\nGuan Yu could not reply, but he whirled round his sword and rode forward. Gong Du fled, and Guan Yu followed. Gong Du turned and said to Guan Yu, \"Do not forget your old chief's kindness. Now attack as soon as you can, and I will give up the defense.\"\n\nGuan Yu understood and urged on his troops. The leaders of the rebels pretended they were worsted, and they all scattered. So Runan was retaken. Having pacified the people, Guan Yu quickly led his army back to the capital, where he was met by Cao Cao and congratulated on his success and feasted.\n\nWhen this was all over, Guan Yu went to the dwelling of his sisters-in-law to pay his respects at their gate.\n\n\"Have you been able to get any news of Uncle Liu Bei in your two expeditions?\" asked Lady Gan.\n\n\"None,\" replied Guan Yu.\n\nAs he retired from the door, he heard sounds of bitter weeping within.\n\n\"Alas! He is dead,\" said they. \"Our brother-in-law thinks we shall be greatly distressed; and thus, he hides the truth from us.\"\n\nOne of the old soldiers, who acted as guard, hearing the sounds of perpetual grief, took pity on them and said, \"Do not weep, ladies. Your lord is with Yuan Shao in the North of Yellow River.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" said they.\n\n\"I went out with General Guan Yu, and one of the soldiers told me.\"\n\nThe two ladies summoned Guan Yu and reproached him, saying, \"Uncle Liu Bei never betrayed you, and yet you remain here enjoying the bounty of Cao Cao and forgetting the old times. And you tell us falsehoods.\"\n\nGuan Yu bowed his head, saying, \"My brother really is in the North of Yellow River, but I dared not tell you, lest it should become known. Something must be done, but done carefully, and it needs time.\"\n\n\"Brother-in-law, you should hasten,\" said Lady Gan.\n\nGuan Yu withdrew feeling that he must evolve some scheme of departure without further loss of time. It caused him much uneasiness.\n\nYu Jin, having found out that Liu Bei was in the north, told Cao Cao, who at once sent Zhang Liao to find out Guan Yu's intentions.\n\nZhang Liao entered jauntily and congratulated Guan Yu, saying, \"They tell me you obtained news of your brother in the battlefield. I felicitate you.\"\n\n\"My lord was there indeed, but I met him not. I see nothing to be glad about.\"\n\n\"Is there any difference between the relationship of you two and that of any other two brothers?\"\n\nGuan Yu replied, \"You and I stand in the relationship of friends. Liu Bei and I are friends and brothers beside, and prince and minister in addition to both. Our relationship cannot be discussed in usual terms.\"\n\n\"Well, now that you know where your brother is, are you going to him?\"\n\n\"How can I go back on what I said before? I am sure you will explain fully to the Prime Minister.\"\n\nZhang Liao went back and told his master, who said, \"I must find a way to keep him here.\"\n\nWhile Guan Yu was pondering over his difficulties, they told him that a friend had come to inquire for him. The visitor was introduced but Guan Yu did not recognize him.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"I am Chen Zhen of Nanyang, in the service of Yuan Shao.\"\n\nIn great perturbation, Guan Yu sent away the attendants and, they being gone, said, \"There is some special reason for your visit?\"\n\nFor reply Chen Zhen drew out a letter and handed it to his host, who recognized that it was from his brother Liu Bei. The letter read:\n\n\"I, the writer, and you, Sir, pledged ourselves in the Peach Garden to die together. Why then are we apart and yet alive, our kindly feelings destroyed, our sense of right outraged? If you desire to obtain fame and acquire riches and honor, I will offer my head without hesitation so that your achievement is fulfilled. More might be said, but I await your commands with great anxiety.\"\n\nGuan Yu finished the letter with a bitter cry.\n\n\"I always wanted to find my brother, but I did not know where he was. How can he think such evil of me?\" said he.\n\n\"Liu Bei looks for you very eagerly. If you are still bound by the old pledge, you should go quickly,\" said Chen Zhen.\n\n\"Anyone born into the world without the essential virtue of sincerity is no true human. I came here openly and can go in no other way. Now will I write a letter which I will ask you to bear to my brother, that as soon as I can take leave of Cao Cao, I will bring the ladies and come to him.\"\n\n\"But what if Cao Cao refuse to let you go?\" said Chen Zhen.\n\n\"Then would I rather die. I will not remain here.\"\n\n\"Then, Sir, quickly write your letter and relieve your brother from his anxiety.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu wrote like this:\n\n\"I, the humble one, know full well that a human of principle does not betray and a human of loyalty despises death. I have been a student in my youth and know somewhat of the proprieties. I sigh and weep at the memory of the fraternal affection that made Yangjue Ai and Zuo Botao die rather than separate. I was in charge of Xiapi, but the place lacked provision and there was no help. I would have fought to the death, but there was on my shoulders the responsibility for my sisters-in-law. Wherefore I had to take care of my body lest I betrayed your trust. And so I made a prisoner of myself, hoping to find a way of release. I heard of you lately in Runan. I must, however, bid farewell to Cao Cao and bring the ladies with me when I come. May I perish, victim to the superhuman powers, if I have harbored any traitorous thought. Ink and paper are poor substitutes for what I would say, but I look to see you soon.\"\n\nChen Zhen left with this missive, and Guan Yu went to tell the women. Then he proceeded to the Prime Minister's palace to say farewell. But Cao Cao knew what he was coming for, and at the gate Guan Yu found the board intimating that no one could be received. So he had to return. However, he bade his own few soldiers prepare to start at any moment. He also gave orders that everything received from Cao Cao was to be left in the quarters. Nothing was to be taken.\n\nNext day he again proceeded to the palace to say farewell to his patron, but again found the board hanging there to show there was no admission. So it was several times; he could never enter. Then he went to see Zhang Liao, but Zhang Liao was indisposed.\n\n\"This means Cao Cao will not let me go,\" thought Guan Yu. \"But I am going, and I shall hesitate no longer.\"\n\nSo he wrote this letter:\n\n\"As a young man I entered the service of the Imperial Uncle, and pledged myself to share his fortunes. Heaven and Earth witnessed this oath. When I lost the city, I made three requests which you granted. Now I hear my brother is with Yuan Shao and I, remembering our pledge, cannot but go to him. Though your bounty is great, I forget not the bond of the past; wherefore I write this letter of farewell trusting that when you have read it, you will be content for me to postpone to another season the proof of my gratitude.\"\n\nGuan Yu sealed and sent it to the palace. Then he deposited in the treasury of his dwelling all the gold and silver he had received, hung his seal of lordship of Hanshou in the middle of the reception hall and left, taking his sisters-in-law with him in a carriage. He rode Red Hare and carried the green-dragon saber in his hand. With a small escort of guards, those formerly under his command, he left the city by the north gate.\n\nThe wardens would have stopped him, but Guan Yu frightened them with a fierce shout. Having got out, he told the escort to go in front with the carriage while he would remain behind to guard against pursuit. So they pushed the carriage toward the high road.\n\nIn the city, Guan Yu's letter reached the Prime Minister while he was consulting about what to do. He read it and exclaimed, \"So he has left!\"\n\nThen the warden of the gate came to report that Guan Yu had forced his way out, and was gone with a carriage, a horse, and a score of guards. Next came the servants from his house to report that he had left, taking nothing of the treasure, nor anyone of the waiting maids. Everything was left in the house. Even his seal was there. His only escort were the few soldiers of his original force.\n\nSuddenly from the assembly of officers rose a voice, saying, \"With three thousand of mailed horse, I will bring him back alive.\"\n\nTheir eyes turned to the speaker, who was General Cai Yang.\n\n\u2003On the dragon's cave he turns his back,\n\n\u2003But numberless wolves infest his track." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "The Man Of Beautiful Beard Rides On A Solitary Journey; Guan Yu Slays Six Generals Through Five Passes.\n\nNow of all the officers in Cao Cao's army, the two friendly toward Guan Yu were Zhang Liao and Xu Huang. The others treated Guan Yu with respect, except Cai Yang who was decidedly inimical. So this Cai Yang was ready to pursue and capture Guan Yu as soon as he heard of his departure. But Cao Cao accepted Guan Yu's going as natural.\n\n\"He does not forget his old leader, and he was perfectly open in all his actions. He is a gentleman, and you would do well to follow his example,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSo Cao Cao bade the would-be pursuer be gone and say no more about pursuit.\n\n\"You were exceedingly good to Guan Yu,\" said Cheng Yu, \"but he went off very rudely. He certainly left a screed behind with his reasons, but he affronted you, and that is no light matter. Now to let him join Yuan Shao is to add wings to a tiger. You had better catch him and put him to death so as to guard against future evil.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"But he had my promise, and can I break my word? Each has his master. Do not pursue.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao said to Zhang Liao, \"He has rejected all I gave him, so bribes were powerless with him in whatever shape. I have the greatest respect for such as him. He has not yet gone far, and I will try to strengthen his attachment to me and make one appeal to sentiment. Ride after him and beg him to stop till I can come up and bid farewell and offer him a sum of money for his expenses and a fighting robe, that he may remember me kindly in after days.\"\n\nSo Zhang Liao rode out quite alone. Cao Cao followed him leisurely with an escort of a score or so.\n\nNow the steed that Guan Yu rode was Red Hare, and it was very fast. No one could have come up with him but that there was the ladies' carriage to escort, and so Red Hare had to be held in and go slow. Suddenly Guan Yu heard a shout behind him, a voice crying, \"Go slowly, Guan Yu!\"\n\nHe turned and made out the person to be Zhang Liao. Ordering the pushers of the carriage to press on along the high road, he reined in his steed, held the green-dragon saber ready for a stroke, and waited for Zhang Liao to come up.\n\n\"Of course you have come to take me back, Zhang Liao?\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"No. The Prime Minister, seeing that you are going a long journey, wishes to see you on your way and told me to hasten forward and beg you to wait till he can come up. That is the only thing.\"\n\n\"Seeing that he is coming along with mailed men, I shall fight to the very last,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nAnd he took up his position on a bridge where he waited the approach of the party, who advanced quickly. Four of Cao Cao's generals, Xu Chu, Xu Huang, Yu Jin, and Li Dian, followed close. Seeing Guan Yu was ready to fight, Cao Cao ordered his escort to open out in two lines, and then it was seen they carried no arms. This relieved his mind, for it proved to Guan Yu they meant no attack.\n\n\"Why do you go in such haste, Guan Yu?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nGuan Yu inclined his head but did not dismount, saying, \"I informed you in writing that since my lord was in the North of Yellow River, I had to leave at once. I went to your palace again and again but was refused admittance. So I wrote a letter of farewell, sealed up the treasure, resigned my lordship seal, and left everything for you. I hope you recall the promise you once made me.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"My desire is to keep my troth with all people. I cannot go back on my word. However, you may find the journey expensive, and therefore I have here prepared a sum of money to help you.\"\n\nThen from horseback Cao Cao held out a packet of gold.\n\nGuan Yu said, \"I have sufficient left from your former bounty. Keep that for presents to your soldiers.\"\n\n\"Why should you refuse this? It is but an insignificant return for great services.\"\n\n\"My services have been all trifling, not worth mentioning.\"\n\n\"Really, Guan Yu, you are the most high-principled of humans. I am very sorry my luck is too poor to retain you at my side. Pray accept just this robe to show you I am not quite ungrateful,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd one of his generals, dismounting, held up a silken coat in both hands. Guan Yu even still fearful of what might happen, would not dismount, but he reached down his sword and took the robe on its point. Then he threw it over his shoulders and turned to thank the giver.\n\n\"I thank you, Sir Prime Minister, for the robe and trust we shall meet again.\"\n\nSo saying, Guan Yu went down from the bridge and bore away to the north.\n\n\"He is a very rude man,\" said Xu Chu, who was of the escort. \"Why do you not take him prisoner?\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"He was absolutely alone facing scores of us. He was justified in being suspicious. But my word has gone forth, and he is not to be pursued.\"\n\nCao Cao and his escort returned, the Prime Minister very sad when he thought of the man who had gone.\n\nGuan Yu went down from the bridge and started in the wake of the carriage carrying the two ladies, which should have gone about ten miles while this interview had been going on. He could see no signs of it and rode hither and thither looking on all sides.\n\nPresently he heard someone shouting from a hill, calling him by name to halt. He saw a youth wearing a yellow turban and dressed in a silk robe. He held a spear in his hand and was mounted on a horse from the neck of which dangled a bloody head. Behind him were a hundred or so men on foot, and they advanced quickly.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\nThe young man dropped his spear, dismounted, and made a low bow. Guan Yu feared this was some ruse, so he only checked his horse and gripped his sword the more firmly, saying, \"Sir, I desire you to tell me your name!\"\n\n\"My name is Liao Hua. I belong to a Xiangyang family. Since these troubled times began I have been an outlaw among the rivers and lakes, and I and my comrades have lived by plunder. We are about five hundred in all. By chance my friend Du Yuan came across two ladies in a carriage just now; and, quite wrongly, he took them prisoners and brought them to the hold in the hills. I questioned the servants and so found out who they were and who was escorting them. So I wished them to be set free to pursue their journey. Du Yuan opposed this and spoke so ill-mannerly that I killed him. And here is his head. I pray you pardon me.\"\n\n\"Where are the two ladies?\"\n\n\"They are among the hills,\" replied Liao Hua.\n\n\"Bring them down here, at once,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nIn a short time a party of the brigands pushed the carriage down the hill, and the ladies sat there before him.\n\nThen Guan Yu dismounted, laid aside his sword, and stood respectfully before them with his arms crossed.\n\n\"Sisters, have you been alarmed?\" asked he.\n\nThey replied, \"We should have suffered at the hands of Du Yuan had it not been for Liao Hua.\"\n\n\"How did Liao Hua come to save the ladies?\" asked Guan Yu of those who stood by.\n\nThey said, \"Du Yuan carried off the ladies and proposed that he and Liao Hua should have one each as wife. But Liao Hua had found out they were of gentle birth and worthy, and was for treating them with respect. When Du Yuan disagreed, Liao Hua slew him.\"\n\nHearing this Guan Yu bowed to Liao Hua and thanked him. Liao Hua then wanted to join himself and his troop to Guan Yu, but Guan Yu, seeing he was a Yellow Scarf, would have nothing to do with him. So Guan Yu simply thanked him for his kindness to the ladies. Liao Hua offered some presents, but these were also declined.\n\nSo Liao Hua took his leave and presently disappeared in a valley among the hills. Guan Yu told his sisters the story of his interview with Cao Cao and the gift of a robe, and then he urged the carriage on its way. Towards dark they came to a farm where they would rest. The farmer, an old graybeard, came out to welcome the party and asked who they were. Guan Yu described himself as the brother of Liu Bei, and said his name.\n\n\"Surely you are no other than the slayer of Yan Liang and Wen Chou,\" said the venerable host.\n\n\"That is so,\" replied Guan Yu.\n\n\"Come in,\" said the old man, joyfully.\n\n\"My two sisters-in-law are in the carriage,\" said Guan Yu. \"Will you let your women folks go out to receive them?\"\n\nAs Guan Yu remained standing there, the host asked him to be seated, but he would not sit while the women were present and remained standing in a respectful attitude till the old man's wife had returned and ushered the ladies into the inner apartments. Then the old man set to the entertainment of his guest in the guest hall. Guan Yu asked his name.\n\nHe replied, \"I am called Hu Hua. In the days of the Emperor Huan, I was an officer of the court, but I resigned and retired into private life. I have a son, Hu Ban, with Governor Wang Zhi of Yingyang. If you should be going that way, General, I should like to send him a letter by you.\"\n\nGuan Yu said he would take the letter. Next day, after an early meal, the ladies got into their carriage, the host handed his letter to Guan Yu, and the little party once more took the road. They went toward Luoyang.\n\nPresently they approached a pass known as the Dongling Pass, guarded by Commander Kong Xiu and five hundred soldiers. When the soldiers saw a carriage being pushed toward the pass, they ran to tell their commander, who came out to accost the travelers.\n\nGuan Yu dismounted and returned the officer's salute, and Kong Xiu said, \"Whither are you going?\"\n\n\"I have left the Prime Minister to go into the North of Yellow River to find my brother.\"\n\n\"But Yuan Shao is my master's rival. You have authority from him to go thither?\"\n\n\"I left hurriedly and could not get it.\"\n\n\"If you have no authority, you must wait while I send to request orders.\"\n\n\"To remain while you send and receive an answer will delay me greatly,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"I must stand by my instructions. That is the only thing to do,\" said Kong Xiu.\n\n\"Then you refuse to let me pass?\"\n\n\"If you want to go through, leave the family as a gage.\"\n\nAt this Guan Yu got very angry and made to cut at the commander on the spot, but Kong Xiu withdrew into the gate and beat the drums for an attack. Thereupon the soldiers armed themselves, mounted, and came down to oppose the passage, crying, \"Dare you go through, eh?\"\n\nThe carriage was sent off to a safe distance, and then Guan Yu rode at full speed directly at the commander, who set his spear and came to meet him. The two steeds met and the men engaged, but at the first stroke of the green-dragon saber the commander of the gate fell to the earth dead. His troops fled.\n\n\"Soldiers, do not flee!\" cried Guan Yu. \"I killed him because I could do no otherwise. I have nothing against you, but I would ask you to tell the Prime Minister how this thing came to pass, that Kong Xiu wished to kill me, and so I slew him in self defense.\"\n\nThe soldiers bowed before him, and Guan Yu, with the carriage, passed through the gates and continued their way to Luoyang. But one of the guards of the pass went quickly in advance and informed the Governor of Luoyang, Han Qu, of the slaughter of Kong Xiu. Wherefore Han Qu assembled his officers to take counsel.\n\nMeng Tan, one of his generals, said, \"This Guan Yu must be a fugitive, or he would have a safe conduct. Our only course is to stop him, or we shall incur blame.\"\n\n\"The man is fierce and brave. Remember the fate of Yan Liang and Wen Chou. It seems vain to oppose him by force, and so we must think out some trap for him,\" said Han Qu.\n\n\"I have a ruse ready,\" said Meng Tan. \"I will close the gate with thorny blockades, and I will go to fight with him. I will engage and then flee, and you can shoot him from an ambush along the road. If we can get him and his party and send them prisoners to the capital, we ought to be well rewarded.\"\n\nThis course was determined upon, and soon they heard that Guan Yu was approaching. Han Qu strung his bow and filled his quiver with arrows and with one thousand soldiers took up position along the pass.\n\nThen as the party approached, Han Qu said, \"Who is the traveler who comes?\"\n\nGuan Yu bowed low and said, \"He is a certain Guan Yu, Lord of Hanshou, and he wishes to go through the pass.\"\n\n\"Have you a letter from the Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"In the hurry of departure I did not get any.\"\n\n\"My special orders from him are to hold this pass and make examination of all spies that may go to and fro. Any person without an authority must be a fugitive.\"\n\nThen Guan Yu began to be angry, saying, \"I have killed Kong Xiu at Dongling Pass. Do you also seek death?\"\n\n\"Who will capture him for me?\" cried Han Qu, and Meng Tan offered himself. He rode out, whirling his double swords, and made straight for Guan Yu.\n\nGuan Yu sent back the carriage out of danger and then rode toward Meng Tan. They engaged, but very soon Meng Tan turned his steed and fled. Guan Yu pursued. Meng Tan, intent only on leading his enemy toward the ambush, took no account of the speed of Red Hare. Very soon Meng Tan was caught up, and a stroke of the mighty sword cut him in two pieces. Then Guan Yu stopped and turned back. The archers in the gate shot their hardest; and though it was a long way off, one of them lodged an arrow in his left arm. He pulled it out with his teeth, but the blood streamed down as he rode toward Governor Han Qu. The men scattered. Guan Yu rode straight at his next victim. He raised his sword and made an oblique cut which sliced off the head and shoulder of Han Qu.\n\nThen Guan Yu drove off the soldiers and returned to escort the carriage. He bound up his wound, and, fearing lest anyone might take advantage of his weakness, he made no long halts on the road but hurried toward River Si Pass.\n\nThe warden of this pass was Bian Xi of Bingzhou, a warrior whose weapon was a comet-hammer. He had been a Yellow Scarf and had gone over to Cao Cao, who had given him this post. As soon as he heard of the coming of the redoubtable Guan Yu, he cudgeled his brains for a ruse to use against him. He decided upon an ambush. In the State Guardian Temple at the pass he placed two hundred ax-men and swordsmen. He reckoned on enticing Guan Yu to the temple for refreshment, and when he let fall a cup as signal, the hidden ruffians would rush out.\n\nAll being thus arranged and ready, he went out to welcome Guan Yu in friendly guise, and Guan Yu dismounted at his coming. Bian Xi began very amiably.\n\n\"Your name, General, makes the very earth tremble, and everyone looks up to you. This return to the Imperial Uncle proves you to be noble and true.\"\n\nGuan Yu in reply told him the story of the men he had slain in the last two passes.\n\nBian Xi replied, \"You slew them; that is well. When I see the Prime Minister, I will explain to him the inner reasons for these acts.\"\n\nGuan Yu thought he had found a friend and so mounted and rode through the pass. When he came to the temple, a number of priests came out to meet him with clanging bells.\n\nThis temple, named State Guardian Temple, had a courtyard in which the Emperor Ming had burned incense in the past. In the temple were thirty priests, and among these there happened to be one Pu Jing who came from the same village as Guan Yu. His religious name was Transverse Peace. Hearing who the visitor was, Transverse Peace came forward to speak with him.\n\n\"General,\" said Transverse Peace, \"it is many a long year since you left Pudong.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Guan Yu, \"nearly twenty years.\"\n\n\"Do you recognize this poor priest?\"\n\n\"I left the village many years ago; I do not recognize you.\"\n\n\"My house and yours were only separated by a rivulet,\" said the priest.\n\nNow Bian Xi, seeing Transverse Peace holding forth about village matters, thought Transverse Peace would blab about the ambush, so Bian Xi bade him be silent.\n\n\"I want to invite the General to a feast. You priest fellows seem to have a lot to say,\" said Bian Xi.\n\n\"Not too much,\" said Guan Yu. \"Naturally when fellow villagers meet, they talk of old times.\"\n\nBian Xi invited the visitor into the guest room to take tea, but Guan Yu said, \"The two ladies are out there in the carriage. They ought to have some first.\"\n\nSo the priest bade them take some tea to the ladies, and then he led Guan Yu within, at the same time lifting the priest knife which he wore at his side and looking meaningfully at Guan Yu. The latter understood and told his people to bring along his weapon and keep close at his side.\n\nWhen Bian Xi invited Guan Yu to go into the Hall of the Laws for some refreshment, Guan Yu turned to him, saying, \"Is this invitation with good intention or evil?\"\n\nBian Xi was so taken aback that he could make no reply, and then Guan Yu saw that many armed men were concealed behind the arras.\n\nThen Guan Yu shouted loudly at Bian Xi, saying, \"What means this? I thought you an honorable man. How dare you?\"\n\nThe traitor saw that his plot had failed and called to the assassins to come out and fall to, but Guan Yu had a short sword in his hand and slashed at anyone who came near. So they scattered. Their commander ran down the hall and tried to escape among the side buildings, but Guan Yu threw aside the short sword, took up the green-dragon saber and went after Bian Xi. The latter was trying to get into position to throw his comet-hammer, but Guan Yu cut the cord and the weapon was useless. Guan Yu followed Bian Xi in and out and soon caught up with him. Then with one blow Guan Yu cut him in halves.\n\nThe fight over, Guan Yu sought the two ladies, who were surrounded by soldiers. These fled at sight of the terrible warrior. Seeking out the priest, his fellow countryman, he thanked him for the timely warning which had saved him from death.\n\n\"I cannot remain here after this,\" said Transverse Peace. \"I shall pack up my few garments and my alms bowl and take to the road, vague in my wanderings as the clouds in the sky. But we shall meet again and till then take care of yourself.\"\n\nThen Guan Yu took leave and retook the road to Yingyang. The Governor of this city was named Wang Zhi, and he was related to Han Qu by their children's marriage. Hearing of the death of his relative, Wang Zhi set about a scheme to kill Guan Yu secretly. He sent soldiers to guard the city gates and, when he heard that Guan Yu approached, he went himself and received Guan Yu with a smiling countenance and bade Guan Yu welcome. Guan Yu told him the object of his journey.\n\n\"You, General, have been able to get some exercise on the road, but the ladies in their carriage must be cramped and fatigued. I pray you come into the city, and all of you remain the night in the official travelers' quarters. Tomorrow you can set forth again.\"\n\nThe offer was tempting, and his host seemed in earnest, so the two ladies went into the city, where they found everything very comfortably prepared for them. And, though Guan Yu declined the Governor's invitations to a banquet, refreshments for the travelers were sent to their lodgings. Guan Yu was fatigued from the trials of the journey, and as soon as the evening meal was over, he bade the ladies retire to rest while he sat down in the main room, quite alone, for he bade all to get repose while they could. His horse was given a good feed for once. He sat with his armor loosened in order to be more at ease.\n\nNow Governor Wang Zhi had a general named Hu Ban to whom he had entrusted the arrangements for the destruction of his guest.\n\nSaid Wang Zhi, \"This Guan Yu is a traitor to the Prime Minister and a fugitive. On the road he has murdered several pass commanders and is guilty of serious crimes. But he is too strong and valiant for any ordinary soldier to overcome. So this evening you will lead a whole company of a thousand troops to surround his lodging, each one armed with a torch, and we will burn him. They will start the fire about midnight. Everyone of the party will perish. I will come with a force to stand by and assist if necessary.\"\n\nThese orders received, Hu Ban passed them on to the soldiers, who began secretly to prepare dry wood and other combustibles which they piled up at the gate of the rest house. Hu Ban thought within himself that he would like to know what manner of man was this Guan Yu, whose fame had spread so far, so he determined to get a peep at the guest. He went to the rest house and inquired where Guan Yu was.\n\n\"The General is the man in the main hall reading,\" was the reply.\n\nHu Ban noiselessly made his way to the outside of the room and peeped in. He saw the famous warrior stroking his beard with his left hand while he read by the light of a lamp placed on a low table. An involuntary exclamation of wonder escaped at the majesty of the figure.\n\n\"Really a god!\" Hu Ban sighed.\n\n\"Who is there?\" suddenly asked the reader at the sound.\n\nHu Ban entered and said, \"I am Hu Ban, a general of the Governor.\"\n\n\"Surely you are the son of Hu Hua, who lives outside Xuchang,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"I am he,\" replied Hu Ban.\n\nThen Guan Yu called up his followers and bade them look among the baggage for the letter, which they brought. Guan Yu handed it to the general.\n\nHu Ban read it and then breathed long, saying, \"I very nearly caused the death of a good man.\"\n\nThen he betrayed the whole plot, saying, \"This Wang Zhi is a wicked man, who wanted to kill you. At this moment you are surrounded, and at the third watch they will set fire to this place. Now I will go and open the city gates while you hastily prepare for flight.\"\n\nGuan Yu was greatly surprised, but he quickly buckled up his armor, got his steed ready, roused the two ladies, and put them into their carriage. Then they left the rest house; and as they passed out, they saw the soldiers all about them, each with a torch. The party hastened to the outskirts of the city and found the gate already open, and they lost no time in getting clear of the city. Hu Ban returned to give orders to fire the rest house.\n\nThe fugitives pressed on. But before long they saw lights coming up behind them, and Wang Zhi called out to them to stop.\n\nGuan Yu reined in his horse and began to abuse him, crying, \"Worthless fellow! What had you against me that you wished to burn me to death?\"\n\nWang Zhi whipped up his steed and set his spear, but Guan Yu cut him through with the short sword he wore at his side and scattered his followers.\n\nThen the carriage pushed on. Guan Yu's heart was filled with gratitude to Hu Ban.\n\nWhen the party drew near Huazhou, someone told Liu Yue, who rode out to welcome him. Liu Yue had been once rescued by Guan Yu, who slew Yan Liang and Wen Chou and lifted the siege of the city.\n\nGuan Yu did not dismount but bowed from horseback, saying, \"Have you been quite well since we parted?\"\n\n\"Whither are you going, Sir?\" replied Liu Yue.\n\n\"I have left the Prime Minister and am on my way to find my brother.\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is with Yuan Shao, who is at enmity with the Prime Minister. How can you be allowed to go to him?\" asked Liu Yue.\n\n\"That matter was settled long ago.\"\n\n\"The Yellow River Ferry is an important point and is guarded by a commander of Xiahou Dun. He will not let you cross.\"\n\n\"But suppose then you provide boats for me?\"\n\n\"Though there are boats, I dare not give them to you.\"\n\n\"Well, formerly I slew Yan Liang and Wen Chou and saved you a grave danger. Now you refuse me a ferry boat!\"\n\n\"I am afraid Xiahou Dun will know of it and make it a fault against me.\"\n\nGuan Yu perceived that no help was to be expected from this man, so he pushed on and presently reached the ferry. There the Commander of the Guard, Qin Qi, came out to question him.\n\n\"I am one Guan Yu, Lord of Hanshou.\"\n\n\"Whither are you bound?\"\n\n\"I go to the North of Yellow River to seek my brother, Liu Bei, and I respectfully ask you to grant me a passage over the river.\"\n\n\"Where is the authority of the Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"I am not on a mission from the Prime Minister, so why should I have such an authority?\"\n\n\"I have orders from my chief to guard the ferry, and you will not cross. Even if you grew wings, you should not fly over.\"\n\nGuan Yu's choler arose.\n\n\"Do you know that I have been the death of all those who have hitherto tried to stop me?\" said he.\n\n\"You have only slain a few officers of no rank or reputation; but you dare not kill me!\"\n\n\"Where would you stand beside Yan Liang and Wen Chou?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\nQin Qi grew angry, and he loosed his rein. Sword in hand, he came at a gallop. The two met, but in the first encounter Qin Qi's head was swept off by the terrible green-dragon saber.\n\n\"He who opposed me is dead! You others need not be afraid,\" cried Guan Yu. \"Be quick and prepare me a boat.\"\n\nThe boat was soon at the landing, and the two women stepped on board, followed by Guan Yu. They crossed and were then in the country of Yuan Shao. In the course of his journey to this point, Guan Yu had forced five passes and slain six generals.\n\n\u2003His seal hung up, the treasury locked, his\n\n\u2003courtly mansion left,\n\n\u2003He journeyed toward his brother dear, too long\n\n\u2003from his side left.\n\n\u2003The horse he rode was famed for speed as for\n\n\u2003endurance great,\n\n\u2003His good sword made a way for him and\n\n\u2003opened every gate.\n\n\u2003His loyalty and truth forth stand, a pattern\n\n\u2003unto all,\n\n\u2003His valor would frighten rushing streams and\n\n\u2003make high mountains fall.\n\n\u2003Alone he traveled lustily, this was death to meet\n\n\u2003his blade,\n\n\u2003He has been themed by myriads, his glory never\n\n\u2003will fade.\n\n\"I did not willingly slay a single one of them,\" mused Guan Yu as he rode along. \"There was no help for it. Nevertheless when Cao Cao hears of it, he will regard me as ungrateful for his bounty.\"\n\nBefore long he saw a rider on the road who soon hailed him and proved to be Sun Qian.\n\n\"I have never heard a word from you since we lost sight of each other at Runan. How have you fared?\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"After your departure Liu Pi and Gong Du retook the city. I was sent by them to Yuan Shao to try to make peace with him and succeeded, so that Yuan Shao invited Liu Bei to go to him and share in the deliberations for a concerted attack on Cao Cao. But to my disgust the leaders of Yuan Shao's army showed great jealousy of each other so that Tian Feng got into gaol, Ju Shou was degraded, and others quarreled. Then Yuan Shao vacillated and hesitated, so that your brother and I consulted how we might get away from them all. Now the Uncle is at Runan with Liu Pi and, thinking you could not know that and might suffer some harm if you unwillingly went to Yuan Shao, I have come to warn you. It is good fortune to find you like this. Now we can hasten to Runan, and you will meet your brother.\"\n\nGuan Yu took Sun Qian to make his bow to the ladies, who asked after his adventures, and Sun Qian said, \"Uncle Liu Bei were nearly executed due to Yuan Shao's sudden bursts of anger after the deaths of Yan Liang and Wen Chou. Now, however, he is out of his way and safe at Runan, and you will meet him soon.\"\n\nThe ladies covered their faces and wept at the recital of his dangers. Then the party no longer traveled north but took the road toward Runan. Not long after a great cloud of dust was noticed behind them, and that presently made out a hundred of horsemen. These were led by Xiahou Dun, who shouted out to Guan Yu to stop.\n\n\u2003One by one the pass commanders stopped his\n\n\u2003progress and were slain,\n\n\u2003The river crossed, another army comes and he\n\n\u2003must fight again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Putting Cai Yang To Death, The Brothers' Doubts Disappear; Meeting At Gucheng, Lord and Lieges Fortify Each Other.\n\nSun Qian had joined Guan Yu in escorting the two ladies, and they were on the road to Runan when Xiahou Dun suddenly determined to pursue. So with a couple of hundred horse, Xiahou Dun set out. When Xiahou Dun was seen approaching, Guan Yu bade Sun Qian go ahead with the carriage while he remained to deal with the pursuers.\n\nWhen they were near enough, Guan Yu said, \"In coming after me thus you do not reinforce the magnanimity of your master!\"\n\nReplied Xiahou Dun, \"The Prime Minister has sent no definite instructions. You have caused the death of several people, among them one of my commanders, and so I have come to capture you! You have behaved most grossly. The Prime Minister will decide.\"\n\nThereupon Xiahou Dun dashed forward with his spear ready to thrust.\n\nBut at that moment a rider came up behind him at full gallop, crying, \"You must not fight with Guan Yu!\"\n\nGuan Yu stayed his steed at once and waited.\n\nThe messenger came up, drew from his bosom an official letter, and said to Xiahou Dun, \"The Prime Minister loves General Guan Yu for his loyalty and honor, and fearing lest Guan Yu might be stopped at the various passes, he sent me with this letter to show when necessary at any point on the road.\"\n\n\"But this Guan Yu has slain several commanders of the passes. Does the Prime Minister know that?\" said Xiahou Dun.\n\nThe messenger said these things were unknown.\n\n\"Then,\" said Xiahou Dun, \"I will arrest him and take him to the Prime Minister, who may set him free or not as he wills.\"\n\n\"Do you think I fear anything you can do?\" said Guan Yu getting wrathful.\n\nAnd he rode forward. Xiahou Dun, nothing loth, set his spear and prepared for battle. They met and had reached the tenth encounter when a second horseman came up at full speed, crying, \"Generals, wait a little!\"\n\nXiahou Dun stayed his hand and asked the messenger, saying, \"Am I to arrest him?\"\n\n\"No,\" replied the messenger. \"Fearing lest he should have difficulties at the passes, the Prime Minister has sent me with a dispatch to say he is to be released.\"\n\n\"Did the Prime Minister know that he had slain several commanders on the way?\"\n\n\"He did not know!\"\n\n\"Since he was ignorant of that, I may not let this Guan Yu go,\" and Xiahou Dun gave the signal to his men to close in round Guan Yu.\n\nBut Guan Yu flourished his sword and made to attack them and a fight was again imminent, when a third rider appeared, who cried, \"Guan Yu, give way and do not fight!\"\n\nThe speaker was Zhang Liao. Both combatants made no further move but awaited his arrival.\n\nZhang Liao said, \"I bring the Prime Minister's order that since he has heard that Guan Yu has slain certain commanders on the way, he fears that some will hinder his passage. Wherefore he has sent me to deliver his command at each gate that Guan Yu is to be suffered to pass freely.\"\n\nXiahou Dun said, \"Qin Qi was the son of Cai Yang's sister, and he was confided to my especial care. Now this Guan Yu has killed him, and how can I refrain?\"\n\n\"When I see his uncle Cai Yang, I will explain. But now the main point is that you have the Prime Minister's orders to let Guan Yu pass and you may not despise his wish.\"\n\nSo the only thing for Xiahou Dun to do was to retire, and he did.\n\n\"Whither are you going?\" then said Zhang Liao to Guan Yu.\n\n\"I fear my brother is no longer with Yuan Shao, and now I am going to find him wherever he is.\"\n\n\"As you do not know where to go, why not return to the Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"Where is the sense of that?\" said Guan Yu with a smile. \"But, Zhang Liao, you return, and try to arrange pardon for my faults.\"\n\nWith this Guan Yu saluted Zhang Liao and took his leave. Zhang Liao retired and joined Xiahou Dun.\n\nGuan Yu quickly regained the carriage, and as they went along side by side he told Sun Qian what had happened. Several days later a heavy rain storm came on which soaked everything. Looking about for protection they noticed a farm under the shelter of a precipice and took their way thither. An old man came out to them, to whom they told their story.\n\nWhen they had finished, the old fellow said, \"My name is Guo Chang, and I have lived here many years. I am very pleased to greet the man whom I have known so long by reputation.\"\n\nGuo Chang quickly killed a sheep for their refreshment and brought out wine for the two men. The two ladies were entertained in the inner apartments. And while they refreshed themselves, their baggage was put out to dry and their steeds were fed.\n\nAs the day closed in, they saw several youths come along, and their host said, \"My son is come to pay his respects.\"\n\n\"This is my humble son,\" said Guo Chang, presenting a lad to Guan Yu.\n\n\"What has he been doing?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"He has just come in from hunting.\"\n\nThe young fellow went out. The old man continued, \"All my family have been farmers or scholars. He is my only son, and instead of following in the footsteps of his ancestors he cares for nothing but gadding about and hunting, unhappily.\"\n\n\"Why unhappily?\" said Guan Yu. \"In these days of disorder a good soldier can make a name for himself.\"\n\n\"If he would only learn the military arts, that would be something of a career. But he is nothing but a vagabond and does everything he should not. He is a grief to me.\"\n\nGuan Yu sighed in sympathy. The old gentleman stayed till a late hour; and when he took his leave, his two guests began to prepare for rest.\n\nSuddenly outside there arose a great hubbub, men shouting and horses neighing. Guan Yu called to his people; but as no one answered, he and Sun Qian drew their swords and went into the stable yard. There they found their host's son on the ground shouting to his followers to fight.\n\nGuan Yu asked what it was all about, and his guards told him, \"The young fellow had tried to steal Red Hare, but had been badly kicked. We heard shouting and went to see what it meant when his men had set on us.\"\n\nGuan Yu was very wrathful.\n\n\"You mean thieves! Would you steal my horse?\" cried he.\n\nBut before he could do anything, his host came running out, saying, \"It was not with my consent that my son did this evil thing. I know he is very guilty and deserves death. But his mother loves him tenderly, and I pray you be generous and pardon him!\"\n\n\"Really he is unworthy of his father,\" said Guan Yu. \"What you told me shows he is a degenerate. For your sake I pardon him.\"\n\nThen Guan Yu told his own people to keep a better lookout, sent the people about their business and, in company with Sun Qian, went away to rest.\n\nNext morning both the host and hostess were up betimes waiting to thank Guan Yu for forgiving their son's mad freak.\n\n\"My son has insulted your tiger dignity, I know, and I am deeply affected by your kindness in not punishing him,\" said the old man.\n\n\"Bring him here and I will talk to him,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"He went out before daylight with a lot of his fellow rogues, and I know not where he is.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu bade them farewell, got the ladies into their carriage, and they moved out of the farmyard. Guan Yu and Sun Qian riding abreast as escort. They took the road toward the hills.\n\nBefore they had gone far, they saw a large party of men, led by a couple of riders, pouring down one of the gullies. One of the riders wore a yellow turban and a battle robe. The other was Guo Chang's son.\n\nThe wearer of the turban called out, saying, \"I am one of the commanders of Zhang Jue the Lord of Heaven. Whoever you may be, leave that horse you are riding for me. You may then go free!\"\n\nGuan Yu greeted the speech with a hearty laugh.\n\n\"O you mad ignoramus! If you had ever been with Zhang Jue as a bandit, you would have learned to know Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, the three brothers.\"\n\n\"I have heard of the ruddy long beard called Guan Yu, but I have never seen him. Who may you be?\"\n\nGuan Yu then laid aside his sword, stopped his horse, and drew off the bag that covered his beard thus showing its magnificence.\n\nThe turban wearer immediately slipped out of the saddle, laid an angry hand on his companion, and they both bowed low in front of Guan Yu's steed.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"I am Pei Yuanshao. After the death of Zhang Jue, I was left forlorn; and I got together a few others like myself, and we took refuge in the forests. This morning early this fellow came to tell us that a guest at his father's farm had a valuable horse and proposed to me to steal it. I did not think I should meet you, General.\"\n\nThe wretched Guo Chang's son implored that his life might be spared, and Guan Yu pardoned him for his father's sake. Then Guan Yu covered his face and crept away.\n\n\"You did not recognize me. How then did you know my name?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\nPei Yuanshao replied, \"Not far from here is a mountain called the Sleeping Bull, where lives a certain Zhou Cang, a very powerful man who came from the west. He has a stiff curly beard and looks very handsome. He also was a commander in the rebel army, who took to the forest when his leader perished. He has told me a lot about you, but I have never had the happiness of seeing you.\"\n\nSaid Guan Yu, \"Under the green wood trees is no place for a hero's foot. You had better abandon this depraved life and return to the path of virtue. Do not work out your own destruction.\"\n\nAs they were talking, a troop of horsemen appeared in the distance. They belonged to Zhou Cang, as Pei Yuanshao said, and Guan Yu waited for them to approach. The leader was very dark complexioned, tall, and armed with a spear. As soon as he drew near enough to see, he exclaimed joyfully, \"This is General Guan Yu!\"\n\nIn a moment he had slipped out of the saddle and was on his knees by the roadside.\n\n\"Zhou Cang renders obeisance,\" said he.\n\nSaid Guan Yu, \"O Warrior, where have you known me?\"\n\n\"I was one of the Yellow Scarves, and I saw you then. My one regret was that I could not join you. Now that my good fortune has brought me here, I hope you will not reject me. Let me be one of your foot soldiers to be always near you to carry your whip and run by your stirrup. I will cheerfully die for you.\"\n\nAs he seemed thoroughly in earnest, Guan Yu said, \"But if you follow me, what of your companions?\"\n\n\"They may do as they please: Follow me or go their ways.\"\n\nThereupon they all shouted, \"We will follow!\"\n\nGuan Yu dismounted and went to ask the ladies what they thought of this.\n\nLady Gan replied, \"Brother-in-law, you have traveled thus far alone and without fighters; you have safely passed many dangers and never wanted their assistance. You refused the service of Liao Hua, why then suffer this crowd? But this is only a my view and you must decide.\"\n\n\"What you say, sister-in-law, is to the point.\"\n\nTherefore returning to Zhou Cang, he said, \"It is not that I am lacking in gratitude, but my sisters-in-law do not care for a large following. Wherefore return to the mountains till I shall have found my brother, when I will surely call you.\"\n\nZhou Cang replied, \"I am only a rough uncouth fellow, wasting his life as a brigand. Meeting you, General, is like seeing the full sun in the skies, and I feel that I can never bear to miss you again. As it might be inconvenient for all my people to follow you, I will bid my companion lead them away, but I will come and follow you on foot wherever you go.\"\n\nGuan Yu again asked his sisters-in-law what they thought of this. Lady Gan said one or two made no difference, and so Guan Yu consented. But Pei Yuanshao was not satisfied with this arrangement and said he wished also to follow.\n\nZhou Cang said, \"If you do not stay with the band, they will disperse and be lost. You must take command for the moment and let me accompany General Guan Yu. As soon as he has a fixed abode, I will come to fetch you.\"\n\nSomewhat discontentedly Pei Yuanshao accepted the situation and marched off, while his one-time colleague joined the train of Guan Yu, and they went toward Runan. They traveled quickly for some days, and then they saw a city on a hill.\n\nThe natives told them, \"This city is called Gucheng. A few months before a warrior suddenly appeared, drove out the magistrate, and took possession. Then he has begun to recruit soldiers, bought up horses, and laid in stores. The warrior's name is Zhang Fei. Now he has a large force, and no one in the neighborhood dare face him.\"\n\n\"To think that I should find my brother like this!\" said Guan Yu, delighted. \"I have had never a word of him, nor knew I where he was since Xuzhou fell.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu dispatched Sun Qian into the city to tell its new commander to come out to meet him and provide for their sisters-in-law.\n\nNow, after being separated from his brothers, Zhang Fei had gone to the Mangdang Hills, where he had remained a month or so while he sent far and near for tidings of Liu Bei. Then as he happened to pass Gucheng, he had sent in to borrow some grain, but had been refused. In revenge, he had driven away the magistrate and taken possession of the city. He found the place well suited to his needs at the moment.\n\nAs directed by Guan Yu, Sun Qian entered the city and, after the usual ceremonies, told Zhang Fei the news, \"Liu Bei has left Yuan Shao and gone to Runan; and Guan Yu, with your sisters-in-law, is at the gates. He wishes you to go out and receive them.\"\n\nZhang Fei listened without a word till he came to the request to go out to meet his brother. At that point he called for his armor and, when he had put it on, laid hold of his long serpent halberd, mounted, and rode out with a large company at his back. Sun Qian was too astonished to ask what this meant and simply followed.\n\nGuan Yu was very glad when he saw his brother coming, put up his weapons and, with Zhou Cang at his back, rode toward him at full speed. But as Guan Yu approached, he saw all the signs of fierce anger on Zhang Fei's face, and Zhang Fei roared as he shook his spear, threatening Guan Yu.\n\nGuan Yu was entirely taken aback and called out anxiously, \"Brother, what does this mean? Is the Peach Garden Pledge quite forgotten?\"\n\n\"What impudence is this that you come to see me since your disgraceful behavior?\" shouted Zhang Fei.\n\n\"What disgraceful behavior has been mine?\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"You have betrayed your brother; you have surrendered to Cao Cao; and you have received title and office at his hands. And now you are come to exploit me. One of us shall die!\"\n\nGuan Yu said, \"Really you do not understand, and it is hard for me to explain. But ask the two ladies here, worthy brother, and they will tell you.\"\n\nAt this the ladies lifted the curtain of the carriage and called out: \"Brother, why is this?\"\n\nZhang Fei said, \"Wait a while, sisters, and see me slay this traitor. After that I will conduct you into the city.\"\n\nSaid Lady Gan, \"Since he knew not where you were, our brother took shelter with Cao Cao. And since he knew that his elder brother was at Runan, he has braved every danger to escort us thus far on the road. Pray take a correct view of his conduct.\"\n\nLady Mi also chimed in, \"When your brother went to Xuchang, no other course was open to him.\"\n\n\"Sisters, do not let him deceive you to the truth. Real loyalty prefers death to dishonor. No good person can serve two masters.\"\n\nGuan Yu said, \"Brother, cease to wrench me I pray you.\"\n\nSun Qian said, \"Guan Yu came expressly to seek you.\"\n\n\"How much more nonsense will you talk?\" roared Zhang Fei. \"How can he be true-hearted? He came to capture me, I say.\"\n\n\"Had I come to capture you, I should have come with troops and horses,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"And are there not troops and horses?\" said Zhang Fei pointing to a point behind Guan Yu.\n\nGuan Yu turned, and there he saw a cloud of dust rising as though a squadron of horse was coming. And soon they were near enough, and from their trumpets and banners they showed themselves to be of Cao Cao's army.\n\n\"Now will you try to cajole me further?\" cried Zhang Fei in a rage.\n\nHe set his serpent halberd and was just coming on when Guan Yu said, \"Brother, wait a while. See me slay the leader of these that I may prove myself no traitor.\"\n\n\"Well, if you are really true, prove it by slaying that leader, whoever he may be, before I have finished three rolls of the drum.\"\n\nZhang Fei's condition was accepted. Soon the attacking force was near enough to make out the leader to be Cai Yang.\n\nSword in hand Cai Yang rode at full speed, crying, \"So I have found you, slayer of my nephew! I have a command to capture you and will execute it.\"\n\nGuan Yu made no reply. Raising his sword ready to strike, he moved out and the drums began to beat. Before a roll could be completed the fight was over, and Cai Yang's head had rolled on the ground. His force scattered and fled. Guan Yu, however, captured the young ensign bearer and questioned him.\n\nThe youth said, \"The fact is the Prime Minister had not given an order. Incensed at the loss of his nephew, Cai Yang wished to cross the river to pursue and attack you, General, although the Prime Minister refused permission. To satisfy him, the Prime Minister had sent Cai Yang to attack Runan, and the meeting at this place is entirely an accident.\"\n\nGuan Yu bade him repeat this story to his brother. Zhang Fei also questioned him concerning all that had happened in the capital, and the recital of the whole story satisfied Zhang Fei of the fidelity of Guan Yu.\n\nJust then messengers came from the city to Zhang Fei to say: \"Some scores of horsemen has arrived at the south gate. They seem in a great hurry but no one know them.\"\n\nZhang Fei, with still a lingering doubt in his mind, went to look at the newcomers and there saw some forty mounted archers with light bows and short arrows. Hastily dismounting to see them better, he found they were Mi Zhu and Mi Fang.\n\nQuickly slipping out of the saddle, they came up and Mi Zhu said, \"After the dispersal at Xuzhou when we lost sight of you, we returned to our village whence we sent all around for news of you. We heard that Guan Yu had surrendered to Cao Cao and our lord was in the North of Yellow River with Yuan Shao. The one of whom we could hear nothing was yourself. But yesterday, while on our way, we fell in with some travelers who told us a certain General Zhang Fei, of such and such an appearance, had suddenly occupied Gucheng, and we felt it must be you. So we came to inquire, and we happily fell in with you here.\"\n\nZhang Fei replied, \"Guan Yu and Sun Qian are here, and my two sisters are with them. They had heard where my elder brother was.\"\n\nThis news added to the joy of the two newcomers who went to see Guan Yu and the women, and then they all entered the city. When the ladies had settled down a little, they related the whole story of the adventures on the road at which Zhang Fei was overcome with remorse and bowed before his brother bitterly weeping. Mi Zhu and Mi Fang were greatly affected. Then Zhang Fei related what had happened to him.\n\nA day was spent in banquets, and next day Zhang Fei wished his newly found brother to go with him to Runan to see their elder brother Liu Bei.\n\nBut Guan Yu said, \"No. you take care of the ladies here while Sun Qian and I go to get news.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu and Sun Qian with a small escort set out. When they reached Runan, they were received by Liu Pi.\n\n\"Liu Bei is no longer in the city. After waiting some days, he has come to the conclusion that the soldiers are too few, and has gone back to Yuan Shao to consult with him,\" said Liu Pi.\n\nGuan Yu was greatly disappointed, and Sun Qian did his best to console him, saying, \"Do not be sorrowful. It only means the trouble of another journey into the North of Yellow River to tell Uncle Liu Bei, and then we can all meet at Gucheng.\"\n\nSo spoke Sun Qian, and Guan Yu accepted it. They took leave of Liu Pi and returned to Gucheng where they related what had happened.\n\nZhang Fei wanted to go with them into the North of Yellow River, but Guan Yu opposed this, saying, \"Seeing you have this city, it makes a rallying point for us and a resting place. We must not abandon it lightly. Sun Qian and I will go; and while sway we look to you to keep the city safe.\"\n\n\"How can you go after killing the two generals, Yan Liang and Wen Chou?\"\n\n\"That will not stop me. And after I am there, I can act according to circumstances.\"\n\nThen Guan Yu summoned Zhou Cang and asked him, saying, \"How many followers are there with Pei Yuanshao at Sleeping Bull Mountain?\"\n\n\"I should think four or five hundred.\"\n\n\"Now,\" said Guan Yu, \"I am going to take the shortest road to find my brother. Can you go to summon your army and lead them along the high road to assist me?\"\n\nWith instructions to bring up this force, Zhou Cang left, while Guan Yu and Sun Qian and their small escort went off to the north.\n\nWhen they drew near the boundary, Sun Qian said, \"You must be careful how you go over. You ought to stop here while I go in, see Uncle Liu Bei, and take the necessary steps.\"\n\nSeeing the wisdom of this, Guan Yu stopped there and sent his companion in advance. He and his followers going up to a nearby farm as an abiding place.\n\nWhen they got to the farm, out came a venerable man leaning on a staff. After exchanging salutes, Guan Yu told the old man all about himself.\n\n\"My family name is also Guan, my personal name being Ding,\" said the old man. \"I know your reputation, and I am very happy to meet you.\"\n\nGuan Ding sent for his two sons to come and make their bow. He put up Guan Yu in his house and provided for his escort in the farm buildings.\n\nIn the meantime Sun Qian had made his way to Jizhou City and told Liu Bei the whole story.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Jian Yong is also here. We will send for him secretly to talk over this matter.\"\n\nThey did so; and when the usual salutes had been exchanged, they three began to consider the means of getting away.\n\n\"My lord,\" said Jian Yong, \"you see Yuan Shao personally and say you wish to go to Jingzhou to see Liu Biao about a scheme for the destruction of Cao Cao. That will give an excuse.\"\n\n\"That seems best,\" said Liu Bei, \"but will you go with me?\"\n\n\"I have another plan to extricate myself,\" said Jian Yong.\n\nHaving settled their plans, Liu Bei soon went in to see his protector and suggested, \"Liu Biao is strong and well posted. His help should be sought against our enemy.\"\n\n\"I have sent messengers repeatedly to ask his help,\" said Yuan Shao, \"but he is unwilling.\"\n\n\"As he and I are of the same family, he will not refuse me if I go and ask him,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Certainly he is worth much more than Liu Pi. You shall go.\"\n\n\"I have just heard,\" Yuan Shao continued, \"that Guan Yu has left Cao Cao and wants to come here. If he does, I will put him to death out of revenge for my two beloved generals \u2014 Yan Liang and Wen Chou.\"\n\n\"Illustrious Sir, you wished to employ him and so I sent for him. Now you threaten to put him to death. The two men he slew were but deer compared with such a tiger as he is. When you exchange a couple of deer for a tiger, you need not complain of the bargain.\"\n\n\"Really I like him,\" said Yuan Shao. \"I was only joking. You can send another messenger for him and tell him to come soon.\"\n\n\"May I send Sun Qian for him?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\nAfter Liu Bei had gone, Jian Yong came in and said to Yuan Shao, \"If Liu Bei goes, he will not come back. I had better go to speak to Liu Biao. And I can keep a watch on Liu Bei.\"\n\nYuan Shao agreed and issued orders for both to go.\n\nOn the subject of the mission, Guo Tu came in to his chief to dissuade him.\n\nSaid Guo Tu, \"Liu Bei went to speak to Liu Pi, but he accomplished nothing. Now you are sending Jian Yong with him, and I am sure neither will ever return.\"\n\n\"Do not be too suspicious,\" said Yuan Shao. \"Jian Yong is clever enough.\"\n\nThat was the end of the interview. Forthwith Liu Bei sent Sun Qian back to Guan Yu and then, with Jian Yong, took leave of Yuan Shao and rode out of the city, As soon as they reached the border line, they met Sun Qian and all three rode off to Guan Ding's farm to meet Guan Yu. He came out to welcome them, bowed and then seized his brother's hands while tears streamed down his face.\n\nPresently the two sons of their host came to bow to the visitors. Liu Bei asked their names.\n\n\"These are of the same name as myself,\" said Guan Yu. \"The sons are Guan Neng, who is a student, and Guan Ping, who is to be a soldier.\"\n\n\"I have been thinking of sending the younger in your train, General,\" said old Guan Ding, \"Would you take him?\"\n\n\"What is his age?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"He is eighteen.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Since, O Senior, you are so kind, I venture to suggest that your son should be adopted by my brother, who has no son of his own. What think you of that?\"\n\nGuan Ding was perfectly willing, so he called Guan Ping and bade him make a son's obeisance to Guan Yu and to style Liu Bei \"Uncle.\"\n\nThen it was time to get on their way lest they should be pursued, and with Guan Yu went Guan Ping. Guan Ding and Guan Ning escorted them a long distance and then returned.\n\nThe party took the road to Sleeping Bull Mountain. Before they had gone very far, they met Zhou Cang with a small party. He was wounded. He was introduced to Liu Bei who asked him how it was.\n\nHe replied, \"Before I reached the hill, a certain warrior all alone, had fought with my friend Pei Yuanshao and killed him. Then many of our troops surrendered to him, and he occupied our old camp. When I reached it, I tried to allure the soldiers back to my side but only succeeded with a few. The others were too afraid. I got angry and engaged the interloper, who however worsted me time after time and wounded me thrice.\"\n\n\"Who is the warrior? What does he look like?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"All I know he is a doughty fighter, I do not know his name.\"\n\nThereafter they advanced toward the hill with Guan Yu in front and Liu Bei in rear. When they drew near, Zhou Cang began to abuse his enemy, who soon appeared, mailed and armed, coming down the hill like a tornado.\n\nSuddenly Liu Bei rode out waving his whip and shouting, \"O Zhao Zilong, I am here to look for you!\"\n\nIndeed the rider was Zhao Zilong. He instantly slipped out of the saddle and bowed by the roadside.\n\nLiu Bei dismounted to talk with him and ask how he came to be there.\n\n\"When I left you, I had no idea that Gongsun Zan was a man who would listen to no reason. The result was disaster, and he perished in the flames. Yuan Shao invited me to him several times, but I thought too little of him to go. Then I wanted to go to Xuzhou to you, but you had lost that place, and Guan Yu had gone over to Cao Cao, and you had joined Yuan Shao. Several times I thought of coming to you, but I feared Yuan Shao. So I drifted from one place to another with nowhere to rest till I happened to come this way, and Pei Yuanshao tried to steal my horse. So I slew him and took possession of his camp. I heard Zhang Fei was in Gucheng but thought it might be only a rumor. And so the days have passed till this happy meeting.\"\n\nLiu Bei told Zhao Zilong all that had happened to him since they parted, and so did Guan Yu.\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"The first time I saw you, I felt drawn to you and did not want to part from you. I am very happy to meet you again.\"\n\n\"In all my wanderings, trying to find a lord worth serving, I have seen no one like you. Now I have reached your side, that is enough for all my life. I care not what may happen to me.\"\n\nNext they burned the camp on Sleeping Bull Mountain, after which they all took the road back to Gucheng where they were welcomed. They exchanged the stories of their several adventures, and the two ladies related the valiant deeds of Guan Yu whereat Liu Bei was too affected to speak.\n\nThen they performed a great sacrifice to Heaven and Earth with the slaughter of a bull and a horse.\n\nThe soldiers also were recompensed for their toils. Liu Bei surveyed the conditions around him and found therein much to rejoice at. His two brothers were restored to his side and none of his helpers were missing. Moreover he had gained Zhao Zilong, and Guan Yu had acquired an adopted son Guan Ping. Another commander had joined his ranks in the person of Zhou Cang. There was every occasion for feasting and gratification.\n\n\u2003Scattered wide were the brothers, none knew another's retreat,\n\n\u2003Joyfully now they foregather, dragon and tigers meet.\n\nAt this time the forces under the command of Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Zilong, Sun Qian, Jian Yong, Mi Zhu, Mi Fang, Guan Ping, and Zhou Cang numbered four or five thousand soldiers. Liu Bei was in favor of leaving Gucheng and occupying Runan, and just then Liu Pi and Gong Du, the commanders of that city, sent to invite him to go there. So they went. There they devoted all their efforts to strengthen their army, both horse and foot.\n\nYuan Shao was much annoyed when Liu Bei did not return and at first was for sending a force after him. However Guo Tu dissuaded him.\n\n\"Liu Bei needs cause you no anxiety. Cao Cao is your one enemy and must be destroyed. Even Liu Biao, though strongly posted on River Han, is none too terrible. There is Sun Ce on the southeast of the Great River, strong, feared, with wide domain of six territories, a large army, and able counselors and leaders; you should make an alliance there against Cao Cao.\"\n\nGuo Tu won his chief to his view and wrote to Sun Ce, sending the letter by Chen Zhen.\n\n\u2003Just as one warrior leaves the north,\n\n\u2003Another from the east comes forth." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "The Little Chief Of The South Slays Yu Ji; The Green Eyed Boy Lays Hold On The South Land.\n\nSun Ce gradually became supreme on the southeast of the Great River. In the fourth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 199), he took Lujiang by the defeat of the Governor Liu Xu. He dispatched Yu Fan with a dispatch to Governor Hua Xin of Yuzhang, and Hua Xin surrendered. Thence Sun Ce's renown increased, and he boldly sent a memorial on his military successes to the Emperor by the hand of Zhang Hong.\n\nCao Cao saw in Sun Ce a powerful rival and said, \"He is a lion difficult to contend with.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao betrothed his niece, daughter of Cao Ren, to Sun Kuang, the youngest brother of Sun Ce, thus connecting the two families by marriage. Cao Cao also retained Zhang Hong near him in the capital.\n\nThen Sun Ce sought the title of Grand Commander, one of the highest offices of state, but Cao Cao prevented the attainment of this ambition, and Sun Ce keenly resented it. Henceforward his thoughts turned toward an attack on Cao Cao.\n\nAbout this time the Governor of Wujun, Xu Gong, sent a secret letter to the capital to Cao Cao, saying:\n\n\"Sun Ce is a turbulent fellow of the Xiang Yu type. The government ought, under the appearance of showing favor to him, to recall him to the capital, for he is a danger in the southern regions.\"\n\nBut the bearer of this letter was captured on the Great River and sent to Sun Ce, who immediately put him to death. Then Sun Ce treacherously sent to ask the author of the letter to come and consult over some affair. The unsuspecting Xu Gong came.\n\nSun Ce produced the letter, saying, \"So you wish to send me to the land of the dead, eh?\"\n\nAnd thereupon the executioners came in and strangled Xu Gong. The family of the victim scattered, but three of his clients determined to avenge him if only they could find some means of attacking Sun Ce.\n\nOne day Sun Ce went hunting in the hills to the west of Dantu. A stag was started, and Sun Ce pressed after it at topmost speed and followed it deep into the forest. Presently he came upon three armed men standing among the trees. Rather surprised to see them there, he reined in and asked who they were.\n\n\"We belong to Han Dang's army and are shooting deer,\" was the reply.\n\nSo Sun Ce shook his bridle to proceed. But just as he did so, one of the men thrust at him with a spear and wounded his thigh. Sun Ce drew the sword at his side, dashed forward, and tried to cut down the aggressor. The blade of his sword suddenly fell to the ground, only the hilt remaining in his hand. Then one of the assassins drew his bow, and an arrow wounded Sun Ce in the cheek. Sun Ce plucked out the arrow and shot at the offender, who fell, but the other two attacked him furiously with their spears, shouting, \"We are Xu Gong's men and his avengers!\"\n\nSun Ce then understood. But he had no weapons save his bow against them. He tried to draw off, keeping them at bay striking with his bow. But the fight was getting too much for him, and both he and his steed were wounded in several places. However, just at the critical moment, Cheng Pu and some of his own officers came up, and they minced the assassins into pieces.\n\nBut their lord was in a sorry plight. His face was streaming with blood, and some of the wounds were very severe. They tore up his robe and therewith bound up his wounds, and they carried him home.\n\nA poem in praise of the three avengers says:\n\n\u2003O Sun Ce was a warrior and a stranger he to fear.\n\n\u2003But he was basely murdered while hunting of the deer.\n\n\u2003Yet were they leal who slew him, to avenge a murdered lord.\n\n\u2003Self immolated like Yu Rang, they dreaded not the sword.\n\nBadly wounded, Sun Ce was borne to his home. They sent to call the famous physician Hua Tuo, but he was far away and could not be found. However, a disciple of his came, and the wounded man was committed to his care.\n\n\"The arrowheads were poisoned,\" said the physician, \"and the poison has penetrated deep. It will take a hundred days of perfect repose before danger will be past. But if you give way to passion or anger, the wounds will not heal.\"\n\nSun Ce's temperament was hasty and impatient, and the prospect of such a slow recovery was very distasteful. However, he remained quiet for some twenty of the hundred days. Then came Zhang Hong from the capital, and Sun Ce insisted on seeing and questioning him.\n\n\"Cao Cao fears you, my lord, very greatly,\" said Zhang Hong, \"and his advisers have exceeding respect for you \u2014 all except Guo Jia.\"\n\n\"What did Guo Jia say?\" asked the sick chieftain.\n\nZhang Hong remained silent, which only irritated his master and caused him to demand to be told. So Zhang Hong had to speak the truth.\n\nHe said, \"The fact is Guo Jia told Cao Cao that he needed not fear you, that you were frivolous and unready, impulsive and shallow, just a stupid swaggerer who would one day come to his death at the hands of some mean person.\"\n\nThis provoked the sick man beyond endurance.\n\n\"The fool, how dare he say this of me?\" cried Sun Ce. \"I will take Xuchang from Cao Cao, I swear.\"\n\nIt was no more a question of repose. Ill as he was, he wanted to begin preparations for an expedition at once. They remonstrated with him, reminded him of the physician's orders and urged him to rest.\n\n\"You are risking your priceless self in a moment's anger,\" said Zhang Zhao.\n\nThen arrived Chen Zhen, the messenger from Yuan Shao, and Sun Ce would have him brought in.\n\nHe said, \"My master wishes to ally himself with the South Land in an attack on Cao Cao.\"\n\nSuch a proposal was just after Sun Ce's heart. At once he called a great meeting of his officers in the wall tower and prepared a banquet in honor of the messenger. While this was in progress, Sun Ce noticed many of his officers whispering to each other, and they all began to go down from the banquet chamber. He could not understand this and inquired of the attendants near him what it meant.\n\nThey told him, \"Saint Yu Ji has just gone by, and the officers have gone down to pay their respects to him.\"\n\nSun Ce rose from his place and went and leaned over the railing to look at the man. He saw a Daoist priest in snowy garb leaning on his staff in the middle of the road, while the crowd about him burnt incense and made obeisance.\n\n\"What wizard fellow is this? Bring him here!\" said Sun Ce.\n\n\"This is Yu Ji,\" said the attendants. \"He lives in the east and goes to and fro distributing charms and draughts. He has cured many people as everybody will tell you, and they say he is a saint. He must not be profaned.\"\n\nThis only angered Sun Ce the more, and he told them to arrest the man at once or disobey at their peril. So there being no help for it, they went down into the road and hustled the saint up the steps.\n\n\"You madman! How dare you incite people to evil?\" said Sun Ce.\n\n\"I am but a poor priest of the Langye Mountains. More than half a century ago, when gathering simples in the woods, I found near the Yangqu Spring a book called 'The Way of Peace.' It contains a hundred and more chapters and taught me how to cure the diseases of humans. With this in my possession I had only one thing to do: To devote myself to spreading its teachings and saving humankind. I have never taken any thing from the people. Can you say I incite people to evil deeds?\"\n\n\"You say you take nothing: Whence came your clothes and your food? The fact is you are one of the Yellow Scarves, and you will work mischief if you are left alive.\"\n\nThen turning to his attendants, Sun Ce ordered, \"Take him away and put him to death.\"\n\nZhang Zhao interceded, \"The Daoist Saint has been here in the east these many years. He has never done any harm and does not deserve death or punishment.\"\n\n\"I tell you I will kill these wizard fellows just as I would cattle.\"\n\nThe officials in a body interceded, even the guest of honor, Chen Zhen, but in vain. Sun Ce refused to be placated. He ordered Yu Ji to be imprisoned.\n\nThe banquet came to an end, and Chen Zhen retired to his lodging. Sun Ce also returned to his palace.\n\nHis treatment of the Daoist Holy Man was theme of general conversation and soon reached the ears of his mother.\n\nLady Wu sent for her son to the ladies' apartments and said to him, \"They tell me you have put Saint Yu Ji in bonds. He has cured many sick people, and the common folk hold him in great reverence. Do not harm him!\"\n\n\"He is simply a wizard who upsets the multitude with his spells and craft. He must be put to death,\" replied Sun Ce.\n\nLady Wu entreated him to stay his hand, but he was obstinate.\n\n\"Do not heed the gossip of the streets, Mother,\" said he. \"I must be judge of these matters.\"\n\nHowever, Sun Ce sent to the prison for Yu Ji in order to interrogate him. Now the gaolers, having a great respect for Yu Ji and faith in his powers, were very indulgent to him and did not keep him in the collar. However when Sun Ce sent for him, they put on him with collar and fetters all complete.\n\nSun Ce had heard of their indulgence and punished the gaolers, and ordered the prisoner thereafter to be put in constant torture. Zhang Zhao and many others, moved by pity, made a petition which they humbly presented, and they offered to become surety for him.\n\nSun Ce said to them, \"Gentlemen, you are all great scholars, but why do you not understand reason? Formerly in Jiaozhou was Imperial Protector Zhang Jing, who was deluded by these vicious doctrines into beating drums, twanging lyres, burning incense, and such things. He wore a red turban and represented himself as able to ensure victory to an army. But he was slain by the enemy. There is nothing in all this, only none of you will see it. I am going to put this fellow to death in order to stop the spread of this pernicious doctrine.\"\n\nLu Fan interposed, saying, \"I know very well this Yu Ji can control the weather. It is very dry just now, why not make him pray for rain as an amercement?\"\n\n\"We will see what sort of witchcraft he is equal to,\" said Sun Ce.\n\nThereupon he had the prisoner brought in, loosed his fetters, and sent him up to an altar to intercede for rain.\n\nThe docile Daoist Yu Ji prepared to do as he was bidden. He first bathed himself, then dressed himself in clean garments. After that he bound his limbs with a cord and lay down in the fierce heat of the sun. The people came in crowds to look on.\n\nSaid Yu Ji, \"I will pray for three spans high of refreshing rain for the benefit of the people, nevertheless I shall not escape death thereby.\"\n\nThe people said, \"But if your prayer be efficacious, our lord must believe in your powers.\"\n\n\"The day of fate has come for me, and there is no escape.\"\n\nPresently Sun Ce came near the altar and announced that if rain had not fallen by noon, he would burn the priest. And to confirm this he bade them prepare the pyre.\n\nAs it neared noon a strong wind sprang up, and the clouds gathered from all quarters. But there was no rain.\n\n\"It is near noon,\" said Sun Ce. \"Clouds are of no account without rain. He is only an impostor.\"\n\nSun Ce bade his attendants lay the priest on the pyre and pile wood around him and apply the torch. Fanned by the gale the flames rose rapidly. Then appeared in the sky above a wreath of black vapor, followed by roaring thunder and vivid lightning, peal on peal and flash on flash. And the rain fell in a perfect deluge. In a short time the streets became rivers and torrents. It was indeed a three-span fall.\n\nYu Ji, who was still lying upon the pile of firewood, cried in a loud voice, \"O Clouds, cease thy rain, and let the glorious sun appear!\"\n\nThereupon officials and people helped the priest down, loosened the cord that bound him, and bowed before him in gratitude for the rain.\n\nBut Sun Ce boiled with rage at seeing his officers and the people gathered in groups and kneeling in the water regardless of the damage to their clothing.\n\n\"Rain or shine are as nature appoints them, and the wizard has happened to hit upon a moment of change. What are you making all this fuss about?\" cried he.\n\nThen he drew his sword and told the attendants to smite the Daoist Saint therewith. They all besought him to hold his hand.\n\n\"You want to follow Yu Ji in rebellion, I suppose,\" cried Sun Ce.\n\nThe officers, now thoroughly cowed by the rage of their lord, were silent and showed no opposition when the executioners seized the Daoist Saint and beheaded him.\n\nAs the head fell, they saw just a wreath of black smoke drift away to the northeast where lay the Langye Mountains.\n\nThe corpse was exposed in the market place as a warning to enchanters and wizards and such people. That night there came a very violent storm, and when it calmed down at daylight, there was no trace of the body of Yu Ji. The guards reported this, and Sun Ce in his wrath sentenced them to death. But as he did so, he saw Yu Ji calmly walking toward him as if the Daoist Saint were still alive. Sun Ce drew his sword and darted forward to strike at the wraith, but he fainted and fell to the ground.\n\nThey carried him to his chamber, and in a short time he recovered consciousness.\n\nHis mother, Lady Wu, came to visit him and said, \"My son, you have done wrong to slay the holy one, and this is your retribution.\"\n\n\"Mother, when I was a boy, I went with Father to wars, where people are cut down as one cuts reed stalks. There is not much retribution about such doings. I have put this fellow to death and so checked a great evil. Where does retribution come in?\"\n\n\"This comes of want of faith,\" she replied. \"Now you must avert the evil by meritorious deeds.\"\n\n\"My fate depends on Heaven. Wizards can do me no harm, so why avert anything?\"\n\nHis mother saw that it was useless to try persuasion, but she told his attendants to do some good deeds secretly whereby the evil should be turned aside.\n\nThat night about the third watch, as Sun Ce lay in his chamber, he suddenly felt a chill breeze, which seemed to extinguish the lamps for a moment, although they soon brightened again; and he saw in the lamp light the form of Yu Ji standing near his bed.\n\nSun Ce said, \"I am the sworn foe of witchcraft, and I will purge the world of all such as deal in magic. You are a spirit, and how dare you approach me?\"\n\nReaching down a sword that hung at the head of his bed, he hurled it at the phantom, which then disappeared. When his mother heard this story, her grief redoubled. Sun Ce, ill as he was, went to see his mother and did his utmost to reassure her.\n\nShe said, \"Confucius the Teacher says: 'How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them!' and 'Prayer has been made to the spirits of the upper and lower worlds.' You must have faith. You sinned in putting Saint Yu Ji to death, and retribution is sure. I have already sent to have sacrifices performed at the Jade Pure Monastery, and you should go in person to pray. May all come right!\"\n\nSun Ce could not withstand such a mandate from his mother so, mustering all his strength, he managed to get into a sedan chair and went to the monastery, where the Daoists received him respectfully and begged him to light the incense. He did so, but he returned no thanks. To the surprise of all, the smoke from the brazier, instead of floating upwards and dissipating, collected in a mass that gradually shaped itself into an umbrella, and there on the top sat Yu Ji.\n\nSun Ce simply spat abuse and went out of the temple. As he passed the gates, lo! Yu Ji stood there gazing at him with angry eyes.\n\n\"Do you see that wizard fellow?\" said he to those about him.\n\nThey said they saw nothing. More angry than ever, he flung his sword at the figure by the gate. The sword struck one of his escorts who fell. Sun Ce told them to bury the man. But as he went out of the courtyard, he saw Yu Ji walking in.\n\n\"This temple is nothing more than a lurking place for sorcerers and wizards and such people,\" said Sun Ce.\n\nWhereupon he took a seat in front of the building and sent for five hundred soldiers to pull the place down. When they went up on the roof to strip off the tiles, Sun Ce saw Yu Ji standing on the main beam flicking tiles to the ground. More angry than ever, Sun Ce told them to drive out the priests belonging to the place and burn it. They did so, and when the flames rose their highest, Sun Ce saw the dead Daoist Yu Ji standing in the midst of the fire.\n\nSun Ce returned home still in a bad humor, which increased when he saw the form of Yu Ji standing at his gate. He would not enter but mustered his army and went into camp outside the city walls. And there he summoned his officers to meet him and talk over joining Yuan Shao in an attack on Cao Cao.\n\nThey assembled, but they remonstrated with him and begged him to consider his precious health. That night he slept in the camp and again saw Yu Ji, this time with his hair hanging loose. Sun Ce raged at the vision without cessation.\n\nNext day his mother called him into the city and he went. She was shocked at the change in his appearance: He looked so utterly miserable. Her tears fell.\n\n\"My son,\" said Lady Wu, \"how wasted you are!\"\n\nHe had a mirror brought and looked at himself. He was indeed so gaunt and thin that he was almost frightened and exclaimed, \"How do I come to look so haggard?\"\n\nWhile he spoke, Yu Ji appeared in the mirror. He struck it and shrieked. Then the half healed wounds reopened and he fainted.\n\nHe was raised and borne within. When he recovered consciousness, he said, \"This is the end. I shall die.\"\n\nHe sent for Zhang Zhao and his other chief officers and his brother, Sun Quan, and they gathered in his chamber.\n\nHe gave them his dying charge, saying, \"In the disordered state of the empire, the domains of Wu and Yue, with its strong defense of the three rivers and resourceful lands, has a brilliant future. You, Zhang Zhao, must assist my brother.\"\n\nSo saying Sun Ce handed his seal to Sun Quan, saying, \"For manipulating the might of Wu so as to make it the deciding force among the factions and then obtaining the whole empire, you are not so suited as I. But in encouraging the wise and confiding in the able and getting the best out of everyone for the preservation of this land, I should not succeed as you will. Remember with what toil and labor your father and I have won what we possess, and take good care thereof.\"\n\nSun Quan wept as he knelt to receive the seal, and the dying Sun Ce turned to his mother, saying, \"Mother, the days allotted of Heaven have run out, and I can no longer serve my tender mother. I have given over the seal to my brother and trust that you will advise him early and late, and see that he lives worthy of his predecessors.\"\n\n\"Alas! Your brother is full young for such a task,\" said his mother, weeping. \"I know not what may happen.\"\n\n\"He is far abler than I and fully equal to the task of ruling. Should he have doubts upon internal affairs, he must turn to Zhang Zhao; for outer matters he must consult Zhou Yu. It is a pity Zhou Yu is absent so that I cannot give him my charge face to face.\"\n\nTo his brothers Sun Ce said, \"When I am gone, you must help your brother. Should any discord arise in the family, let the others punish the wrongdoer and let not his ashes mingle with those of his ancestors in the family vaults.\"\n\nThe young men wept at these words.\n\nThen he called for his wife, Lady Qiao, and said, \"Unhappily we have to part while still in the full vigor of life. You must care for my mother. Your sister will come to see you presently, and you can ask her to tell her husband, Zhou Yu, to help my brother in all things and make my brother keep to the way I have taught him to walk in.\"\n\nThen Sun Ce closed his eyes and soon after passed away. He was only twenty-six.\n\n\u2003People called him first of the chieftains,\n\n\u2003The east had felt his might,\n\n\u2003He watched like a tiger crouching.\n\n\u2003Struck as a hawk in flight.\n\n\u2003There was peace in the lands he ruled.\n\n\u2003His fame ran with the wind.\n\n\u2003But he died and left to another.\n\n\u2003The great scheme in his mind.\n\nAs his brother breathed his last, Sun Quan sank by the bed and wept.\n\n\"This is not the time to mourn,\" said Zhang Zhao. \"First see to the funeral ceremonies and that the government is safe.\"\n\nSo the new ruler dried his tears. The superintendence of the funeral was confided to Sun Jing, and then Zhang Zhao led his young master to the hall to receive the felicitations of his officers.\n\nSun Quan was endowed with a square jaw and a large mouth; he had green eyes and a purple beard.\n\nFormerly, when Minister Liu Wan had gone to Wu to visit the Sun family, he said of the family of brothers, \"I have looked well at them all, and they are all clever and perspicacious, but none of them have the very ultimate degree of good fortune. Only the second, Sun Quan, has the look of a deep thinker. His face is remarkable, and his build unusual, and he has the look of one who will come to great honor.\"\n\nWhen Sun Quan succeeded to his brother and his brother's might, there was still some reorganization to be done. Soon Zhou Yu had arrived at Wujun.\n\nThe young ruler received him very graciously and said, \"I need have no anxiety now that you have come.\"\n\nZhou Yu had been sent to hold Baqiu. When he heard that his chief had been wounded, he thought it well to return to see how he was. But Sun Ce had died before Zhou Yu could arrive. He hurried to be present at the funeral.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu went to wail at the coffin of his late chief, Lady Wu, the dead man's mother, came out to deliver her son's last injunctions.\n\nWhen she had told him the last charge, Zhou Yu bowed to the earth, saying, \"I shall exert the puny powers I have in your service as long as I live.\"\n\nShortly after Sun Quan came in, and, after receiving Zhou Yu's obeisance, said, \"I trust you will not forget my brother's charge to you.\"\n\nZhou Yu bowed, saying, \"I would willingly suffer any form of death for you.\"\n\n\"How best can I maintain this great charge which I have inherited from my father and brother?\"\n\n\"He who wins people, prospers; he who loses them, fails. Your present plan should be to seek people of high aims and farseeing views, and you can establish yourself firmly.\"\n\n\"My brother bade me consult Zhang Zhao for internal administration, and yourself on external matters,\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"Zhang Zhao is wise and understanding and equal to such a task. I am devoid of talent and fear to take such responsibility, but I venture to recommend to you as a helper one Lu Su, a man of Linhuai. This man's bosom hides strategy, and his breast conceals tactics. He lost his father in early life and has been a perfectly filial son to his mother. His family is rich and renowned for charity to the needy. When I was stationed at Juchao, I led some hundreds of soldiers across Linhuai. We were short of grain. Hearing that the Lu family had two granaries there, each holding three thousand carts, I went to ask for help. Lu Su pointed to one granary and said, 'Take that as a gift.' Such was his generosity!\n\n\"He has always been fond of fencing and horse archery. He was living in Que. His grandmother died while he was there, and he went to bury her in Dongcheng, and then his friend, Liu Ziyang, wished to engage him to go to Chaohu and join Zheng Bao. However, he hesitated about that and has not gone yet. You should invite him without loss of time.\"\n\nSun Quan at once sent Zhou Yu to engage the services of this man, and Zhou Yu set out. When the obeisance was over, Zhou Yu laid before Lu Su the inducements that his own master held out.\n\nLu Su replied, \"I have been engaged by Liu Ziyang to go to Chaohu, and I am just starting thither.\"\n\nSaid Zhou Yu, \"Of old Ma Yuan said to Liu Xiu, 'This is an age when not only do princes select their ministers, but ministers must also choose their princes.' Now our General Sun Quan calls to him the wise and treats his officers well. Thus he engages the help of the wonderful and gets the services of the extraordinary in a way that few others do. But if you are not engaged elsewhere, come with me to the South Land as the best thing to do.\"\n\nLu Su returned with Zhou Yu and saw Sun Quan, who treated him with the greatest deference and with him discussed affairs very fully. The conference proved so interesting that it went on all day and neither felt fatigue.\n\nOne day at the close of the usual reception, Sun Quan kept Lu Su to dine with him. They sat up late and by and by slept on the same couch as would the closest of friends.\n\nIn the dead of night Sun Quan said to his bedfellow, \"The dynasty is failing, and everything is at sixes and sevens. I have received a great charge from my father and brother, and I am thinking of imitating the actions of the celebrated Protectors of Reign, Wen and Huan, and becoming the leader of the feudal lords, and I pray you instruct me.\"\n\nLu Su replied, \"Of old the Founder of Han, the Supreme Ancestor, wished to honor and serve Emperor Yi of Qin, but could not on account of Xiang Yu's evildoings. Now Cao Cao can be compared with Xiang Yu: How can you be the protector of the Emperor? My humble opinion is that the Hans have fallen beyond hope of recovery and Cao Cao cannot be destroyed, and that the only key to your big schemes is to secure your present position in order to keep the master hand and control the combinations among the others. Now take advantage of the turmoil in the north to smite Huang Zu and attack Liu Biao in Jingzhou. Thereby you will command the whole length of the Great River. Then you may consolidate the empire and become the Son of Heaven. This was how the Supreme Ancestor acted.\"\n\nHearing this Sun Quan was very greatly pleased. He threw on some clothing, got up, and thanked his newly-found adviser. Next day Sun Quan gave Lu Su costly gifts and sent robes and silks to his mother.\n\nLu Su then recommended a friend of his to Sun Quan's notice, a man of wide reading and great ability. He was also a filial son. His name was Zhuge Jin, and he came from Nanyang. Sun Quan treated Zhuge Jin as a superior guest. This man dissuaded Sun Quan from making common cause with Yuan Shao, but advised him rather to favor Cao Cao, against whom he could plan when occasion served. Sun Quan therefore sent back the messenger Chen Zhen with dispatches that broke off all negotiations.\n\nHearing of Sun Ce's death, Cao Cao was for sending an expedition against the south.\n\nBut Zhang Hong dissuaded him, saying, \"It would be mean to take advantage of the period of mourning. And if you should not overcome him, you will make him an enemy instead of being a friend. It would be preferable to treat him generously.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao memorialized the Throne and obtained for Sun Quan the title of General and Governor of Kuaiji, while Zhang Hong was appointed Commander under Sun Quan.\n\nAnd a seal of office was sent to Sun Quan by Zhang Hong. The new appointment pleased Sun Quan, and he was greatly glad to get Zhang Hong back again. Then Zhang Hong was sent to act jointly with Zhang Zhao in the administration.\n\nZhang Hong was the means of getting another into Sun Quan's service. His friend was Gu Yong, a disciple of the Historian Cai Yong. Gu Yong was a man of few words and an abstainer from wine. He was very correct in all things. Sun Quan appointed Gu Yong Deputy Governor.\n\nHenceforward Sun Quan's rule was very prosperous, and he waxed mightily in influence and won the love of all the people.\n\nWhen Chen Zhen had returned and related the events in the South Land and told of the honors that Cao Cao had obtained for Sun Quan in return for his support, Yuan Shao was very wroth, and he set about preparing for an attack on Xuchang with a force of seven hundred thousand northern soldiers.\n\n\u2003Although in the south they rest from war,\n\n\u2003They rattle the spears beneath the northern star." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Shunning Advice, Yuan Shao Loses Leaders and Granaries; Using Strategy, Cao Cao Scores Victory At Guandu.\n\nHearing that Yuan Shao was hastening to attack at Guandu, Xiahou Dun wrote to the capital urgently asking for reinforcements, and Cao Cao told off seventy thousand troops with which he marched. Xun Yu was left to guard the capital.\n\nJust as Yuan Shao's army was starting, Tian Feng sent out a remonstrance from his prison cell, saying, \"My lord, a hasty attack in full scale will bring disaster to our army. It is best now to wait upon such times as Heaven should appoint.\"\n\nPeng Ji said to Yuan Shao, \"Why does this Tian Feng utter ill-omened words? My lord is sending forth an army in the cause of humanity and justice.\"\n\nEasily moved to anger, Yuan Shao was going to execute Tian Feng, but this time he forbore at the entreaties of many of his officers.\n\nHowever, he was not appeased, for he said, \"I will punish Tian Feng when I return from conquering Cao Cao.\"\n\nMeanwhile Yuan Shao hastened to start. The banners of his host filled the horizon, their swords were as trees in the forest. They marched to Yangwu and there made a strong camp.\n\nThen Ju Shou once more opposed any hasty movement, saying, \"Though our soldiers are many, they are not so bold as the enemy. However, veterans as are the enemy, they have not ample supplies. Therefore they will wish to force on a speedy battle, while our policy is to hold them off and delay. If we can keep from a decisive battle long enough, the victory will be ours without fighting.\"\n\nThis advice did not appeal to Yuan Shao.\n\nSaid he, threateningly, \"Tian Feng spoke discouraging words to my armies, and I will assuredly put him to death on my return. How dare you follow in the same way?\"\n\nYuan Shao summoned the lictors and sent away the adviser in chains, saying, \"When I have overcome Cao Cao, then will I deal with you and Tian Feng together!\"\n\nThe huge army was camped in four divisions, one toward each point of the compass. The camps were thirty miles in circuit. Scouts and spies were sent out to discover the strong and the weak points of the enemy.\n\nCao Cao's army arrived and were smitten with fear when they heard of the strength of their enemy. The leader called together his council.\n\nThen said Adviser Xun You, \"The enemy are many but not terrible. Ours is an army of veterans, every soldier of ours worth ten of theirs. But our advantage lies in a speedy battle, for unhappily our stores are insufficient for a long campaign.\"\n\n\"You speak to the point,\" said Cao Cao. \"I think the same.\"\n\nTherefore Cao Cao issued orders to press noisily forward and force on a battle. Yuan Shao's soldiers took up the challenge, and the two sides were arrayed. On Yuan Shao's side, Shen Pei placed ten thousand of crossbowmen in ambush on the two wings, while five thousand of archers held the center. The signal for general attack was a bomb, and the onset was to continue through three rolls of the drum.\n\nYuan Shao wore a silver helmet and breastplate and an embroidered robe held in by a jeweled belt. He took up his post in the center with his commanders \u2014 Gao Lan, Zhang He, Han Meng, Chunyu Qiong, and others \u2014 ranged right and left. His banners and ensigns made a brave show.\n\nWhen Cao Cao's army's center opened and the banners moved aside, the chieftain appeared on horseback with his staff of doughty leaders all fully armed \u2014 Xu Chu, Zhang Liao, Xu Huang, Li Dian, and others.\n\nPointing with his whip at Yuan Shao, Cao Cao cried, \"In the presence of the Emperor, I pressed your claims to consideration and obtained for you the title of Regent Marshal. Why do you now plan rebellion?\"\n\nYuan Shao replied, \"You take the title of a minister of Han, but you are really a rebel against the House. Your crimes and evil deeds reach to the heavens, and you are worse than the usurper Wang Mang and the rebel Dong Zhuo. What are these slanderous words about rebellion that dare you address to me?\"\n\n\"I have a command to make you prisoner!\"\n\n\"I have the Girdle Decree to arrest rebels!\" replied Yuan Shao.\n\nThen Cao Cao became wrathful and bade Zhang Liao ride forth as his champion. From the other side rode Zhang He on a curvetting steed. The two champions fought forty or fifty bouts with no advantage to either. In his heart Cao Cao thought the contest amazing. Then Xu Chu whirled up his sword and went to help. From the other side, to match him rode out Gao Lan with his spear set, and the contestants were now four, battling two and two. Then Cao Cao ordered three thousand troops under Xiahou Dun and Cao Hong to attack the opponents' array. Thereupon on Yuan Shao's side, Shen Pei gave the signal for attack, and the legion of crossbowmen on the wings shot and the center archers let fly all together. The arrows flew all over the field in front, and Cao Cao's troops could not advance. They hastened away toward the south. Yuan Shao threw his soldiers on their rear, and they were broken. They fled away toward Guandu, and Yuan Shao advanced another stage. He camped near them.\n\nThen Shen Pei said, \"Now send one hundred thousand soldiers to guard Guandu, and get near Cao Cao's camp. Then build up observation mounds to get a clear view of the enemy, and choose vantage points whence to shoot arrows into the midst of their host. If we can force him to evacuate this place, we shall have gained a strategic point whence Capital Xuchang can be attacked.\"\n\nYuan Shao adopted this suggestion. From each of the camps, they sought out the strongest veterans who dug with iron spades and carried earth to raise mounds near Cao Cao's camp.\n\nCao Cao's soldiers saw what their enemies were doing and were anxious to make a sortie and drive them off. But the archers and crossbowmen came out commanding the narrow throat through which it was necessary to attack and stayed them. At the end of ten days, they had build up more than half a hundred mounds, and on the summit of each was a lofty tower, whence the archers could command their opponents' camp. Cao Cao's soldiers were greatly frightened and held up their bucklers to keep off the various missiles. From the mounds the arrows flew down like a fierce rain after each roll of drums. The soldiers of Yuan Shao's army laughed and jeered when they saw their enemies crouching under their shields and crawling on the ground to avoid their missiles.\n\nCao Cao saw that his troops were getting out of hand under this attack, so he called a council.\n\nLiu Ye spoke up, saying, \"Let us make catapults and so destroy them.\"\n\nCao Cao at once had models brought and set cunning workers to make these stone-throwing machines. They soon constructed some hundreds and placed them along the walls of the camp inside, just opposite the high ladders on the enemy's mounds.\n\nThen Cao Cao's troops watched for Yuan Shao's archers to ascend the towers. As soon as the archers began to shoot, all the catapults began to heave stone balls into the skies and they wrought great havoc. There was no shelter from the falling stones, and enormous numbers of the archers were killed. Yuan Shao's troops called these machines \"Rumblers,\" and after their appearance the archers dared not ascend the mounds to shoot.\n\nThen Shen Pei, the strategist, thought out another plan. He set troops to tunnel under the walls into the midst of Cao Cao's camp and called this corps \"The Sappers\". Cao Cao's soldiers saw the enemy digging out pits behind the mounds and told the chief, who at once sought a counter plan from Liu Ye.\n\n\"As Yuan Shao can no longer attack openly, he is attacking secretly and is tunneling a road under ground into the midst of our camp,\" said Liu Ye.\n\n\"But how to meet it?\"\n\n\"We can surround the camp with a deep moat which renders their tunnel useless.\"\n\nSo a deep moat was dug as quickly as possible, and when the enemy sappers arrived thereat, lo! their labor had been in vain and the sap was useless.\n\nCao Cao held Guandu throughout the eighth and ninth months when, his army being worn out and provisions failing, he began to think of giving up and returning to the capital. As he could not make up his mind, he referred his difficulties by letter to Xun Yu, whom he had left to guard Xuchang. The reply he got was to this effect:\n\n\"I have received your command to decide whether to continue the campaign or retire. It appears to me that Yuan Shao assembled such large forces at Guandu with the expectation of winning a decision. You, Sir, are very weak while he is very strong. If you cannot get the better of him, he will be able to work his will on you, and this will be a crisis of the empire. Your opponents are indeed numerous, but their leader knows not how to use them. With your military genius and discernment, where are you not sure to succeed? Now though your numbers are small, your situation is still brighter than Liu Bang's when he faced against Xiang Yu in Jungyang and Chenggao. You are securely entrenched with your hands on Yuan Shao's throat; and even if you cannot advance, that state of things cannot endure forever but must change. This is the time to play some unexpected move, and you must not miss it. The device I leave to your illustrious ingenuity.\"\n\nThis letter greatly pleased Cao Cao, and he urged upon his troops to use every effort to maintain the position.\n\nYuan Shao then retired some ten miles, and Cao Cao sent out scouts to ascertain his new dispositions. One of Xu Huang's officers, Shi Huan, captured an enemy spy and sent him to his chief. Xu Huang interrogated him and found out that a convoy of supplies was expected and that this spy and others had been sent to find out what the risks of the route were. Xu Huang went at once to tell Cao Cao.\n\nWhen Xun You heard that the commander of the convoy was Han Meng, he said, \"That fellow is a valiant fool. A few thousand light horse sent to intercept him can capture the whole train and cause much trouble in the enemy's camp.\"\n\n\"Whom should I send?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"You might send Xu Huang. He is capable of such a task.\"\n\nSo Xu Huang was deputed, and he took with him Shi Huan, who had captured the spy, and his company. And this party was supported by Zhang Liao and Xu Chu.\n\nIt was night when the commissariat train of many thousands of wagons drew near Yuan Shao's camp. As they passed through a defile, Xu Huang and Shi Huan came out and stopped the train. Han Meng galloped up to give battle but was soon overcome. The guard was scattered, and soon the whole train was in flames. The escort and their leader fled away.\n\nThe glow of the flames seen from Yuan Shao's camp caused great consternation, which became fear when the escaped soldiers rode in and told their tale.\n\nYuan Shao sent out Zhang He and Gao Lan to try to intercept the raiders, and they came upon Xu Huang and his company. Just as Zhang He and Gao Lan were attacking, reinforcements from Zhang Liao and Xu Chu came up, and the Yuan Shao's troops were between two fires. They were cut to pieces and the successful generals of Cao Cao rode back to Guandu, where they were richly rewarded.\n\nAs an additional safeguard, Cao Cao made a supporting outpost in front of the main camp to be the apex of a triangle of defense.\n\nWhen Han Meng returned with his woeful tidings, Yuan Shao was angry and threatened to put him to death. His colleagues begged him off.\n\nThen said Shen Pei, \"Food is very important for an army in the field and must be defended with the greatest diligence. Wuchao is our main depot and must be carefully guarded.\"\n\n\"My plans being complete,\" said Yuan Shao. \"You may as well return to Capital Yejun of Jizhou and undertake the control of the supplies. Let there be no shortage.\"\n\nSo Shen Pei left the army. Then a force of twenty thousand troops was told off to defend the depot in Wuchao. The leaders of this body were Chunyu Qiong, Gui Yuanjin, Han Juzi, Lu Weihuang, and Zhao Rui.\n\nOf these generals, Chunyu Qiong was a hard man and a heavy drinker, who in his cups was a terror to the soldiers. Under the idle life of guarding the supply depot, the leaders gave themselves up to indulgence and drank heavily.\n\nIn Cao Cao's army food was also getting scarce, and a message was sent to Capital Xuchang to send grain quickly. The messenger with the letter, however, had not gone far when he fell into the hands of Yuan Shao's guards, who took him to the adviser Xu You.\n\nSeeing from the letter that Cao Cao was short of supplies, Xu You went to Yuan Shao and told him, saying, \"Cao Cao and we have been at grips here for a long time, and Capital Xuchang must be undefended. A small army sent quickly could take it, and at the same moment an attack here would deliver Cao Cao into our hands. Now is the moment to strike, for his supplies are short.\"\n\nYuan Shao replied, \"Cao Cao is full of ruses, and this letter is artfully designed to bring about a battle to suit himself.\"\n\n\"If you do not take this chance, he will do you some injury by and by.\"\n\nJust at this juncture in came a dispatch from Yejun in which, after some details regarding the forwarding of grain, Shen Pei said he had discovered that Xu You had been in the habit of receiving bribes while in Jizhou and had winked at his relatives collecting excess taxes. One of his son and nephew were then in prison.\n\nAt this Yuan Shao turned on Xu You angrily and said, \"How can you have the face to stand before me and propose plans, you extortionate fellow? You and Cao Cao have old liking for each other, and he has bribed you to do his dirty work for him and help his base schemes. Now you want to betray my army. I ought to take off your head, but temporarily I will let your neck carry it away. Get out and never let me see you again.\"\n\nThe discredited adviser sighed and went out, saying, \"Faithful words offend his ear. He is a pest and unworthy of advice from me. And now that Shen Pei has injured my son and nephew, how can I look my fellow folks in the face again?\"\n\nAnd Xu You drew his sword to end his life. But his people prevented that.\n\nThey said, \"If Yuan Shao rejects your honest words, then assuredly he will be taken by Cao Cao. You are an old friend of Cao Cao's: Why not abandon the shade for the sunlight?\"\n\nJust these few words awakened Xu You to consciousness of his position, and he decided to leave Yuan Shao and go over to Cao Cao for he was an old friend.\n\n\u2003Vainly now for chances lost\n\n\u2003Yuan Shao sighs; once he was great.\n\n\u2003Had he taken Xu You's advice,\n\n\u2003Cao Cao had not set up a state.\n\nXu You stealthily left the camp and set out for Cao Cao's lines. He was captured on the way. He told his captors: \"I am an old friend of the Prime Minister. Go and tell the Prime Minister that Xu You of Nanyang wishes to see him.\"\n\nThey did so. Cao Cao was resting in his tent, his clothing loose and comfortable after the toils of the day. When he heard who wished to see him, he arose quite joyfully and hastily ran out, on bare feet, to receive Xu You. Cao Cao went forth to greet him. They saw each other in the distance, and Cao Cao clapped his hands with gladness, bowing to the ground when near enough to his visitor.\n\nXu You hastened to help him rise, saying, \"Sir, you, a great minister, should not thus salute a simple civilian like me.\"\n\n\"But you are my old friend, and no name or office makes any difference to us,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\n\"Having been unable to choose the lord I would serve, I bowed my head before Yuan Shao wishing to support him sincerely. But he was deaf to my words and disregarded my plans. Wherefore I have left him and come now to see my old friend from whom I hope employment.\"\n\n\"If you are willing to come, then have I indeed a helper,\" said Cao Cao. \"I desire you to give me a scheme for the destruction of Yuan Shao.\"\n\n\"I counseled him to send a light force to take Capital Xuchang and at the same time attack here in full scale so that head and tail be both attacked.\"\n\nCao Cao was alarmed, saying, \"If he does so, I am lost!\"\n\n\"How much grain have you in store?\" said the new adviser.\n\n\"Enough for a year.\"\n\n\"I think not quite,\" said Xu You, smiling.\n\n\"Well, half a year.\"\n\nThe visitor shook out his sleeves, rose and hurried toward the door of the tent, saying, \"I offer him good counsel, and he repays me with deceit. Could I have expected it?\"\n\nCao Cao held him back.\n\n\"Do not be angry,\" said he. \"I will tell you the truth. Really I have here only enough for three months.\"\n\n\"Everybody says you are a marvel of wickedness, and indeed it is true,\" said Xu You.\n\n\"But who does not know that in war there is no objection to deceit?\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nThen whispering in Xu You's ear, he said, \"Actually here I have only supplies for this month's use.\"\n\n\"O do not throw dust in my eyes any more. Your grain is exhausted and I know it.\"\n\nCao Cao was startled, for he thought no one knew of the straits he was in.\n\n\"How did you find that out?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nXu You produced the captured letter, saying, \"Who wrote that?\"\n\n\"Where did you get it?\"\n\nWhereupon Xu You told Cao Cao the story of the captured messenger.\n\nCao Cao seized him by the hand, saying, \"Since our old friendship has brought you to me, I hope you have some plan to suggest to me.\"\n\nXu You said, \"To oppose a great army with a small one is to walk in the way of destruction, unless you inflict quick defeat. I can propose a plan which will defeat the innumerable hordes of Yuan Shao without fighting a battle. But will you follow my advice?\"\n\n\"I very much desire to know your plan,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Your enemy's stores of all kinds are at Wuchao, where the Commander of the Guard is that drunkard Chunyu Qiong. You can send some of your trusty veterans to pretend they belong to one of Yuan Shao's generals, Jiang Qi, sent to help guard the depot. These soldiers can find an opportunity to fire the grain and stores of all kinds, which will upset all Yuan Shao's calculations. In three days Yuan Shao is no more.\"\n\nCao Cao greatly approved. He treated Xu You very liberally and kept him in his camp. Forthwith he chose five thousand of horse and foot ready for the expedition.\n\nZhang Liao protested, saying, \"The enterprise will be futile as the grain depot will certainly be well guarded. Without caution, we may be victims of the treachery on the part of the newly arrived Xu You.\"\n\n\"Xu You is no traitor,\" said Cao Cao. \"He has come sent by Heaven to defeat Yuan Shao. If we do not get grain, it will be hard to hold out. I have to either follow his advice or sit still and be hemmed in. If he were a traitor, he would hardly remain in my camp. Moreover this raid has been my desire for a long time. Have no doubts: The raid will certainly succeed.\"\n\n\"Well, then, you must look out for an attack here while the camp is undefended.\"\n\n\"That is already well provided for,\" said Cao Cao gleefully.\n\nThe arrangements for the raid on the grain depot were made with extreme care to ensure success. Cao Cao assigned Xun You, Jia Xu, and Cao Hong to guard the main camp, together with Xu You; Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan to guard the left camp; Cao Ren and Li Dian to guard the right camp. When all was ready they set out, Cao Cao himself in the center, with Zhang Liao and Xu Chu as van leaders and Xu Huang and Yu Jin as rear guard. The army showed the ensigns of their opponents. The troops carried bundles of grass and faggots to make a blaze. The soldiers were gagged and the horses tied round the muzzles so as to prevent any noise. They set out at dusk.\n\nThe night was fine and the stars shone brightly.\n\nJu Shou, still a prisoner in Yuan Shao's camp, saw the stars were very brilliant and told his gaolers to conduct him out to the central pavilion whence he could study them. While watching he saw the planet Venus invade the quarter of the Bear and Lyra, which startled him very greatly.\n\n\"Some misfortune is near!\" said Ju Shou.\n\nSo although it was still night, he went to see his master. But Yuan Shao was sleeping after indulgence in too much wine and was in bad humor. However, when they had roused him saying that the prisoner had a secret message to deliver, he got up.\n\n\"While I happened to be studying the aspect of the heavens,\" said the night visitor, \"I saw Venus, then between Hydra and Cancer, suddenly shoot into the neighborhood of the Bear and Lyra. There is danger of a robber raid, and special precautions must be taken at the grain depot. Lose no time in sending good soldiers and vigorous leaders thither, and keep a lookout on the byways among the hills that you may escape the wiles of Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"You are a criminal!\" said Yuan Shao. \"How dare you come with such wild nonsense to upset my armies.\"\n\nAnd turning to the gaolers Yuan Shao continued, \"I bade you confine him. Why did you let him come?\"\n\nThen he issued orders to put the gaolers to death and appointed others to keep the prisoner in close custody.\n\nJu Shou went away, wiping his falling tears and sighing deeply, \"Our soldiers' destruction is at hand, and I know not where our poor corpses may find a resting place.\"\n\n\u2003Blunt truth offended Yuan Shao,\n\n\u2003Too stupid any plan to make,\n\n\u2003His stores destroyed this is evident\n\n\u2003That Jizhou also is at stake.\n\nCao Cao's raiding party went along through the night. Passing one of Yuan Shao's outpost camps, they were challenged.\n\nCao Cao sent forward a man to say, \"Jiang Qi has orders to go to Wuchao to guard the grain stores.\"\n\nSeeing that the raiders marched under the ensigns of Yuan Shao, the guard had no suspicions and let them pass. At every post this ruse was effective, and they got safely through. They reached their objective at the end of the fourth watch, the straw and wood were placed in position without loss of time, and the blaze started. Then Cao Cao's commanders beat to attack.\n\nAt this time Chunyu Qiong and his companions were all asleep after a heavy drinking bout. However, when the alarm was given, they sprang up and asked what was the matter. The hubbub was indescribable. Very soon the fuddled officers were caught with hooks and hauled out of their camp.\n\nYuan Shao's generals Gui Yuanjin and Zhao Rui were just returning from taking grain to the camp and seeing the flames arise, they hastened to assist.\n\nSome of Cao Cao's soldiers ran to him, saying, \"The enemy is coming up in the rear. Send reinforcements.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao only replied, \"Press on to the front till the enemy is actually close at hand and then face about.\"\n\nSo the attack was pressed on and they all hastened forward. Very soon the fire gained strength, and thick smoke hung all around filling the sky. When Gui Yuanjin and Zhao Rui drew near, Cao Cao turned about and attacked them. They could not stand this for a moment, and both generals were killed. Finally the stores of grain and forage were utterly destroyed.\n\nThe commander, Chunyu Qiong, was made prisoner and taken to Cao Cao who ordered him to be deprived of ears, nose, and hands. He was bound on a horse and sent, thus horribly mutilated, to his master.\n\nFrom Yuan Shao's camp, the flames of the burning depot were seen away in the north, and they knew what they meant. Yuan Shao hastily summoned his officers to a council to send a rescue party.\n\nZhang He offered to go with Gao Lan, but Guo Tu said, \"You may not go. It is certain that Cao Cao is there in person, wherefore his camp is undefended. Let loose our soldiers on the camp, and that will speedily bring Cao Cao back again. This is how Sun Bin besieged Wei and thereby rescued Zhao.\"\n\nBut Zhang He said, \"Not so; Cao Cao is too wily not to have fully prepared against a chance attack. If we attack his camp and fail and Chunyu Qiong should be caught, we shall all be captured too.\"\n\nGuo Tu said, \"Cao Cao will be too intent on the destruction of the grain to think of leaving a guard. I entreat you to attack his camp.\"\n\nSo Yuan Shao sent five thousand soldiers under Zhang He and Gao Lan to attack Cao Cao's camp, and he sent ten thousand with Jiang Qi to go to recover the grain store.\n\nNow after overcoming Chunyu Qiong, Cao Cao's troops dressed themselves in the armor and clothing of the defeated soldiers and put out their emblems, thus posing as defeated force running back to their own headquarters. And when they happened upon Jiang Qi's rescue body, they said they had been beaten at Wuchao and were retreating. So Cao Cao's troops were suffered to pass without molestation while Jiang Qi hastened on. But soon Jiang Qi came to Zhang Liao and Xu Chu who cried out, \"Stop!\"\n\nAnd before Jiang Qi could make any opposition, Zhang Liao had cut him down. Soon his force were killed or dispersed, and the victors sent false messengers to Yuan Shao's camp to say that Jiang Qi had attacked and driven away the attackers of the granaries. So no more relief were sent that way. However, Yuan Shao sent reinforcements to Guandu.\n\nIn due course, the Yuan Shao's force came down upon Cao Cao's camp at Guandu, and the defenders \u2014 Xiahou Dun, Cao Ren, and Cao Hong \u2014 at once came out and fought them on three sides so that they were worsted. By the time reinforcements arrived, Cao Cao's army, returning from the raid, had also come, and Yuan Shao's army were attacked in the rear. So they were quite surrounded. However, Zhang He and Gao Lan managed to force their way out and got away.\n\nWhen the remains of the defenders of the grain stores reached their master's camp, they were mustered. Seeing the mutilated state of their one time leader, Yuan Shao asked how Chunyu Qiong had come to betray his trust and to suffer thus.\n\nThe soldiers told their lord, \"The General was intoxicated at the time of the attack.\"\n\nSo Yuan Shao ordered Chunyu Qiong to be forthwith executed.\n\nGuo Tu, fearing lest Zhang He and Gao Lan would return and testify the whole truth, began to intrigue against them.\n\nFirst Guo Tu went to his lord, saying, \"Those two, Zhang He and Gao Lan, were certainly very glad when your armies were defeated.\"\n\n\"Why do you say this?\" asked Yuan Shao.\n\n\"O they have long cherished a desire to go over to Cao Cao. So when you sent them on the duty of destroying his camp, they did not do their best and so brought about this disaster.\"\n\nYuan Shao accordingly sent to recall these two to be interrogated as to their faults. But Guo Tu sent a messenger in advance to warn them, as though in friendly guise, of the adverse fate that awaited them.\n\nSo when the orders reached them to return to answer for their faults, Gao Lan asked, \"For what reason are we recalled?\"\n\n\"Indeed I do not know,\" said the messenger.\n\nGao Lan drew his sword and killed the messenger.\n\nZhang He was astonished at this demonstration, but Gao Lan said, \"Our lord has allowed someone to malign us and say we have been bought by Cao Cao. What is the sense in our sitting still and awaiting destruction? Rather let us surrender to Cao Cao in reality and save our lives.\"\n\n\"I have been wanting to do this for some time,\" replied Zhang He.\n\nWherefore both, with their companies, made their way to Cao Cao's camp to surrender.\n\nWhen they arrived, Xiahou Dun said to his master, \"These two have come to surrender, but I have doubts about them.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"I will meet them generously and win them over, even if they have treachery in their hearts.\"\n\nThe camp gates were opened to the two officers, and they were invited to enter. They laid down their weapons, removed their armor, and bowed to the ground before Cao Cao, who said, \"If Yuan Shao had listened to you, he would not have suffered defeat. Now you two coming to surrender are like Wei Zi leaving the falling House of Shang to go to Zhou and Han Xin leaving Xiang Yu to go over to the rising House of Han.\"\n\nCao Cao made them Generals and conferred upon Zhang He the title of Lord of Duting and upon Gao Lan Lord of Donglai, which pleased them much.\n\nAnd so as Yuan Shao had formerly driven sway his adviser, Xu You, so now he had alienated two leaders and had lost his stores at Wuchao, and his army was depressed and down-hearted.\n\nWhen Xu You advised Cao Cao to attack Yuan Shao as promptly as he could, the two newly surrendered generals volunteered to lead the way. So Cao Cao sent Zhang He and Gao Lan to make a first attack on the camp, and they left in the night with three thousand troops. The fighting went on confusedly all night but stayed at dawn. Yuan Shao had lost half of his army.\n\nThen Xun You suggested a plan to Cao Cao, saying, \"Now is the moment to spread a report that an army will go to take Suanzao and attack Yejun, and another to take Liyang and intercept the enemy's retreat. Yuan Shao, when he hears of this, will be alarmed and tell off his troops to meet this new turn of affairs; and while he is making these new dispositions, we can have him at great disadvantage.\"\n\nCao Cao adopted the suggestion, and care was taken that the report spread far around. It came to the ears of Yuan Shao's soldiers, and they repeated it in camp. Yuan Shao believed it and ordered his son Yuan Tan with fifty thousand troops to rescue Yejun, and General Xin Ming with another fifty thousand to go to Liyang, and they marched away at once. Cao Cao heard that these armies had started, and at once dispatched troops in eight divisions to make a simultaneous attack on the nearly empty camp. Yuan Shao's troops were too dispirited to fight and gave way on all sides.\n\nYuan Shao without waiting to don his armor went forth in simple dress with an ordinary cap upon his head and mounted his steed. His youngest son, Yuan Shang, followed him. Four of the enemy generals \u2014 Zhang Liao, Xu Chu, Xu Huang, and Yu Jin \u2014 with their forces pressed in his rear, and Yuan Shao hastened across the river, abandoning all his documents and papers, baggage, treasure, and stores. Only eight hundred horsemen followed him over the stream. Cao Cao's troops followed hard but could not come up with him. However, they captured all his impedimenta, and they slew some eighty thousands of his army so that the watercourses ran blood and the drowned corpses could not be counted. It was a most complete victory for Cao Cao, and he made over all the spoil to the army.\n\nAmong the papers of Yuan Shao was found a bundle of letters showing secret correspondence between him and many persons in the capital and army.\n\nCao Cao's personal staff suggested that the names of those concerned should be abstracted and the persons arrested, but their lord said, \"Yuan Shao was so strong that even I could not be sure of safety. How much less other people?\"\n\nSo Cao Cao ordered the papers to be burned and nothing more was said.\n\nNow when Yuan Shao's soldiers ran away, Ju Shou, being a prisoner, could not get away and was captured.\n\nTaken before Cao Cao, who knew him, Ju Shou cried aloud, \"I will not surrender!\"\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"Yuan Shao was foolish and neglected your advice: Why still cling to the path of delusion? Had I had you to help me, I should have been sure of the empire.\"\n\nJu Shou was well treated in the camp, but he stole a horse and tried to get away to Yuan Shao. This angered Cao Cao who recaptured him and put him to death, which he met with brave composure.\n\n\"I have slain a faithful and righteous man!\" then said Cao Cao sadly.\n\nAnd the victim was honorably buried at Guandu. His tomb bore the inscription This is the tomb of Ju Shou the Loyal and Virtuous.\n\n\u2003Ju Shou was honest and virtuous,\n\n\u2003The best in Yuan Shao's train,\n\n\u2003From him the stars no secrets held,\n\n\u2003In tactics all was plain.\n\n\u2003For him no terrors had grim death.\n\n\u2003Too lofty was his spirit,\n\n\u2003His captor slew him, but his tomb\n\n\u2003Bears witness to his merit.\n\nCao Cao now gave orders to attack Jizhou.\n\nIn feeling over confident, that's where one's weakness lay;\n\nThe other bettered him by plans which never went astray." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Cao Cao Overcomes Yuan Shao In Cangting; Liu Bei Seeks Shelter With Liu Biao In Jingzhou.\n\nCao Cao lost no time in taking advantage of Yuan Shao's flight, but smote hard at the retreating army. Yuan Shao without helmet or proper dress, and with few followers, crossed hastily to the north bank at Liyang. He was met by one of his generals, Jiang Yiqu, who took him in and comforted him and listened to the tale of misfortunes. Next Jiang Yiqu called in the scattered remnants of the army, and when the soldiers heard that their old lord was alive they swarmed to him like ants, so that Yuan Shao quickly became strong enough to attempt the march to Jizhou. Soon the army set out and at night halted at Huang Hills.\n\nThat evening, sitting in his tent, Yuan Shao seemed to hear a far off sound of lamentation. He crept out quietly to listen and found it was his own soldiers telling each other tales of woe. This one lamented an elder brother lost, that one grieved for his younger brother abandoned, a third mourned a companion missing, a fourth, a relative cut off. And each beat his breast and wept.\n\nAnd all said, \"Had he but listened to Tian Feng, we had not met this disaster!\"\n\nYuan Shao, very remorseful, said, \"I did not hearken unto Tian Feng, and now my soldiers have been beaten and I was nearly lost. How can I return and look him in the face?\"\n\nNext day the march was resumed, and Yuan Shao met Peng Ji with reinforcements, to whom he said, \"I disregarded Tian Feng's advice and have brought myself to defeat. Now shall I be greatly ashamed to look him in the face.\"\n\nThis tribute to Tian Feng's prescience roused the jealousy of Peng Ji, who replied, \"Yes. When he heard the news of your defeat, though he was a prisoner, he clapped his hands for joy and said, 'Indeed, just as I foretold!'\"\n\n\"How dare he laugh at me, the blockhead? Assuredly he shall die!\" said Yuan Shao.\n\nWhereupon Yuan Shao wrote a letter and sent therewith a sword to slay the prisoner.\n\nMeanwhile Tian Feng's gaoler came to him one day, saying, \"Above all humans I felicitate you.\"\n\n\"What is the joyful occasion and why felicitate?\" said Tian Feng.\n\nThe gaoler replied, \"Imperial Protector Yuan Shao has been defeated and is on his way back. He will treat you with redoubled respect.\"\n\n\"Now am I a dead man!\" said Tian Feng.\n\n\"Why say you that, Sir, when all people give you joy?\"\n\n\"The Imperial Protector appears liberal, but he is jealous and forgetful of honest advice. Had he been victorious, he might have pardoned me. Now that he has been defeated and put to shame, I may not hope to live.\"\n\nBut the gaoler did not believe Tian Feng. Before long came the letter and the sword with the fatal order.\n\nThe gaoler was dismayed, but the victim said, \"I knew all too well that I should have to die.\"\n\nThe gaoler wept.\n\nTian Feng said, \"An able person born into this world who does not recognize and serve the right lord is ignorant. Today I die, but I am not deserving of pity.\"\n\nWhereupon he cut his throat in the prison.\n\n\u2003Ju Shou but yesterday was killed,\n\n\u2003Tian Feng ends his life his fate fulfilled;\n\n\u2003The Yellow River's main beams break one by one,\n\n\u2003Mourn ye that Yuan House! Its day is done.\n\n\u2003Thus died Tian Feng, pitied of all who heard of his fate.\n\nWhen Yuan Shao came home in Jizhou, he was with troubled mind and distorted thoughts. He could not attend to the business of government and became so ill that his second wife, who came of the Liu family and had replaced the first wife after her death, besought him to make his last dispositions.\n\nNow three sons had been born to Yuan Shao: Yuan Tan the eldest, who was the Commander of Qingzhou; Yuan Xi, who ruled over Youzhou; and Yuan Shang, borne to him by Lady Liu. This youngest son was very handsome and noble looking, and his father's favorite. So he was kept at home.\n\nAfter the defeat at Guandu, the lad's mother was constantly urging that her son should be named as successor, and Yuan Shao called together four of his counselors to consider this matter. These four happened to be divided in their sympathies: Shen Pei and Peng Ji being in favor of the youngest son, and Xin Ping and Guo Tu supporters of the eldest.\n\nWhen they met to consult, Yuan Shao said, \"As there is nought but war and trouble outside our borders, it is necessary that tranquillity within be early provided for, and I wish to appoint my successor. My eldest son is hard and cruel, my second is mild and unfit. The third has the outward form of a hero, appreciates the wise, and is courteous to his subordinates. I wish him to succeed, but I wish that you tell me your opinions.\"\n\nGuo Tu said, \"Yuan Tan is your first born, and he is in a position of authority beyond your control. If you pass over the eldest in favor of the youngest, you sow the seeds of turbulence. The prestige of the army has been somewhat lowered and enemies are on our border. Should you add to our weakness by making strife between father and son, elder and younger brothers? Rather consider how the enemy may be repulsed and turn to the question of the heirship later.\"\n\nThen the natural hesitation of Yuan Shao asserted itself, and he could not make up his mind. Soon came news that his sons Yuan Tan was coming from Qingzhou with sixty thousand troops, Yuan Xi coming from Youzhou with fifty thousand troops, and his nephew Gao Gan coming from Bingzhou with fifty thousand troops to help him, and he turned his attention to preparations for fighting Cao Cao.\n\nWhen Cao Cao drew up his victorious army on the banks of Yellow River, the aged natives brought an offering of food and sauce to bid him welcome. Their venerable and hoary appearances led Cao Cao to treat them with the highest respect.\n\nHe invited them to be seated and said to them, \"Venerable Sirs, what may be your age?\"\n\n\"We are nearly a hundred,\" replied the old villagers.\n\n\"I should be very sorry if my army had disturbed your village,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nOne of them said, \"In the days of the Emperor Huan a yellow star was seen over by way of the ancient states of Chu and Song in the southwest. Yin Kui of Liaodong, who was learned in astrology, happened to be passing the night here, and he told us that the star foretold the arrival in these parts, fifty years hence, of a true and honest man here in the Yellow River. Lo! That is exactly fifty years ago. Now Yuan Shao is very hard on the people and they hate him. You, Sir, having raised this army in the cause of humanity and righteousness, out of pity for the people and to punish crimes, and having destroyed the hordes of Yuan Shao at Guandu, just fulfill the prophecy of Yin Kui. The millions of the land may look now for tranquillity.\"\n\n\"How dare I presume that I am he?\" said Cao Cao with a smile.\n\nWine was served and refreshments brought in, and the old gentlemen were sent away with presents of silk stuffs. And an order was issued to the army that if anyone killed so much as a fowl or a dog belonging to the villagers, he should be punished as for murder. And the soldiers obeyed with fear and trembling while Cao Cao rejoiced in his heart.\n\nIt was told Cao Cao that the total army from the four regions under the Yuan family amounted to two hundred thirty thousand soldiers and they were camped at Cangting. Cao Cao then advanced nearer to them and made a strong camp.\n\nNext day the two armies were arrayed over against each other. On one side Cao Cao rode to the front surrounded by his commanders, and on the other appeared Yuan Shao supported by his three sons, his nephew, and his leaders.\n\nCao Cao spoke first, \"Yuan Shao, your schemes are poor, your strength is exhausted, why still refuse to think of surrender? Are you waiting till the sword shall be upon your neck? Then it will be too late.\"\n\nYuan Shao turned to those about him, saying, \"Who dares go out?\"\n\nHis son Yuan Shang was anxious to exhibit his prowess in the presence of his father, so he flourished his pair of swords and rode forth.\n\nCao Cao pointed him out to his officers and asked, \"Anyone knows him?\"\n\n\"He is the youngest son of Yuan Shao,\" was the reply.\n\nBefore they had finished speaking, from their own side rode out Shi Huan, armed with a spear. The two champions fought a little while and suddenly Yuan Shang whipped up his horse, made a feint and fled. His opponent followed. Yuan Shang took his bow, fitted an arrow, turned in his saddle, and shot at Shi Huan, wounding him in the left eye. Shi Huan fell from the saddle and died on the spot.\n\nYuan Shao seeing his son thus get the better of his opponent, gave the signal for attack, and the whole army thundered forward. The onslaught was heavy, but presently the gongs on both sides sounded the retire and the battle ceased.\n\nWhen he had returned to camp, Cao Cao took counsel to find a plan to overcome Yuan Shao. Then Cheng Yu proposed the plan of the \"Ten Ambushes\" and persuaded Cao Cao to retire upon the river, placing troops in ambush as he went. Thus would Yuan Shao be inveigled into pursuit as far as the river, when Cao Cao's army would be forced to make a desperate stand or be driven into the water.\n\nCao Cao accepted this suggestion and told off ten companies of five thousand soldiers each to lie in ten ambush on two sides of the road of retreat. The arrangement of the ambushes were thus: On the left, first company under Xiahou Dun; second company, Zhang Liao; third company, Li Dian; fourth company, Yue Jing; fifth company, Xiahou Yuan; on the right, first company was under Cao Hong; second company, Zhang He; third company, Xu Huang; fourth company, Yu Jin; fifth company, Gao Lan. Xu Chu commanded the advanced front.\n\nNext day the ten companies started first and placed themselves right and left as ordered. In the night Cao Cao ordered the advanced front to feign an attack on the camp, which roused all the enemy in all their camps. This done, Xu Chu retreated and Yuan Shao's army came in pursuit. The roar of battle went on without cessation, and at dawn Cao Cao's army rested on the river and could retreat no farther.\n\nThen Cao Cao shouted, \"There is no road in front, so all must fight or die.\"\n\nThe retreating army turned about and advanced vigorously. Xu Chu simply flew to the front, smote and killed ten generals and threw Yuan Shao's army into confusion. They tried to turn and march back, but Cao Cao was close behind. Then the drums of the enemy were heard, and right and left there appeared two ambush companies of Gao Lan and Xiahou Yuan. Yuan Shao collected about him his three sons and his nephew, and they were enabled to cut an alley out and flee. Three miles further on they fell into another ambush of Yue Jing and Yu Jin, and here many troops of Yuan Shao were lost so that their corpses lay over the countryside and the blood filled the water courses. Another three miles and they met the third pair of Li Dian and Xu Huang barring their road.\n\nHere they lost heart and bolted for an old camp of their own that was near, and bade their men prepare a meal. But just as the food was ready to eat, down came Zhang Liao and Zhang He and burst into the camp.\n\nYuan Shao mounted and fled as far as Cangting, when he was tired and his steed spent. But there was no rest, for Cao Cao came in close pursuit. It seemed now a race for life. But presently Yuan Shao found his onward course again blocked by Xiahou Dun and Cao Hong, and he groaned aloud.\n\n\"If we do not make most desperate efforts, we are all captives!\" said he.\n\nAnd they plunged forward. His second son Yuan Xi and his nephew Gao Gan were wounded by arrows, and most of his soldiers were dead or had disappeared. He gathered his sons into his arms and wept bitterly. Then he fell into a swoon. He was picked up, but his mouth was full of blood which ran forth in a bright scarlet stream.\n\nHe sighed, saying, \"Many battles have I fought, and little did I think to be driven to this. Heaven is afflicting me. You had better return each to his own territory and swear to fight this Cao Cao to the end.\"\n\nThen Yuan Shao bade Xin Ping and Guo Tu as quickly as possible follow Yuan Tan to Qingzhou and prepare to give battle to Cao Cao lest he should invade. Yuan Xi was told to go to Youzhou and Gao Gan to Bingzhou.\n\nSo each started to prepare armies and horses for repulsing Cao Cao. Yuan Shao with his youngest son Yuan Shang and the remnant of his officers went away to Jizhou, and military operations were suspended for a time.\n\nMeanwhile Cao Cao was distributing rewards to his army for the late victory, and his spies were scouting all about Jizhou. He soon learned that Yuan Shao was ill, and that the youngest son Yuan Shang and Shen Pei were in command of the city, while his brothers and cousin had returned each to his own. Cao Cao's advisers were in favor of a speedy attack.\n\nBut he objected, saying, \"Jizhou is large and well supplied. Shen Pei is an able strategist. And it behooves me to be careful. I would rather wait till the autumn when the crops have been gathered in so that the people will not suffer.\"\n\nWhile the attack was being talked over there came letters from Xun Yu:\n\n\"Liu Bei was strengthening himself at Runan with the force of Liu Pi and Gong Du and, when he heard that you was attacking Jizhou, he said he would take the opportunity to march on the capital. Wherefore you, Sir, should hasten homeward to defend Xuchang.\"\n\nThis news disconcerted Cao Cao. He left Cao Hong in command on the river bank, with orders to maintain the appearance of strength there, while he led the main part of his army to meet the threatened attack from Runan.\n\nMeanwhile Liu Bei, his brothers, and the leaders, having gone forth with the intention of attacking the capital, had reached a point near the Rang Mountains when Cao Cao came upon them. So Liu Bei camped by the hills and divided his army into three, sending Guan Yu and Zhang Fei with ten thousand troops each to entrench themselves southeast and southwest respectively of the main body, which he and Zhao Zilong commanded.\n\nWhen Cao Cao came near, Liu Bei beat his drums and went out to where Cao Cao had already arrayed his army.\n\nCao Cao called Liu Bei to a parley, and when the latter appeared under his great standard, Cao Cao pointed his whip at him and railed, saying, \"I treated you as a guest of the highest consideration. Why then do you turn your back on righteousness and forget kindness?\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"Under the name of Prime Minister you are really a rebel. I am a direct descendant of the family, and I have a secret decree from the Throne to take such offenders as you.\"\n\nAs he said these words, he produced and recited the decree which is known as the \"Girdle Mandate.\"\n\nCao Cao grew very angry and ordered Xu Chu to go out to battle. As Liu Bei's champion, out rode Zhao Zilong with spear ready to thrust. The two warriors exchanged thirty bouts without advantage to either. Then there arose an earth-rending shout and up came the two brothers, Guan Yu from the southeast and Zhang Fei from the southwest. The three armies then began a great attack, which proved too much for Cao Cao's troops, fatigued by a long march, and they were worsted and fled. Liu Bei having scored this victory returned to camp.\n\nNext day he sent out Zhao Zilong again to challenge the enemy, but it was not accepted and Cao Cao's army remained ten days without movement. Then Zhang Fei offered a challenge which also was not accepted. And Liu Bei began to feel anxious.\n\nThen unexpectedly came news that the enemy had stopped a train of supplies brought by Gong Du, and at once Zhang Fei went to the rescue. Worse still was the news that followed, that an army led by Xiahou Dun had got in behind to attack Runan.\n\nQuite dismayed, Liu Bei said, \"If this be true, I have enemies in front and rear and have no place to go.\"\n\nHe then sent Guan Yu to try to recover the city and thus both his brothers were absent from his side. One day later a horseman rode up to say that Runan had fallen, its defender Liu Pi had fled, and Guan Yu was surrounded. To make the matters worse, the news came that Zhang Fei, who had gone to rescue Gong Du, was in like case.\n\nLiu Bei tried to withdraw his troops, fearing all the time an attack from Cao Cao. Suddenly the sentinels came in, saying: \"Xu Chu is at the camp gate offering a challenge.\"\n\nLiu Bei did not allow his army to go out. They waited till dawn, and then Liu Bei bade the soldiers get a good meal and be ready to start. When ready the foot went out first, the horsemen next, leaving a few troops in the camp to beat the watches and maintain an appearance of occupation.\n\nAfter traveling some miles, they passed some mounds. Suddenly torches blazed out, and on the summit stood one who shouted, \"Do not let Liu Bei run away! I, the Prime Minister, am here awaiting you!\"\n\nLiu Bei dashed along the first clear road he saw.\n\nZhao Zilong said, \"Fear not, my lord, only follow me!\"\n\nAnd setting his spear, Zhao Zilong galloped in front opening an alley as he went. Liu Bei gripped his double swords and followed close. As they were winning through, Xu Chu came in pursuit and engaged Zhao Zilong, and two other companies led by Yu Jin and Li Dian bore down as well. Seeing the situation so desperate, Liu Bei plunged into the wilds and fled. Gradually the sounds of battle became fainter and died away while he went deeper and deeper into the hills, a single horseman fleeing for his life. He kept on his way till daybreak, when a company suddenly appeared beside the road. Liu Bei saw these men with terror at first, but was presently relieved to find they were led by the friendly Liu Pi. They were a company of his defeated army escorting the family of their chief. With them also were Sun Qian, Jian Yong, and Mi Fang.\n\nThey told him, \"The attack on Runan was too strong to be resisted, and so we were compelled to abandon the defense, and the enemy followed, and only Guan Yu's timely arrival saved us from destruction.\"\n\n\"I do not know where my brother is,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"All will come right if you will push on,\" said Liu Pi.\n\nThey pushed on. Before they had gone far, the beating of drums was heard and suddenly appeared Zhang He with a thousand soldiers.\n\nZhang He cried, \"Liu Bei, quickly dismount and surrender!\"\n\nLiu Bei was about to retire when he saw a red flag waving from a rampart on the hills and down came rushing another body of troops under Gao Lan.\n\nThus checked in front and his retreat cut off, Liu Bei looked up to Heaven and cried, \"O Heaven, why am I brought to this state of misery? Nothing is left me now but death!\"\n\nAnd he drew his sword to slay himself.\n\nBut Liu Pi stayed his hand, saying, \"Let me try to fight a way out and save you. Death is nothing to me!\"\n\nAs he spoke Gao Lan's force was on the point of engaging his. The two leaders met and in the third bout Liu Pi was cut down. Liu Bei at once rushed up to fight, but just then there was sudden confusion in the rear ranks of the opponents, and a warrior dashed up and thrust at Gao Lan with his spear. Gao Lan fell from his steed. The newcomer was Zhao Zilong.\n\nHis arrival was most opportune. He urged forward his steed thrusting right and left, and the enemy's ranks broke and scattered. Then the first force under Zhang He came into the fight, and the leader and Zhao Zilong fought thirty or more bouts. However, this proved enough, for Zhang He turned his horse away recognizing that he was worsted. Zhao Zilong vigorously attacked, but was forced into a narrow space in the hills where he was hemmed in. While seeking for some outlet, they saw Guan Yu, Guan Ping, and Zhou Cang, with three hundred men, coming along. Soon Zhang He was driven off, and then Liu Bei's troops came out of the narrow defile and occupied a strong position among the hills where they made a camp.\n\nLiu Bei sent Guan Yu for news of the missing brother. Zhang Fei had been attacked by Xiahou Yuan who had killed Gong Du, but Zhang Fei had vigorously resisted, beaten him off, and followed him up. Then Yue Jing had come along and surrounded Zhang Fei.\n\nIn this pass he was found by Guan Yu, who had heard of his plight from some of his scattered soldiers met on the way. Now they drove off the enemy. The two brothers returned. Soon they heard of the approach of a large body of Cao Cao's army. Liu Bei then bade Sun Qian guard his family and sent him on ahead, while he and the others kept off the enemy, sometimes giving battle and anon marching. Seeing that Liu Bei had retired too far, Cao Cao let him go and left the pursuit.\n\nWhen Liu Bei collected his army, he found they numbered only a thousand, and this halting and broken force marched as fast as possible to the west. Coming to a river they asked the natives its name and were told it was the Han River, and near it Liu Bei made a temporary camp. When the local people found out who was in the camp, they presented meat and wine.\n\nA feast was given upon a sandy bank of the Han River.\n\nAfter they had drunk awhile, Liu Bei addressed his faithful followers, saying, \"All you, Fair Sirs, have talents fitting you to be advisers to a monarch, but your destiny has led you to follow poor me. My fate is distressful and full of misery. Today I have not a spot to call my own, and I am indeed leading you astray. Therefore I say you should abandon me and go to some illustrious lord where you may be able to become famous.\"\n\nAt these words they all covered their faces and wept.\n\nGuan Yu said, \"Brother, you are wrong to speak thus. When the great Founder of Han contended with Xiang Yu, he was defeated many times, but he won at the Nine-Mile Mountains and that achievement was the foundation of a dynasty that endured for four centuries. Victory and defeat are but ordinary events in a soldier's career, and why should you give up?\"\n\n\"Success and failure both have their seasons,\" said Sun Qian, \"and we are not to grieve. Jingzhou, which your illustrious relative, Liu Biao, commands, is a rich and prosperous country. Liu Biao is of your house, why not go to him?\"\n\n\"Only that I fear he may not receive me,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Then let me go and prepare the way. I will make Liu Biao come out to his borders to welcome you.\"\n\nSo with his lord's approval, Sun Qian set off immediately and hastened to Jingzhou. When the ceremonies of greeting were over, Liu Biao asked the reason of the visit.\n\nSaid Sun Qian, \"The princely Liu Bei is one of the heroes of the day, although just at the moment he may lack soldiers and leaders. His mind is set upon restoring the dynasty to its pristine glory, and at Runan the two commanders, Liu Pi and Gong Du, though bound to him by no ties, were content to die for the sake of his ideals. You, Illustrious Sir, like Liu Bei, are a scion of the imperial stock. Now the Princely One has recently suffered defeat and thinks of seeking a home in the east with Sun Quan. I have ventured to dissuade him, saying that he should not turn from a relative and go to a mere acquaintance; telling him that you, Sir, are well known as courteous to the wise and condescending to scholars, so that they flock to you as the waters flow to the east sea, and that certainly you would show kindness to one of the same ancestry. Wherefore he has sent me to explain matters and request your commands.\"\n\n\"He is my brother,\" said Liu Biao, \"and I have long desired to see him, but no opportunity has occurred. I should be very happy if he would come.\"\n\nCai Mao, who was sitting by, here broke in, \"No, no! Liu Bei first followed Lu Bu, then he served Cao Cao, and next he joined himself to Yuan Shao. And he stayed with none of these, so that you can see what manner of man he is. If he comes here, Cao Cao will assuredly come against us and fight. Better cut off this messenger's head and send it as an offering to Cao Cao, who would reward you well for the service.\"\n\nSun Qian sat unmoved while this harangue was pronounced, saying at the end, \"I am not afraid of death. Liu Bei, the Princely One, is true and loyal to the state and so out of sympathy with Lu Bu, or Cao Cao, or Yuan Shao. It is true he followed these three, but there was no help for it. Now he knows your chief is a member of the family, so that both are of the same ancestry, and that is why he has come far to join him. How can you slander a good man like that?\"\n\nLiu Biao bade Cai Mao be silent and said, \"I have decided, and you need say no more.\"\n\nWhereat Cai Mao sulkily left the audience chamber.\n\nThen Sun Qian was told to return with the news that Liu Bei would be welcome, and Imperial Protector Liu Biao went ten miles beyond the city to meet his guest.\n\nWhen Liu Bei arrived, he behaved to his host with the utmost politeness and was warmly welcomed in return. Then Liu Bei introduced his two sworn brothers and friends and they entered Jingzhou City where Liu Bei finally was lodged in the Imperial Protector's own residence.\n\nAs soon as Cao Cao knew whither his enemy had gone, he wished to attack Liu Biao, but Cheng Yu advised against any attempt so long as Yuan Shao, the dangerous enemy, was left with power to inflict damage.\n\nHe said, \"My lord should return to the capital to refresh the soldiers so that they may be ready for a north and south campaign in the mild spring weather.\"\n\nCao Cao accepted his advice and set out for the capital. In the first month of the eighth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 203), Cao Cao once again began to think of war, and sent to garrison Runan as a precaution against Liu Biao. Then, after arranging for the safety of the capital, he marched a large army to Guandu, the camp of the year before, and aimed at Jizhou.\n\nAs to Yuan Shao, who had been suffering from blood-spitting but was now in better health, he began to think of measures against Xuchang, but Shen Pei dissuaded him, saying, \"You are not yet recovered from the fatigues of last year. It would be better to make your position impregnable and set to improving the army.\"\n\nWhen the news of Cao Cao's approach arrived, Yuan Shao said, \"If we allow the foe to get close to the city before we march to the river, we shall have missed our opportunity. I must go out to repel this army.\"\n\nHere his son Yuan Shang interposed, \"Father, you are not sufficiently recovered for a campaign and should not go so far. Let me lead the army against this enemy.\"\n\nYuan Shao consented, and he sent to Qingzhou and Youzhou and Bingzhou to call upon his other two sons and his nephew to attack Cao Cao at the same time as his own army.\n\n\u2003Against Runan they beat the drum,\n\n\u2003And from Jizhou the armies come." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Jizhou Taken: Yuan Shang Strives; River Zhang Cut: Xun You Schemes.\n\nYuan Shang was puffed up with pride after his victory over Shi Huan and, without deigning to wait the arrival of his brothers, he marched out with thirty thousand troops to Liyang to meet the army of Cao Cao. Zhang Liao came out to challenge him, and Yuan Shang, accepting the challenge rode out with spear set. But he only lasted to the third bout when he had to give way. Zhang Liao smote with full force and Yuan Shang, quite broken, fled pell-mell to Jizhou. His defeat was a heavy shock to his father Yuan Shao, who had a severe fit of hemorrhage at the news and swooned.\n\nLady Liu, his wife, got him to bed as quickly as possible, but he did not rally; and she soon saw it was necessary to prepare for the end. So she sent for Shen Pei and Peng Ji that the succession might be settled. They came and stood by the sick man's bed, but by this time he could no longer speak. He only made motions with his hands.\n\nWhen his wife put the formal question, \"Is Yuan Shang to succeed?\"\n\nYuan Shao nodded his head. Shen Pei at the bedside wrote out the dying man's testament. Presently Yuan Shao uttered a loud moan, a fresh fit of bleeding followed, and he passed away.\n\n\u2003Born of a line of nobles famous for generations,\n\n\u2003He himself in his youth was wayward always and headstrong,\n\n\u2003Vainly he called to his side generals skilled and courageous,\n\n\u2003Gathered beneath his banner countless legions of soldiers,\n\n\u2003For he was timid at heart, a lamb dressed as a tiger,\n\n\u2003Merely a cowardly chicken, phoenix-feathered but spurless.\n\n\u2003Pitiful was the fate of his house; for when he departed\n\n\u2003Brother with brother strove and quarrels arose in the household.\n\nShen Pei and some others set about the mourning ceremonies for the dead man. His wife, Lady Liu, put to death five of his favorite concubines, and such was the bitterness of her jealousy that, not content with this, she shaved off the hair and slashed the faces of their poor corpses lest their spirits should meet and rejoin her late husband in the land of shades beneath the Nine Golden Springs. Her son followed up this piece of cruelty by slaying all the relatives of the unhappy concubines lest they should avenge their deaths.\n\nShen Pei and Peng Ji declared Yuan Shang successor with the titles of Regent Marshal and Supreme Imperial Protector of the four regions of Jizhou, Qingzhou, Youzhou, and Bingzhou and sent in a report of the death of the late Imperial Protector.\n\nAt this time Yuan Tan, the eldest son, had already marched out his army to oppose Cao Cao. But hearing of his father's death, he called in Guo Tu and Xin Ping to consult as to his course of action.\n\n\"In your absence, my lord,\" said Guo Tu, \"the two advisers of your younger brother will certainly set him up as lord, wherefore you must act quickly.\"\n\n\"Those two, Shen Pei and Peng Ji, have already laid their plans,\" said Xin Ping. \"If you go, you will meet with some misfortune.\"\n\n\"Then what should I do?\" asked Yuan Tan.\n\nGuo Tu replied, \"Go and camp near the city, and watch what is taking place while I enter and inquire.\"\n\nAccordingly Guo Tu entered the city and sought an interview with the young Imperial Protector.\n\n\"Why did not my brother come?\" asked Yuan Shang after the usual salutes.\n\nGuo Tu said, \"He cannot come as he is in the camp unwell.\"\n\n\"By the command of my late father, I take the lordship. Now I confer upon my brother the rank of General of the Flying Cavalry, and I wish him to go at once to attack Cao Cao, who is pressing on the borders. I will follow as soon as my army is in order.\"\n\n\"There is no one in our camp to give advice,\" said Guo Tu. \"I wish to have the services of Shen Pei and Peng Ji.\"\n\n\"I also need the help of these two,\" said Yuan Shang. \"And as I am always working at schemes, I do not see how I can do without them.\"\n\n\"Then let one of these two go,\" replied Guo Tu.\n\nYuan Shang could do no other than accede to this request, so he bade the two men cast lots who should go. Peng Ji drew the lot and was appointed, receiving a seal of office. Then he accompanied Guo Tu to the camp. But when he arrived and found Yuan Tan in perfect health, he grew suspicious and resigned.\n\nYuan Tan angrily refused to accept his resignation and was disposed to put him to death, but Guo Tu privately dissuaded him, saying, \"Cao Cao is on the borders, and Peng Ji must be kept here to allay your brother's suspicions. After we have beaten Cao Cao, we can at once make an attempt on Jizhou.\"\n\nYuan Tan agreed and forthwith broke up his camp to march against the enemy. He reached Liyang and lost no time in offering battle. He chose for his champion Wang Zhao and, when Wang Zhao rode out, Cao Cao sent Xu Huang to meet him. These two had fought but a few bouts when Wang Zhao was slain. At once Cao Cao's army pressed forward, and Yuan Tan suffered a severe defeat. Yuan Tan drew off his army and retired into Liyang, whence he sent to his brother for reinforcements.\n\nYuan Shang and his adviser Shen Pei discussed the matter and only five thousand troops were sent. Cao Cao hearing of the dispatch of this meager force sent Li Dian and Yue Jing to waylay them, and the half legion was destroyed. When Yuan Tan heard of the inadequate force sent and their destruction, he was very wrath and roundly abused Peng Ji.\n\nPeng Ji replied, \"Let me write to my lord and pray him to come himself.\"\n\nSo Peng Ji wrote and the letter was sent. When it arrived, Yuan Shang again consulted Shen Pei.\n\nThe Counselor said, \"Guo Tu, your elder brother's adviser, is very guileful. Formerly he left without discussion because Cao Cao was on the border. If Cao Cao be defeated, there will certainly be an attempt on you. The better plan is to withhold assistance and use Cao Cao's hand to destroy your rival.\"\n\nYuan Shang took his advice and no help was sent. When the messenger returned to Liyang without success, Yuan Tan was very angry and showed it by putting Peng Ji to death. He also began to talk of surrendering to Cao Cao. Soon spies brought news of this to Yuan Shang, and again Shen Pei was called in.\n\nYuan Shang said, \"If Yuan Tan goes over to Cao Cao, they will both attack Jizhou, and we shall be in great danger.\"\n\nFinally Shen Pei and General Su You were left to take care of the defense of the city, and Yuan Shang marched his army to the rescue of his brother.\n\n\"Who dares lead the van?\" said Yuan Shang.\n\nTwo brothers named Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang volunteered, and thirty thousand troops were given them. They were the first to reach Liyang.\n\nYuan Tan was pleased that Yuan Shang had decided to play a brotherly part and come to his aid, so he at once abandoned all thought of going over to the enemy. He being in the city, Yuan Shang camped outside, making that an ox-horn formation of their strategic position.\n\nBefore long Yuan Xi, the second brother, and their cousin, Gao Gan, arrived with their legions and also camped outside the city.\n\nEngagements took place daily, and Yuan Shang suffered many defeats. On the other hand Cao Cao was victorious and elated. In the second month of the eighth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 203), Cao Cao made separate attacks on all four armies and won the day against each. Then the Yuans abandoned Liyang, and Cao Cao pursued them to Jizhou, where Yuan Tan and Yuan Shang went into the city to defend it, while their brother and cousin camped about ten miles away making a show of great force.\n\nWhen Cao Cao had made many attacks without success, Guo Jia proffered the following plan.\n\nHe said, \"There is dissension among the Yuans because the elder has been superseded in the succession. The brothers are about equally strong and each has his party. If we oppose them, they unite to assist each other; but if we have patience, they will be weakened by family strife. Wherefore send first a force to reduce Liu Biao in Jingzhou, and let the fraternal quarrels develop. When they have fully developed, we can smite them and settle the matter.\"\n\nCao Cao approved of the plan. So leaving Jia Xu as Governor of Liyang and Cao Hong as guard at Guandu, the army went away toward Jingzhou.\n\nThe two brothers Yuan Tan and Yuan Shang congratulated each other on the withdrawal of their enemy, and their brother Yuan Xi and their cousin Gao Gan marched their armies back to their own districts.\n\nThen the quarrels began. Yuan Tan said to his confidants Guo Tu and Xin Ping, \"I, the eldest, have been prevented from succeeding my father, while the youngest son, born of a second wife, received the main heritage. My heart is bitter.\"\n\nSaid Guo Tu, \"Camp your army outside, invite your brother and Shen Pei to a banquet, and assassinate them. The whole matter is easily settled.\"\n\nAnd Yuan Tan agreed. It happened that Adviser Wang Xiu came just then from Qingzhou whom Yuan Tan took into his confidence.\n\nWang Xiu opposed the murder plan, saying, \"Brothers are as one's limbs. How can you possibly succeed if at a moment of conflict with an enemy you cut off one of your hands? If you abandon your brother and sever relationship, whom will you take in all the world as a relation? That fellow Guo Tu is a dangerous mischief-maker, who would sow dissension between brothers for a momentary advantage, and I beg you to shut your ears and not listen to his persuasions.\"\n\nThis was displeasing to Yuan Tan, and he angrily dismissed Wang Xiu, while he sent the treacherous invitation to his brother.\n\nYuan Shang and Shen Pei talked over the matter.\n\nShen Pei said, \"I recognize one of Guo Tu's stratagems and if you go, my lord, you will be the victim of their plot. Rather strike at them at once.\"\n\nWhereupon Yuan Shang rode out to battle. His brother Yuan Tan, seeing him come with fifty thousand troops, knew that his treachery had been discovered, so he also took the field. When the forces were near enough, Yuan Tan opened on Yuan Shang with a volley of abuse.\n\n\"You poisoned my father and usurped the succession. Now you come out to slay your elder brother?\"\n\nThe battle went against Yuan Tan. Yuan Shang himself took part in the fight, risking the arrows and the stones. He urged on his troops and drove his brother off the field. Yuan Tan took refuge in Pingyuan. Yuan Shang drew off his army to his own city.\n\nYuan Tan and Guo Tu decided upon a new attack, and this time they chose General Cen Bi as Leader of the Van. Yuan Shang went to meet him. When both sides had been arrayed and the banners were flying and the drums beating, Cen Bi rode out to challenge and railed at his opponent. At first Yuan Shang was going to answer the challenge himself, but Lu Kuang had advanced. Lu Kuang and Cen Bi met but had fought only a few bouts when Cen Bi fell. Yuan Tan's soldiers were once more defeated and ran away to Pingyuan. Shen Pei urged his master to press for the advantage, and Yuan Tan was driven into the city, where he fortified himself and would not go out. So the city was besieged on three sides.\n\nYuan Tan asked his strategist what should be done next, and Guo Tu said, \"The city is short of food, the enemy is flushed with victory, and we cannot stand against them. My idea is to send someone to offer surrender to Cao Cao and thus get him to attack Jizhou. Your brother will be forced to return thither, which will leave you free to join in the attack. We may capture Yuan Shang. Should Cao Cao begin to get the better of your brother's army, we will lend our force to help Yuan Shang against Cao Cao; and as Cao Cao's base of supply is distant, we shall drive him off. And we can seize on Jizhou and begin our great design.\"\n\n\"Supposing this scheme be attempted, who is the man for a messenger?\"\n\n\"I have one Xin Pi, Xin Ping's younger brother. Xin Pi is the magistrate here in this very place. He is a fluent speaker and good scholar and suited to your purpose.\"\n\nSo Xin Pi was summoned and came readily enough. Letters were given him and an escort of three thousand soldiers took him beyond the border. He traveled as quickly as possible.\n\nAt that time Cao Cao's camp was at the Xiping Pass and he was attacking Liu Biao, who had sent Liu Bei out to offer the first resistance. No battle had yet taken place.\n\nSoon after his arrival, Xin Pi was admitted to the Prime Minister's presence. After the ceremonies of greeting, Cao Cao asked the object of the visit. Xin Pi explained that Yuan Tan wanted assistance and presented his dispatches. Cao Cao read them and told the messenger to wait in his camp while he called his officers to a council.\n\nThe council met. Cheng Yu said, \"Yuan Tan has been forced into making this offer because of the pressure of his brother's attack. Put no trust in him.\"\n\nLu Qian and Man Chong said, \"You have led your armies here for a special purpose. How can you abandon that and go to assist Yuan Tan?\"\n\n\"Gentlemen, not one of you is giving good advice,\" interposed Xun You. \"This is how I regard it. Since there is universal trouble, in the midst of which Liu Biao remains quietly content with his position between the River Zhang and the River Han, it is evident that he has no ambition to enlarge his borders. The Yuans hold four regions and have many legions of soldiers. Harmony between the two brothers means success for the family, and none can foresee what will happen in the empire. Now take advantage of this fraternal conflict and let them fight till they are weakened and have to yield to our Prime Minister. Then Yuan Shang can be removed, and when the times are suitable, Yuan Tan can be destroyed in his turn. Thus peace will ensue. This present combination of circumstances is to be taken advantage of to full measure.\"\n\nCao Cao realized the truth of this and treated Xin Pi well.\n\nAt a banquet Cao Cao said, \"But is this surrender of Yuan Tan real or false? Do you really think that Yuan Shang's army is sure to overcome him?\"\n\nXin Pi replied, \"Illustrious Sir, do not inquire into the degree of sincerity; rather regard the situation. The Yuans have been suffering military losses for years and are powerless without, while their strategists are put to death within. The brothers seize every chance to speak evil of each other, and their country is divided. Add to this famine, supplemented by calamities and general exhaustion, and everybody, wise as well as simple, can see that the catastrophe is near and the time ordained of Heaven for the destruction of the Yuans is at hand. Now you have a force attacking the capital of Jizhou \u2014 Yejun \u2014 and if Yuan Shang will not return to give aid, the place of refuge is lost. If he helps, then Yuan Tan will follow up and smite him, making use of your power to destroy the remnant of his brother's army, just as the autumn gale sweeps away the fallen leaves. Now Liu Biao's Jingzhou is rich, the government peaceful, the people submissive, and it cannot be shaken. Moreover, there is no greater threat to it than the North of Yellow River. If that be reduced, then the task is complete. I pray you, Sir, think of it.\"\n\n\"I am sorry that I did not meet you earlier,\" said Cao Cao, much gratified with this speech.\n\nForthwith orders were given to return and attack Jizhou. Liu Bei, fearing this retirement was only a ruse, allowed it to proceed without interference and himself returned to Jingzhou.\n\nWhen Yuan Shang heard that Cao Cao had crossed the Yellow River, he hastily led his army back to Yejun, ordering Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang to guard the rear.\n\nYuan Tan started from Pingyuan with a force in pursuit. He had proceeded only a dozen miles when he heard a bomb and two bodies of troops came out in front of him and checked his progress. Their leaders were Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang.\n\nYuan Tan reined in and addressed them, saying, \"While my father lived, I never treated you badly. Why do you support my brother and try to injure me?\"\n\nThe two generals had no reply to make, but they dismounted and bowed before him yielding submission.\n\nYuan Tan said, \"Do not surrender to me but to the Prime Minister.\"\n\nAnd he led them back to camp, where he waited the arrival of Cao Cao and then presented the pair. Cao Cao received them well. He promised his daughter to Yuan Tan to wife, and he appointed the two brothers as advisers.\n\nWhen Yuan Tan asked Cao Cao to attack Jizhou, the reply was: \"Supplies are short and difficult to transport. I must turn the waters of River Ji into the White River whereby to convey my grain and afterwards I can advance.\"\n\nOrdering Yuan Tan to remain in Pingyuan, Cao Cao retired into camp at Liyang. The two brothers Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang, who were renegades from Yuan Shang, were now raised to noble rank and followed the army as supernumeraries.\n\nGuo Tu noted this advancement and said to Yuan Tan, \"He has promised you a daughter to wife. I fear that bodes no good. Now he has given titles of nobility to the two Lus and taken them with him. This is a bait for the northern people, and at the same time he intends evil toward us. You, my lord, should have two generals' seals engraved and send them secretly to the brothers so that you may have friends at court ready for the day when Cao Cao shall have broken your brother's power, and we can begin to work against him.\"\n\nThe seals were engraved and sent.\n\nAs soon as the Lu brothers received them, they informed Cao Cao, who smiled, saying, \"He wants your support so he sends you seals as officers. I will consider it as soon as Yuan Shang has been dealt with. In the meantime you may accept the seals till I shall decide what to do.\"\n\nThenceforward Cao Cao planned Yuan Tan's doom.\n\nShen Pei and his master also discussed the current situation. Yuan Shang said, \"Cao Cao is getting grain into the White River, which means an attack on Jizhou. What is to be done?\"\n\nShen Pei replied, \"Send letters to Yin Kai, Commander of Wuan, bidding him camp at Maocheng to secure the road to Shangdang, and direct Ju Gu, son of Ju Shou, to maintain Handan as a distant auxiliary. Then you may advance on Pingyuan and attack Yuan Tan. After he is destroyed, Cao Cao is next.\"\n\nThe plan seemed good. Yuan Shang left Shen Pei and Chen Lin in charge of Yejun, appointed two Commanders Ma Yan and Zhang Zi as Van Leaders, and set out hastily for Pingyuan.\n\nWhen Yuan Tan heard of the approach of his brother's army, he sent urgent messages to Cao Cao, who said to himself, \"I am going to get Jizhou this time.\"\n\nJust at this time it happened that Xun You came down from the capital. When he heard that Yuan Shang was attacking his brother Yuan Tan, he sought Cao Cao and said, \"You, Sir, sit here on guard. Are you waiting till Heaven's thunder shall strike the two Yuans?\"\n\n\"I have thought it all out,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he ordered Cao Hong to go and fight against Yejun, while he led another army against Yin Kai in Maocheng. Yin Kai could make no adequate defense and was killed by Xu Chu. His soldiers ran away and presently joined Cao Cao's army. Next Cao Cao led the army to Handan, and Ju Gu came out to fight him. Zhang Liao advanced to fight with Ju Gu, and after the third encounter Ju Gu was defeated and fled. Zhang Liao went after him, and when their two horses were not far apart, Zhang Liao took his bow and shot. The fleeing warrior fell as the bowstring twanged. Cao Cao completed the rout, and Ju Gu's force was broken up.\n\nNow Cao Cao led his armies to an attack on Yejun. Cao Hong had arrived before, and a regular siege began. The army encompassed the city and began by throwing up great mounds. They also tunneled subterranean ways.\n\nWithin the city Shen Pei turned his whole care to the defense and issued the severest commands. The Commander of the East Gate, Feng Li, got intoxicated and failed to keep his watch for which he was severely punished. Feng Li resented this, sneaked out of the city, went over to the besiegers, and told them how the place could be attacked.\n\n\"The earth within the Pearly Gate is solid enough to be tunneled, and entrance can be effected there,\" said the traitor.\n\nSo Feng Li was sent with three hundred men to carry out his plan under cover of darkness.\n\nAfter Feng Li had deserted to the enemy, Shen Pei went every night to the wall to inspect the soldiers on duty. The night of the sapping he went there as usual and saw that there were no lights outside the city and all was perfectly quiet.\n\nSo he said to himself, \"Feng Li is certain to try to come into the city by an underground road.\"\n\nWhereupon he ordered his troops to bring up stones and pile them on the cover of the tunnel opening. The opening was stopped up and the attacking party perished in the tunnel they had excavated.\n\nCao Cao having failed in this attempt abandoned the scheme of underground attack. He drew off the army to a place above the River Huan to await till Yuan Shang should return to relieve the city.\n\nYuan Shang heard of the defeat of Yin Kai and Ju Gu, and the siege of his own city, and bethought himself of relieving it.\n\nOne of his commanders, Ma Yan, said, \"The high road will surely be ambushed. We must find some other way. We can take a by-road from the West Hills and get through by River Fu, whence we can fall upon Cao Cao's camp.\"\n\nThe plan was acceptable and Yuan Shang started off with the main body, Ma Yan and Zhang Zi being rear guard.\n\nCao Cao's spies soon found out this move, and when they reported it, he said, \"If Yuan Shang comes by the high road, I shall have to keep out of the way; but if by the West Hills' by-road, I can settle him in one battle. And I think he will show a blaze as a signal to the besieged that they may make a sortie. I shall prepare to attack both.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao made his preparations. Now Yuan Shang went out by River Fu east toward Yangping, and near this he camped. Thence to Yejun was five miles. River Fu ran beside the camp. He ordered his soldiers to collect firewood and grass ready for the blaze he intended to make at night as his signal. He also sent Li Mu, a civil officer, disguised as an officer of Cao Cao's army, to inform Shen Pei of his intentions.\n\nLi Mu reached the city wall safely and called out to the guards to open. Shen Pei recognized his voice and let him in. Thus Shen Pei knew of the arrangements for his relief, and it was agreed that a blaze should be raised within the city so that the sortie could be simultaneous with Yuan Shang's attack. Orders were given to collect inflammables.\n\nThen said Li Mu, \"As your food supply is short, it would be well for the old people, the feeble soldiers and the women to surrender. This will come upon them as a surprise, and we will send the soldiers out behind them.\"\n\nShen Pei promised to do all this, and next day they hoisted on the wall a white flag with the words The populace of Jizhou surrender! on it.\n\n\"Ho ho! This means no food,\" said Cao Cao. \"They are sending away the non-combatants to escape feeding them. And the soldiers will follow behind them.\"\n\nCao Cao bade Zhang Liao and Xu Huang laid an ambush of three thousand troops on both sides while he went near the wall in full state. Presently the gates were opened and out came the people supporting their aged folks and leading their little ones by the hand. Each carried a white flag. As soon as the people had passed the gate, the soldiers followed with a rush.\n\nThen Cao Cao showed a red flag, and the ambushing soldiers led by Zhang Liao and Xu Huang fell upon the sortie. The troops tried to return and Cao Cao's force made a direct attack. The chase continued to the drawbridge, but there Cao Cao's force met with a tremendous shower of arrows and crossbow bolts which checked the advance. Cao Cao's helmet was struck and the crest carried away. His leaders came to pull him back, and the army retired.\n\nAs soon as Cao Cao had changed his dress and mounted a fresh horse, he set out at the head of the army to attack Yuan Shang's camp.\n\nYuan Shang led the defense. The attack came simultaneously from many directions. The defenders were quite disorganized and presently defeated. Yuan Shang led his troops back by the West Hills and made a camp under their shelter. Thence he sent messengers to urge Ma Yan and Zhang Zi to bring up the supports. He did not know that Cao Cao had sent Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang to persuade these two into surrender and that they had already passed under Cao Cao's banner, and he had conferred upon them the title of lordship.\n\nJust before going to attack the West Hills, Cao Cao sent Lu Xiang, Lu Kuang, Ma Yan, and Zhang Zi to seize the source of Yuan Shang's supplies.\n\nYuan Shang had realized he could not hold the hills, so he went by night to Lankou. Before he could get camped, he saw flaring lights springing up all around him and soon an attack began. He was taken aback and had to oppose the enemy with his men half armed, his steeds unsaddled. His army suffered, and he had to retreat another fifteen miles. By that time his force was too enfeebled to show any resistance, and as no other course was possible, he sent the Imperial Protector of Yuzhou, Yin Ku, to Cao Cao's camp and ask that he might surrender.\n\nCao Cao feigned to consent, but that night he sent Zhang Liao and Xu Huang to raid Yuan Shang's camp. Then it became flight, abandoning everything, seals, emblems of office, and even personal clothing. Yuan Shang made for the Zhongshan Mountains.\n\nThen Cao Cao came to attack Jizhou City, and to help out this Xun You suggested drowning the city by turning the course of the River Zhang. Cao Cao adopted the suggestion and at once sent a small number of men to dig a channel to lead the water to the city. All told, it was seventeen miles.\n\nShen Pei saw the diggers from the city wall and noticed that they made only a shallow channel.\n\nHe chuckled, saying to himself, \"What is the use of such a channel to drown out the city from a deep river?\"\n\nSo he made no preparations to keep out the water.\n\nBut as soon as night came on, Cao Cao increased his army of diggers tenfold and by daylight the channel was deepened to twenty spans and the water was flowing in a great stream into the city where it already stood some spans deep. So this misfortune was added to the lack of food.\n\nXin Pi now displayed the captured seal and garments of Yuan Shang hung out on spears, to the great shame of their late owner, and called upon the people of the city to surrender. This angered Shen Pei, who avenged the insult by putting to death on the city wall the whole of the Xin family who were within the city. There were eighty of them, and their severed heads were cast down from the walls. Xin Pi wept exceedingly.\n\nShen Pei's nephew Shen Rong, one of the gate wardens, was a dear friend of Xin Pi, and the murder of Xin Pi's family greatly distressed him. He wrote a secret letter offering to betray the city and tied it to an arrow, which he shot out among the besiegers. The soldiers found it, gave it to Xin Pi who took it to his chief.\n\nCao Cao issued an order:\n\n\"The family of the Yuans should be spared when the city should be taken and that no one who surrendered should be put to death.\"\n\nThe next day the soldiers entered by the west gate, opened for them by Shen Rong. Xin Pi was the first to prance in on horseback and the army followed.\n\nWhen Shen Pei, who was on the southeast of the city, saw the enemy within the gates, he placed himself at the head of some horsemen and dashed toward them. He was met and captured by Xu Huang who bound him and led him outside the city.\n\nOn the road they met Xin Pi, who ground his teeth with rage at the murderer of his relatives and then struck the prisoner over the head with his whip, crying, \"Murder! Blood drinker! You will meet your death!\"\n\nShen Pei retorted, \"Traitor! Seller of the city! I am very sorry I was not to have slain you before.\"\n\nWhen the captive was taken into Cao Cao's presence, Cao Cao said, \"Do you know who opened the gate to let me in?\"\n\n\"No, I know not.\"\n\n\"It was your nephew Shen Rong who gave up the gate,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"He was always unprincipled, and it has come to this!\" said Shen Pei.\n\n\"The other day when I approached the city, why did you shoot so hard at me?\"\n\n\"I am sorry we shot too little.\"\n\n\"As a faithful adherent of the Yuans, you could do no otherwise. Now will you come over to me?\"\n\n\"Never; I will never surrender.\"\n\nXin Pi threw himself on the ground with lamentations, saying, \"Eighty of my people murdered by this ruffian. I pray you slay him, O Prime Minister!\"\n\n\"Alive, I have served the Yuans;\" said Shen Pei, \"dead, I will be their ghost! I am no flattering time-server as you are. Kill me!\"\n\nCao Cao gave the order. They led him away to put him to death.\n\nOn the execution ground he said to the executioners, \"My lord is in the north, I pray you not to make me face the south.\"\n\nSo Shen Pei knelt facing the north and extended his neck for the fatal stroke.\n\n\u2003Who of all the official throng\n\n\u2003In the North was true like Shen Pei?\n\n\u2003Sad his fate! He served a fool,\n\n\u2003But faithful, as the ancient humans.\n\n\u2003Straight and true was every word,\n\n\u2003Never from the road he swerved.\n\n\u2003Faithful unto death, he died\n\n\u2003Gazing toward the lord he'd served.\n\nThus died Shen Pei and from respect for his character Cao Cao ordered that he be buried honorably on the north of the city.\n\nThe Prime Minister then entered the city of Yejun. As he was starting, he saw the executioners hurrying forward a prisoner who proved to be Chen Lin.\n\n\"You wrote that manifesto for Yuan Shao. If you had only directed your diatribe against me, it would not have mattered. But why did you shame my forefathers?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"When the arrow is on the string, it must fly,\" replied Chen Lin.\n\nThose about Cao Cao urged him to put Chen Lin to death, but he was spared on account of his genius and given a civil post.\n\nNow Cao Cao's eldest son was named Cao Pi. At the taking of the cities he was eighteen years of age. When he was born a dark purplish halo hung over the house for a whole day. One who understood the meaning of such manifestations had secretly told Cao Cao that the halo belonged to the imperial class and portended honors which could not be put into words.\n\nAt eight the lad could compose very skillfully, and he was well read in ancient history. Now he was an adept at all military arts and very fond of fencing. He had gone with his father on the expedition to Jizhou. When Yejun had fallen, he led his escort in the direction of the Yuan family dwelling, and when he reached it, he strode in, sword in hand. When some commander would have stayed him, saying that by order of the Prime Minister no one was to enter the house, Cao Pi bade them begone. The guards fell back and he made his way into the private rooms, where he saw two women weeping in each other's arms. He went forward to slay them.\n\n\u2003Four generations of honors, gone like a dream,\n\n\u2003Fate follows on ever surely, though slow she seems." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "A Gallant Warrior, Cao Pi Marries Lady Zhen; An Expiring Star, Guo Jia Settles Liaodong.\n\nAs was said, Cao Pi, having made his way into the Yuans' palace, saw two women there whom he was about to kill. Suddenly a red light shone in his eyes, and he paused.\n\nLowering his sword he said, \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Thy handmaid is the widow of the late Yuan Shao, Lady Liu,\" said the elder of the two, \"and this is the wife of Yuan Xi, his second son. She was of the Zhen family. When Yuan Xi was sent to command in Youzhou, her family objected to her going so far from home and she stayed behind.\"\n\nCao Pi drew Lady Zhen toward him and looked at her closely. Her hair hung disordered, her face was dusty and tear-stained, but when, with the sleeve of his inner garment, he had wiped sway these disfigurements, he saw a woman of exquisite loveliness, with a complexion clear as jade touched with the tender bloom of a flower petal, a woman indeed beautiful enough to ruin a kingdom.\n\n\"I am the son of the Prime Minister,\" said he turning to the elder woman. \"I will guarantee your safety, so you need fear nothing.\"\n\nHe then put by his sword and sat down at the upper end of the room.\n\nAs Cao Cao was entering the gate of the conquered city of Yejun, Xu You rode up very quickly, passed him, and pointed with his whip at the gate, saying, \"Sir Prime Minister, you would not have been here but for my plans!\"\n\nCao Cao laughed, but his generals were very annoyed.\n\nWhen Cao Cao reached the residence, he stopped at the gate and asked, \"Has anyone had gone in?\"\n\nThe guard at the gate said, \"Your son is within.\"\n\nCao Cao called him out and chided him, but the wife of the late Imperial Protector interposed, saying, \"But not for your son we had not been saved. I desire to present to you a lady, of the Zhen family, as a handmaid to your son.\"\n\nCao Cao bade them bring out the girl and she bowed before him. After looking at her intently, he said, \"Just the wife for him!\"\n\nAnd he told Cao Pi to take Lady Zhen to wife.\n\nAfter the conquest of Jizhou had been made quite sure, Cao Cao made a ceremonial visit to the Yuan family cemetery, where he sacrificed at the tomb of his late rival, bowed his head, and lamented bitterly.\n\nTurning to his generals, he said, \"Not long ago when Yuan Shao and I worked together in military matters, he asked me, saying, 'If this disturbance does not cease, what fronts should be held?' And I replied asking him what he thought. He said, 'In the North of Yellow River, to the south I would hold the Yellow River; on the north, guard against Yan and Dai and absorb the hordes from the Gobi Desert. Thence southward I would try for the empire, and do you not think I might succeed?' I replied saying, 'I depend upon the wisdom and force of the world directed by scholars; then every thing would be possible.' These words seem as if spoken only yesterday, and now he is gone. Thinking over it I cannot refrain from tears.\"\n\nHis officers were deeply affected. Cao Cao treated the widow generously, giving her gold and silks and food to her content.\n\nHe also issued a further order that the taxes in the North of Yellow River would be remitted in consideration of the sufferings of the people during the warlike operations. He sent up a memorial to the Throne and formally became Imperial Protector of Jizhou.\n\nOne day Xu Chu, riding in at the east gate, met Xu You, who called out to him, \"Would you fellows be riding through here if it had not been for me?\"\n\nXu Chu replied, \"We fellows, those who survive and those who perished, risked our lives in bloody battle to get this city, so do not brag of your deeds!\"\n\n\"You are a lot of blockheads, not worth talking about,\" said Xu You.\n\nXu Chu in his anger drew his sword and ran Xu You through. Then he took Xu You's head and went to tell Cao Cao the reason.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"He and I were old friends, and we could joke together. Why did you kill him?\"\n\nCao Cao blamed Xu Chu very severely and gave orders that Xu You should be buried honorably.\n\nCao Cao inquired for any wise and reputable people who were known to be living in the region and was told: \"Commander Cui Yan, of Dongwu, who had on many occasions given valuable advice to Yuan Shao. As the advice was not followed, he had pleaded indisposition and remained at home.\"\n\nCao Cao sent for this man, gave him an office and said to him, \"According to the former registers, there are three hundred thousand households in the region so that one may well call it a major region.\"\n\nCui Yan replied, \"The empire is rent, and the country is torn; the Yuan brothers are at war, and the people have been stripped naked. Yet, Sir, you do not hasten to inquire after local conditions and how to rescue the people from misery, but first compute the possibilities of taxation. Can you expect to gain the support of our people by such means?\"\n\nCao Cao accepted the rebuke, changed the policy, thanked him, and treated him all the better for it.\n\nAs soon as Jizhou was settled, Cao Cao sent to find out the movements of Yuan Tan. He heard Yuan Tan was ravaging Ganling, Anping, Bohai, and Hejian. Moreover, the scouts brought the news that Yuan Shang had fled to Zhongshan, and Yuan Tan led an expedition against him, but Yuan Shang would not face a battle. He had gone away to Youzhou to his brother Yuan Xi. Yuan Tan, having gathered Yuan Shang's troops, prepared for another attempt on Jizhou.\n\nWhereupon Cao Cao summoned him. Yuan Tan refused to come, and Cao Cao sent letters breaking off the marriage between Yuan Tan and his daughter. Soon after Cao Cao led an expedition against Yuan Tan and marched to Pingyuan, whereupon Yuan Tan sent to Liu Biao to beg assistance. Liu Biao sent for Liu Bei to consult about this.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Cao Cao is very strong now that he has overcome Jizhou, and the Yuans will be unable to hold out for long. Nothing is to be gained by helping Yuan Tan, and it may give Cao Cao the loophole he is always looking for to attack this place. My advice is to keep the army in condition and devote all our energies to defense.\"\n\n\"Agreed; but what shall we say?\" said Liu Biao.\n\n\"Write to both the brothers as peacemaker in gracious terms.\"\n\nAccordingly Liu Biao wrote thus to Yuan Tan:\n\n\"When the superior person would escape danger, that person does not go to an enemy state. I heard recently that you had crooked the knee to Cao Cao, which was ignoring the enmity between him and your father, rejecting the duties of brotherhood, and leaving behind you the shame of an alliance with the enemy. If your brother, the successor to Jizhou, has acted unfraternally, your duty was to bend your inclination to follow him and wait till the state of affairs had settled. Would it not have been very noble to bring about the redress of wrongs?\"\n\nAnd to Yuan Shang, Liu Biao wrote:\n\n\"Your brother, the ruler of Qingzhou, is of an impulsive temperament and confuses right with wrong. You ought first to have destroyed Cao Cao in order to put an end to the hatred which your father bore him and, when the situation had become settled, to have endeavored to redress the wrongs. Would not that have been well? If you persist in following this mistaken course, remember the hound and the hare, both so wearied that the peasant got them all.\"\n\nFrom this letter Yuan Tan saw that Liu Biao had no intention of helping him, and feeling he alone could not withstand Cao Cao. He abandoned Pingyuan and fled to Nanpi, whither Cao Cao pursued him.\n\nThe weather was very cold and the river was frozen, so that the grain boats could not move. Wherefore Cao Cao ordered the inhabitants to break the ice and tow the boats. When the peasants heard the order they ran away. Cao Cao angrily wished to arrest and behead them. When they heard this, they went to his camp in a body and offered their heads to the sword.\n\n\"If I do not kill you, my order will not be obeyed,\" said Cao Cao. \"Yet supposing I cut off your heads, but I cannot bear to do that severity. Quickly flee to the hills and hide so that my soldiers do not capture you.\"\n\nThe peasants left weeping.\n\nThen Yuan Tan led out his army against Cao Cao. When both sides were arrayed, Cao Cao rode to the front.\n\nPointing with his whip at his opponent, Cao Cao railed at him, saying, \"I treated you well. Why then have you turned against me?\"\n\nYuan Tan replied, \"You have invaded my land, captured my cities, and broken off my marriage. Yet you accuse me of turning against you!\"\n\nCao Cao ordered Xu Huang to go out and give battle. Yuan Tan bade Peng An accept the challenge. After a few bouts Peng An was slain; and Yuan Tan, having lost, fled and went into Nanpi, where he was besieged. Yuan Tan, panic-stricken, sent Xin Ping to see Cao Cao and arrange surrender.\n\n\"He is nothing but a fickle-minded child,\" said Cao Cao. \"He is never of the same mind two days running, and I cannot depend upon what he says. Now your brother Xin Pi is in my employ and has a post of importance, you had better remain here also.\"\n\n\"Sir Prime Minister, you are in error,\" said Xin Ping. \"It is said that the lord's honor is the servant's glory; the lord's sadness is the servant's shame. How can I turn my back on the family I have so long served?\"\n\nCao Cao felt he could not be persuaded and sent him back. Xin Ping returned and told Yuan Tan the surrender could not be arranged.\n\nYuan Tan turned on him angrily, saying, \"Your brother is with Cao Cao, and you want to betray me also!\"\n\nAt this unmerited reproach such a huge wave of anger welled up in Xin Ping's breast that he was overcome and fell in a swoon. They carried him out, but the shock had been too severe, and soon after he died. Yuan Tan regretted his conduct when it was too late.\n\nThen Guo Tu said, \"Tomorrow when we go out to battle, we will drive the people out in front as a screen for the soldiers, and we must fight a winning battle.\"\n\nThat night they assembled all the common people of the place and forced into their hands swords and spears. At daylight they opened the four gates, and a huge party with much shouting came out at each, peasantry carrying arms in front, and soldiers behind them. They pushed on toward Cao Cao's camps, and a melee began lasted till near midday. But this was quite indecisive, although heaps of dead lay everywhere.\n\nSeeing that success was at best only partial, Cao Cao rode out to the hills near and thence had the drums beaten for a new attack under his own eye. His officers and troops, seeing that he could observe them in person, exerted themselves to the utmost, and Yuan Tan's army was severely defeated. Of the peasantry driven into the battlefield, multitudes were slain.\n\nCao Hong, who displayed very great valor, burst into the press of battle and met Yuan Tan face to face. The two slashed and hammered at each other, and Yuan Tan was killed.\n\nGuo Tu saw that his side was wholly disorganized and tried to withdraw into the shelter of Nanpi. Yue Jing saw this and opened a tremendous discharge of arrows so that Guo Tu fell and the moat was soon filled with dead.\n\nThe city of Nanpi fell to Cao Cao. He entered and set about restoring peace and order. Then suddenly appeared a new army under two of Yuan Xi's generals, Jiao Chu and Zhang Neng. Cao Cao led out his troops to meet them, but the two commanders laid down their arms and yielded. They were rewarded with the rank of lordship.\n\nThen Zhang Yan, the leader of the Black Hills Brigands, came with one hundred thousand troops and gave in his submission. He was made General Who Pacifies the North.\n\nBy an order of Cao Cao, the head of Yuan Tan was exposed, and death was threatened to anyone who should lament for him. Nevertheless a man dressed in mourning attire was arrested for weeping below the exposed head at the north gate. Taken into Cao Cao's presence, he said he was Wang Xiu and had been an officer in Qingzhou. He had been expelled because he had remonstrated with Yuan Tan. But when the news of Yuan Tan's death came, he had come to weep for his late master.\n\n\"Did you know of my command?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I knew it.\"\n\n\"Yet you were not afraid?\"\n\n\"When one has received favors from a man in life, it would be wrong not to mourn at his death. How can one stand in the world if one forgets duty through fear? If I could bury his body, I would not mind death.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"And there were many such as this in the north. What a pity that the Yuan family could not make the best of them! But if they had done so, I should never have dared to turn my eyes toward this place.\"\n\nThe intrepid mourner was not put to death. The remains of Yuan Tan were properly interred, and Wang Xiu was well treated and even given an appointment.\n\nIn his new position Wang Xiu was asked for advice about the best way to proceed against Yuan Shang, who had fled to his second brother, but Wang Xiu remained silent, thereby winning from Cao Cao renewed admiration for his constancy.\n\n\"He is indeed loyal!\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he questioned Guo Jia, who advised him, saying, \"Give Yuan Xi's former generals the command and ask them to attack Youzhou.\"\n\nWhereupon Jiao Chu and Zhang Neng were given the command and reinforced by the armies under Lu Xiang, Lu Kuang, Ma Yan, and Zhang Zi to bring about the surrender of Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang. Then six generals, to attack Youzhou along three routes. Other armies led by Li Dian, Yue Jing, and Zhang Yan were sent against Gao Gan at Bingzhou.\n\nThe two Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang heard of Cao Cao's advance with dismay for they had no hope of successful resistance. Therefore they abandoned Youzhou and hastily marched into Liaoxi to seek refuge with the Wuhuan tribespeople in the frontier Wuhuan State.\n\nThen Wuhuan Chu, new Imperial Protector of Youzhou, was not disposed to incur the enmity of the powerful Cao Cao, so he called his subordinates together to swear them to support him.\n\nWuhuan Chu said, \"I understand that Cao Cao is the most powerful man of the day, and I am going to support him, and those who do not go with me I shall put to death.\"\n\nEach in turn smeared his lips with the blood of sacrifice and took the oath, till it came to the turn of Han Heng.\n\nInstead he dashed his sword to the ground, crying, \"I have received great promotions and benefits from the Yuans. Now my lord has been vanquished. My knowledge was powerless to save him, and my bravery insufficient to cause me to die for him: I have failed in my duty. But I refuse to commit the crowning act of treachery and ally myself with Cao Cao.\"\n\nThis speech made the others turn pale.\n\nThe chief said, \"For a great undertaking, there must be lofty principles. However, success does not necessarily depend upon universal support, and since Han Heng is actuated by such sentiments, then let him follow his conscience.\"\n\nSo Wuhuan Chu turned Han Heng out of the assembly. Wuhuan Chu then went out of the city to meet and welcome Cao Cao's army and rendered his submission. He was well received and the title given him of General Who Guards the North.\n\nThen the scouts came to report: \"Generals Li Dian, Yue Jing, and Zhang Yan had marched to Bingzhou, but that Gao Gan had occupied Huguan Pass and could not be dislodged.\"\n\nSo Cao Cao marched thither himself. The defender still maintaining his position, Cao Cao asked for plans. Xun You proposed that a band should go over pretending to be deserters. Cao Cao assented and then called the two Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang, to whom he gave whispered orders. They left with their companies.\n\nSoon they came near the pass and called out, saying, \"We are old officers in Yuan Shao's armies forced into surrender to Cao Cao. We find him so false and he treats us so meanly that we want to return to help our old master. Wherefore quickly open your gates to us.\"\n\nGao Gan was suspicious, but he let the two officers come up to the pass; and when they had stripped off their armor and left their horses, they were permitted to enter.\n\nAnd they said to Gao Gan, \"Cao Cao's troops are new to the country and not settled. You ought to fall upon their camp this very evening. If you approve, we will lead the attack.\"\n\nGao Gan decided to trust them and prepared to attack, giving the two brothers the leadership of ten thousand soldiers. But as they drew near Cao Cao's camp, a great noise arose behind them and they found themselves in an ambush attacked on all sides. Realizing too late that he had been the victim of a ruse, Gao Gan retreated to the pass, but found it occupied by Li Dian and Yue Jing. Gao Gan then made the best of his way to the Chieftain of the Xiongnu People. Cao Cao gave orders to hold the passes and sent companies in pursuit.\n\nWhen Gao Gan reached the boundary of the Xiongnu State, he met Ce Xian, the Khan of the northern tribespeople.\n\nGao Gan dismounted and made a low obeisance, saying, \"Cao Cao is conquering and absorbing all the borders and your turn, O King, will come quickly. I pray you help me and let us smite together for the safety of the northern regions.\"\n\nCe Xian the Khan replied, \"I have no quarrel with Cao Cao. Why then should he invade my land? Do you desire to embroil me with him?\"\n\nHe would have nothing to do with Gao Gan and sent him sway. At his wits' end, Gao Gan decided to try to join Liu Biao and go southward so far on his journey as Shanglu when he was taken prisoner and put to death by Governor Wang Yan. His head was sent to Cao Cao, and Wang Yan received lordship for this service.\n\nThus Bingzhou was conquered. Then Cao Cao began to discuss the overthrow of the Wuhuan State.\n\nCao Hong, speaking in the name of other officials, said, \"The two Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang are nearly done for and too weak to be feared. They have fled far into the Sea of Sand. If we pursue them thither, it may bring down Liu Biao and Liu Bei upon the capital. Should we be unable to rescue it, the misfortune would be immense. Wherefore we beg you to return to Xuchang.\"\n\nBut Guo Jia was of different advice.\n\n\"You are wrong,\" said he. \"Though the prestige of our lord fills the empire, yet the peoples of the desert, relying upon their inaccessibility, will not be prepared against us. Wherefore I say attack, and we shall conquer them. Beside Yuan Shao was kind to the nomads, and the two brothers have been more so. They must be destroyed. As for Liu Biao he is a mere gossip, who needs not cause the least anxiety. And Liu Bei is unfit for any heavy responsibility and will take no trouble over a light one. You may leave the base with perfect safety and make as long an expedition as you choose. Nothing will happen.\"\n\n\"You speak well, O Guo Jia,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nHe led his legions, heavy and light, to the edge of the desert, with many wagons. The expedition marched into the Gobi Desert. The rolling ocean of yellow sand spread its waves before them, and they saw far and near the eddying sand pillars, and felt the fierce winds that drove them forward. The road became precipitous and progress difficult. Cao Cao began to think of returning and spoke thereof to Guo Jia, who had advised the journey.\n\nGuo Jia had speedily fallen victim to the effects of the climate, and at this time he lay in his cart very ill.\n\nCao Cao's tears fell as he said, \"My friend, you are suffering for my ambition to subdue the Gobi Desert. I cannot bear to think you should be ill.\"\n\n\"You have always been very good to me,\" said the sick man, \"and I can never repay what I owe you.\"\n\n\"The country is exceedingly precipitous, and I am thinking of going back. What think you?\"\n\nGuo Jia replied, \"The success of an expedition of this kind depends upon celerity. To strike a sudden blow on a distant spot with a heavy baggage train is difficult. To ensure success the need is light troops and a good road to strike quickly before an enemy has time to prepare. Now you must find guides who know the road well.\"\n\nThen the sick adviser was left at Yezhou for treatment, and they sought among the natives for some persons to serve as guides. Tian Chou, one of Yuan Shao's old generals, knew those parts well, and Cao Cao called him and questioned him.\n\nTian Chou said, \"Between autumn and summer this route is under water, the shallow places too heavy for wheeled traffic, the deep parts insufficient for boats. It is always difficult. Therefore you would do better to return and at Lulong cross the Baitan Pass into the desert. Then advance to Liucheng and smite before there is time to prepare. One sudden rush will settle King Mao Dun.\"\n\nFor this valuable information and plan, Tian Chou was made General Who Calms the North, and went in advance as leader and guide. Next after him came Zhang Liao, and Cao Cao brought up the rear. They advanced by double marches.\n\nTian Chou led Zhang Liao to White Wolf Hills, where they came upon Yuan Xi, Yuan Shang, and King Mao Dun and a force of ten thousand cavalry. Zhang Liao galloped to inform his chief, and Cao Cao rode up to the top of an eminence to survey the foe. He saw a large mass of cavalry without any military formation advancing in a disorderly crowd.\n\nSaid he, \"They have no formation. We can easily rout them.\"\n\nThen he handed over his ensign of command to Zhang Liao who, with Xu Chu, Yu Jin, and Xu Huang, made a vigorous attack from four different points, with the result that the enemy was thrown into confusion. Zhang Liao rode forward and slew King Mao Dun, and the other generals gave in. Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang with a few thousand of horse got away east into Liaodong.\n\nCao Cao then led his army into Liucheng. For his services, Tian Chou was conferred the rank of Lord of Liucheng and Commander of that county.\n\nBut Tian Chou declined the rank, saying with tears, \"I am a renegade and a fugitive. It is my good fortune that you spared my life, and how can I accept a rank for betraying Lulong? I would rather die than accept the lordship.\"\n\nCao Cao recognized that reason was on Tian Chou's side and conferred upon him the office of Court Counselor. Cao Cao then pacified the Xiongnu Chieftains, collected a large number of horses, and at once set out on the homeward march.\n\nThe season was winter, cold and dry. For seventy miles there was no water, and grain also was scanty. The troops fed on horse flesh. They had to dig very deep, three or four hundred spans to find water.\n\nWhen Cao Cao reached Yezhou, he rewarded those who had remonstrated with him against the expedition.\n\nHe said, \"I took some risk in going so far, but by good fortune I have succeeded. With the aid of Heaven I have secured victory. I could not be guided by your advice, but still they were counsels of safety, and therefore I reward you to prove my appreciation of advice and that hereafter you may not fear to speak your minds.\"\n\nAdviser Guo Jia did not live to see the return of his lord. His coffin was placed on the bier in a hall of the government offices, and Cao Cao went thither to sacrifice to his manes.\n\nCao Cao mourned for him, crying, \"Alas! Heaven has smitten me: Guo Jia is dead!\"\n\nThen turning to his officers he said, \"You, gentlemen, are of the same age as myself, but he was very young to die. I needed him for the future generation, and unhappily he has been torn from me in the flower of his age. My heart and my bowels are torn with grief.\"\n\nThe servants of the late adviser presented his last testament, which they said his dying hand had written, and he had told them to say, \"If the Prime Minister shall follow the advice given herein, then Liaodong will be secure.\"\n\nCao Cao opened the cover and read, nodding his head in agreement and uttering deep sighs. But no other person knew what was written therein.\n\nShortly after, Xiahou Dun at the head of a delegation presented a petition, saying, \"For a long time the Governor of Liaodong, Gongsun Kang, has been contumacious, and it bodes ill for peace that the Yuan brothers have fled to him. Would it not be well to attack before they move against you?\"\n\n\"I need not trouble your tiger courage, Sirs,\" said Cao Cao smiling. \"Wait a few days and you will see the heads of our two enemies sent to me.\"\n\nThey could not believe it.\n\nAs has been related the two Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang escaped to the east with a few hundreds of horse. The Governor of Liaodong was a son of Gongsun Du the Warlike, the General of Han. Gongsun Kang was a native of Xiangping. When he heard that Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang were on their way to his territory, he called a council to decide upon his plan.\n\nAt the council Gongsun Gong rose, saying, \"When Yuan Shao was alive, he nourished the plan of adding this territory to his own. Now his sons, homeless, with a broken army and no officers, are coming here. It seems to me like the dove stealing the magpie's nest. If we offer them shelter, they will assuredly intrigue against us. I advise that they be inveigled into the city, put to death, and their heads sent to Cao Cao, who will be most grateful to us.\"\n\nSaid the Governor Gongsun Kang, \"I have one fear: Cao Cao will come against us. If so, it would be better to have the help of the Yuans against him.\"\n\n\"Then you can send spies to ascertain whether Cao Cao's army is preparing to attack us. If it is, then save the Yuans alive; if not, then follow my advice.\"\n\nIt was decided to wait till the spies came back.\n\nIn the meantime, Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang had taken counsel together as they approached Liaodong, saying, \"Liaodong has a large army, strong enough to oppose Cao Cao. We will go thither and submit till we can slay the Governor and take possession. Then when we are strong enough, we will attack and recover our own land.\"\n\nWith these intentions they went into the city. They were received and lodged in the guests' quarters. But when they wished to see Gongsun Kang, he put them off with the excuse of indisposition.\n\nHowever, before many days the spies returned with the news that Cao Cao's army was quiescent and there was no hint of any attack.\n\nThen Gongsun Kang called Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang into his presence. But before they came he hid swordsmen and ax-men behind the arras in the hall. When the visitors came and had made their salutations, Gongsun Kang bade them be seated.\n\nNow it was bitterly cold and on the couches where they were sitting were no coverings. So Yuan Shang said, \"May we have cushions?\"\n\nThe host said, \"When your heads take that long, long journey, will there be any cushions?\"\n\nBefore Yuan Shang could recover from his fright, Gongsun Kang shouted, \"Why do you not begin?\"\n\nAt this out rushed the assassins and the heads of the two brothers were cut off as they sat. Packed in a small wooden box they were sent to Cao Cao at Yezhou.\n\nAll this time Cao Cao had been calmly waiting. His impatient officers had petitioned in a body, saying, \"Let's march to the capital to ward off Liu Biao's threat if we are not going to attack the east.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"I am waiting for the heads of the enemy. We will go as soon as the heads arrive.\"\n\nIn their secret hearts they laughed. But then, surely enough, messenger soon came from Liaodong bringing the heads. Then they were greatly surprised.\n\nAnd when the messenger presented Gongsun Kang's letters, Cao Cao cried, \"Just as Guo Jia said!\"\n\nHe amply rewarded the messenger, and the Governor of Liaodong was made Lord of Xiangping and General of the Left Army. When the officers asked what had happened, Cao Cao told them what the late adviser had predicted. He read to them the dead officer's testament, which ran something like this:\n\n\"Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang are going to Liaodong. Illustrious Sir, you are on no account to attack, for Gongsun Kang has long lived in fear lest the Yuans should absorb his country. When they arrive, Gongsun Kang will hesitate. If you attack, he will save the Yuans to help him; if you wait, they will work against each other. This is evident.\"\n\nThe officers simply jumped with surprise to see how perfectly events had been foreseen. Then Cao Cao at the head of all his officers performed a grand sacrifice before the coffin of the wise Guo Jia. He had died at the age of thirty-eight, after eleven years of meritorious and wonderful service in wars.\n\n\u2003When Heaven permitted Guo Jia's birth,\n\n\u2003It made him ablest man on earth.\n\n\u2003He knew by rote all histories,\n\n\u2003From him war kept no mysteries.\n\n\u2003Like Fan Li's, his plans were quite decisive,\n\n\u2003As Chen Ping's, his strokes were most incisive.\n\n\u2003Too soon he ran his earthly race,\n\n\u2003Too soon the great beam fell from place.\n\nWhen Cao Cao returned to Jizhou, he sent off the coffin of his late adviser to Capital Xuchang where it was interred.\n\nThen Cheng Yu and others said, \"As the north has been overcome, it is time to settle the south.\"\n\nCao Cao was pleased and said, \"That has long occupied my thoughts.\"\n\nThe last night he spent in Jizhou, Cao Cao went to the eastern corner tower and stood there regarding the sky. His only companion was Xun You.\n\nPresently Cao Cao said, \"That is a very brilliant glow there in the south. It seems too strong for me to do anything there.\"\n\n\"What is there that can oppose your heaven-high prestige?\" said Xun You.\n\nSuddenly a beam of golden light shot up out of the earth.\n\n\"Surely a treasure is buried there,\" remarked Xun You.\n\nThey went down from the city wall, called some guards, and led them to the point whence the light proceeded. There the men were ordered to dig.\n\n\u2003The southern skies with portents glow,\n\n\u2003The northern lands their treasures show." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Behind The Screen, Lady Cai Overhears A Secret; Across The Tan Torrent, The Dilu Horse Carries Its Master.\n\nThe diggers at the spot whence the golden light proceeded presently unearthed a bronze bird. Looking at it, Cao Cao turned to his companion, saying, \"What is the portent?\"\n\n\"You will remember that the mother of the praiseworthy King Shun dreamed of a jade bird before his birth, so certainly it is a felicitous omen,\" said Xun You.\n\nCao Cao was very pleased, and he ordered forthwith the building of a lofty tower to celebrate the find, and they began to dig foundations and cut timber, to burn tiles and to smooth bricks for the Bronze Bird Tower on the banks of the River Zhang. Cao Cao set a year for the building.\n\nHis younger son, Cao Zhi, said, \"If you build a terraced tower, you should add two others, one on each side. The center tower as the tallest should be called the Bronze Bird Tower. The side towers named Jade Dragon Tower and Golden Phoenix Tower. Then connect these by flying bridges and the effect will be noble.\"\n\n\"My son, your words are very good; and by and bye when the building is complete, I can solace my old age therein.\"\n\nCao Cao had five sons, but this one Cao Zhi was the most clever and his essays were particularly elegant. His father was very fond of him and, seeing that the young man took an interest in the building, Cao Cao left him with his elder brother Cao Pi at Yejun to superintend the work, while he led a half-a-million army that had recently been captured from the Yuans back to Capital Xuchang.\n\nWhen he arrived, he distributed rewards liberally and memorialized the Throne obtaining the title of the Pure Lord for the late Guo Jia. And he took Guo Jia's son, Guo Ye, to be brought up in his own family.\n\nNext Cao Cao began to consider the reduction of Liu Biao's power.\n\nXun You said, \"The Grand Army has only just returned from the north and needs rest. Wait half a year that the soldiers may recover from the fatigue of the campaign, and both Liu Biao and Sun Quan will fall at the first roll of the drums.\"\n\nPresently Cao Cao approved of this plan. To enrich his troops, he assigned certain lands to them to till while they rested.\n\nIn Jingzhou, Liu Biao had been very generous to Liu Bei ever since he had come as a fugitive seeking shelter. One day at a banquet there came news that two generals, Zhang Wu and Chen Sun, who had tendered their submission, had suddenly begun plundering the people in Jiangxia. They evidently meant rebellion.\n\n\"If they really rebel, it will cause a lot of trouble,\" said Liu Biao, rather dismayed.\n\n\"Do not let that trouble you. I will go and settle it,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nPleased with this proposal, Liu Biao told off thirty thousand troops and placed them under his friend, and the army marched as soon as the orders were issued. In a short time it reached the scene, and the two malcontents came out to fight. Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Zilong took their stand beneath the great banner and looked over at the enemy.\n\nZhang Wu was riding a handsome prancing horse, and Liu Bei said, \"He certainly has a fine steed.\"\n\nAs he spoke, Zhao Zilong galloped out with his spear set and dashed toward the enemy. Zhang Wu came out to meet him, but the combat was very brief for Zhang Wu was soon killed by a spear thrust. Thereupon Zhao Zilong laid a hand upon the bridle of the fallen man's horse to lead it back to his own side. The slain rebel's companion Chen Sun at once rode after Zhao Zilong, whereupon Zhang Fei uttered a loud shout and rode out to meet him. With one thrust Zhang Fei slew the rebel. Their followers now scattered, and Liu Bei speedily restored order in Jiangxia and returned to Jingzhou City.\n\nLiu Biao, grateful for this service, rode out to the boundary to welcome the victors. They reentered the city and grand banquets were instituted, at which they emptied great goblets in congratulations over the victory.\n\nAt one of these banquets the Imperial Protector said, \"With such heroism as my brother has shown, Jingzhou has one upon whom to rely. But a source of sorrow is the borders with the lands of Yue, Wu, and Shu, from which a raid may come at any time. Zhang Lu of Shu and Sun Quan of Yue and Wu are to be feared.\"\n\n\"But I have three bold generals,\" said Liu Bei, \"quite equal to any task you can set them. Send Zhang Fei to keep ward on the southern border of Yue, Guan Yu to guard the city of Guzi against Zhang Lu in the west, and Zhao Zilong holding the Three Gorges will protect you from Sun Quan. Why need you grieve?\"\n\nThe scheme appealed strongly to the Imperial Protector, but Cai Mao did not approve.\n\nSo he spoke to his sister, Liu Biao's wife, saying, \"Liu Bei is putting his troops in such commanding positions all round the region. That is the danger.\"\n\nLady Cai, thus influenced by her brother, undertook to remonstrate, and that night began by saying to Liu Biao, \"Some in the Jingzhou army seem to have a great liking for Liu Bei. They are always coming and going. You ought to take precautions. I do not think you should let Liu Bei stay in the city. Why not send him on some mission?\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is a good man,\" replied the Imperial Protector.\n\n\"I think others differ from you,\" said the lady.\n\nLiu Biao said nothing but muttered to himself. Soon after he went out of the city to see Liu Bei and noticed he was riding a very handsome horse. They told him it was a prize taken from the recently conquered rebels; and as he praised it very warmly, Liu Bei presented it to him. Liu Biao was delighted and rode it back to the city. Kuai Yue saw it and asked where it had come from. The Imperial Protector told him it was a gift from Liu Bei.\n\nKuai Yue said, \"My passed-away brother, Kuai Liang, knew horses very well, and I am not a bad judge. This horse has tear-tracks running down from its eyes and a white blaze on its forehead. It is called a Dilu horse, and it is a danger to his master. That is why Zhang Wu was killed. I advise you not to ride it.\"\n\nLiu Biao began to think.\n\nSoon after he asked Liu Bei to a banquet and in the course of it said, \"You kindly presented me with a horse lately, and I am most grateful. But you may need it on some of your expeditions and, if you do not mind, I would like to return it.\"\n\nLiu Bei rose and thanked him.\n\nThe Imperial Protector continued, \"You have been here a long time, and I fear I am spoiling your career as a warrior. Now Xinye in Xiangyang is no poverty-stricken town. How would you like to garrison it with your own troops?\"\n\nLiu Bei naturally took the offer as a command and set out as soon as he could, taking leave of the Imperial Protector the next day. And so he took up his quarters in Xinye.\n\nWhen he left Jingzhou City, he noticed in the gate a person making him emphatic salutations, and the man presently said, \"You should not ride that horse.\"\n\nLiu Bei looked at the man and recognized in the speaker one of the secretaries of Liu Biao named Yi Ji, a native of Shanyang. So Liu Bei hastily dismounted and asked why.\n\nYi Ji replied, \"Yesterday I heard that Kuai Yue told the Imperial Protector that that horse was a Dilu horse and brought disaster to its owner. That is why it was returned to you. How can you mount it again?\"\n\n\"I am deeply touched by your affection,\" replied Liu Bei, \"but a person's life is governed by fate, and what a horse can interfere with that?\"\n\nYi Ji admitted his superior view, and thereafter he kept in touch with Liu Bei wherever he went.\n\nThe arrival of Liu Bei in Xinye was a matter of rejoicing to all the inhabitants, and the whole administration was reformed.\n\nIn the spring of the twelfth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 207), Liu Bei's wife, Lady Gan, gave birth to a son who was named Liu Shan. The night of his birth a crane settled on the roof of the house, screeched some forty times and then flew away westward.\n\nJust at the time of birth a miraculous incense filled the chamber. Lady Gan one night had dreamed that she was looking up at the sky, and the constellation of the Great Bear had fallen down her throat. And she conceived soon after.\n\nWhile Cao Cao was absent from the capital on his northern expedition, Liu Bei went to Liu Biao and said to him, \"Why do you not take this opportunity to march against the capital? An empire might follow from that.\"\n\n\"I am well placed here,\" was the reply. \"Why should I attempt other things?\"\n\nLiu Bei said no more. Then the Imperial Protector invited him into the private apartments to drink. While they were so engaged, Liu Biao suddenly began to sigh despondently.\n\n\"O brother, why do you sigh thus?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"I have a secret sorrow that is difficult to speak about,\" said Liu Biao.\n\nLiu Bei was on the point of asking what it was when Lady Cai came and stood behind the screen, whereat Liu Biao hung his head and became silent. Before long host and guest bade each other farewell, and Liu Bei went back to his own place at Xinye.\n\nThat winter they heard that Cao Cao had returned from Liucheng, and Liu Bei sighed when he reflected that his friend had paid no heed to his advice.\n\nUnexpectedly a messenger came from the capital city with a request that Liu Bei would go thither to consult with the Imperial Protector. So he started at once with the messenger to Jingzhou City. He was received very kindly, and when the salutations were over, the two men went into the private quarters at the rear to dine.\n\nPresently Liu Biao said, \"Cao Cao has returned, and he is stronger than ever. I am afraid he means to absorb this region. I am sorry I did not follow your advice for I have missed an opportunity.\"\n\n\"In this period of disruption, with strife on every side, one cannot pretend that there will be no more opportunities. If you only take what that offers, there will be nothing to regret.\"\n\n\"What you say, brother, is quite to the point,\" replied Liu Biao.\n\nThey drank on for a time till presently Liu Bei noticed that his host was weeping, and when he asked the cause of these tears, Liu Biao replied, \"It is that secret sorrow I spoke of to you before. I wished to tell you, but there was no opportunity that day.\"\n\n\"O brother, what difficulty have you, and can I assist you? I am entirely at your service.\"\n\n\"My first wife, of the Chen family, bore me a son Liu Qi, my eldest. He grew up virtuous but weakly and unfitted to succeed me in my office. Later I took a wife of the Cai family, who bore me a son named Liu Zong, fairly intelligent. If I pass over the elder in favor of the younger, there is the breach of the rule of primogeniture. But if I follow law and custom, there are the intrigues of the Cai family and clan to be reckoned with. Further, the army is in the hollow of their hands. There will be trouble, and I cannot decide what to do.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"All experience proves that to set aside the elder for the younger is to take the way of confusion. If you fear the power of the Cai faction, then gradually reduce its power and influence, but do not let doting affection lead you into making the younger your heir.\"\n\nLiu Biao pondered silent. But Lady Cai had had a suspicion why her lord had summoned Liu Bei and what was the subject of discussion, so she had determined to listen secretly. She was behind the screen when the matter was talked over, and she conceived deep resentment against Liu Bei for what he had said.\n\nOn his side, Liu Bei felt that his advice had fallen upon a forbidden subject, and he arose and walked across the room. As he did so he noticed that he was getting heavy and stiff, and a furtive tear stole down his cheek as he thought of the past. When he returned and sat down, his host noticed the traces of weeping and asked the cause of his sorrow.\n\n\"In the past I was always in the saddle, and I was slender and lithe. Now it is so long since I rode that I am getting stout, and the days and months are slipping by \u2014 wasted. I shall have old age on me in no time, and I have accomplished nothing. So I am sad.\"\n\n\"I have heard a story that when you were at Xuchang at the season of green plums, you and Cao Cao were discussing heroes. You mentioned this name and that to him as humans of parts, and he rejected everyone of them. Finally he said that you and he were the only two persons of real worth in the whole empire. If he with all his power and authority did not dare to place himself in front of you, I do not think you need grieve about having accomplished nothing.\"\n\nAt this flattering speech Liu Bei, as wine was getting the better of him and in a half maudlin manner, replied, \"If I only had a starting point, then I would not be afraid of anyone in a world full of fools.\"\n\nHis host said no more and the guest, feeling that he had slipped up in speech, rose as if drunk, took leave, and staggered out saying he must return to his lodging to recover.\n\nThe episode has been celebrated in a poem:\n\n\u2003When with crooking fingers counting,\n\n\u2003Cao Cao reckoned up the forceful\n\n\u2003Humans of real determination,\n\n\u2003Only two he found; and one was\n\n\u2003Liu Bei. But by inaction\n\n\u2003He had grown both fat and slothful;\n\n\u2003Yet the months and years in passing\n\n\u2003Fretted him with nought accomplished.\n\nThough Liu Biao kept silence when he heard the words of Liu Bei, yet he felt the more uneasy. After the departure of his guest, he retired into the inner quarters where he met his wife.\n\nLady Cai said, \"I happened to be behind the screen just now and so heard the words of Liu Bei. They betray scant regard for other people and mean that he would take your territory if he could. If you do not remove him, it will go ill with you.\"\n\nHer husband made no reply, but only shook his head.\n\nThen Lady Cai took counsel with her kinsman Cai Mao, who said, \"Let me go to the guest-house and slay him forthwith, and we can report what we have done.\"\n\nHis sister consented and he went out, and that night told off a party of soldiers to do the foul deed.\n\nNow Liu Bei sat in his lodging by the light of a single candle till about the third watch, when he prepared to retire to bed. He was startled by a knock at his door and in came Yi Ji, who had heard of the plot against his new master and had come in the darkness to warn him. He related the details of the plot and urged speedy departure.\n\n\"I have not said farewell to my host. How can I go away?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If you go to bid him farewell, you will fall a victim to the Cai faction,\" said Yi Ji.\n\nSo Liu Bei said a hasty good-bye to his friend, called up his escort, and they all mounted and rode away by the light of the stars toward Xinye. Soon after they had left the soldiers arrived at the guest-house, but their intended victim was already well on his way.\n\nNaturally the failure of the plot chagrined the treacherous Cai Mao, but he took the occasion to scribble some calumnious verses on one of the partitions.\n\nThen he went to see Liu Biao to whom he said, \"Liu Bei has treacherous intentions, as can be seen from some lines written on the wall. And his hurried departure is suspicious.\"\n\nLiu Biao felt doubtful, but he went to the guest-house and there on the wall he read this poem:\n\n\u2003Too long, far too long I have dreamed life away,\n\n\u2003Gazing at scenery day after day.\n\n\u2003A dragon can never be kept in a pond,\n\n\u2003He should ride on the thunder to heaven and beyond.\n\nGreatly angered by what he read, Liu Biao drew his sword and swore to slay the writer. But before he had gone many paces, his anger had already died down, and he said to himself, \"I have seen much of the man, but have never known him write verses. This is the handiwork of someone who wishes to sow discord between us.\"\n\nSo saying, he turned back and with the point of his sword scraped away the poem. Then, putting up his sword, he mounted and rode home.\n\nBy and bye Cai Mao reminded him, saying, \"The soldiers are awaiting your orders to go to Xinye and arrest Liu Bei.\"\n\n'There is no hurry,\" he replied.\n\nCai Mao saw his brother-in-law's hesitation and again sought his sister.\n\nShe said, \"Soon there is to be the great gathering at Xiangyang, and we can arrange something for that day.\"\n\nNext day Cai Mao petitioned the Imperial Protector, saying, \"We have had several fruitful harvests recently. I pray you, Sir, attend the Full Harvest Festival at Xiangyang. It would be an encouragement to the people.\"\n\n\"I have been feeling my old trouble lately. I certainly cannot go,\" replied he, \"but my two sons can go to represent me and to receive the guests.\"\n\n\"They are full young,\" replied Cai Mao. \"They may make some mistakes.\"\n\n\"Then go to Xinye and request Liu Bei to receive the guests,\" said Liu Biao.\n\nNothing could have pleased Cai Mao more, for this would bring Liu Bei within reach of his plot. Without loss of time he sent to Liu Bei requesting him to go to preside at the Festival.\n\nIt has been said that Liu Bei made the best of his way home to Xinye. He felt that he had offended by that slip in speech, but determined to keep silence about it and attempt no explanation. So he discussed it with nobody. Then came the message asking him to preside at the Festival, and he needed counsel.\n\nSun Qian said, \"You have seemed worried and preoccupied lately, and I think something untoward happened at Jingzhou. You should consider well before you accept this invitation.\"\n\nThereupon Liu Bei told his confidants the whole story.\n\nGuan Yu said, \"You yourself think your speech offended the Imperial Protector, but he said nothing to show displeasure. You need pay no attention to the babble of outsiders like Yi Ji. Xiangyang is quite near and, if you do not go, Liu Biao will begin to suspect something really is wrong.\"\n\n\"You speak well,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSaid Zhang Fei, \"Banquets are no good; gatherings are no better. It is best not to go.\"\n\n\"Let me take three hundred horse and foot as escort: There will be no trouble then,\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"That is the best course,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThey soon set out for the gathering place, and Cai Mao met them at the boundary and was most affable and courteous. Soon arrived the Imperial Protector's sons at the head of a great company of officers, civil and military. Their appearance put Liu Bei more at ease. He was conducted to the guest-house, and Zhao Zilong posted his men so as to guard it completely, while he himself, armed, remained close to his chief.\n\nLiu Qi said to Liu Bei, \"My father is feeling unwell and could not come, wherefore he begs you, Uncle Liu Bei, to preside at the various ceremonies and give encouragement to the officers who administer the region.\"\n\n\"Really I am unfit for such responsibilities,\" said Liu Bei. \"But my brother's command must be obeyed.\"\n\nNext day it was reported that the officials from forty-two counties of nine territories of Jingzhou had all arrived.\n\nThen Cai Mao said to Kuai Yue, \"This Liu Bei is the villain of the age and if left alive will certainly work harm to us. He must be got rid of now.\"\n\n\"I fear you would forfeit everybody's favor if you harmed him,\" replied Kuai Yue.\n\n\"I have already secretly spoken in these terms to the Imperial Protector,\" said Cai Mao, \"and I have his word here.\"\n\n\"So it may be regarded as settled. Then we can prepare.\"\n\nCai Mao added, \"My brothers are ready. Cai He is posted on the road to the Xian Hills from the east gate; Cai Zhong and Cai Xun are on the north and south roads. No guard is needed on the west as the Tan Torrent is quite safeguard enough. Even with legions, Liu Bei could not get over that.\"\n\nKuai Yue replied, \"I notice that Zhao Zilong never leaves him. I feel sure he expects some attack.\"\n\n\"I have placed five hundred men in ambush in the city.\"\n\n\"We will tell Wen Ping and Wang Wei to invite all the military officers to a banquet at one of the pavilions outside the city, and Zhao Zilong will be among them. Then will be our opportunity.\"\n\nCai Mao thought this a good device for getting Zhao Zilong out of the way.\n\nNow oxen and horses had been slaughtered and a grand banquet prepared. Liu Bei rode to the residence on the horse of ill omen, and when he arrived, the steed was led into the back part of the enclosure and tethered there. Soon the guests arrived, and Liu Bei took his place as master of the feast, with the two sons of the Imperial Protector, one on each side. The guests were all arranged in order of rank. Zhao Zilong stood near his lord sword in hand as a faithful henchman should do.\n\nThen Wen Ping and Wang Wei came to invite Zhao Zilong to the banquet they had prepared for the military officers. But he declined. However, Liu Bei told him to go, and, after some demur, he went. Then Cai Mao perfected his final arrangements, placing his people surrounding the place like a ring of iron. The three hundred guards that formed the escort of Liu Bei were sent away to the guest-house.\n\nAll were ready and awaiting the signal. At the third course, Yi Ji took a goblet of wine in his hands and approached Liu Bei, at the same time giving him a meaningful look. Then in a low voice he said, \"Make an excuse to get away.\"\n\nLiu Bei understood and presently rose and went to the inner chamber, and then he went to the backyard. There he found Yi Ji, who had gone thither after presenting the cup of wine.\n\nYi Ji then told him, saying, \"Cai Mao plots to kill you, and all the roads have been guarded except that to the west. My lord, you must lose no time to depart.\"\n\nLiu Bei was quite taken aback. However, he got hold of the Dilu horse, opened the door of the garden, and led it out. Then he took a flying leap into the saddle and galloped off without waiting for the escort. He made for the west gate. At the gate the wardens wanted to question him, but he only whipped up his steed and rode through. The guards at the gate ran off to report to Cai Mao, who quickly went in pursuit with five hundred soldiers.\n\nAs has been said Liu Bei burst out at the west gate. Before he had gone far, there rolled before him a river barring the way. It was the Tan Torrent, many score spans in width, which pours its waters into the River Xiang. Its current was very swift.\n\nLiu Bei reached the bank and saw the river was unfordable. So he turned his horse and rode back. Then, not far off, he saw a cloud of dust and knew that his pursuers were therein. He thought that it was all over. However, he turned again toward the swift river, and seeing the soldiers now quite near, plunged into the stream. A few paces, and he felt the horse's fore legs floundering in front, while the water rose over the skirt of his robe.\n\nThen he plied the whip furiously, crying, \"Dilu, Dilu, why betray me?\"\n\nWhereupon the good steed suddenly reared up out of the water and, with one tremendous leap, was on the western bank. Liu Bei felt as if he had come out of the clouds.\n\nIn after years the famous court official, Su Dongpo, wrote a poem on this leap over the Tan Torrent:\n\n\u2003I'm growing old, the leaves are sere,\n\n\u2003My sun slopes westward, soon will sink,\n\n\u2003And I recall that yesteryear\n\n\u2003I wandered by Tan River brink.\n\n\u2003Irresolute, anon I paused,\n\n\u2003Anon advanced, and gazed around,\n\n\u2003I marked the autumn's reddened leaves,\n\n\u2003And watched them eddying to the ground.\n\n\u2003I thought of all the mighty deeds\n\n\u2003Of him who set the House of Han\n\n\u2003On high, and all the struggles since,\n\n\u2003The battlefields, the blood that ran.\n\n\u2003I saw the nobles gathered round\n\n\u2003The board, set in the Banquet Hall;\n\n\u2003Amid them, one, above whose head\n\n\u2003There hung a sword about to fall.\n\n\u2003I saw him quit that festive throng\n\n\u2003And westward ride, a lonely way;\n\n\u2003I saw a squadron follow swift,\n\n\u2003Intent the fugitive to slay.\n\n\u2003I saw him reach the River Tan,\n\n\u2003Whose swirling current rushes by;\n\n\u2003Adown the bank he galloped fast,\n\n\u2003\"Now leap, my steed!\" I heard him cry.\n\n\u2003His steed's hoofs churn the swollen stream;\n\n\u2003What chills he that the waves run high?\n\n\u2003He hears the sound of clashing steel,\n\n\u2003Of thundering squadrons coming nigh.\n\n\u2003And upward from the foaming waves\n\n\u2003I saw two peerless beings soar;\n\n\u2003One was a destined western king,\n\n\u2003And him another dragon bore.\n\n\u2003The Tan still rolls from east to west.\n\n\u2003Its roaring torrent never dry.\n\n\u2003Those dragons twain, ah! Where are they?\n\n\u2003Yes, where? But there is no reply.\n\n\u2003The setting sun, in dark relief\n\n\u2003Against the glowing western sky.\n\n\u2003Throws out the everlasting hills\n\n\u2003While, saddened, here I stand and sigh.\n\n\u2003Humans died to found the kingdoms three,\n\n\u2003Which now as misty dreams remain.\n\n\u2003Of greatest deeds the traces oft\n\n\u2003Are faint that fleeting years retain.\n\nThus Liu Bei crossed the rolling river. Then he turned and looked back at the other bank which his pursuers had just gained.\n\n\"Why did you run sway from the feast?\" called out Cai Mao.\n\n\"Why did you wish to harm a person who has done you no injury?\" replied Liu Bei.\n\n\"I have never thought of such a thing. Do not listen to what people say to you.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei saw that his enemy was fitting an arrow to his bowstring, so he whipped up his steed and rode away southwest.\n\n\"What spirits aided him?\" said Cai Mao to his followers.\n\nThen Cai Mao turned to go back to the city, but in the gate he saw Zhao Zilong coming out at the head of his company of guards.\n\n\u2003By wondrous leap the dragon steed his rider's life could save,\n\n\u2003Now follows him, on vengeance bent, his master's henchman brave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Liu Bei Meets A Recluse At Nanzhang; Shan Fu Sees A Noble Lord At Xinye.\n\nJust as Cai Mao was going into the city, he met Zhao Zilong and his three hundred coming out. It had happened that, while at the banquet, Zhao Zilong had noticed some movement of soldiers and horses and had at once gone to the banquet-hall to see if all was well with his lord. Missing Liu Bei from his place, Zhao Zilong had become anxious and gone to the guest-house. There he heard that Cai Mao had gone off to the west gate with troops. So he quickly took his spear, mounted and went, he and the escort, in hot haste along the same road.\n\nMeeting Cai Mao near the gate, he said, \"Where is my lord?\"\n\n\"He left the banquet-hall quite suddenly, and I know not whither he has gone,\" was the reply.\n\nNow Zhao Zilong was cautious and careful and had no desire to act hastily, so he urged his horse forward till he came to the river. There he was checked by a torrent without ford or bridge.\n\nAt once he turned back and shouted after Cai Mao, \"You invited my lord to a feast. What means this going after him with a squadron of horse?\"\n\nCai Mao replied, \"It is my duty to guard the officials of forty-two counties who have assembled here, as I am the Chief Commander.\"\n\n\"Whither have you driven my lord?\" asked Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"They tell me he rode quite alone out through the west gate, but I have not seen him.\"\n\nZhao Zilong was anxious and doubtful. Again he rode to the river and looked around. This time he noticed a wet track on the farther side. He thought to himself that it was almost an impossible crossing for a person and a horse, so he ordered his followers to scatter and search. But they also could find no trace of Liu Bei.\n\nZhao Zilong turned again to the city. By the time he had reached the wall, Cai Mao had gone within. He then questioned the gate wardens, and they all agreed in saying that Liu Bei had ridden out at full gallop. That was all they knew. Fearing to reenter the city lest he should fall into an ambush, Zhao Zilong started for Xinye.\n\nAfter that marvelous life-saving leap over the Tan Torrent, Liu Bei felt elated but rather dazed.\n\nHe could not help telling himself, \"My safety is due to an especial interposition of Providence.\"\n\nFollowing a tortuous path, he urged his steed toward Nanzhang. But the sun sank to the west and his destination seemed yet a long way off. Then he saw a young cowherd seated on the back of a buffalo and playing on a short flute.\n\n\"If I were only as happy!\" sighed Liu Bei.\n\nHe checked his horse and looked at the lad, who stopped his beast, ceased playing on the pipe, and stared fixedly at the stranger.\n\n\"You must be Liu Bei, the general who fought the Yellow Scarves,\" said the boy presently.\n\nLiu Bei was taken aback.\n\n\"How can you know my name, a young rustic like you living in such a secluded place?\" said he.\n\n\"Of course I do not know you, but my master often has visitors, and they all talk about Liu Bei, the tall man whose hands hang down below his knees and whose eyes are very prominent. They say he is the most famous man of the day. Now you, General, are just such a man as they talk about, and surely you are he.\"\n\n\"Well, who is your master?\"\n\n\"My master's name is Sima Hui. He belongs to Yingchuan and his Daoist appellation is Water Mirror.\"\n\n\"Who are your master's friends that you mentioned?\"\n\n\"They are Pang Degong and Pang Tong of Xiangyang.\"\n\n\"And who are they?\"\n\n\"Uncle and nephew. Pang Degong is ten years older than my master; the other is five years younger. One day my master was up in a tree picking mulberries when Pang Tong arrived. They began to talk and kept it up all day, my master did not come down till the evening. My master is very fond of Pang Tong and calls him brother.\"\n\n\"And where does your master live?\"\n\n\"In that wood there, in front,\" said the cowherd pointing to it. \"There he has a farmstead.\"\n\n\"I really am Liu Bei, and you might lead me to your master that I may salute him.\"\n\nThe cowherd led the way for about one mile, when Liu Bei found himself in front of a farm house. He dismounted and went to the center door. Suddenly came to his ear the sound of a lute most skillfully played and the air was extremely beautiful. He stopped his guide and would not allow him to announce a visitor, but stood there rapt by the melody.\n\nSuddenly the music ceased.\n\nHe heard a deep laugh and a man appeared, saying, \"Amidst the clear and subtle sounds of the lute, there suddenly rang out a high note as though some noble man was near.\"\n\n\"That is my master,\" said the lad pointing.\n\nLiu Bei saw before him a figure slender and straight as a pine tree, a very saint-like being. Hastening forward he saluted. The skirt of his robe was still wet from the river.\n\n\"You have escaped from a grave danger today, Sir,\" said Water Mirror.\n\nLiu Bei was startled into silence, and the cowherd said to his master, \"This is Liu Bei.\"\n\nWater Mirror asked him to enter; and when they were seated in their relative positions as host and guest, Liu Bei glanced round the room. Upon the bookshelves were piled books and manuscripts. The window opened upon an exquisite picture of pines and bamboos and a lute lay upon a stone couch. The room showed refinement in its last degree.\n\n\"Whence come you, Illustrious Sir?\" asked the host.\n\n\"By chance I was passing this way and the lad pointed you out to me. So I came to bow in your honored presence. I cannot tell what pleasure it gives me.\"\n\nWater Mirror laughed, saying, \"Why this mystery? Why must you conceal the truth? You have certainly just escaped from a grave danger.\"\n\nThen Liu Bei told the story of the banquet and the flight.\n\n\"I knew it all from your appearance,\" said his host. \"Your name has long been familiar, but whence comes it that, up to the present, you are only a homeless devil?\"\n\n\"I have suffered many a check during my life,\" said Liu Bei, \"and through one of them am I here now.\"\n\n\"It should not be so. But the reason is that you still lack the one person to aid you.\"\n\n\"I am simple enough in myself, I know. But I have Sun Qian, Mi Zhu, and Jian Yong on the civil side, and for warriors I have Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Zilong. These are all most loyal helpers, and I depend upon them not a little.\"\n\n\"Your fighting generals are good: Fit to oppose a legion. The pity is you have no really able adviser. Your civilians are but pallid students of books, not people fitted to weave and control destiny.\"\n\n\"I have always yearned to find one of those marvelous recluses who live among the hills till their day arrive. So far I have sought in vain.\"\n\n\"You know what the Teacher Confucius said, 'In a hamlet of ten households there must be one true person.' Can you say there is no one?\"\n\n\"I am simple and uninstructed. I pray you enlighten me.\"\n\n\"You have heard what the street children sing:\n\n\u2003\"In eight and nine years begins decay,\n\n\u2003Four years, then comes the fateful day,\n\n\u2003When destiny will show the way,\n\n\u2003And the dragon flies out of the mire!\n\n\"This song was first heard when the new reign style was adopted. The first line was fulfilled when Imperial Protector Liu Biao lost his first wife, and when his family troubles began. The next line relates to the approaching death of Liu Biao, and there is not a single person among all his crowd of officers who has the least ability. The last two lines will be fulfilled in you, General.\"\n\nLiu Bei started up in surprise, crying, \"How could such a thing be?\"\n\nWater Mirror continued, \"At this moment the marvelously clever people of the earth are all here and you, Sir, ought to seek them.\"\n\n\"Where are they? Who are they?\" said Liu Bei quickly.\n\n\"If you could find either Sleeping Dragon or Young Phoenix, you could restore order in the empire.\"\n\n\"But who are these two?\"\n\nHis host clapped his hands, smiled and said, \"Good, very good!\"\n\nWhen Liu Bei persisted and pressed home his questions, Water Mirror said, \"It is getting late. You might stay the night here, General, and we will talk over these things tomorrow.\"\n\nHe called to a lad to bring wine and food for his guest and his horse was taken to the stable and fed. After Liu Bei had eaten, he was shown to a chamber opening off the main room and went to bed. But the words of his host would not be banished, and he lay there only dozing till far into the night.\n\nSuddenly he became fully awake at the sound of a knock at the door and a person entering. And he heard his host say, \"Where are you from?\"\n\nLiu Bei rose from his couch and listened secretly.\n\nHe heard the visitor reply, \"It has long been said that Liu Biao treated good people and bad people as they each should be treated. So I went to see for myself. But that reputation is undeserved. He does treat good people correctly but he cannot use them, and he treats wicked people in the right way, all but dismissing them. So I left a letter for him and went away. And here I am.\"\n\nWater Mirror replied, \"You, capable enough to be the adviser of a king, ought to be able to find someone fit to serve. Why did you cheapen yourself so far as to go to Liu Biao? Beside, there is a real hero right under your eyes and you do not know him.\"\n\n\"It is just as you say,\" replied the stranger.\n\nLiu Bei listened with great joy for he thought this visitor was certainly one of the two he was advised to look for. Liu Bei would have shown himself then and there, but he thought that would look strange. So he waited till daylight, when he sought out his host.\n\n\"Who was it came last night?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"A friend of mine,\" was the reply.\n\nLiu Bei begged for an introduction. Water Mirror said, \"He wants to find an enlightened master, and so he has gone elsewhere.\"\n\nWhen Liu Bei asked his name, his host only replied, \"Good, good!\"\n\nAnd when Liu Bei asked who they were who went by the names of Sleeping Dragon and Young Phoenix, he only elicited the same reply.\n\nLiu Bei then, bowing low before his host, begged him to leave the hills and help him to bring about the restoration of the ruling house to its prerogatives.\n\nBut Water Mirror replied, \"People of the hills and woods are unequal to such a task. However, there must be many far abler than I who will help you if you seek them.\"\n\nWhile they were talking, they heard outside the farm the shouts of troops and neighing of horses, and a servant came in to say that a general with a large company of soldiers had arrived. Liu Bei went out hastily to see who these were and found Zhao Zilong. He was much relieved, and Zhao Zilong dismounted and entered the house.\n\n\"Last night, on my return to Xinye,\" said Zhao Zilong, \"I could not find you, my lord, so I followed at once and traced you here. I pray you return quickly, as I fear an attack on the city.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei took leave of his host, and the whole company returned to Xinye. Before they had gone far another army appeared, and, when they had come nearer, they saw Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. They met with great joy, and Liu Bei told them of the wonderful leap his horse had made over the torrent. All expressed surprise and pleasure.\n\nAs soon as they reached the city, a council was called and Zhao Zilong said, \"You ought first of all to indite a letter to Liu Biao telling him all these things.\"\n\nThe letter was prepared and Sun Qian bore it to the seat of government in Jingzhou City. He was received, and Liu Biao at once asked the reason of Liu Bei hasty flight from the festival. Whereupon the letter was presented, and the bearer related the machinations of Cai Mao and told of the escape and the amazing leap over the Tan Torrent.\n\nLiu Biao was very angry, sent for Cai Mao, and berated him soundly, saying, \"How dare you try to hurt my brother?\"\n\nAnd he ordered Cai Mao out to execution.\n\nLiu Biao's wife, Cai Mao's sister, prayed for a remission of the death penalty, but Liu Biao refused to be appeased.\n\nThen spoke Sun Qian, saying, \"If you put Cai Mao to death, I fear Uncle Liu Bei will be unable to remain here.\"\n\nThen Cai Mao was reprieved, but dismissed with a severe reprimand.\n\nLiu Biao sent his elder son Liu Qi back with Sun Qian to apologize. When Liu Qi reached Xinye, Liu Bei welcomed him and gave a banquet in his honor.\n\nAfter some little drinking, the chief guest suddenly began to weep and presently said, \"My step mother, Lady Cai, always cherishes a wish to put me out of the way, and I do not know how to avoid her anger. Could you advise me, Uncle?\"\n\nLiu Bei exhorted him to be careful and perfectly filial and nothing could happen. Soon after, the young man took his leave and wept at parting.\n\nLiu Bei escorted Liu Qi well on his way and, pointing to his steed, said, \"I owe my life to this horse. Had it not been for him, I had been already below the Nine Golden Springs.\"\n\n\"It was not the strength of the horse, but your noble fortune, Uncle.\"\n\nThey parted, the young man weeping bitterly. On reentering the city, Liu Bei met a person in the street wearing a hempen turban, a cotton robe confined by a black girdle, and black shoes. He came along singing a song:\n\n\u2003\"The universe is rived, O! Now nears the end of all.\n\n\u2003The noble mansion quakes, O! What beam can stay the fall?\n\n\u2003A wise one waits his lord, O! But hidden in the glen,\n\n\u2003The seeker knows not him, O! Nor me, of common humans.\"\n\nLiu Bei listened.\n\n\"Surely this is one of the people Water Mirror spoke of,\" thought he.\n\nHe dismounted, spoke to the singer, and invited him into his residence. Then when they were seated, he asked the stranger's name.\n\n\"I am from Yingchuan, and my name is Shan Fu. I have known you by repute for a long time, and they said you appreciated humans of ability. I wanted to come to you but every way of getting an introduction seemed closed. So I bethought me of attracting your notice by singing that song in the market place.\"\n\nLiu Bei thought he had found a treasure and treated the newcomer with the greatest kindness. Then Shan Fu spoke of the horse that he had seen Liu Bei riding and asked to look at it. So the animal was brought round.\n\n\"Is not this a Dilu horse?\" said Shan Fu. \"But though it is a good steed, it risks his master. You must not ride it.\"\n\n\"It has already fulfilled the omens,\" said Liu Bei, and he related the story of the leap over the Tan Torrent.\n\n\"But that was saving his master, not risking him. It will surely harm someone in the end. But I can tell you how to avert the omen.\"\n\n\"I should be glad to hear it,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If you have an enemy against whom you bear a grudge, give him this horse and wait till it has fulfilled the evil omens on this person, then you can ride it in safety.\"\n\nLiu Bei changed color.\n\n\"What, Sir! You are but a new acquaintance, and you would advise me to take an evil course and to harm another for my own advantage? No, Sir! I cannot listen.\"\n\nHis guest smiled, saying, \"People said you were virtuous. I could not ask you directly, so I put it that way to test you.\"\n\nLiu Bei's expression changed. He rose and returned the compliment, saying, \"But how can I be virtuous while I lack your teaching?\"\n\n\"When I arrived here, I heard the people saying:\n\n\"Since Liu Bei came here, O blessed day!\n\nWe've had good luck, long may he stay!\n\n\"So you see, the effects of your virtue extend to the ordinary people.\"\n\nThereupon Shan Fu was made Commanding Adviser of the army.\n\nThe one idea that held Cao Cao after his return from Jizhou was the capture of Jingzhou. He sent Cao Ren and Li Dian, with the two brothers Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang who had surrendered, to camp at Fancheng with thirty thousand troops and so threaten Jingzhou and Xiangyang. Thence he sent spies to find out the weak points.\n\nThen the two Lu Xiang and Lu Kuang petitioned Cao Ren, saying, \"Liu Bei is strengthening his position at Xinye and laying in large supplies. Some great scheme is afoot, and he should be checked. Since our surrender we have performed no noteworthy service and, if you will give us five thousand soldiers, we promise to bring you the head of Liu Bei.\"\n\nCao Ren was only too glad, and the expedition set out. The scouts reported this to Liu Bei who turned to Shan Fu for advice.\n\nShan Fu said, \"They must not be permitted to cross the boundary. Send Guan Yu and Zhang Fei left and right, each with one thousand troops, one to attack the enemy on the march, the other to cut off the retreat. You and Zhao Zilong will make a front attack.\"\n\nGuan Yu and Zhang Fei started, and then Liu Bei went out at the gate with two thousand troops to oppose the enemy. Before they had gone far they saw a great cloud of dust behind the hills. This marked the approach of the Lu brothers. Presently, both sides being arrayed, Liu Bei rode out and stood by his standard.\n\nHe called out, \"Who are you who thus would encroach on my territory?\"\n\n\"I am the great General Lu Kuang, and I have the order of the Prime Minister to make you prisoner!\" said the leader.\n\nLiu Bei ordered Zhao Zilong to go out, and the two generals engaged. Very soon Zhao Zilong with a spear thrust had disposed of his opponent, and Liu Bei gave the signal to attack. Lu Xiang could not maintain his position and led his troops off. Soon his force found themselves attacked by an army rushing in from the side led by Guan Yu. The loss was more than a half, and the remainder fled for safety.\n\nAbout three miles farther on they found their retreat barred by an army under Zhang Fei, who stood in the way with a long spear ready to thrust, crying out, \"Zhang Fei is waiting!\"\n\nZhang Fei bore down upon Lu Xiang, who was slain without a chance of striking a blow. The troops again fled in disorder. They were pursued by Liu Bei, and the greater part killed or captured.\n\nThen Liu Bei returned into Xinye where he rewarded Shan Fu and feasted his victorious soldiers.\n\nSome of the defeated troops took the news of the deaths of the leaders and the capture of their comrades to Cao Ren at Fancheng.\n\nCao Ren, much distressed, consulted Li Dian who advised, saying, \"The loss is due to our underestimation of our enemy. Now we should stay where we are, hold on, and request reinforcements.\"\n\n\"Not so,\" said Cao Ren. \"We cannot support calmly the death of two leaders and the loss of so many soldiers. We must avenge them quickly. Xinye is but a crossbow-slug of a place and not worth disturbing the Prime Minister for.\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is a man of metal,\" said Li Dian. \"Do not esteem him lightly.\"\n\n\"What are you afraid of?\" said Cao Ren.\n\n\"The Rule of War says 'To know your enemy and yourself is the secret of victory,'\" replied Li Dian. \"I am not afraid of the battle, but I do not think we can conquer.\"\n\n\"You are a traitor!\" cried Cao Ren angrily. \"Then I will capture Liu Bei myself.\"\n\n\"Do so. I will guard this city,\" said Li Dian.\n\n\"If you do not go with me, it is a proof that you are a traitor,\" retorted Cao Ren.\n\nAt this reproach, Li Dian felt constrained to join the expedition. So they told off twenty five thousand troops with which they crossed the River Yu for Xinye.\n\n\u2003The officers all keenly felt the shame of many slain,\n\n\u2003The chief determines on revenge and marches out again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Shan Fu's Strategy: Fankou Is Captured; Xu Shu's Affection: Zhuge Liang Is Recommended.\n\nIn hot anger, Cao Ren lost no time in marching out to avenge the loss of so many of his army. He hastily crossed the River Yu to attack Xinye and trample it in the dust.\n\nWhen Shan Fu got back into the city, he said to Liu Bei, \"When Cao Ren, now at Fancheng, hears of his losses, he will try to retrieve them and will come to attack us.\"\n\n\"What is the counter move?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"As he will come with all his force, his own city will be left undefended. We will surprise it.\"\n\n\"By what ruse?\"\n\nThe adviser leaned over and whispered to his chief. Whatever the plan was, it pleased Liu Bei, who made arrangements. Soon the scouts reported Cao Ren crossing the river with a mighty host.\n\n\"Just as I guessed,\" said Shan Fu, hearing of it.\n\nThen he suggested that Liu Bei should lead out one army against the invaders. Liu Bei did so, and, when the formation was complete, Zhao Zilong rode to the front as champion and challenged the other side.\n\nLi Dian rode out and engaged. At about the tenth bout Li Dian found he was losing and retired toward his own side. Zhao Zilong pressed after him, but was checked by a heavy discharge of arrows from the wings. Then both sides stopped the battle and retired to their camps.\n\nLi Dian reported to his chief: \"Our enemy are brave, very full of spirit, and we will be hard to overcome. We had better retreat to Fancheng and wait for reinforcements.\"\n\nCao Ren angrily replied, \"You damped the army's spirit before we started, and now you betray us. You have been bought, and you deserve death.\"\n\nCao Ren called in the executioners, and they led away their victim. But the other officers came to intercede, and Li Dian was spared. However, he was transferred to the command of the rear, while Cao Ren himself led the attack.\n\nNext day the drums beat an advance and Cao Ren, having drawn up his soldiers, sent a messenger over to ask if Liu Bei recognized his plan of battle array.\n\nSo Shan Fu went on a hill and looked over it.\n\nThen he said to Liu Bei, \"The arrangement is called 'The Eight Docked Gates,' and the names of the gates are Birth, Exit, Expanse, Wound, Fear, Annihilation, Obstacle, and Death. If you enter by one of the three Birth, Exit, or Expanse you succeed. If by one of the gates Wound, Fear, or Annihilation, you sustain injuries. The other two gates Obstacles and Death will bring the end. Now, though the eight gates are all there quite correct, the central key-post is lacking, and the whole formation can be thrown into confusion by entry from the southeast and exit due west.\"\n\nWherefore certain orders were issued and Zhao Zilong, leading five hundred troops, rode out on his prancing steed to break the array. He burst in, as directed, at the southeast and, with great clamor and fighting, reached the center. Cao Ren made for the north, but Zhao Zilong, instead of following him, made a dash westward and got through. Thence he turned round to the southeast again and smote till Cao Ren's army was in disarray. Liu Bei gave a general advance signal, and the victory was complete. The beaten enemy retired.\n\nShan Fu forbade pursuit, and they returned. The loss of the battle convinced Cao Ren of the wisdom of his colleague Li Dian, and he sent for Li Dian to consult.\n\n\"They certainly have some very able person in Liu Bei's army since my formation was so quickly broken,\" said Cao Ren.\n\n\"My chief anxiety is about Fancheng,\" said Li Dian.\n\n\"I will raid their camp this night,\" said Cao Ren. \"If I succeed, we will decide upon what should be done next. If I fail, we will return to Fancheng.\"\n\n\"Their camp will be well prepared against such a thing, and you will fail,\" said Li Dian.\n\n\"How can you expect to fight successfully when you are so full of doubts?\" said Cao Ren, angrily.\n\nHe held no more converse with his cautious colleague, but himself took command of the van and set out. Li Dian was relegated to the rear. The attack on the enemy's camp was fixed for the second watch.\n\nNow as Shan Fu was discussing plans with his chief a whirlwind from the northeast went by, which Shan Fu said, \"There will be a raid on the camp tonight.\"\n\n\"How shall we meet it?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"The plans are quite ready,\" was the reply.\n\nShan Fu whispered them to the chief. So at the second watch, when the enemy arrived, they saw fires on all sides, the stockades and huts burning. Cao Ren understood at once that all hope of a surprise was vain, and he turned to get away as quickly as possible. This was the signal for Zhao Zilong to fall on, and that cut Cao Ren's return road. He hastened north toward the river, and reached the bank, but, while waiting for boats to cross the stream, up came Zhang Fei and attacked.\n\nBy dint of great efforts and with the support of Li Dian, Cao Ren got into a boat, but most of the soldiers were drowned in the stream. As soon as he got to the farther shore, he bolted for Fancheng. He reached the wall and hailed the gate, but, instead of a friendly welcome, he heard the rolling of drums, which was soon followed by the appearance of a body of troops. Guan Yu led them.\n\n\"I took the city a long time ago!\" shouted Guan Yu.\n\nThis was a severe shock to Cao Ren, who turned to flee. As soon as he faced about, Guan Yu attacked and killed many of his force. The remnant hastened to Xuchang. On the road the beaten general wondered who had advised his opponents with such success, and he asked the natives for the answer.\n\nWhile the defeated Cao Ren had to find his way back to the capital, Liu Bei had scored a great success. Afterwards he marched to Fancheng, where he was welcomed by Magistrate Liu Mi, himself a scion of the ruling family, who had been born in Changsha. Liu Mi received Liu Bei as a guest in his own house and gave banquets and treated him exceedingly well.\n\nIn the train of the Magistrate, Liu Bei saw a very handsome and distinguished-looking young man, and asked who he was.\n\nLiu Mi replied, \"He is my nephew, Kou Feng, son of Lord Kou of Luo. I have taken care of him after his parents died.\"\n\nLiu Bei had taken a great liking for the lad and proposed to adopt him. His guardian was willing, and so the adoption was arranged. The young man's name was changed to Liu Feng. When Liu Bei left, he took his adopted son with him. Liu Feng was then made to bow before Guan Yu and Zhang Fei as uncles.\n\nGuan Yu was doubtful of the wisdom of adopting another son, saying, \"You have a son. Why do you think it necessary to adopt another? It may cause confusion.\"\n\n\"How? I shall treat him as a father should, and he will serve me as befits a son.\"\n\nGuan Yu was displeased.\n\nThen Liu Bei and Shan Fu began further discussions of strategy, and they decided to leave Zhao Zilong with one thousand soldiers to guard Fancheng, and they returned to Xinye.\n\nIn the meantime Cao Cao's defeated generals had gone back. When they saw the Prime Minister, Cao Ren threw himself on the ground weeping and acknowledging his faults. He told the tale of his losses.\n\n\"The fortune of war,\" said Cao Cao. \"But I should like to know who laid Liu Bei's plans.\"\n\n\"That was Shan Fu,\" said Cao Ren.\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nCheng Yu said, \"The man is not Shan Fu. When young this man was fond of fencing and used to take up the quarrels of other people and avenge their wrongs. At the end of Emperor Ling, he killed a man to avenge his friend, and then he let down his hair, muddled his face, and was trying to escape when a lictor caught him and questioned him. He would not reply. So they carted him through the streets beating a drum and asking if anyone recognized him. Nobody dared own to knowing him, even if they did so. However, his comrades managed to release him secretly, and he ran away under some other name. Then he turned to study and wandered hither and thither wherever scholars were to be found. He was a regular disputant with Sima Hui. His real name is Xu Shu and he comes from Yingchuan. Shan Fu is merely an assumed name.\"\n\n\"How does he compare with yourself?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"Ten times cleverer.\"\n\n\"It is a pity. If able people gather to Liu Bei, his wings will soon grow. What is to be done?\"\n\n\"Xu Shu is there now. But if you wanted him, it would not be difficult to call him,\" replied Cheng Yu.\n\n\"How could I make him come?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"He is noted for his affection for his mother. His father died young, leaving his mother a widow with one other son. Now that son is dead, and his mother, Lady Xun, has no one to care for her. If you sent and got his mother here and told her to write and summon her son, he would surely come.\"\n\nCao Cao sent without loss of time and had the old lady brought to the capital, where he treated her exceedingly well.\n\nPresently he said, \"I hear you have a very talented son, who is now at Xinye helping on that rebel Liu Bei against the government. There he is like a jewel in a muck heap: It is a pity. Supposing you were to call him, I could speak of him before the Emperor, and he might get an important office.\"\n\nCao Cao bade his secretaries bring along paper and ink, with which Lady Xun could write to her son.\n\n\"What sort of a man is Liu Bei?\" asked she.\n\nCao Cao replied, \"A common sort of person from Zhuo, irresponsible enough to style himself Imperial Uncle, and so claiming some sort of connection with the Hans. He is neither trustworthy nor virtuous. People say he is a superior man as far as externals go, but a mean man by nature.\"\n\nLady Xun answered in a hard voice, \"Why do you malign him so bitterly? Everyone knows he is a descendant of one of the Han princes and so related to the House. He has condescended to take a lowly office and is respectful to all people. He has a reputation for benevolence. Everyone, young and old, cowherds and firewood cutters, all know him by name and know that he is the finest and noblest man in the world. If my son is in his service, then has he found a fitting master. You, under the name of a Han minister, are really nothing but a Han rebel. Contrary to all truths, you tell me Liu Bei is a rebel, whereby you try to induce me to make my son leave the light for darkness. Are you devoid of all sense of shame?\"\n\nAs Lady Xun finished speaking, she picked up the inkstone to strike Cao Cao. This so enraged him that he forgot himself and the need for caution and bade the executioners lead off the old woman and put her to death.\n\nAdviser Cheng Yu, however, stopped this act, saying, \"This old lady wished to die. But if you kill her, your reputation will be damaged and hers enhanced. Beside that will add a keen desire for revenge to the motives which led Xu Shu to labor in the interest of Liu Bei. You had better keep her here so that Xu Shu's body and his thoughts may be in different places. He can not devote all his energies to helping our enemy while his mother is here. If you keep her, I think I can persuade the son to come and help you.\"\n\nSo the outspoken old lady was saved. She was given quarters and cared for. Daily Cheng Yu went to ask after her health, falsely claiming to being a sworn brother of her son's, and so entitled to serve her and treat her as a filial son would have done. He often sent her gifts and wrote letters to her so that she had to write in reply. And thereby he learned her handwriting so that he could forge a \"home\" letter. When he could do this without fear of detection, he wrote one and sent it by the hand of a trusty person to Xinye.\n\nOne day a man arrived inquiring for one Shan Fu. He claimed to have a letter from home for him. The soldiers led the man to Shan Fu. The man said he was an official carrier of letters and had been told to bring this one. Shan Fu quickly tore it open and read:\n\n\"On your brother's death recently I was left alone: No relative was near, and I was lonely and sad. To my regret, the Prime Minister Cao Cao inveigled me into coming to the capital, and now he says you are a rebel, and he has thrown me into bonds. However, thanks to Cheng Yu, my life has been spared so far, and, if you would only come and submit too, I should be quite safe. When this reaches you, remember how I have toiled for you and come at once, that you may prove yourself a filial son. We may together find some way of escape to our own place and avoid the dangers that threaten me. My life hangs by a thread, and I look to you to save me. You will not require a second summon.\"\n\nTears gushed from Xu Shu's eyes as he read, and with the letter in his hand he went to seek his chief, to whom he told the true story of his life.\n\n\"I heard that Liu Biao treated people well and went to him. I happened to arrive at a time of confusion. I saw he was of no use, so I left him very soon. I arrived at the retreat of Sima Hui the Water Mirror late one night and told him, and he blamed me for not knowing a master when I saw one. Then he told me of you and I sang that wild song in the streets to attract your attention. You took me; you used me. But now my aged mother is the victim of Cao Cao's wiles. She is in prison, and he threatens to do worse. She has written to call me, and I must go. I hoped to be able to render you faithful service, but, with my dear mother a captive, I should be useless. Therefore I must leave you and hope in the future to meet you again.\"\n\nLiu Bei broke into loud moans when he heard that his adviser was to leave.\n\n\"The bond between mother and son is divine,\" said Liu Bei, \"and I do not need to be reminded where your duty lies. When you have seen your venerable mother, perhaps I may have again the happiness of receiving your instruction.\"\n\nHaving said farewell, Xu Shu prepared to leave at once. However, at Liu Bei's wish, he consented to stay over the night.\n\nThen Sun Qian said privately to his master, \"Xu Shu is indeed a genius, but he has been here long enough to know all our secrets. If you let him go over to Cao Cao, he will be in his confidence, and that will be to our detriment. You ought to keep him at all costs and not let him go. When Cao Cao sees Xu Shu does not come, he will put the mother to death, and that will make Xu Shu the more zealous in your service, for he will burn to avenge his mother's death.\"\n\n\"I cannot do that. It would be very cruel and vile to procure the death of his mother that I might retain the son's services. If I kept him, it would lead to a rupture of the parental lien, and that would be a sin I would rather die than commit.\"\n\nBoth were grieved and sighed.\n\nLiu Bei asked the parting guest to a banquet, but he declined, saying, \"With my mother a prisoner I can swallow nothing, nay, though it were brewed from gold or distilled from jewels.\"\n\n\"Alas! Your departure is as if I lost both my hands,\" said Liu Bei. \"Even the liver of a dragon or the marrow of a phoenix would be bitter in my mouth.\"\n\nThey looked into each other's eyes and wept. They sat silent till dawn. When all was ready for the journey, the two rode out of the city side by side. At Daisy Pavilion they dismounted to drink the stirrup cup.\n\nLiu Bei lifted the goblet and said, \"It is my mean fortune that separates me from you, but I hope that you may serve well your new lord and become famous.\"\n\nXu Shu wept as he replied, \"I am but a poor ignorant person whom you have kindly employed. Unhappily I have to break our intercourse in the middle, but my venerable mother is the real cause. Though Cao Cao use all manner of means to coerce me, yet will I never plan for him.\"\n\n\"After you are gone, I shall only bury myself in the hills and hide in the forests,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nXu Shu said, \"I had in my heart for you the position of leader of the chieftains, but my plans have been altogether upset by my mother. I have been of no advantage to you, nor should I do any good by remaining. But you ought to seek some person of lofty wisdom to help you in your great enterprise. It is unseemly to be downcast.\"\n\n\"I shall find none to help better than you, my master.\"\n\n\"How can I permit such extravagant praise?\" said Xu Shu. \"I am only a useless blockhead.\"\n\nAs he moved off, he said to the followers, \"Officers, I hope you will render the Princely One good service, whereby to write his name large in the country's annals and cause his fame to glow in the pages of history. Do not be like me, a person who has left his work half done.\"\n\nThey were all deeply affected. Liu Bei could not bring himself to part from his friend. He escorted him a little further, and yet a little further, till Xu Shu said, \"I will not trouble you, O Princely One, to come further. Let us say our farewell here.\"\n\nLiu Bei dismounted, took Xu Shu by the hands, and said, \"Alas! We part. Each goes his way, and who knows if we shall meet again?\"\n\nHis tears fell like rain and Xu Shu wept also. But the last goodbyes were said. When the traveler had gone, Liu Bei stood gazing after the little party and watched it slowly disappear. At the last glimpse he broke into lamentation.\n\n\"He is gone! What shall I do?\"\n\nOne of the trees shut out the traveler from his sight, and Liu Bei pointed at it, saying, \"Wish that I could cut down every tree in the countryside!\"\n\n\"Why?\" said his officers.\n\n\"Because they hinder my sight of Xu Shu.\"\n\nSuddenly they saw Xu Shu galloping back.\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"He is returning: Can it be that he is going to stay?\"\n\nSo he hastened forward to meet Xu Shu, and when they got near enough, he cried, \"This return is surely for no slight reason.\"\n\nChecking his horse, Xu Shu said, \"In the turmoil of my feelings, I forgot to say one word. There is a person of wonderful skill living about seven miles from the city of Xiangyang. Why not seek him?\"\n\n\"Can I trouble you to ask him to visit me?\"\n\n\"He will not condescend to visit you. You must go to him. But if he consents, you will be as fortunate as the Zhou when they got the aid of Lu Wang, or the Han when Zhang Liang came to help.\"\n\n\"How does the unknown compare with yourself?\"\n\n\"With me? Compared with him I am as a worn-out carthorse to a palomino, an old duck to a phoenix. This man often compares himself with the ancient sages Guan Zhong and Yue Yi but, in my opinion, he is far their superior. He has the talent to measure the heavens and mete the earth. He is a man who overshadows every other in the world.\"\n\n\"I would know his name.\"\n\n\"He belongs to Langye, and his name is Zhuge Liang. He is of the family of the former General Zhuge Feng. His father, Zhuge Gui, was the Deputy Governor of Taishan but died young, and the young fellow went with his uncle Zhuge Xuan to Jingzhou. Imperial Protector Liu Biao was an old friend of his uncle, and Zhuge Liang became settled in Xiangyang. Then his uncle died, and he and his younger brother, Zhuge Jun, returned to their farm in Nanyang and worked as farmers. They used to amuse themselves with the composition of songs in the Liangfu style.\n\n\"On their land was a ridge of hills called the Sleeping Dragon, and the elder of the brothers took it as a name and called himself Master Sleeping Dragon. This is your man. He is a veritable genius. You ought really to visit him. And if he will help you, you need feel no more anxiety about peace in the empire.\"\n\n\"Water Mirror spoke that time of two persons, Sleeping Dragon and Young Phoenix, and said if only one of them could be got to help me all would be well. Surely he, whom you speak of, is one of them.\"\n\n\"Young Phoenix is Pang Tong of Xiangyang, and Sleeping Dragon is Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nLiu Bei jumped with delight, \"Now at last I know who the mysterious ones are. How I wish they were here! But for you I should have still been an unclued man,\" said he.\n\nSomeone has celebrated in verse this interview where Xu Shu from horseback recommended Zhuge Liang:\n\n\u2003Liu Bei heard that his able friend\n\n\u2003Must leave him, with saddened heart,\n\n\u2003For each to the other had grown very dear,\n\n\u2003Both wept when it came to part.\n\n\u2003But the parting guest then mentioned a name\n\n\u2003That echoed both loud and deep,\n\n\u2003Like a thunder clap in a spring-time sky,\n\n\u2003And there wakened a dragon from sleep.\n\nThus was Zhuge Liang recommended to Liu Bei, and Xu Shu rode away.\n\nNow Liu Bei understood the speech of the hermit Water Mirror, and he woke as one from a drunken sleep. At the head of his officers, he retook the road to the city and having prepared rich gifts set out, with his brothers, for Nanyang.\n\nUnder the influence of his emotions at parting, Xu Shu had mentioned the name and betrayed the retreat of his friend. Now he thought of the possibility that Zhuge Liang would be unwilling to play the part of helper in Liu Bei's scheme, so Xu Shu determined to go to visit him. He therefore took his way to Sleeping Dragon Ridge and dismounted at the cottage.\n\nAsked why he had come, Xu Shu replied, \"I wished to serve Liu Bei of Yuzhou, but my mother has been imprisoned by Cao Cao, and has sent to call me. Therefore I have had to leave him. At the moment of parting I commended you to him. You may expect him speedily and I hope, Sir, you will not refuse your aid but will consent to use your great talents to help him.\"\n\nZhuge Liang showed annoyance and said, \"And so you have made me a victim of the world's sacrifice.\"\n\nSo saying, Zhuge Liang shook out his sleeves and left the room. The guest shamefacedly retired, mounted his horse, and hastened on his way to the capital to see his mother.\n\n\u2003To help the lord he loved right well,\n\n\u2003He summoned the aid of another\n\n\u2003When he took the distant homeward way\n\n\u2003At the call of a loving mother." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Sima Hui Recommends A Scholar To Liu Bei; Liu Bei Pays Three Visits To The Sleeping Dragon Ridge.\n\nAs has been said Xu Shu hastened to the capital. When Cao Cao knew Xu Shu had arrived, he sent two of his confidants, Xun Yu and Cheng Yu to receive the newcomer at the city gate, and so Xu Shu was led first to the Prime Minister's palace.\n\n\"Why did such an illustrious scholar as you bow the knee to Liu Bei?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I am young, and I fled to avoid the results of certain escapades. I spent some time as a wanderer and so came to Xinye where I became good friends with him. But my mother is here, and when I thought of all her affection, I could no longer remain absent.\"\n\n\"Now you will be able to take care of your mother at all times. And I may have the privilege of receiving your instructions.\"\n\nXu Shu then took his leave and hastened to his mother's dwelling. Weeping with emotion, he made his obeisance to her at the door of her room.\n\nBut she was greatly surprised to see him and said, \"What have you come here for?\"\n\n\"I was at Xinye, in the service of Liu Bei of Yuzhou, when I received your letter. I came immediately.\"\n\nHis mother suddenly grew very angry.\n\nStriking the table she cried, \"You shameful and degenerate son! For years you have been a vagabond in spite of all my teaching. You are a student and know the books. You must then know that loyalty and filial piety are often opposed. Did you not recognize in Cao Cao a traitor, a man who flouts his king and insults the mighty ones? Did you not see that Liu Bei was virtuous and upright as all the world knows? Moreover, he is of the House of Han, and when you were with him you were serving a fitting master. Now on the strength of a scrap of forged writing, with no attempt at any inquiry, you have left the light and plunged into darkness and earned a disgraceful reputation. Truly you are stupid. How can I bear to look upon you? You have besmirched the fair fame of your forefathers and are of no use in the world!\"\n\nThe son remained bowed to the earth, not daring to lift his eyes while his mother delivered this vilifying tirade. As she said the last word, she rose suddenly and left the room. Soon after one of the servants came out to say Lady Xun had hanged herself. Xu Shu rushed in to try to save her, but was too late. A eulogy of her conduct has been written thus:\n\n\u2003Wise Mother Xun, fair is your fame,\n\n\u2003The storied page glows with your name,\n\n\u2003From duty's path you never strayed,\n\n\u2003The family's renown you made.\n\n\u2003To train your son no pains you spared,\n\n\u2003For your own body nothing cared.\n\n\u2003You stand sublime, from us apart,\n\n\u2003Through simple purity of heart.\n\n\u2003Brave Liu Bei's virtues you extolled,\n\n\u2003You blamed Cao Cao, the basely bold.\n\n\u2003Of blazing fire you felt no fear,\n\n\u2003You blenched not when the sword came near,\n\n\u2003But dreaded lest a willful son\n\n\u2003Should dim the fame his fathers won.\n\n\u2003Yes, Mother Xun was of one mold\n\n\u2003With famous heroes of old,\n\n\u2003Who never shrank from injury,\n\n\u2003And even were content to die.\n\n\u2003Fair meed of praise, while still alive,\n\n\u2003Was yours, and ever will survive.\n\n\u2003Hail! Mother Xun, your memory,\n\n\u2003While time rolls on, shall never.\n\nAt sight of his mother dead, Xu Shu fell in a swoon and only recovered consciousness after a long time. By and bye Cao Cao heard of it and sent mourning gifts, and in due course went in person to condole and sacrifice. The body was interred on the south of the capital, and the dead woman's unhappy son kept vigil at her tomb. He steadily rejected all gifts from Cao Cao.\n\nAt that time Cao Cao was contemplating an attack on the south.\n\nHis adviser Xun Yu dissuaded him, saying, \"The winter is not favorable for this campaign. My lord should await milder weather.\"\n\nAnd Cao Cao yielded. But he began to prepare, and led the River Zhang's waters aside to form a lake, which he called the Aquamarine Lake, where he could accustom his soldiers to fight on the water.\n\nAs has been said, Liu Bei prepared gifts to offer to Zhuge Liang on his visit. One day his servants announced a stranger of extraordinary appearance, wearing a lofty headdress and a wide belt.\n\n\"Surely this is he,\" said Liu Bei, and, hastily arranging his dress, he went to welcome the visitor.\n\nBut the first glance showed him that it was the recluse of the mountains, Sima Hui. However, Liu Bei was glad to see him and led him into the inner apartment as he would an old friend.\n\nThere Liu Bei conducted him to the seat of honor and made his obeisance, saying, \"Since leaving you that day in the mountains, I have been overwhelmed with military preparations and so have failed to visit you as courtesy demanded. Now that the brightness has descended upon me, I hope this dereliction of duty may be pardoned.\"\n\n\"I hear Xu Shu is here. I have come expressly to see him,\" replied Water Mirror bluntly.\n\n\"He has lately left for Xuchang. A messenger came with a letter telling of the imprisonment of his mother.\"\n\n\"Then he has just fallen into Cao Cao's trap, for that letter was a forgery. I have known his mother to be a very noble woman. Even if she were imprisoned by Cao Cao, she would not summon her son like that. Certainly the letter was a forgery. If the son did not go, the mother would be safe; if he went, she would be a dead woman.\"\n\n\"But how?\" asked Liu Bei dismayed.\n\n\"She is a woman of the highest principles, who would be greatly mortified at the sight of her son under such conditions.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Just as your friend was leaving, he mentioned the name of a certain Zhuge Liang. What think you of him?\"\n\nWater Mirror laughed, saying, \"If Xu Shu wanted to go, he was free to go. But why did he want to provoke Zhuge Liang into coming out and showing compassion for someone else?\"\n\n\"Why do you speak like that?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\nHe replied, \"Five persons, Zhuge Liang of Nanyang, Cui Zhouping of Boling, Shi Guangyuan of Yingchuan, Meng Gongwei of Runan, and Xu Shu of Yingchuan were the closest of friends. They formed a little coterie devoted to meditation on essential refinement. Only Zhuge Liang arrived at a perception of its meaning. He used to sit among them with his arms about his knees muttering and then, pointing to his companions, he would say, 'You, gentlemen, would become governors and protectors if you were in official life.'\n\n\"When they asked him what was his ambition, he would only smile and always compared himself with the great ancient scholars Guan Zhong and Yue Yi. No one could gauge his talents.\"\n\n\"How comes it that Yingchuan produces so many able humans?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"That old astrologer, Yin Kui, used to say that the stars clustered thick over the region, and so there were many wise people.\"\n\nNow Guan Yu was there. When he heard Zhuge Liang so highly praised, he said, \"Guan Zhong and Yue Yi are the two most famous leaders mentioned in the Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Periods. They well overtopped the rest of humankind. Is it not a little too much to say that Zhuge Liang compares with these two?\"\n\n\"In my opinion he should not be compared with these two, but rather with two others,\" said Water Mirror.\n\n\"Who are these two?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"One of them is Lu Wang, who laid the foundations of the Zhou Dynasty so firmly that it lasted eight hundred years; and the other Zhang Liang, who made the Han glorious for four centuries.\"\n\nBefore the surprise called forth by this startling statement had subsided, Water Mirror walked down the steps and took his leave. Liu Bei would have kept him if he could, but he was obdurate.\n\nAs he stalked proudly away, he threw up his head and said, \"Though Sleeping Dragon has found his lord, he has not been born at the right time. It is a pity!\"\n\n\"What a wise hermit!\" was Liu Bei's comment.\n\nSoon after the three brothers set out to find the abode of the wise man. When they drew near the Sleeping Dragon Ridge, they saw a number of peasants in a field hoeing up the weeds, and as they worked they sang:\n\n\u2003\"The earth is a checkered board,\n\n\u2003And the sky hangs over all,\n\n\u2003Under it humans are contending,\n\n\u2003Some rise, but a many fall.\n\n\u2003For those who succeed this is well,\n\n\u2003But for those who go under rough.\n\n\u2003There's a dozing dragon hard by,\n\n\u2003But his sleep is not deep enough.\"\n\nLiu Bei and his brothers stopped to listen to the song and, calling up one of the peasants, asked who made it.\n\n\"It was made by Master Sleeping Dragon,\" said the laborer.\n\n\"Then he lives hereabout. Where?\"\n\n\"South of this hill there is a ridge called the Sleeping Dragon, and close by is a sparse wood. In it stands a modest cottage. That is where Master Zhuge Liang takes his repose.\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him and the party rode on. Soon they came to the ridge, most aptly named, for indeed it lay wrapped in an atmosphere of calm beauty.\n\nA poet wrote of it thus:\n\n\u2003Not far from Xiangyang\n\n\u2003There stands, clear cut against the sky,\n\n\u2003A lofty ridge, and at its foot\n\n\u2003A gentle stream goes gliding by.\n\n\u2003The contour, curving up and down,\n\n\u2003Although by resting cloud it's marred,\n\n\u2003Arrests the eye; and here and there\n\n\u2003The flank by waterfalls is scarred.\n\n\u2003There, like a sleeping dragon coiled,\n\n\u2003Or phoenix hid among thick pines,\n\n\u2003You see, secure from prying eyes,\n\n\u2003A cot, reed-built on rustic lines.\n\n\u2003The rough-joined doors, pushed by the wind,\n\n\u2003Swing idly open and disclose\n\n\u2003The greatest genius of the world\n\n\u2003Enjoying still his calm repose.\n\n\u2003The air is full of woodland scents,\n\n\u2003Around are hedgerows trim and green,\n\n\u2003Close-growing intercrossed bamboos\n\n\u2003Replace the painted doorway screen.\n\n\u2003But look within and books you see\n\n\u2003By every couch, near every chair;\n\n\u2003And you may guess that common persons\n\n\u2003Are very seldom welcomed there.\n\n\u2003The hut seems far from human ken,\n\n\u2003So far one might expect to find\n\n\u2003Wild forest denizens there, trained\n\n\u2003To serve in place of humankind.\n\n\u2003Without a hoary crane might stand\n\n\u2003As warden of the outer gate;\n\n\u2003Within a long-armed gibbon come\n\n\u2003To offer fruit upon a plate.\n\n\u2003But enter; there refinement reigns;\n\n\u2003Brocaded silk the lutes protect,\n\n\u2003And burnished weapons on the walls\n\n\u2003The green of pines outside reflect.\n\n\u2003For he who dwells within that hut\n\n\u2003Is talented beyond compare,\n\n\u2003Although he lives the simple life\n\n\u2003And harvest seems his only care.\n\n\u2003He waits until the thunderous call\n\n\u2003Shall bid him wake, nor sleep again;\n\n\u2003Then will he forth and at his word\n\n\u2003Peace over all the land shall reign.\n\nLiu Bei soon arrived at the door of the retreat, dismounted, and knocked at the rough door of the cottage. A youth appeared and asked what he wanted.\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I am Liu Bei, General of the Han Dynasty, Lord of Yicheng, Imperial Protector of Yuzhou, and Uncle of the Emperor. I am come to salute the Master.\"\n\n\"I cannot remember so many titles,\" said the lad.\n\n\"Then simply say that Liu Bei has come to inquire after him.\"\n\n\"The Master left this morning early.\"\n\n\"Whither has he gone?\"\n\n\"His movements are very uncertain. I do not know whither he has gone.\"\n\n\"When will he return?\"\n\n\"That also is uncertain. Perhaps in three days, perhaps in ten.\"\n\nThe disappointment was keen.\n\n\"Let us go back, since we cannot see him,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Wait a little time,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"It would be better to return,\" said Guan Yu, \"then we might send to find out when this man had come back.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei agreed, first saying to the boy, \"When the Master returns, tell him that Liu Bei has been here.\"\n\nThey rode away for some miles. Presently Liu Bei stopped and looked back at the surroundings of the little cottage in the wood.\n\nThe mountains were picturesque rather than grand, the water clear rather than profound, the plain was level rather than extensive, the woods luxuriant rather than thick. Gibbons ranged through the trees, and cranes waded in the shallow water. The pines and the bamboos vied with each other in verdure. It was a scene to linger upon.\n\nWhile Liu Bei stood regarding it, he saw a figure coming down a mountain path. The man's bearing was lofty. He was handsome and dignified. He wore a comfortable-looking bonnet on his head, and a black robe hung about his figure in easy folds. He used a staff to help him down the steep path.\n\n\"Surely that is he!\" said Liu Bei.\n\nHe dismounted and walked over to greet the stranger, whom he saluted deferentially, saying, \"Are you not Master Sleeping Dragon, Sir?\"\n\n\"Who are you, General?\" said the stranger.\n\n\"I am Liu Bei.\"\n\n\"I am not Zhuge Liang, but I am a friend of his. My name is Cui Zhouping.\"\n\n\"Long have I known of you! I am very glad to see you,\" replied Liu Bei. \"And now I pray you be seated just where we are, and let me receive your instruction.\"\n\nThe two men sat down in the wood on a stone, and the two brothers ranged themselves by Liu Bei's side.\n\nCui Zhouping began, saying, \"General, for what reason do you wish to see Zhuge Liang?\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"The empire is in confusion, and troubles gather everywhere. I want your friend to tell me how to restore order.\"\n\n\"You, Sir, wish to arrest the present disorder, although you are a kindly man and, from the oldest antiquity, the correction of disorder has demanded stern measures. On the day that Liu Bang first put his hand to the work and slew the wicked ruler of Qin, order began to replace disorder. Good government began with the Supreme Ancestor (BC 206), and endured two hundred years \u2014 two centuries of tranquillity. Then came Wang Mang's rebellion, and disorder took the place of order. Anon, arose Liu Xiu, who restored the Han Dynasty, and order once more prevailed. We have had two centuries of order and tranquillity, and the time of trouble and battles is due. The restoration of peace will take time. It cannot be quickly accomplished. You, Sir, wish to get Zhuge Liang to regulate times and seasons, to repair the cosmos, but I fear the task is indeed difficult, and to attempt it would be a vain expenditure of mental energy. You know well that he who goes with the favor of Heaven travels an easy road; he who goes contrary meets difficulties. One cannot escape one's lot; one cannot evade fate.\"\n\n\"Master,\" replied Liu Bei, \"your insight is indeed deep, and your words of wide meaning. But I am a scion of the House of Han and must help it. Dare I talk of the inevitable and trust to fate?\"\n\nCui Zhouping replied, \"A simple denizen of the mountain wilds is unfitted to discuss the affairs of empire. But you bade me speak and I have spoken \u2014 perhaps somewhat madly.\"\n\n\"Master, I am grateful for your instruction. But know you whither Zhuge Liang has gone?\"\n\n\"I also came to see him, and I know not where he is,\" said Cui Zhouping.\n\n\"If I asked you, Master, to accompany me to my poor bit of territory, would you come?\"\n\n\"I am too dilatory, too fond of leisure and ease, and no longer have any ambitions. But I will see you another time.\"\n\nAnd with these words Cui Zhouping saluted and left. The three brothers also mounted and started homeward.\n\nPresently Zhang Fei said, \"We have not found Zhuge Liang, and we have had to listen to the wild ravings of this so-called scholar. There is the whole result of this journey.\"\n\n\"His words were those of a deep thinker,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nSome days after the return to Xinye, Liu Bei sent to find out whether Zhuge Liang had returned, and the messenger came back saying that he had. Wherefore Liu Bei prepared for another visit.\n\nAgain Zhang Fei showed his irritation by remarking, \"Why must you go hunting after this villager? Send and tell him to come.\"\n\n\"Silence!\" said Liu Bei, \"The Teacher Mencius said, 'To try to see the sage without going his way is like barring a door you wish to enter.' Zhuge Liang is the greatest sage of the day. How can I summon him?\"\n\nSo Liu Bei rode away to make his visit, his two brothers with him as before. It was winter and exceedingly cold. Floating clouds covered the whole sky. Before they had gone far, a bitter wind began to blow in their faces, and the snow began to fly. Soon the mountains were of jade and the trees of silver.\n\n\"It is very cold and the earth is frozen hard, no fighting is possible now,\" said Zhang Fei. \"Yet we are going all this way to get advice which will be useless to us. Where is the sense of it? Let us rather get back to Xinye out of the cold.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I am set upon proving my zeal to Zhuge Liang. But if you, my brother, do not like the cold, you can return.\"\n\n\"I do not fear death: Do you think I care for the cold? But I do care about wasting my brother's energies,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Say no more,\" said Liu Bei, and they traveled on.\n\nWhen they drew near the little wood, they heard singing in a roadside inn and stopped to listen. This was the song:\n\n\u2003Although possessed of talent rare,\n\n\u2003This man has made no name;\n\n\u2003Alas! The day is breaking late\n\n\u2003That is to show his fame.\n\n\u2003O friends you know the Lu Wang's tale:\n\n\u2003The aged man constrained to leave\n\n\u2003His cottage by the sea,\n\n\u2003To follow in a prince's train\n\n\u2003His counselor to be.\n\n\u2003Eight hundred feudal chieftains met\n\n\u2003Who came with one accord;\n\n\u2003The happy omen, that white fish,\n\n\u2003That leapt the boat aboard;\n\n\u2003The gory field in distant wilds.\n\n\u2003Whence flowed a crimson tide,\n\n\u2003And him acknowledged chief in war\n\n\u2003Whose virtues none denied;\n\n\u2003That Zhang Liang, a Gaoyang rustic,\n\n\u2003Fond of wine, who left, his native place\n\n\u2003And went to serve so faithfully\n\n\u2003The man of handsome face;\n\n\u2003And one who spoke of ruling chiefs\n\n\u2003In tones so bold and free,\n\n\u2003But sitting at the festive board\n\n\u2003Was full of courtesy;\n\n\u2003And one, that was he who laid in dust\n\n\u2003Walled cities near four score\n\n\u2003But humans of doughty deeds like these\n\n\u2003On earth are seen no more.\n\n\u2003Now had these humans not found their lord\n\n\u2003Would they be known to fame?\n\n\u2003Yet having found, they served him well\n\n\u2003And so achieved a name.\n\nThe song ended, the singer's companion tapping the table sang:\n\n\u2003We had a famous founder,\n\n\u2003Who drew his shining sword,\n\n\u2003Cleansed all the land within the seas\n\n\u2003And made himself its lord.\n\n\u2003In time his son succeeded him,\n\n\u2003And so from son to son\n\n\u2003The lordship passed, held firm until\n\n\u2003Four hundred years had run.\n\n\u2003Then dawned a day of weaklier sons,\n\n\u2003The fiery virtue failed,\n\n\u2003Then ministers betrayed their trust,\n\n\u2003Court intrigues vile prevailed.\n\n\u2003The omens came; a serpent\n\n\u2003Coiled on the dragon throne,\n\n\u2003While in the hall of audience\n\n\u2003Unholy haloes shone.\n\n\u2003Now bandits swarm in all the land\n\n\u2003And noble strives with chief,\n\n\u2003The common people, sore perplexed,\n\n\u2003Can nowhere find relief.\n\n\u2003Let's drown our sorrows in the cup,\n\n\u2003Be happy while we may,\n\n\u2003Let those who wish run after fame\n\n\u2003That is to last for aye.\n\nThe two men laughed loud and clapped their hands as the second singer ceased. Liu Bei thought full surely the longed for sage was there, so he dismounted and entered the inn. He saw the two merry-makers sitting opposite each other at a table. One was pale with a long beard; the other had a strikingly refined face.\n\nLiu Bei saluted them and said, \"Which of you is Master Sleeping Dragon?\"\n\n\"Who are you, Sir?\" asked the long-bearded one. \"What business have you with Sleeping Dragon?\"\n\n\"I am Liu Bei. I want to inquire of him on how to restore tranquillity to the world.\"\n\n\"Well, neither of us is your man, but we are friends of his. My name is Shi Guangyuan and my friend here is Meng Gongwei.\"\n\n\"I know you both by reputation,\" said Liu Bei gladly. \"I am indeed fortunate to meet you in this haphazard way. Will you not come to Sleeping Dragon's retreat and talk for a time? I have horses here for you.\"\n\n\"We idle folks of the wilds know nothing of tranquilizing states. Please do not trouble to ask. Pray mount again and continue searching Sleeping Dragon.\"\n\nSo he remounted and went his way. He reached the little cottage, dismounted, and tapped at the door. The same lad answered his knock, and he asked whether the Master had returned.\n\n\"He is in his room reading,\" said the boy.\n\nJoyful indeed was Liu Bei as he followed the lad in. In front of the middle door he saw written this pair of scrolls:\n\nBy purity inspire the inclination;\n\nBy repose affect the distant.\n\nAs Liu Bei was looking at this couplet, he heard someone singing in a subdued voice and stopped by the door to peep in. He saw a young man close to a charcoal brazier, hugging his knees while he sang:\n\n\u2003\"The phoenix dies high, O!\n\n\u2003And only will perch on a magnolia tree.\n\n\u2003The scholar is hidden, O!\n\n\u2003Till his lord appear he can patient be.\n\n\u2003He tills his fields, O!\n\n\u2003He is well-content and loves his home,\n\n\u2003He awaits his day, O!\n\n\u2003His books and his lute to leave and roam.\n\nAs the song ended Liu Bei advanced and saluted, saying, \"Master, long have I yearned for you, but have found it impossible to salute you. Lately Water Mirror spoke of you and I hastened to your dwelling, only to come away disappointed. This time I have braved the elements and come again and my reward is here. I see your face, and I am indeed fortunate.\"\n\nThe young man hastily returned the salute and said, \"General, you must be that Liu Bei of Yuzhou who wishes to see my brother.\"\n\n\"Then, Master, you are not Sleeping Dragon!\" said Liu Bei, starting back.\n\n\"I am his younger brother, Zhuge Jun. He has another elder brother, Zhuge Jin, now with Sun Quan in the South Land as a counselor. Zhuge Liang is the second of our family.\"\n\n\"Is your brother at home?\"\n\n\"Only yesterday he arranged to go a jaunt with Cui Zhouping.\"\n\n\"Whither have they gone?\"\n\n\"Who can say? They may take a boat and sail away among the lakes, or go to gossip with the priests in some remote mountain temple, or wander off to visit a friend in some far away village, or be sitting in some cave with a lute or a chessboard. Their goings and comings are uncertain and nobody can guess at them.\"\n\n\"What very poor luck have I! Twice have I failed to meet the great sage.\"\n\n\"Pray sit a few moments, and let me offer you some tea.\"\n\n\"Brother, since the master is not here, I pray you remount and go,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Since I am here, why not a little talk before we go home again?\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThen turning to his host he continued, \"Can you tell me if your worthy brother is skilled in strategy and studies works on war?\"\n\n\"I do not know.\"\n\nGrumbled Zhang Fei, \"The wind and snow are getting worse. We ought to go back.\"\n\nLiu Bei turned on him angrily and told him to stop.\n\nZhuge Jun said, \"Since my brother is absent, I will not presume to detain you longer. I will return your call soon.\"\n\n\"Please do not take that trouble. In a few days I will come again. But if I could borrow paper and ink, I would leave a note to show your worthy brother that I am zealous and earnest.\"\n\nZhuge Jun produced the \"four treasures\" of the scholar, and Liu Bei, thawing out the frozen brush between his lips, spread the sheet of delicate note-paper and wrote:\n\n\"Liu Bei has long admired your fame. He has visited your dwelling twice, but to his great regret he has gone empty away. He humbly remembers that he is a distant relative of the Emperor, that he has undeservedly enjoyed fame and rank. When he sees the proper government wrested aside and replaced by pretense, the foundation of the state crumbling away, hordes of braves creating confusion in the country, and an evil cabal behaving unseemly toward the rightful Prince, then his heart and gall are torn to shreds. Though he has a real desire to assist, yet is he deficient in the needful skill. Wherefore he turns to the Master, trusting in his kindness, graciousness, loyalty, and righteousness. Would the Master but use his talent, equal to that of Lu Wang, and perform great deeds like Zhang Liang, then would the empire be happy and the Throne would be secure.\n\n\"This is written to tell you that, after purification of mind with fasting and of body with fragrant baths, Liu Bei will come again to prostrate himself in your honored presence and receive enlightenment\"\n\nThe letter written and given to Zhuge Jun, Liu Bei took his leave, exceedingly disappointed at this second failure.\n\nAs he was mounting, he saw the serving lad waving his hand outside the hedge and heard him call out, \"The old Master is coming!\"\n\nLiu Bei looked and then saw a figure seated on a donkey leisurely jogging along over a bridge.\n\nThe rider of the donkey wore a cap with long flaps down to his shoulders, and his body was wrapped in a fox fur robe. A youth followed him bearing a jar of wine. As he came through the snow he hummed a song:\n\n\u2003\"This is eve, the sky is overcast,\n\n\u2003The north wind comes with icy blast,\n\n\u2003Light snowflakes whirl down until\n\n\u2003A white pall covers dale and hill.\n\n\u2003Perhaps above the topmost sky\n\n\u2003White dragons strive for mastery,\n\n\u2003The armor scales from their forms riven\n\n\u2003Are scattered over the world wind-driven.\n\n\u2003Amid the storm there jogs along\n\n\u2003A simple wight who croons a song.\n\n\u2003'O poor plum trees, the gale doth tear\n\n\u2003Your blossoms off and leave you bare.'\"\n\n\"Here at last is Sleeping Dragon,\" thought Liu Bei, hastily slipping out of the saddle.\n\nHe saluted the donkey rider as he neared and said, \"Master, it is hard to make way against this cold wind. I and my companions have been waiting long.\"\n\nThe rider got off his donkey and returned the bow, while Zhuge Jun from behind said, \"This is not my brother. It is his father-in-law Huang Chenyan.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"I chanced to hear the song you were singing. It is very beautiful.\"\n\nHuang Chenyan replied, \"It is a little poem I read in my son in-law's house, and I recalled it as I crossed the bridge and saw the plum trees in the hedge. And so it happened to catch your ear, Noble Sir.\"\n\n\"Have you seen your son-in-law lately?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"That is just what I have come to do now.\"\n\nAt this Liu Bei bade him farewell and went on his way. The storm was very grievous to bear, but worse than the storm was the grief in his heart as he looked back at Sleeping Dragon Ridge.\n\n\u2003One winter's day through snow and wind\n\n\u2003A prince rode forth the sage to find;\n\n\u2003Alas! His journey was in vain,\n\n\u2003And sadly turned he home again.\n\n\u2003The stream stood still beneath the bridge\n\n\u2003A sheet of ice draped rock and ridge,\n\n\u2003His steed benumbed with biting cold\n\n\u2003But crawled as he were stiff and old.\n\n\u2003The snowflakes on the rider's head\n\n\u2003Were like pear-blossoms newly shed,\n\n\u2003Or like the willow-catkins light\n\n\u2003They brushed his cheek in headlong flight.\n\n\u2003He stayed his steed, he looked around,\n\n\u2003The snow lay thick on tree and mound,\n\n\u2003The Sleeping Dragon Ridge lay white\n\n\u2003A hill of silver, glistening bright.\n\nAfter the return to Xinye, the time slipped away till spring was near. Then Liu Bei cast lots to find the propitious day for another journey in search of Zhuge Liang. The day being selected, he fasted for three days and then changed his dress ready for the visit. His two brothers viewed the preparations with disapproval and presently made up their minds to remonstrate.\n\n\u2003The sage and the fighting generals never agree,\n\n\u2003A warrior despises humility." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Plans For The Three Kingdoms; Sun Quan Attacks Xiakou To Take Revenges.\n\nNothing discouraged by two unsuccessful visits to the retreat of the sage whose advice he sought to secure, Liu Bei made preparations for a third visit.\n\nHis brothers disapproved, and Guan Yu said, \"Brother, you have sought him twice. Surely this is showing even too much deference. I do not believe in this fame of his for learning. He is avoiding you and dare not submit to the test. Why so obstinately hold this idea?\"\n\n\"You are wrong, my brother. In the Spring and Autumn Period Prince Huan of Qi paid five visits to the Eastern Suburb before he got to see Guan Zhong. And my desire to see Zhuge Liang is even greater than his.\"\n\n\"I think you are mistaken,\" said Zhang Fei. \"How can this villager be such a marvel of wisdom? You should not go again and, if he will not come, I will bring him with a hempen rope.\"\n\n\"Have you forgotten the great King Wen's visit to Lu Wang, the old man of the River Wei? If King Wen could show such deference to a wise man, where am I too deferential? If you will not go, your brother and I will go without you,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If you two go, how can I hang back?\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"If you go, then you must be polite.\"\n\nZhang Fei said he would not forget himself, and the three set out. When they were a quarter of mile from the little cottage, Liu Bei dismounted, deciding to show his respect by approaching the house on foot. Very soon he met Zhuge Jun, whom he saluted with great deference, inquiring whether his brother was at home.\n\n\"He returned last evening. You can see him today, General.\"\n\nAs Zhuge Jun said this, he went off with some swagger.\n\n\"Fortune favors me this time,\" said Liu Bei. \"I am going to see the Master.\"\n\n\"That was a rude fellow,\" said Zhang Fei. \"It would not have hurt him to have conducted us to the house. Why did he go off like that?\"\n\n\"Each one has his own affairs,\" said Liu Bei. \"What power have we over him?\"\n\nSoon the three stood at the door, and they knocked. The serving lad came out and asked their business.\n\nLiu Bei said very deferentially, \"I would trouble the servant of the genius, gentle page, to inform the Master that Liu Bei wishes to pay his respects to him.\"\n\n\"My master is at home, but he is asleep.\"\n\n\"In that case do not announce me.\"\n\nLiu Bei bade his two brothers wait at the door quietly, and he himself entered with careful steps. There was the man he sought, lying asleep on the couch, stretched on a simple mat. Liu Bei saluted him with joined hands at a respectful distance.\n\nThe time passed and still the sleeper did not wake. The two brothers left without, beginning to feel impatient, also came in, and Zhang Fei was annoyed at seeing his revered elder brother respectfully standing by while another slept.\n\n\"What an arrogant fellow is this Master?\" said he. \"There is our brother waiting, while he sleeps on perfectly carelessly. I will go to the back of the place and let off a bomb and see if that will rouse him.\"\n\n\"No, no! You must do nothing of the kind,\" whispered Guan Yu, and then Liu Bei told them to go out again.\n\nJust then Liu Bei noticed that the Master moved. He turned over as though about to rise, but, instead, he faced the wall and again fell asleep. The serving lad made as if he would rouse his master, but Liu Bei forbade him to be disturbed, and Liu Bei waited yet another weary hour. Then Zhuge Liang woke up repeating to himself the lines:\n\n\u2003\"Can any know what fate is his?\n\n\u2003Yet have I felt throughout my life,\n\n\u2003The day would come at last to quit\n\n\u2003The calm retreat for toil and strife.\"\n\nAs he finished, he turned to the lad, saying, \"Have any of the usual people come?\"\n\n\"Liu Bei, the Uncle of the Emperor is here,\" said the boy. \"He has been waiting a long time.\"\n\n\"Why did you not tell me?\" said he, rising from the couch. \"I must dress.\"\n\nZhuge Liang rose and turned into a room behind to dress. In a short time he reappeared, his clothing properly arranged, to receive his visitor.\n\nThen Liu Bei saw coming toward him a young man of medium height with a refined face. He wore a head-wrap and a long crane-white gown. He moved with much dignity as though he was rather more than mortal.\n\nLiu Bei bowed, saying, \"I am one of the offshoots of the Han family, a simple person from Zhuo. I have long known the Master's fame, which has indeed thundered in my ear. Twice I have come to visit you, without success. Once I left my name on your writing table. You may have my note.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"This hermit is but a dilatory person by temperament. I know I have to thank you for more than one vain visit, and I am ashamed to think of them.\"\n\nThese courteous remarks and the proper bows exchanged, the two men sat in their relative positions as host and guest, and the serving lad brought tea.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said, \"From your letter I know that you grieve for both people and government. If I were not so young and if I possessed any talent, I would venture to question you.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"Sima Hui and Xu Shu have both spoken of you. Can it be that their words were vain? I trust, O Master, that you will not despise my worthlessness but will condescend to instruct me.\"\n\n\"The two men you speak of are very profound scholars. I am but a peasant, a mere farmer, and who am I that I should talk of empire politics? Those two misled you when they spoke of me. Why do you reject the beautiful jewel for a worthless pebble?\"\n\n\"But your abilities are world embracing and marvelous. How can you be content to allow time to pass while you idle away life in these secluded haunts? I conjure you, O Master, to remember the inhabitants of the empire and remove my crass ignorance by bestowing instruction upon me.\"\n\n\"But what is your ambition, General?\"\n\nLiu Bei moved his seat nearer to his host and said, \"The Hans are sinking: Designing ministers steal away their authority. I am weak, yet I desire to restore the state to its right mind. But my ignorance is too vast, my means are too slender, and I know not where to turn. Only you, Master, can lighten my darkness and preserve me from falling. How happy should I be if you would do so!\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"One bold person after another has arisen in various parts of the empire ever since the days of the rebel Dong Zhuo. Cao Cao was not so powerful as Yuan Shao, but he overcame Yuan Shao by seizing the favorable moment and using his soldiers properly. Now he is all-powerful: He rules an immense army and, through his control of the court, the various feudal lords as well. You cannot think of opposing him. Then the Suns have held their territory in the South Land for three generations. Their position in that old state of Wu may not appear too secure, but they have popularity to appeal to. You can gain support but win no success there.\n\n\"The Region of Jingzhou rests on the two Rivers Han and Mian to the north, and their interests lie in all to the south of these rivers. On the east they touch Wu, and on the west they extend to the ancient states of Ba and Shu. This is the area in which decisive battles have to be won, and one must hold it in order to be secure, and Heaven has virtually made it yours.\n\n\"The Region of Yizhou in the west is an important place, fertile and extensive, a country favored of Heaven and that through which the Founder of Han obtained the empire. Its ruler Liu Zhang is ignorant and weak. The people are noble and the country prosperous, but he does not know how to hold it all, and all the able people of the region are yearning for an enlightened prince.\n\n\"As you are a scion of the Family, well known throughout the land as trusty and righteous, a whole-hearted hero, who greatly desires to win the support of the wise, if you get possession of Yizhou and Jingzhou, if on the west you are in harmony with the Rong Tribes, on the south win over the ancient states of Yi and Viet, make an alliance with Sun Quan of Wu, and maintain good government, you can await confidently the day when Heaven shall offer you the desired opportunity. Then you may depute a worthy leader to go to the northeast while you take command of an expedition to the northwest, and will you not find the warmest welcome prepared for you by the people? This done, the completion of the task will be easy. The Hans will be restored. And these are my counsels in all these operations, if you will only undertake them.\"\n\nZhuge Liang paused while he bade the lad bring out a map. As this was unrolled Zhuge Liang went on, \"There you see the fifty-four counties of the west. Should you wish to take the overlordship, you will yield the Heaven's favor to Cao Cao in the north, and you will relinquish the Earth's advantage to Sun Quan in the south. You, General, will hold the Human's heart and complete the trinity. Jingzhou is to be taken first as a home, the River Lands next for the foundation of domination. When you are firmly established, you can lay your plans for the attainment of the whole empire.\"\n\nAs Zhuge Liang ceased his harangue, Liu Bei left his place and saluted him, saying, \"Your words, O Master, render everything so clear that the clouds are swept aside and I see the clear sky. But Jingzhou belongs to Liu Biao, my kinsman, and Yizhou to another kinsman Liu Zhang. I could hardly take the lands from them.\"\n\n\"I have studied the stars and I know Liu Biao is not long for this world. Further, Liu Zhang is not the sort of man to endure. Both places will certainly fall to you.\"\n\nLiu Bei bowed his acknowledgments. And so, in one conversation, Zhuge Liang proved that he, who had lived in complete retirement all his life, knew and foresaw the tripod division into which the empire was to break. True, indeed, is it that throughout all the ages no one has ever equaled his intelligence and mastery of the situation.\n\n\u2003Behold, when Liu Bei frets that he is weak,\n\n\u2003Then Sleeping Dragon is not far to seek;\n\n\u2003When he desires to know how things will hap,\n\n\u2003The Master, smiling, shows him on the map.\n\n\"Though I be of small repute and scanty virtue,\" said Liu Bei, \"I hope, O Master, you will not despise me for my worthlessness, but will leave this retreat to help me. I will assuredly listen most reverently to your words.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I have long been happy on my farm and am fond of my leisure. I fear I cannot obey your command.\"\n\nLiu Bei wept. \"If you will not, O Master, what will become of the people?\"\n\nThe tears rolled down unchecked upon the lapel and sleeves of Liu Bei's robe. This proved to Zhuge Liang the sincerity of his desire.\n\nHence, Zhuge Liang said, \"General, if you will accept me, I will render what trifling service I can.\"\n\nLiu Bei was greatly delighted. He called in Guan Yu and Zhang Fei to make their bow and brought out the gifts he had prepared. Zhuge Liang refused all the gifts.\n\n\"These are not gifts to engage your services, but mere proof of my regard,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThen the presents were accepted. They all remained that night at the farm. Next day Zhuge Jun returned, and his brother said to him, \"Uncle Liu Bei has come thrice to see me, and now I must go with him. Keep up the farm in my absence and do not let the place go to ruin. As soon as my work is accomplished, I will certainly return.\"\n\n\u2003Then, turning from his humble home,\n\n\u2003He thought of peaceful days to come,\n\n\u2003When he should take the homeward way\n\n\u2003And never beyond the valley stray.\n\n\u2003But duty kept him in the west,\n\n\u2003And there he found his place of rest.\n\n\u2003An old poem may be quoted here:\n\n\u2003The Founder of Han seized his gleaming blade\n\n\u2003And at Mangdang Hills the blood of the white snake flowed.\n\n\u2003He conquered Qin, destroyed Chu, and entered Xianyang.\n\n\u2003After two centuries of rule the line was near broken,\n\n\u2003But Liu Xiu restored the glory at Capital Luoyang.\n\n\u2003And his children occupied the throne\n\n\u2003Till decay began in the days of Huan and Ling.\n\n\u2003The Emperor Xian removed the capital to Xuchang,\n\n\u2003And, within the four seas, all was confusion.\n\n\u2003Bold spirits started up in fierce contention.\n\n\u2003Cao Cao, seized the favorable moment\n\n\u2003And the imperial authority passed into his hands.\n\n\u2003While the Suns made to themselves\n\n\u2003A glorious heritage at the Great River,\n\n\u2003Solitary and poor, Liu Bei wandered from place to place,\n\n\u2003Till he found a haven in Xinye.\n\n\u2003Sorely distressed he was at the sorrows of the people,\n\n\u2003But Sleeping Dragon conceived a noble ambition,\n\n\u2003Within his breast were thoughts\n\n\u2003Of great things to be accomplished by force of arms.\n\n\u2003Then, because of the parting words of Xu Shu,\n\n\u2003And by the thrice repeated visits to his retreat,\n\n\u2003The great hero found and knew his mentor.\n\n\u2003When the age of Zhuge Liang was but thrice nine years,\n\n\u2003He turned from his books, put aside his lute,\n\n\u2003And left the peaceful fields he had loved,\n\n\u2003Under his guidance Jingzhou was taken\n\n\u2003And the two Lands of the Rivers conquered.\n\n\u2003He unrolled great schemes, as one all knowing,\n\n\u2003In speech, he went to and fro in the world,\n\n\u2003The sound of war drums rolled from his tongue,\n\n\u2003The words from his heart stirred one to the utmost depths.\n\n\u2003The dragon pranced, the tiger glared,\n\n\u2003And peace was brought to the world.\n\n\u2003Through all the ages his fame shall never decay.\n\nAfter taking leave of Zhuge Jun, Liu Bei and his followers left for Xinye, with Zhuge Liang as companion. When they took up their abode there, Zhuge Liang was treated as a mentor, eating at the same table, sleeping on the same couch as Liu Bei. They spent whole days conversing over the affairs of the empire.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"Cao Cao is training his troops for naval service in Aquamarine Lake, and hence certainly intends to invade the country south of the Great River. We ought to send our spies to ascertain what Cao Cao and Sun Quan are really doing.\"\n\nSo spies were dispatched.\n\nNow after Sun Quan succeeded to the heritage of his father and brother, he sent far and wide to invite people of ability to aid him. He established lodging places for them in Kuaiji in Wu, and directed Gu Yong and Zhang Hong to welcome and entertain all those who came. And year by year they flocked in, one recommending another. Among them were Kan Ze of Kuaiji, Yan Jun of Pengcheng, Xue Yong of Beishan, Cheng Bing of Runan, Zhu Huan of Wujun, Lu Ji of the same place, Zhang Wen of Wucheng, Luo Tong of Kuaiji, and Wu Can of Wushang. All these scholars were treated with great deference.\n\nMany able leaders came also. Among them were Lu Meng of Runan, Lu Xun of Wujun, Xu Sheng of Langye, Pan Zhang of Dongjun, and Ding Feng of Lujiang. Thus Sun Quan obtained the assistance of many people of ability both in peace and war and all went well with him.\n\nIn the seventh year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 202), Cao Cao had broken the power of Yuan Shao. Then he sent a messenger to the South Land ordering Sun Quan to send his son to court to serve in the retinue of the Emperor. Sun Quan, however, hesitated to comply with this request, and the matter was the subject of much discussion. His mother, Lady Wu, sent for Zhou Yu and Zhang Zhao and asked their advice.\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"Cao Cao wishes a son to be present at court as a hostage whereby he has a hold upon us, as formerly was the case with all the feudal chiefs. If we do not comply with this request, he will doubtless attack the region. There is some peril.\"\n\nZhou Yu said, \"Our lord has succeeded to the heritage and has a large army of veterans and ample supplies. He has able officers ready to do his bidding. So why should he be compelled to send a hostage to any person? To send a hostage is to be forced into joining Cao Cao, and to carry out his behests, whatever they be. Then we shall be in his power. It would be better not to send, but rather to wait patiently the course of events and prepare plans to attack.\"\n\n\"That is also my opinion,\" said the Dowager.\n\nSo Sun Quan dismissed the messenger but did not send his son. Cao Cao resented this and had since nourished schemes against the South Land. But their realization had been delayed by the dangers on the north and, so far, no attack had been made.\n\nLate in the eighth year (AD 203), Sun Quan led his armies against Huang Zu and fought on the Great River, where he was successful in several battles. One of Sun Quan's leaders, Ling Cao, led a fleet of light vessels up the river and broke into Xiakou but was killed by an arrow of Gan Ning, a general of Huang Zu. Ling Cao left a son, Ling Tong, fifteen years of age, who led another expedition to recover his father's corpse and was so far successful. After that, as the war was inclined to go against him, Sun Quan returned again to his own country.\n\nNow Sun Quan's younger brother, Sun Yi, was Governor of Dangyang. He was a hard man and given to drink and, in his cups, very harsh to his people, ordering the infliction of severe floggings. Two of his officers, Military Inspector Gui Lan and Secretary Dai Yuan, bore their chief a grudge and sought to assassinate him. They took into their confidence one Bian Hong, of the escort, and the three plotted to kill their master at a great assembly of officials at Dangyang amid the banquets.\n\nSun Yi's wife, Lady Xu, was skilled in divination, and on the day of the great banquet she cast a most inauspicious lot. Wherefore she besought her husband to stay away from the assembly. But he was obstinate and went. The faithless guardsman followed his master in the dusk when the gathering dispersed, and stabbed him with a dagger.\n\nThe two prime movers at once seized Bian Hong and beheaded him in the market place. Then they went to Sun Yi's residence, which they plundered.\n\nGui Lan was taken with the beauty of the dead Governor's wife and told her, \"I had avenged the death of your husband, and you must go with me.\"\n\nLady Xu pleaded, saying, \"It is too soon after my husband's death to think of remarriage. But as soon as the thirty-day mourning sacrifices are over, I will be yours.\"\n\nShe thus obtained a respite, which she utilized to send for two old generals of her husband, Sun Gao and Fu Ying. They came and she tearfully told her tale.\n\n\"My husband had great faith in you. Now Gui Lan and Dai Yuan have compassed his death and have laid the crime on Bian Hong. They have plundered my house and carried off my servants. Worse than this, Gui Lan insists that I shall be his wife. To gain time I have pretended to favor this proposal, and I pray you now send the news to my husband's brother and beg him to slay these two miscreants and avenge this wrong. I will never forget your kindness in this life or the next.\"\n\nAnd she bowed before them.\n\nThey wept also and said, \"We were much attached to our master; and now that he has come to an untimely end, we must avenge him. Dare we not carry out your behests?\"\n\nSo they sent a trusty messenger to Sun Quan.\n\nOn the day of the sacrifices Lady Xu called in her two friends and hid them in a secret chamber. Then the ceremonies were performed in the great hall. These over, she put off her mourning garb, bathed and perfumed herself, and assumed an expression of joy. She laughed and talked as usual, so that Gui Lan rejoiced in his heart, thinking of the pleasure that was to be his.\n\nWhen night came she sent a servant girl to call her suitor to the palace, where she entertained him at supper. When he had well drunk, she suggested that they should retire and led him to the chamber where her friends were waiting. He followed without the least hesitation.\n\nAs soon as she entered the room, she called out, \"Where are you, Generals?\"\n\nOut rushed Sun Gao and Fu Ying, and the drunken Gui Lan, incapable of any resistance, was dispatched with daggers.\n\nNext Lady Xu invited Dai Yuan to a supper, and he was slain in similar fashion. After that, she sent to the houses of her enemies and slew all therein. This done, she resumed her mourning garb, and the heads of the two men were hung as a sacrifice before the coffin of her husband.\n\nVery soon her brother-in-law came with an army, and hearing the story of the deeds of the two generals from the widow, gave them the ranks of Commandership and put them over Dangyang. When Sun Quan left, he took the widow to his own home so that she would be cared for. All those who heard of her brave conduct were loud in praise of her virtue:\n\n\u2003Full of resource and virtuous, few in the world are like her,\n\n\u2003Guilefully wrought she and compassed the death of the lusty assassins,\n\n\u2003Faithful servants are always ready to deal with rebellion,\n\n\u2003None can ever excel that heroine famous in Wu.\n\nThe brigandage that had troubled the South Land had all been suppressed, and a large fleet of seven thousand battleships was in the Great River ready for service. Sun Quan appointed Zhou Yu to be the Supreme Admiral and Commander-in-Chief over all military forces.\n\nIn the twelfth year (AD 207), the Dowager Wu, feeling her end approaching, called to her the two advisers Zhou Yu and Zhang Zhao and spoke thus: \"I came of a family of the old Wu, but losing my parents in early life. My brother Wu Jing and I went into the old Yue, and then I married into this family. I bore my husband four sons, not without premonitions of the greatness to be theirs. With my first, Sun Ce, I dreamed of the moon and with my second, Sun Quan, of the sun, which omens were interpreted by the soothsayer as signs of their great honor. Unhappy Sun Ce died young, but Sun Quan inherited, and it is he whom I pray you both assist with one accord. Then may I die in peace.\"\n\nAnd to her son she said, \"These two you are to serve as they were your teachers and treat them with all respect. My younger sister and I both were wives to your father, and so she is also a mother to you, and you are to serve her after I am gone as you now serve me. And you must treat your sister with affection and find a handsome husband for her.\"\n\nThen she died and her son mourned for her that year.\n\nThe following year, they began to discuss an attack upon Huang Zu.\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"The armies should not move during the period of mourning.\"\n\nHowever, Zhou Yu, more to the point, said, \"Vengeance should not be postponed on that account. It could not wait upon times and seasons.\"\n\nStill Sun Quan halted between two opinions and would not decide.\n\nThen came Commander Lu Meng who said to his master, \"While I was at Dragon Gorge, one leader of Huang Zu, Gan Ning from Lingjiang, offered to surrender. I found out all about him. He is something of a scholar, is forceful, fond of wandering about as a fighter-errant. He assembled a band of outlaws with whom he roamed over the rivers and lakes, where he would terrorize everybody. He wore a bell at his waist, and at the sound of this bell everyone fled and hid. He fitted his boats with sails of Xichuan brocade, and people called him the 'Pirate with Silken Sails.'\n\n\"Then he reformed. He and his band went to Liu Biao, but they left him when they saw he would never accomplish anything, and now they would serve under your banner, only that Huang Zu detains them at Xiakou. Formerly when you were attacking Huang Zu, he owed the recovery of Xiakou to this same Gan Ning, whom he treated without liberality. When Commander Su Fei recommended Gan Ning for promotion, Huang Zu said, 'He is unsuited for any high position as, after all, he is no more than a pirate.'\n\n\"So Gan Ning became a disappointed and resentful man. Su Fei tried to win him over to good humor and invited him to wine parties and said, 'I have put your name forward many times, but our chief says he has no place suitable for you. However, time slips away and man's life is not very long. One must make the most of it. I will put you forward for the magistracy of Exian, whence you may be able to advance.'\n\n\"So Gan Ning got away from Xiakou and would have come to you then, but he feared that he would not be welcomed, since he had assisted Huang Zu and killed Ling Cao. I told him you were always ready to welcome able people and would nourish no resentment for former deeds. After all, every person was bound to do his best for his master. He would come with alacrity if he only felt sure of a welcome. I pray you express your pleasure.\"\n\nThis was good news for Sun Quan and he said, \"With his help, I could destroy Huang Zu.\"\n\nThen Sun Quan bade Lu Meng bring Gan Ning to see him.\n\nWhen the salutations were over, the chief said, \"My heart is entirely captivated by your coming. I feel no resentment against you. I hope you will have no doubts on that score, and I may as well tell you that I desire some plan for the destruction of Huang Zu.\"\n\nGan Ning replied, \"The dynasty is decadent and without influence. Cao Cao will finally absorb the country down to the river unless he is opposed. Liu Biao provides nothing against the future, and his sons are quite unfitted to succeed him. You should lay your plans to oust him at once before Cao Cao anticipates you. The first attack should be made on Huang Zu, who is getting old and avaricious, so that everyone hates him. He is totally unprepared for a fight and his army is undisciplined. He would fall at the first blow. If he were gone, you would control the western passes and could conquer the lands of Ba and Shu. And you would be securely established.\"\n\n\"The advice is most valuable,\" said Sun Quan, and he made his preparations.\n\nZhou Yu was appointed Commander-in-Chief; Lu Meng was Van Leader; Dong Xi and Gan Ning were Generals. Sun Quan himself would command the main army of one hundred thousand troops.\n\nThe spies reported that to Huang Zu who, at the news of an expedition against him, called his officers together to consult. He placed Su Fei in chief command. He also appointed Chen Jiu and Deng Long as Van Leaders, and prepared for general defense. He had two hundreds of warships under the command of Chen Jiu and Deng Long. On these he placed strong bows and stiff crossbows to the number of more than a thousand and secured the boats to heavy hawsers so that they formed a barrier in the river.\n\nAt the approach of the southern fleet, the drums beat for the ships to attack. Soon arrows and bolts flew thick, forcing back the invaders, who withdrew till several miles of water lay between them and the defenders.\n\n\"We must go forward,\" said Gan Ning to Dong Xi.\n\nSo they chose a hundred light craft and put picked men on them, fifty to a boat. Twenty were to row the boats and thirty to fight. These latter were armored swordsmen. Careless of the enemy's missiles these boats advanced, got to the defenders' fleet, and cut the hawsers of their ships so that they drifted hither and thither in confusion. Gan Ning leaped upon one boat and killed Deng Long. Chen Jiu left the fleet and set out for the shore. Lu Meng dropped into a small boat and went among the larger ships setting them on fire. When Chen Jiu had nearly reached the bank, Lu Meng reckless of death went after him, got ahead, and struck him full in the breast so that he fell.\n\nBefore long Su Fei came along the bank with reinforcements, but it was too late. The armies of the South Land had already landed, and there was no hope of repelling them. Su Fei fled into the open country, but he was made prisoner.\n\nSu Fei was taken to Sun Quan who ordered that he be put into a cage-cart and kept till Huang Zu should be captured. Then he would execute the pair. And the attack was pressed on. Day and night they wrought to capture Xiakou.\n\n\u2003He sees his ships cut loose and burned,\n\n\u2003By the Silk-sailed Pirate he once spurned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "At Jingzhou, The Son Of Liu Biao Thrice Begs Advice; At Bowang Slope, The Directing Instructor Plans His First Battle.\n\nNow Sun Quan fought against Xiakou. When Huang Zu recognized that he was beaten and could not maintain his position, he abandoned Jiangxia and took the road to Jingzhou. Gan Ning, foreseeing this, had laid an ambush outside the east gate of Jiangxia. Soon after the fugitive, with a small following, had burst out of the gate, he found his road blocked.\n\nFrom horseback, Huang Zu said, \"I treated you well in the past. Why do you now press me so hard?\"\n\nGan Ning angrily shouted, \"I did good service for you, and yet you treated me as a pirate. Now what have you to say?\"\n\nThere was nothing to be said, and Huang Zu turned his horse to escape. But Gan Ning thrust aside his troops and himself rode in pursuit. Then he heard a shouting in his rear and saw General Cheng Pu coming up. Fearing lest this other pursuer should overpass him and score the success he desired for himself, Gan Ning fitted an arrow to his bow and shot at the fugitive. Huang Zu was hit and fell from his steed. Then Gan Ning cut off his head. After this, joining himself to Cheng Pu, the two returned bearing the ghastly trophy to their lord. Sun Quan ordered them to place it in a box to be taken back home and offered as a sacrifice to the manes of his father.\n\nHaving rewarded the soldiers for the victory and promoted Gan Ning, Sun Quan next discussed the advisability of sending a force to hold Jiangxia.\n\nBut his adviser, Zhang Zhao, said, \"It is impossible to try to hold one distant city alone. It is better to return home and prepare for the expedition that Liu Biao will surely send in revenge. We will meet and defeat his worn army, push home the attack, and capture his whole region.\"\n\nSun Quan saw the advice was wise, so he left Jiangxia and led his army home to the South Land.\n\nNow Su Fei was still confined, but he got someone to go to Gan Ning to beg him to plead for mercy. Gan Ning had expected this although the prisoner had said no word, and he was averse from leaving his friend and one-time protector to perish.\n\n\"I should not have forgotten him even if he had said nothing,\" said Gan Ning.\n\nWhen the army had returned, Sun Quan gave orders for Su Fei's execution that his head might be offered with that of Huang Zu.\n\nThen Gan Ning went in to his lord and said, weeping, \"Long ago, if it had not been for Su Fei, my bones would have been rotting in some ditch and how then could I have rendered service under your banner? Now he deserves death, but I cannot forget his kindness to me, and I pray you take away the honors you have bestowed on me as a set-off to his crime.\"\n\nSun Quan replied, \"Since he once showed kindness to you, I will pardon him for your sake. But what can be done if he run away?\"\n\n\"If he be pardoned and escape death, he will be immeasurably grateful and will not go away. If he should, then will I offer my life in exchange.\"\n\nSo the condemned man escaped death, and only one head was offered in sacrifice. After the sacrificial ceremonies, a great banquet was spread in honor of the victories. As it was proceeding, suddenly one of the guests burst into loud lamentations, drew his sword, and rushed upon Gan Ning. Gan Ning hastily rose and defended himself with the chair on which he had been sitting. The host looked at the assailant and saw it was Ling Tong, whose father Ling Cao had fallen under an arrow shot by Gan Ning. The son was now burning to avenge his father's death.\n\nHastily leaving his place, Sun Quan checked the angry officer, saying, \"If he slew your noble father, then remember each was fighting for his lord for whom he was bound to exert himself to the utmost. But now that you both are under one flag and are of one house, you may not recall an ancient injury. You must regard my interests continually.\"\n\nLing Tong beat his head upon the floor and cried, saying, \"But how can I not avenge this? It is a blood feud, and we may not both live under the same sky.\"\n\nThe guests interfered, beseeching the man to forgo his revenge, and at last he ceased from his murderous intention. But he sat glaring wrathfully at his enemy.\n\nSo soon after Gan Ning was dispatched with five thousand troops and one hundred warships to guard Xiakou, where he was beyond the reach of Ling Tong's wrath. Then Sun Quan promoted Ling Tong, and so he was somewhat appeased.\n\nFrom about this time the South Land enlarged her fleets, and soldiers were sent to various points to guard the river banks. The brother of the chieftain, Sun Kuang, was placed in command at Wujun, and Sun Quan himself, with a large army, camped at Chaisang.\n\nZhou Yu, Commander-in-Chief of the army and Supreme Admiral of the navy, was on the Poyang Lake training the naval forces, and general preparations were made for defense and attack.\n\nBy his spies, Liu Bei had tidings of the doings in the lower portion of the Great River, and knew of the death of Huang Zu. So he consulted Zhuge Liang as to his action. While they were discussing matters, there arrived a messenger from Liu Biao, begging Liu Bei to go to see him.\n\nZhuge Liang advised him to go and said, \"This call is to consult you about avenging Huang Zu. You must take me with you and let me act as the circumstances direct. There are advantages to be got.\"\n\nLeaving Guan Yu in command at Xinye, Liu Bei set forth, taking Zhang Fei with five hundred soldiers as his escort.\n\nOn the way he discussed the course of action with his adviser, who said, \"First you must thank Liu Biao for having saved you from the evil that Cai Mao planned against you at Xiangyang. However, you must not undertake any expedition against the South Land but say you must return to Xinye to put your army in good order.\"\n\nWith this admonition Liu Bei came to Jingzhou and was lodged in the guest-house. Zhang Fei and the escort camped without the walls. In due course Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang were received, and after the customary salutations, Liu Bei apologized for his conduct at the banquet.\n\nThe host said, \"Worthy brother, I know you were the victim of a vile plot; and I should have put the prime mover to death for it, had there not been so universal a prayer for mercy. However, I remitted that penalty. I hope you do not consider that I was wrong.\"\n\n\"Cai Mao had little to do with it. I think it was due to his subordinates,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nLiu Biao said, \"Jiangxia is lost, as you know, and Huang Zu is dead. So I have asked you to come that we might take measures of vengeance.\"\n\n\"Huang Zu was harsh and cruel and never used his people in the proper way: That was the real cause of his fall. But have you reflected what Cao Cao may do on the north if we attack the south?\"\n\n\"I am getting old and weak, and I am unable to manage affairs properly. Will you aid me, brother? After I am gone you will have this region.\"\n\n\"Why do you say this, my brother? Think you that I am equal to such a task?\"\n\nHere Zhuge Liang glanced at Liu Bei who continued, \"But give me a little time to think it over.\"\n\nAnd at this point he took his leave.\n\nWhen they had reached their lodging, Zhuge Liang said, \"Why did you decline his offer of the region.\"\n\n\"He has always been most kind and courteous. I could not take advantage of his weakness.\"\n\n\"A perfectly kind and gracious lord,\" sighed Zhuge Liang.\n\nSoon after the son of the Imperial Protector, Liu Qi, was announced, and Liu Bei received him and led him in.\n\nThe young man began to weep, saying, \"My mother cannot bear the sight of me. My very life is in danger. Can you not save me, Uncle?\"\n\n\"My worthy nephew, this is a family affair. You should not come to me.\"\n\nZhuge Liang who was present, smiled. Liu Bei turned to him to know what he should do.\n\n\"This is a family affair. I cannot touch it!\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe young man soon left, and when Liu Bei was saying good-bye, he whispered, \"I will get Zhuge Liang to return your call, and you can do so and so. He will advise you.\"\n\nLiu Qi thanked him and left. Next day when the call was to be returned, Liu Bei pretended to be suffering from colic and made that an excuse to send Zhuge Liang to return the call.\n\nThe adviser went, and when he had reached the palace, dismounted, and was led in, Liu Qi conducted him into one of the inner rooms.\n\nWhen the tea had been brought, Liu Qi said, \"I am an object of my stepmother's dislike. Can you advise me what to do?\"\n\n\"As a mere stranger guest, I can hardly have anything to do with your own 'bone and flesh' matters. If I did, and the story got abroad, much harm might ensue.\"\n\nWith this he rose to take leave.\n\nBut Liu Qi was unwilling to say farewell, and he said, \"Your glory has turned in my direction. You cannot mean to go away so pointlessly.\"\n\nLiu Qi led his visitor into a private chamber and had refreshments brought. While they ate and drank, Liu Qi repeated his first request: What was he to do since his stepmother disliked him.\n\n\"It is not the sort of thing I can advise in,\" replied Zhuge Liang, as he rose for the second time to take leave.\n\n\"Master, if you will not reply, that is well. But why incontinently leave me?\"\n\nSo the adviser once more seated himself, and Liu Qi said, \"There is an ancient writing I should like to show you.\"\n\nAnd he led his visitor to a small upper room.\n\n\"Where is the writing?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nInstead of answering Liu Qi wept, saying, \"My stepmother cannot bear me. My life is in danger. O Master, will you not say a word to save me?\"\n\nZhuge Liang flushed and rose to go away. But he found the ladder by which they had mounted had been removed.\n\nAgain Liu Qi besought some advice, saying, \"Master, you fear lest it may get abroad! Is that why you are silent? Here we are between earth and sky, and what you say will come out of your mouth directly into my ear. No other soul can hear. Now can you tell me what to do?\"\n\n\"Sow not dissension among relatives,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Is it possible for me to make any plan for you?\"\n\n\"Then is my life indeed in danger,\" said the young man. \"I will die at your feet.\"\n\nSo saying, Liu Qi pulled out a dagger and threatened to make an end of himself.\n\nZhuge Liang checked him, saying, \"There is a way.\"\n\n\"I pray you tell me.\"\n\n\"You have heard of the old tale of the brothers Shen Sheng and Chong Er, have you not? Shen Sheng stayed at home and died; his brother Chong Er went away and lived in peace. Now that Huang Zu is gone and Jiangxia is weakly defended, why do you not ask to be sent there to guard it? Then you would be out of the way of harm.\"\n\nLiu Qi thanked him. Then he called to his people to restore the ladder, and he escorted Zhuge Liang down to the level ground.\n\nZhuge Liang returned to Liu Bei and related the whole interview. The young man soon acted on the advice given him, but his father would not at first consent to let him go.\n\nTo settle his doubts Liu Biao sent for Liu Bei, who said, \"Jiangxia is important, and your son is the most suitable man to defend it. You must let him go. The southeast will be defended by your son. The northwest I will look after.\"\n\n\"I hear that Cao Cao has been training a naval force, and I am afraid he has intentions against us. We must be on our guard.\"\n\n\"I know all about it. You need feel no anxiety,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nHe took leave of his relative and went home while Liu Qi received command of three thousand soldiers and went to guard Jiangxia.\n\nAt this time Cao Cao suppressed the three highest officers of state and exercised their functions himself as the Prime Minister. He appointed as his general secretaries Mao Jie and Cui Yan, and as literary secretary Sima Yi. Sima Yi of Henei was grandson of Sima Juan, Governor of Yingchuan; son of Sima Fang, Governor of Jingzhao; and younger brother of Sima Lang, Secretary General.\n\nCao Cao then called his officers to a council to discuss an expedition against the south.\n\nXiahou Dun opened the debate, saying, \"Liu Bei is drilling his army at Xinye, and is a source of danger. He should be destroyed.\"\n\nAccordingly Xiahou Dun was appointed Commanding General, and four assistants \u2014 Yu Jin, Li Dian, Xiahou Lan, and Han Hao \u2014 were given him. With these he led one hundred thousand troops to Bowang, whence he could observe Xinye.\n\nXun Yu was opposed to this and said, \"Liu Bei is a famous warrior, and he has lately taken to himself as his Directing Instructor Zhuge Liang. Caution is needed!\"\n\nXiahou Dun replied, \"Liu Bei is a mean rat! I will certainly take him prisoner.\"\n\n\"Do not despise him,\" said Xu Shu. \"Remember he has Zhuge Liang to help him, and so he is like a tiger who has grown wings.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"Who is this Zhuge Liang?\"\n\n\"He has taken a Daoist cognomen of Sleeping Dragon. He is a perfect genius, god and devil combined, the greatest marvel of the age. Do not despise him.\"\n\n\"How does he stand as compared with you?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"There is no comparison. I am a mere glow-worm spark; he is the glory of the full moon,\" replied Xu Shu.\n\n\"You are mistaken,\" replied Xiahou Dun. \"This Zhuge Liang of yours is of no account. Who would fear him? If I do not take him and his master prisoners in the first battle, then here is my head, a free gift to our lord, the Prime Minister.\"\n\n\"Hasten to comfort me with news of victory,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nXiahou Dun hastened to depart.\n\nThe advent of Zhuge Liang and the extravagant deference shown him did not please Liu Bei's sworn brothers who grumbled, saying, \"He is very young, although he is clever and learned. Our brother really treats him too well. We have not seen any evidence of his wonderful skill.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"You do not know his worth. I have him as if the fish has got into the water again. Pray do not discuss this matter further, my brothers.\"\n\nThey withdrew, silent but dissatisfied.\n\nOne day a man presented Liu Bei with a yak's tail, and he at once was trying to weave it into his cap as an ornament. Zhuge Liang came in and noticed it at once.\n\n\"Then you have renounced all ambitions, my lord. You are just going to attend to this sort of thing,\" Zhuge Liang quietly remarked.\n\nLiu Bei snatched off his cap and flung it away, saying, \"I was only amusing myself with the thing.\"\n\n\"How do you think you stand compared with Cao Cao?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Inferior.\"\n\n\"Yes. Your army is less than ten thousand, and the chances are ten thousand to one that he will attack. How can we meet him?\"\n\n\"I am greatly distressed about it, but I see no way.\"\n\n\"You might recruit, and I will train them. Then we might be able to oppose him.\"\n\nSo recruiting began and three thousand were enlisted. Zhuge Liang set about drilling them diligently.\n\nSoon they heard that Xiahou Dun was leading an army of one hundred thousand troops against them.\n\nWhen he heard it, Zhang Fei said to his brother, Guan Yu, \"We will get this Zhuge Liang to go and fight them.\"\n\nJust at that moment they were summoned to their brother, who asked their advice.\n\n\"Why not send the 'Water,' brother?\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"For method I rely on Zhuge Liang; but for action I put my faith in you, my brothers. Are you going to fail me?\"\n\nThey went out, and Zhuge Liang was called.\n\n\"I fear your brothers will not obey me,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Wherefore, if I am to direct the campaign, you must give me a seal of office and a sword of authority.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei gave him both. Armed with these ensigns of power, Zhuge Liang assembled the officers to receive their orders.\n\n\"We will go just to see what he will do,\" said Zhang Fei to Guan Yu.\n\nIn the assembly Zhuge Liang spoke, saying, \"On the left of Bowang are Yushan Hills. On the right is Anlin Forest. There we will prepare an ambush. Guan Yu will go to Yushan Hills with one thousand soldiers. He is to remain there quiescent till the enemy has passed; but when he sees a flame in the south, that will be the signal to attack. He will first burn their baggage train. Zhang Fei will go to a valley behind Anlin Forest. When he sees the signal, he is to go to the old stores depot at Bowang and burn that. Liu Feng and Guan Ping will take five hundred soldiers each to the south, prepare combustibles and be ready with them beyond Bowang Slope. The enemy will arrive about dusk, and then the two generals can start the blare. Zhao Zilong, now recalled from Fancheng, is to lead the attack, but he is to lose and not win. And our lord is to command the reserve. See that each one obeys these orders and let there be no mistakes.\"\n\nThen said Guan Yu, \"All of us are to go out to meet the enemy, but I have not yet heard what you are going to do.\"\n\n\"I will just be sitting here guarding the city.\"\n\nZhang Fei burst into a laugh, \"We are to go out to bloody battle, and you are to stay quietly at home quite comfortable.\"\n\n\"Here is the sword and here the seal!\" replied the strategist, displaying the emblems of authority. \"Disobedience of orders will be death.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Do you not understand that the plans elaborated in a little chamber decide success over thousands of miles? Do not disobey the command, my brothers.\"\n\nZhang Fei went out smiling cynically.\n\nGuan Yu remarked, \"Let us await the result. If he fails, then we can look to it.\"\n\nThe brothers left. None of the officers understood anything of the general line of strategy and, though they obeyed orders, they were not without doubts and misgivings.\n\nZhuge Liang said to Liu Bei, \"You may now lead your soldiers to the hills and camp till the enemy shall arrive tomorrow evening. Then you are to abandon the camp and move away retreating till the signal is seen. Then you will advance and attack with all force. Mi Zhu, Mi Fang, and I will guard the city.\"\n\nIn the city Zhuge Liang prepared banquets to celebrate the victory and also prepared the books to record exceptional services.\n\nLiu Bei noted all these things, but his heart was also troubled not a little.\n\nCao Cao's army of one hundred thousand troops in due course reached Bowang. Then half of them, the veterans, were told off for the first attack, and the remainder were to guard the baggage train and supplies. Thus they marched in two divisions. The season was autumn and a chilly wind began to blow.\n\nThey pressed forward. Presently they saw a cloud of dust ahead of them, and Xiahou Dun ordered the ranks to be reformed. He questioned the guides as to the name of the place.\n\n\"The place in front is Bowang Slope, and behind us is the River Luo,\" was the reply.\n\nThen Xiahou Dun rode to the front to reconnoiter, leaving Yu Jin and Li Dian to finish setting out the battle array.\n\nPresently Xiahou Dun began to laugh and, when they asked the cause of this merriment, he replied, \"Xu Shu praised Zhuge Liang to the very skies as something more than human. But now that I see how he has placed his soldiers and the stuff he has put into his vanguard, it seems to me that he is sending dogs or sheep against tigers and leopards. I bragged a little when I said I would take him prisoner, but I am going to make good my boast!\"\n\nThen he rode forward at full speed.\n\nZhao Zilong rode to meet him, and Xiahou Dun opened a volley of abuse, \"You lot, followers of Liu Bei, are only like wraiths following devils!\"\n\nThis angered Zhao Zilong and a combat began. In a little time Zhao Zilong turned and retreated as if he was worsted. Xiahou Dun pressed after him and kept up the chase for some three miles. Then Zhao Zilong suddenly turned again and offered fight, but only to retreat after a few passes.\n\nSeeing these tactics Han Hao, one of Xiahou Dun's generals, rode up to his chief and urged him to use caution, saying, \"I fear he is trying to lead us into an ambush.\"\n\n\"With such antagonists as these, I should not fear even Ten Ambushes!\" replied Xiahou Dun, pressing forward eagerly.\n\nJust as he reached the slope, he heard the roar of a bomb and out came Liu Bei to attack.\n\n\"Here is your ambush!\" said Xiahou Dun, laughing. \"I will get to Xinye this evening before I have done.\"\n\nXiahou Dun urged his soldiers forward, and his opponents retired in measure as he advanced. As evening came on, thick clouds overcast the whole sky. The wind increased but the leader still urged his troops after the retreating foe.\n\nThe two generals in the rear came to a narrow part of the road with reeds and rushes thick all round them.\n\n\"Those who despise the enemy are beaten,\" said Li Dian to Yu Jin. \"Away south there the roads are narrow, and streams and mountains make the country difficult. The forests are dense, and if the enemy used fire we should be lost.\"\n\n\"You are right,\" replied Yu Jin. \"I will get on and warn the Commanding General. Perhaps he will stop. You can halt those who come up.\"\n\nYu Jin rode forward shouting at the top of his voice, \"Halt the train!\"\n\nXiahou Dun saw him coming up and asked what the matter was.\n\nYu Jin said, \"The roads here are narrow and difficult. Around us are thick forests. What if they use fire?\"\n\nXiahou Dun's ferocity had then somewhat abated, and he turned his steed toward his main body.\n\nThen there arose a shout behind him. A rushing noise came from in the reeds and great tongues of flame shot up here and there. These spread and soon the fire was in \"the four quarters and the eight sides,\" and fanned by a strong wind.\n\nXiahou Dun's troops were thrown into confusion and trampled each other down. Many perished. Zhao Zilong turned on them again to make a slaughter. Xiahou Dun dashed through the fire and smoke to escape.\n\nNow Li Dian saw that things were going very badly, so he turned to get back to Bowang but fell upon a body of troops in the way, led by Guan Yu. He desperately dashed into their midst and managed to get clear. Yu Jin saw the supplies were being destroyed and there was nothing left to guard, so he escaped along a bye-path. Two other generals, who came to try to save the baggage train, met Zhang Fei; and Xiahou Lan was slain forthwith, but Han Hao managed to flee. Next morning the countryside was strewn with corpses and drenched with blood.\n\n\u2003The armies met on Bowang Slope\n\n\u2003And Zhuge Liang fought with fire;\n\n\u2003A perfect strategist, he bent\n\n\u2003All humans to his desire.\n\n\u2003But poor Cao Cao, his enemy,\n\n\u2003He trembled in his shoes\n\n\u2003Before the man, who'd never fought\n\n\u2003But yet could armies use.\n\nXiahou Dun drew up the battered remains of his army and led them back to Xuchang.\n\nZhuge Liang ordered his armies to collect.\n\nAs Guan Yu and Zhang Fei rode homeward, they confessed, saying, \"Zhuge Liang is really a fine strategist!\"\n\nBefore long they saw Mi Zhu and Mi Fang leading out a small body of soldiers. Among them was a light carriage in which the Directing Instructor Zhuge Liang was seating. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei dismounted and bowed before him. The remaining bodies came in. The spoil was distributed among the soldiers and all returned to Xinye, where the populace lined the roads to bid them welcome.\n\n\"We owe our lives to the Prince!\" they cried to Liu Bei.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"Xiahou Dun has been driven off, but Cao Cao will come with a stronger force.\"\n\n\"And what shall we do?\" replied Liu Bei.\n\n\"My plan is quite ready,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nAlways battles, nowhere rest for horse or human;\n\nMust rely on ruses, dodging where one can." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Lady Cai Renounces Jingzhou; Zhuge Liang Burns Xinye.\n\nWhen Liu Bei asked how his adviser hoped to repel Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang replied, \"Xinye is a small city and unfitted for our lengthy occupation. Liu Biao is ill and failing fast, so this is the time to take his region as a base where we may be safe against Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"You speak well, but Liu Biao has shown me great kindness, and I could not bear to serve him an ill turn.\"\n\n\"If you do not take this opportunity, you will regret it ever after,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I would rather perish than do what is wrong.\"\n\n\"We will discuss it again,\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\nWhen Xiahou Dun reached the capital, he presented himself to his master in bonds and craved death. But his master loosed him and let him tell his tale.\n\nAnd Xiahou Dun said, \"I was the victim of Zhuge Liang's evil machinations: He attacked with fire.\"\n\n\"As a soldier from your youth, you should have remembered that fire was a likely weapon in narrow roads.\"\n\n\"Li Dian and Yu Jin reminded me. I am sorry enough now.\"\n\nCao Cao rewarded Li Dian and Yu Jin who had warned their leader.\n\n\"Liu Bei as strong as he is now certainly is a menace to our existence, and he must be quickly destroyed,\" said Xiahou Dun.\n\n\"He is one of my anxieties,\" replied Cao Cao. \"Sun Quan is the other. The rest do not count. We must take this chance to sweep the south clean.\"\n\nThen orders were issued to prepare an army of five hundred thousand troops, in five divisions of ten legions each. Each division had two leaders: Cao Ren and Cao Hong were in command of the first division; Zhang Liao and Zhang He, the second; Xiahou Dun and Xiahou Yuan, the third; Yu Jin and Li Dian, the fourth. The fifth body was led by Cao Cao himself. The van was commanded by Xu Chu. The \"horse\" day of the seventh moon of the thirteenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity was fixed for the march (AD 208).\n\nThe High Minister, Kong Rong, offered a remonstrance.\n\nHe said, \"Liu Bei and Liu Biao are both of the Imperial House and should not be attacked without grave reasons. Sun Quan in the six territories of the South Land is terrible as a crouching tiger and, with the Great River as his defense, he is very secure. If, Sir Prime Minister, you undertake this unjustifiable expedition, you will forfeit the respect of the world, I fear.\"\n\n\"All three of them are disobedient ministers and rebels, and how can I fail to punish them?\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nCao Cao was angry, and bade the adviser go from his presence. Presently Cao Cao gave formal orders that he would put to death anyone who remonstrated on the subject of his expedition.\n\nKong Rong went forth from the Palace sadly.\n\nCasting his eyes up to heaven, he cried, \"Where is the chance of success when the perfectly inhumane attacks the perfectly humane? He must be defeated!\"\n\nOne of the clients of the Imperial Inspector Chi Lu, whom Kong Rong had always treated contemptuously and disdainfully, happened to hear this apostrophe and told his patron who carried the tale to Cao Cao.\n\nChi Lu also added to it, saying, \"Kong Rong habitually speaks disrespectfully of the Chief Minister and has been very friendly with Mi Heng. In fact the insults that Mi Heng had hurled at you had been deliberately arranged and intrigued by Kong Rong. Kong Rong and Mi Heng seemed to admire each other hugely, and Mi Heng used to say, 'Confucius is not dead, because Kong Rong is he,' and the other used to reply, 'And his treasured disciple, Yan Hui, has risen again, because Mi Heng is he.'\"\n\nChi Lu's tale angered Cao Cao, who ordered the execution of the high minister.\n\nNow Kong Rong had two sons, both young, who were sitting at home playing chess, when one of their servants ran in and said, \"Your father has just been carried off for execution. Why do you not run away?\"\n\nThe youths replied, \"When the nest is pulled down, are the eggs left unbroken?\"\n\nEven at that moment the same executors came and carried off the whole household. The two youths were beheaded. The father's corpse was exposed in the streets.\n\nMinister Zhi Xi wept over the corpse. This public exhibition of sympathy rekindled Cao Cao's anger, and he was going to punish it with death.\n\nHowever, this additional punishment was prevented by Adviser Xun Yu, who said, \"You should not slay a righteous man who came to mourn over his friend's corpse. Zhi Xi had often warned Kong Rong against the danger his severe rectitude might lead him into.\"\n\nZhi Xi took up the remains of father and sons and buried them.\n\n\u2003Kong Rong, who dwelt on the north sea shore,\n\n\u2003A noble reputation bore;\n\n\u2003With him all guests warm welcome found,\n\n\u2003And ceaselessly the wine went round.\n\n\u2003For skill in letters he was famed,\n\n\u2003In speech, he dukes and princes shamed,\n\n\u2003Historians his merits tell,\n\n\u2003Recorders say that he did well.\n\nAfter wreaking his wrath on Kong Rong, Cao Cao issued the order to march. Xun Yu was left in command of the capital.\n\nAbout this time the Imperial Protector of Jingzhou became seriously ill, and he summoned Liu Bei to his chamber. Liu Bei went accompanied by his two brothers, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and Directing Instructor Zhuge Liang.\n\nLiu Biao said, \"The disease has attacked my very vitals, and my time is short. I confide my orphans to your guardianship. My sons are unfit to succeed to my place, and I pray you, my brother, administer the region after my death.\"\n\nLiu Bei wept, saying, \"I will do my utmost to help my nephews. What else could I do, indeed?\"\n\nEven at this moment came the news of the march of Cao Cao's armies, and Liu Bei, taking hasty leave of his kinsman, was forced to hurry to his station. The evil tidings aggravated the sick man's condition, and he began to make his last arrangements. In his testament he appointed Liu Bei the guardian of his son Liu Qi, who was to succeed in the lordship.\n\nThis arrangement greatly angered his wife, Lady Cai. She closed the inner doors against all and confided to her own partisans, of whom Cai Mao and Zhang Yun were her confidants, the keeping of the outer gates.\n\nThe heir was at Jiangxia, and he came to make filial inquiries as soon as his father's condition became serious.\n\nBut Cai Mao refused him admittance and said, \"Your father sent you to guard Jiangxia. Such a very responsible post should by no means have been quitted without orders. Suppose it was attacked, what might not happen? If your father sees you, he will be very angry, and it will make him worse. That would be most undutiful, and you should return to your command at once.\"\n\nLiu Qi stood out for some time, but admittance was denied him in spite of his tears. So he returned to his post. Meanwhile Liu Biao rapidly grew worse. He anxiously looked for his son, but Liu Qi came not. Suddenly Liu Biao uttered piercing shrieks and then passed away.\n\n\u2003When the Yuans were lords of the north,\n\n\u2003And Liu Biao held the bank of the river,\n\n\u2003It seemed, so strong were they both,\n\n\u2003That they would endure forever.\n\n\u2003But the family affairs troubled their states,\n\n\u2003And, meddling, confusion made;\n\n\u2003It was mournful indeed to see\n\n\u2003How quickly the houses decayed.\n\nSo Imperial Protector Liu Biao died. Then the widow and her partisans took counsel together and forged a testament conferring the lordship of Jingzhou on the second son Liu Zong before they published the news of the death.\n\nThe wrongful heir was then fourteen years of age. But he was a cunning boy, so he assembled the officials and said, \"My father has passed away, and my elder brother is at Jiangxia. More than that, our uncle is at Xinye. You have made me lord, but if my brother and uncle come here with an army to punish me for usurping the lordship, what explanation can I offer?\"\n\nAt first no one replied.\n\nThen Adviser Li Gui rose and said, \"You speak well. Now hasten to send letters of mourning to your brother and ask him to come and take his inheritance. Also call upon Liu Bei to come and assist in the administration. Then shall we be safe against our enemies \u2014 Cao Cao on the north and Sun Quan on the south. I consider this the most excellent plan.\"\n\nBut Cai Mao replied harshly, \"Who are you to speak thus wildly and oppose the testament of our late lord?\"\n\nLi Gui began to abuse him, saying, \"You and your party have fabricated this testament, setting aside the rightful heir. Now the whole region is in the hands of the Cai family. If our dead lord knew your doings, he would slay you!\"\n\nCai Mao ordered the lictors to take Li Gui away to execution. He was hurried out, but his tongue ceased not.\n\nSo the younger son was placed in his father's seat, and the Cai clan shared among them the whole military authority of the region. The defense of Jingzhou was confided to Liu Xin and Deng Yi, while Lady Cai and her son took up their residence in Xiangyang so as to be out of the reach of the rightful heir and his uncle. They interred the remains of the late Imperial Protector on the east of Xiangyang, near the bank of the Han River. No notice of the death was sent to Liu Qi, the son, or to Liu Bei, his uncle.\n\nLiu Zong arrived at Xiangyang, but, before he had had time to recover from the fatigue of the journey, the startling news of the approach of Cao Cao's great army came in. He summoned Kuai Yue and Cai Mao and others to ask counsel.\n\nOne of the secretaries, Fu Xuan, offered his advice, saying, \"Not only are we threatened by a great army from the north, but the elder son, who is the real heir, at Jiangxia, and his uncle at Xinye, are to be reckoned with. These two have not been notified of the death, and they will resent that. We shall be in sad case if they also march against us. But if you will adopt my suggestion, then our people will be as steady as Taishan Mountains and our young lord's position and rank will be assured.\"\n\n\"What is your plan?\" asked the young lord.\n\n\"To offer the whole region to Cao Cao, who will treat our young master most liberally.\"\n\n\"What advice!\" said Liu Zong angrily. \"Am I to yield my heritage to another before I have even fairly succeeded to it?\"\n\n\"The advice is good,\" said Kuai Yue. \"Opportunism is a policy, and possibilities need consideration. In the name of government, Cao Cao is fighting against his neighbors. If our lord opposes him, he will be termed contumacious. Beside, any misfortune on our borders before our young lord is well established will react upon the internal administration, and our people will be panic-stricken at the mere news of the approach of a hostile army. How could we then offer any resistance?\"\n\nLiu Zong replied, \"It is not that I disagree with you, but I should be a laughing stock to the whole world were I to abandon my heritage without an effort.\"\n\nHe was interrupted by a speaker who said, \"If their advice is good, why not follow it?\"\n\nThey turned toward the speaker who was a certain Wang Can of Shanyang, a lean, cadaverous individual much below the middle height of a man.\n\nHowever, his talents did not conform to his physical appearance. When he was yet a youth, he went to visit Minister Cai Yong, then a vice-chairman of the Secretariat; and although many guests of exalted rank were present, the host hastened to welcome the newcomer with the greatest deference. The others were astonished and asked why he was so respectful to a mere youth.\n\n\"He is a young man with the highest gifts,\" said Cai Yong.\n\nWang Can was widely read and had a most retentive memory, better than any of his contemporaries. If he glanced at a roadside monument as he passed, he remembered every word of the inscription. If he saw people playing chess and the board was suddenly overthrown, he could replace every pip in its proper place. He was a good mathematician and his poems were exquisite. At seventeen he was appointed a court official but did not take up the appointment. When the disturbance in the empire grew serious, he sought refuge in Jingzhou, where he was received with great honor as guest of the Imperial Protector.\n\nWhat he said was this, \"General, how do you compare with Cao Cao?\"\n\n\"Inferior,\" replied Liu Zong.\n\nWang Can continued, \"Cao Cao has many soldiers and bold leaders. He is able and resourceful. He took Lu Bu at Xiapi and broke the power of Yuan Shao at Guandu. He pursued Liu Bei into Longyou and destroyed Mao Dun at White Wolf Hills. The destruction of such firmly established men shows his invincible character. Now he is on the way here, and it will be very difficult to withstand him. The plan proposed is the best you can expect, and you should not delay and hesitate till it is too late for ought but regret.\"\n\n\"Worthy Sir, you indeed speak to the point. I must inform my mother,\" said the young ruler.\n\nBut just then they saw his mother appear from behind a screen. She had been listening to all that was said.\n\n\"Why refer to me when three such gentlemen coincide in their opinions?\" said Lady Cai.\n\nSo Liu Zong decided, and the letter of surrender was composed and entrusted to one Song Zhong to convey secretly to Cao Cao. Song Zhong went straight to Wancheng and presented the letter. It was received with joy, and the bearer well rewarded.\n\nThe submission was accepted, and Cao Cao said, \"Tell Liu Zong to go out to meet me in the open country, and he will be in perpetual tenure of his land.\"\n\nSong Zhong left the city and took the homeward way. He had nearly reached the ferry when he fell in with a party of horse. On a closer look he saw the leader was Guan Yu. The messenger tried to escape observation, but was presently captured and taken to the leader to be questioned. At first he prevaricated but on being closely questioned told the whole story. Then he was carried off to Xinye and made to retell his story to Liu Bei who heard it with lamentations.\n\nZhang Fei said, \"This being so, I propose that we put this fellow to death, then cross the river, attack Xiangyang, and make an end of the Cai tribe and Liu Zong as well. Then we can attack Cao Cao.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei replied, \"Hold on. I have something more to say.\"\n\nThen turning to the prisoner, Liu Bei shouted, \"When they did all this, why did you not come to tell me? As things are now, there is nothing to be gained by killing you. You may go.\"\n\nSong Zhong stammered his thanks, threw his arms over his head, and ran away. Liu Bei was very sad.\n\nPresently Yi Ji from Jiangxia was announced. Liu Bei was very fond of this man and went down the steps to welcome him.\n\nThen said Yi Ji, \"The heir has heard that his father is dead, but his stepmother and her family are keeping back the news so that they may set up Liu Zong. He knows the news is true, as he sent a special messenger to find out. He thinks you, O Prince, may not know and has sent me to inform you, and his letter begs you to lead all the troops you can to Xiangyang to help him assert his claims.\"\n\nLiu Bei opened and read the letter.\n\nThen he said, \"Yes. You know that the younger son has usurped the lordship, but you have not heard that he has already sent to offer Jingzhou to Cao Cao.\"\n\nThis news shocked Yi Ji, who asked, \"How know you this?\"\n\nLiu Bei told of the capture of Song Zhong.\n\nYi Ji said, \"You can go to Xiangyang as if to attend the mourning ceremonies and so draw Liu Zong into coming out of the city to welcome you. Then you can seize him, slay his party, and take the region.\"\n\n\"Your advice is good,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"and my lord ought to take it.\"\n\nLiu Bei wept, saying, \"In his last interview, my brother confided his son and heir to my care. If I lay hands upon another son and seize upon the inheritance, how shall I be able to look my brother in the face when I meet him by and by beyond the grave?\"\n\n\"If you do not act in this way now, how will you repel Cao Cao, who has already reached Wancheng?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Our best plan is to take refuge in Fancheng,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nJust about this time the spies came to say that Cao Cao's army had reached Bowang. So Yi Ji was sent off with instructions to take measures for the defense of Jiangxia, while Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang discussed plans for meeting the enemy.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"My lord should not worry. We have burned the army of Cao Cao at Bowang Slope, so we will see them fallen into another ruse in Xinye. This is no place to live in. We will move over to Fancheng.\"\n\nThen notices were posted at all the gates that all the people, without any exception, were to follow their ruler at once to the new city to escape danger. Boats were prepared and the people sent away under the direction of Sun Qian. Mi Zhu saw to the safe conveyance of the families of the officials.\n\nThen the officers assembled for orders.\n\nZhuge Liang gave directions, \"Guan Yu is to go to the upper of the White River with one thousand troops. His men are to carry bags to fill with sand and earth to dam the river till the enemy shall be heard, about the third watch next day. Then the waters are to be freed to drown one of the armies. He is then to march down river.\n\n\"Zhang Fei is to go to the Boling Ferry, where the current is slow. After the waters of the White River have been let loose on Cao Cao's soldiers, they will try to get over the river at the ferry. They are to be attacked by Zhang Fei and his one thousand troops.\n\n\"Zhao Zilong is to divide three thousand troops into four parties and take one to the east gate. The other three are for the other gates. The roofs of the houses within the city walls are piled with sulfur, saltpeter, and other combustibles. The intention is to set fire to the city when the army of the enemy has entered it for shelter. There will be a strong breeze next day in the evening which will fan the flames. When this wind begins to blow, fire arrows are to be shot into the city from all sides. When the flames are high, there is to be a great shouting outside to add to the general terror. The east gate is to be left free for escape, but the flying men are to be smitten after passing the gate.\n\n\"Mi Fang and Liu Feng are to take command of two thousand troops, one half with red flags and the other half with blue. They are to go to Magpie Tail Slope, about ten miles from the city and camp. When they see Cao Cao's army coming along, the red flags are to move left and the blue right to confuse the enemy so that they shall be afraid to advance further. Then an ambush is to be laid to smite the enemy when the fire in Xinye starts. After that Mi Fang and Liu Feng are to go to the river to meet us.\n\n\"After the battle, all generals shall gather at Fancheng.\"\n\nAll the orders given, the various leaders went their way to take up their positions and await the burning of the city. Zhuge Liang and Liu Bei went away to an eminence whence they could watch what happened and where they would await the reports of victory.\n\nCao Hong and Cao Ren, with their one hundred thousand troops, preceded by Xu Chu leading three thousand of mailed men, marched toward Xinye. They formed a mighty host and reached Magpie Tail Slope about noon. Looking ahead, they saw what seemed a goodly army with many blue and red flags. Xu Chu pressed forward. As he neared, the flags moved from side to side, and he hesitated.\n\nHe began to think, \"It could be an ambush. It is unwise to advance.\"\n\nFinally Xu Chu decided to go no farther and called a halt, and he rode back to the main body to see Cao Ren.\n\n\"Those troops are only make-believe,\" said Cao Ren. \"Advance, there is no ambush. I will hasten up the supports.\"\n\nSo Xu Chu rode to his own command again and advanced. When he reached the wood where he had seen the flags, he saw no one at all. It was then late in the afternoon but he decided to move on. Then he heard from the hills the sound of musical instruments and, looking up, saw on the hill top two umbrellas surrounded by many banners. There sat Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang quietly drinking.\n\nAngry at their coolness, Xu Chu sought for a way up, but logs of wood and great stones were thrown down, and he was driven back. Further, from the rear of the hills came a confused roar. He could find no way to attack, and the sun began to set.\n\nThen Cao Ren and Cao Hong arrived and ordered an attack on Xinye that he might have a place to rest in. They marched to the walls and found the gates wide open. They entered and found a deserted city. No one was visible.\n\n\"This shows they are done,\" said Cao Hong. \"They have all run away, people and all. We may as well occupy the city and rest our soldiers ready for tomorrow.\"\n\nThe soldiers were fatigued with marching and hungry as well, so they lost no time in scattering among the houses and setting about preparing food in the deserted kitchens. The leaders took up their quarters in the state residence to rest.\n\nAfter the first watch the wind began to blow. Soon after the gate guards reported that a fire had started.\n\n\"The careless men have let sparks fly about,\" said Cao Ren.\n\nHe thought no more about it just then, but along came other reports of like nature, and soon he realized that fires breaking out in all quarters were not due to accident. So he gave orders to evacuate the city. Soon the whole city seemed on fire, and a red glow hung in the sky. The army was beset with fire fiercer than what Xiahou Dun had experienced at Bowang Slope.\n\n\u2003Thrice wicked was Cao Cao, but he was bold;\n\n\u2003Though all in the capital he controlled,\n\n\u2003Yet with this he was not content,\n\n\u2003So southward his ravaging army went.\n\n\u2003But, the autumn wind aiding, the Spirit of Fire\n\n\u2003Wrought to his army destruction dire.\n\nOfficers and troops dashing through the smoke and fire in utter confusion sought some way of escape, and hearing that the east gate was free, they made for that quarter. Out they rushed pell-mell, many being trodden down and trampled to death. Those who got through took the road to the east.\n\nBut presently there was a shouting behind them, and Zhao Zilong's company came up and attacked. Then Cao Cao's troops scattered, each fleeing for his life. No stand was made. A little later Mi Fang and Liu Feng came to take another toll. The fleeing Cao Ren then had very few followers, and those left him were scorched and burned.\n\nThey directed their way to the White River, joyfully remembering that the river was shallow and fordable. And they went down into the stream and drank their fill, humans shouting and horses neighing.\n\nMeantime Guan Yu, higher up its course, had dammed the river with sandbags so that its waters were collected in a lake. Toward evening he had seen the red glow of the burning city and began to look out for his signal. About the fourth watch, he heard down stream the sounds of soldiers and horse and at once ordered the breaking of the dam. The water rushed down in a torrent and overwhelmed the men just then in the bed of the river. Many were swept away and drowned. Those who escaped made their way to where the stream ran gently and got away.\n\nPresently Cao Ren and his troops reached the Boling Ferry. Here, where they thought there would be safety, they found the road barred.\n\n\"You Cao Cao brigands!\" shouted Zhang Fei. \"Come and receive your fate!\"\n\nWithin the city the red flame leaps out;\n\nOn the river bank burning anger is met." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Liu Bei Leads His People Over The River; Zhao Zilong Rescues The Child Lord At Dangyang.\n\nThe last chapter closed with the attack made by Zhang Fei as soon as his brother had let loose the waters on the doomed army. He met with Xu Chu and a combat began, but a fight with such a warrior was not to Xu Chu's taste and he ran away. Zhang Fei followed till he came upon Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang, and the three went upstream till they came to the boats that had been prepared by Liu Feng and Mi Fang, when they all crossed over and marched toward Fancheng. As soon as they disembarked, Zhuge Liang ordered the boats and rafts to be burned.\n\nCao Ren gathered in the remnants of his army and camped at Xinye, while his colleague Cao Hong went to tell their lord the evil tidings of defeat.\n\n\"How dare he, this rustic Zhuge Liang!\" exclaimed Cao Cao angrily.\n\nCao Cao then hastily sent an overwhelming army to camp near the place and gave orders for enormous works against the city, leveling hills and turning rivers to launch a violent assault on Fancheng from every side at once.\n\nThen Liu Ye came in to see his lord and said, \"Sir, you are new to this region, and you should win over the people's hearts. Liu Bei has moved all the people from Xinye to Fancheng. If we march through the country, the people will be ground to powder. It would be well to call upon Liu Bei first to surrender, which will prove to the people that you have a care for them. If he yields, then we get Jingzhou without fighting.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed and asked who would be a suitable messenger. Liu Ye suggested Xu Shu.\n\n\"He is a close friend of Liu Bei, and he is here with the army,\" said Liu Ye.\n\n\"But he will not come back,\" objected Cao Cao.\n\n\"If he does not return, he will be a laughing stock to the whole world. He will come back.\"\n\nXu Shu was sent for, and Cao Cao said, \"My first intention was to level Fancheng with the ground. But out of pity for its people, you may carry an offer to Liu Bei that if he will surrender, he will not only not be punished but he shall be given rank. But if he holds on his present misguided course, the whole of his followers shall be destroyed. Now you are an honest man and so I confide this mission to you, and I trust you will not disappoint me.\"\n\nXu Shu said nothing but accepted his orders and went to the city, where he was received by both Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang. They enjoyed a talk over old times before Xu Shu mentioned the object of his mission.\n\nThen he said, \"Cao Cao has sent me to invite you to surrender, thereby making a bid for popularity. But you ought also to know that he intends to attack the city from every point, that he is damming up the White River's waters to be sent against you, and I fear you will not be able to hold the city. You ought to prepare.\"\n\nLiu Bei asked Xu Shu to remain with them, but Xu Shu said, \"That is impossible, for all the world would ridicule me if I stayed. My old mother is dead, and I never forget my resentment. My body may be over there, but I swear never to form a plan for Cao Cao. You have the Sleeping Dragon to help you and need have no anxiety about the ultimate achievement of your undertaking. But I must go.\"\n\nAnd Xu Shu took his leave. Liu Bei felt he could not press his friend to stay. Xu Shu returned to Cao Cao's camp and reported that Liu Bei had no intention of surrender. This angered Cao Cao who gave orders to begin the advance and siege.\n\nWhen Liu Bei asked what Zhuge Liang meant to do, Zhuge Liang replied, \"We shall abandon Fancheng and take Xiangyang.\"\n\n\"But what of the people who have followed us? They cannot be abandoned.\"\n\n\"You can tell them to do as they wish. They may come if they like, or remain here.\"\n\nThey sent Guan Yu to prepare boats and told Sun Qian to proclaim to the people that Cao Cao was coming, that the city could not be defended, and those who wished to do so might cross the river with the army.\n\nAll the people cried, \"We will follow the Prince even if it be to death!\"\n\nThey started at once, some lamenting, some weeping, the young helping the aged, parents leading their children, the strong soldiers carrying the women. As the crowds crossed the river, from both banks arose the sound of lamentation.\n\nLiu Bei was much affected as he saw all this from the boat.\n\n\"Why was I ever born,\" said he, \"to be the cause of all this misery to the people?\"\n\nHe made to leap into the river, but they held him back. All were deeply sympathetic. When the boat reached the southern shore, he looked back at the weeping crowds waiting still on the other bank and was again moved to tears. He bade Guan Yu hasten the boats before he mounted and rode on.\n\nWhen Xiangyang came in sight, they saw many flags flying on the walls and that the moat was protected by barbed barriers.\n\nLiu Bei checked his horse and called out, \"Liu Zong, good nephew! I only wish to save the people and nothing more. I pray you quickly open the gates.\"\n\nBut Liu Zong was too frightened to appear. Cai Mao and Zhang Yun went up to one of the fighting towers and ordered the soldiers to shoot arrows down on those without the walls. The people gazed up at the towers and wept aloud.\n\nSuddenly there appeared a general, with a small following, who cried out, \"Cai Mao and Zhang Yun are two traitors. The princely Liu Bei is a most upright man and has come here to preserve his people. Why do you repulse him?\"\n\nAll looked at this man. He was of eight-span height, with a face dark brown as a ripe date. He was from Yiyang and named Wei Yan. At that moment he looked very terrible, whirling his sword as if about to slice up the gate guards. They lost no time in throwing open the gate and dropping the bridge.\n\n\"Come in, Uncle Liu Bei,\" cried Wei Yan, \"and bring your army to slay these traitors!\"\n\nZhang Fei plunged forward to take Cai Mao and Zhang Yun, but he was checked by his brother, who said, \"Do not frighten the people!\"\n\nThus Wei Yan let in Liu Bei. As soon as he entered, he saw a general galloping up with a few men.\n\nThe newcomer yelled, \"Wei Yan, you nobody! How dare you create trouble? Do you not know me, General Wen Ping?\"\n\nWei Yan turned angrily, set his spear, and galloped forward to attack the general. The soldiers joined in the fray and the noise of battle rose to the skies.\n\n\"I wanted to preserve the people, and I am only causing them injury,\" cried Liu Bei distressed. \"I do not wish to enter the city.\"\n\n\"Jiangling is an important point. We will first take that as a place to dwell in,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"That pleases me greatly,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSo they led the people thither and away from Xiangyang. Many of the inhabitants of that city took advantage of the confusion to escape, and they also joined themselves to Liu Bei.\n\nMeanwhile, within the inhospitable city, Wei Yan and Wen Ping fought. The battle continued for four or five watches, all through the middle of the day, and nearly all the combatants fell. Then Wei Yan got away. As he could not find Liu Bei, he rode off to Changsha and sought an asylum with Governor Han Xuan.\n\nLiu Bei wandered away from the city of Xiangyang that had refused shelter. Soldiers and people, his following numbered more than a hundred thousand. The carts numbered scores of thousands, and the burden bearers were innumerable. Their road led them past the tomb of Liu Biao, and Liu Bei turned aside to bow at the grave.\n\nHe lamented, saying, \"Shameful is thy brother, lacking both in virtue and in talents. I refused to bear the burden you wished to lay upon me, wherein I was wrong. But the people committed no sin. I pray your glorious spirit descend and rescue these people.\"\n\nHis prayer was fraught with sorrow, and all those about him wept.\n\nJust then a scout rode up with the news that Fancheng was already taken by Cao Cao and that his army were preparing boats and rafts to cross the river.\n\nThe generals of Liu Bei said, \"Jiangling is a defensible shelter, but with this crowd we can only advance very slowly, and when can we reach the city? If Cao Cao pursue, we shall be in a parlous state. Our counsel is to leave the people to their fate for a time and press on to Jiangling.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei wept, saying, \"The success of every great enterprise depends upon humanity. How can I abandon these people who have joined me?\"\n\nThose who heard him repeat this noble sentiment were greatly affected.\n\n\u2003In time of stress his heart was tender toward the people,\n\n\u2003And he wept as he went down into the ship,\n\n\u2003Moving the hearts of soldiers to sympathy.\n\n\u2003Even today, in the countryside,\n\n\u2003Fathers and elders recall the Princely One's kindness.\n\nThe progress of Liu Bei, with the crowd of people in his train, was very slow.\n\n\"The pursuers will be upon us quickly,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Let us send Guan Yu to Jiangxia for succor. Liu Qi should be told to bring soldiers and prepare boats for us at Jiangling.\"\n\nLiu Bei agreed to this and wrote a letter which he sent by the hands of Guan Yu and Sun Qian and five hundred troops. Zhang Fei was put in command of the rear guard. Zhao Zilong was told to guard Liu Bei's family, while the others ordered the march of the people.\n\nThey only traveled three or four miles daily and the halts were frequent.\n\nMeanwhile Cao Cao was at Fancheng, whence he sent troops over the river toward Xiangyang. He summoned Liu Zong, but Liu Zong was too afraid to answer the call. No persuasion could get him to go.\n\nWang Wei said to him privately, \"Now you can overcome Cao Cao if you are wise. Since you have announced surrender and Liu Bei has gone away, Cao Cao will relax his precautions, and you can catch him unawares. Send a well-prepared but unexpected force to waylay him in some commanding position, and the thing is done. If you were to take Cao Cao prisoner, your fame would run throughout the empire, and the land would be yours for the taking. This is a sort of opportunity that does not recur, and you should not miss it.\"\n\nThe young man consulted Cai Mao, who called Wang Wei an evil counselor and spoke to him harshly.\n\n\"You are mad! You know nothing and understand nothing of destiny,\" said Cai Mao.\n\nWang Wei angrily retorted, saying, \"Cai Mao is the betrayer of the country, and I wish I could eat him alive!\"\n\nThe quarrel waxed deadly, and Cai Mao wanted to slay Wang Wei. But eventually peace was restored by Kuai Yue.\n\nThen Cai Mao and Zhang Yun went to Fancheng to see Cao Cao.\n\nCai Mao was by instinct specious and flattering, and when his host asked concerning the resources of Jingzhou, he replied, \"There are fifty thousand of horse, one hundred fifty thousand of foot, and eighty thousand of marines. Most of the money and grain are at Jiangling. The rest is stored at various places. There are ample supplies for a year.\"\n\n\"How many war vessels are there? Who is in command?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"The ships, of all sizes, number seven thousands, and we two are the commanders.\"\n\nUpon this Cao Cao conferred upon Cai Mao the title of the Lord Who Controls the South, and Supreme Admiral of the Naval Force; and Zhang Yun was his Vice-Admiral with the title of the Lord Who Brings Obedience.\n\nWhen they went to thank Cao Cao for these honors, he told them, saying, \"I am about to propose to the Throne that Liu Biao's son should be perpetual Imperial Protector of Jingzhou in succession to his late father.\"\n\nWith this promise for their young master and the honors for themselves, they retired.\n\nThen Xun You asked Cao Cao, \"Why these two evident self-seekers and flatterers have been treated so generously?\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"Do I not know all about them? Only in the north, where we have been, we know very little of war by water, and these two men do. I want their help for the present. When my end is achieved, I can do as I like with them.\"\n\nLiu Zong was highly delighted when his two chief supporters returned with the promise Cao Cao had given them. Soon after he gave up his seal and military commission and proceeded to welcome Cao Cao, who received him very graciously.\n\nCao Cao next proceeded to camp near Xiangyang. The populace, led by Cai Mao and Zhang Yun, welcomed him with burning incense, and he on his part put forth proclamations couched in comforting terms.\n\nCao Cao presently entered the city and took his seat in the residence in state. Then he summoned Kuai Yue and said to him graciously, \"I do not rejoice so much at gaining Jingzhou as at meeting you, friend Kuai Yue.\"\n\nCao Cao made Kuai Yue Governor of Jiangling and Lord of Fancheng; Wang Can, Fu Xuan, and Kuai Yue's other adherents were all ennobled. Liu Zong became Imperial Protector of Qingzhou in the north and was ordered to proceed to his region forthwith.\n\nLiu Zong was greatly frightened and said, \"I have no wish to become an actual official. I wish to remain in the place where my father and mother live.\"\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"Your protectorship is quite near the capital, and I have sent you there as a full official to remove you from the intrigues of this place.\"\n\nIn vain Liu Zong declined the honors thus thrust upon him: He was compelled to go and he departed, taking his mother with him. Of his friends, only Wang Wei accompanied him. Some of his late officers escorted him as far as the river and then took their leave.\n\nThen Cao Cao called his trusty officer Yu Jin and said, \"Follow Liu Zong and put him and his mother to death. Our worries are thus removed.\"\n\nYu Jin followed the small party.\n\nWhen he drew near he shouted, \"I have an order from the great Prime Minister to put you both to death, mother and son! You may as well submit quietly.\"\n\nLady Cai threw her arms about her son, lifted up her voice and wept. Yu Jin bade his soldiers get on with their bloody work. Only Wang Wei made any attempt to save his mistress, and he was soon killed. The two, mother and son, were soon finished, and Yu Jin returned to report his success. He was richly rewarded.\n\nNext Cao Cao sent to discover and seize the family of Zhuge Liang, but they had already disappeared. Zhuge Liang had moved them to the Three Gorges. It was much to Cao Cao's disgust that the search was fruitless.\n\nSo Xiangyang was settled. Then Xun You proposed a further advance.\n\nHe said, \"Jiangling is an important place, and very rich. If Liu Bei gets it, it will be difficult to dislodge him.\"\n\n\"How could I have overlooked that?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he called upon the officers of Xiangyang for one who could lead the way. They all came except Wen Ping.\n\nCao Cao sent for him and soon he came also.\n\n\"Why are you late?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nWen Ping said, \"To be a minister and see one's master lose his own boundaries is most shameful. Such a person has no face to show to anyone else, and I was too ashamed to come.\"\n\nHis tears fell fast as he finished this speech. Cao Cao admired his loyal conduct and rewarded him with office of Governorship of Jiangxia and a title of Lordship, and also bade him open the way.\n\nThe spies returned and said, \"Liu Bei is hampered by the crowds of people who have followed him. He can proceed only three or four miles daily, and he is only one hundred miles away.\"\n\nCao Cao decided to take advantage of Liu Bei's plight, so he chose out five thousand of tried horsemen and sent them after the cavalcade, giving them a limit of a day and a night to come up therewith. The main army would follow.\n\nAs has been said Liu Bei was traveling with a huge multitude of followers, to guard whom he had taken what precautions were possible. Zhang Fei was in charge of the rear guard, and Zhao Zilong was to protect his lord's family. Guan Yu had been sent to Jiangxia.\n\nOne day Zhuge Liang came in and said, \"There is as yet no news from Jiangxia. There must be some difficulties.\"\n\n\"I wish that you yourself would go there,\" said Liu Bei. \"Liu Qi would remember your former kindness to him and consent to anything you proposed.\"\n\nZhuge Liang said he would go and set out with Liu Feng, the adopted son of Liu Bei, taking an escort of five hundred troops.\n\nA few days after, while on the march in company with three of his commanders \u2014 Jian Yong, Mi Zhu, and Mi Fang \u2014 a sudden whirlwind rose just in front of Liu Bei, and a huge column of dust shot up into the air hiding the face of the sun.\n\nLiu Bei was frightened and asked, \"What might that portend?\"\n\nJian Yong, who knew something of the mysteries of nature, took the auspices by counting secretly on his fingers.\n\nPale and trembling, he announced, \"A calamity is threatening this very night. My lord must leave the people to their fate and flee quickly.\"\n\n\"I cannot do that,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If you allow your pity to overcome your judgment, then misfortune is very near,\" said Jian Yong.\n\nThus spoke Jian Yong to his lord, who then asked what place was near.\n\nHis people replied, \"Dangyang is quite close, and there is a very famous mountain near it called Prospect Mountain.\"\n\nThen Liu Bei bade them lead the way thither.\n\nThe season was late autumn, just changing to winter, and the icy wind penetrated to the very bones. As evening fell, long-drawn howls of misery were heard on every side. At the middle of the fourth watch, two hours after midnight, they heard a rumbling sound in the northwest. Liu Bei halted and placed himself at the head of his own guard of two thousand soldiers to meet whatever might come.\n\nPresently Cao Cao's men appeared and made fierce onslaught. Defense was impossible, though Liu Bei fought desperately. By good fortune just at the crisis Zhang Fei came up, cut an alley through, rescued his brother, and got him away to the east. Presently they were stopped by Wen Ping.\n\n\"Turncoat! Can you still look humans in the face?\" cried Liu Bei.\n\nWen Ping was overwhelmed with shame and led his troops away. Zhang Fei, now fighting, protected his brother till dawn.\n\nBy that time Liu Bei had got beyond the sound of battle, and there was time to rest. Only a few of his followers had been able to keep near him. He knew nothing of the fate of his officers or the people.\n\nHe lifted up his voice in lamentation, saying, \"Myriads of living souls are suffering from love of me, and my officers and my loved ones are lost. One would be a graven image not to weep at such loss!\"\n\nStill plunged in sadness, presently he saw hurrying toward him Mi Fang, with an enemy's arrow still sticking in his face.\n\nMi Fang exclaimed, \"Zhao Zilong has gone over to Cao Cao!\"\n\nLiu Bei angrily bade him be silent, crying, \"Do you think I can believe that of my old friend?\"\n\n\"Perhaps he has gone over,\" said Zhang Fei. \"He must see that we are nearly lost and there are riches and honors on the other side.\"\n\n\"He has followed me faithfully through all my misfortunes. His heart is firm as a rock. No riches or honors would move him,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"I saw him go away northwest,\" said Mi Fang.\n\n\"Wait till I meet him,\" said Zhang Fei. \"If I run against him, I will kill him!\"\n\n\"Beware how you doubt him,\" said Liu Bei. \"Have you forgotten the circumstances under which your brother Guan Yu had to slay Cai Yang to ease your doubts of him? Zhao Zilong's absence is due to good reason wherever he has gone, and he would never abandon me.\"\n\nBut Zhang Fei was not convinced. Then he, with a score of his men, rode to the Long Slope Bridge. Seeing a wood near the bridge, an idea suddenly struck him. He bade his followers cut branches from the trees, tie them to the tails of the horses, and ride to and fro so as to raise a great dust as though an army were concealed in the wood. He himself took up his station on the bridge facing the west with spear set ready for action. So he kept watch.\n\nNow Zhao Zilong, after fighting with the enemy from the fourth watch till daylight, could see no sign of his lord and, moreover, had lost his lord's family.\n\nHe thought bitterly within himself, \"My master confided to me his family and the child lord Liu Shan; and I have lost them. How can I look him in the face? I can only go now and fight to the death. Whatever happen, I must go to seek the women and my lord's son.\"\n\nTurning about he found he had but some forty followers left. He rode quickly to and fro among the scattered soldiers seeking the lost women. The lamentations of the people about him were enough to make heaven and earth weep. Some had been wounded by arrows, others by spears; they had thrown away their children, abandoned their wives, and were flying they knew not whither in crowds.\n\nPresently Zhao Zilong saw a man lying in the grass and recognized him as Jian Yong.\n\n\"Have you seen the two mothers?\" cried he.\n\nJian Yong replied, \"They left their carriage and ran away taking the child lord Liu Shan in their arms. I followed but on the slope of the hill I was wounded and fell from my horse. The horse was stolen. I could fight no longer, and I lay down here.\"\n\nZhao Zilong put his colleague on the horse of one of his followers, told off two soldiers to support Jian Yong, and bade Jian Yong ride to their lord and tell him of the loss.\n\n\"Say,\" said Zhao Zilong, \"that I will seek the lost ones in heaven or hell, through good or evil. And if I find them not, I will die in the battlefield.\"\n\nThen Zhao Zilong rode off toward the Long Slope Bridge.\n\nAs he went, a voice called out, \"General Zhao Zilong, where are you going?\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" said Zhao Zilong, pulling up.\n\n\"One of the Princely One's carriage guards. I am wounded.\"\n\n\"Do you know anything of the two ladies?\"\n\n\"Not very long ago I saw Lady Gan go south with a party of other women. Her hair was down, and she was barefooted\"\n\nHearing this, without even another glance at the speaker, Zhao Zilong put his horse at full gallop toward the south. Soon he saw a small crowd of people, male and female, walking hand in hand.\n\n\"Is Lady Gan among you!\" he called out.\n\nA woman in the rear of the party looked up at him and uttered a loud cry.\n\nHe slipped off his steed, stuck his spear in the sand, and wept, \"It was my fault that you were lost. But where are Lady Mi and our child lord?\"\n\nLady Gan replied, \"She and I were forced to abandon our carriage and mingle with the crowd on foot. Then a band of soldiers came up, and we were separated. I do not know where they are. I ran for my life.\"\n\nAs she spoke, a howl of distress rose from the crowd of fugitives, for a thousand of soldiers appeared. Zhao Zilong recovered his spear and mounted ready for action. Presently he saw among the soldiers a prisoner bound upon a horse, and the prisoner was Mi Zhu. Behind Mi Zhu followed a general gripping a huge sword. The troops belonged to the army of Cao Ren, and the general was Chunyu Dao. Having captured Mi Zhu, he was just taking him to his chief as a proof of his prowess.\n\nZhao Zilong shouted and rode at the captor who was speedily slain by a spear thrust and his captive was set free. Then taking two of the horses, Zhao Zilong set Lady Gan on one and Mi Zhu took the other. They rode away toward Long Slope Bridge.\n\nBut there, standing grim on the bridge, was Zhang Fei.\n\nAs soon as he saw Zhao Zilong, he called out, \"Zhao Zilong, why have you betrayed our lord?\"\n\n\"I fell behind because I was seeking the ladies and our child lord,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"What do you mean by talking of betrayal?\"\n\n\"If it had not been that Jian Yong arrived before you and told me the story, I should hardly have spared you.\"\n\n\"Where is the master?\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"Not far away, in front there,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Conduct Lady Gan to him. I am going to look for Lady Mi,\" said Zhao Zilong to his companion, and he turned back along the road by which he had come.\n\nBefore long he met a leader armed with an iron spear and carrying a sword slung across his back, riding a curvetting steed, and leading ten other horsemen. Without uttering a word Zhao Zilong rode straight toward him and engaged. At the first pass Zhao Zilong disarmed his opponent and brought him to earth. His followers galloped away.\n\nThis fallen officer was no other than Xiahou En, Cao Cao's sword-bearer. And the sword on Xiahou En's back was his master's . Cao Cao had two swords, one called \"Trust of God\" and the other \"Blue Blade\". Trust of God was the weapon Cao Cao usually wore at his side, the other being carried by his sword-bearer. The Blue Blade would cut clean through iron as though it were mud, and no sword had so keen an edge.\n\nBefore Zhao Zilong thus fell in with Xiahou En, the latter was simply plundering, depending upon the authority implied by his office. Least of all thought he of such sudden death as met he at Zhao Zilong's hands.\n\nSo Zhao Zilong got possession of a famous sword. The name Blue Blade was chased in gold characters so that he recognized its value at once. He stuck it in his belt and again plunged into the press. Just as he did so, he turned his head and saw he had not a single follower left. He was quite alone.\n\nNevertheless not for a single instant thought he of turning back. He was too intent upon his quest. To and fro, back and forth, he rode questioning this person and that.\n\nAt length a man said, \"A woman with a child in her arms, and wounded in the thigh so that she cannot walk, is lying over there through that hole in the wall.\"\n\nZhao Zilong rode to look and there, beside an old well behind the broken wall of a burned house, sat the mother clasping the child to her breast and weeping.\n\nZhao Zilong was on his knees before her in a moment.\n\n\"My child will live then since you are here,\" cried Lady Mi. \"Pity him, O General! Protect him, for he is the only son of his father's flesh and blood. Take him to his father, and I can die content.\"\n\n\"It is my fault that you have suffered,\" replied Zhao Zilong. \"But it is useless to say more. I pray you take my horse, while I will walk beside and protect you till we get clear.\"\n\nShe replied, \"I may not do that. What would you do without a steed? But the boy here I confide to your care. I am badly wounded and cannot hope to live. Pray take him and go your way. Do not trouble more about me.\"\n\n\"I hear shouting,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"The soldiers will be upon us again in a moment. Pray mount quickly!\"\n\n\"But really I cannot move,\" she said. \"Do not let there be a double loss!\"\n\nAnd she held out the child toward him as she spoke.\n\n\"Take the child!\" cried Lady Mi. \"His life and safety are in your hands.\"\n\nAgain and again Zhao Zilong besought her to get on his horse, but she would not.\n\nThe shouting drew nearer and nearer, Zhao Zilong spoke harshly, saying, \"If you will not do what I say, what will happen when the soldiers come up?\"\n\nShe said no more. Throwing the child on the ground, she turned over and threw herself into the old well. And there she perished.\n\n\u2003The warrior relies upon the strength of his charger,\n\n\u2003Afoot, how could he bear to safety his young prince?\n\n\u2003Brave mother! Who died to preserve the son of her husband's line;\n\n\u2003Heroine was she, bold and decisive!\n\nSeeing that Lady Mi had resolved the question by dying, there was nothing more to be done. Zhao Zilong pushed over the wall to fill the well, and thus making a grave for the lady. Then he loosened his armor, let down the heart-protecting mirror, and placed the child in his breast. This done he slung his spear and remounted.\n\nZhao Zilong had gone but a short distance, when he saw a horde of enemy led by Yan Ming, one of Cao Hong's generals. This warrior used a double edged, three pointed weapon and he offered battle. However, Zhao Zilong disposed of him after a very few bouts and dispersed his troops.\n\nAs the road cleared before him, Zhao Zilong saw another detachment barring his way. At the head of this was a general exalted enough to display a banner with his name Zhang He of Hejian. Zhao Zilong never waited to parley but attacked. However, this was a more formidable antagonist, and half a score bouts found neither any nearer defeat. But Zhao Zilong, with the child in his bosom, could only fight with the greatest caution, and so he decided to flee.\n\nZhang He pursued, and as Zhao Zilong thought only of thrashing his steed to get away, and little of the road, suddenly he went crashing into a pit. On came his pursuer, spear at poise. Suddenly a brilliant flash of light seemed to shoot out of the pit, and the fallen horse leapt with it into the air and was again on firm earth.\n\n\u2003A bright glory surrounds the child of the imperial line, now in danger,\n\n\u2003The powerful charger forces his way through the press of battle,\n\n\u2003Bearing to safety him who was destined to the throne two score years and two;\n\n\u2003And the general thus manifested his godlike courage.\n\nThis apparition frightened Zhang He, who abandoned the pursuit forthwith, and Zhao Zilong rode off.\n\nPresently he heard shouts behind, \"Zhao Zilong, Zhao Zilong, stop!\" and at the same time he saw ahead of him two generals who seemed disposed to dispute his way.\n\nMa Yan and Zhang Zi following and Jiao Chu and Zhang Neng in front, his state seemed desperate, but Zhao Zilong quailed not.\n\nAs the men of Cao Cao came pressing on, Zhao Zilong drew Cao Cao's own sword to beat them off. Nothing could resist the blue blade sword. Armor, clothing, it went through without effort and blood gushed forth in fountains wherever it struck. So the four generals were soon beaten off, and Zhao Zilong was once again free.\n\nNow Cao Cao from a hilltop of the Prospect Mountain saw these deeds of derring-do and a general showing such valor that none could withstand him, so Cao Cao asked of his followers whether any knew the man. No one recognized him.\n\nSo Cao Hong galloped down into the plain and shouted out, \"We should hear the name of the warrior!\"\n\n\"I am Zhao Zilong of Changshan!\" replied Zhao Zilong.\n\nCao Hong returned and told his lord, who said, \"A very tiger of a leader! I must get him alive.\"\n\nWhereupon he sent horsemen to all detachments with orders that no arrows were to be fired from an ambush at any point Zhao Zilong should pass: He was to be taken alive.\n\nAnd so Zhao Zilong escaped most imminent danger, and Liu Shan's safety, bound up with his savior's, was also secured. On this career of slaughter which ended in safety, Zhao Zilong, bearing in his bosom the child lord Liu Shan, cut down two main banners, took three spears, and slew or wounded of Cao Cao's generals half a hundred, all men of renown.\n\n\u2003Blood dyed the fighting robe and crimsoned his buff coat;\n\n\u2003None dared engage the terrible warrior at Dangyang;\n\n\u2003In the days of old lived the brave Zhao Zilong,\n\n\u2003Who fought in the battlefield for his lord in danger.\n\nHaving thus fought his way out of the press, Zhao Zilong lost no time in getting away from the battle field. His white battle robe had turned red, soaking in blood.\n\nOn his way, near the rise of the hills, he met with two other bodies of troops under two brothers, Zhong Jin and Zhong Shen. One of these was armed with a massive ax, the other a halberd.\n\nAs soon as they saw Zhao Zilong, they knew him and shouted, \"Quickly dismount and be bound!\"\n\n\u2003He has only escaped from the tiger cave,\n\n\u2003To risk the dragon pool's sounding wave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Screaming Zhang Fei Triumphs At Long Slope Bridge; Defeated Liu Bei Marches To Hanjin.\n\nAs related in the last chapter two generals appeared in front of Zhao Zilong, who rode at them with his spear ready for a thrust. Zhong Jin was leading, flourishing his battle-ax. Zhao Zilong engaged and very soon unhorsed him. Then Zhao Zilong galloped away. Zhong Shen rode up behind ready with his halberd, and his horse's nose got so close to the other's tail that Zhao Zilong could see in his armor the reflection of the play of Zhong Shen's weapon. Then suddenly, and without warning, Zhao Zilong wheeled round his horse so that he faced his pursuer, and their two steeds struck breast to breast. With his spear in his left hand, Zhao Zilong warded off the halberd strokes, and in his right he swung the blue blade sword. One slash and he had cut through both helmet and head. Zhong Shen fell to the ground, a corpse with only half a head on his body. His followers fled, and Zhao Zilong retook the road toward Long Slope Bridge.\n\nBut in his rear arose another tumultuous shouting, seeming to rend the very sky, and Wen Ping came up behind. However, although the man was weary and his steed spent, Zhao Zilong got close to the bridge where he saw standing, all ready for any fray, Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Help me, Zhang Fei!\" he cried and crossed the bridge.\n\n\"Hasten!\" cried Zhang Fei, \"I will keep back the pursuers!\"\n\nAbout seven miles from the bridge, Zhao Zilong saw Liu Bei with his followers reposing in the shade of some trees. He dismounted and drew near, weeping. The tears also started to Liu Bei's eyes when he saw his commander.\n\nStill panting from his exertions, Zhao Zilong gasped out, \"My fault \u2014 death is too light a punishment. Lady Mi was severely wounded. She refused my horse and threw herself into a well. She is dead, and all I could do was to fill in the well with the rubbish that lay around. But I placed the babe in the breast of my fighting robe and have won my way out of the press of battle. Thanks to the little lord's grand luck I have escaped. At first he cried a good deal, but for some time now he has not stirred or made a sound. I fear I may not have saved his life after all.\"\n\nThen Zhao Zilong opened his robe and looked: The child was fast asleep.\n\n\"Happily, Sir, your son is unhurt,\" said Zhao Zilong as he drew him forth and presented him in both hands.\n\nLiu Bei took the child but threw it aside angrily, saying, \"To preserve that suckling I very nearly lost a great general!\"\n\nZhao Zilong picked up the child again and, weeping, said, \"Were I ground to powder, I could not prove my gratitude.\"\n\n\u2003From out Cao Cao's host a tiger rushed,\n\n\u2003His wish but to destroy;\n\n\u2003Though Liu Bei's consort lost her life,\n\n\u2003Zhao Zilong preserved her boy.\n\n\u2003\"Too great the risk you ran to save\n\n\u2003This child,\" the father cried.\n\n\u2003To show he rated Zhao Zilong high,\n\n\u2003He threw his son aside.\n\nWen Ping and his company pursued Zhao Zilong till they saw Zhang Fei's bristling mustache and fiercely glaring eyes before them. There he was seated on his battle steed, his hand grasping his terrible serpent spear, guarding the bridge. They also saw great clouds of dust rising above the trees and concluded they would fall into an ambush if they ventured across the bridge. So they stopped the pursuit, not daring to advance further.\n\nIn a little time Cao Ren, Xiahou Dun, Xiahou Yuan, Li Dian, Yue Jing, Zhang Liao, Xu Chu, Zhang He, and other generals of Cao Cao came up, but none dared advance, frightened not only by Zhang Fei's fierce look, but lest they should become victims of a ruse of Zhuge Liang. As they came up, they formed a line on the west side, halting till they could inform their lord of the position.\n\nAs soon as the messengers arrived and Cao Cao heard about it, he mounted and rode to the bridge to see for himself. Zhang Fei's fierce eye scanning the hinder position of the army opposite him saw the silken umbrella, the axes and banners coming along, and concluded that Cao Cao came to see for himself how matters stood.\n\nSo in a mighty voice he shouted: \"I am Zhang Fei of Yan. Who dares fight with me?\"\n\nAt the sound of this thunderous voice, a terrible quaking fear seized upon Cao Cao, and he bade them take the umbrella away.\n\nTurning to his followers, he said, \"Guan Yu had said that his brother Zhang Fei was the sort of man to go through an army of a hundred legions and take the head of its commander-in-chief, and do it easily. Now here is this terror in front of us, and we must be careful.\"\n\nAs he finished speaking, again that terrible voice was heard, \"I am Zhang Fei of Yan. Who dares fight with me?\"\n\nCao Cao, seeing his enemy so fierce and resolute, was too frightened to think of anything but retreat.\n\nZhang Fei, seeing a movement going on in the rear, once again shook his spear and roared, \"What mean you? You will not fight nor do you run away!\"\n\nThis roar had scarcely begun when one of Cao Cao's staff, Xiahou Jie, reeled and fell from his horse terror-stricken, paralyzed with fear. The panic touched Cao Cao and spread to his whole surroundings, and he and his staff galloped for their lives. They were as frightened as a suckling babe at a clap of thunder or a weak woodcutter at the roar of a tiger. Many threw away their spears, dropped their casques and fled, a wave of panic-stricken humanity, a tumbling mass of terrified horses. None thought of ought but flight, and those who ran trampled the bodies of fallen comrades under foot.\n\n\u2003Zhang Fei was wrathful; and who dared\n\n\u2003To accept his challenge? Fierce he glared;\n\n\u2003His thunderous voice rolled out, and then\n\n\u2003In terror fled Cao Cao's armed soldiers.\n\nPanic-stricken Cao Cao galloped westward with the rest, thinking of nothing but getting away. He lost his headdress, and his loosened hair streamed behind him. Presently Zhang Liao and Xu Chu came up with him and seized his bridle; fear had deprived him of all self-control.\n\n\"Do not be frightened,\" said Zhang Liao. \"After all Zhang Fei is but one man and not worthy of extravagant fear. If you will only return and attack, you will capture your enemy.\"\n\nThat time Cao Cao had somewhat overcome his panic and become reasonable. Two generals were ordered back to the bridge to reconnoiter.\n\nZhang Fei saw the disorderly rout of the enemy but he dared not pursue. However, he bade his score or so of dust-raising followers to cut loose the branches from their horses' tails and come to help destroy the bridge. This done he went to report to his brother and told him of the destruction of the bridge.\n\n\"Brave as you are, brother, and no one is braver, but you are no strategist,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"What mean you, brother?\"\n\n\"Cao Cao is very deep. You are no match for him. The destruction of the bridge will bring him in pursuit.\"\n\n\"If he ran away at a yell of mine, think you he will dare return?\"\n\n\"If you had left the bridge, he would have thought there was an ambush and would not have dared to pass it. Now the destruction of the bridge tells him we are weak and fearful, and he will pursue. He does not mind a broken bridge. His legions could fill up the biggest rivers that we could get across.\"\n\nSo orders were given to march, and they went by a bye-road which led diagonally to Hanjin by the road of Minyang.\n\nThe two generals sent by Cao Cao to reconnoiter near Long Slope Bridge returned, saying, \"The bridge has been destroyed. Zhang Fei has left.\"\n\n\"Then he is afraid,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nCao Cao at once gave orders to set ten thousand men at work on three floating bridges to be finished that night.\n\nLi Dian said, \"I fear this is one of the wiles of Zhuge Liang. So be careful.\"\n\n\"Zhang Fei is just a bold warrior, but there is no guile about him,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nHe gave orders for immediate advance.\n\nLiu Bei was making all speed to Hanjin. Suddenly there appeared in his track a great cloud of dust whence came loud rolls of drums and shoutings.\n\nLiu Bei was dismayed and said, \"Before us rolls the Great River; behind is the pursuer. What hope is there for us?\"\n\nBut he bade Zhao Zilong organize a defense.\n\nNow Cao Cao in an order to his army had said, \"Liu Bei is a fish in the fish kettle, a tiger in the pit. Catch him this time, or the fish will get back to the sea and the tiger escape to the mountains. Therefore every general must use his best efforts to press on.\"\n\nIn consequence every leader bade those under him hasten forward. And they were pressing on at great speed, when suddenly a body of soldiers appeared from the hills and a voice cried, \"I have waited here a long time!\"\n\nThe leader who had shouted this bore in his hand the green-dragon saber and rode Red Hare, for indeed it was no other than Guan Yu. He had gone to Jiangxia for help and had returned with a whole legion of ten thousand. Having heard of the battle, he had taken this very road to intercept pursuit.\n\nAs soon as Guan Yu appeared, Cao Cao stopped and said to his officers, \"Here we are, tricked again by that Zhuge Liang!\"\n\nWithout more ado he ordered a retreat. Guan Yu followed him some three miles and then drew off to act as guard to his elder brother on his way to the river. There boats were ready, and Liu Bei and family went on board. When all were settled comfortably in the boat, Guan Yu asked where was his sister, the second wife of his brother, Lady Mi. Then Liu Bei told him the story of Dangyang.\n\n\"Alas!\" said Guan Yu. \"Had you taken my advice that day of the hunting in Xutian, we should have escaped the misery of this day.\"\n\n\"But,\" said Liu Bei, \"on that day it was 'Ware damaged when pelting rats.'\"\n\nJust as Liu Bei spoke, he heard war drums on the south bank. A fleet of boats, thick as a flight of ants, came running up with swelling sails before the fair wind. He was alarmed.\n\nThe boats came nearer. There Liu Bei saw the white clad figure of a man wearing a silver helmet who stood in the prow of the foremost ship.\n\nThe leader cried, \"Are you all right, my uncle? I am very guilty.\"\n\nIt was Liu Qi. He bowed low as the ship passed, saying, \"I heard you were in danger from Cao Cao, and I have come to aid you.\"\n\nLiu Bei welcomed Liu Qi with joy, and his soldiers joined in with the main body, and the whole fleet sailed on, while they told each other their adventures.\n\nUnexpectedly in the southwest there appeared a line of fighting ships swishing up before a fair wind.\n\nLiu Qi said, \"All my troops are here, and now there is an enemy barring the way. If they are not Cao Cao's ships, they must be from the South Land. We have a poor chance. What now?\"\n\nLiu Bei went to the prow and gazed at them. Presently he made out a figure in a turban and Daoist robe sitting in the bows of one of the boats and knew it to be Zhuge Liang. Behind him stood Sun Qian.\n\nWhen they were quite near, Liu Bei asked Zhuge Liang how he came to be there.\n\nAnd Zhuge Liang reported what he had done, saying, \"When I reached Jiangxia, I sent Guan Yu to land at Hanjin with reinforcements, for I feared pursuit from Cao Cao and knew that road you would take instead of Jiangling. So I prayed your nephew to go to meet you, while I went to Xiakou to muster as many soldiers as possible.\"\n\nThe new-comers added to their strength, and they began once more to consider how their powerful enemy might be overcome.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"Xiakou is strong and a good strategic point. It is also rich and suited for a lengthy stay. I would ask you, my lord, to make it a permanent camp. Your nephew can go to Jiangxia to get the fleet in order and prepare weapons. Thus we can create two threatening angles for our position. If we all return to Jiangxia, the position will be weakened.\"\n\nLiu Qi replied, \"The Directing Instructor's words are excellent, but I wish rather my uncle stayed awhile in Jiangxia till the army was in thorough order. Then he could go to Xiakou.\"\n\n\"You speak to the point, nephew,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nThen leaving Guan Yu with five thousand troops at Xiakou he, with Zhuge Liang and his nephew, went to Jiangxia.\n\nWhen Cao Cao saw Guan Yu with a force ready to attack, he feared lest a greater number were hidden away behind, so he stopped the pursuit. He also feared lest Liu Bei should take Jiangling, so he marched thither with all haste.\n\nThe two officers in command at Jingzhou City, Deng Yi and Liu Xin, had heard of the death of their lord Liu Zong at Xiangyang and, knowing that there was no chance of successful defense against Cao Cao's armies, they led out the people of Jingzhou to the outskirts and offered submission. Cao Cao entered the city and, after restoring order and confidence, he released Han Song and gave him the dignified office of Director of Ambassadorial Receptions. He rewarded the others.\n\nThen said Cao Cao, \"Liu Bei has gone to Jiangxia and may ally himself with the South Land, and the opposition to me will be greater. Can he be destroyed?\"\n\nXun You said, \"The splendor of your achievements has spread wide. Therefore you might send a messenger to invite Sun Quan to a grand hunting party at Jiangxia, and you two could seize Liu Bei, share Jingzhou with Sun Quan, and make a solemn treaty. Sun Quan will be too frightened not to come over to you, and your end will be gained.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed. He sent the letters by a messenger, and he prepared his army \u2014 horse and foot and marines. He had in all eight hundred thirty thousand troops, but he called them a million. The attack was to be by land and water at the same time.\n\nThe fleet advanced up the river in two lines. On the west it extended to Jingxia, on the east to Qichun. The stockades stretched one hundred miles.\n\nThe story of Cao Cao's movements and successes reached Sun Quan, then in camp at Chaisang. He assembled his strategists to decide on a scheme of defense.\n\nLu Su said, \"Jingzhou is contiguous to our borders. It is strong and defensive, its people are rich. It is the sort of country that an emperor or a king should have. Liu Biao's recent death gives an excuse for me to be sent to convey condolence and, once there, I shall be able to talk over Liu Bei and the officers of the late Imperial Protector to combine with you against Cao Cao. If Liu Bei does as I wish, then success is yours.\"\n\nSun Quan thought this a good plan, so he had the necessary letters prepared, and the gifts, and sent Lu Su with them.\n\nAll this time Liu Bei was at Jiangxia where, with Zhuge Liang and Liu Qi, he was endeavoring to evolve a good plan of campaign.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"Cao Cao's power is too great for us to cope with. Let us go over to the South Land and ask help from Sun Quan. If we can set north and south at grips, we ought to be able to get some advantage from our intermediate position between them.\"\n\n\"But will they be willing to have anything to do with us?\" said Liu Bei. \"The South Land is a large and populous country, and Sun Quan has ambitions of his own.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Cao Cao with his army of a million holds the Han River and a half of the Great River. The South Land will certainly send to find out all possible about the position. Should any messenger come, I shall borrow a little boat and make a little trip over the river and trust to my little lithe tongue to set north and south at each other's throats. If the south wins, we will assist in destroying Cao Cao in order to get Jingzhou. If the north wins, we shall profit by the victory to get the South Land. So we shall get some advantage either way.\"\n\n\"That is a very fine view to take,\" said Liu Bei. \"But how are you going to get hold of anyone from the South Land to talk to?\"\n\nLiu Bei's question was answered by the arrival of Lu Su, and as the ship touched the bank and the envoy came ashore, Zhuge Liang laughed, saying, \"It is done!\"\n\nTurning to Liu Qi he asked, \"When Sun Ce died, did your country send any condolences?\"\n\n\"It is impossible there would be any mourning courtesies between them and us. We had caused the death of his father, Sun Jian.\"\n\n\"Then it is certain that this envoy does not come to present condolences but to spy out the land.\"\n\nSo he said to Liu Bei, \"When Lu Su asks about the movements of Cao Cao, you will know nothing. If he presses the matter, say he can ask me.\"\n\nHaving thus prepared their scheme, they sent to welcome the envoy, who entered the city in mourning garb. The gifts having been accepted, Liu Qi asked Lu Su to meet Liu Bei. When the introductory ceremonies were over, the three men went to one of the inner chambers to drink a cup of wine.\n\nPresently Lu Su said to Liu Bei, \"By reputation I have known you a long time, Uncle Liu Bei, but till today I have not met you. I am very gratified at seeing you. You have been fighting Cao Cao, though, lately, so I suppose you know all about him. Has he really so great an army? How many, do you think, he has?\"\n\n\"My army was so small that we fled whenever we heard of his approach. So I do not know how many he had.\"\n\n\"You had the advice of Zhuge Liang, and you used fire on Cao Cao twice. You burned him almost to death so that you can hardly say you know nothing about his soldiers,\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"Without asking my adviser, I really do not know the details.\"\n\n\"Where is Zhuge Liang? I should like to see him,\" said Lu Su.\n\nSo they sent for him, and he was introduced.\n\nWhen the ceremonies were over, Lu Su said, \"I have long admired your genius but have never been fortunate enough to meet you. Now that I have met you, I hope I may speak of present politics.\"\n\nReplied Zhuge Liang, \"I know all Cao Cao's infamies and wickednesses, but to my regret we were not strong enough to withstand him. That is why we avoided him.\"\n\n\"Is the Imperial Uncle going to stay here?\"\n\n\"The Princely One is an old friend of Wu Ju, Governor of Changwu, and intends to go to him.\"\n\n\"Wu Ju has few troops and insufficient supplies. He cannot ensure safety for himself. How can he receive the Uncle?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"Changwu is not one to remain in long, but it is good enough for the present. We can make other plans for the future.\"\n\nLu Su said, \"Sun Quan is strongly posted in the six southern territories and is exceedingly well supplied. He treats able people and scholars with the greatest courtesy and so they gather round him. Now if you are seeking a plan for your Prince, you cannot do better than send some friend to confer with him.\"\n\n\"There have never been any relations between my master and yours,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"I fear there would be nothing but a waste of words. Besides, we have no one to send.\"\n\n\"Your elder brother Zhuge Jin is there as adviser and is longing to see you. I am but a simple wight, but I should be pleased to discuss affairs with my master and you.\"\n\n\"But Zhuge Liang is my Directing Instructor,\" said Liu Bei, \"and I cannot do without him. He cannot go.\"\n\nLu Su pressed him. Liu Bei pretended to refuse permission.\n\n\"It is important. I pray you give me leave to go,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThen Liu Bei consented. And they soon took leave and the two set out by boat for Sun Quan's headquarters.\n\n\u2003A little boat sailed down the stream\n\n\u2003With Zhuge Liang well content;\n\n\u2003For he could see his enemies\n\n\u2003To fiery perdition sent." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Disputes With The Southern Scholars; Lu Su Denounces The Majority Opinion.\n\nIn the boat on the way to Chaisang, the two travelers beguiled the time by discussing affairs.\n\nLu Su impressed upon his companion, saying, \"When you see my master, do not reveal the truth about the magnitude of Cao Cao's army.\"\n\n\"You do not have to remind me,\" replied Zhuge Liang, \"but I shall know how to reply.\"\n\nWhen the boat arrived, Zhuge Liang was lodged in the guests' quarters, and Lu Su went alone to see his master. Lu Su found Sun Quan actually at a council, assembled to consider the situation. Lu Su was summoned thereto and questioned at once upon what he had discovered.\n\n\"I know the general outline, but I want a little time to prepare my report,\" replied Lu Su.\n\nThen Sun Quan produced Cao Cao's letter and gave it to Lu Su.\n\n\"That came yesterday. I have sent the bearer of it back, and this gathering is to consider the reply,\" said he.\n\nLu Su read the letter:\n\n\"When I, the Prime Minister, received the imperial command to punish a fault, my banners went south and Liu Zong became my prisoner, while the people of Jingzhou flocked to my side at the first rumor of my coming. Under my hand are one million strong and a thousand able leaders. My desire is, General, that we go on a great hunting expedition into Jiangxia and together attack Liu Bei. We will share his land between us, and we will swear perpetual amity. If happily you would not be a mere looker-on, I pray you reply quickly.\"\n\n\"What have you decided upon, my lord?\" asked Lu Su as he finished the letter.\n\n\"I have not yet decided.\"\n\nThen Zhang Zhao said, \"It would be imprudent to withstand Cao Cao's hundred legions backed by the imperial authority. Moreover, your most important defense against him is the Great River; and since Cao Cao has gained possession of Jingzhou, the river is his ally against us. We cannot withstand him, and the only way to tranquillity, in my opinion, is submission.\"\n\n\"The words of the speaker accord with the manifest decree of providence,\" echoed all the assembly.\n\nSun Quan remaining silent and thoughtful.\n\nZhang Zhao again took up the argument, saying, \"Do not hesitate, my lord. Submission to Cao Cao means tranquillity to the people of the South Land and safety for the inhabitants of the six territories.\"\n\nSun Quan still remained silent. His head bent in deep thought. Presently he arose and paced slowly out at the door, and Lu Su followed him.\n\nOutside he took Lu Su by the hand, saying, \"What do you desire?\"\n\n\"What they have all been saying is very derogatory to you. A common person might submit. You cannot.\"\n\n\"Why? How do you explain that?\"\n\n\"If people like us servants submitted, we would just return to our village or continue holding our offices, and everything would go on as before. If you submit, whither will you go? You will be created a lord of some humble fief, perhaps. You will have one carriage, no more; one saddle horse, that is all. Your retinue will be some ten. Will you be able to sit facing the south and call yourself by the kingly title of 'The Solitary'? Each one in that crowd of hangers-on is thinking for himself, is purely selfish, and you should not listen to them, but take a line of your own and that quickly. Determine to play a bold game!\"\n\nSun Quan sighed, \"They all talk and talk: They miss my point of view. Now you have just spoken of a bold game, and your view is the same as mine. Surely God has expressly sent you to me. Still Cao Cao is now the stronger by all Yuan Shao's and Liu Biao's armies, and he has possession of Jingzhou. I fear he is almost too powerful to contend with.\"\n\n\"I have brought back with me Zhuge Liang, the younger brother of our Zhuge Jin. If you questioned him, he would explain clearly.\"\n\n\"Is Master Sleeping Dragon really here?\"\n\n\"Really here, in the guest-house.\"\n\n\"It is too late to see him today. But tomorrow I will assemble my officials, and you will introduce him to all my best. After that we will debate the matter.\"\n\nWith these instructions Lu Su retired.\n\nNext day he went to the guest-house and conveyed Sun Quan's commands to the guest, particularly saying, \"When you see my master, say nothing of the magnitude of Cao Cao's army.\"\n\nZhuge Liang smiled, saying, \"I shall act as circumstances dictate. You may be sure I shall make no mistakes.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was then conducted to where the high officers, civil and military to the number of forty and more, were assembled. They formed a dignified conclave as they sat in stately ranks with their tall headdresses and broad girdles.\n\nZhang Zhao sat at the head, and Zhuge Liang first saluted him. Then, one by one, he exchange the formal courtesies with them all. This done he took his seat in the guest's chair.\n\nThey, on their part, noted with interest Zhuge Liang's refined and elegant manner and his commanding figure, thinking within themselves, \"Here is a persuader fitted for discourse.\"\n\nZhang Zhao led the way in trying to bait the visitor. He said, \"You will pardon the most insignificant of our official circle, myself, if I mention that people say you compare yourself with those two famous men of talent, Guan Zhong and Yue Yi. Is there any truth in this?\"\n\n\"To a trifling extent I have compared myself with them,\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I have heard that Liu Bei made three journeys to visit you when you lived in retirement in your simple dwelling in the Sleeping Dragon Ridge, and that when you consented to serve him, he said he was as lucky as a fish in getting home to the ocean. Then he desired to possess the region about Jingzhou. Yet today all that country belongs to Cao Cao. I should like to hear your account of all that.\"\n\nZhuge Liang thought, \"This Zhang Zhao is Sun Quan's first adviser. Unless I can nonplus him, I shall never have a chance with his master.\"\n\nSo he replied, \"In my opinion the taking of the region around the Han River was as simple as turning over one's hand. But my master Liu Bei is both righteous and humane and would not stoop to filching the possession of a member of his own house. So he refused the offer of succession. But Liu Zong, a stupid lad, misled by specious words, submitted to Cao Cao and fell victim to his ferocity. My master is in camp at Jiangxia, but what his future plans may be cannot be divulged at present.\"\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"Be it so; but your words and your deeds are something discordant. You say you are the equal of the two famous ones. Well, Guan Zhong, as minister of Prince Huan, put his master at the very head of the feudal nobles, making his master's will supreme in all the land. Under the able statesmanship of Yue Yi, the feeble state of Yan conquered Qi, reducing nearly seventy of its cities. These two were men of most commanding and conspicuous talent.\n\n\"When you lived in retirement, you smiled scornfully at ordinary people, passed your days in idleness, nursing your knees and posing in a superior manner, implying that if you had control of affairs, Liu Bei would be more than human; he should bring good to everybody and remove all evil; rebellion and robbery would be no more. Poor Liu Bei, before he obtained your help, was an outcast and a vagabond, stealing a city here and there where he could. With you to help him, he was to become the cynosure of every eye, and every lisping school child was to say that he was a tiger who had grown wings; the Hans were to be restored and Cao Cao and his faction exterminated; the good old days would be restored, and all the people who had been driven into retirement by the corruption of political life would wake up, rub the sleep out of their eyes, and be in readiness to lift the cloud of darkness that covered the sky and gaze up at the glorious brilliancy of the sun and moon, to pull the people out of fire and water and put all the world to rest on a couch of comfort. That was all supposed to happen forthwith.\n\n\"Why then, when you went to Xinye, did not Cao Cao's army throw aside their arms and armors and flee like rats? Why could you not have told Liu Biao how to give tranquillity to his people? Why could you not aid his orphan son to protect his frontiers? Instead you abandoned Xinye and fled to Fancheng; you were defeated at Dangyang and fled to Xiakou with no place to rest in. Thus, after you had joined Liu Bei, he was worse off than before. Was it thus with Guan Zhong and Yue Yi? I trust you do not mind my blunt speech.\"\n\nZhuge Liang waited till Zhang Zhao had closed his oration, then laughed and said, \"How can the common birds understand the long flight of the cranes? Let me use an illustration. A man has fallen into a terrible malady. First the physician must administer hashish, then soothing drugs until his viscera shall be calmed into harmonious action. When the sick man's body shall have been reduced to quietude, then may he be given strong meats to strengthen him and powerful drugs to correct the disorder. Thus the disease will be quite expelled, and the man restored to health. If the physician does not wait till the humors and pulse are in harmony, but throws in his strong drugs too early, it will be difficult to restore the patient.\n\n\"My master suffered defeat at Runan and went to Liu Biao. He had then less than one thousand soldiers and only three generals \u2014 Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Zilong. That was indeed a time of extreme weakness. Xinye was a secluded, rustic town with few inhabitants and scanty supplies, and my master only retired there as a temporary refuge. How could he even think of occupying and holding it? Yet, with insufficient force, in a weak city, with untrained men and inadequate supplies, we burned Xiahou Dun at Bowang Slope, drowned Cao Ren and Cao Hong and their army in the White River, and set them in terror as they fled. I doubt whether the two ancient heroes would have done any better. As to the surrender of Liu Zong, Liu Bei knew nothing of it. And he was too noble and too righteous to take advantage of a kinsman's straits to seize his inheritance. As for the defeat at Dangyang, it must be remembered that Liu Bei was hampered with a huge voluntary following of common people, with their aged relatives and their children, whom he was too humane to abandon. He never thought of taking Jiangling, but willingly suffered with his people. This is a striking instance of his magnanimity.\n\n\"Small forces are no match for large armies. Victory and defeat are common episodes in every campaign. The great Founder of the Hans suffered many defeats at the hands of Xiang Yu, but Liu Bang finally conquered at Gaixia, and that battle was decisive. Was not this due to the strategy of Han Xin who, though he had long served Liu Bang, had never won a victory. Indeed real statesmanship and the restoration of stable government is a master plan far removed from the vapid discourses and debates of a lot of bragging babblers and specious and deceitful talkers, who, as they themselves say, are immeasureably superior to the rest of humankind but who, when it comes to deeds and decisions to meet the infinite and constant vicissitudes of affairs, fail to throw up a single capable person. Truly such people are the laughing stock of all the world.\"\n\nZhang Zhao found no reply to this diatribe.\n\nBut another in the assembly lifted up his voice, saying, \"But what of Cao Cao's present position? There he is, encamped with one hundred legions and a thousand leaders. Whither he goes he is invincible as wriggling dragon, and whither he looks he is as fearsome as roaring tiger. He seems to have taken Jiangxia already, as we see.\"\n\nThe speaker was Yu Fan.\n\nAnd Zhuge Liang replied, \"Cao Cao has acquired the swarms of Yuan Shao and stolen the crowds of Liu Biao. Yet I care not for all his mob legions.\"\n\nYu Fan smiled icily, saying, \"When you got thrashed at Dangyang and in desperation sent this way and that to ask help, even then did you not care? But do you think big talk really takes people in?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Liu Bei had a few thousand scrupulous soldiers to oppose against a million fierce brutes. He retired to Xiakou for breathing space. The South Land have strong and good soldiers, and there are ample supplies, and the Great River is a defense. Is now a time for you to convince your lord to bend the knee before a renegade, to be careless of his honor and reputation? As a fact Liu Bei is not the sort of man to fear such a rebel as Cao Cao.\"\n\nYu Fan had nothing to reply.\n\nNext, Bu Zhi, who was among those seated, said, \"Will you talk of our southern land with a tongue like the tongues of the persuaders Zhang Yi and Su Qin in the ancient time?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"You regard those two as mere speculative talkers; you do not recognize them also as heroes. Su Qin bore the Prime Ministers' seals of six federated states; Zhang Yi was twice Prime Minister of the state of Qin. Both were men of conspicuous ability who brought about the reformation of their governments. They are not to be compared with those who quail before the strong and overbear the weak, who fear the dagger and run away from the sword. You, Sir, have listened to Cao Cao's crafty and empty threat, and it has frightened you into advising surrender. Dare you ridicule Su Qin and Zhang Yi?\"\n\nBu Zhi was silenced.\n\nThen suddenly another interjected the question, \"What do you think of Cao Cao?\"\n\nIt was Xue Zong who had spoken.\n\nAnd Zhuge Liang replied, \"Cao Cao is one of the rebels against the dynasty. Why ask about him?\"\n\n\"You are mistaken,\" said Xue Zong. \"The Hans have outlasted their allotted time, and the end is near. Cao Cao already has two-thirds of the empire, and people are turning to him. Your master has not recognized the fateful moment, and to contend with a man so strong is to try to smash stones with eggs. Failure is certain.\"\n\nZhuge Liang angrily replied, \"Why do you speak so undutiful words, as if you knew neither father nor prince? Loyalty and filial duty are the essentials of a person's being. For a minister of Han, correct conduct demands that one is pledged to the destruction of anyone who does not follow the canon of a minister's duty. Cao Cao's forbears enjoyed the bounty of Han, but instead of showing gratitude, he nourishes in his bosom thoughts of rebellion. The whole world is incensed against him, and yet you would claim for him the indication of destiny. Truly you are a man who knows neither father nor prince, a man unworthy of any words, and I decline to argue with you further.\"\n\nThe blush of shame overspread Xue Zong's face, and he said no more.\n\nBut another, Lu Ji, took up the dispute and said, \"Although Cao Cao overawes the Emperor and in his name coerces the nobles, yet he is the descendant of the Supreme Ancestor's Prime Minister Cao Shen; while your master, though he says he is descended from a prince, has no proof thereof. In the eyes of the world, Liu Bei is just a weaver of mats, a seller of straw shoes. Who is he to strive with Cao Cao?\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughed and replied, \"Are you not that Lu Ji who pocketed the orange when you were sitting among Yuan Shu's guests? Listen to me: I have a word to say to you. Inasmuch as Cao Cao is a descendant of a minister of state, he is by heredity a servant of the Hans. But now he has monopolized all state authority and knows only his own arbitrary will, heaping every indignity upon his lord. Not only does he forget his prince, but he ignores his ancestors; not only is he a rebellious servant of Han, but the renegade of his family. Liu Bei of Yuzhou is a noble scion of the imperial family upon whom the Emperor has conferred rank, as is recorded in the annals. How then can you say there is no evidence of his imperial origin? Beside, the very founder of the dynasty was himself of lowly origin, and yet he became emperor. Where is the shame in weaving mats and selling shoes? Your mean, immature views are unfit to be mentioned in the presence of scholars of standing.\"\n\nThis put a stop to Lu Ji's flow of eloquence.\n\nBut another of those present said, \"Zhuge Liang's words are overbearing, and he distorts reason. It is not proper argument, and he had better say no more. But I would ask him what classical canon he studied.\"\n\nZhuge Liang looked at his interlocutor, who was Yan Jun, and said, \"The dryasdusts of every age select passages and choose phrases. What else are they good for? Do they ever initiate a policy or manage an affair? Yi Yin, who was a farmer in the state of Shen, and Lu Wang, the fisherman of the River Wei, Zhang Liang and Chen Ping, Zheng Yu and Geng Yan \u2014 all were men of transcendent ability, but I have never inquired what classical canon they followed or on whose essays they formed their style. Would you liken them to your rusty students of books, whose journeyings are comprised between their brush and their inkstone, who spend their days in literary futilities, wasting both time and ink?\"\n\nNo reply was forthcoming. Yan Jun hung his head with shame.\n\nBut another disputant, Cheng Deshu by name, suddenly shouted, \"You are mightily fond of big words, Sir, but they do not give any proof of your scholarship after all. I am inclined to think that a real scholar would just laugh at you.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"There is the noble scholar, loyal and patriotic, of perfect rectitude and a hater of any crookedness. The concern of such a scholar is to act in full sympathy with his day and leave to future ages a fine reputation. There is the scholar of the mean type, a pedant and nothing more. He labors constantly with his pen, in his callow youth composing odes and in hoary age still striving to understand the classical books completely. Thousands of words flow from his pen, but there is not a solid idea in his breast. He may, as did Yang Xiong, glorify the age with his writings and yet stoop to serve a tyrant such as Wang Mang. No wonder Yang Xiong threw himself out of a window; he had to. That is the way of the scholar of mean type. Though he composes odes by the hundred, what is the use of him?\"\n\nCheng Deshu could make no reply. The other officers now began to hold this man of torrential speech in wholesome fear.\n\nOnly two of them, Zhang Wen and Luo Tong, had failed to challenge him, but when they would have tried to pose Zhuge Liang, suddenly someone appeared from without and angrily shouted, \"This is not paying fit respect to a guest. You have among you the most wonderful man of the day, and you all sit there trying to entangle him in speech while our archenemy Cao Cao is nearing our borders. Instead of discussing how to oppose Cao Cao, you are all wrangling and disputing!\"\n\nAll eyes turned toward the speaker. It was Huang Gai of Lingling, who was the Chief of the Commissariat of the South Land.\n\nHe turned to address Zhuge Liang, saying, \"There is a saying that though something may be gained by talk, there is more to be got by silence. Why not give my lord the advantage of your valuable advice instead of wasting time in discussion with this crowd?\"\n\n\"They did not understand,\" replied Zhuge Liang, \"and it was necessary to enlighten them, so I had to speak.\"\n\nAs Huang Gai and Lu Su led the guest toward their master's apartments, they met his brother Zhuge Jin. Zhuge Liang saluted him with the deference due to an elder brother.\n\nZhuge Jin said, \"Why have you not been to see me, brother?\"\n\n\"I am now in the service of Liu Bei of Yuzhou, and it is right that public affairs precede private obligations. I cannot attend to any private matters till my work is done. You must pardon me, brother.\"\n\n\"After you have seen Marquis Sun Quan, you will come and tell me your news,\" said he as he left.\n\nAs they went along to the audience chamber, Lu Su again cautioned Zhuge Liang against any rash speech, saying, \"Do not tell the magnitude of Cao Cao's forces. Please remember.\"\n\nThe latter nodded but made no other reply. When they reached the hall, Sun Quan came down the steps to welcome his guests and was extraordinarily gracious. After the mutual salutations, the guest was given a chair while the Marquis' officials were drawn up in two lines, on one side the civil, on the other the military. Lu Su stood beside Zhuge Liang and listened to his introductory speech.\n\nAs Zhuge Liang spoke of Liu Bei's intentions, he glanced up at his host. He noted the green eyes and purple beard and the dignified commanding air of the man and thought within himself, \"Certainly in appearance this is no common man. He is one to be incited perhaps, but not to be persuaded. It will be better to see what he has to say first, then I will try to stir him to action.\"\n\nThe serving of tea being now finished, Sun Quan began with the usual gracious ceremonial expressions.\n\n\"Lu Su has often spoken of your genius,\" said the host. \"It is a great pleasure to meet you. I trust you will confer upon me the advantage of your instruction.\"\n\n\"I am neither clever nor learned,\" was the reply. \"It humiliates me to hear such words.\"\n\n\"You have been at Xinye lately, and you helped your master to fight that decisive battle with Cao Cao, so you must know exactly the measure of his military strength.\"\n\n\"My master's army was small and his generals were few; the city was paltry and lacked supplies. Hence no stand could be made against such a force as Cao Cao had.\"\n\n\"How many has he in all?\"\n\n\"Horse and foot, land and marine, he has a million.\"\n\n\"Is there not some doubt about that?\" said Sun Quan, surprised.\n\n\"None whatever. When Cao Cao went to Yanzhou, he had the two hundred thousand soldiers of Qingzhou. He gained five or six hundred thousand more when Yuan Shao fell. He has three or four hundred thousand troops newly recruited in the capital. Lately he has acquired two or three hundred thousand troops in Jingzhou. And if these be reckoned up, the total is not less than a million and a half. Hence I said a million for I was afraid of frightening your officers.\"\n\nLu Su was much disturbed and turned pale. He looked meaningfully at the bold speaker, but Zhuge Liang would not see. Sun Quan went on to ask if his archenemy had a corresponding number of leaders.\n\n\"Cao Cao has enough administrators and strategists to control such a host, and his capable and veteran leaders are more than a thousand; perhaps more than two thousand.\"\n\n\"What will be Cao Cao's next move now that he has overcome Jingzhou?\"\n\n\"He is camped along the river, and he has collected a fleet. If he does not intend to invade the South Land, what can his intentions be?\"\n\n\"Since that is his intention, it is a case of fight or not fight. I wish you would decide that for me.\"\n\n\"I have something I could say, but I fear, Sir, you would not care to hear it.\"\n\n\"I am desirous of hearing your most valuable opinion.\"\n\n\"Strife has prevailed for a long time; and so you have raised your army in the South Land and Liu Bei collected his forces south of the Han River to act in contest for the empire against Cao Cao. Now Cao Cao has overcome most of his difficulties, and his recent conquest of Jingzhou has won him great and wide renown. Though there might be one bold enough to tackle him, yet there is no foothold for such. That is how Liu Bei has been forced to come here. But, General, I wish you to measure your forces and decide whether you can venture to meet Cao Cao and that without loss of time. If you cannot, then follow the advice of your councilors: Cease your military preparations and yield, turn your face to the north and serve.\"\n\nSun Quan did not reply. But his guest went on, \"You have the reputation of being reasonable, but I know also you are inclined to hesitate. Still this matter is most important, and evil will be quickly upon you if you do not decide.\"\n\nThen replied Sun Quan, \"If what you say represents the actual conditions, why does not Liu Bei yield?\"\n\n\"Well, you know Tian Heng, that hero of the state of Qi: His character was too noble for him to submit to any shame. It is necessary to remember that Liu Bei also is an off-shoot from the Dynastic Family, beside being a man of great renown. Everyone looks up to him. His lack of success is simply the will of Heaven, but manifestly he could not bow the knee to anyone.\"\n\nThese last words touched Sun Quan to the quick, and he could not control his anger. He shook out his sleeves, rose, and left the audience chamber. Those present smiled at each other as they dispersed.\n\nBut Lu Su was annoyed and reproached Zhuge Liang for his maladroit way of talking to Sun Quan, saying, \"Luckily for you, my lord is too large-minded to rebuke you to your face, for you spoke to him most contemptuously.\"\n\nZhuge Liang threw back his head and laughed.\n\n\"What a sensitive fellow it is!\" cried he. \"I know how Cao Cao could be destroyed, but he never asked me. So I said nothing.\"\n\n\"If you really do know how that could be done, I will certainly beg my lord to ask you.\"\n\n\"Cao Cao's hosts in my eyes are but as swarms of ants. I have but to lift my hand, and they will be crushed,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nLu Su at once went into his master's private room, where he found Sun Quan still very irritable and angry.\n\n\"Zhuge Liang insulted me too deeply,\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"I have already reproached him,\" said Lu Su, \"and he laughed and said you were too sensitive. He would not give you any advice without being asked for it. Why did you not seek advice from him, my lord?\"\n\nAt once Sun Quan's anger changed to joy.\n\nHe said, \"So he had a plan ready, and his words were meant to provoke me. I did despise him for a moment, and it has very nearly lost me.\"\n\nSo Sun Quan returned to the audience chamber where the guest was still seated and begged Zhuge Liang to continue his speech.\n\nSun Quan spoke courteously, saying, \"I offended you just now. I hope you are not implacable.\"\n\n\"And I also was rude,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"I entreat pardon.\"\n\nHost and guest retired to the inner room where wine was served.\n\nAfter it had gone round several times, Sun Quan said, \"The enemies of Cao Cao were Lu Bu, Liu Biao, Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu, Liu Bei, and my poor self. Now most of these are gone, and only Liu Bei and I remain. I will never allow the land of Wu to be dictated to by another. The only one who could have withstood Cao Cao was Liu Bei, but he has been defeated lately and what can he do now against such force?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Although defeated, Liu Bei still has Guan Yu with ten thousand veterans. And Liu Qi still leads the troops of Jiangxia, another ten thousand. Cao Cao's army is far from home, and the soldiers are worn out. They made a frantic effort to come up with my master, and the light horse marched one hundred miles in a day and a night. This was the final kick of the crossbow spring, and the bolt was not swift enough to penetrate even the thin silken vesture of Lu. The army can do no more. They are northern people, unskilled in water warfare, and the people of Jingzhou are unwilling supporters. They have no desire to help Cao Cao. Now if you, General, will assist Liu Bei, Cao Cao will certainly be broken, and he must retire northwards. Then your country and Jingzhou will be strong, and the tripod will be firmly established. But the scheme must be carried out without delay, and only you can decide.\"\n\nSun Quan joyfully replied, \"Your words, Master, open up the road clearly. I have decided and shall have no further doubts.\"\n\nSo the orders were issued forthwith to prepare for a joint attack on Cao Cao. And Sun Quan bade Lu Su bear the news of his decision to all his officers. He himself escorted Zhuge Liang to the guest-quarters and saw to his comfort.\n\nWhen Zhang Zhao heard of the decision he met his colleagues and said to them, \"Our master has fallen into the trap set by this Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nThey went in a body to their lord and said, \"We hear you are going to attack Cao Cao. But how do you stand when compared with Yuan Shao? In those days Cao Cao was comparatively weak, and yet he overcame. What is he like today with his countless legions? He is not to be lightly attacked, and to listen to Zhuge Liang's advice to engage in a conflict is like carrying fuel to a fire.\"\n\nSun Quan made no reply, and Gu Yong took up the argument.\n\nGu Yong said, \"Liu Bei has been defeated, and he wants to borrow our help to beat his enemy. Why must our lord lend himself to his schemes? Pray listen to our leader's words.\"\n\nDoubts again surged up in the mind of Sun Quan.\n\nWhen the troop of advisers had retired, Lu Su came in, saying, \"They came to exhort you not to fight, but to compel you to surrender. All this is simply because they wish to secure the safety of their families. They distort their sense of duty to serve their own ends, and I hope you will not take their advice.\"\n\nSun Quan being sunk in thought and saying nothing, Lu Su went on, \"If you hesitate, you will certainly be led astray by the majority and--\"\n\n\"Retire for a time,\" said his master. \"I must think it over carefully.\"\n\nSo Lu Su left the chamber. Among the soldiers some wished for war, but of the civil officers, all were in favor of surrender; and so there were many discussions and much conflict of opinion. Sun Quan went to his private apartments greatly perplexed. There his worry was easily discernible, and he neither ate nor slept. He was quite unable to decide finally upon a course of action.\n\nThen Lady Wu, the sister of his late mother, whom he also regarded as his own mother, asked him what so troubled him, and he told her of the threatened danger of Cao Cao and the different opinions his advisers held one and another and all his doubts and fears.\n\n\"If I fight, I might fail. But if I offer to surrender, perhaps Cao Cao will not tolerate me,\" said he.\n\nThen she replied, \"Have you forgotten the last words of my sister?\"\n\nAs to one recovering from a fit of drunkenness, or waking out of a dream, so came to him the dying words of the mother who bore him.\n\n\u2003His mother's advice he called to mind,\n\n\u2003\"In Zhou Yu's counsels you safety find.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Stirs Zhou Yu To Actions; Sun Quan Decides To Attack Cao Cao.\n\nThe dying message which Lady Wu recalled to Sun Quan's memory was, \"For internal matters consult Zhang Zhao; for external policy Zhou Yu.\"\n\nWherefore Zhou Yu was summoned.\n\nBut Zhou Yu was already on the way. He had been training his naval forces on Poyang Lake when he heard of the approach of Cao Cao's hosts and had started for Chaisang without loss of time. So, before the messenger ordered to call him could start, he had already arrived. As he and Lu Su were close friends, the latter went to welcome him and told him of all that had happened.\n\n\"Have no anxiety,\" said Zhou Yu. \"I shall be able to decide this. But go quickly and beg Zhuge Liang to come to see me.\"\n\nSo Lu Su went to seek out Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhou Yu had many other visitors. First came Zhang Zhao, Zhang Hong, Gu Yong, and Bu Zhi to represent their faction to find out what might be afoot.\n\nThey were received, and after the exchange of the usual commonplaces, Zhang Zhao said, \"Have you heard of our terrible danger?\"\n\n\"I have heard nothing,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Cao Cao and his hordes are encamped up the Han River. He has just sent letters asking our lord to hunt with him in Jiangxia. He may have a desire to absorb this country but, if so, the details of his designs are still secret. We prayed our master to give in his submission and so avoid the horrors of war, but now Lu Su has returned bringing with him the Directing Instructor of Liu Bei's army, Zhuge Liang. Zhuge Liang, desiring to avenge himself for the recent defeat, has talked our lord into a mind for war, and Lu Su persists in supporting that policy. They only await your final decision.\"\n\n\"Are you all unanimous in your opinions?\"\n\n\"We are perfectly unanimous,\" said Zhang Zhao.\n\nZhou Yu said, \"The fact is I have also desired to submit for a long time. I beg you to leave me now, and tomorrow we will see our master, and I shall make up his mind for him.\"\n\nSo they took their leave. Very soon came the military party led by Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, and Han Dang. They were admitted and duly inquired after their host's health.\n\nThen the leader Cheng Pu said, \"Have you heard that our country is about to pass under another's government?\"\n\n\"No, I have heard nothing,\" replied the host.\n\n\"We helped General Sun Quan to establish his authority here and carve out this kingdom, and to gain that end we fought many a battle before we conquered the country. Now our lord lends his ear to his civil officers and desires to submit himself to Cao Cao. This is a most shameful and pitiful course, and we would rather die than follow it. So we hope you will decide to fight, and you may depend upon our struggling to the last person.\"\n\n\"And are you unanimous, Generals?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\nHuang Gai suddenly started up and smote his forehead, saying, \"They may take my head, but I swear never to surrender.\"\n\n\"Not one of us is willing to surrender,\" cried all the others.\n\n\"My desire also is to decide matters with Cao Cao on the battlefield. How could we think of submission? Now I pray you retire, Generals, and when I see our lord, I will settle his doubts.\"\n\nSo the war party left. They were quickly succeeded by Zhuge Jin, Lu Fan, and their faction.\n\nThey were brought in and, after the usual courtesies, Zhuge Jin said, \"My brother has come down the river saying that Liu Bei desires to ally himself with our lord against Cao Cao. The civil and military hold different opinions as to the course to be pursued. But as my brother is so deeply concerned, I am unwilling to say much on either side. We are awaiting your decision.\"\n\n\"And what do you think about it?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Submission is an easy road to tranquillity, while the result of war is hard to foretell.\"\n\nZhou Yu smiled, \"I shall have my mind made up. Come tomorrow to the palace, and the decision shall be announced.\"\n\nThe trimmers took their leave. But soon after came Lu Meng, Gan Ning, and their supporters, also desirous of discussing the same thing, and they told him that opinions differed greatly, some being for peace and others for war. One party constantly disputed with the other.\n\n\"I must not say much now,\" replied Zhou Yu, \"but you will see tomorrow in the palace, when the matter will be fully debated.\"\n\nThey went away leaving Zhou Yu smiling cynically.\n\nAbout eventide Lu Su and Zhuge Liang came, and Zhou Yu went out to the main gate to receive them.\n\nWhen they had taken their proper seats, Lu Su spoke first, saying, \"Cao Cao has come against the South Land with a huge army. Our master cannot decide whether to submit or give battle and waits for your decision. What is your opinion?\"\n\nZhou Yu replied, \"We may not oppose Cao Cao when he acts at the command of the Emperor. Moreover, he is very strong, and to attack him is to take serious risks. In my opinion, opposition would mean defeat and, since submission means peace, I have decided to advise our lord to write and offer surrender.\"\n\n\"But you are wrong!\" stammered Lu Su. \"This country has been under the same rule for three generations and cannot be suddenly abandoned to some other. Our late lord Sun Ce said that you were to be consulted on matters beyond the border, and we depended upon you to keep the country as secure and solid as the Taishan Mountains. Now you adopt the view of the weaklings and propose to yield! I cannot believe you mean it.\"\n\nReplied Zhou Yu, \"The six territories contain countless people. If I am the means of bringing upon them the misery of war, they will hate me. So I have decided to advise submission.\"\n\n\"But do you not realize our lord's might and the strength of our country? If Cao Cao does attack, it is very uncertain that he will realize his desire.\"\n\nThe two wrangled for a long time, while Zhuge Liang sat smiling with folded arms.\n\nPresently Zhou Yu asked, \"Why do you smile thus, Master?\"\n\nAnd Zhuge Liang replied, \"I am smiling at no other than your opponent Lu Su, who knows nothing of the affairs of the day.\"\n\n\"Master,\" said Lu Su, \"what do you mean?\"\n\n\"Why, this intention to submit is perfectly reasonable. It is the one proper thing.\"\n\n\"There!\" exclaimed Zhou Yu. \"Zhuge Liang knows the times perfectly well, and he agrees with me.\"\n\n\"But, both of you, why do you say this?\" said Lu Su.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"Cao Cao is an excellent commander, so good that no one dares oppose him. Only very few have ever attempted it, and they have been exterminated \u2014 the world knows them no more. The only exception is Liu Bei, who did not understand the conditions and vigorously contended against him, with the result that he is now at Jiangxia in a very parlous state. To submit is to secure the safety of wives and children, to be rich and honored. But the dignity of the country would be left to chance and fate \u2014 however, that is not worth consideration.\"\n\nLu Su interrupted angrily, \"Would you make our lord crook the knee to such a rebel as Cao Cao?\"\n\n\"Well,\" replied Zhuge Liang, \"there is another way, and a cheaper. There would be no need to 'lead the sheep and shoulder wine pots' for presents, nor any need to yield territory and surrender seals of office. It would not even be necessary to cross the river yourselves. All you would require is a simple messenger and a little boat to ferry a couple of persons across the river. If Cao Cao only got these two under his hand, his hordes and legions would just drop their weapons, furl their banners, and silently vanish away.\"\n\n\"What two persons could cause Cao Cao to go away as you say?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Two persons who could be easily spared from this populous country. They would not be missed any more than a leaf from a tree or a grain of millet from a granary. But if Cao Cao could only get them, would he not go away rejoicing?\"\n\n\"But who are the two?\" asked Zhou Yu again.\n\n\"When I was living in the country, they told me that Cao Cao was building a pavilion on the River Zhang. It was to be named the Bronze Bird Tower. It is an exceedingly handsome building, and he has sought throughout all the world for the most beautiful women to live in it. For Cao Cao really is a sensualist.\n\n\"Now there are two very famous beauties in Wu, born of the Qiao family. So beautiful are they that birds alight and fishes drown, the moon hides her face and the flowers blush for shame at sight of them. Cao Cao has declared with an oath that he only wants two things in this world: The imperial throne in peace and the sight of those two women on the Bronze Bird Terraces. Given these two, he would go down to his grave without regret. This expedition of his, his huge army that threatens this country, has for its real aim these two women. Why do you not buy these two from their father, the State Patriarch Qiao, for any sum however large and send them over the river? The object of the army being attained, it will simply be marched away. This is the ruse that Fan Li of Yue made to the king of Wu of the famous beauty Xi Shi.\"\n\n\"How do you know Cao Cao so greatly desires these two?\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Because his son Cao Zhi, who is an able writer, at the command of his father wrote a poem 'An Ode to the Bronze Bird Terrace,' theme only allowing allusions to the family fitness for the throne. He has sworn to possess these two women. I think I can remember the poem, if you wish to hear it. I admire it greatly.\"\n\n\"Try,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\nSo Zhuge Liang recited the poem:\n\n\u2003\"Let me follow in the footsteps of the enlightened ruler that I may rejoice,\n\n\u2003And ascend the storied terrace that I may gladden my heart,\n\n\u2003That I may see the wide extent of the palace,\n\n\u2003That I may gaze upon the plans of the virtuous one.\n\n\u2003He has established the exalted gates high as the hills,\n\n\u2003He has built the lofty towers piercing the blue vault,\n\n\u2003He has set up the beautiful building in the midst of the heavens,\n\n\u2003Whence the eye can range over the cities of the west.\n\n\u2003On the banks of the rolling River Zhang he planned it,\n\n\u2003Whence abundance of fruits could be looked for in his gardens.\n\n\u2003The two towers rise, one on either flank,\n\n\u2003This named Golden Phoenix, that Jade Dragon.\n\n\u2003He would have the two Qiaos, these beautiful ladies of Wu,\n\n\u2003That he might rejoice with them morning and evening.\n\n\u2003Look down; there is the grand beauty of an imperial city,\n\n\u2003And the rolling vapors lie floating beneath.\n\n\u2003He will rejoice in the multitude of scholars that assemble,\n\n\u2003Answering to the felicitous dream of King Wen.\n\n\u2003Look up; and there is the gorgeous harmony of springtime,\n\n\u2003And the singing of many birds delighting the ear;\n\n\u2003The lofty sky stands over all.\n\n\u2003The house desires success in its double undertaking,\n\n\u2003That the humane influence may be poured out over all the world,\n\n\u2003That the perfection of reverence may be offered to the Ruler.\n\n\u2003Only the richly prosperous rule of Kings Wu and Huan\n\n\u2003Could compare with that of the sacred understanding\n\n\u2003That fortune! What beauty!\n\n\u2003The gracious kindness spreads afar,\n\n\u2003The imperial family is supported,\n\n\u2003Peace reigns over all the empire,\n\n\u2003Bounded only by the universe.\n\n\u2003Bright as the glory of the sun and moon,\n\n\u2003Ever honorable and ever enduring,\n\n\u2003The Ruler shall live to the age of the eastern emperor,\n\n\u2003The dragon banner shall wave to the farthest limit.\n\n\u2003His glorious chariot shall be guided with perfect wisdom,\n\n\u2003His thoughts shall reform all the world,\n\n\u2003Felicitous produce shall be abundant,\n\n\u2003And the people shall rest firm.\n\n\u2003My desire is that these towers shall endure forever,\n\n\u2003And that joy shall never cease through all the ages.\n\nZhou Yu listened to the end but then suddenly jumped up in a tremendous rage.\n\nTurning to the north and pointing with his finger, he cried, \"You old rebel, this insult is too deep!\"\n\nZhuge Liang hastily rose too and soothed him, saying, \"But remember the Khan of the Xiongnu People. The Han emperor gave him a princess of the family to wife although he had made many incursions into our territory. That was the price of peace. You surely would not grudge two more women from among the common people.\"\n\n\"You do not know, Sir,\" replied Zhou Yu. \"Of those two women of the Qiao family you mentioned, Elder Qiao is the widow of Sun Ce, our late ruler, and Younger Qiao is my wife!\"\n\nZhuge Liang feigned the greatest astonishment and said, \"No indeed: I did not know. I blundered \u2014 a deadly fault \u2014 a deadly fault!\"\n\n\"One of us two has to go: Either the old rebel or I. We shall not both live. I swear that!\" cried Zhou Yu.\n\n\"However, such a matter needs a good deal of thought,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"We must not make any mistake.\"\n\nZhou Yu replied, \"I hold a sacred trust from my late lord, Sun Ce. I would not bow the knee to any such as Cao Cao. What I said just now was to see how you stood. I left Poyang Lake with the intention of attacking the north, and nothing can change that intention, not even the sword at my breast or the ax on my neck. But I trust you will lend an arm, and we will smite Cao Cao together.\"\n\n\"Should I be happy enough not to be rejected, I would render such humble service as I could. Perhaps presently I might be able to offer a plan to oppose him.\"\n\n\"I am going to see my lord tomorrow to discuss this matter,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\nZhuge Liang and Lu Su then left.\n\nNext day at dawn Sun Quan went to the council chamber, where his officials, civil and military, were already assembled. They numbered about sixty in all. The civil, with Zhang Zhao at their head, were on the right; the military, with Cheng Pu as their leader, were ranged on the left. All were in full ceremonial dress, and the swords of the soldiers clanked on the pavement.\n\nSoon Zhou Yu entered.\n\nWhen Sun Quan had finished the usual gracious remarks, Zhou Yu said, \"I hear that Cao Cao is encamped on the river and has sent a dispatch to you, my lord. I would ask what your opinion is.\"\n\nThereupon the dispatch was produced and handed to Zhou Yu.\n\nAfter reading it through he said, smiling, \"The old thief thinks there are no people in this land that he writes in this contemptuous strain.\"\n\n\"What do you think, Sir?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"Have you discussed this with the officials?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"We have been discussing this for days. Some counsel surrender and some advise fight. I am undecided, and therefore I have asked you to come and decide the point.\"\n\n\"Who advise surrender?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Zhang Zhao and his party are firmly set in this opinion.\"\n\nZhou Yu then turned to Zhang Zhao and said, \"I should be pleased to hear why you are for surrender, Master.\"\n\nThen Zhang Zhao replied, \"Cao Cao has been attacking all opponents in the name of the Emperor, who is entirely in his hands. He does everything in the name of the government. Lately he has taken Jingzhou and thereby increased his prestige. Our defense against him was the Great River, but now he also has a large fleet and can attack by water. How can we withstand him? Wherefore I counsel submission till some chance shall offer.\"\n\n\"This is but the opinion of an ill-advised student,\" said Zhou Yu. \"How can you think of abandoning this country that we have held for three generations?\"\n\n\"That being so,\" said Sun Quan, \"where is a plan to come from?\"\n\n\"Though Cao Cao assumes the name of the Prime Minister of the empire, he is at heart a rebel. You, O General, are able in war and brave. You are the heir to your father and brother. You command brave and tried soldiers, and you have plentiful supplies. You are able to overrun the whole country and rid it of every evil. There is no reason why you should surrender to a rebel.\n\n\"Moreover, Cao Cao has undertaken this expedition in defiance of all the rules of war. The north is unsubdued. Ma Teng and Han Sui threaten his rear, and yet he persists in his southern march. This is the first point against Cao Cao. The northern soldiers are unused to fighting on the water. Cao Cao is relinquishing his well-tried cavalry and trusting to ships. That is the second point against him. Again, we are now in full winter and the weather is at its coldest so there is no food for the horses. That is the third point against. Soldiers from the central state marching in a wet country among lakes and rivers will find themselves in an unaccustomed climate and suffer from malaria. That is the fourth point against. Now when Cao Cao's armies have all these points against them, defeat is certain, however numerous they may be, and you can take Cao Cao captive just as soon as you wish. Give me a few legions of veterans, and I will go and destroy him.\"\n\nSun Quan started up from his place, saying, \"The rebellious old rascal has been wanting to overthrow the Hans and set up himself for years. He has rid himself of all those he feared, save only myself, and I swear that one of us two shall go now. Both of us cannot live. What you say, noble friend, is just what I think, and Heaven has certainly sent you to my assistance.\"\n\n\"Thy servant will fight a decisive battle,\" said Zhou Yu, \"and shrink not from any sacrifice. Only, General, do not hesitate.\"\n\nSun Quan drew the sword that hung at his side and slashed off a corner of the table in front of him, exclaiming, \"Let any other person mention surrender, and he shall be served as I have served this table!\"\n\nThen he handed the sword to Zhou Yu, at the same time giving him a commission as Commander-in-Chief and Supreme Admiral, Cheng Pu being Vice-Admiral. Lu Su was also nominated as Assistant Commander.\n\nIn conclusion Sun Quan said, \"With this sword you will slay any officer who may disobey your commands.\"\n\nZhou Yu took the sword and turning to the assembly said, \"You have heard our lord's charge to me to lead you to destroy Cao Cao. You will all assemble tomorrow at the riverside camp to receive my orders. Should any be late or fail, then the full rigor of military law \u2014 the seven prohibitions and the fifty-four capital penalties \u2014 there provided, will be enforced.\"\n\nZhou Yu took leave of Sun Quan and left the chamber. The various officers also went their several ways.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu reached his own place, he sent for Zhuge Liang to consult over the business in hand. He told Zhuge Liang of the decision that had been taken and asked for a plan of campaign.\n\n\"But your master has not yet made up his mind,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Till he has, no plan can be decided upon.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"In his heart, Sun Quan is still fearful of Cao Cao's numbers and frets over the inequality of the two armies. You will have to explain away those numbers and bring him to a final decision before anything can be effected.\"\n\n\"What you say is excellent,\" said Zhou Yu, and he went to the palace that night to see his master.\n\nSun Quan said, \"You must have something of real importance to say if you come like this at night.\"\n\nZhou Yu said, \"I am making my dispositions tomorrow. You have quite made up your mind?\"\n\n\"The fact is,\" said Sun Quan, \"I still feel nervous about the disparity of numbers. Surely we are too few. That is really all I feel doubtful about.\"\n\n\"It is precisely because you have this one remaining doubt that I am come. And I will explain. Cao Cao's letter speaks of a million of marines, and so you feel doubts and fears and do not wait to consider the real truth. Let us examine the case thoroughly. We find that he has of central regions' soldiers, say, some one hundred fifty thousand troops, and many of them are sick. He only got seventy or eighty thousand northern soldiers from Yuan Shao, and many of those are of doubtful loyalty. Now these sick men and these men of doubtful loyalty seem a great many, but they are not at all fearsome. I could smash them with fifty thousand soldiers. You, my lord, have no further anxiety.\"\n\nSun Quan patted his general on the back, saying, \"You have explained my difficulty and relieved my doubts. Zhang Zhao is a fool who constantly bars my expeditions. Only you and Lu Su have any real understanding of my heart. Tomorrow you and Lu Su and Cheng Pu will start, and I shall have a strong reserve ready with plentiful supplies to support you. If difficulties arise, you can at once send for me, and I will engage with my own army.\"\n\nZhou Yu left. But in his innermost heart, he said to himself, \"If that Zhuge Liang can gauge my master's thoughts so very accurately, he is too clever for me and will be a danger. He will have to be put out of the way.\"\n\nZhou Yu sent a messenger over to Lu Su to talk over this last scheme. When he had laid it bare, Lu Su did not favor it.\n\n\"No, no,\" said Lu Su, \"it is self-destruction to make away with your ablest officer before Cao Cao shall have been destroyed.\"\n\n\"But Zhuge Liang will certainly help Liu Bei to our disadvantage.\"\n\n\"Try what his brother Zhuge Jin can do to persuade him. It would be an excellent thing to have these two in our service.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed,\" replied Zhou Yu.\n\nNext morning at dawn, Zhou Yu went to his camp and took his seat in the council tent. The armed guards took up their stations right and left, and the officers ranged themselves in lines to listen to the orders.\n\nNow Cheng Pu, who was older than Zhou Yu but was made second in command, was very angry at being passed over, so he made a pretense of indisposition and stayed away from this assembly. But he sent his eldest son, Cheng Zi, to represent him.\n\nZhou Yu addressed the gathering, saying, \"The law knows no partiality, and you will all have to attend to your several duties. Cao Cao is now more absolute than ever was Dong Zhuo, and the Emperor is really a prisoner in Xuchang, guarded by the most cruel soldiers. We have a command to destroy Cao Cao, and with your willing help we shall advance. The army must cause no hardship to the people anywhere. Rewards for good service and punishments for faults shall be given impartially.\"\n\nHaving delivered this charge, Zhou Yu told off Han Dang and Huang Gai as Leaders of the Van, and ordered the ships under their own command to get under way and go to the Three Gorges. They would get orders by and bye. Then he appointed four armies with two leaders over each: The first body was under Jiang Qin and Zhou Tai; the second, Pan Zhang and Ling Tong; the third, Taishi Ci and Lu Meng; the fourth, Lu Xun and Dong Xi. Lu Fan and Zhu Zhi were appointed inspectors, to move from place to place and keep the various units up to their work and acting with due regard to the general plan. Land and marine forces were to move simultaneously. The expedition would soon start.\n\nHaving received their orders, each returned to his command and busied himself in preparation. Cheng Zi, the son of Cheng Pu, returned and told his father what arrangements had been made, and Cheng Pu was amazed at Zhou Yu's skill.\n\nSaid he, \"I have always despised Zhou Yu as a mere student who would never be a general, but this shows that he has a leader's talent. I must support him.\"\n\nSo Cheng Pu went over to the quarters of the Commander-in-Chief and confessed his fault. He was received kindly and all was over.\n\nNext Zhou Yu sent for Zhuge Jin and said to him, \"Evidently your brother is a genius, a man born to be a king's counselor. Why then does he serve Liu Bei? Now that he is here, I wish you to use every effort to persuade him to stay with us. Thus our lord would gain able support and you two brothers would be together, which would be pleasant for you both. I wish you success.\"\n\nZhuge Jin replied, \"I am ashamed of the little service I have rendered since I came here, and I can do no other than obey your command to the best of my ability.\"\n\nThereupon he went away to his brother, whom he found in the guest-house. The younger brother received him; and when he had reached the inner rooms, Zhuge Liang bowed respectfully and, weeping, told his experiences since they parted and his sorrow at their separation.\n\nThen Zhuge Jin, weeping also, said, \"Brother, do you remember the story of Bo Yi and Shu Qi, the brothers who would not be separated?\"\n\n\"Ah, Zhou Yu has sent him to talk me over,\" thought Zhuge Liang. So he replied, \"They were two of the noble people of old days. Yes, I know.\"\n\n\"Those two, although they perished of hunger near the Shouyang Hills, yet never separated. You and I, born of the same mother and suckled at the same breast, yet serve different masters and never meet. Are you not ashamed when you think of such examples as Bo Yi and Shu Qi?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"You are talking now of love, but what I stand for is duty. We are both men of Han, and Liu Bei is of the family. If you, brother, could leave the South Land and join me in serving the rightful branch, then on the one side we should be honored as Ministers of Han, and on the other we should be together as people of the same flesh and blood should be. Thus love and duty would both receive their proper meed. What do you think of it, my brother?\"\n\n\"I came to persuade him and lo! It is I who is being talked over,\" thought Zhuge Jin.\n\nHe had no fitting reply to make, so he rose and took his leave. Returning to Zhou Yu, he related the story of the interview.\n\n\"What do you think?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"General Sun Quan has treated me with great kindness, and I could not turn my back on him,\" replied Zhuge Jin.\n\n\"Since you decide to remain loyal, there is no need to say much. I think I have a plan to win over your brother.\"\n\n\u2003The wisest people see eye to eye,\n\n\u2003For each but sees the right;\n\n\u2003But should their several interests clash,\n\n\u2003They all the fiercer fight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "At The Three Gorges, Cao Cao Loses Soldiers; In The Gathering Of Heroes, Jiang Gan Is Trapped.\n\nZhou Yu was very annoyed by the words of Zhuge Jin, and a fierce hatred for Zhuge Liang took root in his heart. He nourished a secret resolve to make away with Zhuge Liang. He continued his preparations for war, and when the troops were all mustered and ready, he went in for a farewell interview with his lord.\n\n\"You go on first, Noble Sir,\" said Sun Quan. \"I will then march to support you.\"\n\nZhou Yu took his leave and then, with Cheng Pu and Lu Su, marched out with the army. He invited Zhuge Liang to accompany the expedition, and when Zhuge Liang cheerfully accepted, the four embarked in the same ship. They set sail, and the fleet made for Xiakou.\n\nAbout twenty miles from Three Gorges the fleet anchored near the shore, and Zhou Yu built a stockade on the bank near the middle of their line with the Western Hills as a support. Other camps were made near his. Zhuge Liang, however, took up his quarters in a small ship.\n\nWhen the camp dispositions were complete, Zhou Yu sent to request Zhuge Liang to come and give him advice. Zhuge Liang came.\n\nAfter the salutations were ended, Zhou Yu said, \"Cao Cao, though he had fewer troops than Yuan Shao, nevertheless overcame Yuan Shao because he followed the advice given by Xun You to destroy Yuan Shao's supplies at Wuchao. Now Cao Cao has over eight hundred thousand troops while I have but fifty or sixty thousand. In order to defeat him, his supplies must be destroyed first. I have found out that the main depot is at the Iron Pile Mountains. As you have lived hereabout, you know the topography quite well, and I wish to entrust the task of cutting off supplies to you and your colleagues Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Zilong. I will assist you with a thousand soldiers. I wish you to start without delay. In this way we can best serve our masters.\"\n\nZhuge Liang saw through this at once. He thought to himself, \"This is a ruse in revenge for my not having been persuaded to enter the service of the South Land. If I refuse, I shall be laughed at. So I will do as he asks and trust to find some means of deliverance from the evil he intends.\"\n\nTherefore Zhuge Liang accepted the task with alacrity, much to the joy of Zhou Yu.\n\nAfter the leader of the expedition had taken his leave, Lu Su went to Zhou Yu secretly and said, \"Why have you set him this task?\"\n\n\"Because I wish to compass his death without appearing ridiculous. I hope to get him killed by the hand of Cao Cao and prevent his doing further mischief.\"\n\nLu Su left and went to see Zhuge Liang to find out if he suspected anything. Lu Su found him looking quite unconcerned and getting the soldiers ready to march.\n\nUnable to let Zhuge Liang go without a warning, however, Lu Su put a tentative question, \"Do you think this expedition will succeed?\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughingly replied, \"I am an adept at all sorts of fighting, with foot, horse, and chariots on land and marines on the water. There is no doubt of my success. I am not like you and your friend, only capable in one direction.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by our being capable only in one direction?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"I have heard the street children in your country singing:\n\n\u2003\"To lay an ambush, hold a pass,\n\n\u2003Lu Su is the man to choose;\n\n\u2003But when you on the water fight,\n\n\u2003Zhou Yu is the man to use.\n\n\"You are only fit for ambushes and guarding passes on land, just as Zhou Yu only understands fighting on the water,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nLu Su carried this story to Zhou Yu, which only incensed him the more against Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"How dare he flout me, saying I cannot fight a land battle? I will not let him go. I will go myself with ten thousand troops and cut off Cao Cao's supplies.\"\n\nLu Su went back and told this to Zhuge Liang, who smiled and said, \"Zhou Yu only wanted me to go on this expedition because he wanted Cao Cao to kill me. And so I teased him a little. But he cannot bear that. Now is the critical moment, and Marquis Sun Quan and my master must act in harmony if we are to succeed. If each one tries to harm the other, the whole scheme will fail. Cao Cao is no fool, and it is he who usually attack enemies through cutting off their supplies. Do you not think Cao Cao has already taken double precautions against any surprise of his own depot? If Zhou Yu tries, he will be taken prisoner. What he ought to do is to bring about a decisive naval battle, whereby to dishearten the northern soldiers, and then find some other means to defeat them utterly. If you could persuade him what his best course was, it would be well.\"\n\nWithout loss of time, Lu Su went to Zhou Yu to relate what Zhuge Liang had told him.\n\nZhou Yu shook his head when he heard it and beat the ground with his foot, saying, \"This man is far too clever. He beats me ten to one. He will have to be done away with, or the South Land will suffer.\"\n\nSaid Lu Su, \"This is the moment to use people. You must think of the country's good first of all. When once Cao Cao is defeated, you may do as you please.\"\n\nZhou Yu had to confess the reasonableness of this.\n\nLiu Bei had ordered his nephew Liu Qi to hold Jiangxia, while he and the bulk of the army returned to Xiakou. Thence he saw the opposite bank thick with banners and flags and glittering with every kind of arms and armors. He knew then that the expedition from the South Land had started. So he moved all his force from Jiangxia to Fankou.\n\nThen he assembled his officers and said to them, \"Zhuge Liang went to Wu some time ago, and no word has come from him, so I know not how the business stands. Will anyone volunteer to go to find out?\"\n\n\"I will go,\" said Mi Zhu.\n\nSo presents were prepared and gifts of flesh and wine, and Mi Zhu prepared to journey to the South Land on the pretext of offering a congratulatory feast to the army. He set out in a small ship and went down river. He stopped opposite the camp, and the soldiers reported his arrival to Zhou Yu, who ordered him to be brought in. Mi Zhu bowed low and expressed the respect which Liu Bei had for Zhou Yu and offered the various gifts. The ceremony of reception was followed by a banquet in honor of the guest.\n\nMi Zhu said, \"Zhuge Liang has been here a long time, and I desire that he may return with me.\"\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is making plans with me, and I could not let him return,\" said Zhou Yu. \"I also wish to see Liu Bei that we may make joint plans. But when one is at the head of a great army, one cannot get away even for a moment. If your master would only come here, it would be very gracious on his part.\"\n\nMi Zhu agreed that Liu Bei might come and presently took his leave.\n\nThen Lu Su asked Zhou Yu, \"What is your reason for desiring Liu Bei to come?\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is the one bold and dangerous man and must be removed. I am taking this opportunity to persuade him to come. When he shall be slain, a great danger will cease to threaten our interests.\"\n\nLu Su tried to dissuade him from this scheme, but Zhou Yu was deaf to all Lu Su said.\n\nZhou Yu even issued orders: \"Arrange half a hundred executioners to be ready to hide within the lining of the tent if Liu Bei decides to come; and when I drop a cup, that will be a signal for them to fall on and slay him.\"\n\nMi Zhu returned and told Liu Bei that his presence was desired by Zhou Yu. Suspecting nothing, Liu Bei at once ordered them to prepare a fast vessel to take him without loss of time.\n\nGuan Yu was opposed to his going, saying, \"Zhou Yu is artful and treacherous, and there is no news from Zhuge Liang. Pray think more carefully.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I have joined my forces to theirs in this attack on our common enemy. If Zhou Yu wishes to see me and I refuse to go, it is a betrayal. Nothing will succeed if both sides nourish suspicions.\"\n\n\"If you have finally decided to go, then will I go with you,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"And I also,\" cried Zhang Fei.\n\nBut Liu Bei said, \"Let Guan Yu come with me while you and Zhao Zilong keep guard. Jian Yong will hold Exian. I shall not be away long.\"\n\nSo leaving these orders, Liu Bei embarked with Guan Yu on a small boat. The escort did not exceed twenty. The light craft traveled very quickly down the river. Liu Bei rejoiced greatly at the sight of the war vessels in tiers by the bank, the soldiers in their breastplates, and all the pomp and panoply of war. All was in excellent order.\n\nAs soon as he arrived, the guards ran to tell Zhou Yu.\n\n\"How many ships has he?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\nThey replied, \"Only one; and the escort is only about a score.\"\n\n\"His fate is sealed,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\nZhou Yu sent for the executioners and placed them in hiding between the outer and inner tents, and when all was arranged for the assassination he contemplated, he went out to receive his visitor. Liu Bei came with his brother and escort into the midst of the army to the Admiral's tent.\n\nAfter the salutations, Zhou Yu wished Liu Bei to take the upper seat, but he declined saying, \"General, you are famous throughout all the empire, while I am a nobody. Do not overwhelm me with too great deference.\"\n\nSo they took the positions of simple friends, and refreshments were brought in.\n\nNow by chance Zhuge Liang came on shore and heard that his master had arrived and was with the Commander-in-Chief. The news gave Zhuge Liang a great shock, and he said to himself, \"What is to be done now?\"\n\nHe made his way to the reception tent and stole a look therein. He saw murder written on Zhou Yu's countenance and noted the assassins hidden within the walls of the tent. Then he got a look at Liu Bei, who was laughing and talking quite unconcernedly. But when he noticed the redoubtable figure of Guan Yu near his master's side, he became quite calm and contented.\n\n\"My lord faces no danger,\" said Zhuge Liang, and he went away to the river bank to await the end of the interview.\n\nMeanwhile the banquet of welcome proceeded. After the wine had gone around several times, Zhou Yu picked up a cup to give the signal agreed upon. But at that moment Zhou Yu saw so fierce a look upon the face of the trusty henchman who stood, sword in hand, behind his guest, that Zhou Yu hesitated and hastily asked who he was.\n\n\"That is my brother, Guan Yu,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nZhou Yu, quite startled, said, \"Is he the slayer of Yan Liang and Wen Chou?\"\n\n\"Exactly; he it is,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\nThe sweat of fear broke out all over Zhou Yu's body and trickled down his back. Then he poured out a cup of wine and presented it to Guan Yu.\n\nJust then Lu Su came in, and Liu Bei said to him, \"Where is Zhuge Liang? I would trouble you to ask him to come.\"\n\n\"Wait till we have defeated Cao Cao,\" said Zhou Yu, \"then you shall see him.\"\n\nLiu Bei dared not repeat his request, but Guan Yu gave him a meaningful look which Liu Bei understood and rose, saying, \"I would take leave now. I will come again to congratulate you when the enemy has been defeated and your success shall be complete.\"\n\nZhou Yu did not press him to remain, but escorted him to the great gates of the camp, and Liu Bei left. When he reached the river bank, they found Zhuge Liang awaiting them in their boat.\n\nLiu Bei was exceedingly pleased, but Zhuge Liang said, \"Sir, do you know in how great danger you were today?\"\n\nSuddenly sobered, Liu Bei said, \"No, I did not think of danger.\"\n\n\"If Guan Yu had not been there, you would have been killed,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nLiu Bei, after a moment's reflection, saw that it was true. He begged Zhuge Liang to return with him to Fankou, but Zhuge Liang refused.\n\n\"I am quite safe,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Although I am living in the tiger's mouth, I am as steady as the Taishan Mountains. Now, my lord, return and prepare your ships and soldiers. On the twentieth day of the eleventh month, send Zhao Zilong with a small ship to the south bank to wait for me. Be sure there is no miscarriage.\"\n\n\"What are your intentions?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"When the southeast wind begins, I shall return.\"\n\nLiu Bei would have questioned him further, but Zhuge Liang pressed him to go. So the boat started up river again, while Zhuge Liang returned to his temporary lodging.\n\nThe boat had not proceeded far when appeared a small fleet of fifty ships sweeping down with the current, and in the prow of the leading vessel stood a tall figure armed with a spear. Guan Yu was ready to fight. But when they were near, they recognized that was Zhang Fei, who had come down fearing lest his brother might be in some difficulty from which the strong arm of Guan Yu might even be insufficient to rescue him.\n\nThe three brothers thus returned together.\n\nAfter Zhou Yu, having escorted Liu Bei to the gate of his camp, had returned to his quarters, Lu Su soon came to see him.\n\n\"Then you had cajoled Liu Bei into coming, why did you not carry out your plan?\" asked Lu Su.\n\n\"Because of that Guan Yu. He is a very tiger, and he never left his brother for a moment. If anything had been attempted, he would certainly have had my life.\"\n\nLu Su knew that Zhou Yu spoke the truth. Then suddenly they announced a messenger with a letter from Cao Cao. Zhou Yu ordered them to bring him in and took the letter. But when he saw the superscription The First Minister of Han to Commander-in-Chief Zhou Yu, he fell into a frenzy of rage, tore the letter to fragments, and threw them on the ground.\n\n\"To death with this fellow!\" cried he.\n\n\"When two countries are at war, their emissaries are not slain,\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"Messengers are slain to show one's dignity and independence,\" replied Zhou Yu.\n\nThe unhappy bearer of the letter was decapitated, and his head sent back to Cao Cao by the hands of his escort.\n\nZhou Yu then decided to move. The van under Gan Ning was to advance, supported by two wings led by Han Dang and Jiang Qin. Zhou Yu would lead the center body in support. The next morning the early meal was eaten in the fourth watch, and the ships got under way in the fifth with a great beating of drums.\n\nCao Cao was greatly angered when he heard that his letter had been torn to fragments, and he resolved to attack forthwith. His advance was led by the Supreme Admiral Cai Mao, the Vice-Admiral Zhang Yun, and others of the Jingzhou officers who had joined his side. Cao Cao went as hastily as possible to the meeting of the three rivers and saw the ships of the South Land sailing up.\n\nIn the bow of the foremost ship from the south stood a fine figure of a warrior, who cried, \"I am Gan Ning. I challenge anyone to combat!\"\n\nCai Mao sent his young brother, Cai Xun, to accept the challenge. But as Cai Xun's ship approached, Gan Ning shot an arrow and Cai Xun fell. Gan Ning pressed forward, his crossbowmen keeping up a heavy discharge which Cao Cao's troops could not stand. The wings of Han Dang from the left and Jiang Qin from the right also joined in.\n\nCao Cao's soldiers, being mostly from the dry plains of the north, did not know how to fight effectually on water, and the southern ships had the battle all their own way. The slaughter was very great. However, after a contest lasting till afternoon, Zhou Yu thought it more prudent, in view of the superior numbers of his enemy, not to risk further the advantage he had gained. So he beat the gongs as the signal to cease battle and recall the ships.\n\nCao Cao was worsted, but his ships returned to the bank, where a camp was made and order was restored.\n\nCao Cao sent for his defeated leaders and reproached them, saying, \"You did not do your best. You let an inferior force overcome you.\"\n\nCai Mao defended himself, saying, \"The Jingzhou marines have not been exercised for a long time, and the others have never been trained for naval warfare at all. A naval camp must be instituted, the northern soldiers trained, and the Jingzhou force drilled. When they have been made efficient, they will win victories.\"\n\n\"You are the Supreme Admiral. If you know what should be done, why have you not done it?\" said Cao Cao. \"What is the use of telling me this?\"\n\nSo Cai Mao and Zhang Yun organized a naval camp on the river bank. They established twenty-four \"Water Gates,\" with the large ships outside as a sort of rampart, and under their protection the smaller ships went to and fro freely. At night when the lanterns and torches were lit, the very sky was illuminated, and the water shone red with the glare. On land the smoke of the camp fires could be traced for one hundred mile without a break.\n\nZhou Yu returned to camp and feasted his victorious fighting force. A messenger bore the joyful tidings of victory to his master Sun Quan. When night fell, Zhou Yu went up to the summit of one of the hills and looked out over the long line of bright lights stretching toward the west, showing the extent of the enemy's camp. He said nothing, but a great fear came in upon him.\n\nNext day Zhou Yu decided that he would go in person to find out the strength of the enemy. So he bade them prepare a small squadron which he manned with strong, hardy men armed with powerful bows and stiff crossbows. He also placed musicians on each ship. They set sail and started up the stream. When they got opposite Cao Cao's camp, the heavy stones that served as anchors were dropped, and the music was played while Zhou Yu scanned the enemy's naval camp. What he saw gave him no satisfaction, for everything was most admirable.\n\nHe said, \"How well and correctly built is that naval base! Anyone knows the names of those in command?\"\n\n\"They are Cai Mao and Zhang Yun,\" said his officers.\n\n\"They have lived in the south a long time,\" said Zhou Yu, \"and are thoroughly experienced in naval warfare. I must find some means of removing them before I can effect anything.\"\n\nMeanwhile on shore the sentinels had told Cao Cao that the enemy craft were spying upon them, and Cao Cao ordered out some ships to capture the spies. Zhou Yu saw the commotion of the commanding flags on shore and hastily gave the order to unmoor and sail down stream. The squadron at once got under way and scattered; to and fro went the oars, and each ship seemed to fly. Before Cao Cao's ships could get out after them, they were all far away.\n\nCao Cao's ships took up the chase but soon saw pursuit was useless. They returned and reported their failure.\n\nAgain Cao Cao found fault with his officers and said, \"The other day you lost a battle, and the soldiers were greatly dispirited. Now the enemy have spied out our camp. What can be done?\"\n\nIn eager response to his question one stepped out, saying, \"When I was a youth, Zhou Yu and I were fellow students and pledged friends. My three-inch tongue is still good, and I will go over and persuade him to surrender.\"\n\nCao Cao, rejoiced to find so speedy a solution, looked at the speaker. It was Jiang Gan of Jiujiang, one of the counseling staff in the camp.\n\n\"Are you a good friend of Zhou Yu?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Rest content, O Prime Minister,\" replied Jiang Gan. \"If I only get on the other side of the river, I shall succeed.\"\n\n\"What preparations are necessary?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"Just a youth as my servant and a couple of rowers. Nothing else.\"\n\nCao Cao offered him wine, wished him success, and sent him on his way.\n\nClad in a simple linen robe and seated in his little craft, the messenger reached Zhou Yu's camp and bade the guards say that an old friend Jiang Gan wished to see him.\n\nThe commander was in his tent at a council when the message came, and he laughed as he said to those about him, \"A persuader is coming.\"\n\nThen he whispered certain instructions in the ear of each one of them, and they went out to await his arrival.\n\nZhou Yu received his friend in full ceremonial garb. A crowd of officers in rich silken robes were about him. The guest appeared, his sole attendant a lad dressed in a simple blue gown. Jiang Gan bore himself proudly as he advanced, and Zhou Yu made a low obeisance.\n\n\"You have been well I hope since last we met,\" said Jiang Gan.\n\n\"You have wandered far and suffered much in this task of emissary in Cao Cao's cause,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"I have not seen you for a very long time,\" said the envoy much taken aback, \"and I came to visit you for the sake of old times. Why do you call me an emissary for the Cao Cao's cause?\"\n\n\"Though I am not so profound a musician as Shi Kuang of old, yet I can comprehend the thought behind the music,\" replied Zhou Yu.\n\n\"As you choose to treat your old friend like this, I think I will take my leave,\" said Jiang Gan.\n\nZhou Yu laughed again, and taking Jiang Gan by the arm, said, \"Well, I feared you might be coming on his behalf to try to persuade me. But if this is not your intention, you need not go away so hastily.\"\n\nSo they two entered the tent. When they had exchanged salutes and were seated as friends, Zhou Yu bade them call his officers that he might introduce them. They soon appeared civil and military officials, all dressed in their best. The military officers were clad in glittering silver armor and the staff looked very imposing as they stood ranged in two lines.\n\nThe visitor was introduced to them all. Presently a banquet was spread, and while they feasted, the musicians played songs of victory and the wine circulated merrily.\n\nUnder the mellowing influence, Zhou Yu's reserve seemed to thaw and he said, \"Jiang Gan is an old fellow student of mine, and we are pledged friends. Though he has arrived here from the north, he is no artful pleader so you need not be afraid of him.\"\n\nThen Zhou Yu took off the commanding sword which he wore as Commander-in-Chief and handed it to Taishi Ci, saying, \"You take this and wear it for the day as master of the feast. This day we meet only as friends and speak only of friendship, and if anyone shall begin a discussion of the questions at issue between Cao Cao and the South Land, just slay him.\"\n\nTaishi Ci took the sword and seated himself in his place. Jiang Gan was not a little overcome, but he said no word.\n\nZhou Yu said, \"Since I assumed command, I have tasted no drop of wine; but today as an old friend is present and there is no reason to fear him, I am going to drink freely.\"\n\nSo saying he quaffed a huge goblet and laughed loudly.\n\nThe rhinoceros cups went swiftly round from guest to guest till all were half drunk. Then Zhou Yu, laying hold of the guest's hand, led him outside the tent. The guards who stood around all braced themselves up and seized their shinning weapons.\n\n\"Do you not think my soldiers a fine lot of fellows?\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Strong as bears and bold as tigers,\" replied Jiang Gan.\n\nThen Zhou Yu led him to the rear of the tent whence he saw the grain and forage piled up in mountainous heaps.\n\n\"Do you not think I have a fairly good store of grain and forage?\"\n\n\"Your troops are brave and your supplies ample: The empire's gossip is not baseless, indeed.\"\n\nZhou Yu pretended to be quite intoxicated and went on, \"When you and I were students together, we never looked forward to a day like this, did we?\"\n\n\"For a genius like you, it is nothing extraordinary,\" said the guest.\n\nZhou Yu again seized his hand, and they sat down.\n\n\"A man of the time, I have found a proper lord to serve. In his service, we rely upon the right feeling between minister and prince outside, and at home we are firm in the kindly feeling of relatives. He listens to my words and follows my plans. We share the same good or evil fortune. Even when the great old persuaders like Su Qin, Zhang Yi, Lu Jia, and Li Yiji lived again, even when their words poured forth like a rushing river, their tongues were as a sharp sword, it is impossible to move such as I am!\"\n\nZhou Yu burst into a loud laugh as he finished, and Jiang Gan's face had become clay-colored. Zhou Yu then led his guest back into the tent, and again they fell to drinking.\n\nPresently Zhou Yu pointed to the others at table and said, \"These are all the best and bravest of the land of the south. One might call this the 'Gathering of Heroes.'\"\n\nThey drank on till daylight failed and continued after lamps had been lit. Zhou Yu even gave an exhibition of sword play and sang this song:\n\n\u2003When a man is in the world, O,\n\n\u2003He ought to do his best.\n\n\u2003And when he's done his best, O.\n\n\u2003He ought to have his rest.\n\n\u2003And when I have my rest, O,\n\n\u2003I'll quaff my wine with zest.\n\n\u2003And when I'm drunk as drunk can be, O,\n\n\u2003I'll sing the madman's litany.\n\nA burst of applause greeted the song. By this time it was getting late, and the guest begged to be excused.\n\n\"The wine is too much for me,\" said Jiang Gan.\n\nHis host bade them clear the table.\n\nAs all the others left, Zhou Yu said, \"It has been many a day since I shared a couch with my friend, but we will do so tonight.\"\n\nPutting on the appearance of irresponsible intoxication, he led Jiang Gan into the tent and they went to bed. Zhou Yu simply fell, all dressed as he was, and lay there emitting uncouth grunts and groans, so that to the guest sleep was impossible.\n\nJiang Gan lay and listened to the various camp noises without and his host's thunderous snores within. About the second watch he rose and looked at his friend by the dim light of the small lamp. He also saw on the table a heap of papers, and coming out and looking at them furtively, he saw they were letters. Among them he saw one marked as coming from Cai Mao and Zhang Yun, Cao Cao's Supreme Admiral and Vice-Admiral. He read it and this is what it said:\n\n\"We surrendered to Cao Cao, not for the sake of pay but under stress of circumstances. Now we have been able to hold these northern soldiers into this naval camp but, as soon as occasion offers, we mean to have the rebel's head to offer as a sacrifice to your banner. From time to time there will be reports as occasions serve, but you may trust us. This is our humble reply to your letter.\"\n\n\"Those two were connected with the South Land in the beginning,\" thought Jiang Gan, so he secreted the letter in his dress and began to examine the others. But at that moment Zhou Yu turned over, and so Jiang Gan hastily blew out the light and went to his couch.\n\nZhou Yu was muttering as he lay there as if dreaming, saying, \"Friend, I am going to let you see Cao Cao's head in a day or two.\"\n\nJiang Gan hastily made some reply to load on his host to say more. Then came, \"Wait a few days; you will see Cao Cao's head. The old wretch!\"\n\nJiang Gan tried to question him as to what he meant, but Zhou Yu was fast asleep and seemed to hear nothing. Jiang Gan lay there on his couch wide awake till the fourth watch was beating.\n\nThen someone came in, saying, \"General, are you awake?\"\n\nAt that moment as if suddenly awakened from the deepest slumber, Zhou Yu started up and said, \"Who is this on the couch?\"\n\nThe voice replied, \"Do you not remember, General? You asked your old friend to stay the night with you. It is he, of course.\"\n\n\"I drank too much last night,\" said Zhou Yu in a regretful tone, \"and I forgot. I seldom indulge to excess and am not used to it. Perhaps I said many things I ought not.\"\n\nThe voice went on, \"A man has arrived from the north.\"\n\n\"Speak lower,\" said Zhou Yu, and turning toward the sleeper, he called him by name. But Jiang Gan affected to be sound asleep and made no sign.\n\nZhou Yu crept out of the tent, while Jiang Gan listened with all his ears. He heard the man say, \"Cai Mao and Zhang Yun, the two commanders, said that they cannot execute the plan in a hurry.\"\n\nBut listening as he did with straining ears, he could not make out what followed. Soon after Zhou Yu reentered and again called out his companion's name. But no reply came, for Jiang Gan was pretending to be in the deepest slumber and to hear nothing. Then Zhou Yu undressed and went to bed.\n\nAs Jiang Gan lay awake, he remembered that Zhou Yu was known to be meticulously careful in affairs, and if in the morning Zhou Yu found that a letter had disappeared, he would certainly slay the offender. So Jiang Gan lay there till near daylight and then called out to his host. Getting no reply, he rose, dressed, and stole out of the tent. Then he called his servant and made for the camp gate.\n\n\"Whither are you going, Sir?\" said the watchmen at the gate.\n\n\"I fear I am in the way here,\" replied Jiang Gan, \"and so I have taken leave of the Commander-in-Chief for a time. So do not stop me.\"\n\nHe found his way to the river bank and reembarked. Then, with flying oars, he hastened back to Cao Cao's camp. When he arrived, Cao Cao asked at once how he had sped, and he had to acknowledge failure.\n\n\"Zhou Yu is very clever and perfectly high-minded,\" said Jiang Gan. \"Nothing that I could say moved him in the least.\"\n\n\"Your failure makes me look ridiculous,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Well, if I did not win over Zhou Yu, I found out something for you. Send away these people, and I will tell you,\" said Jiang Gan.\n\nThe servants were dismissed, and then Jiang Gan produced the letter he had stolen from Zhou Yu's tent. He gave it to Cao Cao. Cao Cao was very angry and sent for Cai Mao and Zhang Yun at once.\n\nAs soon as they appeared, he said, \"I want you two to attack.\"\n\nCai Mao replied, \"But the soldiers are not yet sufficiently trained.\"\n\n\"The soldiers will be well enough trained when you have sent my head to Zhou Yu, eh?\"\n\nBoth commanders were dumb-founded, having not the least idea what this meant. They remained silent for they had nothing to say. Cao Cao bade the executioners lead them away to instant death. In a short time their heads were produced.\n\nBy this time Cao Cao had thought over the matter, and it dawned upon him that he had been tricked. A poem says:\n\n\u2003No one could stand against Cao Cao,\n\n\u2003Of sin he had full share,\n\n\u2003But Zhou Yu was more treacherous,\n\n\u2003And caught him in a snare.\n\n\u2003Two commanders to save their lives,\n\n\u2003Betrayed a former lord,\n\n\u2003Soon after, as was very met.\n\n\u2003Both fell beneath the sword.\n\nThe death of these two naval commanders caused much consternation in the camp, and all their colleagues asked the reason for their sudden execution. Though Cao Cao knew they had been victimized, he would not acknowledge it.\n\nSo he said, \"These two had been remiss, and so had been put to death.\"\n\nThe others were aghast, but nothing could be done. Two other officers, Mao Jie and Yu Jin, were put in command of the naval camp.\n\nSpies took the news to Zhou Yu, who was delighted at the success of his ruse.\n\n\"Those two Cai Mao and Zhang Yun were my only source of anxiety,\" said he. \"Now they are gone: I am quite happy.\"\n\nLu Su said, \"General, if you can continue like this, you need not fear Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"I do not think any of them saw my game,\" said Zhou Yu, \"except Zhuge Liang. He beats me, and I do not think this ruse was hidden from him. You go and sound him. See if he knew.\"\n\n\u2003Zhou Yu's treacherous plot succeeded well,\n\n\u2003Dissension sown, his rivals fell.\n\n\u2003Drunk with success was he, but sought\n\n\u2003To know what cynic Zhuge Liang thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Using Strategy, Zhuge Liang Borrows Arrows; Joining A Ruse, Huang Gai Accepts Punishment.\n\nLu Su departed on his mission and found Zhuge Liang seated in his little craft.\n\n\"There has been so much to do that I have not been able to come to listen to your instructions,\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"That is truly so,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"and I have not yet congratulated the Commander-in-Chief.\"\n\n\"What have you wished to congratulate him upon?\"\n\n\"Why Sir, the matter upon which he sent you to find out whether I knew about it or not. Indeed I can congratulate him on that.\"\n\nLu Su turned pale and gasped, saying, \"But how did you know, Master?\"\n\n\"The ruse succeeded well thus played off on Jiang Gan. Cao Cao has been taken in this once, but he will soon rise to it. Only he will not confess his mistake. However, the two men are gone, and the South Land is freed from a grave anxiety. Do you not think that is a matter for congratulation? I hear Mao Jie and Yu Jin are the new admirals, and in their hands lie both good and evil for the fate of the northern fleet.\"\n\nLu Su was quite dumbfounded. He stayed a little time longer passing the time in making empty remarks, and then took his leave.\n\nAs he was going away, Zhuge Liang cautioned him, saying, \"Do not let Zhou Yu know that I know his ruse. If you let him know, he will seek some chance to do me harm.\"\n\nLu Su promised. Nevertheless he went straight to his chief and related the whole thing just as it happened.\n\n\"Really he must be got rid of,\" said Zhou Yu. \"I have quite decided to put the man out of the way.\"\n\n\"If you slay him, will not Cao Cao laugh at you?\"\n\n\"Oh, no! I will find a legitimate way of getting rid of him so that he shall go to his death without resentment.\"\n\n\"But how can you find a legitimate way of assassinating him?\"\n\n\"Do not ask too much. You will see presently.\"\n\nSoon after all the officers were summoned to the main tent, and Zhuge Liang's presence was desired. He went contentedly enough.\n\nWhen all were seated, Zhou Yu suddenly addressed Zhuge Liang, saying, \"I am going to fight a battle with the enemy soon on the water. What weapons are the best?\"\n\n\"On a great river arrows are the best,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Your opinion and mine agree. But at the moment we are short of them. I wish you would undertake to supply about a hundred thousand arrows for the naval fight. As it is for the public service, you will not decline, I hope.\"\n\n\"Whatever task the Commander-in-Chief lays upon me, I must certainly try to perform,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"May I inquire by what date you require the hundred thousand arrows?\"\n\n\"Could you have them ready in ten days?\"\n\n\"The enemy will be here very soon. Ten days will be too late,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"In how many days do you estimate the arrows can be ready?\"\n\n\"Let me have three days. Then you may send for your hundred thousand.\"\n\n\"No joking, remember!\" said Zhou Yu. \"There is no joking in war time.\"\n\n\"Dare I joke with the Commander-in-Chief? Give me a formal military order. If I have not completed the task in three days, I will take my punishment.\"\n\nZhou Yu, secretly delighted, sent for the secretaries and prepared the commission then and there.\n\nThen he drank to the success of the undertaking and said, \"I shall have to congratulate you most heartily when this is accomplished.\"\n\n\"This day is too late to count,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"On the third from tomorrow morning send five hundred soldiers to the river side to convey the arrows.\"\n\nThey drank a few more cups together, and then Zhuge Liang took his leave.\n\nAfter he had gone, Lu Su said, \"Do you not think there is some deceit about this?\"\n\n\"Clearly it is not I! It is he who has signed his own death warrant,\" said Zhou Yu. \"Without being pressed in the least, he asked for a formal order in the face of the whole assembly. Even if he grew a pair of wings, he could not escape. Only I will just order the workers to delay him as much as they can, and not supply him with materials, so that he is sure to fail. And then, when the certain penalty is incurred, who can criticize? You can go and inquire about it all and keep me informed.\"\n\nSo off went Lu Su to seek Zhuge Liang, who at once reproached him with having blabbed about the former business.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"He wants to hurt me, as you know, and I did not think you could not keep my secret. And now there is what you saw today, and how do you think I can get a hundred thousand arrows made in three days? You will simply have to rescue me.\"\n\n\"You brought the misfortune on yourself, and how can I rescue you?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"I look to you for the loan of twenty vessels, manned each by thirty people. I want blue cotton screens and bundles of straw lashed to the sides of the boats. I have good use for them. On the third day, I shall undertake to deliver the fixed number of arrows. But on no account must you let Zhou Yu know, or my scheme will be wrecked.\"\n\nLu Su consented, and this time he kept his word. He went to report to his chief as usual, but he said nothing about the boats.\n\nHe only said, \"Zhuge Liang is not using bamboo or feathers or glue or varnish, but has some other way of getting arrows.\"\n\n\"Let us await the three days' limit,\" said Zhou Yu, puzzled though confident.\n\nOn his side Lu Su quietly prepared a score of light swift boats, each with its crew and the blue screens and bundles of grass complete and, when these were ready, he placed them at Zhuge Liang's disposal.\n\nZhuge Liang did nothing on the first day, nor on the second. On the third day at the middle of the fourth watch, Zhuge Liang sent a private message asking Lu Su to come to his boat.\n\n\"Why have you sent for me, Sir?\" asked Lu Su.\n\n\"I want you to go with me to get those arrows.\"\n\n\"Whither are you going?\"\n\n\"Do not ask. You will see.\"\n\nThen the twenty boats were fastened together by long ropes and moved over to the north bank. The night proved very foggy and the mist was very dense along the river, so that one person could scarcely see another. In spite of the fog, Zhuge Liang urged the boats forward as if into the vast fairy kingdom.\n\nThere is a poem on these river fogs:\n\n\u2003Mighty indeed is the Great River!\n\n\u2003Rising far in the west, in the Emei and Min Mountains,\n\n\u2003Plowing its way through Wu, east flowing, resistless,\n\n\u2003Swelled by its nine tributary streams, rolling down from the far north,\n\n\u2003Aided and helped by a hundred rivulets swirling and foaming,\n\n\u2003Ocean receives it at last welcoming, joyful, its waters.\n\n\u2003Therein abide sea nymphs and water gods,\n\n\u2003Enormous whales a thousand fathoms long,\n\n\u2003Nine-headed monstrous beasts, reptiles and octopi,\n\n\u2003Demons and uncouth creatures wondrous strange.\n\n\u2003In faith it is the home and safe retreat\n\n\u2003Of devils and sprites, and wondrous growths,\n\n\u2003And eke the battle ground of valiant humans.\n\n\u2003At times occur strange strife of elements,\n\n\u2003When darkness strives on light's domains that encroach,\n\n\u2003Whereat arises in the vaulted dome of blue\n\n\u2003White wreaths of fog that toward the center roll.\n\n\u2003Then darkness falls, too dense for any torch\n\n\u2003Illumine; only clanging sounds can pass.\n\n\u2003The fog at first appears, a vaporous wreath\n\n\u2003Scarce visible. But thickening fast, it veils\n\n\u2003The Southern Hills, the painted leopard's home.\n\n\u2003And spreads afar, until the northern sea\n\n\u2003Leviathans are amazed and lose their course.\n\n\u2003And denser yet it touches on the sky.\n\n\u2003And spreads a heavy mantle over the earth.\n\n\u2003Then, wide as is the high pitched arch of heaven,\n\n\u2003Therein appears no single rift of blue.\n\n\u2003Now mighty whales lead up their spouses to sport\n\n\u2003Upon the waves, the sinuous dragons dive\n\n\u2003Deep down and, breathing, swell the heaving sea,\n\n\u2003The earth is moist as with the early rains,\n\n\u2003And spring's creative energy is chilled.\n\n\u2003Both far and wide and high the damp fog spreads,\n\n\u2003Great cities on the eastern bank are hid,\n\n\u2003Wide ports and mountains in the south are lost,\n\n\u2003Whole fleets of battle ships, a thousand keels,\n\n\u2003Hide in the misty depths; frail fishing boats\n\n\u2003High riding on a wave are seen \u2014 and lost.\n\n\u2003The gloom increases and the domed sky\n\n\u2003Grows dark and darker as the sun's light fails.\n\n\u2003The daylight dies, dim twilight's reign begins,\n\n\u2003The ruddy hills dissolve and lose their hue.\n\n\u2003The skill of matchless King Yu would fail to sound\n\n\u2003The depth and height; and Li Lou's eye, though keen,\n\n\u2003Could never pierce this gloom.\n\n\u2003Now is the time, O sea and river gods, to use your powers.\n\n\u2003The gliding fish and creeping water folk\n\n\u2003Are lost; there is no track for bird or beast.\n\n\u2003Fair Penglai Isles are hidden from our sight,\n\n\u2003The lofty gates of heaven have disappeared.\n\n\u2003Nature is blurred and indistinct, as when\n\n\u2003A driving rain storm hurries over the earth.\n\n\u2003And then, perhaps, within the heavy haze,\n\n\u2003A noisome serpent vents his venom foul\n\n\u2003And plagues descend, or impish demons work\n\n\u2003Their wicked wills.\n\n\u2003Ills fall on humans but do not stay,\n\n\u2003Heaven's cleansing breath sweeps them sway,\n\n\u2003But while they last the mean ones cry,\n\n\u2003The nobler suffer silently.\n\n\u2003The greatest turmoil is a sign\n\n\u2003Of quick return to state benign.\n\nThe little fleet reached Cao Cao's naval camp about the fifth watch, and Zhuge Liang gave orders to form line lying prows west, and then to beat the drums and shout.\n\n\"But what shall we do if they attack us?\" exclaimed Lu Su.\n\nZhuge Liang replied with a smile, \"I think their fleet will not venture out in this fog. Go on with your wine, and let us be happy. We will go back when the fog lifts.\"\n\nAs soon as the shouting from the river was heard by those in the camp, the two admirals, Mao Jie and Yu Jin, ran off to report to Cao Cao, who said, \"Coming up in a fog like this means that they have prepared an ambush for us. Do not go out, but get all the force together and shoot at them.\"\n\nHe also sent orders to the ground camps to dispatch six thousand of archers and crossbowmen to aid the marines.\n\nThe naval forces were then lined up shooting on the bank to prevent a landing. Presently the soldiers arrived, and ten thousand and more soldiers were shooting down into the river, where the arrows fell like rain. By and bye Zhuge Liang ordered the boats to turn round so that their prows pointed east and to go closer in so that many arrows might hit them.\n\nZhuge Liang ordered the drums to be kept beating till the sun was high and the fog began to disperse, when the boats got under way and sailed down stream. The whole twenty boats were bristling with arrows on both sides.\n\nAs they left, Zhuge Liang asked all the crews to shout derisively, \"We thank you, Sir Prime Minister, for the arrows!\"\n\nThey told Cao Cao, but by the time he came, the light boats helped by the swift current were seven miles long down the river and pursuit was impossible. Cao Cao saw that he had been duped and was very sorry, but there was no help for it.\n\nOn the way down Zhuge Liang said to his companion, \"Every boat must have five or six thousand arrows and so, without the expenditure of an ounce of energy, we must have more than ten myriad arrows, which tomorrow can be shot back again at Cao Cao's army to his great inconvenience.\"\n\n\"You are really superhuman,\" said Lu Su. \"But how did you know there would be a thick fog today?\"\n\n\"One cannot be a leader without knowing the workings of heaven and the ways of earth. One must understand the secret gates and the interdependence of the elements, the mysteries of tactics and the value of forces. It is but an ordinary talent. I calculated three days ago that there would be a fog today, and so I set the limit at three days. Zhou Yu would give me ten days, but neither artificers nor materials, so that he might find occasion to put me to death as I knew. But my fate lies with the Supreme, and how could Zhou Yu harm me?\"\n\nLu Su could not but agree. When the boats arrived, five hundred soldiers were in readiness on the bank to carry away the arrows. Zhuge Liang bade them go on board the boats, collect them and bear them to the tent of the Commander-in-Chief. Lu Su went to report that the arrows had been obtained and told Zhou Yu by what means.\n\nZhou Yu was amazed and sighed sadly, saying, \"He is better than I. His methods are more than human.\"\n\n\u2003Thick lies the fog on the river,\n\n\u2003Nature is shrouded in white,\n\n\u2003Distant and near are confounded,\n\n\u2003Banks are no longer in sight.\n\n\u2003Fast fly the pattering arrows,\n\n\u2003Stick in the boats of the fleet.\n\n\u2003Now can full tale be delivered,\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang is victor complete.\n\nWhen, shortly after his return, Zhuge Liang went to the tent of the Commander-in-Chief, he was welcomed by Zhou Yu, who came forward to greet him, saying, \"Your superhuman predictions compel one's esteem.\"\n\n\"There is nothing remarkable in that trifling trick,\" replied he.\n\nZhou Yu led him within and wine was brought.\n\nThen Zhou Yu said, \"My lord sent yesterday to urge me to advance, but I have no master plan ready. I wish you would assist me, Master.\"\n\n\"But where should I, a man of poor everyday ability, find such a plan as you desire?\"\n\n\"I saw the enemy's naval camp just lately, and it looked very complete and well organized. It is not an ordinary place to attack. I have thought of a plan, but I am not sure it will answer. I should be happy if you would decide for me.\"\n\n\"General,\" replied Zhuge Liang, \"do not say what your plan is, but each of us will write in the palm of his hand and see whether our opinions agree.\"\n\nSo brush and ink were sent for, and Zhou Yu first wrote on his own palm, and then passed the pen to Zhuge Liang who also wrote. Then getting close together on the same bench, each showed his hand to the other, and both burst out laughing, for both had written the same word, \"Fire.\"\n\n\"Since we are of the same opinion,\" said Zhou Yu, \"there is no longer any doubt. But our intentions must be kept secret.\"\n\n\"Both of us are public servants, and what would be the sense of telling our plans? I do not think Cao Cao will be on his guard against this, although he has had two experiences. You may put your scheme into force.\"\n\nThey finished their wine and separated. Not an officer knew a word of their plans.\n\nNow Cao Cao had expended a myriad arrows in vain and was much irritated in consequence. He deeply desired revenge.\n\nThen Xun You proposed a ruse, saying, \"The two strategists on the side of the enemy are Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, two men most difficult to get the better of. Let us send someone who shall pretend to surrender to them but really be a spy on our behalf and a helper in our schemes. When we know what is doing, we can plan to meet it.\"\n\n\"I had thought of that myself,\" replied Cao Cao. \"Whom do you think the best person to send?\"\n\n\"Cai Mao has been put to death, but all his clan and family are in the army, and his two younger brothers are junior generals. You have them most securely in your power and may send them to surrender. The ruler of the South Land will never suspect deceit there.\"\n\nCao Cao decided to act on this plan, and in the evening summoned Cai Zhong and Cai He to his tent, where he told them, saying, \"I want you to pretend to surrender to the South Land so that you can gather intelligence and sent it back. When all done, you will be richly rewarded. But do not betray me.\"\n\n\"Our families are in Jingzhou, and that place is yours,\" replied they. \"Should we dare betray? You need have no doubts, Sir. You will soon see the heads of both Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang at your feet.\"\n\nCao Cao gave them generous gifts. Soon after the two men, each with his five hundred soldiers, set sail with a fair wind for the opposite bank.\n\nNow as Zhou Yu was preparing for the attack, the arrival of some northern ships was announced. They bore the two younger brothers of Cai Mao, who had come as deserters.\n\nThey were led in and, bowing before the general, said, weeping, \"Our innocent brother has been put to death, and we desire vengeance. So we have come to offer allegiance to you. We pray you appoint us to the vanguard.\"\n\nZhou Yu appeared very pleased and made them presents. Then he ordered them to join Gan Ning in leading the van. They thanked him and regarded their scheme as already a success.\n\nBut Zhou Yu gave Gan Ning secret orders, saying, \"They have come without their families, and so I know their desertion is only pretense. They have been sent as spies, and I am going to meet their ruse with one of my own. They shall have some information to send. You will treat them well, but keep a careful guard over them. On the day our soldiers start the offense, they shall be sacrificed to the flag. But be very careful that nothing goes wrong.\"\n\nGan Ning went away.\n\nThen Lu Su came to tell Zhou Yu, saying, \"Everyone agrees in thinking the surrender of Cai Zhong and Cai He feigned and they should be rejected.\"\n\n\"But they wish to revenge the death of their brother,\" said the Fleet Admiral. \"Where is the pretense? If you are so suspicious, you will receive nobody at all.\"\n\nLu Su left much piqued and went to see Zhuge Liang to whom he told the story. Zhuge Liang only smiled.\n\n\"Why do you smile?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"I smile at your simplicity. The General is playing a game. Spies cannot easily come and go, so these two have been sent to feign desertion that they may act as spies. The General is meeting one ruse with another. He wants them to give false information. Deceit is not to be despised in war, and his scheme is the correct one to employ.\"\n\nThen Lu Su understood.\n\nThat night as Zhou Yu was sitting in his tent, Huang Gai came to see him privately.\n\nZhou Yu said, \"You have surely some wise plan to propose that you come at night like this.\"\n\nHuang Gai replied, \"The enemy are more numerous than we, and it is wrong to delay. Why not burn them out?\"\n\n\"Who suggested that to you?\"\n\n\"I thought of it myself. Nobody suggested it,\" replied Huang Gai.\n\n\"I just wanted something like this, and that is why I kept those two pretended deserters. I want them to give some false news. The pity is that I have no one to feign desertion to the other side and work my plan.\"\n\n\"But I will carry out your plan,\" said Huang Gai.\n\n\"But if you cannot show some injury, you will not be believed,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"The Sun family have been very generous to me, and I would not resent being crushed to death to repay them,\" said Huang Gai.\n\nZhou Yu bowed and thanked him, saying, \"If you would not object to some bodily suffering, then the South Land would indeed be happy.\"\n\n\"Kill me. I do not mind,\" repeated Huang Gai as he took his leave.\n\nNext day the drums called all the officers together to the Commander-in-Chief's tent, and Zhuge Liang came with the others.\n\nZhou Yu said, \"The enemy's camps extend about one hundred miles so that the campaign will be a long one. Each leader is to prepare supplies for three months.\"\n\nScarcely had he spoken when Huang Gai started up, crying, \"Say not three months. Be ready for thirty months, and even then it will not be ended. If you can destroy them this month, then all is well. If you cannot, then it were better to take Zhang Zhao's advice, throw down your weapons, turn to the north, and surrender.\"\n\nZhou Yu's anger flared up, and he flushed, crying, \"Our lord's orders were to destroy Cao Cao, and whoever mentioned the word surrender should be put to death! Now, the very moment when the two armies are to engage, you dare talk of surrender and damp the ardor of my army! If I do not slay you, how can I support the others?\"\n\nHe ordered the lictors to remove Huang Gai and execute him without delay.\n\nHuang Gai then flamed up in turn, saying, \"This is the third generation since I went with General Sun Jian, and we overran the southeast. Whence have you sprung up?\"\n\nThis made Zhou Yu perfectly furious, and Huang Gai was ordered to instant death. But Gan Ning interfered.\n\nSaid he, \"He is a veteran officer of the South Land. Pray pardon him!\"\n\n\"What are you prating about?\" cried Zhou Yu. \"Dare you come between me and my duty?\"\n\nTurning to the lictors, Zhou Yu ordered them to drive Gan Ning forth with blows.\n\nThe other officials fell on their knees entreating pity for Huang Gai.\n\n\"He is indeed most worthy of death, but it would be a loss to the army. We pray you forgive him. Record his fault for the moment; and after the enemy shall have been defeated, then put him to death.\"\n\nBut Zhou Yu was implacable. The officers pleaded with tears.\n\nAt length he seemed moved, saying, \"Had you not interceded, he should certainly have suffered death. But now I will mitigate the punishment to a beating. He shall not die.\"\n\nZhou Yu turned to the lictors and bade them deal the culprit one hundred blows. Again his colleagues prayed for remission, but Zhou Yu angrily pushed over the table in front of him and roared to the officers to get out of the way and let the sentence be executed.\n\nSo Huang Gai was stripped, thrown to the ground, and fifty blows were given. At this point the officers again prayed that he be let off.\n\nZhou Yu sprang from his chair and pointing his finger at Huang Gai said, \"If you dare flout me again, you shall have the other fifty. If you are guilty of any disrespect, you shall be punished for both faults!\"\n\nWith this he turned into the inner part of the tent, growling as he went, while the officers helped their beaten colleague to his feet. He was in a deplorable state. His back was cut in many places, and the blood was flowing in streams. They led him to his own quarters and on the way he swooned several times. His case seemed most pitiable.\n\nLu Su went to see the suffering officer and then called on Zhuge Liang in his boat.\n\nLu Su related the story of the beating and said, \"Though the other officers have been cowed into silence, I think thought you, Sir, might have interceded. You are a guest and not under Zhou Yu's orders. Why did you stand by with your hands up your sleeves and say never a word?\"\n\n\"You insult me,\" said Zhuge Liang smiling.\n\n\"Why do you say that? I have never insulted you: Never since the day we came here together.\"\n\n\"Do you not know that terrible beating was but a ruse? How could I try to dissuade Zhou Yu?\"\n\nThen Lu Su began to perceive, and Zhuge Liang continued, saying, \"Cao Cao would not be taken in unless there was some real bodily suffering. Zhou Yu is going to send Huang Gai over as a deserter, and Zhou Yu will see to it that the two Cao Cao's spies duly tell the tale. But when you see the General, you must not tell him that I saw through the ruse. You say that I am very angry like the others.\"\n\nLu Su went to see Zhou Yu and asked, \"Why have you so cruelly beaten a proved and trusty officer?\"\n\n\"Do the officers resent it?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"They are all upset about it.\"\n\n\"And what does your friend think?\"\n\n\"Zhuge Liang also resents it in his heart, and he thinks you have made a mistake.\"\n\n\"Then I have deceived him for once,\" said Zhou Yu gleefully.\n\n\"What mean you?\" cried Lu Su.\n\n\"That beating that Huang Gai got is part of my ruse. I am sending him to Cao Cao as a deserter, and so I have supplied a reason for desertion. Then I am going to use fire against the enemy.\"\n\nLu Su kept silence, but he recognized that Zhuge Liang was again right.\n\nMeanwhile Huang Gai lay in his tent, whither all his colleague officers went to condole with him and inquire after his health. But Huang Gai would say never a word. He only lay sighing deeply from time to time.\n\nBut when the Strategist Kan Ze came, Huang Gai told them to bring him to the room where he lay. Then he bade the servants go away.\n\nKan Ze said, \"Surely you must have some serious quarrel with the General.\"\n\n\"I have none,\" said Huang Gai.\n\n\"Then this beating is just part of a ruse?\"\n\n\"How did you guess?\" said Huang Gai.\n\n\"Because I watched the General, and I guessed about nine tenths of the truth.\"\n\nHuang Gai said, \"You see I have been very generously treated by the Sun family, all three of them, and have no means of showing my gratitude except by offering to help in this ruse. True I suffer, but I do not regret that. Among all those I know in the army, there is not one I am intimate with except yourself. You are true, and I can talk with you as a friend.\"\n\n\"I suppose you wish me to present your surrender letter to Cao Cao. Is that it?\"\n\n\"Just that; will you do it?\" said Huang Gai.\n\nKan Ze consented joyfully.\n\n\u2003Even the warrior's body is but a stake in the game,\n\n\u2003The friend so ready to help him proves that their hearts are the same." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Kan Ze Presents A Treacherous Letter; Pang Tong Suggests Chaining The Ships.\n\nKan Ze was from Shanyin, a son of a humble family. He loved books, but as he was too poor to buy, he used to borrow. He had a wonderfully tenacious memory, was very eloquent and no coward. Sun Quan had employed him among his advisers, and he and Huang Gai were excellent friends.\n\nNow Huang Gai had thought of Kan Ze to present the treacherous letter to Cao Cao, as Kan Ze's gifts made him most suitable.\n\nKan Ze accepted with enthusiasm, saying, \"When you, my friend, have suffered so much for our lord, could I spare myself? No! While a person lives, he must go on fulfilling his mission, or he is no better than the herbs that rot in the field.\"\n\nHuang Gai slipped off the couch and came over to salute him.\n\n\"However, this matter must speed,\" continued Kan Ze. \"There is no time to lose.\"\n\n\"The letter is already written,\" said Huang Gai.\n\nKan Ze received it and left. That night he disguised himself as an old fisherman and started in a small punt for the north shore, under the cold, glittering light of the stars. Soon he drew near the enemy's camp and was captured by the patrol.\n\nWithout waiting for day, they informed Cao Cao, who said at once, \"Is he not just a spy?\"\n\n\"No,\" said they, \"he is alone, just an old fisherman. And he says he is an adviser in the service of the South Land named Kan Ze, and he has come on secret business.\"\n\n\"Bring him,\" said Cao Cao, and Kan Ze was led in.\n\nCao Cao was seated in a brilliantly lighted tent. He was leaning on a small table, and as soon as he saw the prisoner, he said harshly, \"You are an adviser of East Wu. What then are you doing here?\"\n\n\"People say that you greedily welcome people of ability. I do not think your question a very proper one. O friend Huang Gai, you made a mistake,\" said Kan Ze.\n\n\"You know I am fighting against East Wu, and you come here privately. Why should I not question you?\"\n\n\"Huang Gai is an old servant of Wu, one who has served three successive rulers. Now he has been cruelly beaten, for no fault, before the face of all the officers in Zhou Yu's camp. He is grievously angry about this and wishes to desert to your side that he may be revenged. He discussed it with me, and as we are inseparable, I have come to give you his letter asking whether you would receive him.\"\n\n\"Where is the letter? said Cao Cao.\n\nThe missive was produced and presented. Cao Cao opened it and read:\n\n\"I, Huang Gai, have been generously treated by the Sun family and have served them single-heartedly. Lately they have been discussing an attack with our forces on the enormous army of the central government. Everyone knows our few are no match for such a multitude, and every officer of the South Land, wise or foolish, recognizes that quite well. However, Zhou Yu who, after all, is but a youth and a shallow minded simpleton, maintains that success is possible and rashly desires to smash stones with an egg. Beside, he is arbitrary and tyrannical, punishing for no crime, and leaving meritorious service unrewarded. I am an old servant and for no reason have been shamed in the sight of people. Wherefore I hate him in my heart.\n\n\"You, O Prime Minister, treat people with sincerity and are ready to welcome ability and so I, and those under my leadership, desire to enter your service whereby to acquire reputation and remove the shameful stigma. The commissariat, weapons, and the supply ships that I am commanding will also come over to you. In perfect sincerity I state these matters. I pray you not to doubt me.\"\n\nLeaning there on the low table by his side, Cao Cao turned this letter over and over and read it again and again.\n\nThen he smacked the table, opened his eyes wide with anger, saying, \"Huang Gai is trying to play the personal injury trick on me, is he? And you are in it as the intermediary to present the letter. How dare you come to sport with me?\"\n\nCao Cao ordered the lictors to thrust forth the messenger and take off his head. Kan Ze was hustled out, his face untroubled. On the contrary, he laughed aloud.\n\nAt this Cao Cao told them to bring him back and harshly said to him, \"What do you find to laugh at now that I have foiled you and your ruse has failed?\"\n\n\"I was not laughing at you. I was laughing at my friend's simplicity.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by his simplicity?\"\n\n\"If you want to slay, slay. Do not trouble me with a multitude of questions.\"\n\n\"I have read all the books on the art of war, and I am well versed in all ways of misleading the enemy. This ruse of yours might have succeeded with many, but it will not do for me.\"\n\n\"And so you say that the letter is a vicious trick?\" said Kan Ze.\n\n\"What I say is that your little slip has sent you to the death you risked. If the thing was real and you were sincere, why does not the letter name a time of coming over? What have you to say to that?\"\n\nKan Ze waited to the end and then laughed louder than ever, saying, \"I am so glad you are not frightened but can still boast of your knowledge of the books of war. Now you will not lead away your soldiers. If you fight, Zhou Yu will certainly capture you. But how sad to think I die at the hand of such an ignorant fellow!\"\n\n\"What mean you? I, ignorant?\"\n\n\"You are ignorant of any strategy and a victim of unreason. Is not that sufficient?\"\n\n\"Well then, tell me where is any fault.\"\n\n\"You treat wise people too badly for me to talk to you. You can finish me and let there be an end of it.\"\n\n\"If you can speak with any show of reason, I will treat you differently.\"\n\n\"Do you not know that when one is going to desert one's master and become a renegade, one cannot say exactly when the chance will occur? If one binds one's self to a fixed moment and the thing cannot be done just then, the secret will be discovered. One must watch for an opportunity and take it when it comes. Think: Is it possible to know exactly when? But you know nothing of common sense. All you know is how to put good people to death. So you really are an ignorant fellow!\"\n\nAt this Cao Cao changed his manner, got up, and came over to the prisoner bowing, \"I did not see clearly. That is quite true. I offended you, and I hope you will forget it.\"\n\n\"The fact is that Huang Gai and I are both inclined to desert to you. We even yearn for it as a child desires its parents. Is it possible that we should play you false?\"\n\n\"If you two could render me so great a service, you shall certainly be richly rewarded.\"\n\n\"We do not desire rank or riches. We come because it is the will of Heaven and the plain way of duty.\"\n\nThen wine was set out, and Kan Ze was treated as an honored guest. While they were drinking, someone came in and whispered in Cao Cao's ear.\n\nHe replied, \"Let me see the letter.\"\n\nWhereupon the man pulled out and gave him a letter, which evidently pleased him.\n\n\"That is from the two Cai brothers,\" thought Kan Ze. \"They are reporting the punishment of my friend, and that will be a proof of the sincerity of his letter.\"\n\nTurning toward Kan Ze, Cao Cao said, \"I must ask you to return to settle the date with your friend. As soon as I know, I will have a force waiting.\"\n\n\"I cannot return. Pray, Sir, send some other one you can trust.\"\n\n\"If someone else should go, the secret would be discovered.\"\n\nKan Ze refused again and again but at last gave way, saying, \"If I am to go, I must not wait here. I must be off at once.\"\n\nCao Cao offered him gold and silks, which were refused. Kan Ze started, left the camp, and reembarked for the south bank, where he related all that had happened to Huang Gai.\n\n\"If it had not been for your persuasive tongue, then had I undergone this suffering in vain,\" said Huang Gai.\n\n\"I will now go to get news of the two Cai brothers,\" said Kan Ze.\n\n\"Excellent,\" said Huang Gai.\n\nKan Ze went to the camp commanded by Gan Ning.\n\nWhen they were seated, Kan Ze said to his host, \"I was much distressed when I saw how disgracefully you were treated for your intercession on behalf of Huang Gai.\"\n\nGan Ning smiled. Just then the two Cai brothers came, and host and guest exchanged glances.\n\nGan Ning said, \"The truth is Zhou Yu is over confident, and he reckons us as nobody. We count for nothing. Everyone is talking of the way I was insulted.\"\n\nAnd he shouted and gritted his teeth and smacked the table in his wrath.\n\nKan Ze leaned over toward his host and said something in a very low voice, at which Gan Ning bent his head and sighed.\n\nCai He and Cai Zhong gathered from this scene that both Gan Ning and Kan Ze were ripe for desertion and determined to probe them.\n\n\"Why, Sir, do you anger him? Why not be silent about your injuries?\" said they.\n\n\"What know you of our bitterness?\" said Kan Ze.\n\n\"We think you seem much inclined to go over to Cao Cao,\" said they.\n\nKan Ze at this lost color. Gan Ning started up and drew his sword, crying, \"They have found out. They must die to keep their mouths shut!\"\n\n\"No, no,\" cried the two in a flurry. \"Let us tell you something quite secret!\"\n\n\"Quick, then!\" cried Gan Ning.\n\nSo Cai He said, \"The truth is that we are only pretended deserters, and if you two gentlemen are of our way of thinking, we can manage things for you.\"\n\n\"But are you speaking the truth?\" said Gan Ning.\n\n\"Is it likely we should say such a thing if it were untrue?\" cried both at the same moment.\n\nGan Ning put on a pleased look and said, \"Then this is the very heaven-given chance.\"\n\n\"You know we have already told Cao Cao of the Huang Gai affair and how you were insulted.\"\n\n\"The fact is I have given the Prime Minister a letter on behalf of Huang Gai, and he sent me back again to settle the date of Huang Gai's desertion,\" said Kan Ze.\n\n\"When an honest person happens upon an enlightened master, his heart will always be drawn toward him,\" said Gan Ning.\n\nThe four then drank together and opened their hearts to each other. The two Cai Zhong and Cai He wrote a private letter to their master saying Gan Ning has agreed to join in our plot and play the traitor, and Kan Ze also wrote, and they sent the letters secretly to Cao Cao.\n\nKan Ze's letter said:\n\n\"Huang Gai has found no opportunity so far. However, when he comes, his boat can be recognized by a black, indented flag. That shall mean he is on board.\"\n\nHowever, when Cao Cao got these two letters, he was still doubtful and called together his advisers to talk over the matter.\n\nSaid he, \"On the other side Gan Ning has been put to shame by the Commander-in-Chief whom he is prepared to betray for the sake of revenge. Huang Gai has been punished and sent Kan Ze to propose that he should come over to our side. Only I still distrust the whole thing. Who will go over to the camp to find out the real truth?\"\n\nThen Jiang Gan spoke up, saying, \"I failed in my mission the other day and am greatly mortified. I will risk my life again and, this time, I shall surely bring good news.\"\n\nCao Cao approved of him as messenger and bade him start. Jiang Gan set out in a small craft and speedily arrived in the Three Gorges, landing near the naval camp. Then he sent to inform Zhou Yu.\n\nHearing who it was, Zhou Yu chuckled, saying, \"Success depends upon this man.\"\n\nThen Zhou Yu called Lu Su and told him to call Pang Tong to come and do certain things for him.\n\nThis Pang Tong was from Xiangyang. And he had gone to the east of the river to get away from the strife. Lu Su had recommended him to Zhou Yu, but he had not yet presented himself.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu sent Lu Su to ask what scheme of attack he would recommend against Cao Cao, Pang Tong had said to Lu Su, \"You must use fire against him. But the river is wide and if one ship is set on fire, the others will scatter unless they are fastened together so that they must remain in one place. That is the one road to success.\"\n\nLu Su took this message to Zhou Yu, who pondered over it and then said, \"The only person who can manage this is Pang Tong himself.\"\n\n\"Cao Cao is very wily,\" said Lu Su. \"How can Pang Tong go?\"\n\nSo Zhou Yu was sad and undecided. He could think of no method till suddenly the means presented itself in the arrival of Jiang Gan.\n\nZhou Yu at once sent instructions to Pang Tong how to act, and then sat himself in his tent to await his visitor Jiang Gan.\n\nBut the visitor became ill at ease and suspicious when he saw that his old student friend did not come to welcome him, and he took the precaution of sending his boat into a retired spot to be made fast before he went to the general's tent.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu saw Jiang Gan, Zhou Yu put on an angry face and said, \"My friend, why did you treat me so badly?\"\n\nJiang Gan laughed and said, \"I remembered the old days when we were as brothers, and I came expressly to pour out my heart to you. Why do you say I treated you badly?\"\n\n\"You came to persuade me to betray my master, which I would never do unless the sea dried up and the rocks perished. Remembering the old times, I filled you with wine and kept you to sleep with me. And you, you plundered my private letters and stole away with never a word of farewell. You betrayed me to Cao Cao and caused the death of my two friends on the other side and so caused all my plans to miscarry. Now what have you come for? Certainly, it is not out of kindness to me. I would cut you in two, but I still care for our old friendship. I would send you back again, but within a day or two I shall attack that rebel. If I let you stay in my camp, my plans will leak out. So I am going to tell my attendants to conduct you to a certain retired hut in the Western Hills, and keep you there till I shall have won the victory. Then I will send you back again.\"\n\nJiang Gan tried to say something, but Zhou Yu would not listen. He turned his back and went into the recesses of his tent. The attendants led the visitor off, set him on a horse, and took him away over the hills to the small hut, leaving two soldiers to look after him.\n\nWhen Jiang Gan found himself in the lonely hut, he was very depressed and had no desire to eat or sleep. But one night, when the stars were very brilliant, he strolled out to enjoy them. Presently he came to the rear of his lonely habitation and heard, near by, someone crooning over a book. Approaching with stealthy steps, he saw a tiny cabin half hidden in a cliff whence a slender beam or two of light stole out between the rafters. He went nearer and peeping in, saw a man reading by the light of a lamp near which hung a sword. And the book was Sun Zi's classic \"The Art of War.\"\n\n\"This is no common person,\" thought Jiang Gan, and so he knocked at the door.\n\nThe door was opened by the reader, who bade him welcome with cultivated and refined ceremony. Jiang Gan inquired his name.\n\nThe host replied, \"I am Pang Tong.\"\n\n\"Then you are surely the Master known as Young Phoenix, are you not?\"\n\n\"Yes, I am he.\"\n\n\"How often have I heard you talked about! You are famous. But why are you hidden away in this spot?\"\n\n\"That fellow Zhou Yu is too conceited to allow that anyone else has any talent, and so I live here quietly. But who are you, Sir?\"\n\n\"I am Jiang Gan.\"\n\nThen Pang Tong made him welcome and led him in, and the two sat down to talk.\n\n\"With your gifts, you would succeed anywhere,\" said Jiang Gan. \"If you would enter Cao Cao's service, I would recommend you to him.\"\n\n\"I have long desired to get away from here. And if you, Sir, will present me, there is no time like the present. If Zhou Yu heard of my wish, he would kill me, I am sure.\"\n\nSo without more ado, they made their way down the hill to the water's edge to seek the boat in which Jiang Gan had come. They embarked and, rowing swiftly, they soon reached the northern shore. At the central camp, Jiang Gan landed and went to seek Cao Cao to whom he related the story of the discovery of his new acquaintance.\n\nWhen Cao Cao heard that the newcomer was Master Young Phoenix, Cao Cao went to meet him personally, made him very welcome, and soon they sat down to talk on friendly terms.\n\nCao Cao said, \"And so Zhou Yu in his youth is conceited and annoys his officers and rejects all their advice: I know that. But your fame has been long known to me, and now that you have been gracious enough to turn my way, I pray you not to be thrifty of your advice.\"\n\n\"I, too, know well that you are a model of military strategy,\" said Pang Tong, \"but I should like to have one look at your disposition.\"\n\nSo horses were brought, and the two rode out to the lines, host and visitor on equal terms, side by side. They ascended a hill whence they had a wide view of the land base.\n\nAfter looking all round Pang Tong remarked, \"Wu Qi the Great General, came to life again, could not do better, nor Sun Zi the Famed Strategist if he reappeared! All accords with the precepts. The camp is beside the hills and is flanked by a forest. The front and rear are within sight of each other. Gates of egress and ingress are provided, and the roads of advance and retirement are bent and broken.\"\n\n\"Master, I entreat you not to overpraise me, but to advise me where I can make further improvements,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen the two men rode down to the naval camp, where twenty four gates were arranged facing south. The cruisers and the battleships were all lined up so as to protect the lighter crafts which lay inside. There were channels to pass to and fro and fixed anchorages and stations.\n\nPang Tong surveying all this smiled, saying, \"Sir Prime Minister, if this is your method of warfare, you enjoy no empty reputation.\"\n\nThen pointing to the southern shore, he went on, \"Zhou Yu! Zhou Yu! You are finished. You will have to die.\"\n\nCao Cao was mightily pleased. They rode back to the chief tent and wine was brought. They discussed military matters, and Pang Tong held forth at length. Remarks and comments flowed freely between the two, and Cao Cao formed an exalted opinion of his new adherent's abilities and treated him with the greatest honor.\n\nBy and bye the guest seemed to have succumbed to the influence of many cups and said, \"Have you any capable medical people in your army?\"\n\n\"What are they for, Master?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"There is a lot of illness among the marines, and you ought to find some remedy.\"\n\nThe fact was that at this time Cao Cao's men were suffering from the climate. Many were vomiting and not a few had died. It was a source of great anxiety to him, and when the newcomer suddenly mentioned it, of course he had to ask advice.\n\nPang Tong said, \"Your marine force is excellent, but there is just one defect. It is not quite perfect.\"\n\nCao Cao pressed him to say where the imperfection lay.\n\n\"I have a plan to overcome the ailment of the soldiers so that no one shall be sick and all fit for service.\"\n\n\"What is this excellent scheme?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"The river is wide, and the tides ebb and flow. The winds and waves are never at rest. Your troops from the north are unused to ships, and the motion makes them ill. If your ships, large and small, were classed and divided into thirties, or fifties, and joined up stem to stem by iron chains and boards spread across them, to say nothing of soldiers being able to pass from one to the next, even horses could move about on them. If this were done, then there would be no fear of the wind and the waves and the rising and falling tides.\"\n\nComing down from his seat, Cao Cao thanked his guest, saying, \"I could never defeat the land of the south without this scheme of yours.\"\n\n\"That is only my idea,\" said Pang Tong. \"It is for you to decide about it.\"\n\nOrders were then issued to call up all the blacksmiths and set them to work, night and day, forging iron chains and great bolts to lock together the ships. And the soldiers rejoiced when they heard of the plan.\n\n\u2003In the Red Cliffs' fight they used the flame,\n\n\u2003The weapon here will be the same.\n\n\u2003By Pang Tong's advice the ships were chained,\n\n\u2003Else Zhou Yu had not that battle gained.\n\nPang Tong further told Cao Cao, saying, \"I know many bold people on the other side who hate Zhou Yu. If I may use my little tongue in your service, I can induce them to come over to you. If Zhou Yu be left alone, you can certainly take him captive. And Liu Bei is of no account.\"\n\n\"Certainly if you could render me so great a service, I would memorialize the Throne and obtain for you one of the highest offices,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I am not doing this for the sake of wealth or honors, but from a desire to succor humankind. If you cross the river, I pray you be merciful.\"\n\n\"I am Heaven's means of doing right and could not bear to slay the people.\"\n\nPang Tong thanked him and begged for a document that would protect his own family.\n\nCao Cao asked, \"Where do they live?\"\n\n\"All are near the river bank.\"\n\nAnd Cao Cao ordered a protection declaration to be prepared. Having sealed it, he gave it to Pang Tong.\n\nPang Tong said, \"You should attack as soon as I have gone, but do not let Zhou Yu doubt anything.\"\n\nCao Cao promised secrecy, and the wily traitor took his leave. Just as he was about to embark, he met a man in a Daoist robe, with a bamboo comb in his hair, who stopped him.\n\nThe man said, \"You are very bold. Huang Gai is planning to use the 'personal injury ruse', and Kan Ze has presented the letter of pretended desertion. You have proffered the fatal scheme of chaining the ships together lest the flames may not completely destroy them. This sort of mischievous work may have been enough to deceive Cao Cao, but I saw it all.\"\n\nPang Tong become helpless with fear \u2014 his viscera flown away, his spirit scattered.\n\n\u2003By guileful means one may succeed,\n\n\u2003The victims too find friends in need." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Banquet On The Great River, Cao Cao Sings A Song; Battle On Water, Northerners Fight With Chained Ships.\n\nIn the last chapter Pang Tong was brought up with a sudden shock when someone seized him and said of his scheme. Upon turning to look at the man, Pang Tong saw it was Xu Shu, an old friend, and his heart revived.\n\nLooking around and seeing no one near, Pang Tong said, \"It would be a pity if you upset my plan. The fate of the people of all the eighty-one southern counties is in your hands.\"\n\nXu Shu smiled, saying, \"And what of the fate of these eight hundred thirty thousand soldiers and horse of the north?\"\n\n\"Do you intend to wreck my scheme, Xu Shu?\"\n\n\"I have never forgotten the kindness of Uncle Liu Bei, nor my oath to avenge the death of my mother at Cao Cao's hands. I have said I would never think out a plan for him. So am I likely to wreck yours now, brother? But I have followed Cao Cao's army thus far; and after they shall have been defeated, good and bad will suffer alike and how can I escape? Tell me how I can secure safety, and I sew up my lips and go away.\"\n\nPang Tong smiled, \"If you are as high-minded as that, there is no great difficulty.\"\n\n\"Still I wish you would instruct me.\"\n\nSo Pang Tong whispered something in his ear, which seemed to please Xu Shu greatly, for he thanked him most cordially and took his leave. Then Pang Tong betook himself to his boat and left for the southern shore.\n\nHis friend gone, Xu Shu mischievously spread certain rumors in the camp, and next day were to be seen everywhere soldiers in small groups, some talking, others listening, heads together and ears stretched out, till the camps seemed to buzz.\n\nSome of the officers went to Cao Cao and told him, saying, \"A rumor is running around the camps that Han Sui and Ma Teng are marching from Xiliang to attack the capital.\"\n\nThis troubled Cao Cao, who called together his advisers to council.\n\nSaid he, \"The only anxiety I have felt in this expedition was about the possible doings of Han Sui and Ma Teng. Now there is a rumor running among the soldiers, and though I know not whether it be true or false, it is necessary to be on one's guard.\"\n\nAt this point Xu Shu said, \"You have been kind enough to give me an office, Sir, and I have really done nothing in return. If I may have three thousand troops, I will march at once to San Pass and guard this entrance. If there be any pressing matter, I will report at once.\"\n\n\"If you would do this, I should be quite at my ease. There are already troops beyond the Pass, who will be under your command, and now I will give you three thousand of horse and foot, and Zang Ba shall lead the van and march quickly.\"\n\nXu Shu took leave of the Prime Minister and left in company with Zang Ba. This was Pang Tong's scheme to secure the safety of Xu Shu.\n\nA poem says:\n\n\u2003Cao Cao marched south, but at his back\n\n\u2003There rode the fear of rear attack.\n\n\u2003Pang Tong's good counsel Xu Shu took,\n\n\u2003And thus the fish escaped the hook.\n\nCao Cao's anxiety diminished after he had thus sent away Xu Shu. Then he rode round all the camps, first the land forces and then the naval. He boarded one of the large ships and thereon set up his standard. The naval camps were arranged along two lines, and every ship carried a thousand bows and crossbows.\n\nWhile Cao Cao remained with the fleet, it occurred the full moon of the eleventh month of the thirteenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 208). The sky was clear; there was no wind; and the river lay unruffled. He prepared a great banquet, with music, and thereto invited all his leaders. As evening drew on, the moon rose over the eastern hills in its immaculate beauty, and beneath it lay the broad belt of the river like a band of pure silk. It was a great assembly, and all the guests were clad in gorgeous silks and embroidered robes, and the arms of the fighting soldiers glittered in the moonlight. The officers, civil and military, were seated in their proper order of precedence.\n\nThe setting, too, was exquisite. The Southern Hills were outlined as in a picture; the boundaries of Chaisang lay in the east; the river showed west as far as Xiakou; on the south lay the Fan Mountains, on the north was the Black Forest. The view stretched wide on every side.\n\nCao Cao's heart was jubilant, and he harangued the assembly, saying, \"My one aim since I enlisted my first small band of volunteers has been the removal of evil from the state, and I have sworn to cleanse the country and restore tranquillity. Now there is only left this land of the south to withstand me. I am at the head of a hundred legions. I depend upon you, gentlemen, and have no doubt of my final success. After I have subdued the South Land, there will be no trouble in all the country. Then we shall enjoy wealth and honor and revel in peace.\"\n\nThey rose in a body and expressed their appreciation, saying, \"We trust that you may soon report complete victory, and we shall all repose in the shade of your good fortune.\"\n\nIn his elation, Cao Cao bade the servants bring more wine and they drank till late at night.\n\nWarmed and mellowed, the host pointed to the south bank, saying, \"Zhou Yu and Lu Su know not the appointed time. Heaven is aiding me bringing upon them the misfortune of the desertion of their most trusted friends.\"\n\n\"O Prime Minister, say nothing of these things lest they become known to the enemy,\" said Xun You.\n\nBut the Prime Minister only laughed.\n\n\"You are all my trusty friends,\" said he, \"both officers and humble attendants. Why should I refrain?\"\n\nPointing to Xiakou, he continued, \"You do not reckon for much with your puny force, Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang. How foolish of you to attempt to shake the Taishan Mountains!\"\n\nThen turning to his officers, he said, \"I am now fifty-four; and if I get the South Land, I shall have the wherewithal to rejoice. In the days of long ago, the Patriarch Duke Qiao in the south and I were great friends, and we came to an agreement on certain matters, for I knew his two daughters \u2014 Elder Qiao and Younger Qiao \u2014 were lovely beyond words. Then by some means, they became wives to Sun Ce and Zhou Yu. But now my palace of rest is built on the River Zhang, and victory over the South Land will mean that I marry these two fair women. I will put them in the Bronze Bird Tower, and they shall rejoice my declining years. My desires will then be completely attained.\"\n\nHe smiled at the anticipation.\n\nDu Mu, a famous poet of the Tang Dynasty, in one poem says:\n\n\u2003A broken halberd buried in the sand,\n\n\u2003With deep rust eaten,\n\n\u2003Loud tells of ancient battles on the strand,\n\n\u2003When Cao Cao was beaten.\n\n\u2003Had eastern winds Zhou Yu's plan refused to aid\n\n\u2003And fan the blaze,\n\n\u2003The two fair Qiaos, in the Bronze Bird's shade,\n\n\u2003Would have been locked at spring age.\n\nBut suddenly amid the merriment was heard the hoarse cry of a raven flying toward the south.\n\n\"Why does the raven thus cry in the night?\" said Cao Cao to those about him.\n\n\"The moon is so bright that it thinks it is day,\" said they, \"and so it leaves its tree.\"\n\nCao Cao laughed. By this time he was quite intoxicated. He set up his spear in the prow of the ship and poured a libation into the river and then drank three brimming goblets.\n\nAs he lowered the spear, he said, \"This is the spear that broke up the Yellow Scarves, captured Lu Bu, destroyed Yuan Shao, and subdued Yuan Shu, whose armies are now mine. In the north it reached to Liaodong, and it stretched out over the whole south. It has never failed in its task. The present scene moves me to the depths, and I will sing a song in which you shall accompany me.\"\n\nAnd so he sang:\n\n\u2003\"When goblets are brimming then sang is near birth,\n\n\u2003But life is full short and has few days of mirth,\n\n\u2003Life goes as the dew drops fly swiftly away,\n\n\u2003Beneath the glance of the glowing hot ruler of day.\n\n\u2003Human's life may be spent in the noblest enterprise,\n\n\u2003But sorrowful thoughts in his heart oft arise.\n\n\u2003Let us wash clean away the sad thoughts that intrude,\n\n\u2003With bumpers of wine such as Du Kang once brewed.\n\n\u2003Gone is my day of youthful fire\n\n\u2003And still ungained is my desire.\n\n\u2003The deer feed on the level plain\n\n\u2003And joyful call, then feed again.\n\n\u2003My noble guests are gathered round.\n\n\u2003The air is trilled with joyful sound.\n\n\u2003Bright my future lies before me.\n\n\u2003As the moonlight on this plain;\n\n\u2003But I strive in vain to reach it.\n\n\u2003When shall I my wish attain?\n\n\u2003None can answer; and so sadness\n\n\u2003Grips my inmost heart again.\n\n\u2003Far north and south,\n\n\u2003Wide east and west,\n\n\u2003We safety seek;\n\n\u2003Vain is the quest.\n\n\u2003Human's heart oft yearns\n\n\u2003For converse sweet.\n\n\u2003And my heart burns\n\n\u2003When old friends greet.\n\n\u2003The stars are paled by the full moon's light,\n\n\u2003The raven wings his southward flight.\n\n\u2003And thrice he circles round a tree,\n\n\u2003No place thereon to rest finds he.\n\n\u2003They weary not the mountains of great height,\n\n\u2003The waters deep of depth do not complain,\n\n\u2003Duke Zhou no leisure found by day or night\n\n\u2003Stern toil is his who would the empire gain.\"\n\nThe song made they sang it with him and were all exceedingly merry, save one guest who suddenly said, \"When the great army is on the point of battle and lives are about to be risked, why do you, O Prime Minister, speak such ill words?\"\n\nCao Cao turned quickly toward the speaker, who was Liu Fu, Imperial Protector of Yangzhou. This Liu Fu sprang from Hefei. When first appointed to his post, he had gathered in the terrified and frightened people and restored order. He had founded schools and encouraged the people to till the land. He had long served under Cao Cao and rendered valuable service.\n\nWhen Liu Fu spoke, Cao Cao dropped his spear to the level and said, \"What ill-omened words did I use?\"\n\n\"You spoke of the moon paling the stars and the raven flying southward without finding a resting place. These are ill-omened words.\"\n\n\"How dare you try to belittle my endeavor?\" cried Cao Cao, very wrathful. And with that he smote Liu Fu with his spear and slew him.\n\nThe assembly broke up, and the guests dispersed in fear and confusion. Next day, when Cao Cao had recovered from his drunken bout, he was very grieved at what he had done. When the murdered man's son, Liu Xi, came to crave the body of his father for burial, Cao Cao wept and expressed his sorrow.\n\n\"I am guilty of your father's death. I was drunk yesterday. I regret the deed exceedingly. Your father shall be interred with the honors of a minister of the highest rank.\"\n\nCao Cao sent an escort of soldiers to take the body to the homeland for burial.\n\nA few days after, the two leaders of the naval force, Mao Jie and Yu Jin, came to say the ships were all connected together by chains as had been ordered, and all was now ready. They asked for the command to start.\n\nThereupon the leaders of both land and naval forces were assembled on board a large ship in the center of the squadron to receive orders. The various armies and squadrons were distinguished by different flags: Mao Jie and Yu Jin led the central naval squadron with yellow flag; Zhang He, the leading squadron, red flag; Lu Qian, the rear squadron, black flag; Wen Ping, the left squadron, blue flag; and Li Tong, the right squadron, white flag. On shore Xu Huang commanded the horsemen with red flag; Li Dian, the vanguard, black flag; Yue Jing, the left wing, blue flag; and Xiahou Yuan, the right wing, white flag. Xiahou Dun and Cao Hong were in reserve, and the general staff was under the leadership of Xu Chu and Zhang Liao. The other leaders were ordered to remain in camps, but ready for action.\n\nAll being ready, the squadron drums beat the roll thrice, and the ships sailed out under a strong northwest wind on a trial cruise. When they got among the waves, they were found to be as steady and immovable as the dry land itself. The northern soldiers showed their delight at the absence of motion by capering and flourishing their weapons. The ships moved on, the squadrons keeping quite distinct. Fifty light cruisers sailed to and fro keeping order and urging progress.\n\nCao Cao watched his navy from the Command Terrace and was delighted with their evolutions and maneuvers. Surely this meant complete victory. He ordered the recall and the squadrons returned in perfect order to their base.\n\nThen Cao Cao went to his tent and summoned his advisers.\n\nHe said, \"If Heaven had not been on my side, should I have got this excellent plan from the Young Phoenix? Now that the ships are attached firmly to each other, one may traverse the river as easily as walking on firm earth.\"\n\n\"The ships are firmly attached to each other,\" said Cheng Yu, \"but you should be prepared for an attack by fire so that they can scatter to avoid it.\"\n\nCao Cao laughed.\n\n\"You look a long way ahead,\" said he, \"but you see what cannot happen.\"\n\n\"Cheng Yu speaks much to the point, my lord,\" said Xun You. \"Why do you laugh at him?\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"Anyone using fire depends upon the wind. This is now winter and only west winds blow. You will get neither east nor south winds. I am on the northwest, and the enemy is on the southeast bank. If they use fire, they will destroy themselves. I have nothing to fear. If it was the tenth moon, or early spring, I would provide against fire.\"\n\n\"The Prime Minister is indeed wise,\" said the others in chorus. \"None can equal him.\"\n\n\"With northern troops unused to shipboard, I could never have crossed the river but for this chaining plan,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he saw two of the secondary leaders stand up, and they said, \"We are from the north, but we are also sailors. Pray give us a small squadron, and we will seize some of the enemy's flags and drums for you that we may prove ourselves adepts on the water.\"\n\nThe speakers were two men who had served under Yuan Shao, named Jiao Chu and Zhang Neng.\n\n\"I do not think naval work would suit you two, born and brought up in the north,\" said Cao Cao. \"The southern soldiers are thoroughly accustomed to ships. You should not regard your lives as a child's plaything.\"\n\nThey cried, \"If we fail, treat us according to army laws!\"\n\n\"The fighting ships are all chained together, there are only small, twenty-men boats free. They are unsuitable for fighting.\"\n\n\"If we took large ships, where would be the wonderful in what we will do? No! Give us a score of the small ships, and we will take half each and go straight to the enemy's naval port. We will just seize a flag, slay a leader, and come home.\"\n\n\"I will let you have the twenty ships and five hundred of good, vigorous marines with long spears and stiff crossbows. Early tomorrow the main fleet shall make a demonstration on the river, and I will also tell Wen Ping to support you with thirty ships.\"\n\nThe two men retired greatly elated.\n\nNext morning, very early, food was prepared, and at the fifth watch all was ready for a start. Then from the naval camp rolled out the drums and the gongs clanged, as the ships moved out and took up their positions, the various flags fluttering in the morning breeze. And the two intrepid leaders with their squadron of small scouting boats went down the lines and out into the stream.\n\nNow a few days before the sound of Cao Cao's drums had been heard on the southern bank, Zhou Yu had watched the maneuvers of the northern fleet on the open river from the top of a hill till the fleet had gone in again. So when the sound of drums was again heard, all the southern army went up the hills to watch the northern fleet. All they saw was a squadron of small ships bounding over the waves.\n\nAs the northern fleet came nearer, the news was taken to Zhou Yu who called for volunteers to go out against them. Han Dang and Zhou Tai offered themselves. They were accepted and orders were issued to the camps to remain ready for action but not to move till told.\n\nHan Dang and Zhou Tai sailed out each with a small squadron of five ships in line.\n\nThe two braggarts from the north, Jiao Chu and Zhang Neng, really only trusted to their boldness and luck. Their ships came down under the powerful strokes of the oars. As they neared, the two leaders put on their heart-protectors, gripped their spears, and each took his station in the prow of the leading ship of his division. Jiao Chu's ship led and as soon as he came near enough, his troops began to shoot at Han Dang, who fended off the arrows with his buckler. Jiao Chu twirled his long spear as he engaged his opponent. But, at the first thrust, he was killed.\n\nHis comrade Zhang Neng with the other ships was coming up with great shouts, when Zhou Tai sailed up at an angle, and these two squadrons began shooting arrows at each other in clouds. Zhou Tai fended off the arrows with his shield and stood gripping his sword firmly till his ships came within a few spans of the enemy's ships, when he leaped across and cut down Zhang Neng. Zhang Neng's dead body fell into the water. Then the battle became confused, and the attacking ships rowed hard to get away. The southerners pursued but soon came in sight of Wen Ping's supporting fleet. Once more the ships engaged and the forces fought with each other.\n\nZhou Yu with his officers stood on the summit of a mountain and watched his own and the enemy ships out on the river. The flags and the ensigns were all in perfect order. Then he saw Wen Ping and his own fleets engaged in battle, and soon it was evident that the former was not a match for his own sailors. Wen Ping turned about to retire, Han Dang and Zhou Tai pursued. Zhou Yu fearing lest his sailors should go too far, then hoisted the white flag of recall.\n\nTo his officers Zhou Yu said, \"The masts of the northern ships stand thick as reeds. Cao Cao himself is full of wiles. How can we destroy him?\"\n\nNo one replied, for just then the great yellow flag that flapped in the breeze in the middle of Cao Cao's fleet suddenly fell over into the river.\n\nZhou Yu laughed.\n\n\"That is a bad omen,\" said he.\n\nThen an extra violent blast of wind came by, and the waves rose high and beat upon the bank. A corner of his own flag flicked Zhou Yu on the cheek, and suddenly a thought flashed through his mind. Zhou Yu uttered a loud cry, staggered, and fell backward. They picked him up. There was blood upon his lips, and he was unconscious. Presently, however, he revived.\n\n\u2003And once he laughed, then gave a cry,\n\n\u2003This is hard to ensure a victory." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "On Seven-Star Altar, Zhuge Liang Sacrifices To The Winds; At Three Gorges, Zhou Yu Liberates The Fire.\n\nIn the last chapter Zhou Yu was seized with sudden illness as he watched the fleets of his enemy. He was borne to his tent, and his officers came in multitudes to inquire after him.\n\nThey looked at each other, saying, \"What a pity our general should be taken ill, when Cao Cao's legions threaten so terribly! What would happen if Cao Cao attacked?\"\n\nMessengers with the evil tidings were sent to Sun Quan, while the physicians did their best for the invalid. Lu Su was particularly sad at the illness of his patron and went to see Zhuge Liang to talk it over.\n\n\"What do you make of it?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Good luck for Cao Cao; bad for us,\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"I could cure him,\" said Zhuge Liang laughing.\n\n\"If you could, Wu would be very fortunate,\" said Lu Su.\n\nLu Su prayed Zhuge Liang to go to see the sick man. They went, and Lu Su entered first. Zhou Yu lay in bed, his head covered by a quilt.\n\n\"How are you, General?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"My heart pains me. Every now and again I feel faint and dizzy.\"\n\n\"Have you taken any remedies?\"\n\n\"My gorge rises at the thought. I could not.\"\n\n\"I saw Zhuge Liang just now, and he says he could heal you. He is just outside, and I will call him if you like.\"\n\n\"Ask him to come in.\"\n\nZhou Yu bade his servants help him to a sitting position, and Zhuge Liang entered.\n\n\"I have not seen you for days,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"How could I guess that you were unwell?\"\n\n\"How can anyone feel secure? We are constantly the playthings of luck, good or bad.\"\n\n\"Yes. Heaven's winds and clouds are not to be measured. No one can reckon their comings and goings, can they?\"\n\nZhou Yu turned pale and a low groan escaped him, while his visitor went on, \"You feel depressed, do you not? As though troubles were piling up in your heart?\"\n\n\"That is exactly how I feel,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"You need cooling medicine to dissipate this sense of oppression.\"\n\n\"I have taken a cooling draught, but it has done no good.\"\n\n\"You must get the humors into good order before the drugs will have any effect.\"\n\nZhou Yu began to think Zhuge Liang knew what was really the matter and resolved to test him.\n\n\"What should be taken to produce a favorable temper?\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"I know one means of producing a favorable temper,\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I wish you would tell me.\"\n\nZhuge Liang got out writing materials, sent away the servants, and then wrote a few words:\n\n\u2003\"To defeat Cao Cao\n\n\u2003You have to use fire;\n\n\u2003All are in your wish,\n\n\u2003But wind from the east.\"\n\nThis he gave to the sick general, saying, \"That is the origin of your illness.\"\n\nZhou Yu read the words with great surprise, and it confirmed his secret opinion that Zhuge Liang really was rather more than human. He decided that the only course was to be open and tell him all.\n\nSo he said, \"Since you know the cause of the disease, what do you recommend as treatment? The need of a remedy is very urgent.\"\n\n\"I have no great talent,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"but I have had to do with humans of no ordinary gifts from whom I have received certain magical books called 'Concealing Method'. I can call the winds and summon the rains. Since you need a southeast breeze, General, you must build an altar on the Southern Hills, the Altar of the Seven Stars. It must be nine spans high, with three steps, surrounded by a guard of one hundred and twenty humans bearing flags. On this altar I will work a spell to procure a strong southeast gale for three days and three nights. Do you approve?\"\n\n\"Never mind three whole days,\" said Zhou Yu. \"One day of strong wind will serve my purpose. But it must be done at once and without delay.\"\n\n\"I will sacrifice for a wind for three days from the twentieth day of the moon. Will that suit you?\"\n\nZhou Yu was delighted and hastily rose from his couch to give the necessary orders. He commanded that five hundred men should be sent to the mountains to build the altar, and he told off the guard of one hundred and twenty to bear the flags and be at the orders of Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhuge Liang took his leave, went forth, and rode off with Lu Su to the mountains where they measured out the ground. He bade the soldiers build the altar of red earth from the southeast quarter. It was two hundred and forty spans in circuit, square in shape, and of three tiers, each of three spans, in all nine spans high.\n\nOn the lowest tier he placed the flags of the twenty-eight \"houses\" of the heavens and four constellations: On the east seven, with blue flags; on the north seven, with black flags; on the west seven, with white flags; and on the south seven, with red flags.\n\nAround the second tier he placed sixty-four yellow flags, corresponding to the number of the diagrams of the Book of Divination, in eight groups of eight.\n\nFour men were stationed on the highest platform, each wearing a Daoist headdress and a black silk robe embroidered with the phoenix and confined with wide sashes. They wore scarlet boots and square-cut skirts. On the left front stood a man supporting a tall pole bearing at its top a plume of light feathers to show by their least movement the wind's first breathing. On the right front was a man holding a tall pole whereon was a flag with the symbol of the seven stars to show the direction and force of the wind. On the left rear stood a man with a sword, and on the right rear a man with a censer.\n\nBelow the altar were forty-four men holding flags, umbrellas, spears, lances, yellow banners, white axes, red banderoles, and black ensigns. And these were spaced about the altar.\n\nOn the appointed day Zhuge Liang, having chosen a propitious moment, bathed his body and purified himself. Then he robed himself as a Daoist, loosened his locks, and approached the altar.\n\nHe bade Lu Su retire, saying, \"Return to the camp and assist the General in setting out his forces. Should my prayers avail not, do not wonder.\"\n\nSo Lu Su left him. Then Zhuge Liang commanded the guards on no account to absent themselves, to maintain strict silence, and to be reverent. Death would be the penalty of disobedience.\n\nNext, with solemn steps he ascended the altar, faced the proper quarter, lighted the incense, and sprinkled the water in the basins. This done he gazed into the heavens and prayed silently. The prayer ended he descended and returned to his tent. After a brief rest he allowed the soldiers by turns to go away to eat.\n\nThrice that day he ascended the altar and thrice descended, but there was no sign of the wind.\n\nDuring that time, Zhou Yu, with Cheng Pu and Lu Su and other military officials on duty, sat waiting in the tent till the wished-for wind should blow and the attack could be launched. Messengers were also sent to Sun Quan to prepare to support the forward movement.\n\nHuang Gai had his fire ships ready, twenty of them. The fore parts of the ships were thickly studded with large nails, and they were loaded with dry reeds, wood soaked in fish oil, and covered with sulfur, saltpeter, and other inflammables. The ships were covered in with black oiled cloth. In the prow of each was a black dragon flag with indentations. A fighting ship was attached to the stern of each to propel it forward. All were ready and awaited orders to move.\n\nMeanwhile Cao Cao's two spies, Cai He and Cai Zhong, were being guarded carefully in an outer camp far from the river bank and daily entertained with feasting. They were not allowed to know of the preparations. The watch was so close that not a trickle of information reached the prisoners.\n\nPresently, while Zhou Yu was anxiously awaiting in his tent for the desired wind, a messenger came to say that Sun Quan had anchored at a place thirty miles from the camp, where he awaited news from the Commander-in-Chief.\n\nLu Su was sent to warn all the various commanders to be ready, the ships and their weapons, sails and oars, all for instant use, and to impress upon them the penalties of being caught unprepared. The soldiers were indeed ready for the fight and yearning for the fray.\n\nBut the sky remained obstinately clear, and as night drew nigh no breath of air stirred.\n\n\"We have been cajoled,\" said Zhou Yu. \"Indeed what possibility is there of a southeast wind in midwinter?\"\n\n\"Zhuge Liang would not use vain and deceitful words,\" replied Lu Su.\n\nTowards the third watch, the sound of a movement arose in the air. Soon the flags fluttered out. And when the Commander-in-Chief went out to make sure, he saw they were flowing toward the northwest. In a very short time the southeast wind was in full force.\n\nZhou Yu was, however, frightened at the power of the man whose help he had invoked.\n\nHe said, \"Really the man has power over the heavens and authority over the earth. His methods are incalculable, beyond the ken of god or devil. He cannot be allowed to live to be a danger to our land of the south. We must slay him soon to fend off later evils.\"\n\nSo Zhou Yu resolved to commit a crime to remove his dangerous rival.\n\nHe called two of the generals of his guard, Ding Feng and Xu Sheng, and said to them, \"Each of you take a party of one hundred troops, one along the river, the other along the road, to the altar on the mountains. As soon as you get there, without asking questions or giving reasons, you are to seize and behead Zhuge Liang. Rich reward will be given when you bring his head back.\"\n\nXu Sheng and Ding Feng went off on their errand, the former leading dagger and ax-men going as fast as oars could propel them along the river, the latter at the head of archers and bowmen on horseback. The southeast wind buffeted them as they went on their way.\n\n\u2003High was raised the Seven Stars Altar,\n\n\u2003On it prayed the Sleeping Dragon\n\n\u2003For an eastern wind, and straightway\n\n\u2003Blew the wind. Had not the wizard\n\n\u2003Exercised his mighty magic\n\n\u2003Nought had Zhou Yu's skill availed.\n\nDing Feng first arrived. He saw the guards with their flags, dropped off his steed, and marched to the altar, sword in hand. But he found no Zhuge Liang.\n\nWhen he asked the guards, they told him, saying, \"He has just gone down.\"\n\nDing Feng ran down the hill to search. There he met his fellow Xu Sheng, and they joined forces.\n\nPresently a simple soldier told them, saying, \"The evening before a small, fast boat anchored there near a sand spit, and Zhuge Liang was seen to go on board. Then the boat went up river.\"\n\nSo Xu Sheng and Ding Feng divided their party into two, one to go by water, the other by land.\n\nXu Sheng bade his boatmen put on all sail and take every advantage of the wind. Before very long he saw the fugitive's boat ahead, and when near enough, stood in the prow of his own and shouted, \"Do not flee, O Instructor of the Army! The General requests your presence.\"\n\nZhuge Liang, who was seated in the stern of his boat, just laughed aloud, saying, \"Return and tell the General to make good use of his soldiers. Tell him I am going up river for a spell and will see him again another day.\"\n\n\"Pray wait a little while,\" cried Xu Sheng. \"I have something most important to tell you!\"\n\n\"I knew all about it, that Zhou Yu would not let me go and that he wanted to kill me. That is why Zhao Zilong was waiting for me. You had better not approach nearer.\"\n\nSeeing the other ship had no sail, Xu Sheng thought he would assuredly come up with it and so maintained the pursuit.\n\nThen when he got too close, Zhao Zilong fitted an arrow to the bowstring and, standing up in the stern of his boat, cried, \"You know who I am, and I came expressly to escort the Directing Instructor. Why are you pursuing him? One arrow would kill you, only that would cause a breach of the peace between two houses. I will shoot and just give you a specimen of my skill.\"\n\nWith that he shot, and the arrow whizzed overhead cutting the rope that held up the sail. Down came the sail trailing in the water and the boat swung round. Then Zhao Zilong's boat hoisted its sail, and the fair wind speedily carried it out of sight.\n\nOn the bank stood Ding Feng. He bade his comrade come to the shore and said, \"Zhuge Liang is too clever for anyone; and Zhao Zilong is bravest of the brave. You remember what he did at Dangyang, at the Long Slope Bridge. All we can do is to return and report.\"\n\nSo they returned to camp and told their master about the preparations that Zhuge Liang had made to ensure safety. Zhou Yu was indeed puzzled at the depth of his rival's insight.\n\n\"I shall have no peace day or night while he lives,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"At least wait till Cao Cao is done with,\" said Lu Su.\n\nAnd Zhou Yu knew Lu Su spoke wisely.\n\nHaving summoned the leaders to receive orders, first Zhou Yu gave orders to Gan Ning: \"Take with you the false deserter Cai Zhong and his soldiers, and go along the south bank, showing the flags of Cao Cao, till you reach the Black Forest just opposite the enemy's main store of grain and forage. Then you are to penetrate as deeply as possible into the enemy's lines and light a torch as a signal. Cai He is to be kept in camp for another purpose.\"\n\nThe next order was: \"Taishi Ci is to lead two thousand troops as quickly as possible to Huangzhou and cut the enemy's communications with Hefei. When near the enemy, he is to give a signal. If he sees a red flag, he will know that our lord, Sun Quan, is at hand with reinforcements.\"\n\nGan Ning and Taishi Ci had the farthest to go and started first.\n\nThen Lu Meng was sent into the Black Forest with three thousand troops as a support to Gan Ning who was ordered to set fire to Cao Cao's depot. A fourth party of three thousand troops was led by Ling Tong to the borders of Yiling and attack as soon as the signal from the forest was seen. A fifth party of three thousand under Dong Xi went to Hanyang to fall upon the enemy along the River Han. Their signal was a white flag; and a sixth division of three thousand commanded by Pan Zhang would support them.\n\nWhen these six parties had gone off. Huang Gai got ready his fire ships and sent a soldier with a note to tell Cao Cao that he was coming over that evening. Four naval squadrons were told off to support Huang Gai.\n\nThe four squadrons, each of three hundred ships, were placed under four commanders: Han Dang, Zhou Tai, Jiang Qin, and Chen Wu. Twenty fire ships preceded each fleet. Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu went on board one of the large ships to direct the battle. Their guards were Ding Feng and Xu Sheng. Lu Su, Kan Ze, and the advisers were left to guard the camp. Cheng Pu was greatly impressed with Zhou Yu's ordering of the grand attack.\n\nThen came a messenger bearing a mandate from Sun Quan making Lu Xun Leader of the Van. He was ordered to go to Qichun. Sun Quan himself would support Lu Xun. Zhou Yu also sent two command units, one to the Western Hills to make fire signals, and the other to the Southern Hills to hoist flags.\n\nSo all being prepared they waited for dusk.\n\nLiu Bei was at Xiakou anxiously awaiting the return of his adviser. Then appeared a fleet, led by Liu Qi, who had come to find out how matters were progressing.\n\nLiu Bei sent to call him to the battle tower and said, \"The southeast wind had begun to blow, and that Zhao Zilong had gone to meet Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nNot long after a single sail was seen coming up before the wind, and Liu Bei knew it was Zhuge Liang, the Directing Instructor of the Army.\n\nSo Liu Bei and Liu Qi went down to meet the boat. Soon the vessel reached the shore, and Zhuge Liang and Zhao Zilong disembarked.\n\nLiu Bei was very glad, and after they had inquired after each other's well-being, Zhuge Liang said, \"There is no time to tell of any other things now. Are the soldiers and ships ready?\"\n\n\"They have long been ready,\" replied Liu Bei. \"They only await you to direct how they are to be used.\"\n\nThe three then went to the tent and took their seats.\n\nZhuge Liang at once began to issue orders: \"Zhao Zilong, with three thousand troops is to cross the river and go to the Black Forest by the minor road. He will choose a dense jungle and prepare an ambush. Tonight, after the fourth watch, Cao Cao will hurry along that way. When half his troops have passed, the jungle is to be fired. Cao Cao will not be wholly destroyed but many will perish.\"\n\n\"There are two roads,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"One leads to the southern regions and the other to Jingzhou. I do not know by which he will come.\"\n\n\"The south road is too dangerous. Cao Cao will certainly pass along the Jingzhou road, so that he may get away to Xuchang.\"\n\nThen Zhao Zilong went away.\n\nNext Zhuge Liang said to Zhang Fei, \"You will take three thousand troops over the river to cut the road to Yiling. You will ambush in the Hulu Valley. Cao Cao, not daring to go to South Yiling, will go to North Yiling. Tomorrow, after the rain, he will halt to refresh his troops. As soon as the smoke is seen to rise from their cooking fires, you will fire the hill side. You will not capture Cao Cao, but you will render excellent service.\"\n\nSo Zhang Fei left. Next was called Mi Zhu, Mi Fang, and Liu Feng. They were to take command of three squadrons and go along the river to collect beaten soldiers and their weapons.\n\nThe three left. Then Zhuge Liang said to Liu Qi, \"The country around Wuchang is very important, and I wish you to take command of your own troops and station them at strategic points. Cao Cao, being defeated, will flee thither, and you will capture him. But you are not to leave the city without the best of reasons.\"\n\nAnd Liu Qi took leave.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said to Liu Bei, \"I wish you to remain quietly and calmly in Fankou, in a high tower, to watch Zhou Yu work out his great scheme this night.\"\n\nAll this time Guan Yu has been silently waiting his turn, but Zhuge Liang said no word to him.\n\nWhen Guan Yu could bear this no longer, he cried, \"Since I first followed my brother to battle many years ago, I have never been left behind. Now that great things are afoot, is there no work for me? What is meant by it?\"\n\n\"You should not be surprised. I wanted you for service at a most important point, only that there was a something standing in the way that prevented me from sending you,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"What could stand in the way? I wish you would tell me.\"\n\n\"You see Cao Cao was once very kind to you, and you cannot help feeling grateful. Now when his soldiers have been beaten, he will have to flee along the Huarong Road. If I sent you to guard it, you would have to let him pass. So I will not send you.\"\n\n\"You are most considerate, Instructor. But though it is true that he treated me well, yet I slew two of his most redoubtable opponents, Yan Liang and Wen Chou, by way of repayment, beside raising a siege. If I happened upon him on this occasion, I should hardly let him go.\"\n\n\"But what if you did?\"\n\n\"You could deal with me by military rules.\"\n\n\"Then put that in writing.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu wrote a formal undertaking and gave the document to Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"What happens if Cao Cao does not pass that way?\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"I will give you a written engagement that he will pass.\" Then Zhuge Liang continued, \"On the hills by the Huarong Valley, you are to raise a heap of wood and grass to make a great column of smoke and mislead Cao Cao into coming.\"\n\n\"If Cao Cao sees a smoke, he will suspect an ambush and will not come,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"You are very simple,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Do you not know more of war's ruses than that? Cao Cao is an able leader, but you can deceive him this time. When he sees the smoke, he will take it as a subterfuge and risk going that way. But do not let your kindness of heart rule your conduct.\"\n\nThus was his duty assigned Guan Yu, and he left, taking his adopted son Guan Ping, his general Zhou Cang, and five hundred swordsmen.\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"His sense of rectitude is very profound. I fear if Cao Cao should come that way, my brother will let him pass.\"\n\n\"I have consulted the stars lately, and the rebel Cao Cao is not fated to come to his end yet. I have purposely designed this manifestation of kindly feeling for Guan Yu to accomplish and so act handsomely.\"\n\n\"Indeed there are few such far-seeing humans as you are,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThe two then went to Fankou whence they might watch Zhou Yu's evolutions. Sun Qian and Jian Yong were left on guard of Xiakou.\n\nCao Cao was in his great camp in conference with his advisers and awaiting the arrival of Huang Gai. The southeast wind was very strong that day, and Cheng Yu was insisting on the necessity for precaution.\n\nBut Cao Cao laughed, saying, \"The Winter Solstice depends upon the sun and nothing else. There is sure to be a southeast wind at some one or other of its recurrences. I see nothing to wonder at.\"\n\nJust then they announced the arrival of a small boat from the other shore with a letter from Huang Gai. The bearer of the letter was brought in and presented it. Cao Cao read it:\n\n\"Zhou Yu has kept such strict watch that there has been no chance of escape. But now some grain is coming down river, and I, Huang Gai, have been named as Escort Commander which will give me the opportunity I desire. I will slay one of the known generals and bring his head as an offering when I come. This evening at the third watch, if boats are seen with dragon toothed flags, they will be the grain boats.\"\n\nThis letter delighted Cao Cao who, with his officers, went to the naval camp and boarded a great ship to watch for the arrival of Huang Gai.\n\nIn the South Land, when evening fell, Zhou Yu sent for Cai He and bade the soldiers bind him.\n\nThe unhappy man protested, saying, \"I have committed no crime!\"\n\nBut Zhou Yu said, \"What sort of a fellow are you, think you, to come and pretend to desert to my side? I need a small sacrifice for my flag, and your head will serve my purpose. So I am going to use it.\"\n\nCai He being at the end of his tether unable to deny the charge suddenly cried, \"Two of your own side, Kan Ze and Gan Ning, are also in the plot!\"\n\n\"Under my directions!\" said Zhou Yu.\n\nCai He was exceedingly repentant and sad, but Zhou Yu bade them take Cai He to the river bank where the black standard had been set up and there, after the pouring of a libation and the burning of paper, Cai He was beheaded, his blood being a sacrifice to the flag.\n\nThis ceremony over, the ships started, and Huang Gai took his place on the third ship. He merely wore breast armor and carried a keen blade. On his flag were written four large characters Van Leader Huang Gai. With a fair wind his fleet sailed toward the Red Cliffs.\n\nThe wind was strong and the waves ran high. Cao Cao in the midst of the central squadron eagerly scanned the river which rolled down under the bright moon like a silver serpent writhing in innumerable folds. Letting the wind blow full in his face, Cao Cao laughed aloud for he was now to obtain his desire.\n\nThen a soldier pointing to the river said, \"The whole south is one mass of sails, and they are coming up on the wind.\"\n\nCao Cao went to a higher point and gazed at the sails intently, and his officers told him that the flags were black and dragon shaped, and indented, and among them there flew one very large banner on which was a name Huang Gai.\n\n\"That is my friend, the deserter!\" said he joyfully. \"Heaven is on my side today.\"\n\nAs the ships drew closer, Cheng Yu said, \"Those ships are treacherous. Do not let them approach the camp.\"\n\n\"How know you that?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\nAnd Cheng Yu replied, \"If they were laden with grain, they would lie deep in the water. But these are light and float easily. The southeast wind is very strong, and if they intend treachery, how can we defend ourselves?\"\n\nCao Cao began to understand. Then he asked who would go out to stop the approaching fleet, and Wen Ping volunteered, saying, \"I am well used to the waters.\"\n\nThereupon Wen Ping sprang into a small light craft and sailed out, followed by ten cruisers which came at his signal.\n\nStanding in the prow of his ship, Wen Ping called out to those advancing toward them, \"You southern ships are not to approach! Such are the orders of the Prime Minister. Stop there in mid stream!\"\n\nThe soldiers all yelled to them to lower their sails. The shout had not died away when a bowstring twanged, and Wen Ping rolled down into the ship with an arrow in the left arm. Confusion reigned on his ship, and all the others hurried back to their camp.\n\nWhen the ships were about a mile of distant, Huang Gai waved his sword and the leading ships broke forth into fire, which, under the force of the strong wind, soon gained strength and the ships became as fiery arrows. Soon the whole twenty dashed into the naval camp.\n\nAll Cao Cao's ships were gathered there, and as they were firmly chained together not one could escape from the others and flee. There was a roar of bombs and fireships came on from all sides at once. The face of the three rivers was speedily covered with fire which flew before the wind from one ship to another. It seemed as if the universe was filled with flame.\n\nCao Cao hastened toward the shore. Huang Gai, with a few troops at his back, leaped into a small boat, dashed through the fire, and sought Cao Cao. Cao Cao, seeing the imminence of the danger, was making for the land. Zhang Liao got hold of a small boat into which he helped his master; none too soon, for the ship was burning. They got Cao Cao out of the thick of the fire and dashed for the bank.\n\nHuang Gai, seeing a handsomely robed person get into a small boat, guessed it must be Cao Cao and pursued.\n\nHe drew very near and he held his keen blade ready to strike, crying out, \"You rebel! Do not flee. I am Huang Gai.\"\n\nCao Cao howled in the bitterness of his distress. Zhang Liao fitted an arrow to his bow and aimed at the pursuer, shooting at short range. The roaring of the gale and the flames kept Huang Gai from hearing the twang of the string, and he was wounded in the shoulder. He fell and rolled over into the water.\n\n\u2003He fell in peril of water\n\n\u2003When flames were high;\n\n\u2003Ere cudgel bruises had faded,\n\n\u2003An arrow struck." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Foresees The Huarong Valley Episode; Guan Yu Lifts His Saber To Release Cao Cao.\n\nThe last chapter closed with Huang Gai in the water wounded, Cao Cao rescued from immediate danger, and confusion rampant among the soldiers. Pressing forward to attack the naval camp, Han Dang was told by his soldiers that someone was clinging to the rudder of his boat and shouting to him by his familiar name. Han Dang listened carefully and in the voice at once he recognized that Huang Gai was calling to him for help.\n\n\"That is my friend Huang Gai!\" cried he, and they quickly pulled the wounded leader out of the water.\n\nThen they saw Huang Gai was wounded for the arrow still stuck. Han Dang bit out the shaft of the arrow but the point was deeply buried in the flesh. They hastily pulled off his wet garments and cut out the metal arrowhead with a dagger, tore up one of the flags, and bound up the wound. Then Han Dang gave Huang Gai his own fighting robe to put on and sent him off in a small boat back to camp.\n\nHuang Gai's escape from drowning must be taken as proof of his natural affinity for, or sympathy with, water. Although it was the period of great cold and he was heavy with armor when he fell into the river, yet he escaped with life.\n\nIn this great battle at the junction of the three rivers, the Three Gorges, when fire seemed to spread wide over all the wide surface of the water, when the earth quaked with the roar of battle, when land forces closed in on both wings and four battle squadrons advanced on the front, when the ferocity of fire answered the clash of weapons and weapons were aided by fire, under the thrusts of spears and the flights of arrows, burnt by fire and drowned by water, Cao Cao lost an incalculable number of troops. And a poet wrote:\n\n\u2003When Wei and Wu together strove\n\n\u2003For the mastery,\n\n\u2003In the Red Cliffs fight the tall ships\n\n\u2003Vanished from the sea,\n\n\u2003For there the fierce flames, leaping high.\n\n\u2003Burned them utterly.\n\n\u2003So Zhou Yu for his liege lord\n\n\u2003Got the victory.\n\n\u2003And another poem runs:\n\n\u2003The hills are high, the moon shines faint.\n\n\u2003The waters stretch afar;\n\n\u2003I sigh to think how oft this land\n\n\u2003Has suffered stress of war;\n\n\u2003And I recall how southerners\n\n\u2003Shrank from the northern army's might,\n\n\u2003And how a favoring eastern gale\n\n\u2003Helped them to win the fight.\n\nWhile fire was consuming the naval base of Cao Cao, Gan Ning made Cai Zhong guide him into the innermost recesses of Cao Cao's camp. Then Gan Ning slew Cai Zhong with one slash of his sword. After this Gan Ning set fire to the jungle; and at this signal, Lu Meng put fire to the grass in ten places near to each other. Then other fires were started, and the noise of battle was on all sides.\n\nCao Cao and Zhang Liao, with a small party of horsemen, fled through the burning forest. They could see no road in front; all seemed on fire. Presently Mao Jie and Wen Ping, with a few more horsemen, joined them. Cao Cao bade the soldiers seek a way through.\n\nZhang Liao pointed out, saying, \"The only suitable road is through the Black Forest.\"\n\nAnd they took it.\n\nThey had gone but a short distance when they were overtaken by a small party of the enemy, and a voice cried, \"Cao Cao, stop!\"\n\nIt was Lu Meng, whose ensign soon appeared against the fiery background. Cao Cao urged his small party of fugitives forward, bidding Zhang Liao defend him from Lu Meng.\n\nSoon after Cao Cao saw the light of torches in front, and from a gorge there rushed out another force. And the leader cried, \"Ling Tong is here!\"\n\nCao Cao was scared. His liver and gall both seemed torn from within.\n\nBut just then on his half right, he saw another company approach and heard a cry, \"Fear not, O Prime Minister, I am here to rescue you!\"\n\nThe speaker was Xu Huang, and he attacked the pursuers and held them off.\n\nA move to the north seemed to promise escape, but soon they saw a camp on a hill top. Xu Huang went ahead to reconnoiter and found the officers in command were Cao Cao's Generals Ma Yan and Zhang Zi, who had once been in the service of Yuan Shao. They had three thousand of northern soldiers in camp. They had seen the sky redden with the flames, but knew not what was afoot so dared make no move.\n\nThis turned out lucky for Cao Cao who now found himself with a fresh force. He sent Ma Yan and Zhang Zi, with a thousand troops, to clear the road ahead while the others remained as guard. And he felt much more secure.\n\nThe two went forward, but before they had gone very far, they heard a shouting and a party of soldiers came out, the leader of them shouting, \"I am Gan Ning of Wu!\"\n\nNothing daunted the two leaders, but the redoubtable Gan Ning cut down Ma Yan. And when his brother warrior Zhang Zi set his spear and dashed forward, he too fell beneath a stroke from the fearsome sword of Gan Ning. Both leaders dead, the soldiers fled to give Cao Cao the bad news.\n\nAt this time Cao Cao expected aid from Hefei, for he knew not that Sun Quan was barring the road. But when Sun Quan saw the fires and so knew that his soldiers had won the day, he ordered Lu Xun to give the answering signal. Taishi Ci seeing this came down and his force joined up with that of Lu Xun, and they went against Cao Cao.\n\nAs for Cao Cao, he could only get away toward Yiling. On the road Cao Cao fell in with Zhang He and ordered him to protect the retreat. Cao Cao pressed on as quickly as possible.\n\nAt the fifth watch he was a long way from the glare and he felt safer. He asked, \"What is this place?\"\n\nThey told him, \"It is west of the Black Forest and north of Yidu.\"\n\nSeeing the thickly crowded trees all about him, and the steep hills and narrow passes, Cao Cao threw up his head and laughed.\n\nThose about him asked, \"Why are you, Sir, so merry?\"\n\nAnd he said, \"I am only laughing at the stupidity of Zhou Yu and the ignorance of Zhuge Liang. If they have only set an ambush there, as I would have done, why, there is no escape.\"\n\nCao Cao had scarcely finished his explanation when from both sides came a deafening roll of drums and flames sprang up to heaven. Cao Cao nearly fell off his horse \u2014 he was so startled.\n\nAnd from the side dashed in a troop, with Zhao Zilong leading, who cried, \"I am Zhao Zilong, and long have I been waiting here!\"\n\nCao Cao ordered Xu Huang and Zhang He to engage this new opponent, and he himself rode off into the smoke and fire. Zhao Zilong did not pursue; he only captured the banners, and Cao Cao escaped.\n\nThe faint light of dawn showed a great black cloud all around, for the southeast wind had not ceased. Suddenly began a heavy downpour of rain, wetting everyone to the skin, but still Cao Cao maintained his headlong flight till the starved faces of the soldiers made a halt imperative. He told the men to forage in the villages about for grain and the means of making a fire. But when these had been found and they began to cook a meal, another pursuing party came along, and Cao Cao again was terrified. However, these proved to be Li Dian and Xu Chu escorting some of his advisers whom he saw with joy.\n\nWhen giving the order to advance again, Cao Cao asked, \"What places lay ahead?\"\n\nThey told him, \"There are two roads. One was the highway to South Yiling, and the other a mountain road to North Yiling.\"\n\n\"Which is the shorter way to Jiangling?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"The best way is to take the south road through Hulu Valley,\" was the reply.\n\nSo Cao Cao gave orders to march that way. By the time Hulu Valley was reached, the soldiers were almost starving and could march no more; horses too were worn out. Many had fallen by the roadside. A halt was then made, food was taken by force from the villagers, and as there were still some boilers left, they found a dry spot beside the hills where they could rest and cook. And there they began to prepare a meal, boiling grain, and roasting strips of horse flesh. Then they took off their wet clothes and spread them to dry. The beasts, too, were unsaddled and turned out to graze.\n\nSeated comfortably in a somewhat open spot, Cao Cao suddenly looked up and began to laugh loud and long.\n\nHis companions, remembering the sequel of his last laugh, said, \"Not long since, Sir, you laughed at Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang. That resulted in the arrival of Zhao Zilong and great loss of troops to us. Why do you now laugh?\"\n\n\"I am laughing again at the ignorance of the same two men. If I were in their place, and conducting their campaign, I should have had an ambush here, just to meet us when we were tired out. Then, even if we escaped with our lives, we should suffer very severely. They did not see this, and therefore I am laughing at them.\"\n\nEven at that moment behind them rose a great yell. Thoroughly startled, Cao Cao threw aside his breastplate and leaped upon his horse. Most of the soldiers failed to catch theirs, and then fires sprang up on every side and filled the mouth of the valley. A force was arrayed before them and at the head was the man of ancient Yan, Zhang Fei, seated on his steed with his great spear leveled.\n\n\"Whither would you flee, O rebel?\" shouted he.\n\nThe soldiers grew cold within at the sight of the terrible warrior. Xu Chu, mounted on a bare-backed horse, rode up to engage him, and Zhang Liao and Xu Huang galloped up to his aid. The three gathered about Zhang Fei and a melee began, while Cao Cao made off at top speed. The other leaders set off after him, and Zhang Fei pursued. However, Cao Cao by dint of hard riding got away, and gradually the pursuers were out-distanced. But many had received wounds.\n\nAs they were going. the soldiers said, \"There are two roads before us. Which shall we take?\"\n\n\"Which is the shorter?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"The high road is the more level, but it is fifteen miles longer than the bye road which goes to Huarong Valley. Only the latter road is narrow and dangerous, full of pits and difficult.\"\n\nCao Cao sent men up to the hill tops to look around.\n\nThey returned, saying: \"There are several columns of smoke rising from the hills along the bye road. The high road seems quiet.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao bade them lead the way along the bye road.\n\n\"Where smoke arises there are surely soldiers,\" remarked the officers. \"Why go this way?\"\n\n\"Because the 'Book of War' says that the hollow is to be regarded as solid, and the solid as hollow. That fellow Zhuge Liang is very subtle and has sent people to make those fires so that we should not go that way. He has laid an ambush on the high road. I have made up my mind, and I will not fall a victim to his wiles.\"\n\n\"O Prime Minister, your conclusions are most admirable. None other can equal you,\" said the officers.\n\nAnd the soldiers were sent along the bye road. They were very hungry and many almost too weak to travel. The horses too were spent. Some had been scorched by the flames, and they rode forward resting their heads on their whips. The wounded struggled on to the last of their strength. All were soaking wet and all were feeble. Their arms and accouterments were in a deplorable state, and more than half had been left upon the road they had traversed. Few of the horses had saddles or bridles, for in the confusion of pursuit they had been left behind. It was the time of greatest winter cold, and the suffering was indescribable.\n\nNoticing that the leading party had stopped, Cao Cao sent to ask the reason.\n\nThe messenger returned, saying, \"The rain water collected in the pits makes the ground a mire, and the horses cannot not move.\"\n\nCao Cao raged. He said, \"When soldiers come to hills, they cut a road; when they happen upon streams, they bridge them. Such a thing as mud cannot stay an army.\"\n\nSo he ordered the weak and wounded to go to the rear and come on as they could, while the robust and able were to cut down trees, and gather herbage and reeds to fill up the holes. And it was to be done without delay, or death would be the punishment of the disobedient or remiss.\n\nSo the soldiers dismounted and felled trees and cut bamboos, and they leveled the road. And because of the imminence and fear of pursuit, a party of one hundred under Zhang Liao, Xu Chu, and Xu Huang was told off to hasten the workers and slay any that idled.\n\nThe soldiers made their way along the shallower parts, but many fell, and cries of misery were heard the whole length of the way.\n\n\"What are you howling for?\" cried Cao Cao. \"The number of your days is fixed by fate. Anyone who howls shall be put to death.\"\n\nThe remnant of the army, now divided into three, one to march slowly, a second to fill up the waterways and hollows, and a third to escort Cao Cao, gradually made its way over the precipitous road. When the going improved a little and the path was moderately level, Cao Cao turned to look at his following and saw he had barely three hundred soldiers. And these lacked clothing and armor and were tattered and disordered.\n\nBut he pressed on, and when the officers told him the horses were quite spent and must rest, he replied, \"Press on to Jingzhou, and there we shall find repose.\"\n\nSo they pressed on. But they had gone only one or two miles when Cao Cao flourished his whip and broke once again into loud laughter.\n\n\"What is there to laugh at?\" asked the officers.\n\n\"People say those two, Zhou Yu and Zhuge Liang, are able and crafty. I do not see it. They are a couple of incapables. If an ambush had been placed here, we should all be prisoners.\"\n\nCao Cao had not finished this speech when the explosion of a bomb broke the silence, and a company of five hundred troops with swords in their hands appeared and barred the way. The leader was Guan Yu, holding his green-dragon saber, bestriding the Red Hare. At this sight, the spirits of Cao Cao's soldiers left them, and they gazed into each others' faces in panic.\n\n\"Now we have but one course,\" said Cao Cao. \"We must fight to the death!\"\n\n\"How can we?\" said the officers. \"Though the leaders may have some strength left, the horses are spent.\"\n\nCheng Yu said, \"I have always heard that Guan Yu is haughty to the proud but kindly to the humble; he despises the strong, but is gentle with the weak. He discriminates between love and hate and is always righteous and true. You, O Prime Minister, have shown him kindness in the past. If you will remind him of that, we shall escape this evil.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed to try. He rode out to the front, bowed low and said, \"General, I trust you have enjoyed good health.\"\n\n\"I had orders to await you, O Prime Minister,\" replied Guan Yu, bowing in return, \"and I have been expecting you these many days.\"\n\n\"You see before you one Cao Cao \u2014 defeated and weak. I have reached a sad pass, and I trust you, O General, will not forget the kindness of former days.\"\n\n\"Though indeed you were kind to me in those days, yet I slew your enemies for you and relieved the siege of Baima. As to the business of today, I cannot allow private feelings to outweigh public duty.\"\n\n\"Do you remember my six generals, slain at the five passes? The noble person values righteousness. You are well versed in the histories and must recall the action of Yu Gong, the archer, when he released his master Zi Zhuo, for he determined not to use Zi Zhuo's teaching to kill Zi Zhuo.\"\n\nGuan Yu was indeed a very mountain of goodness and could not forget the great kindness he had received at Cao Cao's hands, and the magnanimity Cao Cao had shown over the deeds at the five passes. He saw the desperate straits to which his benefactor was reduced, and tears were very near to the eyes of both. He could not press Cao Cao hard.\n\nHe pulled at the bridle of his steed and turned away saying to his followers, \"Break up the formation!\"\n\nFrom this it was evident that his design was to release Cao Cao, who then went on with his officers. When Guan Yu turned to look back, they had all passed. He uttered a great shout, and Cao Cao's soldiers jumped off their horses and knelt on the ground crying for mercy. But he also had pity for them. Then Zhang Liao, whom he knew well, came along and was allowed to go free also.\n\n\u2003Cao Cao, his army lost, fled to the Huarong Valley;\n\n\u2003There in the throat of the gorge met he Guan Yu.\n\n\u2003Grateful was Guan Yu, and mindful of former kindness,\n\n\u2003Wherefore slipped he the bolt and freed the imprisoned dragon.\n\nHaving escaped this danger, Cao Cao hastened to get out of the valley. As the throat opened out, he glanced behind him and saw only forty-seven horsemen. As evening fell, they reached Jiangling, and they came upon an army that they took to be more enemies.\n\nCao Cao thought the end had surely come, but to his delight they were his own soldiers and he regained all his confidence.\n\nCao Ren, who was the leader, said, \"I heard of your misfortunes, my lord, but I was afraid to venture far from my charge, else I would have met you before.\"\n\n\"I thought I would never see you again,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThe fugitives found repose in the city, where Zhang Liao soon joined them. He also praised the magnanimity of Guan Yu.\n\nWhen Cao Cao mustered the miserable remnant of his officers, he found nearly all were wounded and he bade them rest. Cao Ren poured the wine of consolation whereby his master might forget his sorrows.\n\nAs Cao Cao drank among his familiars, he became exceedingly sad.\n\nWherefore they said, \"O Prime Minister, when you were in the cave of the tiger and trying to escape, you showed no sign of sorrow. Now that you are safe in a city, where you have food and the horses have forage, where all you have to do is to prepare for revenge, suddenly you lose heart and grieve. Why thus?\"\n\nReplied Cao Cao, \"I am thinking of my friend Guo Jia: Had he been alive, he would not have let me suffer this loss.\"\n\nHe beat his breast and wept, saying, \"Alas for Guo Jia! I grieve for Guo Jia! I sorrow for Guo Jia!\"\n\nThe reproach shamed the advisers, who were silent.\n\nNext day Cao Cao called Cao Ren and said, \"I am going to the capital to prepare another army for revenge. You are to guard this region and, in case of necessity, I leave with you a sealed plan. You are only to open the cover when hard-pressed, and then you are to act as directed. The South Land will not dare to look this way.\"\n\n\"Who is to guard Hefei and Xiangyang?\"\n\n\"Jingzhou is particularly your care, and Xiahou Dun is to hold Xiangyang. As Hefei is most important, I am sending Zhang Liao thither with good aids of Li Dian and Yue Jing. If you get into difficulties, send at once to tell me.\"\n\nHaving made these dispositions, Cao Cao set off at once with a few followers. He took with him the officers who had come over to his side when Jingzhou fell into his hands.\n\nCao Ren placed Cao Hong in charge of Yiling and Jiangling.\n\nAfter having allowed the escape of Cao Cao, Guan Yu found his way back to headquarters. By this time the other detachments had returned bringing spoil of horses and weapons and supplies of all kinds. Only Guan Yu came back empty-handed. When he arrived, Zhuge Liang was with his brother congratulating him on his success. When Guan Yu was announced, Zhuge Liang got up and went to welcome him, bearing a cup of wine.\n\n\"Joy! O General,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"You have done a deed that overtops the world. You have removed the empire's worst foe and ought to have been met at a distance and felicitated.\"\n\nGuan Yu muttered inaudibly, and Zhuge Liang continued, \"I hope it is not because we have omitted to welcome you on the road that you seem sad.\"\n\nTurning to those about him, Zhuge Liang said, \"Why did you not tell us Guan Yu was coming?\"\n\n\"I am here to ask for death,\" said Guan Yu.\n\n\"Surely Cao Cao came through the valley?\"\n\n\"Yes, he came that way. But I could not help it: I let him go.\"\n\n\"Then whom have you captured?\"\n\n\"No one.\"\n\n\"Then you remembered the old kindness of Cao Cao and so allowed him to escape. But your acceptance of the task with its conditions is here. You will have to suffer the penalty.\"\n\nZhuge Liang called in the lictors and told them to take away Guan Yu and put him to death.\n\n\u2003Guan Yu risked life when he spared\n\n\u2003Cao Cao in direst need,\n\n\u2003And age-long admiration gained\n\n\u2003For kindly deed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Cao Ren Withstands The South Land; Zhuge Liang Angers Zhou Yu.\n\nGuan Yu would have died there but for his elder brother, who said to Zhuge Liang, \"We three pledged ourselves to live and die together. Although my brother Guan Yu has offended, I cannot bear to break our oath. I hope you will only record this against him and let him atone later for the fault by some specially meritorious service.\"\n\nSo the sentence was remitted.\n\nIn the meantime, Zhou Yu mustered his officers and called over his soldiers, noted the special services of each, and sent full reports to his master. The soldiers who had surrendered were all transported across the river. All this done they spread the feast of victory.\n\nThe next step was to attack and capture Nanjun. The van of the army camped on the river bank. There were five camps and the Commander-in-Chief's tent was in the center. He summoned his officers to a council. At this moment Sun Qian arrived with congratulations from Liu Bei.\n\nZhou Yu received him and, having saluted in proper form, Sun Qian said, \"My lord sent me on this special mission to felicitate the General on his great virtue and offer some unworthy gifts.\"\n\n\"Where is Liu Bei?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"He is now encamped at Youkou, the mouth of River You.\"\n\n\"Is Zhuge Liang there?\" asked Zhou Yu, taken aback.\n\n\"Both are there,\" said Sun Qian.\n\n\"Then return quickly, and I will come in person to thank them.\"\n\nThe presents handed over, Sun Qian was sent back forthwith to his own camp. Then Lu Su asked Zhou Yu why he had started when he heard where Liu Bei was camped.\n\n\"Because,\" replied Zhou Yu, \"camping at the mouth of River You means that he has the intention of taking Nanjun. Having spent much military energy and spared no expenditure, we thought the territory should fall to us easily. Those others are opposed to us, and they wish to get the advantage of what we have already accomplished. However, they must remember that I am not dead yet.\"\n\n\"How can you prevent them?\" asked Lu Su.\n\n\"I will go myself and speak with them. If all goes well, then, let it be so. In case it does not, then I shall immediately settle up with Liu Bei without waiting for Nanjun to be taken.\"\n\n\"I should like to accompany you,\" said Lu Su.\n\nThe commander and his adviser started, taking with them a guard of three thousand light horse. Having arrived at Youkou, they sought out Sun Qian, who, in turn, went in to see Liu Bei and told him Zhou Yu had come to render thanks.\n\n\"Why has he come?\" asked Liu Bei of his Directing Instructor.\n\n\"He is not likely to come out of simple politeness. Surely he has come in connection with Nanjun.\"\n\n\"But if he brings an army, can we stand against it?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"When he comes, you may reply thus and thus.\"\n\nThen they drew up the warships in the river and ranged the soldiers upon the bank. When the arrival of Zhou Yu was formally announced, Zhao Zilong, with some horsemen, went to welcome him. When Zhou Yu saw what bold soldiers they looked, he began to feel uncomfortable, but he went on his way. Being met at the camp gates by Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang, he was taken in to the chief tent, where the ceremonies were performed and preparations for a banquet had been made.\n\nPresently Liu Bei raised his cup in felicitation on the recent victory gained by his guest. The banquet proceeded.\n\nAfter a few more courses Zhou Yu said, \"Of course you are camped here with no other idea than to take Nanjun?\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"We heard you were going to take the place and came to assist. Should you not take it, then we will occupy it.\"\n\nZhou Yu laughed, saying, \"We of the South Land have long wished for this territory. Now that it is within our grasp, we naturally shall take it.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"There is always some uncertainty. Cao Cao left Cao Ren to guard the region, and you may be certain that there is good strategy behind Cao Ren, to say nothing of his boldness as a warrior. I fear you may not get it.\"\n\n\"Well, if we do not take it then, Sir, you may have it,\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Here are witnesses to your words,\" said Liu Bei, naming Lu Su, Zhuge Liang, and those at table. \"I hope you will never repent what you have just said.\"\n\nLu Su stammered and seemed unwilling to be cited as one of the witnesses, but Zhou Yu said, \"When the word of a noble person has gone forth, it is ended. He never regrets.\"\n\n\"This speech of yours, Sir, is very generous,\" interjected Zhuge Liang. \"The South Land shall try first. But if the place does not fall, there is no reason why my lord should not capture it.\"\n\nThe two visitors then took their leave and rode away.\n\nAs soon as they had left, Liu Bei turned to Zhuge Liang and said, \"O Master, you bade me thus reply to Zhou Yu. But though I did so, I have turned it over and over in my mind without finding any reason in what I said. I am alone and weak, without a single foot of land to call my own. I desired to get possession of Nanjun that I might have, at least, a temporary shelter, yet I have said that Zhou Yu may attack it first. If it falls to the South Land, how can I get possession?\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughed and replied, \"First I advised you to attack Jingzhou, but you would not listen. Do you remember?\"\n\n\"But it belonged to Liu Biao, and I could not bear to attack it then. Now it belongs to Cao Cao, I might do so.\"\n\n\"Do not be anxious,\" replied the adviser. \"Let Zhou Yu go and attack it. Some day, my lord, I shall make you sit in the high place thereof.\"\n\n\"But what design have you?\"\n\n\"So and so,\" said Zhuge Liang, whispering.\n\nLiu Bei was satisfied with the reply, and only strengthened his position at Youkou.\n\nIn the meantime Zhou Yu and Lu Su returned to their own camp, and the latter said, \"Why did you tell Liu Bei that he might attack Nanjun?\"\n\n\"I can take it with a flick of my finger,\" replied Zhou Yu, \"but I just manifested a little pretended kindliness.\"\n\nThen he inquired among his officers for a volunteer to attack the city. Jiang Qin offered himself, and was put in command of the vanguard, with Xu Sheng and Ding Feng as helpers. He was given five thousand of veterans, and they moved across the river. Zhou Yu promised to follow with supports.\n\nOn the other side Cao Ren ordered Cao Hong to guard Yiling, and so hold one corner of an ox-horn defense.\n\nWhen the news came that the South Land's force had crossed the River Han, Cao Ren said, \"We will defend and not offer battle.\"\n\nBut General Niu Jin said impetuously, \"To let the enemy approach the walls and not offer battle is timidity. Our troops, lately worsted, need heartening and must show their mettle. Let me have five hundred of veterans, and I will fight to a finish.\"\n\nCao Ren could not withstand this offer, and so the five hundred went out of the city. At once Ding Feng came to challenge the leader, and they fought a few bouts. Then Ding Feng pretended to be defeated, gave up the fight, and retreated into his own lines. Niu Jin followed him hard. When he had got within the South Land's formation, at a signal from Ding Feng, the army closed round and Niu Jin was surrounded. He pushed right and left, but could find no way out. Seeing Niu Jin in the toils, Cao Ren, who had watched the fight from the wall, donned his armor and came out of the city at the head of his own bold company of horsemen and burst in among the forces of the South Land to try to rescue his colleague. Beating back Xu Sheng, Cao Ren fought his way in and presently rescued Niu Jin.\n\nHowever, having got out, Cao Ren saw several score of horsemen still in the middle unable to make their way out, whereupon he turned again to the battle and dashed in to their rescue. This time he met Jiang Qin on whom Cao Ren and Niu Jin made a violent attack. Then his brother Cao Chun came up with supports, and the great battle ended in a defeat for the troops of the South Land.\n\nSo Cao Ren went back victor, while the unhappy Jiang Qin returned to report his failure. Zhou Yu was very angry and would have put to death his hapless subordinate but for the intervention of the other officers. Then Zhou Yu prepared for another attack where he himself would lead.\n\nBut Gan Ning said, \"General, do not be in too great hurry. Let me go first and attack Yiling, the supporting angle of the ox-horn formation. After that the conquest of Nanjun will be easy.\"\n\nZhou Yu accepted the plan and Gan Ning, with three thousand troops, went to attack Yiling.\n\nWhen news of the approaching army reached him, Cao Ren called to his side Chen Jiao, who said, \"If Yiling be lost, then Nanjun is lost too. So help must be sent quickly.\"\n\nThereupon Cao Chun and Niu Jin were sent by secret ways to the aid of Cao Hong. Cao Chun sent a messenger to the city to ask that they should cause a diversion by a sortie at the time the reinforcements should arrive.\n\nSo when Gan Ning drew near, Cao Hong went out to meet and engage him. They fought a score of rounds, but Cao Hong was overcome at last, and Gan Ning took the city. However, as evening fell the reinforcements under Cao Chun and Niu Jin came up, and the captor was surrounded in the city he had taken. The scouts went off immediately to tell Zhou Yu of this sudden change of affairs which greatly alarmed him.\n\n\"Let us hasten to his rescue,\" said Cheng Pu.\n\n\"Our place is of the greatest importance,\" said Zhou Yu, \"and I am afraid to leave it undefended lest Cao Ren should attack.\"\n\n\"But Gan Ning is one of our first leaders and must be rescued,\" said Lu Meng.\n\n\"I should like to go myself to his aid, but whom can I leave here in my place?\" said Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Leave Ling Tong here,\" said Lu Meng. \"I will push on ahead, and you can protect my advance. In less than ten days we shall be singing the paean of victory.\"\n\n\"Are you willing?\" said Zhou Yu to the man who was to act for him.\n\nLing Tong said, \"If the ten-day period is not exceeded, I may be able to carry on for that time. I am unequal to more than that.\"\n\nLing Tong's consent pleased Zhou Yu who started at once, leaving ten thousand troops for the defense of the camp.\n\nLu Meng said to his chief, \"South of Yiling is a little-used road that may prove very useful in an attack on Nanjun. Let us send a party to fell trees and barricade this road so that horses cannot pass. In case of defeat, the defeated will take this road and will be compelled to abandon their horses, which we shall capture.\"\n\nZhou Yu approved, and the men set out. When the main army drew near Yiling, Zhou Yu asked who would try to break through the besiegers, and Zhou Tai offered himself. He girded on his sword, mounted his steed, and burst straight into the Cao Hong's army. He got through to the city wall.\n\nFrom the city wall Gan Ning saw the approach of his friend Zhou Tai and went out to welcome him. Zhou Tai told him the Commander-in-Chief was on the way to his relief, and Gan Ning at once bade the defenders prepare from within to support the attack of the rescuers.\n\nWhen the news of the approach of Zhou Yu had reached Yiling, Cao Hong, Cao Chun, and Niu Jin had sent to tell Cao Ren, who was at Nanjun, and at the same time they prepared to repel the assailants.\n\nAs the army of the South Land came near, they at once attacked. Simultaneously Gan Ning and Zhou Tai went out to attack on two sides, and the troops of Cao Hong were thrown into confusion. The soldiers of the South Land fell on lustily, and the three leaders all fled by a bye road, but, finding the way barred with felled trees and other obstacles, they had to abandon their horses and go afoot. In this way the troops of the South Land gained some five hundred steeds.\n\nZhou Yu, pressing on as quickly as possible toward Nanjun, came upon Cao Ren and his army marching to save Yiling. The two armies engaged and fought a battle which lasted till late in the evening. Then both drew off, and Cao Ren withdrew into the city.\n\nDuring the night he called his officers to a council.\n\nThen said Cao Hong, \"The loss of Yiling has brought us to a dangerous pass. Now it seems the time to open the guide-letter of the Prime Minister, and see what plans he arranged for our salvation in this peril.\"\n\n\"You but say what I think,\" replied Cao Ren.\n\nWhereupon he tore open the guide-letter and read it. His face lighted up with joy, and he at once issued orders to have the morning meal prepared at the fifth watch. At daylight the whole army moved out of the city through three gates, but they left a semblance of occupation in the shape of banners on the walls.\n\nZhou Yu went up to the tower of observation and looked over the city. He saw that the flags along the battlements had no guards behind them, and he noticed that all troops carried bundles at their waists behind so that they were ready for a long march.\n\nThought Zhou Yu to himself, \"Cao Ren must be prepared for a long march.\"\n\nSo Zhou Yu went down from the tower of observation and sent out an order for two wings of the army to be ready. One of these was to attack and, in case of its success, the other was to pursue at full speed till the clanging of the gongs should call them to return. He took command of the leading force in person, and Cheng Pu commanded the other. Thus they advanced to attack the city.\n\nThe armies being arrayed facing each other, the drums rolled out across the plain. Cao Hong rode forth and challenged, and Zhou Yu, from his place by the standard, bade Han Dang respond. The two champions fought near two score bouts, and then Cao Hong fled. Thereupon Cao Ren came out to help him, and Zhou Tai rode out at full speed to meet him. These two exchanged a half score passes and then Cao Ren tied.\n\nCao Ren's army fell into confusion. Thereupon Zhou Yu gave the signal for the advance of both his wings, and the forces of Cao Ren were sore smitten and defeated. Zhou Yu pursued to the city wall, but Cao Ren's troops did not enter the city. Instead, they went away northwest. Han Dang and Zhou Tai pressed them hard.\n\nZhou Yu, seeing the city gates standing wide open and no guards upon the walls, ordered the raiding of the city. A few score horsemen rode in first, Zhou Yu followed and whipping his steed. As he galloped into the enclosure around the gate, Chen Jiao stood on the defense tower. When he saw Zhou Yu enter, in his heart he applauded the god-like perspicacity of the Prime Minister Cao Cao.\n\nThen was heard the clap-clap of a watchman's rattle. At this signal the archers and crossbowmen let fly, and the arrows and bolts flew forth in a sudden fierce shower, while those who had won their way to the van of the inrush went headlong into a deep trench. Zhou Yu managed to pull up in time, but turning to escape, he was wounded in the left side and fell to the ground. Niu Jin rushed out from the city to capture the chief, but Xu Sheng and Ding Feng at the risk of their lives got him away safe. Then the troops of Cao Ren dashed out of the city and wrought confusion among the troops of the South Land, who trampled each other down and many more fell into the trenches. Cheng Pu tried to draw off, but Cao Ren and Cao Hong came toward him from different directions, and the battle went hardly against the soldiers of Zhou Yu, till help came from Ling Tong, who bore back their assailants. Satisfied with their success, Cao Ren led his forces into the city, while the losers marched back to their own camp.\n\nZhou Yu, sorely wounded, was taken to his own tent and the army physician called in. With iron forceps, he extracted the sharp bolt and dressed the wound with a lotion designed to counteract the poison of the metal. But the pain was intense, and the patient rejected all nourishment.\n\nThe physician said, \"The missile had been poisoned, and the wound will require a long time to heal. You, General, must be kept quiet and especially free from any irritation, which will cause the wound to reopen.\"\n\nThereupon Cheng Pu gave orders that each division was to remain in camp. Three days later, Niu Jin came within sight and challenged the men of the South Land to battle, but they did not stir. The enemy hurled at them taunts and insults till the sun had fallen low in the sky, but it was of no avail and Niu Jin withdrew.\n\nNext day Niu Jin returned and repeated his insulting abuse. Cheng Pu dared not tell the wounded general. The third day, waxing bolder, the enemy came to the very gates of the stockade, the leader shouting that he had come for the purpose of capturing Zhou Yu.\n\nThen Cheng Pu called together his officers, and they discussed the feasibility of retirement into the South Land that they might seek the opinion of Sun Quan.\n\nIll as he was, Zhou Yu still retained control of the expedition. He knew that the enemy came daily to the gates of his camp and reviled him, although none of his officers told him. One day Cao Ren came in person, and there was much rolling of drums and shouting. Cheng Pu, however, steadily refused to accept the challenge and would not let anyone go out.\n\nThen Zhou Yu summoned the officers to his bedside and said, \"What mean the drums and the shouting?\"\n\n\"The soldiers are drilling,\" was the reply.\n\n\"Why do you deceive me?\" said Zhou Yu angrily. \"Do I not know that our enemies come day by day to our gates and insult us? Yet Cheng Pu suffers this in silence and makes no use of his powers and authority.\"\n\nHe sent for Cheng Pu and, when he arrived, asked him why he acted thus.\n\n\"Because you are ill, and the physician said you were on no account to be provoked to anger. Wherefore, although the enemy challenged us to battle, I kept it from you.\"\n\n\"And if you do not fight, what think you should be done?\" said Zhou Yu.\n\nAnd they all said they desired to return to the South Land till he had recovered from his wound, when they would make another expedition.\n\nZhou Yu lay and listened. Suddenly he sprang up, crying, \"The noble person who has eaten of his lord's bounty should die in his lord's battles. To return home dead and wrapped in a horse's hide is a happy fate. Am I the sort of people to bring to nought the grand designs of my lord?\"\n\nSo speaking he proceeded to gird on his armor, and he mounted his horse. The wonder of the officers only redoubled when their General placed himself at the head of some hundreds of horsemen and went out of the camp gates toward the enemy, then fully arrayed. Cao Ren, their general, stood beneath the great standard.\n\nAt sight of the opponents, Cao Ren flourished his whip and began to hurl abuse at them, \"Zhou Yu, you babe! I think your fate has met you. You dare not face my army!\"\n\nThe stream of insult never ceased.\n\nPresently Zhou Yu could stand it no longer. Riding out to the front he cried, \"Here I am, base churl. Look at me!\"\n\nThe whole Cao Ren's army were taken aback. But Cao Ren turned to those about him and said, \"Let us all revile him!\"\n\nAnd the whole army yelled insults.\n\nZhou Yu grew angry and sent Pan Zhang out to fight. But before he had delivered his first blow, Zhou Yu suddenly uttered a loud cry, and he fell to the ground with blood gushing from his mouth.\n\nAt this Cao Ren's army rushed to the battle, and the army of the South Land pressed forward to meet them. A fierce struggle waged around Zhou Yu's body, but he was borne off safely and taken to his tent.\n\n\"Do you feel better?\" asked Cheng Pu anxiously.\n\n\"It was a ruse of mine,\" whispered Zhou Yu in reply.\n\n\"But what avails it?\"\n\n\"I am not suffering, but I did that to make our enemies think I was very ill and so oppose them by deceit. I will send a few trusty men to pretend desertion and tell them I am dead. That will cause them to try a night raid on the camp, and we shall have an ambush ready for them. We shall get Cao Ren easily.\"\n\n\"The plan seems excellent,\" said Cheng Pu.\n\nSoon from the tent there arose the sound of wailing as for the dead. The soldiers around took up the cry and said one to another, \"The General is dead of his wound!\" and they all put on the symbols of mourning.\n\nMeanwhile Cao Ren was consulting with his officers.\n\nSaid he, \"Zhou Yu lost his temper, and that has caused his wound to reopen and brought on that flow of blood. You saw him fall to the ground, and he will assuredly die soon.\"\n\nJust then there came in one who said that a few men had come over from the enemy asking to be allowed to join the army of Cao Ren. Among them were two of Cao Cao's men who had been made prisoners. Cao Ren sent for the deserters and questioned them.\n\nThey told him, saying, \"Zhou Yu's wound reopened at his anger, and he died in the camp that day. The leaders are all clothing in white and in mourning. We desert because we have been put to shame by the second in command.\"\n\nPleased at this news, Cao Ren at once began to arrange to make a night attack on the camp and, if possible, get the head of the dead general to send to the capital.\n\n\"Success depends upon promptitude, so act without delay,\" said Chen Jiao.\n\nNiu Jin was told off as Van Leader, Cao Ren himself led the center, while the rear was commanded by Cao Hong and Cao Chun. Chen Jiao and a small force were left to guard Nanjun.\n\nAt the first watch they left the city and took the way toward Zhou Yu's camp. When they drew near, not a soldier was visible in the camp, but flags and banners and spears were all there, evidently to keep up an appearance of preparation. Feeling at once that they had been tricked, they turned to retreat.\n\nBut a bomb exploded, and this was the signal for an attack on all four sides. Han Dang and Jiang Qin pressed in from the east; Zhou Tai and Pan Zhang, from the west; Chen Wu and Lu Meng, from the north; and Xu Sheng and Ding Feng, from the south. The result was a severe defeat for the raiders, and the army of Cao Ren was entirely broken and scattered abroad so that no one part of the beaten army could aid the other.\n\nCao Ren, with a few horsemen got out of the press and presently met Cao Hong. The two leaders ran away together, and by the fifth watch they had got near Nanjun. Then they heard a beating of drums, and Ling Tong appeared barring the way. There was a small skirmish, and Cao Ren went off at an angle. But he fell in with Gan Ning, who attacked him vigorously. Cao Ren dared not go back to Nanjun, but he made for Xiangyang along the main road. The forces of the South Land pursued him for a time and then desisted.\n\nZhou Yu and Cheng Pu then made their way to Nanjun where they were startled to see flags on the walls and every sign of occupation.\n\nBefore they had recovered from their surprise, there appeared one who cried, \"Pardon, General! I had orders from the Directing Instructor to take this city. I am Zhao Zilong of Changshan.\"\n\nZhou Yu was fiercely angry and gave orders to assault the city, but the defenders sent down flights and flights of arrows, and his troops could not stay near the rampart. So he withdrew and took counsel. In the meantime he decided to send Gan Ning with a force of several thousand to capture Jingzhou City, and Ling Tong with another army to take Xiangyang. Nanjun could be taken later.\n\nBut even as these orders were being given, the scouts came in hurriedly to report, saying, \"After Nanjun fell, Zhuge Liang, suddenly forging a military commission, induced the guards of Jingzhou City to leave it and go to the rescue of Cao Ren. Whereupon Zhang Fei occupied the capital.\"\n\nSoon after another messenger came, saying, \"Xiahou Dun, at Xiangyang, received from Zhuge Liang dispatches, supported by a commission in due form, saying that Cao Ren was in danger and needed help, whereupon Xiahou Dun marched off, and Guan Yu seized that city.\"\n\nThus the two cities that Zhou Yu wanted had fallen, without the least effort, into the hands of his rival Liu Bei.\n\n\"How did Zhuge Liang get this military commission with which he has imposed on the generals?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\nCheng Pu replied, \"He seized that of Chen Jiao and so has got all this region into his power.\"\n\nZhou Yu uttered a great cry, for at that moment his wound had suddenly burst open.\n\nA city falls, but not to us the gain;\n\nThe guerdon is another's; ours the pain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Negotiates With Lu Su; Zhao Zilong Captures Guiyang.\n\nZhou Yu's anger at seeing that his rival, Zhuge Liang, had surprised Nanjun, and at hearing the same news of Jingzhou and Xiangyang, was but natural. And this sudden fit of rage caused his wound to reopen. However, he soon recovered. All his officers besought him to accept the situation.\n\nBut he said, \"What but the death of that bumpkin Zhuge Liang will assuage my anger? If Cheng Pu can but aid me in an attack on Nanjun, I can certainly restore it to the South Land.\"\n\nSoon Lu Su came in, to whom Zhou Yu said, \"I simply must fight Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang till it is decided which shall have the upper hand. I must also recapture the cities. Perhaps you can assist me.\"\n\n\"It cannot be done,\" replied Lu Su. \"We are now at grips with Cao Cao, and victory or defeat is undecided. Our lord has not been successful in overcoming Hefei. Do not fight near home, or it will be like people of the same household destroying each other. Should Cao Cao take advantage of this position to make a sudden descent, we should be in a parlous condition. Further, you must remember that Liu Bei and Cao Cao are united by the bonds of old friendship. If the pressure becomes too great, Liu Bei may relinquish these cities, offer them to Cao Cao, and join forces with him to attack the south. That would be a real misfortune.\"\n\n\"I cannot help being angry,\" said Zhou Yu, \"to think that we should have used our resources for their benefit. They get all the advantage.\"\n\n\"Well, let me go and see Liu Bei and talk reason to him. If I can arrive at no understanding, then attack at once.\"\n\n\"Excellent proposal!\" cried all present.\n\nSo Lu Su, with his escort, went away to Nanjun to carry out his proposal and try to arrange matters. He reached the city wall and summoned the gate, whereat Zhao Zilong came out to speak with him.\n\n\"I have something to say to Liu Bei,\" said he. \"I wish to see him.\"\n\n\"My lord and Zhuge Liang are in Jingzhou,\" was the reply.\n\nLu Su turned away and hasted to Jingzhou. He found the walls bedecked with flags and everything in excellent order. In his heart he admired the sight, and thought what an able person was the commander of that army.\n\nThe guards reported his arrival, and Zhuge Liang ordered them to throw wide the gate. Lu Su was led to the government house and, after the usual exchange of salutes, Zhuge Liang and his visitor took their respective seats.\n\nHaving finished the tea, Lu Su said, \"My master, Marquis Sun Quan, and the commander of his army, Zhou Yu, have sent me to lay before the Imperial Uncle their views. When Cao Cao led his huge host southward, he gave out that it was for the conquest of the South Land. But really his intention was to destroy Liu Bei. Happily our army was able to repulse that mighty host and so saved him. Wherefore Jingzhou with its nine territories of forty-two counties ought to belong to us. But by a treacherous move, your master has occupied Jingzhou and Xiangyang, so that we have spent our treasure in vain and our armies have fought to no purpose. The Imperial Uncle has reaped the benefits to the full. This is not as it should be.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Lu Su, you are a man of high intelligence. Why do you hold such language? You know the saying that all things return to their owner. These places have never belonged to the South Land, but were of the patrimony of Liu Biao, and though he is dead, his son remains. Should not the uncle assist the nephew to recover his own? Could my master have refrained?\"\n\n\"If the nephew Liu Qi, the rightful heir, had occupied these cities, there would have been something to say. But he is at Jiangxia and not here.\"\n\n\"Would you like to see him?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nAt the same time he ordered the servants to request Liu Qi to come. Thereupon Liu Qi at once appeared, supported by two attendants.\n\nAddressing Lu Su, Liu Qi said, \"I am too weak to perform the correct ceremonies. I pray you pardon me, Lu Su.\"\n\nLu Su said not a word. He was too much taken aback. However, he recovered himself presently and said, \"But if the heir had not been here, what then?\"\n\n\"The heir is living but from day to day. Should he go, then \u2014 there will be something to talk about.\"\n\n\"Should he die, then you ought to return these cities to us.\"\n\n\"You state the exact facts,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThen a banquet was prepared and, that over, Lu Su took his leave. He hastened back to his own camp and gave Zhou Yu an account of his mission.\n\n\"But what is there for us in the chance of Liu Qi's death?\" said Zhou Yu. \"He is in his very first youth. When will these places fall to us?\"\n\n\"Rest content, General. Let me guarantee the return of these places.\"\n\n\"But how can you?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"Liu Qi has indulged too freely in wine and women. He is a wreck and rotten to the core, miserably emaciated and panting for breath. I will not give him half a year's life. Then I will go to Liu Bei, and he will be unable to deny the request.\"\n\nBut Zhou Yu was still unmollified.\n\nSuddenly came a messenger from Sun Quan, who said, \"Our lord is laying siege to Hefei but in several battles has had no victory. He now orders you to withdraw from here and go to Hefei to help him.\"\n\nThereupon Zhou Yu marched back to Chaisang. Having reached home, he began to give attention to the recovery of his health. He sent Cheng Pu with the marine and land forces to Hefei ready for Sun Quan's call.\n\nLiu Bei was exceedingly well satisfied with the possession of his new region, and his thoughts turned to more ambitious schemes. Then a certain man came to him to suggest a plan. This man was Yi Ji and, remembering the kindly feeling of other days, Liu Bei received him most graciously.\n\nWhen Yi Ji was seated, and his host had asked what he proposed, he said, \"You wish for a plan to accomplish yet greater deeds. Why not seek wise people and ask them?\"\n\n\"Where are these wise people to be found?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\nYi Ji replied, \"In this region there is a certain family named Ma, five brothers, all of whom are known as men of ability. The youngest is called Ma Su. The ablest is Ma Liang, who has white hairs in his eyebrows, and the villagers have a little rhyming couplet that means 'There are five sons in the family Ma, but white eyebrows is the best of them.' You should get this man to draw up a plan for you.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei told them to request his presence. Ma Liang came and was received with great respect.\n\nHe was asked to suggest a plan for the security of the newly acquired region, and he said, \"Attacked as it is on all sides, this region is not one in which one is permanently secure. You should let Liu Qi remain here till he is recovered from his present illness, but the actual protection of the place is to be placed in the hands of trusty friends. Obtain an edict appointing him Imperial Protector of Jingzhou, and the people will be content. Then conquer Wuling, Changsha, Guiyang, and Lingling. And with the resources you will thus acquire, you will have the means for further plans. That should be your policy.\"\n\n\"Which of the four territories should be first taken?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"The nearest, Lingling, which lies in the west of River Xiang. The next is Wuling, and after these the other two.\"\n\nMa Liang was given an appointment as Imperial Protector Assistant, with Yi Ji as his second. Then Liu Bei consulted Zhuge Liang about sending Liu Qi to Xiangyang, so that Guan Yu could be free to return. Next they made preparations to attack Lingling, and Zhang Fei was to lead the van. Zhao Zilong was to guard the rear, while Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang were to command the main body. A fifteen thousand troops were left to hold Jingzhou. Mi Zhu and Liu Feng were left to guard Jiangling.\n\nThe Governor of Lingling was Liu Du. When danger thus threatened, he called in his son Liu Xiang, and they discussed the case.\n\nThe son was very self-confident and said to his father, \"Have no anxiety. They may have the known and famous warriors, Zhang Fei and Zhao Zilong, but we have our leader, Xing Darong, who is match for any number of men. He can withstand them.\"\n\nSo Liu Xiang, with the famous leader, was entrusted with the defense. At the head of a full ten thousand troops, they made a camp about ten miles from the city, with the shelter of hills and a river. Their scouts brought news that Zhuge Liang was close at hand with one army. Xing Darong decided to check his advance and went forth to oppose him. When both sides were arrayed, Xing Darong rode to the front. In his hand he held a battle-ax called Cleaver of Mountains.\n\nIn a mighty voice he cried, \"Rebels, how comes it that you have dared to enter our territory?\"\n\nFrom the center of the opposing army, where appeared a cluster of yellow flags, there came out a small four-wheeled carriage in which sat, very erect, a certain man dressed in white, with a turban on his head. In one hand he held a feather fan, with which he signed to the warrior to approach.\n\nAt the same time he said, \"I am Zhuge Liang of Nanyang, whose plans broke up the countless legions of Cao Cao so that nothing of them returned whence they started. How then can you hope to oppose me? I now offer you peace, and it will be well for you to surrender.\"\n\nXing Darong laughed derisively, saying, \"Their defeat was owing to the plan of Zhou Yu. You had nothing to do with it. How dare you try to deceive me?\"\n\nSo saying he swung up his battle-ax and came running toward Zhuge Liang. But Zhuge Liang turned his carriage and retired within the lines which closed up behind him. Xing Darong came rushing on. As he reached the array, the troops fell away on both sides and let him enter. Well within he looked round for his chief opponent. Seeing a yellow flag moving along quietly, he concluded that Zhuge Liang was with it and so followed it. When the flag had gone over the shoulder of a hill it stopped. Then suddenly as if the earth had opened and swallowed it up, the four-wheeled carriage disappeared, while in its place came a ferocious warrior, with a long serpent halberd in his hand and mounted on a curvetting steed. It was Zhang Fei, who dashed at Xing Darong with a tremendous roar.\n\nNothing daunted, Xing Darong whirled up his battle-ax and went to meet Zhang Fei. But after four or five bouts, Xing Darong saw that there was no chance of victory for him, so he turned his horse and ran. Zhang Fei pursued, the air shaking with the thunder of his voice. Then the ambushing troops appeared. Xing Darong, nothing daunted, rushed into their midst.\n\nBut in front appeared another warrior barring the way, who called out, \"Do you know me? I am Zhao Zilong of Changshan.\"\n\nXing Darong knew that all was over. He could neither fight nor fly. So he dismounted and gave in. He was fettered and taken to camp, where were Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang. Liu Bei ordered him out to execution, but Zhuge Liang hastily checked him.\n\n\"We will accept your submission if you capture Liu Xiang for us,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe captive accepted the offer without the least hesitation.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang asked how he intended to do it, he replied, \"If you will set me free, I shall be cunning of speech. If you raid the camp this evening, you will find me your helper on the inside. I will make Liu Xiang a prisoner and will hand him over to you. He being captured, his father will surrender at once.\"\n\nLiu Bei doubted the good faith of the man, but Zhuge Liang said, \"Xing Darong is not deceiving.\"\n\nWherefore Xing Darong was set free and went back to camp, where he related all that had occurred.\n\n\"What can we do?\" asked Liu Xiang.\n\n\"We can meet trick with trick. Put soldiers in ambush tonight outside our camp while within everything will appear as usual. When Zhuge Liang comes we shall capture him.\"\n\nThe ambush was prepared. At the second watch an army came out of the darkness and appeared in the gate. Each carried a torch and they began to set fire to all about them. Out dashed Liu Xiang and Xing Darong, and the incendiaries forthwith fled. The two warriors pursued them, but the fugitives ran and then suddenly disappeared at about three miles from the camp.\n\nMuch surprised the two turned to wend their way back to their own camp. It was still burning for no one had extinguished the flames. Soon from behind them came out Zhang Fei.\n\nLiu Xiang called out to his companion, saying, \"Do not enter the burning camp, but to go to attack Zhuge Liang's stockade.\"\n\nThereupon they turned again, but at a distance of three miles Zhao Zilong and an army suddenly debouched upon their road. Zhao Zilong attacked and slew Xing Darong by a spear thrust. Liu Xiang turned to flee, but Zhang Fei was close upon him and made him prisoner. He was thrown across a horse, bound, and taken to camp.\n\nWhen he saw Zhuge Liang, Liu Xiang said, \"The ruse was Xing Darong's evil counsel. I was forced to follow.\"\n\nZhuge Liang ordered them to loose his bonds, had him properly dressed, and gave him wine to cheer him and help him forget his troubles. When he was recovered, he was told to go to his father and persuade him to yield.\n\n\"And if he does not, the city shall be destroyed and everyone put to death,\" said Zhuge Liang as Liu Xiang left.\n\nThe son returned to the city and told his father these things. Liu Du at once decided to yield and forthwith hoisted the flag of surrender, opened the gates, and went out taking his seal of office with him. He was reappointed to his governorship, but his son was sent to Jingzhou for service with the army.\n\nThe people of Lingling all rejoiced greatly at the change of rulers. Liu Bei entered the city, calmed and reassured the people, and rewarded his army.\n\nBut he at once began to think of the next move and asked for an officer to volunteer to take Guiyang. Zhao Zilong offered, but Zhang Fei vehemently proposed himself for the command of the expedition. So they wrangled and contended.\n\nThen said Zhuge Liang, \"Undoubtedly Zhao Zilong was first to volunteer, wherefore he is to go.\"\n\nStill Zhang Fei opposed and insisted on going. They were told to decide the dispute by drawing lots, and Zhao Zilong drew the winning lot.\n\nZhang Fei was still very angry and grumbled, \"I would not have wanted any helpers: Just three thousand soldiers and I would have done it.\"\n\n\"I also only want three thousand soldiers,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"And if I fail, I am willing to suffer the penalties.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was pleased that Zhao Zilong recognized his responsibility so fully, and with the commission he gave Zhao Zilong three thousand of veterans.\n\nThough the matter was thus settled, Zhang Fei was discontented and pressed his claim till Liu Bei bade him desist and retire.\n\nWith his three thousand troops, Zhao Zilong took the road to Guiyang. The Governor, Zhao Fan, soon heard of his approach and hastily called his officers to take counsel. Two of them, Chen Ying and Bao Long, offered to meet the invaders and turn them back.\n\nThese two warriors belonged to Guiyang and had made themselves famous as hunters. Chen Ying used a \"Flying Fork,\" and Bao Long could draw a bow with such force that he had been known to send an arrow through two tigers. So strong were they, as well as bold.\n\nThey stood before Zhao Fan and said, \"We will lead the way against Liu Bei.\"\n\nThe Governor replied, \"I know that Liu Bei is of the imperial family, and Zhuge Liang is exceedingly resourceful. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are very bold. But the commander of this force is Zhao Zilong who, on one occasion, faced a hundred legions of Cao Cao and never blenched. Our small force here cannot stand against such people. We shall have to yield.\"\n\n\"Let me go out to fight,\" said Chen Ying. \"If I cannot capture Zhao Zilong, then you can yield.\"\n\nThe Governor could not resist him and gave his consent. Then Chen Ying, with three thousand troops, went forth. Soon the two armies came within sight of each other. When Chen Ying's army was drawn up, he girded on his flying fork and rode to the front. Zhao Zilong gripped his spear and rode to meet him.\n\nZhao Zilong began to rail at Chen Ying, saying, \"My master is the brother of Liu Biao to whom belonged this land. Now he is supporting his nephew, the heir and son of Liu Biao. Having taken Jingzhou, I am come to soothe and comfort the people here. Why then do you oppose me?\"\n\n\"We are supporters of the Prime Minister Cao Cao and are no followers of your master,\" was the reply.\n\nZhao Zilong, waxing angry, firmly grasped his spear and rode forward. His opponent twirled the flying fork and advanced. The horses met, but after four or five encounters Chen Ying, realizing that there was no hope of victory, turned and fled. Zhao Zilong followed. Suddenly turning, Chen Ying got close to Zhao Zilong and flung the fork. Zhao Zilong deftly caught it and threw it back. Chen Ying dodged away, but Zhao Zilong soon caught him up, seized, dragged him out of the saddle, and threw him to the ground. Then Zhao Zilong called up his soldiers, and they bound the prisoner. Chen Ying was taken to the camp, while his troops scattered and fled.\n\n\"I thought you would not dare a combat with me,\" said Zhao Zilong to the prisoner when they had returned to camp. \"However, I am not going to put you to death. You are free. But persuade your master to yield.\"\n\nChen Ying asked pardon, put his hands over his head, and fled like a frightened rat. When he reached his city, he told the Governor all these things.\n\n\"My original desire was to yield, but you insisted on fighting, and this is what it has brought you to.\"\n\nSo spoke the Governor. He bade Chen Ying begone and then prepared his letter of submission and put up his seal. With a small party, Zhao Fan went out of the city and wended his way to Zhao Zilong's camp. Zhao Zilong received him graciously, offered him wine, and then accepted the seal of office.\n\nAfter the wine had gone round several times, Zhao Fan became talkative, saying, \"General, your surname is the same as mine, and five centuries ago we were one family. You are from Changshan, and so am I. Moreover we are from the same village. If you do not mind, we might swear brotherhood. I should be very happy.\"\n\nZhao Zilong was pleased and they compared ages. They were of the same year. However, Zhao Zilong was the elder by four months, and so Zhao Fan made his bow as younger brother. The two men, having so many things in common, were very pleased with each other and seemed fitted to be close friends.\n\nAt eventide the feast broke up, and the late Governor returned to his dwelling. Next day Zhao Fan requested Zhao Zilong to enter the city, where, after Zhao Zilong had assured the people of their safety, he went to a banquet at the state residence. When they had become mellow with wine, the Governor invited Zhao Zilong into the inner quarters, where wine was again served. When Zhao Zilong was a little intoxicated, his host bade a woman come forth and offer a cup of wine to the guest.\n\nThe woman was dressed entirely in white silk, and her beauty was such as to overthrow cities and ruin states.\n\n\"Who is she?\" asked Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"My sister-in-law. She is of the Fan family.\"\n\nZhao Zilong at once changed his look and treated her with deference. When she had offered the cup, the host told her to be seated and join the party, but Zhao Zilong declined this addition to the evening, and the lady withdrew.\n\n\"Why did you trouble your sister-in-law to present wine to me, brother?\" asked Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"There is a reason,\" said the host smiling. \"I pray you let me tell you. My brother died three years ago and left her a widow. But this cannot be regarded as the end of the story. I have often advised her to marry again, but she said she would only do so if three conditions were satisfied in one man's person. The suitor must be famous for literary grace and warlike exploits, secondly, handsome and highly esteemed and, thirdly, of the same name as our own. Now where in all the world was such a combination likely to be found? Yet here are you, brother, dignified, handsome, and prepossessing, a man whose name is known all over the wide world and of the desired name. You exactly fulfill my sister's ambitions. If you do not find her too plain, I should like her to marry you and I will provide a dowry. What think you of such an alliance, such a bond of relationship?\"\n\nBut Zhao Zilong rose in anger, shouting, \"As I have just sworn brotherhood with you, is not your sister-in-law my sister-in-law? How could you think of bringing such confusion into the relationship?\"\n\nShame suffused Zhao Fan's face, and he said, \"I only thought of being kind to you. Why are you so very rude to me?\"\n\nZhao Fan looked right and left to his attendants with murder in his eye. Zhao Zilong raised his fist and knocked him down.\n\nThen he strode out of the place, mounted, and rode out of the city.\n\nZhao Fan at once called in his two generals.\n\nChen Ying said, \"He has gone away in a rage, which means that we shall have to fight him.\"\n\n\"I greatly fear you will lose,\" said Zhao Fan.\n\n\"We will pretend to be deserters,\" said Bao Long, \"and so get among his soldiers. When you challenge him, we will suddenly catch him.\"\n\n\"We shall have to take some others with us,\" said Chen Ying.\n\n\"Five hundred troops will be ample,\" said Bao Long.\n\nSo in the night the two men and their followers ran over to Zhao Zilong's camp to desert.\n\nZhao Zilong understood the trick they would play, but he called them in, and they said, \"When Zhao Fan tempted you with that fair lady, he wanted to make you drunk and get you into the private apartments so that he might murder you and send your head to Cao Cao. Yes, he was as wicked as that even. We saw you go away in anger, and we thought that would mean grave trouble for us, and so we have deserted.\"\n\nZhao Zilong listened with simulated joy, and he had wine served to the two men, and pressed them to drink so that they were quite overcome. When this was done, he had both bound with cords, called up their followers, and asked them whether this was real or pretended desertion, and they told him the truth.\n\nThen he gave the soldiers wine and said, \"Those who wanted to harm me are your leaders and not you. If you do as I tell you, you shall be well rewarded.\"\n\nThe soldiers threw themselves to the ground and promised obedience. Thereupon the two leaders \u2014 Chen Ying and Bao Long \u2014 were beheaded. Their five hundred troops were made to lead the way and act as screen for a whole thousand of horsemen, and the party set out at full speed for Guiyang. When they got there, they summoned the gate and said that they had slain Zhao Zilong and had got back. And they wished to speak with the Governor.\n\nThose on the wall lighted flares and inspected those at the gate. Surely enough they wore the uniforms of their own people, and Zhao Fan went out to them. He was immediately seized and made prisoner. Then Zhao Zilong entered the city, restored order, and sent off swift messengers to Liu Bei who at once, with his adviser, came to Guiyang.\n\nWhen they had taken their seats, the late Governor was brought in and placed at the foot of the steps. In response to Zhuge Liang's questions, Zhao Fan related the story of the proposed marriage.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang to Zhao Zilong, \"But this seems a fine project. Why did you receive the proposal so roughly?\"\n\nZhao Zilong said, \"Zhao Fan and I had just sworn brotherhood, and so marriage with his sister-in-law would have called down on my head universal blame. That is one reason. Another is that I should have made his sister fail to keep her dutiful chastity. And thirdly, I did not know whether I might trust such a proposal from one who had just yielded to force. My lord, your position as a recent victor was one of danger, and could I risk the failure of your plans for my sake?\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"But now that the plan has been carried out, and we are victors, would you care to marry her?\"\n\n\"All my fear is for the building of a reputation. Family can come later.\"\n\n\"You are indeed right honorable,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nZhao Fan was released and restored to the governorship. Zhao Zilong was conspicuously rewarded.\n\nBut Zhang Fei was angry and disappointed.\n\n\"So Zhao Zilong gets all the praise, and I am worth nothing,\" cried he. \"Just give me three thousand soldiers, and I will take Wuling and bring you the Governor.\"\n\nThis pleased Zhuge Liang, who said, \"There is no reason why you should not go, but I will only require one condition of you.\"\n\nWondrous, the plans of the general, so doth he conquer in battle;\n\nSoldiers keenly competing gain renown in the fighting." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Guan Yu Releases Huang Zhong; Sun Quan Fights With Zhang Liao.\n\nWhat Zhuge Liang required from Zhang Fei was a formal recognition of responsibility for success.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"When Zhao Zilong went on his expedition, he gave written guarantee of being responsible for success. You ought to do the same now that you are starting for Wuling. In that case you may have men and start.\"\n\nSo Zhang Fei gave the required document and received joyfully the three thousand of soldiers he had demanded. He set out at once and traveled without rest till he reached Wuling.\n\nWhen the Governor of Wuling, Jin Xuan by name, heard that an expedition against him was afoot, he mustered his officers and recruited brave soldiers and put his weapons in order ready for the struggle. And his army moved out of the city.\n\nA certain secretary, Gong Zhi, remonstrated with his chief for opposing a scion of the imperial house, saying, \"Liu Bei is of the Hans, and recognized as an uncle of the Emperor. All the world knows he is kindly and righteous. Added to that his brother Zhang Fei is extraordinarily bold. We cannot face them in battle with hope of success. Our best course is to give in.\"\n\nBut his master angrily replied, \"Do you want to play the traitor and take the side of the rebels and help them?\"\n\nJin Xuan called in the lictors and told them to put Gong Zhi to death.\n\nThe other officers interceded for Gong Zhi, saying, \"It augers ill to start an expedition by slaying your own officer.\"\n\nSo the Governor merely sent Gong Zhi sway. He himself led the army out of the city. After marching seven miles, he met with Zhang Fei's army.\n\nZhang Fei at once rode to the front, spear ready to thrust, and opened with a shout. Jin Xuan turned to his officers and asked who would go out to fight him, but no one replied. They were too afraid.\n\nSo the Governor himself galloped out, flourishing his sword. Seeing him advance, Zhang Fei shouted in a voice of thunder. Poor Jin Xuan was seized with panic, turned pale and could not go on. He turned his steed and fled. Then Zhang Fei and his army went in pursuit and smote the fugitives, chasing them to the city wall.\n\nHere the fugitives were greeted by a flight of arrows from their own wall. Greatly frightened, Jin Xuan looked up to see what this meant, and there was Gong Zhi, who had opposed him, standing on the wall.\n\n\"You brought defeat upon yourself because you opposed the will of God,\" cried the traitor. \"The people and I are determined to yield to Liu Bei.\"\n\nJust as Gong Zhi finished speaking, an arrow wounded Jin Xuan in the face and he fell to the ground. Thereupon his own troops cut off his head, which they forthwith presented to Zhang Fei. Gong Zhi then went out and made formal submission, and Zhang Fei bade him take his letter and the seal to Guiyang to Liu Bei, who was pleased to hear of Zhang Fei's success and gave the governorship to Gong Zhi. Soon after Liu Bei came to Wuling in person and soothed the people.\n\nThis done he wrote to Guan Yu telling him Zhao Zilong and Zhang Fei had gained a territory each.\n\nGuan Yu at once wrote back and said, \"Changsha is yet to be taken. If I am not thought too feeble, I would like to be sent to attack it.\"\n\nLiu Bei agreed and sent Zhang Fei to relieved his brother, whom Liu Bei ordered to return and prepare for an expedition to Changsha. Guan Yu came and went in to see his elder brother and Zhuge Liang.\n\nAt this interview Zhuge Liang said, \"Zhao Zilong has taken Guiyang, and Zhang Fei Wuling. Both successful warriors have done their work with three thousand troops. The Governor of Changsha, Han Xuan, was not worth mentioning, but there was a certain general with him, named Huang Zhong, who had to be reckoned with.\n\n\"Huang Zhong is a native of Nanyang. He used to be in the service of Liu Biao and was a colleague Liu Biao's nephew, Liu Pan, when he was in command of Changsha. After Liu Biao's death, he joined Han Xuan when he took command of the city. Now, although he is nearly sixty, he is a man to be feared and a warrior of a thousand. You ought to take a larger number of troops.\"\n\nGuan Yu replied, \"Instructor, what makes you damp another man's ardor to fight and do away with your own dignity? I do not think the old leader need be discussed, and I do not think I require three companies of soldiers. Give me my own five hundred of swordsmen, and I will have the heads of both Han Xuan and Huang Zhong to sacrifice to our standard.\"\n\nLiu Bei resisted this decision of Guan Yu, but Guan Yu would not give way. He just took his five hundred and set out.\n\n\"If he is not careful how he attacks Huang Zhong, there will be a mishap,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"You must go to support him.\"\n\nLiu Bei accordingly, at the head of another and larger party, set out toward Changsha.\n\nGovernor Han Xuan of Changsha was of hasty temperament with small compunction in matters of life and death and was universally hated. When he heard of the army coming against him, he called his veteran leader, Huang Zhong, to ask advice.\n\nThe latter said, \"Do not be distressed. This sword of mine and my bow are equal to the slaughter of all who may come.\"\n\nHuang Zhong had been very strong and could bend the three-hundred-pound bow and was a most perfect archer.\n\nWhen Huang Zhong referred to his prowess, a certain man spoke up and said, \"Let not the Veteran General go out to battle. Trust to my right arm, and you shall have this Guan Yu a prisoner in your hands.\"\n\nThe speaker was General Yang Lin. The Governor accepted his offer and told off a thousand troops to go with him, and they quickly rode out of the city. About fifteen miles from the city, they observed a great cloud of dust approaching and soon distinguished the invaders. Yang Lin set his spear and rode to the front to abuse and fight. Guan Yu made no reply to the abuse, but rode forward flourishing his sword. The warriors soon met, and in the third encounter Yang Lin was cut down. Guan Yu's army dashed forward and pursued the defeated force to the city wall.\n\nWhen the Governor heard of this reverse, he ordered the veteran Huang Zhong to go out while he went up on the city wall to watch the fight.\n\nHuang Zhong took his sword and crossed the drawbridge of Changsha at the head of his force. Guan Yu, seeing an old leader riding out, knew it must be Huang Zhong. Guan Yu halted his troops and placed them in line with their swords at the point.\n\nThen sitting there on horseback, he said, \"He who comes is surely Huang Zhong, eh?\"\n\n\"Since you know me, how dare you come within my boundaries?\" replied the veteran.\n\n\"I have come expressly to get your head!\"\n\nThen the combat began. They fought a hundred and more bouts, and neither seemed nearer victory. At this point the Governor, fearing some mishap to his veteran general, beat the gong to retreat and the battle ceased, one side going into the city of Changsha and the other camping three miles away to the rear.\n\nGuan Yu thought in his heart that the fame of the veteran opposed to him was well merited. He had fought a hundred bouts and discovered never a weak spot. He determined that in the next encounter he would use a \"swinging-horse stab\" and so overcome Huang Zhong.\n\nNext day, the early meal eaten, Guan Yu came to the city wall and offered his challenge. The Governor seated himself on the city wall and bade his veteran warrior go out to accept it. At the head of a few horsemen, Huang Zhong dashed across the drawbridge. The two champions engaged, and at the end of half a hundred bouts neither had the advantage. On both sides the soldiers cheered lustily.\n\nWhen the drums were beating most furiously, suddenly Guan Yu wheeled round his horse and fled. Of course Huang Zhong followed. Just as the moment for the feint arrived, Guan Yu heard behind him a tremendous crash and turned to see his pursuer lying prone upon the ground. Huang Zhong's steed had stumbled and thrown him.\n\nGuan Yu turned, raised his sword in both hands, and cried in a fierce tone, \"I spare your life, but quick! Get another horse and come again to battle.\"\n\nHuang Zhong pulled his horse to its feet hastily, leapt upon its back, and went into the city at full speed. The Governor was astonished and asked for an account of the accident.\n\n\"The horse is too old,\" replied Huang Zhong.\n\n\"Why did you not shoot since your aim is so perfect?\" asked the Governor.\n\n\"I will try again tomorrow,\" said Huang Zhong. \"I will run away as if overcome, and so tempt him to the drawbridge and then shoot him.\"\n\nHan Xuan gave the veteran a gray horse that he usually rode himself. Huang Zhong thanked him and retired.\n\nBut Huang Zhong could not forget Guan Yu's generous conduct, nor could he understand it. He could not make up his mind to shoot the man who had spared his life. Yet if he did not shoot, he betrayed his duty as a soldier. It was very perplexing, and the whole night spent in thinking it over found him still undecided.\n\nAt daybreak a man came in saying that Guan Yu was near the wall and challenging them again. So Huang Zhong gave order to go out.\n\nNow Guan Yu, having fought for two days and not having overcome Huang Zhong, was very ill at ease. So he called up all his dignity when he went forth to fight that day. When they had got to the thirtieth bout, Huang Zhong fled as if he was overcome. Guan Yu pursued.\n\nAs he rode away, Huang Zhong thought in his heart, \"He spared me only yesterday, and I cannot bear to shoot him today.\"\n\nPutting up his sword, Huang Zhong took his bow and twanged the string only. No arrow flew. Guan Yu dodged, but seeing no arrow in the air, he retook the pursuit. Again Huang Zhong twanged an arrowless bowstring, and again Guan Yu dodged, but no arrow came.\n\nThen Guan Yu said to himself, \"He cannot shoot,\" and pressed on in pursuit.\n\nAs they neared the city wall, the veteran stopped on the drawbridge, fitted an arrow, pulled the bow, and sent an arrow flying that just hit the base of the plume on Guan Yu's helmet.\n\nThe soldiers shouted at the display of marksmanship. Guan Yu was taken aback and set off for camp with the arrow still sticking. Then he heard that Huang Zhong's skill was said to be equal to piercing a willow leaf at a hundred paces, and Guan Yu understood that he owed this warning in the shape of an arrow in his plume to gratitude for sparing the veteran the preceding day.\n\nBoth withdrew. But when the veteran leader went up on the wall to see the Governor, he was at once seized.\n\n\"What have I done?\" cried Huang Zhong.\n\n\"I have seen these last three days that you were fooling me. You were slack the day before yesterday, which proved you had some sinister intention. Yesterday, when your horse stumbled and he spared you, it showed that you were in league with him. And today you twice twanged a vain bowstring, while at the third shot you only hit your opponent's helmet. Dare you say there is no secret understanding in all this? If I do not put you to death, it will assuredly redound to my own hurt.\"\n\nHan Xuan ordered Huang Zhong to be executed outside the city gate. Han Xuan also met the intercession of the officers by saying, \"Anyone who pleads for the condemned shall be regarded as in the plot.\"\n\nThe executioners had hustled the old man out of the city and the sword was in the air and on the point of descending, when a man suddenly dashed in, cut down the lictor, and rescued Huang Zhong.\n\n\"Huang Zhong is our bulwark!\" shouted he. \"To destroy him is to destroy the Changsha people. This Governor is too fierce and cruel, too lightly values good people, and is too arrogant toward his officers. We ought rather to kill him, and those who will, let them follow me.\"\n\nAll eyes turned toward this bold speaker, who was bronzed and had eyes like the Cowherd's star. Some of them knew him as Wei Yan, a native of Yiyang. He would have followed Liu Bei from Xiangyang but, unable to come up with him, had gone into the service of Han Xuan. Han Xuan took exception to his arrogant carriage and lack of polish and neglected him. And so Wei Yan had remained in the city without office.\n\nAfter the rescue of Huang Zhong, Wei Yan called upon the people to make an end of the Governor. He waved his arm and shouted to the people. Soon he had a following of several hundreds. Huang Zhong could not stop them. In a very short time, Wei Yan had dashed up on the wall, and Han Xuan lay dead. Taking his head, Wei Yan rode off out of the city to lay the bloodstained trophy at the feet of Guan Yu, who forthwith went into the city to restore confidence.\n\nWhen the people were all quiet, Guan Yu sent to request Huang Zhong to come to see him, but the old general pleaded illness.\n\nNext Guan Yu sent the good news to his brother and to Zhuge Liang and asked them to come.\n\nSoon after Guan Yu had left to capture Changsha, Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang had followed him up with supports in case of need. While on the march, a black flag was furled backwards and a crow flew over from north to south croaking thrice as it passed.\n\n\"What good or evil things do these omens presage?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\nWith hands hidden within his long sleeves, Zhuge Liang performed a rapid calculation on his fingers of the auspices and replied, \"Changsha is taken and a great leader mastered. We shall know soon after noon.\"\n\nSure enough a simple soldier presently came galloping along with the welcome tidings of the capture of the city, and saying that the two city warriors who had aided them were near waiting the arrival of Liu Bei. Soon after they arrived, Liu Bei entered the city, where he was escorted to the magistracy and heard the recital of Huang Zhong's deeds.\n\nLiu Bei went in person to Huang Zhong's house and inquired for him, whereupon Huang Zhong came forth and yielded formally. Huang Zhong requested to be permitted to bury the remains of the late Governor on the east of the city.\n\n\u2003Lofty as is heaven above earth was the spirit of the general,\n\n\u2003Who, even in his old age, suffered sorrows in the south;\n\n\u2003Cheerfully had he approached death, with no thought of resentment,\n\n\u2003But, bowing before the conqueror, he hung his head and was ashamed.\n\n\u2003Praise the sword, gleaming snow-white, and the glory of super-human bravery,\n\n\u2003Consider the mail-clad steed snuffing the wind and rejoicing in the battle,\n\n\u2003That warrior's name shall stand high and its brightness be undiminished,\n\n\u2003While the cold moon sheds her light on the waters of River Xiang.\n\nLiu Bei was generous toward the veteran leader, who had come under his banner, and was grateful for the service of Wei Yan. He made both of them Van Leaders.\n\nHaving given in with good grace, Huang Zhong introduced a nephew of Liu Biao, named Liu Pan, then living in Yuxian near by. Liu Bei gave Liu Pan the governorship of Changsha.\n\nAll being tranquil at the four territories, Liu Bei and his army returned to Jingzhou City. The name of Youkou was changed to Gongan, and soon all was prosperous. Able people from all sides came to assist in the administration. Guards were placed at strategic points.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu went to Chaisang to recover from his wound, he left Gan Ning in command at Baling and Ling Tong at Hanyang. The fleet was shared between these two places to be ready to move when required. The remainder of the force was under Cheng Pu, and he went to Hefei, where Sun Quan had been since the fight at the Red Cliffs. Sun Quan was still fighting the northern army, and in half a score encounters, small and great, neither had gained a decided advantage. Sun Quan could not approach the city but entrenched himself about fifteen miles away.\n\nWhen Sun Quan heard of the coming of reinforcements of Cheng Pu, he was very pleased and went in person to meet and welcome the leaders. Lu Su was in advance of the main body, and Sun Quan dismounted and stood by the roadside to greet him. As soon as he saw this, Lu Su slid out of the saddle and made his obeisance.\n\nBut the officers were amazed at the attitude of Sun Quan, and still more so when Sun Quan asked Lu Su to remount and ride by his side.\n\nPresently Sun Quan said secretly to Lu Su, \"I, the Lone One, dismounted to greet you as you saw. Was that manifestation enough for you?\"\n\n\"No,\" replied Lu Su.\n\n\"Then what further can I do?\"\n\n\"I want to see your authority and virtue spread over the four seas and enfold the nine regions, and you yourself playing your part as emperor. Then will my name be inscribed in the annals, and I shall indeed be known.\"\n\nSun Quan clapped his hands and laughed gleefully.\n\nWhen they reached the camp, a banquet was prepared and the services of the new arrivals were praised and glorified.\n\nThe destruction of Hefei was one day under discussion, when one came in to say that Zhang Liao had sent a written challenge to battle. Sun Quan tore open the cover, and what he read therein made him very wrath.\n\n\"This Zhang Liao has insulted me grossly,\" said he. \"He hears that Cheng Pu has arrived and sends a challenge. Tomorrow, O newly-come warriors, you shall see me fight with him. You shall have no share in the battle.\"\n\nOrders were given that next morning the army would move out of camp and advance on Hefei. Early in the morning, when they had advanced about halfway, they met the army of Cao Cao and prepared for battle. Sun Quan, with helmet of gold and breastplate of silver, rode to the front with Song Qian and Jia Hua, each armed with a halberd to support him and guard him one on each side.\n\nWhen the third roll of the drum ceased, the center of Cao Cao's army opened to allow the exit of three warriors, all fully armed. They were Zhang Liao, supported by Li Dian and Yue Jing. Zhang Liao, the central figure, especially designated Sun Quan as the object of his challenge. Sun Quan took his spear and was about to accept the challenge, from when the ranks behind him came out Taishi Ci, who galloped forth with his spear ready to thrust. Zhang Liao whirled up his sword to strike the newcomer, and the two fought near a hundred bouts without a decisive blow.\n\nThen said Li Dian to Yue Jing, \"He there opposite us with the golden helm is Sun Quan. Could we but capture him, the loss of our eight hundred thirty thousand soldiers at the Red Cliffs would be amply avenged.\"\n\nSo speaking Yue Jing rode out, alone, just one man and one sword, and went sidelong toward the two combatants. Then suddenly, swift as a flash of lightning, he ran forward and slashed at Sun Quan. But Sun Quan's two guards were too quick for him. Up went the two halberds of Song Qian and Jia Hua guarding their lord's head. The blow fell, but on the crossed halberds which were shorn through near the head, and in another moment they were hammering away on the head of Yue Jing's steed with the shafts of their broken weapons and forcing it back.\n\nSong Qian snatched a spear from a soldier near and went in pursuit of Yue Jing, but Li Dian, on the other side, fitted an arrow to his bow and aimed at Song Qian's heart from behind. And Song Qian fell as the bowstring twanged.\n\nThen Taishi Ci, seeing his colleague fell, left off the fight with Zhang Liao and returned to his own line. At this Zhang Liao fell on in a swift attack, and the army of Sun Quan, thrown into confusion, scattered and fled.\n\nZhang Liao, having distinguished Sun Quan in the distance, galloped in pursuit and had nearly come up with him, when Cheng Pu happily rushed in from one side of the line of fight, stayed the pursuit, and saved his master. Zhang Liao withdrew to Hefei. Sun Quan was escorted back to his main camp, where his beaten soldiers gradually rejoined him and their ranks were reformed.\n\nWhen Sun Quan knew of the death of Song Qian, he was greatly pained and wept aloud.\n\nBut Adviser Zhang Hong reproached him, saying, \"My lord, you relied too much upon your martial prowess and lightly engaged in battle with a formidable enemy. Every person in the army was chilled with fear, and you lost a general and some of your banners. It is not for you to exhibit prowess on the actual battlefield and encroach upon the duties of a general. Rather curb and repress such physical feats as those ancient Xia Yu and Meng Ben, and contemplate schemes of exercising princely virtues with the hegemony of all the feudal states. It is because of your ill-regulated action in engaging in battle that Song Qian perished at the hands of your enemies. Hereafter you should regard as most important your personal safety.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is indeed a fault,\" said Sun Quan. \"I will reform.\"\n\nSoon after, Taishi Ci entered the tent and said, \"In my command there is a certain Ge Ding, brother of a groom in the army of Zhang Liao. This servant is deeply resentful on account of a punishment inflicted upon him and is anxious to be revenged. He has sent over to say that he will show a signal tonight when he has assassinated Zhang Liao in revenge for the death of your late leader Song Qian. I wish to take some troops over to await this signal to attack.\"\n\n\"Where is Ge Ding?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"Ge Ding has mingled with the enemy and gone into the city. Let me have five thousand soldiers.\"\n\nZhuge Jin said, \"Zhang Liao is full of guile. I think you will find him prepared for your coming. Be careful.\"\n\nAs Taishi Ci urged his chief to let him go, and Sun Quan was deeply hurt by the death of his leader, the permission was given and the force started.\n\nNow here it must be said that Taishi Ci and this Ge Ding were natives of the same place. Ge Ding had made his way into the city without detection, found his brother, and the two had arranged their plot.\n\nGe Ding also told him, saying, \"Taishi Ci will come over tonight to help us. What need to be done now?\"\n\nHis brother, the groom, said, \"As the troops of Sun Quan are far away, I fear they cannot be here tonight, so we will make a huge bonfire of straw and then you can rush out and cry treachery. That will throw all into confusion and will give a chance to kill Zhang Liao.\"\n\n\"This is an excellent plan,\" said Ge Ding.\n\nNow after the victory, Zhang Liao returned to the city and rewarded his soldiers, but he issued orders that no one was to doff his armor or sleep.\n\nHis attendants said, \"You have gained a great victory today, and the enemy are far away. You might doff your armor and get some repose.\"\n\nBut Zhang Liao replied, \"That is not the way of a leader. A victory is no reason for rejoicing, nor should a defeat cause sadness. If those of the South Land suspect that I am unprepared, they will attack. And we must be ready to repel them. Be ready tonight and be doubly careful.\"\n\nScarcely had he said this than a fire started and cries of \"Treachery!\" arose. Many rushed to tell the leader, who went out and called together his guard of about half a score. They took up a commanding position in the way.\n\nThose about him said, \"The shouts are insistent. You ought to go and see what it means.\"\n\n\"A whole city cannot be traitors,\" said Zhang Liao. \"Some discontented person has frightened the soldiers. If I see anyone doing so, I will slay him.\"\n\nSoon after this Li Dian dragged up Ge Ding and his fellow traitor. After a few brief questions, they were beheaded.\n\nThen arose a great noise, shouting and the rolling of drums was heard outside the gate.\n\n\"That means the troops of South Land are there to help,\" said Zhang Liao. \"But we will destroy them by a simple ruse.\"\n\nHe bade them light torches and yell \"Treachery! Rebellion!\" and throw open the city gates and let down the drawbridge.\n\nWhen Taishi Ci saw the gates swing open, he thought his scheme was going well and in full confidence rode in at the gate. But just at the entrance a signal bomb suddenly exploded, and the enemy arrows came down on him like pelting rain. Then he knew he had fallen into a snare and turned to ride out. But he was wounded in many places. And in the pursuit that followed, more than half the troops under Taishi Ci were cut off. As he drew near his own lines, a rescue force led by Lu Xun and Dong Xi came to his aid, and the Cao Cao's soldiers ceased from pursuit.\n\nSun Quan was exceedingly sad when he learned that his faithful general had been grievously wounded. Then Zhang Zhao prayed him to cease from war, and Sun Quan was content. They gathered in their soldiers to their ships and sailed to Nanxu and Runzhou where they camped.\n\nMeanwhile Taishi Ci was dying.\n\nWhen his lord went to ask how he fared, he cried, \"When a worthy person is born into a turbulent world, he has to be a soldier and gird on a three-span sword to step on the mountains to mend the sky. I have not rendered great service. Why must I die before I have attained my desire?\"\n\nThese were his last words. He was forty-one years of age.\n\n\u2003Single minded and perfectly loyal,\n\n\u2003Such was Taishi Ci, in Donglai,\n\n\u2003Far distant frontiers rang with his exploits,\n\n\u2003Riding or archery, all humans he excelled,\n\n\u2003One in Bohai who admired his valor,\n\n\u2003Cared for his mother while he was fighting,\n\n\u2003How he roared in the battle at Shenting!\n\n\u2003Dying, he spoke as a hero;\n\n\u2003All through the ages people sigh for his fate.\n\nSun Quan was exceedingly grieved when this second of his leaders died. He gave orders to bury his remains most honorably outside the north wall of Nanxu on Beigu Hill and took his son, Taishi Heng, into his own palace to be brought up.\n\nIn Jingzhou, when Liu Bei heard of the series of misfortunes that had befallen Sun Quan and of his retirement to Nanxu, he and Zhuge Liang discussed their plans.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"I was studying the sky and saw a falling star in the northwest. The imperial family is to suffer a loss.\"\n\nZhuge Liang had scarcely said this when they brought news of the death of Liu Qi, son of Liu Biao.\n\nLiu Bei at once began to wail bitterly.\n\nBut his adviser said to him, \"Life and death are beyond our control, wherefore weep not, my lord, for grief harms the body. Rather consider what is necessary to be done. Send someone to assume control and make arrangements for the interment.\"\n\n\"Who can go?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"No other than Guan Yu.\"\n\nSo they sent Guan Yu to guard the city of Xiangyang.\n\nLiu Bei at once began to feel troubled about his promise to surrender Jingzhou on the death of Liu Qi. Zhuge Liang did not consider this a matter of moment.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I will have somewhat to say to anyone who comes to ask fulfillment of the promise.\"\n\nIn half a month it was announced that Lu Su would come to mourn at the funeral.\n\n\u2003To claim the promise one will come,\n\n\u2003But they will send him empty home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "The Dowager Marchioness Sees Her Son-In-Law; The Imperial Uncle Takes A Worthy Consort.\n\nLiu Bei and Zhuge Liang went out of the city to welcome the envoy of the South Land and led him to the guest-house.\n\nAfter the usual greetings, Lu Su said, \"Hearing of the death of your nephew, my lord Sun Quan has prepared some gifts and sent me to take his place at the funeral sacrifices. General Zhou Yu also sends regards to the Imperial Uncle and to you, Master Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nBoth rose at once and thanked him for the courtesy. Then the gifts were handed over and a banquet prepared, and while it was in progress, the guest brought up the real object of his visit.\n\n\"You said, Sir, that Jingzhou should be returned to us after the death of Liu Qi. Now that that event has happened, rendition becomes due, and I should be glad to know when the transfer can take place.\"\n\n\"We will discuss that later. In the meantime let us go on with our wine,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSo the feasting continued. Some time later Lu Su returned to the subject, but this time his host remained silent.\n\nHowever, Zhuge Liang, changing color, said, \"Lu Su, you are unreasonable. You could not wait till some other has to explain this matter to you. From the very foundation of the empire by our illustrious ancestor, the great heritage has descended in due course till today when, unhappily, evil doers have risen among the powerful and they have seized upon such portions as they could. But with God's favor and help, unity is nearly restored. My lord is a scion of the Imperial House, a great great grandson of Emperor Jing. Now, as the Emperor's Uncle, should he not have a share of the empire? Moreover, Liu Biao was my lord's elder brother, and there is certainly nothing extraordinary in one brother's succession to another's estate.\n\n\"What is your master? The son of a petty official on the banks of the River Qiantang, absolutely without merit so far as the state is concerned. Just because he is powerful, he holds actual possession of six territories and eighty-one counties, which has whetted his insatiable appetite till he now desires to swallow the whole empire. The land is the estate of the Liu family and my lord, who is of that name, has no share thereof, while your master, whose name is Sun, would dispute with, and even fight him. Beside, at the battle at the Red Cliffs my lord did good service and acquired great merit while his commanders risked their lives. Was it solely the strength of your southern soldiers that won that fight? Had I not brought that southeast wind that meant so much for Zhou Yu, could he have done anything? Had the South Land been conquered, it is needless to say that the two paramount beauties would now be gracing the Bronze Bird Palace. And as for yourself and other officers, insignificant though your families be, could you have been sure to survive? Just now my lord did not reply because he was willing to believe rather that a scholar of your abilities would understand without a detailed explanation, and I trust now that you will.\"\n\nThis speech absolutely shut the guest's mouth for a time, and he said no word in reply. But after an interval he said, \"What you say, Zhuge Liang, I think is devoid of reason, and means much unpleasantness for me.\"\n\n\"What unpleasantness?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe guest replied, \"When Liu Bei was in serious straits at Dangyang, I conducted you across the river and introduced you to my lord. I opposed Zhou Yu when he was going to capture Jingzhou, and then it came to agreement that the place was to be ours when the young man died. And I pledged myself to that. Now how can I go back and say you break your promise? Both my lord and Zhou Yu will hold me guilty. I would not mind death so much, but I fear that my master will be very wrathful and make war on the Imperial Uncle, who will have no place of refuge and he will look ridiculous in the eyes of the world for no reason.\"\n\nReplied Zhuge Liang, \"I care not for Cao Cao with his million troops and the Emperor in name at his back, and do you think I fear such a youngster as Zhou Yu? However, as it may cause you some loss of consideration, I will try to persuade my master to put the matter in writing and give you a paper to the effect that he is temporarily occupying Jingzhou as a base. When he can obtain possession of some other city, this shall be returned to you. What think you the South Land would say to this?\"\n\n\"Wait till what other place was obtained?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"My master can scarcely think of attacking the Middle Land yet, but Liu Zhang in Yizhou is ignorant and weak, and my master will attack him. If he gets the western region, then this place will be given up to you.\"\n\nLu Su had no alternative and accepted the offer. Liu Bei with his own hand wrote the pledge and sealed it. Zhuge Liang being named as guarantor also signed the document.\n\n\"Since I belong to this side of the compact and one can hardly have a guarantor of the same party, I would trouble you, Lu Su, also to sign. It will look better when you reach the South Land again,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nLu Su said, \"I know that your master is perfectly honorable and will adhere to the bargain.\"\n\nAnd so Lu Su signed. Then he received the document in formal style and took his departure. He was sent off with every mark of great respect, both Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang attending him to his boat.\n\nThere the Directing Instructor delivered him a last exhortation, \"When you see your master, speak discreetly and explain fully so as not to create a bad impression. If he rejects our document, we may get angry and we will take his whole country. The one thing now is for our two houses to live in harmony and not give our common enemy, Cao Cao, an opportunity against us.\"\n\nLu Su went down into his ship. He reached Chaisang and there saw Zhou Yu, who said, \"Well, how did you speed with your demand for Jingzhou?\"\n\n\"Here is the document,\" said Lu Su, giving it to Zhou Yu to read.\n\n\"You have been victimized by Zhuge Liang!\" said Zhou Yu, stamping his foot with irritation. \"In name it may be temporary occupation, but in fact it is humbug. They say the place is to be returned when they get the west. Who knows when that will be? Suppose ten years: Then it will be ten years before they give us Jingzhou. What is the use of such a document as this? And you are a guarantor of its due performance! If they do not give us the city, you get into trouble. Suppose our lord finds you in the wrong, what then?\"\n\nLu Su was dumbfounded. When he had somewhat recovered his self-possession, he said, \"I think Liu Bei will be true to me.\"\n\n\"You, my friend, are simple and sincere. Liu Bei is a scoundrel adventurer, and Zhuge Liang is a slippery customer. They and you are utterly different.\"\n\n\"What then is to be done?\" cried Lu Su distressfully.\n\n\"You are my dear friend, and your kindness in freely offering your store of grain to relieve my army is still fresh in my memory. Of course I will save you. Do not be anxious, but wait a few days till we get news of what is doing on the north of the river, and then we can decide upon a plan.\"\n\nLu Su passed some very uneasy days. Then the scouts came back saying that in Jingzhou everything seemed in excellent order and the white flags were flying everywhere, while outside the city they were building a magnificent mausoleum for Lady Gan, wife of Liu Bei. All the soldiers were in mourning.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu knew who was dead, he said to Lu Su, \"My scheme is made. You will see Liu Bei just stand still to be bound, and we shall get Jingzhou like turning a hand.\"\n\n\"What is the main spring of your plan?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"Liu Bei will want to remarry, and our lord has a sister, Sun Ren. She is a tough lady, whose women guards number many hundreds, all armed with weapons of war. Her apartments also are full of such things. I will write to our lord to send an intermediary to arrange that the lady shall wed Liu Bei at her family home, and thus we shall entice Liu Bei to Nanxu. But instead of marrying a wife, Liu Bei will find himself a prisoner, and then we will demand Jingzhou as ransom. When they have handed over the region, I shall find something else to say and nothing will fall on your head.\"\n\nLu Su was very grateful. Then Zhou Yu wrote letters to his master, and a swift boat was chosen to take Lu Su to see the Marquis of Wu.\n\nAfter the lending of Jingzhou had been discussed, Lu Su presented the document given him by Liu Bei.\n\n\"What is the use of such nonsense as this?\" said Sun Quan, when he had read it.\n\n\"There is another letter from General Zhou Yu. And he says that if you will employ his scheme, you can recover Jingzhou,\" replied Lu Su.\n\nHaving read that letter, Sun Quan was more pleased and began to consider who was the best person to send.\n\nSuddenly he cried, \"I have it. Lu Fan is the man to send.\"\n\nSun Quan called Lu Fan and said to him, \"I have just heard that Liu Bei has lost his wife. I have a sister whom I should like to marry to him and so make a bond of union between our two houses. Thus we should be united against Cao Cao and in support of the House of Han. You are the one man to be intermediary, and I hope you will go to Jingzhou and see to this.\"\n\nUnder these orders, Lu Fan at once began to prepare his ships for the voyage and soon started.\n\nLiu Bei was greatly distressed at the death of Lady Gan, fretting for her day and night. One day when he was talking with his adviser, they announced the arrival of Lu Fan who had come on a mission from the South Land.\n\n\"One of Zhou Yu's devices,\" said Zhuge Liang smiling, \"and it is all on account of this region. I will just retire behind the screen and listen. But you, my lord, agree to whatever the messenger proposes. Then let the messenger be taken to the guest-house while we arrange what is to be done.\"\n\nSo the envoy was introduced. Bows having been exchanged, host and guest being seated in due order and the tea drunk, Liu Bei opened the interview.\n\n\"You must have some commands for me, Sir, since you come thus.\"\n\n\"News has just been received that you, O Imperial Uncle, have just been bereaved of your consort. I venture to hope you would not object to an advantageous match, and I have come to propose one. Are you disposed to listen?\"\n\n\"To lose one's wife in middle age is truly a great misfortune,\" said Liu Bei. \"While her body is still warm, I cannot listen to proposals for another marriage.\"\n\nLu Fan said, \"A man without a wife is like a house without a ridge pole. At your age, one should not live an incomplete life. I am come on the part of Marquis Sun Quan, who has a sister, beautiful as she is, accomplished and well fitted to be a mate for you. Should the two families become allied as formerly were Qin and Jin, then that ruffian Cao Cao would never dare so much as look this way. Such an alliance would be to the benefit of both our houses and of the state. I hope, O Imperial Uncle, that you will fairly consider the proposal. However, since the young girl's mother is dotingly fond of her, the mother does not wish her to go far away, and so I must ask you to come into our country for the wedding.\"\n\n\"Does the Marquis know of your coming?\"\n\n\"How dare I come without his knowledge?\"\n\n\"I am no longer young,\" said Liu Bei. \"I am fifty and grizzled. This fair damsel, the sister of the Marquis, is now in the flower of her youth and no mate for me.\"\n\n\"Although the damsel is a woman, yet in mind she surpasses many a man, and she has said she will never wed anyone who is unknown to fame. Now, Sir, you are renowned throughout the four seas. Marriage with you would be the chaste maiden mating with the born gentleman. Of what consequence is the difference in age?\"\n\n\"Sir, stay here awhile, and I will give you a reply tomorrow,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nSo that day the envoy was entertained at a banquet and then conducted to the guest-house to repose, while, late as it was, Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang discussed their plans.\n\n\"I knew what he had come about,\" said the adviser. \"While he was talking, I consulted the oracle and obtained an excellent sign. Wherefore you may accept the proposal and send Sun Qian back with this envoy to arrange the details. When the promise has been ratified, we will choose a day and you shall go to complete the ceremony.\"\n\n\"How can I thus go into enemy territory? Zhou Yu has wanted to slay me for a long time.\"\n\n\"Let Zhou Yu employ all his ruses. Think you he can get beyond me? Let me act for you, and his calculations will always fail halfway. Once Sun Quan's sister is in your power, there will be no fear for Jingzhou.\"\n\nStill Liu Bei doubted in his mind. However, Sun Qian was sent to the South Land, with definite instructions, and traveled thither with Lu Fan.\n\nAt the interview Sun Quan said, \"I wish my sister could induce Liu Bei to live here with us. He would come to no harm.\"\n\nSun Qian took his leave. And returning to Jingzhou, he told the bridegroom elect, saying, \"Sun Quan's sole desire is for our lord to go over and complete the marriage.\"\n\nHowever, Liu Bei feared and would not go.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I have prepared three plans, but I need Zhao Zilong to carry them out. He will be sent as your guard.\"\n\nSo Zhuge Liang called in Zhao Zilong, gave him three silken bags, and whispered in his ear, saying, \"Here are three schemes enclosed in three bags. When you escort our lord to the South Land, you will take these with you and act as they direct.\"\n\nZhao Zilong hid the three silken bags in his breast so that they should be at hand when required.\n\nZhuge Liang next sent the wedding gifts, and when these had been received, the preliminaries were settled.\n\nIt was then the early winter of the fourteenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 209). The bridegroom elect, his escort, and the intermediary left the city of Jingzhou with a fleet of ten fast ships to sail down the river to Nanxu. Zhuge Liang remained to guard and rule the region.\n\nBut Liu Bei was far from feeling comfortable. They arrived and the ships were made fast. This done, the time had come for the first of the silken bags to be opened. And so it was. Thereupon Zhao Zilong gave each of his five hundred guards his instructions, and they went their several ways. Next Zhao Zilong told Liu Bei what he was to do: To pay his visit first to the State Patriarch Qiao, who was the father-in-law of Sun Ce and of Zhou Yu.\n\nThe State Patriarch Qiao resided in Nanxu and to his house, leading sheep and bearing wine jars, went the bridegroom elect. Having made his obeisance, Liu Bei explained that as Lu Fan had arranged, he had come to marry a wife.\n\nIn the meantime the five hundred guards, all in gala dress, had scattered over the city place buying all sorts of things, as they said, for the wedding of Liu Bei with the daughter of the Sun House. They spread the news far and wide and the whole town talked about it.\n\nWhen Sun Quan heard of Liu Bei's arrival, he bade Lu Fan wait upon him and take him to the guest-house. Meanwhile the State Patriarch Qiao went to the Dowager Marchioness, mother of Sun Quan, to congratulate her on the happy event.\n\n\"What happy event?\" ejaculated the old lady.\n\n\"The betrothal of your beloved daughter to Liu Bei. And he has arrived too, as surely you know.\"\n\n\"My poor old self does not know,\" said the Dowager. \"I have heard nothing of all this.\"\n\nShe at once summoned her son and also sent her servants out into the town to see what was going about.\n\nThey quickly returned to say: \"The whole city know of the coming wedding, and the bridegroom is now at the guest-house. Moreover, he has come with a large escort, and they are spending freely, buying pork and mutton and fruits, all in readiness for the wedding feasting. Lu Fan and Sun Qian are the intermediaries on each side, and they are in the guest-house too.\"\n\nThe Dowager Marchioness was terribly taken aback and upset so that, when Sun Quan arrived, he found his mother beating her breast and weeping bitterly.\n\n\"What has disturbed you, Mother?\" asked he.\n\n\"What you have just done,\" said she. \"You have treated me as a nonentity. When my elder sister lay dying, what did she tell you?\"\n\nSun Quan began to be frightened, but he said boldly, \"Please speak out plainly, Mother. What is this great sorrow?\"\n\n\"When a son is grown, he takes a wife; and when a girl is old enough, she goes to her husband. And that is right and proper. But I am the mother, and you ought to have told me that your sister was to become the wife of Liu Bei. Why did you keep me in the dark? It was my place to promise her in marriage.\"\n\n\"Whence comes this story?\" said the Marquis, really much frightened.\n\n\"Do you pretend ignorance? There is not a soul in the city who does not know! But you have succeeded in keeping me in the dark.\"\n\n\"I heard it several days ago,\" said the State Patriarch Qiao. \"And I came just now to offer my felicitations.\"\n\n\"There is no such thing,\" said Sun Quan. \"It is just one of the ruses of Zhou Yu to get hold of Jingzhou. He has used this means to inveigle Liu Bei here and hold him captive till Jingzhou is restored to us. And if they will not give it back, then Liu Bei will be put to death. That is the plot. There is no real marriage.\"\n\nBut the Dowager was in a rage and vented her wrath in abusing Zhou Yu.\n\nShe said, \"Zhou Yu is a pretty sort of governor over the six territories and eighty-one counties, if he cannot find any means of recovering one region except making use of my child as a decoy. Truly this is a fine deed, to spoil the whole of my child's life and condemn her to perpetual widowhood, because he wants to use the fair damsel ruse to slay a man! Who will ever come to talk of marriage with her after this?\"\n\nSaid the State Patriarch Qiao, \"By this means you may indeed recover Jingzhou, but you will be a shameful laughing stock to all the world. What can be done?\"\n\nSun Quan had nothing to say. He could only hang his head, while the Dowager abused his general.\n\nThe State Patriarch Qiao tried to soothe her, saying, \"After all Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, is a scion of the reigning family. You can do nothing better now than to welcome him as a son-in-law and not let this ugly story get abroad.\"\n\n\"I am afraid their ages do not match,\" interposed Sun Quan.\n\n\"Liu Bei is a very famous man,\" said the State Patriarch Qiao. \"There can be no shame in having such a son-in-law.\"\n\n\"I have never seen him,\" said the Dowager. \"Arrange that I may get a look at him tomorrow at the Sweet Dew Temple. If he displeases me, you may work your will on him. But if I am satisfied with him, then I shall simply let the girl marry him.\"\n\nNow Sun Quan was above all things filial and at once agreed to what his mother said. He went out, called in Lu Fan, and told him to arrange a banquet for the morrow at the temple so that the Dowager Marchioness might see the bridegroom.\n\n\"Why not order Jia Hua to station some men in the wings of the temple? Then if the Dowager be not pleased, we can call them out and fall upon him,\" said Lu Fan.\n\nAccordingly the ambush was prepared and five hundred ruffians posted to act as the Dowager's attitude might determine.\n\nWhen the State Patriarch Qiao took his leave and had reached his house, he sent to tell Liu Bei, saying, \"Tomorrow the Marquis and the Dowager Marchioness wished to see you. So be careful!\"\n\nLiu Bei and his faithful henchman discussed their plans.\n\nZhao Zilong said, \"The morrow bodes rather ill than well. However, your escort shall be there.\"\n\nNext day the Dowager Marchioness and the State Patriarch Qiao went to the Temple of Sweet Dew as had been arranged. Sun Quan came with a number of his strategists; and when all were assembled, Lu Fan was sent to the guest-house to request Liu Bei to come. He obeyed the summons, but as a precaution he put on a light coat of mail under his brocaded robe. His followers too took their swords upon their backs and followed close. He mounted his steed, and the cavalcade set out for the temple. At the door of the temple he met Sun Quan on whom the visitor's brave demeanor was not lost. After they had exchanged salutations, Sun Quan led Liu Bei into the presence of his mother.\n\n\"Just the son-in-law for me!\" said the Dowager delighted with the appearance of Liu Bei.\n\n\"He has the air of an emperor and a look like the sun,\" remarked the State Patriarch Qiao. \"When one remembers also that his fair fame has spread over the whole earth, you may well be congratulated on getting such a noble son-in-law.\"\n\nLiu Bei bowed, in acknowledgment of his reception. Soon after they were all seated at the banquet in the temple, Zhao Zilong entered and took his place beside Liu Bei.\n\n\"Who is this?\" asked the Dowager.\n\n\"This is Zhao Zilong of Changshan.\"\n\n\"Then he must be the hero of Dangyang, who saved the little Liu Shan.\"\n\n\"Yes, this is he,\" replied Liu Bei.\n\n\"A fine general!\" said the Dowager, and she gave him wine.\n\nPresently Zhao Zilong said to his master, \"I have seen a lot of armed ruffians hidden away in the purlieus of the temple. They can be there for no good, and you should ask the Dowager to get them sent away.\"\n\nThereupon Liu Bei knelt at the feet of the Dowager and, weeping, said, \"If you would slay me, let it be here.\"\n\n\"Why do you say this?\" asked she.\n\n\"Because there are assassins in hiding in the wings of the temple. What are they there for if not to kill me?\"\n\nThe Dowager wrathfully turned on Sun Quan, \"What are armed men doing there today, when Liu Bei is to become my son-in-law and the pair are my son and daughter?\"\n\nSun Quan said he did not know and sent Lu Fan to inquire. Lu Fan put the blame on Jia Hua. The Dowager summoned him and upbraided him severely. He had nothing to say, and she told them to put him to death.\n\nBut Liu Bei interceded, saying, \"The General's death will do me harm and make it hard for me to stay at your side.\"\n\nThe State Patriarch Qiao also interceded, and she only ordered the general out of her presence. His subordinates also scattered and ran like frightened rats.\n\nBy and bye, strolling out of the banquet room into the temple grounds, Liu Bei came to a boulder. Drawing his sword he looked up to heaven and prayed, saying, \"If I am to return to Jingzhou and achieve my intent to become a chief ruler, then may I cleave this boulder asunder with my sword. But if I am to meet my doom in this place, then may the sword fail to cut this stone.\"\n\nRaising his sword he smote the boulder. Sparks flew in all directions, and the boulder lay split in twain.\n\nIt happened that Sun Quan had seen the blow, and he said, \"Why do you thus hate that stone?\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I am near my fifth decade and have so far failed to rid the state of evil. I greatly regret my failure. Now I have been accepted by the Dowager as her son-in-law, and this is a critical moment in my life. So I implored of Heaven a portent that I might destroy Cao Cao as I would that boulder and restore the dynasty. You saw what happened.\"\n\n\"That is only to deceive me,\" thought Sun Quan. Drawing his own sword, he said, \"And I also ask of Heaven an omen, that if I am to destroy Cao Cao, I may also cut this rock.\"\n\nSo he spoke. But in his secret heart he prayed, \"If I am to recover Jingzhou and extend my borders, may the stone be cut in twain.\"\n\nHe smote the stone and it split in twain. And to this day there are cross cuts in the stone, which is still preserved.\n\nOne who saw this relic wrote a poem:\n\n\u2003The shining blades fell and the rock was shorn through,\n\n\u2003The metal rang clear and the sparks widely flew.\n\n\u2003Thus fate then declared for the dynasties two\n\n\u2003And the tripartite rule there began.\n\nBoth put up their swords and returned hand in hand to the banquet hall.\n\nAfter some more courses, Sun Qian gave his master a warning look, and Liu Bei said, \"I pray you excuse me as my drinking powers are very small.\"\n\nWherefore Sun Quan escorted him to the gate.\n\nAs they walked down looking at high land and rolling river spreading in glorious panorama before their eyes, Liu Bei exclaimed, \"Really this is the finest scene in the whole world!\"\n\nThese words are recorded on a tablet in the Temple of the Sweet Dew, and one who read them wrote a poem:\n\n\u2003From the riverside hills the rain clears off,\n\n\u2003And the black clouds roll away,\n\n\u2003And this is the place of joy and mirth\n\n\u2003And never can sorrow stay.\n\n\u2003And here two heroes of ages past\n\n\u2003Decided their parts to play,\n\n\u2003And the lofty heights flung back wind and wave\n\n\u2003Then, as they do today.\n\nYes, they stood both entranced by the beautiful scene. And gradually along the vast river the wind whipped the waves into snowy foam and raised them high toward heaven. And in the midst of the waves appeared a tiny leaf of a boat riding over the waves as if all was perfect calm.\n\n\"The northern people are riders and the southern people sailors. It is said quite true,\" sighed Liu Bei.\n\nSun Quan hearing this remark took it as a reproach to his horsemanship. Bidding his servants lead up his steed, Sun Quan leaped into the saddle and set off, full gallop, down the hill. Then wheeling he came up again at the same speed.\n\n\"So the southerners cannot ride, eh?\" said Sun Quan laughing.\n\nNot to be outdone, Liu Bei lifted the skirts of his robe, jumped upon his horse and repeated the feat.\n\nThe two steeds stood side by side on the declivity, the riders flourishing their whips and laughing.\n\nThence forward that hillside was known as the \"Slope Where the Horses Stood,\" and a poem was written about it:\n\n\u2003Their galloping steeds were of noble breed,\n\n\u2003And both of spirit high,\n\n\u2003And the riders twain from the hill-crest gazed\n\n\u2003At the river rolling by.\n\n\u2003One of them mastered the western mountains.\n\n\u2003One ruled by the eastern sea;\n\n\u2003And the hill to this very day\n\n\u2003Still is the Slope Where the Horses Stood.\n\nWhen they rode side by side into Nanxu, the people met them with acclamations. Liu Bei made his way to the guest-house and there sought advice from Sun Qian as to the date of the wedding.\n\nSun Qian advised, \"It should be fixed as early as possible so that no further complications could arise.\"\n\nSo next day Liu Bei went to the State Patriarch Qiao and told him in plain words, \"Many the people of the place mean harm to me, and I cannot stay here long. I must return soon.\"\n\n\"Do not be anxious,\" said the State Patriarch Qiao. \"I will tell the Dowager Marchioness, and she will protect you.\"\n\nLiu Bei bowed to express his thanks.\n\nThe State Patriarch Qiao saw the Dowager, and she was very angry when she heard the reason for Liu Bei's desire to leave.\n\n\"Who would dare harm my son-in-law?\" cried she.\n\nBut she made Liu Bei move into the library of the palace as a precaution, and she chose a day for the celebration of the wedding. But his soldiers could not keep guard at the library and were removed from his commands. Liu Bei explained to his hostess, and when she understood this, she gave her son-in-law and his people rooms in her own palace so that he might be quite safe.\n\nLiu Bei was very happy, and there were fine banquets, and the bride and bridegroom duly plighted their troth. And when it grew late and the guests had gone, the newly wedded pair walked through the two lines of red torches to the nuptial apartment.\n\nTo his extreme surprise, Liu Bei found the chambers furnished with spears and swords and banners and flags, while every waiting-maid had girded on a sword.\n\n\u2003Walls hung with spears the bridegroom saw,\n\n\u2003And armed waiting-maids;\n\n\u2003His heart fell back on all its fears\n\n\u2003Of well-laid ambuscades." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Liu Bei Rouses The Spirit Of Lady Sun; Zhuge Liang A Second Time Angers Zhou Yu.\n\nThe bridegroom turned pale. Bridal apartments lined with weapons of war and waiting maids armed!\n\nBut the housekeeper of the lady said, \"Do not be frightened, O Honorable One! My lady has always had a taste for warlike things, and her maids have all been taught fencing as a pastime. That is all it is.\"\n\n\"Not the sort of thing a wife should ever look at,\" said Liu Bei. \"It makes me feel cold, and you may have them removed for a time.\"\n\nThe housekeeper went to her mistress and said, \"The weapons in your chamber displease the handsome one. May we remove them?\"\n\nLady Sun laughed, saying, \"Afraid of a few weapons after half a life time spent in slaughter!\"\n\nBut she ordered their removal and bade the maids take off their swords while they were at work.\n\nThat night Liu Bei and Lady Sun conversed under the moonlight, and the night passed happily enough.\n\nNext day Liu Bei distributed gifts among the maids to secure their good will. He also sent Sun Qian to Jingzhou with news of the wedding, while he gave himself up to feasting and enjoyment. The Dowager loved him more every day.\n\nThe results of the plot to destroy Liu Bei were thus very different from the originators' intention. Sun Quan sent to his general:\n\n\"My mother had insisted upon marrying her daughter to Liu Bei; and so by juggling with the fictitious, we had made it real. What is to be done?\"\n\nThe news troubled Zhou Yu day and night, but eventually he thought but another scheme which he embodied in a letter sent to his master. Here is the outline of the missive:\n\n\"Contrary to expectation, the plot that I, Zhou Yu, contrived has turned the wrong way. However, since by juggling with deceit, we have ended in a solid truth. Our future plans must start from the actual present facts. To the boldness of the adventurer Liu Bei is added the aid of such great leaders as Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Zilong, not to mention that he has a strategist like Zhuge Liang. He is not the man to remain long in a lowly position. Wherefore I can think of no better plan than to enervate him by surrounding him with softness and keeping him in the South Land, a prisoner of luxury. Therefore build for him a fine palace to blunt the edge of his determination and surround him with sensuous luxury. In this way the affection of his brothers will be alienated, and Zhuge Liang will be driven away. When this result has been attained, we can smite him and so end a great matter. If we be at all careless, I fear the recumbent dragon may fly to the skies; it is no beast to be kept in a pond. My lord, I pray you consider this thoroughly.\"\n\nThe letter was shown to Zhang Zhao who said, \"My idea is identical with his. Liu Bei began life in a humble position and for years has been a wanderer. He has never tasted the delights of wealth. Give him the means of luxury, a beautiful dwelling, fair women, gold and silken attire. As he enjoys them, the thoughts of Zhuge Liang and his brothers will fade away and they, on their side, will be filled with rancor. Thus can we lay our plans for recovering Jingzhou. I recommend action as Zhou Yu says and quickly.\"\n\nSun Quan then set about redecorating the Eastern Palace and laying out the grounds. He filled the rooms with beautiful furniture for his sister and her husband. He also sent fair damsels and musicians by the score, and many and beautiful vessels in gold and silver, and silken stuffs. And his mother was delighted at his kindness to her son-in-law.\n\nIndeed Liu Bei was soon so immersed in sensuous pleasure that he gave no thought to return. Zhao Zilong and the company under him led an idle life in the front portion of the Eastern Palace, save that at times they went outside the city for archery and horse-racing. And thus passed the year.\n\nSuddenly Zhao Zilong remembered the orders he had received and the three bags with the plans in them. It was time to open the second one for the end of the year was nigh. His orders were only to open the third when danger was very near and there appeared no way out.\n\nAs already remarked, the year was drawing to a close, and Zhao Zilong saw his lord daily becoming more and more the slave of pleasure. Liu Bei never appeared among his guards now. So the bag was opened and in pursuance of the wonderful scheme thereby discovered, Zhao Zilong went to the hall of the palace and asked to see his master.\n\nThe maid in attendance went within and said, \"Zhao Zilong has some important matter on which to see the master.\"\n\nLiu Bei called him in and asked what the business was.\n\nZhao Zilong assumed an attitude of great concern and said, \"My lord, you are living happily secluded in these beautiful apartments. Do you never think of Jingzhou?\"\n\n\"But what is the matter that you seem so disturbed?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"Today early Zhuge Liang sent a messenger to say that Cao Cao was trying to avenge his last defeat and was leading five hundred thousand troops to attack Jingzhou, which was in great danger. And he wished you to return.\"\n\n\"I must speak to my wife,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"If you consult her, she will be unwilling for you to return. It would be better to say nothing but to start this evening. Delay may do great damage.\"\n\n\"Retire for a time. I must act discreetly,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nZhao Zilong urged the need to return several times more, but finally went away.\n\nLiu Bei went into his wife's rooms and began to weep silently.\n\nSeeing his tears, Lady Sun said, \"Why are you so sad, my husband?\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I have been driven hither and thither all my life. I was never able to do my duty to my parents, nor have I been able to sacrifice to my ancestors. I have been very unfilial. The new year is at hand, and its approach disquiets me greatly.\"\n\n\"Do not try to deceive me,\" said Lady Sun. \"I heard and I know all. Just now Zhao Zilong came to tell you Jingzhou was threatened and you wish to return home. That is why you put forward this excuse.\"\n\nThen Liu Bei fell on his knees and said, \"Why should I dissemble, O Wife, since you know? I do not wish to go, but if Jingzhou be lost, I shall be an object of ridicule to everyone. I do desire to go, but I cannot leave you. Now you know why I am grieved.\"\n\nShe replied, \"I am your handmaid, and whithersoever you go, it is my duty to follow.\"\n\n\"Yes, your heart is right. But the difficulty is your mother and the Marquis. They will be unwilling. If you would have pity on me and let me go for a time\u2014\"\n\nAnd again the tears gushed forth.\n\n\"Do not be so sad, my husband,\" said Lady Sun. \"I will implore my mother to let us go, and she will surely allow it.\"\n\n\"Even supposing the Dowager permits, I am sure the Marquis will hinder.\"\n\nLady Sun said nothing for a long time while she weighed the matter thoroughly.\n\nPresently she spoke, \"On New Year's Day you and I will go to court and present our congratulations. Then we will give the excuse of a sacrifice on the river bank and go away without formal leave. Will that suit you?\"\n\nLiu Bei knelt at her feet and expressed his gratitude.\n\n\"I should be never so grateful,\" said he. \"Dead or alive I would remember your love. But this must be a perfect secret.\"\n\nThis having been decided and the arrangements made.\n\nLiu Bei gave Zhao Zilong secret orders, saying, \"Lead your company out of the city and be on the road on New Year's morn. We are going away.\"\n\nSun Quan held a grand court on the New Year's Day of the fifteenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 210).\n\nLiu Bei and his bride went into the Dowager Marchioness' presence, and Lady Sun said, \"My husband has been thinking of his ancestors, who lie in the county of Zhuo, and grieves that he cannot do his duty by them. Today we wish to go to the river side and offer sacrifice toward the north. It is our duty to inform you.\"\n\n\"A very filial proceeding,\" said the Dowager. \"I should not think of stopping you. Although you have never known your husband's parents, yet you may go with him to sacrifice as it is proper for a wife to do.\"\n\nBoth thanked the Dowager Marchioness and went out, rejoicing at having so far hoodwinked Sun Quan. Lady Sun got into her carriage taking only a little clothing with her, while Liu Bei followed with a small escort. They went out of the city of Nanxu and met Zhao Zilong at the place arranged. Then with a guard in front and rear, they left the precincts of the city, traveling as quickly as they could.\n\nThat day, at the new year banquet, Sun Quan drank freely so that he had to be helped to his chamber, and the guests left. Before very long the escape of the fugitives became known, but it was then dark, and when they tried to tell Sun Quan, they could not rouse him. He slept heavily until the fifth watch.\n\nThe next morning, when Sun Quan heard the story, he asked advice of his counselors.\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"They have got away today, but trouble will surely come of it. Therefore, pursue after them without loss of time.\"\n\nSo Chen Wu and Pan Zhang, with five hundred of veterans, were sent out with orders to use all speed both by day and by night and bring back the fugitives.\n\nThey left. Sun Quan's anger burned hot against Liu Bei. In his wrath he seized his jade inkstone and dashed it to the ground where it shivered to pieces.\n\nSaid Cheng Pu, \"My lord, your wrath is in vain, for I do not think your generals will catch the runaways.\"\n\n\"Will they dare to disobey my order?\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"Our young lady had always delighted to look upon war and is very fierce and determined. All the officers fear her. Now she has gone with her husband of her own free will; and those sent in pursuit, if once they look upon her countenance, will not dare to lay hands on her.\"\n\nSun Quan's wrath burned the more fiercely at these words.\n\nHe drew the sword girded at his side and called up Jiang Qin and Zhou Tai, saying, \"You two take this sword and bring back the heads of my sister and Liu Bei. And if you do not, I will put you to death.\"\n\nWith this order they set out in pursuit, leading a whole thousand troops. Meanwhile Liu Bei and his wife were pressing forward with all speed. When night fell, they rested for a time by the roadside, but not for long. Just as they reached the confines of Chaisang, they turned and saw a great cloud of dust and the soldiers said that a force was coming in pursuit.\n\n\"What shall we do if they come up with us?\" said Liu Bei excitedly to Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"My lord, you go on in front and I will prevent pursuit.\"\n\nAs they turned the foot of a hill, they saw a troop of soldiers blocking their road in front.\n\nTwo generals were there and they bellowed, \"Liu Bei, dismount and yield yourself captive. We are here by order of General Zhou Yu, and you have kept us waiting long!\"\n\nNow the thought had come to Zhou Yu that Liu Bei would try to flee, and so he had sent Xu Sheng and Ding Feng, with three thousand troops, to intercept him at this critical spot. They had made a camp there and kept a lookout from the hilltops, for Zhou Yu had calculated that Liu Bei would certainly pass that way. So when Liu Bei and his cavalcade appeared, they all buckled on their arms and barred the way.\n\nGreatly fearing, Liu Bei rode back to consult Zhao Zilong, to whom he said, \"In front a force barring the road; in rear pursuers. There is no escape. What can we do?\"\n\n\"Do not be alarmed, my lord. The Directing Instructor gave me three plans enclosed in three silken bags. Two have been used and have answered admirably. There is yet the third, and my orders were to open the bag in such a strait as this. This is a day of great danger such as calls me to open the bag.\"\n\nThereupon Zhao Zilong opened the bag and handed it to Liu Bei.\n\nAs soon as Liu Bei had seen the contents, he hastened to Lady Sun's carriage and began to weep, saying, \"I have something private to say, and I must tell you.\"\n\n\"What have you to tell me, my husband? Tell me the whole truth,\" replied she.\n\n\"Your brother and Zhou Yu formerly made a plot for you to marry me, not for your sake, but to get me into their power and hold me so that they might recover Jingzhou. They were set on my murder, and you were the bait with which to hook me. Careless of consequences I came, for I knew that the spirit of a heroine dwelt in your bosom and you would pity me. Lately I heard that harm was intended me, and so I made danger to Jingzhou the excuse to escape. Happily for me you have remained true and come with me. But now the Marquis is pursuing us, and Zhou Yu's soldiers are in front. Only you, my wife, can extricate us from this danger; and if you refuse, then slay me where I stand that I may thus show my gratitude for your kindness.\"\n\nLady Sun grew angry and said, \"Then does my brother forget that I am his sister? How will he ever look me in the face? I can extricate us from this danger.\"\n\nThereupon she bade her people push the carriage to the front. She rolled up the curtains and herself called out, \"Xu Sheng, Ding Feng, are you turned traitors then?\"\n\nThe two generals slid out of their saddles, dropped their arms, and stood meekly in front of the carriage.\n\n\"We are no traitors,\" said they. \"We have the Commander-in-Chief's orders to camp here and await Liu Bei.\"\n\n\"Zhou Yu is an interfering scoundrel,\" cried she. \"We of the land of the south have never harmed you, and Liu Bei, the Uncle of the Great Family, is my husband. I have already told my mother and my brother of our journey, and now I find you with an army at the foot of these hills preventing our passage. Is it that you would plunder us of our valuables?\"\n\nThe two generals mumbled dissent. They would not dare such a thing.\n\n\"We pray you, O Lady, stay your anger. This is no plan of ours. We do but obey our General's orders.\"\n\n\"So you fear Zhou Yu and not me!\" cried she scornfully. \"Think you that if he slays you, I will not slay him?\"\n\nShe broke into a torrent of abuse of Zhou Yu. Then she bade them push her carriage forward.\n\nThe two leaders thought within themselves, \"We are but men of lowly rank. We dare not dispute with Lady Sun.\"\n\nBeside they saw Zhao Zilong was bursting with wrath. So they ordered their troops to stand aside and leave the road clear.\n\nThe cavalcade had only gone a few miles when up came the pursuers. The two generals told the new-comers what had happened.\n\n\"You were wrong to let them pass,\" said Chen Wu and Pan Zhang. \"We have orders from the Marquis himself to arrest them.\"\n\nThereupon all four went in pursuit.\n\nWhen the noise of the approaching force reached the ears of Liu Bei, he said to his wife, \"They are again pursuing us. What now?\"\n\n\"Husband, go on in front. Zhao Zilong and I will keep them off.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei and a small company went on toward the river bank, while Zhao Zilong reined up beside the lady's carriage and set out his troops ready for battle. And when the four generals came up, they dismounted and stood with folded arms.\n\n\"What are you doing here, Generals?\" asked Lady Sun.\n\n\"We have orders from our lord to request you and Liu Bei to return.\"\n\nCalmly but bitterly she said, \"So this is the sort of fools you are! You would make dissension between brother and sister. But I am a wife on my way to my husband's home. Nor am I leaving clandestinely, for I had my mother's gracious permission. Now we, husband and wife, are going to Jingzhou. If even my brother were here himself, he would let us pass in all politeness. But you, because you have weapons in your hands, would slay us!\"\n\nShe abused the four men to their faces so that they looked from one to another in shame. And each in his heart thought, \"Say what one will, after all they two are brother and sister and the Dowager Marchioness is the controlling power. Sun Quan is most obedient and would never dare oppose his mother's decision. When the reaction comes, then indeed we shall certainly be found in the wrong. We had better be kind.\"\n\nAnother thing was that one of the two they sought, Liu Bei, was not there and Zhao Zilong looked angry and dangerous. Finally, muttering to themselves, they gave way and with one accord retired and left the road open. Lady Sun passed through.\n\n\"We four will go to see the Commander-in-Chief and report,\" said Xu Sheng.\n\nBut that did not please them all, and they stood irresolute. Presently they saw a column of troops sweeping down on them like a hurricane. These were Jiang Qin and Zhou Tai with their company.\n\n\"Have you fellows seen Liu Bei?\" they cried as they rushed up.\n\n\"He has just passed along.\"\n\n\"Why did you not arrest him?\"\n\n\"Because of what Lady Sun said.\"\n\n\"That is just as the Marquis feared, and so he gave us this sword and told us first to slay his sister and then Liu Bei. And if we disobey, he will put us to death.\"\n\n\"What can be done? They are far away by now.\"\n\nJiang Qin said, \"After all they are but a few and on foot. They cannot travel very fast. Let Xu Sheng and Ding Feng go to Zhou Yu to tell him, and he can send fast boats to pursue them on the river while we follow up on the bank. We must get them either on water or land, and we must not listen to what they say.\"\n\nWhereupon two went back to report and four to the river bank. Meanwhile Liu Bei had got a long way from Chaisang and reached Loving Shore. He now felt calmer. He went along the bank of the river seeking a boat, but there was no craft on the broad bosom of the stream. He bowed his head in deep sorrow.\n\nZhao Zilong bade him be of good courage, saying, \"My lord, you have just escaped from the tiger's jaws and had not far to go. Moreover, I suspect Zhuge Liang has something prepared for us.\"\n\nBut his master was despondent. His thoughts were back to the pleasures he had enjoyed but a few hours since in the house of his wife, and the tears rolled down his cheeks. A poem has been written on this episode:\n\n\u2003By the bank of the deep flowing Great River\n\n\u2003Once was a wedding,\n\n\u2003And the ruling houses of two states yet to be\n\n\u2003Were allied by marriage.\n\n\u2003See the beautiful maiden stepping slowly\n\n\u2003To the golden bridal chamber!\n\n\u2003Yet was the marriage but a ruse.\n\n\u2003Its author vainly imagined that a hero,\n\n\u2003Sinking in amorous toils,\n\n\u2003Would forget his high intent.\n\nLiu Bei bade Zhao Zilong go along the bank to seek some boats. Then the soldiers told him there was a huge cloud of dust on the road. Ascending one of the hills, he looked back whence they had come and saw the whole earth as it were covered with an advancing host.\n\nHe sighed and said, \"We have fled before them now for days, worn out our soldiers and jaded our horses, and all to die in a strange place.\"\n\nHe watched the enemy coming nearer and nearer. Then as things began to look most desperate, he saw a line of some twenty boats all in the act of setting their sails.\n\n\"By good luck here are some ships,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"Let us get on board, row to the further bank, and see what can be done.\"\n\nLiu Bei and his bride hastened down the bank and went into a ship. The soldiers were embarked. Then they saw in the hold of the ship someone in Daoist dress.\n\nThat person came up with a smile, saying, \"My lord, again you see Zhuge Liang. He has waited a long time.\"\n\nAll the soldiers on board were from Jingzhou, and Liu Bei rejoiced at the sudden happy turn of affairs.\n\nBefore long the four pursuing leaders reached the bank.\n\nZhuge Liang pointed to them and laughed, saying, \"I foresaw this a long time ago. You may return and tell Zhou Yu not to use the 'Fair Damsel Trick' again.\"\n\nThose on the bank sent a flight of arrows at the ships, but they were already too far away. The four generals on the bank looked very foolish.\n\nAs the boats were sailing along, a great noise was heard on the river behind them, and there appeared a huge fleet of war ships, sailing under the flag of Zhou Yu. He also was there in command of the fleet, and he was supported by Huang Gai and Han Dang. They seemed like a drove of horses and came along swift as a falling star. They gained on the fugitives rapidly.\n\nZhuge Liang ordered the boats to row over to the north bank, and the party landed. They had started off away from the shore before Zhou Yu could land. Zhou Yu's marines, except the leaders, were all afoot, but they kept up the pursuit, following as quickly as they could. Zhou Yu led the pursuit, closely followed by Huang Gai, Han Dang, Xu Sheng, and Ding Feng.\n\nWhen Zhou Yu's force reached the borders of Huangzhou, Liu Bei and his party were not far away, and so they pressed the pursuit. But there were only horses for a few leaders in front, and suddenly the rolling of drums struck Zhou Yu's ears, and from out a gully dashed a troop of swordsmen led by Guan Yu. Zhou Yu was too surprised and unprepared to do anything but flee.\n\nZhou Yu fled for his life and Guan Yu pursued. At different points Liu Bei's generals, Huang Zhong and Wei Yan, came out and attacked, so that the troops of the South Land suffered a great defeat, and Zhou Yu barely escaped. As he came to the river and was going down into his ship, the soldiers of Liu Bei on the bank jeered at him on account of the miscarriage of his scheme, shouting, \"General Zhou Yu has given Uncle Liu Bei a wife and has lost his soldiers!\"\n\nZhou Yu was so annoyed that he would have gone up the bank to fight again, but his generals restrained him.\n\nHe uttered, \"My schemes are a failure and a defeat, and how can I face my master again?\"\n\nAll at once he cried aloud and fell back in a swoon. His wound had reopened. The generals came to his help, but it was long before he recovered consciousness.\n\n\u2003Twice had he played his trick\n\n\u2003And twice had he lost the game;\n\n\u2003His heart was full of resentment,\n\n\u2003He was overwhelmed with shame." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Cao Cao Feasts In The Bronze Bird Tower; Zhuge Liang Provokes Zhou Yu A Third Time.\n\nThe ambuscade into which Zhou Yu had fallen had been prepared by the orders of Zhuge Liang and was triple. However, Huang Gai and Han Dang contrived to get clear and found refuge in the ships, though with the loss of many troops. When Zhou Yu was in safety and looked about him, he saw Liu Bei and Lady Sun safely resting on a hilltop. How could such a sight fail to put him in a rage? And with the access of rage, his wound, not yet healed, burst open once again. He swooned and fell. They raised him and his ship set sail. Zhuge Liang ordered no pursuit, the southern fleet departed undisturbed, and Liu Bei proceeded to Jingzhou City, where were great rejoicings in honor of his recent marriage.\n\nMeanwhile Zhou Yu had gone to Chaisang while Jiang Qin and those with him bore to Nanxu the sad tidings to Sun Quan. He was angry beyond words, and his first thought was to send an army under Cheng Pu to take Jingzhou. Zhou Yu also wrote from his sick bed urging his lord to take vengeance. But Zhang Zhao knew better and said it could not be done.\n\nSaid he, \"Cao Cao has never forgotten his defeat at the Red Cliffs, but he dares not attempt to avenge himself while the Sun family are friendly with Liu Bei. If in any moment of anger you two fall upon each other, Cao Cao will certainly seize the opportunity and your position will be dangerous.\"\n\nGu Yong supported Zhang Zhao, saying, \"Beyond all doubt Cao Cao has his spies here. As soon as he hears of any rift in the friendship between the Sun and Liu families, he will desire to come to an understanding with the latter, and Liu Bei, who fears your power, will accept his offer and take his side. Such an alliance will be a continual menace to the land south of the river. No! The plan for the occasion is to secure the friendship of Liu Bei by memorializing that he be made Imperial Protector of Jingzhou. This will make Cao Cao afraid to send any army against the South Land. At the same time it will raise kindly feelings in the heart of Liu Bei and win his support. You will be able to find someone who will provoke a quarrel between Cao Cao and Liu Bei and set them at each other, and that will be your opportunity. In this way you will succeed.\"\n\n\"These are good words,\" said Sun Quan, \"but have I a messenger who can accomplish such a mission?\"\n\n\"There is such a man, one whom Cao Cao respects and loves.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"What prevents you from employing Hua Xin? He is ready to hand.\"\n\nWherefore Hua Xin was given letters and bidden go to the capital, Xuchang, whither he proceeded at once and sought to see Cao Cao. They told him that Cao Cao and all his friends were at Yejun, celebrating the completion of the Bronze Bird Tower. So thither he went.\n\nCao Cao had indeed never forgotten his great defeat at the Red Cliffs and nourished schemes to avenge it, but he feared the combination of his two chief enemies, and that fear restrained him.\n\nIn the spring of the fifteenth year (AD 210) the great Tower was completed, and Cao Cao invited a vast assembly to celebrate its inauguration with banquets and rejoicings. The feast was on the bank of River Zhang. The Bronze Bird Terrace stood in the center, flanked by two others named the Terrace of the Jade Dragon and the Terrace of the Golden Phoenix. Each tower was a hundred spans high, and two bridges connected them. Gold and jade vied with each other in the many apartments.\n\nAt the opening ceremony, Cao Cao wore a golden headdress inlaid with jewels and a robe of green brocaded silk, girded with a belt of jade. On his feet were pearl-encrusted shoes. So clad he took his seat as host, while his officers, civil and military, were drawn up below the terrace.\n\nFor the military officers was arranged an archery competition, and one of his attendants brought forth a robe of red crimson Xichuan silk as a prize. This was suspended from one of the drooping branches of a willow tree, beneath which was the target. The distance was a hundred paces. The competitors were divided into two bands, those of Cao Cao's own family being dressed in red and the others in green. They all had carved bows and long arrows and were mounted. They stood holding in their steeds till the signal should be given for the games to begin. Each was to shoot one arrow, and the robe was the guerdon for hitting the target in the red; misses were to pay a forfeit of drinking a cup of cold water.\n\nAs soon as the signal was given, a red-robed youth rode quickly forth. He was Cao Xiu. Swiftly he galloped to and fro thrice. Then he adjusted the notch of his arrow to the string, pulled the bow to its full, and the arrow flew straight to the bull's eye.\n\nThe clang of the gongs and the roll of the drums announced the feat, which astonished them all. And Cao Cao, as he sat on the terrace, was delighted.\n\n\"A very promising colt of my own,\" said he to those about him, and he sent a messenger for the red robe that the winner might receive it from his own hands.\n\nBut suddenly from the green side rode out one who cried, \"It were more fitting to let outsiders compete for the Prime Minister's silken robe. It is not right that members of the family monopolize the contest.\"\n\nCao Cao looked at the speaker, who was Wen Ping. And some of the officers cried, \"Let us see what his shooting is like!\"\n\nSo Wen Ping fitted an arrow to the string and fired also from horseback while galloping. To the surprise of the onlookers, he also made a bull's eye, which was honored by another salute from gongs and drums.\n\n\"Quickly bring me the robe,\" cried Wen Ping.\n\nBut at once from the ranks of the red-robed another competitor dashed forward, shouting fiercely, \"How can you win what has been already won? But let me show you how I can shoot an arrow that shall overcome both your shots.\"\n\nHe drew his bow to the full, and the arrow flew straight to the heart of the red. The surprised onlookers saw that this new competitor was Cao Hong, who now became also a claimant for the robe.\n\nHowever, yet another archer came forth from the green-robed ranks, playing with his bow and crying, \"What is there amazing in your shooting, you three? See how I can shoot.\"\n\nThis man was Zhang He. He put his horse to the gallop, then turned his back and, shooting backwards, also hit the center of the red.\n\nThus four arrows were now sticking in the bull's eye, and all agreed that it was marvelous archery.\n\n\"I think the robe should be mine,\" said Zhang He.\n\nBefore he could finish speaking, a fifth competitor came out from the red robes and shouted, \"You shot backwards; but that is commonplace enough. Look while I shoot better than you all.\"\n\nThe speaker was Xiahou Yuan. He galloped off to the very limit, and then bending his body over backwards he sent his arrow right in among the other four.\n\nAs the gongs and drums broke out, Xiahou Yuan put aside his bow and rode up, saying, \"Is not that a better shot than any of its predecessors?\"\n\nThen came out another from the greens who cried, \"Leave the robe there for me, Xu Huang, to win!\"\n\n\"What can you do that is better than my shot?\" said Xiahou Yuan.\n\n\"That you hit the bull's eye is no great feat. You will see me win the silken robe after all.\"\n\nSo speaking, Xu Huang fitted an arrow to his bow. Then looking around, he aimed at the willow twig from which the robe hung down and shot thereat so true that his arrow cut it through, and the robe fluttered to the ground. At once Xu Huang dashed along, picked up the robe and slipped it on. Then riding swiftly to the terrace, he thanked the Prime Minister. No one present could withhold unstinted praise, and Xu Huang was turning to ride away.\n\nBut another green clad general leaped out, saying, \"Where would you go with that robe? Quickly leave it for me!\"\n\nAll eyes turned to this man who was Xu Chu.\n\nXu Huang cried, \"The robe has already been adjudged to me. Would you dare take it by forces\"\n\nXu Chu made no reply but galloped up to snatch the robe. As Xu Chu's horse drew near, Xu Huang struck at his rival a blow with his bow. But Xu Chu seized the bow with one hand while with the other he simply lifted his opponent out of his seat. Wherefore Xu Huang let go the bow and the next moment lay sprawling on the ground. Xu Chu slipped out of the saddle too, and they began to pommel each other with their fists. Cao Cao sent one to separate them. But in the struggle, the robe had been torn and soiled. Cao Cao called the angry rivals before him; and they came, one darting fierce looks of hate, the other grinding his teeth with rage.\n\n\"Never mind the robe. I see only your magnificent courage,\" said Cao Cao smiling. \"What does a robe more or less matter?\"\n\nWhereupon Cao Cao called the generals to him one by one, and to each he presented a robe of Xichuan silk. They thanked him for the generous gifts, and he then commanded them to take their seats in due order. Then to the strains of a band of music, wherein each performer vied with all the others, the naval and military officers took their places. Civil officers of repute and generals of renown drank one to another, and hearty felicitations were exchanged.\n\nCao Cao looked around to those about him, saying, \"Since the military officers have competed in mounted archery for our enjoyment and displayed their boldness and their skill, you, Gentlemen Scholars, stuffed full of learning as you are, can surely mount the terrace and present some complimentary odes to make the occasion a perfect success.\"\n\n\"We are most willing to obey your commands,\" they replied, all bowing low.\n\nAt that time there was a band of four scholars named Wang Lang, Zhong Yao, Wang Can, and Chen Lin, and each of them presented a poem. Every poem sang the praises of Cao Cao's valuable services and great merits and said he was worthy to receive the highest trust of all.\n\nWhen Cao Cao had read them, he laughed, saying, \"You gentlemen are really too flattering. As a fact I am but an ignoramus who began life with a simple bachelor's degree and recommendations for filial devotion. And when the troubles began, I built for myself a little cottage in the country near Qiao, where I could study in spring and summer and spend the rest of the year in hunting till the empire was once more tranquil and I could emerge and take office.\n\n\"To my surprise, I was chosen for a small military office which changed my intentions, and I determined to repress the rebellion and so make a name for myself. I thought that I might win an inscription on my tomb to the effect that it covered the remains of the 'Lord Cao Cao Who Restores Order in the West.' That would have been ample for a life's work. I recall now how I destroyed Dong Zhuo and smote the Yellow Scarves; then I made away with Yuan Shu and broke the power of Lu Bu; next I exterminated Yuan Shao; and at the death of Liu Biao, I had subdued the whole empire.\n\n\"As a minister of state I have attained the topmost pinnacle of honor, and I have no more to hope for. Were it not for poor me, I know not how many there would be styling themselves emperors and dubbing themselves princes. Certain there be who, seeing my great authority, think I have some ulterior aim. But they are quite wrong. I ever bear in mind what Confucius said of King Wen of Zhou, that he was perfectly virtuous, and this saying is ever engraved on my mind. If I could, I would do away with my armies and retire to my fief with my simple title of Lord of Wuping. Alas! I cannot. I am afraid to lay down my military powers lest I should come to harm. Should I be defeated, the state would totter; and so I may not risk real misfortune for the sake of an empty reputation for kindness. There be some of you who do not know my heart.\"\n\nAs he closed, they all rose and bowed their heads, saying, \"None are your equals, O Prime Minister, not even Duke of Zhou or the great Minister Yi Yin.\"\n\nA poem has been written referring to this:\n\n\u2003Had Duke Zhou, the virtuous, died, while foul-mouthed slander\n\n\u2003was spreading vile rumors;\n\n\u2003Or Wang Mang, the treacherous, while he was noted for the\n\n\u2003deference paid to learned men;\n\n\u2003None would have known their real characters.\n\nAfter this oration Cao Cao drank many cups of wine in quick succession till he became very intoxicated. He bade his servants bring him brush and inkstone so that he might compose a poem.\n\nBut as he was beginning to write, they announced, \"The Marquis of Wu has sent Hua Xin as an envoy and presented a memorial to appoint Liu Bei Imperial Protector of Jingzhou. Sun Quan's sister is now Liu Bei's wife, while on the River Han, the greater part of the nine territories is under Liu Bei's rule.\"\n\nCao Cao was seized with quaking fear at the news and threw the pen on the floor.\n\nCheng Yu said to him, \"O Prime Minister, you have been among fighting soldiers by myriads and in danger from stones and arrows many a time and never quailed. Now the news that Liu Bei has got possession of a small tract of country throws you into a panic. Why is it thus?\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"Liu Bei is a dragon among humans. All his life hitherto he has never found his element, but now that he has obtained Jingzhou: It is as if the dragon, once captive, had escaped to the mighty deep. There is good reason for me to quake with fear.\"\n\n\"Do you know the reason of the coming of Hua Xin?\" said Cheng Yu.\n\n\"No, I know not,\" said the Prime Minister.\n\n\"Liu Bei is Sun Quan's one terror, and Sun Quan would attack Liu Bei were it not for you, O Prime Minister. Sun Quan feels you would fall upon him while he was smiting his enemy. Wherefore he has taken this means of calming Liu Bei's suspicions and fears and at the same time directing your enmity toward Liu Bei and from himself.\"\n\nCao Cao nodded. \"Yes,\" he said.\n\nCheng Yu continued, \"Now this is my plan to set Sun Quan and Liu Bei at one another and give you the opportunity to destroy both. It can be done easily.\"\n\n\"What is your plan?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"The one prop of the South Land is Zhou Yu. Remove it by memorializing that Zhou Yu be appointed Governor of Nanjun. Then get Cheng Pu made Governor of Jiangxia, and cause the Emperor to retain this Hua Xin in the capital to await some important post. Zhou Yu will assuredly attack Liu Bei, and that will be our chance. Is not the scheme good?\"\n\n\"Friend Cheng Yu, you are a man after my own heart.\"\n\nWherefore Cao Cao summoned the emissary from the South Land and overwhelmed him with gifts. That day was the last of the feastings and merry-makings; and Cao Cao, with all the company, returned to the capital where he forthwith presented a memorial assigning Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu to the governorships of Nanjun and Jiangxia, and Hua Xin was retained at the capital with a post of ministry.\n\nThe messenger bearing the commissions for their new offices went down to the South Land, and both Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu accepted the appointments. Having taken over his command, the former thought all the more of the revenge he contemplated and, to bring matters to a head, he wrote to Sun Quan asking him to send Lu Su and renew the demand for the rendition of Jingzhou.\n\nWherefore Lu Su was summoned, and his master said to him, \"You are the guarantor in the loan of Jingzhou to Liu Bei. He still delays to return it, and how long am I to wait?\"\n\n\"The writing said plainly that the rendition would follow the occupation of Yizhou.\"\n\nSun Quan shouted back, \"Yes, it said so! But so far they have not moved a soldier to the attack. I will not wait till old age has come to us all.\"\n\n\"I will go and inquire?\" said Lu Su.\n\nSo he went down into a ship and sailed to Jingzhou.\n\nMeanwhile Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang were at Jingzhou gathering in supplies from all sides, drilling their troops, and training their armies. From all quarters people of learning flocked to their side. In the midst of this they heard of Lu Su's coming, and Liu Bei asked Zhuge Liang what he thought.\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Just lately Sun Quan concerned himself with getting you appointed Imperial Protector of Jingzhou: That was calculated to inspire Cao Cao with fear. Cao Cao obtained for Zhou Yu the governorship of Nanjun: That was designed to stir up strife between our two houses and set us fighting so that he might accomplish his own ends. This visit of Lu Su means that Zhou Yu, having taken over his new governorship, wishes to force us out of this place.\"\n\n\"Then how shall we reply?\"\n\n\"If Lu Su introduces the subject, you will at once set up loud lamentations. When the sound of lamentation is at its height, I will appear and talk over your visitor.\"\n\nThus they planned, and Lu Su was duly received with all honor.\n\nWhen the salutations were over and host and guest were about to be seated, Lu Su said, \"Sir, now that you are the husband of a daughter of Wu, you have become my lord, and I dare not sit in your presence.\"\n\nLiu Bei laughed. \"You are an old friend,\" said he. \"Why this excessive humility?\"\n\nSo Lu Su took his seat. And when tea had been served, the guest said, \"I have come at the order of my master to discuss the subject of Jingzhou. You, O Imperial Uncle, have had the use of the place for a long time. Now that your two houses are allied by marriage, there should be the most friendly relations between you two, and you should hand it back to my master.\"\n\nAt this Liu Bei covered his face and began to cry.\n\n\"What is the matter?\" asked the guest.\n\nLiu Bei only wept the more bitterly.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang came in from behind a screen, saying, \"I have been listening. Do you know why my lord weeps so bitterly?\"\n\n\"Really I know not.\"\n\n\"But it is easy to see. When my lord got the temporary occupation of Jingzhou, he gave the promise to return it when he had got the West River Land. But reflect. Liu Zhang of Yizhou is my lord's younger brother, and both of them are blood relations of the ruling family. If my lord were to move an army to capture another region, he fears the blame of the ignorant. And if he yields this place before he has another, where could he rest? Yet while he retains this place, it seems to shame you. The thing is hard on both sides, and that is why he weeps so bitterly.\"\n\nThe close of Zhuge Liang's speech seemed to move Liu Bei to greater grief, for he beat his breast and stamped his feet and wept yet more bitterly.\n\nLu Su attempted to console him, saying, \"Be not so distressed, O Uncle. Let us hear what Zhuge Liang can propose.\"\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I would beg you to return to your master and tell him all. Tell him of this great trouble, and entreat him to let us stay here a little longer.\"\n\n\"But suppose he refuses: What then?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"How can he refuse since he is related by marriage to my master?\" said Zhuge Liang. \"I shall expect to hear glad tidings through you.\"\n\nLu Su was really the first of generous people. Seeing Liu Bei in such distress, he could do no other than consent and say he would do so. Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang both thanked him most cordially, and after a banquet the emissary went down into his ship to return.\n\nOn the way Lu Su called in to see Zhou Yu at Chaisang and told him.\n\nBut Zhou Yu stamped his foot with rage and said, \"My friend, you have been fooled again. Long ago when Liu Bei was dependent on Liu Biao, he always cherished the intention to supplant him. Think you that he really pities Liu Zhang? This sort of evasive policy will certainly cause you much trouble. However, I have a scheme which I think Zhuge Liang will not be able to get the better of. Only you will have to make another journey.\"\n\n\"I should be pleased to hear your fine scheme,\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"Do not go to see our master. Return to Jingzhou and say to Liu Bei that since his family and the Suns are related by marriage, they really form but one house, and since he has qualms about attacking the west, we will do it for him. Thus, the South Land will march an army under this pretext, but really go to Jingzhou, and we shall take him unprepared. The road to the west runs through his city, and we will call upon him for supplies. He will come out to thank the army, and we will assassinate him whereby we shall revenge ourselves and at the same time remove a source of future evil.\"\n\nThis seemed an excellent plan to Lu Su, and he returned at once to Jingzhou. Before receiving him, Liu Bei talked over the matter with his adviser.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"Lu Su has not seen the Marquis of Wu. He has called in at Chaisang, and he and Zhou Yu have decided upon some scheme, which he is to talk you into accepting. However, let him talk. You, my lord, only watch me; and when I nod my head, then you agree to whatever he may propose.\"\n\nLu Su was then admitted and said, \"The Marquis of Wu praises the noble virtue of the Imperial Uncle; and after consultation with his officers, he has determined to take the western country on the Imperial Uncle's behalf and, that done, Jingzhou can be exchanged for it without further delay. However, when the army marches through, it will be expected of you to contribute some necessary supplies.\"\n\nZhuge Liang here nodded his head rapidly, at the same time saying, \"We could hardly have hoped for such kindness.\"\n\nAnd Liu Bei saluted with joined hands and said, \"This is due to your friendly efforts on our behalf.\"\n\n\"When the brave army arrives, we shall certainly come out to meet it and entertain the soldiers,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nLu Su felt great satisfaction and was quite happy at his success. He took his leave and went homeward. But Liu Bei as yet did not understand.\n\n\"What is their intention?\" said he.\n\nHis adviser smiled, saying, \"Zhou Yu's end is very near. The ruse he is now trying would not take in a child.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"This is the ruse known as 'Borrow a Road to Destroy the Host'. Under the pretense of taking the west, they intend to capture this place; and when you go out to compliment the army, you will be seized and they will dash into the city which they hope to find unprepared.\"\n\n\"And what are we to do?\"\n\n\"Have no anxiety, my lord. All we have to do is to prepare a hidden bow to get the fierce tiger; to spread the enticing bait to hook the great leviathan. Wait till Zhou Yu comes. If he is not killed, he will be nine-tenths a corpse. We will call in Zhao Zilong for orders and give him secret instructions, and I will dispose the others.\"\n\nAnd Liu Bei was glad.\n\n\u2003Let Zhou Yu lay what plans he will,\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang anticipates his skill;\n\n\u2003That land of rivers fair bait did look,\n\n\u2003But he forgot the hidden hook.\n\nLu Su hastened back to Zhou Yu to tell him that all was going as he desired and Liu Bei would come out to welcome the army.\n\nZhou Yu laughed with glee, saying, \"At last! Now they will fall into my trap.\"\n\nZhou Yu bade Lu Su prepare a petition for the information of the Marquis, and he ordered Cheng Pu to bring up reinforcements. He himself had nearly recovered from the arrow wound and felt well. He made his dispositions for the advance, appointing Gan Ning Van Leader, Xu Sheng and Ding Feng the Commanders of the body, and Ling Tong and Lu Meng Rear Guards. The army numbered fifty thousand troops, and Zhou Yu marched with the second division. While voyaging in his ship, he was always smiling to think how he was to have Zhuge Liang at last.\n\nAt Xiakou he inquired, \"Is there anyone to welcome the brave army?\"\n\nThey told him, \"The Imperial Uncle has sent Mi Zhu to greet us.\"\n\nAnd Mi Zhu was called.\n\n\"What of the preparations for the army?\" asked Zhou Yu as soon as Mi Zhu came.\n\n\"My master has seen to that. All is prepared,\" said Mi Zhu.\n\n\"Where is the Imperial Uncle?\" asked Zhou Yu.\n\n\"He is at the city of Jingzhou, waiting outside the walls to offer you the cup of greeting.\"\n\n\"This expedition is on your account,\" said Zhou Yu. \"When one undertakes so long a march and such a task, the rewards for the army must be very substantial.\"\n\nHaving got this idea of what Zhou Yu expected, Mi Zhu returned to his own city, while the southern battle ships in close order sailed up the river and took their places along the bank. As they went on, the most perfect tranquillity seemed to reign on all sides. Not a ship was visible anywhere, and no one hindered. Zhou Yu pressed forward till he came quite near Jingzhou, and still the wide river lay calm. But the spies who came back reported two white flags flying on the city walls.\n\nStill not a person was seen, and Zhou Yu began to feel suspicious. He had his ship navigated in shore, and he himself landed on the bank, where he mounted a horse and, with a small army of three thousand veterans under Gan Ning, Xu Sheng, and Ding Feng, traveled along the land road.\n\nBy and bye he came to the city wall. There was no sign of life. Reining in his steed, he bade them challenge the gate.\n\nThen someone from the wall asked, \"Who is there?\"\n\nThe soldiers of the South Land replied, \"The Commander-in-Chief of the South Land, Zhou Yu, in person.\"\n\nImmediately was heard the thud of a club, and the wall became alive with troops all armed. And from the tower came out Zhao Zilong who said, \"Why are you here, General?\"\n\n\"I am going to take the west for you,\" replied Zhou Yu. \"Do you not know?\"\n\n\"The Directing Instructor knows that you want to try the ruse of 'Borrow a Road to Destroy the Host'. And so he stationed me here. And my master bade me say that he and the ruler of the West River Land are both members of the reigning family so that he could not think of such baseness as attacking Yizhou. If you people of the South Land do so, he will be forced to go away into the mountains and become a recluse. He could not bear to lose the confidence of humankind.\"\n\nAt this Zhou Yu turned his horse as if to return. Just then his scouts came up to report: \"Armed bands are moving toward us from all four sides, led by Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Huang Zhong, and Wei Yan. Their number is unknown, but the sound of their tramping shakes the heavens. They say they want to capture the Commander-in-Chief.\"\n\nAt these tidings Zhou Yu's excitement became so intense that he fell to the ground with a great cry, and the old wound reopened.\n\n\u2003The game was now too deep; in vain he sought\n\n\u2003A countermove; his efforts came to nought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Sleeping Dragon Mourns In Chaisang; Young Phoenix Intervenes At Leiyang.\n\nIn the last chapter it was said that a sudden rage filled the bosom of Zhou Yu, and he fell to the ground. Then he was carried to his boat. It only added to his rage and mortification to be told that Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang could be seen on the top of one of the hills apparently feasting and enjoying some music. He lay grinding his teeth with vexation.\n\n\"They say I shall never be able to get Yizhou! But I will \u2014 I swear I will.\"\n\nSoon after Sun Quan's brother Sun Hu arrived, and Zhou Yu told him his vexations.\n\n\"My brother sent me to assist you,\" said Sun Hu.\n\nZhou Yu ordered Sun Hu to press the army forward for Yizhou, and they got to Baqiu. There they stopped, for the scouts reported large forces under Liu Bei's generals \u2014 Liu Feng and Guan Ping \u2014 barring the water route in the Great River. This failure did not make the Commander-in-Chief any calmer.\n\nAbout this time a letter from Zhuge Liang arrived, which ran like this:\n\n\"Since our parting at Chaisang I have thought of you often. Now comes to me a report that you desire to take the West River Land, which I regret to say I consider impossible. The people there are strong, and the country is precipitous and defensible. Imperial Protector Liu Zhang may be weak within, but he is strong enough to defend himself.\n\n\"Now indeed, General, you would go far and you would render great services, yet can anyone foretell the final result? No! Not even Wu Qi the Great General could say for certain, nor could Sun Zi the Famed Strategist be sure of a successful issue. Cao Cao suffered severe defeat at the Red Cliffs. Think you he will ever cease to hope for revenge? Now if you undertake a long expedition, will he not seize the occasion to fall upon the South Land and grind it to powder? Such a deed would be more than I could bear, and I venture to warn you of the possible danger if haply you may condescend to regard it.\"\n\nThe letter made Zhou Yu feel very sorrowful, and he sighed deeply. He called for paper and ink and wrote to the Marquis of Wu.\n\nHaving done this, he said to his assembled officers, \"I have honestly tried to do my best for our house, but my end is at hand. The number of my days is accomplished. You must continue to aid our master till his end shall be achieved\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped, for he had swooned.\n\nSlowly he regained consciousness; and as he looked up to heaven, he sighed heavily, \"O God, since you made Zhou Yu, why did you also create Zhuge Liang?\"\n\n\u2003Soon after he passed away. He was only thirty-six.\n\n\u2003The battle at the Red Cliffs made him famous;\n\n\u2003Though young in years he gained a veteran's reputation.\n\n\u2003Deep feeling, his music declared its intensity;\n\n\u2003Subtle, with excess hospitality he foiled a plot;\n\n\u2003Persuasive, he obtained a large gift of grain from Lu Su;\n\n\u2003Capable, he led an army of millions.\n\n\u2003Baqiu was his deathbed, there his fate met him.\n\n\u2003Sadly indeed they mourned him.\n\nAfter his death his generals sent his dying memorial to the Marquis of Wu, who was most deeply affected and wept aloud at the sad tidings of his death. When Sun Quan opened the letters, he saw that Lu Su was named as the dead general's successor, This is the letter:\n\n\"Possessing but ordinary abilities, there was no reason why I should have been the recipient of your confidence and high office, but I have not spared myself in the leadership of the great army under my command that thereby I might prove my gratitude. Yet none can measure life, and the number of our days is ordained by fate. Before I could achieve even my poor intentions, my feeble body has failed me. I regret it without measure. I die with Cao Cao threatening and our northern borders disturbed, and with Liu Bei in your family as though you were feeding a fierce tiger. None can foretell the fate of the empire in these nervous days of stress and of peculiar anxiety for you.\n\n\"Lu Su is most loyal, careful in all matters and a fitting man to succeed to my office. When a person is near death, his words are wise. If I may haply retain your regard, I may die but I shall not decay.\"\n\n\"Zhou Yu should have been a king's counselor!\" cried Sun Quan, amid his tears. \"He has left me alas! too soon, and whom have I to lean upon? But he recommends Lu Su, and I can do nothing better than take that advice.\"\n\nWhereupon Sun Quan appointed Lu Su to the vacant command, Commander-in-Chief. Sun Quan also saw that the coffin of his beloved general was sent to Chaisang ready for the funeral sacrifices.\n\nThe night of Zhou Yu's death, Zhuge Liang was gazing up at the heavens when he saw a star of a general fall to the earth.\n\n\"Zhou Yu is dead,\" said he with a smile.\n\nAt dawn he sent to tell Liu Bei, who sent people to find out, and they came back to say it was true that Zhou Yu had died.\n\n\"Now that this has come to pass, what should we do?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Lu Su will succeed,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"And I see in the heavens signs of an assembly of generals in the southeast, so I shall go there. The mourning for Zhou Yu will serve as a pretext. I may find some able leaders there to be of help to you.\"\n\n\"I am afraid lest the generals of the South Land harm you,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"While Zhou Yu lived, I did not fear. Is there anything to dread now that he is gone?\"\n\nHowever, Zhuge Liang took Zhao Zilong as commander of his escort when he embarked for Baqiu, and on the road he heard of Lu Su's succession to the late general's post. As the coffin of Zhou Yu had been sent to Chaisang, Zhuge Liang continued his journey thither and, on landing, was kindly received by Lu Su. The officers of the South Land did not conceal their enmity, but the sight of the redoubtable Zhao Zilong, always close at hand, kept them from trying to hurt Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe officers brought by Zhuge Liang were arranged in order before the bier, and he himself poured the libation. Then he knelt and read this threnody:\n\n\"Alas, Zhou Yu! Hapless are you in your early death. Length of days is in the hands of God, yet do humans suffer and my heart is deeply grieved for you. I pour this libation that your spirit may enjoy its fragrance.\n\n\"I lament you. I lament your younger days passed in the companionship of Sun Ce, when, preferring eternal principles to material wealth, you abode in a humble cottage.\n\n\"I lament your ripe strength when you guarded distant Baqiu, putting fear into the heart of Liu Biao, destroying rebels, and ensuring safety.\n\n\"I lament the grace of your manhood. Married to a fair maid of the Qiao family, son-in-law of a great minister, you were such as would add luster to the Han Court.\n\n\"I lament your resolute purpose when you opposed the pledge-giving to Cao Cao. As in the beginning your wings drooped not, so in the end your pinions spread wide.\n\n\"I lament your abandon, when your false friend, Jiang Gan, came to you at Poyang Lake. There you manifested your lofty ideals.\n\n\"I lament your magnificent talents, proved in civil administration as in military science. With fire attacking the fierce enemy at the Red Cliffs, you brought his strength to weakness.\n\n\"I recall you as you were but yesterday, bold and successful, and I weep your untimely death. Prostrate I weep tears of sorrow. Loyal and upright in heart, noble and spiritual by nature, your life has been but three decades, but your fame will endure for ages.\n\n\"I mourn for your affection. My bowels writhe with sorrow, and my deep-seated sadness will never cease. The very heavens are darkened; the army is sad; your lord sheds tears; your friends weep floods.\n\n\"Scanty of ability am I, yet even of me you begged plans and sought schemes to aid the South Land to repulse Cao Cao, to restore the Hans and comfort the Lius. But with you as the firm corner stone and your perfect dispositions, could the final result cause any anxiety?\n\n\"Alas, my friend! The quick and the dead are ever separate; they mingle never. If in the deep shades spirits have understanding, you now read my inmost heart, yet hereafter there will be none on earth to comprehend.\n\n\"Alas, the pain!\n\n\"Deign to accept this my sacrifice.\"\n\nThe sacrifice finished, Zhuge Liang bowed to the ground and keened while his tears gushed forth in floods. He was deeply moved.\n\nThose who stood on guard by the bier said one to another, \"People lied when they said these two were enemies. Look at the sincerity shown in sacrifice.\"\n\nAnd Lu Su was particularly affected by the display of feeling and thought, \"Plainly Zhuge Liang loved Zhou Yu much, but Zhou Yu was not broadminded enough and would have done Zhuge Liang to death.\"\n\n\u2003Before Sleeping Dragon emerged from his Nanyang retreat,\n\n\u2003A brilliant man had descended upon this earth;\n\n\u2003Since, O Azure Heaven, ye made Zhou Yu,\n\n\u2003Why needed Yellow Earth produce a Zhuge Liang?\n\nLu Su gave a banquet for Zhuge Liang after which the guest left.\n\nJust as Zhuge Liang was embarking, his arm was clutched by a person in Daoist dress who said with a smile, \"You exasperated literally to death the man whose body lies up there. To come here as a mourner is an open insult to the South Land. It is as good as to say they have no other left.\"\n\nZhuge Liang turned to look, and he saw it was no other than Pang Tong, or the Young Phoenix. Then Zhuge Liang laughed in his turn, and they two hand in hand went down into the ship, where they talked heart to heart for a long time.\n\nBefore leaving, Zhuge Liang gave his friend a letter and said, \"I do not think that Sun Quan will use you as you merit. If you find life here distasteful, then you may come to Jingzhou and help to support my master. He is liberal and virtuous and will not disdain what you have spent your life in learning.\"\n\nThen they parted, and Zhuge Liang went alone to Jingzhou.\n\nLu Su had the coffin of Zhou Yu taken to Wuhu, where Sun Quan received it with sacrifices and lamentations. The dead leader was buried in his native place.\n\nZhou Yu's family consisted of two sons and a daughter, the children being named Zhou Xun, Zhou Yin, and Zhou Ying. Sun Quan treated them with generosity and tenderness.\n\nLu Su was not satisfied that he was the fittest successor to his late chief and said, \"Zhou Yu was not right in recommending me, for I have not the requisite ability and am unfitted for this post. But I can commend to you a certain able man, conversant with all knowledge, and a most capable strategist, not inferior to the old Guan Zhong or Yue Yi, one whose plans are as good as those of Sun Zi and Wu Qi, the most famous masters of the Art of War. Zhou Yu often took his advice, and Zhuge Liang believes in him. And he is at hand.\"\n\nThis was good news for Sun Quan, who asked the man's name, and when he heard it was Pang Tong or Young Phoenix, he replied, \"Yes. I know him by reputation. Let him come.\"\n\nWhereupon Pang Tong was invited to the palace and introduced. The formal salutations over, Sun Quan was disappointed with the man's appearance, which was indeed extraordinary. Pang Tong had bushy eyebrows, a turned-up nose, and a stubby beard. So Sun Quan was prejudiced against Pang Tong.\n\n\"What have you studied,\" asked Sun Quan, \"and what are you master of?\"\n\nPang Tong replied, \"One must not be narrow and obstinate; one must change with circumstances.\"\n\n\"How does your learning compare with that of Zhou Yu?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"My learning is not to be compared with his in the least. Mine is far greater.\"\n\nNow Sun Quan had always loved his late general, and he could not bear to hear him disparaged. This speech of Pang Tong only increased his dislike.\n\nSo Sun Quan said, \"You may retire, Sir. I will send for you when I can employ you.\"\n\nPang Tong uttered one long sigh and went away.\n\nWhen he had gone, Lu Su said, \"My lord, why not employ him?\"\n\n\"What good would result? He is just one of those mad fellows.\"\n\n\"He did good service at the Red Cliffs fight, however, for it was he who got Cao Cao to chain his ships together.\"\n\n\"It was simply that Cao Cao wished to chain his ships together. No credit was due to this fellow. In any case I give you my word that I will not employ him. That much is certain.\"\n\nLu Su went out and explained to Pang Tong that the failure was not due to lack of recommendation, but simply a whim of Sun Quan, and he must put up with it. The disappointed suitor hung his head and sighed many times without speaking.\n\n\"I fear you are doomed to constant disappointment here,\" said Lu Su. \"There is nothing you can hope for, eh?\"\n\nBut still Pang Tong was silent.\n\n\"With your wonderful gifts, of course you will be successful whithersoever you may go. You may take my word for that. But to whom will you go?\"\n\n\"I think I will join Cao Cao,\" said Pang Tong suddenly.\n\n\"That would be hinging a gleaming pearl into darkness. Rather go to Liu Bei, who would appreciate you and employ you fittingly.\"\n\n\"The truth is that I have been thinking of this for a long time,\" said Pang Tong. \"I was only joking just now.\"\n\n\"I will give you a letter to Liu Bei. And if you go to him, you must try to maintain peace between him and my lord and get them to act together against Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"That has been the one desire of my life.\"\n\nPang Tong took the letter offered by Lu Su and soon made his way to Jingzhou City. He arrived at a moment that Zhuge Liang was absent on an inspection journey, but the doorkeeper announced him and said he had come to throw in his lot with Liu Bei. He was received, for he was no stranger in name.\n\nWhen Pang Tong was admitted, he made the ordinary salutation but did not make an obeisance and this, coupled with his ugly face, did not please his host.\n\n\"You have come a long and arduous journey,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nAt this point the suitor should have produced his letters from Zhuge Liang and Lu Su, but did not.\n\nInstead he replied, \"I hear, O Imperial Uncle, that you are welcoming the wise and receiving scholars, wherefore I have come to join your service.\"\n\n\"The country is decently peaceful now, and unfortunately there is no office vacant. But away to the northeast there is a small magistracy, Leiyang, which needs a chief. I can offer you that post until there should be something more fitting.\"\n\nPang Tong thought this rather poor welcome for a person of his talent. But his friend was absent, so he could do nothing but control his annoyance and accept. He took his leave and started.\n\nBut when he arrived at his post, he paid no attention to business at all. He gave himself up entirely to dissipation. The taxes were not collected nor were lawsuits decided.\n\nNews of this reaching Liu Bei, who was angry and said, \"Here is this stiff-necked pedant throwing my administration into disorder.\"\n\nSo Liu Bei sent Zhang Fei to the county with orders to make a general inspection of the whole county and look into any irregularities and disorders. But as Liu Bei thought there might be some tact needed, Sun Qian was also sent as coadjutor.\n\nIn due course the inquisitors arrived at Leiyang, where they were received by the officials and welcomed by the people at the boundary. But the Magistrate did not appear.\n\n\"Where is the Magistrate?\" asked Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Ever since his arrival, a hundred days ago and more, he has attended to no business, but spends his days from morn to night in wine-bobbing and is always intoxicated. Just now he is sleeping off a debauch and is not yet risen.\"\n\nThis raised Zhang Fei's choler, and he would have dismissed the offender forthwith had not his colleague said, \"Pang Tong is a man of great ability, and it would be wrong to deal with him thus summarily. Let us inquire into it. If he is really so guilty, we will punish his offense.\"\n\nSo they went to the magistracy, took their seats in the Hall of Justice, and summoned the Magistrate before them. He came with dress all disordered and still under the influence of wine.\n\n\"My brother took you for a decent person,\" said Zhang Fei, angrily, \"and sent you here as magistrate. How dare you throw the affairs of the county into disorder?\"\n\n\"Do you think I have done as you say, General?\" said Pang Tong. \"What affairs have I disordered?\"\n\n\"You have been here over a hundred days and spent the whole time in dissipation. Is not that disorderly?\"\n\n\"Where would be the difficulty in dealing with the business of a trifling county like this? I pray you, General, sit down for a while till I have settled the cases.\"\n\nThereupon Pang Tong bade the clerks bring in all the arrears and he would settle them at once. So they brought in the piles of papers and ordered the suitors to appear. They came and knelt in the hall while the magistrate, brush in hand, noted this and minuted that, all the while listening to the pleadings. Soon all the difficulties and disputes were adjusted, and never a mistake was made, as the satisfied bows of the people proved. By midday the whole of the cases were disposed of, and the arrears of the hundred days settled and decided.\n\nThis done, the Magistrate threw aside his pen and turned to the inquisitors, saying, \"Where is the disorder? When I can take on Cao Cao and Sun Quan as easily as I can read this paper, what attention from me is needed for the business of this paltry place?\"\n\nZhang Fei was astonished at the man's ability, rose from his seat, and crossed over, saying, \"You are indeed a marvel, Master. I have not treated you respectfully enough, but now I shall commend you to my brother with all my might.\"\n\nThen Pang Tong drew forth Lu Su's letter and showed it to Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Why did you not show this to my brother when you first saw him?\" asked Zhang Fei.\n\n\"If I had had a chance, I would have done so. But is it likely that one would just take advantage of a letter of commendation to make a visit?\"\n\nZhang Fei turned to his colleague and said, \"You just saved a wise man for us.\"\n\nSun Qian and Zhang Fei left the magistracy and returned to Liu Bei to whom they related what had happened.\n\nLiu Bei then seemed to be conscious of his error and said, \"I have been wrong. I have behaved unjustly to a learned person.\"\n\nZhang Fei then gave his brother the letter in which Lu Su had recommended Pang Tong. Opening it he read:\n\n\"Pang Tong is not the sort of person to be met with in any day's march. Employ him in some capacity where extra ordinary talent is required, and his powers will declare themselves. Beware of judging him by his looks, or you may lose the advantage of his abilities, and some other will gain him. This would be a misfortune.\"\n\nWhile Liu Bei was feeling cast down at the mistake he had made, as shown by the letter, they announced the return of Zhuge Liang.\n\nSoon Zhuge Liang entered the hall, and the first question he put after the formal salutations was: \"Is Directing-Instructor Pang Tong quite well?\"\n\n\"He is in charge of Leiyang,\" replied Liu Bei, \"where he is given to wine and neglects his business.\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughed, saying, \"My friend Pang Tong has extraordinary abilities and ten times my knowledge. I gave him a letter for you, my lord. Did he present it?\"\n\n\"This very day I have received a letter, but from Lu Su. I have had no letter written by you.\"\n\n\"When a person of transcendent abilities is sent to a paltry post, he always turns to wine out of simple ennui,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"If it had not been for what my brother said, I should have lost a great scholar,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThen he lost no time, but sent Zhang Fei off to the northeast to request Pang Tong to come to Jingzhou City. When he arrived, Liu Bei went out to meet him and at the foot of the steps asked pardon for his mistake. Then Pang Tong produced the letter that Zhuge Liang had given him. What Liu Bei read therein was this:\n\n\"As soon as the Young Phoenix shall arrive, he should be given an important post.\"\n\nLiu Bei rejoiced indeed as he read it, and he said, \"Water Mirror said of the two men, Sleeping Dragon and Young Phoenix, that any man who obtained the help of either of them could restore the empire when he would. As I now have them both, surely the Hans will rise again.\"\n\nThen he appointed Pang Tong as Vice Directing Instructor and General, and the two strategists began training the army for its work of subjugation.\n\nNews of these doings came to the capital, Xuchang, and Cao Cao was told of Liu Bei's two strategists and of the army in training and the stores accumulating and the league between his two chief enemies. And he knew that he had to expect an attack sooner or later. So he summoned his strategists to a council for a new campaign.\n\nSaid Xun Yu, \"Sun Quan should be first attacked, because of the recent death of their ablest general Zhou Yu. Liu Bei will follow.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"If I go on such a distant expedition, Ma Teng will fall upon the capital. While I was at the Red Cliffs, there were sinister rumors of this, and I must guard against it.\"\n\nXun Yu said, \"The best thing that occurs to me is to obtain for Ma Teng the title of General Who Subdues the South and send him against the South Land. Thus he can be enticed to the capital and got rid of. Then you can have no fear of marching southward.\"\n\nCao Cao approved, and soon Ma Teng was summoned from Xiliang, a frontier territory in the west.\n\nMa Teng was a descendant of the famous leader Ma Yuan, General Who Quells the Waves. His father's name was Ma Sui. Ma Sui had held a minor magistracy in Tianshui in the reign of Emperor Huan, but had lost it and drifted west into the West Valley Land where he got amongst the Qiang Peoples, one of whose women he took to wife. She bore him a son, Ma Teng. Ma Teng was rather over the common height, and bold-looking. He was of a mild disposition and very popular. But in the reign of Emperor Ling, these Qiangs made trouble, and then Ma Teng raised a force and put it down. For his services he received the tile of General Who Corrects the West. He and Han Sui, who was known as Commander Who Guards the West, were pledged brothers.\n\nOn receipt of the summons to the capital, Ma Teng took his eldest son, Ma Chao, into his confidence and told him some of his former life.\n\n\"When Dong Cheng got the Girdle Edict from the Emperor, we formed a society, of which Liu Bei was one, pledged to put down rebellion. However, we accomplished nothing, for Dong Cheng was put to death and Liu Bei was unfortunate, while I escaped to the west. However, I hear that Liu Bei now holds Jingzhou, and I am inclined to carry out the plan we made so long ago. But here I am summoned by Cao Cao and what is to be done?\"\n\nMa Chao replied, \"Cao Cao has the command of the Emperor to call you. If you do not go, that will mean disobeying an imperial command and you will be punished. Obey the summons in so far as to go to the capital, where you may be able to arrange to carry out your original intention.\"\n\nBut Ma Teng's nephew, Ma Dai, held other opinions and opposed this.\n\nSaid he, \"Cao Cao's designs are unfathomable. If you go, Uncle, I fear you will suffer.\"\n\n\"Let me lead the army against the capital,\" said Ma Chao. \"Can we not purge the empire of evil?\"\n\nBut his father said, \"You must take command of the Qiang troops for the defense of our territory here. I will take with me your two brothers and your cousin. When Cao Cao knows that you have the Qiangs at your call and that Han Sui is prepared to assist, he will hardly dare to work any harm to me.\"\n\n\"Father, if you must go, be careful not to enter the city till you know exactly what plots and machinations are afoot.\"\n\n\"I will certainly take great care, so do not be too anxious,\" said the father.\n\nThe order of march was prepared. The Governor took five thousand troops, with his two sons \u2014 Ma Xiu and Ma Tie \u2014 as Leaders of the Van and his nephew Ma Dai bringing up the rear. These set out along the tortuous road to the capital. At seven miles distance from Xuchang they camped.\n\nWhen Cao Cao heard of Ma Teng's arrival, he called to him Minister Huang Kui and said to him, \"Ma Teng is to be sent against the south, and I shall send you as Adviser. You are first to go to his camp and express my congratulations on his arrival and say that as Xiliang is so distant and transport very difficult, he is not to take too large an army of his own. I will send a large force. Also tell him to come in soon for audience of the Emperor. I will send him supplies.\"\n\nWith these instructions Huang Kui went to Ma Teng, who brought out wine and entertained him well.\n\nIn his cups the messenger grew confidential and said, \"My father perished at the hands of Li Jue and Guo Si, and I have always nourished resentment. Now there is another rebel in power wronging our Prince.\"\n\n\"Who is that?\" asked Ma Teng.\n\n\"The wrong doer is that rebel Cao Cao, of course. Do you mean to say you do not know?\"\n\nHowever, Ma Teng was careful. He thought it very likely that these words were but a trap for him, so he pretended to be greatly shocked and begged his guest to be careful lest he be overheard.\n\nBut Huang Kui cared not, shouting, \"Then you have quite forgotten the Girdle Edict, eh?\"\n\nMa Teng began to see Huang Kui was sincere and presently became confidential in turn and told his guest all his schemes.\n\n\"Cao Cao wants you to go in to audience. There is no good intention there. Do not go,\" said Huang Kui. \"You lead your army up close to the city and get Cao Cao to come and review them. When he comes, assassinate him.\"\n\nThey two settled how this plan could be worked out and the messenger, still hot with anger and excitement, returned to his home.\n\nSeeing Huang Kui so disturbed in mind, his wife, Lady Zhi, asked him what was wrong. But he would tell her nothing. However, he had a concubine, Li Chunxiang. And it happened that she had an intrigue with the wife's younger brother, Miao Ze, who much desired to marry her. The concubine who also saw her lord's displeasure, spoke of it to her paramour, and he told her she could probably draw from him what was wrong by a leading question.\n\n\"Ask him what is the truth about two men, Liu Bei and Cao Cao? Who is the wicked one,\" suggested Miao Ze.\n\nThat evening Huang Kui went to the apartments of his concubine, and she presently put the question proposed by her lover.\n\nHer lord, still rather intoxicated, said, \"You are not an official; still you know right from wrong as well as I. My enemy, and the man I would slay if I could, is Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"But why? And if you wish to slay him, why do you not do something?\" said she.\n\n\"I have done something. I have settled with General Ma Teng to assassinate Cao Cao at the review.\"\n\nLi Chunxiang of course told her paramour, who told Cao Cao, and Cao Cao made his arrangements to defeat the scheme. He called up his trusty generals and gave them orders for the morrow and, this done, he arrested Huang Kui and all his household.\n\nNext day, as arranged, Ma Teng and his western troops came close up to the wall, and among the flags and banners he discerned that of the Prime Minister himself, whereby he knew that Cao Cao would hold the review in person.\n\nSo Ma Teng rode forward. Suddenly a bomb exploded, and at this signal there appeared bodies of armed troops in four directions: Right and left, front and rear, led by Xu Chu, Xiahou Yuan, Cao Hong, and Xu Huang. The western forces were quite hemmed in. Ma Teng then saw the mistake he had made, and he and his two sons fought valiantly to free themselves from the trap. The youngest son \u2014 Ma Tie \u2014 soon fell in the volleys of arrows. Father and son rode this way and that, seeking a way out, but failed on every side. Both were sorely wounded; and when their steeds fell from their many arrow wounds, both were captured.\n\nMa Teng, Ma Xiu, and the miserable Huang Kui who could not keep his counsel, were brought before Cao Cao. Huang Kui loudly protested his innocence. Cao Cao then called in the witness Miao Ze.\n\n\"That worthless scoundrel has spoiled all my plans!\" cried Ma Teng against Huang Kui. \"Now I cannot slay the rebel and purge my country. But it is the will of God!\"\n\nFather and son were dragged forth, the father uttering volleys of abuse all the time. And so three men were executed in this adventure.\n\n\u2003The sons and father share one niche of fame,\n\n\u2003For purest loyalty their praise the same.\n\n\u2003To their own hurt the rebels they withstood,\n\n\u2003Content to die to make their pledges good.\n\n\u2003In blood the solemn oath they did indite\n\n\u2003To slay the wicked and preserve the right.\n\n\u2003A worthy father's worthy sons by western bride,\n\n\u2003Old Waves Queller's name his grandson glorified.\n\n\"I desire no other reward than Li Chunxiang as wife,\" said the betrayer, Miao Ze.\n\nCao Cao smiled and said, \"For her sake then you have brought a whole household to death. What advantage would there be in preserving such a miscreant?\"\n\nSo Cao Cao bade the executioners put both the traitor and the woman to death, with Huang Kui's household. Those who saw the fearful vengeance sighed at its cruelty.\n\n\u2003Through passion base a loyal man was slain,\n\n\u2003And she who shared his passion shared his fate;\n\n\u2003The man they served was pitiless in hate,\n\n\u2003And thus a mean man's treachery was vain.\n\nCao Cao did not desire to rouse the rancor of the army of Xiliang, wherefore he proclaimed to them, \"The intended treachery of your leaders was theirs alone.\"\n\nHowever, he sent to secure the passes so that Ma Dai should not escape.\n\nAs has been said, Ma Dai led the rearguard. Before long the fugitives from the main army came and told him what had occurred at the capital. This frightened him so much that he abandoned his army and escaped disguised as a trader.\n\nHaving slain Ma Teng, Cao Cao decided to set out on his expedition to the south. But then came the disquieting news of the military preparations of Liu Bei, whose objective was said to be the west.\n\nThis caused Cao Cao alarm, for he said, \"The bird's wings will be fully grown if he obtains possession of the West River Land.\"\n\nAs Cao Cao recognized the difficulty, from among his counselors there arose one who said, \"I know how to prevent Liu Bei and Sun Quan from helping each other, and both the south and the west will be yours.\"\n\n\u2003Chill death struck down the heroes of the west,\n\n\u2003Calamity approached the bold leaders of the south." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Ma Chao Launches An Expedition For Revenge; Cao Cao Flees The Field In Disguise.\n\n\"What is this good plan of yours, friend Chen Qun?\" asked Cao Cao of the speaker, who was a civilian in his service.\n\nChen Qun replied, \"Your two principal enemies \u2014 Liu Bei and Sun Quan \u2014 are now firm allies, close as lips and teeth. But Liu Bei wants the West River Land and if you, O Prime Minister, send a mighty host against Sun Quan, Sun Quan must ask help from his friend Liu Bei, who, having his heart set on the west, will refuse it. Sun Quan without this aid cannot stand and will become so weak that the South Land will be yours for the taking, and Jingzhou will follow in a tap of the drum. The west will follow and the whole empire is yours.\"\n\n\"Those are my thoughts put into words,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nThe expeditionary force of three hundred thousand troops set out for the south. Zhang Liao of Hefei was in command of the supply department.\n\nSun Quan speedily heard of the move and called in his advisers.\n\nAt the council Zhang Zhao said, \"Let us send to Lu Su to tell him to write at once to Liu Bei that he may help us. They are good friends, and Liu Bei will certainly respond favorably. Beside, since Liu Bei and our lord are now connected by marriage, there is no risk of refusal. With the support of Liu Bei, there is no danger to our country.\"\n\nSun Quan listened to this advice and sent to Lu Su bidding him to ask help from Liu Bei. Accordingly, on receipt of this command, a letter was written to Liu Bei, who after reading it, retained the messenger at the guest-house till Zhuge Liang could arrive from Nanjun. As soon as he arrived, Liu Bei showed him the letter.\n\nThe adviser said, \"It is not necessary for the South Land's troops to move, nor need we send ours. I can prevent Cao Cao from even daring to look in the southeast direction.\"\n\nSo Zhuge Liang wrote a reply telling Lu Su:\n\n\"You can lay aside all anxiety and rest content, for if the northern army approach, they will be forced backward at once.\"\n\nThe letter was given to the messenger, and then Liu Bei asked his adviser, \"How could the Instructor hope to roll back the huge army of three hundred thousand troops that Cao Cao is preparing to bring south?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Cao Cao's chief fear is Xiliang. Now just lately he has slain Ma Teng and his sons as well, and the people of Xiliang are grinding their teeth with rage. Now you must write and ask Ma Chao to march through the pass, and Cao Cao will have no leisure to think of any expedition to the south.\"\n\nThe letter was written, sent by a trusty hand, and duly delivered.\n\nNow Ma Chao was in Xiliang. One night he had a vision. In his dream he saw himself lying out on a snowy plain and many tigers were coming up and biting him. He awoke in a fright and began to wonder what the dream portended. Failing to explain it, he told the dream to his officers. One of them ventured to say the portent was evil. This was General Pang De.\n\n\"What is your interpretation?\" asked Ma Chao.\n\n\"Meeting with tigers on a snowy plain is a very inauspicious subject to dream about. Assuredly our old General is in trouble at the capital.\"\n\nAnd at that moment one entered in hot haste and cast himself on the earth, weeping and crying, \"The Uncle and his sons are dead!\"\n\nIt was Ma Dai, the nephew of Ma Teng. And he told the story of the evil: \"Uncle Ma Teng and Huang Kui had planned to assassinate Cao Cao, but the plot had miscarried and become known. Ma Tie fell in the battlefield, Uncle Ma Teng and Ma Xiu were put to death in the market place, and I escaped in disguise.\"\n\nMa Chao fell to the ground and wept bitterly, grinding his teeth with rage at his enemy Cao Cao. They lifted him to his feet and led him away to repose.\n\nSoon after arrived a messenger with a letter from Liu Bei, which read like this:\n\n\"In these latter days of the hapless Hans, when the rebellious and tyrannical Cao Cao monopolizes all power, to the injury of the Emperor and the wretchedness of the people, I, Liu Bei, recall that your father and I were recipients of an edict and we swore to exterminate the recreant. Now your father has suffered death at the hands of the tyrant, and you must avenge him. As the holy books say, you cannot let the same sky cover you nor the same sunshine upon you and your father's murderer. If you can lead your army to attack Cao Cao on one side, I will march my armies to prevent his retreat, and he will be taken, and all his evil crew can be exterminated. Then and thus will your father be avenged, and the Hans can be restored. I might add more, but I will await your reply.\"\n\nWiping his tears, Ma Chao wrote a reply which was returned by the bearer.\n\nThe Xiliang army was then mustered; horse and foot were assembled. Just before the day that had been fixed for the start, the Imperial Protector of Xizhou, Han Sui, sent for Ma Chao, to whom he showed a letter from Cao Cao promising the Lordship of Xiliang as a reward for sending Ma Chao a prisoner to the capital.\n\n\"Bind us both, Uncle, and send us thither! You need not move a single spear,\" said the younger man prostrating himself.\n\nBut Han Sui raised him, saying, \"Your father and I were sworn brothers. Think you I would harm you? Rather will I help if you are going to fight.\"\n\nMa Chao expressed his gratitude. The unhappy bearer of Cao Cao's letter was dragged forth and beheaded. This done, the two took count of their armies. Han Sui had eight divisions under eight commanders \u2014 Yang Qiu, Cheng Yin, Hou Xuan, Liang Xing, Cheng Yi, Li Kan, Ma Wan, and Zhang Han \u2014 all to be relied upon to follow Han Sui. Ma Chao had two leaders, Pang De and Ma Dai. The total force was two hundred thousand troops with which the commanders march to Changan.\n\nThe Governor of that city was Zhong Yao. As soon as he heard what was afoot, he sent a fleet messenger to Cao Cao and prepared for defense. He led his force out into the open plain and arrayed it for battle.\n\nMa Dai, with fifteen thousand, came on first, pouring over the countryside like a flood. Zhong Yao would parley with him, but Ma Dai came forward, sword in hand, to attack. However, the defender did not take the challenge but turned and fled. Ma Dai followed in pursuit. Soon the main body of the invaders arrived, and they surrounded the city, which Zhong Yao set about defending.\n\nChangan had been the capital of the Western Han and so was well fortified with a solid wall and a deep moat, safe against the most terrific attacks. The new armies besieged the city for ten days without success. Then Pang De proposed a plan.\n\nSaid he, \"Since the land about the city is barren and the water bitter, the people must have communication with the country around in order to live. Further they have no fuel. Ten days of siege must have exhausted the supplies in the city, wherefore if we relax for a time \u2014 well, you will see. We shall capture the city without moving a finger.\"\n\n\"Your plan seems excellent,\" said Ma Chao, when he heard what it was.\n\nThereupon they sent orders to each division to retire, and Ma Chao covered the retreat. Next day Zhong Yao went up on the walls to look around and saw that the besiegers had gone. However, suspecting a ruse, he sent out spies, who returned to say the soldiers had really moved away to a distance. Wherefore he felt much relieved and allowed both soldiers and people to go out into the country to cut the much needed firewood and bring in water. The city gates, thrown wide open, were thronged with those passing in and out.\n\nThis continued for five days, and then they heard that Ma Chao's army was returning. A panic ensued. The people rushed into the city, and the gates were once more barred.\n\nThe commander of the west gate was Zhong Jing, brother of Zhong Yao. About the third watch of the night, a torch was seen moving just inside the gate; and when Zhong Jing went to see what was wrong, and was passing the gateway, a man suddenly galloped up and slashed at him with a sword.\n\nAt the same time the attacker shouted, \"Here is Pang De!\"\n\nZhong Jing was taken aback, could not defend himself and was cut down. The gate guard was soon disposed of, the gates were shattered, and the soldiers of Ma Chao and Han Sui came pouring in. Zhong Yao escaped by the opposite gate and left the city in the hands of his enemies. He reached Tong Pass, where he fortified himself and sent news of the misfortune to Cao Cao.\n\nCao Cao threw aside all plans for his expedition to the south when Changan was lost.\n\nHe at once gave orders, \"Cao Hong and Xu Huang are to march your ten thousand troops to Tong Pass to support Zhong Yao. You are to hold the Pass at all costs for ten days, or you will pay for its loss with your heads. After ten days the Pass will be no concern of yours, for I will be there with the main army.\"\n\nCao Ren said, \"Cao Hong short of temper is unfitted to hold the Pass. Everything could happen.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"You will go to reinforce him.\"\n\nCao Hong and Xu Huang made all haste to Tong Pass and took over the command from Zhong Yao. They confined themselves to defense; and though Ma Chao appeared every day and reviled and shouted shameful things of the three generations of Cao Cao's family, the guardians of the Pass remained quiet. But Cao Hong fretted at the daily insults and would have led the defenders out to fight had not his colleague restrained him.\n\n\"Ma Chao only wishes to provoke you to come out, but remember our orders and go not. The Prime Minister has some master plan.\"\n\nSo spoke Xu Huang. But the advice was hard to follow, for Ma Chao's soldiers took turns in reviling the defenders of the Pass, resting neither day nor night. And Xu Huang found it hard to curb his colleague's impatience.\n\nThus it continued till the ninth day. Then the defenders saw that their enemies had turned all their horses loose and were lolling about on the grass and sleeping as if quite fatigued.\n\nThereupon Cao Hong bade them saddle his horse, told off three thousand troops, and soon this small force was dashing down to catch the besiegers unprepared. The soldiers of Ma Chao at once fled, leaving their steeds and throwing aside their weapons. Cao Hong could not resist pursuit and chased them.\n\nAt this time Xu Huang was higher up the road taking in cartloads of grain and forage. But when he heard what his impulsive colleague had done, he hastily got a force together and went to his rescue. He shouted to Cao Hong to return.\n\nSuddenly a great shouting arose near Xu Huang, and out dashed Ma Dai to attack. Both Cao Hong and Xu Huang turned to flee, but the drums rolled and two bodies of troops led by Ma Chao and Pang De came out from behind the hills. Then a battle began which went against Cao Cao's troops from the first. They fell fast, but some of them cut an alley through the press and made for the Pass. Their enemies flooded into the Pass in close pursuit, and they had to abandon their post and flee whither they could find a way.\n\nPang De pursued after Cao Hong, but Cao Ren came to his rescue and they both fled. Ma Chao and Pang De took the Pass.\n\nCao Hong made all haste to his master to give him the evil tidings.\n\n\"When I gave you the limit of ten days, why did you leave the Pass on the ninth?\"\n\n\"Those soldiers from Xiliang hurled every sort of insult at us,\" replied Cao Hong. \"And when I thought I had them unprepared, I took the opportunity. But I fell victim to their cunning.\"\n\n\"You are young and impetuous. But, Xu Huang, you ought to have known.\"\n\nXu Huang said, \"He would not listen, though I told him many times. And that day I was taking in stores in another part of the Pass. As soon as they told me, I felt sure there would be some misfortune, and so I hastened after him, but it was too late.\"\n\nCao Cao was annoyed and ordered Cao Hong to be put to death. But his colleague officers begged that he might be pardoned, and as he had confessed his fault, he was allowed to go free and unpunished.\n\nCao Cao advanced to Tong Pass.\n\nCao Ren said, \"We should establish a strong stockade before attacking.\"\n\nSo trees were felled and a strong stockade built. They made three camps: Cao Ren was in the left; Xiahou Yuan, the right; and Cao Cao himself was in the center one.\n\nSoon after, Cao Cao and all his officers in a body rushed to attack the Pass. They ran against the Xiliang troops posted on two sides, halted and formed their array. This done, Cao Cao rode to the center standard whence he looked at his opponents.\n\nHe saw before him a body of fine troops, everyone with the bearing of a hero. And the leader, Ma Chao, was worthy of them, with his vivid face as if powdered and red lips as if colored, his supple hips and broad shoulders, his deep voice and fierce strength. He was wearing silver helmet and armor and gripping a long spear as he sat there on his charger. Pang De and Ma Dai supported him, and Cao Cao admired Ma Chao in his secret heart.\n\nHowever, Cao Cao urged forward his steed and shouted to Ma Chao, \"Why are you arrayed against the Hans, whom your father and grandfather served faithfully?\"\n\nMa Chao ground his teeth and cursed Cao Cao, \"Rebel! Betrayer of both prince and people! Murderer of my father and brothers! My hate for you is to the death: The same sky shall not continue to cover us, for I will take you captive and satiate my appetite on your living flesh.\"\n\nWith this he set his spear and rode over toward Cao Cao as if to slay him. But Yu Jin came out from behind and engaged Ma Chao in battle. These two fought some half score bouts, and then Yu Jin had to flee. Zhang He, however, took his place and the two warriors exchanged twenty passes. Then Zhang He, too, ran away.\n\nNext to come forth was Li Tong. Ma Chao's martial prowess was now at its height, and he made short work of Li Tong, who went out of the saddle at the first blow. Then Ma Chao flourished his spear at the troops behind him as a signal for them to come on, which they did like a flood. They overwhelmed Cao Cao's forces, and Ma Chao, Pang De, and Ma Dai rode forward to try to capture Cao Cao.\n\nThey came close. Cao Cao heard one of his pursuers shout to another, \"Cao Cao is he in the red dress!\"\n\nSo he hastily tore off his red robe and threw it away. He also heard one say \"Cao Cao is he with the long beard!\"\n\nAt once Cao Cao took the sword that he wore at his side and sawed off some of the beard. Yet again a soldier recognized him and told Ma Chao that Cao Cao had now cut his beard, whereupon the order went forth to capture short beards. And then Cao Cao wrapped the corner of a flag about neck and jowl and fled.\n\n\u2003Panic seized upon the soldiers at Tong Pass;\n\n\u2003Frightened, Cao Cao flung off his brocade robe\n\n\u2003And, terror-stricken, sawed his beard off with a sword.\n\n\u2003The fame of Ma Chao rose even to the sky.\n\nCao Cao had got clear of the battle and was getting calmer. Then again the sound of hoofs fell upon his ears. And on looking round, he perceived Ma Chao quite close. He and those near were panic-stricken, and all scattered for their lives, careless of the fate of their leader.\n\n\"Cao Cao, do not flee!\" cried Ma Chao coming nearer.\n\nThe whip dropped from Cao Cao's nerveless hand as he saw his enemy coming closer and closer. But just as Ma Chao had leveled his spear for a thrust, Cao Cao slipped behind a tree, changed the direction of his flight and so escaped, while Ma Chao struck the tree. He quickly pulled out his spear, but the delay gave the fugitive an advantage, although it did not quite free him from pursuit, for Ma Chao was soon again galloping on his track.\n\nAs they drew near the slope of some hills, a bold general suddenly appeared, who cried, \"Do not hurt my lord!\"\n\nThis was Cao Hong, and he went toward Ma Chao, whirling his sword. Ma Chao was stopped, and this saved Cao Cao's life. Cao Hong and Ma Chao fought half a hundred bouts till Cao Hong began to grow weary and become uncertain of his strokes. And when, shortly after, Xiahou Yuan appeared with some thirty horsemen, Ma Chao found it prudent to retire.\n\nThen Cao Cao was escorted to his camp defended by Cao Ren. He found the camps were still unharmed and the losses had not been great.\n\nAs he sat in his tent, Cao Cao said, \"Had I not spared Cao Hong, I should have fallen at the hands of Ma Chao today.\"\n\nSo he called in his rescuer and rewarded him well.\n\nAnd they got together the scattered troops and strengthened the camp, deepening the moat and raising the rampart. Ma Chao came daily and challenged anyone to combat and abused them all shamefully, but, by the order of the Prime Minister, these insults were treated with silent contempt.\n\n\"Our enemies use long spears,\" said the officers. \"We will meet them with bows and crossbows.\"\n\n\"They may have long spears,\" replied Cao Cao, \"but whether I give battle or not depends on my decision. How can they thrust at us if we do not go out? All you have to do is to take no notice of them, and they will speedily retire.\"\n\nThe officers wondered. They said one to another, \"The Prime Minister came out on this expedition of his own will and was foremost in the fight. Why does he accept defeat so easily?\"\n\nAfter some days the spies reported: \"Ma Chao has been reinforced by twenty thousand Qiangs, the tribespeople beyond the frontier.\"\n\nCao Cao took the news gleefully. His officers asked him why the news pleased him.\n\nHe replied, \"Wait till I have defeated them, and I will explain.\"\n\nThree days later there was a report of further reinforcements, and Cao Cao not only smiled but gave a banquet. His officers ridiculed him in secret.\n\nThen said Cao Cao, \"You gentlemen laugh because I cannot destroy Ma Chao. Well then, can anyone of you propose a plan?\"\n\nThen rose Xu Huang and said, \"O Prime Minister, you have a large force here, and the enemy also accumulate their strength on the Pass. This means that on the west side of Yellow River, behind their back, they are unprepared. If you can get an army secretly across the river and cross the Cattail Ferry, you will cut off their retreat. Then if you can march down and smite them on the banks of River Wei, they can get no reinforcements and must fail.\"\n\n\"What you propose is just what I think,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSo Xu Huang was placed over four thousand troops, and with Zhu Ling, marched to the west of Yellow River and hid in the gullies. They were to wait till Cao Cao crossed the Yellow River so that both could strike together.\n\nThen Cao Cao ordered Cao Hong to prepare boats and rafts. Cao Ren was left in command of the camps. Cao Cao himself marched to the east bank of Yellow River first, and from there attempted to cross to the west bank.\n\nWhen Ma Chao heard of the new military movements, he said, \"I understand. The Pass is left, rafts are being prepared: That means that he is going to cross to the west side and cut off my retreat. I must coast along the river and keep him off. If I can do that, his food will run short within twenty days in the east bank, and that will cause a mutiny. Then I will travel south along the river and attack.\"\n\nHan Sui did not approve this plan. He quoted the military maxim to strike when troops were half over the river.\n\n\"Attack from the south when his army is in the act of crossing, and his army will be drowned in the river,\" said he.\n\n\"Uncle, your words are good,\" replied Ma Chao. And the spies went forth to find out the time of crossing the river.\n\nWhen Cao Cao's preparations were complete and all was ready, he sent three parties of soldiers over the river first. They reached the ferry at the first sign of dawn, and the veterans were sent over first and lay out a camp. Cao Cao and his guard took up station on the east bank to watch the crossing.\n\nVery soon the sentinels reported, \"A general dressed all in white is approaching.\"\n\nEveryone knew it must be Ma Chao. This terrified them and they made a rush to get into the boats. The river bank became a scene of shouting men struggling who could first embark. Cao Cao sat watching and never stirred. He only issued orders to stop the confusion. Meanwhile, the yelling of the troops and the neighing of the horses of the approaching army came nearer and nearer.\n\nSuddenly a general jumped out of one of the boats and shouted to Cao Cao: \"The rebels are close! Get into a boat, O Prime Minister!\"\n\n\"The rebels are near. What matter?\" replied Cao Cao simply to the speaker, who was Xu Chu. And he turned round to look at them.\n\nAs a fact Ma Chao was very close, not a hundred paces away, and Xu Chu laid hold of Cao Cao and dragged him down the bank. The boat had already pushed off and was ten spans from the bank, but Xu Chu took Cao Cao on his back and leaped on board. The boat was small and in danger of being overturned, wherefore Xu Chu drew his sword and chopped away at the hands clinging to the side so that the soldiers fell back into the water.\n\nThe boat went down stream, Xu Chu standing in the prow poling as hard as he could. His master crouched out of sight at his feet.\n\nWhen Ma Chao saw the boat in midstream drifting down with the current, he took his bow and arrows and began to shoot. He also ordered his brave generals to go along the river and shoot so that a shower of arrows fell about the boat. Xu Chu fearing Cao Cao would be wounded, protected him with a saddle which he held over him with his left hand, for Ma Chao's shooting was not in vain. Many of the soldiers working the boat were wounded. Some had fallen overboard, while more lay in the bottom of the boat. The boat itself got out of control and was whirled hither and thither by the current. Xu Chu straddled over the tiller and tried thus to guide the boat, while he poled with one hand and with the other held the protecting saddle over Cao Cao's head.\n\nThen the Magistrate of Weinan, Ding Fei, who from a hill top saw that Cao Cao was very closely pressed, even in danger of his life, drove out from his camp all the cattle and horses there, so that they scattered over the hillside. This was too much for the born Qiang herdsmen of the plains. At sight of the beasts, they left the river and ran off to secure the cattle. Nor had they any inclination to pursue their enemy.\n\nAnd so Cao Cao escaped. As soon as they reached the west bank of Yellow River (which was also the north bank of River Wei), the boat was scuttled. The rumor had spread that Cao Cao was on the river and in danger, so all his officers came to his aid. But he was now safe on shore. Xu Chu's double armor was stuck full of arrows. The officers escorted Cao Cao to the camp where they made their obeisance and expressed the hope that he had not suffered seriously.\n\n\"The rebels very nearly caught me today,\" said he smiling.\n\n\"They would have got across the river, had they not been enticed away by the freeing of the cattle and horses,\" said Xu Chu.\n\n\"Who was it that drew them off?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSomeone who knew told him. Before long Magistrate Ding Fei came in to pay his respects, and Cao Cao thanked him.\n\n\"I should have been a prisoner but for your happy thought,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd the magistrate received a rank of Commander in the army.\n\n\"Though they have gone, yet they will assuredly return tomorrow,\" said Ding Fei. \"You must prepare to repel them.\"\n\n\"My preparations are all made,\" was the reply.\n\nCao Cao ordered his generals to spread themselves along the river bank and throw up mounds as shelters for camps. If they saw the enemy approaching, the soldiers were to be withdrawn from behind the mounds, leaving the ensigns all flying, so as to give the impression that each camp contained a garrison. Along the river they were to dig ditches and put up sheds, thus to entice the enemy there and their army would stumble into the pits and fall easy victims.\n\nMa Chao returned to Han Sui and told him, saying, \"I would have captured Cao Cao, but a certain bold general had taken him on his back and leaped with him into a boat.\"\n\nHan Sui replied, \"I have heard that Cao Cao had a body guard of the bravest and strongest soldiers under the command of Dian Wei and Xu Chu. They are called the Tiger Guard. Now as Dian Wei is dead, the man you saw must have been Xu Chu. He is both brave and powerful and goes by the name of Tiger Lust. You will do well to avoid him.\"\n\n\"I know his name, too,\" said Ma Chao.\n\n\"Cao Cao now means to attack our rear,\" continued Han Sui. \"Let us attack first, before he can establish camps and stockades. If once he can do that, it will be difficult to dislodge him.\"\n\n\"My idea is that we should hold the north bank of River Wei, and prevent him from crossing south.\"\n\n\"Worthy nephew, keep guard here while I go along the bank of the river and fight Cao Cao.\"\n\n\"If you will take Pang De as your Van Leader, I am content,\" said Ma Chao.\n\nSo Han Sui and Pang De, with fifty thousand troops, went away down to the River Wei, while Cao Cao again warned his generals to entice the enemy. Pang De was in advance with a goodly squadron of iron-clad horsemen, and they burst along at full speed. Then there arose a confused shouting as they all went plunging into the ditches prepared for them. Pang De soon leaped out, gained the level ground, and laid about him with all his might. He slew many Cao Cao's soldiers and presently got out of the thick of the fight.\n\nBut Han Sui had also been involved, and Pang De went afoot to try to aid him. On the way he met Cao Yong, a general of Cao Ren. Pang De cut Cao Yong down. Then mounting the dead man's steed, he rode forward fiercely, slaying as he passed. He reached his leader whom he led away southeast. The troops of Cao Cao pursued him, but Ma Chao came with reinforcements and drove them off. Ma Chao rescued a great number, and they continued fighting till evening when they withdrew and mustered their troops. Two commanders, Cheng Yin and Zhang Han, were missing, and a couple of hundred soldiers had been killed when they fell into the pits.\n\nMa Chao and Han Sui discussed what should next be done.\n\n\"If we give the enemy time, he will make himself strong on the north bank. I think we can do no better than to raid his camp tonight,\" said Ma Chao.\n\n\"We must have a force and supports for it,\" said Han Sui.\n\nSo it was decided that Ma Chao should lead the striking force with Pang De and Ma Dai as supports. They would start at nightfall.\n\nNow Cao Cao's troops were on the north bank of River Wei, and he gave his generals orders, saying, \"The rebels will try to surprise us as they are deceived by my not having set up stockades. You will place your soldiers in ambush. At the bomb signal, you will rush out from four directions to capture them.\"\n\nAt nightfall Ma Chao sent out a small scouting party headed by Cheng Yi. Seeing nothing, Cheng Yi penetrated deep into the enemy's lines. Presently, a bomb was exploded. Out leapt the hidden troops, and in a few moments the whole scouting party were killed. Cheng Yi was cut down by the blade of Xiahou Yuan.\n\nBut close at hand came the main army led by Ma Chao, Ma Dai, and Pang De that rushed into the ambush forces.\n\n\u2003Wait for the foe all undismayed.\n\n\u2003Place your men in ambuscade.\n\n\u2003Generals striving to outvie\n\n\u2003Are not beaten easily." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Xu Chu Strips For A Fight With Ma Chao; Cao Cao Writes A Letter To Han Sui.\n\nThe fight narrated in the last chapter lasted till morn when each side drew off, Ma Chao camping on the River Wei, whence he kept up harassing attacks both day and night. Cao Cao, also camped in the bed of the same river, began to construct three floating bridges out of his rafts and boats so as to facilitate communication with the south bank. Cao Ren established a stockade near the camp, which he barricaded with his carts and wagons.\n\nMa Chao determined to destroy this stockade, so his troops collected straw and each man marched with a bundle and took fire with him. Han Sui's forces were to fight. While one party attacked, the other party piled up the straw, which they lit, and soon there was a fierce fire all around. The defenders could do nothing against it, so they abandoned the stockade and ran away. All the transport and bridges were destroyed. It was a great victory for the Xiliang army and gave them the command of the River Wei.\n\nCao Cao was sad at the failure to make good his strong camp and fearful of his defenselessness. Then Xun You proposed a mud wall. So three thousand soldiers were set to build a mud rampart. The enemy seeing this harassed the workmen with perpetual attacks at different points so that the work went slowly. Beside, the soil was very sandy, and the wall would not stand but collapsed as fast as it was built. Cao Cao felt helpless.\n\nIt was the ninth month of the sixteenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 211), and the fierce cold of winter was just coming on. Ominous clouds covered the sky day after day with never a break. One day as Cao Cao sat in his tent, very disheartened, a stranger was announced and was led in. He was an old man who said he had a suggestion to offer. He was tall, as delicate as a crane and as refined as a pine tree. He gave his name as Lou Zibo and said he came from Jingzhao. He was a recluse and a Daoist, his religious name being Plum-Blossom Dreamer.\n\nCao Cao received him with great courtesy, and presently the venerable one began, saying, \"O Prime Minister, you have long been striving to make a camp on the river. Now is your opportunity. Why not begin?\"\n\n\"The soil is too sandy to stand,\" said Cao Cao. \"But if you have some other plan to propose, pray tell me what it is, O Hermit.\"\n\n\"You are more than human, O Prime Minister, in the art of war, and you surely know the times and seasons. It has been overcast for many days, and these clouds foretell a north wind and intense cold. When the wind begins to blow, you should hurry your army to carry up the earth and sprinkle it with water. By dawn your wall will be complete.\"\n\nCao Cao seized upon the suggestion. He offered his aged visitor a reward, but the venerable one would receive nothing.\n\nThat night the wind came down in full force. Every man possible was set to earth-carrying and wetting. As they had no other means of carrying water, they made stuff bags which they filled with water and let out the water over the earth. And so as they piled the earth, they froze it solid with water, and by dawn the wall was finished and stood firm.\n\nWhen his scouts told Ma Chao that the enemy had built a wall, he rode out and saw it. Ma Chao was greatly perplexed and began to suspect help from the gods.\n\nHowever, very soon after, he got his whole army together and sounded an attack. Cao Cao himself rode out of the camp, with only the redoubtable Xu Chu in attendance, and advanced toward the enemy.\n\nFlourishing his whip he called out, \"I, Cao Cao, am here alone, and I beg Ma Chao to come out to parley with me.\"\n\nThereupon Ma Chao rode out, his spear set ready to thrust.\n\n\"You despised me because I had no wall to my camp, but lo! in one single night, God has made me a wall. Do you not think it time to give in?\"\n\nMa Chao was so enraged that he almost rushed at Cao Cao, but he was not too angry to notice the henchman behind him, glaring in angry fashion, who held a gleaming sword in his grip. Ma Chao thought this man could be no other than Xu Chu, so he determined to find out.\n\nWith a flourish of his whip, he said, \"Where is the noble 'Marquis Tiger' that I hear you have in your camp?\"\n\nAt this Xu Chu lifted his sword and roared, \"I am Xu Chu of Qiao!\"\n\nFrom Xu Chu's eyes shot gleams of supernatural light and his attitude was so terror-striking that Ma Chao dared not move. He turned his steed and retired.\n\nCao Cao and his doughty follower returned to their camp. As they two passed between the armies, not a man there but felt a quiver of fear.\n\n\"They know our friend Xu Chu over there as Marquis Tiger,\" said Cao Cao when he returned.\n\nAnd thereafter the soldiers all called Xu Chu by that name.\n\n\"I will capture that fellow Ma Chao tomorrow,\" said Xu Chu.\n\n\"Ma Chao is very bold,\" said his master. \"Be careful!\"\n\n\"I swear to fight him to the death,\" said Xu Chu.\n\nThen Xu Chu sent a written challenge to his enemy saying that the Marquis Tiger challenged Ma Chao to a decisive duel on the morrow.\n\nMa Chao was very angry when he received the letter.\n\n\"Dare he insult me so?\" cried he. Then he wrote his pledge to slay Tiger Lust on the morrow.\n\nNext day both armies moved out and arrayed in order of battle. Ma Chao gave Pang De and Ma Dai command of the two wings, while Han Sui took the center.\n\nMa Chao took up his station in front of the center and shouted, \"Where is the Tiger Lust?\"\n\nCao Cao, who was on horseback by the standard, turned and said, \"Ma Chao is no less bold than Lu Bu!\"\n\nAs he spoke, Xu Chu rode forth whirling his sword and the duel began. They fought over a hundred bouts, and neither had the advantage. But then, their steeds being spent with galloping to and fro, each retired within his own lines and obtained a fresh mount. The contest was renewed, and a hundred more encounters took place, still without victory to either.\n\nSuddenly Xu Chu galloped back to his own side, stripped off his armor, showing his magnificent muscles and, naked as he was, leaped again into the saddle and rode out to continue the battle.\n\nAgain the champions engaged, while both armies stood aghast. Thirty bouts more, and Xu Chu, summoning up all his force, plunged toward Ma Chao with his sword held high to strike. But Ma Chao avoided the stroke and rode in with his spear pointing directly at his opponent's heart. Throwing down his sword, Xu Chu dashed aside the spear, which passed underneath his arm.\n\nThen ensued a struggle for the spear, and Xu Chu by a mighty effort snapped the shaft so that each held one half. Then the duel was continued, each be laboring the other with the pieces of the broken spear.\n\nAt this point Cao Cao began to fear for his champion and so ordered two of his generals, Xiahou Yuan and Cao Hong, to go out and take a hand. At this Pang De and Ma Dai gave the signal to their armored horsemen to attack. They rode in, and a melee began in which Cao Cao's troops were worsted, and the great champion Xu Chu received two arrow wounds in the shoulder. So the troops of Cao Cao retreated to their stockade, Ma Chao following them to the river. Cao Cao's army lost more than half their number.\n\nCao Cao barred his gates and allowed none to go out.\n\nMa Chao went down to the river. When he saw Han Sui, he said, \"I have seen some wicked fighters, but none to match that Xu Chu. He is aptly nicknamed Tiger Lust\"\n\nThinking that by strategy he might get the better of Ma Chao, Cao Cao secretly sent two bodies of troops across the river to the south bank to take up position so that he might attack in front and rear.\n\nOne day from his ramparts, Cao Cao saw Ma Chao and a few horsemen ride close up to the walls and then gallop to and fro like the wind.\n\nAfter gazing at them for a long time, Cao Cao tore off his helmet and dashed it on the ground, saying, \"If that Ma Chao is not killed, may I never know my place of burial!\"\n\nXiahou Yuan heard his master, and his heart burned within him. He cried, \"May I die here at once if I do not destroy that rebel!\"\n\nWithout more ado, Xiahou Yuan flung open the gates and rode out with his company. Cao Cao tried to stop this mad rush, but it was no good. So, fearing Xiahou Yuan might come to grief, Cao Cao rode out after him. At sight of the soldiers of Cao Cao, Ma Chao faced his troops about, extended them in line and, as the enemy approached, dashed forward to the attack. Then noticing Cao Cao himself among them, Ma Chao left Xiahou Yuan and rode straight for Cao Cao. Panic seized Cao Cao and he rode for his life, while his troops were thrown into confusion.\n\nIt was during the pursuit of this portion of the Cao Cao's army that Ma Chao was told of a force of the enemy on the south of River Wei. Realizing the danger, he abandoned the pursuit, called in his forces, and went to his own camp, there to consult with Han Sui.\n\n\"What now? Cao Cao has crossed to the south of the river, and we can be attacked in the rear,\" said Ma Chao.\n\nCommander Li Kan said, \"Then you had better come to an agreement, sacrifice some territory, and make peace. Then both can repose through the winter and await the changes and chances that may come with the spring warmth.\"\n\n\"He is wise,\" said Han Sui, \"and I advise the same.\"\n\nBut Ma Chao hesitated. Others exhorted him to make peace, and at length he agreed. So Yang Qiu and Hou Xuan were sent as messengers of peace to the camp of Cao Cao.\n\n\"You may return. I will send my reply,\" said Cao Cao when they had declared the purport of their mission. And they left.\n\nThen Jia Xu said to Cao Cao, \"What is your opinion, O Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"What is yours?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"War allows deceit, therefore pretend to agree. Then we can try some means of sowing suspicions between Han Sui and Ma Chao so that we may thereby destroy both.\"\n\nCao Cao clapped his hands for very joy, saying, \"That is the best idea of all! Most suitable! You and I agree in our ideas. I was just thinking of that.\"\n\nSo an answer was returned:\n\n\"Let me gradually withdraw my soldiers, and I will give back the land belonging to you on the west of Yellow River.\"\n\nAnd at the same time Cao Cao ordered the construction of a floating bridge to help in the withdrawal to the east side.\n\nWhen the reply arrived, Ma Chao said to Han Sui, \"Although he agrees to peace, yet he is evil and crafty. We must remain prepared against his machinations. Uncle, you and I will take turns in watching Cao Cao and Xu Huang on alternate days. So shall we be safe against his treachery.\"\n\nThey agreed and began the regular alternate watch. Soon Cao Cao got to know what they were doing, and he turned to Jia Xu, saying, \"I am succeeding.\"\n\n\"Who keeps the look-out on the north bank tomorrow?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"Han Sui,\" replied someone.\n\nNext day Cao Cao at the head of a large party of his generals rode out of the camp, and the officers presently spread out right and left, he himself remaining a solitary rider visible in the center. Han Sui did not know that Cao Cao had come out.\n\nPresently Cao Cao called out, \"Do any of you soldiers want to see Cao Cao? Here I am quite alone. I have not four eyes nor a couple of mouths, but I am very knowing.\"\n\nThe soldiers turned pale with fright. Then Cao Cao called up a man and told him to go and see Han Sui and say, \"Sir, the Prime Minister humbly asks you to come and confer with him.\"\n\nThereupon Han Sui went out, and seeing Cao Cao wore no armor, Han Sui also threw off his and rode out clad in a light robe. Each rode up to the other till their horse's heads nearly touched, and there they stood talking.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"Your father and I were granted filial degrees at the same time, and I used to treat him as an uncle. Moreover, you and I set out to serve the court at the same time, too, and yet we have not met for years. How old may you be now, General?\"\n\n\"I am forty,\" replied Han Sui.\n\n\"In those old days in the capital, we were both very young and never thought about middle age. If we could only restore tranquillity to the state, that would be a matter of rejoicing.\"\n\nAfter that they chatted long about old times, but neither said a word on military matters. They gossiped for a couple of hours before they took leave of each other.\n\nIt was not long before someone told Ma Chao of this meeting, and he went over to his ally to ask about it.\n\n\"What was it Cao Cao came out to discuss today?\" said Ma Chao.\n\n\"He just recalled the old days when we were together in the capital.\"\n\n\"Did he say nothing about military matters?\"\n\n\"Not a word; and I could not talk about them alone.\"\n\nMa Chao went out without a word, but he felt suspicious.\n\nWhen Cao Cao returned to his camp, he said to Jia Xu, \"Do you know why I talked with him thus publicly?\"\n\n\"It may be an excellent idea,\" said Jia Xu, \"but it is not sufficient simply to estrange two people. I can improve on it, and we will make them quarrel and even kill each other.\"\n\n\"What is your scheme?\"\n\n\"Ma Chao is brave but not very astute. You write a letter with your own hand to Han Sui himself and put in it some rambling statements about some harm that is going to happen. Then blot it out and write something else. Afterwards you will send it to Han Sui, taking care that Ma Chao shall know all about it. Ma Chao will demand to read the letter, and when he sees that the important part of the letter has been changed, he will think that Han Sui has made the changes lest his secrets should leak out. This will fit into the private talk you had with Han Sui the other day, and the suspicion will grow until it has brought about trouble. I can also secretly corrupt some of Han Sui's subordinates, and get them to widen the breach. Then we can settle Ma Chao.\"\n\n\"The scheme looks excellent,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he wrote the letter as suggested, and then erased and changed it, after which he sealed it securely and sent it across to Han Sui.\n\nSurely enough someone told Ma Chao about the letter, which increased his doubts, and he came to Han Sui's quarters to ask to see it. Han Sui gave it to him, and the erasures and alterations struck Ma Chao at once.\n\n\"Why are all these alterations here?\" asked he.\n\n\"It came like that. I do not know.\"\n\n\"Does anyone send a rough draft like this? It seems to me, Uncle, that you are afraid I shall know something or other too well, and so you have changed the wording.\"\n\n\"It must be that Cao Cao has sealed up the rough draft by mistake.\"\n\n\"I do not think so. He is a careful man and would not make such a mistake. You and I, Uncle, have been allies in trying to slay the rebel. Why are you turning against me now?\"\n\n\"If you doubt my word, I will tell you what you can do. Tomorrow, in full view of the army, I will get Cao Cao to come out and talk. You can hide in behind the ranks ready to kill me if I am false.\"\n\n\"That being so, I shall know that you are true, Uncle.\"\n\nThis arrangement made, next day Han Sui with five generals in his train \u2014 Li Kan, Ma Wan, Yang Qiu, Hou Xuan, and Liang Xing \u2014 rode to the front, while Ma Chao concealed himself behind the great standard. Han Sui sent over to say that he wished to speak to the Prime Minister.\n\nThereupon at his command, Cao Hong, with a train of ten horsemen rode out, advanced straight to Han Sui, leaned over to him and said, loudly enough to be heard plainly, \"Last night the Prime Minister quite understood. Let there be no mistake.\"\n\nThen without another word on either side Cao Hong rode away.\n\nMa Chao had heard. He gripped his spear and started galloping out to slay his companion in arms. But the five generals checked him and begged him to go back to camp.\n\nWhen Han Sui saw him, he said, \"Nephew, trust me, really I have no evil intentions.\"\n\nBut Ma Chao, burning with rage, went away. Then Han Sui talked over the matter with his five generals.\n\n\"How can this be cleared up?\"\n\n\"Ma Chao trusts too much to his strength,\" said Yang Qiu. \"He is always inclined to despise you, Sir. If we overcome Cao Cao, do you think he will give way to you? I think you should rather take care of your own interests, go over to the Prime Minister's side, and you will surely get rank one day.\"\n\n\"I was his father's pledged brother and could not bear to desert him,\" said Han Sui.\n\n\"It seems to me that as things have come to this pass: You simply have to now.\"\n\n\"Who would act as go-between?\" asked Han Sui.\n\n\"I will,\" said Yang Qiu.\n\nThen Han Sui wrote a private letter which he confided to Yang Qiu, who soon found his way over to the other camp. Cao Cao was only too pleased, and he promised that Han Sui should be made Lord of Xiliang and Yang Qiu its Governor. The other confederates should be rewarded in other ways. Then a plot was planned: When the preparations for the act of treachery were complete, a bonfire was to be lighted in Han Sui's camp, and all would try to do away with Ma Chao.\n\nYang Qiu went back and related all this to his chief, and Han Sui felt elated at the success of his overtures. A lot of wood was collected in camp at the back of his tent ready for the signal blaze, and the five generals got ready for the foul deed. It was decided that Ma Chao should be persuaded into coming to a banquet, and there they would slay him then.\n\nAll this was done, but not without some hesitation and delay, and some news of the plot reached Ma Chao. He found out the careful preparations that had been made and resolved to act first. Leaving Ma Dai and Pang De in reserve, he chose a few trusted leaders and with stealthy steps made his way into Han Sui's tent. There he found Han Sui and his five confederates deep in conversation. He just caught a word or two that Yang Qiu said, \"We must not delay, now is the time.\"\n\nIn burst Ma Chao raging and yelling, \"You herd of rebels! Would you dare to plot against me?\"\n\nThey were taken aback. Ma Chao sprang at Han Sui and slashed at his face. Han Sui put up his hand to ward off the blow, and his hand was cut off. The five drew their swords and set on Ma Chao and his men, who rushed outside. Soon Ma Chao was hemmed in by the five, but he kept them at bay by wonderful swordsmanship. And as the swords flashed, the red blood flowed. Soon Ma Wan was down and Liang Xing disabled; then the other three fled.\n\nMa Chao ran back into the tent to finish Han Sui, but the servants had removed him. Then a torch was lit, and soon there was commotion all through the camp. Ma Chao mounted his horse, for Pang De and Ma Dai had now arrived, and the real fight began. Cao Cao's troops poured in from all sides: Xu Chu and Xu Huang were in front and behind; Xiahou Yuan and Cao Hong to the left and right. Meanwhile, the Xiliang soldiers fought with each other.\n\nLosing sight of his generals, Ma Chao and one hundred riders got to the head of the floating bridge over the River Wei just about dawn. There he fell across Li Kan coming over the bridge with an army. Ma Chao set his spear and rode at him full tilt. Li Kan turned down his spear and fled. From behind Ma Chao, Yu Jin came up in pursuit. But unable to get near enough to seize Ma Chao, Yu Jin sent an arrow flying after him. Ma Chao's ear caught the twang of the bowstring, and he dodged the arrow, which flew on and killed Li Kan. Ma Chao turned to attack his pursuer, who galloped away, and then he returned and took possession of the bridge.\n\nQuickly Cao Cao's troops gathered about him, and the fiercest among them, the Tiger Guard, shot arrows at Ma Chao, which he warded off with his spear shaft so that they fell harmless to the earth. Ma Chao and his troops rode to and fro striking a blow wherever there was a chance, but the enemy were very thick about him, and he could not force his way out. In desperation he cut an alley northwards and got through, but quite alone. Of his followers everyone fell.\n\nStill he kept on dashing this way and that, till he was brought down by a crossbow bolt. He lay upon the ground and his enemies were pressing in. But at the critical moment, an army came in from the northwest and rescued him. Pang De and Ma Dai had come up in the very nick of time.\n\nThus Ma Chao was rescued, and they set him on one of the soldiers' horses, and he again took up the battle. Leaving a trail of blood in his rear, he got away northwest.\n\nHearing that his enemy had got away, Cao Cao gave order to his generals, \"Pursue him day and night, and rich rewards are for him dead or alive. For his head the rewards are a thousand ounces of gold and the lordship of a fief of ten thousand families. If anyone captures Ma Chao, the reward is the rank of general.\"\n\nConsequently the pursuit was hot as everyone was anxious to win renown and reward. Meanwhile careless of all but flight, Ma Chao galloped on, and one by one his followers dropped by the way. The footmen who were unable to keep up were captured till very few remained, and only some scores of riders were left. They traveled toward Lintao, a city in West Valley Land.\n\nCao Cao in person joined the pursuit and got to Anding, but there Ma Chao was still far in advance, so he gave up and returned. Gradually the generals did the same, all coming back to Changan. Poor Han Sui, with the loss of his left hand, was an invalid, but he was rewarded with the Lordship of Xiliang. Yang Qiu and Hou Xuan were given noble ranks and offices in Weikou.\n\nThen orders were given to lead the whole army back to the capital. Yang Fu, a military adviser from Liangzhou, came to Changan to point out the danger of withdrawal.\n\n\"Ma Chao has the boldness of Lu Bu and the heart of a barbarian. Unless you destroy him this time, he will come again and he will be both bolder and stronger, and the whole west will be lost. Wherefore you should not withdraw your army.\"\n\nCao Cao said, \"I would be quite willing to finish the subjugation. But there is much to do in the capital, and the south is still to conquer. So I cannot remain. But you, Sir, might secure this region for me. Do you consent?\"\n\nYang Fu did consent. And he brought to Cao Cao's notice Wei Kang, who was made Imperial Protector of Liangzhou, with joint military powers.\n\nJust before Yang Fu left, he said to Cao Cao, \"A strong force ought to be left in Changan, as a reserve in case they be required.\"\n\n\"That has been already dealt with,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nContentedly enough Yang Fu took leave and went away.\n\nCao Cao's generals asked him to explain his recent policy, saying, \"Since the first outbreak at Tong Pass, O Prime Minister, the north bank of River Wei was undefended. Why did you not cross to the north bank from the east of the Yellow River? But instead you engaged in the attack of the Pass for many days before crossing to the north bank.\"\n\nAnd he replied, \"The rebels first held the Pass. Had I forthwith taken the east side of the Yellow River, the rebels would have defended the camps one by one and mustered at all the ferries, and I should never have got across to the west side (which was also the north bank of River Wei). So I massed troops against Tong Pass and made the rebels guard the south bank of River Wei, so that the north bank was left open. Thus Xu Huang and Zhu Ling could move there, and I was able later to cross over to join them. Then I made the raised road and the mud rampart to deceive the enemy and cause them to think I was weak and thus embolden them up to the point of attacking without proper preparation. Then I used the clever device of causing dissension in their ranks and was able in one day to destroy the stored up energy of all their forces. 'It was a thunder clap before you could cover your ears.' Yes, indeed, the mutations of the art of war can be called infinite.\"\n\n\"But one thing more puzzled us,\" said the officers, \"and we ask you to explain it. When you heard the enemy was reinforced, you seemed to grow happier. Why was that?\"\n\n\"Because Tong Pass is distant from Xuchang. If the rebels had taken advantage of all defensible points and held them, they could not have been quelled in less than a couple of years. When they came on altogether, they made a multitude but they were not unanimous. They easily quarreled and, disunited, were easily overcome. So I had reason to rejoice that they came on altogether.\"\n\n\"Indeed no one can equal you in strategy,\" said his officers, bowing low before him.\n\n\"Still, remember that I rely on you,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThen he issued substantial rewards to the army and appointed Xiahou Yuan to the command at Changan. The soldiers who had surrendered were distributed among the various troops. Xiahou Yuan recommended Zhang Jia of Gaoling, as his aids.\n\nSo the army returned to Capital Xuchang where it was welcomed by the Emperor in state chariot. As a reward for his service, Cao Cao was given the court privileges of omitting his distinctive name when he was received in audience and of proceeding toward the court without assuming the appearance of frantic haste. Further he might go to court armed and booted, as did the Han Founding Minister Xiao He of old. Whence his prestige and importance waxed mightily.\n\nThe fame of these doings penetrated west into Hanzhong, and one of the first to be moved to indignation was Zhang Lu, Governor of Hanning. This Zhang Lu was a native of Pei. He was a grandson of Zhang Ling who retired to Mount Humming, in the East River Land, where he had composed a work on Daoism for the purpose of deluding the multitude.\n\nYet all the people respected Zhang Ling, and when he died his son, Zhang Heng, carried on his work, and taught the same doctrines. Disciples had to pay a fee in rice, five carts. The people of his day called him the Rice Thief.\n\nAfter Zhang Heng passed away, his son Zhang Lu followed his step. Zhang Lu styled himself Master Superior, and his disciples were called Commonly Devil Soldiers. A headman was called Libationer, and those who made many converts were called Chief Libationers. Perfect sincerity was the ruling tenet of the cult, and no deceit was permitted. When anyone fell ill, an altar was set up and the invalid was taken into the Room of Silence where he could reflect upon his sins and confess openly. Then he was prayed for. The director of prayers was called Superintending Libationer.\n\nWhen praying for a person, they wrote his name and his confession on a slip and made three copies thereof, called \"The Writing of the Three Gods\". One copy was burned on the mountain top as a means of informing Heaven; another was burned to inform Earth; and the third was sunk in water to tell the Controller of the Waters. If the sick person recovered, he paid as fee five carts of rice.\n\nThey had Public Houses of Charity wherein the poor found rice and flesh and means of cooking. Any wayfarer was allowed to take of these according to the measure of his appetite. Those who took in excess would invite punishment from on high. Offenses were pardoned thrice; afterwards offenders were punished. They had no officials but all were subject to the control of the Libationers.\n\nThis sort of cult had been spreading in Hanzhong for some thirty years and had escaped repression so far because of the remoteness of the region. All the Government did was to give Zhang Lu the title of General Who Guards the South and the post of Governor of Hanning and take means to secure from him a full quota of local tribute.\n\nWhen the reports of Cao Cao's success against the west, and his prestige and influence, reached the Hanzhong people, Zhang Lu met with his counselors to discuss the matter.\n\nSaid Zhang Lu, \"Ma Teng has died, and Ma Chao defeated, thus the northwest has fallen. Cao Cao's next ambition will be the southwest, and Hanzhong will be his first attack. I should act first by assuming the title of Prince of Hanzhong and superintending the defense.\"\n\nIn reply one Yan Pu said, \"The army of this region counts one hundred thousand, and there are ample supplies of everything. East River Land is a natural stronghold with its mountains and rivers. Now Ma Chao's soldiers are newly defeated, and the fugitives from the Ziwu Valley are very numerous. We can add them to our army by several ten-thousands more. My advice is that as Liu Zhang of Yizhou is weak, we should take possession of the forty-one counties of West River Land, and then you may set up your sovereign as soon as you like.\"\n\nThis speech greatly pleased Zhang Lu, who then began to concert measures with his brother, Zhang Wei, to raise an army.\n\nStories of the movement reached Yizhou, whose Imperial Protector was Liu Zhang. A son of Liu Yan, a descendant from Prince Gong of the Imperial House. Prince Gong had been moved out to Jingling several generations ago, and the family had settled there. Later, Liu Yan became Imperial Protector of Yizhou, and when he died in due course in the first year of Prosperous Stability (AD 194), his son was recommended for the vacant Protectorship.\n\nThere was enmity between Liu Zhang and Zhang Lu, for Liu Zhang had put to death Zhang Lu's mother and brother. After that Liu Zhang dispatched Pang Xi as Governor of Baxi to ward off Zhang Lu.\n\nBut Liu Zhang had always been feeble, and when he received news from his commander of Zhang Lu's movements, his heart sank within him for fear, and he hastily called in his advisers.\n\nAt the council one haughtily said, \"My Master, be not alarmed. I am no genius, but I have a bit of a healthy tongue, and with that I will make Zhang Lu afraid even to look this way.\"\n\n\u2003When plots did grow about the west,\n\n\u2003It suited Jingzhou's plans the best." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Zhang Song Turns The Table On Yang Xiu; Pang Tong Proposes The Occupation Of Shu.\n\nThe man who proposed the plan spoken of in the last chapter was Zhang Song, who belonged to Yizhou and held the small office of Supernumerary Charioteer. He had a broad forehead, protuberant at the temples like a countryman's hoe, and a pointed head. His nose was flat and his teeth protruded. He was a dwarf in stature but had a deep voice like a great bell.\n\n\"What proposal have you to offer that may avert this danger?\" asked the Imperial Protector.\n\n\"My proposal is that we gain the support of Cao Cao. As we know, he has made a clean sweep of the empire. Lu Bu went first, and both the Yuans followed, all exterminated. Lately he has destroyed Ma Chao. In short he is the one man against whom no one can stand. Therefore, my lord, prepare me worthy gifts to take to the capital, and I will get Cao Cao to march an army against Hanzhong, which will keep this Zhang Lu occupied so that we shall be left alone.\"\n\nThis met Liu Zhang's views, and so he prepared gold and pearls and rich stuffs, worthy presents for the man of power. And when these were ready, he appointed Zhang Song his emissary. Zhang Song in the meantime occupied his leisure in secretly copying maps and plans of the west country. When all was ready, he started with a small escort.\n\nThey heard this in Jingzhou, and Zhuge Liang sent a trusty person to the capital to keep him informed as to all the doings.\n\nZhang Song arrived in Xuchang, and, after he had established himself in his lodging, he made daily visits to the Prime Minister's palace to try to obtain an interview. But the last success over Ma Chao had filled Cao Cao with insufferable pride, and he did nothing but give banquets. He never appeared except for the most important affairs, and even carried on the business of the state in his own residence. So Zhang Song waited many days. But when he got to know the persons who were nearest the Prime Minister, he bribed them and obtained an audience.\n\nCao Cao was seated in the high place, and after his visitor had finished salutations, he said, \"Your master Liu Zhang has sent no tribute for several years. Why?\"\n\n\"Because the roads are dangerous, and thieves and robbers infest them. Intercourse is restricted.\"\n\nCao Cao interrupted in a loud harsh voice, saying, \"What thieves and robbers are there when I have cleansed the empire?\"\n\n\"How can you say the land is tranquil when one sees Sun Quan in the south, Zhang Lu and Liu Bei in the west, and everyone of these with armies reckoned in legions? The weakest of them has one hundred thousand troops.\"\n\nThe extraordinary appearance of the emissary had prejudiced Cao Cao from the outset; and when Cao Cao heard these blunt words, he suddenly shook out his sleeves, rose and left the hall.\n\nThose in attendance were annoyed with Zhang Song and said, \"How can you behave so rudely when you come on a mission? Your whole attitude was blunt and discourteous. Happily for you, our lord remembered you had come from afar and did not take open notice of your fault. The best thing for you is to go home again as quickly as you can.\"\n\nBut Zhang Song smiled.\n\n\"We have no plausible flatterers and glib talkers in the River Lands,\" said he.\n\nAt this, one from below the steps called out, \"So you call us plausible and glib then. And you have none such in your country, eh?\"\n\nZhang Song looked around and saw the speaker was a man with thin delicate eyebrows crossing narrow eyes set in a pale spiritual face. He asked his name. It was Yang Xiu, son of the former Imperial Guardian Yang Biao. The young man was then employed as Chair of the Secretariat of the Prime Minister's palace. He was deeply read and had the reputation of being a clever controversialist, as Zhang Song knew. So on one side was a desire to confound and on the other overweening pride in his own ability, with contempt for other scholars. Perceiving the ridicule in Zhang Song's speech, Yang Xiu invited him to go to the library where they could talk more freely. There, after they had got settled in their respective places, Yang Xiu began to talk about the west.\n\n\"Your roads are precipitous and wearisome,\" said Yang Xiu.\n\n\"But at our lord's command we travel, even through fire and water. We never decline,\" replied Zhang Song.\n\n\"What sort of a country is this Yizhou?\"\n\n\"Yizhou is a name for the group of western counties and territories known of old as the state of Shu. The roads are intersected by streams, and the land bristles with steep mountains. The circuit is over two hundred stations and marches and the area over one hundred thousand square miles. The population is dense, villages being so close that the crowings of cocks in one waken the people in the next, and the dogs barking in this excite the curs in that. The soil is rich and well cultivated, and droughts or famines are equally unknown. Prosperity is general, and the music of pipes and strings can always be heard. The produce of the fields is piled mountain high. There is no place its equal.\"\n\n\"But what of the people?\"\n\n\"Our administrators are talented as Lin Xiangru; our soldiers able as Ma Yuan; our physicians are expert as Zhang Ji; our diviners are profound as Yan Zun. Our schools of philosophy and our culture stand forth as models, and we have more remarkable people than I can enumerate. How should I ever finish the tale of them?\"\n\n\"And how many such as you, Sir, do you think there are at the orders of your Imperial Protector?\"\n\n\"Our officers are all geniuses: Wise, bold, loyal, righteous, and magnanimous. As for poor simpletons like me: They are counted by hundreds; there are cartloads of them, bushels of them. No one could count them.\"\n\n\"What office may you hold then?\"\n\nZhang Song replied, \"Mine can hardly be called an office. I am a Supernumerary Charioteer. But, Sir, what state affairs may you control?\"\n\n\"I am the First Secretary in the Palace of the Prime Minister,\" replied Yang Xiu.\n\n\"They say that members of your family held office for many generations, and I do not understand why you are not in court service actually assisting the Emperor, instead of filling the post of a mere clerk in the private palace of the Prime Minister.\"\n\nYang Xiu's face suffused with shame at this rebuke, but he mastered himself and replied, \"Though I am among the minor officials, yet my duties are of great importance, and I am gaining experience under the Prime Minister's guidance. I hold the office for the sake of the training.\"\n\nZhang Song smiled, saying, \"If what I have heard is true, Cao Cao's learning throws no gleaming light on the way of Confucius or Mencius, nor does his military skill illumine the art of Sun Zi or Wu Qi. He seems to understand the doctrine of brute force and holding on to what advantages he can seize, but I see not how he can give you any valuable training or enlighten your understanding.\"\n\n\"Ah, Sir, that comes of dwelling in out-of-the-way parts. How could you know of the magnificent talents of the great Prime Minister? But I will show you something.\"\n\nYang Xiu called up an attendant and bade him bring a book from a certain case. He showed this to his guest, who read the title \"The New Book of Cao Cao\". Then Zhang Song opened it and read it through from the beginning, the whole thirteen chapters. They all dealt with the art of war.\n\n\"What do you take this to be?\" asked Zhang Song, when he had finished.\n\n\"This is the great Prime Minister's discussion of the art of ancient and modern war composed on the model of Sun Zi's Treatise on the Art of War. You may be disdainful of the Prime Minister's talents, but will this not go down to posterity?\"\n\n\"This book! Every child in Yizhou knows this by heart. What do you mean by calling it a new book? It was written by some obscure person of the time of the Warring States, and Cao Cao has plagiarized it. But he has deceived no one but you, Sir.\"\n\n\"But what is the use of your sarcastic insult in saying that your school children know the book by rote? It has never been given to the world, although copies have been made. It belongs to his private library.\"\n\n\"Do you disbelieve me? Why, I know it and could repeat it.\"\n\nThen Zhang Song repeated the whole book, word for word, from beginning to end.\n\nYang Xiu said, \"You remember it like this after only one reading! Really you are marvelous.\"\n\n\u2003He boasted not a handsome face,\n\n\u2003Nor was his body blessed with grace.\n\n\u2003His words streamed like a waterfall,\n\n\u2003He read a book and knew it all.\n\n\u2003Shu's glories could he well rehearse,\n\n\u2003His lore embraced the universe.\n\n\u2003Or text or note of scholiast\n\n\u2003Once read, his memory held fast.\n\nAt leave-taking Yang Xiu said, \"Remain a while in your lodgings till I can petition our Prime Minister to give you another interview.\"\n\nZhang Song thanked him and left.\n\nBy and bye Yang Xiu went to see Cao Cao on the matter of receiving the emissary from the west and said, \"Sir, why did you formerly treat Zhang Song so off-hand?\"\n\n\"He spoke very rudely. That is why.\"\n\n\"But you bore with Mi Heng. Why not with this man?\"\n\n\"Mi Heng's reputation for scholarship stood highest of all, and I could not bear to put him to death. But what ability has this Zhang Song?\"\n\n\"To say nothing about his speech being like the River of Heaven, nothing daunts his talent for dialectic. I happened to show him your new treatise; he read it over once and could repeat it. From this, it is evident he is cultured and has a prodigious memory. There are few like him in the world. But he said the book was the work of an obscure person of a few hundred years back, and every school child in his country knew it.\"\n\n\"It only shows that the ancients and I are in secret sympathy,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\nHowever, Cao Cao ordered the book to be torn up and burned.\n\n\"Then may I bring him to see you, Sir, that he may see the glory of our court.\"\n\nCao Cao grudgingly consented, saying \"I am reviewing troops tomorrow on the western parade ground. You may bring him there and let him see what my army looks like. He will be able to talk about it when he goes home. When I have dealt with the south, I shall take the west in hand.\"\n\nHence the very next day Yang Xiu took Zhang Song over to the west parade ground, where a review of the Tiger Guard was to be held. There were fifty thousand of them, and when drawn up in order, they made a very brave show with their gleaming helmets and bright new uniforms. Their drums rolled to shake the heavens, and their weapons glittered in the sun. Their discipline and order were perfect. Their gay banners fluttered in the breeze. They looked ready to fly even, so alert and smart were they.\n\nZhang Song glanced at them contemptuously.\n\nAfter a long time Cao Cao called up Zhang Song and, pointing to his army, said, \"Have you ever seen such fine bold fellows in Yizhou?\"\n\n\"We never see this military parade in Yizhou. We govern the people by righteousness.\"\n\nCao Cao changed color and looked hard at the bold speaker, who gazed back at him without the least sign of fear.\n\nYang Xiu shot a quick glance at Zhang Song, but Cao Cao went on, saying, \"I regard the rat-class of the world as of no more importance than so many weeds, and for my army to reach a place is to overcome it, to give battle is to conquer, to besiege is to take. Those who are with me, live; but those who oppose me, die. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"O Prime Minister, I know well that when you march out your army, you always conquer. I knew it when you attacked Lu Bu at Puyang; and when you fought Zhang Xiu at Wancheng; and when you met Zhou Yu at the Red Cliffs; and when in Huarong Valley you encountered Guan Yu; and on that day when you cut off your beard and threw away your robe at Tong Pass; and when you hid in a boat to escape the arrows on the Yellow River. On all these occasions, no one could stand against you.\"\n\nIt made Cao Cao very angry to be thus twitted with his misfortunes and he said, \"You stuck-up pedant! How dare you thus bring up all my failures?\"\n\nCao Cao called to his attendants to eject the bold disputant and put him to death.\n\nYang Xiu ventured to argue with him, saying, \"You may behead him, but he came from the west bearing tribute, and his death would have a very evil effect on all distant peoples.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao was too angry to be reasonable and persisted. However, Xun Yu also remonstrated, and Zhang Song was not put to death. But he was beaten and ejected. He returned to his lodging and left the city that night, reflecting upon what he had intended and what he had accomplished.\n\nThought he, \"I did not expect such arrogance when I came with the intention of giving him a region. When I get back, Liu Zhang will expect great things. Now I am returning empty handed and a failure to endure the laughter of my fellow country people. I will not go back. I have heard of the virtues of Liu Bei, and I will go to him and see what manner of man he is. Then I can decide what to do.\"\n\nSo with his little escort and following he made for Jingzhou. He had reached the boundaries of Wuchang when he met a body of horsemen, at the head of whom rode a general in simple dress.\n\nThe general pulled up, saying, \"Surely you are the Charioteer Zhang Song.\"\n\n\"I am he,\" said Zhang Song.\n\nThe general quickly dismounted and humbly said, \"I have expected you these many days. I am Zhao Zilong.\"\n\nZhang Song dismounted and returned the salutation, saying, \"Then you are no other than the Fine Man of Changshan.\"\n\n\"No other,\" was the reply. \"And my lord Liu Bei bade me await you here and offer you refreshment after your long and toilsome journey.\"\n\nAt this some soldiers brought forward wine and food which they offered kneeling.\n\nZhang Song said, \"I am come because the world says Liu Bei is liberal and kindly disposed.\"\n\nAfter a few cups of wine, the two retook the road toward Jingzhou City, which they neared next day at evening. They went to the guest-house. Here they found a large number of people who received the visitor with the beating of drums and every sign of respect.\n\nAnd the officer in command, bowing low, said, \"My brother sent me to meet you after your long and dusty journey and prepare the guest-house for your reception. My name is Guan Yu.\"\n\nSo Zhang Song and Zhao Zilong dismounted and entered the guest-house, where hosts and guest exchanged formal salutations and took their seats. In a short time refreshments were served, and both men were most diligent in their attention to the traveler. This roadside banquet was prolonged to the time of setting the watch, when they prepared for rest.\n\nNext morning, after the early meal, they mounted and continued their journey. Very soon they met Liu Bei himself, with an escort, and his two chief advisers, deferentially standing by the roadside.\n\nAs soon as he recognized them, Zhang Song dismounted and walked toward them. Liu Bei received him with extreme respect.\n\n\"Your exalted name has been long known to me,\" said Liu Bei. \"And it has reverberated through my ears. My one regret is that cloudy hills and long distances have hitherto prevented me from enjoying the advantage of your instruction. Hearing that you were passing through, I have come to meet you. And if you would be willing to notice me and condescend to rest for a time in my city, thus allowing me to satisfy my long disappointed desire to see you, I should indeed hold myself fortunate.\"\n\nNaturally the traveler's vanity was tickled, and he joyfully remounted. They rode bridle to bridle into the city. When they reached the residence, again they exchanged profound salutations and compliments before they took their various places as host and guest. And then a banquet was served. But all throughout Liu Bei refrained from saying a word about the west. He only chatted on general and common things.\n\nThe visitor noted this steady avoidance and resolved to probe his host's thoughts.\n\n\"How many counties are there in Jingzhou, where you are now, O Imperial Uncle?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Jingzhou is only ours temporarily. We have borrowed it from the South Land. They are always sending messengers to demand its return. However, now that our lord has married their daughter, his position is more secure. But it is still temporary.\"\n\n\"The South Land is large,\" said Zhang Song, \"yet their six territories and their eighty-one counties do not satisfy them. The people are strong and the land is fruitful.\"\n\nSaid Pang Tong, \"Our lord, being of the dynastic family, has never occupied a territory of the empire. Those others, rebellious as they are, may indeed seize upon as much territory as they are strong enough to hold. People of reasons do not approve such wrongs . . .\"\n\n\"Noble Sirs, pray say no more. What virtue have I that I should expect anything from the future?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Not so, indeed,\" said Zhang Song. \"Illustrious Sir, you are of the lineage of Han. Your noble character is widely known. No one could say that your fate excludes all thoughts of occupying territory, where you might begin to set up authority and take an emperor's position!\"\n\nLiu Bei deprecated such a suggestion, \"Sir, you go too far. This really is too much!\"\n\nThe next three days were spent in banquets and wine parties, but all the time no mention was made of West River Land. And when, at the end of that time, Zhang Song took leave, his host was at the three-mile \"parting road\" to bid him farewell and offer refreshment.\n\nWhen the moment came for the parting, Liu Bei raised his wine-cup and said, \"I am sincerely grateful that you deigned to come here. You have prolonged your visit to three days, but now the moment of parting has come. Who knows when I may have the privilege of receiving your instructions again?\"\n\nAs Liu Bei said this, the tears flowed, but he hid them while Zhang Song, willing to believe that this emotion was on his account, thought how wonderfully kind and noble his host must be to be thus affected. Quite overcome, Zhang Song decided to speak about the west.\n\nSo he said, \"I have thought that I, too, would come to you one day, but so far I have found no way. In Jingzhou I see Sun Quan on the east, always ready to pounce; I see Cao Cao on the north, greedy to swallow. So this is not a wholly desirable place for you to remain in.\"\n\n\"I know this but too well,\" said Liu Bei, \"but I have no secure place to go to.\"\n\n\"Yizhou is well protected, has much fertile soil, is populous and well governed. Its scholars are attracted by your virtue. If you marched your armies westward, you could easily become a real power there and restore the glory of the Hans.\"\n\n\"But how dare I attempt this? The ruler is also of the Imperial House. The whole region is devoted to him for his good deeds, and no other person could attain such a hold.\"\n\n\"I am no traitor,\" said Zhang Song, \"but in your presence I feel constrained to be perfectly open and plain. Liu Zhang, the Imperial Protector of Yizhou, is naturally weak and can neither use the wise nor employ the capable. Then again Zhang Lu threatens on the north. People are distracted and would gladly welcome an appreciative ruler. The journey I have just made was to propose to support Cao Cao and place the region under him, but I found him rebellious and set on evil, proud and arrogant. So I have turned aside to you. If you will take Yizhou, you will have a base from which to deal with Hanzhong when you will, and the whole empire beside. You will continue the rightful line, and your name will live in history. Would not that be real fame? If then you think of taking our region, I am willing to do what little I can as an ally within. But do you contemplate such a step?\"\n\n\"I am deeply grateful that you think so well of me. But the Imperial Protector being a member of the family, I should lay myself open to general execration, were I to attack him.\"\n\n\"When a hero finds himself in the world, his duty is to work out his destiny, to exert himself and perform his task as best as he can, to press forward among the foremost. At the moment the position is that, if you fail to seize this opportunity, some other will take possession of Yizhou, and you will regret when too late.\"\n\n\"And I have heard much of the difficult nature of the country, its many high mountains and numerous streams, and its narrow roads. How could such a country be invaded?\"\n\nThen Zhang Song drew the map from his sleeve, saying, \"I am so deeply affected by your virtue that I offer you this map of the country, whereby its roads and rivers may be known.\"\n\nLiu Bei unrolled the map. It was covered with notes, on the lie of the land, lengths and widths, and such matters. Strategic points on rivers and hills were shown, and store-houses and granaries and treasuries. Everything was plainly stated.\n\nZhang Song went on, \"Sir, you can prepare your plans promptly. I have two friends who will certainly help you. And when they come to see you, you may be perfectly frank with them. Their names are Fa Zheng and Meng Da.\"\n\nLiu Bei thanked him with joined hands.\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"As the blue mountains grow not old and the green waters always remain, so shall I never forget. And when I shall have accomplished my task, you shall have no mean reward.\"\n\nReplied Zhang Song, \"I look for no reward. Having met with an enlightened lord, I felt compelled to unbosom myself to him.\"\n\nZhang Song left soon after, and Guan Yu escorted him for several miles.\n\nAfter arrival in Yizhou, Zhang Song lost no time in visiting his close friend Fa Zheng, who was from Fufeng. Fa Zheng was told of Cao Cao's arrogance and haughtiness toward scholars and good people.\n\n\"As for the man himself,\" said Zhang Song, \"he is a man to grieve with but not a person to rejoice with. I have promised Yizhou to Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, and I want your especial advice and assistance.\"\n\n\"I think Liu Zhang is incapable,\" said Fa Zheng, \"and I have felt drawn to Liu Bei for some time past. So we are in sympathy here.\"\n\nShortly after Meng Da arrived. Meng Da and Fa Zheng were fellow townsmen. When Meng Da entered the room, he saw the other two in earnest and secret conversation.\n\nAnd he said, \"I know what you two are about. You are scheming to hand over Yizhou to somebody.\"\n\n\"It is really so. You have guessed right,\" said Zhang Song.\n\n\"But to whom ought it to go?\" said Fa Zheng.\n\n\"There is but one: Liu Bei,\" said Meng Da.\n\nAll three clapped their hands and laughed.\n\nThen said Fa Zheng to Zhang Song, \"You will see our lord tomorrow. What about that?\"\n\n\"I shall recommend that you two be sent to Jingzhou on a mission.\"\n\nThey thought that a suitable scheme.\n\nAnd when the lately arrived messenger saw his master and was asked how he had fared, Zhang Song said, \"Cao Cao is a rebel who desires to get the whole empire into his hands. I need hardly tell you that. But he also hankers after this region.\"\n\n\"Then what will become of us?\" said Liu Zhang.\n\n\"I have a plan to check both our enemies. Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, now in Jingzhou, is a relative of yours, and he is generous and well disposed. This is a matter of common knowledge. Cao Cao was simply overwhelmed at the result of the battle at the Red Cliffs, and Zhang Lu more so. Now my plan is that you ally yourself with your distinguished relative against Cao Cao and Zhang Lu.\"\n\n\"I have been thinking thus for a long time. Can you recommend a suitable emissary?\"\n\n\"The only ones are Fa Zheng and Meng Da.\"\n\nThese two were summoned and, meanwhile, a letter was prepared. Fa Zheng was to proceed as emissary to open up friendly relations, and Meng Da would follow in due course with an army to welcome Liu Bei into the West River Land.\n\nWhile still discussing the details of the policy, a person forced his way in, his face all running with sweat, and cried out, \"My lord, your land of forty-one counties will be lost to you and pass to another if you listen to Zhang Song!\"\n\nZhang Song turned a startled look on the intruder, who was Huang Quan of Xiliang, First Secretary in the Imperial Protector's palace.\n\nThe Imperial Protector said, \"Why do you use such language? Liu Bei is of my family, and so I am seeking his support.\"\n\nSaid Huang Quan, \"I know all about him. He is liberal minded to gain people to his side, and his softness can overcome the hardest. He is bolder than any other. He gains humans' hearts from afar off, and those near him look up to him. He also has the wisest advisers in Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong, and the boldest warriors such as Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Zilong, Huang Zhong, and Wei Yan. But if you call him here as a soldier, think you that he will be content to remain in a lowly condition? And if you treat him as an honored guest, can a state stand two rulers? Hear me, my lord, and you stand secure as Taishan Mountains; be deaf to my words, and your position is as precarious as a pile of eggs. This Zhang Song has lately come home through Jingzhou, where he has certainly been plotting with Liu Bei. Slay this man; and make an end of Liu Bei. That will be for the happiness of this land.\"\n\n\"But how else am I to fend off my two enemies?\"\n\n\"Fortify your country, dig out your moats, and raise your ramparts. Then you can wait on events.\"\n\n\"If these rebels invade this land, the position will be critical, as when fire singes one's eyebrows. It is idle talk to tell me to wait on events.\"\n\nNo notice was taken of Huang Quan, and Fa Zheng was about to set out when another interfered, crying, \"No, no!\"\n\nThis was a secretary, Wang Lei.\n\nWith bowed head Wang Lei stood and said, \"My lord will bring misfortune upon himself if he listens to this Zhang Song.\"\n\n\"Not so; I make an alliance with Liu Bei in order to withstand Zhang Lu.\"\n\n\"Zhang Lu's invasion would be but a skin disease. Liu Bei's entry into this country would be a mortal malady. Liu Bei is an unscrupulous brave. He was once in Cao Cao's service and plotted against him. Then he hung on to Sun Quan and seized Jingzhou. This shows his character and his designs. Think you that you two can dwell together? If you invite him, then Shu is lost!\"\n\n\"No more wild talk!\" cried Liu Zhang angrily. \"Liu Bei is of my clan and family and will not ravish me of my possessions.\"\n\nHe bade the guards escort both men outside and ordered Fa Zheng to set out. So he did, and before long came to Jingzhou. When the salutations were over, Fa Zheng presented his letter, which Liu Bei opened and read:\n\n\"I, Liu Zhang, a younger brother of our family, now write to General Liu Bei. From my humble place long have I gazed in your direction, but the roads of the West River Land are precipitous, and I have failed to send my tribute. This is to my shame. The victims of misfortune aid each other, and those in trouble support each other. If friends act thus, how much more should members of the same family? Now Zhang Lu is mustering an army of invasion on my northern frontier, much to the injury of my tranquillity. Wherefore I send this letter that you may know of my distress. And if you remember the kindly bonds of family and will play a brotherly part and lead your armies to destroy these ruffians, you will be my eternal protector and I shall be ever grateful. This letter leaves much unsaid, but I await your coming.\"\n\nThis letter greatly pleased Liu Bei. He made a banquet for the bearer thereof, and when they had mellowed themselves with wine, he dismissed the attendants and spoke to Fa Zheng in confidence.\n\n\"Friend, I have long admired you, and Zhang Song extolled your virtues. I shall always feel grateful for this opportunity of hearing you.\"\n\nFa Zheng bowed, saying, \"That is too great praise for a humble emissary from Shu. But they say that horses always neighed in recognition of Bo Le, the supreme judge of horses, and when a person has found his lord, he dies for him. Have you thought further of Zhang Song's proposals, General?\"\n\n\"I have always been a wanderer, often in suffering and sorrow. I have often thought of the wren for even that tiny bird has a twig to rest on; and of the cunning hare, that secures safety with three openings to its burrow. Does not a person need at least a shelter? Your land of the west is fertile and a temptation, but its ruler is of my family, and I cannot plot against him.\"\n\n\"Yes. Yizhou is a very paradise. But without a ruler it cannot exist. Liu Zhang knows not how to use the wise people, and his heritage must speedily pass to another. Today it is offered to your hands, and you must not miss the opportunity. You know the saying, that the leader in the hunt gets the quarry. If you will only consent, I will serve you to the death.\"\n\nLiu Bei signified his gratitude. Said he, \"Let me reflect for a time and take advice.\"\n\nThe banquet terminated and the guest left. Zhuge Liang conducted Fa Zheng to his lodging while his master sat thinking.\n\nThen Pang Tong said, \"You must decide \u2014 not to decide is foolish. You are of high intelligence, my lord, and why do you hesitate?\"\n\n\"What should my reply be?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"You know these surroundings \u2014 Sun Quan in the east and Cao Cao in the north \u2014 , and with them you cannot attain your ends. Now before you lies a populous, fertile, and rich land, a base with the greatest possibilities. You have the promise of assistance from two men within, and it seems like a gift of providence. Why hesitate?\"\n\n\"Now there are two men in the world as mutually antagonistic as fire and water. My opposite is Cao Cao. He is impetuous and I am long suffering; he is cruel and I am humane; he feigns while I am true. In all particulars I act the direct contrary to him. I refuse to risk the loss of the confidence and trust of the world for a trifling advantage.\"\n\nPang Tong smiled at these sentiments, saying, \"My lord's words are quite in accord with abstract rectitude, but such ideas scarcely suit the days of rebellion. There are other ways of fighting than with warlike weapons, but to adhere too obstinately to the idea of abstract rectitude is to do nothing. One must be an opportunist, annex the weak and attack the willfully deluded, seize the recalcitrant and protect the docile. These were the teachings of the great Kings Tang and Wu. If after the settlement you reward with righteousness and make of the land a great country, will you be guilty of a breach of trust? Remember if you do not take it now, another will.\"\n\nLiu Bei, realizing the truth in what Pang Tong said, replied, \"These words are as jewels. They should be engraved on my very heart.\"\n\nThereupon he summoned Zhuge Liang to settle the details of an army to march west.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"This is an important place and must be very well defended.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I, Pang Tong, and my two generals Huang Zhong and Wei Yan will go into the west. You and our three best generals \u2014 Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and Zhao Zilong \u2014 can defend Jingzhou.\"\n\nGuan Yu was told off to hold Xiangyang and the narrow pass at Qingni, Zhang Fei commanded four territories along the river, and Zhao Zilong camped at Jiangling.\n\nFor the march westward, Huang Zhong led the van, Wei Yan had the rearguard, while Liu Bei moved in the center with Liu Feng and Guan Ping as his aids. Pang Tong was Commander of the whole army.\n\nJust as the fifty thousand troops were starting, there came Liao Hua to offer his service. He and his troops were attached to Guan Yu.\n\nIt was in the winter that the expedition started. Soon they met the force under Meng Da, five thousand soldiers, to act as escort into Yizhou. Liu Bei informed Liu Zhang that he had started, and the latter sent orders to the counties along the road to entertain them well on the march.\n\nThe Imperial Protector proposed to go out in person to welcome Liu Bei and ordered carriages to be prepared and tents and banners. All the escort were dressed in glittering armor. At this Secretary Huang Quan, the sturdy opponent of the invitation to Liu Bei, again remonstrated.\n\n\"My lord, if you go out, you will be exposed to danger. I have been in your service for many years, and I would prevent you from being the victim of another's wiles. I pray you reflect.\"\n\nZhang Song said, \"His words are those of one who would sow discord in a family and encourage the power of the robbers who threaten you. Assuredly such action is to your detriment.\"\n\nLiu Zhang then spoke angrily to Huang Quan, saying, \"I have decided, and why do you oppose me?\"\n\nThe objector bowed his head and wept. Then approaching nearer, he seized hold of the Imperial Protector's robe with his teeth to hinder him. Liu Zhang angrily shook his robe and rose from his seat, but Huang Quan still held on till two of his teeth fell out. Then the guards forced him away, and he retired, still crying.\n\nAs Liu Zhang was starting, another man cried, \"My lord, do you neglect the loyal words of your faithful Huang Quan to go to your death?\"\n\nAnd he threw himself prostrate at the steps in remonstrance. He was Li Hui of Jianning.\n\n\"The prince may have ministers who remonstrate with him, and the father may have children who oppose,\" said Li Hui. \"Huang Quan has spoken faithfully, and you ought to listen. To let Liu Bei into this land is to welcome the tiger into your gates.\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is my brother and will not harm me,\" said the Imperial Protector. \"And any other who shall oppose me shall suffer death.\"\n\nSo Li Hui was thrust out.\n\n\"The officers of Shu regard the safety of their families and no longer render you service. The generals are arrogant, and each has some scheme of his own to further. If you do not get Liu Bei to oppose the enemy without and your own people oppose you within, surely you are on the road to ruin.\"\n\nSo spoke Zhang Song, and the Imperial Protector replied, \"I know the plan is for my advantage.\"\n\nWhereupon he mounted his horse to ride out to Elm Tree Bridge.\n\nThen a messenger reported to him: \"Wang Lei has suspended himself, head downwards, at the city gate. In one hand he holds a written remonstrance and in the other a knife. And he says that if you heed him not, he will cut the rope and die at your feet.\"\n\nLiu Zhang went to the gate, took the writing and read:\n\n\"Good medicine is bitter in the mouth but good for the disease; faithful words offend the ear but are good for the conduct. Of old King Huai of Chu listened not to Qu Yuan, but attended the meeting at Wu Pass and was captured by the state of Qin. Sir, you are thoughtlessly leaving your place to go to welcome Liu Bei, but I fear there is a way out and none in. Could you but behead Zhang Song in the market place and have nothing to do with this league with Liu Bei, it would be for the happiness of old and young, and assure the safety of yourself.\"\n\nAnger rose in Liu Zhang's breast as he read.\n\n\"Why do you insult me when I go to meet a kindly man I feel as if I were about to enjoy the delight of seeing brother?\"\n\nAt this Wang Lei gave a great cry, severed the rope, and fell to the ground battered and dead.\n\n\u2003Head downwards at the city gate one hung\n\n\u2003A last remonstrance in his outstretched hand.\n\n\u2003Resolved that, were his words rejected, he\n\n\u2003Would not survive defeat. Sincere was he\n\n\u2003Who, desperate, held to Liu Zhang's silken robe\n\n\u2003Until his broken teeth released their grip.\n\n\u2003Sincere indeed, but how can he compare\n\n\u2003With stern Wang Lei who went to awful death?\n\nLiu Zhang with thirty thousand troops went out to welcome his clansman, and there followed one thousand wagons laden with supplies and rich stuffs.\n\nLiu Bei's advanced guard had arrived at River Dian. During the march the people had brought presents, and Liu Bei had given an order to pay for everything, under penalty of death for disobedience. Thus no one suffered, and the people came out in trusting crowds to watch the soldiers marching by and welcome them in every way. Liu Bei soothed them with very gracious words.\n\nThen Fa Zheng secretly showed Pang Tong a letter from Zhang Song advocating the assassination of Liu Zhang near the place of welcome.\n\nPang Tong said, \"Say nothing about this. After the two Lius have met, there may be opportunities, but this is too early to talk. Any plot would leak out.\"\n\nSo nothing was said.\n\nFucheng, where the meeting was to take place, was one hundred twenty miles from Capital Chengdu. Liu Zhang arrived first and sent messengers to welcome Liu Bei. The two armies camped on the bank of River Fu. Liu Bei went into the city to see the Imperial Protector, and they met cordially as brothers should. Both shed a few tears, and by and bye they began a heart-to-heart talk. Then followed a banquet, and after this each returned to his own camp.\n\nThe Imperial Protector said, \"How ridiculous have been proved the fears of Huang Quan and Wang Lei! They do not understand the force of family affection. I see he is really a kindly and noble man, and with him as a support I shall fear neither Cao Cao nor Zhang Lu. And I owe all this to Zhang Song.\"\n\nTo show his gratitude, Liu Zhang took off the green silken robe he wore and sent it as a gift to Zhang Song, together with five hundred ounces of gold.\n\nHowever, some of his officers were not so content, and a group of them bade him beware.\n\n\"Do not rejoice too soon, O Master,\" said they, \"for Liu Bei is hard enough within in spite of his mild exterior. You have not sounded him yet and should be on your guard.\"\n\n\"You are all too anxious,\" said Liu Zhang, laughing. \"My brother is no double-dealer, I am sure.\"\n\nWhen Liu Bei had returned to his own tent, Pang Tong came in to ask what impression he had of his host of that day.\n\n\"He seems a very honest man,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"He is good enough, but some of his servants are discontented at this turn of affairs, and I would not guarantee there will be no murders. If you took my advice, you would have Liu Zhang assassinated at the return banquet. A hundred ruffians behind the arras, a signal from you, and the deed would be accomplished. All that would be needed, then would be a rush on Capital Chengdu. No sword need be drawn, no arrow fitted to the string.\"\n\n\"He is a brother of my house and has treated me with sincerity. I am a new-comer and so far unknown in this land. Such a deed would be abhorrent to all the world, and these people would resent it. I will not establish myself by such means.\"\n\n\"The scheme is not mine. It originated in a private letter from Zhang Song, who says it will have to be done some time.\"\n\nAt this moment Fa Zheng came in and said, \"This is not for ourselves. It is the will of heaven.\"\n\n\"Liu Zhang and I are of the same house, and I would shudder at harming him,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Sir, you are wrong. If you act not as we propose, then Zhang Lu will take Shu in revenge for the death of his mother. What is there for you at the end of your long march? Advance, and success is yours; retreat, and you have nothing. And delays are most dangerous. At any moment this scheme may leak out, and another will reap the profit. This is the day when Heaven smiles on you. Act before Liu Zhang suspects you. Establish yourself.\"\n\n\u2003So urged Fa Zheng, and Pang Tong backed it.\n\n\u2003Their lord, by argument, they tried\n\n\u2003From rectitude to turn aside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "In The River, Zhao Zilong Recovers Liu Shan; With One Letter, Sun Quan Repulses Cao Cao.\n\nIn spite of the persuasion of Pang Tong and Fa Zheng, Liu Bei steadily refused to sanction the assassination of his host at the banquet, Imperial Protector Liu Zhang, even if thereby he was to gain possession of West River Land.\n\nThe next day there was another banquet, this time in the city of Fucheng, whereat host and guest unbosomed themselves freely to each other and became exceedingly friendly and affectionate.\n\nAll were mellow with wine, and Pang Tong, talking with Fa Zheng, said, \"Since our master will have nothing to do with our scheme, we had better set Wei Yan's sword-play to work and take advantage of the confusion to kill Liu Zhang.\"\n\nWei Yan came in shortly afterward, with his sword drawn, and said, \"There being no other entertainment at this banquet, may I show you a little fencing to amuse you?\"\n\nThereupon Pang Tong called up some of the armed guards and ranged them along the lower part of the hall till Wei Yan should fall on.\n\nAt these preparations the officers of Liu Zhang stared with questioning eyes toward the chief seats at the upper end.\n\nThen one of them, Zhang Ren, drew his sword, saying, \"An opponent is needed to make fencing a success, so he and I will display our skill at the same time.\"\n\nSo they began. Presently, at a glance from Wei Yan, Liu Feng came up and took position at his side.\n\nAt once three of the commanders of the west followed suit, saying, \"And we three will come in too. It may add to your amusement and help to raise a laugh.\"\n\nBut to Liu Bei matters began to take on a serious look. Drawing a sword of a servant, he stood out in the banquet hall and cried, \"We brothers have perhaps honored our meeting with a little too much wine. There is nothing to say against that, but this is no Hongmen Banquet, where murder was done. Put up your swords, or I will slay you!\"\n\n\"Why wear swords at all at a meeting of two brothers?\" cried Liu Zhang, at the same time telling his servants to surround his officers and take away their weapons.\n\nDisarmed, they sulkily withdrew.\n\nThen Liu Bei called all the generals of Liu Zhang to the upper end of the banquet hall, gave them wine, and said, \"You need have no doubts. We two brothers, of the same bone and blood, have talked over the great design, and we are one in purpose.\"\n\nThe officers bowed and retired.\n\nLiu Zhang took his guest by the hand, saying, \"Brother, I shall never forget your kindness.\"\n\nThey sat drinking till late, both feeling very happy. When at length Liu Bei reached his camp, he blamed his strategist for having caused the confusion.\n\n\"Why did you endeavor to force me into committing a great wrong?\" said Liu Bei. \"There must be no repetition of this.\"\n\nPang Tong retired, sighing.\n\nWhen Liu Zhang reached his own camp, his leaders waited on him and said, \"Sir, you saw the real meaning of that occurrence at the banquet, we suppose. We think it prudent for you to retire at once into the city.\"\n\n\"My brother is different from ordinary humans,\" replied Liu Zhang.\n\n\"He may not incline toward murder himself, but those about him have but one desire \u2014 that is to exploit this land of ours to their own advantage.\"\n\n\"Do not try to sow dissension between us and make us quarrel,\" said their chief.\n\nAnd Liu Zhang took no heed of their remonstrance. One day, when he and Liu Bei were enjoying together relaxation from cares of state, the news came that Zhang Lu was about to invade the West River Land at the Jiameng Pass. Thereupon the Imperial Protector begged Liu Bei to go and defend it. Liu Bei consented and left immediately with his own especial band.\n\nAt once Liu Zhang's officers took advantage of the guest's departure to urge the Imperial Protector to place his own trusty generals in command at various strategic points, so as to guard against any attempts of the visitors to seize the land. At first Liu Zhang was unwilling and refused, but as they prayed him most earnestly to do this he yielded and consented to take some steps to safeguard himself. He sent Yang Huai, Commander of Baishui, and Gao Pei to garrison River Fu Pass.\n\nSo Liu Zhang returned to Chengdu and his guest, Liu Bei, went away to the point where invasion threatened. Arrived there, Liu Bei soon won the hearts of the people by the strict discipline he maintained over his army and by his gracious manner.\n\nNews of these doings in the west duly reached the south, and Sun Quan summoned his counselors as to his countermove.\n\nThen Gu Yong spoke, saying, \"I have an infallible plan to propose. Liu Bei and his army are now far away and separated from us by difficult country. Therefore he cannot return quickly, and my advice is to occupy the passes so that he cannot get through. Then send all your force against Jingzhou and Xiangyang, and they will surely fall to you.\"\n\n\"The plan seems excellent,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nBut just then a voice was heard from behind the screen, crying, \"You may just put to death the man who proposed that scheme for trying to compass the death of my daughter.\"\n\nEveryone started with surprise. It was the Dowager Marchioness' voice.\n\nFurther, Lady Wu looked very angry as she entered, saying, \"What is to become of my only daughter, who is the wife of Liu Bei?\"\n\nShe turned her wrathful eyes to Sun Quan and said, \"You were heir to your father and brother and obtained possession of all these lands without the least effort. Yet you are dissatisfied and would forget the claims of your own flesh and blood and sacrifice your sister for the sake of adding a little to your lands.\"\n\n\"No, no!\" murmured Sun Quan, ashamed. \"I would never think of going contrary to my mother's wishes and orders.\"\n\nHe abruptly dismissed the assembly, and when they had gone the old lady, still nursing her wrath, retired to her own apartments.\n\nLeft alone beneath the portico, Sun Quan sighed sadly.\n\n\"This chance missed! When will Jingzhou be mine?\" thought he.\n\nWhile still deep in reverie, Zhang Zhao came up, saying, \"What grieves my lord?\"\n\n\"No great matter; only this last failure to gain my ends.\"\n\n\"The difficulty may be easily removed,\" said Zhang Zhao. \"Choose some trusty man and charge him with a secret letter to Lady Sun Ren saying that her mother is dangerously ill. Give him five hundred men as escort and tell him to make his way privily into Jingzhou City and deliver the letter. Hearing her mother wants her, she will rush home at once, and she might bring with her the only son of Liu Bei. Liu Bei will be glad enough to exchange Jingzhou for his son. If he will not, you can still send the army.\"\n\n\"That sounds like a good plan,\" said Sun Quan. \"Further, I have the man to carry it out successfully. He is that Zhou Shan, who was a bold one. He used to accompany my brother in his youth. He is the man to go.\"\n\n\"Keep it a secret, then,\" said Zhang Zhao, \"and let Zhou Shan start quickly.\"\n\nIt was decided that Zhou Shan should take with him about five hundred soldiers disguised as ordinary traders. He had five vessels and distributed his men among them, while weapons were hidden in the holds. Travel documents were forged to look like veritable authority in case they were asked.\n\nZhou Shan set out along the river route for the city of Jingzhou and was not long on the way. He anchored his ships under the bank, landed, and went into the city to the residence, where he bade the doorkeepers announce him. He was admitted and led into the presence of Lady Sun and presently gave her the secret letter. When she read that her mother was in danger of death, she began to weep bitterly and questioned the messenger closely.\n\nZhou Shan invented a story, saying, \"The Dowager Marchioness is really fretting for a sight of yours. If you do not go quickly, it will be too late. The Dowager Marchioness also wants to see little Liu Shan once before she dies.\"\n\nLady Sun replied, \"You know that the Imperial Uncle is far away on military service, and I ought to inform the chief of the army before returning home.\"\n\n\"But what will you do if the chief says he must inform your husband and await his consent?\" said Zhou Shan.\n\n\"If I went without asking permission \u2014 but I fear that is impossible.\"\n\n\"My ships are all ready in the river, and you have only to drive through the city,\" said Zhou Shan.\n\nNaturally the news of her mother's illness greatly disturbed the young wife. In a short time her carriage was ready, and she mounted, taking Liu Shan with her. She took an escort of thirty guards, all armed, and was soon at the river side and had embarked before the palace people could report what she was doing.\n\nBut just as the ships were starting, a voice was heard, shouting, \"Do not start yet! Let me bid my lady farewell.\"\n\nThe voice was Zhao Zilong's . He had just returned from an inspection trip, and they had at once told him of Lady Sun's sudden departure. As soon as he had recovered from his surprise, he dashed down to the river bank like a whirlwind, with only half a dozen followers. He arrived only just in time. The boat was starting, and Zhou Shan stood in the prow, a long spear in his hand.\n\n\"Who are you that you dare hinder the movements of your mistress?\" cried Zhou Shan.\n\nZhou Shan bade his soldiers cast off and get under way, and also to prepare their weapons to fight. The ship moved off with a fair wind and a strong current beneath her keel.\n\nBut Zhao Zilong followed along the bank.\n\n\"My lady may go or not as she pleases,\" cried he, \"but I have one word to say to her.\"\n\nZhou Shan turned a deaf ear and only urged his soldiers to get greater speed on the ship. Zhao Zilong followed down the bank for some three or more miles. Then he saw a fishing boat made fast to the bank. He at once dismounted, cast off the rope, took his spear, and leaped into the boat. Then he made the two men row him toward the vessel in which sat Lady Sun.\n\nAs he approached, the soldiers of the South Land threatened him with their spears. Thereupon he threw his spear into the bottom of the boat, drew the glittering steel blade he wore, dashed aside the opposing spears, and leaped upon the larger vessel. The guards of the South Land fell back in surprise and fear, and Zhao Zilong went down into the body of the ship. There sat Lady Sun with little Liu Shan in her arms.\n\n\"Why this rude intrusion?\" said she angrily.\n\nThe warrior sheathed his sword and said humbly, \"Whither may my mistress be going, and why goes she privily?\"\n\n\"My mother is ill and on the point of death. I had no time to inform any person of my departure,\" said Lady Sun.\n\n\"But why take the young master if you are going merely to see a sick person?\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"Liu Shan is my son, and I would not leave him behind to be neglected.\"\n\n\"Mistress, you have acted wrongly. My lord has but this one son of his body, and I rescued the child lord from among many thousand troops of Cao Cao in the great battle at Long Slope Bridge in Dangyang. There is no reason for you to take him away.\"\n\nLady Sun took refuge in anger. \"You leave my family affairs alone, you common soldier!\" cried she.\n\n\"My lady, if you will go, then go, but leave the young master behind.\"\n\n\"You are a rebel, jumping on board the ship like that!\" cried Lady Sun.\n\n\"If you will not leave the young lord behind, I refuse to let you go, come what may,\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\nLady Sun called in her maids to seize him, but he just pushed them off. Then he took the boy from her arms and ran out to the prow of the ship. He tried to get the vessel in to the bank, but no one would aid him, and he thought it would be wrong to begin to slay indiscriminately. He knew not what to do in such a quandary. And Lady Sun was screaming to her maids to take the boy away from him. But he kept too firm a grip on the child, and the good sword in his other hand kept everyone at bay.\n\nZhou Shan was at the helm, giving all his attention to getting the ship out into the current and away down the river. He steered for the middle of the stream, where the wind was strong. Zhao Zilong, one hand taken up with holding the boy, was quite unable to get the vessel in toward the shore.\n\nJust as things looked most desperate, Zhao Zilong saw a string of ships filing out from a creek lower down the stream, flags fluttering and drums beating. He thought that certainly all was over and he was about to fall a victim to a stratagem of the South Land, when he noticed a mighty warrior standing in the prow of the leading craft. He was armed with a long spear, and it was Zhang Fei.\n\nZhang Fei also shouted, \"Sister-in-law! Leave the child lord.\"\n\nZhang Fei had been out scouting when he heard the news of his sister-in-law's sudden departure, and he at once made for the River Yu with the intention of intercepting her flight. He had arrived just in the nick of time to cut off the ships of the South Land. Very soon, sword in hand, he had boarded the vessel. As Zhang Fei came on board, Zhou Shan drew his sword and advanced toward him, but one sweep of Zhang Fei's blade laid him on the deck dead. And the grim warrior hung his head at the feet of Lady Sun.\n\n\"Why this very unseemly behavior?\" cried Lady Sun, now quite frightened.\n\n\"Sister,\" said Zhang Fei, \"you thought very little of my brother when you set out on this mad journey. That was behaving rudely.\"\n\n\"My mother is very ill. It is a matter of life and death,\" cried she. \"If I had waited for your brother's permission to go, I should have been too late. If you do not let me go now, I will throw myself into the river.\"\n\nZhao Zilong and Zhang Fei took counsel together. They said to each other, \"It is hardly the correct thing for servants to force their lord's wife into committing suicide. Suppose we keep the child and let the vessel go.\"\n\nThen they said, \"O Lady, we cannot allow the wife of our exalted brother to die a death of shame, and so we will take our leave. We trust you will not forget our brother and that you will return quickly.\"\n\nTaking the child with them, they left the vessel, and the five ships of the South Land continued their voyage down stream. One poet has praised the conduct of Zhao Zilong:\n\n\u2003Before, Zhao Zilong saved Liu Shan,\n\n\u2003What time his mother died;\n\n\u2003Again like service he performs,\n\n\u2003Upon the Great River's tide.\n\n\u2003The soldiers of Wu all in the ship,\n\n\u2003Were stricken down with fear\n\n\u2003Search all the world, you never find\n\n\u2003Of bold Zhao Zilong the peer.\n\n\u2003Another has eulogized Zhang Fei:\n\n\u2003At Long Slope Bridge,\n\n\u2003With rage Zhang Fei boiled,\n\n\u2003Like wild beast roared,\n\n\u2003And warriors recoiled.\n\n\u2003From danger now\n\n\u2003His prince is saved.\n\n\u2003On history's page\n\n\u2003His name is graved.\n\nQuite satisfied with their success, the two warriors sailed homeward. Before they had gone far, they met Zhuge Liang with a squadron of ships. He was very pleased to find they had recovered the child, and they three joyfully returned to Jingzhou, whence an account of the whole adventure was written to Liu Bei.\n\nWhen Lady Sun reached her home, she related the story of the death of Zhou Shan and the carrying off of the child. Naturally Sun Quan was very wrath at the miscarriage of his scheme, and he resolved to attack Jingzhou in revenge for his messenger's murder.\n\n\"Now that my sister has returned home, there is no longer any family tie to prevent the attack, and I will take full measure of revenge for the death of my general,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nSo he called the council to consider the expedition.\n\nBut before they could decide upon any plan, their deliberations were suddenly cut short by the news that Cao Cao was coming down upon the South Land with four hundred thousand troops, burning to avenge his defeat at the Red Cliffs. All thoughts now turned toward repelling his attack.\n\nAdviser Zhang Hong, who had retired to his home ill, had just died, and his testament was sent to his lord to read. Therein he advised Sun Quan:\n\n\"My lord, the seat of government should be removed to the old land of Moling, where the scenery seems to bear the impress of kingly dignity, befitting a person who cherishes the ambition of founding an enduring dynasty.\"\n\nSun Quan read this document out to his councilors at this meeting, not without many tears in memory of the writer.\n\nHe told them, saying, \"Zhang Hong was sincere till his death. I cannot withstand his last advice!\"\n\nAnd Sun Quan at once gave orders to build a walled city named Shidou in Moling, and changed the name of the land to Jianye. Henceforth he intended to make his capital there.\n\nAs a protection against Cao Cao, Admiral Lu Meng proposed building a rampart at River Ruxu.\n\nSome other officers opposed this, saying, \"When the enemy appears, you will have to land in order to attack him, and after that you will return to your ships. What is the use of a rampart?\"\n\nLu Meng replied, \"One must prepare against possibilities. Soldiers vary in keenness and sometimes lose battles. If an urgent occasion arises, the soldiers may be unable to reach the water's edge, and how then are they to embark? They will then need shelter.\"\n\nSun Quan said, \"Provision against eventualities, such as he proposes, is good. Against a distant risk provide, and sorrow walks not by your side.\"\n\nSo they sent soldiers to build ramparts at River Ruxu, and as the work ceased not day or night the wall was soon completed.\n\nIn the capital Cao Cao's influence and glory waxed daily greater. High Counselor Dong Zhao proposed that the title of duke should be conferred upon him.\n\nDong Zhao said, \"In all history, no one has rendered such services as you have, O Prime Minister, not even Duke of Zhou or Lu Wang. These thirty years you have exposed yourself to all risks, been combed by the wind and bathed by the rain, and you have swept evil from the empire, succored the distressed, and restored the Hans. Who of all statesmen can rank with you? It would be fitting for you to become the Duke of Wei and receive the Nine Dignities, that your merit and virtue be known to all.\"\n\nNow the Nine Dignities, or signs of honor, were:\n\n1. Chariots: Gilded chariots drawn by eight horses\n\n2. Court dresses: Dragon-embroidered robes, headdresses, and shoes\n\n3. Music at banquets: By royal bands\n\n4. Red doors: Symbols of wealth\n\n5. Inner staircase: Protection for every step\n\n6. Imperial Tiger Guard: Three hundred at the gates\n\n7. Imperial axes: Commanding and ceremonial symbols\n\n8. Bow and arrows: Red-lacquered bow with a hundred arrows\n\n9. Libation vessels: Jade tablets and libation cups\n\nHowever, all the courtiers were not of one mind.\n\nSaid High Adviser Xun Yu, \"This should not be done, O Prime Minister. You raised a force by an appeal to the innate sense of righteousness of the people, and with that force you restored the Han authority. Now you should remain loyal and humble. The virtuous person loves people with a virtuous love and would not act in this way.\"\n\nCao Cao did not take this opposition kindly.\n\nDong Zhao said, \"How can we disappoint the hopes of many because of the words of one?\"\n\nSo a memorial went to the Throne, and Cao Cao's ambitions and desires were gratified with the title of Duke of Wei. The Nine Dignities were added.\n\n\"I did not think to see this day!\" said Xun Yu, sighing.\n\nThis remark was repeated to the newly created Duke and angered him. He took it to mean that Xun Yu would no longer aid him or favor his designs.\n\nIn the winter of the seventeenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 212), Cao Cao decided to send an army to conquer the South Land, and he ordered Xun Yu to go with it. Xun Yu understood from this that Cao Cao wished his death, so he declined the appointment on the plea of illness. While Xun Yu was at home, he received one day a box such as one sent with presents of dainties. It was addressed in Cao Cao's own handwriting. Opening it, Xun Yu found therein nothing. He understood; so he took poison and died. He was fifty-two years of age.\n\n\u2003Xun Yu's talents were to all people known,\n\n\u2003That was sad that at the door of power he tripped.\n\n\u2003Posterity is wrong to class him with the noble Zhang Liang,\n\n\u2003For, nearing death, he dared not face his lord of Han.\n\nNews of Xun Yu's death came to Cao Cao in the form of the ordinary letter of mourning by his son, Xun Yun. Then Cao Cao was sorry and gave orders for an imposing funeral. He also obtained for the dead man the posthumous title of lordship.\n\nThe northern army reached River Ruxu, whence Cao Cao sent a reconnaissance of thirty thousand troops led by Cao Hong down to the river.\n\nSoon Cao Hong reported: \"The enemy's fleet blankets the river, but no sign of movements.\"\n\nFeeling suspicious, Cao Cao led his army to the river to watch the enemy and deploy his troops. On the river he saw displayed a fleet of ships all arranged in admirable order, the divisions being marked by distinctive flags. The equipment glittered in the sunlight. In the center was a large ship whereon was a huge umbrella, and beneath the shade sat Sun Quan in the midst of his staff.\n\n\"That is the sort of son to have,\" said Cao Cao in admiration, \"not such piglets and puppies as Liu Biao's .\"\n\nSuddenly, at the explosion of a bomb, the ships got under way and came flying toward him, while a force moved out of River Ruxu. Cao Cao's soldiers at once retired in great haste. A company led by the green-eyed, purple-bearded Sun Quan made straight for Cao Cao, who hastily retreated. But Cao Cao was sore pressed by other Sun Quan's commanders, Han Dang and Zhou Tai, and it had gone hard with him but that Xu Chu came to his rescue and fought with the troops of the South Land till his master could escape. Xu Chu fought some score bouts before he could draw off and return to his own aide.\n\nWhen Cao Cao returned to camp, he conferred rich rewards upon his henchman who had saved him, and he reprimanded his other leaders for their too hasty retirement.\n\n\"You blunt the keen spirits of the army. And if you do such a thing again, I will put you to death,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAbout midnight that night there arose great commotion at the gates of the camp. When Cao Cao went outside, he found that the enemy had crept up secretly and started a conflagration. The soldiers of the South Land forced their way into the stockade and went hither and thither, slaying till morning broke. Then Cao Cao and his army retired.\n\nCao Cao was greatly distressed by this misfortune. He was sitting in his tent poring over the Book of War when Cheng Yu came in to see him.\n\n\"O Prime Minister,\" said Cheng Yu, \"you who know so thoroughly the art of war, have you forgotten the maxim to strike quickly? You had your army ready, but you postponed action and allowed your enemies to build the ramparts at River Ruxu. Now you will find it hard to capture the place. It would be better now to retreat on the capital and await a more propitious moment.\"\n\nCao Cao listened, but said nothing. After a time Cheng Yu went away. Cao Cao remained seated in his tent, leaning on a small table by his side. And he fell asleep. Suddenly he heard a sound as of a rushing stream or galloping squadrons of horse, and out of the river in front of him arose a huge red sun, so bright that his eyes were dazzled by it. Looking up at the sky, he saw two other suns as if reflections of this one. And as he wondered, the first sun suddenly flew up and then dropped among the hills in front of his camp with a roar like thunder.\n\nThis woke him. He was in his tent and had been dreaming, and the sentry at his tent door was just reporting noon.\n\nSoon he had his horse saddled and rode out, with a small escort of fifty riders, toward the spot he had seen in his dream. As he stood gazing around him, an army of horse came along with Sun Quan at their head. Sun Quan wore a glittering helmet and was clad in silver armor.\n\nSeeing his chief enemy, Sun Quan showed no sign of haste or dismay, but reined in his steed on a rise.\n\nPointing with his whip at Cao Cao, Sun Quan said, \"Behold the all-powerful minister who holds the Middle Land in the hollow of his hand! He has reached the acme of wealth and good fortune and yet he is not content, but must come to encroach upon our South Land.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"You are disobedient, and the command of the Emperor is to exterminate you!\"\n\n\"What words!\" cried Sun Quan with a laugh. \"Are you not ashamed? Everyone knows that you control every act of the Emperor and you tyrannize over the nobles. I am no rebel against the dynasty, but I do desire to capture you and reform the government.\"\n\nCao Cao grew angry at this speech and bade his generals go over and take Sun Quan prisoner. But before they could obey, Han Dang and Zhou Tai, Chen Wu and Pan Zhang led out two armies of soldiers from left and right at the sound of beating drums, and arrows and crossbow bolts began to fall like raindrops around Cao Cao. He turned to retire, and the archers and bowmen followed him. However, presently appeared Xu Chu, with the Tiger Guards, who rescued Cao Cao and took him back to his camp. The army of the South Land had scored a victory, and they marched back to River Ruxu.\n\nAlone in his camp, Cao Cao thought, \"This Sun Quan certainly is no ordinary man, and by the presage of the sun in my dream he will become an emperor.\"\n\nHe began to think it would be well to retire from the expedition, only that he feared the troops of the South Land would exult over him. So the two armies remained facing each other a whole month, fighting occasional skirmishes and battles in which victory fell sometimes to the one and sometimes to the other.\n\nAnd so it went on till the new year, and the spring rains filled the watercourses to overflowing, and the soldiers were wading in deep mud. Their sufferings were extreme, and Cao Cao became sad at heart. At the council board his officers were divided, some being for retirement and others anxious to hold on till the warm weather. Their chief could not make up his mind.\n\nThen there came a messenger from the South Land bearing a letter of Sun Quan, which read:\n\n\"You and I, O Prime Minister, are both servants of Han, but you are careless for the tranquillity of the people and think only of battle, thereby causing great suffering. Is this conduct worthy of a kindly person?\n\n\"But spring with its heavy rains is at hand, and you would be wise to retire while you can. If not, you may expect a repetition of the misfortune at the Red Cliffs. It would be well to consider this.\"\n\nAnd on the back of the letter was a note in a line running thus: \"No tranquillity for me while you live!\"\n\nCao Cao read the letter and laughed.\n\n\"Sun Quan speaks the truth!\" said he.\n\nHe rewarded the messenger and issued orders to retreat. The Governor of Lujiang, Zhu Guang, was left to guard Huancheng. The army marched for the capital.\n\nSun Quan returned to Jianye.\n\nAt a meeting of his advisers Sun Quan said, \"Cao Cao has marched north, Liu Bei is at Jiameng Pass. Why should I not lead the army that has just repulsed the northern forces to take Jingzhou?\"\n\nThereupon Zhang Zhao offered another plan, saying, \"Do not move a soldier. I know how to keep Liu Bei from returning to Jingzhou.\"\n\n\u2003Cao Cao's army march away,\n\n\u2003Sun Quan's thoughts then southward stray." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "The Taking Of River Fu Pass, Yang Huai and Gao Pei Perish; The Siege Of Luocheng, Huang Zhong and Wei Yan Rival.\n\nZhang Zhao proceeded to unfold his device: \"If you undertake any expedition farther west, Cao Cao will undoubtedly return to the attack. Rather write two letters, one to Liu Zhang saying that Liu Bei has leagued himself with you against the west, which will raise suspicions in the mind of Liu Zhang and cause him to attack his guest, and another letter persuading Zhang Lu to march upon Jingzhou, which will uproot Liu Bei. Between these two conflicting matters, Liu Bei cannot give supports to all fronts, and we can march against Jingzhou.\"\n\nSun Quan approved, wrote the two letters, and sent them by two messengers.\n\nIn the meantime, Liu Bei had been winning the hearts of the people about Jiameng Pass, where his army lay. When he received the news of his wife's flight and of Cao Cao's attack on Ruxu, he called in Pang Tong and laid the matter before him.\n\n\"The victor of Ruxu, whoever it is, will assuredly possess himself of our region of Jingzhou,\" said Liu Bei at the close.\n\n\"You need not trouble about that region,\" said Pang Tong. \"I do not think the South Land or the Middle Land will try to take it so long as Zhuge Liang is there. But, my lord, write to Liu Zhang telling him you wish to return on account of this threatening danger. It will be a plausible excuse. You may say that on account of Cao Cao's attack, Sun Quan has sent to you for help, and that as his country and yours are neighbors and dependent upon each other for safety you cannot refuse. Further, you will assure him that there is no danger of any invasion by Zhang Lu. However, we have too few troops for our purpose and insufficient grain, so you must also urge your relative to send you thirty or forty thousand of veterans and a plentiful supply of food. He will not refuse, and with more soldiers and provisions we can do as we please.\"\n\nLiu Bei agreed to this and sent a messenger to Chengdu. When his messenger reached the River Fu Pass, Yang Huai and Gao Pei, who commanded the garrison, already knew of the design, and the former of the two generals went with him to the city.\n\nAfter reading the letter, the Imperial Protector asked Yang Huai, \"Why did you come with the messenger?\"\n\n\"Only because of that letter,\" Yang Huai replied. \"This Liu Bei, from the day he first entered Yizhou, has been trying to win over the hearts of your people by a display of kindness and virtue. He certainly intends no good, and I think you should refuse both the troops and the supplies he asks. To help him is like adding fuel to a fire.\"\n\n\"We are affectionate brothers, and I must help him,\" said the Imperial Protector.\n\n\"Liu Bei is nothing but a vagabond swashbuckler,\" someone cried, \"and if you keep him here in the west, you are loosing a tiger in your household. If you give him the troops and supplies he asks, you are adding wings to your tiger.\"\n\nTurning whence the voice proceeded, they recognized the speaker as one Liu Ba, a native of Lingling. His words threw the Imperial Protector into a state of doubt and hesitation. Huang Quan also dissuaded him most earnestly, and finally Liu Zhang actually decided to send only four thousand of worn-out soldiers and a paltry supply of grain. At the same time fresh orders enjoining a diligent watchfulness were sent to the guardians of the passes.\n\nWhen Liu Bei read the letter that accompanied the Imperial Protector's miserable contribution to his strength, he was furious and cried, \"I have been spending myself in your defense, and this is my reward! You are mean and greedy enough to stint my supplies. How can you expect generous service?\"\n\nLiu Bei tore the letter to fragments and execrated the writer thereof. The bearer of the letter fled back to the capital.\n\nThen said Pang Tong, \"You have hitherto laid too much stress on humanity and righteousness. However, that is all over now, and all affection between you two is at an end, now that you have torn up that letter.\"\n\n\"Yes. And since that is so, what next?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"I have three schemes ready in my mind. You may choose which pleases you.\"\n\n\"What are your three schemes?\"\n\n\"The first, and best, is to send an army forthwith and seize Chengdu. The second is to capture and put to death the two generals of the River Fu Pass. They are the two most famous fighting men in this land. If you give out that you are returning to Jingzhou, they will assuredly come to say farewell. Seize and put them to death, and the Pass and Fucheng are both yours. Chengdu will follow soon. The third plan is to drop this role you have been playing, go back to Jingzhou and make a regular invasion. But if you ponder these schemes too long, you will get into such straits that nothing can save you.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"Of your three schemes, O Instructor, I find the first too summary and the last too slow. I choose the second scheme, which is neither.\"\n\nSo a letter was written to Liu Zhang saying that Cao Cao was sending an army against Qingni, and since the generals there were unequal to the defense, Liu Bei had to go to help. As the matter was pressing, there could be no personal leave-taking.\n\n\"I knew that the real desire of Liu Bei was to return to Jingzhou,\" said Zhang Song, when he heard of the letter to Liu Zhang.\n\nZhang Song then also composed a letter to Liu Bei. While he was looking about for a trusty person to take it, his brother Zhang Su, who was the Governor of Guanghan, came to see him. Zhang Song hid the letter in his sleeve while he talked with his brother. Zhang Su noticed his anxious inquietude, which he could not explain. Wine was brought in and, as the two brothers chatted over it, the letter dropped to the floor unnoticed by Zhang Song. One of Zhang Su's servants saw it, picked it up, and gave it to his master, who opened and read it.\n\nThis is about how it ran:\n\n\"What I said to you lately was not mere meaningless talk. Why, then, postpone action? The ancients valued the person who took by force and held by conciliation. If you act at once, the whole matter is in your hand. Why abandon all and return to Jingzhou? Surely I do not hear aright! When you get this letter, attack without a moment's delay and remember that I am your ally on the inside. Above all, no delay!\"\n\n\"This plot of my brother's will end in the destruction of the whole family,\" said Zhang Su. \"I must get in the first word.\"\n\nSo at once he went in and laid the whole matter before the Imperial Protector.\n\n\"I have always treated your brother so well!\" said Liu Zhang, very angry.\n\nLiu Zhang issued orders to arrest Zhang Song and behead him and all his household in the market place.\n\n\u2003Zhang Song, such as he have been but few,\n\n\u2003Little thought he that a letter would betray\n\n\u2003When he plotted for another. But success he never knew,\n\n\u2003For himself there opened out a gory way.\n\nHaving thus learned of a real conspiracy to deprive him of his heritage, Liu Zhang assembled his officers and asked their advice.\n\nHuang Quan spoke out, saying, \"Prompt action is needed. Send to every strategic point telling them to increase the garrisons and keep careful guard and, above all, prevent the entrance of any person from Jingzhou.\"\n\nSuch orders were sent to all points of vantage where were garrisons.\n\nIn the meantime, carrying out Pang Tong's scheme, Liu Bei had marched down to Fucheng, where he halted and sent in a messenger to invite the two generals to come forth and say farewell. But they did not respond immediately to this invitation.\n\n\"What is the real meaning of this retirement?\" said one to the other.\n\n\"This Liu Bei ought to die,\" said Gao Pei. \"Let us hide daggers under our dress and stab him at the place of farewell. That will end all our lord's troubles.\"\n\n\"A most excellent plan,\" said Yang Huai.\n\nSo they two, taking only a small escort of two hundred, went down out of the Pass to say goodbye. Most of their forces were left in the camp.\n\nOn the way down to River Fu, Pang Tong had said to his master, \"You have need to be on your guard against those two if they come to bid you farewell. If they do not come, then the Pass must be attacked without delay.\"\n\nJust as he said this, a violent gust of wind overthrew the leading flag of the army, and Liu Bei asked what this portended.\n\n\"That means a surprise. Those two intend to assassinate you, so be on your guard.\"\n\nAccordingly, Liu Bei put on double armor and girded on his sword in readiness. When the two generals arrived, the army halted while the generals should pay the farewell visit.\n\nThen Pang Tong said to his two generals, Wei Yan and Huang Zhong, \"However many soldiers come down from the Pass, see to it that none return.\"\n\nThe two generals of West River Land, Yang Huai and Gao Pei, armed with hidden daggers, came up, their escort bearing gifts of sheep and wine. They marked no precautions being taken against an attack and began to think their task of murder would be an easy one. They were led in to where Liu Bei sat under a tent, his adviser with him.\n\nThey said, \"We hear, O Imperial Uncle, that you contemplate a long march, and therefore we come to offer a few poor gifts to speed you on your way.\"\n\nThe cups of farewell were duly filled.\n\nThen Liu Bei replied, \"You have a heavy responsibility to defend the Pass, Generals. I pray you drink first.\"\n\nThey drank. Then Liu Bei said, \"I have a secret matter to talk over with you.\"\n\nSo all the two hundred soldiers of the escort were sent away and led to the midst of the camp.\n\nAs soon as they had gone, Liu Bei shouted, \"My generals, lay hands upon these two rebels!\"\n\nThereupon Liu Feng and Guan Ping rushed out from behind the tent. The two generals of the Pass were taken aback, but began to struggle. However, Liu Feng and Guan Ping each seized one man and held him.\n\n\"Your lord and I are of the same house,\" said Liu Bei. \"Why then have you plotted against me and conspired to sow enmity between us?\"\n\nPang Tong bade them search the captives, and the hidden daggers were found. So both were ordered to immediate execution. However, Liu Bei hesitated and was unwilling to confirm the sentence and put them to death. But his adviser insisted that they were worthy of death for the assassination they had penned, and bade the executioners fall on. So the two men were beheaded. Of their following not one had been allowed to slip away.\n\nLiu Bei summoned the soldiers of the escort to his tent, gave them wine to comfort them, and said, \"Your leaders conspired to sow dissension between brothers and were found with daggers hidden beneath their clothing. They were assassins in intent and have met the fate they merited. You have committed no crime and need feel no alarm.\"\n\nThe soldiers thanked him for his clemency with low obeisance.\n\nThen said Pang Tong, \"If you will now show the way so that our troops may capture the Pass, you shall even be rewarded.\"\n\nThey consented. That same night the army set out, with the soldiers of the renegade escort leading the way.\n\nWhen they reached the Pass they hailed the gate, saying, \"Open the gate quickly! The Generals have returned earlier than they expected because of important business.\"\n\nHearing the voices of their comrades, the gate guards had no suspicion of treachery and threw open the gates. In rushed the enemy soldiers and so gained possession of River Fu Pass without shedding a drop of blood. The defenders came over to the side of Liu Bei and were liberally rewarded. This done, the army was posted so as to guard the approaches and maintain what they had captured.\n\nThe next few days were spent in banquets and feasts in celebration of success.\n\nAt one of these feasts, Liu Bei turned to his adviser, saying, \"This is what one might call a joyful occasion.\"\n\n\"To employ warlike weapons in making an attack upon the possession of another is not using them in the best way,\" replied Pang Tong. \"Nor is such attack the most proper occasion for rejoicing.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"The success of King Wu of Zhou was celebrated with music. I suppose weapons were not well used on that occasion either. Why do you talk so wide of reason? You had better retire.\"\n\nPang Tong laughed and withdrew from the table, while the attendants supported Liu Bei to his own chamber, where he had a long sleep. About midnight he awoke from his wine, and then the servants told him that he had driven sway his adviser from the feast. He was at once filled with remorse. Next day, having dressed early in full costume of ceremony, he took his seat in the great hall, summoned his adviser and apologized handsomely for his rude behavior the night before.\n\n\"I drank too much last night and spoke rudely. Pray forgive me.\"\n\nPang Tong, who had taken the whole episode in very good part from the first, laughed and talked as usual.\n\nBut Liu Bei went on, \"Really I was the only one to blame yesterday.\"\n\n\"We both slipped up. It was not only you, my lord,\" said Pang Tong.\n\nThen Liu Bei laughed too, and the two were as good friends again as ever.\n\nWhen Imperial Protector Liu Zhang heard of the doings of his relative and guest, he said, \"I did not think that such things would come to pass.\"\n\nThe officers of Yizhou met to consider how to oppose the further advance of Liu Bei.\n\nHuang Quan said, \"Let us send without delay a force to hold Luocheng, which is the very throat of the road he must take. He may have veteran soldiers and fiery generals, but he will not be able to pass.\"\n\nSo the four ablest generals \u2014 Deng Xiang, Ling Bao, Liu Gui, and Zhang Ren \u2014 were told off for this duty, and they led fifty thousand troops.\n\nAs they marched, Liu Gui said, \"In the Silky Hills there is a wonderful Daoist who calls himself 'The Super Human of the Dark Void.' He has the gift of second sight, so let us visit him as we pass and inquire what our fortunes are to be.\"\n\n\"What should one seek of a hermit when one is out to repulse an enemy?\" said his colleague, Zhang Ren, contemptuously.\n\n\"Your view is wrong,\" said Liu Gui. \"The Holy One (Confucius) has said that it is characteristic of the most entire sincerity to be able to foreknow. So let us inquire of this man of high intelligence that we may know what to do and what to avoid.\"\n\nWhereupon they went up into the hills and sought the hermit's retreat. They were a small party, on horseback. Meeting a wood-cutter, they inquired the whereabouts of the dwelling of the wise man, and he pointed to one of the highest hills, saying that the Sage lived on the very summit. They climbed up to the spot he had told them of and found a small hut. At their summons, a lad in Daoist garb came out to speak with them. He asked their names and led them into the presence of the Super Human, who received them seated on a rush cushion. They made a low obeisance, told him the reason of their coming, and asked of the future.\n\n\"How can a poor Daoist recluse know ought of fortunes, good or evil?\" said he.\n\nHowever, after a time, as Liu Gui repeated his request again and again and comported himself most humbly, the hermit bade the lad bring paper and ink and he wrote eight lines, which he handed to his questioner.\n\n\u2003\"Supported by dragon and phoenix,\n\n\u2003So flies he westward.\n\n\u2003But the phoenix shall fall to the earth.\n\n\u2003And the dragon shall soar to the sky;\n\n\u2003There shall be successes and failures,\n\n\u2003For such is the eternal law.\n\n\u2003See that ye act when occasion offers,\n\n\u2003Lest ye descend to the Nine Golden Springs.\"\n\nHaving read the oracle, they pressed the seer to reveal them their individual fortunes, but he replied, \"Why ask these things? None can escape his fate.\"\n\nLiu Gui ventured to question the Sage further, but his eyelids dropped as if he slumbered. Nor would he vouchsafe a word more, and the four generals took leave and descended the hill.\n\n\"One must have faith in such as he says,\" said Liu Gui.\n\n\"What is to be gained by listening to the sayings of a daft old man?\" replied Zhang Ren.\n\nSo they continued their road to Luocheng.\n\nWhen they arrived, Liu Gui said, \"Luocheng is the throat of the road to Chengdu. We must create a pincers defense for the city. Two of us are to guard the ramparts while the other two are to station themselves in front of the city, where is a point of vantage sheltered by some hills.\"\n\nThus Deng Xiang and Ling Bao wanted to build the ramparts outside the city. Twenty thousand troops were told off. The two generals went to establish two camps in two stockades twenty miles away, hoping to be able to keep the foe away from the city.\n\nThe River Fu Pass being captured, Liu Bei took counsel with his adviser as to the next point to be attempted. This was Luocheng.\n\nThe scouts reported: \"Liu Zhang has sent four generals to the defense of that city, and two camps has been established twenty miles away to form an ox horn.\"\n\nThen Liu Bei assembled his officers and asked who would go to attack the camps. The veteran Huang Zhong offered himself.\n\n\"Veteran General, take your own troops and go,\" said Liu Bei. \"A goodly reward shall be yours if you capture the two camps.\"\n\nHuang Zhong thanked his lord and was just leading away his troops when suddenly up spoke a youthful leader, saying, \"The General is too old to go on such an expedition. I am of poor ability, but I wish to take his place.\"\n\nThe speaker was Wei Yan.\n\nHuang Zhong replied, \"I already have my commission. Why should you wish to supplant me?\"\n\n\"Because the task is beyond an old man's strength,\" said Wei Yan. \"The two generals in those camps we know are the best and boldest in the country. They are strong, and, veteran as you are, I fear you will be unable to overcome them. If you fail, our lord's great design will be hindered. Therefore I ask that I may replace you, and my intent is kindly.\"\n\nThis reminder of his age angered the old man.\n\n\"Old, am I? Dare you compete with me in the use of warlike weapons?\" said Huang Zhong.\n\n\"Yes, I dare. And our lord shall be the judge. The winner shall undertake this expedition. Do you agree?\"\n\nHuang Zhong ran down the steps and called to his soldiers to bring his sword.\n\nBut Liu Bei would stop this contest and said, \"I have need of both of you in the task that lies before me. When two tigers fight, one is sure to lose; and the loss of either of you is more than I could bear. Be reconciled and quarrel no more.\"\n\n\"You two must not quarrel,\" said Pang Tong. \"But as there are two camps to be taken and two generals to fight, take one each and let each lead his own troops. The first to capture his camp shall be held to have rendered the greater service and to have acquired the greater merit.\"\n\nThis decision pacified them, and it was settled that Huang Zhong, the veteran, should go against Ling Bao, and Wei Yan, the younger leader, should attack Deng Xiang.\n\nBut after they had marched away, Pang Tong recommended, \"You, my lord, should follow them lest they should quarrel on the way.\"\n\nSo leaving the city of Fucheng in care of his adviser, Liu Bei also marched, taking with him Liu Feng, his adopted son, and Guan Ping, his nephew by adoption. They took five thousand troops.\n\nAfter having received the command to take one of the camps, Huang Zhong went to his own camp and issued orders for the morning meal to be ready very early, and for everyone to be in marching order by daybreak. When the time arrived, his army set out, taking the road through a gully to the left of the hills.\n\nBut early as Huang Zhong started, his rival had stolen a march on him. Wei Yan had sent over the night before to find out the hour fixed for Huang Zhong's start and had arranged his own departure a watch earlier, by which he would be able to reach his objective at dawn. After Wei Yan's troops had taken their early meal, they removed the bells from the horses end put gags in their own mouths to prevent talking, and all-silently the army stole out of the camp just as the other party were eating their breakfast. The ensigns were furled and weapons covered lest the glint of steel should betray their movement.\n\nThus far successful in getting the start of his rival, Wei Yan thought as he rode along what a fine score he would make if he anticipated Huang Zhong also in his attack and captured the camp of Ling Bao before Huang Zhong could get there. Wei Yan at once deviated from his own line and marched toward the camp defended by Ling Bao, of which the capture had been assigned to Huang Zhong.\n\nJust before arrival, Wei Yan halted his troops and bade them prepare the drums and ensigns and their weapons.\n\nEarly as it was, yet the camp commander was on the alert, for the advancing force had been observed by his scouts. At the first sign of attack, the defenders poured out in full force. Wei Yan galloped up and made straight for Ling Bao. These two fought twenty or so of bouts, and then the troops of West River Land came up and joined in the battle. The troops of Jingzhou under Wei Yan having marched a long distance, were fatigued and could not withstand this onslaught, so they fell back. Wei Yan heard the confused sound of hoofs behind him and, giving up all thought of finishing his encounter with Ling Bao, turned his horse and fled. The troops of West River Land kept up the pursuit, and the attackers were defeated and retired.\n\nThey had gone about two miles when another army of Yizhou appeared from behind some hills. They advanced with heating drums. Their leader, Deng Xiang, shouted to Wei Yan to surrender, but Wei Yan heeded him not; whipping up his steed he fled the faster. However, the tired horse tripped and fell on its knees, throwing its rider to the ground. Deng Xiang's forces came galloping up, and he himself set his spear to thrust and slay Wei Yan. Before the spear could get where it was supposed to be, twang! went a bowstring, and Deng Xiang lay prone upon the earth.\n\nLing Bao, Deng Xiang's colleague, rode up quickly to his rescue, but just then a body of horse came dashing down the hill, and their leader shouted, \"General Huang Zhong is here!\"\n\nWith uplifted sword Huang Zhong rode toward Ling Bao, who turned his steed and galloped off to the rear. Huang Zhong pursued, and the army of Yizhou were thrown into confusion. So Huang Zhong was able to rescue his colleague Wei Yan. Huang Zhong had thus slain Deng Xiang and forced his way up to the gate of the camp. Once again Ling Bao came and engaged Huang Zhong. The two had fought some ten bouts when appeared another body of soldiers. Thereupon Ling Bao fled again, and this time he made for the other camp, abandoning his own to the troops of Jingzhou.\n\nBut when he drew near his camp, he saw no longer the familiar flags of his own side. Instead, alien banners fluttered in the breeze. He checked his steed and stared at the new force. The leader was a general wearing a silver breastplate and clad in a silken robe, no other than Liu Bei himself. On his left was his son and on his right rode his nephew.\n\n\"Whither would you come?\" cried Liu Bei. \"The camp is ours. I have captured it.\"\n\nNow Liu Bei had led his troops in the track of the other two armies ready to help either in case of need. He had come across the empty and undefended camp and taken possession.\n\nLeft with no place of refuge, Ling Bao set off along a byway to try to get back to Luocheng. He had not gone far when he fell into an ambush and was taken prisoner. Bound with cords he was taken to the camp of Liu Bei.\n\nThe ambush had been prepared by Wei Yan, who, knowing he had committed a fault, had collected as many of his soldiers as he could find and made some of the captured soldiers of Yizhou guide him to a spot suitable for laying an ambush.\n\nLiu Bei had hoisted the flag of amnesty for his enemies, and whenever any soldier of the West River Land laid down his weapons and stripped off his armor he was spared. Also all the wounded were granted life. Liu Bei told his enemies that they had liberty of choice.\n\nHe said, \"You soldiers have parents and wives and little ones at home, and those who wish to return to them are free to go. If any wish to join my army, they also will be received.\"\n\nAt this proof of generosity the sound of rejoicing filled the land.\n\nHaving made his camp, Huang Zhong came to Liu Bei and said, \"Wei Yan should be put to death for disobedience!\"\n\nThe culprit was summoned and came, bringing with him his prisoner. Liu Bei decided that the merit of capturing an enemy should be set against his fault and bade him thank his rescuer, enjoining upon them both to quarrel no more. Wei Yan bowed his head and confessed his fault, and Huang Zhong was handsomely rewarded.\n\nThe prisoner was then taken before Liu Bei to decide upon his fate. Liu Bei loosened Ling Bao's bonds by his own hands and gave him the cup of consolation. After he had drunk, Liu Bei asked if he was willing to surrender.\n\n\"Since you give me my life, I can do no other,\" said he. \"Moreover, my two companions, Liu Gui and Zhang Ren, and I are sworn to live or die together. If you will release me, I will return and bring them also to you and therewith you will get possession of Luocheng.\"\n\nLiu Bei gladly accepted the offer. He gave Ling Bao clothing and a horse and bade him go to the city to carry out his plan.\n\n\"Do not let him go,\" said Wei Yan. \"If you do, you will never see him again.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"If I treat humans with kindness and justice, they will not betray my trust.\"\n\nSo the prisoner was set free.\n\nWhen Ling Bao reached the city and saw his two friends, he told them, saying, \"I slew many of the enemy and escaped by mounting the steed of one of them.\"\n\nLing Bao said no word of having been captured. Messengers were sent in haste to Chengdu for help.\n\nThe loss of his general, Deng Xiang, disturbed the Imperial Protector greatly. He called his advisers together to consult.\n\nThen his eldest son, Liu Xun, said, \"Father, let me go to defend Luocheng.\"\n\n\"You may go, my son, but who is there to go with you?\"\n\nOne Wu Yi at once offered himself. He was brother-in-law to Liu Zhang.\n\nLiu Zhang said, \"It is well that you go, brother-in-law, but who will second you?\"\n\nWu Yi at once recommended two men, Wu Lan and Lei Tong, who were appointed to assist in the command. Twenty thousand troops were given them, and they set out for Luocheng. Liu Gui and Zhang Ren came out to welcome them and told them what had happened.\n\nWu Yi said, \"If the enemy draw near to the walls, it will be hard to drive them off again. What do you two think should be done?\"\n\nLing Bao replied, \"The city lies along River Fu and the current is strong. The enemy camp lies low at the foot of the hills. With five thousand people I can cut the river banks, flood their camp, and drown Liu Bei and his army with him.\"\n\nThe plan was approved, and Ling Bao went away to carry it out. Wu Lan and Lei Tong were told off to supervise the workers. They began to prepare the tools for cutting the bank.\n\nLeaving Huang Zhong and Wei Yan in command of the two camps, Liu Bei went away to Fucheng to consult with Pang Tong, the army's instructor. Intelligence had been received that Sun Quan had sent a messenger to seek to make a league with Zhang Lu to make a joint attack upon the Jiameng Pass, and Liu Bei was alarmed lest it should come to pass.\n\n\"If they do that, I am taken in the rear and helpless in both advance and retreat,\" said he. \"What do you counsel, O Instructor?\"\n\nPang Tong turned to Meng Da, saying, \"You are a native of Shu and well skilled in its topography. What can be done to make the Pass secure?\"\n\n\"Let me take a certain man with me, and I will defend it myself and answer for its safety.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"He was formerly an officer under Liu Biao. His name is Huo Jun, and he is a native of Nanjun in the south.\"\n\nThis offer was accepted, and the two generals departed.\n\nAfter the council, when Pang Tong returned to his lodging, the doorkeeper told him that a visitor had arrived. When Pang Tong went out to receive him, he saw a huge tall fellow eight cubits in stature and of noble countenance. His hair had been cut short and hung upon his neck. He was poorly dressed.\n\n\"Who may you be, Master?\" asked Pang Tong.\n\nThe visitor made no reply, but went at once straight up the room and lay upon the couch. Pang Tong felt very suspicious of the man and repeated his question.\n\nPressed again, the visitor said, \"Do let me rest a little. Then I will talk with you about everything in the world.\"\n\nThis answer only added to the mystery and increased the host's suspicion, but he had wine and food brought in, of which the guest partook ravenously. Having eaten, he lay down and fell asleep.\n\nPang Tong wag greatly puzzled and thought the man must be a spy. He sent for Fa Zheng, met him in the courtyard, and told him about the strange visitor.\n\n\"Surely it can be no other than Peng Yang,\" said Fa Zheng.\n\nFa Zheng went inside and looked.\n\nImmediately the visitor jumped up, saying, \"I hope you have been well since we parted last!\"\n\n\u2003Because two old friends meet again,\n\n\u2003A river's fatal flood is checked." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Mourns For Pang Tong; Zhang Fei Releases Yan Yan.\n\nFa Zheng and the new comer met with every sign of joy, clapping their hands and laughing with pleasure.\n\n\"This is Peng Yang of Guanghan, one of our heroes. His blunt speech, however, offended Imperial Protector Liu Zhang, who put him to shame by shaving his head, loading him with fetters, and forcing him into a monastery. That is why his hair is short.\"\n\nThe introduction made, Pang Tong treated the stranger with all the courtesy due to a guest and asked why he had come.\n\n\"To save a myriad of your soldiers' lives. I will explain fully when I see General Liu Bei.\"\n\nA message was sent to Liu Bei, who came over to see the visitor.\n\n\"How many troops have you, General?\" asked Peng Yang, when Liu Bei arrived.\n\nLiu Bei told him.\n\n\"As a leader you cannot be ignorant of the lie of the land. Your camps over there are on River Fu. If the river be diverted and the enemy hold your army in front and rear, not a soul can escape.\"\n\nLiu Bei realized that this was true.\n\nPeng Yang continued, \"In the heaven, the bowl of the Dipper lies toward the west, and Venus stands over against us. The aspect is ominous of evil, and some misfortune threatens. It must be warded off.\"\n\nLiu Bei offered Peng Yang an appointment as an adviser. Then he sent messages to the generals at the camps telling them to keep most vigilant look-out to guard against the cutting of the river bank. When this message came, Huang Zhong and Wei Yan agreed together to take duty day and night about and maintain the strict watch necessary in the presence of an enemy near at hand. They arranged means of communication in case either met with a body of the enemy.\n\nOne very stormy night, Ling Bao ventured out with a strong party of five thousand and went along the river bank to seek a suitable place for the breach. But a sudden shouting in his rear told him that the army of Jingzhou were on the alert, and he at once retired. Wei Yan came in pursuit and, as he pressed nearer, Ling Bao's troops hurried forward, trampling each other down in their haste. Suddenly Ling Bao and Wei Yan ran against each other, and they engaged. The fight was very short, for Wei Yan soon took his opponent prisoner. Wu Lan and Lei Tong who came to Ling Bao's rescue were easily beaten off, and Ling Bao was carried away. When Wei Yan reached the Pass, Liu Bei saw Ling Bao and greatly blamed him for his base ingratitude.\n\n\"I treated you generously and set you free, yet you repaid me with ingratitude. I cannot forgive again.\"\n\nSo the prisoner was beheaded, and his captor was rewarded. A banquet was given in honor of Peng Yang.\n\nSoon after this came a letter from Zhuge Liang, by the hand of Ma Liang, who reported all calm in Jingzhou and told Liu Bei that he need feel no anxiety. Opening the letter, Liu Bei read:\n\n\"I have been making some astrological calculations. This is the last year of the cycle, the bowl of the Dipper is in the western quarter, and the planet Venus approaches Luocheng. The configuration is inimical to leaders, and the utmost caution is necessary.\"\n\nHaving read this and sent Ma Liang away, Liu Bei said, \"I will return myself to Jingzhou and discuss the matter.\"\n\nBut Pang Tong opposed this, for he thought in his heart that Zhuge Liang's warning was due to a jealous desire to prevent him from winning the glory of conducting a victorious campaign in West River Land.\n\nTherefore Pang Tong said, \"I also have made calculations, and I read the signs to mean that the time is favorable for you to get possession of this land, and no evil is foreshown. Therefore be not of doubtful heart, my lord, but advance boldly.\"\n\nLiu Bei was won over and decided to follow Pang Tong's advice. He ordered Huang Zhong and Wei Yan to lead.\n\nPang Tong asked of Fa Zheng what roads there were to follow, and the latter drew a map, which was found to agree exactly with that left by Zhang Song.\n\nFa Zheng said, \"North of the mountains is a high road leading to the east gate. South of the mountains is another path leading to the west gate. Both these roads are suitable for the advance of an army.\"\n\nSo Pang Tong said to Liu Bei, \"With Wei Yan to lead the way, I will go along the southern road, while you, my lord, will advance along the high road, with Huang Zhong in the van. We will attack Luocheng at the same time.\"\n\nLiu Bei replied, \"I was trained as a mounted archer and am accustomed to by-roads, wherefore, O Instructor, I think you should take the high road and let me take the other.\"\n\n\"There will be opposition on the high road, and you are the best to deal with it. Let me take the by-road.\"\n\n\"No, this does not suit me,\" replied Liu Bei. \"A spirit bearing a massive iron club appeared to me in a dream and struck my right arm, so that I suffered great pain. I feel sure this expedition will turn out badly.\"\n\nPang Tong replied, \"When a soldier goes into battle, he may be killed, or he may be wounded. He accepts whichever is his fate. But should one hesitate because of a dream?\"\n\n\"The real reason of my hesitation is the letter from Zhuge Liang. Wherefore I wish you to remain and guard River Fu Pass. Do you agree to that?\"\n\nPang Tong smiled, saying, \"Zhuge Liang has indeed filled your mind with doubts. The real thing is that he is unwilling to let me have the merit of accomplishing a great undertaking alone. That is why he has written this. And your doubts and hesitations have produced the dream. But I see nothing ill-omened, and I am prepared for any sacrifice and mean just what I say. Pray, my lord, say no more, but prepare to set forth.\"\n\nSo the order went forth that the morning meal was to be taken early and the army was to march at dawn. Huang Zhong and Wei Yan were to take the lead, one along each road. These two set out first, and in due time Liu Bei and Pang Tong mounted and followed. Suddenly Pang Tong's horse shied and stumbled, throwing him off.\n\nLiu Bei jumped down and seized the horse by the bridle, saying, \"Why do you ride this wretched beast?\"\n\n\"I have ridden him a long time, and he has never done this before,\" was the reply.\n\n\"A shying steed risks a person's life,\" said Liu Bei. \"Ride my horse, which is thoroughly trained and will never fail you. Give me yours.\"\n\nThey exchanged horses.\n\n\"I am deeply affected by your kindness,\" said Pang Tong. \"I could never repay you if I suffered death a thousand times.\"\n\nSoon their ways diverged. After his adviser had left, Liu Bei felt ill at ease and rode gloomily.\n\nWhen the news of Ling Bao's capture and death reached Luocheng, Wu Yi and Liu Gui took counsel together.\n\nTheir colleague, Zhang Ren, said, \"I know a by-road on the southeast which is of great importance, and I pray you let me guard it while you two hold the city.\"\n\nSo as soon as the news of the advancing armies came, Zhang Ren led three thousand troops to this by-road and placed them in ambush. They remained hidden while Wei Yan passed and made no attack. The main body under Pang Tong soon followed.\n\nThe soldiers in ambush saw a rider on a fine white horse and pointed him out to one another, saying, \"That surely is Liu Bei on the white horse!\"\n\nTheir leader Zhang Ren rejoiced too, and he gave certain orders.\n\nPang Tong hastened forward. By and by the mountain road narrowed to a defile with dense thickets on either hand, and as the season was when summer changes into autumn, the foliage was thick and impenetrable. His heart alarmed him, and presently he reined in his steed and asked if any knew the name of that place.\n\nOne of the soldiers of Yizhou who had joined his army said, \"This is called 'The Fallen Phoenix Slope'.\"\n\nPang Tong shuddered. \"An evil omen for me, since Young Phoenix is my Daoist name. There is no luck for me here!\"\n\nHe decided to retire. But as he gave the order, the roar of a bomb rent the air and arrows began to fly toward him thick as swarming locusts. All the hidden men were shooting at the rider of the white horse. And there, wounded by many arrows, poor Pang Tong died at the age of thirty-six.\n\nA poem says:\n\n\u2003Deep in the blue recesses of Xian Hills\n\n\u2003Lay hid the modest cot of Pang Tong.\n\n\u2003But now each village urchin knows his story,\n\n\u2003And any village rustic tells his exploits.\n\n\u2003He knew the empire must be triply rent,\n\n\u2003And far he traveled lonely, to and fro.\n\n\u2003None knew that Heaven would cast down his star,\n\n\u2003Forbidding his return in glory clad.\n\n\u2003A song was also written referring to Pang Tong:\n\n\u2003They were two, the Phoenix and the Dragon,\n\n\u2003And they would travel far to the west;\n\n\u2003But on the road thither\n\n\u2003The Phoenix died on the mountain slope.\n\n\u2003The wind drives off the rain,\n\n\u2003The rain sends off the wind.\n\n\u2003It was the day of the Han restoration,\n\n\u2003When the west was attained,\n\n\u2003But in the attainment\n\n\u2003The Dragon was alone.\n\nNot only was the leader of the expedition slain, but more than half of his soldiers fell in the narrow road that fatal day. Some of the troops in the van escaped and ran off to tell Wei Yan of the mishap to the army, and he halted and turned back to help. However, it was difficult to march back, and he could not hack a way through, for the road was held by Zhang Ren, and archers and crossbowmen occupied all the heights.\n\nThen one of the renegades proposed that they should try to return along the high road, and they started for Luocheng this way. But in front of them arose a great cloud of dust, betraying the approach of an enemy. Wu Lan and Lei Tong, the defenders of the city, were moving toward them, and Wei Yan was between the two armies closed in like the kernel of a nut. Wei Yan fought hard to get through. When his case seemed most desperate and hopeless, he observed signs of confusion in the army that lay between him and the city. Soon that army turned and faced the other way. He pressed forward and presently saw troops of his own side, led by the veteran Huang Zhong.\n\n\"I will rescue you, Wei Yan!\" shouted Huang Zhong, as he came near.\n\nNow the defenders of Luocheng found themselves between two enemies, and they were smitten heavily. They could not check Wei Yan and Huang Zhong, who got close to the very walls of Luocheng. Seeing them near, Liu Gui, who had been left to defend the city, poured out against them. Thereupon Huang Zhong and Wei Yan, in spite of the nearness of the army of Liu Bei, refused battle and turned sway from the city.\n\nLiu Bei's army made a dash for two stockades, but when Zhang Ren came along the by-road, and the other three defenders of the city came on, the stockades could not be held, and Liu Bei's army had to retire. Now fighting and now marching, the army of Liu Bei strove hard to reach River Fu Pass, but Zhang Ren pressed close. However, Liu Feng and Guan Ping came up, and not only drove back the pursuers but chased them some seven miles. Finally, Liu Bei and his troops reached the Pass, weary and dispirited. His son and nephew returned from the pursuit with many horses they had captured from the flying enemy. However, nothing had been gained and the victory lay rather with the army of the West River Land.\n\nLiu Bei sent to inquire about Pang Tong. One of the fugitives from the army finally reached River Fu Pass and told Liu Bei of the sad news \u2014 man and horse wounded to death. Liu Bei turned his face to the west and mourned bitterly.\n\nAlthough the body of the slain leader lay far away, they instituted sacrifice to call the spirit, and all the generals keened for him.\n\nThen said Huang Zhong, \"Now that our leader is no more, certainly the enemy will return to attack the Pass. What is to be done? I think we had better send to Jingzhou for Zhuge Liang and get him to lay plans for getting possession of the West River Land.\"\n\nAnd even then came in one to say that the enemy under Zhang Ren had come and were now offering a challenge at the rampart.\n\nHuang Zhong and Wei Yan wished to go forth to fight, but Liu Bei disapproved, saying, \"We have suffered a severe check, and the soldiers are low-spirited. Let us rather remain on the defensive until the Directing Instructor can arrive.\"\n\nHuang Zhong and Wei Yan made no objection, but set themselves to guard the Pass most vigilantly, while a letter was written to Zhuge Liang and sent by the hand of Guan Ping. He set forth at once, and Liu Bei gave himself up to holding the Pass.\n\nIn Jingzhou, it was the seventh day of the seventh moon, and in the evening Zhuge Liang invited his officers to a banquet. Conversation turned toward the enterprise in the West River Land. Suddenly a large and brilliant meteor appeared falling in the west, illuminating the whole sky. It so disturbed the host that he dashed his wine cup to the ground, covered his face, and burst into tears.\n\n\"Alas! Alas!\"\n\nThe guests eagerly asked him why he wept.\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I knew by my calculations that the bowl of the Dipper would be in the west at this season and that the auspices would be unfavorable to leaders of armies, and lo! the Heavens have gone against our army. When Venus was about to stand over Luocheng, I wrote to our lord warning him to be very cautious. I never contemplated the falling of the star this evening. Now Pang Tong is no more.\"\n\nAgain he fell to weeping. \"My lord has lost an arm!\" moaned he.\n\nThe guests were rather disturbed, but they only half believed that such a misfortune had happened.\n\n\"We shall hear the sad news in a very few days,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe banquet ended sadly enough, and the guests went their ways. A few days later, while Zhuge Liang was sitting with Guan Yu and a few others, they reported the arrival of Guan Ping with letters from the west. When the letters were opened, they knew that Pang Tong had fallen the same evening that the meteor had appeared.\n\nZhuge Liang wailed, and the others wept with him.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said, \"I must go to help our lord. He is hemmed in at the Pass and cannot move.\"\n\n\"If you go away, who will guard this region?\" asked Guan Yu. \"It is of very great importance.\"\n\n\"Our lord has not written plainly, but I know what was in his mind.\" Then he showed the letter to the others and said, \"Provision for the defense of this region is laid upon me, and I am to find one equal to the task. I read the letter to mean that he desires Guan Yu to undertake the defense, and I know that Guan Yu will do it for the sake of the pledge taken long ago in the Peach Garden. The task is no light one.\"\n\nGuan Yu accepted without hesitation or thought of excuse. A special banquet was prepared at which the seal was to be handed over to him.\n\n\"All the future rests with you, General,\" said Zhuge Liang as he raised the symbol of office to place it in the hands of the leader.\n\n\"When a person of honor accepts such a task, he is only released by death,\" replied Guan Yu.\n\nBut that ill-omened word \"death\" displeased Zhuge Liang, and even then he would have retracted but that Guan Yu's word had gone forth. Zhuge Liang went on.\n\n\"Now if Cao Cao attacks what is to be done?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Repel him with all my strength.\"\n\n\"But if Cao Cao and Sun Quan attack you together, what then?\"\n\n\"Fight both; half my force against each.\"\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"In that case, Jingzhou would be in danger. I will give you my advice in a few words, and if you remember them the region is safe.\"\n\n\"What are these few words?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"North, fight Cao Cao; south, ally with Sun Quan.\"\n\n\"These words, O Instructor, are engraved on my heart.\"\n\nThereupon the seal was placed in his hands. Zhuge Liang also appointed tried and worthy people to assist the new commander. Guan Yu's civil staff included Ma Liang, Mi Zhu, and Yi Ji; and on military side, he was assisted by Mi Fang, Liao Hua, Guan Ping, and Zhou Cang.\n\nThis done, Zhuge Liang began to prepare for his march to the River Lands. Zhang Fei, with ten thousand troops, was sent to fight his way into the country west of Bazhou and Luocheng, and he was to go with all speed. The earlier he got through, the greater merit would be his. Zhao Zilong was to lead a force up the Great River and make a junction at Luocheng. Zhuge Liang, with his own body of fifteen thousand troops, would follow.\n\nAmong those who followed Zhuge Liang were Jian Yong and one Jiang Wan. Jiang Wan was a noted scholar from Lingling, and he held the office of Secretary.\n\nZhuge Liang and Zhang Fei set out the same day.\n\nJust before leaving, the Directing Instructor said to Zhang Fei, \"Do not think lightly of the soldiers of Yizhou, for there are many mighty warriors among them. On the march restrain your soldiers from plunder and license lest the ordinary people be against us. Wherever you halt, be compassionate and kindly and do not give way to anger and flog your soldiers. I shall expect you to reach Luocheng very soon.\"\n\nZhang Fei joyously mounted and left. He marched rapidly, and on the way all places that surrendered suffered nothing whatever.\n\nWhen they drew near the county of Bazhou, the scouts of West River Land sent out by the Governor of that place informed their master, Yan Yan. This Yan Yan was one of the famous generals of Yizhou, and even then, although he was rather old, he had lost none of his boldness and could still pull the stiffest bow and wield the heaviest sword.\n\nBeing so famous, Yan Yan was not the man to surrender at the first approach of an enemy. So when Zhang Fei came near, he cautiously encamped about three miles from the city. Thence he sent a messenger to summon the Governor to surrender.\n\nZhang Fei said, \"Tell the old fool to give in, or I will trample down his walls and leave no soul alive.\"\n\nYan Yan had never favored inviting Liu Bei into Yizhou.\n\nWhen he had first heard of the Imperial Protector's intention, he said, \"This is like calling a tiger to protect a person when that person is alone on a bare hill side.\"\n\nWhen he heard of the seizure of River Fu Pass, he was very angry and offered again and again to lead an army and drive out the aggressors. He had feared that his city would be attacked along this very road, so he had prepared his army, and when Zhang Fei's message came, he mustered them, five thousand or so, to oppose him.\n\nThen a certain person said to Yan Yan, \"You must be careful how you oppose a man who by the mere sound of his voice scared the many legions of Cao Cao at Long Slope Bridge. Even Cao Cao himself was careful to keep out of his way. Your safety is in defense, lying behind your ramparts and within your deep moats till hunger shall have vanquished your enemies. This Zhang Fei has a very violent temper. If he is provoked, he vents his anger in flogging his soldiers. If you avoid battle, he will be irritated; and his cruelty to his soldiers will cause them to mutiny. Then you can attack and will succeed.\"\n\nYan Yan thought the advice good. He therefore resolved only to defend, and he set all his soldiers on the walls. When one of Zhang Fei's soldiers came up to the gate and shouted for them to open, Yan Yan gave orders to open the gate and admit the man. When the soldier had come within, he gave the submission demand as has been related before.\n\nBut the Governor was exceedingly angry and said, \"Fool that you are! How dare you speak thus to me? Think you that I, General Yan Yan, will surrender to such as him. By your mouth indeed will I send a message.\"\n\nThen Yan Yan bade the executioner cut off the man's ears and nose. And thus mutilated he returned to Zhang Fei. When Zhang Fei heard of it, his wrath boiled up and he cursed the defender of the city. Grinding his teeth and glaring with rage, he put on his armor, mounted his steed, and went up close to the walls with a few mounted followers, and challenged those on the ramparts to fight him. But the defenders on the walls only replied with shameful abuse, and none accepted the challenge. Zhang Fei galloped again and again to the drawbridge, only to be driven off each time with flights of arrows. But not a man came outside the walls. As the day closed in, the warrior, still fuming with wrath, returned to his own camp.\n\nNext day Zhang Fei again led his troops to the foot of the wall and challenged. Again the challenge was refused. But Yan Yan shot an arrow from the tower that struck Zhang Fei's helmet. This angered him still more.\n\nPointing the finger of disdain at his enemy, Zhang Fei cried, \"I will capture you yet, you old fool, and then I will devour your flesh!\"\n\nSo again at eventide the troops of Jingzhou returned to camp bucking their desire. On the third day Zhang Fei and his troops made the circuit of the city along the edge of the moat, hurling insults at their enemies.\n\nIt so happened that the city was set on a hill with rugged heights all round, so that going around it the assailants were sometimes on hill tops and sometimes on the level. While standing on one of the hills, Zhang Fei noticed that he could see clear down into the city. There stood the defenders in their ranks, all ready for battle although none of them came out. And the common people went to and fro carrying bricks and bringing stones to strengthen the defenses. Then Zhang Fei ordered his horsemen to dismount and his footmen to sit down so that they could not be seen from the city. He hoped thus to cheat the defenders into thinking that there were none to attack and so induce them to come out. But this also was vain, for still the defenders declined battle, and another day was lost. The army once more returned to camp.\n\nThat night Zhang Fei sat in his tent trying to think out some means to overcome an enemy that steadily refused to come out from behind the walls. Presently, however, the brain behind the knitted brows conceived a plan. So next day, instead of sending all the troops to offer a challenge from the foot of the wall, Zhang Fei kept most of them in camp and sent only a few to howl insults and hurl abuse. He hoped by this means to inveigle Yan Yan out to attack the small number of troops. But this also failed, and he was left all day rubbing his hands with impatience. Never a man appeared without the wall.\n\nFoiled again, another ruse grew up behind his bushy eyebrows. He set his troops to cut firewood and seek out and explore the tracks that lay about the city. No longer did they challenge the wall. After some days of this, Yan Yan began to wonder what mischief was brewing, and he sent out spies, dressed as were the firewood cutters, to mingle with them and try to discover what was afoot.\n\nThat day, when the troops returned to camp, Zhang Fei sat in his tent stamping his foot with rage and execrating his enemy.\n\n\"The old fool! Assuredly I shall die of disappointed wrath,\" cried he.\n\nJust then he noticed three or four soldiers lurking about his tent door as if they wished to speak with him.\n\nAnd one of them said, \"General, do not let your heart be hot within you. These last few days we have discovered a narrow road by which we can sneak past this city.\"\n\n\"Why did you not come and tell me before?\" cried he.\n\n\"Because we have only lately discovered it,\" said they.\n\n\"I will lose no time then,\" said he. \"This very night let food be ready at the second watch, and we will break camp and steal away as silently as possible. I will lead the way, and you shall go with me as guides.\"\n\nThe requisite orders were given.\n\nHaving made sure that the preparations for the march were really being made, the spies of the Governor returned into the city.\n\n\"I guessed right then,\" said Yan Yan gleefully when the spies reported their success. \"I cannot bear the fool. He will now try to sneak past with his commissariat following, and I will cut off his rear. How can he get through? He is very stupid to fall thus into my trap. All are to prepare for battle. The food is to be ready at the second watch, and the army is to move out at the third. We will hide in the woods and thickets, till the greater part of the enemy's army has passed and Zhang Fei has arrived in the very throat of the road. Then the blow will be struck.\"\n\nThey waited till night had fallen. In due time the late meal was taken, the soldiers donned their armor, stole silently out of the city, and hid as they had been told. The Governor himself. with a few of his generals, went out also, dismounted and hid in a wood. They waited till after the third watch. Then Zhang Fei came along, urging his troops to the top of their speed. His spear lay ready to thrust. He looked very handsome as he rode at the head of his army. The carts were one or two miles in the rear.\n\nWhen the soldiers had got well past, Yan Yan gave the signal. The drums rolled out, up sprang the hidden troops and fell on the baggage train.\n\nThe western troops began to plunder. But suddenly a gong clanged and along came a company of soldiers Yan Yan had not seen.\n\nAt the same time a voice was heard shouting, \"Old rebel, do not flee! I have been waiting for this chance a long time!\"\n\nYan Yan turned his head. The leader of this band was a tall man with a leopard-like bullet head, round eyes, a sharp chin, and bristling tiger mustache. He was armed with a long serpent halberd and rode a black steed. In a word, it was Zhang Fei.\n\nAll around the gongs were clanging, and many troops of Jingzhou were rushing toward Yan Yan, already too frightened to be able to defend himself. However, the two leaders engaged. Very soon Zhang Fei purposely gave his opponent an opening, and Yan Yan rushed in to cut down his enemy with his sword. But Zhang Fei evaded the blow, made a sudden rush, seized Yan Yan by the lace of his armor, and flung him on the ground. Yan Yan was a prisoner, and in a moment was fast bound with cords.\n\nThe handsome leader who had passed first had not been Zhang Fei at all, but someone dressed and made up to resemble him. To add to the confusion, Zhang Fei had exchanged the signals, making the gong the signal for his troops to fall on instead of the usual drum.\n\nAs the gongs clanged, more and more of the troops of Jingzhou came into the fray. The troops of Yizhou could make no fight, and most of them dropped their weapons and surrendered. To reach the walls of the city was now easy. After entering the gates, the leader ordered his soldiers not to hurt the people, and he put out proclamations to pacify the citizens.\n\nBy and by a party of executioners brought in the prisoner.\n\nZhang Fei took his seat in the great hall, and the late commander of the city was brought before him by a party of executioners. Yan Yan refused to kneel before his captor.\n\n\"Why did you not surrender at first?\" cried Zhang Fei, angrily grinding his teeth. \"How dared you try to oppose me?\"\n\n\"Because you are a lot of unrighteous and lawless invaders!\" replied Yan Yan without the least sign of fear. \"You may behead me as you will, but I will not surrender to you.\"\n\nZhang Fei angrily gave the order for his execution.\n\n\"Strike, if you want to, fool. Why so angry?\" said Yan Yan.\n\nThis bold defiance was not lost upon Zhang Fei. Rising from his seat, he went down the steps, put aside the lictors, and began to loosen the prisoner's bonds. Then he dressed Yan Yan in new garments and led him to the high place.\n\nWhen Yan Yan was seated, Zhang Fei made a low bow, saying, \"I have always known you were a hero. Now I pray you not remember against me the roughness of my speech.\"\n\nYan Yan was overcome with this kindness and forthwith surrendered.\n\n\u2003A graybeard ruled in western Shu,\n\n\u2003Clear fame is his the whole world through,\n\n\u2003As radiant sun his loyalty.\n\n\u2003Unmatched his soul's nobility.\n\n\u2003When captive taken rather he\n\n\u2003Would suffer death than crook his knee.\n\n\u2003Bazhou he ruled for many a year,\n\n\u2003The world cannot produce his peer.\n\n\u2003A poet has also written concerning Zhang Fei:\n\n\u2003Yan Yan made prisoner, then the matchless one\n\n\u2003Exchanged the sword for reason, and so won\n\n\u2003The place he holds among the sacred ones\n\n\u2003Of the west, to whom they sacrifice today.\n\nThen Zhang Fei asked Yan Yan to suggest the means of overcoming the West River Land.\n\nYan Yan replied, \"I am but the defeated leader of a defeated force, indebted to the victor for my life. I have nothing but my humble services to offer, but I can tell you how to get possession of Chengdu without drawing a bow or shooting an arrow.\"\n\n\u2003Cities yield in quick succession\n\n\u2003Because of one old man's secession." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Plans For The Capture Of Zhang Ren; Yang Fu Borrows Soldiers To Destroy Ma Chao.\n\nAs stated in the last chapter, Zhang Fei asked Yan Yan to tell him how he might conquer the whole of the West River Land.\n\nThis was the reply: \"All the fortified posts between this and Luocheng are under my control, and the commanders of all the garrisons owe to me their commissions. The only way for me to prove my gratitude is to make them all yield, as I myself have done. Let me lead the advance, and I will summon them one by one to surrender.\"\n\nZhang Fei thanked him again and again, and the march on this plan began. Whenever the army arrived at a post, Yan Yan summoned the commander, and there it ended. Occasionally, one would hesitate, when Yan Yan would say, \"You see I have submitted. How much more ought you to do so?\"\n\nThese bloodless victories followed each other day after day, supporters rallying to the invaders without question. They simply came.\n\nIn the meantime, Zhuge Liang was preparing. Having decided upon the date of departure, he wrote to inform Liu Bei and made Luocheng the rendezvous for the various armies. On receipt of this letter, Liu Bei assembled his officers and explained to them its purport. He bade them be ready to march on the twenty-second day of the seventh month. Both river and land forces were to set out the same day.\n\nBut the fiery old man Huang Zhong was dissatisfied that there should be no local victory in the River Fu Pass.\n\nHe said, \"Day after day the enemy has come to challenge us, and day after day we have refused. They must have grown lax, and I propose a night raid on their camp. We shall catch them unprepared and shall score a victory.\"\n\nLiu Bei agreed to try. He arranged for a night raid, Huang Zhong on the right, Wei Yan on the left, and the center force under his own command. They set out at the second watch and soon arrived. They found Zhang Ren's troops unprepared, rushed the camp, and set it on fire. The flames were very fierce, and the troops of Yizhou fled in confusion and sought shelter in Luocheng. They were admitted. After pursuing them for some distance, Liu Bei made a camp.\n\nNext day Liu Bei marched right up to the city to besiege it. Zhang Ren kept quiet within and made no attempt to beat off the besiegers. On the fourth day Liu Bei led an attack on the west gate, sending Huang Zhong and Wei Yan to attack the east. The north and south gates were left to give the besieged a chance to escape if they would.\n\nNow, outside the south gate of Luocheng the country was rough and hilly, while the swift River Fu ran past the north. For this reason the city could not be surrounded. From the city wall, Zhang Ren watched the progress of the attack and saw Liu Bei the whole day indefatigably going to and fro directing the assault. He also saw that as the sun dropped toward the west, the attacking force showed signs of weariness. Wherefore he sent his two generals, Wu Lan and Lei Tong, out of the city by the north gate with orders to make their way around and attack Huang Zhong and Wei Yan. Zhang Ren set himself to go out by the south gate and steal around to attack Liu Bei. Lest the withdrawal of troops from the ramparts should discover his plans, he sent the populace up on the walls to make a show and bade them shout loudly to reinforce the rolling of the drums.\n\nAt sundown Liu Bei ordered the retirement of his army, and the rearmost company turned about to march back to camp. At this moment arose still louder shouting from the ramparts, and out at the south gate burst Zhang Ren and his force. Zhang Ren made straight for Liu Bei, who was in the middle of his army. Liu Bei's soldiers were thrown into confusion. As his two generals on the east side were also attacked, they could render no help, and Liu Bei fled to the hills. Zhang Ren followed and soon got very near. They were a whole company pursuing one solitary man, and as Liu Bei plied his whip he felt that the odds were much against him. Just then he saw another company of soldiers ahead, emerging from a hill path.\n\n\"An ambush in front; pursuers in rear! Surely Heaven wishes to destroy me!\" cried Liu Bei.\n\nBut all was not lost. As they drew nearer, he recognized his own troops, and the leader who dashed to meet him was his brother Zhang Fei.\n\nZhang Fei and Yan Yan had happened to take that road, and Zhang Fei had hastened forward when he saw the dust of conflict.\n\nZhang Fei and Zhang Ren soon came up with each other, and they fought ten bouts. By this time Yan Yan with the main body had come up, and Zhang Ren turned and fled. Zhang Fei followed and chased him as far as the city wall. The gate was opened to allow Zhang Ren to enter and at once shut. The drawbridge was raised.\n\nThen Zhang Fei returned to his elder brother to report his arrival and the incidents of the way.\n\nHearing that Zhuge Liang had not yet arrived, Zhang Fei rejoiced, saying, \"So I have the credit of first arrival, although he is traveling by river.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"But how is it you have come so quickly seeing the precipitous road you had to travel? Did you meet no opposition?\"\n\nZhang Fei replied, \"The fact is I have taken the forty-five garrisons on the way by making use of General Yan Yan, whom I captured. It was not my own merit at all. I have come all the way without the least effort.\"\n\nZhang Fei told the story of Yan Yan's capture and services from beginning to end, and then presented the man himself.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"General, my brother's speedy arrival is certainly owing to your help.\"\n\nWhereupon Liu Bei took off the golden chain mantle he was wearing and gave it to his new ally.\n\nOrders were given for a banquet.\n\nWhile it was being prepared, a messenger came to report, saying, \"Huang Zhong and Wei Yan had been fighting with Wu Lan and Lei Tong and had held their own, till enemy reinforcements led by Wu Yi and Liu Gui arrived. Huang Zhong and Wei Yan then fled eastward.\"\n\nZhang Fei at once asked his brother to go with him to rescue them. Both went. When Wu Yi and Liu Gui saw the army of Jingzhou coming, they retired into the city.\n\nWu Lan and Lei Tong continued the pursuit. The coming of Liu Bei and Zhang Fei threatened their rear, and Huang Zhong and Wei Yan turned and recommenced the battle. Wu Lan and Lei Tong were thus between two fires and helpless. They offered to surrender and were received. Liu Bei returned to his own camp near the city.\n\nThe loss of his two generals grieved Zhang Ren sorely. He called his remaining two and asked advice.\n\nWu Yi and Liu Gui proposed, saying, This situation calls for one desperate battle, where we can hope to repel the enemy. Meanwhile you should send to Chengdu to tell our master of our current plight.\n\nZhang Ren agreed. Said he, \"Tomorrow I will go and challenge them. If they accept and come out to fight, I will feign retreat and inveigle them round to the north side of the city. As they follow me, a sortie must be made when they pass the gate so as to cut their army in two. We ought to overcome them in this way.\"\n\n\"Let me lead the sortie,\" said Wu Yi. \"General Liu Gui can stay to help our lord's son Liu Xun guard the city.\"\n\nThis also was agreed to. Next morning Zhang Ren went out to offer the challenge, his troops waving flags and shouting lustily. At once Zhang Fei took up the challenge and rode out. He stayed not to parley, but galloped up to Zhang Ren and engaged him. After about ten bouts Zhang Ren seemed to be getting worsted, so he turned and fled, taking the way around the north of the city. Zhang Fei pursued him with all speed. Then as he passed the gate, Wu Yi made a sortie so that Zhang Fei was between two forces and unable to get clear. Zhang Ren turned back to attack.\n\nZhang Fei seemed in a parlous state. But at this very moment a body of soldiers came up from the riverside and a fierce warrior rode straight for Wu Yi, and in the first bout made him prisoner; his troops were then forced back, and Zhang Fei was free. It was Zhao Zilong who had so opportunely appeared.\n\n\"Where is the Directing Instructor?\" asked Zhang Fei.\n\n\"He has arrived. I think he has already seen our lord,\" replied Zhao Zilong.\n\nThe prisoner was carried to the camp where Zhuge Liang was. Zhang Fei dismounted and went in to greet him.\n\nZhuge Liang was surprised, and said, \"How comes it that you arrived before me?\"\n\nLiu Bei told the story of Zhang Fei's prudence and sagacity in dealing with Yan Yan.\n\nZhuge Liang congratulated Zhang Fei and said, \"When Zhang Fei behaves with such skill, my lord's good fortune is indeed ample.\"\n\nWhen the prisoner was taken in, Liu Bei asked him if he would surrender.\n\nWu Yi replied, \"Why not, seeing I am a prisoner?\"\n\nThereupon Liu Bei himself loosed his bonds. Zhuge Liang began to question him upon the defense.\n\nWu Yi told him the names of the officers, saying, \"The son of the Imperial Protector, Liu Xun, and his generals Liu Gui and Zhang Ren are the defenders. Liu Gui does not count for much, but Zhang Ren is a man to be avoided.\"\n\n\"Then before we can get the city, we must capture Zhang Ren,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"There is a bridge on the east. What is it called?\"\n\n\"It is known as 'Golden Goose Bridge'.\"\n\nZhuge Liang rode over to the bridge and scrutinized the neighborhood.\n\nAfter his return to camp, he summoned Huang Zhong and Wei Yan for orders.\n\nTo them he said, \"On the east of the city is a bridge called Golden Goose Bridge, and about two miles south of this I saw a dense growth of reed and sedge which would afford excellent shelter. Wei Yan is to lead a thousand spearmen to the left and attack, but only attack horsemen. Huang Zhong will lead a thousand swordsmen who are to cut the horses. When Zhang Ren has lost most of his troops and horses, he will flee by the hill road, where he will fall into an ambush of Zhang Fei.\"\n\nNext Zhao Zilong was called and given order, You are to lie in ambush close to the bridge, which you shall destroy as soon as Zhang Ren has crossed. After that, you shall take up a position beyond the bridge to prevent him from getting away to the north. Forced to the south, Zhang Ren will fall into our hand.\n\nThese arrangements made, Zhuge Liang himself went to challenge the enemy and try to bring them to battle.\n\nImperial Protector Liu Zhang had sent two generals, Zhang Yi and Zhuo Ying, to reinforce Zhang Ren. Zhang Ren sent Zhang Yi to the help of Liu Gui in the city, while Zhuo Ying was to march second with Zhang Ren himself to encounter the enemy.\n\nZhuge Liang led across the bridge a mob of disorderly looking soldiers, all in disarray, whom he drew up as if they were a fighting force. He himself, dressed in a simple robe and toying with a fan, took his seat in a small four-wheeled carriage. A few horsemen caracoling gaily to and fro formed his escort.\n\nHaving crossed the bridge, Zhuge Liang halted and pointed to Zhang Ren, saying, \"Dare you withstand me and not surrender when Cao Cao's million troops fled at my name?\"\n\nBut the enemy leader was rather occupied with inspecting the disorderly lot of soldiers he saw in front, all standing anyhow and not drawn up into formation at all.\n\nWith a cynical smile, Zhang Ren said, \"People talk of Zhuge Liang's superhuman military genius. I say his reputation is false!\"\n\nWith that Zhang Ren whirled his spear about his head, and he dashed forward with all his troops. As he came, Zhuge Liang left his carriage, mounted a horse, and retired to the far side of the bridge. Zhang Ren impetuously pursued and rushed over the Golden Goose Bridge. It was only when he had reached the other side that he saw a body of soldiers on either hand. Then he knew that he had been led into a trap.\n\nAs soon as he had got across the bridge, the two bodies of soldiers under Liu Bei and Yan Yan came to the attack. Zhang Ren turned to get back to the bridge, but Zhao Zilong had done his work and the bridge was in ruins. Zhang Ren made to turn sway north, but Zhao Zilong's troops stopped the way so he had to turn southward and followed the course of the river. He presently reached the place where grew the reeds and sedges. Out came Wei Yan and his company of spearmen, who stabbed at the horsemen fiercely while Huang Zhong, with his swordsmen, cut down the horses. Soldiers and horses were soon lying on the ground. The few survivors were quickly made prisoners and bound with cords.\n\nNo footman escaped. But a few lucky horsemen followed Zhang Ren and got away to the hills. There they met Zhang Fei, who fell upon them with a mighty roar, scattered the few followers, and captured the leader. Seeing Zhang Ren a prisoner, his second in command Zhuo Ying turned toward Zhao Zilong and surrendered. Victorious, they returned to camp. Liu Bei rewarded Zhuo Ying.\n\nWhen the leader Zhang Ren was led in by Zhang Fei, Zhuge Liang was seated beside his lord.\n\n\"Why have you held out so long after all the other generals of Yizhou have yielded?\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Can a loyal servant take a second master?\" cried Zhang Ren fiercely, his eyes glaring with hate.\n\n\"You do not know the times. Submission means life.\"\n\n\"I might submit today, but it would not endure. I should repent it. You had better slay me.\"\n\nLiu Bei was inclined to mercy, but the prisoner was irreconcilable and kept up a stream of furious abuse. So at last the order was given for his execution, thus giving him a right to fame.\n\nA poem says:\n\n\u2003No second lord the heroic servant knows,\n\n\u2003The way of death Zhang Ren contented goes.\n\n\u2003Clear shines his fame as doth the heavenly moon\n\n\u2003That nightly lights the ramparts of Luocheng Town.\n\nLiu Bei grieved for Zhang Ren, although Zhang Ren had been an enemy, for he was a brave man. Zhang Ren was given honorable burial, sepulture beside the Golden Goose Bridge, where all the passers-by would be reminded of his loyalty.\n\nNext day the army moved on to Luocheng, Yan Yan and the other generals who had submitted leading the way.\n\nAt the gate they hailed the defenders, Open the gates and surrender, whereby the city should be saved from utter destruction!\n\nFrom the wall, Liu Gui abused the treacherous Yan Yan and took his bow to shoot. But just as Liu Gui was fitting the arrow to the string, another man cut him down. Soon the gates were thrown open and the city had yielded.\n\nAs Liu Bei entered the city by one gate, Liu Xun, who had shared the command of the city, escaped by another gate and set off for Chengdu.\n\nLiu Bei put forth proclamations to allay the fears of the inhabitants of the city. He inquired who had been on his side in cutting down Liu Gui and was told it was Zhang Yi of Wuyang. Zhang Yi and all who had helped in the capture were amply rewarded.\n\n\"Our next city is Chengdu,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"However, in the meantime there may be some trouble in pacifying the outlying counties, and hence it will be well for you to send Zhang Fei and Zhao Zilong with Wu Yi, Zhang Yi, Yan Yan, and Zhuo Ying leading the way, into the country along the river and Changyang, Deyang, and Baxi to reassure the people and to repress any rising that may take place. There will be no need for any especial precautions in the neighborhood of Chengdu.\"\n\nThe warriors went their ways, and then Zhuge Liang began to make careful inquiries concerning the road to Chengdu.\n\nThose who had given in their allegiance to the invaders said, \"The only place where you can expect any serious defense is Mianzhu. Once you have passed this, the capital lies at your mercy.\"\n\nThen Fa Zheng was consulted.\n\nSaid he, \"With the fall of Luocheng, the West River Land passed to you. Let our lord only deal with the people kindly and justly, and there will be no need of weapons. I can write such a letter to Imperial Protector Liu Zhang as shall make him surrender at call.\"\n\n\"That would be most excellent,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe letter was written and sent by the hand of a messenger.\n\nLiu Xun, son of the Imperial Protector, presently reached Chengdu and told his father of the loss of Luocheng. The Imperial Protector at once called his counselors together.\n\nAdviser Zheng Du said, \"Although Liu Bei has been successful and captured cities and towns, yet his army is but small, his hosts are not near him, and he depends upon chance for his grain and has no proper supplies. Therefore our best plan is to remove the people of Baxi and Zitong to the farther side of River Fu, burn all the granaries, fortify the city, and let starvation defeat him. Let us reject all challenges to battle, and in a hundred days his troops will go off of their own accord. Then we can do with him as we will.\"\n\n\"I like not the plan,\" said Liu Zhang. \"Oppose invaders in order that tranquillity may prevail is a well-worn maxim, but till now I have never heard of disturbing the people in order to oppose the march of an enemy. Your words are not such as safety.\"\n\nJust at the moment the letter from Fa Zheng arrived. It was opened and the Imperial Protector read:\n\n\"I was sent to Jingzhou to negotiate an alliance, but the opposition of those about you to their lord has resulted in the present situation. However, the ruler of Jingzhou still remembers old friendship and is mindful of the ties of relationship. If you, my master, could reverse your policy and lend your support to your relative, I think you would be generously treated. I hope you will consider this carefully.\"\n\nLiu Zhang flew into a passion. He tore the letter to fragments and began to abuse its writer, crying, \"That traitor, ingrate, and renegade! How dares he talk thus to me?\"\n\nAnd Liu Zhang drove the bearer of the letter from his presence. He then sent an army under the leadership of Fei Guan, his wife's brother, to reinforce Mianzhu.\n\nFei Guan at once recommended as his assistant one Li Yan of Nanyang, and the two mustered their troops, thirty thousand, and set out for the city.\n\nAt this juncture Dong He, the Governor of Yizhou City, wrote advising to borrow aid from Hanzhong.\n\nBut Liu Zhang rejected this plan, saying, \"It will be useless to try to obtain help from a region under the influence of our relentless enemy Zhang Lu.\"\n\nDong He replied, \"He may be an enemy, but Liu Bei is in possession of Luocheng, and the situation is extremely dangerous. When the lips are gone, the teeth are cold. If you clearly indicate the dangers to him, he must come to our help.\"\n\nSo a letter was written and sent to Hanzhong.\n\nTwo years had elapsed since Ma Chao had been defeated and gone over to the Qiang tribes in the northwest. He had made friends with them and with their aid had conquered portions of the West Valley Land. His expeditions had been very successful, the people opening their gates at the first summons. Only Jicheng had stood out, but ever this was on the point of yielding. The Governor of Jicheng, Wei Kang, had sent many urgent appeals for help to Xiahou Yuan in Changan, who, however, would do nothing without his master's order. Wei Kang was in despair, and at a council his officers advised him to yield.\n\nHowever, one of them, Yang Fu, earnestly opposed yielding, saying, \"We cannot surrender to a lot of rebels such as Ma Chao and his colleagues.\"\n\n\"What is there to hope for?\" asked Wei Kang despairingly.\n\nAlthough Yang Fu besought Wei Kang with bitterness to hold out, it was useless. Wei Kang rejected his advice, opened the city gates, and bowed his head in submission.\n\n\"You only yield now as the last resource,\" cried Ma Chao, angry at the delay he had suffered. \"This is no real submission.\"\n\nWhereupon he put to death Wei Kang and all his family to the number of two score.\n\nBut when they told Ma Chao that Yang Fu had been really responsible for the long delay, in that Yang Fu had urged his master to hold out, Ma Chao did not put him to death but praised him and said, \"Yang Fu had but done his duty.\"\n\nMa Chao further showed his approval by employing Yang Fu and two of his friends in his own army. These two friends were named Liang Kuan and Zhao Qu.\n\nOne day Yang Fu went to his new chief and said, \"My wife has died in Lintao. I wish to take leave for two months to bury her.\"\n\nWherefore Yang Fu was granted leave and went away from the army. On the way, he went to his maternal cousin, General Jiang Xu, Commander of Licheng. The general's mother, then an old lady of eighty-two was Yang Fu's aunt.\n\nWhen Yang Fu saw her, he wept before her, saying, \"Behold an unfortunate man! The city I had to defend is lost; my master is dead; and I have survived him. I am ashamed to look you in the face. Now this Ma Chao ravages the countryside, and everyone hates him. Yet my cousin sits still and does nothing against Ma Chao. Is this fitting conduct for a state servant?\"\n\nYang Fu wept bitterly.\n\nThe old lady was moved by his grief, called in her son and said to him reproachfully, \"You are the cause of the evil that has come upon the noble Wei Kang.\"\n\nThen turning once more toward Yang Fu, she said, \"But what can now be done? You have surrendered and, more than that, you have accepted service under your late enemy.\"\n\n\"It is true,\" replied Yang Fu. \"I have surrendered and I have accepted service, but it is with the desire to preserve my miserable life till I can avenge my master.\"\n\n\"Ma Chao is bold and difficult to destroy,\" said Jiang Xu.\n\n\"Not very difficult,\" replied Yang Fu, \"for though he is bold, yet he is unskillful. Already I have two friends Liang Kuan and Zhao Qu by his side, and they would help against him if you, my brother, would only supply a force.\"\n\n\"What is to be gained by delay?\" then said the old lady. \"Is there anyone who will not have to die? To perish in the way of loyalty and righteousness is to die in the right path. Do not think of me, for if you do, and heed not the call of your cousin, then will I die at once so that you may be free to make up your mind.\"\n\nThere was now no excuse for delay, and Jiang Xu had to act. He summoned two of his officers, Yin Feng and Zhao Ang, and took counsel with them.\n\nNow Zhao Ang had a son, Zhao Yue, who was an officer in the army of Ma Chao. When Zhao Ang had to consent to take part against his son's chief, he became very unhappy and went home to talk over it with his wife, Lady Wang.\n\nHe said, \"I have today been led into a scheme to destroy Ma Chao and avenge Wei Kang. But there is our son there in Ma Chao's service, and Ma Chao will certainly put our son to death as soon as he hears that we are arming against him. What is to be done?\"\n\nBut his wife replied angrily, \"Should anyone grudge even his life to avenge his liege lord or his father? How much less a son? My lord, if you let the thought of your son stay your hand, then will I die forthwith.\"\n\nThis decided the matter, and without further parley Zhao Ang decided to share the expedition and set about preparations. The army was soon on the way. Jiang Xu and Yang Fu camped at the city of Licheng; Zhao Ang and Yin Feng camped at Qishan. The wife of Zhao Ang sold her ornaments and went in person to her husband's camp to feast his soldiers.\n\nThe fears of Zhao Ang concerning the fate of his son were only too soon justified. At the first news of the march of an army against him, Ma Chao beheaded the young Zhao Yue. Then Ma Chao marched his force, together with Pang De and Ma Dai, to Licheng, and the troops under Jiang Xu and Yang Fu went out to oppose it. The two leaders on the avenging side went to battle dressed in mourning white.\n\nThey railed at Ma Chao, crying, \"Wicked traitor! Rebel!\"\n\nMa Chao angrily dashed across toward them, and the fight began. From the very first it was seen that the defenders of the city could not hope to beat off the attack, and they turned to flee. Ma Chao pursued them. But soon he heard the shouting of soldiers behind him and found the other army led by Zhao Ang and Yin Feng was attacking his rear. Wherefore he was between two armies and had a double battle to fight. As he turned toward that in his rear, Jiang Xu and Yang Fu returned again to the attack. And while engaged with these two, there suddenly appeared a third force under Xiahou Yuan, who had just received orders from Cao Cao to come against Ma Chao.\n\nThree attacks at once were too much for Ma Chao, and he fled, his force in utter confusion. He retreated all that night and at dawn reached his own city of Jicheng. He hailed the gate, but a flight of arrows was the response. Soon after, Liang Kuan and Zhao Qu appeared and reviled him from the ramparts above. More than this, they dragged his wife, Lady Yang, up upon the wall, hacked her before his face, and threw the bloody body at his feet. They followed up this by the murder in like manner of his three sons and other members of his family to the number of ten and more. And all their dead bodies were flung from the wall.\n\nRage and despair filled Ma Chao's bosom; he almost fell from his steed. But little time was allowed to grieve, for Xiahou Yuan was nearly upon him. Knowing that he could not oppose this force with any chance of victory, he made no battle line, but set off with two of his generals, Ma Dai and Pang De, to cut his way through such parties of the enemy as they might meet. Their sole object was escape, so when they fell upon Yang Fu and Jiang Xu, they only fought to get through, and in the same way they cut an alley through the army under Yin Feng and Zhao Ang. However, they lost most of their few followers, and at the end had only some sixty horsemen left.\n\nAbout the fourth watch they came to Licheng. In the darkness, the gate guards, thinking only of the return of their own troops, opened the gates and unwittingly let in the enemy. Once in the city Ma Chao and his followers began the slaughter, and everyone, soldier or common person, was slain, till the city was swept clear from the south gate to the very center.\n\nPresently they came to the residence of Jiang Xu and dragged forth his aged mother. She showed no sign of fear, but reviled Ma Chao till in his anger he slew her with his own sword. Thence they went to the house of Yin Feng and Zhao Ang and slew all they found therein. The only person who escaped the massacre was Lady Wang, wife of Zhao Ang, who had accompanied her husband.\n\nBut the city proved no place of safety. Xiahou Yuan with his army appeared the following day, and Ma Chao fled before him to the west. But ere he had gone seven miles, he came face to face with another army drawn up in battle array. Yang Fu was the leader.\n\nGrinding his teeth with rage, Ma Chao set his spear and rode at Yang Fu, while his two generals, Ma Dai and Pang De, attacked the rear. Yang Fu was overcome, and his seven brothers who had gone with him into the battle were slain. Yang Fu himself was wounded in five places, but still fought on till he was wounded down.\n\nHowever, Xiahou Yuan had not left pursuing Ma Chao. He came up to the city, and Ma Chao fled. His army was now reduced to the two generals and about five or six of horsemen, and these few were left to go their way.\n\nCao Cao's general, Xiahou Yuan, set himself to restore order and tranquillity in the region of Xizhou, after which he apportioned its defense among Jiang Xu and other trustworthy commanders. The wounded leader Yang Fu was sent to the capital in a carriage. When he arrived Xuchang, he saw Cao Cao who offered him the title of Lordship.\n\nBut Yang Fu declined the honor, saying, \"I have neither the credit of a successful defense nor the merit of death with my master. Death should be my portion rather than honors. How could I accept the offer?\"\n\nCao Cao praised him and insisted on granting the lordship.\n\nHaving escaped from their pursuers, Ma Chao and his few followers decided to make for Hanzhong and offer their services to Governor Zhang Lu. Zhang Lu received them gladly, for he thought with such help he could certainly get possession of Yizhou on the west as well as repel Cao Cao on the east. More than this, he thought to cement the friendship by giving Ma Chao a daughter to wife. But this displeased one of Zhang Lu's generals, Yang Bo.\n\n\"The misfortune that befell Ma Chao's wife and family was entirely the fault of his own misconduct. Would you give your daughter to such as he to wife?\" said Yang Bo.\n\nZhang Lu again considered the matter and abandoned his intention. But a certain busybody told Ma Chao what had been proposed and that Yang Bo had defeated the scheme. Whereupon Ma Chao was very annoyed and sought to compass the death of Yang Bo. Yang Bo and his brother, Yang Song, on the other side conspired to destroy Ma Chao.\n\nAt this time a messenger from Liu Zhang of Yizhou arrived in Hanzhong begging for assistance against the invader Liu Bei. Zhang Lu refused help. But then Huang Quan came on the same errand. He first saw Yang Song and talked to him and brought him to favor the scheme.\n\nHuang Quan said, \"The East and West River Lands, which stand next each other as the lips are close to the teeth, are interdependent. If Yizhou is lost, Hanzhong has little chance to survive. On the other hand, once relieved by your help, Imperial Protector Liu Zhang will reward twenty counties to Hanzhong as compensation.\"\n\nSo Huang Quan won over Yang Song, who led him to see his master. To Zhang Lu again Huang Quan spoke forcibly and laid the matter before him so cogently that Zhang Lu promised his help.\n\nBut Yan Pu, one of Zhang Lu's officers, tried to dissuade him, saying, This plead for help and offering of twenty counties are only their temporary tactics. Liu Zhang and you are old enemies. His promise is not to be trusted.\n\nAnd another suddenly interjected, saying, \"Useless I may be, but if you will give me troops, I will capture this Liu Bei and you will retain all your land.\"\n\n\u2003The land's true lord goes west and then\n\n\u2003Hanzhong sends forth its bravest men." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Ma Chao Battles At Jiameng Pass; Liu Bei Takes Over Yizhou.\n\nIt was Yan Pu who thus opposed sending help to Liu Zhang.\n\nThen Ma Chao rose and said, \"I have been the recipient of much kindness from my lord, which I feel I can never repay adequately. Now let me lead an army to take Jiameng Pass and capture Liu Bei. Then, my lord, Liu Zhang will surely lose his twenty counties, and they shall be yours.\"\n\nThis offer rejoiced Zhang Lu, who sent away Huang Quan with a promise to help. Then Zhang Lu told off twenty thousand for Ma Chao to lead. Pang De was too ill to take part in the expedition, so he remained in Hanzhong. Zhang Lu ordered Yang Bo to be Army Supervisor. Ma Chao and Ma Dai chose a day to march to Jiameng Pass.\n\nMeanwhile, the messenger sent to Chengdu by Fa Zheng had returned to Luocheng to report: \"Zheng Du advised Liu Zhang to set fire to all the plains and valleys between the capital and the invaders, as well as the granaries, to move sway the people, and to stand solely on the defensive.\"\n\nThis news caused Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang great anxiety, for it would be a grave danger to them. However, Fa Zheng was more sanguine.\n\n\"Do not be anxious,\" said he, \"the plan would be extremely harmful, but it will not be carried out. Liu Zhang will not do that.\"\n\nSurely enough, very soon they heard that Liu Zhang had not adopted the suggestion; he would not remove the people. It was a great relief to Liu Bei.\n\nThen said Zhuge Liang, \"Now let us capture Mianzhu quickly, for, that done, Chengdu is as good as ours.\"\n\nLiu Bei therefore told off Huang Zhong and Wei Yan to advance first. When Commander of Mianzhu, Fei Guan, heard of their advance, he ordered Li Yan to go out to stop them, and Li Yan led out three thousand troops. The two sides being arrayed, Huang Zhong rode out and fought some half hundred bouts with Li Yan. Neither was able to claim a victory, and so Zhuge Liang from the midst of the host ordered them to beat the gongs to cease from battle.\n\nWhen Huang Zhong had got back to his side again, he said, \"O Instructor, why did you sound the retirement just as I was getting the better of my opponent?\"\n\n\"Because I saw that Li Yan was not to be overcome by mere force. Tomorrow you shall fight again, and then you shall lead him into the hills by the ruse of pretended defeat. There will be a surprise awaiting him.\"\n\nHuang Zhong agreed to try this plan, and so on the morrow accepted Li Yan's challenge when it was offered. After about the tenth bout, Huang Zhong and his troops pretended to be worsted and ran. Li Yan pursued and was quickly lured into the mountains. Suddenly his danger flashed into his mind, and he turned to go back.\n\nBut he found Wei Yan's troops drawn up across his path.\n\nFrom a hill top near by, Zhuge Liang cried, \"You had better yield! If not, there are bows and crossbows on both sides of you \u2014 all ready to avenge the death of our Pang Tong.\"\n\nLi Yan dropped off his horse, threw aside his armor, and offered submission. Not a soldier of his had been hurt. The prisoner was conducted to Liu Bei, who was very affable and so won Li Yan's heart that Li Yan offered to try to seduce Fei Guan from his allegiance.\n\n\"Though he is related to Liu Zhang, yet Fei Guan and I are very close friends. Let me go and persuade him.\"\n\nWherefore Li Yan was sent back to the city to induce his chief to come over to Liu Bei's side. Li Yan talked to such effect of the kindness and virtues of Liu Bei that Fei Guan was won over, opened the city gates, and admitted the invaders.\n\nAs soon as Liu Bei had entered Mianzhu, he set out his forces to take the capital.\n\nWhile thus engaged, a hasty messenger came to tell of the doings at Jiameng Pass: \"There suddenly appeared an army from the east under Ma Chao, Ma Dai, and Yang Bo. They are attacking, and the Pass will certainly be lost if help is not sent quickly.\"\n\n\"We need both Zhang Fei and Zhao Zilong for this,\" remarked Zhuge Liang. \"Then we could oppose successfully.\"\n\n\"But Zhao Zilong is away,\" said Liu Bei. \"However, Zhang Fei is here. Let us send him quickly.\"\n\n\"Do not say anything, my lord,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Let me stir him to fight his noblest.\"\n\nBut as soon as Zhang Fei heard of the danger, he came rushing in, shouting, \"I must say farewell, brother! I am off to fight Ma Chao.\"\n\nHowever, Zhuge Liang made as if he heard not and said to Liu Bei, \"That Ma Chao has invaded Jiameng Pass, and we have no one to drive him back. Nobody can stand up to him, unless we can get Guan Yu from Jingzhou. Guan Yu could do it.\"\n\n\"Why do you despise me, O Instructor?\" cried Zhang Fei. \"Did I not once drive back a whole army with my mere voice? Think you that I mind a stupid fool like Ma Chao?\"\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"Yes, General; but when you forced back the waters and broke the bridge in the Long Slope, you succeeded because your enemies were doubtful. If they had known, you would not have come off so easily. Now, all the world knows this Ma Chao and has heard about his six battles at River Wei; and how he made Cao Cao cut off his beard and throw away his robe. Ma Chao very nearly slew Cao Cao too. This is no lightsome task like that, and even Guan Yu might fail.\"\n\n\"All I care for is to go, and if I do not overcome this fellow, I will take the consequences.\"\n\n\"Well, if you will put that in writing, you may lead the attack. And I will ask our lord to lead another army to back you up this time. He can leave the defense of this town to me till Zhao Zilong returns.\"\n\n\"I also want to go,\" said Wei Yan.\n\nWei Yan was allowed to go with five hundred of light horse in advance of Zhang Fei. Liu Bei marched third. Wei Yan and his scouts soon arrived at Jiameng Pass and there fell in with Yang Bo. They engaged; but after a few bouts Yang Bo fled.\n\nAt this success Wei Yan was seized with ambition to rival it and try to snatch the credit that would fall to Zhang Fei. So he pursued. But he presently came across a line of battle all drawn up, the commander being Ma Dai. Wei Yan, thinking it was the redoubtable Ma Chao, rode toward him whirling his sword. Soon Ma Dai turned and ran away, and Wei Yan followed him. However, Ma Dai presently turned back and shot an arrow, which wounded Wei Yan in the left arm, so that he left the pursuit and turned his face the other way. Then Ma Dai came after him and chased Wei Yan nearly up to the Pass.\n\nHere Ma Dai was suddenly confronted by a fierce thunder-roaring leader who dashed down from the Pass as on a flying steed.\n\nIt was Zhang Fei, who had just arrived. Hearing the noise of battle below the Pass, Zhang Fei had come to learn what it meant and saw the arrow wound of Wei Yan. Soon Zhang Fei was in the saddle and off to the rescue. But before he engaged, he would ascertain if the foe was worthy of his steel.\n\n\"Who are you? Tell your name,\" cried Zhang Fei, \"then I may fight with you.\"\n\n\"I am Ma Dai of Xiliang.\"\n\n\"As you are not Ma Chao, go away quickly, for you are no match for me. You may bid Ma Chao himself come, and tell him that Zhang Fei of Yan is here.\"\n\n\"How dare you treat me with contempt?\" cried Ma Dai in hot anger, and he came galloping up with his spear set ready to thrust. But after a half score bouts he fled.\n\nZhang Fei was about to pursue when a rider came up to him hastily, crying, \"Do not pursue, my brother.\"\n\nThe rider was Liu Bei, and Zhang Fei stopped. The two returned together to the Pass.\n\n\"I knew your impulsive temper, and so I followed you. Since you have got the better of him, you may well rest and recuperate for the fight tomorrow with Ma Chao.\"\n\nThe rolling of drums at dawn next day declared the arrival of Ma Chao. Liu Bei looked at the array from a point of vantage and saw Ma Chao emerge from the shadow of his great standard. Ma Chao wore a lion helmet, and his belt was clasped with the shaggy head of a wild beast. His breastplate was silver and his robe of white. As his dress and bearing were so extraordinary, so were his abilities superior. And Liu Bei looked at him, sighing admiringly.\n\n\"He justifies what people say,\" said Liu Bei, \"Handsome Ma Chao.\"\n\nZhang Fei was for going down at once, but his brother once more checked him, saying, \"No, not yet. Avoid the first keenness of his fighting ardor.\"\n\nThus below was Ma Chao challenging Zhang Fei, while, above, Zhang Fei was fretting at being unable to settle Ma Chao. Time after time Zhang Fei was setting out, but each time his brother checked him. And so it continued till past midday, when Liu Bei, noticing signs of fatigue and weariness among Ma Chao's army, decided that it was time to let Zhang Fei try his fortune. Whereupon Liu Bei chose out five hundred horsemen to accompany his brother and let the party go.\n\nMa Chao seeing Zhang Fei coming with so small a force, signaled with his spear to his array to retire a bowshot, and Zhang Fei's troops halted. When all his troops had taken their places, Zhang Fei set serpent halberd and rode out.\n\n\"Do you know who I am?\" shouted Zhang Fei. \"I am Zhang Fei of Yan!\"\n\nMa Chao replied, \"My family having been noble for many generations. I am not likely to know any rustic dolts!\"\n\nThis reply upset Zhang Fei, and in a moment the two steeds were rushing toward each other, both men with poised spears. The fight began and continued for a hundred bouts. Neither had the advantage.\n\n\"A veritable tiger of a leader,\" sighed Liu Bei.\n\nBut Liu Bei felt that Zhang Fei was running a risk, wherefore he sounded the gong as a signal to cease the fight. And each drew off to his own side. Zhang Fei rested his steed for a time, then, leaving his helmet, he wound a turban about his head, mounted, and rode out to renew the fight. Ma Chao also came out, and the duel continued.\n\nPresently Liu Bei thought his brother in danger. So he girded on his armor and went down into the plain. He watched till they had fought another hundred bouts, and then as both seemed to wax fiercer than ever, he gave the signal again to cease the battle. Both drew off and returned each to his own side.\n\nIt was then getting late, and Liu Bei said to his brother, \"You had better retire for today. He is a terrible opponent. Try him again tomorrow.\"\n\nBut Zhang Fei's spirit was roused, and it was unlikely that such advice would be palatable.\n\n\"No,\" shouted he, \"I will die and not come back!\"\n\n\"But it is late. You cannot go on fighting,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"Let them bring torches, and we will have a night battle,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\nMa Chao having mounted a fresh steed, now rode out and shouted, \"Dare you try a night battle, Zhang Fei?\"\n\nZhang Fei's excitement rose higher. He hastily changed horses with his brother and rode forth.\n\n\"If I do not capture you, I will not go back to the Pass,\" said Zhang Fei.\n\n\"And if I do not overcome you, I will not return to the camp,\" said Ma Chao.\n\nBoth sides cheered. They lit many thousand torches till it seemed as light as day, and the two great generals went to the front to fight. At the twentieth bout Ma Chao turned his steed and tied.\n\n\"Whither are you going?\" called out Zhang Fei.\n\nThe fact was that Ma Chao had begun to see he could not win in direct and simple combat, so he thought to try a ruse. By a false flight, as though he knew he had lost, he would inveigle Zhang Fei into pursuit. He picked up a copper mace secretly and kept a careful watch on his opponent for the most favorable moment to strike. But Ma Chao's flight only put Zhang Fei upon his guard, and when the moment came for the blow with the mace he dodged, so that the weapon flew harmlessly past his ear. Then Zhang Fei turned his horse. Whereupon Ma Chao began to pursue. Then Zhang Fei pulled up, took his bow, fitted an arrow to the string, and let fly at Ma Chao. But Ma Chao also dodged, and the arrow flew by. Then each returned to his own side.\n\nThen Liu Bei came out to the front of his battle line and called out, \"Note well, O Ma Chao, that I, who have never treated people other than with kindness and justice and truth and sincerity, swear that I will not take advantage of your period of repose to pursue or attack. Wherefore you may rest awhile in peace.\"\n\nMa Chao, hearing these words, withdrew guarding the rear, and the other generals one by one returned, while Liu Bei drew off his army toward the Pass.\n\nEarly next day Zhang Fei was once more going down out of the Pass to fight, when they told him that the Directing Instructor had arrived. Liu Bei went to receive him, and Zhuge Liang at once began to speak of Ma Chao.\n\n\"He is the most terrible leader of the age. If he fights a desperate battle with Zhang Fei, loss of a general will ensue. So I have come as quickly as I could. I left Mianzhu in the safe hands of Zhao Zilong and Huang Zhong. I think I have a little ruse left that will bring Ma Chao over to our side.\"\n\n\"Now I have seen the man. I greatly admire him,\" said Liu Bei. \"If we could only win him over!\"\n\n\"Then listen, my lord,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Zhang Lu greatly desires the title of 'Prince of Hanzhong.' Among his most intimate subordinates, I know Yang Song open to bribery. So we will send a person secretly to see him and give him gold and silver and so win his support. This done, we will write to Zhang Lu and tell him that you are set upon taking Yizhou from its present ruler, which will give an opportunity to wipe out the enmity he has so long nourished against Liu Zhang, and that the reward of his remaining firmly on our side to the end will be that you will memorialize the Throne for the coveted title for him. This will make him order Ma Chao to return, and, when that is done, I shall find a means of winning him over.\"\n\nLiu Bei wrote a letter and sent it by the hand of Sun Qian together with gold and pearls. Sun Qian went by secret roads to give these to Yang Song. And when he found Yang Song and explained his mission in private, he was quickly led into the presence of Zhang Lu.\n\n\"How can Liu Bei memorialize the Throne to confer on me the rank of a prince when he is but a simple General himself?\" asked Zhang Lu, when he understood the offer and its conditions.\n\n\"He is an Imperial Uncle,\" said Yang Song. \"With such a rank he could present such a memorial.\"\n\nZhang Lu assented. He sent orders to Ma Chao to cease fighting, and Sun Qian remained as the guest of Yang Song till he should see whether Ma Chao would obey the command. Before long the messenger returned with a word from Ma Chao that he could not cease fighting till he had been successful. A second and third messenger returned with a similar response.\n\n\"This Ma Chao is untrustworthy,\" said Yang Song. \"He will not withdraw his soldiers because he contemplates rebellion. That is the real reason.\"\n\nYang Song set stories afloat rumoring: \"Ma Chao desires to make himself the ruler of the west and has said that he will no longer be content with subordinate rank. And he means to avenge the death of his father.\"\n\nThe rumors came to the ear of Zhang Lu, and he asked Yang Song what should be done.\n\nYang Song proposed, saying, \"Give Ma Chao a limit of a month in order to accomplish his task, provided he consents to three conditions. And if he does not agree, he will have to be put to death. The three conditions are the capture of West River Land, the head of Liu Zhang, and the repulse of the Jingzhou troops. If he fails in anyone of these, just bring his head. Meanwhile, Zhang Wei should be sent as guard at one of the strategic points which will control Ma Chao's army in case of rebellion.\"\n\nWhen Ma Chao heard the three demands made on him, he was greatly troubled, saying, \"What can such a charge mean?\"\n\nAfter taking counsel with Ma Dai, it seemed best to suspend fighting, and the army returned.\n\nBut Yang Song had not yet attained his end, so he said to Zhang Lu, \"Ma Chao's return with an army will be a danger, and hence all the points of vantage on the homeward road must be guarded so that to stop him.\"\n\nThus Ma Chao was helpless and could see no way out of the difficulty.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said to his lord, \"Now is my chance to use my little three inches of unworn tongue. Ma Chao is in a fix. I am going to his camp to persuade him to come over to your side.\"\n\n\"But I do not like you to run such a risk, Instructor. You are my most necessary support, and if anything happened to you, what should I do?\"\n\nZhuge Liang was set upon going and persisted in his request. Liu Bei again and again refused. At this juncture a messenger came with letters from Zhao Zilong. Liu Bei called him in and questioned him. He was Li Hui of Jianning, the man who had formerly remonstrated so earnestly with Liu Zhang.\n\n\"You once pleaded with your master to keep me out. Why are you here now?\"\n\n\"Because the prudent bird chooses its perch, and the wise person his master. I did attempt to dissuade Liu Zhang of Yizhou from a course which I felt to be disastrous, and thereby fulfilled my duty as his servant. He rejected my counsel, and I knew he would fail. Your liberality, O General, has won over all the region, and success must be yours. I wish to serve under your banner.\"\n\n\"Your services will surely be of great advantage to me, Sir,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nThen Li Hui began to talk of Ma Chao, \"I knew him when we were in West Valley Land together. He is now in great straits, and I may be able to talk him over. What say you?\"\n\n\"Just the man to go instead of me,\" interjected Zhuge Liang. \"But what arguments will you use?\"\n\nLi Hui leaned over and whispered in his ear thus and thus. What he said seemed to please Zhuge Liang mightily, and he was bidden to go forthwith.\n\nArrived at the camp, Li Hui sent in his name, at which Ma Chao remarked, \"Yes, I know him \u2014 a glib and specious persuader. I know what he has come for, too.\"\n\nSo Ma Chao placed a score of armed ruffians in hiding about his tent and told them to cut the visitor to pieces if the signal was given.\n\nThen the guest was led in and came walking proudly. His host remained seated stiff and upright.\n\nMa Chao spoke roughly, saying, \"What are you come for?\"\n\n\"I am here as persuader.\"\n\n\"This sword here in the scabbard is newly ground. You may try me by words, but if the words do not penetrate, I shall ask you to try the sword.\"\n\nLi Hui smiled, saying, \"O General, evil is not far off. However, I am thinking the newly ground sword will not be tried on my head. You will want to try it on your own!\"\n\n\"What evil were you talking about?\"\n\n\"The worst vilification could not hide the beauty of Lady Xi Shi of Yue, nor could the most fulsome praise gloze over the ugliness of Lady Wuyan of Qi. The sun rises to the meridian and then declines; the moon waxes to the full and then wanes. All things obey the one law. Now, General, you are at enmity with Cao Cao for your father's death, and in West Valley Land you carry a stubborn, grinding hate for your family's death. You can neither rescue Liu Zhang by repulsing the army from Jingzhou, nor can you settle Yang Song by getting an interview with Zhang Lu. The whole world now holds no place for a person without a lord; and if you experience further defeats, like that one on River Wei, or the loss of Jicheng, will you not be too shamed to look any human in the face?\"\n\nMa Chao bowed his head, saying, \"You speak well, Sir. But I am helpless.\"\n\n\"Now that you listen to me, I would ask why those fearsome ruffians are in hiding by your tent?\" continued Li Hui.\n\nMa Chao, suddenly stricken with shame, ordered them to retire. Li Hui continued his speech.\n\n\"Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, is considerate to his subordinates, and I am certain he will succeed, and so I have forsaken Liu Zhang to cleave to him. Your honored father joined him in destroying rebels. Why do you not flee from darkness into the light? Thereby you would avenge your father and become famous.\"\n\nMa Chao, convinced of the wisdom of the course thus recommended, proved his conversion by sending for Yang Bo and slaying him forthwith. Taking with him the head of his victim, Ma Chao accompanied Li Hui to the Pass and tendered his submission. Liu Bei welcomed him warmly and treated him as a highly honored guest.\n\nMa Chao bowed his head, saying, \"Meeting you, O Illustrious Lord, is like seeing the clear sky when the clouds have been swept aside.\"\n\nWhen Sun Qian returned from Yang Song's place, Liu Bei detached a force to go to the capture of Chengdu, left two generals, Meng Da and Huo Jun to guard Jiameng Pass, and made a triumphant entry into Mianzhu with the welcome of Zhao Zilong and Huang Zhong.\n\nTwo generals of West River Land, Ma Han and Liu Jun, came to oppose Liu Bei, but Zhao Zilong went out against them while Liu Bei was entertaining Ma Chao at a banquet on the city wall. Ere it had concluded, Zhao Zilong slew both the generals and brought their heads to the banquet chamber. This exploit put Ma Chao on his mettle and doubled his respect for the conquerors.\n\n\"Let not my lord attack,\" said Ma Chao. \"I will make Liu Zhang surrender of his own accord. Should he resist, my brother Ma Dai and I will take the city and offer it to you with both hands.\"\n\nLiu Bei was very pleased with the course of events. The day was indeed one of rejoicing.\n\nBut Liu Zhang was greatly distressed at the news of his fresh misfortunes, which reached him with the return of his defeated soldiers. He barred the gates and stopped all exits. Before long came news of the approach of Ma Chao with an army of rescue. The Imperial Protector then ventured to mount the walls, and soon Ma Chao and Ma Dai rode up and stood below the ramparts.\n\nAnd Ma Chao called out, \"I wish to speak with Liu Zhang.\"\n\nThen Liu Zhang showed himself, and Ma Chao plunged into the matter without more ado.\n\n\"I took the leadership of Zhang Lu's army to rescue Yizhou, little thinking that, under the calumnious advice of Yang Song, Zhang Lu would try to slay me. However, now I have gone over to the side of Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, and advise you, Sir, to do the same, you and all your officers. Thereby you will all escape harm. If anyone holds on a misguided course, I shall take the city.\"\n\nSuch words came as a shock, and Liu Zhang paled. His feelings overcame him and he swooned.\n\nWhen he came to his senses, he muttered, \"I am stupid and I am sorry. Better open the gates and end it. The city will be saved.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" cried Dong He. \"There are thirty thousand of good soldiers in the city and ample money and stores for a year to come. Hold out!\"\n\nBut Liu Zhang was broken, saying, \"My father and I have ruled Shu for twenty years and have done no particular good for the people. We have fought for three years: The grass has been be stained with the blood of my people. The fault is mine. I could not bear it, and so I see no better way than to surrender, whereby I may bring peace to the people.\"\n\nThose about him wept. One man spoke, saying, \"You speak as Heaven guides you.\"\n\nTurning toward him they recognized a man of Baxi named Qiao Zhou, who had the reputation of being an astrologer.\n\n\"I have studied the aspect of the heavens and a multitude of stars gathered over the west, one of which shone as the full moon: A right royal star. And I recall a popular couplet of last year:\n\n\u2003\"When comes the ruler from the east,\n\n\u2003Then may you on new rice feast.\n\n\u2003\"None can withstand the decree of the Most High.\"\n\nLiu Ba and Huang Quan, who heard these words, were very angry at such a speech and rose up, swords in hand, to smite the speaker. But Liu Zhang stayed them.\n\nNext came news that Xu Jing, the Governor of the Shu District, had climbed the wall and gone over to the invaders. This was the last blow. Liu Zhang went home weeping.\n\nNext day they reported that Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, had sent Jian Yong as legate to visit Liu Zhang and he was even then at the city gate. Jian Yong was admitted, and he entered, riding in a carriage and looking about him most haughtily.\n\nSuddenly he was hailed from the street by a man with a sword in his hand, who cried, \"You have got your wish, wretched creature, and you seem to think there is no one to compare with you. But do not look so contemptuously at us of Shu!\"\n\nJian Yong quickly got out of his carriage to speak to the speaker, who was a man of Mianzhu named Qin Mi.\n\n\"Worthy brother,\" said Jian Yong, \"I did not recognize you. I pray you not to be angry.\"\n\nBoth then went to visit Liu Zhang, and they spoke of the liberality and broad-mindedness of Liu Bei, said he had no intention to harm anyone, and praised him to such effect that Liu Zhang then and there made up his mind finally that he would give up the struggle. So he treated Jian Yong very honorably that day.\n\nAnd the next day, taking his seal and insignia of office and his archives, he accompanied Jian Yong out of the city and went to Liu Bei's camp. Liu Bei came out in person to receive him.\n\nTaking Liu Zhang by the hand, Liu Bei wept, saying, \"It is not that I wish to act cruelly or wrongly. I am the victim of circumstances and cannot help it.\"\n\nThey entered the camp together, where the seal of office and the documents changed hands. Afterwards they rode into the city side by side. The people gave Liu Bei a cordial welcome, burning incense and illuminating the city. The victor went to the residence of the chief of the region, where he took his seat and was saluted by all the subordinate officials.\n\nHowever, Huang Quan and Liu Ba stayed away from the ceremony. This annoyed the more violent of Liu Bei's supporters, and they wished to kill the delinquents. But Liu Bei would not allow violence and threatened condign punishment to anyone who might interfere with these two. When the reception was over, Liu Bei went to visit the two recalcitrants, whereupon both came out and made their obeisance.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang to Liu Bei, \"We have vanquished, and all opposition in Yizhou is at an end. But there cannot be two rulers, so you must remove Liu Zhang to Jingzhou.\"\n\n\"But I do not wish to exile him,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"He lost his prestige through weakness. If you are weak and undecided, you also will not last long.\"\n\nLiu Bei saw his advice was good, and so he gave a great banquet whereat he begged Liu Zhang to pack up his treasures and prepare to move. He gave the dispossessed Imperial Protector the title General Who Spreads Prestige. Liu Zhang went away to Gongan in Jingzhou, taking with him his family and all his possessions.\n\nLiu Bei thus became Imperial Protector of Yizhou. He conferred gifts on the civil and military officers who joined him, confirming their ranks and titles. Yan Yan was made General of the Front Army; Fa Zheng, Governor of the Shu District; Dong He and Xu Jing, Imperial Commanders; Liu Ba, General of the Left Army; Huang Quan, General of the Right Army; Wu Yi, Fei Guan, Peng Yang, Zhuo Ying, Li Yan, Wu Lan, Lei Tong, Li Hui, Zhang Yi, Qin Mi, Qiao Zhou, Lu Yin, Huo Jun, Deng Zhi, Yang Hong, Zhou Qun, Fei Yi, Fei Shi, Meng Da, and others of Shu officers whose aid had been conspicuous were given high ranks and finer titles under the new rule, and the total of more than sixty of them were well rewarded.\n\nNaturally, honors were distributed freely to Liu Bei's immediate helpers, to whose efforts he owed his position. Zhuge Liang was held Directing Instructor; Guan Yu, General Who Destroys Rebels and Lord of Hanshou; Zhang Fei, General Who Subdues Rebels and Lord of Xin; Zhao Zilong, General Who Guards the West; Huang Zhong, General Who Conquers the West; Wei Yan, General Who Wages Successful War; Ma Chao, General Who Pacifies the West. Sun Qian, Jian Yong, Mi Zhu, Mi Fang, Ma Liang, Ma Su, Jiang Wan, Yi Ji, Liu Feng, Guan Ping, Liao Hua, Zhou Cang, and others, many of whom had come to Liu Bei from Jingzhou, received promotions and rewards.\n\nIn addition, a special gift of five hundred ounces of gold, a thousand ounces of silver, much copper money, and a thousand rolls of Xichuan silk, was sent to Guan Yu. And all the military and civil officers were given appointments and rewards. Huge numbers of oxen and horses were slaughtered for banquets to the army, and the contents of the granaries were given to the common people. So that there were great rejoicings.\n\nYizhou being settled, Liu Bei next desired to confiscate the lands of the more famous of the inhabitants about Capital Chengdu and divide them among his officers.\n\nBut here Zhao Zilong and others dissuaded him, saying, \"The sufferings of the people have been severe and losses great. It would be wise policy to let them settle down to their occupations as soon as possible. It would be wrong to reward our own people at the expense of these people.\"\n\nLiu Bei listened and gave in with good grace.\n\nTo Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei assigned the revision of the laws, in which the punishments to be made, on the whole, heavy.\n\nThen Fa Zheng spoke up, \"The founder of Han, Liu Bang, drew up three chapters of law, and the people were all profoundly affected by his virtue. I would rather that the laws be few and liberal that people may be comforted.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"You only look at one side. The laws of Qin were fiercely cruel and provoked resentment among the people. It was fitting that the Supreme Ancestor should temper them with kindness. Under the weak administration of Liu Zhang, there has never been an efficient government, and there is a lack of respect for the law. The proper relationship between ruler and minister has been gradually obscured. Favor has been the means of rising, and the highest in rank have been the basest. Kindness has been extended into license, and the most benefited have been the most contemptuous. And thereby have crept in many evils. Now I mean to inculcate respect for the dignity of the law, and kindness shall follow its attainment: There shall be moderation in conferring rank, but honor shall really follow on such promotion. In the mutual cooperation of kindness and honor and in proper distinction between superiors and inferiors lies the efficiency of a government.\"\n\nFa Zheng had no argument to oppose. In due time all became perfectly tranquil, and all the forty-one counties, with their respective garrisons, were peaceful and contented.\n\nAs Governor of the Shu District, Fa Zheng earned much hatred, busying himself in returning favors and avenging past deeds however small they were. One person told of the complaints to Zhuge Liang, urging his reproof.\n\nBut Zhuge Liang referred to his meritorious services, saying, \"When our lord was in Jingzhou, fearful of Cao Cao on the north and trembling lest he be attacked from the east by Sun Quan, it was Fa Zheng who supported him, gave him directions, and added wings to him so that he could soar this high. In these prosperous days one can hardly begin to discipline Fa Zheng. Could we reasonably forbid him following somewhat his own way?\"\n\nSo no investigation was made, but Fa Zheng heard of the complaints and corrected his faults.\n\nOne day, when Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang were resting and at leisure, Guan Ping arrived with a letter from his father, thanking his elder brother for the handsome gifts.\n\nMaking obeisance and handing in his letter, Guan Ping said, \"My father was anxious to come into Yizhou to try conclusions with Ma Chao.\"\n\nSaid Liu Bei, \"If he were to come and fight, I fear they would not both survive.\"\n\n\"There is nothing to be anxious about,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"I will write to Guan Yu.\"\n\nLiu Bei feared that his brother's impulsive temperament might lead to trouble, so he told Zhuge Liang to compose a letter and send back by Guan Ping.\n\nWhen Guan Ping came again to his father, the first question was: \"Did you mention the contest with Ma Chao?\"\n\nThen the letter was produced, and this is what it said:\n\n\"I hear you are anxious to decide whether of the twain, Ma Chao or yourself, is the better man. Now I can measure Ma Chao. He may be unusually brave and bold, but he is only of the class of Ying Bu and Peng Yue of old. He might be a worthy rival of your younger brother, but he is far from the standard set by you, O Lord of the Beautiful Beard. You have a most important charge. If you come into the West River Land, and Jingzhou should be lost, would you not be guilty of a terrible failure? I think you will see this.\"\n\nGuan Yu stroked his long beard and smiled as he read the letter.\n\n\"The Instructor knows me thoroughly,\" said he to himself.\n\nHe showed the letter to his clients and friends and thought no more of going westward.\n\nThe successes of Liu Bei in the west had been duly noted by Sun Quan, who thought he was surely now going to obtain the much-coveted Jingzhou. So he called in Zhang Zhao and Gu Yong to ask advice.\n\nSun Quan said, \"When Liu Bei occupied Jingzhou temporarily, he pledged he would return the region to the South Land when he would possess Yizhou. Now he has taken the forty-one counties of West River Land. If Jingzhou is not returned, I will take it by force.\"\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"I have already a scheme that will need no fighting. Liu Bei will offer the place to you with both hands.\"\n\n\u2003In Shu there shine new sun and moon,\n\n\u2003Wu dreams Jingzhou will be his soon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Armed With Sword, Guan Yu Goes To A Feast Alone; For The State, Empress Fu Offers Her Life.\n\nThe scheme, which Zhang Zhao had in mind, he laid before his master thus: \"The one man upon whom Liu Bei relies most is Zhuge Liang. Now his brother is in your service and in your power. All you have to do is to seize Zhuge Jin's family and send him west to see Zhuge Liang and make Zhuge Liang persuade Liu Bei to return Jingzhou. If Liu Bei refuses, the family of Zhuge Jin will suffer, and Zhuge Liang will not be able to resist the claims of brotherhood.\"\n\n\"But Zhuge Jin is a loyal and true gentleman. I could not lay hands upon his family!\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"Explain the ruse to him. That will set his mind at rest,\" said Zhang Zhao.\n\nSun Quan consented and issued the command to confine the family of his retainer in the palace but not really imprison them. Then he wrote a letter for Zhuge Jin to take with him on his mission. Before many days Zhuge Jin reached Chengdu and sent to inform Liu Bei of his arrival.\n\nLiu Bei at once sought the advice of Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Why think you your brother has come?\"\n\n\"He has come to force the return of Jingzhou.\"\n\n\"How shall I answer him?\"\n\n\"You must do so and so,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe plan of action being prepared, Zhuge Liang went out of the city to welcome his brother. But instead of taking him to his own residence, Zhuge Liang took him to the guest-house. When the greetings were over, the visitor suddenly lifted up his voice and wept.\n\n\"If you have any trouble, my brother, pray tell. Why do you weep thus?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Alas! My family are lost!\" cried he.\n\n\"I suppose it is in the matter of the return of Jingzhou? If your family have been seized on my account, how can I bear it calmly? But do not be anxious, my brother. I shall certainly find some way out of the difficulty.\"\n\nThis reply pleased Zhuge Jin, and the two brothers went to visit Liu Bei.\n\nThe letter of Sun Quan was presented, but when Liu Bei had read it he said, angrily, \"He is related to me by marriage, and he has profited by my absence from Jingzhou to steal away his sister. That is a sort of kindliness I find it hard to bear. When I am just going to lead my army to the South Land to take vengeance, is it likely he will get Jingzhou out of me?\"\n\nAt this point Zhuge Liang prostrated himself weeping at his lord's feet and said, \"The Marquis of Wu has seized my brother's family, and he will put them all to death if the land be not given up. Can I remain alive if such a fate befall them? I pray my lord for my sake to give back the region and prevent any breach between my brother and me.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei refused. He seemed obdurate, but Zhuge Liang persisted in his entreaty. Finally Liu Bei reluctantly consented.\n\n\"Since things are so, and the Instructor pleads for it, I will return half,\" said he. \"I will give up three territories \u2014 Changsha, Lingling, and Guiyang.\"\n\n\"Then, as you have consented, prepare letters ordering Guan Yu to yield these three territories,\" said Zhuge Jin.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"When you see my brother, you must use most gracious words to him, for his nature is as a fierce fire, and even I fear what he may do. So be very careful.\"\n\nZhuge Jin, having got the letter, took his leave and went straightway to Jingzhou. He asked for an interview, and was received in the grand reception hall.\n\nWhen both were seated in their respective places, the emissary produced the letter of Liu Bei, saying, \"The Imperial Uncle has promised to return three territories to my master, and I hope, General, you will hand them over at once and let me return.\"\n\nGuan Yu's countenance changed, and he said, \"The oath sworn in the Peach Garden bound me and my brother to support the dynasty of Han. Jingzhou is a portion of their domain, and how can any part be given to another? When a leader is in the field, he receives no orders, not even those of his prince. Although you have brought letters from my brother, yet will I not yield the territories.\"\n\n\"But the Marquis of Wu has laid hands upon my family, and they will be slain if the land be not given up. I crave your pity, O General!\"\n\n\"This is but a ruse on his part, but it does not deceive me!\"\n\n\"Why are you so pitiless?\"\n\nGuan Yu drew his sword, saying, \"Let us have no more. This sword is pitiless!\"\n\n\"It will put the Instructor to shame,\" said Guan Ping. \"I pray you not to be angry, my father.\"\n\n\"Were it not for my respect for the Instructor, you would never go back to the South Land,\" said Guan Yu to Zhuge Jin.\n\nZhuge Jin, overwhelmed with shame, took his leave, sought his ship, and hastily returned to Chengdu to see his brother. But Zhuge Liang had gone away upon a journey. However, he saw Liu Bei and related what had happened, and said that Guan Yu was going to slay him.\n\n\"My brother is hasty,\" said Liu Bei. \"It is difficult to argue with him. But return home for the present, and when I have finished my conquest of Hanzhong, I will transfer Guan Yu to another post, and then I may be able to return Jingzhou.\"\n\nZhuge Jin had no choice but to accept this reply and carry the unsatisfactory news to his master.\n\nSun Quan was greatly annoyed and said, \"This running to and fro was nothing more than one of your brother's tricks.\"\n\nThe unhappy messenger denied, saying, \"No, no! Zhuge Liang had interceded with many tears and obtained the promise to return three territories from Liu Bei. It was the obstinacy of Guan Yu that spoiled all.\"\n\n\"Since Liu Bei said he would return three territories, we may send officials to take over their administration. Think you that might be done?\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"What you say, my lord, seems most proper.\"\n\nThe family of Zhuge Jin were restored to liberty, and officers were sent to take charge of the three territories of Changsha, Lingling, and Guiyang.\n\nBut they quickly returned, saying, \"Guan Yu would have none of us, but had chased us away at once with threats to kill us if we did not hasten!\"\n\nSun Quan then summoned Lu Su and laid the blame on him.\n\n\"You are Liu Bei's guarantor in this matter. How can you sit quietly looking on while Liu Bei fails to perform his contract?\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"I have thought out a plan and was just going to impart it to you,\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"And what is your plan?\"\n\nLu Su said, \"There is a camp at Lukou. Invite Guan Yu to a banquet there and try to persuade him. If he still remains obstinate, have some assassins ready to slay him. Should he refuses the banquet, then we must try conclusions with an army.\"\n\n\"This suits me,\" said Sun Quan, \"and it shall be done.\"\n\n\"It should not be done!\" interrupted Kan Ze. \"The man is as bold as a tiger and not at all like common humans. The plan will fail and result in more harm.\"\n\n\"Then when may I expect to get my Jingzhou?\" asked Sun Quan, angrily.\n\nSun Quan ordered Lu Su to carry out his plan, and Lu Su went to Lukou forthwith and settled the preliminaries of the banquet with Lu Meng and Gan Ning. The place selected was by the river. Then Lu Su wrote a letter and found a persuasive person to deliver it. The messenger set out and sailed across the river to the post, where he was received by Guan Ping, who conducted him to his father.\n\n\"As Lu Su invites me, I will come tomorrow. You may return,\" was Guan Yu's reply.\n\nAfter the messenger had gone, Guan Ping said to his father, \"Why did you promise to go? I think Lu Su means you no good.\"\n\n\"Do you think I do not know? This has all come out of my refusal to yield those three territories. They are going to try coercion at this banquet. If I refuse, they will think I fear them. I will go tomorrow in a small ship with just my ten personal guards, and we shall see whether Lu Su will dare to come near me.\"\n\n\"But, Father, why risk your priceless self in the very den of a tiger? I think you are not giving due importance to my uncle's charge.\"\n\n\"I have been in the midst of million blades and arrows, yet I have been riding through it like traveling through a meadow of no one. Think you that I shall begin to show fear of a few such rats as those?\"\n\nNor was the son alone in remonstrance. Ma Liang also warned his chief.\n\n\"Although Lu Su has a great repute, yet now he is pushed hard. He certainly is badly disposed toward you, and you must be careful, General.\"\n\nGuan Yu replied, \"I have given my word, and shall I withdraw from it? In the days of the Warring States, Lin Xiangru of the state of Zhao had not the force even to bind a chicken, yet in the assembly at Shengchi Lake he regarded not the prince and the ministers of the powerful state of Qin, but did his duty without fear of consequences. Have I not learned to face any number of foes? I cannot break my promise.\"\n\n\"If you must go,\" said Ma Liang, \"at least go prepared.\"\n\n\"Tell my son to choose out ten fast ships and five hundred of good marines and be in readiness to help me at need. And when he sees a red flag waved, he can come over to my aid.\"\n\nThe order was given, and the little squadron was got ready.\n\nThe messenger returned to his master and told him that Guan Yu had boldly accepted the invitation, and Lu Su and Lu Meng took counsel together.\n\n\"What do you think of this?\" asked Lu Su.\n\n\"If Guan Yu comes with a force, Gan Ning and I will be in readiness for him by the riverside. And you will hear our bomb as a signal that we are attacking. If he has no force with him, the assassins can set on during the banquet.\"\n\nNext day a look-out was kept on the bank, and early in the day a single ship came along. It was manned by very few men, and a simple red flag flew out on the breeze showing but one word, Guan. Presently they could see him, a handsome figure in a green robe and navy-blue turban. Beside him stood Zhou Cang, his sword-bearer, and near him were eight or nine fine-looking men, each with a sword at his side.\n\nGuan Yu landed and was received by the trembling Lu Su, who conducted him to the hall, bowed his greetings, and led him to the banquet chamber. When Guan Yu drank to his host, Lu Su dared not raise his eyes, but Guan Yu was perfectly composed.\n\nWhen they had become mellow with wine, Lu Su said, \"I have a word to say to you, Sir, if haply I may have your attention. You know that your illustrious brother, the Imperial Uncle, made me surety with my master that Jingzhou would be returned after Yizhou had been taken. Well, now that country is in his possession, but Jingzhou is still unreturned. Is not this a breach of good faith?\"\n\n\"This is a government affair,\" said Guan Yu. \"Such matters should not be introduced at a banquet.\"\n\n\"My master only has petty possessions in the east, and he allowed the temporary loan of Jingzhou out of consideration for the need in which you then were. But now you have Yizhou, and Jingzhou should be given up. The Imperial Uncle has even yielded three territories, but you, Sir, seem unwilling to let them go. This seems hard to explain on reasonable grounds.\"\n\nGuan Yu replied, \"After the Red Cliffs, my brother braved the arrows and the stones in the battle at Wuling and with all his strength drove back the enemy. Did he get a single foot of land for all his efforts? Now you come to force this place out of him.\"\n\n\"No, I do not,\" said Lu Su. \"But at the time that you and your brother suffered defeat at Dangyang, when you were helpless and in the greatest straits, fugitives you knew not whither, then my master was moved with pity and did not grudge the land. So he gave your brother a foothold whence he might be able to accomplish other ends. But your brother has presumed upon long-suffering. He has attained his end \u2014 the country of his desire \u2014 and still he occupies Jingzhou. Such greed and such treachery will make the whole world laugh him to shame, as you know quite well.\"\n\n\"All that is no affair of mine; it is my brother's . I cannot yield the land.\"\n\n\"I know that by the oath in the Peach Garden you three were to live or die together. But your brother has consented to yield: How are you going to get out of that?\"\n\nBefore Guan Yu could reply, however, Zhou Cang burst into the conversation, roaring out, \"Only the virtuous get hold of territory: Does that mean only you people of East Wu?\"\n\nGuan Yu's anger now showed itself. His face changed; he rose in his place, took his sword from his sword-bearer, and said fiercely, \"How dare you talk like this at a discussion of state matters? Go! And go quickly!\"\n\nZhou Cang understood. He left the hall, made his way to the river and waved the red call-flag. The ships of Guan Ping darted across like arrows and were ready for action.\n\nThe mighty sword in his right hand, Guan Yu laid hold of Lu Su with his left and, simulating intoxication, said, \"You have kindly invited me today, Sir, but do not say anything about Jingzhou, for I am so drunk that I may forget our old friendship. Some other day I hope to invite you to Jingzhou, and then we will talk about that matter.\"\n\nPoor Lu Su's soul almost left his body with fright as he was led down to the river bank in the grip of his guest. Lu Meng and Gan Ning, who Lu Su had placed in ambush, dared not act and so made no move lest they should bring about the doom of Lu Su. When they got to the bank, Guan Yu released his host, got on board, and then said farewell. Lu Su stood dumbfounded, staring at the ship, while a fair breeze bore it quickly out of sight.\n\nThis episode has been commemorated in verse:\n\n\u2003He showed his contempt for the soldiers of Wu\n\n\u2003By going alone to their traitor feast;\n\n\u2003As Lin Xiangru of old he was much bolder;\n\n\u2003As the Shengchi Lake game was played again.\n\nGuan Yu took his homeward way, while Lu Su and his two confederates talked over what had occurred.\n\n\"What can be done now?\" said Lu Su.\n\n\"The only thing is to tell our master and let him send an army,\" replied Lu Meng.\n\nLu Su sent a messenger to Sun Quan, who, in his wrath, was for sending every available soldier at once against Jingzhou.\n\nBut at this crisis there came news that Cao Cao was raising a huge army with the intention of attacking the South Land. So hasty orders were sent to Lu Su to make no move, but to send all the troops he could toward Hefei and Ruxu in the north to repel Cao Cao.\n\nHowever, Cao Cao did not march south. One of his military advisers, Fu Gan, sent in a memorial against the scheme:\n\n\"I, Fu Gan, understand that inspiring fear is the chief consideration in war, as inculcating virtue is in government. These two combined in one person fit him to be a prince. Formerly, in the days of disturbance, you, Illustrious Sir, attacked the rebels and restored tranquillity almost everywhere, the only regions unsubdued and not under your control being Wu and Shu. The former of these is protected by the Great River, the latter secured by its mountains, and both difficult to conquer by force of arms.\n\nMy humble opinion is that it is more fitting to increase the authority of civil government, to lay aside arms and rest weapons, to cease from war and train your soldiers until the times shall be favorable. If your mighty legions be now sent to camp on the river bank and the rebels should take refuge behind their natural defenses, your soldiers will be unable to prove their prowess; and should extraordinary strategies be planned, the rebels will not be available. In such a case your high prestige would be impaired. I trust, Illustrious Sir, you will deign to examine this.\"\n\nAfter reading this, Cao Cao ceased to think of an expedition against the south. Instead, he established schools and set himself to attract people of ability.\n\nAbout the same time four of his officers \u2014 Wang Can, Du Xi, Wei Kai, and He He \u2014 conceived the idea of getting for Cao Cao the honor of \"Prince of Wei\".\n\nBut Xun You opposed this course, saying, \"The Prime Minister's rank is already that of \"Duke\", and he has received the additional honor of the Nine Dignities, so that his position is extremely high. If he advances to the rank of kingship, it will be inconsistent with reasonableness.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao was annoyed at this opposition and said, \"Does the man wish to emulate Xun Yu?\"\n\nWhen Xun You heard of Cao Cao's anger, he was grieved and fell ill, so that in a few days he died. He was fifty-eight years of age. Cao Cao had his remains interred honorably, and he stayed his ambition for princely rank.\n\nBut there came a day when Cao Cao entered the Palace wearing his sword and made his way to the apartment where the Emperor and the Empress were seated. The Empress rose in a fright, and the Emperor gazed at his minister in terror.\n\n\"Sun Quan and Liu Bei have each seized a portion of the empire and no longer respect the court. What is to be done?\"\n\nTo this abrupt speech the Emperor replied, \"The matter lies within your province.\"\n\nCao Cao answered, angrily, \"If such a remark be known outside, they will say I treat my prince without respect!\"\n\n\"If you will help me, I shall be most happy,\" said His Majesty. \"If not, then I trust to your kindness to let me alone.\"\n\nAt this Cao Cao glared at the Emperor and went out full of resentment.\n\nThe courtiers said, \"It is said that the Duke of Wei desires to become Prince of Wei, and soon he will aspire to the throne.\"\n\nBoth the Emperor and his consort wept.\n\nPresently Her Majesty said, \"My father, Fu Wan, has long nourished a desire to slay this man. Now I will indite a secret letter to my father to accomplish his end.\"\n\n\"Remember the former attempt with Dong Cheng. The plot was discovered and great misery ensued. I fear that this will leak out also, and both of us will be undone.\"\n\nSaid the Empress, \"We pass our days in constant discomfort, like sitting on a rug full of needles. If life is to be like this, one were better dead. But I know one loyal man among the attendants to whom I may entrust the letter. That one is Mu Shun, and he will deliver it.\"\n\nThereupon Empress Fu summoned Mu Shun within, and having sent away all others, they told their distress to the faithful one.\n\nEmperor Xian said, \"That fellow Cao Cao desires the dignity of a prince, and soon he will aspire to the throne itself. I, the Emperor, wish to order the father of my consort to make away with the man, but the difficulty is that all the courtiers are his creatures and there is none whom I can trust save yourself. I desire you to convey this secret letter to Fu Wan. I know your loyalty and am sure you will prove no betrayer.\"\n\n\"I am the recipient of much graciousness for which not even death would prove my gratitude. Thy servant prays that he may be allowed to undertake this.\"\n\nThe letter was given to Mu Shun, who hid it in his hair, made his way out of the precincts and handed it to its owner. Fu Wan recognized the handwriting of his daughter and read it.\n\nTurning to the messenger, Fu Wan said, \"You know the fellow's creatures are many, and one must act with extreme caution against him. Unless we have the aid of Sun Quan's and Liu Bei's armies, Cao Cao will certainly attain his ends. In this matter we must gain the support of every loyal and faithful one in the court so that within and without there may be a simultaneous attack.\"\n\n\"Then, O Father of the Empress, write a letter in reply asking for a secret edict, so that we may send to the south and the west to join in the attack.\"\n\nSo Fu Wan composed a reply, which he gave to Mu Shun to take into the Palace. This time also the letter was concealed in his hair.\n\nBut there was a traitor, and Cao Cao heard of the letters. So he waited at a Palace gate for Mu Shun to come out.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" asked Cao Cao, when Mu Shun appeared.\n\n\"The Empress is indisposed and has bidden me call a physician.\"\n\n\"Where is the summon for the physician?\"\n\n\"There is no summon.\"\n\nCao Cao bade his guards search Mu Shun, but they did not find the letter.\n\nSo he was allowed to go. But just then a gust of wind blew off his hat, and it struck Cao Cao that that had not been examined. So Mu Shun was called back. Nothing was found in the hat, but when it was given back Mu Shun put it on with both hands. There was something suspicious about the movement, and Cao Cao bade the searchers examine his hair.\n\nTherein the letter of Fu Wan was found. Cao Cao read it, which said that Sun Quan and Liu Bei were to be induced to help. The unhappy Mu Shun was taken away into a secret place and interrogated, but he would confess nothing.\n\nThat night three thousand soldiers surrounded the dwelling of Fu Wan, who was arrested with all his family. Searching the house, they found the first letter in the handwriting of the Empress. Fu Wan and his family were then consigned to a gaol.\n\nAt dawn, a party of Imperial Guards, under Chi Lu, bearing ensigns of authority, entered the Forbidden City with orders to take away the seal of the Empress. On the way they met the Emperor, who asked the reason for a company of armed guards being in the Palace.\n\n\"I have orders from the Duke of Wei to get the Empress's seal,\" said Chi Lu.\n\nThe Emperor grew alarmed. When Chi Lu reached the apartments of the Empress, she had just risen. Chi Lu ordered to take the seal of the Empress and went away.\n\nAs soon as the Empress knew of this, she recognized her danger and hid herself in the hollow walls of her private apartments behind one of the ceremonial halls. She had not been long in hiding when Hua Xin with a company of five hundred armed soldiers appeared and asked where she was. The Palace people said they did not know. The red doors of the hall were burst open, and Hua Xin looked in, but he saw no lady there. It occurred to him where she might be hidden, and he ordered his men to break open the wall. With his own hands, he laid hold of the lady's hair and dragged her forth.\n\n\"Spare my life!\" pleaded she.\n\n\"You may say what you have to say to the Duke!\" cried he.\n\nShe pulled down her hair and kicked off her shoes, but a couple of soldiers pushed her along in front of them outside.\n\nIt may be said here that this Hua Xin had a reputation for learning. He and two others, Bing Yuan and Guan Ning, all good friends, made a little coterie which was known as \"The Dragon\". Hua Xin was the \"head\"; Bing Yuan, the \"belly\"; and Guan Ning, the \"tail\". One day Guan Ning and Hua Xin were hoeing in their garden to grow some vegetables, when they turned up an ingot of gold. Guan Ning went on with his labors without giving a second glance at the find, but Hua Xin picked it up. After regarding it a moment, he threw it away again.\n\nAnother day Guan Ning and Hua Xin were reading together when there arose a great shouting outside the window of the study. A minister from the Palace was passing. Guan Ning took no notice, but kept his eyes on his book; Hua Xin rose and went to the window. For this, Guan Ning despised his companion and the two parted for good.\n\nSometime after, in the disturbance of the empire, Guan Ning fled into Liaodong, where he led the life of hermit. He wore a white cap and lived in the upper part of a house, never touching the ground with his feet. He would have nothing to do with Cao Cao and would not enter his service.\n\nBut Hua Xin led a totally different life. For a time he was with Sun Quan; then he went over to Cao Cao and served him. And here he is found actually laying hands upon the Empress.\n\nHis conduct in this particular is the subject of a poem:\n\n\u2003That was a dastardly thing that Hua Xin did,\n\n\u2003When he broke don the wall where the Empress hid\n\n\u2003And dragged her forth by the hair.\n\n\u2003He lent his aid to a foul, foul crime\n\n\u2003And execrations throughout all time,\n\n\u2003Have been, and shall be, his share.\n\n\u2003A poet also wrote concerning Guan Ning:\n\n\u2003East of Liaodong, so stories tell\n\n\u2003Is Guan Ning's tower, where long he dwelt.\n\n\u2003Ignoble wealth was Hua Xin's quest,\n\n\u2003The hermit's simple life was best.\n\nAs Hua Xin hurried the unhappy woman out of the hall, the Emperor saw her. He went over and clasped her to his bosom, weeping.\n\nHua Xin tried to force her onward, saying, \"The Duke of Wei ordered no delay!\"\n\n\"My doom is sealed,\" wept the Empress.\n\n\"And I know not when my turn will come,\" sighed the Emperor.\n\nThe soldiers hustled the Empress onward, leaving His Majesty beating his breast in despair.\n\n\"Can it be that such things happen in the world?\" cried the Emperor to Chi Lu, who stood by.\n\nAnd the Emperor swooned. Chi Lu made the courtiers pick him up, and they bore him into the Palace.\n\nMeanwhile, the unhappy Empress had been taken before Cao Cao.\n\n\"I have dealt well with you,\" said he angrily, \"and you requited me by plotting my murder. It is the death of one of us, I see.\"\n\nHe ordered the executioners to beat her till she died. After this, he went into the Palace, seized her two sons and had them poisoned. In the evening of the same day the whole households of Mu Shun and Fu Wan were put to death publicly. Such terrible deeds spread terror everywhere. They happened in the eleventh month of the nineteenth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 214).\n\n\u2003As Cao Cao stands first in cruelty,\n\n\u2003So stands Fu Wan in loyalty.\n\n\u2003A married pair of low estate,\n\n\u2003Had not been torn apart by fate.\n\nThe Emperor grieved bitterly over the loss of his consort, and in his despair refused all food. Cao Cao did not wish him to die of starvation and loneliness, so he proposed his own daughter as consort.\n\n\"Be not sad,\" said Cao Cao. \"Thy servant is no rebel. My daughter is already in your palace as a secondary lady. She is wise and dutiful, fit to be your consort and occupy the first rank.\"\n\nEmperor Xian dared not refuse, and therefore at the new year (AD 215), in the time of the festivities, Lady Cao's name was inscribed on the dynastic rolls as Empress. And no one of the courtiers dared protest.\n\nWherefore Cao Cao became even more powerful. But it pleased him not to have rivals in the land, so he again thought of subduing Liu Bei and Sun Quan.\n\nJia Xu proposed, saying, \"Xiahou Dun and Cao Ren, who are serving on the frontiers, should be called to give their advice.\"\n\nThey were sent for, and Cao Ren was the first to arrive. As a relative, he felt he had the right to see the great minister without delay and went directly to the palace.\n\nBut it happened that Cao Cao had been drinking heavily, and his faithful henchman, Xu Chu, would not admit the new arrival.\n\n\"I am of the family,\" said Cao Ren, angry at the hindrance. \"Dare you stop me?\"\n\n\"General, you may be a relative, but here you are but an officer from the frontier. I am of little account, but a duty lies on me here in the palace. Our lord is overcome with wine and asleep, and I dare not allow you to enter.\"\n\nThe refusal came to Cao Cao's knowledge, and he commended the loyalty of Xu Chu.\n\nSoon after, Xiahou Dun came and was called to the council.\n\nXiahou Dun gave his opinion, saying, \"The two rivals should be left until Zhang Lu of Hanzhong has been subdued. The great army that can overcome Zhang Lu will be in condition to attack the West River Land, and it will be conquered without difficulty.\"\n\nThe advice coincided with Cao Cao's own idea, and so he prepared an expedition for the west.\n\nBy a crime he showed his power over a feeble king;\n\nThis done, at once he hastened to destroy his neighbor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Cao Cao Conquers Hanzhong; Zhang Liao Terrorizes Xiaoyao.\n\nThe expedition against the East River Land went out in three divisions. Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He were Leaders of the Van; Cao Cao with his commanders marched in the center; and Cao Ren brought up the rear. Xiahou Dun was in charge of the commissariat.\n\nThe spies soon carried the news into Hanzhong, and Zhang Lu called in his brother Zhang Wei to consult how to meet the attack.\n\nSaid Zhang Wei, \"The strategic point to hold is Yangping Pass, and there should be ten stockades there with the forest and hills to support them. You, my brother, should make your depot of supplies at Hanning.\"\n\nThereupon two generals, Yang Ang and Yan Ren, were sent with Zhang Wei to the Pass, and they built ten stockades.\n\nSoon Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He arrived and learned the Pass had prepared a defense. They camped at a point five miles away. The soldiers were fatigued after the long march, and all lay down to rest without placing proper guards.\n\nSuddenly the camp was attacked in the rear by Yang Ang and Yan Ren from different points. Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He mounted quickly and tried to beat off the attackers, but the enemy poured in all round, and their army suffered great loss. They returned to the main body to tell of their defeat, and their chief abused them for their want of care.\n\n\"Old soldiers like you should have known better and taken precautions against a raid of the camp when the enemy knew your troops were exhausted by a long march.\"\n\nCao Cao even desired to put them to death as a warning, but their fellow officers interceded, and he spared them. Soon Cao Cao himself marched in the van. Then he saw the dangerous and evil nature of the place, with its thick growth of trees. As he knew nothing of the roads and was fearful of an ambush, he returned to his camp.\n\nCalling up his two leaders, Xu Chu and Xu Huang, he said, \"Had I known the dangerous nature of the place, I would never have come.\"\n\nXu Chu replied, \"The soldiers are here now, my lord, and you cannot recoil before the hardships.\"\n\nNext day Cao Cao with only Xu Chu and Xu Huang rode out to reconnoiter the enemy's camp.\n\nAs they rode over the hills, Cao Cao pointed out the position with his whip and said, \"It will be very difficult to reduce a place as strong as this.\"\n\nJust then there arose a shout in their rear, and a shower of arrows fell about them. Yang Ang and Yan Ren were attacking, and the danger became great.\n\n\"Friend Xu Huang, you look after our lord!\" cried Xu Chu. \"I can hold the enemy.\"\n\nXu Chu galloped out, and the two leaders could not stand Xu Chu and took to flight, while their troops scattered. In the meantime Xu Huang led his master over the hills. Soon he met an army of soldiers led by Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He, who had heard the sound of fighting and had come to the rescue, and Cao Cao got back safely to camp. The four generals were rewarded.\n\nFor fifty days the two armies held each other at bay without coming to a fight. At the end of this time, orders were given to retire in the camp of Cao Cao.\n\n\"We have not tried the strength of the enemy,\" said Jia Xu. \"You should not retire, my lord.\"\n\n\"I see that they are always on the alert,\" said Cao Cao. \"I am only retiring to put them off their guard. By and by I will send some light horse to attack their rear. I shall defeat them then.\"\n\n\"Ah! Your skill is unfathomable!\" cried Jia Xu.\n\nThree thousand horsemen led by Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He got round behind the Yangping Pass by unfrequented roads, while Cao Cao broke up his camp and led his main body backward.\n\nWhen Yang Ang heard of the retreat, he thought it would be a good chance to attack.\n\nBut Yan Ren opposed it, saying, \"Cao Cao is full of ruses. The occasion is unclear. We should not lead an attack.\"\n\nYang Ang was willful and said, \"I shall go. You may come or not, as you wish.\"\n\nIn spite of the protestations of his colleague, Yang Ang marched, taking with him the soldiers of five camps and leaving only a few defenders. The day he set out was very foggy, so that one could hardly see his neighbor's face, and soon the force got into difficulties and could not advance. They bivouacked on the road.\n\nNow, Xiahou Yuan was out with a reconnoitering force behind the hills when they heard the voices of troops and the neighing of horses. In the dense fog they could see nothing; but fearing an ambush, they hastened to retire. Somehow they lost their way and presently stumbled on the deserted camp of Yang Ang. The few defenders thought their comrades had returned, so they threw open the gates to let the troops of Cao Cao in. They found an empty camp, and they raised a great blaze, which frightened those few defenders in the other camps so that they fled.\n\nAs soon as the fog cleared, Yan Ren came to the rescue. But as Yan Ren and Xiahou Yuan were fighting, Zhang He suddenly appeared and attacked from the rear. Between two armies, Yan Ren forced his way through and quickly fled toward Nanzheng.\n\nBy and by, when Yang Ang returned, he found his camp in the possession of Cao Cao's troops. Soon Cao Cao's main army came up, and Yang Ang was between two forces. There seemed no other way but to make a dash for it. Falling in with Zhang He, the two engaged, and Yang Ang fell. Those who escaped carried the news of the disaster to Zhang Wei, who abandoned Yangping Pass and fled.\n\nSo the invaders took possession of the Pass, and its late defenders, Zhang Wei and Yan Ren, had to go back and report failure.\n\nZhang Wei laid the blame on his generals, saying, The Pass could not be held after its supporting positions had been lost.\n\nZhang Lu threatened to behead Yan Ren for his failure.\n\nBut Yan Ren said, \"Yang Ang did not listen to my advice, and the defeat followed. Now I volunteer to make another attack. If I fail to take Cao Cao's head, I will abide by the consequences without protest.\"\n\nZhang Lu took his formal pledge to succeed, gave him twenty thousand troops, and sent him away. Yan Ren marched to Nanzheng and made a stockade.\n\nBefore Cao Cao made any further advance, he sent Xiahou Yuan, with five thousand troops, to reconnoiter the road, and they fell in with the force led by Yan Ren. Both sides drew up their battle array. From Yan Ren's side went out one general named Chang Qi to engage Xiahou Yuan. Before the fourth bout was fought, Xiahou Yuan disposed of Chang Qi. Then Yan Ren set his spear and rode to the front. They two fought near forty bouts and neither could claim victory. Then Xiahou Yuan pretended defeat and fled. The other rushed in pursuit. The fugitive suddenly employed the \"swinging-horse stab\" and killed his pursuer. Yan Ren's troops ran away.\n\nAs soon as Cao Cao knew of the death of Yan Ren, he brought up his army, marched straightway to Nanzheng and camped.\n\nZhang Lu became alarmed and called a council.\n\n\"I can propose a man able to stand against the best leader of the enemy,\" said Yan Pu.\n\n\"Who is he?\" asked Zhang Lu.\n\n\"Pang De of Nanan. Pang De surrendered at the same time as Ma Chao, but could not go with Ma Chao into Yizhou as he was ill. You have treated him generously. He will save you.\"\n\nPang De was summoned. He came, and Zhang Lu loaded him with gifts and gave him a force of ten thousand troops, with which he marched and camped three miles from the city, near the besieging force. His camp made, Pang De rode out and challenged.\n\nNow Cao Cao, remembering Pang De's boldness at the battle of River Wei Bridge, was desirous of winning the warrior for himself.\n\nSo Cao Cao told his generals, saying, \"Pang De is a bold general of Xiliang formerly serving under Ma Chao. Though he is now under Zhang Lu, that is not his real wish. I want to win him over. So you should try to weary him by prolonging the fights, and so make him captive.\"\n\nWherefore first rode out Zhang He to answer the challenger. He fought a few bouts and returned. Then Xiahou Yuan did the same thing. So did Xu Huang. Lastly went Xu Chu, who kept up the fight to half a hundred bouts before he retired. Still Pang De showed no signs of fatigue nor of fear, and all those who had fought with him praised his prowess and skill.\n\n\"If only I could win him over to my side!\" said Cao Cao longingly.\n\nSaid Jia Xu, \"I know one of Zhang Lu's subordinates, Yang Song. He is avaricious and open to bribes. You might send him secret presents and get him to slander Pang De to his master so as to weaken Pang De's position.\"\n\n\"But how can one get at this man? He is in Nanzheng.\"\n\n\"In the next battle, pretend defeat, flee, and let Pang De take possession of this camp. Return in the night in force and drive him out, and he must retreat into the city. Let one of our own people with a persuasive tongue mingle with his troops, disguised as one of his soldiers, and so gain entrance into the city.\"\n\nA subtle agent was found, and goodly gifts were his in advance, and he was entrusted with a golden breastplate as a bribe. He put it on and over it put on the dress of an ordinary soldier of Hanzhong. And he made his way quietly to a point on the road along which the soldiers of Hanzhong would retreat into the city. There he waited.\n\nNext day, two parties under Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He were sent to lie in ambush, and Xu Huang was sent to challenge, but with orders to be defeated. The scheme went well, and as Pang De came on to smite, Cao Cao's army retired before Pang De till he found himself at their very camp. And therein he entered and was exceedingly pleased to find fodder and forage in great quantities.\n\nHaving sent off a messenger to his chief, Pang De spread a feast in celebration of the victory; and when night came on they slept. But about the second watch there was an alarm from three directions, and the camp was threatened by three forces: Xu Chu and Xu Huang attacking in the center, Zhang He from the left, and Xiahou Yuan from the right. It was the night attack arranged by Cao Cao, and Pang De could not make any defense. He got to horse, cut his way through, and made for the city. With the attackers in close pursuit, Pang De reached the gate, got it opened, and rushed in.\n\nAnd the false soldier got in amid the confusion. He made his way quickly to Yang Song's residence and saw him.\n\nHe told Yang Song, saying, \"The Great Prime Minister, Duke of Wei, knows you by reputation and holds you in great esteem. And as a token thereof he has sent you his golden breastplate and a confidential letter as well.\"\n\nYang Song took it all in, read the letter, and said, \"I will reply by and by, and the Duke of Wei needs feel no anxiety for I shall find a means of proving my gratitude. You may return.\"\n\nSoon after, Yang Song went to see Zhang Lu and told him, saying, \"Pang De has been defeated because he has been bribed by Cao Cao.\"\n\nForthwith Zhang Lu summoned his general, abused him, and threatened to put him to death. Yan Pu, however, protested and proposed to test Pang De in another encounter.\n\nZhang Lu then said, \"Tomorrow, if you lose, I will take your head!\"\n\nPang De retired full of resentment.\n\nThe next day Cao Cao attacked, and Pang De went out to repel him. Cao Cao sent out Xu Chu, but bade him pretend defeat. When Pang De pursued, Cao Cao rode toward the hills, where he halted and presently got speech with Pang De.\n\nCao Cao called out, \"Pang De! Why not surrender?\"\n\nBut Pang De thought within himself that to capture Cao Cao would be a fine exploit, so he boldly faced his escort and rode up the hills. But there arose a great shouting as if heaven and earth were clashing together, and he and his followers went headlong into ditches and pits that had been dug. Out flew Cao Cao's troops with ropes and hooks, and Pang De was a prisoner.\n\nWhen he was taken to Cao Cao, he was received with the greatest kindness. Cao Cao himself dismounted, loosed the captive's bonds, and asked him, \"Do you surrender?\"\n\nPang De thought of the ill-treatment he had just received at the hands of his master and of his injustice, and gave in. At once Pang De was helped to mount a horse by Cao Cao himself and led to the great camp.\n\nSoldiers placed for the purpose on the city wall saw what happened and reported to Zhang Lu: \"Pang De has ridden off on friendly terms with Cao Cao.\"\n\nWhereby Zhang Lu was persuaded that Yang Song had spoken truly.\n\nSoon after, scaling ladders were set against the city walls, and catapults threw in great stones.\n\nThe danger being imminent, Zhang Wei counseled, saying, \"Set all supplies on fire and flight to the Southern Mountains, where we might be able to defend Bazhong.\"\n\nOn the other hand, Yang Song said, \"The best course is to throw open the gates and surrender.\"\n\nZhang Lu could not decide which to do. His brother, Zhang Wei, maintained that burning everything and flight was the only course.\n\nZhang Lu said, \"I have been always loyal at heart and desired to return to allegiance when circumstances would permit. I have been unable to attain my desire, but now fight seems the only course open to me. However, the granaries and treasures, the public offices, and the government property of all kinds must be kept safe.\"\n\nSo the public buildings were all carefully barred and sealed. The same night, in the late evening, Zhang Lu and his family went out through the south gate and found their way through. Cao Cao let them go unpursued. When Cao Cao entered the city and saw the proofs of Zhang Lu's care of the government property, he compassionated the Governor's misfortunes. He then sent a messenger into Bazhong to induce Zhang Lu to surrender. Zhang Lu was disposed to do so, but his brother would not hear of it. Yang Song wrote a secret letter to Cao Cao urging him to attack and promising treacherous aid.\n\nCao Cao presently attacked, and Zhang Wei came out to meet him. But his opponent was the mighty Xu Chu, who made short work of him. The beaten soldiers fled back into the city, which Zhang Lu then decided to defend.\n\nAs this would not give Yang Song the chance to carry out his treacherous scheme, he persuaded his master, saying, \"If we stay passive, death will surely come. My lord should go out and fight the enemy to the conclusion, leaving me to defend the city.\"\n\nZhang Lu took this advice, although it was opposed by Yan Pu, and went out. But before his van got near the enemy, his rear ranks began to desert, and Zhang Lu retreated. Cao Cao pursued him to the city walls, where Zhang Lu found the gates shut against him.\n\n\"Surrender, O Zhang Lu!\" cried Cao Cao.\n\nThere being now no way open, Zhang Lu dismounted, prostrated himself, and gave in. Because of this and his care of the public property, Cao Cao treated him with great kindness and consoled him with the title of General Who Guards the South. Yan Pu and many others also were enrolled among the nobles. To each county was appointed a Military Commander, in addition to the Governor. All the soldiers were feasted and rewarded.\n\nThen Yang Song, who had sold his master, came and sued for honors. He was condemned to public execution and exposure.\n\n\u2003Selling one's lord may make great service,\n\n\u2003But the gains thereof are vanity;\n\n\u2003No glory clings to his house but a shameful death,\n\n\u2003Wherefore Yang Song is an object of contempt forever.\n\nWhen the East River Land was quite subdued, First Secretary Sima Yi said, \"The people of Shu are not loyal to Liu Bei because of his uprooting the late ruler, Liu Zhang. If on the strength of your present success you press forward, Liu Bei will become as a shattered tile. The wise person takes the occasion when it serves, and this should not be missed.\"\n\nCao Cao sighed, \"There is no end \u2014 as human want has no limit: Now that I have Hanzhong, I am forced into taking Yizhou.\"\n\nLiu Ye supported his colleague, saying, \"Sima Yi spoke well. If you delay, Zhuge Liang will have become top minister, while Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, and the other bold warriors will be at the head of the army. If the people of Shu once settle down, and the points of vantage are held, you will not be able to overcome them.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"My soldiers have marched far and suffered much. Beside we must show pity.\"\n\nWherefore he rested his army for a time.\n\nMeanwhile the populace of Yizhou, having heard of Cao Cao's success in the East River Land, concluded that the West River Land would suffer next, and fear spread among them. Whereupon Liu Bei called in the Directing Instructor and asked his advice.\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I can make Cao Cao retreat of his own accord.\"\n\n\"What is that plan?\"\n\n\"A part of Cao Cao's army is camped at Hefei because of the fear of Sun Quan. If now we restore three territories of Jingzhou \u2014 Changsha, Jiangxia, and Guiyang \u2014 , and send a specious person to talk, we can make Sun Quan attack Hefei, which will lead to Cao Cao going southward and not looking to the west.\"\n\n\"Who is a fit person for the messenger?\" said Liu Bei.\n\nAnd Yi Ji replied, \"I will go.\"\n\nLiu Bei, well-satisfied, wrote letters and prepared gifts, with which Yi Ji went, calling in at Jingzhou City on the way to tell Guan Yu. Then he went on to the capital city of Jianye and saw Sun Quan.\n\nAfter the greetings, Sun Quan asked, \"On what business do you come?\"\n\nYi Ji replied, \"On a former occasion Zhuge Jin would have had the three territories of Changsha, Lingling, and Guiyang, but for the absence of the Directing Instructor, which prevented the actual transfer. Now I am the bearer of letters giving Changsha, Guiyang, and Jiangxia back to you. Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang wanted to restore all the territories of Jingzhou, including those of Xiangyang, Nanjun, and Lingling. But now that Cao Cao has got possession of East River Land, there is no place for General Guan Yu. Hefei is weak, and we hope you will attack it so as to make Cao Cao withdraw to the south and let my master take the East River Land, when he will restore the whole of the Jingzhou Region.\"\n\n\"Go back to the guest-house, and let me take counsel in this matter,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nAs soon as Yi Ji had gone, the Marquis of Wu turned to his officers and asked what should be done.\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"All this is because Liu Bei fears that Cao Cao will attack him. However, since Cao Cao is absent in Hanzhong, it would be well to seize the opportunity and attack Hefei.\"\n\nSun Quan accepted the advice. After he had sent the messenger away, he began to prepare for the expedition. He left Lu Su in command over the three territories of Changsha, Jiangxia, and Guiyang. Then Sun Quan encamped at Lukou, withdrew Generals Lu Meng and Gan Ning, and sent to Yuhang for General Ling Tong.\n\nIn a few days, Lu Meng and Gan Ning returned.\n\nLu Meng suggested a plan, saying, \"Cao Cao has sent Zhu Guang, Governor of Lujiang, to camp at the city of Huancheng and plant grain for the supply of Hefei. Let us first take Huancheng first, and then attack Hefei.\"\n\n\"This scheme is just after my own heart,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nSo Sun Quan appointed Lu Meng and Gan Ning as Van Leaders; Jiang Qin and Pan Zhang as Rear Guards; he himself with Zhou Tai, Chen Wu, Dong Xi, and Xu Sheng commanded the center. But the Commanders Cheng Pu, Huang Gai, and Han Dang were not called to take part in this expedition as they were guarding certain especial places.\n\nThe army crossed the river and captured Hezhou on the way. Governor Zhu Guang sent an urgent message to Hefei for help and set himself to strengthen his fortifications for a siege. Sun Quan went very near the city walls of Huancheng to observe its defense, and a flight of arrows greeted him, some striking his great official parasol. He went back to camp and asked his officers to offer plans of attack.\n\nThen Dong Xi said, \"Pile up great hills of earth and attack from the summits.\"\n\nSaid Xu Sheng, \"Set up long ladders and construct platforms whence you can look over the city walls and thus attack.\"\n\nBut Lu Meng said, \"All such plans need a long time to prepare, and in the meantime the soldiers of Cao Cao will arrive from Hefei. Do not try such long-drawn-out schemes, but take advantage of the fine, fresh spirit of our newly arrived troops and attack impetuously. Their elan will carry the wall. If you attack tomorrow at dawn, the city will fall before noon.\"\n\nSo the early meal was taken at the fifth watch, and the army went to the attack. The defenders sent down showers of arrows and stones. Gan Ning took an iron chain in his hand and climbed up the wall. They shot at him with bows and crossbows, but he turned aside the arrows and bolts, and he threw the chain round Governor Zhu Guang to pull him down. Lu Meng beat the drum for the attack. The soldiers made a rush forward to climb the wall, and they slew Zhu Guang. His officers and soldiers gave in, and so Huancheng fell to Sun Quan. It was still a long time to noon.\n\nIn the meantime Zhang Liao was marching to the aid of the city. Half-way he heard that the city had fallen, and so he returned to Hefei.\n\nSoon after the conqueror's entry into Huancheng, Ling Tong came there with his army. The next few days were devoted to feasting the army. Special rewards were given to the two generals who had done such good work at the capture; and at the banquet to the officers, Gan Ning was seated in the seat of honor, which his colleague, Lu Meng, readily yielded to him for his late prowess.\n\nBut as the cup of felicitation was passing round, Ling Tong's thoughts turned to the enmity he bore Gan Ning for having slain his father, and the praises which Lu Meng now heaped upon Gan Ning filled Ling Tong's heart with bitterness. For some time he glared savagely at Gan Ning, and then he determined on revenge.\n\nDrawing his sword, Ling Tong suddenly rose to his feet and cried, \"There is nothing to amuse the assembly. I will give them a display of swordsmanship!\"\n\nGan Ning quickly saw his real intention. He pushed back his table and laid hold of a halberd in each hand, crying, \"And you may also watch an adept in the use of this weapon!\"\n\nLu Meng saw the evil meaning of both, and assuming his sword and shield, he hastily stepped between the two warriors, saying, \"Neither of you gentlemen is so dexterous as I.\"\n\nSo he forced the two combatants asunder, while someone ran to tell Sun Quan. The Marquis hastily jumped into the saddle and rode to the banquet hall. At sight of their lord, they all three lowered their weapons.\n\n\"I have bidden you two to forget this old enmity,\" said Sun Quan. \"Why do you revive it today?\"\n\nLing Tong prostrated himself in tears. Sun Quan exhorted him to forget his quarrel, and once again there was peace.\n\nThe next day the army set out for Hefei.\n\nBecause of the loss of Huancheng, Zhang Liao grieved greatly. Cao Cao had sent by the hands of Xue Ti a small casket sealed with his own seal and bearing outside the words, \"If rebels come, open this.\"\n\nSo when he received the news of the coming of a powerful army, Zhang Liao opened the casket and read the letter therein:\n\n\"If Sun Quan comes to attack Hefei, the two Generals Li Dian and Zhang Liao are to go out to oppose him, and Yue Jing is to be left to guard the walls.\"\n\nZhang Liao sent the letter to the two men named therein.\n\n\"What do you think to do?\" said Yue Jing.\n\nZhang Liao replied, \"Our lord is away, and Wu is coming to attack for certain. We must go out to repel them and exert ourselves to the utmost to inflict defeat upon their advanced guard. Thus we shall appease the fears of the populace, and then we can hold as best we may.\"\n\nBut Li Dian was silent, for he was ever unfriendly to Zhang Liao.\n\nThen seeing his colleague inclined to hold off, Yue Jing said, \"I am for remaining on the defensive, since the enemy is so much more numerous than we.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen, it seems you are selfish and not devoted to the common weal,\" said Zhang Liao. \"You may have your private reasons for what you do, but I intend to go out and try to repel the enemy. I will fight them to the death.\"\n\nThereupon Zhang Liao bade his servants saddle his steed.\n\nAt this, Li Dian's better feelings were aroused, and he rose, saying, \"How can I be careless of the common weal and indulge my private feelings? I am ready to follow you and do as you command.\"\n\nZhang Liao was elated at this moral victory, and said, \"Since I can depend upon your help, my friend, then I would ask you to lie in ambush on the north of Xiaoyao Ford in order to destroy the Xiaoshi Bridge there as soon as the army of Wu has crossed. I, with my friend Yue Jing, will smite the enemy.\"\n\nLi Dian went away to muster his troops and prepare the ambush.\n\nAs has been recorded, the leaders of the advance guard of the southern army were the veterans Lu Meng and Gan Ning. Sun Quan and Ling Tong were in the center; the other generals followed them. The leaders of the van met Yue Jing first, and Gan Ning rode out and challenged him. After a few bouts, Yue Jing pretended to be defeated and fled. Gan Ning called to his colleague to join in the pursuit.\n\nWhen Sun Quan heard that this advance guard had been successful, he hastened his army to Xiaoyao Ford. But then there came a series of explosions, and up came Zhang Liao and Li Dian, one on each flank. Sun Quan was unprepared for this and sent messengers to call off the pursuit and ask for help from Lu Meng and Gan Ning. Before it could arrived, Zhang Liao had come up. Manifestly, Ling Tong, who had with him only a small troop of three hundred horse, could not long withstand the army of Cao Cao, but he faced them and fought bravely.\n\nPresently Ling Tong cried to his lord, \"Cross the Xiaoshi Bridge and run back, my lord!\"\n\nSun Quan galloped for the bridge, but the southern end had been already broken down and there was a wide breach between the end of the bridge and the shore. Not a single plank was there by which to cross. What could be done? Sun Quan was in a quandary, and helpless.\n\n\"Go back and jump for it!\" yelled one of the generals, Gu Li by name.\n\nSun Quan did so. Backing his horse some thirty spans or so, he then gave it its head and lashed it with his whip.\n\nThe good beast leaped, cleared the chasm and his master was safe on the southern shore.\n\n\u2003Once Dilu leant across the Tan Torrent wide,\n\n\u2003And when defeat did Sun Quan of Wu betide,\n\n\u2003And death came threateningly at Xiaoyao Ford,\n\n\u2003His steed too leapt, and saved him from the sword.\n\nHaving reached the farther shore, Sun Quan embarked on one of the boats of Xu Sheng and Dong Xi and was rowed to a place of safety, while Ling Tong and Gu Li were still fighting with Zhang Liao's army. Gan Ning and Lu Meng, coming to their aid, were pursued by Yue Jing, and Li Dian also stayed their progress. But the soldiers of the South Land fought bravely; half of their force fell, and Ling Tong's troop of three hundred horse perished all, while Ling Tong himself was wounded, but found his way to the bridge. Finding it destroyed, he fled along the stream. Presently he was seen by Sun Quan from the boat and taken on board by Dong Xi. Gan Ning and Lu Meng also cut their ways back to the southern shore.\n\nThe terrible slaughter at this battle put such fear into the minds of the people of the South Land that the name of Zhang Liao kept the very children quiet at night.\n\nWhen Sun Quan reached his camp, he richly rewarded Ling Tong and Gu Li. Then he led his army back to Ruxu and began to put his ships in order so that the army and navy might act in unison. He also sent home for reinforcements.\n\nZhang Liao reflected that he had insufficient force to meet another attack if it should be supported by the navy of the South Land, so he sent Xue Ti through the night to carry an urgent message to his master in Hanzhong. When the messenger arrived, Cao Cao saw that his western expedition would have to yield to the urgency of home defense. However, he called in his counselors and put a direct question to them.\n\n\"Can we take West River Land now, or not?\"\n\n\"Shu is too well prepared; we cannot,\" replied Liu Ye. \"It is better to go to the succor of Hefei, and then go down the river to take the South Land.\"\n\nWherefore, leaving Xiahou Yuan to station at the Dingjun Mountain to guard Hanzhong, and Zhang He to keep Mount Mengtou Pass, Cao Cao broke up his camp and went toward Ruxu with all his commanders.\n\n\u2003The armored horsemen had conquered Hanzhong,\n\n\u2003The ensigns toward the south were turned again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Gan Ning's Hundred Horsemen Raid The Northern Camp; Zuo Ci's Flung-Down Cup Fools Cao Cao.\n\nSun Quan was occupied in ordering his army at Ruxu when he heard of the coming of Cao Cao from Hanzhong with four hundred thousand troops to the relief of Hefei. He told off a fleet of fifty large ships to lie in the port, while Chen Wu went up and down the river banks on the look-out.\n\n\"It would be well to inflict a defeat upon Cao Cao's army before they recover from the long march. It would dishearten them,\" said Zhang Zhao.\n\nLooking around at the officers in his tent, Sun Quan said, \"Who is bold enough to go forth and fight this Cao Cao and so take the keen edge off the spirit of his army?\"\n\nAnd Ling Tong offered himself, saying, \"I will go!\"\n\n\"How many soldiers do you require?\"\n\n\"Three thousand troops will suffice,\" replied Ling Tong.\n\nBut Gan Ning struck in, saying, \"Only a hundred horse would be needed. Why send three thousand?\"\n\nLing Tong was angry, and he and Gan Ning began to wrangle even in the presence of their chief.\n\n\"Cao Cao's army is too strong to be attacked recklessly,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nFinally he gave the commission to Ling Tong with his three thousand, bidding him reconnoiter just outside Ruxu, and fight the enemy if he met him.\n\nMarching out, Ling Tong very soon saw a great cloud of dust, which marked the approach of an army. As soon as they came near enough, Zhang Liao, who led the van, engaged with Ling Tong, and they fought half a hundred bouts without sign of victory for either. Then Sun Quan began to fear for his champion, so he sent Lu Meng to extricate Ling Tong from the battle and escort him home.\n\nWhen Ling Tong had come back, his rival Gan Ning went to Sun Quan and said, \"Now let me have the hundred horsemen, and I will raid the enemy's camp this night. If I lose a soldier or a mount, I will claim no merit.\"\n\nSun Quan commended his courage and chose a hundred of his best veterans, whom he placed under Gan Ning's command for the raid. Sun Quan also gave him as a feast for the soldiers fifty flasks of wine and seventy five pounds of mutton.\n\nReturning to the tents, Gan Ning drew up his little force and made them sit down in rows. Then he filled two silver goblets with wine and solemnly drank to them.\n\nNext he said, \"Comrades, tonight our orders are to raid the camp of the enemy. Wherefore fill your goblets and call up all your strength for the task.\"\n\nBut the men did not welcome his words. Instead they looked one at another uncertain.\n\nSeeing them in this mood, Gan Ning adopted a fierce tone, drew his sword and cried, \"What are you waiting for? If I, a leader of rank, can risk my life, cannot you?\"\n\nMoved by the angry face of the leader, the men rose, bowed their heads and said, \"We will fight to the last!\"\n\nThen the wine and meat were distributed to them and each one ate his fill. The second watch was chosen as the hour to start, and each man stuck a white goose plume in his cap whereby they could recognize each other in the darkness.\n\nAt the time appointed they buckled on their armor, mounted and, galloping away, quickly came to Cao Cao's camp. Hastily throwing aside the thorny barriers, they burst in with a yell that rose to the very heavens. They made straight for the center, hoping to slay Cao Cao himself. But the troops of the leader's brigade had made a rampart of their carts within which they were sheltered as if in an iron tun, so that the raiders failed to find a way in.\n\nHowever, Gan Ning and his small force dashed hither and thither, cutting and slashing, till Cao Cao's men were quite bewildered and frightened. They had no notion of the number of their assailants. All their efforts only increased the confusion. Wherefore the hundred men had it all their own way and rushed from point to point slaying whomever they met. But soon the drums beat in every camp and torches were lit and shouts arose, and it was time for the raiders to get away.\n\nGan Ning led his little body of troops out through the south gate with never a soldier trying to stop him, and rode for his own camp. He met Zhou Tai, who had been sent to help him in case of need; but the need had not arisen, and the hundred heroes with their leader rode back in triumph. There was no pursuit.\n\nA poem was written praising this exploit:\n\n\u2003The drums of war make earth to shake\n\n\u2003When the South Land comes near even devils quake.\n\n\u2003People long will tell of that night raid,\n\n\u2003That Gan Ning's goose-plumed warriors made.\n\nOn his return, Gan Ning took the tale of his men at the camp gate, not a man nor a horse was missing. He entered to the sound of drum and fife and the shouting of his men.\n\n\"Long life!\" shouted they, as Sun Quan came to welcome them.\n\nGan Ning dismounted and prostrated himself.\n\nHis lord raised him, and took him by the hand, saying, \"This expedition of yours must have given those rebels a shaking. I had yielded to your desire only I wished to give you the opportunity to manifest your valor. I did not wish to let you be sacrificed.\"\n\nGan Ning's exploit was rewarded with gifts, a thousand rolls of silk and a hundred keen swords, all of which he distributed among his soldiers.\n\nSun Quan was very proud of his subordinate's doughty deed, and said, \"Cao Cao may have his Zhang Liao, but I can match him with my friend Gan Ning.\"\n\nSoon Zhang Liao came to proffer another challenge, and Ling Tong, impatient at being excelled by his rival and enemy, begged that he might go out to fight. His request was granted, and he marched out a short distance from Ruxu with five thousand troops. Sun Quan, with Gan Ning in his train, went out to look on at the encounter.\n\nWhen both armies had come out on the plain and were arrayed, Zhang Liao, with Li Dian and Yue Jing, one on either side, advanced to the front. Ling Tong, sword in hand, galloped out towards him and, at Zhang Liao's command, Yue Jing took the challenge and went to open the combat. They fought half a hundred bouts, and neither seemed to have the better of the other.\n\nThen Cao Cao, hearing of the great contest going on, rode up to the battlefield and took position under the great standard, whence he could see the fighting. Seeing both combatants were waxing desperate, he thought to decide the struggle by an unfair blow. He bade Cao Xiu let fly a secret arrow, which Cao Xiu did by creeping up under cover of Zhang Liao. It struck Ling Tong's steed, which reared and threw its rider. Yue Jing dashed forward to thrust at the fallen warrior with his spear, but before the blow could be given, the twang of another bow was heard and an arrow speeding by hit Yue Jing full in the face. He fell from his horse. Then both sides rushed forward to rescue their champions. The gongs clanged, and the combat ceased. Ling Tong returned to his camp and reported himself to his master.\n\n\"The arrow that saved you was shot by Gan Ning,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nLing Tong turned to his rival and bowed low.\n\n\"I could not have supposed you would have rendered me such a service, Sir,\" said he to Gan Ning.\n\nThis episode ended the strife and enmity between the two leaders, who thereafter swore perpetual friendship.\n\nOn the other side Cao Cao saw to it that Yue Jing's wound was dressed. Next day he launched an attack against Ruxu along five different lines. He himself led one army in the center; on the left Zhang Liao and Li Dian led two armies; on the right Xu Huang and Pang De commanded the other two. Each army was ten thousand strong, and they marched to give battle on the river bank. The crews and fighting troops of the South Land's naval squadron were greatly frightened by the approach of these armies.\n\n\"You have eaten the bread of your prince, and you must give loyal service. Why fear?\" said Xu Sheng.\n\nThereupon he put some hundreds of his best men into small boats, went along the bank, and broke into the legion under Li Dian. Meanwhile Dong Xi on the ships beat drums and cheered them on. But a great storm came on, lashing the river to fury, and the waves rolled mountains high. The larger ships rolled as if they would overturn, and the soldiers of Wu were frightened. They started to get down into the bulkier cargo-boats to save their lives. But Dong Xi threatened them with his sword, cutting down some half score of the mutineers.\n\n\"My orders are to hold this point against the enemy,\" shouted he. \"We dare not abandon the ships!\"\n\nHowever, the wind increased, and presently the bold Dong Xi was thrown into the river by the rolling of his ship and was drowned, together with his men.\n\nXu Sheng dashed hither and thither among Li Dian's army, slaying right and left. Chen Wu, hearing the noise of battle, set out for the river bank. On his way Chen Wu met Pang De and the legion under him. A melee ensued. Then Sun Quan with Zhou Tai and his troops joined in.\n\nThe small force from the ships that had attacked Li Dian was now surrounded. So Sun Quan gave the signal for an onslaught that should rescue them. This failed, and Sun Quan was himself surrounded in turn and soon in desperate straits. From a height, Cao Cao saw his difficulties and sent in Xu Chu to cut Sun Quan's column in halves so that neither half could aid the other.\n\nWhen Zhou Tai had cut an alley out of the press and reached the riverside, he looked for his master. But Sun Quan was nowhere visible, so Zhou Tai dashed once again into the battle.\n\nComing to his own troops, he cried, \"Where is our lord?\"\n\nThey pointed to where the press was most dense. Zhou Tai stiffened and dashed in.\n\nPresently he reached his lord's side and cried out, \"My lord, follow me, and I will hack a way out!\"\n\nZhou Tai fought his way out to the river bank. Then he turned to look, and Sun Quan was not behind him. So he turned back, forced his way in, and once again found his way to his master's side.\n\n\"I cannot get out. The arrows are too thick!\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"Then go first, my lord, and I will follow!\"\n\nSun Quan then urged his steed as fast as he could go, and Zhou Tai kept off all pursuit. Zhou Tai sustained many wounds and the arrows rattled on his helmet, but he got clear at last and Sun Quan was safe. As they neared the river bank, Lu Meng came up with some of the naval force and escorted Sun Quan down to the ships.\n\n\"I owe my safety to Zhou Tai, who thrice came to my aid,\" said Sun Quan. \"But Xu Sheng is still in the thick of the fight, and how can we save him?\"\n\n\"I will go to his rescue,\" cried Zhou Tai.\n\nWhirling his spear, Zhou Tai again plunged into the battle and presently brought his colleague safely out of the press. Both were severely wounded.\n\nLu Meng ordered his troops to keep up a rapid flight of arrows so as to command the bank, and in this way the two leaders were enabled to get on board the ships.\n\nNow Chen Wu had engaged the legion under Pang De. Being inferior in force and no aid being forthcoming, Chen Wu was forced into a valley where the trees and undergrowth were very dense. He tried to turn, but was caught by the branches, and while so entangled he was killed by Pang De.\n\nWhen Cao Cao saw that Sun Quan had escaped from the battle to the river bank, he urged his steed forward in pursuit. He sent flights of arrows toward the fugitives. By this time Lu Meng's troops had emptied their quivers, and he began to be very anxious. But just then a fleet of ships sailed up led by Lu Xun, the son-in-law of Sun Ce, who came with one hundred thousand marines and drove back Cao Cao's army. Then he landed to pursue. He captured many thousands of horses and slew many men, so that Cao Cao was quite defeated and retired. Then they sought and found the body of Chen Wu among the slain.\n\nSun Quan was much grieved when he came to know that Chen Wu had been slain and Dong Xi drowned, and wept sore. Men were sent to seek for Dong Xi's body, which at last was found. Both generals were buried with great honors.\n\nAs a recompense for Zhou Tai's services in Sun Quan's rescue, Sun Quan prepared in his honor a great banquet, where Sun Quan himself offered Zhou Tai a goblet of wine and complimented and embraced him while the tears coursed down his cheeks.\n\n\"Twice you saved my life, careless of your own,\" cried Sun Quan, \"and you have received many wounds. It is as if your skin had been engraved and painted. What sort of a man should I be if I did not treat you as one of my own flesh and blood? Can I regard you, Noble Sir, merely as a unit in my army? You are my meritorious minister. I share the glory you have won and mine are your joys and sorrows.\"\n\nThen Sun Quan bade Zhou Tai open his dress and exhibit his wounds for all the assembly to see. The skin was gashed all over as if his body had been scored with a knife. Sun Quan pointed to the wounds, one after another, and asked how each one had been received. And, as Zhou Tai told him, for every wound Sun Quan made him drink off a goblet of wine till he became thoroughly intoxicated. Sun Quan then presented him with a green silk parasol and bade him use it on all occasions as a sign of the glory that was his.\n\nBut Sun Quan found his opponents too stable. At the end of a month the two armies were both at Ruxu and neither had won a victory.\n\nThen said Zhang Zhao and Gu Yong, \"Cao Cao is too strong, and we cannot overcome him by mere force. If the struggle continues longer, you will only lose more soldiers. You had better seek to make peace.\"\n\nSun Quan followed this advice and dispatched Bu Zhi on a peace mission to Cao Cao's camp. Sun Quan offered a yearly tribute. Cao Cao also saw that the South Land was too strong to be overcome, and consented.\n\nCao Cao insisted, \"The Marquis should first send away his army, and then I would retire.\"\n\nBu Zhi returned with this message, and Sun Quan sent away the greater part, leaving only Zhou Tai and Jiang Qin to hold Ruxu. The army returned to Capital Jianye.\n\nCao Cao left Cao Ren and Zhang Liao in charge of Hefei, and he marched the army back to Capital Xuchang.\n\nOn arrival, all Cao Cao's officers, military and civil, persuaded him to become Prince of Wei. Only the Chair of the Secretariat, Cui Yan, spoke strongly against the scheme.\n\n\"You are, then, the only man who knows not the fate of Xun Yu,\" said his colleagues.\n\n\"Such times! Such deeds!\" cried Cui Yan. \"You are guilty of rebellion, but you may commit it yourselves. I will bear no part in it.\"\n\nCertain enemies told Cao Cao, and Cui Yan was thrown into prison. At his trial he glared like a tiger, and his very beard curled with contempt. He raged and cursed at Cao Cao for a betrayer of his prince, and a rebel. The interrogating magistrate reported his conduct to Cao Cao, who ordered Cui Yan to be beaten to death in prison.\n\n\u2003Cui Yan of Qinghe,\n\n\u2003Firm and unyielding was he,\n\n\u2003With beard crisp curling and gleaming eyes,\n\n\u2003Which showed the man of stone and iron within.\n\n\u2003He drove the evil from his presence,\n\n\u2003And his glory is fair and high.\n\n\u2003For loyalty to his lord of Han,\n\n\u2003His fame shall increase as the ages roll.\n\nIn the twenty-first year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (216), in the fifth month of that year, a great memorial signed by many officers went up to Emperor Xian, praying:\n\n\"The Duke of Wei has rendered so great services that no minister before him, in Heaven as well as on Earth, not even Yi Yin and the Duke of Zhou, could match his manifest merits to the state. Thus, the title of kingship should be granted to him.\"\n\nThe memorial was approved, and a draft edict was prepared by the famous Zhong Yao to make Cao Cao Prince of Wei. Thrice Cao Cao with seeming modesty pretended to decline the honor, but thrice was his refusal rejected. Finally he made his obeisance and was enrolled as Prince of Wei with the usual insignia and privileges, a coronet with twelve strings of beads and a chariot with gilt shafts, drawn by six steeds. Using the formalities of the Son of God, he decorated his imperial chariot with bells and had the roads cleared when he passed along. He built himself a Palace at Yejun.\n\nThen he began to discuss the appointment of an heir-apparent. His principal wife, Lady Ding, was without issue; but a concubine, Lady Liu, had borne him a son, Cao Ang, who had been killed in battle at the siege of Wancheng when Cao Cao fought against Zhang Xiu. A second concubine, Lady Bian, had borne him four sons: Cao Pi, Cao Zhang, Cao Zhi, and Cao Xiong. Wherefore he elevated Lady Bian to the rank of Queen of Wei in place of Lady Ding.\n\nThe third son, Cao Zhi, was very clever and a ready master of composition. Cao Cao wished him to be named the heir.\n\nThen the eldest son, Cao Pi sought from the High Adviser Jia Xu a plan to secure his rights of primogeniture, and Jia Xu told him to do so and so. Thereafter, whenever the father went out on any military expedition, Cao Zhi wrote fulsome panegyrics, but Cao Pi wept so copiously at bidding his father farewell that the courtiers were deeply affected and remarked that though Cao Zhi was crafty and clever, he was not so sincerely filial as Cao Pi. Cao Pi also bought over his father's immediate attendants, who then rang the praises of his virtues so loud that Cao Cao was strongly disposed to name him as the heir after all.\n\nAfter hesitating a long time, the matter was referred to Jia Xu.\n\n\"I wish to name my heir. Who shall it be?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nJia Xu would not say, and Cao Cao asked why.\n\n\"I was just recalling the past in my mind and could not reply at once,\" said Jia Xu.\n\n\"What were you recalling?\"\n\n\"I was thinking of two fathers, Yuan Shao and Liu Biao, and their sons.\"\n\nCao Cao laughed. Soon after this he declared his eldest son his heir.\n\nIn the winter of that year, in the tenth month, the building of the Palace of the new Prince of Wei was completed, and the furnishing begun. From all parts were collected rare flowers and uncommon trees to beautify the gardens. One agent went into the South Land and saw Sun Quan, to whom he presented a letter from Cao Cao asking that he might be allowed to proceed to Wenzhou to get some oranges. At that period Sun Quan was in a most complaisant mood toward Cao Cao, so from the orange trees in his own city, he picked forty loads of very fine fruits and sent them immediately to Yejun.\n\nOn the way, the bearers of the oranges fell tired, and they had to stop at the foot of a certain hill. There came along an elderly man, blind of one eye and lame of one leg, who wore a white rattan headdress and a black loose robe. He saluted the bearers and stayed to talk.\n\nPresently he said, \"Your burdens are heavy, O Porters. May this old Daoist lend you a shoulder? What do you say?\"\n\nNaturally they were pleased enough, and the amiable wayfarer bore each load for two miles. When they resumed their burdens, they noticed that the loads seemed lighter than before, and they felt rather suspicious.\n\nWhen the Daoist was taking his leave of the officer in charge of the party, he said, \"I am an old friend from the same village as the Prince of Wei. My name is Zuo Ci. Among Daoists I bear the appellation of 'Black Horn'. When you get to the end of your journey, you may say that I was inquiring after your lord.\"\n\nZuo Ci shook down his sleeves and left. In due course the orange bearers reached the new Palace, and the oranges were presented. But when Cao Cao cut one open, it was but an empty shell of a thing: There was no pulp beneath the rind. Cao Cao was rather puzzled and called in the porters, who told him of their falling in with the mysterious Daoist on the way. But Cao Cao scouted the idea of that being the reason.\n\nBut just then the warden of the gate sent to say that a certain Daoist named Zuo Ci was at the gate and wished to see the king.\n\n\"Send him in,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"He is the man we met on the way,\" said the porters when he appeared.\n\nCao Cao said curtly, \"What sorcery have you been exercising on my beautiful fruit?\"\n\n\"How could such a thing happen?\" said the Daoist.\n\nThereupon he cut open an orange and showed it full of pulp, most delicious to the taste. But when Cao Cao cut open another, that again was empty, nothing but rind.\n\nCao Cao was more than ever perplexed. He bade his visitor be seated, and, as Zuo Ci asked for refreshment, wine and food were brought in. The Daoist ate ravenously, consuming a whole sheep, and drank in proportion. Yet he showed no sign of intoxication or repletion.\n\n\"By what magic are you here?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"I am but a poor Daoist. I went into Jialing in Shu, and on Emei Mountain, I studied the way for thirty long years. One day I heard my name called from out the rocky wall of my cell. I looked, but could see nothing. The same thing happened next day, and so on for many days. Then suddenly, with a roar like thunder, the rock split asunder, and I saw a sacred book in three volumes called 'The Book of Concealing Method'\u2014-the first volume was named 'Concealing Heaven', the second 'Concealing Earth', and the third 'Concealing Human'. From the first volume I learned to ascend to the clouds astride the wind, to sail up into the great void itself; from the second to pass through mountains and penetrate rocks; from the third, to float light as vapor, over the seas, to become invisible at will or change my shape, to fling swords and project daggers so as to decapitate a man from a distance. You, O Prince, have reached the acme of glory. Why not now withdraw and, like me, become a disciple of the Daoists? Why not travel to Emei Mountain and there mend your ways so that I may bequeath my three volumes to you?\"\n\n\"Oft have I reflected upon this course and struggled against my fate, but what can I do? There is no one to maintain the government,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\n\"There is Liu Bei of Yizhou, a scion of the dynastic family. Could you not make way for him? If you do not, I may have to send one of my flying swords after your head one day.\"\n\n\"You are one of his secret agents,\" said Cao Cao, suddenly enraged. \"Seize him!\" cried he to his lictors.\n\nThey did so, while the Daoist laughed. And Zuo Ci continued to laugh as they dragged him down to the dungeons, where they beat him cruelly. And when they had finished, the Daoist lay there gently respiring in a sound sleep, just as if he felt nothing whatever.\n\nThis enraged Cao Cao still more, and he bade them put the priest into the large wooden collar and nail it securely and then chain him in a cell. And Cao Cao set guards over him, and the guards saw the collar and chains just fall off while the victim lay fast asleep not injured in the least.\n\nThe Daoist lay in prison seven days without food or water. But when they went to look at him, he was sitting upright on the ground, quite well and rosy looking.\n\nThe gaolers reported these things to Cao Cao, who had the prisoner brought in.\n\n\"I do not mind going without food for years,\" said the victim, when Cao Cao questioned him, \"yet I could eat a thousand sheep in a day.\"\n\nCao Cao was at the end of his resources. He could prevail nothing against such a man.\n\nThat day there was to be a great banquet at the new Palace, and guests came in crowds. When the banquet was in progress and the wine cup passing freely, suddenly the same Daoist appeared. He had wooden clogs on his feet. All faces turned in his direction and not a few were afraid; others wondered.\n\nStanding there in front of the great assembly, the Daoist said, \"O Powerful Prince, here today you have every delicacy on the table and a glorious company of guests. You have rare and beautiful objects from all parts of the world. Is there anything lacking? If there be anything you would like, name it and I will get it for you.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"Then I want a dragon's liver to make soup: Can you get that?\"\n\n\"Where's the difficulty?\" replied Zuo Ci.\n\nWith a pencil the Daoist immediately sketched a dragon on the whitewashed wall of the banquet hall. Then he flicked his sleeve over it, the dragon's belly opened of itself, and therefrom Zuo Ci took the liver all fresh and bloody.\n\n\"You had the liver hidden in your sleeve,\" said Cao Cao, incredulous.\n\n\"Then there shall be another test,\" said the Daoist. \"It is winter and every plant outside is dead. What flower would you like, O Prince. Name any one you will.\"\n\n\"I want a peony,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Easy,\" said the Daoist.\n\nAt this request they brought out a flower-pot, which was placed in full view of the guests. Then he spurted some water over it, and in a very short time up came a peony with two fully expanded flowers.\n\nThe guests were astonished, and they asked the Daoist to be seated and gave him wine and food. The cook sent in some minced fish.\n\n\"The best mince is made from the perch of River Song,\" said the Daoist.\n\n\"How can you get fish five hundred miles away?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Not at all difficult. Tell someone to get a rod and hook, and fish in the pond just below this banquet hall.\"\n\nThey did so, and very soon several beautiful perches lay on the steps.\n\n\"I have always kept some of these in my ponds, of course,\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"O Prince, do you think to deceive me? All perches have two gills except the River Song perch, which has two pairs. That is the distinguishing feature.\"\n\nThe guests crowded round to look, and, surely enough, the fish had four gills.\n\n\"To cook this perch one needs purple sprout ginger though,\" said the Daoist.\n\n\"Can you also produce that?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"Easily.\"\n\nZuo Ci told them to bring in a silver bowl, which the magician filled with water. Very soon the ginger filled the bowl, and he presented it to the host. Cao Cao put out his hand to pick some, when suddenly a book appeared in the bowl and the title was Cao Cao's New Treatise on the Art of War. He took it out and read it over. Not a word of his treatise was missing.\n\nCao Cao became more mystified. Zuo Ci took up a jade cup that stood on the table, filled it with fine wine, and presented it to Cao Cao.\n\n\"Drink this, O Prince, and you will live a thousand years.\"\n\n\"Drink of it first yourself,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThe Daoist took the jade pin from his headdress and drew it across the cup as if dividing the wine into two portions.\n\nThen he drank one half and handed the cup with the other half to Cao Cao. But Cao Cao angrily refused it. The Daoist then threw the cup into the air, where it was transformed into a white dove which circled round the banquet hall and then flew away.\n\nAll faces were turned upward following the flight of the dove, and so no one had noticed the going of the Daoist. But he was gone; and soon the gate warden reported that he had left the Palace.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"A magician like this ought to be put to death, or he will do some mischief.\"\n\nThe redoubtable Xu Chu and a company of three hundred armed men were sent to arrest the Daoist. They saw the Daoist, still wearing his wooden clogs, not far ahead but striding along quickly. Xu Chu rode after Zuo Ci, but in spite of all his horse could do, he could not come up with Zuo Ci. Xu Chu kept up the chase right to the hills, when he met a shepherd lad with a flock of sheep. And there walked the Daoist among the sheep. The Daoist disappeared. The angry warrior slew the whole flock of sheep, while the shepherd lad looked on weeping.\n\nSuddenly the boy heard a voice from one of the severed heads, telling him to replace the heads on the bodies of his sheep. Instead of doing so, he fled in terror, covering his face.\n\nThen he heard a voice calling to him, \"Do not run away. You shall have your sheep again.\"\n\nHe turned, and lo! the sheep were all alive again, and Zuo Ci was driving them along. The boy began to question him, but the Daoist made no reply. With a flick of his sleeves, he was gone.\n\nThe shepherd lad went home and told all these marvels to his master, who could not conceal such a story, and it reached Cao Cao. Then sketches of the Daoist were sent everywhere with orders to arrest him. Within three days were arrested in the city and outside three or four hundred persons all blind of one eye, lame of one leg, and wearing a rattan headdress, a black loose robe and wooden clogs. They were all alike and all answered to the description of the missing Daoist.\n\nThere was a great hubbub in the street. Cao Cao ordered his officer to sprinkle the crowd of Daoists with the blood of pigs and goats in order to exorcise the witchcraft and take them away to the drill ground on the south of the city. Thither he followed them with his guards, who surrounded the crowd of arrested persons and slew everyone. But from the neck of each one, after the head was severed, there floated up into the air a wreath of black vapor, and all these wreaths drifted toward a center where they joined up into the image of another Zuo Ci, who presently beckoned to him a white crane out of the sky, mounted it and sat as on a horse.\n\nClapping his hands, the Daoist cried merrily, \"The rats of the earth follow the golden tiger, and one morning the doer of evil shall be no more.\"\n\nThe soldiers shot arrows at both bird and man. At this a tremendous storm burst over the city. Stones were driven along, sand was whirled about, and all the corpses arose from the ground, each holding his own head in his hands. They rushed toward Cao Cao as if to strike him. The officials covered their eyes, and none dared to look another in the face.\n\n\u2003The power of a bold man will overturn a state,\n\n\u2003The art of a necromancer also produces wonders." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Guan Lu Sees Things In The Book Of Changes; Five Loyal Subjects Die For Their State.\n\nThe sight of the corpses of his victims rising to their feet in the storm and running toward him was too much for Cao Cao, and he swooned. However, the wind quickly fell and the corpses disappeared. His followers assisted Cao Cao to his palace, but he was very ill.\n\nA poet celebrated the episode of the murdered Daoist:\n\n\u2003He studied his magical books,\n\n\u2003He was learned in mystical lore,\n\n\u2003And with magical fleetness of foot\n\n\u2003He could travel the wide world over.\n\n\u2003The magical arts that he knew,\n\n\u2003He employed in an earnest essay\n\n\u2003To reform the bad heart of Cao Cao.\n\n\u2003But in vain; Cao Cao held on his way.\n\nCao Cao's illness seemed beyond the art of the physicians, and drugs seemed of no avail. It happened that Minister Xu Zhi came from the capital to visit the prince, who bade the latter take a cast from the \"Book of Changes\".\n\n\"Have you ever heard of Guan Lu? He is more than human in his skill at divination,\" said Xu Zhi.\n\n\"I have heard a lot about him, but I do not know how clever he is. You tell me about him,\" replied Cao Cao.\n\n\"He is from Pingyuan. His face is ugly and coarse; he drinks to excess and is rather dissipated. His father was an elder of Langye. Since a lad Guan Lu loved to study the stars, staying up all night to watch them, in spite of the prohibition of his father and mother. He used to say that if domestic fowls and wild geese knew the seasons naturally, how much more should humans. He often used to play with other children at drawing pictures of the sky on the ground, putting in the sun, moon, and stars. When he grew older he studied the 'Book of Changes' very deeply and observed the winds. He was a marvelous calculator and excellent physiognomist.\n\n\"His fame reached the ears of Shan Zichun, the Governor of Langye, who called him to his residence for an interview. There were present some hundred or so other guests, everyone of whom could be called able of speech.\n\n\"'I am young and not over-bold,' said Guan Lu to the Governor. 'I pray you give me three flasks of wine to loosen my tongue.' The request was astonishing, but the wine was brought in, and when he had drunk it, Guan Lu, looking contemptuously at the other guests, said, 'Now I am ready. Are these the opponents you have got together for me to contend with? Are these gentlemen sitting around me disputants?'\n\n\"'I myself am anxious for a match with you,' said Shan Zichun. Then they began upon the meaning of the Book of Changes. Guan Lu's words poured forth like a torrent, and his ideas were most recondite. The Governor replied, stating difficulties; Guan Lu swept them away in a stream of eloquence. So it went on the whole day without a pause even for refreshment. Neither Shan Zichun nor his other guests could help praising Guan Lu and agreeing with him.\n\n\"His fame spread wide after this encounter, and people spoke of him as the 'Supernatural Boy.' After this he became famous in another way. There was a certain Guo En, a common man, who had two brothers. All three became lame, and they called in Guan Lu to cast lots and discover the reason. Guan Lu said, 'By the lots there is a female demon in your family tomb, an aunt, the wife of one of your father's brothers. Some years ago, in a time of famine, for the sake of a few carts of grain, she was pushed into a well and a great stone was thrown in on her, crushing her head so that she suffered intensely. She complained to the Most High, and your lameness is the retribution for that crime. No prayers will avert the evil.' The three brothers wept and acknowledged their guilt.\n\n\"Governor Wang Ji of Anping, heard of the diviner's fame and invited him to come on a visit, and he went. It happened that another guest of the Governor was the magistrate of Xindu, whose wife suffered from headaches and his son from pains in the heart. Guan Lu was asked to discover the reason. He cast lots and said that at the west corner of the main hall there were buried two corpses, one of a man who held a spear, the other of a man who had a bow and arrows. The wall was built across them. The spearman's master had gashed his head, and so his head pained. The archer's master had stabbed him in the heart, and so his heart suffered anguish. They dug where Guan Lu indicated and, about eight spans down, found two coffins, one with a spear inside and the other with a strung bow and wooden arrows. All were much decayed. Guan Lu bade them remove the bones and bury them three miles outside the walls. Thereafter the woman and her son suffered no more.\n\n\"A certain Zhuge Yuan, Magistrate of Guantao, newly promoted to Governor, was leaving for his new post, and Guan Lu went to see him off. One of the guests mentioned that Guan Lu could divine what was hidden from sight. The Governor doubted such powers and said he would put a test. He got a swallow's egg, a wasp's nest, and a spider, and concealed them in three separate boxes. He asked Guan Lu to guess the contents. The divination made, Guan Lu wrote three quatrains:\n\n'The latent life will declare itself;\n\n\u2003It will cling to your lordly hall,\n\n\u2003Or male or female, flung into space,\n\n\u2003Wide wings will prevent its fall.\n\n\u2003This seems to indicate a swallow's egg.\n\n\u2003'A many-chambered dwelling\n\n\u2003Is hanging to your eaves.\n\n\u2003Each room has a poisonous tenant;\n\n\u2003Who'll be flying when he leaves.\n\n\u2003This answers to a wasp's nest.\n\n\u2003'Therein is a long-legged, trembling thing,\n\n\u2003Who spins a thread from his inside\n\n\u2003And spreads a fine spun net for flies;\n\n\u2003He profits most at eventide.\n\n\u2003And this it a spider.'\n\n\"The guests were amazed.\n\n\"An old woman in his village having lost a cow, came to consult him. After the divination, he told her that seven men had taken away the cow and were cooking and eating it on the bank of a certain mountain stream. She had better go there quickly and see who they were. If she went with all speed, she would find the skin and the flesh. The woman went and found the seven men hidden behind a small shanty, boiling beef. Most of the cow's flesh was still there. She told Governor Liu Bin, who arrested the seven men and punished them. Then the Governor asked the old lady how she got to know exactly who the offenders were, and she told him.\n\n\"Governor Liu Bin was dubious, too. He sent for Guan Lu and put him to the following test. He placed his seal and a pheasant feather in a box and asked what were the contents. The reply was:\n\n\u2003'Square within, without so round,\n\n\u2003Beauteous colors here abound;\n\n\u2003The jewel within is held secure\n\n\u2003And what it witnesses is sure.\n\n\u2003Is not this a seal in its bag?\n\n\u2003'There's a bird on the precipice steep,\n\n\u2003Its body with flame seems aglow.\n\n\u2003Its wings are barred yellow and black.\n\n\u2003At sunrise it never fails to crow.\n\n\u2003And I think this hints at a pheasant feather.\n\n\"Governor Liu Bin treated the marvelous diviner with great honor.\n\n\"One day Guan Lu saw a youth plowing a field. After watching him for a long time, Guan Lu suddenly asked his name and age. The young man said, 'My name is Zhao Yang, and I am nineteen. Pray, who may you be, Sir?'\n\n\"'I am Guan Lu; you may have heard of me. I see an air of early death about you, and you will be done with life in three days. It is a pity that one so handsome should die so young.'\n\n\"Zhao Yang forsook his plow, hurried home and told his father. The father at once set out to find Guan Lu, and, having found Guan Lu, threw himself on the ground and besought the diviner to save his son.\n\n\"'How can I avert the doom? It is fate,' said Guan Lu.\n\n\"'Alas! I have but this one son, I pray you save him.'\n\n\"And the son added his tears and prayers to those of his father. Guan Lu was deeply touched. Then he turned to the lad and said, 'You get ready some good wine and some venison. Tomorrow go into the forest on the south there, and underneath a lofty tree you will see two men seated on boulders playing chess. One of them will be dressed in white, and he will be facing the south. He is very evil looking. The other will be seated opposite, dressed in red. He is very handsome. They will be deeply absorbed in their game and will not notice who offers them food and wine, which you will humbly present on your knees. When they have eaten and drunk, you will prostrate yourself and with tears pray them to grant you length of days. You will gain an increased span of life, but, above all things, do not mention that I told you what to do.'\n\n\"The father kept Guan Lu as a guest, and the next day the son followed out his instructions. He entered the forest and soon came upon the two men seated beneath a pine, playing chess. They seemed oblivious to all around them. Zhao Yang presented the wine and the food, and the two men ate absent-mindedly, for the game went on. But when Zhao Yang threw himself on the ground and implored the gift of long life, they seemed startled.\n\n\"'This must be some of Guan Lu's doing,' said Red Robe. 'Still, as we have accepted a gift at his hand, we must have pity on him.'\n\n\"He who was dressed in white then lifted up a book that hung at his side and looked therein.\n\n\"'You are nineteen this year,' said White Dress to Zhao Yang. 'You ought to die. But we will insert a number nine over the number one and so make it read ninety-nine, and that is the age you will attain. But when you go back, tell Guan Lu he is not to betray the secrets of fate, or Heaven will surely punish him.'\n\n\"Then Red Robe took out a pen and added the figure. A gust of wind passed, and the two old men were transformed into two cranes that rose into the sky and flew away. Zhao Yang came back home and told what he had seen. Guan Lu told him the red-robed man was the Southern Dipper Constellation, and the white-robed, the Northern Dipper.\n\n\"'But the Northern Dipper consists of nine stars, and there was only one man,' objected the lad.\n\n\"'Separately they are nine, but they combine to form one. The Northern Dipper records deaths; the Southern Dipper, births. Now the extra figure has been added, you need have no anxiety. You will live long.\n\n\"Father and son both thanked him most sincerely, but thereafter Guan Lu was very careful how he divined for people lest he should betray celestial secrets.\n\n\"Now, this man is at Pingyuan, and you, O Prince, can seek your fate of him. Why not call him?\"\n\nCao Cao was greatly glad. Guan Lu was sent for and came. As soon as the salutations were over, Cao Cao asked him to cast lots for him.\n\nGuan Lu at once found the cause and said, \"Your illness is only due to magical machinations. It should not create anxiety.\"\n\nCao Cao was much relieved in his mind, and his health began to improve. Next Cao Cao wished to know about the conditions in the empire's affairs.\n\nAfter the necessary calculations the prophet said:\n\n\u2003Three and eight cross;\n\n\u2003Where the army halt,\n\n\u2003The yellow boar meets the tiger;\n\n\u2003It causes the loss of one limb.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao asked him to inquire whether his life should be long or not.\n\nGuan Lu replied:\n\n\u2003\"In the Lion Palace\n\n\u2003The talents of ancestors are preserved.\n\n\u2003The Prince's way is securely renewed,\n\n\u2003And his son and grandson shall come to high honor.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao asked concerning himself.\n\n\"Divination concerning the fate of the universe may not be foreknown. Wait a time and I will look into it.\"\n\nCao Cao was pleased and would like to keep such a man near him, so he offered him the post of Historiographer (who was also soothsayer) at his court, but it was declined.\n\n\"My destiny is mean, my luck despicable. I am not equal to such an office and dare not undertake it,\" said Guan Lu.\n\n\"Why not?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"My forehead has no lofty fullness; my eyes no steady expression; my nose no bridge; my feet no round, solid heels; my back lacks the triple armor (of shoulder blades and intervening muscles); and my breast the three marks (like the character indicating wealth). I can only control evil spirits securely; I cannot rule living humans.\"\n\n\"What think you of my physiognomy?\"\n\n\"What can a minister of extremely exalted rank like yourself desire further?\" said Guan Lu.\n\nCao Cao pressed him to say. The soothsayer only laughed. Then Cao Cao asked him to look at the many officers of all kinds standing around.\n\n\"Everyone of them is a servant equal to the administration of the empire,\" said Guan Lu.\n\nBut when Cao Cao asked whether good or bad fortune was to be his, the soothsayer would not give a clear and full reply.\n\nA poem says:\n\n\u2003Guan Lu was a seer of old.\n\n\u2003Stars to him their secrets told.\n\n\u2003Mysteries, occult and dim,\n\n\u2003Were as daylight unto him.\n\n\u2003His so subtle intellect\n\n\u2003Could the shade of death detect,\n\n\u2003But the secrets of his skill\n\n\u2003Died with him \u2014 -are secrets still.\n\nAgain Cao Cao asked him to divine concerning his rivals Wu and Shu.\n\nGuan Lu said, \"The south just lost a famous leader, and the west is encroaching on your territory.\"\n\nCao Cao's doubts as to the accuracy of one of these events were soon set at rest, for a messenger came from Hefei to report: \"Lu Su, the Commander-in-Chief of the South Land, has died in Lukou.\"\n\nThen Cao Cao sent hurriedly into Hanzhong, and the scout returned to report: \"Zhang Fei and Ma Chao have taken the Xiabian Pass and are threatening Hanzhong.\"\n\nCao Cao was angry and inclined to march at once against the invaders. But he consulted the great soothsayer, who advised him not to move.\n\n\"Do not act in haste. In the coming spring there will be a conflagration in Xuchang,\" said Guan Lu.\n\nHaving been witness of the verification of Guan Lu's words, Cao Cao was in no mood to neglect the warning. He stayed on in his palace, but he sent Cao Hong with fifty thousand troops to assist in the defense of East River Land, while Xiahou Dun, with thirty thousand troops, went to Xuchang to keep careful watch and be ready against any surprises. He placed High Minister Wang Bi in command of the Imperial Guard.\n\nSima Yi warned Cao Cao against this Wang Bi, saying, \"The man is given to wine, and slack. He is not a fit person for such a post.\"\n\nCao Cao replied, \"He is very fit. He has followed me through all difficulties and dangers. He is loyal and diligent, solid as stone or iron.\"\n\nWang Bi was appointed and led the guard into camp at the capital, outside the East Gate of the Imperial Palace.\n\nNow there was a certain Geng Ji, a Luoyang man, who had long been employed in the Prime Minister's palace in a subordinate capacity and afterward had been promoted to a post of Minister. He and Minister Wei Huang were close friends.\n\nThese two were greatly distressed at Cao Cao's advance to princely rank, and more especially at his use of the imperial chariots. In the early months of the twenty-third year (AD 218), Geng Ji and Wei Huang came to a secret exchange of views on Cao Cao's conduct.\n\nGeng Ji said, \"The man is rebellious and wicked, every day behaving worse. He intends to go farther, and how can we, as servants of the dynasty, help him in his wickedness?\"\n\nWei Huang said, \"I have a friend named Jin Yi, who also is a servant of Han and an enemy of Cao Cao's . He is a descendant of the old Great Minister Jin Midi. Beside, he is friendly with Wang Bi. If we all tried our best, we ought to succeed.\"\n\n\"But if he is friendly with Wang Bi, he will not assist us!\" said Geng Ji.\n\n\"Let us go and sound him,\" said Wei Huang.\n\nSo the two went to see Jin Yi, who received them in his private rooms. There they talked.\n\nSaid Wei Huang, \"O virtuous Jin Yi, we know you are on most friendly terms with Commander Wang Bi, and so have come to beg a favor.\"\n\n\"What is it you ask?\"\n\n\"The Prince of Wei will soon receive the abdication of the Emperor and himself ascend to the seat of the mighty. Then you and your friend Wang Bi will advance to places of great honor. When that day comes, we pray you not forget us, but recommend us for employment. We should feel no shallow gratitude for your kindness.\"\n\nJin Yi flicked down his sleeves and arose looking very angry. At that instant arrived the tea for the visitors. He snatched it away from the serving man and emptied it on the floor.\n\nWei Huang started up in feigned alarm.\n\n\"How have I offended you, my good friend?\" cried he.\n\n\"I have been friends with you because you are descendants of people who have served the Hans faithfully. Now, instead of trying to repay the debt of gratitude you ought to feel, you turn aside to assist one who is their enemy, think you that I can regard you as friends? How could I look the world in the face?\"\n\n\"But if it be destiny, one cannot help it,\" said Geng Ji. \"One must accept it.\"\n\nJin Yi grew still more angry, so that the two visitors were convinced that at heart he was loyal to the dynasty. Then they began to tell him the true state of the case.\n\nSaid they, \"Our real desire is to destroy this rebel, and we have come to ask your help in that. What we said at first was only a test to find out what you thought.\"\n\n\"Think you, with my ancestry, generation after generation in the confidence and service of the Hans, that I would willingly follow a rebel? If you, Sirs, really think of restoring the dynasty, pray tell me your plans.\"\n\n\"Though we have the desire to prove our gratitude, yet we lack the means to destroy the enemy,\" said Wei Huang.\n\nSaid Jin Yi, \"We desire helpers within and supporters without. If we could slay Wang Bi, we could use his name and troops to help the Emperor. With the help of Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle, we should be able to destroy the rebel Cao Cao.\"\n\nHearing Jin Yi's plan, the others clapped their hands in approval.\n\n\"And I have two friends outside of the city who will go with us,\" said Jin Yi. \"Both of them have the murder of a father to avenge. We can get their helps.\"\n\n\"Who are they?\"\n\n\"They are sons of the great physician Ji Ping and are called Ji Mao and Ji Mu. Cao Cao put their father to death for his connection with the plot organized by Dong Cheng, when Dong Cheng received the secret edict conveyed in the robe and girdle, which was conferred upon him by the Emperor. The two sons escaped that time by flight, but they have since secretly returned to the capital. With their help all will go well.\"\n\nGeng Ji and Wei Huang rejoiced at the prospect of further help, and a messenger was sent to call in the two Ji brothers. Soon they arrived, and the plot was laid before them. They were deeply affected and shed copious tears. Their wrath rose to the sky, and they swore to aid in the destruction of the rebel.\n\n\"On the fifteenth day of the first month there will be grand illuminations in the city,\" said Jin Yi, \"and felicitations will continue on every side. Geng Ji and Wei Huang will each lead out their retainers and make their way quickly to Wang Bi's camp to wait till they see the fire begin. Then they will dash in, slay Wang Bi, and follow me inside the Palace. We will then request the Emperor to ascend the Tower of the Five Phoenixes, assemble his officers, and issue orders to destroy the rebels. The two Ji brothers will make their way into the city and set fires going. Then all will raise their voices and summon the populace to their aid. They are to hold up any rescue force in the city till the Emperor has issued the edict and disturbance is allayed, when they will rush toward Yejun and seize Cao Cao. Then a messenger will be dispatched with a summons for Liu Bei, the Imperial Uncle. We will begin our work that night at the second watch, and we will escape the ill success that attended Dong Cheng's attempt.\"\n\nAll five swore before Heaven to be true, and they smeared their lips with blood in earnest of their oath. After this, each returned to his own home to prepare arms and call up their people.\n\nGeng Ji and Wei Huang each had four or five hundred retainers, whom they armed. Ji Mao and Ji Mu also got together three hundred men. They gave out a story of a hunting party to explain the gathering.\n\nWhen the preparations were complete, and before the time fixed for the rising, Jin Yi went to see Wang Bi.\n\nSaid Jin Yi, \"Everything in the world seems now tranquil, and the power of the Prince of Wei extends over all the land. It is a season of joy and felicitation, and you can organize a lantern festivity, and people shall hang out lanterns and put up decorations for the occasion.\"\n\nSo Wang Bi issued guidelines for a Feast of Lanterns in the city. The night of full moon was very clear, moon and stars most brilliant. The people of the capital took advantage of the night and thronged the streets and the market places. The lanterns were hung out in profusion, and all went merrily.\n\nNo official interfered with the crowd;\n\nNo one thought of the flight of time;\n\nAll was simple gaiety.\n\nThat night the Commander of the Imperial Guards, Wang Bi, and his officers had a feast in their camp. Just after the second watch had begun, they heard a great shouting in the camp, and someone came in to say that a fire had started in the rear. Wang Bi hurriedly left the table and went outside. He saw flames leaping up and rolling by and heard shouts of \"Kill!\" rising on every side and echoing to the very sky. He thought the camp had certainly mutinied, and, jumping on his horse, went out at the south gate. Just outside he ran against Geng Ji, who loosed an arrow which struck him in the shoulder. He nearly fell with the shock, but he got away toward the west gate. He found he was pursued by armed men, so he got flurried, dismounted, and went on foot. Presently he came to the house of Jin Yi and hammered at the door.\n\nNow the fire that had created such a scare had been raised by Jin Yi's own people sent for that purpose, and Jin Yi had followed them to fight when the time came. Hence there was no one but the woman folks left in his house. When the women heard the clamor at the door, they thought Jin Yi had come back.\n\nJin Yi's wife, from the door of the women's quarter, called out, \"Have you killed Wang Bi?\"\n\nThis was a shock, but it told Wang Bi that his quondam friend was now an enemy.\n\nWherefore Wang Bi fled further to the house of Cao Xiu and told him, \"Geng Ji and Jin Yi have raised a disturbance.\"\n\nCao Xiu immediately armed himself, got to horse, and led out a thousand troops. He found fires on all sides, and the Tower of the Five Phoenixes was in flames. The Emperor had fled into the recesses of the Palace, but Cao Cao's friends and partisans were defending the Palace gates like grim death.\n\nIn the city the crowd was shouting one to another: \"Slay Cao Cao and restore the Hans!\"\n\nWhen Xiahou Dun had received thirty thousand troops and the command to keep watch and ward over the capital, he had gone into camp three miles from the city. When he saw the conflagration start, he set the army in motion and surrounded the city. He also sent reinforcements to Cao Xiu within.\n\nInside the city the fighting went on all night. No one joined the conspirators; the small band were left to their own efforts. Soon it was reported that Jin Yi, Ji Mao, and Ji Mu were slain. Geng Ji and Wei Huang found their way to one of the gates, but there they met Xiahou Dun's main force and were made prisoners. The handful of men with them were cut to pieces.\n\nWhen the fighting subsided, Xiahou Dun went into the city and set his troops to put out the fires. He also laid hands on the whole households of the five conspirators. Then he sent a report to Cao Cao, who sent back orders to execute the two conspirators and put to death in public all the members of the five families. He was also to arrest every official and send the whole batch to Yejun for interrogations.\n\nXiahou Dun sent his two chief prisoners to the place of execution. They shouted against Cao Cao.\n\n\"Living we have failed to slay you, Cao Cao. Dead we will be malicious spirits smiting rebels in all places!\"\n\nThe executioner smote Geng Ji on the mouth with his sword, so that the blood gushed out, but he continued to shout as long as he could.\n\nWei Huang, his fellow-conspirator, dashed his temples on the ground, crying, \"How I hate him!\" and ground his teeth till he broke them to fragments. And they both died of hatred and exhaustion.\n\n\u2003Who can with outstretched hands uphold the sky\n\n\u2003Or thrones maintain by simple loyalty?\n\n\u2003Han's day was done; two would avert the doom,\n\n\u2003But failed, and carried anger to the tomb.\n\nXiahou Dun carried out his chief's orders and sent the officials he had arrested to Yejun. There Cao Cao set up two flags, one red and one white, in the drill ground and sent all the officials thither. Then he addressed them.\n\n\"In this late rebellion some of you went out to extinguish the fire, some of you stayed within doors. Let those who went forth to put out the fire take their stand by the red flag, and those who remained in their houses go to the white flag.\"\n\nThe officials thought within themselves, \"Certainly there can be nothing wrong in trying to put out a fire,\" so they nearly all placed themselves under the red flag. Only about a third went to the white.\n\nThen the order was given to seize all those by the red flag.\n\nThey protested. \"We are guiltless!\" cried they.\n\nCao Cao said, \"At that time you intended not to put out the flames but to aid the rebels.\"\n\nHe sent them all down to River Zhang and had them put to death on the bank. There were more than three hundred victims. He rewarded those who were under the white flag and sent them to their homes in the capital.\n\nWang Bi died from his wound and was buried with great honor.\n\nCao Xiu was placed over the guards; Zhong Yao was created Prime Minister of the princedom of Wei; Hua Xin became High Minister. The occasion was taken to create six grades of the title of Lordship with three divisions each, eighteen in all. There were seventeen grades of Marquis West of the Pass. And all these had golden seals of office with purple ribbons. There were also sixteen ranks of Interior Marquis and Exterior Marquis. They had silver seals with tortoise ornaments on the back and black ribbons. There were five classes of Minister with three grades in each class. These had brass seals, with chain ornaments and ribbons. And with all these various gradations of ranks and nobility reorganized, the court was entirely reformed. There were new ranks and new people in office.\n\nCao Cao then remembered the warning about a conflagration in the capital and wished to reward Guan Lu for his prescience, but he would receive nothing.\n\nMeanwhile, in East River Land, Cao Hong with an army of fifty thousand went into Hanzhong. He placed Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He in command at points of importance, while he went on to the attack. At that time Zhang Fei and Lei Tong were holding Baxi. Ma Chao marched to Xiabian and sent Wu Lan out as Van Leader to reconnoiter. He fell in with Cao Hong, and Wu Lan was going to retire. But General Ren Kui advised against this.\n\nSaid Ren Kui, \"The enemy are newly arrived. Why not fight and take the keen edge off their pride? If we do not fight, how can we look our chief in the face when we return?\"\n\nSo it was decided to offer battle, and Ren Kui rode out and challenged Cao Hong. The challenge was accepted, and the warriors advanced. Cao Hong cut Ren Kui down in the third encounter and pressed the advantage, and Wu Lan was beaten off. When Wu Lan returned and told Ma Chao, he was blamed.\n\n\"Why did you attack without orders and bring about this defeat?\"\n\n\"It was the fault of Ren Kui, who disobeyed orders.\"\n\n\"Defend the Pass most carefully. Do not engage,\" said Ma Chao.\n\nMa Chao sent a report to Capital Chengdu and awaited orders for a further action. Cao Hong suspected some ruse when Ma Chao remained so long inactive, and retired to Nanzheng.\n\nHere he was visited by Zhang He, who asked, \"General, why did you retire after the successful attack and slaughter of one of the enemy leaders?\"\n\n\"Seeing that Ma Chao declined to come out to fight, I suspected some ruse,\" replied Cao Hong. \"Beside, when I was at Yejun that wonderful soothsayer, Guan Lu, foretold the loss of a leader here. I heeded what he said and so was careful.\"\n\nZhang He laughed, \"You have been a leader of soldiers for half your life, and yet you heed the sayings of a soothsayer! I may be of small wit, but I would take Baxi with my own troops, and the possession of Baxi would be the key to the whole of Shu.\"\n\n\"The defender of Baxi is Zhang Fei,\" said Cao Hong. \"He is no ordinary man to meet. One must be careful.\"\n\n\"All of you fear this Zhang Fei, but I do not. I look upon him as a mere nobody. I shall have to capture him this time.\"\n\n\"But if you fail, what then?\"\n\n\"Then I shall be content to pay the penalty according to military rules.\"\n\nCao Hong made him put his undertaking in writing, and then Zhang He marched to the attack.\n\nThe proud are often defeat;\n\nLightsome attacks oft fail." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Zhang Fei Takes Wakou Pass With Tactics; Huang Zhong Captures Tiandang Mountain By Stratagem.\n\nZhang He's army, with which he felt so sure of victory, consisted of thirty thousand troops, and they were in three camps \u2014 Camp Dangqu, Camp Mengtou, and Camp Dangshi \u2014 which were protected by the hills. When Zhang He marched, he left half the soldiers in each camp as defenders.\n\nThe news soon reached Baxi, and Zhang Fei called in his colleague Lei Tong to give his opinion.\n\nLei Tong said, \"The country is bad and the hills full of danger in the area of Langzhong. Let us lay an ambush. You, General, go out to give battle, and I will help you by a sudden, unexpected attack. We ought to get Zhang He.\"\n\nWhereupon Zhang Fei gave five thousand troops to Lei Tong, and himself led out ten thousand troops to a point ten miles from Langzhong. Having set them in order, he rode out and challenge Zhang He to single combat. Zhang He galloped out to meet him.\n\nAfter the thirtieth or so bout, Zhang He's ranks suddenly began to shout and soon showed signs of confusion. The reason was the appearance of the banners of Shu from the cover of some hills. Zhang He dared not continue to fight, and he fled. Zhang Fei pursued him. Lei Tong also appeared in his road and attacked, and so, with enemies on both sides, Zhang He forced his way out and lost the day. Both Zhang Fei and Lei Tong continued to smite him, even into the night, till he got back to his camp at Dangqu.\n\nZhang He reverted to his old plan of defending the three camps, rolling down logs and hurling stones. But he remained behind his defenses. Zhang Fei made a camp three miles off.\n\nNext day Zhang Fei went forth and offered battle, but Zhang He took no notice. Zhang He ascended to the summit of the hill and drank wine to the accompaniment of trumpets and drums, but he would not fight. Zhang Fei bade his soldiers shout insults, but these had no effect. Lei Tong was sent up the hill, but the rolling logs and hurtling stones forced him to retire. Then the defenders of the other two camps came out to the attack, and Lei Tong was discomfited.\n\nNext day Zhang Fei again offered battle, but there was no response. Again the soldiers yelled every form of insult, but Zhang He from the hill top only replied by similar abuse. Zhang Fei was at his wits' ends; and this game was played for more than fifty days.\n\nThen Zhang Fei made a strong stockade just in front of the hill, and therein he sat day after day drinking till he became half drunk. And when he was so, he reviled his opponent.\n\nAbout this time Liu Bei sent gifts to the army, and when the messenger went back, he told Liu Bei that his brother was giving himself over to wine. This made Liu Bei anxious, so he lost no time in asking advice from Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhuge Liang was jocular, saying, \"Since that is so, let us send him fifty vessels of the best brew of Chengdu. He probably has but poor stuff in the camp.\"\n\n\"But he has always had a weakness for wine, and he has failed because of it. Yet you would encourage him to drink by sending him more wine?\"\n\n\"My lord, is it that you do not understand your brother even after all these years? He is brave and steady, yet when we first invaded West River Land, he released Yan Yan, which was not what a mere brave would have done. He is face to face with Zhang He, and has been for nearly two months, and day after day he drinks and rages and insults his enemy openly. He treats Zhang He with most perfect contempt. But this is not only the wine cup; it is a deep plan to get the better of Zhang He.\"\n\n\"This may be so,\" replied Liu Bei, \"but let us not rely upon it too much. Let Wei Yan go to help him.\"\n\nZhuge Liang sent Wei Yan with the wine, and the carts set out, each flying a yellow flag with a writing in large characters: Fine Wine for the Frontier Army.\n\nWhen Wei Yan reached the army, he handed over the wine, which he said was a gift from the Lord of Shu. And Zhang Fei received it with due respect.\n\nZhang Fei told Wei Yan and Lei Tong each to take a thousand troops and move out on the two wings, ready to act when they saw a red flag displayed. And then he had the wine laid out and called up some soldiers to drink with a great display of flags and a rolling of drums.\n\nThe spies reported all these doings on the hill-top, and Zhang He came out to look for himself. There he saw his opponent drinking, and two of the soldiers were boxing before Zhang Fei for his amusement.\n\n\"He despises me too much,\" said Zhang He.\n\nAnd Zhang He gave orders to prepare for a night attack on the enemy camp. His own troops in Camp Dangqu should do the raiding, and those from Camp Mengtou and Camp Dangshi were to support them.\n\nThere was little moon that night, and Zhang He took advantage of the obscurity to steal down the side of the hill. He got quite close to the enemy camp and stood for a time looking at Zhang Fei sitting amid a blaze of lamps and drinking. Suddenly Zhang He dashed forward with a yell, and at the same moment his drums on the hill-top rolled out their defiance. Zhang Fei never stirred. Zhang He rushed at him and delivered a mighty thrust with his spear. Zhang Fei toppled over \u2014 it was a Zhang Fei of straw. Zhang He checked and turned his steed. At that moment he heard a string of detonations, and a warrior appeared before him barring his way. It was the real Zhang Fei, as the round head and thundering voice speedily made manifest.\n\nWith the serpent halberd set, Zhang Fei rode toward Zhang He. The two warriors fought many bouts under the gleaming lights. No help came to Zhang He. In vain he yearned for the assistance, which the two camps were to bring him. He did not know that his reinforcements had been driven back by Wei Yan and Lei Tong, and that the two camps, Mengtou and Dangshi, were now in possession of his enemies. As the help did not come, Zhang He was powerless; and, to add to his discomfiture, the glare of fire out in the moutains of Dangqu told him of the seizure of his third camp by Zhang Fei's rear force. Nothing could be done, and Zhang He cut an alley, forced out of the press, and fled to Wakou Pass. The victory was all to Zhang Fei.\n\nThe news of the success delighted Liu Bei, and he knew then that Zhang Fei's drinking had been part of a stratagem to entice his enemy into the open and defeat them.\n\nZhang He reached Wakou Pass, but with the loss of two-thirds of his army of thirty thousand troops. He stood on defense and sent urgent messages to Cao Hong to come to his rescue.\n\nCao Hong angrily replied, \"He disobeyed my orders and marched. He has lost an important point and now he sends to me for help!\"\n\nWhile refusing aid, Cao Hong sent to urge his colleague to go out and fight. But Zhang He too greatly feared.\n\nAt length Zhang He decided upon a plan of action. He sent out two parties into ambush and said to them, \"I will pretend defeat and fly. They will follow, and you can cut off their retreat.\"\n\nWhen he did march out, he met Lei Tong. The two engaged in battle, and Zhang He presently ran away. Lei Tong pursued and fell into the ambush. Then Zhang He returned and slew Lei Tong. His troops went back and told Zhang Fei, who came up to provoke another fight. Zhang He again tried his stratagem, but Zhang Fei did not pursue. Again and again the ruse was tried, but Zhang Fei knew it was only a ruse and simply retired to his own camp.\n\nHe said to Wei Yan, \"Zhang He has compassed the death of Lei Tong by leading him into an ambush, and he wants to inveigle me into another. What say you to meeting trick with trick?\"\n\n\"But how?\" said Wei Yan.\n\n\"Tomorrow I will lead the army forward, you following me with some reliable soldiers. When his army come out from their ambush, you can smite them, sending half your men against each party. We will secretly fill the by-roads with loads of combustibles, entice the enemy among them and start a fire. In the confusion, I shall try to capture Zhang He. So will we avenge our comrade's death.\"\n\nSo Zhang Fei went out, and Zhang He's troops came and began to fight. After a half score bouts, Zhang He ran away, and this time Zhang Fei pursued. Zhang He, now fleeing, now stopping to exchange a blow or two, led Zhang Fei through the hills to a valley. Here, suddenly changing front to rear and rear to front, Zhang He halted, made a camp, and offered battle.\n\nIt was now the time when Zhang He expected his hidden troops to appear and surround Zhang Fei. But none appeared. He knew not that his ambush had been broken up by Wei Yan's army and driven into the valley where the road was filled with cartloads of combustibles, and that the valley even then was all aflame.\n\nThen Zhang Fei came to the attack, and the rout was complete. Zhang He, fighting desperately, got through to the Wakou Pass and there mustered the remnant of his force. He strengthened the position and remained behind his ramparts.\n\nZhang Fei and Wei Yan then tried to take the Pass, but day after day they failed. Zhang Fei, seeing no hope of success, retired seven miles and bivouacked. From this point he sent out scouts under Wei Yan to explore the country. While going along, they observed some burden-bearers, men and women, going up a very retired path, pulling down the creepers, and pushing aside the grasses.\n\n\"That is the way to take Wakou Pass,\" cried Zhang Fei, pointing with his whip to the wayfarers.\n\nHe ordered his soldiers not to scare the people, but to call a few gently and bring them to him. They soon had several standing before their leader, who spoke to them kindly and put them at ease.\n\n\"Whence come you?\" asked Zhang Fei.\n\n\"We belong to Hanzhong and are going home. We heard that you were out fighting and the high road to Langzhong was blockaded, and so we have come across the Mist Torrent and Zitong Mountains and down River Guijin. We are going to our homes in Hanzhong.\"\n\n\"Can one reach Wakou Pass by this road? And how far is it?\"\n\nThe country people replied, \"A small road leads past to the rear of the Pass from Zitong Mountains.\"\n\nFor this piece of information Zhang Fei rewarded them by taking them into his camp and giving them a good meal. Then he sent off Wei Yan to make a frontal attack on the Pass, while he himself with five hundred light horse attacked it from the rear by way of Mount Zitong.\n\nZhang He was grieved and disappointed that Cao Hong sent no help, and the news of Wei Yan's attack only added to his sorrow. But he girded on his armor and was about to ride out when they told him that fires had started at half a dozen places behind the Pass. They most likely indicated soldiers. However, he went out to meet them, and, to his horror, when the flags opened out, his eyes fell on the figure of Zhang Fei. Away he ran along a by-road.\n\nBut his steed was not fast, and as Zhang Fei pressed him close, Zhang He dismounted and ran up the mountain side. So Zhang He escaped. He had, however, some ten followers, and it was a small and dejected party that presently found its way into Nanzheng. He saw Cao Hong, and Cao Hong was very angry at his plight.\n\n\"I told you not to go, but you were willful. And you gave in your written pledge. You have lost all your soldiers, yet you do not commit suicide. What will you do next?\"\n\nCao Hong ordered the lictors to put Zhang He to death. But Marching General Guo Huai, interceded.\n\n\"An army is easily raised; a leader is hard to find. Though Zhang He is guilty, he is a great favorite with our prince. I think you should spare him. Rather give him command of another army and send him to take Jiameng Pass and so hold up the soldiers at all the stations. Hanzhong will be tranquil of its own accord. If he fails a second time, you can punish him for both faults.\"\n\nCao Hong was satisfied to do this, and instead of dealing with his fault, he gave Zhang He five thousand troops and told him to take Jiameng Pass.\n\nThe Commanders of the Pass were Meng Da and Huo Jun. They were at variance \u2014 Meng Da desiring to go out to meet Zhang He, but Huo Jun being in favor of defense. Meng Da being set on having his way went out, gave battle, and was defeated. Huo Jun reported this to the capital, where Liu Bei at once called in the Directing Instructor to ask advice. Zhuge Liang assembled all the chief generals into the hall.\n\n\"Jiameng Pass is in danger. We must get Zhang Fei from Langzhong to drive off Zhang He,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nFa Zheng replied, \"Zhang Fei is encamped at Wakou Pass, and Langzhong is no less important than Jiameng Pass. I do not think he should be recalled. Choose one among the generals to go and defeat Zhang He.\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughed, \"Zhang He is renowned in Wei. No ordinary leader will avail. Zhang Fei is the only man to send, the only one equal to the task.\"\n\nThen among the generals one started up crying angrily, \"Instructor, why do you thus despise us? I will use what little skill I have in slaying our enemy and will lay his head at the foot of our standard.\"\n\nThe speaker was Veteran General Huang Zhong, and all eyes centered on him.\n\n\"Friend Huang Zhong, you are bold enough, but what about your age? I fear you are no match for Zhang He.\"\n\nHuang Zhong's white beard bristled, and he said, \"I know I am old. But these two arms can still pull the four-hundred-fifty-pound bow, and the vigor of my body is not yet departed. Am I not strong enough to meet such a poor thing as Zhang He?\"\n\n\"General, you are nearly seventy. Can you still hold you are not aged?\"\n\nHuang Zhong tore down the hall. Seizing one of the great swords off the rack, he whirled it as if it flew. And the stiffest bow that hung on the wall, he pulled till it snapped.\n\n\"Well, if you will go, who will second you?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I would prefer Veteran General Yan Yan. And if there is the least anxiety, well, here is this hoary head.\"\n\nLiu Bei was pleased to let these two go to fight Zhang He. However, Zhao Zilong put in a protest.\n\n\"Zhang He has already got through Jiameng Pass, so that the fighting will be no child's play, and the loss of that Pass endangers the whole of Yizhou. It is no task to set to a couple of old men.\"\n\nReplied Zhuge Liang, \"You regard the two as too old to succeed, but I think the attainment of Hanzhong depends upon these two.\"\n\nZhao Zilong and many others sniggered as they went from the hall. They did not agree with Zhuge Liang.\n\nIn due course the two Veteran Generals arrived at the Pass.\n\nAt sight of them, Meng Da and Huo Jun, the defenders of the Pass, laughed in their hearts, thinking: \"Zhuge Liang has slipped up in his calculations in sending such a pair of dotards on such an important mission.\"\n\nHuang Zhong said to Yan Yan, \"You see the behavior of these people? They are laughing at us because we are old. Now we will do something that will win admiration from all the world.\"\n\n\"I should be glad to hear your orders,\" replied Yan Yan.\n\nThe two generals came to a decision how to act. Huang Zhong led his army down below to meet Zhang He in the open plain. Both drew up their array. When Zhang He rode out and saw his venerable opponent, he laughed in his face.\n\n\"You must be very old, and yet you are unashamed to go into the battle, eh?\" said Zhang He.\n\n\"You menial!\" replied the veteran. \"Do you despise me for my age? You will find my good sword, however, keen enough.\"\n\nSo he urged forward his steed and rode at Zhang He. The two chargers met and a score of bouts were fought. Then suddenly a great shouting came from the rear. Yan Yan had come up and fallen upon the rear portion of Zhang He's army. Thus attacked on two sides, Zhang He was defeated. The pursuit did not cease with nightfall, and Zhang He was driven back near thirty miles. Contented with this success, Huang Zhong and Yan Yan went into their camp, where they rested their soldiers for a time.\n\nWhen Cao Hong heard of Zhang He's new defeat, he was going to exact the penalty. But Guo Huai persuaded him to forbear.\n\n\"If he is pressed too hard, he may take refuge in Shu,\" said Guo Huai. \"Rather send him help. You will thus keep a hold over him and prevent his desertion.\"\n\nWherefore Xiahou Shang and Han Hao were sent with reinforcements. Xiahou Shang was a nephew of Xiahou Dun, and Han Hao was the brother of Han Xuan, the late Governor of Changsha. They had five thousand troops.\n\nThe two generals soon reached Zhang He, and asked how now the situation was going.\n\n\"That old man Huang Zhong is really a hero,\" said Zhang He, \"and with Yan Yan's help he is very formidable.\"\n\n\"When I was at Changsha, I heard the old man was very fierce. He and Wei Yan yielded the city to Liu Bei and killed my own brother. Now that I shall meet him, I can have my revenge,\" said Han Hao.\n\nSo he and Xiahou Shang led out the new army.\n\nNow, by means of spies Huang Zhong had got a thorough knowledge of the country.\n\nYan Yan said, \"Hereabout there is a mountain named Tiandang Mountain wherein Cao Hong has stored his supplies. If we can gain its possession, we shall reduce the enemy to want and we shall get Hanzhong.\"\n\nHuang Zhong replied, \"I think so, too, and so let us do so and so.\"\n\nYan Yan agreed with him and marched off with a body of troops to carry out his part in the stratagem.\n\nAt news of the coming of new armies, Huang Zhong marched out to meet them. He found Han Hao in front of his array, and Han Hao began to abuse the veteran, shouting out, \"Disgraceful old ruffian!\"\n\nThen Han Hao whipped up his steed and set his spear at Huang Zhong. Xiahou Shang also rode out and took part in the combat. The veteran held them both at bay for some half score bouts and then fled. They pursued him for seven miles, when they reached and seized his camp. Huang Zhong, however, quickly made another defense of brushwood. Next day Xiahou Shang and Han Hao renewed the pursuit, which ended with the capture of the temporary camp of the day before. And they had advanced seven miles further. Then they called upon Zhang He to protect the rear camp. When Zhang He came up, he dissuaded them from continuing.\n\n\"Huang Zhong has retreated before you for two days. There is some deep stratagem behind this,\" said Zhang He.\n\nXiahou Shang scoffed at him, saying, \"You are such a coward that you have been defeated many times. Now say no more, but let us accomplish something.\"\n\nZhang He retired much mortified and shamed. Next day the two generals again went out to battle, and again Huang Zhong fled from them for seven miles. The two generals pursued as quickly as they could. The day after, Huang Zhong fled without any pretense of showing fight, except at short intervals. He got to Jiameng Pass and went on the defensive. The pursuers knocked at the very gate of the Pass and made a camp close by.\n\nThen Meng Da secretly wrote to Liu Bei that Huang Zhong had been repeatedly defeated and now was in the Pass and unable to go out.\n\nLiu Bei became alarmed and consulted Zhuge Liang, who said, \"The old general is making the enemy over-confident \u2014 to their ultimate destruction.\"\n\nBut Zhao Zilong did not share this opinion, nor did many others, and Liu Bei decided to send Liu Feng to reinforce his aged general.\n\nThe young man came to the Pass and saw Huang Zhong, who asked him, \"General, what makes you come here?\"\n\n\"My father heard that you have sustained several defeats, and he has sent me,\" said Liu Feng.\n\n\"But I am only employing the ruse of leading on the enemy,\" said Huang Zhong, smiling. \"You will see tonight that in one battle I shall regain all the camps and capture their supplies and many horses. I have only lent the camps to them to store their supplies. Tonight I shall leave Huo Jun to guard the Pass, while General Meng Da will gather up the spoils for us. Now, young Sir, you shall see the destruction of the enemy.\"\n\nThat same night, at the second watch, Huang Zhong left the Pass with five thousand troops. But now Xiahou Shang and Han Hao, seeing no move from the Pass for many days, had become careless and so their camps were unable to resist. Their troops had no time to don their armors or to saddle their horses. All the leaders did was to flee for their lives, while their troops trampled each other down and were killed in great numbers. All three camps were recovered by dawn, and in them were found all sorts of military equipment. Horses and their caparisons also fell to the victors, and all the booty was carried off by Meng Da and stored in the Pass.\n\nHuang Zhong pressed on his victory. Liu Feng ventured to say, \"Our soldiers need repose.\"\n\n\"Can you seize the tiger's whelps without going into the tiger's den?\" cried Huang Zhong. And he urged on his steed. The soldiers also were eager.\n\nZhang He's own army was thrown into confusion by the flying men from the defeated armies, and he could not maintain his station, but was forced to retreat. They abandoned all their stockades and rushed to the bank of River Han.\n\nThen Zhang He sought the two generals who had brought about the misfortune and said to them, \"This is Tiandang Mountain, where our stores are. Close by is Micang Mountain. The two mountains are the very source of life of the Hanzhong army. Lose them, and Hanzhong is gone too. We must see to their security.\"\n\nXiahou Shang said, \"My uncle, Xiahou Yuan, will look out for the defense of Micang Mountain, which is next to his station at Dingjun Mountain; there need be no anxiety about that. And my brother, Xiahou De, guards Tiandang Mountain. Let us go to him and help to protect that.\"\n\nZhang He and the two generals set out at once. They reached the mountain and told Xiahou De all that had happened.\n\n\"I have one hundred thousand troops in camp here,\" replied he. \"You may take some of them and recover your lost camps.\"\n\n\"No,\" replied Zhang He. \"The only proper course is to defend.\"\n\nAlmost as they spoke the rolling of drums and the clang of gongs were heard, and the look-outs came to say that Huang Zhong was near.\n\n\"The old ruffian does not know much of the art of war,\" said Xiahou De with a laugh. \"After all, he is only a brave.\"\n\n\"Be not mistaken: He is crafty and not only bold,\" said Zhang He.\n\n\"This move is against the rules and not at all crafty. He is worn from a long march and his soldiers are fatigued, and they are deep in an enemy's country.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless, be careful how you attack,\" said Zhang He. \"You would still do well to depend upon defense only.\"\n\n\"Give me three thousand good soldiers, and I will cut him to pieces,\" cried Han Hao.\n\nThey told off the three companies for him, and down he went into the plain. As he approached, Huang Zhong arrayed his army.\n\nLiu Feng put in a note of warning, saying, \"The sun is setting, and our men are weary. Let us retire for the fight tomorrow.\"\n\nBut Huang Zhong paid little attention, saying, \"I do not hold with your objections. This is the one God-given opportunity to make good, and it would be a sin not to take it.\"\n\nSo saying, the drums rolled for a great attack. Han Hao came forward with his troops, and the aged general went toward him whirling his sword. In the first encounter Han Hao fell. At this the soldiers of Shu gave a yell and went away up the hill, whereupon Zhang He and Xiahou Shang hastily moved out to withstand them. But a great red glare sprang into the sky from behind the hill, and a shouting arose. Hastily Xiahou De led off his troops to meet the danger there and went straight into the arms of Yan Yan. The Veteran General's arm rose, the sword fell, and Xiahou De dropped from his steed to rise no more.\n\nThis ambush, into which the dead general had rushed, had been carefully prepared by Huang Zhong, who had sent Yan Yan away before he marched himself and given Yan Yan orders what to do. It was the brushwood that Yan Yan's men had spent the time in collecting that now sent forth the flames reaching up to the heavens and filling the valleys.\n\nYan Yan, after slaying Xiahou De, came round the hill to aid in the attack so that the defenders were taken both in front and rear. They could do nothing and presently left the battlefield and rushed toward Dingjun Mountain to seek refuge with Xiahou Yuan.\n\nMeanwhile the victors took steps to hold the position they had won and sent the good news of victory to Capital Chengdu. And when the news arrived, Liu Bei called together all his officers to rejoice.\n\nThen said Fa Zheng, \"Not long ago Zhang Lu submitted to Cao Cao, and thereby Cao Cao got possession of Hanzhong quite easily. Instead of following up this by an advance westward, he left two generals to guard it and went south. That was a mistake. Now, my lord, do not make a mistake yourself, but take advantage of the present favorable position, with Zhang He newly defeated and Tiandang Mountain captured, to attack Hanzhong and you will have it at once. Once that is yours, you can train your army and amass supplies ready for a stroke against the arch-rebel himself. This God-given advantage will be confirmed to you, and you should not miss it.\"\n\nBoth Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang saw the wisdom of this scheme and prepared to act. Zhao Zilong and Zhang Fei were to lead the van, while Liu Bei with Zhuge Liang commanded the main army of one hundred thousand troops. A day was chosen to set out, and orders were sent to everyone to keep careful guard for Yizhou.\n\nIt was a certain auspicious day in the seventh month of the twenty-third year that the army marched (AD 218). Reaching Jiameng Pass, Huang Zhong and Yan Yan were summoned and well rewarded for their services.\n\nLiu Bei said to Huang Zhong, \"People said you were old, General, but the Directing Instructor of the army know you better than they, and you have rendered amazing service. Still, Dingjun Mountain is yet to be captured, and it is both a great central store and a major defense of Nanzheng. If we could get Dingjun Mountain, we could be quite easy about the whole region of Hanzhong. Think you that you are equal to taking Dingjun Mountain?\"\n\nTo this harangue of Liu Bei, the veteran nobly answered that he was willing to try and was ready to start when they would.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang hastily, \"Do not be hasty. You are brave enough, General, but Xiahou Yuan is a man of different stamp from Zhang He. Xiahou Yuan is a real strategist and tactician; so much so that Cao Cao relies upon him as his defense against Xiliang. It was he who was set to defend Changan when threatened by Ma Chao. Now he is in Hanzhong, and Cao Cao puts his whole confidence in him and his skill as a leader. You have overcome Zhang He, but it is not certain you will conquer this man. I think I must send down to Jingzhou for Guan Yu for this task.\"\n\nHuang Zhong hotly replied, \"Old Lian Po was eighty years old and yet he ate a bushel of rice and ten pounds of flesh, so that his vigor frightened the nobles and not one dared encroach upon the borders of the state of Zhao. I am not yet seventy. You call me old, O Instructor; then I will not take any helper, but go out simply with my own three thousand troops, and we will lay Xiahou Yuan's head at your feet.\"\n\nZhuge Liang refused to allow him to go; Huang Zhong insisted. At last Zhuge Liang consented, but said he would send an overseer.\n\n\u2003They put upon his mettle the man who was to go,\n\n\u2003Youth's vigor may be lesser worth than age's powers, we know." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "At Opposite Hill, Huang Zhong Scores A Success; On The River Han, Zhao Zilong Conquers A Host.\n\n\"If you are really determined to undertake this expedition, I shall send Fa Zheng with you,\" said Zhuge Liang to the veteran leader. \"You will have to discuss everything with him. I shall also dispatch supports and reinforcements.\"\n\nHuang Zhong agreed, and the expedition set out.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang explained to Liu Bei, \"I purposely tried to spur on the old general that he will really exert himself, else he fears he will not do much. But he will need reinforcement.\"\n\nAfter this, Zhuge Liang ordered Zhao Zilong to march after the first army and help, if help was needed. So long as the old man was victorious, Zhao Zilong was to do nothing; if he was in difficulties, then Zhao Zilong was to rescue.\n\nAlso, three thousand troops under Liu Feng and Meng Da were sent out among the hills to take position at strategic points and set up many banners and make a brave show in order to spread the impression of huge forces, and so frighten and perplex the enemy. In addition, Zhuge Liang sent to Xiabian Pass to tell Ma Chao what part to play in the campaign. Yan Yan was to hold Langzhong and Baxi in place of Zhang Fei and Wei Yan, who also went in expedition in Hanzhong.\n\nThe refugees, Zhang He and Xiahou Shang, reached Xiahou Yuan's camp and told their doleful tale, \"Tiandang Mountain has been captured, and Xiahou De and Han Hao have died with the loss. Liu Bei is about to invade Hanzhong. Send a swift messenger to inform the Prince of Wei and ask for help.\"\n\nThe news was sent to Cao Hong, who bore it quickly to Capital Xuchang.\n\nCao Cao lost no time in calling a council.\n\nThen High Minister Liu Ye said, \"The loss of Hanzhong would shake the whole Middle Land. You, O Prince, must not shrink from toil and hardship, but must yourself go to lead the army.\"\n\n\"This state of things comes of my not heeding your words before, gentle Sir,\" said Cao Cao, then repentant.\n\nHowever, Cao Cao hastily prepared and issued an edict to raise an army of four hundred thousand troops which he would lead.\n\nThe army was ready in the seventh month, the early autumn, in the twenty-third year (AD 218), and marched in three divisions. The leading division was under Xiahou Dun, Cao Cao commanded the center, and Cao Xiu was the rear guard.\n\nCao Cao rode a white horse, beautifully caparisoned. His guards were clad in embroidered silk. They carried the huge red parasol woven of silk and gold threads. Beside him in two lines were the symbols of kingly dignity, the golden melons, silver axes, stirrups, clubs, spears, and lances; banderoles embroidered with the sun and moon, dragon and phoenix, all were borne aloft. His imperial escort of twenty-five thousand stout warriors led by bold officers, marched in five columns of five thousand each, under banners of the five colors, blue, yellow, red, white, and black. The five companies made a brave show as they marched, each column under its own flag with soldiers in armors and horses in caparisons all of one color and all glittering in the sun.\n\nAs they debouched through Tong Pass, Cao Cao noticed in the distance a thick wood, very luxuriant, and asked those near him what it was called.\n\n\"This place is the Indigo Field,\" they replied. \"And in that wood is the estate of the late Minister Cai Yong. His daughter, Cai Yan, and her present husband, Dong Si, live there.\"\n\nNow Cao Cao and Cai Yong had been excellent friends at one time. Cai Yong's daughter had been first married to Wei Zhongdao. Then she was abducted by the frontier tribes and taken away to the north, where she had borne two sons. She had composed a ballad called \"Eighteen Stanzas for the Mongol Flageolet,\" which was widespread to the empire. Cao Cao had been moved by pity for her sorrows and sent a messenger with a thousand ounces of gold to ransom her. The Prince of the frontier Xiongnu State, Ce Xian the Khan, overawed by Cao Cao's strength, had restored her to Cai Yong. Then Cao Cao gave her in marriage to Dong Si.\n\nOrdering his escort to march on, Cao Cao went up to the gate with only a few attendants, dismounted, and inquired after the lady of the house. At this time Dong Si was absent at his post, and the lady was alone. As soon as she heard who her visitor was, she hastened to welcome him and led him into the reception room. When Cao Cao was seated and she had performed the proper salutations, she stood respectfully at his side. Glancing round the room, Cao Cao saw a rubbing of a tablet hanging on the wall. So he got up to read it, and asked his hostess about it.\n\n\"It is a tablet of Cao E, or the fair Lady Cao. In the time of the Emperor He (AD 100), in the Xiongnu State there was a certain magician named Cao Xu, who could dance and sing like the very Spirit of Music. On the fifth of the fifth month he was out in a boat, and being intoxicated, fell overboard and was drowned. He had a daughter, Cao E, then fourteen years of age. She was greatly distressed and sought the body of her father for seven days and nights, weeping all the while. Then she threw herself into the waves, and five days later she floated to the surface with her father's body in her arms. The villagers buried them on the bank, and the magistrate reported the occurrence to the Emperor as a worthy instance of daughterly affection and remarkable piety.\n\n\"A later magistrate had the story inscribed by Handan Chun in memory of the event. At that time Handan Chun was only thirteen, but the composition of the inscription was so perfect that neither jot nor tittle could be added, and yet he had written it impromptu without revision. The stone was set up beside the grave, and both inscription and story were the admiration of all the people of that day. My father went to see it. It was evening, but in the obscurity he felt out the inscription with his fingers. He got hold of a pencil and wrote eight large characters on the reverse of the stone and, later, some person recutting the stone engraved these eight words as well.\"\n\nCao Cao then read the eight words; they formed an enigma. Literally they read, \"yellow silk, young wife, a daughter's child, pestle and mortar.\"\n\n\"Can you explain?\" asked Cao Cao of his hostess.\n\n\"No. Although it is a writing of my father's, thy handmaid cannot interpret it,\" she replied.\n\nTurning to the strategists of his staff, Cao Cao said, \"Can anyone of you explain it?\"\n\nBut no one made any reply. Suddenly, they heard one voice, \"I have grasped the meaning of it.\"\n\nThe man who said he had fathomed the meaning was First Secretary Yang Xiu.\n\n\"Do not tell me yet. Let me think it out,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nSoon after they took leave of the lady, went out of the farm, and rode on. About one mile from the farm, the meaning suddenly dawned upon Cao Cao.\n\nHe laughingly turned to Yang Xiu, saying, \"Now, you may try.\"\n\n\"This is the solution of the enigma,\" said Yang Xiu. \"'Yellow silk' is silk threads of natural color, and the character for 'silk' placed beside that for 'color' forms a word meaning 'finally, decidedly'. The 'young wife' is a 'little female', and the character for 'female' with 'little', or 'few', placed beside it forms a word meaning 'admirable, fine'. The 'daughter's child' is 'daughter' and 'child', which side by side make the word 'good'. And a 'pestle and mortar' suggest pounding together the five bitter herbs in a receptacle: The character for 'receptacle' and 'bitter' form a word meaning 'to tell'. So the four words are 'Decidedly fine and well told.'\"\n\nCao Cao was astonished at Yang Xiu's cleverness, and said, \"Just what I made it.\"\n\nThose around greatly wondered at Yang Xiu's ingenuity and knowledge.\n\nIn less than a day they reached Nanzheng, where Cao Hong welcomed them. He told the tale of Zhang He's misfortunes.\n\n\"To suffer defeat is no crime,\" said Cao Cao. \"That and victory are things that happen constantly in war.\"\n\n\"Liu Bei has sent Huang Zhong to take Dingjun Mountain,\" said Cao Hong. \"Xiahou Yuan, hearing you were coming, O Prince, has been defending the position and not going out to give battle.\"\n\n\"But standing always on the defensive is showing weakness,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nThereupon he bade a man carry an authority ensign to the Mountain Commander and so order him to attack the enemy.\n\n\"Xiahou Yuan is very stern and inflexible, and he may be carried too far and fall victim to some vile ruse,\" said Liu Ye.\n\nWherefore the Prince wrote a letter to him to accompany the authority ensign. And when the messenger arrived and the letter was opened, it read:\n\n\"Every leader must exercise a combination of inflexibility and yielding. Boldness is not the only thing that counts; if he makes it so, then is he a mere creature to fight. Now I am camped at Nanzheng ready to watch the deeds of your admirable prowess and capacity, and all I have to say is, 'Do not disgrace your previous reputation.'\"\n\nThe letter pleased the commander mightily. Having sent away the bearer, Xiahou Yuan called in Zhang He to consult.\n\n\"The Prince has a great army at Nanzheng ready to destroy Liu Bei. We have been on the defense here long enough, and it is time we rendered some solid service. Tomorrow I am going out to battle, and hope to capture Huang Zhong.\"\n\n\"Your opponent combines ready resource with boldness and prevision,\" said Zhang He. \"Beside, he has Fa Zheng to aid him; and you must be cautious, for the country is very difficult and dangerous. You had better keep on the defensive.\"\n\n\"How shall we be able to look our prince in the face when other leaders render good services? However, you just keep the hill, and I will go out to battle.\"\n\nThen an order was issued asking who would go out to reconnoiter and provoke a battle. Xiahou Shang volunteered.\n\nXiahou Yuan said to him, \"You are not to make a real stand, but merely to begin the fight. You are to lose and not win, for a grand ruse is ready for the enemy.\"\n\nHe explained his plans, and Xiahou Shang went away with a small column.\n\nNow Huang Zhong and his helper Fa Zheng were camped quite close to the Dingjun Mountain. They had endeavored to entice Xiahou Yuan out into the field to fight, but failed to attack him as he stood in that difficult, mountainous country. So thus far no advance had been made. But as soon as Xiahou Shang's troops appeared and seemed to offer battle, Huang Zhong was ready to march out to meet them at once. But General Chen Shi, offered his services.\n\n\"Do not trouble yourself to move, O General,\" said Chen Shi, \"for I will go out to fight them.\"\n\nHuang Zhong consented, and placed three thousand troops under Chen Shi, who went out of the valley and set his army in array. And when Xiahou Shang came up and, as arranged, merely fought a few bouts and ran away. Chen Shi followed to take advantage of his success. But he was soon brought to a standstill by the rolling of logs and hurling of stones on the part of his opponents. As he turned to retire, Xiahou Yuan brought out his troops and attacked. Chen Shi had no chance against them and was quickly made prisoner. Many of his soldiers joined the enemy, but a few escaped to their own side and told Huang Zhong of the misfortune.\n\nHuang Zhong at once asked advice from Fa Zheng, who said, \"This Xiahou Yuan is easily provoked to anger, and being angry he is bold without discretion. Your way now is to work up the enthusiasm of your soldiers, then break camp and advance. Do this in a series of marches, and you will excite him up to the point of giving battle, when you can capture him. They call this the 'Ruse of the Interchange of Host and Guest'.\"\n\nSo Huang Zhong collected all the things his soldiers liked, and made them presents, till the sound of rejoicing filled the whole valley and the men were hot to fight. Then camp was broken, and the army marched forward a certain distance. Then they encamped. After some days' rest the march was repeated; and then again.\n\nWhen tidings of the advance reached Xiahou Yuan, he proposed to go out and fight.\n\n\"No, no,\" said the prudent Zhang He. \"This is a well known ruse, and you should remain on the defensive. You will lose if you fight.\"\n\nXiahou Yuan was not the man to stomach this moderate advice, so he sent out Xiahou Shang to give battle. As soon as this force reached the camp of Huang Zhong, the Veteran General mounted and rode out to fight. In the very first bout he captured Xiahou Shang. Those who escaped told how their leader had been captured, and Xiahou Yuan at once sent to offer an exchange of prisoners. This was agreed to, to be effected the following day in front of both armies.\n\nSo next day both sides were arrayed in a spot where the valley widened, the two leaders on horseback beneath their respective standards. Beside each stood his prisoner. Neither was encumbered with robe or helmet, but each wore thin, simple dress. At the first beat of the drum each started to race over to his own side. Just as Xiahou Shang reached the ranks of his own side, Huang Zhong shot an arrow and wounded him in the back. The wounded man did not fall, but went on.\n\nBut Xiahou Yuan, mad with rage, could contain himself no longer. He galloped straight at Huang Zhong, which was exactly what the latter wanted to irritate him into doing. The fight that then ensued went on for twenty bouts, when suddenly the gongs clanged out from Xiahou Yuan's side and he drew off. Huang Zhong pressed on and shattered the army of Wei.\n\nWhen Xiahou Yuan reached his own side, he asked why the gong had sounded.\n\n\"Because we saw the banners of Shu through openings in the mountains in several places, and we feared an ambush,\" said Zhang He.\n\nXiahou Yuan believed him and did not return to the battlefield. He simply remained defensive.\n\nBefore long, Huang Zhong had got quite near to Xiahou Yuan's camp, and then he asked further advice from his colleague.\n\nFa Zheng pointed over to the hills and said, \"There rises a steep hill on the west of Dingjun Mountain, difficult of access, but from its summit one has a complete view of the defenses of the enemy. If you can take this hill, the mountain lies in the hollow of your hand.\"\n\nHuang Zhong looked up and saw the top of the hill was a small tableland and there were very few defenders there. So that evening he left his camp, dashed up the hill, drove out the small host of one hundred under Xiahou Yuan's General Du Xi and took it. It was just opposite to Dingjun Mountain.\n\nThen said Fa Zheng, \"Now take up position half way up the hill, while I go to the top. When the enemy appears, I will show a white flag. But you will remain quiet till the enemy become tired and remiss, when I will hoist a red flag. That will be the signal for attack.\"\n\nHuang Zhong cheerfully prepared to act on this plan. In the meantime Du Xi, who had been driven from the hill-top, had run back and reported the loss of the hill to Xiahou Yuan.\n\n\"With Huang Zhong in occupation of that hill, I simply must give battle,\" said Xiahou Yuan.\n\nZhang He strongly dissuaded him, saying, \"The whole thing is but a ruse of Fa Zheng. General, you had better defend our position.\"\n\nBut Xiahou Yuan was obstinate.\n\n\"From the top of that hill the whole of our position is visible, our strength and our weakness. I must fight.\"\n\nIn vain were the remonstrances repeated. Xiahou Yuan set out his troops to surround the opposite hill and then began to vent his rage at his enemy so as to incite Huang Zhong to give battle.\n\nThen the white flag was hoisted. However, Xiahou Yuan was allowed to fume and rage in vain. He tried every form of insult, but no one appeared. In the afternoon the soldiers became weary and dispirited. Plainly their eagerness had gone; and Fa Zheng unfurled the red flag.\n\nThen the drums rolled out, and the men of Shu shouted till the earth seemed to shake as the hoary old leader rode out and led his force down the slope with a roar as of an earthquake. Xiahou Yuan was too surprised to defend himself. His chief enemy rushed straight to his standard. With a thundering shout, Huang Zhong raised his sword and cleft Xiahou Yuan through between the head and shoulders so that he fell in two pieces.\n\n\u2003Hoary headed is he, but he goes up to battle;\n\n\u2003Gray haired, yet recklessly mighty;\n\n\u2003With his strong arms he bends the bow,\n\n\u2003The arrows fly.\n\n\u2003With the swiftness of the wind he rides,\n\n\u2003The white sword gleams.\n\n\u2003The sound of his voice is as the roar of a tiger,\n\n\u2003His steed is fleet as a dragon in flight.\n\n\u2003Victory is his and its rich rewards,\n\n\u2003For he extends the domain of his lord.\n\nAt the death of their general, the soldiers of Wei fled for their lives, and Huang Zhong attacked Dingjun Mountain. Zhang He came out to oppose the army of Shu, but, attacked at two points by Huang Zhong and Chen Shi, he could not stand. He lost the day and fled. However, before he had gone far, another cohort flashed out from the hills and barred his way.\n\nAnd the leader cried out, \"Zhao Zilong of Changshan is here!\"\n\nConfused and uncertain what to do, Zhang He led his troops toward Dingjun Mountain. But a body of soldiers came out to stop him.\n\nThe leader was Du Xi, who said, \"The mountain is in the hands of Liu Feng and Meng Da!\"\n\nSo Zhang He and Du Xi joined their forces and went to River Han, where they camped. Thence they sent to tell Cao Cao of their defeat.\n\nAt the news of the death of Xiahou Yuan, Cao Cao uttered a great cry and then he understood the prediction of the soothsayer, Guan Lu, that the cast showed opposition: It was the twenty-fourth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (three and eight cross); the yellow boar (the month Xiahou Yuan died) had met the tiger; the expedition had suffered a loss indeed by the death of a general, and the death had taken place at the mount known as \"Army Halt\" (Dingjun). The affection between Cao Cao and his general had been very close, for he considered Xiahou Yuan as his limb.\n\nCao Cao sent to inquire the whereabouts of Guan Lu, but no one knew.\n\nCao Cao nourished feelings of resentment against the slayer of his friend, and he led his army out against Dingjun Mountain to avenge Xiahou Yuan's death. Xu Huang led the van. When the army reached River Han, Zhang He and Du Xi joined them.\n\nThey said to Cao Cao, \"Dingjun Mountain is lost. Before marching farther, the stores in Micang Mountain should be moved to the Northern Mountain.\"\n\nAnd Cao Cao agreed.\n\nHuang Zhong cut off the head of Xiahou Yuan and took it to Liu Bei when he reported his victory. For these services, Liu Bei conferred upon him the title General Who Conquers the West, and great banquets were given in his honor.\n\nWhile these were going on, General Zhang Zhu brought the news: \"Cao Cao's army of two hundred thousand troops is on the way to avenge Xiahou Yuan's loss; and the supplies on Micang Mountain are being moved to the Northern Mountain.\"\n\nThen said Zhuge Liang, \"Cao Cao is certainly short of supplies. If we can burn what he has and destroy his baggage train, he will have but little spirit left to fight.\"\n\n\"I am willing to undertake the task,\" said Huang Zhong.\n\n\"Remember Cao Cao is a different sort of man from Xiahou Yuan.\"\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Zhang He is the Escort Leader of the train. Though Xiahou Yuan was the Mountain Commander, after all he was but a bold warrior. It would have been ten times better to have killed Zhang He.\"\n\n\"I will go and kill him,\" said the aged general, firing up.\n\n\"Then go with Zhao Zilong,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Act in concert and see who can do best.\"\n\nHuang Zhong agreed to this condition, and Zhang Zhu was sent with him as Marching General.\n\nSoon after the army had marched out, Zhao Zilong asked of his colleague, \"What plan have you prepared against Cao Cao's army of two hundred thousand in their ten camps, and how are the stores of grain and forage to be destroyed?\"\n\n\"I am going to lead,\" said Huang Zhong.\n\n\"No wait. I am going first,\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"But I am the senior leader. You are only my second,\" said Huang Zhong.\n\n\"No. You and I are equal in responsibility and both anxious to render good service. We are no rivals. Let us cast lots for who is to lead the way.\"\n\nThey did so, and the Veteran General gained precedence.\n\n\"Since you have won the right to make the first attempt, you must let me help you,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"Now let us decide upon a fixed time, and if you have returned by that time, I shall not need to stir. But if at that time you have not come back, then I shall come to reinforce you.\"\n\n\"That suits me admirably,\" said Huang Zhong.\n\nSo they decided upon noon as the time.\n\nZhao Zilong went back to his own camp, where he called in his Deputy General, Zhang Yi, and said, \"My friend Huang Zhong is going to try to burn the stores tomorrow. If he has not returned at noon, I am to go to aid him. You are to guard our camp, which is in a dangerous place by the river, but you are not to move out unless compelled.\"\n\nHuang Zhong went back to his camp and said to his general, Zhang Zhu, \"I have slain Xiahou Yuan and cowed Zhang He. I am going to destroy the enemy's store of grain tomorrow, taking with me most of the troops. You are to come and assist me. A meal for the men is to be ready about midnight tonight, and we shall move at the fourth watch. We shall march to the foot of their hill, capture Zhang He, and then start the fire.\"\n\nAll being ready, they set out \u2014 Huang Zhong leading \u2014 and stole across River Han to the foot of the hills. As the sun got up out of the east, they saw before them mountains of grain and only a few guards on watch. These fled at first sight of the army of Shu. The horsemen dismounted and began to collect brushwood and pile it round the grain heaps. Just as they were starting the fire, there appeared a cohort led by Zhang He, who at once began a fight with Huang Zhong. Then Cao Cao heard of the fight and sent Xu Huang to help. Xu Huang came up in the rear, and Huang Zhong was surrounded. Zhang Zhu with three thousand troops tried to get away to their camp, but they were intercepted by Wen Ping; and more troops of Wei coming up by the rear, Zhang Zhu also was surrounded. Both were in difficulties.\n\nMeanwhile, time passed and noon came with no news of Huang Zhong. Wherefore Zhao Zilong girded on his armor, took three thousand troops with him and went to his aid. Just as he was leaving, he again warned Zhang Yi to keep good watch.\n\n\"Guard the camp most carefully. See that you have archers and crossbowmen on both sides.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" said Zhang Yi.\n\nZhao Zilong rode off, spear in hand, and went out to give battle where he could find the enemy. Soon he fell in with one of Wen Ping's companies led by General Murong Lie. Zhao Zilong plunged in, cut Murong Lie down, and disposed of the troops of Wei. Then he came to the real press. A cohort barred his way, led by General Jiao Bing.\n\n\"Where are the soldiers of Shu?\" cried Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"All killed!\" cried Jiao Bing.\n\nZhao Zilong angrily dashed forward and thrust Jiao Bing through so that he died. The cohort scattered, and Zhao Zilong went on to the foot of Northern Mountain, where he found Huang Zhong surrounded. With a yell Zhao Zilong dashed at the encircling ring, thrusting this way and shoving that, so that everyone shrank and recoiled before him. The mighty spear laid low his opponents like the whirlwind scatters the petals of the wild pear tree till they lie on the bosom of the earth like snowflakes. Panic seized Zhang He and Xu Huang so that they dared not stand in his way, and thus Zhao Zilong fought his way through and rescued his fellow warrior. Then they fought their way out and none could withstand them.\n\nCao Cao had been watching the course of the fighting from a high place, and when he saw a doughty warrior forcing his way into the press and all going down before him, he asked of his officers if they knew who the leader was.\n\n\"That is Zhao Zilong of Changshan,\" replied one who knew.\n\n\"So the hero of Dangyang is still alive,\" said Cao Cao, marveled.\n\nThen Cao Cao gave general orders to his soldiers not to attack Zhao Zilong without being sure of success, no matter where they met him.\n\nHaving rescued his colleague and got clear of the battle, Zhao Zilong was told Zhang Zhu hemmed in on a hill not far off. Wherefore Zhao Zilong went to his relief before going back to his own camp. He had little need to fight, for Cao Cao's soldiers no sooner saw the name emblazoned on the banners than they fled without more ado.\n\nBut it filled Cao Cao with rage to see his troops falling away before Zhao Zilong, who marched on as though no one would think of standing in his way, and Cao Cao went in pursuit himself with his officers.\n\nZhao Zilong reached his own camp, where he was welcomed by Zhang Yi. But a cloud of dust was seen in the distance, and they knew Cao Cao was in that cloud and coming upon them.\n\n\"Let us bar the gates while we make preparation,\" said Zhang Yi.\n\n\"Do not bar the gates,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"Have you never heard of my exploit at Dangyang, when I laughed at Cao Cao's many legions? Now that I have an army at my back and generals to help, what is there to fear?\"\n\nThen Zhao Zilong placed the archers and the bowmen in a covered position outside, while he threw down all the weapons and flags within. And no drums beat. But he himself, alone, stood outside the gate of the camp.\n\nIt was dusk when Zhang He and Xu Huang neared the camp of the army of Shu. They saw that the ensigns and weapons had been overthrown, and no drums beat at their approach. They also saw the one figure of the doughty warrior at the gate, and then they halted and dared advance no farther. While they hesitated, Cao Cao arrived and urged his army to march quicker. They answered with a shout and made a dash forward, but they saw the one figure at the gate, and every man halted. And before long, one by one they turned about and went away.\n\nThen Zhao Zilong gave a signal to his troops to come out of the moat, and the archers and bowmen began to shoot. The soldiers of Cao Cao knew not in the dusk how many their enemies were, but terror seized upon them and they ran, each trying to be first. And as they ran, the drums rolled, and the soldiers of Shu shouted and pursued, till the flight became a perfect rout and a confused mass of troops reached the banks of River Han. The press continuing, many soldiers of Cao Cao were forced into the river and were drowned.\n\nZhao Zilong, Huang Zhong, and Zhang Zhu followed close on the heels of the routed army. While Cao Cao was making off with all speed, two other generals of Shu, Liu Feng and Meng Da, came from Micang Mountain and set fire to all the army stores of food and forage in Northern Mountain. Then Cao Cao abandoned the stores in Northern Mountain and set out hastily for Nanzheng. Zhang He and Xu Huang could make no stand, and they also abandoned their camps, which Zhao Zilong at once occupied. Beside the stores of food, the victors collected countless weapons along the banks of the river.\n\nThey sent news of the victory to Liu Bei, who came with Zhuge Liang to the scene of the victory, and there they heard the full story of Zhao Zilong's prowess. Liu Bei was very glad, and when he had seen the steepness and difficulties of the surrounding hills, he understood the fine deeds of valor that had been done.\n\nTurning to Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei said, \"Truly, the man is brave all through!\"\n\n\u2003Behold Zhao Zilong of Changshan,\n\n\u2003Whose whole body is valor;\n\n\u2003Formerly he fought at Dangyang,\n\n\u2003And his courage today is no less.\n\n\u2003He rushes into the array to manifest heroism;\n\n\u2003Surrounded by his enemies,\n\n\u2003He is dauntless and daring.\n\n\u2003Devils howl and spirits cry,\n\n\u2003The sky is afraid and earth trembles.\n\n\u2003Such is Zhao Zilong, the brave,\n\n\u2003Whose whole body is valor.\n\nFor his services Liu Bei gave Zhao Zilong the title of General Who Possesses Tiger Prowess. And the soldiers of his army were rewarded, and there was banqueting to a late hour.\n\nSoon it was reported: \"Cao Cao is coming again down through the Xie Valley to try to capture River Han.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei laughed, saying, \"He will not succeed, for I think that we shall gain command of the river.\"\n\nThen Liu Bei led his army west of the river to oppose Cao Cao. When Cao Cao drew near, he sent out Xu Huang to lead the van and open the battle.\n\nA General named Wang Ping said, \"I know the country well, and I wish to help General Xu Huang to destroy the army of Shu.\"\n\nWang Ping was sent as second in command.\n\nCao Cao camped on the north of Dingjun Mountain, and his advanced guard marched away making for River Han. And when they reached the bank, Xu Huang gave orders to cross to the other side.\n\n\"To cross the river is well,\" said Wang Ping, \"but what if you have to retreat?\"\n\n\"Of old, when Han Xin made his array with a river in his rear, he said that out of the place of death one could return to life.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken now. The cases are not the same, for then Han Xin knew his opponents were unskillful. Have you reckoned upon the skill of our opponents, Zhao Zilong and Huang Zhong?\"\n\n\"You may lead the footmen to hold the enemy while I destroy them with the horsemen,\" said Xu Huang.\n\nThen bridges were built and the army crossed.\n\n\u2003A man of Wei wildly quoted Han Xin,\n\n\u2003A minister of Shu would be another Zhang Liang?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Zhuge Liang's Wit Takes Hanzhong; Cao Cao's Army Retires To The Ye Valley.\n\nIn spite of the most earnest dissuasion, Xu Huang crossed the river and camped. Huang Zhong and Zhao Zilong asked to be allowed to go against the host of Cao Cao, and Liu Bei gave his consent.\n\nThen said Huang Zhong, \"Xu Huang has been bold enough to come. We will not go out against him till evening, when his soldiers are fatigued. Then we will fall upon him one on either side.\"\n\nZhao Zilong consented, and each retired to a stockade. Xu Huang appeared and for a long time tried to draw them into a fight, but they refused to go forth. Then Xu Huang ordered his bowmen to begin to shoot straight before them, and the arrows and bolts fell in the Shu camp.\n\nHuang Zhong said, \"He must be thinking of retreat, or he would not shoot thus. Now is our time to smite him.\"\n\nThen the scouts reported that the rearmost bodies of the enemy had begun to retreat. The drums of Shu rolled a deafening peal, and Huang Zhong's army from the left and Zhao Zilong's army from the right came to the attack, and the double fight began. Xu Huang was badly defeated, and the flying soldiers were forced to River Han, where many were drowned. But Xu Huang escaped after fighting desperately, and when he got back to camp, he blamed his colleague Wang Ping for not having come to his aid.\n\n\"Had I done so, these camps would have been left unguarded,\" said Wang Ping. \"I tried to dissuade you from going, but you would not hear me, and you brought about this reverse yourself.\"\n\nXu Huang in his wrath tried to slay Wang Ping, but Wang Ping escaped to his own camp. In the night, Wang Ping set fire on both camps, and great confusion reigned in the lines. Xu Huang ran away, but Wang Ping crossed the river and surrendered to Zhao Zilong, who led him to Liu Bei. Wang Ping told Liu Bei all about River Han and the country near by.\n\n\"I shall surely capture Hanzhong now that you are here to help me, friend Wang Ping,\" said Liu Bei.\n\nLiu Bei made Wang Ping General and Army Guide.\n\nXu Huang reported Wang Ping's defection, which made Cao Cao very angry. Cao Cao placed himself at the head of a force and tried to retake the bank of the river.\n\nZhao Zilong, thinking his troops too few, retired to the west side, and the two armies lay on opposite sides of the stream. Liu Bei and his adviser came down to view the position. Zhuge Liang saw in the upper course of the stream a hill which might well screen a thousand soldiers.\n\nSo Zhuge Liang returned to camp, called in Zhao Zilong and said, \"General, you lead five hundred troops, with drums and horns, and place them in ambush behind the hill, to await certain orders which will come some time during the night or at dawn. When you hear a detonation, you are not to appear, only give a long roll of the drums at every report.\"\n\nZhao Zilong departed to play his part in the drama, while Zhuge Liang went to a hill whence he could overlook the scene.\n\nWhen next the army of Cao Cao approached the camp of Shu and offered battle, not a man came out, nor was an arrow or a bolt shot. They retired without any result. But in the depths of the night, when all the lights in the camp were extinguished and all appeared tranquil and restful, Zhuge Liang exploded a bomb, and at once Zhao Zilong beat his drums and blared his trumpets. Cao Cao's soldiers awoke in alarm, thinking it was a night raid. They rushed out, but there was no enemy, and as the hubbub ceased they went back to sleep. Soon after there was another bomb, and again the drums and the trumpets seeming to shake the earth itself, and the fearsome roar echoing along the valleys and from the hills again scared Cao Cao's soldiers. Thus the night passed in constant alarms. The next night was the same, and the next. On the fourth day Cao Cao broke up his camp, marched his troops ten miles to the rear and pitched his camp in a clear, wide space among the hills.\n\nZhuge Liang was pleased at the result of his ruse. Said he, smiling, \"Cao Cao is skilled in war, but still he is not proof against all deceitful tricks.\"\n\nThe troops of Shu then crossed the river and camped with the stream behind them. When Liu Bei asked the next move, he was told, but also told to keep the plan a secret.\n\nSeeing Liu Bei thus encamped, Cao Cao became doubtful and anxious, and, to bring things to a decision, he sent a written declaration of war, to which Zhuge Liang replied that they would fight a battle on the morrow.\n\nOn the morrow the armies faced each other half way between the two camps in front of the Mountain of Five Borders, and there they arrayed. Cao Cao presently rode up stood beside his banner, with his officers right and left and the dragon and phoenix banners fluttering in the wind. His drums rolled thrice, and then he summoned Liu Bei to a parley. Liu Bei rode out supported by Liu Feng, Meng Da, and other leaders. Then Cao Cao insolently flourizshed his whip and vilified his opponent.\n\n\"Liu Bei, you have forgotten kindness and lost the sense of right. You are a rebel against the government.\"\n\nLiu Bei answered, \"I am related to the imperial family, and I hold an edict authorizing me to seize all rebels. You have dared to lift up your hand against Empress Fu, made yourself a king, and arrogantly presume to an imperial chariot. If you are not a rebel, what are you?\"\n\nThen Cao Cao ordered Xu Huang out to give battle, and Liu Feng went to meet him. As the combat began, Liu Bei retired within the ranks of his array. Liu Feng was no match for his opponent, and fled.\n\nCao Cao issued an order to capture Liu Bei, saying, \"He who captures Liu Bei will be made Prince of Hanzhong!\"\n\nAt this the army of Wei uttered one great roar of rage, then they came surging on. The troops of Shu fled toward the river abandoning everything, even throwing aside their weapons, which littered the road. But as Cao Cao's army pressed forward, he suddenly clanged the gongs, called a halt and drew off.\n\n\"Why did you call us off, O Prince, just as we were on the point of success?\" said his commanders.\n\n\"Because I saw the enemy had encamped with the river in their rear, which was very suspicious. They also abandoned their steeds and weapons, which made me doubt. Wherefore I could only retire. But retain your armor. Let not a person take off his harness on pain of death. Now retire as quickly as you can march.\"\n\nAs Cao Cao turned about to retire, Zhuge Liang hoisted the signal to attack, and the retreating soldiers were harassed on every side both night and day till they were all disordered. Cao Cao ordered his army to retire to Nanzheng.\n\nPresently they saw flames rising all around, and soon it was known that their city of refuge was in the hands Zhang Fei and Wei Yan, who, after Yan Yan had taken the command of Langzhong, had launched a double attack and captured Nanzheng. Disappointed and saddened, Cao Cao bade them march to Yangping Pass. Liu Bei with the main army followed them to Baozhou and Nanzheng and there pacified the people and restored confidence.\n\n\"Cao Cao was exceedingly quickly overcome this time,\" said Liu Bei. \"How was that?\"\n\n\"He has always been of a suspicious nature,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"and that has led to many failures although he is a good leader of armies. I have defeated him by playing upon his doubts.\"\n\n\"He is rather weakened now,\" said Liu Bei. \"Can you not devise a plan to drive him away finally?\"\n\n\"That is all thought out.\"\n\nNext Zhang Fei and Wei Yan were sent along two different roads to cut off Cao Cao's supplies. Two other cohorts led by Huang Zhong and Zhao Zilong were bidden to go and fire the hills and forests. All these four armies had natives of the place to act as guides and show the way.\n\nCao Cao's scouts sent out from Yangping Pass returned to report: \"The roads far and near are blocked by the troops of Shu, and every place seems to be burning. No soldier is seen.\"\n\nCao Cao knew not what to do. Then other scouts told him, \"Our stores are being plundered by Zhang Fei and Wei Yan.\"\n\nAt this, Cao Cao called for a volunteer to drive off the plunderers; and Xu Chu offered. He was given a thousand veterans, and went down the Pass to act as escort of the grain wagons.\n\nThe officers in charge of the transport were very glad to receive a general of such renown.\n\n\"Except for you, O General, the grain could never reach Yangping Pass.\"\n\nThey entertained Xu Chu with the wine and food on the carts; and he ate and drank copiously, so that he became very intoxicated. And in that state he insisted on marching, urging the convoy to start at once.\n\n\"The sun has nearly set,\" said the transport officers, \"and the road near Baozhou is bad and dangerous, so that we cannot pass there at night.\"\n\n\"I can face any danger,\" boasted the drunken general. \"I am brave as a myriad men put together. What do you think I fear? Beside, there is a good moon tonight, just the sort of thing to take grain carts along by.\"\n\nXu Chu took the lead, sword in hand. By the second watch they were passing Baozhou. About half the train had passed when the rolling drums and the blare of horns came down to them through a rift in the hills. It was soon followed by the appearance of a cohort led by Zhang Fei. With spear ready, he came racing down straight for Xu Chu, who, whirling his sword, dashed to the front to meet the enemy.\n\nBut Xu Chu was too drunk to stand against such a warrior. After a few bouts he received a spear thrust in the shoulder, turned round in his saddle, and fell from his horse. His men rushed to his help, and they carried him away as they retreated, while Zhang Fei took the whole transport train of fodder and forage away to his own camp.\n\nThe defeated escort carried their wounded leader back to Cao Cao's camp, where he was placed in the care of physicians. Then Cao Cao himself led out his army to fight a decisive battle with the army of Shu. Liu Bei went out to meet him, and, when both sides were arrayed, Liu Feng went out to challenge. Cao Cao at once let loose a torrent of taunts and reproaches.\n\n\"Seller of shoes, you are always sending out this pretended son of yours to fight for you! If I only call my golden-bearded son Cao Zhang, your so-called son will be chopped to mincemeat!\"\n\nThese words enraged Liu Feng, who raised his spear and galloped toward Cao Cao. Cao Cao bade Xu Huang do battle with the young man, and Liu Feng at once ran away. Cao Cao led on his legions, but he was harassed by the explosion of bombs, the beating of drums, and the blare of trumpets that came from every side. He concluded that he was being led into an ambush, and he hastened to retire. The retreat was unfortunate, for the soldiers trampled upon each other and many were killed. Anon they all ran off to Yangping Pass as quickly as they could.\n\nBut the soldiers of Shu came right up to the walls of the Pass, and some burned the east gate while others shouted at the west. Others, again, burned the north gate while drums rolled at the south. Leaders and led were alike harassed and frightened, and presently they left the Pass and ran away. They were pursued and sore smitten.\n\nThe road to safety was not easy. In one direction Zhang Fei barred the way, while Zhao Zilong attacked the rear. Then Huang Zhong came from Baozhou and pressed a slaughter on the flank. Cao Cao's army lost many troops, and he was severely defeated in this triple attack. His commanders gathered about him and took him off toward the Xie Valley. Here a great cloud of dust was seen in the distance.\n\n\"If that is an ambush, it is the last of me,\" sighed Cao Cao.\n\nThe soldiers came nearer, and then Cao Cao recognized not a enemy but his second son, Cao Zhang. As a lad Cao Zhang was a good horseman and an expert archer. He was more powerful than most men and could overcome a wild beast with his bare hands. Cao Cao did not approve of the young man's bent, and often warned him to study instead.\n\n\"You do not study, but only love your bow and your horse; this is the courage of a mere person. Think you that this makes for an honorable career?\"\n\nBut Cao Zhang replied, \"The really noble person ought to imitate such grand men as Wei Qing and Huo Qubing. They won their reputation in the Gobi Desert, where they led a mighty host of hundred thousand, able to overrun the whole world and go anywhere. What have I to do with scholarship?\"\n\nCao Cao used to ask his sons what career they found admirable, and Cao Zhang always replied that he would be a leader of armies.\n\n\"But what should a leader be like?\" asked Cao Cao.\n\n\"He should be endued with firmness and courage, never turn aside from a difficulty, but be in the van of his officers and troops. Rewards should be certain; and so should punishments.\"\n\nCao Cao smiled with pleasure.\n\nIn the twenty-third year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 218), the Wuhuan Peoples revolted in Daichun, and Cao Cao sent this son with fifty thousand troops to suppress them. Just as Cao Zhang was leaving, his father read him a homily on his duty.\n\n\"At home we are father and son, but when a task is given you, you have to consider your duty as a servant of your ruler. The law knows no kindness, and you must beware.\"\n\nWhen the expedition reached the north of Daichun, Cao Zhang led the array and smote as far as Sanggan in the Gobi Desert, and peace was restored. He had lately heard that his father was at Yangping Pass, and had come to help him to fight.\n\nHis coming greatly pleased his father, who said, \"Now that my golden-bearded son has arrived, we can destroy Liu Bei for certain.\"\n\nThen the army was marched back again and pitched camp at the Xie Valley.\n\nSomeone told Liu Bei of the arrival of Cao Zhang, and he asked for a volunteer to go out against the newcomer. Liu Feng offered. Meng Da also desired to go, and Liu Bei decided to let both go.\n\n\"Vie with each other,\" said he.\n\nEach general had five thousand troops, and Liu Feng led the way. Cao Zhang rode out and engaged him, and in the third bout Liu Feng was overcome and ran off. Then Meng Da advanced, and a battle was just beginning when he saw that Cao Cao's troops were in confusion. The cause was the sudden coming of Ma Chao and Wu Lan. Before the enemy had recovered from the panic, Meng Da attacked on another side. Ma Chao's force, who had been nursing their courage for a long time, fought brilliantly, so that none could withstand their onslaught, and they won the day. But in his flight, Cao Zhang met Wu Lan, and he thrust and slew Wu Lan with his spear.\n\nAfter a great fight, Cao Cao ordered his army to retire into camp at the Xie Valley. Here he remained many days, prevented from advancing by Ma Chao and fearing the ridicule of Shu if he should retreat. One day, while he was anxiously trying to decide what to do, his cook sent in some chicken broth. He noticed in the broth some chicken tendons, and this simple fact led him into a train of reflection. He was still deep in thought when Xiahou Dun entered his tent to ask the watchword for that night.\n\nCao Cao at once involuntarily replied, \"Chicken tendon.\"\n\nThe word was passed on in orders. When First Secretary Yang Xiu saw the order that the watchword was \"chicken tendon,\" he told all his people to pack up their belongings ready for the march. One who saw this went and told Xiahou Dun, who sent for Yang Xiu and asked why he had packed up.\n\nYang Xiu replied, \"By tonight's orders I see that the Prince of Wei is soon going to retire. 'Chicken tendons' are tasteless things to eat, and yet it is a pity to waste them. Now if we advance, we cannot conquer; and if we retire, we fear we shall look ridiculous. There being no advantage here, the best course is to retire. You will certainly see the Prince of Wei retreat before long. I have made my preparations so as not to be hurried and confused at the last moment.\"\n\n\"You seem to know the Prince's inmost heart,\" said Xiahou Dun, and he bade his servants pack. The other generals seeing this, also made preparations for departure.\n\nCao Cao's mind was too perturbed for sleep. In the night he got up, took a steel battle-ax in his hand, and wandered privily through the camp. When he got to Xiahou Dun's tents, he saw everything packed and ready for a move. Much surprised, he made his way back to his own tent and sent for that officer.\n\n\"Why is everything in your camp packed as if ready for the march?\"\n\n\"First Secretary Yang Xiu seems to have private knowledge of the Prince's design to retire,\" said Xiahou Dun.\n\nCao Cao summoned Yang Xiu and questioned him, and Yang Xiu replied with the chicken tendon incident.\n\n\"How dare you invent such a story and disturb the hearts of my army?\"\n\nCao Cao called in his lictors and told them to take Yang Xiu away and behead him and hang his head at the camp gate.\n\nYang Xiu was a man of acute and ingenious mind, but inclined to show off. His lack of restraint over his tongue had often wounded Cao Cao's susceptibilities. Once Cao Cao was having a pleasance laid out, and when it was completed, he went to inspect the work. He uttered no word of praise or blame; he just wrote the word \"Alive\" on the gate and left. Nobody could guess what he meant till Yang Xiu heard of it.\n\n\"'Gate' with 'Alive' inside it makes the word for 'wide',\" said he. \"The Prime Minister thinks the gates are too wide.\"\n\nThereupon they rebuilt the outer walls on an altered plan. When complete, Cao Cao was asked to go and see it. And he was then delighted.\n\n\"But who guessed what I meant?\" said he.\n\n\"Yang Xiu,\" replied his people.\n\nCao Cao thereafter lauded Yang Xiu's ingenuity, but in his heart he feared.\n\nAnother time Cao Cao received a box of cream cheese from Mongolia. Cao Cao just scribbled three words \"One Cream Box\" on the top and left it on the table. The words seemed to have no meaning. But Yang Xiu happened to come in, saw the box, and at once handed a spoonful of the contents to each guest in the room. When Cao Cao asked why he did this, he explained that that was the interpretation of the words on the box, which, resolved into primary symbols, read, \"Each person a mouthful.\"\n\n\"Could I possibly disobey your orders?\" said he.\n\nCao Cao laughed with the others, but hatred was in his heart.\n\nCao Cao lived in constant fear of assassination, and said to his attendants, \"Let none of you come near me when I am sleeping, for I am likely to slay people in my dreams.\"\n\nOne day he was enjoying a siesta, and his quilt fell off. One of the attendants saw it and hastened to cover him again. Cao Cao suddenly leaped from the couch, cut down the intruder with his sword, and lay down again to sleep. Some time after he awoke, simulated surprise and asked who had killed his attendant. When they told him, Cao Cao wept aloud for the dead man and had him buried in a fine grave. Most people thought that Cao Cao had slain the man while asleep, but Yang Xiu knew better.\n\nAt the funeral of the victim Yang Xiu remarked, \"The Prime Minister was in no dream, but only you were asleep.\"\n\nThis only increased the hatred.\n\nCao Cao's third son, Cao Zhi, took great delight in Yang Xiu's cleverness and often invited him, when they would talk the whole night.\n\nWhen Cao Cao was considering the nomination of his heir and desired to name Cao Zhi, Cao Pi got to hear of the proposal to set him aside in favor of his younger brother, so he secretly requested the Master of the Court Singers, Wu Zhi, to come and discuss this matter. Then fearing that someone might see his visitor, Cao Pi got a large basket made, in which his friend was smuggled into the Palace. Cao Pi gave out that the basket contained rolls of silk. Yang Xiu heard the truth and informed Cao Cao, who sent guards to watch at the gates.\n\nCao Pi, in alarm, told Wu Zhi, who said, \"Be not afraid, but to fill a basket actually with rolls of silk on the morrow and have it carried in as before.\"\n\nThe searchers peeped into the basket and found the rolls of silk. They told Cao Cao the result of their search, and Cao Cao began to think Yang Xiu was plotting against his son. This also added to his hatred.\n\nAnother time Cao Cao, wishing to compare the abilities of his two sons Cao Pi and Cao Zhi, told them both to go out of the city, at the same time ordering the gate wardens to forbid their exit. Cao Pi first came to the gate, was stopped by the wardens, and returned to his palace.\n\nBut his brother Cao Zhi consulted Yang Xiu, who said, \"You have received orders from the Prince to go out. Simply cut down any who may try to prevent you.\"\n\nWhen Cao Zhi went to the gate and was stopped, he shouted out to the wardens, \"I have the Prince's order to go out. Dare you stop me?\"\n\nHe slew the man who would have prevented him. Wherefore Cao Cao considered his younger son the more able. But when some other person told him that the device came from Yang Xiu, he was angry and took a dislike to his son Cao Zhi.\n\nYang Xiu also used to coach Cao Zhi in preparing replies to likely questions, which were learned by heart and quoted when necessary. Cao Cao was always asking this son his opinion on military matters, and Cao Zhi always had a fluent reply ready. His father was not without suspicions, which were turned into certainties when Cao Pi gave his father the written replies which Cao Pi had bribed a servant to filch from his brother's apartments. Cao Cao was quite angry.\n\n\"How dare he throw dust in my eyes like this?\" said Cao Cao.\n\nYang Xiu very nearly lost his life for his share in that business. Now sending him to execution on the charge of destroying the morale of the soldiers was only a subterfuge. Yang Xiu was but thirty-four when he met his end.\n\n\u2003Talented was Yang Xiu,\n\n\u2003Born of an illustrious stock,\n\n\u2003His pen traced wonderful characters,\n\n\u2003In his breast were beautiful words.\n\n\u2003When he talked, his hearers were astonished,\n\n\u2003His alert responses overpast everyone.\n\n\u2003He died because of misdirected genius\n\n\u2003And not because he foretold retreat.\n\nCao Cao thus put to death the prime mover and simulated anger against Xiahou Dun. He threatened to execute Xiahou Dun, but listened to those who begged him to show mercy.\n\n\"Get out of this!\" said he.\n\nNext he issued an order to advance on the morrow. The army moved out of the valley and came face to face with the troops of Shu led by Wei Yan. He summoned Wei Yan to surrender, but received abuse and contumely in return.\n\nPang De went out to fight Wei Yan. But while the combat was in progress, fires broke out in Cao Cao's camp, and a soldier came flying to say that the rear and center camps had been seized by Ma Chao.\n\nFearing lest this should lead to a rout, he drew his sword and stood before the army, crying out, \"Death for any officer who flinches!\"\n\nWherefore the men of Wei pressed forward valiantly, and Wei Yan, pretending defeat, retreated. Having driven back this army, Cao Cao gave the signal to turn toward camp and fight with Ma Chao. He took up his station on the top of a hill whence he could survey the field.\n\nSuddenly a cohort appeared just below him, and the leader cried, \"Wei Yan is here!\"\n\nWei Yan fitted an arrow to his bow, shot, and wounded Cao Cao right in his lip. Cao Cao turned and fell. Wei Yan threw aside his bow, seized his sword, and came charging up the hill to finish his enemy. But with a shouting Pang De flashed in.\n\n\"Spare my lord!\" cried Pang De.\n\nHe rushed up and drove Wei Yan backward. Then they took Cao Cao away. Ma Chao also retired, and the wounded prince slowly returned to his own camp.\n\nCao Cao was wounded full in the face, and the arrow knocked out two of his front teeth. When in the hands of the physicians, he lay thinking over Yang Xiu's words. In a repentant mood he had Yang Xiu's remains decently interred.\n\nThen he gave the order to retreat. Pang De was the rear guard. Cao Cao set out homeward in a padded carriage, escorted by his Tiger Guards.\n\nBefore they had gone far, there was an alarm of fire and ambush in the Xie Valley. The soldiers of Wei were all fear-stricken.\n\n\u2003That was something like the danger once at Tong Pass met,\n\n\u2003Or like the fight at the Red Cliffs which no one could never forget." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Liu Bei Becomes The Prince Of Hanzhong; Guan Yu Marches To Attack Xiangyang.\n\nWhen Cao Cao retired to the Xie Valley, Zhuge Liang considered it to mean the abandonment of his attempt to acquire possession of Hanzhong. So Zhuge Liang sent out Ma Chao and a dozen parties to harass and hasten Cao Cao's retreat. For this reason the retreating army had to keep on the move. Beside, Cao Cao was suffering from his wound, and he marched as hurriedly as possible. But it was a dejected army, when the leading legions encountered fire on both flanks, which had been raised by troops placed in ambush while Ma Chao's main force kept driving the army before it. Everyone in the Cao Cao army was dispirited, and there was no more courage in them. They pressed forward day and night alike without halting to rest. It was only after reaching Jingzhao that they had some repose.\n\nHaving conquered Hanzhong, Liu Bei sent Liu Feng, Meng Da, and Wang Ping to take Shangyong. The Commander of the city, Shen Dan, and his colleagues, knowing that Cao Cao had retreated, offered their submission. After confidence had been restored among the people, Liu Bei rewarded his army generously, and they were all joyful.\n\nIt was after this that the general body of the officers decided to urge Liu Bei to assume the title of \"Emperor\", but they dared not tell him so. However, they sent up a petition to Zhuge Liang.\n\nHe replied, I have already decided on this course.\n\nSo Zhuge Liang and Fa Zheng headed a deputation that went in to see their lord.\n\nThey said, \"Now that Cao Cao really holds the reins of authority, the people are without a true sovereign. Our lord, your kindness and sense of justice have spread throughout the empire. You have restored peace over the two River Lands, and your becoming an emperor would be according to God's will and the desire of the people. Then by right and title you could destroy rebels. This matter should not be delayed, and we pray you choose the auspicious day.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei evinced great surprise, and replied, \"Your words, O Instructor, are wrong. Although I am of the imperial house, yet I am but a minister. And to do this thing would be rebellion against Han.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Not so. Today the empire is riven, and many of the bolder spirits have seized upon and claim the rule of various portions. The talented of the empire and the virtuous among officers, who have risked death and lost their lives in serving those above them, all desire to have the opportunity of serving a true emperor and doing service for a true Throne. Now, if you insist on modestly maintaining your righteous way, I fear that you will lose popular support. My lord, I wish that you should reflect upon this.\"\n\n\"But you desire me to usurp a place of great honor in the state, and I dare not. Let there be more delay and discussion.\"\n\nBut with one voice they said, \"Our lord, if you reject this, the hearts of the people will turn from you!\"\n\n\"My lord,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"you have made rectitude your motto all your life. If you really object to the most honored title, then, since you have Jingzhou, Yizhou, and Hanzhong, take temporarily the title of 'Prince of Hanzhong'.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen, though you may desire to honor me by the title of Prince, yet, without an edict from the Emperor, such action would be usurpation.\"\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"The time demands recognition of the actual state of authority, and not a rigid adherence to all the rules of propriety.\"\n\nAnd Zhang Fei roared out, \"All sorts of people with all sorts of names are making themselves rulers: How much more ought you, brother, who are of the dynastic stock? It ought not to be Prince of Hanzhong but Emperor. What prevents it?\"\n\n\"Brother, say no more,\" said Liu Bei, roughly.\n\n\"My lord,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"it is fitting to follow political changes and suit one's conduct to circumstances. Wherefore first take the princedom, and then memorialize the Throne.\"\n\nLiu Bei declined two or three times; but as there seemed no other option, he listened and complied. In the twenty-fourth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity (AD 219), in the seventh month, an altar was set up at Mianyang, half a square mile, which was set around with the proper flags and banners and symbols. In the presence of all his civil and military officers assembled according to their rank, and at the request of the two Ministers Xu Jing and Fa Zheng, Liu Bei received the headdress and seat of a prince. Then he took his seat, facing the south as a ruler should, and received the salutes and felicitations of all his officers as the Prince of Hanzhong. And his son Liu Shan was nominated his heir-apparent.\n\nXu Jing was given the title of Imperial Guardian; Fa Zheng that of Chair of the Secretariat. Zhuge Liang was reappointed Directing Instructor of the Forces, with the additional powers of control over the whole state policy. Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Zilong, Huang Zhong, and Ma Chao were the Five Tiger Generals. Wei Yan was made Governor of Hanzhong, and all the others who had assisted were given ranks and offices.\n\nAs soon as the investiture was completed, Liu Bei composed a memorial and sent it to Capital Xuchang. This is the document:\n\n\"I, Liu Bei, have but ordinary talents, yet was I made a general of high rank and led a great army. Though I received a commission to purge the empire of rebels, I was unable to cleanse it and so renew the tranquillity to Your Majesty's house and restore the dynasty. Too long have I delayed to spread Your Majesty's sacred governance. The world is evil and not in good case, and as I sorrowfully think it over and over, I am distressed as one in severe pain.\n\n\"Rebellion began with Dong Zhuo, and all kinds of evils have spread abroad; cruelty and ferocity have become rife. Strong in faith in Your Majesty's sacred virtue and inspiring presence, many banded together to help. The loyal exerted themselves to destroy the rebels, but others of them were smitten of heaven. The fierce and the contumacious have been exterminated, and gradually rebellion has melted away.\n\n\"Only Cao Cao now remains, too long unpunished. He has arrogated to himself the authority of the state. His wicked heart is very rebellious. Once I, with General Dong Cheng, the State Uncle, conspired against him, but the plot was discovered and my fellow conspirator suffered. Thenceforward I was a wanderer and my loyalty availed nothing. It only allowed Cao Cao further license and liberty to do evil, till he dared even to accomplish the death of the Empress and the destruction of her sons. Although we might band together and form associations, yet, with all our energy, we had to recognize that we were too weak for war. Wherefore the years passed and nothing was accomplished. In constant fear of destruction, we even fear more lest our duty to the state be forgotten. Waking and sleeping we sighed, and our nights were times of anxiety.\n\n\"Now my fellows consider that history has repeated itself. They attach the utmost importance to the family and would manifest it with all their might. Hereditary succession of rulers is still a principle. The rulers of Zhou, taking the two preceding dynasties as models, strengthened its clan's position through all the states, and it reinforced itself with the support of the states of Jing and Zheng. When the great Founder of Han came into his own, he ennobled his whole family with kingships and lordships. Later, the dynasty had to issue a general command throughout the whole of the nine regions in order to destroy the widespread Lu Family and to enhance the Liu Family.\n\n\"Now Cao Cao is an enemy of all rectitude, and his followers are all evil. His treachery is manifest. Since the members of the imperial clan are few and weak, the clan is not honored. Having reflected upon the ancient models and being desirous of temporary alleviation, my fellows have made me assume the title of Prince of Hanzhong with the addition of Regent Marshal.\n\n\"I have deeply considered these things. If one receives kindness from the Throne and accepts the responsibility for a portion of the state and fail, then such a fault would only be made the more serious by holding high rank and thereby increasing the burden of reproach. But my fellows have urged me, and they have convinced me that it would be right; and, should I refuse, the wicked will not be destroyed and the danger to the state will not be removed. The temple of our ancestors is in danger, and the imperial prerogatives are failing. A faithful servant, who in the day of tribulation can undertake a suitable policy whereby to preserve the dynasty, should not refuse his help at any cost. Wherefore I have yielded and accepted the position for the glory of the state.\n\n\"Humbly I think of such a title and its exalted position and the favor vouchsafed me, and I would endeavor to show true gratitude. My anxiety is deep, for the responsibility is heavy. I am as one on the brink of a great gulf. I must surely exert myself to the utmost and encourage my armies and lead all disciples of rectitude, in accordance with the will of Heaven and as occasion serves, to smite rebellion so as to restore the dynasty.\"\n\nWhen this memorial reached Capital Xuchang, Cao Cao was in the Palace at Yejun, and it annoyed him greatly.\n\n\"How dare this mean weaver of straw shoes behave thus?\" said he. \"Now I swear that I will destroy him.\"\n\nSo he issued orders for the whole force of the state to go out against the two River Lands to wage fierce war with the new Prince of Hanzhong.\n\nBut a remonstrance came from the mouth of one man.\n\n\"Let not the great Prince of Wei trouble himself to go on a distant expedition because of a temporary annoyance. I can propose a plan of which the execution will need not the bending of a single bow, and yet it will make Liu Bei bring down disaster upon his own head. When his army shall have become exhausted, it will only be necessary to send one single general against him and victory will be ours.\"\n\nCao Cao looked at the officer. It was First Secretary Sima Yi.\n\n\"What is your exalted view, my friend?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"Sun Quan's sister is wife to Liu Bei, but Sun Quan has found an occasion to steal away the bride. Liu Bei is in possession of Jingzhou still, and he and Sun Quan are bitter enemies. Therefore send some able speaker with a letter to Wu to persuade the Marquis to send an army to recover Jingzhou. That will draw thither all the armies of Shu, when you can send your army to Hanzhong. Liu Bei will be helpless, and his strength will be wasted.\"\n\nThe scheme pleased Cao Cao. He at once drew up a letter and sent it by the hand of Man Chong, who soon arrived in Wu. As soon as Sun Quan knew of the mission, he summoned his advisers to consult.\n\nZhang Zhao said, \"Wei and Wu are primarily enemies because of the dissension fomented by the words of Zhuge Liang. We have been fighting for several years, and many lives have been lost. Now this messenger has surely come to discuss terms of friendship, and he should be welcomed.\"\n\nOn the strength of this, Man Chong was well received and conducted into the city and into the presence of Sun Quan. He presented his letters at the conclusion of the ceremonies of reception and declared his mission.\n\n\"Wu and Wei have no fundamental quarrel, and their dissension has been brought about by Liu Bei. My master sends me to covenant with you for an attack on Jingzhou, while he goes against Hanzhong. This double attack being successful, the conquered regions can be divided between us two, and we can both swear to respect each other's territory.\"\n\nHaving read the letter, Sun Quan prepared a banquet in honor of Man Chong and then sent him to the guest-house to rest while he discussed the matter with his council of advisers.\n\nSaid Gu Yong, \"Although the messenger's speech was all special pleading, it was correct in form. I propose that the messenger be allowed to return and that a covenant be made with Cao Cao for joint attack. In addition, let spies be sent over the Great River to find out Guan Yu's movements, and then we may act.\"\n\nZhuge Jin said, \"I hear that since Guan Yu has been in Jingzhou, Liu Bei has found him a wife, who has borne him a son and a daughter. The daughter is too young to have been betrothed, wherefore let me go to ask her in marriage with your heir. If Guan Yu agrees, then we can arrange with him to attack Cao Cao. If Guan Yu refuses, then let us aid Cao Cao in an attack on Jingzhou.\"\n\nSun Quan took this advice. So he sent Man Chong away and sent Zhuge Jin to Jingzhou to try to arrange the betrothal. Zhuge Jin was received.\n\nWhen the time came to state the reason for his coming, Guan Yu asked him, \"What have you come for, Zhuge Jin?\"\n\n\"I have come seeking to ally the two houses. My master, the Marquis of Wu, has a son who is quite clever. Hearing that you have a daughter, General, I ask her in marriage, hereby the two houses may join in an attack on Cao Cao. This would be an admirable result, and I pray you consider the proposal.\"\n\nBut the warrior flared up.\n\n\"How can a tiger's daughter marry with a dog's whelp? Were it not for your brother, I would take your head. Say no more!\"\n\nGuan Yu called his servants to hustle forth the hapless messenger, who ran away with his hands over his head, too astonished to look anyone in the face. And reaching his own place, he dared not hide the manner of his reception, but told the whole truth.\n\n\"What ruffianism!\" exclaimed the Marquis.\n\nThereupon Sun Quan ordered the council again to consider an attack on Jingzhou.\n\nBu Zhi rose and said, \"It has been long manifest that Cao Cao wishes to usurp the Throne, but he is afraid of Liu Bei. Now we are to attack Shu with an army, and so Cao Cao wants to shift the misfortune to us indeed.\"\n\n\"But I also want the place,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nSaid Bu Zhi, \"Cao Ren is already camped at Fancheng and Xiangyang and in no danger from the river. If Cao Cao can take Jingzhou by land, why does he not take it? However, he wants you, my lord, to send your army, and you can judge his real intention from this. Send to Cao Cao and tell him to make Cao Ren attack by land. Then Guan Yu must take the army from Jingzhou to Fancheng. When Guan Yu has left Jingzhou, you can send an army to seize it.\"\n\nSun Quan thought the scheme good and sent letters with these proposals to Cao Cao. Cao Cao adopted the plan, and having sent the messenger back to the South Land, he next sent Man Chong to help Cao Ren at Fancheng as Adviser in the matter of attack. He also sent dispatches to the South Land to ask for the assistance of Sun Quan's marine force.\n\nHaving laid on Wei Yan the task of holding the East River Land, the Prince of Hanzhong, with his officers, returned to Chengdu and began to set his new house in order. A Palace was begun and public guest-houses were built, and between Chengdu and Baishui, at selected places, they built four hundred rest-houses and post stations. The Prince of Hanzhong also set himself to accumulate great stores of grain and forage and to till his arsenals with weapons with the design of mastering the capital in the north and the whole empire.\n\nThen his spies told him of the treaty between Cao Cao and Sun Quan, with designs upon Jingzhou, and he hastily called in Zhuge Liang to ask what should be done.\n\n\"I felt that Cao Cao would try to do this,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"and most of the advisers in the South Land will persuade Cao Cao to order Cao Ren to begin the campaign.\"\n\n\"But what am I to do?\" asked the Prince.\n\n\"First send a special messenger to Guan Yu with his new title, telling him to capture Fancheng, which will so damp the ardor of the enemy that they will break off themselves.\"\n\nTherefore Liu Bei sent Fei Shi, a minister from his Board of War, to take the patent of the new title to Guan Yu, who received the delegate with great deference and conducted him into the city. After they had arrived at the official residence, Guan Yu inquired what new title had been conferred upon him.\n\n\"The first of the Five Tiger Generals,\" replied Fei Shi.\n\n\"And who are the five?\"\n\n\"Their names are Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Zilong, Ma Chao, and Huang Zhong.\"\n\n\"The second is my brother,\" said Guan Yu, \"Ma Chao comes of a famous family, and Zhao Zilong has been with my elder brother so long that he is as a brother. It is right for them to be put on a level with me. But what sort of a man is this Huang Zhong that he is ranked with us? The really great man does not stand shoulder to shoulder with any soldier that comes along.\"\n\nAnd Guan Yu refused both title and seal.\n\n\"You do wrong to refuse,\" said Fei Shi. \"Of old, Xiao He and Cao Shen helped Liu Bang, the Founder of the Han Dynasty, in his great enterprise and were very dear friends, while Han Xin was but a runaway leader from Chu. Yet Liu Bang made Han Xin a prince, and so placed over the heads of the other two. I have never heard that these two resented it. The Prince of Hanzhong has his Five Tiger Generals, but he is still your brother and all that that means. As his brother, you are he and he is you. Is there any comparison with any other? The Prince has always treated you with the greatest kindness. You two are one in sorrow and joy, sharers of disaster and good fortune. No such question as that of a mere title ought to reckon at all. I pray you, Sir, reflect.\"\n\nGuan Yu understood, and thanked Fei Shi, saying, \"You have prevented me from making a great mistake due to my ignorance.\"\n\nGuan Yu then received the seal with all humility.\n\nNext Fei Shi produced the edict ordering the capture of Fancheng. Guan Yu lost no time in obeying its command. He appointed Fu Shiren and Mi Fang Leaders of the Van to take the first army out of the city into camp.\n\nThis done, a banquet was prepared for Fei Shi, and they sat late at their wine. While still at table there was an alarm of fire in the new camp, and Guan Yu hastened out of the city to see. He found that the two generals had also been feasting, and the fire had started behind their tent, a spark having fallen into some explosives, whence it spread and destroyed the whole camp and all that was in it. Guan Yu and his soldiers did what they could to put out the fire and then reentered the city. There Guan Yu summoned the two generals before him, abused them for their lack of care, and sentenced them to death.\n\nHowever, Fei Shi interceded for them, saying, \"It is not well to put two leaders to death at the beginning of a campaign, before even the army has marched. You might reprieve them at least.\"\n\nGuan Yu's anger had by no means subsided, but he recalled the two generals and said, \"Were it not that I have the greatest regard for Chairman Fei Shi here, I had let the sentence take its course. Now I will only flog you.\"\n\nSo the two officers received forty blows each and were degraded from leading the van. Their seals were taken away, and Mi Fang was sent to Nanjun, Fu Shiren to Gongan.\n\n\"Now be warned,\" said Guan Yu. \"If, when I return from my victories, there is the least sign of disorder on your part, you will suffer for both faults.\"\n\nThe two men flushed crimson and went out.\n\nThen two new officers were appointed, Liao Hua and Guan Ping. Next Guan Yu took command of the main army, and he had two advisers \u2014 Ma Liang and Yi Ji. Then it was that Hu Hua's son, Hu Ban, came to Jingzhou and joined Guan Yu, who loved him for the sake of his father and the good service Hu Ban had rendered when he saved Guan Yu. Guan Yu sent Hu Ban to the Prince of Hanzhong in the train of Fei Shi.\n\nThe day that Guan Yu sacrificed to his standard before starting, he was lying in his tent resting when suddenly there dashed into his tent a huge boar, very large, as big as a bullock and quite black. It bit his foot. He jumped up to kill the creature, when it squealed with the sound of tearing cloth \u2014 and he awoke. It was a dream, but he had a pain in his foot. The dream perplexed him, and he could not explain it.\n\nHe related it to his son, who interpreted it happily, saying, \"The boar is a royal beast, like the dragon, and coming to your feet means a rise of your dignity.\"\n\nWhen the dream got noised abroad, for he told his officers, some interpreted it as auspicious and some the reverse.\n\n\"When a person nears sixty, he ought not to be greatly disturbed by the thought of death,\" said Guan Yu. \"After all, I am a warrior.\"\n\nJust about that time came an edict from the Prince of Hanzhong making him Commanding General, with honorable insignia of rank and control over the nine territories of forty-one counties in Jingzhou. When the officers congratulated him on his new honors, they did not forget the dream.\n\n\"This shows what a dream of boars means.\"\n\nThis new distinction pleased Guan Yu greatly, and he had no more perplexing doubts. Soon he marched away along the great road to the point of danger.\n\nCao Ren was in Xiangyang when he heard that Guan Yu was coming against him. He was much put about, and inclined to trust solely to defense. But his next command, Zhai Yuan, did not support this course and argued against it.\n\n\"The Prince of Wei has ordered you to act in concert with Wu and take Jingzhou. For the other side to come against such a combination is to walk in the way of death. Certainly we have no occasion to avoid a conflict.\"\n\nOn the other hand the newly sent Adviser Man Chong inculcated caution.\n\nSaid he, \"Guan Yu is brave and cunning and one not to be met lightly. I think defense is best.\"\n\nThen General Xiahou Cun said contemptuously, \"This is all the talk of a lot of book-folks. When the flood approaches, bank up to keep it out. Let the enemy come with their tired soldiers, and we shall go out, defeat them, and receive our reward, for we are sure of victory.\"\n\nCao Ren was won over to the side of those of action. He placed Man Chong in command of the defenses of Fancheng, while he went outside to beat off Guan Yu. When the two forces met, Guan Yu called to his side Guan Ping and Liao Hua, to whom he gave certain orders. These two advanced, settled their array, and Liao Hua then rode out and offered a challenge. Zhai Yuan accepted it. But soon after the combat began, Liao Hua made as if he was defeated and turned to leave the field. Zhai Yuan went after him. The Jingzhou troops retired seven miles or so.\n\nSoon the Jingzhou soldiers came again and offered battle, when Xiahou Cun and Zhai Yuan both went out. The maneuver of the preceding day was repeated, and the Jingzhou army retreated another seven miles. But suddenly there was a detonation behind the army of Cao Cao, and the rolling of drums as for attack. Cao Ren hastily called upon his troops to return. They did so; but Guan Ping and Liao Hua then turned and followed on their heels so that the troops of Cao Cao were thrown into confusion.\n\nCao Ren by this time had seen that a trap had been laid and he had fallen therein, so he hastily marched with one army to Xiangyang. He got to within a short distance of the city when he saw before him a handsome banner waving in the wind, and out came Guan Yu with his green-dragon saber ready to slay. Cao Ren was powerless from fear, and, fighting being impossible, he turned off into a bye-road for Xiangyang.\n\nThen Xiahou Cun came. He fell into a rage at the sight of the old warrior and went to fight him. But Xiahou Cun was slain in the first encounter. Zhai Yuan fled, but Guan Ping pursued and slew him. Then the pursuit was continued, and the loss of Cao Cao's side was very heavy. More than half were drowned in River Xiang. Seeing the situation was desperate, Cao Ren fled to Fancheng. Guan Yu got possession of Xiangyang.\n\n\"You have obtained this city very easily,\" said the Marching General, Wang Fu, \"but the task is not ended. Cao Cao's army have been beaten and their courage broken, but there is danger from the side of Wu. Lu Meng is at Lukou, and he has long cherished the desire to lay hands on Jingzhou. Suppose he now attacks: What will happen?\"\n\n\"I was even thinking of that myself. You may go and attend to this matter. You will certainly be able to find certain elevated spots on the river bank, about seven miles apart, suitable for alarm beacons, whence could be signaled any attempt of the marines of Wu to cross the river. Fifty soldiers could guard each station. Let there be a flame by night and a smoke by day. If they cross the river, I must go and smite them.\"\n\nWang Fu replied, \"Fu Shiren and Mi Fang are defending important places, but they may not be able to defend the Passes well. There ought to be a commander-in-chief over Jingzhou City.\"\n\n\"There is no need for anxiety. Army Inspector Pan Jun is guarding the city.\"\n\n\"The objection is the character of Pan Jun. He is jealous and selfish and not a fit person for the task. I think you would do well to replace him by Zhao Lei, now of the Chief of the Commissariat. Zhao Lei is loyal, trusty, clean-handed, and straight, a much more desirable man for the post.\"\n\n\"I know Pan Jun very well, but I have delegated him for that duty and cannot change now. The work Zhao Lei has to do in the supplies is also most important. I do not think you need be anxious. Just get along with those beacons for me.\"\n\nWang Fu, disappointed, took his leave.\n\nThen Guan Ping was bidden to prepare ships ready to cross the river and attack Fancheng, whither Cao Ren had retired after his defeat.\n\nNow Cao Ren said to Man Chong, \"Neglecting your advice, I lost soldiers, two generals, and the city of Xiangyang. What am I to do now?\"\n\n\"Guan Yu is very dangerous, too brave and skillful for us to try to defeat. We had better remain on the defensive,\" replied Man Chong.\n\nJust about this time came the tidings that Guan Yu was crossing the river on the way to attack. Man Chong maintained his policy of defense. But one of Cao Ren's generals, Lu Chang, was for going out to meet the enemy.\n\n\"I ask for a few thousand troops,\" said Lu Chang, \"and I will meet the enemy on the way.\"\n\n\"You cannot do any good,\" said Man Chong.\n\n\"According to the advice of you and the other bookish officials, there is only one thing to do. But will defense drive off the enemy? The proper way is to attack your enemy while he is crossing a river, and as Guan Yu is doing that now, why not attack? It will be quite another matter if you let him reach the walls and get possession of the moat.\"\n\nAs a result of his arguments and protest, Lu Chang got command of two thousand troops, whom he led to the river. And there he found Guan Yu already arrayed for battle. Guan Yu at once rode out, and the bold Lu Chang was going to attack him. But his soldiers were panic-stricken at the sight of Guan Yu's fierce countenance and ran away. Lu Chang called them to come back, but they would not stop, and as Guan Yu came on with a rush, the army of Wei again lost the day. Many were slain, and the remainder ran into Fancheng. Cao Ren sent off a hasty messenger for help and a letter to Xuchang to tell what Guan Yu had done and how Fancheng was in imminent danger of falling.\n\nThe letter reached Cao Cao, who chose a certain general among his leaders and assigned the task, \"You go and defend Fancheng!\"\n\nThe man at once stepped out and accepted the assignment. He was Yu Jin.\n\n\"Let me have another general to lead the van,\" said Yu Jin.\n\n\"Who volunteers?\" asked Cao Cao, looking around.\n\n\"I do!\" cried a man, \"I will give my poor services for what they are worth. And I will capture this fellow Guan Yu and bring him as an offering before your standard.\"\n\n\u2003The soldiers of Wei began the war\n\n\u2003Even before Wu had sent out armies." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Pang De Takes His Coffin To The Field; Guan Yu Uses Water To Drown The Seven Armies.\n\nThe bold and self-confident leader of Cao Cao's army who promised to make an end of Guan Yu was Pang De. Cao Cao was glad to find such a man.\n\n\"That fellow Guan Yu has a great reputation, and in the whole empire he has no rival. He has not met his match yet, but now you are going, he will find all his work cut out.\"\n\nSo spoke Cao Cao. He conferred on Yu Jin the title of General Who Corrects the South and on Pang De that of General Who Corrects the West, and he made Pang De Leader of the Van. The two generals marched out with their seven armies to Fancheng.\n\nThese seven armies were composed of sturdy fellows from the north, led by two of their own Marching Commanders named Dong Heng and Dong Chao. Hearing who was to command them, these two, supported by their generals, went to see Yu Jin and represented that the Leader of the Van was unsuitable.\n\nDong Heng said, \"Sir General, the expedition you lead is for the relief of Fancheng, and it can confidently expect victory. But is it wise to place such as Pang De in command of the van?\"\n\n\"Why?\" said Yu Jin, surprised.\n\n\"Because Pang De was once under the command of Ma Chao. He had no alternative but to surrender and fight for Wei. But his former chief is now in high honor in Shu, one of the Five Tiger Generals, and his own brother Pang Rou is there, too, as an officer. To send Pang De as Leader of the Van just now seems like trying to extinguish a fire with oil. Would it not be well to inform the Prince of Wei and ask him to exchange this man for another?\"\n\nWithout further argument or delay, Yu Jin went to see the Prince and laid before him the objections to Pang De's appointment. As soon as Cao Cao understood, he summoned Pang De to the steps and bade him yield his seal as Leader of the Van.\n\n\"O Prince, why do you reject my services? I was just about to do my best for you.\"\n\n\"I do not doubt you, but Ma Chao is now in the west, and your brother also \u2014 both in the service of Liu Bei. I myself have no doubts, but it is what all the crowd are saying. What can I do?\"\n\nPang De took off his headdress and prostrated himself, bitter tears rolling down his cheeks.\n\n\"Since I surrendered to you, O Prince, I have experienced much kindness, so that I would undergo any sufferings to show my gratitude. I hope you will trust me. When my brother and I were at home together, his wife was a wicked woman, and I slew her while I was drunk. My brother has never forgiven me, but is permeated with hate for me. He swears never to see me again, and we are enemies. For my old master, Ma Chao, I have profound contempt. He is bold, but only that, and was in a pitiable and dejected state when he found his way to the west. Now, like me, he serves his own master, but our friendship is at an end. How could I think of another after your kindness to me?\"\n\nCao Cao raised Pang De from the ground and soothed him, saying, \"I have always known what a noble man you are, and what I said just now was to satisfy the feelings of other people. Now you can strive to win fame. If you do not turn your back on me, I shall not on you.\"\n\nThen Pang De took his leave and returned to his house, where he ordered the artificers to make him a coffin. Next he invited all his friends to a banquet, and the coffin was set out in the reception room for all to see.\n\nAnd they asked one another, \"What can that inauspicious thing mean putting out on the eve of a campaign?\"\n\nBy and by, drinking to them, Pang De said, \"The Prince of Wei has been generous to me, and I am pledged to show my gratitude to the death. I am about to go out against this Guan Yu, and I have to kill him or he must kill me. If he does not kill me, I must commit suicide, and so I have prepared what is necessary. I will not return leaving my task unachieved.\"\n\nThe terrible omen saddened the guests, and they fell to sighing. Then Pang De called in his wife, Lady Li, and bade her bring their son Pang Hui, whom he commended to her care.\n\n\"I have been appointed Leader of the Van of this new expedition against Guan Yu, and my duty bids me seek death or glory on the battlefield. If I die, our son is in your special care. Alas, the child has been born ill-starred, and when he grows up he will have to avenge a father.\"\n\nBoth mother and son wept as they bade him farewell. When the army marched, the coffin was carried in its train.\n\nPang De bade his officers, saying, \"I will fight to the end with Guan Yu. Place my body therein if I fall in combat. And if I slay him, then will I bring his head in this coffin as an offering to our Prince.\"\n\nThen out spoke his five hundred veterans and said, \"If you are like this, O General, then we also will follow you to the end.\"\n\nThe vanguard then marched away.\n\nA certain man told the story of these happenings to Cao Cao, who was very pleased, saying, \"I have no anxiety with such a general to lead my armies.\"\n\nBut Jia Xu said, \"I am anxious for Pang De's safety. He is over-bold and imprudent to fight with Guan Yu to the death.\"\n\nCao Cao thought such an act would be unwise, and he hastily sent a messenger with an edict warning Pang De against his antagonist.\n\n\"This Guan Yu lacks neither cunning nor valor. You are to be most cautious in engaging him. If you can conquer, then conquer; but if there be any doubt, remain on the defensive.\"\n\n\"How highly does our Prince regard this fellow Guan Yu!\" said Pang De to his officers when he heard this new command. \"But I think I shall be able to take the keen edge off his thirty-year reputation.\"\n\n\"The command of the Prince is to be obeyed,\" said Yu Jin.\n\nPang De hastened to Fancheng in all the pomp and panoply of war, his gongs clanging, his drums rolling as he marched.\n\nGuan Yu was sitting in his tent when his spies came to report: \"Seven armies of the north under Yu Jin are approaching. They are ten miles away. The Van Leader is Pang De, who brings with him a coffin. As he marches, he slanders you, General, and vows to fight a decisive battle with you.\"\n\nRage took possession of Guan Yu. His face changed color, his beard shook, and he roared out, \"There is never a fighting man in all the world who has heard my name without trembling. Does this fellow dare disdain me?\"\n\nThen he ordered Guan Ping to attack Fancheng while he went out to slay the impudent boaster who dared him.\n\n\"Father,\" said Guan Ping, \"Taishan Mountain in its majesty does not quarrel with a pebble. Let me go and fight this Pang De.\"\n\n\"Well, my son, go and try. I will support you.\"\n\nSo Guan Ping took his sword, mounted his steed, and went out with his troops. Both sides being drawn up for battle. On the side of Wei there flew a single black flag on which was inscribed Pang De, Corrector of the West in white. The leader himself wore a blue robe with a silver helmet and rode a white charger. He stood out in front backed by his five hundred veterans, and a few foot soldiers were there too, bearing the gruesome coffin.\n\nGuan Ping was very angry, crying out, \"Turncoat! Traitor!\"\n\n\"Who is that?\" asked Pang De of his followers.\n\nA certain one replied, \"That is Guan Yu's adopted son, Guan Ping.\"\n\nPang De cried, \"I have an edict from the Prince of Wei to take your father's head. You are but a weakling, and I will spare you. But call your father!\"\n\nGuan Ping dashed forward flourishing his sword. Pang De went to meet him, and there followed thirty odd bouts with no advantage to either.\n\nBoth sides then drew off to rest. Soon the news of this combat reached Guan Yu, and he was not pleased. He sent Liao Hua to assault the city while he went to do battle with Pang De. Guan Ping met his father and related the story of the indecisive fight.\n\nSo Guan Yu rode out with his green-dragon saber ready, and he shouted to Pang De, \"Come quickly and be slain!\"\n\nThe drums reechoed as Pang De rode out and replied, \"The edict from the Prince of Wei tells me to take your head. In case you disbelieve it, here is the coffin ready to receive it. If you fear death, down from your horse and surrender!\"\n\n\"I hold you for a simple fool!\" cried Guan Yu. \"What can you do? It is a pity to stain my blade with the blood of such a rat.\"\n\nThen he galloped Red Hare out toward Pang De, flourishing the saber. Pang De whirled his blade and came to meet him, and they two fought a hundred bouts. And as they fought, the lust of battle seemed to grow and both armies were lost in amazement.\n\nBut the army of Wei began to fear for their champion, and the gongs sounded the retirement. At the same time Guan Ping began to think of his father's fatigue, and his gongs clanged too. So that both armies drew off at the same time.\n\n\"People rumor Guan Yu is a mighty man of war. Today I really believe that,\" said Pang De, when he had got back among his own line.\n\nThen his chief, Yu Jin, came to see him and said, \"O General, you fought the great combat of a hundred bouts, which ended indecisively. I think it would be prudent to retire out of his way, and therefore blunting his spirit.\"\n\nBut Pang De replied haughtily, \"What makes you so soft? Yet the Prince gave you the command of the seven armies! But tomorrow I will fight again and that to the death. I swear I will never give way.\"\n\nYu Jin could not overcome Pang De's decision, so he went back to his own camp.\n\nWhen Guan Yu had got back to his camp, he extolled Pang De, saying, \"His swordsmanship is perfect. He is my worthy enemy.\"\n\n\"The new-born calf fears not the tiger,\" said Guan Ping. \"But if you slay this fellow, my father, you have only killed a common soldier of the Qiang tribes beyond the frontier. If any accident occurs, then you will have the reproach of not having considered your brother's charge.\"\n\n\"How can my resentment be assuaged save by the death of this man?\" returned Guan Yu. \"I have decided to fight, so say no more.\"\n\nNext day Guan Yu took the field first, and Pang De quickly came out. Both arrayed their troops and then went to the front at the same moment. This time neither spoke, but the combat began forthwith. It went on for fifty bouts, and then Pang De pulled his horse, sheathed his sword, and fled. Guan Yu went in pursuit, and Guan Ping followed lest there should be need of him.\n\nGuan Yu roared out reviling to his flying foe, \"Traitor! You want to use the 'swinging-horse stab', but here I am, never afraid of that.\"\n\nBut the fact was that Pang De had only pretended to try for a foul stroke in order to cover a resort to his bow. He pulled in his horse, fitted an arrow to the string, and was just on the point of shooting when Guan Ping, who was sharp-eyed, shouted out a warning.\n\n\"The bandit is going to shoot!\"\n\nGuan Yu saw it, but the bowstring twanged, and the arrow came flying. He was not nimble enough to avoid it, and it wounded his left arm. Guan Ping at once went to his father's assistance and led him away to the camp. Pang De wished to follow up this advantage and came back whirling his sword, but, ere he could strike, the gongs of his own side rang out. He thought there was something amiss in the rear and stopped.\n\nThe signal for retreat had been sounded by Yu Jin out of jealousy, for he had seen that Guan Yu had been wounded, and he grudged his colleague the glory which would eclipse his own. Pang De obeyed, but when he got back, he wanted to know why retreat had been sounded on the very verge of a great success.\n\n\"Why did the gongs clang?\" asked Pang De.\n\n\"Because of our Prince's warning. Though Guan Yu was wounded, I feared some trick on his part. He is very cunning.\"\n\n\"I should have killed him if you had not done that,\" said Pang De.\n\n\"Haste makes slow going. You can postpone your fight with him,\" said Yu Jin.\n\nPang De, though ignorant of the real reason why he was made to miss success at the critical moment, was still very vexed.\n\nGuan Yu went back to camp, and the arrow-head was puled out of the wound. Happily it had not penetrated very deeply, and the usual remedies against injuries by metal were applied.\n\nGuan Yu was very bitter against his enemy and declared, \"I swear I will have my revenge for this arrow.\"\n\n\"Never mind anything but recovering now,\" said his officers. \"Rest and get well; then you may fight again.\n\nBefore long, Pang De renewed his challenge, and Guan Yu was for going out to fight; however, he yielded to the entreaties of his officers. And when Pang De set his soldiers to reviling the warrior, Guan Ping saw to it that his father never heard it. After ten days of challenges hurled uselessly at an army that ignored them, Pang De took council with Yu Jin.\n\n\"Evidently Guan Yu is helpless from the effects of that arrow-wound. We ought to advance all our seven armies against him while he is ill and destroy his camp. Thereby we shall relieve Fancheng.\"\n\nThus spoke Pang De, but jealousy of the glory that might accrue to his next in command again made Yu Jin urge caution and obedience to the command of the Prince of Wei. Yu Jin refused to move his army in spite of Pang De's repeated persuasion. Still more, Yu Jin led the armies to a new camping ground behind the hills some three miles north of Fancheng. There his own army prevented communication by the main road, while he sent Pang De into a valley in the rear so that Pang De could do nothing.\n\nTo Guan Ping's great joy, Guan Yu's wound soon healed. Soon after they heard of Yu Jin's new camp, and as Guan Ping could assign no reason for the change, and suspected some ruse, he told his father, who went up to a high place to reconnoiter.\n\nLooking round, Guan Yu noted that there seemed much slackness about everything \u2014 from flags to soldiers \u2014 in Fancheng, that the relief armies were camped in a valley to the north, and that River Xiang seemed to run very swiftly. After impressing the topography on his mind, he called the guides and asked the name of the gully about three miles north of the city.\n\n\"Zengkou Stream,\" was the reply.\n\nHe chuckled.\n\n\"I shall capture Yu Jin,\" said he.\n\nThose with him asked how he knew that.\n\nHe replied, \"Why, how can any fish last long in such a trap?\"\n\nThose in his train gave but little weight to what he said, and presently he went back to his own tent. It was just then the time for the autumn rains, and a heavy downpour came on, lasting several days. Orders were given to get ready boats and rafts and such things. Guan Ping could not think what such preparations meant in a dry land campaign. So he asked his father.\n\n\"Do you not know even?\" replied his father. \"Our enemies have camped in difficult ground instead of the open country and are crowded in the dangerous valley there. After some days of this rain, River Xiang will swell, and I shall send people to dam up all the outlets and so let the water rise very high. When at its highest, I shall open the dams and let the water out over Fancheng. That valley will be flooded too, and all the soldiers will become aquatic animals.\"\n\nThe Wei armies had camped in the gully, and after several days of heavy rain, Army Inspector Cheng He ventured to speak to his commander.\n\nHe said, \"The army is camped near the mouth of a stream in a depression. There are hills around us, but they are too far off to keep the water away. Our soldiers are already suffering from these heavy rains, and, moreover, they say the Jingzhou troops have moved to higher ground. More than that, at River Han they are preparing boats and rafts so that they can take advantage of the floods if there are any. Our army will be in great danger, and something should be done.\"\n\nBut Yu Jin scoffed at his words, saying, \"You fool! Do you want to injure the spirit of our soldiers? Talk no more, or your head will be fallen.\"\n\nCheng He went away greatly ashamed.\n\nThen Cheng He went to Pang De, who saw the force of his words and said, \"What you said is excellent. If Yu Jin will not move camp tomorrow, I myself will do so.\"\n\nSo Cheng He left it at that.\n\nThat night there came a great storm. As Pang De sat in his tent, he heard the sound as of ten thousand horses in stampede and a roar as of the drums of war seeming to shake the earth. He was alarmed, left his tent, and mounted his charger to go and see what it meant. Then he saw the rolling waters coming in from every side and the seven armies flying from the flood, which speedily rose to the height of ten spans. Yu Jin, Pang De, and several other officers sought safety by rushing up the hills.\n\nAs day dawned, Guan Yu and his marines came along in large boats with flags flying and drums beating. Yu Jin saw no way of escape, and his following was reduced to about fifty or sixty soldiers. They all said they surrendered. Guan Yu made them strip and then took them on board.\n\nAfter that he went to capture Pang De, who was standing on a hillock with Dong Heng, Dong Chao, Cheng He, and his five hundred troops, all without armors. Pang De saw his archenemy approach without a sign of fear, and even went boldly to meet him. Guan Yu surrounded the party with his boats, and the archers began to shoot. When more than half the troops had been struck down, the survivors became desperate.\n\nDong Heng and Dong Chao pressed their chief to give in, saying, \"We have lost more than half of our men. Surrender is the only course!\"\n\nBut Pang De only raged, saying, \"I have received great kindness from the Prince. Think you that I will bow the head to any other?\"\n\nPang De cut down Dong Heng and Dong Chao right in the battlefield and then shouted, \"Anyone who says surrender shall be as these two!\"\n\nSo the survivors made a desperate effort to beat off their enemies, and they held their own up to midday. Then Guan Yu's marines redoubled their efforts, and the arrows and stones rained down upon the defenders, who fought desperately hand to hand with their assailants.\n\n\"The valorous leader fears death less than desertion; the brave warrior does not break faith to save his life!\" cried Pang De. \"This is the day of my death, but I will fight on to the last. And you, General, should fight to your end, too.\"\n\nSo Cheng He pressed on till he fell into the water by an arrow of Guan Yu, and then the soldiers yielded.\n\nPang De fought on. Then one of the boats happened to close in to the bank. With a tremendous leap Pang De lighted on it and slashed at the marines, killing ten of them. The others jumped overboard and swam away. Then Pang De one hand still holding his sword, tried to maneuver the boat across the river to Fancheng. But there came drifting down a raft, which collided with and upset his boat so that he was struggling in the water. Next a general on the raft jumped into the water, gripped him, put him on the boat again.\n\nThe captor was Zhou Cang, a skillful waterman who, having lived in Jingzhou for many years, was thoroughly expert in boat navigation. Beside, he was very powerful and so was able to make Pang De a prisoner.\n\nIn this flood perished the whole of the seven armies, except the few that saved themselves by swimming. These latter, having no way of escape, surrendered to the victors.\n\n\u2003In the depth of night rolled the war drums,\n\n\u2003Summoning the warriors as to battle;\n\n\u2003But the enemy was no man,\n\n\u2003For the waters had risen and the flood came.\n\n\u2003This was the plan of Guan Yu, the crafty,\n\n\u2003To drown his enemies. More than human\n\n\u2003was he in cunning. The ages hand on his fame\n\n\u2003As his glory was told in his own day.\n\nGuan Yu then returned to the higher ground, where his tent was pitched and therein took his seat to receive his prisoners. The lictors brought up Yu Jin, who prostrated himself humbly.\n\n\"How dared you think to oppose me? To execute you would be like killing a hog. It would be soiling weapons for nothing,\" said Guan Yu, stroking his beard.\n\nYu Jin was hound and sent to the prison in Jingzhou.\n\n\"I will decide your fate when I return,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nThe general having thus dealt with the chief, Pang De was sent for. He came, pride and anger flashing from his eyes. He did not kneel but stood boldly erect.\n\n\"You have a brother in Hanzhong, and your old chief was Ma Chao, also in high honor in Shu. Would you not better join them?\"\n\n\"Rather than surrender to you, I would perish beneath the sword,\" cried Pang De.\n\nHe reviled his captors without ceasing till, losing patience at last, Guan Yu sent him to his death. Pang De was beheaded. He stretched out his neck for the headsman's sword. Out of pity he was honorably buried.\n\nThe floods were still out, and taking advantage of them, the troops of Jingzhou boarded the boats to move toward Fancheng, which now stood out as a mere island with waves breaking against the walls.\n\nThe force of the waters being great, the city wall was beginning to give way, and the whole population, male and female, aged and young, were carrying mud and bricks to strengthen it. Their efforts seemed vain, and the leaders of Cao Cao's army were very desperate.\n\nSome of the generals went to see Cao Ren, who said, \"No ordinary person's strength can fend off today's danger. If we can hold out till nightfall, we may escape by boat. We shall lose the city, but we shall save our skins.\"\n\nBut Man Chong interposed before the boats could be got ready.\n\nHe said, \"No! No! Though the force of these mountainous waters is great, we only have to wait ten days or so, and the flood will have passed. Though Guan Yu has not assaulted this city, yet he has sent another army to Jiaxia, which indicates he dares not advance lest we should fall upon his rear. Remember, too, that to retire from this city means the abandonment of everything south of the Yellow River. Therefore I decide that you defend this place.\"\n\nCao Ren saluted Man Chong as he concluded his harangue, saying, \"What a tremendous error I should have committed had it not been for you, Sir!\"\n\nThen riding his white charger he went up on the city walls, gathered his officers around him, and pledged himself not to surrender.\n\n\"The Prince's command being to defend this city, I shall defend it to the last. And I shall put to death anyone who even mentions abandonment,\" said he.\n\n\"And we desire to defend it to out last gasp,\" chimed in his officers.\n\nThen they saw to it that the means of offense were good. Many hundreds of archers and crossbowmen were stationed on the wall and kept watch night and day. The old and the young of ordinary people were made to carry earth and stones to strengthen the wall.\n\nAfter some ten days the flood was at an end. Then the news of Guan Yu's success against the Wei campaign got abroad, and the terror of his name spread wider and wider. About the same time, too, his second son, Guan Xing, came to visit his father in camp. Guan Yu thought this a good opportunity to send his report of success to Capital Chengdu and entrusted to Guan Xing a dispatch mentioning each officer's services and requesting promotion for them. Guan Xing accordingly took leave of his father and left.\n\nAfter Guan Xing's departure, the army was divided into two halves, one under Guan Yu to attack Fancheng, and the other to go to Jiaxia.\n\nOne day Guan Yu rode over to the north gate. Halting his steed, he pointed with his whip toward the defenders on the wall, and called out, \"You lot of rats will not give in then! What are you waiting for?\"\n\nCao Ren, who was among his soldiers on the wall, saw that Guan Yu had no armor on, so he ordered his men to shoot. The archers and bowmen at once sent a great flight of arrows and bolts that way. Guan Yu hastily pulled the reins to retire, but an arrow struck him in the arm. The shock of the blow made him turn in the saddle, and he fell from his horse.\n\n\u2003Just now a mighty army perished\n\n\u2003By the river's overflow;\n\n\u2003A crossbow bolt from the city wall\n\n\u2003Lays a valiant warrior low." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Guan Yu Has A Scraped-Bone Surgery; Lu Meng Crosses The River In White Robe.\n\nAt the sight of Guan Yu falling from his charger, Cao Ren led his army out of the city to follow up with an attack, but Guan Ping drove him off and escorted his father back to camp. There the arrow was extracted, but the arrow head had been poisoned. The wound was deep, and the poison had penetrated to the bone. The right arm was discolored and swollen and useless.\n\nGuan Ping consulted with the other leaders and proposed, saying, \"As fighting is impossible for the moment, we should withdraw to Jingzhou, where my father's wound can be treated.\"\n\nHaving decided upon this, they went to see the wounded warrior.\n\n\"What have you come for?\" asked Guan Yu when they entered.\n\n\"Considering that you, Sir, have been wounded in the right arm, we fear the result of the excitement of battle. Moreover, you can hardly take part in a fight just now, and we therefore propose that the army retire till you are recovered.\"\n\nGuan Yu replied angrily, \"I am on the point of taking the city, and if I succeed, I must press forward to Capital Xuchang, and destroy that brigand Cao Cao, so that the Hans may be restored to their own. Think you that I can vitiate the whole campaign because of a slight wound? Would you dishearten the army?\"\n\nGuan Ping and his colleagues said no more, but somewhat unwillingly withdrew.\n\nSeeing that their leader would not retire and the wound showed no signs of healing, the various generals inquired far and near for a good surgeon to attend their general.\n\nOne day a person arrived in a small ship and, having landed and come up to the gate of the camp, was led in to see Guan Ping. The visitor wore a square-cut cap and a loose robe. In his hand he carried a small black bag.\n\nHe said, \"My name is Hua Tuo, and I belong to Qiao. I have heard of the wound sustained by the famous general and have come to heal it.\"\n\n\"Surely you must be the physician who treated Zhou Tai in the South Land,\" said Guan Ping.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nTaking with him the other generals, Guan Ping went in to see his father. Guan Yu was engaging in a game of chess with Ma Liang, although his arm was very painful. But Guan Yu kept up appearances so as not to discourage the troops. When they told him that a physician had come, he consented to see him.\n\nHua Tuo was introduced, asked to take a seat and, after the tea of ceremony, was shown the injured arm.\n\n\"This was caused by an arrow,\" said the doctor. \"There is poison in the wound, and it has penetrated to the bone. Unless the wound is soon treated, the arm will become useless.\"\n\n\"What do you propose to do?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"I know how to cure the wound, but I think you will be afraid of the remedy.\"\n\n\"Am I likely to be afraid of that when I am not even afraid of death? Death is only a return home after all.\"\n\nThen Hua Tuo said, \"This is what I shall do. In a private room I shall erect a post with a steel ring attached. I shall ask you, Sir, to insert your arm in the ring, and I shall bind it firmly to the post. Then I shall cover your head with a quilt so that you cannot see, and with a scalpel I shall open up the flesh right down to the bone. Then I shall scrape away the poison. This done, I shall dress the wound with a certain preparation, sew it up with a thread, and there will be no further trouble. But I think you may quail at the severity of the treatment.\"\n\nGuan Yu smiled.\n\n\"It all sounds easy enough,\" said he. \"But why the post and the ring?\"\n\nRefreshments were then served, and after a few cups of wine, the warrior extended his arm for the operation. With his other hand he went on with his game of chess. Meanwhile the surgeon prepared his knife and called a lad to hold a basin beneath the limb.\n\n\"I am just going to cut. Do not start,\" said Hua Tuo.\n\n\"When I consented to undergo the treatment, did you think I was afraid of pain?\"\n\nThe surgeon then performed the operation as he had pre-described. He found the bone much discolored, but he scraped it clean. When the knife went over the surface of the bone and made horrible sounds, all those near covered their eyes and turned pale. But Guan Yu went on with his game, only drinking a cup of wine now and again, and his face betrayed no sign of pain.\n\nWhen the wound had been cleansed, sewn up and dressed, the patient stood up smiling and said, \"This arm is now as good as it ever was. There is no pain. Indeed, Master, you are a marvel.\"\n\n\"I have spent my life in the art,\" said Hua Tuo, \"but I have never seen such a patient as you, Sir. You are as if not from the earth but heaven.\"\n\n\u2003Here as surgeons, there physicians, all boast their skill;\n\n\u2003Bitter few are those that cure one when one's really ill.\n\n\u2003As for superhuman valor rivals Guan Yu had none,\n\n\u2003So for holy touch in healing Hua Tuo stood alone.\n\nWhen the cure was well advanced, Guan Yu gave a fine banquet in honor of Hua Tuo and offered him a fee of a hundred ounces of gold.\n\nBut Hua Tuo declined it, saying, \"I had come to treat you, O General, from admiration of your great virtue and not for money. Although your wound is cured, you must be careful of your health, and especially avoid all excitement for a hundred days, when you will be as well as ever you were.\"\n\nThen Hua Tuo, having prepared dressings for the wound, took his leave, refusing fees to the very last.\n\nHaving captured Yu Jin and accomplished the death of Pang De, Guan Yu became more famous and more fear-inspiring through the empire than even before. Cao Cao called together his advisers to help him decide upon what he should do.\n\nSaid Cao Cao, \"I must acknowledge this Guan Yu as the one man who, in skill and valor, overtops the whole world. Lately he has obtained possession of Jingzhou and the territory near it, and has so become very terrible. He is a tiger with wings added. Pang De is no more; Yu Jin is his prisoner; the armies of Wei have lost their morale; and if he led his armies to Xuchang, we should be helpless. I can only think of avoiding the peril by removal of the capital. What think you?\"\n\n\"No, do not take that step,\" said Sima Yi, rising to reply. \"Yu Jin and all the others you lost were victims of the flood and slain in battle. These losses do no harm at all to your great plan. The Suns and Lius are no longer friends since Guan Yu has accomplished his desire. You may send a messenger into Wu to foment the quarrel and cause Sun Quan to send his armies to attack the army of Guan Yu from the rear, promising that, when things are tranquil, you will reward the south to Sun Quan. In this way you will relieve Fancheng.\"\n\nHere Minister Jiang Ji said, \"Sima Yi speaks well, and the messenger should lose no time. Do not move the capital and disturb the people.\"\n\nCao Cao therefore did not carry out his first proposal.\n\nBut he was sad at the loss of Yu Jin, and spoke of him affectionately, \"Yu Jin had followed me faithfully for thirty years, yet in that moment of truth he was less than Pang De.\"\n\nIt was necessary to send someone with the letters to Wu and also to find another leader willing to face Guan Yu. Cao Cao had not long to wait for the latter, as an officer stepped out from the ranks of those in waiting and offered himself. It was Xu Huang.\n\nXu Huang's offer was accepted, and he was given fifty thousand of veterans. Lu Qian was sent as his second, and the army marched to Yangling Slope, where they halted to see if any support was coming from the southeast.\n\nSun Quan fell in with the scheme of Cao Cao as soon as he had read Cao Cao's letter. He at once prepared a reply for the messenger to take back, and then gathered his officers, civil and military, to consult. Zhang Zhao was the first speaker.\n\n\"We know Guan Yu has captured one leader and slain another. This has added greatly to his fame and reputation. Cao Cao was going to move the capital rather than risk an attack. We also know that Fancheng is in imminent danger. Cao Cao has asked for our help; but when he has gained his end, I doubt whether he will hold to his promise.\"\n\nBefore Sun Quan had replied they announced the arrival of Lu Meng, who had come in a small ship from Lukou with a special message. He was at once called in and asked what it was.\n\nSaid Lu Meng, \"The armies of Guan Yu being absent at Fancheng, the opportunity should be taken to attack Jingzhou.\"\n\n\"But I wish to attack Xuzhou in the north. What of this plan?\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"It would be better to attack Jingzhou, and so get control of the Great River. Cao Cao is far away to the north and too occupied to regard the east. Xuzhou is weakly held and could be taken easily, but the lie of the land favors the use of an army rather than a navy force. If you capture it, it will not be easy to hold. But once you hold Jingzhou, you can evolve other schemes.\"\n\n\"Really, my desire was to attack Jingzhou, but I wished to hear what you would say to the other plan. Now, Sir, make me a plan speedily, and I will act upon it.\"\n\nSo Lu Meng took his leave and went back to Lukou. But soon they heard that Guan Yu had had beacon towers erected at short distances all along the Great River, and that the army of Jingzhou was being put into most efficient condition.\n\n\"If this is so, it is hard to make a plan that will ensure success,\" said Lu Meng. \"I have already advised my master to attack Jingzhou, but I am unable to meet this complication.\"\n\nTherefore he made illness an excuse to stay at home, and sent to inform Sun Quan, who was very distressed at the news.\n\nThen said Lu Xun, \"The illness is feigned. He is quite well.\"\n\n\"If you know that so well, go and see,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nAway went Lu Xun and speedily arrived at Lukou, where he saw Lu Meng, who indeed appeared to be in perfect health. Nor did his face bear any signs of recent illness.\n\n\"The Marquis of Wu has sent me to inquire after your honorable complaint,\" said Lu Xun.\n\n\"How distressed I am that the state of my wretched carcass has caused the Marquis the inconvenience of inquiring\" replied Lu Meng.\n\n\"The Marquis placed a very heavy responsibility on your shoulders, but you are not making the best use of the opportunity. However, what is the real origin of your distress?\"\n\nLu Meng sat gazing at his visitor a long time without replying.\n\n\"I have a little remedy,\" said Lu Xun. \"Do you think you might use it?\"\n\nLu Meng dismissed the servants, and when the two were alone, he said, \"This remedy, my friend, please tell me what it is.\"\n\n\"Your ailment is due simply to the efficiency of the Jingzhou soldiers. I know how to keep the beacons from flaring, and I can make the defenders of Jingzhou come to you with their hands tied. Would that cure you?\"\n\n\"My friend, you speak as if you saw into my inmost heart. Pray unfold your good scheme.\"\n\n\"Guan Yu thinks himself too much of a hero for anyone to dare to face him, and his only anxiety is yourself. Now you must take advantage of this excuse you have made of illness actually to resign this post, so that the pretense may be kept up and another person be appointed to your place. Let this person, your successor, humbly praise Guan Yu till that general becomes so conceited that he will withdraw all the troops from Jingzhou to send them against Fancheng. When Jingzhou is left undefended then is our chance, and the city will fall into our hands.\"\n\n\"The plan seems most excellent,\" said Lu Meng.\n\nWherefore Lu Meng's malady waxed worse, so that he was confined to bed. He gave Lu Xun his letter of resignation to carry back to Sun Quan. The messenger hastened back and explained the ruse to his master, who soon after issued a command for Lu Meng to retire and attend to the recovery of his health.\n\nBut Lu Meng came to Sun Quan to discuss the matter of a successor.\n\nSun Quan said to him, \"As to the appointment at Lukou, you know Zhou Yu recommended Lu Su, who at his last moment proposed you. Now you ought to be able to mention some other talented and well-known officer to succeed you.\"\n\n\"If you choose a well-known man, Guan Yu will certainly be on his guard against him. Now Lu Xun is deep and farseeing, but he has no widespread fame. Hence no particular notice would be taken of his appointment and no countermeasures taken. So he is the most suitable person to send.\"\n\nSun Quan agreed and thereupon promoted Lu Xun to the rank of General of the Right Army and Admiral of the Right Fleet, and sent him to defend the port.\n\n\"I am very young,\" said Lu Xun, \"and feel unequal to such a post.\"\n\n\"Lu Meng has proposed you, and you will not make any mistakes. Pray do not decline,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nSo the appointment was made, and Lu Xun set out at once. When he had assumed charge of the cavalry, the infantry, and the marines, he set about drawing up a letter to Guan Yu, and he selected fine horses and beautiful silks and good wines and delicacies suitable for gifts to go with the letter. He sent all by the hand of a trusty messenger to Fancheng.\n\nThe news of the change of command reached Guan Yu when he lay ill from the effects of his wound and unable to conduct any military operations. Close upon the news came the letter and the gifts from Lu Xun, and the bearer was called in to see the warrior.\n\n\"Friend Sun Quan was not very prudent when he made a Commanding General out of a mere youth,\" said Guan Yu, pointing to the messenger.\n\nThe messenger said, \"General Lu Xun sends this letter and some presents, which he hopes you will accept. He also sends his felicitations, and would rejoice if the two houses could become friends.\"\n\nGuan Yu read the letter, which was couched in most modest language, and then threw back his head and laughed aloud. He bade the attendants receive the various gifts, and sent the bearer away.\n\nThe messenger forthwith returned to Lukou and reported to Lu Xun, Guan Yu seemed very gratified, and he felt no anxiety and danger toward the South Land.\n\nSpies were sent out to report on proceedings, and they returned to say that half the troops of Jingzhou had been sent to assist in the siege of Fancheng. That city was to be seriously assaulted as soon as Guan Yu had recovered.\n\nThis news was promptly sent on to Sun Quan, who at once called in Lu Meng to decide upon the next move.\n\n\"Now is the favorable moment to get possession of Jingzhou,\" said Sun Quan. \"I propose to send you and my brother, Sun Jiao, to lead the army.\"\n\nThis Sun Jiao was really only a cousin, as he was the second son of Sun Quan's uncle, Sun Jing.\n\nBut Lu Meng objected. \"My lord, if you think to employ me, then employ me only; if Sun Jiao, then Sun Jiao only. You cannot have forgotten that Zhou Yu and Cheng Pu were associate commanders, and although the final decision lay with Zhou Yu, yet the other presumed upon his seniority and there was some unfriendliness between the two. All ended well because Cheng Pu recognized the ability of his colleague and so supported him. I know I am not so clever as Zhou Yu, but Sun Jiao's consanguinity will be a greater obstacle than mere length of service, and I fear he may not be wholly with me.\"\n\nSun Quan saw the force of the contention, and appointed Lu Meng to sole command with Sun Jiao to help him in the commissariat. Lu Meng thanked his lord for his commission, soon got his thirty thousand marines together, and assembled eighty ships for the expedition.\n\nLu Meng dressed a number of sailors in the plain white costumes of ordinary merchants and put them on board to work his vessels. He concealed his veterans in the compartments. He selected seven generals \u2014 Han Dang, Jiang Qin, Zhu Ran, Pan Zhang, Zhou Tai, Xu Sheng, and Ding Feng \u2014 to serve under him and settled the order of their successive movements. The remainder of the forces was left with Sun Quan as supports and reserves. Letters were also written to Cao Cao that he might cooperate by sending his army to attack Guan Yu in the rear, and to Lu Xun that he would act in concert.\n\nThen the sailors in plain white dress navigated the ships to River Xunyang as quickly as possible, and then crossed to the north bank.\n\nWhen the beacon-keepers came down to question them, the men of Wu said, \"We are traders forced into the bank by contrary winds.\"\n\nAnd they offered gifts to the beacon-keepers, who accepted them and let the ships come to an anchor close to the shore.\n\nAt about the second watch the soldiers came out of hiding in the holds of the transports, suddenly fell upon the beacon-keepers and made them prisoners, officers and soldiers. Next the signal for a general landing was given, and all the soldiers from the eighty ships went ashore. The guard stations were attacked, and all the troops captured and carried off to the ships, not one being allowed to escape. Then the force of Wu hurried off to the city of Jingzhou, having so far carried out their plans that no one knew of their coming.\n\nNearing Jingzhou, Lu Meng spoke kindly to his captives, and gave them gifts and comforted them in order to induce them to get the gates opened for him to enter the city. He won them over to his side, and they promised to aid him. They would show a flare as a signal that the gates were free. So they went in advance and arrived at the gates about midnight. They called the watch. The wardens of the gate, recognizing their voices, opened for them. Once within, they shouted and lit the flares. Immediately the soldiers of Wu came in with a rush and were soon in possession.\n\nThe first order issued by Lu Meng was to spare the people. Instant death should be the punishment for any murder or robbery. The various officials in the city were retained in their offices and continued their functions. Special guards were set over Guan Yu's family dwelling, and none dared break open any other house. A messenger was sent with tidings to Sun Quan.\n\nOne very wet day Lu Meng, with a few horsemen as escort, was going round the walls and visiting the gates. One of the soldiers took from a passer-by a broad-brimmed hat and put it on over his helmet to keep his armor dry. Lu Meng saw it, and the offender was seized. He was a fellow-villager of Lu Meng, but that did not save him.\n\n\"You are an old acquaintance, but you knew my order. Why did you disobey it?\"\n\n\"I thought the rain would spoil my uniform, and I took the hat to protect it. I did not take it for my own advantage, but to protect state property. Spare me, O General, for the sake of our common dwelling-place.\"\n\n\"I know you were protecting your armor, but still it was disobedience to the order against taking anything from the people.\"\n\nThe soldier was beheaded, and his head exposed as a warning. But when all was over, Lu Meng had the body buried decently and wept at the grave for the loss of his friend. Never after this was there the least laxity of discipline.\n\nWhen Sun Quan visited the city, Lu Meng met him at the boundary and led him to the official residence, where Sun Quan issued rewards and commendations. This done, Sun Quan ordered Pan Jun to take charge of the new possession. Yu Jin, who was in prison, was freed and sent back to Cao Cao. When the people had been comforted and the soldiers rewarded, there was a great banquet in honor of the success of the expedition.\n\nThen said Sun Quan to Lu Meng, \"We have got the city of Jingzhou, but now Fu Shiren is holding Gongan and Mi Fang Nanjun. How can we get these two territories?\"\n\nSuddenly Yu Fan started up and offered his services.\n\n\"You will need neither bows nor arrows,\" said Yu Fan, \"unless my little tongue is worn out. I can persuade Fu Shiren to surrender.\"\n\n\"Friend Yu Fan, how will you do it?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"Fu Shiren and I are very old friends, ever since we were boys. If I explain the matter to him, I am sure he will come over to this side.\"\n\nSo Yu Fan, with an escort, left quickly for Gongan, where his friend was in command.\n\nNow when Fu Shiren heard of the capture of Jingzhou, he closed his gates. Yu Fan arrived, but was refused entrance. So Yu Fan wrote a letter, attached it to an arrow, and shot it over the city wall. A soldier picked it up and took it to his commander, who found therein much persuasion to surrender.\n\nHaving read all this, he thought within himself, \"I think I should do well in surrender, for at his departure Guan Yu was very bitter against me.\"\n\nWithout further ado, he bade the wardens open the gate, and his friend came in. After their greetings they talked of old times, and Yu Fan praised Sun Quan's magnanimity and liberality and greatness generally. So finally Fu Shiren decided to exchange masters and went away, taking with him his seal of office. He was presented to Sun Quan, who reappointed him to the command of Gongan under its new lord.\n\nLu Meng thought the appointment imprudent and said to Sun Quan, \"Guan Yu is yet unconquered. We should not put Fu Shiren in Gongan. Instead, send him to Nanjun to induce his former colleague and fellow Mi Fang to join him in desertion to the enemy.\"\n\nLu Meng's advice was followed, and Fu Shiren was recalled.\n\n\"Go to Nanjun and win over Mi Fang, and I will reward you richly,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nFu Shiren accepted the mission and duly left for Nanjun.\n\n\u2003Jingzhou's defenders failed when tried,\n\n\u2003So Wang Fu's words were justified." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Xu Huang Fights At The River Mian; Guan Yu Retreats To Maicheng.\n\nThe fall of Jingzhou put Mi Fang in a quandary. Before he could decide upon any course, his old colleague Fu Shiren came to see him. Fu Shiren was admitted, and when asked why he had come, he blurted out his business without beating about the bush.\n\n\"I am faithful enough, but I got into difficulties and danger and could not hold on, so I have surrendered to Wu. And I advise you to do the same.\"\n\n\"You and I have both fed on the bounty of the Prince of Hanzhong, and I cannot understand how you can turn against him.\"\n\n\"Guan Yu went away hating both of us intensely. Even if he comes back victorious, I do not think he will forgive us. Just think it over.\"\n\n\"My brother and I have followed the Prince these many years, and I do not like leaving him like this.\"\n\nMi Fang hesitated.\n\nBefore he could make up his mind, there came a messenger, saying, \"The army in Fancheng is short of grain, and I was sent to demand white rice for the soldiers. Nanjun and Gongan are to send ten thousand carts at once. Delay will be most severely punished.\"\n\nThis sudden demand was a shock to Mi Fang.\n\n\"Where am I to get the rice?\" said he despairingly to his friend and tempter. \"Jingzhou is now in the hands of Wu.\"\n\n\"Do not dilly-dally,\" said Fu Shiren. Thereupon he drew his sword and slew the messenger as he stood in the hall.\n\n\"What have you done?\" cried Mi Fang.\n\n\"Guan Yu wanted to slay us two and has forced me to this. Are we to fold our hands and await death? Either you give in at once and go over to Wu, or you will be put to death by Guan Yu.\"\n\nJust then they heard that Lu Meng's troops had actually reached the city wall. Mi Fang saw that nothing could save his life but desertion, so he went out with Fu Shiren and gave in his allegiance to Lu Meng, by whom he was led to Sun Quan. Sun Quan gave both of them presents, after which he proceeded to restore order and to reward his army for their services.\n\nAt the time that great discussion about Jingzhou was going on in Xuchang, a messenger arrived with a letter from Sun Quan. It told the plan of attacking Jingzhou and begged Cao Cao to send an army to attack Guan Yu in the rear, enjoining the utmost secrecy.\n\nCao Cao summoned his advisers to a meeting for consultation.\n\nFirst Secretary Dong Zhao said, \"Now that Fancheng is surrounded, it would be well to shoot letter into the city to let the besieged know, so that they may not yield to depression. Then we will inform Guan Yu of the danger from the south. If Guan Yu hears that Jingzhou is threatened by Wu, he will come back to try to defend it. Then let Xu Huang take the chance to attack, and our victory will be complete.\"\n\nCao Cao agreed that the plan was good, and so he sent a messenger to urge Xu Huang to attack. Cao Cao himself led a large force to Yangling Slope, south of Luoyang, to rescue Cao Ren.\n\nXu Huang was sitting in his tent when they told him that a messenger from the Prince of Wei had arrived.\n\nThe messenger was called in and said, \"The Prince has led an army to Luoyang, and he wishes you to hasten to attack Guan Yu in order to relieve Fancheng.\"\n\nJust then the scouts came to report: \"Guan Ping has encamped at Yencheng and Liao Hua at Sizhong. The enemy have built a line of twelve stockades.\"\n\nXu Huang ordered two of his generals \u2014 Lu Qian and Xu Shang \u2014 to Yencheng to masquerade as if he himself was in command, by showing his ensigns. Xu Huang himself, at the head of five hundred veterans, went along River Mian to attack Yencheng in the rear.\n\nWhen Guan Ping heard of the approach of Xu Huang, he prepared his own division to meet him. When both sides were arrayed, Guan Ping rode out and engaged Xu Shang. After three encounters Xu Shang had the worst of it and fled. Then the other general, Lu Qian, went out. He fought half a dozen bouts and also ran away. Thereupon Guan Ping went in pursuit and smote the flying enemy for seven miles. But then there was an alarm of fire within Yencheng, and Guan Ping knew that he had been inveigled into the pursuit and was a victim. So he turned and set out for the city again. On his way he met a body of troops, and standing under the great standard was Xu Huang.\n\nXu Huang shouted out, \"Guan Ping, my worthy nephew, it is strange that you do not recognize death when it stares you in the face. Your Jingzhou has fallen into the hands of Wu, and yet you act so madly.\"\n\nGuan Ping, whirling his sword, just rode hard at Xu Huang, and they engaged. But after the third bout there was a tremendous shouting among the soldiers, for the flames within the city burst up higher than before. Guan Ping could not follow up his desire to continue the fight, but cut his way out and made a dash for Sizhong, where Liao Hua received him with the news of the disaster to Jingzhou.\n\n\"People say that Jingzhou has fallen to Lu Meng, and the news has frightened the whole army. What is to be done?\" said Liao Hua.\n\n\"It is only a malicious rumor. Do not let it spread. If anyone repeats it, put him to death.\"\n\nJust then a man came running in to say that Xu Huang was attacking the first stockade on the north.\n\n\"If that goes,\" said Guan Ping, \"the remainder will follow. But as we have River Mian at our back, they will not dare attack this. Let us go to the rescue.\"\n\nSo Liao Hua summoned his subordinate leaders and gave them orders to hold the camp and make a signal if the enemy came.\n\n\"There is no danger here,\" said they. \"The camp is defended by a tenfold line of thorny barriers. Even a bird could not get in.\"\n\nGuan Ping and Liao Hua mustered all the veterans they had and went away to the first stockade.\n\nSeeing the Wei soldiers camped on a low hill, Guan Ping said to his colleague, \"Those soldiers are stationed in an unsafe place. Let us raid their camp tonight.\"\n\n\"You take half the force, General, and I will remain to keep the camp,\" said Liao Hua.\n\nWhen night fell, the attacking force went out. But on reaching the camp not a man opposed them. The camp was empty. Then Guan Ping knew he had been deceived, and turned to retreat. He was at once attacked on two sides by Xu Shang and Lu Qian from left and right. Unable to stand, his troops ran for the camp. The soldiers of Wei followed, and presently the camp was surrounded. They were compelled to abandon the position and set off for Sizhong. As they drew near they saw torches, and presently knew by the ensigns displayed that the camp had also fallen to the enemy. Retiring, they hastened along the high road toward Fancheng, but presently their way was barred by a force under Xu Huang himself. By dint of hard fighting they got away and returned to their main camp, and Guan Ping went to his father.\n\nSaid he, \"Xu Huang has got possession of Yencheng. Cao Cao's main army is on the way in three divisions. And many say that Jingzhou is in the enemy's hands.\"\n\nGuan Yu bade him be silent.\n\n\"This is a fabrication of the enemy,\" said Guan Yu, \"but it may dishearten the soldiers. We know Lu Meng is ill, and they have appointed that impractical fellow Lu Xun to succeed him at Lukou. There is nothing to fear.\"\n\nThen news came that Xu Huang had arrived . At once Guan Yu bade them saddle his charger.\n\n\"Father, you are not strong enough to go into the battle,\" said Guan Ping.\n\n\"Xu Huang and I were once friends, and I know what he can do and not do. I will give him the chance to retire. If he does not take it, then I shall just slay him as a warning to the others.\"\n\nMounting his charger, Guan Yu rode out as impetuously as of yore, and the sight of the old warrior made to quake the hearts of the troops of Wei.\n\nWhen he came close enough to his enemy, Guan Yu checked his steed and said, \"Where is my friend Xu Huang?\"\n\nAs a reply, the gate of the battle opened, and Xu Huang appeared under the standard.\n\nWith a low bow Xu Huang said, \"Some years have passed since I met you, Most Excellent Marquis, but I had not expected to see you so gray. I have not forgotten the old brave days, when we were together and you taught me so much, and I am very grateful. Your new fame has spread throughout the whole empire, and your old friends cannot but praise you. I am indeed glad that I have the happiness to see you.\"\n\nGuan Yu replied, \"We have been excellent friends, Xu Huang \u2014 better than most. But why have you pressed my son so hardly of late?\"\n\nXu Huang suddenly turned to the officers about him and cried fiercely, \"I would give a thousand ounces of gold for this Guan Yu's head.\"\n\nGuan Yu, greatly shocked, said, \"What did you say that for?\"\n\n\"Because today I am on state business, and I have no inclination to let private friendship override my public duty.\"\n\nAs he said this, he whirled his battle-ax and rode at Guan Yu, who, greatly enraged, threw up his great saber to strike. They fought a half score bouts, but although his skill lacked nothing of its pristine vigor and excelled all the world, the veteran warrior's right arm was still weak from the wound. Guan Ping saw that his father failed somewhat, and so hastily beat the gong for retreat. Guan Yu rode back.\n\nSuddenly the noise of a great shouting was heard. It came from the troops in Fancheng, for Cao Ren, having heard of the arrival of troops of his own side, had made a sortie and was about to attack to help Xu Huang. His army fell on, and the army of Jingzhou were routed. Guan Yu, with as many of his officers as could, fled away along the banks of River Xiang, hotly pursued by the army of Wei. Crossing the river, he made for Xiangyang.\n\nSuddenly the scouts reported: \"Jingzhou has been taken by Lu Meng. Your family is now in the hand of enemy.\"\n\nGuan Yu was shocked. Thence he marched for Gongan.\n\nBut the scouts told him: \"Fu Shiren has yielded Gongan to the hands of Wu.\"\n\nThen some of the men he had dispatched for supplies came in and reported: \"Fu Shiren murdered the officer and persuade Mi Fang to surrender to Wu.\"\n\nThe story filled Guan Yu with boundless rage. It was too much. The wound reopened, and he fell in a swoon.\n\n\"Wang Fu, you were right,\" said he when he recovered consciousness. \"How I regret that I did not heed what you said!\"\n\n\"But why were the beacon fires not lighted?\" continued he presently.\n\nSaid the scouts, \"Lu Meng's marines in the guise of traders came over the river. There were soldiers hidden in the ships, and they seized the beacon guards, so preventing them from kindling the fires.\"\n\nGuan Yu sighed. Beating the ground with his foot, he said, \"Indeed I have fallen into their trap. How shall I look my brother in the face?\"\n\nThen outspoke Commissariat Commander Zhao Lei, saying, \"We are in straits. Send to Chengdu for help, and let us take the land road to Jingzhou to try to recover it.\"\n\nSo Guan Yu sent Ma Liang and Yi Ji to Shu to ask for help. The messengers rode out swiftly by different routes, while the army set out to return to Jingzhou, Guan Yu leading and Liao Hua with Guan Ping keeping the rear.\n\nThe siege of Fancheng being thus raised, Cao Ren went to see his master. With tears he acknowledged his fault and asked pardon.\n\n\"It was the will of heaven, and no fault of yours,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nAnd he rewarded the armies.\n\nWhen he visited Sizhong and had inspected the captured stockades, he remarked on the defenses, saying, \"Xu Huang was very clever to overcome these. With my thirty years of war, I should not have dared to penetrate such opposition. He is valiant and wise, and both in a high degree.\"\n\n\"Aye,\" said they with him, for they could not but agree.\n\nCao Cao's army marched back to Mopo and there camped. When Xu Huang returned, Cao Cao went out of the stockade to meet him, and netted with joy when seeing the excellent order and discipline that his army showed. Every soldier was in his place, the ranks perfectly kept, all without a trace of disorder.\n\n\"General Xu Huang has the spirit of the old Zhou Yafu,\" said Cao Cao, and on the spot conferred on his commander the title of General Who Pacifies the South. Xu Huang was sent soon after to share in the defense of Xiangyang with Xiahou Shang and to meet Guan Yu's army.\n\nJingzhou being still in turmoil, Cao Cao remained at Mopo waiting for news.\n\nGuan Yu found himself at a standstill on the road to Jingzhou with the army of Wu in front and the men of Wei coming up behind.\n\n\"What is to be done,\" he discussed the position with Zhao Lei, \"when we cannot advance nor retreat and the aid has not come?\"\n\nZhao Lei proposed a halt to try to shame Lu Meng into aiding Cao Cao.\n\nSaid he, \"When Lu Meng was at Lukou, he used to write to you often, and you agreed to join hands in the destruction of Cao Cao. Now he is a traitor and fighting on the other side. Send a letter and reproach him. Perhaps we may get a satisfactory reply.\"\n\nSo the letter was written and sent to Jingzhou.\n\nMeanwhile, by Lu Meng's special command, the most complete protection was given to the families of all the officers who were serving under Guan Yu, and they were kept supplied with all they required. Even the ailing members of their households were treated by physicians free of charge. The result was that they were quite won over to the new order of things, and there was no attempt to disturb it. When Guan Yu's letter came, the messenger was led into the city and well treated.\n\nWhen Lu Meng read the letter, he said to the bearer thereof, \"You must understand the different circumstances. When your general and I were leagued together, it was a personal matter between us two. Now things have changed. I am sent here with certain orders and am not my own master. I would trouble you, O messenger, to return and explain thus to your master and in good words.\"\n\nThe bearer of the letter was entertained at a banquet and sent to repose himself in the guest-house, where the families of the absent officers sought him to have news of their husbands and fathers. Moreover, they brought him letters and gave him messages for the officers, and the whole tenor of these letters and messages was that they were all in good health, all their needs were supplied, and they lacked nothing. When he left the city, Lu Meng himself escorted him to the outskirts and set him on his way.\n\nOn his return to the army, he gave to Guan Yu the message of Lu Meng and told him that the families were all well and safe and well cared for. This, however, did not greatly please Guan Yu.\n\nStamping his foot, Guan Yu said, \"This is merely a ruse to gain favor and popularity. The brigand! If I cannot slay him while I live, I will after I am dead. My hate shall not go unappeased.\"\n\nHe roughly dismissed the messenger, who went out and was at once surrounded by those whose families were in the city and who desired to have news of them. And when he gave them the letters and messages and told them all were well, there was great rejoicing among the men in the camp, and kindly feelings for Lu Meng prevailed. And therewith died down the spirit of fighting.\n\nGuan Yu led the army to attack Jingzhou, but day by day the men deserted and ran away to the very city they were moving to attack. So day by day Guan Yu's bitterness and anger increased, and he advanced in angry haste. One day there was a great shouting and the noise of drums, and he found his way blocked.\n\n\"Why do you not surrender, friend Guan Yu?\" said the leader of this body, Jiang Qin.\n\n\"Could I give in to a rebel \u2014 I, a servant of the Hans and a leader of their army?\" roared Guan Yu in a passion.\n\nThereupon he whipped his horse forward and swung up his sword to strike. However, Jiang Qin would not fight. The two exchanged a few blows, and Jiang Qin fled. Guan Yu followed. When he had gone a long way, there suddenly appeared from a gully near him Han Dang, while Zhou Tai came out from the other side. Thereupon Jiang Qin wheeled round and once more came to do battle, so that three forces were opposed to Guan Yu. Unable to withstand these, he retreated.\n\nBefore he had gone very far, he saw signs of many people bivouacking among the hills, and presently made out, on a huge white banner that flapped in the breeze, the words Natives of Jingzhou, and the people about were calling out, \"All the inhabitants of this place have surrendered.\"\n\nGuan Yu felt like rushing up and cutting these people to pieces, but just then two other cohorts appeared led by Ding Feng and Xu Sheng, who supported Jiang Qin. The three bodies of troops then set on with shouting and loud beating of drums that seemed to make the very earth tremble. And Guan Yu was like the kernel in a nut, quite surrounded.\n\nThis was not all. He saw the number of his followers diminishing every moment. He fought on till dusk, and looking about him he saw all the hills crowded with Jingzhou folks and heard them calling siblings for brother and children for father, till his soldiers' hearts had melted within them. One by one they ran to their relatives, heedless of their leader and his voice. Presently he had but three hundred left, but with them he kept up the battle till the third watch. Then there was another shouting in another note, for his leaders, Guan Ping, his son, and Liao Hua, came to his help. And they rescued him.\n\n\"The soldiers' hearts are all melted,\" said Guan Ping. \"We must find some place wherein to camp till help can arrive. There is Maicheng, small, but sufficient. Let us camp there.\"\n\nGuan Yu consented, and the exhausted army hurried thither as quickly as they could. The small force was divided among the four gates to guard.\n\nZhao Lei said, \"This place is near Shangyong where Meng Da and Liu Feng station. We should send for their help. If their army marches to our relief until the grand army of Shu comes, the morale of our army will improve.\"\n\nBut disappointments dogged them. Very soon the army of Wu came up and laid siege to the city.\n\n\"Who will try to break through and go away to Shangyong for assistance?\" asked Guan Yu.\n\n\"I will go,\" said Liao Hua.\n\n\"And I will escort you past the danger zone,\" said Guan Ping.\n\nGuan Yu wrote his letter, which Liao Hua concealed next to his skin, and having eaten a full meal, he rode out at the gate. The leader of the enemy, Ding Feng, tried to check him, but Guan Ping fought vigorously and drove him away. So Liao Hua escaped the siege and reached Shangyong, while Guan Ping returned. Then they barred the gates and hold their defense.\n\nNow, having captured Shangyong, Liu Feng and Meng Da had remained to guard it. Liu Feng had been created Governor General, and together with Meng Da, to defend that city. When they heard of the defeat of Guan Yu, they took counsel what to do. When Liao Hua came, he was admitted into the city. He told the tale of Guan Yu's straits, and asked for help.\n\nSaid Liao Hua, \"Guan Yu is closely besieged in Maicheng. Help from the west will be a long time in coming, so I have been sent to beg your assistance. I hope you will march the Shangyong troops thither as quickly as possible, for any delay will be fatal.\"\n\nLiu Feng replied, \"Sir, go to the rest-house for a time till we can decide.\"\n\nSo Liao Hua went, and the two leaders talked over the matter.\n\nLiu Feng said, \"This is bad news. What is to be done?\"\n\n\"Wu is very powerful,\" replied his colleague. \"Now they have control over the whole region of Jingzhou, save this small clod of earth called Maicheng. Cao Cao is at hand with five hundred thousand troops, and we cannot stand against the two mighty forces. I say we must not move.\"\n\n\"I know all this. But Guan Yu is my uncle, and I cannot bear to sit still and not try to save him.\"\n\n\"So you hold him as an uncle!\" said Meng Da with a smile. \"Yet I do not think he holds you much as a nephew. When the Prince of Hanzhong adopted you, Guan Yu was greatly annoyed. And after the Prince had accepted his new dignity and was nominating his heir, I heard he consulted Zhuge Liang, who said the affair was one to be decided within the family and declined to advise. Then the Prince sent to ask Guan Yu's advice. Did Guan Yu name you? Not at all. You were only a son by adoption and could have no place in the succession. Further, Guan Yu advised that you be sent to a distance lest you might cause trouble. This is common knowledge, and I am surprised that you are ignorant of it. Yet today you make capital out of the relationship and are willing to run a great risk to support it.\"\n\n\"Granted that what you say is true, still what reply can we give?\"\n\n\"Simply say that this city is still unsettled, and you dare not move lest it be lost.\"\n\nLiu Feng took his colleague's view, sent for the messenger and told him. Liao Hua was greatly disappointed. He threw himself on the ground and knocked his head, imploring assistance.\n\n\"If you act thus, there is an end of Guan Yu!\" cried Liao Hua.\n\n\"Will a cup of water extinguish a wagon load of blazing wood?\" said Meng Da. \"Hasten back and await patiently for the coming of help from the west.\"\n\nLiao Hua renewed his entreaties. The two commanders simply rose, shook out their sleeves, and left him. Liao Hua saw that things had gone against him and thought his best course would be to go at once to Chengdu. He rode out of the city cursing its defenders and went away west.\n\nGuan Yu from his fortress looked anxiously, but vainly, for the coming of the expected aid. He was in a sorry plight. His army numbered but a few hundred, many wounded; there was no food.\n\nThen someone came to the foot of the wall and, calling out to the defenders on the wall not to shoot, said he had a message for the commander. He was allowed to enter. It was Zhuge Jin. When he had made his salutations and taken tea, he began his harangue.\n\n\"I come at the command of my master, the Marquis of Wu, to persuade you to a wise course. From of old it has always been recognized that the hero must bow to circumstances. The region with its nine territories and forty-two counties that you ruled have come under another, with the exception of this single city. Within, there is no food, without, no help, so that it must fall quickly. Wherefore, O General, why not hear me and join your fortunes to those of Wu? You shall be restored to your governorship, and you will preserve your family. If haply, Sir, you would reflect thereon.\"\n\nGuan Yu replied, quite calmly, \"I am a simple soldier from the village of Jieliang, yet my lord and I have become brothers. How can I betray him? If the city may fall, then I can but die. Jade may be shattered, but its whiteness remains; bamboo may be burned, but its joints stand straight. My body may be broken, but my name shall live true in history. Say no more, but leave the city, I beg. I will fight Sun Quan to the end.\"\n\n\"My master desires to enter into such a league with you as did Qin and Jin in former days, that you may mutually assist to destroy Cao Cao and restore the Hans. That is his idea, and why do you persist in this wrong course?\"\n\nAs Zhuge Jin finished this speech, Guan Ping, who was by, drew his sword to slay him. But his father checked him.\n\n\"Remember his brother is in Shu, helping your uncle. If you hurt him, you will injure the principle of fraternity.\"\n\nGuan Yu then bade his servants lead Zhuge Jin away. Zhuge Jin went, his face covered with shame, and left the city. When he reached his master, he told of Guan Yu's obduracy and rejection of all argument.\n\n\"He is indeed a loyal servant!\" said Sun Quan. \"Still, what is to be done next?\"\n\n\"Take some casts in the Book of Changes,\" said Lu Fan.\n\nSo the lots were taken and explained to mean that the Marquis' enemies should flee to a distance.\n\nThen Sun Quan asked Lu Meng, saying, \"If he flies to a distance, how can he be captured?\"\n\n\"The divination exactly fits in with my schemes,\" replied Lu Meng. \"Even if Guan Yu had wings to soar to the skies, he would not escape my net.\"\n\n\u2003The dragon in a puddle is the sport of shrimps,\n\n\u2003The phoenix in a cage is mocked of small birds." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Cao Cao Is Possessed At Luoyang; Guan Yu Manifests At The Jade Spring Mount.\n\nSun Quan having asked Lu Meng for a plan, Lu Meng replied, \"This Guan Yu has very few soldiers left, and he will not venture along the high road. North of Maicheng is a risky path, and he will try to escape along that. Therefore you must lay an ambush for him seven miles away from the city, but do not stop him. Let him go by, and then harass his rear. Thus he will be forced into Linju. Set another small ambush near there, and you will capture your enemy. For the present, attack the city vigorously on all sides but one, leaving the north gate for escape.\"\n\nBefore carrying out this plan, Sun Quan bade Lu Fan consult the auspices.\n\nLu Fan did so, announcing, \"The enemy will flee toward the northwest, but will be caught that night before midnight.\"\n\nSo Zhu Ran was sent in command of the first ambush, and Pan Zhang was the second. The troops sent were all veterans.\n\nWhen Guan Yu mustered his fighting men in the city of Maicheng, he had but three hundred. The food was done. That night many soldiers of Wu came to the city walls and called to their friends by name, and many of these slipped over the wall and deserted, reducing the small force still further. No rescue force appeared, and Guan Yu was at the end of his resources.\n\nAgain he bewailed to Wang Fu, saying, \"I regret that I have neglected your wise warning. In this danger what is to be done?\"\n\n\"I think even if Lu Wang could come to life again, he would be helpless in this case,\" replied Wang Fu, weeping.\n\nSaid Zhao Lei, \"Liu Feng and Meng Da have surely decided not to send help from Shangyong. Let us abandon this miserable place, try to get to Yizhou, and recover the army. We may then tempt our fortune once more.\"\n\n\"I agree with you that that is the best plan,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nThen he ascended the walls and surveyed the country. Noting that the weakest side was the north, he called in some of the inhabitants and inquired the nature of the country on that side.\n\nThey replied, \"There are only paths there, but by them one may get into the West River Land.\"\n\n\"We will go that way tonight,\" said Guan Yu.\n\nWang Fu opposed it, saying, \"General, you will surely fall into an ambush. The main road will be safer.\"\n\n\"There may be an ambush, but do I fear that?\" said the old warrior.\n\nOrders were given to be ready to march.\n\n\"At least be very cautious,\" said Wang Fu. \"I will defend this city to the very last. I only need a hundred troops. Never will we surrender. Only I hope, Most Noble General, that you will send me speedy help.\"\n\nThe two parted in tears. Wang Fu and Zhou Cang remaining to guard Maicheng. Guan Yu, Guan Ping, and Zhao Lei marched with their weak force out of the north gate. Guan Yu, his green-dragon saber ready to hand, went first. About the third watch, seven miles lay between them and the city. There they saw a deep cleft in the hills wherefrom rolled the sound of beaten drums. And men were shouting. Soon appeared a large force with Zhu Ran at their head.\n\nHe came dashing forward, and summoned the small party, saying, \"Guan Yu, do not run! Surrender and live!\"\n\nBut Guan Yu whipped his steed to a gallop and bore down on the leader with anger in his eyes. Then Zhu Ran ran away. Guan Yu followed him till there came the loud boom of a large drum, and out sprang troops from all sides. Guan Yu dared not engage such a number, and fled in the direction of Linju. Zhu Ran came up behind and attacked the flying soldiers, so that Guan Yu's following gradually became smaller and smaller.\n\nStill he struggled on. A few miles farther the drums rolled again, and torches lit up all round. This was Pan Zhang's ambush, and he appeared flourishing his sword. Guan Yu whirled his blade and went to meet him, but Pan Zhang ran away after a couple of bouts. However, Guan Yu saw they were too many for him, and sought refuge among the mountains.\n\nHis son followed, and when he got within speaking distance, Guan Ping gave him the mournful tidings: \"Zhao Lei has fallen in the melee!\"\n\nGuan Yu was very sad, and bade his son try to protect the rear while he should force his way forward.\n\nWith about ten men he reached Zhuxi, a place with mountains on both sides. At their foot was a thick mass of reeds and dried grass. The trees grew very close. It was then the fifth watch. Presently the small party stumbled into another ambush, and the ambushing soldiers thrust forth hooks and threw ropes. Entangled in these, Guan Yu's horse fell, and Guan Yu reeled out of the saddle. In a moment Ma Zhong, the Marching General of Pan Zhang, made him a prisoner. Guan Ping dashed to his rescue, but before he could do anything, he also was surrounded and held. Father and son were both captives.\n\nWith great joy Sun Quan heard of the success of his plans. In the morning, he assembled all his officers in his tent to await the arrival of the prisoners. Before long, Ma Zhong came hustling his prisoner before his lord.\n\n\"I have long had a friendly feeling for you,\" said Sun Quan to Guan Yu, \"on account of your great virtues. Now I would have made a covenant and alliance with you, if you would. You and your son have long held yourselves to be invincible, but you see you are my prisoners today. Yet I hope to win you over to my side.\"\n\nBut Guan Yu only answered roughly, \"You green-eyed boy! You purple-bearded rat! I made a covenant in the Peach Garden with my brothers to uphold the Hans. Think you that I will stand side by side with a rebel such as you are? I am a victim of your vile schemes, but I can only die once. And there is no need of many words.\"\n\n\"He is a real hero, and I love him,\" said Sun Quan to those standing near. \"I will treat him well and endeavor to win him over. Do you think it well?\"\n\nSaid the First Secretary Zuo Xian, \"When Cao Cao had hold of this man, Cao Cao treated him lavishly well. Cao Cao created him a marquis; in three-day interval Cao Cao held a small banquet, in five days a great one; Cao Cao gave him gold and presented him with silver; all this, hoping to retain him at his side. But Cao Cao failed. The man broke through his gates, slew his six generals in five passes and went away. Today Cao Cao fears him, and almost moved the capital for dread of him. Now he is in your power, destroy him, or you will rue the day. Evil will come if you spare him.\"\n\nSun Quan reflected for some time.\n\n\"You are right,\" said he presently, and gave the order for execution.\n\nSo father and son met their fate together in the winter of the twenty-fourth year (AD 219) in the tenth month. Guan Yu was fifty-eight.\n\nA poem says:\n\n\u2003Peerless indeed was our Lord Guan Yu, of the latter days,\n\n\u2003Head and shoulders stood he out among the best;\n\n\u2003Godlike and terrible in war, elegant and refined in peace,\n\n\u2003Resplendent as the noonday sun in the heavens,\n\n\u2003Haloed as are the noblest of those early days,\n\n\u2003He stands, the brightest model for all ages,\n\n\u2003And not only for the strenuous days he lived in.\n\nAnd another:\n\n\u2003Seek ye a noble one? Then take ye the way of Jieliang,\n\n\u2003Watch ye how all people revere Guan Yu,\n\n\u2003Each excelling others to honor him,\n\n\u2003Him, one of the three brothers of the Peach Garden Oath,\n\n\u2003Who have won sacrifices, as emperor and king.\n\n\u2003Incomparable their aura spreads through the world;\n\n\u2003They are resplendent as the great lights of the firmament;\n\n\u2003Temples to our Lord Guan Yu abound, no village lacks one,\n\n\u2003Their venerable trees at sundown are the resting places for birds.\n\nSo Guan Yu ended his life. His famous steed, Red Hare, also captured with its master, was sent to Sun Quan, who gave it as a reward to his captor, Ma Zhong. But Red Hare survived its master only a short time. It refused to feed, and soon died.\n\nForeboding of misfortune came to Wang Fu within the city of Maicheng. His bones felt cold, and his flesh crept.\n\nHe said to his colleague Zhou Cang, \"I have had a terrible dream in which I saw our lord all dripping with gore. I would question him, but I was overcome with dread. May it augur no evil tidings!\"\n\nJust then the troops of Wu came up to the city wall and displayed the gory heads of the two, father and son. Wang Fu and Zhou Cang went up on the wall to see if the dread tokens were real. There was no doubt. Wang Fu with a despairing cry threw himself over the wall and perished, Zhou Cang died by his own hand. Thus Maicheng fell to Wu.\n\nThe execution of Guan Yu gave Sun Quan undisputed possession of the whole of the Jingzhou Region. He rewarded his soldiers and spread a great feast at which Lu Meng was in the seat of honor.\n\nSun Quan made a speech, saying, \"After long waiting, the desire of my heart has come to me very easily through the magnificent efforts of my friend Lu Meng.\"\n\nLu Meng bowed and bowed deprecatingly, but Sun Quan continued, \"My good Zhou Yu was superior to most humans, and he defeated Cao Cao at the Red Cliffs. Alas! He died too soon. My good Lu Su succeeded him. In his first interview, he inaugurated the general policy of creating a state. That was the first instance of his keen insight. When Cao Cao descended upon my country, and everyone counseled me to yield, he advised me to summon my good Zhou Yu to oppose and smite Cao Cao. That was the second instance of his keen insight. He made only one fault: He advised me to let Liu Bei occupy Jingzhou. Now today my good Lu Meng has succeeded, and in that he far surpasses both his predecessors.\"\n\nThen Sun Quan filled a goblet and in person presented it to the guest of the evening. Lu Meng took the cup, but as he raised it, a sudden change came over him.\n\nDashing the cup to the ground, Lu Meng seized Sun Quan, crying, \"O green-eyed boy! O purple-bearded rat! Do you know me?\"\n\nConsternation seized the whole assembly, but many rushed to the rescue of their lord, who had been thrown to the floor by the guest he had so lately complimented. Rushing forward over Sun Quan's body, Lu Meng sat himself in the host's seat, his eyebrows staring stiff and his eyes glaring.\n\n\"After I quelled the Yellow Scarves, I went hither and thither for thirty years. Now I have fallen victim to your base plots, and you have overcome me. Living, I have been unable to gorge upon the flesh of my enemy; dead, I will pursue the spirit of this bandit Lu Meng. I am the Lord of Hanshou, Guan Yu!\"\n\nTerror-stricken, Sun Quan was the first to fall prostrate, and all his officers followed him.\n\nThereupon Lu Meng fell over dead, with blood gushing from the seven orifices of his body.\n\nIn due time the body was coffined and interred. Lu Meng was created posthumously Governor of Nanjun and Lord of Chanling. His son, Lu Ba, was given hereditary nobility.\n\nAfter this visitation Sun Quan lived in constant terror. Soon Zhang Zhao came in from Jianye to see him and blame him for the murder.\n\n\"My lord, by the slaughter of Guan Yu you have brought misfortune very near to this state. You know the oath sworn in the Peach Garden. Now Liu Bei has the force of the two River Lands at his back, Zhuge Liang as adviser, and those heroes Zhang Fei, Zhao Zilong, Huang Zhong, and Ma Chao to carry out his behests. When Liu Bei hears of the death of both father and son, he will set in motion the whole force he has to avenge them, and I fear you cannot stand such an onslaught.\"\n\nSun Quan started up in a fright.\n\n\"Yes, I have made a little mistake,\" said he. \"But seeing it is so, what shall I do?\"\n\n\"You need have no fear,\" replied Zhang Zhao. \"I have a plan to fend off the armies of the west from our borders and keep Jingzhou quite safe.\"\n\n\"What is your plan?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"Cao Cao with his many legions is greedily aiming at the whole empire. If Liu Bei wants revenge, he will ally himself with Cao Cao, and, should they combine against the South Land, we should be in great danger. Therefore I advise you to send Guan Yu's head to Cao Cao to make it appear that Cao Cao was the prime cause of his destruction. This should divert Liu Bei's extreme hatred toward Cao Cao and send the armies of Shu against Wei instead of toward Wu. After carefully considering the whole matter, I counsel this as the best course of action.\"\n\nSun Quan thought the move worth making, and so the head of the great warrior was placed in a box and sent off as quickly as possible to Cao Cao.\n\nAt this time Cao Cao's army had marched back from Mopo to Luoyang. When he heard of the coming of the gruesome gift, he was glad at heart.\n\nSaid he, \"So Guan Yu is dead. Now I can stick to my mat and sleep soundly at night.\"\n\nBut Sima Yi saw through the ruse and said from his place by the steps, \"This is a trick to divert evil from Wu.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? How?\" said Cao Cao.\n\n\"The Peach Garden Oath bound the three brothers to live and die together. Now Wu is fearful of revenge for the execution of one of the three and sends the head to you to cause Liu Bei's wrath to fasten on you, O Prince. Sun Quan wishes Liu Bei to attack you instead of himself, the real perpetrator of the crime. Then he will find a way of accomplishing his ends while you two are quarreling.\"\n\n\"You are right, friend,\" said Cao Cao. \"And now how can we escape?\"\n\n\"I think escape is easy. You have the head of Guan Yu. Make a wooden image of the remainder of the body, and bury the whole with the rites suitable to a minister of state. When Liu Bei hears of this, he will turn his hate toward Sun Quan and raise all his forces to attack him. If you will think it out, you will see that whichever is victor the other will be smitten; and if we get one of the two, the other will follow before very long.\"\n\nCao Cao was pleased with the solution. Then he ordered the messenger to come in with the box, which was opened, and he looked upon the face of the dead. The features had not changed; the face bore the same appearance as of old. Cao Cao smiled.\n\n\"I hope you have been well since our last meeting, Guan Yu,\" said Cao Cao.\n\nTo his horror, the mouth opened, the eyes rolled, and the long beard and hair stiffened. Cao Cao fell to the ground in a swoon.\n\nThey rushed to him, but it was a long time before he recovered consciousness.\n\n\"General Guan Yu is indeed a spirit,\" he said.\n\nThe messenger who had brought the dead warrior's head told the story of Guan Yu cursing and reviling Sun Quan, and of what had befallen Lu Meng.\n\nCao Cao, filled with dread, prepared sacrifices and performed the rites for the honored dead. An effigy was carved out of heavy fragrant wood and buried outside the south gate with all the rites of a princely noble, a huge concourse of officials of all grades following in the procession. At the funeral Cao Cao himself bowed before the coffin and poured a libation. He also conferred on the dead the posthumous title of Prince of Jingzhou, and appointed guardians of the tomb. The messenger was sent back to Wu.\n\nNow the spirit of Guan Yu did not dissipate into space, but wandered through the void till it came to a certain spot in Dangyang on a famous hill known as the Mount of the Jade Spring. There lived a venerable Buddhist priest whose name in the faith was Transverse Peace. He was originally of the State Guardian Temple in the River Si Pass and abbot of that temple. In the course of roaming about the world, he had reached this place. Entranced with its natural beauty, he had built himself a shelter of boughs and grass, where he sat in meditation on the \"Way\". He had a novice with him to beg food and to attend to his simple wants.\n\nThis night, about the third watch, the moon was bright and the air serene. Transverse Peace sat in his usual attitude in the silence of the mountains.\n\nSuddenly he heard a great voice calling in the upper air, \"Give back my head! Give back my head!\"\n\nGazing upward Transverse Peace saw the shape of a man mounted on a red horse. In the hand was a shining blade like unto the green-dragon saber. Two military figures were with him, one on either side. He on the left had a white face; he on the right was swarthy of countenance with a curly beard. And they followed the figure with the shining blade. They floated along on a cloud which came to rest on the summit of the mountain.\n\nThe recluse recognized the figure as that of Guan Yu, so with his yak's tail flagellum he smote the lintel of his hut and cried, \"Where is Guan Yu?\"\n\nThe spirit understood, and the figure dismounted, glided down, and came to rest at the door of the hut.\n\nInterlacing its fingers, it stood in a reverential attitude and said, \"Who is my teacher, and what is his name in the faith?\"\n\n\"In the State Guardian Temple in River Si Pass, I once saw you, O Noble Sir, and I was not likely to forget your face,\" replied the priest.\n\n\"I am deeply grateful for the help you gave me. Misfortune has befallen me, and I have ceased to live. I would seek the pure instruction and beg you to indicate the obscure way.\"\n\n\"Let us not discuss former wrongdoings nor present correct actions. Later events are the inevitable result of former causes. I know that Lu Meng has injured you. You call aloud for the return of your head. But who will also return the heads of your several victims \u2014 Yan Liang, Wen Chou, and the commanders of the five passes?\"\n\nThereupon Guan Yu seemed suddenly to comprehend, bowed in token of assent, and disappeared. After this appearance to the recluse, his spirit wandered hither and thither about the mountain, manifesting its sacred character and guarding the people.\n\nImpressed by his virtue, the inhabitants built a temple on the Mount of the Jade Spring, wherein they sacrificed at the four seasons. In later days, one wrote a couplet for the temple, the first member reading:\n\n\"Ruddy faced, reflecting the honest heart within, out-riding the wind on the Red Hare steed, mindful of the Red Emperor;\"\n\n\"In the light of clear lamp, reading the histories, resting on the Green-Dragon saber curved as the young moon, heart pure as the azure heaven.\"\n\nMeanwhile in Shu, having conquered East River Land, the Prince of Hanzhong returned to his capital Chengdu.\n\nFa Zheng memorialized, saying, \"O Prince, thy consorts has passed away, and the Lady Sun has returned to her maiden home, perhaps never to come again. Human relations should not be set at nought, wherefore another consort should be sought, so that all things may be correctly ordered within the Palace.\"\n\nThe Prince having signified his acceptance of the principle, Fa Zheng continued, \"There is the sister of Wu Yi, comely and good, and declared by the physiognomist as destined to high honor. She was betrothed to Liu Mao, son of Liu Yan, but he died in youth, and she has remained unwedded. Take her as a wife.\"\n\n\"It is incompatible with propriety. Liu Mao and I are of the same ancestry.\"\n\n\"As to the degree of relationship, would it differ from the marriage between Duke Wen of Jin and Lady Huai Ying?\"\n\nUpon this precedent the Prince gave his consent and wedded the lady, and she bore to him two sons, the elder of whom was named Liu Yung and the younger Liu Li.\n\nMeanwhile, the whole land of Shu was prospering, the people were tranquil, and the state was becoming wealthy. The fields in both River Lands yielded bountiful harvests.\n\nSuddenly there came one who told of the attempt of Sun Quan to ally himself with Guan Yu by marriage, and the indignant rejection of the proposal.\n\n\"Jingzhou is in danger,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Recall and replace Guan Yu.\"\n\nThen began to arrive a series of messengers from Jingzhou, bearers of news of the moves in the game. At first they brought good tidings, then evil. Guan Xing came first to tell of the drowning of the seven armies of Yu Jin. Then one reported the installation of beacon towers along the river bank, and other preparations which seemed as near perfect as any could be. And Liu Bei's anxiety ceased.\n\nBut evil tidings were on the way. Liu Bei was ill at ease and felt a creepiness of the skin that boded evil. He was restless by day and sleepless by night. One night he rose from his couch and was reading by the light of a candle when drowsiness overcame him, and he fell asleep over the low table by his side. He dreamed. A cold gust of wind swept through the chamber, almost putting out the candle flame. When it brightened again he glanced up and saw a figure standing near the light.\n\n\"Who are you, who thus come by night to my chamber?\" asked he.\n\nThe figure made no reply, and Liu Bei got up to go over and see who it was. Then the figure took the shape of his brother. But it avoided him, retreating as he advanced.\n\nLiu Bei said, \"Brother, there is nothing wrong, I hope. But surely something of great importance brings you here thus in the dead of the night. And why do you avoid me, your brother, who loves you as himself?\"\n\nThen the figure wept and said, \"Brother, send your armies to avenge me.\"\n\nAs Guan Yu said that, a chilly blast went through the room, and the figure disappeared. Just then Liu Bei awoke and knew that he had dreamed.\n\nThe drums were beating the third watch as he awoke. He felt greatly worried and disturbed. So he went into the front portion of the Palace and sent for Zhuge Liang. Soon he came, and Liu Bei told him of the vision.\n\n\"You have been thinking too deeply of Guan Yu lately, my lord,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"There is no need to be distressed.\"\n\nBut Liu Bei could not find comfort, and Zhuge Liang was long in calming his feelings and arguing away his fancies.\n\nAs Zhuge Liang left the building, he met Xu Jing, who said, \"Instructor, I went to your residence to deliver a very secret piece of news, and they told me to find you here.\"\n\n\"What is your secret?\"\n\n\"There is a report about that Wu has got possession of Jingzhou; Lu Meng has taken it. And more than that, Guan Yu is dead. I had to come to tell you.\"\n\n\"I saw it in the sky some nights ago. A large star of a general fell over against Jingzhou, and I knew some evil had befallen Guan Yu. But I feared the effect upon our master, and I forbore to say anything.\"\n\nThey did not know that Liu Bei was standing just within the door.\n\nSuddenly Liu Bei rushed out, seized Zhuge Liang by the sleeve and said, \"Why did you hide from me? Why, when you had such terrible news?\"\n\n\"Because it is only a rumor,\" replied they. \"It is too improbable for belief. We pray you not to be distressed.\"\n\n\"By our oath we live or die together: How can I go on living if he is lost?\"\n\nThe two men soothed their lord as best they could. But even as they spoke to him, one of the private attendants said that Ma Liang and Yi Ji had arrived. Liu Bei called them in and questioned them eagerly.\n\nThey said, \"Jingzhou has indeed been lost, and Guan Yu begs for instant help.\"\n\nThe letters they brought had not been read before Liao Hua was ushered in. He prostrated himself and, weeping, told the story of the refusal of help on the part of Liu Feng and Meng Da.\n\n\"Then is my brother lost!\" cried Liu Bei.\n\n\"If those two have really behaved so badly, the offense is even too great for death,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"But calm yourself, O Prince. I will see about an army and lead it to the rescue.\"\n\n\"If Guan Yu is gone, I cannot live,\" moaned Liu Bei. \"Tomorrow I myself will set out with an army to rescue him.\"\n\nLiu Bei sent off a messenger to Zhang Fei in Langzhong and gave orders to muster horse and foot for instant departure.\n\nBefore day dawned other messengers arrived, giving step by step the sequence of the tragedy: \"Guan Yu had cut his way to Linju at night and been captured by a general of Wu. He had refused to bend, and both father and son had gone to the Nine Springs.\"\n\nWhen he heard of the final catastrophe, Liu Bei uttered a great cry and fell swooning.\n\nHis mind went back to the pledge of days gone by;\n\nCould he live still and let his brother die?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "Treating A Headache, A Famous Physician Dies; Giving The Last Words, The Crafty Hero Departs.\n\nAs has been said, the Prince of Hanzhong swooned on hearing the terrible news of the death of the two Guans, father and son. His officers went to his help, and when he had recovered sufficiently, they led him to his private apartments.\n\n\"My lord, control your grief,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Life and death are fixed by fate. Guan Yu brought the evil upon himself by his harshness and haughtiness. You must now take care of your health and mature your vengeance.\"\n\n\"When we swore brotherhood in the Peach Garden, we pledged ourselves to live or die together. What enjoyment of riches and honors is there for me now that my brother is gone?\"\n\nJust then he saw Guan Yu's son, Guan Xing, coming in weeping in deep distress. At sight of the youth, Liu Bei uttered a great cry and again sank to the earth. By and by he came to, and spent the whole day weeping and swooning at intervals. For three days he refused all nourishment, and he wept so bitterly that his garments were wetted, and there were spots of blood. Zhuge Liang and the others tried every means to soothe him, but he was inconsolable.\n\n\"I swear I will not live under the same heaven as Sun Quan,\" cried he.\n\n\"It is said that the head of your brother has been sent to Cao Cao, but Cao Cao has buried the remains with the rites of a princely noble,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Why did he do that?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"Because Sun Quan thought thereby to bring evil upon Cao Cao. But Cao Cao saw through the subterfuge and has buried your brother with great honor so that your anger may burn against Wu.\"\n\n\"I want to send my armies to punish Wu and appease my wrath,\" said Liu Bei.\n\n\"No, you may not do that. Wu wishes to move you to smite Wei, and Wei wishes you to attack Wu, each harboring the malevolent design of taking advantage of the quarrel. You would do well, my lord, to keep your armies at home. Put on mourning for Guan Yu, and wait till Wei and Wu are at war. That will be your time.\"\n\nThe other officers supported Zhuge Liang, and Liu Bei listened. Presently his grief spent itself, and he began to take food again. An edict was promulgated enjoining mourning dress upon all officials. The Prince went outside the south gate to summon the spirit home, and sacrificed and wailed a whole day for the dead warrior, his brother.\n\nIn Luoyang, although Cao Cao had given honorable burial to the remains of Guan Yu, yet he was continually haunted by the dead man's spirit. Every night when he closed his eyes, he saw Guan Yu as he knew the warrior so well in the flesh. These visions made him nervous, and he sought the advice of his officers. Some suggested the building of new rooms for his own use.\n\n\"There is much witchcraft and malign influence in this old Palace at Luoyang. Build a new Palace for your own occupation,\" said they.\n\n\"I would, and it should be called 'The New Foundation',\" said he. \"But where is the good architect?\"\n\nJia Xu said, \"There is one Su Yue, a very cunning artificer in Luoyang.\"\n\nSu Yue was called and set to work on the plans for a nine-hall pavilion for Cao Cao's own use. It had verandahs and upper rooms as well. His plans pleased Cao Cao greatly.\n\n\"You have planned just such a place as I wished, only where will you find the main beam for such a building?\"\n\n\"I know a certain tree that will serve,\" said the architect. \"About ten miles from the city there is the Pool of the Leaping Dragon. Near it is a shrine, and beside that grows a fine pear tree. It is over a hundred spans high, and that will serve for the roof tree.\"\n\nCao Cao at once sent people to fell the tree. But after one whole day of labor they came back to say they could make no impression on it neither with saw nor ax. Cao Cao, doubting their word, went to see. When he had dismounted and stood by the tree, he could not but admire its size and proportions, as it rose above him tall, straight and branched till the wide-spreading and symmetrical top reached into the clouds. But he bade the men attack it again.\n\nThen a few aged people of the village came and said, \"The tree has stood here some centuries and is the haunt of a spirit. We think it should not be cut down.\"\n\nCao Cao grew annoyed, saying, \"I have gone to and fro in the world now some thirty years, and there is no one, from the Emperor to the commoner, who does not fear me. What spirit is there who dares oppose my wish?\"\n\nDrawing the sword he was wearing, Cao Cao went up to the tree and slashed at the trunk. The tree groaned as he struck, and blood stains spattered his dress. Terror-stricken, he threw down the sword, mounted his horse and galloped off.\n\nBut that evening when he retired to rest, he could not sleep. He rose, went into the outer room, and sat there leaning on a low table. Suddenly a man appeared with his hair unbound, dressed in black and carrying a naked sword.\n\nThe visitor came straight toward Cao Cao, stopped in front of him and, pointing, cried out, \"Behold the Spirit of the Pear Tree! You may desire to build your nine-hall pavilion, and you may contemplate rebellion. But when you began to attack my sacred tree, the number of your days was accomplished. I am come now to slay you.\"\n\n\"Where are the guards?\" shouted Cao Cao in terror.\n\nThe figure struck at him with the sword. Cao Cao cried out and then awoke. His head was aching unbearably.\n\nThey sought the best physicians for him, but they failed to relieve the terrible pain. Sympathy for their lord was universal among Cao Cao's subordinates.\n\nHua Xin one day said to his master, \"My lord, have you heard of Hua Tuo?\"\n\n\"Do you mean him of Qiao who cured Zhou Tai?\"\n\n\"Yes, that is he,\" replied Hua Xin.\n\n\"I have heard something of his fame, but I know nothing of his capabilities in his art.\"\n\n\"He is very clever; there are few so skillful. If one is ill and calls him in, he knows immediately whether to use drugs, or the needle, or the cutlery, and the patient finds relief at once. Let one suffer from an internal complaint and drugs are ineffectual, with a dose of hashish he throws the patient into a state of perfect insensibility and then opens the abdomen and washes the affected organs with a medicament. The patient feels no pain. When the cleansing is complete, he sews up the wound with thread, dresses it, and in a month or less the patient is well. This shows you how skillful he is.\n\n\"One day Hua Tuo was traveling, when he heard a man by the wayside groaning with pain. 'That is dyspepsia,' said Hua Tuo. And further questions confirmed the diagnosis. He prescribed long draughts of the juice of garlic as an emetic, and the man vomited a worm. After this the man was quite well.\n\n\"Chen Deng, the Governor of Guangling, suffered from a heavy feeling at the heart. His face was red and congested, and he had no appetite. Hua Tuo gave him a drug, and he threw up many internal wriggling parasites with red heads. The Governor asked what had caused the trouble, and Hua Tuo told him that he ate too much strong smelling fish. He could cure Chen Deng this once, but in three years the disease would recur, and then nothing could save him. Three later Chen Deng died.\n\n\"Another man had a tumor between the eyes, and it itched intolerably. Hua Tuo examined it and said there was a bird in it. The tumor was opened, and, surely enough, a canary flew out. The patient was relieved.\n\n\"A dog bit a man's toe, and two tumorous growths ensued, one of which itched intolerably and the other pained severely. Hua Tuo said the painful one contained ten needles, and the other a couple of chess pips, black and white. He opened the two swellings, and the contents were as he had said. Really he is of the same class of physician as masters Bian Que and Zang Kong of old times. He lives at Jincheng, not far away, and could be here very soon.\"\n\nCao Cao summoned him. As soon as he arrived, Hua Tuo felt the pulse and made careful examination.\n\n\"Prince, your headaches are due to a malignant humor within the brain case. The humor is too thick to get out. Swallowing drugs will do no good. But I propose to administer a dose of hashish, then open the brain case and remove the thickened humor. That will be a radical cure.\"\n\n\"You mean you want to kill me?\" cried Cao Cao angrily.\n\n\"O Prince, you have heard how I cured Guan Yu of the poison that had got into his bones? I scraped them, and he did not hesitate a moment. Your malady is trifling, and why do you mistrust me?\"\n\n\"A painful arm may be scraped, but how can you cut open a man's head? The fact is you have conspired with some of Guan Yu's friends to take this opportunity to make away with me in revenge for his death.\"\n\nCao Cao told his lictors to hale Hua Tuo to gaol, and there he was tortured to try to find who were his accomplices.\n\nJia Xu pleaded for him, saying, \"The man possesses rare skills. To kill him is to waste his talents.\"\n\nBut the intervention was of no avail.\n\n\"The man wants to get a chance to kill me. He is the same sort of scoundrel as Ji Ping.\"\n\nThe wretched physician was subjected to worse sufferings.\n\nHis gaoler was a certain Wu, nicknamed \"The Gaoler\" by nearly everybody. He was kindly disposed to Hua Tuo and saw that Hua Tuo was well fed.\n\nHua Tuo conceived a liking for his gaoler and said to him one day, \"I am doomed, I know. The pity is that my Black Bag treatise on medicine may be lost. You have been most kind to me, and as I have no other way of recompensing you, I will give you a letter to my wife telling her to send the Black Bag, and I will give it to you that you may carry on my art.\"\n\nWu the Gaoler rejoiced greatly, saying, If I have that book, I will throw away the menial position of gaoler, travel about the country healing sick folks, and spread your virtue.\n\nThe letter was written and given to Wu the Gaoler, who lost no time in traveling to Jincheng to meet with Hua Tuo's wife, and she gave him the Black Bag to bring back to Hua Tuo. After Hua Tuo had read through the book carefully, he presented it to Wu the Gaoler, who took it home and hid it away.\n\nTen days after this, Hua Tuo died in prison. Wu the Gaoler bought a coffin and had him buried. This done, he quitted the prison and went home. But when he asked for the book, he found that his wife had discovered it and was using it to light the fire. He snatched away what was left of it, but a whole volume was missing, and what was left amounted only to several pages. He vented his anger in cursing his wife.\n\nBut she retorted, saying, \"If you become such a learned person as Hua Tuo, you will only die in prison like him. What good did it all do him?\"\n\nIt struck Wu the Gaoler that there was something in what she said, and he ceased grumbling at her. But the upshot of all this was that the learning in the \"Treatise of the Black Bag\" was finally lost to the world, for what was left only contained the recipes relating to domestic animals.\n\n\u2003Hua Tuo was the ablest of physician,\n\n\u2003Seeing what diseases were lurking within beings.\n\n\u2003Alas! That he died, and his writings\n\n\u2003Followed him to the Nine Golden Springs.\n\nMeanwhile, Cao Cao became worse, the uncertainty of the intentions of his rivals aggravating his disease not a little. Then they said an envoy had come with letter from Wu, and it ran like this:\n\n\"Thy servant, Sun Quan, has long seen destiny indicates Your Highness as master of all, and looks forward with confidence to your early accession to the dignity of the Son of God. If you will send your armies to destroy Liu Bei and sweep rebellion from the two River Lands, thy servant at the head of his armies will submit and accept his land as a fief.\"\n\nCao Cao laughed as he read this, and he said to his officers, \"Is this youth trying to put me on a furnace?\"\n\nBut Minister Chen Qun and the attendants seriously replied, \"O Prince, the Hans have been feeble too long, while your virtues and merits are like the mountains. All the people look to you, and when Sun Quan acknowledged himself as your minister, he is but responsive to the will of God and the desire of humans. It is wrong that you oppose when such contrary influences work to a common end, and you must soon ascend to the high place.\"\n\nCao Cao smiled. \"I have served the Hans for many years. Even if I have acquired some merit, yet I have been rewarded with a princedom and high rank. I dare not aspire to greater things. If the finger of heaven points to me, then shall I be as King Wen of Zhou.\"\n\n\"As Sun Quan acknowledges himself your servant and promises obedience, you, my lord, can confer a title upon him and assign to him the duty of attacking Liu Bei,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nApproving of the suggestion, Cao Cao gave Sun Quan the titles of General of the Flying Cavalry and Lord of Nanzhang, and appointed him to the Imperial Protectorship of Jingzhou. Forthwith this command was sent away to Sun Quan.\n\nCao Cao's condition grew worse daily. One night he had a dream of three horses feeding out of the same manger.\n\nNext day he told it to Jia Xu, saying, \"I saw three horses feeding on the same manger before the family of Ma Teng was harmed. Last night I saw the same dream again. How do you interpret it?\"\n\n\"The horses were feeding on bounty: It is auspicious to dream of dignity,\" replied Jia Xu. \"And naturally such an honor comes to the Caos. I do not think you need feel any misgivings.\"\n\n\u2003Cao Cao was comforted.\n\n\u2003Cao Cao dreamed three steeds together fed,\n\n\u2003The vision seers could not explain,\n\n\u2003None guessed how soon, when Cao Cao was dead,\n\n\u2003One dynasty would rule again.\n\n\u2003Ah, yes, Cao Cao had vainly wrought;\n\n\u2003Of none avail each wicked wile,\n\n\u2003For, later, in Wei court, there fought\n\n\u2003Against him one with equal guile.\n\nThat night Cao Cao became worse. As he lay on his couch he felt dizzy and could not see, so he rose and sat by a table, upon which he leaned. It seemed to him that someone shrieked, and, peering into the darkness, he perceived the forms of many of his victims \u2014 the Empress Fu, the Consort Dong, Fu Wan, Dong Cheng, and more than twenty other officials \u2014 , and all were bloodstained. They stood in the obscurity and whispered, demanding his life. He rose, lifted his sword and threw it wildly into the air. Just then there was a loud crash, and the southwest corner of the new building came down. And Cao Cao fell with it. His attendants raised him and bore him to another palace, where he might lie at peace.\n\nBut he found no peace. The next night was disturbed by the ceaseless wailing of men and women's voices.\n\nWhen day dawned, Cao Cao sent for his officers, and said to them, \"Thirty years have I spent in the turmoil of war and have always refused belief in the supernatural. But what does all this mean?\"\n\n\"O Prince, you should summon the Daoists to offer sacrifices and prayers,\" said they.\n\nCao Cao sighed, saying, \"The Wise Teacher said, 'He who offends against heaven has no one to pray to.' I feel that my fate is accomplished, my days have run, and there is no help.\"\n\nBut he would not consent to call in the priests. Next day his symptoms were worse. He was panting and could no longer see distinctly. He sent hastily for Xiahou Dun, who came at once. But as Xiahou Dun drew near the doors, he too saw the shadowy forms of the slain Empress and her children and many other victims of Cao Cao's cruelty. He was overcome with fear and fell to the ground. The servants raised him and led him away, very ill.\n\nThen Cao Cao called in four of his trusty advisers \u2014 Cao Hong, Chen Qun, Jia Xu, and Sima Yi \u2014 that they might hear his last wishes.\n\nCao Hong, speaking for the four, said, \"Take good care of your precious self, O Prince, that you may quickly recover.\"\n\nBut Cao Cao said, \"Thirty and more years have I gone up and down, and many bold leaders have fallen before me. The only ones that remain are Sun Quan in the south and Liu Bei in the west. I have not yet slain them. Now I am very ill, and I shall never again stand before you; wherefore my family affairs must be settled. My first born \u2014 Cao Ang, son of Lady Liu \u2014 fell in battle at Wancheng, when he was young. The Lady Bian bore four sons to me, as you know. The third, Cao Zhi, was my favorite, but he was vain and unreliable, fond of wine and lax in morals. Therefore he is not my heir. My second son, Cao Zhang, is valiant, but imprudent. The fourth, Cao Xiong, is a weakly and may not live long. My eldest, Cao Pi, is steady and serious; he is fit to succeed me; and I look to you to support him.\"\n\nCao Hong and the others wept as they heard these words, and they left the chamber. Then Cao Cao bade his servants bring all of the rare incenses and fragrances that he burned every day, and he handed out to his handmaids.\n\nAnd he said to them, \"After my death you must diligently attend to your womanly labors. You can make silken shoes for sale, and so earn your own living.\"\n\nHe also bade them go on living in the Bronze Bird Pavilion and celebrate a daily sacrifice for him, with music by the singing women, and presentation of the eatables laid before his tablet.\n\nNext he commanded that seventy-two sites for a tomb should be selected near Jiangwu, that no one should know his actual burying place, lest his remains should be dug up.\n\nAnd when these final orders had been given, he sighed a few times, shed some tears, and died. He was sixty-six, and passed away in the first month of the twenty-fifth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity Era (AD 220).\n\nA certain poet composed \"A Song of Yejun\" expressing sympathy for Cao Cao, which is given here:\n\n\u2003I stood in Yejun and saw the River Zhang\n\n\u2003Go gliding by. I thought no common human\n\n\u2003Ever rose from such a place. Or he was great\n\n\u2003In war, a poet, or an artist skilled.\n\n\u2003Perchance a model minister, or son,\n\n\u2003Or famous for fraternal duty shown.\n\n\u2003The thoughts of heroes are not ours to judge,\n\n\u2003Nor are their actions for our eyes to see.\n\n\u2003A man may stand the first in merit; then\n\n\u2003His crimes may brand him chief of criminals.\n\n\u2003And so his reputation's fair and foul;\n\n\u2003His literary gifts may bear the mark\n\n\u2003Of genius; he may be a ruler born;\n\n\u2003But this is certain: He will stand above\n\n\u2003His fellows, herding not with common people.\n\n\u2003Takes he the field, then is he bold in fight;\n\n\u2003Would he a mansion build, a palace springs.\n\n\u2003In all things great, his genius masters him.\n\n\u2003And such was Cao Cao. He could never be\n\n\u2003Obedient; he a rebel was, foredoomed.\n\n\u2003He seized and ruled, but hungered for more power;\n\n\u2003Became a prince, and still was not content.\n\n\u2003And yet this man of glorious career\n\n\u2003When gripped by sickness, wept as might a child.\n\n\u2003Full well he knew, when on the bed of death,\n\n\u2003That all is vanity and nothing worth.\n\n\u2003His latest acts were kindly. Simple gifts\n\n\u2003Of fragrant incense gave he to the maids.\n\n\u2003Ah! The ancients' splendid deeds or secret thoughts\n\n\u2003We may not measure with our puny rule.\n\n\u2003But criticize them, pedants, as ye may\n\n\u2003The mighty dead will smile at what you say.\n\nAs Cao Cao breathed his last, the whole of those present raised a great wailing and lamentation. The news was sent to the members of the family, the Heir Cao Pi, Lord of Yanling Cao Zhang, Lord of Linzi Cao Zhi, and Lord of Xiaohuai Cao Xiong. They wrapped the body in its shroud, enclosed it in a silver shell, and laid it in a golden coffin, which was sent at once home to Yejun.\n\nThe eldest son wept aloud at the tidings and went out with all his following to meet the procession and escort the body of his father into his home. The coffin was laid in a great hall beside the main building, and all the officials in deep mourning wailed in the hall.\n\nSuddenly one stood out from the ranks of the mourners and said, \"I would request the heir to cease lamentation for the dead and devote himself to the present needs of state.\"\n\nIt was Sima Fu, and he continued, \"The death of the Prince will cause an upheaval in the empire, and it is essential that the heir should assume his dignity without loss of time. There is not mourning alone to be seen to.\"\n\nThe others replied. \"The succession is settled, but the investiture can hardly proceed without the necessary edict from the Emperor. That must be secured.\"\n\nSaid Chen Jiao, who was Minister of War, \"As the Prince died away from home, it may be that disputes will ensue, and the country will be in danger.\"\n\nThen Chen Jiao slashed off the sleeves of his robe with a sword and shouted fiercely, \"We will invest the prince forthwith, and anyone who does not agree, let him be treated as this robe.\"\n\nStill fear held most of the assembly. Then arrived Hua Xin most haste from the capital. They wondered what his sudden arrival meant.\n\nSoon he entered the hall and said, \"The Prince of Wei is dead and the world is in commotion. Why do you not invest his successor quickly?\"\n\n\"We await the command,\" cried they in chorus, \"and also the order of Princess-Mother Bian concerning the heirship.\"\n\n\"I have procured the imperial edict here,\" cried he, pulling it out from his breast.\n\nThey all jumped up and down to shout their congratulations. And Hua Xin read the edict.\n\nHua Xin had always been devoted to Wei. As soon as he knew of Cao Cao's death, he drafted this edict and got it sealed by Emperor Xian almost by force. However, there it was: Therein Cao Pi was named as Prince of Wei, First Minister, and Imperial Protector of Jizhou.\"\n\nCao Pi thereupon took his seat in the princely place and received the exultant congratulations of all the officers. This was followed by a great banquet.\n\nHowever, all was not to pass too smoothly. While the banquet was in progress, the news came: \"Cao Zhang, Lord of Yanling, with an army of one hundred thousand troops, is approaching from Changan.\"\n\nIn a state of consternation, the new Prince turned to his courtiers, saying, \"What shall I do? This young, golden-bearded brother of mine, always obstinate and determined and with no little military skill, is marching hither with an army to contest my inheritance.\"\n\n\"Let me go to see the Marquis. I can make him desist,\" said one of the guests.\n\nThe others cried, \"Only yourself, O Exalted One, can save us in this peril!\"\n\n\u2003Quarrel between two sons of Cao Cao\n\n\u2003Just as in the House of Yuan Shao." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "Brother Oppressing Brother: Cao Zhi Composes Poems; Nephew Harming Uncle: Liu Feng Receives Punishment.\n\nAll eyes turned toward the speaker, High Minister Jia Kui, and the young prince commanded him to undertake the mission. So he went out of the city and sought to speak with Cao Zhang. Cao Zhang came quickly to the point.\n\n\"Who has the late Prince's seal?\" asked he.\n\nJia Kui replied seriously, \"There is an eldest son to a house, and an heir-apparent to a state. Such a question from your lordship is unbecoming.\"\n\nCao Zhang held his peace, and the two proceeded into the city to the gates of the Palace. There Jia Kui suddenly asked him, \"You come as a mourner or as a rival claimant?\"\n\n\"I am come as a mourner. I never had any ulterior motive.\"\n\n\"That being so. Why bring in your soldiers?\"\n\nWhereupon Cao Zhang ordered his escort to retire, and entered the city alone. When the Cao brothers met, they fell into each other's arms and wept. Then Cao Zhang yielded command of all his army, and he was directed to go back to Yanling and guard it. He obediently withdrew.\n\nCao Pi, being now firmly established, changed the name of the period of his rule to the Prolonged Wealth Era, the First Year (AD 220). He made Jia Xu Grand Commander, Hua Xin Prime Minister, and Wang Lang High Minister, and made many promotions. To the late Prince, he gave the posthumous title of the King of Great Might, and buried him in Gaoling.\n\nTo the superintendence of the building of King Cao's tomb, Cao Pi nominated Yu Jin, but with malevolent intent. For when Yu Jin reached his post, he found the walls of the rooms decorated with chalk sketches depicting the drowning of the seven armies and the capture of himself by Guan Yu. Guan Yu was looking very dignified and severe. Pang De was refusing to bow to the victor, while Yu Jin himself was lying in the dust pleading for his life.\n\nCao Pi had chosen this method of putting Yu Jin to open shame, because Yu Jin had not preferred death to the dishonor of capture, and had sent an artist on purpose to depict the shameful scenes. When Yu Jin saw them, shame and rage alternately took possession of him till he fell ill. Soon after he died.\n\n\u2003War waged he for many a year,\n\n\u2003Yet fell prey to craven fear.\n\n\u2003None can know another's heart,\n\n\u2003Drawing tigers, with bones start.\n\nSoon after the accession, Hua Xin memorialized the Prince of Wei, saying, \"The Lord of Yanling has cut himself loose from his army and gone quietly to his post, but your other two brothers did not attend the funeral of their father. Their conduct should be inquired into and punished.\"\n\nCao Pi took up the suggestion and sent commissioners to each.\n\nThey who were sent to the younger quickly returned to report: \"Cao Xiong, the Lord of Xiaohuai, had hanged himself rather than suffer for his fault.\"\n\nCao Pi ordered honorable burial for Cao Xiong and gave him the posthumous title of Prince of Xiaohuai.\n\nSoon after, the envoy to Linzi returned to report: \"The Lord of Linzi, Cao Zhi, is spending his time in dissipation, his especial boon companions being two brothers named Ding Yi and Ding Yin. They were very rude. When we presented ourselves, Cao Zhi sat bolt upright, but would not say a word. Ding Yi used insulting words, saying, 'King Cao intended our lord to succeed, but was turned there from by the slanderous tongues of certain among you. As soon as he is dead, your master begins to think of punishment for his own flesh and blood.'\n\n\"The other brother Ding Yin said, 'In intellect our lord leads the age, and he ought to have been heir to his father. Now, not only does he not succeed, but he is treated in this harsh way by a lot of courtiers of your sort, ignorant of what genius means.'\n\n\"And then Cao Zhi, in a fit of anger, had ordered his lictors to beat the chief envoy and turn him out.\"\n\nThis treatment of his messenger annoyed Cao Pi greatly, and he dispatched a force of three thousand Imperial Tiger Guards under Xu Chu to arrest his brother and all his immediate surroundings. When Xu Chu arrived Linzi, the Gate Commander stopped him. Xu Chu slew that general and entered the city, unchallenged. He went to the residence and found Cao Zhi and all his companions dead drunk. So he bound them, put them into carts, and sent them to court in Yejun. He also arrested all the officers of the palace.\n\nCao Pi's first order was to put to death Ding Yi and Ding Yin. The two brothers were not wholly base; they had a reputation for learning, and many were sorry for them.\n\nCao Pi's mother, Lady Bian, was alarmed at the severity of the new rule, and the suicide of her youngest son wounded her deeply. When she heard that Cao Zhi had been arrested and his comrades put to death, she left her palace and went to see her eldest son. As soon as he saw her, the Prince hastened to meet her. She began to weep.\n\n\"Your brother has always had that weakness for wine, but we let him go his way out of consideration for his undoubted ability. I hope you will not forget he is your brother and that I bore you both. Spare his life that I may close my eyes in peace when I set out for the deep springs.\"\n\n\"I also admire his ability, Mother, and have no intention to hurt him. But I would reform him. Have no anxiety as to his fate,\" said Cao Pi.\n\nSo the mother was comforted and withdrew. The Prince then went to a private room and bade them call his brother.\n\nSaid Hua Xin, \"Surely the Princess-Mother has just been interceding for your brother. Is it not so?\"\n\n\"It is so,\" replied the Prince.\n\n\"Then let me say that Cao Zhi is too clever to be content to remain in a humble station. If you do not remove him, he will do you harm.\"\n\n\"I must obey my mother's command.\"\n\n\"People say your brother simply talks in literature. I do not believe it myself, but he might be put to the test. If he bears a false reputation, you can slay him; if what they say is true, then degrade him, lest the scholars of the land should babble.\"\n\nSoon Cao Zhi came, and in a state of great trepidation bowed low before his elder brother, confessing his fault.\n\nThe Prince addressed him, saying, \"Though we are brothers, yet the proper relation between us of prince and minister must not be overlooked. Why then did you behave indecorously? While the late Prince lived, you made a boast of your literary powers, but I am disposed to think you may have made use of another's pen. Now I require you to compose a poem within the time taken to walk seven paces, and I will spare your life if you succeed. If you fail, then I shall punish you with rigor.\"\n\n\"Will you suggest a theme?\" asked Cao Zhi.\n\nNow there was hanging in the hall a black and white sketch of two bulls that had been fighting at the foot of a wall, and one of them had just fallen dead into a well. Cao Pi pointed to the sketch and said, \"Take that as the subject. But you are forbidden to use the words 'two bulls, one bull, fighting, wall's foot, falling, well, and dead'.\"\n\nCao Zhi took seven paces and then recited this poem:\n\n\u2003Two butcher's victims lowing walked along,\n\n\u2003Each head bore curving bones, a sturdy pair,\n\n\u2003They met just by a hillock, both were strong,\n\n\u2003Each would avoid a pit newly dug there.\n\n\u2003They fought unequal battle, for at length\n\n\u2003One lay below a gory mass, inert.\n\n\u2003It was not that they were of unequal strength\n\n\u2003Though wrathful both, one did not strength exert.\n\nThis exhibition of skill amazed the Prince and the whole court. Cao Pi thought he would use another test, so he bade his brother improvise on the theme of their fraternal relationship, the words \"brotherhood\" or \"brother\" being barred. Without seeming to reflect, Cao Zhi rattled off this rhyme:\n\n\u2003They were boiling beans on a beanstalk fire;\n\n\u2003Came a plaintive voice from the pot,\n\n\u2003'O why, since we sprang from the selfsame root,\n\n\u2003Should you kill me with anger hot?'\n\nThe allusion in these verses to the cruel treatment of one member of a family by another was not lost upon Cao Pi, and he dropped a few silent tears.\n\nThe mother of both men came out at this moment from her abiding place and said, \"Should the elder brother thus oppress the younger?\"\n\nThe Prince jumped from his seat, saying, \"My mother, the laws of the state cannot be nullified.\"\n\nCao Zhi was degraded to the rank of Lord of Anxiang. He accepted the decision without a murmur and at once left his brother's court by horse.\n\nCao Pi's accession was the signal for a set of new laws and new commands. His behavior toward Emperor Xian was more intemperate than his father's had ever been.\n\nThe stories of his harshness reached Chengdu and almost frightened Liu Bei, who summoned his counselors to discuss what he should do.\n\nSaid he, \"Since the death of Cao Cao and the accession of his son, the position of the Emperor has changed for the worse. Sun Quan acknowledges the lordship of Wei, and its influence is becoming too great. I am disposed to destroy Sun Quan in revenge for the death of my brother. That done. I will proceed to the Capital District and purge the whole land of rebellion. What think you?\"\n\nThen Liao Hua stood out from the ranks of officers and threw himself upon the earth, saying with tears, \"Liu Feng and Meng Da were the true cause of the death of your brother and his adopted son. Both these renegades deserve death.\"\n\nLiu Bei was of the same opinion and was going to send and arrest them forthwith, but here Zhuge Liang intervened and gave wiser advice.\n\n\"That is not the way. Go slowly or you may stir up strife. Promote these two and separate them. After that you may arrest.\"\n\nThe Prince of Hanzhong saw the prudence of this procedure and stayed his hand. He raised Liu Feng to the Governorship of Mianzhu, and so separated the two delinquents.\n\nNow Peng Yang and Meng Da were old friends. Hearing what was afoot, the former hastened home and wrote warning his friend. The letter was confided to a trusty messenger to bear to Meng Da. The messenger was caught as he went out of the city and carried before Ma Chao, who thus got wind of the business. He then went to Peng Yang's house, where, nothing being suspected, he was received kindly and wine was brought in. The two drank for some time.\n\nWhen Ma Chao thought his host sufficiently off his guard, he said, \"The Prince of Hanzhong used to look on you with great favor. Why does he do so no longer?\"\n\nThe host began to rave against his master.\n\n\"The obstinate old leather-belly! But I will find some way to pay him out.\"\n\nIn order to see to what lengths he would go, Ma Chao led him on, saying, \"Truth to tell, I have long hated the man too.\"\n\n\"Then you join Meng Da and attack, while I will win over the people of East and West River Lands. That will make it easy enough,\" said Peng Yang.\n\n\"What you propose is very feasible, but we will talk it over again tomorrow,\" said Ma Chao, and took leave.\n\nTaking with him the captured man and the letter he carried, Ma Chao then proceeded to see the Prince, to whom he related the whole story. Liu Bei was very angry and at once had the intended traitor arrested and put in prison, where he was examined under torture to get at full details.\n\nWhile Peng Yang lay in prison, bitterly but vainly repentant, Liu Bei consulted his adviser.\n\n\"That fellow Peng Yang meant to turn traitor. What shall I do with him?\"\n\n\"The fellow is something of a scholar, but irresponsible,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"He is too dangerous to be left alive.\"\n\nThereupon orders were given that he should be allowed to commit suicide in gaol. The news that Peng Yang had been made away frightened his sympathizer and friend, Meng Da, and put him in a quandary. Further, Liu Feng's promotion and transfer to Mianzhu arrived, and it frightened him still more. So he sought advice from two friends and commanders, the brothers Shen Dan and Shen Yi, who lived in Shangyong.\n\n\"My friend Peng Yang and I did much for the Prince of Hanzhong. But now Peng Yang is dead, and I am forgotten. More than that, the Prince wishes to put me to death. What can I do?\" said Meng Da.\n\nShen Dan replied, \"I think I can find a plan that will secure your safety.\"\n\n\"What is it?\" asked Meng Da, feeling happier.\n\n\"Desertion. My brother Shen Yi and I have long desired to go over to Wei. You just write the Prince of Hanzhong a memorial resigning your service and betake yourself to the Prince of Wei, who will certainly employ you in some honorable way. Then we two will follow.\"\n\nMeng Da saw that this was his best course, so he wrote a memorandum, which he gave to the messenger who had brought the recent dispatches to take back with him. That night Meng Da left his post and went to Wei.\n\nThe messenger returned to Chengdu, handed in Meng Da's memorial, and told the story of his desertion. The Prince was angry. He tore open the letter and read:\n\n\"In the humble opinion of thy servant, O Prince, you have set out to accomplish a task comparable with that of Yi Yin, and to walk in the meritorious footsteps of Lu Wang in building the fame of Dukes Wen and Huan. When the great design was rough-hewn, you had the support of the lands of the states of Wu and Chu, wherefore many people of ability incontinently joined you. Since I entered your service, I have committed many faults; and if I recognize them, how much more do you see them! Now, O Prince, you are surrounded by famous people, while I, useless as a helper at home and inept as a leader abroad, should be shamed were I to take a place among them.\n\n\"It is well known that when Fan Li saw certain eventualities, he went sailing on the lakes, and Zi Fan acknowledged his faults and stayed by the rivers. Inasmuch as one cannot take means of safeguarding one's self at the critical and dangerous moment, I desire \u2014 as is my duty \u2014 to go away as I came, untainted. Moreover, I am stupid and without use or merit, merely born in these days as the sport of circumstances.\n\n\"In the days of old, Shen Sheng, though perfectly filial, incurred the suspicions of his father and died; Wu Zixu, though perfectly loyal, was put to death. Meng Tian, though he extended the borders of Qin, suffered the extreme penalty; and Yue Yi, though he destroyed the might of Qi, was the victim of calumny. Whenever I have read of these men, I have been moved to tears, and now I am in like case and the more mortified.\n\n\"Lately Jingzhou was overwhelmed, and I, an officer of rank, failed in my duty, not one in a hundred behaving as I should. Only I return Fangling and Shangyong and seek service abroad. Now I desire you, O Prince, graciously to understand, to sympathize with thy servant and to condone the step he is about to take. Really I am but a mean man, incapable of great deeds. I know what I am doing, and I dare to say it is no small fault.\n\n\"They say that dissolution of bonds should not occasion recrimination, and the dismissed servant should take leave without heart-burning. I have taken your orders many times, and now, O Prince, you must act yourself. I write this with extreme trepidation.\"\n\nBut the reading gave rise to great anger in the breast of the Prince.\n\n\"The unmerited fellow!\" said he. \"He turns traitor and dares to insult me by sending a letter of farewell.\"\n\nLiu Bei was just giving orders to send a force to seize the deserter, when Zhuge Liang interposed, saying, \"You had better send Liu Feng to capture him and let the two tigers worry each other to weakness. Whether Liu Feng succeeds or fails, he will have to come to the capital, and you can kill him. Thus will you cut off two evils.\"\n\nLiu Bei took his advice. Orders were sent to Mianzhu, and Liu Feng obediently led out his troops.\n\nNow Meng Da arrived when Cao Pi was holding a great council. When the attendants told him that General Meng Da of Shu had come, Cao Pi summoned him to enter.\n\nSaid Cao Pi to him, \"Is this a sincere surrender?\"\n\nMeng Da replied, \"I was in fear of death for not having relieved Guan Yu. That is my only reason for coming.\"\n\nHowever, Cao Pi did not trust him. Then they reported that Liu Feng was coming to arrest him, with a large army, and had attacked Xiangyang and was challenging Meng Da to battle.\n\nCao Pi said, \"You seem to be true. Go then to Xiangyang and take Liu Feng. If you bring me his head, I shall no longer doubt.\"\n\nMeng Da replied, \"I will convince him by argument. No soldiers will be needed. I will bring him to surrender too.\"\n\nSo Meng Da was made General Who Establishes Strong Arms, Lord of Pingyang, and Governor of Xincheng, and sent to guard Xiangyang and Fancheng.\n\nNow there were two generals there already, Xiahou Shang and Xu Huang, who engaged in reducing the surrounding territories. Meng Da arrived, met his two colleagues, and was told that Liu Feng was fifteen miles from the city. Whereupon Meng Da wrote him a letter urging him to surrender. But Liu Feng was in no mood to surrender. Instead he tore up the letter and put the messenger to death.\n\n\"The renegade has already made me offend against my duty to my uncle, and now would sever me from my father so that I shall be reproached as disloyal and unfilial,\" said Liu Feng.\n\nMeng Da went out with his army to give battle. Liu Feng rode to the front, pointed with his sword at his opponent, and railed against him.\n\n\"Death is very near you!\" replied Meng Da. \"Yet you continue obstinately in the way of foolishness and will not understand.\"\n\nLiu Feng rode out flourishing his sword. He engaged Meng Da, who ran away before the conflict had well begun. Liu Feng pursued hotly to seven miles. Then he fell into an ambush and found himself attacked on two sides by Xiahou Shang and Xu Huang. Also Meng Da returned to the attack. Liu Feng was forced to fly. He made straight for Shangyong, pursued all the way. When he reached the city and hailed the gate, he was met by a volley of arrows.\n\n\"I have surrendered to Wei!\" cried Shen Dan from the city tower.\n\nLiu Feng got furious and prepared to attack the wall, but the army of Wei was close behind, and having no resting place, he set off for Fangling. He arrived there to find the banners of Wei set out along the walls. Then he saw Shen Yi wave a signal from the tower, and at once there appeared from the shelter of the wall a body of soldiers, and the leading banner displayed General of the Right Army Xu Huang.\n\nLiu Feng was worsted by the ambush. Then he made for home. But he was pursued, and only a hundred riders of his remained to him when he regained Chengdu.\n\nSeeking an interview with his father, he found but scant sympathy.\n\nIn response to his petition, made prostrate, and weeping, Liu Bei said, \"Shameful son! How are you come to see me at all?\"\n\n\"My uncle's mishap was not due to my refusal of help, but because Meng Da thwarted me.\"\n\n\"You eat as a man, you dress as a man; but you have no more the instincts of a man than an image of clay or wood. What mean you by saying another wretch thwarted you?\"\n\nLiu Bei bade the executioners expel Liu Feng and put him to death. But the Prince felt some compunction later when he heard of Liu Feng's treatment to the messenger who had brought Meng Da's letter inviting him to become a traitor. And he gave way to grief for the death of Guan Yu until he fell ill. So no military movements were made.\n\nAfter he had succeeded to the princedom, Cao Pi raised all his officers to high rank and had an army prepared of three hundred thousand, and maneuvered them over the southern territories and made great feasts in the county of Qiao in the old state of Pei, which was the land of his ancestors. As the grand army passed by, the aged villagers lined the roads offering gifts of wine, just as when the Founder of the Hans returned home to Pei.\n\nWhen it was announced that the Regent Marshal Xiahou Dun was near death, Cao Pi hastened back to Yejun, but arrived too late to see him. He put on mourning for the great leader and instituted magnificent funeral ceremonies.\n\nIn the eighth month of that same year (AD 220), it was reported that a phoenix had been seen to bow at Shiyi, and a jilin had appeared at Linzi, while a yellow dragon was observed in Yejun.\n\nWhereupon Imperial Commander Li Qu and Minister Xu Zhi discussed these appearances, and putting them all together they concluded, saying, \"Those splendid signs presage that Wei is about to supplant Han, and the altar of abdication should be set up.\"\n\nPresently a deputation of forty high officers, both military and civil, led by Hua Xin, Wang Lang, Xin Pi, Jia Xu, Liu Ye, Liu Zi, Chen Jiao, Chen Qun, and Huan Jie went into the Forbidden City and proposed to Emperor Xian that he should abdicate and yield to the Prince of Wei, Cao Pi.\n\n\u2003It is time to set up the Throne of Wei,\n\n\u2003And steal the land from the Hans." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "Cao Pi Deposes The Emperor, Taking Away The Fortunes of Han; Liu Bei Assumes The Throne, Continuing The Heritage.\n\nHua Xin was the spokesman of the deputation of officers that went into the Forbidden City, and he spoke thus: \"Since the inauguration of the Prince of Wei, virtue has spread to the four corners of the empire and humanity has permeated all the earth to a degree unexcelled in all the ages, even in the days of the ancient rulers, King Tang and King Yu. We, your servants, have taken account of these things and have reached the conclusion that the fortunes of Han is worn out, wherefore we trust Your Majesty, in imitation of the great prototypes King Yao and King Shun, will yield the mountains, the rivers, and the peoples to a more able guardian and high priest of the sacrifices in the person of the Prince of Wei, thereby pleasing Heaven and satisfying the hearts of humans, and enabling Your Majesty to enjoy the happiness of freedom and repose from the exacting duties of the chief ruler. The happiness of your ancestors and of humanity at large would thereby be enhanced. Having thoroughly debated this matter, we have come to lay it before you.\"\n\nThe Emperor listened in amazement, and for a time could not reply.\n\nThen, looking at the assembly, he said sadly, \"How can I abandon my empire for the sake of repose \u2014 the empire won by my Great Ancestor, its Founder, when, with a three-span sword, he slew the Snake and restored Right, and consolidated when he reduced Qin and overwhelmed Chu \u2014 the empire which has been handed down for four centuries? Though I possess not brilliant talents, yet I have done no wrong. Go back and debate this again in a just and moderate spirit.\"\n\nThen Hua Xin led forward Xu Zhi and Li Qu nearer the throne, saying, \"If Your Majesty thinks we may be mistaken, pray ask these two, who will explain.\"\n\nSaid Li Qu, \"Since the Prince of Wei has taken his seat, the Jilin has descended, the Phoenix has appeared, the Yellow Dragon has come forth, the Grain of Felicity has flourished, and Sweet Dew has watered the earth. All these things augur that Heaven decrees a change, and Wei must replace Han.\"\n\nXu Zhi continued, \"The astrologers, watching the aspect of the skies at night, have seen the blazing light of the star of Han gradually fade away and Your Majesty's own star become dim. On the other hand, the aspect of the sky and the attitude of the earth have been wholly bright in favor of Wei to a degree hard to state in words. Moreover, the lots have been cast, and they gave the words 'Devil, at the side, has been sent, there must be an inroad upon Han without word'; another lot, 'Word, in east, light moves west, two suns radiating as the air blows south'. These oracles gave two words which, joined, compose Xu; 'two suns, one on the other', which is Chang. These signs are unmistakeable, for when put together the whole reads, 'Wei at Xuchang is to receive the abdication of Han.' If you consider, Your Majesty must admit this.\"\n\n\"All empty words and madness, this talk of auguries and lots! Is it reasonable that I should suddenly abandon the great heritage for such nonsense?\"\n\nThen Wang Lang said, \"Wax and wane has been the law of all things from the beginning; every period of glory is followed by one of obscurity. Has any rule endured forever or any House never failed? The rule of Han, handed down through four centuries to Yourself, has lost its vigor, and the time has come to yield. Retirement may not be delayed, or confusion will ensue.\"\n\nThe Emperor wept aloud and retired to his private chamber, while the officers left the hall laughing.\n\nNext morning they assembled in the court, but the Emperor did not appear. So they sent the Palace officers to request his presence. Still he feared to show himself.\n\nEmpress Cao asked him, \"Why do Your Majesty not hold the court as usual, especially when you are requested to go out?\"\n\n\"Because your brother wishes to depose me and become Emperor himself. He has set the whole host of officers against me to force me to abdicate, and I will not expose myself to this compulsion.\"\n\n\"But what can have induced my brother to do such a dreadfully rebellious thing?\" said she angrily.\n\nJust as she spoke, Cao Hong and Cao Xiu, both armed, forced their way into the inner apartments and requested His Majesty to come to the Hall of Audience.\n\nThe Empress broke out into abuse: \"So you are two of the disorderly rebels who, for the sake of your own ends, have conspired to upset all the good service of my father. Though he overshadowed the whole land, yet he never dared to aspire to the sacred throne. But my brother, who has only just succeeded him, sets no bounds to his ambition and temerity and would usurp the Throne. Heaven will surely cut off his offspring!\"\n\nShe wept bitterly as she went away, and the attendants sobbed and wept too. But Cao Xiu and Cao Hong still urged the Emperor to go to the Hall of Audience, and at last he had to yield. There Hua Xin took up the question again.\n\n\"Your Majesty should act as was advised yesterday and so avoid any misfortune.\"\n\nThe Emperor sobbed, \"All of you have eaten of the bounty of Han for years, and among you are many whose fathers and grandfathers were conspicuous for merit. How can you bring yourselves to act thus improperly toward me?\"\n\n\"If Your Majesty refuses to follow advice, I fear that there will soon be trouble in the family. Really we are not disloyal.\"\n\n\"Who would dare to murder me?\" cried the Emperor.\n\n\"Everyone knows that Your Majesty lacks the happy attributes of a successful ruler and that is why there is so much confusion in the country. If it were not for the presence of the Prince of Wei in your court, many people would murder you. Your Majesty has never yet learned how to treat people; is your sole desire to set people against you?\"\n\nThe Emperor, alarmed at the violence of his language, shook out his sleeves and rose to go away. Then Wang Lang glanced at Hua Xin, who rushed forward and seized the Emperor by the sleeve.\n\n\"Is it consent or not?\" cried he angrily. \"One word!\"\n\nThe Emperor was dumb with terror.\n\n\"Where is the Keeper of the Seal?\" shouted Cao Hong and Cao Xiu, drawing their swords.\n\n\"The Keeper of the Seal is here,\" said Zu Bi, stepping calmly to the front.\n\nThey tried to force the seal from him, but he cried, \"The Seal belongs to the Emperor, and I will not yield it!\"\n\nCao Hong called up the executioners and told them to behead him, which they did. Zu Bi abused the ruffians to the last breath.\n\n\u2003Dethroned by wicked traitors was the ruling House of Han,\n\n\u2003They falsely claimed as precedent the deeds of Yu and Tang.\n\n\u2003The crowd of officers at court were all on Cao Pi's side,\n\n\u2003Save one, Zu Bi the Keeper of the Seal, and loyally he died.\n\nThe Emperor was in a state of abject terror, and when he saw the whole court filling up with armed guards, all the soldiers of Wei and so enemies, he burst into tears.\n\n\"Yes. I will give up the throne to the Prince, if haply I may be spared to live out the few years Heaven has assigned me,\" wailed he.\n\n\"The Prince will always take care of Your Majesty,\" said Jia Xu. \"It would be as well to prepare the abdication manifesto quickly so as to preserve tranquillity.\"\n\nSuch a hint could not be missed, and Chen Qun was directed to draft the document. As soon as it was finished, Hua Xin and a host of officers, took it off to the Prince of Wei's palace and presented it, with the Imperial Hereditary Seal, in the name of the Emperor. Very joyfully, Cao Pi read this writing:\n\n\"During the whole of my thirty-two years of reign the land has been in a state of turmoil, but the spirits of my ancestors have preserved me in the midst of danger. Now from the signs of the heavens and the hearts of the people, I see that the virtue of the Hans is exhausted, and happy fortune has devolved upon the House of Wei, as may be seen from the success in war enjoyed by the late King Cao and the resplendent virtue of the present Prince, which answers to the times.\n\n\"By all noble principles the empire is no private possession, but a public trust. Wherefore the great King Yao, to his eternal glory, passed over his own son. How I admire this deed! Now in imitation thereof I have resolved to abdicate in favor of my Chief Minister, the Prince of Wei, who will not, I hope, disappoint my wishes.\"\n\nCao Pi heard this and was going to accept it as final.\n\nBut Sima Yi said no: \"Although the declaration and the seal have been sent, yet decorum demands refusal at first so as to silence people's criticism.\"\n\nThen Wang Lang drafted a memorial modestly declining the proposal of succession on the ground of unfitness and asking that some other be sought. When this reached the Emperor, he was much perturbed and asked what was to be done next.\n\nReplied Hua Xin, \"When his father was offered a princedom, he declined thrice, but he finally accepted. Wherefore Your Majesty should renew the offer. The Prince will end by acceptance.\"\n\nThere was no help for it, and so Huan Jie was bidden to draft another declaration of offer, which was sent by the hand of the Officer of the Dynastic Temple, Zhang Yin, together with the emblems and the seal.\n\nThis new declaration read thus:\n\n\"To the Prince of Wei. You have sent your modest refusal of my offer to abdicate. But I have long since seen that the virtue of Han is passing, and I could only rely upon the late Prince, your father, who virtuously undertook the great task of removing the evil oppressors and purging the land. Now his son Cao Pi has succeeded. His perfect virtue is resplendent, his fame universal and his benevolence is wafted to all parts. The divine choice rests upon him.\n\n\"In the days of old, Yao the Great would abdicate, and did so in favor of Shun, who possessed merit after his twenty accomplishments; and the God-king Shun in the same manner handed the Throne to Yu after Yu had labored to control the floodwaters. The House of Han succeeded in the course of ages to the work of Yao and now passes on the sacred trust, to promote the repose of the Earth and manifest the command of Heaven.\n\n\"By the hand of the Minister Zhang Yin, this is sent with the emblems and the seal.\"\n\nGreatly rejoicing, Cao Pi received this.\n\nBut he said to Jia Xu, \"Although I have received two such declarations, yet I fear that I may not escape being branded as a usurper by posterity.\"\n\n\"That is easily arranged,\" replied Jia Xu. \"Direct Zhang Yin to take the seal back again, and tell Hua Xin to cause the Emperor to set up a Terrace of Abdication and select an auspicious day for the ceremony. Then assemble all the officers at the terrace, and cause the Emperor to offer the seal with his own hands and surrender the empire to you. Thus can you dissipate all doubts and prevent any caviling.\"\n\nSo the seal was once more rejected with a memorial to say so. Zhang Yin returned, and the Emperor inquired of the courtiers how he was to understand this act.\n\nThen Hua Xin said, \"Your Majesty can set up a Terrace of Abdication and assemble nobles, officers, and common people to witness the act of abdication. Thereafter the descendants of your House shall receive favor at the hands of Wei.\"\n\nThe Emperor consented and sent officials in the Office of Imperial Ceremonies to select a site at Fanyang. And there they built a terrace of three stories, and they chose an auspicious day of the tenth month for the act of abdication. On the appointed day, Emperor Xian requested Cao Pi to ascend the terrace and receive his abdication. At the foot of the terrace stood the officials, more than four hundred, and the Imperial Guards and the Tiger Guards, and soldiers to the number of three hundred thousand. Thereupon the Emperor presented the seal, which Cao Pi received into his hands. Then all those about the terrace knelt to listen to the reading of the manifesto:\n\n\"To the Prince of Wei. In days of old, Yao yielded the empire to Shun, and Shun in turn gave it to Yu. The will of Heaven does not follow the way of mortals, but seeks the virtuous. The rule of Han has lost its virility and the times are out of joint. When my turn came to rule, great disorder arose, and evils stalked abroad till the empire was in danger of subversion. I trusted to the military genius of the late Prince of Wei to restore order and purge away the evil, whereby to ensure tranquillity to my House. What could my single hand do to correct this and ensure peace for my Nine Domains?\n\n\"The present Prince has succeeded to his father. He is also resplendent in virtue, capable as Wu the Military King and Wen the Scholar King of the great task, brilliant in the glory of his father. The spirit of the empire is upon him; gods and humans declare his worth. To him be the bright reward, and let him accept this mandate. For all say his capabilities fit him to stand beside Yu.\n\n\"As did my great predecessor, I respectfully retire that he may be set up. The revolution of Heaven brings the glory upon his person, and he will accept the high office and comfort all people by reverently obeying the decree of Heaven.\"\n\nThe reading finished, the Prince of Wei, Cao Pi, proceeded to the terrace and ascended to the place of the Emperor. Then Jia Xu, at the head of the great concourse of officers, came to the foot of the terrace, and a court was held. The year of reign was changed from Prolonged Wealth, the first year, to Yellow Dawn, the first year (AD 220), and the government became that of Great Wei. An edict was then published proclaiming a general amnesty, and the title of \"Founder of the Dynasty\" was conferred upon the late Prince, Cao Cao.\n\nThen said Hua Xin, \"As heaven has but one sun, so the people can have but one ruler. The Hans have abdicated, and it is fitting that they withdraw to a distance. I pray for an edict naming the place of residence of the Liu family.\"\n\nTaking the late Emperor by the arm, Hua Xin led him forward and made him kneel below the terrace to hear the command. Then the new Emperor Pi conferred upon him the title of Duke of Shanyang, bidding him depart forthwith.\n\nThereupon Hua Xin drew his sword and in a harsh voice said, \"It is an old rule that the setting up of one emperor means the degradation of another. Now, through the gracious kindness of His Majesty, you are spared personal injury and created a duke. Proceed at once and return not to court without express command.\"\n\nThe late Emperor Xian controlled his emotion, thanked the Emperor Pi for his clemency and left on horseback. But those who saw the departure could not help a feeling of pity for him.\n\nSaid Cao Pi to his courtiers, \"Now I understand the story of Shun and Yu.\"\n\nThen they all shouted: \"O Ruler, may thy life be eternal!\"\n\n\u2003The ruling policy of Han had failed them,\n\n\u2003Dangers pressed in upon the House,\n\n\u2003And the land they had held so long\n\n\u2003Passed from them forever.\n\n\u2003Little thought he, who then snatched their scepter,\n\n\u2003That the precedent he then claimed\n\n\u2003Would be used in due time by another\n\n\u2003To justify the destruction of his own House.\n\nThe officials then requested Cao Pi to make a solemn declaration to Heaven and Earth, which he did with humble obeisance.\n\nBut at this moment a sudden storm burst whirling up the dust and rolling along stones till no one could see the face of his neighbor. All the lights on the terrace were extinguished. The newly enthroned Emperor was terrified and fell prostrate. He was borne away unconscious. When he revived, he was assisted into the Palace, but for many days he was too ill to hold a court.\n\nWhen he had somewhat recovered, he met his courtiers and received their felicitations. He rewarded Hua Xin with the post of Minister of the Interior, and Wang Lang with that of Minister of Works. All the officers were advanced in rank. But as his recovery was slow, he began to think there was too much witchcraft about the palaces at Xuchang and left it for Luoyang, where he erected a large palace complex.\n\nThe tale of these doings reached Chengdu and caused great grief to the Prince of Hanzhong, for he heard the rumors that the late Emperor had been put to death. He issued an order for mourning to be worn and instituted sacrifices, and he conferred the posthumous title of Emperor Xian the Filial on the late Emperor. This worry brought on an illness, so that he could not transact the business of the court, which was left in the hands of Zhuge Liang.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang and some of his colleagues took counsel one with another, saying, \"The empire cannot be one single day without its ruler, wherefore we desire that our Prince should be honored with the title of 'Emperor'.\"\n\nQiao Zhou said, \"There have been auspicious indications. A yellow vapor has been seen in the northwest of Chengdu rising to the clouds, and the star of emperor has greatly increased in splendor and shined like the moon. These signs mean that our Prince is to become Emperor in succession to the House of Han. There can be no doubt.\"\n\nWhereupon Zhuge Liang and Xu Jing, at the head of a large number of officers, presented a memorial requesting the Prince to assume the title of Emperor. But Liu Bei objected.\n\n\"O Nobles, do you desire to set my feet in the way of disloyalty and wrong-doing?\"\n\n\"Not so,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"But Cao Pi has usurped the Throne, while you are a scion of the House. It is right and proper that you succeed and prolong the line.\"\n\nBut the Prince suddenly showed anger, saying, \"Can I imitate the deeds of such a rebel?\"\n\nHe rose and left the chamber, going to his own apartments. So the officials dispersed.\n\nBut three days later Zhuge Liang again led a deputation to the court, and they requested that the Prince should come forth and hear them. He came, and they all prostrated themselves.\n\nXu Jing spoke, \"The late Emperor of the Hans has been slain by Cao Pi. You, O Prince, will fail both in loyalty and rectitude if you do not assume the succession and destroy the wrong-doers. The whole empire requests you to rule that you may avenge the death of the late Emperor, and the people will be disappointed if you do not accede to their wishes.\"\n\nThe Prince replied, \"Although I am descended from the grandson of Emperor Jing, I have not been of the least advantage. If I assumed the title of 'Emperor', how would that act differ from usurpation?\"\n\nZhuge Liang pleaded with him again and again, but the Prince remained obdurate. Then Zhuge Liang bethought that where argument failed a ruse might succeed. So having arranged the parts his several colleagues were to play, he pleaded illness and remained at home. Presently it was told the Prince that his adviser's condition was becoming serious, wherefore Liu Bei went to see him as he lay on his couch.\n\n\"What illness affects you, my Commander-in-Chief?\" asked Liu Bei.\n\n\"My heart is sad like unto burning, and I shall soon die.\"\n\n\"What is it that causes you such grief?\"\n\nBut Zhuge Liang did not reply. And when the question was repeated again and again he said nothing, but just lay with his eyes closed as if he was too ill to speak.\n\nThe Prince, however, pressed him to reply, and then with a deep sigh Zhuge Liang said, \"Great Prince, from the day I left my humble cottage to follow you, you have always listened to my words and accepted my advice, and now this western domain, the whole of the two River Lands is yours just as I said it would be. But this usurpation of Cao Pi means the annihilation of the Hans and the cessation of their sacrifices, wherefore my colleagues and I desired you to become Emperor in order to crush this upstart Wei and restore the Hans. We all worked for this end, never thinking that you would refuse so obstinately to accede to our wishes. Now the officers are all annoyed, and they will drift away before very long. If you are left alone and Wu and Wei come to attack, it will be difficult for you to hold on to what you have. Do you not think this sufficient reason for me to feel grieved?\"\n\n\"Unless I refused, the whole world would blame me. I am afraid,\" replied the Prince.\n\nQuoting Confucius the Teacher, Zhuge Liang replied, \"'If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.' In other words, if one be not really straight, people will not speak of one favorably. O Prince, you are straight, and people speak of you favorably. What more is there to say? You know when Heaven offers and you refuse, you are certainly to blame.\"\n\n\"When you have recovered, it shall be done,\" said the Prince.\n\nUp leapt Zhuge Liang from his bed, tapped at the screen in front of a doorway and in rushed a number of high officers, who prostrated themselves, crying, \"So you have consented, O Prince! Then choose the day for the ceremony.\"\n\nThey were all the most trusted of his court: Imperial Guardian Xu Jing, General Who Brings Peace to Han Mi Zhu; Lord of Qingyi Xiang Ju, Lord of Yangquan Liu Bao, Deputy Governor Zhao Zuo; First Secretary Yang Hong, Counselor Du Qiong, Secretary Zhang Shuang, Minister Lai Gong, Minister Huang Quan, Minister He Zong, Doctorate Scholar Yin Mo, Minister Qiao Zhou, Grand Commander Yin Chun, Imperial Commander Zhang Si, Treasurer Wang Mou, Doctorate Scholar Yi Ji, Counselor Qin Mi, and many others.\n\nThe Prince was greatly startled, and said, \"You are committing me to doing what is dishonorable!\"\n\nBut Zhuge Liang said, \"Since consent has been given, let a terrace be built and a day chosen for the great ceremony.\"\n\nThe Prince was escorted back to his palace, and Academician Xu Ci and High Counselor Meng Guang were told off to see to the building of the terrace at Mount Wudan south of Chengdu. And when all was ready, a great concourse of officers solemnly escorted the Prince, seated in a carriage of the imperial pattern, to the ground prepared, and he went up to the altar and performed the appointed sacrifice.\n\nThis done, the solemn announcement was read in a loud voice by Qiao Zhou:\n\n\"On this twelfth day of the fourth month of the twenty-fifth year of the Rebuilt Tranquillity Era, Liu Bei, the Emperor, makes this solemn announcement to Heaven and Earth.\n\n\"The dynasty of Han has possessed the empire for years without end. Formerly Wang Mang rebelled against his sovereign, and Liu Xiu the Founder of Latter Han rose in his wrath and put Wang Mang to death, thus restoring the prerogatives of the great sacrifices to him who rightly exercised them. Lately Cao Cao, powerful and cruel, slew the Empress, and his crimes cry aloud to Heaven for vengeance. His son, Cao Pi, carrying evils into every quarter, then seized the scepter.\n\n\"My officials and leaders, regarding the dynasty as having been overthrown, think it fitting that I, Liu Bei, would continue the line. As successor to my two warrior ancestors, Liu Bang and Liu Xiu, I will punish as Heaven decrees.\n\n\"Fearing lest my virtue be inadequate to the Imperial Throne, I consulted the voices of the people, and all, even the most distant, have said that the mandate of Heaven may not be disobeyed, the great task of my ancestors may not discontinue, the land must have a lord, and they aver the cynosure of all eyes is myself.\n\nNow I, respecting the mandate of Heaven and fearing lest the great achievements of Liu Bang and Liu Xiu may be overthrown, have reverently selected this auspicious day to ascend the altar, sacrifice, and announce my assumption of the Imperial Seal in order to comfort all the people, rejoice the ancestors of the Dynastic House, and bring eternal tranquillity to all domains.\"\n\nWhen the reading was ended, and the sacrifice and the prayer, Zhuge Liang, in the name of all those assembled, presented the Imperial Seal.\n\nThe Prince received it in both hands, laid it upon the altar, and again declined acceptance, saying, \"I, Liu Bei, am unfitted. I pray that another, more able, may be chosen.\"\n\nBut Zhuge Liang said, \"Our lord has settled the empire, and his merits are manifest to the whole world. Moreover, he is of the Dynastic Family, and it is fitting that he succeed. Now that the great announcement has been made, such self-abnegation is impossible.\"\n\nSo all the officers shouted, \"Eternal life to the Emperor!\" And they did obeisance.\n\nThen the style of the reign was announced to be Manifest Might, the first year (AD 220). The Lady Wu was declared Empress, and the eldest son, Liu Shan, was declared Heir-Apparent. The second son Liu Yung was made Prince of Lu, and the third son Liu Li, Prince of Liang (the ancient states of Lu and Liang). Zhuge Liang became Prime Minister, and Xu Jing, Minister of the Interior. Many others were promoted, and a general amnesty was proclaimed, so that there was great rejoicing throughout all the length and breadth of the two River Lands.\n\nNext day the first court was held, and after the ceremonial prostration, and when they were all arranged in due order, the First Ruler made a pronouncement.\n\n\"In the Peach Garden I and my brothers Guan Yu and Zhang Fei pledged ourselves to live and die together. Unhappily my brother Guan Yu came to his end at the hands of Sun Quan of Wu, and I must avenge him lest I fail to fulfill the oath. Therefore will I devote the whole force of my kingdom to the destruction of Wu and the capture of its rebellious chief, whereby to wipe away my reproach.\"\n\nBut just as he closed this oration, an officer threw himself down at the foot of the throne, crying, \"It may not be so!\"\n\nAll eyes turned to this man. He was Tiger General Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"Dire vengeance will I wreak!\" so cried the King,\n\nHis minister replied, \"Do no such thing.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "Eager For Vengeance, Zhang Fei Is Assassinated; Athirst Of Retribution, The First Ruler Goes To War.\n\nZhao Zilong was opposed to the attempt to fight Wu, and spoke against the plan.\n\n\"The real rebel was not Sun Quan, but Cao Cao. Now it is his son who has usurped the Imperial Throne and called forth the anger of gods and humans. You should first aim at the Land Within the Passes by camping on the River Wei, from which to attack the rebel. After that the loyal people in the East of the Passes will cart their grains and herd their horses to welcome your army. If you leave River Wei out of consideration in order to fight Wu, your military force will be engaged, and could you disengage it quickly in case of necessity? It is worth reflection.\"\n\nThe First Ruler replied, \"Sun Quan slew my brother. Furthermore, Fu Shiren, Mi Fang, Pan Zhang, and Ma Zhong are on his side, all of whom I hate so much that I could eat their flesh with gusto and devour their relatives, whereby I should have my vengeance. Why, Noble Sir, do you obstruct me?\"\n\n\"Because the enmity against Cao Cao is a public matter; vengeance for the manner of your brother's end is private. The empire should be placed first.\"\n\n\"What care I for myriads of square miles of territory as long as my brother is unavenged?\"\n\nSo Zhao Zilong's remonstrance was disregarded, and orders went forth to prepare an army against Wu. The First Ruler also sent into the Five Valleys to borrow the aid of fifty thousand of tribesmen. He sent a messenger to Langzhong conferring on Zhang Fei the rank of General of the Flying Cavalry and the title of Lord of Xixiang. Zhang Fei became also Governor of Langzhong.\n\nWhen Zhang Fei heard the tidings of Guan Yu's death at the hands of Sun Quan, he wept very bitterly day and night, so that his raiment was soaked with his tears. His subordinates tried to cheer him with wine, but he over-drank, and this increased his ill-humor, which he vented on any offender in his camp. Some of his people even died under the lash. Every day he gazed southward, grinding his teeth with rage and glaring. He wept and groaned without ceasing.\n\nThen a messenger was announced. He was summoned immediately, and Zhang Fei at once tore open and read his dispatches. When Zhang Fei read the edict, he accepted his new rank in all humility, bowing northward toward the imperial mandate. Then he gave a banquet to the messenger.\n\nHe said, \"My enmity for the death of my brother is deep as the sea. Why do not the officers at the court propose an avenging expedition?\"\n\nThe messenger replied, \"Most of them favor first the destruction of Wei. Wu is to follow.\"\n\n\"What sort of talk is this?\" cried Zhang Fei angrily. \"When we three swore brotherhood in the Peach Garden, we pledged ourselves to die together. Now, alas! my brother has perished by the way, and can we enjoy wealth or honors without him? I must see the Son of Heaven and pray to be allowed to lead the van. I will wear mourning, and in that garb I will smite Wu and capture the bandit that rules there. Sun Quan shall be sacrificed to my brother's manes in virtue of our oath.\"\n\nZhang Fei accompanied the messenger to Capital Chengdu. In the meantime the First Ruler had been training his armies. Day after day he went to the drill ground, and he decided upon a day to start, and he would accompany the expedition. Thereupon a number of courtiers went to the palace of the Prime Minister to talk with Zhuge Liang, trying to get this intention modified.\n\nThey said, \"It is not in accordance with the importance due to the Emperor's position that he should go in personal command of this army, particularly as he has but lately assumed his throne. You, Sir, hold the weighty post of adviser in such a matter, and why do you not dissuade him?\"\n\n\"I have done so, most sincerely and repeatedly, but he will not listen. But now you all come with me to the drill ground, and we will try once more.\"\n\nSo they proceeded thither, with Zhuge Liang at their head, and he said, \"Your Majesty has but lately taken the imperial seat. If the expedition was one to march northward to destroy the rebels against Han and in the interest of rectitude, it would be perfectly correct for the Emperor to lead the army. But an officer of high rank should more properly be sent against Wu. Why should Your Majesty expose yourself to such fatigues?\"\n\nThe First Ruler was touched by the depth of his minister's concern and the sincerity of his counsel, and was on the point of yielding when the arrival of Zhang Fei was announced. Zhang Fei was immediately summoned and came to the pavilion on the drill ground, where he threw himself on the ground and clasped the First Ruler's feet, weeping bitterly. The First Ruler joined in the lamentation.\n\n\"Your Majesty is now ruler and too quickly forgets the oath in the Peach Garden. Why is our brother's death not avenged?\"\n\nThe First Ruler replied, \"Many officers dissuade me from such a course. I cannot act rashly.\"\n\n\"What do others know of our oath? If Your Majesty will not go, then let me sacrifice myself to avenge our brother. If I cannot, then would I rather die and see your face no more.\"\n\n\"Then will I go with you,\" said the First Ruler. \"Bring your own troops from Langzhong, and I will bring my veterans to meet you at Jiangzhou. We will both attack Wu and wipe out the reproach.\"\n\nAs Zhang Fei rose to take leave, the First Ruler said to him, \"I know that your weakness for wine leads you astray, and you become very cruel in your cups, and hog your people, and keep the beaten ones near you. They may be dangerous, and it is certainly the road to misfortune. Now you must be more kindly and not give way to passion as before.\"\n\nThus admonished, Zhang Fei said farewell and left.\n\nSoon after, when the First Ruler was preparing to march out, High Minister Qin Mi memorialized, saying, \"That Your Majesty, the Lord of a Myriad Chariots, should risk his person in what is not the way of perfect rectitude is not what the ancients would have done. I pray that this may be reflected upon.\"\n\nBut the First Ruler replied, \"Guan Yu and I were as one body, and the way of perfect rectitude is here. Have you forgotten?\"\n\nBut the officer remained at his feet and said, \"I fear disaster if Your Majesty disregards your servant's words.\"\n\nThe First Ruler replied angrily, \"Why do you use such bad words when I desire to march?\"\n\nHe bade the executioners thrust forth and put to death the bold speaker. Still Qin Mi's face showed no sign of fear.\n\nHe only smiled, saying, \"I die without regret. It is a pity that this newly established state should be overturned ere it be well begun.\"\n\nOther officials interceding, the death punishment was remitted, but the faithful officer was committed to prison.\n\n\"Your fate will be decided when the Army of Vengeance return,\" said the First Ruler.\n\nZhuge Liang sent up a memorial in favor of Qin Mi, saying:\n\n\"I, Zhuge Liang, address Your Majesty in my own name and those of my colleagues. We regard as most grievous the recent events \u2014 Wu's perfidy, by which Jingzhou was lost, the star of a great general was brought down, and the pillar holding the sky was broken \u2014 , and we shall never forget. But it is to be remembered that the crime of overturning the Throne of Han rests on Cao Cao, and the fault of driving away the Liu Family lies not on Sun Quan. We venture to think that the destruction of Wei would cause the submission of Wu, wherefore we beg consideration of the valuable words of Qin Mi. Thus the army will be spared needless exertion and occasion given to make other plans for the prosperity of the Throne and the happiness of the people.\"\n\nBut having listened to the memorial, the First Ruler threw it to the floor, saying, \"I have decided, and no remonstrance should be raised!\"\n\nThen he appointed the Prime Minister to take care of his son and the two River Lands. Then the Generals of the Flying Cavalry \u2014 Ma Chao and Ma Dai \u2014 , together with the General Who Defends the North, Wei Yan, were ordered to guard Hanzhong against Wei. The Tiger General Zhao Zilong was to be in reserve and to control the supplies; Huang Quan and Cheng Jin were made Counselors; Ma Liang and Chen Zhen, Secretaries; Huang Zhong, the Van Leader, assisted by the Marching Generals Feng Xi and Zhang Nan; Fu Tong and Zhang Yi, Marching Commanders of the Center Army; Zhao Rong and Liao Chun, the rear guards. The whole army, including the borrowed foreign troops, numbered seven hundred fifty thousand, and high-rank officials amounted several hundred. And the \"tiger\" day of the seventh month of the first year of Manifest Might was selected as the most propitious day for the start.\n\nAs soon as Zhang Fei had got back to his post, he issued orders that his soldiers should be ready to march in three days and the whole body was to be in mourning, white uniforms and whitened arms.\n\nJust after the order appeared, two generals named Fan Jiang and Zhang Da came to their chief, saying, \"The time allowed is insufficient to make white flags and armors. Pray give us more time, General.\"\n\n\"I am hot to avenge my brother!\" roared Zhang Fei. \"My only regret is that I cannot reach the miserable wretch's country tomorrow. Do you dare to disobey my order?\"\n\nZhang Fei called in the lictors, had the two officers bound to trees, and ordered each to receive fifty lashes.\n\nAt the close of the flogging, he said, \"Now you will be ready tomorrow. If you are not, I will put you to death as an example!\"\n\nThe two generals returned to their place, spitting blood and hot with anger.\n\nThey said one to another, \"We have been beaten today. What about tomorrow? This man's temper is unbearable; and if things are not ready, we shall suffer death.\"\n\n\"Suppose we slay him,\" suddenly said Zhang Da, \"since if we do not, he will kill us.\"\n\n\"But how can we get near him?\"\n\n\"If we are to have a chance to live, he will get drunk and go to bed tonight; if we are to die, he will remain sober.\"\n\nThey made all their arrangements for the crime.\n\nThat day Zhang Fei was greatly disturbed in his mind and restless.\n\nHe told some of his subordinates, saying, \"I feel nervous and creepy and shivery and cannot not rest. What does it mean?\"\n\n\"This is due to too much brooding over the loss of your brother,\" said they.\n\nThen Zhang Fei bade them bring in wine, and he drank with his officers. Presently he became quite intoxicated and lay down on a couch in his tent.\n\nMeanwhile the two assassins had followed all his doings, and when they knew he was lying on his couch intoxicated and incapable, they went into the tent, each armed with a water-sharp dagger. They got rid of the attendants by saying they had confidential matters to talk about and so got into the inner rooms.\n\nBut even then they dared do nothing, for Zhang Fei slept always with open eyelids, and he lay on his couch as if still awake. However, huge snores soon convinced them that their victim really slept, and they crept to the side of the couch. Then both stabbed simultaneously deep into the body. Zhang Fei uttered one cry and lay still. So he died at the hand of assassins at the age of fifty-five years.\n\n\u2003He who whipped the inspector in Anxi,\n\n\u2003Who swept vile rebels from the land of Han,\n\n\u2003And thereby won great glory for the Lius,\n\n\u2003Whose valor shone at Tiger Trap Pass,\n\n\u2003Who turned the tide of victory at Long Slope Bridge,\n\n\u2003Who freed Yan Yan and thus won a friend\n\n\u2003That helped him and his brothers conquer Shu,\n\n\u2003Whose wisdom defeated Zhang He to get Hanzhong,\n\n\u2003Is dead, the victim of assassins' blows.\n\n\u2003Not his avenge his brother's death on Wu,\n\n\u2003Langzhong will grieve him all the ages through.\n\nHaving done their victim to death, Fan Jiang and Zhang Da hacked off his head, and made off for Wu without loss of time. Fleeing with them were a few dozen close subordinates. When the deed was known, they had got too far for capture.\n\nThe assassination was reported in a memorial by a commander of Zhang Fei named Hu Ban, who had been sent from Jingzhou to see the First Ruler and then commissioned to serve under Zhang Fei. He wrote a memorial to the First Ruler and bade the eldest son, Zhang Bao, prepare a coffin for the remains. After the ceremony, leaving his younger brother, Zhang Shao, to hold Langzhong, Zhang Bao went to see the Emperor.\n\nThe day of departure had already come, and the First Ruler had left the capital. Zhuge Liang and many officers had escorted him out of the city for three miles and taken leave.\n\nReturning to Chengdu, Zhuge Liang felt ill at ease, and he remarked to his colleagues, \"If Fa Zheng had been alive, he would have been able to interdict this expedition.\"\n\nOne night the First Ruler felt nervous and shuddered from time to time. He could not sleep, so he went out of his tent and looked up at the stars. Suddenly he saw a bright meteor fall in the northwest, and began to wonder what the portent meant. He sent at once to ask Zhuge Liang to tell him.\n\nZhuge Liang sent back the reply: \"This means the loss of a great leader, and there will be bad news in a few days.\"\n\nSo the army was halted and did not march. Then the arrival of a message from Hu Ban of Langzhong was announced.\n\nThe First Ruler's foreboding increased, and he stamped his foot, saying, \"Alas! My other brother is gone!\"\n\nOpening the letter he found it was indeed so. As he read the news of the assassination, he uttered a loud cry and fell in a swoon. He was raised, and presently they brought him back to life.\n\nNext day they reported a body of horsemen coming. The First Ruler went out of the camp to look at them and presently saw a young general, dressed all in white armor, sweeping forth in quite a terror. The First Ruler recognized that was Zhang Bao.\n\nAs soon as Zhang Bao reached the First Ruler's presence, he dismounted and bowed to the earth, weeping, \"My father has been killed by Fan Jiang and Zhang Da. They have gone over to Wu, taking my father's head with them!\"\n\nThe news was very grievous, and the First Ruler burst into tears and even refused food.\n\nHis officers remonstrated, saying, \"Now Your Majesty has the loss of two brothers to avenge, and you must not destroy yourself.\"\n\nSo after a time he began to eat and drink, and he then offered the leadership of the van to Zhang Bao, saying, \"Are you and Hu Ban willing to lead your troops to attack Wu and to avenge your father?\"\n\n\"For my country or for my father, I would shrink from no sacrifice,\" said the young man.\n\nJust as the force for the young man's leadership was being organized, another party of horsemen approached, also dressed in white armors. This was a small force under Guan Xing, son of Guan Yu. The youth also threw himself to the ground and wept.\n\nAt sight of Guan Xing, thoughts stirred in the First Ruler's breast, and he burst into tears. Neither reason nor persuasion could stop them.\n\n\"I think of the plain and simple days of long ago when we pledged ourselves one to the other. Now I am Emperor. How I should rejoice to share my good fortune with them! But they have met violent deaths, and the sight of these two youths wrings my heart to the very core.\"\n\n\"Young gentlemen, please retire,\" said the officers to the two youthful generals, \"and let our Sacred One repose his dragon body.\"\n\nThey went.\n\nSaid the attendants, \"Your Majesty is no longer young. You are over sixty, remember, and it is not fitting that you give way to such extreme sorrow.\"\n\n\"But my brothers \u2014 dead,\" wailed the First Ruler. \"How can I live without them?\"\n\nHe broke into a fresh paroxysm and beat his head on the ground.\n\n\"What can be done?\" asked the officers one to another. \"He is in such trouble! How can we comfort him?\"\n\nMa Liang said, \"Sire, it is bad for the army to spend whole days in wailing and tears when leading against the enemy.\"\n\nAnd then Chen Zhen said, \"There is a certain hermit living among the Blue Mountains, near Chengdu, who is said to be three hundred years old. He is called Li Yin, and people say he is a seer. Let us tell His Majesty and let him send for this old man that he may know what the future may have in store. It will have more weight than anything we can say.\"\n\nThey went to the First Ruler and told him. He agreed to summon the seer and sent Chen Zhen with the command. Soon the messenger reached the town near the hills and asked the people where the prophet dwelt. They led him far into a secluded valley like a fairy village, very unlike any ordinary spot. Soon a lad came to receive the visitor.\n\n\"You are surely Chen Zhen.\"\n\nChen Zhen was startled that the lad knew him, and still more so at the familiar address, and said, \"O superhuman boy, how do you know my name so well?\"\n\n\"Last evening my master told me that a messenger with an imperial command would come today and mentioned your name.\"\n\n\"Truly he is more than wise,\" said Chen Zhen. \"His reputation is not unfounded.\"\n\nSo the two proceeded to the old man's abode, and Chen Zhen declared his errand. The old man said he was too aged to travel.\n\n\"But the Emperor anxiously desires to see you face to face, if haply you would not mind making the effort.\"\n\nIn the end, and after much persuasion, Li Yin consented and went. The First Ruler received him affably, surprised at the contrast between his hoary head and fresh boyish complexion. The venerable one had green eyes, with square and sparkling pupils. His carriage was erect, and he stood straight as a pine tree.\n\n\"This is no common man,\" thought the First Ruler, and he treated him with distinguished courtesy.\n\nThe seer said, \"I am but an old man of the barren hill country, without learning or wisdom. You shame me, O Emperor, by calling me, and I know not why.\"\n\n\"My two brothers and I swore a mutual oath some thirty years ago. But now my both brothers have gone, both by violent deaths. I would lead a great army to avenge them and wish to know how the expedition will end. Hearing that you, Venerable Sir, are learned in the deeper mysteries, I sent for you and beg you to tell me.\"\n\n\"But this is fate. It is not for an old man like me to know.\"\n\nBut the First Ruler pressed him to say. However, the aged one got paper and a brush and wrote \"soldiers, horses, weapons\" again and again on many sheets of paper. Having done this, he suddenly tore them into fragments. Further, he drew a picture of a tall man lying supine and another above him digging a grave. And over all he wrote \"white\".\n\nAfter this he bowed and departed, leaving the First Ruler annoyed.\n\n\"This is only a demented man. What he says is not worthy of confidence,\" said the First Ruler.\n\nAnd he burned the paper. Then he ordered an advance at full speed.\n\nZhang Fei's son, Zhang Bao, came in, saying, \"Hu Ban and his army have come. I pray that I may be appointed to lead the van.\"\n\nThe First Ruler admired his noble intent and gave him a Van Leader's seal.\n\nBut just as Zhang Bao was attaching the seal to his girdle, another youth boldly stepped forth and said, \"Leave that seal to me!\"\n\nIt was Guan Xing, son of Guan Yu.\n\n\"I have already received my commission,\" said Zhang Bao.\n\n\"What abilities have you for such a task?\" cried Guan Xing.\n\n\"That I have been training as a soldier since my boyhood. I can shoot and never miss.\"\n\n\"I should like to see your prowess,\" said the First Ruler, \"that I may decide who is the better.\"\n\nZhang Bao ordered some of his people to set up a flag at a hundred paces, and on the flag he drew a heart in red. Then he took his bow and shot three arrows, each of which went through the heart. Those present commended the performance.\n\nThen Guan Xing seized his bow, saying, \"What is it to hit such a mark?\"\n\nJust as he said this a flock of wild geese flew over his head.\n\n\"I will hit the third of the flying geese,\" said he.\n\nHe shot; and the third fell.\n\n\"Fine!\" cried all the assembly as one voice.\n\nBut Zhang Bao was enraged. Leaping on his steed, he seized the long serpent halberd left him by his father, crying, \"Dare you try a real combat?\"\n\nGuan Xing took up the challenge at once. He sprang into the saddle, took his great saber, and galloped out.\n\n\"You can use the spear, think you that I cannot wield a sword?\" cried he.\n\nThe two impetuous youths were on the point of a battle when the First Ruler bade them hold.\n\n\"Do not behave so badly!\" cried he.\n\nBoth dropped out of the saddle, threw aside their weapons, ran to his feet, and begged pardon.\n\n\"Young men, from the time I left my native place Zhuo and swore brotherhood with your fathers, they were as my own flesh and blood. You two are also brothers, and you should help each other in vengeance rather than quarrel and dispute. You have lost the sense of rectitude while your fathers' deaths are still recent, and what will happen in future?\"\n\nBoth fell at his feet and implored forgiveness.\n\n\"Which of you two is the elder?\" asked the First Ruler.\n\n\"I am the elder by a year,\" said Zhang Bao.\n\nThe First Ruler then bade Guan Xing bow to Zhang Bao as to an elder brother, and there, in front of all, they broke an arrow as a pledge that each would always succor the other.\n\nThen the First Ruler issued a mandate appointing Hu Ban the Van Leader, and the two young men were enrolled as his own escort.\n\nThe advance began on land and on water, and they made a brave show as they moved against the land of Wu.\n\nIn the meantime the two assassins, Fan Jiang and Zhang Da, with the grim evidence of their deed, duly reached Wu and told their story to the Marquis who received them.\n\nThen Sun Quan said to his assembled officers, \"Liu Bei has declared himself Emperor and is leading against us in person a great host of more than seven hundred thousand. What shall we do, for the danger is imminent?\"\n\nThey all turned pale and looked one at another. Then Zhuge Jin spoke out.\n\n\"I have been in your service these many years and have never justified the favor you have shown me. I will risk my life and go to this Liu Bei of Shu that I may talk to him plainly and prove to him the advantages of friendship and alliance against Cao Pi.\"\n\nThis offer pleased Sun Quan, who then appointed Zhuge Jin as his messenger to try to induce the First Ruler to keep the peace.\n\nMessengers pass when states are at wrangle;\n\nMay this one succeed and unravel this tangle!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Sun Quan Submits To Wei, Receiving The Nine Dignities; The First Ruler Attacks Wu, Rewarding Six Armies.\n\nIn the eighth month of the first year of Manifest Might (AD 221) the First Ruler marched at the head of his army and camped at Baidicheng (City of the White Emperor), through the Kui Pass. His advanced guard had gone beyond the River Lands when his attendants told him that Zhuge Jin had come as a messenger from Wu. He told them not to admit Zhuge Jin.\n\nBut Huang Quan said, \"His brother being your Prime Minister, Zhuge Jin is certainly come on some important mission. Your Majesty ought to see him and hear what he says. If his proposals are admissible, then agree; if not, he can be made use of to take knowledge of your intentions to Sun Quan and let Sun Quan know that you intend to punish his crime.\"\n\nThen the First Ruler gave way, and the messenger was brought in. He bowed down to the earth.\n\n\"Zhuge Jin, you have come a long journey. What is its object?\" said the First Ruler.\n\n\"My brother has long served Your Majesty; I have come at the risk of my life to discuss Jingzhou affairs. When Guan Yu was at Jingzhou, my master repeatedly sought to ally the two families by marriage, but was refused. When Guan Yu attacked Xiangyang, Cao Cao wrote again and again urging my master to attack Jingzhou. But the Marquis was unwilling, and it was the enmity between your brother and Lu Meng that led to the attack and the unfortunate success.\n\n\"My master is now very sorry for it, but it was Lu Meng's doing. However, Lu Meng is now dead, and his enmity has died with him. Moreover, Lady Sun is always thinking over returning to you. My master now proposes to send back the lady, to bind and hand over to you those officers who surrendered, and to restore Jingzhou. If the two houses swear perpetual amity, then we may join forces against Cao Pi and punish his usurpation.\"\n\nTo this harangue the First Ruler only replied, \"You of East Wu killed my brother. Yet you dare come with your artful talk!\"\n\nZhuge Jin said, \"I only wish to discuss the relative importance of the issues. Your Majesty is an Imperial Uncle, and Cao Pi has seized the throne of your House. Yet you do not think of destroying the usurper, but on the other hand you disregard the most honorable position in the world for the sake of a so-called brother, a connection of another name. Surely this is rejecting the chief for the subordinate, the main issue for a detail.\n\n\"The Middle Land is the biggest part of the empire, and the two capitals, Luoyang and Changan, are both famous as places whence the two, one the Founder, the other the Restorer, of the Hans, initiated their mighty task. Your Majesty takes no thought of these, but would dispute over Jingzhou. In other words, the important is abandoned for the worthless.\n\n\"All the world knows of your assumption of the dignity of Emperor and that you will assuredly restore the Hans and rescue their territory. Only now you do not try to deal with Wei, you only desire to attack Wu. I venture to think you have made a bad choice.\"\n\nAll this argument only added fuel to the fire.\n\n\"The slayer of my brother shall not live in the same world as I. You ask me not to fight. I will cease when I have slain your master. Were it not for the sake of your brother, I would behead you at once. As it is, you may go; and you may tell your master to cleanse his neck ready for the blade of the executioner.\"\n\nZhuge Jin saw that the position was hopeless and took his leave to return to the South Land.\n\nBut while Zhuge Jin had been absent, Zhang Zhao said to Sun Quan, \"Zhuge Jin knows something of the strength of the Shu armies, and he made this mission an excuse to get out of danger. He will not return.\"\n\nThe Marquis replied, \"He and I are sworn friends \u2014 friends to the death. I shall not wrong him, nor will he betray me. When he was at Chaisang and Zhuge Liang came to our country, I wanted my friend Zhuge Jin to persuade his brother to remain with me. His reply was that his brother would not remain any more than he himself would go: Each would be faithful to his salt. That was quite clear enough. How could he desert me after that? Our friendship has something of the divine in it, and no talk from outside can sow dissension between us.\"\n\nEven as Sun Quan spoke, the servants told him that Zhuge Jin had returned.\n\n\"What do you think now?\" said Sun Quan.\n\nZhang Zhao retired overwhelmed with shame. The luckless messenger unfolded his tale of failure.\n\n\"Then the South Land is in great danger,\" said Sun Quan, as he heard the story.\n\nBut a certain man here interposed, saying, \"I have a way out of the difficulty.\"\n\nHe was Counselor Zhao Zi.\n\n\"What good scheme do you propose, friend Zhao Zi?\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"Let my lord draw up a document, which I will take to Cao Pi in Wei, making a full statement of the case, and get him to attack Hanzhong and so draw off the danger from our land.\"\n\n\"Though the suggestion is good, yet shall we not lose something of our dignity by that?\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"If there is any such thing, I will simply jump into the river \u2014 I could not look the South Land's people in the face again.\"\n\nSun Quan was satisfied and composed the memorial, styling himself \"Minister\". Therein Zhao Zi was duly appointed messenger. He took the document and soon reached Capital Xuchang, where he first sought out the High Minister Jia Xu, and then saw the others.\n\nNext day, Jia Xu stood forth one day at court and said, \"East Wu has sent a high officer, Zhao Zi, with a memorial.\"\n\n\"Because he wants the armies of Shu driven off,\" said Cao Pi, smiling.\n\nBut he summoned Zhao Zi, who, having prostrated himself in the outer court, handed in his memorial.\n\nAfter reading it, Cao Pi said, \"What sort of an over-lord is the Marquis?\"\n\n\"Intelligent, clear-sighted, wise, brave, and perspicacious,\" was the reply.\n\nCao Pi laughed, \"Your praise is none too enthusiastic.\"\n\n\"I do not wish to overstate,\" replied Zhao Zi, \"but my master has shown various qualities at different times. He made use of Lu Su among the officials of high ranks, which shows his intelligence. He chose Lu Meng as leader of all armies, which showed his clear-sightedness. He captured Yu Jin but did not hurt him, which shows his kindliness. He took Jingzhou without slaughter, which shows his wisdom. He maintains the Three Rivers so as to command the respect of the empire, which shows his boldness. Lastly, he bows before Your Majesty, which shows his perspicacity. You see now that my epithets are justifiable.\"\n\n\"Is he at all learned?\"\n\n\"Sire, remember he commands a large fleet of ten thousand battleships and a huge army of million armored soldiers. He endeavors to find wise and capable people to help him, and his mind is full of plans and projects. When he has a little leisure, he reads the histories and the annals, for the sake of the general lessons to be learned therefrom. He is no dryasdust pedant seeking remarkable passages and culling model sentences.\"\n\n\"Do you think I could overcome Wu?\"\n\n\"If a large state has military force to attack, a small one has also preparations for defense.\"\n\n\"Does Wu fear Wei?\" asked Cao Pi.\n\n\"How can you think so, considering our army of million armored soldiers and the defensive moats we have in the River Han and the Great River?\"\n\n\"How many such persons as high minister does Wu possess?\"\n\n\"Nearly a hundred intelligent and specially qualified ministers like your servants; of my sort of ordinary knowledge there are too many to reckon up.\"\n\nCao Pi sighed, saying, \"The book says 'Going on mission without losing the dignity of the master.' That is the sort of man you are!\"\n\nThereupon he issued the mandate ordering Xing Zhen, Minister of Ceremonies and Sacrifices, to be his ambassador to Wu, bearing for Sun Quan the title of \"Prince of Wu\" and allowing him to use the \"Nine Signs of Honors\".\n\nBut when the messenger had gone out of the city, Liu Ye went to remonstrate, saying, \"Sun Quan has done this for fear of the armies of Shu. In my opinion, if Shu and Wu fight, heaven will make an end of one country. If you will send an army across the Great River to attack, and Shu attack at the same time from the west, Wu as a state will disappear. If Wu goes, then Shu will be left alone and can be dealt with when you will.\"\n\n\"But I cannot attack Sun Quan now that he has come over to my side. It would prevent anyone else from doing so. No! I will really accept his submission. It is the best course.\"\n\nLiu Ye said, \"After all, though talented, he is but a General of the Flying Cavalry and Lord of Nanzhang of the decadent days of Han. His rank is low and his influence small, yet he still wants to contest the Middle Land. If you promote him to kingly rank, he is only one step below yourself. While doubting the reality of his submission, you give him an exalted rank and increase his influence. Surely this is only giving wings to a tiger.\"\n\n\"Not at all; I am helping neither Wu nor Shu. I am waiting till they are at grips, and if one goes under, there will be only one left to destroy. That will be easy. However, say no more, for I have decided.\"\n\nWhereupon Xing Zhen was bidden to take the mandate and the Nine Dignities and accompany Zhao Zi to Wu.\n\nSun Quan assembled his officers to discuss how the armies of Shu could be driven off. Then came the news of princely rank conferred by Wei. By the rules of courtesy, the messenger bearing the edict should be met at a great distance from the capital, but Gu Yong was opposed to accepting the rank.\n\n\"My lord, you should style yourself 'Supreme Ruler' and 'Lord' of the nine territories. You should not receive any rank from Wei.\"\n\n\"But on one occasion Liu Bang received the princedom of Han (Hanzhong) from Xiang Yu. I have to depend upon circumstances. Why refuse?\"\n\nSun Quan discussed the matter no more, but went out at the head of a great gathering of officers to welcome the messenger.\n\nXing Zhen, the bearer of the mandate from Wei, on first arrival comported himself haughtily as the representative of a superior country and an imperial ambassador. And when he entered the city, he did not descend from his carriage. Wherefore Zhang Zhao ventured to rebuke him.\n\n\"Everyone must obey the rules of courtesy as everyone must respect the laws. You, Sir, are behaving proudly as if there was no such thing as a sword in this country.\"\n\nImmediately the messenger descended from his chariot and was presented to Sun Quan. Afterwards they went in side by side.\n\nAs the cavalcade proceeded, a loud voice was heard in the rear of the two carriages, crying, \"Here we are prevented from risking our lives in smashing Wei and swallowing Shu; and our lord receives a title from another man. Are not such things shameful?\"\n\nThe man was Xu Sheng.\n\nAnd Xing Zhen sighed, saying, \"If all the leaders and ministers of the South Land are like this, the Prince of Wu will not long be content to obey another.\"\n\nHowever, the title was accepted. And when he had received the felicitations of his officers, Sun Quan gave orders to collect beautiful works in jade and brilliant pearls, which were sent to Wei as return gifts.\n\nNot long after came tidings of the forces of Shu: \"The First Ruler, together with King Shamo Ke of the Mang nations, leads his own army and a large number of tribesmen from the east and south. Furthermore, he is aided by the two Shu generals of Dongxi, Liu Ning and Du Lu, with their cohorts. They advance both by land and by water, a mighty host, of which the shouting shakes the heavens. The naval force has already come out at Wukou, and the land force has reached Zigui.\"\n\nAlthough Sun Quan had been created a prince, yet Emperor Pi would not send a relieve army.\n\nWhen the terrible news came, the Prince of Wu asked present advice from his officers, saying, How are we going to meet those forces?\n\nBut there was none to help him. They only muttered and were silent.\n\n\"Ah!\" sighed he. \"After Zhou Yu I had Lu Su, and Lu Meng succeeded Lu Su. But now they have all three gone, and there is no one to share my troubles!\"\n\nBut just then a very youthful general stepped out from the ranks of the officials and said, with a lowly obeisance, \"Though I am young, I am not a little versed in the books of war, and with a few legions I could destroy the power of Shu.\"\n\nSun Quan recognized Sun Huan, the son of Sun Hu. Sun Hu was originally from the Yu family, and he had served under Sun Jian, Sun Quan's father. Sun Jian loved the youth and gave him his own family name of Sun and so made him a member of his own clan. Sun Hu had four sons, of whom Sun Huan was the eldest. Sun Huan was an expert archer and horseman and had accompanied Sun Quan in several campaigns, where he had distinguished himself well and had been given a rank of Commander. At this time he was twenty-five.\n\n\"How do you think you can overcome them?\"\n\n\"There are two able commanders under my command named Xie Jing and Li Yi, both very brave. With a few legions I will capture Liu Bei.\"\n\n\"Though you are brave, nephew, yet you are young and ought to have an assistant.\"\n\nThereupon Tiger General Zhu Ran stepped forward, saying, \"Let me go.\"\n\nSun Quan consented. He promoted Sun Huan to General of the Left Army, and he told off fifty thousand of soldiers and marines, over whom he placed Sun Huan and Zhu Ran as joint commanders. They were to start as soon as possible.\n\nThe scouts reported that the army of Shu was camped at Yidu, and Sun Huan led half his army to the borders of that county and camped in three stockades.\n\nNow the Shu General Hu Ban had received his seal as Leader of the Van. From the day he left the borders of the River Lands, he had had uninterrupted success. Everyone had submitted at the mere rumor of his coming. He had conducted his campaign with unstained swords as far as Yidu. When he heard that Sun Huan was camped there to oppose his progress, he sent back rapid messengers to the First Ruler, who was then at Zigui.\n\nThe First Ruler got angry, saying, \"So they think this youth is able to withstand me?\"\n\n\"Since this nephew of Sun Quan has been made a leader,\" said Guan Xing, \"it is unnecessary to send a leader of high rank. Let me go.\"\n\n\"I was just wishing to see what you could do,\" said the First Ruler, and he gave him orders to go.\n\nJust as Guan Xing was leaving, Zhang Bao stepped forth and asked permission to go too.\n\n\"Then both go, my nephews,\" said the Emperor. \"But you must be prudent and not hasty.\"\n\nSo they took leave, collected their troops and advanced. Sun Huan, hearing of the coming of a large army, called out all his troops and drew up his array. His two famous generals, Li Yi and Xie Jing, were placed by the great standard. They watched the soldiers of Shu filing out and noted two leaders in silver helmets and silver armors, riding on white horses, and the flags were white. First came Zhang Bao with a long spear, and then Guan Xing carrying a great saber.\n\n\"Sun Huan, you tiny rascal, your time has come!\" cried Zhang Bao abusively. \"How dare you stand against the forces of Heaven?\"\n\n\"Your father is a headless devil,\" cried Sun Huan, no way backward in reviling, \"and you are going just now to join him. Don't you see?\"\n\nThen Zhang Bao rode at Sun Huan. From behind his chief, Xie Jing dashed out to meet him. They fought nearly forty bouts, and then Xie Jing ran away with Zhang Bao in pursuit.\n\nWhen Li Yi saw his comrade overcome, he whipped up his steed and came into the fray, whirling his silvered battle-ax. Zhang Bao fought twenty bouts with him, but neither got the better.\n\nThen in the army of Wu, a marching general named Tan Xiong, seeing that his two comrades could not overcome Zhang Bao, shot a treacherous arrow from the ranks and wounded Zhang Bao's steed. Feeling the pang of the wound, the horse bolted back to its own side, but fell before it reached it, throwing its rider sprawling on the ground. Seeing this, Li Yi turned and rode toward the prostrate leader to slay him with his battle-ax. But just as he was about to deliver his blow, lo! a red flash came between, and his head rolled along the earth.\n\nThe red flash was Guan Xing's great sword. Seeing the horse fall and Li Yi coming up, he had rushed in and dealt that fatal blow. And he had saved Zhang Bao from death. Then they attacked and lay on so that Sun Huan suffered a great defeat. Then each side beat the retreat and drew off.\n\nNext day Sun Huan came out to offer battle again, and the two cousins went forth together. Guan Xing, from horseback by the main standard, challenged his enemy. Sun Huan rode out fiercely, and they two fought near thirty bouts. But Sun Huan was not strong enough and drew off. The two youths followed and reached his camp. Hu Ban, together with Feng Xi and Zhang Nan, also launched another attack. Zhang Bao helped them with all his force and was the first to force his way into the ranks of Wu. He came across Xie Jing, whom he slew with a spear thrust. The soldiers of Wu scattered and fled, and the victory was on the side of Shu.\n\nBut Guan Xing was missing. Zhang Bao was desperate, saying, \"If something wrong happens to Guan Xing, I will not live!\"\n\nSo he girded on his huge spear and rode far and wide seeking him. Presently he met Guan Xing, bearing his sword in his left hand, while his right held a captive.\n\n\"Who is this?\" asked Zhang Bao.\n\n\"In the melee I met an enemy,\" said Guan Xing, \"and I took him prisoner.\"\n\nThen Zhang Bao recognized Tan Xiong, the man who had let fly the treacherous arrow that had brought down his horse. The two returned to camp, where they slew their prisoner and poured a libation of his blood to the dead horse.\n\nAfter this they drew up a report of the victory for the First Ruler. Sun Huan had lost his generals \u2014 Li Yi, Xie Jing, and Tan Xiong \u2014 as well as several other officers and many troops. His army was too weakened to continue the campaign, so he halted and sent back to Wu for reinforcements.\n\nThen Generals Zhang Nan and Feng Xi said to Hu Ban, \"The power of Wu is broken. Let us raid their encampment.\"\n\nBut Hu Ban said, \"Though so many have been lost, there are many left. Zhu Ran's marine force is in a strong position on the river and is untouched. If you carry out your plan and the marines land in force and cut off our retreat, we shall be in difficulties.\"\n\n\"That is easily met,\" said Zhang Nan. \"Let each of the two leaders Guan Xing and Zhang Bao take five thousand troops and go into ambush in the valleys to guard against any such move.\"\n\nSaid Hu Ban, \"I think it better to send some persons to pretend to be deserters. Let them tell Zhu Ran of the plan to raid the camp, and Zhu Ran will come to the rescue as soon as he sees fire. Then the ambushing soldiers can attack him.\"\n\nThey thought this a fine plan, and they made the necessary arrangements.\n\nHearing of the ill success and losses of his colleague Sun Huan, Zhu Ran was already thinking of going to his help, when a few deserters appeared and hoarded his ship.\n\nHe questioned them, and they said, \"We are Feng Xi's soldiers, and we have deserted because of unfair treatment. We have a secret to tell.\"\n\n\"What secret can you betray?\"\n\n\"Tonight Feng Xi is going to make an attack upon General Sun Huan's camp. He thinks it is a good chance. They are going to raise a fire as a signal.\"\n\nZhu Ran saw no reason to doubt the men, and he sent off at once to tell Sun Huan. But the messenger never arrived, as Guan Xing intercepted and slew him.\n\nThen Zhu Ran deliberated upon going to help.\n\n\"You cannot trust what those soldiers said,\" said Cui Yu, one of the commanders. \"Both army and navy will be lost if anything goes wrong. No, General; rather keep careful watch and let me go.\"\n\nZhu Ran saw this was the wiser plan, so he gave Cui Yu ten thousand troops, and Cui Yu left.\n\nThat night Hu Ban, Zhang Nan, and Feng Xi made an attack on Sun Huan's camp from three directions, and the soldiers were scattered and fled. Then the three generals set the whole camp on fire. Cui Yu saw the flames as he marched and pressed on. Then just as he was passing some hills, he came upon the ambush, and Guan Xing and Zhang Bao poured out from left and right. Taken by surprise, Cui Yu could only try to flee, but he met Zhang Bao, who made him prisoner.\n\nWhen Zhu Ran heard the news, he was panic-stricken and dropped down-river twenty miles. The remnant of Sun Huan's troops ran away, following their leader.\n\nAs they fled, Sun Huan inquired, \"Is there any city ahead that has good defense and granary?\"\n\nThey told him, saying, \"To the north is Yiling, where we can camp.\"\n\nSo they went thither.\n\nJust as they reached the wall, their pursuers came up and the city was besieged in all four sides.\n\nGuan Xing and Zhang Bao brought the captive Cui Yu back to Zigui and saw the First Ruler, who rejoiced at their success. The prisoner was put to death, and the soldiers were rewarded. The effect of these victories spread far, so that the leaders in Wu had no inclination to fight.\n\nWhen the Prince of Wu received Sun Huan's call for help, he was frightened and knew not what to do.\n\nSo he called a great council, and he said, \"Sun Huan is besieged in Yiling, and Zhu Ran has been defeated on the river. What can be done?\"\n\nThen Zhang Zhao said, \"Though several of your commanders are dead, yet have you many left. Half a score is enough to relieve your anxiety. Send Han Dang as Commander, with Zhou Tai as his second, Pan Zhang as Van Leader, Ling Tong as Rear Guard, Gan Ning in reserve. You want one hundred thousand troops.\"\n\nSun Quan made the appointments as proposed. Gan Ning was very seriously ill just then, but he accepted the task.\n\nNow the First Ruler had made a line of forty camps from Wukou and Jianping to Yiling, spreading twenty-five miles of distance.\n\nHe was exceedingly pleased with his two nephews, who had distinguished themselves again and again, and he said, \"The generals that have followed me since the early days have got aged, and thus no longer a big use. But now that I have such two valorous nephews, I have no fear for Sun Quan.\"\n\nThen he heard of the coming of Sun Quan's army under Han Dang and Zhou Tai, and he wished to select a commander to oppose the Wu army.\n\nBut those near him reported: \"Huang Zhong and a half dozen other officers have run off to Wu!\"\n\n\"Huang Zhong is no traitor,\" said the First Ruler, smiling. \"It is only that he heard what I happened to say about old and useless leaders. He will not accept he is useless and wants to prove he is not.\"\n\nThen he called Guan Xing and Zhang Bao and said to them, \"Huang Zhong may fail in this enterprise of his, so I hope you two will not mind going to his assistance. As soon as there is some success to report, get him to return and do not let him come to grief.\"\n\nSo the two got their troops together and went off to assist the aged warrior.\n\n\u2003When young, success is easy, thine at will,\n\n\u2003The aged servant fails, though willing still." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "Fighting At Xiaoting, The First Ruler Captures An Enemy; Defending The Three Gorges, A Student Takes Supreme Command.\n\nIn spring, the first month of the second year of Manifest Might (AD 221), the veteran warrior Huang Zhong was among the officers who followed the First Ruler to war against Wu. When he heard his master talk of old and incapable leaders, he girded on his sword and with a few faithful followers made his way to the camps at Yiling. He was welcomed by Hu Ban, the commander in charge of the siege there.\n\n\"For what reason do you come, O Veteran General?\" asked he.\n\n\"I have followed the Emperor ever since he left Changsha, and I have done diligent service. I am now over seventy, but my appetite is still good for ten pounds of meat, and I can still stretch the strongest bow, and I can still ride three hundred miles without fatigue. I am not weak or worn out. But our master has been talking of old and useless leaders, and I am come to take part in the fight with Wu. If I slay one of their leaders, he will see I may be old but not worn out.\"\n\nJust about that time the leading division of the Wu army drew near the camp. Huang Zhong hastily rose, went out of the tent, and mounted to go into the battle.\n\n\"Aged General, be careful!\" said the generals.\n\nBut Huang Zhong paid no attention and set off at full speed. However, Hu Ban and Feng Xi rode out to help him. As soon as he saw the array of the enemy, he pulled up and challenged Commander Pan Zhang of the vanguard. Pan Zhang sent out one of his generals, Shi Ji, to take the challenge. Shi Ji despised his seed antagonist and rode lightly forth with his spear set, but in the third bout Huang Zhong cut him down. This angered Pan Zhang who flourished the green-dragon saber, the great sword of the old warrior Guan Yu which had passed into his possession, and took up the battle. These two fought several bouts, and neither was victor, for Huang Zhong was brimful of energy. His antagonist, seeing that he could not overcome the old man, galloped off. Huang Zhong pursued and smote his army and scored a full victory.\n\nOn his way back Huang Zhong fell in with the two youthful generals, Guan Xing and Zhang Bao.\n\n\"We come by the sacred command to aid you if necessary. And now that you have scored so complete a victory, we pray you return to the main camp,\" said they.\n\nBut the veteran would not. Next day Pan Zhang came to challenge again, and Huang Zhong at once accepted. Nor would he allow Guan Xing and Zhang Bao to come with him, or accept assistance from any other.\n\nHe led out five thousand troops. Before many bouts had been exchanged, Pan Zhang made a feint and got away. Huang Zhong pursued, shouting to him not to flee.\n\n\"Flee not, for now will I avenge the death of Guan Yu!\" cried he.\n\nHuang Zhong pursued some ten miles, but presently he fell into an ambush and found himself attacked from all sides \u2014 Zhou Tai on the left, Han Dang on the right, Ling Tong from behind, and the erstwhile flying Pan Zhang turned to attack the front \u2014 , so that he was surrounded and hemmed in. Huang Zhong forced his way to retreat. But suddenly a great storm came on, the wind blowing violently, and as Huang Zhong was passing some hills, an enemy cohort led by Ma Zhong came down the slopes, and one of the arrows wounded the veteran in the armpit. He nearly fell from his horse with the shock. The soldiers of Wu, seeing Huang Zhong wounded, came on all together, but soon the two youthful generals, Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, drove them off and scattered them. Thus they rescued Huang Zhong.\n\nHe was taken back to the main camp. But he was old and his blood was thin, and the wound gaped wide, so that he was near to die.\n\nThe First Ruler came to visit him and patted his back and said, \"It is my fault, O Veteran General, that you have been hurt in the battle!\"\n\n\"I am a soldier,\" said the old man. \"I am glad that I could serve Your Majesty. But now I am seventy-five, and I have lived long enough. Be careful of your own safety for the good of the state.\"\n\nThese were his last words. He became unconscious and died that night. A poem was written of him:\n\n\u2003First among veterans stands Huang Zhong,\n\n\u2003Who won great merit in the conquest of Shu.\n\n\u2003Old, he still donned his coat of mail,\n\n\u2003And laid his hand to the curving bow.\n\n\u2003His valor was the talk of all the north,\n\n\u2003Fear of his might maintained the west.\n\n\u2003Tardy he bowed his snow-white head to death,\n\n\u2003Fighting to the end \u2014 in very truth a hero.\n\nHuang Zhong passed away, and the First Ruler looked on, very sad. He made Huang Zhong a grave in Chengdu and ordered an honorable burial there.\n\n\"My brave general is gone,\" sighed he, \"and the third of my five Tiger Generals, and I have been unable to avenge their death. It is very grievous!\"\n\nSo the Emperor led the Imperial Guards to Xiaoting, where he summoned a great assembly. He divided his forces into eight parts ready for an attack by land and water. The marines were placed under Huang Quan, and he himself led the land forces. It was then the second month of the second year of Manifest Might Era (AD 221).\n\nWhen Han Dang and Zhou Tai heard that the army of Shu was approaching, they marched toward it. When near, the two armies were arrayed. The two leaders of Wu rode out and saw the First Ruler riding out under the great standard with his staff about him. A silken umbrella splashed with gold was over his head; right and left were white banners, golden axes, and other insignia of an emperor.\n\nThen Han Dang spoke, \"Your Majesty is now the Ruler of Shu. Why do you risk your life in the battlefield? It would be most regrettable if any untoward event happened.\"\n\nThe First Ruler pointed the finger of scorn at the speaker and said, \"You rats of Wu bereft me of my brother, and I have sworn that you shall not live with me under the same sky!\"\n\n\"Who dares plunge in among the enemy?\" asked Han Dang, turning to those in his train.\n\nMarching General Xia Xun set his spear and rode to the front, and so did Zhang Bao with a roar gallop out to meet him. But this thunderous voice affrighted Xia Xun, and he sought to flee. Then Zhou Tai's brother, Zhou Ping, seeing that his colleague was panic-stricken, flourished his sword and rode out too. At once Guan Xing dashed to the front. Zhang Bao roared again and thrusting at Xia Xun and unhorsing him. This disconcerted Zhou Ping and enfeebled his defense, so that Guan Xing speedily slew him with a slash. Then the two youths rode furiously at Han Dang and Zhou Tai. They sought refuge in their battle array.\n\n\"The tiger fathers have not begotten curs of sons,\" said the First Ruler with a sigh of satisfaction.\n\nThen he waved his whip as a signal to fall on, and the Wu army suffered a great defeat. The Shu force of the eight divisions was irresistible as a river in flood, and the slaughter was immense.\n\nGan Ning was in his ship ill, but he roused himself when he heard the armies of Shu had come, and mounted to go into the battle. Soon he met a cohort of the Mang soldiers. These warriors wore their hair loose and went barefoot. Their weapons were bows and crossbows and long spears and swords and axes. And they had shields to ward off blows. They were led by their own King Shamo Ke. His face was spotted with red as if splashed with blood, and his eyes were green and big. He rushed among Gan Ning's troops wielding a spiked iron mace with bone pendants, and he had two bows slung at his belt. He was terrible to look upon.\n\nGan Ning recognized that he had no chance of victory against such a man and did not engage Shamo Ke, but turned his steed to flee. But as Gan Ning fled, Shamo Ke shot an arrow that pierced Gan Ning's skull. Wounded as he was, Gan Ning rode on to Fuchikou, but there he dismounted and sat under a big tree, where he died. On the tree were many hundreds of crows, and they gathered round the corpse as if to protect it.\n\nThe Prince of Wu was sore grieved at the news of Gan Ning's death, and had the remains buried honorably. Moreover, he raised a temple in Fuchikou to Gan Ning's memory.\n\n\u2003Gan Ning was first of warriors in Wu,\n\n\u2003With silken sails he stemmed the Great River's tide,\n\n\u2003Right loyally he served his prince, and true,\n\n\u2003He made two ill friends put their hate aside.\n\n\u2003Light horse led he by night a camp to raid,\n\n\u2003And first he warmed his soldiers with generous wine.\n\n\u2003In his resting place the holy crows welcome guests,\n\n\u2003And fragrant incense smolders at his shrine.\n\nThis victory gave the First Ruler possession of Xiaoting. But at the muster after the battle, Guan Xing did not appear. Search parties were sent to find him, and they went far and wide beating the country around.\n\nHowever, the dashing young soldier was only following in his father's foe. When Guan Xing had got in among the army of Wu, he had caught sight of Pan Zhang, his especial enemy, and galloped in pursuit. In terror, Pan Zhang took to the hills and disappeared in one of the valleys.\n\nIn seeking him, Guan Xing lost his way and went to and fro till it grew dark without finding a way out. It was clear moonlight. Near midnight he came to a farm, where he dismounted and knocked at the door. A venerable old man appeared and asked who he was.\n\n\"I am a leader of the army, and I have lost my way. I beg a meal, for I am starving,\" said Guan Xing.\n\nThe old man led him into a hall lit by many candles, and there he saw in the family altar a picture of Guan Yu. At once he began to wail and bowed before it.\n\n\"Why do you wail thus?\" asked the old man.\n\n\"This is my father,\" said Guan Xing.\n\nAt this, the old man prostrated himself before his guest.\n\n\"Why should you treat my father with such respect?\" asked Guan Xing.\n\n\"This place is sacred to his honored spirit. While he lived the people served him, and now that he is a spirit should they not revere him the more? I have been waiting for the armies of Shu to avenge his death, and it is indeed the great good fortune of the people that you have come.\"\n\nThen the host brought forth wine and food and served his guest. Moreover, he unsaddled and fed his horse.\n\nIn the third watch a knocking came at the door, and when the old man opened it, the visitor was no other than Pan Zhang, the general of Wu. He also asked shelter.\n\nAs Pan Zhang came in, Guan Xing recognized him and drew his sword, crying, \"Stay, you ruffian! Do not flee!\"\n\nPan Zhang turned to flee. But before he could turn, Guan Xing raised his sword: It fell, and Pan Zhang lay dead. Taking the heart-blood of his dead enemy, Guan Xing poured it in libation before the picture of his father. After that he took possession of his father's green-dragon saber, curved as the young moon. Having hacked off the head of his fallen enemy, he fastened it to his bridle. Then he took leave of his aged host, saddled his enemy's horse, and rode away toward his own camp.\n\nThe old man dragged the corpse of the dead commander outside and burned it.\n\nGuan Xing had not gone very far when he heard the neighing of horses and soon met a troop led by Ma Zhong, one of Pan Zhang's generals, who was looking for his chief. Ma Zhong fell into a great rage when he saw the head of Pan Zhang swinging at the neck of Guan Xing's horse and beheld the famous sword in his hand. Ma Zhong galloped up furiously, and Guan Xing, who recognized an enemy of his late father, rushed to meet him. Just as he would strike, however, Ma Zhong's three hundred troops galloped up to support their general, and Guan Xing was surrounded. He was in dire danger, but just opportunely came up a troop of horse led by his cousin Zhang Bao. At this, Ma Zhong, thinking discretion the better part, drew off his army and rode away.\n\nThe two cousins pursued him. Before they had gone far, they met another force under Mi Fang and Fu Shiren, who had come out to seek Ma Zhong. The two bodies of soldiers met and fought, but the troops of Shu were too few for victory and drew off. Thence they made their way to headquarters in Xiaoting, where they told their adventures and presented the head of Pan Zhang. The First Ruler was very pleased and rewarded all armed forces.\n\nMa Zhong went back and rejoined Han Dang and Zhou Tai. Then they collected their troops, many wounded, and stationed them in various points.\n\nMa Zhong, together with Mi Fang and Fu Shiren, marched to the river bank and encamped. The night they arrived, many soldiers were groaning with the pain of their wounds.\n\nMi Fang, who was listening unknown to them, heard one of them say, \"We are Jingzhou soldiers and victims of Lu Meng's vile machinations. If we had only remained under Liu Bei! Now he is Emperor and has set out to destroy Wu, and he will do it one day. But he has a special grudge against Mi Fang and Fu Shiren. Why should we not kill these two and go over to Shu? They will think we have done well.\"\n\nAnother said, \"Do not be hasty. We will do it presently when there is a chance.\"\n\nMi Fang started as he heard this. He told Fu Shiren, saying, \"The troops are mutinous, and we ourselves are in danger. Ma Zhong is an object of especial hatred to the Ruler of Shu. Suppose we kill him and surrender. We can say we were compelled to give in to Wu, but as soon as the news of the Emperor came near, we wanted to get back.\"\n\n\"It will not do,\" said Fu Shiren. \"If we go, they will kill us!\"\n\n\"No! The Ruler of Shu is liberal and kind. And the heir, Liu Shan, is my nephew. They will surely not do any harm to a connection.\"\n\nIn the end they decided to go. And in the third watch they made their way into their chief's tent and stabbed him to death. Then they cut off his head, and with their grisly trophy and a few dozen followers they set off for the camp of the Ruler of Shu.\n\nThey arrived at the outposts and were taken to see Zhang Nan and Feng Xi, to whom they told their tale. Next day they went into the main camp and were admitted to the presence of the First Ruler, to whom they offered their trophy.\n\nAnd they threw themselves on the ground and wept, saying \"We are not traitors. We were the victims of Lu Meng's wickedness. He said that Guan Yu was dead and tricked us into giving up the cities. We could not help surrendering. When we heard the Sacred Chariot had come, we slew Ma Zhong to satisfy your vengeance, and we implore forgiveness.\"\n\nBut the First Ruler was angry, and said, \"I left Chengdu a long time ago. Why did you not come to confess your fault before? Now you find yourselves in danger, and so you come with this specious tale to try to save your lives. If I pardon you, how shall I look my brother in the face when we meet beneath the Nine Golden Springs?\"\n\nThen he bade Guan Xing set up an altar to his father in the camp, and thereon the First Ruler offered the head of Ma Zhong in sacrifice before the tablet of Guan Yu. This done, he had Guan Xing strip the two deserters and make them kneel before the altar. And presently with his own hand, Guan Xing hewed them in pieces as a sacrifice.\n\nPresently Zhang Bao came in and wailed before the First Ruler, saying, \"The two enemies of my uncle have been slain, but when will vengeance be taken upon those of my father?\"\n\n\"Do not grieve, my nephew,\" said the First Ruler, \"I am going to lay waste the South Land and slay the whole of the curs that live there. I will assuredly capture the two murderers of your father, and you shall hack them to pieces as a sacrifice.\"\n\nZhang Bao went away, still weeping.\n\nAbout this time the fear of the First Ruler was very great among the people of the South Land, who stood in dread of him so that they grieved night and day. Han Dang and Zhou Tai were rather frightened too, and they sent a report to their master of the assassination of Ma Zhong and what had befallen the assassins.\n\nThen Sun Quan was distressed and called together his counselors. At this meeting Bu Zhi proposed submission and self-humiliation for the sake of peace.\n\nSaid he, \"There were five persons \u2014 Lu Meng, Pan Zhang, Ma Zhong, Mi Fang, and Fu Shiren \u2014 whom Liu Bei had a grudge against, and they are all dead. Now the objects of his hate are the murderers of Zhang Fei \u2014 Fan Jiang and Zhang Da. Why not send back Zhang Fei's head, and these two assassins, and give up Jingzhou and restore Lady Sun and ask for peace and alliance against Wei? This will make the army of Shu retire, and we shall have peace.\"\n\nThis proposal seemed good. So the head of Zhang Fei was enclosed in a sandalwood box; Fan Jiang and Zhang Da were bound and put in a cage-cart. All these were sent, with letters, by the hand of Cheng Bing to the camp at Xiaoting.\n\nThe First Ruler was about to march farther east when they told him that a messenger had come from the South Land and what he had brought.\n\nThe Ruler struck his forehead with both hands, saying, \"This is the direct gift of Heaven through my youngest brother's spirit.\"\n\nHe bade Zhang Bao prepare an altar whereon to sacrifice the heads of his father's assassins. When he opened the box and saw the fresh features of Zhang Fei, he broke into wailing for the dead. Then the son hewed Fan Jiang and Zhang Da in pieces and offered them upon the altar.\n\nBut this sacrifice did not appease the First Ruler's anger, and he still desired to destroy Wu. Whereupon Ma Liang remonstrated.\n\n\"Your enemies are now all dead: You are avenged. Wu has sent a high officer with large concessions and awaits your reply.\"\n\nBut the First Ruler angrily replied, \"The one I would grind to pieces is Sun Quan. To act as he proposes and enter into alliance would be treachery to my two brothers and a breach of our oath. Now I will exterminate Wu, and Wei shall follow.\"\n\nHe wished also to put the messenger to death to annihilate all emotions with Wu, but relented when his officers insistently interceded.\n\nPoor Cheng Bing ran off terrified, glad to escape with life. He went back and told the Prince of Wu how implacable his enemy seemed.\n\nSaid he, \"The Ruler of Shu, not listening to words of peace, was determined to level Wu before attacking Wei. Those under him protested in vain. What is to be done?\"\n\nSun Quan was frightened and bewildered.\n\nSeeing this, Kan Ze stepped forward and said, \"Since there is a sky-supporting pillar, why not use it?\"\n\n\"Whom do you refer to?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"You once had perfect confidence in Zhou Yu, and he was followed by Lu Su, equally able. Lu Meng succeeded and you pinned your faith upon him. Though now Lu Meng is dead, yet there is Lu Xun. And he is quite near, in Jingzhou. He is well-known to be a scholar, but really he is a bold and capable man, no whit inferior to Zhou Yu, in my opinion. The plan that broke Guan Yu was his. If anyone can destroy Shu, it is he. If he fails, then I will stand the same punishment as may be his.\"\n\n\"If you had not spoken thus, my whole scheme might have gone amiss,\" said Sun Quan.\n\n\"Lu Xun is a student,\" said Zhang Zhao. \"He is no match for Liu Bei. You may not use him.\"\n\nGu Yong also said, \"Lu Xun is too young and too inexperienced. I fear he will not be obeyed, and that will be mischievous.\"\n\nBu Zhi added, \"Lu Xun is well enough to control a region, but he is not fit for a big matter.\"\n\nKan Ze got desperate, shouting, \"It is the only hope. I will guarantee him with the lives of all my house!\"\n\n\"I know he is able,\" said Sun Quan, \"and I have now made up my mind he is the man. Gentlemen, that is enough.\"\n\nLu Xun was called home. Lu Xun was originally named Lu Yi. He was a native of Wujun in Wu, grandson of Lu Jun, who was Commander of the City Gates of the Han, and son of Lu Yu, Commander of Jiujiang. He was eight spans in height, with a beautiful face, like the finest jade.\n\nWhen Lu Xun arrived at court and made his bow, Sun Quan said to him, \"I wish to send you in supreme command of all the forces against Shu.\"\n\n\"Sir, you have numerous old and tried officers under your command. I am very young and not at all clever,\" replied Lu Xun.\n\n\"Kan Ze goes bail for you and pledges his whole house. Moreover, I know your abilities. You must be Commander-in-Chief and may not refuse the appointment.\"\n\n\"But what will happen if the officers do not support me?\"\n\n\"Here is authority!\" said Sun Quan, taking his own sword from his side and giving it to Lu Xun. \"Slay the disobedient and report afterwards.\"\n\n\"I am grateful for this proof of confidence, but I dare not accept forthwith. I pray you assemble all the officers and confer the office upon me in their presence.\"\n\nSaid Kan Ze, \"The ancient fashion was to set up a platform and thereon present to the leader-elect a white yak's tail and a golden ax with the seal of office and commission. Thereafter his dignity and the reverence due from others were beyond all question. It would be well, O Prince, to follow the old rule. Choose a good day and appoint Lu Xun before all the world, and no one will refuse support.\"\n\nAn altar was begun at once. They worked at it day and night, and as soon as it was finished a great assembly was called. Then Lu Xun was requested to ascend and make his bow on receiving his appointment as Commander-in-Chief, General of the Right Army, General Who Guards the West, and Lord of Fenglou. The sword of authority and the seal of office were presented. His powers extended over the six territories and the eighty-one counties of the South Land, over the forces in Jingzhou and Wu.\n\nAnd in charging him Sun Quan said, \"Domestic affairs belong to me; outer affairs are under your direction.\"\n\nLu Xun then descended. He chose Xu Sheng and Ding Feng as commanders of his guards, and the army lost no time in taking the field. The various dispositions of horse and foot and navy were made, and dispatches were sent to the outlying commanders.\n\nWhen the dispatch reached Han Dang and Zhou Tai, who were camping near Xiaoting, they were alarmed, saying, \"Why did the Prince appoint a mere bookish student to the commandership of all armed forces?\"\n\nSo when the new Commander-in-Chief came, they showed their discontent by a lack of hearty support. Lu Xun went to his tent to receive the reports, and there the majority of the officers manifested only sullen respect and unwilling deference.\n\nThen Lu Xun addressed them, saying, \"By order of my superior I am Commander-in-Chief, and my commission is to destroy Shu. You, gentlemen, all know the ordinary military rules, and you would do well to obey them. The law is no respecter of persons, as those who disobey will find out. Do not have to regret when it is too late.\"\n\nThey nodded in sullen acquiescence.\n\nThen Zhou Tai said, \"There is Sun Huan, nephew of our Prince. He is surrounded at Yiling and is short of food. I venture to request you to send relief to him and get him out, so that the Prince's heart may be comforted.\"\n\n\"I know all about him. His soldiers are faithful, and he can easily maintain his position. There is no need to go to his aid. When Shu is broken, he will be free to come out.\"\n\nThey all sniggered as they left the tent, and Han Dang did not fail to express his contempt for the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief.\n\n\"This will be the end of Wu,\" said he to his colleague. \"Did you note what he said?\"\n\n\"I tried him just to see what he would do,\" said Zhou Tai. \"You see he had no plan ready. He destroys Shu indeed!\"\n\nNext day general orders were issued for defense and prohibitions against giving battle, which provoked more laughter at the incapable pedant, as they thought him in command, and secret resolves to disobey. Moreover, the officers showed their contempt by a general disregard of orders.\n\nSo once more Lu Xun assembled them and said, \"You know I am in command. Yet the recent orders for defense have been disregarded. Why?\"\n\nThen Han Dang spoke up, \"Some of us followed General Sun Ce when he first subdued the South Land. Others won fame in destroying rebels, or in following the present Prince in his campaigns. All of us have donned our armors and gripped our weapons in many bloody fights. Now, Sir, you have been placed in supreme command to repulse Shu, and there should be some plan of campaign made for us at once, some dispositions of our forces, and some definite advance toward that end. Instead of that we are told to strengthen our defenses and are forbidden to fight. What are we to wait for? Will Heaven destroy our opponents for us? We are not afraid to die. Why is our keenness left to be eaten away and our energies wasted in idleness?'\n\nAll the others applauded this speech and cried that the speaker had expressed their own ideas.\n\n\"General Han Dang just says what we think: Let us fight a decisive battle,\" they cried.\n\nThe new leader waited till the uproar had subsided; then drawing his sword, he shouted, \"That I am a student is true. But I have been entrusted with a great task, a task for which the Prince of Wu considers me competent and for the performance of which I am prepared to bear all the responsibilities. As for you, you will do well to act on the defensive as I ordered and not allow yourselves to be led astray into any attacks. And I shall put the disobedient to death!\"\n\nThis speech had little effect, and they dispersed grumbling and murmuring.\n\nMeanwhile the Ruler of Shu had made a long chain of forty camps from Xiaoting to the borders of the River Lands, spreading out two hundred miles. These base camps looked very imposing with their fluttering banners by day and their fires at night.\n\nThen the spies came in and reported: \"Wu appointed Lu Xun as Commander-in-Chief. Lu Xun ordered his commanders to defend strategic points and not to engage in battle.\"\n\n\"What sort of a man is this Lu Xun?\" said the First Ruler.\n\n\"He is a scholar among the people of Wu, and, though young, he is very talented,\" replied Ma Liang. \"His schemes are very deep. He was the author of the villainous and crafty plan of attack on Jingzhou.\"\n\n\"His crafty scheme caused the deaths of my brothers. But now I shall have him!\" said the First Ruler angrily.\n\nHe gave orders to advance. But Ma Liang ventured to remonstrate and dissuade him.\n\n\"Be very careful,\" said he. \"This Lu Xun is no whit inferior to Zhou Yu.\"\n\n\"I have grown old in the field,\" said the Emperor. \"Don't you think me a match for this callow youth?\"\n\nHe confirmed the order to go forward, and they attacked passes and fords and redoubts wherever they were.\n\nHan Dang notified his chief of the movement of the Shu army, and Lu Xun, still rather dubious of the strict obedience to his orders, hastened to the point of danger. He found Han Dang on a hill surveying the enemy's force, which advanced like a great wave. Amidst the army they saw a wide yellow umbrella, and Han Dang pointed it out.\n\n\"That must be Liu Bei,\" said he. \"I should like to kill him!\"\n\n\"Careful!\" said Lu Xun. \"So far he has scored victory after victory, and his soldiers are very keen and confident. Maintain a careful defense on high grounds and do not go out to battle. If you do, you will lose. Impress that upon your officers and soldiers and make them understand the strategy, while you follow the enemy's moves. They are hastening into the wide open space, and I do not wish to hinder them. Nor will I accept any challenge to battle, but wait till they have moved their camps into the forest and among the trees. Then I shall have a scheme ready.\"\n\nHan Dang agreed so far as words went, but in his heart he was still ill-conditioned. When the Shu army drew near, a small force came to challenge. They shouted all sorts of abuse and hurled reproaches to put their opponents to shame, but Lu Xun took no notice and bade his troops stop their ears. He would not allow them to go out to battle, but he went from fort to redoubt, encouraging the soldiers to remain carefully on the defensive.\n\nThe First Ruler's heart burned within him at this refusal to come out to battle.\n\nSaid Ma Liang, \"Lu Xun is a deep and crafty fellow. He recognizes the disadvantages of Your Majesty's troops in being far from their base, and from spring to autumn he will not come out to fight till some move occurs that he may profit by.\"\n\n\"What ruse can he be contemplating?\" said the First Ruler. \"The real fact is that he is afraid. Their army has suffered nothing but defeat times and again. They dare not meet us.\"\n\nOne day the leader of the van, Feng Xi, memorialized the First Ruler, saying, \"The weather is scorching, and the troops are camped in the full glare of sun. Beside, water is scarce and hard to get.\"\n\nThereupon orders were given to move the camps into the shade of the forest close by and near the streams till the summer heats should have passed. This order given, Feng Xi moved the camp to a retired and shady spot for his troops.\n\nMa Liang said, \"If our soldiers move, the enemy will rush out on us and we shall be hard set.\"\n\n\"I will provide for that,\" said the First Ruler. \"I will send Hu Ban with ten thousand of our inferior troops to camp near their lines. But I will choose eight thousand of veterans and place them in ambush. Hu Ban will have orders to flee before the soldiers of Wu and lead them into my ambush if they come out, and I will cut off their retreat. We ought to capture this precocious youth.\"\n\n\"A genius in plans, a marvel of prevision!\" cried all those about him as this plan was unfolded. \"None of us can approach you in cleverness.\"\n\nSo they felicitated their ruler.\n\nBut Ma Liang said, \"They say the Prime Minister is on a tour of inspection of the defenses in the eastern portion of Shu, seeing that they are in good order against any attack on the part of Wei. Why not send him a sketch of your present dispositions of troops and ask his opinion?\"\n\n\"I also am not entirely ignorant of the art of war, and I see no reason to seek advice,\" was the cold reply.\n\n\"There is an old saying about hearing both sides,\" said Ma Liang.\n\n\"Well, then you go round to all the camps and make a map and take it to the Prime Minister. If he finds any fault, you may come and tell me.\"\n\nSo Ma Liang went, while the First Ruler busied himself with getting his army into shelter from the fierce heat of summer.\n\nHis move was no secret, and the scouts soon told Han Dang and Zhou Tai, who rejoiced at the news and soon went to tell Lu Xun.\n\n\"All the enemies' forty camps had been moved into the shade. Now, Sir, you can attack!\" said they.\n\n\u2003That was not a bad plan, an ambush to set,\n\n\u2003Thus thought he his chiefest opponent to get." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Lu Xun Burns All Consecutive Camps; Zhuge Liang Plans The Eight-Array Maze.\n\nThe last chapter closed with the report that the First Ruler had shifted camp in search of cool shade, and the news was very welcome to Lu Xun. He went forthwith to assure himself of the truth of the report and observe the new position. A level plain lay at his feet, whereon he saw something short of ten thousand Shu troops, the greater part of whom appeared invalids. On the banner of their leader he read the name Van Leader Hu Ban.\n\n\"We consider these troops children,\" said Zhou Tai. \"Let me and General Han Dang go out and smite them. I will give the formal guarantee of victory.\"\n\nThe Commander-in-Chief made no reply, but remained gazing out before him.\n\nPresently he said, \"It seems to me that an air of slaughter is rising over there from that valley. Surely there is an ambush there. These poor troops in the foreground are nothing but a bait. No, Gentlemen, do not leave your positions.\"\n\nThose who heard this took it only as another proof of the imbecility of their pedant commander.\n\nNext day Hu Ban's soldiers approached closer and challenged to battle, swaggering about and brandishing their weapons and shouting volleys of abuse without end. They manifested contempt by throwing off their armor and clothing and moving to and fro with the utmost carelessness, bare bodies and naked forms, blatantly unready to fight. Some even sat or lay asleep.\n\nXu Sheng and Ding Feng came to the Commander-in-Chief's tent to complain, saying, \"Those Shu soldiers despise us so much. Let us go out and punish them!\"\n\nBut Lu Xun only smiled, saying, \"You see things from the view point of brute courage. You seem not to know the principles of war laid down by Sun Zi and Wu Qi. This display is only meant to entice us into fight. You will see the pretense yourselves in about three days.\"\n\n\"In three days the change of camp will be complete, and the enemy will be too strongly posted for our success,\" said they.\n\n\"I am just letting them move their camp.\"\n\nXu Sheng and Ding Feng left the tent also sniggering.\n\nBut on the third day the officers were assembled at a look-out point, whence they saw that the army under Hu Ban had left.\n\n\"There is still a deadly look over the valley,\" said Lu Xun, pointing to the hills. \"Liu Bei will soon appear.\"\n\nVery soon they saw a whole army all well accoutered pass across the field escorting the First Ruler. And the sight took away all their courage.\n\n\"That is why I would not listen to those of you who wanted to fight Hu Ban,\" said Lu Xun. \"Now that the ambush has been withdrawn, we can settle them in about ten days.\"\n\n\"The proper time to attack was when they began to transfer their camp. Now they are fully established with encampments stretching two hundred miles. Having spent seven or eight months in strengthening where they might be attacked, will it not be difficult to destroy them?\" said they.\n\n\"I see you do not understand how to carry on war. This man Liu Bei is a capable and crafty man. When he first started on this expedition his methods were of the best, and he kept them so for a long time, so we have to avoid him. When his troops are worn out and his thoughts cease to be clear, that will be our day to attack.\"\n\n\u2003At last they agreed with their chief.\n\n\u2003The general discoursed on war,\n\n\u2003According to the book;\n\n\u2003Right craftily the bait for whales\n\n\u2003Was put upon the hook.\n\n\u2003When kingdoms three were carved out,\n\n\u2003Though famous men were many,\n\n\u2003Lu Xun the hero of Wu\n\n\u2003At least stands high as any.\n\nLu Xun had already had the plan whereby the Shu army was to be crushed, and at this stage he wrote to the Prince of Wu in full details, even naming a day for the victory.\n\n\"We have found another remarkably able leader,\" said the Prince, \"and I have no further anxiety. They all said he was a useless pedant, and only I knew better. Reading this letter shows him nothing at all of a pedant.\"\n\nThen the Prince of Wu mustered the remainder of his soldiers to hold in reserve.\n\nMeanwhile the First Ruler had sent orders to hasten the marines down the river and take up stations along the banks deep in the territory of Wu.\n\nHowever, Huang Quan spoke against this, saying, \"It is easy enough for the ships to go down, but how about returning? Let me make the first advance, and Your Majesty may follow. That will make it more than probable that nothing will go wrong.\"\n\n\"Those Wu enemy are afraid,\" objected the First Ruler, \"and I want to make a dash at them. Where is the difficulty?\"\n\nThough many others had spoken against the proposal, the First Ruler did not give up the notion of going into the forefront of the attack. Then dividing the army into two portions, he placed Huang Quan in command on the North of the Great River, to keep a watch on Wei, while he commanded on the South of the Great River. They made encampments and stations along the bank.\n\nThe spies of Wei duly reported these doings to the Ruler of Wei: \"Shu marches against Wu, erecting forty base camps along two hundred miles of woods and hills. Moreover, the Ruler of Shu places Huang Quan in command of the North of the Great River. Huang Quan's marines patrolled as far as thirty miles daily. We do not know their intention.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei laughed aloud when he heard the details of the long line of camps and the encampments among the trees and all this.\n\n\"Liu Bei is going to be defeated,\" said he.\n\n\"How do you know?\" asked his courtiers.\n\n\"Because Liu Bei does not know how to wage war. How can he beat off an enemy along a front of two hundred miles? The maxims of war forbid to camp in open plains, among marshes, amid precipitous heights and obstacles. He will be defeated at the hand of Lu Xun, and we shall hear of it in about ten days.\"\n\nHis officers felt more than doubtful and entreated their master to prepare an army to guard against Huang Quan, and to attack Shu if the occasion would allow.\n\nBut the Ruler of Wei replied, \"I do not plan to attack Shu. If successful, Lu Xun will lead all his force westward into West River Land, and the South Land will be defenseless. I shall pretend to send an army to help. I shall send them in three divisions, and I shall overcome Wu easily.\"\n\nThey all bowed acquiescence and approval. Then orders went out appointing Cao Ren to lead an army out to Ruxu, Cao Xiu to take a second out to Dongkou, and Cao Zhen to command a third aiming at Nanjun, and the three armies were to combine on a given date for a sudden attack on Wu. The Ruler of Wei would himself bring up the reinforcement in this southern campaign.\n\nHaving reached Chengdu, Ma Liang lost no time in seeing the Prime Minister and presenting the plan of the armies as they were in the field.\n\nSaid Ma Liang, \"Now the forces are on both sides of the Great River extending along a front of two hundred miles, with forty stations, each beside a mountain stream or in a pleasantly shaded forest. At our lord's command, I prepared this map, and he sent me to ask your opinion.\"\n\n\"Who advised such an arrangement? He ought to be put to death, whoever it was!\" cried Zhuge Liang, tapping the table at his side.\n\n\"It is entirely our lord's own work. No other had any hand in it,\" said Ma Liang.\n\n\"The life and energy of the Hans are done indeed,\" said Zhuge Liang sorrowfully. \"Our lord has committed those very faults which the rules of the Art of War lay down as to be particularly avoided. The camps are made where free movement is impossible, and nothing can save him if the enemy use fire. Beside, what defense is possible along a two-hundred-mile front? Disaster is at hand, and Lu Xun sees it all, which explains his obstinate refusal to come out into the open. Go back as quickly as you can, and tell our lord that this will not do, that it must be changed at once.\"\n\n\"But if I am too late \u2014 if Wu has already attacked and won \u2014 , what then?\"\n\n\"The enemy will not dare to follow up their victory by a march on Chengdu. So this capital is secure.\"\n\n\"Why will they not?\"\n\n\"Wei is behind their back: That is why. Our lord will be compelled to shelter in Baidicheng. I have already placed ten thousand troops in hiding at Fishbelly Creek.\"\n\n\"Have you? I have been up and down that creek three or four times without seeing a soldier. I do not see the reason of telling lies to me,\" said Ma Liang.\n\n\"You will see. Do not ask so many questions.\"\n\nWith the precious instructions which he had persuaded Zhuge Liang to draw up, Ma Liang hastened back to the imperial camp, while Zhuge Liang went to the capital to prepare a relief expedition.\n\nThe soldiers of Shu had become slack and idle and no longer maintained adequate defense, wherefore Lu Xun perceived that his moment had arrived, and called his generals to his tent to receive orders.\n\n\"There has been no fighting since I received our lord's command. I have spent the time in acquiring a knowledge of the enemy. As a preliminary operation I want to capture a camp on the south bank. Who volunteers?\"\n\nOut stepped Han Dang and Zhou Tai and Ling Tong, all three at once, each crying that he wanted to be sent. But they were sent back. The Commander-in-Chief did not want any of them.\n\nThen he called up the junior general, Chunyu Dan, and said, \"You will take the fourth camp on the south side. The commander of that post is Fu Tong. You may have five thousand troops. I shall support you.\"\n\nChunyu Dan took the order and was gone.\n\nThen Lu Xun summoned Xu Sheng and Ding Feng and said, \"Each of you will take three thousand troops and bivouac two miles from the camp, so that if Chunyu Dan is repulsed and pursued, you can rescue him.\"\n\nChunyu Dan marched between the lights and reached the camp he was to capture just after the third watch. His drums rolled, and he attacked at once. The defenders came out led by Fu Tong, who, spear ready to thrust, rode straight toward the leader of the attack and forced him back. Suddenly there arose the roll of other drums, and a cohort under Zhao Rong barred the way. Chunyu Dan turned off along another road, escaping with loss of many troops.\n\nBut he was not yet safe. Some distance farther he ran against the Mang tribesmen leader Shamo Ke. However, Chunyu Dan avoided him also and went on his way, pursued now by three parties. Soon he reached the spot two miles from the camp, and here the two leaders of Wu \u2014 Xu Sheng and Ding Feng \u2014 , who had been placed ready to afford succor, came out and stopped the pursuit. When the enemy had retired, Chunyu Dan was escorted back to camp.\n\nHe was wounded, and with the arrow still undrawn he appeared before Lu Xun and apologized for his failure.\n\n\"It was no fault of yours,\" said the Commander-in-Chief. \"I wanted to test the force of our enemy. My plan of attack is quite ready.\"\n\n\"The enemy is very strong and will not be easily overcome,\" said Xu Sheng and Ding Feng. \"We have now suffered great loss to no purpose.\"\n\n\"This plan of mine would not hoodwink Zhuge Liang, but happily he is not here. His absence will allow me to score a great success.\"\n\nThen he summoned his generals to receive orders: \"Zhu Ran is to lead the marine force. He is to advance next day afternoon, when the southeast wind will serve. His ships are laden with reeds and straw, which are to be used as ordered. Han Dang is to attack the north bank, Zhou Tai the south. Each soldier, in addition to his weapons, is to carry a bundle of straw or reeds, with sulfur and saltpeter hidden therein, and each has a piece of tinder. They are to advance, and, when they reach the Shu camps, they are to start a conflagration. But they are to burn only alternate camps, twenty in all, leaving the others untouched. They are to advance and pursue the enemy until they capture Liu Bei.\"\n\nThe leaders received the orders and so set out.\n\nThe First Ruler was in his own camp, pondering over a plan to destroy the armies of Wu, when suddenly the staff that bore the great standard in front of his own tent fell over and lay on the ground. There was no wind to account for this, so he turned to Cheng Jin and asked what it might portend.\n\n\"It means only one thing: The troops of Wu will raid the camp tonight,\" said Cheng Jin.\n\n\"They will not dare after the slaughter of yesterday.\"\n\n\"But suppose that was only a reconnaissance. What then?\"\n\nJust then a report came in that some troops of Wu could be seen, very far off, going along the hills eastward.\n\n\"They are soldiers meant to put us in confusion,\" said the First Ruler. \"Tell the generals not to move, but let Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, with a small mounted force, go out to reconnoiter.\"\n\nIt was dusk when these two returned, and they then reported: \"Fire is seen among the camps on the north bank.\"\n\nThe Emperor hastily bade Guan Xing go to rescue the north camps and Zhang Bao to the south to find out what was really happening. And they started.\n\nAbout the middle of the first watch the wind got up and blew strong from the east. Then fire arose from the camp on the left of the First Ruler's own. He was starting to extinguish this flame when another fire began in the camp on his right. With the aid of the strong breeze both fires became fierce, and soon the trees caught. A confused roar showed the gathering strength of the fire. The soldiers of the burning camps were rushing into the First Ruler's own camp to escape the fire, and in their confusion they trampled on each other, so that many died.\n\nBehind them came the troops of Wu bent on slaughter. Ignorant of how many they might be, the First Ruler mounted and dashed for Feng Xi's camp, but that also was in flames, which seemed to rise to the very sky. By this time flames were rising from both sides of the river, so that everything was as visible as by day.\n\nFeng Xi leaped to his horse and fled, followed by a band of his mounted troops. This small force ran against the soldiers of Wu under Xu Sheng. A melee ensued, thereupon the First Ruler turned and galloped west. Xu Sheng then left Feng Xi and went in pursuit. Presently the Emperor saw a party of soldiers in the way and became greatly alarmed.\n\nThis was Ding Feng's army, and the First Ruler was between two foes. In his terror he saw no possibility of safety, no road was open. Just at this moment another cohort broke through to his side and rescued him. The leader was Zhang Bao, and he led the Imperial Guards, who fled, taking the First Ruler with them. As they marched along, they fell in with another force of Shu; the leader was Fu Tong, and he joined up with them. The Wu army was still following when the fugitives reached Saddle Hill. The two leaders, Zhang Bao and Fu Tong, were urging their lord to go to the top of this and out of immediate danger. Soon Lu Xun arrived with his army and began to surround the hill. Zhang Bao and Fu Tong held the road up the hill and kept the enemy from ascending. From the summit could be seen flames all around, and the First Ruler witnessed the corpses of his soldiers lay about in heaps or floated in the streams.\n\nNext day, the soldiers of Wu set themselves to firing the hill. The First Ruler's remaining escort fled for their lives like rats, and their lord was in despair. Suddenly he saw a general followed by a dozen horsemen cutting an alley through and coming up the hill. As he drew nearer the Emperor recognized Guan Xing.\n\nGuan Xing quickly leapt down, prostrated himself and said, \"Your Majesty, the fire is gaining all round, and this place is not safe. I request you to try to reach Baidicheng, and as many as possible will gather there.\"\n\n\"Who will dare stay behind to keep off the enemy?\" said the First Ruler.\n\nFu Tong volunteered, saying, \"I will fight to death to guard the rear!\"\n\nIt was dusk when they started. Guan Xing led the way, Zhang Bao protected the First Ruler, and Fu Tong guarded the rear. They got their lord safely down the hill and away. As soon as the troops of Wu noticed the flight, they pressed forward, each anxious to gain kudos by the capture of the Emperor's person. Great armies of Wu, blotting out the sky and hiding the earth, went westward in pursuit.\n\nThe First Ruler ordered his soldiers to make fires of their clothing and other things in the road so as to hinder pursuit.\n\nZhu Ran marched up from the river to try to intercept the flight, and the noise of his drums was terrifying.\n\nThe First Ruler thought there was no possibility of escape from this force, and cried, \"This is the end!\"\n\nHis two nephews dashed to the front to try to cut a way through, but returned wounded and bleeding. And the noise of the pursuers came constantly nearer as they found their way along the valleys. About the first glimpse of dawn the case seemed quite desperate. But just at the worst they saw Zhu Ran's soldiers suddenly begin to break up and scatter, tumbling into streams and rolling down precipices. Soon the reason was evident: A fearsome general leading a cohort came to their relief.\n\nOnce again the First Ruler was rescued from pressing danger, and this time the rescuer was Zhao Zilong. He had been in Jiangzhou, and news of the straits of his lord had reached him there. He had set out forthwith. Then he had seen the glow of the burnings and had marched toward it. And thus he had arrived just at the moment to save his master when danger was most imminent.\n\nAs soon as Lu Xun heard that Zhao Zilong had appeared, he ordered his troops to stop pursuit and retire. Zhao Zilong happening upon Zhu Ran, engaged him forthwith and in the first encounter slew Zhu Ran with a spear thrust. And so the army of Wu were dispersed and retired, and the First Ruler got safely to the wall of Baidicheng.\n\nBut on the way thither his thoughts went back to his companions in misfortune, and he inquired after them anxiously.\n\n\"Though I am safe, how about the other generals and soldiers?\" asked the First Ruler.\n\n\"The pursuers are close upon us, and we cannot wait for anything,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"I wish Your Majesty to get into the city as quickly as possible. While you are reposing yourself, we may try to rescue some of the leaders.\"\n\nWhen the First Ruler entered Baidicheng, he was in sore straits, only having about a hundred men left.\n\nA poet wrote concerning this victory of Lu Xun:\n\n\u2003He grips the spear, he kindles fire, the camps are swept away;\n\n\u2003Liu Bei to the White Emperor City flees, lonely and sad today.\n\n\u2003But Lu Xun's meteoric fame now shoots through Shu and Wei,\n\n\u2003For bookish people the Prince of Wu has naught but good to say.\n\nBut Fu Tong, who commanded the rearguard, was surrounded by the enemy in all eight directions.\n\nDing Feng shouted to him, \"You had better surrender! Many soldiers of Shu have fallen, more have surrendered, and your lord is a prisoner. You have no hope against us with your scanty force.\"\n\nBut Fu Tong replied, \"Shall I, a servant of Han, give in to the curs of Wu?\"\n\nUndaunted, he rode at his opponents and fought many bouts. But his strength and valor availed naught. Struggle as he would, he could not make his way out. And so he fell among his enemies.\n\nA poem celebrates his valiancy:\n\n\u2003Wu, at Yiling, strove with Shu,\n\n\u2003Flames, not swords, used crafty Lu Xun.\n\n\u2003Worthy of a place among Han generals\n\n\u2003Is the hero named Fu Tong.\n\nThe Minister Cheng Jin, having got clear of the battle, rode swiftly to the river bank and called to the marines to join in the battle. They landed, but were soon scattered.\n\nOne of Cheng Jin's generals shouted to him: \"The soldiers of Wu are upon us. Let us find a way to escape, Libationer Cheng Jin!\"\n\nBut Cheng Jin shouted back, \"Since I first followed my lord, I have never yet turned my back upon the foe!\"\n\nThe enemy surrounded Cheng Jin, and, as he could do no more, he took his sword and slew himself.\n\n\u2003Noble among the warriors of Shu was Cheng Jin,\n\n\u2003He kept his sword for the service of his prince.\n\n\u2003When danger pressed near he wavered not,\n\n\u2003Wherefore his fame remains forever bright.\n\nNow Hu Ban and Zhang Nan had been besieging Yiling. Then came Feng Xi and told of the need of their lord, and they led off their army to rescue him. Whereupon Sun Huan was set free as Lu Xun had foretold would happen.\n\nAs soon as Sun Huan was free, he set off in pursuit of Hu Ban, Zhang Nan, and Feng Xi. These two marched until they met an army of Wu face to face, and so were between two forces. A desperate battle was fought, and both Zhang Nan and Feng Xi perished therein.\n\n\u2003Feng Xi was loyal without peer;\n\n\u2003Zhang Nan was righteous, few have equaled him.\n\n\u2003In battle on the flaming shore they died,\n\n\u2003And the histories record their deeds.\n\nHu Ban broke through. He was pursued, but he luckily fell in with Zhao Zilong and got safely to Baidicheng.\n\nThe Mang tribesmen King Shamo Ke was flying from the battle field when he met Zhou Tai, who slew him after a short fight.\n\nThe two Shu generals Du Lu and Liu Ning surrendered to Wu, as did many soldiers. Of the stores and weapons in the camps of Shu nothing was saved.\n\nWhen the story of the disaster to Shu reached the South Land, and with it the report that the First Ruler had been killed in battle, Lady Sun gave way to wild grief. She rode down to the river bank and, gazing westward, wept and lamented. Then she threw herself into the stream and was drowned. Posterity erected a temple on the shore called \"The Shrine of the Bold Beauty\", and one who described it wrote a poem:\n\n\u2003The Ruler, defeated, fled to Baidicheng,\n\n\u2003Through thunderous tiding, Lady Sun committed suicide.\n\n\u2003Today the water still flows by the carved stone\n\n\u2003To show where and why this heroine died.\n\nThere could be no question that this exploit brought tremendous glory to Lu Xun. Anxious to push his advantage as far as possible, Lu Xun led his exultant army westward. But as he drew near to Kui Pass, he suddenly pulled up his horse, remarking that he saw an aura of death about the mountain side in front.\n\n\"We may not yet advance farther. I suspect an ambush.\"\n\nSo they retreated three miles and camped in a wide open space. And the army was arrayed ready against any sudden attack. Meanwhile, scouts were sent out. They returned reporting no soldiers. Lu Xun doubted and went up to the summit of a hill whence he could see over the country. The aura was still visible to him, and so he dispatched other people to spy. But he received the same report: Not a soldier, not a horse.\n\nStill, as the sun got lower and lower in the west, he saw the same appearance accentuated, and he began to feel grave doubts. He sent a confidant to look once more.\n\nThis man came back, saying, \"There is not a single soldier, but I have noticed on the river bank nearly a hundred heaps of boulders.\"\n\nThe Commander-in-Chief, still doubting, called in several of the natives and questioned them about the stones.\n\n\"Who put them there? Why did they look so ghastly?\" asked Lu Xun.\n\n\"We do not know. This place is called Fishbelly Creek. When Zhuge Liang was going west into the River Lands, he came along here with a lot of soldiers and heaped up the boulders like that on the sandy beach. We have seen vapors rising from the boulders; they seemed to come from inside them.\"\n\nLu Xun decided to go and look at these boulders himself. So he rode off, with a small escort. Looked down from a declivity, the stones were evidently arranged with a design related to the eight points of the compass. There were doors and door-sills and lintels.\n\n\"This looks likely to drive a person out of his senses,\" he said. \"I wonder whether it is any good.\"\n\nThey rode down with intent to examine the mysterious arrangement more closely and went in among the stones.\n\nPresently one of the escort called attention to the increasing darkness and said, \"The sun is setting. We ought to be returning to camp.\"\n\nBut as Lu Xun glanced round to look for an exit, a sudden squall came on and the dust whirled up, obscuring both sky and earth. And in the swirl the stones reared themselves up like steep mountains, pointed like swords, and the dust and sand shaped themselves into waves and hillocks one behind the other. The roar of the boiling river was as the drums before a battle.\n\n\"This is some trick of Zhuge Liang,\" said Lu Xun in a scared voice, \"and I have been caught.\"\n\nHe would go out, but he had quite lost his way and could find no exit. As he stopped to consider what he should do, an old man suddenly appeared.\n\nThe old man said, \"Does the General wish to go out?\"\n\n\"I greatly desire that you would pilot me out, O Elder!\" replied he.\n\nLeaning on his staff, the old man led the way and with quiet dignity conducted Lu Xun outside. He had no difficulty in finding his way and paused not a single instant. When they were once again on the slope, Lu Xun asked his aged guide who he was.\n\n\"I am Zhuge Liang's father-in-law. My name is Huang Chenyan. My son-in-law placed these boulders here as you see them, and he said they represented the Eight-Array Maze. They are like eight doors, and according to the scheme are named: Gate of Rest, Gate of Life, Gate of Injury, Gate of Obstruction, Gate of Prospect, Gate of Death, Gate of Surprise, and Gate of Openings.\n\n\"They are capable of infinite mutations and would be equal to a hundred thousand soldiers. As he was leaving, he told me that if any leader of Wu became mazed in them, I was not to conduct him outside. From a precipice near by I saw you, General, enter in at the Gate of Death. As I guessed you were ignorant of the scheme, I knew you would be entangled. But I am of a good disposition and could not bear that you should be entrapped without possibility of escape, so I came to guide you to the Gate of Life.\"\n\n\"Have you studied this matter, Sir?\" asked Lu Xun.\n\n\"The variations are inexhaustible, and I could not learn them all.\"\n\nLu Xun dismounted, bowed low before the old man and then rode away.\n\nThe famous poet Du Fu wrote some verses which run something like this:\n\n\u2003Planner of three kingdoms, no small praise\n\n\u2003Is his \u2014 Inventor of the Eight Arrays.\n\n\u2003And for that famous boulders, on the river's brim,\n\n\u2003Firm was set the denouncement of Wu's whim.\n\n\u2003Lu Xun took his way to his camp in deep thought.\n\n\"This Zhuge Liang is well named Sleeping Dragon,\" said he. \"I am not his equal.\"\n\nThen, to the amazement of all, Lu Xun gave orders to retire. The officers ventured to remonstrate, seeing that they had been so successful.\n\n\"General, you have utterly broken the enemy, and Liu Bei is shut up in one small city. It seems the time to smite, and yet you retire because you have come across a mysterious arrangement of stones.\"\n\n\"I am not afraid of the stones, and it is not on their account that I retire. But I fear Cao Pi. He is no less resourceful than his father, and when he hears I am marching into Shu, he will certainly attack us. How could I return then?\"\n\nThe homeward march began.\n\nOn the second day the scouts brought a report: \"Three Wei generals with three armies are debouching at three different points and moving toward the borders of Wu \u2014 Cao Ren to Ruxu, Cao Xiu to Dongkou, and Cao Zhen to Nanjun. Their intentions are unclear.\"\n\n\"Just as I thought,\" said Lu Xun. \"But I am ready for them.\"\n\n\u2003\"And now the west is mine,\" the victor thought,\n\n\u2003But danger from the north discretion taught." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "The First Ruler Confides His Son To A Guardian; The Prime Minister Calmly Settles Five Attacks.\n\nIn summer, the sixth month of the second year of Manifest Might (AD 221) Lu Xun destroyed the army of Shu at Yiling. The First Ruler sought refuge in Baidicheng, of which Zhao Zilong then undertook the defense. When Ma Liang returned only to find his lord defeated, he was more distressed than he could say. He announced what Zhuge Liang had said concerning the plans.\n\nThe First Ruler sighed, saying, \"If I had listened to the Prime Minister's advice, the defeat would not have happened. Now how can I face the officials if I return to my capital?\"\n\nSo he promulgated a command to change the guest-house into the Palace of Eternal Peace. He was deeply grieved when they told him Feng Xi, Cheng Jin, Fu Tong, Zhang Nan, King Shamo Ke, and many of his generals had died loyally in his cause.\n\nNext he heard people say: \"Huang Quan, who had been given command of the army on the north bank, had given in to Wei. Your Majesty should deliver his whole family to the authority and hold them responsible for the renegade.\"\n\nBut the First Ruler only said, \"The army was quite cut off by Wu from the south bank, and he had no alternative but to surrender. Really, I betrayed him, not he me. Why should I take vengeance on his family?\"\n\nSo he continued the issue of the renegade's pay to his family.\n\nWhen Huang Quan surrendered, he was led into the presence of the Ruler of Wei.\n\nCao Pi said, \"You have surrendered to me because you desired to imitate the admirable conduct of Chen Ping and Han Xin of old.\"\n\nBut Huang Quan replied, weeping, \"The Ruler of Shu has been very kind to me, and he gave me the leadership of the army on the North of the Great River. Lu Xun cut me off so that I could not return to Shu, and I would not surrender to Wu, wherefore I have yielded to Your Majesty. Defeated as I am, I should be only too happy if my life were spared, but I have no claim to the credit of the virtuous ones of old.\"\n\nThe reply satisfied the Ruler of Wei, and he conferred on him the title General Who Guards the South. But Huang Quan, however, declined the offer.\n\nThen one of the courtiers said, \"A spy has reported that all of your family have been put to death by the Ruler of Shu.\"\n\nBut the leader replied that he could not believe it.\n\n\"The Ruler of Shu and his officials trust each other. He knows my heart, and he would not injure my family.\"\n\nAnd the Ruler of Wei agreed with his opinion.\n\nA poem has been written upbraiding Huang Quan:\n\n\u2003That was a pity that Huang Quan grudged to die;\n\n\u2003Though he yielded to Wei, not Wu,\n\n\u2003Yet he crooked the knee in an alien court.\n\n\u2003Which the loyal cannot do.\n\nCao Pi sought advice from Jia Xu concerning his design of bringing the whole country under his own rule.\n\n\"I wish to bring the whole empire under my rule. Which shall I first reduce, Shu or Wu?\"\n\n\"Liu Bei is an able warrior, and Zhuge Liang is a most capable administrator. Sun Quan possesses discrimination, and his general, Lu Xun, occupies all the strategic positions of importance; the natural obstacles, the intervening rivers and spreading lakes, would be hard to overcome. I do not think you have any leader to match either of these two men. Even with the prestige of Your Majesty's own presence, no one could guarantee the result. The better course is to hold on and await the outcome of the struggle between those two.\"\n\n\"I have already dispatched three armies against Wu. Can it be that they will fail?\"\n\nThe Chair of the Secretariat, Liu Ye, held the same opinion as his colleague.\n\nSaid he, \"Lu Xun has just won a great victory over the Shu force of seven hundred thousand, and all his army is full of confidence. Further, there are the lakes and the rivers, which are natural difficulties hard to cope with. And again, Lu Xun is resourceful and well prepared.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei said, \"Formerly, Sir, you urged me to attack Wu. Why do you now give contrary advice?\"\n\n\"Because times have changed. When Wu was suffering defeat after defeat, the country was depressed and might be smitten. Now this great victory has changed all that, and their morale has increased a hundred times. I say now they may not be attacked.\"\n\n\"Well, but I have decided to attack. So say no more,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nHe then led the Imperial Guards out to support his three armies.\n\nBut the scouts soon brought news justifying the opinion of his advisers: \"A force of Wu has been sent to oppose each of our three armies. Lu Fan leads an army against Cao Xiu at Dongkou, Zhuge Jin against Cao Zhen at Nanjun, and Zhu Huan against Cao Ren at Ruxu.\"\n\nLiu Ye pointed this out and again said, \"Wu has prepared, and no success can be expected.\"\n\nStill Cao Pi was obstinate, and marched.\n\nThe Wu leader, Zhu Huan, who had been sent against Cao Ren at Ruxu, was a young man of twenty-seven. He was bold and resourceful, and Sun Quan held him in great regard. Hearing that Cao Ren was going to attack Xianxi, Zhu Huan led the bulk of his troops to defend it, leaving only five thousand troops in Ruxu. Then he heard that the van of the enemy, fifty thousand under General Chang Diao, with the aid of Zhuge Qian and Wang Shuang, had made a dash for Ruxu, so he hastened back and found the officers were in great fear.\n\nDrawing his sword, he made a speech, \"Success depends upon the leader rather than on the number of soldiers. The Art of War says that the value of one soldier who inhabits the place equals that of two soldiers who come from afar; and those who are hosts, however in small number, can overcome those who are guests. Now the enemy is weary from a long march, and I and you, my men, can hold this place together. We have the Great River to defend us on the south, and we are backed by the mountains on the north. Success should be ours easily, and we are as hosts at home awaiting the arrival of our weary visitors. This will give us victory in every fight. Even if Cao Pi comes, we need feel no anxiety. How much less care we for Cao Ren and his troops?\"\n\nZhu Huan he issued orders to furl all the banners and to silence all the drums as if the city was empty of defenders.\n\nIn time, Chang Diao and his veterans of the van came to the city. Not a person was visible, and he hastened forward with all speed. But as he neared the city, suddenly a bomb went off. Immediately up rose a forest of flags, and out dashed Zhu Huan with his sword drawn. And he made for Chang Diao. In the third encounter Zhu Huan cut down Chang Diao, and the troops of Wu, rushing to the attack, thoroughly routed the invaders, slaying innumerable soldiers. Beside scoring a complete victory, Zhu Huan took much spoil of flags and weapons and horses.\n\nCao Ren himself, coming up later, was attacked by the troops from Xianxi and was also routed. He fled home to his master with the news of defeat and destruction.\n\nAnd before the Ruler of Wei could decide what course to take in regard to this loss, the news came of the defeat of his another army: \"Cao Zhen and Xiahou Shang were besieging Nanjun when Zhuge Jin from within and Lu Xun from without attacked in concert. The two generals suffered a great loss.\"\n\nImmediately, another report came: \"Cao Xiu has been defeated by Lu Fan at Dongkou.\"\n\nSo all three armies had failed and were lost.\n\nCao Pi sighed and said sadly, \"This has come from my willfulness, and my neglect of the advice of Jia Xu and Liu Ye.\"\n\nThe summer of that year was very unhealthy, and a pestilence swept away the soldiers more than half the number. So they were marched home to Capital Luoyang. The two countries were at enmity though they were not fighting.\n\nMeanwhile the First Ruler was failing. He remained in his Palace of Eternal Peace at Baidicheng and presently was confined to his couch. Gradually he became worse, and in the fourth moon of the third year of Manifest Might (AD 222) his condition became serious. He himself felt the end was near, and he was depressed and wept for his two lost brothers till the sight of his eyes suffered. He was morose and ill-tempered: He could not bear any of his court near him, drove away his servants and lay upon his couch sad and solitary.\n\nOne evening as thus he lay, a sudden gust of wind came into the chamber, almost extinguishing the candles. As they burned bright again, he saw two men standing in the shade behind them.\n\n\"I told you I was worried,\" said the First Ruler, \"and bade you leave me. Why have you come back? Go!\"\n\nBut they remained and did not go. Wherefore the First Ruler rose and went over to look at them. As he drew near he saw one was Guan Yu and the other Zhang Fei.\n\n\"Are you still alive, then, brothers?\" said he.\n\n\"We are not men; we are shades,\" said Guan Yu. \"The Supreme One has conferred spirithood upon us in consideration of our faithfulness throughout life, and ere long, brother, we three shall be together again.\"\n\nThe First Ruler clutched at the figures and burst into tears; then he awoke. The two figures were no longer there. He called in his people and asked the hour. They told him the third watch.\n\n\"I am not much longer for this world,\" said he with a sigh.\n\nMessengers were sent to Capital Chengdu to summon the Prime Minister and other high officers of state to receive the Emperor's last instructions. They came, Zhuge Liang bringing the two younger sons, Prince of Lu Liu Yung and Prince of Liang Liu Li. The eldest, the heir-apparent, was left in charge of the capital.\n\nZhuge Liang saw at once that his master was very ill. He bowed to the ground at the foot of the Dragon Couch.\n\nThe dying Emperor bade him come near and sit beside him, and he patted his Minister on the back, saying, \"The attainment of emperorship was your work. Little thought you that I should prove so stupid as not to follow your advice and so bring about the late disasters. But I am deeply sorry, and now I shall not live long. My heir is a degenerate, but I must leave him to do the best he can with the great inheritance.\"\n\nAnd the tears flowed in streams.\n\n\"I trust Your Majesty will fulfill the hopes of the people by a speedy recovery,\" said Zhuge Liang, also in tears.\n\nTurning his head, the First Ruler saw Ma Su, Ma Liang's brother, at the bedside. He bade him retire.\n\nWhen Ma Su had left the chamber, the First Ruler said, \"Do you think Ma Su is clever?\"\n\n\"He is one of the ablest people in the empire,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I do not think so. I think his words exceed his deeds. Do not make much use of him. Watch him carefully.\"\n\nHaving said this, he bade them summon the high officers of state to the chamber. Taking paper and pen, the First Ruler wrote his testament.\n\nHe handed it to the Prime Minister with a sigh and said, \"I am no great scholar, and I only know the rough outlines of what should be known. But the Teacher has said: 'A bird's song is sad when death is near, and a dying person's words are good.' I was waiting that we might aid each other in the destruction of the Caos and the restoration of the Hans, but ere the work is complete I am called away, and this last command of mine I confide to you as Prime Minister to be handed to my son and heir, Liu Shan. My words are to be taken seriously. I trust that you will instruct and guide my son.\"\n\nZhuge Liang and all those present wept and prostrated themselves, saying, \"We pray Your Majesty repose yourself. We will do our utmost whereby to prove our gratitude for the kindness we have received.\"\n\nAt the First Ruler's command the attendants raised Zhuge Liang from the earth. With one hand the dying man brushed away the falling tears, while with the other he grasped Zhuge Liang's hand.\n\nAnd he said, \"The end is near. I have something more to say as to a close general.\"\n\n\"What holy command has Your Majesty to give?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe First Ruler said, \"You are many times more clever than Cao Pi, and you must safeguard the kingdom and complete the great work. If my son can be helped, help him. But if he proves a fool, then take the throne yourself and be a ruler.\"\n\nSuch a speech almost startled Zhuge Liang out of his senses. A cold sweat broke out all over his body, and his limbs threatened to cease to support him.\n\nHe fell on his knees, saying, \"I could never do otherwise than wear myself to the bone in the service of your son, whom I will serve till death.\"\n\nHe knocked his head upon the ground till blood ran down.\n\nThe dying man called Zhuge Liang closer, and at the same time making his two sons come near, he said to them, \"My sons, remember your father's words. After my death you are to treat the Prime Minister as you would your father and be not remiss, for thereby you will fulfill your father's hopes.\"\n\nHe made the two Princes pay to Zhuge Liang the obeisance due to a father.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"Were I destroyed and ground into the earth, I should be unable to repay the kindness I have experienced.\"\n\nTurning to the assembled officers, the First Ruler said, \"As you have seen, I have confided my orphan son to the care of the Prime Minister and bidden my sons treat him as a father. You too, Sirs, are to treat him with deference. This is my dying request and charge to you.\"\n\nTurning to Zhao Zilong, he said, \"You and I have gone together through many dangers and difficulties. Now comes the parting of our ways. You will not forget our old friendship, and you must see to it that my sons follow my precepts.\"\n\n\"I shall never dare to give other than my best,\" said Zhao Zilong. \"The fidelity of the dog and horse is mine to give and shall be theirs.\"\n\nThen the First Ruler turned to the others, \"Noble Sirs, I am unable to speak to you one by one and lay a charge upon each individual. But I say to you: Maintain your self-respect.\"\n\nThese were his last words. He was sixty-three, and he died on the twenty-fourth day of the fourth month (AD 222). A poem was written by Du Fu on his death:\n\n\u2003The Emperor set out to destroy the land that lay through the Three Gorges,\n\n\u2003Failed he and breathed his last in the Palace of Eternal Peace,\n\n\u2003The Palace fair of his thoughts lay not this side the highlands.\n\n\u2003Beautiful chambers are vainly sought in his rural temple,\n\n\u2003Now are the pines near his shrine nesting places for herons,\n\n\u2003Through the courts aged peasants saunter, enjoying their leisure,\n\n\u2003Nearby often is found a shrine to this famous strategist,\n\n\u2003Prince and minister's needs are now but offerings in season.\n\n\u2003Thus died the First Ruler. All present lifted up their voices and wept.\n\nThe Prime Minister led the procession that escorted the coffin to the capital, and the heir, Liu Shan, came to the outskirts of the city, as a dutiful son should, to receive the remains with due respect. The coffin was laid in the Great Hall of the Palace, wherein they lamented and performed the ceremonies appointed. At the end of these the testament was opened and read:\n\n\"I first fell ill from a simple ailment. Other disorders followed, and it became evident that I should not recover.\n\n\"They say that death at fifty cannot be called premature. As I have passed sixty, I may not resent the call. But when I think of you and your brothers, I regret. Now I say to you, strive and strive again. Do not do evil because it is a small evil; do not leave undone a small good because it is a small good. Only with wisdom and virtue people can be won. But your father's virtue was but slender, and do not imitate.\n\n\"After my death you are to conduct the affairs of the state with the Prime Minister. You are to treat him as a father and serve him without remissness. You and your brothers are to seek instructions. This is my final and simple command.\"\n\nWhen the officials had read this, Zhuge Liang said, \"The state cannot go a single day without a ruler, wherefore I beg you to install the heir as successor to the great line of Han.\"\n\nThereupon the ceremony was performed, and the new Emperor took his place. The style of the reign was changed to \"Beginning Prosperity\". Zhuge Liang was made Lord of Wuxiang and Imperial Protector of Yizhou.\n\nThen they buried the late Emperor at Huiling with the posthumous style of Liu Bei the Glorious Emperor.\n\nThe Empress, of the Wu family, was formally created Empress Dowager. The late Consort Gan became the Glorious Empress, and the Lady Mi was granted similar, also posthumous, rank. There were promotions in rank and rewards for all, and a general amnesty was proclaimed.\n\nBefore long, knowledge of these things came to the Middle Land, and a report was sent to Capital Luoyang and made known to the Ruler of Wei.\n\nCao Pi felt relieved and was glad of the death of his rival, saying, \"Liu Bei is dead: I am no longer worried. An attack during the critical moment can bring a victory over Shu.\"\n\nBut Jia Xu dissuaded him, saying, \"Liu Bei is gone, but surely he has confided the care of the state to Zhuge Liang, who is indebted to him so deeply. He will exhaust every effort to support his young lord. You may not hastily attack.\"\n\nAs Jia Xu tendered this remonstrance, a man suddenly stepped out from the serried ranks of courtiers and said fiercely, \"If you neglect this moment, can you expect a more favorable opportunity?\"\n\nAll eyes turned to the speaker. It was Sima Yi.\n\nThe interruption greatly pleased Cao Pi, who at once asked how it was to be done.\n\nSima Yi propounded his plan in the following speech: \"It would be very difficult to obtain success with our own resources. Hence we must use five armies and attack all round at the same time, so as to divide Zhuge Liang.\"\n\n\"Where are the five armies to come from?\" said Cao Pi.\n\nSima Yi went on, \"The first is to be got from Liaodong, from the Xianbi State. You must write to King Kebi Neng and send him presents of gold and silks so that he may send one hundred thousand Qiang troops from Liaoxi to attack Xiping Pass. Secondly, the king of the Mang Tribes, Meng Huo, must be persuaded to lead one hundred thousand troops to attack the south of Shu \u2014 Yizhou, Yongchang, Zangge, and Yuesui. Thirdly, you must send an ambassador to Wu with fair promises of an increase of territory, and so induce Sun Quan to march one hundred thousand troops to the attack of the Three Gorges, making Fucheng his objective. The fourth army can be got from General Meng Da in Shangyong, who can muster one hundred thousand troops to attack Hanzhong. Lastly, our own force of one hundred thousand troops may be placed under Cao Zhen, who will attack by way of Yangping Pass. With five hundred thousand troops making simultaneous attacks along five different directions, it would be hard for Zhuge Liang to hold his own, even if he had the talent of Lu Wang himself.\"\n\nThe scheme delighted Cao Pi, who at once cast about for four glib-tongued messengers. He also issued a commission to Cao Zhen as Commander-in-Chief with the order to take Yangping Pass.\n\nAt this time Zhang Liao and most others of the veterans who had served Cao Cao were keeping watch in various stations and passes and fords in Jizhou, Xuzhou, Qingzhou, and Hefei. They were not summoned for this expedition to the west.\n\nAfter the accession of Liu Shan, the Latter Ruler, many of those who had served his father gradually died after the decease of their master. The work of the administration of the country, the choice of officials, law-making, taxation, decision of legal cases, was all done by the Prime Minister.\n\nAs the Latter Ruler had no consort, the courtiers, headed by Zhuge Liang, proposed, saying, \"The daughter of the late General of the Flying Cavalry Zhang Fei is prudent, and she is now seventeen. Your Majesty should make her Empress.\"\n\nSo Lady Zhang was married to the Emperor and became Empress Zhang.\n\nIt was in the autumn of the first year of Beginning Prosperity (AD 223) that the Latter Ruler heard of the plans and intentions of Wei against his state.\n\nThe persons who told him gave him full details said: Wei has mustered five armies of one hundred thousand each to march against the River Lands. The first army led by Commander-in-Chief Cao Zhen is heading to Yangping Pass. The second army from Shangyong led by the rebel Meng Da is planning to attack Hanzhong. The third army from Wu is threatening the Three Gorges. The fourth army under King Kebi Neng of the Qiang tribes is marching to Xiping Pass. And the fifth army by Meng Huo of the Mang nations is approaching the southern border near Yizhou, Yongchang, Zangge, and Yuesui. The border stations have sent flying requests for help. We have informed the Prime Minister. But his conduct puzzles us. We do not know why he does not take some action instead of remaining shut up in his palace all the time.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler became really alarmed, and he sent one of his personal attendants to call the Prime Minister to court.\n\nThe servant was gone a long time, and then returned to say: \"The servants in the residence said the Prime Minister was ill and not to be seen.\"\n\nThe young Emperor's distress increased, and he sent two High Ministers \u2014 Dong Yun and Du Qiong \u2014 to Zhuge Liang, saying they were to see him even if he was on his couch and tell him the dreadful news of invasion. They went; but they got no farther than the gate. The keepers of the gate refused them admission.\n\nBut Du Qiong said, The First Ruler had confided his son to the Prime Minister. It has not been long since His Majesty's accession to the Throne that Cao Pi threatens to invade our territories with five armies. This is urgent military matter. How can the Prime Minister make illness as an excuse not to appear?\n\nThe wardens of the gate went inside with what was said.\n\nAfter keeping them waiting a long time, the wardens returned, saying, \"The Prime Minister is rather better and will be at court in the morning.\"\n\nThe two ministers sighed deeply as they wended their way to the Emperor's palace.\n\nNext morning a great crowd of officers assembled at the gate of the Prime Minister's residence to wait for him to appear. But he did not come out. It began to grow late, and many of them were tired of waiting, and the crowd dispersed.\n\nDu Qiong went again to the Emperor and suggested, saying, \"Your Majesty should go in person and try to get Zhuge Liang to say what should be done.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler then returned to his palace with the officials and told the Empress Dowager his trouble. She was also alarmed.\n\n\"What can he mean?\" said she. \"This does not look like acting in the spirit of the charge laid upon him by the late Emperor. Let me go myself.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" said Dong Yun. \"Your Majesty must not go. We think all is well, and the Prime Minister certainly understands and will do something. Beside, you must let His Majesty go first, and if the Prime Minister still shows remissness, then Your Majesty can summon him to the Temple of the Dynasty and ask him.\"\n\nSo it was left at that. And the next day the Emperor rode in his chariot to the gate of his minister. When the doorkeepers saw the imperial chariot appear, they fell upon their knees to welcome the Emperor.\n\n\"Where is the Prime Minister?\" asked he.\n\n\"We do not know. But we have orders not to let in the crowd of officers.\"\n\nThe Emperor then descended and went on foot right in to the third gate. Then he saw Zhuge Liang leaning on a staff beside a fishpond looking at the fish. The Latter Ruler approached, and stood behind him for a long time.\n\nPresently the Latter Ruler said slowly and with dignity, \"Is the Prime Minister really enjoying himself?\"\n\nZhuge Liang started and looked round. When he saw who the speaker was, he suddenly dropped his staff and prostrated himself.\n\n\"I ought to be put to death ten thousand times!\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nBut the Emperor put forth his hand and helped him to rise, saying, \"Cao Pi threatens immediate invasion from five points. Why will you not come forth and attend to business?\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughed. He conducted the Emperor into an inner room, and, when he was seated, Zhuge Liang addressed the Emperor, saying, \"Could it be possible that I was ignorant of these five armies? I was not looking at the fishes; I was thinking.\"\n\n\"But, this being so, what shall we do?\"\n\n\"I have already turned back that Kebi Neng of the Qiangs, and Meng Huo of the Mangs, and the rebel leader Meng Da, and the army from Wei. I have also thought out a plan to circumvent the army from Wu, but I need a special sort of person to carry it out. I want an envoy, an able talker, one capable of persuading other people. It was because I have not found such a person yet that I was so deeply in thought. But Your Majesty may set your mind at rest and not be anxious.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler heard this half terrified and half glad.\n\n\"Surely your superhuman devices are too deep for the mortal. But may I ask how these armies have been made to turn back?\"\n\n\"Since His Late Majesty bade me take the best care of your welfare, I dare not be remiss for a single moment. Some officers in Chengdu are ignorant of that refinement of war which consists in not allowing the enemy to guess your plans. How could I let them know anything? When I heard that Kebi Neng, the king of Qiangs, might invade, I remembered that Ma Chao's forefathers were friendly with those tribespeople and they had a high opinion of Ma Chao, calling him General Who Possesses Heavenly Prestige. So I sent orders by dispatch to Ma Chao to hold the Xiping Pass, and to prepare ambushes in certain places and change them daily so as to keep the Qiangs off. That settled them.\n\n\"I sent hastily to the south to order Wei Yan to move certain bodies of troops about through the southwest territories, to be seen and then to disappear, to go in and come out, and to march to and fro, so that the Mangs should be perplexed. The Mangs are brave, but prone to doubts and hesitations, and they would not advance in the face of the unknown. Hence there is nothing to fear in that quarter.\n\n\"I also knew that Meng Da and our Li Yan were sworn friends. I had left Li Yan in charge of the Palace of Eternal Peace. I sent Li Yan a letter and urged him to write to Meng Da, so that Meng Da would feign illness and not move his army.\n\n\"I sent Zhao Zilong to occupy Yangping Pass and all the strategic positions on the way by which Cao Zhen would march, and bade him defend only and not go to the battle. If our troops refuse to come out, Cao Zhen will certainly have to retire. So all those four are settled. But for greater security I have sent Zhang Bao and Guan Xing each with thirty thousand troops to camp at points whence they can quickly help any of the others who may need it. And none of these arrangements are known here.\n\n\"Now there is only Wu left to deal with. Had the other four armies succeeded and Shu been in danger, Sun Quan would have come to the attack. If the others fail, I know he will not budge, for he will remember that Cao Pi has just sent three armies to attack his country. And this being so, I want someone with a ready tongue and ingenious mind to go and talk plainly to Sun Quan. So far I have not found such a person, and I am perplexed. I regret that I have given Your Majesty occasion to make this journey.\"\n\n\"The Empress Dowager also wanted to come,\" said the Emperor. \"But now you have spoken, O Minister Father, I am as one awakened from a dream. I shall grieve no more.\"\n\nThey two drank a few cups of wine together, and the Prime Minister escorted his master to his chariot. A ring of courtiers were waiting, and they could not help remarking the happiness that shone in their master's face. The Latter Ruler took his leave and returned to his palace, but the courtiers did not know what to think.\n\nNow Zhuge Liang had noted a certain man among the crowd who smiled and looked quite happy. Zhuge Liang looked at him intently and then recollected his name, which was Deng Zhi of Xinye, a descendant of Commander Deng Yu of Han. Deng Zhi was currently the Chair of the Census Board. Zhuge Liang sent a man privately to detain Deng Zhi, and when all the others had gone, Zhuge Liang led him into the library for a chat. Presently he came to the matter near his heart.\n\n\"The three states have become a fact,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Now if our state wanted to absorb the other two and restore the condition of one rule, which country should it attack first?\"\n\n\"Though Wei is the real rebel, yet Wei is strong and would be very difficult to overthrow. Any move against it would have to develop slowly. As our Emperor has but lately succeeded his father and the people are none too decided in his favor, I should propose a treaty of mutual defense with Wu. This would obliterate the enmity of His Late Majesty and would have important results. However, you, Sir, may have another opinion. What is it?\"\n\n\"That is what I have been thinking of this long time, but I had not the person for the task. Now I have found him.\"\n\n\"What do you want the person to do?\" said Deng Zhi.\n\n\"I want him to go as envoy to Wu to negotiate such a treaty. As you understand the position so well, you will surely do honor to your prince's commission as envoy. There is no other who would succeed.\"\n\n\"I fear I am not equal to such a task: I am not clever enough and too ignorant.\"\n\n\"I will inform the Emperor tomorrow and beg him to appoint you. Of course you will accept.\"\n\nDeng Zhi consented and then took his leave. As promised, Zhuge Liang memorialized, and the Latter Ruler consented that the mission should be entrusted to Deng Zhi. And he started.\n\n\u2003The din of war will cease in Wu,\n\n\u2003When Shu's desires are known." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Using Words, Qin Mi Overcomes Zhang Wen; Setting Fire, Xu Sheng Defeats Cao Pi.\n\nAfter his recent exploits, Lu Xun became the one hero of Wu. He was given the title General Who Upholds the State, was ennobled as Lord of Jiangling, and received the Governorship of Jingzhou. He became Supreme Commander of all the military forces.\n\nZhang Zhao and Gu Yong, thinking the moment opportune for enhancing their lord's dignity, sent in a memorial proposing that his rule should be designated by a distinctive style, and Sun Quan assumed Yellow Might Era as his reign style (AD 222).\n\nThen arrived a messenger from Wei, and he was called in to an assembly and bidden to state his business.\n\nThe messenger said, \"Recently Shu sent to Wei for help, and, the situation being misunderstood, the Ruler of Wei dispatched a force against Wu. Now this action is greatly regretted. In Wei it is thought desirable to set four armies in motion against Shu to capture it. Now if Wu will assist, and success crowns these efforts, Wei and Wu will share the conquered territory.\"\n\nSun Quan listened, but was not prepared to give a decided answer. He betook himself to his counselors, Zhang Zhao and Gu Yong.\n\nThey said, \"Lu Xun is the man of profound knowledge. He should be consulted.\"\n\nSo Lu Xun was called, and his speech ran thus: \"Cao Pi is too firmly established in the Middle Land to be upset now; and if this offer of his be refused, we shall provoke his enmity. Neither Wei nor Wu, so far as I see, has anyone fit to oppose Zhuge Liang. We must perforce consent and put our army in order. But we can wait till we see how the four armies speed. If Shu seems likely to fall and Zhuge Liang is outmaneuvered, then our army can be dispatched and we will take Capital Chengdu. If the four armies fail, we shall have to consider.\"\n\nSo Sun Quan said to the envoy of Wei, \"We are not ready at the moment, so we will choose a day to start later.\"\n\nAnd with this answer the envoy left.\n\nNext they made careful inquiries about the success or failure of the four armies against Shu.\n\nThe spies reported: \"The western Qiangs under King Kebi Neng have turned back when they saw Ma Chao in command at Xiping Pass. The southern Mangs led by Meng Huo have been perplexed at the tactics of Wei Yan and have retreated to their territories. The Shangyong leader, Meng Da, have set out, but half way have fallen ill and gone back. And Cao Zhen's army, while marching toward Yangping Pass, have been brought to a halt by the defensive preparations of Zhao Zilong, who has garrisoned every pass and occupied every point of vantage; they have eventually retreated, after being camped in the Xie Valley for some time.\"\n\nKnowing all this, Sun Quan said to his officials, \"Lu Xun's words were indeed prophetic; he made most perfect deductions. Any rash action on my part would place me on bad terms with Shu.\"\n\nJust then the coming of an envoy from Shu was announced.\n\nSaid Zhang Zhao, \"This mission is also part of Zhuge Liang's scheme to divert danger from Shu. Deng Zhi has come as envoy.\"\n\n\"That being so, how should I reply?\" asked Sun Quan.\n\n\"I will tell you. Set up a large cauldron and pour therein a quantity of oil. Light a fire beneath. When the oil is boiling, choose a goodly company of your tallest and brawniest fighting guards, arm them and draw them up in lines between the Palace gate and your throne room. Then summon Deng Zhi. But before he can say a word, forewarn him that he will have the same fate of being boiled in oil if being guilty of the same sort of treachery as Li Yiji when he was a persuader to the state of Qi. Then see what Deng Zhi will say.\"\n\nSun Quan followed this advice, and prepared the cauldron of oil and had the strong guards ready. Then he bade them introduce the envoy.\n\nDeng Zhi came, his ceremonial dress in perfect order, and advanced as far as the gate. Seeing the grim array of fighting men armed, some with gleaming swords, some with great axes, some with long spears, and some with short knives, he understood at once what was meant, but he never blenched. He advanced quite steadily and bravely till he reached the door of the hall. Even when he saw the boiling cauldron of oil and the savage executioners glaring at him, he only smiled.\n\nHe was led to the front of the curtain behind which sat the Prince of Wu, and he made the ordinary salutation of raising his extended arms, but he did not bow in obeisance.\n\nThe Prince bade his attendants roll up the curtain, and called out, \"Why do you not make an obeisance?\"\n\nDeng Zhi replied, \"The envoy of the superior state does not make an obeisance to the ruler of a smaller country.\"\n\n\"If you do not control that tongue of yours, but will let it wag, you will be like that fellow Li Yiji who went to talk to Qi. You will soon find yourself in the cauldron.\"\n\nThen Deng Zhi laughed aloud, saying, \"People say there are many sages in Wu. No one would believe that they would be frightened of a simple scholar.\"\n\nThis reply only increased Sun Quan's anger, and he said, \"Who fears an unmerited fool like you?\"\n\n\"If you fear not the envoy, why so anxious about what he may have to say?\"\n\n\"Because you come here as spokesman of Zhuge Liang, and you want me to sever with Wei and turn to your country. Is not that your message?\"\n\n\"I am a simple scholar of Shu, and I am come to explain matters to the state of Wu. But here I find armed guards and a boiling cauldron all prepared against an envoy. How can I form any other opinion than that you will not allow me to speak?\"\n\nAs soon as Sun Quan heard these words, he bade the soldiers go, and called the envoy into the hall.\n\nThere he invited Deng Zhi to a seat and said, \"What is the real matter between Wei and Wu? I desire that you would inform me.\"\n\nThen Deng Zhi replied, \"Do you, great Prince, desire to discuss peace with Wei or with Shu?\"\n\n\"I really desire to discuss peace with the Ruler of Shu. But he is young and inexperienced and ignorant, and unable to carry a matter through.\"\n\n\"Prince, you are a valiant warrior, just as Zhuge Liang is a great minister. Now Shu has the strength of its mountainous geography just as Wu has the protection of its three rivers. If these two countries are at peace, they are mutually protective. They may swallow up the rest of the empire, or they may stand secure alone. If you send tribute to Wei and acknowledge yourself one of its ministers, you will be expected to attend at court, and your heir-apparent will become a servant in that court; and if you disobey, an army of Wei will be sent to attack you. Shu also will come down the river and invade your country. Then the South Land will be yours no longer. And if you listen not to these words of mine, and refuse my offer, I shall commit suicide before you to prove I am not persuading you only for our own benefit.\"\n\nAs Deng Zhi spoke these last words, he gathered up his robes and marched down the hall as though he was just going to jump into the cauldron.\n\n\"Stop him!\" cried Sun Quan, and they did so.\n\nThen he requested Deng Zhi to go into an inner apartment, where he treated the envoy as a guest of the highest honor.\n\n\"O Master,\" said Sun Quan, \"your words exactly express my thoughts, and I desire to make a league of peace with your country. Are you willing to be the intermediary?\"\n\n\"Just now it was you, O Prince, who wished to boil this poor servant. Now it is also you who wishes to use him. How can such a doubtful person be trusted?\"\n\n\"My mind is made up,\" replied Sun Quan. \"Do not doubt me, Master.\"\n\nDeng Zhi was detained, and a conclave of officers gathered.\n\nSaid Sun Quan to the assembly, \"Under my hand are all eighty-one counties of the southeast, and I have the lands of Jingzhou to boot, yet I am not so well off as that little country of Shu, for Shu has Deng Zhi for an envoy, and he glorifies his lord. I have no one to send to declare my wishes to Shu.\"\n\nThen one stepped forth and said he would go. The speaker was Zhang Wen of Wucheng, who held the office of Imperial Commander.\n\n\"Sir, I fear that when you reach Shu and are in the presence of Zhuge Liang, you will not explain my real sentiments,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nZhang Wen replied, \"Think you that I shall fear him? He also is but a man.\"\n\nSun Quan conferred great gifts on Zhang Wen, and sent him on the return mission to Shu to negotiate the league of peace.\n\nWhile Deng Zhi was absent, Zhuge Liang said to his lord, \"This mission to Wu will succeed, and of the many wise people in the east one will come as return envoy. Your Majesty should treat him with courtesy, and let him return to Wu to complete the league. For if we have an alliance with Wu, Wei will not dare to send an army against us. And if we are safe from those quarters, I will lead an expedition to subdue the Mangs in the south country. After that we can deal with Wei. If Wei is reduced, Wu will not last long, and the whole empire will again be under one ruler.\"\n\nPresently the report reached the capital that Deng Zhi and Zhang Wen, as envoy of Wu, would soon arrive. The Latter Ruler assembled the courtiers to receive them honorably. The envoy of Wu carried himself as one who had attained his desires, and advanced boldly. Having made his salute, the Latter Ruler gave him to sit on a brocaded stool on his left hand. A banquet followed at which Zhang Wen was treated with much honor. At the end of the banquet, the whole court escorted the envoy to the guest-house where he was to lodge.\n\nOn the second day there was a banquet at the Prime Minister's palace, and Zhuge Liang broached the real business.\n\nHe said, \"Our First Ruler was not on friendly terms with Wu. But that is all changed, as is demonstrated by these banquets, and our present Emperor is disposed to be very friendly. It is hoped that the former enmity may be entirely forgotten and the two countries swear eternal friendship and alliance in their common end \u2014 the destruction of Wei. I look to you, Sir, to speak in favor of this league.\"\n\nZhang Wen said that he would support the plan. The wine went merrily round, and as the envoy became mellow, he laughed freely and swaggered and put on a proud demeanor.\n\nNext day the Latter Ruler gave Zhang Wen rich presents of gold and studs and prepared a parting banquet for him in the south guest-chamber, and all the court assembled to take leave of him. The Prime Minister paid him assiduous attention and pressed him to drink. While this banquet was in progress, a man suddenly came in as if he were already drunk, made a proud sort of salutation to the company and at once took a seat.\n\nHis conduct seemed strange to Zhang Wen, who asked, \"Who is the new comer, Sir Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"He is a man named Qin Mi, a Doctorate Academician of Yizhou,\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"He may be that,\" said Zhang Wen with a laugh, \"but I wonder if he has any learning at all inside him.\"\n\nQin Mi listened without changing countenance, and said, \"Since our children are all learned, of course I am more so.\"\n\n\"What may have been your special studies, Sir?\" said Zhang Wen.\n\n\"Many things: Astronomy on one hand, geography on the other, the three teachings and the nine systems, many philosophers, history all through, and many sacred books and traditions.\"\n\n\"Since you talk so big,\" said Zhang Wen, \"I should like to ask you a few questions on celestial matters. Now has the sky a head?\"\n\n\"Yes, it has a head.\"\n\n\"Where is it?\"\n\n\"In the western quarter. The Odes say, 'God turns his head kindly toward the west,' and further it follows from this that the head is in the west.\"\n\n\"Well, has the sky ears?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. The sky is above and listens to all things below. The Odes say, 'The crane calls from the midst of the marsh, its cry is heard by the sky.' How could the sky hear without ears?\"\n\n\"Has the sky feet?\"\n\n\"It has. The Odes say, 'Heaven treads down difficulties.' If there were no feet, how could it tread?\"\n\n\"Has heaven a name?\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Then what is it?\"\n\n\"Liu.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Because the Emperor's family name is Liu, and he is the Son of Heaven. That is how I know.\"\n\n\"Does the sun spring from the east?\"\n\n\"Though it does, yet it sets in the west.\"\n\nAll this time Qin Mi's repartees had flashed back clear and perfect. They came so naturally as to astonish all the guests. Zhang Wen had no word to reply to them.\n\nThen it became Qin Mi's turn, \"You are a famous scholar in your own land, Sir; and since you have asked so many questions about Heaven, I take it you are I well up in all celestial matters. When original chaos resolved into its two elements yin and yang, the lighter portion rose and became sky, and the grosser sank and solidified into earth. When Gong Gong's rebellion was crushed, his head struck the Imperfect Mountain, the pillar, which upholds heaven, was broken and the bonds of earth were destroyed. Heaven fell over to the northwest, and earth sank into the southeast. Since heaven was ethereal and had floated to the top, how could it fall over? Another thing I do not know is what is beyond the ether. I should be glad if you would explain, Master.\"\n\nZhang Wen had no reply ready, but he rose from his place and bowed his acknowledgment, saying, \"I knew not that there was so much ability in this land. I am happy to have heard such a discourse. Now all obstructions have disappeared, and I see quite clearly.\"\n\nBut Zhuge Liang, fearing lest the guest should feel mortified, soothed him with fair words, saying, \"This is all play upon words, the sort of puzzles one propounds at a merry feast. You, honored Sir, know that the tranquillity and safety of states are no matters to joke with.\"\n\nThe envoy bowed. Then Deng Zhi was ordered to return to Wu and thank its ruler for his courtesy, and he was to accompany Zhang Wen. So both, having taken leave of the Prime Minister, set out on their journey to the east.\n\nIn the meantime Sun Quan was beginning to feel perplexed at the long delay of his envoy. He had summoned a council to discuss this question, when the report came that his own envoy had returned, and Deng Zhi was with him. They were brought in forthwith. Zhang Wen, having made his obeisance, began to discourse upon the virtue of the Ruler of Shu and Zhuge Liang and to lay before his lord the proposal for a league of peace. Deng Zhi, the Chair of the Secretariat, was empowered to discuss this matter.\n\nTurning to Deng Zhi, Sun Quan said, \"Would it not be a happy result if tranquillity should be restored to the empire by the destruction of Wei, and Wu and Shu should share its administration?\"\n\n\"The sky knows not two suns,\" replied Deng Zhi, \"nor can the people recognize two kings. If Wei be destroyed, no one can say upon whom the divine command will devolve. But one who becomes an overlord must perfect his virtue, and those who become ministers must be wholly loyal. In this way strife will cease.\"\n\nSun Quan smiled, saying, \"And your sincerity is beyond question.\"\n\nDeng Zhi was dismissed with rich gifts, and after this Wu and Shu were good friends.\n\nThe negotiations between his two rivals were reported in Capital Luoyang without loss of time, and Cao Pi was very angry.\n\n\"If they have made an alliance, it can only mean that they cherish the intention of swallowing the Middle Land. My best move is to strike first.\"\n\nHe called a great council. This council lacked the presence of Regent Marshal Cao Ren and Grand Commander Jia Xu, who had both died.\n\nIn the council Counselor Xin Pi stepped forward and said, \"The Middle Land is extensive, but the population so sparse that no successful army could be raised just now. My advice is to wait ten years, spending that period in forming an army and in cultivating the land till stores and weapons shall have been accumulated. Then both our rivals may be destroyed.\"\n\n\"This is only the distorted opinion of a perverted pedant. Having made this league, Shu and Wu may fall upon us at any moment. This matter cannot be postponed for ten years,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nAn edict appeared commanding the enlistment of soldiers and the formation of an army to subdue Wu.\n\nSima Yi then said, \"Battleships are necessary, as Wu is protected by the Great River. Your Majesty must lead small and big vessels. The navy can advance by way of River Huai, taking Shouchun. When you reach Guangling, the river is to be crossed and Nanxu is to be captured. Then Wu will be subdued.\"\n\nThis plan was accepted, and the construction of dragon ships was put in hand and went on day and night. Ten were built two hundred spans long to carry two thousand marines each. They also collected three thousand fighting ships.\n\nIn the autumn of the fifth year of Yellow Dawn (AD 224) the various generals assembled, and Cao Zhen was appointed leader of the first corps. Zhang Liao, Zhang He, Wen Ping, and Xu Huang were Chief Commanders; Xu Chu and Lu Qian were guards of the Center Army; and Cao Xiu commanded the rear guard; the strategists were Liu Ye and Jiang Ji. In all, land and marine forces numbered over three hundred thousand troops. When the starting day was decided upon, Sima Yi was made Chair of the Secretariat and left in the capital with the powers of Regent Marshal.\n\nThe spies told the Prince of Wu's attendants of the dangers, and the latter hastened to inform the Prince.\n\nThey said, \"Cao Pi is leading the dragon fleet and commanding three hundred thousand marines and ground forces against the South Land, and the danger is very great.\"\n\nWhen Sun Quan met his council, Gu Yong said, \"My lord, you can call upon Shu for help according to the treaty. Write to Zhuge Liang and get him to send out an army through Hanzhong so as to divert part of Wei's army. Also you send an army to Nanxu to oppose them there.\"\n\n\"I shall have to recall Lu Xun,\" said the Prince. \"He is the only man to undertake this great task.\"\n\n\"Do not move him if you can help it. He is necessary for the protection of Jingzhou.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know. But there is no other strong enough to help me.\"\n\nAt these words Xu Sheng advanced, saying, \"I know I am not very able, but I desire to be given an army to meet this danger. If Cao Pi crosses the river in person, I will make him prisoner and present him at the gate of the Palace. If he does not come over here, I will slay so many of his soldiers that his army shall not dare even to look southward.\"\n\nSun Quan was pleased to find a willing volunteer, and replied, \"Noble Sir, what anxiety need I feel if I have your protection?\"\n\nXu Sheng was given the title of General Who Protects the East and made Chief Commander of all the forces in Nanxu and Jianye. As soon as he had received his orders, he retired. He gave command to gather enormous quantities of weapons, and had many flags and banners made for the protection of the river banks.\n\nBut another impetuous young leader was anxious to take more vigorous measures, and he stood forth, saying, \"My lord has laid upon you, O General, a heavy responsibility. But if you really desire to destroy the invading force and capture Cao Pi, you should send an army to meet him on the north side in the South of River Huai. I fear failure if you wait till the northern troops have come this far.\"\n\nThe young man was Sun Shao, nephew of the Prince of Wu. Sun Shao was born to a Yu family, and he was adopted by Sun Ce and given the Sun family name. He had already the title of General Who Possesses Wide Prestige, and was in command at Guangling. Though young and impetuous, he was very valiant.\n\nSaid Xu Sheng, \"Cao Pi's army is strong and its leaders famous. I hold that we may not cross the river to meet him, but wait the arrival of his ships on the other side. Then I shall carry out my plan.\"\n\n\"I have three thousand troops of my own, and I know the country about Guangling thoroughly. Let me go across the river and fight a battle. I will willingly undergo the penalty if I fail,\" said Sun Shao.\n\nHowever, Xu Sheng refused, and all the pleadings of his impetuous general were vain.\n\nAnd when Sun Shao still persisted, the commander grew angry and said, \"What control shall I have if you are allowed to disobey orders?\"\n\nXu Sheng ordered the lictors to take Sun Shao out and put him to death.\n\nThey led him away, and forthwith the black flag was hoisted. But one of Sun Shao's generals went off in hot haste to tell Sun Quan, who came immediately to try to save his favorite. Happily the execution had not been accomplished when the Prince appeared on the scene, and he bade the executioners disperse. The youth was saved.\n\nSun Shao began to press his claim to the Prince, saying, \"I have been at Guangling, and if we do not attack the enemy there, but let him get down to the river, there will be an end of Wu.\"\n\nSun Quan went into the camp, and Xu Sheng came to receive him.\n\nWhen the Prince was seated in his tent, Xu Sheng said, \"O Prince, you placed me in command of the force to repulse Wei. Now this general of mine, Sun Shao, is disobedient and should suffer death. I would ask why he should be pardoned.\"\n\n\"He is naturally hot and impetuous. He has been guilty of disobedience, but I hope you will overlook his fault.\"\n\n\"The law is none of my making, nor is it yours, O Prince. It is a state penalty, and if relationship is enough to evade it, where is discipline?\"\n\n\"He has offended, and you have the right to judge and punish. But although his real name is Yu Shao, yet my brother Sun Ce loved him and gave him our family name. Further, Sun Shao has rendered me good service. If he should be put to death, I should fail in my fraternal duty.\"\n\n\"Since you have intervened, O Prince, I remit the death penalty.\"\n\nSun Quan bade his nephew thank his chief, but the youth would not make an obeisance. On the contrary, he loudly maintained the correctness of his view.\n\n\"Leading troops against Cao Pi is the only way,\" cried Sun Shao. \"I cannot consent to your other plan even under the penalty of death!\"\n\nXu Sheng's countenance changed. The recalcitrant young man was ordered to leave the tent by Sun Quan.\n\n\"He will not be any loss to us,\" said Sun Quan to Xu Sheng, \"and I will not employ him again.\"\n\nThen the Prince left and returned to his own place.\n\nThat night they reported to Xu Sheng that Sun Shao had gone secretly over the river with his own three thousand troops. Xu Sheng did not wish him to come to harm, as evidently that would displease the Prince. So Xu Sheng sent a force to support him. Ding Feng was chosen to command this reinforcement, and he was told what to do.\n\nThe Ruler of Wei, in his dragon ships, reached Guangling, and the van got to the river bank. He came to survey the position.\n\n\"How many soldiers are on the other bank?\" asked Cao Pi.\n\nCao Zhen replied, \"I have not seen a single one. Nor are there any flags or encampments.\"\n\n\"That is a ruse. I will go and find out.\"\n\nSo Cao Pi set out to cross the river in one of the dragon ships. He anchored under the bank. On his boat were displayed the imperial emblems of dragon, phoenix, sun, moon, and they shone out bravely. Seated in the ship, the Emperor looked up and down the south bank, but not a man was visible.\n\n\"Do you think we should cross?\" asked the Emperor of his strategists.\n\nLiu Ye replied, \"If the rules of war mean anything, they ought to be prepared. We think Your Majesty should exercise caution. Wait a few days and watch. Then perhaps the van might be sent to make a reconnaissance.\"\n\n\"So I think,\" said the Ruler of Wei. \"But as it is now late, we will pass the night on the river.\"\n\nIt was a dark night, and the ships was brilliantly lighted up; it seemed like day on board. But all along the south bank there appeared no glimmer of light.\n\n\"What do you think it means?\" said Cao Pi.\n\nThe courtiers replied, \"They heard that Your Majesty's heavenly army was coming, and ran away like so many rats.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei laughed to himself. When daylight came there came with it a thick fog, so that nothing on the bank could be seen. After a time, a breeze blew off the fog, and then, to their immense surprise, they found that the whole length of the South of the Great River as far as they could see was one battlement, with towers at intervals, while spears and swords glittered in the sun and flags and pennons fluttered in the breeze.\n\nIn just a short time several reports came: \"A long wall by the Great River has grown up in a night and stood there with carts and masts of ships lying along it, stretching some one hundred miles from Shidou to Nanxu.\"\n\nThe fact was that the wall was an imitation, and the warriors that manned it were bundles of reeds dressed in soldiers' uniforms. And this was Xu Sheng's tactic. But the sight chilled the ardor of the invaders.\n\n\"My hosts of troops are no use against such warriors. We can do nothing against those talents of the South Land,\" said Cao Pi.\n\nHe thought over this sadly enough. But now the wind had increased in force, and white combers began to heave up in the river, and waters broke over his boat, drenching the dragon robes. The ship seemed as if it would roll right over. So Cao Zhen sent out small boats to rescue his master and his people. But they were too affrighted to move. Wherefore Wen Ping, who was in charge, leaped on board and helped the Emperor down into one of the smaller craft, which then flew away before the wind and got safely into a creek.\n\nSoon came a hasty messenger to report: \"Zhao Zilong is marching out through Yangping Pass and threatening Changan.\"\n\nThis frightened Cao Pi so badly that he decided to retreat, and gave orders to retire. The whole army were in a mood to run away, and moved off toward the north, pursued by the troops of Wu. To hasten the march, the Ruler of Wei bade his soldiers abandon all the imperial paraphernalia and impediments. The dragon ships withdrew into River Huai one by one.\n\nAs they moved in disorder, suddenly arose the sounds of an enemy force, shouts and the rolling of drums and the blaring of trumpets, and a cohort marched down obliquely on to their line. And at the head was Sun Shao.\n\nThe troops of Wei could make no effective stand, and many were slain, while large numbers were driven into the river and drowned. By dint of great efforts, the Emperor was saved and got away up the river. But when they had sailed about ten miles, they saw ahead a tract of blazing reeds. The enemy had poured fish oil over the dry reeds and set them afire. The wind was spreading the flames down river toward the fleet of Wei, and the heat was intense. The dragon ships had to stop.\n\nCao Pi was put into a smaller craft and taken on shore. His larger ships were presently set on fire and destroyed. They mounted the Emperor on a horse and moved along the bank, but soon they fell in with another body of troops. This time it was the supports under Ding Feng.\n\nZhang Liao rode ahead to engage the leader, but was soon wounded by an arrow of Ding Feng in the loins. However, he was helped away by Xu Huang, and the Ruler of Wei was gotten safely out of the turmoil. The loss of soldiers was heavy, and a huge booty of horses, carts, ships, and weapons fell to the victors.\n\nSo the Wei armies went away north thoroughly beaten, while Xu Sheng had scored a great success. Sun Quan richly rewarded him.\n\nZhang Liao got to Xuchang, but only to die from the effects of his wound. He was honorably buried by the Ruler of Wei.\n\nIt has been said that Zhao Zilong was threatening Changan. But soon after he went through Yangping Pass, the Prime Minister of Shu sent a dispatch to recall him because General Yong Kai in Yizhou had joined himself with the Mangs and invaded the four southern territories. So Zhao Zilong returned. Meanwhile Ma Chao was ordered to take command of Yangping Pass. The Prime Minister was about to go to subdue the nations along the south border. He was then preparing at Chengdu for this expedition.\n\n\u2003First Wu met Wei and drove them north,\n\n\u2003Then Shu against the Mangs went south." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Conquering The South Mang, The Prime Minister Marches The Army; Opposing Heaven Troops, The King Of The Mangs Is Captured.\n\nWith Prime Minister Zhuge Liang's administration of affairs in the two River Lands began a period of happiness and prosperity for the people. Tranquillity prevailed, and the state of society was well nigh perfect: Doors unbolted at night, property left by the roadside remaining untouched till the owner returned for it. Moreover, the harvests were rich year after year, and old and young, with fair, round bellies, well lined, simply sang with joy. The people hastened to fulfill their state duties and vied with each other in the performance of all arts. As a natural consequence all military preparations were perfect, the granaries bursting with grain and the treasury full to overflowing.\n\nSuch was the state of things when, in the third year of Beginning Prosperity (AD 225), the news came from Yizhou to the capital to report: \"The Mang King, Meng Huo, leading one hundred thousand Mang tribesmen, has invaded the south and is laying waste the country. Yong Kai, the Governor of Jianning, a descent of the Han Lord Yong Chi of Shifang, had joined Meng Huo to rebel. Zhu Bao and Gao Ding, the Governors of Zangge and Yuesui, have yielded to the invaders. But the Governor of Yongchang, Wang Kang, is staunchly holding out. The three rebels \u2014 Yong Kai, Gao Ding, and Zhu Bao \u2014 , who had joined the invaders, are now acting as guides and assisting in the attack on Yongchang, which has remained faithful. Governor Wang Kang, ably assisted by Lu Kai, his Deputy Governor, is making a all-out effort to defend the city with only its ordinary inhabitants as fighting men. The position is very desperate.\"\n\nWhen this news came, Zhuge Liang went into the Palace and thus memorialized to his lord, \"The contumacy of the Mangs is a real danger to our state. I feel it incumbent upon me to lead an expedition to reduce the tribespeople to obedience.\"\n\nBut the Latter Ruler was afraid, and said, \"Sun Quan is in the east, and Cao Pi the north. If you abandon me and either of them comes, what shall I do?\"\n\n\"Your Majesty need have no fear. We have just concluded a league of peace with Wu, and I think they will be true to their pledge. Li Yan in Baidicheng is quite a match for Lu Xun. Cao Pi's recent defeat has taken the keenness out of his army, so that he will not feel inclined to make any expeditions further. Ma Chao is in command at the passes between Wei and Hanzhong. I shall also leave Guan Xing and Zhang Bao with forces to reinforce any point where danger may appear. I can assure Your Majesty that no untoward event will happen.\n\n\"I am going to sweep clean the Mang country, so that we may have a free hand to attack Wei when the day comes. Thus I shall be enabled to requite the honor paid me by your father the First Ruler, who came thrice to seek me and who doubled my obligation when he confided to me the care of his son.\"\n\n\"Indeed I am young and ignorant,\" replied the Latter Ruler, \"and can only exist with you to decide for me.\"\n\nAt that moment Counselor Wang Lian, a man of Nanyang, stepped forward, crying, \"No, no, Sir; you may not go! The South Mang is a wild country reeking with malaria. It is wrong that an officer of state in such an exalted and responsible position should go away on a distant expedition. These rebels and tribespeople are but an irritation, not a disease, and an ordinary leader would be enough to send against them. He would not fail.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"This country of the Mangs is distant and mostly tribal. To pacify them will be difficult, and I feel I ought to go. When to be harsh and when to show leniency are matters to be decided on at the moment, and instructions cannot be easily given to another.\"\n\nZhuge Liang steadily opposed all Wang Lian's efforts to bring about a change of intention, and he soon took leave of the Latter Ruler and made ready to start.\n\nJiang Wan was Army Counselor of the expedition; Fei Yi, Secretary; Dong Jue and Fan Jian, Army Inspectors; Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan, Commanders; Wang Ping and Zhang Yi, Deputy Commanders. Beside these were other half a hundred leaders and officers of Shu, and the whole force was five hundred thousand troops.\n\nSoon after the force marched south to Yizhou, Guan Suo, the third son of Guan Yu, appeared and wished to see Zhuge Liang.\n\nAnd Guan Suo said to him, \"After the fall of Jingzhou, I was hidden by the Bao family from where I wanted to go to the River Lands to ask the First Ruler for a revenge for my father. But I fell in illness, which was long and severe, and I only just recovered. I was then traveling toward Chengdu to meet with the Latter Ruler, when I met the army in the south expedition. I know that vengeance has been taken on the murderers of my father. And now I want to present myself to the Prime Minster.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was greatly affected to see him. He sent news of the young man's arrival to the court and gave Guan Suo a post of Van Leader.\n\nThe army, foot and horse, marched in the best of order, eating when hungry, drinking when thirsty, camping at night, and moving by day. No plundering was permitted, and the people suffered not at all.\n\nWhen Yong Kai and his fellow rebels heard that Zhuge Liang was marching against them, they called their troops together and formed three divisions, Gao Ding in the center, Yong Kai on the left, and Zhu Bao on the right. They mustered about fifty thousand troops in each army, and they went to oppose the march of the Shu army.\n\nGao Ding sent E Huan to lead the van. This E Huan was nine spans tall in stature, and savage of countenance. His weapon was a two-bladed halberd. He was very valiant and could face many warriors. He led his own cohort out in advance of the main body and fell in with the leading bodies of the Shu army immediately after they had got into Yizhou.\n\nThe two sides drew up for battle. The arrays being complete, Wei Yan rode out and vilified the rebels, shouting, \"O malcontent! Be quick to surrender!\"\n\nInstead, E Huan galloped out and fought with Wei Yan. After a few bouts Wei Yan seemed to be bested and fled. But this was only a ruse. As E Huan followed, the gongs clanged and from left and right poured out Zhang Yi and Wang Ping. Wei Yan turned around, and three generals besieged and captured E Huan.\n\nHe was taken to the tent of Zhuge Liang, who bade his attendants loose his bonds, gave him wine, and comforted him.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang asked, \"Whom do you belong to?\"\n\nE Huan replied, \"I am one of the generals under Gao Ding.\"\n\n\"I know Gao Ding as a loyal and good sort, but he has been led away by this Yong Kai. Now I shall release you, but you are to bring Gao Ding to his senses and see to it that he comes to surrender and avoids grave disaster.\"\n\nE Huan thanked him and withdrew. He went to his own side and soon saw Gao Ding. He told Gao Ding what Zhuge Liang had said, and Zhuge Liang's kindly feeling deeply affected Gao Ding.\n\nNext day, Yong Kai came over to Gao Ding's camp to visit him.\n\nAfter the exchange of salutations, Yong Kai asked, \"How did E Huan manage to return?\"\n\n\"Zhuge Liang released him out of pure kindness,\" replied Gao Ding.\n\n\"This is a ruse of his to separate you from me: He wishes to make us enemies.\"\n\nGao Ding almost believed this too, and he was much perplexed.\n\nJust then the watchers reported that the leaders of Shu had come up and were offering battle. So Yong Kai led out thirty thousand troops to take up the challenge. But after the third encounter he fled. Wei Yan pursued him and smote for a distance of seven miles.\n\nNext day Yong Kai challenged, but the soldiers of Shu refused to fight, and remained within their lines for three days. On the fourth day Yong Kai and Gao Ding divided their troops into two parts and came to attack the camp. Now Zhuge Liang had told Wei Yan to wait for this double attack, and so when it came to pass, both divisions fell into an ambush and suffered great loss, many being killed and more captured.\n\nThe prisoners were taken to the camp, and the soldiers belonging to the two leaders \u2014 Yong Kai and Gao Ding \u2014 were confined separately. Then Zhuge Liang told the soldiers to let it be known that only those belonging to Gao Ding would be spared, the others would be put to death. When time had been given for this story to spread among the prisoners, Yong Kai's troops were brought up to the commander's tent.\n\n\"Whose soldiers were you?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Gao Ding's,\" cried they all, falsely.\n\nThen they were all pardoned, and, after being given wine and food, they were taken to the frontier and set free.\n\nNext the real Gao Ding's soldiers were brought forward, and the same question was put to them.\n\n\"We all really belong to Gao Ding's command,\" said they.\n\nIn like manner they were pardoned and refreshed with wine and food.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang addressed them, saying, \"Yong Kai has just sent a messenger to ask that he may surrender, and he offers to bring with him the heads of Gao Ding and Zhu Bao as a proof of merit. But I will not receive him, and you, since you are Gao Ding's soldiers, shall be released and allowed to return to him. But let there be no ingratitude and fighting again, for if there is, I certainly will not pardon you next time.\"\n\nSo they thanked their liberator and went away. As soon as they reached their own camp, they told the whole story. Then Gao Ding sent a spy to the camp of Yong Kai to find out what was doing. There the spy met those who had been released, and they were all talking about Zhuge Liang's kindness, and many of them were inclined to desert their own camp for the other.\n\nAlthough this seemed very satisfactory, yet Gao Ding did not feel convinced, and he sent another man to Zhuge Liang's camp to try to verify the rumor. But this man was captured and taken before the Commander-in-Chief, who pretended that he thought the spy belonged to Yong Kai.\n\nZhuge Liang said to him, \"Why has your leader failed to send me the heads of Gao Ding and Zhu Bao as he promised? You lot are not very clever, and what are you come to spy out?\"\n\nThe soldier muttered and mumbled in confusion.\n\nBut Zhuge Liang gave the man wine and food, and then wrote a letter which he handed to the spy, saying, \"You give this letter to your commander, Yong Kai, and tell him to get the job done quickly.\"\n\nThe spy took the letter and got away. As soon as he reached camp, he gave the letter to Gao Ding and also the message.\n\nGao Ding read the missive and became very angry.\n\n\"I have ever been true to him, and yet he wants to kill me. It is hard to be either friendly or reasonable.\"\n\nThen he decided to take E Huan into his confidence, and called him.\n\nE Huan was much prejudiced in favor of Zhuge Liang, and said, \"Zhuge Liang is a most benevolent man, and it would be ill to turn our backs upon him. It is Yong Kai's fault that we are now rebels, and our best course would be to slay him and betake ourselves to Zhuge Liang.\"\n\n\"How could it be done?\" asked Gao Ding.\n\n\"Invite him to a banquet. If he refuses, it means he is a traitor, and then you can attack him in front while I will lie in wait behind his camp to capture him as he runs away.\"\n\nThey agreed to try this plan. The banquet was prepared, and Yong Kai invited. But as Yong Kai's mind was full of suspicion from what his returned soldiers had said, he would not come. That night, as soon as darkness fell, Gao Ding attacked his camp.\n\nNow the soldiers who had been released were imbued with the goodness of Gao Ding all quite ready to help him fight. On the other hand, Yong Kai's troops mutinied against him, and so Yong Kai mounted his steed and fled. Before he had gone far, he found his road blocked by the cohort under E Huan, who galloped out with his halberd and confronted the fugitive. Yong Kai could not defend himself, and was struck down. E Huan decapitated him. As soon as they knew he was dead, his troops joined themselves to Gao Ding, who then went and surrendered to Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhuge Liang received Gao Ding sitting in state in his tent, but at once ordered the lictors to decapitate Gao Ding.\n\nBut Gao Ding said, \"Influenced by your kindness, Sir, I have brought the head of my colleague as a proof of the sincerity of my surrender. Why should I die?\"\n\n\"You come with false intent. Do you think you can hoodwink me?\" said Zhuge Liang, laughing.\n\n\"What proof have you that I am false?\"\n\nZhuge Liang drew a letter from his box, and said, \"Zhu Bao sent this secretly to say he wished to surrender, and he said you and Yong Kai were sworn friends to death. How could you suddenly change your feelings and slay him? That is how I know your treachery.\"\n\n\"Zhu Bao only tried to make trouble,\" cried Gao Ding, kneeling.\n\nZhuge Liang still refused to believe him, and said, \"I cannot believe you without more solid proof. If you would slay Zhu Bao, I could take that as proving you were sincere in your surrender.\"\n\n\"Do not doubt me. What if I go and capture this man?\"\n\n\"If you did that, my doubts would be set at rest.\"\n\nThereupon Gao Ding and his subordinate, E Huan, led away their troops to the camp of Zhu Bao. When they were about three miles from his camp, Zhu Bao appeared with a cohort. As soon as they recognized each other, Zhu Bao hastily came forward to parley.\n\nBut Gao Ding cried out to him, \"Why did you write a letter to the Prime Minister and so intrigue with him to get me killed?\"\n\nZhu Bao stared open mouthed and could not reply. Then E Huan rode out from behind his chief and struck Zhu Bao with his halberd so that he fell to the ground.\n\nThereupon Gao Ding shouted, \"The soldiers should either yield or be slain!\"\n\nAnd they yielded in a body.\n\nGao Ding then went back to Zhuge Liang and offered the head of the man just slain.\n\nZhuge Liang laughed again. \"I have made you kill both these as a proof of loyalty.\"\n\nThen he created Gao Ding Governor of Yizhou and chief of three territories, while E Huan was made General. Thus the three rebel divisions were disposed of and troubled the peace no more.\n\nGovernor Wang Kang of Yongchang then came out of the city and welcomed Zhuge Liang.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang had made his entry into that city, he called Wang Kang and asked, \"Who has aided you in the defense of this city?\"\n\nThe Governor said, \"The safety of this city is due entirely to Lu Kai.\"\n\nSo Lu Kai was called. He came and bowed.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"Long since I heard of you as a remarkable person of this area. We are greatly indebted to you for its safety. Now we wish to conquer the Mangs. Have you any advice to offer?\"\n\nLu Kai then produced a map of the country and presented it, saying, \"From the time of my appointment, I have felt certain that the southern tribespeople would rise against you, and so I sent secret agents to map out the country and find the strategic points. From that information I prepared this map, which I call 'The Plan to Subdue the Mangs.' I beg you, Sir, to accept it, as it may be of use.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was very glad. He took Lu Kai into his service as Adviser and Army Guide. With Lu Kai's help, Zhuge Liang advanced and penetrated deeply into the country.\n\nWhile the army was advancing, there came a messenger from the court. When he appeared, Zhuge Liang saw it was Ma Su, and he was clothed in white. He was in mourning for his brother, Ma Liang, who had just died.\n\nHe said, \"I come by special command of the Emperor with gifts of wine and silks for the soldiers.\"\n\nWhen the ceremonies proper on receipt of a mandate from the Emperor had been performed, and the gifts distributed as instructed, Ma Su was asked to remain to talk over matters.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I have His Majesty's command to conquer these Mangs. I hear you have some advice to offer, and I should be pleased if you would instruct me.\"\n\n\"Yes. I have one thing to say that may be worth thinking over. These people refuse to recognize our supremacy, because they think their country is distant and difficult. If you should overcome them today, tomorrow they would revolt. Wherever your army marches, they are overcome and submit; but the day you withdraw the army and attack Cao Pi, they will renew their attack. In arms even it is best to attack hearts rather than cities; to fight with sentiment is better than to fight with weapons. It will be well if you can win them over.\"\n\n\"You read my inmost thoughts,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThen Ma Su was retained with the army as Adviser, and the army marched on.\n\nWhen the King of the Mangs, Meng Huo, heard how cleverly Zhuge Liang had got rid of Yong Kai, he called together the leaders of the \"Three Ravines\" to discuss matters. The chief of the first Ravine was Jinhua Sanjie, of the second Dongtu Na, and of the third Ahui Nan.\n\nThese having come to the King's place, he said to them, \"Zhuge Liang of Shu and his Grand Army has invaded our country, and we must exert our united strength to drive out the invaders. You three must lead your forces, and whoever conquers the enemy shall be chief of chiefs.\"\n\nIt was arranged that Jinhua Sanjie should march in the center division, Dongtu Na on the left, and Ahui Nan on the right. Each division was fifty thousand tribesmen.\n\nWhen the scouts made out that the Mang armies were coming, they at once told Zhuge Liang, who called Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan to his side, but gave them no orders.\n\nNext he sent for Wang Ping and Ma Zheng, and said to them, \"I cannot send Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan against the Mangs because they do not know the country. You two are to go, one against each wing, and the two veteran warriors shall support you. Get your troops ready and start tomorrow at dawn.\"\n\nWang Ping and Ma Zheng took the orders and went out.\n\nThen Zhang Yi and Zhang Ni were given orders: \"You two are to march against the center army. You are to act with Wang Ping and Ma Zheng tomorrow. I want to send Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan, but I am still afraid they do not know the country well.\"\n\nZhang Yi and Zhang Ni also received the orders and went out.\n\nZhao Zilong and Wei Yan now began to feel hurt.\n\nNoticing this, Zhuge Liang said, \"I have no wish to pass you over, you two, but I fear that if you get too deeply into the country and should fall victims to the Mangs, it will have an ill effect on the others.\"\n\n\"But what if we did know the geography of the country?\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"All I say to you is to be careful how you do anything,\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe two soldiers left and went together to the camp of Zhao Zilong.\n\nZhao Zilong said, \"We are greatly ashamed at being put in the background because we do not know the country. We cannot bear this.\"\n\n\"Then let us ride out and survey,\" said his colleague. \"Let us capture a few natives and make them show us the road, and let us defeat these tribesmen.\"\n\nThey rode off. Before they had gone far they saw a cloud of dust in the distance. Climbing a hill to get a better view, they saw a small party of mounted Mangs coming toward them. The two waited till they were near and then suddenly burst out. The Mangs, taken entirely by surprise, ran away all but a few, who yielded themselves prisoners. The two warriors returned to camp.\n\nThe prisoners were given wine and food. When they had satisfied their hunger, they were questioned.\n\nSaid they, \"The camp of Chief Jinhua Sanjie is just in front, just by the entrance to the mountains. Near the camp, running east and west, is the Five Valleys. The camps of the other two chiefs \u2014 Dongtu Na and Ahui Nan \u2014 are behind.\"\n\nHaving listening to this information, Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan got together five thousand troops, took the captured men as guides, and marched out about the second watch. It was a clear night, and the moon gave light to march by.\n\nThe first camp was reached about the fourth watch. The Mang soldiers were already awake and preparing their morning meal, as they intended to attack at daylight. Suddenly Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan gave a signal of attack, and their troops poured forward. The vigorous and unexpected attack of the two generals threw the camp into confusion. Zhao Zilong fought into the center of the camp and encountered Jinhua Sanjie. Both leaders engaged, and Zhao Zilong slew Jinhua Sanjie by a spear thrust. Then Zhao Zilong dismounted and cut off the head of the Chief.\n\nNext Wei Yan took half the force and went west to the second camp, while Zhao Zilong marched east to the third one. By the time they reached the camps, day had dawned. The Mangs also had news of Wei Yan's coming, and drew up the camp to oppose. But when they had got clear, there was a great uproar behind them at the stockade gates, and confusion followed. The reason was the arrival of Wang Ping. Between the two bodies, the Mangs were beaten. Their Chief, Dongtu Na, forced his way out and got away. Wei Yan's soldiers followed, but they could not catch him.\n\nWhen Zhao Zilong led his troops east to attack the third camp in the rear, Ma Zheng made an attack on the front. They scored a success, but the Chief Ahui Nan escaped.\n\nThey returned to headquarters, and Zhuge Liang said, \"The three parties of Mangs have fled, and Dongtu Na and Ahui Nan escaped. Where is the head of Jinhua Sanjie?\"\n\nZhao Zilong produced it. At the same time he reported: \"Dongtu Na and Ahui Nan escaped by abandoning their horses and going over the hills. Therefore, they could not be followed.\"\n\n\"They are already prisoners,\" said Zhuge Liang with a laugh.\n\nThe fighting men could not credit it. But soon after Zhang Ni brought out Dongtu Na; and Zhang Yi, Ahui Nan.\n\nWhen the Shu leaders expressed surprise and admiration, Zhuge Liang said, \"I had studied the map and knew the positions of the camps. I taunted Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan into making a supreme effort into the camp of Jinhua Sanjie. At the same time I sent other forces under Wang Ping and Ma Zheng, with the purpose to support Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan and to force Dongtu Na and Ahui Nan to flee. I felt certain the two chiefs would run away along those small roads, and I set soldiers under Zhang Ni and Zhang Yi on those roads to wait for them. They also were supported.\"\n\nThey all bowed, saying, \"The Prime Minister's calculations are divine and incomprehensible.\"\n\nThe two captive chiefs were then called. As soon as they appeared, Zhuge Liang loosed their bonds, gave them refreshments, and released them, bidding them offend no more. They thanked him for their liberty, and disappeared along a by-road.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said to his generals, \"Tomorrow Meng Huo will come in person to make an attack. We shall probably capture him.\"\n\nThen he summoned Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan and gave them orders. They left, each with five thousand troops. Next he sent Wang Ping and Guan Suo away with instructions. And then he and other officers sat in his tent to wait for the result.\n\nThe King of the Mangs was sitting in his tent when the scouts told him that his three chiefs had been captured and their armies scattered. It made him very angry, and he quickly got his army ready to march. Soon he met Wang Ping and Guan Suo, and, when the armies were arrayed, Wang Ping rode out to the front, saber in his hand. The flaunting banners of the array formation of his foes then opened out, and he saw their ranks. Many generals were on horseback on both sides. In the middle was the King, who advanced to the front. He wore a golden, inlaid headdress; his belt bore a lion's face as clasp; his boots had pointed toes and were green; he rode a frizzy-haired horse the color of a red hare; he carried at his waist a pair of swords chased with the pine amber.\n\nHe looked haughtily at his foes, and then, turning to his generals, said, \"It has always been said that Zhuge Liang is a wonderful strategist, but I see that is false. Look at this array with its banners all in confusion and the ranks in disorder. There is not a weapon among all the swords and spears better than ours. If I had only realized this before, I would have fought them long ago. Who dares go out and capture a Shu general to show them what sort of warriors we are?\"\n\nAt once a general rode toward the leader Wang Ping. His name was Mangya Chang. His weapon was a huge headsman's sword, and he rode a dun pony. Riding up to Wang Ping, the two engaged.\n\nWang Ping only fought a short time, and then fled. Meng Huo at once ordered his troops on in quick pursuit, and the troops of Shu retreated seven miles or so before the Mangs were near enough to fight. Just as the Mangs thought their enemies were in their power, a great shouting arose and two cohorts appeared, Zhang Ni from the left and Zhang Yi from the right, and attacked. The Mangs could not retreat, and as the force under Wang Ping and Guan Suo also turned upon them, the Mangs were surrounded and lost the day. Meng Huo and some of his generals fought their way out and made for the Brocade Mountains. The troops of Shu followed and forced them forward, and presently there appeared, in front, Zhao Zilong.\n\nMeng Huo hastily changed his route to go deeper into the mountains, but Zhao Zilong's soldiers spread around, and the Mangs could not make a stand. Here many were captured. Meng Huo and a few horsemen got away into a valley, which, however, soon became too narrow for the horses to advance. Meng Huo then left his horse and crawled up the mountains, but very soon he fell upon Wei Yan, who had been sent with five hundred troops to lie in wait in that very valley. Meng Huo tried to struggle but soon was captured.\n\nThe King and his followers were taken to the main camp, where Zhuge Liang was waiting with wine and meat ready for the captives. But his tent was now guarded by soldiers all well armed with snow-glittering weapons, beside the lictors bearing the golden axes, a present from the Emperor, and other insignia of rank. The feather-hatted drummers and clarion players were in front and behind, and the Imperial Guards were extended on both sides. The whole was very imposing and awe-inspiring.\n\nZhuge Liang was seated at the top of it all and watched the captives as they came forward in crowds. When they were all assembled, he ordered their bonds to be loosed, and then he addressed them.\n\n\"You are all simple and well-disposed people who have been led into trouble by Meng Huo. I know your fathers and mothers, your brothers and wives, and your children are anxiously watching from the doorways for your return, and they are cut to dear suffering that the news of defeat and capture has reached their ears. They are weeping bitter tears for you. And so I will set you all free to go home and comfort them.\"\n\nAfter they had been given food and wine and a present of grain, he sent them all away. They went off grateful for the kindness shown them, and they wept as they thanked Zhuge Liang.\n\nThen the guards were told to bring the King before the tent. He came, bound, being hustled forward. He knelt in front of the Commander-in-Chief.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"Why did you rebel after the generous treatment you have received from our Emperor?\"\n\n\"The two River Lands belonged to others, and your lord took it from them by force, and gave himself the title of Emperor. My people have lived here for ages, and you and your cohorts invaded my country without the least excuse. How can you talk of rebellion to me?\"\n\n\"You are my prisoner. Will you submit or are you still contumacious?\"\n\n\"Why should I submit? You happened to find me in a narrow place. That is all.\"\n\n\"If I release you, what then?\"\n\n\"If you release me I shall return, and when I have set my army in order, I shall come to fight you again. However, if you catch me once more, I will submit.\"\n\nThe King's bonds were loosed. He was clothed and refreshed, given a horse and caparisons, and sent with a guide to his own camp.\n\n\u2003Once more the captured chieftain is let go,\n\n\u2003To yield tribesmen are ever slow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Crossing River Lu: The Mang King Is Bound The Second Time; Recognizing A Pretend Surrender: Meng Huo Is Captured The Third Time.\n\nThe officers did not approve of the release of the King of the Mangs, and they came to the tent of Zhuge Liang and said, \"Meng Huo is the most important personage of all the Mangs, and his capture is the key to restoring order in the south. Why then, O Minister, did you release him?\"\n\n\"I can capture him just as easily as I can get something out of my pocket. What I want to do is to overcome and win his heart, so that peace may follow of itself.\"\n\nThey listened, but they had no great confidence in the success of the policy of conciliation.\n\nIn the meantime Meng Huo had reached the River Lu, and there he fell in with some of his defeated leaders, who were trying to get news of their King's fate.\n\nThey were surprised, but glad, to see him, and asked, \"How were Your Highness able to get back?\"\n\nThe King lied, saying, \"They confined me in a tent, and I broke out in the night. I slew more than ten guards and ran. And then I met one of their sentries, killed him, and that is how I got this horse.\"\n\nThey never doubted his word, and very joyfully they hurried him over the river to a camping place. Then all the notables assembled from the various ravines, and the soldiers that had escaped death were mustered and got into shape as a fighting force.\n\nThe two leaders in the late campaign, Dongtu Na and Ahui Nan, were in one of the ravines, and Meng Huo sent to ask them to come. They were afraid, but they could not disobey, and they came with an escort.\n\nWhen all had assembled, the King proclaimed as follows: \"I know Zhuge Liang is too full of ruses for us to conquer him in a fight; we should only fall victims to other base devices. However, we must remember that his soldiers have marched far and the weather is sultry, which are factors in our favor. Beside, River Lu is our rampart. We will have boats and rafts on the south side, and we will build a mud wall. With such good defenses we can afford to wait and see what the enemy intends.\"\n\nHis speech met with approval, and his plan was carried out. The wall was supported by the hills and strengthened by fighting turrets, upon which were placed large bows and crossbows and arrows and stones. The defenses looked as if they were permanent. Moreover, each ravine sent supplies in plenty. And having made these preparations, Meng Huo felt comfortable and safe.\n\nZhuge Liang had advanced, and his leading division was now close to the river.\n\nSpies came back to report: \"No boats or rafts can be found to cross, and the current is too strong to think of fording. Beside, we can see the formidable defenses on the farther bank, the mud wall and the turrets all fully manned.\"\n\nThe weather was burning hot, for it was the fifth month, and the soldiers could not tolerate their armor nor even their clothing.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang had inspected the river, he returned to his tent and assembled his officers, to whom he read this order: \"The enemy is securely established on the south bank ready to repel our attack. Yet, having come so far, we cannot return empty. For the present you will all seek what shelter you can find in the forests, and rest and refresh your troops.\"\n\nThen he sent Lu Kai to a distance to select a cool stretch of thirty miles, and there he made four stockades. Within the stockades he built huts for the soldiers and sheds for the horses, so that they were sheltered from the intense heat. The four camps were stationed by Wang Ping, Zhang Ni, Zhang Yi, and Guan Suo.\n\nHowever, Jiang Wan, observed these shelters and went to Zhuge Liang, saying, \"These shelters of Lu Kai are very unsuitable. He has made the same mistake as that which led to the defeat of the First Ruler at the hands of Wu. He has not taken into account the surroundings of the stockades; and if the Mangs should come over and start a fire, there could be no rescue.\"\n\n\"Do not anticipate trouble,\" said the Commander-in-Chief, smiling. \"I have provided against all such dangers.\"\n\nJiang Wan did not know what the chief meant to do, but he said no more. Then Ma Dai arrived from the River Lands, and he brought summer medicines and further supplies of grain. He saw Zhuge Liang, and then proceeded to distribute the supplies he had brought according to orders.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said, \"What force have you brought?\"\n\n\"Three thousand,\" replied Ma Dai.\n\n\"My people are weary and worn out. I want to use yours. You have no objections?\"\n\n\"Of course not. They are equally government troops. They are ready even to die for you if you wish.\"\n\n\"This Meng Huo is established on the river, and we have no means of crossing. But I am anxious to intercept his supplies, so that his troops may mutiny.\"\n\n\"How can you do it?\"\n\n\"Some fifty miles lower down River Lu there is a place called Shakou, where the current is slow and shallow because of sand. You could cross there on rafts. I wish you and your soldiers to cross and cut the road of supplies. After that you are to arrange with the two leaders \u2014 Dongtu Na and Ahui Nan \u2014 whose lives I spared, to be your allies on the inside, and we shall succeed.\"\n\nMa Dai went off gladly enough, and marched his troops to Shakou, where they set about the crossing at once. And as the water was shallow, they did not trouble to make rafts, but just tucked up their clothes and waded in. But half-way across, the men began to fall over; and when they had been rescued and taken to the bank, many of them began to bleed from the nose and mouth and died. In great alarm, Ma Dai sent hasty messages to Zhuge Liang, who called in the native guides and asked what this meant.\n\nThey told him, \"It happens so every year. In the hot season, poisonous miasma collects over the waters of the River Lu, especially during the heat of the day. Anyone who drinks the water will surely die. Travelers who wish to cross have to wait till night, because the cooler waters do not breathe out the poisonous vapors. Further, the crossing should be attempted on a full stomach.\"\n\nZhuge Liang bade the local guides point out the best crossing place. He sent five hundred well-seasoned soldiers to Ma Dai to lash together poles into rafts at Shakou, and in the night the crossing was safely accomplished. Further, the guides then led two thousand men of Shu over to where the grain road of the Mangs led through a narrow valley, called Jiashan Gorge, where, for part of the way, only single file was possible as the road was only wide enough for a soldier and a horse.\n\nMa Dai at once occupied this valley and stationed a force there. And a stockade was put up with tents inside. Presently a convoy of grain came along, and it was captured, more than a hundred wagons. The guards ran off to Meng Huo's great camp and told him.\n\nMeng Huo, thinking all was safe during the hot season, was enjoying himself. Wine and music were the order of the day, and military matters were far from his thoughts. In his cups he admitted Zhuge Liang was ruseful, but said his army had nothing to fear.\n\nSaid he, \"If I attempt to oppose Zhuge Liang, I shall certainly fall a victim to some wile of his. However, my waiting policy is a safe one. With our defenses, and the river to back them, we can wait for the heat to overcome these men of Shu, who cannot stand the hot season. They will have to retreat, and then we can harass them. And we will capture this Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nHe lay back and laughed at the thought.\n\nHowever, one chief, more prudent than the others, stood forth and said, \"Remember the shallows at Shakou. It would be very serious if the soldiers of Shu got across there secretly. It ought to be guarded.\"\n\n\"You belong to these areas. Do you not know that I want the enemy to try to get across there? Why, they will all perish in the water.\"\n\n\"But what if the natives tell them to cross only in the night?\"\n\n\"Do not be so anxious,\" said Meng Huo. \"Our own people will not help the enemy that far.\"\n\nIt was just then that intelligence came: \"The troops of Shu, unknown in number, have crossed the river and, moreover, have seized the Jiashan Gorge. The flags show the words 'General Who Pacifies The North, Ma Dai'.\"\n\nMeng Huo affected indifference.\n\n\"This sort of fellow is not worth talking about,\" said he.\n\nHe sent General Mangya Chang with three thousands troops to recapture the gorge and reopen the grain road.\n\nWhen Ma Dai saw the Mang soldiers approaching, he placed two thousand troops in front of the hills and drew up the troops in formal array. Then Mangya Chang rode out to give battle. This was but a small engagement, as the general of the tribespeople fell at the first stroke of Ma Dai's sword. The Mangs ran away at once.\n\nThey returned to the King's camp and told him what had happened. Whereupon he called up all his generals and asked for another to go up against Ma Dai.\n\n\"I will go,\" cried Dongtu Na.\n\nThe King gave him three thousand troops. After he had gone, Meng Huo thought it would be wise to keep others from crossing the river. So he sent a force of three thousand under Ahui Nan to guard Shakou.\n\nDongtu Na duly arrived at the gorge and made a camp. Ma Dai came out to meet him. Among the soldiers in his cohort were some who recognized the leader of the Mangs and told Ma Dai certain things about how he had been captured and liberated.\n\nSo Ma Dai galloped toward him, shouting, \"O you ingrate! How could you forget the debt to the Prime Minister? Have you known no shame?\"\n\nDongtu Na was very greatly ashamed and turned red in the face, and turned his horse before striking a blow. Ma Dai followed and fell on, slaying many of the Mangs. Then both sides withdrew.\n\nDongtu Na went back and told the King that Ma Dai was too strong for him.\n\nBut Meng Huo was angry, and cried, \"You are a traitor! I know Zhuge Liang was good to you, and that is why you would not fight.\"\n\nMeng Huo ordered Dongtu Na out to execution. However, the notables and chiefs interceded, and the death penalty was remitted, but the unhappy leader was severely beaten, one hundred strokes with the heavy staff.\n\nThe chiefs were mostly on the side of the beaten general and against the King's policy.\n\nThey went to the tent of Dongtu Na and said, \"Though we live in the Mang country, we have never had any thoughts of rebellion against the Imperial Government, nor has the Middle Kingdom ever encroached upon our land. We must own that Meng Huo's superior power forced us into this rising, and we could not help ourselves. Zhuge Liang is too clever for us, and no one can guess what he may do. Even Cao Cao and Sun Quan fear him; how much more must we? Moreover, we have received kindness at his hands and owe him our lives. We ought to show our gratitude. Now let us at all risks slay this Meng Huo and submit to Zhuge Liang so that our people may not suffer.\"\n\nDongtu Na said, \"I do not know your inner sentiments.\"\n\nAt this, all those who had been prisoners and released cried with one voice, \"We desire to go to Meng Huo.\"\n\nThereupon Dongtu Na took in his hand a sharp sword, placed himself at the head of more than a hundred malcontents, and rushed into the great camp. At that moment Meng Huo was, as usual, intoxicated and lay in his tent. The mutineers rushed in. They found two generals on guard.\n\n\"You also received kindness from Zhuge Liang and ought to repay it,\" cried Dongtu Na.\n\nThey replied, \"You do not have to slay him. Let us carry him a prisoner to the Prime Minister.\"\n\nSo they bound the King securely, took him down to the river, and crossed in a boat to the northern bank. There they halted, while they sent a messenger to Zhuge Liang.\n\nNow Zhuge Liang knew what had been happening, and he had issued orders for every camp to prepare their weapons. All being ready, he told the chiefs to bring up their prisoner, and bade the others return to their camps. Dongtu Na went first and told the matter to Zhuge Liang, who praised his zeal and gave him presents. Then he retired with the chiefs, and the executioners brought in Meng Huo.\n\n\"You said once before that if you were captured again, you would give in,\" said Zhuge Liang, smiling. \"Now will you yield?\"\n\n\"This capture is not your work,\" replied Meng Huo. \"It is the work of these minions of mine who want to hurt me. I will not yield on this.\"\n\n\"If I free you again, what then?\"\n\n\"I am a Mang, and so I am not wholly ignorant of war. If you, O Minister, let me return to my ravines, I will muster another army and fight a decisive battle with you. If you capture me again, then I will incline my heart and own myself beaten and yield. I will not go back on my promise again.\"\n\n\"If you refuse to yield next time you are captured, I shall hardly pardon you.\"\n\nAt Zhuge Liang's orders the cords were loosed and refreshments were brought for the prisoner.\n\n\"Remember,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"I have never failed yet. I have never failed to win a battle or to take a city I have assaulted. Why do you Mangs not yield?\"\n\nMeng Huo only nodded his head; he said nothing. After the wine, Zhuge Liang and Meng Huo rode round the camps together, and the King saw all the arrangements and the piles of stores and heaps of weapons.\n\nAnd after the inspection Zhuge Liang said, \"You are silly not to yield to me. You see my veteran soldiers, my able generals, my stores of all kinds and war gear. How can you hope to prevail against me? If you will yield, I will inform the Emperor, and you shall retain your kingship, and your sons and grandsons shall succeed as perpetual guardians of the Mang country. Do you not think it would be well?\"\n\nMeng Huo replied, \"If I did yield, the people of my valleys would not be content. If you release me once more, I will see to it that my own people keep the peace and bring them round to unanimity of feeling, and then they will not oppose any more.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was glad, and they returned to the main camp to feast until dusk, when Meng Huo took his leave. Zhuge Liang ordered a craft and went to see him across River Lu.\n\nBut Meng Huo's first act on his return to his own camp was to send one of his people to Dongtu Na's and Ahui Nan's camps, and pretend to ask them to come to meet a messenger from Zhuge Liang. When the two generals came, Meng Huo ordered assassins who had been placed hidden to do away with the two leaders. Their corpses were thrown into a gully. Then he sent his friends to guard the most important strategic points, while he marched to fight a battle with Ma Dai. But when he got near the valley, he saw no signs of the enemy.\n\nHe questioned the inhabitants, and they said, The Shu army, with all their stores, recrossed the river last night and joined the main body in the northern bank.\n\nMeng Huo then returned to his own ravine and discussed matters with his brother, Meng You, saying, \"I know all the details of the enemy's force from what I saw in their camp.\"\n\nAnd Meng Huo gave his brother certain instructions, which Meng You at once began to carry out. Meng You loaded a hundred men with gold and jewels and pearls and ivory and rhinoceros horn, crossed River Lu, and was on his way to the main camp of the Shu army, when he heard the sound of drums and a cohort under Ma Dai poured out to stop him. Meng You did not expect to meet an enemy, and was surprised. But Ma Dai only asked what he had come for. And when he had heard, Meng You was detained while a message was sent to Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe messenger arrived while a council was in progress, the matter under discussion being how to pacify the Mangs.\n\nThey announced, The brother of Meng Huo has come bearing gifts of gold and pearls.\n\nZhuge Liang turned to Ma Su, saying, \"Know you why this man has come?\"\n\n\"I dare not say plainly, but let me write it,\" said Ma Su.\n\n\"Write it, then.\"\n\nSo Ma Su wrote and handed the paper to his chief, who had no sooner read it than he clapped his hands with joy, crying, \"What you say is exactly what I think. But you may know I have already made arrangements for the capture of Meng Huo.\"\n\nThen Zhao Zilong was called, and some orders were whispered into his ear. Next Wei Yan came, and he also went off with secret orders. Wang Ping, Ma Zheng, and Guan Suo also came, and left with particular instructions. All these things done, the bearer of gifts was called.\n\nMeng You came and bowed low at the door of the tent, saying, \"The brother of my house, Meng Huo, having received great kindness at your hands in sparing his life, feels bound to offer a paltry gift. He has presumed to collect a few pearls and some gold and other trifling jewels by way of something to give your soldiers. And hereafter he will send tribute to your Emperor.\"\n\n\"Where is your brother at this moment?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Having been the recipient of your great bounty, he has gone to the Silver Pit Ravine to collect some treasures. He will soon return.\"\n\n\"How many soldiers have you brought?\"\n\n\"Only about a hundred. I should not dare to bring any large number. They are just porters.\"\n\nThey were brought in for Zhuge Liang's inspection. They had blue eyes and swarthy faces, auburn hair and purple beards. They wore earrings, their hair was fuzzy, and they went barefoot. They were tall and powerful.\n\nZhuge Liang made them sit down, and bade his generals press them to drink and treat them well and compliment them.\n\nMeanwhile, Meng Huo was anxious about the reception that would be given to his brother and the treatment of his gifts, so he sat in his tent expecting the messenger at any moment. Then two men came, and he questioned them eagerly.\n\nThey said, \"The presents have been accepted, and even the porters have been invited to drink in the tent and have been regaled with beef and flesh in plenty. O King, your brother sends the news that all will be ready at the second watch for the attack. He will support you from within.\"\n\nThis was pleasing news, and Meng Huo prepared his thirty thousand troops ready to march out to the camp. They were divided into three divisions.\n\nThe King called up his chieftains and notables, and said, \"Let each army carry the means of making fire, and as soon as they arrive let a light be shown as a signal. I am coming to the main camp to capture Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nWith these orders they marched, and they crossed River Lu at sunset. The King, with a hundred generals as escort, pressed on at once toward the main camp of Shu. They met with no opposition. They even found the main gate open, and Meng Huo and his party rode straight in. But the camp was a desert; not a soldier was visible.\n\nMeng Huo rode right up to the large tent and pushed open the flap. It was brilliantly lighted with lamps, and lying about under their light were his brother and all his men, dead drunk. Zhuge Liang had ordered Ma Su and Lu Kai to entertain Meng You and his men with wine and dance performances. The wine they had been pressed to drink while the plays were going on had been heavily drugged, and they had fallen down almost as soon as they had swallowed it. One or two who had recovered a little could not speak: They only pointed to their mouths.\n\nMeng Huo then saw that he had been the simple victim of another ruse. However, he picked up his brother and the others and started off to return to his main army.\n\nBut as he turned, torches began to flash out and drums to beat. The Mangs were frightened and took to their heels. But they were pursued, and the pursuing cohort was led by Wang Ping. The King bore away to the left to escape, but again a cohort appeared in front of him; Wei Yan was there. Meng Huo tried the other side, and was stopped by Zhao Zilong. He was in a trap and attacked on three sides and no fourth to escape by. He abandoned everything, making one wild rush for the River Lu.\n\nAs he reached the river bank, he saw a bark on the river with Mang soldiers on board. Here was safety. He hailed the boat and jumped on board as soon as it touched the bank. No sooner had he embarked than suddenly he was seized and bound. The boat, which Ma Dai had provided and prepared, was part of the general plan, and the Mang soldiers therein were Ma Dai's soldiers disguised.\n\nMany of Meng Huo's troops accepted the chance of surrender held out by Zhuge Liang, who soothed them and treated them well and did not injure one of them.\n\nThe remains of the conflagration were stamped out, and in a short time Ma Dai brought along his prisoner. At the same time Zhao Zilong led in his brother, Meng You. Wei Yan, Ma Su, Wang Ping, and Guan Suo also brought their prisoners, chiefs or notables, to the camp of the Prime Minister.\n\nZhuge Liang looked at the King and laughed.\n\n\"That was but a shallow ruse of yours to send your brother with presents to pretend to submit to me. Did you really think I should not see through it? But here you are once more in my power. Now do you yield?\"\n\n\"I am a prisoner owing to the gluttony of my brother and the power of your poisonous drugs. If I had only played his part myself and left him to support me with soldiers, I should have succeeded. I am the victim of fate and not of my own incapacity. No, I will not yield.\"\n\n\"Remember this is the third time. Why not?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nMeng Huo dropped his head and made no answer.\n\n\"Ah, well. I will let you go once more,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"O Minister, if you will let me and my brother go, we will get together our family and clients and fight you once more. If I am caught that time, then I will confess myself beaten to the ground, and that shall be the end.\"\n\n\"Certainly I shall scarcely pardon you next time,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"You had better be careful. Diligently tackle your Book of Strategy; look over your list of confidants. If you can apply a good plan at the proper moment, you will not have any need for late regrets.\"\n\nMeng Huo and his brother and all the chiefs were released from their bonds. They thanked Zhuge Liang for his clemency and went away.\n\nBy the time the released prisoners had got back to the river, the army of Shu had crossed to the farther side and had captured the Mang defenses, the Shu flags fluttering in the breeze. As Meng Huo passed the camp, he saw Ma Dai sitting in state.\n\nMa Dai pointed his sword at the King as he passed, and said, \"Next time you are caught, you will not escape.\"\n\nWhen Meng Huo came to his own camp, he found Zhao Zilong in possession and all in order. Zhao Zilong was seated beneath the large banner, with his sword drawn, and as the King passed.\n\nZhao Zilong also said, \"Do not presume on the kindness of the Prime Minister because you have been generously treated.\"\n\nMeng Huo grunted and passed on. Just as he was going over the frontier hills, he saw Wei Yan and a company drawn up on the slopes.\n\nWei Yan shouted, \"See to it: We have got into the inmost recesses of your country and have taken all your defensive positions. Yet you are foolish enough to hold out. Next time you are caught, you will be quite destroyed. There will be no more pardons.\"\n\nMeng Huo and his company ran away with their arms over their heads. Each one returned to his own ravine.\n\n\u2003In the fifth moon, when the sun is fierce,\n\n\u2003Marched the army into the wild land,\n\n\u2003To the River Lu, bright and clear,\n\n\u2003But deadly with miasma.\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang the leader cared not,\n\n\u2003Pledged was he to subdue the south,\n\n\u2003Thereby to repay the First Ruler's deference with service.\n\n\u2003Wherefore he attacked the Mangs.\n\n\u2003Yet seven times he freed their captured king.\n\nAfter the crossing of the river, the Shu soldiers were feasted.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang addressed his officers: \"I let Meng Huo see our camp the second time he was our prisoner, because I wanted to tempt him into raiding it. He is something of a soldier, and I dangled our supplies and resources before his eyes, knowing he would try to burn them and that he would send his brother to pretend to submit that thereby he could get into our camp and have a chance to betray us. I have captured and released him three times, trying to win him over. I do not wish to do him any harm. I now explain my policy that you may understand I am not wasting your efforts and you are still to work your best for the government.\"\n\nThey all bowed, and one said, \"O Prime Minister, you are indeed perfect in everyone of the three gifts: Wisdom, benevolence, and valor. Not even Lu Wang or Zhang Liang can equal you!\"\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"How can I expect to equal our men of old? But my trust is in your strength, and together we shall succeed.\"\n\nThis speech of their leader's pleased them all mightily.\n\nIn the meantime Meng Huo, upset at the three captures, hastened home to his own Silver Pit Ravine, whence he sent trusted friends with gifts to the Eight Nations and the Ninety-three Sees and all the Mang quarters and clans to borrow shields and swords and warriors and braves. He got together one hundred thousand soldiers. They all assembled on an appointed day, massing like clouds and sweeping in like mists gathering on the mountains, each and all obeying the commands of the King Meng Huo.\n\nAnd the scouts knew it all, and they told Zhuge Liang, who said, \"This is what I was waiting for, that the Mangs should have an opportunity of knowing our might.\"\n\nThereupon he seated himself in a small carriage and went out to watch.\n\n\u2003O let our enemy's courage glow\n\n\u2003That our greater might may show." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "The Lord of Wuxiang Uses The Fourth Ruse; The King of Mang Is Captured The Fifth Time.\n\nZhuge Liang's small carriage was escorted by only a few horsemen. Hearing that a sluggish river, the West Er River, lay in the way, and having no boat, Zhuge Liang bade the escort cut down some trees and make a raft. They did so, but the raft sank.\n\nSo Zhuge Liang turned to Lu Kai, who said, \"There is close by a mountain covered with bamboos. I have heard of these bamboos, and some are several spans in girth. We can make a bridge of them for the army to cross.\"\n\nSo thirty thousand soldiers were sent to the mountains, where they cut down many thousands of bamboos, and floated them down river. Then at the narrowest point they made a bridge a hundred spans or so in length. Next the main army was brought down to the river and camped in line along the bank. The camp was protected by a moat, crossed by a floating bridge, and a mud rampart. On the south bank they constructed three large stockades so as to prepare for the coming of the Mang soldiers.\n\nThey had not long to wait. Meng Huo was hot with rage and came quickly with an army of one hundred thousand. As soon as he got near the river, he led out ten thousand fierce warriors, armed with big swords and shield, and challenged the first stockade.\n\nZhuge Liang went forth in simple state. He wore a silk cap and a crane-white robe and held in his hand a feather fan. He sat in a four-horse carriage, and his generals rode right and left.\n\nThe King of the Mang was clad in mail of rhinoceros hide and wore a bright red casque. In his left hand he bore a shield, and his right gripped a sword. He rode a red ox. As soon as he saw his enemies, he opened his mouth and poured forth abuse and insults, while his warriors, huge and bold, darted to and fro brandishing their weapons.\n\nZhuge Liang at once ordered the army to retire within the stockades and bar the gates. The Mangs came close up to the stockade and pranced about naked, shouting in derision.\n\nWithin the stockade the Shu generals grew very angry, and they went in a body to see their leader.\n\nThey all said, We volunteer to march out and fight until death!\n\nBut Zhuge Liang would not listen.\n\nPresently he said, \"These men are not submissive to the Imperial Government and are naturally fierce and turbulent. In that mood we are no match for them. But all we have to do is to remain on guard for a few days till their ferocity has spent itself. Then I have a plan that will overcome them.\"\n\nDays passed, and the army of Shu made no move; they only maintained the defensive. Zhuge Liang watched the besiegers from an eminence, and saw the first vigor of their advance give way to careless idleness.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang called together his generals and asked, \"Dare you give battle now?\"\n\nThey all rejoiced at the suggestion. So he called them two by two or one by one and gave them secret orders. Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan went in first. Wang Ping and Ma Zheng followed.\n\nTo Ma Dai he said, \"I am going to abandon these stockades and retire north of the river. As soon as we have crossed, you are to cut loose the floating bridge and move it down the stream so that Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan may cross.\"\n\nTo Zhang Yi he said, \"You are to remain by the camp and light it up at night \u2014 as if it is still occupied. When Meng Huo pursues, then you are to cut off his retreat.\"\n\nLast of all, Guan Suo was to escort Zhuge Liang's carriage.\n\nThe soldiers marched out of the camp at evening, and the lamps were hung up as usual. The Mangs saw this from a distance and dared not attack. But the next morning at dawn Meng Huo led his troops to the stockades and found all was quiet. He went close up and saw they were all empty and bare; not a soldier was there. Grain and fodder lay about among empty carts. All was in confusion, suggesting hasty departure.\n\n\"They have abandoned the camp,\" said Meng You to his brother. \"But this is only a ruse.\"\n\nSaid Meng Huo, \"I think that Zhuge Liang has important news from the capital that has made him leave without his baggage train like this. Either Wu has invaded or Wei has attacked. They left these lamps burning to make us think the camps were occupied, but they ran away leaving everything behind. If we pursue, we cannot go wrong.\"\n\nSo the King urged his army onward, himself heading the leading division. When they reached the bank of the West Er River, they saw on the farther side that the camps were all in order and the banners flying as usual like a brightly tinted cloud of silk. Along the bank stood a wall of cloth. They dared not attack.\n\nMeng Huo said to his brother, \"This means that Zhuge Liang fears lest we may pursue. That is only a temporary halt, and they will retire in a couple of days.\"\n\nThe Mangs camped on the river bank while they sent into the mountains to cut bamboos to make rafts. The boldest of the soldiers were placed in front of the camp till the rafts should be ready to cross. Little did Meng Huo suspect that the army of Shu was already within his borders.\n\nOne day when the wind blew violently, the Mangs saw great flames spring up around them, and at the same time the rolling of drums heralded an attack. The Mangs, instead of going out to meet the enemy, began to force their way out of the Shu attack. Meng Huo became alarmed and fled with all his clans and dependents. They fought their way through and made a dash for their former camp.\n\nJust as they reached it, there appeared a cohort of the enemy led by Zhao Zilong. Meng Huo turned off west and sought refuge in the mountains. But he was fiercely attacked by a cohort under Ma Dai. With a small remnant of followers, he got away into a valley. Soon he saw in the west, north, and south clouds of smoke rising and the glow of torches, so that he was forced to halt. However, the east remained clear, and presently he fled in that direction. As he was crossing the mouth of a gully, he noticed a few horsemen outlined against a thick wood and saw they were escorting a small carriage. And in that carriage sat Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhuge Liang laughed, and said, \"So King of the Mangs has got here! You have been defeated. I have waited for you a long time.\"\n\nMeng Huo angrily turned to his followers and said, \"Thrice have I been the victim of this man's base wiles and have been put to shame. Now chance has sent him across my path, and you must attack him with all your energy. Let us cut him to pieces and those with him.\"\n\nThe Mang horsemen, with Meng Huo shouting to encourage them, pushed forward in hot haste toward the wood. But in a few moments they all stumbled and disappeared into some pits that had been dug in the way. And just then Wei Yan emerged from the wood. One by one the Mangs were pulled out of the pits and bound tight with cords.\n\nZhuge Liang returned to his camp, where the captors of the King could bring in their prisoner. Zhuge Liang busied himself in soothing the other Mang prisoners. Many of the notables and chiefs of the tributaries had betaken themselves to their own ravines and villages with their followers. Many of those who remained came over and yielded to Shu. They were well fed and assured of safety, and allowed to go to their own. They went off gladly enough.\n\nBy and by Zhang Yi brought up the King's brother, Meng You. Zhuge Liang reproached him for his brother's behavior.\n\n\"Your brother is a misguided simpleton. You ought to remonstrate with him and persuade him to change his course. Here you are, a captive for the fourth time. Are you not ashamed? How can you have the effrontery to look anyone in the face?\"\n\nA deep flush of shame passed over Meng You's face, and he threw himself to the earth begging forgiveness.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"If I put you to death, it shall not be today. This time I pardon you, but you are to talk to your brother.\"\n\nSo Meng You was loosed from his bonds and allowed to get up. He went away weeping.\n\nVery soon Wei Yan brought up Meng Huo, and to him Zhuge Liang simulated great rage, saying, \"What can you say now? You see you are in my hands again.\"\n\n\"I am again an unfortunate victim,\" said Meng Huo. \"Once more I have blundered into your net, and now I shall die with unclosed eyes.\"\n\nZhuge Liang shouted to the lictors to take him away and behead him.\n\nMeng Huo never blenched at the sentence, but he turned to his captor and said, \"If you freed me only once more, I would wipe out the shame of all four captures.\"\n\nZhuge Liang smiled at the bold reply and bade the lictors loose his bonds, and the attendants served him with wine. Meng Huo was invited to sit in the commander's tent.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"Four times you have been treated generously and yet you are still defiant. Why?\"\n\n\"Though I am what you call a barbarian, I would scorn to employ your vile ruses. And that is why I remain defiant.\"\n\n\"I have liberated you four times. Do you think you can give battle again?\"\n\n\"If you catch me again, I will incline my heart to yield and I will give everything in my ravine to reward your army. I will also take an oath not to cause any further trouble.\"\n\nZhuge Liang smiled, but let him go. The King thanked him and left.\n\nAs soon as he was set at liberty, Meng Huo got together several thousand of his adherents and went away southward. Before long he fell in with his brother, Meng You, who had got together an army and was on his way to avenge his brother. As soon as they saw each other, the brothers fell upon each other's necks and wept. They related their experiences.\n\nMeng You said, \"We cannot stand against the enemy. We have been defeated several times. Now I think we had better go into the mountains and hide in some dark gully where they cannot find us. Those soldiers of Shu will never stand the summer heat. They must retire.\"\n\n\"Where can we hide?\" asked his brother.\n\n\"I know a valley away southwest from us called 'Bald Dragon Ravine', and the King, Duo Si, is a friend of mine. Let us take refuge with him.\"\n\n\"Very well. Go and arrange it,\" said Meng Huo.\n\nSo Meng You went. When he got there and talked to the chief, King Duo Si lost no time but came out with his soldiers to welcome Meng Huo, who then entered the valley. After the exchange of salutations, Meng Huo explained his case.\n\nDuo Si said, \"O King, rest content. If those men from the River Lands come here, I will see to it that not one goes home. And Zhuge Liang will meet his death here too.\"\n\nNaturally, Meng Huo was pleased. But he wanted to know how his host could feel so secure.\n\nDuo Si said, \"In this ravine there are only two roads, the one you came by and another by the northwest. The road you traveled along is level and soft, and the waters are sweet. Humans and horses may both use it. But if we close the mouth of the ravine with a barricade, then no one, however strong, can get in. The other road is precipitous, dangerous, and narrow. The only path is beset with venomous serpents and scorpions, and as evening comes on there are malarial exhalations which are dangerous till past noon the next day. The road is only practicable between two watches before sunset. Then the water is undrinkable. The road is very difficult.\n\n\"Then again there are four streams actually poisonous. One is called 'The Dumb Spring'. Its water is pleasant to the palate, but it makes people dumb and they die in a few days. A second fountain is called 'The Destruction Spring' and is hot. But if a person bathes therein, his flesh rots till his bones protrude and he dies. The third is 'The Black Spring'. Its water is clear. If it be sprinkled on a person's body, his limbs turn black and presently he dies. The fourth is 'The Weak Spring', ice cold. If a person drink of this water his breath is chilled, he becomes weak as a thread and soon dies. Neither birds nor insects are found in this region, and no one but the Han General Ma Yuan, who was styled General Who Quells the Waves for this exploit, has ever passed. Now the northeast road shall be blocked, and you may hide here perfectly safe from those troops of Shu, for, finding that way blocked, they will try the other road, which is waterless save for the four deadly springs. No matter how many they be, they will perish, and we need no weapons.\"\n\n\"Now indeed I have found a place to live in,\" cried Meng Huo, striking his forehead. Then looking to the north he said, \"Even Zhuge Liang's wonderful cunning will be of no avail. The four springs alone will defeat him and avenge my army.\"\n\nThe two brothers settled down comfortably as guests of King Duo Si, with whom they spent the days in feasting.\n\nIn the meantime, as the Mangs did not appear, Zhuge Liang gave orders to leave the West Er River and push south. It was then the sixth month, and blazing hot. A poet sang about the bitter heat of the south:\n\n\u2003The hills are sere, the valleys dry,\n\n\u2003A raging heat fills all the sky,\n\n\u2003Throughout the whole wide universe\n\n\u2003No spot exists where heat is worse.\n\n\u2003Another poem runs:\n\n\u2003The glowing sun darts out fierce rays,\n\n\u2003No cloud gives shelter from the blaze.\n\n\u2003In parching heat there pants a crane,\n\n\u2003The whale swims through the hissing main.\n\n\u2003The brook's cool margin now I love,\n\n\u2003Or idle stroll through bamboo grove.\n\n\u2003I would not march to deserts far\n\n\u2003In leathern jerkin donned for war.\n\nJust at the moment of setting out southward, the spies brought news of Meng Huo's retreat: \"Meng Huo has fled into the Bald Dragon Ravine, and there he has barricaded the entrance. The valley is garrisoned; the hills are precipitous and even impassable.\"\n\nSo Zhuge Liang called in Lu Kai and questioned him, but he did not know exactly the conditions.\n\nThen out spoke Jiang Wan, saying, \"Meng Huo's repeated captures have broken his spirit so that he dare not take the field again. Our soldiers are exhausted with this intense heat, and little is to be gained by prolonging the campaign. The best move would be to return to our own country.\"\n\n\"If we do this, we shall fall victims to Meng Huo's scheme,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"If we retreated, he would certainly follow. Beside, having advanced so far, it would be fruitless to turn back now.\"\n\nWang Ping was sent on with the advanced guard and some of the Mangs as guides to seek an entrance on the northwest. They found the road and came to the first spring \u2014 the Dumb Spring \u2014 , of which the thirsty men and horses drank freely.\n\nWang Ping returned to report his success, but by the time he reached camp, he and all his soldiers were speechless. They could only point to their mouths.\n\nZhuge Liang knew they had been poisoned, and was alarmed. He went forward in his light chariot to find out the cause. He came to the spring. The water was very deep and dark green. A mass of vapor hung about the surface rising and falling. They would not touch the water. Zhuge Liang went up the hills to look around, but could see nothing except a rampart of mountains. A deep silence hung over all, unbroken by the cry even of a bird. He was perplexed.\n\nPresently he noticed an old temple away up among the crags. By the aid of the lianas and creepers he managed to clamber up, and in a chamber hewn out of the rock he saw the figure of an officer. Beside it was a tablet saying the temple was dedicated to Ma Yuan, the famous general who had preceded him in that country. The natives had erected it to sacrifice to the leader who had headed the campaign against the Mangs.\n\nZhuge Liang, much impressed, bowed before the image of the great leader, and said, \"Your humble servant received a sacred trust, the protection of the son of the First Ruler. That son, the present Emperor, sent him here to subdue the Mangs that the land might be free from peril when he decided to attack Wei and take possession of Wu and thereby restore the glory of Han. But the soldiers are ignorant of the country, and some of them have drunk of a poisonous spring so that they have become dumb. Your servant earnestly prays your honored spirit, out of regard for the kindness and justice of the present Emperor, to reveal your spiritual character and manifest your holiness by safeguarding and assisting the army.\"\n\nHaving prayed thus, Zhuge Liang left the temple. While seeking some native whom he might question, he saw in the distance, on a hill opposite, an aged man leaning on a staff. He approached, and as he drew nearer, Zhuge Liang noted his extraordinary appearance. When he had reached the temple, Zhuge Liang asked the venerable visitor to walk in. After the salutations, the old man sat on the stones, and Zhuge Liang opened the conversation with the usual questions.\n\nThe old gentleman replied, \"Sir Minister, I know you well by repute, and am happy to meet you. Many of the Mangs owe their lives to you, and all have been deeply impressed by your kindness.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang returned to the matter nearest his heart, the mystery of the spring.\n\nThe old man told him, \"That is the Dumb Spring that your soldiers have drunk, and they will die in a few days. Besides that, there are other three poisonous streams called Destruction Spring, Black Spring, and Weak Spring. All miasma gathers there in the four streams, and it only vaporizes during the two watch before sunset.\"\n\n\"In short, the Mangs cannot be conquered,\" said Zhuge Liang when the old man had finished. \"And Wu cannot be repressed, nor Wei overcome. And the Hans cannot be restored. So, I fail in the task set me by my Prince: I wish that I might die.\"\n\n\"Be not so cast down, O Minister,\" said the aged one. \"I can lead you to a place where you may counteract all this.\"\n\n\"I would ask for your instruction, Venerable One,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"What exalted advice have you to confer upon me? I hope you will instruct me.\"\n\n\"West of this, not far off, is a valley, and seven miles from its entrance is a stream called the 'Spring of Eternal Peace', near which there lives a recluse known as the Hermit of the Stream. He has not left the valley these twenty years. Behind his hut there gushes out a spring of water, called the 'Spring of Peace and Joy'. This is the antidote to your poison. Bathing in its waters is a cure for skin diseases and for malaria. Moreover, near the hut grows an herb called the 'garlic-leaved fragrance'. Chewing a leaf of this safeguards one from malaria. You can do no better than go to the hut of the recluse forthwith and get these remedies.\"\n\nZhuge Liang humbly thanked his aged counselor, and said, \"Venerable Sir, I am profoundly affected by your merciful kindness and compassion. May I ask again by what name may call you?\"\n\nThe old man rose and entered the temple, saying, \"I am the Spirit of this mountain, sent by Ma Yuan to guide you.\"\n\nAs he said this, he shouted at the solid rock behind the temple, and it opened of itself and let him in.\n\nZhuge Liang's astonishment was beyond words. He made another obeisance to the Spirit of the temple and went down by the way he had come. Then he returned to his camp.\n\nNext day, bearing incense and gifts, Wang Ping and his stricken men went west to the spot which the old man had indicated. They luckily found the valley and followed its narrow road till they came to a small, farm-like enclosure, where tall pines and lofty cypresses, luxuriant bamboos, and gorgeous flowers sheltered a few simple huts. An exquisite perfume pervaded the whole place.\n\nZhuge Liang rejoiced to recognize the spot and at once knocked at the door.\n\nA lad answered his knock, and Zhuge Liang was telling his name when the host came out quickly, saying, \"Surely my visitor is the Prime Minister of the Han Dynasty?\"\n\nZhuge Liang saw at the door a man with a bamboo comb holding back his hair, grass shoes on his feet, and a robe of white girded in by a black girdle. He had green eyes and yellowed hair.\n\n\"Great Scholar, how did you know who I was?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"How could I not have heard of your expedition to the south?\"\n\nHe invited Zhuge Liang to enter.\n\nWhen they had seated themselves in their relative positions as host and guest, Zhuge Liang said, \"My former Prince, the First Ruler, confided to me the care of his son and successor. That son, now Emperor, gave me a command to lead an army to this country, get the Mangs on our side, and spread our culture among them. But now to my disappointment Meng Huo, the King, has hidden himself in the Bald Dragon Ravine, and some of my soldiers on the way to seek him drank of a certain fountain and are dumb. But last evening the former leader of an expedition, Ma Yuan, manifested his sacred presence and told me that you, Exalted Sir, had a remedy for this evil, and I pray you of your pity to give me of the potent fluid whereby my soldiers' lives may be saved.\"\n\nThe recluse replied, \"I am only a worthless old man of the wild woods and unworthy of the visit of such as you, O Minister. The water you desire flows out at the back of my cottage, and you may take what you will of it.\"\n\nThe serving lad then showed Wang Ping and his dumb companions to the Spring of Peace and Joy, and he dipped up the waters for them to drink. As soon as they had drunk, they coughed up some poisoned mucus and could speak. The lad also led the soldiers to the Spring of Eternal Peace where they could bathe.\n\nIn the cottage the recluse regaled Zhuge Liang with tea made of cypress seeds and a conserve of pine flowers.\n\nHe also told his guest, saying, \"In this region, the lands are full of serpents and scorpions, and the lily flowers blown into the springs by the wind make them unfit to drink. However, if you dig wells, you will find good water.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang begged some of the garlic-leaved herb as an antidote against malaria. The recluse said the soldiers could pluck as much as they wanted. And so everyone put a leaf in his mouth and thus became malaria-proof.\n\nZhuge Liang, with a low bow then begged to be told the name of his benefactor.\n\n\"I am Meng Huo's eldest brother,\" said the recluse, smiling. \"My name is Meng Jie.\"\n\nZhuge Liang started.\n\n\"Do not be afraid,\" said the recluse. \"Let me explain. We were three brothers of the same parents, the eldest being myself. Our parents are both dead. My brother Meng Huo, being headstrong and vicious, has never been amenable to culture. I have talked to him many times, but he kept his own course. Finally, under an assumed name, I retired to this spot. I am ashamed for my brother's rebellion, which has put you, O Minister, to the trouble of making this expedition into a barren country, but it has given me the privilege of seeing you. For my responsibility in this I deserve to die a thousand times, as I own to your face, and I beg your pardon.\"\n\nZhuge Liang sighed, saying, \"Now I believe that story of the two brothers \u2014 Robber Liu Zhi and Noble Liu Xiahui. This is the same thing over again. People renowned for villainy and virtue may come from the same stock.\"\n\nThen he said to his host, \"Would you wish me to represent your merits to the Emperor and get you created a king?\"\n\n\"How can you think I desire honors or wealth when I am here because of my contempt for all such things?\"\n\nZhuge Liang then wished to make him certain presents, but the recluse would have none of them.\n\n\u2003So taking leave of his host, Zhuge Liang went back to his camp.\n\n\u2003In the southern expedition when the Mangs were subdued,\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang found a high-born recluse in a shady solitude.\n\n\u2003Up till then the gloomy forests were thought destitute of men,\n\n\u2003That no curling smoke wreath ever floated upwards from the glen.\n\nAs soon as Zhuge Liang reached camp, he set the soldiers digging for water. They dug to a great depth but found none; nor were they more successful when they tried other places. They were very discouraged.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang in the depths of the night burned incense and prayed to God: \"Unworthy as is thy servant Zhuge Liang, he has received favor from the Great Han and now has been ordered to subdue the Mangs. Alas! Now our water is spent and my soldiers and animals are parched with thirst. If Thy will be to preserve the line of Hans, then give, I beseech Thee, sweet water; but if their course is run, then may Thy servant and those with him die in this place.\"\n\n\u2003The morning after this prayer the wells were full of sweet water.\n\n\u2003The Mangs must be conquered; Zhuge Liang led a great array,\n\n\u2003Though his skill was superhuman, yet he held the righteous way;\n\n\u2003As the wells gave forth sweet water when Geng Gong's head bowed full low,\n\n\u2003So the reverent prayers of Zhuge Liang made the lower springs to flow.\n\nThe soldiers' spirits revived with the supply of water, and the army soon advanced by hill paths to the Valley of the Bald Dragon, where they camped. When Meng Huo heard the news, he was greatly taken aback.\n\n\"These troops do not appear to have suffered either thirst or fever,\" said he. \"Our springs have lost their power.\"\n\nKing Duo Si heard it, but doubted. He and Meng Huo ascended into a high hill whence they could see their enemies. They saw no signs of illness or distress. All went on calmly and quietly in the camps, water carrying and cooking, eating and attending to the cattle. Duo Si's hair stood on end as he looked at them.\n\n\"These are not human soldiers,\" said he, shivering. \"They must be sent from Heaven.\"\n\n\"Our two brothers will fight one fierce battle with these troops of Shu and die therein,\" said Meng Huo, \"We cannot wait calmly to be put into bonds.\"\n\n\"But, O King, if your army should be beaten, my whole family will also perish. Let us encourage the people of the ravines. Let us kill bullocks and slaughter horses to feed them, and urge them to go through fire and water to rush right up to the camp of the enemy and seize upon victory.\"\n\nSo there was great feasting before the Mangs took the field. Just as this was going on, there arrived one Yang Fang, King of twenty-one ravines in the west, and he led thirty thousand troops.\n\nMeng Huo rejoiced exceedingly, saying, This addition to our forces shall surely bring us victory.\n\nSo he and Duo Si went out of their own valley to welcome Yang Fang.\n\nYang Fang said, \"I have with me thirty thousand troops in iron mail, brave and intrepid warriors, who can fly over mountains and bound across the peaks. They of themselves are a match for the enemy even if the enemy numbered a hundred legions. And, moreover, my five sons, all trained in arms, are with me, all to help you, O Kings.\"\n\nThe five sons were brought in and presented. They were handsome young fellows, bold and martial looking. Father and sons were entertained at a banquet. Halfway through the feast Yang Fang proposed a diversion.\n\n\"There is but scanty amusement in the field,\" said Yang Fang, \"and so I have brought along some native singing girls who have been taught fencing and such things. If you care for it, they might give an exhibition.\"\n\nThe feasters hailed the suggestion with joy, and soon thirty maidens came to the front of the tent. Their hair hung about their shoulders, and they were barefooted. They danced and skipped and went through their performance outside. The guests inside clapped their hands and applauded their skill, and the soldiers joined in the choruses.\n\nPresently, at a signal from their father, two of Yang Fang's sons bore two goblets to Meng Huo and Meng You. Meng Huo and Meng You took the cups and were raising them to their lips when Yang Fang shouted a single word of command, and, instantly, the cupbearers had the two brothers out of their seats and helpless in their hands. At this, Duo Si jumped up to run away, but Yang Fang gripped him, and he was a prisoner too. The Mang maidens ranged themselves in a line along the front of the tent so that none dared approach.\n\n\"When the hare dies the fox mourns,\" said Meng Huo. \"One sympathizes with one's own as a rule. We are both chiefs and have been friends. I know not why you should injure me.\"\n\n\"I had to repay Zhuge Liang the Minister for his compassion on me and my people, and there was no way till you rebelled. Why should I not offer up a rebel in propitiation?\"\n\nLeaving Meng Huo, Meng You, and Duo Si in the hands of Yang Fang, the Mang warriors dispersed, each man returning to his own valley.\n\nYang Fang then took the prisoners to the camp of Shu, where he bowed at the tent door, saying, \"I and my sons and the sons of my brother are grateful to you for much kindness, wherefore we bring to you as an offering the persons of these rebels.\"\n\nZhuge Liang rewarded Yang Fang and bade them bring forward Meng Huo.\n\n\"This time are you prepared to yield?\" said the Prime Minister.\n\n\"It is not your ability, but the treachery of my own people that has brought me to this. If you wish to slay, slay. But I will not yield.\"\n\n\"You know you were the cause of my army entering into a waterless land, where there were those four evil streams, and yet my soldiers were not poisoned and came to no harm. Does it not seem to you like evidence of a superior protecting power? Why will you follow this misguided road and always be obstinate?\"\n\nMeng Huo replied, \"My fathers have long held the Silver Pit Ravine, and the three rivers and the two forests are their ramparts. If you can take that stronghold, then will I and my heirs forever acknowledge your power and yield.\"\n\n\"I am going to liberate you once more,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"and you may put your army in order if you will and fight a decisive battle. But after that, if you are my prisoner and are still refractory and unsubmissive, I shall have to exterminate your whole family.\"\n\nZhuge Liang ordered the lictors to loose the prisoner's bonds and let him go. After he had gone, the other two, Meng You and Duo Si, were led in and they also received their liberty. They were given wine and food. but they were confused and could not look Zhuge Liang in the face. They were given horses to travel on.\n\n\u2003The way has been long and now danger is near,\n\n\u2003But faith in their leader banishes fear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "Chasing Off Wild Beasts, The Prime Minister Defeats The Mangs For The Sixth Time; Burning Rattan Armors, Zhuge Liang Captures Meng Huo The Seventh Time.\n\nAll the prisoners were released. Yang Fang and his sons were rewarded with ranks, and his people were given presents. They expressed their gratitude and returned to their own, while Meng Huo and his brother hastened home to Silver Pit Ravine.\n\nOutside this ravine were three rivers \u2014 River Lu, River Gannan, and River Xicheng. These three streams united to form the Three Rivers. Close to the ravine on the north was a wide and fruitful plain; on the west were salt wells. The River Lu flowed about seventy miles to the southwest, and due south was a valley called the Liangdu Ravine. There were hills in, as well as surrounding, the ravine, and in these they found silver \u2014 whence the name \"Silver Pit\".\n\nA palace complex had been built in the ravine, which the Mang kings had made their stronghold, and there was an ancestral temple, which they called \"Family Spirits\", where they solemnized sacrifices of bulls and horses at the four seasons. They called these sacrifices \"Inquiring of the Spirits\". Human sacrifices were offered also, humans of Shu or of their own people belonging to other villages. The sick swallowed no drugs, but prayed to a chief sorcerer, called \"Drug Demon\". There was no legal code, the only punishment for every transgression being death.\n\nWhen girls were grown and became women, they bathed in a stream. Men and women were kept separate, and they married whom they willed, the parents having no control in that particular. There was no formal vocational training. In good seasons the country produced grain, but if the harvest failed, they would make soup out of serpents and eat boiled elephant flesh.\n\nAll over the country the head of the family of greatest local consideration was termed \"King of the Ravine\", and the next in importance was called a \"Notable\". A market was held in the city of Three Rivers, on the first day of every moon, and another on the fifteenth. Goods were brought in and bartered.\n\nIn his own ravine, Meng Huo gathered his family and clan to the number of a thousand or more and addressed them: \"I have been put to shame by the leaders of Shu many times, and I have sworn to take revenge for the insults. Has anyone any proposal to make?\"\n\nThereupon a certain one replied, saying, \"I can produce a man able to defeat Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nThe assembly turned to the speaker, who was a brother of Meng Huo's wife. He was the head of eight tribes of the Southern Mangs, and was named Chief Dai Lai.\n\n\"Who is the man?\" asked Meng Huo.\n\nChief Dai Lai replied, \"He is Mu Lu, King of the Bana Ravine. He is a master of witchcraft who can call up the wind and invoke the rain. He rides upon an elephant and is attended by tigers, leopards, wolves, venomous snakes, and scorpions. Beside, he has under his hand thirty thousand superhuman soldiers. He is very bold. O King, write him a letter and send him presents, which I will deliver. If he will consent to lend his aid, what fear have we of Shu?\"\n\nMeng Huo was pleased with the scheme and ordered Dai Lai to draft a letter. Then he ordered Duo Si to defend Three Rivers and make the first line of defense.\n\nZhuge Liang led his troops near the city of Three Rivers. Taking a survey of the country, he noted that the city was surrounded by the three rivers and could only be reached by a bank on one face, so he sent Wei Yan and Zhao Zilong to march along the road and attack. But when they reached the rampart, they found it well defended by bows and crossbows.\n\nThe defenders of the city were adepts in the use of the crossbow, and they had one sort which discharged ten arrows at once. Furthermore, the arrows were poisoned, and a wound meant certain death. The two generals saw that they could not succeed, and so retired.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang heard of the poisoned arrows, he mounted his light chariot and went to see for himself. Having regarded the defenses, he returned to his camp and ordered a retirement of three miles. This move delighted the Mangs, who congratulated each other on their success in driving off the besiegers, who, as they concluded, had been frightened away. So they gave themselves up to rejoicing and kept no watch. Nor did they even send out scouts.\n\nThe army of Shu made a strong camp in their new halting place and closed the gates for defense. For five days they gave no sign. One evening, just at sunset, a slight breeze began to blow.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang issued an order: \"Every man should provide himself with a coat by the first watch. If anyone lacks, he will be put to death.\"\n\nNone of the generals knew what was in the wind, but the order was obeyed. Next, each man was ordered to fill his coat with earth. This order appeared equally strange, but it was carried out.\n\nWhen all were ready, they were told: \"You are to carry the earth to the foot of the city wall, and the first arrivals will be rewarded.\"\n\nSo they ran with all speed with the dry earth and reached the wall. Then with the earth they were ordered to make a raised way, and the first soldier on the wall was promised a reward.\n\nThe whole of the one hundred thousand troops of Shu, and their native allies, having thrown their burdens of earth near the wall, then quickly rushed up the incline, and with one great shout were on the wall. The archers on the wall were seized and dragged down. Those who got clear ran away into the city. King Duo Si was slain in the melee that followed on this attack. The soldiers of Shu moved through the city slaying all they met. Thus was the city captured and with it great booty of jewels, which were made over to the army as a reward for their prowess.\n\nThe few soldiers who escaped went away and told Meng Huo: The city of Three Rivers was lost, and King Duo Si slain!\n\nMeng Huo was much distressed. Before he had recovered, they told him: The army of Shu has come over and is encamped at the mouth of Silver Pit Ravine.\n\nJust as he was in the very depths of distress, a laugh came from behind the screen.\n\nA woman appeared, saying, \"Though you are brave, how silly you are! Though I am a woman, but I want to go out and fight.\"\n\nThe woman was his wife, Lady Zhurong. She was a descendant of the Zhurong family of the Southern Mang. She was expert in the use of the flying sword and never missed her aim.\n\nMeng Huo rose and bowed to her. Lady Zhurong thereupon mounted a horse and forthwith marched out at the head of a hundred generals, leading fifty thousand troops of the ravines, and set out to drive off the troops of Shu.\n\nJust as the host got clear of the Silver Pit Palace, it was stopped by a cohort led by Zhang Ni. At once the Mangs deployed, and the lady leader armed herself with five swords such as she used. In one hand she held an eighteen-foot signal staff, and she sat a curly-haired, reddish horse.\n\nZhang Ni was secretly troubled at the sight before him, but he engaged the lady commander. After a few passes the lady turned her steed and bolted. Zhang Ni went after her, but a sword came flying through the air directly at him. He tried to fend off with one hand, but it wounded his arm, and he fell to the ground. The Mangs gave a loud shout; some of them pounced on the unlucky leader and made him prisoner.\n\nThen Ma Zheng, hearing his comrade had been taken, rushed out to rescue, but only to be surrounded. He saw the lady commander holding up her staff and made a dash forward, but just then the Mangs threw hooks and pulled down his steed, and he was also a prisoner.\n\nBoth generals were taken into the ravine and led before the King. He gave a banquet in honor of his wife's success, and during the feast the lady bade the lictors put the two prisoners to death. They hustled the two generals in and were just going to carry out their orders when Meng Huo checked them.\n\n\"No! Five times has Zhuge Liang set me at liberty. It would be unjust to put these to death. Confine them till we have taken their chief, then we may execute them.\"\n\nHis wife was merry with wine and did not object. So their lives were spared.\n\nThe defeated soldiers returned to their camp. Zhuge Liang took steps to retrieve the mishap by sending for Ma Dai, Zhao Zilong, and Wei Yan, to each of whom he gave special and private orders.\n\nNext day the Mang soldiers reported to the King that Zhao Zilong was offering a challenge. Lady Zhurong forthwith mounted and rode out to battle. She engaged Zhao Zilong, who soon fled. The lady was too prudent to risk pursuit, and rode home. Then Wei Yan repeated the challenge, and he also fled as if defeated. But again the lady declined to pursue. Next day Zhao Zilong repeated his challenge and ran away as before. Lady Zhurong signaled no pursuit. But at this Wei Yan rode up and opened a volley of abuse and obloquy. This proved too much, and she gave the signal to go after him and led the way. Wei Yan increased his pace, and the lady commander doubled hers, and she and her followers pressed into a narrow road along a valley. Suddenly behind her was heard a noise, and Wei Yan, turning his head, saw the lady tumble out of her saddle.\n\nShe had rushed into an ambush prepared by Ma Dai: Her horse had been tripped up by ropes. She was captured, bound, and carried off to the Shu camp. Some of her people endeavored to rescue her, but they were driven off.\n\nZhuge Liang seated himself in his tent to see his prisoner, and Lady Zhurong was led up. He bade them remove her bonds, and she was conducted to another tent, where wine was laid before her. Then a message was sent to Meng Huo to say that she would be exchanged for the two captive leaders.\n\nThe King agreed, and Ma Zheng and Zhang Ni were set free. As soon as they arrived, the lady was escorted by Zhuge Liang himself to the mouth of the ravine, where Meng Huo welcomed her both gladly and angrily.\n\nThen they told Meng Huo of the coming of the King of the Bana Ravine, and he went out to meet Mu Lu. Mu Lu rode up on his white elephant, dressed in silks, and with many gold and pearl ornaments. He wore a double sword at his belt, and he was followed by the motley pack of fighting animals that he fed, gamboling and dancing about him.\n\nMeng Huo made him a low obeisance and then poured out his tale of woes. Mu Lu promised to avenge his wrongs and was led off to a banquet which had been prepared.\n\nNext day the deliverer went out to battle, with his pack of wild creatures in his train. Zhao Zilong and his colleague Wei Yan quickly made their array of footmen and then took their station in front side by side and studied their opponents. The Mang banners and weapons were all extraordinary. Most of the warriors wore no armor and none wore any clothing. Their faces were sunburned. They carried four sharp pointed knives in their belts. Signals were not given by drum or trumpet, but by a gong.\n\nKing Mu Lu had two swords in his belt and carried a hand bell. He urged his white elephant forward and emerged from between his flags.\n\n\"We have spent all our life in the battlefields, but we have never seen the like of this before,\" said Zhao Zilong.\n\nAs they talked to one another, they noticed that the opposing leader was mumbling something that might be a spell or a curse, and from time to time he rang his bell. Then suddenly the wind got up, stones began to roll and sand to fly, and there was a sound as of a heavy shower of rain. Next a horn rang out, and thereupon the tigers and the leopards, and the wolves and the serpents, and all the other wild beasts came down on the wind snapping and clawing. How could the soldiers of Shu stand such a thing as that? So they retreated, and the Mangs came after them fiercely, chasing and slaying their enemies as far as the city of Three Rivers.\n\nZhao Zilong and Wei Yan mustered their defeated troops and went to their leader to confess their failure. Zhuge Liang, however, was neither angry nor dejected.\n\n\"The fault is not yours,\" he said. \"Long ago, when I was still in my rustic hut, I knew the Mangs possessed certain powers over beasts, and I provided against this adventure before we left Shu. You will find twenty big sealed carts in the baggage train. We will use half of them now.\"\n\nHe bade his staff bring forward ten of the red box-carts; the other ten black carts were left untouched. They all wondered what would happen. Then the carts were opened, and they turned out to be carved and colored models of huge wild beasts, with coats of worsted, teeth and claws of steel; each could accommodate ten people. Choosing one hundred beasts, he told off a thousand troops and bade them stuff the mouths of the beasts full of inflammables.\n\nNext day the army of Shu marched out to the attack and were arrayed at the entrance to the Silver Pit Ravine. The Mang soldiers went into the ravine and told their king. Mu Lu, thinking himself perfectly invincible, did not hesitate, but marched out, taking Meng Huo with him. Zhuge Liang, dressed in the simple robe of a Daoist, went out in his light chariot. In his hand he held a feather fan. Meng Huo, who recognized his enemy, pointed him out to Mu Lu.\n\n\"That is Zhuge Liang in that small chariot. If we can only capture him, our task is done.\"\n\nThen Mu Lu began to mutter his spells and to ring his bell. As before, the wind got up and blew with violence, and the wild beasts came on.\n\nBut at a wave of the simple feather fan, lo! the wind turned and blew the other way. Then from out of the host of Shu there burst the horrible wild beasts. The real wild beasts of the Mang saw rushing down upon them huge creatures, whose mouths vomited flames and whose nostrils breathed out black smoke. They came along with jingling bells, snapping and clawing, and the real beasts turned tail and fled in among the host of their own side, trampling them down as they sped. Zhuge Liang gave the signal for a general onset, and his troops rushed forward with beating drums and blaring trumpets. Mu Lu was killed in the melee. Meng Huo's whole clan fled in panic and tore up among the hills out of the way. And thus the Silver Pit Ravine was taken.\n\nNext day, as Zhuge Liang was telling off parties to search for and capture the King, it was announced that the brother-in-law of Meng Huo, Chief Dai Lai, having vainly tried to persuade the King to yield, had made prisoners of him and his wife and all his clan and were bringing them to Zhuge Liang.\n\nHearing this, Zhang Ni and Ma Zheng were called and received certain orders, upon which they hid themselves in the wings of the tent with a large body of sturdy warriors. This done, Zhuge Liang ordered the keepers to open the gates, and in came Chief Dai Lai with Meng Huo and his people in custody.\n\nAs Dai Lai bowed at the entrance of the hall, Zhuge Liang called out, \"Let my strong captors appear!\"\n\nAt once out came the hidden men, and every two of them laid hands upon a prisoner and bound him.\n\n\"Did you think your paltry ruse would deceive me?\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Here you are a second time captured by your own people and brought before me that you might surrender. The first time I did not hurt you. But now I firmly believe this surrender is part of a plot to kill me.\"\n\nThen he called out to his guards to search the prisoners. They did so, and on every man they found a sharp knife.\n\n\"Did you not say that if your family were taken prisoners you would yield? How now?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"We have come of our own will and at the risk of our lives. The credit is not yours. Still I refuse to yield,\" replied Meng Huo.\n\n\"This is the sixth time I have captured you, and yet you are obstinate. What do you expect?\"\n\n\"If you take me a seventh time, then I will turn to you and never rebel again.\"\n\n\"Well, your stronghold is now destroyed. What have I to fear?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nHe ordered the bonds to be loosed, saying, \"If you are caught again and lie to me once more, I shall certainly not be inclined to let you off.\"\n\nMeng Huo and his people put their hands over their heads and ran off like rats.\n\nThe defeated Mangs who had fled were of thousands, and more than half of them were wounded. They fell in with their King, who restored what order was possible and felt glad that he had still some leaders left. Then he and the Chief Dai Lai took counsel together.\n\n\"Whither can we go?\" said Meng Huo. \"Our stronghold is in the hands of the enemy.\"\n\nDai Lai replied, \"There is but one country that can overcome these troops. That is the Wuguo Kingdom. It lies two hundred miles to the southeast. The King of that state is named Wutu Gu. He is a giant of twelve spans. He does not eat grain, but lives on serpents and venomous beasts. He wears scaly armor, which is impenetrable to swords and arrows. His warriors wear rattan armor. This rattan grows in gullies, climbing over rocks and walls. The inhabitants cut the rattans and steep them in oil for half a year. Then they are dried in the sun. When dry they are steeped again, and so on many times. Then they are plaited into helmets and armor. Clad in this, the men float across rivers, and it does not get wet. No weapon can penetrate it. The soldiers are called the Rattan Army. You may seek aid from this king, and with his help you can take Zhuge Liang as easily as a sharp knife cleaves a bamboo.\"\n\nMeng Huo went to the Wuguo Kingdom and saw the King. The people of this country do not live in houses, but dwell in caves. Meng Huo told the story of his woes.\n\nAnd King Wutu Gu said, I shall muster all my men to avenge you.\n\nMeng Huo bowed low and expressed great gratitude.\n\nWutu Gu called up two generals named Xi Ni and Tu An and gave them thirty thousand of the rattan-armored soldiers and bade them march northeast.\n\nThey came to a river called the River of Peach Flowers, on both banks of which grow many peach trees. Year after year the leaves of these trees fall into the river and render it poisonous to all but the natives. But to the natives it is a stimulant which doubles their vigor. They camped on the bank of this river to await the coming of the army of Shu.\n\nNow Zhuge Liang was informed of the journey of Meng Huo and its results, and he knew when the rattan-clad army camped at the ford. He also knew that Meng Huo had collected all the soldiers of his own that he could help. Zhuge Liang at once marched to the ford. He questioned the natives, and they told him that the peach leaves were falling and the water of the river was undrinkable. So he retired two miles and camped. Only Wei Yan was left to hold the bank of the River of Peach Flowers.\n\nNext day Wutu Gu led the Wuguo warriors across the stream, and, with a rolling of drums, Wei Yan went out to meet them. The Wuguo men poured forth. The soldiers of Shu shot at them, but neither arrows nor bolts penetrated their armors; they rolled off harmless. Nor could swords cut or spears enter. The enemy, thus protected and armed with big swords and prongs, were too much for the troops of Shu, who had to run away. However, they were not pursued. When, on the retreat, they came to the Peach Flowers Ford, they saw the Mangs crossing as if walking on the water. Some of them were tired, so they took off their rattan breastplates, sat upon them and floated to the other side.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang heard the report of his general, he summoned Lu Kai and called in some natives.\n\nLu Kai said, \"I have heard of the Wuguo Kingdom as perfectly tribal among the Mang nations. I have also heard of the rattan armor, which can withstand all thrusts, and the harmful River of Peach Flowers. The Southern Mangs are so untameable that victory will mean little. We would rather retreat.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" said Zhuge Liang merrily, \"we have had too much difficulty in getting here to go back so easily. I shall have a counter-plan for these people tomorrow.\"\n\nHaving provided for the defense of his camp, he gave strict orders to his generals not to go out to fight, Zhuge Liang went to reconnoiter. He rode in his light chariot with a few natives as guides. He came to the ford, and from a secluded spot in the mountains on the north bank, he looked about him.\n\nThe whole country was mountainous and difficult, impassable for any carriage. So he got out and went afoot. Presently, from a hill he saw a long winding valley, like a huge serpent. The sides were very precipitous and bare. However, a road ran through the middle.\n\n\"What is the name of the valley?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"It is called 'Coiled Serpent Valley',\" said the guides. \"At the other end you come into the high road to Three Rivers. The road goes by a valley called 'Talang See'.\"\n\n\"The very thing,\" said Zhuge Liang gladly. \"Surely this is providence. I shall score a great success here.\"\n\nHaving seen enough, he retraced his steps, found his chariot, and returned to camp. Arrived at the camp, Ma Dai was called and put in charge of the preparations.\n\nZhuge Liang gave him an order: \"I will give you the ten black painted carts, and you are to get a thousand long bamboo poles. Open the carts, and follow my instructions there. Then you are to keep the two ends of the Coiled Serpent Valley. Half a month is the deadline, and all of these must be performed with the most perfect secrecy under military law and punishment.\"\n\nNext Zhao Zilong was sent to a point on the Three Rivers road; Wei Yan to camp at the Peach Flowers Ford.\n\nZhuge Liang told Wei Yan, \"If the Mangs come over the river, you are to abandon the camp and march toward a certain white flag you will see. Further, in half a month you would have to acknowledge defeat some fifteen times and abandon seven camps. On no account are you to come to interview me even after fourteen defeats.\"\n\nWei Yan went off, not a little hipped at the prospect, but prepared to obey. Next, Zhang Yi was sent to make a stockade at a certain indicated point, and Zhang Ni and Ma Zheng was told to lead the Mang soldiers who had surrendered, and other orders were given.\n\nMeng Huo had begun to have a real terror of Zhuge Liang, and he warned King Wutu Gu of Wuguo, saying, \"This Zhuge Liang is exceedingly crafty. Ambush is one of his favorite ruses, so you should warn your soldiers that on no account should they enter a valley where the trees are thick.\"\n\n\"Great King, you speak with reason,\" said Wutu Gu. \"I have always heard that the people of the Middle Kingdom are full of wiles, and I will see that your advice is followed. I will go in front to fight, and you may remain in the rear to give orders.\"\n\nPresently the scouts told them of the arrival of the troops of Shu on the bank of the Peach Flowers River. Wutu Gu sent his two generals \u2014 Xi Ni and Tu An \u2014 to cross the river and engage them. The two sides met, but Wei Yan soon suffered a defeat and left the field. The Mangs were afraid to pursue as they dreaded an ambush.\n\nIn the meantime, Wei Yan laid out another camp. The Mangs crossed the river in greater force. Wei Yan came out to meet them, but again fled after a very short fight. This time the Mangs pursued, but having lost their hold of the enemy after three miles, and coming then to the late camp of the Shu army, which seemed quite safe, they occupied it.\n\nNext day Xi Ni and Tu An asked their King Wutu Gu to come to the camp, and they reported what had happened. Wutu Gu decided to make a general advance to drive the troops of Shu before him. They fled, even casting aside their breastplates and throwing away their arms; they were in such haste to flee. And the troops of Shu went toward a white flag that appeared in the distance. They found a camp already made, which they occupied.\n\nSoon, however, Wutu Gu came near, and as he pressed forward Wei Yan abandoned this camp and fled. When the Mangs reached the camp, they took up quarters therein.\n\nSoon after they set out to renew the pursuit, but Wei Yan turned back and checked them. This was only a temporary check, for he fled after three encounters, going toward a white flag in the distance.\n\nThis sort of thing continued daily until the soldiers of Shu had been defeated and driven out of the field fifteen times and had abandoned their camp on seven different occasions.\n\nThe Mangs were now hot in pursuit and pressed on with all their might, Wutu Gu being in the forefront of the pursuers. But then they came to a thick umbrageous wood, and he halted, for he saw flags moving about behind the sheltering trees.\n\n\"Just as you foretold,\" said Wutu Gu to Meng Huo. \"The men of Shu like using ambush.\"\n\n\"Yes. Zhuge Liang is going to be worsted this time. We have beaten off his troops now daily for half a month and won fifteen successive victories. His troops simply run when they hear the wind. The fact is he has exhausted all his craft and has tried every ruse. Now our task is nearly done.\"\n\nWutu Gu was greatly cheered and began to feel contempt for his enemy.\n\nThe sixteenth day of the long fight found Wei Yan leading his oft-defeated troops once more against the rattan-protected foe. King Wutu Gu on his white elephant was well in the forefront. He had on a cap with symbols of the sun and moon and streamers of wolf's beard, a fringed garment studded with gems, which allowed the plates or scales of his cuirass to appear, and his eyes seemed to flash fire. He pointed the finger of scorn at Wei Yan and began to revile him.\n\nWei Yan whipped up his steed and fled. The Mangs pressed after him. Wei Yan made for the Coiled Serpent Valley, for he saw a white flag calling him thither. Wutu Gu followed in hot haste, and as he saw only bare hills without a sign of vegetation, he felt quite confident that no ambush was laid. So he followed into the valley. There he saw some score of black painted carts in the road.\n\nThe soldiers said to each other, \"The carts must be the commissariat wagons of the enemy, abandoned in their hasty flight when they heard of the coming of Your Majesty.\"\n\nThis only urged the King to greater speed, and he went on toward the other mouth of the valley, for the soldiers of Shu had disappeared. However, he saw piles of timber being tumbled down across the track and great boulders rolled down the hill side into the road. The pursuers cleared away the obstacles. When they had done so and advanced a little, they saw certain wheeled vehicles in the road, some large, some small, laden with wood and straw, which was burning. Wutu Gu was suddenly frightened and ordered a retreat.\n\nBut he heard much shouting in the rear, and they told him: \"The exit has been blocked with wood-laden carts, which on being broken open are found to contain explosive, and they are all on fire.\"\n\nHowever, seeing that the valley was barren and devoid of grass and wood, Wutu Gu was not in the least alarmed and merely bade his soldiers search for a way round.\n\nThen he saw torches being hurled down the mountain side. These torches rolled till they came to a certain spot, where they ignited the fuses leading to the powder. Then the ground suddenly heaved with the explosion of bombs beneath. The whole valley was soon full of flames, darting and playing in all directions, and wherever they met with rattan armor the rattan caught fire, and thus the whole army, huddled and crowded together, burned in the midst of the valley.\n\nZhuge Liang looked on from the heights above and saw the Mangs burned. Many of the dead had been mangled and torn by the explosions of the mines. The air was full of suffocating vapor.\n\nZhuge Liang's tears fell fast as he saw the slaughter, and he sighed, saying, \"Though I am rendering great service to my country, yet I have sacrificed many lives. My life shall be shortened for this.\"\n\nThose who were with him were also deeply affected.\n\nKing Meng Huo was in his camp awaiting news of success when he saw a crowd of Mang soldiers come along, and they bowed before him and told him, \"King Wutu Gu is fighting a great battle and is about to surround Zhuge Liang in the Valley of the Coiled Serpent. But he needs help. We are the natives of the local ravines, and we ourselves had no alternative when we yielded to Shu. But now we have returned to your allegiance and are willing to come to help Your Majesty.\"\n\nSo Meng Huo placed himself at the head of his clansmen and those who had just come to him, and lost no time in marching out. He bade them lead him to the spot. But when he reached the valley and saw the destruction, he knew he had been made a victim again. As he made to retire, there appeared a body of his enemy on each side under Zhang Ni and Ma Zheng, and they began to attack. Meng Huo was making what stand he could when a great shouting arose. The Mangs were nearly all disguised soldiers of Shu, and they quickly surrounded him and his clansmen to make them prisoners.\n\nMeng Huo galloped clear and got into the hills. Presently he fell upon a small chariot, with a few guards about it, and therein sat Zhuge Liang, simply dressed and holding a fan.\n\n\"What now, rebel Meng Huo?\" cried Zhuge Liang.\n\nBut Meng Huo had galloped away. He was soon stopped by Ma Dai and lay a helpless prisoner bound hand and foot. His wife, Lady Zhurong, and the other members of his family were also taken.\n\nZhuge Liang returned to camp and seated himself in the high place in his own tent. He was still sad at the thought of the sacrifice of life.\n\nHe said to his officers, \"There was no help for it; I had to use that plan. But it has sadly injured my inner virtue. Guessing that the enemy would suspect an ambush in every thicket, I sent people to walk about in wooded places with flags. Really there was no ambush. I bade Wei Yan lose battle after battle just to lead the enemy on and harden their hearts. When I saw the Valley of the Coiled Serpent, with its bare sides of smooth rock and the road in its depths, I recognized what could be done and sent Ma Dai to arrange the contents of the black carts, the mines, which I had prepared long ago for this purpose. In every bomb were nine others, and they were buried thirty paces apart. They were connected by fuses laid in hollow bamboos that they might explode in succession, and the force was enormous. Zhao Zilong prepared those carts laden with straw and rolled down the piles of timber and boulders that blocked the mouth. Wei Yan led Wutu Gu on and on till he had enticed the King into the valley, when he took up a position to escape. Then the burning began. They say that what is good for water is not much good for fire, and the oil-soaked rattan, excellent as a protection against swords and arrows, was most inflammable, catching fire at sight. The Mangs were so stubborn that the only way was to use fire, or we should never have scored a victory. But I much regret that the destruction of the people of Wuguo has been so complete. Heaven shall not overlook this wrong.\"\n\nThe officers were deeply moved.\n\nThen Meng Huo was summoned. He appeared and fell upon his knees. His limbs were freed from the bonds, and he was sent into a side tent for refreshment. The chief prisoners were Meng Huo, Lady Zhurong, Meng You, and Dai Lai. There were many of his clan as well.\n\nAs they were eating and drinking, a messenger appeared in the door of the tent and addressed the King: \"The Prime Minister is ashamed and does not wish to see you again, Sir. He has sent me to release you. You may enlist another army if you can and once more try a decisive battle. Now you may go.\"\n\nBut instead of going Meng Huo began to weep.\n\n\"Seven times a captive and seven times released!\" said the King. \"Surely there was never anything like it in the whole world. I am not entirely devoid of a sense of propriety and rectitude. Does he think that I feel no shame?\"\n\nThereupon he and all his followers fell upon their knees and crawled to the tent of the Commander-in-Chief and begged pardon, saying, \"O Minister, you are the majesty of Heaven. We people of the south will offer no more opposition.\"\n\n\"Then you yield?\" said Zhuge Liang, sighing.\n\n\"I and my children and grandchildren are deeply affected by your all-pervading and life-giving mercy. Now how can we not yield?\"\n\nZhuge Liang asked Meng Huo to come up into the tent and be seated, and he prepared a banquet of felicitation. Also he confirmed Meng Huo in his kingship and restored all the places that had been captured. Everyone was overwhelmed with Zhuge Liang's generosity, and they all went away rejoicing. A poem has praised Zhuge Liang's action:\n\n\u2003He rode in his chariot green,\n\n\u2003In his hand just a feather fan,\n\n\u2003Seven times he released a king\n\n\u2003As part of his conquering plan.\n\n\u2003Having chosen a beautiful spot\n\n\u2003Where the valleys debauch on the plain,\n\n\u2003Lest his kindness should ever be forgot,\n\n\u2003The vanquished erected a fane.\n\nHigh Counselor Fei Yi ventured to remonstrate with Zhuge Liang on his policy.\n\nHe said, \"You, O Minister, have led the army this long journey into the wilds and have reduced the Mang country, and have brought about the submission of the king. Why not appoint officials to share in the administration and hold the land?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"There are three difficulties. To leave foreigners implies leaving a guard for them: There is the difficulty of feeding the guard. The Mangs have lost many of their relatives. To leave foreigners without the guard will invite a calamity: This is the second difficulty. Among the Mangs, dethronements and murders are frequent, and there will be enmities and suspicions. Foreigners and they will be mutually distrustful: This is the third difficulty. If I do not leave our people, I shall not have to send supplies, which makes for peace and freedom from trouble.\"\n\nThey had to agree that the policy was wise.\n\nThe kindness of the conqueror was rewarded by the gratitude of these southern people, and they even erected a shrine in his honor, where they sacrificed at the four seasons. As Zhuge Liang and Meng Huo declared peace, the joy spread to all ravines and villages. And the people sent gifts of jewels, cinnabar, lacquer, medicines, plowing cattle, and chargers for the use of the army. And they pledged themselves not to rebel.\n\nWhen the feastings to the soldiers were finished, the army marched homeward to Shu. Wei Yan was in command of the advanced column. He marched to the River Lu. But on his arrival the clouds gathered and a gale blew over the face of the waters. Because of the force of the gale, the army could not advance. Wei Yan then returned and reported the matter to his chief. Zhuge Liang called in Meng Huo to ask what this might mean.\n\n\u2003The Mangs beyond the border have yielded now at last,\n\n\u2003The water demons raging mad won't let the Shu men go past." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "Sacrificing At River Lu, The Prime Minister Marches Homeward; Attacking Wei, The Lord Of Wuxiang Presents A Memorial.\n\nMeng Huo at the head of the Mang Chieftains and Notables attended to do honor to the army of Shu on its departure. They reached the River Lu in autumn, the ninth month. But on trying to cross the river, a tremendous storm came and hindered them. Wei Yan having reported his difficulty to Zhuge Liang, Meng Huo was asked if he knew of any reason for such a storm.\n\nMeng Huo replied, \"Wild spirits have always troubled those who would cross this river. It is necessary to propitiate them with sacrifices.\"\n\n\"What is the sacrifice?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"In the old days when malicious spirits brought misfortune, they sacrificed humans to the number of seven sevens and offered their forty-nine heads. They also slew a black ox and a white goat. Sacrifice thus, the wind will subside and the waters come to rest. The same used to be done to secure a plenteous harvest.\"\n\n\"How can I slay a single person now that fighting is done and peace has returned?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhuge Liang went down to the river to see for himself. The north wind was blowing hard, and the waves were high. Both humans and horses seemed frightened. He himself was perplexed. Then he sought out some of the natives and questioned them.\n\nThey said, \"We have heard the demons moaning every night since your army crossed the river. The cries begin at dusk and continued till dawn. There are many dark demons in the malarial vapors, and no one dared cross.\"\n\n\"The sin is mine,\" sighed Zhuge Liang, \"for more than a thousand soldiers of Ma Dai perished in these waters beside many southern people. Their poor distressed souls are not yet freed. Therefore I will come this night and sacrifice to them.\"\n\n\"According to the ancient rule the number of victims ought to be forty-nine. Then the spirits will disperse,\" said the natives.\n\n\"As the resentful demons are here because of the deaths of people, where is the sense in slaying more humans? But I know what to do.\"\n\nZhuge Liang bade them make balls of flour paste after the manner of human heads and stuff them with the flesh of oxen and goats. These would be used instead of human heads, and they called these 'mantou' or 'human heads'.\n\nBy nightfall, an altar had been set up on the bank of the river with the sacrificial objects all arranged. There were also forty-nine lamps. Flags were flying to summon the souls. The forty-nine mantous were piled up on the ground. In the middle of the third watch, at midnight, Zhuge Liang, dressed in Daoist garb, went to offer the sacrifice in person, and he bade Dong Jue read this prayer:\n\n\"On the first day of the ninth month of the third year of the era Beginning Prosperity of the Han Dynasty, I, Zhuge Liang, Prime Minister of Han, Lord of Wuxiang, Imperial Protector of Yizhou, reverently order this sacrifice to appease the shades of those soldiers of Shu who have died in their country's service and those of the southern people who have perished.\n\n\"I now declare to you, O ye shades, the majesty of my master, the Emperor of the mighty Han Dynasty, excelling that of the Five Feudatories and brilliantly continuing the glory of the Three Dynastic Kings. Recently, when the distant south rebelliously invaded his territory, contumeliously sent an army, loosed the venom of their sorcery, and gave free rein to their savagery in rebellion, I was commanded to punish their crimes. Wherefore my brave armies marched and utterly destroyed the contemptible rebels. My brave soldiers gathered like the clouds, and the insensate rebels melted away. Hearing of the easy successes I won, they were entirely demoralized.\n\n\"My army consists of heroes from the Nine Regions, and officers and people are famous in the empire; all are expert in war and skilled in the use of arms. They go whither light leads them and serve the Emperor. All have exerted themselves to obey orders and carried out the plans for the seven captures of Meng Huo. They were whole-hearted in their service and vied in loyalty. Who could foresee that you, O Spirits, would be sacrificed in the strategy and be involved in the enemies' wicked wiles? Some of you went down to the deep springs wounded by flying arrows. Others went out into the long night hurt by lethal weapons. Living you were valorous, dead you left behind a name.\n\n\"Now we are returning home. The victors' song is in our mouths and our prisoners accompany us. Your spirits are with us still and certainly hear our prayers. Follow the banners, come with the host, return to your country, each to his own village, where you may enjoy the savor of the meat offerings and receive the sacrifices of your own families. Do not become wandering ghosts in unfamiliar hamlets of restless shades in strange cities. I will memorialize our Emperor that your wives and little ones may enjoy his gracious bounty, every year gifts of food and clothing, every month donations for sustenance. Comfort yourselves with this provision.\n\n\"As for you, Spirits of this place, shades of the departed people of the south, here is the usual sacrifice. You are near home. Year-round sacrifice is not lacking. Living you stood in awe of the celestial majesty, dead you come within the sphere of refining influence. It is right that you should hold your peace and refrain from uttering unseemly cries. With bowed head I pray you partake of the sweet savor of this sacrifice.\n\n\"Alas, ye dead! To you this offering!\"\n\nZhuge Liang broke into loud lamentations at the end of this prayer and manifested extreme emotion, and the whole army shed tears. Meng Huo and his followers also moaned and wept, and amid the sad clouds and angry mists they saw the vague forms of many demons floating away on the wind till they disappeared.\n\nThe material portion of the sacrifice was then thrown into the river. Next day the army stood on the south bank with a clear sky over their heads and calm waters at their feet, the clouds gone and the winds hushed, and the crossing was made without misadventure. They continued their way, whips cracking, gongs clanging, spurs jingling, and ever and anon the song of victory rising over all.\n\nPassing through Yongchang, Wang Kang and Lu Kai were left there in command of the four territories \u2014 Yizhou, Yongchang, Zangge, and Yuesui. And then Meng Huo was permitted to leave. He was ordered to be diligent in his administration, maintain good control, and soothe and care for the people left to him to govern and to see to it that agriculture was promoted. He took leave with tears rolling down his cheeks.\n\nWhen the army neared Capital Chengdu, the Latter Ruler came out ten miles in state to welcome his victorious minister. The Emperor stood by the roadside as Zhuge Liang came up, and waited.\n\nZhuge Liang quickly descended from his chariot, prostrated himself and said, \"Thy servant has offended in causing his master anxiety. But the conquest of the south was long.\"\n\nThe Emperor took Zhuge Liang kindly by the hand and raised him. Then the chariots of the Son of God and his minister returned to Chengdu side by side. In the capital were great rejoicings with banquets and rewards for the army. Henceforward distant nations sent tribute to the Imperial Court to the number of two hundred.\n\nAs proposed in a memorial, the Emperor provided for the families of the soldiers who had lost their lives in the expedition, and they were made happy. And the whole land enjoyed tranquillity.\n\nMeanwhile in the Middle Land, the Ruler of Wei, Cao Pi, had now ruled seven years, and it was the fourth year of Beginning Prosperity in Shu-Han calendar. Cao Pi had taken to wife a lady of the Zhen family, formerly the wife of the second son of Yuan Shao. He had discovered Lady Zhen at the sack of Yejun and had married her. She bore him a son, Cao Rui, who was very clever and a great favorite with his father.\n\nLater Cao Pi took as Beloved Consort a daughter of Guo Yong in Guangzong. Lady Guo was a woman of exceeding beauty, whom her father said, \"She is the king among women!\" And the name \"Lady King\" stuck to her.\n\nBut with Lady Guo's arrival at court, Lady Zhen fell from her lord's favor, and the Beloved Consort's ambition led her to intrigue to replace the Empress. She took Zhang Tao, a minister at the court, into her confidence.\n\nAt that time the Emperor was indisposed, and Zhang Tao alleged, saying, \"In the palace of the Empress has been dug up a wooden image with Your Majesty's date of birth written thereon. It is meant to exercise a maleficent influence.\"\n\nCao Pi in his anger forced his Empress to commit suicide; and he set up the Beloved Consort in her place.\n\nBut Lady Guo had no issue. Wherefore she nourished Cao Rui as her own. However, loved as Cao Rui was, he was not then named heir by the Empress.\n\nWhen he was about fifteen, Cao Rui, who was an expert archer and a daring rider, accompanied his father to the hunt. In a gully they started a doe and its fawn. Cao Pi shot the doe, while the fawn fled. Seeing that the fawn's course led past his son's horse, Cao Pi called out to him to shoot it. Instead the youth bursts into tears.\n\n\"Your Majesty has slain the mother. How can one kill the child as well?\"\n\nThe words struck the Emperor with remorse. He threw aside his bow, saying, \"My son, you would make a benevolent and virtuous ruler.\"\n\nFrom this circumstance Cao Pi decided that Cao Rui should succeed, and conferred upon him the princedom of Pingyuan.\n\nIn the fifth month the Emperor fell ill, and medical treatment was of no avail. So the chief officers were summoned to the bedside of the Emperor. They were Commander of the Center Army Cao Zhen, General Who Guards the West Chen Qun, and Grand Commander Sima Yi.\n\nWhen they had come, the Emperor's son was called, and the dying Emperor spoke thus: \"I am grievously ill, and my end is near. I confide to your care and guidance this son of mine. You must support him out of good feeling for me.\"\n\n\"Why does Your Majesty talk thus?\" said they. \"We will do our utmost to serve you for a thousand autumns and a myriad years.\"\n\n\"No. I know that I am about to die,\" said the Emperor. \"The sudden fall of the gates of Xuchang this year was the omen, as I well knew.\"\n\nJust then the attendants said that General Who Conquers the East Cao Xiu had come to ask after the Emperor's health. They were told to call Cao Xiu into the chamber.\n\nWhen he had entered, Cao Pi said to him, \"You and these three are the pillars and cornerstones of the state. If you will only uphold my son, I can close my eyes in peace.\"\n\nThese were his last words. A flood of tears gushed forth, and Cao Pi sank back on the couch dead. He was forty years of age and had reigned seven years (AD 229).\n\nThe four ministers raised the wailing for the dead and forthwith busied themselves with setting up Cao Rui as the Emperor of Great Wei. The late Emperor received the posthumous style of \"Emperor Pi\". The late Empress, the consort who had suffered death, was styled \"Empress Zhen\".\n\nHonors were distributed freely in celebration of the new reign. Zhong Yao was made Imperial Guardian; Cao Zhen, Regent Marshal; Cao Xiu, Minister of War; Hua Xin, Grand Commander; Wang Lang, Minister of the Interior; Chen Qun, Minister of Works; Sima Yi, Imperial Commander of the Flying Cavalry; and many others, conspicuous and obscure, were promoted. A general amnesty was declared throughout all the land.\n\nAbout this time a vacancy existed in the commandership of Yongzhou and Liangzhou. Sima Yi asked for the post and got it. He left for his new office as soon as he had received the appointment. All military affairs of the west were now under his command.\n\nIn due time the news of all these doings reached Zhuge Liang and perturbed him not a little.\n\nHe was anxious, saying, \"Cao Pi is dead, and his son Cao Rui has succeeded him. But that is not my concern. Only I am worried about Sima Yi, who is very crafty and skillful in the art of war, and who, in command of all western forces of Yongzhou and Liangzhou, may prove a serious danger to Shu. This Sima Yi ought to be attacked at once.\"\n\nCounselor Ma Su spoke of this matter. \"You, O Prime Minister, have just returned from an arduous and exhausting expedition, and you should take time to recuperate before you undertake such another. However, I have a scheme by which Cao Rui may be brought to work the destruction of Sima Yi. May I lay it before you?\"\n\n\"What plan have you?\" said he.\n\n\"The young emperor has no confidence in Sima Yi although Sima Yi is a high minister of state. Now send someone secretly to Luoyang and Yejun to disseminate reports that Sima Yi is about to rebel. Further, prepare a proclamation in his name and post it up so as to cause Cao Rui to mistrust him and put him to death.\"\n\nZhuge Liang adopted the suggestion.\n\nWhence it came about that many notices suddenly appeared, and one found its way to the city gate of Yejun. The wardens of the gate took it down and sent it to Cao Rui. This is what it said:\n\n\"I, Sima Yi, Imperial Commander of the Flying Cavalry, Commander of the Forces of Yongzhou and Liangzhou, confident in the universal principles of right, now inform the empire, saying:\n\n\"The Founder of this Dynasty, Emperor Cao, established himself with the design of recurring the empire to the Lord of Linzi, Cao Zhi. Unfortunately, calumny spread abroad, and the Dragon Ruler could not manifest himself for many years. Emperor Cao's grandson, Cao Rui, does not follow a virtuous course, though sitting in the high place, and has not fulfilled the great intention of his ancestor. Now I, in accordance with the will of Heaven and favoring the desires of the people, have decided upon a day to set my army in motion in order to secure the wish of the people. When that day arrives, I call upon each one to gather to his lord, and I will destroy utterly the family of any who shall disobey. You are hereby informed that you may all know.\"\n\nThis document frightened the young Emperor, and he turned pale. At once he called a council of his officials to consider it.\n\nHua Xin said, \"That was the reason for his having requested the commandership of Yongzhou and Liangzhou. Now Emperor Cao, the Founder of Great Wei, frequently said to me that Sima Yi was ambitious and hungry, and should not be entrusted with military authority lest he harm the state. This is the first beginning of rebellion, and the author should be put to death.\"\n\nWang Lang said, \"Sima Yi is a master of strategy and skilled in tactics. Moreover, he is ambitious and will cause mischief if he be allowed to live.\"\n\nWherefore Cao Rui wrote a command to raise an army, which he would lead to punish the minister.\n\nSuddenly Cao Zhen stood forth from the rank of military officers and said, \"What you advise is impossible. His Late Majesty, Emperor Pi, confided his son to the care of certain officers of state, of whom Sima Yi is one, wherefore it is certain that he felt sure of Sima Yi's probity. So far nothing is known certainly. If you hastily send an army to repress him, you may force him into rebellion. This may be but one of the base tricks of Shu or Wu to cause dissension in our midst so that occasion be found to further their own aims. As no one knows, I pray Your Majesty reflect before you do anything.\"\n\n\"Supposing Sima Yi really contemplates a revolt. What then?\" said Cao Rui.\n\nCao Zhen replied, \"If Your Majesty suspects him, then do as did Liu Bang the Supreme Ancestor of Han when, under pretense of taking a trip on the Lake Yunmeng, he summoned his vassals \u2014 and seized Han Xin, who had been denounced. Go to Anyi; Sima Yi will assuredly come out to meet you, and his actions and demeanor may be watched closely. He can be arrested if needed.\"\n\nCao Rui changed his mind. Leaving Cao Zhen to regulate the affairs of state, the young Emperor went out with the Imperial Guards, to the number of one hundred thousand, and traveled to Anyi.\n\nIgnorant of the reason of the Emperor's coming, and anxious to show off his dignity, Sima Yi went to welcome his ruler in all the pomp of a commander of a great army of one hundred thousand.\n\nAs Sima Yi approached, the courtiers told the Emperor, saying, \"Sima Yi's defection is certain since such a large army can only mean that he is prepared to resist.\"\n\nWhereupon Cao Xiu, with a large force, was sent in front to meet him. Sima Yi thought the Imperial Chariot was coming, and he advanced alone and stood humbly by the roadside till Cao Xiu came up.\n\nCao Xiu advanced and said, \"Friend, His Late Majesty entrusted you with the heavy responsibility of caring for his son. Why are you in revolt?\"\n\nSima Yi turned pale, and a cold sweat broke out all over him as he asked the reason for such a charge. Cao Xiu told him what had occurred.\n\n\"This is a vile plot on the part of our rivals, Shu and Wu, to cause dissension,\" said Sima Yi. \"It is a design to make the Emperor work evil upon his ministers that thereby another may profit. I must see the Son of Heaven and explain.\"\n\nOrdering his army to retire, Sima Yi went forward alone to the Emperor's chariot.\n\nSima Yi bowed low and said, weeping, \"His Late Majesty gave me charge of his son. Could I betray him? This is a wile of the enemy. I crave permission to lead an army, first to destroy Shu and then to attack Wu, whereby to show my gratitude to the late Emperor and Your Majesty and manifest my own true heart.\"\n\nHowever, Cao Rui did not feel quite convinced, and Hua Xin said, \"In any case withdraw his military powers and let him go into retirement.\"\n\nAnd thus it was decided. Sima Yi was forced to retire to his native village. Cao Xiu succeeded to his command, and Cao Rui returned to Luoyang.\n\nThe news was soon reported to Shu. Zhuge Liang rejoiced when they told him of the success that had attended the ruse.\n\n\"Sima Yi and the forces he commanded in Yongzhou and Liangzhou have been the obstacles in my long-wished-for attack on Wei. Now he has fallen, I have no more anxiety.\"\n\nAt the first great assembly of officers at court, Zhuge Liang stepped forth and presented to the Ruler of Shu a memorial on the expedition he contemplated.\n\n\"The First Ruler had accomplished but half his great task at his death. At this moment the empire is in three parts, and our country is weak; it is a most critical moment for us. Still, ministers are not remiss in the capital, and loyal and devoted soldiers sacrifice their lives abroad, for they still remember the special kindness of the First Ruler and wish to show their gratitude to him by service to Your Majesty. Therefore it would be indeed fitting that you should extend your holy virtue to glorify his virtuous memory in the stimulation of the will of your purposeful officers. Your Majesty should not lose yourself in the pursuit of mean things, quoting phrases to confound the eternal principles of rectitude, and so preventing remonstrance from honest people. One rule applies to the palace of the Emperor and the residence of a courtier; there must be one law rewarding the good and punishing the evil. Evil-doers and law-breakers, as also true and good people, should be dealt with according to their deserts by the officers concerned in order to manifest Your Majesty's impartial and enlightened administration. Partiality is wrong, as is one law for the court and another for the regions.\n\n\"The High Ministers Fei Yi, Guo Youzhi, and Dong Yun are honest men, devotedly anxious to be loyal to the last degree; wherefore His Late Majesty chose them in his testament. My advice is to consult them in all Palace matters, great or small, before taking action. Your Majesty will reap the enormous advantage of having any failings corrected.\n\n\"General Xiang Chong is a man of well-balanced temperament, versed in military matters, to whom, after testing him, the late Emperor applied the epithet 'capable'. The consensus of opinion is that Xiang Chong should be Grand Commander. My advice is to consult him in all military matters, great or small, whereby your military forces will yield their maximum, each one being employed to the best advantage.\n\n\"Attract worthy people; repel mean ones. This policy achieved the glory of the Former Hans, while its reversal ruined the Latter Hans. When the late Emperor was with us, he often discussed this with your servant, and he took much to heart the story of Emperors Huan and Ling.\n\n\"The Chair of the Secretariat Chen Zhen, Commander Zhang Si, and Minister Jiang Wan are all incorruptible and enlightened people, honest to the death. I wish that Your Majesty should have them near and hold them in confidence. If this be done, then the glory of the House of Han will be quickly consummated.\n\n\"I was originally a private person, a farmer in Nanyang, concerned only to secure personal safety in a troubled age and not seeking conversation with the contending nobles. His Late Majesty, the First Ruler, overlooking the commonness of my origin, condescended to seek me thrice in my humble cot and consult me on the trend of events. His magnanimity affected me deeply, and I consented to do my utmost for him. Then came defeat, and I took office at a moment of darkest outlook and at a most difficult crisis. This is twenty-one years ago. The First Ruler recognized my diligent care, and when dying he confided the great task to me. From that day I have lived a life of anxiety lest I should fail in my trust and so dim his glory.\n\n\"That is why I undertook the expedition to the lands beyond the River Lu. Now the Southern Mangs has been quelled, and our army is in good condition. I ought to lead it against the north, where I may meet with a measure of success in the removal of the wicked ones, the restoration of Han, and a return to the old capital. This is my duty out of gratitude to the late Emperor and loyalty to Your Majesty. As to a discussion of the pros and cons and giving a true version of the whole matter, that belongs to Guo Youzhi and Fei Yi and Dong Yun. I desire Your Majesty to confide to me the task of slaying the rebels and restoring the Hans. If I fail, then punish me by telling the spirit of the late Emperor. If you know not what restoration implies, that is the fault of your advisers.\n\n\"Your Majesty should take pains to be guided into the right path and examine carefully what is laid before you, carefully remembering the late Emperor's testament.\n\n\"I cannot express what would be my delight if you had the goodness to accept and act on my advice.\n\n\"Now I am about to depart on a distant expedition, I write this with tears, and in deep emotions, beyond my words.\"\n\nThe Emperor read it through and said, \"My Father Minister, you have only just returned from a distant and fatiguing expedition against the Southern Mangs. You are not yet refreshed, and I fear this march to the north will be almost too much even for you.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"The heaviest responsibility lies upon me, the well-being of Your Majesty confided to me by the First Ruler. My efforts may not be relaxed night or day. The south is at rest, at home is no anxiety. What better time could be hoped for to destroy the rebels and recover the Middle Land?\"\n\nForth from the ranks of courtiers stood Minister Qiao Zhou and said, \"I have studied the aspect of the stars. The northern quarter is brilliant and strong. The scheme will not speed.\"\n\nThen turning toward the Prime Minister, he continued, \"You, O Prime Minister, understand the mysteries of the skies. Why do you oppose the stars?\"\n\n\"Because the stars are in infinite changes,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"One may rely on the stars too much. Moreover, I have already sent the army into Hanzhong, where I shall act as soon as I have studied what is afoot.\"\n\nQiao Zhou pleaded in vain. Zhuge Liang was too strongly set upon his purpose to yield. So Guo Youzhi, Dong Yun, and Fei Yi were ordered to attend to matters in the Palace; Xiang Chong was to control all military affairs and became Grand Commander; Jiang Wan was made Military Adviser; Chen Zhen became Chair of the Secretariat; Zhang Si, Controller of the Prime Minister's palace; Du Qiong, Imperial Censor; Du Wei and Yang Hong, Ministers; Meng Guang and Lai Min, Libationers; Yin Mo and Li Zhuan, Academicians; Xi Zheng and Fei Shi, General Secretaries; Qiao Zhou, Chief Secretary; and others to the number of over a hundred, all to manage the administration of Shu in the absence of Zhuge Liang.\n\nHaving received his Emperor's command to lead an expedition against the north, Zhuge Liang returned to his palace and summoned the officers of the army to listen to the orders. And they came, and to each was appointed a duty in the great army:\n\nFront Army Commander \u2014 Wei Yan\n\nFront Army Marching Generals \u2014 Zhang Yi, Wang Ping\n\nRear Army Commander \u2014 Li Hui\n\nRear Army Marching General \u2014 Lu Yin\n\nLeft Army Commander and Chief of the Commissariat \u2014 Ma Dai\n\nLeft Army Marching General \u2014 Zhang Ni\n\nRight Army Commander \u2014 Ma Zheng\n\nRight Army Marching General \u2014 Deng Zhi\n\nCenter Army Director \u2014 Liu Yang\n\nCenter Army Marching Generals \u2014 Liao Hua, Hu Ji\n\nCenter Army Front Generals \u2014 Yuan Lin, Liu Ba, Xu Yun\n\nCenter Army Rear General \u2014 Hu Ban\n\nCenter Army Left Generals \u2014 Wu Yi, Ding Xian\n\nCenter Army Right Generals \u2014 Gao Xiang, Guan Yong, Liu Min\n\nCenter Army Center Generals \u2014 Du Qi, Sheng Bo, Fan Qi\n\nAdvisers \u2014 Ma Su, Yang Yi, Cuan Xi, Du Yi\n\nSecretaries \u2014 Fan Jian, Dong Jue\n\nLeft Guard \u2014 Guan Xing\n\nRight Guard \u2014 Zhang Bao\n\nInspector \u2014 Yan Yan\n\nLi Yan was given the task of guarding the passes against Wu from the southeast.\n\nZhuge Liang was the Commander-in-Chief of the Northern Expedition.\n\nAll being ready, a day was chosen for the start: The fifth year, the third month, on the day of \"tiger\".\n\nAfter the appointments had all been made, there came forward a veteran who had listened in vain for the duty assigned him.\n\n\"Old I may be,\" said he, \"yet have I still the valor of Lian Po and the heroism of Ma Yuan. Why am I thought useless any more than these two who refused to acknowledge old age?\"\n\nIt was Zhao Zilong.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I have lost my friend Ma Chao by illness since I returned from the Southern Expedition, and I feel as I had lost an arm. Now, General, you must own that the years are mounting up. Any slight lapse would not only shake the life-long reputation of yourself, but might have a bad effect on the whole army.\"\n\nZhao Zilong replied bitterly, \"I have never quailed in the presence of the enemy from the day I first joined the First Ruler. I have ever pressed to the front. It is a happy ending for a person of valor to die on the frontier. Think you that I should resent it? Let me lead the van, I pray.\"\n\nZhuge Liang used all his skill to dissuade the veteran, but in vain.\n\nZhao Zilong was set on it, saying, If you, O Prime Minister, do not let me lead the van, I will smash my head on the floor and die at your feet.\n\nAt last Zhuge Liang yielded, saying, General, you can have the post of Van Leader, but you must choose a colleague to support you.\n\n\"I will go to help the Veteran Leader!\" cried Deng Zhi, without a moment's hesitation. \"I am not worth much, but I will help lead the attack on the enemy.\"\n\nAccordingly five thousand of veterans were chosen for the advanced guard, and with them, to assist Zhao Zilong, went Deng Zhi and ten other generals.\n\nAfter the vanguard had set out, the main body marched by the north gate, the Latter Ruler himself going to see his minister start. The farewell was taken three miles from the gate, in the face of the grand army with its banners and pennons flaunting in the wind, and spears and swords gleaming in the sun.\n\nThen they took the road leading to Hanzhong.\n\nNaturally, this movement was duly reported in Luoyang at a court held by Cao Rui, when a minister said, \"A report from the border stations says that Zhuge Liang has marched three hundred thousand troops into Hanzhong. Zhao Zilong and Deng Zhi are leading the advanced guard.\"\n\nThe report alarmed Cao Rui, and he asked, \"Who can lead an army to repel the advance?\"\n\nAt once out spoke one, saying, \"My father died in Hanzhong, and to my bitter resentment his death is unavenged. Now I desire to lead the army against Shu, and I pray that the armies west of the Pass may be given me for this purpose. I shall render a service to the state, as well as taking vengeance for my father. I care not what fate may befall me.\"\n\nThe speaker was Xiahou Yuan's son, Xiahou Mao. He was by nature very impulsive and also very miserly. When young he had been adopted by Xiahou Dun. When Xiahou Yuan was killed by Huang Zhong, Cao Cao was moved and married Xiahou Mao to one of his daughters, Princess Qinghe, so that he was an Imperial Son-in-Law. As such he enjoyed great deference at court. But although he held a military commission, he had never been with the army. However, as he requested the command, he was made Commander-in-Chief of the western armies and was ready to march.\n\nBut Minister of the Interior Wang Lang spoke against the appointment, saying, \"The appointment is wrong. Xiahou Mao, the Son-in-Law, has never seen a battle and is unsuitable for this post, especially when his opponent is the clever and crafty Zhuge Liang, a man thoroughly versed in strategy.\"\n\n\"I suppose you have arranged with Zhuge Liang to be his ally,\" sneered Xiahou Mao. \"Ever since I was a boy, I have studied strategy, and I am well acquainted with army matters. Why do you despise my youth? Unless I capture this Zhuge Liang, I pledge myself never again to see the Emperor's face.\"\n\nWang Lang and his supporters were silenced. Xiahou Mao took leave of the Ruler of Wei and hastened to Changan to get his army in order. He had two hundred thousand troops from the western areas.\n\n\u2003He would go to battle, take the signal flags in grip,\n\n\u2003But could he play the leader, he a lad with callow lip?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "Zhao Zilong Slays Five Generals; Zhuge Liang Takes Three Cities.\n\nZhuge Liang's army marched northward, passing through Mianyang, where stood Ma Chao's tomb. In honor of the dead Tiger General, Zhuge Liang sacrificed there in person, and Ma Chao's cousin \u2014 Ma Dai \u2014 being chief mourner for the occasion.\n\nAfter this ceremony, when the Commander-in-Chief was discussing his plans, the spies came in to report: \"The Ruler of Wei, Cao Rui, has put in motion all western forces under Xiahou Mao.\"\n\nThen Wei Yan went in to offer a plan, saying, \"Xiahou Mao is a child of a wealthy family, soft and stupid. Give me five thousand troops, and I will go out by Baozhong, follow the line of the Qinling Mountains east to the Ziwu Valley and then turn north. In ten days I can be at Changan. Hearing of my rush, Xiahou Mao will hasten to vacate the city. Then he must flee by way of Royal Gate. I will come in by the east, and you, Sir, can advance by the Xie Valley with the main army. In this way all west of Changan will be ours in just one move.\"\n\nZhuge Liang smiled at the suggestion.\n\n\"I do not think the plan quite perfect,\" said he. \"You are gambling by thinking there is no northerner worth considering guarding Changan. If anyone suggests sending a force across to block the exit of the mountains, I am afraid we should lose five thousand troops, to say nothing of the check to our elan. The plan will not work.\"\n\n\"If you, O Prime Minister, march by the high road, they will bring against you the whole host Within the Passes and will thus hold you indefinitely. You will never get to the Middle Land.\"\n\n\"But I shall go along the level road on the right of Longyou. I cannot fail if I keep to the fixed rules of war.\"\n\nWei Yan withdrew, gloomy and dissatisfied.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang sent Zhao Zilong orders for the advanced guard to move.\n\nXiahou Mao was at Changan preparing his force. There came to him a general from Xiliang, named Han De, a man of great valor, whose weapon was a mighty battle-ax called \"Mountain Splitter\". He brought with him eighty thousand of the Qiang tribesmen and offered his services. They were gladly accepted, and his army was made the van of the attack.\n\nThis Han De had four sons, all very expert in archery and horsemanship. They were named Han Ying, Han Yao, Han Qiong, and Han Qi, and they came to serve under their father. Han De led his sons and the eighty thousand troops by the road to Phoenix Song Mountain, where they were near the army of Shu, and here they drew up the array.\n\nWhen the battle line was in order, the father, with his four sons, rode to the front and began to revile their enemy, shouting, \"Rebels and raiders! How dare you invade our territory?\"\n\nZhao Zilong quickly lost his temper, rode forward and challenged. The eldest son, Han Ying, accepted and galloped out; but he was slain in the third bout. Immediately his brother Han Yao went out, whirling his sword. But now Zhao Zilong's blood was up, and the old dash and vigor came upon him so that the young man had no chance to win the battle. Then the third son, Han Qiong, took his great halberd and dashed out to his brother's aid. Zhao Zilong had now two opponents; nevertheless he held his own, nor blenched nor failed a stroke. Seeing that his two brothers were nearing defeat, the fourth son Han Qi went to join in the fray with his pair of swords that he had named \"Sun and Moon\". And there was the veteran warrior with three against him, and he still kept them at bay.\n\nPresently a spear thrust got home on Han Qi, who fell. Another general then coming out to take his place. Zhao Zilong lowered his spear and fled. Han Qiong then took his bow and shot three arrows at the fugitive, who turned them aside so that they fell harmless. Angry at this, Han Qiong again seized his halberd and went in pursuit. But Zhao Zilong took his bow and shot an arrow that wounded his pursuer in the face. So Han Qiong fell and died. Han Yao then galloped up and raised his sword to strike, but Zhao Zilong slipped past, got within his guard and made Han Yao a prisoner. Zhao Zilong quickly galloped into his own array with his captive, dropped him and then, dashing out, recovered his spear, which had fallen when he seized his man.\n\nHan De was overwhelmed with the loss of all his sons and went behind the battle array. His Qiang tribesmen were too frightened at the prowess of Zhao Zilong to be of any use in battle, and no one dared to meet the old warrior. So they retired, while Zhao Zilong rode to and fro among them slaying at his will.\n\n\u2003I thought of brave old people, of Zhao Zilong,\n\n\u2003Who, in spite of numbered years three scores and ten,\n\n\u2003Was marvelous strong in battle; who one day\n\n\u2003Slew four opposing generals, as great as\n\n\u2003When at Dangyang he had saved his lord.\n\nSeeing the successful battle that Zhao Zilong was waging, Deng Zhi led on his troops to join in the fight. This completed the discomfiture of the Xiliang army, and they ran away. Han De, seeing the danger of being captured, threw off his armor and went on foot. The soldiers of Shu drew off and returned to their camp.\n\nIn camp Deng Zhi felicitated his veteran colleague.\n\n\"For a man of seventy years, you are unique and wonderful,\" said he. \"You are as much the hero as you ever were. It is almost an incomparable feat to have slain four generals in one day.\"\n\n\"Yet the Prime Minister thought me too old and did not wish to employ me. I had to give him a proof.\"\n\nThe captive Han Yao was sent to the main body with the messenger who bore an account of the victory.\n\nIn the meantime, Han De led his defeated army back to his chief, to whom he related his sad story with many tears. Then Xiahou Mao got angry and decided to lead his own army out against Zhao Zilong.\n\nWhen the scouts reported his coming, Zhao Zilong took his spear and mounted his steed. He led one thousand troops out to Phoenix Song Mountain, at the foot of which he made his array. Xiahou Mao was wearing a golden casque, riding a white horse, and carrying a huge sword. From his place beneath the great standard, he saw Zhao Zilong galloping to and fro. He was going out to give battle, when Han De checked him.\n\n\"Is it not mine to avenge my four sons?\" said Han De.\n\nHan De seized his mountain-splitter ax, and rode directly at the warrior, who advanced with fury. The contest was but short, for in the third encounter Zhao Zilong's spear thrust brought Han De to the earth. Without waiting a moment he made for Xiahou Mao, who hastily dashed in behind his ranks and so escaped. Then Deng Zhi led on the main body and completed the victory. The force of Wei retired three miles and made a camp.\n\nThis first battle having gone against him, Xiahou Mao called his officers to consult.\n\nHe said, \"I have heard Zhao Zilong long ago, but have never met face-to-face. Now though that warrior is old, he still has incredible prowess. The story of Dangyang where he alone fought against a whole host and came out victor is really not fabricated. But what to be done against such a champion?\"\n\nThen Cheng Wu, son of Cheng Yu, said, \"My opinion is that this Zhao Zilong, though brave in the field, is lacking in the council chamber. Really he is not greatly to be feared. Give battle again soon, but first prepare a two-pronged ambush. You can retreat and so draw him into it. Then go up on the hill top and direct the attack from that point of vantage so that he may be hemmed in on all sides and be captured.\"\n\nThe necessary plans for this were made, and two parties of thirty thousand each, led by Dong Xin and Xue Ze, went into ambush right and left. The ambush laid, Xiahou Mao advanced once more to attack, drums rolling and flags flying. As soon as he appeared, Zhao Zilong and Deng Zhi went to meet him.\n\nDeng Zhi said, \"The army of Wei were beaten only yesterday. This renewed attempt must mean that they are trying some trick. You should be cautious, General.\"\n\n\"I do not think this youth, with the smell of mother's milk still on his lips, worth talking about. We shall surely capture him today.\"\n\nZhao Zilong pranced out, and Pan Sui came to meet him from the side of Wei. But Pan Sui made no stand and quickly ran away. Zhao Zilong plunged in to try to capture Xiahou Mao. Then there came out to stop him no less than eight generals of Wei, all of whom passed in front of Xiahou Mao. But one by one they too fled. Zhao Zilong pressed forward at full speed, Deng Zhi coming up behind.\n\nWhen Zhao Zilong had got deeply involved, with the battle raging all around him, Deng Zhi decided to retire. This was the signal for the ambush to come out, Dong Xin from the right and Xue Ze from the left. Deng Zhi was so hampered that he could not attempt to rescue his colleague. Zhao Zilong was thus entirely surrounded. However, he struggled on, losing men at every dash, till he had but one thousand troops left. He was then at the foot of the hill whence Xiahou Mao was directing operations, and observing his enemy from this point of vantage, Xiahou Mao sent troops to check Zhao Zilong whithersoever he went. Zhao Zilong decided to charge up the hill, but was stopped by rolling bulks of timber and tumbling rocks.\n\nThe battle had lasted long, and Zhao Zilong was fatigued. So he halted to rest a time, intending to renew the struggle when the moon should be up. But just as he had taken off his armor the moon rose and, with it, his enemies began to attack with fire as well, and the thunder of the drums was accompanied by showers of stones and arrows.\n\nThe oncoming host shouted, \"Zhao Zilong! Why don't dismount and be bound?\"\n\nHowever, Zhao Zilong did not think of that, but got upon his steed to strive once more to extricate himself. And his enemies pressed closer and closer, pouring in flights and flights of arrows. No advance was possible, and the end seemed very near.\n\n\"I refused the repose of age,\" sighed he, \"and now my end will come to me here!\"\n\nJust then he heard new shouting from the northeast, and the array of Wei became disordered. To his joy, Zhao Zilong saw Zhang Bao coming toward him, the serpent halberd in his hand, and a man's head hanging at his bridle.\n\nSoon Zhang Bao reached the veteran general's side and cried, \"The Prime Minister feared some misfortune had befallen you, so he sent me to your help! I have five thousand troops here. We heard that you were surrounded. On the way I met Xue Ze and slew him.\"\n\nZhao Zilong's courage revived, and he and the young general went on toward the southwest, driving the soldiers of Wei before them in disorder. Soon another cohort came in from the side, the leader wielding the green-dragon saber.\n\nThis was Guan Xing, and he cried, \"The Prime Minister sent me with five thousand troops to your aid. On the way I encountered Dong Xin and slain him. Here is his head. The Prime Minister is coming up too!\"\n\n\"But why not press on to capture Xiahou Mao since you have had such wonderful success?\" cried Zhao Zilong.\n\nZhang Bao took the hint and went forward. Guan Xing followed.\n\n\"They are as my own children,\" said Zhao Zilong to those who stood near. \"And they press on wherever there is merit to be won. I am an old leader and high in rank, but I am not worth so much as these two youths. Yet will I risk my life once more for the sake of my old lord the First Ruler.\"\n\nSo he led the remnant of his troops to try to capture Xiahou Mao.\n\nDuring that night the army of Wei was smitten till corpses covered the earth and gore ran in rivers. Xiahou Mao was unskillful, and young, and inexperienced in battle. His army was in utter rout, and he could not think but only flee. At the head of a hundred cavalries, he made for Nanan. His army, leaderless, scattered like rats.\n\nZhang Bao and Guan Xing set out for Nanan. At the news of their coming, Xiahou Mao closed the city gates and urged his soldiers to defend. Zhao Zilong soon joined the generals, and they attacked on three sides. Deng Zhi arrived also, and the city was quite surrounded.\n\nAfter vain efforts for ten days, they heard the news: \"The Prime Minister has stationed the rear army in Mianyang, the left army in Yangping Pass, the right army in Shicheng. He himself is leading the center army toward Nanan.\"\n\nThe four generals went to visit Zhuge Liang and told him their failure at the city. He got into his light chariot and rode out to view the city, after which he returned and summoned the officers to his tent.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"The moat is deep, the walls are steep. Wherefore the city is well defended and difficult to take. My present plan omits this place. If you persist in the attack and the Wei armies march to try for Hanzhong, our army will be in danger.\"\n\n\"Consider what the capture of Xiahou Mao would mean,\" said Deng Zhi. \"He is an Imperial Son-in-Law, and worth more than slaying a hundred ordinary leaders. We have begun the siege, and we should not raise it.\"\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I have other plans. East of this lies Tianshui and north Anding. Does anyone know the governors of these two places?\"\n\n\"Ma Zun is the Governor of Tianshui, Cui Liang that of Anding,\" replied a scout.\n\nZhuge Liang then called to him one by one \u2014 Wei Yan, Zhang Bao, Guan Xing, and two trusted subordinates \u2014 and gave each certain instructions. They left to carry out their orders.\n\nNext Zhuge Liang ordered the soldiers to pile up beneath the walls heaps of firewood and straw, saying he was going to burn the city. The defenders on the wall derided him.\n\nCui Liang, the Governor of Anding, was much frightened when he heard that Xiahou Mao was besieged, and began to see to his own defenses. He mustered his four thousand soldiers, resolved to defend his city as long as possible. Then there came a man from the south direction, who said he had secret letters.\n\nCui Liang had him brought into the city, and, when questioned, the man said, \"I am one of Xiahou Mao's trusted soldiers and named Pei Xu. I was sent to beg for help from Tianshui and Anding. The city of Nanan is hard pressed. Every day we have raised fires to call the attention of your cities to our plight, but our signals have all failed. No one has come. I was ordered to fight my way through the besiegers and come to tell you. You are to give assistance immediately, and our General will open the gates to help you.\"\n\n\"Have you a letter from the General?\" asked Cui Liang.\n\nA letter was produced from inside the man's dress, all moist with perspiration. After the Governor had read it, the soldier took it back and went on to the direction of Tianshui.\n\nTwo days later a mounted messenger came to Anding and said to Cui Liang: \"Governor Ma Zun of Tianshui with his troops have already started for Nanan. The troops of Anding should march at once to their aid.\"\n\nCui Liang took the advice of his officers. Most of them said, \"If you do not go, and Nanan is taken, we shall he blamed for giving up the Imperial Son-in-Law. He must be rescued.\"\n\nThereupon Cui Liang marched. The civil officers were left in charge of the city. The army took the high road to Nanan. They saw flames shooting up to the sky all the time, and the Governor urged the army to march faster. When fifteen miles from the city, there was heard the drums of an attacking force, and the scouts came to say that the road ahead was held by Guan Xing, while Zhang Bao was coming up quickly in their rear.\n\nAt this news the soldiers scattered in all directions. Cui Liang had a hundred men left with whom he tried to cut his way out that he might return to his own city. He got through.\n\nBut when he came to his own city, a flight of arrows greeted him from the wall, and Wei Yan shouted to him, saying, \"I have taken the city. You had better yield!\"\n\nThis was what had happened. Wei Yan and his soldiers, disguised as an Anding soldiers, in the darkness of the night had beguiled the wardens of the gate into opening it, and the men of Shu had got in.\n\nCui Liang set off for Tianshui. But one march away a cohort came out, and beneath the great flag he saw a light chariot. In the chariot sat a man in Daoist robe with a feather fan in his hand. Cui Liang at once recognized Zhuge Liang, but as he turned, up came Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, who summoned him to surrender. As he was entirely surrounded, no other course was open to him, so he gave in. He went to the great camp with Zhuge Liang, who treated him with courtesy.\n\nAfter a time Zhuge Liang said, \"Is the Govenor of Nanan a friend of yours?\"\n\n\"He is one Yang Ling, a cousin of Yang Fu. Being neighboring counties, we are very good friends.\"\n\n\"I wish to trouble you to persuade him to capture Xiahou Mao. Can you?\"\n\n\"If you, O Prime Minister, order me to do this, I would ask you to withdraw your troops and let me go into the city to speak with him.\"\n\nZhuge Liang consented and ordered the besiegers to draw off seven miles and camp. Cui Liang himself went to the city and hailed the gate. He entered and went forthwith to his friend's residence. As soon as he had finished the salutations, he related what had happened.\n\n\"After the kindness we have received from Wei, we cannot be traitors,\" said Yang Ling. \"But we will meet ruse with ruse.\"\n\nHe led Cui Liang to the Commander-in-Chief and told the whole story.\n\n\"What ruse do you propose?\" asked Xiahou Mao.\n\n\"Let us pretend to offer the city, and let the army of Shu in. Once they are in, we can massacre them.\"\n\nXiahou Mao agreed to plot the scheme.\n\nCui Liang went back to Zhuge Liang's camp, where he said, \"Yang Ling wants to offer the Prime Minister the city. He also wants to capture Xiahou Mao, but he is so afraid of having few soldiers that he has made no hasty move.\"\n\n\"That is simple enough,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"Your hundred troops are here. We can mix with them some of my generals dressed as your officers and so let them get into the city. They can hide in Xiahou Mao's dwelling and arrange with Yang Ling to open the gates in the night. And my grand army will come in to make the capture for you.\"\n\nCui Liang thought within himself, \"If I do not take the Shu generals, they will arouse suspicion. I would rather take them and will kill them as soon as they get within the walls. Then, I will give the signal and beguile Zhuge Liang to enter, and so dispose of him.\"\n\nSo Cui Liang consented to Zhuge Liang's proposal.\n\nZhuge Liang gave him instructions, saying, \"I will send my trusty Guan Xing and Zhang Bao with you. You will pass them off as the rescuers just to set Xiahou Mao's mind at rest. But when you raise a fire, I shall take that as my signal and come in.\"\n\nAt dusk the two trusty generals, having received their secret orders, put on their armor, mounted, took their weapons, and got in among the Anding troops. Cui Liang led the small force to the gate. Yang Ling was on the wall. The drawbridge was hoisted. He leaned over the guard rail and scanned those below.\n\n\"Who are you?\" asked he.\n\n\"We are rescuers from Anding.\"\n\nNow Cui Liang shot an arrow over the wall, to which a secret letter was bound, saying:\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is sending two generals into the city that they may help him to get in, but do nothing till we get inside lest the ruse gets known and the game be spoiled.\"\n\nYang Ling went to show this letter to Xiahou Mao, who said, \"Then Zhuge Liang is going to be our victim. Put a company of ax and bill men in the palace, and as soon as these two generals get inside, shut the gates and fall on. Then give the signal. As soon as Zhuge Liang gets inside the gate, seize him.\"\n\nAll arrangements being made, Yang Ling went back to the wall and said, \"Since you are Anding troops, you may be allowed in.\"\n\nThe gate was thrown open and, while Guan Xing followed close after Cui Liang, Zhang Bao was a little way behind. Yang Ling came down to the gate to welcome them. As soon as Guan Xing got near, he lifted his sword and smote Yang Ling, who fell headless. Cui Liang was startled and lashed his steed to flee.\n\nBut Zhang Bao rushed forth and cried, \"Scoundrel! Did you think your vile plot would be hidden from the eyes of our Prime Minister?\"\n\nWith that Cui Liang fell from a spear thrust of Zhang Bao. Then Guan Xing went up on the wall and lit the fire. Soon the army of Shu filled the city. Xiahou Mao could make no defense, so he tried to fight his way through the south gate. There he met Wang Ping and was captured. Those with him were slain.\n\nZhuge Liang entered the city of Nanan and at once forbade all plunder. The various generals reported the deeds of valor. The captive Commander-in-Chief was placed in a prisoner's cart.\n\nThen Deng Zhi asked, \"O Prime Minister, how did you know the treachery of Cui Liang?\"\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I knew the man was unwilling in his heart to yield, so I sent him into the city that he might have a chance to weave a counter plot with Xiahou Mao. I saw by his manner he was treacherous, and so I sent my two trusty generals with him to give him a feeling of security. Had he been true to me, he would have opposed this. But he accepted it gaily and went with them lest I should suspect him. He thought they could slay the two leaders and entice me in. But Guan Xing and Zhang Bao already had orders of what to do. Everything turned out as I thought, and as they did not expect.\"\n\nThe officers bowed their appreciation of his wonderful insight.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said, \"I sent one of my trusty people to pretend he was a certain Pei Xu of Wei and so deceive this Cui Liang. Then I sent another messenger to reinforce the ruse. I also sent them to Tianshui to repeat the plan, but nothing has happened yet. I do not know the reason. We will take this opportunity to capture that place.\"\n\nIt was decided to take Tianshui next, and thither they moved. Wu Yi and Liu Yang were to guard Nanan and Anding. Wei Yan was ordered to move toward Tianshui.\n\nWhen Ma Zun, Governor of Tianshui, heard of Xiahou Mao's being besieged in Nanan, he called a council at which one party \u2014 headed by Yin Shang and Liang Xu \u2014 were strongly of opinion that a rescue should be attempted.\n\n\"If anything sinister happens to the Imperial Son-in-Law, 'golden branch and jade leaf' as he is, we shall be held guilty of having made no attempt to save him. Wherefore, O Governor, you must march all the forces you have to his rescue,\" said Yin Shang and Liang Xu.\n\nMa Zun found decision difficult, and while thinking over what was best to do, the arrival of Pei Xu, a messenger from Xiahou Mao, was announced. Pei Xu was taken to the Governor's residence and there produced his dispatch and asked for aid. Soon came another man saying that the Anding troops had set out and calling upon Ma Zun to hasten. This decided him, and he prepared his army.\n\nThen an outsider came in and said, \"O Governor, you are the sport of one of Zhuge Liang's wiles.\"\n\nAll looked at him with surprise. He was one Jiang Wei. His father was Jiang Jiong, a former local official who had died in the court's service while quelling one of the Qiang rebellions. Jiang Wei was well up in books, seeming to have read everything, and was also skilled in all warlike exercises. He had studied books on war. He was a very filial son and much esteemed. He held military rank of General.\n\nJiang Wei said to the Governor, \"I hear Zhuge Liang is attacking Xiahou Mao, who is now in Nanan most closely besieged. How then can this messenger have got out? Pei Xu is an unknown officer whom no one has heard of, and the other messenger from Anding bears no dispatch. The fact is the men are imposters sent to beguile you into leaving your city undefended so that it may be the more easily captured.\"\n\nThe Governor began to understand. He said, \"Were it not for you, I would fall into a ruse.\"\n\nThen Jiang Wei said, \"But do not be anxious. I have a scheme by which we can capture Zhuge Liang and relieve Nanan.\"\n\n\u2003The fates all changing bring the man that's needed,\n\n\u2003And warlike skill comes from a source unheeded." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "Jiang Wei Goes Over To Zhuge Liang; Zhuge Liang Reviles Wang Lang.\n\nJiang Wei propounded his scheme of defense, saying, \"Zhuge Liang will lay an ambush behind the city, induce our soldiers to go out and then take advantage of its undefended state to capture it. Now give me three thousand good soldiers, and I will place them in ambush at a certain critical place. Lead your troops out, but go slowly and not further than ten miles, and then turn to retire. However, look out for a signal, and if you see one, attack, for the attack will be double. If Zhuge Liang is there himself, we shall capture him.\"\n\nThe Governor adopted this plan, gave the needed troops to Jiang Wei, who marched at once, and then Ma Zun went forth himself with Liang Qian. Only two civil officials \u2014 Liang Xu and Yin Shang \u2014 were left to guard the city.\n\nZhao Zilong had been sent to lie in ambush in a secret place among the hills till the Tianshui army left the city, when he was to rush in and capture it. His spies reported the departure of the Governor, and only civil officials remained within the city. Zhao Zilong sent on the news to those who were acting with him, Zhang Yi and Gao Xiang, that they might attack Ma Zun.\n\nZhao Zilong and his five thousand troops then quickly marched to the city wall and called out, \"I am Zhao Zilong of Changshan. You have fallen into our trap, but if you will surrender quickly, you will save many lives.\"\n\nBut instead of being alarmed, Liang Xu looked down from the wall and said, \"On the contrary, you have fallen into our trap. Only you do not know it yet!\"\n\nZhao Zilong began his attack on the walls. Soon there was heard a roar, and fire broke out all round, and forth came a youthful leader armed with a spear, riding a curvetting steed.\n\n\"Look at me, Jiang Wei of Tianshui!\" cried he.\n\nZhao Zilong made at him, but after a few bouts he found Jiang Wei was getting very eager.\n\nZhao Zilong was surprised, and wondered, \"No one knows there is such an able man in Tianshui.\"\n\nAs the fight went on, along came the two other forces under Ma Zun and Liang Qian, now returning. As Zhao Zilong found he could not prevail, he set to cut an alley through and lead off his defeated troops. He was pursued, but Zhang Yi and Gao Xiang poured forth to save him, and he got away safely.\n\nZhuge Liang was surprised when he heard what had happened.\n\n\"Who is this?\" said he. \"Who has thus seen into the dark depths of my secret plan?\"\n\nA man of Nanan, who happened to be there, told him, \"He is Jiang Wei from Jicheng of Tianshui County. He is very filial to his mother. Civil skill and military prowess, wisdom and courage, he has all. Truly, he is a hero of the age.\"\n\nZhao Zilong also praised his skill with the spear, which was superior to any other's .\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"I want to take Tianshui now. I did not expect to find such a man as this.\"\n\nThe Shu army then advanced in force.\n\nJiang Wei went back to Ma Zun and said, \"Zhao Zilong's defeat will bring up Zhuge Liang with the main body. He will conclude that we shall be in the city, wherefore you had better divide your force into four. I, with one party, will go into hiding on the east so that I may cut off our enemies if they come that way. You, O Governor, and Liang Qian and Yin Shang will lie in ambush on the other sides of the city. Let Liang Xu and the common people go up on the wall to make the defense.\"\n\nMa Zun agreed to the plan and prepared everything.\n\nDue to Jiang Wei, Zhuge Liang himself led the main army to Tianshui.\n\nWhen they reached the city, Zhuge Liang gave a general orders: \"Attacking a city must be proceeded as soon as the army reaches it. At the rolling of drums, incite and urge the soldiers to advance with a rush. The keenness of the soldiers will be spoiled by any delay.\"\n\nSo this time also the army came straight up to the rampart. But they hesitated and dared not attack when they saw the flags flying in such good order and apparently such thorough preparation.\n\nAbout the middle of the night, fires started up all around and a great shouting was heard. No one could see whence the Wei soldiers were coming, but there were answering shouts from the wall. The soldiers of Shu grew frightened and ran. Zhuge Liang mounted a horse and, with Guan Xing and Zhang Bao as escort, got out of danger. Looking back, they saw many mounted troops with torches winding along like a huge serpent.\n\nZhuge Liang bade Guan Xing find out what this meant, and Guan Xing report: \"These are Jiang Wei's troops.\"\n\nZhuge Liang remarked, \"An army owes more to its leading than to its numbers. This Jiang Wei is a true genius.\"\n\nZhuge Liang led the army back to camp, and then he thought for a long time. Suddenly he called up one of the Anding men and said, \"Where is the mother of this Jiang Wei?\"\n\n\"She lives in Jicheng,\" replied he.\n\nZhuge Liang called Wei Yan and said to him, \"March off with a body of troops, giving out that you are going to take Jicheng. If Jiang Wei comes up, let him enter the city.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang asked, \"What is the most important place in connection with this place?\"\n\nThe man from Anding replied, \"The storehouse of Tianshui is at Shanggui. If that is taken, the supplies are cut off.\"\n\nThis was good news, so Zhao Zilong was sent to attack Shanggui, while Zhuge Liang made a camp ten miles south of the city.\n\nThe spies took the news of the movements of these three forces into Tianshui.\n\nWhen Jiang Wei heard that one army was to attack his own place, he pleaded with Ma Zun, saying, \"My mother is in Jicheng, and I am worried about the attacking force. Let me go to its defense, that I may keep the city and do my duty by my mother at the same time.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei received command of three thousand troops and marched toward his home.\n\nWhen Jiang Wei came near the walls, he saw a cohort under Wei Yan. He attacked. After a show of defense Wei Yan retreated, and Jiang Wei entered the city. He closed the gates and prepared to defend the wall. Then he went home to see his mother.\n\nIn the same way Liang Qian was allowed to enter Shanggui.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang sent for his prisoner, Xiahou Mao, and, when he was brought to his tent, Zhuge Liang said suddenly, \"Are you afraid of death?\"\n\nXiahou Mao prostrated himself and begged for his life.\n\n\"Well, Jiang Wei of Tianshui, who, is now gone to guard Jicheng, has sent a letter to say that he would surrender if only that would secure your safety. Now I am going to let you go if you will promise to induce Jiang Wei to come over to me. Do you accept the condition?\"\n\n\"I am willing to induce him to yield to you,\" said Xiahou Mao.\n\nZhuge Liang then gave his prisoner clothing and a horse and let him ride away. Nor did he send anyone to follow him, but let him choose his own road.\n\nHaving got outside, Xiahou Mao wanted to get away, but he was perfectly ignorant of the roads and knew not which to take. Presently he came across some people, apparently in flight, and he questioned them.\n\n\"We are Jicheng people,\" said they. \"Jiang Wei has surrendered the city and deserted to Zhuge Liang. The troops of Shu are looting and burning, and we have escaped. We are going to Shanggui.\"\n\n\"Do you know who is holding Tianshui?\"\n\n\"Governor Ma Zun is in there,\" said they.\n\nHearing this, Xiahou Mao rode quickly toward Tianshui. Presently he met more people, evidently fugitives, leading sons and carrying daughters, who told the same story. By and by he came to the gate of the city, and, as he was recognized, the wardens of the gate admitted him, and the Governor came to greet him and asked of his adventures. He told all that had happened, that Jiang Wei had surrendered and related what the fugitives had said.\n\n\"I did not think Jiang Wei would have gone over to Shu,\" said the Governor sadly.\n\n\"It seems he thought by this to save you, Sir Commander-in-Chief,\" said Liang Xu. \"I am sure he has made only a pretense of surrendering.\"\n\n\"Where is the pretense when it is a fact that he has surrendered?\" said Xiahou Mao.\n\nThey were all perplexed. Then at the third watch the troops of Shu came to begin an attack. The fires round the wall were very bright, and there in the glare was seen Jiang Wei, armed and riding up and down under the ramparts calling out for Xiahou Mao. Xiahou Mao and Ma Zun ascended the wall, whence they saw Jiang Wei swaggering to and fro.\n\nSeeing the chiefs on the wall, Jiang Wei called out, \"I surrendered for the sake of you, O General. Why have you gone back on your word?\"\n\n\"Why did you surrender to Shu after enjoying so much of Wei's bounty?\" said Xiahou Mao. \"And why do you talk thus?\"\n\n\"What do you mean talking thus after writing me a letter telling me to surrender? You want to secure your own safety by involving me. But I have surrendered, and as I am a superior general in their service now, I see no sense in returning to Wei.\"\n\nSo saying, he urged the soldiers on to the attack. The assault continued till dawn, when the besiegers drew off.\n\nNow the appearance of Jiang Wei in this fashion was but a ruse. Zhuge Liang had found among his men one who resembled Jiang Wei and had disguised him so that Jiang Wei appeared to be leading the attack on the ramparts. In the smoke and fire during the night no one could penetrate the disguise.\n\nZhuge Liang then led the army to attack Jicheng. The grain in the city was insufficient to feed the people. From the wall Jiang Wei saw wagons of grain and forage being driven into the Shu camp, and he determined to try to secure some. So he led three thousand troops out of the city to attack the train of wagons. As soon as he appeared, the convoy abandoned the carts and fled. Jiang Wei seized them, and was taking them into the city, when he was met by a cohort under the command of Zhang Yi. They plunged into battle. After a short time Wang Ping came to reinforce Zhang Yi, so that Jiang Wei was attacked on two sides. All Jiang Wei's efforts were vain, and he had to abandon the spoil and try to reenter the city.\n\nBut as he drew near, he saw the walls were decorated with Shu ensigns, for Wei Yan had captured the place and was in possession. By desperate fighting Jiang Wei got clear and set off for Tianshui. But he only had a few score horsemen left. Presently the small force fell in with Zhang Bao, and at the end of this engagement Jiang Wei found himself alone, a single horseman. He reached Tianshui and hailed the gate. The watchers above the gate knew him and went to tell the Governor.\n\n\"This fellow has came to beguile me into opening the gate,\" said Ma Zun.\n\nSo Ma Zun ordered the defenders to shoot at the fugitive. Jiang Wei turned back, but there were the army of Shu close at hand. He set off as fast as he could for Shanggui. But when he got there Liang Qian hurled a volley of abuse at him.\n\n\"You traitor!\" cried Liang Qian. \"Dare you come to try to cajole me out of my city? I know you have surrendered to Shu.\"\n\nLiang Qian's soldiers also began to shoot at the hapless fugitive.\n\nJiang Wei was helpless. He could not explain the real truth to those who doubted him. Lifting his eyes to heaven, while tears rolled down his cheeks, he whipped up his steed and rode off toward Changan.\n\nBefore he had got very far, he came to a spot where were many heavy foliaged trees. From among these appeared a company of soldiers, led by Guan Xing. Weary as were both horse and rider, there was no chance of successful resistance, and Jiang Wei turned back. But soon appeared a small chariot in which sat Zhuge Liang, dressed simply as usual in a white robe and carrying his feather fan.\n\n\"Friend Jiang Wei,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"is it not time to yield?\"\n\nJiang Wei stopped and pondered. There was Zhuge Liang, and Guan Xing's troops were behind him. There was no way out. So he dismounted and bowed his head in submission.\n\nZhuge Liang at once got out of the chariot and bade him welcome, taking him by the hand and saying, \"Ever since I left my humble cottage, I have been seeking some worthy person to whom I might impart the knowledge that my life has been spent in acquiring. I have found no one till this moment, and now my desire is attained. You are the one.\"\n\nJiang Wei bowed and thanked him, and they two returned to camp.\n\nSoon after their arrival, the new recruit and Zhuge Liang consulted how to capture Tianshui and Shanggui. Jiang Wei had a scheme.\n\n\"The two civil officers in charge of the city, Yin Shang and Liang Xu, are excellent friends of mine,\" said he, \"and I will write a letter to each, shoot it over the wall tied to an arrow, and ask them to help by raising a revolt within the city.\"\n\nThey decided upon this, and two secret letters were duly written and sent flying over the ramparts, where they were found and taken to the Governor. Ma Zun was doubtful what action to take and consulted with Xiahou Mao, asking him to decide.\n\nSaid Ma Zun, Yin Shang and Liang Xu are in league with Jiang Wei, and they plot to aid the enemy from within. What should be done?\n\n\"Put both the men to death,\" Xiahou Mao replied.\n\nBut Yin Shang heard what was toward and said to Liang Xu, \"The best course for us is to yield the city to Shu and trust to them to treat us well as our recompense.\"\n\nThat evening Xiahou Mao sent many times to summon the two officers to him, but they thought it too great a risk to answer the call. Instead, they armed themselves and rode at the head of their own soldiers to the gates, opened them and let in the troops of Shu. Ma Zun and Xiahou Mao fled by the west gate with a hundred faithful followers and sought refuge with the Qiang tribespeople.\n\nLiang Xu and Yin Shang welcomed Zhuge Liang, who entered the city, restored order, and calmed the people.\n\nThis done, Zhuge Liang asked how he might capture Shanggui.\n\nLiang Xu said, \"My brother, Liang Qian, holds that city, and I will call upon him to yield it.\"\n\nThereupon Liang Xu rode over to Shanggui and called out his brother to submit. Zhuge Liang rewarded the two brothers and then made Liang Xu Governor of Tianshui; Yin Shang, Magistrate of Jicheng; and Liang Qian, Magistrate of Shanggui. Next the army prepared to advance.\n\nHis officers asked, \"O Prime Minister, why do you not pursue and capture Xiahou Mao?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I let him go as I would release a duck. In my friend Jiang Wei I recognized a phoenix.\"\n\nSuch awe and fear seized upon the country around when these exploits of Zhuge Liang were heard of that many other cities simply opened their gates without making any resistance. Zhuge Liang brought all soldiers from Hanzhong, horse and foot, and marched on to Qishan.\n\nWhen the Shu army reached the west bank of River Wei, the scouts reported their movements in Luoyang, and, at a court held in the first year of the era of Calm Peace (AD 227), the ministers told the Ruler of Wei of the threatened invasion.\n\nThey said, \"Xiahou Mao, the Imperial Son-in-Law, has lost the three counties and fled to the Qiangs. The enemy has reached Qishan, and their advanced columns are on the west bank of River Wei. I pray that an army be sent to repulse them.\"\n\nThe Emperor, Cao Rui, was alarmed and asked, Who shall go out and drive off the enemy for me?\n\nMinister Wang Lang stepped forward and said, \"I observed that whenever General Cao Zhen was sent by the late Emperor on any expedition, he succeeded. Why not send him to drive off these soldiers of Shu?\"\n\nCao Rui approved of the suggestion.\n\nWhereupon he called up Cao Zhen and said to him, \"The late Emperor confided me to your guardianship. You cannot sit by while the enemy ravages the country.\"\n\nCao Zhen replied, \"Your Majesty, my talents are but poor and unequal to the task you propose.\"\n\n\"You are a trusted minister of state, and you may not really refuse this task. Old and worn as I am, I will use the little strength left me to accompany you,\" said Wang Lang.\n\n\"After the bounties I have received, I cannot refuse,\" replied Cao Zhen. \"But I must ask for an assistant.\"\n\n\"You have only to name him, O Noble One,\" said the Emperor.\n\nSo Cao Zhen named Guo Huai, a man of Yangqu, whose official rank was Lord of Sheting; he was also Imperial Protector of Yongzhou.\n\nThereupon Cao Zhen was appointed Commander-in-Chief, and the ensigns of rank were conferred upon him. Guo Huai was appointed his second, and Wang Lang was created Instructor of the Army. Wang Lang was then already old, seventy-six.\n\nThe army of Cao Zhen consisted of two hundred thousand troops, the best from both capitals. His brother, Cao Zun, was made Leader of the Van with an assistant, Zhu Zan, General Who Opposes Brigands. The army moved out in the eleventh month of that year, and the Ruler of Wei went with it to the outside of the west gate.\n\nCao Zhen marched by way of Changan and camped on the west bank of the River Wei. At a council, which the Commander-in-Chief called to consider the best mode of attack, Wang Lang asked that he might be allowed to parley with the enemy.\n\nSaid Wang Lang, \"Let the army be drawn up in complete battle order and unfurl all the banners. I will go out and call a parley with Zhuge Liang, at which I will make him yield to us without a blow, and the army of Shu shall march home again.\"\n\nCao Zhen agreed to the plan. So orders were given to take the early meal at the fourth watch and have the men fall in with their companies and files at daylight, all in review order. Everything was to be grand and imposing, the flags fluttering and the drums rolling, every soldier in his place. Just before this display, a messenger was to deliver a declaration of war.\n\nNext day, when the armies were drawn up facing each other in front of the Qishan Mountains, the soldiers of Shu saw that their enemies were fine, bold warriors, very different from those that Xiahou Mao had brought against them. Then after three rolls of the drums, Minister of the Interior Wang Lang mounted his horse and rode out, next to him rode Commander-in-Chief Cao Zhen, and followed behind was Deputy Commander Guo Huai. The two Leaders of the Van remained in charge of the army.\n\nThen a messenger rode to the front and called out in a loud voice, \"We request the leader of the opposing army to come out to a parley.\"\n\nAt this, within the Shu army, an opening was made at the main standard, through which came out Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, who took up their stations right and left. Then followed two lines of generals, and beneath the standard, in the center of the array, was seen a four-wheeled carriage wherein sat Zhuge Liang, with turban, white robe and black sash. A leather fan was in his hand. He advanced with the utmost dignity. Looking up, he saw three commander umbrellas and flags bearing large white characters. In the middle was an aged, white-haired figure, Minister Wang Lang.\n\n\"He intends to deliver an oration,\" thought Zhuge Liang. \"I must answer as best I may.\"\n\nHis carriage was then pushed to the front beyond the line of battle, and he directed one of his officers to reply, saying, \"The Prime Minister of the Hans is willing to speak with Minister Wang Lang.\"\n\nWang Lang advanced. Zhuge Liang saluted him from the carriage with raised hands, and Wang Lang replied from horseback with an inclination. Then Wang Lang began his oration.\n\n\"I am happy to meet you, Noble Sir. Your reputation has been long known to me. Since you recognize the decrees of Heaven and are acquainted with the conditions of the world, why do you, without any excuse, lead out such an army?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"How mean you no excuse? I hold an edict to destroy rebels.\"\n\nWang Lang replied, \"Heaven has its mutations, and change its instruments from time to time. The supreme dignity comes at last to the person of virtue. This is the inevitable and immutable law. In the days of Emperors Huan and Ling arose the Yellow Scarves rebellion, and the whole earth was involved in wrangling and warfare. Later, in the eras of Inauguration of Tranquillity and Rebuilt Tranquillity, Dong Zhuo arose in revolt, a revolt which Li Jue and Guo Si continued after Dong Zhuo had been destroyed. Next Yuan Shu usurped the imperial style, and his brother Yuan Shao played the man of might and valor in the land of Yejun. Liu Biao occupied Jingzhou, and Lu Bu seized and held Xuzhou. Thus rebels have arisen in the land like swarm of wasps and bold spirits have followed their own will, to the danger of the supreme dignity and the peril of the people.\n\n\"Then the Founder of Wei, Emperor Cao, swept away rebellion in eight directions, purged the land, and restored order. All hearts turned to him in gratitude, and the people of the four quarters admired his virtue. He gained his position by no manifestation of force: It was simply the will of Heaven. His son and successor, Emperor Pi, was wise and warlike, adequate to the great heritage and fitted to wield supreme power. Wherefore, in accordance with the will of Heaven and the desires of humans, and following the example of the earliest emperors, he took his place as arbiter of the Central Government, whereby the myriad countries are ordered and governed. Can any maintain that it was not the desire of Heaven and the wish of the people?\n\n\"Noble Sir, you are a man of natural talent and acquired attainments, worthy, you say yourself, to be compared with Guan Zhong and Yue Yi. Why then place yourself in opposition to the decree of Heaven and turn away from the desire of humankind to do this thing? You cannot be ignorant of the wise old saying: 'He who accords with the Heaven shall flourish, while he who opposes shall be destroyed.'\n\n\"Now the armies of Wei are countless legions, and their able leaders are beyond number. Can the glowworm in the parched stubble rival the glorious moon in the sky? If you will turn down your weapons and throw aside your armors and dutifully yield, you shall not lose your rank. The state will have tranquillity and the people rejoice. Is not that a desirable consummation?\"\n\nZhuge Liang laughed.\n\nSaid he, \"I regarded you as an old and tried servant of the Han Dynasty and thought you would hold some noble discourse. Could I imagine you would talk so foully? I have a word to say that all the armies may hear. In the days of Emperors Huan and Ling the rule of Han declined, the officers of state were the authors of evil, the government fell into confusion, and misfortune settled on the country. Trouble was rife in every quarter. The Yellow Scaves, Dong Zhuo, Li Jue and Guo Si, and other rebels arose one after another, deposing the emperor and afflicting the people. Because the household officers were corrupt and foolish, and the court officials were as brute beasts, living only that they might feed; because high people, wolfishly cruel in their hearts, savagely mean in their conduct, were in office one after another, and slavish flatterers bending slavish knees confounded the administration, therefore the Throne became as a waste heap, and the people were trodden into the mire.\n\n\"I know all about you. You came from the eastern seashore. You got into office with a recommendation of filial piety and integrity; you properly aided your sovereign and supported the state, cared for the tranquillity of Han and magnified the Lius. But could one have imagined that you would turn and assist rebels and enter into a plot to usurp the Throne? Indeed your crime is great and your guilt heavy. Heaven and earth will not suffer you. The inhabitants of this land would devour you.\n\n\"But happily the design of Heaven is to retain the glorious dynasty. The late Emperor Bei continued the line in the River Lands, and I have been entrusted by the present Emperor with the task of destroying you rebels.\n\n\"Since you are such a false and specious minister, you have but to hide your body and cover your head, concern yourself about your belly and your back. Do not come out before the armies to rave about the decrees of Heaven. You fool and rebel! Mark you, today is your last day. This day even you descend to the Nine Golden Springs. How will you stand before the twenty-four emperors of Latter Han that you will meet there? Retire, you rebel! Go tell your rebellious companions to come and fight one battle with me that shall decide the victory!\"\n\nFierce wrath filled the old man's breast. With one despairing cry Wang Lang fell to the earth dead.\n\nThis exploit of Zhuge Liang's has been lauded in verse:\n\n\u2003In west Qin, when the armies met in the field,\n\n\u2003He, the bold one, singly faced a myriad warriors,\n\n\u2003And with a simple weapon, just his tongue,\n\n\u2003He did to death a wicked minister.\n\nAfter Wang Lang had fallen, Zhuge Liang waved the fan toward Cao Zhen and said, \"As for you, I leave you alone for this occasion. Go and get your army in order for tomorrow's battle.\"\n\nThe chariot turned and left the ground. Both armies retired for that day. To Cao Zhen fell the melancholy duty of rendering the last services to the aged Minister and setting his coffin on its journey to Changan.\n\nThen said General Guo Huai, \"Zhuge Liang will certainly think the army occupied with mourning and make a night attack. Let us anticipate him and set out an ambush about our camp. Let two bodies of our troops be hidden outside and two others take the occasion to raid the camp of the enemy.\"\n\n\"I thought of such a scheme myself,\" said Cao Zhen. \"It exactly suits my plans.\"\n\nSo Cao Zhen gave order to Cao Zun and Zhu Zan: \"You are to take ten thousand troops each, get away by the rear of the mountain, and look out for the passing of the soldiers of Shu. When they have gone by, you are to make for their camp. But you are only to attempt a raid if they have left.\"\n\nCao Zun and Zhu Zan took the order and left. Then the Commander-in-Chief arranged with Guo Huai each to lead a force and hide outside the camp to wait for the raid of Shu. Only a few soldiers were to be left within to make a fire if the enemy were seen to be coming. And all generals set about the necessary preparations.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang reached his tent, he called to him Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan, and said to them, \"You two are to make a night attack.\"\n\n\"Cao Zhen is a man of experience and will be on the lookout,\" ventured Wei Yan.\n\n\"But that is just what I want: I want him to know we shall attack tonight. He will then put some troops in hiding in rear of the Qishan Mountains, who will make for our camp as soon as they see us pass toward theirs. I am sending you to let yourselves be seen passing the hill. but you are to camp behind it and at a distance. When the soldiers of Wei attack this camp, you will see a signal. Then Wei Yan will hold the approach to the hill, and Zhao Zilong will make his way back in fighting order. He will meet the army of Wei returning and will let them pass. The enemy will assuredly fall to fighting among themselves, and we shall finish the battle.\"\n\nThese two having gone away to carry out their portions of the plan, Zhuge Liang next called up Guan Xing and Zhang Bao: \"You are to take each ten thousand troops and hide in the high road to the mountain. When the troops of Wei come, let them pass and then march along the road they came by to their camp that they have just left.\"\n\nThese two having left, Zhuge Liang placed Ma Dai, Wang Ping, Zhang Ni, and Zhang Yi in ambush about the camp.\n\nWithin the camp the tents and shelters were left standing as if the camp was occupied, while wood and straw were heaped up ready to give the signal. This done, Zhuge Liang and his officers retired to the rear of the camp to watch the proceedings.\n\nOn the side of Wei the two Van Leaders, Cao Zun and Zhu Zan, left at dusk and hastened toward the camp of Shu. About the second watch they saw troops busily moving about in front of the hill.\n\nCao Zun thought to himself, \"General Guo Huai is an excellent strategist and of wonderful prevision.\"\n\nThen he hastened the march, and in the third watch reached the camp of Shu. He at once dashed into the enclosure, but only to find it totally deserted. Not a man was visible. At once he knew he had stumbled into a trap, and began to withdraw. Then the flames sprang up. Zhu Zan arrived already to fight, and the two bodies of troops, thrown into confusion, fought with each other till the two leaders met, when they found out they were fighting their own men.\n\nAs they were restoring order, on came the four bodies of troops of Shu under Ma Dai, Wang Ping, Zhang Ni, and Zhang Yi who had lain in ambush ready for them. Cao Zun and Zhu Zan, with more than a hundred of those nearest to them, ran away to get to the high road. But before long the rolling drums announced another body of their enemy, and their flight was stopped by Zhao Zilong.\n\n\"Whither go ye, O rebel leaders?\" cried Zhao Zilong. \"Stop, for here is death!\"\n\nBut Cao Zun and Zhu Zan still fled. Then came up a force led by Wei Yan and completed the defeat. The soldiers of Wei were wholly beaten and ran away to their own camp. But the guard left in the camp thought they were the enemy who come to raid, so they lit the fires, and at this signal Cao Zhen rushed up from one side and Guo Huai from the other, and a fierce fight with their own troops began.\n\nWhile this was going on, three cohorts under Wei Yan, Guan Xing, and Zhang Bao arrived from three points, and a great and confused battle began. The soldiers of Wei were driven off and chased for three miles.\n\nIn the fight Wei lost many leaders, and Zhuge Liang gained a great success. Cao Zhen and Guo Huai got together their beaten troops and went back to their own camp.\n\nWhen they discussed the fight, Cao Zhen said, \"The enemy are too strong for us. Have you any plan to drive them away?\"\n\nReplied Guo Huai, \"Our defeat is one of the ordinary events of war. Let us not be cast down. I have a plan to suggest that will disorder them so that one body cannot help the other, and they will all be compelled to flee.\"\n\n\u2003Wei leaders fail and sadly send\n\n\u2003To pray tribespeople help to lend." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Defeats The Qiangs In A Snowstorm; Sima Yi Captures Meng Da By A Rapid March.\n\nGuo Huai laid before his colleague the scheme to overcome the army of Shu, saying, \"The Qiang tribes have paid tribute regularly since the days of the Founder of Wei. Emperor Pi regarded them with favor. Now let us hold such points of vantage as we may, while we send secret emissaries to engage their help in exchange for kindly treatment. We may get the Qiangs to attack Shu and engage their attention, while we gather a large army to smite them at another place. Thus attacking, how can we help gaining a great victory?\"\n\nA messenger was sent forthwith bearing letters to the Qiang tribespeople.\n\nThe King of the western Qiangs was named Cheli Ji. He had rendered yearly tribute since the days of Cao Cao. He had two ministers, one for civil and the other for military affairs, named, respectively, Prime Minister Ya Dan and Chief Leader Yue Ji.\n\nThe letter was accompanied by presents of gold and pearls, and when the messenger arrived, he first sought Prime Minister Ya Dan, to whom he gave gifts and whose help he begged. Thus he gained an interview with the King, to whom he presented the letter and the gifts. The King accepted both and called his counselors to consider the letter.\n\nYa Dan said, \"We have had regular intercourse with the Wei kingdom. Now that Cao Zhen asks our aid and promises an alliance, we ought to accede to his request.\"\n\nCheli Ji agreed that it was so, and he ordered his two chief ministers to raise an army of two hundred fifty thousand of trained soldiers, archers and crossbowmen, spearmen and swordsmen, warriors who flung maces and hurled hammers. Beside these various weapons, the tribesmen used chariots covered with iron plates nailed on. They prepared much grain and fodder and many spare weapons, all of which they loaded upon these iron-clad chariots. The chariots were drawn by camels or teams of horses. The carts or chariots were known as \"iron chariots\".\n\nThe two leaders took leave of their King and went straightway to Xiping Pass.\n\nThe commander in charge of the Pass, Han Zhen, at once sent intelligence to Zhuge Liang, who asked, \"Who will go to attack the Qiangs?\"\n\nGuan Xing and Zhang Bao said they would go.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang said, \"You shall be sent. But as you are ignorant of the road and the people, Ma Dai shall accompany you.\"\n\nTo Ma Dai he said, \"You know the disposition of the Qiangs from your long residence there. You shall go as guide.\"\n\nThey chose out fifty thousand of veterans for the expedition. When they had marched a few days and drew near their enemy, Guan Xing went in advance with a hundred horsemen and got first sight of them from a hill. The Qiangs were marching, the long line of iron chariots one behind another in close order. Then they halted and camped, their weapons piled all along the line of chariots like the ramparts of a moated city. Guan Xing studied them for a long time quite at a loss to think how to overcome them. He came back to camp and consulted with his two colleagues.\n\nMa Dai said, \"We will see tomorrow what they will do when we make our array, and discuss our plans when we know more.\"\n\nSo the next day they drew up their army in three divisions, Guan Xing's division being in the center, Zhang Bao's in the left, and Ma Dai's in the right. Thus they advanced.\n\nThe enemy also drew up in battle order. Their Chief Leader, Yue Ji, had an iron mace in his hand and a graven bow hung at his waist. He rode forward on a curvetting steed boldly enough. Guan Xing gave the order for all three divisions to go forward. Then the enemy's ranks opened in the center and out rolled the iron chariots like a great wave. At the same time the Qiangs shot arrows and bolts, and the men of Shu could not stand against them.\n\nThe wing divisions under Ma Dai and Zhang Bao retired, and the Qiangs were thus enabled to surround the center. In spite of every effort, Guan Xing could not get free, for the iron chariots were like a city wall and no opening could be found. The troops of Shu were absolutely helpless, and Guan Xing made for the mountains in hope of finding a road through.\n\nAs it grew dark a Qiang leader with a black flag approached, his warriors like a swarm of wasps about him.\n\nPresently the leader cried out to him, \"Youthful general, flee not. I am Yue Ji!\"\n\nBut Guan Xing only hastened forward, plying his whip to urge his steed. Then he suddenly came on a deep gully, and there seemed nothing but to turn and fight. Yue Ji come close and struck at him with the mace. Guan Xing evaded the blow, but it fell upon his steed and knocked it over into water. Guan Xing went into the water too.\n\nPresently he heard a great noise again behind him. Yue Ji and his troops had found a way down into the gully and were coming at him down the stream. Guan Xing braced himself for a struggle in the water.\n\nThen he saw Zhang Bao and Ma Dai coming up on the bank fighting with, and driving off, the Qiangs. Yue Ji was struck by Zhang Bao, and he too fell into the gully. Guan Xing gripped his sword and was about to launch a stroke at Yue Ji as he came up, when Yue Ji jumped out of the water and ran away.\n\nAt once Guan Xing caught the steed Yue Ji had left, led it up the bank and soon had it ready to mount. Then he girded on his sword, got on the horse, and joined the battle with his colleagues.\n\nAfter driving off the Qiangs, Guan Xing, Zhang Bao, and Ma Dai gathered together and rode back. They quickly gained the camp.\n\n\"I do not know how to overcome these men,\" said Ma Dai. \"Let me protect the camp while you go back and ask the Prime Minister what we should do.\"\n\nGuan Xing and Zhang Bao started at once and made the best of their way back. They told Zhuge Liang what had happened. He at once sent off Zhao Zilong and Wei Yan to go into ambush. After this he went himself with thirty thousand troops and Jiang Wei, Zhang Yi, Guan Xing, and Zhang Bao and soon came to Ma Dai's camp. The day after, from the summit of a hill, Zhuge Liang surveyed the country and the enemy, who were coming on in a ceaseless stream.\n\n\"It is not difficult,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nHe called up Ma Dai and Zhang Yi and gave them certain orders.\n\nThey having gone, he turned to Jiang Wei, saying, \"My friend, do you know how to overcome them?\"\n\n\"The enemy only depend upon force and courage. They shall not expect this fine strategy,\" was the reply.\n\n\"You know,\" said Zhuge Liang, smiling. \"Those dark clouds and the strong north wind mean snow. Then I can do what I wish.\"\n\nThe two leaders, Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, were sent into ambush, and Jiang Wei went out to offer battle. But he was to retire before the iron chariots. At the entrance to the camp were displayed many flags, but the soldiers that should serve under them were not there.\n\nIt was now full winter, the twelfth month, and the snow had come. The army of Shu went out to offer battle. When the iron chariots came forward, they retired and thus led the Qiangs to the gate of the camp, Jiang Wei going to its rear. The Qiangs came to the gate and stopped to look. They heard the strumming of a lute, but there were no soldiers there; the flags meant nothing. They told Yue Ji, and he suspected some ruse. Instead of entering, he went back to Prime Minister Ya Dan and told him.\n\n\"It is a ruse,\" said Ya Dan. \"Zhuge Liang's base trick is the pretense of a pretense, and you had better attack.\"\n\nSo Yue Ji led his troops again to the camp gate, and there he saw Zhuge Liang with a lute just getting into his chariot. With a small escort, he went toward the back of the camp. The tribesmen rushed into the camp and caught sight of the light chariot again just as it disappeared into a wood.\n\nThen said Ya Dan, \"There may be an ambush, but I think we need not be afraid of these soldiers.\"\n\nHence they decided to pursue. Ahead of them they saw the division under Jiang Wei hastening off through the snow. Yue Ji's rage boiled up at this sight, and he urged his men to go faster. The snow had filled in the roads among the hills, making every part look like a level plain.\n\nAs they marched, one reported that some of the enemy were appearing from the rear of the hills. Some thought this meant an ambush, but Ya Dan said it did not matter, and they need not fear. He urged them to hasten.\n\nShortly after this they heard a roaring as if the hills were rending asunder and the earth falling in, and the pursuers on foot fell one atop of the other into great pits that were invisible in the snow. The iron chariots, being close behind and hurrying along, could not stop, and they went into the pits also. Those still farther in the rear halted, but just as they were facing about, Guan Xing and Zhang Bao came up, one on either side, and attacked. Myriads of bolts flew through the air. Then three other divisions under Jiang Wei, Ma Dai, and Zhang Yi arrived and confusion was worse than ever.\n\nThe Qiang leader, Yue Ji, fled to the rear and was making for the mountains when he met Guan Xing, who slew him in the first encounter. Prime Minister Ya Dan was captured by Ma Dai and taken to the main camp. The soldiers scattered.\n\nHearing of the capture of one leader, Zhuge Liang took his seat in his tent and bade them bring the prisoner. He told the guards to loose his bonds, and he had wine brought to refresh him and soothed him with kindly words.\n\nYa Dan was grateful for this kindness, and felt more so when Zhuge Liang said, \"My master, the Emperor of the Great Han, sent me to destroy those who are in revolt. Why are you helping them? But I will release you, and you will return to your master and say that we are neighbors and we will swear an oath of everlasting friendship, and tell him to listen no more to the words of those rebels.\"\n\nYa Dan was released and so were all the soldiers that had been captured, and all their stuff was given back to them. They left for their own country.\n\nThe Qiangs being thus disposed of, Zhuge Liang quickly marched again to Qishan. He sent letters to Capital Chengdu announcing his success.\n\nMeanwhile Cao Zhen anxiously waited for news of his expected allies. Then a scout came in with the news that the army of Shu had broken camp and were marching away.\n\n\"That is because the Qiangs have attacked,\" said Guo Huai gleefully, and the two made ready to pursue.\n\nThey saw ahead of them the army of Shu seemed to be in confusion. The Van Leader Cao Zun led the pursuit.\n\nSuddenly, as he pressed on, there came a roll of drums, followed by the appearance of a cohort led by Wei Yan, who cried, \"Stop! You rebels!\"\n\nBut Cao Zun did not obey the summons. He dashed forward to meet the attack. He was killed in the third encounter. His colleague Zhu Zan in similar fashion fell in with a cohort under Zhao Zilong, to whose long spear he soon fell victim. The loss of these two made Cao Zhen and Guo Huai hesitate, and they made to retire.\n\nBut before they could face about, they heard the drums of an army in their rear, and Guan Xing and Zhang Bao came out and surrounded them. Cao Zhen and Guo Huai made a stand for a time, but were soon worsted and fled. The army of Shu pursued the beaten enemy to the bank of River Wei, where they took possession of the Wei camp.\n\nCao Zhen was greatly chagrined at his defeat and sad at the loss of his generals. He send a report of his misfortune to his master and asked for reinforcements.\n\nAt the court of Wei one of the ministers told the story, saying, \"Cao Zhen has been defeated repeatedly, and his two Van Leaders were slain. Further, his Qiang allies have suffered great loss. Cao Zhen is sending for help, and the case is very urgent.\"\n\nCao Rui was alarmed and asked for someone to say how to drive off the victorious foe.\n\nThereupon Hua Xin said, \"It will be necessary for Your Majesty to go in person. You should call together all the nobles, and each will have to exert himself. Unless this is done, Capital Changan will be lost and the whole Land Within the Passes be in danger.\"\n\nBut Imperial Guardian Zhong Yao opposed him.\n\nSaid he, \"The knowledge of every leader must exceed that of those led; then only will he be able to control them. Sun Zi the Strategist sums it up very briefly: 'Know the enemy, know thyself, and every battle is a victory.' I know Cao Zhen has had great experience in the field, but he is no match for Zhuge Liang. Still there is such a match, and I will pledge my whole family that he will succeed. But Your Majesty may be unwilling to listen to me.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei replied, \"You are a minister of high rank and old. If you know any wise person able to repel these soldiers of Shu, call him without delay and ease my mind.\"\n\nThen said Zhong Yao, \"When Zhuge Liang decided to invade us, he was afraid of the one man I will name. Wherefore he spread calumnies concerning him, raising suspicion in Your Majesty's mind that you might dismiss him. That done, Zhuge Liang invaded. Now employ this man again, and the enemy will retire.\"\n\n\"Who is it?\" asked the Ruler of Wei.\n\n\"I mean the Imperial Commander of the Flying Cavalry, Sima Yi.\"\n\n\"I have long regretted my action,\" said Cao Rui. \"Where now is friend Sima Yi?\"\n\n\"He is at the city of Wancheng, idle.\"\n\nAn edict was prepared recalling Sima Yi and restoring him to his rank and titles, and conferring upon him the new title Commander-in-Chief of the Western Forces and General Who Pacifies the West. All troops of Nanyang were set in motion, and Cao Rui led them to Changan. At the same time Cao Rui ordered Sima Yi to be there to meet him on a certain day. And the orders were sent by a swift messenger to the city of Wancheng.\n\nAt this time Zhuge Liang greatly rejoiced at the success he had had. He was at Qishan, busy with plans for other victories, when Li Yan, who was in command at the Palace of Eternal Peace, sent his son Li Teng to the camp. Zhuge Liang concluded that such a visit could only mean that Wu had invaded them, and he was in consequence cast down. However, he summoned Li Teng to his tent, and when asked the object of his mission, Li Teng replied that he had joyful news to impart.\n\n\"What is your joyful news?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Formerly Meng Da deserted to Wei, but only because he could do nothing else. Cao Pi thought much of his capabilities, treated him most generously, kept him at his side, gave him titles of General Who Establishes Strong Arms and Lord of Pingyang, and appointed him to the posts of Governor of Xincheng and Commander of Shangyong and Jincheng, and so on. But when Cao Pi died, all was changed. In Cao Rui's court were many who were jealous of Meng Da's influence and power, so that he enjoyed no peace.\n\n\"He used to talk about being originally one of the Shu leaders, and he was forced to do so-and-so. Lately he has sent several confidants with letters to my father asking that he would state his case to you as to the happenings. When the five armies came upon Shu, he wanted to rejoin the River Lands. Now he is at Xincheng, and, hearing you are attacking Wei, he proposes to lead the army of the three counties about Xincheng, Jincheng, and Shangyong to attack Luoyang while you attack Changan, whereby both capitals will be taken. I have brought with me his messenger and his letters.\"\n\nThis was good news, and the bearer was fittingly rewarded. But at that moment came the news that Cao Rui was leading an army to Changan and had recalled the banished Sima Yi to office. This piece of bad news saddened Zhuge Liang not a little.\n\nHe told Ma Su, who said, \"Cao Rui should not be your worry. If he goes to Changan, we will march there and capture him on the road, and there will be an end of him.\"\n\n\"Do you think I fear him?\" said Zhuge Liang bitterly. \"But the recall of Sima Yi is another matter; that troubles me. And Meng Da's proposal will avail nothing if he comes across this man. Meng Da is no match for him. He will he captured, and, if he should be, the Middle Land will be hard to conquer.\"\n\n\"Why not put Meng Da on his guard then?\" said Ma Su.\n\nZhuge Liang decided to write, and the letter was dispatched immediately.\n\nMeng Da was then at Xincheng, anxiously expecting the return of his last confidential messenger, when, one day, the man returned and gave him this letter from Zhuge Liang himself:\n\n\"Your last letter has convinced me of your loyal rectitude, and I still remember with joy our old friendship. If your plan succeeds, you will certainly stand in the first rank of most worthy ministers. But I scarcely need impress upon you the extreme necessity for most perfect secrecy. Be very careful whom you trust. Fear everyone, guard against everyone. This news of the recall of Sima Yi and the proposed junction of armies at Changan is very serious. If a word reaches Sima Yi, he will come to you first. Therefore take every precaution and do not regard this as a matter of unimportance.\"\n\n\"They say Zhuge Liang leaves nothing to chance,\" said Meng Da, smiling as he read. \"This proves it.\"\n\nHe lost no time in preparing a reply, which he sent also by a trusty messenger. This letter was like this:\n\n\"I acknowledge your most valuable advice, but is it possible that I should be remiss? For my part I do not think the Sima Yi's affair need cause anxiety, for Wancheng is three hundred miles from Luoyang and four hundred miles from Xincheng. Should he hear anything, it would take a month to send a memorial to the capital and get a reply. My ramparts here are strong and my forces posted in the best positions. Let him come! I am not afraid of the result, so you, O Prime Minister, need feel no anxiety. You have only to wait for the good news of success.\"\n\nZhuge Liang read the letter and threw it on the ground, stamping his foot with rage.\n\n\"Meng Da is a dead man!\" said he, \"A victim of Sima Yi.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" said Ma Su.\n\n\"What does the Art of War say? 'Attack before the enemy is prepared; do what he does not expect.' What is the use of reckoning upon a month's delay for sending up a memorial? Cao Rui's commission has already gone, and Sima Yi may strike whom he will. He will not have to wait to memorialize the Throne. Ten days after he hears of Meng Da's defection, he will be upon Meng Da with an army, and Meng Da will be helpless.\"\n\nThe others agreed. However, Zhuge Liang sent the messenger back again with a message:\n\nIf the matter has not yet actually started, no other person is to be told of it; for if anyone knows, it shall certainly come to nothing.\n\nAnd the messenger left for Xincheng.\n\nIn his idle retreat in Wancheng, Sima Yi had heard of his master's ill-success against the armies of Shu, and the news made him very sad. He lifted up his eyes and sighed.\n\nHe had two sons, Sima Shi the elder and Sima Zhao, both clever and ambitious, and both earnest students of military books. One day they were present when their father seemed very cast down, and Sima Shi asked his father the reason.\n\n\"You would not understand,\" said the father.\n\n\"I think you are grieving because the Ruler of Wei does not use you,\" replied Sima Shi.\n\n\"But they will send for you presently,\" said Sima Zhao.\n\nThe prophecy was not long in fulfillment, for even then the bearer of the command stood at the gate, and the servant announced a messenger from the court bearing a commission.\n\nAs soon as he heard its terms, Sima Yi set about ordering the armies of Wancheng. Soon came a messenger from Governor Shen Yi of Jincheng with a secret message for Sima Yi. The messenger was taken into a private chamber, and his message was that Meng Da was on the point of rebellion. The leakage of this news was due to Li Gu, a confidential subordinate of Meng Da, and Deng Xian, Meng Da's nephew. Li Gu and Deng Xian went to confess the plot in exchange for a promise of amnesty.\n\nSima Yi smote his forehead.\n\n\"This is the Emperor's great good fortune, high as heaven itself. Zhuge Liang's army is at Qishan already, and all people's courage is at the brink of breakdown. The Emperor must go to Changan, and if he does not use me soon, Meng Da will carry out his plan; his plot will succeed, and both capitals will be lost. Meng Da is surely in league with Zhuge Liang, and if I can seize this Meng Da before he makes any move, that will damp Zhuge Liang's spirits and he will retreat.\"\n\nHis elder son Sima Shi remarked, \"It is necessary to memorialize the Throne.\"\n\n\"No,\" replied his father, \"that would take a month, and delay would mean failure.\"\n\nSima Yi gave orders to prepare to advance by double-rapid marches and threatened death to all loiterers. In order to avert suspicion, he sent letters to Meng Da by the hand of Military Adviser Liang Ji to tell Meng Da to prepare to join the western expedition.\n\nSima Yi quickly followed Liang Ji. After two days' march Sima Yi fell in with an army of General Xu Huang over the hills.\n\nXu Huang got an interview with Sima Yi, and he said, \"The Emperor has arrived at Changan to lead an expedition against Shu. Whither is the Commander-in-Chief going?\"\n\nSima Yi, in a low voice, said to him, \"Meng Da is on the verge of rebellion, and I am going to seize him.\"\n\n\"Let me go as your Van Leader,\" said Xu Huang.\n\nSo Xu Huang's troops were joined to the expedition and marched in the van. Sima Yi commanded the center, and his sons brought up the rear.\n\nTwo days farther on, some of the scouts captured Meng Da's confidential messenger, and with him Zhuge Liang's reply.\n\nSima Yi said to the man, \"I will let you live if you tell all you know.\"\n\nSo the messenger told all about the letters and messages he had taken from one to the other.\n\nWhen Sima Yi read, he remarked, \"All able people think the same way. Our plan would have been foiled by Zhuge Liang's cleverness unless, by the good luck of the Emperor, this messenger had been captured. Now Meng Da will be helpless.\"\n\nThe army pressed on still more rapidly.\n\nMeng Da had arranged for his stroke with Governor Shen Yi of Jincheng and Governor Shen Dan of Shangyong and was awaiting the day he had fixed. But Shen Yi and Shen Dan were only pretending to abet him, although they went on training and drilling their troops to keep up appearances till the soldiers of Wei could arrive. To Meng Da they pretended delay in their transport as the reason for being unable to start. And he believed them.\n\nJust then Liang Ji came, and when he had been ceremoniously received, he produced the order from Sima Yi and said, \"The Commander-in-Chief has received the edict of the Emperor to call in all the forces in this area, and he has sent me to direct you to hold your troops in readiness to march.\"\n\n\"On what day does the Commander-in-Chief start?\" asked Meng Da.\n\n\"He is just about starting now, and is on the way to Changan\" replied Liang Ji.\n\nMeng Da smiled inwardly, for, this being so, he saw success before him. He gave a banquet to Liang Ji. After Liang Ji took his leave, Meng Da sent to his fellow conspirators \u2014 Shen Yi and Shen Dan \u2014 to say the first step must be taken next day by exchanging the banners of Wei for those of Han and marching to attack Luoyang.\n\nThen the watchmen reported a great cloud of dust in the distance as though an army was coming. Meng Da was surprised and went up on the ramparts to see for himself. Soon he made out the banner of Xu Huang leading. He ran down from the wall and in a state of trepidation ordered the raising of the drawbridge. Xu Huang still came on and in due time stood on the bank of the moat.\n\nThen Xu Huang called out, \"Let the traitor Meng Da yield quickly!\"\n\nMeng Da, in a rage, opened upon him with arrows, and Xu Huang was wounded in the forehead. He was helped to a place of safety while the arrows flew down in great numbers. When the soldiers of Wei retired, Meng Da opened the gates and went in pursuit. But the whole of Sima Yi's army soon came up, and the banners stood so thick that they hid the sun.\n\n\"This is what Zhuge Liang foresaw!\" said Meng Da despairingly. The gates were closed and barred.\n\nMeanwhile the wounded general, Xu Huang, had been borne to his tent, where the arrow head was extracted and the physician attended to him. But that night he died. He was fifty-nine. His body was sent to Luoyang for burial.\n\nNext day, when Meng Da went up on the wall, he saw the city was entirely surrounded as with a girdle of iron. He was greatly perturbed and could not decide what to do. Presently he saw two bodies of troops coming up, their banners bearing the names of his fellow conspirators \u2014 Shen Yi and Shen Dan. He could only conclude that they had come to his help, so he opened the gates to them and went out to join them in the fight.\n\n\"Rebel, stay!\" cried they both as they came up.\n\nRealizing that they had been false, he turned and galloped toward the city, but a flight of arrows met him, and the two who had betrayed him, Li Gu and Deng Xian, began to revile him.\n\n\"We have already yielded the city!\" they cried.\n\nThen Meng Da fled. But he was pursued, and as he and his horse were both exhausted, he was speedily overtaken and slain. They exposed his head, and his soldiers submitted. Sima Yi was welcomed at the open gates. The people were pacified, the soldiers were rewarded and, this done, a report of their success was sent to Cao Rui.\n\nCao Rui ordered the body of Meng Da to be exposed in the market place of Luoyang, and he promoted Shen Yi and Shen Dan and gave them posts in the army of Sima Yi. He gave Li Gu and Deng Xian command of the cities of Xincheng and Shangyong.\n\nThen Sima Yi marched to Changan and camped. The leader entered the city to have audience with his master, by whom he was most graciously received.\n\n\"Once I doubted you,\" said Cao Rui, \"but then I did not understand, and I listened to mischief-makers. I regret it. Had you not suppressed Meng Da, both capitals would have gone wrong.\"\n\nSima Yi replied, \"Shen Yi gave the information of the intended revolt and thought to memorialize Your Majesty. But there would have been a long delay, and so I did not await orders, but set forth at once. Delay would have played into Zhuge Liang's hands.\"\n\nThen Sima Yi handed in Zhuge Liang's letter to Meng Da.\n\nWhen the Emperor had read that, he said, \"You are wiser than both the great strategists of old \u2014 Wu Qi and Sun Zi.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei conferred upon the successful leader a pair of golden axes and the privilege of taking action in important matters without first obtaining his master's sanction. Then Sima Yi was ordered to lead the army to the pass against the enemy.\n\nSima Yi said, \"May I name the Leader of the Van?\"\n\n\"Whom do you nominate?\"\n\n\"Zhang He, General of the Right Army, can shoulder this task.\"\n\n\"Just the man I wished to send,\" said Cao Rui, smiling. And Zhang He was appointed.\n\nSima Yi took his army off Changan and marched it to the camp of the Shu army.\n\nBy strategy the leader shows his skill;\n\nHe needs bold fighting men to work his will." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "Ma Su's Disobedience Causes The Loss Of Jieting; Zhuge Liang's Lute Repulses The Army Of Sima Yi.\n\nBeside sending Zhang He as Van Leader of Sima Yi, Cao Rui appointed two other generals, Xin Pi and Sun Li, to assist Cao Zhen. Xin Pi and Sun Li led fifty thousand troops.\n\nSima Yi's army was two hundred thousand strong. They marched out through the pass and made a camp.\n\nWhen encamped, Sima Yi summoned Zhang He to his tent and admonished him, saying, \"A characteristic of Zhuge Liang is his most diligent carefulness; he is never hasty. If I were in his place, I should advance through the Ziwu Valley to capture Changan and so save much time. It is not that he is unskillful, but he fears lest that plan might miscarry, and he will not sport with risk. Therefore he will certainly come through the Xie Valley, taking Meicheng on the way. That place captured, he will divide his force into two, one part to take Gu Valley. I have sent Cao Zhen orders to guard Meicheng strictly and on no account to let its garrison go out to battle. The generals Sun Li and Xin Pi are to command the Gu Valley entrance, and should the enemy come, they are to make a sudden attack.\"\n\n\"By what road will you advance?\" asked Zhang He.\n\n\"I know a road west of Qinling Mountains called Jieting, on which stands the city Liliu. These two places are the throat of Hanzhong. Zhuge Liang will take advantage of the unpreparedness of Cao Zhen and will certainly come in by this way. You and I will go to Jieting, whence it is a short distance to Yangping Pass. When Zhuge Liang hears that the road through Jieting is blocked and his supplies cut off, he will know that all the lands of West Valley Land is impossible to keep, and will retire without losing a moment into Hanzhong. I shall smite him on the march, and I ought to gain a complete victory. If he should not retire, then I shall block all the smaller roads and so stop his supplies. A month's starvation will kill off the soldiers of Shu, and Zhuge Liang will be my prisoner.\"\n\nZhang He took in the scheme and expressed his admiration, saying, \"O Commander, your calculation exceeds human!\"\n\nSima Yi continued, \"However, it is not to be forgotten that Zhuge Liang is quite different from Meng Da. You, as Leader of the Van, will have to advance with the utmost care. You must impress upon your generals the importance of reconnoitering a long way ahead and only advancing when they are sure there is no ambush. The least remissness will make you the victim of some ruse of the enemy.\"\n\nZhang He, having received his instructions, marched away.\n\nMeanwhile spies had come to Zhuge Liang in Qishan with news of the destruction of Meng Da and the failure of his conspiracy.\n\nThey said, \"Sima Yi marched rapidly in eight days to Xincheng. He had Shen Yi, Shen Dan, Li Gu, and Deng Xian plot against Meng Da from within. Meng Da had not been able to do anything and was killed. Now Sima Yi has gone to Changan, when he has marched through the pass with Zhang He.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was distressed.\n\n\"Meng Da's destruction was certain,\" said he. \"Such a scheme could not remain secret. Now Sima Yi will try for Jieting and block the one road essential to us.\"\n\nSo Jieting had to be defended, and Zhuge Liang asked who would go. Ma Su offered himself instantly.\n\nZhuge Liang urged upon him the importance of his task.\n\n\"The place is small, but of very great importance, for its loss would involve the loss of the whole army. You are deeply read in all the rules of strategy, but the defense of this place is difficult, since it has no wall and no natural defenses.\"\n\n\"I have studied the books of war since I was a boy, and I may say I know a little of the art of war,\" Ma Su replied. \"Why alone is Jieting so difficult to hold?\"\n\n\"Because Sima Yi is an exceptional man, and also he has a famous second in Zhang He as Leader of the Van. I fear you may not be a match for him.\"\n\nMa Su replied, \"To say nothing of these two, I would not mind if Cao Rui himself came against me. If I fail, then I beg you to behead my whole family.\"\n\n\"There is no jesting in war,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I will give a written pledge.\"\n\nZhuge Liang agreed, and a written pledge was given and placed on record.\n\nZhuge Liang continued, \"I shall give you twenty-five thousand veterans and also send an officer of rank to assist you.\"\n\nNext he summoned Wang Ping and said to him, \"As you are a careful and cautious man, I am giving you a very responsible position. You are to hold Jieting with the utmost tenacity. Camp there in the most commanding position so that the enemy cannot steal by. When your arrangements are complete, draw a plan of them and a map of the local topography, and let me see it. All my dispositions have been carefully thought out and are not to be changed. If you can hold this successfully, it will be of the first service in the capture of Changan. So be very, very careful.\"\n\nAfter Ma Su and Wang Ping had gone and Zhuge Liang had reflected for a long time, it occurred to him that there might be some slip between his two leaders.\n\nSo he called Gao Xiang to him and said, \"Northeast of Jieting is a city named Liliu, and near it an unfrequented hill path. There you are to camp and make a stockade. I will give you ten thousand troops for this task. If Jieting should be threatened, you may go to the rescue.\"\n\nAfter Gao Xiang had left, and as Zhuge Liang thought Gao Xiang was not a match for his opponent Zhang He, he decided there ought to be additional strength on the west in order to make Jieting safe. So he summoned Wei Yan and bade him lead his army to the rear of Jieting and camp there.\n\nBut Wei Yan said, \"As Leader of the Van, I should go first against the enemy. Why am I sent to a place where there is no fighting?\"\n\n\"The leadership of the van is really a second-rate task. Now I am sending you to support Jieting and take post on the most dangerous road to Yangping Pass. You are the chief keeper of the throat of Hanzhong. It is a very responsible post and not at all an idle one. Do not so regard it and spoil my whole plan. Be particularly careful.\"\n\nWei Yan, satisfied now that he was given this important mission, marched off.\n\nZhuge Liang's mind was at rest, and he called up Zhao Zilong and Deng Zhi, to whom he said, \"Now that Sima Yi is in command of the army, the whole outlook is different. Each of you will lead a force out to Gu Valley and move about so as to mislead the enemy. Whether you meet and engage them or not, you will certainly cause them uneasiness. I am going to lead the main army through the Xie Valley to Meicheng. If I can capture that, Changan will fall.\"\n\nZhao Zilong and Deng Zhi took the orders and went off.\n\nZhuge Liang appointed Jiang Wei as Leader of the Van, and they marched to the Xie Valley.\n\nWhen Ma Su and Wang Ping had reached Jieting and saw what manner of place it was, Ma Su smiled, saying, \"Why was the Prime Minister so extremely anxious? How would the Wei armies dare to come to such a hilly place as this?\"\n\nWang Ping replied, \"Though they might not dare to come, we should set our camp at this meeting of many roads.\"\n\nSo Wang Ping ordered his soldiers to fell trees and build a strong stockade as for a permanent stay.\n\nBut Ma Su had a different idea.\n\n\"What sort of a place is a road to make a camp in? Here is a hill standing solitary and well wooded. It is a heaven-created point of vantage, and we will camp on it.\"\n\n\"You are wrong, Counselor,\" replied Wang Ping. \"If we camp on the road and build a strong wall, the enemy cannot possibly get past. If we abandon this for the hill, and the troops of Wei come in force, we shall be surrounded, and how then be safe?\"\n\n\"You look at the thing like a child,\" said Ma Su, laughing. \"The rules of war say that when one looks down from a superior position, one can overcome the enemy as easily as cleaving bamboo. If they come, I will see to it that not a breastplate ever goes back again.\"\n\n\"I have followed our Commander-in-Chief in many campaigns, and always has he explained in details about the topography and given out well-thought orders. Now I have studied this hill carefully, and it is a critical spot. If we camp thereon and the enemy cut off our water supply, we shall have a mutiny.\"\n\n\"No such thing!\" said Ma Su. \"Sun Zi says that victory lies in desperate positions. If they cut off our water, will not our soldiers be desperate and fight to the death? Then everyone of them will be worth a hundred. I have studied the books, and the Prime Minister has always asked my advice. Why do you presume to oppose me?\"\n\n\"If you are determined to camp on the hill, then give me part of the force to camp there on the west so that I can support you in case the enemy come.\"\n\nBut Ma Su refused. Just then a lot of the inhabitants of the hills came running along saying that the Wei soldiers had come.\n\nWang Ping was still bent on going his own way, and so Ma Su said to him, \"Since you will not obey me, I will give you five thousand troops and you can go and make your own camp. But when I report my success to the Prime Minister, you shall have no share of the merit.\"\n\nWang Ping marched about three miles from the hill and made his camp. He drew a plan of the place and sent it quickly to Zhuge Liang with a report that Ma Su had camped on the hill.\n\nWhile Sima Yi was marching toward Jieting, he sent his younger son to reconnoiter the road and to find out whether it had a garrison.\n\nSaid Sima Yi, \"If there is a garrison, do not advance further.\"\n\nSima Zhao returned to report: \"Jieting has already been occupied by Shu.\"\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is rather more than human,\" said his father regretfully when Sima Zhao gave in his report. \"He is too much for me.\"\n\n\"Why are you despondent, Father? I think Jieting is not so difficult to take.\"\n\n\"How dare you utter such bold words?\"\n\n\"Because I have seen. There is no camp on the road, but the enemy are camped on the hill.\"\n\nThis was glad news.\n\n\"If they are on the hill, then Heaven means a victory for me,\" said his father.\n\nAt night Sima Yi changed into another dress, took a small escort, and rode out to see for himself. The moon shone brilliantly, and he rode to the hill whereon was the camp and looked all round it, thoroughly reconnoitering the neighborhood. Ma Su saw him, but only laughed.\n\n\"If Sima Yi has any luck, he will not try to surround this hill,\" said he.\n\nMa Su issued an order to his generals: \"In case the enemy come, you are to look to the summit for a signal with a red flag, when you shall rush down on all sides.\"\n\nSima Yi returned to his camp and sent out to inquire who commanded in Jieting.\n\nThey told him, \"He is Ma Su, brother of Ma Liang.\"\n\n\"A man of false reputation and very ordinary ability,\" said Sima Yi. \"If Zhuge Liang uses such as Ma Su, he will fail.\"\n\nThen he asked, \"Are there any other camps near the place?\"\n\nAnd they reported, \"Wang Ping's camp is about three miles off.\"\n\nWherefore Zhang He was ordered to go and check Wang Ping from coming to rescue. Zhang He marched out and placed himself between Wang Ping and the hill.\n\nThis done, Sima Yi ordered Shen Yi and Shen Dan to surround the hill and to block the road to the water supply. Lack of water would cause a mutiny; and when that occurred, it would be time to attack.\n\nThen Sima Yi led the main body to attack the hill on all sides.\n\nFrom the summit of his hill, Ma Su could see the banners of his enemy all round, and the country about was full of soldiers. Presently the hemming in was complete, and the soldiers of Shu became dejected. They dared not descend to attack although Ma Su hoisted the red flag signaling for them to move. The generals stood huddled together, no one daring to go first. Ma Su was furious. He cut down two generals, which frightened the others to the point of descending and making one desperate rush. But the troops of Wei would stand firm against their attack, and they reascended the hill.\n\nMa Su saw that matters were going ill, so he issued orders to bar the gates and defend till help should come from outside.\n\nWhen Wang Ping saw the hill surrounded, he started to go to the rescue, but Zhang He checked him, and after exchanging some ten encounters Wang Ping was compelled to retire whence he had come.\n\nThe Wei troops kept a close siege. The Shu soldiers in the hill camp, having no water, were unable to prepare food, and disorder broke out. The shouting was audible at the foot of the hill and went on far into the night. The soldiers on the south side got out of hand, opened the gates and surrendered. The men of Wei went round the hill setting fire to the wood, which led to still greater confusion in the beleaguered garrison. At last Ma Su decided to make a dash for safety toward the west.\n\nSima Yi allowed him to pass, but Zhang He was sent to pursue and chased him for ten miles. But then there came an unexpected roll of drums. Zhang He was stopped by Wei Yan while Ma Su got past. Whirling up his sword, Wei Yan dashed toward Zhang He, who retired within his ranks and fled. Wei Yan followed and drove Zhang He backward toward Jieting.\n\nThe pursuit continued for fifteen miles, and then Wei Yan found himself in an ambush, Sima Yi on one side and Sima Zhao on the other. They went around the hill and closed in behind Wei Yan, and he was surrounded. Zhang He then turned back, and the attack was now on three sides. Wei Yan lost many troops, and all his efforts failed to get him clear of the press. Then help appeared in the person of Wang Ping.\n\n\"This is life for me!\" said Wei Yan as he saw Wang Ping coming up, and the two forces joined in a new attack on the force of Wei. So the troops of Wei drew off, while Wei Yan and Wang Ping made all haste back to their own camp in Jieting \u2014 only to find them in the hands of the enemy.\n\nShen Yi and Shen Dan then rushed out and drove Wei Yan and Wang Ping to Liliu.\n\nAbout that time Gao Xiang got news of the attack on Jieting, and he marched out his army from Liliu to the rescue. But halfway he fell in with Wei Yan and Wang Ping.\n\nWhen Gao Xiang heard their story, he at once proposed a night attack on the Wei camp and the recovery of Jieting. They talked this over on the hillside and arranged their plans, after which they set themselves to wait till it was dark enough to start.\n\nThey set out along three roads. Wei Yan was the first to reach Jieting. Not a soldier was visible, which looked suspicious. He decided to await the arrival of Gao Xiang, and they both speculated as to the whereabouts of their enemy. They could find no trace, and the third army under Wang Ping had not yet come up.\n\nSuddenly a bomb exploded, and a brilliant flash lit up the sky; drums rolled as though the earth was rending, and the enemy appeared. In a trice the armies of Shu found themselves hemmed in. Both Wei Yan and Gao Xiang pushed here and shoved there, but could find no way out. Then most opportunely from behind a hill rolled out a thunder of drums, and there was Wang Ping coming to their rescue. Then the three forced their way to Liliu. But just as they drew near to the city, another body of soldiers came up, which, from the writing on their flags, they read Wei Commander Guo Huai.\n\nNow Guo Huai had talked over Sima Yi's recall with his colleague Cao Zhen, and, fearing lest the recalled general should acquire too great glory, Guo Huai had set out to anticipate him in the capture of Jieting. Disappointed when he heard of Sima Yi's success there, he had decided to try a similar exploit at Liliu. So he had diverted his march thither.\n\nHe engaged the three Shu armies at once and slew many of them. Wei Yan feared the Wei army might pour into Hanzhong; so Wang Ping, Gao Xiang, and Wei Yan rushed to Yangping Pass and mustered its defense.\n\nGuo Huai, pleased with his success, gathered in his army after the victory and said to his officers, \"I was disappointed at Jieting, but we have taken this place, and that is merit of high order.\"\n\nThereupon he proceeded to the city gates. Just as he arrived, a bomb exploded on the wall, and, looking up, he saw the rampart bedecked with flags. On the largest banner he read the characters Sima Yi, General Who Pacifies the West. At that moment Sima Yi himself lifted a board that hung in front of him and looked over the breast-high rail.\n\nHe looked down and smiled, saying, \"How late you are, friend Guo Huai!\"\n\nGuo Huai was amazed. \"He is too much for me,\" said he.\n\nSo Guo Huai resignedly entered the city and went to pay his respects to his successful rival.\n\nSima Yi was gracious, and said, \"Zhuge Liang must retire now that Jieting is lost. You join forces with Cao Zhen and follow up quickly.\"\n\nGuo Huai agreed and took his leave.\n\nSima Yi called to him Zhang He, and said, \"Cao Zhen and Guo Huai thought we should win too great merit, so they tried to get ahead of us here. We are not the only ones who desire to achieve good service and acquire merit, but we had the good fortune to succeed. I thought Wei Yan, Ma Su, Wang Ping, and Gao Xiang would first try to occupy Yangping Pass. If I went to take it, then Zhuge Liang would fall on our rear. It says in the books on war that one should crush a retreating enemy, not pursue broken rebels. So you may go along the by-roads and smite those withdrawing down the Gu Valley, while I oppose the Xie Valley army. If they flee, do not press them too much, but just hold them up on the road and capture the baggage train.\"\n\nZhang He marched away with half the force to carry out his part of this plan.\n\nThen Sima Yi gave orders: \"We are going to the Xie Valley by way of Xicheng. Though Xicheng is a small place, it is important as a depot of stores for the Shu army, beside commanding the road to the three counties of Nanan, Tianshui, and Anding. If this place can be captured, the other three can be recaptured.\"\n\nSima Yi left Shen Yi and Shen Dan to guard Liliu and marched his army toward the Xie Valley.\n\nAfter Zhuge Liang had sent Ma Su to guard Jieting, his mind was constantly disturbed. Then arrived the messenger with the topography and plan prepared by Wang Ping. Zhuge Liang went over to his table and opened the letter. As he read it he smote the table in wrath.\n\n\"Ma Su's foolishness has destroyed the army!\" he cried.\n\n\"Why are you so disturbed, O Prime Minister?\" asked those near.\n\n\"By this plan I see that we have lost command of an important road. The camp has been made on the hill. If the Wei army come in force, our army will be surrounded and their water supply interrupted. In two days the soldiers will be in a state of mutiny. If Jieting shall be lost, how shall we be able to retire?\"\n\nHere High Counselor Yang Yi said, \"I am none too clever I know, but let me go to replace Ma Su.\"\n\nZhuge Liang explained to Yang Yi how and where to camp; but before he could start, a horseman brought the news of the loss of Jieting and Liliu.\n\nThis made Zhuge Liang very sad, and he sighed, saying, \"The whole scheme has come to nought, and it is my fault.\"\n\nZhuge Liang sent for Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, and said, \"Each of you takes three thousand of good soldiers and go along the road to Wugong Hills. If you fall in with the enemy, do not fight, but beat drums and raise a hubbub and make them hesitate and be doubtful, so that they may retire. Do not pursue, but when they retire, make for Yangping Pass.\"\n\nHe also sent Zhang Yi to put Saber Pass in order for retreat and issued instructions for making ready to march. Ma Dai and Jiang Wei were told to guard the rear, but they were to go into ambush in the valleys till the whole army would have retreated. Trusty messengers were sent with the news to Tianshui, Nanan, and Anding that the officers, army, and people might go away into Hanzhong. He also sent to remove to a place of safety in Hanzhong the aged mother of Jiang Wei.\n\nAll these arrangements made, Zhuge Liang took five thousand troops and set out for Xicheng to remove the stores.\n\nBut messenger after messenger, more than ten of them, came to report: \"Sima Yi is advancing rapidly on Xicheng with an army of one hundred fifty thousand troops.\"\n\nNo leader of rank was left to Zhuge Liang. He had only the civil officials and the five thousand soldiers, and as half this force had started to remove the stores, he had only two thousand five hundred left.\n\nHis officers were all frightened at the news of near approach of the enemy. Zhuge Liang himself went up on the rampart to look around. He saw clouds of dust rising into the sky. The Wei armies were nearing Xicheng along two roads.\n\nThen he gave orders: \"All the banners are to be removed and concealed. If any officer in command of soldiers in the city moves or makes any noise, he will be instantly put to death.\"\n\nNext he threw open all the gates and set twenty soldiers dressed as ordinary people cleaning the streets at each gate. He told them not to react at the coming of the Wei army, as he had a plan ready for the city defense.\n\nWhen all these preparations were complete, he donned the simple Daoist dress and, attended by a couple of lads, sat down on the wall by one of the towers with his lute before him and a stick of incense burning.\n\nSima Yi's scouts came near the city gate and saw all this. They did not enter the city, but went back and reported what they had seen. Sima Yi smiled incredulously. But he halted his army and rode ahead himself. Lo! It was exactly as the scouts had reported: Zhuge Liang sat there, his face with all smiles as he played the lute. A lad stood on one side of him bearing a treasured sword and on the other a boy with the ordinary symbol of authority, a yak's tail. Just inside the gates a score of persons with their heads down were sweeping as if no one was about.\n\nSima Yi hardly believed his eyes and thought this meant some peculiarly subtle ruse. So he went back to his armies, faced them about and moved toward the hills on the north.\n\n\"I am certain there are no soldiers behind this foolery,\" said Sima Zhao. \"What do you retire for, Father?\"\n\nSima Yi replied, \"Zhuge Liang is always most careful and runs no risks. Those open gates undoubtedly mean an ambush. If our force enter the city, they will fall victims to his guile. How can you know? No, our course is to retire.\"\n\nThus were the two armies turned back from the city, much to the joy of Zhuge Liang, who laughed and clapped his hands as he saw them hastening away.\n\nThe officials gasped with astonishment, and they asked, \"Sima Yi is a famous general of Wei, and he was leading one hundred fifty thousand troops. By what reason did he march off at the sight of you, O Prime Minister?\"\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"He knows my reputation for carefulness and that I play not with danger. Seeing things as they were made him suspect an ambush, and so he turned away. I do not run risks, but this time there was no help for it. Now he will meet with Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, whom I sent away into the hills to wait for him.\"\n\nThey were still in the grip of fear, but they praised the depth of insight of their chief and his mysterious schemes and unfathomable plans.\n\n\"We should simply have run away,\" said they.\n\n\"What could we have done with two thousand five hundred soldiers even if we had run? We should not have gone far before being caught,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\u2003Quite open lay the city to the foe,\n\n\u2003But Zhuge Liang's lute of jasper wonders wrought;\n\n\u2003It turned aside the legions' onward march\n\n\u2003For both the leaders guessed the other's thought.\n\n\"But if I had been in Sima Yi's place, I should not have turned away,\" said Zhuge Liang, smiling and clapping his hands.\n\nHe gave orders that the people of the place should follow the army into Hanzhong, for Sima Yi would assuredly return.\n\nThey abandoned Xicheng and returned into Hanzhong. In due course the officials and soldiers and people out of the three counties also came in.\n\nIt has been said that Sima Yi turned aside from the city. He went to Wugong Hills. Presently there came the sounds of a Shu army from behind the hills.\n\nSima Yi turned to his sons, saying, \"If we do not retire, we shall yet somehow fall victims to this Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nThen appeared a force advancing rapidly, the main banner displaying Tiger General of the Right Guard, Zhang Bao. The soldiers of Wei were seized with sudden panic and ran, flinging off their armors and throwing away their weapons. But before they had fled very far, they heard other terrible sounds in the valley and soon saw another force, with the main banner Dragon General of the Left Guard, Guan Xing. The roar of armed troops echoing up and down the valley was terrifying. As no one could tell how many men there were bearing down on them, the panic increased. The Wei army abandoned all the baggage and took to flight. But having orders not to pursue, Zhang Bao and Guan Xing let their enemies run in peace, while they gathered up the spoils. Then they returned.\n\nSeeing the valley apparently full of Shu soldiers, Sima Yi dared not marched by the main road. He hurried back to Jieting.\n\nAt this time Cao Zhen, hearing that the army of Shu was retreating, went in pursuit. But at a certain point he encountered a strong force under Ma Dai and Jiang Wei. Valleys and hills seemed to swarm with enemies, and Cao Zhen became alarmed. Then Chen Zao, his Van Leader, was slain by Ma Dai, and the soldiers were panic-stricken and fled in disorder. And the soldiers of Shu were hastening night and day along the road into Hanzhong.\n\nZhao Zilong and Deng Zhi, who had been lying in ambush in Gu Valley, heard that their comrades were retreating.\n\nThen said Zhao Zilong, \"The army of Wei will surely come to smite us while we are retreating. Wherefore let me first take up a position in their rear, and then you lead off your troops and part of mine, showing my ensigns. I will follow, keeping at the same distance behind you, and thus I shall be able to protect the retreat.\"\n\nNow Guo Huai was leading his army through the Gu Valley.\n\nHe called up his Van Leader, Su Yong, and said to him, \"Zhao Zilong is a warrior whom no one can withstand. You must keep a most careful guard lest you fall into some trap while they are retreating.\"\n\nSu Yong replied, smiling, \"If you will help me, O Commander, we shall be able to capture this Zhao Zilong.\"\n\nSo Su Yong, with three thousand troops, hastened on ahead and entered the valley in the wake of the Shu army. He saw upon a slope in the distance a large red banner bearing the name Zhao Zilong of Changshan. This frightened him, and he retired.\n\nBut before he had gone far a great uproar arose about him, and a mighty warrior came bounding forth on a swift steed, crying, \"Do you recognize Zhao Zilong?\"\n\nSu Yong was terrified.\n\n\"Whence came you?\" he cried. \"Is there another Zhao Zilong here?\"\n\nBut Su Yong could make no stand, and soon fell victim to the spear of the veteran. His troops scattered, and Zhao Zilong marched on after the main body.\n\nBut soon another company came in pursuit, this time led by a general of Guo Huai, named Wan Zheng. As they came along Zhao Zilong halted in the middle of the road to wait for the enemy. By the time Wan Zheng had come close, the other Shu soldiers had gone about ten miles along the road. However, when Wan Zheng drew nearer still and saw who it was standing in his path, he hesitated and finally halted. Zhao Zilong guarded the road until the sunset, when he he turned back and retired slowly.\n\nGuo Huai and his army came up and met Wan Zheng, who said, \"Zhao Zilong is as terrible as ever. He guards the rear carefully, and I dare not be reckless.\"\n\nHowever, Guo Huai was not content and ordered Wan Zheng to return to the pursuit of the retreating army. This time Wan Zheng led a company of several hundred horsemen.\n\nPresently they came to a wood, and, as they entered, a loud shout arose in the rear, \"Zhao Zilong is here!\"\n\nTerror seized upon the pursuers, and many fell from their horses. The others scattered among the hills. Wan Zheng braced himself for the encounter and went on. Zhao Zilong shot an arrow which struck the plume on his helmet. Startled, Wan Zheng tumbled into a water stream.\n\nThen Zhao Zilong pointed his spear at him and said, \"Be off! I will not kill you. Go and tell Guo Huai to come quickly, if he is coming.\"\n\nWan Zheng fled for his life, while Zhao Zilong continued his march as rear guard, and the retreat into Hanzhong steadily continued. There were no other episodes by the way.\n\nCao Zhen and Guo Huai took to themselves all the credit of having recovered the three counties \u2014 Nanan, Tianshui, and Anding.\n\nBefore the cautious Sima Yi was ready to pursue the army of Shu, it had already reached Hanzhong. He took a troop of horse and rode to Xicheng and there heard from the few people who had formerly sought refuge in the hills, and now returned, that Zhuge Liang really had had no men in the city, with the exception of the two thousand five hundred soldiers, that he had not a single military commander, but only a few civil officers. Sima Yi also heard that Guan Xing and Zhang Bao had had only a few troops whom they led about among the hills making as much noise as they could.\n\nSima Yi felt sad at having been tricked.\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is a cleverer man than I am,\" said he with a sigh of resignation.\n\nHe set about restoring order, and presently marched back to Changan.\n\nHe saw the Ruler of Wei, who was pleased with his success and said, \"It is by your good service that all counties of West Valley Land is again mine.\"\n\nSima Yi replied, \"But the army of Shu is in Hanzhong undestroyed. Therefore, I pray for authority to go against them that you may recover the West River Land also.\"\n\nCao Rui rejoiced and approved, and authorized the raising of an army.\n\nBut then one of the courtiers suddenly said, \"Your servant can propose a plan by which Shu will be overcome and Wu submits.\"\n\n\u2003The generals lead their beaten soldiers home,\n\n\u2003The victors plan new deeds for days to come." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "Shedding Tears, Zhuge Liang Puts Ma Su To Death; Cutting Hair, Zhou Fang Beguiles Cao Xiu.\n\nThe proposer of the great plan that was to conquer the empire was the Chair of the Secretariat, named Sun Zu.\n\n\"Noble Sir, expound your excellent scheme,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nAnd Sun Zu said, \"When your great progenitor, Emperor Cao, first got Zhang Lu, he was at a critical stage in his career, but thenceforward all went well. He used to say the land of Nanzheng is really a natural hell. In the Xie Valley there are one hundred fifty miles of rocks and caves, so that it is an impossible country for an army. If Wei be denuded of soldiers in order to conquer Shu, then for sure we shall be invaded by Wu on the east. My advice is to divide the army among the various generals and appoint each a place of strategic value to hold, and let them train their forces. In a few years the Middle Land will be prosperous and wealthy, while the other two Shu and Wu, will have been reduced by mutual quarrels and will fall an easy prey. I hope Your Majesty will consider whether this is not a superior plan.\"\n\n\"What does the General think?\" said Cao Rui to Sima Yi.\n\nHe replied, \"Chairman Sun Zu says well.\"\n\nSo Cao Rui bade Sima Yi draw up a scheme of defense and station the soldiers, leaving Guo Huai and Zhang He to guard Changan. And having rewarded the army, the Ruler of Wei returned to Luoyang.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang got back to Hanzhong and missed Zhao Zilong and Deng Zhi, the only two generals who had not arrived, he was sad at heart and bade Guan Xing and Zhang Bao go back to afford them assistance. However, before the reinforcing parties could leave, the missing men arrived. Furthermore, they came with their army in excellent condition and not a man short, nor a horse nor any of their equipment.\n\nAs they drew near, Zhuge Liang went out of the city to welcome them.\n\nThereupon Zhao Zilong hastily dismounted and bowed to the earth, saying, \"The Prime Minister should not have come forth to welcome a defeated general.\"\n\nBut Zhuge Liang lifted him up and took his hand and said, \"Mine was the fault. Mine were the ignorance and unwisdom that caused all this. But how is it that amid all the defeat and loss you have come through unscathed?\"\n\nAnd Deng Zhi replied, \"It was because friend Zhao Zilong sent me ahead, while he guarded the rear and warded off every attack. One leader he slew, and this frightened the others. Thus nothing was lost or left by the way.\"\n\n\"A really great general!\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nHe sent Zhao Zilong a gift of fifty ounces of gold, and to his army ten thousand rolls of silk.\n\nBut these were returned as Zhao Zilong said, \"All armies have accomplished nothing, and that is also our fault. The rules for reward and punishment must be strictly kept. I pray that these things be kept in store till the winter, when they can be distributed among the army.\"\n\n\"When the First Ruler lived, he never tired of extolling Zhao Zilong's virtues. The First Ruler was perfectly right,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nAnd his respect for the veteran was doubled.\n\nThen came the turn of the four unfortunate leaders Ma Su, Wang Ping, Wei Yan, and Gao Xiang to render account. Wang Ping was called to the Commander-in-Chief's tent and rebuked.\n\n\"I ordered you and Ma Su to guard Jieting. Why did you not remonstrate with him and prevent this great loss?\"\n\n\"I did remonstrate many times. I wished to build a rampart down in the road and construct a solid camp, but the Counselor would not agree and showed ill temper. So I led five thousand troops and camped some three miles off. When the army of Wei came in crowds and surrounded my colleague, I led my army to attack them a score of times. But I could not penetrate, and the catastrophe came quickly. Many of our troops surrendered, and mine were too few to stand. Wherefore I went to friend Wei Yan for help. Then we were intercepted and imprisoned in a valley and only got out by fighting most desperately. We got back to my camp to find the enemy in possession, and so we set out for Liliu. On the road I met Gao Xiang, and we three tried to raid the enemy's camp, hoping to recover Jieting. But as there was no one soldier there, I grew suspicious. From a hill I saw Wei Yan and Gao Xiang had been hemmed in by the soldiers of Wei, so I went to rescue them. Thence we hastened to Yangping Pass to try to prevent that from falling. It was not that I failed to remonstrate. And you, O Prime Minister, can get confirmation of my words from any of the officers.\"\n\nZhuge Liang bade him retire, and sent for Ma Su. He came, bound himself, and threw himself on the earth at the tent door.\n\nZhuge Liang got angry, saying, \"You have filled yourself with the study of the books on war ever since you were a boy. You know them thoroughly. I enjoined upon you that Jieting was most important, and you pledged yourself and all your family to do your best in the enterprise. Yet you would not listen to Wang Ping, and thus you caused this misfortune. The army is defeated, generals have been slain and cities and territory lost, all through you. If I do not make you an example and vindicate the law, how shall I maintain a proper state of discipline? You have offended, and you must pay the penalty. After your death the little ones of your family shall be my care, and I will see that they get a monthly allowance. Do not let their fate cause you anxiety.\"\n\nZhuge Liang told the executioners to take Ma Su away.\n\nMa Su wept bitterly, saying, \"Pity me, O Prime Minister! You have looked upon me as a son; I have looked up to you as a father. I know my fault is worthy of death, but I pray you remember how King Shun employed Yu, after executing Yu's father. Though I die, I will harbor no resentment down in the depths of the Nine Golden Springs.\"\n\nZhuge Liang brushed aside his tears and said, \"We have been as brothers, and your children shall be as my own. I know what to do.\"\n\nThey led the doomed man away. Without the main gate, just as they were going to deal the fatal blow, High Counselor Jiang Wan, who had just arrived from Capital Chengdu, was passing in. He bade the executioners wait a while, and he went in and interceded for Ma Su.\n\n\"Formerly the King of Chu put Minister Cheng Dechen to death due to a defeat, and his rival Duke Wen of Jin rejoiced. There is great confusion in the land, and yet you would slay a man of admitted ability. Can you not spare him?\"\n\nZhuge Liang's tears fell, but he said, \"Sun Zi maintains that the one way to obtain success is to make the law supreme. Now confusion and actual war are in every quarter. If the law be not observed, how may rebels be made away with? He must die.\"\n\nSoon after they bore in the head of Ma Su as proof, and Zhuge Liang wailed bitterly.\n\n\"Why do you weep for him now that he has met the just penalty for his fault?\" said Jiang Wan.\n\n\"I was not weeping then because of Ma Su, but because I remembered the words of the First Ruler. At his last moment in Baidicheng, he said: 'Ma Su's words exceed his deeds. Do not make much use of him.' It has come true, and I greatly regret my want of insight. That is why I weep.\"\n\nEvery officer wept. Ma Su was but thirty-nine, and he met his end in the fifth month of the sixth year of Beginning Prosperity (AS 228).\n\nA poet wrote about him thus:\n\n\u2003That was pitiful that he who talked so glib\n\n\u2003Of war, should lose a city, fault most grave,\n\n\u2003With death as expiation. At the gate\n\n\u2003He paid stern law's extremest penalty.\n\n\u2003Deep grieved, his chief recalled the late Prince's words.\n\nThe head of Ma Su was paraded round the camps. Then it was sewn again to the body and buried with it. Zhuge Liang conducted the sacrifices for the dead and read the oration. A monthly allowance was made for the family, and they were consoled as much as possible.\n\nNext Zhuge Liang made his memorial to the Throne and bade Jiang Wan bear it to the Latter Ruler. Therein Zhuge Liang proposed his own degradation from his high office.\n\n\"Naturally a man of mediocre abilities, I have enjoyed your confidence undeservedly. Having led out an expedition, I have proved my inability to perform the high office of leader. Over solicitude was my undoing. Hence happened disobedience at Jieting and the failure to guard the Gu Valley. The fault is mine in that I erred in the use of officers. In my anxiety I was too secretive. The 'Spring and Autumn' philosophy has pronounced the commander such as I am is blameworthy, and whither may I flee from my fault? I pray that I may be degraded three degrees as punishment. I cannot express my mortification. I humbly await your command.\"\n\n\"Why does the Prime Minister speak thus?\" said the Latter Ruler after reading the memorial. \"It is but the ordinary fortune of war.\"\n\nCourt Counselor Fei Yi said, \"The ruler must enhance the majesty of the law, for without law how can people support him? It is right that the Prime Minister should be degraded in rank.\"\n\nThereupon an edict was issued reducing Zhuge Liang to the rank of General of the Right Army, but retaining him in the same position in the direction of state affairs and command of the military forces. Fei Yi was directed to communicate the decision.\n\nFei Yi bore the edict into Hanzhong and gave it to Zhuge Liang, who bowed to the decree. The envoy thought Zhuge Liang might be mortified, so he ventured to felicitate him in other matters.\n\n\"It was a great joy to the people of Shu when you, O Prime Minister, captured the four northwest counties,\" said he.\n\n\"What sort of language is this?\" said Zhuge Liang, annoyed. \"Success followed by failure is no success. It shames me indeed to hear such a compliment.\"\n\n\"His Majesty will be very pleased to hear of the acquisition of Jiang Wei.\"\n\nThis remark also angered Zhuge Liang, who replied, \"It is my fault that a defeated army has returned without any gain of territory. What injury to Wei was the loss of Jiang Wei?\"\n\nFei Yi tried again, saying, \"But with an army of one hundred thousand bold veterans, you can attack Wei again.\"\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"When we were at Qishan and Gu Valley, we outnumbered the enemy, but we could not conquer them. On the contrary, they beat us. The defect was not in the number of soldiers, but in the leadership. Now we must reduce the army, discover our faults, reflect on our errors, and mend our ways against the future. Unless this is so, what is the use of a numerous army? Hereafter everyone will have to look to the future of his country. But most diligently each of you must fight against my shortcomings and blame my inefficiencies. Then we may succeed, rebellion can be exterminated, and merit can be set up.\"\n\nFei Yi and the officers acknowledged the aptness of these remarks. Fei Yi went back to the capital, leaving Zhuge Liang in Hanzhong resting his soldiers and doing what he could for the people, training and heartening his troops and turning special attention to the construction of apparatus for assaults on cities and crossing rivers. He also collected grain and fodder and built battle rafts, all for future use.\n\nThe spies of Wei got to know of these doings in the River Lands and reported to Luoyang. The Ruler of Wei called Sima Yi to council and asked how Shu might be annexed.\n\n\"Shu cannot be attacked,\" was the reply. \"In this present hot weather they will not come out, but, if we invade, they will only garrison and defend their strategic points, which we should find it hard to overcome.\"\n\n\"What shall we do if they invade us again?\"\n\n\"I have prepared for that. Just now Zhuge Liang shall imitate Han Xin who secretly crossed the river into Chencang. I can recommend a man to guard the place by building a rampart there and rendering it absolutely secure. He is a nine-span man, round shouldered and powerful, a good archer and prudent strategist. He would be quite equal to dealing with an invasion.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei was very pleased and asked for his name.\n\n\"His name is Hao Zhao, and he is in command at Hexi.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei accepted the recommendation, and an edict went forth promoting Hao Zhao to General Who Guards the West, and sending him to command in the county of Chencang.\n\nSoon after this edict was issued, a memorial was received from Cao Xiu, Minister of War and Commander of Yangzhou, saying that Zhou Fang, the Wu Governor of Poyang, wished to tender his submission and transfer his allegiance, and had sent a man to present a memorandum under seven headings showing how the power of the South Land could be broken and to ask that an army be dispatched soon.\n\nCao Rui spread the document out on the couch that he and Sima Yi might read it.\n\n\"It seems very reasonable,\" said Sima Yi. \"Wu could be quite destroyed. Let me go with an army to help Cao Xiu.\"\n\nBut from among the courtiers stepped out Jia Kui, who said, \"What this man of Wu says may be understood in two ways. Do not trust it. Zhou Fang is a wise and crafty man and very unlikely to desert. In this is some ruse to decoy our soldiers into danger.\"\n\n\"Such words must also be listened to,\" said Sima Yi. \"Yet such a chance must not be missed.\"\n\n\"You and Jia Kui might both go to the help of Cao Xiu,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nSima Yi and Jia Kui went.\n\nA large army, led by Cao Xiu, moved to Huancheng. Jia Kui, assisted by General Man Chong and Governor Hu Zhi of Dongwan, marched to capture Yangcheng, and facing the East Pass. Sima Yi led the third army to Jiangling.\n\nNow the Prince of Wu, Sun Quan, was at the East Pass in Wuchang, and there he assembled his officers and said, \"The Governor of Poyang, Zhou Fang, has sent up a secret memorial saying that Cao Xiu intends to invade. Zhou Fang has therefore set out a trap for Cao Xiu and has drawn up a document giving seven plausible circumstances, hoping thereby to cajole the Wei army into his power. The armies of Wei are on the move in three divisions, and I need your advice.\"\n\nGu Yong stood forth, saying, \"There is only one man fit to cope with the present need: He is Lu Xun.\"\n\nSo Lu Xun was summoned and made Grand Commander, General Who Pacifies the North, Commander-in-Chief of all the State Armies, including the Imperial Guards, and Assistant in the Royal Duties. He was given the White Banners and the Golden Axes, which denoted imperial rank. All officers, civil and military, were placed under his orders. Moreover, Sun Quan personally stood beside him and held his whip while he mounted his steed.\n\nHaving received all these marks of confidence and favor, Lu Xun wanted two persons to be his assistants.\n\nSun Quan asked their names, and Lu Xun said, \"They are Zhu Huan, General Who Fortifies Prowess, and Quan Zong, General Who Calms the South. These two should be in command.\"\n\nSun Quan approved and appointed Zhu Huan and Quan Zong as Left Commander and Right Commander respectively.\n\nThen the grand army, comprising all the forces of the eighty-one counties of the South Land and the levies of Jingzhou, seven hundred thousand troops in total, was assembled and marched out in three divisions, Lu Xun in the center, with Zhu Huan and Quan Zong supporting him left and right with the other two columns.\n\nThen said Zhu Huan, \"Cao Xiu is neither able nor bold. He holds office because he is of the blood. He has fallen into the trap laid by Zhou Fang and marched too far to be able to withdraw. If the Commander-in-Chief will smite, Cao Xiu must be defeated. Defeated, he must flee along two roads, one Jiashi on the left, the other Guichi on the right, both of which are precipitous and narrow. Let me and my colleague go to prepare an ambush in these roads. We will block them and so cut off their escape. If this Cao Xiu could be captured, and a hasty advance made, success would be easy and sure. We should get Shouchun, whence Xuchang and Luoyang can be seen. This is the one chance in the thousand.\"\n\n\"I do not think the plan good,\" said Lu Xun. \"I have a better one.\"\n\nZhu Huan resented the rejection of his scheme and went away. Lu Xun ordered Zhuge Jin and certain others to garrison Jiangling and oppose Sima Yi and made all other dispositions of forces.\n\nCao Xiu neared Huancheng, and Zhou Fang came out of the city to welcome him and went to the general's tent.\n\nCao Xiu said, \"I received your letter and the memorandum, which was most logical, and sent it to His Majesty. He has set in motion accordingly three armies. It will be a great merit for you, Sir, if the South Land can be added to His Majesty's dominions. People say you are abundant in craft, but I do not believe what they say, for I think you will be true to me and not fail.\"\n\nZhou Fang wept. He seized a sword from one of his escort and was about to kill himself, but Cao Xiu stopped him.\n\nStill leaning on the sword, Zhou Fang said, \"As to the seven things I mentioned, my regret is that I cannot show you all. You doubt me because some persons from Wu and Wei have been poisoning your mind against me. If you heed them, the only course for me is to die. Heaven only can make manifest my loyal heart.\"\n\nAgain he made to slay himself.\n\nBut Cao Xiu in trepidation threw his arms about him, saying, \"I did not mean it. The words were uttered in jest. Why do you act thus?\"\n\nUpon this, Zhou Fang, with his sword, cut off his hair and threw it on the ground, saying, \"I have dealt with you with sincerity, Sir, and you joke about it. Now I have cut off the hair, which I inherited from my parents, in order to prove my sincerity.\"\n\nThen Cao Xiu doubted no more, but trusted him fully and prepared a banquet for him, and when the feast was over Zhou Fang returned to his own.\n\nGeneral Jia Kui came to Cao Xiu, and when asked whether there was any special reason for the visit, he said, \"I have come to warn you, Commander, to be cautious and wait till you and I can attack the enemy together. The whole army of Wu is encamped at Huancheng.\"\n\n\"You mean you want to share in my victory,\" sneered Cao Xiu.\n\n\"It is said Zhou Fang cut off his hair as a pledge of sincerity. That is only another bit of deceit. According to the Spring and Autumn Annals, Yao Li cut off his arm as a pledge of loyalty before he assassinated Prince Qing Ji. Mutilation is no guarantee. Do not trust Zhou Fang.\"\n\n\"Why do you come to utter ill-omened words just as I am opening the campaign? You destroy the spirit of the army!\" said Cao Xiu.\n\nIn his wrath he told the lictors to put Jia Kui to death.\n\nHowever, the officers interceded, saying, \"Before the march, killing our general is not favorable to the army. O Commander, spare him until after the expedition!\"\n\nAnd Jia Kui was reprieved. But he was not assigned any part in the campaign, and his troops were left in reserve. Cao Xiu himself went away to the East Pass.\n\nWhen Zhou Fang heard that Jia Kui had been broken, he rejoiced in his heart, saying, \"If Cao Xiu had attended to his words, then Wu would have lost. Heaven is good to me and is giving me the means of achieving great things.\"\n\nThen he sent a secret messenger to Huancheng, and Lu Xun knew that the time had come. He assembled the officers for orders.\n\nLu Xun said, \"Shiding, lying over against us, is a hilly country fit for preparing an ambush. It will be occupied as suitable to array our army and await the coming of Wei. Xu Sheng is to be Leader of the Van, and the army will move there.\"\n\nNow Cao Xiu told Zhou Fang to lead the way for his attack. While on march, Cao Xiu asked, \"What is the place lying ahead?\"\n\nZhou Fang replied, \"Shiding, a suitable place to camp in.\"\n\nSo a great camp was made there.\n\nBut soon after the scouts reported, \"Wu soldiers, unknown in number, have camped among the hills.\"\n\nCao Xiu began to feel alarmed, saying, \"Zhou Fang said there were no soldiers. Why these preparations?\"\n\nCao Xiu hastily sought Zhou Fang to ask him, but was told, \"Zhou Fang has gone away with a few dozen riders. No one knows whither.\"\n\n\"I have been deceived and am in a trap,\" said Cao Xiu, now very repentant of his easy confidence. \"However, there is nothing to fear.\"\n\nThen he made his arrangements to march against the enemy, and when they were complete and the array drawn up, Zhang Pu, the Leader of the Van, rode out and began to rail at the men of Wu.\n\n\"Rebel leader, come and surrender!\" cried Zhang Pu.\n\nThen rode out Xu Sheng and fought with him. But Zhang Pu was no match for Xu Sheng, as was soon evident, wherefore he led his troops to retire.\n\n\"Xu Sheng is too strong,\" said Zhang Pu when he saw Cao Xiu.\n\n\"Then will we defeat him by a surprise,\" said Cao Xiu.\n\nHe sent Zhang Pu with twenty thousand troops to hide in the south of Shiding, while another equal party under Xue Qiao was sent north.\n\nAnd Cao Xiu arranged, saying, \"Tomorrow I will lead a thousand soldiers to provoke the troops of Wu into battle, then I will feign defeat and lead them to the hills in the north, when a bomb will explode and a three-pronged ambush will bring us victory.\"\n\nOn the other side Lu Xun called his two generals, Zhu Huan and Quan Zong, and said, \"Each of you is to lead thirty thousand troops and take a cross cut from Shiding to the enemy's camp. Give a fire signal behind the camp on arrival, and then the main army will advance to the camp's front for a double attack.\"\n\nAs evening fell these two moved out their troops, and by the middle of the second watch both had got behind the camp of Wei. Due to darkness, Zhang Pu, Cao Xiu's general, who was there in ambush, did not recognize that the troops who approached him were enemies, but went as to meet friends and was at once slain by the blade of Zhu Huan. The soldiers of Wei then fled, and Zhu Huan lit his signal fires.\n\nQuan Zong, marching up, came across the northern ambush under Xue Qiao. Quan Zong began a battle at once, and the troops of Wei were soon put to flight. Both the armies of Wu pursued, and confusion reigned in Cao Xiu's camp, troops fighting with others of their own side and slaying each other.\n\nCao Xiu despaired and fled toward Jiashi. Xu Sheng, with a strong force, came along the high road and attacked. And the soldiers of Wei killed were very many. Those who escaped did so by abandoning all their armors.\n\nCao Xiu was in straits, but he struggled along the Jiashi Road. Here came a cohort into the road from the side. It was led by Jia Kui. Cao Xiu's alarm gave place to shame on meeting Jia Kui.\n\n\"I took no notice of what you said, and so this evil came upon me,\" said he.\n\nJia Kui replied, \"Commander, you should quickly get out of this road. For if the troops of Wu block it, we shall be in grave danger.\"\n\nSo Cao Xiu hastened, while Jia Kui protected his retreat. And Jia Kui ordered his soldiers to set flags and banners up among trees and in thickets and along by-paths, so as to give an impression of having many men posted all round. Wherefore when Xu Sheng came in pursuit, he thought the country was full of ambushing men and dared not proceed far. So he gave up the pursuit and retired.\n\nBy these means Cao Xiu was rescued, and finally Sima Yi withdrew his army upon the news of Cao Xiu's defeat.\n\nIn the meantime, Lu Xun was awaiting news of victory. Soon Xu Sheng, Zhu Huan, and Quan Zong came and reported their successes, and they brought great spoil of carts and bullocks, horses and mules, and military material and weapons. And they had also ten thousand prisoners. There was great rejoicing, and Lu Xun with Zhou Fang led the army home into Wu.\n\nOn their return Sun Quan, the Prince of Wu, came out with a numerous cortege of officers to welcome the victors, and an imperial umbrella was borne over the head of Lu Xun as they wended their way homeward.\n\nWhen the officers presented their felicitations, Sun Quan noticed that Zhou Fang had no hair.\n\nSun Quan was very gracious to him, saying, \"This deed of yours, and the sacrifice you made to attain it, will surely be written in the histories.\"\n\nHe made Zhou Fang the Lord of the Gate Within. Then there were great feastings and greetings and much revelry.\n\nLu Xun said, \"Cao Xiu has been thoroughly beaten, and the soldiers of Wei are cowed. I think now is an occasion to send letters into Shu to advise Zhuge Liang to attack Wei.\"\n\nSun Quan agreed, and letters were sent to the River Lands.\n\n\u2003The east, successful in one fight,\n\n\u2003Would unto war the west incite." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "Sending A Second Memorial, Zhuge Liang Renews The Attack On Wei; Forging A Letter, Jiang Wei Defeats The Northern Army.\n\nIt was in the autumn of the sixth year of Beginning Prosperity (AD 229) that the Wei army was defeated, with very great loss, by Lu Xun of Wu. Cao Xiu's mortification brought on an illness from which he died in Luoyang. By command of Cao Rui, the Ruler of Wei, Cao Xiu received most honorable burial.\n\nThen Sima Yi brought the army home again.\n\nThe other officers went to welcome him and asked, \"The defeat of Commander Cao Xiu is also partly yours. Why, O General, did you hurry home?\"\n\nSima Yi replied, \"I came for reasons of strategy, because of Zhuge Liang's probable intentions. If he knows I have suffered a defeat, he may try to attack Changan. The whole West Valley Land would be helpless if I did not return.\"\n\nThey listened and smiled, for they thought he was afraid.\n\nLetters from Wu came to Shu proposing a joint attack on Wei and detailing their recent victory. In these letters two feelings were gratified \u2014 that of telling the story of their own grandeur and prowess, and that of furthering the design of a treaty of peace. The Latter Ruler was pleased and sent the letters to Zhuge Liang in Hanzhong.\n\nAt that time the army was in excellent state, the soldiers hardy, the horses strong. There were plentiful supplies of all kinds. Zhuge Liang was just going to propose a new war.\n\nOn receipt of the letter he made a great banquet to discuss an expedition. A severe gale came on from the northeast and brought down a fir tree in front of the general's shelter. It was an inauspicious omen to all the officers, and they were troubled.\n\nZhuge Liang cast lots to know what portent was intended, and announced, \"That gale signals the loss of a great leader.\"\n\nThey hardly believed him. But before the banquet ended, two sons of Zhao Zilong, Zhao Tong and Zhao Guang, came and wished to see the Prime Minister.\n\nZhuge Liang, deeply affected, threw aside his wine cup and cried, \"That is it. Zhao Zilong is gone!\"\n\nWhen the two young men came in, they prostrated themselves and wept, saying, \"Our father died the night before at the third watch.\"\n\nZhuge Liang staggered and burst into lamentation.\n\n\"My friend is gone. The country has lost it great beam, and I my right arm!\"\n\nThose about him joined in, wiping away their tears. Zhuge Liang bade the two young men go in person to Chengdu to bear the sad tidings to the Emperor.\n\nAnd the Latter Ruler wept bitterly.\n\n\"Zhao Zilong was my savior and friend. He saved my life when I was a child in the time of great confusion!\" cried the Latter Ruler.\n\nAn edict was issued creating Zhao Zilong Regent Marshal and Lord of Shunping and giving burial on the east of Silky Hills near Capital Chengdu. A temple was ordered to his memory and sacrifices were offered in four seasons.\n\n\u2003From Changshan came a general, tiger bold,\n\n\u2003In wit and valor he was fitting mate\n\n\u2003For Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, his exploits rivaling\n\n\u2003Even theirs. River Han and Dangyang recall\n\n\u2003His name. Twice in his stalwart arms he bore\n\n\u2003The prince, his well-loved leader's son and heir.\n\n\u2003In storied page his name stands out, writ large.\n\n\u2003Fair record of most brave and loyal deeds.\n\nThe Latter Ruler showed his affectionate gratitude to the late leader, not only in according him most honorable burial, but in kindness to his sons. The elder, Zhao Tong, was made General in the Tiger Army and the younger, Zhao Guang, Station General. He also set guards over the tomb.\n\nWhen the two sons had left, the ministers reported to the Latter Ruler: \"The dispositions of the army are complete, and the Prime Minister proposes to march against Wei without delay.\"\n\nTalking this over with one and another, the Latter Ruler found the courtiers much inclined to a cautious policy and somewhat fearful. And the doubts entered into the Latter Ruler's mind so that he could not decide. Then came a memorial from Zhuge Liang, and the messenger, Yang Yi, was called into the presence and gave it to the Latter Ruler. The Emperor spread it on the table and read:\n\n\"The First Ruler always said: 'Han and rebels cannot coexist; a ruler's domain cannot be confined.' Wherefore he laid upon me, thy minister, to destroy the rebels. Measuring my powers by his perspicacity, he knew that I should attack and oppose my talents, inadequate as they might be, to their strength, for, if I did not, the royal domain would be destroyed. It was a question whether to await destruction without effort, or to attack? Wherefore he assigned me the task confidently. Thenceforward this task occupied all my thoughts.\n\n\"Considering that the south should be made secure before the north could be attacked, I braved the heat of summer and plunged deep into the wilds of the Mang nations. Not that I was careless of myself or the soldiers, but urged by the one consideration, that the royal domain should not be restricted to the capital of Shu, I faced dangers in obedience to the First Ruler's behest. But there were critics who said that I should not do it.\n\n\"Now the rebels have been weakened in the west and have become defeated in the east. The rule of war is to take advantage of the enemy's weakness, and so now is the time to attack. I shall discuss the various circumstances in order.\n\n\"The enlightenment of the Founder of the Hans, Liu Bang, rivaled the glory of the sun and moon; his counselors were profound as the ocean abyss. Nevertheless, he trod a hazardous path and suffered losses, only attaining repose after passing through great dangers. Your Majesty does not reach his level, nor do your counselors equal Zhang Liang and Chen Ping. Yet while we desired victory, we would sit idle, waiting till the empire should become settled. This attitude is beyond my comprehension.\n\n\"Imperial Protector Liu Yao and Governor Wang Lang each occupied a territory. They passed their time in talking of tranquillity and discussing plans, quoting the sayings of the sages till they were filled with doubts and obsessed with difficulties. So this year was not the time to fight, nor next year the season to punish, and, thus talking, it came about that Sun Ce grew powerful and possessed himself of all the South Land. This sort of behavior I cannot understand.\n\n\"In craft Cao Cao surpassed all humans. He could wield armies like the great strategists of old, Sun Zi and Wu Qi. Yet he was surrounded in Nanyang, was in danger at Wuchao, was in difficulties at Qilian, was hard pressed in Liyang, was nearly defeated at Beishan, and nearly killed at Tong Pass. Yet, after all these experiences, there was a temporary and artificial state of equilibrium. How much less can I, a man of feeble powers, bring about a decision without running risks? I fail to understand.\n\n\"Cao Cao failed in five attacks on Changba, and four times crossed Lake Chaohu without success. He employed Li Zu, who betrayed him, and put his trust in Xiahou Yuan, who was defeated and died. The First Ruler always regarded Cao Cao as an able man, and yet Cao Cao made such mistakes. How then can I, in my worn-out condition, avoid any error? I do not understand why.\n\n\"Only one year has elapsed since I went into Hanzhong, yet we have lost Zhao Zilong, Yang Qun, Ma Yun, Yan Zhi, Ding Li, Bo Shou, Liu He, Deng Tong, and others, and leaders of rank and generals of stations, to the number of near eighty, all people unsurpassed in dash and valor, and more than a thousand of the specialized forces of horse and trained cavalry of the Sou and the Tangut tribespeople in the Gobi Desert, whose martial spirit we have fostered these ten years all about us, and not only in one region. If we delay much longer, two-thirds of this will have dissipated, and how then shall we meet the situation? I do not understand delay.\n\n\"The people are stretched and the army exhausted indeed, but confusion does not cease. If confusion does not cease, then, whether we go on or stand still the drain is the same. Does it seems that attack should not be made yet? Is it that the rebels are to be allowed to obtain a permanent hold on some territory? I do not understand the arguments.\n\n\"A stable condition of affairs is indeed difficult to obtain. Once, when the First Ruler was defeated in Jingzhou, Cao Cao patted himself on the back and said that the empire was settled. Yet, after that, the First Ruler obtained the support of Wu and Yue on the east, took Ba and Shu on the west, and undertook an expedition to the north, wherein Xiahou Yuan lost his life. So Cao Cao calculations proved erroneous, and the affairs of Han seemed about to prosper. But, still later, Wu proved false to pledges, our Guan Yu was defeated, we sustained a check at Zigui \u2014 and Cao Pi assumed the imperial style. Such events prove the difficulty of forecast. I shall strive on to the end, but the final result, whether success or failure, whether gain or loss, is beyond my powers to foresee.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler was convinced, and by edict directed Zhuge Liang to start on the expedition.\n\nZhuge Liang marched out with three hundred thousand well-trained soldiers, Wei Yan leading the first division, and made all haste to Chencang.\n\nThe news soon reached Luoyang, and Sima Yi informed the Ruler of Wei, who called his council.\n\nThen Cao Zhen stepped forth and said, \"In the previous campaign I failed to hold West Valley Land, and my disgrace is terrible to bear. But now I beg to be given another command that I may capture Zhuge Liang. Lately I have found a stalwart soldier for a leader, a man who wields a ninety-pound sword, rides a swift and savage steed, bends the three-hundred-pound bow, and carries hidden about him when he goes into battle three meteor maces with which his aim is certain. So valorous is he that none dare stand against him. He comes from Didao in West Valley Land and is named Wang Shuang. I would recommend him for my leader of the van.\"\n\nCao Rui approved at once and summoned this marvel to the hall. There came a nine-span man with a dusky complexion, yellowish eyes, strong as a bear in the hips and with a back supple as a tiger's .\n\n\"No need to fear anything with such a man!\" said Cao Rui, laughing.\n\nHe gave the new hero rich presents, a silken robe and golden breastplate, and gave him the title General Who Possesses the Tiger Majesty. And Wang Shuang became Leader of the Van of the new army. Cao Zhen was appointed Commander-in-Chief.\n\nCao Zhen took leave of his master and left the court. He collected his one hundred fifty thousand veterans and, in consultation with Guo Huai and Zhang He, decided upon the strategic points to be guarded.\n\nThe first companies of the army of Shu sent out their scouts as far as Chencang. They came back and reported: \"A rampart has been built and behind it is a general named Hao Zhao in command. The rampart is very strong and is further defended by thorny barriers. Instead of taking Chencang, which seems difficult, it would be easier to go out to Qishan by the Taibo Mountains, where is a practicable, though winding, road.\"\n\nBut Zhuge Liang said, \"Due north of Chencang is Jieting, so that I must get this city in order to advance.\"\n\nWei Yan was sent to surround Chencang and take it. He went, but days passed without success. Therefore he returned and told his chief the place was impregnable. In his anger, Zhuge Liang was going to put Wei Yan to death, but an officer stepped forth.\n\nSaid he, \"I have followed the Prime Minister for a long time, but have not achieved worthy service. Now I want to go to Chencang and persuade Hao Zhao to yield. Thus, our army does not need to use a single bow or arrow.\"\n\nOthers turned their attention to Counselor Jin Xiang.\n\n\"How do you think you will persuade him?\" said Zhuge Liang. \"What will you say?\"\n\n\"Hao Zhao and I are both from West Valley Land and pledged friends from boyhood. If I can get to see him, I will so lay matters before him that he must surrender.\"\n\nJin Xiang got permission to try, and rode quickly to the wall of Chencang.\n\nThen he called out, \"Friend Hao Zhao, your old chum Jin Xiang has come to see you!\"\n\nA sentry on the wall told Hao Zhao, who bade them let the visitor enter and bring him up on the wall.\n\n\"Friend, why have you come?\" asked Hao Zhao.\n\n\"I am in the service of Shu, serving under Zhuge Liang as an assistant in the Tactical Department. I am treated exceedingly well, and my chief has sent me to say something to you.\"\n\nHao Zhao was rather annoyed, and said, \"Zhuge Liang is my enemy. I serve Wei while you serve Shu. Each serves his own lord. We were brothers once, but now we are enemies. So do not say any more.\"\n\nAnd the visitor was requested to take his leave. Jin Xiang tried to reopen the conversation, but Hao Zhao left him and went up on the tower. The Wei soldiers hurried Jin Xiang on to his horse and led him to the gate. As he passed out, he looked up and saw his friend leaning on the guard rail.\n\nHe pulled up his horse, pointed with his whip at Hao Zhao, and said, \"My friend and worthy brother, why has your friendship become so thin?\"\n\n\"Brother, you know the laws of Wei,\" replied Hao Zhao. \"I have accepted their bounty, and if that leads to death, so be it. Say no more, but return quickly to your master and tell him to come and attack. I am not afraid.\"\n\nSo Jin Xiang had to return and report failure.\n\n\"He would not let me begin to explain,\" said he.\n\n\"Try again,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Go and really talk to him.\"\n\nSo the go-between soon found himself once more at the foot of the wall.\n\nHao Zhao presently appeared on the tower, and Jin Xiang shouted to him, \"My worthy brother, please listen to my words while I explain clearly. Here you are holding one single city. How can you think of opposing one hundred thousand troops? If you do not yield, you will be sorry when it is too late. Instead of serving the Great Han, you are serving a depraved country called Wei. Why do you not recognize the decree of Heaven? Why do you not distinguish between the pure and the foul? Think over it.\"\n\nThen Hao Zhao began to get really angry. He fitted an arrow to his bow and he called out, \"Go! Or I will shoot. I meant what I said at first, and I will say no more.\"\n\nAgain Jin Xiang returned and reported failure to Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"The fool is very ill-mannered,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Does he think he can beguile me into sparing the city?\"\n\nHe called up some of the local people and asked about the forces in the city. They told him about three thousand.\n\n\"I do not think such a small place can beat me,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Attack quickly before any reinforcements can arrive.\"\n\nThereupon the assailants brought up scaling ladders, upon the platforms of which ten or more men could stand. These were surrounded by planks as protection. The other soldiers had short ladders and ropes, and, at the beat of the drum, they attempted to scale the walls.\n\nBut when Hao Zhao saw the ladders being brought up, he made his soldiers shoot fire-arrows at them. Zhuge Liang did not expect this. He knew the city was not well prepared for defense, and he had had the great ladders brought up and bade the soldiers take the wall with a rush. He was greatly chagrined when the fire arrows set his ladders on fire and so many of his soldiers were burned. And as the arrows and stones rained down from the wall, the soldiers of Shu were forced to retire.\n\nZhuge Liang angrily said, \"So you burn my ladders! Then I will use battering rams.\"\n\nSo the rams were brought and placed against the walls and again the signal given for assault. But the defenders brought up great stones suspended by ropes, which they swung down at the battering rams and so broke them to pieces.\n\nNext the besiegers set to work to bring up earth and fill the moat, and Liao Hua led three thousand soldiers to excavate a tunnel under the ramparts. But Hao Zhao cut a counter-trench within the city and turned that device.\n\nSo the struggle went on for near a month, and still the city was not taken. Zhuge Liang was very depressed.\n\nThat was not all. The scouts reported: \"From the east there is coming a relief force of Wei, the flags of which bears the name Van Leader Wang Shuang.\"\n\nZhuge Liang asked, \"Who wants to go out and oppose this force?\"\n\nWei Yan offered himself.\n\n\"No,\" said Zhuge Liang, \"you are our Van Leader. We must test Wang Shuang first.\"\n\nGeneral Xie Xiong offered his services. They were accepted, and Xie Xiong was given three thousand troops. After he had gone, Zhuge Liang decided to send a second force, and for command of this General Gong Qi volunteered and was accepted. Gong Qi also had three thousand troops.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang feared lest there would be a sortie from the city to aid the relief force just arriving, so he led off the army seven miles and made a camp.\n\nThe first body sent against Wang Shuang had no success: Xie Xiong fell almost immediately under Wang Shuang's great sword. The men fled and Wang Shuang pursued, and so came upon Gong Qi, who had come to support his colleague. Gong Qi met a similar fate, being slain in the third bout.\n\nWhen the defeated parties returned, Zhuge Liang was anxious and called up Liao Hua, Wang Ping, and Zhang Ni to go out to check this Wang Shuang, They went and drew up in formal array, and then Zhang Ni rode to the front. Wang Shuang rode to meet him, and they two fought several bouts. Then Wang Shuang ran away and Zhang Ni followed.\n\nHis colleague, Wang Ping, suspected this flight was but a ruse, so he called to Zhang Ni, \"Do not follow the fleeing general!\"\n\nZhang Ni then turned, but Wang Shuang turned also and hurled one of his meteor hammers, which hit Zhang Ni in the back, so that he fell forward and lay over the saddle. Wang Shuang rode on to follow up this advantage, but Liao Hua and Wang Ping poured out and checked him. Wang Shuang's whole force then came on and slew many of the troops of Shu.\n\nZhang Ni was hurt internally and vomited blood at times. He came back and told Zhuge Liang, saying, \"Wang Shuang is very terrible and no one can stand up to him. He camps outside Chencang, building a strong stockade, and so making the city with double walls and a deep moat.\"\n\nHaving lost two generals, and a third being wounded, Zhuge Liang called up Jiang Wei and said, \"We are stopped this way. Can you suggest another road?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" said Jiang Wei. \"Chencang is too well protected and, with Hao Zhao as defender and Wang Shuang as supporter, cannot be taken. I would propose to check Chencang by leaving a general here, who shall make a strong camp with the support of the hills. Then try to hold the roads so that the attack from Jieting may be prevented. Then if you will send a strong force against Qishan, I can do something which will capture Cao Zhen.\"\n\nZhuge Liang agreed. He sent Wang Ping and Li Hui to hold the narrow road to Jieting, and Wei Yan was sent to guard the way from Chencang. And then the army marched out of the Xie Valley by a small road and made for Qishan.\n\nNow Cao Zhen still remembered bitterly that in the last campaign Sima Yi had filched from him the credit he hoped to obtain. So when he received the commission of defending the capitals against the invading forces, he detached Guo Huai and Sun Li and sent them to hold positions east and west. Then he had heard that Chencang was threatened, so had sent Wang Shuang to its relief, and now to his joy he heard of his henchman's success. He placed Grand Commander Fei Yao in command of the van and stationed other generals at strategic and commanding points.\n\nThen they caught a spy. He was taken into the presence of the Commander-in-Chief to be questioned.\n\nThe man knelt down and said, \"I am not really a spy in the bad sense. I was bringing a secret communication for you, Sir, but I was captured by one of the parties in ambush. Pray send away your attendants.\"\n\nThe man's bonds were loosed and the tent cleared.\n\nThe captive said, \"I am a confidant of Jiang Wei, who has entrusted me with a secret letter.\"\n\n\"Where is the letter?\"\n\nThe man took it from among his garments and presented it to Cao Zhen, who read:\n\n\"I, Jiang Wei, your guilty general, make a hundred prostrations to the great leader Cao Zhen, now in the field. I have never forgotten that I was in the employment of Wei and disgraced myself; having enjoyed favors, I never repaid them. Lately I have been an unhappy victim of Zhuge Liang's wiles and so fell into the depths. But I never forgot my old allegiance. How could I forget?\n\n\"Now happily the army of Shu has gone west, and Zhuge Liang trusts me. I rely upon your leading an army this way. If resistance be met, then you may simulate defeat and retire, but I shall be behind and will make a blaze as signal. Then I shall set fire to their stores, whereupon you will face about and attack. Zhuge Liang ought to fall into your hands. If it be that I cannot render service and repay my debt to the state, then punish me for my former crime.\n\n\"If this should be deemed worthy of your attention, then without delay communicate your commands.\"\n\nThe letter pleased Cao Zhen, and he said, \"This is heaven-sent help to aid me in an achievement.\"\n\nCao Zhen rewarded the messenger and bade him return to say that it was accepted.\n\nThen he called Fei Yao to his councils and said, \"I have just had a secret letter from Jiang Wei telling me to act in a certain fashion.\"\n\nBut Fei Yao replied, \"Zhuge Liang is very crafty, and Jiang Wei is very knowing. If by chance Zhuge Liang has planned all this and sent this man, we may fall into a snare.\"\n\n\"But Jiang Wei is really a man of Wei. He was forced into surrender. Why are you suspicious?\"\n\n\"My advice is not to go, but to remain here on guard. Let me go to meet this man, and any service I can accomplish will redound to your credit. And if there be any craft, I can meet it for you.\"\n\nCao Zhen approved this and bade Fei Yao take fifty thousand troops by way of the Xie Valley.\n\nFei Yao marched away and halted after the second or third stage and send out scouts. This was done, and the scouts reported that the Shu army was coming through the valley. Fei Yao at once advanced, but before the troops of Shu got into contact with him, they retired. Fei Yao pursued. Then the troops of Shu came on again. Just as Fei Yao was forming up for battle, the Shu army retreated again. And these maneuvers were repeated thrice, and a day and a night passed without any repose for the Wei army.\n\nAt length rest was imperative, and they were on the point of entrenching themselves to prepare food when a great hubbub arose all around, and with beating of drums and blaring of trumpets, the whole country was filled with the soldiers of Shu. Suddenly there was a stir near by the great standard, and out came a small four-wheeled chariot in which sat Zhuge Liang. He bade a herald call the leader of the Wei army to a parley.\n\nFei Yao rode out and, seeing Zhuge Liang, he secretly rejoiced.\n\nTurning to those about him, Fei Yao said, \"If the soldiers of Shu come on, you are to retire and look out for a signal. If you see a blaze, you are to turn and attack, for you will be reinforced by Jiang Wei.\"\n\nThen Fei Yao rode to the front and shouted, \"You rebel leader in front there. How dare you come here again after the last defeat?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Go and call Cao Zhen to a parley.\"\n\n\"My chief, Cao Zhen, is of the royal stock. Think you that he will come to parley with rebels?\"\n\nZhuge Liang angrily waved his fan, and there came forth Ma Dai and Zhang Ni and their troops with a rush. The Wei army retired. But ere they had gone far, they saw a blaze in the rear of the advancing host of Shu and heard a great shouting. Fei Yao could only conclude that this was the signal of Jiang Wei he was looking for, and so he faced about to attack.\n\nBut the enemy also turned about and retired. Fei Yao led the pursuit, sword in hand, hastening to the point whence the shouting came. Nearing the signal fire, the drums beat louder than ever, and then out came two armies, one under Guan Xing and the other under Zhang Bao, while arrows and stones rained from the hill-tops. The Wei troops could not stand it and knew not only they were beaten, but beaten by a ruse. Fei Yao tried to withdraw his force into the shelter of the valley to rest, but the enemy pressed on him, and the army of Wei fell into confusion. Pressing upon each other, many fell into the streams and were drowned.\n\nFei Yao could do nothing but flee for his life. Just as he was passing by a steep hill there appeared a cohort, and the leader was Jiang Wei.\n\nFei Yao began to upbraid him, crying, \"Faithless ingrate! I have haplessly fallen in your treachery and craftiness!\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"You are the wrong victim. We meant to capture Cao Zhen not you. You would do well to yield!\"\n\nBut Fei Yao only galloped away toward a ravine. Suddenly the ravine filled with flame. Then he lost all hope. The pursuers were close behind, so Fei Yao with a sword put an end to his own life.\n\nOf the army of Wei many surrendered. The Shu army pressed home their advantage and, hastening forward, reached Qishan and made a camp. There the army was mustered and put in order.\n\nJiang Wei received a reward, but he was chagrined that Cao Zhen had not been taken.\n\n\"My regret is that I did not slay Cao Zhen,\" said he.\n\n\"Indeed, yes,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"It is a pity that a great scheme should have had so small a result.\"\n\nCao Zhen was very sad when he heard of the loss of Fei Yao. He consulted Guo Huai as to a new plan to drive back the enemy.\n\nMeanwhile, flying messengers had gone to the capital with news of Zhuge Liang's arrival at Qishan and the defeat. Cao Rui called Sima Yi to ask for a plan to meet these new conditions.\n\n\"I have a scheme all ready, not only to turn back Zhuge Liang, but to do so without any exertion on our part. They will retire of their own will.\"\n\n\u2003Cao Zhen's wits are dull; so he\n\n\u2003Fights on Sima Yi's strategy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "Pursuing The Shu Army, Wang Shuang Meets His Death; Raiding Chencang, Zhuge Liang Scores A Victory.\n\nNow Sima Yi spoke to the Ruler of Wei, saying, \"I have said repeatedly that Zhuge Liang would come against us by way of Chencang; wherefore I set Hao Zhao to guard it. If an Zhuge Liang did invade, he could easily obtain his supplies by that road. But with Hao Zhao and Wang Shuang on guard there, he will not dare to come that way. It is very difficult to get supplies any other way. Therefore I can give the invaders a month to exhaust their food. Hence their advantage lies in forcing a battle; ours is postponing it as long as possible. Wherefore I pray Your Majesty order Cao Zhen to hold passes and positions tenaciously and on no account to seek battle. In a month the enemy will have to retreat, and that will be our opportunity.\"\n\nCao Rui was pleased to hear so succinct a statement, but he said, \"Since, Noble Sir, you foresaw all this so plainly, why did you not lead an army to prevent it?\"\n\n\"It is not because I grudged the effort, but I had to keep the army here to guard against Lu Xun of Wu. Sun Quan will declare himself 'Emperor' before long. If he does, he will be afraid of Your Majesty's attack, and so he will try to invade us first. I shall be ready to defend our frontier. The army is prepared.\"\n\nJust then one of the courtiers announced dispatches from Cao Zhen on military affairs, and Sima Yi closed his speech, saying, \"Your Majesty should send someone especially to caution the Commander to be careful not to be tricked by Zhuge Liang, not to pursue rashly, and never to penetrate deeply into the enemy country.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei gave the order, and he sent the command by the hand of Minister Han Ji and gave him authority to warn Cao Zhen against giving battle.\n\nSima Yi escorted the royal messenger out of the city and, at parting, said, \"I am giving this magnificent opportunity to obtain glory to Cao Zhen, but do not tell him the suggestion was mine; only quote the royal command. Tell him that defense is the best, pursuit is to be most cautious, and he is not to send any impetuous leader to follow up the enemy.\"\n\nHan Ji agreed and took leave.\n\nCao Zhen was deep in affairs connected with his army when they brought news of a royal messenger, but he went forth to bid Han Ji welcome. When the ceremonial receipt of the edict had come to an end, he retired to discuss matters with Guo Huai and Sun Li.\n\n\"That is Sima Yi's idea,\" said Guo Huai with a laugh.\n\n\"But what of the idea?\" asked Cao Zhen.\n\n\"It means that he perfectly understands Zhuge Liang's plans, and he will eventually have to be called in to defeat Shu.\"\n\n\"But if the Shu army holds its ground?\"\n\n\"We will send Wang Shuang to reconnoiter and keep on the move along the by-roads so that they dare not attempt to bring up supplies. They must retreat when they have no more to eat, and we shall be able to beat them.\"\n\nThen said Sun Li, \"Let me go out to Qishan as if to escort a convoy from the West Valley Land, only the carts shall be laden with combustibles instead of grain. We will sprinkle sulfur and saltpeter over wood and reeds. The troops of Shu, who lack supplies, will surely seize the convoy and take it to their own camp, when we will set fire to the carts. When they are blazing, our hidden men can attack.\"\n\n\"It seems an excellent plan,\" said Cao Zhen.\n\nAnd he issued the requisite orders: Sun Li to pretend to escort a convoy; Wang Shuang to prowl about the by-roads; Guo Huai and various generals to command in the Gu Valley, Jieting, and other strategic points. Also Zhang Hu, son of Zhang Liao, was made Leader of the Van, and Yue Chen, son of Yue Jing, was his second. These two were to remain on guard in the outermost camp.\n\nNow at Qishan, Zhuge Liang sought to bring on a battle, and daily sent champions to provoke a combat. But the men of Wei would not come out.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang called Jiang Wei and certain others to him and said, \"The enemy refuse battle, because they know we are short of food. We can get none by way of Chencang, and all other roads are very difficult. I reckon the grain we brought with us will not last a month. What must we do?\"\n\nWhile thus perplexed, they heard that many carts of provisions for Wei were passing by from the West Valley Land, and the convoy was commanded by Sun Li.\n\n\"What is known of this Sun Li?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\nA certain man of Wei replied, \"He is a bold man. Once he was out hunting with the Ruler of Wei on Great Rock Hill, and a tiger suddenly appeared in front of his master's chariot. He jumped off his horse and dispatched the beast with his sword. He was rewarded with a Commandership. He is an intimate friend of Cao Zhen.\"\n\n\"This is a ruse,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"They know we are short of food, and those carts are only a temptation. They are laden with combustibles. How can they imagine that I shall be deceived by this sort of thing, when I have fought them with fire so many times? If we go to seize the convoy, they will come and raid our camp. But I will meet ruse with ruse.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang sent Ma Dai with order: \"You and three thousand troops are to make your way to the enemy's store camp and, when the wind serves, to start a fire. When the stores are burning, the soldiers of Wei will come to surround our camp. That is how we will provoke a battle.\"\n\nHe also sent Ma Zheng and Zhang Ni with five thousand troops each to halt near the camp so that they might attack from without.\n\nThese having gone, he called Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, and said, \"The outermost camp of Wei is on the main road. This night, when the enemy see a blaze, our camp will be attacked, so you two are to lie in wait on the two sides of the Wei camp and seize it when they have left.\"\n\nCalling Hu Ban and Wu Yi, he said, \"You are to lie in wait outside the camp to cut off the retreat of the force of Wei.\"\n\nAll these arrangements made, Zhuge Liang betook himself to a summit of the Qishan Mountains to watch the results.\n\nThe soldiers of Wei heard that their enemies were coming to seize the grain convoy and ran to tell Sun Li, who sent on a message to Cao Zhen.\n\nCao Zhen sent to the chief camp for Zhang Hu and Yue Chen and told them, \"Look out for a signal blaze; that would mean the coming of the army of Shu, and then you are to raid the Shu camp immediately.\"\n\nZhang Hu and Yue Chen sent watchers on the tower to look out for the promised blaze.\n\nMeanwhile Sun Li marched over and hid in the west hills to await the coming of the men of Shu. That night, at the second watch, Ma Dai came with his three thousand troops all silent, the soldiers with gags, the horses with a lashing round their muzzles. They saw tier after tier of carts on the hills, making an enclosure like a walled camp, and on the carts were planted many flags.\n\nThey waited. Presently the southwest wind came up, and then they launched the fire. Soon all the carts were in a blaze that lit up the sky. Sun Li saw the blaze and could only conclude that the troops of Shu had arrived and his own side were giving the signal, so he dashed out to attack. But soon two parties of soldiers were heard behind him closing in. These were Ma Zheng and Zhang Ni, who soon had Sun Li as in a net. Then he heard a third ominous roll of drums, which heralded the approach of Ma Dai from the direction of the blaze.\n\nUnder these several attacks, the troops of Wei quailed and gave way. The fire grew more and more fierce. Soldiers ran and horses stampeded, and the dead were too many to count. Sun Li made a dash through the smoke and fire of the battle and got away.\n\nWhen Zhang Hu and Yue Chen saw the fire, they threw open the gates of their camp and sallied forth to help defeat the army of Shu by seizing their camp. But when they reached the Shu camp, they found it empty. So they hurried to set out to return. That was the moment for Hu Ban and Wu Yi to appear and cut off their retreat. However, they fought bravely and got through. But when at length they reached their own camp, they were met by arrows flying thick as locusts. For Guan Xing and Zhang Bao had taken possession in their absence.\n\nThey could only set out for headquarters to report their mishap. As they neared Cao Zhen's camp, they met another remnant marching up. They were Sun Li's soldiers, and the two parties went into camp together and told the tale of their victimization. Cao Zhen thereafter looked to his defenses and attacked no more.\n\nThus victorious, the soldiers of Shu went to Zhuge Liang, who at once dispatched secret directions to Wei Yan. Then Zhuge Liang gave orders to break camp and retreat.\n\nThis move was not understood, and Yang Yi asked the leader, \"O Prime Minister, you have just scored a victory, and the enemy have lost their bravery; why retreat?\"\n\n\"Because we are short of food,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Our success lay in swift victory, but the enemy will not fight, and thus they weaken us day by day. Though we have worsted them now, they will soon be reinforced, and their light horse can cut off our provisions. Then we could not retreat at all. For a time they will not dare look at us, and we must take the occasion to do what they do not expect, and retreat. But I am solicitous about Wei Yan, who is on the Chencang road to keep off Wang Shuang. I fear he cannot get away. So I have sent him certain orders to slay Wang Shuang, and then the force of Wei will not dare to pursue.\"\n\nTherefore the retreat began, but to deceive the enemy the watchmen were left in the empty camp to beat the watches through the night.\n\nCao Zhen was depressed at his recent misfortune. Then they told him Zhang He, General of the Left Army, had come. Zhang He came up to the gate, dismounted, and entered.\n\nWhen he saw Cao Zhen, he said, \"I have received a royal command to come and to be into your arrangements.\"\n\n\"Did you take leave of friend Sima Yi?\" asked Cao Zhen.\n\nZhang He said, \"His said to me that if you won the field the Shu army would stay, but if you did not, the Shu army would retreat. It seems that our side has missed success. Have you since found out what the troops of Shu are doing?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\nSo Cao Zhen sent out some scouts, and they found empty camps. There were flags flying, but the army had been gone two days. Cao Zhen was disgusted.\n\nWhen Wei Yan received his secret orders, he broke up camp that night and hastened toward Hanzhong. Wang Shuang's scouts heard this and told their chief, who hurried in pursuit. After about seven miles, he came in sight of Wei Yan's ensigns.\n\nAs soon as Wang Shuang got within hailing distance, he shouted, \"Do not flee, Wei Yan!\"\n\nBut no one looked back, so he again pressed forward.\n\nThen he heard one of his guards behind him shouting, \"There is a blaze in the camp outside the city wall. I think it is some wile of the enemy!\"\n\nWang Shuang pulled up and, turning, saw the fire. He therefore tried to draw off his troops. Just as he passed a hill, a horseman suddenly came out of a wood.\n\n\"Here is Wei Yan!\" shouted the horseman.\n\nWang Shuang was too startled to defend himself and fell at the first stroke of Wei Yan's blade. Wang Shuang's troops thought this was only the beginning of an ambush and serious attack, so they scattered. But really Wei Yan only had thirty men with him, and they moved off leisurely toward Hanzhong.\n\n\u2003No man could better Zhuge Liang's foresight keen;\n\n\u2003Brilliant as a comet where it flashed:\n\n\u2003Back and forth at will his soldiers dashed,\n\n\u2003And Wang Shuang's dead body marked where they had been.\n\nThe secret orders sent to Wei Yan was that he was to keep back thirty men and hide beside Wang Shuang's camp till that warrior left. Then the camp was to be set on fire. After that the thirty were to wait till Wang Shuang's return to fall upon him. The plan being successfully carried out, Wei Yan followed the retreating army into Hanzhong and handed over his command.\n\nThe Shu army having retreated safely to Hanzhong, feastings were held in celebration of the event.\n\nZhang He, who, failing to come up with the retiring enemy, presently returned to camp. Hao Zhao sent a letter to say that Wang Shuang had met his end. This loss caused Cao Zhen deep grief, so that he became ill and had to return to Luoyang. He left Zhang He, Sun Li, and Guo Huai to guard the approaches to Changan.\n\nMeanwhile in the South Land, at a court held by Sun Quan, the Prince of Wu, a certain spy reported: \"Prime Minister Zhuge Liang has invaded Wei twice, and Commander-in-Chief Cao Zhen has suffered great losses.\"\n\nThereupon his ministers urged on Sun Quan that he should attack Wei and try to gain the Middle Land.\n\nHowever, Sun Quan could not make up his mind, and Zhang Zhao endeavored to prove to him that his hour was come by this memorial:\n\n\"I have heard that a phoenix has lately appeared in the hills east of Wuchang and bowed; that a yellow dragon has been seen in the Great River. My lord, your virtue matches that of Kings Yu and Tang, and your understanding is on a level with that of Kings Wen and Wu. Wherefore you should now proceed to the imperial style and then raise an army to maintain your authority.\"\n\nAnd many other officers supported Zhang Zhao's proposal. They finally persuaded Sun Quan to decide upon the 'tiger' day in the forth month, in summer. They prepared an altar on the south of Wuchang, and on that day his courtiers formally requested him to ascend to the high place and assume the style of \"Emperor\".\n\n\"Yellow Dragon\" was chosen as the style of the reign (AD 229). Sun Jian, the deceased father of the new Emperor, was given the title of the Martially Glorious Emperor, his mother Empress Wu, and his elder brother, Sun Ce, was made posthumously Prince of Changsha, and his son, Sun Deng, was styled Heir Apparent. The rank of Left Companion of the Heir Apparent was conferred upon the eldest son of Zhuge Jin, Zhuge Ke. The rank of Right Companion of the Heir Apparent was bestowed upon the second son of Zhang Zhao, Zhang Xi.\n\nThis son of Zhuge Jin was a person seven-span height, very clever, and especially apt at capping verses. Sun Quan liked him much. When Zhuge Ke was six, he went with his father to a banquet. Sun Quan noticed that Zhuge Jin had a long face, so he bade a man lead in a donkey, and he wrote on it with chalk, \"My friend Zhuge Jin\". Everyone roared with laughter. But the youngster ran up and added a few strokes making it read, \"My friend Zhuge Jin's donkey\". The guests were astonished at his ready wit, and praised him. Sun Quan was also pleased and made him a present of the donkey.\n\nAnother day, at a large official banquet, Sun Quan sent the boy with a goblet of wine to each courtier.\n\nWhen he came to Zhang Zhao, the old man declined it, saying, \"This is not the proper treatment for old age.\"\n\n\"Can you not make him drink?\" said Sun Quan.\n\nThen said Zhuge Ke to the old gentleman, \"You remember Lu Wang; he was ninety and yet gripped the signaling flags and wielded the axes of an army commander in the field. He never spoke of age. Nowadays in battle we put seniors behind, but at the banquet board we give them a front place. How can you say we do not treat old age properly?\"\n\nZhang Zhao had no reply ready, and so had to drink. This sort of precocity endeared the boy to Sun Quan, and now Sun Quan made him the Left Companion to the Heir Apparent.\n\nZhang Zhao's son, Zhang Xi, was chosen for honor on account of the eminent services of his father, whose rank was only below that of Prince. Then Gu Yong became Prime Minister and Lu Xun, Regent Marshal. And Lu Xun assisted the Heir Apparent in the custody of Wuchang. Sun Quan himself returned to Jianye.\n\nAs Sun Quan seemed powerful and well established, the whole of his court turned their thoughts toward the suppression of Wei. Only Zhang Zhao opposed it and tendered counsels of internal reform.\n\n\"It is not well to begin Your Majesty's new reign with fighting. Rather improve learning and hide the sword; establish schools and so give the people the blessings of peace. Make a treaty with Shu to share the empire, and lay your plans slowly and carefully.\"\n\nSun Quan saw the wisdom of the advice. He sent an envoy into the River Lands to lay the scheme of an alliance before the Latter Ruler. The Latter Ruler called his courtiers to discuss it. Many were opposed to Sun Quan as an upstart usurper and advised rejection of any friendly proposals from him.\n\nThen Jiang Wan said, \"We should get the opinion of Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nSo they sent and put the matter before the Prime Minister.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"Send an envoy with presents and felicitations and ask Sun Quan to send Lu Xun against Wei. Then Sima Yi will be engaged with Wu, and I may once more march to Qishan and attempt Capital Changan.\"\n\nWherefore the Chair of the Secretariat, Chen Zhen, was sent with presents of horses, a jeweled belt, gold and pearls, and precious things into the South Land to congratulate the Ruler of Wu on his newly assumed dignity. And the presents were accepted, and the bearer thereof honored and allowed to return.\n\nWhen this was all over, Sun Quan called in Lu Xun and asked his opinion about the concerted attack on Wei. Lu Xun saw through the scheme at once.\n\n\"We owe this to Zhuge Liang's fear of Sima Yi,\" said he. \"However, we must consent since Shu asks it. We will make a show of raising an army and in a measure support them. When Zhuge Liang has actually attacked Wei, we will make for the Middle Land ourselves.\"\n\nOrders went forth for enlisting and training Jingzhou soldiers ready for an expedition to start presently.\n\nWhen Chen Zhen returned to Hanzhong and reported to the Prime Minister, Zhuge Liang was still worried that he could not advanced hastily by the road through Chencang. So he sent scouts out first.\n\nSoon the scouts brought the news back: \"The defender of the city, Hao Zhao, is being very ill.\"\n\n\"That means success for me,\" cried he, cheering.\n\nHe called in Wei Yan and Jiang Wei, and said, \"Take five thousand troops and hasten to Chencang. If you see a blaze, then attack.\"\n\nThey could hardly believe what the order was meant, and came again to see their chief and asked the exact date of departure.\n\nReplied Zhuge Liang, \"In three days you should be ready to march. Do not come to take leave of me, but set out as soon as possible.\"\n\nAfter they had left his tent, he summoned Guan Xing and Zhang Bao and gave them secret instructions.\n\nNow when Guo Huai heard that Commander Hao Zhao of Chencang was ill, he and Zhang He talked over the matter.\n\nGuo Huai said, \"Hao Zhao is very ill. You had better go and relieve him. I will report to the capital what we have done that they may arrange.\"\n\nSo Zhang He started with his three thousand troops to relieve the sick man.\n\nHao Zhao was indeed at the point of death, and suddenly they told him that the army of Shu had reached the walls. Hao Zhao roused himself and bade them go on the ramparts. But then fire broke out at each gate, a panic spread in the city, and the noise of the confusion startled the dying man so that he passed away just as the troops of Shu were bursting in.\n\nWhen Wei Yan and Jiang Wei reached the walls, they were perplexed to find no sign of life. No flags were flying and no watchmen struck the hours. They delayed their attack for a time. Then they heard a bomb, and suddenly the wall was thick with flags, and there appeared the well-known figure of the minister.\n\n\"You have come too late,\" cried Zhuge Liang.\n\nBoth dropped out of the saddle and prostrated themselves.\n\n\"Really, you are supernatural, O Prime Minister!\" they cried.\n\nThey entered the city, and then he explained to them, saying, \"I heard the news that Hao Zhao was seriously sick, so I sent you with the deadline of three days as a decoy to calm the people of this city. Then I hid myself in the ranks of another force under Guan Xing and Zhang Bao, which came to Chencang by double marches. Also, I had sent spies into the city to start the fires and throw the defenders into confusion. An army without a leader could never fight, and I could take the city easily. This is an instance of the rule of war: 'Do the unexpected; attack the unprepared.'\"\n\nThey bowed. In commiseration Zhuge Liang sent all the family of Hao Zhao, and his coffin, over to Wei, thus showing his sense of the dead man's loyalty.\n\nTurning once more to Wei Yan and Jiang Wei, he said, \"But do not divest yourself of your armor. Go and attack San Pass and drive away the guards while they are in a state of surprise. If you delay, Wei will have sent reinforcements.\"\n\nThey went. Surely enough the capture of San Pass was easy as the Wei soldiers scattered. But when they went up to look around, they saw a great cloud of dust moving toward them. The Wei reinforcements were already near.\n\nThey remarked to each other, \"The Prime Minister's foresight was superhuman.\"\n\nWhen they had looked a little longer, they saw the leader of the Wei army then approaching was Zhang He.\n\nThey then divided their soldiers to hold the approaches. When Zhang He saw that all was prepared, he retired. Wei Yan followed and fought a battle, defeating Zhang He heavily.\n\nWei Yan sent to report his success, but Zhuge Liang had already left Chencang and had gone into the Xie Valley to capture the county of Jianwei. Other armies from Shu followed. Moreover, the Latter Ruler sent Chen Shi to assist in the campaign. Zhuge Liang then marched his main force to Qishan and there made a camp. Then he called an assembly of officers.\n\n\"Twice have I gone out by Qishan without success, but at last I am here. I think Wei will resume the former battle ground and oppose us. If so, they will assume that I shall attack Yongcheng and Meicheng and send armies to defend them. But I see Yinping and Wudu are connected with Hanzhong. If I can win these, I can drive a wedge into the Wei force. Who will go to take these places?\"\n\nJiang Wei and Wang Ping offered themselves. The former was sent with ten thousand troops to capture Wudu; the latter, with an equal force, went to Yinping.\n\nZhang He went back to Changan and saw Guo Huai and Sun Li, to whom he said, \"Chencang is lost, Hao Zhao is dead, and San Pass is taken. Zhuge Liang is again at Qishan, and thence has sent out two armies.\"\n\nGuo Huai was frightened, saying, \"In that case, Yongcheng and Meicheng are in danger.\"\n\nLeaving Zhang He to guard Changan, Guo Huai sent Sun Li to Yongcheng, and he himself set out at once for Meicheng. He sent an urgent report to Luoyang.\n\nAt Wei's next court the Emperor was informed of all the misfortunes in the west: \"Chencang has fallen, and Hao Zhao has died. Zhuge Liang has captured San Pass. He is camping at Qishan and is planning to invade Wei.\"\n\nCao Rui was alarmed.\n\nJust then Man Chong reported, \"Sun Quan has declared himself Emperor, and Lu Xun is drilling his army in Wuchang. An invasion from the east can be expected soon.\"\n\nCao Rui was embarrassed and frightened. Cao Zhen, being ill, could not be consulted, and Sima Yi was called. He was ready with a proposal.\n\n\"In my humble opinion, Wu will not attack us,\" said Sima Yi.\n\n\"What makes you think so?\" asked the Ruler of Wei.\n\n\"Because Zhuge Liang still resents, and wishes to avenge, the event at Xiaoting. He never ceases to desire to absorb Wu. His only fear is that we may swoop down upon Shu. That is why there is an alliance with Wu. Lu Xun knows it also quite well, and he is only making a show of raising an army as they arranged. The truth is he is sitting on the fence. Hence Your Majesty may disregard the menace on the east, and only protect yourself against Shu.\"\n\n\"Your insight is very profound,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nSima Yi was created Commander-in-Chief of all the forces in the west, and the Ruler of Wei directed a courtier to go to Cao Zhen for the seal.\n\n\"I would rather go myself,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nSo Sima Yi left the audience and went to the palace of Cao Zhen, where presently he saw the invalid. First he asked after his health and then gradually opened his errand.\n\n\"Shu and Wu have made an alliance to invade Wei and share its domains, and Zhuge Liang is at Qishan the third time. Have you heard, Illustrious Sir?\"\n\n\"My people have kept back all news as I am ill,\" said he, startled. \"But if this is true, the country is in danger. Why have they not made you Commander-in-Chief to stop this invasion?\"\n\n\"I am unequal to the post,\" said Sima Yi.\n\n\"Bring the seal and give it to him,\" said Cao Zhen to his attendants.\n\n\"You are anxious on my account. Really I am only come to lend you an arm. I dare not accept the seal.\"\n\nCao Zhen started up, saying, \"If you do not take it, I shall have to go to see the Emperor, ill as I am. The Middle Land is in danger.\"\n\n\"Really the Emperor has already shown his kindness, but I dare not accept his offer.\"\n\n\"If you have been appointed, then Shu will be driven off.\"\n\nThrice Sima Yi declined the seal, but eventually he received it into his hands as he knew Cao Zhen was sincere. Then he took leave of the Ruler of Wei and marched to Changan.\n\n\u2003The seal of office changes hands,\n\n\u2003Two armies now one force become." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "Zhuge Liang Defeats The Wei Army; Sima Yi Invades The West River Land.\n\nThe fourth month of Beginning Prosperity, seventh year (AD 229), found Zhuge Liang camped at Qishan in three camps, waiting to attack Wei.\n\nWhen Sima Yi reached Changan, the officer in command, Zhang He, told him all that had happened. He gave Zhang He the post of Leader of the Van, with Dai Ling as his Assistant General and a hundred thousand troops, and then marched out toward the enemy, camping on River Wei's south bank.\n\nWhen the local commanders Guo Huai and Sun Li went to see the new Commander-in-Chief, he asked, \"Have you fought any battle with Shu?\"\n\n\"Not yet,\" said they.\n\nSima Yi said, \"The enemy had a long march; their chance lay in attacking quickly. As they have not attacked, they have some deep laid scheme to work out. What news have you from the counties of West Valley Land?\"\n\nGuo Huai replied, \"The scouts say that the greatest care is being taken in every county. But there is no news from Wudu and Yinping.\"\n\n\"I must send someone to fight a decisive battle with them there. You get away as quickly and privily as you can to the rescue of those two cities, and then attack the rear of the Shu army so as to throw them into disorder.\"\n\nThey set out to obey these orders, and on the way they fell to discussing Sima Yi.\n\n\"How does Sima Yi compare with Zhuge Liang?\" said Guo Huai.\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is by far the better,\" replied Sun Li.\n\n\"Though Zhuge Liang may be the cleverer, yet this scheme of our leader's shows him to be superior to most people. The enemy may have got those two cities. Yet when we unexpectedly fall upon their rear, they will certainly be disordered.\"\n\nSoon after this a scout came in to report: \"Wang Ping has captured Yinping, and Wudu is in possession of Jiang Wei. Furthermore, the Shu army is not far in front.\"\n\nSaid Sun Li, \"There is some crafty scheme afoot. Why are they prepared for battle in the open when they hold two cities? We had better retire.\"\n\nGuo Huai agreed, and they issued orders to face about and retreat. Just then a bomb exploded, and, at the same time, there suddenly appeared from the cover of some hills a small body of troops. On the flag that came forward they read Han Prime Minister Zhuge Liang, and in the midst of the company they saw him, seated in a small chariot. On his left was Guan Xing, and on his right Zhang Bao.\n\nThey were quite taken aback.\n\nZhuge Liang laughed and said, \"Do not run away! Did you think that your leader's ruse would take me in? Sima Yi sent a challenge to fight every day, indeed, while you were to slip round behind my army and attack! I have the two cities \u2014 Wudu and Yinping. If you have not come to surrender, then hurry up and fight a battle with me.\"\n\nBy now Guo Huai and Sun Li were really frightened. Then behind them there rose a shout as of battle, and Wang Ping and Jiang Wei began to smite them in the rear, while Guan Xing and Zhang Bao bore down upon them in front. They were soon utterly broken, and the two leaders escaped by scrambling up the hillside.\n\nZhang Bao saw them, and was urging his steed forward to catch them, when unhappily he and his horse went over together into a gully. When they picked him up, they found that he had been kicked in the head and was badly hurt.\n\nZhuge Liang sent him back to Chengdu.\n\nIt has been said that Guo Huai and Sun Li escaped. They got back to Sima Yi's camp and said, \"Wudu and Yinping were both in the enemy's possession, and Zhuge Liang had prepared an ambush, so that we were attacked front and rear. We lost the day and only escaped on foot.\"\n\n\"It is no fault of yours,\" said Sima Yi. \"The fact is he is sharper than I. Now go to defend Yongcheng and Meicheng and remain on the defensive. Do not go out to give battle. I have a plan to defeat them.\"\n\nThese two having left, Sima Yi called in Zhang He and Dai Ling and said, \"Zhuge Liang has captured Wudu and Yinping. He must restore order and confidence among the people of these places and so will be absent from his camp. You two will take ten thousand troops each, start tonight and make your way quietly to the rear of the Shu army. Then you will attack vigorously. When you have done that, I shall lead out the army in front of them and array ready for battle. While they are in disorder, I shall make my attack. Their camp ought to be captured. If I can win the advantage of these hills, their defeat will be easy.\"\n\nThese two left, Dai Ling marching on the left and Zhang He on the right. They took by-roads and got well to the rear of the Shu army. In the third watch they struck the high road and joined forces. Then they marched toward the enemy. After about ten miles there was a halt in front. The two leaders galloped up to see what had caused it, and found many straw-carts drawn across the road.\n\n\"The enemy has been prepared,\" said Zhang He. \"We should return.\"\n\nJust as they ordered the troops to turn about, torches broke into flame all over the hills, the drums rolled, trumpets blared, and soldiers sprang out on every side.\n\nAt the same time Zhuge Liang shouted from the hill-top, \"Dai Ling and Zhang He, listen to my words! Your master reckoned that I should be busy restoring order in the two cities and so should not be in my camp. Wherefore he sent you to take the camp, and you have just fallen into my snare. As you are leaders of no great importance, I shall not harm you. Dismount and yield.\"\n\nZhang He's wrath blazed forth at this, and he pointed at Zhuge Liang, crying, \"You peasant out of the woods, invader of our great country! How dare you use such words to me? Wait till I catch you: I will tear you to shreds!\"\n\nHe galloped forward to ascend the hill, his spear ready for the thrust. But the arrows and stones pelted too quickly. Then he turned and dashed in among the Shu soldiers, scattering them right and left. He got clear, but he saw Dai Ling was not with him. At once he turned back, fought his way to his comrade and brought Dai Ling out safely.\n\nZhuge Liang on the hill-top watched this warrior and saw he was a right doughty fighting man.\n\n\"I have heard that soldiers stood aghast when Zhang Fei fought his great fight with Zhang He. Now I can judge Zhang He's valor for myself. He will do harm to Shu one day if I spare him. He will have to be removed.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang returned to his camp.\n\nBy this time Sima Yi had completed his battle line and was waiting the moment of disorder in the Shu army to attack. Then he saw Zhang He and Dai Ling come limping back dejected and crestfallen.\n\nThey said, \"Zhuge Liang forestalled us. He was well prepared, and so we were quite defeated.\"\n\n\"He is more than human!\" exclaimed Sima Yi. \"We must retreat.\"\n\nSo the whole army retired into the fortified camps and would not come out.\n\nThus a great victory fell to Shu, and their booty was immense: Weapons and horses innumerable. Zhuge Liang led his army back to camp. Thereafter he sent parties to offer a challenge at the gate of the Wei camp every day, but the soldiers remained obstinately behind their shelters and would not appear. When this had continued half a month Zhuge Liang grew sad.\n\nThen came Fei Yi from Capital Chengdu with an edict of the Emperor. Fei Yi was received with all respect, and incense was burnt as propriety demanded. This done, the command was unsealed, and Zhuge Liang read:\n\n\"The failure at Jieting was really due to the fault of Ma Su. However, you held yourself responsible and blamed yourself very severely. It would have been a serious matter for me to have withstood your intentions, and so I did what you insisted on.\n\n\"However, that was a glorious exploit last year when Wang Shuang was slain. This year, Guo Huai has been driven back and the Qiangs have been reduced; the two counties of Wudu and Yinping have been captured; you have driven fear into the hearts of all evil doers and thus rendered magnificent services.\n\n\"But the world is in confusion, and the original evil has not been destroyed. You fill a great office, for you direct the affairs of the state. It is not well for you to remain under a cloud for any length of time and cloak your grand virtue, wherefore I restore you to the rank of Prime Minister and pray you not to decline the honor.\"\n\nZhuge Liang heard the edict to the end and then said, \"My task is not yet accomplished. How can I return to my duties as Prime Minister? I must really decline to accept this.\"\n\nFei Yi said, \"If you decline this, you flout the desires of the Emperor and also show contempt for the feelings of the army. At any rate accept for the moment.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang humbly bowed acquiescence.\n\nFei Yi took leave and returned.\n\nSeeing that Sima Yi remained obstinately on the defensive, Zhuge Liang thought of a plan by which to draw him. He gave orders to break camp and retire.\n\nWhen the scouts told Sima Yi, he said, \"We may not move. Certainly there is some deep craftiness in this move.\"\n\nZhang He said, \"It must mean that their food is exhausted. Why not pursue?\"\n\n\"I reckon that Zhuge Liang laid up ample supplies last year. Now the wheat is ripe, and he has plenty of every sort. Transport might be difficult, but yet he could hold out half a year. Why should he run away? He sees that we resolutely refuse battle, and he is trying some ruse to inveigle us into fighting. Send out spies to a distance to see what is going on.\"\n\nThey reconnoitered a long way round, and the scouts returned to say that a camp had been formed ten miles away.\n\n\"Ah, then he is not running away,\" said Sima Yi. \"Remain on the defensive still more strictly and do not advance.\"\n\nTen days passed without further news; nor did the soldiers of Shu offer the usual challenge. Again spies were sent far afield, and they reported a further retreat of ten miles and a new encampment.\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is certainly working some scheme,\" said Sima Yi. \"Do not pursue.\"\n\nAnother ten days passed and spies went out. The enemy had gone ten miles farther and encamped.\n\nZhang He said, \"What makes you so over-suspicious? I can see that Zhuge Liang is retreating into Hanzhong, only he is doing it gradually and arousing our suspicion. Why not pursue before it is too late. Let me go and fight one battle.\"\n\n\"No,\" said Sima Yi. \"A defeat would destroy the morale of our soldiers, and I will not risk it. Zhuge Liang's vile tricks are innumerable.\"\n\n\"If I go and get beaten, I will stand the full rigor of military punishment,\" said Zhang He.\n\n\"Well, if you are set on going, we will divide the army. You take your wing and go, but you will have to fight your best. I will follow to help in case of need. Tomorrow you should march only halfway and rest your troops for the battle.\"\n\nSo Zhang He got independent command of thirty thousand troops and took Dai Ling as his second in command, and he had a few score of generals as assistants. Halfway they camped. Then Sima Yi, leaving a substantial guard for his camp, set out along the same road with fifty thousand troops.\n\nZhuge Liang knew the movements of the army of Wei and when Zhang He's army camped to rest. In the night he summoned his generals and told them.\n\n\"The enemy are coming in pursuit and will fight desperately. You will have to fight everyone of you like ten, but I will set an ambush to attack their rear. Only a wise and bold leader is fit for this task.\"\n\nWang Ping stepped forth and said he was willing to go on this expedition.\n\n\"But if you fail, what then?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Then there is the military rule.\"\n\nZhuge Liang sighed. \"Wang Ping is most loyal. He is willing to risk wounds and death in his country's service. However, the enemy are in two divisions, one coming in front, the other trying to get round to the rear. Wang Ping is crafty and bold, but he cannot be in two places at once, so I must have yet another general. Is it that among you there is no other willing to devote himself to death?\"\n\nHe did not wait long for a reply. Zhang Yi stepped to the front.\n\n\"Zhang He is a most famous leader in Wei and valorous beyond all compare. You are not a match for him,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"If I fail, may my head fall at the tent door,\" said Zhang Yi.\n\n\"Since you wish to go, I accept you. Each of you shall have ten thousand veterans. You will hide in the valleys till the enemy come up, and you will let them pass. Then you will fall upon their rear. If Sima Yi comes, you must divide the army, Zhang Yi to hold the rear and Wang Ping to check the advance. But they will fight desperately, and I must find a way to aid you.\"\n\nWhen they had gone, Jiang Wei and Liao Hua were called, and Zhuge Liang said, \"I am going to give you a silken bag. You are to proceed secretly into those mountains in front. When you see that Zhang Yi and Wang Ping are in great straits with the enemy, then open the bag and you will find a plan of escape.\"\n\nAfter this he gave secret instructions to four other generals \u2014 Hu Ban, Wu Yi, Ma Zheng, and Zhang Ni \u2014 to observe the enemy and, if the enemy seemed confident of victory, to retire, fighting at intervals, till they saw Guan Xing come up, when they could turn and fight their best.\n\nThen calling Guan Xing, he said to them, \"Hide in the valleys with five thousand troops till you see a red flag flutter out, and then fall on the enemy.\"\n\nZhang He and Dai Ling hurried along like a rain squall till they were suddenly confronted by Ma Zheng, Zhang Ni, Wu Yi, and Hu Ban. Zhang He dashed toward his enemy, and then they retired, stopping at intervals to fight. The Wei army pursued for about seven miles.\n\nIt was the sixth moon and very hot, so that soldiers and horses sweated profusely. When they had gone ten miles farther, the soldiers and horses were panting and nearly spent. Then Zhuge Liang, who had watched the fighting from a hill, gave the signal for Guan Xing to emerge and join battle. Ma Zheng, Zhang Ni, Hu Ban, and Wu Yi all led on their troops. Zhang He and Dai Ling fought well, but they could not extricate themselves and retire.\n\nPresently, with a roll of drums, Wang Ping and Zhang Yi came out and made for the rear to cut the retreat.\n\n\"Why do you not fight to death?\" shouted Zhang He to his generals when he saw the new dangers.\n\nThe soldiers of Wei dashed this way and that, but were stayed at every attempt. Then there was heard another roll of drums, and Sima Yi came up in the rear. He at once signaled to his generals to surround Wang Ping and Zhang Yi.\n\n\"Our minister is truly wonderful. The battle goes just as he foretold,\" cried Zhang Yi. \"He will surely send help now, and we will fight to the death.\"\n\nThereupon the Shu force were divided into two parties. Wang Ping led one army to hold up Zhang He and Dai Ling; Zhang Yi led the other division to oppose Sima Yi. On both sides the fighting was keen and continued all the day.\n\nFrom their station on a hill, Jiang Wei and Liao Hua watched the battle. They saw that the Wei force was very strong and their side was in danger and slowly giving way.\n\n\"Now surely is the moment to open the bag,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\nSo the bag was opened, and they read the letter. It said:\n\n\"If Sima Yi comes and Wang Ping and Zhang Yi seem hard pressed, you are to divide forces and go off to attack Sima Yi's camp, which will cause him to retire, and then you can attack him as his army is in disorder. The actual capture of the camp is not of great moment.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei and Liao Hua divided the force and started for the enemy's camp.\n\nNow Sima Yi had really feared that he would fall victim to some ruse of Zhuge Liang, so he had arranged for messengers and news to meet him at intervals along the road.\n\nSima Yi was pressing his troops to fight when a messenger galloped up to report: \"The soldiers of Shu are making for the main camp by two directions.\"\n\nSima Yi was frightened and changed color. He turned on his generals, saying, \"I knew Zhuge Liang would plan some trick, but you did not believe me. You forced me to pursue, and now the whole scheme has gone astray.\"\n\nThereupon he gathered in his army and turned to retire. The troops went hurriedly and got into disorder. Zhang Yi came up behind, causing huge damage to the Wei army. Zhang He and Dai Ling, having but few troops left, sought refuge among the hills. The victory was to Shu, and Guan Xing came up helping in the rout wherever there appeared a chance to strike.\n\nSima Yi, defeated, hurried to the camp. But when he reached it, the army of Shu had already left. He gathered in his broken army and abused his generals as the cause of his failure.\n\n\"You are all ignorant of the proper way to wage war, and think it simply a matter of valor and rude strength. This is the result of your unbridled desire to go out and give battle. For the future no one of you will move without definite orders, and I will apply strict military law to any who disobey.\"\n\nThey were all greatly ashamed and retired to their quarters. In this fight the losses of Wei were very heavy, not only in soldiers, but in horses and weapons.\n\nZhuge Liang led his victorious army to their camp. He intended to advance again, when a messenger arrived from Capital Chengdu with the sad news that Zhang Bao had died. When they told Zhuge Liang he uttered a great cry, blood gushed from his mouth and he fell in a swoon. He was raised and taken to his tent, but he was too ill to march and had to keep his bed. His generals were much grieved.\n\nA later poet sang:\n\n\u2003Fierce and valiant was Zhang Bao,\n\n\u2003Striving hard to make a name;\n\n\u2003Sad the gods should interfere\n\n\u2003And withhold a hero's fame!\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang wept his end\n\n\u2003In the western winds blowing.\n\n\u2003For he knew the warrior gone,\n\n\u2003This grieving is beyond knowing.\n\nZhuge Liang's illness continued. Ten days later he summoned to his tent Dong Jue and Fan Jian, and said, \"I feel void and am too ill to carry on, and the best thing for me is to return into Hanzhong and get well. You are to keep my absence perfectly secret, for Sima Yi will certainly attack if he hears.\"\n\nZhuge Liang issued orders to break up the camp that night, and the army retired into Hanzhong forthwith. Sima Yi only heard of it five days later, and he knew that again he had been outwitted.\n\n\"The man appears like a god and disappears like a demon. He is too much for me,\" sighed Sima Yi.\n\nSima Yi set certain generals over the camp and placed others to guard the commanding positions, and he also marched homeward.\n\nAs soon as the Shu army was settled in Hanzhong, Zhuge Liang went to Chengdu for treatment. The officials of all ranks came to greet him and escort him to his palace. The Latter Ruler also came to inquire after his condition and sent his own physicians to treat him. So gradually he recovered.\n\nIn Beginning Prosperity, eighth year and seventh month (AD 230), Cao Zhen, the Grand Commander in Wei, had recovered, and he sent a memorial to his master, saying: \"Shu has invaded more than once and threatened Changan. If this state be not destroyed, it will ultimately be our ruin. The autumn coolness is now here. The army is in good form, and it is the time most favorable for an attack on Shu. I desire to take Sima Yi as colleague and march into Hanzhong to exterminate this wretched horde and free the borders from trouble.\"\n\nPersonally, the Ruler of Wei approved, but he consulted Liu Ye, saying, \"Cao Zhen proposes an attack on Shu. How about that?\"\n\nLiu Ye replied, \"The Grand Commander speaks well. If that state be not destroyed, it will be to our hurt. Your Majesty should give effect to his desire.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei nodded.\n\nWhen Liu Ye went home, a crowd of officers flocked to inquire, saying, \"We heard the Emperor has consulted you about an expedition against Shu: What think you?\"\n\n\"No such thing,\" said Liu Ye. \"Shu is too difficult a country to invade. It would be a mere waste of humans and weapons.\"\n\nThey left him. Then Yang Jin went into the Emperor and said, \"It is said that yesterday Liu Ye advised Your Majesty to fall upon Shu. Today when we talked with him, he said Shu could not be attacked. This is treating Your Majesty with indignity, and you should issue a command to punish him.\"\n\nWherefore Cao Rui called in Liu Ye and asked him to explain.\n\nLiu Ye replied, \"I have studied the details. Shu cannot be attacked.\"\n\nCao Rui laughed.\n\nIn a short time Yang Jin left.\n\nThen Liu Ye said, \"Yesterday I advised Your Majesty to attack Shu. That being a matter of state policy should be divulged to no person. The essential of a military move is secrecy.\"\n\nThen Cao Rui understood, and thereafter Liu Ye was held in greater consideration.\n\nTen days later Sima Yi came to court, and Cao Zhen's memorial was shown him.\n\nSima Yi replied, \"The moment is opportune. I do not think there is any danger from Wu.\"\n\nCao Zhen was created Minister of War, General Who Conquers the West, and Commander-in-Chief of the Western Expedition; Sima Yi was made Grand Commander, General Who Conquers the West, and was second in command; and Liu Ye was made Instructor of the Army. These three then left the court, and the army of four hundred thousand troops marched to Changan, intending to dash to Saber Pass and attack Hanzhong. The army was joined by Guo Huai and Sun Li.\n\nThe defenders of Hanzhong brought the news to Zhuge Liang, then quite recovered and engaged in training his army and elaborating the \"Eight Arrays\". All was in an efficient state and ready for an attack on Changan.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang heard of the intended attack, he called up Zhang Ni and Wang Ping and gave orders: \"You are to lead one thousand troops to Chencang and garrison that road so as to check the Wei army.\"\n\nThe two replied, \"It is said the Wei army numbers four hundred thousand, though they pretend to have eight hundred thousand. But they are very numerous, and a thousand troops is a very small force to meet them.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I would give you more, but I fear to make it hard for the soldiers. If there be a failure, I shall not hold you responsible. I send you thus; you may be sure there is a meaning in it. I observed the stars yesterday, and I see there will be a tremendous rain this month. The army of Wei may consist of any number of legions, but they will be unable to penetrate into a mountainous country. So there is no need to send a large force. You will come to no harm, and I shall lead the main body into Hanzhong and rest for a month while the enemy retreats. Then I shall smite them. My strong army needs only one hundred thousand to defeat their worn four hundred thousand. Do not say any more, but get off quickly.\"\n\nThis satisfied Wang Ping and Zhang Ni, and they left, while Zhuge Liang led the main body out toward Hanzhong. Moreover, every station was ordered to lay in a stock of wood and straw and grain enough for a whole month's use, ready against the autumn rains. A month's holiday was given, and food and clothing were issued in advance. The expedition was postponed for the present.\n\nWhen Cao Zhen and Sima Yi approached Chencang and entered the city, they could not find a single house.\n\nThey questioned some of the people near, who said, \"Zhuge Liang had burned everything before he left.\"\n\nThen Cao Zhen proposed to advance along the road, but Sima Yi opposed, saying that the stars foretold much rain.\n\n\"I have watched the Heaven, and the stars' movement signals long rains. If we get deep in a difficult country and are always victorious, it is all very well. But if we lose, we shall not get out again. Better remain in this city and build what shelter we can against the rains.\"\n\nCao Zhen followed his advice. In the middle of the month the rain began, and came down in a deluge so that the surrounding country was three feet under water. The equipment of the soldiers was soaked, and the soldiers themselves could get no place to sleep. For a whole month the rain continued. The horses could not be fed, and the soldiers grumbled incessantly. They sent to Luoyang, and the Ruler of Wei himself ceremonially prayed for fine weather, but with no effect.\n\nMinister Wang Su sent up a memorial:\n\n\"The histories say that when supplies have to be conveyed a long distance, the soldiers are starved; if they have to gather brushwood before they can cook, then the army is not full fed. This applies to ordinary expeditions in an ordinary country. If, in addition, the army has to march through a difficult country and roads have to be cut, the labor is doubled. Now this expedition is hindered by rain and steep and slippery hills; movement is cramped and supplies can only be maintained with difficulty. All is most unpropitious to the army.\n\n\"Cao Zhen has been gone over a month and has only got half through the valley. Road making is monopolizing all energies, and the fighting soldiers have to work on them. The state of affairs is the opposite to ideal, and the fighting soldiers dislike it.\n\n\"I may quote certain parallels. King Wu of Zhou attacked the last king of Shang Dynasty; he went through the pass, but returned. In recent times Emperors Cao and Pi, attacking Sun Quan, reached the river, and went no farther. Did they not recognize limitations and act accordingly? I pray Your Majesty remember the grave difficulties caused by the rain and put an end to this expedition. By and by another occasion will arise for using force, and in the joy of overcoming difficulties the people will forget death.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei could not make up his mind, but two other memorials by Yang Fu and Hua Xin followed, and then he issued the command to return, which was sent to Cao Zhen and Sima Yi.\n\nCao Zhen and Sima Yi had already discussed the abandonment of the expedition.\n\nCao Zhen had said, \"We have had rain for a whole month, and the soldiers are downhearted and think only of getting home again. How can we stop them?\"\n\nSima Yi replied, \"Return is best.\"\n\n\"If Zhuge Liang pursue, how shall we repulse him?\"\n\n\"We can leave an ambush.\"\n\nWhile they were discussing this matter, the Emperor's command arrived. Whereupon they faced about and marched homeward.\n\nNow Zhuge Liang had reckoned upon this month of rain and so had had his troops camped in a safe place. Then he ordered the main army to assemble at Red Slope and camp there.\n\nHe summoned his officers to his tent and said, \"In my opinion the enemy must retire, for the Ruler of Wei will issue such an order. To retreat needs preparation, and if we pursue, we will fall in their trap. So we will let them retire without molestation. Some other plan must be evolved.\"\n\nSo when Wang Ping sent news of the retreat of the enemy, the messenger carried back the order not to pursue.\n\n\u2003It is only lost labor to cover retreat\n\n\u2003When your enemy does not pursue." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Raiding A Camp, The Shu Soldiers Defeat Cao Zhen; Contesting Array Battles, Zhuge Liang Shames Sima Yi.\n\nWhen the Shu officers got to know that the Wei army had gone but they were not to pursue, they were inclined to discontent and went in a body to the Prime Minister's tent and said, \"The rain has driven the enemy away. Surely it is the moment to pursue.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"Sima Yi is an able leader who would not retreat without leaving an ambush to cover it. If we pursue we shall fall victims. Let him go in peace, and I shall then get through the Xie Valley and take Qishan, making use of the enemy's lack of defense.\"\n\n\"But there are other ways of taking Changan,\" said they. \"Why only take Qishan?\"\n\n\"Because Qishan is the first step to Changan, and I want to gain the advantage of position. And every transportation from the West Valley Land must come this way. It rests on River Wei in front and is backed by the Xie Valley. It gives the greatest freedom of movement and is a natural maneuvering ground. That is why I want it.\"\n\nThey bowed to his wisdom.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang dispatched Wei Yan, Zhang Ni, Du Qiong, and Chen Shi for Gu Valley; and he sent Ma Dai, Wang Ping, Zhang Yi, and Ma Zheng for the Xie Valley; all were to meet at the Qishan Mountains. He led the main army himself, with Guan Xing and Liao Hua in the van.\n\nWhen the Wei army retreated, Cao Zhen and Sima Yi remained in the rear superintending the movement. They sent a reconnoitering party along the old road to Chencang, and they returned saying no enemy was to be seen. Ten days later the leaders, who had commanded in the ambush, joined the main body saying that they had seen no sign of the enemy.\n\nCao Zhen said, \"This continuous autumn rain has rendered all the plank trails impassable. How could the soldiers of Shu know of our retreat?\"\n\n\"They will appear later,\" said Sima Yi.\n\n\"How can you know?\"\n\n\"These late five dry days they have not pursued, because they think we shall have left a rearguard in ambush. Therefore they have let us get well away. But after we have gone, they will try to occupy Qishan.\"\n\nCao Zhen was not convinced.\n\n\"Why do you doubt?\" asked Sima Yi. \"I think Zhuge Liang will certainly advance by way of the two valleys, and you and I should guard the entrances. I give them ten days, and if they do not appear, I will come to your camp painted in the face to own my mistake.\"\n\n\"If the army of Shu do appear, I will give you the girdle and the steed that the Emperor gave me,\" replied Cao Zhen.\n\nAnd they split their force, Cao Zhen taking up his station on the west of Qishan in the Xie Valley, and Sima Yi going to the east in the Gu Valley.\n\nAs soon as the camp was settled, Sima Yi led a cohort into hiding in the valley. The remainder of the force was placed in detachments on the chief roads.\n\nSima Yi disguised himself as a soldier and went among the soldiers to get a private survey of all the camps.\n\nIn one of them he happened upon a junior officer who was complaining, saying, \"The rain has drenched us for days, and they would not retire. Now they have camped here for a wager. They have no pity for us soldiers.\"\n\nSima Yi returned to his tent and assembled his officers.\n\nHauling out the grumbler, Sima Yi said to him, angrily, \"The state feeds and trains soldiers a thousand days for one hour's service. How dare you give vent to your spleen to the detriment of discipline?\"\n\nThe man would not confess, so his comrades were called to bear witness. Still he would not own up.\n\n\"I am not here for a wager, but to overcome Shu,\" said Sima Yi. \"Now you all have done well and are going home, but only this fellow complains and is guilty of mutinous conduct.\"\n\nSima Yi ordered the lictors to put him to death, and in a short time they produced his head.\n\nThe others were terrified, but Sima Yi said, \"All you must do your utmost to guard against the enemy. When you hear a bomb explode, rush out on all sides and attack.\"\n\nWith this order they retired.\n\nNow Wei Yan, Zhang Ni, Chen Shi, and Du Qiong, with twenty thousand troops, entered the Gu Valley. As they were marching, Adviser Deng Zhi came.\n\n\"I bear an order from the Prime Minister. As you go out of the valley, beware of the enemy,\" said Deng Zhi.\n\nChen Shi said, \"Why is the Prime Minister so full of doubts? We know the soldiers of Wei have suffered severely from the rain and must hasten home. They will not lay any ambush. We are doing double marches and shall gain a great victory. Why are we to delay?\"\n\nDeng Zhi replied, \"You know the Prime Minister's plans always succeed. How dare you disobey his orders?\"\n\nChen Shi smiled, saying, \"If he was really so resourceful, we should not have lost Jieting.\"\n\nWei Yan, recalling that Zhuge Liang had rejected his plan, also laughed, and said, \"If he had listened to me and gone out through Ziwu Valley, not only Changan but Luoyang too would be ours. Now he is bent on taking Qishan. What is the good of it? He gave us the order to advance and now he stops us. Truly the orders are confusing.\"\n\nThen said Chen Shi, \"I will tell you what I will do. I shall take only five thousand troops, get through the Gu Valley, and camp at Qishan. Then you will see how ashamed the Prime Minister will look.\"\n\nDeng Zhi argued and persuaded, but to no avail: The willful leader hurried on to get out of the valley. Deng Zhi could only return as quickly as possible and report.\n\nChen Shi proceeded. He had gone a few miles when he heard a bomb, and he was in an ambush. He tried to withdraw, but the valley was full of the enemy and he was surrounded as in an iron cask. All his efforts to get out failed. Then there was a shout, and Wei Yan came to the rescue. Wei Yan saved his comrade, but Chen Shi's five thousand troops was reduced to about five hundred, and these wounded. The Wei soldiers pursued, but two other divisions of Zhang Ni and Du Qiong prevented the pursuit, and finally the army of Wei retired.\n\nChen Shi and Wei Yan who had criticized Zhuge Liang's powers of prevision no longer doubted that he saw very clearly. They regretted their own shortsightedness.\n\nWhen Deng Zhi told his chief of the bad behavior of Chen Shi and Wei Yan, Zhuge Liang only laughed.\n\nSaid he, \"Wei Yan has been disposed to disobey and resent. However, I value his valor and dedication, and so I have employed him. But he will do real harm some day.\"\n\nThen came a messenger, who reported, \"Chen Shi had fallen into an ambush and lost more than four thousand troops. He has led his remained five hundred horse back to the gorge.\"\n\nZhuge Liang sent Deng Zhi back again to Gu Valley to console with Chen Shi and so keep him from actual mutiny.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang called to his tent Ma Dai and Wang Ping, and said, \"If there are any troops of Wei in the Xie Valley, you are to go across the mountains, marching by night and concealing yourselves by day, and make for the east of Qishan. When you arrive, make a fire as a signal.\"\n\nNext he gave orders to Ma Zheng and Zhang Ni, saying, \"You are to follow the by-roads to the west of Qishan. You are also to march by night and conceal by day. Then you are to join up with Ma Dai and Wang Ping. The four of you shall make a joint attack on Cao Zhen's camp. I shall lead the army through the valley and attack the camp in the center.\"\n\nAfter the four Generals left, Guan Xing and Liao Hua also received secret orders.\n\nThe armies marched rapidly. Not long after starting, two other detachments led by Hu Ban and Wu Yi received secret orders and left the main body.\n\nThe doubts about the coming of the Shu army made Cao Zhen careless, and he allowed his soldiers to become slack and rest. He only thought of getting through the allotted ten days, when he would have the laugh against his colleague.\n\nSeven of the days had passed, when a scout reported a few odd men of Shu in the valley. Cao Zhen sent Qin Liang with five thousand troops to reconnoiter and keep them at a distance.\n\nQin Liang he led his troops to the entrance of the valley. As soon as he arrived, the enemy retired. Qin Liang went after them, but they had disappeared. He was perplexed and puzzled, and while trying to decide, he told the troops to dismount and rest.\n\nBut almost immediately he heard a shout, and ambushing troops appeared in front of him. He jumped on his horse to look about him, and saw a great cloud of dust rising among the hills. He disposed his troops for defense, but the shouting quickly came nearer, and then Hu Ban and Wu Yi appeared advancing towards him. Retreat was impossible for Guan Xing and Liao Hua had blocked the road.\n\nThe hills were on both sides, and from the hill-tops came shouts of \"Dismount and yield!\"\n\nMore than half did surrender. Qin Liang rode out to fight, but he was slain by Liao Hua.\n\nZhuge Liang put the Wei soldiers who had come over to his side in one of the rear divisions. With their dress and arms, he disguised five thousand of his own troops so that they looked like his enemies, and then he sent this division \u2014 under Guan Xing, Liao Hua, Wu Yi, and Hu Ban \u2014 to raid Cao Zhen's camp. Before they reached the camp, they sent one of their number ahead as a galloper to tell Cao Zhen that there had been only a few men of Shu and they had all been chased out of sight, and so lull him into security.\n\nThis news satisfied Cao Zhen.\n\nBut just then a trusty messenger from Sima Yi came with a message: \"Our troops have fallen into an ambush, and many have been killed. Do not think any more about the wager: That is canceled. But take most careful precautions.\"\n\n\"But there is not a single soldier of Shu near,\" said Cao Zhen.\n\nHe told the messenger to go back. Just then they told him Qin Liang's army had returned, and he went out to meet them. Just as he got near, someone remarked that some torches had flared up in the rear of his camp. He hastened thither to see. As soon as he was out of sight, the four leaders waved on their troops and dashed up to the camp. At the same time Ma Dai and Wang Ping came up behind, and Ma Zheng and Zhang Yi came out.\n\nThe soldiers of Wei were trapped and helpless. They scattered and fled for life. Cao Zhen, protected by his generals, fled away eastward. The enemy chased them closely. As Cao Zhen fled there arose a great shouting, and up came an army at full speed. Cao Zhen thought all was lost, and his heart sank, but it was Sima Yi, who drove off the pursuers.\n\nThough Cao Zhen was saved, he was almost too ashamed to show his face.\n\nThen said Sima Yi, \"Zhuge Liang has seized Qishan, and we cannot remain here. Let us go to River Wei, whence we may try to recover our lost ground.\"\n\n\"How did you know I was in danger of defeat?\" asked Cao Zhen.\n\n\"My messenger told me that you said there was not a single soldier of Shu near, and I knew Zhuge Liang would try to seize your camp. So I came to your help. The enemy's plan succeeded, but we will say no more about that wager. We must both do our best for the country.\"\n\nBut the fright and excitement made Cao Zhen ill, and he took to his bed. And while the army were in such a state of disorder, Sima Yi was afraid to advise a return. They camped at River Wei.\n\nAfter this adventure Zhuge Liang hastened back to Qishan. After the soldiers had been feasted and services recognized, the four discontented leaders \u2014 Wei Yan, Chen Shi, Du Qiong, and Zhang Ni \u2014 came to the tent to apologize.\n\n\"Who caused the loss?\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nWei Yan said, \"Chen Shi disobeyed orders and rushed into the valley.\"\n\n\"Wei Yan told me to,\" said Chen Shi.\n\n\"Would you still try to drag him down after he rescued you?\" said Zhuge Liang. \"However, when orders have been disobeyed, it is useless to try and gloze it over.\"\n\nZhuge Liang sentenced Chen Shi to death, and he was led away. Soon they brought his head into the presence of the assembled generals. Zhuge Liang spared Wei Yan as there was yet work for him to accomplish.\n\nAfter this, Zhuge Liang prepared to advance. The scouts reported that Cao Zhen was ill, but was being treated by doctors in his tent.\n\nThe news pleased Zhuge Liang, and he said to his officers, \"If Cao Zhen's illness is slight, they will surely return to Changan. They must be delayed by his serious sickness. He stays on so that his soldiers may not lose heart. Now I will write him such a letter that he will die.\"\n\nThen he called up the soldiers of Wei who had yielded, and said to them, \"You are Wei troops, and your families are all over there: It is wrong for you to serve me. Suppose I let you go home?\"\n\nThey thanked him, falling prostrate and weeping.\n\nThen Zhuge Liang continued, \"Friend Cao Zhen and I have a compact, and I have a letter for him which you shall take. The bearer will be well rewarded.\"\n\nThey received the letter and ran home to their own tents, where they gave their Commander-in-Chief the letter. Cao Zhen was too ill to rise, but he opened the cover and read:\n\n\"The Prime Minister of Han, Zhuge Liang, to the Minister of War, Cao Zhen:\n\n\"You will permit me to say that a leader of an army should be able to go and come, to be facile and obdurate, to advance and retire, to show himself weak or strong, to be immovable as mountains, to be inscrutable as the operations of nature, to be infinite as the universe, to be everlasting as the blue void, to be vast as the ocean, to be dazzling as the lights of heaven, to foresee droughts and floods, to know the nature of the ground, to understand the possibilities of battle arrays, to conjecture the excellencies and defects of the enemy.\n\n\"Alas! One of your sort, ignorant and inferior, rising impudently in heaven's vault, has had the presumption to assist a rebel to assume the imperial style and state at Luoyang, to send some miserable soldiers into Xie Valley. There they happened upon drenching rain. The difficult roads wearied both soldiers and horses, driving them frantic. Weapons and armors littered the countryside, swords and spears covered the ground. You, the Commander-in-Chief, were heart-broken and cowed, your generals fled like rats. You dare not show your faces at home, nor can you enter the halls of state. The historians' pens will record your defeats; the people will recount your infamies: 'Sima Yi is frightened when he hears of battle fronts, Cao Zhen is alarmed at mere rumors.' My soldiers are fierce and their steeds strong; my great generals are eager as tigers and majestic as dragons. I shall sweep the Middle Land bare and make Wei desolate.\"\n\nCao Zhen's wrath rose as he read. At the end it filled his breast. And he died that evening. Sima Yi sent his coffin to Luoyang on a wagon.\n\nWhen the Ruler of Wei heard of the death of Cao Zhen, he issued an edict urging Sima Yi to prosecute the war, to raise a great army, and to fight with Zhuge Liang.\n\nSima Yi sent a declaration of war one day in advance, and Zhuge Liang replied that he would fight on the morrow.\n\nAfter the envoy had left, Zhuge Liang said, \"Cao Zhen must have died!\"\n\nHe called Jiang Wei by night to receive secret orders. He also summoned Guan Xing and told him what to do.\n\nNext morning the whole force marched to the bank of River Wei and took up a position in a wide plain with the river on one flank and hills on the other. The two armies saluted each other's appearance with heavy flights of arrows. After the drums had rolled thrice the Wei center opened at the great standard and Sima Yi appeared, followed by his officers. Opposite was Zhuge Liang, in a four-horse chariot, waving his feather fan.\n\nSima Yi addressed Zhuge Liang, \"Our master's ascension of the Throne was after the manner of King Yao, who abdicated in favor of King Shun. Two emperors have succeeded and have their seat in the Middle Land. Because of his liberality and graciousness, my lord has suffered the rule of Shu and Wu lest the people should suffer in a struggle. You, who are but a plowman from Nanyang, ignorant of the ways of Heaven, wish to invade us, and you should be destroyed. But if you will examine your heart and repent of your fault and retire, then each may maintain his own borders, and a settled state of three kingdoms will be attained. Thus the people may be spared distress, and you will save your life.\"\n\nZhuge Liang smiled and replied, \"Our First Ruler entrusted to me the custody of his orphan son: Think you that I shall fail to exert myself to the uttermost to destroy rebels against his authority? Your soldiers of the Cao family will soon be exterminated by Han. Your ancestors were servants of Han and for generations ate of their bounty. Yet, instead of giving grateful service, you assist usurpers. Are you not ashamed?\"\n\nThe flush of shame spread over Sima Yi's face, but he replied, \"We will try the test of battle. If you can conquer, I pledge myself to be no longer a leader of armies. But if you are defeated, then you will retire at once to your own village and I will not harm you.\"\n\n\"Do you desire a contest of generals, or of weapons, or of battle array?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"Let us try a contest of battle array,\" replied Sima Yi.\n\n\"Then draw up your array that I may see,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nSima Yi withdrew within the line and signaled to his officers with a yellow flag to draw up their troops.\n\nWhen he had finished, he rode again to the front, saying, \"Do you recognize my formation?\"\n\n\"The least of my generals can do as well,\" said Zhuge Liang, smiling. \"This is called the 'Disorder-in-Order' formation.\"\n\n\"Now you try while I look on,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nZhuge Liang entered the lines and waved his fan. Then he came out and said, \"Do you recognize that?\"\n\n\"Of course. This is the 'Eight Arrays'.\"\n\n\"Yes, you seem to know it. But dare you attack?\"\n\n\"Why not, since I know it?\" replied Sima Yi.\n\n\"Then you need only try.\"\n\nSima Yi entered the ranks and called to him three generals \u2014 Dai Ling, Zhang Hu, and Yue Chen \u2014 to whom he said, \"That formation consists of eight gates \u2014 Birth, Exit, Expanse, Wound, Fear, Annihilation, Obstacle, and Death. You will go in from the east at the Gate of Birth, turn to the southwest and make your way out by the Gate of Annihilation. Then enter at the north, at the Exit Gate, and the formation will be broken up. But be cautious.\"\n\nThey started with Zhang Hu leading, Dai Ling next, and Yue Chen in rear, each with thirty horsemen. They made their way in at the Gate of Birth amid the applause of both sides. But when they had got within they found themselves facing a wall of troops and could not find a way out. They hastily led their men round by the base of the line toward the southwest to rush out there. But they were stopped by a flight of arrows. They became confused and saw many gates, but they had lost their bearings. Nor could they aid each other. They dashed hither and thither in disorder, but the formation was as if gathering clouds and rolling mists. Then a shout arose, and each one was seized and bound.\n\nThey were taken to the center, where Zhuge Liang sat in his tent, and the three leaders with their ninety men were ranged in front.\n\n\"Indeed you are prisoners. Are you surprised?\" said Zhuge Liang, smiling. \"But I will set you free to return to your leader, and tell him to read his books again, and study his tactics, before he comes to try conclusions with me. You are pardoned, but leave your weapons and horses here.\"\n\nSo they were stripped of their arms and armors and their faces inked. Thus were they led on foot out of the array. Sima Yi lost his temper at sight of his people thus put to shame.\n\nSaid he, \"After this disgrace, how can I face the other officers in the Middle Land?\"\n\nHe gave the signal for the army to fall on and attack the enemy, and, grasping his sword, led his brave generals into the fray and commanded the attack. But just as the two armies came to blows, Guan Xing came up fromt the southwest, his drums rolling and troops shouting, and attacked. Sima Yi told off a division from the rear to oppose Guan Xing, and again turned to urge on his main body.\n\nThen the army of Wei was thrown into confusion by another attack from Jiang Wei, who came up silently and joined in the battle. Thus three sides of the Wei army were attacked by three different divisions of the enemy, and Sima Yi decided to retire. However, this was difficult. The soldiers of Shu hemmed him in and came closer every moment. At last, by a desperate push, he cut an alley toward the south and freed his army. But he had lost six or seven out of every ten of his soldiers.\n\nThe Wei army withdrew to the south bank of River Wei and camped. They strengthened their position and remained entirely on the defensive.\n\nZhuge Liang mustered his victorious army and returned to Qishan.\n\nNow Li Yan sent an officer, General Gou An, from Baidicheng with a convoy of grain. Gou An was a drunkard and loitered on the road so that he arrived ten days late.\n\nZhuge Liang, angry at the delay, upbraided him, saying, \"This grain is of the utmost importance to the army and you delay it. Three days' delay ought to mean the death penalty. What can you say to this delay of ten?\"\n\nGou An was sentenced to death and hustled out.\n\nBut Yang Yi ventured to intervene, saying, \"Gou An is a servant of Li Yan, and Li Yan has sent large supplies of all sorts from the West River Land. The road is long and difficult. If you put this man to death, perhaps others will not undertake transport duty.\"\n\nZhuge Liang then bade the executioners loose the offender, give him eighty blows, and let him go.\n\nThis punishment filled Gou An's heart with bitter resentment, and, in the night, he deserted to the enemy, he and his half dozen personal staff. He was taken before Sima Yi and told the tale of his wrongs.\n\n\"Your tale may be true, but it is hard to trust it,\" said Sima Yi. \"Zhuge Liang is full of guile. However, you may render me a service, and if you do, I will ask the Ruler of Wei that you may be allowed to serve him and obtain a post for you.\"\n\n\"Whatever you ask, I will do the best I can,\" replied the deserter.\n\n\"Then go to Chengdu and spread a lying report that Zhuge Liang is angry with the powers there and means to make himself emperor. This will get him recalled, and that will be a merit to you.\"\n\nGou An accepted the treacherous mission. In Chengdu he got hold of the eunuchs, and told them his lying tale that the Prime Minister was too proud of his services and was about to use his sweeping powers to usurp the Throne.\n\nThe eunuchs became alarmed for their own safety and told the Emperor all these things.\n\n\"In such a case what am I to do?\" asked the Latter Ruler.\n\n\"Recall him to the capital,\" said the eunuchs, \"and take away his military powers so that he cannot rebel.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler issued an edict recalling the army.\n\nBut Jiang Wan stepped forward and said, \"The Prime Minister has rendered many great services since he led out the army. Wherefore is he recalled?\"\n\n\"I have a private matter to consult him about,\" said the Latter Ruler. \"I must see him personally.\"\n\nSo the edict was issued and sent to Zhuge Liang. The messenger was at once received as soon as he reached Qishan.\n\n\"The Emperor is young, and there is some jealous persons by his side,\" said Zhuge Liang sadly. \"I was just going to achieve some solid success. Why am I recalled? If I go not, I shall insult my Prince. If I retire, I shall never get such a chance again.\"\n\n\"If the army retire, Sima Yi will attack,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\n\"I will retire in five divisions. Thus today this camp goes. Supposing that there are a thousand soldiers in the camp, then I shall have two thousand cooking places prepared, or if there are three thousand soldiers, then four thousand cooking plates shall be got ready, and so on, increasing the cooking arrangements as the troops are sent away.\"\n\nYang Yi said, \"In the days of old, when Sun Bin was attacking Pang Juan, Sun Bin decreased the cooking arrangements as the soldiers were increased. Why do you reverse this, O Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"Because Sima Yi is an able leader and would pursue if he knew we were retreating. But he would recognize the probability of an ambush; and if he sees an increase in the cooking arrangements in a camp, he will be unable to conclude whether the troops have gone or not, and he will not pursue. Thus I shall gradually withdraw without loss.\"\n\nThe order for retreat was given.\n\nConfident of the effect that Gou An's lying report would produce, Sima Yi waited for the retreat of the Shu army to begin. He was still waiting when the scouts told him the enemy's camps were empty. Wishing to make sure, he rode out himself with a small reconnoitering party and inspected the empty camps. Then he bade them count the stoves. Next day he paid a second visit to another empty camp, and again the cooking stoves were counted. The count showed an increase of a half.\n\n\"I felt sure that Zhuge Liang would have more troops ready. He has increased the cooking arrangements, and so, if we pursue, he will be ready for us. No! We also will retire and await another opportunity.\"\n\nSo there was no pursuit, and Zhuge Liang did not lose a soldier on his retreat to Hanzhong.\n\nBy and by, people came in from the River Lands to say that the retreat was a fact, and that only the cooking arrangements had been increased, not the soldiers.\n\nSima Yi knew that he had been tricked, and looking up the sky, he sighed, \"Zhuge Liang imitated the ruse of Sun Bin to rouse my suspicion. His thinking is superior to mine.\"\n\nAnd Sima Yi set out for Changan.\n\n\u2003When players of equal skill are matched,\n\n\u2003Then victory hovers between;\n\n\u2003Perhaps your opponent's a genius,\n\n\u2003So put on your lowliest mien." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "Going Out From Longshang, Zhuge Liang Dresses As A God; Dashing Toward Saber Pass, Zhang He Falls Into A Snare.\n\nBy means of the artifice just described, Zhuge Liang withdrew his army safely into Hanzhong, while Sima Yi retreated upon Changan. Zhuge Liang distributed the rewards for success and then went to Capital Chengdu for audience.\n\n\"Your Majesty recalled me just as I was about to advance upon Changan. What is the important matter?\" said the Prime Minister.\n\nFor a long time the Latter Ruler made no reply.\n\nPresently he said, \"I longed to see your face once more, that is the only reason.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I think my recall was not on your own initiative. Some slanderous persons has hinted that I cherished ulterior objects.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler, who indeed felt guilty and ill at ease, made no reply.\n\nZhuge Liang continued, \"Your late father laid me under an obligation which I am pledged to fulfill to the death. But if vile influences are permitted to work at home, how can I destroy the rebels without?\"\n\n\"The fact is I recalled you because of the talk of the eunuchs. But I understand now and am unutterably sorry,\" said the Latter Ruler.\n\nZhuge Liang interrogated the eunuchs and thus found out the base rumors that had been spread abroad by Gou An. He sent to arrest this man, but Gou An had already fled and gone over to Wei. The eunuchs who had influenced the Emperor were put to death, and all the other eunuchs who were involved were expelled from the Palace.\n\nThe Prime Minister also upbraided Jiang Wan and Fei Yi for not having looked into the matter and set the Son of God right. The two Ministers bowed their heads and admitted their fault.\n\nZhuge Liang then took leave of the Latter Ruler and returned to the army. He wrote to Li Yan to see to the necessary supplies and began preparations for a new expedition.\n\nYang Yi said, \"The soldiers are wearied by the many expeditions, and the supplies are not regular. I think a better plan would be to send half the army to Qishan for three months, and at the end of that time exchange them for the other half, and so on alternately. For example, if you have two hundred thousand troops, let one hundred thousand go into the field and one hundred thousand remain. In this way, using ten legions and ten legions, their energies will be conserved and you can gradually work toward the Middle Land.\"\n\n\"I agree with you,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Our attack is not a matter to be achieved in haste. The suggestion for an extended campaign is excellent!\"\n\nWherefore the army was divided, and each half went out for one hundred days' service at a time, when it was relieved by the other half. Full penalties were provided for any laxity and failure to maintain the periods of active service.\n\nIn the spring of the ninth year of Beginning Prosperity, the Shu army once more took the field against Wei. In Wei it was the fifth year of Calm Peace (AD 231).\n\nWhen the Ruler of Wei heard of this new expedition, he called Sima Yi and asked his advice.\n\n\"Now that my friend Cao Zhen is no more, I am willing to do all that one man can to destroy the rebels against Your Majesty's authority,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nCao Rui was gratified by this ready offer, and honored Sima Yi with a banquet. Next day an edict was issued for the army to move. The Ruler of Wei, riding in his state chariot, escorted Sima Yi out of the city, and, after the farewells, Sima Yi took the road to Changan, where the force was gathering. There was assembled a council of war.\n\nZhang He offered his services, saying, \"I volunteer to guard Yongcheng and Meicheng against the Shu army.\"\n\nBut Sima Yi said, \"Our vanguard army is not strong enough to face the enemy's whole force. Moreover, to divide an army is not generally a successful scheme. The better plan will be to leave a guard in Shanggui and send all the others to Qishan. Will you undertake the Leadership of the Van?\"\n\nZhang He consented, saying, \"I have always been most loyal and will devote my energies entirely to the service of the state. So far I have not had an adequate opportunity to prove my sincerity. But now that you confer upon me a post of such responsibility, I can only say that no sacrifice can be too great for me, and I will do my utmost.\"\n\nSo Zhang He was appointed Van Leader, and then Guo Huai was set over the defense of the counties of West Valley Land. Other generals were distributed to other posts, and the march began toward Qishan.\n\nThe spies reported: \"The main force of Shu is directed toward Qishan, and the Leaders of the Van are Wang Ping and Zhang Ni. The route chosen for their march is from Chencang across San Pass and to the Xie Valley.\"\n\nHearing this, Sima Yi said to Zhang He, \"Zhuge Liang is advancing in great force and certainly intends to reap the wheat in West Valley Land for his supply. You get sufficient troops to hold Qishan, while Guo Huai and I go to Tianshui and foil the enemy's plan to gather the wheat.\"\n\nSo Zhang He took forty thousand troops to hold Qishan, and Sima Yi set out westwards to the West Valley Land.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang reached Qishan and had settled his army in camp, he saw that the bank of River Wei had been fortified by his enemy.\n\n\"That must be the work of Sima Yi,\" remarked Zhuge Liang to his generals. \"But we have not enough food in camp. I have written to Li Yan to send grain, but it has not yet arrived. The wheat in West Valley Land is now just ripe, and we will go and reap it.\"\n\nLeaving Wang Ping, Zhang Ni, Hu Ban, and Wu Yi to guard for the camps, Zhuge Liang, with Wei Yan, Jiang Wei, and several other generals, went over to Lucheng. The Governor of that city knew he could not offer any real defense, so he opened the gates and yielded.\n\nAfter calming the people, Zhuge Liang asked, \"Where is the ripe wheat to be found?\"\n\nThe Governor replied, \"Longshang is the place.\"\n\nSo Zhang Yi and Ma Zheng were left to guard the city, and the remainder of the army went to Longshang.\n\nBut soon the leading body returned to say, \"Sima Yi has already occupied that city.\"\n\n\"He guessed what I intended to do!\" said Zhuge Liang, taken aback.\n\nZhuge Liang then retired, bathed and put on another dress. Next he bade them bring out three four-wheeled chariots, all exactly alike, that were among the impedimenta of the army. They had been built in Shu some time before.\n\nJiang Wei was told off to lead a thousand troops as escort for one chariot, and five hundred drummers were appointed to accompany it. The chariot with its escort and drummers was sent away behind the city. In like manner two other chariots were equipped and sent east and west of the city under Ma Dai and Wei Yan. Each chariot was propelled by a team of twenty-four men, all dressed in black, barefooted and with loosened hair. Each one of the team also had in hand a sword and a black seven-starred flag.\n\nWhile the chariots were taking up their positions, thirty thousand soldiers were ordered to prepare wagons and sickles to cut and carry away the grain.\n\nNext Zhuge Liang selected twenty-four good soldiers, whom he dressed and armed like those sent away with the three chariots. These were to push his own chariot. Guan Xing was told to dress up as the God of Clouds and to walk in front of Zhuge Liang's chariot holding a black seven-starred flag. These preparations complete, Zhuge Liang mounted, and the chariot took the road toward the Wei camp.\n\nThe appearance of a chariot with such attendants more than startled the enemy's scouts, who did not know whether the apparition was that of a human or a demon. They hastened to their commander and told him.\n\nSima Yi came out himself and saw the cavalcade, and its central figure being Zhuge Liang, dressed as a Daoist mystic, with headdress, white robe, and a feather fan. Around the chariot were twenty-four hair-loosened beings, each with a sword in hand; and leading was a being as a heaven-sent god with the seven-starred flag.\n\n\"Some of Zhuge Liang's odd doings,\" said he.\n\nAnd Sima Yi ordered two thousand troops, saying, \"Chase as fast as you can, and bring in the chariot, escort, and the seated figure.\"\n\nThe soldiers went out to do their bidding. But as soon as they appeared, the chariot retired and took a road leading to the Shu camp. Although the Wei soldiers were mounted, they could not come up with the cavalcade. What they did meet with was a chilly breeze and a cold mist that rolled about them.\n\nThey found it uncanny and halted, saying one to another, \"How extraordinary it is that we have been pressing on and yet we got no nearer. What does it mean?\"\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang saw that the pursuit had ceased, he had his chariot pushed out again to the front and passed within sight of the halted troops. At first they hesitated, but presently took up the pursuit once more. Whereupon the chariot again retired, proceeding slowly, but always keeping out of reach. And thus more than seven miles were covered and the chariot was still not captured.\n\nAgain the soldiers halted, puzzled and perplexed at this incomprehensible chase. But as soon as they stopped, the chariot came again toward them and they retook pursuit.\n\nSima Yi now came up with a strong force. But he also halted, and said to his generals, \"This Zhuge Liang is a master in the arts of necromancy and juggling and Eight Gates and knows how to call up the Deities of Six Layers to his aid. I know this trick of his: It is the 'Ground Rolling' in the 'Book of Six Layers Deities', and it is vain to pursue.\"\n\nSo they ceased following. But then a roll of drums came from the left side as if a body of troops were approaching. Sima Yi told off some companies to repel them, but there only came into view a small force, and in their midst was a party of men dressed in black, the exact counterpart of the cavalcade he had first sent to pursue. In the chariot sat another Zhuge Liang just like the one that had just disappeared.\n\n\"But just now he was sitting in that other chariot, which we chased for fifteen miles. How can he be here?\" said Sima Yi.\n\nShortly after they heard another roll of the drums, and as the sound died away there appeared another body of men, with a chariot in the midst, exactly like the last and also carrying a sitting figure of Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"They must be heaven-sent soldiers,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nThe soldiers were now feeling the strain of these weird appearances and began to get out of hand. They dared not stay to fight such beings, and some ran away. But before they had gone far, lo! another roll of drums, another cohort and another chariot with a similar figure seated therein.\n\nThe soldiers of Wei were now thoroughly frightened, and even Sima Yi himself began to feel doubtful whether these appearances should be ascribed to humans or devils. He realized, however, that he was in the midst of dangers as he did not know the number of the Shu soldiers, and he and his troops ran away helter-skelter, never stopping till they reached Shanggui. They entered the city and closed the gates.\n\nHaving thus driven off the Wei soldiers, Zhuge Liang proceeded to reap and gather the wheat in Longshang, which was carried into Lucheng and laid out to dry.\n\nSima Yi remained shut up within the walls for three days. Then, as he saw his enemies retiring, he sent out some scouts, who presently returned with a Shu soldier they had captured. The prisoner was questioned.\n\n\"I was of the reaping party,\" said the man. \"They caught me when I was looking for some horses that had strayed.\"\n\n\"What wonderful soldiers were they of yours that one saw here lately?\" asked Sima Yi.\n\nThe man replied, \"Zhuge Liang was with one party of them, the others were led by Jiang Wei, Ma Dai, and Wei Yan. There was a thousand of fighting soldiers with each chariot and five hundred drummers. Zhuge Liang was with the first party.\"\n\n\"His comings and goings are not human,\" said Sima Yi sadly.\n\nThen Guo Huai came, and he was called to a council.\n\nSaid Guo Huai, \"I hear the soldiers of Shu in Lucheng are very few, and they are occupied with gathering the grain. Why not smite them?\"\n\nSima Yi told him his last experience of his opponent's wiles.\n\n\"He threw dust in your eyes that time,\" said Guo Huai with a smile. \"However, now you know. What is the good of more talk? Let me attack the rear, while you lead against the front, and we shall take the city and Zhuge Liang too.\"\n\nAn attack was decided upon.\n\nIn Lucheng, while the soldiers were still busy with the wheat, Zhuge Liang called up his generals, and said, \"The enemy will attack tonight. There is a suitable place for an ambush in the newly reaped fields, but who will lead for me?\"\n\nFour generals \u2014 Jiang Wei, Wei Yan, Ma Dai, and Ma Zheng \u2014 offered themselves, and he posted them, each with two thousand troops, outside the four corners of the city. They were to await the signal and then converge. When these had gone, Zhuge Liang led out a small party of one hundred soldiers and hid in the newly reaped fields.\n\nIn the meantime Sima Yi was drawing near. It was dusk when he stood beneath the walls of Lucheng.\n\nSaid he to his officers, \"If we attacked by daylight, we should find the city well prepared. So we will take advantage of the darkness. The moat is shallow here, and there shall be no difficulty in crossing it.\"\n\nThe troops bivouacked till the time should come to attack. About the middle of the first watch Guo Huai arrived, and his force joined up with the others. This done, the drums began to beat, and the city was quickly surrounded. However, the defenders maintained such a heavy discharge of arrows, bolts and stones from the walls that the besiegers dared not close in.\n\nSuddenly from the midst of the Wei army came the roar of a bomb, soon followed by others from different places. The soldiers were startled, but no one could say whence the sounds had proceeded. Guo Huai went to search the wheat fields, and then the four armies from the corners of the city converged upon the Wei army. At the same time the defenders burst out of the city gates, and a great battle began. Wei lost many troops.\n\nAfter heavy fighting Sima Yi extricated his army from the battle and made his way to a hill, which he set about holding and fortifying, while Guo Huai got round to the rear of the city and called a halt.\n\nZhuge Liang entered the city and sent his troops to camp again at the four corners of the walls.\n\nGuo Huai went to see his chief, and said, \"We have long been at grips with these soldiers and are unable to drive them off. We have now lost another fight. Unless something is done, we shall not get away at all.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\" asked Sima Yi.\n\n\"You might write to Yongzhou and Liangzhou to send their forces to our help. I will try my fortune against Saber Pass and cut off Zhuge Liang's retreat and supplies. That should bring about discontent and mutiny, and we can attack when we see the enemy in confusion.\"\n\nThe letters were sent, and soon Sun Li came leading the troops of Yongzhou and Liangzhou, foot and horse, of two hundred thousand. The new arrivals were sent to help Guo Huai in the attack on Saber Pass.\n\nAfter many days had passed without sight of the enemy, Zhuge Liang thought it was time to make another move.\n\nCalling up Jiang Wei and Ma Dai, he said, \"The soldiers of Wei are well posted on the hills and refuse battle because, firstly, they think that we are short of food, and, secondly, they have sent an army against Saber Pass to cut off our supplies. Now each of you will take ten thousand troops and garrison the important points about here to show them that we are well prepared to defend ourselves. Then they will retire.\"\n\nAfter these two had gone, Yang Yi came to see Zhuge Liang about the change of troops then due.\n\nYang Yi said, \"O Prime Minister, you have ordered the troops to be alternated every one hundred days. Now the time is due, and the replacing troops have already left Hanzhong and that dispatches from the leading divisions have come in. Here we have eighty thousand troops, of which forty will be due for relief.\"\n\n\"There is the order; carry it out,\" replied Zhuge Liang.\n\nSo the forty thousand home-going soldiers prepared to withdraw.\n\nJust then came the news: \"Sun Li has arrived with reinforcements of two hundred thousand troops from Yongzhou and Liangzhou. Guo Huai and Sun Li have gone to attack Saber Pass, and Sima Yi is leading an army against Lucheng.\"\n\nIn the face of such important news, Yang Yi went to discuss with Zhuge Liang.\n\nSaid Yang Yi, \"The Wei army are advancing against our critical points. Should you, O Prime Minister, postpone for a time the withdrawal of the field troops in order to strengthen our defense? You can wait for the new troops to arrive first.\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"I must keep faith with the soldiers. Since the order for the periodical exchange of troops has been issued, it must be carried out. Beside, the soldiers due for relief are all prepared to start, their expectations have been roused and their relatives await them. In the face of yet greater difficulties I would still let them go.\"\n\nSo orders were given for the time-expired soldiers to march that day. But when the legionaries heard it, a sudden movement of generosity spread among them.\n\nAnd they said, \"Since the Prime Minister cares for us so much, we do not wish to go, but will prefer to remain to fight the Wei army to death.\"\n\n\"But you are due for home. You cannot stay here,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\nThey reiterated that they all wished to stay instead of going home.\n\nZhuge Liang was glad and said, \"Since you wish to stay and fight with me, you can go out of the city and camp ready to encounter the army of Wei as soon as they arrive. Do not give them time to rest or recover breath, but attack vigorously at once. You will be fresh and fit, waiting for those fagged with a long march.\"\n\nSo they gripped their weapons and joyfully went out of the city to array themselves in readiness.\n\nNow the Yongzhou and Liangzhou troops had traveled by double marches, and so were worn out and needed rest. But while they were pitching their tents, the troops of Shu fell upon them lustily, leaders full of spirit, soldiers full of energy. The weary soldiers could make no proper stand, and retired. The troops of Shu followed, pressing on them till corpses littered the whole plain and blood flowed in runnels.\n\nIt was a victory for Zhuge Liang, and he came out to welcome the victors and led them into the city and distributed rewards.\n\nJust then arrived an urgent letter from Li Yan, then at Baidicheng, and when Zhuge Liang had torn it open he read:\n\n\"News has just come that Wu has sent an envoy to Luoyang and entered into an alliance with Wei whereby Wu is to attack us. The army of Wu has not yet set out, but I am anxiously awaiting your plans.\"\n\nDoubts and fears crowded in upon Zhuge Liang's mind as he read. He summoned his officers.\n\n\"As Wu is coming to invade our land, we shall have to retire quickly,\" said he. \"If I issue orders for the Qishan force to withdraw, Sima Yi will not dare to pursue while we are camped here.\"\n\nThe Qishan force broke camp and marched in two divisions under Wang Ping, Zhang Ni, Hu Ban, and Wu Yi. Zhang He watched them go, but was too fearful of the movement being some ruse to attempt to follow. He went to see Sima Yi.\n\n\"The enemy have retired, but I know not for what reason.\"\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is very crafty, and you will do well to remain where you are and keep a careful lookout. Do nothing till their grain has given out, when they must retire for good,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nHere General Wei Ping stepped forward, saying, \"But they are retreating from Qishan. We should seize the occasion of their retreat to smite them. Are they tigers that you fear to move? How the world will laugh at us?\"\n\nBut Sima Yi was obstinate and ignored the protest.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang knew that the Qishan troops had got away safely, he called Yang Yi and Ma Zheng and gave them secret orders to lead ten thousand of bowmen and crossbowmen out by the Wooden Path of Saber Pass and place them in ambush on both sides of the road.\n\nSaid he, \"If the soldiers of Wei pursue, wait till you hear a bomb. When you hear the bomb, at once barricade the road with timber and stones so as to impede them. When they halt, shoot at them with the bows and the crossbows.\"\n\nWei Yan and Guan Xing were told to attack the rear of the enemy.\n\nThese orders given, the walls of Lucheng were decorated lavishly with flags, and at various points within the city were piled straw and kindling wood ready to make some smoke as though there were cooking activities in the city. The soldiers were sent out along the road toward Saber Pass.\n\nThe spies of Wei returned to headquarters to report: \"A large number of Shu soldiers have left, but we do not know how many remain within the city.\"\n\nIn doubt, Sima Yi went himself to look, and when he saw the smoke rising from within the walls and the fluttering flags, he said, \"The city is deserted!\"\n\nHe sent men in to confirm this, and they said the place was empty.\n\n\"Then Zhuge Liang is really gone. Who will pursue?\"\n\n\"Let me,\" replied Zhang He.\n\n\"You are too impulsive,\" said Sima Yi.\n\n\"I have been Leader of the Van from the first day of this expedition. Why not use me today, when there is work to be done and glory to be gained?\"\n\n\"Because the utmost caution is necessary. They are retreating, and they will leave an ambush at every possible point.\"\n\n\"I know that, and you need not be afraid.\"\n\n\"Well; you wish to go and may, but whatever happens you must be prepared for.\"\n\n\"A really noble man is prepared to sacrifice self for country. Never mind what happens.\"\n\n\"Then take five thousand troops and start. Wei Ping shall follow with twenty thousand of horse and foot to deal with any ambush that may discover itself. I will follow later with three thousand to help where need be.\"\n\nSo Zhang He set out and advanced quickly.\n\nTen miles out he heard a roll of drums, and suddenly appeared from a wood a cohort led by Wei Yan, who galloped to the front, crying, \"Whither would you go, O rebel leader?\"\n\nZhang He swiftly turned and engaged Wei Yan, but after some ten passes Wei Yan fled. Zhang He rode after Wei Yan along the road for ten miles and then stopped to observe. As he saw no ambush, he turned again and resumed the pursuit. All went well till he came to a slope, when there arose shouts and yells and another body of soldiers came out.\n\n\"Zhang He, do not run away!\" cried this leader, who was Guan Xing.\n\nGuan Xing galloped close, and Zhang He did not flee. They fought, and after half a score of passes Guan Xing seemed to have the worst of the encounter and fled. Zhang He followed. Presently they neared a dense wood. Zhang He was fearful of entering in, so he sent forward scouts to search the thickets. They could find no danger, and Zhang He again pursued.\n\nBut quite unexpectedly Wei Yan, who had formerly fled, got round ahead of Zhang He and now appeared again. The two fought a half score bouts and again Wei Yan ran. Zhang He followed, but Guan Xing also got round to the front by a side road and so stopped the pursuit of Zhang He. Zhang He attacked furiously as soon as he was checked, this time so successfully that the troops of Shu threw away their war-gear and ran. The road was thus littered with spoil, and the Wei soldiers could not resist the temptation to gather it. They slipped from their horses and began to collect the arms.\n\nThe maneuvers just described continued, Wei Yan and Guan Xing one after the other engaging Zhang He, and Zhang He pressing on after each one, but achieving nothing. And as evening fell the running fight had led both sides close to the Wooden Path.\n\nThen suddenly Wei Yan made a real stand, and he rode to the front, yelling, \"Rebel! I have despised fighting you, but you have kept pursuing me. Now we will fight to the death!\"\n\nZhang He was furious and nothing loath, so he came on with his spear to meet Wei Yan, who was flourishing his sword. They met; yet again, after some ten bouts, Wei Yan threw aside weapons, armor, helmet and all his gear, and led his defeated company sway along the Wooden Path.\n\nZhang He was filled with the lust to kill, and he could not let Wei Yan escape. So he set out after Wei Yan, although it was already dark. But suddenly lights appeared, and the sky became aglow, and at the same time huge boulders and great bulks of timber came rolling down the slopes and blocked the way.\n\nFear gripped Zhang He, and he cried, \"I have blundered into an ambush!\"\n\nThe road was blocked in front and behind and bordered by craggy precipices. Then, rat-tat-tat! came the sound of a rattle, and therewith flew clouds of arrows and showers of bolts. Zhang He, his more than one hundred generals, and his whole pursuing army perished in the Wooden Path.\n\n\u2003With myriad shining bolts the air was filled,\n\n\u2003The road was littered with brave soldiers killed;\n\n\u2003The force to Saber Pass faring perished here;\n\n\u2003The tale of valor grows from year to year.\n\nSoon the second army of Wei under Wei Ping came up, but too late to help. From the signs they knew that their comrades had been victims of a cruel trick, and they turned back.\n\nBut as they faced about, a shout was heard, and from the hilltops came, \"I, Zhuge Liang, am here!\"\n\nLooking up they saw his figure silhouetted against a fire.\n\nPointing to the slain, Zhuge Liang cried, \"I have gone hunting in this wood. Only instead of slaying a horse, I have killed a deer. But you may go in peace, and when you see your commander, tell him that he will be my quarry one day!\"\n\nThe soldiers told this to Sima Yi when they returned.\n\nSima Yi was deeply mortified, saying, \"Letting friend Zhang He die is my fault!\"\n\nAnd when he returned to Luoyang, the Ruler of Wei wept at the death of his brave leader and had his body searched and honorably buried.\n\nZhuge Liang had no sooner reached Hanzhong than he prepared to go on to Capital Chengdu and see his lord.\n\nBut Li Yan, who was in the capital, said to the Latter Ruler, \"Why does the Prime Minister return, for I have kept him fully supplied with all things needed for the army?\"\n\nThen the Latter Ruler sent Fei Yi into Hanzhong to inquire why the army had retired.\n\nWhen Fei Yi had arrived and showed the cause of his coming, Zhuge Liang was greatly surprised.\n\nZhuge Liang showed the letter from Li Yan, saying, \"Li Yan wrote to warn that East Wu was about to invade the country.\"\n\nFei Yi said, \"Li Yan memorialized to the Throne, saying he had sent you supplies and knew not why Your Excellency returned.\"\n\nSo Zhuge Liang inquired carefully, and then it came out that Li Yan had failed to find sufficient grain to keep the army supplied, and so had sent the first lying letter to the army that it might retire before the shortage showed itself. His memorial to the Throne was designed to cover the former fault.\n\n\"The fool has ruined the great design of the state just to save his own skin!\" cried Zhuge Liang bitterly.\n\nHe summoned the offender and sentenced him to death.\n\nBut Fei Yi interceded, saying, \"O Prime Minister, the First Ruler had loved and trusted Li Yan with his son. Please forgive him this time.\"\n\nAnd so Li Yan's life was spared.\n\nHowever, when Fei Yi made his report in Chengdu, the Latter Ruler was wroth and ordered Li Yan to suffer death.\n\nBut this time Jiang Wan intervened, saying, \"Your late father named Li Yan as one of the guardians of your youth.\"\n\nAnd the Latter Ruler relented. However, Li Yan was stripped of all ranks and relegated to Zitong.\n\nZhuge Liang went to Chengdu and appointed Li Teng, Li Yan's son, as High Counselor.\n\nPreparations then began for another expedition. Plans were discussed, provisions were accumulated, weapons put in order, and officers and soldiers kept fit and trained. By his kindness to the people, Zhuge Liang waited for three years before beginning marching, and in the two River Lands people's hearts filled with joys.\n\nAnd the time passed quickly.\n\nIn the second month of the twelfth year (AD 234), Zhuge Liang presented a memorial, saying, \"I have been training the army for three years. Supplies are ample, and all is in order for an expedition. We may now attack Wei. If I cannot destroy these rebels, sweep away the evil hordes, and bring about a glorious entry into the capital, then may I never again enter Your Majesty's presence.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler replied, \"The empire has settled on a tripod, and Wu and Wei trouble us not at all. Why not enjoy the present tranquillity, O Father Minister?\"\n\n\"Because of the mission left me by your father. I am ever scheming to destroy Wei, even in my dreams. I must strive my best and do my utmost to regain you the Middle Land and restore the glory of the Hans.\"\n\nAs Zhuge Liang said this, a voice cried, \"An army may not go forth, O Prime Minister!\"\n\nQiao Zhou had raised a last protest.\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang's sole thought was service,\n\n\u2003Himself he would not spare;\n\n\u2003But Qiao Zhou had watched the starry sky,\n\n\u2003And read misfortune there." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 102", + "text": "Sima Yi Occupies The Banks Of River Wei; Zhuge Liang Constructs Mechanical Bullocks And Horses.\n\nQiao Zhou, who protested against the war, was Grand Historian. He was also an astrologer.\n\nHe opposed the war, saying, \"My present office involves the direction of the observations on the Astrological Terrace, and I am bound to report whether the aspect forebodes misfortune or promises happiness. Not long since, several flights of thousands of birds came from the south, plunged into River Han and were drowned. This is an evil augury. Moreover, I have studied the aspect of the sky, and the 'Wolf' constellation is influencing the aspect of the planet Venus. An aura of prosperity pervades the north. To attack Wei will not be to our profit. Again, the people in Chengdu say that the cypress trees moan in the night. With so many evil omens, I wish that the Prime Minister should not go forth to war, but remain at home to guard what we have.\"\n\n\"How can I?\" said Zhuge Liang. \"His Late Majesty laid upon me a heavy responsibility, and I must exert myself to the utmost in the endeavor to destroy these rebels. The policy of a state cannot be changed because of inauspicious signs.\"\n\nZhuge Liang was not to be deterred. He instructed the officials to prepare the Great Bovine Sacrifice in the Dynastic Temple. Then, weeping, he prostrated himself and made this declaration:\n\n\"Thy servant Zhuge Liang has made five expeditions to Qishan without gaining any extension of territory. His fault weighs heavily upon him. Now once again he is about to march, pledged to use every effort of body and mind to exterminate the rebels against the Han House, and to restore to the dynasty its glory in the Middle Land. To achieve this end, he would use the last remnant of his strength and could die content.\"\n\nThe sacrifice ended, he took leave of the Latter Ruler and set out for Hanzhong to make the final arrangements for his march. While so engaged, he received the unexpected news of the death of Guan Xing. He was greatly shocked, and fainted. When he had recovered consciousness, his officers did their utmost to console him.\n\n\"How pitiful! Why does Heaven deny long life to the loyal and good? I have lost a most able general just as I am setting out and need him most.\"\n\n\u2003As all are born, so all must die;\n\n\u2003People are as gnats against the sky;\n\n\u2003But loyalty or piety\n\n\u2003May give them immortality.\n\nThe armies of Shu numbered three hundred forty thousand strong, and they marched in five divisions, with Jiang Wei and Wei Yan in the van, and when they had reached Qishan, Li Hui, the Commissary General, was instructed to convey stores into the Xie Valley in readiness.\n\nIn Wei they had recently changed the style of the year period to \"Green Dragon\", because a green dragon had been seen to emerge from Mopo Well. The year of the fighting was the second year (AD 234).\n\nThe courtiers said to the Ruler of Wei, \"The commanders of the passes report thirty or so legions advancing in five divisions from Shu upon Qishan.\"\n\nThe news distressed the Ruler of Wei, who at once called in Sima Yi and told him of the invasion.\n\nSima Yi replied, \"The aspect of the sky is very auspicious for the Middle Land. The Wolf star has encroached upon the planet Venus, which bodes ill for the River Lands. Thus Zhuge Liang is pitting his powers against Heaven, and will meet defeat and suffer death. And I, by virtue of Your Majesty's good fortune, am to be the instrument of destruction. I request to name four leaders to go with me.\"\n\n\"Who are they? Name them,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\n\"They are the four sons of Xiahou Yuan: Xiahou Ba, Xiahou Wei, Xiahou Hui, and Xiahou He. Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Wei are trained archers and cavaliers; Xiahou Hui and Xiahou He are deep strategists. All four desire to avenge the death of their father. Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Wei should be Leaders of the Van; Xiahou Hui and Xiahou He should be Marching Generals, to discuss and arrange plans for the repulse of our enemy.\"\n\n\"You remember the evil results of employing the Dynastic Son-in-Law Xiahou Mao: He lost his army and is still too ashamed to return to court. Are you sure these are not of the same kidney?\"\n\n\"They are not like Xiahou Mao in the least.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei granted the request and named Sima Yi as Commander-in-Chief with the fullest authority. When Sima Yi took leave of the Ruler of Wei, he received a command in Cao Rui's own writing:\n\n\"When you, Noble Sir, reach the banks of River Wei and have well fortified that position, you are not to give battle. The army of Shu, disappointed of their desire, will pretend to retire and so entice you on, but you will not pursue. You will wait till their supplies are consumed and they are compelled to retreat, when you may smite them. Then you will obtain the victory without distressing the army unduly. This is the best plan of campaign.\"\n\nSima Yi took it with bowed head. He proceeded forthwith to Changan. When he had mustered the forces assembled from all western counties, they numbered four hundred thousand, and they were all camped on River Wei. In addition, fifty thousand troops were farther up the stream preparing nine floating bridges. The two Leaders of the Van, Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Wei, were ordered to cross the river and camp, and in rear of the main camp on the east a solid earth rampart was raised to guard against any surprises from the rear.\n\nWhile these preparations were in progress, Guo Huai and Sun Li came to the new camp.\n\nGuo Huai said, \"With the troops of Shu at Qishan, there is a possibility of their dominating River Wei, going up on the plain, and pushing out a line to the northern hills whereby to cut off all highways in the West Valley Land.\"\n\n\"You say well,\" said Sima Yi. \"See to it. Take command of all the West Valley Land forces, occupy Beiyuan, and make a fortified camp there. But adopt a defensive policy. Wait till the enemy's food supplies get exhausted before you think of attack.\"\n\nSo Guo Huai and Sun Li left to carry out these orders.\n\nMeanwhile Zhuge Liang made five main camps at Qishan, and between Xie Valley and Saber Pass he established a line of fourteen large camps. He distributed the troops among these camps as for a long campaign. He appointed inspecting officers to make daily visits to see that all was in readiness.\n\nWhen he heard that the army of Wei had camped in Beiyuan, he said to his officers, \"They camp there fearing that our holding this area will sever connection with West Valley Land. I am pretending to look toward Beiyuan, but really my objective is River Wei. I am going to build a hundred or more large rafts and pile them with straw, and I have five thousand of marines to manage them. In the darkness of the night I shall attack Beiyuan. Sima Yi will come to the rescue. If he is only a little worsted, I shall cross the river with the rear divisions, then the leading divisions will embark on the rafts, drop down the river, set fire to the floating bridges, and attack the rear of the enemy. I shall lead an army to take the gates of the first camp. If we can get the south bank of the river, the campaign will become simple.\"\n\nThen the generals took orders and went to prepare.\n\nThe spies carried information of the doings of the troops of Shu to Sima Yi, who said to his generals, \"Zhuge Liang has some crafty scheme, but I think I know it. He proposes to make a show of taking Beiyuan, and then, dropping down the river, he will try to burn our bridges, throw our rear into confusion, and then attack our camps.\"\n\nSo he gave Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Wei orders: \"You are to listen for the sounds of battle about Beiyuan. If you hear the shouting, you are to march down to the river, to the hills on the south, and lay an ambush against the troops of Shu as they arrive.\"\n\nZhang Hu and Yue Chen were to lead two other forces, of two thousand of bowmen each, and lie in hiding on the north bank near the bridges to keep off the rafts that might come down on the current and keep them from touching the bridges.\n\nThen he sent for Guo Huai and Sun Li, and said, \"Zhuge Liang is coming to Beiyuan to cross the river secretly. Your new force is small, and you can hide half way along the road. If the enemy cross the river in the afternoon, that will mean an attack on us in the evening. Then you are to simulate defeat and run. They will pursue. You can shoot with all your energy, and our marines and land troops will attack at once. If the attack is in great force, look out for orders.\"\n\nAll these orders given, Sima Yi sent his two sons Sima Shi and Sima Zhao to reinforce the front camp, while he led his own army to relieve Beiyuan.\n\nZhuge Liang sent Wei Yan and Ma Dai to cross River Wei and attack Beiyuan, while the attempt to set fire to the bridges was confided to Hu Ban and Wu Yi. The general attack on the Wei camp by River Wei was to be made by three divisions: The front division under Wang Ping and Zhang Ni, the middle division under Jiang Wei and Ma Zheng, the rear division under Liao Hua and Zhang Yi. The various divisions started at noon and crossed the river, where they slowly formed up in battle order.\n\nWei Yan and Ma Dai arrived Beiyuan about dusk. The scouts having informed the defenders of their approach, Sun Li abandoned his camp and fled. This told Wei Yan that his attack was expected, and he turned to retire. At this moment a great shouting was heard, and there appeared two bodies of the enemy under Sima Yi and Guo Huai bearing down upon the attackers from left and right. Wei Yan and Ma Dai fought desperately to extricate themselves, but many of the soldiers of Shu fell into the river and drowned. The others scattered. However, Wu Yi came up and rescued the force from entire destruction, and moved across the river to make camp.\n\nHu Ban set half his troops to navigate the rafts down the river to the bridges. But Zhang Hu and Yue Chen stationed near the bridges shot clouds of arrows at them, and the Shu leader, Hu Ban, was wounded. He fell into the river and was drowned. The crews of the rafts jumped into the water and got away. The rafts fell into the hands of the soldiers of Wei.\n\nAt this time the front division under Wang Ping and Zhang Ni were ignorant of the defeat of their Beiyuan army, and they went straight for the camps of Wei. They arrived in the second watch.\n\nThey heard loud shouting, and Wang Ping said to Zhang Ni, \"We do not know whether the cavalry sent to Beiyuan has been successful or not. It is strange that we do not see a single soldier of the enemy. Surely Sima Yi has found out the plan and prepared to frustrate the attack. Let us wait here till the bridges have been set on fire and we see the flames.\"\n\nSo they halted. Soon after, a mounted messenger came up with orders: \"The Prime Minister bade you retire immediately, as the attack on the bridges has failed.\"\n\nWang Ping and Zhang Ni attempted to withdraw, but a bomb exploded and the troops of Wei, who had taken a by-road to their rear, at once attacked. A great fire started also. A disorderly battle ensued, from which Wang Ping and Zhang Ni eventually forced their ways out, but only with great loss.\n\nAnd when Zhuge Liang collected his army at Qishan once more he found, to his sorrow, that he had lost more than ten thousand troops.\n\nJust at this time Fei Yi arrived front Chengdu.\n\nZhuge Liang received him and, after the ceremonies were over, said, \"I would trouble you, Sir, to carry a letter for me into East Wu. Will you undertake the mission?\"\n\n\"Could I possibly decline any task you laid upon me?\" said Fei Yi.\n\nSo Zhuge Liang wrote a letter and sent it to Sun Quan. Fei Yi took it and hastened to Capital Jianye, where he saw Sun Quan, the Ruler of Wu, and presented this letter:\n\n\"The Hans have been unfortunate, and the line of rulers has been broken. The Cao party have usurped the seat of government and still hold the command. My late master, Emperor Bei, confided a great task to me, and I must exhaust every effort to achieve it. Now my army is at Qishan, and the rebels are on the verge of destruction on River Wei. I hope Your Majesty, in accordance with your oath of alliance, will send a leader against the north to assist by taking the Middle Land, and the empire can be shared. The full circumstances cannot be told, but I hope you will understand and act.\"\n\nSun Quan was pleased at the news and said to the envoy, \"I have long desired to set my arm in motion, but have not been able to arrange with Zhuge Liang. After this letter I will lead an expedition myself, and go to Juchao and capture Xincheng of Wei. Moreover, I will send Lu Xun and Zhuge Jin to camp at Miankou and Jiangxia, and take Xiangyang. I will also send another army under Sun Shao and Zhang Cheng into Guangling to capture Huaiyang. The total number will be three hundred thousand troops, and they shall start at once.\"\n\nFei Yi thanked him and said, \"In such a case the Middle Land will fall forthwith.\"\n\nA banquet was prepared. At this, Sun Quan said, \"Whom did the Prime Minister send to lead the battle?\"\n\nFei Yi replied, \"Wei Yan was the chief leader.\"\n\n\"A man brave enough, but ambitious. One day he will work a mischief unless Zhuge Liang is present. But surely Zhuge Liang knows.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty's words are to the point,\" said the envoy. \"I will return at once and lay them before Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nFei Yi quickly took leave and hastened to Qishan with his news of the intended expedition of Wu against Wei with three hundred thousand troops in three directions.\n\n\"Did the Ruler of Wu say nothing else?\" asked Zhuge Liang.\n\nThen Fei Yi told him what had been said about Wei Yan.\n\n\"Truly a comprehending ruler,\" said Zhuge Liang, appreciatively. \"But I could not be ignorant of this. However, I value Wei Yan because he is very bold and devoted.\"\n\n\"Then Sir, you ought to decide soon what to do with him.\"\n\n\"I have a scheme of my own.\"\n\nFei Yi returned to Chengdu, and Zhuge Liang resumed the ordinary camp duties of a leader.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang was in a council with his commanders, suddenly a certain Wei leader came and begged to be allowed to surrender. Zhuge Liang had the man brought in and questioned him.\n\n\"I am a leader, Zheng Wen by name. General Qin Lang and I are old colleagues. Recently Sima Yi transferred us and, showing great partiality for my colleague, appointed him Leader of the Van and threw me out like a weed. I was disgusted and left, and I wish to join your ranks if you will accept my service.\"\n\nJust at that moment a soldier came in to say that Qin Lang with a company had appeared in front of the tents and was challenging Zheng Wen.\n\nSaid Zhuge Liang, \"How does this man stand with you in fighting skill?\"\n\n\"I should just kill him,\" said Zheng Wen.\n\n\"If you were to slay him, that would remove my doubts.\"\n\nZheng Wen accepted the proposer with alacrity, mounted his horse, and away he went. Zhuge Liang went out to see the fight. There was the challenger shaking his spear and reviling his late friend as rebel and brigand and horse-thief.\n\n\"Traitor! Give me back my horse you stole!\" cried Qin Lang, galloping toward Zheng Wen as soon as he appeared.\n\nZheng Wen whipped up his horse, waved his sword, and went to meet the attack. In the first bout he cut down Qin Lang. The Wei soldiers then ran away. The victor hacked off the head of his victim and returned to lay it at Zhuge Liang's feet.\n\nSeated in his tent, Zhuge Liang summoned Zheng Wen and burst out: \"Take him away and behead him!\"\n\n\"I have done nothing wrong!\" cried Zheng Wen.\n\n\"As if I do not know Qin Lang! The man you have just killed was not Qin Lang. How dare? you try to deceive me?\"\n\nZheng Wen said, \"I will own up. But this was his brother Qin Ming.\"\n\nZhuge Liang smiled.\n\n\"Sima Yi sent you to try this on for some reason of his own, but he could not throw dust in my eyes. If you do not tell the truth, I will put you to death.\"\n\nThus caught, the false deserter confessed and begged his life.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"You can save your life by writing a letter to Sima Yi telling him to come to raid our camp. I will spare you on this condition. And if I capture Sima Yi, I will give you all the credit and reward you handsomely.\"\n\nThere was nothing for it but to agree, and the letter was written. Then Zheng Wen was placed in confinement.\n\nBut Fan Jian asked, \"How did you know this was only a pretended desertion?\"\n\n\"Sima Yi looks to his people,\" replied Zhuge Liang. \"If he made Qin Lang a leading general, Qin Lang was certainly a man of great military skill and not the sort of man to be overcome by this fellow Zheng Wen in the first encounter. So Zheng Wen's opponent certainly was not Qin Lang. That is how I knew.\"\n\nThey congratulated him on his perspicacity. Then Zhuge Liang selected a certain persuasive speaker from among his officers and whispered certain instructions in his ear. The officer at once left and carried the letter just written to the Wei camp, where he asked to see the Commander-in-Chief. He was admitted, and the letter was read.\n\n\"Who are you?\" said Sima Yi.\n\n\"I am a man from the Middle Land, a poor fellow stranded in Shu. Zheng Wen and I are fellow villagers. Zhuge Liang has given Zheng Wen a Van Leadership as a reward for what he has done, and Zheng Wen got me to bring this letter to you and to say that he will show a light tomorrow evening as a signal, and he hopes you will lead the attack yourself. Zheng Wen will work from the inside in your favor.\"\n\nSima Yi took great pains to test the reliability of these statements, and he examined the letter minutely to see if it bore any signs of fabrication, but he found it was Zheng Wen's writing.\n\nPresently he ordered in refreshments for the bearer of the letter, and then he said, \"We will fix today at the second watch for the raid, and I will lead in person. If it succeeds, I will give you a good appointment as a reward.\"\n\nTaking leave, the soldier retraced his steps to his own camp and reported the whole interview to Zhuge Liang.\n\nZhuge Liang held his sword aloft toward the North Star, took the proper paces for an incantation, and prayed.\n\nThis done, he summoned Wang Ping, Zhang Ni, Wei Yan, Ma Dai, Ma Zheng, and Jiang Wei, to whom he gave certain instructions. When they had gone to carry them out, he ascended a hill, taking with him a few score guards only.\n\nSima Yi had been taken in by Zheng Wen's letter and intended to lead the night raid. But the elder of his sons, Sima Shi, expostulated with his father.\n\n\"Father, you are going on a dangerous expedition on the faith of a mere scrap of paper,\" said his son. \"I think it imprudent. What if something goes unexpectedly wrong? Let some general go in your place, and you come up in rear as a reserve.\"\n\nSima Yi saw there was reason in this proposal, and he finally decided to send Qin Lang, with ten thousand troops, and Sima Yi himself would command the reserve.\n\nThe night was fine with a bright moon. But about the middle of the second watch the sky clouded over, and it became very black, so that a man could not see his next neighbor.\n\n\"This is providential,\" chuckled Sima Yi.\n\nThe expedition duly started, soldiers with gags, and horses with cords round their muzzles. They moved swiftly and silently, and Qin Lang made straight for the camp of Shu.\n\nBut when he reached it and entered, and saw not a soldier, he knew he had been tricked. He yelled to his troops to retire, but lights sprang up all round, and attacks began from four sides. Fight as he would, Qin Lang could not free himself.\n\nFrom behind the battle area Sima Yi saw flames rising from the camp of Shu and heard continuous shouting, but he knew not whether it meant victory for his own army or to his enemy. He pressed forward toward the fire. Suddenly, a shout, a roll of drums, and a blare of trumpets close at hand, a bomb that seemed to rend the earth, and Wei Yan and Jiang Wei bore down upon Sima Yi, one on each flank. This was the final blow to him. Of every ten soldiers of Wei, eight or nine were killed or wounded, and the few others scattered to the four winds.\n\nMeanwhile Qin Lang's ten thousand troops were falling under arrows that came in locust-flights, and their leader was killed. Sima Yi and the remnant of his army ran away to their own camp.\n\nAfter the third watch the sky cleared. Zhuge Liang from the hill-top sounded the gong of retreat. This obscurity in the third watch was due to an incantation called Concealing Method. The sky became clear, because Zhuge Liang performed another incantation to have the Deities of Six Layers sweep away the few floating clouds that still persisted.\n\nThe victory was complete. The first order on Zhuge Liang's return to camp was to put Zheng Wen to death.\n\nNext he considered new plans for capturing the south bank. Every day be sent a party to offer a challenge before the camps of the enemy, but no one accepted.\n\nOne day Zhuge Liang rode in his small chariot to the front of the Qishan Mountains, keenly scanned the course of River Wei and carefully surveyed the lie of the land. Presently he came to a valley shaped like a bottle-gourd, large enough to form a hiding place for a whole thousand soldiers in the inner recess, while half as many more could hide in the outer. In rear the mountains were so close that they left passage only for a single horseman. The discovery pleased the general mightily, and he asked the guides what the place was called.\n\nThey replied, \"It is called Shangfang Valley, and nicknamed Gourd Valley.\"\n\nReturning to his camp, he called up two leaders named Du Rui and Hu Zhong and whispered into their ears certain secret orders. Next he called up a thousand craftspeople and sent them into the Gourd Valley to construct \"wooden oxen and running horses\" for the use of the troops. Finally he set Ma Dai with five hundred troops to guard the mouth of the Gourd Valley and prevent all entrance and exit.\n\nZhuge Liang said, \"People from outside cannot enter, from inside cannot exit. I will visit the valley at irregular intervals to inspect the work. A plan for the defeat of Sima Yi is being prepared here and must be kept a profound secret.\"\n\nMa Dai left to take up the position. The two generals, Du Rui and Hu Zhong, were superintendents of the work in the Gourd Valley. Zhuge Liang came every day to give instructions.\n\nOne day Yang Yi went to Zhuge Liang and said, \"The stores of grain are all at Saber Pass, and the labor of transport is very heavy. What can be done?\"\n\nZhuge Liang replied, smiling, \"I have had a scheme ready for a long time. The timber that I collected and bought in the River Lands was for the construction of wooden transport animals to convey grain. It will be very advantageous, as they will require neither food nor water and they can keep on the move day and night without resting.\"\n\nAll those within hearing said, \"From old days till now no one has ever heard of such a device. What excellent plan have you, O Prime Minister, to make such marvelous creatures?\"\n\n\"They are being made now after my plans, but they are not yet ready. Here I have the sketches for these mechanical oxen and horses, with all their dimensions written out in full. You may see the details.\"\n\nZhuge Liang then produced a paper, and all the generals crowded round to look at it. They were all greatly astonished and lauded, \"The Prime Minister is superhuman!\"\n\nA few days later the new mechanical animals were complete and began work. They were quite life-like and went over the hills in any desired direction. The whole army saw them with delight. They were but in charge of Right General Gao Xiang and a thousand soldiers to guide them. They kept going constantly between Saber Pass and the front carrying grain for the use of the soldiers.\n\n\u2003Along the Saber Pass mountain roads\n\n\u2003The running horses bore their loads,\n\n\u2003And through Xie Valley's narrow way\n\n\u2003The wooden oxen paced each day.\n\n\u2003O generals, use these means today,\n\n\u2003And transport troubles take away.\n\nSima Yi was already sad enough at his defeat, when the spies told him of these wooden bullocks and horses of new design which the soldiers of Shu were using to convey their grain.\n\nThis troubled him still more, and he said to his generals, \"I knew the transportation from the River Lands was difficult; therefore, I shut the gates and remained on the defensive waiting for the enemy to be starved. With this device, they may never be compelled to retreat for want of food.\"\n\nThen he called up Zhang Hu and Yue Chen and gave orders: \"Each of you with five hundred troops will goes to the Xie Valley by by-roads. When you see the Shu soldiers transport their grain by, you are to let them through, but only to attack at the end and capture four or five of the wooden horses and bullocks.\"\n\nSo a thousand soldiers went on this service disguised as soldiers of Shu. They made their way along the by-ways by night and hid. Presently the wooden convoy came along under the escort of Gao Xiang. Just as the end of it was passing, they made a sudden rush, and captured a few of the \"animals\" which the soldiers of Shu abandoned. In high glee they took them to their own camp.\n\nWhen Sima Yi saw them, he had to confess they were very life-like. But what pleased him most was that he could imitate them now that he had models.\n\n\"If Zhuge Liang can use this sort of thing, it would be strange if I could not,\" said he.\n\nHe called to him many clever craftspeople and made them then and there take the machines to pieces and make some exactly like them. In less than half a month, they had completed a couple of thousand after Zhuge Liang's models, and the new mechanical animals could move. Then Sima Yi placed Cen Wei, General Who Guards the Frontiers, in charge of this new means of transport, and the \"animals\" began to ply between the camp and the West Valley Land. The Wei soldiers were filled with joys.\n\nGao Xiang returned to camp and reported the loss of a few of his wooden oxen and horses.\n\n\"I wished him to capture some of them,\" said Zhuge Liang, much pleased. \"I am just laying out these few, and before long I shall get some very solid help in exchange.\"\n\n\"How do you know, O Prime Minister?\" said his officers.\n\n\"Because Sima Yi will certainly copy them; and when he has done that, I have another plan ready to play on him.\"\n\nSome days later Zhuge Liang received a report that the enemy were using the same sort of wooden bullocks and horses to bring up supplies from Xizhou.\n\n\"Exactly as I thought,\" said he.\n\nCalling Wang Ping, he said, \"Dress up a thousand soldiers as those of Wei, and find your way quickly and secretly to Beiyuan. Tell them that you are escort for the convoy, and mingle with the real escort. Then suddenly turn on them so that they scatter. Next you will turn the herd this way. By and by you will be pursued. When that occurs, you will give a turn to the tongues of the wooden animals, and they will be locked from movement. Leave them where they are and run away. When the soldiers of Wei come up, they will be unable to drag the creatures and equally unable to carry them. I shall have soldiers ready, and you will go back with them, give the tongues a backward turn and bring the convoy here, The enemy will be greatly astonished.\"\n\nNext he called Zhang Ni and said, \"Dress up five hundred soldiers in the costume of the Deities of the Six Layers so that they appear supernatural. Fit them with demon heads and wild beast shapes, and let them stain their faces various colors so as to look as strange as possible. Give them flags and swords and bottle-gourds with smoke issuing from combustibles inside. Let these soldiers hide among the hills till the convoy approaches, when they will start the smoke, rush out suddenly and drive off the wooden animals. No one will dare pursue such uncanny company.\"\n\nWhen Zhang Ni had left, Wei Yan and Jiang Wei were called.\n\n\"You will take ten thousand troops, go to the border of Beiyuan to receive the wooden transport creatures and defend them against attack.\"\n\nThen another five thousand under Zhang Yi and Liao Hua was sent to check Sima Yi if he should come, while a small force under Ma Dai and Ma Zheng was sent to bid defiance to the enemy near their camp on the south bank.\n\nSo one day when a convoy was on its way from the West Valley Land, the scouts in front suddenly reported some soldiers ahead who said they were escort for the grain. Commander Cen Wei halted and sent to inquire. It appeared the newcomers were really the soldiers of Wei, however, and so he started once more.\n\nThe newcomers joined up with his own troops. But before they had gone much farther, there was a yell, and the men of Shu began to kill, while a voice shouted, \"Wang Ping is here!\"\n\nThe convoy guard were taken aback. Many were killed, but the others rallied round Cen Wei and made some defense. However, Wang Ping slew Cen Wei, and the others ran this way and that, while the convoy was turned toward the Shu camp.\n\nThe fugitives ran off to Beiyuan and reported the mishap to Guo Huai, who set out hot foot to rescue the convoy. When he appeared, Wang Ping gave the order to turn tongues, left the wooden animals in the road, and ran away. Guo Huai made no attempt to pursue, but tried to put the wooden animals in motion toward their proper destination. But he could not move them.\n\nHe was greatly perplexed. Then suddenly there arose the roll of drums all round, and out burst two parties of soldiers. These were Wei Yan and Jiang Wei's troops, and when they appeared Wang Ping's soldiers faced about and came to the attack as well. These three being too much for Guo Huai; he retreated before them. Thereupon the tongues were turned back again and the wooden herd set in motion.\n\nSeeing this, Guo Huai came on again. But just then he saw smoke curling up among the hills and a lot of extraordinary creatures burst out upon him. Some held swords and some flags, and all were terrible to look at. They rushed at the wooden animals and urged them away.\n\n\"Truly these are supernatural helpers,\" cried Guo Huai, quite frightened.\n\nThe soldiers also were terror-stricken and stood still.\n\nHearing that his Beiyuan troops had been driven off, Sima Yi came out to the rescue. Midway along the road, just where it was most precipitous, a cohort burst out upon him with fierce yells and bursting bombs. Upon the leading banners he read Han General Zhang Yi and Han General Liao Hua.\n\nPanic seized upon his army, and they ran like winds.\n\n\u2003In the field the craftier leader on the convoy makes a raid,\n\n\u2003And his rival's life endangers by an ambush subtly laid." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "In Gourd Valley, Sima Yi Is Trapped; In Wuzhang Hills, Zhuge Liang Invokes The Stars.\n\nHeavily smitten in the battle, Sima Yi fled from the field a lonely horseman. Seeing a thick wood in the distance, he made for its shelter.\n\nZhang Yi halted the rear division while Liao Hua pressed forward after the fugitive, whom he could see threading his way among the trees. And Sima Yi indeed was soon in fear of his life, dodging from tree to tree as his pursuer neared. Once Liao Hua was actually close enough to slash at his enemy, but Liao Hua missed the blow and his sword struck a tree; and before he could pull his sword out of the wood, Sima Yi had got clear away. When Liao Hua got through into the open country, he did not know which way to go. Presently he noticed a golden helmet lying on the ground to the east, just lately thrown aside. He picked it up, hung it on his saddle, and went away eastward.\n\nBut the crafty fugitive, having flung away his helmet thus on the east side of the wood, had gone away west, so that Liao Hua was going away from his quarry. After some time Liao Hua fell in with Jiang Wei, when he abandoned the pursuit and rode with Jiang Wei back to camp.\n\nThe wooden oxen and running horses having been driven into camp, their loads were put into the storehouse. The grain that fell to the victors amounted to ten thousand carts or more.\n\nLiao Hua presented the enemy's helmet as proof of his prowess in the field, and received a reward of the first grade of merit. Wei Yan went away angry and discontented; Zhuge Liang noticed this, but he said nothing.\n\nVery sadly Sima Yi returned to his own camp. Bad news followed, for a messenger brought letters telling of an invasion by three armies of Wu. The letters said that forces had been sent against them, and the Ruler of Wei again enjoined upon his Commander-in-Chief a waiting and defensive policy. So Sima Yi deepened his moats and raised his ramparts.\n\nMeanwhile, when the South Land marched against the Middle Land, Cao Rui sent three armies against the invaders: Liu Shao led that to save Jiangxia; Tian Du led the Xiangyang force; Cao Rui himself, with Man Chong, went into Hefei. This last was the main army.\n\nMan Chong led the leading division toward Lake Chaohu. Thence, looking across to the eastern shore, he saw a forest of battleships, and flags and banners crowded the sky. So he returned to the main army and proposed an attack without loss of time.\n\n\"The enemy think we shall be fatigued after a long march, and so they have not troubled to prepare any defense. We should attack this night, and we shall overcome them.\"\n\n\"What you say accords with my own ideas,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nThen the Ruler of Wei told off the cavalry leader, Zhang Qiu, to take five thousand troops and try to burn out the enemy with combustibles. Man Chong was also to attack from the eastern bank.\n\nIn the second watch of that night, the two forces set out and gradually approached the entrance to the lake. They reached the marine camp unobserved, burst upon it with a yell, and the soldiers of Wu fled without striking a blow. The troops of Wei set fires going in every direction and thus destroyed all the ships together with much grain and many weapons.\n\nZhuge Jin, who was in command, led his beaten troops to Miankou, and the attackers returned to their camp much elated.\n\nWhen the report came to Lu Xun, he called together his officers and said, \"I must write to the Emperor to abandon the siege of Xincheng, that the army may be employed to cut off the retreat of the Wei army while I will attack them in front. They will be harassed by the double danger, and we shall break them.\"\n\nAll agreed that this was a good plan, and the memorial was drafted. It was sent by the hand of a junior officer, who was told to convey it secretly. But this messenger was captured at the ferry and taken before the Ruler of Wei.\n\nCao Rui read the dispatch, then said with a sigh, \"This Lu Xun of Wu is really very resourceful.\"\n\nThe captive was put into prison, and Liu Shao was told off to defend the rear and keep off Sun Quan's army.\n\nNow Zhuge Jin's defeated soldiers were suffering from hot weather illnesses, and at length he was compelled to write and tell Lu Xun, and ask that his army be relieved and sent home.\n\nHaving read this dispatch, Lu Xun said to the messenger, \"Make my obeisance to the General, and say that I will decide.\"\n\nWhen the messenger returned with this reply, Zhuge Jin asked what was doing in the Commander-in-Chief's camp.\n\nThe messenger replied, \"The soldiers were all outside planting beans, and the officers were amusing themselves at the gates. They were playing a game of skill, throwing arrows into narrow-necked vases.\"\n\nAlarmed, Zhuge Jin himself went to his chief's camp.\n\nSaid he, \"Cao Rui himself leads the expedition, and the enemy is very strong. How do you, O Commander, meet this pressing danger?\"\n\nLu Xun replied, \"My messenger to the Emperor was captured, and thus my plans were discovered. Now it is useless to prepare to fight, and so we had better retreat. I have sent in a memorial to engage the Emperor to retire gradually.\"\n\nZhuge Jin replied, \"Why delay? If you think it best to retire, it had better be done quickly.\"\n\n\"My army must retreat slowly, or the enemy will come in pursuit, which will mean defeat and loss. Now you must first prepare your ships as if you meant to resist, while I make a semblance of an attack toward Xiangyang. Under cover of these operations we shall withdraw into the South Land, and the enemy will not dare to follow.\"\n\nSo Zhuge Jin returned to his own camp and began to fit out his ships as if for an immediate expedition, while Lu Xun made all preparations to march, giving out that he intended to advance upon Xiangyang.\n\nThe news of these movements were duly reported in the Wei camps. When the leaders heard it, they wished to go out and fight. But the Ruler of Wei knew his opponent better than they and would not bring about a battle.\n\nSo he called his officers together and said to them, \"This Lu Xun is very crafty. Keep careful guard, but do not risk a battle.\"\n\nThe officers obeyed.\n\nA few days later the scouts brought in news: \"The three armies of Wu have retired!\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei doubted and sent out some of his own spies, who confirmed the report.\n\nWhen he thus knew it was true, he consoled himself with the words, \"Lu Xun knows the art of war even as did Sun Zi and Wu Qi. The subjugation of the southeast is not for me this time.\"\n\nThereupon Cao Rui distributed his generals among the various vantage points and led the main army back into Hefei, where he camped ready to take advantage of any change of conditions that might promise success.\n\nMeanwhile Zhuge Liang was at Qishan, where he intended to make a long sojourn. He made his soldiers mix with the people in Wei and share in the labor of the fields, and the crops \u2014 the soldiers one-third, the people two-third. He gave strict orders against any encroachment on the property of the farmers, and so they and the soldiers lived together very amicably.\n\nThen Sima Yi's son, Sima Shi, went to his father and said, \"These soldiers of Shu have despoiled us of much grain, and now they are mingling with the people of Qishan and tilling the fields along the banks of River Wei as if they intended to remain there. This would be a calamity for us. Why do you not appoint a time to fight a decisive battle with Zhuge Liang?\"\n\nHis father replied, \"I have the Emperor's orders to act on the defensive and may not do as you suggest.\"\n\nWhile they were thus talking, one reported that Wei Yan had come near and was insulting the army and reminding them that he had the helmet of their leader. And he was challenging them. The generals were greatly incensed and desired to accept the challenge, but the Commander-in-Chief was immovable in his decision to obey his orders.\n\n\"The Holy One says: 'If one cannot suffer small things, great matters are imperiled.' Our plan is to defend.\"\n\nSo the challenge was not accepted, and there was no battle. After reviling them for some time, Wei Yan went away.\n\nSeeing that his enemy was not to be provoked into fighting, Zhuge Liang gave orders to Ma Dai to build a strong stockade in the Gourd Valley and therein to excavate pits and to collect large quantities of inflammables. So on the hill they piled wood and straw in the shape of sheds, and all about they dug pits and buried mines. When these preparations were complete, Ma Dai received instructions to block the road in rear of Gourd Valley and to lay an ambush at the entrance.\n\n\"If Sima Yi comes, let him enter the valley, and then explode the mines and set fire to the straw and the wood,\" said Zhuge Liang. \"Also, set up seven star flags at the mouth of the valley and arrange a night signal of seven lamps on the hill.\"\n\nAfter Ma Dai had gone, Wei Yan was called in, and Zhuge Liang said to him, \"Go to the camp of Wei with five hundred troops and provoke them to battle. The important matter is to entice Sima Yi out of his stronghold. You will be unable to obtain a victory, so retreat that he may pursue. You are to make for the signal, the seven star flags by day or the seven lamps at night. Thus you will lead him into the Gourd Valley, where I have a plan prepared for him.\"\n\nWhen Wei Yan had gone, Gao Xiang was summoned.\n\n\"Take small herds, forty or fifty at a time, of the wooden oxen and running horses, load them up with grain and lead them to and fro on the mountains. If you can succeed in getting the enemy to capture them, you will render a service.\"\n\nSo the transport wooden cattle were sent forth to play their part in the scheme, and the remainder of the Qishan soldiers were sent to work in the fields.\n\nHe gave orders to his generals, saying, \"If the enemy under other leaders come to attack, you are to flee the field. Only in the case Sima Yi comes in person, you are to attack most vigorously the south bank of the river and cut off the retreat.\"\n\nThen Zhuge Liang led his army away to camp next to the Gourd Valley.\n\nXiahou Hui and Xiahou He went to their chief, Sima Yi, and said, \"The enemy have set out camps and are engaged in field work as though they intended to remain. If they are not destroyed now, but are allowed to consolidate their position, they will be hard to dislodge.\"\n\n\"This certainly is one of Zhuge Liang's ruses,\" said the chief.\n\n\"You seem very afraid of him, Commander,\" retorted they. \"When do you think you can destroy him? At least let us two brothers fight one battle that we may prove our gratitude for the Emperor's kindness.\"\n\n\"If it must be so, then you may go in two divisions,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nAs the two divisions, five thousand troops each, were marching along, they saw coming toward them a number of the transport wooden animals of the enemy. They attacked at once, drove off the escort, captured them, and sent them back to camp. Next day they captured more, with soldiers and horses as well, and sent them also to camp.\n\nSima Yi called up the prisoners and questioned them.\n\nThey told him, saying, \"The Prime Minister understood that you would not fight, and so had told off the soldiers to various places to work in the fields, and therefore provide for future needs. We had been unwittingly captured.\"\n\nSima Yi set them free and bade them begone.\n\n\"Why spare them?\" asked Xiahou He.\n\n\"There is nothing to be gained by the slaughter of a few common soldiers. Let them go back to their own and praise the kindliness of the Wei leaders. That will slacken the desire of their comrades to fight against us. That was the plan by which Lu Meng captured Jingzhou.\"\n\nThen he issued general orders that all Shu prisoners should be well treated and sent away free. However, he kept rewarding those of his army who had done well.\n\nAs has been said, Gao Xiang was ordered to keep pretended convoys on the move, and the soldiers of Wei attacked and captured them whenever they saw them. In half a month they had scored many successes of this sort, and Sima Yi's heart was cheered. One day, when he had made new captures of soldiers, he sent for them and questioned them again.\n\n\"Where is Zhuge Liang now?\"\n\n\"He is no longer at Qishan, but in camp about three miles from the Gourd Valley. He is gathering a great store of grain there.\"\n\nAfter he had questioned them fully, he set the prisoners free.\n\nCalling together his officers, he said, \"Zhuge Liang is not camped on Qishan, but near the Gourd Valley. Tomorrow you shall attack the Qishan camp, and I will command the reserve.\"\n\nThe promise cheered them, and they went away to prepare.\n\n\"Father, why do you intend to attack the enemy's rear?\" asked Sima Shi.\n\n\"Qishan is their main position, and they will certainly hasten to its rescue. Then I shall make for the valley and burn the stores. That will render them helpless and will be a victory.\"\n\nThe son exclaimed his admiration for the plan.\n\nSima Yi began to march out, with Zhang Hu and Yue Chen following as the reserves.\n\nFrom the top of a hill Zhuge Liang watched the Wei soldiers march and noticed that they moved in companies from three to five thousand, observing the front and the rear carefully as they marched. He guessed that their object was the Qishan camp.\n\nSo he sent strict orders to his generals: \"If Sima Yi leads in person, you are to go off and capture the Wei camp and the south bank of River Wei.\"\n\nThey received and obeyed his orders.\n\nWhen the troops of Wei had got near and made their rush toward the camp of Shu in Qishan, the troops of Shu ran up also, yelling and pretending to reinforce the defenders. Sima Yi, seeing the Shu troops rushing to rescure Qishan, suddenly marched his center army's guards with his two sons, changed his direction, and turned off for the Gourd Valley. Here Wei Yan was expecting him; and as soon as he appeared, Wei Yan galloped up and soon recognized Sima Yi as the leader.\n\n\"Sima Yi, stay!\" shouted Wei Yan as he came near.\n\nHe flourished his sword, and Sima Yi set his spear. The two warriors exchanged a few passes, and then Wei Yan suddenly turned his steed and bolted. As he had been ordered, he made direct for the seven star flags, and Sima Yi followed, the more readily as he saw the fugitive had but a small force. The two sons of Sima Yi rode with him, Sima Shi on the left, Sima Zhao on the right.\n\nPresently Wei Yan and his troops entered the mouth of the valley. Sima Yi halted a time while he sent forward a few scouts.\n\nThey returned and reported: \"Not a single Shu soldier is seen, but a many straw houses are on the hills.\"\n\nSima Yi said, \"This must be the store valley!\"\n\nHe led his army in eagerly. But when he had got well within, Sima Yi noticed that kindling wood was piled over the straw huts; and as he saw no sign of Wei Yan, he began to feel uneasy.\n\n\"Supposing soldiers seize the entrance. What then?\" said he to his sons.\n\nAs he spoke there arose a great shout, and from the hillside came many torches, which fell all around them and set fire to the straw, so that soon the entrance to the valley was lost in smoke and flame. They tried to get away from the fire, but no road led up the hillside. Then fire-arrows came shooting down, and the earth-mines exploded, and the straw and firewood blazed high as the heavens. The fire caused strong winds, and the winds aided the fire; and the valley became a fiery stove.\n\nSima Yi, scared and helpless, dismounted, clasped his arms about his two sons, and wept, saying, \"My sons, we three are doomed!\"\n\nAs they stood weeping, a fierce gale suddenly sprang up, black clouds gathered, a peal of thunder followed, and rain poured down in torrents, speedily extinguishing the fire all through the valley. The mines no longer exploded, and all the fiery contrivances ceased to work mischief.\n\n\"If we do not break out now, what better chance shall we have?\" cried Sima Yi, and he led the soldiers to make a dash for the outlet.\n\nAs they broke out of the valley, they came upon reinforcements under Zhang Hu and Yue Chen, and so were once more safe. Ma Dai was not strong enough to pursue, and the soldiers of Wei got safely to the river.\n\nBut there they found their camp in the possession of the enemy, while Guo Huai and Sun Li were on the floating bridge struggling with the troops of Shu. Sima Yi charged up hastily, and the troops of Shu retreated, whereupon Sima Yi crossed the river and ordered the bridges burned. He then occupied the north bank.\n\nThe Wei army attacking the Qishan camp were greatly disturbed when they heard of the defeat of their Commander-in-Chief and the loss of the camp on River Wei. The troops of Shu took the occasion to strike with greater vigor, and so gained a great victory. The beaten army suffered heavy loss. Those who escaped fled across the river.\n\nWhen Zhuge Liang from the hill-top saw that Sima Yi had been inveigled into the trap by Wei Yan, he rejoiced exceedingly; and when he saw the flames burst forth, he thought surely his rival was done for. Then, unhappily for him, Heaven thought it well to send down torrents of rain, which quenched the fire and upset all his calculations.\n\nSoon after, the scouts reported the escape of his victims.\n\nZhuge Liang sighed, saying, \"Human proposes; God disposes. We cannot wrest events to our will.\"\n\n\u2003Fierce fires roared in the valley,\n\n\u2003But the rain quenched them.\n\n\u2003Had Zhuge Liang's plan but succeeded,\n\n\u2003Where had been the Jins?\n\nFrom the new camp on the north bank of the river, Sima Yi issued an order: \"The south shore has been lost. If any of you proposes going out to battle again, he shall be put to death!\"\n\nAccordingly no one spoke of attacking, but all turned their energies toward defense.\n\nGuo Huai went to the general to talk over plans.\n\nHe said, \"The enemy have been carefully spying out the country. They are certainly selecting a new position for a camp.\"\n\nSima Yi said, \"If Zhuge Liang goes out to Wugong Hills, and thence eastward along the hills, we shall be in grave danger. If he goes westward along River Wei, and halts on the Wuzhang Hills, we need feel no anxiety.\"\n\nThey decided to send scouts to find out the movements of their enemy. Presently the scouts returned to say that Zhuge Liang had chosen the Wuzhang Hills.\n\n\"Our great Emperor of Wei has remarkable fortune,\" said Sima Yi, clapping his hand to his forehead.\n\nThen he confirmed the order to remain strictly on the defensive till some change of circumstances on the part of the enemy should promise advantage.\n\nAfter his army had settled into camp on the Wuzhang Hills, Zhuge Liang continued his attempts to provoke a battle. Day after day, parties went to challenge the army of Wei, but they resisted all provocation.\n\nOne day Zhuge Liang wrote a letter, which he sent to his rival. The generals led the bearer of the letter to their chief. Sima Yi opened the letter, which read something like this:\n\n\"Friend Sima Yi, although you are the Commander-in-Chief and lead the armies of the Middle Land, you seem but little disposed to display the firmness and valor that would render a contest decisive. Instead, you have prepared a comfortable lair where you are safe from the keen edge of the sword. Are you not very like a coward? Wherefore I send this letter, and you will humbly accept it and the humiliation, unless, indeed, you finally decide to come out and fight like a warrior. If you are not entirely indifferent to shame, if you retain any of the feelings of a leader, you will answer by giving battle.\"\n\nSima Yi, although inwardly raging, pretended to take it all as a joke and smiled.\n\n\"So he regards me as a coward,\" said he.\n\nHe accepted the letter and treated the messenger well. Before the messenger left, Sima Yi asked him a few questions about his master's eating and sleeping and hours of labor.\n\n\"The Prime Minister works very hard,\" said the messenger. \"He rises early and retires to bed late. He attends personally to all cases requiring punishment of over twenty of strokes. As for food, he does not eat more than a few pints of grain daily.\"\n\n\"Indeed, Zhuge Liang eats little and works much,\" remarked Sima Yi to his generals. \"Can he last long?\"\n\nThe messenger returned to his own side and reported to Zhuge Liang, saying, \"Sima Yi took the whole episode in good part and shown no sign of anger. He only asked about the Prime Minister's hours of rest, and food, and such things. He said no word about military matters. I told him that you ate little and worked long hours, and then he said, 'Can he last long?' That was all.\"\n\n\"He knows me,\" said Zhuge Liang, pensively.\n\nFirst Secretary Yang Yong presently ventured to remonstrate with his chief.\n\n\"I notice,\" said Yang Yong, \"that you check the books personally. I think that is needless labor for a Prime Minister to undertake. In every administration the higher and subordinate ranks have their especial fields of activity, and each should confine his labors to his own field. In a household, for example, the male plows and the female cooks, and thus operations are carried on without waste of energy, and all needs are supplied. If one individual strives to attend personally to every matter, he only wearies himself and fails to accomplish his end. How can he possibly hope to perform all the various tasks well?\n\n\"And, indeed, the ancients held this same opinion, for they said that the high officers should attend to the discussion of ways and means, and the lower should carry out details. Of old, Bing Ji was moved to deep thought by the panting of an ox, but inquired not about the corpses of certain brawlers which lay about the road, for this matter concerned the magistrate. Chen Ping was ignorant of the figures relating to taxes, for he said these were the concern of the tax controllers. O Prime Minister, you weary yourself with minor details and sweat yourself everyday. You are wearing yourself out, and Sima Yi has good reason for what he said.\"\n\n\"I know \u2014 I cannot but know,\" replied Zhuge Liang with tears in his eyes. \"But this heavy responsibility was laid upon me, and I fear no other will be so devoted as I am.\"\n\nThose who heard him wept. Thereafter Zhuge Liang appeared more and more harassed, and military operations did not speed.\n\nOn the other side the officers of Wei resented bitterly the insult that had been put upon them when their leader had been presented with the provocative letter.\n\nThey wished to avenge the taunt, and went to their general, saying, \"We are reputable generals of the army of a great state. How can we put up with such insults from these soldiers of Shu? We pray you let us fight them.\"\n\n\"It is not that I fear to go out,\" said Sima Yi, \"nor that I relish the insults, but I have the Emperor's command to hold on and may not disobey.\"\n\nThe officers were not in the least appeased.\n\nWherefore Sima Yi said, \"I will send your request to the Throne in a memorial. What think you of that?\"\n\nThey consented to await the Emperor's reply, and a messenger bore to the Ruler of Wei, in Hefei, this memorial:\n\n\"I have small ability and high office. Your Majesty laid on me the command to defend and not fight till the army of Shu had suffered by the flux of time. But Zhuge Liang has now sent me a letter openly calling me a coward, and my shame is very deep. Wherefore I advise Your Majesty that one day I shall have to fight in order to justify your kindness to me and to remove the shameful stigma that now rests upon my army. I cannot express the degree to which I am urged to this course.\"\n\nCao Rui read it and turned questioningly to his courtiers seeking an explanation.\n\nSaid he, \"Sima Yi has been in obstinate defense: Why does he want to attack now?\"\n\nCommander Xin Pi replied, \"Sima Yi has no desire to give battle. This memorial is because of the shame put upon the officers by Zhuge Liang's letter. They are all in a rage. He wishes for an edict to pacify them.\"\n\nCao Rui understood and gave to Xin Pi an authority ensign and sent him to the River Wei camp to make known that it was the Emperor's command not to fight.\n\nSima Yi received the messenger with all respect, and it was given out that any future reference to offering battle would be taken as disobedience to the Emperor's especial command in the edict.\n\nThe officers could but obey.\n\nSima Yi said to Xin Pi, \"Noble Sir, you interpreted my own desire correctly!\"\n\nIt was thenceforward understood that Sima Yi was forbidden to give battle.\n\nWhen it was told to Zhuge Liang, he said, \"This is only Sima Yi's method of pacifying his army.\"\n\nJiang Wei asked, \"How do you know, O Prime Minister?\"\n\n\"Sima Yi has never had any intention of fighting. So he requested the edict to justify his strategy. It is well known that a general in the field takes no command from any person, not even his own prince. Is it likely that he would send a thousand miles to ask permission to fight if that was all he needed? The officers were bitter, and so Sima Yi got the Emperor to assist him in maintaining discipline. All this is meant to slacken our soldiers.\"\n\nJust at this time Fei Yi came from Capital Chengdu. He was called in to see the Prime Minister, and Zhuge Liang asked the reason for his coming.\n\nHe replied, \"The Ruler of Wei, Cao Rui, hearing that Wu has invaded his country at three points, has led a great army to Hefei and sent three armies under Man Chong, Tian Du, and Liu Shao, to oppose the invaders. The stores and fight-material of Wu have been burned, and the army of Wu have fallen victims to sickness. A letter from Lu Xun containing a scheme of attack fell into the hands of the enemy, and the Ruler of Wu has marched back into his own country.\"\n\nZhuge Liang listened to the end; then, without a word, he fell in a swoon. He recovered after a time, but he was broken.\n\nHe said, \"My mind is all in confusion. This is a return of my old illness, and I am doomed.\"\n\nIll as he was, Zhuge Liang that night went forth from his tent to scan the heavens and study the stars. They filled him with fear.\n\nHe returned and said to Jiang Wei, \"My life may end at any moment.\"\n\n\"Why do you say such a thing?\"\n\n\"Just now in the Triumvirate constellation the Guest Star was twice as bright as usual, while the Host Star was darkened; the supporting stars were also obscure. With such an aspect I know my fate.\"\n\n\"If the aspect be as malignant as you say, why not pray in order to avert it?\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\n\"I am in the habit of praying,\" replied Zhuge Liang, \"but I know not the will of God. However, prepare me forty-nine guards and let each have a black flag. Dress them in black and place them outside my tent. Then will I from within my tent invoke the Seven Stars of the North. If my master-lamp remain alight for seven days, then is my life to be prolonged for twelve years. If the lamp goes out, then I am to die. Keep all idlers away from the tent, and let a couple of guards bring me what is necessary.\"\n\nJiang Wei prepared as directed.\n\nIt was then the eighth month, mid-autumn, and the Milky Way was brilliant with scattered jade. The air was perfectly calm, and no sound was heard. The forty-nine men were brought up and spaced out to guard the tent, while within Zhuge Liang prepared incense and offerings. On the floor of the tent he arranged seven lamps, and, outside these, forty-nine smaller lamps. In the midst he placed the lamp of his own fate.\n\nThis done, he prayed:\n\n\"Zhuge Liang, born into an age of trouble, would willingly have grown old in retirement. But His Majesty, Liu Bei the Glorious Emperor, sought him thrice and confided to him the heavy responsibility of guarding his son. He dared not do less than spend himself to the utmost in such a task, and he pledged himself to destroy the rebels. Suddenly the star of his leadership has declined, and his life now nears its close. He has humbly indited a declaration on this silk piece to the Great Unknowable and now hopes that He will graciously listen and extend the number of his days that he may prove his gratitude to his prince and be the savior of the people, restore the old state of the empire and establish eternally the Han sacrifices. He dares not make a vain prayer: This is from his heart.\"\n\nThis prayer ended, in the solitude of his tent Zhuge Liang awaited the dawn.\n\nNext day, ill as he was, he did not neglect his duties, although he spat blood continually. All day he labored at his plans, and at night he paced the magic steps, the steps of seven stars of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor.\n\nSima Yi remained still on the defensive.\n\nOne night as he sat gazing up at the sky and studying its aspect, he suddenly turned to Xiahou Ba, saying, \"A leadership star has just lost position: Surely Zhuge Liang is ill and will soon die. Take a reconnoitering party of one thousand to the Wuzhang Hills and find out. If you see signs of confusion, it means that Zhuge Liang is ill. I shall take the occasion to smite hard.\"\n\nXiahou Ba left with an army.\n\nIt was the sixth night of Zhuge Liang's prayers, and the lamp of his fate still burned brightly. He began to feel a secret joy. Presently Jiang Wei entered and watched the ceremonies. He saw Zhuge Liang was loosening his hair, his hand holding a sword, his heels stepping on Ursa Major and Ursa Minor to hold the leadership star.\n\nSuddenly a great shouting was heard outside, and Jiang Wei was about to send someone to inquire when Wei Yan dashed in, crying, \"The Wei soldiers are upon us!\"\n\nIn his haste Wei Yan had knocked over and extinguished the Lamp of Fate.\n\nZhuge Liang threw down the sword and sighed, saying, \"Life and death are foreordained. No prayers can alter them.\"\n\nStunned, Wei Yan fell to the earth and craved forgiveness. Jiang Wei got angry and drew his sword to slay the unhappy general.\n\n\u2003Nought is under man's control,\n\n\u2003Nor can he with fate contend." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "A Falling Star: The Prime Minister Ascends To Heaven; A Wooden Statue: The Commander-In-Chief Is Terrified.\n\nThe unhappy Wei Yan did not suffer the edge of the sword, for Zhuge Liang stayed the stroke, saying, \"It is my fate \u2014 not his fault.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei put up his sword.\n\nZhuge Liang spat a few mouthfuls of blood, then sank wearily upon his couch.\n\nSaid he, \"Sima Yi thinks I am dead, and he sent these few troops to make sure. Go and drive them off.\"\n\nWei Yan left the tent and led out a small party to drive away the troops of Wei, who fled as they appeared. He chased them to more than seven miles and returned. Then Zhuge Liang sent Wei Yan to his own camp and bade him keep a vigilant lookout.\n\nPresently Jiang Wei came in, went up to the sick man's couch, and asked how he felt.\n\nZhuge Liang replied, \"My death is very near. My chief desire has been to spend myself to the utmost to restore Han to its glory and to regain the Middle Land. But Heaven decrees it otherwise. My end is not far away. I have written a book in twenty-four chapters, 104,112 words, treating the Eight Needfuls, the Seven Cautions, the Six Fears, and the Five Dreads of war. But among all those about me there is no one fit to receive it and carry on my work save you. I pray you not to despise it.\"\n\nHe gave the treatise to Jiang Wei, who received it sobbing.\n\n\"I have also a plan for a multiple crossbow, which I have been unable to execute. The weapon shoots ten bolts of eight inches length at every discharge. The sketches are quite ready, and the weapons can be made according to them.\"\n\nJiang Wei took the papers with a deep bow.\n\nThe dying man continued, \"There is no part of Shu that causes anxiety, save the Yinping Mountains. That must be carefully guarded. It is protected naturally by its lofty precipices, but it will surely be the cause of great losses.\"\n\nNext Zhuge Liang sent for Ma Dai, to whom he gave certain whispered instructions, and then said, \"You are to follow out my instructions after my death.\"\n\nSoon after, Yang Yi entered the tent and went to the couch. He received a silken bag containing certain secret orders.\n\nAs Zhuge Liang gave it to him, he said, \"After my death, Wei Yan will turn traitor. When that happens and the army is in danger, you will find herein what to do.\"\n\nJust as these arrangements were finished, Zhuge Liang fell into a swoon, from which he did not revive till late in the evening. Then he set himself to compose a memorial to the Latter Ruler.\n\nWhen this reached the Latter Ruler, he was greatly alarmed and at once sent Chief Secretary Li Fu to visit and confer with the dying minister.\n\nLi Fu traveled quickly to the Wuzhang Hills and was led to the tent of the Commander-in-Chief. He delivered the Latter Ruler's command and inquired after the sick man's welfare.\n\nZhuge Liang wept, and he replied, \"Unhappily I am dying and leaving my task incomplete. I am injuring my country's policy and am in fault to the world. After my death you must aid the Emperor in perfect loyalty, and see that the old policy is continued, and the rules of government maintained. Do not lightly cast out the people I have employed. My plans of campaign have been confided to Jiang Wei, who can continue my policy for the service of the state. But my hour draws near, and I must write my testament.\"\n\nLi Fu listened, and then took his leave.\n\nZhuge Liang made one final effort to carry out his duties. He rose from his couch, was helped into a small carriage, and thus made a round of inspection of all the camps and posts. But the cold autumn wind chilled him to the bone.\n\n\"I shall never again lead the army against the rebels,\" said he. \"O Azure Heaven, when will this regret end?\"\n\nZhuge Liang returned to his tent. He became rapidly weaker and called Yang Yi to his bedside.\n\nSaid he, \"Ma Dai, Wang Ping, Liao Hua, Zhang Yi, Zhang Ni may be depended on to the death. They have fought many campaigns and borne many hardships; they should be retained in the public service. After my death let everything go on as before, but the army is to be gradually withdrawn. You know the tactics to be followed, and I need say little. My friend Jiang Wei is wise and brave; set him to guard the retreat.\"\n\nYang Yi received these orders, weeping.\n\nNext, writing materials were brought in and the dying minister set himself to write his testament. It is here given in substance:\n\n\"Life and death are the common lot, and fate cannot be evaded. Death is at hand, and I desire to prove my loyalty to the end. I, thy servant Zhuge Liang, dull of parts, was born into a difficult age, and it fell to my lot to guide military operations. I led a northern expedition, but failed to win complete success. Now sickness has laid hold upon me and death approaches, so that I shall be unable to accomplish my task. My sorrow is inexpressible.\n\n\"I desire Your Majesty to cleanse your heart and limit your desires, to practice self-control and to love the people, to maintain a perfectly filial attitude toward your late father and to be benevolent to all the world. Seek out the recluse scholars that you may obtain the services of the wise and good; repel the wicked and depraved that your moral standard may be exalted.\n\n\"To my household belong eight hundred mulberry trees and a hundred acres of land; thus there is ample provision for my family. While I have been employed in the service of the state, my needs have been supplied from official sources, but I have not contrived to make any additions to the family estate. At my death I shall not leave any increased possessions, even an excess roll of silk, that may cause Your Majesty to suspect that I have wronged you.\"\n\nHaving composed this document, the dying man turned again to Yang Yi, saying, \"Do not wear mourning for me, but make a large coffer and therein place my body, with seven grains of rice in my mouth. Place a lamp at my feet and let my body move with the army as I was wont to do. If you refrain from mourning, then my leadership star will not fall, for my inmost soul will ascend and hold it in place. So long as my star retains its place, Sima Yi will be fearsome and suspicious.\n\n\"Let the army retreat, beginning with the rearmost division; send it away slowly, one camp at a time. If Sima Yi pursues, array the army and offer battle, turn to meet him and beat the attack. Let him approach till he is very near and then suddenly display the wooden image of myself that I have had carved, seated in my chariot in the midst of the army, with the generals right and left as usual. And you will frighten Sima Yi away.\"\n\nYang Yi listened to these words intently. That night Zhuge Liang was carried into the open and gazed up at the sky.\n\n\"That is my star,\" said he, pointing to one that seemed to be losing its brilliancy and to be tottering in its place. Zhuge Liang's lips moved as if he muttered a spell. Presently he was borne into his tent and for a time was oblivious of all about him.\n\nWhen the anxiety caused by this state of coma was at its height, Li Fu arrived.\n\nHe wept when he saw the condition of the great leader, crying, \"I have foiled the great designs of the state!\"\n\nHowever, presently Zhuge Liang's eyes reopened and fell upon Li Fu standing near his couch.\n\n\"I know your mission,\" said Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"I came with the royal command to ask also who should control the destinies of the state for the next century,\" replied Li Fu. \"In my agitation I forgot to ask that.\"\n\n\"After me, Jiang Wan is the most fitting man to deal with great matters.\"\n\n\"And after Jiang Wan?\"\n\n\"After him, Fei Yi.\"\n\n\"Who is next after Fei Yi?\"\n\nNo reply came, and when they looked more carefully, they perceived that the soul of the Prime Minister had passed.\n\nThus died Zhuge Liang, on the twenty-third day of the eighth month in the twelfth year of Beginning Prosperity, at the age of fifty and four (AD 234).\n\n\u2003The poet Du Fu wrote some verses on his death.\n\n\u2003A bright star last night falling from the sky,\n\n\u2003This message gave, \"The Master is no more.\"\n\n\u2003No more in camps shall bold men tramp at his command;\n\n\u2003At court no statesman ever will fill the place he held;\n\n\u2003At home, his clients miss their patron kind;\n\n\u2003Sad for the army, who were lonely in this world.\n\n\u2003In the green wood stones and creeks are crying,\n\n\u2003No more of his lute, birds have hushed singing.\n\n\u2003And Bai Juyi also wrote a poem:\n\n\u2003Within the forest dim the Master lived obscure,\n\n\u2003Till, thrice returning, there the prince his mentor met.\n\n\u2003As when a fish the ocean gains, desire was filled\n\n\u2003Wholly the dragon freed could soar aloft at will.\n\n\u2003As king's son's guardian none more zealous was;\n\n\u2003As minister, most loyally he wrought at court.\n\n\u2003His war memorials still to us are left,\n\n\u2003And, reading them, the tears unconscious fall.\n\nNow in past days, Commander Liao Li in Changshui had a high opinion of his own abilities and thought himself perfectly fitted to be Zhuge Liang's second. So he neglected the duties of his proper post, showed discontent and indiscipline, and was constantly slandering the minister. Thereupon Zhuge Liang degraded him and transferred him to Minshan.\n\nWhen Liao Li heard of Zhuge Liang's death, he shed tears and said, \"Then, after all, I shall remain a barbarian!\"\n\nLi Yan also grieved deeply at the sad tidings, for he had always hoped that Zhuge Liang would restore him to office and so give him the opportunity of repairing his former faults. After Zhuge Liang had died, he thought there was no hope of reemployment, and so he died.\n\nAnother poet, Yuan Weizhi, also wrote in praise of the great adviser.\n\n\u2003He fought disorder, helped a weak king;\n\n\u2003Most zealously he kept his master's son.\n\n\u2003In state-craft he excelled Guan Zhong, Yue Yi,\n\n\u2003In war-craft he overpassed Wu Qi, Sun Zi.\n\n\u2003With awe the court his war memorials heard,\n\n\u2003With majesty his Eight Arrays were planned.\n\n\u2003Virtue and wisdom both filled in his heart,\n\n\u2003For thousand autumns, his fame would still stay.\n\nHeaven grieved and earth mourned on the night of Zhuge Liang's death. Even the moon was dimmed, as Zhuge Liang's soul returned to Heaven.\n\nAs the late commander had directed, Jiang Wei and Yang Yi forbade the mourning of his death. His body was placed in the coffer as he had wished, and three hundred of his trusted leaders and soldiers were appointed to watch it.\n\nSecret orders were given to Wei Yan to command the rearguard, and then, one by one, the camps were broken up and the army began its homeward march.\n\nSima Yi watched the skies. One night a large red star with bright rays passed from the northeast to the southwest and dropped over the camps of Shu. It dipped thrice and rose again. Sima Yi heard also a low rumbling in the distance.\n\nHe was pleased and excited, and said to those about him, \"Zhuge Liang is dead!\"\n\nAt once he ordered pursuit with a strong force. But just as he passed his camp gates, doubts filled his mind and he gave up the plan.\n\n\"Zhuge Liang is a master of mysteries: He can get aids from the Deities of the Six Layers. It may be that this is but a ruse to get us to take the field. We may fall victims to his guile.\"\n\nSo he halted. But he sent Xiahou Ba with a few dozen scouts to reconnoiter the enemy's camps.\n\nOne night as Wei Yan lay asleep in his tent, he dreamed a dream. In his vision two horns grew out of his head. When he awoke he was much perplexed to explain his dream.\n\nMarching General Zhao Zhi came to see him, and Wei Yan said, \"You are versed in the Book of Changes. I have dreamed that two horns grew upon my head, and would trouble you to expound the dream and tell me its portent.\"\n\nZhao Zhi thought a moment and replied, \"It is an auspicious dream. Dragon and Jilin both have horns on the head. It augurs transformation into an ascending creature.\"\n\nWei Yan, much pleased, said, \"If the dream proves true as you said, I will thank you with very generous gifts.\"\n\nZhao Zhi left and presently met Fei Yi, who asked whence he came.\n\n\"From the camp of our friend Wei Yan. He dreamed that he grew horns upon his head, and I have given him an auspicious interpretation. But really it is inauspicious. However, I did not wish to annoy him.\"\n\n\"How do you know it is inauspicious?\"\n\n\"The word for horn is composed of two parts, 'knife' above and 'use' below, and so means that there is a knife upon his head. It is a terrible omen.\"\n\n\"Keep it secret,\" said Fei Yi.\n\nThen Fei Yi went to the camp of Wei Yan, and when they were alone, he said, \"The Prime Minister died last night in the third watch. He left certain final orders, and among them, that you are to command the rearguard to keep Sima Yi at bay while the army retreats. No mourning is to be worn. Here is your authority, so you can march forthwith.\"\n\n\"Who is acting in place of the late minister?\" asked Wei.\n\n\"The chief command has been delegated to Yang Yi, but the secret plans of campaign have been entrusted to Jiang Wei. This authority was issued from Yang Yi.\"\n\nWei Yan replied, \"Though the Prime Minister is dead, I am yet alive. Counselor Yang Yi is only a civil officer and unequal to this post. He ought to conduct the coffin home while I lead the army against Sima Yi. I shall achieve success, and it is wrong to abandon a whole plan of campaign because of the death of one man, even if that be the Prime Minister.\"\n\n\"The Prime Minister's orders were to retire, and these orders are to be obeyed.\"\n\n\"If the Prime Minister had listened to me, we should now have been at Changan. I am the Van Leader, General Who Conquers the West, and Lord of Nanzheng. I am not going to act as rearguard for any civil official,\" said Wei Yan, angry.\n\n\"It may be as you say, General, but you must not do anything to make us ridiculous. Let me go back to Yang Yi and explain, and I may be able to persuade him to pass on to you the supreme military authority he holds.\"\n\nWei Yan agreed, and Fei Yi went back to the main camp and told Yang Yi what had passed.\n\nYang Yi replied, \"When near death the Prime Minister confided to me that Wei Yan would turn traitor. I sent him the authority to test him, and now he has discovered himself as the Prime Minister foretold. So I will direct Jiang Wei to command the rearguard.\"\n\nThe coffer containing the remains of Zhuge Liang was sent on in advance, and Jiang Wei took up his post to cover the retreat.\n\nMeanwhile Wei Yan sat in his tent waiting for the return of Fei Yi and was perplexed at the delay. When the suspense became unbearable, he sent Ma Dai to find out the reason.\n\nMa Dai returned and told him: \"Jiang Wei is covering the retreat, and that most of the army has already gone.\"\n\nWei Yan was furious.\n\n\"How dare he play with me, the pedantic blockhead?\" cried he. \"But he shall die for this!\"\n\nTurning to Ma Dai, Wei Yan said, \"Will you help me?\"\n\nMa Dai replied, \"I have long hated Yang Yi; certainly I am ready to attack him.\"\n\nSo Wei Yan broke camp and marched southward.\n\nBy the time Xiahou Ba had reached the Shu camps, they were all empty, and he hastened back with this news.\n\n\"Then Zhuge Liang is really dead! Let us pursue,\" said Sima Yi, much irritated at being misled.\n\n\"Be cautious,\" said Xiahou Ba. \"Send an subordinate leader first.\"\n\n\"No, I must go myself this time.\"\n\nSo Sima Yi and his two sons hastened to the Wuzhang Hills. With shouts and waving flags, they rushed into the camps, only to find them quite deserted.\n\nSima Yi said to his sons, \"You are to bring up the remaining force with all speed, whereas I will lead the vanguard.\"\n\nSima Yi hastened in the wake of the retreating army. Coming to some hills, he saw them in the distance and pressed on still harder. Then suddenly a bomb exploded, a great shout broke the stillness, and the retiring army turned about and came toward him, ready for battle. In their midst fluttered a great banner bearing the words, Prime Minister of Han, Lord of Wuxiang, Zhuge Liang.\n\nSima Yi stopped, pale with fear. Then out from the army came some score of generals of rank, and they were escorting a small carriage, in which sat Zhuge Liang as he had always appeared, in his hand the feather fan.\n\n\"Then Zhuge Liang is still alive!\" gasped Sima Yi. \"And I have rashly placed myself in his power.\"\n\nAs he pulled round his horse to flee, Jiang Wei shouted, \"Do not try to run away, O rebel! You have fallen into one of the Prime Minister's traps and had better stay!\"\n\nThe soldiers, seized with panic, fled, throwing off all their gear. They trampled each other down, and many perished. Their leader galloped fifteen miles without pulling rein. When at last two of his generals came up with him, and had stopped his flying steed by catching at the bridle, Sima Yi clapped his hand to his head, crying, \"Have I still a head?\"\n\n\"Do not fear, Commander, the soldiers of Shu are now far away,\" they replied.\n\nBut he still panted with fear, and only after some time did he recognize that his two companions were Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Hui. The three found their way by by-roads to their own camp, whence scouts were sent out in all directions.\n\nIn a few days the natives brought news: \"The Shu army had really gone, and as soon as the retiring army entered the valley, they raised a wailing for the dead and hoisted white flags. Zhuge Liang was really dead, and Jiang Wei's rearguard consisted of only one thousand troops. The figure in the carriage was only a wooden image of the Prime Minister.\"\n\n\"While he lived, I could guess what he would do; dead, I was helpless!\" said Sima Yi.\n\nThe people had a saying that \"A dead Zhuge Liang can scare off a live Sima Yi.\"\n\n\u2003In the depth of night a brilliant star\n\n\u2003Fell from the northern sky;\n\n\u2003Doubts stayed Sima Yi\n\n\u2003When he would pursue\n\n\u2003His dead, but fearsome enemy.\n\n\u2003And even now the western people,\n\n\u2003With scornful smile, will say\n\n\u2003\"Oh, is my head on my shoulder still?\n\n\u2003It was nearly lost today.\"\n\nNow indeed Sima Yi knew that his rival was no more, so he retook the pursuit. But when he reached the Red Hills, the Shu army had marched too far away.\n\nAs he took the homeward road, he said to his officers, \"We can now sleep in comfort.\"\n\nAs they marched back, they saw the camps of their enemies, and were amazed at their skillful arrangement.\n\n\"Truly a wonderful genius!\" sighed Sima Yi.\n\nThe armies of Wei returned to Changan. Leaving officers to guard the various strategic points, Sima Yi himself went on to Luoyang to see the audience.\n\nYang Yi and Jiang Wei retired slowly and in good order till they neared the Plank Trail, when they donned mourning garb and began to wail for their dead. The soldiers threw themselves on the ground and wailed in sorrow. Some even wailed themselves to death.\n\nBut as the leading companies entered upon the Plank Trail, they saw a great blaze in front, and, with a great shout, a cohort came out barring the way. The leaders of the retreating army were taken aback and sent to inform Yang Yi.\n\n\u2003The regiments of Wei are nowhere near,\n\n\u2003Then who are these soldiers that now appear?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "The Lord of Wuxiang Leaves A Plan In The Silken Bag; The Ruler of Wei Removes The Bronze Statue With The Dew Bowl.\n\nYang Yi sent forward a man to find out what force this was that stood in his way, and the scout returned to say they were soldiers of Shu led by Wei Yan. Wei Yan had burned the Plank Trail and now barred the way.\n\nThen said Yang Yi, \"Just before his death the Prime Minister foretold that this man would one day turn traitor, and here it has come to pass. I did not expect to meet it thus, but now our road of retreat is cut, and what is to be done?\"\n\nThen replied Fei Yi, \"He certainly has slandered us to the Emperor and said that we were rebelling, and therefore he has destroyed the wooden roads in order to prevent our progress first. Therefore, we must memorialize to the Throne the truth about him and then plan his destruction.\"\n\nJiang Wei said, \"I know a by-way hereabout that will lead us round to the rear of these covered roads. True it is precipitous and dangerous, but it will take us to our destination. It is called the Chashan Mountain Path.\"\n\nSo they prepared a memorial and turned off in order to follow the narrow mountain road.\n\nMeanwhile in Chengdu the Latter Ruler of Shu was troubled; he lost his appetite and was sleepless. Then he dreamed that the Silky Hills that protected his capital was rived and fell. This dream troubled him till morning, when he called in his officers of all ranks to ask them to interpret his vision.\n\nWhen he had related his dream, Qiao Zhou stood forth and said, \"Last night I saw a large red star fall from the northeast to the southwest. Surely it forebodes a misfortune to the First Minister. Your Majesty's dream corresponds to what I saw.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler's anxiety increased. Presently Li Fu returned and was summoned into the Latter Ruler's presence.\n\nLi Fu bowed his head and wept, saying, \"The Prime Minister is dead!\"\n\nHe repeated Zhuge Liang's last messages and told all that he knew.\n\nThe Latter Ruler was overcome with great sorrow, and wailed, crying, \"Heaven smites me!\"\n\nAnd he fell over and lay upon his couch. They led him within to the inner chambers; and when Empress Wu, the Empress Dowager, heard the sad tidings, she also wailed without ceasing. And all the officers were distressed and wept, and the common people showed their grief.\n\nThe Latter Ruler was deeply affected, and for many days could hold no court. And while thus prostrate with grief, they told him that Wei Yan had sent up a memorial charging Yang Yi with rebellion. The astounded courtiers went to the Latter Ruler's chamber to talk over this thing, and Empress Wu was also there. The memorial was read aloud. It was much like this:\n\n\"I, thy Minister and General, Wei Yan, General Who Conquers the West and Lord of Nanzheng, humbly and with bowed head write that Yang Yi has assumed command of the army and is in rebellion. He has made off with the coffin of the late Prime Minister and wishes to lead enemies within our borders. As a precaution, and to hinder his progress, I have burned the Plank Trail and now report these matters.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler said, \"Wei Yan is a valiant warrior and could easily have overcome Yang Yi. Why then did he destroy the Plank Trail?\"\n\nEmpress Wu said, \"The First Ruler used to say that Zhuge Liang knew that treachery lurked in the heart of Wei Yan, and he wished to deal with Wei Yan; he only spared Wei Yan because Wei Yan is a valiant and committed leader. We should not believe too readily this tale of his that Yang Yi has rebelled. Yang Yi is a scholar and a civil officer, and the late Prime Minister placed him in a position of great responsibility, thereby proving that he trusted and valued Yang Yi. If we believe this statement, surely Yang Yi will be forced to go over to Wei. Nothing should be done without due meditation.\"\n\nAs they were discussing this matter, an urgent memorial came from Yang Yi, and opening it, they read:\n\n\"I, Yang Yi, leader of the retreating army, humbly and with trepidation, present this memorial. In his last moments the late Prime Minister made over to me the charge of the great enterprise, and bade me carry out his plan without change. I have respected his charge. I ordered Wei Yan to command the rearguard with Jiang Wei as his second. But Wei Yan refused obedience and led away his own army into Hanzhong. Then he burned the Plank Trail, tried to steal away the body of the late Commander-in-Chief, and behaved altogether unseemly. His rebellion came upon me suddenly and unexpectedly. I send this memorial in haste.\"\n\nThe Empress Dowager listened to the end.\n\nThen, turning to the officers, she said, \"What is your opinion now?\"\n\nJiang Wan replied, \"Yang Yi is hasty and intolerant, but he has rendered great services in supplying the army. He has long been a trusted colleague of the late Prime Minister, who, being near his end, entrusted to him the conduct of affairs. Certainly he is no rebel. On the other hand, Wei Yan is bold and ambitious and thinks himself everybody's superior. Yang Yi is the only one who has openly been of different opinion, and hence Wei Yan hates him. When he saw Yang Yi placed over his head in command of the army, Wei Yan refused his support. Then Wei Yan burned the Plank Trail in order to cut off Yang Yi's retreat, and maligned him, hoping to bring about his fall. I am ready to guarantee Yang Yi's fealty to the extent of my whole house, but I would not answer for Wei Yan.\"\n\nDong Yun followed, \"Wei Yan has always been conceited and discontented. His mouth was full of hate and resentment, and only fear of the late Prime Minister held him in check. The Prime Minister's death gave him his opportunity, and he turned traitor. This is certainly the true state of the case. Yang Yi is able, and his employment by the late Prime Minister is proof of his loyalty.\"\n\n\"If this is true and Wei Yan is really a rebel, what should be done?\" asked the Latter Ruler.\n\nJiang Wan said, \"I think the late Prime Minister has framed some scheme by which to get rid of Wei Yan. If Yang Yi had not felt secure, he would scarcely have set out to return through the valleys. Your Majesty may feel sure that Wei Yan will fall into some trap. We have received, almost at the same time, two memorials from two men, each bringing against the other a charge of rebellion. Let us wait.\"\n\nIn a short time another memorial arrived from Wei Yan, who accused Yang Yi of rebellion. The Latter Ruler was reading it, when a messenger from Yang Yi was announced with yet another memorial labeling Wei Yan a rebel. The court received several more memorials from both sides blaming each other, and the officials did not know what to do.\n\nJust then Fei Yi arrived. He was summoned into the royal presence and told the story of Wei Yan's revolt.\n\nThe Latter Ruler replied, \"In that case I should do well to send Dong Yun with the ensigns of authority to mediate the situation and attempt to persuade Wei Yan with kind words.\"\n\nSo Dong Yun left on this mission.\n\nAt this time Wei Yan was camped at Nangu Valley, which was a commanding position. He thought his plan was succeeding well. It had not occurred to him that Yang Yi and Jiang Wei could get past him by any by-way.\n\nOn the other hand, Yang Yi, thinking that Hanzhong was lost, sent He Ping with three thousand troops on in front while he followed with the coffin.\n\nWhen He Ping had got to the rear of Nangu Valley, they announced their presence with rolling drums. The scouts quickly told Wei Yan, who at once armed himself, took his sword, and rode out to confront He Ping. When both sides were arrayed, He Ping rode to the front and began to revile his opponent.\n\n\"Where is that rebel Wei Yan?\" cried He Ping.\n\n\"You aided that traitor Yang Yi!\" cried Wei Yan, no way backward with his tongue. \"How dare you abuse me?\"\n\nHe Ping waxed more indignant.\n\n\"You rebelled immediately after the late chief's death, before even his body was cold. How could you?\"\n\nThen shaking his whip at the followers of Wei Yan, He Ping cried, \"And you soldiers are Shu people. Your fathers and mothers, wives and children, and your friends are still in the land. Were you treated unkindly that you have joined a traitor and aid his wicked schemes? You ought to have returned home and waited quietly the rewards that would have been yours.\"\n\nThe soldiers were touched by his words. They cheered, and more than a half ran away.\n\nWei Yan was now raging. He whirled up his sword and galloped forward straight for He Ping, who went to meet him with his spear ready. They fought several bouts, and then He Ping rode away as if defeated. Wei Yan followed, but He Ping's troops began to shoot and Wei Yan was driven backward. As he got near his own ranks, Wei Yan saw many generals leaving their companies and going away. He rode after them and cut some of them down. But this did not stay the movement; they continued to go. The only steady portion of his own army was that commanded by Ma Dai. They stood their ground.\n\n\"Will you really help me?\" said Wei Yan. \"I will surely remember you in the day of success.\"\n\nThe two then went in pursuit of He Ping, who fled before them. However, it was soon evident that He Ping was not to be overtaken, and the pursuers halted. Wei Yan mustered his now small force.\n\n\"What if we go over to Wei?\" said Wei Yan.\n\n\"I think your words unwise,\" said Ma Dai. \"Why should we join anyone? A really strong person would try to carve out his own fortune and not be ready to crook the knee to another. You are far more able and brave than any leader in the River Lands. No one would dare to stand up to you. I pledge myself to go with you to the seizure of Hanzhong, and thence we will attack the West River Land.\"\n\nSo they marched together toward Nanzheng, where Jiang Wei stationed. From the city wall Jiang Wei saw their approach and marked their proud, martial look. He ordered the drawbridge to be raised and sent to tell his colleague, Yang Yi.\n\nAs they drew near, both Wei Yan and Ma Dai shouted out, \"Surrender!\"\n\nIn spite of the smallness of their following, Jiang Wei felt that Ma Dai acting with Wei Yan was a dangerous combination, and he wanted the advice of Yang Yi.\n\n\"Wei Yan is valorous, and he is having the help of Ma Dai. How shall we repel them?\" asked Jiang Wei.\n\nYang Yi replied, \"Just before his death, the Prime Minister gave me a silken bag, which he said I was to open when Wei Yan's mutiny reached a critical point. It contains a plan to rid ourselves of this traitor, and it seems that now is the moment to see what should be done.\"\n\nSo Yang Yi opened the bag and drew forth the letter it held. On the cover he read:\n\n\"To be opened when Wei Yan is actually arrayed opposite you.\"\n\nSaid Jiang Wei, \"As this has all been arranged for, I had better go out, and when his line is formed then you can come forth.\"\n\nJiang Wei donned his armor, took his spear, and rode out, with three thousand troops. They marched out of the city gates with the drums beating. The array completed, Jiang Wei took his place under the great standard and opened with a volley of abuse.\n\n\"Rebel Wei Yan, the late Prime Minister never harmed you. Why have you turned traitor?\"\n\nWei Yan reined up, lowered his sword and replied, \"Friend Jiang Wei, this is no concern of yours. Tell Yang Yi to come.\"\n\nNow Yang Yi was also beneath the standard, but hidden. He opened the letter, and the words therein seemed to please him, for he rode forward blithely.\n\nPresently he reined in, pointed to Wei Yan and said, \"The Prime Minister foresaw your mutiny and bade me be on my guard. Now if you are able thrice to shout, 'Who dares kill me?', then you will be a real hero, and I will yield to you the whole of Hanzhong.\"\n\nWei Yan laughed.\n\n\"Listen, you old fool! While Zhuge Liang lived I feared him somewhat. But he is dead and no one dares stand before me. I will not only shout the words thrice, but a myriad times. Why not?\"\n\nWei Yan raised his sword, shook his bridle, and shouted, \"Who dares kill me?\"\n\nHe never finished. Behind him someone shouted savagely, \"I dare!\" and at the same moment Wei Yan fell dead, cut down by Ma Dai.\n\nThis was the denouement, and was the secret entrusted to Ma Dai just before Zhuge Liang's death. Wei Yan was to be made to shout these words and slain when he least expected it. Yang Yi knew what was to happen, as it was written in the letter in the silken bag. A poem says:\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang foresaw when freed from his restraint\n\n\u2003Wei Yan would traitor prove. The silken bag\n\n\u2003Contained the plan for his undoing. We see\n\n\u2003How it succeeded when the moment came.\n\nSo before Dong Yun had reached Nanzheng, Wei Yan was dead. Ma Dai joined his army to Jiang Wei's, and Yang Yi wrote another memorial, which he sent to the Latter Ruler.\n\nThe Latter Ruler issued an edict:\n\n\"Wei Yan had paid the penalty of his crime. He should be honorably buried in consideration of his former services.\"\n\nThen Yang Yi continued his journey and in due time arrived at Chengdu with the coffin of the late Prime Minister. The Latter Ruler led out a large cavalcade of officers to meet the body at a point seven miles from the walls, and he lifted up his voice and wailed for the dead, and with him wailed all the officers and the common people, so that the sound of mourning filled the whole earth.\n\nBy royal command the body was borne into the city to the palace of the Prime Minister, and his son Zhuge Zhan was chief mourner.\n\nWhen next the Latter Ruler held a court, Yang Yi bound himself, and confessed he had been in fault.\n\nThe Latter Ruler bade them loose his bonds and said, \"Noble Sir, the coffin would never have reached home but for you. You carried out the orders of the late Prime Minister, whereby Wei Yan was destroyed and all was made secure. This was all your doing.\"\n\nYang Yi was promoted to be the Instructor of the Center Army, and Ma Dai was rewarded with the rank that Wei Yan had forfeited.\n\nYang Yi presented Zhuge Liang's testament, which the Latter Ruler read, weeping. By a special edict it was commanded that soothsayers should cast lots and select the site for the tomb of the great servant of the state.\n\nThen Fei Yi said to the Latter Ruler, \"When nearing his end, the Prime Minister commanded that he should be buried on Dingjun Mountain, in open ground, without sacrifice or monument.\"\n\nThis wish was respected, and they chose a propitious day in the tenth month for the interment, and the Latter Ruler followed in the funeral procession to the grave on the Dingjun Mountain. The posthumous title conferred upon the late Prime Minister was Zhuge Liang the Loyally Martial, and a temple was built in Mianyang wherein were offered sacrifices at the four seasons.\n\nThe poet Du Fu wrote a poem:\n\n\u2003To Zhuge Liang stands a great memorial hall,\n\n\u2003In cypress shade, outside the Chengdu Wall,\n\n\u2003The steps thereto are bright with new grass springing,\n\n\u2003Hiding among the branches orioles are singing.\n\n\u2003The people and army asked for his wisdoms,\n\n\u2003Upon the throne, built for the father, sat the son.\n\n\u2003But ere was compassed all his plans conceived\n\n\u2003He died; and heroes since for him have ever grieved.\n\n\u2003Another poem by the same author says:\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang's fair fame stands clear to all the world;\n\n\u2003Among king's ministers he surely takes\n\n\u2003Exalted rank; for when the empire cleft\n\n\u2003In three, a kingdom for his lord he won\n\n\u2003By subtle craft. Throughout all time he stands\n\n\u2003A shining figure, clear against the sky.\n\n\u2003Akin was he to famous Yi Yin, Lu Wang,\n\n\u2003Yet stands with chiefs, like Xiao He, Cao Shen;\n\n\u2003The fates forbade that Han should be restored,\n\n\u2003War-worn and weary, yet he steadfast stood.\n\nEvil tidings came to the Latter Ruler on his return to his capital. He heard that Quan Zong had marched out with a large army from Wu and camped at the entrance to Baqiu. No one knew the object of this expedition.\n\n\"Here is Wu breaking their oath just as the Prime Minister has died,\" cried the Latter Ruler. \"What can we do?\"\n\nThen said Jiang Wan, \"My advice is to send Wang Ping and Zhang Ni to camp at Baidicheng as a measure of precaution, while you send an envoy to Wu to announce the death and period of mourning. He can there observe the signs of the times.\"\n\n\"The envoy must have a ready tongue,\" said the Latter Ruler.\n\nOne stepped from the ranks of courtiers and offered himself. He was Zong Yu, a man of Nanyang, a Military Adviser. So he was appointed as envoy with the commissions of announcing the death of the Prime Minister and observing the conditions.\n\nZong Yu set out for Capital Jianye, arrived and was taken in to the Emperor's presence. When the ceremony of introduction was over and the envoy looked about him, he saw that all were dressed in mourning.\n\nBut Sun Quan's countenance wore a look of anger, and he said, \"Wu and Shu are one house. Why has your master increased the guard at Baidicheng?\"\n\nZong Yu replied, \"It seemed as necessary for the west to increase the garrison there as for the east to have a force at Baqiu. Neither is worth asking about.\"\n\n\"As an envoy you seem no way inferior to Deng Zhi,\" said Sun Quan, smiling.\n\nSun Quan continued, \"When I heard that your Prime Minister Zhuge Liang had gone to heaven, I wept daily and ordered my officers to wear mourning. I feared that Wei might take the occasion to attack Shu, and so I increased the garrison at Baqiu by ten thousand troops that I might be able to help you in case of need. That was my sole reason.\"\n\nZong Yu bowed and thanked the Ruler of Wu.\n\n\"I would not go back upon the pledge between us,\" said Sun Quan.\n\nZong Yu said, \"I have been sent to inform you of the mourning for the late Prime Minister.\"\n\nSun Quan took up a gold-tipped arrow and snapped it in twain, saying, \"If I betray my oath, may my posterity be cut off!\"\n\nThen the Ruler of Wu dispatched an envoy with incense and silk and other gifts to be offered in sacrifice to the dead in the land of Shu.\n\nZong Yu and the envoy took leave of the Ruler of Wu and journeyed to Chengdu, where they went to the Latter Ruler.\n\nZong Yu made a memorial, saying, \"The Ruler of Wu has wept for our Prime Minister and put his court into mourning. The increased garrison at Baqiu is intended to safeguard us from Wei, lest they take the occasion of a public sorrow to attack. And in token of his pledge, the Ruler of Wu broke an arrow in twain.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler was pleased and rewarded Zong Yu. Moreover, the envoy of Wu was generously treated.\n\nAccording to the advice in Zhuge Liang's testament, the Latter Ruler made Jiang Wan Prime Minister and Chair of the Secretariat, while Fei Yi became Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Chair of the Secretariat. Wu Yi was made Commander of the Flying Cavalry and Commander of Hanzhong; Jiang Wei, General Who Upholds the Han, Lord of Pingxiang, Commander-in-Chief, and Commander of Hanzhong.\n\nNow as Yang Yi was senior in service to Jiang Wan, who had thus been promoted over his head, and as he considered his services had been inadequately rewarded, he was discontented and spoke resentfully.\n\nHe said to Fei Yi, \"If when the Prime Minister died I had gone over to Wei, with the whole army, I should not have been thus left out in the cold.\"\n\nFei Yi secretly reported this speech to the Latter Ruler, who was angered and threw Yang Yi into prison.\n\nThe Latter Ruler intended putting him to death, but Jiang Wan interceded, saying, \"Yang Yi had followed the late Prime Minister in many campaigns and had had many good services. Your Majesty should not put him to death, but take away his rank.\"\n\nAnd Yang Yi was reprieved. However, he was degraded and sent into Hanjia in Hanzhong, where he committed suicide through shame.\n\nIn the thirteenth year of Beginning Prosperity of Shu, the same year being the third year of Green Dragon of Wei, and the fourth year of Domestic Peace of Wu (AD 235), there were no military expeditions. In Wei, Sima Yi was created Grand Commander, with command over all the forces of Wei, and he departed for Luoyang.\n\nThe Ruler of Wei, at Xuchang, made preparations to build himself a palace complex. At Luoyang he also built the Hall of Sunrise, the Hall of the Firmament, and the Hall of Complete Patterns, all lofty and of beautiful designs. He also raised a Hall of Beautiful Passions, a Green Flageolet Tower, and a Phoenix Tower. He also dug a Nine Dragons Pool. Over all these works he placed Doctorate Scholar Ma Jun as superintendent of their building.\n\nNothing was spared that would contribute to the beauty of these buildings. The beams were carved, the rafters were painted, the walls were of golden bricks, and the roofs of green tiles. They glittered and glowed in the sunlight. The most cunning craftspeople in the world were sought, many thousands of them, and myriads of ordinary workers labored day and night on these works for the Emperor's glory and pleasure. But the strength of the people was spent in this toil, and they cried aloud and complained unceasingly.\n\nMoreover, the Ruler of Wei issued an edict to carry earth and bring trees for the Fragrant Forest Park, and he employed officers of state in these labors, carrying earth and transporting trees.\n\nThe Minister of Works, Dong Xun, ventured upon a remonstrance, sending a memorial:\n\n\"From the beginning of Rebuilt Tranquillity Era, a generation ago, wars have been continuous and destruction rife. Those who have escaped death are few, and these are old and weak. Now indeed it may be that the palaces are too small and enlargement is desired, but would it not be more fitting to choose the building season so as not to interfere with cultivation? Your Majesty has always valued many honorable officers, letting them wear beautiful headdresses, clad in handsome robes, and riding in decorated chariots to distinguish them from the common people. Now these officers are being made to carry timber and bear earth, to sweat and soil their feet. To destroy the glory of the state in order to raise a useless edifice is indescribable folly. Confucius the Teacher said that princes should treat ministers with polite consideration, and ministers should serve princes with loyalty. Without loyalty, without propriety, can a state endure?\n\n\"I recognize that these words of mine mean death, but I am of no value, a mere bullock's hair, and my life is of no importance, as my death would be no loss. I write with tears, bidding the world farewell.\n\n\"Thy servant has eight sons, who will be a burden to Your Majesty after his death. I cannot say with what trepidation I await my fate.\"\n\n\"Has the man no fear of death?\" said Cao Rui, greatly angered.\n\nThe courtiers requested the Emperor to put Dong Xun to death, but Cao Rui remembered his rectitude and proven loyalty and only degraded him, adding a warning to put to death those who would remonstrate.\n\nA certain Zhang Mao, in the service of the Heir Apparent, also ventured upon a remonstrance. Cao Rui put him to death immediately.\n\nThen Cao Rui summoned his Master of Works, Ma Jun, and said, \"I have built high terraces and lofty towers with intent to hold intercourse with gods and goddesses, that I may obtain from them the elixir of life.\"\n\nThen Ma Jun replied, \"Of the four and twenty emperors of the line of Latter Han, only Emperor Wu enjoyed the throne very long and really attained to old age. That was because he drank of the essence of the brilliancy of the sun and the brightness of the moon. In the Palace at Changan is the Terrace of Cypress Beams, upon which stands the bronze figure of a man holding up a Dew Bowl, whereinto distills, in the third watch of the night, the vapor from the great constellation of the north. This liquid is called Celestial Elixir, or Sweet Dew. If mingled with powdered jade and swallowed, it restores youth to the aged.\"\n\n\"Take workers to Changan immediately and bring hither the bronze figure to set up in the Fragrant Forest Park,\" said the Ruler of Wei.\n\nAs the Ruler of Wei commanded, they took ten thousand workers to Changan, and they built a scaffold around the figure. Then they attached ropes to haul it down. The terrace being two hundred feet high and the pedestal ten cubits in circumference, Ma Jun bade his laborers first detach the bronze image. They did so and brought it down. Its eyes were moist as with tears, and the workers were affrighted.\n\nThen suddenly beside the terrace sprang up a whirlwind, with dust and pebbles flying thick as a shower of rain, and there was a tempestuous roar as of an earthquake. Down fell the pedestal, and the platform crumbled, crushing a thousand people to death.\n\nHowever, the bronze figure and the golden bowl were conveyed to Luoyang and presented to the Emperor.\n\n\"Where is the pedestal?\" asked the Ruler of Wei.\n\n\"It is too heavy to transport,\" replied the Ma Jun. \"It weighs a million and half of pounds.\"\n\nWherefore the Ruler of Wei ordered the pillar to be broken up and the metal brought, and from this he caused to be cast two figures which he named Saints of Wengzhong. They were placed outside the gate of the Board of War. A pair of dragons and a pair of phoenixes were also cast, the dragons forty feet high and the birds thirty. These were placed in front of the Hall of Audience.\n\nMoreover, in the Fragrant Forest Park the Ruler of Wei planted wonderful flowers and rare trees, and he also established a menagerie of strange animals.\n\nYang Fu, Assistant Imperial Guardian, remonstrated with the Emperor on these extravagances in a memorial:\n\n\"As is well known, King Yao preferred his humble thatched cottage, and all the world enjoyed tranquillity; King Yu contented himself with a small modest palace, and all the empire rejoiced. In the days of Yin and Zhou Dynasties the hall of the ruler stood three feet above the usual height and its area was nine mats. The sage emperors and illustrious kings had no decorated chambers in lofty palaces built with the wealth, and by the strength, of a worn-out and despoiled people.\n\n\"Emperor Jie built a jade chamber and elephant stables; Emperor Zhou erected a surpassingly beautiful palace complex and a Deer Terrace. But these lost the empire. King Ling of Chu built beautiful palaces, but he came to an evil end. The First Emperor of Qin made the Epang Palace, but calamity fell upon his son, for the empire rebelled and his house was exterminated in the second generation.\n\n\"All those who have failed to consider the means of the people and given way to sensuous pleasures have perished. Your Majesty has the examples of Kings Yao, Yu, Shun, and Tang on the one hand, and the warnings of Kings Jie, Zhou, Ling, and the First Emperor on the other. To seek only self-indulgence and think only of fine palaces will surely end in calamity.\n\n\"The prince is the first and the head; his ministers are his limbs; they live or die together, they are involved in the same destruction. Though I am timorous, yet if I dared forget my duty, or failed to speak firmly, I should be unable to move Your Majesty. Now I have prepared my coffin and bathed my body ready for the most condign punishment.\"\n\nBut the Ruler of Wei disregarded this memorial and only urged on the rapid completion of the terrace. Thereon he set up the bronze figure with the golden bowl. Moreover, he sent forth a command to select the most beautiful women in the empire for his garden of delight. Many memorials were presented, but the Ruler of Wei heeded them not.\n\nNow the Consort of the Ruler of Wei was of the Mao family of Henei. In earlier days, when he was a prince, he had loved her exceedingly, and when he succeeded to the Throne she became Empress Mao. Later he favored Lady Guo, and his Consort Mao was neglected. Lady Guo was beautiful and clever, and the Ruler of Wei delighted in her. He neglected state affairs for her society and often spent a month at a time in retirement with her. Every day there was some new gaiety.\n\nIn the spring, when the plants in the Fragrant Forest Park were in flower, the Ruler of Wei and Lady Guo came to the garden to enjoy them and to feast.\n\n\"Why not invite the Empress?\" asked Lady Guo.\n\n\"If she came, nothing would pass my lips,\" replied the Ruler of Wei.\n\nHe gave orders that his Consort should be kept in ignorance of these rejoicings.\n\nBut when a month passed without the appearance of the Emperor, Empress Mao and her ladies went to the Blue Flower Pavilion to entertain themselves. Hearing music, she asked who was providing it, and they told her that the Emperor and Lady Guo were feasting in the grounds.\n\nThat day Empress Mao returned to her palace filled with sorrow. Next day she went out in her carriage and saw the Emperor on a verandah.\n\n\"Yesterday Your Majesty was walking in the north garden, and you had plenty of music too,\" said she, smiling.\n\nCao Rui was wroth and sent for all the attendants.\n\nHe upbraided them with disobedience, saying, \"I had forbidden you to tell things to the Empress, and you disobeyed my command.\"\n\nWith this he put them all to death. Empress Mao feared and returned to her palace.\n\nThen an edict appeared forcing Empress Mao to commit suicide and raising Lady Guo to be Empress in her place. And no officer dared to utter a remonstrance.\n\nJust after this the Imperial Protector of Youzhou, Guanqiu Jian, sent in a memorial, saying: \"Gongsun Yuan of Liaodong has risen in revolt, assumed the style of Prince of Yan, and adopted a reign title of Extending Han. Gongsun Yuan has built himself a Palace, established an administration of his own, and is disturbing the whole north with plundering.\"\n\nA council met to consider this memorial.\n\n\u2003Within, officials labor at ignoble tasks, and mean,\n\n\u2003Without, the glint of weapons on the border may be seen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "Suffering Defeat, Gongsun Yuan Meets His Death; Pretending Illness, Sima Yi Deceives Cao Shuang.\n\nThis Gongsun Yuan was a grandson of Gongsun Du the Warlike, and a son of Gongsun Kang in Liaodong. In the twelfth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity, when Cao Cao was pursuing Yuan Xi and Yuan Shang, who had fled eastward, Gongsun Kang had captured them, beheaded them, and sent their heads to Cao Cao. For this service Gongsun Kang received the title of Lord of Xiangping. After Gongsun Kang's death, as his two sons \u2014 Gongsun Huang and Gongsun Yuan \u2014 were young, his brother Gongsun Gong took the chiefship; and Cao Pi, beside confirming the lordship, gave him the rank of General of the Flying Cavalry.\n\nIn the second year of Calm Peace (AD 228), the second son, Gongsun Yuan, being now grown up, well-educated and trained in military exercises, obstinate and fond of fighting, took away his uncle's power and ruled the heritage of his father. Cao Rui conferred upon him the title of General Who Wields Ferocity, and made him Governor of Liaodong.\n\nThen the Ruler of Wu, Sun Quan, anxious to secure Gongsun Yuan's support, sent two envoys, Zhang Mi and Xu Yan, with gifts of gold and gems and pearls and offered Gongsun Yuan the title of Prince of Yan. Fearing that the Middle Land would resent any dallying with Wu, Gongsun Yuan slew the Wu envoys and sent the heads to the Ruler of Wei. For this proof of fealty, Cao Rui gave him the title of Grand General and the Dukedom of Yuelang.\n\nHowever, Gongsun Yuan was dissatisfied, and his thoughts turned toward independence. He took council with his officers and proposed to style himself Prince of Yan and to adopt a reign-title of Extending Han, the first year.\n\nOne general, Jia Fan, opposed this and said, \"My lord, the central authorities have treated you well and honored you. I fear that Sima Yi is too skillful a leader for rebellion to succeed. You see even Zhuge Liang cannot defeat him. How much less can you?\"\n\nGongsun Yuan's reply was to condemn Jia Fan to death. However, Adviser Lun Zhi ventured upon further remonstrance.\n\n\"Jia Fan spoke well. The Sacred One says that extraordinary phenomena presage the destruction of a state. Now this time portents are not wanting, and wonders have been seen. A dog, dressed in red and wearing a turban, went up to the roof and walking like a man. Moreover, while a certain person living in a village south of the city was cooking his food, he saw a child in the pan, boiled to death. A great cave opened near the market place and threw out a large, fleshy body completely human save that it lacked limbs. Swords could not cut it; arrows could not penetrate it. No one knew what to call it; and when they consulted the soothsayers, they obtained the reply, 'Incomplete shape, silent mouth: A state is near destruction.' These prodigies are all inauspicious. Flee from evil and strive to walk in fair fortune's way. Make no move without most careful thought.\"\n\nThis second remonstrance enraged Gongsun Yuan still more, and he sent Lun Zhi to death with Jia Fan. Both were executed in the public place.\n\nGongsun Yuan then prepared to make a bid for empire. He raised an army of one hundred fifty thousand, appointed Bei Yan as Commander, and Yang Zuo as Leader of the Van. This army set out for the Middle Land.\n\nRuler of Wei was alarmed at the report of this rising, and sent for Sima Yi.\n\nSima Yi was not greatly perturbed, and said, \"My forty thousand troops will be equal to the task.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei replied, \"The task is heavy, for your troops are few and the road is long.\"\n\n\"The strength of an army is not in numbers, but in strategy. Aided by Your Majesty's good fortune, I shall certainly be able to bring this fellow Gongsun Yuan a captive to your feet.\"\n\n\"What do you think will be the rebel's plan?\" asked the Ruler of Wei.\n\n\"His high plan would be flight before our army can arrive; his middle plan would be defending his position in Liaodong; his low plan would be to try to hold Xiangping. In the last case I shall certainly capture him.\"\n\n\"How long will the expedition take?\"\n\n\"We have to cover one thousand five hundred miles which will take a hundred days. Attack will consume another hundred. The return will need a hundred, and with sixty days to rest we shall take a year.\"\n\n\"Suppose during that year we are attacked by Wu or Shu.\"\n\n\"My plans provide for that. Your Majesty need have no anxiety.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei being thus reassured, formally ordered Sima Yi to undertake the expedition.\n\nHu Zun was appointed to lead the van. Hu Zun went and camped in Liaodong. The scouts hastened to tell Gongsun Yuan, who sent Bei Yan and Yang Zuo to camp at Liaosui with eighty thousand troops. They surrounded their camp with a wall seven miles in circumference and placed thorny barriers outside the rampart. It seemed very secure.\n\nHu Zun saw these preparations and sent to tell his chief. Sima Yi smiled.\n\n\"So the rebel does not want to fight, but thinks to weary my soldiers,\" said Sima Yi. \"Now I am disposed to think that most of his army is within that wall, so that his stronghold is empty and undefended. I will make a dash at Xiangping. He will have to go to its rescue, and I will smite him on the way. I should score a great success.\"\n\nSo Sima Yi hastened to Xiangping along unfrequented ways.\n\nMeanwhile Bei Yan and Yang Zuo, the two generals within the walled camp, discussed their plans.\n\nYang Zuo said, \"When the Wei army comes near, we will not fight. They will have come a long march and their supplies will be short, so that they cannot hold out long. When they retreat, we shall find our opportunity. These were the tactics Sima Yi used against Zhuge Liang on River Wei, and Zhuge Liang died before the end of the expedition. We will try similar means.\"\n\nPresently the scouts reported that the Wei army had marched south.\n\nBei Yan at once saw the danger and said, \"They are going to attack Xiangping, which they know has few troops. If that base be lost, this position is useless.\"\n\nSo they broke up their camp and followed the enemy.\n\nWhen Sima Yi heard it, he rejoiced, saying, \"Now they will fall into the snare I have laid for them.\"\n\nSima Yi sent Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Wei to take up position on the River Ji. They were to attack if the army of Liaodong came near them. They had not long to wait. As soon as Bei Yan and his army approached, Xiahou Ba and Xiahou Wei exploded a bomb, beat the drums, waved their flags, and came out, one force on each side. Bei Yan and Yang Zuo made a fight but soon fled to Shoushan Mountain, where they fell in with Gongsun Yuan and joined the main army. Then they turned to give battle to the Wei army.\n\nBei Yan rode to the front and reviled the enemy, shouting, \"You rebels! Do not try trickery, but dare you fight in the open?\"\n\nXiahou Ba rode out to accept the challenge, and after a few bouts Bei Yan fell. In the confusion caused by the death of their leader, Xiahou Ba urged on his troops and drove Gongsun Yuan back to Xiangping, and Gongsun Yuan took refuge in the city.\n\nThe city was surrounded. It was autumn, and the rain fell day after day without ceasing. At the end of the month, the plain was under three feet of water, so that the grain boats sailed straight from River Ji to the city walls. The besiegers suffered much from the floods.\n\nPei Jing, Commander of the Left, went to Sima Yi and asked, \"The rain keeps pouring down, and tents cannot be pitched on mud. May the army be moved to camp on the higher ground?\"\n\nBut Sima Yi flouted the suggestion.\n\n\"How can the army move away just when success is in sight? The rebels will be conquered now any day. If any other speaks about drawing off, he will be put to death.\"\n\nPei Jing agreed and went away.\n\nSoon after, Chou Lian, Commander of the Right, came to see his chief and repeated the suggestion, saying, \"The soldiers are suffering from the rains. O Commander, let them camp on the hills.\"\n\nSima Yi got angry and said, \"I have sent the command, and you are against it!\"\n\nAnd he ordered Chou Lian to be executed. His head was suspended at the camp gate as a warning to others. The soldiers dared to complain any more.\n\nThen Sima Yi ordered the south camp to be abandoned, and the army marched seven miles south, thus allowing the soldiers and people in the city to come out to gather fuel and pasture their cattle.\n\nThe attacking army could not understand this move, and General Chen Qun spoke about it.\n\n\"When you besieged Shangyong, O Commander, you attacked all round at eight points, and the city fell in eight days. Meng Da was taken, and you won a great success. Now your forty thousand troops have borne their armors many days over long marches and you do not press the attack, but keep them in the mud and mire and let the enemy gather supplies and feed their cattle. I do not know what your intention may be.\"\n\n\"Sir,\" replied the Commander-in-Chief, \"I see you are ignorant of war after all. You do not understand the different conditions. Meng Da then had ample supplies and few troops, while we were under exactly opposite conditions. So we had to attack vigorously and at once. The suddenness of the attack defeated the enemy. But look at present conditions. The Liaodong troops are many and we few; they are on the verge of starvation, and we are full fed. Why should we force the attack? Our line is to let the soldiers desert and capture the city. Therefore I leave a gate open and the road free that they may run away.\"\n\nChen Qun then understood and acknowledged the correctness of the strategy. Sima Yi sent to Luoyang to hasten supplies, that there should be no shortage.\n\nHowever, the war was not supported in the capital, for when the messenger arrived and the Ruler of Wei summoned his courtiers, they said, \"In Liaodong the rain has been continuous for a month, and the soldiers are in misery. Sima Yi ought to be recalled, and the war renewed at a more convenient season.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei replied, \"The leader of our army is most capable and best able to decide upon what should be done. He understands the conditions and is teeming with magnificent plans. He will certainly succeed. Wherefore, Noble Sirs, wait a few days and let us not be anxious about the result.\"\n\nSo Cao Rui heeded not the voice of the dissentients, but took care that provisions were sent.\n\nAfter a few days the rain ceased, and fine, clear weather followed. That night Sima Yi went out of his tent that he might study the sky. Suddenly he saw a very large and bright star start from a point over Shoushan Mountain and travel over toward Xiangping, where it fell. The soldiers were rather frightened at this apparition, but the leader rejoiced.\n\n\"Five days from now Gongsun Yuan will be slain where that star fell,\" said he. \"Therefore attack with vigor.\"\n\nThey opened the attack the next morning at dawn, throwing up banks and sapping the walls, setting up stone-throwing machines and rearing ladders. When night came the attack did not cease. Arrows fell in the city like pelting rain.\n\nWithin the city, grain began to run short, and soon there was none. They slaughtered bullocks and horses for food. The soldiers began to be mutinous and no longer fought with any spirit. There was talk of slaying Gongsun Yuan and yielding the city.\n\nGongsun Yuan was disheartened and frightened, and decided to sue for peace. He sent his Prime Minister Wang Jian and Imperial Censor Liu Fei out of the city to beg Sima Yi to allow him to submit. These two had to be let down from the walls by ropes, as no other means of exit were possible.\n\nWang Jian and Liu Fei found their way to Sima Yi and said, \"We pray you, O Commander, retire seven miles and allow the officers to come forth and surrender.\"\n\n\"Why did not Gongsun Yuan himself come?\" said Sima Yi. \"He is rude.\"\n\nHe put the two envoys to death and sent their heads back into the city.\n\nGongsun Yuan was still more alarmed, but he resolved to make one more attempt. This time he sent High Counselor Wei Yin as his envoy. Sima Yi received this messenger sitting in state in his tent with his officers standing right and left. Wei Yin approached on his knees, and when he reached the door of the tent recited his petition.\n\n\"I pray you, O Commander, turn your thunderous wrath from us. We will send the son of our leader, Gongsun Xiu, the Heir Apparent, as hostage and all the officers shall appear before you bound with cords.\"\n\nSima Yi replied, \"There are five possible operations for any army. If you can fight, fight; if you cannot fight, defend; if you cannot defend, flee; if you cannot flee, surrender; if you cannot surrender, die. These five courses are open to you, and a hostage would be useless. Now return and tell your master.\"\n\nWei Yin put his hands over his head and fled like a rat. He went into the city and related what had happened to him.\n\nThe Gongsuns, father and son, resolved to flee. They chose a thousand of mounted troops, and in the dead of night opened the south gate and got out. They took the road to the east and were rejoiced to find it clear.\n\nAll went well for a distance of three miles, when a bomb exploded. This was followed by a roll of drums and the blare of trumpets; and a cohort stood in the way. The leader was Sima Yi, supported by his two sons \u2014 Sima Shi and Sima Zhao.\n\n\"Stop, O rebel!\" cried the sons.\n\nBut Gongsun Yuan lashed his steed to a gallop. Then Hu Zun, Xiahou Ba, Xiahou Wei, Zhang Hu, and Yue Chen, with their troops, came up and quickly surrounded them so that they were helpless. Gongsun Yuan saw that escape was impossible, so he came with his son, dismounted, and offered surrender.\n\nSima Yi hardly looked at the two men, but he turned to his officers and said, \"That night the star fell to this land, and today, five days later, the omen becomes true.\"\n\nThey all felicitated him, saying, \"The Commander is superhuman!\"\n\nGongsun Yuan and Gongsun Xiu were slain where they stood. Then Sima Yi turned to resume the siege of Xiangping; but before he had reached the walls, Hu Zun's army had entered. Sima Yi went in and was received with great respect, the people burning incense as he passed. He went to the residence, and then the whole of the Gongsun Yuan's clan, and all who had assisted in his rising, were beheaded. They counted heads to the number of seventy.\n\nThe city taken and the rebels destroyed, Sima Yi issued a proclamation in order to restore confidence among the people.\n\nCertain persons told him, \"Jia Fan and Lun Zhi had been against the revolt and had therefore suffered death.\"\n\nSo Sima Yi honored their tombs and conferred ranks upon their children. The contents of the treasury were distributed among the soldiers as rewards, and then the army marched back to Luoyang.\n\nOne night the Ruler of Wei was suddenly awakened by a chill blast that extinguished all the lights, but he saw the form of the late Empress Mao, with a score or two of other Palace attendants, coming toward the bed whereon he lay, and as they approached they demanded his life. He was very frightened and fell ill so that he was like to die.\n\nSo the two officers, Liu Fang and Sun Zu, were set over the privy council, and he summoned his brother Cao Yu, the Prince of Yan, to the capital to make him Regent Marshal to assist the Heir Apparent, Cao Fang. However, Cao Yu being modest and retiring by nature, declined these high offices and their responsibilities.\n\nThe Ruler of Wei then turned to his two confidants, Liu Fang and Sun Zu, inquired of them, saying, \"Who of the family is a suitable person to support the Heir Apparent?\"\n\nAs Liu Fang and Sun Zu had both received many favors from Cao Zhen, they replied, \"None is so fit as Cao Shuang, the son of Cao Zhen.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei approved their choice, and thus Cao Shuang became a great person.\n\nThen Liu Fang and Sun Zu memorialized, saying, \"As Cao Shuang has been chosen, Cao Yu, the Prince of Yan, should be ordered to leave the capital and return to Yan, his own place.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wei consented and issued an edict, which these two bore to Cao Yu, saying, \"The edict in the Emperor's own hand bids you return to your own domain at once, and you are not to return to court without a special command.\"\n\nCao Yu wept, but he left forthwith.\n\nThereupon Cao Shuang was created Regent Marshal and Court Administrator.\n\nBut the Ruler of Wei's illness advanced rapidly, and he sent messenger with authority ensign to call Sima Yi into the Palace. As soon as he arrived, he was led to the Emperor's chamber.\n\n\"I feared lest I should not see you again,\" said the Ruler of Wei. \"But now I can die content.\"\n\nThe general bowed and said, \"On the road they told me the sacred person was not perfectly well. I grieved that I had not wings to hasten hither. But I am happy in that I now behold the dragon countenance.\"\n\nThe heir, Cao Fang, was summoned to the Emperor's bedside and also Cao Shuang, Liu Fang, Sun Zu, and certain others.\n\nTaking Sima Yi by the hand, the dying Emperor said, \"When Liu Bei lay dying at Baidicheng, he confided his son, so soon to be an orphan, to the care of Zhuge Liang, who labored in this task to the very end and whose devotion only ceased with death. If such conduct is possible in the mere remnant of a dying dynasty continued in a small state, how much more may I hope for it in a great country! My son is only eight years of age, and incapable of sustaining the burden of rulership. Happily for him he has ample merit and experience around him in the persons of yourself and his relatives. He will never lack friends for my sake.\"\n\nTurning to the young prince, he continued, \"My friend Sima Yi is as myself, and you are to treat him with the same respect and deference.\"\n\nCao Rui bade Sima Yi lead the young prince forward. The boy threw his arms around Sima Yi's neck and clung to him.\n\n\"Never forget the affection he has just shown,\" said Cao Rui, weeping. And Sima Yi wept also.\n\nThe dying man swooned; although he could not speak, his hand still pointed to his son, and soon after he died. Cao Rui had reigned thirteen years and was thirty-six years of age. His death took place in the first month of the third year of Spectacular Beginning (AD 239).\n\nNo time was lost in enthroning the new Emperor, the supporters being Sima Yi and Cao Shuang. The new ruler's name was Cao Fang. However, he was Cao Rui's son only by adoption. He had been brought up in the Palace secretly, and no one knew his real origin.\n\nThe posthumous title of Emperor Rui the Knowledgeable was conferred upon the late ruler, and he was buried in the Gaoping Tombs. Empress Guo was given the title of Empress Dowager.\n\nThe new reign was styled Right Beginning Era, the first year (AD 239). Sima Yi and Cao Shuang conducted the government, and in all matters Cao Shuang treated Sima Yi with deference and took no steps without his knowledge.\n\nCao Shuang was no stranger at court. Cao Rui had respected him for his diligence and care and had been very fond of him, He had had the freedom of the Palace all his life. He had a host of five hundred clients and retainers. Among them were five wholly light and foppish. Their names were He Yan, Deng Yang, Li Sheng, Ding Mi, and Bi Gui. Deng Yang was a descendant of Commander Deng Yu of Han. Beside these five there was another named Huan Fan, Minister of Agriculture, a man of good parts, who had the sobriquet of \"Bag of Wisdom\". These six were Cao Shuang's most trusted companions and confidants.\n\nOne day He Yan said, \"My lord, you should not let your great powers slip into the hands of any other, or you will repent it.\"\n\nCao Shuang replied, \"Sima Yi as well as I received the late Emperor's sacred trust, and I mean to be true.\"\n\nHe Yan said, \"When your father and this Sima Yi were winning their victories in the west, your father suffered much from this man's temper, which ultimately brought about his death. Why do you not look into that?\"\n\nCao Shuang seemed suddenly to wake up.\n\nHaving entered into an intrigue with the majority of the officers about the court, then one day he presented to the Ruler of Wei a memorial, saying, \"Sima Yi should be promoted to the rank of Imperial Guardian for his great merits and services.\"\n\nThe promotion was made, and consequently Sima Yi, now a civil officer, let the whole military authority fall into the hands of Cao Shuang.\n\nHaving thus far succeeded, Cao Shuang next appointed his brothers to high military posts: Cao Xi as Commander of the Center Army; Cao Xun, Commander of the Imperial Guards; Cao Yan, Commander of the Cavalry. Each commanded three thousand of the Palace guards, with right to go in and out of the Palace at will. Moreover, three of his friends \u2014 He Yan, Deng Yang, and Ding Mi \u2014 were created Chairs of three boards; Bi Gui, Commander of Capital District; and Li Sheng, Governor of Henan. These five and their patron were close associates in all concerns of state.\n\nCao Shuang gathered about him larger and still larger numbers of supporters, till Sima Yi gave out that he was ill and remained in seclusion. His two sons also resigned their offices.\n\nCao Shuang and his friends now gave themselves up to dissipation, spending days and nights in drinking and music. In their dress and the furniture of their table they copied the Palace patterns. Tribute in the shape of jewels and curios went to the residence of Cao Shuang before it entered the Emperor's palace, and his complex swarmed with beautiful damsels. Minister Zhang Dang of the Inner Bureau toadied to Cao Shuang so far as to select eighteen of the late Emperor's handmaids and send them to the now powerful minister. Cao Shuang also chose for him a chorus of two score well-born ladies who were skilled in music and dancing. Cao Shuang also built for himself beautiful towers and pavilions and made to himself vessels of gold and silver, the work of the most expert craftspeople, whom he kept constantly employed.\n\nNow He Yan heard of Guan Lu's great skill in divination and sent to Pingyuan to invite him to discuss about the Book of Changes.\n\nWhen the soothsayer arrived, Deng Yang was of the company to meet him, and he said to Guan Lu, \"You call yourself a skillful diviner, but your speech does not resemble the language of the Book of Changes. How is that?\"\n\nGuan Lu replied, \"An interpreter does not use the language of the original.\"\n\nHe Yan laughed, saying, \"Certainly good words are not wearisome. But cast a lot for me, and tell me whether I shall ever arrive at the highest office or not, for I have dreamed repeatedly that many blue flies settled on my nose.\"\n\nGuan Lu replied, \"Gao Kai and Gao Yuan aided King Shun; Duke Zhou assisted the young Emperor Cheng of Zhou Dynasty; all these were kindly and modest and enjoyed great happiness. You, Sir, have come to high honors and wield great powers, but those who esteem you are few and those who fear you, many. You are not careful to walk in the way of good fortune. Now the nose is an eminence. If an eminence retains its characteristic, thereby it remains in honor. But is it not that blue flies gather to foul objects and the lofty fears a fall? I would wish you to give of your abundance for the good of the poor and avoid walking in the wrong road. Then indeed may you reach the highest dignity, and the blue flies will disperse.\"\n\n\"This is mere senile gossip,\" said Deng Yang.\n\n\"The gift of age is to see that which is yet to come; the gift of gossip is to perceive what is not said,\" replied Guan Lu. Thereupon he shook out his sleeves and went away.\n\n\"He is very mad, really,\" said his two hosts.\n\nGuan Lu went home. When he saw his uncle, Guan Lu gave him an account of the interview.\n\nHis uncle was alarmed at the probable consequences, and said, \"Why did you anger them? They are too powerful for you to offend.\"\n\n\"What is there to fear? I have been talking to two dead men.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Deng Yang's gait is that of one whose sinews are loosed from his bones, and his pulse is unsteady. When he would stand, he totters as a man without limbs. This is the aspect of a disembodied soul. He Yan looks as if his soul was about to quit its habitation. He is bloodless, and what should be solid in him is mere vapor. He looks like rotten wood. This is the aspect of a soul even now in the dark valley. Both these men will certainly soon die a violent death, and none need fear them.\"\n\nHis uncle left, cursing him for a madman.\n\nCao Shuang and his five friends were devoted to hunting and were often out of the city. Cao Xi, a brother of Cao Shuang, remonstrated with him about this and pointed out the dangers of such frequent absence on these excursions.\n\n\"You are in an exalted position and yet you are constantly being out hunting. If anyone took advantage of this to work you evil, you might have to be exceedingly regretful.\"\n\nCao Shuang only showed anger and replied, \"The whole military authority is in my hands, and what is there to fear?\"\n\nHuan Fan, Minister of Agriculture, also reasoned with him, but Cao Shuang would not listen.\n\nAbout this time the style of the reign was changed from Right Beginning, the tenth year, to Domestic Calm, the first year (AD 249).\n\nNow ever since Cao Shuang had enjoyed the monopoly of military authority, he had never heard the truth about the state of health of the man he had maneuvered out of power. But when the Ruler of Wei appointed Li Sheng to the Imperial Protectorship of Qingzhou, Cao Shuang bade Li Sheng go to take leave of Sima Yi, at the same time to find out the true state of his health.\n\nSo Li Sheng proceeded to the residence of the High Minister and was announced.\n\nSima Yi saw through the device at once and told his sons, saying, \"This is Cao Shuang's wish to find out my real condition.\"\n\nAnd he bade them play their parts in the scene he arranged, before the visitor was admitted.\n\nSima Yi threw aside his headdress, so letting his hair fall in disorder, stretched himself upon his couch, tumbled the bed ding into confusion, got a couple of servant girls to support him, and then told his servants to lead in the visitor.\n\nLi Sheng came in and went up to the sick man, saying, \"It is a long time since I have seen you, and I did not know you were so seriously ill. His Majesty is sending me to Qingzhou, and I have come to pay my respects to you and bid you farewell.\"\n\n\"Ah, Bingzhou is in the north; you will have to be very careful there,\" said Sima Yi feigning that he had not heard.\n\n\"I am going as Imperial Protector of Qingzhou, not Bingzhou,\" said Li Sheng.\n\n\"Oh, you have just come from Bingzhou.\"\n\n\"Qingzhou, in Huashan Mountains.\"\n\n\"Just back from Qingzhou, eh?\" said Sima Yi, smiling.\n\n\"How very ill the Imperial Guardian is!\" said Li Sheng to the servants.\n\n\"The Minister is deaf,\" said they.\n\n\"Give me paper and a pen,\" said Li Sheng.\n\nWriting materials were brought, when Li Sheng wrote what he wished to say and put it before his host.\n\n\"My illness has made me very deaf. Take care of yourself on the way,\" said Sima Yi.\n\nLooking up, he pointed to his mouth. One of the girls brought some broth and held the cup for him to drink. He put his lips to the cup, but spilled the broth all over his dress.\n\n\"I am very weak and ill,\" said he, \"and may die at any moment. My sons are but poor things, but you will instruct them. When you see the Regent Marshal, you will ask him to take care of them for me, will you not?\"\n\nAt this point Sima Yi fell back on the couch, panting, and Li Sheng took his leave.\n\nLi Sheng told Cao Shuang what he had seen, and Cao Shuang rejoiced, thinking his rival could not last long.\n\n\"If the old man died, I should not be the one to grieve,\" said Cao Shuang.\n\nBut no sooner had Li Sheng gone than Sima Yi rose from his couch and said to his sons, \"Li Sheng will take a full account of this to Cao Shuang, who will not fear me any more. But wait till Cao Shuang goes on his next hunting trip, and we will see what can be done.\"\n\nSoon after this, Cao Shuang proposed to the Ruler of Wei, Cao Fang, to visit the Gaoping Tombs where his father lay and perform the filial sacrifices in person. So they went, a goodly company of officers in the train of the imperial chariot, and Cao Shuang with all his brothers and his friends went with the guards.\n\nHuan Fan, Minister of Agriculture, entreated him to remain in the city for fear of plots and risings.\n\n\"Your Lordship are in charge of the capital security, and you and your brothers should not leave the city together. Suppose there were a revolt, what then?\"\n\nBut Cao Shuang asked angrily and rudely, \"Who would dare make trouble? Hold your wild tongue!\"\n\nAnd he went with the Emperor.\n\nHis departure rejoiced the heart of Sima Yi, who at once began quietly to muster his trusty friends and henchmen and put the finishing touches to the plot for the overthrow of his rival.\n\n\u2003Now terminates his forced inaction,\n\n\u2003He must destroy the hostile faction." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "The Ruler of Wei Hands Over The Power To Sima Yi; Jiang Wei Is Defeated At Ox Head Hills.\n\nSima Yi was very pleased to hear that Cao Shuang and his party were to follow the Ruler of Wei on a visit to the tombs combined with a hunt, for it meant that the whole enemy faction left the city. Accordingly, Cao Shuang and his three brothers Cao Xi, Cao Xun, Cao Yan, and his friends He Yan, Deng Yang, Ding Mi, Bi Gui, Li Sheng, and others left the capital with the Emperor.\n\nAs soon as they left, Sima Yi entered with his authority as Imperial Guardian, gave Gao Rou, Minister of the Interior, provisional command of the army and sent him to seize the camp of Cao Shuang. A similar command was given to Wang Guan, Supervisor of the Palace, to replace Cao Xi as Commander of the Center Army and to occupy his camp.\n\nHaving secured his position thus, Sima Yi and his supporters went to the palace of the Empress Dowager.\n\nThey said to her, \"Cao Shuang has betrayed the trust placed in him by the late Emperor and has ruined the government. His fault must be expiated.\"\n\nEmpress Guo replied, \"What can be done in the absence of the Son of Heaven?\"\n\n\"I have prepared plans for the destruction of these base ministers and will see to it that no trouble happens to yourself.\"\n\nThe Empress was much alarmed, but could only act as she was directed and agree. So two of Sima Yi's supporters, Commander Jiang Ji and High Minister Sima Fu, copied out the memorial he had prepared, and it was sent to the Ruler of Wei by the hand of an eunuch. Then the arsenals were seized.\n\nSoon the news of the rising came to the knowledge of the family of Cao Shuang, and his wife, Lady Liu, came out from the inner apartments and summoned Pan Ju, Commander of the Gates.\n\nShe inquired, \"The Master is outside, and Sima Yi is revolting: What does it mean?\"\n\n\"Your Ladyship need feel no alarm. Let me go and find out the truth,\" said Pan Ju.\n\nThereupon Pan Ju, at the head of a several dozen bowmen, went up on the wall and looked around. At that moment Sima Yi was crossing the court, and Pan Ju bade his men shoot. Sima Yi could not pass.\n\nBut Sun Qiao, one of his generals, said, \"You must not shoot at the Imperial Guardian; he is on public service.\"\n\nThrice Sun Qiao urged his chief not to let the men shoot, and so Pan Ju desisted. Sima Yi went across guarded by his son Sima Zhao. Then he went out of the city and camped on River Luo at the Floating Bridge.\n\nWhen the revolution began, one of Cao Shuang's officers, Lu Zhu by name, took counsel with Military Adviser Xin Chang.\n\n\"Now that this revolt has begun, what should we do?\"\n\n\"Let us go to the Emperor with what troops we have,\" replied Xin Chang.\n\n\"Perhaps the best course,\" replied Lu Zhu.\n\nAnd Xin Chang went into the inner chamber to get ready to start. There he met his sister, Xin Xianying, who asked the meaning of all this haste.\n\n\"His Majesty is out on a hunt, and Sima Yi has closed the gates of the city. This is rebellion.\"\n\n\"I do not think so. He only means to slay Cao Shuang, his rival,\" replied she.\n\n\"What will be the outcome of this?\" asked her brother.\n\n\"Cao Shuang is no match for Sima Yi,\" replied she.\n\n\"If Sima Yi asks us to join him, should we?\" asked Xin Chang.\n\nXin Xianying replied, \"You know what a true man should do. When a man is in danger, there is the greater need for sympathy. To be of Cao Shuang's people and desert him in an emergency is the greatest of evils.\"\n\nThis speech decided Xin Chang, who went with Lu Zhu. At the head of a some twenty horsemen, they forced the gate and got out of the city.\n\nWhen their escape was reported to Sima Yi, he thought that Huan Fan would surely try to follow their example, so he sent to call him. However, on the advice of his son, Huan Fan did not answer the summons, but decided to flee. He got into his carriage and drove hastily to the South Gate. But the gate was barred. The Commander of the Gate, Si Fan, was an old dependant of Huan Fan.\n\nHuan Fan pulled out from his sleeve a slip of bamboo and said, \"The Empress's command: Open the gate for me.\"\n\n\"Let me look,\" said Si Fan.\n\n\"What! How dare you, an old servant of mine, behave thus?\"\n\nSi Fan let Huan Fan pass.\n\nAs soon as he had got outside, Huan Fan shouted to Si Fan, \"Sima Yi has raised a revolt, and you had better follow me!\"\n\nSi Fan realized that he had made a mistake, and chase after Huan Fan, but failed to come up with him.\n\n\"So the 'Bag of Wisdom' has got away too. That is a pity, but what can we do?\" said Sima Yi, when they reported the escape.\n\n\"The poor horse always hankers after the old stable and manger. Cao Shuang would not know how to use Huan Fan,\" replied Jiang Ji.\n\nThen Sima Yi called to him Xu Yun and Chen Tai and said, \"Go you to Cao Shuang and say that I have no other intention than to take away the military power from him and his brothers.\"\n\nAs soon as they had left, he called Yin Damu and ordered Jiang Ji prepare a letter to be taken to Cao Shuang by Yin Damu.\n\nSaid Sima Yi, \"You are on good terms with the man and are the fittest person for this mission. Tell him that Jiang Ji and I are concerned solely with the military powers in the hands of himself and his brothers, as we have sworn pointing to River Luo.\"\n\nSo Yin Damu went his way.\n\nOut in the country Cao Shuang was enjoying the hunting, flying his falcons and coursing his hounds. Suddenly came the news of the rising in the city and the memorial against him. He almost fell out of the saddle when they told him. The eunuch handed in the memorial to the Ruler of Wei in the presence of Cao Shuang, who took it and opened it. A minister in attendance was ordered to read it. It said:\n\n\"Sima Yi, General Who Conquers the West and Imperial Guardian, with bowed head and trepidation, presents this memorial. On my return from the expedition into Liaodong, His late Majesty summoned Your Majesty, Cao Shuang, myself and certain others to his bedside, took me by the arm and impressed upon us all our duty in the years to be.\n\n\"Now Cao Shuang has betrayed the trust placed in him, has disordered the kingdom, usurped power at court, and seized upon power in the regions. He has appointed Zhang Dang, Administrator of the City, to control the court and spy upon Your Majesty. He is surely lying in wait to seize the empire. He has sown dissension in the royal family and injured his own flesh and blood. The whole land is in confusion, and people's hearts are full of fear. All this is opposed to the injunctions of His Late Majesty and his commands to me.\n\n\"Stupid and worthless as I am, yet I dare not forget the words of His Late Majesty. My colleagues, Jiang Ji and Sima Fu, agree that Cao Shuang is disloyal at heart, and great military powers should not be entrusted to him or his brothers.\n\n\"I have memorialized Her Majesty and obtained her authority to act.\n\n\"All military powers have been wrested from the hands of Cao Shuang, Cao Xi, and Cao Xun, leaving them only the simple title of lordships, so that hereafter they may be unable to hinder or control Your Majesty's actions. If there be any obstruction, the matter shall be summarily dealt with.\n\n\"Although in ill health, as a precautionary measure I have camped at the Floating Bridge, whence I write this.\"\n\nWhen they had made an end of reading, the Ruler of Wei turned to Cao Shuang and said, \"In the face of such words what mean you to do?\"\n\nCao Shuang was at a loss and turned to his younger brother, saying, \"What now?\"\n\nCao Xi replied, \"I remonstrated with you, but you were obstinate and listened not. So it has come to this. Sima Yi is false and cunning beyond measure. If Zhuge Liang could not get the better of him, could we hope to do so? I see nothing but to yield that haply we may live.\"\n\nJust at this moment arrived Adviser Xin Chang and Commander Lu Zhu. Cao Shuang asked what tidings they brought.\n\nThey replied, \"The city is completely and closely surrounded, Sima Yi is camped on the river at the Floating Bridge, and you cannot return. You must decide how to act at once.\"\n\nThen galloped up Huan Fan, who said, \"This is really rebellion. Why not request His Majesty to proceed to Xuchang till regional troops can arrive and deal with Sima Yi?\"\n\nCao Shuang replied, \"How can we go to another place when all our families are in the city?\"\n\nSaid Huan Fan, \"Even a fool in this crisis would think only of life. You have the Son of Heaven with you here and command all the forces of the empire. None would dare disobey you, and yet you march quietly to death.\"\n\nCao Shuang could not decide to strike a blow for safety; he did nothing but snivel.\n\nHuan Fan continued, \"We can reach Xuchang tonight. The stay in Xuchang would be but brief, and there are ample supplies for years. You have forces at your call at the South Pass. You hold the seal of Minister of War, and I have brought it with me. Everything is in your favor. Act! Act at once! Delay is death.\"\n\n\"Do not hurry me,\" said Cao Shuang. \"Let me think it over carefully.\"\n\nThen came Xu Yun and Chen Tai, the two messengers of Sima Yi, and said, \"The Imperial Guardian desires only to strip the military power of the Regent Marshal. If the Regent Marshal yields, he may return peacefully to the city.\"\n\nStill Cao Shuang hesitated.\n\nNext arrived Yin Damu, saying, \"The Imperial Guardian had sworn by River Luo to the singleness of his aim. Here is letter of Minister Jiang Ji. The Regent Marshal should relinquish the military power and return to the Palace in peace.\"\n\nWhen Cao Shuang seemed disposed to accept the assurance of Sima Yi, Huan Fan inveighed against it, saying, \"You are a dead man if you listen to the voice of these people!\"\n\nNight found Cao Shuang still vacillating. As twilight faded into darkness he stood, sword in hand, sad, sighing and weeping. And morning found him still trying to make up his mind.\n\nHuan Fan again urged him to decide upon some course.\n\n\"You have had a whole day and a whole night for reflection and must decide,\" said he.\n\n\"I will not fight; I will yield all; being a wealthy man is enough,\" said Cao Shuang, throwing down his sword.\n\nHuan Fan left the tent wailing.\n\n\"Cao Zhen might boast of his abilities, but his sons are mere cattle,\" said he, weeping copiously.\n\nThe two messengers, Xu Yun and Chen Tai, bade Cao Shuang offer his seal of office to Sima Yi, and it was brought.\n\nBut First Secretary Yang Zong clung to it and would not give it up, saying, \"Alas! That you, my lord, should resign your powers and make such a pitiful surrender. For surely you will not escape death in the eastern market place.\"\n\n\"The Imperial Guardian will surely keep faith with me,\" said Cao Shuang.\n\nThe seal was borne away, and Cao Shuang's generals and soldiers, thus released from the bonds of discipline, dispersed and the hosts melted away. When the Cao brothers reached the Floating Bridge, they were ordered to go to their dwellings, and they went. Their supporters were imprisoned to await the edicts of the Emperor.\n\nCao Shuang and his friends, so lately all-powerful, entered the city alone, without even a servant following.\n\nAs Huan Fan approached the bridge, Sima Yi, from horseback, pointed his whip disdainfully at him and said, \"What brought you to this?\"\n\nHuan Fan made no reply, but with head bent followed the others.\n\nIt was decided to request the Emperor to declare the hunt at an end and order a return to the city. Cao Shuang, Cao Xi, and Cao Xun were confined in their own house, the gate whereof was fastened with a huge lock, and soldiers were set to guard it round about. They were sad and anxious, not knowing what would be their fate.\n\nThen Cao Xi said, \"We have but little food left. Let us write and ask for supplies. If Sima Yi sends us food, we may be sure he does not intend harm.\"\n\nThey wrote, and a hundred carts of supplies were sent.\n\nThis cheered them, and Cao Shuang said, \"Our lives are safe in the hands of Sima Yi!\"\n\nSima Yi had Zhang Dang arrested and put to the question.\n\nZhang Dang said. \"I am not the only one who has tried to subvert the government. He Yan, Deng Yang, Li Sheng, Ding Mi, and Bi Gui are all involved in the plot.\"\n\nSo they were arrested and, when interrogated, confessed that a revolt had been arranged for the third month. Sima Yi had them locked in one long wooden collar.\n\nThe Commander of the Gates, Si Fan, testified: \"Huan Fan has imposed upon me with a pretended command from Her Majesty and so has escaped out of the city. Beside he has said the Imperial Guardian was a rebel.\"\n\nThen said Sima Yi, \"When a person maligns another and is false, the punishment for such a crime as he imputes falls upon his own head.\"\n\nHuan Fan and those with him were thrown into prison.\n\nPresently Cao Shuang and his brothers, all persons connected with them, and their clans were put to death in the market place. All the treasures of their houses was sent to the public treasury.\n\nNow there was a certain woman of the Xiahou family who had been wife to Wen Shu, a second cousin of Cao Shuang. Early left a childless widow, her father wished her to marry again. Lady Xiahou refused and cut off her ears as a pledge of constancy. However, when the Caos were all put to death, her father arranged another marriage for her; whereupon she cut off her nose. Her own people were chagrined at her obstinate determination.\n\n\"For whom are you keeping your vow?\" said they. \"Man is but as the light dust upon the tender grass, and what is the good of mutilating your body?\"\n\nThe woman replied, weeping, \"I have heard that honorable persons do not break a vow of chastity for the sake of wealth, and the hearts of righteous persons are constant unto death regardless of all losses. While the house of Cao enjoyed prosperity, I remained faithful; how much more should I be true now that it has fallen upon evil days? Can I act like a mere beast of the field?\"\n\nThe story of her devotion came to the ears of Sima Yi, who praised her conduct and allowed her to adopt a son to rear as her own and so continue the family.\n\nA poem says:\n\n\u2003What is a man to be mindful of?\n\n\u2003A grain of dust on a blade of grass;\n\n\u2003Such virtue as Lady Xiahou had\n\n\u2003Stands out sublime as the ages pass.\n\n\u2003This fair young wife of gentle mien\n\n\u2003Dared all to maintain her purpose high.\n\n\u2003What people though strong in the flush of life\n\n\u2003Have equaled her in constancy?\n\nAfter Cao Shuang had suffered death, Jiang Ji said to Sima Yi, \"Xin Chang and Lu Zhu and others who had been of his party had forced the gate and joined the rebels. Yang Zong had opposed the surrender of the seal of the late minister. They deserve punishment.\"\n\nHowever, no action was taken against them.\n\n\"They are righteous people who serves their master faithfully,\" said Sima Yi, and he even confirmed these men in their offices.\n\nXin Chang sighed, \"Had I not listened to the advice of my sister, I would have walked in the way of unrighteousness.\"\n\n\u2003A poet has praised his sister, Xin Xianying.\n\n\u2003\"You call him lord and take his pay,\n\n\u2003Then stand by him when danger nears.\"\n\n\u2003Thus to her brother spoke Xin Xianying,\n\n\u2003And won fair fame though endless years.\n\nA general amnesty was extended to all Cao Shuang's partisans, and no officer was removed or dismissed for having supported the late order of things. All were left in possession of their property, and soon all was tranquillity.\n\nHowever, it is to be noted that He Yan and Deng Yang met the unhappy end that Guan Lu had foretold for them.\n\n\u2003The seer Guan Lu was deeply read\n\n\u2003In all the lore of the ancient sages.\n\n\u2003Thus he could see events to come\n\n\u2003As clear as those of former ages.\n\n\u2003And he perceived the soul of He Yan,\n\n\u2003Already in the vale of gloom.\n\n\u2003And knew the outer shell of Deng Yang\n\n\u2003Was hastening to an early tomb.\n\nAfter his recovery of power, Sima Yi was made Prime Minister and received the Nine Dignities. Sima Yi refused these honors, but the Ruler of Wei insisted and would take no denial. His two sons were made assistants to their father, and all state affairs fell under the control of these three.\n\nHowever, Sima Yi remembered that one man, Xiahou Ba, a member of the Cao clan, still commanded at Yongzhou. In his position Xiahou Ba might be a real danger, and he must be removed. So an edict was issued calling him to Capital Luoyang to discuss affairs.\n\nUpon receiving this call, Xiahou Ba was shocked. But instead of obeying this call, he declared himself a rebel, and he had a force of three thousand troops to support him. As soon as this was known, Guo Huai marched to suppress the malcontent. The two armies were soon face to face, and Guo Huai went to the front and began to revile his opponent.\n\n\"How could you rebel against the ruling house, you who are of the same clan as our great founder, and you who have always been treated generously?\"\n\nXiahou Ba replied, \"My forefathers served the state right well, but who is this Sima Yi that he has put to death my kinspeople and would now destroy me? What is his aim, if it be not to usurp the Throne? If I can cut him off and so frustrate his design, I shall at least be no traitor to the state.\"\n\nGuo Huai rode forward to attack, and Xiahou Ba advanced to the encounter. They fought some ten bouts, and then Guo Huai turned and fled. But this was only a feint to lead on his enemy, for ere Xiahou Ba had gone far, he heard a shout behind him and turned to see Chen Tai about to attack. At the same moment Guo Huai turned again, and thus Xiahou Ba was between two fires. He could effect nothing, so he fled, losing many troops. Soon he decided that his only course was to flee to Hanzhong and to surrender to the Ruler of Shu.\n\nWherefore he went into Hanzhong to see if haply the Latter Ruler would accept his services. When Jiang Wei heard of his desire to surrender, he had doubts of Xiahou Ba's sincerity. However, after due inquiry Jiang Wei was satisfied and allowed the renegade from Wei to enter the city. After making his obeisance, Xiahou Ba, with many tears, told the story of his wrongs. Jiang Wei expressed sympathy.\n\nSaid Jiang Wei, \"In the ancient time Wei Zi left the court of King Zhou in disgust, and this act has assured to him everlasting honor. You may be able now to assist in the restoration of the House of Han, and you will then stand no whit inferior to any person of antiquity.\"\n\nA banquet was ordered, and while it was being prepared the host talked of affairs in Capital Luoyang.\n\nSaid Jiang Wei, \"The Simas are now most powerful and in a position to carry out any scheme they planned. Think you that they have any intentions against Shu?\"\n\n\"The old traitor has enough to do with his rebellion; he has no leisure to trouble about any outside matters. However, two other young leaders in Wei have lately come to the front, and if Sima Yi sent them against Shu and Wu, it might go ill with you both.\"\n\n\"And who are these two?\"\n\n\"One is named Zhong Hui, a man of Changsha. He is a son of the former Imperial Guardian Zhong Yao. As a mere boy he was noted for being bold and smart. His father used to take him and his brother, Zhong Yu, to court. Zhong Hui was seven and his brother a year older. Emperor Pi noticed one day that the elder boy was sweating and asked him the reason. Zhong Yu replied, 'Whenever I am frightened, the sweat pours out.' Then Emperor Pi said to the other boy, 'You do not seem frightened.' And Zhong Hui replied, 'I am so frightened that the sweat cannot come out.' The Emperor was discerned the extraordinary ability of the boy. A little later Zhong Hui was always studying books on war and tactics, and became an able strategist, so that he won admiration from both Sima Yi and Jiang Ji. Zhong Hui is being a secretary in the Palace.\n\n\"The second man is Deng Ai from Yiyang. He was left an orphan very early, but he was ambitious and enterprising. If he saw lofty mountains or wide marshes, he always looked for those points where soldiers might be stationed or depots of provisions made or combustibles laid. People ridiculed him, but Sima Yi saw there was much to admire and employed the young man on his staff. Deng Ai had an impediment in his speech, so that he called himself 'Deng-eng-eng-Ai', and Sima Yi used to make fun of him and asked him one day how many there were of him since he called himself 'Deng-eng-eng-Ai'. Deng Ai at once replied, 'There is only one phoenix when they say 'O Phoenix! O Phoenix!\" This ready repartee shows the quickness of his intellect, and you may well be on your guard against him and the other, for they are to be feared.\"\n\n\"I do not think them worth even talking about,\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\nJiang Wei took Xiahou Ba to Chengdu and presented him to the Latter Ruler.\n\nJiang Wei said, \"Sima Yi had slain Cao Shuang, and he wanted to bait Xiahou Ba, who yielded to Shu. Now the Simas, father and sons, are holding the supreme power, the young Ruler Cao Fang is a weakling, and Wei's fortune is near its end. For many years in Hanzhong, our troops have been well trained, and our stores and depots filled with ample supplies. Now I wish to lead an expedition, using Xiahou Ba as guide, to conquer the Middle Land and to reestablish the House of Han in its old capital. This is how I could show my gratitude to Your Majesty and fulfill the desire of the late Prime Minister.\"\n\nBut Fei Yi, Chair of the Secretariat, opposed any expedition, saying, \"We have lately lost by death two trusty ministers, Jiang Wan and Dong Yun, and there is no one left fit to take care of the government. The attempt should be postponed; no hasty move should be made.\"\n\n\"Not so,\" replied Jiang Wei. \"Life is short. Our days flash by as the glint of a white horse across a chink in the door. We are waiting and waiting. Are we never to try to restore Han to its old glory?\"\n\n\"Remember the saying of the wise Sun Zi: 'Know thyself and know thine enemy, then is victory sure.' We are not the equals of the late Prime Minister, and where he failed, are we likely to succeed?\"\n\nJiang Wei said, \"I would enlist the aid of the Qiangs. I have lived near them in Longshang and know them well. With their help, even if we do not gain the whole empire, we can at least conquer and hold all west of Changan.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler here closed the discussion, saying, \"Sir, as you desire to conquer Wei, do your best. I will not damp your enthusiasm.\"\n\nThus the Latter Ruler's consent was given. Then Jiang Wei left the court and betook himself, with Xiahou Ba, into Hanzhong to prepare for a new expedition.\n\n\"We will first send an envoy to the Qiangs to make a league with them,\" said Jiang Wei. \"Then we will march out by the Xiping Pass to Yongzhou, where we will build up two ramparts in Qushan in Qushan Mountains and garrison them. The position is a point of vantage. Then we will send supplies beyond the pass by land and waterways, and advance gradually, according to the plan devised by the late Prime Minister.\"\n\nIn the autumn of the year (AD 249) they sent the two Shu generals, Li Xin and Gou Ai, with fifteen thousand troops, to construct the two ramparts in Qushan in Qushan Mountains, of which Gou Ai was to hold the eastern and Li Xin the western.\n\nWhen the news reached Yongzhou, the Imperial Protector, Guo Huai, sent a report to Luoyang and also dispatched Chen Tai with a force of fifty thousand troops to oppose the troops of Shu. When that army arrived, Li Xin and Gou Ai led their troops to meet it. But their armies were too weak to stand such a large force, and they once more retired into the city. Chen Tai ordered his army to lay siege and occupy the road that led to Hanzhong, so that supplies were cut off.\n\nAfter some days, and when the soldiers of Shu began to feel the pinch of hunger, Guo Huai came to see what progress his general was making.\n\nAt sight of the position he rejoiced exceedingly, and when he returned to camp he said to Chen Tai, \"In this high country the city must be short of water, which means that the besieged must come out for supplies. Let us cut off the streams that supply them, and they will perish of thirst.\"\n\nSo the Wei soldiers were set to work to divert the streams above the city, and the besieged were soon distressed. Li Xin led out a strong force to try to seize the water sources and fought stubbornly, but was at length worsted and driven back within the walls. After that Li Xin and Gou Ai joined their forces and made another attempt to go out and fight. But the Yongzhou troops surrounded them, and a melee ensured until Li Xin and Gou Ai fought their way back to the city.\n\nMeanwhile the soldiers were parched with thirst.\n\nGou Ai discussed the circumstance with Li Xin, saying, \"I do not understand the delay of Commander Jiang Wei's reinforcements.\"\n\nLi Xin said, \"Let me try to fight my way out and get help.\"\n\nSo the gates were opened, and Li Xin rode out with some twenty horsemen. These were opposed and had to fight every inch of the way, but eventually Li Xin won though severely wounded. All his followers had fallen.\n\nThat night a strong north wind brought a heavy fall of snow, and the besieged were thus temporarily relieved from the water famine. They melted the snow and prepared food.\n\nLi Xin, severely wounded, made his way west along the hill paths. After two days he fell in with Jiang Wei.\n\nHe dismounted, prostrated himself, and told his story: \"Qushan had been surrounded and cut off water supplies. By luck it snowed, and our soldiers were partly relieved. But the situation was very urgent.\"\n\n\"The delay is not due to my slackness. The Qiang allies we depended upon have not come,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\nJiang Wei sent an escort with the wounded Li Xin to conduct him to Chengdu, where his wounds could be treated.\n\nTurning to Xiahou Ba, Jiang Wei asked, \"The Qiangs do not come, and the Wei army is besieging Qushan. General, do you have any plan to propose?\"\n\nXiahou Ba replied, \"If we wait for the coming of the Qiangs, it looks as if we shall be too late to relieve Qushan. It is very probable that Yongzhou has been left undefended, wherefore I propose that you go toward Ox Head Hills and work round to the rear of Yongzhou, which will cause the Wei army to fall back to relieve Yongzhou and so relieve our force.\"\n\n\"The plan appears excellent,\" replied Jiang Wei. And he set out.\n\nWhen Chen Tai knew that Li Xin had escaped, he said to his chief, \"Now that this man has got out, he will tell Jiang Wei of the danger and Jiang Wei will conclude that our efforts are concentrated on the ramparts and will endeavor to attack our rear. Therefore I suggest, General, that you go to River Yao and stop the supplies of our enemies, while I go to the Ox Head Hills and smite them. They will retreat as soon as they know their supplies are threatened.\"\n\nSo Guo Huai marched secretly to River Yao, while Chen Tai went to the hills.\n\nWhen the Shu army led by Jiang Wei came near the Ox Head Hills, they heard a great shouting in front, and the scouts came in to report that the road was barred. Jiang Wei himself rode out to look.\n\n\"So you intended to attack Yongzhou, did you?\" shouted Chen Tai. \"But we know it and have been watching for you a long time.\"\n\nJiang Wei rode forth to attack. Chen Tai advanced with a flourish of his sword, and they engaged. Chen Tai soon ran away. Then the soldiers of Shu came forward and fell on, driving the soldiers of Wei back to the summit of the hills. But they halted there, and Jiang Wei encamped at the foot of the hills, whence he challenged the enemy every day. But he could gain no victory.\n\nSeeing no result after some days of this, Xiahou Ba said, \"This is no place to remain in. We can get no victory and are tempting fate by remaining open to a surprise. I think we should retire till some better plan can be tried.\"\n\nJust then it was reported: \"The supplies road by River Yao has fallen into the hands of Guo Huai!\"\n\nShocked with the news, Jiang Wei bade Xiahou Ba march away first, and he covered the retreat. Chen Tai pursued in five divisions along five different roads, but Jiang Wei got possession of the meeting point and held them all in check, finally forcing them back on the hills. But from this position Chen Tai ordered his troops to shoot heavy discharges of arrows and stones so that Jiang Wei was forced to abandon his position. He went to River Yao, where Guo Huai led his force out to attack. Jiang Wei went to and fro smiting where he could, but he was surrounded and only got out by a desperate effort and after suffering more than half of his force.\n\nJiang Wei hastened toward Yangping Pass, but fell in with another body of the enemy, at the head of which he saw a fierce, youthful leader, who at once rode out furiously to attack. This leader had a round face, long ears, and a square mouth with thick lips. Below his left eye was a large hairy mole. It was the elder son of Sima Yi. He was General of the Flying Cavalry, Sima Shi.\n\n\"Simpleton! How dare you stand in my way?\" yelled Jiang Wei, as he rode forward with his spear set.\n\nSima Shi met the attack, and a few bouts were fought before Sima Shi fled. Jiang Wei came off victor and so was free to continue his way. Presently he reached the pass and was welcomed within its sheltering walls. Sima Shi soon followed and attacked the Pass after his arrival, but those within the ramparts replied with the multiple crossbows which threw ten bolts at each discharge. For the army of Shu had made these engines of war after the design left by Zhuge Liang.\n\n\u2003Owing to superior weapons, Shu defeated Wei,\n\n\u2003Wei would never recover what was lost that day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "In The Snow, Ding Feng Wins A Victory; At A Banquet, Sun Jun Executes A Secret Plan.\n\nAs has been said, Jiang Wei, in his retreat, fell in with a force under Sima Shi, barring his road. It came about thus. After Jiang Wei invaded Yongzhou, Guo Huai had sent a flying messenger to the capital, and the Ruler of Wei summoned Sima Yi for advice. It had then been decided to send reinforcements to Yongzhou, and fifty thousand troops had marched, led by the son of the Prime Minister. On the march Sima Shi had heard that the Shu army had been beaten back, and he had concluded they were weak. So he decided to meet them on the road and give battle. Near the Yangping Pass, however, the roads had been lined with troops armed with the multiple crossbows designed by Zhuge Liang. Since Zhuge Liang's death, large numbers of these weapons had been made, and the bolts from them, which went in flights of ten, were poisoned. Consequently the Wei losses were very heavy, and Sima Shi himself barely escaped with life. However, eventually he returned to Luoyang.\n\nFrom the walls of Qushan, the Shu general, Gou Ai, watched anxiously for the expected help. As it came not, he ultimately surrendered. And Jiang Wei, with a loss of twenty to thirty thousand soldiers, marched back into Hanzhong.\n\nIn the third year of Domestic Calm (AD 251), in the eighth month, Sima Yi fell ill. His sickness increased rapidly, and, feeling that his end was near, he called his two sons to his bedside to hear his last words.\n\n\"I have served Wei many years and reached the highest rank possible among ministers. People have suspected me of ulterior aims, and I have always felt afraid of that. After my death the government will be in your hands, and you must be doubly careful.\"\n\nSima Yi passed away even as he said these last words. The sons informed the Ruler of Wei, who conferred high honors upon the dead and advanced his sons, Sima Shi to the rank of Regent Marshal with the leadership of the Chairs of the Boards, and Sima Zhao to the rank of Commander of the Flying Cavalry.\n\nMeanwhile in the South Land, the Ruler of Wu, Sun Quan, had named his son Sun Deng as his heir. His mother was Lady Xu. But Sun Deng died in the fourth year of the Red Crow Era (AD 241). So the second son Sun He was chosen his successor. His mother was Lady Wang. A quarrel arose between Sun He and Princess Quan, who maligned him and intrigued against him, so that he was set aside. Sun He died of mortification. Then the third son Sun Liang was named the Heir Apparent. His mother was Lady Pan.\n\nAt this time old officials like Lu Xun and Zhuge Jin were dead, and the business of the government, great and small, was in the hands of Zhuge Ke, son of Zhuge Jin.\n\nIn the first year of Grand Beginning Era (AD 251), on the first of the eighth month, a great storm passed over Wu. The waves rose to a great height, and the water stood eight feet deep over the low-lying lands. The pines and cypresses, which grew at the cemetery of the Imperial Ancestors of Wu, were uprooted and carried to the South Gate of Jianye, where they stuck, roots upward, in the road.\n\nSun Quan was frightened and fell ill. In the early days of the next year his illness became serious, whereupon he called in Imperial Guardian Zhuge Ke and Regent Marshal Lu Dai to hear the declaration of his last wishes. Soon after he died, at the age of seventy-one. He had reigned for twenty-four years. In Shu-Han calendar it was the fifteenth year of Long Enjoyment (AD 252).\n\n\u2003A hero, green-eyed and purple-bearded,\n\n\u2003He called forth devotion from all.\n\n\u2003He lorded the east without challenge\n\n\u2003Till death's one imperative call.\n\nZhuge Ke immediately placed his late lord's son Sun Liang on the throne, and the opening of the new reign was marked by the adoption of the style Great Prosperity Era, the first year (AD 252). A general amnesty was proclaimed. The late ruler received the posthumous style of Sun Quan the Great Emperor and was buried in Jiangling.\n\nWhen these things were reported in the Wei capital, Sima Shi's first thought was to attack the South Land.\n\nBut his plans were opposed by Chair of the Secretariat Fu Gu, saying, \"Remember what a strong defense to Wu is the Great River. The country has been many times attacked by our ancestors, but never conquered. Rather let us all hold what we have till the time be expedient to possess the whole empire.\"\n\nSima Shi replied, \"The way of Heaven changes thrice in a century, and no three-part division is permanent. I wish to attack Wu.\"\n\nSima Zhao, his brother, was in favor of attack, saying \"The occasion is most opportune. Sun Quan is newly dead, and the present ruler is a child.\"\n\nAn expedition was decided upon. Wang Chang, General Who Conquers the South, was sent with one hundred thousand troops against Nanjun. Guanqiu Jian, General Who Guards the South, was given one hundred thousand troops to go against Wuchang. Hu Zun, General Who Conquers the East, led one hundred thousand troops against Dongxing. They marched in three divisions. Sima Zhao was made Commander-in-Chief of the campaign.\n\nIn the winter of that year, the tenth month, Sima Zhao marched the armies near to the Wu frontiers and camped. Sima Zhao called together Wang Chang, Guanqiu Jian, Hu Zun, and various other commanders to decide upon plans.\n\nHe said, \"The county of Dongxing is most important to Wu. They have built a great rampart, with walls right and left to defend Lake Chaohu from an attack in the rear. You gentlemen will have to exercise extreme care.\"\n\nThen he bade Wang Chang and Guanqiu Jian each to take ten thousand troops and place themselves right and left, but not to advance till Dongxing had been captured. When that city had fallen, these two were to go forward at the same time. Hu Zun was to lead the van. The first step was to construct a floating bridge to storm the rampart. The two walls should then be captured.\n\nNews of the danger soon came to Wu, and Zhuge Ke called a council to take measures.\n\nThen said Ding Feng, General Who Pacifies the North, \"Dongxing is of the utmost importance as its loss would endanger Wuchang.\"\n\n\"I agree with you,\" said Zhuge Ke. \"You say just what I think. You should lead three thousand marines up the river in thirty ships, while on land Lu Ju, Tang Zi, and Liu Zang will follow in three directions with ten thousand troops each. The signal for the general attack will be a cluster of bombs.\"\n\nDing Feng received the command, and, with three thousand marines and thirty battleships, he sailed in the Great River to Dongxing.\n\nHu Zun, the Van Leader of Wei, crossed on the floating bridge, took and camped on the rampart. He then sent Huan Jia and Han Zong to assault the left and right flanking forts, which were held by the Wu Generals Quan Yi and Liu Lue. These forts had high walls and strong, and made a good resistance, so that the Wei force could not overcome. But Quan Yi and Liu Lue dared not venture out to attack so strong a force as was attacking them.\n\nHu Zun made a camp at Xutang. It was then the depth of winter and intensely cold. Heavy snow fell. Thinking that no warlike operations were possible in such weather, Hu Zun and his officers made a great feast.\n\nIn the midst of the feasting came one to report: \"Thirty ships are coming in the river.\"\n\nHu Zun went out to look and saw them come into the bank. He made out a hundred troops on each.\n\nAs they were so few, he returned to the feast and told his officers, \"Only three thousand sailors. There is nothing to be alarmed at.\"\n\nGiving orders to keep a careful watch, they all returned to enjoy themselves.\n\nDing Feng's ships were all drawn up in line. Then he said to his officers, \"Today there is indeed a grand opportunity for a brave soldier to distinguish himself. We shall need the utmost freedom of movement, so throw off your armor, leave your helmets, cast aside your long spears, and reject your heavy halberds. Short swords are the weapons for today.\"\n\nFrom the shore the soldiers of Wei watched the Wu marines with amusement, taking no trouble to prepare against an attack. But suddenly a cluster of bombs exploded, and simultaneously with the roar Ding Feng sprang ashore at the head of his troops. They dashed up the bank and made straight for the Wei camp.\n\nThe soldiers of Wei were taken completely by surprise and were helpless. Han Zong grasped one of the halberds that stood by the door of the commander's tent, but Ding Feng stabbed him in the breast, and he rolled over. Huan Jia went round and came up on the left. Just as he poised his spear to thrust, Ding Feng gripped it under his arm. Huan Jia let go and turned to flee, but Ding Feng sent his sword flying after him and caught him in the shoulder. He turned and was thrust through by Ding Feng's spear.\n\nThe three companies of Wu marines went to and fro in the camp of Wei slaying as they would. Hu Zun mounted a horse and fled. His troops ran away across the floating bridge, but that gave way and many were thrown into the water and drowned. Dead bodies lay about on the snow in large numbers. The spoil of military gear that fell to Wu was immense.\n\nSima Zhao, Wang Chang, and Guanqiu Jian, seeing the Dongxing front had been broken, decided to retreat.\n\nZhuge Ke marched his army to Dongxing, and he made great feastings and distribution of rewards in celebration of victory.\n\nThen he said to his leaders, \"Sima Zhao has suffered a defeat and retreated to the north. It is time to take the Middle Land!\"\n\nSo he told his officers that this was his intention, and also sent away letters to Shu to engage the aid of Jiang Wei, promising that the empire should be divided between them when they had taken it.\n\nAn army of two hundred thousand troops was told off to invade the Middle Land. Just as it was starting, a stream of white vapor was seen emerging from the earth, and as it spread it gradually enveloped the whole army so that people could not see each other.\n\n\"It is a white rainbow,\" said Jiang Yan, \"and it bodes ill to the army. I advise you, O Imperial Guardian, to return and not march against Wei.\"\n\n\"How dare you utter such ill-omened words and blunt the keenness of my army?\" cried Zhuge Ke, angrily.\n\nHe bade the lictors take Jiang Yan out and put him to death. But Jiang Yan's colleagues interceded for him, and he was spared, but he was stripped of all rank. Orders were issued to march quickly.\n\nThen Ding Feng offered a suggestion, saying, \"Wei depends on Xincheng for the defense of its passes. It would be a severe blow to Sima Shi if Xincheng falls.\"\n\nZhuge Ke welcomed this suggestion and gave orders to march on Xincheng. They came up and found the city gates closed, wherefore they began to besiege the city. The Commander in the city, Zhang Te, saw the legions of Wu at the walls, held a strict defense.\n\nA hasty messenger was sent to Luoyang, and Secretary Yu Song told the Prime Minister, Sima Shi.\n\nYu Song said, \"Zhuge Ke is laying siege to Xincheng. The city should not try to repulse the attack, but simply hold out as long as possible. When the besiegers have exhausted their provisions, they will be compelled to retire. As they retreat, we can smite them. However, it is necessary to provide against any invasion from Shu.\"\n\nAccordingly Sima Zhao was sent to reinforce Guo Huai so as to keep off Jiang Wei, while Guanqiu Jian and Hu Zun kept the army of Wu at bay.\n\nFor months the army of Zhuge Ke battered at Xincheng without success. He urged his generals to strenuous efforts, threatening to put to death anyone who was dilatory. At last his attacks looked like succeeding, for the northeast corner of the wall seemed shaken.\n\nThen Zhang Te, the Commander of Xincheng, thought of a device. He sent a persuasive messenger with all the register documents to Zhuge Ke.\n\nAnd the messenger said, \"It is a rule in Wei that if a city holds out against attack for a hundred days and reinforcement has not arrived, then its commander may surrender without penalty to his family. Now Xincheng has held out for over ninety days, and my master hopes you will allow him to withstand the few days necessary to complete the hundred, when he will yield. Here are all register documents that he desires to tender first.\"\n\nZhuge Ke had no doubts that the story was genuine. He ordered the army to retreat temporarily, and the defenders enjoyed a rest. But all Zhang Te really desired was time wherein to strengthen the weak angle of the wall. As soon as the attacks ceased, the defenders pulled down the houses near the corner and repaired the wall with the material.\n\nAs soon as the repairs were complete, Zhang Te threw off all pretense and cried from the wall, \"I have half a year's provisions yet and will not surrender to any curs of Wu!\"\n\nThe defense became as vigorous as before the truce. Zhuge Ke was enraged at being so tricked, and urged on the attack. But one day one of the thousands of arrows that flew from the rampart struck him in the forehead, and he fell. He was borne to his tent, but the wound inflamed, and he became very ill.\n\nTheir leader's illness disheartened the troops, and, moreover, the weather became very hot. Sickness invaded the camp, so that soldiers and leaders alike wished to go home.\n\nWhen Zhuge Ke had recovered sufficiently to resume command, he urged on the attack, but the generals said, \"The soldiers are sick and unfit for battle.\"\n\nZhuge Ke burst into fierce anger, and said, \"The next person who mentions illness will be beheaded.\"\n\nWhen the report of this threat got abroad, the soldiers began to desert freely. Presently Commander Cai Lin, with his whole company, went over to the enemy. Zhuge Ke began to be alarmed and rode through the camps to see for himself. Surely enough, the soldiers all looked sickly, with pale and puffy faces.\n\nThe siege had to be raised, and Zhuge Ke retired into his own country. But scouts brought the news of retreat to Guanqiu Jian who led the Wei's grand army to follow and harass Zhuge Ke's march and inflicted a severe defeat.\n\nMortified by the course of events, after his return Zhuge Ke did not attend court held by the Ruler of Wu, but pretended illness.\n\nSun Liang, the Ruler of Wu, went to the residence to see his general, and the officers came to call. In order to silence comment, Zhuge Ke assumed an attitude of extreme severity, investigating everyone's conduct very minutely, punishing rigorously any fault or shortcoming and meting out sentences of banishment, or death with exposure, till everyone walked in terror. He also placed two of his own cliques \u2014 Zhang Yue and Zhu En \u2014 over the royal guards, making them the teeth and claws of his vengeance.\n\nNow Sun Jun was a son of Sun Gong and a great grandson of Sun Jing, brother of Sun Jian. Sun Quan loved him and had put him in command of the guards. Sun Jun was enraged at being superseded by Zhang Yue and Zhu En, the two creatures of Zhuge Ke.\n\nMinister Teng Yin, who had an old quarrel with Zhuge Ke, said to Sun Jun, \"This Zhuge Ke is as cruel as he is powerful. He abuses his authority, and no one is safe against him. I also think he is aiming at something yet higher and you, Sir, as one of the ruling family ought to put a stop to it.\"\n\n\"I agree with you, and I want to get rid of him,\" replied Sun Jun. \"Now I will obtain an edict condemning him to death.\"\n\nBoth went in to see the Ruler of Wu, Sun Liang, and they laid the matter before him.\n\n\"I am afraid of him, too,\" replied Sun Liang. \"I have wanted to remove him for some time, but have found no opportunity. If you would prove your loyalty, you would do it for me.\"\n\nThen said Teng Yin, \"Your Majesty can give a banquet and invite him, and let a few braves be ready hidden behind the curtains. At a signal, as the dropping of a wine cup, they might jump out and slay him, and all further trouble would be avoided.\"\n\nSun Liang agreed.\n\nZhuge Ke had never been to court since his return from the unfortunate expedition. Under a plea of indisposition he had remained moping at home. One day he was going out of his reception room when he suddenly saw coming in a person dressed in the mourning white.\n\n\"Who are you?\" said he, rather roughly.\n\nThe person seemed too terror-stricken to reply or resist when he was seized.\n\nThey questioned him, and he said, \"I was in mourning for my father newly dead, and had come into the city to seek a priest to read the liturgy. I had entered by mistake, thinking it was a temple.\"\n\nThe gate wardens were questioned. They said, \"There are scores of us at the gate, which is never unwatched. We have not seen a man enter.\"\n\nZhuge Ke raged and had the mourner and the gate wardens put to death. But that night he was restless and sleepless. By and by he heard a rending sound that seemed to come from the reception hall, so he arose and went to see what it was. The great main beam had broken in two.\n\nZhuge Ke, much disturbed, returned to his chamber to try once more to sleep. But a cold wind blew, and, shivering in the chilly air, he saw the figures of the mourner and the gate wardens he had put to death. They advanced toward him holding their heads in their hands and seemed to threaten him. He was frightened, and fell in a swoon.\n\nNext morning, when washing his face, the water seemed tainted with the smell of blood. He bade the maid throw it away and bring more; it made no difference, the odor was still there. He was perplexed and distressed. Then came a messenger with an invitation to a royal banquet. He had his carriage prepared. As he was passing through the gate, a yellow dog jumped up and caught hold of his garment and then howled lugubriously.\n\n\"The dog even mocks me!\" said he, annoyed, and he bade his attendants take it away.\n\nThen he set out for the Palace. Before he had gone far, he saw a white rainbow rise out of the earth and reach up to the sky. While he was wondering what this might portend, his friend Zhang Yue came up and spoke a word of warning.\n\n\"I feel doubtful about the real purpose of this banquet,\" said Zhang Yue, \"and advise you not to go.\"\n\nZhuge Ke gave orders to drive home again. But before he had reached his own gate, the two conspirators \u2014 Sun Jun and Teng Yin \u2014 rode up and asked, \"O Imperial Guardian, why are you turning back?\"\n\n\"I feel unwell and cannot see the Emperor today,\" replied Zhuge Ke.\n\nThey replied, \"This court is appointed to be held especially to do honor to you and the army. You have not yet reported, and there is a banquet for you. You may be ill, but you really must go to court.\"\n\nZhuge Ke yielded, and once more set his face toward the Palace. Sun Jun and Teng Yin went with him, and his friend Zhang Yue followed. The banquet was spread when he arrived, and after he had made his obeisance he went to his place.\n\nWhen the wine was brought in, Zhuge Ke, thinking it might be poisoned, excused himself from drinking, saying, \"I am currently ill, and I cannot drink wine.\"\n\n\"Will you have some of the medicated wine brought from your own residence?\" said Sun Jun.\n\n\"Yes, I could drink that,\" replied he.\n\nSo a servant was sent for a supply that he might drink with the other guests.\n\nAfter several courses, the Ruler of Wu made an excuse and left the banquet hall. Sun Jun went to the foot of the hall and changed his garments of ceremony for more homely garb, but underneath these he put on armor.\n\nThen suddenly he raised his keen sword and ran up the hall, shouting, \"The Emperor has issued an edict to slay a rebel!\"\n\nZhuge Ke, startled so that he dropped his cup, laid his hand upon his sword. But he was too late; his head rolled to the floor. His friend Zhang Yue drew his sword and rushed at the assassin, but Sun Jun evaded the full force of the blow and was only wounded in the left finger. Sun Jun slashed back at Zhang Yue and wounded him in the right arm. Then the braves dashed in and finished Zhang Yue.\n\nThe braves were then sent to arrest Zhuge Ke's family, while the bodies of Zhuge Ke and Zhang Yue were hastily rolled in matting, thrown into a cart, taken to the outside of the south gate, and tossed into a rubbish pit.\n\nWhile Zhuge Ke was absent in the palace, his wife sat in the women's quarters at home feeling strangely unquiet.\n\nPresently a maid came in and, when she drew near, his wife said, \"Why does your clothing smell of blood?\"\n\nTo her horror the maid suddenly transformed into a weird creature with rolling eyes and gritting teeth, that went dancing about the room and leaping till it touched the roof-beams, shrieking all the time, \"I am Zhuge Ke, and I have been slain by that bastard Sun Jun!\"\n\nBy this time the whole family were frightened and began wailing. And a few minutes later the residence was surrounded by a crowd of armed guards sent to murder the inmates, whom they bound, carried off to the market place, and put to the sword. These things occurred in the tenth month of the second year of Great Prosperity (AD 253).\n\nWhen Zhuge Jin lived, he saw his son's ability display prominently, and he often sighed, saying, \"This son will not safeguard the family.\"\n\nOthers had also predicted an early death. Zhang Qi, High Minister in Wei, used to say to Sima Shi, \"Zhuge Ke will die soon.\"\n\nAnd when asked why, Zhang Qi replied, \"Can a person live long when his dignity endangers that of his lord?\"\n\nAfter the conspiracy, Sun Jun became Prime Minister in place of his victim. He was also placed in command of all the military forces, and became very powerful. The control of all matters was in his hands.\n\nIn Chengdu, when the letter of Zhuge Ke asking help from Jiang Wei arrived, Jiang Wei had audience with the Latter Ruler and requested authority to raise an army against the north.\n\n\u2003The army fought, but fought in vain,\n\n\u2003Success may crown a new campaign." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "A Ruse Of A Han General: Sima Zhao Is Surrounded; Retribution For The House Of Wei: Cao Fang Is Dethroned.\n\nIt was the autumn of the sixteenth year of Long Enjoyment (AD 253), and Jiang Wei's army of two hundred thousand was ready to march against the north. Liao Hua and Zhang Yi were Leaders of the Van; Xiahou Ba was Army Strategist; Zhang Ni was in command of the commissariat. The army marched out by the Yangping Pass.\n\nDiscussing the plan of campaign with Xiahou Ba, Jiang Wei said, \"Our former attack on Yongzhou failed, so this time they will doubtless be even better prepared to resist. What do you suggest?\"\n\nXiahou Ba replied, \"Nanan is the only well-provided place in all Longshang. If we take that, it will serve as an excellent base. Our former ill-success was due to the non-arrival of the Qiangs. Let us therefore send early to tell them to assemble at Longyou, after which we will move out at Shiying and march to Nanan by way of Dongting.\"\n\n\"You spoke well,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\nHe at once sent Xi Zheng as his envoy, bearing gifts of gold and pearls and silk to win the help of the King of the Qiangs, whose name was Mi Dang. The mission was successful: King Mi Dang accepted the presents and sent fifty thousand troops to Nanan under the Qiang General Ehe Shaoge.\n\nWhen Guo Huai heard of the threatened attack, he sent a hasty memorial to Capital Luoyang.\n\nSima Shi at once asked his leaders, \"Who will go out to meet the army from the west?\"\n\nXu Zi volunteered, and as Sima Shi had a high opinion of his capacity, he appointed Xu Zi as Leader of the Van. The brother of the Prime Minister, Sima Zhao, went as Commander-in-Chief.\n\nThe Wei army set out for West Valley Land, reached Dongting, and there fell in with Jiang Wei. When both sides were arrayed Xu Zi, who wielded a mighty splitter-of-mountains ax as his weapon, rode out and challenged. Liao Hua went forth to accept, but after a few bouts he took advantage of a feint and fled.\n\nThen Zhang Yi set his spear and rode forth to continue the fight. He also soon fled and returned within his own ranks. Thereupon Xu Zi gave the signal to fall on in force, and the army of Shu lost the day. They retired ten miles, Sima Zhao also drew off his troops, and both sides encamped.\n\n\"Xu Zi is very formidable. How can we overcome him?\" asked Jiang Wei.\n\n\"Tomorrow make pretense of defeat and so draw them into an ambush,\" replied Xiahou Ba.\n\n\"But remember whose son this Sima Zhao is,\" said Jiang Wei. \"Sima Zhao cannot be a novice in war. If he sees a likely spot for an ambush, he will halt. Now the troops of Wei have cut our transportation many times. Let us do the same to them, and we may slay this Xu Zi.\"\n\nHe called in Liao Hua and Zhang Yi and gave them secret orders, sending them in different directions. Then he laid iron thorns along all the approaches and planted thorny barriers as if making a permanent defense. When the troops of Wei came up and challenged, the troops of Shu refused battle.\n\nThe scouts reported to Sima Zhao: \"The Shu supplies are coming up along the rear of Iron Cage Mountain, and they are using the wooden oxen and running horses as transport. The Shu army are building permanent defenses and are awaiting the arrival of their allies the Qiang tribes.\"\n\nThen said Sima Zhao to Xu Zi, \"We formerly defeated the army of Shu by cutting off supplies, and we can do that again. Let five thousand troops go out tonight and occupy the road.\"\n\nAbout the middle of the first watch Xu Zi marched across the hills. When he came to the other side, he saw a couple of hundred soldiers driving a hundred or so heads of mechanical animals laden with grain and forage. His army rushed down upon them with shouts, and the troops of Shu, seeing that their road was impassable, abandoned their supplies and ran away. Xu Zi took possession of the supply train, which he sent back to his own camp under the escort of half his troops. With the other half he set out in pursuit.\n\nAbout three miles away, the road was found blocked with carts set across the track. Some of his soldiers dismounted to clear the way. But as they did so, the brushwood on both sides burst into a blaze. Xu Zi at once drew off his force and turned to retire, but coming to a defile he found the road again blocked with wagons, and again the brushwood began to burn. He made a dash to escape, but before he could get clear a bomb roared, and he saw the troops of Shu coming down on him from two directions. Liao Hua and Zhang Yi from left and right fell on Xu Zi with great fury, and the troops of Wei were wholly defeated. Xu Zi himself got clear, but without any following.\n\nHe struggled on till he and his steed were almost spent with fatigue. Presently he saw another company of the enemy in his way, and the leader was Jiang Wei. Before he could make any resistance, Jiang Wei's spear thrust him down, and as Xu Zi lay on the ground he was cut to pieces.\n\nMeanwhile those troops of Wei who had been sent to escort to camp the convoy of supplies which they had seized were captured by Xiahou Ba. They surrendered. Xiahou Ba then stripped them of their weapons and clothing and therein disguised some of his own soldiers. Holding aloft banners of Wei, these disguised soldiers made for the Wei camp. When they arrived, they were mistaken by those in the camp for comrades, and the gates were thrown open. They rushed in and began to slay. Taken wholly by surprise, Sima Zhao leaped upon his steed and fled. But Liao Hua met him and drove him back. Then appeared Jiang Wei in the path of retreat, so that no road lay open. Sima Zhao made off for the hills, hoping to be able to hold out on the Iron Cage Mountain.\n\nNow there was only one road up the hill, which rose steeply on all sides. And the hill had but one small spring of water, enough to serve a hundred people or so, while Sima Zhao's force numbered six thousand. Their enemies had blocked the only road of escape. This one fountain was unequal to supplying the needs of the beleaguered army, and soon they were tormented with thirst.\n\nIn despair, Sima Zhao looked up to heaven and sighed, saying, \"Death will surely come to me here!\"\n\n\u2003The host of Wei on Iron Cage Mountain\n\n\u2003Were once fast held by Jiang Wei's skill;\n\n\u2003When Pang Juan first crossed the Maling Hills,\n\n\u2003His strategy was reckoned fine\n\n\u2003As Xiang Yu at the Nine Mountains;\n\n\u2003Both bent opponents to their will.\n\nIn this critical situation Secretary Wang Tao reminded his leader of what Geng Gong had done in ancient time, saying, \"O General, why do you not imitate Geng Gong, who, being in great need, prostrated himself and prayed at a well, wherefrom he afterwards was supplied with sweet water?\"\n\nSo the leader went to the summit of the hill and knelt beside the spring and prayed thus:\n\n\"The humble Sima Zhao received a command to repulse the army of Shu. If he is to die here, then may this spring cease its flow, when he will end his own life and let his soldiers yield to the enemy. But if his allotted span of life be not reached, then, O Blue Vault, increase the flow of water and save the lives of this multitude.\"\n\nThus he prayed; and the waters gushed forth in plenty, so that they all quenched their thirst and lived.\n\nJiang Wei had surrounded the hill, holding the army thereon as in a prison.\n\nHe said to his officers, \"I have always regretted that our great Prime Minister was unable to capture Sima Yi in the Gourd Valley, but now I think his son is doomed to fall into our hands!\"\n\nHowever, news of the dangerous position of Sima Zhao had come to Guo Huai, who set about a rescue.\n\nChen Tai said to him, \"Jiang Wei has made a league with the Qiangs, and they have arrived to help him. If you go away to rescue Sima Zhao, the Qiangs will attack from the rear. Therefore I would propose to send someone to the tribespeople to try to create a diversion and get them to retire. If they are disposed of, you may go to the rescue of Sima Zhao.\"\n\nGuo Huai saw there was much reason in this, and told Chen Tai to take a force of five thousand troops and go to the camp of the King of the Qiangs. When Chen Tai reached the camp, he threw off his armor and entered weeping and crying that he was in danger of death.\n\nHe said, \"Guo Huai sets himself up as superior to everyone and is trying to slay me. Therefore I have come to offer my services to you. I know all the secrets of the Wei army, and, if you will, this very night I can lead you to their camp. I have friends in the camp to help, and you can destroy it.\"\n\nKing Mi Dang was taken with the scheme, and sent his General Ehe Shaoge to go with Chen Tai. The deserters from Wei were placed in the rear, but Chen Tai himself rode with the leading body of the Qiangs. They set out at the second watch and soon arrived. They found the gates open, and Chen Tai rode in boldly. But when Ehe Shaoge and his troops galloped in, there suddenly arose a great cry as soldiers and horses went tumbling into great pits. At the same time Chen Tai came round in the rear and attacked, while Guo Huai appeared on the flank. The Qiangs trampled each other down, and many were killed. Those who escaped death surrendered, and the leader, Ehe Shaoge, committed suicide in a pit.\n\nGuo Huai and Chen Tai then hastened back into the camp of the Qiangs. Mi Dang, taken unprepared, rushed out of his tent to get to horse, but was made prisoner. He was taken before Guo Huai, who hastily dismounted, loosed the prisoner's bonds, and soothed him with kindly words.\n\n\"Our government has always regarded you as a loyal and true friend,\" said Guo Huai. \"Why then are you helping our enemies?\"\n\nMi Dang sank to the ground in confusion, while Guo Huai continued, \"If you will now raise the siege of Iron Cage Mountain and drive off the troops of Shu, I will memorialize the Throne and obtain a substantial reward for you.\"\n\nMi Dang agreed. He set out forthwith, his own army leading and the army of Wei in the rear. At the third watch he sent on a messenger to tell Jiang Wei of his coming. And the Shu leader was glad. Mi Dang was invited to come. On the march the soldiers of Wei had mingled with the Qiangs, and many of them were in the forefront of the army.\n\nAs they drew near the camp, Jiang Wei gave order: \"The army are to camp outside. Only the King can enter the gate.\"\n\nMi Dang went up toward the gate with a hundred or more followers, and Jiang Wei with Xiahou Ba went to welcome him. Just as they met, before Mi Dang could say a word, the Wei generals dashed on past him and set on to slay. Jiang Wei was taken aback, leaped on his steed and fled, while the mixed force of troops of Wei and Qiangs drove the camp defenders before them and sent them flying.\n\nWhen Jiang Wei leaped upon his steed at the gate, he had no weapon in his hand, only his bow and quiver hung at his shoulder. In his hasty flight the arrows fell out and the quiver was empty, so when he set off for the hills with Guo Huai in pursuit, Jiang Wei had nothing to oppose to the spears of his pursuers. As they came near he laid hands upon his bow and made as if to shoot. The string twanged and Guo Huai blenched. But as no arrow went flying by, Guo Huai knew Jiang Wei had none to shoot. Guo Huai therefore hung his spear, took his bow and shot. Jiang Wei caught the arrow as it flew by and fitted it to his bowstring. He waited till Guo Huai came quite near, when he pulled the string with all his force and sent the arrow flying straight at Guo Huai's face. Guo Huai fell even as the bowstring sang.\n\nJiang Wei pulled up and turned to finish his fallen enemy, but the soldiers of Wei were nearly upon him, and he had only time to snatch up Guo Huai's spear and ride off. Now that Jiang Wei was armed and their own leader wounded, the soldiers of Wei had no more desire to fight. They picked up their general and carried him to camp. There the arrow-head was pulled out, but the flow of blood could not be stanched, and Guo Huai died.\n\nSima Zhao descended from the hill as soon as Jiang Wei moved away, and pursued some distance before returning.\n\nXiahou Ba forced his way out and rejoined Jiang Wei as soon as he could, and they marched away together. The losses of Shu in this defeat were very heavy. On the road they dared not halt to muster or reform, but went helter-skelter into Hanzhong. In that campaign, though the Shu army were defeated, they had killed Xu Zi and Guo Huai on the other side and had damaged the prestige of Wei. Thus Jiang Wei's achievement made up for his offense.\n\nAfter rewarding the Qiangs for their help, Sima Zhao led his army back to Capital Luoyang, where he joined his brother Sima Shi in administering the government. They were too strong for any of the officers to dare opposition, and they terrorized Cao Fang, the Ruler of Wei, so that he shook with fright whenever he saw Sima Shi at court, and felt as if needles were being stuck into his back.\n\nOne day, when the Ruler of Wei was holding a court, Sima Shi came into the hall wearing his sword. Cao Fang hastily left his dragon throne to receive him.\n\n\"What does this mean? Is this the correct etiquette for a prince when his minister approaches?\" said Sima Shi, smiling. \"I pray Your Majesty remember your dignity and listen while the ministers address the Throne.\"\n\nCourt business then proceeded. Sima Shi decided every question without reference to the Ruler of Wei; and when Sima Shi retired, he stalked haughtily down the hall and went home, followed by his escort, which numbered thousands of horse and foot.\n\nWhen the Ruler of Wei left the court, only three followed him to the private apartments. They were Minister Xiahou Xuan, Secretary Li Feng, and High Minister Zhang Qi. Zhang Qi was the father of his consort, Empress Zhang. Sending away the servants, Cao Fang and these three went into a private chamber.\n\nSeizing his father-in-law's hand, Cao Fang began to weep, saying, \"That man Sima Shi treats me as a child and regards the officers of state as if they were so many straws. I am sure the throne will be his one day.\"\n\nAnd he wept bitterly.\n\nSaid Li Feng, \"Do not be so sad, Sire. I am but a poor sort of person. But if Your Majesty will give me authority, I will call together all the bold people in the country and slay this man.\"\n\n\"It was from fear of this man that my brother Xiahou Ba was forced to go over to Shu,\" said Xiahou Xuan. \"If Sima Shi were destroyed, my brother could return. I belong to a family related to the rulers of the state for many generations, and I cannot sit still while a wretch ruins the government. Put my name in the command as well, and we will work together to remove him.\"\n\n\"But I am afraid we can not overcome him,\" said Cao Fang.\n\nThey wept and said, \"We pledge ourselves to work together for the destruction of the tyrant, and to show our gratitude to Your Majesty!\"\n\nCao Fang them stripped himself of his innermost garment, gnawed his finger till the blood flowed, and with his finger-tip traced a command in blood.\n\nHe gave it to his father-in-law, Zhang Qi, saying, \"My ancestor, Emperor Cao, put to death Dong Cheng for just such a matter as this, so you must be exceedingly careful and maintain the greatest secrecy.\"\n\n\"Oh, why use such ill-omened words?\" cried Li Feng. \"We are not like Dong Cheng, and Sima Shi cannot compare to the Founder. Have no doubts.\"\n\nThe three conspirators took leave and went out carrying the edict with them. Beside the Donghua Gate of the Palace, they saw Sima Shi coming to meet them wearing a sword. Following him were many armed guards. The three ministers took the side of the road to let the party go by.\n\n\"Why are you three so late in leaving the Palace?\" asked Sima Shi.\n\n\"His Majesty was reading, and we stayed with him,\" said Li Feng.\n\n\"What was he reading?\"\n\n\"The histories of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties.\"\n\n\"What questions did the Emperor ask as he read those books?\"\n\n\"He asked about Yi Yin and how he upheld the Shang; and the Duke of Zhou, how he acted when he was regent. And we told His Majesty that you were both Yi Yin and the Duke of Zhou to him.\"\n\nSima Shi smiled grimly and said, \"Why did you compare me with those two when in your hearts you think me a rebel like Wang Mang and Dong Zhuo?\"\n\n\"How should we dare when we are your subordinates?\" said the three ministers.\n\n\"You are a lot of flatterers,\" said Sima Shi, angrily. \"And what were you crying about in that private chamber with the Emperor?\"\n\n\"We did no such thing.\"\n\n\"Your eyes are still red: You cannot deny that!\"\n\nXiahou Xuan then knew that the secrecy had been showed, so he broke out into a volley of abuse, crying, \"Well, we were crying because of your conduct, because you terrorize over the Emperor and are scheming to usurp the Throne!\"\n\n\"Seize him!\" roared Sima Shi.\n\nXiahou Xuan threw back his sleeves and struck at Sima Shi with his fists, but the lictors pulled him back. Then the three were searched, and on Zhang Qi was found the blood-stained garment of the Emperor. They handed it to their chief, who recognized the object of his search, the secret edict. It said:\n\n\"The two Sima brothers have stolen away all my authority and are plotting to take the Throne. The edicts I have been forced to issue do not represent my wishes, and hereby all officers, civil and military, may unite to destroy these two and restore the authority of the Throne. These ends achieved, I will reward those who help to accomplish them.\"\n\nSima Shi, more angry than ever, said, \"So you wish to destroy me and my brother. This is too much!\"\n\nHe ordered his followers to execute the three on the public ground by waist-bisection and to destroy their whole clans.\n\nThe three reviled without ceasing. On the way to the place of execution, they ground their teeth with rage, spitting out the pieces they broke off. They died muttering curses.\n\nSima Shi then went to the rear apartments of the Palace, where he found the Emperor talking with his Consort.\n\nJust as he entered, she was saying to the Emperor, \"The Palace is full of spies, and if this comes out, it will mean trouble for me.\"\n\nSima Shi strode in, sword in hand.\n\n\"My father placed Your Majesty on the throne, a service no less worthy than that of Duke Zhou; I have served Your Majesty as Yi Yin served his master. Now is kindness met by enmity and service regarded as a fault. Your Majesty has plotted with two or three insignificant officials to slay me and my brother. Why is this?\"\n\n\"I had no such intention,\" said Cao Fang.\n\nIn reply Sima Shi drew the garment from his sleeve and threw it on the ground.\n\n\"Who did this?\"\n\nCao Fang was overwhelmed: His soul flew beyond the skies, his spirit lied to the ninth heaven.\n\nShaking with fear, he said, \"I was forced into it. How could I think of such a thing?\"\n\n\"To slander ministers by charging them with rebellion is an aggravated crime,\" said Sima Shi.\n\nCao Fang knelt at his feet, saying, \"Yes, I am guilty. Forgive me.\"\n\n\"I beg Your Majesty to rise: The laws must be respected!\"\n\nPointing to Empress Zhang, Sima Shi said, \"She is of the Zhang house and must die!\"\n\n\"Spare her!\" cried Cao Fang, weeping bitterly.\n\nBut Sima Shi was obdurate. He bade the lictors lead her away, and she was strangled with a white silk cord at a Palace gate.\n\n\u2003Now I recall another year; and lo!\n\n\u2003An empress borne away to shameful death.\n\n\u2003Barefooted, weeping bitterly she shrieks\n\n\u2003\"Farewell,\" torn from her consort's arms.\n\n\u2003History repeats itself; time's instrument,\n\n\u2003Sima Shi avenges this on Cao Cao's heirs.\n\nThe day after these events, Sima Shi assembled all the officers and addressed them thus: \"Our present lord is profligate and devoid of principle; familiar with the vile and friendly with the impure. He lends a ready ear to slander and keeps good people at a distance. His faults exceed those of the Prince of Changyi of old, and he has proved himself unfit to rule. Wherefore, following the precedents of Yi Yin and Huo Guang, I have decided to put him aside and to set up another, thereby to maintain the sanctity of the ruler and ensure tranquillity. What think you, Sirs?\"\n\nThey all agreed, saying, \"General, you are right to play the same part as Yi Yin and Huo Guang, thereby acting in accordance with Heaven and fulfilling the desire of humankind. Who dares dispute it?\"\n\nThen Sima Shi, followed by the whole of the officials, went to the Palace of Everlasting Peace and informed the Empress Dowager of his intention.\n\n\"Whom do you propose to place on the throne, General?\" she asked.\n\n\"I have observed that Cao Ju, Prince of Pengcheng, is intelligent, benevolent, and filial. He is fit to rule the empire.\"\n\nShe replied, \"He is my uncle, and it is not convenient. However, there is Cao Mao, Duke of Gaogui, and grandson of Emperor Pi. He is of mild temperament, respectful, and deferential, and may be set up. You, Sir, and the high officers of state might favorably consider this.\"\n\nThen spoke one, saying, \"Her Majesty speaks well: Cao Mao should be raised to the throne.\"\n\nAll eyes turned toward the speaker, who was Sima Fu, uncle of Sima Shi.\n\nThe Duke of Gaogui was summoned to the capital.\n\nThe Empress called Cao Fang into her presence in the Hall of Principles and blamed him, saying, \"You are vicious beyond measure, a companion of lewd men and a friend of vile women. You are unfitted to rule. Therefore resign the imperial seal and revert to your status of Prince of Qi. You are forbidden to present yourself at court without special command.\"\n\nCao Fang, weeping, threw himself at her feet. He gave up the seal, got into his carriage and went away. Only a few faithful ministers restrained their tears and bade him farewell.\n\n\u2003Cao Cao, the mighty minister of Han,\n\n\u2003Oppressed the helpless; little then thought he\n\n\u2003That only two score swiftly passing years\n\n\u2003Would bring like fate to his posterity.\n\nThe Emperor-elect Cao Mao was the grandson of Emperor Pi, and son of Cao Lin, Prince of Donghai. When Cao Mao was nearing the capital, all the officers attended to receive him at the Nanye Gate, where an imperial carriage awaited him. He hastily returned their salutations.\n\n\"The ruler ought not to return these salutations,\" said Grand Commander Wang Su.\n\n\"I also am a minister and must respond,\" replied he.\n\nThey conducted him to the carriage to ride into the Palace, but he refused to mount it, saying, \"Her Majesty has commanded my presence; I know not for what reason. How dare I enter the Palace in such a carriage?\"\n\nHe went on foot to the Hall, where Sima Shi awaited him. He prostrated himself before Sima Shi. Sima Shi hastily raised him and led him into the presence.\n\nThe Empress Dowager said, \"In your youth I noticed that you bore the impress of majesty. Now you are to be the Ruler of the Empire. You must be respectful and moderate, diffusing virtue and benevolence. You must do honor to your ancestors \u2014 the former emperors.\"\n\nCao Mao modestly declined the proposed honor, but he was compelled to accept it. He was led out of the presence of the Empress Dowager and placed in the seat of empire in the Hall of Principles.\n\nThe style of the reign was changed from Domestic Calm, the sixth year, to Right Origin, the first year (AD 254). An amnesty was granted. Honors were heaped upon Sima Shi, who also received the golden axes, with the right to proceed leisurely within the precincts, to address the Throne without using his name, and to wear arms at court. Many other officers also received promotions.\n\nBut in the spring of the second year of Right Origin, it was reported at court that Guanqiu Jian, General Who Guards the East, and Wen Qin, Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, were raising armies with the declared design of restoring the deposed emperor.\n\nSima Shi disconcerted.\n\n\u2003If ministers of Han have always faithful been,\n\n\u2003Wei leaders, too, prove their loyalty are keen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "Riding Alone, Wen Yang Repulses A Brave Force; Following The River, Jiang Wei Defeats The Enemy.\n\nIt has been said that in the second year of Right Origin (AD 256) Guanqiu Jian, of the South of River Huai, General Who Guards the East, was commanding the forces in River Huai when he heard the news Sima Shi deposed Cao Fang.\n\nHe was moved to great anger, and his eldest son, Guanqiu Dian, fomented his father's wrath, saying, \"Father, you are chief of all this region. With this Sima Shi in such a position, the country is in danger, and you cannot sit still and look on.\"\n\n\"My son, you speak well!\" replied Guanqiu Jian.\n\nWhereupon he requested Wen Qin, Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, to come and consult with him. This Wen Qin had been a client of Cao Shuang's, and he hastened at the call of the general. When he arrived, he was led into the private apartments, and, the salutations at an end, the two began to talk over the situation. Presently the host began to weep, and his visitor asked the cause of his tears.\n\n\"Think you that this conduct of Sima Shi does not tear my heart? He has deposed the Emperor and now holds in his grip all authority of the state. Things are all upside down.\"\n\nWen Qin replied, \"You are the chief of this region. If you are willing to play the part, you ought to take arms and slay this rebel. I will help you, regardless of consequences. My second son, Wen Yang, is a good warrior and a man of great valor. Moreover, he hates Sima Shi and wishes to avenge on the Sima brothers the death of Cao Shuang. He would make an excellent Leader of the Van.\"\n\nGuanqiu Jian was delighted to get such ready and willing support, and the two poured a libation in pledge of mutual good faith. Then, pretending that they held an edict from the Empress Dowager, they summoned all the officers to Shouchun, where they built an altar on the west side and sacrificed a white horse, smearing their lips with its blood in token of their oath.\n\nThey made this declaration:\n\n\"Sima Shi is a rebel and devoid of rectitude. We have a secret edict commanding us to muster the forces of the South of River Huai and put down this rebellion.\"\n\nThus supported, Guanqiu Jian led sixty thousand troops to Xiangcheng, where he camped, while his fellow-conspirator Wen Qin took twenty thousand troops to the front to go to and fro lending help where it was needed. Letters were sent all through the counties and territories calling for assistance.\n\nNow that mole below the left eye of Sima Shi used to pain at times, and he decided to have it removed. The surgeon excised it, closed and dressed the wound, and the patient rested quietly in his palace till it should heal.\n\nIt was at this time that he received the disquieting news of opposition to his authority. Whereupon he called in Grand Commander Wang Su to discuss the matter.\n\nSaid Wang Su, \"When Guan Yu was most famous, Sun Quan sent Lu Meng to capture Jingzhou by surprise. What did Lu Meng do? He first won over the officers of Guan Yu by taking care of their families and thus broke the power of his enemy like a tile. Now the families of all the officers in the South of River Huai are here in the Middle Land. Treat them well, at the same time taking care that they do not get away, and you will be irresistible.\"\n\n\"Your words are good,\" said Sima Shi. \"However, I cannot go out to war till I have recovered. Yet, to send another is to take great risks, and I shall feel insecure.\"\n\nThere was also present Secretary Zhong Hui, who here interposed, saying, \"The forces of the South of River Huai and Chu are very formidable. If you send another, there is danger whatever happens; and if your leader makes a serious mistake, your whole policy will fail.\"\n\n\"No one but myself can succeed,\" cried Sima Shi, starting from his couch. \"I must go.\"\n\nSo, in spite of illness, he resolved to lead in person. He left his brother in charge of affairs at Luoyang and set out, traveling in a padded carriage.\n\nZhuge Dan, General Who Guards the East, was given command over all the forces of Yuzhou and ordered to march from Anfeng and to take possession of Shouchun. Hu Zun, General Who Conquers the East, with the Qingzhou forces, was sent to bar any retreat at Qiaosong. Wang Ji, Imperial Protector of Yuzhou and Army Inspector, was sent to capture Chennan.\n\nTo his camp at Xiangyang, Sima Shi summoned all his officers to a council.\n\nMinister Zheng Mao spoke first, saying, \"Guanqiu Jian is fond of laying plans, but slow to come to any decision. His fellow-conspirator Wen Qin is bold, but imprudent. Now this scheme of theirs is too large for their minds. But as their soldiers are full of spirit, they should not be engaged lightly. We should remain on the defensive till their ardor has burned out. This is what Zhou Yafu of old time did.\"\n\nBut Army Inspector Wang Ji objected, saying, \"This is not a rising of the people, nor of the soldiers, but is the work of Guanqiu Jian. The people are merely his tools and cannot help themselves. The rebellion will go to pieces as soon as an army approaches the region.\"\n\n\"I agree with you,\" replied Sima Shi.\n\nThen he advanced upon River Ying and camped by the bridge.\n\nWang Ji said, \"The city of Nandun is an excellent camping ground. Occupy it at once, for if not the enemy will do so.\"\n\nSima Shi sent Wang Ji to carry out his own plan.\n\nReports of these movements of the enemy came to Guanqiu Jian in Xiangcheng, and an assembly of officers was called.\n\nThe Leader of the Van, Ge Yong, said, \"Nandun is an excellent site for a camp, with a river beside it and hills at the rear. If the Wei armies camp there, we shall be unable to dislodge them. Let us occupy it.\"\n\nSo the army set out. But before they drew near, the scouts reported a camp already there. It was incredible, and Guanqiu Jian rode to the front to reconnoiter. He was convinced by the sight of flags and banners over all the plain, fluttering above an orderly array of tents and huts. The sight disconcerted him, and he rode back to the main body not knowing what to do.\n\nJust then a scout came in to say: \"Sun Jun of Wu has crossed the river to attack Shouchun.\"\n\n\"If we lose that city, we shall have no base,\" cried Guanqiu Jian.\n\nThat same night he retreated upon Xiangcheng.\n\nSeeing the enemy retreat, Sima Shi called together his officers to talk it over.\n\nChair of the Secretariat Fu Gu, who was of the expedition, said, \"The retirement to Xiangcheng was obviously due to Wu's threatened attack upon Shouchun. General, you should send three armies to attack upon Xiangcheng, Lojia, and Shouchun. The Imperial Protector of Yanzhou, Deng Ai, is a man of tactics; he should be sent against Lojia. Our main army will reinforce them.\"\n\nHis plan was acceptable to Sima Shi, who sent letters to Yanzhou telling Deng Ai to march against Lojia, where Sima Shi himself would soon meet him.\n\nCamped at Xiangcheng, Guanqiu Jian sent spies to Lojia to see what might be happening there, for he feared it would be attacked.\n\nWhen he spoke of his fears to Wen Qin, the latter said, \"General, you need not be anxious. My son Wen Yang and I will answer for its safety. Give us but five thousand troops.\"\n\nFather and son, with the five thousand troops, went to Lojia.\n\nBefore the main body arrived, the scouts reported: \"Wei banners are flying on the west of the city. There are about ten thousand troops. In their midst are seen authority ensigns such as white yaks' tails, golden axes, purple umbrellas, and a flag bearing the word Commander. Perhaps Sima Shi himself is at this camp. The troops are pitching the camp rapidly, but it is not yet complete.\"\n\nWhen this was reported to Wen Qin, his son Wen Yang, bearing his famous whip of steel, was by his father's side.\n\n\"We should attack before they have settled down in camp, Father,\" said he. \"Let us go quickly and attack on two sides.\"\n\n\"When can we start?\" said the father.\n\n\"Tonight at dusk. You lead half the force round by the south, and I will march the other half round by the north, and we will meet in the third watch at the Wei camp.\"\n\nThe youth who propounded this plan was then eighteen, tall and strong. He wore complete armor and carried at his waist a steel whip. When the hour came to start, he took his spear, swung himself into the saddle and set out.\n\nThat night Sima Shi, who had arrived and had at once set about settling into camp, lay on a couch in his tent, for he was still suffering pain from the surgery wound beneath his eye. The tent was surrounded by several hundred armored guards. Deng Ai had not arrived.\n\nAbout the third watch Sima Shi heard a great shouting and asked what it was.\n\nOne replied: \"An army has come round from the north and burst into the lines. The leader is too bold for anyone to face.\"\n\nSima Shi became much troubled. His heart burned within him, and the excitement caused the wound to open, so that the eyeball protruded and blood flowed freely. The pain became intense, nearly unbearable. In his agony and alarm lest his army should be thrown into confusion, he lay gnawing the bed clothes till they were in rags.\n\nWen Yang's force lost no time, but attacked as soon as it arrived. He dashed into the camp, slashing and thrusting right and left, and everyone gave way before him. If anyone stayed to oppose, the sharp spear or the terrible whip did its work, and that one fell. But after a time, seeing no sign of his father, Wen Yang grew anxious. And he had to retire several times before the fierce flights of arrows and crossbow bolts as he tried to reach the main tent.\n\nAbout daylight he heard shouts and thought they must mean the arrival of his father with help. But the shouting came from the north, and his father was to arrive by the south road. He galloped out to get a clearer view, and saw a force sweeping down like a gale of wind.\n\nIt was not his father, but a body of the enemy, and the leader was Deng Ai.\n\nDeng Ai rode forward shouting, \"Rebel, flee not!\"\n\nWen Yang had no intention to flee. Setting his spear, he rode savagely toward his opponent. They engaged and fought half a hundred bouts without either gaining the advantage. Then, the duel still raging, the Wei army attacked in full force, and Wen Yang's troops began to give way and run, so that soon he found himself alone.\n\nHowever, he got clear of the fight and went away south. But he was pursued, for more than a hundred Wei generals plucked up courage to follow when he ran away. They pressed on his heels till near the Lojia Bridge, when it seemed that they must catch him. Then he suddenly pulled up his steed, turned and rode in among them, flogging with the terrible steel whip, and wherever it struck there lay warriors and horses in confused heaps. So they left him, and he retook his way in peace.\n\nThen the Wei generals met and said, \"Lo! Here is a man who has driven us all backward. But we are many and may not suffer that.\"\n\nWherefore they reformed and once again took up pursuit.\n\n\"You fools?\" cried Wen Yang, as he saw them coming on. \"Have you then no regard for your lives?\"\n\nAgain he fell upon them with the steel whip and slew many, so that the survivors retreated. But yet again they found courage to come on, and yet again, but they had to fall back before the lash of that terrible whip.\n\n\u2003Defiance hurled at Cao Cao's mighty host\n\n\u2003Arrayed near Long Slope proclaimed Zhao Zilong,\n\n\u2003A valiant man; and peerless stood he till.\n\n\u2003At Lojia another hero faced,\n\n\u2003Alone, another host, and Wen Yang's name\n\n\u2003Was added to the roll of famous people.\n\nWen Qin never reached the appointed rendezvous. In the darkness he lost his way among the precipices and gullies, whence he only got out as day dawned. He saw all the signs of a fight and a victory for Wei, but could not discover whither his son had gone. So he returned without fighting, and in spite of pursuit, made his way safely to Shouchun.\n\nNow Commander Yin Damu had accompanied Sima Shi on his expedition, but was no friend of his. He had been of the Cao Shuang's party and bitterly resented the death of his patron. He was watching for a chance to avenge him. Seeing that Sima Shi was ill, he thought to secure his end by making friends with Wen Qin.\n\nSo he went in to see the sick Sima Shi, and said, \"Wen Qin had no sincere intention to rebel, but was led astray by Guanqiu Jian. If you will let me go and speak with him, he will come over to you at once.\"\n\nSima Shi said he might go to try, and Yin Damu put on his armor and rode after Wen Qin. By and by he got near enough to shout.\n\n\"Do you not recognize me? I am Yin Damu.\"\n\nWen Qin stopped and looked back.\n\nYin Damu removed his helmet that his face might be clearly seen, and said, \"O Imperial Protector, why can you not bear up for a few days?\"\n\nYin Damu implied that Sima Shi was very near death, and he wished Wen Qin to remain at hand. But Wen Qin did not understand. He abused Yin Damu and even threatened that the bowmen should shoot, and Yin Damu could only sorrowfully turn away.\n\nWhen Wen Qin reached Shouchun and found it occupied by Zhuge Dan, he tried for Xiangcheng. But three armies under Hu Zun, Wang Ji, and Deng Ai came up and attacked at once so that it seemed impossible that his army could hold out long. So he decided to flee to Wu and serve Sun Jun.\n\nGuanqiu Jian, then behind the walls of Xiangcheng, heard that Shouchun had fallen, that his fellow-conspirator Wen Qin had failed and, with three armies against his city, knew that his case was desperate. He mustered all the forces in the city and marched out to try his fortune.\n\nAs he went forth, he fell in with Deng Ai. He bade Ge Yong go out to fight, but Ge Yong fell in the first encounter, cut down by Deng Ai himself. The enemy came on in force. Guanqiu Jian fought gallantly, but his army fell into confusion. Then two other armies under Wang Ji and Hu Zun came up, and he was completely surrounded. Nothing could be done, and he fled from the field with a dozen riders and made for Shenxian.\n\nHere Governor Song Bai received him kindly and comforted him with a feast. At the banquet Guanqiu Jian drowned his sorrows in the wine cup till he was helpless, when he was slain by his host. His head was sent to the Wei army as proof of his death, and the rising came to an end. Peace was restored in the South of River Huai.\n\nSima Shi grew worse. Recovery being hopeless, he called Zhuge Dan to his tent and gave him a seal and conferred upon him the title of General Who Conquers the East, with command of all the forces in Yangzhou, and soon after the army marched back to Xuchang.\n\nThe sick man began to have visions. Night after night he was troubled by the apparitions of the three courtiers \u2014 Zhang Qi, Li Feng, and Xiahou Xuan \u2014 he had put to death, and he knew that his end was near. He sent for his brother, Sima Zhao, who came and wept by his couch while he listened to his elder brother's last commands.\n\nSaid Sima Shi, \"The responsibility of power is heavy, but we must bear it: There is no possible relief. You must continue my plans and maintain my policy yourself, and you must be exceedingly careful how you entrust any other with power, lest you bring about the destruction of our whole clan.\"\n\nThen Sima Shi handed the seal of office to Sima Zhao, weeping the while. Sima Zhao would ask some questions still, but with a deep groan as his eye popped out Sima Shi died. It was the second month of the second year of Right Origin (AD 256).\n\nSima Zhao put on mourning for his brother and informed the Ruler of Wei, Cao Mao, of the death. By special edict Sima Zhao was ordered to remain at Xuchang so as to guard against any attack from Wu. This order was unpleasing to its recipient, but he felt doubtful what to do.\n\nSima Zhao took counsel with Zhong Hui, who said, \"The death of your brother has disturbed the country. If you remain here, some shifting of power at the capital will surely work to your disadvantage. It will be too late for regrets then.\"\n\nWherefore Sima Zhao left Xuchang and camped on River Luo. This move alarmed Cao Mao.\n\nThen Grand Commander Wang Su advised, saying, \"Sima Zhao has succeeded the office of his late brother. It is well that Your Majesty should placate him with a new title.\"\n\nSo Cao Mao sent Wang Su with an edict creating Sima Zhao Regent Marshal, with control of the Secretariat. Sima Zhao came to Luoyang to thank the Emperor for these honors and stayed. Henceforward all matters and the whole government were under Sima Zhao's hand.\n\nWhen news of these things came to Chengdu, Jiang Wei thought the time had come to make another bid for the empire, so he wrote a memorial to the Latter Ruler:\n\n\"Sima Shi having just died, his brother, Sima Zhao, who succeeds, will be unable to leave Luoyang until he has consolidated his position. Wherefore I crave permission to attack Wei.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler agreed and bade him raise an army. So he went into Hanzhong to prepare for the expedition.\n\nHowever, Zhang Yi, General Who Conquers the West, was opposed to the expedition and said, \"Shu is not a big country, and its resources are not too abundant. Thus a far expedition should be avoided. The state policy should rather be the improvement of conditions at home. Thinking well for the soldiers and the people is the way to preserve the country.\"\n\n\"You are mistaken,\" said Jiang Wei. \"Before our great Minister Zhuge Liang emerged from his reed hut in the wilds and undertook the affairs of a state, the three kingdoms were already a fact. Six times he led armies to try to gain the northern portion of the empire, but failed to attain his desire. Unhappily he died leaving his design unaccomplished. But he bequeathed to me the legacy of his intention, and I must be a loyal and worthy executor. If I die in the attempt, I will perish without regret. Now is our opportunity, and if we miss it, shall we find a better?\"\n\n\"What you say is the real truth,\" said Xiahou Ba. \"Let us send first some light horse out by Baohan to capture Nanan and thereby settle that county.\"\n\nThen said Zhang Yi, \"Procrastination and delay have been hitherto the causes of our failure. We ought to obey the precepts of the books of war, strike where the enemy is unprepared and appear where he does not expect us. A rapid march and a sudden blow will find Wei unready, and we shall succeed.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei led an army of fifty thousand troops out by Baohan. When he reached River Yao, the spies reported his arrival to Wang Jing, Imperial Protector of Yongzhou, who led out seventy thousand troops against him. Jiang Wei gave certain orders to Zhang Yi and Xiahou Ba, and after they had marched, he drew up the main body by River Yao.\n\nWang Jing rode out to parley.\n\n\"Wu, Shu, and Wei are now actually established as a tripod. Why then have you invaded our borders these many times?\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"Because Sima Shi deposed his prince without cause, and it behooves the neighboring countries to punish such a crime. Moreover, your country is a rival state.\"\n\nThen Wang Jing turned and said to four of his generals, Zhang Ming, Hua Yong, Liu Dan, and Zhu Fang, \"You see that the enemy is drawn up with a river at his back, so that his troops must conquer or drown. Though Jiang Wei is bold, you four can fight him at the same time and pursue if he retires.\"\n\nThe four rode out two and two. Jiang Wei stood through a few encounters, but then moved backward toward his camp. At this, Wang Jing led on his main body to smite. Jiang Wei fled toward the river.\n\nAs he drew near he shouted, \"Danger, O Generals! Now do your utmost!\"\n\nHis generals turned on the foe and fought with such vigor that the Wei army was defeated, and, as they turned away, Zhang Yi and Xiahou Ba fell upon their rear. Soon the Wei army was hemmed in, and Jiang Wei rushed in among the host of Wei and threw them into utter confusion. They trod each other down in the press, and many fell into the river. Dead bodies lay about over several miles.\n\nWang Jing and a hundred horsemen forced their way out and fled to Didao, where they entered within the walls and barred the gates.\n\nAfter Jiang Wei had rewarded and feasted his army, he was for attacking Didao, but Zhang Yi was against this.\n\n\"General, you have won a great victory, which will bring you fame. If you attempt more, things may go astray, and you will only add legs to your sketch of a serpent.\"\n\nSaid Jiang Wei, \"When our army were defeated not long ago, they still desired to overrun the whole north. Now our opponents have been overcome, and that has broken the spirit of their army, and this city can be easily captured. Do not damp the spirit of the soldiers.\"\n\nSo it was decided to attack Didao despite further remonstrances of Zhang Yi.\n\nChen Tai, General Who Conquers the West and Commander of Yongzhou, was just about to set out to avenge the defeat of Wang Jing when Deng Ai, Imperial Protector of Yanzhou, arrived with his army. Chen Tai welcomed him, and when Deng Ai had said he had come by imperial edict to assist to defeat the army of Shu, Chen Tai asked his plans.\n\nDeng Ai replied, \"They are victors on River Yao. If they enlist the aid of the Qiangs to cause a diversion in the West Valley Land and the Land Within the Passes and also obtain the support of the four counties, it will be a misfortune for us. If they do not think of that, but try to take Didao, they will only fritter away their energies against a place too strongly fortified for them to capture. Let us now array our force along the Xiangling Mountain, and then we can advance and smite them. We shall get a victory.\"\n\n\"That is well said!\" cried Chen Tai.\n\nThen twenty cohorts of fifty soldiers each were told off to find their way secretly to the southeast of Didao and there hide in the valleys. They were then to display many ensigns and sound trumpets as if they were a very large force, and make huge fires at night, so as to cause anxiety among the enemy. And thus they waited for the troops of Shu to come, while Chen Tai and Deng Ai marched with forty thousand troops against the Shu army.\n\nThe army of Shu had marched to Didao and begun the siege around the whole circuit of the walls. At the end of many days the fall of the city seemed no nearer, and Jiang Wei began to fret. He could think of no plan likely to succeed.\n\nOne eventide a horseman came in to report: \"Two armies are approaching rapidly, and the names on the banners were General Who Conquers the West Chen Tai and Imperial Protector of Yanzhou Deng Ai.\"\n\nJiang Wei called in his colleague Xiahou Ba, who said, \"I have spoken to you of Deng Ai many times. He is perspicacious, valiant, resourceful, and has always delighted in the study of military topography. As he is coming, we shall have to put forth all our energies.\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"We will attack before he can get a foothold and while his soldiers are fatigued with the march.\"\n\nSo Zhang Yi was left to carry on the siege while the two leaders went out to meet the new armies. Jiang Wei went against Deng Ai, and Xiahou Ba against Chen Tai.\n\nBefore Jiang Wei had marched far, the stillness was broken by the roar of a bomb, and at once all about the Shu army arose the rolling of drums and the blare of trumpets, soon followed by flames that shot up to the very sky. Jiang Wei rode to the front and saw the ensigns of Wei all about him.\n\n\"I have fallen into a trap set by Deng Ai!\" cried he.\n\nHe sent orders to Xiahou Ba and Zhang Yi to withdraw immediately while he would cover their retreat. When they had retired, he followed them into Hanzhong, harassed all along the road by the sounds of marching soldiers and glimpses of enemy banners. But these enemies never attacked. It was only after the army had retreated to Saber Pass that Jiang Wei knew all this was make-believe.\n\nHe camped in Zhongti. For his services and success on River Yao, Jiang Wei was rewarded with the rank of Regent Marshal. As soon as the ceremonies connected with his promotion were ended, he began again to talk of an expedition against Wei.\n\n\u2003Remember enough is as good as a feast,\n\n\u2003Having sketched a good snake don't add legs to the beast;\n\n\u2003And in fighting remember that others are bold,\n\n\u2003And tigers have claws though their teeth may be old." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "Deng Ai Outwits Jiang Wei; Zhuge Dan Battles Sima Zhao.\n\nJiang Wei camped at Zhongti. The army of Wei camped outside Didao. Wang Jing welcomed Chen Tai and Deng Ai and prepared a banquet to celebrate the raising of the siege and also rewarded the army with gifts. Then Chen Tai sent up a memorial to the Ruler of Wei, Cao Mao, eulogizing the magnificent services of Deng Ai, who was rewarded with the title General Who Pacifies the West. For the time, Deng Ai was left in the west. He and Chen Tai placed their men in cantonments in Yongzhou, Liangzhou, and the counties round about.\n\nAfter Deng Ai had rendered his thanks to the Emperor, Chen Tai spread a great feast in his honor, and in congratulating his guest, said, \"Jiang Wei slipped off in the night because he was broken, and he will never dare to return.\"\n\n\"I think he will,\" replied Deng Ai, smiling. \"I can give five reasons why he should.\"\n\n\"What are they?\"\n\n\"First, although the soldiers of Shu have retired, they have the self-possessed and confident look of holding the victory; our soldiers are really weak and broken. Second, the soldiers of Shu were trained and inspirited by Zhuge Liang and are easy to mobilize; our generals are all of different periods of service, and our army indifferently trained. Third, the Shu soldiers often use boats for traveling, and so they move at leisure and the troops arrive fresh; ours do all their journeys on land, and they arrive fatigued with marching. Fourth, again, Didao, Longxi, Nanan, and Qishan are all places suitable for defense or use as battle fields, and thus the army of Shu can conceal their intentions and strike where they will; we have to remain on guard at many points, thus dividing our forces; when they concentrate, they have only to reckon with a part of our force. And fifth, if they come out by way of Longxi and Nanan, they have the grain of the Qiangs to depend upon; and if they choose Qishan, they have the wheat there. These are the five reasons why they should make another expedition.\"\n\nChen Tai was overcome with the clear vision of his new colleague.\n\n\"Sir, your foresight is godlike. I think we need feel no anxiety about what the enemy can achieve.\"\n\nThe two leaders became the best of friends in spite of the difference of age. Deng Ai spent his time in training the army, and garrisons were placed at all points where surprise attacks seemed possible.\n\nThere was feasting also at Zhongti, and the occasion was taken to discuss a new attack on Wei.\n\nBut Assistant Fan Jian opposed. \"General, your expeditions have partly failed many times; you have never scored a complete victory. But now on River Yao the army of Wei recognize your superiority, and why should you try again? There is small chance of success, and you risk all you have gained.\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"You all regard only the largeness and population of Wei and the time necessary for conquest, but you do not see five reasons for victory.\"\n\nThe assembly asked what these were.\n\n\"First, the fighting spirit of the soldiers of Wei has been badly broken on River Yao, while that of our soldiers, although we retired, is unimpaired. If we attack, we shall certainly succeed. Second, our soldiers can travel in boats and so will not be wearied with marching; their soldiers have to march to meet us. Third, our soldiers are thoroughly trained; theirs are recruits, a mere flock of crows, quite undisciplined. Fourth, when we go out by Qishan, we can seize upon the autumn wheat for food. Finally, they are scattered, having to defend various points, while we can concentrate on any point we wish, and they will find it difficult to bring up reinforcements. If we miss this chance, can we hope for a better?\"\n\nXiahou Ba said, \"Deng Ai is young, but he is deep and crafty. He has certainly taken great pains to secure the regions under his charge as General Who Pacifies the West. Victory will not be so easy as it was before.\"\n\n\"Why should I fear him?\" cried Jiang Wei, angrily. \"You should not laud the spirit of the enemy and belittle that of our own soldiers. But in any case I have made up my mind and shall take West Valley Land.\"\n\nNo one dared to offer any further opposition. Jiang Wei himself led the first army; the others followed in due order; and thus the soldiers of Shu marched out of Zhongti to Qishan.\n\nBefore they could reach Qishan, the scouts reported the hills already occupied by the armies of Wei. Jiang Wei rode forward to verify this, and, surely enough, he saw the Wei camps, nine in number, stretching over the hills like a huge serpent, and all arranged to give each other support.\n\n\"Xiahou Ba spoke only too well,\" said he. \"The plan of those camps is excellent and only our Zhuge Liang could have laid them out with equal skill.\"\n\nReturning to his own army, he said to his officers, \"They must have known of my coming, and I think Deng Ai is here too. Now from this as base you are to send out daily small reconnoitering parties showing my banner, but different flags and uniforms, blue, yellow, red, white, and black, in turns. While you are thus distracting attention, I will lead the main army by Dongting to attack Nanan.\"\n\nBao Su was sent to camp at the mouth of the Qishan Mountains Valley while the main army marched.\n\nAs soon as Deng Ai had heard that the enemy would come out at Qishan, he had camped there with his colleague Chen Tai. But when days had passed without anyone coming to fling a challenge, he sent out spies to find out where the Shu army was lurking. They could find nothing, and so Deng Ai went to the summit of a hill to look around.\n\nHe came to the conclusion, saying, \"Jiang Wei must not be in this camp. He must be on his way to capture Nanan. Those soldiers in the Shu camp were nothing but a feint, accentuated by the daily change of uniform. Going to and fro for days, the horses look tired, and their leaders are certainly none of the ablest. Therefore, General, I advise an attack here. If that succeeds, the Dongting road can be occupied, and Jiang Wei will be unable to retreat. I think I ought to try to relieve Nanan. I will go by the Wucheng Mountain, and if I occupy that, the enemy will try to take Shanggui. Near that place is a narrow and precipitous valley called Block Valley, just the place for an ambush, where I shall lie in wait till Jiang Wei comes to take the Wucheng Mountain.\"\n\nChen Tai replied, \"I have been here over twenty years and have never known so much of the military possibilities of the place. You are very wonderful and must carry out your plan.\"\n\nSo Deng Ai marched toward Nanan by double marches. Soon they came to the Wucheng Mountain, where they camped without opposition. He sent his son Deng Zhong and Shi Zuan, each leading five thousand troops, to lie in wait in the Block Valley and not to betray their presence.\n\nIn the meantime Jiang Wei was marching between Dongting and Nanan.\n\nNear the Wucheng Mountain, he turned to Xiahou Ba and said, \"That hill is our point, and Nanan is close. I fear lest the artful Deng Ai may seize and fortify it.\"\n\nThey hastened, anxious to reach the hill before the enemy. But it was not to be. Presently they heard the roar of bombs and the beating of drums, and then flags and banners appeared, all of Wei. And among them fluttered the leader's standard, bearing two words Deng Ai.\n\nThis was a sad disappointment. The army of Shu halted, and veteran soldiers of Wei came rushing down from various points on the hill, too many for the troops of Shu to drive back. So the advance guard was defeated. Jiang Wei went to their help with his central body, but when he got near, the soldiers of Wei had retreated up to the hill.\n\nJiang Wei went on to the foot of the hill and challenged, but no one came out to accept. The soldiers of Shu began to shout abuse, and kept it up till late in the day, but they failed to provoke a fight. As the army of Shu began to retire, the Wei drums beat furiously, yet no one appeared. Jiang Wei turned about to ascend the hill, but its defenders prevented that by stones thrown from above. He hung on till the third watch, when he tried again. But he failed. Thereupon he went down the hill and halted, bidding his soldiers build a barricade of wood and boulders. The troops of Wei came on again, and the Shu troops scrambled to run to the old camp.\n\nNext day Jiang Wei brought up many transport wagons and placed them on the slope as the nucleus of a camp. But in the night a number of Wei troops came down with torches and set fire to them. A fight ensued, which lasted till dawn.\n\nSeeing that a camp could not be made there, Jiang Wei retired to consider new plans with Xiahou Ba.\n\n\"Since we cannot take Nanan, our next best plan is to try for Shanggui, which is the storehouse of Nanan.\"\n\nLeaving Xiahou Ba on the hill, Jiang Wei led a force of veteran soldiers and bold officers along the road toward Shanggui. They marched all night, and dawn found them in a deep valley, which the guides said was Block Valley.\n\n\"That sounds too much like 'Cut-off Valley',\" said Jiang Wei. \"And if a force held the mouth, we should be in sorry straits.\"\n\nWhile hesitating whether to advance farther or not, the leading troops came back to say: \"We have seen a cloud of dust beyond the hills, which seems to indicate a body of soldiers in hiding.\"\n\nSo the order was given to retire. At that moment the armies under Shi Zuan and Deng Zhong came out and attacked. Jiang Wei, alternately fighting and retreating, tried to get away. Then Deng Ai himself appeared, and the Shu army had enemies on three sides. They were in grave danger, but Xiahou Ba came to their rescue, and so Jiang Wei escaped.\n\nJiang Wei proposed to return to Qishan, but Xiahou Ba said, \"We cannot go thither, for Chen Tai has destroyed the force under Bao Su, and he himself was killed. All that was left of that army has gone back into Hanzhong.\"\n\nIt was no longer a question of taking the Dongting road. Jiang Wei sought out by-roads to march along. Deng Ai came in pursuit, and as he pressed hard on the rear, Jiang Wei sent the others on ahead while he covered the retreat.\n\nSoon Chen Tai came out from the hills, and Jiang Wei was surrounded by a shouting body of the enemy. He fought all directions, but could not clear the way. He and his horse were very weary when Zhang Ni, who had heard of his straits, came to his rescue with a body of cavalry. Zhang Ni cut his way in, and Jiang Wei immediately broke the siege and got out. Zhang Ni saved his general, but lost his own life in the melee. Finally Jiang Wei got back into Hanzhong.\n\nFrom Hanzhong the death of Zhang Ni in battle was reported to the Latter Ruler, who bestowed suitable honors upon his family.\n\nThe Shu people blamed Jiang Wei for the serious loss of life of their relatives in the military operations that had just failed, and Jiang Wei, following the precedent in Jieting of the late Lord of Wuxiang, asked that he himself should be degraded in rank, retaining, however, the command. He was put back to General of the Rear Army.\n\nThe country being now cleared of the enemy, Chen Tai and Deng Ai prepared a banquet in honor of victory and gave rewards to the soldiers who had fought. Chen Tai sent a memorial to the capital upon the services of Deng Ai, and a special commission of Sima Zhao brought Deng Ai higher rank; the title of lordship was given to his son, Deng Zhong.\n\nAt this time the style of the reign in Wei was changed from Right Origin, the third year, to Gentle Dew Era, the first year (AD 256). Sima Zhao commanded all the military forces and made himself Empire's Commander-in-Chief. He assumed great pomp, and whenever he moved outside his palace, he was escorted by three thousand mail-clad guards, beside squadrons of cavalry. All power lay in his hands, and he decided all questions so that the court was rather in his palace than in that of the Emperor.\n\nPlans for taking the final step constantly occupied his thoughts. The question of mounting the throne was openly mooted by Jia Chong, a confidant, who was a son of Commander Jia Kui. Jia Chong was holding the High Counselor office in the Prime Minister's palace.\n\nJia Chong said, \"Sir, all real authority is in your hands, and the country is not tranquil. The only remedy is for you to become actual ruler, and you should find out who are your supporters.\"\n\nSima Zhao replied, \"This has been in my thoughts a long time. You might be my emissary to the east to find out the feeling there. You can pretend you go to thank the soldiers who took part in the late campaign. That would be a good pretext.\"\n\nAccordingly Jia Chong traveled into the South of River Huai, where he saw Zhuge Dan, General Who Guards the East. This officer was from Nanyang and a cousin of the late Lord of Wuxiang, Zhuge Liang. Zhuge Dan had gone to Wei for employment, but had received no significant office while Zhuge Liang was the Prime minister of Shu. After Zhuge Liang's death, Zhuge Dan's promotion was rapid. He was now Lord of Gaoping and Commander of the South and East of River Huai.\n\nJia Chong went to Zhuge Dan to ask him to convey to the army the appreciation of the soldiers' services. Jia Chong was received courteously, and at a banquet, when host and guest were both mellow with wine, Jia Chong set himself to discover Zhuge Dan's feelings.\n\nJia Chong said, \"Lately in Luoyang there has been much talk of the weakness and lack of ability of the Emperor and his unfitness to rule. Now General Sima Zhao comes of a family noted for state service for three generations. His own services and virtues are high as the heavens, and he is the man best fitted to take the rulership of Wei. Is this not your opinion?\"\n\nBut Zhuge Dan did not favor the suggestion. On the contrary, he broke out angrily, \"You are a son of Jia Kui of Yuzhou, and your family have received the bounty of Wei. Yet you dare speak of rebellion!\"\n\nJia Chong said, \"I only repeat what people have said.\"\n\nZhuge Dan said, \"If the state is in difficulty, then one ought to stand up for it even to the death!\"\n\nJia Chong said no more. He soon returned and told Sima Zhao what had been said.\n\n\"The rat!\" cried Sima Zhao, angrily.\n\n\"Zhuge Dan is exceedingly popular there in the South of River Huai; and if he is left too long, he will do harm.\"\n\nSima Zhao began to take measures. He wrote privately to Yue Chen, Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, and sent a messenger to Zhuge Dan with an edict making him Minister of Works. This meant that Zhuge Dan had to come to the capital.\n\nBut Zhuge Dan knew that Jia Chong had done him mischief, and he interrogated the messenger, who told him that Yue Chen knew all about the matter.\n\n\"How does he know?\"\n\n\"General Sima Zhao sent him a private letter.\"\n\nThe messenger was condemned to death. Then Zhuge Dan placed himself at the head of his personal guard and marched to Yangzhou. The city gates were closed and the drawbridge raised. He summoned the gate, but no one answered.\n\n\"How dare this fellow Yue Chen treat me thus?\" cried Zhuge Dan.\n\nHe ordered his troops to force the gate. Ten of his bold generals dismounted, crossed the moat, and climbed the ramparts, where they slew all who opposed them and opened the gate. The others entered, set fire to the houses, and began to fight their way toward the state residence.\n\nThe Imperial Protector sought refuge in a tower, but Zhuge Dan made his way up and reproached his enemy, crying, \"Your father, Yue Jing, enjoyed the bounty of Wei. Yet you have not sought to repay the kindness of the Ruling House, but you want to help the rebel Sima Zhao!\"\n\nBefore Yue Chen was able to answer, Zhuge Dan slew him. Then he sent to Luoyang a memorial detailing Sima Yi's many faults, and made preparations for war. He called up all the militia of the south and east of River Huai, to the total of one hundred thousand, and took over the forty thousand troops who had surrendered on the fall of Yue Chen and gathered supplies. He also sent Adviser Wu Gang to Wu for aid, offering his son Zhuge Jing as a hostage for his good faith.\n\nAt this time Sun Jun had died and his brother, Sun Chen, was Prime Minister. Sun Chen was a man of cruel and violent temper and had put many officers to death on his way to power \u2014 among them were Grand Commander Teng Yin, General Lu Ju, and Minister Wang Chun. The Ruler of Wu, Sun Liang, although intelligent, was helpless in his hands.\n\nThe messenger, Wu Gang, conducted Zhuge Jing to the residence of Sun Chen in Shidou, who asked what he had come for.\n\nWu Gang explained, \"Zhuge Dan is a cousin of the Lord of Wuxiang in Shu. Zhuge Dan had been in service of Wei; and seeing Sima Zhao depose the his prince and oppress good people, he wants to punish the tyrant. But his force is not enough, and he asks for your help. To show his sincerity, he sends his son Zhuge Jing as a token of good faith.\"\n\nWu Gang's request was received favorably, and Sun Chen sent seventy thousand troops with a full complement of officers \u2014 Quan Yi and Quan Duan as Commanders, Yu Quan as Rear Guard, Tang Zi and Zhu Yi as Leaders of the Van, Wen Qin as Military Guide. They marched in three directions to attack Wei.\n\nWu Gang returned to Shouchun report success. Zhuge Dan thought all was going well and prepared the army for a general attack.\n\nIn Luoyang, Zhuge Dan's memorial angered Sima Zhao, who wished to set out to revenge the attack at once, but Jia Chong preached caution.\n\n\"My lord, you derived your power from your father and brother, and people have not had time to discover your own virtue. If you leave the court and there be a revulsion of feeling against you, you will lose all. Rather request the Empress Dowager and the Son of Heaven to go with you in the expedition, and nothing is to be feared,\" said Jia Chong.\n\n\"That is an excellent plan.\"\n\nSima Zhao went into the Palace and proposed it to Her Majesty, saying, \"Zhuge Dan is in revolt, and my colleagues and I intend to punish him. I beg that you will accompany the expedition as the late Emperor would have done.\"\n\nThe Empress was afraid, but dared not refuse, and the next day was requested to set out with the Ruler of Wei, Cao Mao.\n\nCao Mao said, \"General, you command all the armies and dispose them as you will. Why do you ask me to go?\"\n\nSima Zhao replied, \"Your Majesty is wrong to hesitate. Your ancestors traveled over the empire and wished to unite the whole under one ruler. Wherever there was a worthy opponent, they went to face him. Your Majesty should follow their example and sweep the land clean. Why fear?\"\n\nCao Mao, fearing his minister's terrible power, consented, and an edict was issued for the commands to mobilize two hundred sixty thousand troops of two capitals. Wang Ji, General Who Corrects the South, was in command of the van, and Chen Qian, General Who Pacifies the East, was second in command of the van. Shi Bao, Army Inspector, and Zhou Cai, Imperial Protector of Yangzhou, led the Imperial Escort. The army moved into the South of River Huai like a great flood.\n\nZhu Yi, the Leader of the Van of Wu, encountered them, and both sides drew up for battle. Zhu Yi rode out and took the challenge, but was overcome by Wang Ji in the third bout and he fled. Tang Zi also rode out, but was also beaten in the third encounter by Wang Ji. Then Wang Ji ordered a full attack. The troops of Wu were broken and retired fifteen miles and camped. Thence they sent tidings of their ill-success to Shouchun.\n\nZhuge Dan in Shouchun led out his bold and strong soldiers to join forces with Wen Qin and his two sons, Wen Yang and Wen Hu. Then they set out against Sima Zhao.\n\n\u2003Now here is a check to the armies of Wu,\n\n\u2003And Wei's gallant men advance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "Rescuing Shouchun, Yu Quan Dies Nobly; Attacking Changcheng, Jiang Wei Mobilizes.\n\nHearing of this threatened attack, Sima Zhao sought advice from two of his officers, High Counselor Pei Xiu and Palace Assistant Zhong Hui.\n\nZhong Hui said, \"The Wu army is helping our enemies for the sake of profit, and hence we can seduce them with an offer of greater profit.\"\n\nSima Zhao agreed in this opinion and resolved accordingly. As part of his plan, he sent Shi Bao and Zhou Cai to lay ambushes in different places near Shouchun.\n\nAs ordered by Sima Zhao, Wang Ji and Chen Qian commanded an army of veterans on the rear, Cheng Zu led thirty thousand troops out to bring on a battle, while Chen Jun got together many wagons, herds of oxen, droves of horses, donkeys and mules, and heaps of military supplies, all of which he crowded together in the midst of the army. This stuff was meant to be abandoned as soon as the fight began, so that the enemy might be tempted to plunder.\n\nThat day, Zhuge Dan led the center army, while Zhu Yi and Wen Qin commanded the left and right armies. The armies being drawn up, Zhuge Dan looked across at his opponents and saw that the center of the Wei army was taken up by a disorderly mass of transport. Presently he led on his troops to attack, and Cheng Zu, as bidden to do, gave way and fled, leaving a large amount of spoil. When the soldiers of Wu saw such huge quantities of booty, theirs for the taking, they lost all desire to fight and scattered to gather the spoil.\n\nWhile thus occupied, suddenly a bomb exploded and, from left and right, down came Shi Bao and Zhou Cai and the army of Wei upon the spoilers. Zhuge Dan attempted to draw off, but other forces under Wang Ji and Chen Qian appeared, and he was heavily smitten. Then came on Sima Zhao with his army, and Zhuge Dan fled to Shouchun, where he entered and shut the gates. The army of Wei set down to the siege of the city, and the army of Wu retired into camp at Anfeng. The Ruler of Wei, Cao Mao, was lodging at this time in Xiangcheng.\n\nThen said Zhong Hui, \"Zhuge Dan has been worsted, but the city wherein he has taken refuge is well supplied, and his allies, the troops of Wu, are not distant. His position is strong. Our soldiers are besieging the city all round, which means that those within will hold out for a long time, or they will make a desperate sortie. Their allies also may fall upon us at the same time, and it would go hard with us. Therefore, I advise that the attack be made only on three sides, leaving the south gate open for them if they wish to flee. If they flee, we can fall on the fugitives. The troops of Wu cannot have supplies for very long. If we sent some light cavalry round by their rear, we might stay their fighting power without a battle.\"\n\n\"You are my Zhang Liang,\" said Sima Zhao, stroking the back of his adviser. \"Your advice is excellent!\"\n\nSo Wang Ji, who was on the south of the city, was ordered to withdraw.\n\nBut in the Wu camp at Anfeng was much sadness at the want of success.\n\nSun Chen said to General Zhu Yi, \"If we cannot succor Shouchun, how can we hope to overrun the Middle Land? Now and here you have to win a victory or die, for another defeat will mean death.\"\n\nZhu Yi went back to his camp and talked with Yu Quan.\n\nYu Quan said, \"The south gate of Shouchun is free, and I will lead therein some of our troops to help Zhuge Dan. Then you challenge the Wei army on one side, and we will come out from the city and attack on the other side.\"\n\nZhu Yi thought the plan good, and Quan Yi, Quan Duan, and Wen Qin were willing to go into the city and share in the attack. They were allowed to march in without hindrance as the Wei generals had no orders to stop them.\n\nWhen this was reported to Sima Zhao, he said, \"This is a plan to defeat our army by making a front and rear attack.\"\n\nSo he called Wang Ji and Chen Qian and told them to take five thousand troops to keep the road along which Zhu Yi would come and strike him in rear.\n\nZhu Yi was advancing toward the city when he heard a shouting in the rear, and soon the attack began from two sides by Wang Ji and Chen Qian. His army was worsted and returned to Anfeng.\n\nWhen Sun Chen heard of this new defeat, he was very angry.\n\n\"What is the use of leaders who always lose?\" cried he.\n\nHe sentenced Zhu Yi to death, and upbraided Quan Wei, son of Quan Duan, and said, \"If you do not drive off this army of Wei, let me never again see your face, nor that of your father.\"\n\nThen Sun Chen returned to Capital Jianye.\n\nWhen this was known in the Wei camp, Zhong Hui said to his chief, \"Now the city of Shouchun may be attacked, for Sun Chen has gone away, and there is no hope of succor for the besieged.\"\n\nA vigorous assault began. Quan Wei tried to cut his way through and get into the city. But when he saw Shouchun quite surrounded by the enemy and no hope of success, he gave in and went over to Sima Zhao, by whom he was well received and given the rank of General.\n\nDeeply affected by this kindness, Quan Wei wrote to his father, Quan Duan, and uncle, Quan Yi, advising them to follow his example. He tied the letter to an arrow and shot it over the walls. Quan Yi found the letter, and he and Quan Duan, with their several thousand troops, came out and yielded.\n\nWithin the city Zhuge Dan was very sad.\n\nTwo advisers, Jiang Ban and Jiao Yi, came to him and said, \"The food in the city is short, and the soldiers are many; this can not last long. General, you should let the Wu troops to go out and make a decisive fight with the Wei army.\"\n\nZhuge Dan turned on them angrily.\n\n\"Why do you tell me to fight when I am set on holding out to the very last? If you say that again, you shall die as traitors!\"\n\n\"He is lost!\" said they, going away. \"We can do no other than surrender or we shall die too.\"\n\nThat night Jiang Ban and Jiao Yi slipped over the wall and surrendered. Both were given employment.\n\nOf those left in the city some were for fighting, but no one dared say so.\n\nMeanwhile Zhuge Dan saw the Wei troops build earth walls to anticipate the expected floods of River Huai. This flood had been the only hope of Zhuge Dan, who had trusted to be able to smite the besiegers when it came to destroy the earth wall. However, that autumn was dry, and the river did not swell.\n\nWithin the besieged city the food diminished rapidly, and soon starvation stared them in the face. Wen Qin and his sons were defending the citadel, and they saw their soldiers sinking one by one for lack of food till the sight became unbearable.\n\nWen Qin went to Zhuge Dan with a proposal, saying, \"The northern troops should be sent away in order to save food.\"\n\nHis suggestion called forth an outburst of fierce wrath of Zhuge Dan.\n\n\"Do you want to kill me that you propose to send the northern soldiers away?\"\n\nWen Qin suffered death. His two sons, Wen Yang and Wen Hu, ran amok with rage. Armed with short swords, they attacked all they met and slew many scores in their desperate anger. The fit over, they dropped down the wall and deserted to the Wei camp.\n\nHowever, Sima Zhao had not forgotten that Wen Yang had defied and held at bay his whole army once. At first Sima Zhao thought to put Wen Yang to death, but Zhong Hui interposed.\n\n\"The real offender was his father, Wen Qin,\" said Zhong Hui, \"but he is dead, and these two come to you in desperation. If you slay those who surrender, you will strengthen the obstinacy of those who remain in the city.\"\n\nThere was reason in this, and so their submission was accepted. They were led to Sima Zhao's tent, and he soothed them with kind words and gave them gifts and lordships, and made them Generals.\n\nAfter expressing their gratitude, they rode about the city on the horses he had given them, shouting, \"We have received great kindness at the hands of Sima Zhao, who not only has pardoned us but given us gifts. Why do you not all yield?\"\n\nWhen their companions heard this, they said one to another. \"This Wen Yang was an enemy, and yet he has been well received. How much more may we expect generous treatment?\"\n\nThe desire to surrender possessed them all. When Zhuge Dan heard it, he was incensed and went round the posts night and day on the watch for any who seemed inclined to go. He put many to death in these efforts to retain his authority.\n\nZhong Hui heard how things were going in the city and went in to Sima Zhao to say the moment to attack had come. Sima Zhao was only too pleased. He stimulated his troops, and they flocked to the ramparts and assaulted vigorously. Then the commander of the north gate, Zeng Xuan, treacherously opened the gate and let in the Wei soldiers.\n\nWhen Zhuge Dan heard that the enemy were in the city, he called his guards and tried to escape. He took his way along the smaller streets to the gate, but on the drawbridge he met Hu Fen, who cut him down. His followers were made prisoners.\n\nWang Ji fought his way to the west gate, where he fell in with the Wu general, Yu Quan.\n\n\"Why do you not yield?\" shouted Wang Ji.\n\n\"Where is the principle for yielding when I have my orders to rescue the city and so far have not succeeded?\" Throwing off his helmet, he cried, \"The happiest death a man can die is on the battlefield!\"\n\nWhirling his sword about, Yu Quan dashed among his enemies and fought till he fell under many wounds.\n\n\u2003Many were they who yielded at Shouchun,\n\n\u2003Bowing their heads in the dust before Sima Zhao.\n\n\u2003Wu had produced its heroes,\n\n\u2003Yet none were faithful to the death like Yu Quan.\n\nWhen Sima Zhao entered the city, he put to death the whole family of Zhuge Dan. Some of his guards fell into the hands of Sima Zhao alive, and he offered them their lives if they would yield.\n\nThey all refused, saying, \"We would rather share the fate of our leader.\"\n\nThey were sent out of the city to be beheaded, but orders were given to offer each one his life at the last moment. Thus, before a person was about to receive the fatal blow, that one was asked to yield. Not one accepted, and they all died. In admiration for their fortitude, they were honorably interred by order of Sima Zhao.\n\nThe loyal servant flees not in the day of disaster;\n\nSuch were they who followed Zhuge Dan to the shades.\n\nEver and again begins the Song of Life's Brevity.\n\nFaithful unto death were they, even as Tian Heng's people.\n\nAs has been said, many of the troops of Wu surrendered.\n\nThen said Pei Xiu, \"The parents and children of these soldiers are living all over River Huai. If you spare them and they return home, they will foment rebellion by and by. The best way is to bury them.\"\n\nBut Zhong Hui said, \"No. When the ancients made war, their policy was to maintain the state as a whole, and so they only put to death the originators of trouble. It would be inhumane to slay all. Rather let them return home as witnesses to your liberal policy.\"\n\n\"That is better advice,\" said Sima Zhao. So the soldiers of Wu were released and allowed to return home.\n\nTang Zi dared not return to his own place in Wu for fear of the cruel Sun Chen, so he went over to Wei, taking his company with him. He was well received, and his people were employed over the counties of the three rivers.\n\nThe country about River Huai being now quiet, Sima Zhao decided to march homeward.\n\nJust then the news came: \"Jiang Wei, the Shu General, is attacking Changcheng and interfering with the supplies.\"\n\nAnd so a council was called to discuss this matter.\n\nAt this time in Shu, the reign style was changed from Long Enjoyment, the twentieth year, to Wonderful Sight, the first year (AD 258). In Hanzhong Jiang Wei had recruited two generals, Fu Qian and Jiang Shu, both of whom he loved greatly, and set them to train the army, horse and foot.\n\nThen came the news: \"Zhuge Dan has set out to destroy Sima Zhao; Sun Chen of Wu has supported him with a large army; and Sima Zhao has led the army himself, bringing with him the Empress Dowager and the Ruler of Wei.\"\n\nJiang Wei said, \"The great opportunity has come at last!\"\n\nSo he asked the Latter Ruler's authority to make another expedition.\n\nBut Minister Qiao Zhou heard this with grief, for internal affairs were not well.\n\nSaid he, \"The court is sunk in dissipation, and the Emperor's confidence is given to that eunuch, Huang Hao. State affairs are neglected for pleasure, which is the Emperor's sole aim. Jiang Wei has led many expeditions and wasted the lives of many soldiers, so that the state is falling.\"\n\nQiao Zhou then wrote an essay on \"Enemy Kingdoms,\" which he sent to Jiang Wei.\n\n\"When one asks by what means the weak overcame the strong in past times, the answer is that those responsible for the strong state made no struggle against general laxity, while those in power in a weak state took careful steps for improvement. Confusion followed upon laxity and efficiency grew out of diligence, as is the universal rule. King Wen of Zhou devoted himself to the welfare of his people, and with a small number achieved great results; Gou Jian sympathized with all, and with a weak force overcame a powerful opponent. These were their methods.\n\n\"One may recall that in the past Chu was strong and Han weak when the empire was divided by agreement at the Grand Canal. Then, seeing that his people were satisfied and settled in their minds, Zhang Liang went in pursuit of Xiang Yu and destroyed him.\n\n\"But is it necessary to act like King Wen and Gou Jian? Listen to the reply. In the days of Shang and Zhou, when imperial ranks had long existed and the relations between prince and minister were firmly established, even such as the Founder of the Hans could not have carved his way to a throne. But when the dynasty of Qin had suppressed the feudal nobles and set up mere representatives of its own power, and the people were weak and enslaved, the empire was rived asunder, and there succeeded a time of contention, when every bold soul strove with his neighbor.\n\n\"But we are now in other times. Since there is not the state of confusion that waited on the end of Qin, but a state of things more nearly like that of the period of the Warring States, in which six kingdoms contended for the mastery, therefore one may play the part of King Wen. If one would found a dynasty, then must that one wait upon time and favorable destiny. With these in his favor, the consummation will follow forthwith, as the armies of Kings Tang and Wu fought but one battle. Therefore have real compassion for the people and wait on opportunity. If wars are constant, and a mishap come, even the wisest will be unable to show the way of safety.\"\n\n\"An effusion from the pen of a rotten pedant?\" cried Jiang Wei wrathfully as he finished reading, and he dashed the essay on the ground in contempt.\n\nThe protest was disregarded, and the army marched.\n\n\"In your opinion where should we begin?\" asked he of Fu Qian.\n\nFu Qian replied, \"The great storehouse of Wei is at Changcheng, and we ought to burn their grain and forage. Let us go out by the Luo Valley and cross the Shen Ridge. After the capture of Changcheng, we can go on to Qinchuan, and the conquest of the Middle Land will be near.\"\n\n\"What you say just fits in with my secret plans,\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\nSo the army marched to the Luo Valley and crossed the Shen Ridge.\n\nThe Commander of Changcheng was Sima Wang, a cousin of Sima Zhao. Huge stores of grain were in the city, but its defenses were weak. So when Sima Wang heard of the approach of the Shu army, he and his two leaders, Wang Zhen and Li Peng, made a camp seven miles from the walls to keep any attack at a distance.\n\nWhen the enemy came up, Sima Wang and his two generals went forth from the ranks to meet them.\n\nJiang Wei stood in the front of his army and said, \"Sima Zhao has forced his prince to go with him to war, which plainly indicates that he intends to emulate the deeds of Li Jue and Guo Si. My government has commanded me to punish this fault. Wherefore I say to you yield at once. For if you persist in the way of error, you and yours shall all be put to death!\"\n\nSima Wang shouted back, \"You and yours are wholly strangers to any feeling of rectitude. You have repeatedly invaded a superior state's territory. If you do not at once retire, I will see to it that not even a breastplate returns!\"\n\nWith these words General Wang Zhen rode out, his spear set ready to thrust. From the host of Shu came Fu Qian to take the challenge, and the two champions engaged. After a few encounters Fu Qian tempted his opponent by feigning weakness. Wang Zhen thrust at the opening he gave. Fu Qian evaded the blow, snatched Wang Zhen out of the saddle, and bore him off.\n\nSeeing this, his colleague, Li Peng whirled up his sword and went pounding down toward the captor. Fu Qian went but slowly, thus luring Li Peng into rash pursuit. When Li Peng was near enough, Fu Qian dashed his prisoner with all his strength to the earth, took a firm grip on his four-edged brand, and smote Li Peng full in the face. The blow knocked out an eye, and Li Peng fell dead. Wang Zhen had been already killed by the Shu troops as he lay on the ground. Both generals being dead, the troops of Wei fled into the city and barred the gates.\n\nJiang Wei gave orders for the army to rest that night and take the city on the morrow with all vigor.\n\nNext day, at dawn, the assault began. The soldiers, fresh from their rest, vied with each other who should be first on the wall. They shot over the ramparts fire-arrows and firebombs and burned all the buildings on the wall. They next brought up brushwood and piled it against the rampart and set it alight, so that the flames rose high.\n\nWhen the city seemed about to fall, the defenders set up a howling and a lamentation that could be heard all around. But suddenly a great rolling of drums diverted the attention of the assailants from the city, and they turned their faces to see a great host of Wei soldiers marching up in all the glory of waving banners. Jiang Wei faced about to meet this attack and took his place beneath the great standard.\n\nPresently Jiang Wei made out a youthful-looking leader riding in advance with his spear ready to thrust. He looked scarcely more than twenty years of age, his face was smooth as if powdered, and his lips were crimson. But from them came fierce words.\n\n\"Do you recognize General Deng?\" cried he.\n\n\"So this is Deng Ai,\" thought Jiang Wei.\n\nThereupon Jiang Wei set his spear and rode out. Both were adepts in arms and neither gave the other an opening, so that at the end of near half a hundred bouts neither could claim advantage. The youth wielded his spear with perfect skill.\n\n\"If I cannot gain the advantage by some ruse, how shall I win?\" thought Jiang Wei.\n\nSo he turned aside his steed and dashed along a certain road that led to the hills. The youth followed. Presently Jiang Wei slung his spear, laid hands upon his bow, chose with care a feathered arrow, and laid it on the string. But the youth was quick of eye, and as the bowstring sang, he bent his head over the saddle and the arrow passed harmlessly by.\n\nThe next time Jiang Wei turned, he saw his pursuer close upon him, and already the spear was threatening his life. But as the youth thrust, Jiang Wei evaded the blow and caught the shaft under his arm. Thus deprived of his weapon, the young man made for his own array.\n\n\"What a pity! What a great pity!\" cried Jiang Wei, turning to pursue.\n\nHe followed the young general close up to the standard.\n\nBut just as he came near, a warrior came to the front, shouting, \"Jiang Wei, you fool, do not pursue my son when I, Deng Ai, am here!\"\n\nJiang Wei was taken aback; so he had only been contending with Deng Zhong, the son of his real opponent. Although he was astonished at the skill and vigor of the youth, he now knew that a heavier task lay before him and feared lest his steed was then too far spent for the contest.\n\nSo he said to Deng Ai, \"Seeing things are so, let us both hold off our troops till the morrow, when we will fight.\"\n\nDeng Ai, glancing around, saw that the place was ill-suited for him, so he agreed to wait, saying, \"Let us lead off our armies then, and whoever shall take any secret advantage is a base fellow.\"\n\nBoth sides retired into camp, Deng Ai on the bank of River Wei, and Jiang Wei on the hills.\n\nDeng Ai saw that the army of Shu had the advantage of position, so he wrote off at once to Sima Wang:\n\n\"General, we should not give battle, but wait for reinforcements. Meanwhile the soldiers of Shu will be consuming their supply of grain, and we will attack on three sides when they begin to be hungry. I send my son Deng Zhong to you for further help in the defense of the city.\"\n\nJiang Wei sent a messenger to the Wei camp to deliver a letter of battle, the contest to take place the next day. Deng Ai openly accepted. But when morning came and Jiang Wei had arrayed his troops, his enemy had not appeared on the field. Nor was there any sign of giving battle, no display of flags or rolling of drums all day.\n\nAt nightfall the army of Shu returned to camp, and Jiang Wei sent a letter reproaching his opponent with his failure to keep his word.\n\nDeng Ai treated the bearer of the letter with great courtesy and explained, saying, \"I have been indisposed today, but will certainly fight on the morrow.\"\n\nBut the next day passed also without any move on the part of Wei; and the same thing went on for five days.\n\nThen said Fu Qian to his chief, \"There is some knavery afoot, and we must be on our guard.\"\n\n\"They must be waiting for reinforcements from Within the Passes that they may attack on three sides,\" said Jiang Wei. \"But now will I send into Wu and get Sun Chen to strike at the same time as I.\"\n\nJust then scouts came to give the news of the rout of the army of Wu: \"Sima Zhao has defeated Shouchun and killed Zhuge Dan. Many in the Wu army have gone over to Wei. Sima Zhao has gone to Luoyang and is planning to march an army to attack Changcheng.\"\n\n\"So our attack on Wei is but a sham!\" said Jiang Wei, bitterly. \"It is only a picture of a cake.\"\n\n\u2003Four times he missed! He hailed\n\n\u2003The fifth occasion joyfully, and failed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "Ding Feng Makes A Plan To Slay Sun Chen; Jiang Wei Arrays A Battle To Defeat Deng Ai.\n\nFearing lest reinforcements would strengthen his enemy beyond his own power of resistance, Jiang Wei decided to retreat while he could. He sent all his stores and baggage away first with the footmen, and kept the cavalry to cover the retirement.\n\nThe spies reported his movements to Deng Ai, who said, \"He has gone because he knew that the main army would soon be upon him. Let him go, and do not follow. If we pursue, he will play us some evil trick.\"\n\nScouts were sent to keep in touch with the retreating army, and when they returned they reported that preparations of dry woods and straws had been made in the Luo Valley to check any pursuit with fire.\n\nThe officers praised the prescience of Deng Ai, \"General, your calculation is superhuman!\"\n\nWhen Deng Ai reported these matters to the capital, Sima Zhao was very pleased and confer more rewards.\n\nThe Prime Minister of Wu, Sun Chen, was greatly angered by the desertion of so many of his soldiers and officers to Wei, and revenged himself by putting their families to death. The Ruler of Wu, Sun Liang, disapproved of these acts of cruelty, but he was powerless.\n\nThe young Emperor was of an ingenious turn of mind. One day he went to the West Park to eat of the newly ripened plums. He bade one of the eunuchs bring some honey. It was brought, but there were mouse droppings in it. The Ruler of Wu called the storekeeper and blamed him for carelessness.\n\nThe storekeeper said, \"We are very careful to keep the stores in good order, and the honey cannot not possibly have been fouled in the storehouse.\"\n\n\"Has anyone asked you for honey lately?\" asked the Ruler of Wu.\n\n\"One of the eunuchs asked for some a few days ago. I refused him.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wu called the named eunuch and said, \"You defiled the honey out of spite.\"\n\nThe man denied it.\n\n\"It is very easy to tell,\" said the Ruler of Wu. \"If the dirt has been lying in the honey for some time it will be wet all through.\"\n\nThen the Ruler of Wu ordered them to cut one of the lumps, and it was quite dry inside. The eunuch then confessed.\n\nThis shows the Ruler of Wu was quick-witted. But clever as he was, he could not control his Prime Minister, whose relatives were in command of all the garrisons and armies, so that he was unassailable. His four brothers all had high offices: Sun Ju was General Who Terrifies Distant Regions and Commander of Imperial Guards; Sun En, General Who Shows Prowess; Sun Gan, Imperial Commander; and Sun Kan, Commander of Changshui.\n\nOne day the Ruler of Wu, musing over his sorrows and feeling very miserable, began to weep. The officer in charge of the eunuchs, who was an Imperial Brother-in-Law, stood by.\n\n\"Sun Chen holds all real power and does as he wishes, while I am despised,\" said the Ruler of Wu. \"Something must be done.\"\n\nQuan Ji said, \"I would think no sacrifice too great if Your Majesty would make use of me.\"\n\n\"If you could muster the Palace guards and help General Liu Cheng to keep the gates, I would go and murder that ruffian. But you must not let anyone know; for if you tell your noble mother, who is a sister of Sun Chen, she will tell her brother, and that would be very serious for me.\"\n\n\"Will Your Majesty give me a command that I may have authority to act when the time comes?\" said Quan Ji. \"At the critical moment I could show the edict and hold back Sun Chen's supporters.\"\n\nThe command was given, and Quan Ji went home. But he could not keep his secret, and confided the plan to his father, Quan Shang.\n\nHis father told his wife, \"Sun Chen will be got rid of in three days.\"\n\n\"Oh, he deserves that,\" said she.\n\nAlthough she seemed to approve with her tongue, she sent a secret messenger with a letter to the proposed victim.\n\nThat same night Sun Chen called in his four leader brothers, and the Palace was surrounded. The conspirators were seized, with Liu Cheng and Quan Shang and all their families.\n\nAbout dawn the Ruler of Wu was disturbed by a commotion at the gates, and a servant told him, \"Sun Chen with his army has surrounded the Inner Palace!\"\n\nSun Liang knew that he had been betrayed. He turned on Empress Quan, who was of the Quan house, and reproached her.\n\n\"Your father and brother have upset all my plans!\"\n\nDrawing his sword, he was dashing out when his Consort and her people clung to his clothing and held him back.\n\nAfter putting to death Liu Cheng's and Quan Shang's parties, Sun Chen assembled the officers in the court and addressed them thus: \"The Emperor is vicious and weak, depraved and foolish and unfit for his high office. Wherefore he must be deposed. Any of you who oppose will be punished as for conspiracy.\"\n\n\"We shall obey your command, O General!\" said the court officiers out of fear.\n\nOnly one of those present dared to say a word of protest.\n\nIt was Chair of the Secretariat Huan Yi, who said, \"How dare you utter such words? Our Emperor is very intelligent, and I will not support you. I would rather die!\"\n\nSun Chen wrathfully drew his sword and slew Huan Yi.\n\nThen Sun Chen went into the Palace and said to Sun Liang, \"O unrighteous and unenlightened Highness, your death would be the only fitting reparation to make to the empire, but out of consideration for your ancestors you are only deposed and degraded to princely rank as Prince of Kuaiji. I will select a worthy successor.\"\n\nSecretary Li Zong was ordered to bring in the royal seal, which was delivered to Deng Cheng. The deposed ruler retired weeping.\n\n\u2003The sage example of the wise Yi Yin\n\n\u2003Perverted now to traitor's use we see;\n\n\u2003And Huo Guang's faithful services are made\n\n\u2003A cloak to cover vilest treachery.\n\n\u2003Even able princes are but toys of fate,\n\n\u2003And need our pity, fallen from high estate.\n\nSun Chen then sent two ministers of the court, Royal Clan Recorder Sun Kai and Secretary Dong Cao, went as envoys to Hulin to request Sun Xiu, Prince of Langye, the sixth son of Sun Quan, to ascend the throne.\n\nThe Emperor-elect had had some premonition of the high honor to which he was now called, for in a dream he saw he ascended into the skies seated on a dragon. Only the dragon seemed to have no tail. He woke up in a fright, and the next day brought the Imperial Envoys, Sun Kai and Dong Cao.\n\nSun Xiu set out. At Que his carriage was stopped by a venerable old man who claimed to be Gan Xiu and offered felicitations.\n\n\"Your Majesty should move faster, for things may change swiftly,\" said the aged one.\n\nSun Xiu thanked the old man.\n\nAt Busai Pavilion awaited Sun En with a chariot, but Sun Xiu's modesty would not allow him to mount it. He remained in his own simple carriage and therein traveled to the Palace. Officials lined the road to salute him, and he dismounted to return their salutations. Then Sun Chen stood forth and bade them take the newly-elected Emperor by the arm and lead him into the Great Hall, where, after thrice refusing the honor, he at last took his seat in the dragon throne and received the jade seal passed from one ruler to another.\n\nWhen all the officers had made obeisance, there were the usual amnesties, promotions, and honors, and Eternal Tranquillity, the first year (AD 258), was the name of the new reign. Sun Chen was confirmed as Prime Minister, with the Imperial Protectorship of Jingzhou. Moreover, Sun Hao, the son of his elder brother, was created Lord of Wucheng.\n\nSun Chen, with five persons in his family holding lordships and the whole army under their command, was immensely powerful, able to set up and pull down at will. The new Ruler of Wu, Sun Xiu, secretly feared him; and although outwardly he showed Sun Chen great favor, yet he kept careful watch over Sun Chen, whose arrogance knew no bounds.\n\nIn the winter Sun Chen sent into the Palace presents of oxen and wine as birthday gifts. The Ruler of Wu declined them. Sun Chen was very annoyed and took the presents to Zhang Bu's residence, where they two dined together. Zhang Bu was the General of the Left Army.\n\nWhen warmed with wine, Sun Chen said, \"When I deposed the present Prince of Kuaiji, many people urged me to take the throne myself. But I acted magnanimously and set up this present Emperor. Now I suffer the mortification of seeing my presents rejected. You will see what will come of this slight.\"\n\nZhang Bu showed sympathy, but the next day he secretly told the Ruler of Wu, and Sun Xiu's fears increased so that he could not rest. Shortly after this, Sun Chen sent a large body of troops under the command of Minister Meng Zong into camp at Wuchang, and Sun Chen armed them from the state arsenals.\n\nWhereupon General Wei Miao and Imperial Guard Shi Shuo secretly memorialized the Ruler of Wu: \"Sun Chen has moved the troops outside and provided them with state arms. This action points to rebellion.\"\n\nSun Xiu was shocked, and called in Zhang Bu to consult, and he said, \"The Veteran General Ding Feng is an able and trustworthy officer. He should be consulted.\"\n\nSo Ding Feng was called and taken into the Emperor's confidence.\n\n\"Have no anxiety,\" said Ding Feng. \"I will find some way of ridding the state of this evil.\"\n\n\"What do you propose?\"\n\n\"When the winter court is held, and all the officers are assembled, spread a great banquet and invite Sun Chen. I shall be ready to act.\"\n\nWei Miao and Shi Shuo were taken into the plot and were to do what was possible outside the Palace, and Zhang Bu saw to arrangements within.\n\nOne night a heavy storm came on to blow, which tore up great trees by the roots. However, by daylight it had abated, and that morning an Emperor's messenger arrived bearing an invitation to a banquet in the Palace. Sun Chen rose from his couch, and, as he did so, fell flat on the ground as though he had been pushed from behind. This accident troubled him, and he felt apprehensive, so he called half a score of his trusty guards to act as his escort to the Palace.\n\nAs he was leaving home, his family besought him not to go out, saying, \"The storm last night and the fall this morning are fearful omens. You should not go to that banquet.\"\n\nHowever, he made light of their fears and said, \"My brothers are holding the army. Who will dare come near me? But if there is anything amiss, you just give a fire signal from the Prime Minister's residence.\"\n\nSo Sun Chen took his seat, and the carriage set out. When he reached the court, the Ruler of Wu rose from his place to welcome him, and at table Sun Chen sat in the seat of honor. The banquet proceeded.\n\n\"There is a fire outside: What does that mean?\" said a guest presently.\n\nSun Chen rose to go out, but the Ruler of Wu said, \"There is no danger, and there are plenty of soldiers outside to take care of that.\"\n\nJust at that moment Zhang Bu entered at the head of thirty armed guards. He rushed up the banquet chamber, shouting, \"I hold a command to slay the rebel Sun Chen!\"\n\nInstantly the Prime Minister was seized. He fell prostrate before the Ruler of Wu, knocking his head on the ground and crying, \"Spare my life! Exile me to Jiaozhou, where I will do plow work.\"\n\n\"Did you exile any of your victims \u2014 Teng Yin, Lu Ju, Wang Chun, and others?\" said the Ruler of Wu, angrily.\n\nThe order went forth to carry out the execution, and Sun Chen was hustled out and put to death. No single person of his servants raised a hand to help him.\n\nThen Zhang Bu read an edict: \"Sun Chen is the only culprit, and no other will be questioned.\"\n\nThen at Zhang Bu's request, the Ruler of Wu went up on the Tower of the Five Phoenixes. Zhang Bu, Wei Miao, and Shi Shuo brought the brothers of the Prime Minister before Sun Xiu, and he condemned them to death. After this their families were slain, so that many hundreds suffered death. Not content with all these things, the tomb of Sun Jun was broken open and his corpse beheaded.\n\nMagnificent tombs were raised to his victims \u2014 Zhuge Ke, Teng Yin, Lu Ju, Wang Chun, and others. Thus at last loyalty was rewarded, and the banished were permitted to return home with full pardon. The conspirators were rewarded.\n\nNews of this revolution was sent into Chengdu, and the Latter Ruler sent an envoy into Wu with felicitations. In return, the Ruler of Wu sent Xue Xu as his envoy to Shu.\n\nWhen Xue Xu returned, the Ruler of Wu questioned about affairs in the west, and Xue Xu said, \"All affairs of state are in the hands of a certain eunuch named Huang Hao, and all the courtiers look up to him as to a father. At court plain truth is never heard, and the country people look sallow and starved. The whole country appears on the verge of destruction. The birds on the roof do not know that the building is about to be burned.\"\n\n\"Ah! If only Zhuge Liang the Martial Lord was still alive \u2014 how different all would be!\" said Sun Xiu, with a sigh.\n\nLetters were prepared saying that beyond doubt Sima Zhao intended usurpation, and when that came about in Wei, both Wu and Shu would be invaded. Wherefore both should be ready.\n\nOn the arrival of these letters, Jiang Wei hastened to seek permission to attempt another expedition. Consent being given, a large army marched into Hanzhong in the winter of the first year of Wonderful Sight (AD 258). Liao Hua and Zhang Yi were appointed Leaders of the Van, Wang Han and Jiang Bin as Commanders of the Left Army, and Jiang Shu and Fu Qian as Commanders of the Right Army, while Jiang Wei and Xiahou Ba led the main column.\n\nAsked what he thought should be the first objective, Xiahou Ba replied, \"There is no better fighting ground than Qishan, as the tactics of the late Prime Minister made evident, and it is the only good exit.\"\n\nSo thither three armies marched, and they made three camps at the entrance to the valley. At this time Deng Ai had a training camp at Qishan drilling the Longyou troops.\n\nThe scouts told him: \"The Shu army have pitched three camps in the valley.\"\n\nHe ascended a hill to see and verify their reports. He seemed pleased when he saw the enemy camp.\n\n\"They have just done as I foresaw,\" said Deng Ai.\n\nNow Deng Ai had carefully considered the topography of the countryside, and so had not interfered with the Shu army when it was on the march or settling into camp. Moreover, he had excavated a subterranean road to the spot where he had thought they would halt, and their left camp had been pitched just on it. Wang Han and Jiang Bin commanded in that camp.\n\nDeng Ai called his son Deng Zhong and Shi Zuan and sent them with ten thousand troops each to attack the left camp, one on each flank. Then he sent Zheng Lun and five hundred troops into the underground road, which opened in rear of the camp of Wang Han and Jiang Bin.\n\nAs the newly made camp was not yet well fortified, Wang Han and Jiang Bin exercised great care and kept their troops under arms all night, watching with vigilance. So when the alarm was given, they had but to seize their weapons and go out. But as the two leaders were mounting their steeds, Deng Zhong and Shi Zuan had attacked from without, and Zheng Lun from within. Thus attacked from three sides, soon Wang Han and Jiang Bin found the position untenable and fled.\n\nWhen Jiang Wei saw that his left camp had been attacked on three sides, he mounted and took his position in front of the center camp.\n\n\"Let no one move on pain of death!\" he shouted. \"Stand still. When the enemy approaches, shoot!\"\n\nThe right camp was ordered to stand fast. His defense was effective. A dozen of times the troops of Wei came forward, only to be driven back before the arrows and bolts of the defenders. Daylight found the Shu camps still firm, and the Wei troops drew off.\n\n\"Jiang Wei has indeed learned of Zhuge Liang,\" said Deng Ai. \"His soldiers stood the night attack without flinching, and the leaders took the chances of battle quite calmly. He is able.\"\n\nNext day, when Wang Han and Jiang Bin went to confess their fault, Jiang Wei said, \"It was less your fault than mine, for I did not clearly recognize the nature of the terrain.\"\n\nSo no penalty was inflicted. The camp was made stronger, and the subterranean passage was filled with the bodies of the slain.\n\nA challenge to battle for the following day was sent to Deng Ai, who accepted it joyfully.\n\nNext day the two armies were arrayed in front of the Qishan Mountains. The troops of Shu arrayed according to the \"Eight Formations\" designed by Zhuge Liang, which are called Heaven, Earth, Wind, Cloud, Bird, Serpent, Dragon, and Tiger. While the maneuver was in progress, Deng Ai recognized it as the Eight Gates Formation and placed his troops accordingly.\n\nJiang Wei then gripped his spear and rode out, saying, \"You have made a good imitation of my eight, but can you work variations?\"\n\n\"You call these yours! Did you think that you alone held the secret? Since I have made it, of course I know the variations.\"\n\nDeng Ai reentered his ranks, gave the signal officers certain orders, and the eight gates were evolved in rapid succession into sixty-four gates. Then he rode to the front again.\n\n\"What of my evolution?\" asked Deng Ai.\n\n\"Not so bad. Would you like to try a surrounding move with me?\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\nThe two armies moved in orderly ranks. Deng Ai stood in the midst of his army giving the necessary orders. Then the clash came, but his tactics did not grip. Then Jiang Wei waved a certain signal flag, and his force suddenly assumed the form of a serpent coiled on the ground with Deng Ai in the center. Shouts arose all about him, and Deng Ai could not understand what had happened and began to feel afraid. Gradually the troops of Shu closed in upon him, and he saw no way of escape.\n\n\"Deng Ai, you must surrender!\" cried the soldiers.\n\n\"Indeed a moment of pride had led me into the trap of Jiang Wei!\" he sighed.\n\nSuddenly from the northwest a cohort dashed in. To Deng Ai's great joy they were soldiers of Wei, and they forced over the battle array and released him. The leader was Sima Wang.\n\nBut although Deng Ai had been rescued, his nine camps were seized by his enemy and he had to retire. He led his army to the south of River Wei and made a camp.\n\n\"How did you know exactly where to strike in that maze?\" asked Deng Ai of his rescuer.\n\nSima Wang replied, \"In my youth I went to study in Jingzhou and was friendly with Shi Guangyuan and Cui Zhouping. They explained that formation to me. Jiang Wei used what is known as 'The Serpent Coil', and the only way to break it is to attack the head, which I saw was in the northwest.\"\n\nDeng Ai replied, \"Although I have studied formations, I do not know all the modifications. But since you know about this, we may be able to recover our camps.\"\n\n\"I fear the little I have learned will not be enough to overcome Jiang Wei.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow you shall contend with him, and while his attention is engaged, I will attack the rear of Qishan, and we will recover our camps.\"\n\nSo a force was prepared to attack on the morrow, and Deng Ai sent a letter of challenge to a contest in tactics for the same day. Jiang Wei marked in to accept.\n\nJiang Wei said to his officers, \"In the secret book that I received from the Prime Minister, the variations of the formation are three hundred and sixty-five, corresponding to the circuit of the heavens. This challenge from them is as one going to teach hewing to the God of Carpenters. I think some ruse lies behind this. Can you guess what it is?\"\n\nLiao Hua replied, \"While they engage your attention in this competition, they intend to attack our rear.\"\n\n\"Just so; that is also my opinion,\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\nSo he prepared a counter-stroke by sending Liao Hua and Zhang Yi to lie in wait at the back of the hills with ten thousand troops.\n\nNext day Jiang Wei led all the troops from the nine camps out and drawn up in front of the hills. Sima Wang came out on the other side and presently rode to the front to parley.\n\n\"You have challenged me to a contest. Now draw up your army for me to see,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\nSima Wang did so and arrayed the eight diagrams.\n\n\"That is what we know as the Octagon,\" said Jiang Wei. \"But it is nothing wonderful, only a sort of array fit for a brigand's raid.\"\n\n\"You also have only stolen another man's tactics,\" replied his adversary.\n\n\"How many modifications of this are there?\" asked Jiang Wei.\n\n\"Since I have arranged this, naturally I know the variations, of which there are nine nines, making eighty-one.\"\n\n\"Try them.\"\n\nSima Wang returned to his array and evolved many, finally riding out and asking his opponent if he recognized them.\n\n\"My formation admits of three hundred and sixty-five variations. You are but a frog in a well and know nothing of the deeper mysteries.\"\n\nNow Sima Wang knew that so many variations were possible, but had not studied them. However, he put on a bold air and said contemptuously, \"I do not believe you. Prove it!\"\n\n\"Go and call Deng Ai,\" replied Jiang Wei. \"I will display them to him.\"\n\n\"General Deng Ai has excellent plans and does not think much of such tactics.\"\n\n\"What plans? I suppose you mean a plan to keep me here while he tries a surprise attack in the rear.\"\n\nSima Wang was aghast. He made a sudden dash forward, and a melee began. Jiang Wei made a signal with his whip, and his force poured in from both wings. The troops of Wei were seized with sudden panic, threw down their weapons and fled.\n\nNow Deng Ai had hurried on Zheng Lun to make the first attack. As Zheng Lun turned the corner of the hill, a bomb exploded. At once the drums rolled and an ambush discovered itself. Liao Hua was in command. Neither side stayed to parley, and the leaders engaged in single combat. In the first encounter Liao Hua cut Zheng Lun down.\n\nDeng Ai had not expected such preparation, and he hastened to withdraw. Then Zhang Yi came forth and attacked on the other side. The army of Wei was worsted. Deng Ai fought his way out, but he bore four arrow wounds upon his body. He got to the river, where he found Sima Wang, and they discussed how to get away.\n\nBut Sima Wang proposed another form of attack.\n\n\"Recently the Ruler of Shu has had a favorite, Eunuch Huang Hao, in whom he places all his trust and with whom he spends his time in one round of pleasure. Let us use the eunuch to sow distrust between the Emperor and his general and so get Jiang Wei recalled. In that way we shall retrieve our defeat.\"\n\nSo Deng Ai assembled his advisers and asked who could go into Shu and get into communication with Huang Hao.\n\nDang Jun volunteered at once. Deng Ai entrusted gold and pearls and precious things to him, and sent him into Shu to win the treacherous alliance of the eunuch. As Dang Jun went, he also disseminated reports that Jiang Wei was angry and intended to go over to Wei.\n\nThese rumors became the common talk in Chengdu, and everyone believed them. Huang Hao carried them to the Emperor, and a messenger was sent to call the general to the capital.\n\nMeanwhile Jiang Wei tried every day to bring the enemy to give battle, but they remained obstinately behind their defenses. Jiang Wei began to think some evil scheme was afoot, when suddenly he was recalled by Imperial Edict. Although ignorant of the reason, he could not disobey; and when he began the retreat, Deng Ai and Sima Wang knew that their plot had succeeded. They broke camp and set out to attack the retreating army.\n\n\u2003Because of court intrigues\n\n\u2003Yue Yi and Yue Fei failed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "Driving To The South Gate, Cao Mao Plunges Into Death; Abandoning Stores, Jiang Wei Defeats The Wei Army.\n\nWhen the order to retreat was given, Liao Hua said, \"A leader in the field is independent and need not obey even the command of his prince.\"\n\nZhang Yi said, \"The country begins to resent these many years of war. Rather take the occasion of the victory you have just won to return and pacify the people.\"\n\n\"It is good,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\nA systematic and orderly retirement began. The army of Wei, loth to forgo an opportunity, followed, but the absence of the least confusion gave them no chance.\n\nAs he saw his enemy disappearing in perfect order, Deng Ai sighed, \"Jiang Wei is a worthy inheritor of the warlike methods of Zhuge Liang.\"\n\nDeng Ai did not pursue but returned to his camp on Qishan.\n\nOn his return to Chengdu, Jiang Wei had audience with the Latter Ruler, whereat he inquired, saying, \"Your Majesty has commanded me to return for an important reason?\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler replied, \"Because you have been so long on the frontier, Noble Sir. I thought the soldiers must be weary. There was no other reason.\"\n\n\"Your Majesty, thy servant had got his camps on Qishan and was on the eve of complete success. To leave off thus in the middle just played into the hands of our enemies. Surely Deng Ai found means of sowing distrust in me.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler sat lost in thought, and silent.\n\nJiang Wei continued, \"I am pledged to destroy those rebels and prove my devotion to my country. Your Majesty should not listen to the babble of mean persons till distrust grows in your heart.\"\n\n\"I do not distrust you,\" said the Latter Ruler after a long pause. \"You may return into Hanzhong and await the next favorable opportunity.\"\n\nJiang Wei left the court and betook himself into Hanzhong to the army.\n\nDang Jun went back to the Qishan camp and reported his success.\n\nDeng Ai and Sima Wang rejoiced, saying, \"In the River Lands, trouble is not far off when the ruler and his servants do not live in harmony.\"\n\nThey sent Dang Jun to Luoyang to tell his own story to Sima Zhao, who also rejoiced, for he ardently desired to subdue Shu.\n\nOn this matter Sima Zhao consulted Jia Chong, Commander of the Center Guard.\n\n\"What do you think of an attack upon Shu?\"\n\n\"Not to be considered,\" said Jia Chong. \"The Emperor does not trust you, and your departure would be the beginning of trouble for you. Last year, when a yellow dragon was seen in the Ningling well and all the officers were felicitating the Emperor upon such a very auspicious occurrence, the Emperor said, 'It is not auspicious; just the reverse. The dragon symbolizes the ruler. To be neither in heaven, nor on earth among the people, but to be in a well, is a dark portent and bodes evil.' He wrote some verses, and one stanza undoubtedly points to you, my lord. It reads:\n\n\u2003\"The dragon like a prisoner is,\n\n\u2003No longer leaps he in the abyss.\n\n\u2003He soars not to the Milky Way\n\n\u2003Nor can he in the meadows play;\n\n\u2003But coiled within a dismal well,\n\n\u2003With slimy creatures he must dwell,\n\n\u2003Must close his jaws, his claws retract,\n\n\u2003Alas! Quite like myself in fact.\"\n\nThe recital of the poem annoyed Sima Zhao.\n\n\"This fellow is very like Cao Fang, and if I do not remove him he will hurt me,\" said he.\n\n\"I will see to it for you,\" said Jia Chong.\n\nIn the fifth year of Sweet Dew, in Wei calendar (AD 261), during the fourth month, in summer, Sima Zhao had the effrontery to go to court armed. However, the Ruler of Wei received him with exaggerated courtesy.\n\nThe courtiers said, \"The services of the Regent Marshal are so magnificent, and his virtue so high that he should be rewarded with the title 'Duke of Jin' and the Nine Dignities.\"\n\nCao Mao hung his head and kept silent.\n\nAnd Sima Zhao himself said discontentedly, \"My father and my brother have all given great services to Wei, and yet I deserves not being a mere Duke of Jin?\"\n\n\"Should I dare not do what you requested?\" said Cao Mao.\n\n\"That poem about the Lurking Dragon called us slimy creatures. What sort of politeness is that?\" said Sima Zhao.\n\nThe Ruler of Wei had nothing to say, and the haughty minister left the chamber, smiling cruelly.\n\nCao Mao retired, taking with him Minister Wang Jing, Adviser Wang Shen, and General of the Cavalry Wang Ye, and they went to a privy chamber to consult. Cao Mao was very sad.\n\nHe said, \"There is no doubt that Sima Zhao intends to usurp the Throne \u2014 everybody knows that. But I will not sit thereon patiently awaiting the indignity of being pushed off. Cannot you gentlemen help me to kill him?\"\n\n\"He may not be slain,\" said Wang Jing. \"That will not do. In the old state of Lu, King Zhao could not bear with the Ji family, and ran away, thus losing his country. But this Sima Zhao and his family have been in power very long and have innumerable supporters, many of whom are quite independent of any act of his whether loyal or disloyal. They support him under any conditions. Your Majesty's guards are few and weak and incapable \u2014 not the ones for any desperate effort. It would be most lamentable if Your Majesty could not bear this trial. The correct course is to wait and not act hastily.\"\n\n\"If I can bear this, what cannot I bear?\" said Cao Mao. \"But I will do something, and if I die, what matters?\"\n\nHe went into the private apartments and spoke to the Empress Dowager.\n\nWang Shen, Wang Jing, and Wang Ye sat outside talking.\n\n\"This matter is coming to a head, and unless we want to be put to death and all our loved ones with us, we had better go and warn Sima Zhao,\" said Wang Shen.\n\nThis advice angered Wang Jing, and he said, \"The prince's sorrow is the minister's shame, and a shamed minister dies. Dare you contemplate treachery?\"\n\nWang Jing would have nothing to do with this visit to Sima Zhao, but the other two went to the Prime Minister's palace to betray their prince.\n\nShortly after, Cao Mao appeared, called the officer of the guard, Jiao Bo, and bade him muster his force, as many as he could. Jiao Bo got together about three hundred, and this little force marched out to the beating of a drum as escort to a small carriage, in which sat the Ruler of Wei gripping his sword. They proceeded south.\n\nWang Jing stepped to the front and prayed Cao Mao to stay his steps and not go.\n\n\"To go against Sima Zhao with such a force is driving the sheep into the tiger's jaws. To die such a death is a vain sacrifice. Not that I want to live, but this can do nothing,\" said Wang Jing.\n\n\"Do not hinder me. I have made up my mind,\" replied the Ruler of Wei, heading toward the Dragon Gate.\n\nPresently Jia Chong came in sight. He was armed and mounted on a fine horse. Beside him rode two generals, Cheng Zu and Cheng Ji, and behind him followed a body of mail-clad guards, who shouted one to another as they rode.\n\nThen Cao Mao held up his sword and cried, \"I am the Son of God. Who are you thus breaking into the Forbidden City? Are you come to murder your lawful ruler?\"\n\nThe soldiers suddenly stopped, for they were Palace guards.\n\nThen Jia Chong shouted to Cheng Ji, saying, \"What did Duke Sima Zhao train you for if not for this day's work?\"\n\nCheng Ji took his halberd and turned to Jia Chong, saying, \"Death or capture?\"\n\n\"Duke Sima Zhao said the man had to die,\" replied Jia Chong.\n\nCheng Ji rushed toward the carriage.\n\n\"Fool! How dare you?\" cried the Ruler of Wei.\n\nBut the shout was cut short by a thrust from the halberd full in the breast; another thrust, and the point came out at the back, so that Cao Mao lay there dead beside his carriage. Jiao Bo coming up to strike a blow in defense was also slain, and the little escort scattered.\n\nWang Jing, who had followed, upbraided Jia Chong, shouting, \"Rebel and traitor! How dare you kill the Emperor?\"\n\nJia Chong got angry and bade his lictors arrest Wang Jing and stop his tongue.\n\nWhen they told Sima Zhao, he went into the Palace, but the Emperor was dead. He assumed an air of being greatly shocked and beat his head against the carriage, weeping and lamenting the while. He sent to tell all the officials of high rank.\n\nWhen Imperial Guardian Sima Fu saw the dead body of the Emperor, he threw himself beside it, his head resting thereon, and wept, saying, \"It is my fault that they slew Your Majesty!\"\n\nSima Fu had a coffin brought, and the remains were laid therein and borne to the West Hall. Therein Sima Zhao entered and summoned the chief officers to a council. They came, all but Minister Chen Tai. Sima Zhao noticed his absence and sent the Chair of the Secretariat Xun Yi, his uncle, to call him.\n\nChen Tai wept aloud, saying, \"Gossips often class me and my uncle together. Yet today is my uncle less virtuous than I.\"\n\nHowever, Chen Tai obeyed the summons and came, dressed in the coarse white cloth of mourning, and prostrated himself before the bier. Sima Zhao feigned to be grieved also.\n\n\"How can this day's work be judged?\" said Sima Zhao.\n\n\"If only Jia Chong be put to death, that will only be a slight atonement to satisfy the empire,\" replied Chen Tai.\n\nSima Zhao was silent and thought long before he spoke. Then he said, \"How about a little less severe?\"\n\n\"That is only the beginning. I know not other punishments less severe.\"\n\n\"Cheng Ji is the ungodly rebel and actual criminal. He should suffer the death of shame \u2014 and his family, too,\" said Sima Zhao.\n\nThereupon Cheng Ji broke out into abuse of Sima Zhao and reviled him, saying, \"It was not my crime: It was Jia Chong who passed on your own orders!\"\n\nSima Zhao bade them cut out his tongue and put him to death. They did so; and Cheng Ji and his brother Cheng Zu were both put to death in the market place, and their families were exterminated.\n\n\u2003\"The Emperor must die,\" thus spoke Sima Zhao full plain\n\n\u2003In Jia Chong's hearing; and the Emperor was slain.\n\n\u2003Although they killed Cheng Ji, who dealt the blow,\n\n\u2003The author of the crime we all well know.\n\nWang Jing's whole household were imprisoned. He himself was standing in the courthouse when he saw his mother, Lady Zhao, being brought up a prisoner.\n\nHe knocked his head on the ground and wept, saying, \"O unfilial son to bring distress upon a gentle mother!\"\n\nBut his mother laughed.\n\n\"Who does not die?\" cried she. \"The only thing to be feared is not dying the proper death. Who would regret dying like this?\"\n\nWhen next day the family were led out to execution, both mother and son smiled as they went past. But the whole city wept tears of sorrow.\n\n\u2003Mother Yuan was famous at the rise of Han,\n\n\u2003Mother Zhao was distinguished at the end of Wei,\n\n\u2003With purest virtue and unfaltering heart,\n\n\u2003With resolution stern she played her part.\n\n\u2003Her fortitude was great as Taishan Mountains,\n\n\u2003Her life but as the floating down did count,\n\n\u2003Like mother like son, their fame never will die,\n\n\u2003So long as shall endure the earth and sky.\n\nImperial Guardian Sima Fu proposed that the body of the late Emperor should receive a royal funeral, and Sima Zhao consented. Jia Chong and those of his party urged Sima Zhao to assume the Throne and replace Wei, but he refused.\n\n\"Formerly King Wen had two-thirds of the empire, and yet he supported and served the state of Yin to its end. Wherefore Confucius called him 'Complete of Virtue'. Emperor Cao of Wei would not replace the Hans, nor will I accept an abdication of Wei.\"\n\nThose who heard this felt that in these words was an implication that he intended to place his own son Sima Yan on the throne, and they ceased to urge him to act.\n\nIn the sixth month of that year, Cao Huang, Duke of Changdao, was raised to the throne as Emperor, the period-style being changed to Wonderful Beginning, the first year (AD 260). Cao Huang was a son of Cao Yu, Prince of Yan, and a great grandson of Cao Cao.\n\nSima Zhao was made Prime Minister and Duke of Jin. Beside, he received gifts of one hundred thousand gold coins and ten thousand rolls of silk. All the officers were promoted or received honors.\n\nWhen these doings in Wei were told in Shu, Jiang Wei seized upon them as pretext for another war, to punish Wei for the deposition of its ruler. So letters were written calling upon Wu to help, and a memorial was sent to the Throne. The army raised was one hundred fifty thousand, and there were many carts with boxes made to fit them. Liao Hua and Zhang Yi were the Leaders of the Van. Liao Hua was to march to the Ziwu Valley, and Zhang Yi to the Luo Valley, while Jiang Wei took the Xie Valley road. They marched at the same time and hastened toward Qishan.\n\nDeng Ai was still on the Qishan Mountains training the Wei soldiers when he heard that the Shu armies were once more on the war path. He called his officers together.\n\nAnd Adviser Wang Guan said, \"I have a plan to propose, but I will not tell it openly. However, I have written it down for your consideration.\"\n\nDeng Ai took the envelop, opened, and read it.\n\n\"Though excellent, I fear it is not enough to beguile the leader of Shu,\" said Deng Ai as he finished reading.\n\n\"I am willing to stake my life on it,\" said Wang Guan, \"and I will lead the way.\"\n\n\"Since you have such confidence you may try. You ought certainly to succeed.\"\n\nSo five thousand troops were put under the leadership of Wang Guan, and they set out for the Xie Valley, where they fell in with the scouts of Jiang Wei's force.\n\nSeeing these, their leader, Wang Guan, shouted, \"We are deserters. Tell your leader!\"\n\nSo the scouts told Jiang Wei, who replied, \"Hold up the soldiers, letting their leader only come to me.\"\n\nWang Guan went forward and kneeled before Jiang Wei, saying, \"I am a nephew of Wang Jing, and I hate Sima Zhao for what he has done to the Emperor and my family, and I wish to join you and my five thousand soldiers with me. I also desire to be sent against the rebel army that I may avenge my uncle.\"\n\nThen said Jiang Wei, \"Since you are sincere in your desertion, I must be sincere in my treatment of you. The one thing my army needs is grain. There is plenty at the border of the River Lands. If you can transport it to Qishan, I can go straightway and take the Qishan camps of Deng Ai.\"\n\nThis reply rejoiced Wang Guan, who saw that Jiang Wei was just going to walk into the trap. So he agreed at once.\n\n\"But you will not need five thousand troops to see after the transport. Take three thousand and leave two thousand as guides for me.\"\n\nWang Guan, thinking that suspicions would be raised if he refused, took the three thousand of his troops and marched away, and the other two thousand were attached to the army of Shu.\n\nThen Xiahou Ba was announced, and, when he was come in, he said, \"O Commander, why have you believed the tale of this Wang Guan? In Wei I never heard that Wang Guan was related to Wang Jing, though it is true I never made particular inquiries. You should look to it, for there is much pretense in his story.\"\n\n\"I know Wang Guan is false,\" said Jiang Wei, with a smile. \"That is why I have taken away many of his force. I am meeting trick with trick.\"\n\n\"How do you know for certain he is a false?\"\n\n\"Sima Zhao is as crafty as Cao Cao. If he slew all Wang Jing's family, would he have left a nephew and sent that nephew to the pass beyond his own reach with soldiers? You saw this, as did I.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei did not go out by the Xie Valley, but he set an ambush there ready for any move of Wang Guan. And indeed, within ten days, the ambush caught a man with a letter from Wang Guan to Deng Ai telling him what had come about. From the letter and the bearer thereof, Jiang Wei learned that Wang Guan would divert a convoy of grain to the Wei camps on the twentieth and Deng Ai was to send troops to Yunshan Valley to help.\n\nJiang Wei beheaded the courier. Then he sent another letter to Deng Ai by a man dressed as a Wei soldier, the date being altered to the fifteenth instead of the twentieth.\n\nAs a preparation, Jiang Wei ordered many wagons to be emptied of their grain and laden with inflammables, covered with green cloth. The two thousand Wei soldiers were ordered to show flags belonging to the Shu transport corps. Then Jiang Wei and Xiahou Ba went into the valleys in ambush, while Jiang Shu was ordered to march to the Xie Valley, and Liao Hua and Zhang Yi were sent to capture Qishan.\n\nThe letter, apparently from Wang Guan, was sufficient for Deng Ai, and he wrote back to say it was agreed. So on the fifteenth day, Deng Ai led out fifty thousand veteran troops and moved in sight near Yunshan Valley. And the scouts saw endless carts of grain and fodder in the distance zigzagging through the mountains. When Deng Ai got closer, he distinguished the uniforms of Wei.\n\nHis staff urged him, saying, \"It is getting dark, O General. Hurry to help Wang Guan escort the convoy out of the valley!\"\n\n\"The mountains ahead are hazardous,\" said the general. \"If by any chance an ambush has been laid, we could hardly escape. We will wait here.\"\n\nBut just then two horsemen came up at a gallop and said, \"Just as General Wang Guan was crossing the frontier with the convoy, he was pursued, and reinforcements are urgently needed!\"\n\nDeng Ai, realizing the importance of the request, gave orders to press onward. It was the first watch, and a full moon was shining as bright as day. Shouting was heard behind the hills, and he could only conclude it was the noise of the battle in which Wang Guan was engaged.\n\nSo Deng Ai dashed over the hills. But suddenly a body of troops came out from the shelter of a grove of trees, and at their head rode the Shu leader, Fu Qian.\n\n\"Deng Ai, you are stupid! You have just fallen into the trap set for you by our general. Dismount and prepare for death!\"\n\nDeng Ai halted and turned to flee. Then the wagons burst into flame. That flame was a signal, and down came the army of Shu.\n\nHe heard shouts all round him, \"A thousand ounces of gold for anyone who captures Deng Ai, and a lordship of ten thousand households as well!\"\n\nTerrified, Deng Ai dropped his arms, threw aside his armor, slipped from his steed, mingled with the footmen, and with them scrambled up the hills. The generals of Shu only looked for him among the mounted leaders, never guessing that he had got away among the common soldiers. So he was not captured.\n\nJiang Wei gathered in his victorious army and went to meet Wang Guan and his convoy.\n\nHaving made all arrangements, as he thought, complete, Wang Guan was patiently awaiting the development of his scheme.\n\nBut suddenly a trusted subordinate came and told him, \"The ruse has been discovered, and Deng Ai has already suffered defeat!\"\n\nWang Guan sent out some scouts, and the report was confirmed, with the addition that the Shu armies were coming against him. Moreover, clouds of dust were rising. There was no way of escape, so Wang Guan ordered his troops to set fire to the convoy, and soon huge flames were rising high into the air.\n\n\"The case is desperate,\" cried Wang Guan. \"It is a fight to the death!\"\n\nHe led his force westward, but the army of Shu came in pursuit. Jiang Wei thought Wang Guan would try at all costs to get back to his own side, but instead, Wang Guan went on toward Hanzhong. As his troops were too few to risk a battle, Wang Guan ordered them to burn and destroy all military stations and even the Plank Trail as he went. Fearing the loss of Hanzhong, Jiang Wei made all haste along the by-roads after Wang Guan. Surrounded on all sides, Wang Guan jumped into the Black Dragon River and so died. Those of his soldiers who survived were slain by Jiang Wei.\n\nThough a victory had been won and Wang Guan killed, it was costly. Many wagons and much grain had been lost, and the Plank Trail had been destroyed. Jiang Wei led his army into Hanzhong.\n\nDeng Ai made his way back to Qishan. From there he reported his defeat to the Ruler of Wei and asked for degradation as a penalty. However, Sima Zhao saw that Deng Ai had rendered good services, so he did not degrade the general, but, on the other hand, sent him magnificent gifts, which Deng Ai distributed to the families of the soldiers who had been killed. Sima Zhao also sent him fifty thousand troops as reinforcement lest Shu should attack again.\n\nJiang Wei set about the restoration of the Plank Trail ready for the next expedition.\n\n\u2003Repair the roads for marching feet to tread,\n\n\u2003The strife will only cease when all are dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "Listening To Slander, The Latter Ruler Recalls His Army; Living In Farms, Jiang Wei Avoids Disaster.\n\nIn the autumn of the fifth year of Wonderful Sight, in Shu-Han calendar (AD 262), Jiang Wei was occupied with preparations for the renewal of an attack: Mending the hill roads, gathering stores, and mobilizing his boats on the waterways of Hanzhong. These things done, he memorized the Throne, asking permission to go again to the attack:\n\n\"Although I have not been wholly victorious nor accomplished great things, yet I have put fear into the hearts of the Wei armies. Our soldiers have been long under training, and they must now be used, or the army will go to pieces for lack of exercise. The soldiers are ready to die, the officers prepared for all risks, and I am determined to conquer or perish.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler did not consent at once.\n\nAs he was hesitating, Qiao Zhou stood forth and said, \"I have observed the heavens. I have seen the leadership stars in Shu dull and obscured. This expedition will be disastrous, and I hope Your Majesty will not approve.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler replied, \"Let us see the results of this campaign. If it fails, then the war shall cease.\"\n\nQiao Zhou tried to dissuade the Latter Ruler two or three more times, but he failed. In despair he withdrew to his home, and retired on the pretext of illness.\n\nAs the final preparations were being made, Jiang Wei said to Liao Hua, \"We are pledged to get through to the Middle Land this time. What do you advise to start with?\"\n\n\"I dare not presume to advise you, General. For years we have been fighting and giving the people no rest. In Deng Ai we find a most formidable and resourceful opponent and an extraordinarily capable man, so that you must exert yourself to the very utmost.\"\n\nJiang Wei was annoyed. Said he, \"The late Prime Minister made six attempts, all for the state. I have attacked eight times. Was anyone of those attacks to serve my private ends? This time I go to attack Taoyang, and no one shall say me nay. I will punish opposition with death.\"\n\nJiang Wei left Liao Hua in charge of the base in Hanzhong and marched with three hundred thousand troops to Taoyang. His movements were reported in the Qishan camps, and Deng Ai's spies confirmed the news.\n\nIt happened that Sima Wang was with Deng Ai discussing military matters, and the former, when he heard it, said, \"That move is a decoy: He does not mean it. What he really intends is an attack on Qishan.\"\n\n\"However, he has really gone to Taoyang,\" said Deng Ai.\n\n\"How can you know?\"\n\n\"Formerly Jiang Wei has always opened with a march to those parts of the country where we have stored supplies. Taoyang has no stores, so he thinks we shall not have taken care for its defense as we shall concentrate our efforts on Qishan. But, if he can take that place, he can collect stores there, and get into touch with the Qiang tribespeople and finally work out some grand plan.\"\n\n\"Supposing this true, what should we do?\"\n\n\"I advise the abandonment of this place and a march in two bodies toward Taoyang. I know a small town called Houxia, eight miles from Taoyang, which is the throat of the place. You go to Taoyang, hide your force, and open the gates. Then act as I shall tell you presently. I will lie in wait at Houxia. We shall score a victory.\"\n\nDeng Ai gave Shi Zuan the command of the camps in Qishan when the main body left.\n\nMeanwhile Xiahou Ba led the van of the Shu army toward Taoyang. As he drew near, he noticed the place seemed to have no defenses; not a flag staff reared its head. The gates stood wide open.\n\nHe was too wary to go straight in however, and said, \"Is there any ruse in there?\"\n\nHis generals said, \"We think the city was deserted when they heard your army coming. A few people were running away along the southern road.\"\n\nXiahou Ba rode south and saw there that the northwest road, at a little distance from the city, was crowded with fugitives.\n\n\"The city is really empty,\" said Xiahou Ba.\n\nHe led the way in all ready to fight, and the troops followed. As they came near to the curtain wall, however, a bomb exploded. At this sound the drums beat, trumpets blared, and flags suddenly appeared. At the same moment the drawbridge rose.\n\n\"Caught!\" said Xiahou Ba.\n\nAs he turned to retire, the arrows and stones flew down in clouds, and under these Xiahou Ba and many of his soldiers lost their lives.\n\n\u2003Most able strategist and brave,\n\n\u2003Xiahou Ba, outwitted here\n\n\u2003By Deng Ai, more prudent still, and slain,\n\n\u2003Deserves a pitying tear.\n\nThe flights of arrows from the ramparts was followed by a sortie, which broke up the force of Shu entirely, and the troops fled. However, Jiang Wei came up and drove Sima Wang back into the city. The army of Shu camped beside the walls. Jiang Wei was very grieved at the loss of Xiahou Ba.\n\nThat night Deng Ai came up secretly and attacked the Shu camp. At the same time the defenders within the city made a sortie. Jiang Wei could not resist the double attack, and left the field. He marched some seven miles and camped.\n\nTwice beaten, the soldiers of Shu were very downcast.\n\nJiang Wei tried to console them, saying, \"Loss or gain is the platitude of war. But I am not worried yet about our recent defeats, for a total victory will surely come in this expedition if all of you strive your best. But remember, no mutiny! He who talks of retreat will suffer death.\"\n\nThen Zhang Yi said, \"With so many troops of Wei here, their camp at Qishan must be undefended. I propose, General, that while you continue the contest here with Deng Ai, I go to try to capture the nine camps. If I succeed, Changan will be at our mercy.\"\n\nThe second division of the army was detached to march on Qishan, and Jiang Wei went down to Houxia to provoke Deng Ai into fighting. The challenge this time was accepted forthwith. Deng Ai led his troops out and engaged with Jiang Wei in a fight, but after thirty bouts without a decision, both retired to their camps.\n\nFor days after this, Jiang Wei challenged again and again, but Deng Ai declined and would not fight. The Shu soldiers howled abuse and hurled insults at their opponents, but all without effect.\n\nThen Deng Ai thought within him, \"There must be some reason for this persistence. I think they have sent an army to try to seize Qishan while they hold me here. Shi Zuan and the force there are insufficient, and I shall have to go to the rescue.\"\n\nDeng Ai called his son Deng Zhong, and said, \"Hold this place most carefully. Let them challenge as they may, do not go out. Tonight I go to the help of Qishan.\"\n\nIt was night, and Jiang Wei was in his tent, intent upon his plans, when he was disturbed by a great shouting and drumming. They told him Deng Ai had suddenly appeared. The generals asked leave to go out to fight.\n\n\"Let no one move!\" said Jiang Wei.\n\nThe fact was Deng Ai had only made a demonstration at the camp of Shu on his way to reinforce Qishan.\n\nThen Jiang Wei said to his officers, \"The attack of Deng Ai was a feint. He has certainly gone to relieve Qishan.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei decided to go to the aid of Zhang Yi. He left Fu Qian to guard the camp, and he marched away with three thousand troops.\n\nZhang Yi was then actually attacking the Wei position on Qishan. Shi Zuan had few troops, and it looked as though the defenders must soon give in, when the sudden appearance of Deng Ai made all the difference. The onslaught of Deng Ai's force drove off Zhang Yi, and he was forced to take refuge behind the hills. No road was open to him. When things looked worst, he saw the Wei soldiers suddenly falling back in confusion.\n\n\"General Jiang Wei has come!\" they told him.\n\nZhang Yi took the opportunity to return to the attack, and the tables were turned. Deng Ai lost the fight and retired into his camp, which Jiang Wei surrounded and attacked vigorously.\n\nIn Chengdu the Latter Ruler fell daily more and more under the malign influence of Huang Hao, who encouraged him in every form of self-indulgence and ministered to every desire for luxury and dissipation. Government was left to look after itself.\n\nAt that time High Minister Liu Yang had a very beautiful wife, Lady Hu. One day she went into the Palace to visit the Empress, who kept her there a whole month. Liu Yang was not without suspecting an intrigue with the Latter Ruler and took a brutal revenge. He bound Lady Hu, and made five hundred of his soldiers shame her to the last degree by beating her on the face with their boots. She swooned many times.\n\nThe story got to the ears of the Latter Ruler, and he ordered the officials concerned to investigate and decide the crime and its punishment.\n\nThe judges found that: \"Soldiers are not proper persons to administer a punishment to a woman, and the face is not a portion of the body to be mortified: The author of this crime ought to be put to death.\"\n\nWherefore Liu Yang was beheaded.\n\nAs time went on the Latter Ruler indulged in unbridled sensuality, and gradually all good people left the government, giving place to the meanest, who soon swarmed there.\n\nAmong the sycophants of Huang Hao was Yan Yun, General of the Right Army, whose lack of merit had not stood in the way of preferment.\n\nHearing of Jiang Wei's defeats at Qishan, Yan Yun got his friend Huang Hao to propose to the Latter Ruler, saying, \"Jiang Wei should be recalled as he has not been able to score a decisive victory. Yan Yun can be sent to replace him.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler agreed, and the edict was issued.\n\nOne day, as Jiang Wei was working out his plan of attack on the camps of Wei, three edicts came, all to the same effect, recalling him to the capital. Disobedience being out of the question, Jiang Wei ceased all operations and sent the Taoyang force back first. Then gradually he and Zhang Yi withdrew with the others.\n\nDeng Ai in his camp wondered at the rolling of drums one night, but next day he heard that the Shu camps were empty. However, he suspected some ruse and did not pursue.\n\nArrived in Hanzhong, the army halted, and Jiang Wei went on to the capital in company with the messenger who had brought his orders. Here he waited ten days, and still the Latter Ruler held no court. He began to suspect mischief.\n\nOne day near a Palace gate he met Secretary General Xi Zheng, and asked, \"Do you know the reason for my recall?\"\n\n\"What General! Do you not know? Huang Hao wanted to push Yan Yun into favor, so he intrigued for your recall. Now they have found out Deng Ai is too clever to be tackled, and so they are not fighting any more.\"\n\n\"I shall certainly have to put this eunuch fellow out of the way,\" said Jiang Wei.\n\n\"Hush! You are the successor of the Martial Lord, Zhuge Liang, the man to whom he bequeathed his unfinished task. You are too important to act hastily or indiscreetly. If the Emperor withdrew his support, it would go ill with you.\"\n\n\"Sir, what you say is true,\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\nHowever, soon after this Jiang Wei, with a small party, got into the Palace. The Latter Ruler was enjoying himself with Huang Hao in the gardens. They told Huang Hao, who at once hid himself among the rocks by a pond.\n\nJiang Wei approached his master and prostrated himself, saying, \"Why did Your Majesty recall me? I had the enemy in my power at Qishan when the triple edicts came.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler hummed and hawed, but made no reply. Then Jiang Wei began his real grievance.\n\n\"This Huang Hao is wicked and artful and seems to have the last say in everything. The times of the Emperor Ling and the Ten Regular Attendants have returned. Your Majesty may recall Zhang Rang recently or Zhao Gao in the old time. If you will only slay this man, the court will be purified, and you may return gloriously to the home of your fathers.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler smiled, saying, \"Huang Hao is but a minor servant, one who runs errands for me. If he tried to do as you say, he could not. I always wondered why Dong Yun seemed to hate poor Huang Hao so much. Now you are the same. I pray you, Noble Sir, take no notice of him.\"\n\n\"Unless Your Majesty gets rid of him, evil is very close,\" said Jiang Wei, beating his head upon the ground.\n\nThe Latter Ruler replied, \"If you love anyone, you want him to live; if you dislike him, you desire his death. Can you not bear with my one poor eunuch?\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler bade one of the attendants go and call Huang Hao. When Huang Hao approached the pavilion, the Latter Ruler told him to ask pardon of Jiang Wei.\n\nHuang Hao prostrated himself and wept, saying, \"I am always in attendance upon the Sacred One \u2014 that is all I do. I never meddle in state affairs. I pray you, General, pay no heed to what people say. If you desire my death, I am in your hands, but pity me.\"\n\nAnd tears ran down his cheeks. Jiang Wei went away in ill humor. Outside he sought his friend Xi Zheng and told him what had happened.\n\n\"General, you are in grave danger,\" said Xi Zheng. \"And if you fall, the country falls with you.\"\n\n\"Can you advise me?\" said Jiang Wei. \"How can I secure the state and myself?\"\n\nXi Zheng replied, \"There is a place of refuge for you in the West Valley Land, and that is Tazhong. It is a rich county, and you can make a cantonment there like the Martial Lord did. Request the Emperor to let you go thither. You can gather in corn and wheat for your armies, you can secure all the west of Longyou, you can keep Wei from troubling Hanzhong, you will retain your military authority, so that no one will dare intrigue against you, and you will be safe. Thus you can ensure the safety of the state and yourself. You should lose no time.\"\n\n\"Your speech is gold and jewels!\" said Jiang Wei, gratefully.\n\nWithout loss of time, Jiang Wei memorialized the Throne and obtained the Latter Ruler's consent. Then he returned to Hanzhong, assembled his officers, and told them his plans.\n\n\"Our many expeditions have failed to achieve success owing to lack of supplies. Now I am about to take eighty thousand troops to Tazhong to form a cantonment and grow wheat and corn ready for the next expedition. You are spent with much fighting and may now repose while collecting grain and guarding Hanzhong. The armies of Wei are from home and have to drag their grain over the mountains. They will be worn out with the labor and must soon retire. That will be the time to smite them, and success must be ours.\"\n\nHu Ji was set over Hanshou, Wang Han of Yuecheng, Jiang Bin over Hancheng, and Jiang Shu and Fu Qian went to guard the passes. After these arrangements had been made, Jiang Wei went off to Tazhong to grow grain and mature his plans.\n\nDeng Ai heard of these dispositions and discovered that the armies of Shu were distributed in forty camps, each connected with the next like the joints of a huge serpent. He sent out his spies to survey the country, and they made a map which was sent to the capital.\n\nBut when the Duke of Jin, Sima Zhao, saw the memorial and the map, he was very angry.\n\n\"This Jiang Wei has invaded our country many times, and we have been unable to destroy him. He is the one sorrow of my heart.\"\n\nSaid Jia Chong, \"He has carried on the work of Zhuge Liang only too thoroughly, and it is hard to force him back. What you need is some crafty brave to assassinate him, so remove this constant menace of war.\"\n\nBut Assistant Xun Xu said, \"That is not the way. Liu Shan, the Ruler of Shu, is steeped in dissipation and has given all his confidence to one favorite, Eunuch Huang Hao. The higher officers of state are concerned solely with their own safety, and Jiang Wei has gone to Tazhong only that he may save his life. If you send an able leader and a strong army, victory is certain. Where is the need for an assassin's dagger?\"\n\n\"These are excellent words,\" said Sima Zhao, with a laugh, \"but if I would attack Shu, where is the leader?\"\n\n\"Deng Ai is the ablest leader of the day,\" said Xun Xu. \"Give him Zhong Hui as his second, and the thing is done.\"\n\n\"Exactly what I think!\" said Sima Zhao.\n\nSo he summoned Zhong Hui and said to him, \"I desire to send you as leader against Wu: Can you go?\"\n\n\"My lord's design is not against Wu, but Shu,\" was his reply.\n\n\"How well you know my inmost thought!\" said Sima Zhao. \"But how would you conduct an expedition against Shu?\"\n\n\"Thinking that my lord would desire to attack Shu, I have already prepared plans. Here they are.\"\n\nHe laid out his maps, and thereon were shown the camps, and storehouses, and roads all complete.\n\nSima Zhao was highly pleased.\n\n\"You are an excellent leader,\" said he. \"What say you to going with Deng Ai?\"\n\n\"The River Lands is large, and there is space for more than one set of operations. Deng Ai can be sent along another line.\"\n\nZhong Hui was given the title of General Who Conquers the West and the insignia of a Commander-in-Chief over the forces of the Land Within the Passes and control of the armies of Qingzhou, Xuzhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou, Jingzhou, and Yangzhou. At the same time a commission with authority ensign was sent to Deng Ai giving him command of the forces beyond the pass, with the title of General Who Conquers the West. And the time for an attack on Shu was settled.\n\nWhen Sima Zhao was settling the plans in the court, Deng Dun, General of the Front Army, said, \"Why are you sending our armies into a distant and dangerous country and thus inviting trouble? Jiang Wei has invaded this country many times, and the wars have cost us many lives. We should rather seek safety in defense.\"\n\n\"I am sending a righteous army against an unrighteous ruler. How dare you oppose my designs?\"\n\nSima Zhao ordered the executioners to put Deng Dun to death forthwith, and they soon returned to lay his head at the foot of the steps. This frightened all those present, and they turned pale.\n\nSima Zhao said, \"It is six years since I conquered the east, and the six years have been spent in preparation. I have long intended to reduce both Wu and Shu. Now I will destroy Shu, and then like a flood I will descend upon Wu and conquer that. That is the method 'destroy Guo to capture Yu'. I can tell very nearly what forces they have in Shu. There are eighty or ninety thousand troops in the garrison of Capital Chengdu, forty or fifty thousand on the frontier, while Jiang Wei has about sixty thousand in his cantonments. Against them we can pit one hundred thousand troops beyond the pass under Deng Ai, enough to hold Jiang Wei and keep him from moving east, and Zhong Hui has two or three hundred thousand veterans within the pass. And they will march in three divisions through Luo Valley and straight into Hanzhong. Liu Shan, the Ruler of Shu, is an oblivious fool with his frontier cities in ruins, the populace and officials quaking with fear. The state will not last long.\"\n\nThe assembly praised this perspicacity.\n\nZhong Hui marched as soon as he received his seal of office. Lest his real object should be known, he gave out that his force was directed against Wu. To give color to the pretense, he had many large ships built in Qingzhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou, Jingzhou, and Yangzhou. He also sent Tang Zi along the coastal regions of Dengzhou and Laizhou to collect vessels.\n\nEven his chief, Sima Zhao, was deceived and called him to ask: \"I commanded you to invade the Riverlands by land march. Why are you collecting ships?\"\n\nZhong Hui replied, \"If Shu hears that we intend to attack the west, they will ask assistance from Wu. So I pretend to attack Wu, and Wu will not dare to move under a year. When Shu is beaten, the ships will be ready and useful for an expedition into the east.\"\n\nSima Zhao was pleased. The day chosen for the march was the third day of the seventh month in the fourth year of Wonderful Beginning, in Wei calendar (AD 264). Sima Zhao escorted his leader out of the city for three miles and then took his leave.\n\nShao Ti, Minister of the Western Affairs, whispered a word of warning.\n\n\"My lord has sent Zhong Hui with a large army against Shu. I think he is too ambitious to be trusted with such powers?\"\n\n\"Think you I do not know?\" said Sima Zhao.\n\n\"Then why have you sent him alone and without a colleague?\"\n\nSima Zhao said a few words to Shao Ti which put his doubts at rest.\n\n\u2003Zhong Hui went alone, although his master knew,\n\n\u2003Occasion serving, he would be untrue." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 116", + "text": "On Hanzhong Roads, Zhong Hui Divides The Army; In Dingjun Mountain, The Martial Lord Shows His Apparition.\n\nThe words whispered in the ear of Shao Ti proved Sima Zhao's subtlety.\n\nSaid Sima Zhao, \"This morning the officers all maintained that Shu should not be attacked, because they are timid. If I let them lead the army, they would surely be defeated. You saw Zhong Hui was set upon his plan, and he is not afraid. Shu must therefore be beaten, and then the Shu people's hearts will be torn. Beaten leaders cannot boast, and the officers of a broken state are no fit guardians of its welfare. When Zhong Hui turns against us, the people of Shu cannot support him. Further, our troops being victors, they will wish to return home and will not follow their leader into revolt. Hence there is nothing to be feared. I know this, as you do, but it must remain our secret.\"\n\nShao Ti showed his admiration for Sima Zhao.\n\nIn his camp, just prior to his march, Zhong Hui assembled his officers, among them were Army Inspector Wei Guan, Assistant General Hu Lie, Generals Tian Xu, Tian Zhang, Yuan Xing, Qiu Jian, Xiahou Xian, Wang Mai, Huangfu Kai, Gou Ai, and others, some eighty of them.\n\n\"Firstly I want a Leader of the Van,\" said Zhong Hui. \"He must be skilled in making roads and repairing bridges.\"\n\n\"I will take that post,\" said a voice, and the speaker was Xu Yi, son of the Tiger Leader Xu Chu.\n\n\"Nobody is fitter!\" cried all present.\n\n\"You shall have the seal,\" said Zhong Hui. \"You are lithe and strong and have the renown of your father to maintain. Beside, all your colleagues recommend you. Your force shall be five thousand of cavalry and a thousand of footmen. You are to march into Hanzhong in three divisions, the center you will lead through the Xie Valley, the other two passing through the Luo and Ziwu Valleys. You must level and repair the roads, put the bridges in order, bore tunnels and break away rocks. Use all diligence, for any delay will entail punishment.\"\n\nXu Yi was told to set out immediately, and his chief would follow with one hundred thousand troops.\n\nIn West Valley Land, as soon as Deng Ai received his orders to attack Shu, he sent Sima Wang to keep the Qiangs in check. Next he summoned Zhuge Xu, Imperial Protector of Yongzhou, Wang Qi, Governor of Tianshui, Qian Hong, Governor of Longxi, and Yang Xin, Governor of Jincheng, and soon soldiers gathered in the West Valley Land like clouds.\n\nOne night Deng Ai dreamed a dream wherein he was climbing a lofty mountain on the way into Hanzhong. Suddenly a spring of water gushed out at his feet and boiled up with great force so that he was alarmed.\n\nHe awoke all in a sweat and did not sleep again, but sat awaiting the dawn. At daybreak he summoned his guard Shao Yuan, who was skilled in the Book of Changes, told him the dream and asked the interpretation.\n\nShao Yuan replied, \"According to the book, 'water on a mountain' signifies the diagram Jian, whereunder we find that the southwest augurs well, but the northeast is unpropitious. Confucius said of Jian that it meant advantage in the southwest, that is, success, but the northeast spelt failure, that is, there was no road. In this expedition, General, you will overcome Shu, but you will not have a road to return.\"\n\nDeng Ai listened, growing more and more sad as the interpretation of his dream was unfolded.\n\nJust then came dispatches from Zhong Hui asking him to advance into Hanzhong together. Deng Ai at once sent Zhuge Xu with fifteen thousand troops to cut off Jiang Wei's retreat; and Wang Qi was to lead fifteen thousand troops to attack Tazhong from the left; Qian Hong was to march fifteen thousand troops to attack Tazhong from the right; and Yang Xin with fifteen thousand troops was to block Jiang Wei at Gansong. Deng Ai took command of a force to go to and fro and reinforce whatever body needed help.\n\nMeanwhile in the camp of Zhong Hui, all the officials came out to see him depart. It was a grand sight, the gay banners shutting out the sun, breastplates and helmets glittering. The soldiers were fit and the horses in good condition. They all felicitated the leader.\n\nAll save one; for Adviser Liu Shi was silent. He smiled grimly.\n\nThen Grand Commander Wang Xiang made his way through the crowd and said, \"Do you think these two \u2014 Zhong Hui and Deng Ai \u2014 will overcome Shu?\"\n\nSaid Liu Shi, sighing, \"With such brave soldiers and bold leaders and their talents, they will overcome Shu certainly. Only I think neither will ever come back.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\"\n\nBut Liu Shi did not reply; he only smiled. And the question was not repeated.\n\nThe armies of Wei were on the march when Jiang Wei heard of the intended attack. He at once sent up a memorial:\n\nYour Majesty need to make defensive arrangements by commanding Zhang Yi, Left Commander of the Flying Cavalry, to guard the Yangping Pass, and Liao Hua, Right Commander of the Flying Cavalry, to guard the Yinping Bridge in Yinping. These two places are the most important points upon which depend the security of Hanzhong. Send also to engage the help of Wu. I, thy humble servant, shall gather soldiers in Tazhong ready for the march.\"\n\nThat year in Shu the reign-style had been changed from Wonderful Sight, the fifth year, to Joyful Prosperity, the first year (AD 263). When the memorial of Jiang Wei came to the Latter Ruler, it found him as usual amusing himself with his favorite Huang Hao.\n\nHe read the document and said to the eunuch, \"Here Jiang Wei says that the Wei armies under Deng Ai and Zhong Hui are on the way against us. What shall we do?\"\n\n\"There is nothing of the sort. Jiang Wei only wants to get a name for himself, and so he says this. Your Majesty need feel no alarm, for we can find out the truth from a certain wise woman I know. She is a real prophetess. May I call her?\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler consented, and a room was fitted up for the seance. They prepared therein incense, flowers, paper, candles, sacrificial articles and so on, and then Huang Hao went with a chariot to beg the wise woman to attend upon the Latter Ruler.\n\nShe came and was seated on the Dragon Couch. After the Latter Ruler had kindled the incense and repeated the prayer, the wise woman suddenly let down her hair, dropped her slippers, and capered about barefoot. After several rounds of this, she coiled herself up on a table.\n\nHuang Hao then said, \"The spirit has now descended. Send everyone away and pray to her.\"\n\nSo the attendants were dismissed, and the Latter Ruler entreated the wise woman.\n\nSuddenly she cried out, \"I am the guardian spirit of the West River Land. Your Majesty, rejoices in tranquillity; why do you inquire about other matters? Within a few years the land of Wei shall come under you, wherefore you need not be sorrowful.\"\n\nShe then fell to the ground as in a swoon, and it was some time before she revived. The Latter Ruler was well satisfied with her prophesy and gave her large presents. Further, he thereafter believed all she told him. The immediate result was that Jiang Wei's memorial remained unanswered; and as the Latter Ruler was wholly given to pleasure, it was easy for Huang Hao to intercept all urgent memorials from the commander.\n\nMeanwhile Zhong Hui was hastening toward Hanzhong. The Van Leader Xu Yi was anxious to perform some startling exploit, and so he led his force to Nanzheng.\n\nHe said to his officers, \"If we can take this pass, then we can march directly into Hanzhong. The defense is weak.\"\n\nA dash was made for the fort, each one vying with the rest to be first. But the Commander of Nanzheng was Lu Xu, and he had had early information of the coming of his enemies. So on both sides of the bridge he posted soldiers armed with multiple bows and crossbows. As soon as the attacking force appeared, the signal was given by a clapper and a terrific discharge of arrows and bolts opened. Many troops of Wei fell, and the army of Xu Yi was defeated.\n\nXu Yi returned and reported his misfortune. Zhong Hui himself went with a hundred armored horsemen to see the conditions. Again the machine bows let fly clouds of missiles, and Zhong Hui turned to flee.\n\nLu Xu led out five hundred troops to pursue. As Zhong Hui crossed the bridge at a gallop, the roadway gave, and his horse's hoof went through so that he was nearly thrown. The horse could not free its hoof, and Zhong Hui slipped from his back and fled on foot. As he ran down the slope of the bridge, Lu Xu came at him with a spear, but one of Zhong Hui's followers, Xun Kai by name, shot an arrow at Lu Xu and brought him to the earth.\n\nSeeing this lucky hit, Zhong Hui turned back and signaled to his force to make an attack. They came on with a dash, the defenders were afraid to shoot, as their own troops were mingled with the enemy, and soon Zhong Hui crushed the defense and possessed the pass. The defenders scattered.\n\nThe pass being captured, Xun Kai was well rewarded for the shot that had saved his general's life. He was promoted to Assistant General and received presents of a horse and a suit of armor.\n\nXu Yi was called to the tent, and Zhong Hui blamed him for the lack of care in his task, saying, \"You were appointed Leader of the Van to see that the roads were put in repair, and your special duty was to see that the bridges were in good condition. Yet on the bridge just now my horse's hoof was caught, and I nearly fell. Happily Xun Kai was by, or I had been slain. You have been disobedient and must bear the penalty.\"\n\nThe delinquent was sentenced to death.\n\nThe other generals tried to beg him off, pleading, \"His father is Xu Chu who had rendered good services to the state!\"\n\n\"How can discipline be maintained if the laws are not enforced?\" said Zhong Hui.\n\nThe sentence was carried out, and the unhappy Xu Yi's head was exposed as a warning. This severity put fear into the hearts of the officers.\n\nOn the side of Shu, Wang Han commanded at Yuecheng, and Jiang Bin was in Hancheng. As the enemy came in great force, they dared not go out to meet them, but stood on the defensive with the gates of the cities closed.\n\nZhong Hui issued an order, \"Speed is the soul of war: No halts.\"\n\nLi Du was ordered to lay siege to Yuecheng, and Xun Kai was to surround Hancheng. The main army under Zhong Hui would capture the Yangping Pass.\n\nThe Shu General Fu Qian commanded at the pass. He discussed plans with Jiang Shu, his second in command, and Jiang Shu was wholly in favor of defense, saying, \"The enemy is too strong to think of any other course.\"\n\n\"I do not agree,\" replied Fu Qian. \"They are now fatigued with marching, and we need not fear them. Unless we go out and attack, Yuecheng and Hancheng will fall.\"\n\nJiang Shu made no reply. Soon the enemy arrived, and both officers went up to the wall and looked out.\n\nAs soon as Zhong Hui saw them, he shouted, \"We have here a host of one hundred thousand. If you yield, you shall have higher rank than you hold now. But if you persist in holding out then, when we take the pass, you shall all perish. Jewels and pebbles will share the same destruction!\"\n\nThis threat angered Fu Qian. He bade Jiang Shu guard the walls, and he went down to give battle, taking three thousand troops. He attacked, and Zhong Hui retreated. Fu Qian pursued. But soon the army of Wei closed up their ranks and counterattacked. Fu Qian turned to retire. But when he reached his own defenses, he saw they flew the flags of Wei \u2014 the banners of Shu had gone.\n\n\"I have yielded!\" cried Jiang Shu from the ramparts.\n\nFu Qian shouted angrily, \"Ungrateful and treacherous rogue! How can you ever face the world again?\"\n\nBut that did no good. Fu Qian turned to go once more into the battle. He was soon surrounded. He fought desperately, but could not win clear. His troops fell one by one, and when they were reduced to one out of ten, he cried, \"Alive I have been a servant of Shu; dead I will be one of their spirits!\"\n\nFu Qian forced his way into the thickest of the fight. Then his steed fell, and as he was grievously wounded, he put an end to his own life.\n\n\u2003The loyalty Fu Qian showed in stressful days\n\n\u2003Won him a thousand autumns' noble praise;\n\n\u2003The base Jiang Shu lived on, a life disgraced,\n\n\u2003One would prefer the death that Fu Qian faced.\n\nWith the Yangping Pass falling into the hands of Zhong Hui were great booty of grain and weapons. He feasted the army, and that night they rested in the city of Yangan. However, the night was disturbed by sounds as of people shouting, so that Zhong Hui got up and went out thinking there must be an attack. But the sounds ceased, and he returned to his couch. However, he and his army could not sleep.\n\nNext night the same thing happened, shoutings in the southwest. As soon as day dawned scouts went out to search, but they came back to say they had gone three miles and found no sign of any Shu soldier. Zhong Hui did not feel satisfied, so he took a hundred cavalrymen and rode in the same direction to explore.\n\nPresently they happened upon a hill of sinister aspect overhung by angry clouds, while the summit was wreathed in mist.\n\n\"What hill is that?\" asked Zhong Hui, pulling up to question the guides.\n\n\"It is known as the Dingjun Mountain,\" was the reply. \"It is where Xiahou Yuan met his death.\"\n\nThis did not sound cheering at all, and Zhong Hui turned back to camp greatly depressed. Rounding the curve of a hill, he came full into a violent gust of wind and there suddenly appeared a large body of horse coming down the wind as if to attack.\n\nThe whole party galloped off panic-stricken, Zhong Hui leading the way. Many generals fell from their steeds. Yet when they arrived at the pass, not a man was missing, although there were many with bruises and cuts from the falls and many had lost helmets. Everyone had seen phantom horsemen, who did no harm when they came near, but melted away in the wind.\n\nZhong Hui called the surrendered General Jiang Shu and asked, \"Is there any temple to any supernatural being on the Dingjun Mountain?\"\n\n\"No,\" replied he, \"there is nothing but the tomb of Zhuge Liang.\"\n\n\"Then this must have been a manifestation of Zhuge Liang,\" said Zhong Hui. \"I ought to sacrifice to him.\"\n\nSo he prepared presents and slew an ox and offered sacrifice at the tomb, and when the sacrifice had been completed, the wind calmed, and the dark clouds dispersed. There followed a cool breeze and a gentle shower, and the sky cleared. Pleased with the evidence of the acceptance of their offerings, the sacrificial party returned to camp.\n\nThat night Zhong Hui fell asleep in his tent with his head resting on a small table. Suddenly a cool breeze began to blow, and he saw a figure approaching clad in Daoist garb, turban, feather fan, white robe of Daoist cut bound with a black girdle. The countenance of the figure was as refined as jade, the lips a deep red and the eyes clear. The figure moved with the calm serenity of a god.\n\n\"Who are you, Sir?\" asked Zhong Hui, rising.\n\n\"Out of gratitude for your kindly visit this morning, I would make a communication. Though the Hans have declined and the mandate of the Eternal cannot be disobeyed, yet the people of the west, exposed to the inevitable miseries of war, are to be pitied. After you have passed the frontier, do not slay ruthlessly.\"\n\nThen the figure disappeared with a flick of the sleeves of its robe, nor would it stay to answer any questions.\n\nZhong Hui awoke and knew that he had been dreaming, but he felt that the spirit of Zhuge Liang the Martial Lord had visited him, and he was astonished.\n\nHe issued an order that the leading division of his army should bear a white flag with six words plainly written thereon, Secure the state, comfort the people, so that all might know that no violence was to be feared. If anyone was slain wantonly, then the offender should pay with his own life. This tender care was greatly appreciated, so that the invaders were welcomed in every step. Zhong Hui soothed the people, and they suffered no injury.\n\n\u2003Those phantom armies circling in the gleam\n\n\u2003Moved Zhong Hui to sacrifice at Zhuge Liang's tomb;\n\n\u2003For the Lius had Zhuge Liang wrought unto the end,\n\n\u2003Though dead, he would the Han people still defend.\n\nJiang Wei at Tazhong heard of the invasion and wrote to his three generals \u2014 Zhang Yi, Liao Hua, and Dong Jue \u2014 to march against the enemy, while he prepared to repulse them if they came to his station.\n\nSoon they came, and he went out to encounter them. Their leader was Wang Qi, Governor of Tianshui.\n\nWhen near enough, Wang Qi shouted, \"Our forces are numbered by millions, our generals by thousands. Two hundred thousand are marching against you, and Chengdu has already fallen. In spite of this you do not yield, wherefore it is evident you do not recognize the divine command!\"\n\nJiang Wei cut short this tirade by galloping out with his spear set. Wang Qi stood three bouts and then fled. Jiang Wei pursued, but seven miles away he met a cohort drawn up across the road. On the banner he read Qian Hong, Governor of Longxi.\n\n\"Dead rat! No match for me,\" said Jiang Wei, smiling.\n\nDespising this antagonist, he led his army straight on, and the enemy fell back. He drove them before him for three more miles, and then came upon Deng Ai. A battle at once began, and the lust of battle held out in the breast of Jiang Wei for a score of bouts. But neither could overbear the other. Then in the Shu rear arose the clang of gongs and other signs of coming foes.\n\nJiang Wei retired the way he had come, and presently one came to report: \"The Governor of Jincheng, Yang Xin, has destroyed the camps at Gansong.\"\n\nThis was evil tidings. He bade his generals keep his own standard flying and hold Deng Ai while he went to try to recover the camps. On the way he met Yang Xin, but Yang Xin had no stomach for a fight with Jiang Wei and made for the hills. Jiang Wei followed till he came to a precipice down which the enemy were hurling boulders and logs of wood so that he could not pass.\n\nJiang Wei turned to go back to the battlefield he had just left, but on the way he met the defeated Shu army, for Deng Ai had crushed his generals. Jiang Wei joined them but was surrounded by the Wei forces. Presently he got clear with a sudden rush and hastened to the great camp.\n\nNext came the news: \"Zhong Hui has defeated the Yangping Pass; Jiang Shu has surrendered, while Fu Qian has fallen in the field. Hanzhong is now in the possession of Wei. Wang Han of Yuecheng and Jiang Bin of Hancheng has also opened their gates and yielded to the invaders at the loss of Hanzhong. Hu Ji has gone to Chengdu for help.\"\n\nThis greatly troubled Jiang Wei, so he broke camp and set out for Hanzhong. That night the Shu army reached the Frontier River Pass. An army under Yang Xin barred his way, and again Jiang Wei was forced to fight. He rode out in a great rage, and as Yang Xin fled, he shot at him thrice, but his arrows missed.\n\nThrowing aside his bow, he gripped his spear and set off in pursuit, but his horse tripped and fell, and Jiang Wei lay on the ground. Yang Xin turned to slay his enemy now that he was on foot, but Jiang Wei thrust Yang Xin's horse in the head. Other Wei troops came up rescued Yang Xin.\n\nMounting another steed of his follower, Jiang Wei was just setting out again in pursuit when they reported that Deng Ai was coming against his rear. Realizing that he could not cope with this new force, Jiang Wei collected his troops in order to retreat into Hanzhong.\n\nHowever, the scouts reported: \"Zhuge Xu, Imperial Protector of Yongzhou, is holding Yinping Bridge, our retreat path.\"\n\nSo Jiang Wei halted and made a camp in the mountains. Advance and retreat seemed equally impossible.\n\nHe cried in anguish, \"Heaven is destroying me!\"\n\nThen said Ning Sui, one of his generals, \"If our enemies are blocking Yinping Bridge, they can only have left a weak force in Yongzhou. We can make believe to be going thither through the Konghan Valley and so force them to abandon the bridge in order to protect the city. When the bridge is clear, you can make a dash for Saber Pass and plan for a recapture of Hanzhong.\"\n\nThis plan seemed to promise success, so Jiang Wei ordered them to march into the Konghan Valley, making as though they would go to Yongzhou.\n\nWhen Zhuge Xu, who was at the Yinping Bridge, heard this, he said in great shock, \"Yongzhou is my own city, and headquarters of the expedition. If it would be lost, I would be punished!\"\n\nSo Zhuge Xu set off to its relief by the south road. He left only a small force at the bridge.\n\nJiang Wei marched along the north road for ten miles till he guessed that Zhuge Xu had abandoned the bridge, when he reversed his course, making the rearguard the van. He dispersed the small force left at the bridge head and burned their camp. Zhuge Xu, as he marched, saw the flames, and he turned back to the bridge, but he arrived too late. The army of Shu had already crossed, and he dared not pursue.\n\nSoon after Jiang Wei crossed the bridge, he saw another force, but this was led by his own generals, Liao Hua and Zhang Yi.\n\nThey told him, \"The Latter Ruler, firm in his faith in a wise woman, would not send help to defend the frontiers. We heard Hanzhong was threatened, and thus marched there to its rescue, but then Zhong Hui had taken the Yangping Pass. We also heard you were surrounded here, so we came to your help.\"\n\nThe two armies amalgamated and marched together.\n\nLiao Hua said, \"We are attacked all round, and the grain transportation is blocked. It seems to me wisest to retire on the Saber Pass and plan other designs.\"\n\nBut Jiang Wei was doubtful. Then they heard that Deng Ai and Zhong Hui were approaching in ten divisions.\n\nJiang Wei was disposed to stand, but Liao Hua said, \"This country of White Water is laced with by-roads and is too narrow and difficult to fight in with any hope of success. It would be better to retreat to the Saber Pass. If we loss that pass, all paths will be closed to us.\"\n\nAt last Jiang Wei consented, and the march began. But as they neared the pass, they heard drums rolling and saw flags fluttering, which told them that the pass was held.\n\nHanzhong, that strong defense, is lost;\n\nAnd storm clouds gather round Saber Pass." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 117", + "text": "Deng Ai Gets Through The Yinping Mountains; Zhuge Zhan Falls In The Battlefield Of Mianzhu.\n\nWhen Dong Jue, General Who Upholds the State, heard of the invasion of Wei in ten divisions, he brought to the frontier twenty thousand troops to Saber Pass. And when the dust showed an approaching army, Dong Jue thought it wise to go to the Pass lest the coming armies should be enemies to be stopped.\n\nBut Dong Jue found that the newcomers were Jiang Wei, Liao Hua, and Zhang Yi. He let them pass through. Then he gave them the news from the capital, bad news of the deeds of both the Latter Ruler and Huang Hao. His tears fell as he told the tales.\n\n\"But do not grieve,\" said Jiang Wei. \"So long as I live, I will not allow Wei to come and conquer Shu. Now we must defend this pass, and then evolve a strategy.\"\n\nThey kept good guard at Saber Pass, while they discussed future plans.\n\n\"Though we are holding this pass, yet Chengdu is well-nigh empty of soldiers,\" said Dong Jue. \"If it was attacked, it would go crack!\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"The natural defenses of Chengdu are excellent: It is hard to cross over the mountains and climb the steep roads. No one needs fear.\"\n\nSoon after this, Zhuge Xu appeared at the pass challenging the defenders. Jiang Wei forthwith placed himself at the head of five thousand troops and went down to meet the Wei army. He gained an easy victory, slaying many of the enemy and taking much spoil in horses and weapons.\n\nWhile Jiang Wei went back to the pass, the defeated Zhuge Xu made his way to Zhong Hui's camp, seven miles away, to confess his failure. His general was very angry.\n\n\"My orders to you were to hold Yinping Bridge so as to stop Jiang Wei, and you lost it. Now without any orders you attack and are defeated.\"\n\n\"Jiang Wei played so many deceitful tricks. He pretended to be going to take Yongzhou, and I thought that was very important, so I sent troops to rescue it. Then he meanly got away. I followed to the pass, but never thought he would come out and defeat my troops.\"\n\nZhuge Xu pleaded thus, but he was sentenced to die.\n\nNow Wei Guan, Army Inspector, said, \"Zhuge Xu is really a subordinate of Deng Ai and, admitting that he is in fault, his punishment should not have been pronounced by you, O Commander.\"\n\nBut Zhong Hui swaggeringly replied, \"I have a command from the Emperor and orders from the Prime Minister to attack Shu. If Deng Ai himself offended, I would behead him.\"\n\nHowever, other leaders interceded for Zhuge Xu, and Zhong Hui did not put him to death, but sent him a caged prisoner to the capital to be judged. The surviving soldiers were added to Zhong Hui's army.\n\nThis insolent speech of Zhong Hui was duly repeated to Deng Ai, who was angry in his turn and said, \"His rank and mine are the same. I have held a frontier post for years and sustained many fatigues in the country's service. Who is he that he gives himself such airs?\"\n\nHis son Deng Zhong endeavored to appease his wrath.\n\n\"Father, if you cannot suffer small things, you may upset the grand policy of the state. Unfriendliness with him may do great harm, so I hope you will bear with him.\"\n\nDeng Ai saw his son was right, and said no more; but he nourished anger in his heart. With a small escort he went to call upon his colleague.\n\nWhen his coming was announced, Zhong Hui asked his staff, \"How many soldiers are following Deng Ai?\"\n\n\"He has only some twenty horsemen,\" they replied.\n\nZhong Hui had a large body of guards drawn up about his tent, and then gave orders that his visitor should be led in. Deng Ai dismounted, and the two men saluted each other. But the visitor did not like the look on the faces of his host's guards. He decided to find out what Zhong Hui was thinking.\n\n\"The capture of Hanzhong is a piece of excellent fortune for the state,\" said Deng Ai. \"The capture of Saber Pass can now be accomplished easily.\"\n\n\"What is your own idea, General?\" asked Zhong Hui.\n\nDeng Ai tried to evade answering the question, admitting he had no good suggestion. But Zhong Hui pressed him to reply.\n\nFinally he said, \"In my simple opinion one might proceed by by-roads from the pass through the Yinping Mountains to Deyang in Hanzhong, and thence make a surprise march to Chengdu. Jiang Wei must go to its defense, and you, General, can take the Saber Pass.\"\n\n\"A very good plan,\" said Zhong Hui. \"You may start forthwith, and I will wait here till I hear news of your success.\"\n\nThey drank, and Deng Ai took his leave. Zhong Hui went back to his own tent filled with contempt for Deng Ai's plan. which he thought impracticable.\n\n\"They say Deng Ai is able. I think he is of most ordinary capacity,\" said he to his officers.\n\n\"But why?\" said they.\n\n\"Because the by-roads by Yinping Mountains are impassable, nothing but lofty cliffs and steep hills. A hundred defenders at a critical point could cut all communications, and Deng Ai's army would starve to death. I shall go by the direct road, and there is no fear about the result. I shall overcome Shu.\"\n\nSo he prepared scaling ladders and stone-throwing machines and set himself to besiege Saber Pass.\n\nDeng Ai went out to the main gate of the court. While mounting, he said to his followers, \"What did Zhong Hui think of me?\"\n\n\"He looked as though he held a poor opinion of what you had said, General, and disagreed with you, although his words were fair enough.\"\n\n\"He thinks I cannot take Chengdu. So I shall take it!\"\n\nHe was received at his own camp by Shi Zuan and his son Deng Zhong, and a party of others of his generals, and they asked what the conversation had been about.\n\n\"I told Zhong Hui simple truth, but he thinks I am just a common person of no ability to speak of. He regards the capture of Hanzhong as an incomparable feat of arms. Where would he have been if I had not held up Jiang Wei at Tazhong? But I think the capture of Chengdu will beat that of Hanzhong.\"\n\nThat night the camp was broken up, and Deng Ai set his army out upon a long march along the mountainous paths. At twenty miles from Saber Pass they made a camp. The scouts told Zhong Hui of his movement, and Zhong Hui laughed at the attempt.\n\nFrom his camp Deng Ai sent a letter to Sima Zhao.\n\nThen he called his officers to his tent and asked them, saying, \"I am going to make a dash for Chengdu while it is still undefended, and success will mean unfading glory for us all. Will you follow me?\"\n\n\"We will follow you and obey your orders,\" cried they all.\n\nSo the final dispositions were made. Deng Zhong and three thousand troops went first to improve the road. His troops wore no armor, but they had axes and boring tools. They were to level roads and build bridges.\n\nNext went thirty thousand troops furnished with dry grain and ropes. At every one hundred miles they were to make a post of three thousand.\n\nIn autumn of that year, they left Yinping, and in the tenth month they were in most precipitous country of the Yinping Mountains. They had taken twenty days to travel two hundred and fifty miles. They were in an uninhabited country. After garrisoning the various posts on the way, they had only two thousand soldiers left. Before them stood a range named Heaven Cliffs, which no horse could ascend. Deng Ai climbed up on foot to see his son and the troops with him opening up a road. They were exhausted with fatigue and weeping.\n\nDeng Ai asked why they were so sad, and his son replied, \"We have found an impassable precipice away to the northwest which we cannot get through. All our labor has been in vain.\"\n\nDeng Ai said, \"We have got over two hundred and fifty miles, and just beyond is Jiangyou. We cannot go back. How can one get tiger cubs except by going into tiger caves? Here we are, and it will be a very great feat to capture Chengdu.\"\n\nThey all said they would go on. So they came to the precipice. First they threw over their weapons; then the leader wrapped himself in blankets and rolled over the edge; next the generals followed him, also wrapped in blankets. Those who had not blankets were let down by cords round the waist, and others clinging to trees followed one after another till all had descended and the Heaven Cliffs was passed. Then they retook their armor and weapons and went on their way.\n\nThey came across a stone by the roadside. It bore a mysterious inscription, translated literally it read:\n\n\"This stone is a message of Zhuge Liang the Prime Minister: Two fires were just founded; armies pass by here. Two soldiers compete; both soon die.\"\n\nDeng Ai was astonished. Presently he bowed before the stone and prayed to the spirit of Zhuge Liang.\n\n\"O Martial Lord, immortal! I grieve that I am not thy worthy disciple.\"\n\n\u2003The rugged lofty mountain peaks\n\n\u2003Of Yinping, pierce the sky,\n\n\u2003The somber crane with wearied wing\n\n\u2003Can scarcely over them fly.\n\n\u2003Intrepid Deng Ai in blankets wrapped\n\n\u2003Rolled down the craggy steep,\n\n\u2003His feat Zhuge Liang prophesied\n\n\u2003By insight wondrous deep.\n\nHaving crossed this great range of mountains without discovery, Deng Ai marched forward. Presently he came to a roomy camp, empty and deserted. He was told that while Zhuge Liang lived, a thousand troops had been kept in garrison at this point of danger, but the Latter Ruler had withdrawn them. Deng Ai sighed at the thought.\n\nHe said to his troops, \"Now retreat is impossible, there is no road back. Before you lies Jiangyou with stores in abundance. Advance and you live, retreat and you die. You must fight with all your strength.\"\n\n\"We will fight to the death!\" they cried.\n\nThe leader was now afoot, doing double marches with his two thousand troops toward Jiangyou.\n\nThe Commander at Jiangyou was Ma Miao. He heard the East River Land had fallen into the hands of the enemy. Though some thing prepared for defense, yet his post had a wide area to cover and guard, and he trusted Jiang Wei would defend the Saber Pass. So he did not take his military duties very seriously, just maintaining the daily drills and then going home to his wife to cuddle up to the stove and drink.\n\nHis wife was of the Li family. When she heard of the state of things on the frontier, she said to her husband, \"If there is so great danger on the borders, how is it you are so unaffected?\"\n\n\"The affair is in Jiang Wei's hands and is not my concern,\" replied he.\n\n\"Nevertheless, you finally have to guard the capital, and that is a heavy responsibility.\"\n\n\"O, well! The Emperor trusts his favorite Huang Hao entirely and is sunk in vice and pleasure. Disaster is very near. If the Wei armies get here, I shall yield. It is no good taking it seriously.\"\n\n\"You call yourself a man! Have you such a disloyal and treacherous heart? Is it nothing to have held office and taken pay for years? How can I bear to look upon your face?\"\n\nMa Miao was too ashamed to attempt to reply. Just then his house servants came to tell him that Deng Ai, with his two thousand troops, had found their way along some road and had already broken into the city. Ma Miao was now frightened and hastily went out to find the leader and offer his formal submission.\n\nHe went to the Town Hall and bowed on the steps, crying, \"I have long desired to come over to Wei. Now I yield myself and my army and all the town.\"\n\nDeng Ai accepted his surrender and incorporated his army with his own force. He took Ma Miao into his service as guide.\n\nThen came a servant with the news: \"Lady Li has hanged herself!\"\n\nDeng Ai asked why she had done it, and Ma Miao told him. Deng Ai, admiring her rectitude, gave orders for an honorable burial. He also went in person to sacrifice. Everyone extolled her conduct.\n\n\u2003When the Ruler of Shu had wandered from the way,\n\n\u2003And the House of Han fell lower,\n\n\u2003Heaven sent Deng Ai to smite the land.\n\n\u2003Then did a woman show herself most noble,\n\n\u2003So noble in conduct,\n\n\u2003That no leader equaled her.\n\nAs soon as Jiangyou was taken, the posts along the road by which the army had come were withdrawn, and there was a general rendezvous at this point. This done, they marched toward Fucheng.\n\nGeneral Tian Xu remonstrated, saying, \"We have just finished a long and perilous march and are weary and worn out. We ought to repose for a few days to recover.\"\n\nDeng Ai angrily replied, \"Speed is the one important matter in war. Do not encourage any discontent. I will not have it.\"\n\nTian Xu was sentenced to death. But as many officers interceded for him, he was pardoned.\n\nThe army pressed on toward Fucheng. As soon as they arrived, the officers yielded as if they thought Deng Ai had fallen from the heavens. Some took the news to the capital, and the Latter Ruler began to feel alarmed. He hastily called for Huang Hao, who at once denied the report.\n\n\"That is just false rumor. The spirits would not deceive Your Majesty,\" said Huang Hao.\n\nThe Latter Ruler summoned the wise woman to the Palace, but the messengers said she had gone no one knew whither.\n\nAnd now urgent memorials and letters fell in from every side like a snow storm, and messengers went to and fro in constant streams. The Latter Ruler called a court to discuss the danger, but no one had any plan or suggestion to offer. The courtiers just looked blankly into each other's faces.\n\nFinally Xi Zheng spoke out, \"In this extremity Your Majesty should call in the help of the son of the Martial Lord.\"\n\nThis son of Zhuge Liang was named Zhuge Zhan. His mother was born of the Huang family and a daughter of Huang Chenyan. She was singularly plain and extraordinarily talented. She had studied everything, even books of strategy and magic. Zhuge Liang in Nanyang had sought to marry her because of her goodness, and she had studied with him for all their lives. She had survived her husband but a short time, and her last words to her son had been \"be loyal and filial\".\n\nZhuge Zhan had been known as a clever lad and had married a daughter of the Latter Ruler, so that he was an Imperial Son-in-Law. His father's rank, Lord of Wuxiang, had descended to him. In the fourth year of Wonderful Sight (AD 261) Zhuge Zhan received the rank of General of the Guard as well. But he had retired when Huang Hao, the eunuch, as first favorite, began to direct state affairs.\n\nAs suggested, the Latter Ruler summoned Zhuge Zhan to court, and he said, weeping, \"Deng Ai has defeated Fucheng, and the capital is seriously threatened. You must think of your father and rescue me!\"\n\n\"My father and I owe too much to the First Ruler's and Your Majesty's kindness for me to think any sacrifice too great to make for Your Majesty. I pray that you give me command of the troops in the capital, and I will fight a decisive battle.\"\n\nSo the soldiers, seventy thousand, were placed under Zhuge Zhan's command.\n\nWhen he had gathered all together, he said, \"Who dares be Leader of the Van?\"\n\nHis son, Zhuge Shang, then nineteen, offered himself, saying, \"Since my father commands the army, I volunteer to lead the van!\"\n\nZhuge Shang had studied military books and made himself an adept in the various exercises. So he was appointed, and the army marched to find the enemy.\n\nIn the meantime the surrender general, Ma Miao, had given Deng Ai a very complete map of the country showing the whole sixty miles of road to Chengdu. However, Deng Ai was dismayed when he saw the difficulties ahead of him.\n\n\"If they defend the hills in front, I shall fail; for if I am delayed, Jiang Wei will come up, and my army will be in great danger. The army must press on.\"\n\nHe called Shi Zuan and his son Deng Zhong and said, \"Lead one army straight to Mianzhu to keep back any Shu soldiers sent to stop our march. I will follow as soon as I can. But hasten; for if you let the enemy forestall you, I will put you to death.\"\n\nThey went. Nearing Mianzhu they met the army under Zhuge Zhan. Both sides prepared for battle. The Shu armies adopted the Eight Diagrams formation and presently, after the usual triple roll of drums, Shi Zuan and Deng Zhong saw their opponents' ranks open in the center, and therefrom emerge a light carriage in which sat a figure looking exactly as Zhuge Liang used to look when he appeared on the battlefield. Everybody knew the Daoist robes and the feather fan. The standard bore his name and titles The Han Prime Minister Zhuge Liang.\n\nThe sight was too much for Deng Zhong and Shi Zuan. The cold sweat of terror poured down them, and they stammered out.\n\n\"If Zhuge Liang is still alive, that is the end of us!\"\n\nThey led their army to flee. The troops of Shu came on, and the army of Wei was driven away in defeat and chased a distance of seven miles. Then the pursuers sighted Deng Ai, and they turned and retired.\n\nWhen Deng Ai had camped, he called the two leaders before him and reproached them for retreating without fighting.\n\n\"We saw Zhuge Liang leading the enemy,\" said Deng Zhong, \"So we ran away.\"\n\n\"Why should we fear, even if they bring Zhuge Liang to life again? You ran away without cause, and we have lost. You ought both to be put to death.\"\n\nHowever, they did not die, for their fellows pleaded for them, and Deng Ai's wrath was mollified.\n\nThen the scouts came in to say: \"The leader of the army is a son of Zhuge Liang, Zhuge Zhan. The Van Leader is Zhuge Zhan's son, Zhuge Shang. They had set up on the carriage the old wooden image of the late strategist.\"\n\nDeng Ai, however, said to Deng Zhong and Shi Zuan, \"This is the critical stage. If you lose the next battle, you will certainly lose your lives with it!\"\n\nAt the head of ten thousand troops, they went out to battle once more. This time they met the vanguard led by Zhuge Shang, who rode out alone, boldly offering to repulse the leaders of Wei. At Zhuge Zhan's signal the two wings advanced and threw themselves against the Wei line. The center portion of the Wei line met them, and the battle went to and fro many times, till at length the force of Wei, after great losses, had to give way. Both Deng Zhong and Shi Zuan being badly wounded, they fled and the army of Shu pursued and drove the invaders into their camp.\n\nShi Zuan and Deng Zhong had to acknowledge a new defeat, but, when Deng Ai saw both were severely wounded, he forbore to blame them or decree any penalty.\n\nTo his officers Deng Ai said, \"This Zhuge Zhan well continues the paternal tradition. Twice they have beaten us and slain great numbers. We must defeat them, and that quickly, or we are lost.\"\n\nThen Military Inspector Qiu Ben said, \"Why not persuade their leader with a letter?\"\n\nDeng Ai agreed and wrote a letter, which he sent by the hand of a messenger. The warden of the Shu camp gate led the messenger in to see Zhuge Zhan, who opened the letter and read:\n\n\"Deng Ai, General Who Conquers the West, writes to Zhuge Zhan, General of the Guard and Leader of the army in the field.\n\n\"Now having carefully observed all the talents of the time, I see not one of them is equal to your most honored father. From the moment of his emergence from his retreat, he said that the country was to be in tripod division. He conquered Jingzhou and Yizhou and Hanzhong and thus established a position. Few have been his equal in all history. He made six expeditions from Qishan, and, if he failed, it was not that he lacked skill \u2014 it was the will of Heaven.\n\n\"But now this Latter Ruler is dull and weak, and his kingly aura is already exhausted. I have a command from the Son of Heaven to smite Shu with severity, and I already possess the land. Your capital must quickly fall. Why then do you not bow to the will of Heaven and fall in with the desires of people by acting rightly and coming over to our side? I will obtain the rank of Prince of Langye for you, whereby your ancestors will be rendered illustrious. These are no vain words if happily you will consider them.\"\n\nThe letter made Zhuge Zhan furiously angry. He tore it to fragments and ordered the bearer thereof to be put to death immediately. He also ordered the escort to bear the head of the messenger to the camp of Wei and lay it before Deng Ai.\n\nDeng Ai was very angry at this insult and wished to go forth at once to battle. But Qiu Ben dissuaded him.\n\n\"Do not go out to battle,\" said he. \"Rather overcome him by some unexpected stroke.\"\n\nSo Deng Ai laid his plans. He sent Wang Qi, Governor of Tianshui, and Qian Hong, Governor of Longxi, to lie in wait in the rear while he led the main body.\n\nZhuge Zhan happened to be close at hand seeking battle. When he heard the enemy was near, he led out his army eagerly and rushed into the midst of the invaders. Then Deng Ai fled as though worsted, so luring on Zhuge Zhan. But when the pursuit had lasted some time, the pursuers were attacked by those who lay in wait, and the Shu troops were defeated. They ran away into Mianzhu.\n\nTherefore Deng Ai besieged Mianzhu, and the troops of Wei shouted about the city and watched the ramparts, thus keeping the defenders close shut in as if held in an iron barrel.\n\nZhuge Zhan was desperate, seeing no way of escape without help from outside. Wherefore he wrote a letter to East Wu begging for assistance, and he gave this letter to Peng He to bear through the besiegers.\n\nPeng He fought his way through and reached Wu, where he saw the Ruler of Wu, Sun Xiu. And he presented the letter showing the wretched plight of Zhuge Zhan and his urgent need.\n\nThen the Ruler of Wu assembled his officers and said to them, \"The land of Shu being in danger, I cannot sit and look on unconcerned.\"\n\nHe therefore decided to send fifty thousand troops, over whom he set the Veteran General Ding Feng, with two able assistants \u2014 Sun Yin and Ding Fung. Having received his edict, Ding Feng sent away his commanders with twenty thousand troops to Mianzhu, and he himself went with thirty thousand troops toward Shouchun. The army marched in three divisions.\n\nIn the city of Mianzhu, Zhuge Zhan waited for the rescue which never came.\n\nWeary of the hopeless delay, he said to his generals, \"This long defense is useless. I will fight!\"\n\nLeaving his son Zhuge Shang and Chair of the Secretariat Zhang Zun \u2014 Zhang Fei's grandson \u2014 in the city, Zhuge Zhan put on his armor and led out three thousand troops through three gates to fight in the open. Seeing the defenders making a sortie, Deng Ai drew off and Zhuge Zhan pursued him vigorously, thinking Deng Ai really fled before his force. But there was an ambush, and falling therein he was quickly surrounded as is the kernel of a nut by the shell. In vain he thrust right and shoved left, he only lost his troops in the raining arrows and bolts. The troops of Wei poured in more flights of arrows, so that his army were all shattered. Before long, Zhuge Zhan was wounded and fell.\n\n\"I am done,\" cried he. \"But in my death I will do my duty!\" He drew his sword and slew himself.\n\nFrom the city walls his son Zhuge Shang saw the death of his father. Girding on his armor he made to go out to fight.\n\nBut Zhang Zun told him, \"Young general, do not go out immediately!\"\n\nCried Zhuge Shang, \"My father and I and all our family have received favors from the state. My father has died in battle against our enemies, and can I live?\"\n\nHe whipped his horse and dashed out into the thick of the fight, where he died. A poem has been written extolling the conduct of both father and son.\n\n\u2003In skill he was found wanting, not in loyalty,\n\n\u2003But the Lord's word had gone forth,\n\n\u2003That the Ruler of Shu was to be cut off,\n\n\u2003Noble were Zhuge Liang's descendants.\n\nIn commiseration of their loyalty, Deng Ai had both father and son buried fittingly. Then he began attacking the city vigorously. Zhang Zun, Huang Chong, and Li Qiu, the defenders, however, held the city desperately, but to no avail for their numbers being small, and the three leaders were slain. This was the end of the defense, and Deng Ai then entered as conqueror. Having rewarded his army, he set out for Chengdu.\n\n\u2003The closing days of the Latter Ruler were\n\n\u2003As had been those of Liu Zhang." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 118", + "text": "Weeping At The Ancestral Temple, A Filial Prince Dies; Marching To The West River Land, Two Leaders Competes.\n\nThe news of the fall of Mianzhu and the deaths in battle of Zhuge Zhan and Zhuge Shang, father and son, brought home to the Latter Ruler that danger was very near, and he summoned a council.\n\nThen the officials said, \"Panic has seized upon the people, and they are leaving the city in crowds. Their cries shake the very sky!\"\n\nSorely he felt his helplessness. Soon they reported the enemy were actually near the city, and many courtiers advised flight.\n\n\"We do not have enough troops to protect the capital. Leave the city and flee south to the seven counties of Nanzhong,\" said they. \"The country is difficult and easily defended. We can get the Mangs to come and help us.\"\n\nBut Minister Qiao Zhou opposed, saying, \"No, no, that will not do. The Mangs are old rebels. To go to them would be a calamity.\"\n\nThen some proposed seeking refuge in Wu: \"The people of Wu are our sworn allies, and this is a moment of extreme danger. Let us go thither.\"\n\nBut Qiao Zhou also opposed this, saying, \"In the whole course of past ages no emperor has ever gone to another state. So far as I can see, Wei will presently absorb Wu, and certainly Wu will never overcome Wei. Imagine the disgrace of becoming a minister of Wu and then having to style yourself minister of Wei. It would double the mortification. Do neither. Surrender to Wei, and Wei will give Your Majesty a strip of land where the ancestral temple can be preserved, and the people will be saved from suffering. I desire Your Majesty to reflect well upon this.\"\n\nThe distracted Latter Ruler retired from the council without having come to any decision. Next day confusion had become still worse. Qiao Zhou saw that matters were very urgent and presented a written memorial. The Latter Ruler accepted it and decided to yield.\n\nBut from behind a screen stepped out the fifth of the Emperor's sons, Liu Chan, Prince of Beidi.\n\nLiu Chan shouted at Qiao Zhou, \"You corrupt pedant, unfit to live among people! How dare you offer such mad advice in a matter concerning the existence of a dynasty? Has any emperor ever yielded to the enemy?\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler had seven sons in all \u2014 Liu Rui, Liu Dao, Liu Zhong, Liu Zan, Liu Chan, Liu Xue, and Liu Ju. But the ablest, and the only one above the common level of people, was this Liu Chan.\n\nThe Latter Ruler turned feebly to his son and said, \"The ministers have decided otherwise: They advise surrender. You are the only one who thinks that boldness may avail, and would you drench the city in blood?\"\n\nThe Prince said, \"While the First Ruler lived, this Qiao Zhou had no voice in state affairs. Now he gives this wild advice and talks the most subversive language. There is no reason at all in what he says, for we have in the city many legions of soldiers, and Jiang Wei is undefeated in Saber Pass. He will come to our rescue as soon as he knows our straits, and we can help him to fight. We shall surely succeed. Why listen to the words of this dryasdust? Why abandon thus lightly the work of our great forerunner?\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler became angry at this harangue and turned to his son, saying, \"Be silent! You are too young to understand Heaven's will!\"\n\nLiu Chan beat his head upon the ground and implored his father to make an effort.\n\n\"If we have done our best and defeat yet comes, if parents and children, lords and ministers have set their backs to the wall and died in one final effort to preserve the dynasty, then in the shades of the Nine Golden Springs we shall be able to look the First Ruler in the face, unashamed. But what if we surrender?\"\n\nThe appeal left the Latter Ruler unmoved.\n\nThe Prince cried, \"Is it not shameful in one day to throw down all that our ancestors built up with so great labor? I would rather die.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler, now very angry, bade the courtiers thrust the young man out of the Palace. Then he ordered Qiao Zhou to prepare the formal Act of Surrender. After it had been written, three officers \u2014 Adviser Zhang Shao, Imperial Son-in-Law and Commander Deng Liang, and Minister Qiao Zhou \u2014 were sent with it and the Hereditary Seal to the camp of Deng Ai to offer submission.\n\nEvery day Deng Ai's horsemen rode to the city to see what was afoot. It was a glad day when they returned reporting the hoisting of the flag of surrender. The general had not long to wait. The three messengers soon arrived and presented the letter announcing surrender and the seal therewith. Deng Ai read the letter with great exultation, and took possession of the seal. He treated the envoys courteously, and by their hands sent back a letter to allay any anxiety among the people. In due time they reentered the city and bore this missive to the Latter Ruler, and they told him they had been treated well. The Latter Ruler read the letter with much satisfaction. Then he sent Minister Jiang Xian to order Jiang Wei to surrender.\n\nThen Li Hu, Chair of the Secretariat, carried to the victorious Deng Ai the statistical documents of the resources of the kingdom:\n\n2,800,000 households, 9,140,000 souls, 102,000 active armed soldiers of all ranks, and 40,000 civil employees. Besides, there were granaries with 4,000,000 carts of grain, treasuries with 3,000 pounds of gold and silver and 200,000 rolls of silks of many qualities, and many unenumerated but precious things in the various storehouses.\n\nLi Hu arranged that the ceremony of surrender should take place on the first day of the twelfth month.\n\nThe wrath of Prince Liu Chan swelled high as heaven when he heard that his father had actually arranged the date of his abdication.\n\nGirding on his sword, he was setting out for the Palace when his Consort, Lady Cui, stopped him, saying, \"My Prince, why does your face bear this look of terrible anger?\"\n\nHe replied, \"The army of Wei is at the gates, and my father has made his Act of Surrender. Tomorrow he and all his ministers are going out of the city to submit formally, and the dynasty will end. But rather than bow the knee to another, I will die and go into the presence of the First Ruler in the realms below.\"\n\n\"How worthy; how worthy!\" replied she. \"And if my lord must die, I, thy handmaid, prays that she may die first. Then may my Prince depart.\"\n\n\"But why should you die?\"\n\n\"The Prince dies for his father and the handmaid for her husband. One eternal principle guides us all.\"\n\nThereupon she dashed herself against a pillar, and so she died. Then Liu Chan slew his three sons and cut off the head of his Consort that he might sever all ties to life lest he be tempted to live. Bearing the head of the princess in his hand, he went to the Temple of the First Ruler, where he bowed his head, saying, \"Thy servant is ashamed at seeing the kingdom pass to another. Therefore has he slain his Consort and his sons that nothing should induce him to live and forego death.\"\n\nThis announcement recited, he made yet another to his ancestors.\n\n\"My ancestors, if you have spiritual intelligence, you know the feelings of your descendant.\"\n\nThen he wept sore till his eyes ran blood, and he committed suicide. The people of Shu grieved deeply for him, and a poet has praised his noble deed.\n\n\u2003Both king and courtiers, willing, bowed the knee,\n\n\u2003One son alone was grieved and would not live.\n\n\u2003The western kingdom fell to rise no more,\n\n\u2003A noble prince stood forth, for aye renowned\n\n\u2003As one who died to save his forbears' shame.\n\n\u2003With grievous mien and falling tears he bowed\n\n\u2003His head, declaring his intent to die.\n\n\u2003While such a memory lingers none may say\n\n\u2003That the Han Dynasty has perished.\n\nWhen the Latter Ruler knew of the death of his son, he sent people to bury him.\n\nSoon the main body of the Wei army came. The Latter Ruler and all his courtiers to the number of sixty went out three miles from the north gate to bow their heads in submission, the Latter Ruler binding himself with cord and taking a coffin with him. But Deng Ai with his own hands loosened the bonds and raised the Latter Ruler from the ground. The coffin was burned. Then the victorious leader and the vanquished Emperor returned into the city side by side.\n\n\u2003Wei's legions entered Shu,\n\n\u2003And the ruler thereof saved his life\n\n\u2003At the price of his honor and his throne.\n\n\u2003Huang Hao's vicious counsels had brought disaster\n\n\u2003Against which Jiang Wei's efforts were vain.\n\n\u2003How bright shone the loyalty of the faithful one!\n\n\u2003How noble was the grandson of the First Ruler!\n\n\u2003Alas! It led him into the way of sorrow.\n\n\u2003And the plans of the First Ruler,\n\n\u2003Excellent and far-reaching.\n\n\u2003Whereby he laid the foundations of a mighty state,\n\n\u2003Were brought to nought in one day.\n\nThe common people rejoiced at the magnanimity of Deng Ai, and met the returning cavalcade with burning incense and flowers. The title of General of the Flying Cavalry was given to the Latter Ruler and other ranks were given to the ministers who had surrendered.\n\nDeng Ai requested the Latter Ruler to issue one more proclamation from the Palace to reassure the people, and then the conquerors took formal possession of the state and its granaries and storehouses. Two officers \u2014 Governor of Yizhou Zhang Shao and Minister Zhang Jung \u2014 were sent into the counties and territories to explain the new situation and pacify malcontents, and another messenger was sent to exhort Jiang Wei to yield peaceably. A report of the success was sent to Capital Luoyang.\n\nHuang Hao, the eunuch whose evil counsels had wrought such ruin to his master, was looked upon as a danger, and Deng Ai decided to put him to death. However, Huang Hao was rich, and he gave bribes to Deng Ai's people, and so he escaped the death penalty.\n\nThus perished the House of Han. Reflecting on its end a poet recalled the exploits of Zhuge Liang the Martial Lord, and he wrote a poem.\n\n\u2003The denizens of tree-tops, apes and birds,\n\n\u2003Most lawless of crested things, yet knew\n\n\u2003And feared his mordant pen. The clouds and winds\n\n\u2003Conspired to aid him to defend his lord.\n\n\u2003But nought awaited the leader's precepts, wise\n\n\u2003To save; with base content the erstwhile king\n\n\u2003Too soon surrendered, yielding all but life.\n\n\u2003In gifts Zhuge Liang was peer with\n\n\u2003Guan Zhong and Yue Yi,\n\n\u2003His hapless death compared with\n\n\u2003Zhang Fei's and Guan Yu's;\n\n\u2003Sad sight, his temple on the river's brink!\n\n\u2003It wrings the heart more than the tearful verse\n\n\u2003Of the Liangfu songs he most loved.\n\nIn due time Minister Jiang Xian reached the Saber Pass, and gave Jiang Wei the Latter Ruler's command to surrender to the invaders. Jiang Wei was dumb with amazement at the order; his officers ground their teeth with rage and mortification. Their hair stood on end with anger; they drew their swords and slashed at stones in their wrath.\n\nShouted they, \"While we are fighting to our death, the Latter Ruler has yielded!\"\n\nThe roar of their angry lamentation was heard for miles.\n\nBut Jiang Wei soothed them with kindly words, saying, \"Generals, grieve not. Even yet I can restore the House of Han!\"\n\n\"How?\" cried they.\n\nAnd he whispered low in their ears.\n\nThe flag of surrender fluttered over the ramparts of Saber Pass, and a messenger went to Zhong Hui's camp. When Jiang Wei and his generals drew near, Zhong Hui went out to meet them.\n\n\"Why have you been so long in coming?\" said Zhong Hui.\n\nJiang Wei looked him straight in the face and said, without a tremor, but through falling tears, \"The whole armies of the state are under me, and I am here far too soon!\"\n\nZhong Hui wondered about this firm remark, and said nothing more. The two saluted each other and took their seats, Jiang Wei being placed in the seat of honor.\n\nJiang Wei said, \"I hear that every detail of your plans, from the time you left the South of River Huai till now, has been accomplished. The good fortune of the Sima family is owing to you, and so I am the more content to bow my head and yield to you. Had it been Deng Ai, I should have fought to the death, for I would not have surrendered to him!\"\n\nThen Zhong Hui broke an arrow in twain, and they two swore close brotherhood. Their friendship became close-knit. Jiang Wei was continued in command of his own army, at which he secretly rejoiced. He sent Jiang Xian back to Chengdu.\n\nAs conqueror, Deng Ai arranged for the administration of the newly-gained territory. He made Shi Zuan Imperial Protector of Yizhou and appointed Qian Hong, Yang Xin, and many others to various posts. He also built a tower in Mianzhu in commemoration of his conquest.\n\nAt a great banquet, where most of the guests were people of the newly-conquered land, Deng Ai drank too freely and in his cups became garrulous.\n\nWith a patronizing wave of his hand, he said to his guests, \"You are lucky in that you have had to do with me. Things might well have been otherwise, and you might all have been put to death, if you surrender to other leader!\"\n\nThe guests rose in a body and expressed their gratitude. Just at that moment Jiang Xian arrived from his visit to Jiang Wei to say that Jiang Wei and his army had surrendered to Zhong Hui. Deng Ai thereupon conceived a great hatred for Zhong Hui, and soon after he wrote to Luoyang a letter something like this:\n\n\"I would venture to remark that misleading rumors of war should precede actual attack. Now that Shu has been overcome, the manifest next move is against Wu, and in present circumstances victory would easily follow an attack. But after a great effort, both leaders and led are weary and unfit for immediate service. Therefore of this army twenty thousand Wei troops should be left west of Longyou, and with them twenty thousand Shu troops, to be employed in boiling salt so as to improve the finances. Moreover, ships should be built ready for an expedition down the river. When these preparations shall be complete, then send an envoy into Wu to lay before its ruler the truth about its position. It is possible that matters may be settled without any fighting.\n\n\"Further, generous treatment of Liu Shan will tend to weaken Sun Xiu; but if Liu Shan be removed to Luoyang, the people of Wu will be perplexed and doubtful about what may happen to them, and they will not be amenable. Therefore it seems the most fitting to leave the late Ruler of Shu here. Next year, in the winter season, he might be removed to the capital. For the present I would recommend that he be created Prince of Fufeng, and granted a sufficient revenue and suitable attendants. His sons also should receive ducal rank. In this way would be demonstrated that favorable treatment follows upon submission. Such a course would inspire fear of the might of Wei and respect for its virtue, and the result will be all that could be desired.\"\n\nReading this memorial, the thought entered the mind of Sima Zhao that Deng Ai was exaggerating his own importance, wherefore he first wrote a private letter and sent it by the hand of Wei Guan to Deng Ai and then caused the Ruler of Wei to issue an edict promoting Deng Ai. The edict ran thus:\n\n\"General Deng Ai has performed a glorious exploit, penetrating deeply into a hostile country and reducing to submission a usurping potentate. This task has been quickly performed: The clouds of war have already rolled away, and peace reigns throughout Ba and Shu.\n\n\"The merits of Deng Ai surpass those of Bai Qi, who subdued the mighty state of Chu, and Han Xin, who conquered the state of Zhao. Deng Ai is created Grand Commander, and we confer upon him a fief of twenty thousand homesteads, and his two sons are ennobled, each with a fief of one thousand homesteads.\"\n\nAfter the edict had been received with full ceremonies, Wei Guan produced the private letter, which said that Deng Ai's proposals would have suitable consideration in due time.\n\nThen said Deng Ai, \"A general in the field may decline to obey even the orders of his prince. My commission was to conquer the west. Why are my plans hindered?\"\n\nSo he wrote a reply and sent it to the capital by the hand of the envoy. At that time it was common talk at court that Deng Ai intended to rebel; and when Sima Zhao read the letter, his suspicions turned to certainty, and he feared. This was the letter:\n\n\"Deng Ai, General Who Conquers the West, has reduced the chief of the revolt to submission, and must have authority to act according as he sees best in order to settle the early stages of administration of the new territory. To await government orders for every step means long delays. According to the Spring and Autumn Annals a high officer, when abroad, has authority to follow his own judgment for the safety of the Throne and the advantage of the state.\n\n\"Now seeing that Wu is still unsubdued, all interest centers upon this country, and schemes of settlement should not be nullified by strict adherence to rules and formalities. In war advances are made without thought of reputation, retreats without consideration of avoiding punishment. Though I do not possess the fortitude of the ancients, I shall not be deterred from acting for the benefit of the state by craven and selfish fears for my own reputation.\"\n\nIn his perplexity Sima Zhao turned to Jia Chong for advice.\n\nSaid he, \"Deng Ai presumes upon his services to be haughty and imperious. His recalcitrance is very evident. What shall I do?\"\n\n\"Why not order Zhong Hui to reduce him to obedience?\" replied Jia Chong.\n\nSima Zhao accepted the suggestion and issued an edict raising Zhong Hui to Minister of the Interior. After this he made Wei Guan the Inspector of the Forces and set Wei Guan over both armies, with special orders to keep a watch upon Deng Ai and guard against any attempt at insubordination.\n\nThe edict sent to Zhong Hui ran as follows:\n\n\"Zhong Hui, General Who Conquers the West, against whose might none can stand, before whom no one is strong, whose virtue conquers every city, whose wide net no one escapes, to whom the valiant army of Shu humbly submitted, whose plans never fail, whose every undertaking succeeds, is hereby made Minister of the Interior and raised to the rank of lordship of a fief of ten thousand families. His two sons also have similar rank with a fief of one thousand families.\"\n\nWhen this edict reached Zhong Hui, he called in Jiang Wei and said to him, \"Deng Ai has been rewarded more richly than I and is the Grand Commander. But Sima Zhao suspects him of rebellion and has ordered Wei Guan and myself to keep him in order. What does my friend Jiang Wei think ought to be done?\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"They say Deng Ai's origin was ignoble and in his youth he was a farmer and breeder of cattle. However, he had good luck and has won a great reputation in this expedition. But this is due not to his able plans, but to the good fortune of the state. If you had not been compelled to hold me in check at Saber Pass, he could not have succeeded. Now he wishes the late Ruler of Shu to be created Prince of Fufeng, whereby he hopes to win the goodwill of the people of Shu. But to me it seems that perfidy lies therein. The Duke of Jin suspects him, it is evident.\"\n\nZhong Hui complimented him. Jiang Wei continued, \"If you will send away your people, I have something to say to you in private.\"\n\nWhen this had been done and they two were alone, Jiang Wei drew a map from his sleeve and spread it before Zhong Hui, saying, \"Long ago, before he had left his humble cot. Zhuge Liang gave this to the First Ruler and told him of the riches of Yizhou and how well it was fitted for an independent state. Whereupon Chengdu was seized as a first step towards attaining it. Now that Deng Ai has got to the same point, it is small wonder that he has lost his balance.\"\n\nZhong Hui asked many questions about the details of the features of the map, and Jiang Wei explained in full. Toward the end, he asked how Deng Ai could be got rid of.\n\n\"By making use of the Duke of Jin's suspicions,\" replied Jiang Wei. \"Send up a memorial to say that it looks as if Deng Ai really contemplated rebellion. You will receive direct orders to check the revolt.\"\n\nSo a memorial was sent to Luoyang. It said that Deng Ai aimed at independence, nourished base designs, was making friends with the vanquished, and was about to revolt.\n\nAt this news the court was much disturbed. Then to support his charges, Zhong Hui's soldiers intercepted Deng Ai's letters and rewrote them in arrogant and rebellious terms. Sima Zhao was greatly angered and sent Jia Chong to lead an expedition into the Xie Valley, he ordered Zhong Hui to arrest Deng Ai, and he himself directing a great march under the leadership of the Ruler of Wei, Cao Huang, whom he compelled to go with him.\n\nThen said Shao Ti, \"Zhong Hui's army outnumbers that of Deng Ai by six to one. You need not go. You need only order Zhong Hui to arrest Deng Ai.\"\n\n\"Have you forgotten?\" said Sima Zhao, smiling. \"You said Zhong Hui was a danger. I am not really going against Deng Ai, but against the other.\"\n\n\"I feared lest you had forgotten,\" said Shao Ti. \"I ventured to remind you, but the matter must be kept secret.\"\n\nThe expedition set out.\n\nBy this time Zhong Hui's attitude had aroused Jia Chong's suspicions, and he spoke of it to Sima Zhao, who replied, \"I have sent you: Should I have doubts about you, too? However, come to Changan and things will clear up.\"\n\nThe dispatch of the army under Sima Zhao was reported to Zhong Hui, who wondered what it might mean. He at once called in Jiang Wei to consult about the seizure of Deng Ai.\n\nLo! He is victor here, a king must yield;\n\nAnd there a threatening army takes the field." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 119", + "text": "The False Surrender: A Wit Scheme Becomes A Vain Plan; The Abdication: Later Seeds Learn From The Ancient.\n\nAsked to say what was the best plan to secure the arrest of Deng Ai, Jiang Wei said, \"Send Wei Guan. If Deng Ai tries to kill Wei Guan, he will manifest the desire of his heart. Then you can destroy him as a traitor.\"\n\nHence Wei Guan was sent, with some thirty men, to effect the arrest.\n\nWei Guan's own people saw the danger of the enterprise and urged him not to go, saying, \"Zhong Hui clearly wants Deng Ai to kill you to prove his point!\"\n\nBut Wei Guan said, \"Do not worry. I have a scheme prepared.\"\n\nWei Guan first wrote a score or two of letters, all in the same terms, saying:\n\n\"Wei Guan has orders to arrest Deng Ai, but no other persons will be dealt with providing they submit quickly. Rewards await those who obey the Imperial Command. However, the punishment for laggards and those who are contumacious will be death to the whole family.\"\n\nWei Guan sent these letters to various officers who were serving under Deng Ai. He also prepared two cage carts.\n\nWei Guan and his small party reached Chengdu about cockcrow and found waiting for him most of the officers to whom he had written. They at once yielded. Deng Ai was still asleep when the party reached his palace, but Wei Guan entered and forced his way into Deng Ai's chamber.\n\nHe roared out: \"I serve the Son of Heaven's command to arrest Deng Ai and his son!\"\n\nThe noise awakened the sleeper, who tumbled off his couch in alarm. But before Deng Ai could do anything to defend himself, he was seized, securely bound, and huddled into one of the carts. Deng Ai's son, Deng Zhong, rushed in at the noise, but was also made prisoner and thrust into the other cart. Many generals and attendants in the Palace want to attempt a rescue, but before they had prepared, they saw dust arose outside, and Zhong Hui with an army was close at hand, thus they scattered.\n\nZhong Hui and Jiang Wei dismounted at the Palace gates and entered.\n\nZhong Hui, seeing both the Dengs prisoners, struck the elder about the head and face with his whip and insulted him, saying, \"Vile cattle breeder! How dare you have your own scheme?\"\n\nNor was Jiang Wei backward. \"You fool! See what your good luck has brought you today!\" cried he.\n\nAnd Deng Ai replied in kind. Zhong Hui at once sent off both the prisoners to Luoyang, and then entered Chengdu in state. He added all Deng Ai's army to his own forces, so that he became very formidable.\n\n\"Today I have attained the one desire of my life!\" cried Zhong Hui.\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"At the beginning of Han, Han Xin hearkened not to Kuai Tong to establish his own kingdom, and so blundered into trouble at the Weiyang Palace, where he met his fate. In Yue, High Minister Wen Zhong would not follow Fan Li into retirement on the lakes, and so fell victim to a sword. No one would say these two \u2014 Han Xin and Wen Zhong \u2014 were not brilliant, but they did not scent danger early enough. Now, Sir, your merit is great and your prestige overwhelming that of your prince, but why do you risk future dangers? Why not sail off in a boat leaving no trace of your going? Why not go to Emei Mountain and wander free with Master Red Pine?\"\n\nZhong Hui smiled.\n\n\"I do not think your advice much to the point. I am a young man, not forty yet, and think rather of going on than halting. I could not take up a do-nothing hermit's life.\"\n\n\"If you do not, then take heed and prepare for dangers. Think out a careful course, as you are well able to do. You need not trouble any old fool for advice.\"\n\nZhong Hui laughed loud and rubbed his hands together with glee.\n\n\"How well you know my thoughts, my friend!\" said Zhong Hui.\n\nThey two became absorbed in the plans for their grand scheme.\n\nBut Jiang Wei wrote a secret letter to the Latter Ruler, saying:\n\n\"I pray Your Majesty be patient and put up with humiliations for a season, for Jiang Wei, your humble servant, will have the country restored in good time. The sun and moon are all the more glorious when they burst through the dark clouds. The House of Han is not yet done.\"\n\nWhile Zhong Hui and Jiang Wei were planning how best to outwit each other, but both being against Wei, there suddenly arrived a letter from Sima Zhao:\n\n\"I am at Changan with an army lest there should be any difficulty in disposing of Deng Ai. I need you to come to discuss state affairs.\"\n\nZhong Hui divined the real purport at once.\n\n\"He suspects,\" said Zhong Hui. \"He knows quite well that my army outnumbers that of Deng Ai many times and I could do what he wishes easily. There is more than that in his coming.\"\n\nHe consulted Jiang Wei, who said, \"When the prince suspects a minister, that minister dies. Have we not seen Deng Ai?\"\n\n\"This decides me,\" replied Zhong Hui. \"Success, and the empire is mine; failure, and I go west into Shu to be another Liu Bei, but without his mistakes.\"\n\nJiang Wei said, \"Empress Guo of Wei has just died. You can pretend she left you a command to destroy Sima Zhao, the real murderer of the Emperor. Your talents are quite sufficient to conquer the empire.\"\n\n\"Will you lead the van?\" said Zhong Hui. \"When success is ours, we will share the spoil.\"\n\n\"The little I can do, I will do most willingly,\" said Jiang Wei. \"But I am not sure of the support of all our subordinates.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow is the fifteenth day of the month, a Feast of Lanterns will be held. We can gather in the Palace for the congratulations. There will be grand illuminations, and we will prepare a banquet for the officers, whereat we can kill all those who will not follow us.\"\n\nAt this, the heart of Jiang Wei leapt with joy. Invitations were sent out in the joint names of the two conspirators, and the feast began. After several courses, suddenly Zhong Hui lifted his cup and broke into wailing.\n\nEveryone asked what was the cause of this grief, and Zhong Hui replied. \"The Empress has just died, but before her death she gave me an edict, which is here, recounting the crimes of Sima Zhao and charging him with aiming at the Throne. I am commissioned to destroy him, and you all must join me in the task.\"\n\nThe guests stared at each other in amazement, but no one uttered a word.\n\nThen the host suddenly drew his sword, crying, \"Here is death for those who oppose!\"\n\nNot one was bold enough to refuse, and, one by one, they all signed a promise to help. As further security, they were all kept prisoners in the Palace under careful guard.\n\n\"They are not really with us,\" said Jiang Wei. \"I venture to request you to bury them all.\"\n\n\"A great pit has been already dug,\" replied his brother host. \"And I have a lot of clubs ready. We can easily club those who disagree and bury them in the pit.\"\n\nAs Jiang Wei and Zhong Hui discussed the matter, General Qiu Jian, a man in the confidence of Zhong Hui, was present. He had once served under Assistant General Hu Lie, who was one of the imprisoned guests, and thus he found means to warn his former chief.\n\nHu Lie wept and said, \"My son, Hu Yuan, is in command of a force outside the city. He will never suspect Zhong Hui capable of such a crime, and I pray you tell him. If I am to die, it will be with less regret if my son can be told.\"\n\n\"Kind master, have no anxiety; only leave it to me,\" replied Qiu Jian.\n\nHe went to Zhong Hui, and said, \"Sir, you are holding in captivity a large number of officers, and they are suffering from lack of food and water. Will you not appoint an officer to supply their needs?\"\n\nZhong Hui was accustomed to yield to the wishes of Qiu Jian, and he made no difficulty about this. He told Qiu Jian to see to it himself, only saying, \"I am placing great trust in you, and you must be loyal. Our secret must be kept.\"\n\n\"My lord, you may be quite content. I know how to keep a strict watch when necessary.\"\n\nAnd Qiu Jian allowed to enter into the place of confinement a trusty confidant of Hu Lie, who gave him a letter to his son Hu Yuan.\n\nWhen Hu Yuan knew the whole story, he was astonished and told his subordinates, and they were greatly enraged.\n\nThey came to their commander's tent to say: \"We would rather die than follow a rebel!\"\n\nSo Hu Yuan fixed upon the eighteenth day of the month to attempt the rescue. He enlisted the sympathy of Wei Guan and got his army ready. He bade Qiu Jian tell his father what was afoot. Hu Lie then told his fellow-captives.\n\nOne day Zhong Hui said to Jiang Wei, \"Last night I dreamed a dream, that I was bitten by many serpents. Can you expound the vision?\"\n\nJiang Wei replied, \"Dreams of dragons and snakes and scaly creatures are exceedingly auspicious.\"\n\nZhong Hui was only too ready to accept this interpretation. Then he told Jiang Wei that all was ready and they would put the crucial question to each captive.\n\n\"I know they are opposed to us, and you would do well to slay them all, and that right quickly,\" replied Jiang Wei.\n\n\"Good,\" replied Zhong Hui.\n\nHe bade Jiang Wei with several ruffians kill the Wei leaders among the captives. But just as Jiang Wei was starting to carry out these instructions, he was seized with a sudden spasm of the heart, so severe that he fainted. He was raised from the earth and in time revived. Just as he came to, a tremendous hubbub arose outside the Palace. Zhong Hui at once sent to inquire what was afoot, but the noise waxed louder and louder, sounding like the rush of a multitude.\n\n\"The officers must be raging,\" said Zhong Hui. \"We would best slay them at once!\"\n\nBut they told him: \"The outside soldiers are in the Palace!\"\n\nZhong Hui bade them close the doors of the Hall of Audience, and he sent his own troops upon the roof to pelt the incoming soldiers with tiles. Many were slain on either side in the melee. Then a fire broke out. The assailants broke open the doors. Zhong Hui faced them and slew a few, but others shot at him with flights of arrows, and he fell and died. They hacked off his head.\n\nJiang Wei ran to and fro slaying all he met till another heart spasm seized him.\n\n\"Failed!\" he shrieked, \"But it is the will of Heaven!\"\n\nHe put an end to his own life. He was fifty-nine.\n\nMany hundreds were slain within the Forbidden City. Wei Guan presently ordered that the soldiers were to be led back to their various camps to await the orders of the Duke of Jin.\n\nThe soldiers of Wei, burning for revenge of his many invasions, hacked the dead body of Jiang Wei to pieces. They found his gall bladder extraordinarily large, as large as a hen's egg. They also seized and slew all the family of the dead leader.\n\nSeeing that Deng Ai's two enemies on the spot were both dead, his old soldiers bethought themselves of trying to rescue him. When Wei Guan, who had actually arrested Deng Ai, heard this, he feared for his life.\n\n\"If Deng Ai lives, I will die in his hand!\" said Wei Guan.\n\nFurthermore, General Tian Xu said, \"When Deng Ai took Jiangyou, he wished to put me to death. It was only at the prayer of my friends that he let me off. May I not have my revenge now?\"\n\nSo Wei Guan gave order. At the head of five hundred cavalry, Tian Xu went in pursuit of the cage-carts. He came up with them at Mianzhu and found that the two prisoners had just been released from the carts in which they were being carried to Luoyang. When Deng Ai saw that those coming up were soldiers of his own late command, he took no thought for defense. Nor did Tian Xu waste time in preliminaries. He went up to where Deng Ai was standing and cut him down. His soldiers fell upon the son, Deng Zhong, and slew him also, and thus father and son met death in the same place.\n\nA poem, pitying Deng Ai, was written:\n\n\u2003While yet a boy, Deng Ai loved to sketch and plan;\n\n\u2003He was an able leader as a man.\n\n\u2003The earth could hide no secrets from his eye,\n\n\u2003With equal skill he read the starry sky.\n\n\u2003Past every obstacle his way he won,\n\n\u2003And onward pressed until his task was done.\n\n\u2003But foulest murder closed a great career,\n\n\u2003His spirit ranges now a larger sphere.\n\n\u2003A poem was also composed in pity for Zhong Hui:\n\n\u2003Of mother wit Zhong Hui had no scanty share,\n\n\u2003And in due time at court did office bear.\n\n\u2003His subtle plans shook Sima Zhao's hold on power,\n\n\u2003He was well named the Zhang Liang of the hour.\n\n\u2003Shouchun and Saber Pass ramparts straight fell down,\n\n\u2003When he attacked, and he won great renown.\n\n\u2003Ambition beckoned, he would forward press\n\n\u2003His spirit homeward wandered, bodiless.\n\n\u2003Another poem, in pity of Jiang Wei, runs:\n\n\u2003Tianshui boasts of a hero,\n\n\u2003Talent came forth from Xizhou,\n\n\u2003Lu Wang fathered his spirit,\n\n\u2003Zhuge Liang tutored his mind,\n\n\u2003Valiant he ever pressed forward,\n\n\u2003Nor had a thought of returning,\n\n\u2003Grieved were the soldiers of Han\n\n\u2003When death rapt his soul from his body.\n\nAnd thus died all three leaders. Many other generals also perished in the fighting, and with them died Zhang Yi and other officers. Liu Rui, the heir-apparent, and Guan Yi, Lord of Hanshou and grandson of Guan Yu, were also killed by the Wei soldiers. Then followed a time of great confusion and bloodshed, which endured till Jia Chong arrived and restored confidence and order.\n\nJia Chong set Wei Guan over the city of Chengdu and sent the captive Latter Ruler to Luoyang. A few officers \u2014 Fan Jian, Zhang Shao, Qiao Zhou, and Xi Zheng \u2014 accompanied the deposed emperor on this degrading journey. Liao Hua and Dong Jue made illness an excuse not to go. They died of grief soon after.\n\nAt this time the year-style of Wei was changed from Wonderful Beginning, the fifth year, to Great Glory, the first year (AD 264). In the third month of this year, since nothing could be done to assist Shu to recover its independence, the troops of Wu under Ding Feng were withdrawn and returned to their own land.\n\nNow Secretary Hua Jiao sent up a memorial to Sun Xiu, the Ruler of Wu, saying, \"Wu and Shu were as close as are one's lips to one's teeth, and when the lips are gone the teeth are cold. Without doubt Sima Zhao will now turn his thoughts to attacking us, and Your Majesty must realize the danger and prepare to meet it.\"\n\nSun Xiu knew that he spoke truly, so he set Lu Kang, son of the late leader Lu Xun, over the army of Jingzhou and the river ports with the title General Who Guards the East; Sun Yin was sent to Nanxu; and Ding Feng was ordered to set up several hundred garrisons along the river banks.\n\nIn Shu when Huo Yi, Governor of Jianning, heard that Chengdu had been taken, he dressed himself in white and wailed during three days, facing west toward the capital.\n\n\"Now that the capital has fallen and the Ruler of Shu is a captive, it would be well to surrender,\" said his officers.\n\nHuo Yi replied, \"There is a hindrance. I know not how fares our lord, whether he is in comfort or in misery. If his captors treat him generously, then will I yield. But perhaps they will put him to shame; and when the prince is shamed, the minister dies.\"\n\nSo certain persons were sent to Luoyang to find out how fared the Latter Ruler.\n\nSoon after the Latter Ruler reached the capital of Wei, Sima Zhao returned.\n\nSeeing the Latter Ruler at court, Sima Zhao upbraided him, saying, \"You deserved death for your vicious courses \u2014 corrupt morality, unchecked self-indulgence, contempt of good people, and misgovernment \u2014 , which had brought misfortune upon yourself!\"\n\nHearing this, the face of the Latter Ruler turned to the color of clay with fear, and he was speechless.\n\nBut the courtiers said, \"He has lost his kingdom, he has surrendered without a struggle, and he now deserves pardon.\"\n\nThus the Latter Ruler suffered no injury, but was created Duke of Anle. Moreover, he was assigned a residence and a revenue, and he received presents of silk, and servants were sent to wait upon him, males and females in total one hundred. His son Liu Dao and the officers of Shu \u2014 Fan Jian, Qiao Zhou, Xi Zheng, and others \u2014 were given ranks of nobility. The Latter Ruler expressed his thanks and left.\n\nHuang Hao, whose evil influence had brought the kingdom to nought, and who had oppressed the people, was put to death with ignominy in the public place.\n\nWhen Huo Yi heard all these things, he came with his officers and yielded submission.\n\nNext day the Latter Ruler went to the residence of Sima Zhao to thank him for his bounty, and a banquet was prepared. At the banquet they performed the music of Wei, with the dances, and the hearts of the officers of Shu were sad. Only the Latter Ruler appeared merry.\n\nHalf way through the feast, Sima Zhao said to Jia Chong, \"The man lacks feeling. That is what has ruined him. Even if Zhuge Liang had lived, he could not have maintained such a man. It is no wonder that Jiang Wei failed.\"\n\nTurning to his guest, Sima Zhao said, \"Do you never think of Shu?\"\n\n\"With such music as this, I forget Shu,\" replied the Latter Ruler.\n\nPresently the Latter Ruler rose and left the table to change dress.\n\nXi Zheng went over to him and said, \"Why did Your Majesty not say you missed Shu? If Your Majesty are questioned again, weep and say that in Shu are the tombs of your forefathers and no day passes that Your Majesty do not grieve to be so far away. The Duke of Jin may let Your Majesty return.\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler promised he would.\n\nWhen the wine had gone round several more times, Sima Zhao put the same question a second time: \"Do you never think of Shu?\"\n\nThe Latter Ruler replied as he had been told. He also tried to weep, but failed to shed a tear. So he shut his eyes.\n\n\"Is not that just what Xi Zheng told you to say?\" asked Sima Zhao.\n\n\"It is just as you say,\" was the reply.\n\nThey all laughed. But really Sima Zhao was pleased with the frank answer and felt that nothing was to be feared from him.\n\n\u2003Laughter loving, pleasure pursuing,\n\n\u2003Rippling smiles over a merry face,\n\n\u2003Never a thought of his former glory\n\n\u2003In his callous heart finds place.\n\n\u2003Childish joy in a change of dwelling,\n\n\u2003That he feels and that alone;\n\n\u2003Manifest now that he was never\n\n\u2003Worthy to sit on his father's throne.\n\nThe courtiers thought that so grand an exploit as the conquest of the River Lands was worthy of high honor, so they memorialized the Ruler of Wei, Cao Huang, to confer the rank Prince of Jin on Sima Zhao. At that time, Cao Huang ruled in name only, for he had no authority. The whole land was under Sima Zhao, whose will the Emperor himself dared not cross. And so, in due course, the Duke of Jin became Prince of Jin.\n\nAfter being made Prince of Jin, Sima Zhao posthumously created his father, Sima Yi, the Original Prince and his late elder brother, Sima Shi, the Wonderful Prince.\n\nThe wife of Sima Zhao was the daughter of Wang Su. She bore to him two sons, the elder of whom was named Sima Yan. Sima Yan was huge of frame, his flowing hair reached to the ground when he stood up, and both hands hung down below his knees. He was clever, brave, and skilled in the use of arms.\n\nThe second son, Sima You, was mild of disposition, a filial son and a dutiful brother. His father loved him dearly. As Sima Shi had died without leaving sons, this youth, Sima You, was regarded as his son, to continue that line of the family.\n\nSima Zhao used to say: \"The empire was really my brother's .\"\n\nBecoming a prince, it was necessary for Sima Zhao to choose his heir, and he wished to name his younger son Sima You. But Shan Tao remonstrated.\n\n\"It is improper and infelicitous to prefer the younger,\" said Shan Tao.\n\nAnd Jia Chong, He Zeng, and Pei Xiu followed in the same strain.\n\n\"The elder is clever, able in war, one of the most talented people in the state and popular. With such natural advantages he has a great destiny: He was not born to serve.\"\n\nSima Zhao hesitated, for he was still unwilling to abandon his desire.\n\nBut two other officers \u2014 Grand Commander Wang Xiang and Minister of Works Xun Kai \u2014 also remonstrated, saying, \"Certain former dynasties have preferred the younger before the elder and rebellion has generally followed. We pray you reflect upon these cases.\"\n\nFinally Sima Zhao yielded and named his elder son Sima Yan as his successor.\n\nCertain officers memorialized: \"This year a gigantic figure of a man descended from heaven in Xiangwu. His height was twenty feet and his footprint measured over three feet. He had white hair and a hoary beard. He wore an unlined yellow robe and a yellow cape. He walked leaning on a black-handled staff. This extraordinary man preached, saying, 'I am the king of the people, and now I come to tell you of a change of ruler and the coming of peace.' He wandered about for three days and then disappeared. Evidently this portent refers to yourself, Noble Sir, and now you should assume the imperial headdress with twelve strings of pearls, set up the imperial standard, and have the roads cleared when you make a progress. You should ride in the golden-shafted chariot with six horses. Your consort should be styled 'Empress' and your heir 'Apparent'.\"\n\nSima Zhao was greatly pleased. He returned to his palace, but just as he was sitting down, he was suddenly seized with paralysis and lost the use of his tongue. He quickly grew worse. His three chief confidants, Wang Xiang, He Zeng, and Xun Kai, together with many court officials, came to inquire after his health, but he could not speak to them. He pointed toward the heir apparent, Sima Yan, and died. It was the eighth month of that year.\n\nThen said He Zeng, \"The care of the empire devolves upon the Prince of Jin: Let us induct the heir. Then we can perform the sacrifices to the late prince.\"\n\nThereupon Sima Yan was set up in his father's place. He gave He Zeng the title of Prime Minister; Sima Wang, Minister of the Interior; Shi Bao, Commander of the Flying Cavalry; and conferred many other titles and ranks. The posthumous title of the \"Scholar Prince\" was conferred upon his late father.\n\nWhen the obsequies were finished, Sima Yan summoned Jia Chong and Pei Xiu into the Palace, and said, \"Cao Cao said that if the celestial mandate rested upon him, he could be no more than King Wen of Zhou, who served as a regent only. Is this really so?\"\n\nJia Chong replied, \"Cao Cao was in the service of Han and feared lest posterity should reproach him with usurpation. Wherefore he spoke thus. Nevertheless he caused Cao Pi to become Emperor.\"\n\n\"How did my father compare with Cao Cao?\" asked Sima Yan.\n\n\"Although Cao Cao was universally successful, yet the people feared him and credited him with no virtue. Cao Pi's rule was marked by strife and lack of tranquillity. No single year was peaceful. Later the Original Prince and Wonderful Prince of your line rendered great services and disseminated compassion and virtue, so that they were beloved. Your late father overcame Shu in the west and was universally renowned. Comparison with Cao Cao is impossible.\"\n\n\"Still Cao Pi succeeded the rule of Han. Can I not in like manner succeed that of Wei?\"\n\nJia Chong and Pei Xiu bowed low and said, \"Cao Pi's action may be taken as a precedent to succeed an older dynasty. Wherefore prepare an abdication terrace to make the great declaration.\"\n\nSima Yan resolved to act promptly. Next day he entered the Forbidden City armed with a sword. No court had been held for many days, for Cao Huang was ill at ease and full of dread. When Sima Yan appeared, the Ruler of Wei left his place and advanced to met him. Sima Yan sat down.\n\n\"By whose merits did Wei succeed to empire?\" he asked suddenly.\n\n\"Certainly success was due to your forefathers,\" replied Cao Huang.\n\nSima Yan smiled, saying, \"Your Majesty is unskilled in debate, inept in war, and unfit to rule. Why not give place to another more able and virtuous?\"\n\nCao Huang's lips refused a reply.\n\nBut Zhang Jie, one of the ministers, cried, \"You are wrong to speak thus, O Prince. His Majesty's ancestor conquered east and west, north and south, and won the empire by strenuous effort. The present Emperor is virtuous and without fault. Why should he yield place to another?\"\n\nSima Yan replied angrily, \"The imperial right lay with the Hans, and Cao Cao coerced them as he did the nobles. In making himself the Prince of Wei, he usurped the Throne of Han. Three generations of my forefathers upheld the House of Wei, so that their power is not the result of their own abilities, but of the labor of my house. This is known to all the world, and am I not equal to carrying on the rule of Wei?\"\n\n\"If you do this thing, you will be a rebel and an usurper,\" said Zhang Jie.\n\n\"And what shall I be if I avenge the wrongs of Han?\"\n\nHe bade the lictors take Zhang Jie outside and beat him to death, while the Ruler of Wei wept and besought pardon for his faithful minister.\n\nSima Yan rose and left.\n\nCao Huang turned to Jia Chong and Pei Xiu, saying, \"What should I do? Some decision must be taken.\"\n\nThey replied, \"Truth to tell, the measure of your fate is accomplished and you cannot oppose the will of Heaven. You must prepare to abdicate as did Emperor Xian of the Hans. Resign the throne to the Prince of Jin and thereby accord with the design of Heaven and the will of the people. Your personal safety need not cause you anxiety.\"\n\nCao Huang could only accept this advice, and the terrace was built. The \"mouse\" day of the twelfth month was chosen for the ceremony. On that day the Ruler of Wei, dressed in full robes of ceremony, and bearing the seal in his hand, ascended the terrace in the presence of a great assembly.\n\n\u2003The House of Wei displaced the House of Han\n\n\u2003And Jin succeeded Wei; so turns fate's wheel\n\n\u2003And none escape its grinding. Zhang Jie the true\n\n\u2003Stood in the way and died. We pity him.\n\n\u2003Vain hope with one hand to hide Taishan Mountains.\n\nThe Emperor-elect was requested to ascend the high place, and there received the great salute. Cao Huang then descended, robed himself as a minister and took his place as the first of subjects.\n\nSima Yan now stood upon the terrace, supported by Jia Chong and Pei Xiu. Cao Huang was ordered to prostrate himself, while the command was recited, and Jia Chong read:\n\n\"Forty-five years have elapsed since, in the twenty-fifth year of Rebuilt Tranquillity, the House of Han gave place to the House of Wei. But after forty-five years, the favor of Heaven has now left the latter House and reverts to Jin. The merits and services of the family of Sima reach to the high heavens and pervade the earth. The Prince of Jin is fitted for the high office and to continue the rule. Now His Majesty the Emperor confers upon you the title of Prince of Chenliu. You are to proceed to the city of Jinyong, where you will reside; you are forbidden to come to court unless summoned.\"\n\nSadly Cao Huang withdrew with tears in his eyes. Sima Fu, Imperial Guardian, wept before the deposed Emperor and promised eternal devotion.\n\n\"I have been a servant of Wei and will never turn my back upon the House!\" said he.\n\nSima Yan did not take this amiss, and out of admiration he offered Sima Fu the princedom of Anping. But Sima Fu declined the offer.\n\nThe new Emperor was now seated in his place, and all the officers made their salutations and felicitated him. The very hills rang with \"Wan shui! O King, live forever!\"\n\nThus succeeded Sima Yan, and the state was called Great Jin and a new year-style was changed from Great Glory, the second year, to Great Beginning Era, the first year (AD 265). An amnesty was declared. Since then Wei Dynasty ended.\n\n\u2003The kingdom of Wei had ended.\n\n\u2003The Founder of the Dynasty of Jin\n\n\u2003Took Wei as model; thus the displaced emperor\n\n\u2003Was named a prince, when on the terrace high\n\n\u2003His throne he had renounced.\n\n\u2003We grieve when we recall these deeds.\n\nThe new Emperor conferred posthumous rank upon his grandfather, his uncle, and his father: Sima Yi the Original Emperor, Sima Shi the Wonderful Emperor, and Sima Zhao the Scholar Emperor. Sima Yan built seven temples in honor of his ancestors: Sima Jun, the Han General Who Conquers the West; Sima Jun's son, Sima Liang, Governor of Yuzhang; Sima Liang's son, Sima Juan, Governor of Yingchuan; Sima Juan's son, Sima Fang, Governor of Jingzhao; Sima Fang's son, Sima Yi the Original Emperor; and Sima Yi's sons, Sima Shi the Wonderful Emperor and Sima Zhao the Scholar Emperor.\n\nAll these things being accomplished, courts were held daily, and the one subject of discussion was the subjugation of Wu.\n\n\u2003The House of Han has gone for aye,\n\n\u2003And Wu will quickly follow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 120", + "text": "Recommending Du Yu, An Old General Offers New Plans; Capturing Of Sun Hao, Three Kingdoms Becomes One.\n\nWhen Sun Xiu, the Ruler of Wu, knew that the House of Wei had fallen before the Jins, he also knew that the usurper's next thought would be the conquest of his own land. The anxiety made him ill, so that he took to his bed and was like to die. He then summoned to his bedside his Prime Minister, Puyang Xing, and his heir, Sun Wan. But they two came almost too late. The dying Ruler, with his last effort, took the Minister by the hand, but could only point to his son. Then he died.\n\nPuyang Xing left the couch and called a meeting of the officers, whereat he proposed to place the heir on his father's throne.\n\nThen Wan Yu, Inspector of the Left Army, rose and said, \"Prince Sun Wan is too youthful to rule in such troublous times. Let us confer the throne to Sun Hao, Lord of Wucheng.\"\n\nZhang Bu, General of the Left Army, supported his election, saying, \"Sun Hao is able and prompt in decision. He can handle the responsibilities of an emperor.\"\n\nHowever, Puyang Xing was doubtful and consulted the Empress Dowager.\n\n\"Settle this with the officials;\" she replied, \"I am a widow and know nothing of such matters.\"\n\nFinally Sun Hao won the day, and in the seventh month he was enthroned as Emperor of Wu, and the first year of his reign was Prosperous Beginning (AD 264). Sun Hao was the son of Sun He, a former Heir Apparent, and grandson of Sun Quan the Great Emperor. The excluded prince, Sun Wan, was consoled with the title of Prince of Yuzhang. Posthumous rank was given to his late father, Sun He the Scholar Emperor, and his mother, Lady He, the Scholar Empress. The Veteran Leader Ding Feng was made Commander of the Right and Left Armies.\n\nHowever, the year-style was changed to Sweet Dew the very next year. The new ruler soon proved himself cruel and oppressive and day by day grew more so. Sun Hao indulged in every form of vice and chose Eunuch Cen Hun as his confidant and favorite. When Prime Minister Puyang Xing and General Zhang Bu ventured upon remonstrance, both, with all their family, were put to death. Thereafter none dared to speak; the mouth of every courtier was shut tight.\n\nAnother year-style, Treasured Paramount, was adopted the next year (266), and the responsibility of the Prime Minister's office was shared by two officers, Lu Kuai the Left and Wan Yu the Right.\n\nAt this time the imperial residence was in Wuchang. The people of Yangzhou shouldered heavy tribute and suffered exceedingly. There was no limit to the Ruler's extravagance. The treasury was swept clean, and the income of the royal domain exhausted.\n\nAt length Lu Kuai, Left Prime Minister, ventured a memorial, saying:\n\n\"No natural calamity has fallen upon the people, yet they starve; no public work is in progress, yet the treasury is empty. I am distressed. The country under the Hans has fallen apart and three states have arisen therefrom. Those ruled by the Caos and the Lius, as the result of their own folly, have been lost in Jin. Foolish I may be, but I would protect the state for Your Majesty against the evils we have seen in the other divisions. This city of Wuchang is not safe as a royal residence. There is a rhyme concerning it, the gist of which is that it is better to drink the water of Jianye than eat the fish of Wuchang, better to die in Jianye than to live in Wuchang. This shows the regard of the people as well as the will of Heaven. Now the public storehouses are nearly empty; they contain insufficient for a year's use. The officers of all grades vex and distress the people and none pity them.\n\n\"In former times the Palace women numbered less than a hundred; for years past they have exceeded a thousand. This is an extravagant waste of treasure. The courtiers render no disinterested service, but are split into cliques and cabals. The honest are injured, and the good driven away. All these things undermine the state and weaken the people. I beg Your Majesty to reduce the number of officers and remove grievances, to dismiss the Palace women and select honest officers, to the joy of the people and the tranquillity of the state.\"\n\nBut the Ruler of Wu was displeased, threw the memorial away, and showed his contempt for the Minister's remonstrance by beginning to collect material for the building of a new palace complex to be called the Reflected Light Palace. He even made the officers of the court go into the forest to fell trees for the work.\n\nThe Ruler of Wu called in the soothsayer Shang Guang and bade him take the cast and inquire as to the attainment of empire.\n\nShang Guang cast a lot and replied, \"All is propitious, and in the year of the 'mouse' your blue umbrella will enter Luoyang!\"\n\nAnd Sun Hao was pleased.\n\nHe said to Minister Hua Jiao, \"The former Rulers listened to your words and sent generals to various points and placed defensive camps along the rivers. And over all these was set Ding Feng. Now my desire is to conquer Han and avenge the wrongs of my brother, the Ruler of Shu. What place should be first conquered?\"\n\nHua Jiao replied, \"Now that Chengdu has fallen and the Throne there been overturned, Sima Yan will assuredly desire to absorb this southern land. Your Majesty should display virtue and restore confidence to your people. That would be the best plan. If you engage in war, it will be like throwing on hemp to put out a fire \u2014 the hemp only adds to the blaze. This is worthy of careful consideration.\"\n\nBut Sun Hao grew angry and said, \"I desire to take this opportunity to return to my real heritage. Why do you employ this ill-omened language? Were it not for your long service, now would I slay you and expose your head as a warning.\"\n\nHe bade the lictors hustle Minister Hua Jiao from his presence, and Hua Jiao left the court.\n\n\"It is pitiful,\" said Hua Jiao. \"Ere long our silky, beautiful country will pass to another!\"\n\nSo Hua Jiao retired.\n\nAnd the Ruler of Wu ordered Lu Kang, General Who Guards the East, to camp his army at Jiangkou in order to attack Xiangyang.\n\nSpies reported this in Luoyang, and it was told the Ruler of Jin. When Sima Yan heard that the army of Wu threatened to invade Xiangyang, he called a council.\n\nJia Chong stood forth, saying, \"I hear the government of Wu, under its present ruler, Sun Hao, is devoid of virtue, and the Ruler of Wu has turned aside out of the road. Your Majesty should send Commander Yang Hu to oppose this army. When internal trouble shall arise, let him attack, and victory will then be easy.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Jin issued an edict ordering Yang Hu to prepare, and so he mustered his troops and set himself to guard the county.\n\nYang Hu became very popular in Xiangyang. Any of the soldiers of Wu who desired to desert to the other side were allowed to come over. He employed only the fewest possible troops on patrol duty. Instead he set his soldiers to till the soil, and they cultivated an extensive area, whereby the hundred days supplies with which they set out were soon increased to enough for ten years.\n\nYang Hu maintained great simplicity, wearing the lightest of garments and no armor. His personal escort and servants numbered only about ten.\n\nOne day his officers came to his tent and said, \"The spies reported great laxity in the enemy's camp. It is time to make an attack!\"\n\nBut Yang Hu replied, \"You must not despise Lu Kang, for he is able and crafty. Formerly his master sent him to attack Xiling, and he slew Bu Chan and many of his generals, before I could save that city. So long as Lu Kang remains in command, I shall remain on the defensive. I shall not attack till there be trouble and confusion among our enemies. To be rash and not await the proper moment to attack is to invite defeat.\"\n\nThey found him wise and said no more. They only kept the boundaries.\n\nOne day Yang Hu and his officers went out to hunt, and it happened that Lu Kang had chosen the same day to hunt. Yang Hu gave strict orders not to cross the boundary, and so each hunted only on his own side.\n\nLu Kang was astonished at the enemy's scrupulous propriety.\n\nHe sighed, \"The soldiers of Yang Hu have so high a discipline that I may not make any invasion now.\"\n\nIn the evening, after both parties had returned, Yang Hu ordered an inspection of the slaughtered game and sent over to the other side any that seemed to have been first struck by the soldiers of Wu.\n\nLu Kang was greatly pleased and sent for the bearers of the game.\n\n\"Does your leader drink wine?\" asked he.\n\nThey replied, \"Only fine wines does he drink.\"\n\n\"I have some very old wine,\" replied Lu Kang, smiling, \"and I will give of it to you to bear to your general as a gift. It is the wine I myself brew and drink on ceremonial occasions, and he shall have half in return for today's courtesy.\"\n\nThey took the wine and left.\n\n\"Why do you give him wine?\" asked Lu Kang's officers.\n\n\"Because he has shown kindness, and I must return courtesy for courtesy.\"\n\nWhen the gift of wine arrived and the bearers told Yang Hu the story of their reception, he laughed.\n\n\"So he knows I can drink,\" said Yang Hu.\n\nHe had the jar opened, and the wine was poured out. One of his generals, Chen Yuan, begged him to drink moderately lest there should be some harm come of it.\n\n\"Lu Kang is no poisoner,\" replied Yang Hu.\n\nAnd he drank. The friendly intercourse thus continued, and messengers frequently passed from one camp to the other.\n\nOne day the messengers said that Lu Kang was unwell and had been ailing for several days.\n\n\"I think he suffers from the same complaint as I,\" said Yang Hu. \"I have some remedies ready prepared and will send him some.\"\n\nThe drugs were taken over to the Wu camp.\n\nBut the sick man's officers were suspicious and said, \"This medicine is surely harmful: It comes from the enemy.\"\n\nHowever, Lu Kang said, \"No, old Uncle Yang Hu would not poison a person. Do not doubt.\"\n\nHe drank the decoction. Next day he was much better.\n\nWhen his staff came to congratulate him, he said, \"If our opponents take their stand upon virtue and we take ours upon violence, they will drag us after them without fighting. See to it that the boundaries be well kept and that we seek not to gain any unfair advantage.\"\n\nSoon after came a special envoy from the Ruler of Wu to urge upon Lu Kang prompt activity.\n\n\"Our Emperor sends orders for you to press forward,\" said the envoy. \"You are not to await a Jin invasion.\"\n\n\"You may return, and I will send up a memorial,\" replied Lu Kang.\n\nSo a memorial was written and soon followed the envoy to the capital, which by this time was Jianye. When the Ruler of Wu, Sun Hao, read it, he found therein many arguments against attacking Jin and exhortations to exercise a virtuous rule instead of engaging in hostilities. It angered him.\n\n\"They say Lu Kang has come to an understanding with the enemy, and now I believe it!\" said the Ruler of Wu.\n\nThereupon he deprived Lu Kang of his command and took away his commission and degraded him into Marching General. Sun Ji, General of the Left Army, was sent to supersede Lu Kang. And none dared to intervene.\n\nSun Hao became still more arbitrary and of his own will changed the year-style once more to the Phoenix (AD 269). Day by day his life became more wanton and vicious. The soldiers in every camp murmured with anger and resentment, and at last three high officers \u2014 Prime Minister Wan Yu, General Liu Ping, and Minister of Agriculture Lou Xuan \u2014 boldly and earnestly remonstrated with the Emperor for his many irregularities. They suffered death. Within ten years more than forty ministers were put to death for doing their duty.\n\nSun Hao maintained an extravagantly large guard of fifty thousand heavy cavalry, and these soldiers were the terror of everyone.\n\nNow when Yang Hu, on the Jin side of the frontier, heard that his opponent Lu Kang had been removed from his command and that the conduct of the Ruler of Wu had become wholly unreasonable, he knew that the time was near for him to conquer Wu. Wherefore he presented a memorial:\n\n\"Although fate is superior to human, yet success depends upon human effort. Now as the geographic difficulties of the South Land are not as those of the River Lands, while the ferocity of Sun Hao exceeds that of Liu Shan, the misery of the people of Wu exceeds that of the dwellers in Shu. Our armies are stronger than ever before, and if we miss this opportunity to bring the whole land under one rule, but continue to weary our army with continual watching and cause the world to groan under the burden of militarism, then our efficiency will decline and we shall not endure.\"\n\nWhen Sima Yan read this, he gave orders for the army to move. But three officers \u2014 Jia Chong, Xun Xu, and Feng Dan \u2014 opposed it, and the orders were withdrawn.\n\nYang Hu was disappointed at the news and said, \"What a pity it is that of ten affairs in the world, one always meets with eight or nine vexations!\"\n\nIn the fourth year of Universal Tranquillity, in Jin calendar (AD 278), Yang Hu went to court and asked leave to retire on account of ill health.\n\nBefore granting him leave to go, Sima Yan asked, \"Do you have plans to propose to settle the empire?\"\n\nYang Hu replied, \"Sun Hao is a very cruel ruler and could be conquered without fighting. If he were to die and a wise successor sat upon his throne, Your Majesty would never be able to gain possession of Wu.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Jin realized the truth, and he said, \"Suppose your army attacked now. What then?\"\n\n\"I am now too old and too ill for the task,\" replied Yang Hu. \"Some other bold and capable leader must be found.\"\n\nYang Hu left the court and retired to his home. Toward the end of the year he was nigh unto death, and the Ruler of Jin went to visit him. The sight of his master at his bedside brought tears to the eyes of the faithful old leader.\n\n\"If I died a myriad times, I could never requite Your Majesty,\" said Yang Hu.\n\nSima Yan also wept, saying, \"My great grief is that I could not take advantage of your abilities to attack Wu. Who now is there to carry out your design?\"\n\nHesitatingly the sick man replied, \"I am dying and must be wholly sincere. General Du Yu is equal to the task, and is the one man to attack Wu.\"\n\nSima Yan said, \"How beautiful it is to bring good people into prominence! But why did you write a memorial recommending certain people and then burn the draft so that no one knew?\"\n\nThe dying man answered, \"I bowed before the officials in open court, but I did not beseech the kindness of the private attendants.\"\n\nSo Yang Hu died, and Sima Yan wailed for him and then returned to his palace. He conferred on the dead leader the posthumous rank of Imperial Guardian and Lord of Juping. The traders closed their shops out of respect to his memory, and all the frontier camps were filled with wailing. The people of Xiangyang, recalling that he loved to wander on the Xian Hills, built there a temple to him and set up a stone and sacrificed regularly at the four seasons. The passers-by were moved to tears when they read Yang Hu's name on the tablet, so that it came to be called \"The Stone of Tears\".\n\n\u2003I saw the fragments of a shattered stone\n\n\u2003One spring time on the hillside, when, alone,\n\n\u2003I walked to greet the sun. The pines distilled\n\n\u2003Big drops of dew unceasing; sadness filled\n\n\u2003My heart. I knew this was the Stone of Tears,\n\n\u2003The stone of memory of long-past years.\n\nOn the strength of Yang Hu's recommendation, Du Yu was made Commander of Jingzhou, and the title of General Who Guards the South was conferred upon him. He was a man of great experience, untiring in study and devoted to the Zuo Volume, the book of commentaries composed by Zuo Qiuming upon the Spring and Autumn Annals. In hours of leisure, a copy of Zuo Volume was never out of his hand; and when he went abroad, an attendant rode in front with the beloved book. He was said to be \"Zuo mad\".\n\nDu Yu went to Xiangyang and began by being kind to the people and caring for his soldiers. By this time Wu had lost by death both Ding Feng and Lu Kang.\n\nThe conduct of the Ruler of Wu waxed worse and worse. He used to give great banquets whereat intoxication was universal. He appointed Rectors of Feasts to observe all the faults committed by guests, and after these banquets all offenders were punished, some by flaying the face, others by gouging out the eyes. Everyone went in terror of these Rectors.\n\nWang Jun, Imperial Protector of Yizhou, sent in a memorial advising an attack upon Wu. He said:\n\n\"Sun Hao is steeped in vice and should be attacked at once. Should he die and be succeeded by a good ruler, we might meet with serious opposition. The ships I built seven years ago lie idle and rotting: We can use them. I am seventy years of age and must soon die. If any one of these three events happen \u2014 the death of Sun Hao, the destruction of these ships, or my death \u2014 then success will be difficult to ensure. I pray Your Majesty not to miss the tide.\"\n\nAt the next assembly of officers Sima Yan said to them, \"I have decided to act. I have received similar advice from Yang Hu and Wang Jun.\"\n\nAt this arose Minister Wang Hun and said, \"I hear Sun Hao intends to march north to the Middle Land and has his army ready. Report says it is formidable and would be hard to defeat. I counsel to await another year till that army has lost its first vigor.\"\n\nA command to cease warlike preparations was the result of this counsel. The Ruler of Jin betook himself to his private chamber where he engaged in a game of chess with Secretary Zhang Hua as opponent. While at the game, another memorial arrived. It was from Du Yu. It read:\n\n\"Formerly Yang Hu explained his plans confidentially to Your Majesty, but did not lay them before the court. The result has been much debate and conflict of opinion. In every project there are pros and cons, but in this the arguments are mostly in favor. The worst that can happen is failure. Since last autumn the proposed attack has become generally known, and, if we stop now, Sun Hao will be frightened and remove the capital to Wuchang, repair his fortifications in the South Land, and move his threatened people out of danger. Then the southern capital cannot be assaulted, nor is there anything left in the countryside to rob. Hence next year's attack will also fail.\"\n\nJust as the Ruler of Jin finished reading, Zhang Hua pushed aside the board, rose and drew his hands into his sleeves, saying, \"Your Majesty's skill in war is almost divine, your state is prosperous, and the army strong. The Ruler of Wu is a tyrant, his people are miserable, and his country mean. Now you can easily conquer him, and I pray that there be no further hesitation!\"\n\n\"How could I hesitate after your discourse?\" said Sima Yan.\n\nThereupon he returned to the council chamber and issued his commands. Du Yu was made Commander-in-Chief and, with one hundred thousand troops, was to attack Jiangling; Sima Zhou, Prince of Langye and General Who Guards the East, was to attack Tuzhong; Wang Hun, General Who Conquers the East, to go up against Hengjiang; Wang Rong, General Who Exhibits Prowess, to move against Wuchang; Hu Fen, General Who Pacifies the South, to attack Xiakou. And all divisions, fifty thousand troops each, were under the orders of Du Yu. In addition to the land forces, two large fleets were to operate on the river under Wang Jun, General Who Shows Dragon Courage, and Tang Bin, General Who Possesses Martial Bravery. Marines and lands troops amounted to more than two hundred thousand. A separate force under Yang Ji, General Who Holds the South, was sent away to Xiangyang to coordinate all forces.\n\nThe Ruler of Wu was greatly alarmed at the news of such armies and fleets, and he called to him quickly his Prime Minister Zhang Ti, Minister of the Interior He Zhi, and Minister of Works Teng Xun, to consult how to defend his land.\n\nZhang Ti proposed: \"Send Commander of the Flying Chariots Wu Yan to meet the enemy at Jiangling; Commander of the Flying Cavalry Sun Xin to Xiakou; I volunteer to take command of a camp at Niuzhu, together with the General of the Left Army Shen Zong and the General of the Right Army Zhuge Xing, ready to lend help at any point.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Wu approved his dispositions and felt satisfied that he was safe by land. But in the privacy of his own apartment he felt miserable, for he realized that no preparations had been made against an attack by water under the Jin leader Wang Jun.\n\nThen the favorite eunuch Cen Hun asked the Emperor why he bore a sad countenance, and Sun Hao told him of his dread of the enemy navy.\n\n\"The armies of Jin are coming, and I have deployed troops for general defense. Only the water front, by which Wang Jun and his several thousand battleships sail east along the tide, makes me feel so worried.\"\n\n\"But I have a scheme that will smash all Wang Jun's ships!\" cried Cen Hun.\n\n\"What is it?\" asked the Ruler of Wu, pleased to hear this.\n\n\"Iron is plentiful. Make great chains with heavy links and stretch them across the river at various points. Also forge many massive hammers and arrange them in the stream, so that when the enemy's ships sail down before the wind, they will collide with the hammers and be wrecked. Then they will sail no more.\"\n\nBlacksmiths were soon at work on the river bank welding the links and forging the hammers. Work went on day and night, and soon all the chains were placed in different points.\n\nAs has been said Du Yu was to attack Jiangling, and he sent General Zhou Zhi with eight hundred sailors to sail secretly along the Great River to capture Yuexiang. There they were to make an ambush in the Bashan Mountains and a great show of flags along the bank and among the trees. Drums were to be beaten and bombs exploded during the day and many fires lighted at night to give the appearance of a great army.\n\nSo Zhou Zhi sailed to the Bashan Mountains.\n\nNext day Du Yu directed the army and the marine forces in a simultaneous advance.\n\nThe scouts reported: \"The Ruler of Wu has sent the land force under Wu Yan, the navy under Lu Jing, and the vanguard under Sun Xin!\"\n\nDu Yu led his forces forward. The vanguard of Wu, under Sun Xin, came up, and at the first encounter Du Yu's army retired. Sun Xin landed his marines and pursued. But in the midst of the pursuit a signal bomb sounded, and Sun Xin was attacked on all sides by the Jin troops. He tried to retire, but the army he had been pursuing, Du Yu's force, turned back too and joined in the attack. Wu's losses were very heavy, and Sun Xin hastened back to the city. But the eight hundred Jin soldiers of Zhou Zhi mingled with the Wu army at the ramparts and so entered the gates. The Jin soldiers raised signal fires on the walls.\n\nThis maneuver amazed Sun Xin, and he said, \"The northern troops had surely flown across the river into the city!\"\n\nSun Xin made an effort to escape, but the leader of Jin, Zhou Zhi, unexpectedly appeared and slew him.\n\nAdmiral Lu Jing of the Wu fleet of that had accompanied Sun Xin saw on the south shore, in the Bashan Mountains, a great standard bearing the name Jin General Who Guards the South Du Yu. Lu Jing became alarmed and landed to try to escape, but the Jin General Zhang Shang soon found and slew him.\n\nAt his position at Jiangling, Wu Yan heard of these defeats and knew his position was untenable, so he fled. However, he was soon captured and led into the presence of the victorious general.\n\n\"No use sparing you,\" said Du Yu, and he sentenced the prisoner to death.\n\nThus Jiangling was captured and all the counties along the River Xiang and River Yuan as far as Huangzhou, which surrendered at the first summons.\n\nDu Yu sent out officers to soothe the people of the conquered counties, and they suffered nothing from the soldiery. Next he marched toward Wuchang, and that city also yielded. So the glory of Du Yu became very great. He then summoned his officers to a council to decide upon attacking Capital Jianye.\n\nHu Fen said, \"A one-century rebellion will not be reduced completely at once. The time of the spring rise of waters is near, and our position is precarious. We should do well to await the coming spring.\"\n\nDu Yu replied, \"In the days of old, Yue Yi overcame the powerful state Qi in one battle in Jixi. Our prestige is now high and success certain, easy as the splitting of a bamboo, which seems to welcome the knife after the first few joints have been overcome. We shall meet no great opposition.\"\n\nSo Du Yu gave orders to the various leaders to move in concert against the capital land of Jianye.\n\nNow the Jin leader Wang Jun had gone down the river with his naval force. From his scouts he heard of the iron chains and the hammers that had been laid in the river to hinder his progress. But he only laughed. He constructed great rafts of timber and placed on them straw effigies of soldiers in armors and sent them down river with the current. The defenders of Wu took them for real troops and, alarmed by their numbers, fled in panic. Then the great hammers and chains were dragged away as the rafts drifted on. Moreover, on the rafts they laid great torches many fathoms long, and very thick, made of straw soaked in linseed oil. When the raft was checked by a chain, the torches were lighted and the chains exposed to the heat till they melted and broke asunder. Thus the rafts went down stream conquering wherever they came.\n\nThen the Prime Minister of Wu, Zhang Ti, sent two leaders, General of the Left Army Shen Zong and General of the Right Army Zhuge Xing, to try to check the advance of the armies.\n\nShen Zong said to his colleague, \"The forces above have failed to stop the enemy, and the enemy will surely come here. We shall have to put forth all our strength. If haply we can succeed, the safety of our South Land is assured. But suppose we fight and lose the battle, then is our country lost.\"\n\n\"Sir, you only say what is too true,\" said Zhuge Xing.\n\nJust as they talked of these matters came reports of the approach of their enemies in irresistible force. The two leaders were seized with panic and went back to see the Prime Minister.\n\n\"Our country is lost!\" cried Zhuge Xing. \"Why not run?\"\n\n\"We all know that the land is doomed,\" replied Zhang Ti. \"But if we make no defense, and no one dies for his country, shall we not be shamed?\"\n\nZhuge Xing left, weeping; and Zhang Ti went with Shen Zong to the army. The invaders soon arrived, and the Jin General Zhou Zhi was the first to break into the camp. Zhang Ti resisted stubbornly, but was soon slain in a melee, and Shen Zong was killed by Zhou Zhi. The army of Wu was defeated and scattered.\n\n\u2003Jin's army banners waved on Bashan Mountains\n\n\u2003And trusty Zhang Ti in Jiangling fighting died;\n\n\u2003He accepted not that the kingly grace was spent,\n\n\u2003He rather chose to die than shame his side.\n\nThe armies of Jin conquered at Niuzhu and penetrated deeply into the country of Wu. From his camp Wang Jun sent a report of his victory to Luoyang, and Sima Yan was pleased.\n\nBut Jia Chong again opposed further fighting, saying, \"The armies have been long absent, and the soldiers will suffer from the unhealthiness of the southern country. It would be well to call them home.\"\n\nZhang Hua spoke against this course, saying, \"The Jin army has reached the very home and center of the enemy. Soon Wu courage will fail, and the Ruler of Wu himself will be our prisoner. To recall the army now would be to waste the efforts already made.\"\n\nThe Ruler of Jin inclined to neither side.\n\nJia Chong turned upon Zhang Hua savagely, saying, \"You are wholly ignorant and understand nothing. You are bent upon winning some sort of glory at the expense of our soldiers' lives. Death would be too good for you!\"\n\n\"Why wrangle?\" said Sima Yan. \"Zhang Hua agrees with me, and he knows my wishes.\"\n\nJust at this moment came a memorial from the leader Du Yu also recommending advance, whereupon the Ruler of Jin decided that the army should go on.\n\nThe royal mandate duly reached the camp of Wang Jun, and the Jin navy went out to the attack in great pomp. The soldiers of Wu made no defense, but surrendered at once.\n\nWhen Sun Hao, the Ruler of Wu, heard his armies had surrendered thus, he turned pale, and his courtiers said, \"What is to be done? Here the northern army comes nearer every day and our troops just give in.\"\n\n\"But why do they not fight?\" said Sun Hao.\n\nThe courtiers replied, \"The one evil of today is Eunuch Cen Hun. Slay him, and we ourselves will go out and fight to the death!\"\n\n\"How can a eunuch harm a state?\" cried Sun Hao.\n\n\"Have we not seen what Huang Hao did in Shu?\" shouted the courtiers in chorus.\n\nMoved by sudden fury, the courtiers rushed into the Palace, found the wretched object of their hate and slew him, and even feeding on his palpitating flesh.\n\nThen Tao Jun said, \"All my ships are small, but give me large vessels and I will place thereon twenty thousand marines and go forth to fight. I can defeat the enemy.\"\n\nHis request was granted, and the royal guards were sent up the river to join battle, while another naval force went down stream, led by Leader of the Van Zhang Xiang. But a heavy gale came on. The flags were blown down and lay over in the ships, and the marines would not embark. They scattered leaving their leader with only a few score men.\n\nWang Jun, the leader of Jin, set sail and went down the river.\n\nAfter passing Three Mountains, the sailing master of his ship said, \"The gale is too strong for the fleet to go on. Let us anchor till the storm has moderated.\"\n\nBut Wang Jun would not listen. Drawing his sword, he said, \"I wish to capture Capital Shidou, and will not hear of anchoring.\"\n\nSo he compelled the sailing master to continue. On the way Zhang Xiang, one of the leaders of Wu, came to offer surrender.\n\n\"If you are in earnest, you will lead the way and help me,\" said Wang Jun.\n\nZhang Xiang consented, returned to his own ship, and led the squadron. When he reached the walls of Shidou, he called to the defenders to open the gates and allow the Jin army to enter. The gates were opened.\n\nWhen the Ruler of Wu heard that his enemies had actually entered the capital city, he wished to put an end to his life, but his officers prevented this.\n\nSecretary Hu Zong and Palace Officer Xue Rong said, \"Your Majesty, why not imitate the conduct of Liu Shan of Shu, now Duke of Anle?\"\n\nSo Sun Hao no longer thought of death, but went to offer submission. He bound himself and took a coffin with him. His officers followed him. He was graciously received, and the Jin General Wang Jun himself loosened the bonds, and the coffin was burned. The vanquished Ruler was treated with the ceremony due to a prince.\n\nA poet of the Tang Dynasty wrote a few lines on this surrender:\n\n\u2003Adown the stream ride storied warships tall;\n\n\u2003With massive chains some seek to stop their way.\n\n\u2003But Jiangling's independence fades away,\n\n\u2003And soon \"We yield\" is signaled from the wall.\n\n\u2003Full oft I think of bygone days and sigh,\n\n\u2003Along the stream, unmoved, the old hills rest,\n\n\u2003While I am homeless on the earth's broad breast,\n\n\u2003Where grim old forts stand gray beneath the sky.\n\nTherefore Wu was subdued and ceased to exist as a state. Its 4 regions, 43 counties, 313 districts, 5,230,000 families, 62,000 civil officers, 230,000 soldiers and military officers, 23,000,000 inhabitants, its stores of grain and over five thousand large ships, all fell booty to the victorious Jin Dynasty. In the women's quarters of the Palace were found more than five thousand persons.\n\nProclamations were issued; treasuries and storehouses were sealed. Tao Jun's navy soon melted away without striking a blow. Wang Jun was greatly elated at his success. Sima Zhou, Prince of Langye, and General Wang Rong also arrived and congratulated each other.\n\nWhen Du Yu, the Commander-in-Chief, arrived, there were great feastings and rewards for the soldiers. The granaries were opened and doles of grain issued to the people, so that they also were glad of peace.\n\nOnly one city stood out \u2014 Jianping, under Governor Wu Yang. However, he too surrendered when he heard the capital had fallen.\n\nThe tidings of all these successes reached Capital Luoyang just at the celebration of the birthday of the Ruler of Jin, and the rejoicings and congratulations were redoubled. At one of the banquets the Ruler of Jin did honor to the memory of the late Yang Hu.\n\nRaising his wine cup, and in a voice broken by emotion, he said, \"Today's success is the merit of the Imperial Guardian. I regret that he is not here to share our rejoicings.\"\n\nIn Wu, Sun Xi, General of the Flying Cavalry, went away from the court and wailed, facing the south.\n\n\"Alas, ye blue heavens! What manner of man is this Sun Hao to yield thus the heritage of his family, won by the sword of General Sun Jian the Martially Glorious in the brave days that are past?\"\n\nMeantime the victors marched homeward, and Sun Hao went to Luoyang to present himself at court. In his capacity of minister, he prostrated himself at the feet of the Emperor of the Jin Dynasty in the Hall of Audience. He was allowed a seat.\n\n\"I set that seat for you long since,\" said the Ruler of Jin.\n\n\"Thy servant also set a seat for Your Majesty in the south,\" retorted Sun Hao.\n\nThe Ruler of Jin laughed loudly.\n\nThen Jia Chong turned to Sun Hao and said, \"I hear, Sir, that when you were in the south, they gouged out people's eyes and flayed their faces. What crimes were so punished?\"\n\n\"Murders of princes and malicious speech and disloyal conduct were so punished!\"\n\nJia Chong was silenced, for he was ashamed.\n\nSun Hao was created Lord of Guiming. His sons and grandsons received minor ranks and other grades were conferred upon his ministers who had followed him in his surrender. The sons and grandsons of the late Prime Minister of Wu, Zhang Ti, who had perished in battle, were given ranks. The victorious leader, Wang Jun, was rewarded with the title General Who Upholds the State. And many other ranks were conferred to the Jin officers.\n\nThe three states now became one empire under the rule of Sima Yan of the Jin Dynasty. That is the world under heaven, after a long period of union, tends to divide; after a long period of division, tends to unite.\n\nLiu Shan, the Emperor of Shu-Han, passed away in the seventh year of Great Beginning, in Jin calendar (AD 271). Cao Huang, the Emperor of Wei, passed away in the first year of Magnificent Peace (AD 302). And Sun Hao, the Emperor of Wu, passed away in the fourth year of Prosperous Peace (AD 283). All three died of natural causes.\n\nA poet has summed up the history of these stirring years in a poem:\n\n\u2003It was the dawning of a glorious day\n\n\u2003When first the Founder of the House of Han\n\n\u2003Xianyang's proud Palace entered. Noontide came\n\n\u2003When Liu Xiu the imperial rule restored.\n\n\u2003Alas, that Liu Xian succeeded in full time\n\n\u2003And saw the setting of the sun of power!\n\n\u2003He Jin, the feeble, fell beneath the blows\n\n\u2003Of Palace minions. Dong Zhuo, vile though bold,\n\n\u2003Then ruled the court. The plot Wang Yun\n\n\u2003To oust him, failed, recoiled on his own head.\n\n\u2003The Li Jue and Guo Si lit up the flame of war\n\n\u2003And brigands swarmed like ants through all the land.\n\n\u2003Then rose the valiant and deployed their might.\n\n\u2003Sun Ce carved out a kingdom in the southeast,\n\n\u2003North of Yellow River the Yuans strove to make their own.\n\n\u2003Liu Zhang went west and seized on Ba and Shu,\n\n\u2003Liu Biao laid hold on Jingzhou and Chu,\n\n\u2003Zhang Lu, in turn held Hanzhong by force.\n\n\u2003Ma Teng and Han Sui kept Xiliang.\n\n\u2003Tao Qian and Gongsun Zan built up quarters,\n\n\u2003Zhang Xiu and Lu Bu challenged the bold.\n\n\u2003But overtopping all Cao Cao the strong\n\n\u2003Became first minister, and to his side,\n\n\u2003Drew many able people. He swayed the court,\n\n\u2003Without, he held the nobles in his hand;\n\n\u2003By force of arms he held the capital\n\n\u2003Against all rivals. Of imperial stock\n\n\u2003Was born Liu Bei, who with sworn brothers twain\n\n\u2003Made oath the dynasty should be restored.\n\n\u2003These wandered homeless east and west for years,\n\n\u2003A petty force. But Destiny was kind\n\n\u2003And led Liu Bei to Nanyang's rustic cot,\n\n\u2003Where lay Sleeping Dragon, he who\n\n\u2003Already that the empire must be rent.\n\n\u2003Twice Liu Bei essayed in vain to see the sage\n\n\u2003Once more he went? And then his fortune turned.\n\n\u2003Jingzhou fell to him, followed the River Lands,\n\n\u2003A fitting base to build an empire on.\n\n\u2003Alas! He ruled there only three short years,\n\n\u2003Then left his only son to Zhuge Liang's care.\n\n\u2003Full nobly Zhuge Liang played protector's part,\n\n\u2003Unceasing strove to win first place for Shu;\n\n\u2003But Fate forbade; one night for aye his star\n\n\u2003Went down behind the rampart of the hills.\n\n\u2003Jiang Wei the strong inherited his task\n\n\u2003And struggled on for years.\n\n\u2003But Zhong Hui and Deng Ai\n\n\u2003Attacked the Hans' last stronghold, and it fell.\n\n\u2003Five sons of Cao Cao sat on the dragon throne,\n\n\u2003And Sima Yan snatched the court from Cao Huang.\n\n\u2003Before him bowed the kings of Shu and Wu,\n\n\u2003Content to forfeit kingly power for life.\n\n\u2003All down the ages rings the note of change,\n\n\u2003For fate so rules it; none escapes its sway.\n\n\u2003The three kingdoms have vanished as a dream,\n\n\u2003The useless misery is ours to grieve." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/Science Fantasy.json b/Science Fantasy.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..953e830345b3c6e422bf6d7ce16a3c6dda6d0501 --- /dev/null +++ b/Science Fantasy.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:19520ea46b58d2eed5bce8048064011b2013ea29f76d1e16ed230da2c72f8418 +size 36652896 diff --git a/Shridan Le Fanu.json b/Shridan Le Fanu.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..d38ae027a1e2ec11df66abeca647c7e310690957 --- /dev/null +++ b/Shridan Le Fanu.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:b20afc5529627b242a7e3a967fb51c2498d33a0110bc4970f1b818509da25053 +size 16606374 diff --git a/Space Opera.json b/Space Opera.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..5915f4787750078453c63182812ec3cc32368bc8 --- /dev/null +++ b/Space Opera.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:b5727633636ddd14e936416491d9782591a6c82b06485ca54590bd4ce5ed03a8 +size 53282607 diff --git a/Superheroes.json b/Superheroes.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..b1f543f9ce6d35e10a1d1b0f7ed509b0237dff38 --- /dev/null +++ b/Superheroes.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:81d72b3acc8baea58fc4aee397713af1abdef6f6fa1fc379da4d24bf3b0af1ed +size 40885130 diff --git a/Travel.json b/Travel.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..87152bf3cffe0b32591ce79dd0ef745a8595a5f3 --- /dev/null +++ b/Travel.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:c3fa3a2829156664eafc2586836b9b4186a70df826ff20e8d2c7dad8e46d0716 +size 31109771 diff --git a/Urban Fantasy.json b/Urban Fantasy.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..78539f295eb95f3f1abc6385127f72785cf730e4 --- /dev/null +++ b/Urban Fantasy.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:dba34f38a6ef1e27537abfdff50460cf884de566433c41b313980e3983329f5d +size 66071856 diff --git a/Valentines.json b/Valentines.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..4cb7fff7aaecc1cfd080d84933f75c89ff0e5e19 --- /dev/null +++ b/Valentines.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:266352b61a4fc587392f02d447d687a1706a5d7ae6eb54c76fb1fe60b28fa10a +size 32846379 diff --git a/Vikings.json b/Vikings.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..96288278c6a93303e6056db6d0d51df43a951ed4 --- /dev/null +++ b/Vikings.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:2e6c45687a3fa9dd8968ab2978db63b5956fe51c9253abef2ca1d72c32682ef3 +size 24573113 diff --git a/Weird West.json b/Weird West.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..bb7bafa4779dcda2b714e3da6ade28b3acdfe961 --- /dev/null +++ b/Weird West.json @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +version https://git-lfs.github.com/spec/v1 +oid sha256:8dc713ab121b1db4566d14b3083ecd2d4f12bec082b134d4fc2ef0b62fcd9796 +size 17797864 diff --git a/Western Romance.json b/Western Romance.json new file mode 100644 index 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000..2b8f372003c81e6df48115927286271b031b745b --- /dev/null +++ b/Western Romance.json @@ -0,0 +1,6082 @@ +[ + { + "title": "Riders of the Purple Sage.txt", + "author": "Zane Grey", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Chapter I. Lassiter\n\na sharp clip-crop of iron-shod hoofs deadened and died away, and clouds of yellow dust drifted from under the cottonwoods out over the sage.\n\nJane Withersteen gazed down the wide purple slope with dreamy and troubled eyes. A rider had just left her and it was his message that held her thoughtful and almost sad, awaiting the churchmen who were coming to resent and attack her right to befriend a Gentile.\n\nShe wondered if the unrest and strife that had lately come to the little village of Cottonwoods was to involve her. And then she sighed, remembering that her father had founded this remotest border settlement of southern Utah and that he had left it to her. She owned all the ground and many of the cottages. Withersteen House was hers, and the great ranch, with its thousands of cattle, and the swiftest horses of the sage. To her belonged Amber Spring, the water which gave verdure and beauty to the village and made living possible on that wild purple upland waste. She could not escape being involved by whatever befell Cottonwoods.\n\nThat year, 1871, had marked a change which had been gradually coming in the lives of the peace-loving Mormons of the border. Glaze\u2014Stone Bridge\u2014Sterling, villages to the north, had risen against the invasion of Gentile settlers and the forays of rustlers. There had been opposition to the one and fighting with the other. And now Cottonwoods had begun to wake and bestir itself and grown hard.\n\nJane prayed that the tranquility and sweetness of her life would not be permanently disrupted. She meant to do so much more for her people than she had done. She wanted the sleepy quiet pastoral days to last always. Trouble between the Mormons and the Gentiles of the community would make her unhappy. She was Mormon-born, and she was a friend to poor and unfortunate Gentiles. She wished only to go on doing good and being happy. And she thought of what that great ranch meant to her. She loved it all\u2014the grove of cottonwoods, the old stone house, the amber-tinted water, and the droves of shaggy, dusty horses and mustangs, the sleek, clean-limbed, blooded racers, and the browsing herds of cattle and the lean, sun-browned riders of the sage.\n\nWhile she waited there she forgot the prospect of untoward change. The bray of a lazy burro broke the afternoon quiet, and it was comfortingly suggestive of the drowsy farmyard, and the open corrals, and the green alfalfa fields. Her clear sight intensified the purple sage-slope as it rolled before her. Low swells of prairie-like ground sloped up to the west. Dark, lonely cedar-trees, few and far between, stood out strikingly, and at long distances ruins of red rocks. Farther on, up the gradual slope, rose a broken wall, a huge monument, looming dark purple and stretching its solitary, mystic way, a wavering line that faded in the north. Here to the westward was the light and color and beauty. Northward the slope descended to a dim line of canyons from which rose an up-flinging of the earth, not mountainous, but a vast heave of purple uplands, with ribbed and fan-shaped walls, castle-crowned cliffs, and gray escarpments. Over it all crept the lengthening, waning afternoon shadows.\n\nThe rapid beat of hoofs recalled Jane Withersteen to the question at hand. A group of riders cantered up the lane, dismounted, and threw their bridles. They were seven in number, and Tull, the leader, a tall, dark man, was an elder of Jane's church.\n\n\"Did you get my message?\" he asked, curtly.\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Jane.\n\n\"I sent word I'd give that rider Venters half an hour to come down to the village. He didn't come.\"\n\n\"He knows nothing of it;\" said Jane. \"I didn't tell him. I've been waiting here for you.\"\n\n\"Where is Venters?\"\n\n\"I left him in the courtyard.\"\n\n\"Here, Jerry,\" called Tull, turning to his men, \"take the gang and fetch Venters out here if you have to rope him.\"\n\nThe dusty-booted and long-spurred riders clanked noisily into the grove of cottonwoods and disappeared in the shade.\n\n\"Elder Tull, what do you mean by this?\" demanded Jane. \"If you must arrest Venters you might have the courtesy to wait till he leaves my home. And if you do arrest him it will be adding insult to injury. It's absurd to accuse Venters of being mixed up in that shooting fray in the village last night. He was with me at the time. Besides, he let me take charge of his guns. You're only using this as a pretext. What do you mean to do to Venters?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you presently,\" replied Tull. \"But first tell me why you defend this worthless rider?\"\n\n\"Worthless!\" exclaimed Jane, indignantly. \"He's nothing of the kind. He was the best rider I ever had. There's not a reason why I shouldn't champion him and every reason why I should. It's no little shame to me, Elder Tull, that through my friendship he has roused the enmity of my people and become an outcast. Besides I owe him eternal gratitude for saving the life of little Fay.\"\n\n\"I've heard of your love for Fay Larkin and that you intend to adopt her. But\u2014Jane Withersteen, the child is a Gentile!\"\n\n\"Yes. But, Elder, I don't love the Mormon children any less because I love a Gentile child. I shall adopt Fay if her mother will give her to me.\"\n\n\"I'm not so much against that. You can give the child Mormon teaching,\" said Tull. \"But I'm sick of seeing this fellow Venters hang around you. I'm going to put a stop to it. You've so much love to throw away on these beggars of Gentiles that I've an idea you might love Venters.\"\n\nTull spoke with the arrogance of a Mormon whose power could not be brooked and with the passion of a man in whom jealousy had kindled a consuming fire.\n\n\"Maybe I do love him,\" said Jane. She felt both fear and anger stir her heart. \"I'd never thought of that. Poor fellow! he certainly needs some one to love him.\"\n\n\"This'll be a bad day for Venters unless you deny that,\" returned Tull, grimly.\n\nTull's men appeared under the cottonwoods and led a young man out into the lane. His ragged clothes were those of an outcast. But he stood tall and straight, his wide shoulders flung back, with the muscles of his bound arms rippling and a blue flame of defiance in the gaze he bent on Tull.\n\nFor the first time Jane Withersteen felt Venters's real spirit. She wondered if she would love this splendid youth. Then her emotion cooled to the sobering sense of the issue at stake.\n\n\"Venters, will you leave Cottonwoods at once and forever?\" asked Tull, tensely.\n\n\"Why?\" rejoined the rider.\n\n\"Because I order it.\"\n\nVenters laughed in cool disdain.\n\nThe red leaped to Tull's dark cheek.\n\n\"If you don't go it means your ruin,\" he said, sharply.\n\n\"Ruin!\" exclaimed Venters, passionately. \"Haven't you already ruined me? What do you call ruin? A year ago I was a rider. I had horses and cattle of my own. I had a good name in Cottonwoods. And now when I come into the village to see this woman you set your men on me. You hound me. You trail me as if I were a rustler. I've no more to lose\u2014except my life.\"\n\n\"Will you leave Utah?\"\n\n\"Oh! I know,\" went on Venters, tauntingly, \"it galls you, the idea of beautiful Jane Withersteen being friendly to a poor Gentile. You want her all yourself. You're a wiving Mormon. You have use for her\u2014and Withersteen House and Amber Spring and seven thousand head of cattle!\"\n\nTull's hard jaw protruded, and rioting blood corded the veins of his neck.\n\n\"Once more. Will you go?\"\n\n\"NO!\"\n\n\"Then I'll have you whipped within an inch of your life,\" replied Tull, harshly. \"I'll turn you out in the sage. And if you ever come back you'll get worse.\"\n\nVenters's agitated face grew coldly set and the bronze changed\n\nJane impulsively stepped forward. \"Oh! Elder Tull!\" she cried. \"You won't do that!\"\n\nTull lifted a shaking finger toward her.\n\n\"That'll do from you. Understand, you'll not be allowed to hold this boy to a friendship that's offensive to your Bishop. Jane Withersteen, your father left you wealth and power. It has turned your head. You haven't yet come to see the place of Mormon women. We've reasoned with you, borne with you. We've patiently waited. We've let you have your fling, which is more than I ever saw granted to a Mormon woman. But you haven't come to your senses. Now, once for all, you can't have any further friendship with Venters. He's going to be whipped, and he's got to leave Utah!\"\n\n\"Oh! Don't whip him! It would be dastardly!\" implored Jane, with slow certainty of her failing courage.\n\nTull always blunted her spirit, and she grew conscious that she had feigned a boldness which she did not possess. He loomed up now in different guise, not as a jealous suitor, but embodying the mysterious despotism she had known from childhood\u2014the power of her creed.\n\n\"Venters, will you take your whipping here or would you rather go out in the sage?\" asked Tull. He smiled a flinty smile that was more than inhuman, yet seemed to give out of its dark aloofness a gleam of righteousness.\n\n\"I'll take it here\u2014if I must,\" said Venters. \"But by God!\u2014Tull you'd better kill me outright. That'll be a dear whipping for you and your praying Mormons. You'll make me another Lassiter!\"\n\nThe strange glow, the austere light which radiated from Tull's face, might have been a holy joy at the spiritual conception of exalted duty. But there was something more in him, barely hidden, a something personal and sinister, a deep of himself, an engulfing abyss. As his religious mood was fanatical and inexorable, so would his physical hate be merciless.\n\n\"Elder, I\u2014I repent my words,\" Jane faltered. The religion in her, the long habit of obedience, of humility, as well as agony of fear, spoke in her voice. \"Spare the boy!\" she whispered.\n\n\"You can't save him now,\" replied Tull stridently.\n\nHer head was bowing to the inevitable. She was grasping the truth, when suddenly there came, in inward constriction, a hardening of gentle forces within her breast. Like a steel bar it was stiffening all that had been soft and weak in her. She felt a birth in her of something new and unintelligible. Once more her strained gaze sought the sage-slopes. Jane Withersteen loved that wild and purple wilderness. In times of sorrow it had been her strength, in happiness its beauty was her continual delight. In her extremity she found herself murmuring, \"Whence cometh my help!\" It was a prayer, as if forth from those lonely purple reaches and walls of red and clefts of blue might ride a fearless man, neither creed-bound nor creed-mad, who would hold up a restraining hand in the faces of her ruthless people.\n\nThe restless movements of Tull's men suddenly quieted down. Then followed a low whisper, a rustle, a sharp exclamation.\n\n\"Look!\" said one, pointing to the west.\n\n\"A rider!\"\n\nJane Withersteen wheeled and saw a horseman, silhouetted against the western sky, coming riding out of the sage. He had ridden down from the left, in the golden glare of the sun, and had been unobserved till close at hand. An answer to her prayer!\n\n\"Do you know him? Does any one know him?\" questioned Tull, hurriedly.\n\nHis men looked and looked, and one by one shook their heads.\n\n\"He's come from far,\" said one.\n\n\"Thet's a fine hoss,\" said another.\n\n\"A strange rider.\"\n\n\"Huh! he wears black leather,\" added a fourth.\n\nWith a wave of his hand, enjoining silence, Tull stepped forward in such a way that he concealed Venters.\n\nThe rider reined in his mount, and with a lithe forward-slipping action appeared to reach the ground in one long step. It was a peculiar movement in its quickness and inasmuch that while performing it the rider did not swerve in the slightest from a square front to the group before him.\n\n\"Look!\" hoarsely whispered one of Tull's companions. \"He packs two black-butted guns\u2014low down\u2014they're hard to see\u2014black akin them black chaps.\"\n\n\"A gun-man!\" whispered another. \"Fellers, careful now about movin' your hands.\"\n\nThe stranger's slow approach might have been a mere leisurely manner of gait or the cramped short steps of a rider unused to walking; yet, as well, it could have been the guarded advance of one who took no chances with men.\n\n\"Hello, stranger!\" called Tull. No welcome was in this greeting only a gruff curiosity.\n\nThe rider responded with a curt nod. The wide brim of a black sombrero cast a dark shade over his face. For a moment he closely regarded Tull and his comrades, and then, halting in his slow walk, he seemed to relax.\n\n\"Evenin', ma'am,\" he said to Jane, and removed his sombrero with quaint grace.\n\nJane, greeting him, looked up into a face that she trusted instinctively and which riveted her attention. It had all the characteristics of the range rider's\u2014the leanness, the red burn of the sun, and the set changelessness that came from years of silence and solitude. But it was not these which held her, rather the intensity of his gaze, a strained weariness, a piercing wistfulness of keen, gray sight, as if the man was forever looking for that which he never found. Jane's subtle woman's intuition, even in that brief instant, felt a sadness, a hungering, a secret.\n\n\"Jane Withersteen, ma'am?\" he inquired.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied.\n\n\"The water here is yours?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"May I water my horse?\"\n\n\"Certainly. There's the trough.\"\n\n\"But mebbe if you knew who I was\u2014\" He hesitated, with his glance on the listening men. \"Mebbe you wouldn't let me water him\u2014though I ain't askin' none for myself.\"\n\n\"Stranger, it doesn't matter who you are. Water your horse. And if you are thirsty and hungry come into my house.\"\n\n\"Thanks, ma'am. I can't accept for myself\u2014but for my tired horse\u2014\"\n\nTrampling of hoofs interrupted the rider. More restless movements on the part of Tull's men broke up the little circle, exposing the prisoner Venters.\n\n\"Mebbe I've kind of hindered somethin'\u2014for a few moments, perhaps?\" inquired the rider.\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Jane Withersteen, with a throb in her voice.\n\nShe felt the drawing power of his eyes; and then she saw him look at the bound Venters, and at the men who held him, and their leader.\n\n\"In this here country all the rustlers an' thieves an' cut-throats an' gun-throwers an' all-round no-good men jest happen to be Gentiles. Ma'am, which of the no-good class does that young feller belong to?\"\n\n\"He belongs to none of them. He's an honest boy.\"\n\n\"You KNOW that, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014yes.\"\n\n\"Then what has he done to get tied up that way?\"\n\nHis clear and distinct question, meant for Tull as well as for Jane Withersteen, stilled the restlessness and brought a momentary silence.\n\n\"Ask him,\" replied Jane, her voice rising high.\n\nThe rider stepped away from her, moving out with the same slow, measured stride in which he had approached, and the fact that his action placed her wholly to one side, and him no nearer to Tull and his men, had a penetrating significance.\n\n\"Young feller, speak up,\" he said to Venters.\n\n\"Here stranger, this's none of your mix,\" began Tull. \"Don't try any interference. You've been asked to drink and eat. That's more than you'd have got in any other village of the Utah border. Water your horse and be on your way.\"\n\n\"Easy\u2014easy\u2014I ain't interferin' yet,\" replied the rider. The tone of his voice had undergone a change. A different man had spoken. Where, in addressing Jane, he had been mild and gentle, now, with his first speech to Tull, he was dry, cool, biting. \"I've lest stumbled onto a queer deal. Seven Mormons all packin' guns, an' a Gentile tied with a rope, an' a woman who swears by his honesty! Queer, ain't that?\"\n\n\"Queer or not, it's none of your business,\" retorted Tull.\n\n\"Where I was raised a woman's word was law. I ain't quite outgrowed that yet.\"\n\nTull fumed between amaze and anger.\n\n\"Meddler, we have a law here something different from woman's whim\u2014Mormon law!... Take care you don't transgress it.\"\n\n\"To hell with your Mormon law!\"\n\nThe deliberate speech marked the rider's further change, this time from kindly interest to an awakening menace. It produced a transformation in Tull and his companions. The leader gasped and staggered backward at a blasphemous affront to an institution he held most sacred. The man Jerry, holding the horses, dropped the bridles and froze in his tracks. Like posts the other men stood watchful-eyed, arms hanging rigid, all waiting.\n\n\"Speak up now, young man. What have you done to be roped that way?\"\n\n\"It's a damned outrage!\" burst out Venters. \"I've done no wrong. I've offended this Mormon Elder by being a friend to that woman.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, is it true\u2014what he says?\" asked the rider of Jane, but his quiveringly alert eyes never left the little knot of quiet men.\n\n\"True? Yes, perfectly true,\" she answered.\n\n\"Well, young man, it seems to me that bein' a friend to such a woman would be what you wouldn't want to help an' couldn't help... What's to be done to you for it?\"\n\n\"They intend to whip me. You know what that means\u2014in Utah!\"\n\n\"I reckon,\" replied the rider, slowly.\n\nWith his gray glance cold on the Mormons, with the restive bit-champing of the horses, with Jane failing to repress her mounting agitations, with Venters standing pale and still, the tension of the moment tightened. Tull broke the spell with a laugh, a laugh without mirth, a laugh that was only a sound betraying fear.\n\n\"Come on, men!\" he called.\n\nJane Withersteen turned again to the rider.\n\n\"Stranger, can you do nothing to save Venters?\"\n\n\"Ma'am, you ask me to save him\u2014from your own people?\"\n\n\"Ask you? I beg of you!\"\n\n\"But you don't dream who you're askin'.\"\n\n\"Oh, sir, I pray you\u2014save him!\"\n\n\"These are Mormons, an' I...\"\n\n\"At\u2014at any cost\u2014save him. For I\u2014I care for him!\"\n\nTull snarled. \"You love-sick fool! Tell your secrets. There'll be a way to teach you what you've never learned... Come men out of here!\"\n\n\"Mormon, the young man stays,\" said the rider.\n\nLike a shot his voice halted Tull.\n\n\"What!\"\n\n\"Who'll keep him? He's my prisoner!\" cried Tull, hotly. \"Stranger, again I tell you\u2014don't mix here. You've meddled enough. Go your way now or\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen!... He stays.\"\n\nAbsolute certainty, beyond any shadow of doubt, breathed in the rider's low voice.\n\n\"Who are you? We are seven here.\"\n\nThe rider dropped his sombrero and made a rapid movement, singular in that it left him somewhat crouched, arms bent and stiff, with the big black gun-sheaths swung round to the fore.\n\n\"LASSITER!\"\n\nIt was Venters's wondering, thrilling cry that bridged the fateful connection between the rider's singular position and the dreaded name.\n\nTull put out a groping hand. The life of his eyes dulled to the gloom with which men of his fear saw the approach of death. But death, while it hovered over him, did not descend, for the rider waited for the twitching fingers, the downward flash of hand that did not come. Tull, gathering himself together, turned to the horses, attended by his pale comrades." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Chapter II. Cottonwoods\n\nventers appeared too deeply moved to speak the gratitude his face expressed. And Jane turned upon the rescuer and gripped his hands. Her smiles and tears seemingly dazed him. Presently as something like calmness returned, she went to Lassiter's weary horse.\n\n\"I will water him myself,\" she said, and she led the horse to a trough under a huge old cottonwood. With nimble fingers she loosened the bridle and removed the bit. The horse snorted and bent his head. The trough was of solid stone, hollowed out, moss-covered and green and wet and cool, and the clear brown water that fed it spouted and splashed from a wooden pipe.\n\n\"He has brought you far to-day?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, a matter of over sixty miles, mebbe seventy.\"\n\n\"A long ride\u2014a ride that\u2014Ah, he is blind!\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" replied Lassiter.\n\n\"What blinded him?\"\n\n\"Some men once roped an' tied him, an' then held white-iron close to his eyes.\"\n\n\"Oh! Men? You mean devils... Were they your enemies\u2014Mormons?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"To take revenge on a horse! Lassiter, the men of my creed are unnaturally cruel. To my everlasting sorrow I confess it. They have been driven, hated, scourged till their hearts have hardened. But we women hope and pray for the time when our men will soften.\"\n\n\"Beggin' your pardon, ma'am\u2014that time will never come.\"\n\n\"Oh, it will!... Lassiter, do you think Mormon women wicked? Has your hand been against them, too?\"\n\n\"No. I believe Mormon women are the best and noblest, the most long-sufferin', and the blindest, unhappiest women on earth.\"\n\n\"Ah!\" She gave him a grave, thoughtful look. \"Then you will break bread with me?\"\n\nLassiter had no ready response, and he uneasily shifted his weight from one leg to another, and turned his sombrero round and round in his hands. \"Ma'am,\" he began, presently, \"I reckon your kindness of heart makes you overlook things. Perhaps I ain't well known hereabouts, but back up North there's Mormons who'd rest uneasy in their graves at the idea of me sittin' to table with you.\"\n\n\"I dare say. But\u2014will you do it, anyway?\" she asked.\n\n\"Mebbe you have a brother or relative who might drop in an' be offended, an' I wouldn't want to\u2014\"\n\n\"I've not a relative in Utah that I know of. There's no one with a right to question my actions.\" She turned smilingly to Venters. \"You will come in, Bern, and Lassiter will come in. We'll eat and be merry while we may.\"\n\n\"I'm only wonderin' if Tull an' his men'll raise a storm down in the village,\" said Lassiter, in his last weakening stand.\n\n\"Yes, he'll raise the storm\u2014after he has prayed,\" replied Jane. \"Come.\"\n\nShe led the way, with the bridle of Lassiter's horse over her arm. They entered a grove and walked down a wide path shaded by great low-branching cottonwoods. The last rays of the setting sun sent golden bars through the leaves. The grass was deep and rich, welcome contrast to sage-tired eyes. Twittering quail darted across the path, and from a tree-top somewhere a robin sang its evening song, and on the still air floated the freshness and murmur of flowing water.\n\nThe home of Jane Withersteen stood in a circle of cottonwoods, and was a flat, long, red-stone structure with a covered court in the center through which flowed a lively stream of amber-colored water. In the massive blocks of stone and heavy timbers and solid doors and shutters showed the hand of a man who had builded against pillage and time; and in the flowers and mosses lining the stone-bedded stream, in the bright colors of rugs and blankets on the court floor, and the cozy corner with hammock and books and the clean-linened table, showed the grace of a daughter who lived for happiness and the day at hand.\n\nJane turned Lassiter's horse loose in the thick grass. \"You will want him to be near you,\" she said, \"or I'd have him taken to the alfalfa fields.\" At her call appeared women who began at once to bustle about, hurrying to and fro, setting the table. Then Jane, excusing herself, went within.\n\nShe passed through a huge low ceiled chamber, like the inside of a fort, and into a smaller one where a bright wood-fire blazed in an old open fireplace, and from this into her own room. It had the same comfort as was manifested in the home-like outer court; moreover, it was warm and rich in soft hues.\n\nSeldom did Jane Withersteen enter her room without looking into her mirror. She knew she loved the reflection of that beauty which since early childhood she had never been allowed to forget. Her relatives and friends, and later a horde of Mormon and Gentile suitors, had fanned the flame of natural vanity in her. So that at twenty-eight she scarcely thought at all of her wonderful influence for good in the little community where her father had left her practically its beneficent landlord, but cared most for the dream and the assurance and the allurement of her beauty. This time, however, she gazed into her glass with more than the usual happy motive, without the usual slight conscious smile. For she was thinking of more than the desire to be fair in her own eyes, in those of her friend; she wondered if she were to seem fair in the eyes of this Lassiter, this man whose name had crossed the long, wild brakes of stone and plains of sage, this gentle-voiced, sad-faced man who was a hater and a killer of Mormons. It was not now her usual half-conscious vain obsession that actuated her as she hurriedly changed her riding-dress to one of white, and then looked long at the stately form with its gracious contours, at the fair face with its strong chin and full firm lips, at the dark-blue, proud, and passionate eyes.\n\n\"If by some means I can keep him here a few days, a week\u2014he will never kill another Mormon,\" she mused. \"Lassiter!... I shudder when I think of that name, of him. But when I look at the man I forget who he is\u2014I almost like him. I remember only that he saved Bern. He has suffered. I wonder what it was\u2014did he love a Mormon woman once? How splendidly he championed us poor misunderstood souls! Somehow he knows\u2014much.\"\n\nJane Withersteen joined her guests and bade them to her board. Dismissing her woman, she waited upon them with her own hands. It was a bountiful supper and a strange company. On her right sat the ragged and half-starved Venters; and though blind eyes could have seen what he counted for in the sum of her happiness, yet he looked the gloomy outcast his allegiance had made him, and about him there was the shadow of the ruin presaged by Tull. On her left sat black-leather-garbed Lassiter looking like a man in a dream. Hunger was not with him, nor composure, nor speech, and when he twisted in frequent unquiet movements the heavy guns that he had not removed knocked against the table-legs. If it had been otherwise possible to forget the presence of Lassiter those telling little jars would have rendered it unlikely. And Jane Withersteen talked and smiled and laughed with all the dazzling play of lips and eyes that a beautiful, daring woman could summon to her purpose.\n\nWhen the meal ended, and the men pushed back their chairs, she leaned closer to Lassiter and looked square into his eyes.\n\n\"Why did you come to Cottonwoods?\"\n\nHer question seemed to break a spell. The rider arose as if he had just remembered himself and had tarried longer than his wont.\n\n\"Ma'am, I have hunted all over the southern Utah and Nevada for\u2014somethin'. An' through your name I learned where to find it\u2014here in Cottonwoods.\"\n\n\"My name! Oh, I remember. You did know my name when you spoke first. Well, tell me where you heard it and from whom?\"\n\n\"At the little village\u2014Glaze, I think it's called\u2014some fifty miles or more west of here. An' I heard it from a Gentile, a rider who said you'd know where to tell me to find\u2014\"\n\n\"What?\" she demanded, imperiously, as Lassiter broke off.\n\n\"Milly Erne's grave,\" he answered low, and the words came with a wrench.\n\nVenters wheeled in his chair to regard Lassiter in amazement, and Jane slowly raised herself in white, still wonder.\n\n\"Milly Erne's grave?\" she echoed, in a whisper. \"What do you know of Milly Erne, my best-beloved friend\u2014who died in my arms? What were you to her?\"\n\n\"Did I claim to be anythin'?\" he inquired. \"I know people\u2014relatives\u2014who have long wanted to know where she's buried, that's all.\"\n\n\"Relatives? She never spoke of relatives, except a brother who was shot in Texas. Lassiter, Milly Erne's grave is in a secret burying-ground on my property.\"\n\n\"Will you take me there?... You'll be offendin' Mormons worse than by breakin' bread with me.\"\n\n\"Indeed yes, but I'll do it. Only we must go unseen. To-morrow, perhaps.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Jane Withersteen,\" replied the rider, and he bowed to her and stepped backward out of the court.\n\n\"Will you not stay\u2014sleep under my roof?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, ma'am, an' thanks again. I never sleep indoors. An' even if I did there's that gatherin' storm in the village below. No, no. I'll go to the sage. I hope you won't suffer none for your kindness to me.\"\n\n\"Lassiter,\" said Venters, with a half-bitter laugh, \"my bed too, is the sage. Perhaps we may meet out there.\"\n\n\"Mebbe so. But the sage is wide an' I won't be near. Good night.\"\n\nAt Lassiter's low whistle the black horse whinnied, and carefully picked his blind way out of the grove. The rider did not bridle him, but walked beside him, leading him by touch of hand and together they passed slowly into the shade of the cottonwoods.\n\n\"Jane, I must be off soon,\" said Venters. \"Give me my guns. If I'd had my guns\u2014\"\n\n\"Either my friend or the Elder of my church would be lying dead,\" she interposed.\n\n\"Tull would be\u2014surely.\"\n\n\"Oh, you fierce-blooded, savage youth! Can't I teach you forebearance, mercy? Bern, it's divine to forgive your enemies. 'Let not the sun go down upon thy wrath.'\"\n\n\"Hush! Talk to me no more of mercy or religion\u2014after to-day. To-day this strange coming of Lassiter left me still a man, and now I'll die a man!... Give me my guns.\"\n\nSilently she went into the house, to return with a heavy cartridge-belt and gun-filled sheath and a long rifle; these she handed to him, and as he buckled on the belt she stood before him in silent eloquence.\n\n\"Jane,\" he said, in gentler voice, \"don't look so. I'm not going out to murder your churchman. I'll try to avoid him and all his men. But can't you see I've reached the end of my rope? Jane, you're a wonderful woman. Never was there a woman so unselfish and good. Only you're blind in one way... Listen!\"\n\nFrom behind the grove came the clicking sound of horses in a rapid trot.\n\n\"Some of your riders,\" he continued. \"It's getting time for the night shift. Let us go out to the bench in the grove and talk there.\"\n\nIt was still daylight in the open, but under the spreading cottonwoods shadows were obscuring the lanes. Venters drew Jane off from one of these into a shrub-lined trail, just wide enough for the two to walk abreast, and in a roundabout way led her far from the house to a knoll on the edge of the grove. Here in a secluded nook was a bench from which, through an opening in the tree-tops, could be seen the sage-slope and the wall of rock and the dim lines of canyons. Jane had not spoken since Venters had shocked her with his first harsh speech; but all the way she had clung to his arm, and now, as he stopped and laid his rifle against the bench, she still clung to him.\n\n\"Jane, I'm afraid I must leave you.\"\n\n\"Bern!\" she cried.\n\n\"Yes, it looks that way. My position is not a happy one\u2014I can't feel right\u2014I've lost all\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll give you anything you\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen, please. When I say loss I don't mean what you think. I mean loss of good-will, good name\u2014that which would have enabled me to stand up in this village without bitterness. Well, it's too late... Now, as to the future, I think you'd do best to give me up. Tull is implacable. You ought to see from his intention to-day that\u2014But you can't see. Your blindness\u2014your damned religion!... Jane, forgive me\u2014I'm sore within and something rankles. Well, I fear that invisible hand will turn its hidden work to your ruin.\"\n\n\"Invisible hand? Bern!\"\n\n\"I mean your Bishop.\" Venters said it deliberately and would not release her as she started back. \"He's the law. The edict went forth to ruin me. Well, look at me! It'll now go forth to compel you to the will of the Church.\"\n\n\"You wrong Bishop Dyer. Tull is hard, I know. But then he has been in love with me for years.\"\n\n\"Oh, your faith and your excuses! You can't see what I know\u2014and if you did see it you'd not admit it to save your life. That's the Mormon of you. These elders and bishops will do absolutely any deed to go on building up the power and wealth of their church, their empire. Think of what they've done to the Gentiles here, to me\u2014think of Milly Erne's fate!\"\n\n\"What do you know of her story?\"\n\n\"I know enough\u2014all, perhaps, except the name of the Mormon who brought her here. But I must stop this kind of talk.\"\n\nShe pressed his hand in response. He helped her to a seat beside him on the bench. And he respected a silence that he divined was full of woman's deep emotion beyond his understanding.\n\nIt was the moment when the last ruddy rays of the sunset brightened momentarily before yielding to twilight. And for Venters the outlook before him was in some sense similar to a feeling of his future, and with searching eyes he studied the beautiful purple, barren waste of sage. Here was the unknown and the perilous. The whole scene impressed Venters as a wild, austere, and mighty manifestation of nature. And as it somehow reminded him of his prospect in life, so it suddenly resembled the woman near him, only in her there were greater beauty and peril, a mystery more unsolvable, and something nameless that numbed his heart and dimmed his eye.\n\n\"Look! A rider!\" exclaimed Jane, breaking the silence. \"Can that be Lassiter?\"\n\nVenters moved his glance once more to the west. A horseman showed dark on the sky-line, then merged into the color of the sage.\n\n\"It might be. But I think not\u2014that fellow was coming in. One of your riders, more likely. Yes, I see him clearly now. And there's another.\"\n\n\"I see them, too.\"\n\n\"Jane, your riders seem as many as the bunches of sage. I ran into five yesterday 'way down near the trail to Deception Pass. They were with the white herd.\"\n\n\"You still go to that canyon? Bern, I wish you wouldn't. Oldring and his rustlers live somewhere down there.\"\n\n\"Well, what of that?\"\n\n\"Tull has already hinted to your frequent trips into Deception Pass.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Venters uttered a short laugh. \"He'll make a rustler of me next. But, Jane, there's no water for fifty miles after I leave here, and the nearest is in the canyon. I must drink and water my horse. There! I see more riders. They are going out.\"\n\n\"The red herd is on the slope, toward the Pass.\"\n\nTwilight was fast falling. A group of horsemen crossed the dark line of low ground to become more distinct as they climbed the slope. The silence broke to a clear call from an incoming rider, and, almost like the peal of a hunting-horn, floated back the answer. The outgoing riders moved swiftly, came sharply into sight as they topped a ridge to show wild and black above the horizon, and then passed down, dimming into the purple of the sage.\n\n\"I hope they don't meet Lassiter,\" said Jane.\n\n\"So do I,\" replied Venters. \"By this time the riders of the night shift know what happened to-day. But Lassiter will likely keep out of their way.\"\n\n\"Bern, who is Lassiter? He's only a name to me\u2014a terrible name.\"\n\n\"Who is he? I don't know, Jane. Nobody I ever met knows him. He talks a little like a Texan, like Milly Erne. Did you note that?\"\n\n\"Yes. How strange of him to know of her! And she lived here ten years and has been dead two. Bern, what do you know of Lassiter? Tell me what he has done\u2014why you spoke of him to Tull\u2014threatening to become another Lassiter yourself?\"\n\n\"Jane, I only heard things, rumors, stories, most of which I disbelieved. At Glaze his name was known, but none of the riders or ranchers I knew there ever met him. At Stone Bridge I never heard him mentioned. But at Sterling and villages north of there he was spoken of often. I've never been in a village which he had been known to visit. There were many conflicting stories about him and his doings. Some said he had shot up this and that Mormon village, and others denied it. I'm inclined to believe he has, and you know how Mormons hide the truth. But there was one feature about Lassiter upon which all agree\u2014that he was what riders in this country call a gun-man. He's a man with a marvelous quickness and accuracy in the use of a Colt. And now that I've seen him I know more. Lassiter was born without fear. I watched him with eyes which saw him my friend. I'll never forget the moment I recognized him from what had been told me of his crouch before the draw. It was then I yelled his name. I believe that yell saved Tull's life. At any rate, I know this, between Tull and death then there was not the breadth of the littlest hair. If he or any of his men had moved a finger downward\u2014\"\n\nVenters left his meaning unspoken, but at the suggestion Jane shuddered.\n\nThe pale afterglow in the west darkened with the merging of twilight into night. The sage now spread out black and gloomy. One dim star glimmered in the southwest sky. The sound of trotting horses had ceased, and there was silence broken only by a faint, dry pattering of cottonwood leaves in the soft night wind.\n\nInto this peace and calm suddenly broke the high-keyed yelp of a coyote, and from far off in the darkness came the faint answering note of a trailing mate.\n\n\"Hello! the sage-dogs are barking,\" said Venters.\n\n\"I don't like to hear them,\" replied Jane. \"At night, sometimes when I lie awake, listening to the long mourn or breaking bark or wild howl, I think of you asleep somewhere in the sage, and my heart aches.\"\n\n\"Jane, you couldn't listen to sweeter music, nor could I have a better bed.\"\n\n\"Just think! Men like Lassiter and you have no home, no comfort, no rest, no place to lay your weary heads. Well!... Let us be patient. Tull's anger may cool, and time may help us. You might do some service to the village\u2014who can tell? Suppose you discovered the long-unknown hiding-place of Oldring and his band, and told it to my riders? That would disarm Tull's ugly hints and put you in favor. For years my riders have trailed the tracks of stolen cattle. You know as well as I how dearly we've paid for our ranges in this wild country. Oldring drives our cattle down into the network of deceiving canyons, and somewhere far to the north or east he drives them up and out to Utah markets. If you will spend time in Deception Pass try to find the trails.\"\n\n\"Jane, I've thought of that. I'll try.\"\n\n\"I must go now. And it hurts, for now I'll never be sure of seeing you again. But to-morrow, Bern?\"\n\n\"To-morrow surely. I'll watch for Lassiter and ride in with him.\"\n\n\"Good night.\"\n\nThen she left him and moved away, a white, gliding shape that soon vanished in the shadows.\n\nVenters waited until the faint slam of a door assured him she had reached the house, and then, taking up his rifle, he noiselessly slipped through the bushes, down the knoll, and on under the dark trees to the edge of the grove. The sky was now turning from gray to blue; stars had begun to lighten the earlier blackness; and from the wide flat sweep before him blew a cool wind, fragrant with the breath of sage. Keeping close to the edge of the cottonwoods, he went swiftly and silently westward. The grove was long, and he had not reached the end when he heard something that brought him to a halt. Low padded thuds told him horses were coming this way. He sank down in the gloom, waiting, listening. Much before he had expected, judging from sound, to his amazement he descried horsemen near at hand. They were riding along the border of the sage, and instantly he knew the hoofs of the horses were muffled. Then the pale starlight afforded him indistinct sight of the riders. But his eyes were keen and used to the dark, and by peering closely he recognized the huge bulk and black-bearded visage of Oldring and the lithe, supple form of the rustler's lieutenant, a masked rider. They passed on; the darkness swallowed them. Then, farther out on the sage, a dark, compact body of horsemen went by, almost without sound, almost like specters, and they, too, melted into the night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Chapter III. Amber Spring\n\nNo unusual circumstances was it for Oldring and some of his men to visit Cottonwoods in the broad light of day, but for him to prowl about in the dark with the hoofs of his horses muffled meant that mischief was brewing. Moreover, to Venters the presence of the masked rider with Oldring seemed especially ominous. For about this man there was mystery, he seldom rode through the village, and when he did ride through it was swiftly; riders seldom met by day on the sage, but wherever he rode there always followed deeds as dark and mysterious as the mask he wore. Oldring's band did not confine themselves to the rustling of cattle.\n\nVenters lay low in the shade of the cottonwoods, pondering this chance meeting, and not for many moments did he consider it safe to move on. Then, with sudden impulse, he turned the other way and went back along the grove. When he reached the path leading to Jane's home he decided to go down to the village. So he hurried onward, with quick soft steps. Once beyond the grove he entered the one and only street. It was wide, lined with tall poplars, and under each row of trees, inside the foot-path, were ditches where ran the water from Jane Withersteen's spring.\n\nBetween the trees twinkled lights of cottage candles, and far down flared bright windows of the village stores. When Venters got closer to these he saw knots of men standing together in earnest conversation. The usual lounging on the corners and benches and steps was not in evidence. Keeping in the shadow Venters went closer and closer until he could hear voices. But he could not distinguish what was said. He recognized many Mormons, and looked hard for Tull and his men, but looked in vain. Venters concluded that the rustlers had not passed along the village street. No doubt these earnest men were discussing Lassiter's coming. But Venters felt positive that Tull's intention toward himself that day had not been and would not be revealed.\n\nSo Venters, seeing there was little for him to learn, began retracing his steps. The church was dark, Bishop Dyer's home next to it was also dark, and likewise Tull's cottage. Upon almost any night at this hour there would be lights here, and Venters marked the unusual omission.\n\nAs he was about to pass out of the street to skirt the grove, he once more slunk down at the sound of trotting horses. Presently he descried two mounted men riding toward him. He hugged the shadow of a tree. Again the starlight, brighter now, aided him, and he made out Tull's stalwart figure, and beside him the short, froglike shape of the rider Jerry. They were silent, and they rode on to disappear.\n\nVenters went his way with busy, gloomy mind, revolving events of the day, trying to reckon those brooding in the night. His thoughts overwhelmed him. Up in that dark grove dwelt a woman who had been his friend. And he skulked about her home, gripping a gun stealthily as an Indian, a man without place or people or purpose. Above her hovered the shadow of grim, hidden, secret power. No queen could have given more royally out of a bounteous store than Jane Withersteen gave her people, and likewise to those unfortunates whom her people hated. She asked only the divine right of all women\u2014freedom; to love and to live as her heart willed. And yet prayer and her hope were vain.\n\n\"For years I've seen a storm clouding over her and the village of Cottonwoods,\" muttered Venters, as he strode on. \"Soon it'll burst. I don't like the prospects.\" That night the villagers whispered in the street\u2014and night-riding rustlers muffled horses\u2014and Tull was at work in secret\u2014and out there in the sage hid a man who meant something terrible\u2014Lassiter!\n\nVenters passed the black cottonwoods, and, entering the sage, climbed the gradual slope. He kept his direction in line with a western star. From time to time he stopped to listen and heard only the usual familiar bark of coyote and sweep of wind and rustle of sage. Presently a low jumble of rocks loomed up darkly somewhat to his right, and, turning that way, he whistled softly. Out of the rocks glided a dog that leaped and whined about him. He climbed over rough, broken rock, picking his way carefully, and then went down. Here it was darker, and sheltered from the wind. A white object guided him. It was another dog, and this one was asleep, curled up between a saddle and a pack. The animal awoke and thumped his tail in greeting. Venters placed the saddle for a pillow, rolled in his blankets, with his face upward to the stars. The white dog snuggled close to him. The other whined and pattered a few yards to the rise of ground and there crouched on guard. And in that wild covert Venters shut his eyes under the great white stars and intense vaulted blue, bitterly comparing their loneliness to his own, and fell asleep.\n\nWhen he awoke, day had dawned and all about him was bright steel-gray. The air had a cold tang. Arising, he greeted the fawning dogs and stretched his cramped body, and then, gathering together bunches of dead sage sticks, he lighted a fire. Strips of dried beef held to the blaze for a moment served him and the dogs. He drank from a canteen. There was nothing else in his outfit; he had grown used to a scant fire. Then he sat over the fire, palms outspread, and waited. Waiting had been his chief occupation for months, and he scarcely knew what he waited for unless it was the passing of the hours. But now he sensed action in the immediate present; the day promised another meeting with Lassiter and Jane, perhaps news of the rustlers; on the morrow he meant to take the trail to Deception Pass.\n\nAnd while he waited he talked to his dogs. He called them Ring and Whitie; they were sheep-dogs, half collie, half deerhound, superb in build, perfectly trained. It seemed that in his fallen fortunes these dogs understood the nature of their value to him, and governed their affection and faithfulness accordingly. Whitie watched him with somber eyes of love, and Ring, crouched on the little rise of ground above, kept tireless guard. When the sun rose, the white dog took the place of the other, and Ring went to sleep at his master's feet.\n\nBy and by Venters rolled up his blankets and tied them and his meager pack together, then climbed out to look for his horse. He saw him, presently, a little way off in the sage, and went to fetch him. In that country, where every rider boasted of a fine mount and was eager for a race, where thoroughbreds dotted the wonderful grazing ranges, Venters rode a horse that was sad proof of his misfortunes.\n\nThen, with his back against a stone, Venters faced the east, and, stick in hand and idle blade, he waited. The glorious sunlight filled the valley with purple fire. Before him, to left, to right, waving, rolling, sinking, rising, like low swells of a purple sea, stretched the sage. Out of the grove of cottonwoods, a green patch on the purple, gleamed the dull red of Jane Withersteen's old stone house. And from there extended the wide green of the village gardens and orchards marked by the graceful poplars; and farther down shone the deep, dark richness of the alfalfa fields. Numberless red and black and white dots speckled the sage, and these were cattle and horses.\n\nSo, watching and waiting, Venters let the time wear away. At length he saw a horse rise above a ridge, and he knew it to be Lassiter's black. Climbing to the highest rock, so that he would show against the sky-line, he stood and waved his hat. The almost instant turning of Lassiter's horse attested to the quickness of that rider's eye. Then Venters climbed down, saddled his horse, tied on his pack, and, with a word to his dogs, was about to ride out to meet Lassiter, when he concluded to wait for him there, on higher ground, where the outlook was commanding.\n\nIt had been long since Venters had experienced friendly greeting from a man. Lassiter's warmed in him something that had grown cold from neglect. And when he had returned it, with a strong grip of the iron hand that held his, and met the gray eyes, he knew that Lassiter and he were to be friends.\n\n\"Venters, let's talk awhile before we go down there,\" said Lassiter, slipping his bridle. \"I ain't in no hurry. Them's sure fine dogs you've got.\" With a rider's eye he took in the points of Venter's horse, but did not speak his thought. \"Well, did anythin' come off after I left you last night?\"\n\nVenters told him about the rustlers.\n\n\"I was snug hid in the sage,\" replied Lassiter, \"an' didn't see or hear no one. Oldrin's got a high hand here, I reckon. It's no news up in Utah how he holes in canyons an' leaves no track.\" Lassiter was silent a moment. \"Me an' Oldrin' wasn't exactly strangers some years back when he drove cattle into Bostil's Ford, at the head of the Rio Virgin. But he got harassed there an' now he drives some place else.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, you knew him? Tell me, is he Mormon or Gentile?\"\n\n\"I can't say. I've knowed Mormons who pretended to be Gentiles.\"\n\n\"No Mormon ever pretended that unless he was a rustler,\" declared Venters.\n\n\"Mebbe so.\"\n\n\"It's a hard country for any one, but hardest for Gentiles. Did you ever know or hear of a Gentile prospering in a Mormon community?\"\n\n\"I never did.\"\n\n\"Well, I want to get out of Utah. I've a mother living in Illinois. I want to go home. It's eight years now.\"\n\nThe older man's sympathy moved Venters to tell his story. He had left Quincy, run off to seek his fortune in the gold fields had never gotten any farther than Salt Lake City, wandered here and there as helper, teamster, shepherd, and drifted southward over the divide and across the barrens and up the rugged plateau through the passes to the last border settlements. Here he became a rider of the sage, had stock of his own, and for a time prospered, until chance threw him in the employ of Jane Withersteen.\n\n\"Lassiter, I needn't tell you the rest.\"\n\n\"Well, it'd be no news to me. I know Mormons. I've seen their women's strange love en' patience en' sacrifice an' silence en' whet I call madness for their idea of God. An' over against that I've seen the tricks of men. They work hand in hand, all together, an' in the dark. No man can hold out against them, unless he takes to packin' guns. For Mormons are slow to kill. That's the only good I ever seen in their religion. Venters, take this from me, these Mormons ain't just right in their minds. Else could a Mormon marry one woman when he already has a wife, an' call it duty?\"\n\n\"Lassiter, you think as I think,\" returned Venters.\n\n\"How'd it come then that you never throwed a gun on Tull or some of them?\" inquired the rider, curiously.\n\n\"Jane pleaded with me, begged me to be patient, to overlook. She even took my guns from me. I lost all before I knew it,\" replied Venters, with the red color in his face. \"But, Lassiter, listen. Out of the wreck I saved a Winchester, two Colts, and plenty of shells. I packed these down into Deception Pass. There, almost every day for six months, I have practiced with my rifle till the barrel burnt my hands. Practised the draw\u2014the firing of a Colt, hour after hour!\"\n\n\"Now that's interestin' to me,\" said Lassiter, with a quick uplift of his head and a concentration of his gray gaze on Venters. \"Could you throw a gun before you began that practisin'?\"\n\n\"Yes. And now...\" Venters made a lightning-swift movement.\n\nLassiter smiled, and then his bronzed eyelids narrowed till his eyes seemed mere gray slits. \"You'll kill Tull!\" He did not question; he affirmed.\n\n\"I promised Jane Withersteen I'd try to avoid Tull. I'll keep my word. But sooner or later Tull and I will meet. As I feel now, if he even looks at me I'll draw!\"\n\n\"I reckon so. There'll be hell down there, presently.\" He paused a moment and flicked a sage-brush with his quirt. \"Venters, seein' as you're considerable worked up, tell me Milly Erne's story.\"\n\nVenters's agitation stilled to the trace of suppressed eagerness in Lassiter's query.\n\n\"Milly Erne's story? Well, Lassiter, I'll tell you what I know. Milly Erne had been in Cottonwoods years when I first arrived there, and most of what I tell you happened before my arrival. I got to know her pretty well. She was a slip of a woman, and crazy on religion. I conceived an idea that I never mentioned\u2014I thought she was at heart more Gentile than Mormon. But she passed as a Mormon, and certainly she had the Mormon woman's locked lips. You know, in every Mormon village there are women who seem mysterious to us, but about Milly there was more than the ordinary mystery. When she came to Cottonwoods she had a beautiful little girl whom she loved passionately. Milly was not known openly in Cottonwoods as a Mormon wife. That she really was a Mormon wife I have no doubt. Perhaps the Mormon's other wife or wives would not acknowledge Milly. Such things happen in these villages. Mormon wives wear yokes, but they get jealous. Well, whatever had brought Milly to this country\u2014love or madness of religion\u2014she repented of it. She gave up teaching the village school. She quit the church. And she began to fight Mormon upbringing for her baby girl. Then the Mormons put on the screws\u2014slowly, as is their way. At last the child disappeared. 'Lost' was the report. The child was stolen, I know that. So do you. That wrecked Milly Erne. But she lived on in hope. She became a slave. She worked her heart and soul and life out to get back her child. She never heard of it again. Then she sank... I can see her now, a frail thing, so transparent you could almost look through her\u2014white like ashes\u2014and her eyes!... Her eyes have always haunted me. She had one real friend\u2014Jane Withersteen. But Jane couldn't mend a broken heart, and Milly died.\"\n\nFor moments Lassiter did not speak, or turn his head.\n\n\"The man!\" he exclaimed, presently, in husky accents.\n\n\"I haven't the slightest idea who the Mormon was,\" replied Venters; \"nor has any Gentile in Cottonwoods.\"\n\n\"Does Jane Withersteen know?\"\n\n\"Yes. But a red-hot running-iron couldn't burn that name out of her!\"\n\nWithout further speech Lassiter started off, walking his horse and Venters followed with his dogs. Half a mile down the slope they entered a luxuriant growth of willows, and soon came into an open space carpeted with grass like deep green velvet. The rushing of water and singing of birds filled their ears. Venters led his comrade to a shady bower and showed him Amber Spring. It was a magnificent outburst of clear, amber water pouring from a dark, stone-lined hole. Lassiter knelt and drank, lingered there to drink again. He made no comment, but Venters did not need words. Next to his horse a rider of the sage loved a spring. And this spring was the most beautiful and remarkable known to the upland riders of southern Utah. It was the spring that made old Withersteen a feudal lord and now enabled his daughter to return the toll which her father had exacted from the toilers of the sage.\n\nThe spring gushed forth in a swirling torrent, and leaped down joyously to make its swift way along a willow-skirted channel. Moss and ferns and lilies overhung its green banks. Except for the rough-hewn stones that held and directed the water, this willow thicket and glade had been left as nature had made it.\n\nBelow were artificial lakes, three in number, one above the other in banks of raised earth, and round about them rose the lofty green-foliaged shafts of poplar trees. Ducks dotted the glassy surface of the lakes; a blue heron stood motionless on a water-gate; kingfishers darted with shrieking flight along the shady banks; a white hawk sailed above; and from the trees and shrubs came the song of robins and cat-birds. It was all in strange contrast to the endless slopes of lonely sage and the wild rock environs beyond. Venters thought of the woman who loved the birds and the green of the leaves and the murmur of the water.\n\nNext on the slope, just below the third and largest lake, were corrals and a wide stone barn and open sheds and coops and pens. Here were clouds of dust, and cracking sounds of hoofs, and romping colts and heehawing burros. Neighing horses trampled to the corral fences. And on the little windows of the barn projected bobbing heads of bays and blacks and sorrels. When the two men entered the immense barnyard, from all around the din increased. This welcome, however, was not seconded by the several men and boys who vanished on sight.\n\nVenters and Lassiter were turning toward the house when Jane appeared in the lane leading a horse. In riding-skirt and blouse she seemed to have lost some of her statuesque proportions, and looked more like a girl rider than the mistress of Withersteen. She was brightly smiling, and her greeting was warmly cordial.\n\n\"Good news,\" she announced. \"I've been to the village. All is quiet. I expected\u2014I don't know what. But there's no excitement. And Tull has ridden out on his way to Glaze.\"\n\n\"Tull gone?\" inquired Venters, with surprise. He was wondering what could have taken Tull away. Was it to avoid another meeting with Lassiter that he went? Could it have any connection with the probable nearness of Oldring and his gang?\n\n\"Gone, yes, thank goodness,\" replied Jane. \"Now I'll have peace for a while. Lassiter, I want you to see my horses. You are a rider, and you must be a judge of horseflesh. Some of mine have Arabian blood. My father got his best strain in Nevada from Indians who claimed their horses were bred down from the original stock left by the Spaniards.\"\n\n\"Well, ma'am, the one you've been ridin' takes my eye,\" said Lassiter, as he walked round the racy, clean-limbed, and fine-pointed roan.\n\n\"Where are the boys?\" she asked, looking about. \"Jerd, Paul, where are you? Here, bring out the horses.\"\n\nThe sound of dropping bars inside the barn was the signal for the horses to jerk their heads in the windows, to snort and stamp. Then they came pounding out of the door, a file of thoroughbreds, to plunge about the barnyard, heads and tails up, manes flying. They halted afar off, squared away to look, came slowly forward with whinnies for their mistress, and doubtful snorts for the strangers and their horses.\n\n\"Come\u2014come\u2014come,\" called Jane, holding out her hands. \"Why, Bells\u2014Wrangle, where are your manners? Come, Black Star\u2014come, Night. Ah, you beauties! My racers of the sage!\"\n\nOnly two came up to her; those she called Night and Black Star. Venters never looked at them without delight. The first was soft dead black, the other glittering black, and they were perfectly matched in size, both being high and long-bodied, wide through the shoulders, with lithe, powerful legs. That they were a woman's pets showed in the gloss of skin, the fineness of mane. It showed, too, in the light of big eyes and the gentle reach of eagerness.\n\n\"I never seen their like,\" was Lassiter's encomium, \"an' in my day I've seen a sight of horses. Now, ma'am, if you was wantin' to make a long an' fast ride across the sage\u2014say to elope\u2014\"\n\nLassiter ended there with dry humor, yet behind that was meaning. Jane blushed and made arch eyes at him.\n\n\"Take care, Lassiter, I might think that a proposal,\" she replied, gaily. \"It's dangerous to propose elopement to a Mormon woman. Well, I was expecting you. Now will be a good hour to show you Milly Erne's grave. The day-riders have gone, and the night-riders haven't come in. Bern, what do you make of that? Need I worry? You know I have to be made to worry.\"\n\n\"Well, it's not usual for the night shift to ride in so late,\" replied Venters, slowly, and his glance sought Lassiter's. \"Cattle are usually quiet after dark. Still, I've known even a coyote to stampede your white herd.\"\n\n\"I refuse to borrow trouble. Come,\" said Jane.\n\nThey mounted, and, with Jane in the lead, rode down the lane, and, turning off into a cattle trail, proceeded westward. Venters's dogs trotted behind them. On this side of the ranch the outlook was different from that on the other; the immediate foreground was rough and the sage more rugged and less colorful; there were no dark-blue lines of canyons to hold the eye, nor any uprearing rock walls. It was a long roll and slope into gray obscurity. Soon Jane left the trail and rode into the sage, and presently she dismounted and threw her bridle. The men did likewise. Then, on foot, they followed her, coming out at length on the rim of a low escarpment. She passed by several little ridges of earth to halt before a faintly defined mound. It lay in the shade of a sweeping sage-brush close to the edge of the promontory; and a rider could have jumped his horse over it without recognizing a grave.\n\n\"Here!\"\n\nShe looked sad as she spoke, but she offered no explanation for the neglect of an unmarked, uncared-for grave. There was a little bunch of pale, sweet lavender daisies, doubtless planted there by Jane.\n\n\"I only come here to remember and to pray,\" she said. \"But I leave no trail!\"\n\nA grave in the sage! How lonely this resting-place of Milly Erne! The cottonwoods or the alfalfa fields were not in sight, nor was there any rock or ridge or cedar to lend contrast to the monotony. Gray slopes, tinging the purple, barren and wild, with the wind waving the sage, swept away to the dim horizon.\n\nLassiter looked at the grave and then out into space. At that moment he seemed a figure of bronze.\n\nJane touched Venters's arm and led him back to the horses.\n\n\"Bern!\" cried Jane, when they were out of hearing. \"Suppose Lassiter were Milly's husband\u2014the father of that little girl lost so long ago!\"\n\n\"It might be, Jane. Let us ride on. If he wants to see us again he'll come.\"\n\nSo they mounted and rode out to the cattle trail and began to climb. From the height of the ridge, where they had started down, Venters looked back. He did not see Lassiter, but his glance, drawn irresistibly farther out on the gradual slope, caught sight of a moving cloud of dust.\n\n\"Hello, a rider!\"\n\n\"Yes, I see,\" said Jane.\n\n\"That fellow's riding hard. Jane, there's something wrong.\"\n\n\"Oh yes, there must be... How he rides!\"\n\nThe horse disappeared in the sage, and then puffs of dust marked his course.\n\n\"He's short-cut on us\u2014he's making straight for the corrals.\"\n\nVenters and Jane galloped their steeds and reined in at the turning of the lane. This lane led down to the right of the grove. Suddenly into its lower entrance flashed a bay horse. Then Venters caught the fast rhythmic beat of pounding hoofs. Soon his keen eye recognized the swing of the rider in his saddle.\n\n\"It's Judkins, your Gentile rider!\" he cried. \"Jane, when Judkins rides like that it means hell!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter IV. Deception Pass\n\nThe rider thundered up and almost threw his foam-flecked horse in the sudden stop. He was a giant form, and with fearless eyes.\n\n\"Judkins, you're all bloody!\" cried Jane, in affright. \"Oh, you've been shot!\"\n\n\"Nothin' much Miss Withersteen. I got a nick in the shoulder. I'm some wet an' the hoss's been throwin' lather, so all this ain't blood.\"\n\n\"What's up?\" queried Venters, sharply.\n\n\"Rustlers sloped off with the red herd.\"\n\n\"Where are my riders?\" demanded Jane.\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, I was alone all night with the herd. At daylight this mornin' the rustlers rode down. They began to shoot at me on sight. They chased me hard an' far, burnin' powder all the time, but I got away.\"\n\n\"Jud, they meant to kill you,\" declared Venters.\n\n\"Now I wonder,\" returned Judkins. \"They wanted me bad. An' it ain't regular for rustlers to waste time chasin' one rider.\"\n\n\"Thank heaven you got away,\" said Jane. \"But my riders\u2014where are they?\"\n\n\"I don't know. The night-riders weren't there last night when I rode down, en' this mornin' I met no day-riders.\"\n\n\"Judkins! Bern, they've been set upon\u2014killed by Oldring's men!\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" replied Venters, decidedly. \"Jane, your riders haven't gone out in the sage.\"\n\n\"Bern, what do you mean?\" Jane Withersteen turned deathly pale.\n\n\"You remember what I said about the unseen hand?\"\n\n\"Oh!... Impossible!\"\n\n\"I hope so. But I fear\u2014\" Venters finished, with a shake of his head.\n\n\"Bern, you're bitter; but that's only natural. We'll wait to see what's happened to my riders. Judkins, come to the house with me. Your wound must be attended to.\"\n\n\"Jane, I'll find out where Oldring drives the herd,\" vowed Venters.\n\n\"No, no! Bern, don't risk it now\u2014when the rustlers are in such shooting mood.\"\n\n\"I'm going. Jud, how many cattle in that red herd?\"\n\n\"Twenty-five hundred head.\"\n\n\"Whew! What on earth can Oldring do with so many cattle? Why, a hundred head is a big steal. I've got to find out.\"\n\n\"Don't go,\" implored Jane.\n\n\"Bern, you want a hoss thet can run. Miss Withersteen, if it's not too bold of me to advise, make him take a fast hoss or don't let him go.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, Judkins. He must ride a horse that can't be caught. Which one\u2014Black Star\u2014Night?\"\n\n\"Jane, I won't take either,\" said Venters, emphatically. \"I wouldn't risk losing one of your favorites.\"\n\n\"Wrangle, then?\"\n\n\"Thet's the hoss,\" replied Judkins. \"Wrangle can outrun Black Star an' Night. You'd never believe it, Miss Withersteen, but I know. Wrangle's the biggest en' fastest hoss on the sage.\"\n\n\"Oh no, Wrangle can't beat Black Star. But, Bern, take Wrangle if you will go. Ask Jerd for anything you need. Oh, be watchful, careful... God speed you.\"\n\nShe clasped his hand, turned quickly away, and went down a lane with the rider.\n\nVenters rode to the barn, and, leaping off, shouted for Jerd. The boy came running. Venters sent him for meat, bread, and dried fruits, to be packed in saddlebags. His own horse he turned loose into the nearest corral. Then he went for Wrangle. The giant sorrel had earned his name for a trait the opposite of amiability. He came readily out of the barn, but once in the yard he broke from Venters, and plunged about with ears laid back. Venters had to rope him, and then he kicked down a section of fence, stood on his hind legs, crashed down and fought the rope. Jerd returned to lend a hand.\n\n\"Wrangle don't git enough work,\" said Jerd, as the big saddle went on. \"He's unruly when he's corralled, an' wants to run. Wait till he smells the sage!\"\n\n\"Jerd, this horse is an iron-jawed devil. I never straddled him but once. Run? Say, he's swift as wind!\"\n\nWhen Venters's boot touched the stirrup the sorrel bolted, giving him the rider's flying mount. The swing of this fiery horse recalled to Venters days that were not really long past, when he rode into the sage as the leader of Jane Withersteen's riders. Wrangle pulled hard on a tight rein. He galloped out of the lane, down the shady border of the grove, and hauled up at the watering-trough, where he pranced and champed his bit. Venters got off and filled his canteen while the horse drank. The dogs, Ring and Whitie, came trotting up for their drink. Then Venters remounted and turned Wrangle toward the sage.\n\nA wide, white trail wound away down the slope. One keen, sweeping glance told Venters that there was neither man nor horse nor steer within the limit of his vision, unless they were lying down in the sage. Ring loped in the lead and Whitie loped in the rear. Wrangle settled gradually into an easy swinging canter, and Venters's thoughts, now that the rush and flurry of the start were past, and the long miles stretched before him, reverted to a calm reckoning of late singular coincidences.\n\nThere was the night ride of Tull's, which, viewed in the light of subsequent events, had a look of his covert machinations; Oldring and his Masked Rider and his rustlers riding muffled horses; the report that Tull had ridden out that morning with his man Jerry on the trail to Glaze, the strange disappearance of Jane Withersteen's riders, the unusually determined attempt to kill the one Gentile still in her employ, an intention frustrated, no doubt, only by Judkin's magnificent riding of her racer, and lastly the driving of the red herd. These events, to Venters's color of mind, had a dark relationship. Remembering Jane's accusation of bitterness, he tried hard to put aside his rancor in judging Tull. But it was bitter knowledge that made him see the truth. He had felt the shadow of an unseen hand; he had watched till he saw its dim outline, and then he had traced it to a man's hate, to the rivalry of a Mormon Elder, to the power of a Bishop, to the long, far-reaching arm of a terrible creed. That unseen hand had made its first move against Jane Withersteen. Her riders had been called in, leaving her without help to drive seven thousand head of cattle. But to Venters it seemed extraordinary that the power which had called in these riders had left so many cattle to be driven by rustlers and harried by wolves. For hand in glove with that power was an insatiate greed; they were one and the same.\n\n\"What can Oldring do with twenty-five hundred head of cattle?\" muttered Venters. \"Is he a Mormon? Did he meet Tull last night? It looks like a black plot to me. But Tull and his churchmen wouldn't ruin Jane Withersteen unless the Church was to profit by that ruin. Where does Oldring come in? I'm going to find out about these things.\"\n\nWrangle did the twenty-five miles in three hours and walked little of the way. When he had gotten warmed up he had been allowed to choose his own gait. The afternoon had well advanced when Venters struck the trail of the red herd and found where it had grazed the night before. Then Venters rested the horse and used his eyes. Near at hand were a cow and a calf and several yearlings, and farther out in the sage some straggling steers. He caught a glimpse of coyotes skulking near the cattle. The slow sweeping gaze of the rider failed to find other living things within the field of sight. The sage about him was breast-high to his horse, oversweet with its warm, fragrant breath, gray where it waved to the light, darker where the wind left it still, and beyond the wonderful haze-purple lent by distance. Far across that wide waste began the slow lift of uplands through which Deception Pass cut its tortuous many-canyoned way.\n\nVenters raised the bridle of his horse and followed the broad cattle trail. The crushed sage resembled the path of a monster snake. In a few miles of travel he passed several cows and calves that had escaped the drive. Then he stood on the last high bench of the slope with the floor of the valley beneath. The opening of the canyon showed in a break of the sage, and the cattle trail paralleled it as far as he could see. That trail led to an undiscovered point where Oldring drove cattle into the pass, and many a rider who had followed it had never returned. Venters satisfied himself that the rustlers had not deviated from their usual course, and then he turned at right angles off the cattle trail and made for the head of the pass.\n\nThe sun lost its heat and wore down to the western horizon, where it changed from white to gold and rested like a huge ball about to roll on its golden shadows down the slope. Venters watched the lengthening of the rays and bars, and marveled at his own league-long shadow. The sun sank. There was instant shading of brightness about him, and he saw a kind of cold purple bloom creep ahead of him to cross the canyon, to mount the opposite slope and chase and darken and bury the last golden flare of sunlight.\n\nVenters rode into a trail that he always took to get down into the canyon. He dismounted and found no tracks but his own made days previous. Nevertheless he sent the dog Ring ahead and waited. In a little while Ring returned. Whereupon Venters led his horse on to the break in the ground.\n\nThe opening into Deception Pass was one of the remarkable natural phenomena in a country remarkable for vast slopes of sage, uplands insulated by gigantic red walls, and deep canyons of mysterious source and outlet. Here the valley floor was level, and here opened a narrow chasm, a ragged vent in yellow walls of stone. The trail down the five hundred feet of sheer depth always tested Venters's nerve. It was bad going for even a burro. But Wrangle, as Venters led him, snorted defiance or disgust rather than fear, and, like a hobbled horse on the jump, lifted his ponderous iron-shod fore hoofs and crashed down over the first rough step. Venters warmed to greater admiration of the sorrel; and, giving him a loose bridle, he stepped down foot by foot. Oftentimes the stones and shale started by Wrangle buried Venters to his knees; again he was hard put to it to dodge a rolling boulder, there were times when he could not see Wrangle for dust, and once he and the horse rode a sliding shelf of yellow, weathered cliff. It was a trail on which there could be no stops, and, therefore, if perilous, it was at least one that did not take long in the descent.\n\nVenters breathed lighter when that was over, and felt a sudden assurance in the success of his enterprise. For at first it had been a reckless determination to achieve something at any cost, and now it resolved itself into an adventure worthy of all his reason and cunning, and keenness of eye and ear.\n\nPinyon pines clustered in little clumps along the level floor of the pass. Twilight had gathered under the walls. Venters rode into the trail and up the canyon. Gradually the trees and caves and objects low down turned black, and this blackness moved up the walls till night enfolded the pass, while day still lingered above. The sky darkened; and stars began to show, at first pale and then bright. Sharp notches of the rim-wall, biting like teeth into the blue, were landmarks by which Venters knew where his camping site lay. He had to feel his way through a thicket of slender oaks to a spring where he watered Wrangle and drank himself. Here he unsaddled and turned Wrangle loose, having no fear that the horse would leave the thick, cool grass adjacent to the spring. Next he satisfied his own hunger, fed Ring and Whitie and, with them curled beside him, composed himself to await sleep.\n\nThere had been a time when night in the high altitude of these Utah uplands had been satisfying to Venters. But that was before the oppression of enemies had made the change in his mind. As a rider guarding the herd he had never thought of the night's wildness and loneliness; as an outcast, now when the full silence set in, and the deep darkness, and trains of radiant stars shone cold and calm, he lay with an ache in his heart. For a year he had lived as a black fox, driven from his kind. He longed for the sound of a voice, the touch of a hand. In the daytime there was riding from place to place, and the gun practice to which something drove him, and other tasks that at least necessitated action, at night, before he won sleep, there was strife in his soul. He yearned to leave the endless sage slopes, the wilderness of canyons, and it was in the lonely night that this yearning grew unbearable. It was then that he reached forth to feel Ring or Whitie, immeasurably grateful for the love and companionship of two dogs.\n\nOn this night the same old loneliness beset Venters, the old habit of sad thought and burning unquiet had its way. But from it evolved a conviction that his useless life had undergone a subtle change. He had sensed it first when Wrangle swung him up to the high saddle, he knew it now when he lay in the gateway of Deception Pass. He had no thrill of adventure, rather a gloomy perception of great hazard, perhaps death. He meant to find Oldring's retreat. The rustlers had fast horses, but none that could catch Wrangle. Venters knew no rustler could creep upon him at night when Ring and Whitie guarded his hiding-place. For the rest, he had eyes and ears, and a long rifle and an unerring aim, which he meant to use. Strangely his foreshadowing of change did not hold a thought of the killing of Tull. It related only to what was to happen to him in Deception Pass; and he could no more lift the veil of that mystery than tell where the trails led to in that unexplored canyon. Moreover, he did not care. And at length, tired out by stress of thought, he fell asleep.\n\nWhen his eyes unclosed, day had come again, and he saw the rim of the opposite wall tipped with the gold of sunrise. A few moments sufficed for the morning's simple camp duties. Near at hand he found Wrangle, and to his surprise the horse came to him. Wrangle was one of the horses that left his viciousness in the home corral. What he wanted was to be free of mules and burros and steers, to roll in dust-patches, and then to run down the wide, open, windy sage-plains, and at night browse and sleep in the cool wet grass of a springhole. Jerd knew the sorrel when he said of him, \"Wait till he smells the sage!\"\n\nVenters saddled and led him out of the oak thicket, and, leaping astride, rode up the canyon, with Ring and Whitie trotting behind. An old grass-grown trail followed the course of a shallow wash where flowed a thin stream of water. The canyon was a hundred rods wide, its yellow walls were perpendicular; it had abundant sage and a scant growth of oak and pinon. For five miles it held to a comparatively straight bearing, and then began a heightening of rugged walls and a deepening of the floor. Beyond this point of sudden change in the character of the canyon Venters had never explored, and here was the real door to the intricacies of Deception Pass.\n\nHe reined Wrangle to a walk, halted now and then to listen, and then proceeded cautiously with shifting and alert gaze. The canyon assumed proportions that dwarfed those of its first ten miles. Venters rode on and on, not losing in the interest of his wide surroundings any of his caution or keen search for tracks or sight of living thing. If there ever had been a trail here, he could not find it. He rode through sage and clumps of pinon trees and grassy plots where long-petaled purple lilies bloomed. He rode through a dark constriction of the pass no wider than the lane in the grove at Cottonwoods. And he came out into a great amphitheater into which jutted huge towering corners of a confluence of intersecting canyons.\n\nVenters sat his horse, and, with a rider's eye, studied this wild cross-cut of huge stone gullies. Then he went on, guided by the course of running water. If it had not been for the main stream of water flowing north he would never have been able to tell which of those many openings was a continuation of the pass. In crossing this amphitheater he went by the mouths of five canyons, fording little streams that flowed into the larger one. Gaining the outlet which he took to be the pass, he rode on again under over hanging walls. One side was dark in shade, the other light in sun. This narrow passageway turned and twisted and opened into a valley that amazed Venters.\n\nHere again was a sweep of purple sage, richer than upon the higher levels. The valley was miles long, several wide, and inclosed by unscalable walls. But it was the background of this valley that so forcibly struck him. Across the sage-flat rose a strange up-flinging of yellow rocks. He could not tell which were close and which were distant. Scrawled mounds of stone, like mountain waves, seemed to roll up to steep bare slopes and towers.\n\nIn this plain of sage Venters flushed birds and rabbits, and when he had proceeded about a mile he caught sight of the bobbing white tails of a herd of running antelope. He rode along the edge of the stream which wound toward the western end of the slowly looming mounds of stone. The high slope retreated out of sight behind the nearer protection. To Venters the valley appeared to have been filled in by a mountain of melted stone that had hardened in strange shapes of rounded outline. He followed the stream till he lost it in a deep cut. Therefore Venters quit the dark slit which baffled further search in that direction, and rode out along the curved edge of stone where it met the sage. It was not long before he came to a low place, and here Wrangle readily climbed up.\n\nAll about him was ridgy roll of wind-smoothed, rain-washed rock. Not a tuft of grass or a bunch of sage colored the dull rust-yellow. He saw where, to the right, this uneven flow of stone ended in a blunt wall. Leftward, from the hollow that lay at his feet, mounted a gradual slow-swelling slope to a great height topped by leaning, cracked, and ruined crags. Not for some time did he grasp the wonder of that acclivity. It was no less than a mountain-side, glistening in the sun like polished granite, with cedar-trees springing as if by magic out of the denuded surface. Winds had swept it clear of weathered shale, and rains had washed it free of dust. Far up the curved slope its beautiful lines broke to meet the vertical rim-wall, to lose its grace in a different order and color of rock, a stained yellow cliff of cracks and caves and seamed crags. And straight before Venters was a scene less striking but more significant to his keen survey. For beyond a mile of the bare, hummocky rock began the valley of sage, and the mouths of canyons, one of which surely was another gateway into the pass.\n\nHe got off his horse, and, giving the bridle to Ring to hold, he commenced a search for the cleft where the stream ran. He was not successful and concluded the water dropped into an underground passage. Then he returned to where he had left Wrangle, and led him down off the stone to the sage. It was a short ride to the opening canyons. There was no reason for a choice of which one to enter. The one he rode into was a clear, sharp shaft in yellow stone a thousand feet deep, with wonderful wind-worn caves low down and high above buttressed and turreted ramparts. Farther on Venters came into a region where deep indentations marked the line of canyon walls. These were huge, cove-like blind pockets extending back to a sharp corner with a dense growth of underbrush and trees.\n\nVenters penetrated into one of these offshoots, and, as he had hoped, he found abundant grass. He had to bend the oak saplings to get his horse through. Deciding to make this a hiding-place if he could find water, he worked back to the limit of the shelving walls. In a little cluster of silver spruces he found a spring. This inclosed nook seemed an ideal place to leave his horse and to camp at night, and from which to make stealthy trips on foot. The thick grass hid his trail; the dense growth of oaks in the opening would serve as a barrier to keep Wrangle in, if, indeed, the luxuriant browse would not suffice for that. So Venters, leaving Whitie with the horse, called Ring to his side, and, rifle in hand, worked his way out to the open. A careful photographing in mind of the formation of the bold outlines of rimrock assured him he would be able to return to his retreat even in the dark.\n\nBunches of scattered sage covered the center of the canyon, and among these Venters threaded his way with the step of an Indian. At intervals he put his hand on the dog and stopped to listen. There was a drowsy hum of insects, but no other sound disturbed the warm midday stillness. Venters saw ahead a turn, more abrupt than any yet. Warily he rounded this corner, once again to halt bewildered.\n\nThe canyon opened fan-shaped into a great oval of green and gray growths. It was the hub of an oblong wheel, and from it, at regular distances, like spokes, ran the outgoing canyons. Here a dull red color predominated over the fading yellow. The corners of wall bluntly rose, scarred and scrawled, to taper into towers and serrated peaks and pinnacled domes.\n\nVenters pushed on more heedfully than ever. Toward the center of this circle the sage-brush grew smaller and farther apart He was about to sheer off to the right, where thickets and jumbles of fallen rock would afford him cover, when he ran right upon a broad cattle trail. Like a road it was, more than a trail, and the cattle tracks were fresh. What surprised him more, they were wet! He pondered over this feature. It had not rained. The only solution to this puzzle was that the cattle had been driven through water, and water deep enough to wet their legs.\n\nSuddenly Ring growled low. Venters rose cautiously and looked over the sage. A band of straggling horsemen were riding across the oval. He sank down, startled and trembling. \"Rustlers!\" he muttered. Hurriedly he glanced about for a place to hide. Near at hand there was nothing but sage-brush. He dared not risk crossing the open patches to reach the rocks. Again he peeped over the sage. The rustlers\u2014four\u2014five\u2014seven\u2014eight in all, were approaching, but not directly in line with him. That was relief for a cold deadness which seemed to be creeping inward along his veins. He crouched down with bated breath and held the bristling dog.\n\nHe heard the click of iron-shod hoofs on stone, the coarse laughter of men, and then voices gradually dying away. Long moments passed. Then he rose. The rustlers were riding into a canyon. Their horses were tired, and they had several pack animals; evidently they had traveled far. Venters doubted that they were the rustlers who had driven the red herd. Olding's band had split. Venters watched these horsemen disappear under a bold canyon wall.\n\nThe rustlers had come from the northwest side of the oval. Venters kept a steady gaze in that direction, hoping, if there were more, to see from what canyon they rode. A quarter of an hour went by. Reward for his vigilance came when he descried three more mounted men, far over to the north. But out of what canyon they had ridden it was too late to tell. He watched the three ride across the oval and round the jutting red corner where the others had gone.\n\n\"Up that canyon!\" exclaimed Venters. \"Oldring's den! I've found it!\"\n\nA knotty point for Venters was the fact that the cattle tracks all pointed west. The broad trail came from the direction of the canyon into which the rustlers had ridden, and undoubtedly the cattle had been driven out of it across the oval. There were no tracks pointing the other way. It had been in his mind that Oldring had driven the red herd toward the rendezvous, and not from it. Where did that broad trail come down into the pass, and where did it lead? Venters knew he wasted time in pondering the question, but it held a fascination not easily dispelled. For many years Oldring's mysterious entrance and exit to Deception Pass had been all-absorbing topics to sage-riders.\n\nAll at once the dog put an end to Venters's pondering. Ring sniffed the air, turned slowly in his tracks with a whine, and then growled. Venters wheeled. Two horsemen were within a hundred yards, coming straight at him. One, lagging behind the other, was Oldring's Masked Rider.\n\nVenters cunningly sank, slowly trying to merge into sage-brush. But, guarded as his action was, the first horse detected it. He stopped short, snorted, and shot up his ears. The rustler bent forward, as if keenly peering ahead. Then, with a swift sweep, he jerked a gun from its sheath and fired.\n\nThe bullet zipped through the sage-brush. Flying bits of wood struck Venters, and the hot, stinging pain seemed to lift him in one leap. Like a flash the blue barrel of his rifle gleamed level and he shot once\u2014twice.\n\nThe foremost rustler dropped his weapon and toppled from his saddle, to fall with his foot catching in a stirrup. The horse snorted wildly and plunged away, dragging the rustler through the sage.\n\nThe Masked Rider huddled over his pommel slowly swaying to one side, and then, with a faint, strange cry, slipped out of the saddle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter V. The Masked Rider\n\nVenters looked quickly from the fallen rustlers to the canyon where the others had disappeared. He calculated on the time needed for running horses to return to the open, if their riders heard shots. He waited breathlessly. But the estimated time dragged by and no riders appeared. Venters began presently to believe that the rifle reports had not penetrated into the recesses of the canyon, and felt safe for the immediate present.\n\nHe hurried to the spot where the first rustler had been dragged by his horse. The man lay in deep grass, dead, jaw fallen, eyes protruding\u2014a sight that sickened Venters. The first man at whom he had ever aimed a weapon he had shot through the heart. With the clammy sweat oozing from every pore Venters dragged the rustler in among some boulders and covered him with slabs of rock. Then he smoothed out the crushed trail in grass and sage. The rustler's horse had stopped a quarter of a mile off and was grazing.\n\nWhen Venters rapidly strode toward the Masked Rider not even the cold nausea that gripped him could wholly banish curiosity. For he had shot Oldring's infamous lieutenant, whose face had never been seen. Venters experienced a grim pride in the feat. What would Tull say to this achievement of the outcast who rode too often to Deception Pass?\n\nVenters's curious eagerness and expectation had not prepared him for the shock he received when he stood over a slight, dark figure. The rustler wore the black mask that had given him his name, but he had no weapons. Venters glanced at the drooping horse, there were no gun-sheaths on the saddle.\n\n\"A rustler who didn't pack guns!\" muttered Venters. \"He wears no belt. He couldn't pack guns in that rig... Strange!\"\n\nA low, gasping intake of breath and a sudden twitching of body told Venters the rider still lived.\n\n\"He's alive!... I've got to stand here and watch him die. And I shot an unarmed man.\"\n\nShrinkingly Venters removed the rider's wide sombrero and the black cloth mask. This action disclosed bright chestnut hair, inclined to curl, and a white, youthful face. Along the lower line of cheek and jaw was a clear demarcation, where the brown of tanned skin met the white that had been hidden from the sun.\n\n\"Oh, he's only a boy!... What! Can he be Oldring's Masked Rider?\"\n\nThe boy showed signs of returning consciousness. He stirred; his lips moved; a small brown hand clenched in his blouse.\n\nVenters knelt with a gathering horror of his deed. His bullet had entered the rider's right breast, high up to the shoulder. With hands that shook, Venters untied a black scarf and ripped open the blood-wet blouse.\n\nFirst he saw a gaping hole, dark red against a whiteness of skin, from which welled a slender red stream. Then the graceful, beautiful swell of a woman's breast!\n\n\"A woman!\" he cried. \"A girl!... I've killed a girl!\"\n\nShe suddenly opened eyes that transfixed Venters. They were fathomless blue. Consciousness of death was there, a blended terror and pain, but no consciousness of sight. She did not see Venters. She stared into the unknown.\n\nThen came a spasm of vitality. She writhed in a torture of reviving strength, and in her convulsions she almost tore from Ventner's grasp. Slowly she relaxed and sank partly back. The ungloved hand sought the wound, and pressed so hard that her wrist half buried itself in her bosom. Blood trickled between her spread fingers. And she looked at Venters with eyes that saw him.\n\nHe cursed himself and the unerring aim of which he had been so proud. He had seen that look in the eyes of a crippled antelope which he was about to finish with his knife. But in her it had infinitely more\u2014a revelation of mortal spirit. The instinctive bringing to life was there, and the divining helplessness and the terrible accusation of the stricken.\n\n\"Forgive me! I didn't know!\" burst out Venters.\n\n\"You shot me\u2014you've killed me!\" she whispered, in panting gasps. Upon her lips appeared a fluttering, bloody froth. By that Venters knew the air in her lungs was mixing with blood. \"Oh, I knew\u2014it would\u2014come\u2014some day!... Oh, the burn!... Hold me\u2014I'm sinking\u2014it's all dark... Ah, God!... Mercy\u2014\"\n\nHer rigidity loosened in one long quiver and she lay back limp, still, white as snow, with closed eyes.\n\nVenters thought then that she died. But the faint pulsation of her breast assured him that life yet lingered. Death seemed only a matter of moments, for the bullet had gone clear through her. Nevertheless, he tore sageleaves from a bush, and, pressing them tightly over her wounds, he bound the black scarf round her shoulder, tying it securely under her arm. Then he closed the blouse, hiding from his sight that blood-stained, accusing breast.\n\n\"What\u2014now?\" he questioned, with flying mind. \"I must get out of here. She's dying\u2014but I can't leave her.\"\n\nHe rapidly surveyed the sage to the north and made out no animate object. Then he picked up the girl's sombrero and the mask. This time the mask gave him as great a shock as when he first removed it from her face. For in the woman he had forgotten the rustler, and this black strip of felt-cloth established the identity of Oldring's Masked Rider. Venters had solved the mystery. He slipped his rifle under her, and, lifting her carefully upon it, he began to retrace his steps. The dog trailed in his shadow. And the horse, that had stood drooping by, followed without a call. Venters chose the deepest tufts of grass and clumps of sage on his return. From time to time he glanced over his shoulder. He did not rest. His concern was to avoid jarring the girl and to hide his trail. Gaining the narrow canyon, he turned and held close to the wall till he reached his hiding-place. When he entered the dense thicket of oaks he was hard put to it to force a way through. But he held his burden almost upright, and by slipping side wise and bending the saplings he got in. Through sage and grass he hurried to the grove of silver spruces.\n\nHe laid the girl down, almost fearing to look at her. Though marble pale and cold, she was living. Venters then appreciated the tax that long carry had been to his strength. He sat down to rest. Whitie sniffed at the pale girl and whined and crept to Venters's feet. Ring lapped the water in the runway of the spring.\n\nPresently Venters went out to the opening, caught the horse and, leading him through the thicket, unsaddled him and tied him with a long halter. Wrangle left his browsing long enough to whinny and toss his head. Venters felt that he could not rest easily till he had secured the other rustler's horse; so, taking his rifle and calling for Ring, he set out. Swiftly yet watchfully he made his way through the canyon to the oval and out to the cattle trail. What few tracks might have betrayed him he obliterated, so only an expert tracker could have trailed him. Then, with many a wary backward glance across the sage, he started to round up the rustler's horse. This was unexpectedly easy. He led the horse to lower ground, out of sight from the opposite side of the oval along the shadowy western wall, and so on into his canyon and secluded camp.\n\nThe girl's eyes were open; a feverish spot burned in her cheeks she moaned something unintelligible to Venters, but he took the movement of her lips to mean that she wanted water. Lifting her head, he tipped the canteen to her lips. After that she again lapsed into unconsciousness or a weakness which was its counterpart. Venters noted, however, that the burning flush had faded into the former pallor.\n\nThe sun set behind the high canyon rim, and a cool shade darkened the walls. Venters fed the dogs and put a halter on the dead rustlers horse. He allowed Wrangle to browse free. This done, he cut spruce boughs and made a lean-to for the girl. Then, gently lifting her upon a blanket, he folded the sides over her. The other blanket he wrapped about his shoulders and found a comfortable seat against a spruce-tree that upheld the little shack. Ring and Whitie lay near at hand, one asleep, the other watchful.\n\nVenters dreaded the night's vigil. At night his mind was active, and this time he had to watch and think and feel beside a dying girl whom he had all but murdered. A thousand excuses he invented for himself, yet not one made any difference in his act or his self-reproach.\n\nIt seemed to him that when night fell black he could see her white face so much more plainly.\n\n\"She'll go, presently,\" he said, \"and be out of agony\u2014thank God!\"\n\nEvery little while certainty of her death came to him with a shock; and then he would bend over and lay his ear on her breast. Her heart still beat.\n\nThe early night blackness cleared to the cold starlight. The horses were not moving, and no sound disturbed the deathly silence of the canyon.\n\n\"I'll bury her here,\" thought Venters, \"and let her grave be as much a mystery as her life was.\"\n\nFor the girl's few words, the look of her eyes, the prayer, had strangely touched Venters.\n\n\"She was only a girl,\" he soliloquized. \"What was she to Oldring? Rustlers don't have wives nor sisters nor daughters. She was bad\u2014that's all. But somehow... well, she may not have willingly become the companion of rustlers. That prayer of hers to God for mercy!... Life is strange and cruel. I wonder if other members of Oldring's gang are women? Likely enough. But what was his game? Oldring's Mask Rider! A name to make villagers hide and lock their doors. A name credited with a dozen murders, a hundred forays, and a thousand stealings of cattle. What part did the girl have in this? It may have served Oldring to create mystery.\"\n\nHours passed. The white stars moved across the narrow strip of dark-blue sky above. The silence awoke to the low hum of insects. Venters watched the immovable white face, and as he watched, hour by hour waiting for death, the infamy of her passed from his mind. He thought only of the sadness, the truth of the moment. Whoever she was\u2014whatever she had done\u2014she was young and she was dying.\n\nThe after-part of the night wore on interminably. The starlight failed and the gloom blackened to the darkest hour. \"She'll die at the gray of dawn,\" muttered Venters, remembering some old woman's fancy. The blackness paled to gray, and the gray lightened and day peeped over the eastern rim. Venters listened at the breast of the girl. She still lived. Did he only imagine that her heart beat stronger, ever so slightly, but stronger? He pressed his ear closer to her breast. And he rose with his own pulse quickening.\n\n\"If she doesn't die soon\u2014she's got a chance\u2014the barest chance to live,\" he said.\n\nHe wondered if the internal bleeding had ceased. There was no more film of blood upon her lips. But no corpse could have been whiter. Opening her blouse, he untied the scarf, and carefully picked away the sage leaves from the wound in her shoulder. It had closed. Lifting her lightly, he ascertained that the same was true of the hole where the bullet had come out. He reflected on the fact that clean wounds closed quickly in the healing upland air. He recalled instances of riders who had been cut and shot apparently to fatal issues; yet the blood had clotted, the wounds closed, and they had recovered. He had no way to tell if internal hemorrhage still went on, but he believed that it had stopped. Otherwise she would surely not have lived so long. He marked the entrance of the bullet, and concluded that it had just touched the upper lobe of her lung. Perhaps the wound in the lung had also closed. As he began to wash the blood stains from her breast and carefully rebandage the wound, he was vaguely conscious of a strange, grave happiness in the thought that she might live.\n\nBroad daylight and a hint of sunshine high on the cliff-rim to the west brought him to consideration of what he had better do. And while busy with his few camp tasks he revolved the thing in his mind. It would not be wise for him to remain long in his present hiding-place. And if he intended to follow the cattle trail and try to find the rustlers he had better make a move at once. For he knew that rustlers, being riders, would not make much of a day's or night's absence from camp for one or two of their number; but when the missing ones failed to show up in reasonable time there would be a search. And Venters was afraid of that.\n\n\"A good tracker could trail me,\" he muttered. \"And I'd be cornered here. Let's see. Rustlers are a lazy set when they're not on the ride. I'll risk it. Then I'll change my hiding-place.\"\n\nHe carefully cleaned and reloaded his guns. When he rose to go he bent a long glance down upon the unconscious girl. Then ordering Whitie and Ring to keep guard, he left the camp.\n\nThe safest cover lay close under the wall of the canyon, and here through the dense thickets Venters made his slow, listening advance toward the oval. Upon gaining the wide opening he decided to cross it and follow the left wall till he came to the cattle trail. He scanned the oval as keenly as if hunting for antelope. Then, stooping, he stole from one cover to another, taking advantage of rocks and bunches of sage, until he had reached the thickets under the opposite wall. Once there, he exercised extreme caution in his surveys of the ground ahead, but increased his speed when moving. Dodging from bush to bush, he passed the mouths of two canyons, and in the entrance of a third canyon he crossed a wash of swift clear water, to come abruptly upon the cattle trail.\n\nIt followed the low bank of the wash, and, keeping it in sight, Venters hugged the line of sage and thicket. Like the curves of a serpent the canyon wound for a mile or more and then opened into a valley. Patches of red showed clear against the purple of sage, and farther out on the level dotted strings of red led away to the wall of rock.\n\n\"Ha, the red herd!\" exclaimed Venters.\n\nThen dots of white and black told him there were cattle of other colors in this inclosed valley. Oldring, the rustler, was also a rancher. Venters's calculating eye took count of stock that outnumbered the red herd.\n\n\"What a range!\" went on Venters. \"Water and grass enough for fifty thousand head, and no riders needed!\"\n\nAfter his first burst of surprise and rapid calculation Venters lost no time there, but slunk again into the sage on his back trail. With the discovery of Oldring's hidden cattle-range had come enlightenment on several problems. Here the rustler kept his stock, here was Jane Withersteen's red herd; here were the few cattle that had disappeared from the Cottonwoods slopes during the last two years. Until Oldring had driven the red herd his thefts of cattle for that time had not been more than enough to supply meat for his men. Of late no drives had been reported from Sterling or the villages north. And Venters knew that the riders had wondered at Oldring's inactivity in that particular field. He and his band had been active enough in their visits to Glaze and Cottonwoods; they always had gold; but of late the amount gambled away and drunk and thrown away in the villages had given rise to much conjecture. Oldring's more frequent visits had resulted in new saloons, and where there had formerly been one raid or shooting fray in the little hamlets there were now many. Perhaps Oldring had another range farther on up the pass, and from there drove the cattle to distant Utah towns where he was little known But Venters came finally to doubt this. And, from what he had learned in the last few days, a belief began to form in Venters's mind that Oldring's intimidations of the villages and the mystery of the Masked Rider, with his alleged evil deeds, and the fierce resistance offered any trailing riders, and the rustling of cattle\u2014these things were only the craft of the rustler-chief to conceal his real life and purpose and work in Deception Pass.\n\nAnd like a scouting Indian Venters crawled through the sage of the oval valley, crossed trail after trail on the north side, and at last entered the canyon out of which headed the cattle trail, and into which he had watched the rustlers disappear.\n\nIf he had used caution before, now he strained every nerve to force himself to creeping stealth and to sensitiveness of ear. He crawled along so hidden that he could not use his eyes except to aid himself in the toilsome progress through the brakes and ruins of cliff-wall. Yet from time to time, as he rested, he saw the massive red walls growing higher and wilder, more looming and broken. He made note of the fact that he was turning and climbing. The sage and thickets of oak and brakes of alder gave place to pinyon pine growing out of rocky soil. Suddenly a low, dull murmur assailed his ears. At first he thought it was thunder, then the slipping of a weathered slope of rock. But it was incessant, and as he progressed it filled out deeper and from a murmur changed into a soft roar.\n\n\"Falling water,\" he said. \"There's volume to that. I wonder if it's the stream I lost.\"\n\nThe roar bothered him, for he could hear nothing else. Likewise, however, no rustlers could hear him. Emboldened by this and sure that nothing but a bird could see him, he arose from his hands and knees to hurry on. An opening in the pinyons warned him that he was nearing the height of slope.\n\nHe gained it, and dropped low with a burst of astonishment. Before him stretched a short canyon with rounded stone floor bare of grass or sage or tree, and with curved, shelving walls. A broad rippling stream flowed toward him, and at the back of the canyon waterfall burst from a wide rent in the cliff, and, bounding down in two green steps, spread into a long white sheet.\n\nIf Venters had not been indubitably certain that he had entered the right canyon his astonishment would not have been so great. There had been no breaks in the walls, no side canyons entering this one where the rustlers' tracks and the cattle trail had guided him, and, therefore, he could not be wrong. But here the canyon ended, and presumably the trails also.\n\n\"That cattle trail headed out of here,\" Venters kept saying to himself. \"It headed out. Now what I want to know is how on earth did cattle ever get in here?\"\n\nIf he could be sure of anything it was of the careful scrutiny he had given that cattle track, every hoofmark of which headed straight west. He was now looking east at an immense round boxed corner of canyon down which tumbled a thin, white veil of water, scarcely twenty yards wide. Somehow, somewhere, his calculations had gone wrong. For the first time in years he found himself doubting his rider's skill in finding tracks, and his memory of what he had actually seen. In his anxiety to keep under cover he must have lost himself in this offshoot of Deception Pass, and thereby in some unaccountable manner, missed the canyon with the trails. There was nothing else for him to think. Rustlers could not fly, nor cattle jump down thousand-foot precipices. He was only proving what the sage-riders had long said of this labyrinthine system of deceitful canyons and valleys\u2014trails led down into Deception Pass, but no rider had ever followed them.\n\nOn a sudden he heard above the soft roar of the waterfall an unusual sound that he could not define. He dropped flat behind a stone and listened. From the direction he had come swelled something that resembled a strange muffled pounding and splashing and ringing. Despite his nerve the chill sweat began to dampen his forehead. What might not be possible in this stonewalled maze of mystery? The unnatural sound passed beyond him as he lay gripping his rifle and fighting for coolness. Then from the open came the sound, now distinct and different. Venters recognized a hobble-bell of a horse, and the cracking of iron on submerged stones, and the hollow splash of hoofs in water.\n\nRelief surged over him. His mind caught again at realities, and curiosity prompted him to peep from behind the rock.\n\nIn the middle of the stream waded a long string of packed burros driven by three superbly mounted men. Had Venters met these dark-clothed, dark-visaged, heavily armed men anywhere in Utah, let alone in this robbers' retreat, he would have recognized them as rustlers. The discerning eye of a rider saw the signs of a long, arduous trip. These men were packing in supplies from one of the northern villages. They were tired, and their horses were almost played out, and the burros plodded on, after the manner of their kind when exhausted, faithful and patient, but as if every weary, splashing, slipping step would be their last.\n\nAll this Venters noted in one glance. After that he watched with a thrilling eagerness. Straight at the waterfall the rustlers drove the burros, and straight through the middle, where the water spread into a fleecy, thin film like dissolving smoke. Following closely, the rustlers rode into this white mist, showing in bold black relief for an instant, and then they vanished.\n\nVenters drew a full breath that rushed out in brief and sudden utterance.\n\n\"Good Heaven! Of all the holes for a rustler!... There's a cavern under that waterfall, and a passageway leading out to a canyon beyond. Oldring hides in there. He needs only to guard a trail leading down from the sage-flat above. Little danger of this outlet to the pass being discovered. I stumbled on it by luck, after I had given up. And now I know the truth of what puzzled me most\u2014why that cattle trail was wet!\"\n\nHe wheeled and ran down the slope, and out to the level of the sage-brush. Returning, he had no time to spare, only now and then, between dashes, a moment when he stopped to cast sharp eyes ahead. The abundant grass left no trace of his trail. Short work he made of the distance to the circle of canyons. He doubted that he would ever see it again; he knew he never wanted to; yet he looked at the red corners and towers with the eyes of a rider picturing landmarks never to be forgotten.\n\nHere he spent a panting moment in a slow-circling gaze of the sage-oval and the gaps between the bluffs. Nothing stirred except the gentle wave of the tips of the brush. Then he pressed on past the mouths of several canyons and over ground new to him, now close under the eastern wall. This latter part proved to be easy traveling, well screened from possible observation from the north and west, and he soon covered it and felt safer in the deepening shade of his own canyon. Then the huge, notched bulge of red rim loomed over him, a mark by which he knew again the deep cove where his camp lay hidden. As he penetrated the thicket, safe again for the present, his thoughts reverted to the girl he had left there. The afternoon had far advanced. How would he find her? He ran into camp, frightening the dogs.\n\nThe girl lay with wide-open, dark eyes, and they dilated when he knelt beside her. The flush of fever shone in her cheeks. He lifted her and held water to her dry lips, and felt an inexplicable sense of lightness as he saw her swallow in a slow, choking gulp. Gently he laid her back.\n\n\"Who\u2014are\u2014you?\" she whispered, haltingly.\n\n\"I'm the man who shot you,\" he replied.\n\n\"You'll\u2014not\u2014kill me\u2014now?\"\n\n\"No, no.\"\n\n\"What\u2014will\u2014you\u2014do\u2014with me?\"\n\n\"When you get better\u2014strong enough\u2014I'll take you back to the canyon where the rustlers ride through the waterfall.\"\n\nAs with a faint shadow from a flitting wing overhead, the marble whiteness of her face seemed to change.\n\n\"Don't\u2014take\u2014me\u2014back\u2014there!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Chapter VI. The Mill-Wheel of Steers\n\nMeantime, at the ranch, when Judkins's news had sent Venters on the trail of the rustlers, Jane Withersteen led the injured man to her house and with skilled fingers dressed the gunshot wound in his arm.\n\n\"Judkins, what do you think happened to my riders?\"\n\n\"I\u2014I d rather not say,\" he replied.\n\n\"Tell me. Whatever you'll tell me I'll keep to myself. I'm beginning to worry about more than the loss of a herd of cattle. Venters hinted of\u2014but tell me, Judkins.\"\n\n\"Well, Miss Withersteen, I think as Venters thinks\u2014your riders have been called in.\"\n\n\"Judkins!... By whom?\"\n\n\"You know who handles the reins of your Mormon riders.\"\n\n\"Do you dare insinuate that my churchmen have ordered in my riders?\"\n\n\"I ain't insinuatin' nothin', Miss Withersteen,\" answered Judkins, with spirit. \"I know what I'm talking about. I didn't want to tell you.\"\n\n\"Oh, I can't believe that! I'll not believe it! Would Tull leave my herds at the mercy of rustlers and wolves just because\u2014because\u2014? No, no! It's unbelievable.\"\n\n\"Yes, thet particular thing's onheard of around Cottonwoods But, beggin' pardon, Miss Withersteen, there never was any other rich Mormon woman here on the border, let alone one thet's taken the bit between her teeth.\"\n\nThat was a bold thing for the reserved Judkins to say, but it did not anger her. This rider's crude hint of her spirit gave her a glimpse of what others might think. Humility and obedience had been hers always. But had she taken the bit between her teeth? Still she wavered. And then, with quick spurt of warm blood along her veins, she thought of Black Star when he got the bit fast between his iron jaws and ran wild in the sage. If she ever started to run! Jane smothered the glow and burn within her, ashamed of a passion for freedom that opposed her duty.\n\n\"Judkins, go to the village,\" she said, \"and when you have learned anything definite about my riders please come to me at once.\"\n\nWhen he had gone Jane resolutely applied her mind to a number of tasks that of late had been neglected. Her father had trained her in the management of a hundred employees and the working of gardens and fields; and to keep record of the movements of cattle and riders. And beside the many duties she had added to this work was one of extreme delicacy, such as required all her tact and ingenuity. It was an unobtrusive, almost secret aid which she rendered to the Gentile families of the village. Though Jane Withersteen never admitted so to herself, it amounted to no less than a system of charity. But for her invention of numberless kinds of employment, for which there was no actual need, these families of Gentiles, who had failed in a Mormon community, would have starved.\n\nIn aiding these poor people Jane thought she deceived her keen churchmen, but it was a kind of deceit for which she did not pray to be forgiven. Equally as difficult was the task of deceiving the Gentiles, for they were as proud as they were poor. It had been a great grief to her to discover how these people hated her people; and it had been a source of great joy that through her they had come to soften in hatred. At any time this work called for a clearness of mind that precluded anxiety and worry; but under the present circumstances it required all her vigor and obstinate tenacity to pin her attention upon her task.\n\nSunset came, bringing with the end of her labor a patient calmness and power to wait that had not been hers earlier in the day. She expected Judkins, but he did not appear. Her house was always quiet; to-night, however, it seemed unusually so. At supper her women served her with a silent assiduity; it spoke what their sealed lips could not utter\u2014the sympathy of Mormon women. Jerd came to her with the key of the great door of the stone stable, and to make his daily report about the horses. One of his daily duties was to give Black Star and Night and the other racers a ten-mile run. This day it had been omitted, and the boy grew confused in explanations that she had not asked for. She did inquire if he would return on the morrow, and Jerd, in mingled surprise and relief, assured her he would always work for her. Jane missed the rattle and trot, canter and gallop of the incoming riders on the hard trails. Dusk shaded the grove where she walked; the birds ceased singing; the wind sighed through the leaves of the cottonwoods, and the running water murmured down its stone-bedded channel. The glimmering of the first star was like the peace and beauty of the night. Her faith welled up in her heart and said that all would soon be right in her little world. She pictured Venters about his lonely camp-fire sitting between his faithful dogs. She prayed for his safety, for the success of his undertaking.\n\nEarly the next morning one of Jane's women brought in word that Judkins wished to speak to her. She hurried out, and in her surprise to see him armed with rifle and revolver, she forgot her intention to inquire about his wound.\n\n\"Judkins! Those guns? You never carried guns.\"\n\n\"It's high time, Miss Withersteen,\" he replied. \"Will you come into the grove? It ain't jest exactly safe for me to be seen here.\"\n\nShe walked with him into the shade of the cottonwoods.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, I went to my mother's house last night. While there, some one knocked, an' a man asked for me. I went to the door. He wore a mask. He said I'd better not ride any more for Jane Withersteen. His voice was hoarse an' strange, disguised I reckon, like his face. He said no more, an' ran off in the dark.\"\n\n\"Did you know who he was?\" asked Jane, in a low voice.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nJane did not ask to know; she did not want to know; she feared to know. All her calmness fled at a single thought.\n\n\"Thet's why I'm packin' guns,\" went on Judkins. \"For I'll never quit ridin' for you, Miss Withersteen, till you let me go.\"\n\n\"Judkins, do you want to leave me?\"\n\n\"Do I look thet way? Give me a hoss\u2014a fast hoss, an' send me out on the sage.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you, Judkins! You're more faithful than my own people. I ought not accept your loyalty\u2014you might suffer more through it. But what in the world can I do? My head whirls. The wrong to Venters\u2014the stolen herd\u2014these masks, threats, this coil in the dark! I can't understand! But I feel something dark and terrible closing in around me.\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, it's all simple enough,\" said Judkins, earnestly. \"Now please listen\u2014an' beggin' your pardon\u2014jest turn thet deaf Mormon ear aside, an' let me talk clear an' plain in the other. I went around to the saloons an' the stores an' the loafin' places yesterday. All your riders are in. There's talk of a vigilance band organized to hunt down rustlers. They call themselves 'The Riders.' Thet's the report\u2014thet's the reason given for your riders leavin' you. Strange thet only a few riders of other ranchers joined the band! An' Tull's man, Jerry Card\u2014he's the leader. I seen him en' his hoss. He 'ain't been to Glaze. I'm not easy to fool on the looks of a hoss thet's traveled the sage. Tull an' Jerry didn't ride to Glaze!... Well, I met Blake en' Dorn, both good friends of mine, usually, as far as their Mormon lights will let 'em go. But these fellers couldn't fool me, an' they didn't try very hard. I asked them, straight out like a man, why they left you like thet. I didn't forget to mention how you nursed Blake's poor old mother when she was sick, an' how good you was to Dorn's kids. They looked ashamed, Miss Withersteen. An' they jest froze up\u2014thet dark set look thet makes them strange an' different to me. But I could tell the difference between thet first natural twinge of conscience an' the later look of some secret thing. An' the difference I caught was thet they couldn't help themselves. They hadn't no say in the matter. They looked as if their bein' unfaithful to you was bein' faithful to a higher duty. An' there's the secret. Why it's as plain as\u2014as sight of my gun here.\"\n\n\"Plain!... My herds to wander in the sage\u2014to be stolen! Jane Withersteen a poor woman! Her head to be brought low and her spirit broken!... Why, Judkins, it's plain enough.\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, let me get what boys I can gather, an' hold the white herd. It's on the slope now, not ten miles out\u2014three thousand head, an' all steers. They're wild, an' likely to stampede at the pop of a jack-rabbit's ears. We'll camp right with them, en' try to hold them.\"\n\n\"Judkins, I'll reward you some day for your service, unless all is taken from me. Get the boys and tell Jerd to give you pick of my horses, except Black Star and Night. But\u2014do not shed blood for my cattle nor heedlessly risk your lives.\"\n\nJane Withersteen rushed to the silence and seclusion of her room, and there could not longer hold back the bursting of her wrath. She went stone-blind in the fury of a passion that had never before showed its power. Lying upon her bed, sightless, voiceless, she was a writhing, living flame. And she tossed there while her fury burned and burned, and finally burned itself out.\n\nThen, weak and spent, she lay thinking, not of the oppression that would break her, but of this new revelation of self. Until the last few days there had been little in her life to rouse passions. Her forefathers had been Vikings, savage chieftains who bore no cross and brooked no hindrance to their will. Her father had inherited that temper; and at times, like antelope fleeing before fire on the slope, his people fled from his red rages. Jane Withersteen realized that the spirit of wrath and war had lain dormant in her. She shrank from black depths hitherto unsuspected. The one thing in man or woman that she scorned above all scorn, and which she could not forgive, was hate. Hate headed a flaming pathway straight to hell. All in a flash, beyond her control there had been in her a birth of fiery hate. And the man who had dragged her peaceful and loving spirit to this degradation was a minister of God's word, an Elder of her church, the counselor of her beloved Bishop.\n\nThe loss of herds and ranges, even of Amber Spring and the Old Stone House, no longer concerned Jane Withersteen, she faced the foremost thought of her life, what she now considered the mightiest problem\u2014the salvation of her soul.\n\nShe knelt by her bedside and prayed; she prayed as she had never prayed in all her life\u2014prayed to be forgiven for her sin to be immune from that dark, hot hate; to love Tull as her minister, though she could not love him as a man; to do her duty by her church and people and those dependent upon her bounty; to hold reverence of God and womanhood inviolate.\n\nWhen Jane Withersteen rose from that storm of wrath and prayer for help she was serene, calm, sure\u2014a changed woman. She would do her duty as she saw it, live her life as her own truth guided her. She might never be able to marry a man of her choice, but she certainly never would become the wife of Tull. Her churchmen might take her cattle and horses, ranges and fields, her corrals and stables, the house of Withersteen and the water that nourished the village of Cottonwoods; but they could not force her to marry Tull, they could not change her decision or break her spirit. Once resigned to further loss, and sure of herself, Jane Withersteen attained a peace of mind that had not been hers for a year. She forgave Tull, and felt a melancholy regret over what she knew he considered duty, irrespective of his personal feeling for her. First of all, Tull, as he was a man, wanted her for himself; and secondly, he hoped to save her and her riches for his church. She did not believe that Tull had been actuated solely by his minister's zeal to save her soul. She doubted her interpretation of one of his dark sayings\u2014that if she were lost to him she might as well be lost to heaven. Jane Withersteen's common sense took arms against the binding limits of her religion; and she doubted that her Bishop, whom she had been taught had direct communication with God\u2014would damn her soul for refusing to marry a Mormon. As for Tull and his churchmen, when they had harassed her, perhaps made her poor, they would find her unchangeable, and then she would get back most of what she had lost. So she reasoned, true at last to her faith in all men, and in their ultimate goodness.\n\nThe clank of iron hoofs upon the stone courtyard drew her hurriedly from her retirement. There, beside his horse, stood Lassiter, his dark apparel and the great black gun-sheaths contrasting singularly with his gentle smile. Jane's active mind took up her interest in him and her half-determined desire to use what charm she had to foil his evident design in visiting Cottonwoods. If she could mitigate his hatred of Mormons, or at least keep him from killing more of them, not only would she be saving her people, but also be leading back this bloodspiller to some semblance of the human.\n\n\"Mornin', ma'am,\" he said, black sombrero in hand.\n\n\"Lassiter I'm not an old woman, or even a madam,\" she replied, with her bright smile. \"If you can't say Miss Withersteen\u2014call me Jane.\"\n\n\"I reckon Jane would be easier. First names are always handy for me.\"\n\n\"Well, use mine, then. Lassiter, I'm glad to see you. I'm in trouble.\"\n\nThen she told him of Judkins's return, of the driving of the red herd, of Venters's departure on Wrangle, and the calling-in of her riders.\n\n\"'Pears to me you're some smilin' an' pretty for a woman with so much trouble,\" he remarked.\n\n\"Lassiter! Are you paying me compliments? But, seriously I've made up my mind not to be miserable. I've lost much, and I'll lose more. Nevertheless, I won't be sour, and I hope I'll never be unhappy\u2014again.\"\n\nLassiter twisted his hat round and round, as was his way, and took his time in replying.\n\n\"Women are strange to me. I got to back-trailin' myself from them long ago. But I'd like a game woman. Might I ask, seein' as how you take this trouble, if you're goin' to fight?\"\n\n\"Fight! How? Even if I would, I haven't a friend except that boy who doesn't dare stay in the village.\"\n\n\"I make bold to say, ma'am\u2014Jane\u2014that there's another, if you want him.\"\n\n\"Lassiter!... Thank you. But how can I accept you as a friend? Think! Why, you'd ride down into the village with those terrible guns and kill my enemies\u2014who are also my churchmen.\"\n\n\"I reckon I might be riled up to jest about that,\" he replied, dryly.\n\nShe held out both hands to him.\n\n\"Lassiter! I'll accept your friendship\u2014be proud of it\u2014return it\u2014if I may keep you from killing another Mormon.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you one thing,\" he said, bluntly, as the gray lightning formed in his eyes. \"You're too good a woman to be sacrificed as you're goin' to be... No, I reckon you an' me can't be friends on such terms.\"\n\nIn her earnestness she stepped closer to him, repelled yet fascinated by the sudden transition of his moods. That he would fight for her was at once horrible and wonderful.\n\n\"You came here to kill a man\u2014the man whom Milly Erne\u2014\"\n\n\"The man who dragged Milly Erne to hell\u2014put it that way!... Jane Withersteen, yes, that's why I came here. I'd tell so much to no other livin' soul... There're things such a woman as you'd never dream of\u2014so don't mention her again. Not till you tell me the name of the man!\"\n\n\"Tell you! I? Never!\"\n\n\"I reckon you will. An' I'll never ask you. I'm a man of strange beliefs an' ways of thinkin', an' I seem to see into the future an' feel things hard to explain. The trail I've been followin' for so many years was twisted en' tangled, but it's straightenin' out now. An', Jane Withersteen, you crossed it long ago to ease poor Milly's agony. That, whether you want or not, makes Lassiter your friend. But you cross it now strangely to mean somethin to me\u2014God knows what!\u2014unless by your noble blindness to incite me to greater hatred of Mormon men.\"\n\nJane felt swayed by a strength that far exceeded her own. In a clash of wills with this man she would go to the wall. If she were to influence him it must be wholly through womanly allurement. There was that about Lassiter which commanded her respect. She had abhorred his name; face to face with him, she found she feared only his deeds. His mystic suggestion, his foreshadowing of something that she was to mean to him, pierced deep into her mind. She believed fate had thrown in her way the lover or husband of Milly Erne. She believed that through her an evil man might be reclaimed. His allusion to what he called her blindness terrified her. Such a mistaken idea of his might unleash the bitter, fatal mood she sensed in him. At any cost she must placate this man; she knew the die was cast, and that if Lassiter did not soften to a woman's grace and beauty and wiles, then it would be because she could not make him.\n\n\"I reckon you'll hear no more such talk from me,\" Lassiter went on, presently. \"Now, Miss Jane, I rode in to tell you that your herd of white steers is down on the slope behind them big ridges. An' I seen somethin' goin' on that'd be mighty interestin' to you, if you could see it. Have you a field-glass?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have two glasses. I'll get them and ride out with you. Wait, Lassiter, please,\" she said, and hurried within. Sending word to Jerd to saddle Black Star and fetch him to the court, she then went to her room and changed to the riding-clothes she always donned when going into the sage. In this male attire her mirror showed her a jaunty, handsome rider. If she expected some little need of admiration from Lassiter, she had no cause for disappointment. The gentle smile that she liked, which made of him another person, slowly overspread his face.\n\n\"If I didn't take you for a boy!\" he exclaimed. \"It's powerful queer what difference clothes make. Now I've been some scared of your dignity, like when the other night you was all in white but in this rig\u2014\"\n\nBlack Star came pounding into the court, dragging Jerd half off his feet, and he whistled at Lassiter's black. But at sight of Jane all his defiant lines seemed to soften, and with tosses of his beautiful head he whipped his bridle.\n\n\"Down, Black Star, down,\" said Jane.\n\nHe dropped his head, and, slowly lengthening, he bent one foreleg, then the other, and sank to his knees. Jane slipped her left foot in the stirrup, swung lightly into the saddle, and Black Star rose with a ringing stamp. It was not easy for Jane to hold him to a canter through the grove, and like the wind he broke when he saw the sage. Jane let him have a couple of miles of free running on the open trail, and then she coaxed him in and waited for her companion. Lassiter was not long in catching up, and presently they were riding side by side. It reminded her how she used to ride with Venters. Where was he now? She gazed far down the slope to the curved purple lines of Deception Pass and involuntarily shut her eyes with a trembling stir of nameless fear.\n\n\"We'll turn off here,\" Lassiter said, \"en' take to the sage a mile or so. The white herd is behind them big ridges.\"\n\n\"What are you going to show me?\" asked Jane. \"I'm prepared\u2014don't be afraid.\"\n\nHe smiled as if he meant that bad news came swiftly enough without being presaged by speech.\n\nWhen they reached the lee of a rolling ridge Lassiter dismounted, motioning to her to do likewise. They left the horses standing, bridles down. Then Lassiter, carrying the field-glasses began to lead the way up the slow rise of ground. Upon nearing the summit he halted her with a gesture.\n\n\"I reckon we'd see more if we didn't show ourselves against the sky,\" he said. \"I was here less than an hour ago. Then the herd was seven or eight miles south, an' if they ain't bolted yet\u2014\"\n\n\"Lassiter!... Bolted?\"\n\n\"That's what I said. Now let's see.\"\n\nJane climbed a few more paces behind him and then peeped over the ridge. Just beyond began a shallow swale that deepened and widened into a valley and then swung to the left. Following the undulating sweep of sage, Jane saw the straggling lines and then the great body of the white herd. She knew enough about steers, even at a distance of four or five miles, to realize that something was in the wind. Bringing her field-glass into use, she moved it slowly from left to right, which action swept the whole herd into range. The stragglers were restless; the more compactly massed steers were browsing. Jane brought the glass back to the big sentinels of the herd, and she saw them trot with quick steps, stop short and toss wide horns, look everywhere, and then trot in another direction.\n\n\"Judkins hasn't been able to get his boys together yet,\" said Jane. \"But he'll be there soon. I hope not too late. Lassiter, what's frightening those big leaders?\"\n\n\"Nothin' jest on the minute,\" replied Lassiter. \"Them steers are quietin' down. They've been scared, but not bad yet. I reckon the whole herd has moved a few miles this way since I was here.\"\n\n\"They didn't browse that distance\u2014not in less than an hour. Cattle aren't sheep.\"\n\n\"No, they jest run it, en' that looks bad.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, what frightened them?\" repeated Jane, impatiently.\n\n\"Put down your glass. You'll see at first better with a naked eye. Now look along them ridges on the other side of the herd, the ridges where the sun shines bright on the sage... That's right. Now look en' look hard en' wait.\"\n\nLong-drawn moments of straining sight rewarded Jane with nothing save the low, purple rim of ridge and the shimmering sage.\n\n\"It's begun again!\" whispered Lassiter, and he gripped her arm. \"Watch... There, did you see that?\"\n\n\"No, no. Tell me what to look for?\"\n\n\"A white flash\u2014a kind of pin-point of quick light\u2014a gleam as from sun shinin' on somethin' white.\"\n\nSuddenly Jane's concentrated gaze caught a fleeting glint. Quickly she brought her glass to bear on the spot. Again the purple sage, magnified in color and size and wave, for long moments irritated her with its monotony. Then from out of the sage on the ridge flew up a broad, white object, flashed in the sunlight and vanished. Like magic it was, and bewildered Jane.\n\n\"What on earth is that?\"\n\n\"I reckon there's some one behind that ridge throwin' up a sheet or a white blanket to reflect the sunshine.\"\n\n\"Why?\" queried Jane, more bewildered than ever.\n\n\"To stampede the herd,\" replied Lassiter, and his teeth clicked.\n\n\"Ah!\" She made a fierce, passionate movement, clutched the glass tightly, shook as with the passing of a spasm, and then dropped her head. Presently she raised it to greet Lassiter with something like a smile. \"My righteous brethren are at work again,\" she said, in scorn. She had stifled the leap of her wrath, but for perhaps the first time in her life a bitter derision curled her lips. Lassiter's cool gray eyes seemed to pierce her. \"I said I was prepared for anything; but that was hardly true. But why would they\u2014anybody stampede my cattle?\"\n\n\"That's a Mormon's godly way of bringin' a woman to her knees.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, I'll die before I ever bend my knees. I might be led I won't be driven. Do you expect the herd to bolt?\"\n\n\"I don't like the looks of them big steers. But you can never tell. Cattle sometimes stampede as easily as buffalo. Any little flash or move will start them. A rider gettin' down an' walkin' toward them sometimes will make them jump an' fly. Then again nothin' seems to scare them. But I reckon that white flare will do the biz. It's a new one on me, an' I've seen some ridin' an' rustlin'. It jest takes one of them God-fearin' Mormons to think of devilish tricks.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, might not this trick be done by Oldring's men?\" asked Jane, ever grasping at straws.\n\n\"It might be, but it ain't,\" replied Lassiter. \"Oldring's an honest thief. He don't skulk behind ridges to scatter your cattle to the four winds. He rides down on you, an' if you don't like it you can throw a gun.\"\n\nJane bit her tongue to refrain from championing men who at the very moment were proving to her that they were little and mean compared even with rustlers.\n\n\"Look!... Jane, them leadin' steers have bolted. They're drawin' the stragglers, an' that'll pull the whole herd.\"\n\nJane was not quick enough to catch the details called out by Lassiter, but she saw the line of cattle lengthening. Then, like a stream of white bees pouring from a huge swarm, the steers stretched out from the main body. In a few moments, with astonishing rapidity, the whole herd got into motion. A faint roar of trampling hoofs came to Jane's ears, and gradually swelled; low, rolling clouds of dust began to rise above the sage.\n\n\"It's a stampede, an' a hummer,\" said Lassiter.\n\n\"Oh, Lassiter! The herd's running with the valley! It leads into the canyon! There's a straight jump-off!\"\n\n\"I reckon they'll run into it, too. But that's a good many miles yet. An', Jane, this valley swings round almost north before it goes east. That stampede will pass within a mile of us.\"\n\nThe long, white, bobbing line of steers streaked swiftly through the sage, and a funnel-shaped dust-cloud arose at a low angle. A dull rumbling filled Jane's ears.\n\n\"I'm thinkin' of millin' that herd,\" said Lassiter. His gray glance swept up the slope to the west. \"There's some specks an' dust way off toward the village. Mebbe that's Judkins an' his boys. It ain't likely he'll get here in time to help. You'd better hold Black Star here on this high ridge.\"\n\nHe ran to his horse and, throwing off saddle-bags and tightening the cinches, he leaped astride and galloped straight down across the valley.\n\nJane went for Black Star and, leading him to the summit of the ridge, she mounted and faced the valley with excitement and expectancy. She had heard of milling stampeded cattle, and knew it was a feat accomplished by only the most daring riders.\n\nThe white herd was now strung out in a line two miles long. The dull rumble of thousands of hoofs deepened into continuous low thunder, and as the steers swept swiftly closer the thunder became a heavy roll. Lassiter crossed in a few moments the level of the valley to the eastern rise of ground and there waited the coming of the herd. Presently, as the head of the white line reached a point opposite to where Jane stood, Lassiter spurred his black into a run.\n\nJane saw him take a position on the off side of the leaders of the stampede, and there he rode. It was like a race. They swept on down the valley, and when the end of the white line neared Lassiter's first stand the head had begun to swing round to the west. It swung slowly and stubbornly, yet surely, and gradually assumed a long, beautiful curve of moving white. To Jane's amaze she saw the leaders swinging, turning till they headed back toward her and up the valley. Out to the right of these wild plunging steers ran Lassiter's black, and Jane's keen eye appreciated the fleet stride and sure-footedness of the blind horse. Then it seemed that the herd moved in a great curve, a huge half-moon with the points of head and tail almost opposite, and a mile apart But Lassiter relentlessly crowded the leaders, sheering them to the left, turning them little by little. And the dust-blinded wild followers plunged on madly in the tracks of their leaders. This ever-moving, ever-changing curve of steers rolled toward Jane and when below her, scarce half a mile, it began to narrow and close into a circle. Lassiter had ridden parallel with her position, turned toward her, then aside, and now he was riding directly away from her, all the time pushing the head of that bobbing line inward.\n\nIt was then that Jane, suddenly understanding Lassiter's feat stared and gasped at the riding of this intrepid man. His horse was fleet and tireless, but blind. He had pushed the leaders around and around till they were about to turn in on the inner side of the end of that line of steers. The leaders were already running in a circle; the end of the herd was still running almost straight. But soon they would be wheeling. Then, when Lassiter had the circle formed, how would he escape? With Jane Withersteen prayer was as ready as praise; and she prayed for this man's safety. A circle of dust began to collect. Dimly, as through a yellow veil, Jane saw Lassiter press the leaders inward to close the gap in the sage. She lost sight of him in the dust, again she thought she saw the black, riderless now, rear and drag himself and fall. Lassiter had been thrown\u2014lost! Then he reappeared running out of the dust into the sage. He had escaped, and she breathed again.\n\nSpellbound, Jane Withersteen watched this stupendous millwheel of steers. Here was the milling of the herd. The white running circle closed in upon the open space of sage. And the dust circles closed above into a pall. The ground quaked and the incessant thunder of pounding hoofs rolled on. Jane felt deafened, yet she thrilled to a new sound. As the circle of sage lessened the steers began to bawl, and when it closed entirely there came a great upheaval in the center, and a terrible thumping of heads and clicking of horns. Bawling, climbing, goring, the great mass of steers on the inside wrestled in a crashing din, heaved and groaned under the pressure. Then came a deadlock. The inner strife ceased, and the hideous roar and crash. Movement went on in the outer circle, and that, too, gradually stilled. The white herd had come to a stop, and the pall of yellow dust began to drift away on the wind.\n\nJane Withersteen waited on the ridge with full and grateful heart. Lassiter appeared, making his weary way toward her through the sage. And up on the slope Judkins rode into sight with his troop of boys. For the present, at least, the white herd would be looked after.\n\nWhen Lassiter reached her and laid his hand on Black Star's mane, Jane could not find speech.\n\n\"Killed\u2014my\u2014hoss,\" he panted.\n\n\"Oh! I'm sorry,\" cried Jane. \"Lassiter! I know you can't replace him, but I'll give you any one of my racers\u2014Bells, or Night, even Black Star.\"\n\n\"I'll take a fast hoss, Jane, but not one of your favorites,\" he replied. \"Only\u2014will you let me have Black Star now an' ride him over there an' head off them fellers who stampeded the herd?\"\n\nHe pointed to several moving specks of black and puffs of dust in the purple sage.\n\n\"I can head them off with this hoss, an' then\u2014\"\n\n\"Then, Lassiter?\"\n\n\"They'll never stampede no more cattle.\"\n\n\"Oh! No! No!... Lassiter, I won't let you go!\"\n\nBut a flush of fire flamed in her cheeks, and her trembling hands shook Black Star's bridle, and her eyes fell before Lassiter's." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter VII. The Daughter of Withersteen\n\n\"Lassiter, will you be my rider?\" Jane had asked him.\n\n\"I reckon so,\" he had replied.\n\nFew as the words were, Jane knew how infinitely much they implied. She wanted him to take charge of her cattle and horse and ranges, and save them if that were possible. Yet, though she could not have spoken aloud all she meant, she was perfectly honest with herself. Whatever the price to be paid, she must keep Lassiter close to her; she must shield from him the man who had led Milly Erne to Cottonwoods. In her fear she so controlled her mind that she did not whisper this Mormon's name to her own soul, she did not even think it. Besides, beyond this thing she regarded as a sacred obligation thrust upon her, was the need of a helper, of a friend, of a champion in this critical time. If she could rule this gun-man, as Venters had called him, if she could even keep him from shedding blood, what strategy to play his flame and his presence against the game of oppression her churchmen were waging against her? Never would she forget the effect on Tull and his men when Venters shouted Lassiter's name. If she could not wholly control Lassiter, then what she could do might put off the fatal day.\n\nOne of her safe racers was a dark bay, and she called him Bells because of the way he struck his iron shoes on the stones. When Jerd led out this slender, beautifully built horse Lassiter suddenly became all eyes. A rider's love of a thoroughbred shone in them. Round and round Bells he walked, plainly weakening all the time in his determination not to take one of Jane's favorite racers.\n\n\"Lassiter, you're half horse, and Bells sees it already,\" said Jane, laughing. \"Look at his eyes. He likes you. He'll love you, too. How can you resist him? Oh, Lassiter, but Bells can run! It's nip and tuck between him and Wrangle, and only Black Star can beat him. He's too spirited a horse for a woman. Take him. He's yours.\"\n\n\"I jest am weak where a hoss's concerned,\" said Lassiter. \"I'll take him, an' I'll take your orders, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm glad, but never mind the ma'am. Let it still be Jane.\"\n\nFrom that hour, it seemed, Lassiter was always in the saddle, riding early and late, and coincident with his part in Jane's affairs the days assumed their old tranquility. Her intelligence told her this was only the lull before the storm, but her faith would not have it so.\n\nShe resumed her visits to the village, and upon one of these she encountered Tull. He greeted her as he had before any trouble came between them, and she, responsive to peace if not quick to forget, met him halfway with manner almost cheerful. He regretted the loss of her cattle; he assured her that the vigilantes which had been organized would soon rout the rustlers; when that had been accomplished her riders would likely return to her.\n\n\"You've done a headstrong thing to hire this man Lassiter,\" Tull went on, severely. \"He came to Cottonwoods with evil intent.\"\n\n\"I had to have somebody. And perhaps making him my rider may turn out best in the end for the Mormons of Cottonwoods.\"\n\n\"You mean to stay his hand?\"\n\n\"I do\u2014if I can.\"\n\n\"A woman like you can do anything with a man. That would be well, and would atone in some measure for the errors you have made.\"\n\nHe bowed and passed on. Jane resumed her walk with conflicting thoughts. She resented Elder Tull's cold, impassive manner that looked down upon her as one who had incurred his just displeasure. Otherwise he would have been the same calm, dark-browed, impenetrable man she had known for ten years. In fact, except when he had revealed his passion in the matter of the seizing of Venters, she had never dreamed he could be other than the grave, reproving preacher. He stood out now a strange, secretive man. She would have thought better of him if he had picked up the threads of their quarrel where they had parted. Was Tull what he appeared to be? The question flung itself in-voluntarily over Jane Withersteen's inhibitive habit of faith without question. And she refused to answer it. Tull could not fight in the open. Venters had said, Lassiter had said, that her Elder shirked fight and worked in the dark. Just now in this meeting Tull had ignored the fact that he had sued, exhorted, demanded that she marry him. He made no mention of Venters. His manner was that of the minister who had been outraged, but who overlooked the frailties of a woman. Beyond question he seemed unutterably aloof from all knowledge of pressure being brought to bear upon her, absolutely guiltless of any connection with secret power over riders, with night journeys, with rustlers and stampedes of cattle. And that convinced her again of unjust suspicions. But it was convincement through an obstinate faith. She shuddered as she accepted it, and that shudder was the nucleus of a terrible revolt.\n\nJane turned into one of the wide lanes leading from the main street and entered a huge, shady yard. Here were sweet-smelling clover, alfalfa, flowers, and vegetables, all growing in happy confusion. And like these fresh green things were the dozens of babies, tots, toddlers, noisy urchins, laughing girls, a whole multitude of children of one family. For Collier Brandt, the father of all this numerous progeny, was a Mormon with four wives.\n\nThe big house where they lived was old, solid, picturesque the lower part built of logs, the upper of rough clapboards, with vines growing up the outside stone chimneys. There were many wooden-shuttered windows, and one pretentious window of glass proudly curtained in white. As this house had four mistresses, it likewise had four separate sections, not one of which communicated with another, and all had to be entered from the outside.\n\nIn the shade of a wide, low, vine-roofed porch Jane found Brandt's wives entertaining Bishop Dyer. They were motherly women, of comparatively similar ages, and plain-featured, and just at this moment anything but grave. The Bishop was rather tall, of stout build, with iron-gray hair and beard, and eyes of light blue. They were merry now; but Jane had seen them when they were not, and then she feared him as she had feared her father.\n\nThe women flocked around her in welcome.\n\n\"Daughter of Withersteen,\" said the Bishop, gaily, as he took her hand, \"you have not been prodigal of your gracious self of late. A Sabbath without you at service! I shall reprove Elder Tull.\"\n\n\"Bishop, the guilt is mine. I'll come to you and confess,\" Jane replied, lightly; but she felt the undercurrent of her words.\n\n\"Mormon love-making!\" exclaimed the Bishop, rubbing his hands. \"Tull keeps you all to himself.\"\n\n\"No. He is not courting me.\"\n\n\"What? The laggard! If he does not make haste I'll go a-courting myself up to Withersteen House.\"\n\nThere was laughter and further bantering by the Bishop, and then mild talk of village affairs, after which he took his leave, and Jane was left with her friend, Mary Brandt.\n\n\"Jane, you're not yourself. Are you sad about the rustling of the cattle? But you have so many, you are so rich.\"\n\nThen Jane confided in her, telling much, yet holding back her doubts of fear.\n\n\"Oh, why don't you marry Tull and be one of us?\n\n\"But, Mary, I don't love Tull,\" said Jane, stubbornly.\n\n\"I don't blame you for that. But, Jane Withersteen, you've got to choose between the love of man and love of God. Often we Mormon women have to do that. It's not easy. The kind of happiness you want I wanted once. I never got it, nor will you, unless you throw away your soul. We've all watched your affair with Venters in fear and trembling. Some dreadful thing will come of it. You don't want him hanged or shot\u2014or treated worse, as that Gentile boy was treated in Glaze for fooling round a Mormon woman. Marry Tull. It's your duty as a Mormon. You'll feel no rapture as his wife\u2014but think of Heaven! Mormon women don't marry for what they expect on earth. Take up the cross, Jane. Remember your father found Amber Spring, built these old houses, brought Mormons here, and fathered them. You are the daughter of Withersteen!\"\n\nJane left Mary Brandt and went to call upon other friends. They received her with the same glad welcome as had Mary, lavished upon her the pent-up affection of Mormon women, and let her go with her ears ringing of Tull, Venters, Lassiter, of duty to God and glory in Heaven.\n\n\"Verily,\" murmured Jane, \"I don't know myself when, through all this, I remain unchanged\u2014nay, more fixed of purpose.\"\n\nShe returned to the main street and bent her thoughtful steps toward the center of the village. A string of wagons drawn by oxen was lumbering along. These \"sage-freighters,\" as they were called, hauled grain and flour and merchandise from Sterling, and Jane laughed suddenly in the midst of her humility at the thought that they were her property, as was one of the three stores for which they freighted goods. The water that flowed along the path at her feet, and turned into each cottage-yard to nourish garden and orchard, also was hers, no less her private property because she chose to give it free. Yet in this village of Cottonwoods, which her father had founded and which she maintained she was not her own mistress; she was not able to abide by her own choice of a husband. She was the daughter of Withersteen. Suppose she proved it, imperiously! But she quelled that proud temptation at its birth.\n\nNothing could have replaced the affection which the village people had for her; no power could have made her happy as the pleasure her presence gave. As she went on down the street past the stores with their rude platform entrances, and the saloons where tired horses stood with bridles dragging, she was again assured of what was the bread and wine of life to her\u2014that she was loved. Dirty boys playing in the ditch, clerks, teamsters, riders, loungers on the corners, ranchers on dusty horses, little girls running errands, and women hurrying to the stores all looked up at her coming with glad eyes.\n\nJane's various calls and wandering steps at length led her to the Gentile quarter of the village. This was at the extreme southern end, and here some thirty Gentile families lived in huts and shacks and log-cabins and several dilapidated cottages. The fortunes of these inhabitants of Cottonwoods could be read in their abodes. Water they had in abundance, and therefore grass and fruit-trees and patches of alfalfa and vegetable gardens. Some of the men and boys had a few stray cattle, others obtained such intermittent employment as the Mormons reluctantly tendered them. But none of the families was prosperous, many were very poor, and some lived only by Jane Withersteen's beneficence.\n\nAs it made Jane happy to go among her own people, so it saddened her to come in contact with these Gentiles. Yet that was not because she was unwelcome; here she was gratefully received by the women, passionately by the children. But poverty and idleness, with their attendant wretchedness and sorrow, always hurt her. That she could alleviate this distress more now than ever before proved the adage that it was an ill wind that blew nobody good. While her Mormon riders were in her employ she had found few Gentiles who would stay with her, and now she was able to find employment for all the men and boys. No little shock was it to have man after man tell her that he dare not accept her kind offer.\n\n\"It won't do,\" said one Carson, an intelligent man who had seen better days. \"We've had our warning. Plain and to the point! Now there's Judkins, he packs guns, and he can use them, and so can the daredevil boys he's hired. But they've little responsibility. Can we risk having our homes burned in our absence?\"\n\nJane felt the stretching and chilling of the skin of her face as the blood left it.\n\n\"Carson, you and the others rent these houses?\" she asked.\n\n\"You ought to know, Miss Withersteen. Some of them are yours.\"\n\n\"I know?... Carson, I never in my life took a day's labor for rent or a yearling calf or a bunch of grass, let alone gold.\"\n\n\"Bivens, your store-keeper, sees to that.\"\n\n\"Look here, Carson,\" went on Jane, hurriedly, and now her cheeks were burning. \"You and Black and Willet pack your goods and move your families up to my cabins in the grove. They're far more comfortable than these. Then go to work for me. And if aught happens to you there I'll give you money\u2014gold enough to leave Utah!\"\n\nThe man choked and stammered, and then, as tears welled into his eyes, he found the use of his tongue and cursed. No gentle speech could ever have equaled that curse in eloquent expression of what he felt for Jane Withersteen. How strangely his look and tone reminded her of Lassiter!\n\n\"No, it won't do,\" he said, when he had somewhat recovered himself. \"Miss Withersteen, there are things that you don't know, and there's not a soul among us who can tell you.\"\n\n\"I seem to be learning many things, Carson. Well, then, will you let me aid you\u2014say till better times?\"\n\n\"Yes, I will,\" he replied, with his face lighting up. \"I see what it means to you, and you know what it means to me. Thank you! And if better times ever come, I'll be only too happy to work for you.\"\n\n\"Better times will come. I trust God and have faith in man. Good day, Carson.\"\n\nThe lane opened out upon the sage-inclosed alfalfa fields, and the last habitation, at the end of that lane of hovels, was the meanest. Formerly it had been a shed; now it was a home. The broad leaves of a wide-spreading cottonwood sheltered the sunken roof of weathered boards. Like an Indian hut, it had one floor. Round about it were a few scanty rows of vegetables, such as the hand of a weak woman had time and strength to cultivate. This little dwelling-place was just outside the village limits, and the widow who lived there had to carry her water from the nearest irrigation ditch. As Jane Withersteen entered the unfenced yard a child saw her, shrieked with joy, and came tearing toward her with curls flying. This child was a little girl of four called Fay. Her name suited her, for she was an elf, a sprite, a creature so fairy-like and beautiful that she seemed unearthly.\n\n\"Muvver sended for oo,\" cried Fay, as Jane kissed her, \"an' oo never tome.\"\n\n\"I didn't know, Fay; but I've come now.\"\n\nFay was a child of outdoors, of the garden and ditch and field, and she was dirty and ragged. But rags and dirt did not hide her beauty. The one thin little bedraggled garment she wore half covered her fine, slim body. Red as cherries were her cheeks and lips; her eyes were violet blue, and the crown of her childish loveliness was the curling golden hair. All the children of Cottonwoods were Jane Withersteen's friends, she loved them all. But Fay was dearest to her. Fay had few playmates, for among the Gentile children there were none near her age, and the Mormon children were forbidden to play with her. So she was a shy, wild, lonely child.\n\n\"Muvver's sick,\" said Fay, leading Jane toward the door of the hut.\n\nJane went in. There was only one room, rather dark and bare, but it was clean and neat. A woman lay upon a bed.\n\n\"Mrs. Larkin, how are you?\" asked Jane, anxiously.\n\n\"I've been pretty bad for a week, but I'm better now.\"\n\n\"You haven't been here all alone\u2014with no one to wait on you?\"\n\n\"Oh no! My women neighbors are kind. They take turns coming in.\"\n\n\"Did you send for me?\"\n\n\"Yes, several times.\"\n\n\"But I had no word\u2014no messages ever got to me.\"\n\n\"I sent the boys, and they left word with your women that I was ill and would you please come.\"\n\nA sudden deadly sickness seized Jane. She fought the weakness, as she fought to be above suspicious thoughts, and it passed, leaving her conscious of her utter impotence. That, too, passed as her spirit rebounded. But she had again caught a glimpse of dark underhand domination, running its secret lines this time into her own household. Like a spider in the blackness of night an unseen hand had begun to run these dark lines, to turn and twist them about her life, to plait and weave a web. Jane Withersteen knew it now, and in the realization further coolness and sureness came to her, and the fighting courage of her ancestors.\n\n\"Mrs. Larkin, you're better, and I'm so glad,\" said Jane. \"But may I not do something for you\u2014a turn at nursing, or send you things, or take care of Fay?\"\n\n\"You're so good. Since my husband's been gone what would have become of Fay and me but for you? It was about Fay that I wanted to speak to you. This time I thought surely I'd die, and I was worried about Fay. Well, I'll be around all right shortly, but my strength's gone and I won't live long. So I may as well speak now. You remember you've been asking me to let you take Fay and bring her up as your daughter?\"\n\n\"Indeed yes, I remember. I'll be happy to have her. But I hope the day\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind that. The day'll come\u2014sooner or later. I refused your offer, and now I'll tell you why.\"\n\n\"I know why,\" interposed Jane. \"It's because you don't want her brought up as a Mormon.\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't altogether that.\" Mrs. Larkin raised her thin hand and laid it appealingly on Jane's. \"I don't like to tell you. But\u2014it's this: I told all my friends what you wanted. They know you, care for you, and they said for me to trust Fay to you. Women will talk, you know. It got to the ears of Mormons\u2014gossip of your love for Fay and your wanting her. And it came straight back to me, in jealousy, perhaps, that you wouldn't take Fay as much for love of her as because of your religious duty to bring up another girl for some Mormon to marry.\"\n\n\"That's a damnable lie!\" cried Jane Withersteen.\n\n\"It was what made me hesitate,\" went on Mrs. Larkin, \"but I never believed it at heart. And now I guess I'll let you\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait! Mrs. Larkin, I may have told little white lies in my life, but never a lie that mattered, that hurt any one. Now believe me. I love little Fay. If I had her near me I'd grow to worship her. When I asked for her I thought only of that love... Let me prove this. You and Fay come to live with me. I've such a big house, and I'm so lonely. I'll help nurse you, take care of you. When you're better you can work for me. I'll keep little Fay and bring her up\u2014without Mormon teaching. When she's grown, if she should want to leave me, I'll send her, and not empty-handed, back to Illinois where you came from. I promise you.\"\n\n\"I knew it was a lie,\" replied the mother, and she sank back upon her pillow with something of peace in her white, worn face. \"Jane Withersteen, may Heaven bless you! I've been deeply grateful to you. But because you're a Mormon I never felt close to you till now. I don't know much about religion as religion, but your God and my God are the same.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Chapter VIII. Surprise Valley\n\nBack in that strange canyon, which Venters had found indeed a valley of surprises, the wounded girl's whispered appeal, almost a prayer, not to take her back to the rustlers crowned the events of the last few days with a confounding climax. That she should not want to return to them staggered Venters. Presently, as logical thought returned, her appeal confirmed his first impression\u2014that she was more unfortunate than bad\u2014and he experienced a sensation of gladness. If he had known before that Oldring's Masked Rider was a woman his opinion would have been formed and he would have considered her abandoned. But his first knowledge had come when he lifted a white face quivering in a convulsion of agony; he had heard God's name whispered by blood-stained lips; through her solemn and awful eyes he had caught a glimpse of her soul. And just now had come the entreaty to him, \"Don't\u2014take\u2014me\u2014back\u2014there!\"\n\nOnce for all Venters's quick mind formed a permanent conception of this poor girl. He based it, not upon what the chances of life had made her, but upon the revelation of dark eyes that pierced the infinite, upon a few pitiful, halting words that betrayed failure and wrong and misery, yet breathed the truth of a tragic fate rather than a natural leaning to evil.\n\n\"What's your name?\" he inquired.\n\n\"Bess,\" she answered.\n\n\"Bess what?\"\n\n\"That's enough\u2014just Bess.\"\n\nThe red that deepened in her cheeks was not all the flush of fever. Venters marveled anew, and this time at the tint of shame in her face, at the momentary drooping of long lashes. She might be a rustler's girl, but she was still capable of shame, she might be dying, but she still clung to some little remnant of honor.\n\n\"Very well, Bess. It doesn't matter,\" he said. \"But this matters\u2014what shall I do with you?\"\n\n\"Are\u2014you\u2014a rider?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Not now. I was once. I drove the Withersteen herds. But I lost my place\u2014lost all I owned\u2014and now I'm\u2014I'm a sort of outcast. My name's Bern Venters.\"\n\n\"You won't\u2014take me\u2014to Cottonwoods\u2014or Glaze? I'd be\u2014hanged.\"\n\n\"No, indeed. But I must do something with you. For it's not safe for me here. I shot that rustler who was with you. Sooner or later he'll be found, and then my tracks. I must find a safer hiding-place where I can't be trailed.\"\n\n\"Leave me\u2014here.\"\n\n\"Alone\u2014to die!\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I will not.\" Venters spoke shortly with a kind of ring in his voice.\n\n\"What\u2014do you want\u2014to do\u2014with me?\" Her whispering grew difficult, so low and faint that Venters had to stoop to hear her.\n\n\"Why, let's see,\" he replied, slowly. \"I'd like to take you some place where I could watch by you, nurse you, till you're all right.\"\n\n\"And\u2014then?\"\n\n\"Well, it'll be time to think of that when you're cured of your wound. It's a bad one. And\u2014Bess, if you don't want to live\u2014if you don't fight for life\u2014you'll never\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh! I want\u2014to live! I'm afraid\u2014to die. But I'd rather\u2014die\u2014than go back\u2014to\u2014to\u2014\"\n\n\"To Oldring?\" asked Venters, interrupting her in turn.\n\nHer lips moved in an affirmative.\n\n\"I promise not to take you back to him or to Cottonwoods or to Glaze.\"\n\nThe mournful earnestness of her gaze suddenly shone with unutterable gratitude and wonder. And as suddenly Venters found her eyes beautiful as he had never seen or felt beauty. They were as dark blue as the sky at night. Then the flashing changed to a long, thoughtful look, in which there was a wistful, unconscious searching of his face, a look that trembled on the verge of hope and trust.\n\n\"I'll try\u2014to live,\" she said. The broken whisper just reached his ears. \"Do what\u2014you want\u2014with me.\"\n\n\"Rest then\u2014don't worry\u2014sleep,\" he replied.\n\nAbruptly he arose, as if words had been decision for him, and with a sharp command to the dogs he strode from the camp. Venters was conscious of an indefinite conflict of change within him. It seemed to be a vague passing of old moods, a dim coalescing of new forces, a moment of inexplicable transition. He was both cast down and uplifted. He wanted to think and think of the meaning, but he resolutely dispelled emotion. His imperative need at present was to find a safe retreat, and this called for action.\n\nSo he set out. It still wanted several hours before dark. This trip he turned to the left and wended his skulking way southward a mile or more to the opening of the valley, where lay the strange scrawled rocks. He did not, however, venture boldly out into the open sage, but clung to the right-hand wall and went along that till its perpendicular line broke into the long incline of bare stone.\n\nBefore proceeding farther he halted, studying the strange character of this slope and realizing that a moving black object could be seen far against such background. Before him ascended a gradual swell of smooth stone. It was hard, polished, and full of pockets worn by centuries of eddying rain-water. A hundred yards up began a line of grotesque cedar-trees, and they extended along the slope clear to its most southerly end. Beyond that end Venters wanted to get, and he concluded the cedars, few as they were, would afford some cover.\n\nTherefore he climbed swiftly. The trees were farther up than he had estimated, though he had from long habit made allowance for the deceiving nature of distances in that country. When he gained the cover of cedars he paused to rest and look, and it was then he saw how the trees sprang from holes in the bare rock. Ages of rain had run down the slope, circling, eddying in depressions, wearing deep round holes. There had been dry seasons, accumulations of dust, wind-blown seeds, and cedars rose wonderfully out of solid rock. But these were not beautiful cedars. They were gnarled, twisted into weird contortions, as if growth were torture, dead at the tops, shrunken, gray, and old. Theirs had been a bitter fight, and Venters felt a strange sympathy for them. This country was hard on trees\u2014and men.\n\nHe slipped from cedar to cedar, keeping them between him and the open valley. As he progressed, the belt of trees widened and he kept to its upper margin. He passed shady pockets half full of water, and, as he marked the location for possible future need, he reflected that there had been no rain since the winter snows. From one of these shady holes a rabbit hopped out and squatted down, laying its ears flat.\n\nVenters wanted fresh meat now more than when he had only himself to think of. But it would not do to fire his rifle there. So he broke off a cedar branch and threw it. He crippled the rabbit, which started to flounder up the slope. Venters did not wish to lose the meat, and he never allowed crippled game to escape, to die lingeringly in some covert. So after a careful glance below, and back toward the canyon, he began to chase the rabbit.\n\nThe fact that rabbits generally ran uphill was not new to him. But it presently seemed singular why this rabbit, that might have escaped downward, chose to ascend the slope. Venters knew then that it had a burrow higher up. More than once he jerked over to seize it, only in vain, for the rabbit by renewed effort eluded his grasp. Thus the chase continued on up the bare slope. The farther Venters climbed the more determined he grew to catch his quarry. At last, panting and sweating, he captured the rabbit at the foot of a steeper grade. Laying his rifle on the bulge of rising stone, he killed the animal and slung it from his belt.\n\nBefore starting down he waited to catch his breath. He had climbed far up that wonderful smooth slope, and had almost reached the base of yellow cliff that rose skyward, a huge scarred and cracked bulk. It frowned down upon him as if to forbid further ascent. Venters bent over for his rifle, and, as he picked it up from where it leaned against the steeper grade, he saw several little nicks cut in the solid stone.\n\nThey were only a few inches deep and about a foot apart. Venters began to count them\u2014one\u2014two\u2014three\u2014four\u2014on up to sixteen. That number carried his glance to the top of his first bulging bench of cliff-base. Above, after a more level offset, was still steeper slope, and the line of nicks kept on, to wind round a projecting corner of wall.\n\nA casual glance would have passed by these little dents; if Venters had not known what they signified he would never have bestowed upon them the second glance. But he knew they had been cut there by hand, and, though age-worn, he recognized them as steps cut in the rock by the cliff-dwellers. With a pulse beginning to beat and hammer away his calmness, he eyed that indistinct line of steps, up to where the buttress of wall hid further sight of them. He knew that behind the corner of stone would be a cave or a crack which could never be suspected from below. Chance, that had sported with him of late, now directed him to a probable hiding-place. Again he laid aside his rifle, and, removing boots and belt, he began to walk up the steps. Like a mountain goat, he was agile, sure-footed, and he mounted the first bench without bending to use his hands. The next ascent took grip of fingers as well as toes, but he climbed steadily, swiftly, to reach the projecting corner, and slipped around it. Here he faced a notch in the cliff. At the apex he turned abruptly into a ragged vent that split the ponderous wall clear to the top, showing a narrow streak of blue sky.\n\nAt the base this vent was dark, cool, and smelled of dry, musty dust. It zigzagged so that he could not see ahead more than a few yards at a time. He noticed tracks of wildcats and rabbits in the dusty floor. At every turn he expected to come upon a huge cavern full of little square stone houses, each with a small aperture like a staring dark eye. The passage lightened and widened, and opened at the foot of a narrow, steep, ascending chute.\n\nVenters had a moment's notice of the rock, which was of the same smoothness and hardness as the slope below, before his gaze went irresistibly upward to the precipitous walls of this wide ladder of granite. These were ruined walls of yellow sandstone, and so split and splintered, so overhanging with great sections of balancing rim, so impending with tremendous crumbling crags, that Venters caught his breath sharply, and, appalled, he instinctively recoiled as if a step upward might jar the ponderous cliffs from their foundation. Indeed, it seemed that these ruined cliffs were but awaiting a breath of wind to collapse and come tumbling down. Venters hesitated. It would be a foolhardy man who risked his life under the leaning, waiting avalanches of rock in that gigantic split. Yet how many years had they leaned there without falling! At the bottom of the incline was an immense heap of weathered sandstone all crumbling to dust, but there were no huge rocks as large as houses, such as rested so lightly and frightfully above, waiting patiently and inevitably to crash down. Slowly split from the parent rock by the weathering process, and carved and sculptured by ages of wind and rain, they waited their moment. Venters felt how foolish it was for him to fear these broken walls; to fear that, after they had endured for thousands of years, the moment of his passing should be the one for them to slip. Yet he feared it.\n\n\"What a place to hide!\" muttered Venters. \"I'll climb\u2014I'll see where this thing goes. If only I can find water!\"\n\nWith teeth tight shut he essayed the incline. And as he climbed he bent his eyes downward. This, however, after a little grew impossible; he had to look to obey his eager, curious mind. He raised his glance and saw light between row on row of shafts and pinnacles and crags that stood out from the main wall. Some leaned against the cliff, others against each other; many stood sheer and alone; all were crumbling, cracked, rotten. It was a place of yellow, ragged ruin. The passage narrowed as he went up; it became a slant, hard for him to stick on; it was smooth as marble. Finally he surmounted it, surprised to find the walls still several hundred feet high, and a narrow gorge leading down on the other side. This was a divide between two inclines, about twenty yards wide. At one side stood an enormous rock. Venters gave it a second glance, because it rested on a pedestal. It attracted closer attention. It was like a colossal pear of stone standing on its stem. Around the bottom were thousands of little nicks just distinguishable to the eye. They were marks of stone hatchets. The cliff-dwellers had chipped and chipped away at this boulder till it rested its tremendous bulk upon a mere pin-point of its surface. Venters pondered. Why had the little stone-men hacked away at that big boulder? It bore no semblance to a statue or an idol or a godhead or a sphinx. Instinctively he put his hands on it and pushed; then his shoulder and heaved. The stone seemed to groan, to stir, to grate, and then to move. It tipped a little downward and hung balancing for a long instant, slowly returned, rocked slightly, groaned, and settled back to its former position.\n\nVenters divined its significance. It had been meant for defense. The cliff-dwellers, driven by dreaded enemies to this last stand, had cunningly cut the rock until it balanced perfectly, ready to be dislodged by strong hands. Just below it leaned a tottering crag that would have toppled, starting an avalanche on an acclivity where no sliding mass could stop. Crags and pinnacles, splintered cliffs, and leaning shafts and monuments, would have thundered down to block forever the outlet to Deception Pass.\n\n\"That was a narrow shave for me,\" said Venters, soberly. \"A balancing rock! The cliff-dwellers never had to roll it. They died, vanished, and here the rock stands, probably little changed... But it might serve another lonely dweller of the cliffs. I'll hide up here somewhere, if I can only find water.\"\n\nHe descended the gorge on the other side. The slope was gradual, the space narrow, the course straight for many rods. A gloom hung between the up-sweeping walls. In a turn the passage narrowed to scarce a dozen feet, and here was darkness of night. But light shone ahead; another abrupt turn brought day again, and then wide open space.\n\nAbove Venters loomed a wonderful arch of stone bridging the canyon rims, and through the enormous round portal gleamed and glistened a beautiful valley shining under sunset gold reflected by surrounding cliffs. He gave a start of surprise. The valley was a cove a mile long, half that wide, and its enclosing walls were smooth and stained, and curved inward, forming great caves. He decided that its floor was far higher than the level of Deception Pass and the intersecting canyons. No purple sage colored this valley floor. Instead there were the white of aspens, streaks of branch and slender trunk glistening from the green of leaves, and the darker green of oaks, and through the middle of this forest, from wall to wall, ran a winding line of brilliant green which marked the course of cottonwoods and willows.\n\n\"There's water here\u2014and this is the place for me,\" said Venters. \"Only birds can peep over those walls, I've gone Oldring one better.\"\n\nVenters waited no longer, and turned swiftly to retrace his steps. He named the canyon Surprise Valley and the huge boulder that guarded the outlet Balancing Rock. Going down he did not find himself attended by such fears as had beset him in the climb; still, he was not easy in mind and could not occupy himself with plans of moving the girl and his outfit until he had descended to the notch. There he rested a moment and looked about him. The pass was darkening with the approach of night. At the corner of the wall, where the stone steps turned, he saw a spur of rock that would serve to hold the noose of a lasso. He needed no more aid to scale that place. As he intended to make the move under cover of darkness, he wanted most to be able to tell where to climb up. So, taking several small stones with him, he stepped and slid down to the edge of the slope where he had left his rifle and boots. He placed the stones some yards apart. He left the rabbit lying upon the bench where the steps began. Then he addressed a keen-sighted, remembering gaze to the rim-wall above. It was serrated, and between two spears of rock, directly in line with his position, showed a zigzag crack that at night would let through the gleam of sky. This settled, he put on his belt and boots and prepared to descend. Some consideration was necessary to decide whether or not to leave his rifle there. On the return, carrying the girl and a pack, it would be added encumbrance; and after debating the matter he left the rifle leaning against the bench. As he went straight down the slope he halted every few rods to look up at his mark on the rim. It changed, but he fixed each change in his memory. When he reached the first cedar-tree, he tied his scarf upon a dead branch, and then hurried toward camp, having no more concern about finding his trail upon the return trip.\n\nDarkness soon emboldened and lent him greater speed. It occurred to him, as he glided into the grassy glade near camp and head the whinny of a horse, that he had forgotten Wrangle. The big sorrel could not be gotten into Surprise Valley. He would have to be left here.\n\nVenters determined at once to lead the other horses out through the thicket and turn them loose. The farther they wandered from this canyon the better it would suit him. He easily descried Wrangle through the gloom, but the others were not in sight. Venters whistled low for the dogs, and when they came trotting to him he sent them out to search for the horses, and followed. It soon developed that they were not in the glade nor the thicket. Venters grew cold and rigid at the thought of rustlers having entered his retreat. But the thought passed, for the demeanor of Ring and Whitie reassured him. The horses had wandered away.\n\nUnder the clump of silver spruces a denser mantle of darkness, yet not so thick that Venter's night-practiced eyes could not catch the white oval of a still face. He bent over it with a slight suspension of breath that was both caution lest he frighten her and chill uncertainty of feeling lest he find her dead. But she slept, and he arose to renewed activity.\n\nHe packed his saddle-bags. The dogs were hungry, they whined about him and nosed his busy hands; but he took no time to feed them nor to satisfy his own hunger. He slung the saddlebags over his shoulders and made them secure with his lasso. Then he wrapped the blankets closer about the girl and lifted her in his arms. Wrangle whinnied and thumped the ground as Venters passed him with the dogs. The sorrel knew he was being left behind, and was not sure whether he liked it or not. Venters went on and entered the thicket. Here he had to feel his way in pitch blackness and to wedge his progress between the close saplings. Time meant little to him now that he had started, and he edged along with slow side movement till he got clear of the thicket. Ring and Whitie stood waiting for him. Taking to the open aisles and patches of the sage, he walked guardedly, careful not to stumble or step in dust or strike against spreading sage-branches.\n\nIf he were burdened he did not feel it. From time to time, when he passed out of the black lines of shade into the wan starlight, he glanced at the white face of the girl lying in his arms. She had not awakened from her sleep or stupor. He did not rest until he cleared the black gate of the canyon. Then he leaned against a stone breast-high to him and gently released the girl from his hold. His brow and hair and the palms of his hands were wet, and there was a kind of nervous contraction of his muscles. They seemed to ripple and string tense. He had a desire to hurry and no sense of fatigue. A wind blew the scent of sage in his face. The first early blackness of night passed with the brightening of the stars. Somewhere back on his trail a coyote yelped, splitting the dead silence. Venters's faculties seemed singularly acute.\n\nHe lifted the girl again and pressed on. The valley better traveling than the canyon. It was lighter, freer of sage, and there were no rocks. Soon, out of the pale gloom shone a still paler thing, and that was the low swell of slope. Venters mounted it and his dogs walked beside him. Once upon the stone he slowed to snail pace, straining his sight to avoid the pockets and holes. Foot by foot he went up. The weird cedars, like great demons and witches chained to the rock and writhing in silent anguish, loomed up with wide and twisting naked arms. Venters crossed this belt of cedars, skirted the upper border, and recognized the tree he had marked, even before he saw his waving scarf.\n\nHere he knelt and deposited the girl gently, feet first and slowly laid her out full length. What he feared was to reopen one of her wounds. If he gave her a violent jar, or slipped and fell! But the supreme confidence so strangely felt that night admitted no such blunders.\n\nThe slope before him seemed to swell into obscurity to lose its definite outline in a misty, opaque cloud that shaded into the over-shadowing wall. He scanned the rim where the serrated points speared the sky, and he found the zigzag crack. It was dim, only a shade lighter than the dark ramparts, but he distinguished it, and that served.\n\nLifting the girl, he stepped upward, closely attending to the nature of the path under his feet. After a few steps he stopped to mark his line with the crack in the rim. The dogs clung closer to him. While chasing the rabbit this slope had appeared interminable to him; now, burdened as he was, he did not think of length or height or toil. He remembered only to avoid a misstep and to keep his direction. He climbed on, with frequent stops to watch the rim, and before he dreamed of gaining the bench he bumped his knees into it, and saw, in the dim gray light, his rifle and the rabbit. He had come straight up without mishap or swerving off his course, and his shut teeth unlocked.\n\nAs he laid the girl down in the shallow hollow of the little ridge with her white face upturned, she opened her eyes. Wide, staring black, at once like both the night and the stars, they made her face seem still whiter.\n\n\"Is\u2014it\u2014you?\" she asked, faintly.\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Venters.\n\n\"Oh! Where\u2014are we?\"\n\n\"I'm taking you to a safe place where no one will ever find you. I must climb a little here and call the dogs. Don't be afraid. I'll soon come for you.\"\n\nShe said no more. Her eyes watched him steadily for a moment and then closed. Venters pulled off his boots and then felt for the little steps in the rock. The shade of the cliff above obscured the point he wanted to gain, but he could see dimly a few feet before him. What he had attempted with care he now went at with surpassing lightness. Buoyant, rapid, sure, he attained the corner of wall and slipped around it. Here he could not see a hand before his face, so he groped along, found a little flat space, and there removed the saddle-bags. The lasso he took back with him to the corner and looped the noose over the spur of rock.\n\n\"Ring\u2014Whitie\u2014come,\" he called, softly.\n\nLow whines came up from below.\n\n\"Here! Come, Whitie\u2014Ring,\" he repeated, this time sharply.\n\nThen followed scraping of claws and pattering of feet; and out of the gray gloom below him swiftly climbed the dogs to reach his side and pass beyond.\n\nVenters descended, holding to the lasso. He tested its strength by throwing all his weight upon it. Then he gathered the girl up, and, holding her securely in his left arm, he began to climb, at every few steps jerking his right hand upward along the lasso. It sagged at each forward movement he made, but he balanced himself lightly during the interval when he lacked the support of a taut rope. He climbed as if he had wings, the strength of a giant, and knew not the sense of fear. The sharp corner of cliff seemed to cut out of the darkness. He reached it and the protruding shelf, and then, entering the black shade of the notch, he moved blindly but surely to the place where he had left the saddle-bags. He heard the dogs, though he could not see them. Once more he carefully placed the girl at his feet. Then, on hands and knees, he went over the little flat space, feeling for stones. He removed a number, and, scraping the deep dust into a heap, he unfolded the outer blanket from around the girl and laid her upon this bed. Then he went down the slope again for his boots, rifle, and the rabbit, and, bringing also his lasso with him, he made short work of that trip.\n\n\"Are\u2014you\u2014there?\" The girl's voice came low from the blackness.\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied, and was conscious that his laboring breast made speech difficult.\n\n\"Are we\u2014in a cave?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Oh, listen!... The waterfall!... I hear it! You've brought me back!\"\n\nVenters heard a murmuring moan that one moment swelled to a pitch almost softly shrill and the next lulled to a low, almost inaudible sigh.\n\n\"That's\u2014wind blowing\u2014in the\u2014cliffs,\" he panted. \"You're far from Oldring's\u2014canyon.\"\n\nThe effort it cost him to speak made him conscious of extreme lassitude following upon great exertion. It seemed that when he lay down and drew his blanket over him the action was the last before utter prostration. He stretched inert, wet, hot, his body one great strife of throbbing, stinging nerves and bursting veins. And there he lay for a long while before he felt that he had begun to rest.\n\nRest came to him that night, but no sleep. Sleep he did not want. The hours of strained effort were now as if they had never been, and he wanted to think. Earlier in the day he had dismissed an inexplicable feeling of change; but now, when there was no longer demand on his cunning and strength and he had time to think, he could not catch the illusive thing that had sadly perplexed as well as elevated his spirit.\n\nAbove him, through a V-shaped cleft in the dark rim of the cliff, shone the lustrous stars that had been his lonely accusers for a long, long year. To-night they were different. He studied them. Larger, whiter, more radiant they seemed; but that was not the difference he meant. Gradually it came to him that the distinction was not one he saw, but one he felt. In this he divined as much of the baffling change as he thought would be revealed to him then. And as he lay there, with the singing of the cliff-winds in his ears, the white stars above the dark, bold vent, the difference which he felt was that he was no longer alone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Chapter IX. Silver Spruce and Aspens\n\nThe rest of that night seemed to Venters only a few moments of starlight, a dark overcasting of sky, an hour or so of gray gloom, and then the lighting of dawn.\n\nWhen he had bestirred himself, feeding the hungry dogs and breaking his long fast, and had repacked his saddle-bags, it was clear daylight, though the sun had not tipped the yellow wall in the east. He concluded to make the climb and descent into Surprise Valley in one trip. To that end he tied his blanket upon Ring and gave Whitie the extra lasso and the rabbit to carry. Then, with the rifle and saddle-bags slung upon his back, he took up the girl. She did not awaken from heavy slumber.\n\nThat climb up under the rugged, menacing brows of the broken cliffs, in the face of a grim, leaning boulder that seemed to be weary of its age-long wavering, was a tax on strength and nerve that Venters felt equally with something sweet and strangely exulting in its accomplishment. He did not pause until he gained the narrow divide and there he rested. Balancing Rock loomed huge, cold in the gray light of dawn, a thing without life, yet it spoke silently to Venters: \"I am waiting to plunge down, to shatter and crash, roar and boom, to bury your trail, and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass!\"\n\nOn the descent of the other side Venters had easy going, but was somewhat concerned because Whitie appeared to have succumbed to temptation, and while carrying the rabbit was also chewing on it. And Ring evidently regarded this as an injury to himself, especially as he had carried the heavier load. Presently he snapped at one end of the rabbit and refused to let go. But his action prevented Whitie from further misdoing, and then the two dogs pattered down, carrying the rabbit between them.\n\nVenters turned out of the gorge, and suddenly paused stock-still, astounded at the scene before him. The curve of the great stone bridge had caught the sunrise, and through the magnificent arch burst a glorious stream of gold that shone with a long slant down into the center of Surprise Valley. Only through the arch did any sunlight pass, so that all the rest of the valley lay still asleep, dark green, mysterious, shadowy, merging its level into walls as misty and soft as morning clouds.\n\nVenters then descended, passing through the arch, looking up at its tremendous height and sweep. It spanned the opening to Surprise Valley, stretching in almost perfect curve from rim to rim. Even in his hurry and concern Venters could not but feel its majesty, and the thought came to him that the cliff-dwellers must have regarded it as an object of worship.\n\nDown, down, down Venters strode, more and more feeling the weight of his burden as he descended, and still the valley lay below him. As all other canyons and coves and valleys had deceived him, so had this deep, nestling oval. At length he passed beyond the slope of weathered stone that spread fan-shape from the arch, and encountered a grassy terrace running to the right and about on a level with the tips of the oaks and cottonwoods below. Scattered here and there upon this shelf were clumps of aspens, and he walked through them into a glade that surpassed in beauty and adaptability for a wild home, any place he had ever seen. Silver spruces bordered the base of a precipitous wall that rose loftily. Caves indented its surface, and there were no detached ledges or weathered sections that might dislodge a stone. The level ground, beyond the spruces, dropped down into a little ravine. This was one dense line of slender aspens from which came the low splashing of water. And the terrace, lying open to the west, afforded unobstructed view of the valley of green treetops.\n\nFor his camp Venters chose a shady, grassy plot between the silver spruces and the cliff. Here, in the stone wall, had been wonderfully carved by wind or washed by water several deep caves above the level of the terrace. They were clean, dry, roomy.\n\nHe cut spruce boughs and made a bed in the largest cave and laid the girl there. The first intimation that he had of her being aroused from sleep or lethargy was a low call for water.\n\nHe hurried down into the ravine with his canteen. It was a shallow, grass-green place with aspens growing up everywhere. To his delight he found a tiny brook of swift-running water. Its faint tinge of amber reminded him of the spring at Cottonwoods, and the thought gave him a little shock. The water was so cold it made his fingers tingle as he dipped the canteen. Having returned to the cave, he was glad to see the girl drink thirstily. This time he noted that she could raise her head slightly without his help.\n\n\"You were thirsty,\" he said. \"It's good water. I've found a fine place. Tell me\u2014how do you feel?\"\n\n\"There's pain\u2014here,\" she replied, and moved her hand to her left side.\n\n\"Why, that's strange! Your wounds are on your right side. I believe you're hungry. Is the pain a kind of dull ache\u2014a gnawing?\"\n\n\"It's like\u2014that.\"\n\n\"Then it's hunger.\" Venters laughed, and suddenly caught himself with a quick breath and felt again the little shock. When had he laughed? \"It's hunger,\" he went on. \"I've had that gnaw many a time. I've got it now. But you mustn't eat. You can have all the water you want, but no food just yet.\"\n\n\"Won't I\u2014starve?\"\n\n\"No, people don't starve easily. I've discovered that. You must lie perfectly still and rest and sleep\u2014for days.\"\n\n\"My hands\u2014are dirty; my face feels\u2014so hot and sticky; my boots hurt.\" It was her longest speech as yet, and it trailed off in a whisper.\n\n\"Well, I'm a fine nurse!\"\n\nIt annoyed him that he had never thought of these things. But then, awaiting her death and thinking of her comfort were vastly different matters. He unwrapped the blanket which covered her. What a slender girl she was! No wonder he had been able to carry her miles and pack her up that slippery ladder of stone. Her boots were of soft, fine leather, reaching clear to her knees. He recognized the make as one of a boot-maker in Sterling. Her spurs, that he had stupidly neglected to remove, consisted of silver frames and gold chains, and the rowels, large as silver dollars, were fancifully engraved. The boots slipped off rather hard. She wore heavy woollen rider's stockings, half length, and these were pulled up over the ends of her short trousers. Venters took off the stockings to note her little feet were red and swollen. He bathed them. Then he removed his scarf and bathed her face and hands.\n\n\"I must see your wounds now,\" he said, gently.\n\nShe made no reply, but watched him steadily as he opened her blouse and untied the bandage. His strong fingers trembled a little as he removed it. If the wounds had reopened! A chill struck him as he saw the angry red bullet-mark, and a tiny stream of blood winding from it down her white breast. Very carefully he lifted her to see that the wound in her back had closed perfectly. Then he washed the blood from her breast, bathed the wound, and left it unbandaged, open to the air.\n\nHer eyes thanked him.\n\n\"Listen,\" he said, earnestly. \"I've had some wounds, and I've seen many. I know a little about them. The hole in your back has closed. If you lie still three days the one in your breast will close and you'll be safe. The danger from hemorrhage will be over.\"\n\nHe had spoken with earnest sincerity, almost eagerness.\n\n\"Why\u2014do you\u2014want me\u2014to get well?\" she asked, wonderingly.\n\nThe simple question seemed unanswerable except on grounds of humanity. But the circumstances under which he had shot this strange girl, the shock and realization, the waiting for death, the hope, had resulted in a condition of mind wherein Venters wanted her to live more than he had ever wanted anything. Yet he could not tell why. He believed the killing of the rustler and the subsequent excitement had disturbed him. For how else could he explain the throbbing of his brain, the heat of his blood, the undefined sense of full hours, charged, vibrant with pulsating mystery where once they had dragged in loneliness?\n\n\"I shot you,\" he said, slowly, \"and I want you to get well so I shall not have killed a woman. But\u2014for your own sake, too\u2014\"\n\nA terrible bitterness darkened her eyes, and her lips quivered.\n\n\"Hush,\" said Venters. \"You've talked too much already.\"\n\nIn her unutterable bitterness he saw a darkness of mood that could not have been caused by her present weak and feverish state. She hated the life she had led, that she probably had been compelled to lead. She had suffered some unforgivable wrong at the hands of Oldring. With that conviction Venters felt a shame throughout his body, and it marked the rekindling of fierce anger and ruthlessness. In the past long year he had nursed resentment. He had hated the wilderness\u2014the loneliness of the uplands. He had waited for something to come to pass. It had come. Like an Indian stealing horses he had skulked into the recesses of the canyons. He had found Oldring's retreat; he had killed a rustler; he had shot an unfortunate girl, then had saved her from this unwitting act, and he meant to save her from the consequent wasting of blood, from fever and weakness. Starvation he had to fight for her and for himself. Where he had been sick at the letting of blood, now he remembered it in grim, cold calm. And as he lost that softness of nature, so he lost his fear of men. He would watch for Oldring, biding his time, and he would kill this great black-bearded rustler who had held a girl in bondage, who had used her to his infamous ends.\n\nVenters surmised this much of the change in him\u2014idleness had passed; keen, fierce vigor flooded his mind and body; all that had happened to him at Cottonwoods seemed remote and hard to recall; the difficulties and perils of the present absorbed him, held him in a kind of spell.\n\nFirst, then, he fitted up the little cave adjoining the girl's room for his own comfort and use. His next work was to build a fireplace of stones and to gather a store of wood. That done, he spilled the contents of his saddle-bags upon the grass and took stock. His outfit consisted of a small-handled axe, a hunting-knife, a large number of cartridges for rifle or revolver, a tin plate, a cup, and a fork and spoon, a quantity of dried beef and dried fruits, and small canvas bags containing tea, sugar, salt, and pepper. For him alone this supply would have been bountiful to begin a sojourn in the wilderness, but he was no longer alone. Starvation in the uplands was not an unheard-of thing; he did not, however, worry at all on that score, and feared only his possible inability to supply the needs of a woman in a weakened and extremely delicate condition.\n\nIf there was no game in the valley\u2014a contingency he doubted\u2014it would not be a great task for him to go by night to Oldring's herd and pack out a calf. The exigency of the moment was to ascertain if there were game in Surprise Valley. Whitie still guarded the dilapidated rabbit, and Ring slept near by under a spruce. Venters called Ring and went to the edge of the terrace, and there halted to survey the valley.\n\nHe was prepared to find it larger than his unstudied glances had made it appear; for more than a casual idea of dimensions and a hasty conception of oval shape and singular beauty he had not had time. Again the felicity of the name he had given the valley struck him forcibly. Around the red perpendicular walls, except under the great arc of stone, ran a terrace fringed at the cliff-base by silver spruces; below that first terrace sloped another wider one densely overgrown with aspens, and the center of the valley was a level circle of oaks and alders, with the glittering green line of willows and cottonwood dividing it in half. Venters saw a number and variety of birds flitting among the trees. To his left, facing the stone bridge, an enormous cavern opened in the wall; and low down, just above the tree-tops, he made out a long shelf of cliff-dwellings, with little black, staring windows or doors. Like eyes they were, and seemed to watch him. The few cliff-dwellings he had seen\u2014all ruins\u2014had left him with haunting memory of age and solitude and of something past. He had come, in a way, to be a cliff-dweller himself, and those silent eyes would look down upon him, as if in surprise that after thousands of years a man had invaded the valley. Venters felt sure that he was the only white man who had ever walked under the shadow of the wonderful stone bridge, down into that wonderful valley with its circle of caves and its terraced rings of silver spruce and aspens.\n\nThe dog growled below and rushed into the forest. Venters ran down the declivity to enter a zone of light shade streaked with sunshine. The oak-trees were slender, none more than half a foot thick, and they grew close together, intermingling their branches. Ring came running back with a rabbit in his mouth. Venters took the rabbit and, holding the dog near him, stole softly on. There were fluttering of wings among the branches and quick bird-notes, and rustling of dead leaves and rapid patterings. Venters crossed well-worn trails marked with fresh tracks; and when he had stolen on a little farther he saw many birds and running quail, and more rabbits than he could count. He had not penetrated the forest of oaks for a hundred yards, had not approached anywhere near the line of willows and cottonwoods which he knew grew along a stream. But he had seen enough to know that Surprise Valley was the home of many wild creatures.\n\nVenters returned to camp. He skinned the rabbits, and gave the dogs the one they had quarreled over, and the skin of this he dressed and hung up to dry, feeling that he would like to keep it. It was a particularly rich, furry pelt with a beautiful white tail. Venters remembered that but for the bobbing of that white tail catching his eye he would not have espied the rabbit, and he would never have discovered Surprise Valley. Little incidents of chance like this had turned him here and there in Deception Pass; and now they had assumed to him the significance and direction of destiny.\n\nHis good fortune in the matter of game at hand brought to his mind the necessity of keeping it in the valley. Therefore he took the axe and cut bundles of aspens and willows, and packed them up under the bridge to the narrow outlet of the gorge. Here he began fashioning a fence, by driving aspens into the ground and lacing them fast with willows. Trip after trip he made down for more building material, and the afternoon had passed when he finished the work to his satisfaction. Wildcats might scale the fence, but no coyote could come in to search for prey, and no rabbits or other small game could escape from the valley.\n\nUpon returning to camp he set about getting his supper at ease, around a fine fire, without hurry or fear of discovery. After hard work that had definite purpose, this freedom and comfort gave him peculiar satisfaction. He caught himself often, as he kept busy round the camp-fire, stopping to glance at the quiet form in the cave, and at the dogs stretched cozily near him, and then out across the beautiful valley. The present was not yet real to him.\n\nWhile he ate, the sun set beyond a dip in the rim of the curved wall. As the morning sun burst wondrously through a grand arch into this valley, in a golden, slanting shaft, so the evening sun, at the moment of setting, shone through a gap of cliffs, sending down a broad red burst to brighten the oval with a blaze of fire. To Venters both sunrise and sunset were unreal.\n\nA cool wind blew across the oval, waving the tips of oaks, and while the light lasted, fluttering the aspen leaves into millions of facets of red, and sweeping the graceful spruces. Then with the wind soon came a shade and a darkening, and suddenly the valley was gray. Night came there quickly after the sinking of the sun. Venters went softly to look at the girl. She slept, and her breathing was quiet and slow. He lifted Ring into the cave, with stern whisper for him to stay there on guard. Then he drew the blanket carefully over her and returned to the camp-fire.\n\nThough exceedingly tired, he was yet loath to yield to lassitude, but this night it was not from listening, watchful vigilance; it was from a desire to realize his position. The details of his wild environment seemed the only substance of a strange dream. He saw the darkening rims, the gray oval turning black, the undulating surface of forest, like a rippling lake, and the spear-pointed spruces. He heard the flutter of aspen leaves and the soft, continuous splash of falling water. The melancholy note of a canyon bird broke clear and lonely from the high cliffs. Venters had no name for this night singer, and he had never seen one, but the few notes, always pealing out just at darkness, were as familiar to him as the canyon silence. Then they ceased, and the rustle of leaves and the murmur of water hushed in a growing sound that Venters fancied was not of earth. Neither had he a name for this, only it was inexpressibly wild and sweet. The thought came that it might be a moan of the girl in her last outcry of life, and he felt a tremor shake him. But no! This sound was not human, though it was like despair. He began to doubt his sensitive perceptions, to believe that he half-dreamed what he thought he heard. Then the sound swelled with the strengthening of the breeze, and he realized it was the singing of the wind in the cliffs.\n\nBy and by a drowsiness overcame him, and Venters began to nod, half asleep, with his back against a spruce. Rousing himself and calling Whitie, he went to the cave. The girl lay barely visible in the dimness. Ring crouched beside her, and the patting of his tail on the stone assured Venters that the dog was awake and faithful to his duty. Venters sought his own bed of fragrant boughs; and as he lay back, somehow grateful for the comfort and safety, the night seemed to steal away from him and he sank softly into intangible space and rest and slumber.\n\nVenters awakened to the sound of melody that he imagined was only the haunting echo of dream music. He opened his eyes to another surprise of this valley of beautiful surprises. Out of his cave he saw the exquisitely fine foliage of the silver spruces crossing a round space of blue morning sky; and in this lacy leafage fluttered a number of gray birds with black and white stripes and long tails. They were mocking-birds, and they were singing as if they wanted to burst their throats. Venters listened. One long, silver-tipped branch dropped almost to his cave, and upon it, within a few yards of him, sat one of the graceful birds. Venters saw the swelling and quivering of its throat in song. He arose, and when he slid down out of his cave the birds fluttered and flew farther away.\n\nVenters stepped before the opening of the other cave and looked in. The girl was awake, with wide eyes and listening look, and she had a hand on Ring's neck.\n\n\"Mocking-birds!\" she said.\n\n\"Yes,\" replied Venters, \"and I believe they like our company.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\"\n\n\"Never mind now. After a little I'll tell you.\"\n\n\"The birds woke me. When I heard them\u2014and saw the shiny trees\u2014and the blue sky\u2014and then a blaze of gold dropping down\u2014I wondered\u2014\"\n\nShe did not complete her fancy, but Venters imagined he understood her meaning. She appeared to be wandering in mind. Venters felt her face and hands and found them burning with fever. He went for water, and was glad to find it almost as cold as if flowing from ice. That water was the only medicine he had, and he put faith in it. She did not want to drink, but he made her swallow, and then he bathed her face and head and cooled her wrists.\n\nThe day began with the heightening of the fever. Venters spent the time reducing her temperature, cooling her hot cheeks and temples. He kept close watch over her, and at the least indication of restlessness, that he knew led to tossing and rolling of the body, he held her tightly, so no violent move could reopen her wounds. Hour after hour she babbled and laughed and cried and moaned in delirium; but whatever her secret was she did not reveal it. Attended by something somber for Venters, the day passed. At night in the cool winds the fever abated and she slept.\n\nThe second day was a repetition of the first. On the third he seemed to see her wither and waste away before his eyes. That day he scarcely went from her side for a moment, except to run for fresh, cool water; and he did not eat. The fever broke on the fourth day and left her spent and shrunken, a slip of a girl with life only in her eyes. They hung upon Venters with a mute observance, and he found hope in that.\n\nTo rekindle the spark that had nearly flickered out, to nourish the little life and vitality that remained in her, was Venters's problem. But he had little resource other than the meat of the rabbits and quail; and from these he made broths and soups as best he could, and fed her with a spoon. It came to him that the human body, like the human soul, was a strange thing and capable of recovering from terrible shocks. For almost immediately she showed faint signs of gathering strength. There was one more waiting day, in which he doubted, and spent long hours by her side as she slept, and watched the gentle swell of her breast rise and fall in breathing, and the wind stir the tangled chestnut curls. On the next day he knew that she would live.\n\nUpon realizing it he abruptly left the cave and sought his accustomed seat against the trunk of a big spruce, where once more he let his glance stray along the sloping terraces. She would live, and the somber gloom lifted out of the valley, and he felt relief that was pain. Then he roused to the call of action, to the many things he needed to do in the way of making camp fixtures and utensils, to the necessity of hunting food, and the desire to explore the valley.\n\nBut he decided to wait a few more days before going far from camp, because he fancied that the girl rested easier when she could see him near at hand. And on the first day her languor appeared to leave her in a renewed grip of life. She awoke stronger from each short slumber; she ate greedily, and she moved about in her bed of boughs; and always, it seemed to Venters, her eyes followed him. He knew now that her recovery would be rapid. She talked about the dogs, about the caves, the valley, about how hungry she was, till Venters silenced her, asking her to put off further talk till another time. She obeyed, but she sat up in her bed, and her eyes roved to and fro, and always back to him.\n\nUpon the second morning she sat up when he awakened her, and would not permit him to bathe her face and feed her, which actions she performed for herself. She spoke little, however, and Venters was quick to catch in her the first intimations of thoughtfulness and curiosity and appreciation of her situation. He left camp and took Whitie out to hunt for rabbits. Upon his return he was amazed and somewhat anxiously concerned to see his invalid sitting with her back to a corner of the cave and her bare feet swinging out. Hurriedly he approached, intending to advise her to lie down again, to tell her that perhaps she might overtax her strength. The sun shone upon her, glinting on the little head with its tangle of bright hair and the small, oval face with its pallor, and dark-blue eyes underlined by dark-blue circles. She looked at him and he looked at her. In that exchange of glances he imagined each saw the other in some different guise. It seemed impossible to Venters that this frail girl could be Oldring's Masked Rider. It flashed over him that he had made a mistake which presently she would explain.\n\n\"Help me down,\" she said.\n\n\"But\u2014are you well enough?\" he protested. \"Wait\u2014a little longer.\"\n\n\"I'm weak\u2014dizzy. But I want to get down.\"\n\nHe lifted her\u2014what a light burden now!\u2014and stood her upright beside him, and supported her as she essayed to walk with halting steps. She was like a stripling of a boy; the bright, small head scarcely reached his shoulder. But now, as she clung to his arm, the rider's costume she wore did not contradict, as it had done at first, his feeling of her femininity. She might be the famous Masked Rider of the uplands, she might resemble a boy; but her outline, her little hands and feet, her hair, her big eyes and tremulous lips, and especially a something that Venters felt as a subtle essence rather than what he saw, proclaimed her sex.\n\nShe soon tired. He arranged a comfortable seat for her under the spruce that overspread the camp-fire.\n\n\"Now tell me\u2014everything,\" she said.\n\nHe recounted all that had happened from the time of his discovery of the rustlers in the canyon up to the present moment.\n\n\"You shot me\u2014and now you've saved my life?\"\n\n\"Yes. After almost killing you I've pulled you through.\"\n\n\"Are you glad?\"\n\n\"I should say so!\"\n\nHer eyes were unusually expressive, and they regarded him steadily; she was unconscious of that mirroring of her emotions and they shone with gratefulness and interest and wonder and sadness.\n\n\"Tell me\u2014about yourself?\" she asked.\n\nHe made this a briefer story, telling of his coming to Utah, his various occupations till he became a rider, and then how the Mormons had practically driven him out of Cottonwoods, an outcast.\n\nThen, no longer able to withstand his own burning curiosity, he questioned her in turn.\n\n\"Are you Oldring's Masked Rider?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied, and dropped her eyes.\n\n\"I knew it\u2014I recognized your figure\u2014and mask, for I saw you once. Yet I can't believe it!... But you never were really that rustler, as we riders knew him? A thief\u2014a marauder\u2014a kidnapper of women\u2014a murderer of sleeping riders!\"\n\n\"No! I never stole\u2014or harmed any one\u2014in all my life. I only rode and rode\u2014\"\n\n\"But why\u2014why?\" he burst out. \"Why the name? I understand Oldring made you ride. But the black mask\u2014the mystery\u2014the things laid to your hands\u2014the threats in your infamous name\u2014the night-riding credited to you\u2014the evil deeds deliberately blamed on you and acknowledged by rustlers\u2014even Oldring himself! Why? Tell me why?\"\n\n\"I never knew that,\" she answered low. Her drooping head straightened, and the large eyes, larger now and darker, met Venters's with a clear, steadfast gaze in which he read truth. It verified his own conviction.\n\n\"Never knew? That's strange! Are you a Mormon?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Is Oldring a Mormon?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Do you\u2014care for him?\"\n\n\"Yes. I hate his men\u2014his life\u2014sometimes I almost hate him!\"\n\nVenters paused in his rapid-fire questioning, as if to brace him self to ask for a truth that would be abhorrent for him to confirm, but which he seemed driven to hear.\n\n\"What are\u2014what were you to Oldring?\"\n\nLike some delicate thing suddenly exposed to blasting heat, the girl wilted; her head dropped, and into her white, wasted cheeks crept the red of shame.\n\nVenters would have given anything to recall that question. It seemed so different\u2014his thought when spoken. Yet her shame established in his mind something akin to the respect he had strangely been hungering to feel for her.\n\n\"D\u2014n that question!\u2014forget it!\" he cried, in a passion of pain for her and anger at himself. \"But once and for all\u2014tell me\u2014I know it, yet I want to hear you say so\u2014you couldn't help yourself?\"\n\n\"Oh no.\"\n\n\"Well, that makes it all right with me,\" he went on, honestly. \"I\u2014I want you to feel that... you see\u2014we've been thrown together\u2014and\u2014and I want to help you\u2014not hurt you. I thought life had been cruel to me, but when I think of yours I feel mean and little for my complaining. Anyway, I was a lonely outcast. And now!... I don't see very clearly what it all means. Only we are here\u2014together. We've got to stay here, for long, surely till you are well. But you'll never go back to Oldring. And I'm sure helping you will help me, for I was sick in mind. There's something now for me to do. And if I can win back your strength\u2014then get you away, out of this wild country\u2014help you somehow to a happier life\u2014just think how good that'll be for me!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter X. Love\n\nDuring all these waiting days Venters, with the exception of the afternoon when he had built the gate in the gorge, had scarcely gone out of sight of camp and never out of hearing. His desire to explore Surprise Valley was keen, and on the morning after his long talk with the girl he took his rifle and, calling Ring, made a move to start. The girl lay back in a rude chair of boughs he had put together for her. She had been watching him, and when he picked up the gun and called the dog Venters thought she gave a nervous start.\n\n\"I'm only going to look over the valley,\" he said.\n\n\"Will you be gone long?\"\n\n\"No,\" he replied, and started off. The incident set him thinking of his former impression that, after her recovery from fever, she did not seem at ease unless he was close at hand. It was fear of being alone, due, he concluded, most likely to her weakened condition. He must not leave her much alone.\n\nAs he strode down the sloping terrace, rabbits scampered before him, and the beautiful valley quail, as purple in color as the sage on the uplands, ran fleetly along the ground into the forest. It was pleasant under the trees, in the gold-flecked shade, with the whistle of quail and twittering of birds everywhere. Soon he had passed the limit of his former excursions and entered new territory. Here the woods began to show open glades and brooks running down from the slope, and presently he emerged from shade into the sunshine of a meadow. The shaking of the high grass told him of the running of animals, what species he could not tell, but from Ring's manifest desire to have a chase they were evidently some kind wilder than rabbits. Venters approached the willow and cottonwood belt that he had observed from the height of slope. He penetrated it to find a considerable stream of water and great half-submerged mounds of brush and sticks, and all about him were old and new gnawed circles at the base of the cottonwoods.\n\n\"Beaver!\" he exclaimed. \"By all that's lucky! The meadow's full of beaver! How did they ever get here?\"\n\nBeaver had not found a way into the valley by the trail of the cliff-dwellers, of that he was certain; and he began to have more than curiosity as to the outlet or inlet of the stream. When he passed some dead water, which he noted was held by a beaver dam, there was a current in the stream, and it flowed west. Following its course, he soon entered the oak forest again, and passed through to find himself before massed and jumbled ruins of cliff wall. There were tangled thickets of wild plum-trees and other thorny growths that made passage extremely laborsome. He found innumerable tracks of wildcats and foxes. Rustlings in the thick undergrowth told him of stealthy movements of these animals. At length his further advance appeared futile, for the reason that the stream disappeared in a split at the base of immense rocks over which he could not climb. To his relief he concluded that though beaver might work their way up the narrow chasm where the water rushed, it would be impossible for men to enter the valley there.\n\nThis western curve was the only part of the valley where the walls had been split asunder, and it was a wildly rough and inaccessible corner. Going back a little way, he leaped the stream and headed toward the southern wall. Once out of the oaks he found again the low terrace of aspens, and above that the wide, open terrace fringed by silver spruces. This side of the valley contained the wind or water worn caves. As he pressed on, keeping to the upper terrace, cave after cave opened out of the cliff; now a large one, now a small one. Then yawned, quite suddenly and wonderfully above him, the great cavern of the cliff-dwellers.\n\nIt was still a goodly distance, and he tried to imagine, if it appeared so huge from where he stood, what it would be when he got there. He climbed the terrace and then faced a long, gradual ascent of weathered rock and dust, which made climbing too difficult for attention to anything else. At length he entered a zone of shade, and looked up. He stood just within the hollow of a cavern so immense that he had no conception of its real dimensions. The curved roof, stained by ages of leakage, with buff and black and rust-colored streaks, swept up and loomed higher and seemed to soar to the rim of the cliff. Here again was a magnificent arch, such as formed the grand gateway to the valley, only in this instance it formed the dome of a cave instead of the span of a bridge.\n\nVenters passed onward and upward. The stones he dislodged rolled down with strange, hollow crack and roar. He had climbed a hundred rods inward, and yet he had not reached the base of the shelf where the cliff-dwellings rested, a long half-circle of connected stone house, with little dark holes that he had fancied were eyes. At length he gained the base of the shelf, and here found steps cut in the rock. These facilitated climbing, and as he went up he thought how easily this vanished race of men might once have held that stronghold against an army. There was only one possible place to ascend, and this was narrow and steep.\n\nVenters had visited cliff-dwellings before, and they had been in ruins, and of no great character or size but this place was of proportions that stunned him, and it had not been desecrated by the hand of man, nor had it been crumbled by the hand of time. It was a stupendous tomb. It had been a city. It was just as it had been left by its builders. The little houses were there, the smoke-blackened stains of fires, the pieces of pottery scattered about cold hearths, the stone hatchets; and stone pestles and mealing-stones lay beside round holes polished by years of grinding maize\u2014lay there as if they had been carelessly dropped yesterday. But the cliff-dwellers were gone!\n\nDust! They were dust on the floor or at the foot of the shelf, and their habitations and utensils endured. Venters felt the sublimity of that marvelous vaulted arch, and it seemed to gleam with a glory of something that was gone. How many years had passed since the cliff-dwellers gazed out across the beautiful valley as he was gazing now? How long had it been since women ground grain in those polished holes? What time had rolled by since men of an unknown race lived, loved, fought, and died there? Had an enemy destroyed them? Had disease destroyed them, or only that greatest destroyer\u2014time? Venters saw a long line of blood-red hands painted low down upon the yellow roof of stone. Here was strange portent, if not an answer to his queries. The place oppressed him. It was light, but full of a transparent gloom. It smelled of dust and musty stone, of age and disuse. It was sad. It was solemn. It had the look of a place where silence had become master and was now irrevocable and terrible and could not be broken. Yet, at the moment, from high up in the carved crevices of the arch, floated down the low, strange wail of wind\u2014a knell indeed for all that had gone.\n\nVenters, sighing, gathered up an armful of pottery, such pieces as he thought strong enough and suitable for his own use, and bent his steps toward camp. He mounted the terrace at an opposite point to which he had left. He saw the girl looking in the direction he had gone. His footsteps made no sound in the deep grass, and he approached close without her being aware of his presence. Whitie lay on the ground near where she sat, and he manifested the usual actions of welcome, but the girl did not notice them. She seemed to be oblivious to everything near at hand. She made a pathetic figure drooping there, with her sunny hair contrasting so markedly with her white, wasted cheeks and her hands listlessly clasped and her little bare feet propped in the framework of the rude seat. Venters could have sworn and laughed in one breath at the idea of the connection between this girl and Oldring's Masked Rider. She was the victim of more than accident of fate\u2014a victim to some deep plot the mystery of which burned him. As he stepped forward with a half-formed thought that she was absorbed in watching for his return, she turned her head and saw him. A swift start, a change rather than rush of blood under her white cheeks, a flashing of big eyes that fixed their glance upon him, transformed her face in that single instant of turning, and he knew she had been watching for him, that his return was the one thing in her mind. She did not smile; she did not flush; she did not look glad. All these would have meant little compared to her indefinite expression. Venters grasped the peculiar, vivid, vital something that leaped from her face. It was as if she had been in a dead, hopeless clamp of inaction and feeling, and had been suddenly shot through and through with quivering animation. Almost it was as if she had returned to life.\n\nAnd Venters thought with lightning swiftness, \"I've saved her\u2014I've unlinked her from that old life\u2014she was watching as if I were all she had left on earth\u2014she belongs to me!\" The thought was startlingly new. Like a blow it was in an unprepared moment. The cheery salutation he had ready for her died unborn and he tumbled the pieces of pottery awkwardly on the grass while some unfamiliar, deep-seated emotion, mixed with pity and glad assurance of his power to succor her, held him dumb.\n\n\"What a load you had!\" she said. \"Why, they're pots and crocks! Where did you get them?\"\n\nVenters laid down his rifle, and, filling one of the pots from his canteen, he placed it on the smoldering campfire.\n\n\"Hope it'll hold water,\" he said, presently. \"Why, there's an enormous cliff-dwelling just across here. I got the pottery there. Don't you think we needed something? That tin cup of mine has served to make tea, broth, soup\u2014everything.\"\n\n\"I noticed we hadn't a great deal to cook in.\"\n\nShe laughed. It was the first time. He liked that laugh, and though he was tempted to look at her, he did not want to show his surprise or his pleasure.\n\n\"Will you take me over there, and all around in the valley\u2014pretty soon, when I'm well?\" she added.\n\n\"Indeed I shall. It's a wonderful place. Rabbits so thick you can't step without kicking one out. And quail, beaver, foxes, wildcats. We're in a regular den. But\u2014haven't you ever seen a cliff-dwelling?\"\n\n\"No. I've heard about them, though. The\u2014the men say the Pass is full of old houses and ruins.\"\n\n\"Why, I should think you'd have run across one in all your riding around,\" said Venters. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully, and he essayed a perfectly casual manner, and pretended to be busy assorting pieces of pottery. She must have no cause again to suffer shame for curiosity of his. Yet never in all his days had he been so eager to hear the details of anyone's life.\n\n\"When I rode\u2014I rode like the wind,\" she replied, \"and never had time to stop for anything.\"\n\n\"I remember that day I\u2014I met you in the Pass\u2014how dusty you were, how tired your horse looked. Were you always riding?\"\n\n\"Oh, no. Sometimes not for months, when I was shut up in the cabin.\"\n\nVenters tried to subdue a hot tingling.\n\n\"You were shut up, then?\" he asked, carelessly.\n\n\"When Oldring went away on his long trips\u2014he was gone for months sometimes\u2014he shut me up in the cabin.\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"Perhaps to keep me from running away. I always threatened that. Mostly, though, because the men got drunk at the villages. But they were always good to me. I wasn't afraid.\"\n\n\"A prisoner! That must have been hard on you?\"\n\n\"I liked that. As long as I can remember I've been locked up there at times, and those times were the only happy ones I ever had. It's a big cabin, high up on a cliff, and I could look out. Then I had dogs and pets I had tamed, and books. There was a spring inside, and food stored, and the men brought me fresh meat. Once I was there one whole winter.\"\n\nIt now required deliberation on Venters's part to persist in his unconcern and to keep at work. He wanted to look at her, to volley questions at her.\n\n\"As long as you can remember\u2014you've lived in Deception Pass?\" he went on.\n\n\"I've a dim memory of some other place, and women and children; but I can't make anything of it. Sometimes I think till I'm weary.\"\n\n\"Then you can read\u2014you have books?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, I can read, and write, too, pretty well. Oldring is educated. He taught me, and years ago an old rustler lived with us, and he had been something different once. He was always teaching me.\"\n\n\"So Oldring takes long trips,\" mused Venters. \"Do you know where he goes?\"\n\n\"No. Every year he drives cattle north of Sterling\u2014then does not return for months. I heard him accused once of living two lives\u2014and he killed the man. That was at Stone Bridge.\"\n\nVenters dropped his apparent task and looked up with an eagerness he no longer strove to hide.\n\n\"Bess,\" he said, using her name for the first time, \"I suspected Oldring was something besides a rustler. Tell me, what's his purpose here in the Pass? I believe much that he has done was to hide his real work here.\"\n\n\"You're right. He's more than a rustler. In fact, as the men say, his rustling cattle is now only a bluff. There's gold in the canyons!\"\n\n\"Ah!\"\n\n\"Yes, there's gold, not in great quantities, but gold enough for him and his men. They wash for gold week in and week out. Then they drive a few cattle and go into the villages to drink and shoot and kill\u2014to bluff the riders.\"\n\n\"Drive a few cattle! But, Bess, the Withersteen herd, the red herd\u2014twenty-five hundred head! That's not a few. And I tracked them into a valley near here.\"\n\n\"Oldring never stole the red herd. He made a deal with Mormons. The riders were to be called in, and Oldring was to drive the herd and keep it till a certain time\u2014I won't know when\u2014then drive it back to the range. What his share was I didn't hear.\"\n\n\"Did you hear why that deal was made?\" queried Venters.\n\n\"No. But it was a trick of Mormons. They're full of tricks. I've heard Oldring's men tell about Mormons. Maybe the Withersteen woman wasn't minding her halter! I saw the man who made the deal. He was a little, queer-shaped man, all humped up. He sat his horse well. I heard one of our men say afterward there was no better rider on the sage than this fellow. What was the name? I forget.\"\n\n\"Jerry Card?\" suggested Venters.\n\n\"That's it. I remember\u2014it's a name easy to remember\u2014and Jerry Card appeared to be on fair terms with Oldring's men.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't wonder,\" replied Venters, thoughtfully. Verification of his suspicions in regard to Tull's underhand work\u2014for the deal with Oldring made by Jerry Card assuredly had its inception in the Mormon Elder's brain, and had been accomplished through his orders\u2014revived in Venters a memory of hatred that had been smothered by press of other emotions. Only a few days had elapsed since the hour of his encounter with Tull, yet they had been forgotten and now seemed far off, and the interval one that now appeared large and profound with incalculable change in his feelings. Hatred of Tull still existed in his heart, but it had lost its white heat. His affection for Jane Withersteen had not changed in the least; nevertheless, he seemed to view it from another angle and see it as another thing\u2014what, he could not exactly define. The recalling of these two feelings was to Venters like getting glimpses into a self that was gone; and the wonder of them\u2014perhaps the change which was too illusive for him\u2014was the fact that a strange irritation accompanied the memory and a desire to dismiss it from mind. And straightway he did dismiss it, to return to thoughts of his significant present.\n\n\"Bess, tell me one more thing,\" he said. \"Haven't you known any women\u2014any young people?\"\n\n\"Sometimes there were women with the men; but Oldring never let me know them. And all the young people I ever saw in my life was when I rode fast through the villages.\"\n\nPerhaps that was the most puzzling and thought-provoking thing she had yet said to Venters. He pondered, more curious the more he learned, but he curbed his inquisitive desires, for he saw her shrinking on the verge of that shame, the causing of which had occasioned him such self-reproach. He would ask no more. Still he had to think, and he found it difficult to think clearly. This sad-eyed girl was so utterly different from what it would have been reason to believe such a remarkable life would have made her. On this day he had found her simple and frank, as natural as any girl he had ever known. About her there was something sweet. Her voice was low and well modulated. He could not look into her face, meet her steady, unabashed, yet wistful eyes, and think of her as the woman she had confessed herself. Oldring's Masked Rider sat before him, a girl dressed as a man. She had been made to ride at the head of infamous forays and drives. She had been imprisoned for many months of her life in an obscure cabin. At times the most vicious of men had been her companions; and the vilest of women, if they had not been permitted to approach her, had, at least, cast their shadows over her. But\u2014but in spite of all this\u2014there thundered at Venters some truth that lifted its voice higher than the clamoring facts of dishonor, some truth that was the very life of her beautiful eyes; and it was innocence.\n\nIn the days that followed, Venters balanced perpetually in mind this haunting conception of innocence over against the cold and sickening fact of an unintentional yet actual gift. How could it be possible for the two things to be true? He believed the latter to be true, and he would not relinquish his conviction of the former; and these conflicting thoughts augmented the mystery that appeared to be a part of Bess. In those ensuing days, however, it became clear as clearest light that Bess was rapidly regaining strength; that, unless reminded of her long association with Oldring, she seemed to have forgotten it; that, like an Indian who lives solely from moment to moment, she was utterly absorbed in the present.\n\nDay by day Venters watched the white of her face slowly change to brown, and the wasted cheeks fill out by imperceptible degrees. There came a time when he could just trace the line of demarcation between the part of her face once hidden by a mask and that left exposed to wind and sun. When that line disappeared in clear bronze tan it was as if she had been washed clean of the stigma of Oldring's Masked Rider. The suggestion of the mask always made Venters remember; now that it was gone he seldom thought of her past. Occasionally he tried to piece together the several stages of strange experience and to make a whole. He had shot a masked outlaw the very sight of whom had been ill omen to riders; he had carried off a wounded woman whose bloody lips quivered in prayer; he had nursed what seemed a frail, shrunken boy; and now he watched a girl whose face had become strangely sweet, whose dark-blue eyes were ever upon him without boldness, without shyness, but with a steady, grave, and growing light. Many times Venters found the clear gaze embarrassing to him, yet, like wine, it had an exhilarating effect. What did she think when she looked at him so? Almost he believed she had no thought at all. All about her and the present there in Surprise Valley, and the dim yet subtly impending future, fascinated Venters and made him thoughtful as all his lonely vigils in the sage had not.\n\nChiefly it was the present that he wished to dwell upon; but it was the call of the future which stirred him to action. No idea had he of what that future had in store for Bess and him. He began to think of improving Surprise Valley as a place to live in, for there was no telling how long they would be compelled to stay there. Venters stubbornly resisted the entering into his mind of an insistent thought that, clearly realized, might have made it plain to him that he did not want to leave Surprise Valley at all. But it was imperative that he consider practical matters; and whether or not he was destined to stay long there, he felt the immediate need of a change of diet. It would be necessary for him to go farther afield for a variety of meat, and also that he soon visit Cottonwoods for a supply of food.\n\nIt occurred again to Venters that he could go to the canyon where Oldring kept his cattle, and at little risk he could pack out some beef. He wished to do this, however, without letting Bess know of it till after he had made the trip. Presently he hit upon the plan of going while she was asleep.\n\nThat very night he stole out of camp, climbed up under the stone bridge, and entered the outlet to the Pass. The gorge was full of luminous gloom. Balancing Rock loomed dark and leaned over the pale descent. Transformed in the shadowy light, it took shape and dimensions of a spectral god waiting\u2014waiting for the moment to hurl himself down upon the tottering walls and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass. At night more than by day Venters felt something fearful and fateful in that rock, and that it had leaned and waited through a thousand years to have somehow to deal with his destiny.\n\n\"Old man, if you must roll, wait till I get back to the girl, and then roll!\" he said, aloud, as if the stones were indeed a god.\n\nAnd those spoken words, in their grim note to his ear, as well as contents to his mind, told Venters that he was all but drifting on a current which he had not power nor wish to stem.\n\nVenters exercised his usual care in the matter of hiding tracks from the outlet, yet it took him scarcely an hour to reach Oldring's cattle. Here sight of many calves changed his original intention, and instead of packing out meat he decided to take a calf out alive. He roped one, securely tied its feet, and swung it over his shoulder. Here was an exceedingly heavy burden, but Venters was powerful\u2014he could take up a sack of grain and with ease pitch it over a pack-saddle\u2014and he made long distance without resting. The hardest work came in the climb up to the outlet and on through to the valley. When he had accomplished it, he became fired with another idea that again changed his intention. He would not kill the calf, but keep it alive. He would go back to Oldring's herd and pack out more calves. Thereupon he secured the calf in the best available spot for the moment and turned to make a second trip.\n\nWhen Venters got back to the valley with another calf, it was close upon daybreak. He crawled into his cave and slept late. Bess had no inkling that he had been absent from camp nearly all night, and only remarked solicitously that he appeared to be more tired than usual, and more in the need of sleep. In the afternoon Venters built a gate across a small ravine near camp, and here corralled the calves; and he succeeded in completing his task without Bess being any the wiser.\n\nThat night he made two more trips to Oldring's range, and again on the following night, and yet another on the next. With eight calves in his corral, he concluded that he had enough; but it dawned upon him then that he did not want to kill one. \"I've rustled Oldring's cattle,\" he said, and laughed. He noted then that all the calves were red. \"Red!\" he exclaimed. \"From the red herd. I've stolen Jane Withersteen's cattle!... That's about the strangest thing yet.\"\n\nOne more trip he undertook to Oldring's valley, and this time he roped a yearling steer and killed it and cut out a small quarter of beef. The howling of coyotes told him he need have no apprehension that the work of his knife would be discovered. He packed the beef back to camp and hung it upon a spruce-tree. Then he sought his bed.\n\nOn the morrow he was up bright and early, glad that he had a surprise for Bess. He could hardly wait for her to come out. Presently she appeared and walked under the spruce. Then she approached the camp-fire. There was a tinge of healthy red in the bronze of her cheeks, and her slender form had begun to round out in graceful lines.\n\n\"Bess, didn't you say you were tired of rabbit?\" inquired Venters. \"And quail and beaver?\"\n\n\"Indeed I did.\"\n\n\"What would you like?\"\n\n\"I'm tired of meat, but if we have to live on it I'd like some beef.\"\n\n\"Well, how does that strike you?\" Venters pointed to the quarter hanging from the spruce-tree. \"We'll have fresh beef for a few days, then we'll cut the rest into strips and dry it.\"\n\n\"Where did you get that?\" asked Bess, slowly.\n\n\"I stole that from Oldring.\"\n\n\"You went back to the canyon\u2014you risked\u2014\" While she hesitated the tinge of bloom faded out of her cheeks.\n\n\"It wasn't any risk, but it was hard work.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I said I was tired of rabbit. Why! How\u2014When did you get that beef?\"\n\n\"Last night.\"\n\n\"While I was asleep?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I woke last night sometime\u2014but I didn't know.\"\n\nHer eyes were widening, darkening with thought, and whenever they did so the steady, watchful, seeing gaze gave place to the wistful light. In the former she saw as the primitive woman without thought; in the latter she looked inward, and her gaze was the reflection of a troubled mind. For long Venters had not seen that dark change, that deepening of blue, which he thought was beautiful and sad. But now he wanted to make her think.\n\n\"I've done more than pack in that beef,\" he said. \"For five nights I've been working while you slept. I've got eight calves corralled near a ravine. Eight calves, all alive and doing fine!\"\n\n\"You went five nights!\"\n\nAll that Venters could make of the dilation of her eyes, her slow pallor, and her exclamation, was fear\u2014fear for herself or for him.\n\n\"Yes. I didn't tell you, because I knew you were afraid to be left alone.\"\n\n\"Alone?\" She echoed his word, but the meaning of it was nothing to her. She had not even thought of being left alone. It was not, then, fear for herself, but for him. This girl, always slow of speech and action, now seemed almost stupid. She put forth a hand that might have indicated the groping of her mind. Suddenly she stepped swiftly to him, with a look and touch that drove from him any doubt of her quick intelligence or feeling.\n\n\"Oldring has men watch the herds\u2014they would kill you. You must never go again!\"\n\nWhen she had spoken, the strength and the blaze of her died, and she swayed toward Venters.\n\n\"Bess, I'll not go again,\" he said, catching her.\n\nShe leaned against him, and her body was limp and vibrated to a long, wavering tremble. Her face was upturned to his. Woman's face, woman's eyes, woman's lips\u2014all acutely and blindly and sweetly and terribly truthful in their betrayal! But as her fear was instinctive, so was her clinging to this one and only friend.\n\nVenters gently put her from him and steadied her upon her feet; and all the while his blood raced wild, and a thrilling tingle unsteadied his nerve, and something\u2014that he had seen and felt in her\u2014that he could not understand\u2014seemed very close to him, warm and rich as a fragrant breath, sweet as nothing had ever before been sweet to him.\n\nWith all his will Venters strove for calmness and thought and judgment unbiased by pity, and reality unswayed by sentiment. Bess's eyes were still fixed upon him with all her soul bright in that wistful light. Swiftly, resolutely he put out of mind all of her life except what had been spent with him. He scorned himself for the intelligence that made him still doubt. He meant to judge her as she had judged him. He was face to face with the inevitableness of life itself. He saw destiny in the dark, straight path of her wonderful eyes. Here was the simplicity, the sweetness of a girl contending with new and strange and enthralling emotions here the living truth of innocence; here the blind terror of a woman confronted with the thought of death to her savior and protector. All this Venters saw, but, besides, there was in Bess's eyes a slow-dawning consciousness that seemed about to break out in glorious radiance.\n\n\"Bess, are you thinking?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes\u2014oh yes!\"\n\n\"Do you realize we are here alone\u2014man and woman?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Have you thought that we may make our way out to civilization, or we may have to stay here\u2014alone\u2014hidden from the world all our lives?\"\n\n\"I never thought\u2014till now.\"\n\n\"Well, what's your choice\u2014to go\u2014or to stay here\u2014alone with me?\"\n\n\"Stay!\" New-born thought of self, ringing vibrantly in her voice, gave her answer singular power.\n\nVenters trembled, and then swiftly turned his gaze from her face\u2014from her eyes. He knew what she had only half divined\u2014that she loved him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Chapter XI. Faith and Unfaith\n\nAt Jane Withersteen's home the promise made to Mrs. Larkin to care for little Fay had begun to be fulfilled. Like a gleam of sunlight through the cottonwoods was the coming of the child to the gloomy house of Withersteen. The big, silent halls echoed with childish laughter. In the shady court, where Jane spent many of the hot July days, Fay's tiny feet pattered over the stone flags and splashed in the amber stream. She prattled incessantly. What difference, Jane thought, a child made in her home! It had never been a real home, she discovered. Even the tidiness and neatness she had so observed, and upon which she had insisted to her women, became, in the light of Fay's smile, habits that now lost their importance. Fay littered the court with Jane's books and papers, and other toys her fancy improvised, and many a strange craft went floating down the little brook.\n\nAnd it was owing to Fay's presence that Jane Withersteen came to see more of Lassiter. The rider had for the most part kept to the sage. He rode for her, but he did not seek her except on business; and Jane had to acknowledge in pique that her overtures had been made in vain. Fay, however, captured Lassiter the moment he first laid eyes on her.\n\nJane was present at the meeting, and there was something about it which dimmed her sight and softened her toward this foe of her people. The rider had clanked into the court, a tired yet wary man, always looking for the attack upon him that was inevitable and might come from any quarter; and he had walked right upon little Fay. The child had been beautiful even in her rags and amid the surroundings of the hovel in the sage, but now, in a pretty white dress, with her shining curls brushed and her face clean and rosy, she was lovely. She left her play and looked up at Lassiter.\n\nIf there was not an instinct for all three of them in that meeting, an unreasoning tendency toward a closer intimacy, then Jane Withersteen believed she had been subject to a queer fancy. She imagined any child would have feared Lassiter. And Fay Larkin had been a lonely, a solitary elf of the sage, not at all an ordinary child, and exquisitely shy with strangers. She watched Lassiter with great, round, grave eyes, but showed no fear. The rider gave Jane a favorable report of cattle and horses; and as he took the seat to which she invited him, little Fay edged as much as half an inch nearer. Jane replied to his look of inquiry and told Fay's story. The rider's gray, earnest gaze troubled her. Then he turned to Fay and smiled in a way that made Jane doubt her sense of the true relation of things. How could Lassiter smile so at a child when he had made so many children fatherless? But he did smile, and to the gentleness she had seen a few times he added something that was infinitely sad and sweet. Jane's intuition told her that Lassiter had never been a father, but if life ever so blessed him he would be a good one. Fay, also, must have found that smile singularly winning. For she edged closer and closer, and then, by way of feminine capitulation, went to Jane, from whose side she bent a beautiful glance upon the rider.\n\nLassiter only smiled at her.\n\nJane watched them, and realized that now was the moment she should seize, if she was ever to win this man from his hatred. But the step was not easy to take. The more she saw of Lassiter the more she respected him, and the greater her respect the harder it became to lend herself to mere coquetry. Yet as she thought of her great motive, of Tull, and of that other whose name she had schooled herself never to think of in connection with Milly Erne's avenger, she suddenly found she had no choice. And her creed gave her boldness far beyond the limit to which vanity would have led her.\n\n\"Lassiter, I see so little of you now,\" she said, and was conscious of heat in her cheeks.\n\n\"I've been riding hard,\" he replied.\n\n\"But you can't live in the saddle. You come in sometimes. Won't you come here to see me\u2014oftener?\"\n\n\"Is that an order?\"\n\n\"Nonsense! I simply ask you to come to see me when you find time.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nThe query once heard was not so embarrassing to Jane as she might have imagined. Moreover, it established in her mind a fact that there existed actually other than selfish reasons for her wanting to see him. And as she had been bold, so she determined to be both honest and brave.\n\n\"I've reasons\u2014only one of which I need mention,\" she answered. \"If it's possible I want to change you toward my people. And on the moment I can conceive of little I wouldn't do to gain that end.\"\n\nHow much better and freer Jane felt after that confession! She meant to show him that there was one Mormon who could play a game or wage a fight in the open.\n\n\"I reckon,\" said Lassiter, and he laughed.\n\nIt was the best in her, if the most irritating, that Lassiter always aroused.\n\n\"Will you come?\" She looked into his eyes, and for the life of her could not quite subdue an imperiousness that rose with her spirit. \"I never asked so much of any man\u2014except Bern Venters.\"\n\n\"'Pears to me that you'd run no risk, or Venters, either. But mebbe that doesn't hold good for me.\"\n\n\"You mean it wouldn't be safe for you to be often here? You look for ambush in the cottonwoods?\"\n\n\"Not that so much.\"\n\nAt this juncture little Fay sidled over to Lassiter.\n\n\"Has oo a little dirl?\" she inquired.\n\n\"No, lassie,\" replied the rider.\n\nWhatever Fay seemed to be searching for in Lassiter's sun-reddened face and quiet eyes she evidently found. \"Oo tan tom to see me,\" she added, and with that, shyness gave place to friendly curiosity. First his sombrero with its leather band and silver ornaments commanded her attention; next his quirt, and then the clinking, silver spurs. These held her for some time, but presently, true to childish fickleness, she left off playing with them to look for something else. She laughed in glee as she ran her little hands down the slippery, shiny surface of Lassiter's leather chaps. Soon she discovered one of the hanging gun\u2014sheaths, and she dragged it up and began tugging at the huge black handle of the gun. Jane Withersteen repressed an exclamation. What significance there was to her in the little girl's efforts to dislodge that heavy weapon! Jane Withersteen saw Fay's play and her beauty and her love as most powerful allies to her own woman's part in a game that suddenly had acquired a strange zest and a hint of danger. And as for the rider, he appeared to have forgotten Jane in the wonder of this lovely child playing about him. At first he was much the shyer of the two. Gradually her confidence overcame his backwardness, and he had the temerity to stroke her golden curls with a great hand. Fay rewarded his boldness with a smile, and when he had gone to the extreme of closing that great hand over her little brown one, she said, simply, \"I like oo!\"\n\nSight of his face then made Jane oblivious for the time to his character as a hater of Mormons. Out of the mother longing that swelled her breast she divined the child hunger in Lassiter.\n\nHe returned the next day, and the next; and upon the following he came both at morning and at night. Upon the evening of this fourth day Jane seemed to feel the breaking of a brooding struggle in Lassiter. During all these visits he had scarcely a word to say, though he watched her and played absent-mindedly with Fay. Jane had contented herself with silence. Soon little Fay substituted for the expression of regard, \"I like oo,\" a warmer and more generous one, \"I love oo.\"\n\nThereafter Lassiter came oftener to see Jane and her little protegee. Daily he grew more gentle and kind, and gradually developed a quaintly merry mood. In the morning he lifted Fay upon his horse and let her ride as he walked beside her to the edge of the sage. In the evening he played with the child at an infinite variety of games she invented, and then, oftener than not, he accepted Jane's invitation to supper. No other visitor came to Withersteen House during those days. So that in spite of watchfulness he never forgot, Lassiter began to show he felt at home there. After the meal they walked into the grove of cottonwoods or up by the lakes, and little Fay held Lassiter's hand as much as she held Jane's. Thus a strange relationship was established, and Jane liked it. At twilight they always returned to the house, where Fay kissed them and went in to her mother. Lassiter and Jane were left alone.\n\nThen, if there were anything that a good woman could do to win a man and still preserve her self-respect, it was something which escaped the natural subtlety of a woman determined to allure. Jane's vanity, that after all was not great, was soon satisfied with Lassiter's silent admiration. And her honest desire to lead him from his dark, blood-stained path would never have blinded her to what she owed herself. But the driving passion of her religion, and its call to save Mormons' lives, one life in particular, bore Jane Withersteen close to an infringement of her womanhood. In the beginning she had reasoned that her appeal to Lassiter must be through the senses. With whatever means she possessed in the way of adornment she enhanced her beauty. And she stooped to artifices that she knew were unworthy of her, but which she deliberately chose to employ. She made of herself a girl in every variable mood wherein a girl might be desirable. In those moods she was not above the methods of an inexperienced though natural flirt. She kept close to him whenever opportunity afforded; and she was forever playfully, yet passionately underneath the surface, fighting him for possession of the great black guns. These he would never yield to her. And so in that manner their hands were often and long in contact. The more of simplicity that she sensed in him the greater the advantage she took.\n\nShe had a trick of changing\u2014and it was not altogether voluntary\u2014from this gay, thoughtless, girlish coquettishness to the silence and the brooding, burning mystery of a woman's mood. The strength and passion and fire of her were in her eyes, and she so used them that Lassiter had to see this depth in her, this haunting promise more fitted to her years than to the flaunting guise of a wilful girl.\n\nThe July days flew by. Jane reasoned that if it were possible for her to be happy during such a time, then she was happy. Little Fay completely filled a long aching void in her heart. In fettering the hands of this Lassiter she was accomplishing the greatest good of her life, and to do good even in a small way rendered happiness to Jane Withersteen. She had attended the regular Sunday services of her church; otherwise she had not gone to the village for weeks. It was unusual that none of her churchmen or friends had called upon her of late; but it was neglect for which she was glad. Judkins and his boy riders had experienced no difficulty in driving the white herd. So these warm July days were free of worry, and soon Jane hoped she had passed the crisis; and for her to hope was presently to trust, and then to believe. She thought often of Venters, but in a dreamy, abstract way. She spent hours teaching and playing with little Fay. And the activity of her mind centered around Lassiter. The direction she had given her will seemed to blunt any branching off of thought from that straight line. The mood came to obsess her.\n\nIn the end, when her awakening came, she learned that she had builded better than she knew. Lassiter, though kinder and gentler than ever, had parted with his quaint humor and his coldness and his tranquility to become a restless and unhappy man. Whatever the power of his deadly intent toward Mormons, that passion now had a rival, the one equally burning and consuming. Jane Withersteen had one moment of exultation before the dawn of a strange uneasiness. What if she had made of herself a lure, at tremendous cost to him and to her, and all in vain!\n\nThat night in the moonlit grove she summoned all her courage and, turning suddenly in the path, she faced Lassiter and leaned close to him, so that she touched him and her eyes looked up to his.\n\n\"Lassiter!... Will you do anything for me?\"\n\nIn the moonlight she saw his dark, worn face change, and by that change she seemed to feel him immovable as a wall of stone.\n\nJane slipped her hands down to the swinging gun-sheaths, and when she had locked her fingers around the huge, cold handles of the guns, she trembled as with a chilling ripple over all her body.\n\n\"May I take your guns?\"\n\n\"Why?\" he asked, and for the first time to her his voice carried a harsh note. Jane felt his hard, strong hands close round her wrists. It was not wholly with intent that she leaned toward him, for the look of his eyes and the feel of his hands made her weak.\n\n\"It's no trifle\u2014no woman's whim\u2014it's deep\u2014as my heart. Let me take them?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I want to keep you from killing more men\u2014Mormons. You must let me save you from more wickedness\u2014more wanton bloodshed\u2014\" Then the truth forced itself falteringly from her lips. \"You must\u2014let\u2014help me to keep my vow to Milly Erne. I swore to her\u2014as she lay dying\u2014that if ever any one came here to avenge her\u2014I swore I would stay his hand. Perhaps I\u2014I alone can save the\u2014the man who\u2014who\u2014Oh, Lassiter!... I feel that I can't change you\u2014then soon you'll be out to kill\u2014and you'll kill by instinct\u2014and among the Mormons you kill will be the one\u2014who... Lassiter, if you care a little for me\u2014let me\u2014for my sake\u2014let me take your guns!\"\n\nAs if her hands had been those of a child, he unclasped their clinging grip from the handles of his guns, and, pushing her away, he turned his gray face to her in one look of terrible realization and then strode off into the shadows of the cottonwoods.\n\nWhen the first shock of her futile appeal to Lassiter had passed, Jane took his cold, silent condemnation and abrupt departure not so much as a refusal to her entreaty as a hurt and stunned bitterness for her attempt at his betrayal. Upon further thought and slow consideration of Lassiter's past actions, she believed he would return and forgive her. The man could not be hard to a woman, and she doubted that he could stay away from her. But at the point where she had hoped to find him vulnerable she now began to fear he was proof against all persuasion. The iron and stone quality that she had early suspected in him had actually cropped out as an impregnable barrier. Nevertheless, if Lassiter remained in Cottonwoods she would never give up her hope and desire to change him. She would change him if she had to sacrifice everything dear to her except hope of heaven. Passionately devoted as she was to her religion, she had yet refused to marry a Mormon. But a situation had developed wherein self paled in the great white light of religious duty of the highest order. That was the leading motive, the divinely spiritual one; but there were other motives, which, like tentacles, aided in drawing her will to the acceptance of a possible abnegation. And through the watches of that sleepless night Jane Withersteen, in fear and sorrow and doubt, came finally to believe that if she must throw herself into Lassiter's arms to make him abide by \"Thou shalt not kill!\" she would yet do well.\n\nIn the morning she expected Lassiter at the usual hour, but she was not able to go at once to the court, so she sent little Fay. Mrs. Larkin was ill and required attention. It appeared that the mother, from the time of her arrival at Withersteen House, had relaxed and was slowly losing her hold on life. Jane had believed that absence of worry and responsibility coupled with good nursing and comfort would mend Mrs. Larkin's broken health. Such, however, was not the case.\n\nWhen Jane did get out to the court, Fay was there alone, and at the moment embarking on a dubious voyage down the stone-lined amber stream upon a craft of two brooms and a pillow. Fay was as delightfully wet as she could possibly wish to get.\n\nClatter of hoofs distracted Fay and interrupted the scolding she was gleefully receiving from Jane. The sound was not the light-spirited trot that Bells made when Lassiter rode him into the outer court. This was slower and heavier, and Jane did not recognize in it any of her other horses. The appearance of Bishop Dyer startled Jane. He dismounted with his rapid, jerky motion flung the bridle, and, as he turned toward the inner court and stalked up on the stone flags, his boots rang. In his authoritative front, and in the red anger unmistakably flaming in his face, he reminded Jane of her father.\n\n\"Is that the Larkin pauper?\" he asked, bruskly, without any greeting to Jane.\n\n\"It's Mrs. Larkin's little girl,\" replied Jane, slowly.\n\n\"I hear you intend to raise the child?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Of course you mean to give her Mormon bringing-up?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHis questions had been swift. She was amazed at a feeling that some one else was replying for her.\n\n\"I've come to say a few things to you.\" He stopped to measure her with stern, speculative eye.\n\nJane Withersteen loved this man. From earliest childhood she had been taught to revere and love bishops of her church. And for ten years Bishop Dyer had been the closest friend and counselor of her father, and for the greater part of that period her own friend and Scriptural teacher. Her interpretation of her creed and her religious activity in fidelity to it, her acceptance of mysterious and holy Mormon truths, were all invested in this Bishop. Bishop Dyer as an entity was next to God. He was God's mouthpiece to the little Mormon community at Cottonwoods. God revealed himself in secret to this mortal.\n\nAnd Jane Withersteen suddenly suffered a paralyzing affront to her consciousness of reverence by some strange, irresistible twist of thought wherein she saw this Bishop as a man. And the train of thought hurdled the rising, crying protests of that other self whose poise she had lost. It was not her Bishop who eyed her in curious measurement. It was a man who tramped into her presence without removing his hat, who had no greeting for her, who had no semblance of courtesy. In looks, as in action, he made her think of a bull stamping cross-grained into a corral. She had heard of Bishop Dyer forgetting the minister in the fury of a common man, and now she was to feel it. The glance by which she measured him in turn momentarily veiled the divine in the ordinary. He looked a rancher; he was booted, spurred, and covered with dust; he carried a gun at his hip, and she remembered that he had been known to use it. But during the long moment while he watched her there was nothing commonplace in the slow-gathering might of his wrath.\n\n\"Brother Tull has talked to me,\" he began. \"It was your father's wish that you marry Tull, and my order. You refused him?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You would not give up your friendship with that tramp Venters?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But you'll do as I order!\" he thundered. \"Why, Jane Withersteen, you are in danger of becoming a heretic! You can thank your Gentile friends for that. You face the damning of your soul to perdition.\"\n\nIn the flux and reflux of the whirling torture of Jane's mind, that new, daring spirit of hers vanished in the old habitual order of her life. She was a Mormon, and the Bishop regained ascendance.\n\n\"It's well I got you in time, Jane Withersteen. What would your father have said to these goings-on of yours? He would have put you in a stone cage on bread and water. He would have taught you something about Mormonism. Remember, you're a born Mormon. There have been Mormons who turned heretic\u2014damn their souls!\u2014but no born Mormon ever left us yet. Ah, I see your shame. Your faith is not shaken. You are only a wild girl.\" The Bishop's tone softened. \"Well, it's enough that I got to you in time... Now tell me about this Lassiter. I hear strange things.\"\n\n\"What do you wish to know?\" queried Jane.\n\n\"About this man. You hired him?\"\n\n\"Yes, he's riding for me. When my riders left me I had to have any one I could get.\"\n\n\"Is it true what I hear\u2014that he's a gun-man, a Mormon-hater, steeped in blood?\"\n\n\"True\u2014terribly true, I fear.\"\n\n\"But what's he doing here in Cottonwoods? This place isn't notorious enough for such a man. Sterling and the villages north, where there's universal gun-packing and fights every day\u2014where there are more men like him, it seems to me they would attract him most. We're only a wild, lonely border settlement. It's only recently that the rustlers have made killings here. Nor have there been saloons till lately, nor the drifting in of outcasts. Has not this gun-man some special mission here?\"\n\nJane maintained silence.\n\n\"Tell me,\" ordered Bishop Dyer, sharply.\n\n\"Yes,\" she replied.\n\n\"Do you know what it is?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Tell me that.\"\n\n\"Bishop Dyer, I don't want to tell.\"\n\nHe waved his hand in an imperative gesture of command. The red once more leaped to his face, and in his steel-blue eyes glinted a pin-point of curiosity.\n\n\"That first day,\" whispered Jane, \"Lassiter said he came here to find\u2014Milly Erne's grave!\"\n\nWith downcast eyes Jane watched the swift flow of the amber water. She saw it and tried to think of it, of the stones, of the ferns; but, like her body, her mind was in a leaden vise. Only the Bishop's voice could release her. Seemingly there was silence of longer duration than all her former life.\n\n\"For what\u2014else?\" When Bishop Dyer's voice did cleave the silence it was high, curiously shrill, and on the point of breaking. It released Jane's tongue, but she could not lift her eyes.\n\n\"To kill the man who persuaded Milly Erne to abandon her home and her husband\u2014and her God!\"\n\nWith wonderful distinctness Jane Withersteen heard her own clear voice. She heard the water murmur at her feet and flow on to the sea; she heard the rushing of all the waters in the world. They filled her ears with low, unreal murmurings\u2014these sounds that deadened her brain and yet could not break the long and terrible silence. Then, from somewhere\u2014from an immeasurable distance\u2014came a slow, guarded, clinking, clanking step. Into her it shot electrifying life. It released the weight upon her numbed eyelids. Lifting her eyes she saw\u2014ashen, shaken, stricken\u2014not the Bishop but the man! And beyond him, from round the corner came that soft, silvery step. A long black boot with a gleaming spur swept into sight\u2014and then Lassiter! Bishop Dyer did not see, did not hear: he stared at Jane in the throes of sudden revelation.\n\n\"Ah, I understand!\" he cried, in hoarse accents. \"That's why you made love to this Lassiter\u2014to bind his hands!\"\n\nIt was Jane's gaze riveted upon the rider that made Bishop Dyer turn. Then clear sight failed her. Dizzily, in a blur, she saw the Bishop's hand jerk to his hip. She saw gleam of blue and spout of red. In her ears burst a thundering report. The court floated in darkening circles around her, and she fell into utter blackness.\n\nThe darkness lightened, turned to slow-drifting haze, and lifted. Through a thin film of blue smoke she saw the rough-hewn timbers of the court roof. A cool, damp touch moved across her brow. She smelled powder, and it was that which galvanized her suspended thought. She moved, to see that she lay prone upon the stone flags with her head on Lassiter's knee, and he was bathing her brow with water from the stream. The same swift glance, shifting low, brought into range of her sight a smoking gun and splashes of blood.\n\n\"Ah-h!\" she moaned, and was drifting, sinking again into darkness, when Lassiter's voice arrested her.\n\n\"It's all right, Jane. It's all right.\"\n\n\"Did\u2014you\u2014kill\u2014him?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Who? That fat party who was here? No. I didn't kill him.\"\n\n\"Oh!... Lassiter!\"\n\n\"Say! It was queer for you to faint. I thought you were such a strong woman, not faintish like that. You're all right now\u2014only some pale. I thought you'd never come to. But I'm awkward round women folks. I couldn't think of anythin'.\"\n\n\"Lassiter!... the gun there!... the blood!\"\n\n\"So that's troublin' you. I reckon it needn't. You see it was this way. I come round the house an' seen that fat party an' heard him talkin' loud. Then he seen me, an' very impolite goes straight for his gun. He oughtn't have tried to throw a gun on me\u2014whatever his reason was. For that's meetin' me on my own grounds. I've seen runnin' molasses that was quicker 'n him. Now I didn't know who he was, visitor or friend or relation of yours, though I seen he was a Mormon all over, an' I couldn't get serious about shootin'. So I winged him\u2014put a bullet through his arm as he was pullin' at his gun. An' he dropped the gun there, an' a little blood. I told him he'd introduced himself sufficient, an' to please move out of my vicinity. An' he went.\"\n\nLassiter spoke with slow, cool, soothing voice, in which there was a hint of levity, and his touch, as he continued to bathe her brow, was gentle and steady. His impassive face, and the kind gray eyes, further stilled her agitation.\n\n\"He drew on you first, and you deliberately shot to cripple him\u2014you wouldn't kill him\u2014you\u2014Lassiter?\"\n\n\"That's about the size of it.\"\n\nJane kissed his hand.\n\nAll that was calm and cool about Lassiter instantly vanished.\n\n\"Don't do that! I won't stand it! An' I don't care a damn who that fat party was.\"\n\nHe helped Jane to her feet and to a chair. Then with the wet scarf he had used to bathe her face he wiped the blood from the stone flags and, picking up the gun, he threw it upon a couch. With that he began to pace the court, and his silver spurs jangled musically, and the great gun-sheaths softly brushed against his leather chaps.\n\n\"So\u2014it's true\u2014what I heard him say?\" Lassiter asked, presently halting before her. \"You made love to me\u2014to bind my hands?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" confessed Jane. It took all her woman's courage to meet the gray storm of his glance.\n\n\"All these days that you've been so friendly an' like a pardner\u2014all these evenin's that have been so bewilderin' to me\u2014your beauty\u2014an'\u2014an' the way you looked an' came close to me\u2014they were woman's tricks to bind my hands?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"An' your sweetness that seemed so natural, an' your throwin' little Fay an' me so much together\u2014to make me love the child\u2014all that was for the same reason?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nLassiter flung his arms\u2014a strange gesture for him.\n\n\"Mebbe it wasn't much in your Mormon thinkin', for you to play that game. But to ring the child in\u2014that was hellish!\"\n\nJane's passionate, unheeding zeal began to loom darkly.\n\n\"Lassiter, whatever my intention in the beginning, Fay loves you dearly\u2014and I\u2014I've grown to\u2014to like you.\"\n\n\"That's powerful kind of you, now,\" he said. Sarcasm and scorn made his voice that of a stranger. \"An' you sit there an' look me straight in the eyes! You're a wonderful strange woman, Jane Withersteen.\"\n\n\"I'm not ashamed, Lassiter. I told you I'd try to change you.\"\n\n\"Would you mind tellin' me just what you tried?\"\n\n\"I tried to make you see beauty in me and be softened by it. I wanted you to care for me so that I could influence you. It wasn't easy. At first you were stone-blind. Then I hoped you'd love little Fay, and through that come to feel the horror of making children fatherless.\"\n\n\"Jane Withersteen, either you're a fool or noble beyond my understandin'. Mebbe you're both. I know you're blind. What you meant is one thing\u2014what you did was to make me love you.\"\n\n\"Lassiter!\"\n\n\"I reckon I'm a human bein', though I never loved any one but my sister, Milly Erne. That was long\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, are you Milly's brother?\"\n\n\"Yes, I was, an' I loved her. There never was any one but her in my life till now. Didn't I tell you that long ago I back-trailed myself from women? I was a Texas ranger till\u2014till Milly left home, an' then I became somethin' else\u2014Lassiter! For years I've been a lonely man set on one thing. I came here an' met you. An' now I'm not the man I was. The change was gradual, an' I took no notice of it. I understand now that never-satisfied longin' to see you, listen to you, watch you, feel you near me. It's plain now why you were never out of my thoughts. I've had no thoughts but of you. I've lived an' breathed for you. An' now when I know what it means\u2014what you've done\u2014I'm burnin' up with hell's fire!\"\n\n\"Oh, Lassiter\u2014no\u2014no\u2014you don't love me that way!\" Jane cased.\n\n\"If that's what love is, then I do.\"\n\n\"Forgive me! I didn't mean to make you love me like that. Oh, what a tangle of our lives! You\u2014Milly Erne's brother! And I\u2014heedless, mad to melt your heart toward Mormons. Lassiter, I may be wicked but not wicked enough to hate. If I couldn't hate Tull, could I hate you?\"\n\n\"After all, Jane, mebbe you're only blind\u2014Mormon blind. That only can explain what's close to selfishness\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not selfish. I despise the very word. If I were free\u2014\"\n\n\"But you're not free. Not free of Mormonism. An' in playin' this game with me you've been unfaithful.\"\n\n\"Un-faithful!\" faltered Jane.\n\n\"Yes, I said unfaithful. You're faithful to your Bishop an' unfaithful to yourself. You're false to your womanhood an' true to your religion. But for a savin' innocence you'd have made yourself low an' vile\u2014betrayin' yourself, betrayin' me\u2014all to bind my hands an' keep me from snuffin' out Mormon life. It's your damned Mormon blindness.\"\n\n\"Is it vile\u2014is it blind\u2014is it only Mormonism to save human life? No, Lassiter, that's God's law, divine, universal for all Christians.\"\n\n\"The blindness I mean is blindness that keeps you from seein' the truth. I've known many good Mormons. But some are blacker than hell. You won't see that even when you know it. Else, why all this blind passion to save the life of that\u2014that...\"\n\nJane shut out the light, and the hands she held over her eyes trembled and quivered against her face.\n\n\"Blind\u2014yes, en' let me make it clear en' simple to you,\" Lassiter went on, his voice losing its tone of anger. \"Take, for instance, that idea of yours last night when you wanted my guns. It was good an' beautiful, an' showed your heart\u2014but\u2014why, Jane, it was crazy. Mind I'm assumin' that life to me is as sweet as to any other man. An' to preserve that life is each man's first an' closest thought. Where would any man be on this border without guns? Where, especially, would Lassiter be? Well, I'd be under the sage with thousands of other men now livin' an' sure better men than me. Gun-packin' in the West since the Civil War has growed into a kind of moral law. An' out here on this border it's the difference between a man an' somethin' not a man. Look what your takin' Venters's guns from him all but made him! Why, your churchmen carry guns. Tull has killed a man an' drawed on others. Your Bishop has shot a half dozen men, an' it wasn't through prayers of his that they recovered. An' to-day he'd have shot me if he'd been quick enough on the draw. Could I walk or ride down into Cottonwoods without my guns? This is a wild time, Jane Withersteen, this year of our Lord eighteen seventy-one.\"\n\n\"No time\u2014for a woman!\" exclaimed Jane, brokenly. \"Oh, Lassiter, I feel helpless\u2014lost\u2014and don't know where to turn. If I am blind\u2014then\u2014I need some one\u2014a friend\u2014you, Lassiter\u2014more than ever!\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't say nothin' about goin' back on you, did I?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Chapter XII. The Invisible Hand\n\nJane received a letter from Bishop Dyer, not in his own handwriting, which stated that the abrupt termination of their interview had left him in some doubt as to her future conduct. A slight injury had incapacitated him from seeking another meeting at present, the letter went on to say, and ended with a request which was virtually a command, that she call upon him at once.\n\nThe reading of the letter acquainted Jane Withersteen with the fact that something within her had all but changed. She sent no reply to Bishop Dyer nor did she go to see him. On Sunday she remained absent from the service\u2014for the second time in years\u2014and though she did not actually suffer there was a dead-lock of feelings deep within her, and the waiting for a balance to fall on either side was almost as bad as suffering. She had a gloomy expectancy of untoward circumstances, and with it a keen-edged curiosity to watch developments. She had a half-formed conviction that her future conduct\u2014as related to her churchmen\u2014was beyond her control and would be governed by their attitude toward her. Something was changing in her, forming, waiting for decision to make it a real and fixed thing. She had told Lassiter that she felt helpless and lost in the fateful tangle of their lives; and now she feared that she was approaching the same chaotic condition of mind in regard to her religion. It appalled her to find that she questioned phases of that religion. Absolute faith had been her serenity. Though leaving her faith unshaken, her serenity had been disturbed, and now it was broken by open war between her and her ministers. That something within her\u2014a whisper\u2014which she had tried in vain to hush had become a ringing voice, and it called to her to wait. She had transgressed no laws of God. Her churchmen, however invested with the power and the glory of a wonderful creed, however they sat in inexorable judgment of her, must now practice toward her the simple, common, Christian virtue they professed to preach, \"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you!\"\n\nJane Withersteen, waiting in darkness of mind, remained faithful still. But it was darkness that must soon be pierced by light. If her faith were justified, if her churchmen were trying only to intimidate her, the fact would soon be manifest, as would their failure, and then she would redouble her zeal toward them and toward what had been the best work of her life\u2014work for the welfare and happiness of those among whom she lived, Mormon and Gentile alike. If that secret, intangible power closed its coils round her again, if that great invisible hand moved here and there and everywhere, slowly paralyzing her with its mystery and its inconceivable sway over her affairs, then she would know beyond doubt that it was not chance, nor jealousy, nor intimidation, nor ministerial wrath at her revolt, but a cold and calculating policy thought out long before she was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an atom.\n\nThen might come her ruin. Then might come her fall into black storm. Yet she would rise again, and to the light. God would be merciful to a driven woman who had lost her way.\n\nA week passed. Little Fay played and prattled and pulled at Lassiter's big black guns. The rider came to Withersteen House oftener than ever. Jane saw a change in him, though it did not relate to his kindness and gentleness. He was quieter and more thoughtful. While playing with Fay or conversing with Jane he seemed to be possessed of another self that watched with cool, roving eyes, that listened, listened always as if the murmuring amber stream brought messages, and the moving leaves whispered something. Lassiter never rode Bells into the court any more, nor did he come by the lane or the paths. When he appeared it was suddenly and noiselessly out of the dark shadow of the grove.\n\n\"I left Bells out in the sage,\" he said, one day at the end of that week. \"I must carry water to him.\"\n\n\"Why not let him drink at the trough or here?\" asked Jane, quickly.\n\n\"I reckon it'll be safer for me to slip through the grove. I've been watched when I rode in from the sage.\"\n\n\"Watched? By whom?\"\n\n\"By a man who thought he was well hid. But my eyes are pretty sharp. An', Jane,\" he went on, almost in a whisper, \"I reckon it'd be a good idea for us to talk low. You're spied on here by your women.\"\n\n\"Lassiter!\" she whispered in turn. \"That's hard to believe. My women love me.\"\n\n\"What of that?\" he asked. \"Of course they love you. But they're Mormon women.\"\n\nJane's old, rebellious loyalty clashed with her doubt.\n\n\"I won't believe it,\" she replied, stubbornly.\n\n\"Well then, just act natural an' talk natural, an' pretty soon\u2014give them time to hear us\u2014pretend to go over there to the table, en' then quick-like make a move for the door en' open it.\"\n\n\"I will,\" said Jane, with heightened color. Lassiter was right; he never made mistakes; he would not have told her unless he positively knew. Yet Jane was so tenacious of faith that she had to see with her own eyes, and so constituted that to employ even such small deceit toward her women made her ashamed, and angry for her shame as well as theirs. Then a singular thought confronted her that made her hold up this simple ruse\u2014which hurt her, though it was well justified\u2014against the deceit she had wittingly and eagerly used toward Lassiter. The difference was staggering in its suggestion of that blindness of which he had accused her. Fairness and justice and mercy, that she had imagined were anchor-cables to hold fast her soul to righteousness had not been hers in the strange, biased duty that had so exalted and confounded her.\n\nPresently Jane began to act her little part, to laugh and play with Fay, to talk of horses and cattle to Lassiter. Then she made deliberate mention of a book in which she kept records of all pertaining to her stock, and she walked slowly toward the table, and when near the door she suddenly whirled and thrust it open. Her sharp action nearly knocked down a woman who had undoubtedly been listening.\n\n\"Hester,\" said Jane, sternly, \"you may go home, and you need not come back.\"\n\nJane shut the door and returned to Lassiter. Standing unsteadily, she put her hand on his arm. She let him see that doubt had gone, and how this stab of disloyalty pained her.\n\n\"Spies! My own women!... Oh, miserable!\" she cried, with flashing, tearful eyes.\n\n\"I hate to tell you,\" he replied. By that she knew he had long spared her. \"It's begun again\u2014that work in the dark.\"\n\n\"Nay, Lassiter\u2014it never stopped!\"\n\nSo bitter certainty claimed her at last, and trust fled Withersteen House and fled forever. The women who owed much to Jane Withersteen changed not in love for her, nor in devotion to their household work, but they poisoned both by a thousand acts of stealth and cunning and duplicity. Jane broke out once and caught them in strange, stone-faced, unhesitating falsehood. Thereafter she broke out no more. She forgave them because they were driven. Poor, fettered, and sealed Hagars, how she pitied them! What terrible thing bound them and locked their lips, when they showed neither consciousness of guilt toward their benefactress nor distress at the slow wearing apart of long-established and dear ties?\n\n\"The blindness again!\" cried Jane Withersteen. \"In my sisters as in me!... O God!\"\n\nThere came a time when no words passed between Jane and her women. Silently they went about their household duties, and secretly they went about the underhand work to which they had been bidden. The gloom of the house and the gloom of its mistress, which darkened even the bright spirit of little Fay, did not pervade these women. Happiness was not among them, but they were aloof from gloom. They spied and listened; they received and sent secret messengers; and they stole Jane's books and records, and finally the papers that were deeds of her possessions. Through it all they were silent, rapt in a kind of trance. Then one by one, without leave or explanation or farewell, they left Withersteen House, and never returned.\n\nCoincident with this disappearance Jane's gardeners and workers in the alfalfa fields and stable men quit her, not even asking for their wages. Of all her Mormon employees about the great ranch only Jerd remained. He went on with his duty, but talked no more of the change than if it had never occurred.\n\n\"Jerd,\" said Jane, \"what stock you can't take care of turn out in the sage. Let your first thought be for Black Star and Night. Keep them in perfect condition. Run them every day and watch them always.\"\n\nThough Jane Withersteen gave them such liberality, she loved her possessions. She loved the rich, green stretches of alfalfa, and the farms, and the grove, and the old stone house, and the beautiful, ever-faithful amber spring, and every one of a myriad of horses and colts and burros and fowls down to the smallest rabbit that nipped her vegetables; but she loved best her noble Arabian steeds. In common with all riders of the upland sage Jane cherished two material things\u2014the cold, sweet, brown water that made life possible in the wilderness and the horses which were a part of that life. When Lassiter asked her what Lassiter would be without his guns he was assuming that his horse was part of himself. So Jane loved Black Star and Night because it was her nature to love all beautiful creatures\u2014perhaps all living things; and then she loved them because she herself was of the sage and in her had been born and bred the rider's instinct to rely on his four-footed brother. And when Jane gave Jerd the order to keep her favorites trained down to the day it was a half-conscious admission that presaged a time when she would need her fleet horses.\n\nJane had now, however, no leisure to brood over the coils that were closing round her. Mrs. Larkin grew weaker as the August days began; she required constant care; there was little Fay to look after; and such household work as was imperative. Lassiter put Bells in the stable with the other racers, and directed his efforts to a closer attendance upon Jane. She welcomed the change. He was always at hand to help, and it was her fortune to learn that his boast of being awkward around women had its root in humility and was not true.\n\nHis great, brown hands were skilled in a multiplicity of ways which a woman might have envied. He shared Jane's work, and was of especial help to her in nursing Mrs. Larkin. The woman suffered most at night, and this often broke Jane's rest. So it came about that Lassiter would stay by Mrs. Larkin during the day, when she needed care, and Jane would make up the sleep she lost in night-watches. Mrs. Larkin at once took kindly to the gentle Lassiter, and, without ever asking who or what he was, praised him to Jane. \"He's a good man and loves children,\" she said. How sad to hear this truth spoken of a man whom Jane thought lost beyond all redemption! Yet ever and ever Lassiter towered above her, and behind or through his black, sinister figure shone something luminous that strangely affected Jane. Good and evil began to seem incomprehensibly blended in her judgment. It was her belief that evil could not come forth from good; yet here was a murderer who dwarfed in gentleness, patience, and love any man she had ever known.\n\nShe had almost lost track of her more outside concerns when early one morning Judkins presented himself before her in the courtyard.\n\nThin, hard, burnt, bearded, with the dust and sage thick on him, with his leather wrist-bands shining from use, and his boots worn through on the stirrup side, he looked the rider of riders. He wore two guns and carried a Winchester.\n\nJane greeted him with surprise and warmth, set meat and bread and drink before him; and called Lassiter out to see him. The men exchanged glances, and the meaning of Lassiter's keen inquiry and Judkins's bold reply, both unspoken, was not lost upon Jane.\n\n\"Where's your hoss?\" asked Lassiter, aloud.\n\n\"Left him down the slope,\" answered Judkins. \"I footed it in a ways, an' slept last night in the sage. I went to the place you told me you 'moss always slept, but didn't strike you.\"\n\n\"I moved up some, near the spring, an' now I go there nights.\"\n\n\"Judkins\u2014the white herd?\" queried Jane, hurriedly.\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, I make proud to say I've not lost a steer. Fer a good while after thet stampede Lassiter milled we hed no trouble. Why, even the sage dogs left us. But it's begun agin\u2014thet flashin' of lights over ridge tips, an' queer puffin' of smoke, en' then at night strange whistles en' noises. But the herd's acted magnificent. An' my boys, say, Miss Withersteen, they're only kids, but I ask no better riders. I got the laugh in the village fer takin' them out. They're a wild lot, an' you know boys hev more nerve than grown men, because they don't know what danger is. I'm not denyin' there's danger. But they glory in it, an' mebbe I like it myself\u2014anyway, we'll stick. We're goin' to drive the herd on the far side of the first break of Deception Pass. There's a great round valley over there, an' no ridges or piles of rocks to aid these stampeders. The rains are due. We'll hev plenty of water fer a while. An' we can hold thet herd from anybody except Oldrin'. I come in fer supplies. I'll pack a couple of burros an' drive out after dark to-night.\"\n\n\"Judkins, take what you want from the store-room. Lassiter will help you. I\u2014I can't thank you enough... but\u2014wait.\"\n\nJane went to the room that had once been her father's, and from a secret chamber in the thick stone wall she took a bag of gold, and, carrying it back to the court, she gave it to the rider.\n\n\"There, Judkins, and understand that I regard it as little for your loyalty. Give what is fair to your boys, and keep the rest. Hide it. Perhaps that would be wisest.\"\n\n\"Oh... Miss Withersteen!\" ejaculated the rider. \"I couldn't earn so much in\u2014in ten years. It's not right\u2014I oughtn't take it.\"\n\n\"Judkins, you know I'm a rich woman. I tell you I've few faithful friends. I've fallen upon evil days. God only knows what will become of me and mine! So take the gold.\"\n\nShe smiled in understanding of his speechless gratitude, and left him with Lassiter. Presently she heard him speaking low at first, then in louder accents emphasized by the thumping of his rifle on the stones. \"As infernal a job as even you, Lassiter, ever heerd of.\"\n\n\"Why, son,\" was Lassiter's reply, \"this breakin' of Miss Withersteen may seem bad to you, but it ain't bad\u2014yet. Some of these wall-eyed fellers who look jest as if they was walkin' in the shadow of Christ himself, right down the sunny road, now they can think of things en' do things that are really hell-bent.\"\n\nJane covered her ears and ran to her own room, and there like caged lioness she paced to and fro till the coming of little Fay reversed her dark thoughts.\n\nThe following day, a warm and muggy one threatening rain awhile Jane was resting in the court, a horseman clattered through the grove and up to the hitching-rack. He leaped off and approached Jane with the manner of a man determined to execute difficult mission, yet fearful of its reception. In the gaunt, wiry figure and the lean, brown face Jane recognized one of her Mormon riders, Blake. It was he of whom Judkins had long since spoken. Of all the riders ever in her employ Blake owed her the most, and as he stepped before her, removing his hat and making manly efforts to subdue his emotion, he showed that he remembered.\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, mother's dead,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh\u2014Blake!\" exclaimed Jane, and she could say no more.\n\n\"She died free from pain in the end, and she's buried\u2014resting at last, thank God!... I've come to ride for you again, if you'll have me. Don't think I mentioned mother to get your sympathy. When she was living and your riders quit, I had to also. I was afraid of what might be done\u2014said to her... Miss Withersteen, we can't talk of\u2014of what's going on now\u2014\"\n\n\"Blake, do you know?\"\n\n\"I know a great deal. You understand, my lips are shut. But without explanation or excuse I offer my services. I'm a Mormon\u2014I hope a good one. But\u2014there are some things!... It's no use, Miss Withersteen, I can't say any more\u2014what I'd like to. But will you take me back?\"\n\n\"Blake!... You know what it means?\"\n\n\"I don't care. I'm sick of\u2014of\u2014I'll show you a Mormon who'll be true to you!\"\n\n\"But, Blake\u2014how terribly you might suffer for that!\"\n\n\"Maybe. Aren't you suffering now?\"\n\n\"God knows indeed I am!\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, it's a liberty on my part to speak so, but I know you pretty well\u2014know you'll never give in. I wouldn't if I were you. And I\u2014I must\u2014Something makes me tell you the worst is yet to come. That's all. I absolutely can't say more. Will you take me back\u2014let me ride for you\u2014show everybody what I mean?\"\n\n\"Blake, it makes me happy to hear you. How my riders hurt me when they quit!\" Jane felt the hot tears well to her eyes and splash down upon her hands. \"I thought so much of them\u2014tried so hard to be good to them. And not one was true. You've made it easy to forgive. Perhaps many of them really feel as you do, but dare not return to me. Still, Blake, I hesitate to take you back. Yet I want you so much.\"\n\n\"Do it, then. If you're going to make your life a lesson to Mormon women, let me make mine a lesson to the men. Right is right. I believe in you, and here's my life to prove it.\"\n\n\"You hint it may mean your life!\" said Jane, breathless and low.\n\n\"We won't speak of that. I want to come back. I want to do what every rider aches in his secret heart to do for you... Miss Withersteen, I hoped it'd not be necessary to tell you that my mother on her deathbed told me to have courage. She knew how the thing galled me\u2014she told me to come back... Will you take me?\"\n\n\"God bless you, Blake! Yes, I'll take you back. And will you\u2014will you accept gold from me?\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen!\"\n\n\"I just gave Judkins a bag of gold. I'll give you one. If you will not take it you must not come back. You might ride for me a few months\u2014weeks\u2014days till the storm breaks. Then you'd have nothing, and be in disgrace with your people. We'll forearm you against poverty, and me against endless regret. I'll give you gold which you can hide\u2014till some future time.\"\n\n\"Well, if it pleases you,\" replied Blake. \"But you know I never thought of pay. Now, Miss Withersteen, one thing more. I want to see this man Lassiter. Is he here?\"\n\n\"Yes, but, Blake\u2014what\u2014Need you see him? Why?\" asked Jane, instantly worried. \"I can speak to him\u2014tell him about you.\"\n\n\"That won't do. I want to\u2014I've got to tell him myself. Where is he?\"\n\n\"Lassiter is with Mrs. Larkin. She is ill. I'll call him,\" answered Jane, and going to the door she softly called for the rider. A faint, musical jingle preceded his step\u2014then his tall form crossed the threshold.\n\n\"Lassiter, here's Blake, an old rider of mine. He has come back to me and he wishes to speak to you.\"\n\nBlake's brown face turned exceedingly pale.\n\n\"Yes, I had to speak to you,\" he said, swiftly. \"My name's Blake. I'm a Mormon and a rider. Lately I quit Miss Withersteen. I've come to beg her to take me back. Now I don't know you; but I know\u2014what you are. So I've this to say to your face. It would never occur to this woman to imagine\u2014let alone suspect me to be a spy. She couldn't think it might just be a low plot to come here and shoot you in the back. Jane Withersteen hasn't that kind of a mind... Well, I've not come for that. I want to help her\u2014to pull a bridle along with Judkins and\u2014and you. The thing is\u2014do you believe me?\"\n\n\"I reckon I do,\" replied Lassiter. How this slow, cool speech contrasted with Blake's hot, impulsive words! \"You might have saved some of your breath. See here, Blake, cinch this in your mind. Lassiter has met some square Mormons! An' mebbe\u2014\"\n\n\"Blake,\" interrupted Jane, nervously anxious to terminate a colloquy that she perceived was an ordeal for him. \"Go at once and fetch me a report of my horses.\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen!... You mean the big drove\u2014down in the sage-cleared fields?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" replied Jane. \"My horses are all there, except the blooded stock I keep here.\"\n\n\"Haven't you heard\u2014then?\"\n\n\"Heard? No! What's happened to them?\"\n\n\"They're gone, Miss Withersteen, gone these ten days past. Dorn told me, and I rode down to see for myself.\"\n\n\"Lassiter\u2014did you know?\" asked Jane, whirling to him.\n\n\"I reckon so... But what was the use to tell you?\"\n\nIt was Lassiter turning away his face and Blake studying the stone flags at his feet that brought Jane to the understanding of what she betrayed. She strove desperately, but she could not rise immediately from such a blow.\n\n\"My horses! My horses! What's become of them?\"\n\n\"Dorn said the riders report another drive by Oldring... And I trailed the horses miles down the slope toward Deception Pass.\"\n\n\"My red herd's gone! My horses gone! The white herd will go next. I can stand that. But if I lost Black Star and Night, it would be like parting with my own flesh and blood. Lassiter\u2014Blake\u2014am I in danger of losing my racers?\"\n\n\"A rustler\u2014or\u2014or anybody stealin' hosses of yours would most of all want the blacks,\" said Lassiter. His evasive reply was affirmative enough. The other rider nodded gloomy acquiescence.\n\n\"Oh! Oh!\" Jane Withersteen choked, with violent utterance.\n\n\"Let me take charge of the blacks?\" asked Blake. \"One more rider won't be any great help to Judkins. But I might hold Black Star and Night, if you put such store on their value.\"\n\n\"Value! Blake, I love my racers. Besides, there's another reason why I mustn't lose them. You go to the stables. Go with Jerd every day when he runs the horses, and don't let them out of your sight. If you would please me\u2014win my gratitude, guard my black racers.\"\n\nWhen Blake had mounted and ridden out of the court Lassiter regarded Jane with the smile that was becoming rarer as the days sped by.\n\n\"'Pears to me, as Blake says, you do put some store on them hosses. Now I ain't gainsayin' that the Arabians are the handsomest hosses I ever seen. But Bells can beat Night, an' run neck en' neck with Black Star.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, don't tease me now. I'm miserable\u2014sick. Bells is fast, but he can't stay with the blacks, and you know it. Only Wrangle can do that.\"\n\n\"I'll bet that big raw-boned brute can more'n show his heels to your black racers. Jane, out there in the sage, on a long chase, Wrangle could kill your favorites.\"\n\n\"No, no,\" replied Jane, impatiently. \"Lassiter, why do you say that so often? I know you've teased me at times, and I believe it's only kindness. You're always trying to keep my mind off worry. But you mean more by this repeated mention of my racers?\"\n\n\"I reckon so.\" Lassiter paused, and for the thousandth time in her presence moved his black sombrero round and round, as if counting the silver pieces on the band. \"Well, Jane, I've sort of read a little that's passin' in your mind.\"\n\n\"You think I might fly from my home\u2014from Cottonwoods\u2014from the Utah border?\"\n\n\"I reckon. An' if you ever do an' get away with the blacks I wouldn't like to see Wrangle left here on the sage. Wrangle could catch you. I know Venters had him. But you can never tell. Mebbe he hasn't got him now... Besides\u2014things are happenin', an' somethin' of the same queer nature might have happened to Venters.\"\n\n\"God knows you're right!... Poor Bern, how long he's gone! In my trouble I've been forgetting him. But, Lassiter, I've little fear for him. I've heard my riders say he's as keen as a wolf... As to your reading my thoughts\u2014well, your suggestion makes an actual thought of what was only one of my dreams. I believe I dreamed of flying from this wild borderland, Lassiter. I've strange dreams. I'm not always practical and thinking of my many duties, as you said once. For instance\u2014if I dared\u2014if I dared I'd ask you to saddle the blacks and ride away with me\u2014and hide me.\"\n\n\"Jane!\"\n\nThe rider's sunburnt face turned white. A few times Jane had seen Lassiter's cool calm broken\u2014when he had met little Fay, when he had learned how and why he had come to love both child and mistress, when he had stood beside Milly Erne's grave. But one and all they could not be considered in the light of his present agitation. Not only did Lassiter turn white\u2014not only did he grow tense, not only did he lose his coolness, but also he suddenly, violently, hungrily took her into his arms and crushed her to his breast.\n\n\"Lassiter!\" cried Jane, trembling. It was an action for which she took sole blame. Instantly, as if dazed, weakened, he released her. \"Forgive me!\" went on Jane. \"I'm always forgetting your\u2014your feelings. I thought of you as my faithful friend. I'm always making you out more than human... only, let me say\u2014I meant that\u2014about riding away. I'm wretched, sick of this\u2014this\u2014Oh, something bitter and black grows on my heart!\"\n\n\"Jane, the hell\u2014of it,\" he replied, with deep intake of breath, \"is you can't ride away. Mebbe realizin' it accounts for my grabbin' you\u2014that way, as much as the crazy boy's rapture your words gave me. I don't understand myself... But the hell of this game is\u2014you can't ride away.\"\n\n\"Lassiter!... What on earth do you mean? I'm an absolutely free woman.\"\n\n\"You ain't absolutely anythin' of the kind... I reckon I've got to tell you!\"\n\n\"Tell me all. It's uncertainty that makes me a coward. It's faith and hope\u2014blind love, if you will, that makes me miserable. Every day I awake believing\u2014still believing. The day grows, and with it doubts, fears, and that black bat hate that bites hotter and hotter into my heart. Then comes night\u2014I pray\u2014I pray for all, and for myself\u2014I sleep\u2014and I awake free once more, trustful, faithful, to believe\u2014to hope! Then, O my God! I grow and live a thousand years till night again!... But if you want to see me a woman, tell me why I can't ride away\u2014tell me what more I'm to lose\u2014tell me the worst.\"\n\n\"Jane, you're watched. There's no single move of yours, except when you're hid in your house, that ain't seen by sharp eyes. The cottonwood grove's full of creepin', crawlin' men. Like Indians in the grass. When you rode, which wasn't often lately, the sage was full of sneakin' men. At night they crawl under your windows into the court, an' I reckon into the house. Jane Withersteen, you know, never locked a door! This here grove's a hummin' bee-hive of mysterious happenin's. Jane, it ain't so much that these soles keep out of my way as me keepin' out of theirs. They're goin' to try to kill me. That's plain. But mebbe I'm as hard to shoot in the back as in the face. So far I've seen fit to watch only. This all means, Jane, that you're a marked woman. You can't get away\u2014not now. Mebbe later, when you're broken, you might. But that's sure doubtful. Jane, you're to lose the cattle that's left\u2014your home an' ranch\u2014an' Amber Spring. You can't even hide a sack of gold! For it couldn't be slipped out of the house, day or night, an' hid or buried, let alone be rid off with. You may lose all. I'm tellin' you, Jane, hopin' to prepare you, if the worst does come. I told you once before about that strange power I've got to feel things.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, what can I do?\"\n\n\"Nothin', I reckon, except know what's comin' an' wait an' be game. If you'd let me make a call on Tull, an' a long-deferred call on\u2014\"\n\n\"Hush!... Hush!\" she whispered.\n\n\"Well, even that wouldn't help you any in the end.\"\n\n\"What does it mean? Oh, what does it mean? I am my father's daughter\u2014a Mormon, yet I can't see! I've not failed in religion\u2014in duty. For years I've given with a free and full heart. When my father died I was rich. If I'm still rich it's because I couldn't find enough ways to become poor. What am I, what are my possessions to set in motion such intensity of secret oppression?\"\n\n\"Jane, the mind behind it all is an empire builder.\"\n\n\"But, Lassiter, I would give freely\u2014all I own to avert this\u2014this wretched thing. If I gave\u2014that would leave me with faith still. Surely my\u2014my churchmen think of my soul? If I lose my trust in them\u2014\"\n\n\"Child, be still!\" said Lassiter, with a dark dignity that had in it something of pity. \"You are a woman, fine en' big an' strong, an' your heart matches your size. But in mind you're a child. I'll say a little more\u2014then I'm done. I'll never mention this again. Among many thousands of women you're one who has bucked against your churchmen. They tried you out, an' failed of persuasion, an' finally of threats. You meet now the cold steel of a will as far from Christlike as the universe is wide. You're to be broken. Your body's to be held, given to some man, made, if possible, to bring children into the world. But your soul?... What do they care for your soul?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Chapter XIII. Solitude and Storm\n\nIn his hidden valley Venters awakened from sleep, and his ears rang with innumerable melodies from full-throated mockingbirds, and his eyes opened wide upon the glorious golden shaft of sunlight shining through the great stone bridge. The circle of cliffs surrounding Surprise Valley lay shrouded in morning mist, a dim blue low down along the terraces, a creamy, moving cloud along the ramparts. The oak forest in the center was a plumed and tufted oval of gold.\n\nHe saw Bess under the spruces. Upon her complete recovery of strength she always rose with the dawn. At the moment she was feeding the quail she had tamed. And she had begun to tame the mocking-birds. They fluttered among the branches overhead and some left off their songs to flit down and shyly hop near the twittering quail. Little gray and white rabbits crouched in the grass, now nibbling, now laying long ears flat and watching the dogs.\n\nVenters's swift glance took in the brightening valley, and Bess and her pets, and Ring and Whitie. It swept over all to return again and rest upon the girl. She had changed. To the dark trousers and blouse she had added moccasins of her own make, but she no longer resembled a boy. No eye could have failed to mark the rounded contours of a woman. The change had been to grace and beauty. A glint of warm gold gleamed from her hair, and a tint of red shone in the clear dark brown of cheeks. The haunting sweetness of her lips and eyes, that earlier had been illusive, a promise, had become a living fact. She fitted harmoniously into that wonderful setting; she was like Surprise Valley\u2014wild and beautiful.\n\nVenters leaped out of his cave to begin the day.\n\nHe had postponed his journey to Cottonwoods until after the passing of the summer rains. The rains were due soon. But until their arrival and the necessity for his trip to the village he sequestered in a far corner of mind all thought of peril, of his past life, and almost that of the present. It was enough to live. He did not want to know what lay hidden in the dim and distant future. Surprise Valley had enchanted him. In this home of the cliff-dwellers there were peace and quiet and solitude, and another thing, wondrous as the golden morning shaft of sunlight, that he dared not ponder over long enough to understand.\n\nThe solitude he had hated when alone he had now come to love. He was assimilating something from this valley of gleams and shadows. From this strange girl he was assimilating more.\n\nThe day at hand resembled many days gone before. As Venters had no tools with which to build, or to till the terraces, he remained idle. Beyond the cooking of the simple fare there were no tasks. And as there were no tasks, there was no system. He and Bess began one thing, to leave it; to begin another, to leave that; and then do nothing but lie under the spruces and watch the great cloud-sails majestically move along the ramparts, and dream and dream. The valley was a golden, sunlit world. It was silent. The sighing wind and the twittering quail and the singing birds, even the rare and seldom-occurring hollow crack of a sliding weathered stone, only thickened and deepened that insulated silence.\n\nVenters and Bess had vagrant minds.\n\n\"Bess, did I tell you about my horse Wrangle?\" inquired Venters.\n\n\"A hundred times,\" she replied.\n\n\"Oh, have I? I'd forgotten. I want you to see him. He'll carry us both.\"\n\n\"I'd like to ride him. Can he run?\"\n\n\"Run? He's a demon. Swiftest horse on the sage! I hope he'll stay in that canyon.\n\n\"He'll stay.\"\n\nThey left camp to wander along the terraces, into the aspen ravines, under the gleaming walls. Ring and Whitie wandered in the fore, often turning, often trotting back, open-mouthed and solemn-eyed and happy. Venters lifted his gaze to the grand archway over the entrance to the valley, and Bess lifted hers to follow his, and both were silent. Sometimes the bridge held their attention for a long time. To-day a soaring eagle attracted them.\n\n\"How he sails!\" exclaimed Bess. \"I wonder where his mate is?\"\n\n\"She's at the nest. It's on the bridge in a crack near the top. I see her often. She's almost white.\"\n\nThey wandered on down the terrace, into the shady, sun-flecked forest. A brown bird fluttered crying from a bush. Bess peeped into the leaves. \"Look! A nest and four little birds. They're not afraid of us. See how they open their mouths. They're hungry.\"\n\nRabbits rustled the dead brush and pattered away. The forest was full of a drowsy hum of insects. Little darts of purple, that were running quail, crossed the glades. And a plaintive, sweet peeping came from the coverts. Bess's soft step disturbed a sleeping lizard that scampered away over the leaves. She gave chase and caught it, a slim creature of nameless color but of exquisite beauty.\n\n\"Jewel eyes,\" she said. \"It's like a rabbit\u2014afraid. We won't eat you. There\u2014go.\"\n\nMurmuring water drew their steps down into a shallow shaded ravine where a brown brook brawled softly over mossy stones. Multitudes of strange, gray frogs with white spots and black eyes lined the rocky bank and leaped only at close approach. Then Venters's eye descried a very thin, very long green snake coiled round a sapling. They drew closer and closer till they could have touched it. The snake had no fear and watched them with scintillating eyes.\n\n\"It's pretty,\" said Bess. \"How tame! I thought snakes always ran.\"\n\n\"No. Even the rabbits didn't run here till the dogs chased them.\"\n\nOn and on they wandered to the wild jumble of massed and broken fragments of cliff at the west end of the valley. The roar of the disappearing stream dinned in their ears. Into this maze of rocks they threaded a tortuous way, climbing, descending, halting to gather wild plums and great lavender lilies, and going on at the will of fancy. Idle and keen perceptions guided them equally.\n\n\"Oh, let us climb there!\" cried Bess, pointing upward to a small space of terrace left green and shady between huge abutments of broken cliff. And they climbed to the nook and rested and looked out across the valley to the curling column of blue smoke from their campfire. But the cool shade and the rich grass and the fine view were not what they had climbed for. They could not have told, although whatever had drawn them was well-satisfying. Light, sure-footed as a mountain goat, Bess pattered down at Venters's heels; and they went on, calling the dogs, eyes dreamy and wide, listening to the wind and the bees and the crickets and the birds.\n\nPart of the time Ring and Whitie led the way, then Venters, then Bess; and the direction was not an object. They left the sun-streaked shade of the oaks, brushed the long grass of the meadows, entered the green and fragrant swaying willows, to stop, at length, under the huge old cottonwoods where the beavers were busy.\n\nHere they rested and watched. A dam of brush and logs and mud and stones backed the stream into a little lake. The round, rough beaver houses projected from the water. Like the rabbits, the beavers had become shy. Gradually, however, as Venters and Bess knelt low, holding the dogs, the beavers emerged to swim with logs and gnaw at cottonwoods and pat mud walls with their paddle-like tails, and, glossy and shiny in the sun, to go on with their strange, persistent industry. They were the builders. The lake was a mud-hole, and the immediate environment a scarred and dead region, but it was a wonderful home of wonderful animals.\n\n\"Look at that one\u2014he puddles in the mud,\" said Bess. \"And there! See him dive! Hear them gnawing! I'd think they'd break their teeth. How's it they can stay out of the water and under the water?\"\n\nAnd she laughed.\n\nThen Venters and Bess wandered farther, and, perhaps not all unconsciously this time, wended their slow steps to the cave of the cliff-dwellers, where she liked best to go.\n\nThe tangled thicket and the long slant of dust and little chips of weathered rock and the steep bench of stone and the worn steps all were arduous work for Bess in the climbing. But she gained the shelf, gasping, hot of cheek, glad of eye, with her hand in Venters's. Here they rested. The beautiful valley glittered below with its millions of wind-turned leaves bright-faced in the sun, and the mighty bridge towered heavenward, crowned with blue sky. Bess, however, never rested for long. Soon she was exploring, and Venters followed; she dragged forth from corners and shelves a multitude of crudely fashioned and painted pieces of pottery, and he carried them. They peeped down into the dark holes of the kivas, and Bess gleefully dropped a stone and waited for the long-coming hollow sound to rise. They peeped into the little globular houses, like mud-wasp nests, and wondered if these had been store-places for grain, or baby cribs, or what; and they crawled into the larger houses and laughed when they bumped their heads on the low roofs, and they dug in the dust of the floors. And they brought from dust and darkness armloads of treasure which they carried to the light. Flints and stones and strange curved sticks and pottery they found; and twisted grass rope that crumbled in their hands, and bits of whitish stone which crushed to powder at a touch and seemed to vanish in the air.\n\n\"That white stuff was bone,\" said Venters, slowly. \"Bones of a cliff-dweller.\"\n\n\"No!\" exclaimed Bess.\n\n\"Here's another piece. Look!... Whew! dry, powdery smoke! That's bone.\"\n\nThen it was that Venters's primitive, childlike mood, like a savage's, seeing, yet unthinking, gave way to the encroachment of civilized thought. The world had not been made for a single day's play or fancy or idle watching. The world was old. Nowhere could be gotten a better idea of its age than in this gigantic silent tomb. The gray ashes in Venters's hand had once been bone of a human being like himself. The pale gloom of the cave had shadowed people long ago. He saw that Bess had received the same shock\u2014could not in moments such as this escape her feeling living, thinking destiny.\n\n\"Bern, people have lived here,\" she said, with wide, thoughtful eyes.\n\n\"Yes,\" he replied.\n\n\"How long ago?\"\n\n\"A thousand years and more.\"\n\n\"What were they?\"\n\n\"Cliff-dwellers. Men who had enemies and made their homes high out of reach.\"\n\n\"They had to fight?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"They fought for\u2014what?\"\n\n\"For life. For their homes, food, children, parents\u2014for their women!\"\n\n\"Has the world changed any in a thousand years?\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2014perhaps a little.\"\n\n\"Have men?\"\n\n\"I hope so\u2014I think so.\"\n\n\"Things crowd into my mind,\" she went on, and the wistful light in her eyes told Venters the truth of her thoughts. \"I've ridden the border of Utah. I've seen people\u2014know how they live\u2014but they must be few of all who are living. I had my books and I studied them. But all that doesn't help me any more. I want to go out into the big world and see it. Yet I want to stay here more. What's to become of us? Are we cliff-dwellers? We're alone here. I'm happy when I don't think. These\u2014these bones that fly into dust\u2014they make me sick and a little afraid. Did the people who lived here once have the same feelings as we have? What was the good of their living at all? They're gone! What's the meaning of it all\u2014of us?\"\n\n\"Bess, you ask more than I can tell. It's beyond me. Only there was laughter here once\u2014and now there's silence. There was life\u2014and now there's death. Men cut these little steps, made these arrow-heads and mealing-stones, plaited the ropes we found, and left their bones to crumble in our fingers. As far as time is concerned it might all have been yesterday. We're here to-day. Maybe we're higher in the scale of human beings\u2014in intelligence. But who knows? We can't be any higher in the things for which life is lived at all.\"\n\n\"What are they?\"\n\n\"Why\u2014I suppose relationship, friendship\u2014love.\"\n\n\"Love!\"\n\n\"Yes. Love of man for woman\u2014love of woman for man. That's the nature, the meaning, the best of life itself.\"\n\nShe said no more. Wistfulness of glance deepened into sadness.\n\n\"Come, let us go,\" said Venters.\n\nAction brightened her. Beside him, holding his hand she slipped down the shelf, ran down the long, steep slant of sliding stones, out of the cloud of dust, and likewise out of the pale gloom.\n\n\"We beat the slide,\" she cried.\n\nThe miniature avalanche cracked and roared, and rattled itself into an inert mass at the base of the incline. Yellow dust like the gloom of the cave, but not so changeless, drifted away on the wind; the roar clapped in echo from the cliff, returned, went back, and came again to die in the hollowness. Down on the sunny terrace there was a different atmosphere. Ring and Whitie leaped around Bess. Once more she was smiling, gay, and thoughtless, with the dream-mood in the shadow of her eyes.\n\n\"Bess, I haven't seen that since last summer. Look!\" said Venters, pointing to the scalloped edge of rolling purple clouds that peeped over the western wall. \"We're in for a storm.\"\n\n\"Oh, I hope not. I'm afraid of storms.\"\n\n\"Are you? Why?\"\n\n\"Have you ever been down in one of these walled-up pockets in a bad storm?\"\n\n\"No, now I think of it, I haven't.\"\n\n\"Well, it's terrible. Every summer I get scared to death and hide somewhere in the dark. Storms up on the sage are bad, but nothing to what they are down here in the canyons. And in this little valley\u2014why, echoes can rap back and forth so quick they'll split our ears.\"\n\n\"We're perfectly safe here, Bess.\"\n\n\"I know. But that hasn't anything to do with it. The truth is I'm afraid of lightning and thunder, and thunder-claps hurt my head. If we have a bad storm, will you stay close to me?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nWhen they got back to camp the afternoon was closing, and it was exceedingly sultry. Not a breath of air stirred the aspen leaves, and when these did not quiver the air was indeed still. The dark-purple clouds moved almost imperceptibly out of the west.\n\n\"What have we for supper?\" asked Bess.\n\n\"Rabbit.\"\n\n\"Bern, can't you think of another new way to cook rabbit?\" went on Bess, with earnestness.\n\n\"What do you think I am\u2014a magician?\" retorted Venters.\n\n\"I wouldn't dare tell you. But, Bern, do you want me to turn into a rabbit?\"\n\nThere was a dark-blue, merry flashing of eyes and a parting of lips; then she laughed. In that moment she was naive and wholesome.\n\n\"Rabbit seems to agree with you,\" replied Venters. \"You are well and strong\u2014and growing very pretty.\"\n\nAnything in the nature of compliment he had never before said to her, and just now he responded to a sudden curiosity to see its effect. Bess stared as if she had not heard aright, slowly blushed, and completely lost her poise in happy confusion.\n\n\"I'd better go right away,\" he continued, \"and fetch supplies from Cottonwoods.\"\n\nA startlingly swift change in the nature of her agitation made him reproach himself for his abruptness.\n\n\"No, no, don't go!\" she said. \"I didn't mean\u2014that about the rabbit. I\u2014I was only trying to be\u2014funny. Don't leave me all alone!\"\n\n\"Bess, I must go sometime.\"\n\n\"Wait then. Wait till after the storms.\"\n\nThe purple cloud-bank darkened the lower edge of the setting sun, crept up and up, obscuring its fiery red heart, and finally passed over the last ruddy crescent of its upper rim.\n\nThe intense dead silence awakened to a long, low, rumbling roll of thunder.\n\n\"Oh!\" cried Bess, nervously.\n\n\"We've had big black clouds before this without rain,\" said Venters. \"But there's no doubt about that thunder. The storms are coming. I'm glad. Every rider on the sage will hear that thunder with glad ears.\"\n\nVenters and Bess finished their simple meal and the few tasks around the camp, then faced the open terrace, the valley, and the west, to watch and await the approaching storm.\n\nIt required keen vision to see any movement whatever in the purple clouds. By infinitesimal degrees the dark cloud-line merged upward into the golden-red haze of the afterglow of sunset. A shadow lengthened from under the western wall across the valley. As straight and rigid as steel rose the delicate spear-pointed silver spruces; the aspen leaves, by nature pendant and quivering, hung limp and heavy; no slender blade of grass moved. A gentle splashing of water came from the ravine. Then again from out of the west sounded the low, dull, and rumbling roll of thunder.\n\nA wave, a ripple of light, a trembling and turning of the aspen leaves, like the approach of a breeze on the water, crossed the valley from the west; and the lull and the deadly stillness and the sultry air passed away on a cool wind.\n\nThe night bird of the canyon, with clear and melancholy notes announced the twilight. And from all along the cliffs rose the faint murmur and moan and mourn of the wind singing in the caves. The bank of clouds now swept hugely out of the western sky. Its front was purple and black, with gray between, a bulging, mushrooming, vast thing instinct with storm. It had a dark, angry, threatening aspect. As if all the power of the winds were pushing and piling behind, it rolled ponderously across the sky. A red flare burned out instantaneously, flashed from the west to east, and died. Then from the deepest black of the purple cloud burst a boom. It was like the bowling of a huge boulder along the crags and ramparts, and seemed to roll on and fall into the valley to bound and bang and boom from cliff to cliff.\n\n\"Oh!\" cried Bess, with her hands over her ears. \"What did I tell you?\"\n\n\"Why, Bess, be reasonable!\" said Venters.\n\n\"I'm a coward.\"\n\n\"Not quite that, I hope. It's strange you're afraid. I love a storm.\"\n\n\"I tell you a storm down in these canyons is an awful thing. I know Oldring hated storms. His men were afraid of them. There was one who went deaf in a bad storm, and never could hear again.\"\n\n\"Maybe I've lots to learn, Bess. I'll lose my guess if this storm isn't bad enough. We're going to have heavy wind first, then lightning and thunder, then the rain. Let's stay out as long as we can.\"\n\nThe tips of the cottonwoods and the oaks waved to the east, and the rings of aspens along the terraces twinkled their myriad of bright faces in fleet and glancing gleam. A low roar rose from the leaves of the forest, and the spruces swished in the rising wind. It came in gusts, with light breezes between. As it increased in strength the lulls shortened in length till there was a strong and steady blow all the time, and violent puffs at intervals, and sudden whirling currents. The clouds spread over the valley, rolling swiftly and low, and twilight faded into a sweeping darkness. Then the singing of the wind in the caves drowned the swift roar of rustling leaves; then the song swelled to a mourning, moaning wail; then with the gathering power of the wind the wail changed to a shriek. Steadily the wind strengthened and constantly the strange sound changed.\n\nThe last bit of blue sky yielded to the on-sweep of clouds. Like angry surf the pale gleams of gray, amid the purple of that scudding front, swept beyond the eastern rampart of the valley. The purple deepened to black. Broad sheets of lightning flared over the western wall. There were not yet any ropes or zigzag streaks darting down through the gathering darkness. The storm center was still beyond Surprise Valley.\n\n\"Listen!... Listen!\" cried Bess, with her lips close to Venters's ear. \"You'll hear Oldring's knell!\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Oldring's knell. When the wind blows a gale in the caves it makes what the rustlers call Oldring's knell. They believe it bodes his death. I think he believes so, too. It's not like any sound on earth... It's beginning. Listen!\"\n\nThe gale swooped down with a hollow unearthly howl. It yelled and pealed and shrilled and shrieked. It was made up of a thousand piercing cries. It was a rising and a moving sound. Beginning at the western break of the valley, it rushed along each gigantic cliff, whistling into the caves and cracks, to mount in power, to bellow a blast through the great stone bridge. Gone, as into an engulfing roar of surging waters, it seemed to shoot back and begin all over again.\n\nIt was only wind, thought Venters. Here sped and shrieked the sculptor that carved out the wonderful caves in the cliffs. It was only a gale, but as Venters listened, as his ears became accustomed to the fury and strife, out of it all or through it or above it pealed low and perfectly clear and persistently uniform a strange sound that had no counterpart in all the sounds of the elements. It was not of earth or of life. It was the grief and agony of the gale. A knell of all upon which it blew!\n\nBlack night enfolded the valley. Venters could not see his companion, and knew of her presence only through the tightening hold of her hand on his arm. He felt the dogs huddle closer to him. Suddenly the dense, black vault overhead split asunder to a blue-white, dazzling streak of lightning. The whole valley lay vividly clear and luminously bright in his sight. Upreared, vast and magnificent, the stone bridge glimmered like some grand god of storm in the lightning's fire. Then all flashed black again\u2014blacker than pitch\u2014a thick, impenetrable coal-blackness. And there came a ripping, crashing report. Instantly an echo resounded with clapping crash. The initial report was nothing to the echo. It was a terrible, living, reverberating, detonating crash. The wall threw the sound across, and could have made no greater roar if it had slipped in avalanche. From cliff to cliff the echo went in crashing retort and banged in lessening power, and boomed in thinner volume, and clapped weaker and weaker till a final clap could not reach across the waiting cliff.\n\nIn the pitchy darkness Venters led Bess, and, groping his way, by feel of hand found the entrance to her cave and lifted her up. On the instant a blinding flash of lightning illumined the cave and all about him. He saw Bess's face white now with dark, frightened eyes. He saw the dogs leap up, and he followed suit. The golden glare vanished; all was black; then came the splitting crack and the infernal din of echoes.\n\nBess shrank closer to him and closer, found his hands, and pressed them tightly over her ears, and dropped her face upon his shoulder, and hid her eyes.\n\nThen the storm burst with a succession of ropes and streaks and shafts of lightning, playing continuously, filling the valley with a broken radiance; and the cracking shots followed each other swiftly till the echoes blended in one fearful, deafening crash.\n\nVenters looked out upon the beautiful valley\u2014beautiful now as never before\u2014mystic in its transparent, luminous gloom, weird in the quivering, golden haze of lightning. The dark spruces were tipped with glimmering lights; the aspens bent low in the winds, as waves in a tempest at sea; the forest of oaks tossed wildly and shone with gleams of fire. Across the valley the huge cavern of the cliff-dwellers yawned in the glare, every little black window as clear as at noonday; but the night and the storm added to their tragedy. Flung arching to the black clouds, the great stone bridge seemed to bear the brunt of the storm. It caught the full fury of the rushing wind. It lifted its noble crown to meet the lightnings. Venters thought of the eagles and their lofty nest in a niche under the arch. A driving pall of rain, black as the clouds, came sweeping on to obscure the bridge and the gleaming walls and the shining valley. The lightning played incessantly, streaking down through opaque darkness of rain. The roar of the wind, with its strange knell and the re-crashing echoes, mingled with the roar of the flooding rain, and all seemingly were deadened and drowned in a world of sound.\n\nIn the dimming pale light Venters looked down upon the girl. She had sunk into his arms, upon his breast, burying her face. She clung to him. He felt the softness of her, and the warmth, and the quick heave of her breast. He saw the dark, slender, graceful outline of her form. A woman lay in his arms! And he held her closer. He who had been alone in the sad, silent watches of the night was not now and never must be again alone. He who had yearned for the touch of a hand felt the long tremble and the heart-beat of a woman. By what strange chance had she come to love him! By what change\u2014by what marvel had she grown into a treasure!\n\nNo more did he listen to the rush and roar of the thunder-storm. For with the touch of clinging hands and the throbbing bosom he grew conscious of an inward storm\u2014the tingling of new chords of thought, strange music of unheard, joyous bells sad dreams dawning to wakeful delight, dissolving doubt, resurging hope, force, fire, and freedom, unutterable sweetness of desire. A storm in his breast\u2014a storm of real love." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter XIV. West Wind\n\nWhen the storm abated Venters sought his own cave, and late in the night, as his blood cooled and the stir and throb and thrill subsided, he fell asleep.\n\nWith the breaking of dawn his eyes unclosed. The valley lay drenched and bathed, a burnished oval of glittering green. The rain-washed walls glistened in the morning light. Waterfalls of many forms poured over the rims. One, a broad, lacy sheet, thin as smoke, slid over the western notch and struck a ledge in its downward fall, to bound into broader leap, to burst far below into white and gold and rosy mist.\n\nVenters prepared for the day, knowing himself a different man.\n\n\"It's a glorious morning,\" said Bess, in greeting.\n\n\"Yes. After the storm the west wind,\" he replied.\n\n\"Last night was I\u2014very much of a baby?\" she asked, watching him.\n\n\"Pretty much.\"\n\n\"Oh, I couldn't help it!\"\n\n\"I'm glad you were afraid.\"\n\n\"Why?\" she asked, in slow surprise.\n\n\"I'll tell you some day,\" he answered, soberly. Then around the camp-fire and through the morning meal he was silent; afterward he strolled thoughtfully off alone along the terrace. He climbed a great yellow rock raising its crest among the spruces, and there he sat down to face the valley and the west.\n\n\"I love her!\"\n\nAloud he spoke\u2014unburdened his heart\u2014confessed his secret. For an instant the golden valley swam before his eyes, and the walls waved, and all about him whirled with tumult within.\n\n\"I love her!... I understand now.\"\n\nReviving memory of Jane Withersteen and thought of the complications of the present amazed him with proof of how far he had drifted from his old life. He discovered that he hated to take up the broken threads, to delve into dark problems and difficulties. In this beautiful valley he had been living a beautiful dream. Tranquility had come to him, and the joy of solitude, and interest in all the wild creatures and crannies of this incomparable valley\u2014and love. Under the shadow of the great stone bridge God had revealed Himself to Venters.\n\n\"The world seems very far away,\" he muttered, \"but it's there\u2014and I'm not yet done with it. Perhaps I never shall be... Only\u2014how glorious it would be to live here always and never think again!\"\n\nWhereupon the resurging reality of the present, as if in irony of his wish, steeped him instantly in contending thought. Out of it all he presently evolved these things: he must go to Cottonwoods; he must bring supplies back to Surprise Valley; he must cultivate the soil and raise corn and stock, and, most imperative of all, he must decide the future of the girl who loved him and whom he loved. The first of these things required tremendous effort, the last one, concerning Bess, seemed simply and naturally easy of accomplishment. He would marry her. Suddenly, as from roots of poisonous fire, flamed up the forgotten truth concerning her. It seemed to wither and shrivel up all his joy on its hot, tearing way to his heart. She had been Oldring's Masked Rider. To Venters's question, \"What were you to Oldring?\" she had answered with scarlet shame and drooping head.\n\n\"What do I care who she is or what she was!\" he cried, passionately. And he knew it was not his old self speaking. It was this softer, gentler man who had awakened to new thoughts in the quiet valley. Tenderness, masterful in him now, matched the absence of joy and blunted the knife-edge of entering jealousy. Strong and passionate effort of will, surprising to him, held back the poison from piercing his soul.\n\n\"Wait!... Wait!\" he cried, as if calling. His hand pressed his breast, and he might have called to the pang there. \"Wait! It's all so strange\u2014so wonderful. Anything can happen. Who am I to judge her? I'll glory in my love for her. But I can't tell it\u2014can't give up to it.\"\n\nCertainly he could not then decide her future. Marrying her was impossible in Surprise Valley and in any village south of Sterling. Even without the mask she had once worn she would easily have been recognized as Oldring's Rider. No man who had ever seen her would forget her, regardless of his ignorance as to her sex. Then more poignant than all other argument was the fact that he did not want to take her away from Surprise Valley. He resisted all thought of that. He had brought her to the most beautiful and wildest place of the uplands; he had saved her, nursed her back to strength, watched her bloom as one of the valley lilies; he knew her life there to be pure and sweet\u2014she belonged to him, and he loved her. Still these were not all the reasons why he did not want to take her away. Where could they go? He feared the rustlers\u2014he feared the riders\u2014he feared the Mormons. And if he should ever succeed in getting Bess safely away from these immediate perils, he feared the sharp eyes of women and their tongues, the big outside world with its problems of existence. He must wait to decide her future, which, after all, was deciding his own. But between her future and his something hung impending. Like Balancing Rock, which waited darkly over the steep gorge, ready to close forever the outlet to Deception Pass, that nameless thing, as certain yet intangible as fate, must fall and close forever all doubts and fears of the future.\n\n\"I've dreamed,\" muttered Venters, as he rose. \"Well, why not?... To dream is happiness! But let me just once see this clearly wholly; then I can go on dreaming till the thing falls. I've got to tell Jane Withersteen. I've dangerous trips to take. I've work here to make comfort for this girl. She's mine. I'll fight to keep her safe from that old life. I've already seen her forget it. I love her. And if a beast ever rises in me I'll burn my hand off before I lay it on her with shameful intent. And, by God! sooner or later I'll kill the man who hid her and kept her in Deception Pass!\"\n\nAs he spoke the west wind softly blew in his face. It seemed to soothe his passion. That west wind was fresh, cool, fragrant, and it carried a sweet, strange burden of far-off things\u2014tidings of life in other climes, of sunshine asleep on other walls\u2014of other places where reigned peace. It carried, too, sad truth of human hearts and mystery\u2014of promise and hope unquenchable. Surprise Valley was only a little niche in the wide world whence blew that burdened wind. Bess was only one of millions at the mercy of unknown motive in nature and life. Content had come to Venters in the valley; happiness had breathed in the slow, warm air; love as bright as light had hovered over the walls and descended to him; and now on the west wind came a whisper of the eternal triumph of faith over doubt.\n\n\"How much better I am for what has come to me!\" he exclaimed. \"I'll let the future take care of itself. Whatever falls, I'll be ready.\"\n\nVenters retraced his steps along the terrace back to camp, and found Bess in the old familiar seat, waiting and watching for his return.\n\n\"I went off by myself to think a little,\" he explained.\n\n\"You never looked that way before. What\u2014what is it? Won't you tell me?\"\n\n\"Well, Bess, the fact is I've been dreaming a lot. This valley makes a fellow dream. So I forced myself to think. We can't live this way much longer. Soon I'll simply have to go to Cottonwoods. We need a whole pack train of supplies. I can get\u2014\"\n\n\"Can you go safely?\" she interrupted.\n\n\"Why, I'm sure of it. I'll ride through the Pass at night. I haven't any fear that Wrangle isn't where I left him. And once on him\u2014Bess, just wait till you see that horse!\"\n\n\"Oh, I want to see him\u2014to ride him. But\u2014but, Bern, this is what troubles me,\" she said. \"Will\u2014will you come back?\"\n\n\"Give me four days. If I'm not back in four days you'll know I'm dead. For that only shall keep me.\"\n\n\"Oh!\"\n\n\"Bess, I'll come back. There's danger\u2014I wouldn't lie to you\u2014but I can take care of myself.\"\n\n\"Bern, I'm sure\u2014oh, I'm sure of it! All my life I've watched hunted men. I can tell what's in them. And I believe you can ride and shoot and see with any rider of the sage. It's not\u2014not that I\u2014fear.\"\n\n\"Well, what is it, then?\"\n\n\"Why\u2014why\u2014why should you come back at all?\"\n\n\"I couldn't leave you here alone.\"\n\n\"You might change your mind when you get to the village\u2014among old friends\u2014\"\n\n\"I won't change my mind. As for old friends\u2014\" He uttered a short, expressive laugh.\n\n\"Then\u2014there\u2014there must be a\u2014a woman!\" Dark red mantled the clear tan of temple and cheek and neck. Her eyes were eyes of shame, upheld a long moment by intense, straining search for the verification of her fear. Suddenly they drooped, her head fell to her knees, her hands flew to her hot cheeks.\n\n\"Bess\u2014look here,\" said Venters, with a sharpness due to the violence with which he checked his quick, surging emotion.\n\nAs if compelled against her will\u2014answering to an irresistible voice\u2014Bess raised her head, looked at him with sad, dark eyes, and tried to whisper with tremulous lips.\n\n\"There's no woman,\" went on Venters, deliberately holding her glance with his. \"Nothing on earth, barring the chances of life, can keep me away.\"\n\nHer face flashed and flushed with the glow of a leaping joy; but like the vanishing of a gleam it disappeared to leave her as he had never beheld her.\n\n\"I am nothing\u2014I am lost\u2014I am nameless!\"\n\n\"Do you want me to come back?\" he asked, with sudden stern coldness. \"Maybe you want to go back to Oldring!\"\n\nThat brought her erect, trembling and ashy pale, with dark, proud eyes and mute lips refuting his insinuation.\n\n\"Bess, I beg your pardon. I shouldn't have said that. But you angered me. I intend to work\u2014to make a home for you here\u2014to be a\u2014a brother to you as long as ever you need me. And you must forget what you are\u2014were\u2014I mean, and be happy. When you remember that old life you are bitter, and it hurts me.\"\n\n\"I was happy\u2014I shall be very happy. Oh, you're so good that\u2014that it kills me! If I think, I can't believe it. I grow sick with wondering why. I'm only a let me say it\u2014only a lost, nameless\u2014girl of the rustlers. Oldring's Girl, they called me. That you should save me\u2014be so good and kind\u2014want to make me happy\u2014why, it's beyond belief. No wonder I'm wretched at the thought of your leaving me. But I'll be wretched and bitter no more. I promise you. If only I could repay you even a little\u2014\"\n\n\"You've repaid me a hundredfold. Will you believe me?\"\n\n\"Believe you! I couldn't do else.\"\n\n\"Then listen!... Saving you, I saved myself. Living here in this valley with you, I've found myself. I've learned to think while I was dreaming. I never troubled myself about God. But God, or some wonderful spirit, has whispered to me here. I absolutely deny the truth of what you say about yourself. I can't explain it. There are things too deep to tell. Whatever the terrible wrongs you've suffered, God holds you blameless. I see that\u2014feel that in you every moment you are near me. I've a mother and a sister 'way back in Illinois. If I could I'd take you to them\u2014to-morrow.\"\n\n\"If it were true! Oh, I might\u2014I might lift my head!\" she cried.\n\n\"Lift it then\u2014you child. For I swear it's true.\"\n\nShe did lift her head with the singular wild grace always a part of her actions, with that old unconscious intimation of innocence which always tortured Venters, but now with something more\u2014a spirit rising from the depths that linked itself to his brave words.\n\n\"I've been thinking\u2014too,\" she cried, with quivering smile and swelling breast. \"I've discovered myself\u2014too. I'm young\u2014I'm alive\u2014I'm so full\u2014oh! I'm a woman!\"\n\n\"Bess, I believe I can claim credit of that last discovery\u2014before you,\" Venters said, and laughed.\n\n\"Oh, there's more\u2014there's something I must tell you.\"\n\n\"Tell it, then.\"\n\n\"When will you go to Cottonwoods?\"\n\n\"As soon as the storms are past, or the worst of them.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you before you go. I can't now. I don't know how I shall then. But it must be told. I'd never let you leave me without knowing. For in spite of what you say there's a chance you mightn't come back.\"\n\nDay after day the west wind blew across the valley. Day after day the clouds clustered gray and purple and black. The cliffs sang and the caves rang with Oldring's knell, and the lightning flashed, the thunder rolled, the echoes crashed and crashed, and the rains flooded the valley. Wild flowers sprang up everywhere, swaying with the lengthening grass on the terraces, smiling wanly from shady nooks, peeping wondrously from year-dry crevices of the walls. The valley bloomed into a paradise. Every single moment, from the breaking of the gold bar through the bridge at dawn on to the reddening of rays over the western wall, was one of colorful change. The valley swam in thick, transparent haze, golden at dawn, warm and white at noon, purple in the twilight. At the end of every storm a rainbow curved down into the leaf-bright forest to shine and fade and leave lingeringly some faint essence of its rosy iris in the air.\n\nVenters walked with Bess, once more in a dream, and watched the lights change on the walls, and faced the wind from out of the west.\n\nAlways it brought softly to him strange, sweet tidings of far-off things. It blew from a place that was old and whispered of youth. It blew down the grooves of time. It brought a story of the passing hours. It breathed low of fighting men and praying women. It sang clearly the song of love. That ever was the burden of its tidings\u2014youth in the shady woods, waders through the wet meadows, boy and girl at the hedgerow stile, bathers in the booming surf, sweet, idle hours on grassy, windy hills, long strolls down moonlit lanes\u2014everywhere in far-off lands, fingers locked and bursting hearts and longing lips\u2014from all the world tidings of unquenchable love.\n\nOften, in these hours of dreams he watched the girl, and asked himself of what was she dreaming? For the changing light of the valley reflected its gleam and its color and its meaning in the changing light of her eyes. He saw in them infinitely more than he saw in his dreams. He saw thought and soul and nature\u2014strong vision of life. All tidings the west wind blew from distance and age he found deep in those dark-blue depths, and found them mysteries solved. Under their wistful shadow he softened, and in the softening felt himself grow a sadder, a wiser, and a better man.\n\nWhile the west wind blew its tidings, filling his heart full, teaching him a man's part, the days passed, the purple clouds changed to white, and the storms were over for that summer.\n\n\"I must go now,\" he said.\n\n\"When?\" she asked.\n\n\"At once\u2014to-night.\"\n\n\"I'm glad the time has come. It dragged at me. Go\u2014for you'll come back the sooner.\"\n\nLate in the afternoon, as the ruddy sun split its last flame in the ragged notch of the western wall, Bess walked with Venters along the eastern terrace, up the long, weathered slope, under the great stone bridge. They entered the narrow gorge to climb around the fence long before built there by Venters. Farther than this she had never been. Twilight had already fallen in the gorge. It brightened to waning shadow in the wider ascent. He showed her Balancing Rock, of which he had often told her, and explained its sinister leaning over the outlet. Shuddering, she looked down the long, pale incline with its closed-in, toppling walls.\n\n\"What an awful trail! Did you carry me up here?\"\n\n\"I did, surely,\" replied he.\n\n\"It frightens me, somehow. Yet I never was afraid of trails. I'd ride anywhere a horse could go, and climb where he couldn't. But there's something fearful here. I feel as\u2014as if the place was watching me.\"\n\n\"Look at this rock. It's balanced here\u2014balanced perfectly. You know I told you the cliff-dwellers cut the rock, and why. But they're gone and the rock waits. Can't you see\u2014feel how it waits here? I moved it once, and I'll never dare again. A strong heave would start it. Then it would fall and bang, and smash that crag, and jar the walls, and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass!\"\n\n\"Ah! When you come back I'll steal up here and push and push with all my might to roll the rock and close forever the outlet to the Pass!\" She said it lightly, but in the undercurrent of her voice was a heavier note, a ring deeper than any ever given mere play of words.\n\n\"Bess!... You can't dare me! Wait till I come back with supplies\u2014then roll the stone.\"\n\n\"I\u2014was\u2014in\u2014fun.\" Her voice now throbbed low. \"Always you must be free to go when you will. Go now... this place presses on me\u2014stifles me.\"\n\n\"I'm going\u2014but you had something to tell me?\"\n\n\"Yes... Will you\u2014come back?\"\n\n\"I'll come if I live.\"\n\n\"But\u2014but you mightn't come?\"\n\n\"That's possible, of course. It'll take a good deal to kill me. A man couldn't have a faster horse or keener dog. And, Bess, I've guns, and I'll use them if I'm pushed. But don't worry.\"\n\n\"I've faith in you. I'll not worry until after four days. Only\u2014because you mightn't come\u2014I must tell you\u2014\"\n\nShe lost her voice. Her pale face, her great, glowing, earnest eyes, seemed to stand alone out of the gloom of the gorge. The dog whined, breaking the silence.\n\n\"I must tell you\u2014because you mightn't come back,\" she whispered. \"You must know what\u2014what I think of your goodness\u2014of you. Always I've been tongue-tied. I seemed not to be grateful. It was deep in my heart. Even now\u2014if I were other than I am\u2014I couldn't tell you. But I'm nothing\u2014only a rustler's girl\u2014nameless\u2014infamous. You've saved me\u2014and I'm\u2014I'm yours to do with as you like... With all my heart and soul\u2014I love you!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chapter XV. Shadows on the Sage-slope\n\nIn the cloudy, threatening, waning summer days shadows lengthened down the sage-slope, and Jane Withersteen likened them to the shadows gathering and closing in around her life.\n\nMrs. Larkin died, and little Fay was left an orphan with no known relative. Jane's love redoubled. It was the saving brightness of a darkening hour. Fay turned now to Jane in childish worship. And Jane at last found full expression for the mother-longing in her heart. Upon Lassiter, too, Mrs. Larkin's death had some subtle reaction. Before, he had often, without explanation, advised Jane to send Fay back to any Gentile family that would take her in. Passionately and reproachfully and wonderingly Jane had refused even to entertain such an idea. And now Lassiter never advised it again, grew sadder and quieter in his contemplation of the child, and infinitely more gentle and loving. Sometimes Jane had a cold, inexplicable sensation of dread when she saw Lassiter watching Fay. What did the rider see in the future? Why did he, day by day, grow more silent, calmer, cooler, yet sadder in prophetic assurance of something to be?\n\nNo doubt, Jane thought, the rider, in his almost superhuman power of foresight, saw behind the horizon the dark, lengthening shadows that were soon to crowd and gloom over him and her and little Fay. Jane Withersteen awaited the long-deferred breaking of the storm with a courage and embittered calm that had come to her in her extremity. Hope had not died. Doubt and fear, subservient to her will, no longer gave her sleepless nights and tortured days. Love remained. All that she had loved she now loved the more. She seemed to feel that she was defiantly flinging the wealth of her love in the face of misfortune and of hate. No day passed but she prayed for all\u2014and most fervently for her enemies. It troubled her that she had lost, or had never gained, the whole control of her mind. In some measure reason and wisdom and decision were locked in a chamber of her brain, awaiting a key. Power to think of some things was taken from her. Meanwhile, abiding a day of judgment, she fought ceaselessly to deny the bitter drops in her cup, to tear back the slow, the intangibly slow growth of a hot, corrosive lichen eating into her heart.\n\nOn the morning of August 10th, Jane, while waiting in the court for Lassiter, heard a clear, ringing report of a rifle. It came from the grove, somewhere toward the corrals. Jane glanced out in alarm. The day was dull, windless, soundless. The leaves of the cottonwoods drooped, as if they had foretold the doom of Withersteen House and were now ready to die and drop and decay. Never had Jane seen such shade. She pondered on the meaning of the report. Revolver shots had of late cracked from different parts of the grove\u2014spies taking snap-shots at Lassiter from a cowardly distance! But a rifle report meant more. Riders seldom used rifles. Judkins and Venters were the exceptions she called to mind. Had the men who hounded her hidden in her grove, taken to the rifle to rid her of Lassiter, her last friend? It was probable\u2014it was likely. And she did not share his cool assumption that his death would never come at the hands of a Mormon. Long had she expected it. His constancy to her, his singular reluctance to use the fatal skill for which he was famed\u2014both now plain to all Mormons\u2014laid him open to inevitable assassination. Yet what charm against ambush and aim and enemy he seemed to bear about him! No, Jane reflected, it was not charm; only a wonderful training of eye and ear, and sense of impending peril. Nevertheless that could not forever avail against secret attack.\n\nThat moment a rustling of leaves attracted her attention; then the familiar clinking accompaniment of a slow, soft, measured step, and Lassiter walked into the court.\n\n\"Jane, there's a fellow out there with a long gun,\" he said, and, removing his sombrero, showed his head bound in a bloody scarf.\n\n\"I heard the shot; I knew it was meant for you. Let me see\u2014you can't be badly injured?\"\n\n\"I reckon not. But mebbe it wasn't a close call!... I'll sit here in this corner where nobody can see me from the grove.\" He untied the scarf and removed it to show a long, bleeding furrow above his left temple.\n\n\"It's only a cut,\" said Jane. \"But how it bleeds! Hold your scarf over it just a moment till I come back.\"\n\nShe ran into the house and returned with bandages; and while she bathed and dressed the wound Lassiter talked.\n\n\"That fellow had a good chance to get me. But he must have flinched when he pulled the trigger. As I dodged down I saw him run through the trees. He had a rifle. I've been expectin' that kind of gun play. I reckon now I'll have to keep a little closer hid myself. These fellers all seem to get chilly or shaky when they draw a bead on me, but one of them might jest happen to hit me.\"\n\n\"Won't you go away\u2014leave Cottonwoods as I've begged you to\u2014before some one does happen to hit you?\" she appealed to him.\n\n\"I reckon I'll stay.\"\n\n\"But, oh, Lassiter\u2014your blood will be on my hands!\"\n\n\"See here, lady, look at your hands now, right now. Aren't they fine, firm, white hands? Aren't they bloody now? Lassiter's blood! That's a queer thing to stain your beautiful hands. But if you could only see deeper you'd find a redder color of blood. Heart color, Jane!\"\n\n\"Oh!... My friend!\"\n\n\"No, Jane, I'm not one to quit when the game grows hot, no more than you. This game, though, is new to me, an' I don't know the moves yet, else I wouldn't have stepped in front of that bullet.\"\n\n\"Have you no desire to hunt the man who fired at you\u2014to find him\u2014and\u2014and kill him?\"\n\n\"Well, I reckon I haven't any great hankerin' for that.\"\n\n\"Oh, the wonder of it!... I knew\u2014I prayed\u2014I trusted. Lassiter, I almost gave\u2014all myself to soften you to Mormons. Thank God, and thank you, my friend... But, selfish woman that I am, this is no great test. What's the life of one of those sneaking cowards to such a man as you? I think of your great hate toward him who\u2014I think of your life's implacable purpose. Can it be\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait!... Listen!\" he whispered. \"I hear a hoss.\"\n\nHe rose noiselessly, with his ear to the breeze. Suddenly he pulled his sombrero down over his bandaged head and, swinging his gun-sheaths round in front, he stepped into the alcove.\n\n\"It's a hoss\u2014comin' fast,\" he added.\n\nJane's listening ear soon caught a faint, rapid, rhythmic beat of hoofs. It came from the sage. It gave her a thrill that she was at a loss to understand. The sound rose stronger, louder. Then came a clear, sharp difference when the horse passed from the sage trail to the hard-packed ground of the grove. It became a ringing run\u2014swift in its bell-like clatterings, yet singular in longer pause than usual between the hoofbeats of a horse.\n\n\"It's Wrangle!... It's Wrangle!\" cried Jane Withersteen. \"I'd know him from a million horses!\"\n\nExcitement and thrilling expectancy flooded out all Jane Withersteen's calm. A tight band closed round her breast as she saw the giant sorrel flit in reddish-brown flashes across the openings in the green. Then he was pounding down the lane\u2014thundering into the court\u2014crashing his great iron-shod hoofs on the stone flags. Wrangle it was surely, but shaggy and wild-eyed, and sage-streaked, with dust-caked lather staining his flanks. He reared and crashed down and plunged. The rider leaped off, threw the bridle, and held hard on a lasso looped round Wrangle's head and neck. Janet's heart sank as she tried to recognize Venters in the rider. Something familiar struck her in the lofty stature in the sweep of powerful shoulders. But this bearded, longhaired, unkempt man, who wore ragged clothes patched with pieces of skin, and boots that showed bare legs and feet\u2014this dusty, dark, and wild rider could not possibly be Venters.\n\n\"Whoa, Wrangle, old boy! Come down. Easy now. So\u2014so\u2014so. You're home, old boy, and presently you can have a drink of water you'll remember.\"\n\nIn the voice Jane knew the rider to be Venters. He tied Wrangle to the hitching-rack and turned to the court.\n\n\"Oh, Bern!... You wild man!\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"Jane\u2014Jane, it's good to see you! Hello, Lassiter! Yes, it's Venters.\"\n\nLike rough iron his hard hand crushed Jane's. In it she felt the difference she saw in him. Wild, rugged, unshorn\u2014yet how splendid! He had gone away a boy\u2014he had returned a man. He appeared taller, wider of shoulder, deeper-chested, more powerfully built. But was that only her fancy\u2014he had always been a young giant\u2014was the change one of spirit? He might have been absent for years, proven by fire and steel, grown like Lassiter, strong and cool and sure. His eyes\u2014were they keener, more flashing than before?\u2014met hers with clear, frank, warm regard, in which perplexity was not, nor discontent, nor pain.\n\n\"Look at me long as you like,\" he said, with a laugh. \"I'm not much to look at. And, Jane, neither you nor Lassiter, can brag. You're paler than I ever saw you. Lassiter, here, he wears a bloody bandage under his hat. That reminds me. Some one took a flying shot at me down in the sage. It made Wrangle run some... Well, perhaps you've more to tell me than I've got to tell you.\"\n\nBriefly, in few words, Jane outlined the circumstances of her undoing in the weeks of his absence.\n\nUnder his beard and bronze she saw his face whiten in terrible wrath.\n\n\"Lassiter\u2014what held you back?\"\n\nNo time in the long period of fiery moments and sudden shocks had Jane Withersteen ever beheld Lassiter as calm and serene and cool as then.\n\n\"Jane had gloom enough without my addin' to it by shootin' up the village,\" he said.\n\nAs strange as Lassiter's coolness was Venters's curious, intent scrutiny of them both, and under it Jane felt a flaming tide wave from bosom to temples.\n\n\"Well\u2014you're right,\" he said, with slow pause. \"It surprises me a little, that's all.\"\n\nJane sensed then a slight alteration in Venters, and what it was, in her own confusion, she could not tell. It had always been her intention to acquaint him with the deceit she had fallen to in her zeal to move Lassiter. She did not mean to spare herself. Yet now, at the moment, before these riders, it was an impossibility to explain.\n\nVenters was speaking somewhat haltingly, without his former frankness. \"I found Oldring's hiding-place and your red herd. I learned\u2014I know\u2014I'm sure there was a deal between Tull and Oldring.\" He paused and shifted his position and his gaze. He looked as if he wanted to say something that he found beyond him. Sorrow and pity and shame seemed to contend for mastery over him. Then he raised himself and spoke with effort. \"Jane I've cost you too much. You've almost ruined yourself for me. It was wrong, for I'm not worth it. I never deserved such friendship. Well, maybe it's not too late. You must give me up. Mind, I haven't changed. I am just the same as ever. I'll see Tull while I'm here, and tell him to his face.\"\n\n\"Bern, it's too late,\" said Jane.\n\n\"I'll make him believe!\" cried Venters, violently.\n\n\"You ask me to break our friendship?\"\n\n\"Yes. If you don't, I shall.\"\n\n\"Forever?\"\n\n\"Forever!\"\n\nJane sighed. Another shadow had lengthened down the sage slope to cast further darkness upon her. A melancholy sweetness pervaded her resignation. The boy who had left her had returned a man, nobler, stronger, one in whom she divined something unbending as steel. There might come a moment later when she would wonder why she had not fought against his will, but just now she yielded to it. She liked him as well\u2014nay, more, she thought, only her emotions were deadened by the long, menacing wait for the bursting storm.\n\nOnce before she had held out her hand to him\u2014when she gave it; now she stretched it tremblingly forth in acceptance of the decree circumstance had laid upon them. Venters bowed over it kissed it, pressed it hard, and half stifled a sound very like a sob. Certain it was that when he raised his head tears glistened in his eyes.\n\n\"Some\u2014women\u2014have a hard lot,\" he said, huskily. Then he shook his powerful form, and his rags lashed about him. \"I'll say a few things to Tull\u2014when I meet him.\"\n\n\"Bern\u2014you'll not draw on Tull? Oh, that must not be! Promise me\u2014\"\n\n\"I promise you this,\" he interrupted, in stern passion that thrilled while it terrorized her. \"If you say one more word for that plotter I'll kill him as I would a mad coyote!\"\n\nJane clasped her hands. Was this fire-eyed man the one whom she had once made as wax to her touch? Had Venters become Lassiter and Lassiter Venters?\n\n\"I'll\u2014say no more,\" she faltered.\n\n\"Jane, Lassiter once called you blind,\" said Venters. \"It must be true. But I won't upbraid you. Only don't rouse the devil in me by praying for Tull! I'll try to keep cool when I meet him. That's all. Now there's one more thing I want to ask of you\u2014the last. I've found a valley down in the Pass. It's a wonderful place. I intend to stay there. It's so hidden I believe no one can find it. There's good water, and browse, and game. I want to raise corn and stock. I need to take in supplies. Will you give them to me?\"\n\n\"Assuredly. The more you take the better you'll please me\u2014and perhaps the less my\u2014my enemies will get.\"\n\n\"Venters, I reckon you'll have trouble packin' anythin' away,\" put in Lassiter.\n\n\"I'll go at night.\"\n\n\"Mebbe that wouldn't be best. You'd sure be stopped. You'd better go early in the mornin'\u2014say, just after dawn. That's the safest time to move round here.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, I'll be hard to stop,\" returned Venters, darkly.\n\n\"I reckon so.\"\n\n\"Bern,\" said Jane, \"go first to the riders' quarters and get yourself a complete outfit. You're a\u2014a sight. Then help yourself to whatever else you need\u2014burros, packs, grain, dried fruits, and meat. You must take coffee and sugar and flour\u2014all kinds of supplies. Don't forget corn and seeds. I remember how you used to starve. Please\u2014please take all you can pack away from here. I'll make a bundle for you, which you mustn't open till you're in your valley. How I'd like to see it! To judge by you and Wrangle, how wild it must be!\"\n\nJane walked down into the outer court and approached the sorrel. Upstarting, he laid back his ears and eyed her.\n\n\"Wrangle\u2014dear old Wrangle,\" she said, and put a caressing hand on his matted mane. \"Oh, he's wild, but he knows me! Bern, can he run as fast as ever?\"\n\n\"Run? Jane, he's done sixty miles since last night at dark, and I could make him kill Black Star right now in a ten-mile race.\"\n\n\"He never could,\" protested Jane. \"He couldn't even if he was fresh.\"\n\n\"I reckon mebbe the best hoss'll prove himself yet,\" said Lassiter, \"an', Jane, if it ever comes to that race I'd like you to be on Wrangle.\"\n\n\"I'd like that, too,\" rejoined Venters. \"But, Jane, maybe Lassiter's hint is extreme. Bad as your prospects are, you'll surely never come to the running point.\"\n\n\"Who knows!\" she replied, with mournful smile.\n\n\"No, no, Jane, it can't be so bad as all that. Soon as I see Tull there'll be a change in your fortunes. I'll hurry down to the village... Now don't worry.\"\n\nJane retired to the seclusion of her room. Lassiter's subtle forecasting of disaster, Venters's forced optimism, neither remained in mind. Material loss weighed nothing in the balance with other losses she was sustaining. She wondered dully at her sitting there, hands folded listlessly, with a kind of numb deadness to the passing of time and the passing of her riches. She thought of Venters's friendship. She had not lost that, but she had lost him. Lassiter's friendship\u2014that was more than love\u2014it would endure, but soon he, too, would be gone. Little Fay slept dreamlessly upon the bed, her golden curls streaming over the pillow. Jane had the child's worship. Would she lose that, too? And if she did, what then would be left? Conscience thundered at her that there was left her religion. Conscience thundered that she should be grateful on her knees for this baptism of fire; that through misfortune, sacrifice, and suffering her soul might be fused pure gold. But the old, spontaneous, rapturous spirit no more exalted her. She wanted to be a woman\u2014not a martyr. Like the saint of old who mortified his flesh, Jane Withersteen had in her the temper for heroic martyrdom, if by sacrificing herself she could save the souls of others. But here the damnable verdict blistered her that the more she sacrificed herself the blacker grew the souls of her churchmen. There was something terribly wrong with her soul, something terribly wrong with her churchmen and her religion. In the whirling gulf of her thought there was yet one shining light to guide her, to sustain her in her hope; and it was that, despite her errors and her frailties and her blindness, she had one absolute and unfaltering hold on ultimate and supreme justice. That was love. \"Love your enemies as yourself!\" was a divine word, entirely free from any church or creed.\n\nJane's meditations were disturbed by Lassiter's soft, tinkling step in the court. Always he wore the clinking spurs. Always he was in readiness to ride. She passed out and called him into the huge, dim hall.\n\n\"I think you'll be safer here. The court is too open,\" she said.\n\n\"I reckon,\" replied Lassiter. \"An' it's cooler here. The day's sure muggy. Well, I went down to the village with Venters.\"\n\n\"Already! Where is he?\" queried Jane, in quick amaze.\n\n\"He's at the corrals. Blake's helpin' him get the burros an' packs ready. That Blake is a good fellow.\"\n\n\"Did\u2014did Bern meet Tull?\"\n\n\"I guess he did,\" answered Lassiter, and he laughed dryly.\n\n\"Tell me! Oh, you exasperate me! You're so cool, so calm! For Heaven's sake, tell me what happened!\"\n\n\"First time I've been in the village for weeks,\" went on Lassiter, mildly. \"I reckon there 'ain't been more of a show for a long time. Me an' Venters walkin' down the road! It was funny. I ain't sayin' anybody was particular glad to see us. I'm not much thought of hereabouts, an' Venters he sure looks like what you called him, a wild man. Well, there was some runnin' of folks before we got to the stores. Then everybody vamoosed except some surprised rustlers in front of a saloon. Venters went right in the stores an' saloons, an' of course I went along. I don't know which tickled me the most\u2014the actions of many fellers we met, or Venters's nerve. Jane, I was downright glad to be along. You see that sort of thing is my element, an' I've been away from it for a spell. But we didn't find Tull in one of them places. Some Gentile feller at last told Venters he'd find Tull in that long buildin' next to Parsons's store. It's a kind of meetin'-room; and sure enough, when we peeped in, it was half full of men.\n\n\"Venters yelled: 'Don't anybody pull guns! We ain't come for that!' Then he tramped in, an' I was some put to keep alongside him. There was a hard, scrapin' sound of feet, a loud cry, an' then some whisperin', an' after that stillness you could cut with a knife. Tull was there, an' that fat party who once tried to throw a gun on me, an' other important-lookin' men, en' that little frog-legged feller who was with Tull the day I rode in here. I wish you could have seen their faces, 'specially Tull's an' the fat party's. But there ain't no use of me tryin' to tell you how they looked.\n\n\"Well, Venters an' I stood there in the middle of the room with that batch of men all in front of us, en' not a blamed one of them winked an eyelash or moved a finger. It was natural, of course, for me to notice many of them packed guns. That's a way of mine, first noticin' them things. Venters spoke up, an' his voice sort of chilled an' cut, en' he told Tull he had a few things to say.\"\n\nHere Lassiter paused while he turned his sombrero round and round, in his familiar habit, and his eyes had the look of a man seeing over again some thrilling spectacle, and under his red bronze there was strange animation.\n\n\"Like a shot, then, Venters told Tull that the friendship between you an' him was all over, an' he was leaving your place. He said you'd both of you broken off in the hope of propitiatin' your people, but you hadn't changed your mind otherwise, an' never would.\n\n\"Next he spoke up for you. I ain't goin' to tell you what he said. Only\u2014no other woman who ever lived ever had such tribute! You had a champion, Jane, an' never fear that those thick-skulled men don't know you now. It couldn't be otherwise. He spoke the ringin', lightnin' truth... Then he accused Tull of the underhand, miserable robbery of a helpless woman. He told Tull where the red herd was, of a deal made with Oldrin', that Jerry Card had made the deal. I thought Tull was goin' to drop, an' that little frog-legged cuss, he looked some limp an' white. But Venters's voice would have kept anybody's legs from bucklin'. I was stiff myself. He went on an' called Tull\u2014called him every bad name ever known to a rider, an' then some. He cursed Tull. I never hear a man get such a cursin'. He laughed in scorn at the idea of Tull bein' a minister. He said Tull an' a few more dogs of hell builded their empire out of the hearts of such innocent an' God-fearin' women as Jane Withersteen. He called Tull a binder of women, a callous beast who hid behind a mock mantle of righteousness\u2014an' the last an' lowest coward on the face of the earth. To prey on weak women through their religion\u2014that was the last unspeakable crime!\n\n\"Then he finished, an' by this time he'd almost lost his voice. But his whisper was enough. 'Tull,' he said, 'she begged me not to draw on you to-day. She would pray for you if you burned her at the stake... But listen!... I swear if you and I ever come face to face again, I'll kill you!'\n\n\"We backed out of the door then, an' up the road. But nobody follered us.\"\n\nJane found herself weeping passionately. She had not been conscious of it till Lassiter ended his story, and she experienced exquisite pain and relief in shedding tears. Long had her eyes been dry, her grief deep; long had her emotions been dumb. Lassiter's story put her on the rack; the appalling nature of Venters's act and speech had no parallel as an outrage; it was worse than bloodshed. Men like Tull had been shot, but had one ever been so terribly denounced in public? Over-mounting her horror, an uncontrollable, quivering passion shook her very soul. It was sheer human glory in the deed of a fearless man. It was hot, primitive instinct to live\u2014to fight. It was a kind of mad joy in Venters's chivalry. It was close to the wrath that had first shaken her in the beginning of this war waged upon her.\n\n\"Well, well, Jane, don't take it that way,\" said Lassiter, in evident distress. \"I had to tell you. There's some things a feller jest can't keep. It's strange you give up on hearin' that, when all this long time you've been the gamest woman I ever seen. But I don't know women. Mebbe there's reason for you to cry. I know this\u2014nothin' ever rang in my soul an' so filled it as what Venters did. I'd like to have done it, but\u2014I'm only good for throwin' a gun, en' it seems you hate that... Well, I'll be goin' now.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Venters took Wrangle to the stable. The sorrel's shy a shoe, an' I've got to help hold the big devil an' put on another.\"\n\n\"Tell Bern to come for the pack I want to give him\u2014and\u2014and to say good-by,\" called Jane, as Lassiter went out.\n\nJane passed the rest of that day in a vain endeavor to decide what and what not to put in the pack for Venters. This task was the last she would ever perform for him, and the gifts were the last she would ever make him. So she picked and chose and rejected, and chose again, and often paused in sad revery, and began again, till at length she filled the pack.\n\nIt was about sunset, and she and Fay had finished supper and were sitting in the court, when Venters's quick steps rang on the stones. She scarcely knew him, for he had changed the tattered garments, and she missed the dark beard and long hair. Still he was not the Venters of old. As he came up the steps she felt herself pointing to the pack, and heard herself speaking words that were meaningless to her. He said good-by; he kissed her, released her, and turned away. His tall figure blurred in her sight, grew dim through dark, streaked vision, and then he vanished.\n\nTwilight fell around Withersteen House, and dusk and night. Little Fay slept; but Jane lay with strained, aching eyes. She heard the wind moaning in the cottonwoods and mice squeaking in the walls. The night was interminably long, yet she prayed to hold back the dawn. What would another day bring forth? The blackness of her room seemed blacker for the sad, entering gray of morning light. She heard the chirp of awakening birds, and fancied she caught a faint clatter of hoofs. Then low, dull distant, throbbed a heavy gunshot. She had expected it, was waiting for it; nevertheless, an electric shock checked her heart, froze the very living fiber of her bones. That vise-like hold on her faculties apparently did not relax for a long time, and it was a voice under her window that released her.\n\n\"Jane!... Jane!\" softly called Lassiter.\n\nShe answered somehow.\n\n\"It's all right. Venters got away. I thought mebbe you'd heard that shot, en' I was worried some.\"\n\n\"What was it\u2014who fired?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014some fool feller tried to stop Venters out there in the sage\u2014an' he only stopped lead!... I think it'll be all right. I haven't seen or heard of any other fellers round. Venters'll go through safe. An', Jane, I've got Bells saddled, an' I'm going to trail Venters. Mind, I won't show myself unless he falls foul of somebody an' needs me. I want to see if this place where he's goin' is safe for him. He says nobody can track him there. I never seen the place yet I couldn't track a man to. Now, Jane, you stay indoors while I'm gone, an' keep close watch on Fay. Will you?\"\n\n\"Yes! Oh yes!\"\n\n\"An' another thing, Jane,\" he continued, then paused for long\u2014\"another thing\u2014if you ain't here when I come back\u2014if you're gone\u2014don't fear, I'll trail you\u2014I'll find you out.\"\n\n\"My dear Lassiter, where could I be gone\u2014as you put it?\" asked Jane, in curious surprise.\n\n\"I reckon you might be somewhere. Mebbe tied in an old barn\u2014or corralled in some gulch\u2014or chained in a cave! Milly Erne was\u2014till she give in! Mebbe that's news to you... Well, if you're gone I'll hunt for you.\"\n\n\"No, Lassiter,\" she replied, sadly and low. \"If I'm gone just forget the unhappy woman whose blinded selfish deceit you repaid with kindness and love.\"\n\nShe heard a deep, muttering curse, under his breath, and then the silvery tinkling of his spurs as he moved away.\n\nJane entered upon the duties of that day with a settled, gloomy calm. Disaster hung in the dark clouds, in the shade, in the humid west wind. Blake, when he reported, appeared without his usual cheer; and Jerd wore a harassed look of a worn and worried man. And when Judkins put in appearance, riding a lame horse, and dismounted with the cramp of a rider, his dust-covered figure and his darkly grim, almost dazed expression told Jane of dire calamity. She had no need of words.\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, I have to report\u2014loss of the\u2014white herd,\" said Judkins, hoarsely.\n\n\"Come, sit down, you look played out,\" replied Jane, solicitously. She brought him brandy and food, and while he partook of refreshments, of which he appeared badly in need, she asked no questions.\n\n\"No one rider\u2014could hev done more\u2014Miss Withersteen,\" he went on, presently.\n\n\"Judkins, don't be distressed. You've done more than any other rider. I've long expected to lose the white herd. It's no surprise. It's in line with other things that are happening. I'm grateful for your service.\"\n\n\"Miss Withersteen, I knew how you'd take it. But if anythin', that makes it harder to tell. You see, a feller wants to do so much fer you, an' I'd got fond of my job. We led the herd a ways off to the north of the break in the valley. There was a big level an' pools of water an' tip-top browse. But the cattle was in a high nervous condition. Wild\u2014as wild as antelope! You see, they'd been so scared they never slept. I ain't a-goin' to tell you of the many tricks that were pulled off out there in the sage. But there wasn't a day for weeks thet the herd didn't get started to run. We allus managed to ride 'em close an' drive 'em back an' keep 'em bunched. Honest, Miss Withersteen, them steers was thin. They was thin when water and grass was everywhere. Thin at this season\u2014thet'll tell you how your steers was pestered. Fer instance, one night a strange runnin' streak of fire run right through the herd. That streak was a coyote\u2014with an oiled an' blazin' tail! Fer I shot it an' found out. We had hell with the herd that night, an' if the sage an' grass hadn't been wet\u2014we, hosses, steers, an' all would hev burned up. But I said I wasn't goin' to tell you any of the tricks... Strange now, Miss Withersteen, when the stampede did come it was from natural cause\u2014jest a whirlin' devil of dust. You've seen the like often. An' this wasn't no big whirl, fer the dust was mostly settled. It had dried out in a little swale, an' ordinarily no steer would ever hev run fer it. But the herd was nervous en' wild. An' jest as Lassiter said, when that bunch of white steers got to movin' they was as bad as buffalo. I've seen some buffalo stampedes back in Nebraska, an' this bolt of the steers was the same kind.\n\n\"I tried to mill the herd jest as Lassiter did. But I wasn't equal to it, Miss Withersteen. I don't believe the rider lives who could hev turned thet herd. We kept along of the herd fer miles, an' more 'n one of my boys tried to get the steers a-millin'. It wasn't no use. We got off level ground, goin' down, an' then the steers ran somethin' fierce. We left the little gullies an' washes level-full of dead steers. Finally I saw the herd was makin' to pass a kind of low pocket between ridges. There was a hog-back\u2014as we used to call 'em\u2014a pile of rocks stickin' up, and I saw the herd was goin' to split round it, or swing out to the left. An' I wanted 'em to go to the right so mebbe we'd be able to drive 'em into the pocket. So, with all my boys except three, I rode hard to turn the herd a little to the right. We couldn't budge 'em. They went on en' split round the rocks, en' the most of 'em was turned sharp to the left by a deep wash we hedn't seen\u2014hed no chance to see.\n\n\"The other three boys\u2014Jimmy Vail, Joe Willis, an' thet little Cairns boy\u2014a nervy kid! they, with Cairns leadin', tried to buck thet herd round to the pocket. It was a wild, fool idee. I couldn't do nothin'. The boys got hemmed in between the steers an' the wash\u2014thet they hedn't no chance to see, either. Vail an' Willis was run down right before our eyes. An' Cairns, who rode a fine hoss, he did some ridin'. I never seen equaled, en' would hev beat the steers if there'd been any room to run in. I was high up an' could see how the steers kept spillin' by twos an' threes over into the wash. Cairns put his hoss to a place thet was too wide fer any hoss, an' broke his neck an' the hoss's too. We found that out after, an' as fer Vail an' Willis\u2014two thousand steers ran over the poor boys. There wasn't much left to pack home fer burying!... An', Miss Withersteen, thet all happened yesterday, en' I believe, if the white herd didn't run over the wall of the Pass, it's runnin' yet.\"\n\nOn the morning of the second day after Judkins's recital, during which time Jane remained indoors a prey to regret and sorrow for the boy riders, and a new and now strangely insistent fear for her own person, she again heard what she had missed more than she dared honestly confess\u2014the soft, jingling step of Lassiter. Almost overwhelming relief surged through her, a feeling as akin to joy as any she could have been capable of in those gloomy hours of shadow, and one that suddenly stunned her with the significance of what Lassiter had come to mean to her. She had begged him, for his own sake, to leave Cottonwoods. She might yet beg that, if her weakening courage permitted her to dare absolute loneliness and helplessness, but she realized now that if she were left alone her life would become one long, hideous nightmare.\n\nWhen his soft steps clinked into the hall, in answer to her greeting, and his tall, black-garbed form filled the door, she felt an inexpressible sense of immediate safety. In his presence she lost her fear of the dim passageways of Withersteen House and of every sound. Always it had been that, when he entered the court or the hall, she had experienced a distinctly sickening but gradually lessening shock at sight of the huge black guns swinging at his sides. This time the sickening shock again visited her, it was, however, because a revealing flash of thought told her that it was not alone Lassiter who was thrillingly welcome, but also his fatal weapons. They meant so much. How she had fallen\u2014how broken and spiritless must she be\u2014to have still the same old horror of Lassiter's guns and his name, yet feel somehow a cold, shrinking protection in their law and might and use.\n\n\"Did you trail Venters\u2014find his wonderful valley?\" she asked, eagerly.\n\n\"Yes, an' I reckon it's sure a wonderful place.\"\n\n\"Is he safe there?\"\n\n\"That's been botherin' me some. I tracked him an' part of the trail was the hardest I ever tackled. Mebbe there's a rustler or somebody in this country who's as good at trackin' as I am. If that's so Venters ain't safe.\"\n\n\"Well\u2014tell me all about Bern and his valley.\"\n\nTo Jane's surprise Lassiter showed disinclination for further talk about his trip. He appeared to be extremely fatigued. Jane reflected that one hundred and twenty miles, with probably a great deal of climbing on foot, all in three days, was enough to tire any rider. Moreover, it presently developed that Lassiter had returned in a mood of singular sadness and preoccupation. She put it down to a moodiness over the loss of her white herd and the now precarious condition of her fortune.\n\nSeveral days passed, and as nothing happened, Jane's spirits began to brighten. Once in her musings she thought that this tendency of hers to rebound was as sad as it was futile. Meanwhile, she had resumed her walks through the grove with little Fay.\n\nOne morning she went as far as the sage. She had not seen the slope since the beginning of the rains, and now it bloomed a rich deep purple. There was a high wind blowing, and the sage tossed and waved and colored beautifully from light to dark. Clouds scudded across the sky and their shadows sailed darkly down the sunny slope.\n\nUpon her return toward the house she went by the lane to the stables, and she had scarcely entered the great open space with its corrals and sheds when she saw Lassiter hurriedly approaching. Fay broke from her and, running to a corral fence, began to pat and pull the long, hanging ears of a drowsy burro.\n\nOne look at Lassiter armed her for a blow.\n\nWithout a word he led her across the wide yard to the rise of the ground upon which the stable stood.\n\n\"Jane\u2014look!\" he said, and pointed to the ground.\n\nJane glanced down, and again, and upon steadier vision made out splotches of blood on the stones, and broad, smooth marks in the dust, leading out toward the sage.\n\n\"What made these?\" she asked.\n\n\"I reckon somebody has dragged dead or wounded men out to where there was hosses in the sage.\"\n\n\"Dead\u2014or\u2014wounded\u2014men!\"\n\n\"I reckon\u2014Jane, are you strong? Can you bear up?\"\n\nHis hands were gently holding hers, and his eyes\u2014suddenly she could no longer look into them. \"Strong?\" she echoed, trembling. \"I\u2014I will be.\"\n\nUp on the stone-flag drive, nicked with the marks made by the iron-shod hoofs of her racers, Lassiter led her, his grasp ever growing firmer.\n\n\"Where's Blake\u2014and\u2014and Jerb?\" she asked, haltingly.\n\n\"I don't know where Jerb is. Bolted, most likely,\" replied Lassiter, as he took her through the stone door. \"But Blake\u2014poor Blake! He's gone forever!... Be prepared, Jane.\"\n\nWith a cold prickling of her skin, with a queer thrumming in her ears, with fixed and staring eyes, Jane saw a gun lying at her feet with chamber swung and empty, and discharged shells scattered near.\n\nOutstretched upon the stable floor lay Blake, ghastly white\u2014dead\u2014one hand clutching a gun and the other twisted in his bloody blouse.\n\n\"Whoever the thieves were, whether your people or rustlers\u2014Blake killed some of them!\" said Lassiter.\n\n\"Thieves?\" whispered Jane.\n\n\"I reckon. Hoss-thieves!... Look!\" Lassiter waved his hand toward the stalls.\n\nThe first stall\u2014Bells's stall\u2014was empty. All the stalls were empty. No racer whinnied and stamped greeting to her. Night was gone! Black Star was gone!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Chapter XVI. Gold\n\nAs Lassiter had reported to Jane, Venters \"went through\" safely, and after a toilsome journey reached the peaceful shelter of Surprise Valley. When finally he lay wearily down under the silver spruces, resting from the strain of dragging packs and burros up the slope and through the entrance to Surprise Valley, he had leisure to think, and a great deal of the time went in regretting that he had not been frank with his loyal friend, Jane Withersteen.\n\nBut, he kept continually recalling, when he had stood once more face to face with her and had been shocked at the change in her and had heard the details of her adversity, he had not had the heart to tell her of the closer interest which had entered his life. He had not lied; yet he had kept silence.\n\nBess was in transports over the stores of supplies and the outfit he had packed from Cottonwoods. He had certainly brought a hundred times more than he had gone for; enough, surely, for years, perhaps to make permanent home in the valley. He saw no reason why he need ever leave there again.\n\nAfter a day of rest he recovered his strength and shared Bess's pleasure in rummaging over the endless packs, and began to plan for the future. And in this planning, his trip to Cottonwoods, with its revived hate of Tull and consequent unleashing of fierce passions, soon faded out of mind. By slower degrees his friendship for Jane Withersteen and his contrition drifted from the active preoccupation of his present thought to a place in memory, with more and more infrequent recalls.\n\nAnd as far as the state of his mind was concerned, upon the second day after his return, the valley, with its golden hues and purple shades, the speaking west wind and the cool, silent night, and Bess's watching eyes with their wonderful light, so wrought upon Venters that he might never have left them at all.\n\nThat very afternoon he set to work. Only one thing hindered him upon beginning, though it in no wise checked his delight, and that in the multiplicity of tasks planned to make a paradise out of the valley he could not choose the one with which to begin. He had to grow into the habit of passing from one dreamy pleasure to another, like a bee going from flower to flower in the valley, and he found this wandering habit likely to extend to his labors. Nevertheless, he made a start.\n\nAt the outset he discovered Bess to be both a considerable help in some ways and a very great hindrance in others. Her excitement and joy were spurs, inspirations; but she was utterly impracticable in her ideas, and she flitted from one plan to another with bewildering vacillation. Moreover, he fancied that she grew more eager, youthful, and sweet; and he marked that it was far easier to watch her and listen to her than it was to work. Therefore he gave her tasks that necessitated her going often to the cave where he had stored his packs.\n\nUpon the last of these trips, when he was some distance down the terrace and out of sight of camp, he heard a scream, and then the sharp barking of the dogs.\n\nFor an instant he straightened up, amazed. Danger for her had been absolutely out of his mind. She had seen a rattlesnake\u2014or a wildcat. Still she would not have been likely to scream at sight of either; and the barking of the dogs was ominous. Dropping his work, he dashed back along the terrace. Upon breaking through a clump of aspens he saw the dark form of a man in the camp. Cold, then hot, Venters burst into frenzied speed to reach his guns. He was cursing himself for a thoughtless fool when the man's tall form became familiar and he recognized Lassiter. Then the reversal of emotions changed his run to a walk; he tried to call out, but his voice refused to carry; when he reached camp there was Lassiter staring at the white-faced girl. By that time Ring and Whitie had recognized him.\n\n\"Hello, Venters! I'm makin' you a visit,\" said Lassiter, slowly. \"An' I'm some surprised to see you've a\u2014a young feller for company.\"\n\nOne glance had sufficed for the keen rider to read Bess's real sex, and for once his cool calm had deserted him. He stared till the white of Bess's cheeks flared into crimson. That, if it were needed, was the concluding evidence of her femininity, for it went fittingly with her sun-tinted hair and darkened, dilated eyes, the sweetness of her mouth, and the striking symmetry of her slender shape.\n\n\"Heavens! Lassiter!\" panted Venters, when he caught his breath. \"What relief\u2014it's only you! How\u2014in the name of all that's wonderful\u2014did you ever get here?\"\n\n\"I trailed you. We\u2014I wanted to know where you was, if you had a safe place. So I trailed you.\"\n\n\"Trailed me,\" cried Venters, bluntly.\n\n\"I reckon. It was some of a job after I got to them smooth rocks. I was all day trackin' you up to them little cut steps in the rock. The rest was easy.\"\n\n\"Where's your hoss? I hope you hid him.\"\n\n\"I tied him in them queer cedars down on the slope. He can't be seen from the valley.\"\n\n\"That's good. Well, well! I'm completely dumfounded. It was my idea that no man could track me in here.\"\n\n\"I reckon. But if there's a tracker in these uplands as good as me he can find you.\"\n\n\"That's bad. That'll worry me. But, Lassiter, now you're here I'm glad to see you. And\u2014and my companion here is not a young fellow!... Bess, this is a friend of mine. He saved my life once.\"\n\nThe embarrassment of the moment did not extend to Lassiter. Almost at once his manner, as he shook hands with Bess, relieved Venters and put the girl at ease. After Venters's words and one quick look at Lassiter, her agitation stilled, and, though she was shy, if she were conscious of anything out of the ordinary in the situation, certainly she did not show it.\n\n\"I reckon I'll only stay a little while,\" Lassiter was saying. \"An' if you don't mind troublin', I'm hungry. I fetched some biscuits along, but they're gone. Venters, this place is sure the wonderfullest ever seen. Them cut steps on the slope! That outlet into the gorge! An' it's like climbin' up through hell into heaven to climb through that gorge into this valley! There's a queer-lookin' rock at the top of the passage. I didn't have time to stop. I'm wonderin' how you ever found this place. It's sure interestin'.\"\n\nDuring the preparation and eating of dinner Lassiter listened mostly, as was his wont, and occasionally he spoke in his quaint and dry way. Venters noted, however, that the rider showed an increasing interest in Bess. He asked her no questions, and only directed his attention to her while she was occupied and had no opportunity to observe his scrutiny. It seemed to Venters that Lassiter grew more and more absorbed in his study of Bess, and that he lost his coolness in some strange, softening sympathy. Then, quite abruptly, he arose and announced the necessity for his early departure. He said good-by to Bess in a voice gentle and somewhat broken, and turned hurriedly away. Venters accompanied him, and they had traversed the terrace, climbed the weathered slope, and passed under the stone bridge before either spoke again.\n\nThen Lassiter put a great hand on Venters's shoulder and wheeled him to meet a smoldering fire of gray eyes.\n\n\"Lassiter, I couldn't tell Jane! I couldn't,\" burst out Venters, reading his friend's mind. \"I tried. But I couldn't. She wouldn't understand, and she has troubles enough. And I love the girl!\"\n\n\"Venters, I reckon this beats me. I've seen some queer things in my time, too. This girl\u2014who is she?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Don't know! What is she, then?\"\n\n\"I don't know that, either. Oh, it's the strangest story you ever heard. I must tell you. But you'll never believe.\"\n\n\"Venters, women were always puzzles to me. But for all that, if this girl ain't a child, an' as innocent, I'm no fit person to think of virtue an' goodness in anybody. Are you goin' to be square with her?\"\n\n\"I am\u2014so help me God!\"\n\n\"I reckoned so. Mebbe my temper oughtn't led me to make sure. But, man, she's a woman in all but years. She's sweeter 'n the sage.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, I know, I know. And the hell of it is that in spite of her innocence and charm she's\u2014she's not what she seems!\"\n\n\"I wouldn't want to\u2014of course, I couldn't call you a liar, Venters,\" said the older man.\n\n\"What's more, she was Oldring's Masked Rider!\"\n\nVenters expected to floor his friend with that statement, but he was not in any way prepared for the shock his words gave. For an instant he was astounded to see Lassiter stunned; then his own passionate eagerness to unbosom himself, to tell the wonderful story, precluded any other thought.\n\n\"Son, tell me all about this,\" presently said Lassiter as he seated himself on a stone and wiped his moist brow.\n\nThereupon Venters began his narrative at the point where he had shot the rustler and Oldring's Masked Rider, and he rushed through it, telling all, not holding back even Bess's unreserved avowal of her love or his deepest emotions.\n\n\"That's the story,\" he said, concluding. \"I love her, though I've never told her. If I did tell her I'd be ready to marry her, and that seems impossible in this country. I'd be afraid to risk taking her anywhere. So I intend to do the best I can for her here.\"\n\n\"The longer I live the stranger life is,\" mused Lassiter, with downcast eyes. \"I'm reminded of somethin' you once said to Jane about hands in her game of life. There's that unseen hand of power, an' Tull's black hand, an' my red one, an' your indifferent one, an' the girl's little brown, helpless one. An', Venters there's another one that's all-wise an' all-wonderful. That's the hand guidin' Jane Withersteen's game of life!... Your story's one to daze a far clearer head than mine. I can't offer no advice, even if you asked for it. Mebbe I can help you. Anyway, I'll hold Oldrin' up when he comes to the village an' find out about this girl. I knew the rustler years ago. He'll remember me.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, if I ever meet Oldring I'll kill him!\" cried Venters, with sudden intensity.\n\n\"I reckon that'd be perfectly natural,\" replied the rider.\n\n\"Make him think Bess is dead\u2014as she is to him and that old life.\"\n\n\"Sure, sure, son. Cool down now. If you're goin' to begin pullin' guns on Tull an' Oldin' you want to be cool. I reckon, though, you'd better keep hid here. Well, I must be leavin'.\"\n\n\"One thing, Lassiter. You'll not tell Jane about Bess? Please don't!\"\n\n\"I reckon not. But I wouldn't be afraid to bet that after she'd got over anger at your secrecy\u2014Venters, she'd be furious once in her life!\u2014she'd think more of you. I don't mind sayin' for myself that I think you're a good deal of a man.\"\n\nIn the further ascent Venters halted several times with the intention of saying good-by, yet he changed his mind and kept on climbing till they reached Balancing Rock. Lassiter examined the huge rock, listened to Venters's idea of its position and suggestion, and curiously placed a strong hand upon it.\n\n\"Hold on!\" cried Venters. \"I heaved at it once and have never gotten over my scare.\"\n\n\"Well, you do seem uncommon nervous,\" replied Lassiter, much amused. \"Now, as for me, why I always had the funniest notion to roll stones! When I was a kid I did it, an' the bigger I got the bigger stones I'd roll. Ain't that funny? Honest\u2014even now I often get off my hoss just to tumble a big stone over a precipice, en' watch it drop, en' listen to it bang an' boom. I've started some slides in my time, an' don't you forget it. I never seen a rock I wanted to roll as bad as this one! Wouldn't there jest be roarin', crashin' hell down that trail?\"\n\n\"You'd close the outlet forever!\" exclaimed Venters. \"Well, good-by, Lassiter. Keep my secret and don't forget me. And be mighty careful how you get out of the valley below. The rustlers' canyon isn't more than three miles up the Pass. Now you've tracked me here, I'll never feel safe again.\"\n\nIn his descent to the valley, Venters's emotion, roused to stirring pitch by the recital of his love story, quieted gradually, and in its place came a sober, thoughtful mood. All at once he saw that he was serious, because he would never more regain his sense of security while in the valley. What Lassiter could do another skilful tracker might duplicate. Among the many riders with whom Venters had ridden he recalled no one who could have taken his trail at Cottonwoods and have followed it to the edge of the bare slope in the pass, let alone up that glistening smooth stone. Lassiter, however, was not an ordinary rider. Instead of hunting cattle tracks he had likely spent a goodly portion of his life tracking men. It was not improbable that among Oldring's rustlers there was one who shared Lassiter's gift for trailing. And the more Venters dwelt on this possibility the more perturbed he grew.\n\nLassiter's visit, moreover, had a disquieting effect upon Bess, and Venters fancied that she entertained the same thought as to future seclusion. The breaking of their solitude, though by a well-meaning friend, had not only dispelled all its dream and much of its charm, but had instilled a canker of fear. Both had seen the footprint in the sand.\n\nVenters did no more work that day. Sunset and twilight gave way to night, and the canyon bird whistled its melancholy notes, and the wind sang softly in the cliffs, and the camp-fire blazed and burned down to red embers. To Venters a subtle difference was apparent in all of these, or else the shadowy change had been in him. He hoped that on the morrow this slight depression would have passed away.\n\nIn that measure, however, he was doomed to disappointment. Furthermore, Bess reverted to a wistful sadness that he had not observed in her since her recovery. His attempt to cheer her out of it resulted in dismal failure, and consequently in a darkening of his own mood. Hard work relieved him; still, when the day had passed, his unrest returned. Then he set to deliberate thinking, and there came to him the startling conviction that he must leave Surprise Valley and take Bess with him. As a rider he had taken many chances, and as an adventurer in Deception Pass he had unhesitatingly risked his life, but now he would run no preventable hazard of Bess's safety and happiness, and he was too keen not to see that hazard. It gave him a pang to think of leaving the beautiful valley just when he had the means to establish a permanent and delightful home there. One flashing thought tore in hot temptation through his mind\u2014why not climb up into the gorge, roll Balancing Rock down the trail, and close forever the outlet to Deception Pass? \"That was the beast in me\u2014showing his teeth!\" muttered Venters, scornfully. \"I'll just kill him good and quick! I'll be fair to this girl, if it's the last thing I do on earth!\"\n\nAnother day went by, in which he worked less and pondered more and all the time covertly watched Bess. Her wistfulness had deepened into downright unhappiness, and that made his task to tell her all the harder. He kept the secret another day, hoping by some chance she might grow less moody, and to his exceeding anxiety she fell into far deeper gloom. Out of his own secret and the torment of it he divined that she, too, had a secret and the keeping of it was torturing her. As yet he had no plan thought out in regard to how or when to leave the valley, but he decided to tell her the necessity of it and to persuade her to go. Furthermore, he hoped his speaking out would induce her to unburden her own mind.\n\n\"Bess, what's wrong with you?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" she answered, with averted face.\n\nVenters took hold of her gently, though masterfully, forced her to meet his eyes.\n\n\"You can't look at me and lie,\" he said. \"Now\u2014what's wrong with you? You're keeping something from me. Well, I've got a secret, too, and I intend to tell it presently.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014I have a secret. I was crazy to tell you when you came back. That's why I was so silly about everything. I kept holding my secret back\u2014gloating over it. But when Lassiter came I got an idea\u2014that changed my mind. Then I hated to tell you.\"\n\n\"Are you going to now?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014yes. I was coming to it. I tried yesterday, but you were so cold. I was afraid. I couldn't keep it much longer.\"\n\n\"Very well, most mysterious lady, tell your wonderful secret.\"\n\n\"You needn't laugh,\" she retorted, with a first glimpse of reviving spirit. \"I can take the laugh out of you in one second.\"\n\n\"It's a go.\"\n\nShe ran through the spruces to the cave, and returned carrying something which was manifestly heavy. Upon nearer view he saw that whatever she held with such evident importance had been bound up in a black scarf he well remembered. That alone was sufficient to make him tingle with curiosity.\n\n\"Have you any idea what I did in your absence?\" she asked.\n\n\"I imagine you lounged about, waiting and watching for me,\" he replied, smiling. \"I've my share of conceit, you know.\"\n\n\"You're wrong. I worked. Look at my hands.\" She dropped on her knees close to where he sat, and, carefully depositing the black bundle, she held out her hands. The palms and inside of her fingers were white, puckered, and worn.\n\n\"Why, Bess, you've been fooling in the water,\" he said.\n\n\"Fooling? Look here!\" With deft fingers she spread open the black scarf, and the bright sun shone upon a dull, glittering heap of gold.\n\n\"Gold!\" he ejaculated.\n\n\"Yes, gold! See, pounds of gold! I found it\u2014washed it out of the stream\u2014picked it out grain by grain, nugget by nugget!\"\n\n\"Gold!\" he cried.\n\n\"Yes. Now\u2014now laugh at my secret!\"\n\nFor a long minute Venters gazed. Then he stretched forth a hand to feel if the gold was real.\n\n\"Gold!\" he almost shouted. \"Bess, there are hundreds\u2014thousands of dollars' worth here!\"\n\nHe leaned over to her, and put his hand, strong and clenching now, on hers.\n\n\"Is there more where this came from?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Plenty of it, all the way up the stream to the cliff. You know I've often washed for gold. Then I've heard the men talk. I think there's no great quantity of gold here, but enough for\u2014for a fortune for you.\"\n\n\"That\u2014was\u2014your\u2014secret!\"\n\n\"Yes. I hate gold. For it makes men mad. I've seen them drunk with joy and dance and fling themselves around. I've seen them curse and rave. I've seen them fight like dogs and roll in the dust. I've seen them kill each other for gold.\"\n\n\"Is that why you hated to tell me?\"\n\n\"Not\u2014not altogether.\" Bess lowered her head. \"It was because I knew you'd never stay here long after you found gold.\"\n\n\"You were afraid I'd leave you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\n\n\"Listen!... You great, simple child! Listen... You sweet, wonderful, wild, blue-eyed girl! I was tortured by my secret. It was that I knew we\u2014we must leave the valley. We can't stay here much longer. I couldn't think how we'd get away\u2014out of the country\u2014or how we'd live, if we ever got out. I'm a beggar. That's why I kept my secret. I'm poor. It takes money to make way beyond Sterling. We couldn't ride horses or burros or walk forever. So while I knew we must go, I was distracted over how to go and what to do. Now! We've gold! Once beyond Sterling, we'll be safe from rustlers. We've no others to fear.\n\n\"Oh! Listen! Bess!\" Venters now heard his voice ringing high and sweet, and he felt Bess's cold hands in his crushing grasp as she leaned toward him pale, breathless. \"This is how much I'd leave you! You made me live again! I'll take you away\u2014far away from this wild country. You'll begin a new life. You'll be happy. You shall see cities, ships, people. You shall have anything your heart craves. All the shame and sorrow of your life shall be forgotten\u2014as if they had never been. This is how much I'd leave you here alone\u2014you sad-eyed girl. I love you! Didn't you know it? How could you fail to know it? I love you! I'm free! I'm a man\u2014a man you've made\u2014no more a beggar!... Kiss me! This is how much I'd leave you here alone\u2014you beautiful, strange, unhappy girl. But I'll make you happy. What\u2014what do I care for\u2014your past! I love you! I'll take you home to Illinois\u2014to my mother. Then I'll take you to far places. I'll make up all you've lost. Oh, I know you love me\u2014knew it before you told me. And it changed my life. And you'll go with me, not as my companion as you are here, nor my sister, but, Bess, darling!... As my wife!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Chapter XVII. Wrangle's Race Run\n\nThe plan eventually decided upon by the lovers was for Venters to go to the village, secure a horse and some kind of a disguise for Bess, or at least less striking apparel than her present garb, and to return post-haste to the valley. Meanwhile, she would add to their store of gold. Then they would strike the long and perilous trail to ride out of Utah. In the event of his inability to fetch back a horse for her, they intended to make the giant sorrel carry double. The gold, a little food, saddle blankets, and Venters's guns were to compose the light outfit with which they would make the start.\n\n\"I love this beautiful place,\" said Bess. \"It's hard to think of leaving it.\"\n\n\"Hard! Well, I should think so,\" replied Venters. \"Maybe\u2014in years\u2014\" But he did not complete in words his thought that might be possible to return after many years of absence and change.\n\nOnce again Bess bade Venters farewell under the shadow of Balancing Rock, and this time it was with whispered hope and tenderness and passionate trust. Long after he had left her, all down through the outlet to the Pass, the clinging clasp of her arms, the sweetness of her lips, and the sense of a new and exquisite birth of character in her remained hauntingly and thrillingly in his mind. The girl who had sadly called herself nameless and nothing had been marvelously transformed in the moment of his avowal of love. It was something to think over, something to warm his heart, but for the present it had absolutely to be forgotten so that all his mind could be addressed to the trip so fraught with danger.\n\nHe carried only his rifle, revolver, and a small quantity of bread and meat, and thus lightly burdened, he made swift progress down the slope and out into the valley. Darkness was coming on, and he welcomed it. Stars were blinking when he reached his old hiding-place in the split of canyon wall, and by their aid he slipped through the dense thickets to the grassy enclosure. Wrangle stood in the center of it with his head up, and he appeared black and of gigantic proportions in the dim light. Venters whistled softly, began a slow approach, and then called. The horse snorted and, plunging away with dull, heavy sound of hoofs, he disappeared in the gloom. \"Wilder than ever!\" muttered Venters. He followed the sorrel into the narrowing split between the walls, and presently had to desist because he could not see a foot in advance. As he went back toward the open Wrangle jumped out of an ebony shadow of cliff and like a thunderbolt shot huge and black past him down into the starlit glade. Deciding that all attempts to catch Wrangle at night would be useless, Venters repaired to the shelving rock where he had hidden saddle and blanket, and there went to sleep.\n\nThe first peep of day found him stirring, and as soon as it was light enough to distinguish objects, he took his lasso off his saddle and went out to rope the sorrel. He espied Wrangle at the lower end of the cove and approached him in a perfectly natural manner. When he got near enough, Wrangle evidently recognized him, but was too wild to stand. He ran up the glade and on into the narrow lane between the walls. This favored Venters's speedy capture of the horse, so, coiling his noose ready to throw, he hurried on. Wrangle let Venters get to within a hundred feet and then he broke. But as he plunged by, rapidly getting into his stride, Venters made a perfect throw with the rope. He had time to brace himself for the shock; nevertheless, Wrangle threw him and dragged him several yards before halting.\n\n\"You wild devil,\" said Venters, as he slowly pulled Wrangle up. \"Don't you know me? Come now\u2014old fellow\u2014so\u2014so\u2014\"\n\nWrangle yielded to the lasso and then to Venters's strong hand. He was as straggly and wild-looking as a horse left to roam free in the sage. He dropped his long ears and stood readily to be saddled and bridled. But he was exceedingly sensitive, and quivered at every touch and sound. Venters led him to the thicket, and, bending the close saplings to let him squeeze through, at length reached the open. Sharp survey in each direction assured him of the usual lonely nature of the canyon, then he was in the saddle, riding south.\n\nWrangle's long, swinging canter was a wonderful ground-gainer. His stride was almost twice that of an ordinary horse; and his endurance was equally remarkable. Venters pulled him in occasionally, and walked him up the stretches of rising ground and along the soft washes. Wrangle had never yet shown any indication of distress while Venters rode him. Nevertheless, there was now reason to save the horse, therefore Venters did not resort to the hurry that had characterized his former trip. He camped at the last water in the Pass. What distance that was to Cottonwoods he did not know; he calculated, however, that it was in the neighborhood of fifty miles.\n\nEarly in the morning he proceeded on his way, and about the middle of the forenoon reached the constricted gap that marked the southerly end of the Pass, and through which led the trail up to the sage-level. He spied out Lassiter's tracks in the dust, but no others, and dismounting, he straightened out Wrangle's bridle and began to lead him up the trail. The short climb, more severe on beast than on man, necessitated a rest on the level above, and during this he scanned the wide purple reaches of slope.\n\nWrangle whistled his pleasure at the smell of the sage. Remounting, Venters headed up the white trail with the fragrant wind in his face. He had proceeded for perhaps a couple of miles when Wrangle stopped with a suddenness that threw Venters heavily against the pommel.\n\n\"What's wrong, old boy?\" called Venters, looking down for a loose shoe or a snake or a foot lamed by a picked-up stone. Unrewarded, he raised himself from his scrutiny. Wrangle stood stiff head high, with his long ears erect. Thus guided, Venters swiftly gazed ahead to make out a dust-clouded, dark group of horsemen riding down the slope. If they had seen him, it apparently made no difference in their speed or direction.\n\n\"Wonder who they are!\" exclaimed Venters. He was not disposed to run. His cool mood tightened under grip of excitement as he reflected that, whoever the approaching riders were, they could not be friends. He slipped out of the saddle and led Wrangle behind the tallest sage-brush. It might serve to conceal them until the riders were close enough for him to see who they were; after that he would be indifferent to how soon they discovered him.\n\nAfter looking to his rifle and ascertaining that it was in working order, he watched, and as he watched, slowly the force of a bitter fierceness, long dormant, gathered ready to flame into life. If those riders were not rustlers he had forgotten how rustlers looked and rode. On they came, a small group, so compact and dark that he could not tell their number. How unusual that their horses did not see Wrangle! But such failure, Venters decided, was owing to the speed with which they were traveling. They moved at a swift canter affected more by rustlers than by riders. Venters grew concerned over the possibility that these horsemen would actually ride down on him before he had a chance to tell what to expect. When they were within three hundred yards he deliberately led Wrangle out into the trail.\n\nThen he heard shouts, and the hard scrape of sliding hoofs, and saw horses rear and plunge back with up-flung heads and flying manes. Several little white puffs of smoke appeared sharply against the black background of riders and horses, and shots rang out. Bullets struck far in front of Venters, and whipped up the dust and then hummed low into the sage. The range was great for revolvers, but whether the shots were meant to kill or merely to check advance, they were enough to fire that waiting ferocity in Venters. Slipping his arm through the bridle, so that Wrangle could not get away, Venters lifted his rifle and pulled the trigger twice.\n\nHe saw the first horseman lean sideways and fall. He saw another lurch in his saddle and heard a cry of pain. Then Wrangle, plunging in fright, lifted Venters and nearly threw him. He jerked the horse down with a powerful hand and leaped into the saddle. Wrangle plunged again, dragging his bridle, that Venters had not had time to throw in place. Bending over with a swift movement, he secured it and dropped the loop over the pommel. Then, with grinding teeth, he looked to see what the issue would be.\n\nThe band had scattered so as not to afford such a broad mark for bullets. The riders faced Venters, some with red-belching guns. He heard a sharper report, and just as Wrangle plunged again he caught the whim of a leaden missile that would have hit him but for Wrangle's sudden jump. A swift, hot wave, turning cold, passed over Venters. Deliberately he picked out the one rider with a carbine, and killed him. Wrangle snorted shrilly and bolted into the sage. Venters let him run a few rods, then with iron arm checked him.\n\nFive riders, surely rustlers, were left. One leaped out of the saddle to secure his fallen comrade's carbine. A shot from Venters, which missed the man but sent the dust flying over him made him run back to his horse. Then they separated. The crippled rider went one way; the one frustrated in his attempt to get the carbine rode another, Venters thought he made out a third rider, carrying a strange-appearing bundle and disappearing in the sage. But in the rapidity of action and vision he could not discern what it was. Two riders with three horses swung out to the right. Afraid of the long rifle\u2014a burdensome weapon seldom carried by rustlers or riders\u2014they had been put to rout.\n\nSuddenly Venters discovered that one of the two men last noted was riding Jane Withersteen's horse Bells\u2014the beautiful bay racer she had given to Lassiter. Venters uttered a savage outcry. Then the small, wiry, frog-like shape of the second rider, and the ease and grace of his seat in the saddle\u2014things so strikingly incongruous\u2014grew more and more familiar in Venters's sight.\n\n\"Jerry Card!\" cried Venters.\n\nIt was indeed Tull's right-hand man. Such a white hot wrath inflamed Venters that he fought himself to see with clearer gaze.\n\n\"It's Jerry Card!\" he exclaimed, instantly. \"And he's riding Black Star and leading Night!\"\n\nThe long-kindling, stormy fire in Venters's heart burst into flame. He spurred Wrangle, and as the horse lengthened his stride Venters slipped cartridges into the magazine of his rifle till it was once again full. Card and his companion were now half a mile or more in advance, riding easily down the slope. Venters marked the smooth gait, and understood it when Wrangle galloped out of the sage into the broad cattle trail, down which Venters had once tracked Jane Withersteen's red herd. This hard-packed trail, from years of use, was as clean and smooth as a road. Venters saw Jerry Card look back over his shoulder, the other rider did likewise. Then the three racers lengthened their stride to the point where the swinging canter was ready to break into a gallop.\n\n\"Wrangle, the race's on,\" said Venters, grimly. \"We'll canter with them and gallop with them and run with them. We'll let them set the pace.\"\n\nVenters knew he bestrode the strongest, swiftest, most tireless horse ever ridden by any rider across the Utah uplands. Recalling Jane Withersteen's devoted assurance that Night could run neck and neck with Wrangle, and Black Star could show his heels to him, Venters wished that Jane were there to see the race to recover her blacks and in the unqualified superiority of the giant sorrel. Then Venters found himself thankful that she was absent, for he meant that race to end in Jerry Card's death. The first flush, the raging of Venters's wrath, passed, to leave him in sullen, almost cold possession of his will. It was a deadly mood, utterly foreign to his nature, engendered, fostered, and released by the wild passions of wild men in a wild country. The strength in him then\u2014the thing rife in him that was not hate, but something as remorseless\u2014might have been the fiery fruition of a whole lifetime of vengeful quest. Nothing could have stopped him.\n\nVenters thought out the race shrewdly. The rider on Bells would probably drop behind and take to the sage. What he did was of little moment to Venters. To stop Jerry Card, his evil hidden career as well as his present flight, and then to catch the blacks\u2014that was all that concerned Venters. The cattle trail wound for miles and miles down the slope. Venters saw with a rider's keen vision ten, fifteen, twenty miles of clear purple sage. There were no on-coming riders or rustlers to aid Card. His only chance to escape lay in abandoning the stolen horses and creeping away in the sage to hide. In ten miles Wrangle could run Black Star and Night off their feet, and in fifteen he could kill them outright. So Venters held the sorrel in, letting Card make the running. It was a long race that would save the blacks.\n\nIn a few miles of that swinging canter Wrangle had crept appreciably closer to the three horses. Jerry Card turned again, and when he saw how the sorrel had gained, he put Black Star to a gallop. Night and Bells, on either side of him, swept into his stride.\n\nVenters loosened the rein on Wrangle and let him break into a gallop. The sorrel saw the horses ahead and wanted to run. But Venters restrained him. And in the gallop he gained more than in the canter. Bells was fast in that gait, but Black Star and Night had been trained to run. Slowly Wrangle closed the gap down to a quarter of a mile, and crept closer and closer.\n\nJerry Card wheeled once more. Venters distinctly saw the red flash of his red face. This time he looked long. Venters laughed. He knew what passed in Card's mind. The rider was trying to make out what horse it happened to be that thus gained on Jane Withersteen's peerless racers. Wrangle had so long been away from the village that not improbably Jerry had forgotten. Besides, whatever Jerry's qualifications for his fame as the greatest rider of the sage, certain it was that his best point was not far-sightedness. He had not recognized Wrangle. After what must have been a searching gaze he got his comrade to face about. This action gave Venters amusement. It spoke so surely of the facts that neither Card nor the rustler actually knew their danger. Yet if they kept to the trail\u2014and the last thing such men would do would be to leave it\u2014they were both doomed.\n\nThis comrade of Card's whirled far around in his saddle, and he even shaded his eyes from the sun. He, too, looked long. Then, all at once, he faced ahead again and, bending lower in the saddle, began to fling his right arm up and down. That flinging Venters knew to be the lashing of Bells. Jerry also became active. And the three racers lengthened out into a run.\n\n\"Now, Wrangle!\" cried Venters. \"Run, you big devil! Run!\"\n\nVenters laid the reins on Wrangle's neck and dropped the loop over the pommel. The sorrel needed no guiding on that smooth trail. He was surer-footed in a run than at any other fast gait, and his running gave the impression of something devilish. He might now have been actuated by Venters's spirit; undoubtedly his savage running fitted the mood of his rider. Venters bent forward swinging with the horse, and gripped his rifle. His eye measured the distance between him and Jerry Card.\n\nIn less than two miles of running Bells began to drop behind the blacks, and Wrangle began to overhaul him. Venters anticipated that the rustler would soon take to the sage. Yet he did not. Not improbably he reasoned that the powerful sorrel could more easily overtake Bells in the heavier going outside of the trail. Soon only a few hundred yards lay between Bells and Wrangle. Turning in his saddle, the rustler began to shoot, and the bullets beat up little whiffs of dust. Venters raised his rifle, ready to take snap shots, and waited for favorable opportunity when Bells was out of line with the forward horses. Venters had it in him to kill these men as if they were skunk-bitten coyotes, but also he had restraint enough to keep from shooting one of Jane's beloved Arabians.\n\nNo great distance was covered, however, before Bells swerved to the left, out of line with Black Star and Night. Then Venters, aiming high and waiting for the pause between Wrangle's great strides, began to take snap shots at the rustler. The fleeing rider presented a broad target for a rifle, but he was moving swiftly forward and bobbing up and down. Moreover, shooting from Wrangle's back was shooting from a thunderbolt. And added to that was the danger of a low-placed bullet taking effect on Bells. Yet, despite these considerations, making the shot exceedingly difficult, Venters's confidence, like his implacability, saw a speedy and fatal termination of that rustler's race. On the sixth shot the rustler threw up his arms and took a flying tumble off his horse. He rolled over and over, hunched himself to a half-erect position, fell, and then dragged himself into the sage. As Venters went thundering by he peered keenly into the sage, but caught no sign of the man. Bells ran a few hundred yards, slowed up, and had stopped when Wrangle passed him.\n\nAgain Venters began slipping fresh cartridges into the magazine of his rifle, and his hand was so sure and steady that he did not drop a single cartridge. With the eye of a rider and the judgment of a marksman he once more measured the distance between him and Jerry Card. Wrangle had gained, bringing him into rifle range. Venters was hard put to it now not to shoot, but thought it better to withhold his fire. Jerry, who, in anticipation of a running fusillade, had huddled himself into a little twisted ball on Black Star's neck, now surmising that this pursuer would make sure of not wounding one of the blacks, rose to his natural seat in the saddle.\n\nIn his mind perhaps, as certainly as in Venters's, this moment was the beginning of the real race.\n\nVenters leaned forward to put his hand on Wrangle's neck, then backward to put it on his flank. Under the shaggy, dusty hair trembled and vibrated and rippled a wonderful muscular activity. But Wrangle's flesh was still cold. What a cold-blooded brute thought Venters, and felt in him a love for the horse he had never given to any other. It would not have been humanly possible for any rider, even though clutched by hate or revenge or a passion to save a loved one or fear of his own life, to be astride the sorrel to swing with his swing, to see his magnificent stride and hear the rapid thunder of his hoofs, to ride him in that race and not glory in the ride.\n\nSo, with his passion to kill still keen and unabated, Venters lived out that ride, and drank a rider's sage-sweet cup of wildness to the dregs.\n\nWhen Wrangle's long mane, lashing in the wind, stung Venters in the cheek, the sting added a beat to his flying pulse. He bent a downward glance to try to see Wrangle's actual stride, and saw only twinkling, darting streaks and the white rush of the trail. He watched the sorrel's savage head, pointed level, his mouth still closed and dry, but his nostrils distended as if he were snorting unseen fire. Wrangle was the horse for a race with death. Upon each side Venters saw the sage merged into a sailing, colorless wall. In front sloped the lay of ground with its purple breadth split by the white trail. The wind, blowing with heavy, steady blast into his face, sickened him with enduring, sweet odor, and filled his ears with a hollow, rushing roar.\n\nThen for the hundredth time he measured the width of space separating him from Jerry Card. Wrangle had ceased to gain. The blacks were proving their fleetness. Venters watched Jerry Card, admiring the little rider's horsemanship. He had the incomparable seat of the upland rider, born in the saddle. It struck Venters that Card had changed his position, or the position of the horses. Presently Venters remembered positively that Jerry had been leading Night on the right-hand side of the trail. The racer was now on the side to the left. No\u2014it was Black Star. But, Venters argued in amaze, Jerry had been mounted on Black Star. Another clearer, keener gaze assured Venters that Black Star was really riderless. Night now carried Jerry Card.\n\n\"He's changed from one to the other!\" ejaculated Venters, realizing the astounding feat with unstinted admiration. \"Changed at full speed! Jerry Card, that's what you've done unless I'm drunk on the smell of sage. But I've got to see the trick before I believe it.\"\n\nThenceforth, while Wrangle sped on, Venters glued his eyes to the little rider. Jerry Card rode as only he could ride. Of all the daring horsemen of the uplands, Jerry was the one rider fitted to bring out the greatness of the blacks in that long race. He had them on a dead run, but not yet at the last strained and killing pace. From time to time he glanced backward, as a wise general in retreat calculating his chances and the power and speed of pursuers, and the moment for the last desperate burst. No doubt, Card, with his life at stake, gloried in that race, perhaps more wildly than Venters. For he had been born to the sage and the saddle and the wild. He was more than half horse. Not until the last call\u2014the sudden up-flashing instinct of self-preservation\u2014would he lose his skill and judgment and nerve and the spirit of that race. Venters seemed to read Jerry's mind. That little crime-stained rider was actually thinking of his horses, husbanding their speed, handling them with knowledge of years, glorying in their beautiful, swift, racing stride, and wanting them to win the race when his own life hung suspended in quivering balance. Again Jerry whirled in his saddle and the sun flashed red on his face. Turning, he drew Black Star closer and closer toward Night, till they ran side by side, as one horse. Then Card raised himself in the saddle, slipped out of the stirrups, and, somehow twisting himself, leaped upon Black Star. He did not even lose the swing of the horse. Like a leech he was there in the other saddle, and as the horses separated, his right foot, that had been apparently doubled under him, shot down to catch the stirrup. The grace and dexterity and daring of that rider's act won something more than admiration from Venters.\n\nFor the distance of a mile Jerry rode Black Star and then changed back to Night. But all Jerry's skill and the running of the blacks could avail little more against the sorrel.\n\nVenters peered far ahead, studying the lay of the land. Straightaway for five miles the trail stretched, and then it disappeared in hummocky ground. To the right, some few rods, Venters saw a break in the sage, and this was the rim of Deception Pass. Across the dark cleft gleamed the red of the opposite wall. Venters imagined that the trail went down into the Pass somewhere north of those ridges. And he realized that he must and would overtake Jerry Card in this straight course of five miles.\n\nCruelly he struck his spurs into Wrangle's flanks. A light touch of spur was sufficient to make Wrangle plunge. And now, with a ringing, wild snort, he seemed to double up in muscular convulsions and to shoot forward with an impetus that almost unseated Venters. The sage blurred by, the trail flashed by, and the wind robbed him of breath and hearing. Jerry Card turned once more. And the way he shifted to Black Star showed he had to make his last desperate running. Venters aimed to the side of the trail and sent a bullet puffing the dust beyond Jerry. Venters hoped to frighten the rider and get him to take to the sage. But Jerry returned the shot, and his ball struck dangerously close in the dust at Wrangle's flying feet. Venters held his fire then, while the rider emptied his revolver. For a mile, with Black Star leaving Night behind and doing his utmost, Wrangle did not gain; for another mile he gained little, if at all. In the third he caught up with the now galloping Night and began to gain rapidly on the other black.\n\nOnly a hundred yards now stretched between Black Star and Wrangle. The giant sorrel thundered on\u2014and on\u2014and on. In every yard he gained a foot. He was whistling through his nostrils, wringing wet, flying lather, and as hot as fire. Savage as ever, strong as ever, fast as ever, but each tremendous stride jarred Venters out of the saddle! Wrangle's power and spirit and momentum had begun to run him off his legs. Wrangle's great race was nearly won\u2014and run. Venters seemed to see the expanse before him as a vast, sheeted, purple plain sliding under him. Black Star moved in it as a blur. The rider, Jerry Card, appeared a mere dot bobbing dimly. Wrangle thundered on\u2014on\u2014on! Venters felt the increase in quivering, straining shock after every leap. Flecks of foam flew into Venters's eyes, burning him, making him see all the sage as red. But in that red haze he saw, or seemed to see, Black Star suddenly riderless and with broken gait. Wrangle thundered on to change his pace with a violent break. Then Venters pulled him hard. From run to gallop, gallop to canter, canter to trot, trot to walk, and walk to stop, the great sorrel ended his race.\n\nVenters looked back. Black Star stood riderless in the trail. Jerry Card had taken to the sage. Far up the white trail Night came trotting faithfully down. Venters leaped off, still half blind, reeling dizzily. In a moment he had recovered sufficiently to have a care for Wrangle. Rapidly he took off the saddle and bridle. The sorrel was reeking, heaving, whistling, shaking. But he had still the strength to stand, and for him Venters had no fears.\n\nAs Venters ran back to Black Star he saw the horse stagger on shaking legs into the sage and go down in a heap. Upon reaching him Venters removed the saddle and bridle. Black Star had been killed on his legs, Venters thought. He had no hope for the stricken horse. Black Star lay flat, covered with bloody froth, mouth wide, tongue hanging, eyes glaring, and all his beautiful body in convulsions.\n\nUnable to stay there to see Jane's favorite racer die, Venters hurried up the trail to meet the other black. On the way he kept a sharp lookout for Jerry Card. Venters imagined the rider would keep well out of range of the rifle, but, as he would be lost on the sage without a horse, not improbably he would linger in the vicinity on the chance of getting back one of the blacks. Night soon came trotting up, hot and wet and run out. Venters led him down near the others, and unsaddling him, let him loose to rest. Night wearily lay down in the dust and rolled, proving himself not yet spent.\n\nThen Venters sat down to rest and think. Whatever the risk, he was compelled to stay where he was, or comparatively near, for the night. The horses must rest and drink. He must find water. He was now seventy miles from Cottonwoods, and, he believed, close to the canyon where the cattle trail must surely turn off and go down into the Pass. After a while he rose to survey the valley.\n\nHe was very near to the ragged edge of a deep canyon into which the trail turned. The ground lay in uneven ridges divided by washes, and these sloped into the canyon. Following the canyon line, he saw where its rim was broken by other intersecting canyons, and farther down red walls and yellow cliffs leading toward a deep blue cleft that he made sure was Deception Pass. Walking out a few rods to a promontory, he found where the trail went down. The descent was gradual, along a stone-walled trail, and Venters felt sure that this was the place where Oldring drove cattle into the Pass. There was, however, no indication at all that he ever had driven cattle out at this point. Oldring had many holes to his burrow.\n\nIn searching round in the little hollows Venters, much to his relief, found water. He composed himself to rest and eat some bread and meat, while he waited for a sufficient time to elapse so that he could safely give the horses a drink. He judged the hour to be somewhere around noon. Wrangle lay down to rest and Night followed suit. So long as they were down Venters intended to make no move. The longer they rested the better, and the safer it would be to give them water. By and by he forced himself to go over to where Black Star lay, expecting to find him dead. Instead he found the racer partially if not wholly recovered. There was recognition, even fire, in his big black eyes. Venters was overjoyed. He sat by the black for a long time. Black Star presently labored to his feet with a heave and a groan, shook himself, and snorted for water. Venters repaired to the little pool he had found, filled his sombrero, and gave the racer a drink. Black Star gulped it at one draught, as if it were but a drop, and pushed his nose into the hat and snorted for more. Venters now led Night down to drink, and after a further time Black Star also. Then the blacks began to graze.\n\nThe sorrel had wandered off down the sage between the trail and the canyon. Once or twice he disappeared in little swales. Finally Venters concluded Wrangle had grazed far enough, and, taking his lasso, he went to fetch him back. In crossing from one ridge to another he saw where the horse had made muddy a pool of water. It occurred to Venters then that Wrangle had drunk his fill, and did not seem the worse for it, and might be anything but easy to catch. And, true enough, he could not come within roping reach of the sorrel. He tried for an hour, and gave up in disgust. Wrangle did not seem so wild as simply perverse. In a quandary Venters returned to the other horses, hoping much, yet doubting more, that when Wrangle had grazed to suit himself he might be caught.\n\nAs the afternoon wore away Venters's concern diminished, yet he kept close watch on the blacks and the trail and the sage. There was no telling of what Jerry Card might be capable. Venters sullenly acquiesced to the idea that the rider had been too quick and too shrewd for him. Strangely and doggedly, however, Venters clung to his foreboding of Card's downfall.\n\nThe wind died away; the red sun topped the far distant western rise of slope; and the long, creeping purple shadows lengthened. The rims of the canyons gleamed crimson and the deep clefts appeared to belch forth blue smoke. Silence enfolded the scene.\n\nIt was broken by a horrid, long-drawn scream of a horse and the thudding of heavy hoofs. Venters sprang erect and wheeled south. Along the canyon rim, near the edge, came Wrangle, once more in thundering flight.\n\nVenters gasped in amazement. Had the wild sorrel gone mad? His head was high and twisted, in a most singular position for a running horse. Suddenly Venters descried a frog-like shape clinging to Wrangle's neck. Jerry Card! Somehow he had straddled Wrangle and now stuck like a huge burr. But it was his strange position and the sorrel's wild scream that shook Venters's nerves. Wrangle was pounding toward the turn where the trail went down. He plunged onward like a blind horse. More than one of his leaps took him to the very edge of the precipice.\n\nJerry Card was bent forward with his teeth fast in the front of Wrangle's nose! Venters saw it, and there flashed over him a memory of this trick of a few desperate riders. He even thought of one rider who had worn off his teeth in this terrible hold to break or control desperate horses. Wrangle had indeed gone mad. The marvel was what guided him. Was it the half-brute, the more than half-horse instinct of Jerry Card? Whatever the mystery, it was true. And in a few more rods Jerry would have the sorrel turning into the trail leading down into the canyon.\n\n\"No\u2014Jerry!\" whispered Venters, stepping forward and throwing up the rifle. He tried to catch the little humped, frog-like shape over the sights. It was moving too fast; it was too small. Yet Venters shot once... twice... the third time... four times... five! all wasted shots and precious seconds!\n\nWith a deep-muttered curse Venters caught Wrangle through the sights and pulled the trigger. Plainly he heard the bullet thud. Wrangle uttered a horrible strangling sound. In swift death action he whirled, and with one last splendid leap he cleared the canyon rim. And he whirled downward with the little frog-like shape clinging to his neck!\n\nThere was a pause which seemed never ending, a shock, and an instant's silence.\n\nThen up rolled a heavy crash, a long roar of sliding rocks dying away in distant echo, then silence unbroken.\n\nWrangle's race was run." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Chapter XVIII. Oldring's Knell\n\nSome forty hours or more later Venters created a commotion in Cottonwoods by riding down the main street on Black Star and leading Bells and Night. He had come upon Bells grazing near the body of a dead rustler, the only incident of his quick ride into the village.\n\nNothing was farther from Venters's mind than bravado. No thought came to him of the defiance and boldness of riding Jane Withersteen's racers straight into the arch-plotter's stronghold. He wanted men to see the famous Arabians; he wanted men to see them dirty and dusty, bearing all the signs of having been driven to their limit; he wanted men to see and to know that the thieves who had ridden them out into the sage had not ridden them back. Venters had come for that and for more\u2014he wanted to meet Tull face to face; if not Tull, then Dyer; if not Dyer, then anyone in the secret of these master conspirators. Such was Venters's passion. The meeting with the rustlers, the unprovoked attack upon him, the spilling of blood, the recognition of Jerry Card and the horses, the race, and that last plunge of mad Wrangle\u2014all these things, fuel on fuel to the smoldering fire, had kindled and swelled and leaped into living flame. He could have shot Dyer in the midst of his religious services at the altar; he could have killed Tull in front of wives and babes.\n\nHe walked the three racers down the broad, green-bordered village road. He heard the murmur of running water from Amber Spring. Bitter waters for Jane Withersteen! Men and women stopped to gaze at him and the horses. All knew him; all knew the blacks and the bay. As well as if it had been spoken, Venters read in the faces of men the intelligence that Jane Withersteen's Arabians had been known to have been stolen. Venters reined in and halted before Dyer's residence. It was a low, long, stone structure resembling Withersteen House. The spacious front yard was green and luxuriant with grass and flowers; gravel walks led to the huge porch; a well-trimmed hedge of purple sage separated the yard from the church grounds; birds sang in the trees; water flowed musically along the walks; and there were glad, careless shouts of children. For Venters the beauty of this home, and the serenity and its apparent happiness, all turned red and black. For Venters a shade overspread the lawn, the flowers, the old vine-clad stone house. In the music of the singing birds, in the murmur of the running water, he heard an ominous sound. Quiet beauty\u2014sweet music\u2014innocent laughter! By what monstrous abortion of fate did these abide in the shadow of Dyer?\n\nVenters rode on and stopped before Tull's cottage. Women stared at him with white faces and then flew from the porch. Tull himself appeared at the door, bent low, craning his neck. His dark face flashed out of sight; the door banged; a heavy bar dropped with a hollow sound.\n\nThen Venters shook Black Star's bridle, and, sharply trotting, led the other horses to the center of the village. Here at the intersecting streets and in front of the stores he halted once more. The usual lounging atmosphere of that prominent corner was not now in evidence. Riders and ranchers and villagers broke up what must have been absorbing conversation. There was a rush of many feet, and then the walk was lined with faces.\n\nVenters's glance swept down the line of silent stone-faced men. He recognized many riders and villagers, but none of those he had hoped to meet. There was no expression in the faces turned toward him. All of them knew him, most were inimical, but there were few who were not burning with curiosity and wonder in regard to the return of Jane Withersteen's racers. Yet all were silent. Here were the familiar characteristics\u2014masked feeling\u2014strange secretiveness\u2014expressionless expression of mystery and hidden power.\n\n\"Has anybody here seen Jerry Card?\" queried Venters, in a loud voice.\n\nIn reply there came not a word, not a nod or shake of head, not so much as dropping eye or twitching lip\u2014nothing but a quiet, stony stare.\n\n\"Been under the knife? You've a fine knife-wielder here\u2014one Tull, I believe!... Maybe you've all had your tongues cut out?\"\n\nThis passionate sarcasm of Venters brought no response, and the stony calm was as oil on the fire within him.\n\n\"I see some of you pack guns, too!\" he added, in biting scorn. In the long, tense pause, strung keenly as a tight wire, he sat motionless on Black Star. \"All right,\" he went on. \"Then let some of you take this message to Tull. Tell him I've seen Jerry Card!... Tell him Jerry Card will never return!\"\n\nThereupon, in the same dead calm, Venters backed Black Star away from the curb, into the street, and out of range. He was ready now to ride up to Withersteen House and turn the racers over to Jane.\n\n\"Hello, Venters!\" a familiar voice cried, hoarsely, and he saw a man running toward him. It was the rider Judkins who came up and gripped Venters's hand. \"Venters, I could hev dropped when I seen them hosses. But thet sight ain't a marker to the looks of you. What's wrong? Hev you gone crazy? You must be crazy to ride in here this way\u2014with them hosses\u2014talkie' thet way about Tull en' Jerry Card.\"\n\n\"Jud, I'm not crazy\u2014only mad clean through,\" replied Venters.\n\n\"Mad, now, Bern, I'm glad to hear some of your old self in your voice. Fer when you come up you looked like the corpse of a dead rider with fire fer eyes. You hed thet crowd too stiff fer throwin' guns. Come, we've got to hev a talk. Let's go up the lane. We ain't much safe here.\"\n\nJudkins mounted Bells and rode with Venters up to the cottonwood grove. Here they dismounted and went among the trees.\n\n\"Let's hear from you first,\" said Judkins. \"You fetched back them hosses. Thet is the trick. An', of course, you got Jerry the same as you got Horne.\"\n\n\"Horne!\"\n\n\"Sure. He was found dead yesterday all chewed by coyotes, en' he'd been shot plumb center.\"\n\n\"Where was he found?\"\n\n\"At the split down the trail\u2014you know where Oldring's cattle trail runs off north from the trail to the pass.\"\n\n\"That's where I met Jerry and the rustlers. What was Horne doing with them? I thought Horne was an honest cattle-man.\"\n\n\"Lord\u2014Bern, don't ask me thet! I'm all muddled now tryin' to figure things.\"\n\nVenters told of the fight and the race with Jerry Card and its tragic conclusion.\n\n\"I knowed it! I knowed all along that Wrangle was the best hoss!\" exclaimed Judkins, with his lean face working and his eyes lighting. \"Thet was a race! Lord, I'd like to hev seen Wrangle jump the cliff with Jerry. An' thet was good-by to the grandest hoss an' rider ever on the sage!... But, Bern, after you got the hosses why'd you want to bolt right in Tull's face?\"\n\n\"I want him to know. An' if I can get to him I'll\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't get near Tull,\" interrupted Judkins. \"Thet vigilante bunch hev taken to bein' bodyguard for Tull an' Dyer, too.\"\n\n\"Hasn't Lassiter made a break yet?\" inquired Venters, curiously.\n\n\"Naw!\" replied Judkins, scornfully. \"Jane turned his head. He's mad in love over her\u2014follers her like a dog. He ain't no more Lassiter! He's lost his nerve, he doesn't look like the same feller. It's village talk. Everybody knows it. He hasn't thrown a gun, an' he won't!\"\n\n\"Jud, I'll bet he does,\" replied Venters, earnestly. \"Remember what I say. This Lassiter is something more than a gun-man. Jud, he's big\u2014he's great!... I feel that in him. God help Tull and Dyer when Lassiter does go after them. For horses and riders and stone walls won't save them.\"\n\n\"Wal, hev it your way, Bern. I hope you're right. Nat'rully I've been some sore on Lassiter fer gittin' soft. But I ain't denyin' his nerve, or whatever's great in him thet sort of paralyzes people. No later 'n this mornin' I seen him saunterin' down the lane, quiet an' slow. An' like his guns he comes black\u2014black, thet's Lassiter. Wal, the crowd on the corner never batted an eye, en' I'll gamble my hoss thet there wasn't one who hed a heartbeat till Lassiter got by. He went in Snell's saloon, an' as there wasn't no gun play I had to go in, too. An' there, darn my pictures, if Lassiter wasn't standin' to the bar, drinking en' talkin' with Oldrin'.\"\n\n\"Oldring!\" whispered Venters. His voice, as all fire and pulse within him, seemed to freeze.\n\n\"Let go my arm!\" exclaimed Judkins. \"Thet's my bad arm. Sure it was Oldrin'. What the hell's wrong with you, anyway? Venters, I tell you somethin's wrong. You're whiter 'n a sheet. You can't be scared of the rustler. I don't believe you've got a scare in you. Wal, now, jest let me talk. You know I like to talk, an' if I'm slow I allus git there sometime. As I said, Lassiter was talkie' chummy with Oldrin'. There wasn't no hard feelin's. An' the gang wasn't payin' no pertic'lar attention. But like a cat watchin' a mouse I hed my eyes on them two fellers. It was strange to me, thet confab. I'm gittin' to think a lot, fer a feller who doesn't know much. There's been some queer deals lately an' this seemed to me the queerest. These men stood to the bar alone, an' so close their big gun-hilts butted together. I seen Oldrin' was some surprised at first, an' Lassiter was cool as ice. They talked, an' presently at somethin' Lassiter said the rustler bawled out a curse, an' then he jest fell up against the bar, an' sagged there. The gang in the saloon looked around an' laughed, an' thet's about all. Finally Oldrin' turned, and it was easy to see somethin' hed shook him. Yes, sir, thet big rustler\u2014you know he's as broad as he is long, an' the powerfulest build of a man\u2014yes, sir, the nerve had been taken out of him. Then, after a little, he began to talk an' said a lot to Lassiter, an' by an' by it didn't take much of an eye to see thet Lassiter was gittin' hit hard. I never seen him anyway but cooler 'n ice\u2014till then. He seemed to be hit harder 'n Oldrin', only he didn't roar out thet way. He jest kind of sunk in, an' looked an' looked, an' he didn't see a livin' soul in thet saloon. Then he sort of come to, an' shakin' hands\u2014mind you, shakin' hands with Oldrin'\u2014he went out. I couldn't help thinkin' how easy even a boy could hev dropped the great gun-man then!... Wal, the rustler stood at the bar fer a long time, en' he was seein' things far off, too; then he come to an' roared fer whisky, an' gulped a drink thet was big enough to drown me.\"\n\n\"Is Oldring here now?\" whispered Venters. He could not speak above a whisper. Judkins's story had been meaningless to him.\n\n\"He's at Snell's yet. Bern, I hevn't told you yet thet the rustlers hev been raisin' hell. They shot up Stone Bridge an' Glaze, an' fer three days they've been here drinkin' an' gamblin' an' throwin' of gold. These rustlers hev a pile of gold. If it was gold dust or nugget gold I'd hev reason to think, but it's new coin gold, as if it had jest come from the United States treasury. An' the coin's genuine. Thet's all been proved. The truth is Oldrin's on a rampage. A while back he lost his Masked Rider, an' they say he's wild about thet. I'm wonderin' if Lassiter could hev told the rustler anythin' about thet little masked, hard-ridin' devil. Ride! He was most as good as Jerry Card. An', Bern, I've been wonderin' if you know\u2014\"\n\n\"Judkins, you're a good fellow,\" interrupted Venters. \"Some day I'll tell you a story. I've no time now. Take the horses to Jane.\"\n\nJudkins stared, and then, muttering to himself, he mounted Bells, and stared again at Venters, and then, leading the other horses, he rode into the grove and disappeared.\n\nOnce, long before, on the night Venters had carried Bess through the canyon and up into Surprise Valley, he had experienced the strangeness of faculties singularly, tinglingly acute. And now the same sensation recurred. But it was different in that he felt cold, frozen, mechanical incapable of free thought, and all about him seemed unreal, aloof, remote. He hid his rifle in the sage, marking its exact location with extreme care. Then he faced down the lane and strode toward the center of the village. Perceptions flashed upon him, the faint, cold touch of the breeze, a cold, silvery tinkle of flowing water, a cold sun shining out of a cold sky, song of birds and laugh of children, coldly distant. Cold and intangible were all things in earth and heaven. Colder and tighter stretched the skin over his face; colder and harder grew the polished butts of his guns; colder and steadier became his hands as he wiped the clammy sweat from his face or reached low to his gun-sheaths. Men meeting him in the walk gave him wide berth. In front of Bevin's store a crowd melted apart for his passage, and their faces and whispers were faces and whispers of a dream. He turned a corner to meet Tull face to face, eye to eye. As once before he had seen this man pale to a ghastly, livid white so again he saw the change. Tull stopped in his tracks, with right hand raised and shaking. Suddenly it dropped, and he seemed to glide aside, to pass out of Venters's sight. Next he saw many horses with bridles down\u2014all clean-limbed, dark bays or blacks\u2014rustlers' horses! Loud voices and boisterous laughter, rattle of dice and scrape of chair and clink of gold, burst in mingled din from an open doorway. He stepped inside.\n\nWith the sight of smoke-hazed room and drinking, cursing, gambling, dark-visaged men, reality once more dawned upon Venters.\n\nHis entrance had been unnoticed, and he bent his gaze upon the drinkers at the bar. Dark-clothed, dark-faced men they all were, burned by the sun, bow-legged as were most riders of the sage, but neither lean nor gaunt. Then Venters's gaze passed to the tables, and swiftly it swept over the hard-featured gamesters, to alight upon the huge, shaggy, black head of the rustler chief.\n\n\"Oldring!\" he cried, and to him his voice seemed to split a bell in his ears.\n\nIt stilled the din.\n\nThat silence suddenly broke to the scrape and crash of Oldring's chair as he rose; and then, while he passed, a great gloomy figure, again the thronged room stilled in silence yet deeper.\n\n\"Oldring, a word with you!\" continued Venters.\n\n\"Ho! What's this?\" boomed Oldring, in frowning scrutiny.\n\n\"Come outside, alone. A word for you\u2014from your Masked Rider!\"\n\nOldring kicked a chair out of his way and lunged forward with a stamp of heavy boot that jarred the floor. He waved down his muttering, rising men.\n\nVenters backed out of the door and waited, hearing, as no sound had ever before struck into his soul, the rapid, heavy steps of the rustler.\n\nOldring appeared, and Venters had one glimpse of his great breadth and bulk, his gold-buckled belt with hanging guns, his high-top boots with gold spurs. In that moment Venters had a strange, unintelligible curiosity to see Oldring alive. The rustler's broad brow, his large black eyes, his sweeping beard, as dark as the wing of a raven, his enormous width of shoulder and depth of chest, his whole splendid presence so wonderfully charged with vitality and force and strength, seemed to afford Venters an unutterable fiendish joy because for that magnificent manhood and life he meant cold and sudden death.\n\n\"Oldring, Bess is alive! But she's dead to you\u2014dead to the life you made her lead\u2014dead as you will be in one second!\"\n\nSwift as lightning Venters's glance dropped from Oldring's rolling eyes to his hands. One of them, the right, swept out, then toward his gun\u2014and Venters shot him through the heart.\n\nSlowly Oldring sank to his knees, and the hand, dragging at the gun, fell away. Venters's strangely acute faculties grasped the meaning of that limp arm, of the swaying hulk, of the gasp and heave, of the quivering beard. But was that awful spirit in the black eyes only one of vitality?\n\n\"Man\u2014why\u2014didn't\u2014you\u2014wait? Bess\u2014was\u2014\" Oldring's whisper died under his beard, and with a heavy lurch he fell forward.\n\nBounding swiftly away, Venters fled around the corner, across the street, and, leaping a hedge, he ran through yard, orchard, and garden to the sage. Here, under cover of the tall brush, he turned west and ran on to the place where he had hidden his rifle. Securing that, he again set out into a run, and, circling through the sage, came up behind Jane Withersteen's stable and corrals. With laboring, dripping chest, and pain as of a knife thrust in his side, he stopped to regain his breath, and while resting his eyes roved around in search of a horse. Doors and windows of the stable were open wide and had a deserted look. One dejected, lonely burro stood in the near corral. Strange indeed was the silence brooding over the once happy, noisy home of Jane Withersteen's pets.\n\nHe went into the corral, exercising care to leave no tracks, and led the burro to the watering-trough. Venters, though not thirsty, drank till he could drink no more. Then, leading the burro over hard ground, he struck into the sage and down the slope.\n\nHe strode swiftly, turning from time to time to scan the slope for riders. His head just topped the level of sage-brush, and the burro could not have been seen at all. Slowly the green of Cottonwoods sank behind the slope, and at last a wavering line of purple sage met the blue of sky.\n\nTo avoid being seen, to get away, to hide his trail\u2014these were the sole ideas in his mind as he headed for Deception Pass, and he directed all his acuteness of eye and ear, and the keenness of a rider's judgment for distance and ground, to stern accomplishment of the task. He kept to the sage far to the left of the trail leading into the Pass. He walked ten miles and looked back a thousand times. Always the graceful, purple wave of sage remained wide and lonely, a clear, undotted waste. Coming to a stretch of rocky ground, he took advantage of it to cross the trail and then continued down on the right. At length he persuaded himself that he would be able to see riders mounted on horses before they could see him on the little burro, and he rode bareback.\n\nHour by hour the tireless burro kept to his faithful, steady trot. The sun sank and the long shadows lengthened down the slope. Moving veils of purple twilight crept out of the hollows and, mustering and forming on the levels, soon merged and shaded into night. Venters guided the burro nearer to the trail, so that he could see its white line from the ridges, and rode on through the hours.\n\nOnce down in the Pass without leaving a trail, he would hold himself safe for the time being. When late in the night he reached the break in the sage, he sent the burro down ahead of him, and started an avalanche that all but buried the animal at the bottom of the trail. Bruised and battered as he was, he had a moment's elation, for he had hidden his tracks. Once more he mounted the burro and rode on. The hour was the blackest of the night when he made the thicket which inclosed his old camp. Here he turned the burro loose in the grass near the spring, and then lay down on his old bed of leaves.\n\nHe felt only vaguely, as outside things, the ache and burn and throb of the muscles of his body. But a dammed-up torrent of emotion at last burst its bounds, and the hour that saw his release from immediate action was one that confounded him in the reaction of his spirit. He suffered without understanding why. He caught glimpses into himself, into unlit darkness of soul. The fire that had blistered him and the cold which had frozen him now united in one torturing possession of his mind and heart, and like a fiery steed with ice-shod feet, ranged his being, ran rioting through his blood, trampling the resurging good, dragging ever at the evil.\n\nOut of the subsiding chaos came a clear question. What had happened? He had left the valley to go to Cottonwoods. Why? It seemed that he had gone to kill a man\u2014Oldring! The name riveted his consciousness upon the one man of all men upon earth whom he had wanted to meet. He had met the rustler. Venters recalled the smoky haze of the saloon, the dark-visaged men, the huge Oldring. He saw him step out of the door, a splendid specimen of manhood, a handsome giant with purple-black and sweeping beard. He remembered inquisitive gaze of falcon eyes. He heard himself repeating: \"OLDRING, BESS IS ALIVE! BUT SHE'S DEAD TO YOU,\" and he felt himself jerk, and his ears throbbed to the thunder of a gun, and he saw the giant sink slowly to his knees. Was that only the vitality of him\u2014that awful light in the eyes\u2014only the hard-dying life of a tremendously powerful brute? A broken whisper, strange as death: \"MAN\u2014WHY\u2014DIDN'T\u2014YOU WAIT! BESS\u2014WAS\u2014\" And Oldring plunged face forward, dead.\n\n\"I killed him,\" cried Venters, in remembering shock. \"But it wasn't THAT. Ah, the look in his eyes and his whisper!\"\n\nHerein lay the secret that had clamored to him through all the tumult and stress of his emotions. What a look in the eyes of a man shot through the heart! It had been neither hate nor ferocity nor fear of men nor fear of death. It had been no passionate glinting spirit of a fearless foe, willing shot for shot, life for life, but lacking physical power. Distinctly recalled now, never to be forgotten, Venters saw in Oldring's magnificent eyes the rolling of great, glad surprise\u2014softness\u2014love! Then came a shadow and the terrible superhuman striving of his spirit to speak. Oldring shot through the heart, had fought and forced back death, not for a moment in which to shoot or curse, but to whisper strange words.\n\nWhat words for a dying man to whisper! Why had not Venters waited? For what? That was no plea for life. It was regret that there was not a moment of life left in which to speak. Bess was\u2014Herein lay renewed torture for Venters. What had Bess been to Oldring? The old question, like a specter, stalked from its grave to haunt him. He had overlooked, he had forgiven, he had loved and he had forgotten; and now, out of the mystery of a dying man's whisper rose again that perverse, unsatisfied, jealous uncertainty. Bess had loved that splendid, black-crowned giant\u2014by her own confession she had loved him; and in Venters's soul again flamed up the jealous hell. Then into the clamoring hell burst the shot that had killed Oldring, and it rang in a wild fiendish gladness, a hateful, vengeful joy. That passed to the memory of the love and light in Oldring's eyes and the mystery in his whisper. So the changing, swaying emotions fluctuated in Venters's heart.\n\nThis was the climax of his year of suffering and the crucial struggle of his life. And when the gray dawn came he rose, a gloomy, almost heartbroken man, but victor over evil passions. He could not change the past; and, even if he had not loved Bess with all his soul, he had grown into a man who would not change the future he had planned for her. Only, and once for all, he must know the truth, know the worst, stifle all these insistent doubts and subtle hopes and jealous fancies, and kill the past by knowing truly what Bess had been to Oldring. For that matter he knew\u2014he had always known, but he must hear it spoken. Then, when they had safely gotten out of that wild country to take up a new and an absorbing life, she would forget, she would be happy, and through that, in the years to come, he could not but find life worth living.\n\nAll day he rode slowly and cautiously up the Pass, taking time to peer around corners, to pick out hard ground and grassy patches, and to make sure there was no one in pursuit. In the night sometime he came to the smooth, scrawled rocks dividing the valley, and here set the burro at liberty. He walked beyond, climbed the slope and the dim, starlit gorge. Then, weary to the point of exhaustion, he crept into a shallow cave and fell asleep.\n\nIn the morning, when he descended the trail, he found the sun was pouring a golden stream of light through the arch of the great stone bridge. Surprise Valley, like a valley of dreams, lay mystically soft and beautiful, awakening to the golden flood which was rolling away its slumberous bands of mist, brightening its walled faces.\n\nWhile yet far off he discerned Bess moving under the silver spruces, and soon the barking of the dogs told him that they had seen him. He heard the mocking-birds singing in the trees, and then the twittering of the quail. Ring and Whitie came bounding toward him, and behind them ran Bess, her hands outstretched.\n\n\"Bern! You're back! You're back!\" she cried, in joy that rang of her loneliness.\n\n\"Yes, I'm back,\" he said, as she rushed to meet him.\n\nShe had reached out for him when suddenly, as she saw him closely, something checked her, and as quickly all her joy fled, and with it her color, leaving her pale and trembling.\n\n\"Oh! What's happened?\"\n\n\"A good deal has happened, Bess. I don't need to tell you what. And I'm played out. Worn out in mind more than body.\"\n\n\"Dear\u2014you look strange to me!\" faltered Bess.\n\n\"Never mind that. I'm all right. There's nothing for you to be scared about. Things are going to turn out just as we have planned. As soon as I'm rested we'll make a break to get out of the country. Only now, right now, I must know the truth about you.\"\n\n\"Truth about me?\" echoed Bess, shrinkingly. She seemed to be casting back into her mind for a forgotten key. Venters himself, as he saw her, received a pang.\n\n\"Yes\u2014the truth. Bess, don't misunderstand. I haven't changed that way. I love you still. I'll love you more afterward. Life will be just as sweet\u2014sweeter to us. We'll be\u2014be married as soon as ever we can. We'll be happy\u2014but there's a devil in me. A perverse, jealous devil! Then I've queer fancies. I forgot for a long time. Now all those fiendish little whispers of doubt and faith and fear and hope come torturing me again. I've got to kill them with the truth.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you anything you want to know,\" she replied, frankly.\n\n\"Then by Heaven! we'll have it over and done with!... Bess\u2014did Oldring love you?\"\n\n\"Certainly he did.\"\n\n\"Did\u2014did you love him?\"\n\n\"Of course. I told you so.\"\n\n\"How can you tell it so lightly?\" cried Venters, passionately. \"Haven't you any sense of\u2014of\u2014\" He choked back speech. He felt the rush of pain and passion. He seized her in rude, strong hands and drew her close. He looked straight into her dark-blue eyes. They were shadowing with the old wistful light, but they were as clear as the limpid water of the spring. They were earnest, solemn in unutterable love and faith and abnegation. Venters shivered. He knew he was looking into her soul. He knew she could not lie in that moment; but that she might tell the truth, looking at him with those eyes, almost killed his belief in purity.\n\n\"What are\u2014what were you to\u2014to Oldring?\" he panted, fiercely.\n\n\"I am his daughter,\" she replied, instantly.\n\nVenters slowly let go of her. There was a violent break in the force of his feeling\u2014then creeping blankness.\n\n\"What\u2014was it\u2014you said?\" he asked, in a kind of dull wonder.\n\n\"I am his daughter.\"\n\n\"Oldring's daughter?\" queried Venters, with life gathering in his voice.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nWith a passionately awakening start he grasped her hands and drew her close.\n\n\"All the time\u2014you've been Oldring's daughter?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course all the time\u2014always.\"\n\n\"But Bess, you told me\u2014you let me think\u2014I made out you were\u2014a\u2014so\u2014so ashamed.\"\n\n\"It is my shame,\" she said, with voice deep and full, and now the scarlet fired her cheek. \"I told you\u2014I'm nothing\u2014nameless\u2014just Bess, Oldring's girl!\"\n\n\"I know\u2014I remember. But I never thought\u2014\" he went on, hurriedly, huskily. \"That time\u2014when you lay dying\u2014you prayed\u2014you\u2014somehow I got the idea you were bad.\"\n\n\"Bad?\" she asked, with a little laugh.\n\nShe looked up with a faint smile of bewilderment and the absolute unconsciousness of a child. Venters gasped in the gathering might of the truth. She did not understand his meaning.\n\n\"Bess! Bess!\" He clasped her in his arms, hiding her eyes against his breast. She must not see his face in that moment. And he held her while he looked out across the valley. In his dim and blinded sight, in the blur of golden light and moving mist, he saw Oldring. She was the rustler's nameless daughter. Oldring had loved her. He had so guarded her, so kept her from women and men and knowledge of life that her mind was as a child's. That was part of the secret\u2014part of the mystery. That was the wonderful truth. Not only was she not bad, but good, pure, innocent above all innocence in the world\u2014the innocence of lonely girlhood.\n\nHe saw Oldring's magnificent eyes, inquisitive, searching, softening. He saw them flare in amaze, in gladness, with love, then suddenly strain in terrible effort of will. He heard Oldring whisper and saw him sway like a log and fall. Then a million bellowing, thundering voices\u2014gunshots of conscience, thunderbolts of remorse\u2014dinned horribly in his ears. He had killed Bess's father. Then a rushing wind filled his ears like a moan of wind in the cliffs, a knell indeed\u2014Oldring's knell.\n\nHe dropped to his knees and hid his face against Bess, and grasped her with the hands of a drowning man.\n\n\"My God!... My God!... Oh, Bess!... Forgive me! Never mind what I've done\u2014what I've thought. But forgive me. I'll give you my life. I'll live for you. I'll love you. Oh, I do love you as no man ever loved a woman. I want you to know\u2014to remember that I fought a fight for you\u2014however blind I was. I thought\u2014I thought\u2014never mind what I thought\u2014but I loved you\u2014I asked you to marry me. Let that\u2014let me have that to hug to my heart. Oh, Bess, I was driven! And I might have known! I could not rest nor sleep till I had this mystery solved. God! how things work out!\"\n\n\"Bern, you're weak\u2014trembling\u2014you talk wildly,\" cried Bess. \"You've overdone your strength. There's nothing to forgive. There's no mystery except your love for me. You have come back to me!\"\n\nAnd she clasped his head tenderly in her arms and pressed it closely to her throbbing breast." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Chapter XIX. Fay\n\nAt the home of Jane Withersteen Little Fay was climbing Lassiter's knee.\n\n\"Does oo love me?\" she asked.\n\nLassiter, who was as serious with Fay as he was gentle and loving, assured her in earnest and elaborate speech that he was her devoted subject. Fay looked thoughtful and appeared to be debating the duplicity of men or searching for a supreme test to prove this cavalier.\n\n\"Does oo love my new muvver?\" she asked, with bewildering suddenness.\n\nJane Withersteen laughed, and for the first time in many a day she felt a stir of her pulse and warmth in her cheek.\n\nIt was a still drowsy summer of afternoon, and the three were sitting in the shade of the wooded knoll that faced the sage-slope. Little Fay's brief spell of unhappy longing for her mother\u2014the childish, mystic gloom\u2014had passed, and now where Fay was there were prattle and laughter and glee. She had emerged from sorrow to be the incarnation of joy and loveliness. She had grown supernaturally sweet and beautiful. For Jane Withersteen the child was an answer to prayer, a blessing, a possession infinitely more precious than all she had lost. For Lassiter, Jane divined that little Fay had become a religion.\n\n\"Does oo love my new muvver?\" repeated Fay.\n\nLassiter's answer to this was a modest and sincere affirmative.\n\n\"Why don't oo marry my new muvver an' be my favver?\"\n\nOf the thousands of questions put by little Fay to Lassiter this was the first he had been unable to answer.\n\n\"Fay\u2014Fay, don't ask questions like that,\" said Jane.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because,\" replied Jane. And she found it strangely embarrassing to meet the child's gaze. It seemed to her that Fay's violet eyes looked through her with piercing wisdom.\n\n\"Oo love him, don't oo?\"\n\n\"Dear child\u2014run and play,\" said Jane, \"but don't go too far. Don't go from this little hill.\"\n\nFay pranced off wildly, joyous over freedom that had not been granted her for weeks.\n\n\"Jane, why are children more sincere than grown-up persons?\" asked Lassiter.\n\n\"Are they?\"\n\n\"I reckon so. Little Fay there\u2014she sees things as they appear on the face. An Indian does that. So does a dog. An' an Indian an' a dog are most of the time right in what they see. Mebbe a child is always right.\"\n\n\"Well, what does Fay see?\" asked Jane.\n\n\"I reckon you know. I wonder what goes on in Fay's mind when she sees part of the truth with the wise eyes of a child, an' wantin' to know more, meets with strange falseness from you? Wait! You are false in a way, though you're the best woman I ever knew. What I want to say is this. Fay has taken you're pretendin' to\u2014to care for me for the thing it looks on the face. An' her little formin' mind asks questions. An' the answers she gets are different from the looks of things. So she'll grow up gradually takin' on that falseness, an' be like the rest of the women, an' men, too. An' the truth of this falseness to life is proved by your appearin' to love me when you don't. Things aren't what they seem.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, you're right. A child should be told the absolute truth. But\u2014is that possible? I haven't been able to do it, and all my life I've loved the truth, and I've prided myself upon being truthful. Maybe that was only egotism. I'm learning much, my friend. Some of those blinding scales have fallen from my eyes. And\u2014and as to caring for you, I think I care a great deal. How much, how little, I couldn't say. My heart is almost broken, Lassiter. So now is not a good time to judge of affection. I can still play and be merry with Fay. I can still dream. But when I attempt serious thought I'm dazed. I don't think. I don't care any more. I don't pray!... Think of that, my friend! But in spite of my numb feeling I believe I'll rise out of all this dark agony a better woman, with greater love of man and God. I'm on the rack now; I'm senseless to all but pain, and growing dead to that. Sooner or later I shall rise out of this stupor. I'm waiting the hour.\"\n\n\"It'll soon come, Jane,\" replied Lassiter, soberly. \"Then I'm afraid for you. Years are terrible things, an' for years you've been bound. Habit of years is strong as life itself. Somehow, though, I believe as you\u2014that you'll come out of it all a finer woman. I'm waitin', too. An' I'm wonderin'\u2014I reckon, Jane, that marriage between us is out of all human reason?\"\n\n\"Lassiter!... My dear friend!... It's impossible for us to marry!\"\n\n\"Why\u2014as Fay says?\" inquired Lassiter, with gentle persistence.\n\n\"Why! I never thought why. But it's not possible. I am Jane, daughter of Withersteen. My father would rise out of his grave. I'm of Mormon birth. I'm being broken. But I'm still a Mormon woman. And you\u2014you are Lassiter!\"\n\n\"Mebbe I'm not so much Lassiter as I used to be.\"\n\n\"What was it you said? Habit of years is strong as life itself! You can't change the one habit\u2014the purpose of your life. For you still pack those black guns! You still nurse your passion for blood.\"\n\nA smile, like a shadow, flickered across his face.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, I lied to you. But I beg of you\u2014don't you lie to me. I've great respect for you. I believe you're softened toward most, perhaps all, my people except\u2014But when I speak of your purpose, your hate, your guns, I have only him in mind. I don't believe you've changed.\"\n\nFor answer he unbuckled the heavy cartridge-belt, and laid it with the heavy, swing gun-sheaths in her lap.\n\n\"Lassiter!\" Jane whispered, as she gazed from him to the black, cold guns. Without them he appeared shorn of strength, defenseless, a smaller man. Was she Delilah? Swiftly, conscious of only one motive\u2014refusal to see this man called craven by his enemies\u2014she rose, and with blundering fingers buckled the belt round his waist where it belonged.\n\n\"Lassiter, I am a coward.\"\n\n\"Come with me out of Utah\u2014where I can put away my guns an' be a man,\" he said. \"I reckon I'll prove it to you then! Come! You've got Black Star back, an' Night an' Bells. Let's take the racers an' little Fay, en' race out of Utah. The hosses an' the child are all you have left. Come!\"\n\n\"No, no, Lassiter. I'll never leave Utah. What would I do in the world with my broken fortunes and my broken heart? I'll never leave these purple slopes I love so well.\"\n\n\"I reckon I ought to 've knowed that. Presently you'll be livin' down here in a hovel, en' presently Jane Withersteen will be a memory. I only wanted to have a chance to show you how a man\u2014any man\u2014can be better 'n he was. If we left Utah I could prove\u2014I reckon I could prove this thing you call love. It's strange, an' hell an' heaven at once, Jane Withersteen. 'Pears to me that you've thrown away your big heart on love\u2014love of religion an' duty an' churchmen, an' riders an' poor families an' poor children! Yet you can't see what love is\u2014how it changes a person!... Listen, an' in tellin' you Milly Erne's story I'll show you how love changed her.\n\n\"Milly an' me was children when our family moved from Missouri to Texas, an' we growed up in Texas ways same as if we'd been born there. We had been poor, an' there we prospered. In time the little village where we went became a town, an' strangers an' new families kept movin' in. Milly was the belle them days. I can see her now, a little girl no bigger 'n a bird, an' as pretty. She had the finest eyes, dark blue-black when she was excited, an' beautiful all the time. You remember Milly's eyes! An' she had light-brown hair with streaks of gold, an' a mouth that every feller wanted to kiss.\n\n\"An' about the time Milly was the prettiest an' the sweetest, along came a young minister who began to ride some of a race with the other fellers for Milly. An' he won. Milly had always been strong on religion, an' when she met Frank Erne she went in heart an' soul for the salvation of souls. Fact was, Milly, through study of the Bible an' attendin' church an' revivals, went a little out of her head. It didn't worry the old folks none, an' the only worry to me was Milly's everlastin' prayin' an' workin' to save my soul. She never converted me, but we was the best of comrades, an' I reckon no brother an' sister ever loved each other better. Well, Frank Erne an me hit up a great friendship. He was a strappin' feller, good to look at, an' had the most pleasin' ways. His religion never bothered me, for he could hunt an' fish an' ride an' be a good feller. After buffalo once, he come pretty near to savin' my life. We got to be thick as brothers, an' he was the only man I ever seen who I thought was good enough for Milly. An' the day they were married I got drunk for the only time in my life.\n\n\"Soon after that I left home\u2014it seems Milly was the only one who could keep me home\u2014an' I went to the bad, as to prosperin' I saw some pretty hard life in the Pan Handle, an' then I went North. In them days Kansas an' Nebraska was as bad, come to think of it, as these days right here on the border of Utah. I got to be pretty handy with guns. An' there wasn't many riders as could beat me ridin'. An' I can say all modest-like that I never seen the white man who could track a hoss or a steer or a man with me. Afore I knowed it two years slipped by, an' all at once I got homesick, en' purled a bridle south.\n\n\"Things at home had changed. I never got over that homecomin'. Mother was dead an' in her grave. Father was a silent, broken man, killed already on his feet. Frank Erne was a ghost of his old self, through with workin', through with preachin', almost through with livin', an' Milly was gone!... It was a long time before I got the story. Father had no mind left, an' Frank Erne was afraid to talk. So I had to pick up whet 'd happened from different people.\n\n\"It 'pears that soon after I left home another preacher come to the little town. An' he an' Frank become rivals. This feller was different from Frank. He preached some other kind of religion, and he was quick an' passionate, where Frank was slow an' mild. He went after people, women specially. In looks he couldn't compare to Frank Erne, but he had power over women. He had a voice, an' he talked an' talked an' preached an' preached. Milly fell under his influence. She became mightily interested in his religion. Frank had patience with her, as was his way, an' let her be as interested as she liked. All religions were devoted to one God, he said, an' it wouldn't hurt Milly none to study a different point of view. So the new preacher often called on Milly, an' sometimes in Frank's absence. Frank was a cattle-man between Sundays.\n\n\"Along about this time an incident come off that I couldn't get much light on. A stranger come to town, an' was seen with the preacher. This stranger was a big man with an eye like blue ice, an' a beard of gold. He had money, an' he 'peered a man of mystery, an' the town went to buzzin' when he disappeared about the same time as a young woman known to be mightily interested in the new preacher's religion. Then, presently, along comes a man from somewheres in Illinois, en' he up an' spots this preacher as a famous Mormon proselyter. That riled Frank Erne as nothin' ever before, an' from rivals they come to be bitter enemies. An' it ended in Frank goin' to the meetin'-house where Milly was listenin', en' before her en' everybody else he called that preacher\u2014called him, well, almost as hard as Venters called Tull here sometime back. An' Frank followed up that call with a hosswhippin', en' he drove the proselyter out of town.\n\n\"People noticed, so 'twas said, that Milly's sweet disposition changed. Some said it was because she would soon become a mother, en' others said she was pinin' after the new religion. An' there was women who said right out that she was pinin' after the Mormon. Anyway, one mornin' Frank rode in from one of his trips, to find Milly gone. He had no real near neighbors\u2014livin' a little out of town\u2014but those who was nearest said a wagon had gone by in the night, an' they thought it stopped at her door. Well, tracks always tell, an' there was the wagon tracks an' hoss tracks an' man tracks. The news spread like wildfire that Milly had run off from her husband. Everybody but Frank believed it an' wasn't slow in tellin' why she run off. Mother had always hated that strange streak of Milly's, takin' up with the new religion as she had, an' she believed Milly ran off with the Mormon. That hastened mother's death, an' she died unforgivin'. Father wasn't the kind to bow down under disgrace or misfortune but he had surpassin' love for Milly, an' the loss of her broke him.\n\n\"From the minute I heard of Milly's disappearance I never believed she went off of her own free will. I knew Milly, an' I knew she couldn't have done that. I stayed at home awhile, tryin' to make Frank Erne talk. But if he knowed anythin' then he wouldn't tell it. So I set out to find Milly. An' I tried to get on the trail of that proselyter. I knew if I ever struck a town he'd visited that I'd get a trail. I knew, too, that nothin' short of hell would stop his proselytin'. An' I rode from town to town. I had a blind faith that somethin' was guidin' me. An' as the weeks an' months went by I growed into a strange sort of a man, I guess. Anyway, people were afraid of me. Two years after that, way over in a corner of Texas, I struck a town where my man had been. He'd jest left. People said he came to that town without a woman. I back-trailed my man through Arkansas an' Mississippi, an' the old trail got hot again in Texas. I found the town where he first went after leavin' home. An' here I got track of Milly. I found a cabin where she had given birth to her baby. There was no way to tell whether she'd been kept a prisoner or not. The feller who owned the place was a mean, silent sort of a skunk, an' as I was leavin' I jest took a chance an' left my mark on him. Then I went home again.\n\n\"It was to find I hadn't any home, no more. Father had been dead a year. Frank Erne still lived in the house where Milly had left him. I stayed with him awhile, an' I grew old watchin' him. His farm had gone to weed, his cattle had strayed or been rustled, his house weathered till it wouldn't keep out rain nor wind. An' Frank set on the porch and whittled sticks, an' day by day wasted away. There was times when he ranted about like a crazy man, but mostly he was always sittin' an' starin' with eyes that made a man curse. I figured Frank had a secret fear that I needed to know. An' when I told him I'd trailed Milly for near three years an' had got trace of her, an' saw where she'd had her baby, I thought he would drop dead at my feet. An' when he'd come round more natural-like he begged me to give up the trail. But he wouldn't explain. So I let him alone, an' watched him day en' night.\n\n\"An' I found there was one thing still precious to him, an' it was a little drawer where he kept his papers. This was in the room where he slept. An' it 'peered he seldom slept. But after bein' patient I got the contents of that drawer an' found two letters from Milly. One was a long letter written a few months after her disappearance. She had been bound an' gagged an' dragged away from her home by three men, an' she named them\u2014Hurd, Metzger, Slack. They was strangers to her. She was taken to the little town where I found trace of her two years after. But she didn't send the letter from that town. There she was penned in. 'Peared that the proselytes, who had, of course, come on the scene, was not runnin' any risks of losin' her. She went on to say that for a time she was out of her head, an' when she got right again all that kept her alive was the baby. It was a beautiful baby, she said, an' all she thought an' dreamed of was somehow to get baby back to its father, an' then she'd thankfully lay down and die. An' the letter ended abrupt, in the middle of a sentence, en' it wasn't signed.\n\n\"The second letter was written more than two years after the first. It was from Salt Lake City. It simply said that Milly had heard her brother was on her trail. She asked Frank to tell her brother to give up the search because if he didn't she would suffer in a way too horrible to tell. She didn't beg. She just stated a fact an' made the simple request. An' she ended that letter by sayin' she would soon leave Salt Lake City with the man she had come to love, en' would never be heard of again.\n\n\"I recognized Milly's handwritin', an' I recognized her way of puttin' things. But that second letter told me of some great change in her. Ponderin' over it, I felt at last she'd either come to love that feller an' his religion, or some terrible fear made her lie an' say so. I couldn't be sure which. But, of course, I meant to find out. I'll say here, if I'd known Mormons then as I do now I'd left Milly to her fate. For mebbe she was right about what she'd suffer if I kept on her trail. But I was young an' wild them days. First I went to the town where she'd first been taken, an' I went to the place where she'd been kept. I got that skunk who owned the place, an' took him out in the woods, an' made him tell all he knowed. That wasn't much as to length, but it was pure hell's-fire in substance. This time I left him some incapacitated for any more skunk work short of hell. Then I hit the trail for Utah.\n\n\"That was fourteen years ago. I saw the incomin' of most of the Mormons. It was a wild country an' a wild time. I rode from town to town, village to village, ranch to ranch, camp to camp. I never stayed long in one place. I never had but one idea. I never rested. Four years went by, an' I knowed every trail in northern Utah. I kept on an' as time went by, an' I'd begun to grow old in my search, I had firmer, blinder faith in whatever was guidin' me. Once I read about a feller who sailed the seven seas an' traveled the world, an' he had a story to tell, an' whenever he seen the man to whom he must tell that story he knowed him on sight. I was like that, only I had a question to ask. An' always I knew the man of whom I must ask. So I never really lost the trail, though for many years it was the dimmest trail ever followed by any man.\n\n\"Then come a change in my luck. Along in Central Utah I rounded up Hurd, an' I whispered somethin' in his ear, an' watched his face, an' then throwed a gun against his bowels. An' he died with his teeth so tight shut I couldn't have pried them open with a knife. Slack an' Metzger that same year both heard me whisper the same question, an' neither would they speak a word when they lay dyin'. Long before I'd learned no man of this breed or class\u2014or God knows what\u2014would give up any secrets! I had to see in a man's fear of death the connections with Milly Erne's fate. An' as the years passed at long intervals I would find such a man.\n\n\"So as I drifted on the long trail down into southern Utah my name preceded me, an' I had to meet a people prepared for me, an' ready with guns. They made me a gun-man. An' that suited me. In all this time signs of the proselyter an' the giant with the blue-ice eyes an' the gold beard seemed to fade dimmer out of the trail. Only twice in ten years did I find a trace of that mysterious man who had visited the proselyter at my home village. What he had to do with Milly's fate was beyond all hope for me to learn, unless my guidin' spirit led me to him! As for the other man, I knew, as sure as I breathed en' the stars shone en' the wind blew, that I'd meet him some day.\n\n\"Eighteen years I've been on the trail. An' it led me to the last lonely villages of the Utah border. Eighteen years!... I feel pretty old now. I was only twenty when I hit that trail. Well, as I told you, back here a ways a Gentile said Jane Withersteen could tell me about Milly Erne an' show me her grave!\"\n\nThe low voice ceased, and Lassiter slowly turned his sombrero round and round, and appeared to be counting the silver ornaments on the band. Jane, leaning toward him, sat as if petrified, listening intently, waiting to hear more. She could have shrieked, but power of tongue and lips were denied her. She saw only this sad, gray, passion-worn man, and she heard only the faint rustling of the leaves.\n\n\"Well, I came to Cottonwoods,\" went on Lassiter, \"an' you showed me Milly's grave. An' though your teeth have been shut tighter 'n them of all the dead men lyin' back along that trail, jest the same you told me the secret I've lived these eighteen years to hear! Jane, I said you'd tell me without ever me askin'. I didn't need to ask my question here. The day, you remember, when that fat party throwed a gun on me in your court, an'\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh! Hush!\" whispered Jane, blindly holding up her hands.\n\n\"I seen in your face that Dyer, now a bishop, was the proselyter who ruined Milly Erne.\"\n\nFor an instant Jane Withersteen's brain was a whirling chaos and she recovered to find herself grasping at Lassiter like one drowning. And as if by a lightning stroke she sprang from her dull apathy into exquisite torture.\n\n\"It's a lie! Lassiter! No, no!\" she moaned. \"I swear\u2014you're wrong!\"\n\n\"Stop! You'd perjure yourself! But I'll spare you that. You poor woman! Still blind! Still faithful!... Listen. I know. Let that settle it. An' I give up my purpose!\"\n\n\"What is it\u2014you say?\"\n\n\"I give up my purpose. I've come to see an' feel differently. I can't help poor Milly. An' I've outgrowed revenge. I've come to see I can be no judge for men. I can't kill a man jest for hate. Hate ain't the same with me since I loved you and little Fay.\"\n\n\"Lassiter! You mean you won't kill him?\" Jane whispered.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"For my sake?\"\n\n\"I reckon. I can't understand, but I'll respect your feelin's.\"\n\n\"Because you\u2014oh, because you love me?... Eighteen years! You were that terrible Lassiter! And now\u2014because you love me?\"\n\n\"That's it, Jane.\"\n\n\"Oh, you'll make me love you! How can I help but love you? My heart must be stone. But\u2014oh, Lassiter, wait, wait! Give me time. I'm not what I was. Once it was so easy to love. Now it's easy to hate. Wait! My faith in God\u2014some God\u2014still lives. By it I see happier times for you, poor passion-swayed wanderer! For me\u2014a miserable, broken woman. I loved your sister Milly. I will love you. I can't have fallen so low\u2014I can't be so abandoned by God\u2014that I've no love left to give you. Wait! Let us forget Milly's sad life. Ah, I knew it as no one else on earth! There's one thing I shall tell you\u2014if you are at my death-bed, but I can't speak now.\"\n\n\"I reckon I don't want to hear no more,\" said Lassiter.\n\nJane leaned against him, as if some pent-up force had rent its way out, she fell into a paroxysm of weeping. Lassiter held her in silent sympathy. By degrees she regained composure, and she was rising, sensible of being relieved of a weighty burden, when a sudden start on Lassiter's part alarmed her.\n\n\"I heard hosses\u2014hosses with muffled hoofs!\" he said; and he got up guardedly.\n\n\"Where's Fay?\" asked Jane, hurriedly glancing round the shady knoll. The bright-haired child, who had appeared to be close all the time, was not in sight.\n\n\"Fay!\" called Jane.\n\nNo answering shout of glee. No patter of flying feet. Jane saw Lassiter stiffen.\n\n\"Fay\u2014oh\u2014Fay!\" Jane almost screamed.\n\nThe leaves quivered and rustled; a lonesome cricket chirped in the grass, a bee hummed by. The silence of the waning afternoon breathed hateful portent. It terrified Jane. When had silence been so infernal?\n\n\"She's\u2014only\u2014strayed\u2014out\u2014of earshot,\" faltered Jane, looking at Lassiter.\n\nPale, rigid as a statue, the rider stood, not in listening, searching posture, but in one of doomed certainty. Suddenly he grasped Jane with an iron hand, and, turning his face from her gaze, he strode with her from the knoll.\n\n\"See\u2014Fay played here last\u2014a house of stones an' sticks... An' here's a corral of pebbles with leaves for hosses,\" said Lassiter, stridently, and pointed to the ground. \"Back an' forth she trailed here... See, she's buried somethin'\u2014a dead grasshopper\u2014there's a tombstone... here she went, chasin' a lizard\u2014see the tiny streaked trail... she pulled bark off this cottonwood... look in the dust of the path\u2014the letters you taught her\u2014she's drawn pictures of birds en' hosses an' people... Look, a cross! Oh, Jane, your cross!\"\n\nLassiter dragged Jane on, and as if from a book read the meaning of little Fay's trail. All the way down the knoll, through the shrubbery, round and round a cottonwood, Fay's vagrant fancy left records of her sweet musings and innocent play. Long had she lingered round a bird-nest to leave therein the gaudy wing of a butterfly. Long had she played beside the running stream sending adrift vessels freighted with pebbly cargo. Then she had wandered through the deep grass, her tiny feet scarcely turning a fragile blade, and she had dreamed beside some old faded flowers. Thus her steps led her into the broad lane. The little dimpled imprints of her bare feet showed clean-cut in the dust they went a little way down the lane; and then, at a point where they stopped, the great tracks of a man led out from the shrubbery and returned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Chapter XX. Lassiter's Way\n\nFootprints told the story of little Fay's abduction. In anguish Jane Withersteen turned speechlessly to Lassiter, and, confirming her fears, she saw him gray-faced, aged all in a moment, stricken as if by a mortal blow.\n\nThen all her life seemed to fall about her in wreck and ruin.\n\n\"It's all over,\" she heard her voice whisper. \"It's ended. I'm going\u2014I'm going\u2014\"\n\n\"Where?\" demanded Lassiter, suddenly looming darkly over her.\n\n\"To\u2014to those cruel men\u2014\"\n\n\"Speak names!\" thundered Lassiter.\n\n\"To Bishop Dyer\u2014to Tull,\" went on Jane, shocked into obedience.\n\n\"Well\u2014what for?\"\n\n\"I want little Fay. I can't live without her. They've stolen her as they stole Milly Erne's child. I must have little Fay. I want only her. I give up. I'll go and tell Bishop Dyer\u2014I'm broken. I'll tell him I'm ready for the yoke\u2014only give me back Fay\u2014and\u2014and I'll marry Tull!\"\n\n\"Never!\" hissed Lassiter.\n\nHis long arm leaped at her. Almost running, he dragged her under the cottonwoods, across the court, into the huge hall of Withersteen House, and he shut the door with a force that jarred the heavy walls. Black Star and Night and Bells, since their return, had been locked in this hall, and now they stamped on the stone floor.\n\nLassiter released Jane and like a dizzy man swayed from her with a hoarse cry and leaned shaking against a table where he kept his rider's accoutrements. He began to fumble in his saddlebags. His action brought a clinking, metallic sound\u2014the rattling of gun-cartridges. His fingers trembled as he slipped cartridges into an extra belt. But as he buckled it over the one he habitually wore his hands became steady. This second belt contained two guns, smaller than the black ones swinging low, and he slipped them round so that his coat hid them. Then he fell to swift action. Jane Withersteen watched him, fascinated but uncomprehending and she saw him rapidly saddle Black Star and Night. Then he drew her into the light of the huge windows, standing over her, gripping her arm with fingers like cold steel.\n\n\"Yes, Jane, it's ended\u2014but you're not goin' to Dyer!... I'm goin' instead!\"\n\nLooking at him\u2014he was so terrible of aspect\u2014she could not comprehend his words. Who was this man with the face gray as death, with eyes that would have made her shriek had she the strength, with the strange, ruthlessly bitter lips? Where was the gentle Lassiter? What was this presence in the hall, about him, about her\u2014this cold, invisible presence?\n\n\"Yes, it's ended, Jane,\" he was saying, so awfully quiet and cool and implacable, \"an' I'm goin' to make a little call. I'll lock you in here, an' when I get back have the saddle-bags full of meat an bread. An' be ready to ride!\"\n\n\"Lassiter!\" cried Jane.\n\nDesperately she tried to meet his gray eyes, in vain, desperately she tried again, fought herself as feeling and thought resurged in torment, and she succeeded, and then she knew.\n\n\"No\u2014no\u2014no!\" she wailed. \"You said you'd foregone your vengeance. You promised not to kill Bishop Dyer.\"\n\n\"If you want to talk to me about him\u2014leave off the Bishop. I don't understand that name, or its use.\"\n\n\"Oh, hadn't you foregone your vengeance on\u2014on Dyer?\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But\u2014your actions\u2014your words\u2014your guns\u2014your terrible looks!... They don't seem foregoing vengeance?\"\n\n\"Jane, now it's justice.\"\n\n\"You'll\u2014kill him?\"\n\n\"If God lets me live another hour! If not God\u2014then the devil who drives me!\"\n\n\"You'll kill him\u2014for yourself\u2014for your vengeful hate?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"For Milly Erne's sake?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"For little Fay's?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014for whose?\"\n\n\"For yours!\"\n\n\"His blood on my soul!\" whispered Jane, and she fell to her knees. This was the long-pending hour of fruition. And the habit of years\u2014the religious passion of her life\u2014leaped from lethargy, and the long months of gradual drifting to doubt were as if they had never been. \"If you spill his blood it'll be on my soul\u2014and on my father's. Listen.\" And she clasped his knees, and clung there as he tried to raise her. \"Listen. Am I nothing to you?\"\n\n\"Woman\u2014don't trifle at words! I love you! An' I'll soon prove it.\"\n\n\"I'll give myself to you\u2014I'll ride away with you\u2014marry you, if only you'll spare him?\"\n\nHis answer was a cold, ringing, terrible laugh.\n\n\"Lassiter\u2014I'll love you. Spare him!\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe sprang up in despairing, breaking spirit, and encircled his neck with her arms, and held him in an embrace that he strove vainly to loosen. \"Lassiter, would you kill me? I'm fighting my last fight for the principles of my youth\u2014love of religion, love of father. You don't know\u2014you can't guess the truth, and I can't speak ill. I'm losing all. I'm changing. All I've gone through is nothing to this hour. Pity me\u2014help me in my weakness. You're strong again\u2014oh, so cruelly, coldly strong! You're killing me. I see you\u2014feel you as some other Lassiter! My master, be merciful\u2014spare him!\"\n\nHis answer was a ruthless smile.\n\nShe clung the closer to him, and leaned her panting breast on him, and lifted her face to his. \"Lassiter, I do love you! It's leaped out of my agony. It comes suddenly with a terrible blow of truth. You are a man! I never knew it till now. Some wonderful change came to me when you buckled on these guns and showed that gray, awful face. I loved you then. All my life I've loved, but never as now. No woman can love like a broken woman. If it were not for one thing\u2014just one thing\u2014and yet! I can't speak it\u2014I'd glory in your manhood\u2014the lion in you that means to slay for me. Believe me\u2014and spare Dyer. Be merciful\u2014great as it's in you to be great... Oh, listen and believe\u2014I have nothing, but I'm a woman\u2014a beautiful woman, Lassiter\u2014a passionate, loving woman\u2014and I love you! Take me\u2014hide me in some wild place\u2014and love me and mend my broken heart. Spare him and take me away.\"\n\nShe lifted her face closer and closer to his, until their lips nearly touched, and she hung upon his neck, and with strength almost spent pressed and still pressed her palpitating body to his.\n\n\"Kiss me!\" she whispered, blindly.\n\n\"No\u2014not at your price!\" he answered. His voice had changed or she had lost clearness of hearing.\n\n\"Kiss me!... Are you a man? Kiss me and save me!\"\n\n\"Jane, you never played fair with me. But now you're blisterin' your lips\u2014blackenin' your soul with lies!\"\n\n\"By the memory of my mother\u2014by my Bible\u2014no! No, I have no Bible! But by my hope of heaven I swear I love you!\"\n\nLassiter's gray lips formed soundless words that meant even her love could not avail to bend his will. As if the hold of her arms was that of a child's he loosened it and stepped away.\n\n\"Wait! Don't go! Oh, hear a last word!... May a more just and merciful God than the God I was taught to worship judge me\u2014forgive me\u2014save me! For I can no longer keep silent!... Lassiter, in pleading for Dyer I've been pleading more for my father. My father was a Mormon master, close to the leaders of the church. It was my father who sent Dyer out to proselyte. It was my father who had the blue-ice eye and the beard of gold. It was my father you got trace of in the past years. Truly, Dyer ruined Milly Erne\u2014dragged her from her home\u2014to Utah\u2014to Cottonwoods. But it was for my father! If Milly Erne was ever wife of a Mormon that Mormon was my father! I never knew\u2014never will know whether or not she was a wife. Blind I may be, Lassiter\u2014fanatically faithful to a false religion I may have been but I know justice, and my father is beyond human justice. Surely he is meeting just punishment\u2014somewhere. Always it has appalled me\u2014the thought of your killing Dyer for my father's sins. So I have prayed!\"\n\n\"Jane, the past is dead. In my love for you I forgot the past. This thing I'm about to do ain't for myself or Milly or Fay. It's not because of anythin' that ever happened in the past, but for what is happenin' right now. It's for you!... An' listen. Since I was a boy I've never thanked God for anythin'. If there is a God\u2014an' I've come to believe it\u2014I thank Him now for the years that made me Lassiter!... I can reach down en' feel these big guns, en' know what I can do with them. An', Jane, only one of the miracles Dyer professes to believe in can save him!\"\n\nAgain for Jane Withersteen came the spinning of her brain in darkness, and as she whirled in endless chaos she seemed to be falling at the feet of a luminous figure\u2014a man\u2014Lassiter\u2014who had saved her from herself, who could not be changed, who would slay rightfully. Then she slipped into utter blackness.\n\nWhen she recovered from her faint she became aware that she was lying on a couch near the window in her sitting-room. Her brow felt damp and cold and wet, some one was chafing her hands; she recognized Judkins, and then saw that his lean, hard face wore the hue and look of excessive agitation.\n\n\"Judkins!\" Her voice broke weakly.\n\n\"Aw, Miss Withersteen, you're comin' round fine. Now jest lay still a little. You're all right; everythin's all right.\"\n\n\"Where is\u2014he?\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Lassiter!\"\n\n\"You needn't worry none about him.\"\n\n\"Where is he? Tell me\u2014instantly.\"\n\n\"Wal, he's in the other room patchin' up a few triflin' bullet holes.\"\n\n\"Ah!... Bishop' Dyer?\"\n\n\"When I seen him last\u2014a matter of half an hour ago, he was on his knees. He was some busy, but he wasn't prayin'!\"\n\n\"How strangely you talk! I'll sit up. I'm\u2014well, strong again. Tell me. Dyer on his knees! What was he doing?\"\n\n\"Wal, beggin' your pardon fer blunt talk, Miss Withersteen, Dyer was on his knees an' not prayin'. You remember his big, broad hands? You've seen 'em raised in blessin' over old gray men an' little curly-headed children like\u2014like Fay Larkin! Come to think of thet, I disremember ever hearin' of his liftin' his big hands in blessin' over a woman. Wal, when I seen him last\u2014jest a little while ago\u2014he was on his knees, not prayin', as I remarked\u2014an' he was pressin' his big hands over some bigger wounds.\"\n\n\"Man, you drive me mad! Did Lassiter kill Dyer?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Did he kill Tull?\"\n\n\"No. Tull's out of the village with most of his riders. He's expected back before evenin'. Lassiter will hev to git away before Tull en' his riders come in. It's sure death fer him here. An' wuss fer you, too, Miss Withersteen. There'll be some of an uprisin' when Tull gits back.\"\n\n\"I shall ride away with Lassiter. Judkins, tell me all you saw\u2014all you know about this killing.\" She realized, without wonder or amaze, how Judkins's one word, affirming the death of Dyer\u2014that the catastrophe had fallen\u2014had completed the change whereby she had been molded or beaten or broken into another woman. She felt calm, slightly cold, strong as she had not been strong since the first shadow fell upon her.\n\n\"I jest saw about all of it, Miss Withersteen, an' I'll be glad to tell you if you'll only hev patience with me,\" said Judkins, earnestly. \"You see, I've been pecooliarly interested, an' nat'rully I'm some excited. An' I talk a lot thet mebbe ain't necessary, but I can't help thet.\n\n\"I was at the meetin'-house where Dyer was holdin' court. You know he allus acts as magistrate an' judge when Tull's away. An' the trial was fer tryin' what's left of my boy riders\u2014thet helped me hold your cattle\u2014fer a lot of hatched-up things the boys never did. We're used to thet, an' the boys wouldn't hev minded bein' locked up fer a while, or hevin' to dig ditches, or whatever the judge laid down. You see, I divided the gold you give me among all my boys, an' they all hid it, en' they all feel rich. Howsomever, court was adjourned before the judge passed sentence. Yes, ma'm, court was adjourned some strange an' quick, much as if lightnin' hed struck the meetin'-house.\n\n\"I hed trouble attendin' the trial, but I got in. There was a good many people there, all my boys, an' Judge Dyer with his several clerks. Also he hed with him the five riders who've been guardin' him pretty close of late. They was Carter, Wright, Jengessen, an' two new riders from Stone Bridge. I didn't hear their names, but I heard they was handy men with guns an' they looked more like rustlers than riders. Anyway, there they was, the five all in a row.\n\n\"Judge Dyer was tellin' Willie Kern, one of my best an' steadiest boys\u2014Dyer was tellin' him how there was a ditch opened near Willie's home lettin' water through his lot, where it hadn't ought to go. An' Willie was tryin' to git a word in to prove he wasn't at home all the day it happened\u2014which was true, as I know\u2014but Willie couldn't git a word in, an' then Judge Dyer went on layin' down the law. An' all to onct he happened to look down the long room. An' if ever any man turned to stone he was thet man.\n\n\"Nat'rully I looked back to see what hed acted so powerful strange on the judge. An' there, half-way up the room, in the middle of the wide aisle, stood Lassiter! All white an' black he looked, an' I can't think of anythin' he resembled, onless it's death. Venters made thet same room some still an' chilly when he called Tull; but this was different. I give my word, Miss Withersteen, thet I went cold to my very marrow. I don't know why. But Lassiter had a way about him thet's awful. He spoke a word\u2014a name\u2014I couldn't understand it, though he spoke clear as a bell. I was too excited, mebbe. Judge Dyer must hev understood it, an' a lot more thet was mystery to me, for he pitched forrard out of his chair right onto the platform.\n\n\"Then them five riders, Dyer's bodyguards, they jumped up, an' two of them thet I found out afterward were the strangers from Stone Bridge, they piled right out of a winder, so quick you couldn't catch your breath. It was plain they wasn't Mormons.\n\n\"Jengessen, Carter, an' Wright eyed Lassiter, for what must hev been a second an' seemed like an hour, an' they went white en' strung. But they didn't weaken nor lose their nerve.\n\n\"I hed a good look at Lassiter. He stood sort of stiff, bendin' a little, an' both his arms were crooked an' his hands looked like a hawk's claws. But there ain't no tellin' how his eyes looked. I know this, though, an' thet is his eyes could read the mind of any man about to throw a gun. An' in watchin' him, of course, I couldn't see the three men go fer their guns. An' though I was lookin' right at Lassiter\u2014lookin' hard\u2014I couldn't see how he drawed. He was quicker 'n eyesight\u2014thet's all. But I seen the red spurtin' of his guns, en' heard his shots jest the very littlest instant before I heard the shots of the riders. An' when I turned, Wright an' Carter was down, en' Jengessen, who's tough like a steer, was pullin' the trigger of a wabblin' gun. But it was plain he was shot through, plumb center. An' sudden he fell with a crash, an' his gun clattered on the floor.\n\n\"Then there was a hell of a silence. Nobody breathed. Sartin I didn't, anyway. I saw Lassiter slip a smokin' gun back in a belt. But he hadn't throwed either of the big black guns, an' I thought thet strange. An' all this was happenin' quick\u2014you can't imagine how quick.\n\n\"There come a scrapin' on the floor an' Dyer got up, his face like lead. I wanted to watch Lassiter, but Dyer's face, onct I seen it like thet, glued my eyes. I seen him go fer his gun\u2014why, I could hev done better, quicker\u2014an' then there was a thunderin' shot from Lassiter, an' it hit Dyer's right arm, an' his gun went off as it dropped. He looked at Lassiter like a cornered sage-wolf, an' sort of howled, an' reached down fer his gun. He'd jest picked it off the floor an' was raisin' it when another thunderin' shot almost tore thet arm off\u2014so it seemed to me. The gun dropped again an' he went down on his knees, kind of flounderin' after it. It was some strange an' terrible to see his awful earnestness. Why would such a man cling so to life? Anyway, he got the gun with left hand an' was raisin' it, pullin' trigger in his madness, when the third thunderin' shot hit his left arm, an' he dropped the gun again. But thet left arm wasn't useless yet, fer he grabbed up the gun, an' with a shakin' aim thet would hev been pitiful to me\u2014in any other man\u2014he began to shoot. One wild bullet struck a man twenty feet from Lassiter. An' it killed thet man, as I seen afterward. Then come a bunch of thunderin' shots\u2014nine I calkilated after, fer they come so quick I couldn't count them\u2014an' I knew Lassiter hed turned the black guns loose on Dyer.\n\n\"I'm tellin' you straight, Miss Withersteen, fer I want you to know. Afterward you'll git over it. I've seen some soul-rackin' scenes on this Utah border, but this was the awfulest. I remember I closed my eyes, an' fer a minute I thought of the strangest things, out of place there, such as you'd never dream would come to mind. I saw the sage, an' runnin' hosses\u2014an' thet's the beautfulest sight to me\u2014an' I saw dim things in the dark, an' there was a kind of hummin' in my ears. An' I remember distinctly\u2014fer it was what made all these things whirl out of my mind an' opened my eyes\u2014I remember distinctly it was the smell of gunpowder.\n\n\"The court had about adjourned fer thet judge. He was on his knees, en' he wasn't prayin'. He was gaspin' an' tryin' to press his big, floppin', crippled hands over his body. Lassiter had sent all those last thunderin' shots through his body. Thet was Lassiter's way.\n\n\"An' Lassiter spoke, en' if I ever forgit his words I'll never forgit the sound of his voice.\n\n\"'Proselyter, I reckon you'd better call quick on thet God who reveals Hisself to you on earth, because He won't be visitin' the place you're goin' to!\"\n\n\"An' then I seen Dyer look at his big, hangin' hands thet wasn't big enough fer the last work he set them to. An' he looked up at Lassiter. An' then he stared horrible at somethin' thet wasn't Lassiter, nor anyone there, nor the room, nor the branches of purple sage peepin' into the winder. Whatever he seen, it was with the look of a man who discovers somethin' too late. Thet's a terrible look!... An' with a horrible understandin' cry he slid forrard on his face.\"\n\nJudkins paused in his narrative, breathing heavily while he wiped his perspiring brow.\n\n\"Thet's about all,\" he concluded. \"Lassiter left the meetin'-house an' I hurried to catch up with him. He was bleedin' from three gunshots, none of them much to bother him. An' we come right up here. I found you layin' in the hall, an' I hed to work some over you.\"\n\nJane Withersteen offered up no prayer for Dyer's soul.\n\nLassiter's step sounded in the hall\u2014the familiar soft, silver-clinking step\u2014and she heard it with thrilling new emotions in which was a vague joy in her very fear of him. The door opened, and she saw him, the old Lassiter, slow, easy, gentle, cool, yet not exactly the same Lassiter. She rose, and for a moment her eyes blurred and swam in tears.\n\n\"Are you\u2014all\u2014all right?\" she asked, tremulously.\n\n\"I reckon.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, I'll ride away with you. Hide me till danger is past\u2014till we are forgotten\u2014then take me where you will. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God!\"\n\nHe kissed her hand with the quaint grace and courtesy that came to him in rare moments.\n\n\"Black Star an' Night are ready,\" he said, simply.\n\nHis quiet mention of the black racers spurred Jane to action. Hurrying to her room, she changed to her rider's suit, packed her jewelry, and the gold that was left, and all the woman's apparel for which there was space in the saddle-bags, and then returned to the hall. Black Star stamped his iron-shod hoofs and tossed his beautiful head, and eyed her with knowing eyes.\n\n\"Judkins, I give Bells to you,\" said Jane. \"I hope you will always keep him and be good to him.\"\n\nJudkins mumbled thanks that he could not speak fluently, and his eyes flashed.\n\nLassiter strapped Jane's saddle-bags upon Black Star, and led the racers out into the court.\n\n\"Judkins, you ride with Jane out into the sage. If you see any riders comin' shout quick twice. An', Jane, don't look back! I'll catch up soon. We'll get to the break into the Pass before midnight, an' then wait until mornin' to go down.\"\n\nBlack Star bent his graceful neck and bowed his noble head, and his broad shoulders yielded as he knelt for Jane to mount.\n\nShe rode out of the court beside Judkins, through the grove, across the wide lane into the sage, and she realized that she was leaving Withersteen House forever, and she did not look back. A strange, dreamy, calm peace pervaded her soul. Her doom had fallen upon her, but, instead of finding life no longer worth living she found it doubly significant, full of sweetness as the western breeze, beautiful and unknown as the sage-slope stretching its purple sunset shadows before her. She became aware of Judkins's hand touching hers; she heard him speak a husky good-by; then into the place of Bells shot the dead-black, keen, racy nose of Night, and she knew Lassiter rode beside her.\n\n\"Don't\u2014look\u2014back!\" he said, and his voice, too, was not clear.\n\nFacing straight ahead, seeing only the waving, shadowy sage, Jane held out her gauntleted hand, to feel it enclosed in strong clasp. So she rode on without a backward glance at the beautiful grove of Cottonwoods. She did not seem to think of the past of what she left forever, but of the color and mystery and wildness of the sage-slope leading down to Deception Pass, and of the future. She watched the shadows lengthen down the slope; she felt the cool west wind sweeping by from the rear; and she wondered at low, yellow clouds sailing swiftly over her and beyond.\n\n\"Don't look\u2014back!\" said Lassiter.\n\nThick-driving belts of smoke traveled by on the wind, and with it came a strong, pungent odor of burning wood.\n\nLassiter had fired Withersteen House! But Jane did not look back.\n\nA misty veil obscured the clear, searching gaze she had kept steadfastly upon the purple slope and the dim lines of canyons. It passed, as passed the rolling clouds of smoke, and she saw the valley deepening into the shades of twilight. Night came on, swift as the fleet racers, and stars peeped out to brighten and grow, and the huge, windy, eastern heave of sage-level paled under a rising moon and turned to silver. Blanched in moonlight, the sage yet seemed to hold its hue of purple and was infinitely more wild and lonely. So the night hours wore on, and Jane Withersteen never once looked back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Chapter XXI. Black Star and Night\n\nThe time had come for Venters and Bess to leave their retreat. They were at great pains to choose the few things they would be able to carry with them on the journey out of Utah.\n\n\"Bern, whatever kind of a pack's this, anyhow?\" questioned Bess, rising from her work with reddened face.\n\nVenters, absorbed in his own task, did not look up at all, and in reply said he had brought so much from Cottonwoods that he did not recollect the half of it.\n\n\"A woman packed this!\" Bess exclaimed.\n\nHe scarcely caught her meaning, but the peculiar tone of her voice caused him instantly to rise, and he saw Bess on her knees before an open pack which he recognized as the one given him by Jane.\n\n\"By George!\" he ejaculated, guiltily, and then at sight of Bess's face he laughed outright.\n\n\"A woman packed this,\" she repeated, fixing woeful, tragic eyes on him.\n\n\"Well, is that a crime?'\n\n\"There\u2014there is a woman, after all!\"\n\n\"Now Bess\u2014\"\n\n\"You've lied to me!\"\n\nThen and there Venters found it imperative to postpone work for the present. All her life Bess had been isolated, but she had inherited certain elements of the eternal feminine.\n\n\"But there was a woman and you did lie to me,\" she kept repeating, after he had explained.\n\n\"What of that? Bess, I'll get angry at you in a moment. Remember you've been pent up all your life. I venture to say that if you'd been out in the world you'd have had a dozen sweethearts and have told many a lie before this.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't anything of the kind,\" declared Bess, indignantly.\n\n\"Well\u2014perhaps not lie. But you'd have had the sweethearts\u2014You couldn't have helped that\u2014being so pretty.\"\n\nThis remark appeared to be a very clever and fortunate one; and the work of selecting and then of stowing all the packs in the cave went on without further interruption.\n\nVenters closed up the opening of the cave with a thatch of willows and aspens, so that not even a bird or a rat could get in to the sacks of grain. And this work was in order with the precaution habitually observed by him. He might not be able to get out of Utah, and have to return to the valley. But he owed it to Bess to make the attempt, and in case they were compelled to turn back he wanted to find that fine store of food and grain intact. The outfit of implements and utensils he packed away in another cave.\n\n\"Bess, we have enough to live here all our lives,\" he said once, dreamily.\n\n\"Shall I go roll Balancing Rock?\" she asked, in light speech, but with deep-blue fire in her eyes.\n\n\"No\u2014no.\"\n\n\"Ah, you don't forget the gold and the world,\" she sighed.\n\n\"Child, you forget the beautiful dresses and the travel\u2014and everything.\"\n\n\"Oh, I want to go. But I want to stay!\"\n\n\"I feel the same way.\"\n\nThey let the eight calves out of the corral, and kept only two of the burros Venters had brought from Cottonwoods. These they intended to ride. Bess freed all her pets\u2014the quail and rabbits and foxes.\n\nThe last sunset and twilight and night were both the sweetest and saddest they had ever spent in Surprise Valley. Morning brought keen exhilaration and excitement. When Venters had saddled the two burros, strapped on the light packs and the two canteens, the sunlight was dispersing the lazy shadows from the valley. Taking a last look at the caves and the silver spruces, Venters and Bess made a reluctant start, leading the burros. Ring and Whitie looked keen and knowing. Something seemed to drag at Venters's feet and he noticed Bess lagged behind. Never had the climb from terrace to bridge appeared so long.\n\nNot till they reached the opening of the gorge did they stop to rest and take one last look at the valley. The tremendous arch of stone curved clear and sharp in outline against the morning sky. And through it streaked the golden shaft. The valley seemed an enchanted circle of glorious veils of gold and wraiths of white and silver haze and dim, blue, moving shade\u2014beautiful and wild and unreal as a dream.\n\n\"We\u2014we can\u2014th\u2014think of it\u2014always\u2014re\u2014remember,\" sobbed Bess.\n\n\"Hush! Don't cry. Our valley has only fitted us for a better life somewhere. Come!\"\n\nThey entered the gorge and he closed the willow gate. From rosy, golden morning light they passed into cool, dense gloom. The burros pattered up the trail with little hollow-cracking steps. And the gorge widened to narrow outlet and the gloom lightened to gray. At the divide they halted for another rest. Venters's keen, remembering gaze searched Balancing Rock, and the long incline, and the cracked toppling walls, but failed to note the slightest change.\n\nThe dogs led the descent; then came Bess leading her burro; then Venters leading his. Bess kept her eyes bent downward. Venters, however, had an irresistible desire to look upward at Balancing Rock. It had always haunted him, and now he wondered if he were really to get through the outlet before the huge stone thundered down. He fancied that would be a miracle. Every few steps he answered to the strange, nervous fear and turned to make sure the rock still stood like a giant statue. And, as he descended, it grew dimmer in his sight. It changed form; it swayed it nodded darkly; and at last, in his heightened fancy, he saw it heave and roll. As in a dream when he felt himself falling yet knew he would never fall, so he saw this long-standing thunderbolt of the little stone-men plunge down to close forever the outlet to Deception Pass.\n\nAnd while he was giving way to unaccountable dread imaginations the descent was accomplished without mishap.\n\n\"I'm glad that's over,\" he said, breathing more freely. \"I hope I'm by that hanging rock for good and all. Since almost the moment I first saw it I've had an idea that it was waiting for me. Now, when it does fall, if I'm thousands of miles away, I'll hear it.\"\n\nWith the first glimpses of the smooth slope leading down to the grotesque cedars and out to the Pass, Venters's cool nerve returned. One long survey to the left, then one to the right, satisfied his caution. Leading the burros down to the spur of rock, he halted at the steep incline.\n\n\"Bess, here's the bad place, the place I told you about, with the cut steps. You start down, leading your burro. Take your time and hold on to him if you slip. I've got a rope on him and a half-hitch on this point of rock, so I can let him down safely. Coming up here was a killing job. But it'll be easy going down.\"\n\nBoth burros passed down the difficult stairs cut by the cliff-dwellers, and did it without a misstep. After that the descent down the slope and over the mile of scrawled, ripped, and ridged rock required only careful guidance, and Venters got the burros to level ground in a condition that caused him to congratulate himself.\n\n\"Oh, if we only had Wrangle!\" exclaimed Venters. \"But we're lucky. That's the worst of our trail passed. We've only men to fear now. If we get up in the sage we can hide and slip along like coyotes.\"\n\nThey mounted and rode west through the valley and entered the canyon. From time to time Venters walked, leading his burro. When they got by all the canyons and gullies opening into the Pass they went faster and with fewer halts. Venters did not confide in Bess the alarming fact that he had seen horses and smoke less than a mile up one of the intersecting canyons. He did not talk at all. And long after he had passed this canyon and felt secure once more in the certainty that they had been unobserved he never relaxed his watchfulness. But he did not walk any more, and he kept the burros at a steady trot. Night fell before they reached the last water in the Pass and they made camp by starlight. Venters did not want the burros to stray, so he tied them with long halters in the grass near the spring. Bess, tired out and silent, laid her head in a saddle and went to sleep between the two dogs. Venters did not close his eyes. The canyon silence appeared full of the low, continuous hum of insects. He listened until the hum grew into a roar, and then, breaking the spell, once more he heard it low and clear. He watched the stars and the moving shadows, and always his glance returned to the girl's dimly pale face. And he remembered how white and still it had once looked in the starlight. And again stern thought fought his strange fancies. Would all his labor and his love be for naught? Would he lose her, after all? What did the dark shadow around her portend? Did calamity lurk on that long upland trail through the sage? Why should his heart swell and throb with nameless fear? He listened to the silence and told himself that in the broad light of day he could dispel this leaden-weighted dread.\n\nAt the first hint of gray over the eastern rim he awoke Bess, saddled the burros, and began the day's travel. He wanted to get out of the Pass before there was any chance of riders coming down. They gained the break as the first red rays of the rising sun colored the rim.\n\nFor once, so eager was he to get up to level ground, he did not send Ring or Whitie in advance. Encouraging Bess to hurry pulling at his patient, plodding burro, he climbed the soft, steep trail.\n\nBrighter and brighter grew the light. He mounted the last broken edge of rim to have the sun-fired, purple sage-slope burst upon him as a glory. Bess panted up to his side, tugging on the halter of her burro.\n\n\"We're up!\" he cried, joyously. \"There's not a dot on the sage. We're safe. We'll not be seen! Oh, Bess\u2014\"\n\nRing growled and sniffed the keen air and bristled. Venters clutched at his rifle. Whitie sometimes made a mistake, but Ring never. The dull thud of hoofs almost deprived Venters of power to turn and see from where disaster threatened. He felt his eyes dilate as he stared at Lassiter leading Black Star and Night out of the sage, with Jane Withersteen, in rider's costume, close beside them.\n\nFor an instant Venters felt himself whirl dizzily in the center of vast circles of sage. He recovered partially, enough to see Lassiter standing with a glad smile and Jane riveted in astonishment.\n\n\"Why, Bern!\" she exclaimed. \"How good it is to see you! We're riding away, you see. The storm burst\u2014and I'm a ruined woman!... I thought you were alone.\"\n\nVenters, unable to speak for consternation, and bewildered out of all sense of what he ought or ought not to do, simply stared at Jane.\n\n\"Son, where are you bound for?\" asked Lassiter.\n\n\"Not safe\u2014where I was. I'm\u2014we're going out of Utah\u2014back East,\" he found tongue to say.\n\n\"I reckon this meetin's the luckiest thing that ever happened to you an' to me\u2014an' to Jane\u2014an' to Bess,\" said Lassiter, coolly.\n\n\"Bess!\" cried Jane, with a sudden leap of blood to her pale cheek.\n\nIt was entirely beyond Venters to see any luck in that meeting.\n\nJane Withersteen took one flashing, woman's glance at Bess's scarlet face, at her slender, shapely form.\n\n\"Venters! is this a girl\u2014a woman?\" she questioned, in a voice that stung.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Did you have her in that wonderful valley?\"\n\n\"Yes, but Jane\u2014\"\n\n\"All the time you were gone?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I couldn't tell\u2014\"\n\n\"Was it for her you asked me to give you supplies? Was it for her that you wanted to make your valley a paradise?\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014Jane\u2014\"\n\n\"Answer me.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Oh, you liar!\" And with these passionate words Jane Withersteen succumbed to fury. For the second time in her life she fell into the ungovernable rage that had been her father's weakness. And it was worse than his, for she was a jealous woman\u2014jealous even of her friends.\n\nAs best he could, he bore the brunt of her anger. It was not only his deceit to her that she visited upon him, but her betrayal by religion, by life itself.\n\nHer passion, like fire at white heat, consumed itself in little time. Her physical strength failed, and still her spirit attempted to go on in magnificent denunciation of those who had wronged her. Like a tree cut deep into its roots, she began to quiver and shake, and her anger weakened into despair. And her ringing voice sank into a broken, husky whisper. Then, spent and pitiable, upheld by Lassiter's arm, she turned and hid her face in Black Star's mane.\n\nNumb as Venters was when at length Jane Withersteen lifted her head and looked at him, he yet suffered a pang.\n\n\"Jane, the girl is innocent!\" he cried.\n\n\"Can you expect me to believe that?\" she asked, with weary, bitter eyes.\n\n\"I'm not that kind of a liar. And you know it. If I lied\u2014if I kept silent when honor should have made me speak, it was to spare you. I came to Cottonwoods to tell you. But I couldn't add to your pain. I intended to tell you I had come to love this girl. But, Jane I hadn't forgotten how good you were to me. I haven't changed at all toward you. I prize your friendship as I always have. But, however it may look to you\u2014don't be unjust. The girl is innocent. Ask Lassiter.\"\n\n\"Jane, she's jest as sweet an' innocent as little Fay,\" said Lassiter. There was a faint smile upon his face and a beautiful light.\n\nVenters saw, and knew that Lassiter saw, how Jane Withersteen's tortured soul wrestled with hate and threw it\u2014with scorn doubt, suspicion, and overcame all.\n\n\"Bern, if in my misery I accused you unjustly, I crave forgiveness,\" she said. \"I'm not what I once was. Tell me\u2014who is this girl?\"\n\n\"Jane, she is Oldring's daughter, and his Masked Rider. Lassiter will tell you how I shot her for a rustler, saved her life\u2014all the story. It's a strange story, Jane, as wild as the sage. But it's true\u2014true as her innocence. That you must believe.\"\n\n\"Oldring's Masked Rider! Oldring's daughter!\" exclaimed Jane \"And she's innocent! You ask me to believe much. If this girl is\u2014is what you say, how could she be going away with the man who killed her father?\"\n\n\"Why did you tell that?\" cried Venters, passionately.\n\nJane's question had roused Bess out of stupefaction. Her eyes suddenly darkened and dilated. She stepped toward Venters and held up both hands as if to ward off a blow.\n\n\"Did\u2014did you kill Oldring?\"\n\n\"I did, Bess, and I hate myself for it. But you know I never dreamed he was your father. I thought he'd wronged you. I killed him when I was madly jealous.\"\n\nFor a moment Bess was shocked into silence.\n\n\"But he was my father!\" she broke out, at last. \"And now I must go back\u2014I can't go with you. It's all over\u2014that beautiful dream. Oh, I knew it couldn't come true. You can't take me now.\"\n\n\"If you forgive me, Bess, it'll all come right in the end!\" implored Venters.\n\n\"It can't be right. I'll go back. After all, I loved him. He was good to me. I can't forget that.\"\n\n\"If you go back to Oldring's men I'll follow you, and then they'll kill me,\" said Venters, hoarsely.\n\n\"Oh no, Bern, you'll not come. Let me go. It's best for you to forget me. I've brought you only pain and dishonor.\"\n\nShe did not weep. But the sweet bloom and life died out of her face. She looked haggard and sad, all at once stunted; and her hands dropped listlessly; and her head drooped in slow, final acceptance of a hopeless fate.\n\n\"Jane, look there!\" cried Venters, in despairing grief. \"Need you have told her? Where was all your kindness of heart? This girl has had a wretched, lonely life. And I'd found a way to make her happy. You've killed it. You've killed something sweet and pure and hopeful, just as sure as you breathe.\"\n\n\"Oh, Bern! It was a slip. I never thought\u2014I never thought!\" replied Jane. \"How could I tell she didn't know?\"\n\nLassiter suddenly moved forward, and with the beautiful light on his face now strangely luminous, he looked at Jane and Venters and then let his soft, bright gaze rest on Bess.\n\n\"Well, I reckon you've all had your say, an' now it's Lassiter's turn. Why, I was jest praying for this meetin'. Bess, jest look here.\"\n\nGently he touched her arm and turned her to face the others, and then outspread his great hand to disclose a shiny, battered gold locket.\n\n\"Open it,\" he said, with a singularly rich voice.\n\nBess complied, but listlessly.\n\n\"Jane\u2014Venters\u2014come closer,\" went on Lassiter. \"Take a look at the picture. Don't you know the woman?\"\n\nJane, after one glance, drew back.\n\n\"Milly Erne!\" she cried, wonderingly.\n\nVenters, with tingling pulse, with something growing on him, recognized in the faded miniature portrait the eyes of Milly Erne.\n\n\"Yes, that's Milly,\" said Lassiter, softly. \"Bess, did you ever see her face\u2014look hard\u2014with all your heart an' soul?\"\n\n\"The eyes seem to haunt me,\" whispered Bess. \"Oh, I can't remember\u2014they're eyes of my dreams\u2014but\u2014but\u2014\"\n\nLassiter's strong arm went round her and he bent his head.\n\n\"Child, I thought you'd remember her eyes. They're the same beautiful eyes you'd see if you looked in a mirror or a clear spring. They're your mother's eyes. You are Milly Erne's child. Your name is Elizabeth Erne. You're not Oldring's daughter. You're the daughter of Frank Erne, a man once my best friend. Look! Here's his picture beside Milly's. He was handsome, an' as fine an' gallant a Southern gentleman as I ever seen. Frank came of an old family. You come of the best of blood, lass, and blood tells.\"\n\nBess slipped through his arm to her knees and hugged the locket to her bosom, and lifted wonderful, yearning eyes.\n\n\"It\u2014can't\u2014be\u2014true!\"\n\n\"Thank God, lass, it is true,\" replied Lassiter. \"Jane an' Bern here\u2014they both recognize Milly. They see Milly in you. They're so knocked out they can't tell you, that's all.\"\n\n\"Who are you?\" whispered Bess.\n\n\"I reckon I'm Milly's brother an' your uncle!... Uncle Jim! Ain't that fine?\"\n\n\"Oh, I can't believe\u2014Don't raise me! Bern, let me kneel. I see truth in your face\u2014in Miss Withersteen's. But let me hear it all\u2014all on my knees. Tell me how it's true!\"\n\n\"Well, Elizabeth, listen,\" said Lassiter. \"Before you was born your father made a mortal enemy of a Mormon named Dyer. They was both ministers an' come to be rivals. Dyer stole your mother away from her home. She gave birth to you in Texas eighteen years ago. Then she was taken to Utah, from place to place, an' finally to the last border settlement\u2014Cottonwoods. You was about three years old when you was taken away from Milly. She never knew what had become of you. But she lived a good while hopin' and prayin' to have you again. Then she gave up an' died. An' I may as well put in here your father died ten years ago. Well, I spent my time tracin' Milly, an' some months back I landed in Cottonwoods. An' jest lately I learned all about you. I had a talk with Oldrin' an' told him you was dead, an' he told me what I had so long been wantin' to know. It was Dyer, of course, who stole you from Milly. Part reason he was sore because Milly refused to give you Mormon teachin', but mostly he still hated Frank Erne so infernally that he made a deal with Oldrin' to take you an' bring you up as an infamous rustler an' rustler's girl. The idea was to break Frank Erne's heart if he ever came to Utah\u2014to show him his daughter with a band of low rustlers. Well\u2014Oldrin' took you, brought you up from childhood, an' then made you his Masked Rider. He made you infamous. He kept that part of the contract, but he learned to love you as a daughter an' never let any but his own men know you was a girl. I heard him say that with my own ears, an' I saw his big eyes grow dim. He told me how he had guarded you always, kept you locked up in his absence, was always at your side or near you on those rides that made you famous on the sage. He said he an' an old rustler whom he trusted had taught you how to read an' write. They selected the books for you. Dyer had wanted you brought up the vilest of the vile! An' Oldrin' brought you up the innocentest of the innocent. He said you didn't know what vileness was. I can hear his big voice tremble now as he said it. He told me how the men\u2014rustlers an' outlaws\u2014who from time to time tried to approach you familiarly\u2014he told me how he shot them dead. I'm tellin' you this 'specially because you've showed such shame\u2014sayin' you was nameless an' all that. Nothin' on earth can be wronger than that idea of yours. An' the truth of it is here. Oldrin' swore to me that if Dyer died, releasin' the contract, he intended to hunt up your father an' give you back to him. It seems Oldrin' wasn't all bad, en' he sure loved you.\"\n\nVenters leaned forward in passionate remorse.\n\n\"Oh, Bess! I know Lassiter speaks the truth. For when I shot Oldring he dropped to his knees and fought with unearthly power to speak. And he said: 'Man\u2014why\u2014didn't\u2014you\u2014wait? Bess was\u2014' Then he fell dead. And I've been haunted by his look and words. Oh, Bess, what a strange, splendid thing for Oldring to do! It all seems impossible. But, dear, you really are not what you thought.\"\n\n\"Elizabeth Erne!\" cried Jane Withersteen. \"I loved your mother and I see her in you!\"\n\nWhat had been incredible from the lips of men became, in the tone, look, and gesture of a woman, a wonderful truth for Bess. With little tremblings of all her slender body she rocked to and fro on her knees. The yearning wistfulness of her eyes changed to solemn splendor of joy. She believed. She was realizing happiness. And as the process of thought was slow, so were the variations of her expression. Her eyes reflected the transformation of her soul. Dark, brooding, hopeless belief\u2014clouds of gloom\u2014drifted, paled, vanished in glorious light. An exquisite rose flush\u2014a glow\u2014shone from her face as she slowly began to rise from her knees. A spirit uplifted her. All that she had held as base dropped from her.\n\nVenters watched her in joy too deep for words. By it he divined something of what Lassiter's revelation meant to Bess, but he knew he could only faintly understand. That moment when she seemed to be lifted by some spiritual transfiguration was the most beautiful moment of his life. She stood with parted, quivering lips, with hands tightly clasping the locket to her heaving breast. A new conscious pride of worth dignified the old wild, free grace and poise.\n\n\"Uncle Jim!\" she said, tremulously, with a different smile from any Venters had ever seen on her face.\n\nLassiter took her into his arms.\n\n\"I reckon. It's powerful fine to hear that,\" replied Lassiter, unsteadily.\n\nVenters, feeling his eyes grow hot and wet, turned away, and found himself looking at Jane Withersteen. He had almost forgotten her presence. Tenderness and sympathy were fast hiding traces of her agitation. Venters read her mind\u2014felt the reaction of her noble heart\u2014saw the joy she was beginning to feel at the happiness of others. And suddenly blinded, choked by his emotions, he turned from her also. He knew what she would do presently; she would make some magnificent amend for her anger; she would give some manifestation of her love; probably all in a moment, as she had loved Milly Erne, so would she love Elizabeth Erne.\n\n\"'Pears to me, folks, that we'd better talk a little serious now,\" remarked Lassiter, at length. \"Time flies.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" replied Venters, instantly. \"I'd forgotten time\u2014place\u2014danger. Lassiter, you're riding away. Jane's leaving Withersteen House?\"\n\n\"Forever,\" replied Jane.\n\n\"I fired Withersteen House,\" said Lassiter.\n\n\"Dyer?\" questioned Venters, sharply.\n\n\"I reckon where Dyer's gone there won't be any kidnappin' of girls.\"\n\n\"Ah! I knew it. I told Judkins\u2014And Tull?\" went on Venters, passionately.\n\n\"Tull wasn't around when I broke loose. By now he's likely on our trail with his riders.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, you're going into the Pass to hide till all this storm blows over?\"\n\n\"I reckon that's Jane's idea. I'm thinkin' the storm'll be a powerful long time blowin' over. I was comin' to join you in Surprise Valley. You'll go back now with me?\"\n\n\"No. I want to take Bess out of Utah. Lassiter, Bess found gold in the valley. We've a saddle-bag full of gold. If we can reach Sterling\u2014\"\n\n\"Man! how're you ever goin' to do that? Sterlin' is a hundred miles.\"\n\n\"My plan is to ride on, keeping sharp lookout. Somewhere up the trail we'll take to the sage and go round Cottonwoods and then hit the trail again.\"\n\n\"It's a bad plan. You'll kill the burros in two days.\"\n\n\"Then we'll walk.\"\n\n\"That's more bad an' worse. Better go back down the Pass with me.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, this girl has been hidden all her life in that lonely place,\" went on Venters. \"Oldring's men are hunting me. We'd not be safe there any longer. Even if we would be I'd take this chance to get her out. I want to marry her. She shall have some of the pleasures of life\u2014see cities and people. We've gold\u2014we'll be rich. Why, life opens sweet for both of us. And, by Heaven! I'll get her out or lose my life in the attempt!\"\n\n\"I reckon if you go on with them burros you'll lose your life all right. Tull will have riders all over this sage. You can't get out on them burros. It's a fool idea. That's not doin' best by the girl. Come with me en' take chances on the rustlers.\"\n\nLassiter's cool argument made Venters waver, not in determination to go, but in hope of success.\n\n\"Bess, I want you to know. Lassiter says the trip's almost useless now. I'm afraid he's right. We've got about one chance in a hundred to go through. Shall we take it? Shall we go on?\"\n\n\"We'll go on,\" replied Bess.\n\n\"That settles it, Lassiter.\"\n\nLassiter spread wide his hands, as if to signify he could do no more, and his face clouded.\n\nVenters felt a touch on his elbow. Jane stood beside him with a hand on his arm. She was smiling. Something radiated from her, and like an electric current accelerated the motion of his blood.\n\n\"Bern, you'd be right to die rather than not take Elizabeth out of Utah\u2014out of this wild country. You must do it. You'll show her the great world, with all its wonders. Think how little she has seen! Think what delight is in store for her! You have gold, You will be free; you will make her happy. What a glorious prospect! I share it with you. I'll think of you\u2014dream of you\u2014pray for you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Jane,\" replied Venters, trying to steady his voice. \"It does look bright. Oh, if we were only across that wide, open waste of sage!\"\n\n\"Bern, the trip's as good as made. It'll be safe\u2014easy. It'll be a glorious ride,\" she said, softly.\n\nVenters stared. Had Jane's troubles made her insane? Lassiter, too, acted queerly, all at once beginning to turn his sombrero round in hands that actually shook.\n\n\"You are a rider. She is a rider. This will be the ride of your lives,\" added Jane, in that same soft undertone, almost as if she were musing to herself.\n\n\"Jane!\" he cried.\n\n\"I give you Black Star and Night!\"\n\n\"Black Star and Night!\" he echoed.\n\n\"It's done. Lassiter, put our saddle-bags on the burros.\"\n\nOnly when Lassiter moved swiftly to execute her bidding did Venters's clogged brain grasp at literal meanings. He leaped to catch Lassiter's busy hands.\n\n\"No, no! What are you doing?\" he demanded, in a kind of fury. \"I won't take her racers. What do you think I am? It'd be monstrous. Lassiter! stop it, I say!... You've got her to save. You've miles and miles to go. Tull is trailing you. There are rustlers in the Pass. Give me back that saddle-bag!\"\n\n\"Son\u2014cool down,\" returned Lassiter, in a voice he might have used to a child. But the grip with which he tore away Venters's grasping hands was that of a giant. \"Listen\u2014you fool boy! Jane's sized up the situation. The burros'll do for us. We'll sneak along an' hide. I'll take your dogs an' your rifle. Why, it's the trick. The blacks are yours, an' sure as I can throw a gun you're goin' to ride safe out of the sage.\"\n\n\"Jane\u2014stop him\u2014please stop him,\" gasped Venters. \"I've lost my strength. I can't do\u2014anything. This is hell for me! Can't you see that? I've ruined you\u2014it was through me you lost all. You've only Black Star and Night left. You love these horses. Oh! I know how you must love them now! And\u2014you're trying to give them to me. To help me out of Utah! To save the girl I love!\"\n\n\"That will be my glory.\"\n\nThen in the white, rapt face, in the unfathomable eyes, Venters saw Jane Withersteen in a supreme moment. This moment was one wherein she reached up to the height for which her noble soul had ever yearned. He, after disrupting the calm tenor of her peace, after bringing down on her head the implacable hostility of her churchmen, after teaching her a bitter lesson of life\u2014he was to be her salvation. And he turned away again, this time shaken to the core of his soul. Jane Withersteen was the incarnation of selflessness. He experienced wonder and terror, exquisite pain and rapture. What were all the shocks life had dealt him compared to the thought of such loyal and generous friendship?\n\nAnd instantly, as if by some divine insight, he knew himself in the remaking\u2014tried, found wanting; but stronger, better, surer\u2014and he wheeled to Jane Withersteen, eager, joyous, passionate, wild, exalted. He bent to her; he left tears and kisses on her hands.\n\n\"Jane, I\u2014I can't find words\u2014now,\" he said. \"I'm beyond words. Only\u2014I understand. And I'll take the blacks.\"\n\n\"Don't be losin' no more time,\" cut in Lassiter. \"I ain't certain, but I think I seen a speck up the sage-slope. Mebbe I was mistaken. But, anyway, we must all be movin'. I've shortened the stirrups on Black Star. Put Bess on him.\"\n\nJane Withersteen held out her arms.\n\n\"Elizabeth Erne!\" she cried, and Bess flew to her.\n\nHow inconceivably strange and beautiful it was for Venters to see Bess clasped to Jane Withersteen's breast!\n\nThen he leaped astride Night.\n\n\"Venters, ride straight on up the slope,\" Lassiter was saying, \"'an if you don't meet any riders keep on till you're a few miles from the village, then cut off in the sage an' go round to the trail. But you'll most likely meet riders with Tull. Jest keep right on till you're jest out of gunshot an' then make your cut-off into the sage. They'll ride after you, but it won't be no use. You can ride, an' Bess can ride. When you're out of reach turn on round to the west, an' hit the trail somewhere. Save the hosses all you can, but don't be afraid. Black Star and Night are good for a hundred miles before sundown, if you have to push them. You can get to Sterlin' by night if you want. But better make it along about to-morrow mornin'. When you get through the notch on the Glaze trail, swing to the right. You'll be able to see both Glaze an' Stone Bridge. Keep away from them villages. You won't run no risk of meetin' any of Oldrin's rustlers from Sterlin' on. You'll find water in them deep hollows north of the Notch. There's an old trail there, not much used, en' it leads to Sterlin'. That's your trail. An' one thing more. If Tull pushes you\u2014or keeps on persistent-like, for a few miles\u2014jest let the blacks out an' lose him an' his riders.\"\n\n\"Lassiter, may we meet again!\" said Venters, in a deep voice.\n\n\"Son, it ain't likely\u2014it ain't likely. Well, Bess Oldrin'\u2014Masked Rider\u2014Elizabeth Erne\u2014now you climb on Black Star. I've heard you could ride. Well, every rider loves a good horse. An', lass, there never was but one that could beat Black Star.\"\n\n\"Ah, Lassiter, there never was any horse that could beat Black Star,\" said Jane, with the old pride.\n\n\"I often wondered\u2014mebbe Venters rode out that race when he brought back the blacks. Son, was Wrangle the best hoss?\"\n\n\"No, Lassiter,\" replied Venters. For this lie he had his reward in Jane's quick smile.\n\n\"Well, well, my hoss-sense ain't always right. An' here I'm talkin' a lot, wastin' time. It ain't so easy to find an' lose a pretty niece all in one hour! Elizabeth\u2014good-by!\"\n\n\"Oh, Uncle Jim!... Good-by!\"\n\n\"Elizabeth Erne, be happy! Good-by,\" said Jane.\n\n\"Good-by\u2014oh\u2014good-by!\" In lithe, supple action Bess swung up to Black Star's saddle.\n\n\"Jane Withersteen!... Good-by!\" called Venters hoarsely.\n\n\"Bern\u2014Bess\u2014riders of the purple sage\u2014good-by!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Chapter XXII. Riders of the Purple Sage\n\nBlack Star and Night, answering to spur, swept swiftly westward along the white, slow-rising, sage-bordered trail. Venters heard a mournful howl from Ring, but Whitie was silent. The blacks settled into their fleet, long-striding gallop. The wind sweetly fanned Venters's hot face. From the summit of the first low-swelling ridge he looked back. Lassiter waved his hand; Jane waved her scarf. Venters replied by standing in his stirrups and holding high his sombrero. Then the dip of the ridge hid them. From the height of the next he turned once more. Lassiter, Jane, and the burros had disappeared. They had gone down into the Pass. Venters felt a sensation of irreparable loss.\n\n\"Bern\u2014look!\" called Bess, pointing up the long slope.\n\nA small, dark, moving dot split the line where purple sage met blue sky. That dot was a band of riders.\n\n\"Pull the black, Bess.\"\n\nThey slowed from gallop to canter, then to trot. The fresh and eager horses did not like the check.\n\n\"Bern, Black Star has great eyesight.\"\n\n\"I wonder if they're Tull's riders. They might be rustlers. But it's all the same to us.\"\n\nThe black dot grew to a dark patch moving under low dust clouds. It grew all the time, though very slowly. There were long periods when it was in plain sight, and intervals when it dropped behind the sage. The blacks trotted for half an hour, for another half-hour, and still the moving patch appeared to stay on the horizon line. Gradually, however, as time passed, it began to enlarge, to creep down the slope, to encroach upon the intervening distance.\n\n\"Bess, what do you make them out?\" asked Venters. \"I don't think they're rustlers.\"\n\n\"They're sage-riders,\" replied Bess. \"I see a white horse and several grays. Rustlers seldom ride any horses but bays and blacks.\"\n\n\"That white horse is Tull's. Pull the black, Bess. I'll get down and cinch up. We're in for some riding. Are you afraid?\"\n\n\"Not now,\" answered the girl, smiling.\n\n\"You needn't be. Bess, you don't weigh enough to make Black Star know you're on him. I won't be able to stay with you. You'll leave Tull and his riders as if they were standing still.\"\n\n\"How about you?\"\n\n\"Never fear. If I can't stay with you I can still laugh at Tull.\"\n\n\"Look, Bern! They've stopped on that ridge. They see us.\"\n\n\"Yes. But we're too far yet for them to make out who we are. They'll recognize the blacks first. We've passed most of the ridges and the thickest sage. Now, when I give the word, let Black Star go and ride!\"\n\nVenters calculated that a mile or more still intervened between them and the riders. They were approaching at a swift canter. Soon Venters recognized Tull's white horse, and concluded that the riders had likewise recognized Black Star and Night. But it would be impossible for Tull yet to see that the blacks were not ridden by Lassiter and Jane. Venters noted that Tull and the line of horsemen, perhaps ten or twelve in number, stopped several times and evidently looked hard down the slope. It must have been a puzzling circumstance for Tull. Venters laughed grimly at the thought of what Tull's rage would be when he finally discovered the trick. Venters meant to sheer out into the sage before Tull could possibly be sure who rode the blacks.\n\nThe gap closed to a distance of half a mile. Tull halted. His riders came up and formed a dark group around him. Venters thought he saw him wave his arms and was certain of it when the riders dashed into the sage, to right and left of the trail. Tull had anticipated just the move held in mind by Venters.\n\n\"Now Bess!\" shouted Venters. \"Strike north. Go round those riders and turn west.\"\n\nBlack Star sailed over the low sage, and in a few leaps got into his stride and was running. Venters spurred Night after him. It was hard going in the sage. The horses could run as well there, but keen eyesight and judgment must constantly be used by the riders in choosing ground. And continuous swerving from aisle to aisle between the brush, and leaping little washes and mounds of the pack-rats, and breaking through sage, made rough riding. When Venters had turned into a long aisle he had time to look up at Tull's riders. They were now strung out into an extended line riding northeast. And, as Venters and Bess were holding due north, this meant, if the horses of Tull and his riders had the speed and the staying power, they would head the blacks and turn them back down the slope. Tull's men were not saving their mounts; they were driving them desperately. Venters feared only an accident to Black Star or Night, and skilful riding would mitigate possibility of that. One glance ahead served to show him that Bess could pick a course through the sage as well as he. She looked neither back nor at the running riders, and bent forward over Black Star's neck and studied the ground ahead.\n\nIt struck Venters, presently, after he had glanced up from time to time, that Bess was drawing away from him as he had expected. He had, however, only thought of the light weight Black Star was carrying and of his superior speed; he saw now that the black was being ridden as never before, except when Jerry Card lost the race to Wrangle. How easily, gracefully, naturally, Bess sat her saddle! She could ride! Suddenly Venters remembered she had said she could ride. But he had not dreamed she was capable of such superb horsemanship. Then all at once, flashing over him, thrilling him, came the recollection that Bess was Oldring's Masked Rider.\n\nHe forgot Tull\u2014the running riders\u2014the race. He let Night have a free rein and felt him lengthen out to suit himself, knowing he would keep to Black Star's course, knowing that he had been chosen by the best rider now on the upland sage. For Jerry Card was dead. And fame had rivaled him with only one rider, and that was the slender girl who now swung so easily with Black Star's stride. Venters had abhorred her notoriety, but now he took passionate pride in her skill, her daring, her power over a horse. And he delved into his memory, recalling famous rides which he had heard related in the villages and round the camp-fires. Oldring's Masked Rider! Many times this strange rider, at once well known and unknown, had escaped pursuers by matchless riding. He had to run the gantlet of vigilantes down the main street of Stone Bridge, leaving dead horses and dead rustlers behind. He had jumped his horse over the Gerber Wash, a deep, wide ravine separating the fields of Glaze from the wild sage. He had been surrounded north of Sterling; and he had broken through the line. How often had been told the story of day stampedes, of night raids, of pursuit, and then how the Masked Rider, swift as the wind, was gone in the sage! A fleet, dark horse\u2014a slender, dark form\u2014a black mask\u2014a driving run down the slope\u2014a dot on the purple sage\u2014a shadowy, muffled steed disappearing in the night!\n\nAnd this Masked Rider of the uplands had been Elizabeth Erne!\n\nThe sweet sage wind rushed in Venters's face and sang a song in his ears. He heard the dull, rapid beat of Night's hoofs; he saw Black Star drawing away, farther and farther. He realized both horses were swinging to the west. Then gunshots in the rear reminded him of Tull. Venters looked back. Far to the side, dropping behind, trooped the riders. They were shooting. Venters saw no puffs or dust, heard no whistling bullets. He was out of range. When he looked back again Tull's riders had given up pursuit. The best they could do, no doubt, had been to get near enough to recognize who really rode the blacks. Venters saw Tull drooping in his saddle.\n\nThen Venters pulled Night out of his running stride. Those few miles had scarcely warmed the black, but Venters wished to save him. Bess turned, and, though she was far away, Venters caught the white glint of her waving hand. He held Night to a trot and rode on, seeing Bess and Black Star, and the sloping upward stretch of sage, and from time to time the receding black riders behind. Soon they disappeared behind a ridge, and he turned no more. They would go back to Lassiter's trail and follow it, and follow in vain. So Venters rode on, with the wind growing sweeter to taste and smell, and the purple sage richer and the sky bluer in his sight; and the song in his ears ringing. By and by Bess halted to wait for him, and he knew she had come to the trail. When he reached her it was to smile at sight of her standing with arms round Black Star's neck.\n\n\"Oh, Bern! I love him!\" she cried. \"He's beautiful; he knows; and how he can run! I've had fast horses. But Black Star!... Wrangle never beat him!\"\n\n\"I'm wondering if I didn't dream that. Bess, the blacks are grand. What it must have cost Jane\u2014ah!\u2014well, when we get out of this wild country with Star and Night, back to my old home in Illinois, we'll buy a beautiful farm with meadows and springs and cool shade. There we'll turn the horses free\u2014free to roam and browse and drink\u2014never to feel a spur again\u2014never to be ridden!\"\n\n\"I would like that,\" said Bess.\n\nThey rested. Then, mounting, they rode side by side up the white trail. The sun rose higher behind them. Far to the left a low line of green marked the site of Cottonwoods. Venters looked once and looked no more. Bess gazed only straight ahead. They put the blacks to the long, swinging rider's canter, and at times pulled them to a trot, and occasionally to a walk. The hours passed, the miles slipped behind, and the wall of rock loomed in the fore. The Notch opened wide. It was a rugged, stony pass, but with level and open trail, and Venters and Bess ran the blacks through it. An old trail led off to the right, taking the line of the wall, and this Venters knew to be the trail mentioned by Lassiter.\n\nThe little hamlet, Glaze, a white and green patch in the vast waste of purple, lay miles down a slope much like the Cottonwoods slope, only this descended to the west. And miles farther west a faint green spot marked the location of Stone Bridge. All the rest of that world was seemingly smooth, undulating sage, with no ragged lines of canyons to accentuate its wildness.\n\n\"Bess, we're safe\u2014we're free!\" said Venters. \"We're alone on the sage. We're half way to Sterling.\"\n\n\"Ah! I wonder how it is with Lassiter and Miss Withersteen.\"\n\n\"Never fear, Bess. He'll outwit Tull. He'll get away and hide her safely. He might climb into Surprise Valley, but I don't think he'll go so far.\"\n\n\"Bern, will we ever find any place like our beautiful valley?\"\n\n\"No. But, dear, listen. Well go back some day, after years\u2014ten years. Then we'll be forgotten. And our valley will be just as we left it.\"\n\n\"What if Balancing Rock falls and closes the outlet to the Pass?\"\n\n\"I've thought of that. I'll pack in ropes and ropes. And if the outlet's closed we'll climb up the cliffs and over them to the valley and go down on rope ladders. It could be done. I know just where to make the climb, and I'll never forget.\"\n\n\"Oh yes, let us go back!\"\n\n\"It's something sweet to look forward to. Bess, it's like all the future looks to me.\"\n\n\"Call me\u2014Elizabeth,\" she said, shyly.\n\n\"Elizabeth Erne! It's a beautiful name. But I'll never forget Bess. Do you know\u2014have you thought that very soon\u2014by this time to-morrow\u2014you will be Elizabeth Venters?\"\n\nSo they rode on down the old trail. And the sun sloped to the west, and a golden sheen lay on the sage. The hours sped now; the afternoon waned. Often they rested the horses. The glisten of a pool of water in a hollow caught Venters's eye, and here he unsaddled the blacks and let them roll and drink and browse. When he and Bess rode up out of the hollow the sun was low, a crimson ball, and the valley seemed veiled in purple fire and smoke. It was that short time when the sun appeared to rest before setting, and silence, like a cloak of invisible life, lay heavy on all that shimmering world of sage.\n\nThey watched the sun begin to bury its red curve under the dark horizon.\n\n\"We'll ride on till late,\" he said. \"Then you can sleep a little, while I watch and graze the horses. And we'll ride into Sterling early to-morrow. We'll be married!... We'll be in time to catch the stage. We'll tie Black Star and Night behind\u2014and then\u2014for a country not wild and terrible like this!\"\n\n\"Oh, Bern!... But look! The sun is setting on the sage\u2014the last time for us till we dare come again to the Utah border. Ten years! Oh, Bern, look, so you will never forget!\"\n\nSlumbering, fading purple fire burned over the undulating sage ridges. Long streaks and bars and shafts and spears fringed the far western slope. Drifting, golden veils mingled with low, purple shadows. Colors and shades changed in slow, wondrous transformation.\n\nSuddenly Venters was startled by a low, rumbling roar\u2014so low that it was like the roar in a sea-shell.\n\n\"Bess, did you hear anything?\" he whispered.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Listen!... Maybe I only imagined\u2014Ah!\"\n\nOut of the east or north from remote distance, breathed an infinitely low, continuously long sound\u2014deep, weird, detonating, thundering, deadening\u2014dying." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Chapter XXIII. The Fall of Balancing Rock\n\nThrough tear-blurred sight Jane Withersteen watched Venters and Elizabeth Erne and the black racers disappear over the ridge of sage.\n\n\"They're gone!\" said Lassiter. \"An' they're safe now. An' there'll never be a day of their comin' happy lives but what they'll remember Jane Withersteen an'\u2014an' Uncle Jim!... I reckon, Jane, we'd better be on our way.\"\n\nThe burros obediently wheeled and started down the break with little cautious steps, but Lassiter had to leash the whining dogs and lead them. Jane felt herself bound in a feeling that was neither listlessness nor indifference, yet which rendered her incapable of interest. She was still strong in body, but emotionally tired. That hour at the entrance to Deception Pass had been the climax of her suffering\u2014the flood of her wrath\u2014the last of her sacrifice\u2014the supremity of her love\u2014and the attainment of peace. She thought that if she had little Fay she would not ask any more of life.\n\nLike an automaton she followed Lassiter down the steep trail of dust and bits of weathered stone; and when the little slides moved with her or piled around her knees she experienced no alarm. Vague relief came to her in the sense of being enclosed between dark stone walls, deep hidden from the glare of sun, from the glistening sage. Lassiter lengthened the stirrup straps on one of the burros and bade her mount and ride close to him. She was to keep the burro from cracking his little hard hoofs on stones. Then she was riding on between dark, gleaming walls. There were quiet and rest and coolness in this canyon. She noted indifferently that they passed close under shady, bulging shelves of cliff, through patches of grass and sage and thicket and groves of slender trees, and over white, pebbly washes, and around masses of broken rock. The burros trotted tirelessly; the dogs, once more free, pattered tirelessly; and Lassiter led on with never a stop, and at every open place he looked back. The shade under the walls gave place to sunlight. And presently they came to a dense thicket of slender trees, through which they passed to rich, green grass and water. Here Lassiter rested the burros for a little while, but he was restless, uneasy, silent, always listening, peering under the trees. She dully reflected that enemies were behind them\u2014before them; still the thought awakened no dread or concern or interest.\n\nAt his bidding she mounted and rode on close to the heels of his burro. The canyon narrowed; the walls lifted their rugged rims higher; and the sun shone down hot from the center of the blue stream of sky above. Lassiter traveled slower, with more exceeding care as to the ground he chose, and he kept speaking low to the dogs. They were now hunting-dogs\u2014keen, alert, suspicious, sniffing the warm breeze. The monotony of the yellow walls broke in change of color and smooth surface, and the rugged outline of rims grew craggy. Splits appeared in deep breaks, and gorges running at right angles, and then the Pass opened wide at a junction of intersecting canyons.\n\nLassiter dismounted, led his burro, called the dogs close, and proceeded at snail pace through dark masses of rock and dense thickets under the left wall. Long he watched and listened before venturing to cross the mouths of side canyons. At length he halted, tied his burro, lifted a warning hand to Jane, and then slipped away among the boulders, and, followed by the stealthy dogs, disappeared from sight. The time he remained absent was neither short nor long to Jane Withersteen.\n\nWhen he reached her side again he was pale, and his lips were set in a hard line, and his gray eyes glittered coldly. Bidding her dismount, he led the burros into a covert of stones and cedars, and tied them.\n\n\"Jane, I've run into the fellers I've been lookin' for, an' I'm goin' after them,\" he said.\n\n\"Why?\" she asked.\n\n\"I reckon I won't take time to tell you.\"\n\n\"Couldn't we slip by without being seen?\"\n\n\"Likely enough. But that ain't my game. An' I'd like to know, in case I don't come back, what you'll do.\"\n\n\"What can I do?\"\n\n\"I reckon you can go back to Tull. Or stay in the Pass an' be taken off by rustlers. Which'll you do?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I can't think very well. But I believe I'd rather be taken off by rustlers.\"\n\nLassiter sat down, put his head in his hands, and remained for a few moments in what appeared to be deep and painful thought. When he lifted his face it was haggard, lined, cold as sculptured marble.\n\n\"I'll go. I only mentioned that chance of my not comin' back. I'm pretty sure to come.\"\n\n\"Need you risk so much? Must you fight more? Haven't you shed enough blood?\"\n\n\"I'd like to tell you why I'm goin',\" he continued, in coldness he had seldom used to her. She remarked it, but it was the same to her as if he had spoken with his old gentle warmth. \"But I reckon I won't. Only, I'll say that mercy an' goodness, such as is in you, though they're the grand things in human nature, can't be lived up to on this Utah border. Life's hell out here. You think\u2014or you used to think\u2014that your religion made this life heaven. Mebbe them scales on your eyes has dropped now. Jane, I wouldn't have you no different, an' that's why I'm going to try to hide you somewhere in this Pass. I'd like to hide many more women, for I've come to see there are more like you among your people. An' I'd like you to see jest how hard an' cruel this border life is. It's bloody. You'd think churches an' churchmen would make it better. They make it worse. You give names to things\u2014bishops, elders, ministers, Mormonism, duty, faith, glory. You dream\u2014or you're driven mad. I'm a man, an' I know. I name fanatics, followers, blind women, oppressors, thieves, ranchers, rustlers, riders. An' we have\u2014what you've lived through these last months. It can't be helped. But it can't last always. An' remember this\u2014some day the border'll be better, cleaner, for the ways of men like Lassiter!\"\n\nShe saw him shake his tall form erect, look at her strangely and steadfastly, and then, noiselessly, stealthily slip away amid the rocks and trees. Ring and Whitie, not being bidden to follow, remained with Jane. She felt extreme weariness, yet somehow it did not seem to be of her body. And she sat down in the shade and tried to think. She saw a creeping lizard, cactus flowers, the drooping burros, the resting dogs, an eagle high over a yellow crag. Once the meanest flower, a color, the flight of the bee, or any living thing had given her deepest joy. Lassiter had gone off, yielding to his incurable blood lust, probably to his own death; and she was sorry, but there was no feeling in her sorrow.\n\nSuddenly from the mouth of the canyon just beyond her rang out a clear, sharp report of a rifle. Echoes clapped. Then followed a piercingly high yell of anguish, quickly breaking. Again echoes clapped, in grim imitation. Dull revolver shots\u2014hoarse yells\u2014pound of hoofs\u2014shrill neighs of horses\u2014commingling of echoes\u2014and again silence! Lassiter must be busily engaged, thought Jane, and no chill trembled over her, no blanching tightened her skin. Yes, the border was a bloody place. But life had always been bloody. Men were blood-spillers. Phases of the history of the world flashed through her mind\u2014Greek and Roman wars, dark, mediaeval times, the crimes in the name of religion. On sea, on land, everywhere\u2014shooting, stabbing, cursing, clashing, fighting men! Greed, power, oppression, fanaticism, love, hate, revenge, justice, freedom\u2014for these, men killed one another.\n\nShe lay there under the cedars, gazing up through the delicate lacelike foliage at the blue sky, and she thought and wondered and did not care.\n\nMore rattling shots disturbed the noonday quiet. She heard a sliding of weathered rock, a hoarse shout of warning, a yell of alarm, again the clear, sharp crack of the rifle, and another cry that was a cry of death. Then rifle reports pierced a dull volley of revolver shots. Bullets whizzed over Jane's hiding-place; one struck a stone and whined away in the air. After that, for a time, succeeded desultory shots; and then they ceased under long, thundering fire from heavier guns.\n\nSooner or later, then, Jane heard the cracking of horses' hoofs on the stones, and the sound came nearer and nearer. Silence intervened until Lassiter's soft, jingling step assured her of his approach. When he appeared he was covered with blood.\n\n\"All right, Jane,\" he said. \"I come back. An' don't worry.\"\n\nWith water from a canteen he washed the blood from his face and hands.\n\n\"Jane, hurry now. Tear my scarf in two, en' tie up these places. That hole through my hand is some inconvenient, worse 'n this at over my ear. There\u2014you're doin' fine! Not a bit nervous\u2014no tremblin'. I reckon I ain't done your courage justice. I'm glad you're brave jest now\u2014you'll need to be. Well, I was hid pretty good, enough to keep them from shootin' me deep, but they was slingin' lead close all the time. I used up all the rifle shells, an' en I went after them. Mebbe you heard. It was then I got hit. Had to use up every shell in my own gun, an' they did, too, as I seen. Rustlers an' Mormons, Jane! An' now I'm packin' five bullet holes in my carcass, an' guns without shells. Hurry, now.\"\n\nHe unstrapped the saddle-bags from the burros, slipped the saddles and let them lie, turned the burros loose, and, calling the dogs, led the way through stones and cedars to an open where two horses stood.\n\n\"Jane, are you strong?\" he asked.\n\n\"I think so. I'm not tired,\" Jane replied.\n\n\"I don't mean that way. Can you bear up?\"\n\n\"I think I can bear anything.\"\n\n\"I reckon you look a little cold an' thick. So I'm preparin' you.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"I didn't tell you why I jest had to go after them fellers. I couldn't tell you. I believe you'd have died. But I can tell you now\u2014if you'll bear up under a shock?\"\n\n\"Go on, my friend.\"\n\n\"I've got little Fay! Alive\u2014bad hurt\u2014but she'll live!\"\n\nJane Withersteen's dead-locked feeling, rent by Lassiter's deep, quivering voice, leaped into an agony of sensitive life.\n\n\"Here,\" he added, and showed her where little Fay lay on the grass.\n\nUnable to speak, unable to stand, Jane dropped on her knees. By that long, beautiful golden hair Jane recognized the beloved Fay. But Fay's loveliness was gone. Her face was drawn and looked old with grief. But she was not dead\u2014her heart beat\u2014and Jane Withersteen gathered strength and lived again.\n\n\"You see I jest had to go after Fay,\" Lassiter was saying, as he knelt to bathe her little pale face. \"But I reckon I don't want no more choices like the one I had to make. There was a crippled feller in that bunch, Jane. Mebbe Venters crippled him. Anyway, that's why they were holding up here. I seen little Fay first thing, en' was hard put to it to figure out a way to get her. An' I wanted hosses, too. I had to take chances. So I crawled close to their camp. One feller jumped a hoss with little Fay, an' when I shot him, of course she dropped. She's stunned an' bruised\u2014she fell right on her head. Jane, she's comin' to! She ain't bad hurt!\"\n\nFay's long lashes fluttered; her eyes opened. At first they seemed glazed over. They looked dazed by pain. Then they quickened, darkened, to shine with intelligence\u2014bewilderment\u2014memory\u2014and sudden wonderful joy.\n\n\"Muvver\u2014Jane!\" she whispered.\n\n\"Oh, little Fay, little Fay!\" cried Jane, lifting, clasping the child to her.\n\n\"Now, we've got to rustle!\" said Lassiter, in grim coolness. \"Jane, look down the Pass!\"\n\nAcross the mounds of rock and sage Jane caught sight of a band of riders filing out of the narrow neck of the Pass; and in the lead was a white horse, which, even at a distance of a mile or more, she knew.\n\n\"Tull!\" she almost screamed.\n\n\"I reckon. But, Jane, we've still got the game in our hands. They're ridin' tired hosses. Venters likely give them a chase. He wouldn't forget that. An' we've fresh hosses.\"\n\nHurriedly he strapped on the saddle-bags, gave quick glance to girths and cinches and stirrups, then leaped astride.\n\n\"Lift little Fay up,\" he said.\n\nWith shaking arms Jane complied.\n\n\"Get back your nerve, woman! This's life or death now. Mind that. Climb up! Keep your wits. Stick close to me. Watch where your hoss's goin' en' ride!\"\n\nSomehow Jane mounted; somehow found strength to hold the reins, to spur, to cling on, to ride. A horrible quaking, craven fear possessed her soul. Lassiter led the swift flight across the wide space, over washes, through sage, into a narrow canyon where the rapid clatter of hoofs rapped sharply from the walls. The wind roared in her ears; the gleaming cliffs swept by; trail and sage and grass moved under her. Lassiter's bandaged, blood-stained face turned to her; he shouted encouragement; he looked back down the Pass; he spurred his horse. Jane clung on, spurring likewise. And the horses settled from hard, furious gallop into a long-striding, driving run. She had never ridden at anything like that pace; desperately she tried to get the swing of the horse, to be of some help to him in that race, to see the best of the ground and guide him into it. But she failed of everything except to keep her seat the saddle, and to spur and spur. At times she closed her eyes unable to bear sight of Fay's golden curls streaming in the wind. She could not pray; she could not rail; she no longer cared for herself. All of life, of good, of use in the world, of hope in heaven entered in Lassiter's ride with little Fay to safety. She would have tried to turn the iron-jawed brute she rode, she would have given herself to that relentless, dark-browed Tull. But she knew Lassiter would turn with her, so she rode on and on.\n\nWhether that run was of moments or hours Jane Withersteen could not tell. Lassiter's horse covered her with froth that blew back in white streams. Both horses ran their limit, were allowed slow down in time to save them, and went on dripping, heaving, staggering.\n\n\"Oh, Lassiter, we must run\u2014we must run!\"\n\nHe looked back, saying nothing. The bandage had blown from his head, and blood trickled down his face. He was bowing under the strain of injuries, of the ride, of his burden. Yet how cool and gay he looked\u2014how intrepid!\n\nThe horses walked, trotted, galloped, ran, to fall again to walk. Hours sped or dragged. Time was an instant\u2014an eternity. Jane Withersteen felt hell pursuing her, and dared not look back for fear she would fall from her horse.\n\n\"Oh, Lassiter! Is he coming?\"\n\nThe grim rider looked over his shoulder, but said no word. Fay's golden hair floated on the breeze. The sun shone; the walls gleamed; the sage glistened. And then it seemed the sun vanished, the walls shaded, the sage paled. The horses walked\u2014trotted\u2014galloped\u2014ran\u2014to fall again to walk. Shadows gathered under shelving cliffs. The canyon turned, brightened, opened into a long, wide, wall-enclosed valley. Again the sun, lowering in the west, reddened the sage. Far ahead round, scrawled stone appeared to block the Pass.\n\n\"Bear up, Jane, bear up!\" called Lassiter. \"It's our game, if you don't weaken.\"\n\n\"Lassiter! Go on\u2014alone! Save little Fay!\"\n\n\"Only with you!\"\n\n\"Oh!\u2014I'm a coward\u2014a miserable coward! I can't fight or think or hope or pray! I'm lost! Oh, Lassiter, look back! Is he coming? I'll not\u2014hold out\u2014\"\n\n\"Keep your breath, woman, an' ride not for yourself or for me, but for Fay!\"\n\nA last breaking run across the sage brought Lassiter's horse to a walk.\n\n\"He's done,\" said the rider.\n\n\"Oh, no\u2014no!\" moaned Jane.\n\n\"Look back, Jane, look back. Three\u2014four miles we've come across this valley, en' no Tull yet in sight. Only a few more miles!\"\n\nJane looked back over the long stretch of sage, and found the narrow gap in the wall, out of which came a file of dark horses with a white horse in the lead. Sight of the riders acted upon Jane as a stimulant. The weight of cold, horrible terror lessened. And, gazing forward at the dogs, at Lassiter's limping horse, at the blood on his face, at the rocks growing nearer, last at Fay's golden hair, the ice left her veins, and slowly, strangely, she gained hold of strength that she believed would see her to the safety Lassiter promised. And, as she gazed, Lassiter's horse stumbled and fell.\n\nHe swung his leg and slipped from the saddle.\n\n\"Jane, take the child,\" he said, and lifted Fay up. Jane clasped her arms suddenly strong. \"They're gainin',\" went on Lassiter, as he watched the pursuing riders. \"But we'll beat 'em yet.\"\n\nTurning with Jane's bridle in his hand, he was about to start when he saw the saddle-bag on the fallen horse.\n\n\"I've jest about got time,\" he muttered, and with swift fingers that did not blunder or fumble he loosened the bag and threw it over his shoulder. Then he started to run, leading Jane's horse, and he ran, and trotted, and walked, and ran again. Close ahead now Jane saw a rise of bare rock. Lassiter reached it, searched along the base, and, finding a low place, dragged the weary horse up and over round, smooth stone. Looking backward, Jane saw Tull's white horse not a mile distant, with riders strung out in a long line behind him. Looking forward, she saw more valley to the right, and to the left a towering cliff. Lassiter pulled the horse and kept on.\n\nLittle Fay lay in her arms with wide-open eyes\u2014eyes which were still shadowed by pain, but no longer fixed, glazed in terror. The golden curls blew across Jane's lips; the little hands feebly clasped her arm; a ghost of a troubled, trustful smile hovered round the sweet lips. And Jane Withersteen awoke to the spirit of a lioness.\n\nLassiter was leading the horse up a smooth slope toward cedar trees of twisted and bleached appearance. Among these he halted.\n\n\"Jane, give me the girl en' get down,\" he said. As if it wrenched him he unbuckled the empty black guns with a strange air of finality. He then received Fay in his arms and stood a moment looking backward. Tull's white horse mounted the ridge of round stone, and several bays or blacks followed. \"I wonder what he'll think when he sees them empty guns. Jane, bring your saddle-bag and climb after me.\"\n\nA glistening, wonderful bare slope, with little holes, swelled up and up to lose itself in a frowning yellow cliff. Jane closely watched her steps and climbed behind Lassiter. He moved slowly. Perhaps he was only husbanding his strength. But she saw drops of blood on the stone, and then she knew. They climbed and climbed without looking back. Her breast labored; she began to feel as if little points of fiery steel were penetrating her side into her lungs. She heard the panting of Lassiter and the quicker panting of the dogs.\n\n\"Wait\u2014here,\" he said.\n\nBefore her rose a bulge of stone, nicked with little cut steps, and above that a corner of yellow wall, and overhanging that a vast, ponderous cliff.\n\nThe dogs pattered up, disappeared round the corner. Lassiter mounted the steps with Fay, and he swayed like a drunken man, and he too disappeared. But instantly he returned alone, and half ran, half slipped down to her.\n\nThen from below pealed up hoarse shouts of angry men. Tull and several of his riders had reached the spot where Lassiter had parted with his guns.\n\n\"You'll need that breath\u2014mebbe!\" said Lassiter, facing downward, with glittering eyes.\n\n\"Now, Jane, the last pull,\" he went on. \"Walk up them little steps. I'll follow an' steady you. Don't think. Jest go. Little Fay's above. Her eyes are open. She jest said to me, 'Where's muvver Jane?'\"\n\nWithout a fear or a tremor or a slip or a touch of Lassiter's hand Jane Withersteen walked up that ladder of cut steps.\n\nHe pushed her round the corner of the wall. Fay lay, with wide staring eyes, in the shade of a gloomy wall. The dogs waited. Lassiter picked up the child and turned into a dark cleft. It zigzagged. It widened. It opened. Jane was amazed at a wonderfully smooth and steep incline leading up between ruined, splintered, toppling walls. A red haze from the setting sun filled this passage. Lassiter climbed with slow, measured steps, and blood dripped from him to make splotches on the white stone. Jane tried not to step in his blood, but was compelled, for she found no other footing. The saddle-bag began to drag her down; she gasped for breath, she thought her heart was bursting. Slower, slower yet the rider climbed, whistling as he breathed. The incline widened. Huge pinnacles and monuments of stone stood alone, leaning fearfully. Red sunset haze shone through cracks where the wall had split. Jane did not look high, but she felt the overshadowing of broken rims above. She felt that it was a fearful, menacing place. And she climbed on in heartrending effort. And she fell beside Lassiter and Fay at the top of the incline in a narrow, smooth divide.\n\nHe staggered to his feet\u2014staggered to a huge, leaning rock that rested on a small pedestal. He put his hand on it\u2014the hand that had been shot through\u2014and Jane saw blood drip from the ragged hole. Then he fell.\n\n\"Jane\u2014I\u2014can't\u2014do\u2014it!\" he whispered.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Roll the\u2014stone!... All my\u2014life I've loved\u2014to roll stones\u2014en' now I\u2014can't!\"\n\n\"What of it? You talk strangely. Why roll that stone?\"\n\n\"I planned to\u2014fetch you here\u2014to roll this stone. See! It'll smash the crags\u2014loosen the walls\u2014close the outlet!\"\n\nAs Jane Withersteen gazed down that long incline, walled in by crumbling cliffs, awaiting only the slightest jar to make them fall asunder, she saw Tull appear at the bottom and begin to climb. A rider followed him\u2014another\u2014and another.\n\n\"See! Tull! The riders!\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014they'll get us\u2014now.\"\n\n\"Why? Haven't you strength left to roll the stone?\"\n\n\"Jane\u2014it ain't that\u2014I've lost my nerve!\"\n\n\"You!... Lassiter!\"\n\n\"I wanted to roll it\u2014meant to\u2014but I\u2014can't. Venters's valley is down behind here. We could\u2014live there. But if I roll the stone\u2014we're shut in for always. I don't dare. I'm thinkin' of you!\"\n\n\"Lassiter! Roll the stone!\" she cried.\n\nHe arose, tottering, but with set face, and again he placed the bloody hand on the Balancing Rock. Jane Withersteen gazed from him down the passageway. Tull was climbing. Almost, she thought, she saw his dark, relentless face. Behind him more riders climbed. What did they mean for Fay\u2014for Lassiter\u2014for herself?\n\n\"Roll the stone!... Lassiter, I love you!\"\n\nUnder all his deathly pallor, and the blood, and the iron of seared cheek and lined brow, worked a great change. He placed both hands on the rock and then leaned his shoulder there and braced his powerful body.\n\nROLL THE STONE!\n\nIt stirred, it groaned, it grated, it moved, and with a slow grinding, as of wrathful relief, began to lean. It had waited ages to fall, and now was slow in starting. Then, as if suddenly instinct with life, it leaped hurtlingly down to alight on the steep incline, to bound more swiftly into the air, to gather momentum, to plunge into the lofty leaning crag below. The crag thundered into atoms. A wave of air\u2014a splitting shock! Dust shrouded the sunset red of shaking rims; dust shrouded Tull as he fell on his knees with uplifted arms. Shafts and monuments and sections of wall fell majestically.\n\nFrom the depths there rose a long-drawn rumbling roar. The outlet to Deception Pass closed forever." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Barbed Wire.txt", + "author": "Erin Wade , Victoria Mei", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Nelson Daniel Jouett shifted in his saddle as he surveyed his kingdom. He was third generation Jouett. The third male to inherit the ownership of the million-acre ranch known as Estelline. The ranch and closest town were named after his great-grandmother Classie Estelline.\n\nThe endless herd of Hereford cattle, mingled with Texas Longhorns, dotted the landscape as far as the eye could see. Nelson smiled to himself as he thought about his wife, Sarah. Any day now Sarah would give him an heir. A son to carry on the Jouett name and Estelline's legacy.\n\nNelson was almost forty when pretty Sarah Langley entered his life. The new schoolteacher in the one-room schoolhouse, Sarah had attracted the attention of every single male within fifty miles. Nelson never understood why Sarah had chosen him to marry, but he thanked God at least once a day for her. Soon he would have everything a man could want: a beautiful wife, a vast ranching empire, and an heir. They had already selected a name for their son, Morgan. Nelson knew God would send him a son.\n\nHe turned his horse toward the ranch house and let it take its time getting back to the barn. As he approached the house, he heard a scream that would wake the dead. He kicked his mount and raced to the front door. He was off his horse before the animal stopped.\n\n\"It's time,\" Nell the midwife informed him as another scream ripped through the room.\n\nNelson ran into the bedroom where another neighbor was working with his wife. Sarah's blonde hair was spread on the pillow, and perspiration covered her beautiful face. Nelson caught her hand. \"I'm here.\" He bent and kissed her damp forehead.\n\n\"You need to wait in the other room,\" Nell commanded as she entered carrying a wash pan of boiling water. Sarah screamed again, and Nelson scurried from the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Nelson paced the floor as his wife fought to deliver their firstborn. He knew it would be a boy. He'd name him after his grandfather Morgan Jouett.\n\nHe paced faster, trying to ignore the sounds of Sarah's pain. He promised himself that Morgan would be their only child. He would not have Sarah go through this ordeal again for anything.\n\nNelson lost track of the hours. The sun disappeared from the heavens and then peaked above the horizon, bringing a new day. He stopped pacing. Sarah's screams had ceased. Nell walked into the room holding a small bundle in her arms.\n\n\"You have a\u2014\"\n\nNelson pulled back the baby's blanket and smiled. \"A son. I have a son, Nell.\"\n\nNell nodded and handed the infant to him. Nelson had never seen anything so tiny. Morgan had his mother's blond hair, and Nelson hoped he would have her blue eyes. He kissed his baby on the forehead.\n\n\"Sarah?\" Nelson started toward the bedroom, but Nell caught his arm and shook her head.\n\nNelson brushed off her hand and rushed into the room where his wife was waiting. Only she wasn't waiting. The only thing that remained of his beautiful, wonderful Sarah was a shell.\n\n\"I did everything I could,\" Nell muttered. \"I'm so sorry, Nelson.\"\n\nNelson stared in silence at his dead wife. He had no words for his grief. Morgan mewled in his arms.\n\n\"He's hungry,\" Nell said, reaching for the baby.\n\n\"No. I'll take care of him.\" Nelson clutched the infant to his chest. \"What do I feed him, Nell?\"\n\n\"Cow's milk,\" she whispered. \"I'll get some from the icehouse.\"\n\nNelson knew he would never love another as he loved Sarah. He was happy that their child would be the heir to Estelline." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "In the months that followed Sarah's death, Nelson clung to Morgan as if he were a part of Sarah he couldn't bear to lose. He changed the baby's diapers and bathed him. He refused to let anyone else take care of Morgan, insisting on doing everything for the boy himself.\n\nWhen Morgan caught the measles, Nelson sat up with him around the clock, constantly washing him and submerging him in ice water to get his fever down. In the years that followed, he nursed his son through all the usual childhood colds and maladies. Morgan was the focal point of Nelson's life, the son he had dreamed of. Nothing would stop his only son from inheriting Estelline." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Nelson watched as sixteen-year-old Morgan raced his horse against the ranch hands. The boy rode as if he were attached to the horse. No one could outrun him. He laughed as he thundered to a halt in front of Nelson.\n\n\"Father, I won,\" he declared gleefully, dismounting.\n\n\"I believe you are part horse,\" ranch foreman Shanghai Jones said as Morgan's brothers, Wallace and Reid, tugged at the teen.\n\n\"Take us for a ride,\" the boys begged their older brother.\n\nMorgan laughed. \"Can we eat lunch first?\"\n\nNelson watched his sons as they laughed and teased on their way to the house. He was pleased that they shared a strong bond." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "A year after Sarah's death, Nelson had married Amora, a full-blooded Comanche who worked for them as a cook. He couldn't imagine loving anyone as much as he'd loved Sarah, so he'd selected Amora for convenience and began producing siblings for Morgan. Amora was the only mother Morgan had ever known. He loved her and she loved him.\n\nNelson was devoted to Morgan. He cherished his son who looked so much like Sarah. Morgan's blond hair and blue eyes were already catching the attention of the local girls, who shamelessly flirted with him.\n\nNelson took Morgan everywhere with him. He taught him all there was to know about ranching, riding, shooting, cattle raising, and reading.\n\nDuring Morgan's fifth year, Amora was killed in a wagon accident. Morgan clung to his younger brothers and insisted on including them in everything he did.\n\nWhen Morgan was six, Nelson brought private tutor Christina Ryder from San Francisco to live at the ranch and teach Morgan. She married Nelson on Morgan's ninth birthday, which thrilled the boy. He loved Christina, and she loved him as if he were her own son.\n\nChristina devoted herself to Morgan's education. He was extremely bright and hungry for new information. She insisted that Nelson subscribe to the Fort Worth Star Telegram newspaper and introduced the first radio into the Jouett home.\n\nNelson loved the influx of news so his sons could keep up with what was happening in the rest of the world. They took turns reading the newspaper to each other every night after dinner.\n\nThe ranch hands were extremely fond of Morgan and were always eager to teach him something new. Behind Nelson's back they taught him to fight, play poker, and drink whiskey. They teased him when he complained that he had no whiskers yet.\n\n\"No woman's gonna bed you, boy,\" Shanghai teased him. \"Women like a man that looks like me.\"\n\n\"You look like a big hairy bear,\" Morgan joked back. \"Who'd want to climb into bed with a wooly-faced bear?\"\n\n\"It's his mother's fault,\" Nelson said, coming to Morgan's rescue. \"She was fair-skinned and not a hair on her body except for her head.\"\n\n\"Enjoy it while you can.\" Shanghai grinned. \"Shaving is a bitch. You'll see.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "When Morgan was eleven, Christina received a telegram from her sister in San Francisco telling her that their mother was extremely ill.\n\n\"I must go to her,\" Christina informed Nelson.\n\n\"I can't leave in the middle of spring roundup, and someone needs to take care of the boys,\" Nelson fretted. \"I don't like you traveling alone.\"\n\n\"I'll be just fine, dear,\" she assured him. \"I traveled here alone, and it was much wilder then.\"\n\nNelson begrudgingly agreed to the train trip. In mid-May, he and Morgan took Christina to the station.\n\nChristina sent a telegram informing them that she had arrived safely at her sister's home and was looking after her mother. A second telegram arrived in August. Morgan watched his father as he read the message. Nelson's eyes darkened, and he cleared his throat.\n\n\"What does she say?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Her mother has passed away,\" Nelson said, frowning. \"Christina is with child and is concerned about making the trip home, so she will stay in San Francisco until the baby is born. They have modern hospitals and doctors there. The delivery will be much easier.\"\n\nMorgan beamed. \"I hope we get a sister. When will it come?\"\n\n\"In about six months,\" Nelson said. \"Sometime in January. Let's do everything we can to get the ranch affairs in order so you and I can take the train to San Francisco and bring her home. She'll need help with the baby.\"\n\nMorgan and Nelson were obsessed with the preparations necessary in order to be gone a month. Shanghai assured them he was quite capable of running things in their absence and riding herd on Wallace and Reid.\n\nNelson wrote to Christina every day, telling her of the latest events. On Saturday he sealed the pages in an envelope, and they rode into town to mail the letter to his wife.\n\nIn January, Nelson received a letter from Christina informing him of the birth of their daughter. \"As we planned, I named her Kristen. She is a sickly little thing,\" Christina wrote. \"I fear she may not be strong enough to make the trip home. I will nurse her until she is thriving and plan to return home in March. I miss you and the boys so much. Please give each of them a hug from me.\"\n\nChristina sent a letter in March telling Nelson she and the baby were healthy and would be able to travel by the end of the month. A week before their departure, a telegram was delivered to Nelson. Morgan danced around his father, eager to hear what Christina had written.\n\nDarkness spread over Nelson's face as he read the telegram. Morgan knew something was wrong.\n\n\"Father, what does it say?\" He reached for the telegram, but Nelson pulled it away from him.\n\n\"Christina is dead,\" Nelson said, nearly choking on the words. \"She died of an infection caused by childbirth. We won't be going to San Francisco.\"\n\n\"But Father,\" Morgan argued, \"we must go for my sister Kristen and bring her home.\"\n\n\"Christina's sister and her husband are going to raise her,\" Nelson mumbled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Nelson threw himself into the ranch work, branding cattle and traveling a hundred miles to look at a new Hereford bull he'd heard about. He became withdrawn and sullen, refusing to discuss Christina's death.\n\n\"Father, we need to talk about the baby.\" Morgan handed him a glass of whiskey and sipped his own.\n\nNelson looked at the twelve-year-old boy in disbelief. \"Baby?\"\n\n\"Yes, Christina's baby. Your baby. My sister Kristen,\" Morgan said. \"We should bring her home.\"\n\n\"No,\" Nelson growled. \"I don't want her. She killed my wife.\"\n\n\"You're being unreasonable,\" Morgan argued. \"My mother also died when I was born. Do you hate me?\"\n\n\"Dear Lord no,\" Nelson cried. \"How could I not love you? You're perfect. You look more like her every day. I loved you the minute they placed you in my arms.\"\n\n\"Then you shouldn't\u2014\"\n\n\"No! And that's final,\" Nelson bellowed. \"I never want to discuss this again.\"\n\nIt was an accepted fact that Morgan would one day own Estelline and the vast holdings of the Jouett family. He was Nelson's firstborn son. As stipulated in the will, he would inherit everything. Morgan would need a son of his own someday to insure ownership of Estelline.\n\nNelson made certain his son was well educated to meet the fast-changing world of Texas politics and ranching. Their love and admiration for one another made them close, but the secrets they shared bound them tighter than anyone could ever imagine." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "When Morgan turned eighteen, Nelson arranged for him to go to Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. Morgan's good looks and sharp mind made him a favorite with his instructors and classmates.\n\nNelson took the train from Estelline to Los Angeles to see his son graduate. Morgan was all his father had hoped he would be. Nelson had given him everything money could buy, and now it was time for him to take over the management of the ranch.\n\n\"Look at you,\" Nelson said to his son. \"You're a handsome man, graduated at the top of your class, and such a fine person. Your mother would be so pleased with you. I'm proud to call you my son and know Estelline will be in capable hands.\"\n\n\"I'm proud to call you my father.\" Morgan smiled. \"You have shaped my life and made me what I am today. Without your guidance, Father, my world would be so different. I give you my word that I will protect my birthright.\n\n\"When will we head back to Estelline? I'm anxious to see my brothers.\"\n\n\"We must visit Christina's sister, Louise Wagner,\" Nelson informed him. \"I promised her I'd bring you to meet her. Christina loved you dearly and spoke of you often. I also have business to transact with Christina's brother-in-law, Jude.\"\n\nMorgan was thrilled at the thought of meeting Christina's family and his half sister. He had grown close to Christina. She had taught him about the world outside Estelline. He had been heartbroken when she died.\n\n\"Did she write you?\" Morgan asked as they rode in a carriage to the address the woman had sent Nelson.\n\n\"She telegraphed me about a year ago,\" Nelson replied. \"I wasn't sure we would have time to visit her, so I didn't say anything to you about it.\"\n\nThe carriage groaned to a stop in front of a two-story mansion on the outskirts of San Francisco. \"Please wait for us,\" Nelson instructed the driver.\n\nThe family greeted the two men warmly, expressing their sadness over Christina's death.\n\n\"I need to talk to you in private,\" Jude Wagner said to Nelson.\n\nMorgan expressed his condolences to Christina's sister as his father and Mr. Wagner visited. \"She was an incredible teacher,\" he volunteered. \"She taught me so much and truly prepared me for the university.\"\n\nMorgan saw a movement on the staircase and slyly glanced at a young girl who was silently slipping down the stairs.\n\n\"Hello,\" he said with a smile as the girl poked her head around the last banister. \"My name is Morgan Jouett. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Kristen.\" The child walked toward him. \"You're pretty.\"\n\nMorgan laughed. \"As are you, Kristen. How old are you?\"\n\n\"Eleven.\" The girl moved closer to scrutinize Morgan.\n\nThe door to Jude's study swung open. \"I'm glad we see eye to eye on this matter,\" Wagner said to Nelson. \"Makes things easier for everyone involved.\"\n\nNelson shook hands with the man and motioned for Morgan to follow him.\n\n\"Goodbye, Morgan,\" the girl called after him.\n\nHe turned to face her. \"Goodbye, Kristen. It was nice to meet you.\"\n\nThey hurried from the house, and Morgan wasted no time getting to the point.\n\n\"Father, that was my sister,\" he declared as they entered the coach. \"I want to take her home with us. She's a Jouett.\"\n\n\"No,\" Nelson grunted. \"The Wagner's are raising her, and they love her. They are the only parents she's ever known. It would be cruel to take her away from them.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "\"Surely there's a girl in this county that you fancy.\" Shanghai scowled at Morgan as they rode toward the ranch house.\n\n\"Not enough to marry,\" Morgan said. \"I'll know when I find her.\"\n\n\"Morgan Jouett, you're twenty-six years old. You inherited the ranch when your dad died. You need to get on with your life. You need a woman in your bed.\"\n\n\"I don't want just any woman,\" Morgan argued. \"I certainly don't want an arranged marriage or a marriage of convenience to increase our holdings. God, we own half the state.\"\n\nShanghai laughed. \"Not quite. Estelline is a drop in the bucket compared to the size of Texas. Anyway, you must be nice to Gwen Goodnight while she's visiting. Her father is the circuit judge.\"\n\n\"Father had three wives,\" Morgan pointed out. \"I only want one. He loved them all in his own way, but in the end he died alone, except for Reid, Wallace, and me.\"\n\n\"In the end, I believe the three of you were enough.\" Shanghai sobered. \"He was mighty proud of you boys.\"\n\nThey stopped their horses as a rolling cloud of red dust approached. \"Looks like Wallace,\" Shanghai said.\n\n\"Morgan,\" Wallace hailed them, \"you have a telegram. It says Urgent. I thought I'd better bring it to you.\"\n\nMorgan opened the envelope. \"It's from Kristen, our sister in San Francisco.\"\n\n\"What does she want?\" Wallace asked.\n\n\"She wants me to come for her.\" Morgan scowled as he read the telegram out loud. \"In grave danger. Please save me.\"\n\n\"She must think she's pretty important,\" Wallace scoffed, \"to assume you'd go all the way to San Fran for her.\"\n\n\"She's our sister, Wallace,\" Morgan chided. \"Of course I'll go get her. I can't imagine what danger she's in. I'll leave in the morning.\"\n\n\"Gwen Goodnight is arriving tomorrow,\" Shanghai reminded him. \"You know she has her cap set for you, and Judge Goodnight will be furious if you shun her.\"\n\nMorgan grinned. \"You entertain her.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Fourteen-year-old Kristen Jouett ignored the tapping on her bedroom door. She knew it was her uncle, and she knew what he wanted. She wondered how much longer she could escape his advances. She exhaled when she heard the front door slam. Thank God! Aunt Louise is home, she thought. The knocking on her door stopped as Jude walked downstairs to greet his wife.\n\nKristen prayed that her telegram had reached Morgan Jouett. Most of all, she prayed that Morgan would respond to it. She had only met him once, but he seemed like an honorable man. She was getting desperate and was entertaining the idea of running away. She'd heard about the things that happened to runaway girls and shuddered as she weighed the pros and cons of the two evils she faced.\n\n\"Kristen?\" Louise called up to her. \"I thought you would have dinner ready.\"\n\nKristen unlocked her door and ran down the stairs. \"I'm so sorry, Auntie.\" She pecked her aunt on the cheek. \"I was doing my studies and lost track of time. I'll prepare dinner. You go rest.\"\n\n\"We'll both fix the meal,\" Louise said, smiling at her niece. \"We need to prepare enough to take to Mrs. Benson. \"Her husband's funeral is tomorrow, and the neighbors are taking a potluck supper to her home tonight.\"\n\nAfter dinner, Kristen cleared the table and began washing dishes as her aunt packed food to take to Mrs. Benson. She was glad that Aunt Louise had insisted Jude accompany her. If she hurried, she could be in her room with the door locked before they returned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Kristen was halfway up the stairs when she heard the front door open. She looked down into the foyer and locked eyes with Jude. She ran to the top of the stairs and fumbled with the knob as she tried to open her bedroom door.\n\nJude's arms wrapped around her from behind, and he pulled her to him, pinning her against the door.\n\n\"Let me go,\" she screamed.\n\n\"I will when I'm through with you.\" Jude pushed the bedroom door open and shoved Kristen inside.\n\n\"You didn't think you could live here for free forever, did you?\" A diabolical grin creased Jude's face as he locked the door and unbuckled his belt. \"You're a little spitfire, just like your mother. I had to teach her a lesson too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"Please wait for me,\" Morgan instructed the coach driver as he turned toward the mansion. Everything seemed quiet in the neighborhood. He wondered again what danger could be stalking Kristen. Shanghai was probably right; it was the drama of a teenager.\n\nAs he raised his hand to knock on the door, a bloodcurdling scream ripped the night. Without waiting, Morgan pushed open the front door and ran into the house. Another scream came from above.\n\nMorgan took the stairs two at a time as he raced to the hallway. Muffled sounds came from the room on his left. He tried to open the door but found it locked. He pounded on it, calling Kristen's name.\n\nA feeble \"Help me\" reached his ears. He kicked open the door.\n\nJude was on top of Kristen, pinning her shoulders to the bed. Morgan grabbed the man by his hair and dragged him off his sister. As Jude hit the floor, Morgan kicked him in the groin. The man curled into the fetal position, howling in pain.\n\nMorgan grabbed Kristen's hand. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\nKristen asked no questions, obeying her brother as he led her down the stairs.\n\n\"Take us to the Palace Hotel,\" Morgan directed the coach driver.\n\nThey sat in silence for a few minutes as the coach rattled away from the Wagner residence. Then Kristen burst into tears. Morgan put his arm around her thin shoulders, and she buried her face in his jacket, sobbing until she had no more tears to shed. Morgan gave her his handkerchief.\n\n\"I was so afraid you wouldn't come.\" Kristen sniffled as she dried her eyes and wiped her nose. \"You were almost too late.\"\n\nMorgan breathed a sigh of relief. He'd feared Jude's attack was a repeat of past actions. \"He's never...?\"\n\n\"No. But he would have tonight if you hadn't saved me.\"\n\nWhen they arrived at the hotel, Kristen was overwhelmed by the grandiose architecture and size of the building. She looked down at her thin, ripped dress.\n\n\"I can't go in there looking like this.\" She sobbed anew.\n\nMorgan stepped from the coach and waved down two women wearing long, fashionable coats. He held out gold coins. \"I need to buy a coat from one of you,\" he said.\n\n\"You can have both of our coats for that,\" one of the wide-eyed women said.\n\nMorgan smiled at her. \"I just need one. I'll take yours.\"\n\nAfter making the exchange, Morgan offered his hand to help Kristen from the coach. He held the coat as she slipped into it and then buttoned it for her. \"Keep it closed, and no one will know your dress is in shreds.\"\n\nKristen slipped her arm through her brother's and ducked her head as they made their way to Morgan's room.\n\n\"I should have picked you up before I registered here,\" he said, berating himself. \"It would have saved you from that ugly scene.\"\n\nKristen gave him a timid smile. \"The important thing is, you came for me.\"\n\n\"There's a lady's boutique in the lobby of the hotel,\" Morgan informed her. \"You can use my toiletries to freshen up and fix your hair, and then we'll get you some clothes and anything else you need to take back to Estelline.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Kristen was amazed and delighted at her brother's generosity as he helped her select beautiful dresses and shoes.\n\n\"You must have a corset,\" the salesclerk declared.\n\n\"Must I?\" Kristen's eyes pleaded for a no from her brother.\n\n\"Of course not.\" Morgan snickered. \"That looks beastly. It must be painfully uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"It is,\" the salesclerk sniped. \"But it will give her the perfect figure.\"\n\nMorgan smiled. \"I believe she already has the perfect figure. A little flat-chested, but the corset won't help that.\"\n\nKristen shot him a \"go to hell\" look, and he was thrilled to see his sister had the same fire he carried within him. \"I'll wait outside while you select your undergarments,\" he said.\n\nHe turned to the salesclerk and instructed her to dress Kristen to travel comfortably. \"She needs several changes of clothes, at least one for each day of the week and two for Sunday and maybe a couple for community dances. She'll also require nightwear. Give her whatever she wants. Call me when you're finished.\"\n\nMorgan wandered around the shops that lined the hallway leading to the hotel reception area. He spotted a gentleman's club across the lobby. I'd kill for a shot of whiskey, he thought as he wondered how much longer his sister would shop.\n\nHe returned to the boutique and told the salesclerk he was going to have a drink. \"I will return in half an hour. Do not let my sister wander around alone.\"\n\nThe clerk agreed and scurried off to Kristen's dressing room, a beautiful dress draped over her arm.\n\nAs Morgan headed back to the club, a trunk shop caught his eye. He knew they'd need something to carry Kristen's new wardrobe to Estelline. He pushed aside his desire for a drink and purchased a trunk. The store owner's son helped him carry it back to the boutique.\n\nMorgan held up a ten-dollar gold piece. \"I'll give you this if you'll meet us here in the morning and help me load it on the coach.\"\n\nThe lad eagerly agreed and scampered off to tell his father of the fortune he would earn the next day.\n\n\"I'll wear this on the train,\" Kristen said, twirling around in a simple, but beautiful, dress.\n\n\"It's lovely,\" Morgan said.\n\nHe instructed the clerk to pack all of Kristen's purchases into the trunk except for a nightgown and the dress Kristen was wearing. \"Throw away the things she wore in here,\" he added." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "On the train ride to Estelline, Morgan told Kristen about the ranch. \"We have thousands of cows and hundreds of horses.\" He chuckled at her wide-eyed innocence.\n\n\"We have two brothers, Wallace and Reid. Wallace is married to Naomi and Reid is married to Jerilyn.\"\n\nHe told her their father had passed away and that the men and their wives ran the ranch.\n\n\"What is your wife's name?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"Oh, I have no wife.\" Morgan shrugged. \"I haven't had time for one.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised. You're so handsome. I mean, you're prettier than me.\"\n\nMorgan laughed out loud. \"I don't know if I should be pleased or insulted.\"\n\n\"I meant it as a compliment,\" Kristen said, blushing. \"I mean, I bet you could have your choice of any girl in Texas.\"\n\n\"I could, I suppose,\" Morgan said with a sheepish grin. \"I've just never met one I wanted.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you take me with you when you came to meet Aunt Louise and Jude?\" Kristen asked, abruptly changing the subject.\n\n\"I wanted to,\" Morgan said. \"I truly did, but Father said it would make you unhappy. That the Wagner's had raised you, and they were the only parents you'd ever known.\"\n\n\"Aunt Louise was wonderful,\" Kristen said, \"but Jude was an animal. When I was younger, he always wanted to hold me on his lap. Then I realized sitting on his lap affected him strangely, so I stopped letting him pull me onto it. He began touching me inappropriately, and I realized it was just a matter of time until he molested me.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell your aunt?\"\n\nKristen frowned. \"She couldn't do anything. He had all the money. Where would she go if she confronted him? I feel sorry for her.\"\n\n\"Let's never speak of this again.\" Morgan took her hand. \"I'll never let anyone hurt you. I'll kill anyone that tries.\"\n\nKristen looked at the Colt revolver strapped to Morgan's hip. \"Are you a good shot?\" she asked.\n\n\"The best.\"\n\n\"My, aren't you the modest one,\" she said with a chuckle.\n\n\"It's true. Don't you want me to tell you the truth?\"\n\n\"Yes, I want you to tell me the truth.\" Kristen smiled. \"Always.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Kristen fit into the family as if she'd always been a part of it. Everyone loved her easy laughter and sharp banter. She held her own with her macho brothers and always pitched in to help Naomi and Jerilyn with any chores that needed to be done.\n\nMorgan taught Kristen how to rope, ride, and shoot. He taught her about cattle and shared the ranch's finances with her, teaching her about banking and how to haggle for a fair price for their cattle. He took her everywhere with him, and she loved her brother's company. He taught her how to dance and field dress a deer. In short, Morgan taught his sister everything he knew.\n\nOn her eighteenth birthday, a party to rival all parties was held at Estelline Ranch. Young men came from miles around to celebrate Kristen coming of age.\n\n\"Damn. Look at them,\" Morgan complained to Reid. \"Every one of them looking to marry her. She's just a kid.\"\n\n\"Jerilyn was younger than Kristen when I married her,\" Reid pointed out. \"You were thrilled when we married.\"\n\n\"That's different. I knew you'd be good to Jeri. I have no idea how these jake-legs will treat Kristen. I've yet to see one who is good enough for her.\"\n\n\"Lose the long face,\" Reid teased. \"Here she comes with Judson Enlow.\"\n\nKristen burst into the room and ran to hug Morgan. \"This is the best birthday party ever.\" She giggled as she kissed Morgan on the cheek. \"Jud and I are going to ride out to Mustang Ridge. I want to see if we can get a glimpse of the black stallion.\"\n\n\"Don't be gone long,\" Morgan said. \"We'll begin serving dinner in a couple of hours.\"\n\nThey watched the couple leave. \"Jud is safe,\" Reid said. \"He's married.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Morgan poured whiskey in two glasses and handed one to Reid. \"Poor guy. It's a shame his wife was crippled when that bull gored her. It's good to see him out.\"\n\n\"I've heard she isn't doing well,\" Reid informed his brother. \"You've got to hand it to Jud. He's been right there for her every step of the way.\"\n\nMorgan agreed. \"He's a good man.\"\n\n\"You and Gwen Goodnight?\" Reid cocked an eyebrow at his brother.\n\n\"What about her?\" Morgan huffed.\n\n\"You danced with her a lot tonight. Do I see a sister-in-law in my future?\"\n\n\"Jesus, Reid! I danced with her.\" Morgan scowled. \"I didn't sleep with her.\"\n\nReid held up his hands in defense. \"Easy, bro. I'm just asking.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "The party went on until the wee hours of the morning. By then, everyone was either too drunk or too tired to dance. Those spending the night slept on the porch or in the bunkhouse.\n\nMorgan was eating breakfast when Kristen sashayed into the dining room. \"My, aren't you perky this morning,\" he said to his sister.\n\n\"Why shouldn't I be?\" Kristen poured a cup of coffee and refilled Morgan's. \"I'm a free woman and eighteen.\"\n\n\"So, did anyone strike your fancy?\" Morgan inquired.\n\n\"Maybe.\" Kristen grinned.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"A lady never kisses and tells,\" she said, antagonizing her brother. \"Did you kiss Gwen Goodnight?\"\n\nMorgan laughed. \"No, I didn't.\"\n\n\"I didn't kiss anyone either,\" Kristen confided. \"They're all so boring.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear that. You know the terms of our father's will dictate that the ranch goes to the first one to produce a male heir. That includes you.\"\n\n\"I'm counting on you to do that, big brother.\" Kristen's eyes danced as she watched her brother react to her teasing. She knew how to get under his skin. She also knew that the thought of her brother with another woman drove her crazy.\n\nBefore Morgan could reply, Hassie the cook entered the room carrying a tray loaded with bacon, sausage, and ham. \"There's a telegram for you on the buffet, Miss Kristen. It came early this morning.\"\n\nNaomi followed with a platter of eggs. \"I'll let everyone know breakfast is on the table,\" she said.\n\nKristen opened the envelope and read the telegram. She carried it to Morgan so he could read it too.\n\n\"Jude has been shot,\" Morgan said. \"Your aunt is selling the house, and she wants you to get your mother's trunk as soon as possible. Do you want it?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Kristen said. \"It's all I have left of her.\"\n\n\"I can't leave right now,\" Morgan said. \"Roundup starts tomorrow. We need all the men we have to handle it.\"\n\n\"Maybe Naomi or Jerilyn can accompany me,\" Kristen suggested.\n\n\"I don't like it, but I do understand,\" he said. \"We'll discuss it with the family tonight at dinner. The guests will all be gone by then.\"\n\nIt was decided that Jerilyn would accompany Kristen to San Francisco.\n\n\"Maybe you can find a husband to your liking in San Fran,\" Jerilyn chided Kristen.\n\n\"I don't plan on staying long enough to meet anyone,\" Kristen snapped. \"I'm picking up the trunk and coming back home.\"\n\n\"Don't forget you promised I could do some shopping for new clothes,\" Jerilyn reminded her.\n\nAfter everyone went to bed, Kristen and Morgan settled in front of the fireplace to discuss the trip.\n\n\"I've made reservations for you at the Palace Hotel,\" he said.\n\nKristen pouted. \"I wish you were going with us. I don't like traveling without you. You make me feel safe.\"\n\nMorgan chuckled. \"You handle a gun as well as I do. You can take care of yourself.\"\n\n\"But I'll miss you. We haven't been apart since you brought me home.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said. \"And I'll miss you too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "San Francisco was hot and humid. Kristen longed to be back at Estelline with her family. Jeri was enjoying their visit to the bustling, brawling city and took in its sights with wonder. The Palace Hotel left Jerilyn as speechless as it had Kristen four years earlier.\n\n\"Today we'll shop for new wardrobes for both of us,\" Kristen said as they ate breakfast in the hotel dining room.\n\n\"This is so exciting,\" Jeri exclaimed. Between bites, she stared at the men and women in their fancy dress. \"It's hard to believe people live like this.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" Kristen sneered, \"and they even like it. Give me Estelline any day of the week. I wonder how the boys are doing.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they're getting along fine without us,\" Jeri assured her. \"As long as Hassie and Naomi keep them fed, they won't even miss us.\"\n\n\"Surely you don't believe that,\" Kristen admonished her. \"I'm certain they miss us.\"\n\n\"Morgan may miss you. You two do everything together. You're like playmates, like Wallace and Reid.\"\n\n\"He is the most interesting person I've ever met,\" Kristen said. \"We never run out of things to talk about, and he has taught me so much, Jeri.\"\n\n\"The fact that he is drop-dead handsome doesn't hurt either,\" Jeri teased her.\n\nKristen laughed out loud. \"He's just nice, Jeri. But all of you have been so wonderful to me. You really make me feel like I belong.\"\n\n\"You do, hon,\" Jerilyn said with a smile.\n\nAs they dined, the women stole glances at the men and women strolling through the room. Then Jerilyn reached out for her sister-in-law's hand.\n\n\"Kristen, look!\"\n\n\"Oh God!\" Kristen exclaimed. \"It's him.\" She sprang from her chair and rushed to hug her brother.\n\n\"I knew you'd come,\" she said, beaming up at him. \"I knew you'd miss me too.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, do I know you?\" The man stepped back from Kristen, and her cheeks took on a rosy hue.\n\n\"Don't tease me, Morgan. I'm so happy to see you.\"\n\n\"Miss, my name isn't Morgan.\"\n\nFor the first time, Kristen scrutinized the man she had mistaken for her brother.\n\n\"I am so sorry,\" she said, horrified by the mistake she had made. \"I thought you were someone I know.\"\n\nThe stranger's eyes twinkled as he grinned at her. \"Lucky man. And since we're hugging friends already, you should at least know my name. Cage Fielding at your service, ma'am.\" He bowed at the waist and made a grand sweeping gesture with his arm. \"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss...?\"\n\n\"Uh, Kristen. Kristen Jouett,\" she muttered. \"Again, I'm so sorry.\" She hurried away, disappointed and embarrassed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Cage watched the beautiful blonde return to her friend at a table across the room. Then he turned to his companion.\n\n\"Who is she?\" he said.\n\n\"She is the reason I'm offering to save your worthless ass,\" Nathan Calloway replied as he chewed on his cigar.\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\nCage led the way to the bar on the far side of the lobby. Nathan waited until they were seated at a table and had ordered a bottle of cognac to continue.\n\n\"Her name is Kristen Jouett,\" the portly man began. \"Her family owns over a million acres of Texas ranch land\u2014open free-range grassland.\" Calloway squinted his beady eyes, making them disappear in the folds of fat that padded his face. \"You bear an uncanny resemblance to her brother whom she adores. As you saw, even she mistook you for Morgan Jouett.\"\n\n\"Even she doesn't make your offer sound interesting.\" Cage sipped his drink. \"I'm no salesman. I'm a\u2014\"\n\n\"Two-bit, tinhorn gambler,\" Calloway muttered. \"A gigolo, a pretty boy. Maybe the fact that Elizabeth Thornton's husband arrived yesterday will make my offer more interesting to you.\"\n\nCage's face paled under his dark tan. \"Victor Thornton? But I thought he was still missing.\"\n\n\"It seems that Colonel Thornton escaped his Indian captors and has been reunited with his faithful wife,\" Calloway said sarcastically. \"I wonder how long it will take Colonel Thornton to find out that you have been consoling his bereaved wife in his bed.\"\n\n\"You're lying,\" Cage snorted.\n\n\"Am I?\" Calloway raised his bushy black eyebrows. \"I thought you might accuse me of such underhanded actions, so I brought along a copy of the morning paper.\"\n\nCage stared in shocked disbelief at the paper's headline heralding the return of Colonel Victor Thornton.\n\n\"I don't think his wife's infidelities will upset him nearly as much as the fact that you've helped her squander his family's fortune,\" Calloway said. \"I must say, all of San Francisco will think you have gotten your just reward if Colonel Thornton shoots you. A question of honor, you know.\"\n\n\"Describe your offer again,\" Cage snarled.\n\n\"I'm sure you've heard of John Wayne Gates.\" Calloway's tone was brisk and businesslike.\n\n\"I know he has more money than he knows what to do with.\"\n\n\"Right. And it might interest you to know that he made his fortune selling barbed wire for Joseph Glidden and Isaac Ellwood.\n\n\"I suppose you're going to say I can make my fortune by selling the wire for you,\" Cage scoffed, pouring himself another drink.\n\n\"How can you drink that stuff so early in the morning?\" Calloway grumbled.\n\nCage tossed back the cognac and refilled his glass. \"It helps me make sense of the line of bull you're feeding me.\"\n\n\"The timing is perfect for us,\" Calloway continued. \"Look.\" He held out his open hand to Cage. A twisted ribbon of galvanized metal with dull prongs spaced an inch apart rested in his palm.\n\n\"There's a screwworm epidemic in Southern Texas.\" Calloway placed the wire on the table in front of Cage. \"Cattlemen are blaming barbed wire. The stock gets scratched by the sharp points of the wire. It draws blood, and the cut gets infected with screwworm.\"\n\n\"How interesting,\" Cage leered.\n\n\"This wire is the answer to the problem,\" Calloway explained. \"It's strong, a solid ribbed strip of steel presenting the largest possible viewing surface. The cattle won't be prone to run into it, and if they do, the barbs are blunt and won't break their skin.\n\n\"This wire is what they need. It's light as air, stronger than whiskey, and cheap as dirt.\" Calloway leaned back in his chair with a smug grin on his face. \"And I hold the patent on it.\"\n\n\"And you want me to peddle it door-to-door like some low-class huckster?\" Cage said. \"Why don't you sell it yourself?\"\n\n\"I know my limitations,\" Calloway answered. \"I wouldn't last a week in the Texas heat. But you? You're young, strong, handsome, and the best con man I've ever met.\"\n\n\"Texas!\" Cage spit out the word as if it left a bad taste in his mouth. \"Screwworms?\"\n\n\"Of course, if you'd rather stay here and face Colonel Thornton...\"\n\n\"It seems your offer is the lesser of two evils,\" Cage grumbled. \"Now tell me, where does Kristen Jouett come in?\"\n\n\"As I said, her family owns a million acres in the Texas Panhandle in North Texas,\" Calloway explained. \"I want my wire to fence their ranch. Once they use it, other ranchers will follow their lead.\"\n\n\"Why don't you sell it to them if they need it so badly?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"I've made inquiries.\" Calloway furrowed his forehead. \"The Jouett's are free-range ranchers. They hate barbed wire with a passion, and why not? With a million acres, they can run their cattle on the open range with no problems.\"\n\n\"Then why would they even consider fencing?\"\n\nCalloway relit his cigar. \"That's where you come in. You've got to convince them that settlers will build on their land and interfere with their ranch operations. You shouldn't have any trouble smooth-talking a bunch of cowpunchers.\"\n\n\"And how do I do that?\" Cage refilled his glass again.\n\n\"I've arranged a little help for you,\" Calloway said, a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. \"I have befriended a farmer down on his luck. He's lost everything he owns. I've managed to get a deed to a thousand acres of the Jouett ranch. Out of the goodness of my heart, I'm going to give our farmer friend that land to cultivate and fence.\"\n\n\"Is the deed legal?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"No, but my farmer friend believes it is, and he's the type who will fight for what he believes is his.\"\n\n\"What's his name?\"\n\n\"Strom Lambert. He has a wife and four kids. Just the right number to elicit pity when the Jouetts try to run them off their property. That's where you swoop in and convince the Jouetts to fence their precious land to protect it from future squatters.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you've thought of everything,\" Cage said. \"I'm impressed.\"\n\n\"Right down to you,\" Calloway added. \"Kristen Jouett is single. From what I can find out, she isn't interested in the local yokels and is in line to inherit the entire Jouett estate.\n\n\"The old man... Nelson, I believe his name was... died six or seven years ago. There's an unusual clause in his will. I can't find out what, but until the stipulations of his will are met, the entire ranch is in limbo. The oldest brother, Morgan Jouett, owns the ranch until another heir is born.\"\n\n\"So, you want me to court Miss Jouett?\" Cage smiled.\n\n\"Exactly. If you can gain her confidence and get on the inside, it will be a cinch to sell them the barbed wire.\"\n\n\"Let me get this straight. You want me to go traipsing around in some godforsaken hellhole, amid a screwworm infestation and rattlesnakes, to sell your wonderful invention to people who are already antagonistic toward barbed wire while you sit on your fat duff waiting for me to make you rich?\" Cage glared at the man. \"What's in it for me?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll compensate you, of course,\" Calloway answered.\n\n\"A partnership,\" Cage bellowed.\n\n\"Partnership?\" Calloway's jowls worked furiously. \"Why, that's ridiculous.\"\n\n\"A fifty-fifty partnership or I'll just disappear. And I don't need you to do that.\"\n\n\"Okay, a partnership,\" Calloway growled. \"And a fitting one it is because, like me, your most prominent characteristic is avarice.\"\n\n\"Draw up the contract,\" Cage directed, \"and find out when the women will return to Texas. I'll need a ticket on the same train.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Cage looked casually around the dining room until his eyes came to rest on Kristen Jouett. She was in deep conversation with her companion, a dark-haired woman in her early twenties. If Calloway's information was correct, Kristen was in town to settle an estate left to her by her mother. Heiresses were always welcome in Cage's world.\n\nKristen's companion looked up as Cage approached their table. A flash of recognition was quickly checked by the realization that he wasn't who she thought he was.\n\nCage offered up his sweetest smile. \"Ladies, may I join you?\"\n\n\"I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, let him, Kristen.\" Jerilyn giggled. \"I find it fascinating to see Morgan's face above a frilly white shirt.\"\n\n\"I must confess, I remember that you are Kristen Jouett,\" Cage said as he sat down at the table. \"I'm afraid I don't know your friend's name.\"\n\nKristen made the introductions, trying her best to avoid staring at Cage.\n\n\"I'm surprised I haven't met the two of you before,\" he said.\n\n\"We're just here for a quick visit,\" Jerilyn volunteered. \"Kristen's picking up some things that belonged to her mother. It's all so exciting.\"\n\n\"Jerilyn!\" Kristen scolded.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, Kris.\" Jerilyn turned to Cage. \"I talk too much.\"\n\n\"I hope you will allow me to show you San Francisco while you're here,\" Cage said.\n\n\"That would be great,\" Jerilyn gushed. \"We don't know anything about San Francisco.\"\n\nKristen's blue eyes flashed with anger. \"You'll have to forgive Jerilyn, Mr. Fielding,\" Kristen said coolly. \"This is her first trip to the big city. While we appreciate your gracious offer, I'm afraid we must turn it down.\"\n\n\"I didn't intend to offend you,\" Cage murmured, looking away as if she had insulted him. \"I was trying to be helpful.\"\n\n\"Kristen, how can you be so cruel?\" Jerilyn said. \"Mr. Fielding is obviously a fine gentleman.\"\n\n\"I assure you, my intentions are good,\" Cage teased.\n\nA faint smile played on Kristen's lips. \"Okay, Mr. Fielding, we accept your offer to give us a tour of your city.\"\n\n\"That's settled.\" He beamed at them. \"Please call me Cage.\"\n\nJerilyn giggled again. \"And you may call us by our given names.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "\"I hope you ladies enjoyed seeing Frisco as much as I've enjoyed your company.\" Cage bent low in an exaggerated bow as they stood outside the women's suite.\n\n\"It's a wonderful city,\" Jerilyn crooned, \"so versatile.\"\n\n\"What shall we do tomorrow, ladies? I know\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm afraid we will be busy all day tomorrow,\" Kristen said curtly.\n\n\"Dinner then,\" Cage insisted. \"I'll call for you at seven.\" He walked away before Kristen could protest." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Cage knocked on their door at seven and escorted them to the Chinese restaurant located in the hotel.\n\n\"I promise you they have the most delicious Chinese food you've ever tasted,\" Cage said. He followed the women as the ma\u00eetre d' led them to their table.\n\n\"I've never eaten Chinese food,\" Jerilyn confessed. Her eyes widened as she studied the menu placed before her. \"Bird's nest soup? Do people really eat soup made of a bird's nest?\"\n\n\"The Chinese consider it a delicacy,\" Cage explained. \"They aren't like bird nests found in trees, abandoned by their builders. The soup is made from the edible nest constructed by the swiftlet, a small bird usually found in Southeast Asia.\"\n\nJerilyn eyed him suspiciously, certain Cage was making fun of her.\n\n\"Swiftlets live in dark caves, like bats. They don't make their nests out of straw and twigs like the birds we're familiar with. They use strands of gummy saliva that is produced by the glands under their tongue. The substance hardens when exposed to air. It's interesting... and really quite tasty.\"\n\nJerilyn gulped. \"I'll just have water.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Cage said, laughing. \"Forget the bird's nest soup. There are many wonderful dishes made from chicken and beef.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you'll be kind enough to order for us, Cage,\" Kristen suggested. A smile graced her lovely lips but never reached her cold, blue eyes.\n\nCage didn't miss the lack of warmth in her gaze and promised himself he'd make those eyes smile too before the evening ended.\n\n\"I'm afraid I'll be forced to desert you ladies in a few days,\" Cage informed them after he ordered their dinner.\n\n\"Why?\" Jerilyn asked bluntly.\n\n\"I have some business in Texas and\u2014\"\n\n\"Texas?\" Jerilyn squealed. \"That's where we're from.\"\n\n\"Really? What a coincidence,\" Cage said with feigned surprise.\n\n\"What part of Texas will you be traveling to?\" For the first time, Kristen seemed interested in the conversation.\n\n\"Amarillo.\" Cage sipped his wine. \"This is excellent. You should try it.\"\n\n\"Maybe I will,\" Kristen said as Cage filled her wine glass.\n\n\"You won't be far from us,\" Jerilyn exclaimed. \"You must visit and allow us the opportunity to return your hospitality.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Cage doesn't\u2014\"\n\n\"I'd love to,\" he said, his eyes locked with Kristen's. \"Texas is a big state. What town do you live in?\"\n\n\"Estelline is the closest town,\" Jerilyn said. \"It's on the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway line. You'll go right through it on your way to Amarillo. Estelline is an important shipping center. Cattle are driven there from miles around and then shipped north to Colorado.\"\n\nThe evening was pleasant with the women agreeing they found Chinese food delightful. Cage insisted on paying the check and led them from the restaurant.\n\nMusic from the hotel orchestra played as they entered the lobby. \"It's been a long day.\" Jerilyn covered a yawn.\n\n\"Oh, but I'd hoped the two of you would join me for at least one dance,\" Cage protested.\n\n\"You go dance, Kristen.\" Jerilyn yawned again. \"I'm going to get ready for bed.\"\n\n\"I really should go too,\" Kristen said.\n\nCage refused to let her get away that easily. With a boyish grin and a bit of cajoling, he got his way. He always did." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "\"I can't believe you're from Texas,\" Cage said as he swept her onto the dance floor. \"You don't have the deep accent I've noticed in most Texans.\"\n\n\"I was born and raised in San Francisco until I was fourteen.\" Kristen followed his lead, gliding gracefully across the floor.\n\nCage gasped. \"You're a native! And here I've been leading you around... you must think I'm the world's biggest bore.\"\n\n\"Heavens no,\" Kristen exclaimed. \"I truly don't know much about San Francisco. I was brought up by my aunt and uncle who believed a proper young lady should stay at home and embroider.\"\n\n\"How'd you get to Texas?\" Cage steered her toward a table and motioned for a waitress who took his wine order.\n\n\"My brother Morgan came for me. I'll never forget the way he looked standing in the foyer. To me, he was a knight in shining armor.\"\n\n\"How did you happen to be here and your family in Texas?\" Cage pulled his chair closer to hers.\n\nKristen related her father's history and explained about his three wives. \"My two brothers Wallace and Reid have the same mother, but Morgan and I have different mothers.\n\n\"The ranch was a French land grant given to my ancestors during the French reign over Mexico. Later, my grandfather fought to hold it, and finally, my father obtained legal title to the land as a United States citizen. But I'm boring you.\"\n\n\"No. Honestly, I'm fascinated,\" Cage assured her. \"Please continue.\"\n\n\"My mother returned to San Francisco when her mother became ill. She realized she was carrying me soon after she arrived here. She died when I was born.\n\n\"I was eleven when I met my brother and father for the first time. Morgan wanted to take me back to the ranch with them, but Father didn't want me. So, my aunt and uncle raised me.\n\n\"My uncle became more and more amorous toward me, and I was terrified. I sent Morgan a telegram pleading for his help. He came quickly and saved me from a fate worse than death.\"\n\nCage was strangely touched by her story of love, death, and neglect. \"Let's go for a carriage ride,\" he suggested. \"San Francisco is beautiful at night.\"\n\nThey walked in silence to a carriage waiting in front of the hotel. Morgan helped her in and sat beside her.\n\n\"Now that you know my family history,\" she said, \"I think it only fair that I have the same advantage.\"\n\n\"Nothing as colorful as yours,\" Cage declared. \"I grew up on the streets of San Francisco, the son of a local lady of the evening and God only knows who. My mother deserted me when I was seven. She just up and left with some cowboy.\n\n\"I fought, scratched, and stole to survive, and here I am.\"\n\nKristen stared at him. The moonlight danced in her eyes. \"You look so much like him,\" she whispered.\n\nCage slowly pulled her into his arms. Her lips were soft, but firm. He tightened his arms around her. Suddenly, she pushed him away.\n\n\"I wasn't...\" he stammered.\n\n\"I know,\" she whispered. \"I'm not angry with you.\"\n\nHe lit a cigarette and leaned back. \"I love riding in an open carriage at night.\" He laughed softly. \"Look at the stars, Kristen. They remind me of the good things in life. They seem so close but are always out of reach.\"\n\n\"You didn't impress me as a philosopher,\" she said.\n\n\"You bring out the best in me,\" he said. \"You're a good person, Kristen Jouett.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" Kristen responded as their carriage slowed to a stop in front of their hotel." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Cage lay awake examining the information he had gleaned from Kristen. Although she had been more open with him and even joined in his lighthearted conversation, her eyes had never lost their troubled look.\n\n\"I've decided to postpone my trip to Texas so I can accompany you on the train,\" Cage announced as he ate breakfast with the two women.\n\nKristen sipped her coffee. Her eyes met his, but he couldn't tell if she was pleased or annoyed by his announcement.\n\n\"That's so thoughtful of you,\" Jerilyn declared. \"Don't you think so, Kristen?\"\n\nKristen nodded.\n\n\"When do you think we'll leave?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" Kristen said. \"I need to pick up a trunk from my aunt's home before we go.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "\"Escorting them to Texas!\" Calloway said with a smile of approval. \"I knew you'd live up to my expectations.\"\n\n\"You bring the money and my contract?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"Right here.\" Calloway handed him a fat envelope. \"That should be more than enough if you stay away from the card table.\"\n\n\"We're leaving in the morning,\" Cage informed his new partner. \"You need to drop my train ticket by the hotel tonight. We'll be traveling from here to Fort Worth and then on to Estelline.\"\n\n\"Consider it done.\" Calloway rubbed his hands together in greedy anticipation. \"I'll ramp up production tomorrow.\"\n\nCage stared at the obese man. \"What if I fail, Nate?\"\n\n\"I'll have you shot.\" Calloway grinned at him. \"Gunmen are a dime a dozen.\"\n\n\"Yes, I believe you would,\" Cage said. He did not return the smile." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\"Our last night in Frisco,\" Cage said, holding Kristen close as they danced.\n\n\"Yes, tomorrow I'll be on my way to Texas.\" She smiled wistfully. \"It'll be good to get back home.\"\n\n\"I don't mind,\" he whispered in her ear. \"I'll be leaving with you.\"\n\nShe ignored his attempt at flattery.\n\n\"It's warm in here,\" Cage said. \"Would you mind if we go for a walk in the garden?\" She agreed, and he led her toward the terrace door.\n\n\"It's nice out here,\" Kristen said, inhaling the night air. \"The bougainvillea smell wonderful.\"\n\n\"Kristen,\"\u2014he caught her arm and turned her to face him\u2014\"I've become quite fond of you.\"\n\n\"Cage, please stop.\" She pulled free from his grasp.\n\n\"I know we just met and you know little about me, but I... at least let me call on you at the ranch when I finish my business in Amarillo.\"\n\n\"You'd just be wasting your time,\" Kristen muttered.\n\n\"Are you engaged to someone?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But you are in love with someone else, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Her answer was almost a whisper.\n\n\"Does he love you?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it's one of those eternal triangle situations,\" she said with a bitter laugh. \"You've been so kind. I wouldn't want to drag you into it. I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\n\"It's a chance I'm willing to take.\" He took her by the shoulders and kissed her gently. \"At least give me a chance to convince you that I'm good husband material.\"\n\n\"As you wish.\" She seemed to tire of the conversation. \"We should get some sleep. We have to get up early in the morning to catch the train.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The soft spring rain danced on the window as Cage admired his reflection in the glass. He congratulated himself on his good looks and then hurried downstairs to join Kristen and Jerilyn.\n\nHe found Jerilyn supervising the loading of their trunks.\n\n\"How did that one slip in?\" He gestured toward an old battered trunk as two porters carried it through the lobby. \"It doesn't match the rest of your luggage.\"\n\n\"That old thing is Kristen's inheritance from her mother.\" Jerilyn scowled. \"God only knows what's in it.\"\n\n\"Didn't she open it?\" he asked.\n\n\"No. We picked it up from her aunt yesterday, but Kristen didn't want to look inside,\" Jerilyn explained.\n\n\"Where is she?\" Cage said as he glanced around the lobby.\n\n\"Finishing breakfast. Why don't you join her?\" Jerilyn suggested, winking at him. \"I'll be through here shortly.\"\n\nCage gave the porter instructions about his own luggage and then went in search of Kristen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "The train chugged into the Estelline station, spewed smoke into the air, and screeched to a halt. During the trip, Cage had decided to go to the Jouett ranch instead of Amarillo.\n\n\"This is where we say goodbye to modern conveniences and return to nature.\" Jerilyn wrinkled her nose. \"We'll have a day's ride in a wagon and hopefully arrive at the ranch before sundown.\"\n\nA tall, handsome, dark-haired man hurried toward them. Cage saw that he only had eyes for Jerilyn.\n\n\"Reid!\" Jerilyn ran into his arms, and he swept her off her feet and kissed her soundly.\n\n\"I've missed you something terrible, woman,\" Reid said, laughing as he set her down. \"And Kris...\" His jaw dropped as he stared at Cage.\n\n\"You're not hallucinating,\" Jerilyn informed him. \"This is Cage Fielding. Cage, my husband Reid Jouett.\"\n\n\"My youngest brother.\" Kristen laughed as she tiptoed to kiss Reid's cheek.\n\n\"He looks exactly like\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm told I resemble your brother,\" Cage said, extending his hand to Reid. \"I believe his name is Morgan.\"\n\n\"That's an understatement,\" Reid exclaimed. \"A hell of an understatement.\"\n\n\"Let's go,\" Kristen said. \"I want to get home before dark. Cage, will you help Reid load our luggage onto the wagon? Cage owns a barbed wire manufacturing company. He's going to visit us to get the feel of a large Texas ranch.\"\n\n\"Cage was kind enough to show us around San Francisco and escort us wherever we needed to go,\" Jerilyn explained. \"His ultimate destination is Amarillo.\"\n\n\"We'd better get that luggage,\" Cage said. \"You won't believe how much they've brought back with them.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "\"I didn't know people still used these things,\" Cage said as he settled beside Reid on the wagon seat.\n\n\"Covered wagons are still practical in this part of the country,\" Reid explained. \"It gives the women a place to sleep at night, and it protects them from the hot sun during the day. How did you meet Jerilyn and Kristen?\"\n\n\"We were staying in the same hotel,\" Cage said. \"I kept running into them in the dining room. We exchanged pleasantries and began dining together. Then we discovered all of us were headed to Texas, so I volunteered to escort them on the train for their safety.\"\n\n\"Thank you for that,\" Reid said.\n\nThe two men talked all the way to the ranch, sharing their history and anecdotes about their lives.\n\n\"We'll be home soon,\" Reid said. \"Estelline is just over the ridge yonder.\"\n\n\"Estelline?\" Cage said, confused. \"Both the town and your ranch are named Estelline?\"\n\n\"Yes, after my great-grandmother.\"\n\nThey topped the ridge, and Reid stopped the horses. Below them, the land sloped gently into a valley. The Jouett homesite looked as if someone had plucked twenty acres of lush, green land out of Colorado and dropped them into Texas.\n\nA columned veranda ran the length of the huge, white mansion. Wooden balconies wreathed the second story of the picturesque structure, which sat in the center of the most impeccable lawn Cage had ever seen. A large barn and stables sat about a hundred yards from the house.\n\nCage admired the terraced garden behind the house. It disappeared into a thick cluster of trees that provided a windbreak on the northern ridge of the valley. A deep, lazy river ran through the garden and vanished around a bend in the valley.\n\n\"This must be what heaven looks like,\" Cage mumbled.\n\nReid chuckled. \"Don't let it fool you. It can be its own brand of hell in the summer.\"\n\nReid stopped the wagon in front of the house, and Cage helped him unload the trunks. \"Y'all go on in,\" he said. \"I'll take the wagon to the stables and tend to the horses.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\"Anyone home?\" Jerilyn yelled. \"The men must be out repairing holding pens for the roundup.\"\n\n\"Jerilyn, Kristen, you're home. Welcome back.\" An angular faced, big-boned woman entered the foyer, beaming at the two women.\n\nThey embraced and then Kristen stepped back so the woman could view Cage clearly.\n\n\"Morgan, I didn't think you'd be back at the house until after dark,\" the woman said.\n\nKristen chuckled as she introduced Cage to her sister-in-law Naomi.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you,\" Cage said with a smile.\n\n\"You two up to your stunts again?\" Naomi laughed.\n\n\"Kristen, how nice to have you back.\" An auburn-haired beauty descended the stairs. \"I'm glad to see you could tear yourself away from your cows long enough to welcome your sister home, Morgan.\"\n\n\"Hello, Gwen,\" Kristen said coolly. \"This isn't Morgan. This is Cage Fielding. Cage, our houseguest Gwen Goodnight.\"\n\n\"Is this a joke?\" Gwen said, her hands on her hips. \"If this isn't Morgan, how will you tell them apart?\"\n\n\"I have a tattoo on the back of my hand.\" Cage smirked as he held out his left hand to show her.\n\n\"So you do, Mr. Fielding.\" Gwen smiled as her green eyes held Cage's gaze. \"How classy. A naked woman.\"\n\nCage sensed an ally in the auburn-haired beauty. Although he wasn't certain what their bond would be, he knew there was an unspoken alliance between them.\n\n\"Welcome to Estelline, Mr. Fielding,\" Naomi said, recovered from her surprise. \"I'm sure you must be tired. I'll have one of the maids show you to your room.\"\n\nShe pulled a cord and a plump girl dressed in gray appeared. \"Lizzie, please show Mr. Fielding to his room.\"\n\nThe girl looked around the room slowly. \"Where is he, ma'am?\"\n\n\"I'm Cage Fielding,\" he said, stepping to her side as the girl's mouth dropped open." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Morgan smiled as the door opened and Kristen ran to engulf him in a hug. \"It's about time you came home.\"\n\n\"I've missed you so much,\" she said as she kissed his cheek. \"Did you miss me?\"\n\n\"A little,\" he teased.\n\n\"Cage, I'd like you to meet my brother Morgan Jouett,\" Kristen said, beaming.\n\nFor a moment Cage thought he was facing a mirror. He found himself staring into this own face. The wavy blond hair, the blue eyes, the sensual mouth and naturally arched eyebrows were his. Everything about Morgan Jouett was identical to Cage Fielding. He smiled to see if the image would return the gesture. Instead, it began talking.\n\n\"Reid said you looked like me. We could be identical twins,\" Morgan noted as he clasped Cage's hand in greeting. \"Reid tells me you manufacture barbed wire?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Cage croaked as he recovered from the shock of being introduced to his own image.\n\n\"Please join me in a drink to wash down the sand.\" Morgan moved toward a room that housed a massive fireplace and an equally impressive liquor cabinet. Kristen followed, with Cage on her heels.\n\n\"Yes, please,\" Cage said. \"Cognac, if you have it.\"\n\nMorgan frowned. \"I'm afraid the closest I can get is brandy.\"\n\n\"Anything but your whiskey.\" Cage laughed. \"I'm still recuperating from a glass of it.\"\n\nMorgan chuckled. \"It does bite, but I find anything else tasteless.\"\n\nMorgan crossed the room and handed Cage his drink.\n\n\"We're not a fan of barbed wire,\" he said.\n\nThe two men's eyes met, and Cage sensed an inner strength in Morgan that he lacked. Instinctively, he knew that Morgan was the kind of man who placed honor above all things. A man who would fight and die for his beliefs.\n\nCage watched as Morgan walked to the fireplace and placed his drink on the mantel. His shoulders tapered to a narrow waist and hips. The six-shooter strapped to his leg was worn like an extension of the man's body. He probably sleeps with it, Cage thought.\n\nWhile Cage was acutely aware of his good looks, Morgan Jouett seemed totally unaware of how handsome he was and the effect he had on others.\n\n\"I'm sure you're tired,\" Morgan said abruptly. \"Lizzie will take you to your room. Kristen, if you're not too tired, I'd like to speak with you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Cage thought about his quarters as he soaked in the bath Lizzie had prepared for him. He couldn't recall ever being in a bedroom so large, and even the adjoining rooms would have pleased a king. The entire suite was furnished in excellent taste. He had the feeling each piece of furniture had been carefully selected after much forethought.\n\nHe dried off and put on the only other shirt he owned. He cursed himself for not buying more clothes with the money Calloway had given him. Before he could berate himself further, someone knocked on the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" Cage called out.\n\n\"I noticed you're traveling light, so I brought you some clean clothes,\" Morgan said as he stepped into the room, his blue eyes void of the disapproval Cage expected to see.\n\n\"Well... I... thank you.\" Cage was surprised by the friendliness of the Texan.\n\n\"Six foot, aren't you?\" Morgan continued. \"Same as me. Dinner, downstairs in half an hour. Don't be late. Hassie won't like that.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Cage frowned at his reflection in the mirror. The denim britches and leather vest looked odd on him. Although Morgan Jouett wore them with the air of royalty, Cage felt out of place in them.\n\nHe opened the liquor cabinet in his room and found it well stocked with brandy and sherry but no cognac. I'll have some ordered, he thought.\n\nKristen greeted him as he entered the dining room. \"Cage! Dressed in Morgan's clothes it's almost impossible to tell you two apart.\"\n\n\"Until we open our mouths,\" Morgan said, laughing as he slipped his arm around his sister's shoulders and hugged her.\n\nKristen looked up at Morgan, returning his amused smile, and Cage realized that she adored her brother.\n\n\"Come.\" Kristen gestured for Cage to follow her. \"I want you to meet the rest of my family.\"\n\nShe introduced him to Wallace, her middle brother, and the two shook hands. \"You met his wife, Naomi, earlier. And you already know Jerilyn and Reid.\"\n\n\"And we met earlier this afternoon,\" Gwen said as she took Cage's arm and led him to the table.\n\n\"Yes.\" Cage looked down at Gwen. \"I would never forget meeting someone as beautiful as you.\"\n\n\"I'll have no problem differentiating between you and Morgan,\" Gwen muttered as she glanced at the rancher. \"He never says anything that complimentary.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "As always, things turned out to be more complicated than Cage had expected, but he was used to finagling to get his way.\n\nThe solution was simple: he would marry Kristen and become part owner of Estelline.\n\nAs he drifted into a dreamless sleep, he thought about the welcome he had received from the Jouett family. It had been unusually warm\u2014almost too good to be true." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "The sun sliced midway through the morning sky when he awoke. Cage found that someone had placed more clothes in his room. He winced as he pulled on the tight boots. He found boots uncomfortable but made up his mind to get used to them.\n\n\"Good morning.\" Gwen smiled up at him as he descended the stairs. \"I see you're a late sleeper too. Want to join me for breakfast? Everyone has gone to the holding pens.\"\n\nCage followed her onto a screened porch where a pot of coffee and cups sat on a table. \"Hassie's a mind reader,\" she said as she poured the coffee. \"So be careful what you think when she's around.\"\n\n\"Where's Kristen?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"She's with the others working on the holding pens,\" Gwen jeered. \"Playing nursemaid to Morgan's cows. All the women go with their men.\"\n\n\"Why aren't you with them?\" He sipped his coffee, wishing it were laced with cognac.\n\n\"Now, do I look like a cowpuncher?\" she asked demurely.\n\n\"No. No, you look like you belong in a world filled with social activities, the theater, afternoon bridge games, and dinner parties.\" He gazed at her intently. \"That sort of thing.\"\n\n\"You're wasting your time if you are here to court Kristen,\" Gwen mused.\n\n\"Why would you say that?\"\n\n\"Kristen simply isn't interested in men,\" she quipped. \"She'd much rather run and play with her perfect brother than converse with anyone else.\"\n\n\"Perhaps she hasn't met the right man,\" Cage said, hiding a smug smile behind his coffee cup. \"She's an exquisite woman.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is,\" Gwen snorted. \"Men traveled from miles away to court her when she turned eighteen. It's been like a revolving door here. Young bucks throw themselves at her feet, and she seems utterly bored with their attention. She'd much rather go mustang hunting or brand a calf.\"\n\n\"You make her sound like a tomboy,\" Cage said. \"In San Francisco she displayed all the social graces of a well-bred young woman.\"\n\n\"Yes, she would,\" Gwen said, her voice tinged with jealously. \"She's equally at ease hosting a dinner party or in the saddle. Still, she is twenty. She should be thinking about marriage and settling down.\"\n\n\"Well, I hope to convince her of that.\"\n\n\"You do have a distinct advantage,\" Gwen noted. \"You look like her beloved brother.\"\n\nCage chuckled. \"That's an understatement. It gives me an eerie feeling to see my face on another man.\"\n\n\"It is most disconcerting to sit across from a man who looks identical to the man I want for my husband.\" Gwen smiled seductively at him. \"You must always help me, so I don't mistake you for Morgan.\"\n\nTheir eyes locked. He stared at her for several minutes. Her auburn hair reflected the sun, and her emerald eyes held a promise of things to come.\n\n\"Just remember this,\" he muttered, calling her attention to the tattoo on the back of his left hand.\n\nShe caught his wrist in her cool, soft hands and inspected the tattoo closely. He could smell the sweet scent of her hair.\n\n\"You should keep that covered,\" she said. \"No woman welcomes a man with the tattoo of a naked woman on his hand.\"\n\nShe stood suddenly. \"Would you like a tour of the ranch?\" she asked. \"I know several beautiful, secluded places you might enjoy.\"\n\n\"I'd like that,\" Cage replied. He realized Gwen was dangerous, but she held an overpowering attraction for him.\n\n\"Give me a few minutes to change into something more suitable for riding, and I'll be ready.\" She disappeared up the stairs.\n\nGwen took longer than he'd expected. She had tied her hair back with a pale-yellow ribbon and changed into a clinging yellow blouse, tucked into the waist of her dark-brown riding britches. The outfit accentuated her voluptuous figure, and she knew it. Cage was glad Hassie wasn't around to read his mind.\n\nGwen held out a basket. \"A picnic lunch.\" She smiled sweetly. \"I want to show you my favorite spot on our river. It's a good distance, and we'll be starved by the time we get there.\"\n\nThe cool spring day felt delightful. They let the horses set their own pace. He was surprised to find she was an excellent rider.\n\nGwen was the first to broach the subject both were thinking about. \"We could help each other,\" she said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"You obviously want to marry Kristen, and it's no secret that I want to be Mrs. Morgan Jouett,\" Gwen said. \"We can help each other achieve our goal. Of course, we'd both be in the race once we're married.\"\n\n\"Race?\" Cage furrowed his brow. \"I'm afraid I don't follow you. What race?\"\n\n\"Nelson Jouett's will.\" Gwen huffed. \"The crazy old coot owned half of Texas, but instead of dividing the ranch among his offspring, his will stipulates that the firstborn son will be the sole heir of Estelline, and everyone else must leave.\n\n\"The old man's will states that all of the Jouett properties and assets shall go to the first one of his children to produce a male heir, and that the rest of the siblings must leave the ranch within one year of the boy's birth.\"\n\n\"In other words, the heir gets everything, and everyone else is left out in the cold,\" Cage reiterated. \"Rather a hard bargain for the losers.\"\n\n\"Nelson didn't want the property split up into smaller ranches. And he didn't believe in more than one family living under one roof.\"\n\nCage shook his head. \"Since Morgan is the oldest, I'm surprised he hasn't married and produced a son to hang onto the ranch.\"\n\n\"He's too busy making the ranch the best in Texas,\" Gwen said, her voice laced with bitterness. \"He has no time for courting. I've chased Morgan shamelessly. He is the most handsome man I've ever seen. He's everything a man should be. Good, honest, trustworthy, kind, strong, honorable, and all those other adjectives people use to tell you how wonderful he is.\n\n\"For two years I've schemed and plotted to marry him, and he doesn't even know I'm alive.\"\n\nThey rode in silence. Cage found it difficult to believe that Morgan could be so indifferent to the sensuous woman riding beside him. He raised his head when he heard a distant roar. \"What's that?\"\n\n\"The waterfall,\" she said. \"You'll love it.\"\n\nThe river was as beautiful as Gwen had promised. Cage pulled the quilt from her saddle bag and spread it on the ground.\n\nGwen pulled fresh bread and cheese along with fried chicken from the bag then produced a bottle of wine as she talked about her father the state judge.\n\nShe asked Cage about San Francisco. \"How do you like Texas compared to California?\"\n\n\"The women in California are not nearly so beautiful.\" Cage flattered.\n\nCage gleaned all the information he could about Estelline and the Jouett family. They finished their meal and continued talking.\n\n\"You were right.\" Cage leaned back against a tree. \"I was starved but I shouldn't have eaten so much. I feel as if I could sleep for a week now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "A squirrel scurrying across his leg jerked Cage awake.\n\nGwen was sleeping on her back, her full, red lips parted slightly. She was beautiful, but even sleep couldn't erase the frown on her lovely face.\n\nCage pitied her. Although he'd never experienced it, he could imagine nothing as frustrating as unrequited love. He leaned down and kissed her gently. Gwen slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him to her. He realized she had not been asleep after all.\n\nAcross the river Morgan leaned on the pommel of his saddle and watched them. Perhaps they'll marry each other, he thought. Cage really should make an honest woman of her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Morgan burst into the room with Kristen behind him. \"Hassie, where do you want these supplies?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just put them on the cabinet.\" The old cook smiled at Kristen as her favorite stole a cookie from the pan she had just removed from the oven.\n\n\"Where are Lizzie and Emma?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"It's easier to do the work myself than to chase them down,\" Hassie said with a sigh.\n\nMorgan glanced at Kristen. As if she had read her brother's mind, she left the room and returned quickly with the two teenage girls.\n\n\"Lizzie and Emma,\" Kristen said sternly, \"if I ever come in here again and find Hassie doing all the work while you chase after the stable boys, I'll have your hides. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" the girls said in unison.\n\nKristen removed two necklaces from her pocket, gold lockets dangling from dainty golden chains. \"I bought these for you to wear to the dance tonight\"\u2014the girls squealed with delight\u2014\"but I'm going to give them to Hassie.\"\n\nThe girls' shrieks turned to groans.\n\n\"It'll be up to Hassie to decide whether or not you deserve them. Now get to your chores. We've got company coming.\"\n\nThe girls dashed out of the room and up the stairs, eager to finish their assigned chores and convince Hassie that they deserved the beautiful lockets.\n\n\"Miss Kristen, you spoil those girls,\" Hassie said.\n\nKristen hugged the old woman affectionately. \"Not really, Hassie. I remember what it's like to be alone with no one to care whether you live or die.\"\n\n\"They're not completely alone.\"\n\n\"No, but that old drunk they have for a father doesn't care about anything except where the next drink comes from.\" She stole another cookie from the baking sheet.\n\n\"Get out of here,\" Hassie muttered, swatting her playfully. \"You're as bad as them.\"\n\nKristen scurried away from her. \"Oh, I almost forgot. I've got something for you too. Not that you deserve it,\" she teased as she ran out the door.\n\nHassie's eyes opened wide when Kristen returned with a large box.\n\n\"A new dress.\" Hassie grinned, holding the soft silk material up to her. \"Oh, Miss Kristen, you...\" Her eyes filled with tears. \"You're so good.\"\n\n\"Morgan gets some of the credit,\" Kristen admitted. \"He selected it.\"\n\nAs Hassie admired the gift, Morgan strode in with another armful of supplies. \"Just the right color,\" he said with a smile. \"Brings out those flecks of gold in your eyes.\"\n\nHassie turned away and busied herself with another pan of cookies. She didn't want them to see the tears that streamed down her cheeks. They were so dear to her. She couldn't bear the thought of life at Estelline without them. Their father's will hung over the ranch like a black cloud, for she knew neither Morgan nor Kristen would inherit their home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Cage could not recall ever seeing so many people in one place, and buggies were still flowing into the stable yard.\n\n\"They'll party until they pass out tonight,\" Morgan said, handing Cage a drink. \"Then work like hell for the next two months.\"\n\n\"Do you always make a celebration out of the roundup?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"Uh-huh,\" Morgan mumbled, his mind drifting elsewhere.\n\n\"Where's Kristen?\" Cage sipped his drink. \"Hey, cognac. Where'd you get this?\"\n\n\"Ordered it. Two cases. Figured that would hold you until the next supply run.\"\n\n\"I appreciate it, old man.\" Cage noticed Morgan wasn't listening to him. He looked in the direction Morgan was gazing and caught his breath at the sight of Kristen.\n\nShe looked more beautiful than ever. Her low-cut dress revealed creamy white skin. Her long blonde hair fell loosely around her shoulders. Her easy smile was for a dark-haired man in a white suit who fidgeted as he talked with her. Kristen put her arm through the man's and led him toward them.\n\n\"You two are causing quite an uproar,\" she said to Cage and Morgan. \"Everyone's trying to guess who's who.\"\n\nThe man with her laughed nervously. \"Well, now I don't feel so foolish.\"\n\nKristen introduced Cage to Judson Enlow and waited while the men shook hands. \"Jud owns the ranch adjoining ours.\"\n\n\"You've got to be a cousin or a long-lost twin,\" Jud noted.\n\n\"No, we're not related at all.\" Cage smiled. \"Yet.\"\n\nKristen's blue eyes sparked momentarily, and then she laughed.\n\n\"How do you tell them apart?\" Jud asked her.\n\n\"It's easy.\" Kristen looked into Morgan's laughing blue eyes. Her lips curved into a smile, as if they shared a private joke. \"Cage has a tattoo on the back of his left hand.\"\n\n\"So, if Cage and I keep our left hands in our pockets,\" Morgan teased, \"you won't know which is which?\"\n\n\"What do you think, big brother?\" Kristen chided him.\n\nThe screech of a bow sliding across fiddle strings filled the night. \"The band is ready to start,\" Morgan said as he handed his glass to Cage. \"Excuse us. It's tradition that Kristen and I kick off the first dance.\"\n\nGwen joined Cage as he watched Morgan swing Kristen onto the slick, wooden dance floor that had been constructed for the barbeque. He found himself marveling at the graceful way they moved together. Each seemed to be an extension of the other. He turned to Gwen. \"They dance beautifully,\" he declared.\n\n\"They should,\" she sniped, rolling her eyes. \"They rarely dance with anyone else.\"\n\nCage downed his cognac and handed the two glasses to Jud. \"Let's join them,\" he said to Gwen, smiling as he led her onto the dance floor. Others followed, and soon the floor was filled with dancers.\n\nGwen was a good dancer. As the band slowed to a waltz, Cage watched Morgan and Kristen glide across the floor, her body molded to her brother's. Her head rested on his shoulder.\n\nCage stepped toward them, catching Morgan by the shoulder. \"I thought you might like to dance with your guest,\" he said.\n\nMorgan released Kristen. \"Love to.\" He wheeled away with Gwen.\n\nKristen was an excellent partner. She was more relaxed than she had been in San Francisco. She seemed to anticipate his every move. Cage realized it was the way she danced close to her partner that allowed her to flow gracefully with him.\n\nHe had never held her so close, and it affected him like too much cognac. He felt as if he were floating in her arms.\n\nThe music stopped, and she drew away from him instantly. \"I think I'll get some punch,\" she said.\n\nCage spent the rest of the night being mistaken for Morgan. Men asked his opinion of the new barbed wire fencing that was closing off the open range. Women openly flirted with him, and children showed him horned toads they had caught.\n\n\"I'm not sure I know who I am,\" he said as he steered Kristen away from the noisy merrymakers toward the cool garden at the back of the house.\n\n\"Your brother is a hit with the ladies and the children.\" Cage grinned. \"So far I've received three serious propositions and met twenty-two horned toads, thirteen lizards, and two snakes.\"\n\nKristen laughed out loud at his description of the menagerie that had been paraded before him. \"Tomorrow they'll be up at dawn ready to work fourteen-hour days,\" she said, \"but tonight... tonight they're free and happy.\"\n\n\"Are you happy, Kristen?\" he asked quietly.\n\n\"Yes, I am.\" She looked up at him. \"I'm very happy Cage.\"\n\nHe pulled her into his arms and kissed her gently. She was cold as ice. She neither responded to him nor pushed him away. Frustration welled inside of him. At first it had been a game, a battle of wills. But he knew he had lost.\n\n\"I'm not playing games anymore, Kristen,\" he said hoarsely as he released her. \"I've fallen in love with you. But if you want me to leave, I will.\"\n\nShe stood silent for a long time, her head bowed. \"Please don't go, Cage,\" she finally said, and that was enough. It was more than he'd hoped for.\n\nHe exhaled slowly and took her arm. \"We'd better get back.\"\n\n\"I... you go ahead,\" she whispered. \"I'd like to be alone to think.\"\n\n\"Kristen, I know there has been someone else.\" Cage chose his words carefully. \"I know it takes time to get over a love. I'll wait.\" He walked briskly from the garden.\n\nKristen leaned back against the trunk of a tree, hidden by the overhanging branches. Her heart stilled as footsteps approached.\n\n\"Kristen. Kristen?\" He called her name again as he ducked under the tree to face her.\n\nShe couldn't see his face, but she knew it from memory. Every line of it was etched permanently on her heart. His clean scent assailed her senses. As always, she felt weak and vulnerable when he was near her.\n\nHe kissed her softly, gently. He was amazed by the way she clung to him, pressing her body against him. He pulled back a little and then enfolded her in his arms as he captured her lips again.\n\n\"How long?\" Kristen whispered. \"How long must I wait for you?\"\n\nHe held her close, pressing her head against his chest. \"Hush, little one,\" he murmured.\n\n\"You love me,\" she whispered, her voice thick with passion. \"I know you do. It's right. When two people love each other as we do, it's right.\"\n\nHe called her name, his lips lost in her hair. \"I have never loved anything or anyone as much as I love you. But what about this Cage Fielding you've dragged to the ranch?\"\n\n\"He's a fool,\" she snarled. \"A fortune hunter.\"\n\n\"You don't think he loves you?\"\n\n\"Not at all,\" she said, the lie slipping out with ease. \"At least not like you do. He would gladly possess my body and the ranch. But to care for me, to love me as you do... he's too self-centered for that.\"\n\n\"Little one, when I hold you like this, believe me, it's not for you. It's because I'm too weak to stay away from you.\"\n\n\"Then I'm glad,\" she said. \"I only wish you were weaker.\" She held him at arm's length. \"I love you so.\"\n\nHis strong arms wrapped around her, holding her, driving her crazy. His kiss, urgent and demanding, engulfed her. She knew he wanted her as much as she wanted him. She cursed him for being so stubborn, so honorable. He released her.\n\nKristen listened as his footsteps died away. Then she strolled back to the party. Jud almost knocked her down as she turned the corner.\n\n\"Kristen! I was about to come looking for you,\" he said.\n\n\"I was catching my breath.\" She smiled.\n\n\"There you are,\" Morgan said as he appeared out of nowhere. He caught her hand. \"Have you been running? Your face is flushed. Say, Jud, have you embarrassed my little sister?\" He winked as Jud stuttered a reply.\n\n\"Come on.\" Morgan pulled Kristen to the center of the floor. \"It's a Paul Jones.\"\n\n\"Ladies to the left. Gents to the right,\" the caller yelled as the band played a breakdown." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Cage found himself dancing with Naomi, then Jerilyn and Gwen. Before the dance ended, he'd circled the floor with every woman there. Young, old, skinny or fat, all of them were having the time of their life.\n\n\"Yahoo!\" a giant of a man roared. \"I'm Shanghai Jones, and I can whip any man alive.\"\n\nReid laughed. \"Uh-oh! Our foreman's had too much firewater.\"\n\n\"I got a twenty-dollar gold piece says I can whip any man here,\" Shanghai bellowed, slapping the coin onto a table.\n\nThe men began daring one another to fight the big Texan. Five tough cowboys accepted Shanghai's challenge, placing their bets beside his. In quick order, he tossed them aside and collected their gold pieces.\n\n\"How about you, Cage?\" Reid said, laughing as if he'd made a funny joke.\n\n\"I may as well be knocked out as the next fellow.\" Cage took their teasing in stride. He'd watched Shanghai, and lessons he'd learned during his brief career as a pugilist made him think he could outmaneuver the bigger man. He tossed his coin onto the table.\n\nKristen placed a restraining hand on his arm. \"Cage, don't let them goad you into fighting Shanghai.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" he assured her. \"I can handle him.\"\n\n\"Morgan?\" Shanghai roared as Cage squared off with him. \"Are you crazy?\"\n\n\"It's Cage,\" Reid yelled.\n\n\"Well, that's different!\" Howling with laughter, the foreman lunged at Cage.\n\nCage sidestepped the charge and hit Shanghai hard across the side of his face.\n\nShanghai staggered to a stop. Snorting like a bull, he turned and sized up Cage. The two men danced in a tight circle, each waiting for the other to drop his guard.\n\nCage dodged the Texan's flying fists and jabbed at his face with swift, lethal punches. Blood spurted from a jagged cut above Shanghai's eye. He swung blindly at Cage as the smaller man danced around him, jabbing, stinging, and wearing the giant down.\n\nShanghai bellowed like a wounded animal and charged his opponent. Cage sidestepped again, clasped his hands together, and brought them down with all his strength on the back of Shanghai's neck.\n\nGroaning, Shanghai crumbled to the ground and lay still.\n\n\"He never laid a hand on you,\" Wallace Jouett said in disbelief.\n\nReid stared at Cage in wide-eyed amazement. \"Nobody's ever whipped Shanghai. Can you teach me to fight like that?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Cage said with a smile. He realized it was the first time a member of the Jouett family had asked anything of him.\n\n\"Looks like he's more of a man than you thought,\" Morgan said to Kristen. \"You gotta give him credit.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Cage found the family treated him with new respect after the fight. Kristen's brothers invited him to join them in their daily routine and nighttime poker games in the bunkhouse.\n\n\"We start branding today,\" Morgan noted, refilling his coffee cup as Lizzie and Emma cleared away the breakfast dishes. \"Why don't you ride out to the camp with us, Cage?\"\n\n\"Thanks. I'd like that,\" Cage said.\n\n\"Better take a change of clothes,\" Kristen advised. \"We'll be spending a couple of nights.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "The men around the chuck wagon greeted Cage enthusiastically. He was amazed at how much emphasis they placed on physical abilities. His defeat of Shanghai was the main topic of conversation.\n\nSilence fell over the men as Shanghai thundered into camp. \"Back to work!\" he bellowed before his horse slowed its pace. He dismounted amid a cloud of dry, red dust.\n\n\"Morgan, we've got thousands of those Kansas critters this year.\" Shanghai cut a plug of tobacco and offered it to Cage.\n\nCage knew it was a peace offering and accepted it with gratitude, even though he didn't chew. \"Thanks.\"\n\n\"You're a damn good fighter,\" Shanghai said, spitting on the ground before turning back to Morgan.\n\n\"We gotta do something about them Kansas cows,\" Shanghai declared. \"Their number increases every year. With them damn fools fencing off the grass and water supply, the open-range cattle are just naturally heading south during the winter.\n\n\"Don't seem right for us to feed 'em all winter and round 'em up in the spring. All their owners do is drive 'em the few miles to the railhead and collect their money. Besides, it takes more men than I can spare to cut 'em out of our herd and keep 'em separated.\"\n\nMorgan frowned. \"Shanghai, we've always done it that way. You know how I hate barbed wire. It's the devil's wire. You know C. L. Sloan lost his entire herd last year to screwworms caused by scratches and cuts from the barbed wire.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Shanghai said, \"but times are changing.\"\n\nKristen took Cage's arm. \"Come on. I'll show you the branding pens.\" They headed away from the others. \"Each rancher represented here has his own pens and branding crew,\" she explained. \"When we find a cow with a calf, we run the calf into the pen that corresponds to the mother's brand. This is Jud Enlow's cattle.\"\n\nKristen pulled her bandana over her nose. \"Keeps the dust out,\" she shouted as men drove a small herd of calves past them.\n\n\"After we brand a calf, we put it and its mother in the rancher's holding pen,\" she continued. \"Then they drive them all to the railhead in Estelline Town for shipment.\"\n\n\"It sounds easy,\" Cage said, \"but it certainly looks difficult.\"\n\n\"Just hard work,\" Kristen said matter-of-factly.\n\n\"Where do I start?\" he asked.\n\n\"What?\" She seemed surprised at his question.\n\n\"Where do I start?\" He smiled as Jud, Shanghai, and Morgan rode toward them. \"I should do something to earn my keep.\"\n\n\"Shanghai,\" Kristen called out, \"Cage wants to help.\"\n\nThe burly foreman frowned. \"Under one condition.\" He removed a dirty, red bandana from around his neck and handed it to Cage. \"You gotta wear this all the time so I can tell you and Morgan apart.\"\n\nCage nodded and then tied the scarf around his neck." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "When Cage awoke the next morning, he was almost too stiff to move. His muscles screamed in protest as he forced himself to walk without limping.\n\n\"How do you feel this morning?\" Morgan said, his amused smile reinforcing Cage's resolution to stick it out.\n\n\"Fine,\" he retorted, pouring himself a cup of coffee.\n\n\"Aren't you terribly sore?\" Kristen asked him.\n\n\"A little,\" Cage admitted, \"but it'll go away.\"\n\nKristen finished her breakfast and pushed back from the table. \"I'm taking the horses to the river.\"\n\n\"I'll go with you,\" Cage volunteered.\n\n\"You haven't had breakfast,\" she argued.\n\n\"I'm not hungry.\" He took the lead ropes of four horses and followed her to the river." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "\"The water looks cool,\" Cage said as they watched the horses drink. He longed to submerge his aching body in the lazy river.\n\n\"It is. The Old Canadian is cold as ice. It makes me shudder just thinking about it.\n\n\"When I was sixteen, Morgan threw me in. I kept pestering him to go swimming, and he told me it was too cold, but you know teenagers. He tired of my whining and decided it was easier to show me than to tell me. I was chilled for a week.\"\n\nKristen laughed softly. \"I kept hoping I'd get pneumonia just so he would feel sorry for being so mean to me.\"\n\nCage smiled. \"You would.\"\n\n\"What do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"Oh, just that you would do something like that\u2014hurt yourself\u2014to get even.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"You don't have a very high opinion of me, do you?\"\n\n\"Quite the contrary. I admire a woman who gets what she wants.\"\n\n\"I'm glad,\" Kristen huffed. \"Because I always get what I want.\"\n\nBefore I'm through, Cage thought, you'll want me.\n\nShe pulled on the lead rope of her four horses and headed back to the camp. Cage did the same.\n\n\"Where's Kristen?\" Morgan asked when Cage joined him.\n\n\"Putting the horses in the pen.\"\n\n\"The boys have spotted a herd of mustangs,\" Morgan informed him. \"I want her to see them.\"\n\n\"Here she comes now,\" Cage pointed out as Kristen sprinted toward them.\n\n\"The boys said you found the blacks,\" she exclaimed breathlessly as she mounted the fresh horse her brother had saddled for her.\n\nMorgan nodded. \"In the canyon.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "As they topped the rim of the canyon, two identical black horses raised their heads, sniffing the air. Their pointed ears twitched, trying to detect any sign of danger. A hundred yards behind them, a herd of wild horses grazed peacefully.\n\n\"I want that stallion, Morgan,\" Kristen whispered. \"He's the most magnificent animal I've ever seen.\"\n\nThey watched as the cowboys rode toward the herd. The stallion screamed a warning to the other horses and plunged up the canyon. The black mare was right beside him, matching him stride for stride.\n\nCage watched, awed by the beauty of the two animals as they easily outdistanced the herd. The stallion wheeled, pawed the air, and screamed again, urging the band to run faster.\n\nMorgan broke the silence. \"They got away.\"\n\n\"You could catch them if you wanted to,\" Kristen challenged him.\n\n\"Little sister, I have work to do.\"\n\n\"Please, Morgan?\" she pleaded, her eyes locked on his.\n\nMorgan looked away as if it were difficult to refuse her request. \"I'll try.\"\n\nA hint of a smile crossed Kristen's lips, and Cage knew she had imposed her will on her brother." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "As the rising sun's purple hues mingled with the remaining darkness, Morgan led the black mare into camp. His handsome face was drawn with fatigue, but his joy at capturing his prize added a lilt to his gait as he strode to the wagon where his sister slept.\n\n\"Kristen. Kristen, are you awake?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I've caught her, Kristen. Come see her.\"\n\nKristen secured the last button on her blouse as she jumped from the back of the wagon.\n\n\"Oh Morgan,\" she whispered, her blue eyes twinkling. \"Morgan, she is beautiful, just beautiful.\"\n\n\"Look, fellows,\" Jud Enlow called out. \"Morgan caught the black mare.\"\n\nThe men gathered around, checking the mare, admiring the mare. \"How old you reckon she is?\" Shanghai said as he joined the group of admirers.\n\n\"She's two,\" Kristen replied. \"We've been watching her and her brother for two years. They're twins.\"\n\n\"How'd you catch her, Morgan?\" Jud asked.\n\n\"It wasn't easy,\" Morgan said with a chuckle. \"I'm going to put her in the empty round pen and get some sleep.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "That evening the men encircled the split-rail corral as Shanghai prepared to mount the black. \"Ain't no horse I can't ride,\" he boasted.\n\n\"Well, stop bragging and get to riding,\" Morgan said, holding the hackamore tightly and digging his heels into the dirt as the mare tried to pull away.\n\nMoving faster than Cage believed possible for a man his size, Shanghai bolted into the saddle. The mare trumpeted a shrill whistle and leaped into the air, spinning around like a top.\n\n\"Hold on to her,\" Morgan yelled as the men cheered for Shanghai.\n\nAfter several minutes of jumping and twisting, the mare's thrashing subsided, and she seemed to accept the foreign object on her back. Within an hour, Shanghai was riding her peacefully around the corral.\n\nShe snorted and shied away from Morgan as he removed the saddle and walked her quietly to the side of the pen. From her perch on the top rail of the fence, Kristen applauded the men.\n\n\"She'll make you a good horse,\" she said, smiling down at her brother.\n\n\"Me? I caught her for you,\" Morgan declared.\n\n\"I want the stallion.\"\n\nMorgan groaned. \"Well, you'll just have to settle for her. I'm too tired to spend another night chasing a horse all over the range.\"\n\n\"Then I'll catch him myself,\" she huffed.\n\n\"They're identical twins, Kristen. Why can't you settle for anything less than what you want?\n\n\"Have you ever seen a woman so headstrong?\" Morgan growled at the men as he stomped toward his wagon.\n\nCage started to follow Kristen, but morning came early, and his body was begging for rest. He fell asleep as soon as his head hit his bedroll." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Kristen skipped stones across the river, watching the ripples sparkle in the moonlight.\n\nHe walked to her side and took her small hand in his. She remained motionless, content to be alone with him.\n\n\"I think your friend is going to make it,\" he commented.\n\n\"Maybe.\" She shrugged.\n\nA fish jumped out of the water, glinted in the moonlight, and then disappeared.\n\n\"Are you tired?\" she asked, linking her arm through his as they walked along the river, away from camp.\n\n\"A little, but never too tired to be with you.\"\n\n\"Let's sit then.\" She led him to a nearby oak tree, and they settled beneath its branches. He propped himself against the trunk and closed his eyes.\n\n\"I think I'd die if I had to leave this place.\" She leaned against him. \"I'd die if I had to give up Estelline and you.\"\n\nHe put his arm around her and cradled her against his chest. \"I know, and I'd die if we couldn't share moments like these.\"\n\n\"Would you really?\"\n\n\"Need you ask?\" He kissed her softly, as if she were fragile. \"I love you, Kristen. I love your flashing blue eyes, your silky blonde hair, and your little nose,\" he whispered, planting a kiss on the tip of it. \"Your dimples, your soft lips...\"\n\nShe strained against him, kissing him eagerly. She loved the feel of strong arms around her, his body against hers. A raging inferno threatened to consume her. Nothing mattered but him.\n\n\"Please,\" she whispered, unfastening the top button on his shirt.\n\n\"No!\" He pulled away from her.\n\n\"You don't love me,\" she hissed. \"You couldn't possibly love me and maintain such... such self-control.\"\n\n\"That's exactly why I can maintain my self-control. I love you and you know it. You know this is wrong. Please help me.\"\n\nShe repented immediately. \"I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything I said. It's just that I want you so badly.\"\n\n\"I know, little one.\" He stroked her hair. \"I understand. I share your misery.\"\n\n\"You always do.\" She kissed him slowly. \"I've loved you from the moment I first saw you. Did you love me the first time you saw me?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"No. When you first came here you were so skinny and shy. You reminded me of a frightened rabbit. I only wanted to protect you.\"\n\n\"When did you fall in love with me?\" She knew the answer but wanted to hear him relate his love for her. \"Was it the first time you kissed me?\"\n\n\"Long before that,\" he whispered. \"I watched you mature and become a woman almost overnight. You blossomed like a rose. Slowly at first, then suddenly you were in full bloom. You won everyone's heart with your gaiety and kindness. The young blades wasted no time beating a path to your door. I was surprised when you refused them, ignoring them in favor of me.\"\n\n\"Because I love you,\" she said, snuggling into him. \"I had no time for their foolishness. I only wanted you. I ache for you.\"\n\n\"And you always get what you want!\" He held her tighter. She aroused a feeling in him no woman had ever awakened. Every time he touched her he was awed by the quick, passionate way she responded.\n\nHe found himself striving to be gentle with her. He knew how she trusted and adored him. He would rather die than hurt her.\n\n\"We should return to the campsite,\" he muttered against her lips. \"Sunrise comes early.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "The sound of voices outside her wagon woke her. For an instant Kristen didn't know where she was. Then she remembered she had fallen asleep in his arms. She recalled how safe she felt nestled against him, wrapped in his arms and listening to him talk. His soft southern drawl had lulled her to sleep. She still wore yesterday's clothes. He must have carried her to the wagon.\n\n\"Kristen,\" Morgan yelled. \"Come here quickly!\"\n\nThe shrill scream of a horse cut through the early morning air.\n\n\"Hold him! Hold him!\" Morgan commanded. \"Kristen, come here!\"\n\nShe smoothed her hair, hastily tying it back with a ribbon.\n\n\"Kristen!\" Morgan yelled again.\n\nShe jumped from the wagon as the black stallion trumpeted and fought the air, striking out at the men trying to restrain him with their pitiful ropes.\n\n\"Oh Morgan! You did it. You caught him for me.\" Kristen beamed as she danced around the corral.\n\nMorgan laughed out loud, delighted by his sister's obvious happiness.\n\n\"But how?\"\n\n\"I knew he would try to free her,\" Morgan explained. \"When animals are close, one will follow the other.\"\n\nThe black shook off his captors and raced wildly around the pen as the cowboys tried to regain their hold on the ropes dragging behind the animal.\n\n\"So, I sat up all night waiting for him to come,\" Morgan continued. \"About three this morning, after everyone was asleep, he ventured into camp.\"\n\n\"You were up all night?\" she asked slowly. \"Here?\"\n\n\"Yes. It's surprising what one learns from watching others when they're supposed to be asleep.\" He shot her a wry smile.\n\nKristen looked away, avoiding the questions in his haunting blue eyes.\n\n\"Let me break him?\" Jud said, grinning, his handsome face full of enthusiasm. \"Shanghai's not the only bronc buster around here.\"\n\n\"Give Jud a chance,\" Morgan instructed the cowboys who were holding the stallion.\n\nCage joined them as Jud opened the corral gate.\n\n\"They can't even get a saddle on him,\" Kristen said, unable to contain her excitement. \"Oh Morgan, I told you he's a fighter. Just look at him. He's magnificent.\"\n\nMorgan and Shanghai eased into the corral to still the fighting stallion while the men saddled him. Kristen linked her arm through Cage's and pulled him close. \"Isn't he gorgeous?\" she asked breathlessly.\n\nCage looked down at the woman hugging his arm between her breasts. He had never seen a woman so full of life, so vivacious. It was exciting to be with her. Her love of life was contagious. A man could be everything he should be for a woman like Kristen Jouett.\n\nCage was pulled from his thoughts as the wranglers yelled at each other to hold the horse. Jud jumped into the saddle. The black's shrill scream faded as it leaped into the air, all four hooves leaving the ground.\n\nCage could see Jud's body jar as the horse hit the ground, twisting right and left in an attempt to rid itself of its unwanted passenger.\n\nThe stallion arched its neck and seemed to stand on its head, its hind legs kicking high into the air, sending Jud flying over its ears.\n\nThe young rancher hit the ground hard. Stunned, he shook his head as the raging stallion bared its teeth and charged him.\n\n\"Roll, Jud. Roll!\" Morgan screamed as the stallion's hooves tore at the ground where Jud had lain seconds earlier.\n\nMorgan leaped from the corral rail where he'd been sitting. A lasso shot from his hand, and he roped the stallion as it reared over Jud.\n\nAs the horse brought down its sharp hooves to kill Jud, Morgan jerked the rope with all his might. It snapped taut, yanking the unsuspecting animal off balance and sending it crashing to the ground.\n\n\"Damn, he broke its neck,\" Cage grumbled.\n\nKristen's grip on Cage's arm tightened, and he realized he'd forgotten she was there. His mind was on the struggle taking place between the horse and the man. Both were magnificent specimens of their species.\n\nMorgan threw Jud over his shoulder and ran for the gate. The stunned horse rose slowly as the men put the safety of the corral fence between them and the stallion.\n\n\"He's a killer,\" Shanghai bellowed. \"If it hadn't been for you, Jud would be dead right now.\"\n\nMorgan slid Jud off his shoulder, steadying him as the young rancher regained his senses.\n\n\"Are you alright?\" Morgan asked, his face dark with concern.\n\n\"Yes, I think so,\" Jud said, somehow managing a weak laugh. \"Guess I'll leave the bronc bustin' to you and Shanghai.\"\n\n\"Not today,\" Morgan muttered. \"Get the saddle off him. We've got work to do.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "By the time the men returned to camp, they had made bets on whether Shanghai could break the stallion. Shanghai lasted longer than Jud, but in the end, the black stood unbroken while the foreman nursed his pride.\n\n\"It's enough to make a man feel old,\" Shanghai grumbled. \"First a sweet-smelling dude whips me in a fistfight, and then a good-for-nothing critter cracks open the earth with me.\"\n\nAlthough many tried, no one could stay on the black. The branding was finished, and the stallion was still untamed and as wild as when Morgan had first captured him.\n\nThey led the horse back to the ranch with a rider on each side of him, holding the ropes taut lest the stallion get enough slack to fight. They turned him loose in the large corral at the front of the barn. Kristen insisted on putting the mare in the small corral next to him. They stood at the fence and nuzzled each other, whinnying softly. For the first time, the stallion stopped pacing around his pen.\n\nThe Jouett women ran to meet their husbands. Gwen lagged behind them, as Morgan and Kristen stood admiring the two jet-black horses.\n\n\"He's beautiful,\" Gwen exclaimed. \"I suppose he's yours.\"\n\n\"No,\" Morgan said, casually gesturing toward the mare. \"She's mine.\"\n\nGwen studied the stunning animals. \"They're identical.\"\n\n\"They're twins.\"\n\n\"Then he's mine,\" Gwen declared. \"I want him, Morgan.\"\n\nFire sparked in Kirsten's blue eyes as she met her brother's gaze.\n\n\"He belongs to Kristen,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"Doesn't everything?\" Gwen rasped, before storming toward the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Cage slowly submerged his body in the tub of hot water. He had never realized what a luxury a bath was until this instant. He closed his eyes, letting the warmth of clean, soapy water caress his aching muscles. His thoughts went to Kristen Jouett.\n\nHe'd made up his mind to ask her to marry him. He couldn't waste another minute. If he was to be owner of the vast cattle empire, he must father a son.\n\nHe poured another glass of cognac and drank it as he dressed. It was reassuring to find something civilized in this pagan part of the world. He sipped the bitter liquid, savoring the taste. He admired his image in the mirror one more time and headed downstairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "\"Father will arrive tomorrow,\" Gwen informed Morgan as they walked to the dining room. \"He'll need to stay a couple of months while he holds court in Hall County. Is that agreeable with you?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Morgan assured her. \"You and the judge are always welcome in my home.\"\n\n\"I appreciate the kindness you have extended me,\" Gwen said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. \"My father thinks highly of you. He felt safe leaving me in your care while he traveled the state to hold court. He knew you would treat me like a lady and defend my chastity and virtue.\"\n\n\"I believe I have done that,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"Yes, you have certainly behaved like a gentleman,\" Gwen agreed.\n\nHassie rang the dinner bell, and the entire house came alive with scurrying feet as the hungry ranchers headed for the dining room. Morgan offered Gwen his arm and escorted her to the table." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Cage walked into the dark barn. \"Kristen? Kristen, are you in here?\"\n\n\"Right here,\" she said. Her sudden appearance at his side startled Cage. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Hassie sent me to tell you dinner is ready.\"\n\n\"I'll be finished in a few minutes,\" she said. \"I want to feed Osiris and Isis a scoop of oats.\"\n\n\"Osiris and Isis. Interesting. You've named the twin blacks after Egyptian gods?\"\n\n\"How did you know?\"\n\n\"You don't have exclusive rights to Egyptian mythology,\" he chuckled. \"Let me see if I can recall their story. Osiris was the chief deity of Egypt, the god of gods, right?\"\n\nShe nodded as an easy smile lit her beautiful face.\n\n\"And Isis was queen of the heavens,\" he continued.\n\n\"And Osiris's wife,\" Kristen added.\n\n\"Ah, but that's where the trouble started. She was also his sister.\"\n\nKristen laughed. \"Yes, because gods had to marry goddesses worthy of them.\"\n\n\"They're lucky they lived then and not now,\" Cage pointed out. \"Now there are laws against that sort of thing, you know.\"\n\n\"Gods are above the laws made by mere mortals.\" She giggled as she picked up a bucket and headed for the oat bin.\n\n\"Let me.\" Cage took the bucket and scooped it full of oats. He followed Kristen to the corral and handed her the bucket after she climbed the first two rails of fence.\n\n\"Come here, Osiris. Come on, big fellow,\" Kristen called out to the stallion.\n\nOsiris snorted and shook his head, tossing his thick mane from side to side.\n\n\"That's a good boy,\" Kristen said softly, coaxing the stallion as he inched toward her. \"Come on. No one's going to hurt you.\"\n\nOsiris pawed the ground as if fighting the urge to move closer to the woman. He advanced close enough for Kristen to touch him, but she didn't. His nostrils flared as he caught the scent of the blonde.\n\n\"Come on, Osiris. You've got to eat.\" His small ears stood erect at the sound of Kristen's soft, encouraging voice.\n\nShe held the bucket as he moved closer, his perfectly shaped head held high. Cautiously, he nuzzled the bucket. Kristen remained motionless until the horse had eaten the last oat.\n\n\"A killer,\" she muttered in disgust. \"You're just scared, aren't you?\"\n\nThe mare cried out, breaking the stillness of the night. Osiris whirled away and pawed the air as he answered her shrill whinny.\n\n\"They shouldn't be separated,\" Kristen declared, accepting the hand Cage offered to help her from the fence. rail. \"I'll speak to Morgan about putting them in the same corral.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "They passed through the garden on their way back to the house. The overpowering smell of gardenias filled the hot, still night.\n\n\"Kristen, I want to marry you,\" Cage blurted.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I love you,\" he declared.\n\n\"I... I don't know, Cage,\" she replied. \"To be truthful with you, I have been surprised by the way you've taken to ranching and adjusted to our ways.\"\n\n\"I've surprised myself,\" he admitted. Taking her gently by the shoulders, he kissed her softly. Her body stiffened for a second before she relaxed and returned his embrace.\n\n\"We'd better go inside,\" she said, pushing him away. \"Hassie will skin us alive if we let dinner get cold.\"\n\nCage caught her arm. \"We'll be gone two weeks rounding up the last of the stragglers. I'd like an answer when I return.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Kristen paced the bedroom floor. She had to see him but knew he was probably asleep. She eased from her room and moved silently down the stairs. She knew she shouldn't seek him, but she had to get some fresh air. She prayed he would be walking in the night.\n\nMorgan smiled at her from his perch atop the veranda railing. \"I thought you were asleep,\" he said.\n\n\"I had to get some fresh air.\" Kristen sat down in the porch swing.\n\n\"Cage wants to marry me,\" she mumbled.\n\nMorgan leaned back against the pillar and studied his sister. He stared at her for a long time. Kristen met his gaze without flinching, until he broke the silence.\n\n\"And?\"\n\nShe sighed. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Kristen, it's the only way you'll have a chance to stay here for the rest of your life. After I die, the firstborn son of our next generation will inherit Estelline.\"\n\n\"I don't want to stay here if it means losing you. Oh Morgan.\" Tears filled her eyes. \"Tell me what to do. I love this place. I don't ever want to leave Estelline, but it wouldn't be the same without you.\"\n\n\"Cage looks so much like me,\" Morgan said, trying to erase her unhappiness. \"If you could teach him to talk Texan, you'd have it made.\"\n\nKristen smiled through her tears. \"I don't care if he speaks Latin. He'll never take your place. He knows nothing about ranching.\"\n\n\"Baby sister, I will teach him. He's smart and learns quickly.\"\n\n\"You've always given me good advice, but...\" Her blue eyes pleaded for guidance.\n\n\"Kristen, I know he's not the man you love.\"\n\n\"But Morgan\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me finish. I know he's not the man you love, but the man you love will never be free to marry you. So, make the best of the hand life has dealt you.\"\n\n\"I'm going to bed,\" Kristen muttered.\n\nMorgan followed her into the house. \"Good night, Kristen.\" He kissed her on the cheek and walked into his office, closing the door behind him.\n\nHe poured a glass of bourbon and held it up, looking at the light through the amber liquid. Then he spied the cognac bottle that seemed a permanent fixture beside his bourbon decanter. The sight of it disgusted him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Women and children from neighboring ranches began to converge at Estelline before noon, bringing poultry, cured hams, pastries, and everything imaginable to eat. The roundup was over, and it was time to celebrate.\n\nKristen put down the plate of meat and ran around the corner of the house as the cloud of red dust rose into the sky. \"They're back,\" someone yelled.\n\nThey had been gone for two weeks, and God how she'd missed him. She knew she could only look at him, but that was enough.\n\nCage was off his horse before it stopped running. He swung Kristen into his arms and kissed her solidly. To his surprise, she responded eagerly, clutching him to her.\n\nThe hot flame of desire swept through him. He released her and gazed into her eyes.\n\n\"You missed me too,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes!\" He kissed her again. \"Oh God, yes.\"\n\n\"A little discreetness there,\" Morgan cautioned apologetically.\n\nKristen's eyes snapped with fury. Cage had never seen her so angry. She wheeled away and ran into the house.\n\n\"Everyone to the river,\" Morgan shouted. \"Get the dust off, and be back here for supper.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Cage dressed slowly. It was good to be clean-shaven and wearing clothes that weren't stiff from sweat and dirt. He congratulated himself one more time on his good looks and stepped into the hallway.\n\n\"Don't you look sharp,\" Gwen declared, catching his arm as he exited his room.\n\nCage turned to face her. Her beauty took him by surprise. He'd been so engrossed in thinking about Kristen that Gwen hadn't crossed his mind.\n\n\"Everyone's outside,\" she said demurely, \"and I need help fastening my dress.\"\n\nFor the first time, he noticed that she wore only a dressing gown.\n\n\"Would you mind?\" she said over her shoulder as she sashayed toward her room.\n\n\"Do you think I should be here?\" he asked as he slipped into Gwen's room. \"If Morgan finds me here I\u2014\"\n\n\"You don't have to worry about that,\" Gwen snapped. \"Morgan has never set foot in my room.\"\n\nShe was in his arms, kissing him and igniting the fire that smoldered in his soul. The fury of her passion caught him and held him. Gwen was more woman than most men encountered in a lifetime." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Later she lay in his arms, listening to the band playing and people laughing. \"I missed you. Oh Cage, why didn't you come into my life sooner?\"\n\n\"I'm here now.\" He kissed her softly.\n\n\"But what about tomorrow?\"\n\n\"I'll be here for you as long as you want me,\" he promised. \"Now, wasn't my original purpose for being here to fasten your dress?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"We'd better not go down together,\" he warned. \"I'll go down first. Wait a few minutes then follow me.\" He kissed her one last time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Judge Goodnight arrived in the late afternoon as everyone was getting ready for the feast. He received a warm welcome from friends he had known most of his life. He followed Morgan into the rancher's office and poured himself a glass of whiskey. It was obvious that Morgan had stocked the judge's favorite brand.\n\n\"Gwen tells me she is having a wonderful time here,\" Goodnight said. \"I appreciate the way you've made her feel at home.\"\n\n\"She has enchanted everyone,\" Morgan said, smiling as he poured himself a drink. \"She fits right in with us.\"\n\n\"I can't tell you how much it means to me to know that a man of your integrity is watching over my daughter. It takes a tremendous burden off my shoulders to know she is well cared for while I'm dispensing justice in Texas. It is important that nothing impugn a woman's virtue in this day and time.\"\n\nMorgan sat down at his desk. \"I agree. Virtuous women are few and far between.\"\n\n\"She tells me that you are a perfect gentleman,\" Goodnight said.\n\n\"I try to be.\" Morgan paused for a minute to sip his whiskey. \"That's how I was raised. You know... honesty, integrity, and high morals.\"\n\n\"You are very much like your father. One could deal with Nelson and know that everything would be honest and aboveboard. He always did the right thing.\"\n\n\"Yes, he definitely had his ways. He could also be as stubborn as a mule when he set his mind to something.\"\n\nGoodnight laughed. \"Yes, he could. He wouldn't rest until I got the title to this ranch filed in your name, all legal and proper in Austin.\"\n\n\"I appreciate you handling that,\" Morgan said. \"He never felt comfortable with just the land grant. He wanted everything done according to the laws of the United States.\"\n\nGoodnight placed his drink on Morgan's desk and cleared his throat. \"Son, I don't mean to offend you, but I need to ask you something.\"\n\nMorgan nodded but said nothing.\n\n\"What are your intentions toward my daughter?\"\n\n\"Gwen?\" Morgan reared back in his chair. \"I... I've never... Out of respect for you, sir, I've never had intentions toward Gwen. You entrusted her to my care, and I'd never take advantage of the situation. I hope you know that.\"\n\n\"Of course, I know that,\" Goodnight snorted. \"To be honest, I'd hoped that... well, I'd hoped that one day you'd be my son-in-law.\"\n\nMorgan dragged his hand down his face. \"Sir, I've tried hard not to think of Gwen that way, out of respect for you. I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"As one gentleman to another,\" Goodnight said, \"you have my permission to court my daughter.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Judge. I appreciate your blessing, but I'm not sure Gwen is interested in me.\"\n\n\"Of course she's interested in you,\" Goodnight snickered. \"You're so damn handsome you're almost pretty. All the women swoon over you.\"\n\n\"You flatter me, sir, but thank you. I\u2014\"\n\nThe door to Morgan's office swung open, and Gwen charged in. \"There you are, Father. I've been looking all over for you. Both of you should come join the guests. The fiddlers are tuning right now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Kristen slipped away from the crowd. She had seen him enter the barn. She moved quietly through the row of stalls leading out to the corral. He was watching Osiris.\n\n\"I named them while you were gone,\" she said, catching his hand and lacing her fingers between his.\n\n\"What did you name them?\"\n\n\"Osiris and Isis,\" she said.\n\n\"Egyptian Gods,\" he said with a chuckle. \"They do seem quite regal.\"\n\nHe reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small box. \"I brought you something.\"\n\nKristen caught her breath at the sight of the exquisitely detailed golden lamp fastened to a fine gold chain. \"It's beautiful,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Aladdin's lamp. May I put it on you?\"\n\nShe turned her back to him and lifted her long, blonde hair. He fastened the chain at the back of her neck and pulled her against him, inhaling the sweet fragrance of her. He released her and stepped away.\n\n\"You may have three wishes, madam,\" he said, bowing at the waist.\n\n\"Hmm. Let me see,\" she murmured, playing along. \"I wish...\" She looked up at him and bit her bottom lip to stop its trembling.\n\nHe swept her into his arms and kissed her passionately. She held nothing back from this man. She would gladly die for him, suffer dishonor, and do anything to be with him.\n\nKristen didn't try to control the desire he aroused in her. She responded to his lips with wild abandon.\n\n\"I missed you, little one,\" he whispered. \"Hell could not be as bad as being separated from you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said, sighing. \"I know.\"\n\nKristen took his hand and led him to the ladder that ascended to the hayloft. She climbed the first three rungs and looked down at him. He stared in awe at her as she reached out her hand. \"Please.\"\n\nHe followed her up the ladder and lay down with her on a blanket spread over the hay.\n\n\"I knew you couldn't always be a paragon of virtue,\" she whispered breathlessly as he unbuttoned her dress. Her body was on fire from his touch. No man could ever make her feel as he did. \"I want you more than you could ever imagine.\"\n\n\"Kristen?\" She caught her breath as Cage called her name. \"Kristen, are you in here?\"\n\nHe held her tight as Cage walked through the barn to the corral and returned.\n\nCage called her name again, and then his footsteps faded as he left the barn.\n\n\"Thank God for your friend.\" A strangled laugh caught in his throat. \"Thanks to him, I won't hate myself in the morning.\"\n\nHe stood and pulled her to her feet. Kristen fumbled with the buttons on her dress and followed him down the ladder without speaking.\n\n\"Here, let me get the hay out of your hair,\" he said, reaching out to pull a piece of straw from her tousled locks.\n\n\"Don't touch me!\" she cried out. \"I don't ever want you to touch me again.\"\n\n\"Kristen, please.\" He caught her by the shoulders.\n\n\"Let me go,\" she sobbed. \"Just leave me alone. You don't love me.\"\n\nHe pulled her into the safety of his arms and held her until her body stopped trembling.\n\n\"I'm truly sorry,\" he whispered. \"Please believe me, abstaining from loving you is the hardest thing I've ever done. What almost happened up there had nothing to do with love and everything to do with my desire for you.\" He hooked a finger under her chin and lifted it so he could look into her eyes. \"What didn't happen was because I do love you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she said softly, \"and it makes me love you even more. Thank you for the necklace.\"\n\n\"You never made your three wishes.\"\n\n\"Yes, I did,\" she whispered, her lip trembling. \"And they almost came true.\"\n\nHe brushed his lips across hers.\n\n\"If you had one wish,\" she said, \"what would it be?\"\n\n\"I would wish for the freedom to sit in the swing on the veranda with my arm around you for all the world to see. I would give my soul to bring our love out into the open,\" he said, his voice thick with emotion.\n\n\"I am so proud of you, Kristen. I want everyone to know that of all the people who have thrown themselves at your feet, you chose me. I can't tell you how happy it makes me to be in the same room with you.\"\n\nBefore she could reply, Cage's voice rang out over the noise of the dancers, calling her name from somewhere nearby.\n\n\"Save me a dance,\" he whispered before kissing her one last time and disappearing into the shadows.\n\n\"Kristen!\" Cage said as he strode toward her. \"What are you doing out here all alone?\"\n\n\"Just thinking,\" she replied.\n\n\"I hope you're thinking about us and the question I asked you before I left on the roundup.\"\n\n\"Well... not really,\" she said honestly.\n\n\"Do you have an answer for me?\"\n\n\"I... I don't,\" she said, sighing. \"Not right now.\"\n\n\"But you are considering my proposal.\"\n\n\"I am considering it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Estelline Ranch was riddled with box canyons. The cowboys worked the cattle, driving them to the various canyons where fencing had been put up to hold them. Estelline's ranch hands kept them fed and watered until their owners showed up to claim them.\n\nThe following weeks were filled with ranch crews riding to Estelline from as far away as Kansas. The visitors would pick up their cattle and drive them to the Estelline Town railhead. The cattle were held in pens, where buyers were waiting to bid on them. Then they were loaded onto boxcars and sent to Colorado.\n\nShanghai had driven their herds to market as fast as the railroad cars arrived to take them. It was a well-known fact that the first cattle to market demanded the highest prices.\n\nThere was a steady stream of cattle from the ranch, until only one herd remained. It belonged to the Lazy K Ranch in Kansas.\n\nShanghai and Cage entered Morgan's office and sat down across from their boss. \"We have to do something about the cattle that migrate to our ranch during the winter,\" Shanghai said. \"We've got over five hundred head in Little Egypt. They've eaten most of the grass there, and we need to move them to the north pasture.\"\n\n\"Who owns them?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Lazy K out of Kansas City,\" Shanghai said.\n\nCage chimed in. \"So, what's Little Egypt?\"\n\n\"It's very fertile grassland on the eastern side of the ranch,\" Shanghai informed him.\n\n\"Roundup did take much longer than usual this year,\" Morgan noted.\n\n\"Because we had a thousand head of other people's cattle,\" Shanghai snorted.\n\n\"You should fence the northern border of Estelline,\" Cage suggested.\n\n\"Estelline is open grassland,\" Morgan explained. \"We allow other cattlemen to drive their herds to the railhead. It's good for them and good for our town. God has given us so much. It seems wrong to fence it off from others.\"\n\nMuch to Morgan's surprise, Shanghai agreed with Cage. \"It's something you should consider. If we decide to do it, we need to get busy. Even if we start now, we'll be lucky to finish before the first snowfall.\"\n\nMorgan shook his head. \"No. I won't fence Estelline. Our neighbors depend on us for water and grassland.\"\n\n\"It's just a matter of time until the squatters swarm your ranch,\" Cage pointed out.\n\n\"Take the Lazy K cattle to the railhead and sell them,\" Morgan instructed Shanghai. \"Send a telegram to the Lazy K. Let them know that we will hold their money until they come for it. Tell everyone you meet that we will have a barbeque and dance here Saturday. Let them know we want to discuss fencing Estelline. Invite the Lazy K bunch.\"\n\nA knock at the door ended their conversation. Shanghai and Cage stood as Gwen entered the room. \"I'd like a moment of your time,\" she said to Morgan.\n\nOnce Cage and Shanghai took their leave, Morgan pulled the office door closed behind them. \"Would you like something to drink?\"\n\n\"No. No... I'm not certain where to start,\" Gwen said. \"I am in desperate need of your help.\"\n\n\"You know I'll always help you in any way I can,\" Morgan reassured her. \"What can I do?\"\n\nGwen hung her head. \"I need you to marry me.\"\n\nMorgan stared out the window as he struggled to find the words to properly respond to Gwen's request. \"Gwen, you're a beautiful woman, and you deserve a man who adores you, but that man isn't me. I'm not in love with you. I would do both of us a great disservice if\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm pregnant,\" Gwen blurted.\n\nMorgan's mouth moved, but no sound came out. \"I... I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"My father will kill me,\" Gwen sobbed. \"He'll be disgraced, as will I.\"\n\n\"Won't the father of the child marry you?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Do you think I'd be begging you if he would?\" Gwen cried. \"He's in love with someone else.\"\n\n\"Gwen, I can't marry you.\"\n\n\"I'll tell Father the child is yours.\"\n\n\"I've never touched you!\" Morgan growled. \"I wouldn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Who do you think Father will believe?\" she demanded.\n\nGwen cringed at the look of disgust on Morgan's face.\n\n\"I offered you refuge while the judge is traveling,\" Morgan said softly, \"and this is how you repay me?\"\n\nGwen burst into tears. \"I don't know what to do, Morgan. I'm desperate.\"\n\n\"Who is the father?\"\n\n\"I won't say,\" Gwen sobbed. \"He doesn't know I'm carrying his child.\"\n\nMorgan looked away from the woman. He was furious. \"I need time to think,\" he mumbled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Morgan didn't bother standing when Gwen left the room. He poured a glass of whiskey from the decanter on his desk and gulped it. He winced as the alcohol burned its way down his throat into his stomach.\n\nHe knew Cage was the father of Gwen's baby. At least the baby would look like him. A plan began to formulate in his mind. If he married Gwen and she produced a son, he would have a lifetime claim on Estelline. Once he had an heir and the undeniable right to Estelline, he would petition Judge Goodnight to set aside the provisions of his father's will affecting future generations. Goodnight would do it to assure his grandson's legal right to Estelline.\n\nDespite the seriousness of the problem with Gwen, what bothered him even more was the thought of fencing Estelline. The entire idea made his stomach turn.\n\nHe knew of the devastation caused by range wars in the northern states as farmers and sheep raisers had fenced their land, taking valuable water and grazing rights away from ranchers.\n\nSituated in the Texas Panhandle, Estelline was the only North Texas ranch that still allowed free access to neighbors. Many of the Oklahoma and Kansas ranchers were beginning to use the meat processing and rendering plants springing up in Amarillo, a hundred miles north of Estelline.\n\nThe Canadian River and its tributaries delivered water to the ranch, which was dotted with windmills pumping water for Jouett cattle.\n\nMaybe the path across our ranch to Estelline Town railhead isn't as important as it once was, Morgan reasoned with himself. The northern border of Estelline's million acres formed the line between Oklahoma and Texas. It would take 540 miles of fence to secure the border. Morgan wasn't certain they could string the barbed wire before the winter snows hit.\n\nI need to find Kristen, he thought. Things have a way of working out when we discuss them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "The week passed quickly as everyone prepared for the dance and barbeque. The cattle designated for the market had been shipped, and things were settling down. The Lazy K owners and all the ranchers from bordering properties had sent word that they would attend. Judge Goodnight arranged his schedule so he could be there.\n\nMorgan was wrestling with the problem of Gwen when the auburn-haired beauty knocked on his office door. She entered cautiously and sat down in the chair across from him.\n\n\"I wanted to see if you'd given any more thought to my request,\" she said.\n\n\"I have.\" Morgan furrowed his brow. \"I will marry you, but in name only. As far as I'm concerned, this is a business transaction to save you and Judge Goodnight from public embarrassment. He entrusted you to me for safekeeping, and obviously I've failed. You must give me your word that no one will ever know the child isn't mine. I'm sure Cage is the father, but he must never know. As my wife, if the baby is a boy, he will inherit Estelline only as long as people believe he is my son. Also, you must never do anything to embarrass me or bring shame to the Jouett name.\"\n\nGwen breathed a sigh of relief. \"Of course. I'll do anything you ask. I can't thank you enough for saving me.\"\n\n\"Your father will be here for the dance and ranchers' meeting. We should announce our plans to wed immediately. How far along are you?\"\n\n\"Six weeks,\" Gwen mumbled.\n\n\"We'll marry next weekend,\" Morgan declared. \"The sooner the better in order to maintain a decent timeline for your pregnancy. As soon as he arrives, I'll ask your father's permission to marry you.\"\n\nMorgan stood, signaling and end to their conversation. He walked Gwen to the door, and she turned to face him.\n\n\"Thank you. I'll make you a good wife. I promise.\"\n\nShe tiptoed to kiss him, but Morgan stepped away from her. \"You'll be my wife in name only,\" he reminded her. \"I'm not in love with you.\"\n\n\"No, of course you're not,\" Gwen said, nearly choking on the words." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "\"Reid's going to ride the black stallion,\" Jud said, catching Kristen in his arms.\n\n\"Since you couldn't?\" she teased him.\n\n\"You certainly know how to hurt a fellow, Kristen.\" He smiled and stole a kiss.\n\nKristen linked her arm through Jud's and followed the crowd to Osiris's corral.\n\n\"Reid!\" Morgan yelled over the noise. \"You're drunk. You can't ride him. He'll be harder to stay on than ever. He's learned how to unseat his riders.\"\n\n\"Just because you're afraid of him doesn't mean I am,\" Reid said, his words slurred.\n\nMorgan tried to reason with his brother. \"I know you're not afraid. Just wait until tomorrow when you're sober.\"\n\n\"Saddle him up, boys,\" Reid yelled.\n\nKristen watched as her youngest brother approached the stallion and jumped into the saddle. The crowd laughed as Osiris unseated Reid within seconds.\n\n\"I'll ride him.\" A young cowboy from a neighboring ranch jumped from the top fence rail. \"After I ride him, I get the first dance with you, Miss Kristen.\"\n\nShanghai lassoed the stallion as another ranch hand dropped a noose over the black's head. They held the horse steady as the cowboy mounted.\n\n\"Let him go,\" the young man shouted.\n\nOsiris jumped straight up in the air and landed on his forefeet as he kicked out with his hind legs, sending the rider over his head. The man crashed to the ground in front of the stallion. The raging horse reared, his shrill whinny echoing like a death scream as his front hooves crashed down on the stunned cowboy.\n\nMorgan vaulted the fence but was too late to pull the young rider from beneath the enraged stallion's murderous hooves. Lassos shot out from several directions as the cowboys roped the stallion and pulled him away from his kill.\n\nMorgan held the limp body in his arms. \"He's dead. He's just a kid.\"\n\nJerilyn gasped. \"Reid, that could have been you.\"\n\n\"Or anyone else who's fool enough to get on that damn horse,\" Shanghai said.\n\n\"Turn him loose,\" Morgan ordered. \"He can't be broken.\"\n\n\"No!\" Kristen challenged her brother. \"I want him. If no one else can ride him, I'll break him myself.\"\n\n\"Kristen, a man is dead because you wanted that horse,\" Morgan said, his voice as cold as ice. \"I will not let you ride him. Do you understand?\"\n\nHe carried the cowboy's broken body to a wagon and laid it down gently. \"Someone take him home.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "The first rays of the morning sun streaked across the magenta sky. Ranchers had begun loading their wagons when Kristen appeared in Levi's, her long hair tied back. She ran toward the corral as Morgan opened the gate to release Osiris.\n\n\"Please, Morgan, don't let him go,\" she pleaded. \"He's mine. I'll break him myself. You gave him to me, and now you're taking him away. You're an Indian giver.\"\n\nA flush crept across Morgan's face, darkening his already-tan skin. \"Saddle him.\"\n\n\"You're crazy,\" Shanghai bellowed. \"You're not going to let her ride him?\"\n\n\"Saddle him,\" Morgan growled as ranchers and other onlookers gathered around the corral. He removed his gun belt and handed it to Kristen.\n\n\"Morgan, please don't.\" Gwen caught his arm. \"Don't get yourself killed just because she's a spoiled brat.\"\n\nMorgan shook off her hand and walked to the stallion. \"Easy, boy,\" he whispered to the frightened animal. \"All these people are scaring you, aren't they?\"\n\nHe grabbed the saddle horn and vaulted into the saddle. Osiris trembled and then shot forward like a coiled spring. Morgan's knees gripped the stallion as the horse stood on his hind legs, fighting the air. Osiris hit the ground hard, jarring Morgan's foot loose from the right stirrup.\n\nThe stallion bucked, kicked, whirled, and reared, trying to rid himself of the man determined to ride him. Osiris paused for a second and then reared straight up.\n\n\"He's going to fall backward,\" Shanghai yelled. \"He'll crush you.\"\n\nAs the horse's hind legs slid out from under him, Morgan jumped from the saddle. Osiris crashed to the ground and Morgan dodged his flailing legs.\n\nMorgan jumped back into the saddle when the magnificent stallion struggled to his feet. Osiris stood still, snorting, sweat poured from his gleaming black coat.\n\nMorgan nudged his flanks, and Osiris, still skittish, walked around the corral. A roar of applause went up from the onlookers. Morgan rode the horse for an hour, turning him and letting Osiris get the feel of the hackamore as his rider pulled him one direction and then another.\n\nWhen he felt the stallion had cooled down and had conceded to being ridden, Morgan dismounted, handed the reins to Shanghai, and approached his sister.\n\n\"I knew you could do it,\" Kristen said with an impish grin. \"If you wanted to.\"\n\n\"Oh, you did?\" Morgan's grim face broke into a smile as he slipped his arm around her slim shoulders. \"Weren't you afraid I'd be killed?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Not at all. There's not an animal or man alive who could stand up to you once you've set your mind to something.\"\n\nMorgan stretched his muscular body. \"Right now, all I've set my mind to is breakfast.\"\n\n\"That was a fool thing to do,\" Gwen said, confronting Kristen after Morgan had gone. \"He might have been killed.\"\n\n\"Do you know what your problem is, Gwen?\" Kristen asked. \"You underestimate my brother.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "\"That was quite a show of horsemanship,\" Judge Goodnight noted, following Morgan into his office. \"You should race him at the county fair next month. I'd put my money on a horse like that.\"\n\n\"He belongs to my sister,\" Morgan informed him as he closed his office door. \"Judge, I have another matter I need to discuss with you.\"\n\n\"I'm always happy to discuss things with you.\" The judge sat down and leaned back in his chair.\n\n\"Sir, I'd like to marry your daughter.\"\n\nGoodnight tried to control his joy. \"You know you have my blessings, son.\"\n\n\"I want to marry her next Saturday in the ranch chapel, and we'd like you to officiate.\"\n\nGoodnight chuckled. \"You don't waste any time once you've made up your mind.\"\n\nMorgan shrugged. \"We're not getting any younger. We want to start our family right away.\"\n\n\"Of course you do,\" the judge said with a grin. \"That's why most folks get married. One can't wait around too long, or you'll end up with the cart before the horse.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you understand, sir.\"\n\n\"I'm delighted.\" The judge beamed. \"We'd better get moving. We have a lot to do in a week.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Morgan searched for his sister. He had put off telling her of his plan to marry Gwen. In his mind he had already accepted Gwen's baby as his. He would love it as he would his own. He'd make everything right for the child and do whatever it took to see that he inherited Estelline, just as his father had done for him. In his heart he prayed Gwen would give him a son.\n\nHe walked to the corral. Kristen was spending every waking hour riding Osiris. She wanted to take him out on the open range, but Morgan didn't really trust the stallion and had insisted that she ride him in the corral until Morgan felt good about letting the horse out of the pen with Kristen on his back. He found her watering and feeding Osiris.\n\n\"I thought you might want to walk in the garden with me,\" he said as he hoisted Osiris's saddle onto the saddle tree.\n\n\"You know I always enjoy spending time with you.\" Kristen linking her arm through his. \"What's on your mind, big brother?\"\n\n\"It's time we started planning for the next generation of owners for Estelline,\" he said.\n\n\"One of us needs to marry,\" Kristen blurted. \"Morgan, I've met no one I wish to spend the rest of my life with. I haven't even met anyone I want to spend time with.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Morgan said. \"So, I've asked Gwen to marry me.\"\n\n\"Oh Morgan!\" Kristen tightened her grip on his arm. \"I feel sick to my stomach. I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"There's really nothing to say,\" he mumbled. \"It has to be done. We must secure our ownership of Estelline.\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem right that you must always be the one to sacrifice for our future.\" Kristen wiped a tear from her cheek. \"Do you care for her at all?\"\n\nMorgan groaned. \"I don't even like her. But it's just a matter of time before Naomi or Jerilyn becomes pregnant. So, I've got to jump into the race or risk losing Estelline.\"\n\n\"When are you planning to marry?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"Next Saturday. The judge has given us his blessing and will officiate. It doesn't need to be a big deal. Just the immediate family.\n\n\"If Gwen and I can produce a son, we will be able to get Judge Goodnight to break the clause in our generational will that states only the present and future owners of Estelline may reside on the ranch. I want all of us to continue living here, just as we are now. I couldn't bear to send you and my brothers away.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Although Morgan had opted for a quiet affair, Gwen and her father telegraphed everyone they knew within two hundred miles of Estelline and invited them to the wedding. After all, Morgan Jouett was the biggest catch in the state, and Judge Goodnight wanted the world to know the young rancher would soon be his son-in-law.\n\nThe women of Estelline pitched in to pull together a wedding party that would be remembered for years to come.\n\nCovered wagons began converging on the ranch on Thursday. Shanghai and the trail cooks staged a grand barbeque, roasting pigs and beef over an open fire as fiddlers tuned their instruments. Morgan made certain the liquor flowed freely. He consumed the liquid courage he needed to face the most unpleasant event of his life.\n\nThe wedding celebration went on until dawn, when Morgan and his new bride left for the train station and their honeymoon in Amarillo." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "\"I was hoping we could go to San Francisco or New York for our honeymoon,\" Gwen whined as they settled into the train seat. \"An ocean voyage would be nice with just the two of us.\"\n\n\"Gwen our marriage is nothing but a favor to you to save you shame and your father disgrace,\" Morgan said, leaning close to her to avoid being overheard. \"Hopefully, you'll have a boy, and I will love him with all my heart and raise him as my own. I have no feelings for you. I made that clear from the start. Please don't imagine it will ever be anything else. The only reason we're going on a honeymoon is because everyone would think it strange if we didn't.\"\n\nGwen sat in silence for a long time, staring out the train window. Then she turned to him. \"I could easily fall in love with you,\" she said. \"I'd make you a good wife. I'll be a good mother.\"\n\n\"You should have thought about that before you slept with Cage Fielding,\" Morgan sneered. \"We'll spend a few nights in Amarillo and return home. I want to visit some of the processing plants and line up buyers for our cattle.\"\n\n\"So, you expect nothing of me?\" Gwen frowned. \"I'm more than willing to perform my wifely duties, even under these circumstances.\"\n\n\"I expect nothing from you. As we discussed, you must not embarrass me by continuing to fornicate with Cage. The rest of the world must believe you are carrying my child. If you ever tell anyone otherwise, I'll divorce you for adultery, and no one will blame me.\"\n\n\"I understand,\" Gwen said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Gwen sulked during the train ride home. Except for dining with her, Morgan had left her to entertain herself. He had even arranged for adjoining rooms so he wouldn't have to sleep with her. He refused to wear a wedding ring.\n\nShe knew she had struck a deal with the devil when she'd begged Morgan to marry her, but she had no idea the man would be so cold and unfeeling. She had used all her womanly wiles to seduce him: walking into his bedroom wearing nothing but a see-through negligee, touching his hand as they dined, tossing her long auburn hair back from her face, and even hugging his arm between her breasts.\n\nMorgan responded to nothing. Her efforts only garnered looks of disgust from him. On their last night in Amarillo, she slipped into his bed naked. He had immediately turned on the lamp and demanded that she leave his room. She truly did the walk of shame as she hurried from his bed to hers. She vowed to never give him the opportunity to make her feel so vulgar again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "The entire family was at the train station to meet them. Shanghai slapped Morgan on the back and bellowed, \"I can't believe you got a woman to sleep with you. You haven't even grown whiskers yet.\"\n\n\"There's more to a good man than a hairy face,\" Gwen quipped, waggling her eyebrows.\n\nHer comment ignited much good-natured teasing of the newlywed couple. Kristen hugged her new sister-in-law and welcomed her into the family. She smiled warmly at her brother and shrugged.\n\nKristen had ridden to the station on horseback, leaving the other women to ride in the covered wagon. Gwen watched as her husband mounted a horse and rode alongside his sister. The two of them laughed and talked all the way home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "\"I found buyers for our cattle,\" Morgan informed Kristen. \"They'll have more weight on them if we simply round them up and drive them to Amarillo. We'll get more for them.\n\n\"We'll need to build pens between the north border and Amarillo so we can round up the cattle and brand them to take to market.\"\n\n\"What about the northern cattle that stray to our ranch?\" Kristen asked. \"You know we need to do something about them.\"\n\nMorgan squinted and pulled his hat down to deflect the hot Texas sun. \"I know. I try not to think about it, but it is a situation we must resolve.\"\n\n\"We missed you while you were gone,\" she said, smiling up at him. \"The ranch isn't the same without you.\"\n\n\"I missed you too,\" he replied.\n\n\"Did you have a good honeymoon?\"\n\n\"I'd rather not discuss it,\" he huffed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "They reached the ranch before sundown, and the brothers carried the luggage to Morgan's room. Gwen was surprised to find her things had been moved from her room to her husband's. \"It appears someone didn't get the message,\" she grumbled.\n\nMorgan shrugged off her snark. \"We have to keep up appearances. There's a small bedroom off this one. I'll sleep there.\n\n\"I'll be in my office until Hassie calls us to dinner. Please stop by on your way to the dining room so we can enter together.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Gwen huffed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Morgan slipped down the back stairs to his office and closed the door behind him. He filled a glass with whiskey and sipped it, trying to catalog the thoughts running wildly through his mind.\n\nNo matter how he approached the changes that were happening in Texas, he always arrived at the same conclusion: he needed barbed wire. The growth of the cattle industry and processing plants in Amarillo left him no choice. He couldn't continue to allow open grazing on Estelline.\n\nThe clanging of Hassie's dinner bell pulled him from his reverie. He hurried from his office in time to meet Gwen in the hallway and enter the dining room with her.\n\n\"Here are the newlyweds now,\" Reid announced as Morgan and Gwen entered the room. Rowdy banter and congratulations filled the air as the couple took their seats. Morgan sat at the head of the table, his wife and sister on either side of him. Cage sat next to Kristen.\n\n\"Tell us about Amarillo,\" Wallace insisted. \"Has it grown as much as we've heard?\"\n\n\"As much and more,\" Morgan said. \"It's twice the size it was three years ago. It's booming, Wallace.\"\n\n\"Were you able to make contact with cattle buyers?\" Reid asked, his eyes sparkling with enthusiasm.\n\n\"I did. I even have a couple of contracts. And more are on the way.\"\n\n\"That's what I wanted to hear, Morgan.\" Shanghai slapped the table with his weathered hand. \"You're going to make us all rich.\"\n\nMorgan laughed. \"That's my plan.\"\n\n\"So, how soon can we expect to hear the pitter-patter of little Jouett feet in the house?\" Reid asked his brother.\n\n\"If this weekend was any indication,\" Gwen said, giggling, \"I would say within the next nine months.\"\n\nLaugher filled the room as Morgan blushed and hung his head." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Kristen watched as her brothers teased each other about the race to produce an heir for Estelline. Naomi, Jerilyn, and Gwen reminded the men that they were only half the equation. \"You'll be nowhere without us,\" Naomi declared.\n\nKristen felt like an outsider, an onlooker instead of a participant in the ranch she loved so much. She finished her dinner and excused herself. She had to get outside so she could breathe.\n\nShe inhaled the fragrant night air as she walked through the garden. The creek made a soft, gurgling sound as it flowed over the rocks and terraces on its way to the parched pastures in the southern valley.\n\n\"Kristen,\" Cage called out to her. \"May I walk with you?\"\n\n\"It's warm out here,\" she said, \"but you're welcome to share the heat.\"\n\n\"You've been very distant,\" he noted as he fell into step beside her. \"You haven't said a dozen words to me since the trail ride.\"\n\nKristen stopped and whirled to face him. \"Yes! I will marry you,\" she blurted.\n\nCage was silent for a minute.\n\n\"Your offer still stands, doesn't it?\" she snapped.\n\nHe searched her face for some sign of emotion but found nothing.\n\n\"I... well, yes,\" he muttered. \"But you make it sound as if we're discussing a business deal.\"\n\nShe sneered at him. \"Aren't we?\"\n\n\"No! I love you.\"\n\n\"Cage, while you were on the cattle drive you had two visitors from San Francisco.\"\n\n\"So you know,\" he said with a shrug. \"That doesn't change anything. I still love you.\"\n\n\"I'm fond of you,\" she continued, \"but I don't love you. I need you to... to help me gain ownership of Estelline, but that's all. After that I'll ask nothing of you except that you be discreet.\"\n\nHe stiffened. \"What do you mean by that?\"\n\nHer blue eyes flashed. \"I think you know. Don't think I'm so callous. It's just that I find it difficult to have much faith in the love you profess for me, while you're so easily tempted by my sister-in-law.\"\n\n\"Kristen, I can explain.\" An empty, nauseous feeling gripped him.\n\n\"I don't care,\" she hissed. \"It doesn't matter to me. As I said, it's a business proposition. I told your San Francisco friends that we are to be married and that I'd pay your gambling debt. If it's agreeable with you, I'd like to get married next Saturday.\"\n\n\"Saturday is fine.\" He couldn't look her in the eye. \"It's true I followed you here to marry you because of your money, but I have fallen in love with you. I'll be a good husband. I promise.\" He bent to kiss her, but she pulled away.\n\n\"I have no illusions.\" She whirled around and stormed off, stopping seconds later to offer a parting shot over her shoulder. \"And do something about that obscene tattoo. I don't want our wedding guests staring at it while I'm saying 'I do.'\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "\"I'm going to marry Cage next Saturday,\" Kristen told Morgan as they worked Osiris and Isis.\n\n\"I know.\" Morgan looked away. \"Let's ride the horses to the waterfall.\"\n\n\"Race you,\" she yelled, goading the stallion.\n\nTo Kristen's surprise the mare stayed right beside her all the way to the river. \"I thought Osiris would leave her in his dust,\" she said breathlessly as her brother lifted her from the back of the stallion.\n\n\"I think she's faster.\" Morgan smiled. \"She was carrying more weight than Osiris and still stayed right beside him.\"\n\nHe led the horses to the river and let them drink. \"Do you remember the first time you brought me here?\" She brushed her wavy blonde hair away from her face.\n\n\"Yes.\" He laughed. \"You insisted on walking on a fallen tree trunk. You lost your balance and fell into the river.\"\n\n\"I almost drowned.\"\n\n\"How was I to know you couldn't swim?\" he said. \"You looked like a drowned rat. Just skin and bones and that mop of gorgeous blonde hair.\"\n\nHe touched her cheek lovingly. \"And now you're a woman planning your wedding day.\"\n\n\"Yes. This time next week we'll all be married,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"You're so blas\u00e9 about it,\" he said, his dark brows almost meeting as a frown creased his forehead.\n\n\"You know why I'm marrying,\" she said, shrugging impatiently. \"Please don't make it any more difficult for me.\"\n\nHe wanted to say more but decided against it. \"You've always had a mind of your own.\" He grimaced." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "\"A peso for your thoughts,\" she said as they rode toward the ranch house.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Morgan replied. \"I was thinking about the large number of northern stock we rounded up this year.\"\n\n\"Don't we every year?\"\n\n\"There were three times as many this year,\" he grumbled. \"It's that damn devil's wire Glidden is suturing across Texas. Fencing off the open range. Cattle just naturally wander onto open grassland, and it's getting so bad our men can't cope with it.\"\n\n\"Why don't you fence our property?\" she asked.\n\n\"We may have to. God knows I don't want to. Our neighbor's cattle cross our land to drink from the river. I'm going to talk with Shanghai about putting up a drift fence on our northern property line to keep the Oklahoma and Kansas cattle off our range.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Cage watched out the window as neighboring ranchers from miles around arrived for their wedding.\n\nMorgan opened the door. \"Is the groom as nervous as the brother of the bride?\" He winked knowingly.\n\n\"I'm afraid so,\" Cage said, pouring another glass of cognac. \"Want a drink?\"\n\n\"Bourbon.\" Morgan ran his fingers through his hair pushing it from his forehead. \"I'm afraid your drink is too tame for me.\"\n\n\"Tell me, Morgan,\" Cage said as he filled his look-alike's glass. \"Did you marry Gwen for the same reason Kristen is marrying me?\"\n\nDismay colored Morgan's face, and Cage knew he'd caught the rancher off guard.\n\n\"No!\" Morgan snapped. \"I didn't marry Gwen to father an heir, if that's what you mean.\"\n\n\"Why then?\"\n\n\"I love my wife,\" Morgan mumbled.\n\n\"And I love Kristen,\" Cage vowed, pulling a black glove onto his left hand to cover his tattoo." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Kristen looked breathtakingly beautiful. Every eye was on her as she slowly descended the stairs. She looked at Cage, and for a fleeting moment her courage failed her. She couldn't go through with it. She could not marry one man when she was so completely in love with another. Then, Morgan's words echoed inside her head: \"The man you love will never be free to marry you.\"\n\nThis was her only chance to have Estelline and be close to the ones she loved. She toyed with the wedding ring Cage had insisted on having for himself, and then clutched it in her fist. She lifted her chin high and marched forward to stand beside Cage in front of Judge Goodnight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "\"I thought they would never leave,\" Cage said, sipping his cognac and watching Kristen as she brushed her silky blonde hair. He studied her reflection in the mirror. She was beautiful, and she was finally his. \"I guess half a dozen are spending the night. All the guest rooms are full except the one at the end of the hall.\"\n\nHe paused, waiting for her to say something, to at least engage him in conversation, but she remained silent.\n\n\"Kristen Fielding,\" he said, repeating her new name several times. \"Sounds nice.\"\n\n\"I'm not taking your name,\" she informed him.\n\nShe watched in the mirror as he moved to stand behind her. He encircled her slender waist, kissing the nape of her neck. She was stiff and unyielding.\n\nFury surged through him. He turned her around to face him and kissed her roughly. She pushed him away, but he gripped her arms.\n\n\"You're hurting me,\" she hissed.\n\n\"I'm well aware that you only want one thing from me,\" he said, rage flashing in his eyes. \"And that's exactly what you're going to get right now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "The even rhythm of his breathing told Kristen that Cage was sleeping soundly. She crept from the room and down the stairs.\n\nHe was sitting in the parlor. She knew he would be. \"What are you doing up?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Couldn't sleep,\" he said softly.\n\n\"I wasn't sure you'd still be here.\" She glanced up at him. \"Where's your wife?\"\n\n\"She fell asleep hours ago. Kristen...\" His voice was husky with emotion.\n\nShe was in his arms. Sobs racked her slim body. \"I hate Cage,\" she cried. Hot tears soaked his shirt. \"It was horrible.\" She bit her lower lip to stop it from trembling. \"I wanted you to be my first.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\" She clung to him as if reassuring herself that he would never let anything hurt her. \"You should have told me how bad it would be.\"\n\n\"I couldn't,\" he whispered. \"I couldn't bring myself to think about you with another man.\"\n\n\"I wish I were dead,\" she sobbed.\n\nHe gathered her in his arms and carried her up the stairs to the empty guest room. He gently placed her on the bed and locked the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "The bright sun streaming through the curtains woke Kristen. She lay still for a long time, keeping her eyes closed. She could still feel his touch on her skin. Loving him had been as wonderful as she'd dreamed it would be.\n\nHis tender, loving caresses had given her pleasures she'd never imagined. He taught her about love, just as he had taught her about life. An uncontrollable shiver ran through her body as she relived the sheer joy of lying in his arms, touching him, kissing him. He'd stopped short of consummating their love but had left her completely satiated. She dressed slowly, imagining his strong hands and long fingers trailing down her body, touching her in all the right places." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "Everyone had gone, and Morgan sat alone on the screened porch. \"Good morning, Kristen.\" He grinned boyishly as he sipped his iced lemonade. \"Sleep well?\"\n\nShe couldn't stop the blush that spread up her neck to her face. She avoided meeting her brother's teasing eyes.\n\n\"Enough said.\" He laughed.\n\n\"Where is everyone?\" Kristen asked, filling a glass with lemonade.\n\n\"Reid and Jerilyn rode into town with Wallace and Naomi. Naomi is feeling ill, so Wallace insisted she see the doctor. All of our guests left hours ago.\"\n\n\"I can't remember ever sleeping this late,\" she declared.\n\n\"It's understandable,\" he said with a wink. \"You had a busy night.\"\n\nColor rose in her cheeks again. She wished she could control the childish blush that amused her brother. \"Oh, you think you're so smart,\" she grumbled, poking him in the ribs with her spoon.\n\n\"Hey! No fair using weapons.\" He smirked.\n\n\"Where's Gwen?\"\n\n\"Still sleeping.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Kristen smirked, \"did she have a busy night too?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Touch\u00e9.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Cage surveyed the faces of his new family as they gathered around the dining table. All their guests had gone, and only the Jouetts and Hassie remained in the house. He wondered if they knew his wife loathed him.\n\n\"I'd like to propose a toast.\" Reid stood up, holding his wine glass high. \"To Cage and Kristen. May you always be as happy as you are today.\"\n\nEveryone drank to the toast except Naomi.\n\n\"I believe Wallace has an announcement to make,\" Reid continued.\n\n\"Well... I'm... uh,\" Wallace stammered, a sheepish grin on his face. \"I'm gonna be a father.\"\n\nCage avoided dropping his glass as he stared at Wallace in wide-eyed astonishment.\n\n\"Congratulations!\" Morgan hooted. \"I was beginning to get worried about the Jouett men.\"\n\nKristen's face paled under her tan. She'd married Cage for nothing. Submitted to his pawing and rutting for nothing. Nothing!\n\n\"I'm so happy for you, Naomi.\" Kristen patted her sister-in-law's hand. Naomi is so sweet and devoted to Wallace, Kristen thought. If anyone deserves the ranch, Naomi does." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "Cage tied his horse out of sight and waited impatiently for Gwen. She was late, as usual. The Texas heat was insufferable. Succumbing to the urge for relief from the torrid air, he stripped and plunged into the cool waters of the Canadian River.\n\nGwen rode up as he was dressing. \"I'm sorry I'm so late,\" she said, slipping into his arms and kissing him passionately. \"Did you enjoy your swim?\"\n\n\"Yes. It's the end of May, and the heat is already unbearable. I hate to think what July and August will be like.\"\n\n\"You've almost lost your accent,\" she noted. \"You're even beginning to sound like Morgan.\"\n\nCage shrugged.\n\n\"I'd like to swim too,\" she said, toying with the buttons on her blouse.\n\n\"Always happy to oblige a lady.\" He smiled as he removed his clothes again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Gwen had lain still beside him for so long that Cage thought she'd fallen asleep after their lovemaking.\n\n\"Cage?\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm.\"\n\n\"What do you think their plans are for us?\" She turned on her side to face him.\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"I mean, you're married to a woman who loathes you, and I'm tied to a man who hardly knows I exist. If Naomi has a son, Kristen and Morgan will have no further use for us.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said.\n\n\"Yet we just sit and wait, letting the Jouetts control our destiny.\"\n\n\"Gwen, how does the will spell out the ownership of Estelline?\"\n\n\"Morgan is the current owner. Estelline will go to whoever produces the first son. That son and his parents will remain at Estelline, as will Morgan and his family. The other siblings must leave the ranch and live elsewhere. The oldest son will assume ownership of Estelline when Morgan dies.\n\n\"So... legally, Morgan could sell Estelline right now,\" Cage muttered, thinking out loud.\n\n\"Yes, but no Jouett would ever give up Estelline. It's in their blood.\"\n\n\"Would you?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she hissed. \"I hate it here.\"\n\nCage smiled at her. \"As do I.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "Shanghai met his boss as he came out of the house. \"Morgan, we've got to do something about those strays. The other ranchers' fences are driving them to the open grassland on our ranch. If this keeps up, there won't be enough grass for our cattle this winter.\"\n\n\"Ride over to Enlow's place and invite him to supper tonight,\" Morgan said as he tied his six-shooter to his leg. \"Not that I don't trust what you're saying. I just hate to put up fences.\"\n\nMorgan halted Isis at the top of a grassy knoll. He leaned forward, resting his arms on the saddlebow. As he watched the cattle grazing on the gently rolling plains below, a lump formed in his throat. \"God, I love this country,\" he said out loud for God to hear him.\n\nThis land is mine, he thought. As far as the eye can see, it belongs to me. It's my birthright. For thirty years I've nursed it with my blood, sweat, and tears. It's cattle country.\n\nHis prayer was simple. \"God, give me the strength to give it up if that time comes. Give me the courage to walk away when Wallace plants seeds and farms it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "\"Jud, how do you feel about fencing?\" Morgan asked his friend as he handed him a drink.\n\n\"I try not to think about it,\" Jud Enlow grumbled.\n\n\"We're going to have to face it.\" Morgan sipped his bourbon, enjoying the warmth that spread throughout his body. \"I realize that your cattle need access to my land to reach water, so we won't divide our ranches, but we must do something to stop the northern cattle from drifting down here to graze in the winter.\"\n\n\"I suppose we could put a drift fence across our northern borders,\" Jud suggested.\n\n\"Then we agree.\" Morgan refilled Jud's glass. \"I'll send Cage into town in the morning to order the barbed wire.\"\n\nMorgan bowed his head as if he'd made a deal with the devil. Jud sat quietly, mesmerized by the warm night and the heinous decision they had just made. The mournful sound of a coyote's howl broke the silence.\n\n\"Morgan,\" Jud said slowly, \"how is Kristen?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Morgan snapped.\n\n\"Good.\" Jud downed the remainder of his drink and stood. \"I'd best be heading home.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Cage stepped onto the hot, dusty street, coughing as a passing stagecoach sent a cloud of red sand swirling around him. He had ordered enough barbed wire\u20141,500 miles of it. He would make a small fortune off the sale. Now he wanted a drink. He pulled on his leather gloves and led his horse to the closest saloon.\n\nThe bartender greeted him cheerfully. \"Morgan, what brings you into town? Or are you Cage?\"\n\n\"You'll never know,\" Cage said, doing his best imitation of Morgan's soft southern drawl.\n\n\"You're Morgan.\" The bartender set a glass and a bottle of bourbon in front of Cage. \"Want me to put it on your account?\"\n\nCage nodded, picked up the glass and bottle, and walked to a table in the corner.\n\n\"May I join you?\" he asked the heavily painted young woman seated there.\n\n\"Since when did the great Morgan Jouett stoop to talking to the likes of me?\" she said.\n\n\"You want a drink or not?\" Cage mumbled.\n\n\"No, I'm just here for the scenery,\" she snarled, motioning for the bartender to bring another glass.\n\n\"You slumming today?\" she asked, filling her glass to the brim.\n\n\"Just thought I'd have a drink,\" Cage said, grinning.\n\n\"You ain't ever been friendly to any of us girls before.\" Her speech was already beginning to slur, and he wondered how many men had been in before him.\n\n\"Maybe your little ol' wife ain't taking good care of you, eh Morgan?\"\n\nCage signaled the bartender for another bottle of bourbon. \"Why don't we go upstairs and discuss it?\" He surprised himself with his soft Texas drawl. Masquerading as Morgan did have its advantages." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "\"Get your clothes on!\" Morgan dragged Cage from the bed to the hard floor by his hair.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Cage cursed when Morgan threw his clothes in his face. Cage pulled on his jeans and tucked in his shirttail as Morgan shoved him down the stairs.\n\n\"Your sister sent me for you,\" Morgan said loudly. \"You must be an idiot, fooling around with this barroom trash when you've got a woman like Gwen at home.\"\n\nCage tried to push aside the cobwebs in his brain. For some reason, Morgan wanted the people in the saloon to believe that Cage was him.\n\nMorgan pushed him outside and helped him mount his horse. Cage hung onto the saddle horn as his brother-in-law led the horse out of town.\n\n\"Stop... stop a minute,\" Cage begged as the town disappeared behind them. He slid to the ground and vomited. \"Your barbaric bourbon.\" He retched again as a cold sweat covered his brow. \"How do you drink that stuff?\"\n\n\"In moderation,\" Morgan growled, edging Isis closer to Cage.\n\n\"Why did you let those people believe I was you?\" Cage said, holding on to Morgan's stirrup for support.\n\n\"Because I didn't want our friends and neighbors to know what a pitiful excuse for a man my sister has married.\" Morgan kicked him hard in the chest.\n\nCage stumbled backward and crumbled to the ground, trying to catch his breath.\n\nMorgan dismounted and walked toward him as Cage struggled to his knees. \"If I ever catch you with another woman, I'll kill you,\" Morgan snarled, yanking Cage to his feet.\n\nCage jerked loose from Morgan's grip and swung at him.\n\n\"I'm glad you're fighting back,\" Morgan said as his fist landed in Cage's face. \"It'll give me a good excuse to beat the living hell out of you for what you've done to my sister. Screwing with whores and taking their diseases back to Kristen.\"\n\nMorgan hit him with all his strength, and Cage dropped to his knees. It seemed like Morgan beat him for hours before Cage lost consciousness." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "The room spun like a top as Cage tried to sit up. The floor around him was sticky with blood. He touched his nose; it wasn't broken, but blood still oozed from it. His head felt as if it would burst.\n\n\"Damn you, Morgan Jouett. I'll get even with you, if it's the last thing I do,\" he yelled at the empty room.\n\nCage grabbed the edge of the dresser and pulled himself up. The image that stared back from the mirror looked almost inhuman. He washed the blood from his face and hair and then stripped off his stained clothes. He locked the door to his room and fell across the bed. He didn't want to see anyone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "\"You ride Osiris and let me ride Isis,\" Kristen begged.\n\n\"Just because my horse is faster.\" Morgan's blue eyes danced as he teased his sister. \"You want her now?\"\n\n\"No!\" Kristen scowled. \"I truly believe Osiris is faster, but you're a better rider than I am.\"\n\n\"Oh. Well, now I suppose you want to race and expect me to beat my own horse.\" He laughed, handing her Isis's reins.\n\n\"Morgan!\" She gasped, catching his hand in hers. \"Your knuckles! They're cut and swollen. What happened?\"\n\n\"Someone's face ran into my fist.\" His lips twisted into a grin.\n\n\"Anyone I know?\"\n\n\"No one that matters.\" He mounted Osiris. \"Let's ride over to the south pasture. I want to look at the new bull.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "\"Morgan, he's gorgeous,\" Kristen said as she studied the bull.\n\n\"Let's hope the cows think so.\" Her brother's easy smile lit his handsome face. \"Let's take a closer look.\" He nudged Osiris with his heels, moving him down the slope.\n\n\"You go ahead,\" she called after him. \"I've got to tighten my cinch. It's loose.\"\n\nHe turned Osiris and rode back up the hill. \"I'll do it for you.\" As he reached Kristen, the stallion stumbled, sending Morgan lurching forward as Osiris regained his footing.\n\nThen, a shot sliced through the quiet afternoon. Kristen slumped forward in her saddle, a crimson stain spreading across the back of her blouse. A frightened Isis whirled and galloped down the embankment and out of sight.\n\nMorgan goaded Osiris, and the stallion shot forward in pursuit of the scared mare. Kristen lost the reins and was clinging to the saddle horn. Isis ran at breakneck speed, spurred on by the loose reins whipping wildly about her.\n\nHe could see the saddle slipping sideways and urged Osiris to run faster. Damn you, Morgan thought. Why can't you run as good as you fight?\n\nMorgan leaned low along the stallion's back, demanding every ounce of speed the animal could give. He could feel Osiris straining to catch the mare. The wind whipped in his face as Osiris leveled out with the ground. Each powerful stride closed the gap between him and the injured Kristen.\n\nIsis's saddle slipped more, and Morgan knew it was just a matter of seconds before it swung under the mare's belly, throwing Kristen beneath sharp, pounding hooves. He prayed that she had been right about Osiris outrunning Isis. Her life depended on it.\n\nMorgan swept his sister from the saddle as it slid under Isis. The mare broke her stride, but the force of her great speed sent her hurtling forward. She stumbled, fought to regain her balance, and then crashed to the ground. Morgan glanced back in time to see Isis scramble to her feet, the saddle lying in the dirt.\n\nMorgan pulled Kristen into the saddle in front of him and urged Osiris to run faster. He could tell from the horse's labored breathing that the stallion was giving all he had. The ranch house was in sight when Osiris stumbled. Morgan halted him and slid from the saddle, carrying Kristen like a baby. Osiris fell to his knees, struggled to get up, and then collapsed onto his side.\n\nWhere is everyone? Didn't anyone hear the shot? he thought, running toward the house. His hands were sticky with Kristen's blood, and her blouse was drenched.\n\nSweat ran down his brow, blinding him. How could a little thing like Kristen be so heavy? The pounding in his ears was deafening. He stumbled and fell forward.\n\nStrong arms caught them as Shanghai steadied his friend. \"She's dying,\" Morgan cried out, his blue eyes glistened with tears. \"A doctor... Shanghai, get a doctor!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "\"The doctor says you can go in now,\" Hassie said, avoiding Morgan's questioning eyes.\n\n\"How is she?\" Morgan couldn't tear his eyes away from Kristen's ashen face. She looked so lifeless.\n\n\"Not good, Morgan.\" The doctor led him away from the girl. \"I got the bullet out, but she lost a lot of blood. A Winchester thirty-thirty, I'd say. Hit her dead center in the back.\"\n\n\"But who? Why?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid those are questions I can't answer,\" the doctor replied.\n\n\"She'll make it,\" Morgan declared, clenching his teeth. \"She's got to. The bullet is out, and you've stopped the bleeding and\u2014\"\n\n\"Morgan, do you know your sister is pregnant?\"\n\n\"Kristen? With child? No, I didn't know.\"\n\n\"Morgan?\" The two men whirled around at the sound of Kristen's voice. She whispered his name again, and Morgan hurried to her bedside.\n\n\"I'm here, Kristen.\" He took her hand in his. \"I'm here, baby girl.\"\n\n\"I'm scared, Morgan. Don't let me die.\"\n\n\"I won't. I won't,\" he cried. He clutched her hand as if willing his strength into her frail, pale body.\n\n\"I'll spend the night.\" The doctor placed his hand on Morgan's shoulder. \"In case you need me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "The morning sun found Morgan still on his knees, gripping his sister's hand. He had said every prayer he knew to every god he'd ever heard of. Kristen moved and he raised his head to gaze into her sapphire eyes.\n\nShe smiled weakly. \"Osiris is the fastest, isn't he?\"\n\n\"Yes! Yes!\" Morgan buried his face in the sheets beside her. He didn't want her to see him cry. \"Thank you, God,\" he whispered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "\"She's improved remarkably in two weeks,\" the doctor said, closing his medicine bag. \"A lot of rest and nourishing food and she'll be good as new in no time.\"\n\nThe doctor smiled at Kristen. \"You behave yourself, young lady. I'll be back in a month to check on you.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kristen said. \"You saved my life.\"\n\n\"From the stories I've heard, I believe your brother saved your life.\"\n\nMorgan followed the doctor from the room.\n\n\"I didn't tell her about her other condition,\" the doctor explained as Morgan walked him to the door. \"Sometimes it comes as a shock to a woman. I thought it would be best to wait until she is stronger.\"\n\n\"Did you tell\u2014\"\n\n\"I've only told you, Morgan.\"\n\n\"I'll ride into town with you.\" Morgan strapped on his gun. \"I want to talk to the sheriff. Why don't you have a piece of Hassie's chocolate cake while I talk to Kristen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "Morgan sat on the corner of Sheriff Sam Lee's desk. \"Do you have any ideas about who shot Kristen?\"\n\n\"I don't think that bullet was meant for Kristen,\" Sam replied.\n\n\"You mean someone was gunning for me?\" Morgan scowled. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Not you,\" Sam said. \"Your brother-in-law. The only difference between you and Cage is that tattoo on the back of his hand, and it's not visible from a distance.\"\n\n\"Who would want to kill Cage?\"\n\n\"Two men came into town about a month ago,\" Sam continued. \"They were asking about Cage. Wanted to know if he'd gotten married. They're the same men who went out to the ranch while you were on the cattle drive. Kristen talked with them.\"\n\n\"Kristen never mentioned it.\" Morgan frowned. \"Thanks, Sam.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "\"Yeah, two strangers rented a couple of horses a month ago,\" the livery owner said in response to Morgan's questions. \"And one of them was carrying a rifle. They said they were going hunting. They're still in town. Staying at the Cattlemen's Hotel.\"\n\nMorgan checked the hotel, but the strangers were not in their rooms. He headed for the saloon. Without warning, someone hit him from behind, knocking him to the ground. A hard kick in the stomach doubled him into the fetal position. Two men dragged him into the alley.\n\n\"Did you think we'd forgotten you, Cage?\" A big man with an ugly scar across the side of his face yanked Morgan to his feet. \"You're such a fancy boy. I'm going to enjoy messing up your pretty face.\"\n\nMorgan gasped, trying to catch his breath. \"You shot Kristen?\"\n\n\"Yeah, that was unfortunate. We were aiming for you. She's a pretty little thing. We could have some fun with her.\" The mousy man snickered. \"But you failed to bring the money as promised. Mr. Ren\u00f3is is getting impatient. Said for us to kill you and get it over with.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Morgan groaned. \"I'll bring the money back this afternoon.\"\n\nThe big man stared at Morgan, assessing the chances of getting the money. \"You've got three hours.\" Scarface gave Morgan a final blow to the midsection.\n\nAs they headed to the saloon, they made plans to collect the $20,000, kill Cage, and then tell Ren\u00f3is they shot the gambler because he didn't have the money." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "\"My God, Morgan! What happened to you?\" Sam caught the rancher as he lurched through the jailhouse door.\n\n\"Swear me in, Sam.\" Morgan heaved, trying to breath.\n\n\"Give you a license to kill? Morgan, I\u2014\"\n\n\"They admitted shooting Kristen, Sam. They were aiming for me but hit her. They thought I was Cage. I'll give them more of a chance than they gave my sister. I won't shoot them in the back. I'm going home. When I come back, we can arrest them.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Sam said. \"Raise your right hand.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "\"Where's Cage?\" Morgan demanded, slamming the screen door.\n\nNaomi recoiled from the fury in her brother-in-law's stormy eyes. \"He left about an hour ago, after Kristen refused to see him. She's been calling for you.\"\n\nHis eyes softened momentarily. \"How is she?\"\n\n\"About the same. I'm worried about her, Morgan.\"\n\nConcern for his sister pushed everything else from his mind. He ran up the stairs and eased her door open.\n\n\"Kristen, are you awake?\" he whispered, kneeling beside her bed.\n\nLong lashes fluttered, and then her eyes found his. She whispered his name as she reached for his hand. \"Morgan, I've been calling for you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said, leaning close to kiss her hot forehead. \"You're running fever!\"\n\n\"What happened to your beautiful face?\" Kristen whispered. She managed to lift her hand to caress his cheek.\n\n\"Morgan, thank God you're here!\" Hassie said as she burst into the room, a bucket of ice in her arms. She placed a white cloth in the wash pan, covered it with ice, and poured water over it. \"I've been trying to get her fever down, but I've failed.\"\n\nMorgan wrung the water from the cloth and wrapped it around a long, flat piece of ice. \"I'm here now, baby. Everything's going to be all right.\" He placed the cold compress on her forehead.\n\nHe sat beside her until sleep relaxed her grip on his hand. Her fever broke, and he thanked his God.\n\n\"Hassie, please keep the cold compress on her head. I have to go back into town to take care of unfinished business.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "Morgan threw back a shot of bourbon, caught his breath as it burned its way to his stomach, and pulled his rifle from the gun rack. He checked to make certain it was loaded to capacity and shoved a dozen additional bullets into his pocket. He met Cage on the front porch.\n\n\"Who's Ren\u00f3is?\" Morgan demanded.\n\nCage backed away from his brother-in-law. \"I... I don't know.\"\n\n\"I don't have time for your lies,\" Morgan hissed, grabbing Cage by the front of his shirt. \"Who's Ren\u00f3is?\"\n\nCage gulped. \"A man I owe money to.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"A gambling debt,\" Cage mumbled.\n\n\"How much?\"\n\n\"$20,000.\"\n\nMorgan stared in disbelief. \"You lost $20,000 gambling?\"\n\nCage nodded.\n\n\"Come with me,\" Morgan commanded. \"We're going to pay a debt. Yours and mine.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Morgan kicked open the door, and Scarface reached for his gun. \"Don't do it.\" Morgan leveled his rifle at the man's face. \"Get their guns, Cage.\"\n\nThe two hired killers watched in wide-eyed astonishment as Cage entered the room.\n\n\"You know my brother-in-law Cage Fielding,\" Morgan said coldly. \"Although we've met, we have never been introduced. I'm Morgan Jouett. Now, if you gentlemen will accompany us to the bank and then the telegraph office, we'll settle Cage's debt.\"\n\n\"We appreciate you paying this debt, Mr. Jouett,\" the mousy man said as they left the telegraph office. \"Mr. Ren\u00f3is was pleased. Your bank has already notified him that they are sending his money.\n\n\"I'm sure you can understand our mistaking you for Cage. There's not a hair's difference in the two of you.\"\n\n\"Except I believe in paying my debts.\" Morgan scowled. \"Give them their guns, Cage.\"\n\n\"It was nice doing business with you.\" Scarface said as the men holstered their guns and started across the street.\n\n\"I've taken care of Cage's debt.\" Morgan's voice rang out. \"Now it's time you pay your debt. Time to pay for shooting my sister.\"\n\nThe men stopped, whirling around as they pulled their guns from their holsters. Morgan fired twice. The first shot tore away the scarred side of the big man's face. The second shot hit the mousy-looking man in the chest, lifting him off the ground and sprawling him backward. His leg bent awkwardly under him when he hit the ground.\n\n\"Why did you pay the debt if you were going to kill them?\" Cage snarled as he glanced at the Texan.\n\n\"I believe in paying your debts,\" Morgan said, his jaw set in a hard line. \"If Kristen had only told me, we could have avoided this.\"\n\n\"You mean she didn't mention it to you? I thought she confided everything in you.\"\n\n\"No.\" Morgan frowned. \"I suppose she didn't want me to think badly of you.\"\n\nCage rode in silence, lost in his thoughts. He knew Morgan would do anything for his sister. Since his arrival in Estelline he'd seen Morgan face death because Kristen wanted a killer stallion. Morgan had led people to believe he was a womanizer to protect Kristen, and he'd killed two men because they hurt her.\n\nIt is always nice to know a man's weakness, Cage thought. And he knew exactly how to use it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "\"What a difference a week makes,\" Morgan said, smiling at his sister. \"I think you're gonna live.\"\n\n\"In spite of that horrible witch's brew you and Doc keep pouring down me.\" Kristen made a face at her brother.\n\nMorgan laughed. \"We have pulled you from the brink of death, and you scorn our miracle drugs.\"\n\n\"Sitting in the porch swing soaking up the sunshine would probably cure me.\"\n\n\"Doc said not to let you walk around yet,\" Morgan reminded her.\n\nShe shot him an impish grin. \"You could carry me.\"\n\n\"Indeed! Let me make it comfortable so you can lie on it, and then I'll be right back for you.\"\n\nMorgan gathered a quilt and some pillows and carried them out to the porch. He spread the quilt on the swing seat and placed the pillows so she could recline against them and stretch out her legs.\n\n\"How much longer must I wear this bandage?\" Kristen asked as he carried her down the stairs. \"It's so uncomfortable.\"\n\n\"Doc says another week,\" he said, placing her gently on the makeshift daybed he had made for her. He sat in the swing and pulled her feet onto his lap.\n\n\"Morgan, Shanghai told me what you did to the men who shot me.\"\n\n\"Shanghai has a big mouth.\"\n\n\"I know I should have told you when they first came here looking for Cage.\" She gazed into the distance as a cool breeze gently ruffled her golden hair. \"I didn't because it seems so unfair for you to carry the burdens of this entire family.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Don't worry about it. That's what big brothers are for.\"\n\n\"Oh Morgan! I've made such a mess of things,\" she sobbed. \"I'm tied to him, and Naomi's expecting a child. If it's a boy, I've married Cage for nothing.\"\n\n\"Estelline means that much to you?\" His intense blue eyes bored into hers. \"I think you'd hate leaving as much as I would.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered.\n\nHe shifted her feet in his lap and gently massaged them. \"Kristen, do you know you're going to have a baby?\"\n\nA tear slid down her cheek as she nodded. \"I wasn't positive.\"\n\n\"Doc told me,\" he informed her.\n\nShe took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. \"Morgan, will you move my things back to my room?\"\n\n\"What will Cage say?\"\n\n\"I don't care what Cage says. I have no further use for him.\"\n\n\"Speaking of the devil.\" Morgan nodded toward the cloud of dust approaching them. \"Your husband's back from his ride.\"\n\nCage rode to the barn, handed his horse's reins to one of the cowboys, and then sauntered onto the porch.\n\n\"It's good to see you up, Kristen.\" He looked up at the sky. \"There's a bad storm blowing in. I'm just ahead of the rain.\"\n\n\"I smelled it,\" Morgan said. \"I wondered when it would get here. God knows we need the rain.\"\n\n\"I guess I'd better wash for dinner.\" Cage let the screen door slam closed behind him.\n\n\"Where are Osiris and Isis?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"I turned them lose,\" Morgan said. \"Osiris saved your life. You were right. He is much faster than Isis. I expect we'll have a foal or filly next spring.\"\n\nHuge raindrops splattered onto the ground. Both inhaled deeply, savoring the smell of the rain falling on the parched Texas earth. Loud cracks filled the air as hail pelted the roof of the ranch house.\n\n\"We better go inside.\" Morgan picked her up gently. \"I'd hate to have Gwen beaten to death by hail, and she won't come in as long as we're sitting on the porch. You'd think Cage would have sent her in first to keep her from getting caught in the storm.\"\n\nAs Morgan held her in his arms, Kristen searched his face for any signs of distress. \"So, you know about your wife and my husband?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Morgan hugged her to him and waited as she pulled open the screen door, allowing him to catch it with his boot and push it open so they could enter.\n\nMorgan carried Kristen upstairs and pretended not to see Gwen when she slipped into their room. The storm hit the ranch full force. Torrential rains pelted the windows, and hail hammered the roof. A chill filled the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 102", + "text": "\"Morgan, why don't you bring Kristen down, and we can all have our dessert in the parlor in front of the fireplace,\" Jerilyn suggested, smiling at her brother-in-law. \"I'm sure she's getting restless cooped up in her room.\"\n\n\"Excellent idea,\" he replied. \"You've got yourself a thoughtful wife, Reid.\"\n\n\"I'll bring my wife down.\" Cage rose abruptly and walked up the stairs.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I never thought...\" Jerilyn muttered.\n\n\"Don't worry, honey.\" Morgan patted her hand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "Cage thought Kristen was asleep, but she stirred when he softly called her name. \"I thought you might like me to carry you down to the parlor. We're going to have our dessert there. Everyone hopes you feel like joining us.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'd like that,\" she said, smiling.\n\nCage turned on the bedside lamp and sat down on the edge of her bed. \"Kristen, could we try? I mean really try.\"\n\nShe turned her face toward the wall, exposing the taut muscle that ran down the side of her neck. He stared at her. She was so beautiful. Her golden hair fell around her like a soft cloud. Her smooth skin was flawless. He could see the gentle rise and fall of her ample breasts through her gown.\n\nShe turned to face him, and he caught his breath as he gazed into the most hypnotizing sky-blue eyes he'd ever seen. They haunted him. \"You're so beautiful,\" he murmured, his voice husky with desire.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said casually, as one would acknowledge a stranger's compliment. \"If you'll hand me my dressing gown, I'd love to go downstairs.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "\"Hassie, you make the best blackberry pie in the world,\" Morgan said as he carried the tray of dirty dishes to the kitchen. \"I believe I'll top that off with a glass of Kentucky joy-juice.\"\n\nHe grinned as he poured drinks for his brothers and himself. \"And cognac for Cage. When are you going to learn to drink a man's liquor?\"\n\n\"To each his own,\" Cage grumbled, accepting the offered glass.\n\nMorgan took a large sip of his drink and then sat beside Kristen, facing everyone in the room. \"Kristen has a surprise for you.\" He smiled at his sister.\n\n\"Oh Morgan, I didn't... I\u2014\"\n\n\"Want me to tell them?\" He noted the color creeping into her face. \"I didn't intend to embarrass you,\" he said softly.\n\nShe nodded for him to continue.\n\n\"Our baby sister is going to be a mother,\" Morgan announced proudly.\n\n\"Oh Kristen!\" Jerilyn and Naomi fussed around their sister-in-law. Gwen remained seated across the room.\n\n\"I'm glad we got a head start on you,\" Wallace teased. \"Knowing Kristen, it will be a boy.\"\n\nCage stared at his wife. She hadn't mentioned anything to him. He was the father, and he'd found out through the general family announcement. And Wallace was right. If Naomi's baby was a boy, he'd find himself out on his ear with a wife and a baby to feed.\n\n\"We'd better turn in,\" Reid said, yawning. \"We've got to get started on that fence tomorrow.\"\n\n\"How long do you figure it will take us?\" Wallace drained his glass.\n\n\"All summer,\" Morgan replied. \"But we'll only be gone a week. I want to get the boys started on it and make sure they understand what to do. Then Shanghai will ride herd on them after we leave.\"\n\n\"One of us should stay with the women,\" Cage said.\n\n\"I'll stay,\" Reid volunteered.\n\n\"We'll all get the fencing started,\" Morgan responded. \"All of the women can handle a gun as good as we can, and several hands will remain here to handle the day-to-day activity of the ranch.\"\n\nGwen stood. \"I have an announcement to make too,\" she said. \"Morgan and I are going to be parents.\"\n\n\"You're pregnant?\" Jerilyn gasped. \"How long? When?\"\n\n\"By my count, I conceived during our honeymoon.\" Gwen smiled. \"Kristen and I will be running neck and neck in this race. Of course, Naomi has a head start on both of us.\"\n\n\"It doesn't seem fair.\" Reid grinned. \"Naomi is pregnant and now Kristen and Gwen, and you won't even let me stay home long enough to get Jerilyn in the running.\" Everyone laughed as Jerilyn poked her husband in the side.\n\nCage carefully carried Kristen up the stairs and placed her on the bed. \"You could have told me I'm going to be a father,\" he said calmly.\n\n\"I didn't think it would matter to you.\" She shrugged, kicking off her shoes and sliding her legs under the covers.\n\n\"Everything you do matters to me, Kristen. I love you.\"\n\n\"If you keep saying that, I may start to believe you,\" she said.\n\n\"Then I'll keep right on saying it.\" He bent down and kissed her soft lips. \"When I return, perhaps you'll feel like welcoming me to our bedroom.\"\n\n\"Good night, Cage,\" she murmured." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "\"There go our husbands for a week,\" Jerilyn said, watching from Kristen's window as the men disappeared in a cloud of red dust.\n\n\"I wish I were riding with them,\" Kristen said wistfully.\n\n\"You must give up riding for the next nine months,\" Jerilyn advised. \"It's not good for the baby to be jostled around the countryside.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Kristen sighed. \"But I'm so tired of being stuck inside.\"\n\n\"Doc's coming by at the end of the week to check up on you,\" Jerilyn said. \"Maybe he'll allow you to ride for a couple of months.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\n\"What's it like being married to a man who's a dead ringer for Morgan?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You know what I mean.\" Jerilyn's eyes sparkled. \"Reid's mine, and I love him dearly, but there's something about Morgan that makes you wonder what is going on behind those laughing blue eyes. Something that makes you want to hold him close and cradle is head against your breasts.\"\n\nKristen giggled. \"Maybe he's laughing because he knows he affects women that way.\"\n\n\"And you're just like him,\" Jerilyn continued. \"I wish I affected men the way you do.\"\n\n\"You don't know how lucky you are, Jeri,\" Kristen mumbled.\n\n\"Did you know that Jud Enlow pulled a week-long drunk when you married Cage?\" Jerilyn sighed. \"Imagine a man pining away over you like that.\"\n\nKristen laughed out loud at the moonstruck look on her sister-in-law's face. \"I'm glad Reid married you. You're my favorite.\"\n\n\"I'm so glad,\" Jerilyn said, wrapping Kristen in a warm, sincere embrace. \"I'm going downstairs to help Naomi lock up for the night.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "\"You want me to sleep with you tonight?\" Jerilyn asked, sticking her head into Kristen's room a short while later. \"This storm is frightful, and I might not hear you if you need anything.\"\n\n\"What about Naomi?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"She's already asleep.\" Jerilyn slipped into the bed. \"And I like to talk before I sleep. Once you get used to sleeping with someone it's hard to sleep alone.\"\n\nKristen lay awake long after Jerilyn fell asleep. The rain beat a ragged tattoo on the windows. She pulled the sheet to her chin and clenched it tight as the as the howling wind drove the rain down in waves.\n\nThunder rumbled in the distance, and Kristen thought about how wonderful it would be to snuggle up to her lover on a night like this. She could feel strong, protective arms around her, wrapping her in the security of his love.\n\nA horse's frightened whinny rang out above the fury of the storm. She lay still, listening, but no other sound came. She drifted into a deep sleep, recalling the gentle way he had touched her, his hands giving her more pleasure than she had ever imagined." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "The sound of Morgan's voice pulled her from a peaceful sleep. The bright sunlight flooded her room, and she tried to reason why Morgan was yelling. What was all the fuss about? Why was he back so soon?\n\nPain stabbed her in the back as she sat up straining to hear what was happening.\n\nMorgan burst into her room with Jerilyn at his heels, her face as white as a sheet.\n\n\"I never heard a sound,\" Jerilyn sobbed.\n\n\"What is it? What's wrong?\" Kristen said, searching her brother's weary face.\n\n\"Naomi is dead,\" Morgan said.\n\nKristen gasped. \"Oh my God! But how? What happened?\"\n\n\"Someone broke into the house during the night and stabbed her to death,\" he explained.\n\nKristen stared at her brother in disbelief. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Hassie found the back door standing open when she arrived at five this morning. A trail of blood led from the door to Naomi's room.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Kristen cried. \"Why would anyone want to kill Naomi?\"\n\n\"For a million acres.\" Morgan ran his hand through his thick blond hair, pushing back the unruly forelock that reminded Kristen of a small boy. \"Shanghai just returned with the sheriff, and Sam wants everyone downstairs. Jerilyn, if you'll help Kristen dress, I'll carry her down.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "Sheriff Sam Sharp was the man you'd want protecting your back if you were in a gunfight. At six foot three, he was an intimidating man who never hesitated to draw his six-shooter to even the odds. He greeted each of the Jouetts as they entered the drawing room. After everyone was seated, he walked to the center of the room. \"First of all, I want to know where each of you was last night.\"\n\n\"Wallace, Reid, Cage, and I were on the north range with the fencing crew,\" Morgan answered. \"Wallace and Reid were asleep in the covered wagon. Cage was sleeping in the supply wagon, and I slept alone in my covered wagon.\"\n\n\"So, no one saw you and Cage after you retired.\" Sam said. \"Wallace and Reid were together in the same wagon, so they can provide an alibi for each other.\"\n\nSam turned to Hassie. \"What about the women?\"\n\n\"I slept with Kristen in case she needed me,\" Jerilyn blurted. \"We never left the room all night.\"\n\n\"I was asleep in my room, alone,\" Gwen volunteered. \"Obviously, Naomi was alone in her room.\"\n\n\"I was asleep in my own bed with my husband,\" Hassie added.\n\n\"So, Morgan, Cage, and Gwen have no alibi for last night,\" Sam noted. \"Did any of you hear anything?\"\n\n\"Sometime after midnight, I heard a horse whinny over the storm, as if frightened,\" Kristen answered. \"But that was all. Jerilyn was sound asleep.\"\n\n\"I heard nothing,\" Gwen said.\n\n\"I know your father had a complicated will.\" Sam ran his fingers through his short, black hair. \"Which one of you would benefit the most from Naomi's death?\"\n\nSilence fell on the room as the family stared blankly at one another.\n\n\"Kristen would,\" Gwen muttered.\n\n\"How's that?\" Sam scowled.\n\n\"Whoever has the first male heir inherits the ranch,\" Gwen continued. \"With Naomi and her baby out of the way, Kristen stands a good chance of inheriting Estelline.\"\n\n\"Kristen was with me all night,\" Jerilyn declared. \"I spent the night in her room in case she needed me.\"\n\n\"Kristen's injury disqualifies her as a suspect,\" Sam said gruffly. \"Gwen, you seem to be the only one in the house without an alibi.\"\n\n\"Surely you don't think I'd kill Naomi,\" Gwen sobbed.\n\nMorgan slipped a protective arm around Gwen's shoulders. \"You're not accusing my wife, are you Sam?\"\n\n\"She's the only one without an alibi, Morgan.\"\n\n\"What about us?\" Morgan insisted. \"Any of the men could have ridden back here during the storm, killed Naomi, and returned to camp before sunup. Granted, it would be a fast ride, but it would be possible.\"\n\nSam frowned. \"You're right. Mr. Fielding, can anyone vouch for you?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I was sleeping alone in the wagon,\" Cage replied.\n\n\"As was I,\" Morgan added.\n\nSam shook his head. \"Okay. That's all for now. I'd like to see the room and Naomi again.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "Kristen dressed slowly. The cool bath had felt good. She brushed her hair until it glinted in the sun's rays and left it hanging loose around her shoulders.\n\nA week had passed since Naomi's funeral, and life was going on as usual. Wallace spent a lot of time alone, trying to make sense of his wife's death.\n\n\"Hey!\" Morgan jumped out of Kristen's way as she rushed from her room. \"Where are you going in such a hurry?\"\n\n\"For a ride.\" She laughed joyously. \"Doc said I could.\"\n\n\"That's great news,\" he said with a smile. \"But would you help me with these damn cufflinks before you go?\"\n\n\"Don't you look sharp,\" she quipped as she fastened his sleeves with the gold jewelry. \"Smell good too. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were going courting.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I'd rather. But I've got a ranchers' meeting at the church. It seems our neighbors are getting upset about our drift fence.\"\n\n\"Why should they be?\"\n\n\"Change always upsets people. I'm sure they'll understand once I explain our reasons and that they won't be affected.\"\n\n\"There,\" she said, patting his arm as she finished fastening his cufflinks. \"What about your tie?\"\n\n\"Must I?\" he moaned. He reminded her of a little boy being forced to wear a suit to Sunday school. \"I'll just wear that little string thing you brought back from Frisco.\"\n\nHe kissed her on the cheek and ran down the stairs. Kristen hummed happily as she continued her walk to the barn.\n\nShanghai insisted on saddling a horse for her. \"You sure you should be riding alone?\" he said as he glanced at her pale face. \"You're still not as strong as you should be.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine, Shanghai, and I'd like to be alone.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "Mayor Martin Watson called the meeting to order, and a salty old rancher got to his feet in the midst of the gathering. \"The purpose of this meeting is to find out exactly what Morgan and Jud think they're doing stringing that damn devil's wire across our range.\"\n\n\"Hold on, Hezekiah.\" Mayor Watson pounded his gavel on the long table in front of him as a murmur spread through the group of men.\n\n\"We're with Hezekiah, Mayor,\" another rancher called out.\n\n\"If you'll give me a chance, I'll gladly explain.\" Morgan walked to the front of the group. \"As you know, the northerners began fencing their property a couple of years ago, greatly reducing the grazing land open to ranchers. Each winter, more of their range cattle drift down here. We're rounding up large herds of Kansas cattle.\"\n\n\"As did we,\" a young rancher volunteered.\n\n\"I've got Kansas and Oklahoma cattle grazing at my place right now, which means their owners are just letting them run wild. And the only time they look for them is when it's time to take them to market, after they've gotten fat on our grass.\"\n\n\"That's right. Morgan's got a point,\" an older rancher chimed in.\n\n\"That sounds reasonable,\" the mayor said. \"How do you feel about it, Landon?\"\n\nBenjamin Landon rose to his feet as a hush fell over the group. \"As you all know, I own the spread next to Morgan's. And like Morgan, I run a big herd of cattle. Morgan and I went to Austin some years back and got deeds, all legal and proper, making our land ours in the eyes of the law.\" Landon stopped and looked around the room to make certain everyone understood what he was saying.\n\n\"Now, there are a few of you here who've been using land you've got no right to.\"\n\n\"It's all open range,\" Hezekiah hollered, stomping the floor.\n\n\"No, it ain't,\" Ben Landon boomed. \"It belongs to those who have deeds to it, like me and Morgan and young Jud Enlow. Not only am I gonna put up a drift fence, I'm going to fence my entire ranch. Those of you who have been grazing your cattle on my land better move 'em before my fences go up.\"\n\n\"Like hell we will!\" Hezekiah bellowed. \"You can't do that. Tell him he can't do that, Mayor.\"\n\n\"Gentlemen, gentlemen.\" Morgan banged on the table. \"I'm afraid Ben can do what he's saying... although it doesn't seem neighborly. Morgan, is that your plan too?\"\n\n\"No, Martin. Most of you need to access my land to reach the river for water. I'm not trying to shut out my neighbors.\"\n\n\"What about us on the other side of Ben's land?\" an old-timer called out. \"We won't be able to reach the river because of Ben's fences.\"\n\nMorgan shrugged. \"I don't know. Ben, could you reconsider fencing your entire ranch and just put up a drift fence?\"\n\n\"No, I won't,\" Ben exclaimed stubbornly. \"And if you're smart, Morgan Jouett, You'll fence all your property too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "Kristen looked at the moon through the tree branches. It was almost midnight, and he hadn't come. She mounted her horse and headed toward the ranch house. Doesn't he know how much I need him to hold me? she thought. I need to feel his arms around me.\n\nEveryone was asleep when Kristen reached the barn, so she unsaddled her horse, turned it loose in the corral, and walked toward the house. As she started up the porch steps she realized her brother was sitting in the porch swing, waiting for her.\n\n\"You shouldn't be out alone this late at night,\" he said gruffly.\n\n\"I know, but I'd hoped\u2014\"\n\n\"There's a killer loose, Kris,\" Morgan reminded her. \"I don't want you out alone after dark.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" She sat down beside him. His face was cold and hard. Even the light of the full moon couldn't soften the set line of his jaw.\n\n\"Morgan, what's wrong?\" She knew from experience that only serious trouble could drive the laughter from her brother's blue eyes.\n\n\"There's going to be trouble, Kris. This fencing business is going to play hell with Texas.\"\n\n\"What happened at the meeting?\"\n\nMorgan spent the next few minutes recounting everything that had transpired. \"It's worrisome. Cattlemen like Hezekiah Roberts got all riled up, yelling about it being open range and how they'd graze their herds anywhere they please.\"\n\nKristen shuddered as she recalled what Hezekiah had done to a Mexican man who had tried to force his affections on Hezekiah's sister. He had branded HR on the man's chest. The man had died when the brand became infected.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Morgan looked at her. \"I just don't know, Kris. If the other ranchers fence their property, it will drive the open-range cattle onto our property. You know we have a lot of cattlemen who own nothing but cattle. They have no land in their names. They've taken the land for granted. Few had the foresight to obtain deeds. This could start a range war.\"\n\n\"Why can't we leave things as they are?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"It's already too late,\" he explained patiently. \"The construction company that built the Texas state capitol in Austin was awarded three million acres by the legislature in payment for their work. That's three times as much land as we have, and they fenced it, Kris. The XIT Ranch covers ten counties in Texas.\n\n\"Can you imagine fencing three million acres?\" Morgan took a long draw on his cigarette and exhaled slowly. \"Why, it's going to take us six months to fence our southern property line. I'm just praying we'll be finished before the winter snows hit.\n\n\"If we don't fence everything, other ranchers' fences will drive more free-range cattle onto our land, and we'll soon find ourselves hosts to all the free-grazers in North Texas. We can't allow that to happen.\"\n\nHe paused to catch his breath. Kristen seemed distracted, and his mood changed instantly.\n\n\"I'm some brother, aren't I?\" he mumbled. \"I didn't even ask how you're feeling after your first outing.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she said. She tried to hide the disappointment in her heart as she headed inside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "\"It's been three weeks since Naomi's funeral, Morgan.\" Jud walked beside his friend, matching his stride. \"Don't you think we should ride out and see how the fence is coming along?\"\n\n\"I suppose so,\" Morgan said. \"I just hate to leave the women alone. Whoever murdered Naomi is still running loose, and now that Kristen is...\"\n\n\"Is what?\" Jud demanded.\n\n\"Expecting. She's pregnant, Jud.\"\n\n\"I didn't... no one told me,\" Jud muttered.\n\nMorgan glanced at the dark-haired man's face. The firm set of Jud's jaw confirmed what he'd suspected for some time. \"You're in love with her.\"\n\n\"Yes!\" Jud said, blushing as Kristen bounded down the veranda steps.\n\n\"You two look as if you're going to a funeral,\" she said, tiptoeing to kiss Jud on the cheek. \"It's good to see you.\"\n\n\"We were just discussing riding out to check on the fencing crew,\" Jud said, casually glancing at Morgan.\n\n\"I'll go with you.\" She slipped between the two of them, putting an arm around each one's waist.\n\n\"You'll do no such thing,\" they chorused.\n\n\"Wow!\" Kristen grinned. \"You two certainly know how to make a girl feel wanted.\"\n\n\"We'll leave one of the men here to watch over you,\" Morgan said. \"Just to be safe.\"\n\n\"Don't leave Cage,\" Kristen blurted.\n\n\"Why not?\" Morgan asked.\n\nKristen faced her brother. \"How many horses were in the barn the night Naomi was killed?\"\n\n\"None.\" Morgan shrugged. \"I had released Osiris and Isis, and we needed every extra mount to pull the wagons loaded with fence posts and to carry the extra hands on the fencing crew. I left the span of white mules in case y'all needed mounts. Why?\"\n\nA frown contorted her lovely face. \"I distinctly heard a horse whinnying above the storm. That means someone was outside the house on a horse.\"\n\nMorgan stared at his sister. \"You think it was Cage?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she exclaimed. \"I only know that Naomi's killer came from outside.\"\n\n\"Morgan would you step in here for a second?\" Reid called from the front door of the house.\n\nWhen the rancher closed the door behind him, Jud caught Kristen's arm and gently turned her to face him. \"You think your husband killed Naomi?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"How can you live with a man you suspect of murder?\" Jud's grip tightened on her arm. \"Kristen\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not living with him!\" She jerked her arm away from him and ran into the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "Kristen got up from the quilt she had spread on the grass and walked to the large oak tree. She leaned against it, watching the moon's silver flecks dance on the water. She had come here every night, hoping he'd come to her.\n\nShe walked to the edge of the river and looked into the raging, foaming darkness of the waters produced by melting snow in the high country.\n\nHe'd called this their place. A place away from the world. She'd met him here so often.\n\n\"Kristen?\" His voice sent a wave of warmth through her body.\n\n\"Thank God,\" she whispered, rushing into his arms and kissing him.\n\nSoft, full lips touch hers, hesitantly at first, then hungrily. She surrendered to the raging desire he aroused in her. He crushed her to him, whispering her name over and over, as if to reassure himself that she was in his arms.\n\n\"I love you. I love you,\" he murmured. His voice was hoarse as he kissed the hollow of her neck. Her body seemed to burst into flames wherever his lips touched her.\n\n\"This is what I live for,\" she cried, \"to be with you like this.\"\n\n\"I know, little one,\" he said breathlessly as he pulled her down onto the quilt. He held her tightly, his strong arms pressing her against his flat, muscular torso. When she began to unbutton his shirt, he cupped his hands over hers and kissed her again. Then he held her hands above her head as he slowly kissed the cleavage exposed by her half-opened blouse.\n\nKristen moaned as his lips touched her nipple. She bucked against him, wanting more. She freed her hands, slipping them beneath his shirt and clawing at his back, pulling him harder against her.\n\n\"Suck me,\" she moaned.\n\nHe pulled her breast into his mouth as he slid one hand beneath her back and caressed her other breast gently with his free hand.\n\nShe pushed her hand between them, struggling with the snap on his jeans.\n\n\"No!\" he gasped. \"Let me please you.\" Still teasing her breast with his tongue, he slid his hand down and pushed her skirt up around her waist.\n\nShe screamed his name when he caressed her most private places. He sucked and stroked until she whimpered and begged for something more.\n\nHe cupped her with his hand and slid his fingers through her folds. He covered her mouth with his when she screamed his name as he entered her.\n\nKristen raked her nails down his back, demanding more from him, and he delivered. Her heart hammered his name as he drove his fingers into her. \"Yes! Oh God, yes,\" she cried. She couldn't get enough of him.\n\nAs he slowly brought her down from heaven's heights, she stroked his smooth, muscular back, her hands sliding down to his narrow waist. The feel of his skin rekindled her desire for him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "He rolled away from her, burying his face in the crook of his arm. Kristen's breasts heaved as she tried to catch her breath, still riding the wave of pleasure he had induced.\n\n\"This is wrong. It's wrong, Kristen,\" he cried. \"Our love is so wrong.\"\n\n\"No! No, I won't let it be,\" she said, her eyes blazing.\n\nHe rolled over to face her. \"Do you know what our friends and neighbors would say? What our families would say if they ever found out about us?\"\n\nHe pushed her hair back from her face. \"Oh God! You are so incredibly beautiful. And I am despicably weak where you are concerned, little one.\"\n\nHe stroked her arm, and the agony in his voice told her he loved her above all things. \"I'd rather know death than hurt you or cause you shame.\"\n\n\"I'd gladly suffer either to be with you.\" She snuggled against him.\n\n\"You have a husband, and I have a wife,\" he said. \"And soon you'll have a baby to consider. Above all else, Kristen, you must consider the baby.\"\n\n\"I wish it were your baby,\" she sobbed.\n\n\"We both know there's no possibility of that,\" he said gently. \"It doesn't matter. Listen to me. Don't waste your time coming here because I'll never seek you again.\"\n\n\"No! No!\" she cried. \"I can't live without you.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can... and you must.\"\n\n\"Look at me!\" she hissed. \"Look at me!\"\n\nShe tore open her blouse to reveal the soft white perfection of her breasts. \"Tell me you don't want me.\" She untied the ribbon in her hair, letting it cascade down her shoulders. \"Tell me you can forget tonight and that you'll never want me again!\"\n\n\"Kristen, Kristen.\" His mouth was firm, but gentle, on hers. His body was warm and demanding, \"I love you as I have never loved anything in my life.\"\n\nThe cool night breeze rustled the tree leaves. She lay in his arms, content just to be with him. An owl hooted and Kristen snuggled closer to him.\n\n\"I thought you'd fallen asleep.\" He kissed her.\n\n\"No. I was just lying here enjoying the feel of your arms around me and being happy.\"\n\n\"You know, I should be ashamed of myself.\" Although his words were serious, the laughter in his eyes betrayed him.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I'm really rotten.\" He raised himself on one elbow and looked down at her beautiful face. \"Rolling a pregnant woman in the grass.\"\n\n\"You really are.\" She smiled, pulling him down to her again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "He stood suddenly and helped her to her feet. \"Let's go swimming. I need to show you something.\"\n\n\"Skinny-dipping?\" She teased.\n\nHe chuckled. \"Unless it would embarrass you.\"\n\nNothing about their relationship embarrassed her. She had always been completely at ease with him, trusted him. She knew he would always do what was best for her, no matter what. Her love for him was like a child's innocent faith, completely honest with no pretense. He knew her for what she was: temperamental, demanding, spoiled, and insanely in love with him. But he had made her the way she was. Didn't he enjoy spoiling her, pleasing her, and being with her?\n\nThe whinny of an approaching horse caught their attention.\n\n\"Someone's coming. I'll ride to meet them. Wait ten minutes and then hightail it to the ranch house,\" he whispered. He grabbed his gun and holster from the quilt they had shared, kissed her passionately, and mounted his horse.\n\nKristen folded the quilt as the first rays of the morning sun opened up the eastern sky. I lost track of time, she thought. If I had the power, I'd make time stand still.\n\nShe took her time returning to the ranch. She knew the men would leave tomorrow to join the fencing crew. They would be too busy to notice her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 116", + "text": "\"Reid is already out with the fencing crew.\" Morgan pushed his chair back from the table as Kristen brought him a glass of bourbon. \"Wallace, why don't you stay here with the women? In the morning, Cage and I will ride to camp and see how the fence is progressing.\"\n\n\"I'd rather be working with the boys,\" Wallace said softly. \"Being in this house without Naomi is... difficult.\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to take care of the women,\" Cage said.\n\nGwen glanced at Morgan to see how he would react to her lover's offer.\n\nMorgan sipped his drink. \"No. I want you with me. In a few more months you could be the boss around here, assuming Kristen has a son before Gwen. He will inherit the ranch. You'll need to be thoroughly familiar with every aspect of Estelline. We won't be here to help you.\"\n\nSilence settled on the room as the significance of Morgan's statement registered with each of them.\n\n\"There's no need for anyone to stay with us,\" Kristen declared. \"I'm fine now. The three of us can take care of ourselves. I'm as good with a six-shooter as you.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Jerilyn added. \"We'll keep the doors bolted at night.\"\n\n\"I'll leave two men here,\" Morgan said. \"There are some repairs to be done, so they'll have plenty to do.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 117", + "text": "Cage emptied the cognac decanter. He hoped the supply he'd ordered would arrive before he finished the last bottle. He walked onto the balcony and looked up at the stars. God, how I hate it here, he thought. I'd give anything for a decent suit of clothes, a good cigar, and a deck of cards.\n\nGwen had been his only salvation. If he didn't have her to help kill time, he'd go crazy. He had been astounded to learn that she'd become pregnant so quickly after marrying Morgan. If she gave birth to a boy before Kristen, Morgan's son would inherit Estelline.\n\nCage realized Morgan would kill him if he ever found out he was sleeping with Gwen. Not that he was jealous about it. It would just be a matter of pride. Morgan would never allow anything to tarnish the precious Jouett name.\n\nOf course, if Kristen's baby arrived first, Cage would be the king of Estelline. He chortled as he envisioned himself telling Morgan to pack his bags and get off the ranch. And Kristen... beautiful, cold Kristen. With Morgan and her brothers gone, he could teach her to behave like an obedient wife.\n\nFury surged through him as he recalled watching Morgan move Kristen's things from Cage's room back to her own. Everyone knew she no longer slept with him. He knew she only tolerated him. She can't treat me this way, he thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 118", + "text": "It was after midnight when he stumbled to her room and knocked on her door.\n\n\"Cage! What are you doing here? You're drunk.\" Kristen whispered to avoid waking the sleeping household.\n\nHe shoved her inside and closed the door behind him.\n\n\"What do you want?\" she hissed.\n\n\"What does a man usually want from his wife?\" He caught her as she wheeled away from him, snapping her back against him.\n\n\"Let me go!\" she snarled at him.\n\nHe tightened his grip on her arms. \"Did you think you could just move out and forget about me? Did you honestly think I'd stand for it? You got what you wanted from me, and now you have no further use for me.\" He shook her savagely and then tried to kiss her.\n\n\"You're hurting me,\" she cried, hanging her head to avoid his clumsy kiss.\n\nHe wrapped her long hair around his hand and yanked her head back, forcing her to look at him. The fires of hell flared in her eyes.\n\n\"I can be gentle and loving,\" he growled, \"or I can hurt you. You can have it any way you want it, but you are going to perform your wifely duties.\"\n\n\"I hate you.\" She spit in his face. \"I hate you, and I can't stand you touching me.\"\n\nCage released her hair and backhanded her, sending her sprawling across the bed. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. He was on top of her, pinning her struggling body to the bed. \"Have it your way.\" He grinned cruelly as he slapped her again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 119", + "text": "He knocked on her door early the next morning. \"Kristen? Kristen, we're leaving.\"\n\n\"Goodbye,\" she called out.\n\n\"Kristen, please unlock the door. I want to see you before we leave.\"\n\nThe lock clicked, and the door opened slightly. As he entered she turned away so he couldn't see her face.\n\n\"Kris, we'll be gone about a week. If you have any trouble or need me for anything, don't hesitate to send one of the boys to get me.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nHe caught her arm and gently turned her around to face him. \"Oh my God, Kristen! Who beat you like... Cage! That son of a bitch. I'll kill him.\"\n\n\"No!\" she cried. \"You'll hang, and he's not worth it.\"\n\nHe stared at her, fighting the hollow, sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach. \"How can a man do a thing like this to a woman? Did he... Kristen, did he rape you?\"\n\nHe didn't wait for her answer. \"Is the baby okay?\" he asked with a calmness he didn't feel.\n\n\"Yes. I'm fine. I promise we'll send for you if you're needed.\"\n\nHe kissed her lightly, but instead of releasing her as she expected, he pulled her closer, kissing her sweetly, slowly, as if he couldn't bear to let her go.\n\n\"I love you, Kristen. I'll work something out. We will be together. I promise.\"\n\nHer heart soared above the trees as she melted into him. He'd find a way. She knew he would, and that was all that mattered. She could stand the waiting." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 120", + "text": "Morgan reined in his horse and sat motionless, staring at the miles of fence cutting a jagged scar across the face of the land\u2014a necessary evil.\n\nHe'd heard about the screwworm epidemic in South Texas. Cattle scratched or punctured by the vicious barbs invariably attracted the screwworm flies. They deposited their eggs, which immediately hatched into larva maggots that began feeding on the animals. If not treated, the cattle would die.\n\nHe had ordered Buckthorn barbed wire. It was a wider ribbon with blunt barbs and more expensive, but more easily seen and far less vicious than the sharp-pointed wire that prompted the southern screwworm epidemic.\n\nMorgan was surprised to see four riders approaching. As they drew closer, he recognized Hezekiah Roberts and his brothers.\n\n\"What brings you boys out this way?\" Morgan said when they were within earshot.\n\n\"Your fence!\" Hezekiah's sardonic grin revealed teeth browned by chewing tobacco.\n\n\"What about it?\"\n\n\"Just wanted to see what you're doing with it.\"\n\nMorgan backed his horse, keeping the four in front of him. \"Ben Landon's right, Hezekiah. Your kind of cattle-raising is going to be obsolete in a few years. Why don't you get some property? You can afford to purchase land and\u2014\"\n\n\"Buy land?\" Hezekiah snorted. \"I've always used this land for free. I'll be damned if I'll buy it.\"\n\n\"You'll be damned if you don't.\" Morgan backed his horse again, pulling his six-shooter from its holster. \"Stop where you are. If you try to surround me, I may not kill all of you, but I'll take out at least two of you. Line up in front of me.\"\n\nThe four men did as instructed and glared at Morgan.\n\n\"You can leave your cattle on my land until roundup next year, but be prepared to graze them somewhere else after that.\"\n\n\"You young pup,\" Hezekiah said, spitting on the ground. \"I was running cattle on this land when you Jouetts were still\u2014\"\n\n\"My father and his father and grandfather owned this land, Hezekiah. We've fought Mexicans, Indians, and a civil war for this land. I've lost my mother, father, and a sister-in-law to this land. Don't tell me what I was doing while you were running cattle on it.\"\n\n\"That don't change nothing.\" Hezekiah shifted a chew of tobacco from one jaw to the other.\n\n\"I think I'm being fair,\" Morgan reasoned. \"I'm giving you almost a year to find a place to move your cattle. I won't be responsible for them after that.\"\n\nHezekiah glared at him. \"Is that a threat?\"\n\n\"A friendly warning,\" Morgan replied. \"Y'all best be moving along.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 121", + "text": "Their one-week stay with the fencing crew had turned into months. Setting fence posts and stringing three strands of the devil's wire had taken three times as long as Morgan had anticipated, and it required the work of every man available.\n\n\"It's October, Jud,\" Morgan said as he threw the saddle across his horse's back. \"We've been out here so long I'm not sure they'll remember our names when we get home.\"\n\n\"Stringing that barbed wire did take a lot longer than we expected.\" Jud grinned. \"I can't wait to shave off this beard and soak in a nice hot tub of water. You're lucky, Morgan. You don't grow a beard. Hell, you don't even have peach fuzz.\"\n\n\"His father had a light beard,\" Shanghai informed them. \"I guess the beard gene petered out by the time it got to Morgan.\" Everyone laughed.\n\n\"I'm looking forward to sleeping on clean sheets,\" Reid chimed in.\n\n\"Makes it a lot nicer when there's someone waiting for you in that bed,\" Cage said with a knowing wink.\n\n\"How would you know?\" Jud blurted.\n\nCage's face paled beneath his tan. \"What do you mean by that?\"\n\nMorgan shot Jud a warning glance.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Jud mumbled.\n\n\"You meant something.\" Cage walked around his horse and faced Jud. \"Now why don't we just get it out in the open?\"\n\n\"You're married to the most beautiful woman in the state, and she can't stand you,\" Jud said.\n\nWithout warning, Cage's fist smashed into Jud's midsection. Before he could recover, Cage delivered two sharp blows to the rancher's face, and Jud crumbled to the ground.\n\nShanghai rushed in to stop the fight. \"You know better than to pick a fight with him, boy. He whipped me,\" he said as he helped Jud to his feet.\n\n\"Is that the same way you beat my sister?\" Morgan's voice was full of hate.\n\nCage jerked around to face his twin. The look in Morgan's eyes told him the man would gladly kill him. He stepped back. \"I've got no fight with you, Morgan.\"\n\nMorgan's clenched his fists. \"You're a coward, Cage.\"\n\n\"Not a coward, Morgan. Just practical,\" Cage said with a smirk. \"If you got lucky and landed a punch, you wouldn't stop until you killed me. I've got too much to live for.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 122", + "text": "Jerilyn and Gwen met their husbands on the veranda.\n\n\"Wow! I've missed you,\" Jerilyn said, greeting Reid with an enthusiastic bear hug.\n\n\"Sounds promising.\" Reid laughed as he embraced his wife.\n\nMorgan stopped in his tracks as Gwen appeared on the veranda holding a baby. \"Welcome home, Morgan,\" she said, smiling. \"You have a daughter.\"\n\n\"A daughter?\" Morgan gasped. \"I have a daughter!\"\n\nHe ran up the stairs, hugged Gwen, and pulled back the blanket covering the infant. \"Gwen, I... thank you.\"\n\nGwen held the baby out to him, and Morgan took the tiny bundle into his arms. \"She's beautiful,\" he mumbled, cradling the baby in the crook of his arm. \"Have you named her?\"\n\n\"I thought we would do that together,\" she said. \"Maybe tonight after dinner.\"\n\n\"I'd like that very much. Where's Kristen?\" he asked. \"Has she\u2014?\"\n\n\"No,\" Gwen said. \"She hasn't given birth yet.\"\n\n\"She's upstairs lying down,\" Jerilyn answered. \"She's not feeling well.\"\n\n\"I'm going to look in on her.\" Morgan gazed at the sleeping baby girl. \"May I take her upstairs with me?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Gwen said.\n\nKristen was sleeping peacefully. Morgan noticed the dark circles under her eyes and knew she hadn't slept well in weeks. Her long lashes fluttered on her pale cheeks. As her eyes opened, she recoiled from him.\n\n\"No!\" she pleaded, turning her face away from him.\n\n\"It's me, honey,\" Morgan whispered.\n\n\"Oh Morgan!\" A smile brightened her face. \"I thought you were\u2014\"\n\n\"Cage won't bother you again.\" He sat down beside his sister. \"Look, Kristen. I have a daughter.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Kristen beamed. \"She's beautiful. Look at those eyebrows and lashes. Morgan, she's going to be a heartbreaker.\"\n\n\"Jerilyn said you've been ill.\"\n\n\"Oh, just natural discomfort with pregnancy, I suppose.\" She smiled weakly. \"I'm not used to being sickly.\"\n\n\"Has Doc been checking on you?\"\n\n\"Yes, regularly. He says we'll probably have a Christmas baby.\"\n\n\"I can't think of a better Christmas present.\" Morgan beamed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 123", + "text": "Over dinner the men regaled the women with tales of their hard work and bravery in facing the obstacles of the harsh Texas landscape. The women relived Gwen's delivery, which put the men to shame as they compared their fortitude to hers.\n\n\"I don't know about the rest of you,\" Morgan announced, \"but I'm exhausted. A hot bath and dinner have turned me into jelly. I could sleep for a week.\"\n\nThe other men agreed.\n\nMorgan carried the baby upstairs as Gwen followed them. \"Have you even thought about a girl's name?\" Gwen asked, closing the door to their suite.\n\n\"I've been thinking,\" Morgan replied. \"I like Estelle. That was my grandmother's name.\"\n\n\"My grandmother was named Rachel,\" Gwen informed him.\n\nMorgan contemplated the name. \"I like the name Rachel. How would you feel about Rachel Estelle Jouett?\"\n\nGwen beamed. \"You'd do that? You'd name her after my grandmother?\"\n\n\"Of course. You're her mother.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 124", + "text": "\"Everyone's going to the Christmas dance,\" Jerilyn declared, passing the platter of fried chicken to Morgan. \"I'm so excited. It seems like ages since we've been to a party.\n\n\"Gwen and I have been sewing all week on our new dresses. You'd better keep an eye on me, Reid,\" she said, flirting with her husband.\n\nReid laughed. \"Don't I always?\"\n\n\"You didn't say anything about going.\" Morgan addressed Gwen.\n\n\"I just assumed we were going. You go every year. I've been looking forward to it, and I feel fine. Your sister is the sickly one.\"\n\n\"No problem,\" Morgan said amiably. \"You and Cage go to the party, and I'll take care of Kristen and Rachel.\"\n\n\"Oh, Morgan, that's not necessary,\" Kristen protested. \"You go too. I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"I really don't want to go,\" Morgan said, scowling. \"I'm sure Hezekiah will be there, and I seem to rub him the wrong way. No need to have unnecessary trouble. Y'all plan on going and enjoying yourselves.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 125", + "text": "The day of the Christmas dance arrived, and everyone was in high spirits. Social gatherings were few and always drew a large crowd of people from surrounding ranches.\n\nMorgan stood at the upstairs window, watching his family and employees ride away from the ranch. He put another log on the fire and refilled his glass.\n\n\"What more could a man ask for?\" He propped his feet on the ottoman in front of the fire. He luxuriated in the warmth from the flames. \"A warm fire, good Kentucky bourbon, and the conversation of a beautiful woman.\"\n\n\"I don't feel beautiful,\" Kristen replied. \"I feel fat and ugly.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"You do look funny. But trust me, you are beautiful, little sister.\"\n\n\"Is Hezekiah causing you trouble?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not really.\" He pretended to concentrate on the glass in his hand.\n\n\"What kind of answer is that? Just because I'm pregnant doesn't mean I'm brain-dead.\"\n\nMorgan took a deep breath. \"Ben finished fencing his land and forced Hezekiah to get off his property, and he's fighting mad.\"\n\n\"I don't see how that affects us.\"\n\n\"I told Hezekiah he could run his cattle on our land until spring roundup. Now he's talking around that he's going to build a house in the valley.\"\n\n\"But that's our property,\" Kristen snapped.\n\n\"Exactly. Which tells me Hezekiah has decided he's going to have a battle on his hands, so he intends to stake a claim on what he wants and fight for it.\" Morgan finished his drink and put the glass down.\n\nA painful expression shot across Kristen's face as her body stiffened. Morgan was at her side instantly. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" she gasped. \"He just likes to kick a lot.\"\n\nAnxiety etched Morgan's finely chiseled features as he watched Kristen.\n\n\"Morgan, why don't you just give Hezekiah the land he wants?\"\n\n\"Give it to him? If I back down from him, every two-bit cattle raiser in Texas will swarm here trying to carve out a piece of Estelline for himself.\"\n\n\"Remember what he did to that Mexican boy over a scrawny cow?\" Kristen said, fighting back tears. \"Oh, Morgan, don't you understand? If anything happens to you, I'll be left alone with...\"\n\n\"Cage,\" Morgan growled.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n\"You've really been unfortunate when it comes to men.\" His eyes were full of tenderness and understanding.\n\nShe returned his gaze, her blue eyes brimming with tears. \"I've known more love than most women.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about Hezekiah,\" he said gruffly. \"I can handle the situation, and you know Reid has turned into one hell of a cattleman.\"\n\nKristen grinned. \"Reid tries so hard to be like you. But I'm worried about Wallace. He seems so lethargic.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know. Losing Naomi and the baby was a hard blow for him, but he'll pull out of it. You don't quickly get over losing a loved one. Just give him time.\"\n\nMorgan refilled his glass and was returning to his seat beside Kristen when a rock crashed through the window. \"Get behind the sofa,\" Morgan yelled, turning off the lights.\n\n\"Morgan Jouett, you in there?\" Hezekiah bellowed.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Morgan pulled his rifle from the gun stand.\n\n\"I want to tell you I'm squatting on your west ranch,\" Hezekiah roared.\n\n\"Like I said, Hezekiah, you're welcome to graze your herd on our property through the winter, but you can't build on our ranch.\"\n\n\"We'll see about that.\" Hezekiah emptied his revolver into the house and then rode away with his men.\n\nMorgan made certain the troublemakers had left the ranch then turned his attention to Kristen crouched behind the sofa.\n\n\"Morgan!\" Kristen's scream ripped the night. \"Morgan, help me. The baby.\"\n\n\"Oh my God!\" he whispered.\n\n\"He's coming, Morgan!\" She gasped as her beautiful face contorted in pain.\n\n\"Everything is going to be alright,\" he said, doing his best to reassure her. \"I know what to do. I'll take care of you.\"\n\nMorgan tossed another log into the bedroom fireplace and set a kettle of water on the fire. His hands shook as he readied the things he knew he would need. Despite the coolness of the bedroom, perspiration trickled down his temple. He couldn't recall ever being so scared.\n\nDammit all. Why don't they come home from the dance? he thought.\n\nKristen cried out again.\n\nDear God, please help me, Morgan prayed.\n\n\"Here, bite down on this cloth.\" For the first time, he looked into her eyes. He expected to see them filled with terror; instead, he saw trust and faith. \"You're going to be fine,\" he whispered, wiping the perspiration from her brow.\n\nHer nails dug into his arm as another wave of pain racked her body. \"You'll have to let go of my arm if you want me to bring this baby into the world,\" he said gently.\n\nMorgan lost track of time as he encouraged Kristen to push harder. Tears ran down her cheeks\u2014and Morgan's\u2014 as the baby slipped from her body. \"You have a son,\" Morgan marveled. At the sound of her son's healthy cry, Kristen closed her eyes and allowed herself to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 126", + "text": "Daylight streaming through the window jerked Morgan awake. The sudden motion awoke the tiny infant sleeping in his arms. He pulled back the blanket and marveled at the fresh pink face. He smiled as the baby opened his little mouth and began to cry.\n\n\"Don't just sit there grinning,\" Kristen scolded. \"Give him to me. He's hungry. Bring me Rachel too. She'll be starving.\"\n\nHe gently placed the babies in his sister's arms. \"Look at their blue eyes, Kris. They're the prettiest blue I've ever seen.\"\n\nShe smiled down at the nursing infants. \"They are perfect. I'm going to name him after you and Father. Morgan Daniel Jouett. We'll call him Daniel.\"\n\n\"How do you feel?\"\n\n\"Thankful,\" she whispered. \"Thankful for my son and thankful for you.\"\n\n\"You are an incredible woman.\" His face mirrored his admiration for her. \"Now, if you'll excuse me, I think we've earned a cup of coffee.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 127", + "text": "\"Anyone here?\" a voice called out as Morgan descended the stairs.\n\n\"Doc! Thank God you're here,\" Morgan exclaimed.\n\n\"Most of my patients are suffering from a hangover this morning,\" Doc informed him. \"I thought I'd check on Kristen just so I'd feel like I'd seen someone who needed me for a change.\"\n\n\"The baby came during the night.\" Morgan stepped aside for the doctor to go up the stairs. \"I'll be in the kitchen making breakfast. Our new mother is hungry.\"\n\nMorgan placed the napkins on the breakfast tray beside the coffee cups and was searching for silverware when Doc burst through the door.\n\n\"Kristen's doing beautifully,\" he said. \"Fit as a fiddle. She'll be up and around in no time. Did you deliver her by yourself?\"\n\nMorgan nodded.\n\n\"You never cease to amaze me, Morgan Jouett,\" the old man said. \"I've filled out the birth certificate for Morgan Daniel Jouett and will register him at the courthouse when I get back into town.\"\n\nMorgan nodded as heavy boots stomped onto the porch outside. \"Sounds like everyone is back,\" Morgan said as the squeaking of wagon wheels and loud laughter announced the arrival of the rest of his family.\n\nJerilyn rushed in, followed by everyone else. \"Doc, we saw your buggy outside. Is Kristen okay?\"\n\n\"Kristen is fine,\" he reassured her. \"No thanks to me. I just arrived, but your nephew entered the world last night.\"\n\n\"But how? Who\u2014?\"\n\n\"Morgan.\" Doc grinned. \"He's one of the best midwives I've ever followed up after.\"\n\n\"I have a son!\" Silence fell over the group as Cage stepped forward.\n\nMorgan caught him by the arm. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To see my wife and my son.\" Cage's eyes flashed angrily.\n\n\"Jerilyn, please bring the baby down so everyone can see him,\" Morgan said, his voice low, but firm.\n\nCage remained motionless, blocking Jerilyn's ascent. \"I'd like to see my wife.\"\n\n\"She doesn't want you in her room,\" Morgan said through clenched teeth.\n\nCage looked away from his double's hate-filled eyes. \"Very well.\"\n\nMorgan went to Kristen's room to get his gun while everyone passed the baby around as if he were a creature from another planet.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"To town.\" He tied his holster to his thigh and retrieved his rifle from the corner.\n\n\"Morgan, please don't start any trouble,\" she pleaded.\n\n\"I won't.\" He grinned. \"Unless Mary refuses to come back with me.\"\n\nHer soft lips curved into a smile. \"Mary. You're going to get Mary to take care of Daniel and Rachel?\"\n\n\"I am.\" He assured her as he backed out of the room and headed downstairs.\n\n\"I've never seen you look happier,\" Jerilyn said to Morgan as he entered the parlor. \"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"To get Mary. Daniel and Rachel need a nanny.\"\n\n\"We can take care of them,\" Jerilyn protested.\n\n\"No, you're not.\" Morgan argued. \"Mary will be delighted to live here again, and it'll give her something to do. Taking care of a baby is a full-time job. I don't want any of you to be tied down just because there are little ones in the house.\"\n\n\"What are mothers for?\" Cage demanded.\n\n\"Mothers are for loving babies.\" Morgan smiled. Even Cage couldn't ruin his good mood. \"Kristen is not the kind of woman you can tie down. Not to a house or a baby. And there's no reason she should be.\"\n\nJerilyn elbowed Reid as she swayed with Daniel in her arms. \"Your brother makes good sense.\"\n\n\"He's only voicing my sentiments,\" Reid said with a smirk as he slipped his arm around Jerilyn's shoulders. \"You know, you look good holding a baby.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 128", + "text": "Wallace walked into his sister's room, and she motioned for him to sit on the side of her bed.\n\n\"I'm so glad you came, Wallace.\"\n\n\"You have a beautiful son,\" he said, taking Kristen's hand in his. \"I came to tell you I'm leaving and that I'm glad you're the one to inherit Estelline.\"\n\n\"Please don't go,\" Kristen begged. \"There's no reason for you to leave.\"\n\n\"But Father's will\u2014\"\n\n\"Damn Father's will,\" she said. \"It's not right to break up our family. We all need each other, and Morgan will need you to help him hold on to Estelline. Bad times are coming, Wallace. Please give Morgan a chance to fix this.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"You always could wrap us boys around your little finger. But you know the will specified we must leave within a year.\"\n\n\"I know,\" she murmured, \"but Morgan will fix this.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 129", + "text": "The men stomped the snow from their boots before entering the house. \"Worst snowstorm I've seen in years,\" Ben Landon declared, rubbing his hands before the fireplace.\n\nJud agreed. \"Looks like a blizzard.\"\n\n\"Is everyone here?\" Morgan said, surveying the group of men gathered in his living room.\n\n\"Everyone except Martin,\" Jud noted. \"His wife is down with the flu.\"\n\nBen got to his feet and faced the others. \"Thank you for hosting this meeting, Morgan. We asked to meet with you because we need to know where you stand. You ain't been bothered yet, but all of us have.\"\n\n\"If Hezekiah's broken the law,\" Morgan said, \"call Sheriff Sam.\"\n\n\"It ain't just Hezekiah.\" Ben frowned. \"There's about twenty like him. Lots of cattle but no land. They're camping on your place and any other ranch that isn't fenced.\"\n\n\"I told Hezekiah he could run his herd on our property until spring,\" Morgan reminded them. \"Y'all know that.\"\n\nBen pounded on the coffee table. \"Dammit, Morgan! That ain't what we're worried about. They're cutting our fences!\"\n\nMorgan nodded. \"So I've heard.\"\n\n\"Now, you're either with us or with them,\" Ben declared.\n\n\"I'm with you. No question about it. But what do you have in mind?\" Morgan turned as the door between the dining room and living room opened.\n\nJerilyn bustled into the room, followed by Kristen. \"Hassie made a chocolate cake,\" Jerilyn said, smiling at the men. \"Why don't you retire to the dining room for hot coffee and cake?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 130", + "text": "Kristen could feel his eyes on her as she moved about the room to serve the men. She was afraid to look at him, afraid her eyes would give away her feelings to everyone seated there.\n\nHis hand closed over hers briefly as he took the cup of coffee. She served the others as quickly as possible and fled to the security of the kitchen. She gazed out the window to keep Jerilyn from seeing the tears in her eyes.\n\n\"I'm going to bed,\" Jerilyn said. \"They'll be at it all night.\"\n\n\"I'll be up in a minute.\" Kristen fought to control the tremor in her voice. \"I want to clean up so Hassie doesn't have a mess in the morning.\"\n\nKristen watched the wind blow the snow against the window. She had never dreamed that loving him could be so painful. She closed her eyes, but it only made her thoughts of him more vivid. Thoughts she knew she should be ashamed of having. Thoughts that she'd do anything to make reality. He wanted her too. She had seen it in his eyes. Although he had pleased her in so many ways, he had never allowed her to please him completely.\n\nShe stiffened at the sound of footsteps approaching the kitchen and brushed a stray tear from her cheek.\n\n\"I brought the tray in for you,\" he said, his voice soft and warm.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nHe moved to stand beside her at the window. \"The snow is getting worse.\"\n\nShe held her breath. The nearness of him was almost more than she could bear.\n\n\"The boys are laying in more firewood,\" he said. \"It's going to be cold tonight.\"\n\nShe shuddered involuntarily at the thought of getting between the cold sheets. \"On a night like this,\" she murmured, \"a woman needs a lover.\"\n\nHe gently pulled her to him. \"Oh Kristen,\" he whispered. \"Holding you is the best feeling in the world.\" He kissed her eagerly. \"It feels so right.\"\n\nHe released her as someone called his name. \"I must go.\"\n\nKristen ran upstairs. She couldn't bear seeing him and not touching him. She looked in on the babies and found both sleeping peacefully. Then she headed to her room.\n\nKristen listened as the men shuffled about in the hallway. Morgan had insisted that they spend the night rather than risking the ride home in such frigid weather. After everything got quiet, she put another log on the fire, slipped into bed, and turned out the lamp. She wondered if he was thinking about her.\n\nShe was enjoying fantasies of him when someone knocked on her door. She slipped from the bed to see who it was.\n\n\"It's me, little one.\"\n\nShe let him in and quickly bolted the door behind him. \"I prayed you would come.\" She slipped into his arms.\n\n\"Kristen,\" he moaned, leading her to the bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 131", + "text": "Later, he held her, stroking her hair as she snuggled into him.\n\n\"Daniel looks just like you.\" He cuddled her closer to him. \"I'm glad that's over. I know it must have been hard on you.\"\n\n\"I don't think I could go through it again.\" She shivered.\n\n\"You won't ever have to.\" He wrapped his arms tighter around her. \"I'm afraid Daniel will be an only child.\"\n\nShe kissed him, teasing him with her tongue.\n\n\"You're asking for it again, lady,\" he whispered.\n\n\"Begging,\" she murmured as the raging flame of desire swept over her again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 132", + "text": "Kristen hummed a lively tune as she entered the kitchen.\n\n\"My, aren't we happy this morning,\" Hassie said, laughing at her favorite. \"Here we are in the middle of a blizzard, and you look like a breath of spring.\"\n\n\"Oh Hassie.\" She hugged the older woman. \"Life is so wonderful.\"\n\n\"Wonderful?\" Hassie huffed. \"Looks like we have to play host to all those men for a week.\"\n\n\"You think so?\" Kristen smiled mischievously.\n\n\"You don't have to be so happy about it,\" Hassie scolded. \"That means ten times as much work for me, and I have no helpers since those girls are snowed in at home.\"\n\n\"I'll help you,\" Kristen said, pouring a cup of coffee. \"And Jerilyn will too.\"\n\n\"What about Her Highness?\"\n\n\"Gwen? Don't count on any help from her.\" Kristen frowned. \"But don't worry. We'll help.\"\n\nKristen pulled coffee cups from the cupboard as men's voices floated down the stairwell.\n\n\"What are you doing up so early?\" Morgan stood in the doorway.\n\n\"Helping Hassie,\" Kristen said as she poured his coffee. \"We'll have a dozen hungry men haunting the dining room in a few minutes.\"\n\n\"She certainly seems happy about it,\" he commented to Hassie as his sister carried plates and silverware into the huge dining room.\n\n\"She's been like that all morning,\" Hassie said. \"If I didn't know her situation... poor child... I'd think she was in love.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 133", + "text": "The men sat around the table talking noisily as Kristen refilled their coffee cups. She purposely brushed against his shoulder as she leaned over to pour his coffee. She felt his body stiffen at her closeness, and it pleased her that she had such an effect on him.\n\nAfter breakfast, the restless men milled around.\n\nCage's suggestion that they play poker was met with an enthusiastic reception and the men quickly set up two tables so everyone could play.\n\n\"I'd better go relieve Mary,\" Kristen said after she and Jerilyn finished the dishes. \"It's time for Daniel to nurse.\"\n\n\"I'm going to faint in front of the fire.\" Jerilyn groaned. \"All those dishes. I'm exhausted.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 134", + "text": "\"Look at that grip, Mary,\" he said, his voice floating into the hall. \"He's going to be a real hell-raiser.\"\n\nKristen watched from the doorway as he gently picked up her son and held him against his chest, calming the fretting baby. \"You want your mother, don't you, little fellow?\" he cooed.\n\nThe two people I love most in this world, she thought as she entered the room. \"I'll watch him for a while, Mary. Why don't you get some coffee? Hassie baked some pies. If you want a piece, you'd better beat the pack to them.\"\n\nThe nanny scurried from the room, and Kristen closed the door behind her.\n\n\"Here's the lady who makes the sun shine in our world.\" He smiled shyly at her as he placed Daniel in his crib. \"I think he's asleep.\"\n\nHe walked to the window and stared out at the whiteness. \"You look lovely in that dress.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She stood in the center of the room as memories of last night played through her mind.\n\n\"I wish this damn weather would break,\" he grumbled.\n\n\"Umm, I rather like it.\" Her voice was low and provocative.\n\nHe turned to face her. \"I can't stand that I can't get up and walk outside, or go for a long ride, or find something to keep me busy. That way I could fight this feeling that gnaws at me night and day. But being confined with you like this, wanting you as I do... it's driving me crazy.\"\n\nThe tiny muscle at the corner of her mouth twitched involuntarily as she tried to suppress a smile.\n\n\"You aren't even trying to help. At breakfast you were so close to me. I... that dress... and you look so beautiful.\"\n\nIn two long strides he had her in his arms, kissing her passionately.\n\n\"Why? Why won't you help me be stronger, Kristen?\" His voice was hoarse with anguish.\n\n\"Because I want you,\" she said breathlessly. \"I want you to want me so badly that you will come to me every chance you get.\"\n\n\"And if we're caught?\" He pulled away from her. \"If we're caught, Kristen, how many lives will be ruined because of our lust? Think of Daniel.\"\n\n\"Do you?\"\n\n\"Almost as often as I think of his mother.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" She lowered her head. \"It's just that I love you so much. I've loved you from the moment we met.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best to look as drab and sexless as possible while you're snowed in with me.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"You're impossible.\"\n\nHe traced the outline of her sensuous lips with his fingertips and then kissed her again. \"You already know I'll come to you tonight,\" he whispered.\n\nShe smiled as he slipped from the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 135", + "text": "Kristen fed Daniel and dozed as she rocked him to sleep. She woke to find Mary's hand on her arm. \"Why don't you lie down in your room and take a nap?\" the nanny said. \"Our guests have two poker games going on in the living room. They won't miss you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mary. I believe I will. I didn't realize how exhausted I am until I started rocking Daniel.\"\n\nThe sun had gone down when Kristen combed her hair and dressed for dinner. She looked in on Daniel then walked downstairs.\n\n\"Here's my gorgeous wife,\" Cage bellowed as Kristen entered the room. \"How about giving your husband a kiss for good luck?\"\n\nHatred flamed in her icy blue eyes, but she walked toward him and kissed his cheek, doing her duty despite his drunken state. He jumped up, overturning his chair, and grabbed her by the shoulders. \"I said a kiss.\"\n\n\"I don't think anyone here is interested in what should be your private lives, Cage.\" Morgan's voice cut through the silence that had fallen on the room.\n\n\"I don't give a damn what you think,\" Cage snorted. \"But you're right. What goes on between a man and his wife should be private.\"\n\nCage locked his fingers around Kristen's wrist and dragged her from the room. Morgan stood motionless. He'd hoped their friends and neighbors would never know of the trouble between his sister and her husband. The walls shook as Cage slammed the bedroom door.\n\nAs if someone had thrown a switch, Morgan bolted up the stairs. He stood in the hallway, listening to the muffled voices.\n\n\"No! Please!\" Kristen cried out.\n\n\"You want your precious neighbors to know you're not woman enough to be married?\"\n\n\"Please, Cage. You're drunk,\" she pleaded. \"You don't\u2014\"\n\nMorgan had heard enough. He turned the knob but found it locked. \"Unlock this door!\"\n\n\"Go to hell, Morgan,\" Cage shouted, enraged at Morgan's interference. He tightened his grip on Kristen's wrist.\n\nWith all his strength, Morgan kicked the door, splintering it. The second kick knocked it off the hinges. Cage cowered as Morgan grabbed him by the front of his shirt and slung him into the hallway.\n\nCage landed a hard blow to Morgan's stomach as the rancher stepped through the doorway. Morgan lashed out, catching his brother-in-law under the chin. Cage staggered, regained his footing, and delivered a series of quick jabs to Morgan's face.\n\n\"I'll make quick work of you then take my time with my wife,\" Cage jeered.\n\nMorgan lunged at Cage. Kristen screamed as both men tumbled down the stairs. Morgan was on his feet instantly, striking Cage as hard as he could as Cage tried to stand.\n\n\"Who's winning?\" one of the men said as they circled the fighters.\n\n\"Hell, who knows?\" Ben cackled. \"I can't tell one from the other.\"\n\n\"Stop it! Stop it!\" Reid yelled as he and Wallace separated the battling men.\n\nCage jerked from Reid's grasp. \"It's time you accept it, Morgan,\" he snarled. \"Kristen's my wife, mother of my son, and the ranch is mine. There's no room for you around here anymore.\"\n\nMorgan glared at the man whose face mirrored his own. \"If you weren't married to Kristen, I'd kill you.\"\n\n\"But I am,\" Cage growled, \"and it's time she started acting like it.\"\n\nGwen watched silently from the top of the stairs. For the first time, she realized that Cage was planning his life without her. A scheme began to form in her mind. Cage had no way of knowing that the women in his life were far more capable than he." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 136", + "text": "The snow stopped on the third day, and the sun came out. \"We'd better dig our way out,\" Ben said. He opened the door and jumped back as a snowdrift tumbled into the foyer.\n\nMorgan, Wallace, and Reid sat in front of the fire, leisurely sipping bourbon.\n\n\"We need to check on the cattle,\" Jud said, rallying the ranchers. \"Morgan, aren't you going with us?\"\n\n\"Cage's ranch,\" Morgan huffed. \"Let him go." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 137", + "text": "\"Morgan, we've been out checking cattle for a week,\" Shanghai said, stomping the mud from his boots before entering the house and following Morgan to the kitchen. \"There are still carcasses we ain't found in those damn snowdrifts. I shudder to think what we're going to find on the northern range.\"\n\n\"Sit down and have a cup of coffee,\" Jerilyn said as she poured the burly foreman a mug of the strong, hot brew.\n\nMorgan smiled. \"It's fresh. Jerilyn just made it. It'll warm you up.\"\n\n\"Damn it, Morgan,\" Shanghai growled. \"You ain't heard a word I've said.\"\n\n\"I heard you. What do you want me to do about it?\"\n\n\"Help me,\" Shanghai bellowed. \"I'm not used to running into such problems alone.\"\n\n\"Where's Cage?\"\n\n\"Hell, he can't find his asshole with both hands.\" The foreman grinned sheepishly at Jerilyn. \"Pardon my language, ma'am.\"\n\nJerilyn hid her smile as she left the room.\n\n\"The boys won't work for him, and he's too stupid to know it. He doesn't know what needs doing, so he doesn't know what's not being done. He's as useless as tits on a boar hog.\"\n\nMorgan raised his dark eyebrows in mock disbelief.\n\n\"Hezekiah and his band of cutthroats are cutting Ben's fences as fast as he can restring them,\" Shanghai informed him. \"A gang jumped young Enlow yesterday and beat him up pretty bad.\"\n\nMorgan stirred his coffee. \"Anyone bothering us?\"\n\n\"No,\" Shanghai admitted reluctantly.\n\n\"Then we've no quarrel with Hezekiah.\"\n\n\"Where's Wallace and Reid?\" Shanghai asked.\n\n\"At the barn.\"\n\n\"I'll see if I can talk some sense into them. The boys will work for them.\" The foreman drained the last of his coffee from the cup then stomped from the house slamming the door behind him.\n\nKristen joined her brother at the table. \"I couldn't keep from overhearing Shanghai,\" she said. \"You can't let Cage destroy all we've work for.\"\n\n\"What am I supposed to do, Kristen?\"\n\n\"Fight,\" she whispered. \"Fight for everything you want.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 138", + "text": "Jud's voice was filled with excitement as he entered the house and called out to Morgan.\n\n\"In the kitchen, Jud.\"\n\n\"Morgan, you've got to come to the north pasture. You've got to see it to believe it.\"\n\n\"Jud, I don't\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm begging you, as a favor to a friend.\"\n\n\"Okay.\" Morgan finished the last swig of his coffee and pushed back from the table. \"Want to go, Kris?\"\n\nKristen's eyes twinkled at her brother's invitation. \"I'm dying to get on a horse and ride. Give me a minute to change clothes.\"\n\n\"Bring a warm coat,\" Jud advised.\n\n\"What happened to your face?\" Kristen asked as they rode out of the ranch yard.\n\n\"Hezekiah.\" Jud shrugged. \"It's not as bad as it looks.\"\n\n\"Wait for us!\" Wallace yelled as he and Reid galloped to join them.\n\n\"We've been cooped up in the house for a week. We're going stir-crazy, and you sneak off without us,\" Reid said, scolding his older brother. \"If we hurry, we can catch up with Shanghai.\"\n\nThe sharp north wind felt good to Kristen as it whipped across her face. Most of all, it felt good to be riding again with the ones she cherished most." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 139", + "text": "Shanghai had arrived in camp ahead of them and was arguing vehemently with Cage. A smile lit his angry face as the four siblings rode into camp.\n\n\"Morgan,\" the foreman roared, \"you're just in time.\"\n\n\"You'll still do as I say,\" Cage said, his face twisted in rage.\n\nMounting his horse, Shanghai ignored Cage. \"We gotta hurry. It'll be dark soon.\"\n\nShanghai led them to the area he knew would have the most impact on them. \"How uninvolved do you want to stay, boss?\"\n\nMorgan stared in sickening disbelief at the sight before him.\n\n\"Dear God!\" Kristen muttered. \"How could this happen?\"\n\nShe tried to conquer the nausea threatening to engulf her as she gazed along the fence line. As far as she could see, dead cattle were stacked on top of each other along the fence.\n\n\"There are thousands of them,\" Shanghai quietly pointed out. \"They all froze to death. Some of them made it over by walking on the carcasses of the dead ones.\"\n\n\"It held them back alright,\" Reid mumbled. \"Barbed wire works too damn good.\"\n\n\"But why? How?\" Kristen whispered.\n\n\"The blizzard,\" Morgan explained. \"They instinctively moved south to escape the bitter cold. The fences stopped them.\"\n\n\"God, I've never seen anything so sickening.\" Wallace lowered his head.\n\n\"My drift fence is the same way,\" Jud muttered.\n\nCage joined them, grinning as if he'd won the lottery. \"Your idea worked great, Morgan.\"\n\nMorgan's scowled. \"You don't have to remind me. I know this is my fault. Shanghai, give me those wire cutters.\"\n\n\"What the hell do you think you're doing?\" Cage said as he edged his horse closer to Morgan's.\n\n\"Cutting that devil's wire,\" Morgan growled.\n\n\"Like hell you will. Those fences stay. If not for them, those cattle would be all over the ranch.\"\n\n\"And alive!\" Morgan hissed through clenched teeth.\n\nCage shrugged. \"They're not our problem.\"\n\n\"You make me sick.\" Morgan's horse shot forward. He rode to the nearest fence post and snipped the wire close to the post. Then he repeated the action at the other end of the wire.\n\nReid jumped to the ground and rolled up the loose barbed wire. \"We don't want the cattle getting tangled up in this,\" he said.\n\n\"Tell the men I want sections opened in this fence every half mile,\" Morgan said to Shanghai. \"Send someone into town to tell the hiders to come skin them. No need to let everything go to waste.\n\n\"Jud, you round up a crew to dig trenches. We need to bury them as soon as the hiders finish, otherwise the stench will be unbearable.\"\n\n\"I give the orders around here,\" Cage said, catching the reins on Shanghai's mount. \"And I say leave them be. They're not our concern.\"\n\n\"Since when do you have the authority to give orders?\" Kristen's voice was as cold as the wind whipping her hair around her face.\n\nCage faced her, his eyes black with fury. \"The ranch is\u2014\"\n\n\"Mine!\" Kristen glared at him. \"Mine and Daniel's. And I agree with Morgan.\"\n\n\"You always do,\" Cage snapped. \"But he won't always be around to interfere.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 140", + "text": "\"We're making things harder on Kristen,\" Reed said, pulling off his boots and settling down in the wagon. \"Jesus, it's cold.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Morgan frowned. \"But I couldn't... I guess I should have stayed at the house. Maybe Kris and Cage can work out their differences if I don't interfere.\"\n\n\"I don't know how.\" Reid pulled the blankets up around his chin. \"Jerilyn told me about the beating he gave Kris before the baby came. It takes an awful sorry man to do that to a pregnant woman.\"\n\n\"We'd better get some sleep,\" Morgan said, avoiding the discussion of just how much he hated Cage for that beating." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 141", + "text": "Gunfire jerked Morgan from a sound sleep. \"What the hell is going on?\" He scooted on his stomach to get beside Reid, who was peering out the opening in the canvas.\n\n\"Looks like ten gunmen,\" Reid whispered. \"They're shooting up the camp.\" He aimed his rifle and fired, knocking one of the intruders from his saddle.\n\nThe two brothers fired rapidly into the horsemen, hitting four of them. It was enough to make the other attackers retreat.\n\nOnce the coast was clear, Morgan ran to Kristen's wagon. \"Are you okay, Kris?\"\n\n\"Yes. What happened?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure.\" He looked around, checking for any stragglers that might threaten them.\n\n\"This one is still alive,\" Reid yelled, bending over one of the injured gunmen.\n\nShanghai joined them. \"That's one of Hezekiah's men!\"\n\nMorgan knelt beside the man. \"Was Hezekiah involved in this?\" he asked. The gunman gritted his teeth, determined not to answer.\n\nMorgan placed the barrel of his six-shooter to the man's temple and cocked the hammer. \"You have until the count of three to answer my question.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" the man gasped. \"Yes, Hezekiah sent us.\"\n\n\"Take care of him, Shanghai. I want to turn him over to Sam for trial.\" Morgan stood up. \"Where's Cage?\"\n\nShanghai snorted. \"Last I saw of him, he was hiding under the wagon seat.\"\n\n\"Let's all try to get some sleep,\" Morgan said. \"We have a lot of work to do tomorrow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 142", + "text": "The crew was eating breakfast before sunup. Shanghai and Morgan were directing the operations, and a sulking Cage was sitting away from the others. He knew his cowardly actions in the face of the attack had made him the laughingstock of the ranch. Morgan was openly disgusted with him and no longer tried to hide his feelings. I can't wait to run your smug face off my ranch, Cage thought as he watched Morgan giving orders.\n\n\"Reid, you take Kristen back to the house and then return here.\" Morgan swung into the saddle. \"I'll get the men started on the fence. Later tonight we'll pay Hezekiah a friendly visit. I don't want this to get out of hand.\"\n\nCage stood. \"I'll escort my wife back to the ranch,\" he announced.\n\n\"I think not,\" Morgan said, glaring at him. \"I want a man with her who will fight for her if anything happens. There's nothing you can hide under between here and the ranch.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 143", + "text": "Kristen and Reid rode a long way in silence, each sifting through their own thoughts.\n\n\"Would Morgan have shot that man if he'd refused to talk?\" Kristen said after a while.\n\nReid shrugged. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"Human life means little out here,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Estelline is a demanding mistress.\" Reid chuckled. \"It takes a hell of a man to tame her.\"\n\n\"Men like Morgan?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Reid answered proudly, \"men like Morgan\u2014strong men, proud men, good men. Morgan would never pick a fight, but he'd also never walk away from one if his loved ones were threatened.\"\n\n\"But nevertheless, men who would kill for what they want,\" Kristen declared.\n\n\"I've never thought about it in quite that way,\" Reid said. \"But I guess that's the way it is at the top of the food chain. Either eat or be eaten.\"\n\n\"And only the strong survive.\" Kristen agreed. \"Morgan would do anything to keep Estelline.\"\n\n\"I suppose so. He's only willing to walk away now because the heirs will be you and Daniel.\"\n\n\"Reid, the night Naomi was murdered, did anyone leave camp?\"\n\nReid studied his sister's face. \"You don't think Morgan\u2014\"\n\n\"No! I just asked you a question.\"\n\n\"No one left camp.\"\n\nKristen relaxed to the rocking movement of her horse and let her mind wander. Morgan's face kept flashing before her. She'd never seen him look as he had in the campfire light, his gun muzzle pressed against the head of the injured cowboy.\n\nHe'd kill for this ranch, she thought. Tiny fingers of fear pricked at the hair on the back of her neck. She knew she couldn't even begin to fathom the intense emotions of the brother she adored." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 144", + "text": "\"Kristen, wake up,\" Morgan said as he shook her roughly. It took her a moment to recognize Jerilyn's tearstained face over her brother's shoulder.\n\n\"Reid!\" Her mind was instantly alert. \"Something's happened to Reid!\"\n\n\"We don't know,\" Morgan replied. \"When he didn't return to camp last night, I became worried about him. Jerilyn says he started back immediately after bringing you here. Did he say anything to you about stopping anywhere or making a detour?\"\n\nFear filled her eyes. \"No! He changed horses and said he'd have to hurry to make it back by midnight.\"\n\n\"Get all the men!\" Morgan instructed Wallace. \"Start looking for him. I'll wait here in case he ran into trouble and returns home. Let me know as soon as you find him.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 145", + "text": "\"It's almost sundown,\" Morgan mumbled, pacing the floor. \"We should have heard from someone by now.\"\n\nAn angry cloud of red dust swirled across the plains and up the road heading for the ranch.\n\n\"Riders are coming!\" Jerilyn shouted, running to the door.\n\nTwo men thundered into the ranch yard. The body of Reid dangled between them. \"You're next, Morgan Jouett,\" they hollered, dropping Reid's body to the cold, muddy ground and galloping away.\n\n\"No!\" Jerilyn screamed. \"Not Reid. God, please not Reid.\"\n\nMorgan reached his brother first. \"Don't pick him up,\" he ordered. \"He's wrapped in barbed wire. Wallace, grab a pair of wire cutters from my saddle bag.\n\n\"Kristen, get the bottle of laudanum from my office. Run! Shanghai, get a blanket so we can cover him. He's freezing.\"\n\nReid whimpered when the quilt they placed on him pressed the barbs into his skin. Morgan slowly poured laudanum into his mouth and Reid lapsed into a drug-induced sleep.\n\nWorking at a painfully slow pace, Morgan snipped the strands of barbed wire and carefully removed it from his brother's body. Every pore of Reid's body seemed to ooze blood. After what seemed like an eternity, Morgan motioned for the men to lift Reid onto a clean quilt and carry him into the house.\n\n\"He's still breathing,\" Morgan said, \"but we don't have time to waste. Gwen, go get some hot water and towels, while Jerilyn and I get him out of these wet clothes.\"\n\nHe told Shanghai to ride into town to get Doc. \"Take a few men with you,\" he said. \"And hurry.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 146", + "text": "\"It looks like he was trussed up in barbed wire and then dragged behind a horse,\" Doc said as he closed his bag. \"Broken ribs, fractured leg, and too many minuscule stab wounds to count. But he's a strong young buck. He'll recover. The most important thing is keeping the wounds cleaned and treated three times a day with the antibiotic wash to avoid infection.\n\n\"Morgan, limit the laudanum to three times a day. Opium is exceedingly addictive.\"\n\nMorgan thanked the doctor for coming and escorted him to the door.\n\nKristen sat staring into the licking flames of the fireplace. She softly prayed for her brother in the next room. \"Please don't take Reid, Lord. He's one of the good ones.\"\n\nShe raised her head as boots shuffled to her.\n\nCage sat down opposite her. \"Kristen, I... I'm sorry about Reid.\" He bowed his handsome head. \"I'm sorry about a lot of things. Most of all, us.\"\n\n\"You're not entirely to blame,\" she said.\n\n\"I can be the man you want me to be,\" he blurted out. \"Would you try? If I give it all I've got, will you at least meet me halfway?\"\n\n\"I... I don't know,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I know I've been a bastard, and I know I'm asking a lot, but won't you just try a little for Daniel's sake?\"\n\n\"I don't think... I need to think. Too much is going on right now.\"\n\nHe watched as she left the room. She was a beautiful woman and the ranch was in her name." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 147", + "text": "\"He's coming to,\" Jerilyn said between sobs. \"He's opening his eyes!\"\n\nMorgan knelt beside his brother's bed. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Hezekiah and his gang of thugs... they jumped me in the north canyon,\" Reid mumbled. He paused to catch his breath before continuing. \"Tied me to a horse.\"\n\nKristen had never seen such cold, hard anger in Morgan's eyes. He stood. \"Wallace, get your guns.\"\n\nWallace did as instructed and followed Morgan outside to the horses. \"This stops tonight,\" Morgan grumbled.\n\nThe two men shoved rifles into the scabbards and mounted their horses. They had a long night ahead of them. To hell with revenge being served cold. Morgan intended to burn some souls.\n\nThe two men pulled their mounts off the road into a copse of scrub oaks. A rider was coming behind them. As it approached, Morgan leaped out and grabbed the horse's reins, dragging it to a stop.\n\n\"Kristen? What the hell?\"\n\n\"I'm going with you,\" she announced.\n\n\"Not this time,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"You can't stop me,\" she said. \"Reid's my brother too.\"\n\n\"If I had time, I'd turn you over my knee. What we're about to do isn't going to be pretty, Kris. We're going to kill them.\"\n\n\"I want to go. I'm a Jouett too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 148", + "text": "They dismounted their horses a quarter of a mile from Hezekiah's camp.\n\n\"Kris, hold the horses,\" Morgan said. He handed Wallace a knife. \"Leave no witnesses.\"\n\nSilently, the two brothers visited each sleeping cattleman.\n\n\"I didn't see Hezekiah,\" Morgan whispered as they rejoined Kristen.\n\n\"Neither did I.\" Wallace mounted his horse.\n\n\"That's okay,\" Morgan said, smirking. \"Let him sweat for a while.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 149", + "text": "\"Morgan here?\" The sheriff held his hat in his hand as Kristen opened the screen door for him to enter.\n\n\"He's out at the barn, Sam. They're shoeing horses. Come in and let me get you a nice, hot cup of coffee.\"\n\n\"How's Reid?\"\n\n\"He's better. Doc says it will take a while for the broken bones to heal.\"\n\n\"Could you send someone for Morgan?\" Sam said, following her into the kitchen. \"I need to talk to him alone.\"\n\n\"I'll get him,\" Kristen said. \"Hassie, please give Sam a piece of the cake you made this morning and some fresh coffee.\"\n\nSam watched Kristen stroll across the yard to the barn. \"She's a mighty good-looking woman,\" he said with a sigh.\n\n\"She's a good woman too,\" Hassie added.\n\nA few minutes later they were headed back to the house, Kristen's arm linked through Morgan's.\n\n\"They are the most handsome couple I've ever seen.\" Sam shook his head. \"Where's that baby of theirs? I bet it's a doll.\"\n\n\"That's not Cage,\" Hassie pointed out. \"That's Morgan.\"\n\n\"How do you tell them apart?\"\n\n\"Cage has a naked woman tattooed on the back of his left hand,\" Hassie informed him. \"He wears a black glove to cover it because it offends Kristen.\"\n\nSam chuckled. \"Yeah, I remember someone telling me about that tattoo.\"\n\nMorgan and Kristen laughed as the entered the house.\n\n\"Sam, it's good to see you.\" Morgan shook the sheriff's hand. \"Sit down. I think I'll join you. That cake looks good.\"\n\n\"Morgan, this isn't exactly a social call.\" He pushed away the empty plate as Kristen refilled his coffee cup.\n\n\"What's the problem, Sam?\"\n\n\"Hezekiah Roberts came into my office this morning. Seems someone stole into his camp last night and killed half a dozen of his men.\"\n\n\"Same thing happened to us,\" Morgan exclaimed. \"Bunch rode into camp, shot it up, and rode out. How many of Hezekiah's men were shot?\"\n\n\"None.\" Sam snorted.\n\n\"I thought you said they were killed,\" Kristen said.\n\n\"Throats cut,\" Sam said bluntly.\n\nMorgan leaned back in his chair, balancing on the two back legs. \"Sam, we always take care of our own. You know they dragged Reid behind a horse after wrapping him in barbed wire. I think Hezekiah will be the first to tell you we haven't started any trouble.\"\n\nThe two men stared intently at each other.\n\n\"I just rode out to warn you that there are troublemakers roaming the countryside.\" Sam stood, extending his hand. \"It's been good visiting with you.\"\n\n\"You never cease to amaze me, Morgan,\" Kristen said as Sam rode away. \"You're so good and gentle with us but so ruthless when someone threatens one of us.\"\n\n\"A man has to take care of his own, Kris.\" Morgan put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her gently. \"They can cut my fences and kill my cattle, but heaven help the man who harms my family.\"\n\n\"Naomi,\" Kristen muttered. \"You haven't avenged Naomi.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Morgan said. \"Because I have no idea who murdered her.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 150", + "text": "Cage rolled onto his back and looked at the sky through green leaves. It hardly seemed possible that he'd been in this uncivilized state for almost two years.\n\n\"Such deep thoughts,\" Gwen murmured as she stirred beside him.\n\n\"I was thinking of all the work we must do to get ready for the rounding up and branding,\" Cage said. \"We should get back to the house. Everyone will be returning from town, and we really should be there since we were left to look after the babies.\"\n\n\"Mary is with them,\" Gwen reminded him.\n\n\"Still, we should give the appearance of giving a damn.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 151", + "text": "May brought weather warm enough to melt all the snow on the ranch. Calves were on the ground, and corrals were being repaired. Reid was forging additional branding irons to speed up the branding process for all the calves. For the first time, they would brand at the roundup site and drive half the cattle to Amarillo to fulfill the contracts Morgan had signed.\n\nAfter selecting the best bulls for breeding, the remaining two-year-olds were turned into steers. Older cows and steers were sent to market, leaving the ranch with a new herd for the next year.\n\nAfter rounding up all the cattle within riding distance of the ranch, the men would ride to the northern boundary and begin a sweep, driving half the cattle to Amarillo and the remainder to the ranch for shipment to Colorado.\n\nShanghai and the trail cook were loading two chuck wagons with enough food to keep the hands fed for a month. Hassie and the girls had packed the cured pork in barrels of salt, and they'd dried beef to make jerky.\n\nWallace was overseeing the riders as they broke a new string of mustangs for the roundup.\n\n\"Looks like we're ready to go,\" Morgan noted as he checked on the various activities of the ranch.\n\n\"I appreciate you letting me and my boys ride with you every year,\" Jud said.\n\n\"It makes things easier for everyone,\" Morgan replied.\n\n\"I see Cage is on crutches,\" Jud commented, watching Cage hobble toward them. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"He sprained his ankle jumping from a hay wagon,\" Morgan grumbled. \"I swear, Jud, the man is work-brittle. He works harder finding excuses to get out of work than he would if he just did the work itself.\"\n\n\"Hey, Jud,\" Cage said, greeting the young rancher. \"How's your wife?\"\n\nJud shrugged. \"As well as can be expected. Looks like you're going to miss the roundup.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Cage replied. \"Someone needs to stay here with the women anyway.\"\n\nWhen Morgan walked away without speaking, Jud excused himself. \"I guess I'd better get to work.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 152", + "text": "From her upstairs window, Kristen observed the hustle and bustle of roundup preparations. I want to go with them, she thought. She quickly pulled on a pair of Levi's, a button-down flannel shirt, and a leather jacket. She knew her attire would cause a stir among the men but didn't care. Her clothes were comfortable and warm.\n\nJud couldn't take his eyes off Kristen as she strolled toward the chuck wagon. \"Good morning, Miss Kristen.\" He grinned impishly, and Kristen flirted back.\n\n\"Good morning to you too, Mr. Enlow,\" she said. \"Have you seen Morgan?\"\n\n\"I think he's on the other side of that chuck wagon.\" Jud jerked his head in the direction of the second covered wagon.\n\nKristen headed that way and found Morgan in deep conversation with Shanghai.\n\n\"I don't like leaving her here with Cage,\" Morgan argued.\n\n\"Then take me with you,\" Kristen said, beaming. \"I assume you're making decisions for me without asking me what I think.\"\n\n\"We... we were just discussing\u2014\" Shanghai faltered.\n\n\"Inviting you to go on the trail ride,\" Morgan said. \"Judging by your attire, you've already decided to go with us.\"\n\n\"I have.\" Kristen winked at her brother. \"What can I do to help?\"\n\n\"We're leaving at five in the morning,\" Morgan informed her. \"Breakfast will be served from four to five.\"\n\nShanghai studied Kristen as she walked away. \"I don't know, Morgan. She's a fine-looking woman. Do you think she'll be safe with a bunch of cowpokes for a month?\"\n\n\"See that six-shooter strapped on her hip?\" Morgan asked. \"She can use it better than I can. If anyone messes with her and she doesn't kill them, I will.\"\n\n\"Enough said!\" Shanghai laughed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 153", + "text": "It took two days to reach their campsite on the Canadian River. North of Amarillo, the Canadian site allowed them to round up cattle and drive them directly to the packing plants.\n\nThe trail cook, Kristen, and Reid set up camp while the other men constructed corrals and established a branding routine.\n\n\"I brought ten branding irons,\" Reid explained. \"We can brand a calf every ten minutes\u2014six an hour\u2014so in ten hours we can brand sixty calves. That will speed up our process considerably.\"\n\nIt was almost sundown when the cook rang the dinner bell. The hungry men sat around the fire, sharing tales of past roundups and the men who had been lost in stampedes.\n\nAfter dinner Kristen washed her plate and utensils, took them to her wagon, and returned to stand in front of her brother \"I'd like to bathe in the river,\" she informed him.\n\n\"Let's ride a mile or so away from camp,\" Morgan said. \"I don't relish the idea of you naked in a river this close to all the fellows.\"\n\nKristen laughed. \"Whatever you say, big brother.\"\n\nShe grabbed the saddlebag containing her clothes, while Morgan informed Reid and Wallace of their plans.\n\n\"If we're not back in an hour, come looking for us,\" he told them.\n\n\"Everything is different this year,\" Kristen noted as they rode along the riverbank. \"This is the first time we've dropped cattle at Amarillo on our way home.\"\n\n\"Yes. If this works out and I can convince more buyers to purchase our cattle next year, we'll probably drive all of the northern cattle to Amarillo. Hell, we may even drive the southern cattle there too. It would sure save us on shipping costs. Almost double our profit.\"\n\nMorgan stopped his horse in a clearing on the riverbank. \"This looks like a good spot,\" he said. \"You bathe here. I'm going to be about a hundred feet away washing the dust off myself. Yell if you need me.\"\n\nThey carried on a loud conversation as they bathed. The water was cold, so they didn't linger. Half an hour later, they headed back to camp.\n\n\"I wish we had built the ranch house in a more centralized location,\" Morgan informed her as they rode.\n\n\"Morgan, what are we going to do about Estelline?\" Kristen said, asking the question both had avoided. \"The ranch will die without you, Wallace, and Reid. Cage hates it and will pressure me to sell it. Sometimes I think he might kill me if he weren't so afraid of you. If I were out of the way, he could force Daniel to sell.\"\n\n\"I think about our situation all the time, Kris. That damn will is the bane of my existence. I promise you, I'll come up with something.\"\n\n\"We were about to send out a rescue party,\" Wallace teased as they rode into camp. \"Half the fellows here bathed in the river while you were gone.\"\n\nKristen laughed. \"I'm glad we were upstream.\"\n\n\"We'd better turn in,\" Shanghai said. \"Sunup comes mighty early in the morning.\"\n\nThe cowboys began tossing their bedrolls around the fire, claiming their sleeping place.\n\nJud walked Kristen to the covered wagon that would be her home for the next month. \"I'm sleeping by the fire,\" he told her. \"Just call my name if you need me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 154", + "text": "Kristen snuggled into the covers, trying to get warm. She was still chilled from her bath in the icy river. She wished he'd come and heat up her bed. Drowsiness was turning into sleep when a movement in the wagon jerked her awake. The voice that soothed her soul murmured her name. \"Are you awake?\"\n\n\"Yes, oh yes, darling.\" She lifted the covers, inviting him to join her.\n\nShe smothered him with kisses, coming to rest with her lips against his. \"I want all of you,\" she whispered.\n\nHe moaned as she ran the tip of her tongue along his lips. His hands stroked her arms, pulling her tighter against him. \"You smell so good,\" he whispered. \"Feel so good.\"\n\nHe kissed her gently at first then harder, pressing his lips against hers as he slipped his hand into her nightgown.\n\n\"Oh God,\" she moaned. \"Please... please make love to me.\"\n\nHis lips trailed down her neck to the top of her breasts. He slowly circled her nipple with his tongue, nipping, sucking, licking.\n\nShe grabbed his hair and pulled his mouth onto her. \"Suck me,\" she pleaded. \"You drive me crazy. I want you so badly.\"\n\nHer nails bit into his back as he slipped his long fingers between her legs. \"Yes,\" she moaned loudly.\n\n\"Shush, little one. Someone will come check on you.\"\n\nShe buried her face against his chest as he elicited a scream from her.\n\n\"More! I want more,\" she demanded, sliding her hand down his stomach. \"I want all of you. I want to consummate our love for each other.\"\n\n\"We can't,\" he whispered, catching her straying hand and pulling it to his lips. \"I can't.\"\n\n\"Yes, you can. If you truly love me, you can.\" She seethed. \"You don't really love me. You're just\u2014\"\n\n\"Christ, Kristen, you're my sister.\" He sobbed. \"I can't. It's incest.\"\n\nHe rolled away from her. \"You know I can't. I'm not the man you believe me to be. I'll never\u2014\"\n\n\"I hate you,\" she cried. \"No, I love you, but I hate you for making love to Gwen, for having a baby with her. I... I love you so much. I'm condemned to this hell, because nothing can ever make me stop loving you.\"\n\nMorgan held her, stroking her silky blonde hair and professing his love for her. \"I love you more than I've ever loved anything in my life,\" he whispered, his lips brushing her ear. \"You are constantly on my mind. Sometimes I lie awake all night thinking about you. I'll never be able to resolve this dull ache I carry all the time.\"\n\n\"I love you, Morgan. There isn't a moment of the day that I don't think about you. The way you feel. The way you make me feel. Your long fingers trailing down my body. Your lips kissing, licking, sucking. You drive me insane.\"\n\nMorgan kissed her slowly, moving his lips sensually against hers. \"I love your lips,\" she whispered.\n\nHis fingers touched her, making her whimper with need. He trailed kisses down her torso and slid his hands under her buttocks, lifting her up, kissing her. She clutched his hair, grasping it, using it to steer his lips where she needed them.\n\nShe tried to control her breathing as his fingers entered her. \"Deeper,\" she begged. \"Harder.\"\n\nKristen lost track of time. All she knew was how he made her feel, how he took her to places that made her blind and dizzy. She fought to keep from screaming his name. Then her body exploded. Every fiber of her being shook. He slid up her body, pulling her face between his breasts to muffle her cries. Her heart hammered so hard. Surely the entire camp could hear it.\n\nMorgan fell onto his back and tried to catch his breath. He closed his eyes to stop things from swirling around him. He took deep, ragged breaths, fighting to control his feelings, to regain his senses.\n\nKristen slid on top of him and kissed him. \"You're going to remember this night for as long as you live,\" she vowed, sliding her hand between his legs.\n\n\"As will you,\" Morgan promised.\n\n\"You're going to... Oh my God!\" Kristen squealed. You're... you're a woman!\"\n\nKristen's shocked statement was like a slap in the face. Morgan's mind cleared in an instant. \"Oh Kristen, I'm so sorry. I've tried to tell you. Tried to\u2014\"\n\n\"Shush,\" Kristen whispered against Morgan's lips. \"I've suspected it for a long time. It doesn't matter. No one makes me feel the way you do. No one loves me as you do. No one needs me like you do, Morgan Jouett.\"\n\n\"I never intended to deceive you,\" Morgan whispered. \"I never meant to fall in love with you. You snuck up on me, and now I can't live without you.\"\n\nKristen pressed her lips to Morgan's. \"I promised you a night you'll never forget. We can talk about this tomorrow. Tonight, I'm going to please you the way you please me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 155", + "text": "The sound of men talking and metal cups clinking against a coffee pot pulled Kristen from a satiated sleep. She kept her eyes closed, reliving the incredible night she had spent with the person she loved most in the world.\n\n\"Morgan Jouett.\" She said the name out loud. Morgan is a woman. That explains so many things. She's protected this secret all her life.\n\nMorgan's gender solved the main problem Kristen had always worried about: getting pregnant. But it also condemned them to forever hide their love in the night.\n\nLoving her brother would probably be more accepted in the male-dominated world than having a lesbian affair with her sister. God, she's my sister. Could you play any crueler joke on me?\n\nAlthough she wanted to savor the feelings she had shared with Morgan the night before, the noise from the wranglers grew louder and Kristen knew she had to dress and meet the day.\n\n\"Kristen,\" Morgan called from outside her wagon. \"Are you okay? Breakfast is almost ready. They're pulling out the biscuits now.\"\n\nThe sound of Morgan's voice made her heart skip a beat. She didn't care if Morgan was a woman; she still loved her with all her heart and soul. Right now, I'd give anything to kiss her good morning. To touch her handsome... beautiful face with my fingertips.\n\n\"I'll be right out,\" Kristen called.\n\nWhen she opened the canvas flap of the wagon, Morgan was standing there. She reached up and lifted Kristen to the ground.\n\n\"You're so strong,\" Kristen whispered.\n\n\"It goes along with my height,\" Morgan explained, \"and the fact that I work like a dog. Doing heavy lifting does build muscles.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm.\" Kristen sighed softly, recalling Morgan's strength in their lovemaking. \"I have many questions for you.\"\n\n\"Questions I'll gladly answer.\" Morgan smiled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 156", + "text": "After breakfast, the men paired off to start the roundup. \"Kristen, why don't you ride with me?\" Morgan said. \"We'll ride the fence line and drive the cattle into camp.\"\n\nThey rode without speaking again until they were far away from the others. Morgan was the first to break the silence. \"Do you hate me?\" she asked.\n\n\"Dear God, no!\" Kristen said. \"I've never loved you more. But how did you conceal such a secret all these years? No one knows?\"\n\n\"Father and one midwife knew,\" Morgan informed her. \"My mother died bringing me into this world. Father was positive he'd never remarry, so he swore the midwife to silence about my gender and presented me to the world as his son. He wanted to make certain that the idiocy of his great-grandfather's last will and testament didn't cost me Estelline.\n\n\"He never let anyone near me. He took care of all my needs as a baby. I was seven before I realized I wasn't like other boys. Father sat me down and explained our situation. He made me promise I would never reveal his duplicity in order to protect Estelline and our family legacy.\n\n\"By that time, I was entrenched in the boy mentality, and I had no problem continuing to live the lie. Father taught me to ride, fight, shoot, and do all the things required to run a ranch the size of Estelline.\n\n\"Women threw themselves at me to become Mrs. Morgan Jouett. Of course, I never had anything to do with them. How could I without revealing my secret? I wasn't drawn to any of them, so it wasn't difficult to dodge their advances. I was honestly happy with my lot in life. How was I to know that when I brought home the scrawny girl from San Francisco I'd fall irrevocably in love with her?\n\n\"At first I was your protector, making sure no harm came to you. I loved you like a sister. Then you morphed into the most beautiful woman I've ever met, and it was no secret you adored me too.\n\n\"The first time you kissed me, I knew my heart and soul would be in your keeping forever. I knew I'd do whatever it took to live out my life with you. Now here we are, still trapped by that damn will.\"\n\nKristen sighed. \"But Gwen... she had a baby. The only thing that could make this story more unbelievable is Gwen giving virgin birth.\"\n\nMorgan laughed out loud. \"I can promise you there is nothing virgin about Gwen,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm afraid Cage is the father of Daniel and Rachel. You giving birth to a son cemented the Jouett inheritance of Estelline and your residence at the ranch. It also sealed the fate of Wallace, Reid, and me. We will be driven from Eden.\"\n\n\"Cage, that bastard. And he can't understand why I don't like him. But even Gwen doesn't suspect?\" Kristen queried.\n\n\"No. I've never let her get close to me.\"\n\n\"But you sleep with her?\"\n\n\"I've never slept with her, Kristen. When Gwen informed me she was pregnant and begged me to marry her, I agreed to help her but strictly as a business proposition. I'd have no relations with her, and she could behave however she wished as long as she was discreet and brought no shame to the Jouett name. The arrangement further bolstered my male standing in our community. Even Cage doesn't know that Rachel is his daughter. I sleep in the small room off Gwen's bedroom.\"\n\nThey rode in silence as they pondered the situation.\n\n\"What will we do?\" Kristen finally asked.\n\n\"I don't know, Kris. I think of this day and night, seeking a solution that will allow us to live at Estelline together. But I... I'm lost.\"\n\n\"We must find a way to be together, Morgan. I don't want Estelline if it means losing you. Can't you petition Judge Goodnight to override the will and make it possible for all of our family to live on the ranch?\"\n\n\"I can if Cage will sign off on the agreement, but he knows he has the upper hand as Daniel's father, so I doubt he will.\"\n\n\"I could persuade him,\" Kristen said suggestively.\n\n\"No!\" Morgan snapped. \"It kills me to even think of him touching you. I can't bear that, even if it will solve our problem.\"\n\n\"Morgan, you've sacrificed so much for Estelline and our family. I can sacrifice too.\"\n\n\"Promise me you won't,\" Morgan begged. \"Promise me, Kristen. It makes me nauseous to think of you with him. I'll figure out something. Promise me!\"\n\n\"I promise,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"There's a group of cows with their calves in the bushes ahead,\" Morgan pointed out. \"We need to herd them toward camp. Just ease up to them. Don't spook them. They will move out in front of us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 157", + "text": "By sundown Kristen and Morgan had gathered over a hundred cows and calves, twice the number driven to camp by any other team. The laughter around the campfire that night was caused by the comment that Morgan and Kristen were the two best cowhands on the drive.\n\n\"This cowgirl is going for a swim to wash the dirt off,\" Kristen informed them. \"Morgan, will you be my guard while I bathe?\"\n\nMorgan nodded and retrieved a rifle. They rode to the spot they had found the night before. As soon as they dismounted, they were in each other's arms.\n\n\"You could wash my back,\" Kristen murmured.\n\nThe vibration of Kristen's lips against hers sent a tremor through Morgan's body. Morgan pulled her closer and kissed her slowly, glorying in the feel of Kristen in her arms. \"You have no idea how you thrill me,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Show me,\" Kristen urged, unbuttoning Morgan's shirt and kissing her way down to the small breasts now visible. She caressed Morgan's breasts, sucking one and palming the other.\n\n\"Oh my God,\" Morgan gasped. \"Do you know what you're doing to\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes, I know exactly what I'm doing.\" She pushed Morgan's shirt off and slid her hands to Morgan's zipper.\n\nFor the first time, Morgan let her unzip the jeans as she unbuttoned Kristen's shirt and pushed it off her arms. \"I want you so badly,\" Morgan murmured.\n\nThey let their clothes fall to the ground and squealed as they waded into the freezing Canadian River. Morgan pulled Kristen into her arms and kissed her, reveling in the feel of Kristen's lips responding to hers. Kristen edged her tongue between Morgan's lips, and Morgan welcomed the sweetness of the deepened kiss.\n\n\"I love you,\" Kristen declared.\n\nMorgan held Kristen tighter and was surprised the water swirling around them wasn't boiling. Her body was on fire." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 158", + "text": "Morgan and Kristen rode back to camp as the men were unfurling their bedrolls and settling in for the night. Morgan walked Kristen to her wagon.\n\n\"Will you come to me tonight?\" Kristen whispered.\n\n\"Tonight and every night, little one.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 159", + "text": "Kristen checked the cinch on her saddle and buckled her saddlebag. The roundup had lasted thirty-three days. The best thirty-three days of her life. She smiled at Morgan as she led her horse toward Kristen.\n\n\"Everything is packed and good to go,\" Morgan said. \"We're riding point. It will probably take us two or three days to get the cattle to Amarillo, maybe longer. We want to let them move at their own pace, grazing along the way so they don't lose weight. We have over a thousand head.\"\n\n\"Can we stay a few days in Amarillo?\" Kristen asked. \"I'm dying for a long, hot bath and clean white sheets.\"\n\n\"Only if I can join you.\" Morgan flirted. \"I've dreamed of making love to you on clean white sheets. Seems almost normal.\"\n\n\"Nothing about us is normal, is it Morgan?\" Kristen whispered.\n\n\"No, nothing is.\" Morgan swung into the saddle. \"Ready?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 160", + "text": "It took another week to get the herd to Amarillo. Residents saw them coming from miles away and gathered at the pens to see the cattle from Estelline Ranch. They cheered as Morgan and Kristen came into view, causing the cattle to bolt.\n\n\"Run,\" Morgan yelled. \"Lead them into the pens.\"\n\nMorgan knew the herd would destroy the pens and everything around them if they stampeded.\n\nKristen kicked her steed, urging him to stay ahead of the restless cattle, and thanked God the pens were open. The drovers rode hard to keep the cattle from scattering as Morgan and Kristen led them into the enclosures.\n\nRailhead workers ran to open the gates in succession, and the endless herd streamed in, filling one corral after another. Morgan prayed the facility was equipped to handle the wild cattle. She followed Kristen out the last gate, and someone shoved it closed behind them.\n\nThe cattle bawled and milled around the pens looking for an escape. The cowboys began to sing \"The Streets of Laredo\" at the top of their voices. Soon everyone joined in, and the soothing sound lulled the cattle.\n\nKristen inched her horse closer to Morgan and reached out to take her hand. \"That was scary,\" she exclaimed.\n\n\"Yes, but you handled it beautifully. You're one hell of a woman, Kristen Jouett.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Then that makes two of us, Morgan Jouett.\"\n\nKristen checked into the elite Amarillo Hotel while Morgan handled the business of collecting payment and signing the bill of sale for each company purchasing the cattle. The buyers quickly contracted for every cow the rancher offered.\n\n\"We should begin a tradition,\" Wallace announced as he and Reid followed Morgan from the bank. \"This is our first cattle drive to Amarillo, and it has been wildly successful for us, so I'm certain we will do this in the future. We should treat the men to a steak dinner and a round of drinks. They're waiting for us at the Longhorn Saloon.\"\n\n\"Excellent suggestion,\" Reid said. \"We pay them then do something nice for them.\"\n\nMorgan handed the payroll pouch to Wallace. \"You and Reid do the honors. I am dying to get into a bath.\"\n\n\"Morgan, you know it will mean more coming from you,\" Wallace declared. \"Surely you want a drink after eating dust for five weeks.\"\n\n\"Okay. We'll hand out payroll, and I'll have a drink with them, but then I'm leaving. You two can take care of dinner.\"\n\nMorgan passed out the pay envelopes in record time. She was pleased with the men's reaction to their offer to buy dinner and a drink. Wallace and Reid had good instincts when it came to handling their riders.\n\n\"What would you like to eat, sir?\" The pretty waitress leaned down so she could hear Morgan's order over the rowdy cowhands.\n\n\"Nothing for me, thanks. I have important business to take care of.\"\n\nMorgan said good night to Reid and Wallace and walked outside. The night air was warm, and Morgan was glad Kristen had insisted on staying at the newly renovated Amarillo Hotel with air-conditioned rooms. The rest of the crew had chosen to stay at the older, less expensive Elmhirst Hotel.\n\nMorgan walked to the front desk and asked for Kristen Jouett's room number.\n\n\"Is she your woman?\" the clerk asked.\n\nMorgan smiled at the woman. \"Yes! Yes, she is.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 161", + "text": "Kristen opened the door as soon as Morgan knocked. \"I was beginning to worry about you,\" she said, tilting her head back for a kiss. \"I have a nice hot bath for you, and I bought you a new pair of jeans and a shirt, along with a few other necessities. Call me when you're ready, and I'll come wash your back.\"\n\nMorgan followed orders and soon slipped into the warm, clear water. \"This must be heaven,\" she called to Kristen.\n\n\"Not yet.\" Kristen smiled from the doorway. \"But you're getting close.\n\n\"We need to get haircuts tomorrow,\" Kristen declared as she washed Morgan's blonde hair. \"Maybe you could get a cut that doesn't look like someone chopped it off with an axe.\"\n\n\"What's wrong with my haircut?\" Morgan teased. \"I thought you loved everything about me.\"\n\n\"Oh, I do,\" Kristen cooed in her ear, running her hands down Morgan's chest. \"Especially these newly discovered erotic points.\" She laughed as Morgan's nipples stood at attention.\n\n\"You are evil, little one.\" Morgan grinned as she soaped down her body. \"God, it feels good to be clean. One more bath in that damn Canadian and I swear I would have caught pneumonia.\"\n\n\"We should put bathtubs in our home,\" Kristen said. \"I love the convenience. One simply turns on the water to fill it and pulls out the plug to drain it. If they can be had in Amarillo, surely we can have them on the ranch.\"\n\nMorgan towel-dried her short hair and then gently pulled Kristen into her arms. \"I want to spend my life making you happy, making certain you have everything you desire. Hoping you'll always desire me.\"\n\nKristen caught her breath as Morgan's lips brushed hers. \"I desire you so much right now that I can hardly breathe.\"\n\nMorgan led her to the bed and pulled back the covers. \"You have no idea how long I have wanted to slip into bed with you. To just hold you and tell you how much you mean to me. To be open and free with you. To have no secrets from you. That hurt me the most\u2014not being truthful with you.\"\n\n\"Your secret has caused me unnecessary anguish,\" Kristen admitted. \"If I had known you were a woman after our first or second encounter, it would have been so much easier to love you. I would have had a better understanding of the things you did. Right now, I am the happiest woman in the world.\n\n\"Promise me that no matter what happens with Estelline, you and I will never be separated.\"\n\n\"I promise,\" Morgan whispered, lying down and pulling Kristen on top of her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 162", + "text": "It was dark when Morgan woke. It took her a moment to identify the woman wrapped around her. She inhaled, and the familiar scent of the woman who shook her soul filled her mind with scenes from the night before. A dull ache started in the pit of her stomach and quickly escalated to a raging need. She lay still, not wanting to wake Kristen.\n\nA soft moan escaped Kristin's lips as she stirred in Morgan's arms. \"This is a dream come true,\" she murmured. \"To wake in your arms is all I've ever asked of the gods.\"\n\n\"Did you sleep well?\" Morgan massaged her back.\n\n\"Like the dead.\" Kristen stretched and snuggled closer to Morgan. \"Umm, for someone with no experience, you certainly know how to please a woman. I can't believe I'm the only woman you've made love to.\"\n\nMorgan kissed her lips. \"You're the only one in the world I trust completely, unconditionally. I can't believe you fell in love with me.\"\n\n\"I loved you from the first time I saw you.\" Kristen trailed her fingers down Morgan's flat stomach to the apex of her legs then combed her fingers through the fine blonde hair covering her. \"Neither of us has much hair here,\" she said as she explored.\n\n\"I think it's a blonde thing.\" Morgan sucked in her breath as Kristen continued to play with her hair.\n\n\"Hmm. Do you think dark-haired women with those glorious manes have thick hair down here?\" Kristen slid her fingers through Morgan's folds. \"You're wet.\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Morgan whimpered. \"I... I... Oh Christ, Kristen! Stop playing with me and make love to me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 163", + "text": "The loud clanging of a fire engine yanked them from a sound sleep, as shouts of \"Fire! Fire!\" filled the street.\n\n\"What the hell?\" Morgan hit the floor running. She yanked on her new jeans and tossed Kristen her Levi's. \"There's a fire. It may be here. Let's go outside.\"\n\nShe pulled on her shirt, strapped her gun to her thigh, and tugged on her boots. Kristen dressed as quickly as Morgan and followed her into the hallway.\n\nThe desk clerk was hanging out the front door of the hotel. \"Is this place on fire?\" Morgan yelled.\n\n\"No, it's the Elmhirst Hotel. Holy hell, that place is going up in flames like dry paper.\"\n\n\"Kristen, our men are staying in that hotel,\" Morgan yelled. \"Reid and Wallace are there.\"\n\nThey ran out into the street and gawked at the raging inferno where a three-story hotel had stood the night before.\n\n\"Dear God, no!\" Morgan howled, running toward the flames with Kristen right behind her.\n\nMen and women in various stages of dress poured out the front door of the old hotel as others crawled out windows. Those trapped on the third floor began jumping.\n\nKristen pointed to an aged gentleman who had packed his suitcase, lowered it to the ground with a rope, and then slid down after it. His only injuries were rope burns on his hands.\n\nCut off from the fire escape by a locked door, hotel guests were inching their way along a ledge toward the guttering and then sliding to safety on the ground.\n\n\"Someone catch my baby,\" a woman screamed over and over. Then she threw the infant out the third-floor window.\n\nMorgan raced to catch the child and reached it just before it hit the ground. The parents climbed out the window and crawled along the ledge to a drainpipe. The man screamed in agony as he caught hold of the searing metal. The woman ripped up her skirt and handed half of it to her husband as she wrapped her hands in the cloth. They slid down the pipe as it began to tilt into the fire.\n\n\"Help them,\" Morgan directed two men beside her. \"Get them off that pipe.\"\n\nAs if awakened from a trance, the men ran to the couple and pulled them to safety as the pipe collapsed into the sea of flames.\n\n\"You saved my baby,\" the woman cried as she reached out to take the wailing infant from Morgan.\n\n\"I believe you saved your baby,\" Morgan said, praising her.\n\nThen, Kristen grabbed Morgan's arm. \"Morgan, where are Wallace and Reid? I can't find them.\"\n\nMorgan looked around spotting Shanghai across the street gathering Estelline cowboys as they escaped the tinder box that had burned to the ground in less than an hour. People wandered around aimlessly. Some were burned; others were half naked. All seemed to be in shock.\n\nWagons arrived on the scene to take the injured to the hospital. The police and fire department pushed people back from the fire as everyone waited for the embers to cool so they could search for their loved ones.\n\n\"Have any of you seen Wallace and Reid?\" Morgan and Kristen moved from man to man asking about their brothers.\n\nMorgan approached the fire chief, who was writing down the names of those who had been in the hotel. \"Sir, I'm looking for my brothers. They spent the night here.\"\n\nThe chief looked at the list of names he had accumulated. \"Names?\"\n\n\"Reid and Wallace Jouett,\" Morgan said, choking back her emotions.\n\n\"You're those boys that brought in that herd of cattle yesterday,\" the chief said. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"Morgan Jouett and my sister, Kristen.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, son. I don't have your brothers' names on my list. Why don't you ask the officer over there? He's writing down the names of folks as they cart them off to the hospital.\"\n\nEverything seemed like a bad dream. Morgan felt as if she were pushing her way through a sandstorm. Heavy smoke hung over the street like a harbinger of doom. They repeated their question to everyone with a list, but no one had the names of Reid and Wallace.\n\n\"We can account for all but five of the hotel guests,\" the fire chief informed Morgan. \"We have to wait until the embers burn out. Then we'll comb the ashes for bodies. Where are you two staying?\"\n\n\"The Amarillo Hotel,\" Morgan muttered. \"Room 18.\"\n\n\"I think I'm going to be sick,\" Kristen mumbled as she clung to Morgan's arm. \"Let's return to our hotel and get a cup of coffee in the dining room.\"\n\nMorgan nodded and they walked wordlessly down the street. Shanghai joined them. \"I'm relocating all the men to the Horseman's Hotel,\" he informed Morgan. \"I'll get everything settled and then report to you.\"\n\n\"We'll be in the dining room,\" Morgan said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 164", + "text": "Morgan stared at the menu. \"What can I get you, sir?\" the waitress asked. \"Our steak and eggs breakfast is a favorite. All you can eat.\"\n\n\"Just coffee,\" Morgan answered.\n\nThe waitress glanced at Kristen. \"I'll have coffee and toast,\" she said.\n\n\"Kris, what are we going to do? I can't return home without our brothers.\" She gasped as the hard knot in her stomach doubled in size. \"I can't face Jerilyn and tell her Reid is...\"\n\nKristen placed her hand over Morgan's. \"We'll get through this,\" she murmured. \"As long as we have each other, we'll survive.\"\n\nA commotion at the hostess stand drew their attention. \"There they are.\" A woman pointed toward Kristen and Morgan. \"They saved my baby's life.\"\n\nBefore Morgan could react, a flash blinded her. A small man in brown slacks and a plaid brown-and-white shirt approached them. \"What's your name, sir?\"\n\n\"Morgan Jouett. Who wants to know?\" she grumbled, trying to refocus her eyes.\n\n\"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to blind you. I just wanted your photo. This lady was telling me about your heroic deed at the fire.\"\n\n\"There were a lot of heroes at the scene,\" Morgan pointed out. \"I'm sure much more heroic ones than me.\"\n\n\"Honestly, sir, you are extremely handsome. Your picture will sell newspapers.\"\n\n\"Sir, I'm trying to locate my brothers.\" Morgan frowned. \"They were staying in that hotel, and now they're missing.\"\n\nThe sound of boisterous laughter preceded a group coming down the stairs. \"I don't know who was in the room under us, but they had a hell of a good time last night. Just listening to them made me horny as hell.\"\n\n\"Reid! Wallace!\" Kristen shrieked as her brothers stepped from the stairwell. \"Oh, thank you, Jesus.\"\n\nMorgan and Kristen ran to their brothers and embraced them. \"We thought we'd lost you,\" Kristen said, tears running freely down her cheeks.\n\n\"What? What's going on?\" Wallace asked.\n\n\"There was a terrible fire, and the Elmhirst Hotel burned to the ground. We thought you two were staying there,\" Morgan explained.\n\n\"By the time we went in last night, they were full,\" Reid said. \"So we checked in here, but we didn't get much sleep.\"\n\nWallace chuckled. \"The couple right below us made more noise than a\u2014\"\n\n\"We're just glad you're alive.\" Kristen hugged her brothers again. \"Come have breakfast. I'm suddenly famished and Shanghai will join us soon.\"\n\nAs if he had been waiting his cue, Shanghai stomped into the lobby. \"Damn, if you two ain't a sight for sore eyes,\" he crowed, clapping Reid and Wallace on the back. \"We thought we'd lost you.\"\n\n\"Morgan was just telling us,\" Reid replied.\n\n\"Join us for breakfast,\" Morgan said. \"My appetite has suddenly returned to.\"\n\nThe five of them gathered around the table and gave thanks that all were safe.\n\n\"Some of the men want to head home,\" Shanghai said.\n\n\"I wouldn't mind going back myself.\" Reid grinned. \"After last night, I'm ready to get home to my wife.\"\n\n\"I'd like to head home too,\" Wallace said.\n\n\"Would y'all take our horses?\" Morgan asked. \"I have meetings over the next two days with potential cattle buyers. We may drive our southern herd here instead of freighting them to Colorado. Kristen and I can catch the train home. I'm a little tired of sitting in the saddle.\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Reid said. \"You'll beat us home. Our horses will only cover twenty miles a day. It'll take us five days to get there.\"\n\n\"Have Shanghai and the boys take your horses. Go buy two train tickets right now, and you'll both be home before dark,\" Morgan instructed.\n\n\"You okay with that, Shanghai?\" Reid asked.\n\n\"Of course,\" the foreman replied. \"I'm pretty sure I can get the gang home without your help.\"\n\nReid let out a whoop that drew the attention of other diners. \"I'm sorry,\" he exclaimed. \"I'm gonna sleep in my own bed tonight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 165", + "text": "Kristen and Morgan walked Wallace and Reid to the train station. \"Let our spouses know we'll be home as soon as I finish my business here,\" Morgan said.\n\nThe brothers boarded the train and waved goodbye through the window.\n\n\"Is there anything in particular you'd like to see while we're here?\" Morgan asked, lacing her fingers through Kristen's.\n\n\"Should we be walking down the street holding hands?\" Kristen asked. \"I mean, won't people think that strange, two women\u2014\"\n\n\"To the world, we're not.\" Morgan smiled mischievously. \"To the world, I'm a man proudly walking down the street with the most beautiful girl in the world.\"\n\nKristen giggled and gripped Morgan's hand tighter. \"This feels so right... and strange at the same time. I could get used to holding your hand everywhere we go. I've always wanted to hold your hand, Morgan.\"\n\n\"I can't tell you how often I've wanted to hold your hand just to reassure you of my love,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"What time are your meetings with the cattle buyers?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"I wrapped all of that up yesterday. I just told the boys that so I could have a few more days alone with you.\"\n\n\"Then why are we wasting precious time walking down the streets of Amarillo?\" Kristen leaned against Morgan's arm and whispered, \"When we could be in our air-conditioned room making love.\"\n\n\"Why, indeed?\" Morgan smiled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 166", + "text": "It was late afternoon when Kristen awoke. She stretched and snuggled into Morgan's side. \"Are you awake?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I am now,\" Morgan chuckled. \"I don't think I've ever been this relaxed.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm. There is something about good loving that makes the world go away,\" Kristen said. \"Morgan, I don't want this to change. I want to always be with you like this. Free to love you with no inhibitions.\"\n\n\"You know that isn't possible, baby.\" Morgan propped up on one elbow and gazed into the bluest eyes she had ever seen. \"You are so beautiful. I could... no, I have lost my soul in your eyes.\"\n\nKristen pulled her down and kissed Morgan's lips, her tongue seeking contact with Morgan's. Their languid kiss and gentle touching of their tongues soon turned into a fevered stroking of each other.\n\nMorgan pushed Kristen onto her back and knelt between her legs. \"Everything about you is perfect,\" Morgan whispered. \"I never dreamed I could love someone as much as I love you. More importantly, I never dreamed someone like you would love me back.\"\n\nMorgan gently traced Kristen's face with her fingertips. \"Your strong jawline and full lips.\"\n\nKristen trembled as Morgan's fingers glided around her mouth, moving from one dimple to the other and back to her full bottom lip. She had never felt so loved, and the look in Morgan's eyes was one of pure adoration.\n\n\"I want you,\" Kristen murmured, touching Morgan's fingertips with her tongue.\n\nMorgan closed her eyes, loving the feel of Kristen's tongue against her fingers. She let her fingers drift down Kristen's neck, inching toward breasts that were already aching for her touch. \"So perfect,\" Morgan cooed as she circled Kristen's nipples with her fingertips.\n\nDesire shot through Kristen's body, and she bucked, begging for more. \"Patience, baby,\" Morgan whispered. \"We have all day.\"\n\n\"Please, I can't wait all day,\" Kristen pleaded.\n\nMorgan moved her strong hands down Kristen's sides, leaning forward to kiss her stomach. Kristen tangled her hands in Morgan's hair and pulled her mouth to her breasts.\n\nMorgan immersed herself in Kristen, caressing her breast, sucking until Kristen was screaming her name.\n\n\"Shush. They can hear you through these thin walls,\" Morgan reminded her.\n\n\"Then do something,\" Kristen whispered. \"You're driving me crazy.\"\n\n\"That is my intent.\" Morgan smiled provocatively, sliding up Kristen's body and capturing her lips in a demanding kiss. \"I want you to want me.\"\n\n\"Oh God, I do,\" Kristen murmured. \"So much, honey. So much.\"\n\nMorgan continued to kiss her lover as she caressed her breasts. \"Please,\" Kristen pleaded. \"Please.\"\n\nMorgan slowly inched her hand down Kristen's stomach as she sucked and licked her nipple. Kristen bucked like a wild mustang and pulled Morgan's mouth against her bosom. Morgan engulfed Kristen's breast, sucking hard, circling her nipple with her tongue.\n\nWhen Kristen cried out, Morgan covered her mouth with her lips and slid her hand between Kristen's legs. \"Is this what you want?\" she teased.\n\n\"Yes, oh yes! Please, Morgan!\"\n\nMorgan kissed her slowly, fanning the flames as she toyed with Kristen's folds. \"Please?\" Kristen whimpered. \"I want you so much.\"\n\nStill kissing her, Morgan slid inside her. \"Yes, oh yes, Morgan.\" She screamed Morgan's name, chanting it over and over as Morgan moved to please her.\n\nMorgan rode her hand, giving Kristen everything she was begging for. \"God, I love you,\" Morgan whispered in her ear. \"I love doing this to you. Most of all, I love how you like it.\"\n\nKristen screamed, gasping for breath as Morgan made one last plunge. \"So good.\" Kristen panted. \"So much more than I ever dreamed possible.\"\n\nMorgan fell onto her back, trying to catch her breath. Kristen lay beside her. \"Thank you,\" Kristen murmured.\n\n\"Umm, the pleasure was all mine.\"\n\nKristen giggled. \"Somehow I seriously doubt that. I've never felt so incredible in my life.\"\n\nMorgan pulled Kristen into her arms and cuddled her. \"I've never loved anything as much as I love you,\" she declared." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 167", + "text": "Morgan slid the luggage under their seats and sat down next to Kristen, who immediately clasped her lover's hand. Kristen toyed with Morgan's fingers, smiling salaciously at the rancher.\n\n\"Don't even think about it,\" Morgan snickered.\n\nKristen laughed and leaned her head on Morgan's shoulder. \"I love that you called from our hotel to the train station in Estelline Town so they could notify Reid or Wallace to meet our train.\"\n\n\"I like that too,\" Morgan said. \"Maybe when we put in the bathtubs we can have a phone installed.\"\n\n\"Yes! Oh Morgan, that would be awesome. We'll have hot running water and a telephone to call anywhere we want.\"\n\nMorgan beamed at her lover. \"I love your enthusiasm. You make everything more fun.\"\n\n\"Umm, so do you,\" Kristen said.\n\nThe couple talked about the future and how to improve their cattle. They discussed the new innovations appearing daily in America. \"Things one never would have believed possible,\" Morgan noted.\n\nThe steam engine hissed and brakes squealed as the train pulled into the Estelline station. \"I can't believe we're already here,\" Morgan said, leading the way to the exit.\n\n\"I hope you had a pleasant trip,\" Cage said as he walked toward them with Gwen following close behind.\n\nKristen wanted to throw up but remained calm as her husband hugged her. She turned her cheek when he tried to kiss her.\n\nMorgan gave Gwen a cursory hug and then gathered their luggage. \"I expected Reid or Wallace to pick us up,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"You've been gone a long time,\" Cage said, catching Kristen's hand in his. \"I wanted to see you.\"\n\n\"How is Daniel?\" Kristen asked. \"I bet he's grown a foot. I missed him something terrible.\"\n\n\"Is that why you came back early like Reid and Wallace?\" Gwen taunted Kristen.\n\n\"I asked Kristen to stay with me,\" Morgan insisted. \"I wanted her to meet the gentlemen we will be doing business with in the future.\"\n\n\"Something I should be doing,\" Cage grumbled.\n\n\"If you could ever be well enough to do any work,\" Morgan retorted. \"Where's the buggy?\"\n\n\"In the back of the station,\" Cage mumbled.\n\n\"I'll drive.\" Morgan's tone dared anyone to challenge the statement.\n\nGwen climbed into the front seat of the buggy to sit next to Morgan. \"I'm glad you're home,\" she said. \"I missed you.\"\n\n\"It's good to be home,\" Morgan acknowledged. \"How is Rachel?\"\n\n\"She took her first step this week,\" Gwen said.\n\n\"I missed her.\"\n\n\"But not your wife,\" Gwen muttered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 168", + "text": "It was almost dark when they reached the ranch. Hassie fussed over them as the girls placed supper on the table. \"The babies are already asleep,\" Hassie informed them. \"You can love on them in the morning.\"\n\n\"We wanted to wait on dinner for you.\" Jerilyn wrinkled her nose in the cute little way that always made Kristen laugh. \"We want to hear all about your adventures. Reid said you have a harrowing tale to share with us.\"\n\n\"The things nightmares are made of,\" Morgan said as they related the information about the fire and their fear that Wallace and Reid had perished in it.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Jerilyn gasped. \"That is an awful story. I'm so glad it had a happy ending.\"\n\n\"What did you two do while we were away?\" Kristen said, looking from Cage to Gwen.\n\nThe blush that colored their faces told Kristen everything she needed to know.\n\n\"I have a new horse,\" Cage informed them. \"A white stallion out of Osiris's herd.\"\n\n\"He's quite beautiful,\" Gwen added. \"Lots of strength and stamina. Cage has won a considerable amount of money with him.\"\n\n\"How?\" Morgan demanded.\n\n\"Racing him.\" Gwen shrugged. \"He takes him to a race every weekend. The horse has never lost.\"\n\n\"We don't race our horses,\" Morgan said. \"I think it's much too hard on them.\"\n\n\"You don't have anything that will beat him anyway,\" Cage said, snarling. \"And he is my horse, so I don't suppose I care what you think.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 169", + "text": "Morgan sat on the porch swing drinking coffee and watching darkness give way to daylight. As the sun's rays cast shadows over Estelline, she was appalled at the condition of her usually pristine ranch.\n\nJohnsongrass had grown around the sides of all the ranch buildings. The noxious weed had taken over the yard in front of the house and was over five feet tall along the fences.\n\nTumbleweeds stacked up against the barn walls and rolled across the dusty Texas landscape. How could this happen in six weeks? Morgan thought. Nature reclaims the land so quickly.\n\nMorgan fought the urge to kill Gwen and Cage in their sleep. They must have screwed like rabbits the entire time we were gone. They did nothing to take care of the ranch.\n\nShe looked around. Everything made her furious. Her mood was getting darker by the minute. She was rarely in a foul mood. It just wasn't her nature.\n\nKristen pushed open the screen door with her hip and carried out a tray that held a coffee carafe, a cup, and a plate of shortbread. She placed it on the table beside the swing.\n\n\"I missed you last night,\" she said softly, touching Morgan's arm.\n\nMorgan inhaled deeply and expelled the air slowly. And just like that, I'm happy, Morgan thought. Her touch turns my day around.\n\n\"I know.\" Morgan smiled, reaching for the shortbread. \"I had a miserable night.\"\n\nThey stopped talking to listen to the mournful howl of a gray wolf. \"They carried on all night.\" A shiver ran down Kristen's spine. \"They must have something cornered.\"\n\n\"We should ride out and check on the cattle,\" Morgan suggested. \"They may have a cow and calf down.\"\n\nBoth stuffed a handful of the shortbread into their jacket pocket and sprinted to the barn. The wolf howled again as they rode out of the stables.\n\n\"It sounds like it's in the south canyon,\" Morgan noted, kicking her horse into a cantor. They topped the ridge of the canyon in time to see a pack of wolves circling Isis and her newborn foal, both lying on the ground. Osiris squealed and kicked, trying to fight off the pack that was closing in on his foal.\n\n\"We can't reach them in time,\" Kristen said.\n\nMorgan handed Kristen her reins and dismounted, pulling her rifle from the scabbard. She moved away from their mounts and took aim at the largest wolf in the pack, who seemed to be the leader. The animal leaped at Osiris, tearing the stallion's side open with its fangs.\n\nThe smell of blood sent the pack into a frenzy, and they tried to get past the black stallion to reach his family. Morgan took aim, held the rifle steady, and squeezed the trigger, catching the pack leader in midair. The wolves ran in circles, looking for guidance from the dead leader.\n\n\"Go,\" Morgan yelled as she remounted. \"We need to run them off before they regroup.\"\n\nShe fired two more shots into the air as they approached the pack. The wolves slinked away from the downed mare and foal. Osiris trumpeted a shrill scream that echoed off the walls of the canyon. The stallion reared, pawed the air, and then stood silently as Kristen approached the mare and foal.\n\n\"It's okay, big fellow.\" Morgan soothed the stallion as she wrapped her hand in his mane and examined his bleeding side. A tremor rippled Osiris's skin as Morgan touched him. \"Kris, we must get them back to the ranch. He's in no condition to do battle again, and the foal can barely stand.\"\n\n\"Will he let us lead him?\" Kristen asked as Isis struggled to her feet. Kristen lifted the foal, holding him until his wobbly legs steadied. Then she helped him find his mother's milk. \"We need to stay here and let him nurse as much as he will before we try to take them to the ranch.\"\n\nMorgan nodded, loving the way Kristen instinctively knew what needed to be done.\n\nAfter the foal nursed and seemed surer of himself, Morgan picked him up and placed him across her saddle. Kristen steadied the colt while Morgan mounted the horse.\n\n\"We're taking your baby home,\" Kristen reassured Isis as she swung into her saddle. The mare and stallion flanked Morgan and the foal, and they all headed toward the ranch.\n\nThey rode slowly, letting their mounts set the pace without jarring the new foal. As they approached the ranch, Kristen surveyed the broken corrals.\n\n\"Morgan, the ranch is a mess. It's overgrown with weeds, and the pens are in disarray. When we saddled the horses, I noticed the saddles needed cleaning badly. What happened while we were gone?\"\n\n\"Nothing much,\" Morgan grunted. \"I believe we have married two of the laziest people in the world.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 170", + "text": "\"We've been working on cleaning this place up ever since we got home,\" Reid said. \"It actually looks better, if you can believe that.\"\n\n\"Cage refuses to lift a hand,\" Wallace informed Morgan.\n\n\"The rest of the crew should be here tomorrow,\" Morgan said. \"Let them rest a couple of days, and then everyone will hit the ground running to clean up this place.\"\n\n\"Osiris and Isis are coming along nicely,\" Wallace said. \"That foal is really something. He may be better than his sire.\"\n\nKristen turned her attention from the colt to the figure approaching them. Cage sauntered toward the siblings. \"A little family powwow or can anyone join the conversation?\" he asked.\n\nKristen greeting him cheerfully. \"Cage, I'm glad you're here. We were just discussing division of labor. We need to clean up the ranch. It's a disgrace.\"\n\n\"I did the best I could,\" Cage muttered. \"With my sprained ankle I couldn't do much.\"\n\n\"But you're healed now.\" Kristen smirked. \"You can carry your part of the workload.\"\n\n\"We have to get everything back in shape before we round up the southern herd,\" Morgan explained. \"That Johnsongrass must be eradicated. It produces cyanide under adverse conditions and can kill a full-grown cow in an hour if enough is ingested.\"\n\nCage snorted. \"I thought it was hay.\"\n\n\"If Johnsongrass is cut at the proper stage and cured correctly, it can be safely used for hay,\" Morgan said, \"but the proper stage is iffy at best, so I prefer not to take a chance on poisoning our herd.\"\n\nKristen pulled on a pair of leather gloves. \"We're not ridding our place of Johnsongrass by standing around talking about it. Everyone pick a spot and start pulling it up by its roots.\"\n\nThey worked in the blazing sun until noon and then stopped for lunch. When they entered the house, Jerilyn was seated on a quilt, playing with Daniel and Rachel. Morgan and Kristen joined her.\n\n\"Where's Gwen?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Lying down.\" Jerilyn shrugged. \"She has a terminal headache.\"\n\nMorgan gasped. \"What?\"\n\n\"Nothing serious,\" Jerilyn replied.\n\n\"You said terminal.\"\n\n\"Yeah... not that she's going to die from it, but that she will have it until she dies. It's a good excuse to keep from helping with the meals or the dishes.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Morgan grunted turning his attention to Daniel.\n\nDaniel crawled into Morgan's lap and started jabbering.\n\n\"You're quite a storyteller.\" Morgan laughed.\n\nRachel also climbed into Morgan's lap, and the two babies jabbered at each other until Hassie announced that lunch was on the table. Kristen lifted Rachel from Morgan's lap, and the two carried the infants to the table." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 171", + "text": "Once the entire crew arrived and joined in the project to restore Estelline to its prior pristine state, the work progressed quickly.\n\nMorgan strolled through the garden behind the house and sat on a bench shadowed by a huge post oak tree. Although they had been unable to steal time together, Morgan was more satisfied than she had ever been. Kristen's soft touches when no one was looking, a stolen kiss in the shadows of the barn, or just a simple conversation made her happy. Sharing everything with Kristen lifted the load Morgan had struggled with all her life. She loved Kristen more every day, but guilt festered in the back of her mind as she tried to forget that Kristen was her half sister.\n\n\"I thought I saw you walk out here,\" Kristen said, joining Morgan on the bench.\n\n\"I was just thinking about you,\" Morgan admitted.\n\n\"Umm... and what were you thinking?\"\n\n\"How much I love you.\"\n\nMorgan placed her fingers under Kristen's chin and tilted her face up. \"How wonderful it would be to kiss you.\"\n\n\"I was hoping there would be kisses in my future when I followed you out here.\" Kristen giggled and added, \"Maybe more than kisses.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" Morgan whispered, pulling Kristen into her arms. \"I love the scent of you,\" she whispered against Kristen's lips." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 172", + "text": "\"I hate him!\" Gwen slammed the book down on her dressing table. \"He doesn't even know I exist.\"\n\n\"Why does he matter?\" Cage huffed. \"You have me.\"\n\nGwen struggled to control her emotions. \"Yes, thank heaven I have you.\"\n\nYou look just like my husband, she thought, but the similarity stops there. You're a lazy drunk and a loutish bore. You are good in bed and someone to pass the time with.\n\n\"I don't know what I'd do without you, Cage. You save my sanity.\"\n\n\"Always happy to be of service, ma'am.\" He made a sweeping bow. \"Did everyone go into town?\"\n\n\"Yes, even Hassie and the nannies. I think it's their annual buying trip. Morgan seemed excited over a new bathtub and visiting the Estelline Town telephone exchange... as if they'd lay a phone line to this godforsaken place.\"\n\n\"They're planning a barn dance next weekend to celebrate another successful roundup,\" Cage informed her.\n\n\"At least we'll be able to mingle with people who aren't named Jouett,\" she said. \"And my father will be here.\"\n\n\"But we are alone for a few hours.\" Cage's eyes glinted. \"I know a good way to kill some time.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you do,\" Gwen said, smirking. That's all you're good for, she thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 173", + "text": "While the others scattered around town on various missions, Morgan and Kristen went to the receiving area of the train station to pick up the large crates marked \"Estelline Ranch.\"\n\n\"There are four of them!\" Kristen gasped.\n\n\"I know.\" Morgan grinned. \"One for your suite and one for the guest suite I plan to move into. The third crate contains the apparatus needed to heat the water, and the fourth crate contains a toilet. We'll install it downstairs so everyone can have access to it. If they work out, we'll put them in everyone's room.\"\n\nMorgan arranged to have the crates loaded onto their wagon, and then they headed to the telephone company's central office.\n\n\"You're in the middle of nowhere,\" Trilton Davis, the phone company official, blurted out. \"We can't afford to run lines that far for one phone.\"\n\n\"Can we lay the lines?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Sure, but you've got to get permission from the two ranches you'll need to cross to reach your place. We'll supply the wire, but we don't have the manpower for such an undertaking, Mr. Jouett. You'll also have to supply the telephone poles.\"\n\n\"Can't we use the poles currently carrying electricity to the ranches in our area?\"\n\n\"I don't see why not,\" Davis said, scratching his bald head. \"You'll have to clear that with the electric company. I have nothing to do with that.\"\n\n\"We can do that,\" Morgan assured him. \"When can we pick up the wire?\"\n\n\"It's out back. Just pull your wagon around, and my men will load it for you.\"\n\n\"We'll come back for it in a couple of days,\" Morgan said. \"We have a big load already, and I don't want to kill my horses.\"\n\nDavis smiled. \"You're a wise man.\"\n\n\"Oh, this is so exciting!\" Kristen laughed as she slipped her arm through Morgan's and squeezed it between her breasts.\n\n\"You are so evil,\" Morgan teased as Kristen's softness cradled her arm.\n\nMorgan checked the time. \"We're supposed to meet everyone in the Texas Hotel dining room.\"\n\n\"I can't wait to tell them what we've been doing,\" Kristen said. \"I don't know which is the most exciting, getting bathtubs with hot running water or getting a telephone.\"\n\nMorgan laughed. \"I'm going with bathtubs. I love the soap you bathe in. When I smell that fragrance, I always think of you.\"\n\n\"And what do you think about me?\"\n\n\"The things I want to do to you,\" Morgan whispered, \"and things I want you to do to me.\"\n\n\"Morgan,\" she moaned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 174", + "text": "\"How did your mysterious business transactions go today?\" Reid asked as their siblings caught up with them.\n\n\"Incredible,\" Kristen crowed. \"Our brother is a genius.\"\n\n\"That's why we let him run things.\" Reid's laughter was cut short as they all realized it was just a matter of time before Morgan would no longer be running things. Worst of all, only Kristen would be remaining at the ranch.\n\nA somber group entered the Texas Hotel dining room.\n\n\"Four glasses and a bottle of your best bourbon,\" Wallace instructed the waitress. \"The Jouetts are about to have a brainstorming session.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 175", + "text": "After a long lunch and a second bottle of bourbon, they had found no good resolution to their problems.\n\n\"Daniel is the legal heir to Estelline,\" Morgan declared. \"Only he, his mother, and his father can break the will, and you all know Cage can't wait to drive us from the ranch.\"\n\n\"I'm going with you,\" Kristen declared.\n\n\"And leave Daniel in Cage's claws? I think not,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"What if something happened to Cage?\" Wallace asked. \"Who would be the boss?\"\n\n\"Kristen, until her death, then Daniel,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"I think Cage murdered Naomi,\" Wallace blurted out.\n\nEveryone stared at him.\n\n\"I think Wallace is right,\" Kristen said. \"Someone definitely rode into the ranch yard. I heard a horse whinny, and the barn is too far away for me to hear that.\"\n\n\"That's a pretty strong allegation to make against your husband,\" Morgan noted. \"Do either of you have any evidence?\"\n\n\"Just a gut feeling,\" Wallace grumbled.\n\n\"You can't hang a man on a gut feeling.\" Morgan glowered at them. \"I want to save Estelline as much as anyone, but I want to do it legally and honorably.\"\n\n\"Morgan is right,\" Wallace said. \"I have no proof.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 176", + "text": "Cage rolled off Gwen and stared at the ceiling. \"You need to tend to the babies,\" he said.\n\n\"Me? One of those squalling brats is yours,\" Gwen squawked.\n\n\"Okay, we'll both go.\" They pulled on their clothes and walked to the nursery.\n\n\"When was the last time you changed their diapers?\" Cage grunted, holding his nose.\n\nGwen glared at him as if he were insane. \"I never change their diapers. That's what nannies are for.\"\n\n\"Do you know how to change a diaper?\"\n\n\"Don't give me that bull, Cage. You're going to change Daniel's diaper while I change Rachel's.\"\n\nThe babies continued to wail even after they had on fresh diapers. \"What's wrong with them?\" Cage ranted. \"They're clean.\"\n\nA light came on in Gwen's eyes. \"Food. They're probably hungry. Help me carry them downstairs and feed them.\"\n\nThey rummaged around the kitchen and finally found the four bottles Mary had left for them. As soon as the nipples were in their mouths, Rachel and Daniel stopped crying, giving all their attention to the milk.\n\n\"We should feed them two bottles each,\" Cage muttered. \"Otherwise, everyone will know we forgot to feed them all day.\"\n\nGwen agreed. \"Good point, but maybe we should pour them out. Two bottles will give them colic.\"\n\nEveryone arrived home as the babies finished their dinner. Gwen and Cage quickly carried them upstairs, placed them in their cribs, and rocked them to sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 177", + "text": "\"Can I give you a hand?\" Cage asked, reaching for a fifty-pound bag of flour.\n\n\"That would be nice,\" Jerilyn said.\n\n\"Where are Morgan and Kristen?\"\n\n\"They took the other wagon to the barn,\" Jerilyn informed him. \"Everything in it can wait until tomorrow to unload.\"\n\n\"What's for dinner?\" Cage glared at Hassie.\n\n\"Homemade bread, cured ham, and beans,\" Hassie sassed. \"Basically, sandwiches.\"\n\nCage nodded, reluctant to push the matter. He knew the old woman was in a querulous mood.\n\nJerilyn and Kristen placed plates of bread and ham on each end of the dining table, along with a huge bowl of red beans.\n\n\"I could eat a horse,\" Reid said, carrying a pitcher of iced tea to the table.\n\n\"We're going to look in on Rachel and Daniel,\" Kristen announced as she and Morgan started up the stairs.\n\n\"Mary is with them,\" Gwen declared from the top of the banister.\n\n\"How were they today?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Good as gold.\" Gwen smiled. \"After all, they are Jouetts.\"\n\n\"We won't be long,\" Kristen said. \"Don't wait dinner for us. I know everyone is hungry.\"\n\nAs they reached the nursery Mary stepped into the hallway. \"They're sound asleep,\" she whispered.\n\n\"We just want to see them.\" Kristen smiled.\n\nThey slipped into the room, closing the door behind them. Kristen stood at the foot of both cribs and admired the next generation of Jouetts.\n\nStrong arms slipped around her as Morgan kissed her neck. \"They are so precious,\" she whispered into Kristen's ear.\n\nKristen inhaled and turned in Morgan's arms for a sweet kiss. \"Don't do this unless you plan to follow up later.\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I'm planning,\" Morgan murmured against the softest lips in the world." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 178", + "text": "Morgan and the men worked nonstop for the next four days. \"I want these things installed and working before the barn dance,\" Morgan said as they dug trenches to lay the drainpipes.\n\n\"Gradually lower the trench half a foot every three feet. Lay the pipe downhill,\" Morgan instructed, \"so it will drain properly.\"\n\nOn the fourth day, Morgan and the men admired their handiwork. She beamed at Kristen. \"Are you ready to give it a try?\"\n\n\"Why does she get a bathtub?\" Gwen complained.\n\n\"Because she owns Estelline,\" Morgan replied. \"You won't be here this time next year.\"\n\nGwen stepped back from the group as she started to formulate a plan. I'll need Cage's help, she thought. I'll enlist my father's help too. He's always wanted to own this ranch. When I'm through with you, Morgan Jouett, you'll be begging me to take you into my bed.\n\nEveryone gathered around the bathtub in Kristen's room and gawked as she placed the stopper in the hole of the tub and turned on the water. Hot water steamed out of the faucet, filling the tub as Kristen adjusted the temperature of the water.\n\n\"It's a miracle,\" Jerilyn declared. \"A flipping miracle.\"\n\n\"Now watch this,\" Kristen said as she turned off the water and removed the stopper. The water swirled from the tub and disappeared.\n\n\"Oh, my Lord!\" Hassie gasped as she witnessed the modern miracle.\n\nKristen replaced the stopper and turned on the water again. \"Everyone out but Hassie,\" she ordered. \"Come on, Hassie. You will take the first bath in our new tub.\"\n\nHassie giggled like a schoolgirl as she undressed. \"Turn your head,\" she instructed the woman she had practically raised. Kristen laughed and did as she was told.\n\n\"Are you comfortable?\" Kristen asked, staring out the window at Morgan as she strolled to the barn.\n\n\"Oh my, yes!\" Hassie laughed. \"I'll hurry.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Kristen replied. \"Relax. Take your time and enjoy your bath. I'm going to give you some privacy.\"\n\n\"May I go next?\" Jerilyn asked as Kristen exited the bedroom.\n\n\"Of course. I'm going outside to get some fresh air.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 179", + "text": "Morgan was pleased with herself. Kristen loved the tub and relished the idea of a bath every night, as did she. She had discovered that nothing made her happier than pleasing Kristen. She is so appreciative, she thought. We'll start on the phone lines next week.\n\nThe horses shuffled their feet and rattled their feed buckets as Morgan entered the barn. The single light in the center of the room did little to dispel the darkness. She loved the barn's smell. The scent of leather, sweet hay, and the animals relaxed her.\n\n\"Morgan?\" Kristen called her name as she entered stables.\n\nMorgan stepped into the shadows when she realized Cage had followed Kristen into the barn.\n\n\"No, it's me,\" Cage answered.\n\n\"Not funny.\" Kristen turned to face Cage. \"Oh, it is you! What are you doing in here?\"\n\n\"I saw you walking this way and wanted to talk with you,\" Cage said. \"I haven't had any time alone with you since you returned with all your fancy new toys.\"\n\n\"What do you want, Cage?\" Kristen asked, backing away from him.\n\n\"You're afraid of me!\" Cage smirked.\n\n\"Yes! Why wouldn't I be? The last time I was alone with you, you raped me.\"\n\n\"One can hardly consider it rape when a husband requires his wife to do her wifely duties.\"\n\nKristen continued to back deeper into the barn, cursing herself for leaving her revolver in the house. \"I want nothing to do with you.\"\n\n\"Come now, Kristen,\" he said. \"You can't avoid me for the rest of your life. After all, I am Daniel's father. Not that I was allowed any input in naming him. I would have preferred something more manly like Cage Junior.\"\n\nKristen snorted. \"Manly? You're the poorest excuse for a man I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"Is that any way to talk about your husband?\" Cage continued to move toward her. \"I really should teach you some manners.\"\n\n\"You really should get the hell away from me,\" Kristen hissed, grabbing a pitchfork from a bale of hay and jabbing it at Cage.\n\n\"Another time,\" he said with a snarl as he backed away from her. \"I'll make sure there are no sharp objects around.\"\n\n\"I will kill you if you ever touch me again,\" Kristen promised.\n\nShe waited until she was certain Cage had returned to the house before calling out to Morgan. \"I know you're in here!\"\n\n\"I am.\" Morgan stepped into the light. \"I'm proud of the way you handled that situation. It eases my mind to know you are quite capable of taking care of yourself.\"\n\n\"I wasn't worried,\" Kristen admitted. \"I knew you'd rescue me if I needed help, but I am rather proud that I drove him away by myself.\"\n\nMorgan leaned down and kissed her. \"You should be proud. I know I am.\"\n\n\"Morgan, can't we do something to rid ourselves of him?\"\n\n\"I'm not giving up on that, honey. I hate him as much as you do. The thought of you, Daniel, and Estelline being in his hands makes me consider murder.\"\n\n\"No, please,\" Kristen whispered. \"That would eventually destroy us. We're not killers.\"\n\n\"I know, little one.\"\n\n\"I'd better get back before Cage decides to look for me again.\"\n\nMorgan embraced her gently and kissed her. \"I love you, Kristen.\"\n\n\"I'm going to use my new bathtub tonight,\" Kristen cooed. \"Just in case there's a chance I'll have a certain visitor.\"\n\nMorgan grinned. \"I'd say your chances are awfully good.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 180", + "text": "The moon's rays cast a soft light across Morgan's face. She pulled the woman in her arms closer, molding her body around Kristen's.\n\nKristen pushed her buttocks into Morgan's pelvis and caught her breath as her lover melted around her. \"You're awake,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Yes. I was lying here thinking how much I love waking beside you and how much I hate leaving your bed.\"\n\nKristen glanced at the bedside clock. \"It's only four. We have time to\u2014\"\n\n\"You know we don't,\" Morgan chuckled. \"I shudder to think what will happen if anyone ever finds me in your bed.\"\n\nKristen turned to face her, pressing her lips against Morgan's. \"Thank you for last night. It was glorious.\"\n\n\"You're glorious,\" Morgan murmured in her ear.\n\n\"There is something so sexy about whispering in your lover's ear,\" Kristen sighed.\n\n\"Indeed, there is,\" Morgan uttered back, her warm breath driving Kristen crazy. \"I must go while I still have the resolve to leave your arms.\" She kissed the woman she loved one more time and slipped out of bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 181", + "text": "\"I must say you have brought civilization to this part of the world,\" Judge Goodnight told Morgan as they watched the guests square dance. \"That toilet and the bathtub are really something. I appreciate you installing one in my guest bedroom.\"\n\nMorgan laughed. \"Thank you, Judge. I'm glad you approve. They seem to be a hit in our household, so we've ordered enough for every bedroom.\"\n\n\"Gwen tells me you're having a little problem with Kristen's husband. She tells me he is lazy and a drunk.\"\n\n\"She shouldn't air our dirty linens,\" Morgan said. \"It's just that my father's will is a bit of a cock-up, and I'm not certain I can fix it.\"\n\n\"Tell me about it,\" Goodnight said.\n\nThe judge listened as Morgan explained the specifics of the will. He pondered it for a moment before commenting. \"It seems to me I could rule on a petition from the offspring of Nelson Jouett to void the will and divide the ranch evenly among you three men and Kristen.\"\n\n\"That would be perfect, sir,\" Morgan said, \"but couldn't Cage claim that we are trying to take away Daniel's birthright?\"\n\n\"He could,\" Goodnight replied, pulling a piece of paper from inside his jacket pocket, \"but this might make him think twice about that.\"\n\nMorgan unfolded the paper and stared at his own face on the \"Wanted!\" poster. A thousand-dollar reward was offered for Cage Fielding in the murder of a San Francisco woman.\n\n\"Sir, I don't believe Cage is a murderer,\" Morgan admitted.\n\n\"He isn't,\" Goodnight said, \"but he doesn't know that. He was cavorting with a Frisco socialite who threatened to tell her husband about him if he didn't continue to service her. He had moved on to greener pastures.\n\n\"The woman accosted Cage in his hotel room, threatening to expose him to his latest paramour. He beat her up badly and fled. The woman later died, but not because of Fielding. Her husband killed her and blamed Fielding for it. The sheriff issued the warrant before discovering that the husband killed his wife.\n\n\"Based on that poster, I could order him hanged by the neck until dead,\" the judge concluded.\n\n\"You would do that?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"For my son-in-law, the father of my granddaughter, of course I would.\" Goodnight slapped Morgan on the back.\n\n\"I couldn't live with that on my conscience,\" Morgan admitted.\n\n\"I had a feeling you'd feel that way,\" Goodnight said, snickering. \"You Jouetts and your damn integrity. But maybe I can scare him into signing the petition to divide the ranch. You just leave this to me, son.\" Goodnight visited the punch bowl for a refill then sauntered to Cage.\n\nMorgan watched Judge Goodnight as he talked to Cage but seriously doubted the judge could resolve their problems.\n\nThe music stopped and the band leader announced a ladies' choice. \"It's a waltz, ladies, so grab your best fellow and enjoy.\"\n\n\"You've always been my best fellow.\" Kristen laughed as she slid into Morgan's arms.\n\n\"Uh, I'm not sure this is such a good idea. I'm having trouble holding you away from me.\"\n\n\"I know.\" Kristen's eyes twinkled mischievously. \"It's hell, isn't it?\"\n\nMorgan chuckled. \"Something like that.\"\n\n\"I love when you smile,\" Kristen said. \"You have the cutest dimples.\"\n\n\"As do you, little one.\"\n\n\"Did Father have dimples?\"\n\n\"No, but your mother did,\" Morgan recalled. \"She was beautiful like you and so intelligent and loving. Christina was the only real mother I ever had.\"\n\n\"Would you like some punch?\" Morgan asked when the dance ended.\n\n\"No, I\u2014\"\n\nBefore Kristen could continue, Cage's loud, drunken voice cut across the room.\n\n\"I can outshoot and outride any man in here,\" he roared over the buzz of conversation. \"Prove it,\" Jud Enlow said, snarling at Cage.\n\n\"I will,\" Cage bellowed. \"A contest in the morning.\"\n\n\"What's the stakes?\"\n\n\"Everyone who enters puts up something dear to them. Morgan can put up Osiris.\"\n\n\"What will you put up?\" Jud scoffed. \"You have nothing.\"\n\nDarkness crossed Cage's face. \"I... I'll put up...\" He looked around the room, his eyes settling on Kristen.\n\n\"I know what I want if I win,\" Morgan said as she stepped forward.\n\n\"What?\" Cage snorted.\n\n\"I want you to dig the twenty miles of trench for our telephone line.\"\n\n\"If I win, I want Osiris,\" Cage roared.\n\n\"This seems to have boiled down to a two-man contest,\" Jud declared.\n\n\"You know I'll win,\" Cage crowed. \"You all should take bets on it.\"\n\n\"I think you need to go to bed.\" Shanghai caught Cage by the arm and tried to lead him outside, but Cage yanked free from the foreman.\n\n\"You know I can kick your ass too,\" Cage muttered.\n\n\"I've had enough of your bullshit.\" Shanghai slammed his fist into Cage's jaw, knocking him out. He picked Cage up from the floor, threw him over his shoulder, and carried him into the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 182", + "text": "Cage frowned at the bruise on his face and squinted as the light tortured his hungover brain. \"I wonder what the other fellow looks like,\" he said out loud.\n\n\"There was no other fellow,\" Gwen said from the doorway.\n\nCage groaned. \"Oh. What did I run into?\"\n\n\"Shanghai's fist.\"\n\n\"Aren't you being a little brave coming into my room in broad daylight?\" he said, scowling at her.\n\n\"Everyone is outside setting up targets so you and Morgan can show off your prowess with a six-shooter.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" he moaned. \"I remember now. I challenged the great Morgan Jouett to a competition.\"\n\nGwen nodded. \"Foolishly, I might add.\"\n\nCage finished dressing and buckled on his holster. \"I can take him.\"\n\n\"For your sake, I hope so,\" she said. \"I understand it will take you two or three months to dig that trench.\n\n\"Coffee's in the kitchen,\" Gwen said over her shoulder as she disappeared down the hall.\n\nCage headed to the kitchen. Hassie was directing Lizzie and Emma, who were bustling around preparing lunch for the Jouetts and their guests.\n\n\"Hurry, girls,\" Hassie said. \"We don't want to miss the competition.\"\n\n\"You don't think you can beat Mr. Morgan, do you?\" Emma asked Cage.\n\n\"Like I own him,\" Cage growled. He gulped a cup of coffee and then stepped outside.\n\nCage couldn't be certain, but the crowd looked as if it had doubled since the barn dance. Cowboys perched along the top rails of the fences, and women clustered together, giggling and flirting with the eligible bachelors.\n\nAs he swaggered to the pens, Cage could see the targets on the far side of the corrals. A hitching post had been set up. Across its rail were twelve small cans, six on one end and six on the other. I'll have no problem hitting those, he thought.\n\n\"Here's our challenger now,\" Shanghai bellowed.\n\n\"Tell me the rules,\" Cage barked.\n\n\"Easy,\" Shanghai said, \"When I give the signal, you draw and shoot all the bullets in your gun\u2014six cans, six bullets. The man who hits all his cans first wins this challenge.\"\n\nA twisted grin curled Cage's lip. He knew he was a good shot. He'd never seen Morgan draw his gun but figured the rancher was fairly accurate with a six-shooter.\n\nSilence fell over the crowd as the two took their places in front of the target.\n\n\"Ready, set, draw!\" Shanghai shouted.\n\nCage was still pulling the gun from his holster when Morgan cleared leather and fanned the hammer on her six-shooter six times, sending all the cans flying. She re-holstered the pistol and turned to face Cage.\n\nCage dropped his gun back into its scabbard. He hadn't removed it completely.\n\nThe crowd hooted and hollered like they were enjoying a July 4th celebration.\n\n\"Whoa! I see a trench in your future,\" Jud yelled with glee. \"Three feet deep and twenty miles long.\"\n\n\"What's next?\" Cage demanded.\n\n\"You wanted a horse race,\" Shanghai said. \"Morgan will ride the black, and you can ride any horse of your choosing.\"\n\n\"I'll ride my white stallion,\" Cage sneered. \"There's bound to be a tiebreaker, so what's the third competition?\"\n\n\"Fisticuffs!\" Shanghai grinned.\n\nCage nodded. \"I'll look forward to winning in that too.\"\n\nThey saddled their horses and led them outside the barn.\n\n\"What kind of rig is that?\" Cage demanded, examining Morgan's saddle.\n\n\"A Spanish saddle,\" Morgan said. \"All the racers use them.\"\n\n\"We have a natural quarter-mile course,\" Shanghai explained as they mounted. \"You'll ride to Hangman's Rock, circle it, and ride back to the finish line. First horse to cross the line wins the race.\"\n\n\"All of you should bet on this race,\" Cage bellowed. \"Place your bets on me. You'll leave here rich.\"\n\nThe crowd quieted as the two inched their horses to the starting line. Shanghai held his hat over his head. \"Start when I bring down my hat,\" he instructed.\n\n\"Read, set, go,\" and the hat slammed against his thigh.\n\nBoth horses bolted from the starting line, with the white leaping ahead. Morgan held Osiris back, keeping his nose even with the white's flank.\n\nGoing into the turn around Hangman's Rock, Cage began whipping his horse with the long reins he was using, and it jumped ahead of Osiris. Morgan pulled Osiris wide so the horse wouldn't feel the sting of the leather reins on his face, allowing the white to increase his lead.\n\nSuddenly, Morgan stood in the stirrups and leaned forward, putting her weight over Osiris's shoulders. \"Now, big guy,\" she yelled. \"Now, Osiris!\"\n\nOsiris made the move Morgan had come to love. The horse stretched out almost level with the ground, his long strides pulling him nose-to-nose with the white.\n\nCage whipped his horse, frantically spurring him on as Osiris cruised by him. The black stallion was running for the pure joy of it, and the rider on his back gave him the reins, letting him take full control of his speed.\n\nMorgan and Osiris shot across the finish line, and Morgan let the stallion slow at his own rate. They were a quarter mile past the finish line when the black finally came to a stop.\n\n\"You son of a gun! You aren't even breathing hard,\" Morgan said, laughing as she hugged the horse's neck.\n\nThey turned and walked back to the cheering crowd. Kristen ran out to meet them as Morgan dismounted.\n\n\"Osiris, you were magnificent.\" Kristen squealed, throwing her arms around the big stallion's neck. \"Absolutely magnificent.\"\n\n\"He really is one hell of a horse,\" Morgan said. \"He's befitting of you.\" They walked with Osiris between them, each praising the stallion in their own way, their hands touching across the horse's neck.\n\nFriends and neighbors crowded around Morgan, offering their congratulations and good wishes.\n\nJudge Goodnight slapped Morgan on the back. \"Good showing, son. I guess you're still the man to beat around here.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 183", + "text": "Cage led his stallion into the barn, unsaddled him, and turned him out. \"Aren't you going to rub him down?\" Wallace asked.\n\nCage glared at the man and walked past him. \"I've better things to do. Why don't you do it?\" he snarled.\n\nHe found Kristen sponging Osiris with cold water and cooing to the horse. \"Who were you rooting for, Kristen?\" Cage asked as he approached his wife. He stopped when her hand dropped to the gun strapped to her hip. Their gazes locked, and he saw pure hatred in her eyes. He turned and walked away, vowing to teach her and her perfect brother a lesson they'd never forget.\n\nJudge Goodnight caught Cage as he exited the barn. \"Morgan, I must speak with you,\" the judge said slyly. \"I thought you should see something I received in the mail.\"\n\nGoodnight pulled out the \"Wanted!\" poster of Cage and opened it, knowing he wasn't speaking with Morgan Jouett. \"This fellow your sister has married is wanted for murder.\"\n\nCage's heart threatened to leap from his chest as he looked at the poster. He had no idea the woman had died from the beating he'd given her. Sweat broke out on his brow, and he swallowed the bile that had rose into his mouth.\n\n\"What are you going to do about this, Judge?\" he asked, doing his best to sound like the Texas rancher.\n\n\"He murdered a woman,\" the judge whispered. \"He will be hanged by the neck until dead. I just wanted to discuss how we should handle this without breaking your sister's heart.\"\n\n\"How many of these posters do you have?\" Cage asked.\n\n\"Just this one. It's not my job to post 'em. I just verify the capture of the criminal and authorize the reward payment to the captor.\"\n\n\"Judge, this will kill Kristen. Is there any way we can forget we ever saw this poster?\"\n\n\"Here, Morgan, you take it.\" Judge Goodnight shoved the poster into Cage's hands. \"I trust you will do the right thing when the time comes. Until then it will be our little secret.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. You can trust me to do what is right.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 184", + "text": "Summer slipped into autumn as the Jouetts made vast improvements to their ranch house. Morgan gained permission from the electric company to use their poles to run the phone lines to the ranch, sparing Cage the agony of digging a twenty-mile trench. Morgan had made the first phone call to business associates in Amarillo, finalizing the sale of all the cattle Estelline could deliver next year.\n\nAdditional wells were dug to furnish water for all the bathtubs and toilets installed.\n\nThe sun was slowly slipping from the sky, and everyone was finished for the day \"Are you ready to take them for their first horseback ride?\" Morgan asked Kristen, hoisting Daniel onto Isis's back.\n\n\"They're almost two years old,\" Kristen said, smiling. \"We should have done this before now.\"\n\n\"Those dimples never fail to grab me by the heart,\" Morgan whispered in her ear. \"You mount, and I'll hand you Rachel.\"\n\n\"Father, I ride,\" Daniel said as he leaned back against Morgan. They had long ago stopped trying to teach the children which person was Morgan and which was Cage.\n\nMorgan placed the reins in Daniel's small hands. \"You're a good rider, son.\" Daniel laughed as Morgan touched Isis's sides and the mare moved forward.\n\nThey rode to the ridge that overlooked Estelline as far as one could see. \"Cows!\" Rachel said, pointing at the vast herd grazing in the distance.\n\n\"Our ranch,\" Kristen said. \"Estelline.\n\n\"Estelline,\" Rachel repeated. \"Our ranch.\"\n\nLaughing and talking they were stunned when Isis suddenly balked sideways and stopped.\n\n\"Snake!\" Daniel pointed to a rattlesnake coiled in front of them. Morgan backed Isis away from the poisonous serpent as it shook the rattlers on the end of its tail.\n\n\"Rattlesnakes are very dangerous,\" Morgan said. \"Rachel, you and Daniel must always stay away from rattlesnakes.\"\n\nLeaving the rattler in peace, they turned their horses toward home. They sang songs and pointed out interesting rock formations to the children.\n\nThey let the horses set their own pace back to the barn. The children jabbered away, as Morgan and Kristen discussed additional improvements they wanted to make on the ranch house.\n\n\"You know that sooner or later Cage is going to tell you and the others to leave,\" Kristen said. \"I've been able to hold him off, but he's getting more difficult to deal with each day.\"\n\n\"I know. I couldn't play the 'Wanted!' poster card. That shouldn't be this little guy's legacy,\" Morgan said, hugging Daniel. \"Cage thinks he has the only copy of it.\"\n\n\"We should make some kind of plan,\" Kristen urged. \"I hate twisting in the wind like this.\"\n\n\"I placed a call to Judge Goodnight,\" Morgan informed her. \"He's supposed to call me back at eight tonight. I want to set up a meeting for us to discuss filing a petition to have the will voided and give Father's direct offspring power of attorney over the ranch. Even if Cage files an injunction, we can tie it up in court forever.\"\n\nKristen laughed. \"I don't know why I worry about such things. I know you will always think of something. Have I mentioned that I love you?\"\n\nMorgan grinned. \"I never get tired of hearing that.\"\n\n\"I saw the men building an addition onto the barn this morning,\" Kristen said, changing the subject. \"What are you up to now?\"\n\n\"We're enlarging the tack room. Not all of our cowboys come with their own saddles, so we must order ten saddles to accommodate the new hires we need for the next roundup.\"\n\n\"I love roundup time,\" Kristen said. \"I know it's a lot of work, but there is something exciting about seeing our herd grow and selecting the best ones to keep.\"\n\n\"I'm thinking about importing some Angus cattle,\" Morgan informed her. \"They have more meat on their bones than Herefords and Longhorns. XIT Ranch has been successful with them. I hear they have a better flavor than other bovine too.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm sure you've researched it, and it's a good decision.\"\n\n\"Your mother's old trunk is still in the tack room,\" Morgan reminded her. \"Should I have the fellows carry it to your room?\"\n\n\"If they have time. I need to look through it. I haven't had the heart to go through her things.\"\n\nHassie rang the dinner bell as they rode into the barn. Morgan lifted the children from their saddles and helped Kristen down. \"I know you don't need my help,\" Morgan whispered. \"I just like to put my hands around your waist.\"\n\n\"Um, I do like your hands on me,\" Kristen murmured.\n\n\"I'll take care of the horses, if you want to take the children inside,\" Morgan volunteered.\n\n\"Okay... but hurry!\" Kristen shot Morgan a glance that shot through her body and settled in the pit of her stomach." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 185", + "text": "After dinner Morgan entered the office to wait for Judge Goodnight's call. Kristen helped Mary bathe the children and tuck them in. Then she joined Morgan.\n\n\"Do you mind if I sit with you?\" she asked, closing the door behind her.\n\n\"I would love that,\" Morgan replied. \"Kris, I know this is just a stopgap action, but it will secure our place here until I can find another way for us to be together.\"\n\n\"I trust you,\" Kristen assured her. \"Shall I pour you a drink?\"\n\n\"Somehow I can't imagine making love to you with liquor on my breath. Believe me, I don't need alcohol to make the experience incredible.\"\n\nKristen squirmed in her chair. \"What time is the judge calling?\"\n\n\"He said sometime after eight.\"\n\n\"Do you mind if I abandon you? I'd like to take a bath.\"\n\n\"Do you have a date tonight?\" Morgan teased.\n\n\"If I don't, I'll cry myself to sleep.\"\n\n\"We can't have that,\" Morgan said, walking her to the door and kissing her gently before opening it. \"Later, little one.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 186", + "text": "Kristen relaxed in the tub, thinking about Morgan and their life together. While she was thankful for the time they shared, she wanted more. She wanted the simple things: holding hands, a quick kiss, a sexy glance. She wanted to put her feet in Morgan's lap when they relaxed on the sofa. She prayed that Judge Goodnight would be able to help them and their siblings.\n\nShe didn't bother putting on a nightgown. I don't want to waste time taking it off, she thought. She lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes as visions of Morgan played through her head.\n\nThe click of the lock pulled Kristen from a light sleep.\n\nMorgan whispered her name as she slipped into bed beside her.\n\n\"Did he call?\" Kristen mumbled.\n\n\"Yes. It will work. Mmmm... you smell so good.\"\n\n\"I taste even better,\" Kristen whispered, moving her hand behind Morgan's head to pull Morgan's lips against hers.\n\nTheir tongues danced the tango of desire as their kiss deepened, and their hearts began to pound. Kristen moaned as Morgan moved her hand to Kristen's breast and slowly caressed it. She loved how quickly Kristen responded, her nipple standing at attention.\n\nMoving her lips down Kristen's neck to the hollow spot that drove Kristen crazy. Morgan sucked gently and then trailed her tongue to taut, full breasts. \"God, it's a sin how much I love your breasts,\" she muttered.\n\n\"Then make it worth going to hell for.\" Kristen moaned, pulling Morgan's mouth to her breast and arching against her. \"Suck me hard. Make me feel you even after you're gone!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 187", + "text": "Much later, Morgan rolled onto her back, trying to keep from hyperventilating. \"You steal my breath,\" she gasped.\n\n\"I can't move,\" Kristen murmured. \"I swear I have no bones in my body. I love you, darling. I love you so much it hurts.\"\n\nMorgan wrapped her arms around her lover and kissed her forehead and soft, silky hair. \"This is the part I hate the most,\" she whispered. \"The part where I must leave your bed and go to my cold, lonely room. God, Kristen, I wish I never had to let you go.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 188", + "text": "Cage Fielding caught the early morning train to Amarillo. No one would miss him. He often disappeared for hours at a time. He met with an attorney and showed him a copy of Nelson Jouett's will.\n\n\"I want to petition the court to force my wife's relatives to vacate our ranch,\" Cage told the lawyer, Rance Reynolds.\n\n\"You certainly have every right to do that,\" Reynolds informed him after reading the will. \"But be prepared for a countersuit. I know Morgan Jouett. He won't walk away without a fight.\"\n\nCage glowered. \"You sound like a fan of his.\"\n\n\"He's a good man. I was shocked when you entered my office. You're a dead ringer for him.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Cage said. \"That is part of our problem. The ranch hands don't know which one of us is boss.\"\n\n\"Do you pretty much run the ranch now?\" Reynolds asked.\n\n\"Mostly.\"\n\n\"But you want the entire enchilada.\"\n\nCage nodded. \"Something like that.\"\n\n\"Is your wife with you?\"\n\n\"No, she stayed home with our son.\"\n\n\"This will be received best by the court if she joins you in your petition. Will she sign it?\" the lawyer asked.\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Cage mumbled. \"But don't I have rights as Daniel's father? He is the actual heir.\"\n\n\"As long as your wife is living, her desires will carry more weight than yours. For instance, if you were to divorce, the courts would award her custody of your son, thus giving her control over the ranch.\"\n\nCage considered his options and instructed Reynolds to file the petition. \"How will the Jouetts be informed of the filing?\"\n\n\"I'll mail them a copy of the petition when I file it with the court,\" Reynolds explained. \"Then they have thirty days to respond. Things could get unpleasant for you.\"\n\n\"It's not a walk in the park now,\" Cage remarked. \"How long will it be before you mail them the papers?\"\n\n\"Couple of weeks,\" Reynolds replied. \"Can I call you?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have a phone in my office. Please don't speak with anyone but me.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Reynolds said. He slid a notepad across the desk, and Cage scribbled down his phone number.\n\n\"Cage, you do know that the circuit judge for Estelline is Judge Goodnight. Isn't Morgan Jouett married to his daughter?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I seriously doubt he'll rule in your favor,\" Reynolds continued. \"There is no way he will take the ranch away from his daughter.\"\n\n\"Can't we get another judge, one who isn't biased?\"\n\n\"The only way the circuit would get a new judge is if Goodnight died, and I don't see that happening. He's in excellent health.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 189", + "text": "Cage left the attorney's office and walked two blocks to a tattoo parlor. \"Can you remove this?\" he asked, pulling off his glove.\n\n\"Wife doesn't like a naked woman on your hand, eh?\" the proprietor asked.\n\n\"She's not a fan.\"\n\n\"Have a seat. I can take it off.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 190", + "text": "Cage arrived at Estelline just before dinner. As he suspected, no one had noticed his absence and barely commented on his bandaged left hand.\n\n\"What happened to your hand?\" Gwen asked during a lull in the dinner conversation.\n\n\"I had my tattoo removed,\" Cage said, watching Kristen for any reaction.\n\nEveryone looked in his direction but quickly returned to their conversations. What he did was of no concern to them.\n\nThe entire dinner discussion revolved around Morgan's acquisition of four prized Angus bulls.\n\n\"They're coming directly from Scotland.\" Kristen's eyes sparkled as she talked about the bulls. \"We will pick them up at the train station on Friday.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't think Angus would do well on this hot, dry land,\" Cage commented, trying to throw cold water on Morgan's accomplishment.\n\n\"XIT Ranch has a huge herd,\" Reid informed them. \"They are taking all the blue ribbons at the state fair and breeding shows. I'd say Angus seem to be tolerating our climate well.\"\n\nWallace joined the conversation. \"More importantly, they weigh in much heavier than the Longhorns and Herefords.\"\n\nGod, I hate these people, Cage thought. Everything they touch turns to gold.\n\n\"What do I know?\" Cage shrugged. \"The discussion is moot anyway. Morgan did as he pleased without getting anyone's input.\"\n\nWallace chimed in. \"No, the family discussed it and agreed it was a wise move.\"\n\n\"The family?\" Cage grumbled. \"Were you included, Gwen?\"\n\n\"No.\" Gwen shrugged, wishing he would shut up.\n\n\"We're part of this damn family!\" Cage stood, slamming his napkin onto the table. \"Why weren't we included?\"\n\n\"Because we couldn't find you!\" Morgan growled. \"The two of you had gone off together. Tell me, Cage, what do you do with my wife for hours at a time?\"\n\nCage was speechless. He hadn't counted on Morgan turning the tables on him.\n\n\"Should I challenge you to a duel to defend my wife's honor?\" Morgan pushed back from the table and got to his feet.\n\n\"Daddy!\" Daniel said, running to Morgan. \"Daddy angry.\"\n\nMorgan looked down at the little boy and was ashamed that she had seriously considered killing his father only moments before. She leaned over and picked him up. \"Daddy isn't angry, son. Let's eat this wonderful meal. I think Hassie has chocolate cake for dessert.\"\n\nCage stomped from the room. He knew he was no match for Morgan in a gunfight. I hope Reynolds serves papers to the smug bastard soon, he thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 191", + "text": "\"Carry it into Morgan's office,\" Kristen instructed the men carrying the heavy chest. \"He's working at the barn. I'll be out of there before he finishes.\"\n\nKristen opened the trunk with the key her aunt had given her and stared at all that was left of her mother's life: old dresses and a pair of shoes that had gone out of style; a calendar with the days marked through. It took her a minute to realize that the days checked off represented the days of her mother's pregnancy. She set the calendar aside.\n\nInside a cigar box was a stack of letters saved in their envelopes and tied together with a ribbon. The return address read, \"Nelson Jouett, Estelline, Texas.\" Love letters from my father, she thought, laying them aside to read later.\n\nHer mother's death certificate and her own birth certificate were under the letters. A Bible and five cheap paperback romance novels completed the sum of her mother's belongings. She shuddered to think what her fate would have been if Morgan hadn't rescued her.\n\nKristen placed the cigar box, books, and Bible in the drawer in Morgan's desk that had been designated as hers. Then she went to find Hassie.\n\n\"Hassie, there's a trunk full of clothes and a pair of shoes in Morgan's office. If anyone can use them, please give them away. The trunk is a fine one. If you'd like it, have one of the hands take it to your home.\n\n\"Has Morgan come in yet?\"\n\n\"No, he's still working in the barn,\" Hassie replied. \"I think everyone else is inside. Judging by the noise of the pipes, all of them are bathing. Mary is in the garden with Daniel and Rachel.\"\n\nKristen thanked her and headed to the barn to steal a few minutes alone with Morgan.\n\nMorgan filled the last grain bucket of the corralled horses and hung it on the fence post watching them eat.\n\nShe caught her breath as Kristen slipped loving arms around her waist and hugged Morgan from behind leaning her cheek between Morgan's shoulder blades. \"I was hoping you'd join me,\" Morgan said. \"Where have you been all day?\"\n\n\"I cleaned out Mother's trunk and gave it to Hassie.\" She told Morgan of the papers she had found.\n\nMorgan turned in Kristen's arms and brushed her lips with her own. \"Did it upset you?\"\n\n\"Not really. I never knew her. But it is sad that her life boiled down to a Bible and a few certificates. You've made mine so much more.\"\n\n\"All of us would have different lives if she hadn't returned to Frisco to help with her dying mother,\" Morgan commented. \"Father truly loved her, as did I.\"\n\nThe clanging of the dinner bell encouraged them to head back to the house. \"I'm going to run upstairs and take a quick bath,\" Morgan said with an impish grin. \"Stall dinner for me.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best,\" Kristen promised." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 192", + "text": "Hassie made certain everything was on the table, fussing around until Morgan joined them. As always she sat down with the family, bowing her head as Wallace gave thanks.\n\n\"We finished the tack room today,\" Morgan announced.\n\n\"We built a fence across the South Box Canyon,\" Wallace said, reporting on his project.\n\n\"I checked out reports that someone is fencing Little Egypt,\" Reid informed them. \"And they are. Some fellow named Strom Lambert. He claims to have a legal deed to the thousand acres.\"\n\n\"Why do you call it Little Egypt?\" Gwen asked.\n\n\"It's the most eastern thousand acres of the ranch,\" Morgan explained. \"Father called it Bumfuck Egypt, which I thought was crude. It was fine as long as it was just the guys, but when Kristen came to live with us, we started calling it Little Egypt.\"\n\nKristen smiled at her siblings. \"And I appreciate it.\"\n\n\"As do I,\" Jerilyn said, laughing.\n\n\"What are we going to do about Lambert?\" Reid asked. \"He's fencing off the land. He's a farmer, not a rancher.\"\n\n\"We'll ride over and explain to him that his deed is fraudulent,\" Morgan said. \"If push comes to shove, we'll go to court.\"\n\n\"I say we go with enough manpower to scare him off our land,\" Cage said.\n\n\"What did you accomplish today, Cage?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"I just took care of some business,\" Cage said as he smirked at her. \"Nothing that would interest you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 193", + "text": "After dinner, Kristen carried the items she had salvaged from her mother's trunk to her room. She got ready for bed, propped herself against a stack of pillows, and pulled the cigar box from her nightstand onto her lap.\n\nNoting that the envelopes were in chronological order based on their postmarks, she opened the one mailed first and began reading.\n\nMonday, May 17, 1920\n\nDear Christina,\n\nI hope this finds you well. The boys and I miss you terribly. Morgan, Wallace, and Reid spent the day rounding up cows with the other cowboys. I'm so proud of them. All three are fine young men.\n\nWe read in the paper tonight that President Wilson warned the U.S. Senate that America has only 20 years left before its oil supply will be exhausted. I'm glad our land produces cattle instead of oil.\n\nIt has been a long day, so I'll say good night for now. Will write more tomorrow.\n\nYour loving husband,\n\nNelson\n\nAs Kristen read Nelson's letters to his wife, she felt a closeness to the father she'd never known. She wished Nelson had kept her mother's letters to him. I'll ask Morgan if she has them somewhere, she thought.\n\nA soft knock on her door preceded the appearance of Morgan's beautiful blonde head. \"Lock the door,\" Kristen advised, sliding over to make room for Morgan.\n\n\"What do you have?\" she asked as she sat on the side of the bed.\n\n\"Letters from Father to my mother while she was in San Francisco. I've learned so much about young Morgan, Wallace, and Reid. I feel even closer to you.\"\n\nMorgan leaned in for a soft kiss. \"I love your lips. You're a really good kisser.\"\n\nKristen put the letters back in the cigar box. \"Why don't you set this on the nightstand, and I'll show you how a good kiss really feels.\" She let her gown fall off her shoulders, exposing the most luscious breasts imaginable.\n\nMorgan admired her beauty. \"I could look at you for days.\"\n\n\"I'd rather you turn off the lamp and touch me,\" Kristen cooed.\n\nMorgan took her time stroking Kristen, touching her in the places she knew drove her into a frenzy. She loved to hear Kristen beg.\n\nSometimes their passion rose to such heights that Morgan forgot she was making love to her sister." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 194", + "text": "After they made love, Morgan cradled Kristen in her arms. \"You are so soft and silky.\"\n\nKristen snuggled in closer but couldn't get the letters out of her mind. \"Did Father keep Mother's letters?\" she asked.\n\n\"For a while,\" Morgan said. \"But when she died, he burned them. I guess it was too painful to read them.\"\n\n\"I'm so thankful you came for me.\" Kristen kissed her on the neck. \"I'm so in love with you, Morgan.\"\n\n\"I keep thinking about Father and Mother,\" Kristen said, sitting up in the bed. Their love story had such a sad ending.\n\nOh Morgan, it would be awful to die away from you. But it would be worse to know you were ill and be unable to get to you.\"\n\nMorgan propped herself against the headboard. \"I can think of nothing more devastating.\"\n\n\"Do you want to read one of the letters?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"Yes, I'd like that.\" Morgan switched on the lamp and pulled the cigar box onto the bed.\n\nThey read several letters together, and then Kristen kissed Morgan's shoulder and down her arm. She trailed her fingers around Morgan's small breasts.\n\nMorgan caught her hands. \"We should sleep, Kris. We have to pick up the bulls tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Do you still feel guilty about loving me?\" Kristen asked intuitively.\n\n\"Yes,\" Morgan whispered. \"I agonize over the way I love you, but I can't help it.\"\n\nMorgan removed the certificates from the box. \"What are these?\"\n\n\"Don't change the subject,\" Kristen said. \"We should discuss the things that bother us. We must communicate with each other.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Morgan muttered, scrutinizing the paper she was holding. \"Kris, this is your mother's death certificate. It shows she died in March in childbirth.\"\n\n\"Yes. My birth certificate is in there too.\"\n\nMorgan pulled out the paper and examined it. \"You were born in March!\" Morgan exclaimed.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Kris, your mother left here in May. She sent us letters saying you were born in January. But if you were born in March, there is no way Nelson Jouett is your father.\"\n\nA gleeful look lit Kristen's face. \"Then I'm not your sister! Oh Morgan! I'm not your sister! Our love isn't so wrong after all.\"\n\nThey embraced, and Morgan kissed her. For the first time since Kristen had arrived at Estelline, Morgan held her without the dreadful weight of guilt.\n\n\"But if you're not Nelson's daughter, you have no claim to Estelline\u2014nor does Daniel.\"\n\nBoth were silent as they considered the ramifications of their discovery.\n\n\"No one must ever know this,\" Morgan said. \"We will destroy this information. I must have a chance to void that stupid will and divide Estelline among the four of us. It's the right thing to do.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Kristen said. \"Now, you really should get out of my bed, Morgan Jouett.\" She kissed Morgan ardently and then pushed her out of the bed.\n\n\"I love you,\" Morgan whispered. \"So much.\"\n\nAfter Morgan's departure, Kristen thought of all the ramifications of the information they had learned. If Nelson Jouett isn't my father, who is? she thought.\n\nSuddenly, Jude Wagner's words exploded in her head. You're a little spitfire, just like your mother. I had to teach her a lesson too. \"Christ! Jude Wagner is my father!\" she muttered. The very thought of it made her ill, and she dashed to the bathroom.\n\nKristen cried herself to sleep. Cried for her mother and all the women who had suffered her fate. She said a prayer of thanks for being spared that misfortune\u2014and for Morgan Jouett." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 195", + "text": "Morgan was laughing and teasing with Hassie when Gwen entered the dining room. \"My, you're in a good mood this morning,\" Gwen said. \"If I didn't know better, I'd think you got laid last night.\"\n\n\"Judging by your crudeness, I assume you didn't,\" Morgan sneered.\n\n\"Do I hear a lovers' quarrel brewing?\" Wallace asked as he entered the room.\n\n\"Not really.\" Morgan smiled. Nothing could dampen the euphoria she felt. \"Where's Kristen?\"\n\n\"She went to the barn to get the horses ready,\" Hassie said. \"Are all of y'all going to pick up the bulls?\"\n\n\"Jerilyn and I are going,\" Reid announced, joining the others in the dining room.\n\n\"I wouldn't miss this for the world,\" Wallace chuckled. \"Surely the five of us can herd four bulls twenty miles.\"\n\n\"Do you want to go, Gwen?\" Morgan said.\n\n\"Not in this lifetime,\" she snorted.\n\n\"I'm packing a lunch for you,\" Hassie informed them. \"You can eat dinner at the hotel. I just need to know how many mouths to feed.\"\n\n\"Looks like five of us,\" Jerilyn said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 196", + "text": "They were halfway to Estelline Town when they stopped for lunch. \"This is almost like when we were kids,\" Wallace said carrying the picnic to the quilt Morgan had spread beneath a tree. \"Remember the first trail drive we did?\"\n\nReid nodded. \"Yeah, I learned more about our ancestors on that one ride than any other time in my life.\"\n\n\"Share,\" Kristen chirped.\n\n\"Um, let Morgan tell our story,\" Reid said. \"He knows more about our history than anyone.\"\n\n\"ZT Nelson was our maternal great-grandfather,\" Morgan began. \"He came to Texas from Kentucky and settled in the Galveston area. His daughter Belle Nelson married a fellow named Thomas Harding Jouett. A real asshole. Thomas was a lazy gambler, a thief, a drunk, and a womanizer. He and Belle settled in Oklahoma, where they had eleven children in eleven years.\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Jerilyn huffed. \"I'd make him a soprano in his sleep.\"\n\n\"Oh, that even sounds painful.\" Reid laughed. \"Go on, Morgan.\"\n\n\"One night, Thomas Jouett was caught cheating in a card game. The man he cheated started to beat the crap out of him, but Thomas got away. Word got back to Thomas that the man had a gun and was going to kill him. Coward that he was, Thomas disappeared. He deserted Belle with eleven children all under the age of twelve. She had no money, no job, and no food to feed her kids.\n\n\"Neighbors helped her, and Belle got word to her father, ZT Nelson. ZT went to Oklahoma, loaded Belle and her children into a covered wagon, and brought them to Texas. He found Thomas and promised he would kill him if he ever deserted Belle and the children again.\n\n\"The French were trying to gain control of the southern part of the US and gave land grants to those who helped them defend against Mexico. ZT had such a grant and gave it to Belle so she and her family would have a home. Our father, Nelson Jouett, did all the right things to hold onto that grant and eventually obtained a legal deed from the US government. So, my dear children, that is how Estelline came to be.\"\n\n\"It appears we have some real scoundrels in our background,\" Kristen said, laughing.\n\n\"We should check Cage's lineage,\" Wallace said. \"He is a dead ringer for Morgan and seems to have all the endearing qualities of our grandfather Thomas Jouett.\"\n\nKristen bowed her head. \"I'm so sorry I allowed Cage into our family,\" she mumbled.\n\n\"We may have gained a bastard,\" Morgan pointed out, \"but the result of that union is Daniel. We must do everything we can to raise him to be an honorable man. And I make all of you a promise: I will do whatever it takes to keep our families together.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 197", + "text": "They arrived at the hotel before sundown, left their horses in the facility's stable, and went to check in.\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Mr. Jouett,\" the flustered clerk twittered. \"I only have three rooms reserved for you.\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" Morgan said. \"Just give us an extra room.\"\n\n\"You don't understand, sir. We're completely booked. It seems someone is taking delivery of some prized bulls from Scotland today, and ranchers have come from miles around to see them.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see. We'll figure it out,\" Morgan replied, accepting the three keys. She gave one to Reid and Jerilyn and another to Kristen. \"I guess you and I will have to double up, Wallace.\n\n\"Let's make ourselves presentable and meet in the dining room in an hour.\"\n\n\"Dammit,\" Morgan grumbled as they entered the room. \"There's only one bed in here.\"\n\n\"Morgan, I've asked Annie Jorgensen to join us for dinner,\" Wallace said as they surveyed the room.\n\n\"The pretty woman you took to the church social?\"\n\n\"Yes. We are serious, and... um, I have asked her to spend the night with me.\" Wallace gulped.\n\nMorgan feigned surprise. \"You dawg! I guess that means you'd rather I didn't sleep here tonight.\"\n\n\"You'd be doing me a tremendous favor if you could sleep somewhere else. I'm planning to ask her to marry me tonight.\"\n\n\"I'll work out something.\" Morgan fought off the urge to cheer at her good fortune. Now she wouldn't have to explain her absence to Wallace. \"Congratulations, bro. I know she'll accept. She's been sweet on you for a long time.\"\n\nA wide grin spread across Wallace's face as he thanked his brother.\n\n\"I get to bathe first,\" Morgan declared. \"I'll hurry. You probably want to take your time.\" She pulled clean clothes from her saddlebag and locked the bathroom door behind her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 198", + "text": "\"I'll see if Kristen is ready,\" Morgan said, pulling on her boots. \"We'll have a drink and wait for you.\"\n\nWallace nodded. \"Thanks, Morgan. You're the best brother a fellow could have.\"\n\nMorgan walked to the end of the hallway and knocked on the door of the corner room. She sucked in her breath when Kristen opened the door wearing only a dressing gown.\n\n\"Dear God, you're beautiful,\" she whispered as she closed the door and pulled Kristen into her arms.\n\n\"I can't believe you're rooming with Wallace,\" Kristen said, pouting. \"I was looking forward to sleeping with you tonight.\"\n\n\"And you shall.\" Morgan grinned. \"If I share something with you, you must promise to keep it to yourself.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Wallace is entertaining a lady friend tonight and asked me to sleep somewhere else. I was hoping you'd share your room with me.\"\n\nKristen's eyes twinkled. \"I guess I could, but only if you promise to behave extremely inappropriately.\"\n\nMorgan laughed out loud. \"I promise.\"\n\nKristen slipped her around Morgan's neck and kissed her. \"You could begin right now, if you'd like.\"\n\nThe scent of Kristen, the feel of her lips, and the softness of her rocked Morgan's senses. \"You'll have to hurry,\" Kristen mumbled. \"None of that forever foreplay. I'm ready right now.\"\n\nMorgan touched her most private place. \"Um, I believe you are.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 199", + "text": "Everyone was in the dining room sharing wine when Wallace and Annie entered. Morgan stood, and Reid followed the example.\n\n\"Annie, we're so glad you could join us for dinner,\" Morgan said to her. \"You know Kristen, Jerilyn, and Reid. Y'all remember Annie Jorgensen from church.\"\n\nThey greeted Annie warmly, and before long, everyone was relaxed and laughing as they shared tales. The dining room filled, and the piano player treated them to his rendition of \"Blue Moon.\"\n\n\"That song makes me want to dance,\" Wallace said.\n\n\"Then we should,\" Morgan insisted. She got to her feet and held out a hand to Kristen. \"Come on, Reid, grab your lady.\"\n\nThey walked to the small dance floor in front of the piano and began to move to the music. Morgan held Kristen close and whispered in her ear, \"I love you.\"\n\nThe year was 1935, and for one night everything was right in the world of Morgan and Kristen Jouett.\n\n\"Look at all these people,\" Annie commented as they returned to their table. \"They're here to see some bulls that have been imported all the way from Scotland.\"\n\nThey ordered another bottle of wine and greeted friends who stopped at their table. \"Are you here to see the bulls too?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"No.\" Wallace ducked his head shyly. \"We're here to pick them up.\"\n\n\"Seriously?\" Annie marveled. \"You're the ones bringing in the Angus bulls?\"\n\n\"Guilty,\" Wallace muttered. \"We think they will increase the beef production, and with the Amarillo packing plants so close, it would be a big boon for our operation.\"\n\n\"All of you work so hard,\" Annie said, her gaze encompassing everyone at the table. \"That's why you're so successful.\"\n\nJerilyn beamed. \"Let's do something exciting. We don't get to town often.\"\n\n\"There's a movie at the movie house tonight,\" Annie suggested.\n\n\"What is it?\" Jerilyn asked.\n\n\"Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Clark Gable.\"\n\n\"I'm game,\" Reid said.\n\n\"Me too.\" Wallace stood. \"Morgan, what about you and Kristen?\"\n\n\"I have some business to take care of,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"And I'm exhausted,\" Kristen added. \"Y'all go on. I think I'll just go to bed and relax.\"\n\n\"You don't know what you're missing,\" Annie said to them.\n\nMorgan smiled. \"Another time but thank you. Perhaps you'd like to join us for breakfast in the morning and go with us to get the bulls.\"\n\n\"I'd love that,\" Annie said. She clapped her hands as she glanced at Wallace.\n\n\"Get going then,\" Morgan said, her heart already pounding in anticipation. \"I'll see Kristen to her room.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 200", + "text": "Kristen leaned against Morgan as she unlocked the door to the room. \"I see you got us a corner room this time.\"\n\n\"Fewer walls with ears to hear you,\" Morgan teased. \"I do intend to hear you scream tonight.\"\n\n\"God, I hope so,\" Kristen whispered as she nibbled at Morgan's ear.\n\nMorgan closed the door and turned as Kristen wrapped strong arms around Morgan's neck and climbed up her tall frame. Long legs encircled Morgan's waist as Kristen kissed her madly.\n\n\"Dancing with you tonight was the most sensuous thing I've ever done,\" Kristen whispered. \"I can't believe you held me that close in public.\"\n\n\"I couldn't help it.\" Morgan groaned as she slid her hands under Kristen's buttocks and pulled her in tighter. \"You're already wet.\"\n\n\"Mm-hmm. You can take your time or be quick. Have it your way. Just remember, once won't be enough.\"\n\n\"I love how you like what I do to you,\" Morgan admitted.\n\n\"And I love what you do to me.\" Kristen wrapped her arms tighter around Morgan's neck and kissed her. \"I've changed my mind. Be quick the first time. I'm aching for you so badly.\"\n\nWithout breaking their kiss, Morgan carried Kristen to the bed and knelt on the floor in front of her. She slowly began kissing the inside of Kristen's thighs, just above her knees, as she firmly grasped Kristen's legs and held her.\n\n\"God, Morgan,\" Kristen moaned. \"What are you doing to me?\"\n\n\"Something I've always wanted to do to you.\" Morgan breathed faster as she kissed her way up Kristen's legs. \"Something I think you'll like.\"\n\nA moment later, Morgan gasped. \"You have on no panties.\"\n\n\"I was hoping you'd do this,\" Kristen whispered as Morgan buried her face in her. \"Morgan! Oh Morgan... !\"\n\nLater, they undressed and slid under the sheets, cuddling and whispering words of love to each other.\n\n\"Honey, I love when you scream, but maybe you shouldn't scream my name when we're in a place where someone might hear us.\"\n\n\"I'll try not to,\" Kristen promised, \"but sometimes I can't help it. You give me such pleasure.\"\n\n\"I want us to be free like this,\" Morgan murmured in her ear. \"I want us to make love all night if we want to and then sleep late. I want us to take ocean cruises and vacations. I want to make love to you in the sleeper car of a train. I want to share the world with you, Kristen Jouett.\"\n\nKristen took Morgan's face in her hands and kissed her, slowly letting the feel of her lips tell Morgan how much she loved her. Her tongue slipped into Morgan's mouth and engaged freely with Morgan's.\n\n\"I can taste me on your lips,\" she whispered. \"I love it. I love tasting me in your mouth.\"\n\nMorgan rose above her, kissing her hungrily, caressing her breasts and thrilling to the feel of Kristen moaning into her mouth.\n\n\"More,\" Kristen whispered. \"I want so much more, Morgan.\"\n\nMorgan kissed her way down to Kristen's tight breasts, massaging them as they warmed to her touch. She pulled Kristen onto her side and kissed her way to one breast as she squeezed the other gently.\n\n\"All I can think about is doing this to you,\" Morgan murmured, moving between Kristen's legs. \"Making love to you. Hearing you scream my name.\"\n\nKristen wrapped her legs around Morgan's waist and pulled her into her tightly. \"I love the feel of your naked body pressed against my\u2014\"\n\nA demanding kiss cut off her words. \"I want you,\" Morgan hissed.\n\n\"Then take me.\" Kristen tightened her long legs around Morgan. \"Do anything you want to me. Don't you know I belong to you heart and soul, Morgan?\"\n\nMorgan sucked harder, pulling Kristen's breast into her mouth and exploring the nipple with her tongue.\n\n\"Yes,\" Kristen hissed, tangling her hands in Morgan's blonde hair. \"More. Please, more.\"\n\nMorgan continued to suck and caress, moving her free hand lower. She walked her fingers up and down Kristen's thighs and then combed them through fine, damp hair. Kristen was hot and wet as Morgan cupped her, pressing the heel of her hand against her opening.\n\n\"Morgan,\" Kristen screamed. \"Please, Morgan, I want you in me. Ride me, baby. Ride me like you own me. Pump me, honey.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 201", + "text": "Kristen woke to the sound of running water. She reached for Morgan but found she was in an empty bed.\n\nMorgan walked into the room and looked down at her with the sweetest expression Kristen had ever seen.\n\n\"You're pretty proud of yourself, aren't you?\" Kristen said.\n\n\"Maybe.\" Morgan laughed. \"Should I be?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.\"\n\n\"I'm taking a bath. Want to join me?\"\n\n\"What I really want is for you to come back to bed.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. If I get back into your bed, I'll be there all day.\" Morgan grinned. She held out her hand and pulled Kristen to her feet.\n\n\"Bath it is then,\" Kristen giggled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 202", + "text": "They bathed and dressed for dinner. Morgan stole one last kiss.\n\n\"You should go to the dining room first,\" Morgan said. \"I'll follow in a few minutes.\"\n\n\"Must we live our lives sneaking around?\" Kristen scowled.\n\n\"Honey, this is not the time or place to discuss this,\" Morgan replied. \"And I have no good answer to your question. Now go.\"\n\nKristen joined Reid and Jerilyn in the dining room. Wallace was close behind. Kristen had to suppress a smile when Annie entered the dining room alone. Welcome to my world, she thought.\n\nWallace stood, strode to Annie, and led her back to the table. \"I'm so glad you could join us,\" he muttered before turning to Kristen. \"Where's Morgan?\"\n\nKristen decided to have some fun. \"How should I know? He's your roommate.\"\n\nIf Wallace's face had turned any redder it would have burst into flames. \"Here he is now,\" he declared.\n\nMorgan dutifully kissed Jerilyn and Kristen on the cheek. \"Good morning. Fellows, do you realize that we are dining with the most beautiful women in the room, possibly in the entire world?\"\n\nEveryone burst into laughter, confident that no one at the table knew what the others had been doing all night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 203", + "text": "The ladies waited on the hotel veranda as the men got the horses. Wallace procured an extra one for Annie, and the six of them rode to the train station, where a crowd had already gathered to see the Scottish bulls.\n\nAs the train slowed to a stop, the last boxcar lined up with a chute that led into the pens. Station employees fastened a fence section on each side of the boxcar doors that would lead the bulls into the pen. A long ramp was hooked into the metal railings of the car, and the door was shoved open.\n\nThe bulls moved around inside the car. They had been in darkness during their cross-country trip, and it took them a few minutes to adjust to the sunlight. Slowly the largest of the four ventured down the ramp.\n\n\"He has no horns,\" someone called out.\n\n\"They don't have horns,\" Morgan yelled back. \"They're hornless cattle. Someday, dehorning will be a thing of the past at Estelline.\"\n\nSlowly, all four bulls exited the boxcar and trotted around the pen, making a beeline for the watering troughs.\n\n\"They're beautiful,\" Morgan gushed as she admired the solid-black bulls. \"And massive. Can you imagine how huge they will be when they put back on the weight they've lost during this trip?\"\n\n\"They are magnificent,\" Kristen said.\n\nThey watched the bulls as they ate and drank water.\n\n\"They seem docile,\" Morgan noted, \"but they might take off if we open the gate. Let's try to get a rope on each of them. Between the five of us, we should be able to lead them to the ranch.\"\n\nTo their surprise, the Angus bulls were quite gentle and allowed the men to drop ropes around their necks. Wallace took Annie back to the hotel, returned her horse, and caught up with his family outside of town.\n\nThe bulls were amiable but didn't travel as fast as the horses, so it was dark as they approached the ranch. \"What is that?\" Morgan gestured toward a glow on the horizon.\n\n\"Something's burning,\" Wallace said.\n\n\"Dear God, Morgan! The house or barn is on fire,\" Kristen cried.\n\n\"Release the bulls,\" Morgan commanded. \"They will be fine.\"\n\nThe five pulled the ropes from the bulls and then galloped toward the ranch house. As they got closer, angry flames licked the heavens, and cinders blew onto them as the winds fanned the blaze.\n\nMorgan arrived first, dismounting before Isis stopped. \"Where are the children?\" she screamed at the people watching the house burn.\n\n\"Cage, are Daniel and Rachel still in there?\" Kristen cried. \"Did you get our babies out?\"\n\nCage turned to face them with a stunned look. \"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Gwen,\" Morgan shook her. \"Where are Rachel and Daniel?\"\n\nKristen ran to Morgan's side. \"The babies,\" she cried. \"Where are our babies?\"\n\n\"In the nursery,\" Mary sobbed. \"They were asleep when the fire started.\"\n\nMorgan looked around as Shanghai organized a water bucket line. \"Soak me down,\" she commanded.\n\nKristen gasped. \"Morgan, please... it may be too late.\"\n\nMorgan grabbed another coat from a bigger man helping in the bucket line. \"Soak it down,\" she yelled as she put it on. She tied a bandana around her face and ran into the flames.\n\nThe staircase was on fire but still standing. Morgan ran up the stairs, ducking flying debris. The heat was searing, and she held her breath until reaching the second floor. She sprinted to the nursery and pushed on the door. It was hot but not sizzling. Crouching close to the floor she shoved against the door as the top of the door frame swung down in front of her. Searing pain shot through her as Morgan realized the frame was stuck to her left hand. She slung it off, skin peeling away with it.\n\nDaniel was wailing, but Rachel seemed to be sleeping. Morgan knew she might already be dead from smoke inhalation, but wasn't leaving her behind.\n\n\"Get on Daddy's back,\" she yelled at Daniel as she swung the boy over her shoulder. \"Hold on tight.\" She cradled Rachel in her left arm and headed for the stairs.\n\nAll she could see in front of her was flames. She didn't know if the staircase was still standing. \"Please, God, let it be there,\" she prayed out loud before dashing into the flames. Every step was hotter than the last. She didn't dare breath for fear of searing her lungs.\n\nAs she reached the middle of the staircase, the lower part fell away, leaving her staring into a flaming abyss.\n\n\"Hold on tight, Daniel!\" she yelled above the roar of the flames.\n\nShe clutched Rachel tighter and jumped." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 204", + "text": "\"Please, please, God, don't let her die,\" Kristen pleaded.\n\nMorgan heard the faraway voice making promises in exchange for her life. She knew she was alive... and then darkness overcame her again.\n\nKristen wouldn't leave her side. Morgan wasn't badly burned but seemed to slip in and out of a coma. A large chunk of skin was burned away from her left hand, and her hair was singed. The wet coats had protected her, but the soles of her boots had melted, leaving blisters on the bottom of her feet.\n\n\"Is he going to be okay, Doc?\" Kristen's eyes begged for an affirmative answer.\n\n\"If his lungs are okay,\" Doc replied, looking back at the smoking embers of the ranch house. \"Although I don't know how he survived that.\n\n\"I won't know until he regains consciousness, but he seems to be breathing easily. Keep this salve on his hand, and change the dressing every four hours. Don't let it stick to what's left of his skin. Do the same with his feet. I've given him morphine for the pain, and I'll leave some with you. I'll be back in a couple of days.\"\n\nMorgan stirred. She had to know. \"The babies...?\"\n\n\"Daniel and Rachel are just fine,\" Kristen assured her.\n\nMorgan slipped back into a peaceful, painless sleep.\n\nHer other siblings took turns sitting with her, but Kristen stayed with her around the clock. They had set up a clean area in the new tack room and brought beds from the bunkhouse for Morgan and Kristen.\n\nUtilizing the chuck wagon and the trail cook Hassie managed to keep everyone fed. A delegation from town had delivered enough food to last a month, and all the neighbors had brought food.\n\nThe family was sleeping in the covered wagons. Without Morgan at the helm, everything seemed to come to a standstill. Kristen called a meeting of her family and Shanghai.\n\n\"We must rebuild,\" she declared. \"Can we obtain a telephone and repair the phone line?\"\n\n\"I'm sure we can,\" Reid assured her. \"I'll take care of that. Jerilyn and I will go to town for anything we need. Why don't you make a list?\"\n\n\"If we can get the phone working, I can order materials and locate a contractor who can build us a new home.\n\n\"Wallace, how are the new bulls?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I haven't seen them.\"\n\n\"Take a dozen men. Spread out and find them,\" Kristen instructed. \"Move them to the Southern Box Canyon and drive some cows in there. We need to make certain they breed.\"\n\n\"Consider it done,\" Wallace said.\n\nLike a captain commanding an army, Kristen directed the rebuilding of their home.\n\nDoc visited once a week to check on Morgan. \"Let him sleep. It helps with the pain. His hand and feet are looking much better.\"\n\nA voice called her name and Kristen's heart stood still for a second. Then she realized the voice calling her name belonged to Cage.\n\n\"Kristen, I wanted to check on you... to see if there is anything I can do,\" Cage said entering the makeshift nursing area set up for Morgan.\n\n\"No, I'm fine.\"\n\n\"I feel like such an awful father,\" he muttered. \"I just stood there. I was paralyzed, Kristen. I couldn't move. If Morgan hadn't taken such quick action, Daniel and Rachel would have died in that fire.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of that,\" Kristen snarled. \"You're a coward, Cage. You should have gotten the children out before you left the house.\"\n\n\"I thought someone else had taken care of them.\"\n\n\"You always expect someone else to take care of you and your responsibilities.\" Kristen said with disgust.\n\n\"I can see there's no reasoning with you!\" Cage left, slamming the door behind him. He was sick of Kristen and her precious brother." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 205", + "text": "Cage looked everywhere for Gwen but couldn't find her. He saddled his horse and rode to the spot he shared with her. To his surprise, she was there.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" he asked, dismounting his horse.\n\n\"Waiting for you,\" she said seductively. \"I knew you'd come. It's been a while.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"You know me too well.\"\n\nAfter they satisfied their cravings, they talked. \"Is this the way you want to live the rest of your life?\" Gwen asked.\n\n\"No,\" Cage grumbled. \"I intend to turn this fiasco into a gold mine and sell it.\"\n\n\"You almost let your meal ticket burn in that fire,\" Gwen reminded him. \"If something happens to Daniel, you'll be thrown off this place so fast it will make your handsome head spin.\"\n\nCage grunted. \"I realize that. That's why I want to make my move and settle this once and for all.\"\n\n\"What about me? Am I included in your plan?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Cage said, the lie slipping easily off his tongue.\n\n\"That's good to know,\" she said. \"I may be pregnant.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Is that all you have to say?\"\n\n\"It's a little unexpected,\" Cage said with a shrug. \"I thought you were taking precautions.\"\n\nGwen bit her tongue. She needed to put up with this bastard until she got her half of the money. \"I told you the timing wasn't good, but you insisted. Remember? I certainly didn't do this by myself.\"\n\n\"I think we should kill Kristen and Morgan,\" he said calmly.\n\n\"You do the dirty work this time,\" she insisted. \"I've already got Naomi's death on my hands.\"\n\n\"Believe me, it will be a pleasure to kill Morgan. I will enjoy it.\"\n\n\"What about Kristen?\"\n\n\"I like her less every day, and she loathes me. I'll have no problem arranging an accident for her.\" I may have some fun with her first, he thought.\n\n\"With both of them out of the way, Daniel and I will inherit the ranch,\" Gwen said. \"Then we will sell it.\"\n\n\"Now is the time to strike, while Morgan is incapacitated.\"\n\nGwen agreed. \"Tell me what to do.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 206", + "text": "A week passed, and Cage laid the groundwork for Morgan's demise. He had to get Kristen away from Morgan's side. Gwen was to tell Kristen that Daniel was ill and running a fever. While Kristen was checking on Daniel, Cage would suffocate Morgan with a pillow. It would look like Morgan had succumbed to his injuries from the fire.\n\nPreparing to put his plan into action Cage put his ear to the tack room door and listened as Kristen talked to her brother. He didn't like what he heard. As always, the gods have crapped on my plans again, he thought. Morgan has come out of his coma.\n\n\"Morgan, thank God you're awake!\" Kristen cried. \"I've been so afraid I would lose you.\"\n\nMorgan tried to sit up in the bed but fell back onto the pillow. \"How long have I been out?\"\n\n\"Almost a month.\"\n\n\"Are Rachel and Daniel okay?\"\n\n\"They are perfect. Thanks to you, they are very much alive. May I help you sit up? Are you hungry?\"\n\n\"Yes, to both.\" Morgan laughed. \"I'm really starved. May I see the children?\"\n\n\"I'll have Mary bring them in.\" Kristen leaned over and brushed Morgan's lips with hers.\n\n\"The house... did it burn to the ground?\" Morgan asked as Kristen propped her up with pillows.\n\n\"Every plank,\" Kristen said. \"Reid fixed the phone, so we can make calls.\"\n\n\"What about the bulls?\"\n\n\"Thriving and breeding,\" Kristen said.\n\n\"Great, that's good. We need to breed as many cows to them as we can. Be sure you keep the cows and their bull together. We need to mark the calves, so we don't inbreed next year.\"\n\nTears ran down Kristen's face. \"Morgan, I was so afraid I'd lose you.\"\n\n\"I'm okay, baby. Everything will be okay. Have you hired a contractor for the house?\"\n\n\"A man is coming to talk with us,\" Kristen informed her. \"We can tell him what we want, and he will draw floorplans and make sure the house is built to our specifications.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 207", + "text": "True to his word, the builder lived at the ranch and oversaw every board put in place. Two large master suites were connected by a locked door. Every bedroom had its own bathroom with a tub and a toilet. Every room that had a faucet had hot and cold water. Morgan improved daily as she and Kristen spent hours poring over magazines and catalogs searching for new furniture for the home.\n\nKristen sat beside Morgan on the porch swing. \"This is so much fun. We're almost ready to move in. The furniture should be here next week. We both have king-size beds in our bedrooms.\"\n\n\"We should have a barn dance,\" Morgan said. \"To thank our neighbors for pitching in and helping. The builder said he'd still be working on the house if all the capable helpers hadn't shown up.\"\n\n\"How do you feel?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"Good. Really good.\"\n\n\"Good enough to christen our new home next week?\"\n\n\"By christen, you mean...?\"\n\n\"You know.\" Kristen blushed.\n\nMorgan laughed. \"No, I don't know. You must tell me.\"\n\n\"Obviously you aren't well enough to\u2014\"\n\n\"If we weren't sitting on our front porch for all the world to see, I'd show you how well I am,\" Morgan whispered.\n\n\"Oh Morgan, will we ever know a time in our life when we'll be able to sit on the swing and kiss?\"\n\n\"I don't know, baby.\"\n\nA cloud of dust rolling up the road announced the arrival of a visitor. \"Who is it?\" Kristen asked.\n\n\"No one I know.\" Morgan walked to the porch railing as the rider slowed his horse to a stop in front of her.\n\n\"I'm looking for Morgan or Kristen Jouett,\" the man announced.\n\n\"I'm Morgan Jouett.\"\n\n\"If you'll sign this form saying I delivered this envelope to you, I'll be on my way.\"\n\nMorgan did as requested and opened the envelope as the rider left. Kristen joined her at the porch railing.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"It's a petition Cage has filed with the court to force us to vacate Estelline. We have thirty days to respond.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 208", + "text": "\"The tributary that runs into Southern Box Canyon has dried up,\" Shanghai informed Morgan. \"We need rain bad. The cattle are restless. We gotta get them to water.\"\n\n\"Open the gates and let them go to the river,\" Morgan instructed. \"That's the closest water. I'll ride to the river just to keep an eye on them. Our bulls are still with the cows in Southern Box Canyon, aren't they?\"\n\n\"Yeah, do you want me to cut them out?\"\n\n\"No, they'll need water. We can cut them out after a few days. I want to put one in each pasture. There's no need to keep them in a box canyon. The cows will find them.\"\n\nAs she rode to the river, Morgan thought about Daniel and Rachel and how proud she was of them. When Kristen wasn't foremost in her mind, she was always dancing in the background. I love her more every day, Morgan thought.\n\nShe dreaded the upcoming court battle with Cage and the rift it might cause between her and Daniel. She knew Cage wouldn't hesitate to use the child to get what he wanted.\n\nMaybe I can buy him off, she thought. Get him to take Gwen and return to San Francisco." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 209", + "text": "Cage waited impatiently for Gwen. God, if she wasn't such a good lay, I'd get rid of her in a heartbeat, he thought as he tied his white stallion in a clump of oaks and spread the quilt under their favorite tree. And she's gotten herself pregnant. Stupid bitch. Hopefully, I'll have things settled before she starts to show. He put on his best smile as she rode toward him.\n\n\"I was getting worried about you,\" he said as he helped her from her horse.\n\n\"Um, that's good,\" she murmured, turning her face up to him for a kiss.\n\n\"We don't have a lot of time,\" Cage explained. \"Master Morgan has called a family meeting.\"\n\n\"Why?\" she asked, stripping off her clothes.\n\n\"Don't know.\"\n\n\"You know how I hate to rush,\" she said salaciously.\n\n\"Yes, but it's better than nothing.\" He pulled her down on the quilt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 210", + "text": "Morgan sat atop Isis and watched the two lovers from the ridge above them. Something's not right, she thought, and it was something more than the disgusting scene below her. Then she realized the earth was trembling.\n\n\"What the hell?\" she mumbled. Dear God! The cattle aren't walking to the river, they're stampeding!\n\nIn a matter of seconds, the herd turned the bend in the ravine and thundered toward the river. Morgan screamed for Cage and Gwen to stand up, to get behind the trees, but she couldn't be heard over the pounding hooves.\n\n\"You're making the earth shake,\" Gwen murmured.\n\n\"That's not me,\" Cage screamed, trying to get to his feet as the first cow slammed into him.\n\nThe cattle slowed to a stop when they reached the river. Many of them waded in, while others moved along the bank, drinking the cool water.\n\nMorgan nudged Isis down the slope and dismounted beside the unrecognizable remains of Cage and Gwen. Cage's wedding band glinted in the sun.\n\nThen Morgan made one of those life-changing decisions. She pulled Cage's ring from the pulverized flesh and slipped it onto her finger. She tied Isis in the clump of trees, mounted the white stallion, and rode to meet the group of men riding toward her.\n\n\"Come quickly,\" she exclaimed. \"Morgan and Gwen were trampled by the cattle. I'll notify Kristin.\"\n\nFor the first time, Morgan could see a life with Kristen raising Daniel and Rachel on Estelline. Breaking the insidious will that had bound Jouetts throughout the generations.\n\nMorgan rode to the ranch house and entered Cage's room. She changed into the clothes that Cage favored, pulled a glove onto her left hand, and walked downstairs to give condolences to the family.\n\nI'm Cage now, she thought as she prepared to face Kristen. I must keep up the charade until the funeral is over and everyone has left the ranch.\n\n\"Reid, Wallace, I'm so sorry about Morgan,\" the Cage imposter said. \"What can I do? Has anyone told Kristen?\"\n\n\"We were just discussing how to break the news to her,\" Wallace muttered, nearly choking on the words.\n\n\"I could\u2014\"\n\n\"No, it'll be better coming from us,\" Reid said.\n\n\"Maybe you can ride into town and arrange for two caskets,\" Wallace suggested.\n\nShe nodded and went back to Cage's room to get a six-shooter. Morgan thanked her lucky stars that Cage hadn't worn his gun for his assignation with Gwen.\n\n\"Cage. From now on I am Cage,\" she reminded herself. \"Morgan Jouett is dead.\"\n\nMorgan walked down the stairs as Kristen fell to her knees in Morgan's office, shrieking like a banshee. Her heart cried for the woman she loved. Morgan wanted to run to Kristen and tell her Morgan was still alive but knew she had to let Kristen suffer to convince the world Morgan Jouett dead and was Cage was alive.\n\nMorgan rode the white stallion into town, missing Isis's smooth, comfortable gait. She went to the saloon first and ordered cognac. One of the saloon girls sidled up to her. \"You need some company, Cage?\"\n\n\"Not today. I'm here to order caskets for Morgan and Gwen Jouett.\"\n\n\"What?\" The woman jumped back from her and cried, \"Morgan Jouett's dead?\"\n\n\"He and his wife were picnicking and were trampled by stampeding cattle,\" she explained as everyone gathered around to ask questions.\n\nMission accomplished, she tossed down the cognac and walked to the undertaker's. By the time she finished her business, everyone in town knew Morgan and Gwen Jouett were dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 211", + "text": "Kristen dressed in black and locked herself in her room. At night Morgan could hear her sobbing. She prayed the funeral would soon be over so she could tell Kristen she was still alive. She was beginning to lose her resolve when Reid announced that the funeral would be held the next day, and Morgan and Gwen would be buried in the family cemetery on the ranch.\n\nOne more day, she thought.\n\nOn the day of the funeral, Morgan was shocked by Kristen's appearance. She obviously hadn't slept or eaten since the deaths. She had lost weight, and her features were haggard and pale. Her eyes were sunken into their sockets and had lost their luster.\n\nShe walked to Kristen's side and offered her arm for support. Kristen looked up, her gaze vacant as she stared at the face that she feared would haunt her forever.\n\nPeople came from all over Texas to mourn Morgan Jouett. It was flattering, really, but she had set upon a path, and there was no turning back.\n\nShe was Kristen's support the entire day. Holding her up when her knees buckled. Putting a protective arm around her shoulders when others pressed too close. Taking her food and insisting she eat something.\n\nWhen everyone left, she walked Kristen to her room. \"I'm so sorry you're going through this... sorry you're hurting. \"Thank you, Cage. I appreciate your concern.\"\n\n\"Well, if I can help in any way, please call on me.\" She kissed Kristen's forehead and walked away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 212", + "text": "The day after the funeral, Kristen was surprised to find Cage sitting on the floor of Morgan's office, playing with Daniel and Rachel. Kristen walked into the room and sat down on the floor with them. \"What are you two doing?\"\n\n\"Daddy is magic,\" Rachel declared. \"Show her, Daddy.\"\n\nMorgan held up her right hand, turning it over to show it was empty, and then reached behind Kristen's ear and pulled out a silver dollar. The children squealed and clapped their hands.\n\n\"Do it again, Daddy,\" Rachel insisted.\n\n\"Maybe later. Mommy is up now. We can eat breakfast together,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"I'm really not hungry,\" Kristen insisted.\n\n\"You must take care of yourself,\" she said, trying hard not to make direct eye contact with the woman she loved so desperately. She got to her feet and held out a hand to pull Kristen to her feet. \"The children need you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 213", + "text": "Judge Goodnight entered the office as Kristen led the children to breakfast.\n\n\"Cage, I feel I must set some things right with you,\" Goodnight said.\n\n\"Judge, I have no words to tell you how sorry I am about your loss. Gwen was a beautiful woman,\" Morgan said, continuing the charade. \"I know she adored you.\"\n\n\"And I her.\" The judge squeezed back tears. \"I wanted to explain about the 'Wanted!' poster and let you know that the woman's husband was hanged for her death.\"\n\nMorgan gazed at the man. \"I appreciate that, sir. I knew she was alive when I left her but had no idea how to prove it.\"\n\n\"It's nothing you should worry about,\" Goodnight continued. \"But there is the matter of my granddaughter. She appears to be an orphan.\"\n\nMorgan's heart stood still. It hadn't occurred to her that taking Cage's identity would leave Rachel without a legal guardian. As far as the world knew, both of her parents were now dead.\n\n\"Kristen and I don't feel that way,\" she said. \"We have always loved and cared for Rachel as if she were our own.\"\n\nGoodnight nodded. \"I am aware of that. I'm an old man with no one in my life to help with a child. I wondered if you and Kristen would consider adopting Rachel, so she is yours legally.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir. Yes, sir. We'd be honored to be the legal parents of Rachel.\"\n\nThe judge pulled documents from his pocket. \"I took the liberty of drawing up these adoption forms. I've already signed them. All that is required is the signatures of you and your wife.\"\n\n\"Let me get Kristen,\" she said, beaming as she hurried from the room. She found Kristen in the dining room and leaned in close.\n\n\"Honey, the judge has some news I think you're going to like. Can you come to the office for a second?\"\n\nThey got Hassie to watch the children, and Morgan explained the judge's offer as they walked back to the office.\n\nKristen ran into the room, threw her arms around Judge Goodnight, and said, \"Judge you have made us the happiest couple in the world.\"\n\nGoodnight smiled. \"I will visit her often.\"\n\n\"Sir, we would have it no other way,\" Morgan enthused." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 214", + "text": "By the end of the day, everyone had departed Estelline. Kristen sat on the porch swing, thinking about Morgan and the love they had shared. Her breath caught in her throat as the man who looked so much like her lover appeared on the veranda.\n\n\"May I sit with you?\" Morgan asked.\n\n\"Cage, I don't think\u2014\"\n\n\"Please?\"\n\nKristen gazed at the man sitting beside her. Her husband. He was so like Morgan.\n\n\"If you had one wish,\" Kristen said, \"what would you wish for?\"\n\n\"I would wish for the freedom to sit in the swing on the veranda with my arm around you for all the world to see. I would give my soul to bring our love out into the open.\" She leaned down and kissed her lover\u2014her wife.\n\n\"Morgan?\" Kristen whispered, wide-eyed.\n\n\"Shush, little one. You must never call me that name again.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 215", + "text": "Wallace and Reid rested on the sofa in the office as the man they knew as Cage called Attorney Rance Reynolds.\n\n\"Rance, I want to cancel my suit against the Jouett family. Instead, I want you to draw up deeds dividing Estelline evenly among the three Jouetts. The deeds should be for Reid and Jerilyn Jouett, Wallace and Annie Jouett, and Cage and Kristen Jouett.\"\n\nMorgan listened as Rance expressed his condolences and agreed with the attorney's instructions. She hung up the phone relayed the conversation to her siblings.\n\nRance will have the deeds drawn up and ready for our signatures when we return from our trip. We'll go to his office in Amarillo where we will sign everything, and each family will walk away with a deed to their part of the ranch.\n\n\"Cage, we want to say how incredible you have been since Morgan's death three months ago. You've taken on all his workload and handled the ranch business just the way he would,\" Wallace said.\n\n\"Kristen is responsible for the way I handle business. Morgan trained her well.\"\n\n\"Most of all, we want to thank you for giving each of us ownership in Estelline. That means a lot to us,\" Reid added.\n\n\"It's the right thing to do,\" she replied, \"and Kristen insisted on it. You know what Kristen wants, Kristen gets.\"\n\nThe three laughed, knowing the headstrong woman all too well.\n\nKristen opened the door and peeked in. \"A family meeting without me?\" she teased.\n\n\"Here's my lovely wife now,\" Morgan said, walking to Kristen and kissing her lightly. \"We have concluded the business with Rance Reynolds. He will take care of drawing up the deeds. Your brothers were just thanking us for giving each one a piece of Estelline.\"\n\n\"It's the fair thing.\" Kristen smiled. \"Cage, I came to tell you the carriage is here.\"\n\n\"My wife,\" she said, slipping her arm around Kristen's waist. \"My beautiful, beautiful wife.\"\n\nThey settled in the carriage and Reid closed the door. \"Don't worry. We'll take care of things while you're gone.\" And with that, they were off.\n\n\"I'm so excited,\" Kristen giggled. \"I never thought this would happen for us. What do you want to do first?\"\n\n\"I want us to make love all night and sleep late. I want us to take ocean cruises and vacations. I want to make love to you in the sleeper car of a train. I want to share the world with you, Kristen Jouett.\"\n\n\"And we will, darling.\" Kristen kissed her. \"I have a feeling our adventure has only just begun.\"\n\nThe End\n\nIt was not uncommon for women to pass themselves off as men in the old west. Many did it to protect themselves from harm while others simply wished to live as a male in a male dominated society.\n\nA trans person's assigned sex was most likely to be discovered upon death or serious illness. When 80-year-old lumberjack Sammy Williams died in Montana in 1908, the undertaker discovered he was female dumbfounding the community that had only ever known him as a man.\n\nAt the age of twelve Charley Parkhurst ran away from an orphanage in Lebanon, New Hampshire. He was taken in by Ebenezer Balch who taught him about horses and discovered the boy had an aptitude for working with equine. He taught Charley to drive a coach first with one, then two and eventually six horses.\n\nFollowing the Goldrush Charley made his way to California.\n\nParkhurst was blinded in one eye when a horse kicked him, leading to his nickname, One-Eyed Charley or Cockeyed Charley. He earned the reputation as one of the finest stagecoach drivers on the West Coast. This inspired another nickname for him, Six-Horse Charley.\n\nCharley's routes in northern California were Stockton to Mariposa, \"the great stage route\" from San Jose to Oakland, and San Juan to Santa Cruz. Stagecoach drivers carried mail as well as passengers, and had to deal with hold-up attempts, bad weather, and perilous, primitive trails. As historian Charles Outland described the era, \"It was a dangerous era in a dangerous country, where dangerous conditions were the norm.\"\n\nWith the expansion of the railroads, Charley left coach driving to become a farmer. He died alone in his cabin. The news of his death gained national coverage. The obituary in the \"San Francisco Call\" was reprinted in the \"New York Times.\"\n\nHe was in his day one of the most dexterous and celebrated of the famous California drivers ranking with Foss, Hank Monk, and George Gordon, and it was an honor to be striven for to occupy the spare end of the driver's seat when the fearless Charley Parkhurst held the reins of a four-or six-in hand... Last Sunday [December 28, 1879], in a little cabin on the Moss Ranch, about six miles from Watsonville, Charley Parkhurst, the famous coachman, the fearless fighter, the industrious farmer and expert woodman died of the cancer on the tongue... Then, when the hands of the kind friends who had ministered to his dying wants came to lay out the dead body of the adventurous Argonaut, a discovery was made that was literally astounding. Charley Parkhurst was a woman.\n\nWomen Impersonating Men throughout History\n\nHistory is filled with stories of women who pretended to be men for various reasons. Whether it was to promote their careers, station in life, inheritance or to be with a loved one, male impersonators were not unusual. Even Shakespeare used the trope to make his plays more interesting.\n\nCharles-Genevi\u00e8ve-Louis-Auguste-Andr\u00e9-Timoth\u00e9e d'\u00c9on de Beaumont (try saying that three times fast!) was born in 1728 in France. D'Eon was born a female but lived the first half of her life as a man. D'Eon's autobiography states that she was raised as a boy because her father could only inherit money from his in-laws if he had a son. As was usual for the day, because her family were nobles without a title, they styled themselves as \"Chevalier\" \u2014 meaning \"Knight\". In 1756, d'Eon joined the spy service of King Louis XV and traveled on a secret mission to Russia to meet the Empress Elizabeth. In 1761, d'\u00c9on returned to France. The next year she became a captain of dragoons under the Marshal de Broglie and fought in the later stages of the Seven Years' War. She was wounded and received the Order of Saint-Louis. She was eventually granted a pension and lived in political exile in London. As part of her negotiation with the crown of King Louis XVI, she was told she could return to France but would have to live as a woman \u2014 an offer she accepted because the King offered to pay for her new clothes. She lived out the rest of her life as a woman.\n\nPopular musician Billy Tipton (born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in 1914) was an American jazz pianist and saxophonist. In 1933, she began her career as a musician in various small Oklahoma bars. As time passed Tipton began to associate with her father's name Billy and eventually, she began to present herself as male by breast-binding and packing. At first Tipton appeared male only in performances, but by 1940 she was living entirely as a male. She ultimately gained great success as a musician and went on to record a series of extremely popular albums. Tipton had several lesbian relationships during which she was able to keep her sex concealed. She eventually had a long-term relationship with a woman \u2014 concealing her sex the whole time \u2014 and they adopted three sons. She was described as \"a good father who loved to go on scouting camps\". In 1989, at the age of 74, Tipton died. It was not until then that the coroner revealed to her family and friends that she was, in fact, a woman.\n\nMalinda Blalock was a female soldier during the American Civil War who fought bravely on both sides. When the war started, rather than be separated from her husband Keith, she decided to disguise herself as a man and join the army too. She was officially registered on March 20, 1862, as \"Samuel 'Sammy' Blalock\" \u2014 claiming to be the older brother of her husband. Her registration papers are one of the few surviving records of female soldiers in the Civil War. Malinda was a good soldier and her identity was never revealed. One of the army surgeons said of her: \"He drilled and did the duties of a soldier as any other member of the Company and was very adept at learning the manual and drill.\" Eventually the couple deserted from the army.\n\nMarinus was born Marina in the 6th century. Her father wanted to join a monastery (Monastery of Qannoubine, in the Holy Valley, Lebanon) so he took his daughter \u2014 disguised as a boy \u2014 with him. Both were admitted and became monks. After living in the monastery for a number of years, it became necessary for both father and daughter to travel. Whilst staying at an inn, the innkeeper's wayward daughter was attracted to Brother Marinus and tried to seduce her. When Marinus refused the advances, the innkeeper's daughter claimed that \"he\" had seduced her, and she was pregnant. Marinus refused to debunk the claims by showing that she was, in fact, female, and she was kicked out of the monastery. She lived outside the monastery walls begging. To make matters worse, Marinus was forced to take custody of the child and raise him. She remained there, raising the child, performing harsh penances, and undertaking menial jobs. It was not until her death that her sex was finally revealed. Marinus is revered as a saint in the Roman Catholic, and Orthodox Churches. She is known as Saint Marina the Monk.\n\nDr. James Barry (born 1792-1795) was a military surgeon in the British Army, and by the end of his career was Inspector General in charge of military hospitals. He served in South Africa and India. Among his accomplishments was the first successful cesarean section in Africa by a British surgeon, in which both the mother and child survived the operation. James Barry was born Margaret Ann Bulkley and is, therefore, the first female Briton to become a qualified medical doctor. It is believed that Bulkley took on the role of a man in order to achieve her dreams of working in medicine \u2014 a dream that could not be fulfilled if she were a woman. Letters reveal that there may have been a conspiracy by Barry's mother and uncles to get him in to medical school. He died from dysentery July 25, 1865 and apparently the charwoman who took care of the body, Sophia Bishop, was the first to discover his female body, and revealed the truth after the funeral. Afterwards many people claimed to \"have known it all along\". The British Army sealed his records for 100 years.\n\nReprinted with permission from an internet article by\n\nJamie Frater, \"Top Ten Men Who Were Really Women,\" Weird Stuff, 4 September 2008, https://listverse.com/2008/09/04/top-10-men-who-were-really-women/, Web, August 18, 2020.\n\nThank you for reading my book. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it for you. If you did, please leave me a review on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0875L5JJM\n\nLearn more about Erin Wade\n\nand her books at\n\nwww.erinwade.us\n\nFollow Erin on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/erin.wade.129142\n\n#1 Best Selling Books by Erin Wade\n\nToo Strong to Die\n\nDeath Was Too Easy\n\nThree Times as Deadly\n\nBranded Wives\n\nLiving Two Lives\n\nDon't Dare the Devil\n\nThe Roughneck & the Lady\n\nWrongly Accused\n\nThe Destiny Factor\n\nShakespeare Under Cover\n\nAssassination Authorized\n\nTwo Ways to Die \u2014 A Java Jarvis Thriller\n\nDo You Hear What I Hear?\n\nCupid's Crossbow\n\nA Woman to Die For\n\nThe Littlest Werewolf\n\nKidnapped Hearts Co-authored with Morgan Elliot\n\nComing in 2020\n\nBarbed Wire\n\nMardi Gras Ghost \u2014 A Java Jarvis Thriller #2\n\nDoomsday Cruise\n\nThe Trinket a Short Story\n\nNever Speak of Tomorrow\n\nBy Morgan Elliot and Erin Wade\n\nBelow are the first five chapters of our next book, Never Speak of Tomorrow" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 216", + "text": "Keaton Springfield wedged herself between the dumpster and the brick wall of Callaway's, a known hangout for Peru's sleazy underworld. She pulled her Glock from its shoulder holster, positioned the mask over her face, and waited.\n\nThe back door of Callaway's swung open and four burly men filled the alley. Each carried a bound woman who had obviously been drugged. \"Prop them up in front of the dumpster so they can see what they are getting for their money.\" A gruff voice commanded. \"The blonde one will bring a pretty penny.\"\n\nA black Cadillac Escalade slowly crawled down the alley stopping in front of the dumpster. Four well-dressed men got out of the vehicle leaving the doors open.\n\n\"What do you have for us tonight, Pepe?\" the tallest of the four asked.\n\n\"Two Americans and two beautiful native girls, Se\u00f1or Cole,\" Pepe replied. \"All prime. They should bring top dollar anywhere.\"\n\n\"A hundred bucks for the blonde,\" Cole bid.\n\n\"Se\u00f1or, you are not renting her for the night,\" Pepe wheedled. \"You are purchasing her for resale when you finish with her. Starting bid on the blonde is one thousand dollars.\"\n\nThe four newcomers discussed the price among themselves. \"Five hundred,\" Cole declared.\n\n\"Take her back in,\" Pepe instructed his henchman. \"I can make more than that off her in one night and still sell her many more times.\"\n\n\"Okay, okay,\" Pepe acquiesced. We'll pay a thousand for her, but no more than two hundred a piece for the other three.\"\n\n\"Oh, sixteen hundred.\" Pepe feigned disappointment. \"These are classy women, not putas. Take the blonde, we'll traffic the others.\"\n\n\"Two thousand for the lot,\" Cole bid.\n\n\"Prime merchandise,\" Pepe reminded him. \"I make you a deal, twenty-five hundred cash for the entire group.\"\n\nThe four businessmen nodded in agreement. \"Load them in the back of my SUV.\" Cole directed Pepe's men.\n\nCole counted the bills as he paid Pepe. \"We need eight more to fill the cargo container going out in two days. Can you handle that?\"\n\n\"Si Se\u00f1or.\"\n\n\"I need you to deliver them. Picking them up here is getting too dangerous for us.\"\n\n\"There will be a delivery charge,\" Pepe bargained. \"Five thousand for eight of them plus delivery charge.\"\n\n\"Fine, fine,\" Cole grunted. \"Deliver them to Pier 12 after midnight on Wednesday. My boys will meet you there and lead you to the container.\"\n\nKeaton waited for the alleyway to empty than stepped from behind the dumpster and began speaking into her open body mike. \"Black Cadillac Escalade, LP number 25Charlie, Echo, X-ray192, headed to Pier 12.\"\n\n\"Following them now, boss.\" Came the reply.\n\nCalloway's door swung open and two of the thugs stepped into the alley lighting their cigarettes. \"What the hell?\" they chorused reaching for their guns.\n\n\"Don't do it,\" Keaton warned. \"Don't pull out a gun unless you want to die.\"\n\nAs if on an unspoken signal both men rushed her. Keaton fired twice dropping them just feet from her. So much for the twenty-one feet rule, she thought as she pitched two white chess pawns between the men and sprinted from the alley." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 217", + "text": "\"Nice job, Springfield.\" Captain Carlos Risso entered the observation room. \"We picked up everyone involved in tonight's little sex-trade operation.\n\n\"There were ninety-two women in the shipping container. All are in bad shape, starved, dehydrated, and abused. With the recording from your open mike and catching them red handed with the drugged women in their vehicle, we'll have no problem getting a conviction on these bastards.\"\n\n\"I love it when an operation goes smoothly,\" Keaton replied. \"But it seems like every time we take down one operation another springs up in its place.\"\n\n\"You must be psychic,\" Risso exclaimed. \"We've got a problem at Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru in Lima.\"\n\n\"The private college?\"\n\n\"Yes, three girls have disappeared in the last four months. We think traffickers are targeting the women attending our local colleges. The University is hosting a fundraising gala the Saturday after next. All of Lima's movers and shakers will be there. I want you to attend. Black tie.\"\n\n\"Sir, you know how I hate black tie affairs. Can't one of the other units handle this one?\"\n\n\"I need your team on this. One of the missing women is the daughter of the Mayor of Lima. We need his support. It will be a real feather in our cap.\"\n\nRisso held out a scrap of paper. \"Here's the name and number of the woman who filed a report. It seems two of the girls were in her class. I think she's a Peace Corp volunteer teaching at the college.\"\n\nKeaton read the name on the note. \"Remi Navarro. Probably some boring academic. I'll try to catch up with her tomorrow afternoon, Sir. Right now, I'm going to get some sleep.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 218", + "text": "\"Good morning Professor Navarro. She's waiting for you.\" Sister Clara was as old as the hills, but somehow still managed to make her way from the convent to the Administration building every day.\n\nRemi nodded, took a deep breath before lightly tapping on the oversized orange agate door and turning the ornate doorknob. Mother Superior beckoned her and told her to take a seat in front of her desk.\n\n\"You sent for me, Mother Superior?\"\n\n\"Yes, Remi. How is this term going?\"\n\nRemi relaxed a bit and said, \"It started out about the same as last term, but the girls settled down much quicker. Maybe they will actually learn some chemistry that will help them in their nursing profession.\"\n\n\"You are no longer so exotic,\" grinned Mother Superior.\n\n\"I think they are beginning to see me as just another boring professor instead of some mysterious woman from the country where the streets are paved with gold and movie stars. In fact, as I learn about the history of your country, I think that Peru should have the moniker of the country with roads paved with gold.\"\n\nMother Superior was in essence the dean of the newly formed Nursing Program, which right now had about 90 women enrolled. She was a formidable woman and usually very serious, succinct, and lacking in humor. However, she must have gotten up on the right side of her bed today because she was congenial, and a very slight sense of humor was attempting to emerge. That made Remi even more suspicious of Mother Superior's reason for calling her in this morning.\n\n\"Remi, I know you have received many invitations from the families of our students to dinner and other social events in their homes. I have heard that you make a good impression on the parents. Is this something you enjoy?\"\n\nRemi knew that Mother Superior was setting her up, but she couldn't quite figure out her motive. She answered cautiously, \"I enjoy getting to know the families; however, I am not one to look for glamor and glitter, and these families are the glitterati.\"\n\nMother Superior's lip curled upward. \"Well, Remi, we'll have to fix that. You are aware that we have a huge gala scheduled the Saturday after next. Right?\"\n\nRemi nodded her head, waiting for the shoe to drop. Mother Superior smiled, took a sip from her coffee cup, and continued. \"This gala is an important fundraising event and we hope to obtain enough donations to construct a building dedicated to our nursing program. All the glitterati, as you put it, will be there, hopefully with their checkbooks open.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mother Superior. I can imagine. I'd love to have a real classroom with a well-equipped lab instead of that prison cell I swear doubles as a classroom.\"\n\n\"Remi you can help make that dream a reality. I'd like you to be the keynote speaker.\"\n\nRemi bounced up from her chair and began pacing, all the while saying, \"No, no, no, not going to happen.\"\n\nMother Superior signed deeply and with an air of authority said, \"Sit down Remi and listen.\"\n\nRemi unhappily complied and said, \"Mother Superior, I don't do public speaking.\"\n\n\"But Remi, think how impactful you could be. A young woman such as yourself who agrees to give up a promising career and come to some third-world country to help prepare\n\ngirls for an admirable career, especially during this global shortage of nurses. They will be shamed into writing big fat checks\u2014just what we need.\"\n\n\"So, the end justifies the means?\" Remi was sick to her stomach, but held her tongue, lest she say something very offensive.\n\n\"I am afraid that this is what the Rector wants, and you can't say no to him, Remi.\"\n\n\"But I don't have anything appropriate to wear.\" Remi knew it was a useless last-ditch effort.\n\n\"Not to worry, Remi. Sister Clara's niece is a top-notch seamstress. Tomorrow you will go with her to pick out an evening gown design, material and get measured. Her niece will custom make a gown that will be the envy of everyone.\"\n\nMother Superior sat back waiting for Remi to try another excuse. When Remi remained silent, she continued. \"I also have secured an escort for you. My brother's son will be at your disposal.\"\n\nJust kill me now. Remi repeated those words over and over as she left the office. On her way out, Sister Clara gleefully shouted, \"Did Mother Superior dress you down, or perhaps, was it dress you up?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 219", + "text": "Keaton searched through the wastepaper basket in her office. Please let it be here, she prayed.\n\n\"What are you looking for?\" her Uncle Lucho Dapelo asked.\n\n\"That invitation. You know the one inviting us to some gala at Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru.\"\n\n\"You threw it away?\" Lucho exclaimed. \"I told you it was important for us to be represented. The cr\u00e8me of Peruvian society will be there. The people who purchase your extremely expensive Peruvian saddles. Keaton, you must take our social and civic obligations more seriously.\n\n\"Fine, Uncle. I'm going but if it's so important why don't you go?\"\n\n\"I hate those things.\" Lucho grinned. \"No one wants to be there, but they go for fear someone else will show them up. It's a zoo.\"\n\n\"I'll go.\" Keaton sighed loudly. \"But I no longer have an invitation.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Lucho waved an engraved invitation in the air. \"I salvaged it from your trash.\"\n\n\"Keaton,\" Office Manager, Ava Calle, called flourishing a memo, \"This call just came in. A Professor, Remi Navarro, has invited us to visit the facilities at Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru to see the condition of the wing they are raising funds to replace. I hear it's very dilapidated.\"\n\n\"Us? Does that mean you'll accompany me?\" Keaton asked hopefully.\n\n\"No dear, I'm just delivering her message. I gave her your email address so she can send you a map of the University grounds.\"\n\nKeaton groaned. \"When is this show and tell?\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" Ava laughed as she left the room.\n\nKeaton carried the invitation and memo into her office, closed the door, and called Stryker Nelson on her cellphone.\n\n\"Hey Keats, what's up?\" Stryker answered.\n\n\"I want to ask you on a date,\" Keaton teased.\n\n\"I love you dearly, babe.\" Stryker chuckled, \"But you're really not my type. You know I like the dark-haired ladies.\"\n\n\"That's why we work so well together,\" Keaton replied. \"Seriously, the Captain wants... no, ordered me to attend a shindig at Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru next week. I need a date, so get your tux out of mothballs and air it.\"\n\n\"Why are we being assigned to the University?\" Stryker queried. \"One of the sisters running drugs?\"\n\n\"No, but three female students have disappeared recently, and the local authorities have asked Captain Risso for help. I'm taking a tour of their facilities tomorrow as the representative of Springfield Exports. The company will contribute to the fundraising gala. I'm trying to get my foot in the door and find an excuse to hang around the University.\"\n\n\"You could enroll at the U,\" Stryker suggested.\n\n\"I'm a little old for a student,\" Keaton pointed out. \"And I do need to carry my weight at Springfield Exports.\"\n\n\"Do you need me to go with you tomorrow.\"\n\n\"No, I can handle a tour alone.\" Keaton laughed. \"I just wanted to update you on what I'm doing.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 220", + "text": "Keaton arrived an hour early for her appointment with Professor Remi Navarro. Dressed in her navy business suit and crisp white blouse, she was the epitome of an American entrepreneur. She pushed back the blonde strands that had escaped her ponytail and now curled around her face, added fresh lipstick, and slipped her dangling earrings into place. She repositioned her rearview mirror looking around to see if anyone was watching her. She hoped to observe Professor Navarro in a classroom situation. To get a feel for her. Using the map provided, Keaton quickly located the women's nursing facilities. She slipped into the class and took a seat at the back of the room. Professor Navarro had her back to the class writing an assignment on the blackboard.\n\nNice derriere, Keaton thought as she watched the five-foot-five woman stretch to add something to the top of the blackboard. She surprised herself by wondering what the professor's hair would look like if she pulled the pins from the French braid and let that glorious dark hair stream down the teacher's back. It's been too long.\n\nNavarro talked as she wrote on the board and Keaton found her voice to be calm yet enthusiastic as she discussed her subject.\n\n\"Good morning ladies. I am happy to tell you that now we have finished our review of basic chemistry, we are going to start learning about Biochemistry.\"\n\nGroans and boisterous protesting rose from the class.\n\nNavarro turned to face her students. Nothing special there, Keaton thought. Tortoise shell-framed glasses perched atop a perfect nose above generous lips just waiting to smile at her class. But oh, those lips.\n\n\"Settle down, you'll like this. I promise. You need to remember that the roles of nurses have changed. The expression \"high tech, high touch\" reflects the need for you to have the ability to combine humanistic skills with scientific knowledge. What we cover the rest of the term will be very useful in your clinical work, specifically in the knowledge of how the body metabolizes different drugs, dosage and concentration, the disposal of byproducts of toxic drugs, and other bodily reactions to disease or illness.\"\n\nGeeze, a snore fest, Keaton thought. I hope I can keep my eyes open.\n\n\"I can see you all are about ready to take a siesta, so let's talk about some biochemical reactions you might already know. How many of you have a significant other?\"\n\nMost students raised their hand snickering and giggling.\n\n\"Now, promise me that you are not going to talk to Mother Superior about this lecture, because we are going to talk about kissing. Yes, that's right, kissing. Promise?\"\n\n\"We promise.\" The girls tittered\n\n\"Ready?\" Remi took a deep breath and plunged ahead. \"Imagine it's Saturday night and your parents have taken your siblings out to dinner and a movie. You feigned an upset stomach and begged off. Now, as soon as they are out the door, you text your significant other that the coast is clear and you run around the house turning off lights, lighting candles, and putting on some soft romantic music.\"\n\nA soft murmur ran through the classroom as the girls became totally engrossed, as did Keaton.\n\n\"I see you've done this.\" Remi laughed. \"As soon as your significant other gets to your house, you both scramble to the couch and start kissing. At first you are gentle, tender, enjoying the closeness. Then what happens?\"\n\nKeaton discovered she was squirming in her chair.\n\n\"Things get heated and more passionate,\" one of the girls answered.\n\n\"Yes, that's right. Does your body actually feel warm?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah!\" Someone breathes and the rest of the class laughs knowingly.\n\nRemi continued. \"What you are experiencing is a biochemical reaction. Dopamine, an organic brain chemical is released during a kiss and can stimulate the same area of the brain activated by heroin and cocaine. As a result, we experience feelings of euphoria and addictive behavior. Oxytocin, another organic chemical, otherwise known as the 'love hormone', fosters feelings of warmth, affection and attachment.\"\n\nA girl shouted, \"Yeah, addicted to love.\" Sending the class into a riotous laugh session.\n\n\"Hold on girls, we're not finished yet. What might happen next during your necking session?\"\n\nA girl from the class interrupted and shouted out, \"Something gets hard!\" The rest of the class went nuts.\n\n\"Settle down. You guys are going to get me fired.\"\n\nRemi's statement set off the class on another laughing jag. Keaton couldn't stop the smile spreading across her face as Remi's glance sent a wordless apology to her visitor.\n\n\"That isn't quite what I had in mind, but since you brought it up, that is an example of a combined biochemical and physical reaction. Now go ask your Biology teacher for specifics.\" Remi laughed, shaking her head at the girls' antics.\n\n\"Let's try that again. The question was, what else happens during kissing? I am going to give you the answer and for your homework, you are going to write two paragraphs why this happens and why it is beneficial.\"\n\nThe girls groaned at the thought of homework.\n\n\"Kissing lowers cortisol levels. Cortisol is another organic compound that you should get to know intimately. Too much or too little can cause serious problems in a human body. Does anyone have a question?\"\n\nOne of the girls raised her hand.\n\nRemi nodded at her. \"Yes?\"\n\n\"Professor Navarro, do you have a boyfriend?\"\n\n\"I didn't mean that kind of question.\" Remi blushed. I meant about your homework.\"\n\n\"Oh, come on Professor,\" the other girls joined in asking for more information about their teacher's private life. \"Tell us?\"\n\n\"I don't have time for romance right now,\" Remi mumbled. \"I'm married to my job and believe me, getting all of you through three terms of chemistry is a full time job! Class dismissed. See you tomorrow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 221", + "text": "Remi picked up her lecture notes and put them into her briefcase while the students were leaving the classroom. Once the room had cleared out, she turned her attention to her visitor. Wow! Did heaven just send me an angel? Who is that?\n\nShe stepped off the dais, almost tripping over her own feet, but caught herself before landing face down and making a fool of herself. Gathering herself, she approached her visitor, and extending her hand. \"Hi. I'm Remi Navarro. Who might you be?\"\n\nKeaton took Remi's hand and told her that she was Keaton Springfield and before she could explain any further, Remi interrupted her.\n\n\"I'm so glad you came. We invited many people to come and look at the deplorable conditions in which we are working, but not many accepted our invitation. Let me take you on a short tour and we can get to know each other. This way please.\"\n\nKeaton walked out the door followed closely by Remi, who seemed to be having trouble keeping her attention on the task at hand, which was to emphasize how bad the conditions were and how much better the educational experience for the students would be if they had better facilities.\n\nKeaton stopped and turned towards Remi. \"Which way?\"\n\n\"Let's start down this hallway,\" answered Remi. As they were walking Remi ticked off the statistics, hoping to show this potential donor just how much of an impact her contribution would have. \"This is the first year for the nursing program. The Board of Regents from the University decided to establish a nursing program to meet the needs, particularly of the rural areas, where medical care is sparse.\"\n\nKeaton asked her how many students were enrolled and was surprised to hear that it was close to a hundred. \"Why so many students right out of the gate?\"\n\n\"I suspect the need is so great and the Board of Regents offered tuition free if applicants pledged two years of rural work post-graduation. That is a huge motivator for girls that normally wouldn't have the resources to attend a private university.\"\n\nKeaton wondered if now was a good time to ask about the girls that disappeared. She made sure she remained relaxed and casually asked, \"I heard that there were three girls that disappeared from the school. Did you know any of them?\"\n\n\"Yes. All three were in the nursing program and came from wealthy families. At first I thought they had been kidnapped for ransom, but there never were ransom demands. Now I can't help but think something worse befell them.\" Remi started to tear up. \"I had been to each of their houses, met their families, and even tutored one of the girls who had a problem learning basic chemistry.\"\n\nKeaton took a clean handkerchief she had in her breast pocket and passed it over to Remi. \"I'm so sorry. Did you get involved?\"\n\n\"Yes, to some extent, and thank you for the hanky. The police interviewed me several times, but the only information I had that was relevant was that the girl I was tutoring one evening, never made it home. They asked me if I thought she could have run away from home, but Keaton, I don't think she was the type. She was really dedicated to getting through the program.\"\n\n\"What did the other girls say? I suppose there's talk\n\nafter a life changing event.\" Keaton reached out and brushed\n\naway a tear that had strayed down Remi's cheek, surprising\n\nthem both. \"I'm sorry Remi, I didn't mean to startle you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Keaton it's fine. I've been with these girls for six months and have grown close to them, but to answer your question, there was a lot of chatter, but nothing useful as far as I could tell.\" Remi sniffled a bit then composed herself. \"So, now we're going to enter the so-called lab. She held open the door for Keaton, noticing how her pencil skirt hugged her curves.\n\n\"This looks pretty dilapidated to me,\" observed Keaton. The benches look like they are made from scrap wood and the chairs look pretty rickety. It's been a long time since I studied chemistry, but it doesn't seem like there is enough equipment to go around.\"\n\n\"You are exactly right. Ideally, we should be able to have teams of two working with one Bunsen burner, but right now, six girls have to share. They learn by doing, not observing.\"\n\n\"Remi, you mentioned that you had grown close to the girls and I could see that from the rapport you had with them. I meant to tell you that I was impressed how you got them to pay attention. Your analogy was spectacular and I for one, won't ever forget the Dopamine and Oxytocin, or what did you call it, the 'love hormone'? I bet they won't either.\" Keaton reached out and gently touched Remi's shoulder. \"You have a gift. I wish I had teachers like you when I was in school.\"\n\nRemi blushed, and managed a shy, \"Thank you.\"\n\nKeaton smiled at her. I wonder what she would look like without those glasses. \"So, Remi, what else is there to see?\"\n\n\"You have seen one of the better classrooms. Would you like to see the rest, though they are currently in use? Also, the professors in the program don't have offices and we have to rotate classrooms so there isn't a permanent place for us to store our materials and meet with students.\"\n\n\"I'll take your word for it. How about if you show me the plans for the new building?\"\n\n\"Sure, we can do that. I signed out a copy of the plans and we can go down to the cantina and look at them over a cup of coffee. What do you say?\"\n\n\"I say let's go.\"\n\nRemi lead the way to the stairway. They went down two floors and ended up in a small lobby. The cantina was situated in a room right next to the lobby. As they walked in, several students called out to Remi.\n\n\"Hi Professor Navarro! How's it going Professor Navarro? When are we getting our tests back, Professor Navarro?\"\n\n\"You seem to be on everyone's mind, Professor.\" joked Keaton.\n\n\"Yeah, just what I need. A bunch of 18-year-old girls dogging my every step.\"\n\nKeaton, mildly flirting said, \"And what's wrong with that?\"\n\n\"Seriously? You must be joking! Spend a day in my shoes and you will know exactly what I mean!\" Remi chuckled, pulled out a folded packet from her briefcase and said, \"Keaton, would you like to open these and spread them out on a table and I'll get the coffee? How do you like it?\"\n\n\"Americano, but please let me get the coffee.\"\n\n\"Really, Keaton, it's the least I can do, because next Saturday you are going to write a big check, right?\" teased Remi.\n\n\"Will you be there?\"\n\n\"Yes, I will. I'll be keeping my eye out for you.\" Remi flashed a smile and headed to the coffee bar where she placed their order. I wonder if she is going alone or if she has a date.\n\nAfter they reviewed the ambitious plans, Remi looked at her watch and apologized to Keaton. \"I'm so sorry to have to cut our time together short, but I have a class in about 15 minutes.\"\n\n\"Of course, I've taken up enough of your time already. You have been very generous.\" Keaton helped her pack up the blueprints and as they were about ready to part she asked Remi, \"Do you suppose that if I have any more questions we could set up another meeting?\"\n\nRemi looked at her quizzically, but in the end said yes, though she had no idea why. Keaton Springfield is way out of my league." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 222", + "text": "Keaton knocked on the doorframe of Captain Risso's office before entering. \"Come in and close the door,\" Risso instructed. \"How did your meeting with the professor go?\" Risso asked as Keaton settled into the chair in front of his desk.\n\n\"Fine. She has a good rapport with the women in her classroom. If anyone can instill trust, she can. She's lowkey and very nondescript.\"\n\n\"Not a looker, eh?\" Risso laughed. \"Comes with the territory, Keats. Old maid schoolteachers are rarely beauties.\"\n\n\"I'm not looking for someone to date, sir. I'm looking for someone who can get the women to open up to them. There is no way three women can go missing and that group knows nothing. They seem to be a close-knit bunch.\"\n\n\"You're usually right,\" Risso agreed. \"Just keep your ear to the ground.\"\n\n\"I will, sir. I need to spend some time at the export business this week. I must carry my weight there.\"\n\n\"Then get out of here. I don't need to see you again until you have something to report.\"\n\n\"Have we identified all the women taken from the cargo container?\" Keaton asked.\n\n\"Stryker is working on that now. Over half of them are still hospitalized. They were in bad shape but none of them are the girls from the Universidad Pontifica. As soon as they are strong enough, we'll question all of them.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 223", + "text": "Keaton walked into her office at Springfield Exports to find her uncle ranting in Spanish. \"Calm down, Uncle,\" she admonished. \"Tell me what is wrong.\"\n\n\"Your girlfriend,\" Dapelo sputtered. \"She is a demanding, self-centered\u2014\"\n\n\"Say no more,\" Keaton interrupted. \"I'll handle Carmen.\"\n\n\"Apparently you don't handle her often enough,\" Dapelo grumped. \"She is on her way here right now.\"\n\n\"Just send her into my office,\" Keaton said unlocking the door to her suite and flipping on the light. She left her door open so nothing would stand in Carmen's way when she stormed into the company.\n\nA sultry dark-haired beauty Carmen Tacona gave a whole new meaning to the term hot blooded. Keaton knew she was about to be lambasted for her failure to return Carmen's calls.\n\nThe doors flew open and employees moved out of her path as Carmen stormed through Springfield Exports. \"Keats,\" she purred intimidatingly reminding Keaton of a big cat just before it devours its prey. \"Why the hell haven't you returned my calls?\"\n\n\"I've been working night and day,\" Keaton explained, closing the door. \"I've been out of the office for the past four days. Unlike you, I must work for a living.\"\n\nFor the first time Keaton was thankful for the stacks of mail and work orders piled on her desk.\n\n\"No matter,\" Carmen walked around the desk and kissed Keaton breathless. \"You will take me to lunch, no?\"\n\n\"I'm terribly busy. I\u2014\"\n\n\"You will take me to lunch.\" Carmen growled.\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Keaton gulped. \"I'll make reservations. Where would you like to go?\"\n\n\"Astrid & Gast\u00f3n of course,\" Carmen replied. \"But, umm, first we stop by my apartment.\"\n\n\"I only have a narrow window of time,\" Keaton pushed Carmen's hands away from the buttons on her blouse. \"I have appointments all afternoon.\"\n\n\"I also need to discuss business with you,\" Carmen smiled salaciously. \"Perhaps you can cancel your appointments for the rest of the day, and we can combine business with pleasure.\"\n\n\"I can't do that,\" Keaton sighed opening her office door. \"Ava, please make reservations for two at Astrid & Gast\u00f3n. Tell them we'll arrive there in thirty minutes.\"\n\nKeaton took Carmen's arm and escorted her from the building to her Jeep. \"Must we ride in that thing?\" Carmen demanded.\n\n\"Yes!\" Keaton smirked. \"You know any vehicle will be destroyed in Lima's traffic. Peruvians consider traffic lights and signs mere suggestions to be ignored. They would rather die than yield to another vehicle. If it were legal, I'd drive a tank.\"\n\n\"Keats, you are so funny.\" Carmen slipped her arm through Keaton's and hugged the blonde's arm into her breasts.\n\nKeaton stiffened. \"Um, you have missed me,\" Carmen hummed.\n\nI'm exhausted, not dead, Keaton thought. Her body jerked involuntarily as the thought of mousy Remi Navarro crossed her mind.\n\n\"We will discuss business on our way to the restaurant,\" Carmen declared. \"Then you may spend your time over lunch convincing me that I should forgive you and sleep with you tonight.\n\n\"As you know, Pap\u00e1 oversees the National Peruvian Paso Horse Competition at the Mamacona showgrounds every year.\"\n\nKeaton nodded.\n\n\"He wants everyone that has anything to do with the Peruvian Horses to be represented at the showgrounds the entire week of the show,\" Carmen continued, \"breeders, trainers and of course vendors\".\n\n\"And you want Springfield Exports to be front and center with a huge display of our goods,\" Keaton added.\n\n\"Of course, darling. You are the largest exporters of Peruvian leather goods in the country and Pap\u00e1 approves of you.\"\n\n\"Consider it done.\" Keaton smiled. \"I'll have Santos arrange it. Springfield Exports will make you proud.\"\n\n\"But Pap\u00e1 wants you to be there, love, especially for opening weekend. It is the biggest event of the year.\"\n\n\"Carmen, I will be there opening weekend. Now I have a favor to ask of you. I must represent Springfield Exports at some black-tie event Uncle Lucho has roped me into. I have no choice. I'd like you to meet me there and bring your checkbook. And I'm truly sorry I haven't returned your calls.\"\n\n\"Um, well, you have all night to beg my forgiveness.\" Carmen blew softly into her ear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 224", + "text": "Remi was finished dressing except for putting on her grandmother's emerald earrings. She had decided earlier to let her hair hang loose. Tossing it to one side, while she put on one of the beautiful earrings, she wished she didn't have to go, even if she might run into Keaton again. Stop dreaming, girl. Finishing with one ear, she draped her hair over her bare shoulder and put on the other earring.\n\nStanding in front of the full-length mirror, she liked what she saw. The glasses she wore at school had been replaced by contact lenses. Her makeup was understated but brought out the best of her naturally attractive features. She was amazed at how perfect the dress was. It was an asymmetrical off-the-shoulder, form fitting dark emerald green cocktail length dress with a moderate slit up the left leg. The left side of the dress covered her shoulder and was capped with a tasteful mini ruffle. Her right shoulder was bare. The back of the dress dipped about a third of the way down her back, so that if she were forced to dance, her partner would not have his hand on her bare skin.\n\nThe doorbell to her flat sounded. She looked out the peep hole before opening the door. Mother Superior had given a description of her nephew. The man on the other side of the door was definitely Rolf. \"Come in Rolf. It's so nice of you to come for me and it is a pleasure to meet you.\"\n\nHe offered his hand. \"I have been looking forward to this evening for a week. My aunt Beatriz, or Mother Superior to you, told me what a wonderful teacher you are, but failed to mention how lovely you are.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the compliment, Rolf. Let me get my wrap and evening bag and I will be ready.\" A moment later she walked out the door, locked it and was escorted to his chauffeured car.\n\nOnce settled, Rolf spoke. \"I understand that you are giving the keynote speech tonight. Are you excited?\"\n\n\"More like petrified,\" answered Remi honestly.\n\n\"Don't worry too much. By then everyone will be feeling no pain and all you have to do is show a little leg and cleavage and they will be tripping over themselves to hand you a big fat check.\"\n\n\"Maybe I should get your check now, before you are feeling no pain,\" answered Remi icily.\n\n\"Don't be such a prude, Remi. I was only telling you how these things go. Let's talk about something else. All right?\" Damn, I am going to have to work hard to get her in bed tonight! Rolf tried to repair his faux pau and began asking her the usual 'first date' questions: Where did you grow up, where did you go to college, what did you do before you came here? Remi answered politely, only out of respect for Mother Superior and what they were trying to accomplish this evening. How do I get rid of this jerk? He makes my skin crawl.\n\nThe Gala was being held at the Country Club Lima Hotel located in a residential district of Lima. It had been declared a Peruvian Cultural Monument and was the perfect marriage of architectural charm, history, and modern comfort. One of the gala organizers had told her that many of the attendees had reserved rooms for the night so they could imbibe freely without concern of getting home safely. Remi wondered if Rolf had reserved a room. She shuddered at the thought.\n\nThey stopped at the Gala registration table to sign in and receive directions to their assigned table. As soon as they found it, situated next to the stage at the front of the ballroom, Rolf turned down the champagne a circulating waiter offered and left in search of something harder. Remi was content to sip her champagne without him. Her people-watching was interrupted when Mother Superior, Bishop Calabria, the Rector of the University, and two other couples joined her. After the introductions, Rolf, seemingly in better spirits, reappeared. Remi could smell the alcohol on him as he sat next to her, slinging his arm around the back of her chair.\n\nA man came out from the stage wing, walked over to the podium, introduced himself as Monsignor Duarte, and welcomed the attendees. He briefly went over the night's program, then announced that dinner would be served. Remi, good naturedly, withstood a mild interrogation by her table mates until their first course arrived.\n\nWhile the food was excellent, Remi couldn't eat. Her stomach was in knots. Is my stomach full of butterflies because in thirty minutes I am going to have to talk to all these people or is it because I don't see her? Mother Superior must have noticed her looking out over the room and quietly asked her if something was wrong, to which Remi replied, \"No, I'm just a little nervous.\" Mother Superior patted her hand and told her she would be fine as soon as she got up on the stage. That didn't help much." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 225", + "text": "\"Keaton, I'm so sorry. I think that ceviche I had for lunch was bad,\" Stryker explained as the two of them were walking toward the Hotel's main exit.\n\n\"Stryker, are you sure it wasn't the pisco sours you had with it?\" Keaton had to agree he looked a little green around the gills.\n\n\"Maybe the combination.\" offered Stryker shrugging his shoulders. \"Look, I don't want to ruin your fun. I'll take a cab and leave you my car so you can get home after this shindig winds down.\"\n\n\"It's okay Stryker. Let me drive you home.\"\n\n\"Keats, how long have we been partners? I can get home. Besides, I know you saw something you like? Why don't you go back in and see if you can get her phone number?\"\n\n\"I thought she was coming, but I haven't seen her. Was I that obvious?\" Keaton sighed.\n\n\"The teacher you met last week?\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\" Keaton was surprised.\n\n\"Keats, you never go out, you never date, except for that wild woman Carmen now and again, so it was just a matter of simple deduction. The teacher is the only woman you've recently met.\" Stryker gave her a key fob and the valet ticket, both of which she slipped into her evening bag, and he hugged her goodnight. The valet flagged a cab and Stryker was gone.\n\nKeaton went back to her table, which had been cleared of the meal, and turned her chair to the stage where Monsignor Duarte was introducing Bishop Calabria. The old wind bag droned on and on for what seemed like eons. He spoke about the plans for the new building and how much money they had already raised through public support and how much more they needed. He was followed by Mother Superior who talked about the students' progress for a few minutes, then segued into introducing Remi.\n\nKeaton's breath caught. She couldn't believe what she was seeing. Her mouth was still open as she blinked her eyes, making sure they were working properly. That can't be the same Remi I met last week. My god, what an unbelievable transformation! She's absolutely stunning. Her hair. Her eyes-what happened to the glasses? Her bare shoulder. She was mesmerized, but as Remi began to talk, her attention was drawn to Remi's words and she became engrossed just as she had in Remi's classroom.\n\nGood evening everyone. Thank you all for coming and thank you Mother Superior for that warm introduction. Remi walked away from the podium to stand in the middle of the stage. She began,\n\nI was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My grandparents came from Colombia during the early years of La Violencia to seek a better life for themselves and the family they hoped to have. I reaped the rewards from their courageous actions. After I went to Nursing School, followed by completing my advanced degree, I was somewhat undecided as to the next steps I wanted to take.\n\nMy father said to me, the best way to discover who you are is to immerse yourself in the service of others.\n\nI said, Dad, I've worked four years in two different hospitals. Isn't that service to others?\n\nHe said, yes of course, but you still seem to be floundering. Maybe the way you get meaning in life is to create something that gives you purpose and a sense of accomplishment.\n\nSo, I started looking for opportunities where I could devote myself to a community that needed me. Did I have illusions of changing the world? Of course not, but I believed that I might be able to help a small group of people who did have the capacity to change the immediate world that surrounded them.\n\nWhen the Peace Corps offered me the opportunity to come to Peru and be part of a bold new venture that had the potential to make a significant impact on improving health care for many, I jumped at it. I am proud to say that I am honored to be part of a four-year journey along with your daughters, who are truly thoughtful, committed citizens dedicated to enriching the lives of others.\n\nYou should be proud to have raised daughters who have embraced the difference between what we do and what we can do. They know what they are capable of doing and they have embraced the idea of active charity and willing service to others. These are the young women who are capable of changing the landscape around them.\n\nRemi paused for a moment, looked out at the crowd, and continued.\n\nWe care a lot about our mission, which is extremely important, but I love focusing on understanding the people behind it. You are the people behind this mission. You will make it possible for these students, your young women, to accomplish the goals that are set in front of them.\n\nTonight, you have the opportunity to make a difference, not only in the lives of your daughters, but in the lives of many people who will be touched by your daughters in the future. I humbly ask you to be as generous as you can so that your daughters can reach their full potential.\n\nRemi looked at the audience, took a breath and continued.\n\nI leave you tonight with a quote from Winston Churchill: 'We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.' Thank you for your gracious attention and your generous gifts.\n\nRemi stood in the center of the stage for a moment as the applause continued. The audience was on its feet, the clapping encouraging Remi to take a small bow. She kept eye contact with the audience and waved goodbye as she walked across the stage. Just as she reached the podium, she caught sight of Keaton. Oh my god, could she be any more stunning? That dress... Of course it's black. Her cleavage\u2014I want my lips there. The slit up her leg, oh god, it's just short of X-rated. Remi stumbled slightly and grabbed onto the podium for a moment before hurrying off the stage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 226", + "text": "Father Duarte helped Remi down the stairs and guided her to an alcove where University employees were receiving donations. She shook hands and answered questions from the donors for about an hour, occasionally looking over the crowd, hoping to catch a glimpse of Keaton, but she didn't. Finally, she was able to extricate herself from the hubbub and find her way out into the hotel lobby. She decided to go to the coat room, grab her wrap and take a cab home. Rolf was stinking drunk, and she wanted nothing further to do with him. There was no one attending the coat room, so she entered. As she was removing her wrap from a hanger, she felt someone come up behind her and grab her around the waist.\n\n\"Finally, I found you,\" slurred a very intoxicated Rolf. He dragged her over to a dark corner, turned her around in his arms and forcibly kissed her. Remi was able to free one of her arms and slapped him hard.\n\n\"Is that how you want it, you tease?\" Rolf reached for her dress and in a flick of his wrist, tore the shoulder of Remi's dress and began to slobber across her chest. She struggled and managed to poke one of his eyes. He yelped, but did not let go, moving one hand to her throat and the other under her dress. Remi managed to bite his hand and he slapped her. She was scared, more frightened than she had ever been.\n\n\"Rolf, let her go right now!\" Remi recognized Keaton's voice but thought she was imagining it. Rolf looked over his shoulder, still clutching Remi's throat and pushing her against the wall with a hand on her chest.\n\n\"Keaton get out of here; this is none of your business,\" hissed Rolf.\n\n\"I won't ask you again, Rolf. You know I'm more than capable of taking you down.\"\n\nRolf relinquished his hold on Remi and whirled to face Keaton. He aggressively reached for her and found himself on his knees with his arm twisted behind his back.\n\n\"Rolf, I'm going to let you go if you promise to get out of here and leave Ms. Navarro alone.\" Keaton applied more torque to Rolf's arm, bringing it close to the point of snapping.\n\n\"Do we have a deal? You'll be in a cast for months if you don't agree.\" Keaton tightened her hold just to make her point and be sure Rolf knew she was serious.\n\n\"All right, all right! I promise, now let me go.\" Keaton released Rolf and stepped between him and Remi. Rolf staggered toward the door, turned, and spat out a threat to Keaton.\n\n\"You American women are all alike, whores! You tease and then cry wolf. You just want her for yourself. Yeah, I hear the rumors. Just know that you will pay for this, Keaton.\" Rolf whirled and stomped out.\n\nKeaton quickly walked over to Remi, who clearly was in shock. She picked up Remi's wrap and evening bag which had fallen to the floor during the attack. She draped Remi's wrap around her shoulders and pulled it across her chest, put her arm around Remi's waist, and said, \"Let me take you home. Okay?\"\n\nRemi nodded her head and walked with Keaton without a word. They waited briefly while the valet brought around Stryker's car. Even after getting into the car, Remi was semi-catatonic. Keaton reached across her and fastened her seat belt all the time wondering if she should take Remi to the hospital. Then she remembered that Stryker carried a flask in the glove compartment. Once more reaching across Remi, she removed the flask, opened it, and told Remi to take a sip.\n\nRemi did as she was told followed swiftly with a sputtering and coughing fit. Keaton told her to take another sip, which she did without any argument. The color was coming back into her face and her eyes weren't quite as glazed over as they had been in the hotel.\n\n\"Remi, may I have your address?\" Keaton asked. At first Remi just stared at her, but then she seemed to understand and recited her address as Keaton punched it into the GPS. Remi didn't speak again until they were nearing her flat.\n\n\"It's on the right, three houses down. You can park in the driveway. It's a pretty safe neighborhood.\"\n\nKeaton parked and as she walked around to the passenger side of the car, the door opened, and Remi swung her legs out. Remi was still unsteady, so Keaton held onto her until they reached the door. Remi was able to retrieve her keys from her evening bag, but her hands were still shaking, and she couldn't insert the key into the lock. Keaton gently took the keys from Remi, opened the door, guided Remi inside, and locked the door behind her. She helped Remi up the stairs and into her bedroom over to the bed, where she asked Remi to sit.\n\n\"Do you want to take a shower or just change clothes and go to bed?\" Keaton asked gently.\n\n\"Shower please,\" answered Remi but not making a move toward the bathroom.\n\nKeaton entered the bathroom, found a robe on a hook behind the door and returned to help Remi disrobe\u2014her hands now trembling. Remi let her take her wrap, remove her shoes, and unzip the ruined dress. With watery eyes, she turned to Keaton, thanked her, and said that she could finish. Keaton nodded, went to the door, and said, \"I'll wait for you in the living room.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 227", + "text": "While waiting for Remi to finish showering, Stryker called. \"Keats, I wanted you to know that I'm at urgent care. I got worse after I got home, and they are keeping me overnight as a precaution. Will you please come get me tomorrow when they release me?\"\n\n\"Of course, Stryker. Did they say what is making you sick?\"\n\n\"Yes. Food poisoning. I should be better by tomorrow morning. They have me hooked up to an IV right now. Where are you... still at the Gala?\"\n\n\"No. You won't believe what happened. I was calling it quits, went to fetch my coat and walked in on Rolf assaulting Remi Navarro, the professor who gave the keynote speech.\"\n\n\"Did you tell her about his reputation?\"\n\n\"I didn't get a chance, Stryker. She was in shock. I took her home and plan to stay the night in case that drunken bastard shows up.\"\n\n\"I'm glad she's okay. I'm going to try and get some sleep now that I am not running to the bathroom every five minutes. See you tomorrow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 228", + "text": "Remi walked into the living room, swathed in a bathrobe, her hair hanging loose still wet from the shower.\n\n\"Thank you for staying Keaton, but I'm all right now. I don't want to keep you from the rest of your night.\"\n\n\"Does Rolf know where you live?\"\n\nRemi nodded her head, \"He picked me up this evening. Do you really think he'll come back?\"\n\n\"Remi come sit next to me,\" she motioned to the couch. Once Remi was seated next to her, Keaton told her of Rolf's reputation, not only of being a player, but also of being a date rapist who so far had gotten away with his degenerate actions by bribing police and justices.\n\n\"Keaton, how do you know this?\"\n\nKeaton was worried that Remi might be homing in on her \"secret career\", so she chose her words carefully.\n\n\"Remi, the Import/Export business is a small ecosphere here in Lima. Everybody knows everybody's dirty laundry. I can't stand Rolf, yet his family's shipping business is the best and most reasonably priced in Lima. My uncle has been doing business with them for years. When I first came from the States to join the business, he tried to put the moves on me. I kicked him in the groin, and he went down. My uncle witnessed the whole encounter, picked up Rolf by the scruff of his neck and in no uncertain terms, told him what would happen if he tried it again. He also called Rolf's father. Since then, Rolf has given me a wide berth.\"\n\nRemi tried to speak, but she was overcome with emotion again. Keaton took her in her arms and let Remi cry on her shoulder until regained control.\n\n\"I'm sorry Keaton. You must think I'm a baby.\"\n\nKeaton wiped the tears from Remi's cheeks with her thumbs and said, \"I don't think you are a baby. I think you were almost raped, and you are upset with good reason. I'm going to stay here tonight, just in case he decides to come back and harass you. Do you have something that I can wear? I'm thinking that this dress won't be too comfortable.\"\n\n\"Keaton, that is so nice of you, but I think I'll be okay. You don't have to ruin the rest of your night.\" Remi sighed, wishing she hadn't told Keaton she could go.\n\n\"Remi, I don't have other plans, so if it's the same with you, I'd feel more comfortable staying. The couch will do fine.\" Keaton's eyes were earnest and sincere. Remi took her hand and led her to the bedroom, where she pulled out clean T-shirt and sweatpants.\n\n\"Please feel free to shower if you like. There are clean towels in the linen cabinet and new toothbrushes in the middle left drawer of the vanity. Use whatever you like. I'm going to make tea. Would you like some?\"\n\nKeaton gave her a thousand-watt smile and joked, \"Only if you make your tea with whiskey and honey!\"\n\n\"I can do that,\" quipped Remi. \"See you in a few.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 229", + "text": "Keaton's long curly blonde hair was slicked back from her face. Remi handed her a mug of hot tea, laced with whiskey and honey. She is so adorable, and she doesn't seem to know it.\n\nKeaton sipped cautiously, smiled widely, and said, \"This is perfect. Thank you.\"\n\nRemi grinned, \"I'm glad you approve. I made up the couch, but why don't you let me sleep there and you take the bed?\"\n\n\"That's very sweet of you, but if Rolf does show up, I want to be the first one that intercepts him. You don't happen to have a firearm, do you?\"\n\nRemi looked back at Keaton with big eyes, reminding her of a Margaret Keane painting. \"You're kidding, right?\"\n\nKeaton shook her head \"no\" but then grinned and said,\n\n\"Yes, I'm kidding, Remi,\" But she was gravely serious. Rolf was dangerous. \"We're safe. Do you need me to tuck you into bed? joked Keaton.\" I'd like to do more than just tuck her in.\n\nRemi smiled lightly, shook her head \"no\", said good night, and went into her bedroom." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 230", + "text": "Keaton couldn't get comfortable. She had been tossing and turning for over an hour. Remi was right. The couch is horrible. I wonder why she hasn't changed out this torture rack... unless the place came furnished. The room was too light. The flimsy curtains did nothing to prevent the moonlight from spilling into the room, disrupting her sleep.\n\nA movement in the hallway pulled her from her grumpy reverie. She quickly sat up and was just about to launch off the couch when she caught a glimpse of bronze legs bathed in the interloping moonlight. Remi.\n\n\"What's wrong Remi?\"\n\n\"I can't sleep.\"\n\n\"You are perfectly safe.\"\n\n\"No. Keaton, I can't sleep with you out here on that god-awful sofa.\" Remi took Keaton's hand, looked into her eyes and said, \"There's room for the both of us in the bed. Besides, it has a new mattress.\"\n\nShe tugged Keaton's hand and pulled her toward the hallway and bedroom. Remi pulled back the covers, got into the bed and held the covers open for Keaton, who was trying her best not to hyperventilate as she looked at Remi's bare legs.\n\n\"Keaton, it's okay. Please get in, it's cold.\"\n\n\"Are you sure Remi?\"\n\n\"Of course, I'm sure. I feel safe with you nearby.\"\n\nKeaton climbed into the bed, lay on her back, and tried to get her impulses and breathing under control. I don't know what it is about her. I've never felt such an instant connection. Being with her is strangely comfortable and at the same time makes every ounce of my body vibrate in need. Keaton's thoughts were interrupted by a whisper.\n\n\"May I sleep next to you? I'm still a little freaked out.\" Remi started to move closer to her without waiting for an answer.\n\nKeaton summoned all her self-control and simply answered, \"Yes.\"\n\nWithout hesitation, Remi curled up next to Keaton, resting her head on Keaton's shoulder, her arm across Keaton's abdomen and her leg thrown over Keaton's. Keaton knew this was not an attempt at seduction. Remi was vulnerable and scared. Maybe that's what has me in a lather, her vulnerability and innocence.\n\nWithin minutes, Remi's breathing slowed, became deeper, and her body relaxed. Keaton knew Remi was asleep. There is no way she is into women, Keaton thought. She couldn't possibly be sprawled all over me like this and go to sleep if she liked women.\n\nKeaton was stunned by what she did next. She slowly lowered her head and placed a soft kiss on Remi's forehead. She was amazed at her own emotional reactions. Keaton took a breath, put her arm around Remi and let herself drift into a deep sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 231", + "text": "Remi woke and glanced at the clock. She couldn't believe that she had slept until noon. Where is Keaton? Remi got up, cleaned up a bit and donned a pair of jeans and an off-white Henley. Walking through the flat and not finding Keaton, she felt a little deflated. Entering the kitchen, she saw a piece of paper and what looked like a creased check on the kitchen table.\n\nDear Remi, I'm sorry I have to leave. My friend Stryker called and needs me to pick him up from urgent care. I wish I could have stayed until you woke up; I really do. I hope that you are feeling better this morning. I'm going to have a talk with Rolf later today to make sure he doesn't bother you again.\n\nAlso, I never got to leave my check for the building fund at the Gala, so I hope it is okay to leave it with you. Please reach out if you need anything. Keaton\n\nRemi looked at the check and almost fainted. She never expected so much. A million sol was the equivalent of about a quarter of a million U.S. dollars. The Import/Export business must be very lucrative." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 232", + "text": "\"Professor Navarro, may I speak with you?\" Angela, one of her chemistry students stayed after class.\n\n\"Yes of course, Angela. What's up?\"\n\n\"I have been too afraid to tell anyone until now, but I think I might know something about Elena's disappearance.\"\n\n\"Sit down Angela and tell me what you know.\" Remi took her arm and directed her to the teacher's chair while she sat on the edge of the desk.\n\n\"Professor Navarro, I think I know where she went after class and tutoring. She met this guy... he was older than she. She had been sneaking around to see him for a couple of weeks. I saw them getting into a black Cadillac Escalade. Maybe she ran off with him.\"\n\n\"Angela, is there a reason why you didn't tell the police about this?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm sorry to say, and now ashamed I didn't say anything. I had told my parents I was going to be studying with Mariana and then spending the night with her. But I didn't. I stayed with my boyfriend because his parents had left for a week.\"\n\n\"All right Angela. I'm glad you told me. I think I have a friend that can help me with this. Try not to worry now and I will get back to you in a few days.\" Remi gave the girl a hug and sent her on her way. Quickly she looked up the phone number for Springfield Exports.\n\n\"Springfield Exports. How may I help you?\"\n\n\"May I speak to Keaton Springfield please?\"\n\n\"Yes, would you mind giving me your name?\"\n\nRemi told the receptionist who she was and before she knew it, Keaton was on the line.\n\n\"Remi, I'm so glad you called. I felt terrible leaving you Sunday morning.\n\n\"Keaton, you did more than I ever expected. Thank you and thank you for the very generous donation to the building fund. I also have another reason for calling. Could you possibly meet me this evening? I want to get your input on how to handle something I learned today, which may be related to the girls who disappeared.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. Where would you like to meet?\"\n\n\"How about dinner at Caf\u00e9 Museo Larco? Do you know it?\"\n\n\"You have good taste, Remi. How does 6:00 p.m. sound?\"\n\n\"Sounds perfect. I'll see you there. Bye Keaton.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 233", + "text": "Where did the day go? Remi had to hustle if she were going home to change, then meet Keaton at the Caf\u00e9 Museo Larco in a couple of hours. As she was dashing out the door to grab her scooter, her cell phone rang. Annoyed she answered, \"Hello. This is Remi.\"\n\n\"Remi,\" this is Mother Superior. I was wondering if you could stop by my office before you leave.\"\n\n\"Oh, I am so sorry Mother Superior, I already left. How about tomorrow morning before my first class?\" Remi didn't think the little white lie would land her in hell, at least not yet.\n\n\"All right Remi. I'll see you at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. Hope you have a good evening.\"\n\nThe scooter cranked at the very first try and then Remi was off, flying through the afternoon traffic like a Peruvian veteran. She made it home in fifteen minutes, unlocked her door, flew up the stairs, and started disrobing before she got to the shower. Ten minutes later she climbed out of the shower, ran a comb through her hair, wrapped a towel around her and went to her closet to choose an outfit. She took out three to mull over as she put in her contacts and makeup.\n\nWhat difference does it make what I wear? She won't care, but I wish she would. Remi picked up the first outfit, turned it around on the hanger, and threw it down. Lord no. That looks like a burlap sack. The next one she picked up was a navy businesslike suit. It looked great on her, but she didn't really want this to be a business meeting, even though that was exactly what it was. Nope. Finally, she looked at the third ensemble. Yes! The suede! The straight skirt was heather green suede and fell to her mid-calf. Perfect with my brown suede high boots. The matching jacket was as soft as butter and perfect for the cooler weather. She layered it with a simple white, deeply cut V-neck top. Perfect!\n\nRemi pulled out a wide belt that matched her boots and picked out a pair of conservative earrings and necklace that hung perfectly on her chest just above the V-neck of her top. After putting on her Tag Heuer watch, a gift from her father, she gave herself a final once over in front of the mirror. She sighed loudly and summoned up a little self-assurance as she left the flat to wait for the ride share she had arranged earlier in the day.\n\nIt wasn't a long ride to the Caf\u00e9 Museo Larco. She arrived with plenty of time to spare and decided to go into the attached museum and browse before going into the restaurant. However, the period paintings that had been curated in the museum were not to her liking, so she walked over to the restaurant, gave her name to the hostess, and took a chair to wait for Keaton.\n\nKeaton burst through the doors like a whirling little dirt devil that was so common in New Mexico. She seemed a bit frazzled. She caught Remi's eye and briskly walked over to her apologizing for being late.\n\nShe looks so good. Okay Keaton, focus.\n\n\"Keaton, you are only five minutes late. I think I can forgive that,\" Remi joked.\n\nThe hostess noticed that Remi's companion had arrived and invited them to follow her to their reserved table.\n\n\"Is this table okay for you, Keaton?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's great. I like that it is tucked away from the main traffic. I think it will be okay to talk. Don't you?\" Keaton waited for Remi to respond.\n\n\"Yes, I'm comfortable here.\"\n\nA server, with a printed name tag announcing he was Antonio, came by, filled their water glasses, gave them menus, and asked if they would like a bottle of wine or perhaps they would prefer a pisco sour. They both said \"wine\" at the same time then began to peruse the wine and dinner menus.\n\nAntonio told them he would give them a minute to decide on their dinner choices and then he could recommend a wine.\n\nWhen he came back, both Keaton and Remi were ready to order. Remi chose a grilled sea bass in brown butter with risotto. Keaton chose a shredded duck leg accompanied by a pumpkin risotto. Before Antonio could suggest a wine, Keaton told him to bring a bottle of the Peruvian Tacama Gran Blanco. She turned her head to Remi and asked, \"Okay?\" Remi nodded and Antonio disappeared.\n\nThe noise of the busy restaurant fell away, and they were both silent, neither knowing how to start the conversation, yet neither one finding a need to fill the silence with idle chatter. They seemed to be lost in watching each other or maybe in their own daydreams.\n\nKeaton smiled at Remi deciding that the only course of action was to help Remi feel comfortable enough to tell her what she had learned.\n\n\"Remi, you look absolutely lovely tonight. That color compliments your eyes beautifully.\"\n\nBlushing, Remi answered a simple \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Remi, you said that one of the girls in your class told you she knew something about the disappearance of one of her classmates. Tell me about it.\"\n\nRemi, looked around the immediate area, leaned across the table and lowered her voice. God, I can't concentrate around her. Concentrate, Remi.\n\n\"Keaton, I don't know how this will help the police, but since you asked me if I had been involved in the police investigation, I thought I would share with you what one of the students told me and see if you could tell me the best course of action. You have been here much longer than I.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. I'm glad to help. Tell me what she told you.\" Keaton's attention kept wandering to Remi's neck. She couldn't quite figure out what kept drawing her to look at the left side of her neck. Hey, you wanted her to talk. Pay attention.\n\n\"This morning, before I called you, one of the students, Angela, asked to talk to me. She told me that the night one of the girls disappeared, she saw Elena, with a man she had been seeing for a couple of weeks. They got into a black Escalade and drove off. I asked her why she didn't tell the police this and she told me that she was afraid her parents would find out that she stayed late at school and then went to spend the night with her boyfriend instead of her study partner.\"\n\n\"Remi, was there anything else?\"\n\n\"No, but I got the impression she might be able to identify him if she saw him again. Keaton, what should I do with this information?\"\n\n\"I have a friend in the police department. I'll talk with him and we'll go from there. Is that okay Remi? Will that work for you?\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, it will, Keaton. I don't know how to thank you. That takes a load off my mind.\"\n\nAntonio returned with the bottle of wine, uncorked it and Keaton tasted it. She nodded her head and Antonio poured them a glass.\n\nThey chatted easily now that the ice was broken, and they tossed questions about each other back and forth until Antonio served their dinners. Over dinner, Keaton noticed that Remi kept touching her neck and finally decided to ask.\n\n\"Remi, I see a mark or something on your neck and you keep touching it. What is it? You can tell me.\"\n\nRemi took a deep breath and said, \"Finger marks. The ones Rolf left behind. I've covered them with makeup, but all that does is cover them up. My neck is still tender.\"\n\nKeaton felt the anger rise and take control of her. How could that brute do that to this sweet woman? I just hope he gives me a reason to kill him. Remi watched her closely, seeing her eyes burn, but said nothing. Keaton got her murderous rage under control, leaned toward Remi, and took her hand across the table. It was intimate and they both knew it.\n\n\"Oh god Remi. I am so sorry. You must go to Mother Superior and tell her, show her what happened. If you want, I will go with you. Please don't let him get away with this. Remember, you had a witness. Promise me, Remi.\"\n\n\"How can I possibly tell Mother Superior? She's his aunt?\"\n\n\"Remi, you have to tell her. I bet you she will be in your corner. Trust me on this. I know I'm right.\"\n\n\"All right Keaton. I'll think about it tonight.\" How can I resist Keaton's impassioned plea?\n\n\"Will you call me and let me know how it goes?\"\n\n\"Of course. Now how about some dessert?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 234", + "text": "During dessert, Remi entertained Keaton with her students' antics and the politics of the University.\n\n\"You know, Keaton, I never thought there could be so much politicking at a University. Boy was I wrong. You either get dragged into it, or if you can resist, the minute your back is turned, you get stabbed.\n\n\"Do you get dragged into it, Remi?\"\n\n\"Pretty much they leave me alone. I'm kind of the wild card and they can't figure out where my loyalties lie.\"\n\nRemi looked up and saw a sexy, dark haired woman closing in on Keaton. If flashing eyes and a fake smile meant trouble, the woman was a walking time bomb.\n\n\"Is this your work?\" The woman demanded.\n\nKeaton stood. \"Carmen Tacona this is my friend Professor Remi Navarro. Remi was the keynote speaker at Saturday night's fund raiser for the nursing college at the Pontifica Universidad.\"\n\nCarmen calmed and was civil. \"I'm pleased to meet you Professor Navarro.\"\n\n\"You remember the fundraiser?\" Keaton continued. \"You were supposed to meet me there but never showed up.\"\n\nCarmen look properly chastised and Remi's heart fell into her stomach. She is far too familiar with Keaton, she thought.\n\n\"However, I'm certain Professor Navarro will be happy to accept your check right here, tonight.\"\n\nCarmen's eyes flashed again, and a seductive smile played on her full lips. \"And what will I get for my check?\"\n\n\"Professor Navarro's undying gratitude.\" Keaton smiled sweetly.\n\nWhy don't you two get a room, Remi thought controlling her own temper.\n\n\"What if I want more than the professor's gratitude?\" Carmen flashed perfect white teeth and sensually raked her teeth over her lower lip.\n\n\"Why don't you match my donation and see?\" Keaton lowered her head and looked up at Carmen through long lashes.\n\nDamn, that's the most adorable little girl look I've ever seen, Remi thought squirming in her chair.\n\nWithout breaking her gaze with Keaton, Carmen pulled a checkbook from her purse. \"How much for what I want?\"\n\n\"Springfield Exports donated this amount,\" Keaton pulled a pen from her jacket pocket and wrote a figure on the napkin.\n\nCarmen glanced at the seven-figure donation. Without a blink she wrote a check for the same amount and handed it to Remi. Remi glanced at the check. It was from Buenaventura Mining, Peru's largest silver mine.\n\n\"This is very generous of you Miss Tacona. Thank you,\" Remi said as she thought, I'd tear it up if I knew it would guarantee you won't have Keaton in your bed tonight.\n\n\"Carmen and her family are very supportive of the Universities in Lima,\" Keaton pointed out. \"I believe one of your buildings is named after her father.\"\n\nTurning her attention back to Carmen, Keaton said, \"If you'll forgive us, Professor Navarro and I were discussing important business matters and it looks like most of your friends have found their way to the bar without you. I believe that one is most antsy about your absence.\" Keaton nodded toward a tall, skinny redhead who was glaring at Carmen and Keaton.\n\nCarmen waved her hand to indicate how insignificant her date was. \"You were busy,\" she huffed at Keaton.\n\n\"So, any port in the storm, eh?\" Keaton snickered signaling for the server to bring their check. \"I must see Professor Navarro home.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 235", + "text": "\"I need to call a ride share or taxi,\" Remi said as they stood by the table.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Keaton exclaimed. \"If you don't mind riding in a Jeep, I'd be delighted to take you home.\"\n\nRemi's heart sang. \"I love Jeeps,\" she murmured.\n\nKeaton slid her hand down Remi's back coming to rest at the small of her back and gently guided her through the now crowded restaurant.\n\nKeaton's hand on Remi's back sent fire shooting in all directions through her body. Remi prayed her knees wouldn't buckle. God I want to be with her, but it is obvious she is involved. She tried to drive from her mind the thoughts of Keaton's firm hands and long fingers strumming her body but failed miserably." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 236", + "text": "Keaton turned to Remi, \"You don't live very far from here if I recall correctly\".\n\n\"You have a good memory, Keaton. Do you need the address again?\"\n\n\"No thank you. Once I have been to a location, I can easily find my way back.\"\n\n\"Seems like a handy skill to have. I'm just beginning to feel comfortable finding my way around the city,\" answered Remi.\n\n\"Perhaps you will let me show you around sometime. I like making new friends.\"\n\nRemi's stomach fell to her feet and clawed its way back up. Well that settles it. She definitely is off the market. Remi answered politely, \"Thank you Keaton, but I rarely have time for sightseeing.\" Remi turned toward the passenger window and didn't say another word until Keaton turned into her driveway.\n\nKeaton felt the icy silence and knew exactly what was wrong but didn't have a clue how to handle it. She was sure that Remi had realized Carmen and she were involved, and as much as she would like to extricate herself from Carmen's talons, she knew she couldn't; not yet at least. She was also reasonably sure that Remi was interested in her more than in a friendly way. And then, a miracle happened.\n\nRemi turned to her, thanked her for the ride, and asked if she would like to come up for a night cap.\n\nKeaton didn't have to think twice. \"Yes, I would, and I want to explain what you witnessed tonight.\"\n\n\"Remi said, \"You don't owe me an explanation. Your life is your life and you don't have to justify it to me or anyone else.\"\n\n\"But I want to; I need to explain. Please?\"\n\nRemi began walking to the door and stopping to look over her shoulder at Keaton. \"Are you coming?\"\n\nKeaton made a beeline to the door and stepped inside as soon as Remi opened it.\n\nRemi took Keaton's coat and her own jacket, hung them in a small coat closet near the top of the stairs. \"What would you like to drink? I have whiskey, as you know, pisco, cerveza, and a Malbec from Chile.\"\n\n\"The Malbec please. Is there anything I can do to help?\"\n\n\"No Keaton, make yourself comfortable.\"\n\nA moment later Remi came into the living room and joined Keaton on the lumpy couch. Keaton could not resist.\n\n\"Why do you keep this lumpy couch? Did the flat come furnished?\"\n\n\"Yes, It did, but honestly, I just haven't gotten around to exchanging it. I've only been here six months and I have been working nonstop at the University.\"\n\nKeaton nodded her head, sipped from her glass, and decided to push forward. \"Remi, why did you invite me up here tonight? It was obvious you were upset with me.\"\n\n\"I was annoyed with the situation, and I want to apologize to you. May I be honest?\"\n\n\"Please do.\"\n\n\"Do you remember the night of the gala, the night you saved me from that despicable Rolf?\"\n\n\"Yes of course. How could I forget? Have you decided to tell Mother Superior?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have a meeting at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, but let's not get off track. Keaton, do you remember what he said when he left?\"\n\n\"I think he threatened me, right?\"\n\n\"Yes Keaton, but he also said that you wanted me for yourself, that he had heard rumors.\" Remi waited, curious to see if Keaton would admit that she remembered.\n\n\"I do remember, Remi. I'm surprised you did.\"\n\n\"From the very first moment I met you Keaton, I felt an inexplicable connection to you and the night you stayed here to take care of me, I thought you might have felt it too. Even tonight, until your, ah, friend came, I thought we were connecting. Was I wrong?\"\n\n\"No. You weren't wrong. I've been powerfully drawn to you, but I didn't know you felt the same, until just now.\"\n\n\"I would like to see you, explore this, um, \"thing\" between us, but I can't, no I won't as long as you are with someone else, Keaton.\"\n\nKeaton seemed to deflate right in front of Remi, who sat immobile while Keaton determined what she was going to say, if anything at all.\n\nKeaton moved closer to Remi and took both her hands in hers. \"I want the same thing, but the situation with Carmen is complicated.\"\n\n\"Aren't they all? She's a boor and you know it. Why are you with her?\"\n\n\"I'm not really with her. She thinks she is with me.\"\n\n\"Keaton, what does that even mean?\"\n\n\"Remi, I'm not going to lie to you. Having an association with Carmen has been advantageous to my line of business.\" But not the one you know about. \"I have been trying to let her down easy, but she just won't take no for an answer.\"\n\n\"Are you in love with her?\" Remi pulled her hands back.\n\n\"No. No. It's never been like that for me and clearly it isn't like that for her.\" Keaton took a big gulp from her glass.\n\n\"Then why? I just don't understand.\" Remi shook her head from side to side.\n\n\"I can't explain right now, but I want you to believe me when I say that she means nothing to me.\"\n\nRemi got up and paced, whirling around in front of Keaton. \"That's what a lot of people say. How many times have I heard, \"It's just sex, she means nothing to me?\"\n\nKeaton captured Remi's hand and pulled her towards her. \"I know you don't have any reason to believe me. I get that, but I beg you to give me time to fix this.\"\n\nRemi let Keaton hold on to her hand, thought a moment, and said, \"You can't have it both ways. You know where I am when you make up your mind, but don't take too long. I don't have much patience for cowards!\"\n\nKeaton dropped Remi's hand, the words feeling as sharp as any slap ever was. She had two choices. She could storm out and leave Remi in the dust, or she could be understanding hoping that somehow Remi would reconsider.\n\nGetting up, Keaton thanked Remi for the nightcap, retrieved her jacket and said goodnight. She had descended one step, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at Remi, whose hand was still on Keaton's shoulder.\n\n\"Keaton, this isn't casual for me. I just wanted you to know.\" Remi bent her head, placed a tender kiss on Keaton's cheek, and said goodnight. She followed Keaton to the door and locked it behind her. Well that couldn't have gone any worse. She sighed and headed to bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 237", + "text": "Keaton walked to her jeep and sat down. One thing was certain, Remi liked women. She even liked her. Keaton fought the urge to bang on Remi's door, make her promises and make love to her. But she knew she couldn't. Things weren't that simple where Carmen was concerned.\n\nKeaton had been undercover associating with drug and human traffickers for so long she sometimes forgot that a world made up of Remi Navarros even existed.\n\nShe liked Remi's no-nonsense truthfulness. The brunette's straight forward approach to their relationship had surprised her. \"I like Remi Navarro very much,\" she said out loud. \"But I don't dare tell her the truth.\"\n\nThe truth would put too many people in harm's way. If the traps the department had been setting the past year were ever made public a lot of undercover drug enforcement officers would lose their lives. Keaton had to play the role assigned to her or endanger others. No matter how badly she wanted Remi Navarro, she could never speak of tomorrow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 238", + "text": "Remi marched into Mother Superior's office at 7:55 a.m. ready to say \"no\" to whatever she wanted now. Sister Clara said good morning and waved Remi in.\n\nRemi was astounded to find Mother Superior in civvies and even more surprised when she saw Keaton fixing coffee.\n\n\"Remi, come in. I take it you know Ms. Springfield?\"\n\nRemi was speechless and wasn't sure she could recover from both shocks. Mother Superior was dressed in a black pant suit and white button-down blouse, looking pretty sharp. Her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail at the back of her neck. Do nuns even have long hair? I thought they chopped it all off. All in all, she was a reasonably attractive woman, though Remi couldn't get over the \"nun\" part. It seemed counter intuitive to think of a nun as a woman.\n\nKeaton was standing to the side like a cat who had just swallowed a canary. What is going on here? Remi mused.\n\n\"Good morning Remi,\" Keaton said as she handed her a cup of coffee. \"I'm sorry to surprise you like this, but I thought you might want someone to back up what happened to you at the Gala.\"\n\nRemi's eyes threw daggers at Keaton but pulled herself together enough to politely thank her for the coffee.\n\n\"What's this situation that happened at the Gala? Please enlighten me?\" Mother Superior asked.\n\n\"Mother Superior, there is no gentle way to say this. I wish there were. Rolf got very drunk and assaulted me in the coat room. If Ms. Springfield had not come along when she did, he would have raped me.\"\n\nMother Superior was shocked. \"Are you sure you didn't misinterpret his actions, Remi?\"\n\n\"No. Absolutely not. The marks of his fingers on my neck are still visible.\" Remi rolled down the turtleneck sweater she had worn and approached Mother Superior, who tentatively touched the bruises and turned pale.\n\n\"Ms. Springfield, you were there? You witnessed this?\" Mother Superior was ashen.\n\n\"Yes, I did. It was exactly how Professor Navarro described it. I pulled him away, brought him to his knees and told him to leave her alone. He left and I took Professor Navarro home.\"\n\n\"Damn it! That boy is going to be the death of me. I'm so sorry Remi that this happened to you. I will see to it that it never happens again. I thought he had grown up and would treat you like a gentleman, but obviously I was wrong.\"\n\nKeaton asked Remi, \"Do you want to press charges?\"\n\nMother Superior visibly paled even more. She stuttered while saying, \"Let's keep this in house and I promise I will take care of this and make it up to you.\"\n\nRemi didn't want the hassle and nodded her head in agreement. She remembered Carmen's check and passed it to Mother Superior. \"Ms. Springfield convinced Ms. Tacona to donate to the building fund. Here is her check. Now may I leave?\"\n\nMother Superior accepted the check and looked at it. \"Ms. Springfield, you must be an excellent persuader to have Ms. Tacona match your company's donation.\"\n\n\"Glad I could help Mother Superior. If you don't mind, I need to take my leave. It was a pleasure to see you again.\"\n\nMother Superior shook her hand and walked her to the door while Remi uncomfortably waited in the hot seat.\n\n\"Remi, please let me say that I am appalled at my nephew's behavior and rest assured that I will take care of it. I'd like to try and make this up to you. Would you like to accompany me to the Peruvian Paso Horse Show and Competition this weekend? It really is a marvelous event, and everyone should attend once in their life. What do you say?\"\n\nRemi knew if she turned Mother Superior down, it would be a huge insult, so she agreed, excused herself, and made her way to her classroom before another disaster befell her. She was surprised to find Keaton waiting in the hallway outside her classroom.\n\n\"Remi,\" Keaton spoke softly, \"may I have a moment of your time?\"\n\nRemi made a show of studying her watch then said, \"My class starts in five minutes.\"\n\n\"Remi, I would very much like to date you,\" Keaton ducked her head and looked at Remi through long lashes. Dear God, did you have to let her look at me that way, Remi thought as her stomach performed a double pike.\n\n\"I know you have reservations about me, but please get to know me before you mark my name off your dance card.\"\n\nRemi ducked her head trying to hide the smile that threatened to spread across her face. Damn she is so cute.\n\n\"I thought that perhaps\u2014\" Keaton faltered. \"That maybe you could accompany me to the President's Ball in celebration of the opening of the annual Peruvian horse show. I have an invitation for a plus one and I thought you might enjoy the festivities. Err not as a date, of course, that sort of thing is frowned on in high places. Just as a friend.\"\n\nRemi watched Keaton's lips as she spoke. She had never wanted to kiss anyone so badly in her life. \"I assumed you would be escorting Carmen,\" Remi lashed out.\n\n\"I have no desire to escort Carmen.\"\n\n\"Did she collect her pound of flesh for her donation?\" Remi couldn't stop her bitter tirade.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Keaton mumbled. \"It appears I've made a mistake.\" She turned on her heel and walked away.\n\nRemi watched her. There goes the woman of my dreams, she thought.\n\n\"Keaton,\" she called, \"I'd love to be your date for the ball.\"\n\nKeaton turned to face her as the school bell clanged and nodded as a huge smile spread over her face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 239", + "text": "Beatriz stormed through the doors of Berger Shipping. She was livid and it showed. Everyone quickly moved out of her way as she headed toward Rolf's office. She barged past Rolf's secretary, flung open the door, and yelled, \"What the hell is the matter with you? Are you a complete imbecilic moron?\" She leveled her gaze at him and spat out, \"Pendejo.\"\n\nRolf stood, nonplused, and said, \"Auntie what are you doing here and in civvies too?\"\n\n\"Rolf, you good for nothing imitation of a man, don't pretend you don't know why I'm here. Your behavior was appalling.\"\n\nSmiling like a Cheshire cat, Rolf said, \"To what are you referring, Auntie?\"\n\n\"I don't have time for games and if you do, I'm going to go directly to my brother about this.\" Mother Superior's chest was heaving.\n\n\"All right Auntie Beatriz don't get your panties in a ruffle. I just had a little too much to drink and misread your precious Professor Navarro's signals. It won't happen again. I'll stay away from her.\"\n\n\"Rolf, you did not misread Professor Navarro's signals. There was a witness, one of our largest donors that came to my office to corroborate the assault. Now, I'm going to have to bend over backwards to repair this, especially if she decides to press charges or even worse report it to her Peace Corp bosses.\"\n\n\"Auntie, you are making too big a deal of this. Water under the bridge.\"\n\n\"Listen to me you sniveling brat, you are going to do exactly as I say, or I am going to make sure that you no longer have a place in this company.\"\n\n\"Okay. Okay. What do you want?\"\n\nMother Superior outlined her plan which included a letter of apology and a huge bouquet of flowers delivered to the University. She shoved him out of the way and left as forcefully as she had entered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 240", + "text": "Keaton called Remi that evening to tell her the date and time of the ball. \"It's formal.\" Wanting to impress on Remi how formal the ball would be she added, \"I'll be wearing a Trumpet/Mermaid off the shoulder evening dress with beading sequins and heels, of course.\"\n\n\"What color?\" Remi asked.\n\n\"White.\"\n\n\"I'll be sure to wear a different color, so we don't look like the Bobbsey Twins,\" Remi giggled.\n\nKeaton laughed out loud happy to hear Remi's giggle. \"I'll pick you up at 6:30 p.m.\"\n\nRemi hung up the phone in a tizzy. She had nothing to wear. She hoped she could hire Sister Clara's niece and pay it out over time. I must wear a dark purple dress or maybe navy blue, she thought. She hugged herself then thought how good it would feel to have Keaton's arms around her. She fell asleep planning things that would steal Keaton's heart and make her forget Carmen Tacona." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 241", + "text": "The next morning Remi approached Sister Clara and spoke with her about the ball dress. Sister Clara shook her head and said, \"Child, my niece can sew for most events, but the President's Ball is a different story all together. I don't think she sews that spectacularly. I'm afraid you would be embarrassed but let me show you something breathtaking. It was donated last year by the American ambassador's wife who has returned to the states. She only wore it once. It is from The Dress Boutique in Miraflores. It is custom made and exquisite!\"\n\n\"What color is it?\" Remi asked following the old woman to the back of her office.\n\n\"Deep Purple with exquisite beading on the bodice. It will look stunning on you.\"\n\nRemi caught her breath when Sister Clara unzipped the bag protecting the dress. It was indeed unique. \"Oh, Sister Clara it is beautiful.\"\n\n\"And it looks like just your size,\" Clara noted. \"I've been saving this dress for someone special going to a significant event. You fit the bill. Take it home and try it on. If it needs adjustments, my niece can help with that.\"\n\n\"I should pay for it,\" Remi insisted. \"The school could sell this for a great deal of money.\"\n\n\"Ridiculous,\" Sister Clara hissed. \"You wear it to the President's Ball, have it dry cleaned, and return it to me. The school will still get its money. Please take it.\"\n\nRemi nodded her head and took the dress." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 242", + "text": "Stryker walked around the body and shook his head as he pushed the button on his cellphone designated as boss. Keaton answered on the first ring.\n\n\"Gallegos is dead,\" Stryker said. \"You'd better come.\"\n\n\"Damn! Where are you.\"\n\nStryker gave Keaton the address. I'll wait until you get here to call Mattie,\" he added. \"You might want to bring a barf bag. It isn't pretty.\"\n\n\"On my way.\" Keaton hung up searching for an excuse to give her uncle for leaving. She walked into Ava's office as the secretary was transferring a call to Lucho. My lucky day she thought.\n\n\"Ava, when Uncle Lucho gets off the phone, please tell him I had to make a sales call.\"\n\nAva nodded and Keaton sprinted from the office to her jeep before Lucho could get off the phone and catch her.\n\nStryker was waiting for her in one of the seedier parts of Lima. The body was on the roof of an apartment building surrounded by other crumbling structures.\n\nKeaton made her way through garbage thrown on the roof from surrounding buildings and found Stryker standing over the remains of a man she guessed to be over three hundred pounds.\n\n\"Tiny Gallegos,\" Stryker said.\n\n\"He's the muscle for Buenaventura Mining.\" Keaton noted. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"The tenant heard something heavy hit the roof and came up to see what it was.\"\n\nKeaton looked around noting the roof was surrounded by taller buildings. \"Let's call Mattie. You know how bent she gets if we rifle a corpse before she has a chance to look at it.\"\n\nStryker laughed as he pulled out his phone to call. \"I sure do.\"\n\nThey walked around the roof looking at debris that had been tossed onto it. \"I can't believe they throw their trash onto the roof,\" Stryker commented as he nudged a sack of garbage with the toe of his boot.\n\n\"Lima is so crowded,\" Keaton pointed out. \"Over eleven million people. That's seven thousand people per square mile. That's staggering.\"\n\n\"Yeah, they can't control the traffic nor the garbage,\" Stryker noted.\n\n\"Any guess from which one of the rooftops Tiny was chucked?\" Keaton asked. \"How in the world did he land right in the center of this roof?\"\n\n\"Maybe he wasn't tossed off a roof. Maybe he was placed here,\" Stryker surmised.\n\n\"Do you see how flat he is?\" Keaton pointed out. \"I'll bet a month's pay every bone in his body is broken indicating he was thrown onto this roof.\"\n\nThe door to the roof opened and Lima's Chief Medical Examiner Mattie Ramos and her entourage joined them. \"Bag everything on this roof,\" Mattie instructed her team.\n\nShe turned her attention to the two DEA officers. \"Thanks for making me the garbage collector today.\"\n\n\"We didn't kill him Mattie,\" Stryker defended. \"I guess it is a good way to get the garbage cleaned up from one's roof. Throw a body on it and the coroner's office cleans the roof.\"\n\n\"Do you know who he is?\" she asked as she lifted Tiny's jacket to get to the inside pocket.\n\n\"Tiny Gallegos,\" Keaton answered. \"He works for Buenaventura Mining.\"\n\nShe checked the wallet she pulled from his pocket and nodded in agreement. \"What's this?\" She held up one of the chess pawns Keaton had tossed between the dead bodies of the human traffickers.\n\n\"A turf war,\" Keaton huffed.\n\n\"They're beginning to kill off each other.\" Mattie grinned. \"Life is good.\"\n\n\"Mattie do you have any idea how the body could land right in the center of this roof?\" Keaton asked.\n\nMattie looked around. \"He wasn't thrown from the buildings surrounding this one. Give my team a chance to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb and I'll let you know what I conclude.\" She slid her hands under Tiny. \"Judging from the jelly-like consistency of the body, I can tell you he is pulverized.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 243", + "text": "Keaton looked at herself in the mirror one more time and thought, Dress to die for, check. Blonde hair anyone would want to spread out on a pillow, check. Heels guaranteed to make legs look even longer, check.\n\nShe suppressed her thoughts of Remi slowly unzipping her dress, slipping off her shoes and admiring her silky blonde hair as the she leaned above her.\n\nShe had invited Remi to a function guaranteed to keep Keaton on her best behavior." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 244", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "", + "author": "Johanna Lindsey", + "genres": [ + "Callahan-Warren 3" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "\"I don't think she's going to stop crying, even for this party,\" Sophie warned Violet as she returned to the bedroom the two girls shared.\n\nViolet Mitchell sighed, knowing Sophie was talking about her aunt Elizabeth, Sophie's mother. But then Violet put her arm around her cousin's shoulders and squeezed gently. She was good at consoling, good at mothering, too, having tried to be a mother to her two brothers when they were all still children.\n\n\"She doesn't want me to go,\" Violet remarked.\n\n\"None of us want you to go!\"\n\n\"She shouldn't have arranged this party, which is just going to remind her that I'm sailing back to America in the morning.\"\n\n\"If only that letter hadn't arrived four days ago,\" Sophie said in a grouchy tone. \"If it had come next week, you would at least have been here for the first ball of the Season. I can't believe you're going to miss them all!\"\n\nViolet was going to start crying herself in a moment. She had so looked forward to the festivities this summer and sharing them with Sophie. She and her cousin had both turned eighteen this year, Violet last month, Sophie in early spring. Violet had continued to grow this year, ending up at five feet seven inches, while Sophie was quite petite at only five foot three. And Elizabeth had spared no expense in having beautiful wardrobes made for both of them.\n\nViolet had lived with her aunt and uncle and their large brood of children these last nine years, ever since Aunt Elizabeth had come to America and visited Philadelphia, where she and Violet's mother had been born, and swooped into the Mitchell household insisting that Violet was returning to London with her to live with her and her husband, Lord Edmund Faulkner, and their six daughters. Violet's father, Charles, hadn't protested too much.\n\nViolet actually understood why her father was relieved to have her taken off his hands. Raising a daughter without his wife, who had died of consumption a few years after Violet was born, had probably been a bit much for him. Her brothers, Daniel and Evan, hadn't protested either. They didn't exactly enjoy her bossing them around, but with no mother to guide the rambunctious boys, Violet had taken it upon herself to assume a motherly role toward her brothers, even though they were two years older than she. But there had been no one to mother her, and by the age of nine, she'd definitely felt that lack. So she hadn't protested much either when she'd been told she would be leaving her immediate family and moving to London. It had been hard trying to be a mother. Yet the behavior had been ingrained in her by then, and she'd done her fair share of bossing her cousins in England, too. But at least they didn't mind. They called it her being American!\n\n\"You should be happy for me,\" Violet remarked. \"It will be wonderful to see Papa and my brothers again. You don't think I've missed them?\"\n\n\"You never mentioned it, so, no, it's not something I gave much thought to.\"\n\nViolet tried teasing: \"If I've learned anything from you Brits, it's to keep unpleasant emotions under wraps.\"\n\n\"As my mother is currently doing, flooding her bedroom with tears?\"\n\nThey both smiled before Violet continued, \"You know what I mean. And you, my girl, have kept me too busy and entertained to darken your moods by sharing those occasional twinges of sadness I've felt when thinking about my brothers and father. But I wrote to them weekly, and while the boys aren't as good about replying as I would have liked, I understand that they have other things on their minds besides writing letters. And I know my father hates writing. I was lucky to get eight letters from him in all the years I've been here, but he always had the boys include a few lines from him in their letters. And at least they all visited twice.\"\n\n\"They should have come more often.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised there was even a second visit five years ago, considering how terribly Papa and Evan suffered with seasickness on the first voyage.\"\n\n\"Oh, I forgot about that. Still, they should have braved it for your come-out. If you hadn't sent them that portrait of you last year, they probably would have, just to see for themselves how you turned out, seasickness or no.\"\n\n\"Stop being annoyed for my sake when I'm not. I told them not to come again, that I would visit them instead. They might have enjoyed touring London, but they already did that twice\u2014and while they would never say so, I don't think they were all that comfortable with the formality of British society. But mainly, I felt too guilty that my father and Evan had to suffer like that both coming here and returning home. And I did plan to visit them this year, just not this soon. I probably shouldn't have mentioned that I hoped to bring a fianc\u00e9 with me. They weren't very happy about that.\"\n\n\"Did you really tell them that?\" Sophie squealed happily.\n\n\"Why wouldn't I? Your mother has been talking to us both about this particular Season for years, so, yes, I thought it was something that might happen, and I shared that with my family. After all, your mother expected us both to get engaged this Season.\"\n\n\"What exactly did your father say about it?\"\n\n\"Nothing yet. There were no lines from Papa in that reply, or in this last vague letter. But Papa will want me to be happy, so I expect to receive his permission to marry an Englishman when the time comes. In any case, it will be sorted out when I get home.\"\n\nSophie suddenly gasped. \"Is that why they want you home immediately? They are afraid to lose you to an English husband?\"\n\nViolet frowned for a moment as she considered that possibility, but then shook her head. \"No, they wouldn't dare try to pull a ruse like that. Daniel just wrote that it was urgent and sounded desperate about it.\"\n\n\"Yet failed to mention what is so urgent,\" Sophie reminded her in pique.\n\nViolet sighed. \"I'm sure he meant to explain, but he did mention that Evan had warned him not to write me about whatever is going on, so Daniel probably rushed the letter off so Evan wouldn't find out about it. He might have thought he did explain better than simply saying, It's urgent, Vi. Only you can fix this.\"\n\n\"But you will return soon, won't you? You're good at fixing things, so it shouldn't take you long a'tall to fix whatever is wrong and be on the next ship back to us. Then you won't miss all of the Season. And bring your brothers back with you, your father, too. It's been five years, and we're their family, too!\"\n\n\"I'll ask them, but there's no guarantee I'll be back before the end of this Season, not when it takes three to four weeks just to cross the ocean. Tonight I should be finishing my packing, not socializing. Shall we see if your mother is ready to go downstairs? I hope she didn't invite many people to this bon voyage party.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't count on that, Cousin. The Season does start next week. Besides, a lot of the ton lives in London as we do and others come early to make sure the hostesses know they are in town. At least you will meet a few of them tonight.\"\n\nViolet laughed. \"I'm going to meet them just to say good-bye?\"\n\n\"No, no, you can assure them you'll be back soon. Or not tell them a'tall. Mama didn't exactly mention this is a good-bye party in the invitations, she just so wanted you to enjoy at least one party before you sail off tomorrow. And you're so pretty, Vi. You were destined to break some hearts this summer. And no, I'm not the least bit jealous. You can only have one, after all. There will be plenty of young gentlemen to go around. And maybe you'll meet the one you want tonight. Wouldn't that be splendid! You'll be yearning to return quickly,\" Sophie ended with a laugh.\n\n\"But the packing\u2014\"\n\n\"Is mostly done and the servants will finish that while we're downstairs. There's no help for it, Cousin. You're destined to simply enjoy yourself tonight.\"\n\nEnjoy herself? Violet thought. Maybe if she hadn't been worried about her brothers and her father since Daniel's letter had arrived four days ago. And maybe if she didn't feel like crying herself because she had to say good-bye to her family here whom she'd come to love so much. But she'd been keeping these feelings to herself, mostly. If she'd learned anything during her stay with the Faulkners, it was how to put on a good face for all occasions.\n\nAunt Elizabeth did that now. She'd dried her tears before Sophie knocked on her door and offered a brilliant smile as she looked over her two favorite girls. Sophie was blond and blue-eyed and wearing an evening gown of palest aqua. Violet was also blond but favored lilac, the color of many of her new gowns, since it went so well with her dark-violet eyes. Tonight's gown was trimmed in white satin and she was wearing her mother's cameo on a ribbon about her neck. She hadn't had much occasion to wear any baubles until now.\n\nHer father had sent her all of her mother's jewelry for her sixteenth birthday. She had hoped he would surprise her with a third visit to London that year, but he didn't. Her father actually expected her to return home about this time, now that her schooling was done and she no longer needed Elizabeth's mothering. He'd said as much the day she'd left home. But he hadn't mentioned it again in those few letters that he actually wrote himself, merely saying that he loved and missed her. She really was going to give all three of them a good scolding when she got home for not writing more often, particularly Daniel for not explaining what required her to rush back to Philadelphia. She'd hoped he had immediately sent off another letter with a full accounting, but no further missives had arrived in the last four days. And while she had come up with all sorts of reasons, she could never, ever have guessed what awaited her at the home where she was born." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "His name was Elliott Palmer\u2014actually, Lord Elliott Palmer. And Violet decided that very night in the Faulkners' elegant parlor that she was going to marry him one day. Instantly smitten, she gushed, she giggled, she blushed repeatedly, which was so not like her, but she couldn't seem to control her emotions in his presence. And he proceeded to monopolize her at the party, more than was proper, so she was quite sure he was smitten with her as well.\n\nBlond with green eyes, and three or four inches taller than she, Lord Elliott was charming, debonair, and humorous. He regaled her with tales about his previous three Seasons, which accounted for all her silly giggling, even though she wouldn't normally have found some of the tales amusing as they focused on other people's stumbles, mishaps, and mismatches. But he seemed to find these faux pas so funny that she laughed with him. She simply couldn't help herself!\n\n\"I'll be turning twenty-one this summer,\" Elliott confided at one point, then leaned closer to whisper, \"I suppose it's time I start looking for a wife.\"\n\nShe nearly swooned in delight at such a provocative hint as that!\n\nSophie tried to keep her circulating among the guests. More people had come than either of them expected. Violet met all the other young gentlemen present, but Lord Elliott never left her alone for long.\n\n\"You're breaking every rule, you know,\" Sophie whispered as she dragged her away from Elliott yet again.\n\n\"I know, but no one will remember it by the time I get back,\" Violet replied.\n\n\"He is handsome, I suppose,\" Sophie said grudgingly.\n\n\"Incredibly.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't go that far\u2014good grief, Vi, you weren't supposed to fall in love at your very first party!\"\n\n\"I haven't\u2014well, I don't think I have.\" But she soon amended, \"So what if I have?\"\n\n\"It simply isn't done.\" But at Violet's smile, Sophie threw up her hands, conceding, \"Well, at least it shall get you back here posthaste, agreed?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\nHer aunt, having noticed Elliott's attention, confided to Violet, \"I know his mother well. She has complained quite often that she despairs of her boy ever settling down. I will be happy to inform her that might not be the case after all.\"\n\nAnd her uncle also whispered an aside to her: \"Good choice, m'dear. He's going to be a viscount one day.\"\n\nElliott stole a kiss, but it was a chaste one on the cheek as he was leaving. And it made him blush. Perhaps he'd finally realized that he'd broken more than one rule of etiquette that night. But he left not knowing that she was sailing in the morning. After meeting him, she so wished she weren't. She'd nearly confided that she was leaving London for a while, but decided not to say anything that might deter his interest in her. She intended to quickly settle whatever needed fixing in America and be on another ship back to London within the week." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Elliott Palmer dominated her thoughts on the voyage home. Her thrilling memories of him kept her from worrying so much about what she might find when she reached Philadelphia. And Jane Alford, her new maid, provided distraction as well.\n\nTalkative once she relaxed, the portly, middle-aged woman had been hired by Elizabeth to accompany her. Violet wished the maid she knew so well could have come with her instead, but she'd shared Joan with Sophie all these years and couldn't ask her cousin to relinquish her, even if only for a couple months\u2014not that Joan would have agreed. Her aunt had complained that most of the women she'd interviewed for the position had refused to travel to America. Jane was the only one willing\u2014and only when Elizabeth, desperate by then, had agreed to provide her with money for her own return passage in case she got homesick by the time they reached Philadelphia. Violet had to repeatedly assure the maid that America was a civilized land and Philadelphia was as fine a city as London. Despite Jane's trepidation, Violet found it hard to contain her excitement about seeing her family again after all these years.\n\nThe day finally arrived when she was standing outside the home she'd been born in, her trunks piled on either side of her. She didn't immediately go to the door, just stood there smiling as the memories flooded back. The large house had been her brothers' playground. How often she'd had to chase after them to keep them from breaking things! Boys that age could be quite rambunctious. She'd never told her father about their wild antics unless something did actually break. Charles hadn't often been at home during the day, and the servants had been afraid to scold the sons of the house.\n\nHer father was wealthy, had received a substantial inheritance from his father, including the house. He was able to live a life of leisure and pursue his own amusements and interests. She wasn't sure what those were, could only remember that he liked betting at the racetrack and finding promising investments that he could brag about to his friends.\n\nViolet finally noticed that all the draperies were drawn shut on the windows on either side of the front door, which was odd for such a beautiful Sunday in June. Even if the family wasn't at home, the servants should have opened the drapes. She moved to the front door, but found it locked. She knocked, but no one answered. Where the deuce was the butler? She knocked louder, pounding on it with her fist, quite worried now. A locked house was definitely not what she'd expected to find at the end of her journey.\n\nShe turned around but was daunted by the sight of her four large trunks. She'd dismissed the hired carriage and had no idea how long it would take to find another. Was she supposed to sit on her trunks all day waiting for her family to come home? If they were coming home. Again she wondered why no servant had answered the door.\n\n\"Will we need to break into the house, Miss Violet?\" Jane asked.\n\nSuch a pragmatic solution! \"Let's hope not.\"\n\nViolet glanced to the side at the windows. She didn't relish crawling through one in her fancy traveling ensemble, but if they were open that would at least indicate someone was in the house. But the windows were shut, too. The drapes on the other side of the glass were utterly still.\n\n\"Is it an American holiday then, and everyone's gone off to celebrate?\"\n\nViolet didn't know what to think, except that someone, even if not the butler, should be manning the door.\n\nLooking worried, Jane added, \"Shall I go to the corner and hail a carriage? We can go to a hotel and wait there for your family to return.\"\n\nViolet was about to agree when she heard the door open. She turned back to it, but it had opened barely a crack, and all she could see was an eye peering out at her; then: \"Violet?\"\n\nShe let out a relieved sigh. \"Of course!\"\n\nThe door opened wide to admit her. Both brothers were standing there, and while she used to have no trouble telling the twins apart, today she couldn't. Dark-blond hair like hers, sapphire-blue eyes, strapping instead of slim like their father, very handsome, they looked nothing like the boys she'd last seen five years ago. They were men now, twenty years old, and as tall as their father, which was a half foot taller than she! She leapt forward exuberantly to hug them, only to be grabbed by the one on the left who said, \"I'm Daniel.\" He lifted her high in the air, then passed her to Evan, who swung her around in a full circle. By the time her feet were on the floor again she was laughing, and finally managed to put her arms around their waists and hug them both at the same time.\n\nShe'd missed so much these last five years. She'd asked them to have portraits done when she'd sat for hers, and to send them to her so she could see how they'd turned out, but they hadn't done it. They'd turned out splendidly indeed. And she felt something like motherly pride as she looked them up and down. It was hard to imagine she'd ever bossed and scolded these two, or that they'd let her!\n\nBut they had much to account for, and recalling that, she stepped back to say, \"One of you let Father know I've arrived, then have someone bring in my trunks. We'll talk in the parlor. You've much to explain, Brothers.\"\n\nThey both walked past her to bring in her luggage themselves, Daniel only saying, \"Father isn't home.\"\n\n\"Twin brothers?\" Jane whispered as she joined Violet in the hallway. \"And no butler?\"\n\nViolet sighed. \"I will have a private word with my brothers. Wait here in the hall. I shouldn't be long.\"\n\n\"I'll find the kitchen, miss, and order you some tea.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nViolet headed to the parlor, the first room on the left of the long hallway. She intended to open a few windows. The house smelled more than a little musty. But she stopped short just inside the parlor and didn't take another step. This had been such a beautifully appointed room the last time she was in it, but nothing remained except the sofa. All the other furniture was gone. All the paintings that had been on the walls were gone. Were the boys waiting for her here so they could take her to their new home?\n\nAt the sound of footsteps behind her, she said, \"I hope you didn't make me cross an ocean just to tell me Father has sold this house and moved to a bigger one.\"\n\n\"No,\" one of them answered. \"You might want to sit down, Vi.\"\n\nWithout turning, she snapped, \"No, you sit down, Evan on the right, Daniel on the left. I want to know who I'm shouting at.\"\n\nShe was glaring at their backs as they moved past her. She saw them wincing as they turned to sit down on the sofa.\n\nAbashed, Daniel said, \"It's as bad as it looks.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Her tone was sarcastic, but the added screech wasn't. \"If you haven't moved, where's all the bloody furniture?!\"\n\n\"We had to sell it to make payments on Father's loan and to keep up appearances,\" Daniel explained. \"The paintings sold well, but the furniture didn't. A nasty amount of money is due every month.\"\n\nHer eyes were wide by then. \"Why would he\u2014where is Father?\"\n\n\"Not here. He left seven months ago to make a new fortune,\" Evan said. \"He didn't want us to tell you he was broke, so we didn't. But if we can't pay the loan, Mr. Perry, the banker, is going to take the house.\"\n\n\"Broke? How is that possible?\"\n\n\"Three bad investments in as many months,\" Evan went on. \"Father didn't even realize his funds had gotten so low until he went to the bank to withdraw for the monthly household account and the clerk warned him he couldn't do that for much longer. He came home and dismissed some of the staff but not all, because he didn't want our neighbors and friends to know he's fallen on hard times. Then he got drunk for a week. Perfectly understandable, now that we know why, but we didn't find out until after he sobered up.\"\n\n\"When he did, he went to the bank and got a loan, using the house as collateral,\" Daniel put in.\n\n\"He wanted us to be able to live our lives as usual while he made more money,\" Evan continued. \"He showed us a flier touting the discovery of more gold out west. We don't know why he fell for that nonsense. We've seen fliers like that since we were children. No one ever comes back rich. But he was so sure that gold mining would be the solution to our sudden dilemma.\"\n\n\"Believe me, Vi, we both tried to talk him out of it. We warned that he was gambling on a one-in-a-million chance of finding gold, that he should come up with a more realistic plan. But he wouldn't be dissuaded.\"\n\nShe glanced around the empty room again, and her shoulders slumped a little. \"I suppose you're going to tell me next that after seven months, he hasn't found any gold?\"\n\n\"Worse,\" Evan replied.\n\n\"What could be worse?\" And then she paled. \"Don't tell me he's\u2014he's\u2014?\"\n\nShe couldn't say the word dead, but Daniel jumped in, \"No, not that. Of course not. But he was writing regularly, and then the letters stopped. And we ran out of money. Both happened two months ago, which is why we sent for you.\"\n\n\"You should just let us tell you the whole of it, Vi, and then you might not have so many questions,\" Evan suggested.\n\nShe doubted it, which was why she was tapping her foot even as she nodded. \"Go ahead.\"\n\n\"Father gave us half the loan money he received to use for the monthly payments and our own expenses, and took the other half to finance his mining venture.\" Daniel grimaced. \"But the payments on the loan escalated after four months, and the entire loan has to be paid off in one year. Father assured us he'd be back in three to five months, so he told us not to worry about it. But with these higher payments, we had to start selling things.\"\n\n\"And we still haven't had another letter from Father. But he seemed optimistic in the last one he wrote.\"\n\n\"More like excited,\" Daniel corrected his twin. \"He tried his luck in two towns out west, but they turned out to be a pure waste of time. But in that last letter, he mentioned he'd just staked a claim in Butte, Montana, near a known silver mine.\"\n\n\"That sounds promising,\" she remarked. \"He's no doubt too busy mining to write.\"\n\n\"For more than two months? It's been about that long since we got his last letter.\" Evan sounded somber.\n\nHer shoulders slumped again. Either their father was dead\u2014no, she refused to believe that when there were too many other possibilities to account for his silence, including his hating to write letters. She knew firsthand what a terrible correspondent he was.\n\nAnd then she realized how dire the situation was. \"Then you've already lost the house? Should you even be here? Why did you tell me to come here? How am I supposed to fix this?\"\n\nDaniel held up his hand to halt her questions. \"The banker\u2014Mr. Perry\u2014did come pounding at the door. And he appeared to relish the fact that most of the furniture had been sold off, as if that meant the house would soon become the bank's property. The only painting we hadn't sold was your portrait. We couldn't bear to part with it. He saw it hanging above the mantel in here and seemed mesmerized by it.\"\n\nHer eyes went to the fireplace, but the portrait wasn't there. \"Where is it?\"\n\n\"He took it as last month's payment and\u2014and\u2014\" Daniel couldn't finish.\n\nEvan snorted and insisted, \"Tell her.\"\n\n\"You tell her.\"\n\n\"One of you better tell me, and quickly,\" she snapped.\n\nEvan looked down at her feet before saying, \"He wants to marry you. He said he'd cancel the loan if you agree. We told him you weren't even in the country, that it would take time to get you here. He said he would extend the loan until you arrived.\"\n\nIt was too much to take in. In fact, she was having a hard time believing any of it. No money? Good God, were they actually paupers now? \"I don't suppose he's reasonably young and personable?\"\n\nDaniel's eyes widened. \"You'd consider it?!\"\n\n\"No, but I do want to know my options.\"\n\nEvan quickly said, \"Not young, not nice, even fat, if you must know.\"\n\nAnd Daniel added, \"But many women in our social circle make arranged marriages. And at least Perry is rich, lives here in Philadelphia, and is already willing. If you married him, we'd have you back with us, Violet. Our family would be together again, and the house problem would be solved!\"\n\n\"So this is why you summoned me home, to toss me to a fat wolf? Now I know why your letter was so bloody vague!\"\n\nDaniel winced. \"It's not like that. We missed you! And we always assumed you'd make an arranged marriage\u2014here in America. So you can't imagine how distressing it was when you wrote in the spring that you hoped to marry over in England. It meant we'd never see you again! If Father had been here to read that letter, we would have convinced him to forbid it.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed on Daniel. \"Oh, you would, would you?\"\n\nEvan elbowed his brother. \"I told you she wouldn't agree to it.\" Then he smiled at Violet. \"But I'm happy that you came back, Vi, even if it is to such a desperate mess.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but the Perry option is crossed off the list.\"\n\n\"We have others?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, though a bit prematurely. \"Give me a moment to gather my thoughts.\"\n\nShe started pacing in front of them. Obviously, they could return to England with her, even if they didn't like it there, but that would mean they would lose this house, the house they'd all spent their childhoods in, the house the boys had lived in all their lives. Maybe her uncle would pay off the loan for them, but sending a letter to London and waiting for a reply would take time.\n\nShe stared at the ceiling in exasperation. \"You do realize that if you had mentioned any of this in your letter to me, I could have come here with enough money to pay off that loan so you could at least stop worrying about losing the house?\"\n\n\"We did discuss it,\" Daniel said, \"and agreed that Father would be furious if we asked the Faulkners for money. That's why I wrote to you in the hope you'd be interested in Mr. Perry's...\" At Violet's glare, his voice trailed off. Then he added, \"But there's a glimmer of hope now that Father's got a mine. We just don't know exactly where it\u2014or he\u2014is.\"\n\nA mine that wasn't paying off yet, but still could, though it might not happen in time. Maybe she could make the next loan payment with the money her father had given her when she first sailed off with Aunt Elizabeth. She'd never needed to spend any of it. But if she used that to make the payment, she wouldn't have enough to solve their other problem: finding their father." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "They moved to the kitchen to continue their talk because the dinner hour was approaching. They, or rather she, had come up with a reasonable plan of action. At least, it struck Violet as the most reasonable option she could think of. It was amazing she could think at all, considering how unsettled she felt after learning she was no longer an heiress but a pauper. But then Jane put a dent in her plan when she stopped in the hall to explain to the maid where they were going tomorrow. And was met with a flat refusal.\n\n\"I wouldn't have come here if I didn't have money to return to London, and a good thing I insisted on that,\" Jane said, her expression quite bullish. \"So I'm returning. You'll be needing to hire a new maid, miss.\"\n\nThere wasn't time for that! \"Jane, it will take just a few days traveling by train to reach Montana. It will be interesting! Don't you want to see\u2014\"\n\n\"I've read me a few dime novels about that wild place west of here. There's Indians and bears and duels on every corner. No, miss, I most certainly am not going anywhere except back home.\"\n\nThe woman grabbed her bag and marched out of the house. Violet gave her brothers an exasperated look, which warned them not to laugh. But she had a brief respite from their dilemma when they reached the kitchen and her brothers paused, looking at her expectantly. They were hoping she'd cook for them, she realized.\n\nShe laughed. \"D'you really think Aunt Elizabeth would let me near her kitchen? I can't cook, but if you've been on your own all these months, surely you've learned how to by now.\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Evan said. \"But at least the meal will be filling.\"\n\n\"If very bland,\" Daniel warned. \"And eating standing up doesn't make the food taste any better.\"\n\nThey really had sold everything, even the kitchen table, which was why she suggested, \"I could take us to dinner at a restaurant.\"\n\n\"You can't, not if we're keeping your arrival a secret,\" Daniel pointed out. \"What if we ran into Mr. Perry?\"\n\nThat wasn't likely, but if it did happen, then her plan would be over before it started. So she just nodded and said, \"My maid's defection doesn't alter my plan\u2014well, it does, it just means one of you will have to accompany me to find Father, while the other stays here to stall Mr. Perry for another month's extension. D'you need to draw straws?\"\n\nThey'd already discussed this part. Perry was to be told that she'd sent them a letter explaining that she needed time to think about marriage to him. She was even going to write that letter tonight, in case he demanded to see it. But she was confident she would be back from Montana in less than a month, either with enough money from their father to save the house, or with their father himself, who would talk the banker into modifying the loan.\n\nDaniel spoke up first. \"Evan has to stay. He's courting a rich heiress and can't lose momentum on that. His marrying her would solve our dilemma\u2014but he has to hurry it up.\"\n\n\"There are three others courting her as well, so it's not a sure solution, though I am hopeful. But these things can't be hurried.\"\n\n\"You love her?\" Violet asked Evan.\n\n\"No, not yet, but at least she's pretty, so I'm willing to make the sacrifice, even if you aren't. And she likes me,\" he added with a rakish grin.\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him. Of course the young woman would like him. He and Daniel were both so handsome. But they were never supposed to have to sacrifice when choosing a wife. Then again, they were never supposed to end up poor either. She was going to give her father a blistering tongue-lashing for thoughtlessly squandering his inheritance and putting them in this dilemma.\n\nShe turned to Daniel who, by default, had become her traveling partner, but he winced and admitted, \"I hate to say it, but I'm also committed. I would have gone to look for Father myself if I weren't. Although I'm sure he's fine. You know how charismatic he is. He makes friends and charms people into helping him wherever he goes.\"\n\n\"Committed how?\" she asked, daunted by the thought of traveling to Montana without at least one of her brothers.\n\n\"It's a debt to a friend,\" Daniel said, then blushed. \"We gambled. I really thought I could win, but I didn't, and I didn't have the money to pay him. If he weren't a friend, he probably would have had me tossed in jail. He was willing to wait for payment, but then his sister came to town and he offered to cancel the debt if I would agree to escort her during her visit. It was worth it to him to get out of the task himself. And I was delighted that I wouldn't have to admit that I couldn't afford to pay him back. It was only supposed to be for a few weeks, but she decided to extend her stay.\"\n\n\"How much do you owe him?\" Violet asked.\n\nEvan glanced up from chopping carrots. \"Don't be annoyed with him, Vi. Had he gotten lucky, he could have turned that first bet into our next loan payment. Besides, Father told us to go on as if nothing had changed. It hasn't been easy, keeping our reduced circumstances from our friends.\"\n\nShe repeated more sternly, \"How much?\"\n\nDaniel sighed. \"Only fifty dollars, but that's a damn lot now that our pockets are empty.\"\n\nShe hated to see her brothers pinching pennies like this, but was relieved by the amount. \"I can pay that off, so you can come with me to Montana.\" When he started to grin, she added, \"Don't look so pleased. You may end up having to help work Father's mine.\"\n\nHe groaned. Evan laughed as he put the slab of beef in the oven to roast with the carrots. But Violet continued giving orders. \"Evan, while you stay here to continue your courtship and deal with Mr. Perry, you might want to discreetly find out if anyone you know is interested in buying this house, just in case we have to lose it. Selling it will allow you to pay off the bank loan as well as any other debts you have and still end up with a profit.\"\n\n\"You know you actually sound British now?\" Daniel suddenly said.\n\nShe raised a brow. \"What did you expect? I've lived in London for as many years as I lived here, so of course I picked up an accent and a few expressions you aren't familiar with.\"\n\n\"You sound exactly like Aunt Elizabeth did when she came for you, furious that Father had let you turn into a tomboy,\" Evan added.\n\nShe laughed. \"No, I wasn't a tomboy. And if I were to stay here for a few months, I might start sounding American again.\"\n\n\"You won't stay? Even if we drag Father home and all is as it should be again?\"\n\nDaniel looked so hopeful she almost told him what he wanted to hear. But if all could be as it should be, her life wouldn't change and she could go back to London and enjoy the Season, so she gently said, \"No, but I will start visiting every few years now that my schooling is done. I won't ask Father and Evan to make that trip again, but you could, you know. In either case, I won't let another five years pass without us seeing each other, I promise you that.\"\n\n\"But why go back?\" Daniel protested.\n\n\"Right before I sailed, I met the man I'm going to marry, Elliott Palmer, an English lord. And I intend to be back in England sooner rather than later so I don't lose him to some other debutante. So let's focus on our plan. Evan, you convince Mr. Perry to hold off on foreclosing on the house. The letter I write tonight should help with that. And Daniel and I will return from Montana with good news\u2014or bring Father with us.\"\n\n\"Send word to me immediately,\" Evan said. \"I want to know that he's well.\"\n\nHe was worried, Violet realized, and Daniel probably was, too; they just didn't want her to know it and start worrying as well. She said staunchly, \"Someone would have notified you if anything bad happened to Father, particularly since he owns property in Montana, if a mining claim can be called that. So it's a good thing that you've heard nothing. He's probably too busy mining so he can get us out of this pickle, and too far from a town to post a letter. Now, is there a bed left in this house for me to sleep in tonight?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Violet was a little excited when she and Daniel left for the train station the next morning. She'd had him buy her a valise yesterday when he'd gone to pay off his friendly wager, because it would be a nuisance to take one of her trunks on this journey when she didn't expect to be in Montana more than a few days. And he'd come back with good news. His friend had refused to take the money, assuring him that putting up with his sister for as long as Daniel had sufficed as payment in full.\n\nShe was more worried about the other creditors her brothers had mentioned, but both assured her their credit was still good because none of those merchants were aware of their financial straits. Still, she left Evan with a little money, wishing it could be more, but she needed to make sure there would be enough left for the whole family to live on if their father hadn't been successful out west. But she was hopeful and so looking forward to seeing her father again.\n\nThey just managed to buy tickets for a train that was about to depart. She boarded ahead of her brother and found them a seat, setting down her valise. She thought he was right behind her until she glanced out and saw him on the platform being led away by a policeman! He was shouting, trying to tell her something, but she couldn't hear him clearly through the closed windows. She rushed to the boarding stairs and would have stepped off onto the platform, but the train started to move.\n\nShe heard Daniel yelling, \"It's my tailor. He thinks I'm skipping town without paying him. I'll straighten this out and follow you tomorrow. Don't waste your ticket to stay and wait for me!\"\n\nShe couldn't get off the train now even if she wanted to. She did want to and considered jumping off, but was afraid she'd break one of her limbs, and then she wouldn't be going anywhere. But she really didn't want to travel alone even for just one day. At least she would have had a maid with her if Jane hadn't been so afraid of going on this trip\u2014good God, now she was just as afraid as Jane. Daniel might follow her tomorrow, if he could get a refund for his ticket to buy another, but he would still be a day behind her for the entire trip, unless she went no farther than the first layover. But time was of the essence, time during which a loan payment was rapidly coming due again.\n\nShe finally pushed her fears aside when she looked around the train car and noticed that the other passengers were all well-dressed, respectable-looking people like her. She took her seat and stared numbly out the window. At the first stop, she sent Evan a telegram telling him she would wait for Daniel in Butte. But she nearly changed her mind later in the week when the train crossed into what was considered the West.\n\nShe hadn't expected it would take her six days to reach her destination, especially after her brothers had bragged that she'd be riding most of the way on the fastest train in the world. They were misinformed. The transcontinental railroad used the same trains as the other railroads; it was touted as being the fastest way to cross the entire country simply because it didn't stop in every town for passengers. But she'd had to change trains twice before getting on the express train. Then she'd had to change again in Utah for the branch train that continued north to Montana\u2014and each of those stops had required a sleepover while waiting for the new train, which amounted to a day wasted at each stop and funds wasted at hotels. She would have to start counting every penny.\n\nViolet felt as if she'd entered a different world after the last change of trains. The easterners who had traveled with her this far and had kept her nervousness at bay were continuing on to California, while she was traveling north. When she looked out the window, she saw wide-open spaces, untouched forests, lakes so big she couldn't see the opposite shores. Fascinated by the landscape, she might have enjoyed this trip if she weren't making it alone and hadn't become such a curiosity to the new passengers, who appeared to be cowboys, farmers, and ragtag men who talked excitedly about getting rich in Butte. Had her father felt as excited and optimistic as these men when he'd come west? He would have been confident of success, so maybe he had.\n\nArriving at last, Violet could never have imagined a town like Butte, Montana. Her schooling hadn't prepared her for the American frontier. She'd studied European history and the wars that Britain had fought against America, but the English weren't interested in the western half of America, which they considered primitive and uncivilized. She'd learned from one of her fellow passengers that Montana wasn't even a state, merely a U.S. territory.\n\nBut for a frontier town, Butte was larger than she'd expected, filled with all manner of businesses and numerous hotels, even entertainment halls, though most of those appeared to be saloons. It was nothing like the two cities in which she'd grown up. The buildings were mostly made of wood and no higher than two stories. Late on a Saturday afternoon, it was incredibly crowded and, even worse, incredibly dusty, with so many people walking and riding through the streets. Most of the men were in work clothes. She saw only a few sporting derby hats, but the men weren't wearing suit coats. The women were plainly dressed, except for a few she was shocked to see in gaudy, low-cut gowns. There was too much to take in, so she didn't try. She just made her way to the nearest respectable-looking hotel, paid for a room, and, bone-weary, went right to sleep.\n\nThe next morning she was anxious to start searching for her father. After finishing a small breakfast in the hotel restaurant, she asked the attendant in the lobby whom she should talk to about finding a missing person. He gave her directions to the sheriff's office. She stopped at the telegraph office first to see if there was word from her brothers. There wasn't, so she sent a telegram to let them know she had arrived in Butte, and told the clerk where she was staying so any replies could be delivered to her.\n\nThe streets weren't as crowded this early in the morning. There were only a few wagons delivering goods. The miners who had filled the streets yesterday must have left town or were sleeping off their revelries. Twice last night she'd been woken by gunshots.\n\nHow on earth had her father managed in this town? Charles Mitchell was a gentleman born and bred, always meticulously dressed. She hadn't seen a single man in a suit yesterday and not one today either. The only men she saw were in work clothes or in pants, shirts, wide-brimmed hats, and gun belts. It was the gun belts that made this place so foreign to her, and made her so eager to leave it. She hoped she'd find her father today and could be on a train back to Philadelphia tomorrow with good news for her brothers.\n\nA man was sitting in a chair on the porch of the sheriff's office. He appeared to be sleeping with his head resting back against the wall and his hat pulled down low over his face. She tried not to disturb him as she stepped past him and went inside.\n\n\"Sheriff?\" she said to the man seated behind the desk. He was middle-aged and clean-shaven, neatly dressed in a leather vest worn over a shirt with rolled-up sleeves.\n\nThe man glanced up from the newspaper he'd been reading and set it aside. \"No, ma'am. The sheriff's gone fishing with his brother, does every weekend. I'm Deputy Barnes. What can I help you with?\"\n\n\"My father, Charles Mitchell, is missing. He came here a few months ago. The information I have is that he staked a claim in this area. Is that how you say it?\"\n\n\"Good enough.\" The deputy grinned. \"And what makes you think he's missing?\"\n\n\"Because his habit was to write home often, but he hasn't sent another letter since he informed us he arrived here and began mining. Too much time has passed since then. We fear he may be hurt\u2014or worse.\"\n\nHe looked solemn now as he said, \"That I can find out immediately.\"\n\nHe opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a ledger. He turned a few pages in it before he glanced up at her again. His new expression made her heart sink.\n\n\"The sheriff usually deals with bad news, but obviously this won't wait till he's back,\" he said in extreme discomfort. \"I'm sorry, ma'am. Your pa died two weeks ago. He was known in these parts as Charley, not that anyone knew him all that well. I recall now that Dr. Wilson let us know about it. He fills in when Dr. Cantry goes away. Your father had been Doc Cantry's patient for more'n a month and never regained consciousness after an accident that happened at his mine. Another mine owner brought him to the doctor. He's the one who found him. I think their mines are in the same area.\"\n\nViolet started to feel faint, and the deputy helped her to a chair. She heard his words; they just weren't sinking in yet. Dead? Her brothers were going to be as crushed as she felt. She'd been so sure she would see her father today. She couldn't believe she'd never see him again! He was really dead?\n\nA handkerchief was being waved in front of her face. She realized she was crying. It had been so long since she'd seen her father, yet she still had so many memories of him, walks and picnics in the parks, him teaching her and her brothers to swim in Springton Lake, boat rides on the Delaware River, and the four of them gathered in the parlor where he would read stories to them with her leaning against his shoulder and the boys sitting at his feet. The memories overwhelmed her. This news overwhelmed her. What was she to do now?\n\n\"Callahan, the man who brought your father to town, was checking on his condition whenever he came down from the hills,\" the deputy was saying. \"Even left money for a funeral if it was needed. He got back to town a few days after your father died and was buried in the graveyard on the edge of town.\"\n\nShe was so numb! He couldn't really be dead. It could be a mistake, some other man with the same name...\n\n\"Dr. Cantry might be able to tell you more. And Morgan Callahan\u2014well, never mind him.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Callahan is something of a hermit, abides up in the hills where no one else lives and doesn't come to town often. Most folks figured he was just a mountain man when he showed up in a bear coat last winter, complete with the fur and looking as shaggy as one. Acts like a bear, too, if you ask me. Turns out he's been mining all this time and just tried to keep it a secret, which is not surprising, with the big mine owners around here buying up the little mines pretty fast. But the news got out that Morgan had found a pretty rich silver vein, and only your father managed to figure out where. Anyways, Morgan's just too gruff and surly for a lady such as yourself to speak to.\"\n\nShe nodded her agreement. \"My father's belongings? Where might they be?\"\n\n\"Probably still at his mine. And you might want to close out your father's bank account here, too, if he had one, but that will have to wait until tomorrow when the bank's open.\"\n\n\"Where is the doctor?\"\n\nHe helped her to her feet to escort her out, saying, \"I can take you to him now. He might have something to recommend for your shock, too.\"\n\n\"And my father's mine, where it is?\"\n\n\"You would need to check with the claims office tomorrow, though that won't be helpful other than to confirm he staked a claim. They might give you the general direction in which it lies, but not much more. You'll need a guide to take you to it in any case, if it is indeed near Callahan's, though I doubt anyone knows where that is. Morgan seems a mite obsessive about keeping the location of his mine a secret, always leaving town in a different direction.\"\n\nDespite the warnings, she had to ask, \"But Mr. Callahan could show me?\"\n\nThe deputy sighed. \"He might be the only one who knows exactly where it is, but honestly, ma'am, you won't want to deal with him.\"\n\n\"Is he in town?\"\n\nHe appeared glad to say, \"No, least, I haven't heard that he is, and I would've heard. He stirs up gossip when he does show up, but that's not often. And when he does, he only spends one night in a hotel, then is gone the next day. But I can point you to the hotel he usually stays at. You could leave a message there for him if you've a mind to. Maybe he'll draw you a map and you can hire someone not as ornery to show you the way.\"\n\nThe last was said without any conviction. If Morgan Callahan was still keeping the location of his mine a secret, he would never draw a map to it, not even for his friend's daughter. Had he and her father been friends? Or just passing acquaintances? No, they must have been friends if Callahan had paid for the funeral, so maybe he would actually draw her a map\u2014if it came to that. And just in case it did...\n\n\"Could you show me the hotel first?\" she asked.\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\nThe desk clerk at the hotel, which was in a newer section of town than where Violet was staying, told her Callahan hadn't been there for weeks.\n\n\"Kinda expected to hear that,\" Deputy Barnes said; then, noticing her crestfallen look, he added, \"That's good news if you're determined to meet him. Means he's due to show up, maybe in the next week or two. I'll ask around, but I'm pretty sure Morgan's location is still a well-kept secret, and with reason. Used to be competition was cutthroat and claim jumping a major problem around here until the big mine owners bought up all the small mines. All the miners you see in town work for them. There aren't many small mines left near town, which is why I figure Morgan's mine is a long distance from Butte and why he doesn't show up often. But come along, the doc's office is in the next block and he lives upstairs from it, so he should still be there even if the office is closed.\"\n\nViolet was daunted by how long she would have to wait for that Callahan fellow just to find out whether her father had found metal worth selling. But she might get the answer tomorrow at the bank, if there was a decent amount in her father's account.\n\n\"It's incredible that you know the comings and goings of all the miners in this town,\" she remarked on the way to Dr. Cantry's office. \"How is that possible?\"\n\nThe deputy chuckled. \"It's not. People have come here from all over the world, Irish, Welsh, Germans, Chinese, heck, even Serbians, just to name a few. And many of the migrants who gave up mining have opened businesses instead.\"\n\n\"Then why do you know so much about Mr. Callahan?\" she asked.\n\n\"That's because we know his family. The Callahans have a large ranch over in Nashart to the east. They used to herd cattle to us before the Northern Pacific Railway reached their town and new ranchers moved in closer to us over in Bozeman. When Morgan came here last year, the rumor was that he's the black sheep of the family and finally got booted from it. But it's just a rumor, and Morgan's temperament is bad enough as it is, so don't mention it if you meet him.\"\n\nIf? Yes, she might not have to wait for him if there was a substantial amount in Charles's bank account. She could then let her brothers decide what to do with their father's mine while she returned to England.\n\nThe doctor wasn't available when they reached his residence, he was out on a call. She decided to wait there for him to return, since she didn't have anything else to do other than let her brothers know that what none of them had wanted to consider even a remote possibility was true\u2014their father was dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "The dilemmas Violet encountered kept getting worse. Why had she thought she could deal with all of this alone? She didn't even realize just how deep her despair was because she was also grieving.\n\nThe brief conversation she'd had with the good doctor had revealed what her brothers didn't know: Charles had left home with a bad heart. He'd visited Dr. Cantry soon after he reached town because he'd been having chest pains. The doctor had warned him to avoid any strenuous activity because it could bring on a heart attack\u2014yet Charles had gone from that visit up into the hills to mine? Something so utterly strenuous? Cantry said a heart attack had likely caused a fall and the resultant head trauma that Charles had never woken from.\n\nShe went to the claims office first thing the next morning. The man there confirmed that Charles Mitchell had staked a claim, but it was against their policy to show their maps to anyone, even relatives of claim holders. However, he did confide as she was leaving that the map wouldn't be helpful since it included no landmarks. \"Not many do. If the miner is there, his mine is there, his stakes are there, therefore it's his place. If there's a fight over it, whoever holds the claim with the earlier date tends to win.\" She must have looked as confused as she felt, because he added, \"It's not as shoddy a system as it sounds, ma'am. We have a large map of the area, but again, it's not for public viewing. We're not here to help men find ore, only to record it when they do.\"\n\nShe thought she understood, although she wondered how her father had managed to find ore. But at least she'd confirmed that he did have a mine in the area.\n\nShe decided to wait to send a telegram to her brothers until after she'd gone to the bank, which was where she headed next. She wanted to be able to add some good news along with the bad. But she wasn't able to do that. Her father had no bank account in this town.\n\nShe found out a possible reason why when she asked the bank clerk to check his records twice. The man complained, \"We were robbed three months ago, so I'm not surprised that your father wouldn't trust us with his money. The miners are sending their money straight home or hiding it, and businesses are keeping their money in their own safes. It might be years before the bank recovers if that money isn't found.\"\n\nSo she had no good news to tell her brothers, but she couldn't hold off sharing the bad any longer. And she asked in that telegram why Daniel hadn't yet arrived in Butte as he'd promised, and stressed that she still needed him there to help find their father's money. Then she sat in her room for two days waiting for their reply. When some of the numbness wore off, she realized she should have switched to Callahan's preferred hotel to be absolutely sure she didn't miss him when he came to town. After she accomplished that, she took flowers to her father's grave and wept some more. Afterward she tried exploring the town to pass the time, but gave up that notion when she drew too many whistles and rudely inappropriate remarks from men she passed on the boardwalks.\n\nShe stayed in her new room mostly during the days, going down to the hotel dining room only for dinner. That first night in the new hotel, she met Katie Sullivan, a kindred spirit. Katie was a lively girl, red-haired, green-eyed, quite pretty. She lived with her family in Chicago and was only in Butte for a visit with her father and to introduce him to her fianc\u00e9, Thomas, who had just arrived and was staying at the hotel.\n\nViolet guessed that Katie had invited her to sit with her and Thomas because of the way she was dressed. So little high fashion was seen in this town that she stood out, as did Katie, and they were naturally drawn to each other by apparent shared interests\u2014at least in fashion.\n\nBut there was more when Violet introduced herself and mentioned her father's name. \"Morgan Callahan's friend?\" Katie asked.\n\n\"So you've met Morgan Callahan?\"\n\n\"Goodness, no, I wouldn't get anywhere near such an uncouth fellow. But everyone knows of him by now. They say he's a former cowboy turned trapper, then a miner, and now he's just crazy from so much solitude\u2014but in any case, he's very unsociable, by all accounts. And my father doesn't like the man, says that he's the most stubborn jack\u2014er, mule he's ever met. My father, Shawn Sullivan, will be joining us shortly. He's always late. And we might not want to mention that you know Mr. Callahan.\"\n\nThat sounded ominous. Violet assured the girl, \"But I don't, and apparently, I don't want to. However, I've been informed that he might be the only one who can show me to my father's mine. I am hoping that he will simply draw me a map to the location instead.\"\n\n\"A map? Yes, that would be ideal, wouldn't it? The less time you must spend with him, the better.\"\n\nFollowing Katie's advice, Violet didn't mention Callahan's name after Shawn Sullivan arrived. He was a gregarious fellow once he relaxed, middle-aged, astute, portly, with a very distinct Irish brogue. Most of the dinner was spent with the parent grilling the possible future son-in-law about his family, his connections, his means. But once he gave his blessing, laughing that there still might be stipulations, both Thomas and Shawn relaxed to enjoy the last of the dinner agreeably.\n\nWhich was when Mr. Sullivan turned his green eyes to Violet and remarked, \"A Mitchell, eh? The name sounds familiar.\"\n\n\"My father was in the area for a few months before he died,\" she explained, then added hopefully, \"Perhaps you met him?\"\n\n\"He might have worked for me if he was a miner.\"\n\n\"No, he had his own mine, I just don't know where it is yet.\"\n\n\"Well, that's too bad.\"\n\nHe did briefly look sad on her behalf, as if he didn't think she would have any luck in finding it, which left her feeling quite crestfallen. So she only vaguely listened to the rest of the conversation that centered on his family in Chicago.\n\nBut apparently Katie must have told her father later that night that Violet intended to have words with Morgan Callahan and why. She actually got a note from Shawn Sullivan the next day, saying if she did get a map to her father's mine, he would be pleased to supply her with an armed escort to take her there. So nice of him!\n\nWith Katie leaving the next day to return to Chicago to plan her wedding, Violet kept mostly to her room again, plying her needle. The little embroidery frame and kit of threads were the only nonessential items she'd stuffed into her valise, because needlepoint was one of her favorite hobbies. She didn't leave the hotel except to visit her father's grave, where she did most of her crying, and to stop by the telegraph office twice a day, even though she'd been assured any telegrams for her would be delivered to her hotel.\n\nShe didn't get her brothers' response until later in the week, and it wasn't what she was hoping for. They said it was impossible for them to join her but they were counting on her to find their father's mine, which was likely where he'd hidden his money. She'd already concluded that if Charles had any money, that's where it would be, so she ought to make every effort to find out, but she hadn't expected to continue this mission alone! How could she? And how much longer could they stall Mr. Perry? It was nearly two weeks since she'd left Philadelphia, and she'd already been waiting a week for Callahan to arrive. She couldn't wait for him indefinitely, or the next telegram she got from her brothers would inform her that they'd lost the house. Another week at the most, then she was leaving. But she started waiting in the hotel lobby. She couldn't afford to miss the man if he did finally show up.\n\nA few people checked in that day, including another fashionably dressed lady. Someone else from back east? Violet considered introducing herself until she saw the young woman speak angrily to one of the gentlemen escorting her and march up the stairs.\n\nThe next morning Violet went straight to the desk to ask after Callahan again, which was what she should have been doing all week. She could no longer leave this to chance or depend on the hotel employees to remember to give him her note when he arrived. There was a new attendant today, one she didn't recognize, so she had to explain once more who she was and that it was imperative that she speak with Morgan Callahan when he checked in and that her note for him was being kept there at the desk. He opened a few drawers until he found it.\n\n\"You do know who I'm talking about?\" she asked the new clerk.\n\n\"Everyone knows him, ma'am. The mountain man, least that's what we thought he was, a gruff hermit of few words, and in fact, he looks mean as hell, beg your pardon. But then word spread that he has a rich silver mine somewhere in the area. That didn't make him any friendlier. Are you sure you want to speak to a man like that?\"\n\nShe wondered how many times she would be asked that question. \"I don't really have a choice,\" she replied. \"So tell me what he looks like. I would like to recognize him when I see him. Or will his identity be very obvious because he still looks like a bear?\"\n\nThe man grinned. \"No, ma'am, he won't be wearing that smelly bear coat in this warm weather. The man's tall, black-haired, in his midtwenties, and he usually wears a gun on his hip no matter the weather.\"\n\nEveryone in this town except the miners seemed to do that, but the clerk's description was helpful and she thanked him. She joined an elderly man on the sofa across from the desk so she could keep an eye on it. He turned to her excitedly and said, \"He's the fastest gun in the West.\"\n\nShe glanced at the elderly gentleman. \"Who is?\"\n\n\"The notorious gunfighter Degan Grant. I heard he's staying in this very hotel.\"\n\nShe lost interest as he droned on about the amazing gunfighter and glanced around the lobby again. Two men came out of the dining room walking briskly toward the hotel's front door, one short, wearing a long tan coat and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low, and the other tall, black-haired, and with a gun on his hip. Was that Callahan? Had he checked in last night and the new desk man didn't know it? She certainly hoped not. The man was quite intimidating, dressed all in black from hat to boots and looking very angry. And it appeared that he was leaving again?!\n\nShe stood up to stop him. The old man pulled her back down, whispering, \"That must be him! And don't gawk. He'll shoot you if you stare too long.\"\n\nShot for gawking? What utter nonsense. And the old fellow was only guessing that this was the gunfighter, when he could in fact be the very man she was waiting for. Who was leaving without talking to her.\n\nShe followed the pair out of the hotel and saw them walking briskly down the middle of the street. But they were already the length of three shops away. She'd have to yell to stop him now, which simply wasn't done. She couldn't bring herself to break that golden rule of etiquette. At least, not in public. Instead she hurried along the boardwalk after him.\n\nShe was almost abreast of the duo and about to ask the man in black if he was Morgan Callahan when she heard a woman shout, \"Degan Grant, come back here!\"\n\nEyes wide, Violet looked back at the hotel and saw the same woman she'd almost approached yesterday, dressed just as finely. This time she wore an outfit that was three shades of blue; even the little hat she wore, which was just like Violet's bonnet, was blue. The pretty lady had actually walked out into the street to yell at the gunfighter. Thank goodness this wasn't Morgan Callahan, Violet thought.\n\nThe gunfighter didn't halt for the lady, didn't even look back, which prompted her to yell even louder, \"Degan, stop! You have to hear me out!\"\n\nHe did stop then, but not for the lady. A man had stepped into the street ahead of the gunfighter and was slowly walking straight toward him. Violet didn't need to be from the West to realize a gunfight was about to take place, especially when people quickly vacated the shops nearby and ran down the boardwalks away from the two men in the street. She knew she ought to do the same, but she was rooted to the spot, too shocked by what was happening to move.\n\nShe was close enough to hear Grant's companion warn him, \"There's a man on the roof up ahead with a rifle pointed at you. This is an ambush.\"\n\n\"I know. I've already spotted two others.\"\n\n\"But that one is out of your range, while you're not out of his.\"\n\n\"It might not matter if I kill Jacob first. This is his fight, not theirs.\"\n\n\"The better idea would be to take cover, don't you think?\" the shorter man suggested.\n\n\"You are,\" Degan Grant replied. \"Get back in the hotel and do it fast.\"\n\nViolet was amazed that he could talk so calmly about killing people. And the short man, or boy\u2014she hadn't actually seen his face\u2014ran back to the hotel, stopping to say something to the lady, who seemed more concerned about not stepping in the horse droppings in the street than the imminent gunfight. But the lady did at that point hurry back to the hotel herself. Which was what Violet started to do, but was suddenly yanked inside the shop behind her.\n\n\"What the hell, lady!\" the shopkeeper said disparagingly. \"Don't you realize what's happening out there?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then maybe you don't know bullets can fly astray in fights like that? And kill innocents who aren't involved?\"\n\nShe blanched a little. \"No, I wasn't aware of that. Thank you.\"\n\n\"Just get down below the window. Mine's been broken before in fights like this. Gunfights don't tend to happen up in this section of Butte anymore, usually only in the rowdier part of town.\"\n\nEven as he spoke, he was staring out the corner of the shop window. Violet glanced down at the dirty floor; refusing to sit on it, she took shelter behind the shopkeeper instead and peeked around his shoulder, his broad back providing good cover. Degan Grant and the man he'd called Jacob were both in view from that angle. She was surprised to see the boy in the long coat on the boardwalk, hurrying past the shop window, not staying out of harm's way after all.\n\nThe shopkeeper hadn't closed the door when he dragged her inside, and Degan Grant was close enough for her to hear him say to the other gunfighter, \"I didn't kill you last time because you were grieving the loss of your brother. You've had enough time for that grief.\"\n\nThat brought a confident laugh from Jacob, but he was too far away for her to hear his reply if he made one. And then Degan Grant drew his gun and fired. Unbelievable, how fast he did that. The other man's gun fired moments later, but his bullet must have gone astray since he was already falling to the ground as he pulled the trigger. If that bullet hit anything, it wasn't obvious. And Jacob lay unmoving in the street now, dead or badly wounded.\n\nThen more shots were fired farther down the street. That must be the ambush that she'd overheard the companion mention. The gunfighter had disappeared and must have gone to deal with it.\n\nShe heard more shots, followed by several minutes of silence. Finally she asked, \"Is it safe for me to return to my hotel now?\"\n\nThe shopkeeper turned around and gave her a long look before smiling. \"Aren't you the brave little lass. The last time a woman hid in my shop was the time the window broke, and she was in tears for a good hour after the last shot was fired, wouldn't leave until all the bodies in the street had been carried to the undertaker.\"\n\nThere was nothing brave about Violet's reaction to the violence; she just couldn't afford to miss Callahan and was afraid he might have arrived at the hotel while all the drama was taking place in the street. He could be there checking in right now!\n\n\"I'll be fine,\" she replied. \"I'm staying at the hotel a few doors down.\"\n\n\"Suit yourself, lady.\"\n\nHe left the shop first\u2014in fact, everyone along the street was leaving their cover to view the body that had been left there. There were enough people gathered around it that she couldn't see it now, for which she was grateful. But she did notice Dr. Cantry running up the boardwalk toward the crowd, so perhaps the man wasn't dead yet. She turned her back on the macabre scene and started back to the hotel to resume her vigil." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Violet became a fixture in the hotel lobby as the days dragged by. She began to recognize all of the hotel guests, saw them check in, saw them check out. And despite the assurances she received that she would be notified as soon as Morgan Callahan arrived, she still checked at the desk twice a day. She even politely declined the invitation she received to dine with Shawn Sullivan and his sister at his home in Butte because she was afraid to be away from the hotel for that long a time and risk missing Morgan. But, desperate to stretch her legs and get out of the hotel for a few minutes, she did actually walk past his house and found it quite impressive.\n\nIn the middle of her second week in Butte she received another telegram from her brothers, informing her that they'd stalled Mr. Perry for another month. That was a relief, though they still insisted they couldn't join her yet. She was annoyed that they didn't explain why, which made her assume the worst, that Daniel was in jail and they had no money to get him out, and Evan thought his marriage to that heiress was their only hope now. Which didn't say much for their confidence in their sister's saving them. And maybe they were right. Charles's mine could be worthless, which would mean there was no money hidden there and she was putting herself through this hellish wait for nothing.\n\nAnd then, at the end of her second week in Butte, he showed up. She'd just finished a quick lunch in the dining room and returned to the lobby when the clerk at the desk waved her over to tell her Morgan Callahan had checked in and immediately left again.\n\n\"He's probably gone out for some fun, ma'am, like he usually does when he first arrives in town.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\nThe question embarrassed the fellow and his reply was vague. \"To places you can't follow him to. Best to wait until morning to speak with him, before he checks out again\u2014if he'll talk to you.\"\n\n\"I've waited two weeks,\" she reminded the man. \"I can't afford to miss him. Did you give him my note?\"\n\n\"Tried to, along with all the other notes piled up here for him, but he wouldn't take any of them.\"\n\n\"Please tell me that you at least told him it's imperative that I speak with him?\"\n\n\"In so many words, I did. He didn't appear curious, didn't even ask why, just nodded, got his key, and left.\"\n\nHis eyes wouldn't meet hers. He was keeping something from her, she was sure of it. Even his posture seemed guilty now.\n\n\"There's something you aren't telling me, isn't there?\" she demanded. \"And what did you mean, if he'll talk to me? Why wouldn't he?\"\n\n\"There's nothing further I can tell you,\" the man said stiffly, but then actually did, adding, \"But if you need Mr. Callahan's help with something, then you probably shouldn't have dined with his worst enemy.\"\n\nKatie? No, of course not Katie\u2014her father. \"Mr. Sullivan?\"\n\n\"I'm done talking, ma'am. Go away or I'll summon my manager.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath indignantly and marched away to retake her seat in the lobby. What the deuce had just happened? She recalled Katie saying her father didn't like Morgan. Well, it appeared Morgan didn't like Katie's father either.\n\nNone of which explained why Morgan might not talk to her. If he recognized her name, and had known her father, why wouldn't he?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Before the dinner hour, the manager of the hotel approached Violet in the lobby. He introduced himself with a slight bow, but his tone was firm when he said, \"I must ask you to leave the lobby, Miss Mitchell.\"\n\nShe frowned at him. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Because you have been disturbing my guests.\"\n\nShe was doing no such thing, but his expression warned he wouldn't argue about it. She was mortified when he added, \"I also expect you to vacate your room in the morning. I won't have you harassing my employees any longer either. They've filed complaints. And in this town, good employees are harder to obtain than guests, so I have no choice but to insist you go.\"\n\nShe was furious as she went upstairs to her room and even slammed the door shut, hoping that awful manager could hear it downstairs. She didn't doubt that Morgan Callahan had somehow arranged for her eviction. And obviously, there would be no waiting for him comfortably in the lobby tomorrow. He'd seen to that. But she could wait outside the hotel for him to come out. She refused to be undone by these despicable shenanigans of his.\n\nShe packed her valise that night. If she couldn't find Morgan as he left town tomorrow, she'd have no choice but to return to Philadelphia. She couldn't afford to wait weeks more for the man to come again to Butte on one of his infrequent visits. Leaving meant her brothers would lose the family home, and she knew they wouldn't want to go to England with her\u2014actually, she couldn't return there either if she failed here. The Faulkners loved her, but she simply couldn't live there as their poor relation. And she certainly couldn't ask her uncle for a dowry when he had six daughters to provide for.\n\nShe sat on the bed quite shocked by the circumstances before her. She had to find her father's mine! She fervently hoped he'd hidden a fortune there. If not, she and her brothers would have to figure out a way to exploit the mine to make their own fortune. Otherwise, she would have to become a schoolteacher in Philadelphia and her brothers would have to get jobs. They would live dreary lives as genteel poor people. Or she could marry Mr. Perry... She blanched at that thought.\n\nBut dare she stay in Butte any longer and risk running out of money? No, the thought of working in this particular town was appalling. She had enough money to send one of her brothers back here to continue the search. They owned a mine somewhere in this territory, and she had the name of the man who could show them to it. Perhaps Daniel or Evan would have better luck than she was having. But whichever brother came, he was going to have to work here in order to stay here.\n\nHer anger returned when she realized that her future and theirs depended on a single man who wouldn't even take the time to find out what she wanted of him! But she still had one last chance to corner him in the morning and hoped she wouldn't be so furious with him that it would put him off dealing with her. If he didn't sneak out of the hotel by a rear exit. If he didn't simply leave town tonight. And she wouldn't even know if he'd managed to escape her notice!\n\nMore fuel for the fire. She was so angry that it took a while to get to sleep that night, hours actually. Fury just wouldn't let her mind rest. But exhaustion finally won out, she had no idea how late.\n\nBeing disturbed from that hard-won slumber brought the fury back\u2014but only for a moment.\n\nThe gag was the first clue that she was in trouble. It tasted salty\u2014from sweat?! She screamed under it, a pathetic mewling sound even to her ears. And then she was yanked out of the bed, only to be tossed back down on top of the covers. She screamed again when a very large shadow loomed over her. Violation came horribly to mind and suddenly terrified her. But she wasn't being accosted\u2014she was being rolled up in the bloody blanket! And hefted over a shoulder to be carried out of there.\n\nShe understood then. She wasn't being allowed to leave the hotel of her own volition. She was being tossed out! Well, she had glared at the manager a bit, no, a lot. He might have thought that she would refuse to vacate the room and this was his only option. Or Morgan Callahan had paid for her to be evicted. This way? Like throwing out the trash? And in the middle of the night so no one would notice such a despicable deed?\n\nShe expected to be unrolled on the boardwalk outside the hotel and at least given her belongings, even if they didn't want her payment for the room. But that didn't actually happen. She was on that shoulder for too long. Was she being taken to a different hotel? Had it all been prearranged?\n\nWhen the man carrying her finally stopped, she hoped she could actually stand upright in her tight cocoon. But she didn't get a chance to find out because her feet never touched the ground. She was dragged off his shoulder simply to be tossed on the back of a horse, stomach down, still bundled tightly in that blanket.\n\nHer new position was what alerted her to the possibility that she was being abducted. She was even being tied to the horse, felt straps tighten across her back to keep her on it! So utterly ignoble. But one frightful thought led to another, until she finally concluded that this was the fault of her clothes! Someone in this town thought she was rich because of them and that a hefty ransom might be forthcoming. And how long would she have to wait to disabuse her captor of that notion? Would he even believe her when she told him that she wasn't rich? Well, her immediate family wasn't, but her uncle in England was. But it would take two months to obtain money from him! And another possibility loomed, that she might be killed instead if her captor chose not to wait months for a ransom.\n\nIt was excruciating waiting to get any answers, and time dragged because the ride was so uncomfortable. Her stomach ached even though the horse wasn't moving fast. Her back ached from trying to work loose of the straps so she could slide off the horse and run. And every so often she felt something press down on her back. Her abductor's hand, so he could assure himself she was still there?\n\nIt could have been an hour or less, or even two or three, for all she knew, before the horse finally stopped, the straps were undone, and her feet touched the ground. The blanket was unwrapped from her and tossed aside, then the gag was removed. She was extremely thirsty and her body ached and, wearing only a thin nightgown, she felt the chill in the air. But she kept her eyes on the man. She thought he might be tying the gag around his neck, but she couldn't be sure since he was just a huge shadow standing next to her.\n\nNonetheless, she demanded, \"Who are you and why have you abducted me? I insist you return me immediately to my hotel!\" He heard her, was looking right at her, but didn't answer, making her point out, \"You've somehow gotten the wrong idea about me. I'm not rich. I warn you, no one will offer a ransom for me.\"\n\n\"I didn't think anyone would pay to get you back, and I'm not after money.\"\n\nShe was jarred by that rude reply, but he turned, apparently not intending to say more. With the eastern sky beginning to brighten behind him, making him just a dark shape, she carefully moved around him to make use of dawn's light to see who had abducted her.\n\nHe was a big bear of a man with a full black beard and mustache, long unkempt hair of the same color beneath a cowboy hat, and feral, light-blue eyes. He wore a tan coat with the sleeves cut off so it resembled a long vest; it was held down by his gun belt, no shirt under it. He was excessively tall, excessively broad of chest, too, and his bare arms were thick with muscles. His pants were dark blue, his boots brown, scuffed, and spurred. There might be a handsome man under all that facial hair or a grotesque one, she simply couldn't tell in the meager dawn light. But from the desk clerk and Deputy Barnes's descriptions, she had no doubt that she was staring at Morgan Callahan.\n\nThinking of the deputy, she realized Morgan might have found out from him yesterday exactly what she needed from him. The hotel employees didn't know about her mission. He must have decided to help her but didn't want anyone to see him leaving town with her. He could have knocked on her bloody door to say so!\n\nHer valise was suddenly tossed by her feet. \"Change your clothes if you've a mind to. Don't matter to me unless you take too long doing it.\"\n\nShe was so pleased that he'd grabbed her valise from her room, she almost thanked him. She quickly bent to open it and saw that her purse was in it, thank God. All the money she had was in that purse. And everything that she'd left out to wear today had been stuffed in the bag. She carried the valise around one of the six pack mules that were tethered to Morgan's horse to have some privacy while she changed clothes. But first she quickly moved to the stream nearby and cupped a handful of water, then another. She assumed it was drinkable, since the animals were helping themselves to it. But she was really too thirsty to care.\n\n\"Here's the deal,\" she heard him say on the other side of the mule. \"You can ride upright without the blanket, but if you make any noise, it's back on your stomach. Try to run and it's back on your stomach.\"\n\n\"It's you, isn't it?\" she said stiffly. \"Don't try to deny it. I know you're Morgan Callahan.\"\n\n\"Stomach again it is.\"\n\n\"Don't be absurd!\" she snapped. \"At least tell me why you've done this.\"\n\n\"You cozied up to the wrong people, lady. How much did they pay you to impersonate Charley's daughter?\"\n\nImpersonate? Was he serious? \"I am Charles Mitchell's daughter.\"\n\n\"No, you aren't, but I suppose Shawn wouldn't know that I know that.\"\n\nHe was making no sense. Maybe he really was as crazy as Katie had suggested.\n\nThen he added, \"And you were warned about noise.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath before blurting out, \"I'll be quiet!\"\n\n\"Smart choice,\" he said. \" 'Sides, nothing you say changes my mind, and we'll both have the truth when we get to where we're going.\"\n\n\"Where is that?\" Instead of answering, he took a step toward her. She quickly held up a hand. \"All right!\"\n\nShe really couldn't bear any more riding on her stomach. And where he was taking her would be obvious enough when they got there. But she was nervously aware that he hadn't confirmed that he was Morgan Callahan. What if he wasn't? But he had to be! There couldn't be two men who looked and behaved so similarly. And he knew Shawn Sullivan and her father. Didn't that confirm it?\n\nShe got her skirt and blouse on before she thought to mention, \"If you will at least tell me you're taking me to my father's mine, I won't say another word. That is why I wanted to speak to you, all I was going to ask of you.\"\n\n\"You bargaining with me, lady?\" he asked in an ominous tone.\n\nShe frowned. \"I asked one simple question.\"\n\n\"And said a whole lot more. But the fact is, I'm not going to believe anything you say until you tell the truth and admit you're working for Sullivan, so don't bother.\"\n\n\"Then why did you abduct me?!\"\n\n\"To find out exactly what you and Sullivan are up to\u2014and you're out of words and time.\"\n\n\"Wait! I haven't finished dressing.\"\n\n\"Then stop talking and get to it,\" he growled.\n\nIt wasn't easy getting her socks and boots on without sitting down, but she managed it by leaning a little against the mule's side. She pulled her jacket out of the valise, shook it out, and donned it, since the morning was still chilly. Then she saw that her hat had been smashed under the jacket and gasped. It was utterly flattened! Did he know no better, putting a beautiful hat under a pile of clothes and boots? She tried to reshape it before tying it on.\n\nThere was nothing she could do for her hair. She'd braided it for bed as usual, but it was already starting to unravel. And it was too dark yet to see if he'd tossed her hairpins into the bag, not that she could fix her hair properly without a mirror. He might have grabbed them if he wanted no trace of her left in the room so it would appear she'd left on her own. Then no questions would be asked. But the sheriff might be notified that she'd skipped out without paying her bill\u2014unless Morgan had paid it.\n\nFor all she knew, he might have left her key along with payment on the desk for the sleeping attendant to find when he woke; then, indeed, no questions would be asked, no sheriff would search for her.\n\nShe came out from behind the mule with the scathing complaint, \"You've ruined my hat.\"\n\nHe stared at her. If he smiled or frowned, she realized she wouldn't be able to see it because his long mustache blended into his beard.\n\nBut he obviously couldn't care less about her hat, because all he said was, \"You'll ride with me.\"\n\nThe devil she would. Ride in close proximity to him for however long it took to reach his mine, which could be days, for all she knew?\n\n\"That's out of the question. A lady doesn't ride with a gentleman who is not her fianc\u00e9 or a member of her family, let alone a stranger who has abducted her.\"\n\n\"Spare me the etiquette lesson, lady. If you don't want to sit behind me, I suppose you can ride on one of the pack mules, though it'll be a tight fit.\"\n\nTight? He had six mules in assorted colors, but all six of them were heavily burdened with sacks, crates, small barrels, baskets, even hay bales. There was no room left on any of them where she could sit even if she would deign to do so. Actually ride a mule? Good God, her options were intolerable. But it was better than riding touching him.\n\nHe didn't wait for her answer. He went to one of the mules and began moving the three hay bales strapped to it farther back toward its rump to make room for her to sit up front. Then he retrieved the blanket he'd tossed aside and folded it for her to sit on. But she could see no way to get onto the mule's back. It didn't have a normal saddle, a pommel, or stirrups, just some sort of apparatus on its back with a lot of straps attached to secure whatever it was carrying. Could she pull herself up by gripping that?\n\n\"They're all sweet gals as long as they're well-fed, and they currently are,\" Morgan said when she moved to stand beside him. \"You won't get bucked off. Carla here has the lightest load, so she won't mind your weight. And being at the front of the team, you'll taste less dust.\"\n\n\"How wonderful,\" she said sarcastically.\n\n\"You could always walk,\" was his terse reply.\n\nBut then his hands suddenly circled her waist and she was lifted high to be plopped down on the mule. Having had no warning, she screeched when he did it. And he just stood there watching her, his thumbs hooked in his belt.\n\nShe felt herself blushing because of the way he'd touched her, no matter that he'd done it to help her. And he seemed to be waiting for something. \"D'you expect me to thank you? That will not be happening!\"\n\nBut all he said was, \"You did notice there's no horn on that pack saddle to help you keep your balance if you're going to sit sideways like that?\"\n\n\"I'll manage,\" she said primly.\n\nHe shook his head. \"I doubt it. And Carla probably won't like the uneven distribution of weight, might even do some bucking to fix it.\"\n\n\"But you assured me\u2014\"\n\n\"That was before I saw the silly way you intend to ride her,\" he cut in. \"Besides, no one will notice if you sit properly.\"\n\n\"Your idea of what is proper is different from mine. I'll manage,\" she repeated.\n\n\"Suit yourself,\" he replied. \"Just don't say I didn't warn you.\"\n\nShe glared at his back as he turned to mount his black horse. And as soon as he urged the animal forward with the mule string following, she was sure she was going to slide to the ground. It was a long way down. Unlike donkeys, the mules were nearly as big as normal-sized horses, just not as big as Morgan's mount.\n\nShe gripped Carla's mane on one side and the edge of the hay bale on the other and tried to scoot back just a little to gain a steadier perch\u2014and appease the mule. But then her valise started to slide off her lap, so she let go of the hay and grabbed the valise and wiggled a little more until her lap was flat enough to keep the valise from sliding off again.\n\nShe felt like laughing hysterically. Good grief, this was ridiculous. And she kept having the urge to bend her right leg for the hook that wasn't there. She'd learned to ride in England with Sophie. Ladies there only rode sidesaddle, perfectly comfortable, perfectly proper. This wasn't comfortable at all and the only thing she could be grateful for at this point was that it wasn't happening in town where it might have created a spectacle, her slowly moving through the streets on the back of a mule. Good Lord, she would have been utterly mortified." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Now that it was daylight and she was sitting upright, Violet could see the landscape clearly. She found it interesting because it was so very different from England and the eastern half of the United States that she was familiar with. Green and golden grass of different lengths swayed and bent in the breeze. There were trees of different shapes and sizes, hills on either side of the road, and lovely mountains in the far distance. There were also a lot of yellow and purple wildflowers. She wanted to inhale deeply to find out if the air was redolent with their fragrance, but she didn't dare with Morgan's large horse kicking up dust in front of her.\n\nThe morning grew steadily hotter, but then every day since she'd arrived in Montana had been excessively warm. She was thirsty again. She was sweating, too. She wanted to take off her jacket, but she was afraid to let go of Carla's mane long enough to slip it off her arms.\n\nShe began to regret mightily the decisions she'd made since returning to America. And she was angry at her brothers for not checking on their father sooner, and especially angry at Daniel for not following her to Montana as he'd promised. And she was angry at herself for thinking this would be just a quick trip, here and back, that would fix everything for all three of them. She was even angry at her father for frittering away his inheritance and her dowry along with it, and dying before he could recover from that disaster. She shouldn't be the one here riding on this bloody mule!\n\nIt had already sunk in how much her own future depended on finding the money her father had made from mining, that she was no longer an heiress. And worse, going to her father's mine might not solve anything. It might not have rich ore in it, it might not be where he'd stored his money, it might not even be worth selling.\n\nShe should at least risk asking Morgan about the value of the mine, but could she trust his answer if he deigned to give her one? Probably not. He'd kept his mine a secret, and if her father's was near it, he'd want to keep her father's a secret, too. Yet he was taking her there, wasn't he? She suddenly froze, wondering if he'd spirited her out of town because he intended for her never to return. Was he planning on killing her to keep his secret? But if so, wouldn't he already have done it when they'd stopped at the stream?\n\nShe was finding it difficult to see any hope in this situation, but she supposed there was a glimmer of hope in his not having killed her yet. She clung to that until he suddenly stopped in the middle of the road, and her whole body stiffened. He'd had an afterthought! He'd remembered that he ought to kill her!\n\nHe dismounted and glanced at her as he untied something from his saddle. \"You're going to be in the sun all day,\" he said. \"You sure you want to wear that silly hat?\"\n\nShe let out the breath she'd been holding; that certainly didn't sound like a death threat. And the fright she'd just had made her sound a little more indignant than she would have otherwise. \"There's nothing silly about this exquisite bonnet.\"\n\n\"Other than it's useless in keeping the sun off your face?\" he countered.\n\nThat was true, but she did have a solution, and with Carla standing still for the moment, she would show him. But first, while the mule wasn't moving, she swiftly shrugged out of her traveling jacket, but didn't try to pull the jacket's bustled train out from under her. She didn't try to get down from Carla, either, which would necessitate Morgan's having to lift her back up. He wouldn't like that any more than she would. Instead, she dug into her valise and took out the one parasol she'd brought with her, slipped her hand through the strap at its base, and opened it. Morgan laughed as she positioned it to block the sun. She bristled. Truly, she didn't like this burly bear one bit.\n\nHe sauntered her way and took the valise from her. \"No need for you to hold that in your lap all day, but you'll need this.\"\n\nHe handed her his water canteen. She reached for it so fast, her fingers touched his. Blushing with embarrassment, she almost let go of the canteen, but he didn't appear to notice and proceeded to tie her valise to one of the straps on Carla's pack saddle.\n\nViolet took a long drink of the warm water, then asked, \"What about you? Will you halt this journey to get your canteen every time you want a drink?\"\n\n\"Won't need to.\" He moved to a different mule, opened one of the baskets it was carrying, and took out another canteen for himself. \"I always carry two in the summer, and you're here smack in the middle of the hottest weather this territory sees.\"\n\nHe came back to stand beside her, but he was looking straight ahead at the long stretch of road before them as he said, \"The stagecoach from Billings travels this road, and those drivers can get real nasty if something is blocking their way. They're all about keeping to their schedules. But the coach stirs up a big cloud of dust, so we'll see it coming from a distance and be able to get off the road.\" And then his eyes came back to hers and his conversational tone turned abruptly cold. \"Sullivan should have known I wouldn't escort you to my mine no matter who you pretend to be. What excuse were you going to use to get me to take you there?\"\n\n\"Deputy Barnes said your mine is close to my father's and you are quite likely the only one who can guide me to it.\"\n\n\"How the hell would he know that?\"\n\nHis sudden snarling tone decided her against mentioning that the town was rife with rumors about him, none of them flattering. So she merely said, \"Because you brought my father to the doctor after the accident in his mine.\" He just scowled at her. She worked up the courage to say, \"Thank you for doing that. Are you taking me to his mine?\"\n\nHe stared at her for a long moment. In the bright morning light, she stared back, but she still couldn't discern what was under all that shaggy hair. But she soon became uncomfortably aware that he seemed to be cataloging her attributes. And she didn't get an answer to her question. She was asked one instead: \"What made you think you could convince me to? Because you're pretty? I reckon Shawn would have picked his spy carefully. You're either an actress\u2014or a harlot. Which is it?\"\n\nOh, good Lord, what he was implying was beyond mortifying. And provoking. Did he want her to yell at him? To give him an excuse to abandon her there on that dusty road?\n\nShe didn't yell, but there was no way she couldn't sound as insulted as she felt. \"I was looking for you before I even met Mr. Sullivan because I am exactly who I said I am and I have a legitimate claim to my father's mine and its proceeds. But to answer your question, no reason had occurred to me why you wouldn't be my guide.\"\n\n\"No? I can give you a bunch, but none suitable for a lady's ears\u2014if you really are one.\" Her blush just got much hotter. \"I heard there was a fancy harridan screaming in the streets last week. Was that you?\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath. \"Certainly not.\"\n\n\"Can't imagine there's more than one fancy harridan in town,\" Morgan countered, apparently not believing her about this either.\n\n\"I assure you that was not me. I would never yell in public. It would be beyond the pale.\"\n\n\"Beyond what?\"\n\n\"The bounds of acceptable behavior.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't you just say that?\"\n\nShe gritted her teeth. The man was intolerable and his disbelief even worse. \"Why are you so sure I'm not Charles Mitchell's daughter?\"\n\n\"He never mentioned a daughter, just sons.\"\n\nIt hurt that her father had forgotten about her. She shouldn't be surprised\u2014out of sight, out of mind\u2014but it still hurt.\n\n\"Are you going to cry?\"\n\nShe blinked, then snapped her brows together. \"Absolutely not. I've had two weeks to shed my tears. And grieving is done in private or with relatives, certainly not with strangers like you.\"\n\n\"Were you fed your lines by Sullivan, or are you just making them up as needed?\"\n\n\"You don't think I would be grieving for a father I dearly loved?\"\n\n\"Lady, I told you I don't believe you're a Mitchell,\" he replied. \"You don't even talk right. Can't believe Shawn couldn't afford a better actress.\"\n\n\"I am no such thing, and I talk perfectly fine for someone who grew up in England these last\u2014\"\n\nHe cut in sharply, \"If you persist in the pretense, then we're done talking.\"\n\nGood. Talking to him was far too infuriating. He obviously wasn't going to tell her anything that she wanted to know and certainly nothing about his mine and its location, so what was the point?\n\nThen he said, \"We can pick up the pace now.\"\n\nMusic to her ears, until he mounted again and the entire string of mules began trotting to keep up with his horse. She nearly screamed, she was so sure she was about to fall off. This wasn't anything like urging one's mount to trot while sitting on a comfortable saddle. This sort of bouncing on the hard back of a mule was more than just jarring, it was becoming painful.\n\nAnd the bustle of her jacket and the blanket under it that she was sitting on had afforded her some cushioning at the slower pace, but not now. It had already been uncomfortable sitting this way without the anchor of a pommel. Her back was already aching from it. Now her arse would be aching, too.\n\nThere was no help for it now. She abandoned propriety and swung one leg over the mule's head to sit astride. She felt warm air on her bare legs just above her boots. She didn't dare lean over to push the sides of her skirt down to cover her legs, if the hem would even stretch that far. Good Lord, she could just imagine what Aunt Elizabeth would say if she could see her now.\n\n\"How are you holding up now?\" she suddenly heard.\n\n\"I'll\u2014manage!\" she snarled.\n\nHe didn't look back to see if she would. The despicable man was probably laughing and didn't want her to see it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\"I'm hungry!\" Violet shouted.\n\nShe'd had no breakfast, thanks to Morgan Callahan's despicable abduction, and lunchtime felt as if it had come and gone. But he didn't appear to want to stop for anything, not even to eat. She assumed there was food among his supplies. Or was he looking for an animal to kill? Did he expect to reach his mine before he ate?\n\nThey were still traveling on the road, heading mostly east. They'd passed that lovely mountain range she'd been able to see when they'd left Butte. She'd thought that might be where they were headed, but obviously not. They passed over creek after creek, many of which had dried up, followed a river for a while, got out of the way of the stagecoach he'd predicted would come along. North of the road the land was still verdant with green grass and trees, but to the south there was only dirt, dried grass, and scrub brush as far as the eye could see. She couldn't stop thinking about that beautiful mountain range that had looked so inviting. She'd bet it was cooler up there!\n\n\"Did you hear me?!\"\n\n\"You screech like a harridan, so how could I not?\" he answered without looking back.\n\n\"So it's your intent to starve me?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, of course not, because that was his intent! Violet had never been this sore in her life. Even that bout she'd had with flu her first year in England when her whole body had ached hadn't been this bad. Morgan had kept up a bouncing pace for a good hour before he'd slowed the animals to a walk for the next few hours. That allowed her to actually lean back a little against the large bundle of hay at her back. Gently. She'd be mortified if she pushed it off of Carla's rump and the bale rolled away.\n\nShe was silently crying in pain by then, though the heat dried the tears so fast, they probably didn't leave streaks on her dusty cheeks. A few times, she thought she might faint. More than a few times, she wished she would, anything to end this misery, however briefly. Oh, how she wished she were back in England traveling in her aunt and uncle's comfortable, elegantly appointed coach. There would be a basket of rolls and pastries on the mere chance that they would get hungry. She was hungry!\n\n\"If you don't tell me when we will eat, I'm dismounting right here,\" she threatened.\n\nShe wanted to, but she hesitated long enough to realize that he wouldn't care, would probably be glad that she'd made the choice to leave herself there in the middle of nowhere. To die. She growled to herself, refusing to give him the satisfaction of having his problem solved so easily. She'd never disliked anyone this much in her life. She disliked him so much, it felt more like hate.\n\nAnd then he turned directly north into a hilly area. A few minutes later, she screamed when he fired his gun. She hadn't expected him to do that, and the sound was so loud and close to her. He dismounted and picked up a long, fat snake near his feet. It had orange, white, and black stripes. And he took out a knife and cut off its head.\n\nShe winced, disgusted, and heard him say, \"It was going to slither past my gals. They would have started bucking to kill it, and you would have landed on your ass. They don't like snakes.\"\n\nSo he'd saved her from falling? Ha! More likely he enjoyed the fright he'd just given her. But instead of tossing the dead reptile aside, he moved to stuff it into one of his baskets. Taking the trophy home? She grimaced at the thought.\n\nPassing Carla again, he handed Violet a strip of dried jerky. She didn't thank him. He could have done that hours ago! And it certainly wouldn't satisfy her hunger for very long, but the first bite she ripped off the strip did take the edge off. And then they continued on.\n\nIt was much greener as they rode north, long grass, a few pine trees, more wildflowers, but the day was still sweltering. She had no idea what time it was, late in the afternoon? The last time she'd glanced at the sun to gauge the time, she'd been blinded for the longest time, so she didn't do that again. But her sore body might be making it seem like they'd ridden longer than they had. Where the devil was his mine? And then they were trotting again! But not for long this time.\n\n\"We'll rest the animals for a while,\" Morgan said, stopping beneath the shade of a large tree.\n\nViolet stared blissfully at the lake they'd come to. Carla had already moved to the water to drink and Morgan was walking toward her. \"Let me help\u2014\"\n\nNot waiting for him to finish, Violet slid off the mule by herself and immediately dropped to her knees, which was not her intention, but her legs just gave out. He shook his head and offered her a hand up, but as long as she was down, she sat to remove her boots.\n\n\"I wouldn't recommend\u2014\" he began, but didn't finish the warning.\n\nHer legs still shaky, she stumbled to the water's edge, sat down on the grass, and stuck her feet in it. It felt sublime, even if the water wasn't as cold as she'd hoped it would be. She wanted to swim in the lake, which was what he must have assumed she was going to do, but she didn't want her clothes to get wet and she certainly couldn't remove them, not with the bear lurking behind her. Her upbringing forbade it. Her legs probably wouldn't cooperate anyway if she tried to swim. Sitting astride might have kept her from bouncing off Carla's back when the mule was trotting, but constantly gripping Carla's sides with her thighs and calves to keep her balance had worsened the aches in her legs.\n\nShe leaned forward to splash water on her face, getting the ends of her hair wet in the process. Then she tried to discreetly knead some of the soreness from her upper thighs, but that hurt too much, so she stopped.\n\nShe realized that she undoubtedly looked a fright. The rest of her braid had unraveled and her long golden hair spilled down her back and over her shoulders. Without her usual coiffure, her lovely little hat probably did look ridiculous now, perched atop her wildly disarrayed mane. But she was beyond caring, too sore, too tired, too miserable\u2014and still a little afraid of her abductor escort. What if he wasn't Morgan Callahan? He never had confirmed that he was. But even if he was, that didn't mean she was safe with him.\n\nA splash to her right made her glance to the side. She was arrested, watching the man dip his head in the water then flip his head back to get the wet hair out of his face. Beads of water reached her, though she barely noticed.\n\nIt was the first time she was seeing him without his hat on. She'd been able to tell that his black hair was beyond shoulder-length. Slicked back with water as it was now, and with his long beard wet, too, his face was a little more defined, could even be called ruggedly handsome, she supposed. It also allowed her to see that he wasn't really that old, maybe less than twenty-five years. Not that either made any difference. He was still a detestable bear.\n\nHe'd been kneeling to dunk his head but stood up now and, once again, hooked both thumbs on his belt\u2014his actual belt, not the gun belt that slanted across his hips. \"I appreciate that you've been mostly silent during the ride.\"\n\nThat \"mostly\" nettled her. \"It's been too hot to make an effort to tell you what I think of the despicable way you are treating me,\" she said indignantly. \"And it wouldn't have served any purpose, would it?\"\n\nHe chuckled and walked away without answering, but then his amusement was answer enough. She huffed to herself and didn't follow him with her eyes. She was content just to sit there in the shade with her feet in the water and ignore the odious man. But she did glance back when she heard the crackling of a fire. He was roasting something above it, had positioned four stakes around it to hold the meat out of the flames. Her eyes flared when she realized he was cooking the snake! Good Lord, did he expect her to eat that? Even as hungry as she was, she simply couldn't.\n\nShe closed her eyes tight, trying to hold back tears. She might have enjoyed the outdoors when she was a child, but she could never have imagined anyone roughing it like this. Or being so poorly prepared that they had to eat snake meat!\n\nA while later he said, \"I've let it cool enough for you to hold.\"\n\nShe glanced down to see a long slice of the cooked meat being offered to her over her shoulder. Oh, God, no plate, skin still on it, though he'd at least split it open.\n\nShe turned her head aside. \"No thank you.\"\n\n\"I thought you said you were hungry? Damn well yelled it, too.\"\n\n\"I am, but only savages eat snake.\"\n\n\"You see a restaurant nearby? Out here, we eat what's available, and while snake meat is tough, it has very little flavor.\"\n\n\"It's certainly not considered fit for human consumption in England.\"\n\n\"Do you see England nearby?\"\n\nWas he making a joke? She remembered an exhibit at a London museum about people in some distant land who ate snake meat. Sophie had whispered that the male savages ate it to increase their virility. This man certainly didn't need help in that regard\u2014he was virile enough as he was!\n\nShe ignored her growling stomach and repeated, \"No thank you.\"\n\nShe squeezed her eyes shut so she wouldn't see him eating. But a while later he tapped her shoulder again, and she turned to see him offering her a piece of bread.\n\nShe took it before saying, \"So the snake was just to prove what a savage you are?\"\n\n\"So savage I tried to feed you something that would hold you till the next meal? You need meat.\"\n\nNot that kind of meat, she didn't, but it was pointless to argue with him. She gazed at the lake as she chewed the dry bread. The less she had to look at the man and his strapping body, the better. His very size still frightened her. He was bearish in appearance and manner. He was rough, uncouth, lacking in refinement, lacking in charm, everything she would find objectionable in a man.\n\nAnd then her eyes flared wide when she saw a very large bear, a bloody real one, lumbering toward the water on the other side of the lake. Horrified, ignoring her screaming muscles, she jumped up and hurried to hide behind Morgan. Why wasn't he getting his rifle?! She peered around his shoulder and saw the bear stand up to sniff the air before it dropped to all four feet again to drink from the lake. Fascinated, she couldn't take her eyes off it.\n\n\"It's not coming over here,\" Morgan said.\n\n\"But if it does?\"\n\n\"Then I'll be taking home bear meat.\"\n\n\"So you're a hunter, too?\"\n\n\"Every man's a hunter when it's necessary, but I don't pass up free food, though I admit I'm not partial to bear unless it's only been eating nuts and berries.\"\n\nBear meat, snake meat. Did people in this uncivilized land really eat anything that became available? God, they probably did. As he'd pointed out, the nearest restaurant she knew of was half a day's ride away.\n\nIgnoring the bear, Morgan moved to another one of his baskets. When he turned, she was amazed to see him offering her a puffy pastry coated in sugar. She was so pleased that she said thank you this time before she sat down by the water again to enjoy the pastry, glad to see the bear wandering off in the opposite direction. A few minutes later, feeling replete, she wished she could lie down and nap for the remainder of the time they would be there, but was afraid she wouldn't get back up if she did.\n\nShe peered up at the cloudless sky. \"Does it ever rain in this territory? Or does the rain dry up in this heat and disappear before it can reach the ground?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I've never thought of that possibility, though I wouldn't be surprised if it happens. But sure, it rains, just not that often. Snows a lot come winter, though.\"\n\nShe didn't care because, thankfully, she wouldn't be here then. She was already dreading having to get back on her feet, much less on the mule. \"How much farther to the mines?\" she asked.\n\n\"Depends.\" She assumed it depended on whether the animals walked or trotted. But then he added, \"But it won't be today.\"\n\nShe was aghast. Was he serious? And if they wouldn't reach his mining camp by nightfall...\"But where will we sleep?\"\n\n\"On the ground, of course.\"\n\nShe was utterly appalled by the notion. \"I've never slept anywhere but on a bed. I simply won't be able to sleep.\"\n\nShe thought she heard a chuckle. \"You will.\"\n\nShe probably would, but she had to point out, \"It would be most improper for me to sleep near you.\"\n\n\"Well, if you don't want me nearby to protect you, I can sleep somewhere else.\"\n\nHer eyes flared, her mind filling with possibilities of what he would need to protect her from. Did he have to be agreeable about this when herds of bears and snakes could converge on them? \"Perhaps near but not too close?\" she amended.\n\n\"I wasn't planning on sharing your blanket, lady. I'll wait for you to invite me.\"\n\nShe gasped and looked away from him again to hide her blush. She heard him walk toward the mules again and glanced to the side to watch him rummage through the baskets until he had a handful of carrots. He proceeded to snap them in two and give each mule half of one, then a whole one to his horse. Feeding his animals lunch\u2014no, she'd seen them eating grass. He was giving them a treat. He definitely had a fondness for them.\n\nShe supposed that might be considered a good trait in a man. His sense of humor was another one. He didn't hesitate to laugh when he was amused. So far that humor had all been at her expense, but two good traits were better than none, she supposed. Still, it was quite surprising that an abductor of women had any.\n\nHer boots suddenly landed next to her. She sighed and tugged them back on before she noticed him standing in front of her with an extended hand. She groaned loudly when he helped her to her feet.\n\n\"It's probably going to feel worse tomorrow,\" he warned.\n\n\"Impossible.\"\n\n\"Meant to stay here longer and sleep off some of this heat, but we can't with that bear in the area. We'll stop again at the next water.\"\n\nShe nodded, but gasped when she took the first step toward Carla. She couldn't bring herself to take another, which might have been why Morgan swooped her up in his arms and deposited her\u2014on his horse.\n\n\"No\u2014\" she began.\n\n\"I wasn't asking,\" he said very firmly as he mounted the animal in front of her. \"It's either this or you're going to be in bed for the next week crying in pain, and I'd just as soon not hear it. So ignore that I'm on the horse with you and try to forget that you're touching me.\"\n\nHer abhorrence of their proximity had nothing to do with propriety at that point. It simply concerned who he was. Her torturer! Her abductor! The man who'd tried to force her to eat snake!\n\nBut then he added, \"Use my back if you want to take a nap. I promise I won't mind.\"\n\nShe sputtered. He took off\u2014at a bloody trot!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Violet had never been this close to a man before. She was actually touching Morgan. Her thighs were touching the sides of his hips. And when he'd taken off at a trot, she'd instinctively grabbed his waist. She was thoroughly embarrassed by this physical proximity, but there was no way around it. After a while, she let go of his waist and just clutched the material of his long vest until he slowed the horse to a walk. That didn't happen soon enough for her.\n\nEven after she could safely remove her hands from his person, she still didn't like riding so close to this frightful beast of a man. He was too big, too masculine, and everything about him made her nervous, but he'd been correct in one regard. She didn't need to use her already screaming leg muscles to stay on the back of his horse. She was perfectly balanced now and firmly seated.\n\nAnother disadvantage of riding with Morgan was being unable to see ahead of them because of the width and height of his back. She couldn't tell where he was going anymore. He seemed to meander for a while in different directions, probably to avoid the steeper slopes of the hills they were crossing over.\n\nAfter perhaps two hours of riding, they crossed a river. She glanced down to see if her boots were going to get wet, but the river was shallow enough at that point for her feet to stay dry. Were they stopping? He had said they would when they reached water again. But he kept going, following the river until they reached a lone tree on its bank. There were forests on all sides of them, most of them in the distance, and mountains on three sides, also in the distance.\n\nDismounting, he slipped his hands under her waist-length hair to lift her down from his horse without asking permission. \"You can sleep until dusk.\"\n\nIf she could move. It hurt so much just standing there, she wasn't sure she could. But at least her legs hadn't buckled this time. And getting to sleep through the remainder of this awful heat sounded heavenly to her\u2014if only there were a bed to do it in.\n\n\"I told you I can't sleep on the ground. I'd like to talk to you about my father instead.\"\n\n\"I don't know your father. If you mean Charley, then say so.\"\n\nShe gritted her teeth, but persisted. \"What was his life like out here? Did he get used to these wilderness hardships?\"\n\n\"Charley had help.\"\n\n\"You?\"\n\n\"And he's none of your business.\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nHe gave her a hard look. \"I can't see what interest Shawn would have in these questions. You improvising, lady? Think this will make your tall tale more believable? So it's actress after all? Too bad, I was hoping for the harlot.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"I've had quite enough of your insults.\"\n\n\"And I've had enough of your jabbering. Sleep or don't sleep, doesn't matter to me, but the animals need rest, so we'll stay here till dusk.\"\n\nThen what? \"Does that mean you intend to ride at night?\" He only nodded, which brought the alarmed question, \"But isn't that dangerous?\"\n\n\"Shouldn't be, as long as the sky remains as cloudless as it's been today. Moonlight can be pretty bright out here.\"\n\nHis lack of concern should have been reassuring, but it wasn't. She kept her eyes on him as he went to get her blanket from Carla and spread it out under the tree for her before he unsaddled his horse.\n\nAt least she wasn't hungry. The last meal had been quite filling and palatable\u2014minus the snake. But she shuddered to think what the next one would be like, so she wasn't looking forward to it. And then she saw the deer at about the same time Morgan did, some hundred or so yards away.\n\nHe reached for his rifle. Violet let go of her parasol to clap both hands over her ears before he could fire. She was watching him, not their soon-to-be dinner, and frowned when he put his rifle away without shooting. She figured the deer must have fled. But when she glanced around, she saw it was still there and so indifferent to their presence that it actually lay down near the river's edge.\n\n\"You're letting it live?\" she said in surprise.\n\n\"Takes time to bleed it so it doesn't taste so gamy. I don't like gamy.\"\n\nShe was surprised that a man who ate snake could be so picky. But she didn't share that thought with him, or how much she abhorred being dependent on him for every morsel of food she got. She wanted to get some rest while she could, even if she couldn't sleep. Dusk came late in summer, but that might be only a few hours away, for all she knew. In Butte she was usually done with dinner long before it started to get dark.\n\nShe proceeded to ignore Morgan and inch her way to the blanket. Each little step she took was painful, but she managed not to cringe. Finally sitting down on the blanket in the shade, she continued to watch Morgan because she didn't trust him one little bit. When he walked away, she lay down to rest her back, planning to sit up when she heard him returning. She never heard him. Despite her sore muscles and the lack of a bed, she fell asleep instantaneously.\n\nShe awoke to the crackling of a campfire, surprised that she'd fallen asleep on the hard ground after all. And it wasn't dusk, but full dark. That was disappointing. She had counted on seeing the sun setting so she could get her bearings. She was also facing her parasol now, but didn't remember opening it and positioning it on the blanket with her. Had Morgan done that to give her extra shade? She doubted he could be so considerate. She must have done it.\n\nThe day's heat was gone. She had no idea how long she'd slept, but she felt refreshed. And hungry again. And cold. But when she sat up, all the pain came rushing back. How on earth had she managed to sleep at all when the slightest turn would have hurt like this?\n\nShe didn't think she could make it to Carla to fetch her jacket, but detested the idea of asking Morgan to get it for her. She was not helpless. And her abused muscles would never get better if she didn't use them. And then she felt her jacket slide down from her shoulders to her lap. Thank God for small favors. Morgan had probably just tossed it toward her and it had ended up covering her. She didn't, couldn't, credit him with actually placing it carefully over her, but she slipped her arms into it.\n\nHe was sitting on the other side of the fire watching her. He was wearing a cream-colored jacket now, made of some sort of smooth animal skin. She saw the vest beneath it, but still no shirt.\n\nHe'd built the fire at the foot of her blanket. She started to get up but was brutally reminded by the pain in her legs that she couldn't. He'd predicted that she'd be crying from it. She fought back the tears by getting angry\u2014at herself. Why did she have to be so bloody stubborn? She could have ridden on his horse from the start and avoided the worst of these aches and pains. He'd offered, but she'd been too furious to accept.\n\nShe managed to roll toward the fire without leaving her blanket. And saw two fish resting on some twigs next to it, already cooked, as well as another chunk of bread and an apple.\n\nShe didn't try to sit up again, just lay there on her stomach resting on her elbows within reach of the food. \"Have you changed your mind about continuing on in the dark?\" she asked.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't you wake me before dusk?\"\n\n\"Maybe I like watching you sleep.\"\n\nThat was absurd when she had to look a fright, her face dirty and dusty, her hair a wild mess, so she put him on the spot, asking, \"Why?\"\n\n\"Why not? For all your lies, you're still a damn fine-looking woman. 'Sides, look at my choices.\"\n\nShe followed his gaze as it turned to his mules and almost laughed, since only their rumps were within view. A joke. Who would have thought a bear could joke?\n\nGlancing at the food again, she asked, \"Is half of this repast for me?\"\n\n\"All of it is,\" he said. \"I'll store whatever you don't eat.\"\n\nThen he'd already eaten? And caught the fish. Which had her ask, \"You didn't sleep a'tall?\"\n\n\"I will, later,\" he said, and got up to resaddle his horse. \"Just hurry it up, lady. Time's wasting.\"\n\nShe picked apart just one of the fish, then ate all the bread and the apple, but now her fingers were utterly sticky from eating without utensils. She glanced toward the river longingly, before he said, \"Here,\" and turned back to see that he was tipping his canteen toward her. She quickly stuck out her hands, and he poured the last of the water over them before he went to the river to refill his canteen. Then he did the same with hers while she flicked her hands to dry them.\n\nThen she became uncomfortably aware that she couldn't leave yet, and started looking around for a bush. And she had to do this on her own. She couldn't very well mention it to the bear.\n\nBut she was scooped up in his arms. \"Wait! I'm not ready to leave yet. Put me down!\"\n\nShe started to struggle when he didn't, until she saw he wasn't taking her to his horse yet. He set her down, taking a moment to steady her, then simply walked away.\n\nGrateful for the bush between them and yet so utterly embarrassed, she found it hard to reconcile the two strong feelings. Her only consolation was that it was dark and he wouldn't notice how red her cheeks were. And then she chided herself for being so silly. Clinging to her civilized mantle was ridiculous when she was smack in the middle of the wilderness. But the conventions of polite behavior were ingrained in her! She wasn't sure she could shed them.\n\nMorgan came back to carry her to his horse. She knew he only did it because he was impatient to leave. So even though she was nestled against his chest and had one arm around his neck, she was compelled to admonish him, \"Your helping me this way doesn't improve my opinion of you one bit. You shouldn't have stolen me away from my hotel. You should have given me a chance to buy a horse and hire servants so I could travel to my father's mine in a more civilized fashion. Which, I should add, would have caused less trouble and work for you.\"\n\n\"You're no trouble\u2014well, let me rephrase that: you're no trouble when your mouth is shut. How about you thank me by shutting it now? Or do you need help with that, too?\"\n\nHe'd stopped and was glancing down at her. His face was awfully close to hers. Was he talking about a gag or a kiss? She wanted neither from him, so she kept quiet and shook her head vigorously. She was done complaining for the moment and back to blushing.\n\nWhen she was seated on the horse, she saw that he'd already put out the fire and repacked. Before mounting, he handed her the hotel blanket. She didn't need it yet, but probably would as the night wore on since her jacket was designed to look pretty, not to keep her warm. But she didn't expect this ride through the darkness to last very long, not when he hadn't gotten any sleep at the last campsite.\n\nThe sky was filled with stars and the moon was indeed bright. The crickets were loud, but a roar in the distance prompted her to put her arms around Morgan. He made no comment, so she kept them there since it made for a steadier seat.\n\nThey continued east, at least she assumed so because he didn't recross the river they'd camped by. But the shadowed landscape became barren again, so she gave up trying to find some sort of landmark in the dark.\n\nTwo or three hours later, Morgan finally stopped and said, \"I need some sleep,\" and abruptly dismounted.\n\nBefore he lifted her down, she had a brief unobstructed view of the dark shape of a mountain rather close by in front of them and another in the far distance to her left. Then his hands were around her waist again, only this time he set her down more slowly and she felt her body brush against his. He was standing too close to the horse. Was the man half-asleep already, not extending his arms fully this time to prevent them colliding?\n\nHe made no apology, probably wasn't even aware that their bodies had touched so intimately. The moment her feet were on the ground he moved away from her, so she didn't give it another thought. She didn't move, and wouldn't until she saw where he was going to place the campfire. She assumed he was going to make one, if only for warmth. It was much chillier now. She felt it even with the blanket wrapped about her like a cloak.\n\nFollowing him with her eyes, she saw that he'd apparently gathered a large armful of dried branches at their last camp while she was sleeping and had tied them to one of the mules. She was glad that he'd thought ahead, since there were no trees anywhere in sight, just a few scraggly bushes and a lot of dead grass. And she didn't see any water nearby.\n\nOnce he got a fire started, she slowly moved over to it and sat down. He tossed her another blanket before unsaddling his horse and spreading out his horse blanket on the other side of the fire. He immediately lay down, using his saddlebag for a pillow.\n\nHe did all this without saying a word to her. Was he not talking because he believed she was an impostor, or was this how he behaved with everyone? It was probably true that he'd become a hermit. He was simply accustomed to silence. Or was he just too tired to talk?\n\nShe wasn't, and stated emphatically, \"I need to reiterate that I am who I say I am. And I know you knew my father.\"\n\n\"I knew Charley, which ain't the same thing.\"\n\n\"Then tell me about Charley. You worked with him, you must even have liked him because you took him to the doctor in town when he was hurt. Was he happy out here? Please, I only had two visits with him in the last nine years. Tell me something about his\u2014his last days.\"\n\nHe sat up. The look he gave her across the fire sent chills down her spine. \"What I'm gonna tell you is I'm tired, otherwise I might applaud. How long did it take you to study for this role?\"\n\nThe question infuriated her. \"Eighteen years, that's how long I've been Violet Mitchell!\"\n\n\"Yet you only show up after Charley dies, 'cause he would've called you a liar same as I am. Nice try, lady, but if I don't get some sleep, you won't like me tomorrow.\"\n\nA distinct threat, yet she still mumbled loud enough for him to hear, \"I don't like you now.\"\n\nShe regretted it immediately, even if it was true. It was still rude, which wasn't like her at all. And turning him even further against her wasn't going to get her any answers. So she raised the proverbial white flag with the neutral remark, \"There was water not far from here. Why didn't we camp by it?\"\n\nHe lay down again and turned on his side facing away from her. \"Water draws animals.\"\n\nAnd he wouldn't be awake to deal with them? She started imagining all sorts of creatures lumbering or slithering past them on the way to that last water they'd passed. Those animals had to come from somewhere!\n\nShe gripped her closed parasol like a weapon and glanced around her. Then heard: \"I'm not going to tie you. Disturb my gals and I'll wake up. Run off and I won't care. You might last a few hours on foot, but I doubt it.\"\n\nSpeechless, she glared at his back. The man was utterly coldhearted. She decided she preferred his silence to nasty warnings like that one." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Violet didn't get any more sleep. She just sat there huddled in her blanket for the remainder of the night. Morgan's proximity didn't help one bit to ease her fear when she knew she could be bitten by a snake or dragged off by a wolf or eaten by a bear before she could wake him up to kill it. There were just too many wild animals in this land, not enough people, and the towns were too far apart. Every little sound, even the swish of a mule's tail, startled her, making her gasp.\n\nIt seemed incredible that only a few months ago she was being fitted for beautiful ball gowns. She'd been so excited with the Season approaching, had such hopes and wonderful possibilities before her. Thanks to her aunt and uncle's sponsorship, she, an American, was going to have her debut in London. And she'd found the husband she wanted before the Season had even started, only to have to sail away the next day\u2014to this.\n\nAll of her dreams had been coming true, but she couldn't return to that upper-class world if her father's mining venture wasn't successful. That future, the one she wanted, hinged on finding his mine and it being a lucrative endeavor.\n\nShe kept feeding the fire with the extra branches. As the night wore on, she got hungry, but after Morgan's warning, she wasn't about to go looking through the mule packs for food. But she was going to wake him the very moment she saw the break of dawn, and kept watching the sky in all directions for it.\n\n\"Still here?\"\n\nShe gasped and glanced back toward the fire to see him standing up. She wondered what had awoken him. It wasn't dawn yet. But then he walked about ten feet away\u2014to relieve himself. She rolled her eyes and pushed herself to her feet to head to the closest bush to do the same. She felt no embarrassment this time, and after massaging her legs all night, it wasn't as painful to walk as it had been yesterday. Her leg muscles still hurt. It would probably be days yet before they returned to normal. Or before she was back in Butte.\n\nShe actually looked forward to that, which was amazing because she didn't consider it a civilized town, but at least she could get a bath there, and a proper meal, and a laundress. And a new hat! Hers must have fallen off yesterday during all that trotting, and she hadn't even noticed until last night. Morgan had already ruined it, so she'd only sighed a little over losing it. Two days in the same clothes, however, was scandalous and worth crying over, but she couldn't very well change without taking a bath first, and she wasn't going to get one out here. She felt so dirty after yesterday's ride!\n\nWhen she returned to the campfire, she saw Morgan saddling his horse. She had a feeling there wouldn't be any breakfast before they departed, at least nothing that she couldn't eat while riding. He confirmed that thought when he handed her two strips of hard jerky before stamping out the fire. She retrieved her canteen and parasol, slipping her hand through each strap to keep them on her wrist, then tried to gnaw off a piece of jerky. It wasn't easy. If it didn't have a salty taste, she would have suspected he'd given her leather to chew on.\n\n\"Put this on.\"\n\nShe scowled when she saw him holding out a small empty sack. \"Put it on what?\"\n\n\"Your head. The rest of the way, you don't get to see.\"\n\nShe was mortified. But there was a bright side. If he didn't want her to see how he reached his mine from here, it was because he intended to release her eventually. So he didn't plan on killing her after all. But she couldn't bring herself to put a sack on her head and refused to take it from him.\n\n\"I'll faint with that covering my face if it gets as hot as it was yesterday,\" she warned. \"And a blindfold will do just as well, won't it?\"\n\nHe said nothing. He didn't move either. If he insisted, she was going to balk and fight tooth and nail. Of course she'd fail. He was too bloody big. But he finally pulled the bandanna off his neck and tied it over her eyes. A concession! So he was capable of reason?\n\nHe picked her up again and placed her on his horse, but this time he mounted behind her. She even guessed why: so he could easily see if she tried to remove her blindfold. This extreme tactic smacked of fanaticism about keeping the location of his mine a secret from her, or perhaps anyone. Which made her wonder why he hadn't shot her father for showing up near his mine. Or were the two mines not really that close together? Maybe it was only Shawn Sullivan that Morgan didn't want in the area. But the man had seemed nice, his daughter even nicer. What exactly would happen if Sullivan learned of the location?\n\nShe really didn't like being seated in front of Morgan. She felt too much of him behind her, and every time he did something with the reins he was holding, his forearms brushed against her waist. But she held her tongue, afraid he might turn around and refuse to take her to the mines if she fussed too much. Good grief, it was abhorrent that her future depended on this particular man!\n\nAs the morning grew warmer, she shrugged the blanket off her shoulders and opened her parasol, not realizing it would block Morgan's view. But she found that out quick enough when he snatched it from her hand. He didn't close it, simply placed it on her head as if it were a hat!\n\n\"Don't lift it any higher or I'll toss it away,\" he growled as he put the handle back in her hand.\n\nViolet sighed, aware that, once again, she must look ridiculous. Not that she cared. After all, for whom did she need to keep up appearances out here?\n\n\"How much longer before this nightmare ride ends and we reach your mine?\"\n\n\"Depends.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"I'm beginning to think you don't know.\"\n\nHe laughed. Again, the sound of genuine humor coming from him surprised her. It made her wonder if he wasn't always a rude, bearish brute. He used to be a rancher, from a family of ranchers to the east. What would they think if they could see him now? And why had he left home? Kicked out for being the black sheep? One dastardly deed too many?\n\nAfter her nervous, wakeful night, the lack of sleep caught up to her as soon as the trotting ended. With Morgan's arms on either side of her holding the reins, the horse's slow, steady motion was making her drowsy. She drifted off, unaware that she was leaning back against the man behind her.\n\nThe shot from a rifle was a very rude awakening. Another snake? She lowered one side of her blindfold, but didn't see anything dead nearby, so she put the cloth back in place before he noticed.\n\n\"What did you shoot this time?\" she asked curiously as he dismounted.\n\n\"The cougar loping toward us. Got him just as he pounced. He thought he'd found dinner.\"\n\nPounced? Had she almost died? She shivered slightly, glad that she hadn't seen that coming. She might have gotten hysterical, then he might have missed his shot. What a horrid thought! God, she hated being out here in the wilderness where death lurked all around them and she had only this man to protect her. She wished she knew how to shoot, wished she had the courage to if she did know, but mostly wished she didn't feel so grateful that she didn't have to\u2014because of him.\n\n\"Will you make camp to cook it?\" she asked when he didn't get back on the horse right away.\n\n\"No, it's one of the bigger wild cats. Some people out here consider it a delicacy since it tastes like pork, but I'm guessing you'd turn up your nose at it as you did with the snake.\"\n\n\"You guessed right.\"\n\n\"I still need to take it home to dispose of,\" he added.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because it will draw vultures that can be seen from far away. And most men would investigate what the birds are after.\"\n\nShe figured they must be near his camp if he was worried about that. She peeked out of her blindfold again and saw him tying the cougar to one of the mules. Apparently they didn't like the smell of blood, because several of them were making a ruckus. Morgan mumbled something that might have passed for soothing. He really did value his animals, and from the way he talked about them, calling them his gals, she guessed they were more like pets to him.\n\nWhen he mounted up again, he placed an apple in her hand. She smiled, well aware that he didn't have to feed her. She wasn't going to die from missing a few meals. She had complained when she was hungry and, of course, would continue to do so, but still, he didn't have to oblige.\n\nHe also didn't have to allow her to lean against him and fall asleep in his arms. But that's what she'd been doing when he'd shot the wild cat. Maybe he hadn't noticed or didn't care as long as she kept quiet, so she didn't give it another thought and refused to feel the least bit embarrassed by it.\n\nThe horse did a lot of zigzagging and climbing. She even heard its hooves striking rock. She could vaguely hear running water in the distance, so she assumed they were following the course of a stream or creek. But it definitely wasn't an ideal path, and she kept getting rocked backward as the horse continued to climb, making it difficult to maintain her erect posture.\n\nShe was tempted to take another peek, but Morgan definitely noticed her raising her hand to her face and sharply said, \"No.\"\n\nShe growled to herself and called him all sorts of nasty names\u2014silently." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "When Morgan finally removed her blindfold a while later, Violet was sure they'd arrived at his mine, but she was wrong. He took back his bandanna because they were surrounded by pine trees now and she couldn't see anything beyond them. They continued climbing slowly upward. She could still hear water trickling somewhere nearby; she just couldn't see it yet.\n\nWith so many hills surrounding Butte, when she'd been in town it had been easy to spot a number of mining camps in the distance because of the workers' tents. There were so many of them, they made the camps look like little tent cities. She'd thought Morgan's mine would be on a hill, too, but they'd been riding uphill for so long she realized they were actually on the side of a mountain.\n\nEventually the trees on their left thinned and she could see a very steep rock slope that gradually grew steeper and steeper until it looked like a cliff face. A lower slope had formed some distance to their right. Now she realized that they were riding through a narrow valley or ravine.\n\nThe trees thinned out further, and soon they came to a western-style fence that blocked their way, just two horizontal planks between posts. Morgan dismounted but didn't help her down from his horse. She was transfixed for a moment when she saw the cabin farther up the slope. It even had a front porch with a roof. She hadn't imagined him living in a wooden structure up here, when all the miners near Butte slept in tents\u2014well, except for well-to-do mine owners like Shawn Sullivan. She'd walked past his big house.\n\nMorgan was unlocking a gate. A sign was posted next to it that read: TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT. If she weren't so tired and uncomfortable, she might have laughed, since they hadn't seen another soul in the day and a half it had taken to get here.\n\n\"Does anyone besides you ever come up this way to trespass?\" she called down to him.\n\n\"Charley Mitchell did. He followed me here. Had a damn spyglass so he stayed far enough back that I didn't notice him.\"\n\nThat was clearly a complaint, yet it made her chuckle. \"That was rather clever of him.\"\n\n\"More like suicidal.\"\n\nShe gasped, thinking of the warning on the sign. \"Did you shoot him?!\"\n\nHe scowled at her. \"Of course not. I gave him time to get off my hill.\"\n\nHe obviously didn't like the fact that her father had started a mine somewhere in these hills, yet eventually he must have accepted him as a neighbor. Her father always had been a charmer. If anyone could tame and talk his way around this bear, Charles could. She smiled at the thought.\n\nShe noticed the chimes and cowbells all along the fence when she heard them jingling and ringing as he opened the gate. The chimes were melodious; the bells weren't.\n\n\"Bells?\"\n\nHe picked up his reins to lead her and the mule team into the fenced area, then turned to lock the gate again, before he deigned to answer her. \"A couple claim jumpers sneaked up on me and took a few potshots last year. They aren't getting another chance to come in here without making some noise. It's the one disadvantage of mining in such isolation. Something happens to me here, no one will know it.\"\n\nDisturbed to hear that dangerous men roamed this seemingly deserted wilderness, she pointed out, \"The law in Butte knows you live in the area. Wouldn't they search for you if after a few weeks you don't return to town?\"\n\n\"Why? Miners often move on or go home. No one looks for them.\"\n\n\"But you're a notable person, Mr. Callahan. Just about everyone I spoke to recognized your name and mentioned a different rumor about you. You've apparently been quite a subject of gossip in Butte.\"\n\nShe was rather pleased to see him frown. His having the upper hand all the time was a difficult pill to swallow, so being able to nettle him with something, even as minor as this, evened the score a tiny bit for her.\n\nWhich was why she continued, \"Aside from the fact that the good deputy knew you brought my father to town when he was injured\u2014which, by the by, was surprisingly decent of you\u2014I assume you mentioned to someone else that your mine is close to my father's. Or did my father tell someone when he was in town?\"\n\n\"Charley did,\" he grumbled, stressing the name, \"when I took him to Butte to file his claim. He was tickled pink that I allowed him to stay.\"\n\n\"Allowed?\"\n\n\"Don't open that can of worms, lady,\" he said.\n\n\"I insist you explain that remark. Do you somehow own this entire mountain?\"\n\n\"You're in no position to insist on anything. Or is the lady going to start yelling in public?\"\n\n\"Your answer is going to make me yell?\"\n\n\"Your tone suggests you're about to show your true colors, which is no lady at all.\"\n\nWas it that obvious that she was exhausted and aching in every limb? They had traveled half the day, to go by the sun directly overhead. But the man was so bloody frustrating. He seemed willing to talk about anything\u2014except the two mines. Because he thought she was an impostor. Yet one of the mines was hers now. But until he actually showed her where it was, she couldn't do anything with it. So she couldn't afford to alienate him in a shouting match or tell him how ridiculous he was being. Not yet.\n\nHe led them into the yard. The land leveled out inside the fence and was actually flat farther back by the cabin. They passed a large, dark hole in the cliff on the left that she assumed was Morgan's mine. A large pile of wooden beams was stacked outside it. Closer to the cabin she saw an iron or steel door in the cliff. She guessed it secured another hole where he stored his supplies. Not far from the steel door stood a narrow structure about six feet tall with a brick dome and some sort of pulley apparatus next to it.\n\nBefore they reached the cabin, she asked, \"Why on earth would you mine here, so far from town, so far from the other mines in Butte?\"\n\n\"Because I wanted to mine in peace, and if I didn't find ore right away, move on to another spot. I traveled through this mountain range for nearly a month last summer before I settled on this location.\"\n\n\"But why so high up the mountain?\"\n\n\"This isn't high up at all. This range has an elevation of ten thousand feet. We're still in the foothills here.\"\n\nShe supposed they were, since he'd been able to get this far on horseback. Still curious, she asked, \"And why exactly here? Did you know you would find ore here?\"\n\n\"I ran across a retired army scout on the way here. He was of Crow descent, the Indians who used to live in this region. He said all the mountains in this territory are rich in ore. His people had always known that, they just had no use for shiny metals. He suggested this particular range instead of the ones by the overcrowded mining camps near Butte and Helena. He said I'd know why once I got here.\"\n\n\"Does that mean gold was just lying around up here?\" she asked.\n\n\"I found a little evidence of it in the creeks and streams around here, but I didn't come this way to pan for gold.\"\n\n\"Why not? Wouldn't that be easier?\"\n\n\"Sure, but not as profitable as a mine full of it would be. And right here, there was evidence of gold in the cliff face. I also liked this spot because it is reasonably flat and wide enough for a camp, the stream runs next to it, and there's even a water hole in case the stream dries up by the end of summer. And the rock face is high enough to tunnel through without having to worry about cave-ins.\"\n\nAs she looked around for the stream, she noticed all the flowers growing along the right side of the camp. She couldn't see the water, but guessed the flowers were hiding it from view. The colorful blooms made the area he'd carved out rather pretty.\n\n\"Well, you obviously didn't need to move on,\" she commented as she glanced back at him.\n\n\"No, I definitely got lucky. There was a smattering of gold for a few feet in, then some silver. I kept digging, hoping for more gold, but five more feet in I crossed a damn mother lode of silver that hasn't let up yet.\"\n\nShe was impressed. If he'd been up here mining since last summer, he must be rich by now. You certainly couldn't tell it by the way he dressed, or lived, for that matter. But his cabin wasn't made of logs, despite there being so many trees up this way. Somehow he'd brought lumber up this hill, and even glass for a couple of windows. But the cabin looked small from out front, which made her wonder about sleeping arrangements. She hoped it had more than one room. Sharing one with him would be scandalous and ruin her reputation! All the more reason for her to quickly find her father's mine and money and persuade Morgan to take her back to Butte.\n\nOther than the gray rock cliff face, it was quite green up here, and the air was cooler even with the sun shining down on them. There were even a few shade trees inside the fence, which continued on the right all the way beyond his cabin. If he hadn't mentioned claim jumpers, she would have thought the purpose of the fence was to provide a corral for his animals.\n\nThey hadn't passed her father's mine on the way up here, or perhaps they had while she'd been blindfolded. But it could as likely be in another gorge nearby. And the sooner she found out if her father had stored his money there, the sooner she could go home.\n\nSo she asked Morgan, \"Will you take me to my father's mine now?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Lady\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop calling me that,\" she cut in. \"The way you say it, it sounds like a bloody insult. If you won't call me Miss Mitchell, then you have my permission to use my given name, Violet.\"\n\n\"Why?\" he countered. \"We aren't friends, you aren't who you claim to be, and I might have to resort to unusual measures to find out what you're really up to.\"\n\nHer eyes flared briefly then narrowed on him. \"You'll do nothing of the sort, and we both know it. You've fed me. You've even let me sleep against your chest, which I apologize for, but you still allowed it. You wouldn't resort to torture no matter who you think I am, so do not make pointless threats.\"\n\nHe turned to her, his light-blue eyes roaming over her for a moment before a lazy smile formed. \"Who said anything about torture?\"\n\nHe took a step toward her, his arms extended. She'd gone too far! He was going to disprove everything she'd just said in a horribly physical manner!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Considering what was rampaging through her mind, Violet gasped and slid down the other side of Morgan's horse to escape him, then groaned as pain shot up her legs from such an abrupt landing. She would have fallen to the ground if she wasn't still grasping the pommel of his saddle.\n\nBut he came around the horse and pried her hands loose from the pommel. \"Why'd you dismount like that? You in some kind of hurry?\"\n\n\"No, I\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped when he swept her into his arms and started walking toward the cabin. She realized he probably only intended to help her up to his porch, since it was about two feet off the ground and the one step that led to it had been built for his long legs, not a woman's. And there was no hand railing to help her manage the steep climb. Her legs probably would balk if she tried to do it herself.\n\nStill, she was utterly flustered by what she'd thought he was about to do and snapped, \"I don't want to hear any more threats from you, real or not. I'm at the end of my tether, tired, and hungry, and I need a bloody bath!\"\n\nHe sniffed. Twice! \"Yes, you do.\"\n\nShe gasped at that insult and immediately returned it: \"So do you!\"\n\n\"Are you suggesting we bathe together?\"\n\nThat infuriated her even more. \"I meant nothing of the kind.\"\n\nShe noticed the twinkle in his eyes. Was he trying not to laugh? The beast! Yet as he finally set her down on the porch, he said, \"You'll get your bath as soon as I unload the mules.\"\n\nHe left her on the porch and started doing just that. The door to the house was closed, and without his permission, she wasn't going to open it. She sat on one of the two rough chairs on the porch, hoping her brocade skirt wouldn't get splinters from it. She wondered why there were two of them when he'd implied no one else ever came up here, but she supposed her father must have visited him from time to time. It was difficult to picture her debonair father, who socialized at Philadelphia's finest homes and gentlemen's clubs, sitting on the porch of this cabin in the middle of nowhere. She found it hard to believe she was there herself.\n\nThe day was still so hot, which made her appreciate the shade on the porch as she watched Morgan. He was leaving everything he took off the mules right there on the ground, his goal apparently to unburden them and set them loose before he put anything away. The unencumbered mules gravitated to the stream, which meandered inside and outside the fence.\n\nHe was close enough to talk to her. After his flat refusal to show her her father's mine, she decided to ask him about his cabin, and then steer the conversation to the topic she was most interested in. Aunt Elizabeth had told her she was an adroit conversationalist.\n\n\"Why did you build this cabin several feet off the ground?\"\n\n\"I got up here last summer, long after the spring thaw. So I didn't know if the runoff from the icecaps would come pouring down here this spring.\"\n\nShe thought he might be grinning, but it was so hard to tell with that bushy mustache of his, so she merely asked, \"Did it?\"\n\n\"No, not this year at least, but water did erode this gorge at some point in the history of this range. And the stream did flood this spring about four feet on this side, more on the other side. But last year I didn't know how bad it would be and pictured my cabin being washed down the hill, so I decided to take the precaution of elevating it when I got tired of sleeping in a tent.\"\n\n\"It must have taken you months to build.\"\n\n\"No, just a few days.\"\n\n\"That's impossible.\"\n\n\"Not with friends helping.\"\n\nShe would have said that was also impossible, his having any friends, but it would have been quite an insult; she wanted to disarm him with harmless talk before she mentioned Charles's mine again, so she asked, \"Friends from Butte?\"\n\n\"No, I sent for some friends I grew up with in Nashart, men I knew I could trust not to reveal the location of my mine. I ordered all the lumber, pipes, flues, bricks, and everything else needed and stored it in town before I asked them to ride over. By then I would have been followed if I'd been seen leaving town with building materials, but they weren't.\"\n\n\"By then?\"\n\n\"Most of the miners in town work for a few big mine owners. And they're a greedy bunch. But most of their mines started pulling more copper than silver or gold, so they concentrate on copper now\u2014all except for your friend Sullivan. His silver hasn't run out yet.\"\n\n\"He's not my friend. And besides, why would Shawn Sullivan or anyone go to so much trouble to find out where your mine is located? From what I've heard, there's lots of gold and silver in these hills and mountains.\"\n\n\"Sure there is, but Sullivan doesn't want anyone else selling silver. He was getting high prices for his when he was the last supplier in this area. He didn't like it when those prices dropped and his buyers told him to find another market if he wasn't satisfied with what they were paying him. He couldn't figure out where all the other silver was coming from and sent spies all around the area to find out. And came up with nothing. Then one of his men got curious about me. No one had paid me any mind before those prices dropped. They thought I came in, sold a few hides, then left again.\"\n\nHis tone remained calm but had turned a little derogatory when he'd mentioned Shawn Sullivan. Now she understood a bit better why he might be suspicious of her and jump to the wrong conclusion that she was colluding with his worst enemy. But she wanted to know more.\n\n\"How did Mr. Sullivan find out you were the mysterious silver miner?\"\n\n\"Because he was still demanding answers from his men, and they broke into my crates at the station before they were loaded on the train. Sullivan approached me after that and offered a fair price for my mine. He wasn't expecting me to tell him to go to hell. After that, he had his men follow me when I left town. It was beyond annoying. Took me twice as long to get back here since I had to throw them off the scent. The second time his men followed me, I jumped them and left them hog-tied in the middle of the road with Go to hell notes pinned to their chests.\"\n\nQuite an aggressive response, Violet thought; but wanting him to think she was on his side, she remarked mildly, \"I don't imagine that went over too well.\"\n\n\"No, the townsfolk didn't like me after that\u2014well, they never did, but they started giving me a wide berth. And Sheriff Gibson gave me a scolding the next time I went to town. He wasn't serious about it. He's had to investigate countless complaints from small mine owners about threats, beatings, even some killings after they refused to sell their operations to rich owners like Sullivan.\"\n\nHe had to be exaggerating or was simply mistaken. But she didn't want to antagonize him by defending Shawn Sullivan, which might reinforce his suspicions that she was working for his enemy, so she only said, \"Well, you certainly made your feelings clear to Mr. Sullivan.\"\n\n\"He doesn't take no for an answer. I even changed markets and made a deal directly with a pair of silversmith brothers in New York. And I started leaving Butte by different routes after that, but Sullivan still tracked me down each time I came to town and made a higher offer for my mine. So I stopped going so often, even started sneaking into town in the dead of night, and I stopped picking up the notes he leaves for me at the hotel. He still wants my mine, but that's not all. He wants to know where both mines are, mine and Charley's. He'd be happy with either one to start, because he knows he'll wind up with both in the end.\"\n\nSullivan wanted her father's mine, too? That would solve everything! As soon as she located it, she could sell it to him for a lot of money, then return to London and slip back into the social whirl and win Lord Elliott before some other debutante did. Thrilled to have such a perfect solution to her problems, she had to cover her mouth so Morgan wouldn't see that she was smiling. But would a sale provide enough money for her and her brothers? Or might it be more profitable for them to hire men to work the mine? She wouldn't know until she actually saw it, but at least she had two good options now.\n\nDone with his task, Morgan slapped the rump of the last mule, then started shoving crates and baskets onto the porch under the railing.\n\n\"But you already knew all that about Shawn Sullivan, didn't you?\" He paused after setting a crate on the porch and looked up at her.\n\nShe sighed in irritation. \"I barely said two words to the man the night I met him. His daughter, Katie, invited me to join them for dinner. He was there to meet his future son-in-law for the first time, not me.\"\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nHis skepticism lit the flame. It might be ingrained in her to keep unpleasant emotions under wraps and put on a good face for all occasions, but she'd never been tested like this! She was tired, hungry, dirty, and totally exasperated with this man.\n\nWith a smoldering glare, she pointed out, \"You snatched me out of a perfectly comfortable hotel room, accused me of being a liar, made me ride a horse in the hot sun for a day and a half, tried to feed me snake meat! And you made me sleep on the bloody ground! The least you can do now is take me to my father's mine!\"\n\n\"You're not going to like your stay here if you keep asking for something that's not going to happen.\"\n\nHis tone was quite sharp, but she was beyond caring or caution. She leapt to her feet, her hands gripping the porch railing. \"You aren't going to like my stay here if you don't answer me! It's my bloody mine you are refusing to tell me about. It belongs to me and my brothers now. I demand you take me to it right this instant!\"\n\n\"Make-believe daughters don't get to demand anything.\"\n\nAnother evasion? One too many! In a fury, she reached into the basket at her feet and threw a handful of the contents at him, then screamed in frustration when she saw it was just carrots.\n\nShe ran into the house to find something heavier to hit him with, shouting back, \"You've stolen our mine! Claim-jumped it, or whatever you call it out here. That's why you want to hide it from me!\"\n\nHe followed her inside, growling, \"You're out of your mind!\"\n\n\"You're right and it's your bloody fault!\"\n\nShe grabbed cans off a shelf and started throwing them at him. She didn't pause to see if any hit him before reaching for more. But when strong arms clamped tightly around her middle and her feet left the floor, she burst into tears at being thwarted.\n\n\"So much for the lady story,\" he said as he put her down on a bed.\n\n\"Go to the devil!\" she yelled, and turned over to face the wall. And cried a lot more." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "\"We're so happy you're home, Violet.\" Sophie sat beside her on the blanket. They were on an outing in the park, a few of the younger girls picking wildflowers. But their favorite park didn't have wildflowers. She tried to tell them that, but no one was listening to her. One of her cousins reached into a picnic hamper and asked her, \"D'you want crumpets or cat meat?\" Appalled, Violet looked around, expecting to see a cougar, but saw Lord Elliott approaching instead. He looked so handsome in riding jodhpurs and holding a crop. All the girls gathered around him excitedly. He kissed Sophie's hand, patted each of the younger girls on the head, then glanced at Violet and raised his nose a little higher in the air and walked on. He was snubbing her?! Sophie stopped giggling long enough to say, \"He heard you're a pauper now. Shame on you, Vi, for letting that happen.\" Violet burst into tears and started throwing carrots at Elliott's retreating back. But Elliott must have forgiven her, because suddenly she was dancing with him in a beautiful ballroom, laughing at his clever quips. Everything was right with the world again until he pulled away from her, looking horrified: \"A snake is slithering out of your reticule!\"\n\nIt was the snake that woke her. She looked around frantically for a moment to make sure there wasn't one with her in the bed that had wormed its way into her dream\u2014nightmare was more like it. She shuddered briefly once she was sure there wasn't a snake in the cabin, as far as she could see.\n\nShe took note of her surroundings. There were just the two windows in the front wall to let in light, the glass so thick she could barely see through it. There was next to no furniture. Instead of a cabinet, Morgan had a wall of deep shelves, one for folded clothes and bedding, one for dishes and pans, the rest for supplies, some of which were stored in baskets. Several crates were now stacked against a wall, too. Three chairs surrounded a rectangular table in the center of the room. Apparently, he did get visitors. There was no kitchen, just a fireplace with two raised griddles over it. A Dutch oven sat on the higher one, two pots on the lower one, a low fire burning beneath them. It was a decent fireplace, though, built of stone with a mantel on which a lantern and a few knickknacks sat. She was disappointed by the spartan accommodations. No sofa, not even one comfortable chair, just two narrow beds in opposite corners. Two?\n\nMorgan walked in with a large sack of grain over his shoulder. She could see that he'd bathed. A long towel was still hanging about his neck, but he hadn't fully dressed. His chest was bare and wet, his hair wet, too. It was too much when she wasn't fully awake yet, all that bare brawn utterly transfixing her, not letting her thoughts through, not letting her breathe...\n\n\"I built most of the furniture, so it's as rough as you might expect, since I'm not a carpenter. The table wobbles. Ignore it, I do.\"\n\nShe breathed deeply, and tore her eyes off him. He must have noticed her looking about the room to say that. She'd rather ignore him and his comments about his living quarters. Was he trying to soothe her with trivial conversation? That wasn't happening.\n\nShe glanced between the two beds, one crumpled with bedding, the one she was sitting on made up neatly. \"Who else lives here with you?\"\n\nHe put the grain sack on a shelf before he turned and said, \"No one now.\"\n\n\"Was it my father? Is his mine actually that close to yours?\"\n\n\"Should I brace myself for another conniption?\"\n\nNormally she would be mortified that she'd let him see her at her worst. Good Lord, she'd actually thrown things at him. But he'd deserved it. And then she realized he'd just evaded again!\n\n\"I think if I had a gun right now, I'd shoot you,\" she said tonelessly.\n\n\"And miss.\"\n\n\"Probably,\" she agreed. \"Though it would be satisfying to try. You really can't keep doing this to me. That mine is too important to my family.\"\n\n\"Well, that's the thing, Violet Mitchell pretender, it's not. It's important to Sullivan, and what's really important to you is his agenda. Now, I might have thrown a wrinkle into your plan by figuring that out, but you apparently had a fallback plan ready in case I did. Bottom line, Charley's mine is still none of your business, so do us both a favor and stop nagging me about it.\"\n\n\"This is bloody absurd. You assumed this impostor nonsense simply because Katie Sullivan befriended me in town, but it's simply not true. I am exactly who I said I am.\"\n\n\"I spent enough time with Charley to know he was from the East, Philadelphia, I think he said. You, however, aren't from there. Sullivan was pretty dumb to hire a foreigner to play the part of Charley's daughter.\"\n\nShe sighed. It was suddenly clear why he refused to believe her\u2014he'd even brought it up before. Her accent. Even her brothers had mentioned it.\n\n\"I tried to tell you on the trail that I've been living with my aunt and uncle in England for the last nine years, which may be why my father never mentioned me to you, and is why I speak with an English accent. Even my brothers teased me about sounding like a Brit now.\"\n\n\"Are they children?\"\n\n\"What difference does that make?\"\n\n\"Then they are?\"\n\n\"No, they are two years older than I.\"\n\n\"Then they wouldn't have let their younger sister come out here alone. You're just providing more proof that you aren't a Mitchell.\"\n\nShe growled under her breath in frustration. \"On the trail you implied that once we reached your mine, the truth would be revealed. Well? What kind of proof do you have that what you say and not what I say is the truth?\"\n\n\"You won't be leaving here until you admit the truth,\" he replied. \"That's all I implied, and I don't give a damn how long it takes.\"\n\nShe was dismayed. Her brothers needed help immediately! \"That's unacceptable. My visit to this territory is a matter of the greatest urgency, and besides, I can prove who I am. You need only send a telegram to my brothers. Time is of the essence. I can give you the address, but you might think that's prearranged. I can also give you their names, but again, you might think they are coconspirators. So just send it to Charles Mitchell's sons. Our family is well known in Philadelphia. It will be delivered to them and they will confirm that I came here to find our father. And one of them intended to come with me, but he was detained. He was supposed to follow, but sent word that he couldn't. They are depending on me to find Father's money. D'you have it?\"\n\n\"You're too interested in that money,\" he remarked. \"Why is that?\"\n\n\"Because my brothers and I need it.\"\n\nThat got her a long stare before he said, \"The brothers who aren't actually yours? When it's more likely that Sullivan has promised you that you can keep any money of Charley's you find out here?\"\n\n\"D'you realize how exasperating you are? I told you exactly how you can prove who I am. I demand you take me back to town to do so!\"\n\n\"Well, that's not happening, not until I'm ready for another trip, and maybe not even then. You don't get to lead anyone back here, and letting you loose back in town will just have you running to Sullivan to do that.\"\n\nHer brief burst of anger petered out, leaving her with a sigh. \"I have no intention of parting company with you when you are the only one who can help me. My brothers are counting on me to fix the dilemma our father left us in.\"\n\n\"You mentioned you're on a tight schedule. What's the hurry, other than Shawn's damn impatience?\"\n\n\"I don't know anything about that man, but my brothers and I are going to lose our family home if you don't turn over our father's money immediately. The loan Papa left them with used the house as collateral, and the payments have escalated. If you won't take me to town so I can get you proof of my identity, then you go. I'll wait here. You can cover the distance in half the time if you travel alone.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why are you being so bloody stubborn about this?!\"\n\nHe straightened. \"Maybe I'm going to enjoy having you around. Maybe I think you're so good at your job that you planned for all contingencies, including paying a visit to Philadelphia first to find out what you could about Charley. Lady, there's all sorts of ways you could have prepared in advance to pull off this scam.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Violet glared at Morgan. He had to be an idiot if he thought his comment about enjoying having her there could disarm her into telling him what he was convinced was the truth. It occurred to her that he might have been taking what he could from her father's mine before relatives arrived to claim it. And that was why he didn't want to show her where it was and why he might insist to the bitter end that she wasn't a Mitchell.\n\n\"What are you going to do when you find out you're wrong and I'm not working for Shawn Sullivan?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'd rather hear you admit the truth and give me a reason to shoot the son of a bitch.\"\n\n\"Men don't seem to need much reason to do that out here,\" she replied, remembering that frightful duel she'd witnessed in Butte. \"Are you a thief? Have you been working my father's mine all this time since he died? Is that why you're being so evasive?\"\n\n\"If you want to see me angry, you're sure working in the right direction.\"\n\nHe didn't sound angry. Actually, the bear sounded amused. \"Do you have his money?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nAn actual answer, but not the one she'd hoped for. \"If you're not a thief, why won't you talk about my father or his mine? I have a right\u2014\"\n\nHe cut in, \"That's just it, you don't. D'you think I don't know that you'll take anything I say right to Sullivan's ears? So give it a rest, 'cause I'm damn tired of reminding you that it's simply not your business.\"\n\nShe sighed. Her belly rumbled, but he hadn't mentioned eating yet, and she'd rather bathe first, so she asked, \"Where is that bath you mentioned? You said there's a water hole.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Oh, hell no, that's for drinking and cooking in case the stream dries up. There's a spot in the stream that's backed up a little and has formed a small pool. It's where I bathe when I feel like it.\"\n\nThat implied he didn't bathe often. She grimaced as she carefully stood up. Her legs still hurt, but she hoped soaking in cold water would ease her thigh muscles. She reached for the valise he'd set next to the bed and pulled out some clean clothes. Very wrinkled clean clothes. She might have asked if he had an iron, but it would no doubt make him laugh again.\n\n\"You're determined?\" he asked, watching her.\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"The pool is outside the fence, so it's not safe for you to go alone.\"\n\n\"I'll brave it.\"\n\n\"You'd still need a gun\u2014if you know how to use one.\" When she frowned, he sighed, adding, \"I'll take you, as long as you're quick about it. And don't worry, the only thing you'll see of me is my back. Come on, the sun will be setting soon.\"\n\n\"Then take a lantern.\"\n\n\"I said quick, but should have added, or not at all. Take your pick.\"\n\nShe was beginning to think disagreeability was ingrained in him, but before he got out the door, she asked, \"Do you have soap?\"\n\nHe turned about and went to his wall of shelves to rummage through a basket, then tossed her a very large bar. The coarsest type of soap\u2014it would probably rub the skin right off her hands. \"A washcloth?\"\n\n\"Lady, does this look like a hotel to you?\" Yet he tossed a small towel at her, then, as an afterthought, the longer one around his neck. She started to ask for a clean one, but he read her mind: \"That's the only one, take it or leave it.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes for the briefest moment, wondering what Sophie would think if she could see her now. Her cousin would either faint or laugh, most likely the latter. She was fond of saying that when situations became absurd, they turned comical. But Violet, in the thick of absurd situations and such primitive choices, hadn't reached that point yet.\n\nShe followed her host outside. He was waiting at the top step, she assumed to help her down them. She noticed a wheelbarrow full of rocks that hadn't been there before.\n\n\"You were mining?\" she asked in surprise.\n\n\"Why not?\" he replied. \"I make use of daylight even if you don't.\"\n\nSure, remind her that she'd slept a good portion of the day away when she hadn't meant to. And that was definitely humor in his tone. \"I assumed you would spend the rest of the day unpacking your supplies.\"\n\n\"I don't unpack anything until I need it.\" Nor had he been waiting there to help her, and the complaint he made as he went down the steps confounded her: \"Waste of two good support beams.\"\n\nShe didn't have a clue\u2014then she did. He'd built railings for the steps while she slept! He didn't need those handholds or they would already have been attached to the steps. He'd built them just for her\u2014and was complaining about it. She was amazed that he'd done it.\n\nShe couldn't help smiling and saying, \"Thank you.\"\n\nHe stopped to wait for her and, seeing her hand on the railing, just nodded curtly. She saw mules grazing on both sides of the stream, then noticed an extension of the fence that ran through the trees on the other side of the stream. \"More bells on that fence, I suppose?\" He nodded, and she wondered aloud, \"I would think bells could be cut off and a fence hopped in silence, so wouldn't a dog prove more useful to let you know if anyone approaches?\"\n\nHis answer was to whistle, very loudly. Nothing happened; he was just facetiously implying he had a dog. But he continued down the hill toward the gate they'd passed through when they arrived.\n\nFollowing him, she passed his horse, the only animal left in the front yard. \"Why isn't he with the mules? Or is he a stallion?\"\n\n\"He'd be a terror around here if he was. No, I just don't take chances with my only way out of here. I lock Caesar in the mine at night. But I dug out a section to make room for my gals, too, during the worst of winter. It's not an ideal stable, but it keeps them from freezing.\"\n\nNow she understood why he'd brought bales of hay from Butte when there was already so much grass around here. And then she heard barking in the distance. \"So you do have a dog?\"\n\nThe animal hadn't appeared yet, but Morgan said, \"I was out hunting after the spring thaw and cooking a rabbit for my lunch when Bo approached my camp snarling at me. Don't know how long he was lost out there, but he was skin and bones by then. There was no doubt he was going to attack, he was that hungry. Rather than shoot him, I tossed him the rest of my meat. It was funny as hell. He wolfed that down in one chomp, then gave me an expectant look with his tail wagging. I'd won him over that easily. So I let him follow me home. He comes in handy, cleaning up scraps. But he wanders pretty far when I'm not here.\"\n\n\"The fences don't keep him in?\"\n\n\"Now that he's healthy, he has no trouble jumping them,\" he said.\n\nThat was proven a moment later when a large black-haired dog leapt over the nearest fence and jumped up on Morgan in greeting, and then almost immediately started growling at Violet.\n\nShe didn't back away. \"You could have warned me he's not tame.\"\n\n\"But he is, tame as a pussycat.\"\n\n\"That, sir, is not a good comparison. I had a cat, the meanest feline ever. She hissed and scratched at anyone who came near her.\"\n\n\"Except you?\"\n\n\"Especially me,\" she corrected, her eyes still on the growling dog. \"I think she knew I preferred dogs and hated me for it. My brothers got dogs, I got the mean cat.\" And then to the dog, she said firmly, \"You, stop that. We're going to be friends.\"\n\nMorgan chuckled and only had to pet the top of the dog's head to get it to stop growling. \"Bo's just protective of his yard. But tell me, why didn't you run into the house screaming? Isn't that what you ladies do when threatened?\"\n\nShe gave him an indignant look. \"I told you I like dogs. Yours will sense that soon enough.\"\n\nShe followed Morgan out of the yard and about twenty feet down the hill. The little pool he'd described was in the thicker part of the forest, but he hadn't mentioned how inviting he'd made it. Smooth rock lined each side to make it easy to get in and out, and there were even a few flowers like those near his cabin.\n\nTrue to his word, Morgan leaned against a tree, facing away from her. She still kept her eyes mostly on his back as she disrobed down to her underclothes and got in the water. She washed quickly, not wanting to give him another reason to complain.\n\nShe noticed another bar of soap next to the stream and almost laughed. Did he think she wouldn't want to use his? She dried herself and dressed behind another tree in dry undergarments, a clean white blouse, and a lavender skirt. After rolling her soap and wet smallclothes in the washcloth, she wrapped Morgan's larger towel around her wet hair, already imagining how painful it was going to be when she took her brush to what was now a wildly tangled mane.\n\nGathering up her things, she walked over to Morgan so they could head back to the cabin. He pushed away from the tree trunk he was leaning against and loomed over her. It did feel that way, he was so tall.\n\n\"This is when you might want to seduce me. If that's one of your options, no point in wasting time.\"\n\nShe was speechless. Strong arms drew her close to him, and he kissed her. Tickled by his mustache, teased by his tongue, she was startled by the fervent sensations that ran through her. It was all too fast and too much. She instinctively shoved him away from her and stumbled on a tree root behind her, toppling backward toward the water." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "He stopped the fall. Violet wished he hadn't. She could have used another dunking, she felt so flustered from that kiss. She certainly didn't thank him for keeping her dry when his effrontery deserved a dressing-down.\n\nShe glowered at him with high indignation. \"I am a proper young lady. Such liberties as you just took I find scandalous! And you will not insinuate again that I'm a harlot when I most certainly am not!\"\n\n\"I know. You're an actress, and a damn good one. Women don't usually react that way when I kiss them.\"\n\nWhat arrogance! At least he hadn't been able to tell that she'd rather liked the kiss, found it quite intriguing. That would have been too embarrassing. But he was still insulting her with that actress nonsense, so she stressed, \"I'm not an act\u2014\"\n\nHe cut in, \"A little too much protesting, or are you regretting the role you got stuck with? You do know you can improvise, right? So don't kick yourself too hard over the lost opportunity. I'm sure you'll get another.\"\n\nOpportunity? \"That will not happen again,\" she insisted.\n\n\"Does that mean I have to shove you away next time?\"\n\nShe gasped. She sputtered. He added, \"That's a yes, I take it? Fine, since you obviously spent a lot of time rehearsing, I won't interfere with your role again.\"\n\nWas that an assurance that there would be no more kissing? She wasn't exactly sure, but he'd already walked away, so she followed. But she couldn't help wondering how she might have reacted if he hadn't insulted her before he'd kissed her. Would she have pushed him away? Yes\u2014no\u2014maybe. She didn't know! But for a first kiss, it had certainly been memorable, even if she wouldn't have picked the bear for such an experience.\n\nBack in the yard she hung her wet clothes to dry on the fence at the side of the cabin where they would be out of view of anyone entering or leaving the cabin. Coming back around the porch, she saw Morgan leading his horse into his storeroom. She frowned when he came out alone, closed the large steel door, and locked it. But he'd told her that he stabled his horse in his mine...\n\nHer eyes immediately moved to the other big hole in the cliff, which she'd wrongly assumed was his mine, just as she'd wrongly assumed the steel door led to a storeroom. Her father's mine was this close to Morgan's?! Yes, of course it was, verified by two chairs on the porch and two beds inside the cabin.\n\nHands on hips, she demanded, \"Why didn't you admit my father's mine is right here in your yard?\"\n\nHe was approaching her but didn't stop, just growled in passing, \"I'm pretty sure I warned you not to open that can of worms. Not another word about it, lady.\"\n\nOh, they would most definitely discuss it, but maybe after dinner. When he wasn't growling. But why was it such a bone of contention with him?\n\nShe followed him inside to return the bar of soap to the basket and was amazed to see shaving tools in it, razors, strops, a fancy lather mug, little scissors. It was a miracle that they hadn't all rusted from disuse. When she turned around, she saw Morgan slipping his arms into a white shirt. After lighting a lantern, he picked up both pots from the fire and carried them to the table. The wooden table. And there was no metal pot holder to set them on.\n\n\"Wait!\" She quickly grabbed a small towel from the shelf, folded it, and laid it on the table. \"There. So you don't warp the wood.\"\n\nShe heard his snort, but didn't wait for his sarcastic reply. She fetched her brush instead and sat down on the bed to tackle the tangles in her hair. They were as bad as she figured, and her hair was still damp, which didn't help.\n\nBut Morgan was suddenly sitting down next to her and taking the brush from her hand. She leaned away with a gasp. \"What are you doing? I don't need your help.\"\n\n\"Instead of getting all prissy, why don't you just wait and say thank you later?\"\n\nShe closed her mouth on what she'd been about to say. Did she really come across as prissy to him? Well, what did he expect when everything she'd experienced with him was new and utterly foreign to her? Including this, a man brushing her hair. Only her maid or Aunt Elizabeth or Sophie had ever done this for her.\n\nShe expected to cry from his yanking her hair out by the roots as he brushed through the tangles, but instead she kept feeling his fingers brush against her neck as he divided the locks and held them tight by her nape so he didn't pull any. She was amazed that someone like him could be so gentle, but she wasn't about to share that thought with him. By the time the last of the tangles were gone and he was running the brush through the entire length of her hair, she was close to sighing in pleasure!\n\nWhen he stood and moved back to the table, she said softly, \"Thank you.\"\n\nHis eyes met hers before he replied, \"My pleasure. No different from grooming a mule's tail.\"\n\nHe was comparing her to his mules? She decided not to reply and joined him at the table as he ladled out two large bowls, then two small ones. A thick stew with carrots was in the large bowl and beans in the smaller one.\n\n\"This isn't the cougar you shot, is it?\" she asked hesitantly before she picked up her spoon.\n\n\"No, this meat isn't as tender. Dried venison never is. Too bad you're so finicky.\"\n\nHe broke off a chunk of bread for her, but there was no butter for it on the table. It was possibly the last of the fresh loaf he'd brought from town, not so fresh now two days later. Would he make more? Did he know how? The stew was evidence that he had some knowledge of cooking.\n\nShe watched him dip his bread in the stew to coat it with gravy before taking a bite of it. She tried that and was surprised by how good it tasted.\n\n\"Are you good at map drawing?\" he asked after a while. \"Or are you just supposed to dazzle me with your beauty?\"\n\nThese backhanded compliments didn't impress her, but they did disconcert her a little. He had been watching her while they ate, so she had a feeling he was leading up to discussing that kiss, or getting ready to insult her again.\n\nViolet had kept her own eyes averted\u2014the man still hadn't buttoned up his shirt! But she glanced up at him now to abruptly change the subject. \"I want to view my father's mine after dinner.\"\n\n\"There's nothing for an impostor in Charley's mine,\" he replied.\n\n\"His money?\"\n\n\"With no mine door to secure it?\"\n\nThat was a good point, but Morgan's mine was about as secure as a bank vault. And if he and her father had been friendly, Charles might have asked Morgan to lock his money up for him. No\u2014he'd already said he didn't have Charles's money. Good grief, this was so frustrating, and he was beyond infuriating with his flat refusals to do as she asked.\n\nHe stood up, saying he was going to wash his empty bowls in the stream. She followed him to do the same, annoyed that her legs still hurt so much, annoyed with Morgan, annoyed with the world\u2014and tripped and fell face-first into the bed of flowers.\n\n\"What the devil!\" she cried out, pushing herself back to her feet.\n\nHe glanced back at her. \"You didn't notice the fence?\"\n\n\"You could have warned me.\"\n\n\"Didn't think you'd go walking through my flowers.\"\n\n\"Yes, you did!\" she accused.\n\n\"Yeah, but I know enough to step over a fence.\"\n\n\"What bloody fence?\"\n\n\"Use those violet eyes of yours\u2014Violet.\"\n\nShe squinted behind her until she saw a rope strung between stakes barely a foot high. And it didn't exactly contain the flowers. They were already growing on the other side of it.\n\n\"It's good enough to keep the animals out,\" he added. \"That and a few good yells taught them pretty quick.\"\n\nGlimpsing bright orange through the trees down below, she realized it was the setting sun and was pleased to have this confirmation of which way was west. She just didn't know if this mountain range was north or south of the road they'd traveled on so long yesterday, or even east if the road had curved around the range.\n\nGlancing around at the flowers, she realized they were nothing like the wild ones she'd seen yesterday. \"These don't grow here naturally, do they?\"\n\n\"I had a dream one night that my mother paid me a visit. Which is never going to happen, but I still ordered some seeds and tossed them around this spring. New ones keep sprouting, and the garden's a bit messy, but I think Ma would approve.\"\n\nThis was the first time he'd talked about his family. She wanted to ask him about them, but he was already walking away, so obviously he didn't want to continue the conversation. Still, it surprised her that he'd plant flowers just because his mother liked them. Unless he'd used that as an excuse so he wouldn't have to admit that he liked them. Did he think that would make him appear less manly? Ha! Nothing could make him appear less manly.\n\nBack in the cabin, he lit several lanterns that hung on the walls, then split an apple for them for dessert and sat down to eat his half. She wondered if he would try to stop her if she went down to view what was now her mine. She didn't need his permission\u2014except he didn't agree that it was hers.\n\nAnd then she was incredulous when he said, \"I know that Charley hid his earnings somewhere up here. He heard too much about the money not being recovered from that recent bank robbery in town. That was why Charley refused to use the bank and hid his money up here.\"\n\n\"Did you lose everything in that robbery?\"\n\n\"No, nothing worth mentioning. I use banks in New York and Nashart. I haven't bothered to look for Charley's stash. You can if you've a mind to, but you don't get to keep it. Find it and I'll send it on to his sons.\"\n\nThat would actually work out perfectly\u2014if it was enough. \"How much did he have?\"\n\n\"Now you're being ridiculous. Have you run out of ammunition?\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon?\"\n\n\"The proof of your identity you offered earlier involves sending a telegram, which I can't do immediately. So what else do you have to support your claim?\"\n\nShe hadn't thought he would accept personal information about her father as proof that she was Charles Mitchell's daughter, and he still might not, but she was invigorated from the bath and her long nap, and ready to do battle again. \"You're quite right. The proof I offered you earlier is days away, not here right now. But I have more up here.\" She pointed to her head. \"I can tell you more about my father than you can tell me. His hair was a lighter shade of blond than mine, his eyes dark blue, and he favored a handlebar mustache\u2014at least, he did the last time I saw him. He was a tad over six feet tall. He broke his right leg when he was a young man and was left with a very slight limp that wasn't noticeable unless he was overly tired, so hardly anyone knew about it. He had a good sense of humor and liked to tell jokes. I could recount some he might have told you, but I'm bad at remembering jokes even if I've heard them a dozen times. But there was one about two sailors, and another one about a princess and her watchmaker, something about her constantly summoning the poor man to her palace to repair her watch that wasn't broken. And Charles's birthday was May fourteenth. Oh, and my brothers are twins. If he mentioned that, he might have admitted that he could never tell them apart.\"\n\n\"Could you?\"\n\n\"When we were children I could, but when I saw them for the first time in five years just three weeks ago, both fully grown, no, I couldn't.\" She was pleased that he no longer looked skeptical. \"You finally believe me, don't you?\"\n\n\"It was the jokes. They were horrible.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"We loved them\u2014when we were children.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "The burden of Morgan's disbelief that she was Charles Mitchell's daughter had been more harrowing than Violet had realized. Now that it was gone, Morgan no longer made her quite so nervous. He might still look like a shaggy bear, but she'd had brief glimpses of his gentle side, and he no longer seemed ferociously unreasonable. He also no longer had any excuse not to answer her questions.\n\n\"What did you mean when you said you allowed my father to stay?\" she asked first.\n\n\"The answer might not be good for the digestion,\" he warned.\n\n\"I assure you I have an excellent constitution.\"\n\n\"I meant mine.\"\n\n\"Oh, the answer makes you angry,\" she said, then reminded him, \"But I've weathered your storms so far, haven't I?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Yeah, I suppose you have. Well, I woke up one morning to find your pa picking at the cliff only a few feet from my claim. I wasn't happy about it.\"\n\n\"You were furious, weren't you?\" she guessed.\n\n\"You could say a little more'n that. I yelled at him to get the hell off my hill. He just waved at me and smiled, as if he didn't hear me, which just made me angrier. I went down there and saw that he'd hammered in a stake that was literally touching mine. But he hadn't made a dent in the rock yet. So I told him that his claim was invalid and he had to be gone by the end of the day.\"\n\nShe paled. \"Was that true?\"\n\n\"Yeah, two mines can't be placed that close together unless the owner of one buys out the other or the two miners partner up. Your father should have known that. Then I took a good look at him. He was already sweating and the sun hadn't even come over the range yet. It was cold as hell that early\u2014\"\n\nShe interrupted, \"You realize that 'cold as hell' is an oxymoron?\"\n\n\"You realize you got my drift anyway?\"\n\nShe blushed a little. \"Continue, please.\"\n\n\"It was obvious he wasn't going to last more than a few hours, if even that, so I went back to the house to make coffee and sat on the porch to wait until he figured out he was no miner. He might not have been too old to mine, but he was certainly in no condition to do hard labor. And I was right. Within the hour, he collapsed.\"\n\nHer eyes flared. \"What do you mean by that?\"\n\n\"Exactly what I said. Charley grabbed his chest and fell over. By the time I got down there, he wasn't conscious. So I carried him inside the house and put him on my bed and waited for him to wake up and explain.\"\n\n\"What was there to explain? He had a bad heart. Dr. Cantry mentioned that when I spoke with him.\"\n\n\"I didn't know that\u2014yet. And there are other reasons why someone might pass out like that. Some people can't tolerate the altitude up here, have trouble breathing. But, yeah, Charley mentioned his heart problem when he woke up. He'd only just found out about it himself, and that it was bad. But he assured me that he had no choice, that he had to mine even if it killed him, and he explained why. Your mentioning that loan that he left your brothers with was my first clue that you might be telling the truth. He told me the same thing that morning, and that his boys were depending on him to make the family rich again.\"\n\nShe winced. It sounded so fanciful when he said it, a lost cause. And yet her father had a mine that now belonged to her and her brothers. An invalid mine? Obviously not, since it was dug, staked, and recorded in town\u2014with Morgan's permission. He'd allowed it. Why would he do that when he'd admitted how angry he was at her father that day?\n\nBut she still had so many things to worry about: how to get her silver out of here, how to pay off the loan immediately, claim jumpers, how to hire workers to mine for her. Or she and her brothers could sell it. Morgan had told her Mr. Sullivan was interested in buying it, but she had a feeling Morgan might raise hell about that option, so she decided not to mention it yet.\n\nInstead she asked, \"Do I need to worry about those claim jumpers? Did they ever bother you again?\"\n\n\"There were signs of someone stealing my silver ore last year while I was in town, leaving picked-out pockets in the walls. After that, I ordered the steel door when I bought the building materials for the house. And there was one other time, end of last winter, when I saw evidence of trespassers in my camp, but I can't say for sure if it was those two claim jumpers who shot at me.\"\n\n\"Do the claim jumpers work for Mr. Sullivan?\"\n\n\"That's a dumb question. I'd probably be dead by now if they did. No, they showed up early on, when the people in town thought I was a trapper selling hides every so often. They were either already roaming these hills and happened upon me, or they followed me up here before I grew cautious after learning how cutthroat mining can be around here, even this far out.\"\n\nShe felt a twinge of unease now that she knew for sure she was a mine owner. Morgan had already told her about the sheriff investigating small miners' complaints that big mine owners had threatened them, and he'd just implied again that Sullivan wanted to harm him. Having met Shawn Sullivan and his daughter, she just couldn't imagine him doing anything like that. Morgan was wrong about Mr. Sullivan, but she wasn't about to try to convince him of that when that particular subject was what he'd call a \"can of worms.\"\n\nSo she moved on to the question that confused her most. \"Why did you let my father stay?\"\n\n\"He said I'd have to shoot him to get him to stop mining here.\"\n\n\"No, he didn't,\" she replied indignantly on her father's behalf.\n\n\"Yeah, he did. But I was already feeling sorry for him after hearing why he was so desperate. He was willing to die to help his family. Caring about kin that much is something I can understand.\" He suddenly stood up. \"More dessert?\"\n\n\"After a visit to the mine.\"\n\n\"You don't want to wait until morning?\"\n\n\"Does daylight reach into the mine?\"\n\n\"Not very far,\" he admitted. \"Grab a lantern, then.\"\n\nShe picked up the one on the table and he reached for one on the wall, then led the way across the yard to the large hole in the cliff.\n\nInside the tunnel, she noticed that the support beams were as tall as Morgan. Anyone taller than him would have to duck.\n\n\"Why is the floor so smooth?\" she asked.\n\n\"Because I chiseled it smooth.\"\n\nShe gasped. Lowering her lantern and looking at the floor more closely, she saw brighter streaks in the rock. \"Is that silver we're walking on?\"\n\n\"The tunnel runs straight through the lode, which was reached after six days of digging. It's not pure silver, it never is. It needs to be processed, which is what the smelter outside is for. But it's a rich lode, eighty percent silver with a sprinkling of copper and gold.\"\n\nEyes wide, she realized all her problems were solved! Those bright streaks in the rock weren't just on the floor, but on the walls and the ceiling, too.\n\n\"Your pa's stuff is here,\" Morgan said when he stopped, not quite at the end of the tunnel, though close enough for her to see the back wall in the lantern light. \"I used his horse to carry him to the doctor and I didn't bother to retrieve it after I was told he died, so the stable has probably sold it by now. This is everything else Charley had with him when he came up here.\"\n\nShe moved around him and saw a bedroll, a rifle, two saddlebags filled with mining tools and cooking gear, everything he would need to survive up here alone. But he hadn't ended up alone, he'd ended up making friends with a bear. Her father's valise was there, too. She dropped to her knees to open it.\n\nBehind her, Morgan said, \"He never talked much about home. He seemed ashamed to admit that he'd been rich at some point and wasn't now, but it was obvious from his manners and the way he talked that he was a gentleman. I would have got around to hiring someone to take this stuff to his boys\u2014he never mentioned their names\u2014I just didn't see any reason to hurry when there's nothing of value here.\"\n\n\"My brothers are Daniel and Evan. You could at least have let them know he'd died.\"\n\n\"It'll be a cold day in hell before I want to deliver news like that. They'll hear from me soon. I was taking their address to Doc Cantry this trip so he could send them a telegram, but I found you there instead.\"\n\nViolet was only half-listening to Morgan as she looked inside her father's valise. The lantern she'd set down didn't offer much light in the dark tunnel, so she couldn't see much of what was in it, but she reached in to pull out a few things. A small handful of letters rested atop the pile of clothes, letters tied with twine, all of them from her brothers, which was where Morgan must have found their address.\n\nShe pulled out one of her father's jackets and held it up to her face. The smell of it brought tears to her eyes. She was surprised she even remembered that scent after all these years, but it had been his favorite cologne. Oh, Papa, why were you so careless with your inheritance that you had to resort to these drastic measures?\n\n\"Are you crying?\"\n\nShe dabbed the cuff of the jacket against her eyes before saying, \"Of course not. Thank you for leading me to Papa's belongings. It's incredible that he was able to dig all this out at his age.\"\n\n\"He didn't\u2014I did.\"\n\nShe glanced around. \"I don't understand. This is his mine, correct?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\nShe was too excited about all the silver in the mine to want to argue with him, so she merely pointed out the obvious. \"He staked the claim\u2014you let him\u2014so now it belongs to his heirs. And you don't need to help with the mining anymore, I can get workers up here to do\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop right there,\" he growled furiously. \"I dug this tunnel for Charley only because I felt sorry for him. I sure as hell don't feel sorry for you. And you damn well aren't deciding anything about what I dug out. Your pa didn't find the silver here, I did. He broke every rule putting a claim down this close to mine. If I hadn't agreed to partner with him, he would have had to move on somewhere else. If you try to bring workers up here, I'll damn well close the book on that partnership and go to the claim office and get his claim invalidated.\"\n\n\"You're a horrible man!\"\n\n\"No, I've got a heart of gold, just not for you!\"\n\nShe'd never seen him this angry. It terrified her because she barely knew the man or what he was capable of in this state. He'd been doing all the work for someone else when he had his own mine? No one could be that generous. He had to be lying, everything he'd told her had to be lies. He'd even admitted that the only way he could get rid of Charles was to kill him!\n\nWithout thinking it through, she reached for her father's rifle and pointed it at Morgan's chest. \"You killed him, didn't you? I only have your word that you found him unconscious. Everything you've said could be lies to cover up what really happened.\"\n\n\"Lady, if I was going to kill him, I would've done it when he first showed up, and I would have finished the job, not hauled him to town unconscious. No one, not even the doc, knew that he wasn't going to wake up and talk again before he passed on. And now you've pissed me off. Point a rifle at me again and you damn well better pull the trigger. You're on your own.\"\n\nNow she'd made him angry? He'd already been furious, she'd just tipped the scale. She let the rifle slip from her fingers as she watched the lantern light move down the short tunnel. Then it was gone\u2014and the cabin door slammed shut in the distance, like a bell tolling her doom. She was horrified by what she'd just done after he'd admitted he and her father had been partners. Her panic at seeing him so angry was no excuse. She'd just enraged a bear, and he wasn't forgiving.\n\nShe had a lantern, but that wouldn't give her any warmth tonight. She untied her father's bedroll and spread it out, then curled up on it, hugging her father's jacket to her chest. Tears were running down her cheeks again, but for herself this time. Morgan really was abandoning her in this cold, dark mine." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Morgan lay on his bed, glowering at the ceiling. He was still livid. Stupid woman. She just didn't get it, that no one could find out about this location or else Sullivan would use underhanded methods, even resort to violence, to commandeer his highly productive mine. He didn't want to have to kill anyone to protect his property. No, she just didn't care about the hell it would put him through, was only interested in what she could get from a mine she thought was now hers. It wasn't. His partnership agreement had been with Charley, made with a handshake. There was no document to prove it. It sure as hell didn't mean he was going to partner with Charley's heirs or a woman who'd just tried to kill him!\n\nIf he hadn't known Charley's rifle was empty, he would have had to grab it from her and risk getting shot. But she didn't know it was empty. Her threat had been valid in her mind, but her reason was ridiculous.\n\nThe woman was cunning, smart, too beautiful, and she'd used it all to get under his skin and lull him into trusting her. He'd been a sucker for that pretty face, and had been feeling guilty ever since she mentioned the loan that Charley also had mentioned. Actually, even before that he had started thinking he might be wrong about her. She was stubborn like her father and had a natural refinement that went deeper than any role-playing. He wished he still thought she was an impostor. It would be so much easier to deal with her now if he did, but he didn't.\n\nBut he sure as hell wasn't going to partner with a viper, Mitchell or not, who now had a very good reason to want him dead, so she'd have both mines and could do whatever she wanted with them. That wasn't happening.\n\nHe sat up and stared at the closed door. She wasn't even going to ask to come back in? She was going to deliberately spend the night in that cold tunnel just to make him feel more guilt! Like hell...\n\nHe went outside and entered the mine, following the light to the end of the tunnel where he'd left her. She sat up.\n\n\"I'm\u2014\" she started.\n\n\"Shut up,\" he snarled.\n\nHe swiped up the lantern, grabbed her hand, and dragged her back to the house, then slammed the door shut behind them. \"Not one damn word if you know what's good for you,\" he warned before he got back in his own bed and glared up at the ceiling as she settled on hers.\n\nShe was silent. Finally she listens? He snorted to himself. And still fumed. And couldn't sleep. It was small consolation that he knew she couldn't either after she'd slept the day away.\n\nAn hour later, he said coldly, \"The agreement I had with Charley was only temporary to help him out of his bind. It ended the day he died. And without a new partnership, which I am in no way inclined to make, that mine is useless where it sits, so there's nothing for you to exploit or sell here. You and your brothers are welcome to the money Charley made from the mine if you can find it, but under no circumstances will I allow you to tell anyone where these mines are located. Got that?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I drew a gun on you. I don't really think you killed Papa. It's just that your anger frightened me and I reacted badly.\"\n\nWas that tearful voice real or just an act? Damnit, she was doing it again, trying to make him feel sorry for her. \"You come west without knowing the difference between a gun and a rifle?\"\n\n\"I do know the difference, but it was a traumatic moment and I misspoke. Must we discuss this? I have apologized, and it was quite sincere.\"\n\n\"Words don't cut it after the fact, so drop it and go to sleep.\"\n\nHe shouldn't have even been here to meet this woman. He'd meant to return to Nashart in the spring. He had more than enough money now to do what he wanted. But he'd bought those damn flower seeds, and Charley had showed up the day after he'd returned from town with them. And when Charley died, he still didn't leave. He kept coming up with excuses not to go home, because the simple fact was he was in no hurry to be browbeaten by his father to go back to ranching.\n\nThat wasn't going to happen. He had other plans for the fortune he'd dug out of these hills that had nothing to do with cattle, and nothing Zachary could say would make him change them. He'd been thinking about it too long. And it was going to make his mother happy. But he would face one hell of a fight when he did get home. Arguing with his pa was never easy. It simply went against the grain not to do what Zachary Callahan wanted.\n\nHis brothers felt the same way. Hell, even his oldest brother, Hunter, was going to marry a woman this summer that he'd never met, just because their father said so. The marriage was supposed to end a feud that should have ended long ago but hadn't. Hunter hated the idea of an arranged marriage, but he'd still go along with it. Heck, it might have happened already, though the letter his mother had written him early last month had said the girl was delayed in arriving. And he hadn't gotten around to checking the post on his last trip to town\u2014because of prissy Miss Violet Mitchell.\n\nAnger still gnawed at him. He didn't hear any movement in the bed across the room. He knew she tossed in her sleep. He'd watched her do it when she'd slept on the trail, and again today when he came in to start dinner. Not one toss yet tonight, which told him she was lying there plotting her next move. He didn't for a moment think she'd give up on that mine. She was stubborn like her father. He'd never imagined Charley had a daughter, let alone such an exasperating one\u2014who was far too attractive.\n\nHe got up and started opening crates until he found the one full of whiskey bottles. He winced at the fumes that rose up. At least one bottle hadn't survived the trip despite the careful packing.\n\nHe took a bottle back to his bed, drank a quarter of it before remarking, \"You said they're older than you?\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Who else? Your brothers. Fact is, I'm not sure I would have felt sorry for Charley if I hadn't pictured two young boys, destitute, helpless, waiting for him to come home with some money. I should have pressed him about his family, asked him how old his sons were\u2014then you wouldn't be here, and he might not be dead.\"\n\n\"So he's dead because you didn't ask a very obvious question? You admit it was your fault?\"\n\nHe glanced over to see that she was leaning up on an elbow, staring at him, looking as huffy as she'd just sounded. He should have turned out the lanterns. Seeing her in bed again, even if she was fully clothed, still had an effect on him. There was no getting around the fact that she was a beautiful, desirable woman, even if she was the most stubborn, exasperating female he'd ever met.\n\n\"That's not what I said. As it happens, if I hadn't dug for him for the month he was up here, Charley would have fallen over dead within a week doing it himself. So you could say that I gave him a few more weeks of life. But I sure as hell wouldn't have helped him if I knew his boys were full-grown men who can take care of themselves. And you, a fancy dresser, obviously don't need money.\"\n\n\"I do, for a dowry.\"\n\n\"A dowry?\" He snorted. \"Who the hell comes with a dowry these days?\"\n\n\"It's expected if you marry an English lord, which I plan to do. I even met the perfect one right before I sailed home\u2014and found out I'm no longer an heiress. So don't tell me what I don't need when you know nothing about my plans for the future.\"\n\n\"So that's what this is about? You're out here driving me crazy for a damn dowry?\"\n\n\"Not just that. Our family home is my priority. Papa came out here to recover his fortune. You gave him hope that he could do that.\"\n\n\"So Charley died with hope. That's not a bad way to go.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"You're just as insufferable foxed as you are otherwise, and if you don't know what 'foxed' means, it means you, sir, are drunk. And will you please stop referring to my father that way. His name was Charles. None of his friends and acquaintances ever called him Charley.\"\n\n\"I did, and he never seemed to mind, so how about you stop complaining about nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with you. And I'm not drunk.\"\n\n\"Of course you are, but you're too thickheaded to realize it!\"\n\nHe sat up. She wisely turned over and showed him her back. At least the scared little girl who could tug on his emotions was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Violet woke at dawn, surprised she'd slept at all. Morgan was still in his bed, his back turned to her. Only one lantern was still flickering, almost out of fuel. The fireplace was cold as well, leaving the room quite chilly.\n\nShe grabbed the blanket from her bed, wrapped it around her shoulders, and went outside, heading down the slope to climb the fence, not caring if the racket she made woke Morgan. She'd looked for a chamber pot in the cabin yesterday, not really expecting to find one, nor had she. And she'd already climbed this fence after seeing Morgan hop it, then hop over the stream and disappear into the trees, only to return a few minutes later. She was glad she hadn't asked about the chamber pot. She was sure it would have made him laugh.\n\nHe'd made getting over the fence seem so easy, but it was quite awkward for her. His camp was so primitive she had no other choice. At least she found the narrow part of the stream he had hopped over, although when she tried it, the heels of her boots got wet because her legs weren't as long as his.\n\nIt was hard not to think of last night. She'd gone from elation over how rich her mine was and how it was going to solve all her problems to anger and suspicion when Morgan had told her the mine didn't belong to her and her brothers to utter despair when he'd abandoned her in that cold tunnel. She'd been crushed. But he'd come back. Even as furious as he was, he had some sort of protective instinct that wouldn't let him leave her there all night. Her opinion of him had risen a notch.\n\nBut she still had trouble believing that she and her brothers had no right to the mine, that her father didn't really own it just because of its proximity to Morgan's. After all, she'd verified that his claim was recorded. Didn't that make it official? Could the position of the mine really invalidate that if there was no partnership? Morgan had been generous in doing most of the work for her father, but she had doubts that he'd told her the whole story. She wished she could consult a solicitor.\n\nShe did feel bad, however, about calling him foxed last night when he probably hadn't been. She also felt bad about thinking, even for a moment, that he'd killed Charles. If everything he'd said about his working relationship with her father was true, the man really was generous beyond words. He'd said he had a heart of gold, but that didn't even half describe his doing all the work in the mine and then sharing the fruits of his labor with someone else when he didn't have to.\n\nOn her way back to the cabin, she stopped at the stream to wash her face, then turned about before lifting her skirt to dry her face. The skirt she'd donned yesterday. She was dismayed that she'd had to sleep in her clothes again, as if they were still camping outdoors. She hoped tonight would be more peaceful because she simply had to rectify the sleeping situation so she could resume her civilized habits, which included sleeping in a nightgown. But first she needed to create some privacy for herself in the cabin.\n\nAs she climbed over the fence again and headed for the porch, her eyes were drawn to the top of the cliff. The dawn light was brighter up there, making the silhouette of a man with a rifle cradled in his arms stand out starkly. She screamed.\n\nThe door to the cabin burst open and Morgan rushed down the steps, gun in hand, demanding, \"What?\"\n\nFrozen, Violet just pointed. Then she heard Morgan say, \"Don't worry about him. That's Texas, a good buddy of mine.\" He lowered his gun. \"He came with my other friends to help throw up the cabin and agreed to stick around.\"\n\n\"So he's a guard?\"\n\n\"Yeah, he stands watch at night, then sleeps during the day when I'm working.\"\n\nShe recalled his previous remark about the disadvantage of mining in such isolation. \"You said no one would know if something happened to you here. That was a lie.\"\n\nHe just shrugged. \"You weren't supposed to notice Tex, and he hasn't always been here. We alternate making trips to town for supplies, so one of us is always here to guard the mine. When Charley was here, he did the guarding and Tex flanked me to make sure no one was trying to follow at a distance.\"\n\nSo many crazy precautions\u2014he really was fanatic about keeping this location a secret.\n\nAnd then he yelled up to Texas, \"Come on down for breakfast so you can meet my unwelcome guest.\"\n\n\"That was rude,\" Violet remarked.\n\n\"No, it wasn't. Rude would have been using words that made you blush.\" He looked down at her as if waiting for something, and finally demanded, \"No retort?\"\n\n\"Do you want another fight?\"\n\n\"Honey, what we do isn't fighting, it's just you doing your best to infuriate me.\"\n\n\"That isn't\u2014\" she started to deny, but he was already walking back to the cabin, so she hurried after him to point out, \"Don't you need to unlock the gate for him if he's coming for breakfast?\"\n\n\"No. I usually leave it open when I'm here. I must have been distracted by you yesterday when I relocked it, but I corrected that while you were taking your long nap.\"\n\nHe could have told her that before she'd climbed over the bloody fence! She didn't say so. She really didn't want to keep fighting with him. What she needed was to come to an arrangement with him. He might have given her leave to search for her father's money, but what if she couldn't find it? And even if she did and there was enough money to pay off the loan, that wouldn't solve her and her brothers' entire dilemma. They needed a lot more money to maintain their lifestyles. She had to persuade Morgan to turn the partnership he'd had with her father into a partnership with her.\n\nShe groaned, realizing what a challenge that would be. She'd have to make him like her, want to help her. Of course, she remembered that he'd seemed to like her last night when he'd kissed her\u2014but had he thought he was kissing Violet Mitchell or an actress? And using his attraction to her could be a dangerous road to take, considering that they were sleeping in the same room. She wouldn't be blatant about it; she'd simply be more like her usual self, charming. Aunt Elizabeth had often told her she was charming. And her aunt had given her and Sophie pointers on how a lady could wrap a man around her finger. Violet would just have to see if an opportunity arose to tame a bear...\n\nHe'd already disappeared inside the cabin, so she sat on the porch. It was still cold, the sun still behind the range, but the yard was a little lighter and the scent of pine in the air was pleasant.\n\nBefore long Morgan came out and handed her a cup of coffee, which meant he'd made a fire. She was tempted to go back in the cabin, but didn't. There was something nice about this porch so early in the morning with wilderness all around them and the mules grazing across the stream. She wondered if this was what his family's ranch in Nashart was like.\n\nShe took a sip from the cup to find he'd sweetened the coffee with something that made it quite tasty. \"No tea?\" she teased. He just raised a brow at her, so she added, \"That was a joke.\"\n\n\"Could have fooled me.\"\n\nWhen she set the cup down on the floor, he went back inside, but came right back out carrying a crate; he set it down next to her chair, then reached down to put her cup on it. How could such an ornery man manage to be so thoughtful\u2014occasionally?\n\n\"How much time do I have to look for Papa's money before you take me back to town?\"\n\n\"Two weeks at least.\"\n\n\"What if I find it today?\"\n\n\"Ask me after you get that lucky. But you can't go looking for it outside the fence without some protection.\"\n\nShe was sure he wasn't offering to escort her. \"I can take my father's rifle.\"\n\n\"It's not loaded. Charley ran out of shells trying to hunt and asked me to pick up more for him, but I didn't see the point. He wasn't a good shot.\"\n\n\"Then why did you get so mad last\u2014\"\n\nHe interrupted, his voice surly. \"You didn't know that rifle wasn't loaded, and we're not discussing your intent again. Flapjacks will be ready shortly.\"\n\nHe turned and went back inside, done talking. She sighed, once more regretting making him so angry last night that she'd lost all headway with him. If she could just stop thinking of him as a bear and stop detesting her surroundings, she was sure her natural charm would resurface.\n\nThere was no sign of his friend coming up the hill yet. It probably would take a while since he would have to ride all the way down from the cliff top to where the rocky slope started before he could then come up Morgan's hill.\n\nBefore going in for breakfast, Violet decided to fetch her father's valise. It felt wrong to just leave it in the mine, and she wanted to go through it more thoroughly later. Now that there was daylight, she didn't need a lantern to enter the mine, since it wasn't very deep.\n\nMission accomplished, she entered the cabin cautiously, hoping Morgan had calmed down. He was putting an open jar of preserves on the table, as well as a crock of butter. Their eyes met for a moment. His were inscrutable, and his beard and mustache hid most of the lower part of his face so it was impossible to tell if he was still angry.\n\nShe pushed her father's valise under the bed, then sat on the edge of it as she braided her hair, aware that he'd paused to watch her. And then she heard him snort and turn about to get their food. Had she merely distracted him, or was he fascinated by her hair?\n\nHe'd begun piling a plate with flapjacks. He'd rigged a metal shelf over the fire, high enough not to be touched by the flames, and had cooked the flapjacks on it. Rather ingenious, she thought.\n\nHe turned to set the plate on the table. She quickly sat down. He filled two more plates before he sat down to start eating, apparently not waiting for Texas to arrive.\n\nShe tested his mood by asking, \"Was your friend using the second bed in here?\"\n\n\"No, I built that for Charley. Tex has his own camp up on the hill. We share the hunting and he comes down occasionally for dinner, but otherwise, he likes being alone up there where he can do his composing without me interrupting him all the time or complaining about the racket.\"\n\n\"Composing?\"\n\n\"He plays the harmonica and loves creating his own music. He's damn good at playing, but it's not at all harmonic when he starts composing, no pun intended. 'Course, every other week he'll head to town to play poker and get drunk.\"\n\nShe realized that might cut in half the two weeks Morgan had said she'd be at his camp, since Texas could take her to town. But she didn't need to mention that yet, since Morgan had already told her to ask him again if she got lucky. \"That long ride just for that?\"\n\n\"Habit. Cowboys are used to hitting the saloons for some hell-raising every weekend. It took some arguing to get him to go only twice a month.\"\n\n\"Were you a cowboy, or did you consider yourself a rancher because your family owns a ranch?\"\n\n\"I herded cattle until the day I left home, so, yeah, either name applies.\"\n\n\"Do you have a big family?\"\n\n\"Felt like it, growing up with three brothers.\"\n\nOne of Aunt Elizabeth's pointers was that men liked to talk about themselves, so a lady could get in their good graces by asking them about themselves, but Morgan was providing only terse answers to her questions. Was he the exception that Elizabeth had never run into?\n\nShe tried again to find a subject he might want to talk about. \"Why didn't you like being a cowboy?\"\n\n\"Never said I didn't like it. Fact is, I loved ranching with my family. But there are other things I want to do now that I consider more important.\"\n\nHe didn't elaborate, and despite her curiosity, she recalled another of her aunt's adages: never pry or become a nuisance when you ask a man about himself. So she referred back to his mention of poker. \"You don't get the urge to hit the saloons, as you say, like your friend?\"\n\n\"I did until Sullivan found out about my silver and started hounding me to sell my mine. I stopped going places where he'd find me. I do my drinking here now, and if I feel like a game of poker, I'll head up the hill. But it's no fun playing with Tex. He loves the game, but he's no good at bluffing or recognizing a bluff, so it's like stealing money from him.\"\n\n\"It's complicated, that game?\"\n\n\"No, but there are some nuances that make it more interesting. You play?\"\n\nHe raised his brows, waiting for her answer, looking hopeful. She almost wished she could say yes. \"Is it anything like whist?\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Never mind. Perhaps I'll ask your friend to teach me how to play poker during his visit.\"\n\nHe snorted. \"If you really want to learn, you'll ask me.\"\n\nShe felt like smiling but didn't. Was that a bit of jealousy, his not wanting anyone else teaching her something he could teach her? Or did he just want her to be good enough at the game to make it interesting for him? She almost laughed, guessing it was the latter.\n\n\"Maybe I will when you aren't busy,\" she said. \"By the by, where is Bo? You don't let him sleep in the house?\"\n\nSince the matter of her being protected while she searched for her father's money hadn't been resolved, she planned to search inside the fences today. Charles could have buried his money close to the house while Morgan was in one of the mines. And Bo might be able to help her find it if he knew how to follow a scent.\n\n\"He wanders a lot and is still young enough to want to chase anything that moves, even birds. He prefers sleeping under the house where he hides his bones. But he's usually nearby at mealtime.\"\n\n\"Would you mind if I invite him in?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Didn't I mention I love dogs?\"\n\n\"Pretty sure you only said you liked them. And it's my turn for a question.\"\n\n\"We're taking turns?\"\n\nHe ignored that and asked, \"Why haven't you demanded that a screen be put up between the beds?\"\n\n\"D'you have one?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I didn't think so. I can be pragmatic, you know, and not complain about what can't be fixed\u2014no matter how uncomfortable I might find it. Actually, sometimes I complain due to frustration, though with you, maybe a little more often.\"\n\n\"Trying to make me feel special?\"\n\nShe laughed, caught herself doing it, and stopped. When had he become amusing? \"However,\" she continued in a determined tone, \"I've decided this can be fixed, and since you mentioned it before I could, I'm going to hazard a guess that you have a solution?\"\n\n\"I'm to produce a screen out of thin air for you?\"\n\n\"No, you're going to improvise!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Violet knew she should be sitting with Texas Weaver on the porch where he was eating breakfast. Good manners demanded it, since Morgan had already left to start his workday. But finding her father's money was more important. She went through his valise more carefully, hoping to discover a clue about his hiding place, but found nothing. He'd brought so little with him, nothing of sentimental value, not even the pocket watch he loved so much. Would he really have left it at home?\n\nShe finally lured Bo in from the porch\u2014at least he was keeping Texas company\u2014to sniff her father's jacket. But when she stepped out on the porch with Bo following, the dog stopped when she did. So much for his interest in chasing scents.\n\nShe saw that Texas was done eating, so she suggested, \"Join me for a tour of the yard, Mr. Weaver?\"\n\n\"You mean walk with you a spell?\"\n\n\"Yes, while we talk.\" He followed her down the steps. He struck her as a nice sort of fellow, handsome with dark hair and a mustache, and well-mannered. He had only raised a brow when Morgan introduced her as Miss Mitchell, which made her guess they'd spoken at some point yesterday when Morgan had still doubted her true identity.\n\n\"I was wondering if Morgan ever deviates from his schedule of going to Butte every two weeks?\" she asked as she led him toward the mule pasture.\n\n\"It's for fresh supplies, ma'am, so either he goes or I go.\"\n\nThat didn't exactly answer her question. \"But you also go to play poker, don't you? Will you do that sooner than two weeks from now?\"\n\nHe opened the gate to the mule pasture. \"I reckon so, but if you're hankering for a ride, I can't oblige without Morgan's say-so. But he's hell-bent on getting rich, downright obsessed with his mine. It's all he cares about. So he sees you as a pretty big thorn, and thorns need to be pulled out sooner rather than later.\"\n\nViolet frowned. \"I don't appreciate being called a thorn, but I assume by 'pulled out' you mean 'taken back' sooner than later?\"\n\nHe grinned slightly. \"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nThat was the answer she was hoping for, though he could have said so in a less insulting way. But she didn't want to push Morgan into deviating from his schedule by continuing to be a thorn in his side. She needed a lot more from him than an opportunity to search for the money her father had hidden. She really couldn't leave here without an agreement to continue the partnership he'd had with Charles.\n\n\"We got along briefly last night,\" she felt compelled to mention.\n\n\"Briefly? Does that even count?\"\n\nShe sighed, wondering if all cowboys were this frustrating to talk to. When Morgan had introduced Texas to her, she'd politely guessed, \"So you're from Texas?\"\n\nHe'd merely said, \"No, ma'am.\" And he hadn't seemed inclined to explain further, but Morgan had added, \"But his ma is.\"\n\nTexas continued now with a warning: \"Morgan's not a man to mess with. You can only push him so far before he'll push back. So you might want to stop riling him.\"\n\nThat wasn't exactly true. She'd pushed and gotten her screen. She was quite pleased about that. After breakfast, Morgan had stacked crates at one end of her bed and nailed a corner of an extra blanket to the top one, then stretched it along the side of the bed and fashioned a hook with another nail to attach the other corner of the blanket to the wall. She'd be boxed in, but she would definitely have some privacy at night.\n\nBut that wasn't what Texas was referring to, so she replied, \"I have stopped riling him\u2014now that he believes I'm a Mitchell.\"\n\n\"Then I reckon he'll take you to town when he's ready. He'll just make sure you can't find your way back here.\"\n\nNo, of course not. Protect the location of the mine at all costs.\n\nTexas didn't appear to be in any hurry to get back up to his camp on the cliff top, so Violet headed toward the back of the cabin after they left the mule pasture. She was glad of the company as she started her search, though she wasn't very hopeful of finding the money near the cabin. Morgan would have noticed anything out of the ordinary close by.\n\n\"Did Morgan get along well with my father?\" she asked.\n\n\"I didn't spend that much time with the two of them because my schedule was different, sleeping during the day, guarding the mine at night, but I enjoyed Charley's good-natured company and I think he enjoyed my harmonica playing. And I can tell you they laughed a lot, those two. Could hear it from up the hill. It always made me smile. I'm sorry about your pa's passing. He was good for Morgan the short time he was here.\"\n\nViolet glanced aside before his words made her cry. They'd rounded the cabin. The water hole was there. It was not as deep as she'd imagined, but the water in it was very clear. She pointed at the long pile of small stones that was blocking most of the gorge.\n\n\"What's that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Morgan calls it slag. It's the by-product of the smelting process. It actually has value because it's used as gravel in making glass and concrete, but Morgan doesn't have time to lug it to town. He makes more focusing on his silver.\"\n\nThe very length of Morgan's disposal area attested to how much work he'd done here. It was piled six feet high where it touched the cliff, sloping down some ten feet into the pathway. Beyond the slag pile the gully narrowed further. She could see little flat land, so she couldn't imagine her father wanting to go that way to hide his money. And she didn't think he'd go north either, since Texas was up that way. But she still had the rest of the mountain to search.\n\nHeading back to the front yard, she asked, \"Will you be returning to Nashart when, or rather if, Morgan does?\"\n\n\"There's no if about it,\" he said with a slight blush. \"My sweetheart, Emma, is there.\"\n\n\"She didn't mind that you took this job so far away from her?\"\n\n\"It's not that far, and I go home to visit every other month. But Emma did mind, until I told her how much I was earning here. We never thought I'd make enough money to buy us a house. I worked for Zachary, Morgan's pa, and he would've let us use one of the cabins he had built in the hills for his married ranch hands, but Emma is a town gal. Thanks to Morgan, who pays me more in one month guarding the camp than I earned in a year herding cattle, we'll have our own place in town when we get hitched.\"\n\n\"You didn't want to help him mine?\"\n\n\"Hell no, I'm a cowboy, won't even touch a pick. He offered me a share in his mine, even tempted me by mentioning that Emma might appreciate the extra muscles I'd gain mining.\" He snorted softly. \"Emma likes me just fine as I am, so I refused.\"\n\nViolet smiled, but couldn't help wondering how many muscles Morgan had gained here doing all the work himself. \"When is the wedding to be?\"\n\n\"When Morgan's ready to go home.\"\n\n\"What if he is never ready?\"\n\n\"Then when Emma gets tired of waiting. But Morgan's going home. He misses his brothers and his folks too much not to. He never intended to dig out every bit of silver up here, just enough for what he wants.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Not for me to say.\"\n\nApparently she'd broached a subject he wasn't allowed to discuss, because he tipped his hat to her in good-bye and went on to open the pasture gate again. When he whistled, his horse came immediately, but so did Caesar and one of the mules. She ought to find out where Morgan kept the carrots. Caesar didn't look too pleased that he wasn't being offered one, even butted his nose against Texas.\n\nBut she wasn't going to get sidetracked when it was imperative that she spend her time looking for the money that could save her and her brothers from penury. Morgan never had told her how much money was hidden, but she would bet he knew the exact amount, since he'd done the mining and the selling of the silver. She wondered what else he wasn't telling her. But she supposed she ought to let him know she was going outside the fence to continue her search, so it was time for another confrontation. Oddly, she felt a sense of anticipation, as if she were looking forward to it..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Violet changed into her prettier pink blouse and found a matching ribbon for her braid, determined to look a little more presentable before approaching Morgan. But she was actually out of breath by the time she reached him in his mine. It was a good thing she'd brought a lantern, because when she'd entered the tunnel she could barely make out the light at the end. Her father's tunnel was barely a scratch compared to this one.\n\n\"Good Lord, this is hundreds of feet long!\" she exclaimed. \"Why don't you dig side tunnels closer to the entrance, instead of just this long one?\"\n\n\"I plan to. But first I wanted to find out how far in this lode goes. Expected to reach the end of it long ago, but haven't yet.\"\n\nHe didn't turn around to talk to her, just kept swinging his pick at the wall of rock in front of him. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and his back glistened in the light of the two lanterns hanging on the support beams behind him. She was fascinated by the rippling of the muscles in his arms and back. He was a primal vision of man carving the land to his whim.\n\nHe broke the spell he'd cast when he asked, \"Did you come in here for a reason other than to annoy me?\"\n\n\"Don't be nasty. I wanted to ask your advice on where else to look for Papa's hidden money\u2014or, more precisely, what to look for other than disturbed dirt. I checked your yard, even the mule pasture, and found nothing.\"\n\n\"He definitely wouldn't hide it there. My gals made him nervous.\"\n\nThe remark brought a smile to her face as she recalled that her father didn't like to ride horses, either. She and her brothers did, but their father did all his gadding about in a carriage or coach. He must have hated having to ride a horse out here in the West.\n\n\"Anything else I should know before I venture beyond the fence?\"\n\n\"It's sure not going to be lying out in the open. It might be buried under a large rock or stuffed inside a hole in a tree trunk.\"\n\n\"Up a tree?\"\n\n\"No, a hole in the tree that's close to the ground. Charley wasn't agile enough to climb trees. But figure on anywhere that's a few minutes' to a few hours' walk from here in any direction. I was in the mine about four hours the day he told me he'd hidden the money. So you'll need to learn how to shoot a rifle and take it with you. Go get Charley's.\"\n\nHe finally turned around. She couldn't help noticing that his chest was glistening with sweat, too. She knew she shouldn't be staring at his naked upper body, but she couldn't help it.\n\n\"Shouldn't you be on your way?\"\n\nHer eyes snapped up to his. \"You said the rifle isn't loaded.\"\n\n\"I'll meet you in the yard with a crate of ammunition and show you how to load it and shoot it. You're not leaving here till you hit what you aim at.\"\n\nShe groaned. Learning how to shoot could take the rest of the day. Was it really necessary if she didn't go beyond shouting distance? But she left to do as he said. A shooting lesson might give her an opportunity to bring up forming a new partnership with him.\n\nBy the time she'd retrieved the rifle from the other tunnel, Morgan was already in the yard with a crate at his feet. Taking the weapon from her, he said, \"This is a Spencer repeating rifle. The magazine holds seven bullets, and this lever needs to be pulled after each shot. After the seventh, you will need to reload.\"\n\nHe demonstrated as he spoke, but he was still shirtless and her eyes kept drifting away from the rifle in his hands to that thin mat of hair across his upper chest.\n\nThen she heard, \"You try,\" and gave him a blank look. He actually chuckled.\n\nShe said, \"It's not funny. You could have dressed more appropriately for this lesson.\"\n\n\"When I'm going right back into the mine? Do I need to repeat myself?\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Once more, please.\"\n\nHe did, and she paid better attention this time, so when he said, \"Your turn,\" she was able to load the magazine. \"Now, positioning is very important.\"\n\nHe started to move behind her, but she turned so she was still facing him and quickly said, \"I'd like to discuss the partnership you mentioned last night.\"\n\n\"I told you it's over and done with, so, no.\"\n\n\"Humor me, please. At least tell me the particulars of it.\"\n\n\"There's no point.\"\n\n\"Please.\"\n\nHe stared at her so long she almost said, \"Forget it,\" but then he said, \"Charley suggested an eighty-twenty split in my favor, since he knew he wasn't going to be able to contribute much. But I was feeling generous the day we came to terms, so I lowered it to seventy-thirty.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Thirty percent instead of half doesn't strike me as a fair partnership.\"\n\n\"When he did so little digging? You really want to take that stand?\"\n\nShe pointed out, \"Would you have been able to mine the silver on his claim without his agreement?\"\n\n\"No, I can't lawfully mine beyond my stake in the yard. If there weren't restrictions, one person could claim everything.\"\n\n\"So this was all extra silver for you, even if you did have to split it. That's quite a contribution from him, if you ask me.\"\n\n\"No one's asking you. And I did consider that, but the fact is, I didn't need to dig another mine. There's more silver on my claim than I'll ever dig out, and it's a hundred percent mine. So the extra silver was just a minor incentive for me to accept Charley's deal.\"\n\n\"It was his idea?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He nodded. \"Like I said, he was pretty desperate that day.\"\n\n\"What about the money you said he hid? Is it worth the effort to search for it?\"\n\n\"He had around thirteen hundred left after our first joint-venture load paid off. It was eighteen hundred, but he insisted on giving me a quarter of that for his share of the supplies and the use of my smelter. It was too much, but I couldn't talk him out of it. I think his pride got in the way.\"\n\nShe was incredulous that her father's 30 percent share amounted to so much money. \"That thirteen hundred will at least let my brothers stave off the banker for a few months, if I can find it. But what I don't understand is why my father didn't send that money to my brothers right away. Or write them when he went to town again.\"\n\nMorgan looked like he might be frowning, but she couldn't be sure because of his mustache. \"Because he didn't go back to Butte after he filed his claim. He got accosted the day he filed it. I found him roughed up in an alley struggling to his feet and got him out of town fast. He was bruised up pretty bad, but otherwise okay. He didn't know who did it, but before the men attacked him they asked him where his mine was located and he refused to tell them. I don't doubt it was a couple of Sullivan's men.\"\n\n\"But how did they even know about it?\"\n\n\"Your father stopped in a saloon to wait for me to finish my business and apparently bragged that he had a silver mine near my claim. I'd warned him not to mention the mine to anyone, but he was so happy he got himself drunk and spilled the beans. So that's why he didn't go back to town until a month later when I took him after the accident. He was guarding the place while Texas and I went to Butte. I suspected the claim jumpers might have killed him when I found him, but there were no fresh tracks outside the mine and there was blood on the support beam next to where he fell.\"\n\n\"What was he doing in the mine while you weren't here?\" she asked.\n\n\"He still tried to dig through the tunnel a couple hours a day off and on. I told him he didn't have to, but he was stubborn, wanted to contribute. Unfortunately, he never made much progress.\"\n\n\"But you and Texas went to town after my father was roughed up. You could have mailed a letter for him.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I could have, but he never asked me to. Maybe he was waiting until he had enough to pay off the loan in full.\"\n\n\"I don't suppose you continued to mine on his claim after the accident?\"\n\n\"No, I went back to working my own mine.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"About this shooting lesson...?\"\n\n\" 'Bout time,\" he said, and stepped behind her again.\n\nShe gasped softly the moment his arms came around her, but she knew he only did it to position her hands on the rifle and lift her arms to the appropriate height. \"The butt of the rifle needs to be pressed against your shoulder or the recoil could knock you on your as\u2014uh, backside and hurt like hell, so don't fire unless the butt is firmly seated like this. Now, let's see if you can hit something before the ammunition crate is empty. Try one of those cowbells on the fence.\"\n\nShe would have huffed at his sarcasm if his chest wasn't still pressed to her back, causing a flurry of agitation inside her.\n\n\"Did I need to mention you have to pull the trigger?\"\n\nMore sarcasm, but he stepped back this time, letting her breathe normally again so she could point out, \"Wild animals that can hurt me aren't as small as that bell. At least give me a target the size of a small animal.\"\n\n\"All right, follow me.\"\n\nHe picked up the crate and moved to open the gate, continuing another twenty feet before putting the crate down. She followed and even closed the gate for him\u2014and noticed that the rifle was already starting to feel a little heavy. Was he really going to make her carry it as she searched for the money?\n\nBefore she brought that up, she looked at the gun on his hip. She was surprised he wore it even when he was mining. \"Wouldn't a pistol be easier for me to handle?\"\n\n\"Not if you want to hit what you're aiming at,\" he said, putting his hands on her shoulders and turning her around so he could help her position the rifle again. \"The rifle you hold high so you can look down its barrel at your target. I have an extra Colt, but you shoot from your waist with that type of gun and hitting your target requires a lot more practice.\"\n\nHe aimed the rifle for her, placed her left hand under the barrel to support it. Tipping her head and looking down the long length, she saw it was pointing at his trespassing sign. She was about to pull the trigger when she felt his breath against her ear. A delicious shiver ran down her spine, and she nearly dropped the weapon. She lowered it before it slipped out of her hands. She turned slowly as he stepped back, and only then realized that he'd merely been leaning close to see if her aim was accurate.\n\n\"Have you changed your mind about learning to shoot?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, I\u2014\" Good grief, where had her bloody thoughts gone! \"You just described how you shoot a Colt, but I'm a woman. Wouldn't it be just as effective if I raised the pistol to the same height as the rifle and looked down the length of my arm?\"\n\nHe stared at her a moment before chuckling. \"You could be right. Wait here while I fetch it.\"\n\nWhat was it about Morgan Callahan that enabled him to make her nervous and breathlessly stirred up at the same time? She set the rifle down and fanned her cheeks with both hands until she saw him heading back to her. Still shirtless. Still flaunting a physique that had to be the pinnacle of masculine beauty and temptation. Did he know what a fine figure of a man he was? Maybe he did and that's why he hid an ugly face under that horribly shaggy beard, so it wouldn't detract from his magnificent body\u2014and she still wasn't thinking clearly!\n\n\"I don't have an extra gun belt for this,\" he said as he reached her, \"so you'll have to figure out how you're going to carry it.\"\n\n\"Couldn't I borrow yours?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nThe weapon was nearly a foot in length, making it too long to fit in her purse or the pocket of her skirt, but she supposed she could tie it to her waist with a long ribbon. She would just have to make sure Morgan didn't see her carrying the gun that way. She caused him enough amusement as it was. But when he put the weapon in her hand, she realized that it was so light compared to the rifle, she could probably just carry it in her hand.\n\n\"All of this is to protect me from animals that will probably run away from me before I run away from them, right?\" she asked.\n\n\"You never know,\" he said as he showed her how to load the Colt by demonstrating with his own. \"Encounters with people in these hills are rare, but in addition to claim jumpers, I've heard of outlaws out this way and seen the marshals and bounty hunters searching for them. There are also other prospectors traveling through these hills. The greatest danger to you will come from wild animals, but you still need to be able to protect yourself from any strangers you come across.\"\n\nShe was more concerned about wild animals. \"What about bears? Do they come up here?\"\n\n\"Ran across one fishing at the river below here last year. Made a coat out of him. But haven't seen any this far up. Now, let's see if your idea has merit. Shoot the sign.\"\n\nShe lifted the gun, looked down the length of her arm, and pulled the trigger. The weapon seemed to jump in her hand, pointing upward as if it had a mind of its own. Texas yelled from the cliff, \"I'm trying to sleep up here!\" And Morgan started laughing.\n\nBut then he was standing behind her again, his chest pressed to her back, and he rasped by her ear, \"You forgot the support.\" He raised her left hand and placed it under her forearm. \"Grip firmly the way you did with the rifle barrel to hold your arm steady. Try now.\"\n\nHis breath crossed her cheek this time. He was doing it again, trying to see for himself if her aim was accurate. Did he really think she could concentrate when it felt like she was utterly surrounded by him and all she could think about was kissing him?\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" he asked.\n\nShe lowered the gun, pointing it at the ground, and turned about in his arms. He'd already straightened, so she had to glance up to meet his eyes. She was going to make it clear that he was far too distracting for this to work and suggest that his friend teach her instead. The words didn't happen.\n\nThe kiss began softly. As she'd guessed, his mustache tickled her upper lip, and she couldn't help the giggle that started, but it was cut off almost instantly when his hand at the back of her neck pressed her closer to him and his lips spread hers apart, or her gasp did; in either case, the kiss was now deep and amazing and so very stirring, with so many wonderful sensations showing up all at once. There was a fluttering in her belly, her pulse racing, a tingling up her back, and a shocking urge to put her arms around him when his tongue slid next to hers.\n\nShe moaned in delight. Unfortunately, he didn't recognize it as a sound of pleasure and stepped back. And for once, she could tell that he was frowning. But for once, she didn't want him to.\n\n\"That was\u2014\" she began.\n\nHe cut in, \"Necessary to clear your head. You were getting distracted. Now, concentrate and keep practicing. I'll check on your progress in a few hours.\" He walked away, but tossed back, \"And no cheating by getting closer to the sign.\"\n\nShe would have admitted the kiss was nice, but maybe it was better that she didn't let him know that she'd liked it quite so much. That might bring him back for more when she supposed they ought not to be doing that, considering they didn't even like each other. But without the insult preceding it this time, she couldn't deny being kissed by the bear had been thrilling.\n\nFeeling a bit full of herself because of it, she raised the weapon she was still holding, supported her arm, and fired off several shots. She stared incredulously at the sign she'd just damaged, then yelled to Morgan before he disappeared inside his mine, \"I've mastered this!\"\n\n\"The hell you have.\"\n\n\"Three shots, three holes in the sign. It would appear shooting is my forte.\"\n\nHe snorted and continued on, yelling back, \"Return before dinner or you go without.\"\n\nShe wasn't displeased with his sour reaction. She smiled, guessing that his anger wasn't directed at her. He was mad at himself because he'd wanted to kiss her, and he had." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Violet returned to the camp at precisely five o'clock. She'd dug her pocket watch out of her valise before she left to make sure she would return long before the sun set. But spending most of the day walking over uneven terrain had left her tired and thinking about taking a short nap before dinner.\n\nShe forgot about the nap when she found Morgan in the yard pouring large rocks from a wheelbarrow into some kind of device. He turned a handle to raise a large square of metal covered in netting, then let it drop into the container below. When she saw him pouring small stones from the container into crates, which were stacked nearby, she realized the device was a rock crusher.\n\n\"You're saving rocks?\" she asked as she approached.\n\n\"That's silver ore,\" he corrected. \"I'm getting it ready for smelting.\"\n\nSince he nodded toward the big brick dome, she guessed, \"So that's what you call a smelter?\"\n\n\"I light it about every four days, and only at night, since it makes a lot of smoke, which could be seen from far off during the day. The wind usually comes up the gully or over the lower slope and blows the smoke away from the cabin. Stinks like hell and can even make you sick if you inhale too much of it, so I don't smelt unless there's a good breeze.\"\n\n\"You built that?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"It's just made of clay bricks. Couldn't very well get a ready-made metal one up this hill, those things are huge. So are rock crushers, so I made one of those, too, just had to order a block of steel and the nets to hold it. You'll need to go into the cabin when I do the burn, just in case the smoke drifts into the yard.\"\n\n\"It seems like a lot of extra work. Wouldn't it be simpler to sell the ore as it is?\"\n\n\"Simpler, but not as convenient. I did that the first few months I was here, which is why I bought so many mules to carry it to town. It's easier to transport silver bricks than bulky raw ore.\"\n\n\"Do you make more money if you smelt it first?\"\n\n\"A lot more. It's still not pure silver, but it averages eighty percent, which is considered high, and if the silversmiths back east want sterling, then they can process it further. That requires a lot more chemicals than I have here and huge machines that generate more heat than a small smelter like mine.\" He finally glanced around at her. \"I didn't hear any shots while you were gone. No animals today?\"\n\n\"Only small ones, but Bo chased them off before I got near them.\"\n\n\"I don't like you going off like that.\"\n\nHis protective instincts were rearing again? She felt like smiling. Maybe Aunt Elizabeth's pointers were working. She wanted to hear him say that he'd been worried about her, so she asked, \"Why?\"\n\n\"If something happens to you, then I have to waste time looking for your body.\" And then he stared at the ribbon around her hips. \"That's a cute gun belt you've got there.\"\n\nHer cheeks lit up angrily on both counts\u2014she knew he'd say something snide about her ribbon, but that remark about wasting time was the last straw. She marched off to the cabin, but she was too agitated\u2014and dirty\u2014to take a nap, and a few minutes later she came out with the bar of brown soap and her last set of clean clothes. Crossing the yard to the gate, she yelled, \"I have the gun, so I do not need your escort for this bath!\"\n\nAll he did was yell back, \"You're bathing again already? You just did that yesterday.\"\n\nShe growled under her breath. Had she really thought he might worry about her, the thorn in his side? Of course he wouldn't. If anything, he'd probably hoped she'd get lost and not return.\n\nShe was laughing at herself by the time she left the little pool. Nothing like a cold dunking to put things in perspective. She didn't need the man to like her; she just needed him to admit that the partnership he'd made with Charles should and would continue with the Mitchell heirs. The reasons he'd partnered with Charles were still valid and hadn't been satisfied yet.\n\nGood grief, for that very short time after he'd finally accepted that she was Violet Mitchell, they'd laughed and gotten along fine. She wanted that back. Then she could broach a plan to save her family's home immediately. She needed Morgan to pay off the loan so she and her brothers could repay him instead of the bank. It would require coaxing the bear into being generous again. How hard could that be? Hadn't he admitted he had a heart of gold? But she couldn't ask him until he was in a more agreeable state of mind, and he wouldn't get there if she kept arguing with him. What was wrong with her to keep deviating from Aunt Elizabeth's advice?\n\nReturning to the cabin, she unhooked the improvised screen so she could sit on the bed to redo her braid without the blanket getting in her way. She was longing to sleep in a nightgown tonight. Should she dare to do so with Morgan in the cabin? Or was he going to smelt tonight after dark? He hadn't exactly said.\n\nIt was the first thing she asked when he returned to start dinner.\n\n\"No, I told you, only every four days. I'll crush rocks every day, but I need enough ore to make it worthwhile to light the smelter. You didn't wash your hair?\"\n\nShe blushed a little. She hadn't washed it because she didn't want Morgan stirring her up again, as he'd done during the shooting lesson, by insisting he help her brush out the tangles. So she said, \"I prefer not to wash it this late in the day, because if I braid it before it's dry it will be all wavy tomorrow.\"\n\n\"So don't braid it.\"\n\n\"It's my habit to braid it before I go to bed, to keep it out of the way.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea, considering all the tossing and turning you do when you sleep.\"\n\nShe was taken aback by his intimate observations of her. Had he watched her sleep? \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Couldn't help noticing when we were on the trail.\"\n\nOh, that. She was relieved until he added, \"You talk in your sleep, too.\"\n\nShe gasped. She did nothing of the sort! But she really didn't want to get into another argument with him, which his observations were priming her for, so she clamped her mouth shut and looked away from his still naked chest. Why couldn't he put on a shirt after he left the mine? But she figured maybe he wanted to bathe first, which he left to do as soon as he'd gotten the meal started.\n\nShe stared at the fire while he was gone, trying to calm herself. She shouldn't let the man and his habits agitate her so. It seemed to work, because she was able to smile at him when he walked in, mostly because he was wearing his shirt now.\n\nHe brought the food to the table. She smirked to herself when he grabbed a towel and laid it on the table before setting down the hot pots. One contained some sort of meat in gravy, the other buttered carrots. The bread he put on the table smelled fresh, so she guessed he must have made it while she'd napped yesterday.\n\nOnce they started eating, he asked, \"Who's Elliott?\"\n\nShe almost choked. She did talk in her sleep? She must have been beyond exhausted for that to happen\u2014well, she had been yesterday. There was simply no way that Sophie, with whom she had shared a room all those years, wouldn't have mentioned something like that if Violet did it regularly.\n\nMorgan was looking at her expectantly, so she cleared her throat and said, \"He's the English lord I told you about, the man I plan to marry when I return to London.\"\n\n\"He's already asked for you?\"\n\n\"No, but the London Season of endless parties was about to begin just as I had to leave to come home. I've been looking forward to the Season for years. I still can't believe I'm missing it. And the balls\u2014I do love dancing. Lord Elliott was immediately interested in me when we met, broke quite a few rules because he wouldn't leave my side! So charming and debonair. He even told me he was looking for a wife, so I know he would have asked to marry me if I were there to enjoy the Season with him\u2014instead of here sorting out this mess Papa left us with.\"\n\n\"You blame Charley for dying?\"\n\n\"No, of course not!\"\n\n\"Sounds like it to me,\" he said with a shrug. \"And this Elliott you're going to pay to marry you sounds like an idiot.\"\n\n\"I told you, dowries are expected among the aristocracy, something you obviously know nothing about. So do us both a favor and finish your meal in silence, as I intend to do.\"\n\nShe ended that with a glare. Why did that make him grin? Had he deliberately provoked her and was pleased he'd succeeded? But she refused to say another word to him while she was so hotly smarting, or she would certainly say something she would regret.\n\nShe finished her dinner quickly and retreated behind the screen so she wouldn't have to look at Morgan for another minute. The new arrangement really did afford her some privacy. Much better. But they were still in the same room, even if she couldn't see him now, so she couldn't quite bring herself to undress and put on her nightgown. Sometimes she wished proper behavior wasn't so bloody uncomfortable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "\"What is it, Bo?\" Violet yelled as the dog started barking up ahead.\n\nShe ran toward him, hoping he'd finally figured out that she wanted him to find her father's scent. She'd continued to let him sniff her father's jacket before she began her search each day. But when she reached him, she saw that he'd just found a family of rabbits and couldn't figure out which one to chase.\n\nAssuring herself that the dog just wanted to play with his find rather than eat it, she continued walking. She was becoming frustrated after four days of searching up and down these hills and finding nothing. She'd gone west down the hill yesterday, all the way down, and was utterly disappointed by the view beyond the trees, just another open vista of endless golden and green grassland. She'd walked around every pine tree on the way down, annoyed that none had any exposed roots or hidey-holes to speak of, so she considered that a wasted day.\n\nAnd the queasiness she'd been feeling wouldn't go away. She was so dreading asking Morgan for that loan to save her family home. But how else would her brothers be able to come west to work their father's mine? Even if she found the money and sent it to them so they could make the next loan payment, Mr. Perry would surely seize the house when he found out both of her brothers had left town without paying back the entire loan.\n\nViolet had to make a deal with Morgan on their behalf without being able to consult them first. What if her brothers balked at the idea of working in the mine? After all, it would be very hard labor. They might want to find some other way to pay Morgan back once the house was safe, and then he might get mad and have them jailed if they didn't pay up or start working toward that end right away.\n\nSo many negative possibilities kept filling her head that she'd accomplished nothing over the last three days other than not getting mad at Morgan or arguing with him. But being afraid to broach such an important subject just increased her nervousness. A flat-out no from him would wreck all her hopes and dreams for the future.\n\nAnd although she'd been maintaining peace with Morgan, she hadn't gotten the sense that he would be receptive to her loan proposal. In fact, his movements and actions such as banging plates on the table and stomping out to go work suggested he was still brooding. His mood seemed to have worsened since their dinner three nights ago when he'd asked her who Elliott was. Perhaps she'd gone on too long singing Elliott's praises and complained too much about missing all the lovely parties during the London Season. She'd broken one of Aunt Elizabeth's rules about charming a man: she'd talked too much about herself. And last night she'd annoyed him so much that he'd stomped out of the cabin and slept on the porch.\n\nBut that hadn't been her fault! She'd been unable to sleep because her legs hurt from so much walking and her calf muscles had cramped. She'd lifted her nightgown to rub her leg, having given in to sleeping more comfortably in the gown the previous night.\n\nHe must have heard her groan and asked, \"What's wrong?\"\n\nWhen she told him, the next thing she knew the bare-chested bear had swiped aside her screen and tossed a bottle of liniment on her bed. She'd gasped because her nightgown was still hiked up, giving him a clear view of her aching legs. But all he did was scowl, drop her blanket-screen back down, and go back to his bed.\n\nThe cooking fire was still burning low, throwing off some light in the cabin, but it was too dark in her enclosure to read the label on the bottle. \"What is this for?\"\n\n\"All sorts of things, one of them sore muscles.\"\n\nHer eyes flared. \"You had this and didn't offer it to me when we arrived and I could barely walk?\"\n\n\"My friends from Nashart left a few things behind when they went home. I forgot about it. Just found it yesterday when I was looking for the fresh salt.\"\n\nAppeased, she'd immediately started rubbing the liniment on her calves and sighed in relief, mumbling, \"This works rather quickly. I'll try it on my thighs, too.\" A few moments later she was sighing in relief and pleasure again, then was startled when she heard Morgan stomp out of the cabin.\n\nViolet didn't like remembering any of that, when all it did was assure her that Morgan still wasn't ready for The Talk. How frustrating! Her father had found exactly what he'd come west for, a new fortune, but it was up to her to secure it for her family.\n\nReturning to camp later than usual, around six in the evening, she found Texas in the cabin instead of Morgan. He'd just made himself a cup of coffee and remarked, \"Morgan's mining late again. He's been working like a demon these last few days.\"\n\nShe wouldn't know, because she'd been out searching like a demon herself. \"I've had no luck finding my father's money, and I still seem to be annoying Morgan.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you could both use a break. You'd surely be less of a thorn in his side if you played poker with him. He loves that game.\" And then he laughed. \"He's not as good at it as he claims to be. You might end up winning some money from him!\"\n\nShe thanked Texas for the advice before he left, thrilled that she had a new way to continue her charm offensive against the bear. So that night, her fifth in Morgan's camp, she waited until they'd finished dinner before suggesting, \"Teach me to play poker? Or are you too tired?\"\n\nIn answer, he took a small box off one of the shelves and set it on the table in front of her, saying, \"Divide the nuggets while I clean up.\"\n\nViolet opened the lid and lifted out a deck of cards, then stared in amazement at the layer of gold at the bottom of the box. Carefully dumping the nuggets on the table, she divided them into two piles of thirty each, putting the odd one back in the box.\n\nWhen he came back inside with the clean dishes, she guessed, \"This is the gold you found in the creeks when you first got to this range, isn't it?\"\n\n\"What's left of it, yeah.\"\n\n\"What is it worth?\"\n\nHe shrugged as he sat down across from her. \"Maybe twelve hundred or so.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"But why haven't you sold them?\"\n\n\"Because I told my family I was coming here to find gold, and I'll take home whatever's left of those nuggets to prove I did. In the meantime, when Tex and I feel like playing poker, I give him a couple nuggets in exchange for forty bucks since I don't keep cash up here, while he does. 'Sides, he loves playing with nuggets in town games. It never fails to cause a ruckus and get him a pretty gal for the night\u2014were you named for the color of your eyes?\"\n\nShe blinked at the question he'd tossed in, grateful that it kept her from blushing over his \"gal for the night\" remark. \"No, I was told my eyes were baby blue when I was born. But violets were in bloom and my father brought a bouquet of them to my mother, and the name just occurred to her when she saw them. My eyes didn't turn violet until I was about six months old, according to my father, and my parents laughed when it happened. Then again, my mother also had violet eyes, so she might have been expecting mine to change color. I don't know. She died before I was old enough to ask her.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"So am I. But her absence was why I took on the mantle of being a mother to my brothers.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"When I was five.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"No, you didn't.\"\n\n\"I did, and they humored me, though it probably would have been in their best interests if they hadn't, because I got better at it.\"\n\n\"Being a mother?\"\n\n\"Keeping them in line. They were so rambunctious at that age. Now, about this poker game?\"\n\nHe explained the rules. He even laid out hands to show her the different ways she could win, from a mere highest card to a royal flush and everything in between. Then he shuffled the deck and dealt five cards to each of them.\n\n\"What about the bluffing you mentioned?\"\n\n\"Say you've got three aces. Odds are that's going to be the winning hand. But you don't want anyone to know that, so instead of betting three aces, you pass on the bet and hope someone else will think you'll drop out if they bet. So when they do bet, you can be nice and just call, or go for blood and raise. Now they have to put in more money to see your winning hand, or they'll fold and you get the pot.\"\n\n\"I've got three aces.\"\n\n\"No, you don't, and saying so isn't bluffing. You bluff with the way you bet, high or low, not by saying what you have or with the expression on your face. And it isn't mandatory to bluff, it just makes the game more interesting.\"\n\nWhich was apparently what he was hoping for, so she smiled sweetly and asked, \"But is it against the rules to say what's in your hand?\"\n\n\"No, it's just not a smart way to play the game, and it isn't considered a bluff.\"\n\n\"Why not? You still need to decide whether I'm telling the truth, which by your poker definition would be am I bluffing or not. Besides, I really do have three aces, and you need to pay to see them, right?\"\n\nHe raised his brow at her and called her bet, but raised her two more nuggets. She called him and upped that three more, but asked, \"Could I have raised with all my nuggets?\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes. \"Yes, but this is a practice game, and you running out of nuggets on the first hand would end it. Besides, I'm calling without raising further, so that ends it.\"\n\nShe smugly laid down her cards. He burst out laughing, seeing her three aces along with a pair of nines. She was delighted, not about winning but because she'd managed to amuse him.\n\nThey played for another hour, with Violet losing all of her nuggets. It seemed to leave him in a good mood, but it was late now and, he'd yawned a few times, so she decided that tomorrow, come what may, she would ask him for the loan and present her partnership proposal." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Filled with determination, Violet started walking south right after breakfast the next morning, vowing to find the money. She would insist that Morgan immediately send it to her brothers. Two days ago she'd searched in this direction, but she'd covered only the slopes that were easy to navigate. Today, feeling more comfortable in the wilderness, she would venture into the rougher terrain where high, rocky ledges abounded.\n\nShe got excited when she found some disturbed dirt. She pushed the dirt away with a sharp stone. Bo's whining should have been a clue, but she was terribly disappointed when all she uncovered was one of the bones he'd buried. He quickly swiped it up and trotted off. She sighed and sat in the grass for a few minutes, looking around. The ledge she'd come across, which was only about five feet high, started a few hundred feet back, and up ahead she could see a black hole at the base of it. Thrilled to have found a potential hiding spot, she leapt to her feet and ran to it, then stared wide-eyed at what was crawling out of it.\n\n\"Oh, aren't you just too adorable!\" she gushed as she picked up the puppy and cuddled it in her arms. It had a cream-colored belly, but its coat was mostly brown hair tipped with black. The lower part of its face was white. \"We're going to be best friends, you and I, and Lord Elliott will love you after I marry him, I will insist.\"\n\nDelighted to finally have a dog of her own that she could raise and train herself, she didn't give the hole another glance, turning to rush back to camp to show Morgan what she'd found. She shouted for him to come out of his mine. He came tearing out, gun in hand, and with a big grin on her face, she held the puppy up for him to see. But he barely glanced at it; he was looking behind her instead.\n\n\"You shouldn't have brought that here.\"\n\nHer chin rose a notch. \"I'm keeping it.\"\n\n\"If you want to stay here and live with it till it dies, fine, I'll kill its mother for you when she shows up, and she will. But you can't take it wherever you're going from here. Most folks have a strong aversion to wolves, even small ones.\"\n\n\"A wolf?\"\n\n\"Did you really think it was a dog?\"\n\n\"It's a baby!\"\n\n\"Which has a mother who will be looking for it. Damn, when the hell did wolves move onto my slopes? Have you seen any others while you've been wandering?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said miserably.\n\nShe was crushed, so much so that she felt tears welling in her eyes. Obviously she couldn't keep it or have its mother killed.\n\n\"Come on, we need to put it back exactly where you found it, and douse it in water to remove your scent. Go dunk it, I'll get a sack to put it in.\"\n\nShe knew he was right, she just didn't like it at all, and promised herself that as soon as she got back to England she was buying a dog, though she supposed she ought to discuss it with Elliott first. Maybe he already had lots of dogs. Maybe he didn't like dogs. If he didn't, she might have to reconsider him as her primary choice of husband.\n\nMorgan took Caesar for the short journey, pulling Violet up behind him. He didn't waste time saddling the horse. Thanks to Carla, she was already used to riding without one. Reaching the hole, he dismounted and carefully rolled the pup out of the sack onto the ground. It immediately pounced on his boot, but Morgan didn't notice, had already glanced up at her to warn, \"You'll need to stay away from here.\"\n\n\"But I haven't finished searching this area. I thought I had gotten lucky when I saw this hole, but I got distracted by the puppy and forgot to look.\"\n\nHe glanced inside it for her. \"It's not deep, looks freshly dug out, too, probably for the birthing. The female could already have been in the process of moving her litter if she noticed you around here in the last day or so. That could be why there was only one pup here, when she-wolves tend to birth four or five. If this one is gone later today\"\u2014he paused to shake the pup off his boot\u2014\"then she's likely moved on with the lot of them. They tend to avoid people. I'll check again before dinner.\"\n\nBack at camp, he lifted her down from Caesar, but didn't remove his hands from her waist once her feet were on the ground. She glanced up to see why and found his blue eyes studying her.\n\nShe waited with bated breath, only to hear him say, \"You'll feel better after lunch. You can eat while you're fishing.\"\n\nShe stared at him as he headed inside the cabin. What the deuce had just happened? Fishing?!\n\nShe followed him to demand, \"When did I decide to go fishing?\"\n\n\"You need a distraction from the pup you had to part with. You can get it fishing. Charley fished twice a week for us to contribute to our store of food, so I don't see why you shouldn't as well. I would advise you to hold a pole in one hand and a revolver in the other, but I'll make it easier for you and go with you instead. Your father's pole is on the other side of the house, along with his box of lures. He fashioned a bunch from the smaller slag stones and tied a few around his hook, since slag turns shiny in water. I suppose you need me to teach you how to fish first?\"\n\n\"No, Papa taught my brothers and me when we were children. He would take us fishing at least once a month during spring and summer.\"\n\n\"If you tell me you dug for worms, too, I won't believe it.\"\n\nShe smiled at him. \"I did actually join my brothers at night for the worm hunts and turned over my share of stones looking for them, but I always called one of my brothers over to gather them up. And they didn't need to be asked to attach them to the hook for me the next day. There are some things a girl just isn't meant to do, touching worms being one of them,\" she ended primly.\n\nHe chuckled. She went out to find the pole. His improved mood was promising. Had he forgiven her for threatening to kill him? If so, it was going to make asking for that loan and partnership a little easier. Maybe she wouldn't wait until tonight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "\"D'you know what happened to my father's pocket watch? Did he break it or lose it? I checked his valise, but it wasn't there.\"\n\nViolet was sitting on the riverbank a few miles from Morgan's mountain; he was lying back next to her in the grass, his hat mostly covering his face. She had a pole in one hand and her parasol in the other, and a good thing she'd brought it, since there were no trees in either direction along this section of the river to offer shade. But she was having trouble keeping her eyes off of that long stretch of body. At least he was wearing a shirt, and had started doing so whenever he wasn't in his mine.\n\nWhen he didn't answer, she wondered if he'd fallen asleep, so she added a little louder, \"I meant to mention it sooner, but I kept forgetting. It has sentimental value, or I wouldn't ask. My mother gave it to him and there was an inscription on it: So you don't forget to come home. Papa said it was a joke between them because he was often late getting home for dinner.\"\n\n\"I saw him use it only a couple days before he had the heart attack and fell, so he didn't lose it. If you didn't find it among his belongings, then he probably had it on him when I took him to town\u2014and he would've been buried in what he was wearing.\"\n\n\"That's\u2014that's actually comforting. He would have liked that.\"\n\nHe sat up. \"You aren't going to cry again, are you?\"\n\nShe glanced aside and gave him a weak smile, but his hat was still tilted so low that all she could really see was that ridiculous beard. Which had her blurt out, \"Why don't you shave? You have the tools for it at your camp.\"\n\n\"Waste of time,\" he said, and lay back down to completely cover his face again with the hat.\n\n\"D'you even have a mirror here to see how\u2014how shaggy you look?\"\n\n\"So my shaving would be for you, not me?\"\n\nShe blushed. \"I was just curious. Did you herd cattle with that beard, or did it scare the cows into running away?\"\n\n\"Hell, no, my ma would skin me alive if I came in the house looking like this.\" She started to chuckle, but he added, \"And I have shaved here\u2014twice, I think.\"\n\nShe laughed this time, and guessed, \"One of your disguises for town? Mountain man, hermit, cowboy, just never miner?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\nAn hour later, with still no bites, she stood up to recast the line farther out. Sitting again, she complained, \"You can't protect me if you're sleeping.\"\n\n\"Was I snoring?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then figure I'm not sleeping.\" He sat up to open the basket between them. \"Eat up, just don't let go of that pole. It's the only one we've got.\"\n\nShe took the sandwich he handed her. \"Are you sure there are fish in this river?\"\n\n\"Pike and trout. Charley always came back with a basketful.\"\n\nShe groaned. They'd be there all day if he expected that many fish. But he didn't seem impatient to get back to work, and she couldn't get back to the south slope until that wolf and her pups were gone. But more importantly, they were talking, without rancor, without accusations. She was surprised by how nice it felt.\n\nShe wondered aloud, \"If my father fished here often, might he have hidden his money here?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I doubt he did. People passing through this area follow this river north and south, and Charley knew that. Seems to me he would've looked for a more private spot where it would be less likely someone would stumble upon his money.\" And then, as he dug out a handful of cherries from the basket for her, he asked, \"Why'd you get shipped off to England?\"\n\n\"You make it sound like I was sent away as a punishment. I assure you I wasn't. Aunt Elizabeth is my mother's sister and is married to an English lord. When she came to visit us in Philadelphia, she was appalled to find me running wild\u2014her words. I merely liked the outdoors, but I admit I had been skipping some of my studies. But she also upbraided Papa for allowing me to act like an adult when I wasn't even ten yet. She was concerned that I was missing my childhood. I think Papa was a bit cowed by her. She can be quite formidable. He didn't argue with her about taking me to England, where I would have a woman's guidance and be raised properly.\"\n\n\"You don't think it's odd that Charley didn't tell me about you?\"\n\n\"Odd for you, but maybe not for him. He probably didn't think losing his inheritance would affect me, since I was still in England in the care of my aunt and uncle. Or maybe he just didn't think it appropriate to mention his daughter to a shaggy bear.\"\n\n\"A bear, huh?\"\n\n\"I heard more than one person liken you to one when I was in town.\"\n\n\"But is that also your opinion of me?\"\n\n\"Well, I won't say if the shoe fits...\"\n\nHe laughed, making her smile.\n\nFinished with lunch and seeing him lie back down, she stood up to get more serious about catching a few fish. And standing on the edge of the river, she was able to cast the line out even farther. Ten minutes later she pulled in her first catch and let it plop down on Morgan's chest, then laughed at how fast he sat up.\n\n\"That's one,\" she said, grinning. \"One to go.\"\n\n\"Or three to go, if you want to be nice and catch a couple for Tex. He was tickled pink over that cougar meat you didn't want. Told me to thank you for turning your nose up at it.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"No, he didn't.\"\n\nSo Texas had been reciprocating over the last few days with two rabbits and a turkey that he'd simply tossed down the cliff for Morgan to find when he came out of the mine. When she'd asked Morgan why she never heard the shots from those kills, he'd told her, \"Tex actually prefers a bow and arrows when none of his buddies are around to tease him about it.\"\n\nMorgan removed the hook from the fish for her. She returned to the spot on the river's edge where she'd got lucky and cast the line out again, then looked back at him to ask, \"Why did you leave ranching to mine instead? Does your family need money?\"\n\n\"No, we own a rich spread. But more'n once growing up, I had this idea that Nashart should have a store that stocked all the fancy eastern stuff that my ma, Mary, had to order and then wait weeks or even months for it to be delivered. I can't count how many times she asked me and my brothers to ride to town to see if the merchandise had arrived. And how many times she looked disappointed when we had to tell her it hadn't come yet. So I finally decided to build her that store right in our own town, but I couldn't tell the family about it. Callahans are ranchers, always have been, always will be, and my pa would've flat-out balked at my idea, even though my ma is going to be tickled pink.\"\n\n\"So you came out here to make the money to do it, thereby skipping the argument?\"\n\n\"Oh, there will still be an argument, and a damn big one, but since I won't be asking my father for the money, that store is still going to be built.\"\n\n\"I just can't picture you as an emporium owner,\" she teased. \"You'll scare everyone out of your shop!\"\n\nHe snorted. She grinned. But his reasons for wanting to do this were commendable. For his mother. To make her happy. To bring fine clothes and furnishings to the people in this wild, remote territory. If she didn't dislike him so much, she might like him\u2014wait, that made no sense.\n\n\"What will you do with your mine when you go home?\"\n\n\"I've considered turning it into a big production when I'm ready to leave, hiring a manager. But I've also considered blowing it up when I go.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"And just bury all that wealth? You could sell it instead.\"\n\n\"That's the thing\u2014I might've, if Sullivan hadn't pissed me off, but now I won't.\"\n\nHe didn't actually growl those words, which was promising; unexpectedly, this gave her a perfect opening to discuss business with him, so she said, \"There's one other option. My brothers and I can continue to mine here if you form a new partnership with us.\"\n\n\"You're going to swing a pick?\"\n\nShe would probably be as pathetic at it as Charles had been, but she stubbornly lifted her chin. \"I will if I have to. I should already be your partner. The laws of inheritance should have applied, making me a mine owner. And need I point out that the terms of your agreement with Papa haven't been fulfilled yet? Didn't you say you formed the partnership to help my father and his family out of their financial bind? So we need to renegotiate to see this through.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\"\n\nHe lay back down and covered his face with his hat. She reprimanded herself for approaching this the wrong way. Demands weren't going to work with this man, hadn't she already learned that?\n\n\"Let me start over\u2014\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2014after you catch another fish.\"\n\nHer brows snapped together in a frown. Stipulations? Or had she caught him off guard, and he needed a few minutes to do his own fishing\u2014for an excuse to tell her no? But, according to him, he didn't need an excuse, didn't need to deal with her about anything since, as he'd pointed out, he no longer had a partner in her family. And he could easily invalidate her father's claim the next time he was in town. So maybe he was only making sure that she caught enough fish for their dinner before he told her no, guessing she'd stomp off angry when he did. Infuriating man!\n\nShe stared at the water again, in time to see two fish swimming past, completely ignoring the lures. She stepped back to pull her line into that pathway, and a few minutes later got the second tug.\n\nIt was an even bigger fish, and she resisted the impulse to drop it in the center of Morgan's chest again. She just held it next to him and said, \"The hook, please?\"\n\nHe sat up and smiled. \"Now, that's a big one. One more should do it.\"\n\nShe cast the line again and, keeping her eyes on the water, took a deep breath and blurted out, \"I need a loan for three thousand dollars. The next payment on the loan Papa took out against our family home is due soon, and it won't even make a dent in the balance still owed, even if my brothers had the money to make the payment, which they don't. There is not enough time to get my brothers here to start mining, when the trip to Butte took me nearly a week. But if you could send them the money now to pay off the loan in full, they could come here immediately to mine and pay you back.\"\n\n\"So you want a loan from me to pay off a loan?\"\n\n\"Yes\u2014please,\" she said sweetly. \"You did agree to help with this very thing.\"\n\n\"When did I do that?\"\n\n\"When you partnered with my father. He was desperate to get rid of this loan and make a fortune so he could give us back the life we were accustomed to, you said it yourself, and that's why you helped him. The reason still exists. The loan is still looming. The goal that started this hasn't been met yet.\"\n\n\"There's no tearing hurry, Violet.\"\n\nShe swung around to stare at him. \"How can you say that? My brothers are almost out of time!\"\n\n\"No, they aren't. I sent off a second load of silver from Charley's mine the day before his accident. After I took your father to the doctor, I sent a telegram to my buyers, the silversmith brothers, and told them to deposit Charley's money with mine until he recovered. The next two times I checked on him that month, he was still unconscious. And then Tex went to town to play poker and brought me the bad news that he'd died. That was about a month after the accident. Charley never did find out that he'd netted another eighteen hundred.\"\n\n\"You have that money?\"\n\n\"Not anymore. The last time I went to Butte, I arranged to have that eighteen hundred sent to your brothers. That was the same day I heard about you. In any case, they should have gotten that money this week.\"\n\nThat was such a relief! Daniel or maybe both of her brothers might already be on their way here because of it. \"Why didn't you tell me this sooner?\"\n\n\"I did, the night you convinced me you are Violet Mitchell, in the mine. I told you your brothers would hear from me soon.\"\n\n\"No, you didn't.\"\n\n\"I did, actually, but I guess you could have been too distracted looking through your pa's belongings to hear me. Now, I suppose I could reverse the seventy-thirty arrangement to thirty-seventy, but only long enough for you and your brothers to pay back the loan.\"\n\nShe was incredulous. Had she just gotten two yeses? But then she groaned\u2014no, only one yes. That \"only long enough\" wasn't going to get her a dowry or enough money for her brothers to live comfortably.\n\nUpset, she said, \"Or you could make it a real partnership with them and a fifty-fifty split. They are both strong men, and with both of them digging, they can mine double what you do.\"\n\n\"You're offering me more'n I just said I was willing to accept? Why?\"\n\n\"Because it's a viable mine that can produce more silver than is required to pay you back. It can secure my brothers' future.\"\n\n\"And get you a dowry.\" He suddenly sounded annoyed, which she didn't want until after he agreed to this business arrangement! But then he added, \"You don't need to dangle a carrot in front of a man to get married. A man is going to want you just for yourself.\"\n\nShe blushed at his flattering opinion of her, but pointed out, \"It's different among the English aristocracy. A dowry is expected, it is a tradition. A lord can't marry a pauper, it would be scandalous.\"\n\n\"But you're an American.\"\n\n\"And I was an heiress, which made all the difference over there.\"\n\n\"So if they don't see money when they look at you, they look at someone else? You really want a man like that?\"\n\nHe was poking holes in her plans for her future. Why would he do that when it didn't concern him? But in a way, it did. Her plans were dependent on his agreeing to her full proposal, which he hadn't done yet.\n\nShe quickly got back to that. \"I was just saying that everyone wins if you maintain a partnership with the Mitchell family even after we repay the money I hope you will loan us. And consider this: it would allow you to leave, to go home and still earn fifty percent from the partnership, without any work crews coming up here. I swear we'll continue to take all the precautions that you do to keep this location a secret.\"\n\n\"Let me think about it.\"\n\nThat wasn't a no! She nodded, delighted. But her delight soon waned as another hour passed without him saying anything more about it. The next fish she caught was too small to count, but they returned to camp after she landed another big one.\n\nWaiting for his answer was agonizing. She couldn't push him about it, he didn't like that. She couldn't nag either\u2014he definitely didn't like that. She had to be patient when it wasn't in her nature to be. But too much depended on her not disturbing the peace.\n\nHe didn't take the extra fish up to Texas when they got back to camp, but she knew his friend slept during the afternoons and that he would usually just lower a basket down the cliff whenever Morgan called up that he had something for him. After all, it was a long ride around that cliff.\n\n\"Stay off the south slope if you do any more searching today,\" he reminded her as he lifted her down from Caesar. \"Or you can give the animals a brushing if you want to wait until tomorrow\u2014that's if the wolf is gone. I'll check before dinner.\"\n\nWhile that thirteen hundred dollars would still be helpful, the urgency to find it would be alleviated if he'd just give her his answer. He didn't. Instead, he went mining for the rest of the day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Violet tried to keep in mind how nice that little fishing trip had been. And she kept reminding herself that Morgan hadn't said no to her partnership proposal. But how bloody long did he need to think about it? Any way he examined it, he had to conclude that the arrangement she was offering would be highly lucrative for him.\n\nShe didn't bring it up that night at dinner as they ate the fish she'd caught. Morgan told her the little wolf had moved on so she carried on as usual the next day, searching the south slope for her father's money, counseling herself to be patient. Morgan didn't seem to be in a good enough mood at dinner for her to ask him if he'd made a decision, so she'd suggested another game of poker. Aside from criticizing her bluffing again, he didn't say much and went straight to bed afterward.\n\nThe next morning while she was drinking her coffee on the porch as usual, she decided to make a greater effort to put Morgan in a good mood, including showing him how helpful she could be as a partner. So when he came out of the cabin to head to work, she told him she was taking the day off from her search.\n\n\"You'll get bored,\" was all he said.\n\n\"No, I'll brush the animals and perhaps even make dinner tonight.\"\n\n\"So you can cook?\"\n\nShe hadn't thought that far ahead. \"Well, how hard can it be?\"\n\n\"You can look in my ma's cookbook for a recipe if you're determined to burn down the cabin, or you can just peel a few carrots and potatoes and I'll do the rest.\"\n\nHe was half teasing, at least about the destruction of his cabin, but that was a good sign. So she smiled. \"Perhaps you're right. You are an excellent cook, after all.\"\n\nDid he blush a little at the compliment? She smiled to herself and watched him enter the mine. A few minutes later, he brought Caesar out into the yard as he did every morning, and once he was in the mine again she got busy.\n\nShe fetched a bucket and the horse brush and tackled the grooming of the animals first, coaxing each one to the stream for a dousing and then a thorough brushing. The mares cooperated, but Caesar didn't. She ended up going to find the carrots; seeing that there were plenty left in the crate, she chopped one up. She put the pieces in her pocket and gave the large horse a piece every time he tried to move away from her. It worked. She briefly thought about braiding their tails, but grooming seven animals properly took up the entire morning, which was verified when Morgan returned to prepare lunch. Well, she did want the rest of her plan to be a surprise, and now it would be, since it would have to wait until he was back in the mine again.\n\nWhen he went back to work, she tried to get Texas's attention without being too loud about it, hoping he wasn't already sleeping. When he poked his head over the cliff edge, she called up, \"Join us for dinner? And bring your harmonica. I would love to hear some music tonight.\"\n\n\"I'll bring the rabbits,\" he replied.\n\nOh no, Bo's playmates! But he added, \"Just caught a pair north of here.\"\n\nPleased that Texas would be joining them for dinner, Violet returned to the cabin to do what she'd never done before: clean the house. Fortunately, it was a small house. She swept the cabin and the porch, and aired out the bedding. She even gathered some of Morgan's pretty flowers and, finding an empty jar, set them at the center of his table. She then peeled the vegetables and left them in a bowl. Finally she made up both beds neatly, then went for her bath, hoping she still had enough time to make an extra effort with her appearance. She couldn't manage her usual coiffure, but she dug out her hairpins and twisted her braid to form a bun, then pinned it at her nape. The last touch was tying a pink ribbon about her neck to match her pretty pink blouse.\n\nMorgan arrived first to get his bath towel. He stopped in the doorway, looking surprised. \"You cleaned?\"\n\n\"You said that I would get bored,\" she reminded him. \"So I made sure I wouldn't. And I invited Texas to join us for dinner. He's bringing the meat.\"\n\n\"But you actually cleaned?\"\n\nShe didn't blush, she threw his towel at him instead and pointed in the direction of the bathing pool. He laughed as he left, confirming he'd been teasing again by exaggerating his surprise. Texas arrived next with the two skinned rabbits.\n\n\"Place looks nice for a change,\" he remarked. \"So do you\u2014not that you don't always, but\u2014\"\n\nHe was blushing so much she cut in, \"Thank you, I understand. I didn't leave camp today and needed to keep myself busy.\"\n\n\"I'll just get these started,\" he offered, and moved over to light the fire.\n\n\"Can I help?\"\n\n\"Appears you already have,\" he said, noticing the bowl of peeled vegetables. \"I'll just chop up everything so it will roast quicker. Morgan will probably want to make some gravy to top it all off. That boy does like his gravy.\"\n\nShe went out on the porch to wait for Morgan. When she saw him approaching, she noted that he was carrying just the towel because he'd already donned his shirt, which was wet in spots because he'd washed his hair and beard. Had he made an extra effort because he'd noticed that she looked a little more elegant tonight? It would be nice to hear him say so, but she doubted that he would compliment her.\n\nWhen he stood next to her on the porch, she whispered, \"He started the meal. I hope he cooks as well as you do.\"\n\n\"Better. He learned from Jakes, our bunkhouse cook back home.\"\n\n\"He still expects you to make the gravy.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"He loves my gravy.\"\n\nShe almost laughed, wondering which one of them was the real gravy lover.\n\nLater, while they ate the hearty meal, Texas asked her how she spent her days in London. Her cleaning the cabin today might have given him the wrong impression about an English lady's daily routine, so she said, \"Walks in the park with my cousins, reading, calling on other ladies of leisure with my aunt. There were a few social gatherings even prior to the start of the official Season this summer, which is a whirlwind of balls and parties I was looking forward to attending.\"\n\n\"Did you have servants?\"\n\n\"Oh, my, yes. There are more than a dozen in my uncle's house\u2014footmen, upstairs and downstairs maids, the cook and her helpers, several ladies' maids, and my uncle's valet.\"\n\nHe seemed incredulous. \"All in one house?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"It is a big house.\"\n\n\"And the men over there of your acquaintance, what sort of work do they do?\"\n\n\"The rich don't work over there, do they?\" Morgan answered Texas's question by asking her one.\n\n\"Lords don't, it would be considered scandalous, but rich tradesmen do, the same as here in America.\" She paused before pointing out, \"You're rich, yet you intend to keep on working. It's all a matter of preference, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"And what country you live in. In ours\u2014yeah, it's yours, too\u2014people don't look down on a man for working even if he's rich enough not to need to.\"\n\nIt was beginning to sound as if they were heading for an argument, which was the last thing she wanted, so she smiled and said, \"Quite right,\" then to Texas, \"I'm hoping that when you finish eating, you will play us one of the songs you've composed. Perhaps one with a waltz tempo so Morgan and I can dance.\"\n\nMorgan put in, \"He's going to be eating until he walks out the door, aren't you, Tex?\"\n\nTexas glanced at Morgan, then at her, then back at Morgan, then down at his plate, which still had a few bites of food on it. \"I don't know, I may be laughing too hard to play anything, if I have to watch you dancing. A waltz?\" He started laughing early.\n\nViolet grinned at Morgan. \"It will be fun. I'll teach you if you don't know how.\" She stood up and held out her hand to him. \"Come, I'll show you the steps while Texas finishes his dinner.\"\n\nFor a moment she didn't think he'd leave his chair, but then he rose and she was reminded of how tall he was, of his magnificent physique. Forcing herself to focus on the dance, she positioned his right hand on her waist and clasped her right hand with his left. Lightly resting her other hand on his upper arm, she said, \"The waltz is a lively formal dance in triple time. Follow my footsteps. One, two, three, then backward, one, two, three. We will turn rhythmically around as we progress around the dance\u2014er, cabin floor. Now again.\"\n\nTexas had started playing his harmonica by then, a lovely tune she didn't recognize. But when she demonstrated the rise and fall part of the dance, where they needed to briefly go up on their toes, Texas started laughing again and the music stopped.\n\nHe complained, \"She should be teaching me. After all, I'm the one getting married soon and will have to dance at the wedding shindig.\"\n\nMorgan's hand tightened a little on hers as he told his friend, \"I'll teach you once I learn. I'm already getting the hang of it. Stick to your harmonica playing.\"\n\nViolet laughed as the music started again, but Morgan did in fact seem to know what he was doing now. She liked the feeling of his hand on her waist, and he was surprisingly light on his feet for a big man. Smiling at her, he twirled her out onto the porch, lifted her down the stairs, and danced with her in the yard under the stars, where they had more room and didn't have to worry about bumping into the table. His blue eyes gazed at her intently as they moved in time to the music. She was enchanted. It was almost what she'd imagined her first ball would be like\u2014well, not the venue, but certainly the thrill of dancing with a tall, strapping, exciting man who was giving her his undivided attention.\n\n\"So this is how they dance at the balls you mentioned?\" he asked. \"It's a lot different from our boisterous western dancing, though both seem to involve twirling about.\"\n\n\"Maybe you can teach me a western dance later?\"\n\n\"Maybe I will. But tell me more about your balls. What does a lady do if she's asked to dance but doesn't like the fella? Or does that proper etiquette you've mentioned require her to accept all offers?\"\n\n\"No, she can simply say her dance card is full.\"\n\n\"And what would she do if her partner holds her too close?\"\n\nHe pulled her closer to him to demonstrate. Violet was startled to feel her breasts brushing against his chest. Giving him an admonishing look, she said, \"A lady would tap his shoulder with her fan and remind him of proper decorum.\" And she pretended to tap his shoulder, but he didn't loosen his hold on her so she could step back.\n\nInstead he lowered his head and said close to ear, \"And what does a lady do if her partner does this?\"\n\nA little shiver ran down her spine, and all of a sudden he was kissing her. She'd expected it when he'd brought her outside, remembering all those warnings about gentlemen who might suggest a stroll on the terrace just so they could steal a kiss. But she hadn't expected to want this particular kiss so much\u2014yet she did, and responded with all the pent-up passion she felt for him. He'd lifted her off her feet with one arm tight around her waist and was still dancing with her held so close to him, not as quickly, yet they still seemed to be twirling. But one kiss turned into another more intense one that stirred her even more deeply. She'd already let go of his hand and put her arms around his neck, while his free hand now moved slowly up and down her back, exciting her further, until his fingers moved to the back of her neck to caress her there.\n\nOne moment she was sighing in pleasure, and then she was gasping as Morgan tripped over the flower fence, losing his footing, but quickly turning their bodies to cushion her fall as they tumbled into the bed of flowers. Breathless, Violet found herself lying on top of him, powerfully aware of the hard, masculine body beneath her. Impulsively, she turned her head to kiss him\u2014but she couldn't be that bold! So she immediately rolled off him, but he rolled as well toward her; thinking he meant to put himself on top of her, she rolled again, and landed smack in the stream.\n\nShe came up sputtering, wiping water from her eyes and face, and burst out laughing. She couldn't stop, not when he started laughing, too. She didn't think she'd ever laughed so hard in her life.\n\nWhen he grabbed her hand to pull her out of the water, she grinned. \"By the by, the lady would have slapped his face.\"\n\n\"Is mine in danger?\"\n\nThat just started another round of laughter." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Violet awoke early the next morning and was surprised to see that she was alone in the cabin. Dressing quickly, she opened the door to let in more light and was even more surprised to find Morgan sleeping on the porch again. It couldn't be comfortable, and she had her screen now. But after last night, maybe it was a good thing he had. Her charm offensive had certainly backfired. He'd ended up charming her!\n\nWhat a fun night it had turned out to be, one she wasn't likely to ever forget. Surely it had left him in a good mood, too. \"Did you intend to sleep this late?\" she asked loud enough to wake him.\n\nHe stirred, mumbled something as he stood, then walked into the cabin to start breakfast. She didn't consider that mumble a setback, merely an expression of annoyance that he wasn't the first one awake as usual. She expected him to tell her any moment now that he accepted her partnership proposal. He did realize she was still waiting for his answer, didn't he?\n\nBut he didn't get around to mentioning it while they ate. When he started to walk out the door still without addressing the issue, she was done waiting. \"What's your answer to the proposals I presented the other day?\"\n\nHe turned, leaned casually against the doorframe, and asked, \"Do you still want to borrow three thousand, or do you want to subtract the eighteen hundred from it and just borrow twelve hundred instead?\"\n\nHe was going to give her the loan! She was thrilled and couldn't help beaming at him before she answered, \"My brothers have other creditors they need to pay. Daniel was even detained by one of them at the train station the day we were to come here together. I don't want to take any chances that they might come up short and not be able to pay off the house loan completely. I'd still like them to get another three thousand.\"\n\n\"Then I'll send it.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"Soon.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"No buts. I said I'll see they get it. You know, you're pretty good at saying please when you want something, but you're lousy at saying thank you when you get it. You might want to think on that before you yell at me anymore.\"\n\nHe left. She ran to the door to yell, \"Thank you!\"\n\n\"You ain't welcome, Mitchell,\" he growled back.\n\nShe sighed and watched him remove his shirt before he disappeared into his mine. What the deuce had just happened? He'd made her sound so ungrateful, which wasn't the case at all. And then she realized, he still hadn't answered her completely. He was lending her and her brothers the money, which implied he agreed to let her brothers come here and work to pay him back. But he hadn't said anything about forming a real partnership with them. She couldn't press him about it now when she'd somehow annoyed him again.\n\nShe'd meant to borrow Carla for the day, but decided against it. She couldn't just take the mule without asking, and she'd already asked Morgan for too much. She would just walk faster today. She was determined to try to reach the next gorge on the south slope, if it was actually reachable in a day.\n\nA few hundred yards beyond the now empty wolf hole, the slopes got a little too steep for her to traverse easily. But she hadn't searched down this side section yet because, like the path up to Morgan's camp, it was too thick with trees, and she'd gotten frustrated with her last attempt to search around the pines. But it occurred to her that her father might have considered the forest an ideal hiding place because the pine needles would have completely covered any hole he'd dug, and even he wouldn't be able to find his own money again without marking the tree near it.\n\nExcited by her new idea, but daunted by how big this forest was, she gathered up a bunch of loose rocks and made a little pile of them before she started straight down the slope, picking up pinecones on the ground and making another mound about two hundred feet down, then another two hundred feet north, marking a square section to search. But by the time she made one sweep back to the top edge of the forest, her legs were getting tired from the climb, so she scratched the idea of making sections and decided to just search the two-hundred-foot-wide area all the way down to the bottom of the forest, then rest before returning to camp for lunch.\n\nAnother good idea\u2014or it would have been if she hadn't seen the man leading a horse through the trees toward her. He wore a wide-brimmed hat, a gun belt, and a vest over a blue shirt. Was he a cowboy? He didn't look like a miner. She ducked behind the nearest pine tree before he could see her, but the trunk wasn't as wide as her skirt!\n\n\"Lost, missy?\" he called out.\n\nWhat had Morgan said? To shoot any strangers she encountered? But this was just one man, not the two claim jumpers he'd mentioned, and this man might be a lawman out looking for those two thieves. In any case, she couldn't very well shoot anyone without reason. Morgan should have known she wouldn't. Still, she raised her Colt to eye level and supported her arm before she stepped around the tree to point the weapon at the stranger.\n\nNow he was maybe only thirty feet away, close enough for her to note his curly brown shoulder-length hair, dark eyes, and mustache. He continued to approach her.\n\n\"Stay back,\" she warned nervously. \"I have a couple partners nearby.\"\n\nHe reined in. \"Careful with that gun. Don't want to shoot yourself.\"\n\n\"If I do, the shot will be heard. If I shoot you instead, the shot will be heard. Either way, help will be here in minutes, so why don't you just head back down the hill, then no one will get hurt.\"\n\n\"You sure do talk funny, but you're not being very friendly. I could use some grub if you have a camp close by.\"\n\nShe didn't lower the Colt, kept it aimed directly at his chest. If she screamed, would Morgan hear it, as far south as she'd gone? But the man might draw his own gun if she did. Oh, God, a shooting match here in the forest? She started to tremble with fear and gripped her arm and the Colt tighter so he wouldn't notice.\n\n\"I can't take you there,\" she said.\n\n\" 'Cause you're alone up here?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not, but my partner doesn't like visitors. He tends to shoot them on sight.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I reckon I know who that is. So he's still here after all this time?\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The miner. Not surprised he got himself a pretty little gal up here to keep him company\u2014and it took you long enough.\"\n\nShe didn't understand what he meant until a gloved hand clamped down over her mouth and the Colt was pulled out of her hand. There were two of them. And now it was too late to scream." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\"Haven't seen you looking like that in a while,\" Texas remarked, and dug an extra mug out of his supplies when Morgan came up the cliff slope to his camp. \"You trying to make me homesick?\"\n\nMorgan fingered his freshly shaven cheeks before he sat on one of the crates Texas used for chairs. \"Figured it was time to get back in the habit, since I don't reckon we'll be here much longer.\"\n\n\"What'd she say about the new you?\"\n\n\"What's she got to do with it?\"\n\nTexas grinned and teased, \"After last night, I'd say everything. But she won't recognize you, that's for sure. You might even get a scream or two. So make sure she ain't holding that gun you gave her first.\"\n\nMorgan snorted and poured himself some coffee. He wasn't sure why he'd waited until Violet left camp this morning to shave off his beard and most of his mustache. He wasn't sure why he'd gotten the urge to anyway. Just because she'd called him shaggy the other day at the river? It was a bad idea he was already regretting, since he anticipated her teasing him about it, thinking he'd done it just for her.\n\nHe tried to put that annoying female from his mind and drank from his mug, staring at the panoramic view of the mountain range stretching to the south. \"If it wouldn't have been a pain in the ass making stairs long enough to get to the bottom of the cliff, I might've put my cabin up here. Damn fine view you got.\"\n\n\"As if you're ever out of the mine long enough to notice a view.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, that's probably why I didn't. Got something that needs to be done, and I'd appreciate you doing it today. That loan Charley was so worried about, it's been burning money in bank interest instead of getting paid off. Violet talked me into a loan so she and her brothers can get rid of it.\"\n\n\"Was the bargain too good to resist?\"\n\nMorgan chuckled. \"Ladies don't make bargains like that. She tossed out logic instead, reminding me that I'd been helping Charley to that same end. It was a good point. And she promised that her brothers would show up to work it off.\"\n\n\"Without asking them first?\"\n\n\"I have a feeling that won't be an issue. You didn't notice how bossy she is?\"\n\n\"Can't say that I did.\"\n\n\"Well, she doesn't ask, she demands. Probably a habit she developed when she mothered her brothers.\"\n\nWhich prompted the question, \"Are those boys old enough to mine?\"\n\n\"Older than her.\"\n\nTexas laughed. \"Yeah, that's bossy.\"\n\nMorgan handed his friend a piece of paper. Texas glanced at it and said, \"That's mighty generous of you.\"\n\n\"That's how much I liked Charley.\"\n\nHe wasn't even sure how that had happened, and so quickly. It wasn't because Charley reminded him of his own father. They were nothing alike. But he'd admired his gumption, his determination to do right by his sons at any cost; and the fact was, the man was a sweet-talker. In that, he'd reminded him of his brother Hunter who could sweet-talk his way around anything. And Morgan had simply enjoyed Charley's company.\n\n\"The instructions and both addresses are on that,\" Morgan said. \"Send the first telegram to the Mellings, the silversmith brothers I deal with. Have them send three thousand from my account to the Mitchells, and sign that one from me. Send the second telegram to Violet's brothers, telling them to expect to receive the money to pay off their loan from the Melling brothers, and to come to Butte as soon as it's done. Sign that one from her.\"\n\n\"You want me to take the little lady back to town to wait for her brothers?\"\n\n\"No, I'll take her to Butte next week. It'll take at least that long for them to get here. But once I show them how to use the smelter, it'll be time for me to pull up stakes and go home.\"\n\n\"Well, hot damn,\" Texas said with a big grin.\n\n\"Yeah, it's time.\" Morgan grinned back.\n\nTexas got up to start saddling his horse. \"I'll be spending the night in Butte after I finish your business, so don't expect me back until tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I figured,\" Morgan said, and headed back down the hill to get lunch started.\n\nThere was no sign of Violet yet, but she'd been consistent about returning around noon to eat before she headed out again. He hoped she did find that money Charley had hidden before it was time to leave. It would make her happy, something she could remember when he explained why he wouldn't partner with her brothers permanently. He wasn't looking forward to that conversation.\n\nLike Charley, Violet's brothers were eastern-bred gentlemen who wouldn't want to dig in a mine for very long. They would grow tired and dissatisfied and would want to bring men up here to do the work for them. But as long as Shawn Sullivan was around, they wouldn't be safe doing that. However, if he allowed them to mine for a limited time, perhaps two months, they would make enough money to last them a lifetime. They could leave as rich men before they got fed up\u2014or, worse, got careless and led Sullivan here.\n\nMorgan finished making lunch and sat on the porch waiting. To go by the sun inching onto the boards above the steps, Violet was about an hour late. Bo lay in the open doorway, as if he, too, were waiting for Violet.\n\n\"This is going to look silly if she opens the gate just as I saddle Caesar to go look for her,\" he said as he stepped over Bo to get his rifle. Coming back to lean against the doorframe, he glanced down at the dog. \"She'll think I got worried. Can't have that. Ten more minutes? Wag your tail if you agree. Wag your tail if you disagree\u2014yeah, that's what I thought. You're too accommodating, Bo.\"\n\n\"Hello in the cabin!\"\n\nMorgan straightened immediately and raised his rifle, his eyes scanning the area until he spotted the hat close to the ground on the other side of the fence by the gate. Since he'd been watching for Violet in that direction, whoever was out there had to have slithered up from the stream. Without a horse. No doubt it was tied farther down the slope out of sight.\n\n\"How many are you?\" he called out.\n\n\"Just me, and I've come to talk.\"\n\n\"We've met, haven't we?\"\n\n\"You could say that.\"\n\n\"Figured you two had left the area.\"\n\n\"We did, but we keep checking on you from time to time. And today was our lucky day. We've got your woman. Give us your mine and we'll give her back.\"\n\nHis answer was to shoot the hat. It flew backward, but there was no head under it. He heard a laugh, likely from behind one of the trees down there.\n\nRifle pointed between the two closest trees, Morgan said, \"She owns the other mine here and you already got her. One of you marry her and you're all set.\" If they were stupid enough to go looking for a preacher, he could easily ambush them on the way.\n\n\"She is a fine-looking filly. My brother might go for that.\"\n\n\"But he's not here to say. Course, if you intend to mine next to me, I'll shoot your ass.\"\n\nHe fired off two rounds, hitting each of the two closest trees. That caused a nervous yell. \"You can't kill me, dumb-ass! She's tucked away where you won't find her. And if I don't come back, she dies.\"\n\n\"You should have moved on last year. Now you've pissed me off.\" Morgan fired off two more rounds.\n\n\"Cut it out! He really will kill her if I don't come back with a deal.\"\n\nMorgan took a deep breath to calm his fury. That didn't work. He tried it three more times, but this kind of rage wasn't going away. But it wasn't in his voice when he said, \"All right, I'm lowering my rifle. If you want to come to terms, show yourself.\"\n\nThe blond man who stepped out from behind the tree was hefty. Good, a nice target. And a gun was in his hand, but he'd spread both arms wide, so the weapon wasn't pointed toward the house.\n\n\"I'm planning to leave this camp pretty soon,\" Morgan said. \"I'll give you two thousand for the woman. It would take you a year to make that much mining without a smelter.\" That wasn't even close to true, but he had a feeling these two wannabe miners didn't have a clue.\n\n\"You got one of those.\"\n\nMorgan nodded. \"I do, but the smelter goes with me, and I'm blowing up these mines when I leave. You should accept my offer. It's going down in value as we speak. One thousand for the woman. In fact\"\u2014he raised his rifle and fired\u2014\"I'll fetch her myself.\"\n\nThe man had fallen to the ground with a bullet in his leg. He was still in view and easy enough to finish off, but Morgan didn't want him dead, so he let the claim jumper crawl back behind a tree for cover while he stepped into the cabin.\n\nHe waited for about five minutes before he yelled out the door, \"You know it would be easy to finish you off. I advise you to toss your gun over the fence before I finish my lunch and agree to take me to the woman. Think carefully. You and your brother have been a pain in my ass for too long.\"\n\n\"You don't really want her back, do you?\" was growled angrily.\n\nHe wanted her back too much, but he answered, \"I'd rather kill you and your brother, so the only way you get to live is to take me to her. Ten minutes to make up your mind.\"\n\nHe didn't expect the man to surrender. He just wanted to give him enough time to get to his horse and flee. Then he could follow the blood trail straight to Violet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Violet had just learned from firsthand experience that hindsight was useless. She realized now that she should have fired her weapon immediately when she'd had the chance, even if she'd only taken a warning shot. Morgan would have heard the shot and come to investigate, and her heart wouldn't be pounding with fear.\n\nBut Morgan would know by now that she had been captured. The man who had gagged her had ridden off to tell him so, while the other one had ridden with her down the hill, then south along the base of the mountain range until he finally came to a temporary-looking camp. They seemed to think they could get Morgan to abandon his mine in exchange for her return. They were in for a nasty surprise.\n\nShe really wished she didn't know who these men were, but she did, the claim jumpers who had tried to kill Morgan last year, the two he'd looked for but never found. She'd gleaned as much from what the men had said to each other.\n\nAs soon as she was set on the ground and her gag was removed, the curly-haired man asked, \"What's your name, honey?\" When she didn't answer, he grinned and pointed at his hair, volunteering, \"Family calls me Curly, enemies aren't so nice. Real name is well-known. Tell me yours and I'll tell you mine.\"\n\nShe ignored his humor, but wanted to talk to him so he wouldn't think she was afraid of him. \"You don't actually live on this range, do you?\" Her mouth was so dry after being gagged that her voice sounded scratchy.\n\n\"Live outdoors? Why would we? We've been living in comfort in Helena for a few years now. Roughing it out here is for loners like your friend, though even he finally built himself a house. Did he do that for you?\"\n\nIt didn't sound as if they knew about Texas. And they certainly didn't know much about Morgan.\n\n\"No, he didn't,\" she said. \"He doesn't like me, considers me a thorn, which you've managed to rid him of. I'm sure it wasn't your intention, but you've done him a favor.\"\n\nHis dark brown eyes moved over her in an insulting manner before he laughed. \"Then we win either way, 'cause I sure as hell wouldn't mind keeping you for a spell. Would you like that?\"\n\nHer stomach turned in repugnance. She glanced away so he wouldn't see the fear in her eyes. Her feet weren't tied, but her wrists were still bound in front of her; however, she didn't think about running. That would just give him an excuse to put his hands on her. She hoped Curly wouldn't try to assault her, at least not before they had Morgan's answer. Would Morgan give up his mine for her? Stupid question\u2014of course he wouldn't. But she imagined he would get angry when he heard the claim jumpers' demand. That would be like poking a bear...\n\nHe handed her a canteen. \"Sit. Striking a bargain with the miner might take a while.\"\n\nAs thirsty as she was, it was frustrating that he'd given her a canteen without removing the cap for her, and he wasn't offering to untie her so she could open it herself. Did he want her to ask him for help? Or was he making it clear she was completely at their mercy? He'd already turned his back on her to watch the path below. So she sat, placing the canteen in her lap long enough to get the cap off so she could bring it to her lips with both hands\u2014and loudly spewed the liquid out of her mouth. Whiskey?!\n\nHe heard the spewing. \"Damn, wrong one. That weren't intentional.\"\n\nAs if she would believe that, but he did fetch a different canteen. She smelled its contents this time before she drank, then watched him go to his horse again. He came back with three strips of jerky for her. She wasn't hungry, although she ought to be, as late in the afternoon as it was, but there was a deep queasiness in her belly instead. Fear. She thought she was doing pretty well at hiding it. She wasn't sure if she feared just for herself, or for Morgan, too.\n\nMorgan might shoot before he was even told that they had her. He had a bloody sign on his gate proclaiming that's exactly what he would do. Then he wouldn't be able to find her. But he would look. He was an honorable man who wouldn't stand by and do nothing when he knew a woman was in danger. And he'd shown her in too many ways that he cared about her welfare\u2014also that he was attracted to her. But what if he got hurt in a shoot-out with the claim jumper? It could already have happened. Would shots from the mine be heard this far away? She had to get out of this herself.\n\nShe stared at the horse, which was still saddled. She could escape if she could get on it before the claim jumper yanked her off. She couldn't try it yet. They were both the same distance from it.\n\n\"Do I need to tie your feet, too?\"\n\nShe glanced at him and saw that he'd been watching her calculating her options. She tried distracting him. \"If you live in Helena, why do you come to this mountain?\"\n\n\"Never would've if we didn't see the miner heading up it last year on our way to Billings. It was my brother's idea to make the detour to see what he was up to.\"\n\n\"And steal his mine?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Seemed like a good idea at the time, though it didn't work out too well. He's pretty good with a gun for a miner. But we've checked back a few times to see if he's moved on, since we pass this range no matter which route we take to Wyoming to sneak in and visit our ma. Thought we got lucky last year when we found his camp empty, but it didn't really look deserted, so we hid till night to see if he was only out hunting. When he didn't show, we got enough ore out of there to fill our bags. That was a nice payday and got my brother determined to take over that mine eventually. Since then he's put up a damn steel door. Not so easy now to help ourselves to his silver. But we've been waiting patiently for another chance, and today on our way to Butte, patience surely has paid off.\"\n\n\"Butte?\"\n\n\"Yeah, that town over yonder,\" he said, pointing his thumb behind him.\n\n\"Butte is northeast of here?\"\n\n\"You've never been? It's only a half day's ride from here.\"\n\nGood grief, had Morgan really taken her on such a roundabout route that he'd wasted a full extra day getting her to his camp? Yes, of course he had. At the time, he'd been sure she worked for his enemy.\n\nHow ironic that she had a claim jumper to thank for telling her exactly where they were, on that lovely mountain she'd seen in the distance\u2014and passed right by\u2014the day Morgan took her out of Butte. But considering everything the claim jumper had just said, she asked, \"If you want to mine, why not just make your own?\"\n\n\" 'Cause this one is already dug and beamed, has a smelter, even a house now, and water right there. And we don't mind killing him for it.\"\n\nShe gasped. He chuckled, adding, \"Who's gonna know if we take over his mine?\"\n\n\"I'll know what you've done.\"\n\n\"Not if you're dead, too. Lawmen ain't hunting for us up here, and we aim to keep it that way. Just have to be real careful down in Wyoming when we visit Ma, or we'll end up getting strung up again. My brother didn't like being kicked out of Laramie and shot the ornery deputy doing it. There were a few witnesses. The posse found us pretty quick, four of them. They hanged us out in the middle of nowhere from the only tree around. But our ma heard about what happened and she followed the posse. She got there in time to shoot them all and our ropes. We thought Bert was dead, he weren't breathing. Ma was mighty steamed up about it and started beating the living daylights out of him, and damned if it didn't wake him up.\"\n\n\"So you've never done anything to deserve a hanging?\" she asked. \"Just your brother\u2014and your mother?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Didn't say that. We had to eat and put some money in our pockets before we found a new place to live. But I won't kill you if you can be accommodating. Can you?\"\n\n\"I thought you were negotiating with the miner!\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"If that works, sure, but you said it wouldn't work. Or were you lying about him not liking you? You were, huh? Course you were, pretty thing like you.\"\n\nShe looked away, closed her eyes. She was going to have to beat him to that horse. But she heard another horse approaching. She glanced around to see his brother riding up to them and dismounting\u2014or attempting to. He fell halfway to the ground, groaning. Blood was pouring down one of his legs.\n\n\"You're bleeding, Bert?\" Curly said. It sounded like an accusation.\n\n\"He shot me. This is the second damn time he's shot me! I want him dead.\"\n\n\"Idiot, you've left a blood trail that will lead him here.\"\n\n\"He won't find it.\" Bert smirked. \"I rode down the stream until I was out of the mountains, then galloped on the flats straight here.\"\n\n\"That skinny-ass stream that flows by his camp? Your horse would've still left some tracks around it.\"\n\n\"Good, then we wait till he shows and shoot him, and her, too.\"\n\n\"I'm not shooting her,\" Curly said, giving Violet another glance. \"She's too pretty.\"\n\n\"Can't leave witnesses. Bad enough we can never live in Wyoming again with all those wanted posters hung in every town down there. Up in this territory, they don't know us. We're keeping it that way.\"\n\nThere was no hiding her trembling now when she saw Curly grudgingly nod his agreement. And Bert managed to get to his feet to draw the gun from his holster, and then her Colt, which he'd stuck in his pants. But it was obvious that he'd been weakened by blood loss. The man hadn't even stopped long enough to tie off the wound to try to lessen the flow. He seemed somewhat dazed from it, wobbling on his feet. She might be able to leap at him, knock him over and grab one of those Colts. But she'd never done anything so daring or aggressive in her life! It certainly wouldn't be easy with her wrists tied together. She'd have to get the gun even as he fell, before she got shot for the effort. So grab, roll, shoot. What other choice\u2014?\n\nThe bullet went right through Bert's neck, blood splattering in every direction. Both of his Colts fell to the ground as he tried to cover one side of his neck. He fell over, face-first.\n\nWith blood on her face, her hands, her dress, and a dead man lying only feet away, Violet was screaming hysterically. She couldn't stop, not even when the brother who wasn't dead yanked her up and held her in front of him, his gun pressed to her cheek. He slowly turned in a circle as if he couldn't find the shooter, had no idea from which direction the shot that had killed his brother had come.\n\n\"Show yourself or she dies!\" he yelled. And then he hissed by her ear, \"Shut the hell up. He can't hear me with you yelling. Shut up or I'll smash your head!\"\n\nShe vaguely heard another shot as she fainted." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "She was being carried, she guessed by Morgan. But when Violet opened her eyes she screamed and struggled, not recognizing whoever was taking her away.\n\n\"Wasn't exactly expecting this reaction to my shaving. It's still me, Morgan, you know.\"\n\nIt was his voice, even if it wasn't his face. She stopped struggling to gaze up at him, trying to process the change in his appearance. It truly wasn't easy.\n\n\"You look so different,\" she said as she clung to him. \"But you rescued me. I knew you would. I was so scared!\"\n\nHe held her tighter. \"You're safe now.\"\n\n\"Are they both...?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Faked or not, your fainting got you out of the way so I could take a clean shot at the last one. Smart thinking if you planned it, good timing otherwise.\"\n\nShe wasn't sure how to fake a faint, but now there were two fewer killers on the loose, so she should be glad. She should thank him for rescuing her, too. She would have died if he hadn't.\n\nHe set her on the ground when he reached Caesar and wrapped a blanket around her, probably because she was still trembling. But when he tied the two horses he'd been leading behind them to Caesar's saddle, she asked haltingly, \"What are you doing? Are you taking the bodies with us, too?\"\n\n\"No. Texas will retrieve them when he returns from Butte. They were both wanted in Wyoming, dead or alive, so there's a reward.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\nHe picked her up and set her on Caesar before mounting behind her. \"Because they were dumb enough to carry their own wanted posters on them.\"\n\nSo Texas hadn't been in the camp to help him? Morgan had come after her alone? But no one else had been needed. Just two shots, and he'd killed both men. He was more dangerous than she'd realized, like that gunslinger she'd seen in Butte. Was everyone in the West like that? Ready to kill if necessary\u2014or, like those two outlaws, ready to kill for any reason? She couldn't stay in this barbaric land any longer. She had to leave, with or without a partnership agreement, and return to the civilized world, her world, where men didn't fall dead at her feet...\n\nHe'd drawn her across his lap before starting off, his arms tight around her. \"You're still trembling,\" he said after a few minutes. \"Did they hurt you?\"\n\n\"No, they only gagged me and tied my hands, but they would have...\" She couldn't bring herself to say it.\n\n\"Don't think about it. You're safe now. No one's going to hurt you and we'll be home soon.\"\n\nHome? She could never call this wild, violent land home. But she felt safe in Morgan's arms.\n\nIt was nearing dusk when they rode up the hill to his camp.He carried her inside the cabin and set her on her bed. \"Will we be safe here? What if other outlaws show up? Texas isn't even here to help guard.\"\n\n\"You know you're safe with me, Violet. And Bo doesn't go far from you. And you have this.\" He set the Colt that he'd retrieved from the claim jumper on the top crate by her bed. \"Don't hesitate to fire it, if only to summon me.\"\n\nShe smiled weakly. She already knew she should have done that today. Next time\u2014God, there couldn't be a next time. She wasn't stepping foot out of this camp again unless the bear was with her.\n\nHe knelt to remove her boots, then left. She didn't move, simply stared at the floor by her bare feet. Even after he came back in and began washing the blood from her face and hands with cold water, she still just stared at the floor, letting him remove the signs of what had happened. But what would wash away the fear and terror that were lurking in her mind?\n\nHe lit a few lanterns and started the fire before he said, \"You need to eat.\"\n\nShe didn't answer. After a moment he stood in front of her again and added, \"Maybe you need this instead.\"\n\nShe saw the glass in his hand filled with golden liquid, the stuff he drank, whiskey or rum. \"No thank you.\"\n\nHe tipped up her chin and looked at her closely. \"How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"I can't stop thinking about the dead men and all that blood.\"\n\n\"You were brave today. I doubt many London debutantes would be able to help take down two American outlaws the way you did.\"\n\nHe was trying to make her laugh, but his grin, so easily seen now, just pointed out that this wasn't her Morgan. His voice, his eyes were familiar to her, but the rest of his face wasn't. It was too bloody handsome. Why'd he have to shave? The bear had been somewhat safe.\n\n\"They were bad men, Violet,\" he added. \"Now they won't be able to hurt people anymore.\"\n\nBut she'd watched them die! She began to shake uncontrollably. And cry, great wrenching sobs. She couldn't stop either reaction. She'd been so sure she was going to die today.\n\n\"Sometimes a good cry helps, according to my ma. I'm sorry you went through this, but I promise it will get better.\"\n\nShe covered her face with her hands and felt him sit on the bed next to her and draw her onto his lap to try to soothe her. She remembered that her aunt had said something similar about tears being beneficial, so she didn't try to stop crying, but she did try to stop thinking. The tears finally wound down to sniffles. She didn't feel better yet, but maybe she could more easily lock those memories away now. And thinking about the new Morgan helped. He was still safe, still protecting her. Even if he was too handsome, she sensed that deep down he was still the bear.\n\n\"You want some of that whiskey now?\"\n\n\"No, I think your mother was right about a good cry,\" she said with a smile to assure him the flood was over.\n\nHe wiped her cheeks gently. \"We should probably get rid of your dirty clothes and brush your hair.\"\n\nShe gave him a curious look. \"You do like doing that, don't you?\"\n\nHe grinned, abashed. \"Can't help it, with beautiful hair like yours.\"\n\nIt was nice of him to just call her clothes dirty instead of mentioning the blood splatters, and she did want to get rid of them, so she helped him get them off her, saying, \"They need to be burned.\"\n\n\"We don't need a room full of smoke. I'll deal with them later.\"\n\nHe found her brush and had her sit between his legs on the edge of the bed. He unwound her braid first, then began the long, gentle strokes that felt so good. \"Picture my flower garden,\" he said softly. \"If I were to stay here longer, what would you recommend adding to it? I was thinking violets, but would roses be better? Are they popular in England?\"\n\nShe laughed, aware that he was trying to make her feel better; it was certainly working. \"Everyone knows English roses are the most beautiful.\"\n\nShe turned halfway to face him, arrested again by his handsome face, but it was suddenly very important that he know how grateful she was. \"Thank you for rescuing me and taking care of me.\"\n\nShe leaned over to kiss his newly smooth cheek, but didn't lean all the way back, still staring at him. He'd done so much for her today, but she suddenly wanted more, and before she could stop them, the words came out: \"Kiss me.\"\n\nHe didn't hesitate, put his mouth to hers gently at first, and then more passionately. Had he already been thinking about this and only resisted for her sake? It only took moments for her to wrap an arm about his neck and kiss him back with equal passion.\n\nA different realm, this, sensual, feelings so new they were yet to be explored, so far removed from what she was escaping. She delved deeper, quickened at the touch of his palm to her cheek, her neck, her breast. When a hand moved ever so slowly up her leg, it was hot skin she felt, making her realize she was only wearing her underclothes now. But propriety didn't intrude, not even a little. There was just him and what he was doing.\n\nHe laid her back on the bed and joined her, half lying on top of her because there was so little room\u2014or because he wanted to. She liked the position, liked feeling so much of him against her. His body, so long, so strong, was her shield from harm. He was her guardian knight, but tonight he was much more than that. He'd saved her life today, rescued her from danger and darkness. And now he was showing her the sweeter side of life\u2014the tenderness! The exquisite pleasures she'd never imagined.\n\nShe wanted to say thank you, but even more she didn't want to distract him, not when he was still kissing her, still moving one hand up and down her body in such an exciting way. He raised one of her legs over his shoulder, then bent down to kiss her breast, but he also slid an arm beneath her between her legs to lift her even closer to him. It felt unusual and yet thrilling, the heat of his mouth over her nipple, that hard arm rubbing between her legs, igniting little fires that coursed through her. Little moans escaped from her in gasps as he continued to kiss her breasts.\n\nShe almost cried out when his warmth left her as he rose to his knees to take off his shirt, but she was arrested by his new appearance, by how handsome he was. Good God, he was tantalizing, and all those muscles, flexed as he tossed the shirt away, flexed again as he removed his gun belt and then started on his belt. Her aunt had been so right when they'd had \"that talk\" and Elizabeth had warned, \"Some men don't want to be naked in bed, but some do. Hope for one that does.\" She hadn't really understood, but now she did\u2014because this man was a feast for the eyes, Adonis in the flesh. Just looking at him set her pulse racing!\n\nHe'd already untied her chemise, those silk ties, a mere decoration, never used because it was easier to slip the garment over her head. It lay open now, both of her breasts exposed, so she didn't even think of protesting when he removed her drawers, too, longer to watch him, longer to be fascinated by his own undressing.\n\nShe was fully embracing the unknown, but she still felt a moment of apprehension when he discarded his pants and she saw the size of his manhood. It might have been better to cut her curiosity short. She closed her eyes. She didn't have to know everything. And yet the moment he slid up her body, his skin against hers, and kissed her deeply again, the thought was gone and she opened her eyes. She did want to know everything, to feel everything sensual he could share with her.\n\nHer arms were around him and she moved a hand into his hair, running her fingers through it. The black mane was still long, but not so shaggy now, even soft to the touch. But his beardless face still fascinated her, and she cupped one of his cheeks to feel stubble already returning. She smiled. She probably wouldn't shave either if the results barely lasted a day.\n\nHe put his hand over hers, brought her fingertips to his lips and kissed the pulse under her wrist. He was staring at her now, those lovely powder-blue eyes, warm with passion and... concern?\n\n\"You've been through a lot today,\" he said. \"I didn't mean for things to progress this quickly, but I want you so much. I don't want to stop, but I will if you want to wait until you feel better?\"\n\nStop? \"No, I want this, want you. Please don't stop.\"\n\nHe groaned and kissed her deeply. Then she felt it, gone in a blink, her maidenhood. And him inside her, foreign but still, waiting. She'd closed her eyes with a gasp but opened them now to see his smile, then felt that amazing length sliding deeper. Divine. There was more to explore, more to feel as he moved steadily inside her, then faster, bringing forth multiple gasps from her. But she sensed something else approaching that widened her eyes, gathering momentum, elusive until she was overwhelmed by a sudden burst of pure, wondrous pleasure.\n\nShe cried out with it, held on to Morgan's shoulders tightly, utterly incredulous that something like that even existed. And it left all sorts of unexpected feelings behind, tenderness, caring, gratitude, and an urge to hug him, to simply hug him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Violet resisted the urge to continue hugging the man on top of her, feeling a little shy now for having behaved so passionately with him. Morgan had felt the same amazing thing she did, had been quite loud about it, but he was still now. Nonetheless, she couldn't resist lightly caressing his shoulder and muscular arm. His face was pressed between her shoulder and her neck, his breathing still labored, his arms keeping most of his weight from her chest. She wondered if they would sleep like that. She didn't think she'd mind. But the bed was so narrow, would it even be possible for two people to sleep on it with any degree of comfort? And once he slept, his arms would relax and she'd end up crushed and have to wake him, and they might end up making love again...\n\nShe frowned. They probably shouldn't do that again, no matter how nice\u2014no, how amazing it had been. Being this close to Morgan, feeling surrounded by him, made her feel so safe, so comfortable. But she was hungry, very hungry, noisily so.\n\nHe chuckled when he heard her belly growl. \"That stew I made for lunch should be hot by now.\"\n\nHe kissed her neck, then her cheek, before he lifted himself off her and headed to the fireplace. Naked. A blush crept up her cheeks.\n\nShe got up quickly, grabbed her valise, and rushed outside to the porch to dress, yelling back, \"Do put something on!\"\n\n\"I've only been sleeping with my pants on for your sake, Violet. It's not how I usually sleep.\"\n\n\"Your thoughtfulness was and is appreciated!\"\n\nShe hoped he got the point. Just because she'd lain naked with him didn't mean she would eat or sleep all night that way.\n\nDressed, she tied her hair back, too hungry to braid it, and hurried back inside. He'd put his pants back on, even his shirt, though he hadn't buttoned it. That's not what caused her to blush again. She was feeling incredibly embarrassed over what they'd done in that very room.\n\nHe put the large bowl of stew in front of her, remarking, \"Why'd you tie your hair back?\"\n\n\"To keep it out of the way.\"\n\n\"It's never in my way. I like it better down.\" She started to remind him about tangles, but he said, \"We can argue about it later.\" And he tossed her half of the bread loaf with a grin.\n\nHe sat down across from her. She wanted to look away but really couldn't. He was too bloody handsome now, and maybe only a few years older than her.\n\n\"How old are you?\" she asked.\n\n\"Twenty-three, second son of four. Hunter's a year older and the charmer in the family. Our brother John is twenty-one and hot-tempered. The runt, Cole, is just nineteen and can't make up his mind who he wants to take after.\"\n\n\"How would you describe yourself?\"\n\n\"You know me. What would you say?\"\n\n\"You're still a bear even if you don't look like one now,\" she replied. \"But I suppose if I had to describe you in one word, I would say determined.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Good choice.\"\n\nHe shouldn't do that. His smile almost transfixed her, making him even more handsome. Thank God she hadn't been able to see that before. But how was she going to deal with it now when it was hard to tear her eyes away from him?\n\nShe stared at her stew, determined not to look up again. \"What was it like, growing up with three brothers?\"\n\n\"Fun\u2014usually. The old feud we have with the Warrens, neighboring ranchers, led to all sorts of mischief, since they have three boys near our ages.\"\n\n\"What sort of feud? The killing kind?\"\n\nHe snorted. \"No\u2014least, not in our day, though it might've led to that if a truce hadn't been arranged years ago by Mrs. Warren with the offer of a marriage to her only daughter, who was still a baby at the time. The peacekeeping wedding is to happen sometime this summer. It could be over with, for all I know\u2014or called off, if Hunter backed out of it. He sure wasn't happy about our parents volunteering him just because he's the oldest, without his having any say about it, and to a filly he's never met. The Warren daughter was raised back east for some reason. Never did find out why. But if that wedding doesn't happen, then there might end up being bloodshed.\"\n\n\"So you don't really know what you'll be going home to, when you get around to it?\"\n\n\"I'll likely know. My ma writes me here and keeps me apprised of what's happening at home. There are probably a few letters waiting for me in town that I didn't pick up this last trip.\"\n\nBecause of her. Because he got the wrong idea about her, got mad about it, and arbitrarily abducted her instead of simply knocking on her door at the hotel and asking her why she was looking for him. But she wasn't going to open that can of worms, as he would say.\n\nSo she only said primly, \"Feuds are archaic. No one in the civilized world has them anymore.\"\n\nHe laughed at the remark. \"Want to bet? They might not label them feuds where you come from, but there will always be neighbors who can't get along, grudges that escalate, and the more common revenge motives that can affect whole families. Emotions that start disputes like that can arise anywhere, in any country. In your civilized world, it might even be labeled war.\"\n\nShe blushed slightly, forced to allow, \"I cede to your reasoning.\"\n\n\"Well, that's a surprise.\"\n\nShe made a face and stood up to go outside. She wasn't going to embarrass herself by saying why. He followed her out, but when she glanced back she saw him heading to the pasture to check on the horses. Now that there were two extra ones, she supposed she could offer to help him. After all, she did know how to saddle and unsaddle a horse; she'd just never had a reason to tell him that. Would he still lock Caesar in his mine now that the claim jumpers were no longer a threat? Probably.\n\nDrowsy after that filling meal, she was extra careful with her steps on the way back to the cabin, now that it was mostly dark. The moon wasn't up yet, but she could see well enough with the streaks of the sunset in the sky. She wanted a bath, a real one, craved it, but her mind balked at cold stream water tonight, and the thought of going to bed with wet hair was just as abhorrent, so a bath would have to wait until morning.\n\nReturning to the cabin, she found Morgan putting the dinner bowls away, his back to her. And it was close enough to the time they usually went to sleep, so she said, \"Good night.\"\n\nHe turned. She was immediately arrested again by the new him, the too-handsome version. She ended up standing there like a bedazzled loon, which allowed him to reach her and put his arms around her before she even thought about retreating out of his way.\n\nThe hug was gentle, the kiss somewhat brief, before he said with a smile, \"Sweet dreams, Thorny Violet.\"\n\nBut he didn't let go of her, and she felt the urge to hug him back. She resisted, turned away, although she no longer felt the least bit tired. And suddenly she stopped resisting. She turned back, put her arms around his neck, and whispered, \"Morgan...\" Then led him to her bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Violet was alone in her bed when she awoke\u2014and naked. The skin on her face felt a little chafed. She recalled Morgan kissing her and her kissing him during the night. But in the cold light of morning, she remembered everything else that had happened last night, and was mortified by what she'd done.\n\nAt least he'd hooked up her screen when he left her bed. To save her embarrassment? Nothing could. But she quickly reached for the clothes that had been laid over the crates at the foot of her bed and dressed, hoping he wasn't still in the cabin.\n\nHe was. Stepping out from behind the screen, she saw him fully dressed and sitting at the table drinking coffee. She paused to ask, \"We slept together all night?\" Then she blushed furiously again.\n\nMorgan raised a brow. \"The sleeping part is all you remember?\"\n\n\"We shan't talk about it,\" she said as she sat down at the table.\n\n\"If you say so.\"\n\n\"I do. Nor shall it happen again.\"\n\n\"I thought we weren't going to talk about it.\"\n\n\"I simply don't want to raise expectations.\"\n\n\"Consider them not raised.\" But then he said, \"You know, you don't have to be beyond-the-pale polite with me\u2014did I use that phrase right?\"\n\n\"Not really, but I caught the drift. However, I will always be polite, no matter whom I'm talking to.\"\n\n\"Always?\" He grinned.\n\nGood Lord, was he constantly going to make allusions to what they'd done last night? He'd saved her twice yesterday, first from harm, then from her horrific memories and fear. And the two outlaws had deserved to die, had killed people for no reason and without remorse. By getting rid of those two men, Morgan had likely saved countless other lives they would have taken. Yes, she could deal with that harrowing adventure pragmatically now. But she wasn't sure she could deal with resisting Morgan.\n\n\"How are you feeling this morning? You were pretty shaken up yesterday.\"\n\n\"I'm better,\" she assured him.\n\n\"You still ought to rest up today, maybe give up on searching for your father's money, or wait until Texas returns. He doesn't sleep the entire day and could go with you some.\"\n\n\"I'll be fine, and I'll have my gun.\"\n\n\"That gun didn't help you much yesterday,\" he said pointedly.\n\n\"I erred in not using it, but I learn from my mistakes. I'll fire off a shot immediately if I see anything that walks on two feet.\"\n\n\"Well, help yourself to lunch today, since I might be late. There's a lot I want to accomplish in the mine before we return to Butte next week to meet up with your brothers.\"\n\n\"My brothers?\"\n\n\"I asked Texas to go to town to send that money you wanted delivered to them. They'll receive it in a couple days.\"\n\nSo she'd accomplished her goal? The family home would be saved. She should be jumping for joy, but she had too many other things on her mind now: the way he was looking at her, noticing that he'd shaved again this morning, remembering that he'd buried his face in her hair last night after he spread it across her pillow, the very tender way he'd held her through the night.\n\nShe ate her breakfast, but after he left, she remained at the table, wallowing in regret. It didn't matter how much she might like him, she'd ruined her life. She'd behaved recklessly and had given her virginity to a man she was never going to marry. And she might even be pregnant! She could imagine how appalled Aunt Elizabeth and Sophie would be by what she'd done. But after the terrifying run-in with the claim jumpers, who could blame her for seeking comfort in the arms of a man as attractive, strong, and decent as Morgan Callahan?\n\nHe'd come to like her, too. And he wanted her as much as she wanted him. There was no way they would be able to resist each other if they lived in this cabin together for another whole week. It would be wrong to allow it because she could never marry him.\n\nShe looked around the shabby cabin, saw her bloodstained clothes still on the floor, weapons lying around. This was no life for her. She knew what she had to do. She had to go back where she belonged, where death didn't lurk around every corner. And she had to do it now. It couldn't wait another day. What they'd done last night could never happen again, the risk was far too great: babies, a forced marriage\u2014or, worse, he wouldn't even offer marriage. Her life would be ruined in either case! And she was not going to end up pregnant. She refused to give up her dreams because of her sinful fascination with a bear.\n\nShe felt a sense of urgency to act, because given how easily she had succumbed and initiated what had happened last night, she didn't think she'd have the willpower to resist him, not with the way he looked now. And that name he'd called her, Thorny Violet, the way he said it, it was a bloody endearment! Tears sprang to her eyes, remembering." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "The first three hours flew by. The outlaw's horse was a surprisingly strong and responsive mount, but she knew better than to push it. But with each mile that passed, Violet felt more confident that she'd done the right thing, leaving without saying good-bye. Morgan wasn't ready to take her to town, and he would have argued against her going alone, leaving her no other option.\n\nSo she'd gathered up a few essential personal belongings, a canteen of water, a blanket, her valise and parasol, and the lunch he'd mentioned; then she'd saddled the horse. Following the outlaw's directions, she'd be in Butte by late afternoon, where she'd have a real bath and sleep in a real bed. Thank goodness this strange adventure was almost over. She'd even accomplished what she'd set out to do: she'd claimed her father's mine and secured her own and her brothers' futures. The telegram Morgan had sent to her brothers could serve as a written confirmation of their new partnership. She'd let her brothers do the rest while she returned to London, and Morgan would end up with more of what mattered most to him, silver.\n\nShe'd followed the river north for a while until she came to a narrow section and crossed it, stopping only long enough to refill her canteen, then continued north until she found the road, exactly where she expected it to be\u2014now. She couldn't imagine how lost she would have been if she'd gone south as she would have if Curly hadn't told her where Butte was in relation to Morgan's mountain.\n\nThe dark clouds were overhead before she saw them coming. She'd been in this wilderness with Morgan for more than a week with not a drop of moisture from the sky. It wouldn't dare rain today of all days. She continued on for another ten minutes before the rain started. Bloody hell. But she didn't let a little rain stop her until a half hour later when it turned torrential and she took shelter under a rocky ledge. Wet, furious at this delay, she hoped the rain wouldn't last too long. It was still early in the day. She could reach Butte before nightfall.\n\nSo she ate her lunch, waiting for the rain to stop. But night arrived and the rain kept pouring down. She felt less confident by then about her decision to leave the camp. All she could think about were the wild animals that roamed through the wilderness. She chided herself when she started wishing that Morgan were there. She kept telling herself she'd made the right decision, but she was so tired, wet, and hungry by then; she sat with her gun in hand, listening for cougars, bears, and snakes, trying to stay awake.\n\nThe horse nudged her awake the next morning. She was glad to see the sun shining. Her muscles aching, somehow she managed to mount the horse and continued riding. An hour later she panicked when she heard hoofbeats behind her. Morgan had caught up to her. Would he be furious? But when she glanced back, she saw a group of men. Had he sent a posse after her? No, of course not. He couldn't have gotten ahead of her to arrange one, not in that downpour yesterday.\n\nShe continued on, hoping they would just ride past her, since they were moving faster than she was; instead, they pulled in abreast of her. One of them politely said, \"Hold up, ma'am. Where are you headed? Are you lost? Do you need help?\"\n\nThey were cleanly dressed and respectful. The one who spoke even tipped his hat to her. But away from Morgan, Violet was back to being prim and proper. She said, \"I'm going to Butte, which I know isn't far now. With whom am I speaking?\"\n\n\"We were doing some surveying in the area for a mining outfit and are heading back to Butte, too. We'd be happy to ride with you and make sure you get there safely.\"\n\nShe nodded her consent, pleased to have come upon decent men who merely wanted to help. They surrounded her on the ride, one in front, one on either side of her, and two behind. Soon she was sneezing from the dust being kicked up by the horse in front.\n\n\"Here, you can use this to keep the dust out of your face.\"\n\nShe glanced to the side. One of the men was offering her a bandanna. \"Thank you,\" she said, reaching for it.\n\n\"Stop for a moment and let me tie it on for you,\" he added. \"Your hands are full with the reins and that pretty parasol.\"\n\nHe was right, so she reined in while he leaned closer to reach her. But she smelled something funny as soon as the bandanna covered her nose. It made her light-headed, and a moment later she felt herself passing out." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "\"Maybe you should fetch your doctor to make sure she's all right. Is this really who you've been searching for? She doesn't look at all well.\"\n\nA female voice made that observation. No one replied to it, but footsteps walked away. Violet fought to open her eyes. The only person who might have searched for her was Morgan. Had he just left the room? Unless the law had noticed her sudden disappearance from Butte. The woman could have been speaking to the sheriff or the deputy.\n\nViolet was in a pretty bedroom, lying in a large bed, her head slightly propped up on a pillow. The woman standing next to her was on the high side of middle age, with tightly coiffured red hair, blue eyes, a somewhat fashionable day dress.\n\n\"Awake finally?\"\n\nViolet could barely concentrate, she felt so fuzzy-headed. \"Where am I?\"\n\n\"You're in my brother's house. I'm Kayleigh Sullivan. You know my brother, Shawn. I was told you dined with him and my niece at the hotel.\"\n\nKatie's aunt? Violet relaxed a little and gave the woman a weak smile. \"I'm Violet Mitchell.\"\n\n\"Yes, we know, dear. Are you feeling better?\"\n\n\"What happened to me?\"\n\n\"You were riding with some of my brother's men when you fainted. You were lucky to have run into them so they could get you back to Butte safely. Now, would you like me to have this food warmed up? I may have brought it too soon.\"\n\nFood? \"No! Cold is fine, burned is fine, anything is fine. Really.\"\n\nShe didn't blush at how desperate she sounded, just tried to sit up, too eager to find the food before it was taken away. But she groaned and fell back against the pillow. Her back hurt; so did her arse. Had she fallen when she fainted, or was she still feeling the effects of sleeping on rock under that ledge? She didn't remember falling, just that odd smell before she fainted. But if she'd broken something, she was going to cry. To have gotten so close to town without injury...\n\nThe woman tsked and leaned over her. \"Just a prop-up for now, shall we?\"\n\n\"Yes, and thank you,\" Violet said as the other pillow on the bed was added to hers so she could sit up halfway; the tray was set on her lap.\n\n\"Of course, dear. How long were you starving out there in the wilderness?\"\n\nViolet brought the bowl to just under her chin. Soup? She wasn't sick, she was hungry. But there were buttered buns on the tray, too, and a small bowl of strawberries.\n\n\"Since yesterday afternoon,\" she said, and started spooning the soup into her mouth.\n\n\"I wouldn't have thought your mine was so far away\u2014that is, we assumed when you left town you did so with young Callahan, that he showed you the way. He wouldn't bring you back to town?\"\n\nViolet managed not to frown, but the mention of her mine was too unexpected. How did this woman know about it and that she'd been with Morgan? And why would Shawn Sullivan's men bring her here instead of to Dr. Cantry? Unless, as his sister had remarked, he'd organized a search for her. Because the law wasn't doing enough to find her? Why not? Mr. Sullivan did know her, after all, and knew she was his daughter's friend.\n\nSo she wasn't sure if she should be worried about it or not, given that her view of Shawn Sullivan differed from Morgan's. And nothing Morgan had said about the man had changed that, since it was all supposition, every bit of it, just part of his obsession with keeping the location of his mine secret. He'd even admitted that Mr. Sullivan kept offering a higher price for his mine. That alone should have assured him that Sullivan wanted to acquire it legally.\n\nBut she still asked, \"Why was your brother searching for me?\"\n\n\"Shawn went to your hotel to invite you to dinner again, only to be told that you'd left rather mysteriously. He assumed you'd found Callahan to guide you to your father's mine, which Katie mentioned you were hoping to do. But when you didn't return to town soon, Shawn became concerned, considering everything that we know about that ornery Callahan. It must have been awful having to deal with someone so rude and surly. I heard he doesn't even wash!\"\n\nViolet choked back a laugh. If only they could see Morgan now. But she certainly didn't feel comfortable talking about him or their mines with a stranger, even if Kayleigh was Katie's aunt and Violet felt safe here, so she asked, \"Whose room is this?\"\n\n\"Katie's. She won't mind your using it. She rarely visits us anymore. I can't say I blame her. This town is taking forever to shake off its primitive beginnings.\"\n\n\"Did Katie get married?\"\n\n\"Yes, and Shawn was so disappointed that business kept him from attending the wedding, but we received a telegram that everything went off perfectly. But do stop eating so fast, dear, or you'll get stomach upset. I assure you I'll bring another tray if that one isn't enough.\"\n\nViolet didn't pause in eating, just nodded. But Kayleigh was staring at her skirt and the bed beneath it. Violet followed her gaze and saw just how dusty she was.\n\n\"Yes, that spread will have to be cleaned now,\" Kayleigh said with yet another tsk. \"I tried to get them to pull it down before you were laid there, but they were in such a hurry, no one listened. I do have water heating for your bath. I think you even have blood in your hair. Goodness, how did that happen? Did you kill him? Is that why you came back to town alone?\"\n\n\"I haven't killed anyone!\" she said indignantly.\n\nThe very idea that she would hurt Morgan was ridiculous. But she'd just gotten too many questions all at once! And blood in her hair? It couldn't be from the shoot-out with the claim jumpers two days ago, because Morgan had brushed her hair and would have noticed it. She must have scratched her head last night or today if she did in fact have a fall. Why couldn't she remember?\n\n\"Of course not, dear,\" Kayleigh was agreeing with her. \"Now, if you don't have clean clothes in that tattered valise, I can bring you some of mine.\"\n\nHer valise wasn't tattered, it was just dirty like her. But she was out of clean clothes, so she said, \"Thank you, mine do need washing.\"\n\n\"I'll send the housekeeper for them, but I expect the doctor to be here soon, so we might want to postpone the bath until after he examines you. You should probably stay in bed until he does. If you have suffered an injury, you don't want to make it worse.\"\n\n\"You're very kind.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't I be? You're one of us.\"\n\nWhat did that mean? Or was Kayleigh being snobbish, because they were both ladies and there were so few of them in Butte? She had denigrated the town, and Morgan, for that matter, though everyone in Butte did the latter. When the woman finally left, Violet got to eat the rest of the meal in peace. But it wasn't enough.\n\nThe door had been left open, so the man with the doctor's bag didn't need to knock and simply entered. \"You aren't Dr. Cantry,\" Violet said.\n\n\"No, I'm not, nor are we affiliated, though we are on good terms,\" he said. \"I'm Dr. Wilson. The mine owners hired me to tend to their workers, while Cantry sees to the townsfolk. But I deal with his patients when he has to leave town, and he returns the favor when I visit my son in Helena. It works out well.\"\n\n\"So he's currently out of town?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of. Mr. Sullivan sent for me. Now, please be at ease, miss. I'm not going to ask you to undress.\"\n\nShe hadn't thought he would. After listening to her heart, gently touching the sore areas on her back, and cleaning the cut on the side of her head, he gave her an encouraging diagnosis. The abrasion on her head was superficial and would heal quickly. Her soreness was due to too much time in the saddle, and he attributed her fainting to the heat and lack of adequate food and water. He recommended a few days of rest. Her body agreed. But she still needed to get a telegram off to her brothers before she could think about convalescing quietly.\n\nAt least Morgan wouldn't look for her in this house\u2014unless she left it. Maybe she could ask Kayleigh to send the telegram for her. She just wanted to make sure her brothers didn't set out for Montana because she would soon be home in Philadelphia.\n\nTomorrow or the day after, she intended to buy a train ticket home. She couldn't impose on the Sullivans for more than a day or two, and she was afraid to check into any of the hotels where Morgan could find her. She did not want to be abducted in the middle of the night again. But she couldn't stop thinking about him. She hoped he would understand why she'd left and not be hurt that she did so without saying good-bye. She could leave a note at his hotel. She knew he ignored notes there, but if he was looking for her, he might check. She didn't want him to worry or keep looking for her after she left the territory... Bloody hell, she missed him. She had to stop it! He wasn't the man for her, and she didn't want any part of his way of life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "\"You're a mess, child. Were you really out in that wilderness on your own?\"\n\nA different woman had entered the room, a basket on one arm, a dress draped over the other. She was middle-aged and her brown hair was pulled back into a simple bun. Was she the housekeeper? Two boys followed her in with buckets of water that they carried behind a screen in the corner of the room, then left to get more. The basket the woman set on the nightstand had little meat pies in it. Bless her, Violet thought, at least someone knew soup wouldn't be enough.\n\n\"Yes,\" Violet replied. \"Foolish, I know. I just got in a bit of a panic after some outlaws absconded with me; then they died\u2014at my feet. It was suddenly paramount that I get back to civilization immediately.\"\n\n\"Oh, you poor dear. I can't imagine witnessing such violence.\" The woman shook her head and walked to the wardrobe to hang the dress she was carrying.\n\nMentioning those outlaws brought that gruesome scene into her mind, so she quickly did what she'd done during her ride to Butte when those images had plagued her\u2014she thought of Morgan and his lovemaking, her real reason for fleeing. She had some very real regret that she would never see him again. He'd protected her, treated her well, was the bravest man she'd ever known. He was smart, even funny, and he'd given her such an amazing romantic experience. But there was a hard, dangerous side to him that enabled him to thrive in this rough, wild land and that she didn't completely understand or feel comfortable with. But she really must have been in a panic to set out for Butte without a care for her own safety. In hindsight, it had been a stupid thing to do.\n\n\"I'm Mrs. Hall,\" the woman said, returning to Violet's bedside. \"Abigail Hall, the housekeeper here, though someone's been calling me Abby recently and I rather like it, so it's fine if you do, too, Miss Violet. Do you need help getting to the tub?\"\n\nViolet smiled. \"I'm not sure, but if there is hot water in it, I'll definitely manage to get into it somehow. I need to send a telegram today, too. I was going to ask Mr. Sullivan's sister to do me that favor.\"\n\n\"Don't bother her about it. She can be... forgetful. But I'll bring you some paper and send it for you myself. The doctor mentioned that you need rest.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Mr. Sullivan expects you to join him and Miss Kayleigh for dinner tonight,\" Abigail said. \"But I can delay that for a day, if you're not up to it. He might be in an all-fired hurry to talk to you, but I think the doctor's recommendation should be taken into account.\"\n\n\"Why is he in a hurry to speak with me?\"\n\n\"That man is always in a hurry, but in your case, I expect he'll make you an offer for your mine, now that you've found it. It can be dirt-poor and he won't care, not if it's near Callahan's mine.\"\n\nViolet frowned, bothered by the fact that both Kayleigh and Abigail knew she'd been with Morgan and had located her father's mine when she hadn't told either of them that, or mentioned it to Sullivan's men, as far as she could remember. It was beginning to feel a little odd; then again, she hadn't disabused them of their assumptions, had just evaded confirming them, and she would rather not lie about it if she didn't have to.\n\nSo she simply said, \"I can't sell either mine.\"\n\n\"Well, then, that's that. Perhaps for once he'll take no for an answer.\"\n\nThat sounded somewhat ominous. Nonsense. She was letting Morgan's rants about Sullivan get to her. But Morgan wasn't a liar. Had his obsession with his mine colored his thinking about Sullivan's efforts to acquire it? He had said that Sullivan had left a pile of notes for him at his hotel that he'd never even read. She supposed there was nothing wrong with persistence like that\u2014as long as it didn't turn into coercion. But she wouldn't be in this town long enough to get badgered into selling a mine she wasn't sure she had the right to sell. Even if she did have the right, she couldn't do that to Morgan.\n\nShe spent close to an hour in the porcelain tub and didn't care that the water got tepid, not when she'd longed for a real bath for more than a week. Abigail brought her dinner, which served as confirmation that dining with her hosts had been put off, but the housekeeper warned Violet that she would be carried to the dining room tomorrow evening if necessary. There was that Sullivan impatience again.\n\nOf course, that wouldn't be necessary. She was feeling better, more like herself already. But she was relieved by the delay. Once she turned down Sullivan's offer for the mine, whatever it was, she'd probably have to leave his house immediately. She didn't think he'd actually kick her out, but she'd feel uncomfortable remaining. It was too bad he hadn't invited her to breakfast instead. Then she could go straight to the train station afterward.\n\nShe spent most of the next day in bed, getting as much rest as she could before her train journey home. Abigail confirmed that she'd sent the telegram to her brothers. With all of her clothes out of her valise for washing, she'd been able to find all of her hairpins and put her hair up properly. Her clothes had been returned clean and pressed, so she felt quite presentable for dinner. Abigail led her to the dining room.\n\nThe interior of the Sullivan house was as grand as its handsomely designed brick fa\u00e7ade, which had so impressed her the day she'd come to see where he lived. She walked through well-lit, carpeted hallways past beautifully appointed rooms with fine furniture, tasteful fabrics, and gleaming silver bowls, vases, and mirror frames. She wasn't the first to arrive in the dining room.\n\nKayleigh, who was standing by a chair at one end of the long table, smiled and greeted her. \"Feeling better today, Miss Mitchell?\"\n\n\"Still a little sore,\" Violet replied. \"But yes, much better and somewhat civilized again.\"\n\n\"Callahan's camp is primitive, is it?\"\n\nShe didn't confirm that she'd been there, saying instead, \"Everything outside of town is.\"\n\nShe glanced about the room at furnishings and luxury goods that couldn't possibly have been bought in this town: fine china, silver cutlery, a crystal chandelier, a long dining table with ornate legs. It reminded her of Morgan's dream to bring fine things to the people in the territory. She hoped he attained his goal\u2014and she really ought to stop thinking about him.\n\n\"Do sit, Miss Mitchell,\" Shawn Sullivan said as he entered the room.\n\nShe swung around to see the man she'd met at dinner with Katie and her fianc\u00e9. Sullivan had brown hair sprinkled with gray, but Katie had gotten her green eyes from her father. Wearing a well-cut charcoal-gray business suit, he was smiling and appeared as gregarious as he'd been that night in the hotel dining room. The man couldn't possibly be as nefarious as Morgan had depicted him. He came forward to pull out a chair for her, one that placed her halfway between him and his sister, who took the seats at either end of the table.\n\n\"You have been most kind to offer me your hospitality, Mr. Sullivan.\"\n\n\"Of course, of course, how could we not? I'm glad my men encountered you and were able to help you. We were concerned when you left so suddenly with Morgan Callahan after he was spotted in town. I know Katie said you hoped he would guide you to your father's mine; I was just surprised that he agreed to. It couldn't have been pleasant dealing with someone that stubborn and rough around the edges. But I expect you're on good terms with him now?\"\n\nAn actual direct question to get their assumptions confirmed. There was no point in denying it or trying to evade it this time, when she had in fact told Katie that. And she didn't have an alternate excuse ready for where she'd been all this time.\n\n\"Somewhat,\" she said. \"At least when he's not accusing me of working for you.\"\n\nShawn laughed. \"Did he?\"\n\nThere was nothing funny about the frustration that Morgan's misunderstanding had caused her, but she wasn't going to be rude, so just said, \"For a few days, yes. But we sorted that out.\"\n\n\"My men didn't see him when you rode toward town. Did he really leave you to get back on your own?\"\n\nHe was asking far too many questions about Morgan. \"Is dinner going to be late?\" she asked politely with a smile, trying to mitigate her rudeness at evading his question.\n\nHe nodded at a servant standing silently by the door. Moments later, the first course arrived. She hoped eating would get his mind off Morgan, because his interest was making her distinctly uncomfortable. She didn't want to reveal any information that might hurt Morgan or her family's interest in the mine. If Sullivan was leading up to asking her where Morgan's mine was, she was going to have to get up and leave.\n\nShe tried to distract him further by asking, \"Will Katie be living in Chicago with her husband? I thought I might visit her briefly before I return to England.\"\n\n\"Her husband has his own house in Chicago, yes,\" Shawn answered, but then gave her a pointed look. \"Do I need to let our sheriff know that Callahan left you out in the wilderness to die? Is that what you're trying to avoid mentioning?\"\n\nShe gasped. \"He did nothing of the sort! He merely wasn't ready to come to town, but I was, so I left to return to Philadelphia. My brothers will deal with our mine from now on.\"\n\n\"But they aren't here, are they?\"\n\n\"No, they're still in the East.\"\n\n\"You would go home and then come all the way back here just to take them to the mine?\" he said a bit incredulously. \"When I could have one of my men do that for you?\"\n\nComing back to Montana wasn't an appealing thought, but she'd known when she slipped away from Morgan that she might have to. Waiting for her brothers to arrive in Butte was an even less appealing solution. Actually, she could probably give them directions, draw them a rough map. She knew the exact mountain range now, just not which exact gorge to climb; but there were only a few gorges, so they would find the right one in a matter of hours. Relief flooded her with that realization. She could catch the train in the morning!\n\nAs for Shawn's offer, she merely reminded him, \"You don't know where it is, so how could you?\"\n\n\"Because you will show me before you leave town\u2014then you won't have to return merely to be your brothers' guide.\"\n\n\"After all you've been through, I'm sure you're hoping to see the last of Butte when you go,\" Kayleigh added.\n\nThe man's persistence was becoming annoying. But she wasn't about to admit that she could provide directions to the mines. And she had a solution for the problem he was predicting, without admitting that there was no problem.\n\n\"That is very kind of you, but Morgan can\u2014\"\n\nHe cut in, \"Morgan is in the habit of making sure he isn't seen when he comes to town, nor does he pick up messages. Your kin will end up stuck in this town waiting for a man who never shows up.\"\n\nShe was even more annoyed that what he was saying could well be true. Morgan might not accept the notes her brothers would leave for him. He might be too angry at her to deal with Daniel and Evan, although he had to want her brothers to work at the mine long enough to repay the three thousand dollars they'd borrowed from him. Still, she simply couldn't be sure of how he would react at this point. But he'd never forgive her if she led Shawn Sullivan to his mine. That she was positive of.\n\nShe wished Sullivan didn't sound so sincere, which made it difficult for her to refuse his offer. But she simply didn't need his help, nor did she believe he had her best interests in mind. She just couldn't let him know that. So she reiterated, \"I just want to go home and forget about this horrible ordeal.\"\n\n\"Certainly, and you can do just that as soon as you show me to my new mine. I will pay you a hundred thousand dollars for it. You won't be going home empty-handed, and you'll never have to venture west again.\"\n\nShe was astonished by the offer. A sane person would accept it immediately. But Violet suspected that Sullivan had made such a high offer because the mine was worth more than that. Or he figured he'd be getting another mine for free\u2014Morgan's. My new mine? Was he that positive she wouldn't turn him down? Or would it even matter once he knew the mine's location? She needed to stall.\n\n\"You are generous, but it's not a decision I can make without first discussing it with my brothers. I assure you I will the moment I arrive home. They will likely want to accept your offer. They are gentlemen, not miners. But I truly can't make this decision on my own.\"\n\n\"Then you can telegraph them in the morning.\"\n\nHe was bullying her, she realized, maneuvering her into a corner. The man really didn't take no for an answer. \"No,\" she said bluntly. \"This is far too important a matter to entrust to telegrams. The decision will be made, sir, when I get home.\"\n\n\"Then we will leave first thing in the morning. You can still show me to the mine tomorrow, so when you and your brothers accept my offer, none of you will need to come back here ever again. I am being magnanimous, Miss Mitchell. Keep that in mind.\"\n\nHe stood and left the room before she could reply to his warning. Hadn't she just refused him? Had he somehow not heard her? Regardless, the only thing she'd be doing in the morning was catching a train." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "What a horrible dinner this had turned out to be, Violet thought as she was left alone in the dining room with Sullivan's sister, who didn't even try to hide her disapproval of Violet's response to her brother's offer. Although she felt most uncomfortable, she finished eating as if nothing untoward had happened. The memory of starving for a day and a half kept her from abandoning the food in front of her.\n\nAt least Kayleigh was silent. Violet waited until the servants had cleared the dishes before carefully pointing out, \"There is absolutely no reason to pressure me this way.\"\n\n\"Except he's waited long enough.\"\n\nFor something he had no right to? Why was that being laid at her door? But she didn't want to antagonize Kayleigh further, so merely pointed out, \"He'll have our answer in a week's time.\"\n\n\"There is only one answer to such generosity, or do you not have the sense to know that my brother offered you too much?\"\n\nHad he? The woman couldn't know if it was too much or too little. Morgan had called the silver in his and her father's mines a mother lode. She'd seen it with her own eyes on the walls, floors, and ceilings of both mines. But none of that mattered, since she didn't own the mine outright and didn't think she could sell her share of an informal partnership. Not that she would. She just wasn't going to explain any of that to these people.\n\nForcing herself to be polite, she thanked Kayleigh for dinner and returned to her room. Should she leave tonight? Obviously she was no longer welcome there. But to get a hotel room this late... no, one more night here wouldn't hurt, and maybe she wouldn't even see the Sullivans again if she left early enough in the morning." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "In the middle of the night, something hard poked her in the side, awakening her. Her first thought was that Morgan had found her and was absconding with her again. But she'd left one lamp lit, turned low, and saw the gun the moment she turned over, and who was holding it.\n\n\"Abigail?\"\n\n\"Shhh,\" the woman whispered. \"No talking yet. Follow me.\"\n\nViolet was frozen in place, shocked. The woman had seemed nice these last two days, but she didn't really know her, and Abigail worked in what was now a hostile household. But the gun was no longer pointed in her direction. She glanced toward the open window\u2014\n\n\"There's no need for that. I'm on your side. You'll find out why in a minute.\"\n\nViolet didn't believe her. There would be no need for a gun if Abigail were telling the truth. She tried to stall. \"I need to dress.\"\n\n\"Shhhhh,\" the woman hissed more sharply, pointing the gun at her again. \"Come as you are.\"\n\nShe got out of bed warily, wondering if she could grab the gun from Abigail without getting shot. Reaching the door, Abigail told her to open it, and then pushed her to the right, away from the main staircase that descended to the first floor. Still being nudged from behind, Violet went around a corner and came to another, narrower staircase that spiraled upward to the third floor or an attic.\n\nShe would have balked right then and there if Abigail weren't pushing her from behind and pressing the gun to her back, forcing her up those stairs. And she'd thought Abigail was a kindly woman. What a bad judge of character she was! Sullivan must have ordered this. But why send a woman to do nasty work like this?\n\nWhen they reached the door at the top of the stairs, Abigail whispered, \"Open it!\"\n\nA lamp was lit in there, dimly illuminating an attic with a slanted roof. All sorts of boxes and furniture were stored there, pushed to one side, leaving a cleared area for a narrow bed. The person in it sat up as they walked in.\n\nViolet stopped short, unable to take another step, horrified, thrilled, utterly confused. Her whisper was timorous: \"Is\u2014is that really you?\"\n\n\"Come closer, Vi.\"\n\nOh, God, it was Charles's voice, his face. She burst into joyful tears. \"Papa!\" She ran to the bed to wrap her arms around her father. She clung to him tightly, afraid that if she didn't he would disappear. He wasn't dead, he wasn't dead! Please don't let this be a dream!\n\n\"Let me look at you, sweetheart.\"\n\n\"Not yet. I don't want to wake up yet. Just hold me like you used to.\"\n\nHe tried to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She felt his touch. She wasn't dreaming. \"How is this possible? You were buried!\"\n\n\"Whoever or whatever was buried, it wasn't me.\"\n\nShe leaned back to look at his face, his wonderful face, thinner, a little older, but still the face of her dear father. \"You're alive. This is\u2014you can't imagine.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to see you, too, darling. But what are you doing here? You shouldn't have found out about any of this nasty business.\"\n\n\"Daniel wrote to me in London, asking me to come home to deal with an urgent matter. I was shocked to find my brothers in dire straits and in danger of losing the house.\"\n\n\"Why? I left them enough money.\"\n\n\"No, they spent it all trying to keep up appearances as you instructed. So I came to find you.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"It should have been enough, and it would have been if I hadn't had that accident. Where are your brothers now?\"\n\n\"They're still in Philadelphia\u2014\"\n\n\"I have three children, two of whom are strapping young men, and it's my daughter who came to this wild territory alone to find me?!\"\n\nHe sounded quite annoyed with the boys, so she quickly said, \"They were trying to hold everything together at home and deal with the banker, who has already come close to seizing the house. Evan is even desperately courting an heiress, whom I hope he won't have to marry now, because he didn't sound smitten with her.\"\n\nCharles shook his head sadly. \"This is my fault. I was foolish with my inheritance. I'm the one who didn't do well by my children. I'm so sorry, sweetheart.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" she assured him. \"I don't care if I ever have my debut in London, I'm just so happy you're alive!\"\n\n\"How long have you been in Montana?\"\n\n\"A few weeks,\" she said evasively. \"When I was told that horrible news about you, well, I tried to find your mine to see if it could save the house, and I met Morgan\u2014\"\n\n\"What did you think of him?\" he cut in.\n\n\"Oh, don't get me started!\"\n\nHe laughed, hugging her closer. \"He does take getting used to.\"\n\n\"But he definitely likes you. He's lent us the money to pay off the house loan, so you don't have to worry about that anymore. Now, what are you doing in this attic?\"\n\n\"He was carried in unconscious,\" Abigail said behind her.\n\nThe housekeeper! She'd forgotten Abigail was even in the room and glanced around to her. \"Why didn't you just tell me my father is alive?\"\n\n\"And get this noisy reaction downstairs where Kayleigh or Mr. Sullivan might've heard you? They can't know that your father is awake, or that you know he's here, or I'll never get him safely out of here. I'm sorry I startled you with the gun, but it was necessary to get you to come along quietly.\"\n\n\"Don't blame Abby,\" Charles said. \"She was very nervous about bringing you up here without being seen.\"\n\n\"As for your question,\" Abigail continued, \"they pulled their scam as soon as Dr. Cantry left town and the miners' doctor took over for him as he usually does. A few of Mr. Sullivan's men sneaked Charles out of the doctor's house and carried him here at night. And they had him buried, supposedly, the very next morning, and merely informed Dr. Cantry about it when he got back to town. Your father has been a prisoner here ever since.\"\n\nViolet shook her head, finding it hard to grasp all of this. \"Wilson seemed like a real doctor.\"\n\n\"He is,\" Abigail said scornfully. \"But he's in the mine owners' pockets, will do whatever they tell him to do and probably asks no questions.\"\n\n\"But why is Father a prisoner?\"\n\n\"The better question is, how did you come to be in Sullivan's house?\" Charles asked.\n\nViolet hesitated for a moment, seeking an explanation that was truthful but held no whiff of scandal. \"Once Morgan agreed to pay off your loan, I had to get back to civilization and didn't want to wait until next week for him to escort me back. I sort of sneaked off without telling him\u2014don't say it! I know that was unwise. But I was almost to Butte when I ran into Sullivan's men and fainted, and they brought me here.\"\n\n\"No, dear,\" Abigail said. \"I overheard the men talking to Mr. Sullivan. They knew they'd met up with Violet Mitchell when they heard your British accent. They put chloroform on the bandanna they gave you so they could knock you out and bring you here.\"\n\nViolet shivered, saw the anger on her father's face. \"So that's why the bandanna smelled funny. I have no memory of what happened after that until I woke up in this house.\"\n\n\"Despicable!\" Charles said, shaking his head. \"Well, I've been in this attic for close to six weeks. I'm actually grateful I was unconscious for most of that time. I only woke up a few days ago. Sullivan doesn't know that yet, and we're keeping it that way.\" He gave Abigail an adoring smile before he added, \"This woman has been my guardian angel. She's the only person in this mansion with a strong and unerring moral compass.\"\n\nAbigail blushed. \"I refuse to be a party to the Sullivans' wickedness, even though Kayleigh threatened to put me in prison for supposedly stealing from them if I told anyone they were hiding Charles up here. It's unconscionable what they're doing to this fine man!\"\n\n\"Thank you for taking such good care of him,\" Violet said sincerely. Glancing at her father again, she reminded him, \"You still haven't said why you're a prisoner here.\"\n\n\"Abigail overheard Sullivan giving orders to his men. He's waiting for me to regain consciousness so I can tell him where my mine is located.\" Charles suddenly looked fierce. \"But I'm not telling him no matter what happens. I'm not selling out my partner. And the money made from my mine is for my children!\"\n\nViolet was horrified, imagining what Sullivan and his men would do to him to gain that information, and glanced frantically at the housekeeper. \"Why is Sullivan going to such lengths to take over Morgan's and Papa's mines when he already has one? Is his here in Butte running out of silver?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but it's only a matter of time. He's greedy for money and power, no amount of either of those things will ever be enough, and he doesn't want anyone challenging his position as the last of the silver kings. He was furious when he found out that Callahan was taking that title away from him. As rich and powerful as he is, no one ever tells him no, except Morgan Callahan. All that did was make Mr. Sullivan mad and more determined than ever. He's one of those men who just don't care who they step on to get what they want.\"\n\nViolet had told Sullivan no, which made her distinctly uneasy now. \"Can't you bring the sheriff here?\"\n\nAbigail sighed. \"If only it were that simple. Sheriff Gibson is a good man, but he would never believe me, a nobody-housekeeper, if I told him my employer, one of the richest and most powerful mine owners in the territory, was holding your father prisoner in his attic. It's an incredible accusation. The sheriff would never insult Mr. Sullivan by asking to search his house without good cause. And who knows what Mr. Sullivan would do to me if he found out I'd gone to the sheriff? I fear, though, that he would kill Charles rather than let him be found here to incriminate him.\"\n\n\"What about the empty grave? That would be proof, wouldn't it?\"\n\n\"But it's not empty. They actually had a body, a miner who'd just died and hadn't been buried yet. But Charles shouldn't have been here this long. Mr. Sullivan had intended to deal with him when he regained consciousness, instead of with Callahan. Exchanging him for Callahan's mine was his alternate plan, but the boy never picked up the messages Mr. Sullivan left for him at his hotel.\"\n\n\"Ransom notes? There's our proof.\"\n\nAbigail shook her head. \"I saw one of them on his desk before he had it delivered. It didn't mention ransom. He's too smart to implicate himself like that. His demands will be made in person, without witnesses.\"\n\n\"But it won't work. There's nothing that could make Morgan give up his mine.\"\n\n\"Have you misjudged him?\" Charles asked in concern. \"He's been nothing but good to me, Violet, when he didn't have to help me. And he pretty much gave me all that silver when he didn't have to do that either.\"\n\n\"But his mine for ransom? He's obsessed with the bloody thing.\"\n\n\"Even if he didn't just hand it over to Sullivan, he would have gotten me out of this if he knew about it. I have no doubt of that.\"\n\nShe blushed, because she didn't doubt it either, not really. Morgan had rescued her, hadn't he? Risked his life to do so. And he'd been right about Shawn Sullivan after all. The man really would resort to any means to get what he wanted, including abduction and murder. She was just so afraid of what would happen to her father if Morgan didn't agree immediately to Sullivan's demands.\n\nShe was beginning to feel\u2014trapped. \"We should leave now while they're all asleep.\"\n\n\"We can't,\" Abigail said. \"As long as Sullivan is in the house, his guards surround it. We can't even sneak out a window without one of them noticing\u2014not that your father is up to something like that. He's still very weak.\"\n\n\"I can't leave without him,\" Violet insisted.\n\n\"You aren't listening, dear. You're as much a prisoner as he is. They just haven't made that clear yet because you haven't tried to leave.\"\n\n\"Abby isn't being melodramatic, Violet,\" Charles put in. \"Sullivan and his sister came up to the attic the other day. They thought I was still unconscious and were arguing about getting rid of me. They're losing patience, waiting for me to wake up. I'm surprised I didn't give myself away, with them standing there talking about killing me in a few more weeks.\"\n\n\"It's going to happen sooner now that they have you, child,\" Abigail warned her. \"They will use him as leverage against you if you don't pretend to cooperate and take them to the mines. But once they have what they want, they can't just let you go, either. So this needs to be resolved before that happens.\"\n\n\"How?!\" Violet was terrified for both her father and herself.\n\n\"He plans to leave with you and his men in the morning. He's certain you can lead him right to Callahan's camp because you've been there. Can you?\"\n\n\"Yes, I can now. But when Morgan took me there, he went by a circuitous route that took a full extra day, and he blindfolded me for the last six hours of that trip, just so I couldn't lead anyone back there.\"\n\nCharles grinned. \"That's perfect\u2014you can honestly say that it took you nearly two days to reach it, when it's only a half day's ride from town. Try to stay on the east road as long as you can, so the sheriff can easily find you.\"\n\nShe glanced between them. \"You two have already planned this?\"\n\nAbigail nodded. \"And for it to work, you will have to go with Sullivan willingly. If he has to force you by revealing that your father is alive and threatening to kill him if you don't take him to the mine, he'll leave too many men behind to guard the house, and I won't be able to help Charles escape.\"\n\n\"Aren't there a lot of servants here who could stop you?\" Violet asked.\n\n\"They won't, but Kayleigh will try to. However, she leaves the house every day for one reason or another, usually before noon. We will leave as soon as she does and go straight to the sheriff. And I'll count how many men Sullivan rides out with to make sure the sheriff takes more than that number with him. So just cooperate as long as you can. You can do so grudgingly if you think that will help\u2014yes, I was listening outside the dining room door tonight and heard your protests against taking him to the mine. Just get as far from town as you can before you admit you're not sure where the mines are. We need half a day at least to sneak your father out of the house and get him to the sheriff, and the sheriff may need a few more hours to round up a big enough posse.\"\n\nViolet nodded, trying not to reveal how worried and scared she was. She wished Morgan were here to deal with all of this for her.\n\nHer father must have sensed her unease, because he said, \"I'm sorry for putting you in this dangerous situation, Violet. But I'm so proud of the brave, capable woman you've become. I have faith that you will keep a level head and lead Sullivan and his men astray until the sheriff can apprehend them.\"\n\nShe smiled weakly, but to put her father at ease, she joked, \"It sounds like I'll be sleeping outdoors again tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"You just need to buy us time tomorrow until the sheriff catches up with you,\" he stressed. \"Can you do that?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Violet said. Well, what choice did she have?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Four days. Morgan thought that by now he would have found Violet\u2014one way or another. He'd searched all the hotels and lodgings in Butte, checked the train station each day to make sure she hadn't bought a ticket, spent half a day watching Shawn Sullivan's house, though that had been a waste of time. And each day he returned to the wilderness to continue the search, south, north, even a day farther east.\n\nHis anger kept him going, refused to let him stop. It had been with him from the moment he'd realized she'd sneaked off while he was working in the mine. The one day he didn't come out for lunch, damnit! And she'd done it after they'd made love, after he'd felt a closeness to her that he'd never felt with another woman. And she'd started it by asking him to kiss her and telling him not to stop. Had that been her way of thanking him because she'd already known she was leaving? Yet he recalled how upset she'd been that day after being captured by the claim jumpers and witnessing their deaths.\n\nShe was a young lady out of her element who'd been scared that night and needed someone to comfort and protect her, and while she had desired him at the time, she might have regretted what she'd done. Of course she would. She was used to sophisticated, wealthy noblemen, even talked about marrying one. She'd never settle for a mountain-man miner like him. One more thing to infuriate him, that she didn't think he was good enough for her.\n\nNo matter what came to mind to explain her taking off like that, it didn't diminish his anger. It was a fact that she'd left the moment she'd gotten what she wanted from him, the money to pay off that loan on her family's home and a mining partnership that would last long enough for her to pay it back. Would she have stayed if he'd agreed to a permanent partnership? Possibly, but he'd never know now.\n\nHe couldn't even guess which way she'd gone. That was why he hadn't found her yet. The rain had washed away her horse's hoof marks, and he'd done too good a job confusing her about the location of the mines. He'd even ridden to Dillon, the last town before Butte on the train line, to see if she'd bought her train ticket there. If she'd ridden directly west and run into the train tracks, and remembered that town from when she'd arrived, she might think she was closer to Dillon and head south to it. But she hadn't been there either, and his anger had turned into fear. Four damn days. Could she really still be alive out here in this heat, without food?\n\nHe'd returned to his cabin late last night for a few hours of sleep and to check if Texas had left another note. His friend was out searching for Violet, too, but his latest note was no more encouraging than the others. Morgan had ended up sleeping till noon, a waste of good daylight, but he wasn't surprised, with as little sleep as he'd been getting since she'd left him. Left him? It did feel personal when it shouldn't.\n\nHe had planned to check Butte again and then Helena today, though with this late start, Helena might have to wait until tomorrow. She might have gone there just to hide while she waited for her brothers to arrive.\n\nHe rode north to the east road. Halfway there he saw the dust cloud, not big like the ones stagecoaches made because of their speed, but big enough to indicate more than a couple of riders. He stopped and pulled out Charley's spyglass. Eight horses riding at a slow trot\u2014and he spotted Violet on one almost immediately. How could he miss that silly parasol?\n\nHis relief was tremendous, until he saw who was riding next to her, and then his rage surged back, worse than ever, because he'd been right from the start\u2014she really was in cahoots with Shawn Sullivan. Had the man promised her a fortune for her mine that night he met her at the hotel? She'd just had to find her way there first, and she'd done that and was now leading him right to both mines for her big payday. Sullivan wouldn't care that she wasn't in a position to sell Charley's mine; he'd pay just as much for the location.\n\nAnd they were almost there. They would notice him soon after they left the road to ride south. He was so furious he couldn't even think how to keep them away from his mountain. They were too close, and besides, she was leading them right to it. He really had misjudged her. This was what she'd apologized for with the gift of her body. She'd known all along that she would betray him.\n\nHe headed back to the mountain to take cover in the first copse of trees, a mile or so before Texas's camp. He pulled out the spyglass again; Sullivan's party hadn't come into view yet. He waited, still not sure how he was going to handle this. Fire the first shot? He'd have cover, they wouldn't. Or maybe he should just go blow up both mines before they reached them. Now, that sounded like a plan he could live with. And he'd beat them to town and have Charley's mine invalidated to boot. Revenge at its finest. So why did it give him a sick feeling in his gut?\n\nHe trained the spyglass again, then frowned when there was still no sign of a dust cloud. Cautiously he rode, back toward the road, but still didn't see it. What the hell? He kept going, and when he finally reached the road, he saw the tail end of their cloud\u2014beyond his mountain.\n\nHe started to laugh. She didn't know where the mines were. Had she found her way back to Butte by sheer luck, or had she encountered someone who had shown her the way?\n\nHe began to follow them, staying far enough back that he could only see that dust cloud with the spyglass. When they made camp for the night and settled down to sleep, he was going to steal her away from them. He wasn't going to leave her out here with Sullivan long enough for her to eventually figure out where the mines were. He was going to take her straight to the claims office in Butte and have her watch as he invalidated Charley's claim. Just desserts, as far as he was concerned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Violet's gun was in her valise. No one had searched it to see if she had a weapon, probably because she was a woman. She'd been told to leave the valise behind, that she wouldn't need it, but she'd refused, so one of the men had tied it to her saddle. Having her own gun close at hand was the only thing that kept her from panicking during that long day of riding surrounded by guards who had the look of hardened men.\n\nThey definitely weren't Shawn's miners, each with a gun on their hip and a rifle on their saddle; they wore vests, their coats already removed\u2014it was going to be another hot day. These were likely the men that Morgan had told her had broken into his crates at the train station and beaten her father in an alley. Irish easterners, probably from Chicago where Shawn was from and who obviously didn't mind breaking the law any more than their employer did.\n\nKayleigh had awakened her at six o'clock that morning, telling her to be dressed to travel, as if she'd already agreed to this trip, so she'd replied, \"An excellent idea, in case my brothers do agree to sell the mine.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"Obviously, none of us will have to come back this way if your brother knows where the mine is located.\"\n\n\"Of course.\" Kayleigh smiled. \"Smart of you to finally realize that, lass.\"\n\nThey had been a little late in leaving, due to some emergency at Sullivan's mine that he'd had to deal with, so they hadn't departed until nine o'clock. She'd had to mention when they left that it was going to take a day and a half to get to the mine. She'd expected that acquiring more provisions might delay them further, but they'd apparently already prepared for being gone several days.\n\nIt was another sweltering day on the road. And she couldn't stop worrying. This plan had sounded fine when she'd discussed it last night with Abigail and her father, but what if Abigail was a part of Sullivan's plan and was just pretending to be on their side? Had the housekeeper really gotten Charles out of the house today? Would the sheriff show up to rescue her?\n\nAt least she was pleased when they passed Morgan's mountain. She made sure not to even glance at it. But when they made camp that night, Shawn Sullivan didn't hide his impatience.\n\nHe joined her at the campfire where she was sitting. It was one of three his men had started, and they were close enough to the road for the sheriff to see the firelight if he hadn't stopped for the night, too.\n\nSullivan looked frustrated and tired, but his tone was sharp when he said, \"If you've lied about how long this trip is going to take\u2014\"\n\n\"I haven't lied,\" she cut in. \"It took a full day and a half to get there, plus a few extra hours of Morgan riding at night. The last thing I saw before he blindfolded me was three mountains pretty far away in different directions, north, south, and east, similar to where we are now. I don't know which one he headed to after that.\"\n\n\"But you managed to get back to Butte. You can't even remember that route?\"\n\n\"What I did was get horribly lost for a day and a half until I had the good fortune to run across your surveyors. My only guess is that the mines are north of this road, because he did turn north at one point before I got blindfolded.\"\n\nHe moved away, but her trembling set in as soon as he did. She didn't know what she was going to do if the sheriff didn't arrive soon, at least before dawn. She could only keep them on that road for about three more hours, because she'd already told Sullivan that they'd turned north. She was going to have to pick a spot to do that while the three mountains were still within view. Would the sheriff notice their tracks leaving the road tomorrow if he had halted his search for the night? Bloody hell, where was he? He should have arrived by now.\n\nShe'd been allowed to sleep by herself beside one of the campfires, a little distance away from the men. But she couldn't sleep, was attuned to every little sound around her, a cough, a snore, the crackle of the fires, crickets that chirped too loudly, everything but the sound she most wanted to hear\u2014the posse arriving. She felt like crying again, but didn't. She wanted to escape, and gave that some thought. But that would give away her plan, reveal that she wasn't really cooperating, so she forced herself to have faith in Abigail and the sheriff. She couldn't lose her nerve at this point!\n\nA hand went over her mouth. She hadn't heard him coming but could see him clearly in the firelight, Morgan leaning over her. He'd come to rescue her again! He really did care for her. She tried to sit up. The hand on her mouth tightened. Did he think she'd give him away?\n\nBefore she realized what was happening, he picked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and moved silently away from Sullivan's camp. Then he started running. She bounced painfully against his shoulder and back, gasping for breath. How long could he run and carry her this way? When he finally set her down on her feet, she leaned over, drawing air into her lungs. Morgan loomed over her, and she saw Caesar hobbled nearby. She straightened up and whispered, \"Thank you for rescuing me again. This situation isn't what it appears to be. I wasn't taking Sullivan to your\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up.\"\n\nHe looked so furious she couldn't keep silent. \"I didn't betray you!\"\n\nHe grabbed her by the shoulders. \"I don't want to hear your lies.\" His mouth covered hers abruptly in a kiss that was rough, passionate, and deeply satisfying. She slipped her hands around his neck and pressed her body against his, responding with equal fervor, so relieved he'd come for her, thrilled by the intensity of his desire and the way his hand was caressing her backside, pushing her closer to him. But... he'd said she was lying? She had to make him understand.\n\nPressing her hands against his shoulders, she shoved, and he stopped kissing her. When she looked up at his face, she was startled by the fierce anger in his eyes. She'd only seen it once before\u2014the night she'd pointed the shotgun at him. \"You're mistaken\u2014\"\n\n\"No, you made a mistake. You should have shown your true colors earlier. We could have had a lot more fun in the sack before you sold me out to Sullivan.\"\n\n\"That's not true!\" She struggled to put some distance between them, but Morgan held on to her. \"I'm here to help\u2014\"\n\nThey both froze at the sound of pistols cocking.\n\n\"Let the lady go, or you'll get more than one bullet in your back.\"\n\nViolet gasped. Oh, God, three men were pointing pistols at them. Sullivan's guards.\n\nMorgan released her. One guard immediately confiscated his Colt. Another approached her to ask, \"Are you all right, miss?\" She just nodded. The third man took the hobbles off Caesar before they began the trek back to Sullivan's campsite, two of the guards flanking Morgan, holding their guns ready.\n\nAs she walked, Violet couldn't tell if she was shivering from the cold or trembling with fear for herself and Morgan. But she felt no relief when she saw the glow of the three campfires. Sullivan was standing by one of them. A guard ran ahead and spoke with him.\n\n\"Well, well, Callahan, finally we meet again.\" Sullivan was smiling. \"But you show up in the middle of the night and try to abduct Miss Mitchell and do who knows what else? I'll have to turn you over to the sheriff. You should be thrown in jail for attempting something that low.\"\n\n\"No, Sullivan, I just hate to see my dead partner's daughter with scum like you. She doesn't know anything. Let her go. You can deal with me now.\"\n\nSullivan laughed. \"Too late. I don't need you anymore. Miss Mitchell is going to show me where her father's mine is located, and yours too, as I understand they're right close to each other. In fact, I offered her a hundred thousand dollars for her mine, and she's going to get her brothers' approval to sell it to me.\"\n\nMorgan snorted. \"She might look like a lady, but she's a viper and a liar. She doesn't own that mine; it's an invalid claim. She can't sell it to you or anyone else. Besides, she doesn't know where it is. She's led you on a wild goose chase.\"\n\n\"I think you might be the one who's lying.\"\n\nSullivan turned to Violet expectantly. She was horrified that she had to lie and act like the viper Morgan had just labeled her in order to preserve the rescue plan.\n\n\"I do own the mine and I know exactly where it is,\" she insisted. \"He's the one lying to you!\"\n\nMorgan glowered at her before turning back to his nemesis. \"Don't get taken in, Sullivan. She might have spent some time in my camp driving me crazy, but she doesn't know the exact location.\"\n\nSullivan smiled. \"But you do.\" And then he told his men, \"Tie him up, and it better be as tight as if he were in a prison cell. He gets away and you're all fired.\" Yet he was smiling again at Morgan when he added, as if giving Morgan a choice, \"Why don't you spend the night with us and show us to the mine tomorrow morning?\"\n\n\"I saw you coming. There's no way you'll ever get your hands on those mines. I planted dynamite charges in them. You go near them and step in the wrong places, half the mountain will come down on you.\"\n\nThe guards looked a little worried, hearing that, but Sullivan didn't. \"Nice bluffing, Callahan. But you'll take me there, and you'll step in the right spots, otherwise Miss Mitchell could have a fatal accident. No one would be surprised if a gently reared lady fell off her horse and broke her neck riding up these rocky slopes.\"\n\nViolet blanched. Morgan was gagged before he could respond. She stared at him, but he didn't seem to notice because he was glaring daggers at Sullivan as the man walked away. One of the guards nudged Morgan pretty hard in the side with his boot, sneering, \"There's no need to wait till the morn.\"\n\n\"What do you think you're doing, O'Donnell?\" Shawn demanded as he walked back to the group.\n\nThe guard stepped back, but wasn't contrite. \"I was thinking to get the answers you want.\"\n\n\"Beating him isn't necessary, not when we have her. We can't leave now in any case, no matter what he says, so he's got the night to decide if the lass lives or not. That's all the torture he needs. Miss Mitchell or his mine.\"\n\nOh, good Lord, what a choice to give Morgan when he was so angry at her! Violet did the only sensible thing she could think of at that point\u2014she started screaming as loudly as she could and wasn't going to stop. She ran around the camp, trying to evade Sullivan's guards, who definitely wanted her to stop it. But the sound would travel far, especially in the stillness at night. If the sheriff was close enough to save them, he'd hear it. If not, she and Morgan would both die tomorrow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Violet was tackled by two of the guards, who gagged her and tied her up for the night. They put her on a bedroll and tossed a blanket over her. She craned her neck to try to catch a glimpse of Morgan, who lay behind her, which was a little too difficult to attempt more than a few times, and he wasn't looking at her anyway. She so regretted not getting a chance to convince him that she hadn't betrayed him. He obviously hadn't believed her when she'd said it. And now she might never get another chance.\n\nWhen she awoke, dawn had come and gone. The sun hadn't topped the ranges to the east yet, but the sky was bright with early morning light. Just one campfire was burning and a pot of coffee was boiling on a rack that had been placed over it. By rolling her body, she managed to sit up, and glanced over to where Morgan lay, but couldn't tell if his eyes were open yet. Her hands, which were tied behind her back, tingled uncomfortably.\n\nOne of the guards poured cups of coffee for Sullivan and himself, but didn't offer her one, so she had a feeling she wasn't going to be untied today. Why would they bother when it was likely she'd have an \"accident\" later and end up in a shallow grave before day's end?\n\nViolet was startled by the thunderous sound of hoofbeats. Sullivan looked alarmed as at least twenty men on horseback surrounded his camp.\n\nHe grabbed the arm of one of his men and shoved him toward Violet. \"Untie her immediately, and take off that gag!\"\n\nBut when the man took a step toward Violet, a bullet hit the dirt between them, changing his mind. Rifles were already aimed at Sullivan and his men.\n\nAs the posse dismounted and started handcuffing Sullivan's guards and collecting their weapons, Sullivan walked confidently over to a big, barrel-chested man who looked older than the others and remained seated on his horse. \"You're just the man I wanted to see, Sheriff Gibson. Callahan over here\"\u2014he gestured toward Morgan, who was still bound and gagged\u2014\"showed up last night and abducted Miss Mitchell. If my men hadn't rescued her, good Lord, who knows what would have happened to her. Arrest that scoundrel immediately!\"\n\nThe sheriff tipped his wide-brimmed hat back and smiled down at Shawn. It wasn't a friendly smile. \"Save it for the judge, Mr. Sullivan. Imagine my surprise, if you can, when a dead man walked into my office yesterday, and quite a tale Charles Mitchell had to tell. Oh, and even better, your own housekeeper confirmed every word of it.\"\n\nAs one of the men in the posse helped Violet to her feet and took off her gag and untied her, she saw that Sullivan no longer looked so self-righteous. In fact, he was scowling. \"I just took the burden off Dr. Cantry by letting Mitchell convalesce in my house. He should be thanking me, not accusing me of wrongdoing.\"\n\nSheriff Gibson laughed. \"Is that so? Then I'm guessing you don't know that he regained consciousness sooner than you thought and was awake to hear you and your sister discussing when and how to kill him?\"\n\nSullivan's face turned red. Gibson continued, \"So here's the thing, Mr. Sullivan. Abduction and confinement of good law-abiding folks doesn't sit well with our circuit judge. Falsifying a man's death and causing his family untold grief, when all along you've got the fella imprisoned in your attic, won't either. And here you are giving me even more evidence against you, out here trying to steal a couple of mines, hog-tying the two owners of those mines. The judge really won't like that charge, not when he's a mine owner himself, you know. But I do thank you, Mr. Sullivan. Been a long while that I've been hankering to tell you that you're under arrest, and that's what I'm telling you now.\"\n\n\"You're making a mistake, Sheriff Gibson,\" Sullivan said furiously. \"I warn you\u2014\"\n\nThe sheriff interrupted sharply, \"Like I said, save it for the judge. You know they hang horse thieves out here. Won't be long before they start hanging mine thieves, too. You better hope the judge hasn't reached that point yet. And don't think I won't be presenting my earlier suspicions alongside all these new facts, like those two mines on either side of yours that you miraculously managed to buy right before the owners had very odd accidents. But you were careful then not to leave a trail of crumbs. Weren't so careful this time, now, were you?\"\n\n\"I haven't killed anyone.\"\n\n\"That anyone knows about. But I have not one but two signed statements that you intended to commit murder. And I reckon I'll have two more before we leave here.\" He paused to look at Morgan, who'd been freed from his bonds, and asked him, \"Did he threaten to kill you in so many words?\"\n\n\"He was very clear that he'd kill Miss Mitchell if I didn't show him the way to my mine.\"\n\nThe sheriff glanced at Violet. \"Did you hear Mr. Sullivan say that?\"\n\n\"I can repeat every word exactly,\" she assured him.\n\nGibson grinned. \"Then I reckon it's a good thing I brought some paper with me so you both can write it all down. No need for you two to wait until the court convenes. Signed statements are just as good around here.\" And then his eyes pinned Sullivan again. \"The judge just might think that's enough to warrant a hanging. Stew on that on the way back to town.\"\n\n\"After my lawyer gets through with you, you'll never work in this territory again, Gibson!\" Sullivan snarled.\n\n\"Someone gag him.\" The sheriff's response drew a few chuckles from the posse.\n\nViolet rubbed her wrists and took a step toward Morgan, but the nasty look he gave her stopped her cold. That hurt, his not wanting to talk to her or share this moment of relief with her. She remembered the angry, possessive way he'd kissed her last night, and also the beautiful, passionate night they'd shared when he was so loving and irresistible, the many caring things he'd done for her. She would never forget any of that, but it was just as well that they keep their distance from each other, because she would be leaving soon. Yet she hoped she would have a chance to explain to him why she'd run off.\n\n\"Are you all right, Miss Mitchell?\" Sheriff Gibson was approaching her.\n\n\"I am now, thanks to you, Sheriff. I was so scared that you wouldn't arrive in time.\"\n\n\"We caught up to you last night, but didn't want to attempt to capture Sullivan while it was dark, which could have turned messy with men dying needlessly. But you weren't in any more danger. I left a couple men to watch your camp. This bunch wasn't going anywhere without my knowing about it. You were very brave to go along with Sullivan and lead him on a wild goose chase so Miss Hall could get your father out of Sullivan's house. They're safe at my office with Deputy Barnes. I reckon you and Miss Hall are the heroines of the day. Without you, Sullivan's ruthlessness and perfidy wouldn't have been exposed so thoroughly.\"\n\nShe blushed a little, glancing at Morgan to see if he'd heard the sheriff's praise and understood now that she hadn't betrayed him. He was within earshot of the sheriff's voice, but he wasn't looking her way.\n\nSheriff Gibson had followed her gaze, and addressed Morgan: \"Didn't recognize you at first without your beard, Callahan. Isn't this little lady amazing?\"\n\nMorgan still didn't look at her when he replied, \"She's the bravest debutante I've ever met.\"\n\nViolet blushed further with the realization that he'd never met any other debutantes, so he wasn't really agreeing with the sheriff.\n\nOnce the prisoners were secured and the posse was ready to depart, Gibson told Violet and Morgan, \"I won't be returning to Butte with you. I'm going to take half the posse and the prisoners and veer off to Helena where the territory judge is holding court this week. I don't want to wait for the trial to be held in Butte. That's just asking for a riot, and I don't doubt it will happen if Sullivan's miners get wind that's he's under arrest and they might lose their jobs if their employer gets convicted.\"\n\n\"But what about Sullivan's sister, Kayleigh?\" Violet asked. \"She knew my father was a prisoner in that house and was in on the plot to steal our mine.\"\n\n\"I went to their house to see for myself where your father had been kept and to confront Miss Sullivan for her part in it. She started crying and confessed that she's had to do whatever her brother ordered because she is utterly dependent on him, so she had no choice. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but I'm not partial to arresting women, so I told her to catch the next train out of town. The judge will decide if that family gets to keep their holdings here.\"\n\nViolet immediately thought of Katie. She didn't think the daughter should be punished for the father's sins. \"Other than Kayleigh, who knew exactly what her brother had been doing and seemed as rapacious as he was, I doubt the rest of his family knew how ruthless he could be.\"\n\n\"That family is rich as sin. I wouldn't worry about the rest of them.\"\n\nMorgan didn't look happy that any Sullivan was escaping justice, but then he'd come very near to dying today. But maybe his disgruntled look was just for her. She was still getting the cold shoulder from him. Even after she'd told him last night that she hadn't betrayed him. Even after he'd just heard about the part she'd played in their rescue. He had heard it, hadn't he? How could he not?\n\nNine men escorted them to Butte, but they were widely spread out along the road since Violet and Morgan didn't need protection now. Violet wasn't sure how she ended up riding next to Morgan a few hours later, but it was just after they passed his mountain, which was the perfect time to break the ice with him.\n\nShe glanced his way and asked, \"You aren't going...?\" She didn't say \"to your mine,\" just nodded back toward his mountain range.\n\nHe shook his head. \"And miss seeing Charley alive and kicking?\"\n\n\"I don't think he'll be kicking for a while. The ordeal has left him very weak. But you can't imagine how happy I was to find him alive.\"\n\n\"That must have been an incredible surprise.\"\n\n\"I confess, at first sight I was afraid he was a ghost! But of course that was silly, and yes, it was unbelievably amazing that he isn't dead after all.\"\n\n\"You're fortunate that someone in that house knew what Sullivan was up to and didn't like it.\"\n\n\"Yes, today would have turned out quite differently without Abigail Hall's help.\"\n\nHe still looked so unapproachable, reminding her of the bear she'd first met. She regretted thinking the worst of him, not that he'd been the best company those first few days she'd known him, but she'd been at her worst, too. While he'd protected her again and again, from wild animals, from muscle pain\u2014well, he'd tried to\u2014from outlaws. He'd even taught her to shoot so she could protect herself. And he'd danced with her under the stars! Yet she'd repaid him by disappearing without a word. She was afraid she might have hurt his feelings or his pride. And he'd obviously looked for her. All those days since she'd left his camp? No wonder he was so mad!\n\nShe'd been trying to speak normally, as if it didn't feel like they were complete strangers again, but she had to explain. \"You may not have guessed, but I was terribly distraught by the violent encounter with those two outlaws. When you went to work the next day as if none of it had happened, the horror of it all came back to me and I sort of panicked. I simply had to get back to civilization immediately, but you'd said you wouldn't take me until the following week.\"\n\n\"You could have said so, instead of taking off on your own when you didn't know where you were.\"\n\n\"But I did know. One of those outlaws mentioned Butte and gave me rough directions to town before you arrived to rescue me. He said it was only a half day's ride away, so I thought I could get there before dark.\" She wasn't going to mention that that hadn't happened, but did admit, \"Yes, it was beyond reckless, and I walked right into Sullivan's plot when his men found me before I got to town. But I was never a party to any of Shawn Sullivan's illegal machinations.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. You made your choice,\" he said, and spurred his horse forward, ending the conversation.\n\nWhat the bloody hell did that mean? But she was afraid she knew. He wasn't talking about trusting him to change his plans and take her to town if he knew she couldn't bear to stay at his camp another minute. Her \"choice\" had been to leave him instead of pursuing a relationship with him. With everything this man could make her feel, she wasn't sure she'd made the right choice." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "They arrived back in Butte by dusk. Violet went straight to the sheriff's office. Morgan followed her. Deputy Barnes immediately stood up from behind the desk. \"Been expecting you after one of the posse rode ahead to give us the good news. Heard congratulations are in order, that you were quite the heroine, Miss Mitchell.\" And then he glanced at Morgan and laughed. \"What happened to you? Misplace your beard somewhere?\" And then he laughed harder.\n\n\"Not funny, Deputy.\" Morgan glowered at him. \"Where's Charley Mitchell?\"\n\nMorgan left as soon as they were told which hotel Charles was in. Violet ended up following him now. All without a word to each other. And she was annoyed that the hotel happened to be the very one she'd been kicked out of\u2014Morgan's hotel. Yes, of course it would be. The one time Charles had come to town with Morgan, they'd probably both stayed there.\n\nShe wasn't happy about it. She even glared at the desk clerk, daring him not to speak to her when she asked for her father's room number and requested a room for herself for the night. The bloody fool actually looked at Morgan first to get his permission. And Morgan gave it with a nod.\n\nHer annoyance mounted over that ridiculous byplay. While Morgan asked for his messages, she marched upstairs and knocked on her father's door. She had to knock several times before he answered. She entered to find him lying in bed, looking as if he'd just awakened from a nap. Her anger was replaced by a burst of happiness. She was never going to get over this joy that he was alive.\n\nShe gave him a brilliant smile. \"It's done, Papa. Shawn Sullivan has been arrested and taken to Helena to be tried in a court of law.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful news,\" Abigail said from a chair by the window.\n\n\"Abigail! I didn't see you there.\"\n\nCharles chuckled. \"I keep telling her to stop watching me sleep.\"\n\nThe housekeeper stood up with a slight blush and approached Violet. \"I was just making sure he didn't need anything while we waited for you to get back. I'm very pleased you've returned safely.\"\n\n\"It all went as planned.\" Violet hugged the older woman. \"Thank you so much for everything you've done to help us. We couldn't have come through this without you.\"\n\n\"I'm just glad it all worked out. But now you're here, I could do with a nap myself. I was falling asleep in that chair. We'll see each other later, dear.\"\n\nViolet nodded and turned to her father again with another wide smile. \"We can go home now and\u2014\"\n\n\"Hell, Charley, you're skin and bones,\" Morgan interrupted as he came into the room moments after Abigail left.\n\n\"Not quite, though it feels like it,\" Charles admitted with a grin as he sat up. \"Good to see you again, partner.\"\n\n\"Not nearly as good as it is to see you,\" Morgan said with a chuckle. \"I'm sorry you had to go through that hell, but as your daughter told you, it's over.\"\n\n\"I slept through most of it, and you never knew it happened. We were both spared that, at least.\"\n\n\"Don't forget about the grief,\" Violet put in, but immediately regretted saying it. She joined her father, sitting on the edge of the bed. \"I'm sorry. It's going to take a while for me to let go of all the emotional upset Sullivan caused. Did you send word to Daniel and Evan that you're alive?\"\n\nHe extended an arm, and Violet moved closer to him so he could put it around her. \"Not yet. I will in the morning.\"\n\n\"No, I will. You're not getting out of that bed until you're ready.\"\n\n\"I'm not sick, dearest, just weak. Dr. Cantry was summoned to examine me and spent most of his visit apologizing for what happened. Needless to say, he won't be asking Dr. Wilson for any more favors. That fellow actually skipped town. The deputy checked. And Cantry's prescription was simply food and more food to get my strength back, but I can't seem to eat very much at one sitting yet.\"\n\n\"Abigail didn't go back to that house, did she?\" Violet asked.\n\n\"No, we got her a room here,\" Charles said. \"She's done with that family and mentioned returning to Chicago to live with her brother. I think I'm going to miss her. She cared for me the whole while and fussed over me like a mother hen once I woke up.\"\n\nViolet grinned. \"I'm good at fussing.\"\n\n\"You're good at bossing, sweetness,\" Charles corrected gently. \"Even in your letters!\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Let's call it fussing, shall we? But you don't have to part ways with Abigail Hall. Our home in Philadelphia is currently without a housekeeper, so you could offer her the job. And she can help you shop for furniture. I wouldn't trust that task to my brothers.\"\n\n\"What happened to\u2014?\" Charles started, but then sighed. \"This damned heart. If it hadn't caused me to hit my head that day, I would have paid off that loan in just one more week, thanks to Morgan. The situation was never supposed to turn so dire that your brothers would summon you back from London, but I'm so fortunate that you came.\"\n\n\"And now it's not dire, thanks to Morgan,\" she said.\n\nCharles smiled at Morgan. \"I understand you've been incredibly generous again in loaning my daughter enough money to stop her immediate worries. We'll need to discuss how to pay that back\u2014\"\n\n\"I've already done that, Papa,\" Violet cut in. \"Morgan and I struck up a new partnership agreement whereby Evan and Daniel will come west to work in the mine until they earn enough money to pay Morgan back, and then maybe\"\u2014she glanced at Morgan questioningly\u2014\"Morgan will agree to a fifty-fifty arrangement for the boys to continue mining.\"\n\n\"Your daughter needs a dowry for her English lord,\" Morgan said scornfully.\n\nCharles looked puzzled. Violet blushed and told her father, \"We can discuss England later.\"\n\n\"Any arrangement we made was discussed before we knew Charley is alive,\" Morgan said. \"He and I will discuss a mutually satisfactory arrangement when you aren't around.\"\n\n\"He's right, sweetness, you no longer need to concern yourself with business matters.\"\n\nFeeling a little hurt, she offered, \"Should I leave so you can do that now?\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Charles said, and hugged her more tightly to him. \"Morgan and I will find time to talk later. We're not going anywhere yet, and I'm certainly not leaving Montana until I hear the results of Sullivan's trial.\"\n\n\"That could take a few more days, at the very least,\" Morgan pointed out.\n\n\"I've already concluded that,\" Charles replied. \"And as long as there is going to be a delay, I intend to return to the mines tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow?!\" Violet and Morgan said almost at the same time, but Violet added, \"Out of the question. It's too soon for you to ride a horse.\"\n\n\"Nonsense, my dear. I might have to ride slowly, but I assure you that I can ride.\"\n\nHe wanted to retrieve his hidden money, she realized. And, while she was dying of curiosity to know where he'd hidden it, she was more concerned about his health.\n\nCharles added, \"I promise I'll stop at the slightest twinge, and I can rest up there at a camp for a few days. By the time we return, the sheriff should be back in town. And besides, I have a few things to pick up there before we go home. Mainly I left my pocket watch in the cabin. You know that watch is very dear to me. It's a symbol of love and the happy marriage I enjoyed with your mother, something I want to leave to you to ensure you're blessed with a marriage that is as happy as mine was. I'm not leaving the territory without it.\"\n\nTouched by her father's words, Violet hated having to tell him the bad news. \"It's not there. I checked your valise as soon as I thought about that memento.\"\n\n\"That's not where I kept it. I shaved every morning and kept my shaving tools in a bag on the shelf. I would put the watch in it every night to remind me to put it back in my pocket in the morning. Otherwise I forgot it. Dreadful habit of mine to forget about trinkets if they're not right under my nose.\"\n\n\"I forgot about that little bag of yours,\" Morgan confessed.\n\n\"No reason for you to remember it when you were always in the mine by the time I performed my morning ablutions. But the day I had the accident, I didn't shave. I'd already had a few twinges in my chest and didn't feel up to it. By noon I was feeling better and hurried out to the mine. You know the rest. Besides, I'm also going back to dig out my money. It appears I need to refurnish the house as soon as I get home, and that money will come in handy.\"\n\nDig it out, not up? \"Where did you hide it? I searched everywhere,\" Violet said.\n\nHe grinned playfully. \"You'll see.\"\n\nShe'd rather not. She'd rather talk him out of going back there. Morgan could gather her father's belongings and money and send them to him in Philadelphia. If he would. If he stopped being mad at her long enough to do them a favor.\n\nShe waited for him to suggest it, but instead Morgan said, \"I'll see if I can borrow a wagon tomorrow and get it fitted with a mattress for you. If you insist on going up to the mines, you can at least do it with a care for your health.\"\n\n\"You know that a wagon will make the trip even longer,\" Charles pointed out.\n\n\"Yeah, I know,\" Morgan said on his way out the door.\n\nViolet's mouth had dropped open, so she snapped it shut. Then she couldn't help saying in a grouchy tone, \"He always gets his way, doesn't he?\"\n\n\"That's been my experience, but it's usually all to the good, so it doesn't trouble me in the slightest.\"\n\nShe wished she could say the same." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Violet felt nostalgic as they approached Morgan's mountain and crossed the river near the spot where Morgan had taken her fishing. It felt so long ago, yet only a little more than a week had passed since then. It had been such a fun, idyllic day. They'd laughed, they'd talked, really talked, and without rancor for a change. She even smiled at the memory of dropping the fish on his chest and his reaction to it. Should she suggest another round of fishing tomorrow? Would he offer to go with her this time? Would he even remember how much fun they'd had that day?\n\nShe sighed. He'd refuse, of course, and then she'd be embarrassed for even asking. That wall of ice still stood between them, and that cold shoulder definitely kept her from indulging in fantasies that he could be more than a business partner to her.\n\nTexas rode in not long after they reached the cabin. He greeted Charles warmly. He merely looked at Violet and grunted, which caused her cheeks to go scarlet and Morgan to tell her, \"He searched for you, too,\" before he and Texas left the room.\n\n\"Is there something I should know about?\" Charles asked.\n\n\"Other than Morgan and I are back to being enemies, or at least he thinks so?\" she said drily, but immediately wished she'd kept that to herself.\n\n\"That sounds... extreme.\"\n\n\"It's not,\" she replied. \"It was extreme at the beginning when he didn't believe I was your daughter. Then when he did believe it, we got along. Now we don't again.\"\n\n\"Because?\"\n\n\"He hasn't said so in so many words, but I have to assume it's because I left the camp without telling him and he felt obliged to look for me\u2014and didn't expect to find me with his worst enemy.\"\n\n\"That wasn't your fault.\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't.\"\n\n\"I understand why he's angry that you ran off and put yourself in danger. But who can quibble with the results of your impulsive decision? I was rescued and Sullivan is in jail.\"\n\nShe couldn't tell her father about the other consequences of her impulsive decision, so she just smiled, then said, \"As for Morgan's still being in a snit about it, I don't see that it matters. He's your friend. He doesn't need to be mine, does he?\"\n\n\"The atmosphere would be more congenial if he were, but I suppose not.\"\n\nMorgan came back in, just long enough to hand Violet a stack of money. \"Your half of the reward Texas got for taking those bodies to town. I don't want it. You can put it toward your dowry.\"\n\nHe made the last word sound like a curse; it wasn't the first time that word had seemed to annoy him. She glared at his back as he left the room again.\n\n\"The atmosphere\u2014\" Charles began.\n\nViolet interrupted, \"Yes, I know, it's bloody chilly in here.\"\n\n\"What bodies was he talking about?\"\n\nShe groaned and joined her father at the table to tell him about the outlaws, the wolves, even her almost shooting Morgan for killing him\u2014might as well make a clean breast of it. Of course, there was one thing she couldn't mention. Her fall from grace.\n\nWhen she was done, he said the last thing she expected. \"Is he in love with you?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" Nonetheless, her heart leapt.\n\n\"It would explain his 'snit,' as you called it.\"\n\n\"So would a hundred other things,\" she exaggerated. \"Believe me, love I would recognize.\"\n\n\"These westerners are different from the people you've grown up with. They're quiet, restrained. When a man wears a gun, he pretty much needs to keep his emotions in check, so what he is feeling might not be so obvious to other people.\"\n\nShe smiled at him. \"I understand what you're getting at, but Morgan has been far from restrained. But I'll talk to him and see if I can muster up a truce at least for the duration of our visit here.\"\n\nShe just had to get up the nerve first, because it wouldn't be easy, would likely be most uncomfortable. Maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, at least he was amiable to her father.\n\nShe pushed that topic aside in order to appease her own curiosity. \"So where did you hide your money up here? I searched for it for days before Morgan loaned us the money to pay off the bank.\"\n\nHe grinned and stood up, leading her down the porch steps and around to the back of the house, then about ten feet beyond the little water hole. She watched as he slowly reached into the slag pile and pulled out a little sack. She laughed. Of course it would be in the one place she had decided wasn't worth checking. He showed her the tiny mark he'd made on the cliff face a foot above the top edge of the slag to indicate where he'd hidden his money. It wasn't big enough to notice unless you were looking for it.\n\nAfter a hearty dinner that evening, she took a quick bath in the stream. There was a tent set up in the yard when she returned. Morgan had already said she and Charles could have the cabin to themselves for the two nights they would be there. Bo seemed delighted with the arrangement. He was already lying in front of the tent, his tail wagging as she passed by. But Morgan wasn't in it yet, as she found out when she entered the cabin and saw him sitting at the table with her father.\n\nHe stood up immediately. \"I'll see you in the morning, then.\"\n\nHe wasn't saying that to her. He didn't even glance at her as he left. She gazed after him wistfully, missing the Morgan who at least talked to her. Her father rose too and crossed over to give her a warm hug good night.\n\n\"You can't imagine how glad I am to have you home again,\" Charles said.\n\nShe knew he meant back in America, so she didn't mention that they weren't home yet\u2014or that she wouldn't be staying once they were. That was another conversation she wasn't looking forward to. The few times she'd tried to broach it in the wagon on the way here today, he'd distracted her with another topic, so she had a feeling he'd guessed that she wanted to return to England and was avoiding the subject.\n\nThe next morning Violet woke up before her father and took her coffee out to the porch, as had been her habit during her stay at the camp. Morgan had come in while they were asleep to make the coffee. He'd left a basket of pastries on the table, too, and an assortment of fruit.\n\nShe stared at the entrance to Morgan's mine. The steel door was open, indicating he was in it. Once again, she thought about asking him if he wanted to take her fishing today. It would be such a perfect opportunity to mend that fence, as it were. Should she wait until he joined her and her father for lunch?\n\nBo caught her eye when he came out of the tent and trotted toward the stream. She started to call him to her, but stopped when she saw him reach his target. So Morgan wasn't mining after all, but sitting in the bed of flowers?\n\nRecalling how they'd tumbled into those flowers the night they'd danced, she left the porch to join him at the edge of the stream. She brought her coffee with her. He'd done the same. Because he'd known she'd come out on the porch as soon as she woke up and he didn't want to be there with her? She sat down next to him anyway.\n\n\"I thought you would be mining as usual,\" she said.\n\nHe glanced at her briefly. \"I always knew when I was ready to go home, I wouldn't give two hoots about this mine anymore. But I didn't expect to meet Charley and like him as much as I do. So your pa and I came to a new agreement last night, and the only reason I'm telling you this is because it cancels the one you and I had.\"\n\n\"I assured you that you would be paid back!\"\n\n\"Settle down, we're not rival miners now. We might have more to dispute, but your father and I don't, and I'd prefer you hear this from me. I've swung my pick for the last time. With Sullivan out of the way, I no longer have a reason not to let crews in here to deplete the rest of the silver from both mines or to form a real partnership, including an even fifty-fifty split with your family. One or both of your brothers can oversee the place until we can hire an experienced manager to run the operation. But the location no longer needs to be kept secret.\"\n\nAnd then it seemed to just fall out of his mouth as an afterthought: \"Why did you really leave?\"\n\nShe'd been waiting for him to look at her again, but even for that question he didn't, so she glanced down at the stream as well before saying, \"What I told you wasn't a lie, but there is more. Yes, I was still distraught because of the violence, but I was also appalled at myself for what happened afterward and beyond embarrassed about it. I simply couldn't stay any longer, but you weren't willing to take me back to Butte yet. You wouldn't even take me to town to pay off the loan. You sent Texas instead. So I took matters into my own hands.\"\n\n\"That's it?\"\n\nHe was looking at her now! She felt like groaning. \"If you must know, you were being too familiar.\"\n\n\"I was?\"\n\nShe blushed at the reminder that she'd started it. \"Afterward, you were.\"\n\n\"You would have preferred that I ignore you after we made love? Really? That wouldn't have made you spitting angry?\"\n\nBloody hell, she thought, of course it would have. She gave him a pointed stare. \"I'm going to speak plainly this once, then we will never mention it again. What we did can't ever happen again, and I was afraid you'd expect more of the same if I stayed.\" There. That was almost all of it.\n\n\"Probably,\" he said grudgingly.\n\n\"Then you understand!\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe looked away so he wouldn't notice her gritting her teeth. She was not going to tell him how much she wanted him, that even now it was hard to resist putting her hands all over him. It would be beyond the pale to admit how much he tempted her to sin again.\n\nBut it was also a sin to lie, so she cleared her throat and said softly, \"I was also afraid I'd want more.\"\n\nMorgan turned to her and gave her the most amazing smile, one filled with happiness, pleasure\u2014an invitation? \"So why can't it happen again?\"\n\nViolet gritted her teeth again. \"Because this isn't my world. I don't belong here. I'm going back to London where there's civilization, polite society, servants, indoor plumbing, fashionably dressed people...\" She couldn't finish because she started to choke up, realizing how much she was going to miss him when she left Montana.\n\nSo he finished the list for her. \"The fancy parties, the dancing, and all those dukes and earls, and, of course, Elliott. I see.\" He nodded as if he understood perfectly now. He smiled at her. \"Want to go fishing today?\"\n\nViolet jumped at the invitation. \"Yes!\" Then she smiled shyly. \"I was hoping you'd ask.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "The last two days at the mining camp had been idyllic for Morgan\u2014once he'd put his anger to rest. He was surprised at how easily Violet had managed to defuse it. The truth was, he didn't like being angry with her. And her reasons for running out on him had been valid. He'd had no intention of taking her back to town for at least another week. His usual two-week mining schedule was the excuse he'd given her, and he'd been glad to have one, because the simple fact was that he liked having her here and hadn't wanted to give her up yet.\n\nWhich was why when he'd had that long talk with Charley about a new partnership, he'd convinced his friend to come to Nashart with him to finish recuperating there. They just hadn't told Violet yet. Of course, that idea could backfire on him. She might just catch the train in Butte by herself to return to Philadelphia and then sail to England and that damned lord she wanted to marry, instead of staying with her father. Could she be that heartless? No. Thorny, yes, but not heartless. But she might insist on taking Charley straight home with her.\n\nBut while his anger was gone, there were still annoyances nagging at him. Violet's damn dowry, for one, and what it signified. After the intimacy they'd shared, he'd really thought she'd hand him back the money he'd given her for her dowry. Stupid of him to test her like that. But despite what'd they'd done, despite her confession that she'd feared she'd want more\u2014it brought a smile every time he remembered that\u2014she obviously still intended to marry her English lord.\n\nHe was also annoyed by how serious she'd sounded when she told him, \"What we did can't happen ever again.\" She'd closed the door before he could even try to open it again. But unlike anger, annoyances he could keep to himself, and he did. And she wasn't gone yet...\n\nThey got back to town late because they'd left the mines at noon. He didn't have much to bring with him, just his personal gear and Bo, since he was leaving all the supplies, including his mules, for her brothers to use. After getting rooms at the hotel, he went to see if the sheriff was back in town yet with news about Sullivan. He wasn't, so he sent off a telegram to Sheriff Gibson in Helena and another to the Mitchell twins to tell them to meet their father in Nashart.\n\nAnd he finally picked up his mail. There were three letters from his mother and one from his father. He read Mary's first, in the order in which they'd arrived, and laughed at the last one. All this time he'd thought his brother was trying to get out of his arranged marriage, only to find out it had happened over a month ago. And Degan Grant had been there to keep the peace. Morgan had even been invited to the wedding in the second letter, although Mary had tried to make it a surprise for him by telling him only, You'll want to come home for a brief visit by the twenty-third. But that had been last month. His father's letter wasn't a surprise, but it also made him laugh. Zachary had been unable to order him home, but now he tried luring him with the news that copper had been found on their property\u2014a great deal of it. What made him laugh was the line If you have to mine, do it at home! His pa would be glad that he was done with mining, but he wouldn't be happy about his next business venture. And he still wasn't looking forward to that argument.\n\nThe next day dragged by waiting to hear from the sheriff about Sullivan's sentencing. Violet had tsked about the delay, but Morgan had heard her assure Charley that she agreed with them, they couldn't leave without learning the outcome of the trial.\n\nMorgan left the two Mitchells alone, hoping Charley would get around to telling Violet he was going to Nashart if they had some time to themselves. And then he heard the rumor raging through town. Degan Grant was getting married right there in Butte. Morgan had to see that for himself, and all he had to do was follow the crowds. It appeared half the town wanted to witness the gunslinger's wedding.\n\nHe'd missed the wedding ceremony, but heard the sounds of merriment behind the church. He spotted the Grants immediately. Degan had that aura about him that screamed gunfighter and had even worn his gun to the altar. The little wife was unusual, too. She had the shortest hair he'd ever seen on a woman, ash-blond in color, and very dark eyes.\n\nAs he approached them, he caught Degan's eye and heard him say, \"Well, I'll be damned.\"\n\nThe pretty blonde whispered something to her new husband that Morgan didn't catch, but he extended his hand and introduced himself. \"I'm Morgan Callahan.\"\n\n\"I guessed as much,\" Degan replied, shaking his hand.\n\n\"Yeah, Hunter and I hear that a lot, how much we look alike. Congratulations on your wedding\u2014but please tell me you're not here because of me.\"\n\n\"I'm not, but why would you think so?\"\n\n\"I heard from some miners here that you were working for my father. I know he hates that I prefer mining to working with my family on the ranch.\"\n\n\"That's between you and Zachary\u2014and it's not why he hired me.\"\n\n\"So it's true? You actually brought about my brother's marriage to the Warren girl?\"\n\n\"I'd say Hunter managed that on his own,\" Degan said.\n\n\"I'm surprised. He really hated having that arranged marriage hanging over his head. I figured it wasn't going to happen unless he was dragged kicking and screaming to the altar.\"\n\n\"Believe me, nothing would have kept Hunter away from that wedding. You'll understand why when you meet his wife.\"\n\nMorgan smiled. \"I'm sorry I missed all the fun, but I struck it rich and will be going home for a visit as soon as I settle a dispute with a rival lady miner. And, no, I'm not asking if I can hire you! But maybe I can kiss this bride, since I missed kissing my brother's new wife?\"\n\n\"Not a chance.\" Degan put his arm around his wife's waist.\n\nMorgan laughed, insisting, \"I'm not like Hunter, who charms every woman in sight! But I'm not going to argue with the notorious Degan Grant, either. Have a happy marriage, you two.\"\n\nHe left and made his way back to the telegraph office. Still no reply from the sheriff, but he took the time to send word to his family. He didn't tell them that he was coming home\u2014he wanted that to be a surprise\u2014but he told them that he'd finally struck it rich. He also mentioned Violet vaguely. She was still a thorn he hadn't yet figured out how to extract from his life\u2014or if he even wanted to. And he mentioned that Degan Grant had got hitched. They would probably get a kick out of that.\n\nJust in case they heard from the sheriff before the end of the day, he went to the stage office and bought tickets for tomorrow, warning the man that he'd expect a refund in the morning if they decided to stay in Butte longer. As he returned to the hotel, a boy caught up with him and handed him a telegram. Morgan read it, then stuffed it in his pocket and went to find the Mitchells.\n\nBefore going upstairs, he checked the hotel dining room to make sure they weren't already there. They were. And it was uncanny how in a room full of people, his eyes went immediately to Violet. Cheeks still porcelain, thanks to her parasol; golden hair prettily coiffured tonight. She never had worn that silly hat again. He supposed he owed her a new one.\n\nShe was so damn beautiful, his violet with thorns. He wasn't sure he could let her leave the territory. He wasn't sure he could stop her. He wasn't sure he should try. She was a fish out of water here. She didn't belong in the West. She belonged in a fancy house full of fancy servants with a fancy English lord...\n\nHe growled under his breath and turned to leave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\"Good grief, he didn't see us,\" Violet said to her father, and stood up to wave and call out to Morgan before he left the doorway. When he reached them, she asked, \"You aren't hungry yet?\"\n\n\"I can eat.\" He caught the attention of the passing waiter, saying, \"Steak, and a lot of it.\" As he sat down, he said to Violet, \"You'll never guess who just got married.\"\n\n\"You are correct, since I don't really know anyone in this town.\"\n\n\"You'll remember this man. I heard he was in a gunfight near here while you were in town, that notorious gunfighter, Degan Grant. Half the town turned out to witness his wedding today.\"\n\nShe shuddered delicately. Charles noticed and put a hand over hers, forcing her to explain. \"I witnessed him shooting another man my first week here. So utterly barbaric. Dueling has been outlawed all over the world\u2014everywhere except here.\"\n\n\"It used to be a lot wilder here,\" Morgan said. \"Gunfights are not nearly as common as they were ten, fifteen years ago. You could say the West is growing up.\"\n\nHow utterly absurd. That would make the odds astronomical that she would see one in the street and then get dragged into another near the mines in just one month in the West, yet it had happened to her. But she didn't want to argue the point with Morgan. They'd been getting along well the last few days and she didn't want to ruin it.\n\nAnd she was managing to ignore how bloody handsome he was now\u2014well, not really ignore, that was impossible, but keep a tight rein on her prurient reactions to him. Her father's presence helped. He'd even joined them on that second fishing trip, though he ended up napping in the grass for most of it, so she hadn't been alone with Morgan. But Morgan had made that day fun again. Every single fish he unhooked for her he then tossed at her until she was throwing them back at him, and at one point she was chasing him to do so. And he talked a lot about his home, telling her about his friends, his family, what it was like growing up on a ranch with such a big family. She was going to have some nice memories of Montana mixed in with the bad when she left. When she... left. Good Lord, she felt tears starting! What the devil?\n\n\"We don't have them in Nashart,\" Morgan added with a pointed stare at Charles. \"It's a peaceful town.\"\n\nViolet blinked rapidly before she glanced up. She almost asked, \"Have what?\" until she recalled the argument she'd avoided. He was still talking about outlaws and gunfights, or the lack thereof.\n\n\"Which is why I'm looking forward to recuperating there,\" Charles said.\n\nShe frowned. \"In Nashart?\"\n\nMorgan answered, \"We can reach Billings in just under two days since the stagecoach travels day and night at top speeds, stopping only to swap out horses and drivers and to allow passengers a quick bite to eat. Then it's another day by train to Nashart. Texas will be bringing the horses, since traveling by horse takes two to three times longer. He's also agreed to show your brothers to the mines, but he insists on getting married to Emma first.\"\n\nShe tried not to show her conflicted feelings at hearing this surprising news. Another delay in getting back to England, but it would give her more time with her father\u2014and she wouldn't have to say good-bye to Morgan yet. She wished that didn't please her so much.\n\nBut she kept her tone neutral when she commented, \"I thought these stagecoaches were crowded.\"\n\n\"They usually are, which is why I bought all the seats on the one leaving first thing tomorrow, so Charley can lie down. Can't do that on the train. I want to see him get better just as much as you do.\"\n\nHe was right, of course. There would be three train changes on the way back to Philadelphia, even if she and her father took the express, and Morgan wouldn't be there to help with her father if assistance was needed. Another week or so of rest and Charles might be able to make the long journey home without difficulty, but not yet.\n\nBut then it occurred to her. \"Aren't we waiting to hear from Sheriff Gibson?\"\n\n\"I just got Gibson's telegram. There wasn't a jury trial. There rarely is with a circuit judge, especially when a lawman is present to testify to witnessing the crime. Sullivan got fifteen years for the abductions and planned murders that would have happened if he hadn't been caught, and another ten were added because he committed and plotted those crimes in an effort to steal a mine. Gibson was right, the judge really didn't like that charge.\"\n\n\"It's not enough,\" Violet said tersely. \"Not when his intentions were so clear. Had he succeeded, he would have killed all three of us to cover up the theft of the mines. And he falsified your death, Papa! The grief that caused me and Evan and Daniel is unforgivable.\"\n\n\"Of course it is,\" Charles said. \"But twenty-five years for a man his age pretty much amounts to a life sentence. It's certainly more than I was expecting, so I'm satisfied with the verdict.\"\n\n\"So am I,\" Morgan said. \"A ruling like this will send a clear message to other unscrupulous miners and businessmen in the territory.\" Then he asked Violet, \"So we're in agreement then? We catch the stage in the morning?\"\n\nHe'd been in doubt? But then her father added, \"Morgan has already telegraphed the boys for me, to tell them to meet us in Nashart.\"\n\nHearing that, she stood up immediately. \"Then I need to tell them to bring one of my trunks with them. I'm suffering from an appalling lack of clothes because I never expected to be here so long. Don't wait on me to eat.\" Violet hurried out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Charles grinned. \"That was easier than I expected. Are you sure she's in a hurry to return to England?\"\n\n\"She's mentioned more than once that she intends to marry a particular English lord in London. Has she really not told you yet?\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised she hasn't. She would consider it a delicate matter, because she knows it will disappoint me. When I let her go to London with her Aunt Elizabeth nine years ago, I never intended for her to live there permanently. I thought she had come home to Philadelphia to stay until you mentioned she has plans to marry in England.\"\n\n\"Could you forbid her to go?\"\n\n\"Not if it's what she really wants. That particular child of mine has been known to\u2014dig in her heels? Is that how you say it out here?\"\n\nMorgan chuckled. \"To say she's stubborn? It sure is, and I already knew that. But she's your only daughter. Her place is with you right now, at least until you're fully recovered.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt she intends to make sure of that before she goes anywhere. She may have tried a few times to broach the subject of her plans for the future, but I interrupted her before she could. I don't want her to go or to turn insistent about it. But I do owe her a full and honest discussion about what she wants to do.\" And then Charles gave him a curious look. \"You know, I've seen how carefree and happy you two can be when you think no one is watching. You get along exceptionally well, considering that you haven't known each other for very long. It's almost as if you've already formed a bond with Violet. So tell me, is her helping me to recuperate the only reason you think she should stay? Just for me?\"\n\nMorgan grinned, only slightly abashed. \"I can't deny I enjoy her company, when we aren't fighting\u2014hell, even when we are. I surely wouldn't mind exploring that more fully. So, no, I won't be happy if she leaves the country.\"\n\n\"Does she know that?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "As she prepared for bed that night, Violet couldn't stop smiling. She realized that, like her father, she was looking forward to seeing Morgan's \"peaceful\" town. Could it really be so different from bustling, overcrowded, and dangerous Butte? And she would be able to regale her cousins with a description of an authentic American cattle town when she returned to England.\n\nWith this unexpected detour to Nashart, it felt as if another weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The misgivings she'd been having about getting on the train with her father weren't only about his health; they were also about saying good-bye to Morgan. She was dreading that. It had nearly brought her to tears in the dining room tonight.\n\nYet it wasn't as if she could marry a man like him, even though he didn't look like a bear anymore. Before leaving London, she'd picked out the perfect husband. She'd been planning on marrying someone like Lord Elliott Palmer for at least six years, ever since she started talking and dreaming about love and marriage with her cousins. Morgan simply wouldn't do. He was excitement, passion, wicked pleasures, while Elliott was refined, sophisticated, and everything proper. There was just no comparison\u2014and besides, she was sure Elliott could be exciting, too. There hadn't been time for her to find out.\n\nShe was getting into bed when a knock came at the door, and she pulled the spread off the bed and wrapped it around herself like a robe. It must be her father\u2014hotel employees wouldn't knock at that hour. So she opened the door wide instead of just a crack.\n\nMorgan must have considered that permission to enter her room, because he did. She stood there with one hand still on the doorknob and the other making sure the spread was covering all of her nightgown. It didn't help her composure that she'd just been thinking about him.\n\nBefore he even turned around to face her, he said, \"Your pa pointed out to me that you might not know that I'm partial to you.\"\n\nPartial? What a tepid word! He favored her? Was fond of her? Or he just wanted her? But she'd already surmised the latter, because she had those exact same feelings about him. But just because they wanted each other...\n\nHe turned, their eyes met, and she sucked in her breath. There it was again, that overwhelming attraction that flamed up between them. She forced herself to keep still. She wasn't going to run to him no matter how much she wanted to. She didn't have to. In the blink of an eye, he was beside her, his hands on her shoulders, his body pressing in closer, then his mouth. Her back was shoved up against the wall and part of the still-open door, which slammed shut. As he kissed her, he slipped one arm around her waist, lifting her and guiding her right leg up around his hips. She raised her left leg and didn't hesitate to wrap both around him, or wrap her arms tightly around his neck.\n\nShe couldn't count how many times she'd let such an encounter play through her mind since that momentous night in his cabin, but now that it was actually happening again, she knew her imaginings had lacked the real passion, the explosion of feelings, the want, the need, the heat that were overwhelming her now. She even felt a little frustration that their lovemaking wasn't happening fast enough, yet at the same time such delight that it was happening at all, despite her warnings and proper disclaimers that it couldn't.\n\nHer nightgown was hiked to her waist. Having been alone in her room, she had nothing on underneath it. Incredibly, the friction of the rough fabric of his pants pressing between her legs brought her first orgasm while she was still pressed to the wall. She dissolved, her head dropping back, his lips scalding her neck as little gasps escaped her. He carried her like that to the bed, both of them falling down on it in unison so her hold on him didn't break.\n\nBut he was kissing her deeply again, so she didn't pay much attention to his unbuckling his belt and taking off his pants, or lifting her nightgown, until he stopped kissing her and pulled the thin cotton garment over her head. Her loose hair fanned out behind her. His lips were back on hers, and then he was inside her, thrusting exquisitely, causing gasp after gasp and then no breath at all as the second orgasm rose up and washed over her. He joined her in that one. Sharing it gave her the most sublime feeling.\n\nShe didn't want to move, probably should, but didn't want to. The bubbly warmth she was feeling inside was worth savoring. He rolled to her side and pulled the sheet up over them. He even gently lifted her long hair and draped it over the top of her pillow for her, then lay down next to her. But when his arm went around her as if he meant to spend the night there, her eyes widened and she rolled out of bed. Fell out would better describe it, but she didn't hit the floor because she straightened in time. But, realizing she didn't have a stitch on, she dropped down below the edge of the bed and pulled the sheet her way. When she finally stood up, somewhat covered, she saw he was lying on his side, his head propped up with a hand, and completely naked because she'd just swiped the sheet from him!\n\nShe'd done it again, tossed out all thoughts of propriety and rectitude. She was appalled by her behavior once again. She swung around so she couldn't see him before saying, \"Get dressed!\"\n\nShe heard vague sounds that assured her he was at least putting something on; then he said, \"I know that wasn't supposed to happen again, but it was a mutual impulse, we both loved it. Think about that before you run back to England.\"\n\nAll she got out of that statement was that he did want to treat her like a wife without offering to make her one. Of course she would refuse, but he could at least ask!\n\nShe could hear him walking away. She turned to see he'd only put his pants on and was carrying his shirt and boots. Before he reached the door, she had to make him understand why they couldn't keep doing this.\n\nIn a stiff tone that mimicked the one her aunt used when she gave one of her scolding lectures, she said, \"A lady always has a chaperone with her to guard her virtue for this very reason\u2014so things like this don't happen. Due to unexpected circumstances, mainly my maid's quitting as soon as we reached America and my brother's being detained at the train station in Philadelphia, I was forced to travel alone. I thought I could manage, and I was managing\u2014until I met you.\"\n\nHe didn't look the least bit contrite when he turned around with a grin. \"I can do that. You want me to?\"\n\nHer virtue was gone, and she wasn't sure what he was suggesting, unless...\"You can't chaperone me when you are the very thing from which a chaperone is supposed to protect me!\"\n\n\"Sure I can. I can beat myself up if I have to.\"\n\nNow he was just teasing, and amazingly enough, she burst out laughing. Good Lord, exquisite sex and then he made her laugh? There was something good to say about a man like him, after all. But she still pointed a finger toward the door.\n\n\"No hugs or cuddles?\" he asked with a raised brow.\n\n\"Go.\"\n\n\"At least a kiss good night?\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes, repeating, \"Go!\"\n\nBut she grinned the moment the door closed behind him. Incorrigible bear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Morgan had told her to bring a pillow, had yelled it from the other side of her door early that morning. She'd told him not to be absurd. When she had to sleep sitting up in a moving stagecoach that night, she kept leaning in his direction, waking, and apologizing. She realized then why he'd suggested a pillow.\n\nThe fourth time she fell toward him, he pulled her closer, put her head on his shoulder, and said, \"I can't sleep if you keep crashing into me. Stay put.\"\n\nViolet would have argued if he hadn't made it seem like she'd be doing him a favor. But when she woke again in the daylight, her head was on his chest instead of his shoulder, and her hand rested on it, too. His arm was around her back, holding her close to him. She leaned away slowly in case he was still sleeping. And caught her father watching her. She wasn't fully awake yet, or else she would have blushed.\n\nShe whispered across the aisle to him, \"Did you get a good night's rest?\"\n\n\"Better than you two did, I imagine,\" Charles said in a normal tone of voice, adding, \"And he's awake.\"\n\nNow she really was embarrassed, but Morgan straightened up in his seat and said, \"We'll have our own beds tonight in Billings, and get you settled in at the ranch tomorrow.\"\n\nThe ranch? She hadn't imagined they would be staying with his family in Nashart, though she probably should have after her father had said he was looking forward to his stay there. And it might be nice. Morgan had told her enough about his family to make her feel like she already knew them. She wondered how he would behave around them.\n\nHe didn't come knocking that night at the Billings hotel. She kept listening for it, not that she would have opened the door. Maybe he'd been serious about appointing himself her chaperone. The thought was silly enough to make her smile.\n\nAfter riding in a stagecoach for two full days and all of one night, Violet found the train ride on the third day quite comfortable. Bo seemed to prefer it, too. They pulled into the Nashart station late in the afternoon.\n\n\"Well, hell, so much for surprises,\" Morgan said when he looked out the window and saw the crowd on the station platform.\n\nHe immediately got up and jumped off the train. Violet heard hoots and hollers, whistles and voices raised in excitement, and when she looked out the window, she saw Morgan being overwhelmed with bear hugs and pats on his back, and some kisses, too.\n\nHis whole family was there, apparently. The older couple were obviously his parents, the three young men also obviously his brothers, but the beautiful copper-haired woman who greeted him so warmly, even kissing his cheek\u2014who the bloody hell was she?\n\nViolet stood up and put her bustled jacket back on. It had been too warm to wear it on the train, but with Morgan's family outside, she wanted to look her best and was glad she'd worn her fancy rose traveling ensemble today. Parasol in hand, she offered her arm to her father.\n\n\"How do you think they found out he was on this train?\" she said as they headed to the exit together.\n\n\"Texas, probably,\" Charles guessed. \"He would have sent word to his fianc\u00e9e that he was coming home for good, and Emma could have told the others.\"\n\n\"That's a shame. I was looking forward to seeing the surprise on their faces, but instead it's Morgan who got surprised.\"\n\nViolet stepped off the train first and turned to help her father down to the platform. She wished she hadn't heard the whisper behind her: \"You think he brought the thorn home with him?\"\n\nShe didn't blush, but she did purse her lips in disapproval of that ridiculous name Morgan had called her more than once. And he'd obviously referred to her that way in a letter to his family, since one of them had just used the silly name. She swung around to see who had made that remark, but found they were all looking at her.\n\nMorgan took that moment to make introductions. \"Ma, Pa, I'd like to introduce my partner, Charles Mitchell, and his daughter, Miss Violet Mitchell.\"\n\nMary Callahan stepped forward to shake their hands, saying, \"I'm Mary, my husband is Zachary. Any friend of Morgan's is a friend of ours, so y'all are welcome to stay at our ranch.\"\n\n\"You are most kind, Mrs. Callahan,\" Violet said.\n\nBut Zachary wanted to know, \"What kind of part\u2014?\"\n\nMorgan cut in, \"Pardon me, Pa, I'd like to finish the introductions first.\"\n\nHe went on to do that, ignoring his father's frown. Zachary Callahan appeared to be in his fifties, with coal-black hair and dark-brown eyes fanned with laugh lines, hinting at a good-natured temperament. He didn't look like a man who could intimidate the bear, yet she knew Morgan was dreading the fight he expected when he got around to sharing his plans.\n\nAs for Zachary's sons, John\u2014the hot-tempered one, according to Morgan\u2014had black hair and brown eyes and a look all his own, darkly brooding, one might say. Cole, the youngest, had brown hair and eyes, and was shorter than his brothers by a few inches. He had boyish good looks, sort of like a younger version of all of them. They did all resemble each other in certain ways\u2014except that Hunter and Morgan looked very much alike. If she didn't know they were a year apart in age, Violet would have thought they were twins.\n\nMary Callahan was the most surprising member of the family. She was petite but she didn't look delicate. She wore her long brown hair in a single braid lying over her shoulder and had keen blue eyes. Morgan's eyes\u2014Hunter's, too. She was wearing a skirt made out of rough material that might actually be rawhide. When she moved to say something to her husband, Violet saw it wasn't a skirt at all, but very wide pants. A female cowboy! She even had the wide-brimmed hat, which she held in her hand, a red bandanna around her neck, scuffed boots, and, most intriguing of all, a gun belt around her hips.\n\nAs for the copper-haired beauty with emerald-green eyes who had caused Violet a brief moment of pique, she turned out to be Hunter's new wife, Tiffany, the feud-ender. Violet was glad to meet her now that she knew she was married. They were the same age and might become friends. It would be so nice to have a friend here, someone with whom she could share confidences as she'd done with Sophie.\n\n\"You're from England, aren't you?\" Tiffany asked Violet.\n\n\"London,\" Violet replied.\n\n\"You have a lovely accent. I look forward to hearing about all the latest fashions and social events.\"\n\nHunter chimed in, \"My wife used to be a fancy easterner, now she's a fancy westerner, but she'll still talk your ear off about fashions.\"\n\nBut with the introductions over, Zachary was quick to seek the answer to his earlier question. \"Mr. Mitchell is your partner in what?\"\n\nMorgan ignored it and asked, \"How in blazes did you know I was on this train?\"\n\nZachary raised a brow, not missing his son's evasion, but he let it go and answered, \"That's a mite funny. We got a telegram this morning from Abe Danton, who moved to Billings last year. He thought he was doing us a favor letting us know that Hunter had just boarded the eastbound train and should be home soon. Hunter had a good laugh about it, since he was out front with his brothers waiting for me and your ma before heading out to the range.\"\n\nMorgan snorted, insisting, \"Hunter and I don't look that much alike.\"\n\nHunter elbowed him. \"From a distance we do, and stop complaining. You should be thankful you share my devastatingly good looks\u2014\"\n\n\"Devastatingly good\u2014\"\n\n\"So my wife tells me. Too bad our other brothers, the runts, missed out and resemble the mules in the south pasture.\"\n\n\"Hey, now,\" Cole mumbled.\n\nBut John actually took a swing at Hunter, who apparently expected such a response from him and stepped out of the way, allowing the punch to catch Morgan's shoulder, which prompted Morgan to put his brother in a headlock. But John managed to trip him and they both went down, sprawled at Violet's feet.\n\nShe jumped back to avoid getting knocked down herself and brandished her parasol at them, scolding, \"Children have better manners!\"\n\nZachary nodded, Mary looked at her in surprise, and John blushed furiously as he scrambled to his feet. Charles protectively put his arm around Violet's waist. But Hunter was bent over laughing. It must have been infectious, because now the other Callahan men were laughing, too.\n\nMary didn't find it funny and admonished sternly, \"She's right, you're no better than wild broncos. Keep those fists in your pockets, John. And stop teasing your brothers, Hunter. All of my boys are beautiful.\"\n\nHunter grinned. \"Only a mother would say that.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll say this, if no one else will,\" Zachary began, his eyes on Morgan. \"It's about damn time you came to your senses and got yourself home, Son.\"\n\nViolet noticed Morgan stiffen, even if no one else did. \"I never lost my senses, Pa. But if you want to have this argument right here and now\u2014\"\n\nMary cut in, \"You'll do no such thing. We're tickled pink you're home, Morg, all of us are. Now, let's get you home and settled, then you can regale us with your exploits and explain how you came to have a partner, and why on earth you would call this beautiful lady a thorn.\"\n\nMorgan actually grinned. \"She's named after a flower.\"\n\n\"Violets don't have thorns, boy,\" Zachary pointed out.\n\n\"Don't they?\"\n\nMary snorted. Violet felt a blush creeping up her cheeks, and she knew the others would notice it because all eyes were on her after those ridiculous remarks. And when she saw Morgan still grinning over that offensive name he'd given her, she pressed the point of her parasol to his chest and said, as politely as possible, \"I may have thorns, but you, sir, have the manners and temperament of a bloody bear.\"\n\nThe Callahans looked stunned. Mary broke the silence, saying, \"Well, then, shall we go?\"\n\nAs Mary led Violet to a buckboard wagon, she whispered, \"So, how did my son behave like a bloody bear?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Violet blamed her reactions at the train station on how unusual Morgan's family had turned out to be. She hadn't expected his mother to be a cowboy\u2014well, cowgirl, but still... She hadn't expected his father to be so testy, though she should have, considering what Morgan had told her. She hadn't expected one of his brothers to throw punches. But it was obvious that Morgan was glad to be home, despite that tense moment with his father. This was the Morgan she liked, relaxed, quick to laugh, not so much carefree but definitely tolerant\u2014or at least, hard to provoke, which was definitely a good thing for a man as big as he was.\n\nMary insisted that Violet ride with her on the perch of the two-seater buckboard, while Tiffany rode in the back with Charles. A horse had been brought from the ranch for Morgan and he rode with the rest of the men, fanned out on both sides of the buckboard, not close enough to hear the uncomfortable conversation Violet was having with his mother.\n\nIn low tones Violet tried to reassure Mary that she'd been exaggerating when she called Morgan a bear, but admitted he'd had quite a shaggy beard when they first met, that he used it to disguise himself as a mountain-man trapper to hide the fact that he was mining. Which led to a whole different topic about keeping the location of his mine secret. She finally eased out of the subject, since it was Morgan who should be telling his mother about his mine, not her. She simply commented on the beautiful landscape they rode through\u2014green, grassy fields and magnificent snowcapped mountains in the distance.\n\nIt didn't take long to reach the Callahans' home, and on the way Tiffany pointed out her own home, a pretty house surrounded by trees and fronted by a lovely lake. And then the ranch loomed ahead, with so many buildings that it looked like a little village. Violet was impressed by the size of the ranch, and was relieved it wasn't as primitive as she'd imagined.\n\nMorgan let out a whoop. \"It's good to be back at the Triple C!\" And he raced his brothers to the house.\n\nTwo stories high and built of smoothly cut boards, the house was big and spread-out, with a long, covered porch in front. There was nothing rustic about it. The moment Violet stepped inside, she loved the ambience, half western, half eastern, a very homey balance.\n\nThis was where Morgan had grown up. The front room alone could have been his playground, it was so big and open, with no walls separating the parlor, hall, and foyer. She could picture him and his brothers playing here, running through the house, riding horses outside. What a wonderful place for boys to be raised.\n\nMary took her straight upstairs to the large bedroom that would be hers, saying, \"There's a bathing room downstairs off the kitchen that's got its own pump. You're welcome to first dibs on it before dinner.\"\n\nViolet smiled. Well, the house was a bit rustic after all, with one shared bath downstairs. But she would make do. She wasn't there to be critical, and in fact, she already liked this house and would probably enjoy her stay there for a week or two.\n\nAfter her bath, she changed into her only other skirt and blouse that weren't stained, then went to find her father. She found him asleep in bed. A tray holding an empty plate sat on the night table. She smiled. Of course her father was tired after their long journey. How thoughtful of the Callahans to bring dinner to his room.\n\nDownstairs she found most of the Callahans in the large room. They were standing as they talked and laughed, all of them holding drinks, even Mary. She saw them all vaguely because her eyes went straight to Morgan and stayed on him. He hadn't shaved yet and his cheeks were shadowed with stubble, but he was wearing a string tie and a light-blue shirt that matched his eyes\u2014and he was still too bloody handsome. She felt a little giddy just being in the same room with him.\n\nAnd then the two missing Callahans walked through the front door, Hunter and his wife, Tiffany, who was wearing a sparkling evening dress. Violet felt like groaning. She hoped her brothers would arrive soon so she'd have more clothes to choose from.\n\nMary raised a brow at her daughter-in-law. \"I hope you didn't ride over in that getup.\"\n\n\"I did,\" Tiffany said, but pointed her thumb at Hunter. \"In his lap on his horse.\"\n\nThat got a few chuckles, but Mary teased, \"You didn't need to dress up, gal. I'm not breaking out the good china tonight.\"\n\nTiffany grinned. \"Don't begrudge me. How often do I get the opportunity? And your houseguests are as eastern as I am. They will appreciate that we're not all cowpunchers here in Nashart.\"\n\nViolet certainly did. Mary urged everyone into the dining room then, and Violet ended up sitting directly across from Morgan\u2014not by choice; it just worked out that way after Tiffany insisted Violet sit next to her. Platters and large bowls were already being passed around the table, so she didn't think it would be too difficult to keep her eyes off Morgan long enough to eat.\n\nThere was a lot of noise, with many people talking all at once, but that quieted down once everyone started eating. So Mary's voice was quite clear when she said to Morgan, \"I hope you brought your shaving razor home with you.\"\n\nViolet smiled. So Morgan and his brothers got their penchant for teasing from their mother. Morgan glanced at Violet before he laughed at Mary. \"It was the bear remark, huh? She explained it to you?\"\n\n\"Barely any skin visible on your face, Morgan? Really?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know. Didn't have a mirror, didn't care. I wasn't there to look pretty.\"\n\nHunter was laughing, but still got in, \"So you really got rich?\"\n\nMorgan nodded. \"I accomplished what I set out to do\u2014well, half of it.\"\n\n\"And the other half?\"\n\n\"None of your damn business, Brother.\"\n\nSo he'd told no one yet about his plans for an emporium, not even his brothers? Or was he just making sure that his father found out first? It could get uncomfortable around here once they learned he hadn't come home to join them on the range again. She hoped not.\n\nAnd then she heard next to her, \"Have you heard yet how Hunter and I met?\"\n\nShe glanced at Tiffany. \"To end a feud?\"\n\nTiffany huffed, \"That silly old thing should have ended long before I was born, but no one got around to saying enough is enough, so poor Hunter was sacrificed to end it by joining our two families through marriage.\"\n\n\"I only viewed it as a sacrifice before I met you, Red,\" Hunter clarified.\n\n\"And that's what I was getting to, how we met.\" Tiffany proceeded to regale Violet with how she'd assumed the identity of the housekeeper her father, a neighboring rancher, had hired, only to get snatched up by the Callahans as a practical joke on her father, though they did actually need a housekeeper, too. \"And I'd promised my mother that I would stay in Nashart for at least a month to give Hunter a chance to woo me, so it was a perfect opportunity for me to get to know him while he didn't know who I really was. Then I could honestly tell my mother that I'd met him and he wouldn't do. Trouble was, he most certainly did do\u2014he's a little bit irresistible once you get to know him.\"\n\n\"Only a little?\" Hunter complained.\n\n\"You know exactly what you are, darling,\" Tiffany said, and blew a kiss to her husband before grinning at Violet. \"Now, tell me how you met Morgan.\"\n\n\"He abducted me out of my hotel room and dragged me into the wilderness.\"\n\nThere was silence; then the laughter started. Violet would never have said it if she wasn't sure they would think she was joking, and they did. She smiled to confirm it, then looked at Morgan for help. \"You tell them.\"\n\nShe thought he'd give them a modified version, but she failed to notice his wicked grin. \"I thought she was a con artist working for a ruthless mining company owner who was trying to steal my mine.\"\n\nThere wasn't any laughter now, and Zachary demanded, \"Did you abduct her, Son?\"\n\nAppalled, Violet jumped in to rescue them both. \"It was just a misunderstanding that we quickly sorted out.\" After explaining the strange circumstances she'd confronted when she arrived in Butte and her need for a guide to take her to her father's mine, she simply said, \"So I was pleased that he arranged that trek into the wilderness.\"\n\n\"Walked right into your trap, didn't I?\" Morgan grinned.\n\n\"You wanted information, I wanted information,\" she reminded him pertly, then said to Tiffany, \"It was a rough few days to begin with, but as I said, we got it all sorted out.\"\n\n\"All the while he looked like a bear,\" Mary added with a disapproving look at Morgan.\n\n\"Well\u2014yes,\" Violet answered.\n\nTiffany asked, \"A cuddly bear or a grizzly?\"\n\n\"The latter. Quite frightful, actually.\"\n\n\"Enough about me,\" Morgan growled.\n\n\"Not nearly enough,\" Mary insisted. \"We have a whole year to catch up on, Morgan. You didn't exactly write very often and shared barely anything of note when you did.\"\n\n\"Because there was nothing to tell. I mined for a year and nothing else. I was single-minded about it because the sooner I reached my goal, the sooner I could come home.\"\n\n\"We thought it would've been sooner,\" Cole put in. \"That you would have hired a crew to mine for you.\"\n\n\"I thought so, too, until I found out how cutthroat it is in that area. One mine owner in particular was willing to kill to get my mine, so I had to keep the location of my camp a secret, which meant no crews, and I had to do the mining myself. That routine only got interrupted when Charley's daughter showed up. She reminded me of things I was missing\u2014like family. And the threat has been dealt with, so Charley and I will hire a manager to run the mines now and get crews in there to work them.\"\n\n\"So you're not going back?\" Mary asked.\n\n\"I'll go back every so often to make sure it's running smoothly and the manager is doing a good job, but it won't be to stay.\"\n\nShe gave him a brilliant smile, then called for the maid to bring in dessert. There was more teasing, more laughter, but thankfully, no more personal questions.\n\nWhen they stood up to leave the table, Morgan came around to take her arm and whisper, \"Come with me. I have two things to show you.\"\n\nShe was surprised when he led her to the back of the house, through the kitchen, and outside toward the cluster of other buildings. She remembered thinking Morgan might be used to gazing at pastures with animals from the front porch of his ranch house, but the only thing out front would be a clear view of the setting sun in another hour or so.\n\n\"What are all these buildings for?\" she asked.\n\n\"There's a stable, there's a barn. Ma likes to say we're half farm, though Pa vehemently objects to that term. But we do keep enough farm animals\u2014chickens, pigs, a few dairy cows\u2014to be self-sufficient when it comes to eating. And, of course, steak is brought in from the range. She even has a vegetable garden that one of our former cooks started a while back. I think the only thing we fetch in town anymore is grain for bread. The long building is the bunkhouse, but there's also a washhouse and a number of storage sheds.\"\n\nHe led her into the barn, where she saw bales of hay, a wagon, Mary's buckboard, and two dairy cows in their own stalls. There were a few other stalls, but they were empty, and it was mostly just a big open space with a loft where more hay was stacked. She didn't miss seeing the cat up there staring down at them as they continued toward the back of the barn.\n\nThen she saw Bo sitting on his haunches, but he barely glanced at them, and she finally noticed why. He was keeping his distance while he avidly watched another dog curled in the corner. Or rather, he was watching all the babies playing around the other dog.\n\n\"Oh,\" she cooed, unable to take her eyes off the puppies.\n\n\"They aren't wolves,\" Morgan remarked with a chuckle. \"Cole said they're around two months old now and ready to leave their mother. Take your pick. One of them is yours if you want it.\"\n\nShe couldn't help throwing her arms around his neck and hugging him, then immediately dropped to her knees before he could return that hug. There were four of them in assorted colors\u2014no, five, the smallest was still nursing. The mother was medium-sized and all golden, but had pointed ears, so Violet couldn't imagine what mix of breeds she might be. She started picking them up. Only one was all gold like its mother, and one was mostly gold with black patches; another was gold and brown, the fourth brown and white, and the runt appeared to be all black. When the runt moved away from the dam, she saw that its face was actually golden, the black only starting at its forehead. She picked that one up and fell in love.\n\n\"Him,\" she said.\n\n\"Is it?\"\n\nShe didn't know and held it up for him. \"You check.\"\n\n\"Not a him,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled. \"Even better. You realize you couldn't have given me a nicer gift.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Yeah, I had a feeling.\"\n\n\"It can come inside the house, correct?\" she said on her way out of the barn, the puppy in her arms.\n\n\"I'd say it will whether it's allowed to or not,\" he said, following her.\n\nAnd then she stopped. \"Oh my.\" She was staring at the beginning of a magnificent sunset.\n\n\"That was the other thing I wanted to show you. Let's head to the front porch where you can get an unobstructed view.\"\n\nShe nodded. They made their way to the long swing on the porch that she'd noticed when they arrived; it hung from the ceiling and had room for two. She sat down, and Morgan joined her there and pushed a little with his long legs, making the swing rock slowly. At the mining camp, the sky was obscured by all the trees, but here she could appreciate the beauty of Montana's big sky.\n\nShe petted the puppy in her lap. Morgan slipped his arm around her shoulders. He probably thought she didn't notice because she was so amazed at the flaming colors in the sky. She noticed. She noticed everything about him.\n\n\"I bet you never saw a sunset like this in London,\" he remarked.\n\nShe laughed. \"No, there's too much fog and coal smoke!\"\n\nThere were other beautiful things in London, but she didn't mention them, because nothing could really compare to this view and how happy she felt sitting here sharing it with him.\n\nShe went to sleep that night with her very own puppy curled in the crook of her arm and memories of that lovely little interlude on the porch." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "The next morning on her way downstairs to take the puppy outside, she heard Zachary demanding, \"Then where the hell did Morgan go?\"\n\nAs she reached the bottom of the stairs, she could see most of the parlor and the couple in it. Zachary hadn't been talking to her, but both of Morgan's parents looked at her when she came into view, so she shrugged. \"I haven't seen him today.\"\n\n\"He didn't mention his plans to you when you sneaked off with him last night?\" Zachary asked.\n\nViolet objected to what he was implying, but she didn't blush. Instead she raised Tiny, the name she'd given her precious gift, and said, \"He took me to the barn to let me pick out one of the puppies for myself.\"\n\n\"At least it's not a pig,\" Zachary grumbled, and headed out the front door.\n\nMary chuckled when she saw Violet's confused look and explained, \"Tiffany kept a pet pig in the house while she lived with us. Go ahead and take your pet outside to start its training. Use the side yard. Her ma favors that area, so the pup will recognize the smell and know what to do. And don't let it sleep in your bed yet, or you could wake up to wet sheets.\"\n\nViolet's eyes flared. The puppy had woken her, licking her cheek. She hadn't even thought to check the sheets.\n\nMary grinned. \"I'll see if I can find some old newspapers and a box for you to put the pup in at night. And the coffee's hot. There's fixings to eat in the kitchen. We're not formal about breakfast, so get a plate and sit wherever you like. I'll take you out for a tour of the range later, if you like. Find me when you're ready.\"\n\nViolet smiled. \"Thank you. I'll take a plate up to my father, too.\"\n\nA little later Mary took her out to the range to see where the cattle were grazing. There were no fences out there, so cows that wandered had to be brought back to the herd; and because the herd was so big, it needed to be moved to new grazing pastures often. But she hadn't expected the sheer size of that herd, more than a thousand cows. No wonder it took the whole family plus a lot of cowboys to manage it.\n\nThen in the afternoon Tiffany came by to take her for a tour of her house, a short ride away. Violet laughed when she saw how many servants worked there, which caused Tiffany to whisper, \"They're all from New York and they may be hard to keep. I've already heard complaints about how isolated they feel here. They miss the bustle and excitement of crowded city streets. But they haven't been here long, so I hope they'll fall in love with Montana as I did.\"\n\nViolet was impressed by the home. It was built with lumber, but the inside was furnished and decorated as finely as any home in Philadelphia, or London, for that matter. Tiffany explained, \"Hunter and I took our wedding trip back east to pick out all the furniture. The house was finished long before the furnishings got here, but it was worth the wait.\"\n\nViolet could have told her that waits like that would soon be a thing of the past, but again she said nothing about the emporium Morgan planned to open. She hoped he would break the news to his family soon. She was beginning to feel uneasy about their reaction.\n\nAfter they settled in the parlor with coffee and pastries, Tiffany asked bluntly, \"You and Morgan, is there something we should know about?\"\n\n\"No,\" Violet replied a little too quickly. \"He helped my father when he most needed it, so I'm grateful to him.\"\n\n\"It's probably something he does naturally,\" Tiffany guessed. \"I heard he has the most friends of all the Callahan brothers. Hunter draws women like bees to honey\u2014or he did\u2014while Morgan draws lasting friendships. The way Hunter tells it, Morgan can make each of his buddies feel like his best friend. I guess he's charismatic that way.\"\n\n\"So is my father. That would explain why they became friends so fast.\"\n\nTiffany nodded. \"Morgan hasn't been home since I got here, so I was really looking forward to meeting him. But I sense some sort of tension and, well, I assumed it was because of you.\"\n\n\"No, but the tension should ease up in a few days\u2014or get worse! I'm sorry, I really can't say more about it.\"\n\nTiffany laughed. \"So mysterious. I love it!\"\n\nWhen Violet returned to the ranch, she found her father sitting on the porch. She laughed at him. \"You just aren't going to stay in bed, are you?\"\n\n\"I'm not supposed to. Rest was defined as doing nothing strenuous other than eating more than I can stomach. I'm also supposed to slowly work in some exercise. Walking about a house got full approval.\"\n\n\"I hadn't realized Dr. Cantry was so specific in his recommendations. We should probably visit the local doctor this week, too, or find out if he'll ride out here.\"\n\n\"I can make the trip to town if we borrow Mary's buckboard. But sit down.\" He waited for her to do so, then took her hand in his. \"It's time we talk about your future. I confess I've been dodging the issue, because I love having you back and don't want to see you go. I think it may have been a mistake to let you stay in England for as long as you did, because you appear to view it as your home now, where you want to marry and have a family. But you need to remember that you have a home with me and your brothers, too, Vi. However, whatever you decide, I will honor your wishes because I love you and want you to be happy.\"\n\n\"I know you do, Papa.\"\n\n\"No matter where you are, soon you will be an heiress again with a dowry that will rival that of a duke's daughter. Just keep in mind that you can have your pick of husbands in this country, too. You needn't choose only from the men available in England.\"\n\n\"I thought I knew what I wanted, but now I'm not so sure,\" she admitted.\n\n\"There's no rush! Take your time and think about what you really want. Just know that I'm on your side no matter what.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Well, if you are up to walking, what I want to do right now is introduce you to my new puppy.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Violet was still on the porch with Tiny asleep in her lap when Morgan returned to the ranch. Her father had already gone in to take a nap before dinner, so no one was there to see how brazenly she stared at Morgan from the moment he came into view. He had dressed up a bit fancy today, wearing an eastern-style coat and a string tie, even polished boots, though the gun belt ruined the effect. Had he visited his friends? Or a woman?\n\nThe last thought irked her a little, so she wasn't exactly smiling when he sat down next to her. But he was. Whatever he'd done today had apparently made him happy.\n\nBut his first question was about her. \"How are you getting on here? Comfortable enough?\"\n\n\"Yes, your family is very friendly\u2014well, aside from your father. He seems a bit cantankerous.\"\n\n\"He only gets that way when he has a bone to pick and he can't get to it. They're all still on the range?\"\n\n\"I believe so,\" she replied. \"Your mother took me out there for a tour. I was amazed to see so many cows in one place.\"\n\n\"Cattle,\" he corrected as he reached into his pocket and handed her a strip of rawhide. She would have dropped the ugly thing if he hadn't nodded at the puppy. \"Give her this and maybe she'll leave your shoes alone.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Puppies eat shoes?\"\n\n\"Dogs will gnaw on them at any age. I laughed like hell when I saw Bo trotting off with one of my boots one day. We always had a dog or two around here when I was young, just never in the house where they could get near the boots.\"\n\nShe set Tiny down on the porch to let her sniff the strip of leather. She latched on to it immediately and plopped down to start chewing it. \"It's safe for her to eat?\"\n\n\"She's not going to eat it, only chew it. Throw it away when it gets soggy.\"\n\nShe nodded, still watching the pup. But Tiny appeared to lose interest in the rawhide and stood up and moved away from them, sniffing at the floorboards. Guessing what would happen next, Violet quickly scooped up her pet and took her to the side yard. She heard Morgan laughing behind her.\n\nWhen she came back and took her seat again, she said, \"Your father was looking for you.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised. I was scouting the town to figure out where I want to build my emporium. Nashart grew while I was gone. There's one intersection on the main street now that's filled with stores and businesses on all four corners, but there's another partial intersection with only one street coming in perpendicular to the main road, so I bought the property on the other side. It took a while to convince the mayor to sell me what will one day be a whole street and half a block on either side of it. Since he has no plans in the works yet for that section, it was just a matter of haggling. And it's perfect, or will be by the time I'm done with it. I won't need it all, but now I can control what gets built there. Now I can have that talk with my pa.\"\n\nShe raised a brow at him. \"You were holding off until you bought the land first? Why?\"\n\n\"Because Pa could have stopped me cold if he knew my intention. He and Mayor Quade are poker buddies. He could easily have pulled a few strings to get Quade to refuse to sell me any part of town. Quade did in fact ask me a few times if Zachary approved of my buying such a large parcel.\"\n\n\"How did you answer?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I didn't. I smooth-talked him away from Pa's opinion by stressing how pleased my mother is going to be with the new business.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"So you implied that because your mother was in favor of it, of course your father must be, too?\"\n\n\"Something like that. But I also assured him that what goes up on that street will be businesses the town doesn't have yet, which will draw a lot more people to Nashart\u2014and a lot more women.\" He laughed. \"Which is what sold him and got me a good deal. Nashart has always been short on women who aren't already married\u2014and the mayor is a widower.\"\n\n\"It sounds like it's really happening. I confess, I find it hard to believe that a cowboy-turned-miner will now be happy working in a shop.\"\n\n\"This is just the beginning. I'll have to do a lot of traveling, to purchase all the things I want to sell. I'll start with the big cities in the East, and eventually I may want to travel to Europe.\"\n\nSo he did have bigger plans than spending every day in a shop in Nashart. \"That sounds exciting. France is known for fine craftsmanship in furniture. And England\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped, not wanting to remind him of her future plans, but the simple word England had done it. He remarked, \"Maybe I'll visit you in London on one of my business trips. But in the meantime, would you like a tour of town tomorrow? I can show you where I plan to build. We can make a day of it and have lunch in town.\"\n\nSpend the whole day with him\u2014alone? But she'd made her stand about that, so she replied, \"I'll see if my father is up to it.\"\n\n\"Charley doesn't need another bouncy ride this soon. And you'll have the whole town as chaperones. It's not like I have a bedroom there to lure you into\u2014though I could arrange for one...\"\n\nShe could tell he wasn't teasing because she saw the desire in his eyes. Her pulse started racing at the thought of being in bed with him again. No, she wouldn't let herself be that reckless. But she did want to go to town with him, so she teased, \"I suppose it will be a good time for you to test your chaperoning skills.\"\n\nHe laughed, but then she gestured toward the approaching dust cloud. \"Since you're likely to get cornered for that 'talk,' I think I'll take Tiny down for another spin around the side yard, then visit her littermates.\n\n\"Good luck,\" she added as she walked down the stairs.\n\n\"If it gets loud, cover your ears!\" he called after her with a chuckle.\n\nShe didn't think he was teasing. She did expect it to get loud, so she moved toward the back of the house so she wouldn't hear it. But the two men's voices grew loud enough for her to recognize an angry tone, if not the exact words, until there was a really loud yell: \"The hell you did! No son of mine is going\u2014\"\n\n\"Pa, it's a done deal. It's what I spent a year working for. And I'm damn well old enough to make my own bloody decisions!\"\n\nViolet's eyes flared when she heard him say \"bloody.\" His use of the Britishism made her grin.\n\n\"Not in my house, you don't!\" Zachary yelled before a door slammed and it got quiet.\n\nThat wasn't the least bit amusing. Had Morgan just been kicked out of his own home? He could probably use a little encouragement.\n\nShe headed back to the porch, but slowed her steps when she saw that Zachary was still there, not Morgan. She was put on the spot when the older man pinned her with angry eyes. \"Did you put him up to this, gal?\"\n\nShe slowly continued forward. \"I haven't known your son for very long. His decisions have nothing to do with me. However, I do know he's starting a new business. It's for his mother, your wife. He told me about all the times he and his brothers had to ride to town and then return here only to tell Mrs. Callahan that what she'd ordered and was waiting for hadn't arrived yet, and how disappointed she was. He wants to make sure she's never disappointed again. That's why he went searching for gold and silver ore, because he knew you wouldn't finance such a venture. Or would you have loaned him the money?\"\n\nHe sat back in his chair with a sigh. \"You spend your whole life building something to leave to your children, and then they don't want it,\" he grumbled. \"I probably wouldn't have been open to his idea\u2014unless he explained it like you just did. All for his ma, huh? I can't rightly argue with that, much as I love that gal.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should tell Morgan that.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should mind your own business, missy.\"\n\nWhat an ornery old cuss, Violet thought. If she'd known him better she might have made a sharp reply, but she said nothing more and left him to stew over what he should or shouldn't have said to his son.\n\nShe went upstairs to see if her father was awake. He probably was, considering all the noise she could hear emerging from an open door a few doors down the hall from her room. She set Tiny inside her room, then went to investigate. She stopped in the doorway to see Morgan slamming a bureau drawer shut and throwing a pile of clothes on the bed, where his saddlebags and a valise lay open.\n\n\"You probably don't need to do that,\" she remarked.\n\nHe glanced at her but didn't stop what he was doing, and there was anger in his tone\u2014just not for her. \"Nothing is changing my mind, certainly not that old coot. I love him, but he's still treating me like a boy. Hell, I crossed that bridge five years ago. I think Pa failed to notice.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I'm sure he noticed. But parents will always treat their children like children and try to do what's best for them. They aren't always right. However, I think he's come around. You probably don't need to take a sword and shield to dinner, either.\"\n\nHe stared at her a moment, then laughed and walked over and pulled her into his arms, hugging her. \"So you're my good-luck charm now? What the heck did you tell him?\"\n\nWords caught in her throat, being this close to him again. All she wanted to do was kiss him. She came so close to putting her arms around him and doing it.\n\nBut she managed to step back into the hall and say, \"Just what you should have told him first: that you got the idea for the emporium from your mother. That's all he needed to hear. He does have a soft spot for her, you know.\"\n\nShe hurried on to her father's room before she changed her mind about kissing Morgan. Good grief, how could she marry Lord What's-his-name when this man tempted her beyond reason? Because it was what she'd always dreamed of\u2014and yet, Morgan was the one filling her dreams now. He seemed to be with her every bloody night!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Morgan stopped the buckboard in front of the house to wait for Violet. His mother was leaning against the porch post drinking her coffee. She was dressed for the range, just hadn't left yet, and since they hadn't spoken privately after he'd made his announcement about the emporium last night at dinner, he wasn't really surprised.\n\nShe'd been pleased last night. After she got over her amazement, she'd laughed a lot. His brothers had teased and were already calling him \"shopkeeper.\" Hunter had even ribbed, \"You'll have to put your gun away, or your customers will think you're there to rob the place!\" His father had been mostly silent, but he'd smiled a few times as he'd watched Mary express her delight.\n\nBut this morning his mother said, \"You're really doing this?\"\n\n\"Dig out your old catalogs, circle everything that caught your eye, that you ordered, that you thought about buying but didn't, and leave them in my room. Yes, I'm really doing this. 'Buy it, have it in your home the same day,' that's going to be my motto\u2014at least for Nashart. I might even name the emporium East Comes West.\"\n\n\"I love the idea, Morg,\" she assured him. \"Don't think for a minute that I don't. But I loved having you on the range with us, too.\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving the territory, Ma. I may even get back on the range someday. But for now, this is the only thing I want to do. My store may never sell a damn thing out here, but it's going to be fun creating it, and very satisfying to see you shopping in it.\"\n\n\"What about Miss Mitchell?\"\n\n\"I'll give her a tour of town today and show her my property, if she'll stop primping and get herself down here.\"\n\n\"That's not what I meant. You fancy her?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Who wouldn't?\"\n\n\"Have you told her?\"\n\n\"She's already picked out an English lord to be her husband. She's going back to London. And I'm making sure she has a dowry for it.\"\n\nMary laughed. \"Now, that's not how you get the girl. You give her a choice\u2014but first you make sure she knows she has a choice. Do I need to tell you how to spill the beans properly?\"\n\nMorgan snorted. \"You think I can't say it?\"\n\n\"Have you ever?\"\n\n\"No, but how hard can it be?\"\n\n\"Pretty hard when you're not sure of the answer,\" she replied.\n\n\"Well, that's not holding me back. It's because I do care about her that I have to let her go. She doesn't belong here, Ma.\"\n\n\"Neither did Tiffany, but you can't get that gal to leave now. You don't see it because you grew up here, but Montana has its own charm. Maybe you should ask Miss Mitchell to help you design your store. That might delay her leaving and give her time to start liking the place. Actually, who better than a young lady of London society to advise you on what's fashionable, what women like, and what fancy stores look like in the big cities?\"\n\nMorgan laughed. He was sold on his mother's idea as soon as she said the word delay, but he also liked the part about asking Violet for advice on d\u00e9cor and what merchandise to stock. But he teased his mother, saying, \"I'm not opening a dress shop.\"\n\n\"At least stock some bonnets!\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes, because now he had to. Anything his mother wanted. That was the point, after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "They had already driven down every street in Nashart so that Violet could see everything the town offered before Morgan took her to the land he'd bought, just a long stretch of dusty ground with some grass and a few trees that intersected with Nashart's main road. But then she saw the stacks of lumber. \"You're ready to start building?\"\n\n\"I bought up all the lumber in town and ordered a lot more,\" he explained. \"And I'm thinking about offering the owner of the stable on the main road and the owners of the three other buildings next to it an opportunity to relocate to my new street so I can put the entrance to my store right on the main road. What do you think?\"\n\n\"Visibility from Nashart's main road would be ideal if you can manage it, even if you do have an entire street of your own to work with back here.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Oh, I can manage it, since I'm their landlord now.\"\n\n\"But the size of the building for your store will depend on what you plan to sell. Which is?\"\n\n\"Furniture and silverware to start with. The Melling brothers who buy my silver make everything you can think of: jewelry, candelabra, knickknacks, dinnerware, picture frames, even fancy mirrors, so I'll be going to New York to visit them soon. Oh, I'll also sell bonnets.\"\n\nShe was delighted. \"Really?\"\n\n\"Ma mentioned it this morning.\"\n\n\"Well, that will certainly draw the women in town. So a silver section combined with jewelry, that you might want up front. The furniture will take up the most room because you will probably want to display full sets of it, and at least two sets each for bedrooms, dining rooms, and parlors. What about a second floor?\"\n\n\"I was thinking I'd live up there myself.\"\n\n\"But you may end up needing a second floor for the store\u2014and do you really want to climb two flights of stairs to the third floor to go home at the end of the day?\"\n\n\"I'd still like my own place here in town.\"\n\n\"Why? Your family's ranch isn't far from here.\"\n\n\"And if I get hitched?\"\n\n\"Hitched to what?\"\n\nHe laughed; she grinned. She did know what the phrase meant in Montana. But when they left his new property to have lunch, it ended up being all she could think about. He was already planning ahead for when he got married\u2014just not to her. He'd had many opportunities to broach that particular subject with her. The times they'd made love were prime examples of when he should have gotten down on his bloody knee just so she could say no. Damnit.\n\n\"Why the sour face?\" he asked when she set the restaurant menu down. \"Nothing on the menu appeals to you?\"\n\nShe cast off her jealous thoughts and dredged up a smile for him. \"No, I was just thinking that you've been talking about a store bigger than any I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"I have the room for it, so why not?\"\n\n\"Indeed. In big cities, there isn't much land available, so shops are squeezed in wherever there is space. But with your big store, you will need more than a few employees.\"\n\n\"I've already asked around. There're only two men in town willing to work for me who don't already have jobs, and neither of them wants to do any selling.\"\n\n\"There are employment agencies in the big cities that can hire employees for you, but if you do bring people in, you will need to provide them with someplace to live. Perhaps build rooms in the back? Or you could build your own boardinghouse for your employees next to the store.\"\n\n\"Another good idea I hadn't thought of.\"\n\n\"And what about a warehouse to store your merchandise, or are you going to make your customers wait, as your mother did, when you need to restock?\"\n\n\"You're amazing,\" he said with a wide smile. \"I never really thought that far ahead.\"\n\n\"So think about it. When you buy in bulk, you will get discounts, which will raise your profits. You did plan on making money at this, correct?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"That wasn't the goal, but I suppose it would be a nice bonus.\"\n\n\"And the rest of your street? You'll have room for a boardinghouse, a warehouse, even a house for yourself. You've got both sides of the street to fill.\"\n\n\"Only because the mayor wouldn't agree to prevent any saloons going in, so I took the whole parcel. But it's probably a good investment. I can lease the land to other merchants, or just wait and see what the town needs and put the stores up myself.\"\n\nShe started to laugh. \"So not just an entrepreneur, but on your way to being a business tycoon?\"\n\n\"No, just thinking ahead, mainly making sure this particular street doesn't attract any rowdiness.\"\n\nShe raised a brow. \"You promoted your town as peaceful, as I recall.\"\n\n\"Cowboys will still raise hell on a Saturday night.\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" But her thoughts had raced ahead, and she suggested, \"An ice cream shop! I haven't seen one here. And a bookstore or a library.\"\n\nNow he laughed. \"Let me finish designing my store before I start thinking about others. But by all means, start a list. And maybe think about sticking around to help me bring it all together.\"\n\nThat suggestion sort of fell out there. He wasn't even looking at her when he said it. And she actually wished she could be there to see his finished dream. If she didn't have to get back to that lord\u2014what the devil was his name? Staring at Morgan, it simply wouldn't come to her.\n\nAnd then she realized what he meant. \"Are you offering me a job?\"\n\n\"No, I was thinking more about a partnership.\"\n\nHer eyes flared. In his store? Or in his life, as his wife? His store, of course. That was not how a man proposed marriage. And a business partnership would require her staying here and being tempted by him indefinitely...\n\nShe assumed he would give her time to think about it, which was good, because she didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm with her answer. His store was an exciting venture\u2014but Morgan was the real excitement, the man she wanted to be partnered with in every way. Oh, good grief, having only half of the partnership she wanted would never be enough for her.\n\nShe almost said no immediately. She didn't, but she would have to say it eventually." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "\"What are the odds?\" Morgan said as they left the restaurant.\n\nViolet glanced at him, about to ask what he meant, but he wasn't looking at her. He was gazing down the boardwalk. She squealed in delight when she saw her brothers hurrying toward them. Indeed, what were the odds of seeing identical twins in town who weren't the Mitchell brothers? She laughed and ran ahead to hug them.\n\n\"Why didn't you let us know you were arriving today?\" she asked.\n\n\"We did,\" one of them\u2014Daniel?\u2014said. \"I sent the telegram to Butte as soon as I bought the train tickets and got the date of our arrival here. You must already have left by then.\"\n\n\"No matter, you're here! And you must be anxious to see Father. We're staying at the Triple C ranch with his partner's family, and\"\u2014she turned to make sure Morgan was still behind her\u2014\"this is his partner, Morgan Callahan. Introduce yourselves, I'm not even going to try.\"\n\nHe laughed and did\u2014it was Daniel\u2014but told her, \"I'm making it easy for you. My hair got long while I was detained, and I decided not to cut it. I'll wear this queue for now, until you get used to us again.\"\n\nEvan was shaking Morgan's hand. \"We can't thank you enough, Mr. Callahan, for sending us that money, first to ease the urgency of making the loan payments, then to actually pay off the loan. Vi, you should have seen Mr. Perry's face. He looked so disappointed.\"\n\n\"I wanted to throw the money in his face, but Evan wouldn't let me,\" Daniel added. \"You can't imagine what a relief it was to pay off that loan. Thank you, Mr. Callahan.\"\n\n\"Charley was, is, my friend,\" Morgan replied, then grinned. \"And your sister just had to remind me of that with a bit of nagging.\"\n\nViolet gasped. \"I don't nag!\"\n\n\"Charley?\" Evan asked.\n\nShe tsked. \"That's what Morgan calls Papa.\" But she wasn't letting her brothers off the hook. \"Daniel, why and where exactly were you detained?\"\n\n\"My tailor had me thrown in jail for not paying my bills.\"\n\nEvan quickly added, \"With the first money that arrived, there was enough to hold off Perry and pay off Dan's debts to get him out of jail. But that was a hellish month, Vi, grieving for Father, worried sick about you when we didn't hear from you again, all while the clock was ticking down on the house.\"\n\n\"Well, you'll be glad to know that the man responsible for faking Father's death and causing us that grief is on his way to prison, but I'll let Father explain that later. I'm sure you're eager to see him, so shall we?\" She pointed them toward the buckboard in front of the restaurant.\n\nMorgan helped her onto the driver's seat to ride next to him again, so she had to turn in the seat to converse with her brothers.\n\n\"Papa did exactly what he set out to do: he's found a new fortune, thanks to Morgan's benevolence. You two won't have to work in the mine, but one or both of you will need to oversee the miners who will do the work, at least until a manager is hired and until we've earned enough to pay back the loan Morgan gave us. But Papa and Morgan can explain that in more detail later. So you can both stop worrying\u2014and that means you won't need to marry that heiress now, Evan, unless you want to.\"\n\n\"No!\" He laughed. \"It was merely an option, and a very unpleasant one. She's rich as sin but doesn't even feign being nice.\"\n\n\"He's politely not saying she's insufferable and arrogant, and he was being overly kind when he told you she was pretty, because she's not,\" Daniel put in. \"But we thought it best not to mention that when we had all that other bad news to tell you the day you got home.\"\n\n\"Good of you to spare me, but next time, don't. Well, there won't be a next time.\"\n\n\"I'm excited to be here,\" Evan said. \"I never dreamed we'd get to see this part of the country.\"\n\n\"I feel the same,\" Daniel said enthusiastically. \"So I volunteer to manage the mine.\"\n\nBut Evan objected. \"We may have to fight over it, Brother.\"\n\n\"Mines,\" Violet corrected. \"There are two of them side by side, and we have an equal partnership with Morgan. We can figure out who goes or if you both go later.\"\n\nThey were halfway to the ranch when Evan said, \"Vi, I just remembered! You'll need to send someone with a wagon for your trunks.\"\n\n\"Trunks? I just asked for one.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you didn't say which one, so we had to bring all of them to make sure you got the right one.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of it,\" Morgan told her, then added in a whisper, \"You're happy around them, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Of course I am, they're my brothers.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Another good reason for you not to run back to England.\"\n\nWas that a subtle way of asking for her answer to his partnership offer? But he wanted her to help run his store here in Nashart, and her brothers would be near Butte\u2014but they wouldn't be an ocean away, either. Was Morgan playing underhanded, or just sweetening the pot?\n\nShe might be able to put off answering him until she was ready to leave, so she could continue helping him in the meantime. She wanted to fantasize a little longer about how wonderful it would be working beside this man permanently. She just had to ignore for now the one stumbling block: how inappropriate it would be to partner with a man while she was an unmarried woman. It just wasn't done. She was sure her father would forbid it.\n\nHer brothers' argument about whether they should rent a carriage while they were in Nashart caught her attention. \"Stop it,\" she ordered. \"There are no carriages to be had\u2014\" She broke off, and gave Morgan an excited glance. \"A carriage-maker! For one of the shops on your new street. Or you might even bring in a few carriages yourself and add them to your emporium's inventory.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I like seeing you like this, open, bubbly\u2014bossy.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I'm not bossy.\"\n\n\"She is!\" both brothers said in unison." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "The stay in Nashart was turning out to be most pleasant. Violet loved advising Morgan about his fancy emporium; in fact, it was nearly all they talked about that week. And soon the mines would be earning an incredible amount of money for both partners. Daniel and Evan had left a few days ago to manage them temporarily since they both found the prospect interesting. Morgan spent hours instructing both of them on everything they needed to know to start mining.\n\nWhile Morgan could have gotten his friends in Nashart to help him build his store in just a few days once all the lumber had arrived, Violet had reminded him that it wouldn't be grand enough for the distinctive furnishings he intended to sell, so he'd sent off a few more telegrams to the Melling brothers in New York, asking them to find an architect as well as an experienced manager for him.\n\nTexas got married the very day he arrived back in town, too eager to make Emma his wife to wait for a traditional wedding to be arranged, so only Emma's family witnessed the ceremony. Two days later, he left to take Daniel and Evan to the mines\u2014but Emma went with them. No more separations for those two, a thought that made Violet sad because it reminded her that she would soon be separating herself from her own family\u2014once again. Which had sparked an argument\u2014with herself. But her brothers helped end it by stating a simple truth.\n\nBoth were angry with her when she got around to telling them her plans. But it was Daniel who said, \"It may take months for Father to regain his usual vigor. Are you really going to leave us before then?\"\n\n\"I could return with my husband.\"\n\n\"An English lord visiting America? Must you marry him, Vi? Nine years was too long for you to be over there, and you want to make it forever?\"\n\nShe'd started to cry, and emotion won out. It was that word forever. And she'd already been leaning toward not going. It was definite now.\n\nAnd today\u2014today she was getting married. Well, maybe. She wasn't exactly sure how it all came about, but she was certain it had started with Mary Callahan, who came into the dining room just as she and Morgan were finishing lunch. He had business in town and had just stood up to leave. He kissed his mother in passing. Mary stared after him for a moment before she turned to Violet and remarked, \"He's partial to you.\"\n\nMorgan had used the same word back in Butte, but it hadn't been clear what he meant by it, so Violet asked his mother, \"What exactly does that mean around here? Something more than fond?\"\n\n\"Hell, yeah, a lot more. And it's obvious. How come you don't see it?\"\n\nActually, she did see it when he looked at her, touched her, did nice things for her; it was just that she'd never heard it. But Morgan was a man of action, not a fancy talker. And, as she knew from playing poker with him, he held his cards close to his vest.\n\nWith a big smile on her face, she ran upstairs to find her father. Stepping into his room, she said, \"What would you think about my staying here and marrying your partner?\"\n\nHe put down the book he was reading, stared at her for a moment, then laughed. \"I think that would make me incredibly happy. He already seems like a son to me. And I must confess that I saw this coming\u2014well, I hoped. So I suppose I should also confess that I haven't needed to convalesce here, sweetness. I was just giving you and Morgan time to realize you never want to part. You can tell him you both have my blessing.\"\n\nDelighted, she sat in the chair next to his bed to make a few confessions of her own, how her old dreams of marrying an English lord had waned in comparison to being partners with Morgan in his store\u2014yes, he'd asked her to be his business partner\u2014and how love was so very confusing, but temptation wasn't. Yes, she even said that to her father! And she admitted that she'd known for a while now that she wanted to marry Morgan, but now that she was sure of how he felt about her, she didn't want to wait another moment, wanted to be married today.\n\nIt was late afternoon when she went downstairs to see if Morgan had returned. He hadn't, so she rode to town to find him. She could wait for Morgan to do the asking, but she couldn't imagine how long that might take. It was a momentous decision for her to do the asking instead, and if she thought about it long enough, she wouldn't. So she rode straight for the church first, then set out to find Morgan. She was impatient by the time she spotted him leaving the telegraph office.\n\nShe galloped toward him, reined in abruptly, and said without preamble, \"Marry me by sundown. The preacher has been informed. My father has been informed. You can tell your parents.\" And she rode off just as abruptly with her cheeks scalding from a deep blush.\n\nThe trouble was, she felt like her old self in Nashart, especially after being with her brothers this week, so she'd gotten a bit bossy. There was no other excuse for what she'd just done, ordering him to marry her instead of asking as she'd intended. She was mortified! How could she face him again? How could she not?\n\nThose thoughts raced through her mind as she rode back to the ranch. But when she came to Tiffany and Hunter's house, she slowed down. She could hide there for a while. But as soon as Tiffany opened the door to her pounding, she cried, \"I ordered him to marry me today!\"\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"I didn't give him a chance to say anything!\"\n\n\"But you beat him to it?\"\n\n\"I did what?\"\n\nTiffany couldn't stop laughing long enough to answer, but when she finally did, she said, \"It was only a matter of time, honey. Everyone guessed it would happen soon. Morgan is probably so relieved that you beat him to it and did the asking. Why wait, after all, when you both know it's what you want? And don't worry about a thing. I'll get you to the church on time. Did you specify a time?\"\n\n\"I told him by sundown.\"\n\nTiffany giggled. \"How western of you. I bet that made him laugh.\"\n\nIf she hadn't left him shocked. If he wasn't already riding out of the territory...\n\nBut she stood in the church late that day as the sun set, wearing one of her white evening gowns trimmed in lilac satin, more sedate than one of her ball gowns. Tiffany had fetched it for her, since Violet was too afraid to return to the ranch and run into Morgan if he was back there. Tiffany even supplied her own wedding veil for the occasion. And sneaked Violet into town early so they wouldn't run into any of the family. She'd even refused to let Hunter into the house while they were getting ready. Tiffany Callahan was turning out to be a wonderful friend.\n\nHer father, along with Morgan's family, started arriving at the church, followed by most of the people in town. Word had spread fast. She wished the Faulkners could have been there, too. What a long letter she would have to write to Sophie and Aunt Elizabeth! Morgan's brothers tried to talk to her when they arrived, but Mary shushed them, which was a good thing, because the slightest wrong word could make Violet bolt, she was that nervous. Morgan hadn't arrived yet, and the most nerve-racking part was standing at the altar waiting for him. Traditionally the groom waited for the bride. But nothing about this wedding was traditional, including the possibility the groom wouldn't show up for it\u2014although his family must expect him to or they wouldn't be there, which was why she hadn't run yet.\n\nAnd then he walked down the aisle toward her, her bear, amazingly handsome in his fancy black suit, wearing the biggest grin. He wanted to be there! She was so relieved she thought she might swoon.\n\nWhen he reached her, he took her hand in his and brought it to his lips, then whispered, \"Yes, by the way.\"\n\nHunter took that moment to call out teasingly, \"Who's holding the shotgun?\"\n\n\"I am,\" she and Morgan said in unison.\n\nShe gave Morgan a weak smile for shouldering the blame. \"I'm sorry about how I broached the subject with you.\"\n\n\"I'm not. I wasn't going to. I love you too much and didn't want to try to keep you here if you really wanted to go.\"\n\nHearing that, she threw her arms around him. But someone else yelled, \"Get married first!\"\n\nThey laughed, faced the preacher, and got hitched. Yes, she could definitely think of marriage to Morgan that way. She was going to embrace his way of life, not try to lure him to hers. Well, good intentions...\n\nHe was kissing her before the preacher said he could, and she got lost in it, reveled in the sweet, hot sensations he evoked, would have stayed that way forever if Morgan hadn't taken her hand and rushed them out of the church amid all the loud congratulations. He helped her get in the buckboard waiting out front, then drove them out of town\u2014but not toward the ranch.\n\n\"They're all going to want the traditional bride's kiss,\" he warned. \"Just make sure you slap any men who take too long at it, or I'll have to start throwing punches.\"\n\nBut he'd just absconded with her! She started to laugh again. She had a feeling she was going to do a lot of that this evening, she was so happy. She glanced back to see the whole town following them, in wagons, and buckboards and on horseback. And then she heard the music, and looked ahead once more to see lights strung up in the field they were approaching. There was a large wooden platform there, too, and many benches and tables laden with food.\n\n\"This is where the town comes for gatherings and dances and to celebrate special events,\" he explained. \"And today couldn't be more special. We'll leave when you're ready, or if either of us gets too drunk. I booked us a room at the hotel. There's no way we're spending our wedding night with my family down the hall.\"\n\nShe grinned and stroked his face. \"Good idea, but we're not getting foxed. You can partake of a few, but I want you sober tonight.\"\n\n\"Bossing me already, Mrs. Callahan?\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Sorry, it's a habit. And I'm never going to stop being embarrassed about asking you to marry me.\"\n\n\"You didn't ask, as I recall. But let me fix that. Will you do me the honor of being my wife?\"\n\n\"Too late, I already am!\"\n\n\"Yes, but now you're not the only one who asked.\"\n\nThat was sweet of him, but she already knew that about him, and that he was kind, thoughtful, and generous, once you got to know him\u2014even before you did, her father being a prime example. She wasn't amazed that she'd fallen in love with this man, only that she hadn't figured it out sooner.\n\nThey danced and enjoyed a few drinks, and the men lined up for kisses. And she got to meet the rest of Tiffany's family, the Warrens, who had once been on the other side of that old feud, but were now close friends of the Callahans.\n\nHer father's toast brought tears to her eyes. \"To the bride and groom, I wish the happiness I found in my own marriage, the blessing of children who will make me a grandfather\"\u2014he paused to wink at Violet\u2014\"and the joy of cherishing each other. To Violet, my only daughter, my pride and joy, I know you think this is the happiest day of your life, but love has a way of giving you many such moments. Enjoy them all\u2014and try not to boss your husband too much.\" He waited for the laughter to quiet down before continuing, \"To Morgan, I truly couldn't have asked for a better man to give my daughter to in marriage. I already thought of you as a son, so I couldn't be happier that you're now a member of our family\u2014let your wife boss you a little, she can't help it.\"\n\nMore laughter, especially when Morgan said, \"I said I do, now I say I will!\"\n\n\"To the bride and groom!\" Charles finished, raising his glass.\n\nIt was such a festive evening she hated to see it end, but she was more eager to have her new husband all to herself, so she was the one who suggested that they slip away quietly, which they did.\n\nOn the ride to the hotel in the buckboard, she held up her hand to admire her wedding band, wondering how Morgan had gotten it so quickly. She'd visited every store in Nashart that week, and none had sold rings, as far as she'd noticed.\n\n\"Did you borrow these rings for the ceremony?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, I ordered them before we left Butte, the day you agreed to come to Nashart. I was already hoping you'd never want to leave once you got here.\" Watching her, he added, \"Maybe I shouldn't order jewelry for the store. I'll end up giving it all to you instead of selling it, if it makes you look like that.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"So delighted.\"\n\n\"But I won't let you give it all to me. I am your partner now and will have a say.\"\n\n\"You are?\"\n\n\"Most definitely. I'd already decided, but this partnership\"\u2014she tapped the ring\u2014\"needed to come first. Well, I had to marry someone before I could go into business with a man, you understand. It would have been beyond the pale otherwise. So it was only proper that I ask you to marry me first.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I'm glad you thought of being proper.\"\n\nShe blushed. \"That wasn't all I thought about. How I feel about you in particular sort of made it mandatory that you come first.\"\n\nHe let go of the reins to drag her into his lap. She squealed until she realized they were in front of the hotel and he was only lifting her down, yet he didn't let go of her. He carried her inside and straight up the stairs. She recalled how differently she'd felt when he'd carried her out of that hotel in Butte, rolled up in a blanket. She couldn't stop smiling. When he set her down, the door to their room was closed behind them and the bed was in sight. She wondered why they weren't kissing already. The last time they'd been alone in a hotel room, the atmosphere had been explosive. But Morgan was slowly taking the pins from her hair, then softly kissing her neck, then removing more pins. He was also gently nudging her backward.\n\nFeeling her temperature rising, she said, \"I'm not going to say I'm partial to you, though I am. I prefer to say I love you, because I do, you know.\" That got her a kiss before he continued that slow nudging toward the bed. With a slight blush, she added, \"I was miserable when I left you, and I suppose I can tell you that now.\"\n\nHe confessed as well. \"I was hoping for more time to win you by tempting you with being my partner. But if you had said yes, you better believe I would have asked you to marry me then and there.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"You've made it very hard for me to be proper around you and keep my hands off you.\"\n\nCupping her cheeks in his hands, he kissed her long and luxuriously before he said against her lips, \"No more resisting, so if you've a mind to ravish me, go right ahead. For the first time, I know we have all night.\"\n\nShe grinned at his suggestion about ravishing him, and she definitely liked that she had all night to do it. \"That sounds like you'll get to cuddle,\" she teased.\n\nHis grin grew wide. \"Every night from now on. God, woman, you make me so bloody happy.\"\n\nShe started laughing; he started kissing her more deeply. So maybe she would lure him just a little bit to her ways, even if only in the phrases he used. Time would tell. But the only thing that really mattered tonight was that the bear was now her husband, and good grief, he made her so bloody happy, too!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Saloon Lawyer, The.txt", + "author": "C.J. Petit", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Prologue\n\nOctober 9, 1888\n\nKerrville, Texas\n\nTom Hutchinson lifted his half-empty glass of good Irish whiskey over his head as he shouted, \"Happy Birthday, Bill!\"\n\nBill Kane grinned as he refilled his empty glass then hoisted it high and said, \"Thank you, Tom. And thank all of you for remembering the anniversary of my entrance into the world.\"\n\nThe loud crowd surrounding the roulette table that was covered with bottles and glasses instead of chips cheered as Bill downed the whiskey in one shot. He then pulled Carlotta close and kissed her as the mostly male audience laughed and whistled.\n\nBill was grinning as he lifted his head and exclaimed, \"Drinks are on the house until sunset!\"\n\nHis announcement had its expected effect, so Bill escaped the mad rush to the bar as he kept his arm around his favorite girl and tugged her to his private quarters.\n\nHe hadn't reached the door when a tall, middle-aged man slammed open the batwing doors and entered the raucous saloon. There was so much noise that Bill didn't even hear him enter and probably wouldn't have paid any attention if he had. He was focused on his heavy apartment door that kept the customers from invading his privacy.\n\nEnrique Montoya stopped for just a few seconds and scanned the large, crowded barroom. When he spotted Carlotta being led away, he stormed across the crowded floor towards her. He didn't pull the Colt from his holster as he pushed his way through the partygoers.\n\nBill was reaching for the door when Carlotta looked back at the other working girls almost begging for help. But she didn't find any of her friends before she recognized her enraged father marching towards her.\n\nShe screamed, \"Papa!\"\n\nBill spun around and took just a couple of seconds to realize that her father wasn't there to wish him a happy birthday.\n\nWhen Enrique saw his blue eyes looking back at him, he didn't shout a warning threat. He let his fierce face express his fury.\n\nBill shoved Carlotta away and reached behind his jacket. Enrique was just fifteen feet away when the saloon owner pulled out his Webley Bulldog and fired. The .44 slammed into Enrique's chest as the sharp sound echoed through the noisy barroom.\n\nEnrique's hand never was able to reach his Colt's grips before he spun clockwise then sprawled awkwardly onto the polished wood floor.\n\nCarlotta stood wide-eyed, staring at her unmoving father as his life's blood spread beneath him. His lifeless eyes looked back at her, and she was overwhelmed with shame and guilt.\n\nBill didn't even look at her as he stepped closer to her dead father. He nudged his body with his right boot then looked up at the suddenly silent crowd.\n\n\"He was going to shoot me. You all saw that.\"\n\nThere were murmurs of agreement mixed with head nods as Bill holstered his pistol then stepped past the body to have a drink to soothe his nerves. Before he reached the bar, he stopped and looked at Tom Hutchinson.\n\n\"You'd better get the sheriff, Tom.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nTom turned to leave the saloon, but just as the saloon owner took his next step, another customer screamed, \"Look out, Bill!\"\n\nSome of the men dropped to the floor and a few reached for their pistols as Bill whipped around just as Carlotta pulled the trigger on her father's Colt.\n\nBill never had a chance to react before he felt the same hammer blow that he had delivered to her father. The .45 drilled through his chest before it exited from his back and punched into the face of the long oak bar.\n\nBill staggered a few feet toward Carlotta who was shaking as she held the smoking pistol in her hand. He was reaching out to her before he fell face down onto the floor just inches from her father's body. He was still breathing as his blood mixed with Enrique's.\n\nBy the time Carlotta dropped the pistol and ran across the expansive floor to reach the stairs to the second floor, his breathing and bleeding both stopped.\n\nNo one in the crowd tried to catch her as she rushed past but some of those who were still standing walked slowly toward the two dead men. They knew that neither needed medical help; it was just curiosity that drew them closer.\n\nCarlotta quickly raced up the stairs, entered her room and began gathering her things. She knew that if the sheriff arrived, he'd arrest her, and she'd soon be hanged. She felt she had only avenged her father's death but was convinced that no jury would understand.\n\nAfter filling a pillowcase with as much as it could carry, she left her room and used the back stairs to leave the saloon. When she stepped out into the late afternoon sun, she turned left and hurried down the alley to the only place she could find safety. She would ask Father Ramon for sanctuary in his church." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Sheriff J.R. Brown pushed through the batwing doors with Tom Hutchinson following closely behind. He ignored the barrage of voluntary witness statements from the customers as he strode across the saloon floor. Most of them had full glasses of whiskey or dripping mugs of beer in their hands as they tried to tell the sheriff what they'd seen.\n\nJ.R. stopped when he reached the two bodies, but before he even examined the gunshots, he turned to Tom and said, \"Go get the doc.\"\n\nTom nodded and trotted away as the sheriff knelt on a dry part of the floor.\n\nCharlie Fix arrived from behind the bar and said, \"Bill shot her pa first with his pocket pistol. Montoya was mighty mad, and Bill figured he was gonna shoot him, but her pa never even pulled his gun. Carlotta shot Bill with her pa's pistol.\"\n\nJ.R. grunted then looked up and asked, \"Where's Carlotta?\"\n\n\"She ran upstairs to her room. Nobody wanted to stop her.\"\n\nThe sheriff nodded then turned his eyes back to the bodies. He picked up Enrique's discarded Colt, emptied the chambers and dropped the four cartridges and one empty brass shell into his jacket pocket. It was a real mess, but at least none of the drinking men had decided to become a vigilante and shoot Carlotta. But he suspected that they'd form a lynch mob soon if he didn't find her first.\n\nHe slowly stood and said, \"You boys go back to doing whatever you were doing but leave those bodies alone.\"\n\nJ.R. walked to the stairs still wondering what he would do with Carlotta. He knew that it would be almost impossible for her to get a fair trial. Aside from her job as a prostitute, she had killed a white Texan, even if it was one like Bill Kane. The sheriff had been anticipating the day when the saloon owner met his violent end. He hadn't even been surprised that it had been a woman who had pulled the trigger.\n\nAs he climbed the stairs, he hoped that she had already left the saloon through the back door. If she hadn't, he'd have to arrest her and wasn't sure he'd be able to keep her alive long enough to face trial.\n\nWhen he reached her room's open door, it only took a few seconds to realize that she'd made her escape. He knew where she'd probably gone, but he wouldn't enter the Catholic church to look for her. He wasn't sure if Texas had a sanctuary law, but even if it didn't, he wasn't about to open that can of worms.\n\nHe turned and walked back down the hallway to the stairs. When he reached the barroom floor, he saw Doctor Nagy examining the bodies and headed that way. After they moved the corpses out of the saloon, he'd have it closed. Then he'd send a telegram to Bill Kane's brother down in San Antonio. He was not only a part owner of the establishment, but J.R. knew his reputation and hoped that he'd be able to help resolve his Carlotta dilemma. He only hoped that Morgan was as fair-minded as he believed him to be. Not many men would be willing to resist the temptation of revenge." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Chapter 1 \u2014 The Saloon\n\nOctober 11, 1888\n\nMorgan Kane hopped onto Kerrville's platform before his train completely stopped. He hadn't been shocked when he'd received Sheriff Brown's lengthy telegram, because he knew Bill much longer than anyone else. But he had been surprised when the sheriff's message included the news that he hadn't arrested the woman who'd shot him.\n\nJ.R. was standing near the ticket window when he spotted Morgan. He had never met him before, but there was enough of a family resemblance to convince him that he was looking at Bill Kane's brother. He was much taller than Bill, which surprised him as Bill was a good six feet in height. He also had a noticeably different manner about him, which might make all the difference to Carlotta. J.R. left the ticket window and headed his way.\n\nMorgan saw the star on the lawman's vest and walked to meet him. Just seconds later, the two men stopped and shook hands.\n\n\"I'm Sheriff Julius Brown. I go by J.R. for obvious reasons.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"I'm pleased to meet you, Sheriff. Call me Morg. Where do you want to talk?\"\n\n\"Do you have any travel bags with you?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I only brought my saddlebags.\"\n\nJ.R. was surprised but nodded and said, \"Let's go to my office.\"\n\nMorgan nodded as the sheriff turned then got in step with him as they left the platform and headed west along the boardwalk. As he scanned the street, he could see his brother's Wet Gulch Saloon in the distance. Even though Bill had listed him as a partner because of the money he'd sent to help him improve the place, Morgan still considered it his brother's business. Now it was his and he still was undecided about what he would do with it. As he walked, he studied the surprisingly large establishment to help him reach that decision.\n\nJ.R. said, \"We already buried your brother in the town cemetery. Enrique Montoya's two sons took his body to their ranch to bury him in the family cemetery.\"\n\n\"It might have been a problem for you if they were in town when I arrived.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Enrique was a proud man, and when he found out where Carlotta had gone and what she was doing, his shame enraged him. Senora Montoya told me that her husband hadn't gone to the saloon to shoot your brother. She believed that he was going to shoot Carlotta for shaming the family.\"\n\nMorgan glanced at the sheriff and wondered what the dead rancher's sons might do now.\n\nMorgan studied Kerrville as they stepped along the well-maintained boardwalk. It was a lot nicer than he'd expected to find, even though its population was barely over a thousand. They had built a new brick courthouse and there was a pastoral town square complete with a small park and a bandstand. The businesses seemed to be cared for and prosperous. He spotted two other saloons, but neither was as large as his brother's. He counted four churches to counterbalance the three sin-generating establishments.\n\nAfter entering the large jail, J.R. waved his two deputies down before he walked past the four cells and down a short hallway. They walked past two rooms with closed doors before the sheriff opened his office door and went inside. Morgan followed but left the door open before taking a seat.\n\nJ.R. sat in his leather padded chair and said, \"I'll tell you what happened and why I still haven't arrested the woman who killed your brother.\"\n\nMorgan just nodded as the sheriff pulled his report from the shallow box and began to read. As he listened, he began to understand the sheriff's dilemma. Before he finished talking, Morgan had already decided that he would solve the sheriff's obvious conundrum and do what he could to help the woman who had killed his brother.\n\nWhen the sheriff returned his report to the box, he looked at Morgan and said, \"Well, that's all I got. At least that's my official report. But I still need to tell you why I don't have Carlotta Montoya in one of those cells. I was holding off until you arrived.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm here, but you don't need to explain why you decided not to arrest her. I understand why you chose to avoid taking her into custody. Do you know where she is?\"\n\n\"I'm not certain, but I have a good idea. I haven't seen her, and I told my deputies not to look for her either. There are some hotheads in town who spent all that day and most of the night searching for her. They seemed to give up when they didn't find her in town. But I reckon that if I arrest her, those boys will show up at my jail and make sure she never makes it to the courtroom.\"\n\n\"I assume she sought sanctuary in the Catholic church.\"\n\n\"That's what I figured. She probably snuck into St. Rose of Lima and asked Father Ramon Velasquez to keep her safe. You're a lawyer, so do you know if Texas has a sanctuary law?\"\n\n\"We do, but I can't recall if anyone has been arrested for violating it.\"\n\nJ.R. looked at Morgan and quietly asked, \"So, you don't want me to charge her with murder?\"\n\n\"No. Bill shot her father who hadn't even pulled his pistol. I don't know how badly he treated her, but knowing my brother, I can imagine. I'm sure that she may be the innocent victim in this tragedy. But that doesn't help you with your problem; does it?\"\n\n\"Nope. I was hoping that you might figure out a way to help.\"\n\n\"What did your prosecutor say about it?\"\n\nThe sheriff sheepishly replied, \"I didn't mention it to him because I'm sure he doesn't want to be officially notified. I'm sure he knows about it, but I don't think he wants to stick his nose into that beehive. He wants to see how bad I get stung.\"\n\nMorgan had dealt with many other lawyers who were more politicians than attorneys, so he quickly placed the county prosecutor in that category.\n\n\"Speaking of lawyers; do you have one to act as a defense attorney?\"\n\n\"We had two, but one was sort of run out of town after one of his popular clients hanged. The other one is John Thompson. He's about your age, but a lot of folks figure he's only pretending to be a lawyer. Robert 'don't call me Bob' Goolsby is our prosecutor and is very happy having Mister Thompson represent the accused. So will you help Carlotta and make our prosecutor happy?\"\n\n\"I don't plan to make Bob 'I'll never call him Robert' Goolsby happy. But I'll do what I can to help her.\"\n\nJ.R. snickered, then said, \"I appreciate your help. I don't think Mister Goolsby will argue if you call him Bob, either. You must be a good eight inches taller than he is.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"I'll go and talk to her after I drop my saddlebags at the saloon. Is the place still locked?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. You were a part owner, so I suppose you have your own set of keys.\"\n\n\"I never needed any. I haven't seen Bill in almost ten years. All I did was send him money when he wanted to make some improvements.\"\n\nThe sheriff opened his top right drawer, took out the key ring and handed it to Morgan who dropped it into his left jacket pocket.\n\nThe sheriff then picked up a canvas sack from behind his desk and set it on top.\n\n\"These are his personal effects, including the pistol he used to shoot Enrique Velasquez.\"\n\nMorgan slid it from the desktop onto his lap and asked, \"Are any of the employees who worked in the saloon still there?\"\n\n\"All of the dealers left along with the two bartenders. But some of the whores are still there. I reckon they want to size you up before they leave.\"\n\n\"How many are there?\"\n\n\"There were twelve before the shooting, but six are already working at the other two saloons in town. They didn't want to just sit around. What was kinda odd to me was that the five who stayed were the prettiest of the bunch. They were most of the youngest ones, too. Me and my deputies have been stopping by every so often to keep them safe until you arrived.\"\n\n\"Okay. I know that Bill had a living area on the first floor, so I'll stay there. Do you want to come along?\"\n\n\"He had a house nearby for the dealers, too. It's across the back alley and has a barn, too. I used the key to unlock it when I searched for Carlotta. Seeing as how you haven't been in touch for so long, reckon I've got to tell you a lot more about what your brother did when he got here.\"\n\nMorgan nodded before he stood, turned and left the office with the sheriff walking behind him. He didn't even glance at the two deputies as he left the jail but stopped on the boardwalk as he waited for the sheriff to grab his hat. He hadn't known about the house, but suspected it wasn't as nice as the saloon's apartment because Bill didn't live there. He'd want to stay in the same building where the whores slept.\n\nJ.R. exited his office, then he and Morgan turned right and walked along the boardwalk for two blocks before they crossed the street to the saloon. As they walked the sheriff talked about Bill, but Morgan only paid marginal attention as he didn't expect to hear anything shocking.\n\nAs Morgan unlocked the door, he was still undecided about what he would do with the place. His law practice was flourishing in San Antonio, but he knew that one of the primary reasons for his success was because he was the son of Judge Alex Kane. Just having his surname almost guaranteed a steady flow of clients. But it was his reason for abandoning his practice for three years that now tilted the scale toward keeping the saloon and moving to Kerrville.\n\nHe had just closed the door when he heard the sheriff say, \"Ladies, just quiet down. This is Morgan Kane, Bill's kid brother and the new owner of the saloon.\"\n\nWhen he turned to look at the barroom, he saw five sets of eyes looking back at him with expressions ranging from simple curiosity to fearful tension. After a few seconds of instant evaluation, the women approached him and began bombarding him with questions about their future.\n\nBefore Morgan could say a word, the sheriff shouted, \"Quiet! Now go sit down.\"\n\nTwo of the women glared at Sheriff Brown as they turned to take their seats while the other three kept their eyes on Morgan to continue their evaluations as they walked away.\n\nMorgan made his own quick assessment of the five women before saying, \"I'll answer your questions after I explore this place. I need one of you ladies to act as my guide.\"\n\nThen he turned to J.R. and said, \"I'll handle your problem when I finish my inspection, Sheriff. If I don't get to the jail before you close the office, I'll see you in the morning.\"\n\n\"Okay. Good luck, Morg.\"\n\nAs the sheriff left the saloon, Morgan scanned the large floor with its typical arrangement of tables, chairs and gaming setups including a large spinning wheel. He was already seeing the first of many changes he would want to make when one of the women stood and walked towards him. He hadn't noticed them talking, so he was curious why she had been chosen to be his guide.\n\nHe estimated that she was close to thirty years of age. Yet despite the almost daily abuse she must have endured that was inherent in her profession, she didn't seem affected. She was about average height with blonde hair and blue eyes and was still quite good-looking. But her revealing wardrobe and excessive use of makeup not only defined what she did for a living, but Morgan thought it diminished her naturally handsome features.\n\nShe stopped three feet in front of him then looked up into his dark green eyes and said, \"I'm Stella Culliver and I'm what you might call the mother hen to the other girls because I'm the oldest.\"\n\n\"You're still younger than me by a few years, Stella. You can tell me how things were as you show me around. Where are my brother's living quarters?\"\n\n\"Follow me.\"\n\nMorgan nodded and stepped beside Stella as she walked toward the left of two doors on the south wall. He didn't realize that he would soon step over the spot where Bill had met his end. The polished floor hadn't absorbed the blood, and someone had done a good job of cleaning.\n\nShe stopped before the doorway and said, \"I don't have the key, Mister Kane.\"\n\nHe was surprised that the door was locked but reached into his jacket pocket as he said, \"It must be on the key ring that the sheriff gave to me.\"\n\nAfter unlocking and opening the door, he let Stella enter before following behind. Once over the threshold, he felt as if he was standing in the parlor of a wealthy man's home rather than a room inside a saloon. There was a fancy, brocaded couch and four matching chairs with two small polished side tables, a large matching center table, a sideboard and even a thick rug covering much of the glossy floor.\n\nBill had hung surprisingly tasteful paintings on the walls and instead of a heat stove, there was a brick fireplace with a sculpted oak mantle. There were ceramic and bronze pieces on the mantle that didn't seem to follow a theme of any sort. The room was in stark contrast to what he'd seen out on the saloon floor.\n\nStella waited for Morgan to say something, but he had remained silent as he scanned the room.\n\nShe gave him another minute before she asked, \"What are you going to do with the saloon, Mister Kane? The girls are very worried.\"\n\nMorgan looked at her and asked, \"Are you worried, Stella?\"\n\n\"I'm too old to worry. If you toss us all into the streets, I'll be able to take care of myself. The six who left didn't want to lose any money. The rest of us wanted to see what you would do. We gambled that you might stay to run the place and wouldn't be as bad as your brother. We didn't mind the short respite, either. What really scares them is that you might sell the saloon to Harry Freeman. He owns the other two saloons and wants the Wet Gulch so anyone who wants to buy a beer or rent a woman will have to pay what he charges.\"\n\nMorgan had never heard anyone use the phrase 'rent a woman' before, but thought it was probably better than most of the others in common usage. He was surprised that she wasn't hesitant to say that Bill didn't treat them well but was impressed with Stella's diction and confidence.\n\n\"No, I'm not going to sell the saloon, Stella. I've decided to leave my practice in San Antonio and move to Kerrville.\"\n\n\"What do you mean 'practice'? What do you do in San Antonio?\"\n\nMorgan thought she'd never associated the word with a law office, so he replied, \"That's where I have my law office. I'm a lawyer.\"\n\nStella's eyes grew wide as she asked, \"You're a lawyer?\"\n\nMorgan was just as surprised as she appeared to be and he answered her question with one of his own by asking, \"Didn't Bill even mention it? The sheriff knew I was an attorney.\"\n\n\"No. None of us even knew he had a brother until J.R. told us that he had to notify Bill's brother of his death.\"\n\nMorgan couldn't understand why she didn't know about him at all. His name was on the deed to the place, and he couldn't imagine why Bill hadn't at least mentioned that he had a younger brother. Surely, they would have heard about him from someone during the eight years that Bill had owned the place. But he set the question aside for now.\n\n\"Can you show me the rest of the apartment?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nStella led him down a hallway then stopped before the first door and opened it but didn't enter.\n\nMorgan didn't go into the room either, but when he looked inside, he could understand Stella's reticence about passing through the doorway. It was Bill's bedroom and despite its equally high-grade furnishings, he had an eerie feeling when he saw the enormous, unmade bed. He suspected that Stella and the other girls, including Carlotta, had visited the room often. Bill had exhibited an extreme interest in girls before he even reached his teen years. It was one of the reasons he had chosen not to follow in their father's footsteps. Instead, he left San Antonio to enter a less respectable path. Of course, there are those who would argue that owning a saloon was more respectable than some shysters, and Morgan wasn't about to argue the point.\n\nWhen their father died, Bill hadn't even returned for the funeral. Morgan had sent him a telegram notifying Bill of their father's death, but Bill's reply simply explained where to send his share of the inheritance. He'd never told Bill that their father had disinherited him but did send him about a quarter of the estate. Bill hadn't questioned the amount and purchased the Wet Gulch with the money and fixed it up with most of the remaining balance.\n\nHe had asked Morgan for more money a few months later which he claimed was to finish the improvements. When Sheriff Brown said he bought a house for the dealers, Morgan figured that's what Bill had done with the second infusion of cash. Now that he'd seen the apartment, it was obvious where a good portion of that money had gone.\n\nStella then turned and opened the door across the hall. Morgan turned, saw the bathtub and sink as Stella walked to the end of the hallway and entered the kitchen.\n\nMorgan wasn't surprised to find a well-equipped kitchen complete with a cold room and a large, coal-burning cookstove.\n\nStella then walked to the large oak table and sat down on one of the six matching chairs.\n\nMorgan lowered his saddlebags and the canvas sack to the floor and sat down before taking off his light gray Stetson and setting it on the gleaming tabletop.\n\nShe didn't seem even marginally afraid of him when she looked into his eyes and asked, \"Did the sheriff tell you about Carlotta?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Are you going to have him arrest her?\"\n\n\"No. I'm going to walk to St. Rose of Lima in a little while and talk to her. If I can, I'll help her. The sheriff seemed more concerned about some of the men in town than he was about bringing charges, and I agreed with him.\"\n\nShe seemed surprised with his reply and quickly asked, \"Why would you want to help her after she killed your brother?\"\n\n\"I grew up with Bill and knew him better than anyone else, even our father. I was only surprised that it took so long for him to anger someone enough to shoot him. I wasn't even surprised to learn it was a woman who had killed him.\"\n\nStella chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds before asking, \"You're going to stop being a lawyer to run the saloon?\"\n\n\"No. I'm going to set up my offices here. I assume the door adjacent to this one is to my brother's office. Is that right?\"\n\n\"Yes. We were never allowed into the office. No one was, not even Charlie Fix, the top bartender.\"\n\n\"Didn't he have any friends he could trust?\"\n\n\"He didn't trust anyone that much. He had a lot of chummy pals, but no real friends.\"\n\nMorgan nodded. It was always that way with Bill even during their years in grade school.\n\nStella then asked, \"If you're going to use the office to be a lawyer, then what are you going to do with us?\"\n\n\"I won't throw you out into the streets or make you work for Harry Freeman, if that's what you're asking. But there will be a lot of changes around here, beginning with the name of the place. I intend to convert the Wet Gulch Saloon into a first-class bar and gambling hall. I'll let Mister Freeman provide the unfettered environment for the rough crowd. I'll explain more later because I just decided to keep the place a few minutes ago.\"\n\nStella surprised him when she asked, \"Do you already have a new name?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"The Bluebonnet.\"\n\n\"That's all? Nothing after that?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am.\"\n\nAs she studied Bill's younger brother, Stella found it difficult to believe that he was being honest. He certainly spoke like an educated man, but she couldn't imagine that he'd use a saloon as a law office, especially one that had painted ladies providing services in the same building.\n\nMorgan then said, \"The sheriff told me what happened a couple of days ago, but he wasn't here. Can you tell me about it? I want to understand Carlotta better before I go to the church.\"\n\nShe may have suspected that he really wasn't going to help Carlotta, but Stella wanted to watch his eyes when she told him how his brother had died. She'd do more than just tell him about Carlotta. She'd add her opinion of Bill and see how he reacted. Then she'd have an idea of what he might do with them. She didn't realize that she'd already provided Morgan with her assessment of his brother.\n\n\"Your brother was celebrating his birthday and had been drinking for more than two hours. The place was crowded because they were expecting free drinks. For the past few months, Bill's new favorite was Carlotta. He still used all of us, but after he recruited Carlotta, if you can call it that, he bedded her more often. Sometimes, he'd have more than one of us at the same time.\"\n\nShe paused as she waited for him to explode in anger, but he just watched her without revealing any emotion whatsoever.\n\nAfter her self-imposed, brief interruption, she continued, saying, \"He had his arm around Carlotta and told everyone that drinks were on the house. When he took her toward his apartment, Carlotta's father stormed into the saloon, but I don't think that Bill even noticed him. He was about to open the door when Carlotta saw her angry father and shouted, 'Papa!'. Bill turned around and without a moment's hesitation, pulled his pistol from his shoulder holster and fired point blank into her father's chest. After he fell, the place became quiet. Bill just returned his gun to his holster and walked to her father's body.\n\n\"He gave it a kick to make sure he was dead then told everyone that her father was going for his gun. Of course, all of the men agreed even though her father never touched his pistol. They wanted more free whiskey and a lot of them didn't like Mexicans anyway. After he told one of the men to get the sheriff, one of them shouted a warning. By the time he turned around, Carlotta had shot him with her father's pistol. She dropped the gun and hurried through the crowd to go upstairs. I guess she took some of her things and used the back stairs to leave the saloon.\"\n\n\"Were any of the other girls upstairs, or did you all witness the shootings?\"\n\n\"We were all on the floor because Bill wanted us to help him celebrate his birthday. To be honest, we were relieved when he just walked to his room with Carlotta. We wouldn't have been surprised if he expected all of us to join him in that big bed of his.\"\n\nMorgan stunned Stella when he replied, \"Neither would I.\"\n\nShe quickly asked, \"You really are going to help her; aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I may be a lawyer, but I'm still a fair and honest man. Where have you and the other ladies been eating?\"\n\n\"The sheriff or one of his deputies comes to the back door every few hours to escort us to the diner or the privy. Why do you want to know?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to lock the apartment door when I leave to talk to Carlotta. If you or any of the others can cook, feel free to use this kitchen. I noticed that the pantry and cold room are well-stocked. When I get back, maybe I'll be able to tell you more about the changes I plan to make.\"\n\nStella nodded but still found it hard to imagine that anyone, especially Bill Kane's brother, would improve their lives. But he was the new owner, so all they could do was wait.\n\nMorgan then asked, \"What about the bartenders? Tell me about them and the dealers.\"\n\n\"Both Carl March and Charlie Fix would have been at home in either of Harry Freeman's saloons. We think they were both skimming from the till, too. If I had anything to say about it, they'd both be pouring their watered-down whiskey elsewhere. The dealers are already gone, and the sheriff had them move out of Bill's house.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"Then I guess they'll all be looking for a new job. Did Bill employ anyone else, like a piano player or a couple of big men to keep good order?\"\n\n\"No. Sally Prince can play the piano, and your brother didn't hire any tough men to keep the gamblers and drinkers from misbehaving.\"\n\n\"That's alright. I have some friends I'll bring with me after I return to San Antonio to close my offices.\"\n\n\"Are you going to open the saloon before you leave?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I won't lock the doors because it's going to be busy place when the workmen arrive to start making those changes.\"\n\n\"You're going to leave it shut down for that long? How will we make a living?\"\n\n\"I'll talk about that when I return. Feel free to tell the other ladies all that I've said. Make sure that they understand that they have nothing to worry about and when The Bluebonnet opens again, their lives and yours will be immeasurably better.\"\n\nStella wanted to ask for more information but felt that Morgan wanted her to leave. So, she rose and turned toward the hallway.\n\nBefore she took her first step, Morgan said, \"Oh, and Stella, can you and the other ladies call me Morg rather than Mister Kane? I'm sure that you'd all prefer not to hear my surname again.\"\n\nShe looked back at him and smiled as she replied, \"I'm sure you're right, Morg,\" then walked away.\n\nThe myriad of changes necessary to transform the Wet Gulch into the Bluebonnet were still bouncing around in his mind as Morgan stood, snatched his Stetson from the table and headed down the hallway. He glanced into the bedroom as he passed and felt his stomach sour as he envisioned what his brother had done on the mattress. He'd replace the mattress and bedding, but the bed could stay... at least for a while.\n\nWhen he entered the saloon, he saw Stella sitting at a table with her hands dancing as she told the others what he'd said. He was going to head to the church, but curiosity compelled him to walk to the locked office door.\n\nAfter unlocking and opening the door, he stepped inside and closed it behind him. It was a very large office and Morgan could already imagine partitioning it off for his clerk's desk. He stepped to the dark mahogany desk and sat in the thickly padded red lather swivel chair. He'd never set his butt onto such a fancy chair before.\n\nHe opened each drawer and found most empty, which wasn't surprising. Bill probably didn't even keep a ledger to track expenses and income. But Morgan was sure that somewhere in the office, Bill would have a hidden safe because he didn't trust banks. It wouldn't be anything exotic, either.\n\nAs he slowly scanned the office, his eyes stopped when he saw a robust cabinet under the gun rack. There were two Winchesters and two twelve-gauge, double-barreled shotguns on the racks and the cabinet had one deep drawer. Beneath the drawer were two doors and Morgan assumed that was where Bill had his safe.\n\nHe stood and walked around the large desk and stopped before the cabinet. Before he opened the doors, he examined the two repeaters and two scatterguns. They all looked as if they'd never been fired. The Winchesters were both '73 carbines and the shotguns were Parkers. Bill's choice in weaponry didn't surprise him. He suspected that they were just for show anyway.\n\nHe slid open the drawer and saw a decorative cherrywood box surrounded by ammunition. There were two boxes of .44 Winchester rimfire cartridges, and three of the short .44 Webleys. The rest were various shotgun shells from birdshot to slugs. He didn't open any of the lids because he was sure they were all full except for the ones with the Webley cartridges. He opened the lid of the fancy box and found gun-cleaning and maintenance tools, cloth wads, cleaning fluid and gun oil. None of them appeared to have been used.\n\nAfter closing the drawer, he dropped to his heels and swung the two polished doors open. He smiled when he saw the safe. It didn't have a combination dial, but there was a keyhole on the handle. So, he pulled out the key chain from his jacket pocket again and found the smallest key. He inserted and rotated the key before turning the handle.\n\nThe heavy steel door swung open, and Morgan whistled. He had expected to find a good amount of cash inside, but this was much more than what he would consider a good amount. He didn't see any legal papers but assumed they were under the currency. He took out a few of the bundles and estimated the total before returning the cash to the safe and closing the door. After he turned the key to make sure that the handle wouldn't open, he closed the wooden doors and rose to his feet.\n\n\"I guess that you're going to be the one to pay to make your saloon a lot better, Bill. I plan to make life better for those ladies you treated so badly, too. Now I'm going to the church and talk to Carlotta. She probably feels guilty for shooting you, and maybe feels even worse for what you did to her. I just hope I can help her.\"\n\nHe left the office, locked the door and found all of the working girls staring at him. He waved to the five women then headed for the front door. He wouldn't lock it but didn't expect to be gone that long. He hoped that he wouldn't be returning alone.\n\nMorgan headed down the main street toward the town square. When he'd spotted the four houses of worship, he had a good idea which of them was the Catholic church even without any signage. It was a tall, bright white adobe building with a nicely carved cross at the pinnacle of its bell tower. As he walked along the boardwalk, the townsfolk he passed looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and awe.\n\nHe assumed they knew who he was but were impressed with his height. He was more than six feet and four inches but with his new boots, he appeared even taller. The tall Stetson made it even worse, or better depending on who was looking. He also appeared to be unarmed, but like his older brother, he wore a shoulder harness that carried the same model Webley Bulldog. Their father had given them the British designed but American licensed and manufactured revolver and holster when Morgan turned sixteen. Bill left San Antonio six months later when he turned eighteen.\n\nHe still smiled and greeted each of the citizens as he headed to the church. He was planning to become a resident and didn't want them to believe he was another Bill Kane. He received a wide range of responses, but sullen ones were much fewer than he had anticipated.\n\nMorgan soon reached the church, and as he entered the large doorway, he removed his hat and stepped into the dark, cool interior. He let his eyes adjust to the lower light and saw a couple kneeling in the first pew with their heads bowed. He touched the small bowl of holy water and blessed himself with his damp fingers before he stepped down the aisle. He looked for the priest but wasn't surprised not to find him in the church. He suspected that Father Ramon Velasquez was in the sacristy with Carlotta. It may have been a big church for a town this size, but Morgan doubted if it had much room for a guest to stay overnight.\n\nHe stepped to the front of the aisle, genuflected, then turned right and walked past the elderly couple who still had their eyes closed in prayer. As he headed for the sacristy, he didn't feel the least bit guilty for trying to help his brother's killer.\n\nHe soon stopped and rapped softly on the heavy door. It was only ten seconds later that the door swung partly open and Father Ramon stuck his head around the edge and looked at him.\n\n\"Who are you?\" he asked in heavily accented English.\n\n\"I'm Morgan Kane, Bill Kane's younger brother. Sheriff Brown asked me to help Carlotta and I agreed to do what I could. I assume she's in your sacristy.\"\n\nFather Velasquez was shaken when Morgan had identified himself but didn't slam the door in his face.\n\nHe studied Morgan's eyes for a few seconds to try to understand if he was being honest. Even in the church, a man could hide his true nature. But there were other things that weighed on his decision to admit the man. Sheriff Brown hadn't even shown up at the door to ask if Carlotta was hiding in the church after she'd hurried to him and confessed what she had done. Another factor was that he knew she couldn't stay here much longer because the sacristy didn't even have a bed.\n\nHe had never seen Bill Kane in his church or any others for that matter, but still asked, \"Are you Catholic, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"Yes, Father.\"\n\n\"Then promise to the Virgin that you are truly here to help Carlotta.\"\n\n\"I promise to Mother Mary and to you, Father, that I am only here to do whatever I can to keep her safe.\"\n\nFather Ramon nodded then pulled the door fully open to let Bill Kane's tall brother enter.\n\nMorgan stepped into the sacristy and found Carlotta standing with her back against the far wall staring at him. She must have heard what he'd told Father Ramon, yet she still seemed to expect him to pull a pistol and shoot her.\n\nMorgan took two steps and sat down in one of the two chairs as Father Velasquez closed the door but didn't step any closer. Once he was seated, he smiled at Carlotta but still didn't say anything.\n\nThe priest then walked to the still-terrified, very young, dark-haired woman and took her arm.\n\nHe guided her to the other chair and after she sat down, he quietly said, \"It's alright, Carlotta. I'll stay with you until you feel safe.\"\n\nCarlotta nodded as she continued to stare at the tall man sitting just six feet in front of her. She could see some family resemblance, but his eyes were far different from the man she'd killed. Father Ramon had given her absolution for her mortal sin, but now she felt that she needed to have the brother's forgiveness before she dared to think about forgiving herself.\n\nMorgan continued smiling and waited for her to begin the conversation. He could understand her fear and hoped that she would speak first so he'd know which direction to take.\n\nCarlotta felt her fear beginning to subside and softly asked, \"Will you forgive me for what I did?\"\n\n\"I will, but I don't believe that you need my forgiveness. If Father Ramon has already granted you absolution, then you should no longer feel any guilt for what happened.\"\n\nShe shook her head as she said, \"But I shamed my family and then... I... I.\"\n\nShe quickly closed her eyes as her shame overwhelmed her.\n\nMorgan looked at Father Ramon who nodded before he turned, left the sacristy and silently closed the big door.\n\nAfter the priest left the room, Morgan asked, \"May I call you Carlotta? You can call me Morg.\"\n\nCarlotta was surprised by his sudden shift to the mundane, but opened her eyes, looked up and replied, \"Yes, of course. Why don't you hate me for what I did?\"\n\n\"Because I knew my brother better than anyone else. I talked to Stella Culliver, and she told me what happened. If I'd been in the saloon and seen my brother going for his pistol, I would have shot him, not your father.\"\n\n\"You would have shot your own brother?\" she asked in stunned disbelief.\n\n\"How long have you been working at his saloon?\"\n\nShe dropped her eyes to the floor and whispered, \"Just three months.\"\n\n\"But even after that short time, you must have known him well enough to understand why I would choose to shoot him. How did he convince you to leave your family to work for him?\"\n\nShe still focused on the floor as she said, \"I didn't even know he owned the saloon when I met him. He rode to my father's ranch southeast of the city. He said he wanted to buy a horse. I thought he was the handsomest man I'd ever seen. Later that day, he told me I was pretty, so I thought he wanted to court me. He even said he was Catholic.\"\n\n\"Your parents were there when he told you all this?\"\n\n\"No. They left the room to prepare something to eat. To my eternal shame, I was so taken with his handsome face that I told him I would show him some horses. I walked with him to the back of the barn, but he knew it wasn't to show him horses. That was when he told me how pretty I was. No one else had ever told me that before. I wanted him to kiss me but knew that one of the vaqueros might see. That was when he told me to meet him at the end of the access road the next night after my family was sleeping. I thought he wanted to elope.\"\n\n\"When did you discover what he really expected of you?\"\n\nShe sighed then said, \"When I met him the next night, he was waiting in a buggy. I had my pillowcase full of my clothes with me and climbed in next to him. I was so excited that I thought my heart would burst. After the buggy started rolling, he pulled me close and began to kiss me. I was thrilled and didn't even care when he began to touch my womanly places. I thought it was normal for men and women who were in love. With each kiss and touch, I became more excited and soon, he stopped the buggy and began ripping my dress apart. I was shocked but still didn't complain. I knew he was going to marry me in the church soon, so I gave myself to him in the seat of the buggy.\"\n\n\"You couldn't return to your parents ranch, even after you learned that you wouldn't be marrying him; could you?\"\n\nShe shook her head as tears began to splash onto the sacristy's floor.\n\n\"I shamed myself and my family. Now my father is dead because of me.\"\n\nMorgan couldn't tell her who the sheriff suspected was her father's target. But he was even more ashamed of his brother than he thought possible as he watched Carlotta weep. But aside from the mountain of shame she must feel, he thought she probably had another worry that made her even more depressed.\n\nHe suspected that she may have already discovered her pregnancy. He didn't believe that she would harm herself because suicide would condemn her to everlasting hell. But if she was carrying a child, she knew she'd also be committing a second murder. And this one would be ending the life of the most innocent of all of God's creations... an unborn child.\n\nMorgan said, \"Carlotta, none of this was your fault. You are still an innocent young woman in God's eyes. My brother was nothing less than Satan incarnate. He probably had glimpsed you before he wanted to take you from your home. He only cared about his own lust and not about you at all. You were much younger than he was, and he took advantage of your youth and inexperience. You have to stop blaming yourself for what happened.\"\n\nShe finally raised her tear-filled eyes and said, \"But I snuck out of my family home like a thief and went with him of my own free will. I deserve to be a whore!\"\n\n\"You aren't a whore, Carlotta. I want you to stop thinking of yourself that way. I don't care how many times you've been with men since my brother forced you to start working in his saloon. Do you understand?\"\n\n\"No, I don't understand. It's you who doesn't understand. I'm nothing but a cheap whore who doesn't even earn the three dollars that the men pay to make me spread my legs for them.\"\n\nMorgan stood and slid this chair beside Carlotta's then placed his right arm behind her and held her.\n\nShe bowed her head again as he softly asked, \"Are you carrying a child, Carlotta?\"\n\nShe just nodded as her tears began falling again.\n\n\"Was my brother going to have a woman come to take your baby away?\"\n\nShe covered her face with her hands and began to shudder before almost shouting, \"Yes!\"\n\nHe almost considered exhuming his brother's body and letting the vultures have his remains. But now he needed to help Carlotta in a much different way than he'd planned before assisting her to leave the church.\n\nHe quietly asked, \"Did the other women know about your condition?\"\n\nShe shook her head as she replied, \"No. Only Father Ramon knew.\"\n\n\"Well, it doesn't matter. But you're not going to lose your baby, Carlotta. You'll be able to raise your little girl to be as good a woman as you are. She'll never know the man who helped to create her, but I'll make sure that you find a good man who will love you and your baby.\"\n\nShe stopped shaking and pulled her hands from her face as she turned to look at Morgan.\n\nAs she wiped her cheeks, she quietly asked, \"How can you say such things?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"I can help with most of it, but God is the only one who knows that you have a little girl growing inside you. I'm going to escort you back to the saloon in a little while. Stella and the other ladies were worried about you, so I'm sure that they'll be happy to see you again. The saloon is closed and it's going to stay that way for a few months while I have it renovated.\"\n\n\"I can't go there. Those men will see me and try to hang me.\"\n\n\"No, they won't. In a little while the sun will set, and you can wear a shawl when we leave. We'll use the back alley to get to the saloon. Then you can have a nice supper with the others and get a good night's sleep. Your little girl is probably unhappy because you're not feeding her enough.\"\n\nCarlotta sniffed then giggled before she said, \"I am pretty hungry. But I can't keep... working. I can't live in this town anymore, either.\"\n\n\"I understand. But I'm going to return to San Antonio in a few days to close down my law practice and move here. If you'd like, I can bring you with me. I know and trust a good family in San Antonio who will care for you. You'll never have to worry again, Carlotta.\"\n\n\"But why would you do so much for me? I killed your brother.\"\n\n\"Call it my own penance for helping him buy the saloon when I didn't have to send him a penny. Just make me one promise before we leave the church.\"\n\n\"Alright. What is this promise?\"\n\nHe grinned and said, \"When you have your little girl, don't name her after me. Morgana has a bad reputation in the legend of King Arthur. They thought she was a witch, and it always made me nervous, especially as she was sometimes called Morgan without the 'a'. The good news is that I've never had the urge to ride a broom or hunt for the eye of a newt.\"\n\nDespite the overwhelming depression and fear that had dominated her just minutes earlier, Carlotta laughed and felt incredibly light. She knew that she still wouldn't be able to see her mother and brothers again but began to feel hope for the first time since she left the ranch. It had vanished like a flash of lightning after that buggy ride but now the brother of the man who had stolen every vestige of hope from her had restored it.\n\nMorgan took his arm from her then stood and said, \"Gather your things and I'll let Father Ramon know that you'll be leaving his sacristy.\"\n\nShe smiled as she looked up at him and said, \"Everything I brought with me is still in my pillowcase.\"\n\n\"If you don't have a shawl, then we'll find something else to allow me to sneak you down the dark alley.\"\n\n\"I have a shawl.\"\n\nMorgan smiled back then turned and opened the thick door. When he looked into the church, he found it empty until he saw Father Velasquez step down from the altar and walk towards him. When the priest was close, he smiled, but Morgan didn't believe that he'd been listening. He was probably just reacting to Morgan's own smile.\n\nAfter he and the priest entered the sacristy, Morgan closed the door and said, \"I'll be taking Carlotta back with me to the saloon. When I return to San Antonio in a couple of days, I'll bring her with me and arrange for her to stay with a good family I know well. They'll care for her.\"\n\n\"What will you do with your brother's saloon?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry, Father. I should have told you that I'll be moving to Kerrville. I'm going to completely overhaul the saloon and set up my law practice there.\"\n\n\"You are a lawyer?\" the astonished priest asked.\n\n\"Yes, Father. I was admitted to the Texas bar more than ten years ago. I have my law offices in San Antonio.\"\n\n\"I had heard that Bill Kane had a brother, but I almost began to believe it was just gossip until I opened the door to the sacristy. I'm relieved that you are nothing like your brother.\"\n\n\"So, am I. It should be dark enough by now, so I'll be able to escort Carlotta back to the saloon. I promise you that she will be treated with the utmost respect and will never be asked to do anything immoral again.\"\n\n\"Thank you for setting aside my concerns, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"Please call me Morg, Father. As I intend to be both a resident of Kerrville and a respected member of your parish. I may miss an occasional Mass because of my work, but I'll confess those sins the following Saturday.\"\n\nFather Velasquez smiled as he said, \"Many of my parishioners confess to that same sin. But I understand that there are times when the demands of the world are more important.\"\n\nMorgan then turned to Carlotta and asked, \"Can you cover your head with your shawl? We'll be entering the church in another minute.\"\n\nFather Ramon said, \"We have a back door, so you won't have to go to the main street.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Father.\"\n\nCarlotta had already removed her scarf, so she stood then pulled it over her dark hair and wrapped it around her neck. She then reached for her stuffed pillowcase but before she even touched it, Morgan took one long stride and snatched it from the floor.\n\nFather Velasquez then shook Morgan's hand and blessed them both before opening the door to the sacristy and leading them to the back door.\n\nMorgan stepped into the alley first to check for any spying eyes, then motioned for Carlotta to exit the doorway.\n\nAs they walked through the shadows of early evening, Morgan's biggest concern was now the Montoya boys. He would have asked Carlotta if they might seek revenge for their father's death but wanted to give her time to forget. He'd ask the sheriff tomorrow morning.\n\nHe still had a lot on his plate. He was still fleshing out his plans for the transformation of the Wet Gulch into The Bluebonnet. That included shutting down his law office and moving everything to Kerrville. But that was the simplest of the problems he faced.\n\nHe had an idea of what to do with the five remaining working girls, but it still would be their decision. But as difficult as he expected it to be, he was actually excited with the idea. It was almost the best of both worlds that he'd inhabited before he received Sheriff Brown's telegram.\n\nMorgan didn't see anyone before they reached the back door of the saloon. He unlocked the door to let Carlotta enter. She didn't move but simply stared at the open doorway.\n\nHe could understand her reticence, so he looked down at her tense face and smiled as he said, \"It's alright, Carlotta.\"\n\nShe kept her eyes focused ahead as she nodded but still didn't move. So, Morgan gently placed his hand on her shoulder and waited. After a few seconds, she took a breath then entered as he followed her inside.\n\nOnce they were in the dark hallway, Morgan closed and locked the door before walking beside Carlotta to the large barroom. There were lamps burning, so he knew that at least some of the women were waiting.\n\nBefore they even reached the spacious room, he heard light, hurried footsteps and wasn't surprised to see Stella Culliver appear at the end of the hallway holding one of the kerosene lamps.\n\nCarlotta froze when she saw Stella, so Morgan had to take a step back as Stella drew closer.\n\nStella smiled and asked, \"Are you alright, Carlotta?\"\n\nCarlotta seemed relieved before she replied, \"Yes. How are you, Stella?\"\n\nStella looked at Morgan and said, \"We're not quite sure yet. It depends on our new boss.\"\n\nCarlotta said, \"I think you will all be much happier now.\"\n\nStella shifted her eyes to Carlotta before taking her hand and saying, \"Let's go have a seat and talk. We all hope that Morgan will explain how we fit into his plans for the saloon.\"\n\nMorgan followed the two women into the saloon. After Stella set the lamp on the table surrounded by the other four ladies, she and Carlotta took their seats. He remained standing but handed Carlotta her pillow-less pillowcase.\n\nBefore he started describing his preliminary plans for the saloon, he asked, \"Have you already had dinner?\"\n\nStella replied, \"No. We were waiting for you to return.\"\n\n\"Then why don't we move to the kitchen? I can tell you what I've already decided to do while someone who knows how to cook prepares supper.\"\n\nThe six women rose from their chairs but then waited for Morgan to start walking to the apartment. He was surprised because he'd left it unlocked and given them permission to use the kitchen. He suspected that they still had bad memories of the place. As he headed to the door, he revisited his earlier decision to keep the large bed. He still stopped by the open bedroom door, but just to toss his hat onto the bed.\n\nOnce they entered the kitchen, the women sat at the table while he walked to the large cookstove. He dumped in two large scoops of coal then poured some kerosene over the top then took a match from a tin cup on the counter. After striking it on the side of the stove, he tossed it into the firebox. The flame popped to life, and he closed the heavy door.\n\nHe turned to the women, smiled and said, \"That is the extent of my skills in the kitchen, ladies.\"\n\nStella and Rose Harper stood and walked to the pantry, passing Morgan as he took a seat at the head of the table. He glanced at Carlotta and wasn't surprised to see her brown eyes staring back at him.\n\nHe smiled then looked at the other women and asked, \"I haven't had a chance to meet anyone but Stella and Carlotta. Can you tell me your names?\"\n\nAfter Sally Prince, Fannie Crosby and Ruby McCall introduced themselves, he looked to the cookstove and Rose said, \"I'm Rose Harper.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ladies. In case Stella failed to mention it, please call me Morg. I'll give you the basic idea of what I expect to do over the next few months. Stella and Rose can listen as they do all the work.\"\n\nFive of the women laughed and even Carlotta smiled before he began revealing his plans.\n\n\"I'm sure that Stella told you that I plan to completely renovate the saloon and will change its name to The Bluebonnet. I intend to turn it into a respectable establishment where no one worries about a brawl or gunfire. When I return, I'll bring some of my good friends who will ensure that it stays peaceful. Each customer who enters will turn over his firearms until he leaves. We'll only serve good, undiluted liquor. All of the gambling tables will be honest. It'll be hard going for a while but once The Bluebonnet is in operation for a month or so, customers will appreciate the improvements.\"\n\nFrom the cookstove, Stella asked, \"What about us, Morg?\"\n\n\"I was just about to discuss that, but what you do will be up to you.\"\n\nSally laughed and said, \"We're whores, Morg. There's not much else we can do.\"\n\nHe smiled at her and asked, \"How much were you being paid?\"\n\nShe glanced at Stella before replying, \"The men gave three dollars to the bartender and the customer would get to choose who he wanted to take upstairs. We got fifty cents of the three dollars. It wasn't bad because we didn't have to pay for the room.\"\n\n\"So, you were making about fifty dollars a month; is that right?\"\n\n\"No. I think we made closer to thirty. Bill didn't charge some of his pals and he was his own best customer.\"\n\nMorgan sighed then said, \"Here's my offer. When the place reopens, you'll have two choices. You can continue as you have been doing but with a significant change. You'll keep all of the money you earn, but you'll pay thirty dollars a month in rent for the room.\"\n\nRuby gasped and exclaimed, \"We get to keep all of that money?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. You earned it, so you can keep it.\"\n\nSally then asked, \"What is our other choice?\"\n\n\"If you want to change professions, you can operate the games. I have no intention of rehiring the dealers and operators who ran them before. But even if you would rather continue taking men upstairs, I'll want you to present a less provocative appearance. You're all pretty women but your makeup and the impressive display of your cleavage cheapens you. I think you'd all be much more attractive if you strip that cake and rouge off your faces.\"\n\nStella asked, \"How much would we earn if we decided to work as card dealers?\"\n\n\"I'd pay you a percentage of the take each month. I have no idea what it will be, but I'll establish a base of thirty dollars a month and you won't have to pay for your room.\"\n\n\"But none of us know anything about running those games.\"\n\n\"The few times I played poker, I left much poorer than when I started playing. But my friends who will return with me will be able to teach you. Even my clerk will help.\"\n\nThe room slipped into silence as they began to mull their choices. Morgan assumed that they were all surprised at the amount. But he understood that if they chose to continue to earn their living on their backs, they'd still make much more if they kept all of the money from their customers. Even if they paid the thirty dollars a month for the room, he estimated each of them could still net well over a hundred dollars a month. But it was the hazards associated with the profession that might outweigh the added income.\n\nFannie finally asked, \"What about you, Morg?\"\n\nHe tilted his head slightly and asked, \"What do you mean? I'll still make money from the saloon, but I'll be working as an attorney as well. Trust me, I'll be doing fine.\"\n\n\"No. What I meant was, will you be wanting us to, um, visit you in your apartment?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I'm not anything like my brother. I won't force you to do anything you don't want to do. In fact, you can even turn down clients if you don't feel safe. If any of the men get too rough, let me or one of my assistants know and he'll be banned from The Bluebonnet.\"\n\nRose then asked, \"Will you really let us keep taking men upstairs? I thought you might want us to stop being whores because you're a lawyer.\"\n\nHe smiled at her as he replied, \"What you do after The Bluebonnet opens its doors is up to you. I'm not a preacher and understand why those single men and some of the older, married ones visit you.\"\n\nStella then asked, \"I assume that you're not married. I can't imagine a wife allowing you to run a saloon and brothel.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not married. I also want to let you know that while the saloon is being renovated, I'll pay each of you thirty dollars a month. You'll have to leave your rooms while they're being remodeled, you can move into the house that I didn't know my brother owned.\"\n\nStella asked, \"What if we turn it into a brothel?\"\n\nHe turned his head in her direction before replying, \"Then my friends can move into your newly renovated rooms, and you'll probably be jealous.\"\n\nShe laughed as she shook her head. She'd only been joking because even if they did start accepting customers when they lived in the house, they wouldn't have even the small amount of protection that Bill had provided.\n\nHe then looked at Carlotta who hadn't said a word, but seemed more comfortable now, so he didn't say anything to her.\n\n\"That's the basic plan so far. I'll be bringing Carlotta with me when I return to San Antonio in a couple of days. I should be back within a week or so with my friends. I'll tell Sheriff Brown everything tomorrow and I'm sure he'll keep you safe, but I recommend that you keep the doors locked while I'm gone.\"\n\nCarlotta quietly asked, \"How can you get me to the train? It leaves in the morning, and someone will see me.\"\n\n\"You'll be disguised, Carlotta. We'll buy some men's clothes and alter them to fit. You can tuck your hair into one of my brother's hats and if you keep your eyes down, we should make it to the train station without any problem. I'll pick up the tickets the day before.\"\n\n\"I hope it works.\"\n\n\"I was thinking of asking the sheriff to escort us, but I think that might let everyone know who it was under that big hat. I'll be able to handle any potential trouble that might arrive along the way.\"\n\n\"But you're a lawyer!\"\n\nHe grinned as he replied, \"I was a Texan first.\"\n\nStella asked, \"What about the other women who left to work at the other saloons? What if they want to come back?\"\n\n\"They already made their choice. Each of you has time to decide what you want to do.\"\n\nShe then asked, \"What changes will you make to the saloon?\"\n\n\"I need to find an honest construction company first. Is there one in town or will I have to send a crew from San Antonio?\"\n\nStella replied, \"Mister Dunhill owns the only one in Kerrville, but I don't know if he's honest or not.\"\n\n\"I'll ask the sheriff in the morning. As to the modifications I have in mind, I'll start with the plumbing. I'm going to have a boiler shed built in back and use it to heat water. Then I'll set up hot water to be piped to my bathtub and another one I'll add upstairs after I convert one of the empty rooms to a bathing room.\"\n\nSally exclaimed, \"We'll have our own bathtub with hot water?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he nodded, then continued, saying, \"I'll have a septic tank dug outside and then in each of the two bathrooms, I'll have a water closet installed.\"\n\nRose asked, \"What's a water closet?\"\n\n\"I'll let it be a surprise. I'll probably send a plumber from San Antonio to handle all the work anyway because I doubt if anyone here has ever seen one.\"\n\nStella said, \"I think I read about them. They're like privies inside a house that uses water to flush things away to keep it from stinking up the place. Is that right?\"\n\n\"So much for my surprise. Yes, that's what they are. There aren't that many even in a city like San Antonio.\"\n\nBefore the women started talking about the plumbing wonder, Morgan said, \"Then I'm going to have another kitchen built behind the bar for your use and to make food for customers. I want to have hot coffee available all day and offer it at no cost to our customers. Maybe I'll even use it as a restaurant during the day.\"\n\n\"Are we going to have to cook, even if we decide to deal cards?\" asked Sally.\n\n\"No, ma'am. I'm going to hire a cook. I have other positions I'll need filled as well.\"\n\nStella set her large spoon on the cookstove as she said, \"You'll have a large payroll. What if your new saloon doesn't make that much money?\"\n\n\"I can afford to let it lose money for a while, Stella.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Ten minutes later, they were eating their dinner while Morgan outlined some of the other, less drastic modifications he planned to make to the saloon. Some only popped into his mind as he talked. He knew the list was far from complete, but he'd have time to finalize the conversion. It would take two months or more because much of the materials, furnishings and hardware would have to be shipped from larger cities. Kerrville was growing rapidly after the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in '87, and he expected it to continue to expand, just not as dramatically. But despite its growth, he knew it still lacked much of what he needed to make The Bluebonnet the high-class operation he hoped it would become.\n\nWhen their plates were empty, Morgan said, \"I think we can call it a day, ladies. I'll take care of the dishes.\"\n\nThey looked at him and smiled before they stood and took their own place settings from the table and carried them to the sink.\n\nMorgan rose and after putting his utensils and empty cup onto his plate, carried them to the sink and stood at the end of the queue.\n\nAs the six women turned to leave, Morgan asked, \"Stella, could you stay for a few minutes? I need to ask you something.\"\n\nShe stopped, then turned and took a seat while four of the other women giggled as they left the kitchen believing that Morgan wasn't planning to chat for very long. Carlotta didn't even smile as she was sure that he wasn't going to take Stella into his brother's bedroom. She had spent those few minutes with him in the sacristy and believed that he was almost worthy of sainthood. She picked up her stuffed pillowcase and followed the others down the hallway.\n\nAfter he took a seat at the large table, Morgan said, \"Stella, you told me that you were the ladies' mother hen, but I think you're much more than that. You have a good head on your shoulders and aren't afraid to say what's on your mind. I'm going to need your mind and character to help me make this work.\"\n\nJust like her working sisters, Stella had expected a very different reason for being asked to stay in the apartment. She had been confused a bit because she was the oldest and thought Sally and Rose were both prettier. She was pleased that he seemed to appreciate her personal traits that no men even noticed, but a bit disappointed that she hadn't been asked to join him in the big bed.\n\nShe asked, \"How can I help?\"\n\n\"You can help in many ways. I'll be gone for a couple of weeks and until I return, I want you to be in charge.\"\n\nStella snapped, \"But I'm a woman! And even worse, I'm a whore!\"\n\n\"Strangely enough, I already figured that out. But you're a strong woman and that's all that matters to me.\"\n\n\"I think you're making an enormous mistake.\"\n\n\"I don't. Besides, the worst that could happen is that the saloon burns down while I'm gone. Maybe that would be an advantage because I'd be able to start with a blank canvas.\"\n\n\"That's just silly, Morg.\"\n\nHe smiled as he replied, \"Maybe. Anyway, I'll need to know a lot more about you and the other four ladies who will be staying. I also need to understand more about Kerrville and especially Harry Freeman. Speaking of the ladies, may I ask you something that I noticed when I first walked into the saloon?\"\n\n\"Do I have a choice about answering?\"\n\n\"Of course, you do. But when I first looked at you and the others, I was surprised to see that each of you was younger and much prettier than most of the working girls I've met. You said you were the oldest, but I don't believe that you're thirty years old yet. I assume it's because of my brother's method of hiring. Carlotta told me how she came to work here.\"\n\nShe nodded as she replied, \"Mostly. Some of us were happy to get the job, but just as many fell prey to Bill's handsome face and sweet words.\"\n\n\"He was that way even when he was a teenager. Did you know that Carlotta was pregnant?\"\n\n\"She never told anyone, but we could tell. We've all been there.\"\n\nMorgan closed his eyes for a moment then asked, \"But he took care of your problem; didn't he?\"\n\nHe wasn't surprised when tears began sliding from Stella's eyes as she nodded and softly replied, \"And that witch made sure that it would never happen again.\"\n\nMorgan reached across the table and took her hands as he said, \"I'm so very sorry, Stella.\"\n\nShe sniffed then pulled her hand away to wipe her face before saying, \"I'm all right. I deserved it for coming here.\"\n\n\"No woman deserves it, Stella. I can't change what my brother did, but I promise that you'll have a better life now.\"\n\nStella used her skirt's hem to dry her face then asked, \"What else will you need me to do?\"\n\n\"We'll need to hire two bartenders, a cook and two cleaning women who'll also do the laundry. We'll probably add more help, but that will get things going. When we're close to reopening, you'll be with me when we interview applicants. I'll depend on your judgement.\"\n\n\"You said that you'd want to have them leave their guns when they enter. If you plan to do that, you'll have to hire some hard men, too.\"\n\n\"I'll be bringing my friends back from San Antonio. They've worked for me as investigators for years and they'll continue doing it here, but they won't be as busy here, so they can do the job.\"\n\n\"If all of us accept your offer to work the gaming tables, will you hire some new girls?\"\n\n\"No. But those of you who do choose a new way to earn a living can't accept paying clients any longer. If the non-working girls want to invite some man to keep them company, it's up to them as long as it's only for their own pleasure.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\"\n\n\"I'll depend on you to keep them honest, Stella.\"\n\nShe smiled and said, \"Then you'd better hope that I don't misbehave myself.\"\n\n\"That's only if you decide to accept my offer to give up your old way of life. If you do, then I have to have trust in you, or The Bluebonnet will fail after just a few months and Harry Freeman will win.\"\n\n\"You are really serious about all of this; aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. We can talk more tomorrow. I'm sure that the other ladies are all waiting in the saloon for you, expecting you to tell them what I look like without any clothes.\"\n\nStella laughed as she stood and said, \"I'm sure at least four of them are outside. I imagine Carlotta is already in her room.\"\n\nMorgan watched her leave then turned to the sink to wash the dishes. When he'd left San Antonio early this morning, he couldn't have imagined how the day would end. He expected to be burying his brother, then staying for a few days to sell the saloon. Now he'd be moving to Kerrville and running the saloon while still trying to practice law." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Stella was right when she closed the apartment door and entered the barroom. She found Sally, Rose, Ruby and Fannie waiting for her with big smiles on their expectant faces. She wasn't sure if she would pretend that she'd spent a very different thirty-five minutes with their new boss or disappoint them and tell them the truth. But she was sure they wouldn't believe her if she said that all Morgan did was to talk to her. So, she smiled and sat down at their poker table and soon had them giggling with her lurid but imaginary report.\n\nShe didn't think that Morgan would mind because she expected that he would start inviting them into his apartment before long. She was also hoping to be the first to spend a night with him. She still found it difficult to believe that he saw them any differently than any of their clients or his brother." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Morgan finished washing the dishes then blew out the lamp, picked up his saddlebags and headed down the hallway. He turned into the only bedroom, closed the door behind him and took off his jacket. After hanging it on one of the brass hooks on the back of the door, he removed his shoulder holster and hung it over another hook. He stepped to the big bed, sat down and pulled off his boots and socks. He didn't undress because he wasn't about to sleep between his brother's sheets. He moved his Stetson to the side table then laid on the massive bed. He didn't even know they made mattresses this big. He stretched out his long arms and wiggled his fingers. He estimated that it was almost ten feet wide and eight feet long. He tried not to think of how Bill had made use of it.\n\n\"I guess I'll be buying a new bed after all. This one should be burned for firewood. Bill probably feels much hotter flames now, but I'm not the one to judge him.\"\n\nMorgan closed his eyes and said his nightly prayers, but they weren't for his brother. They were for the ladies sleeping upstairs and especially for Carlotta. He was just thankful that she had killed his brother before he had that witch kill her baby." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nMorgan left The Wet Gulch around eight o'clock the next morning. After he'd taken a cold bath and shaved, he opened the apartment door and called out to the ladies. He assumed they were used to sleeping late after working all night. By the time they began drifting into the apartment, he had breakfast ready. He had them take a seat at the table and served each of them when she arrived. Carlotta was the third to show up, but he gave her more food because she was eating for two. Before he left, he told them that they could use the apartment's bathtub and to start altering some of Bill's clothes to fit Carlotta.\n\nIt was a chilly morning when he left the saloon, but he knew it wouldn't stay that way for very long. He crossed the busy street and headed for the sheriff's office to tell J.R. about Carlotta. He couldn't remember if he'd told the sheriff that he was going to keep the saloon or not, but he was sure that he hadn't told him what he was going to do with it. He'd also ask about his competition because he was sure that Sheriff Brown knew much more about Harry Freeman than Stella did.\n\nWhen he turned into the doorway, he almost collided with one of the deputies.\n\nHe quickly stepped back and said, \"Sorry. I didn't see you.\"\n\nDeputy Joe Bixby grinned and looked up at Morgan as he said, \"I'm just glad you didn't run me over, Mister Kane. The sheriff is in his private office. I'm sure he wants to hear what you're gonna do.\"\n\n\"I imagine so.\"\n\nAfter the young deputy stepped away, Morgan entered the empty jail and headed past the equally empty cells to the sheriff's small office. He was sure that J.R. heard his heavy footsteps, so he didn't bother announcing his arrival before swinging through the open doorway.\n\nThe sheriff looked up from some papers he was reading and smiled as Morgan removed his hat then sat on one of the two chairs.\n\n\"After I got back here, I must have had half the town come to the jail askin' about you. So, what can you tell me when they start showin' up again?\"\n\n\"The first thing you can tell them is that I'll be moving to Kerrville and taking over the saloon.\"\n\nJ.R.'s eyebrows shot up as he asked, \"You're not gonna to sell it?\"\n\n\"No, sir. But I am going to make some big changes in the place. I need to tell you about Carlotta first.\"\n\n\"I didn't want to ask in case you didn't find her or somethin' bad happened.\"\n\n\"As you suspected, I found her in the church. I talked to the priest and then had a long conversation with Carlotta. I was sickened when she told me how she'd been hoodwinked by my brother. I snuck her into the saloon after sunset and told her that I'd take her with me when I leave for San Antonio either tomorrow or the next day. You don't think her family will accept her back; do you?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, and I wasn't about to go out to their ranch to ask, either.\"\n\n\"Were her brothers that angry at Bill?\"\n\n\"Nope. They weren't happy with him, but I think they were pleased that they were now in charge of the ranch. It was Mrs. Montoya who was mad at him. I don't think she'll blame you at all.\"\n\n\"So, you don't think I should ride out there and talk to her?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't recommend it. I don't think Carlotta would want to go back either.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll bring her with me. Before I tell you about my plans for the saloon, can you tell me about Harry Freeman? The ladies didn't seem very fond of the man.\"\n\n\"I can understand why they might feel that way. Harry owns The Thirsty Coyote and Harry's House, the other two saloons in town. The Coyote is a real dump and it's where he sends his whores when they get just as dumpy or diseased. Harry's House is better, but it wasn't as good as your brother's place. I'm sure he'll visit you soon enough to make you an offer.\"\n\n\"He can't buy it at any price. I'm going to rename it The Bluebonnet and turn it into a first-class operation. I told the five girls that were still there that they could either keep working as prostitutes but could give it up and become dealers. If they all take the second option, then the saloon will be just a place to have drinks and gamble.\"\n\nJ.R. leaned back and asked, \"Do you really think they'll do that?\"\n\n\"I could be wrong, but I believe that all of them will. Does Harry have any strongarm types that could cause me problems after I turn him down?\"\n\n\"The last time I counted, he had four of 'em. But I don't think they'll bother you. I keep a close eye on what they do when they're out of Harry's saloons.\"\n\n\"One more thing before I tell you what I plan to do. I'll need a lot of construction work, and Stella told me that there's only one firm in town. Can I trust him to start the work in the two weeks that I'll be gone?\"\n\n\"Jack Dunhill is a good man and runs an honest business. But I'd still wait until you get back before he sends his work crews to the place.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll still go and talk to him to give him an idea what I plan to do.\"\n\n\"You've got to tell me first, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan smiled then began to tell the sheriff about the massive changes he planned to make to the saloon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "While Morgan was outlining his ideas for The Bluebonnet, the six women were seated around the kitchen table discussing their unexpected options. Even though Carlotta would be leaving, Stella wanted her included in the conversation for two reasons: she seemed to trust Morgan already and Stella didn't want her to feel excluded.\n\nStella felt a bit naked without her layer of makeup and was sure that the others felt the same way. But she did admit that each of the others seemed younger and prettier without their war paint. She hadn't looked in her mirror yet, so she wondered if her appearance had improved. They still wore their low-cut dresses because they didn't have anything else. She'd ask Morg about new wardrobes when he returned. But what did surprise her was when she noticed that not one of them was wearing her corset. When she had decided to forgo the strangling garment, she thought that she would be the only one to leave it behind. It was another strange sensation to feel so free of the whalebone prison, but she was relieved to be able to breathe again.\n\nShe scanned the other women's faces before she asked, \"What are your thoughts about him and what he says he's going to do with the place?\"\n\nFannie said, \"I don't think he's anything like Bill, but I'm not sure if he's serious about us really becoming dealers.\"\n\nRose said, \"I trust him, Stella. He could have just sent us all to work for Freeman, but he didn't. I'm just not sure what I want to do.\"\n\nStella replied, \"We don't have to give him our answer until he returns. I think he's being honest with us, and even if he isn't, do we really have a choice?\"\n\nRuby asked, \"How much do you think we'd make if we were getting all of the money from our customers?\"\n\nStella answered, \"After we pay rent for our rooms, I guess we'd still make more than a hundred dollars a month.\"\n\nSally laughed then said, \"If it's just a comparison of dollar amounts, then I guess the smart thing to do would be to keep being whores.\"\n\n\"I don't think it's smart at all,\" Stella replied, \"What happens if one of those men gives you a disease? We've all been pretty lucky so far. You saw what it did to Jessie. I know Morg said that he'd keep us safe, but we could still be roughed up before he could help. Then there's the long-term issue. Even though I'm still pretty young, I know that it won't last. How much longer will you be able to take those men up those stairs even if you don't get sick or hurt?\"\n\nRose said, \"It sounds like you've already decided to become a card dealer, Stella.\"\n\n\"I'm not going to let another man treat me worse than he does his horse.\"\n\nSally smiled and asked, \"Are you hoping that Morg invites you to join him in that giant bed more often now?\"\n\nStella glared at Sally before snapping, \"No, I am not! I was just having fun with all of you last night. All we did was talk about his plans for the saloon and all of us. Do any of you really believe that a lawyer would want to spend a moment of time with any of us?\"\n\nSally's smile vanished as she said, \"I'm sorry, Stella. I was just... well, I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"That's alright. I shouldn't have told you that fable, even if it was a joke.\"\n\nShe then looked at Carlotta and asked, \"What do you think of all this, Carlotta?\"\n\n\"When I first heard his voice at the door, I was terrified. I thought he'd shoot me for killing his brother. But just a few minutes later, I was sure that he would help me. He even blamed Bill for what happened and gave me hope that things would be much better. He even knew that I was pregnant. I didn't let any of you know, so I knew that you didn't tell him.\"\n\nStella replied, \"We knew, but didn't say anything.\"\n\n\"How did you know?\"\n\n\"We've all been through it before. We wished we could do something to stop you from visiting that witch woman, but, well, you understand why we couldn't.\"\n\nCarlotta nodded then said, \"He even seemed to know about the evil woman and said he'd never let her touch me.\"\n\nThen she smiled as she said, \"He even told me that I was going to have a little girl and asked me not to name her Morgana.\"\n\nStella looked at the other women who were smiling after Carlotta told them what Morg had said. She wondered why Morg told Carlotta those things but figured that it really didn't matter. Carlotta would be leaving with him in another day or two and they'd never see her again.\n\nShe then said, \"I guess each of you can make your own decision sometime over the next week or so. But I just wanted to get an idea of what you thought about our new boss and his unexpected plans for the saloon.\"\n\nRose quickly said, \"I already decided to join you as a card dealer, Stella. I think it would be safer and maybe one of the men who plays cards at my table will decide that I'm not a whore and ask to court me.\"\n\n\"It's just a dream, Rose, but even an impossible dream is better than none at all.\"\n\nAs soon as Rose had announced her decision, Sally, Ruby and Fannie quickly followed suit. By the time Morgan was leaving the jail, his new saloon would no longer have any working girls." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Morgan left the sheriff's office and headed to J.M. Dunhill Construction. He wasn't sure if the firm could do some of the fine craftsmanship he would require, but they should be able to do much of the renovation.\n\nWhen he entered the surprisingly large office, he removed his hat as a well-dressed woman secretary smiled and asked, \"May I help you, sir?\"\n\nHe stepped closer to her desk as he returned her smile and said, \"Yes, ma'am. I'm Bill Kane's younger brother, Morgan. I just arrived from San Antonio where I have a law practice. I had intended to dispose of his saloon but changed my mind. I decided to keep the place, but I want to make significant upgrades which is why I'm here.\"\n\nThe secretary seemed to be evaluating him for a few seconds. He was sure that she already knew who he was before he introduced himself. Kerrville may be a good-sized town, but that only gave the gossip train more rails to follow.\n\n\"I'm sure that you'll need to speak to Mister Dunhill, so I'll let him know that you're here.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am.\"\n\nShe stood then stepped to a door with J.M. Dunhill painted its frosted glass window and tapped once before opening it a few inches and saying, \"Sir, Mister Morgan Kane would like to talk to you about renovating The Wet Gulch.\"\n\n\"Send him in, Agatha.\"\n\nAgatha swung the door fully open then waited for Morgan to pass through the doorway before closing it.\n\nJohn Dunhill was stunned when he got his first look at Bill Kane's younger brother. He'd been told that Morgan was taller, but he was even bigger than he'd anticipated. But he also knew that the brother was a lawyer, so he was surprised when Agatha had said that he was here to renovate The Wet Gulch.\n\nHe stood and said, \"Have a seat, Mister Kane.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he sat down and said, \"Please call me Morg. The Kane name is probably unpopular among the honest folks in Kerrville.\"\n\nThe builder didn't deny Morgan's statement, but asked, \"Are you really going to renovate The Wet Gulch?\"\n\n\"I am. And I'll start by changing the name to The Bluebonnet. I want to make it an honest, first-class operation. I just need to know how much of the big job you can handle and how much of it I'll need to have done by firms outside of Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by how much we'll be able to get done. But I heard that you were a lawyer, so if you don't mind my asking, are you giving up your practice?\"\n\n\"No, sir. That's one of the modifications I'll need. I'm going to set up my law office in the saloon.\"\n\nJohn laughed as he shook his head then said, \"I reckon that's a first for Texas, if not the whole United States of America. Just tell me what you want, so I can let you know what we can't do. I won't be able to give you an estimate for at least a day.\"\n\n\"That's alright. Let's get started.\"\n\nMister Dunhill took out a large, lined pad from his desk and laid two extra pencils on the desktop before taking a freshly sharpened pencil in his hand. Morgan then began to slowly explain what he wanted as John's list began to grow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Morgan spent more than an hour with John Dunhill before he left. As John had claimed, Morgan had been pleasantly surprised by all of the work that his men could do. John had laughed when Morgan had told him about the water closets and other changes to the building's plumbing. But his men could dig the septic tank and add the pipes.\n\nWhile he wouldn't get the official estimate until tomorrow, John had suggested that it would cost him about as much as it would to build three houses. There was much more than that in Bill's safe, so Morgan wouldn't need to make any withdrawals from his account in San Antonio. He'd leave most of his money there for a while. Once The Bluebonnet was turning a profit, he'd shift the rest to The First Bank of Kerrville.\n\nHis next stop should be much shorter. He suspected that some of his new clients would be out of town, so he decided he'd buy a buckboard. He'd have some modifications made to it as well. The visit to Wright's Carriages only took twenty minutes because Al Wright needed to draw what Morgan told him. His grin never left his face as he listened to Morgan's design modifications.\n\nIt was almost noon when he headed back down Main Street. He was a block away from The Wet Gulch when he spotted a man standing at the front door peering through the windows. He had no doubt that he was looking at Harry Freeman.\n\nThe owner of the other two saloons was at least eight inches shorter than he was but looked as if he weighed almost as much. He was well-dressed in a nicely fitted light gray suit and wore a dark gray Stetson but didn't wear a gunbelt. He had dark hair with a full beard and Morgan estimated his age to be around forty. As he continued along the boardwalk, Morgan wondered if Harry knew that he was keeping The Wet Gulch. If not, he'd find out soon enough.\n\nHarry Freeman had already tried to open the door, despite the large CLOSED sign. He was looking inside for Bill's brother and was getting frustrated. He didn't even know he had arrived until an hour ago. Nor did he know that Morgan was a lawyer, much less of his plans for The Wet Gulch.\n\nMorgan had his key ring in his hand as he neared the saloon entrance. When Harry heard his footsteps, he turned and immediately identified the tall stranger as Bill's brother.\n\nHe grinned and when Morgan was close, Harry stuck out his hand and said, \"Hello, Mister Kane. My name is Harry Freeman, and I was wondering if I could have a few minutes of your time.\"\n\nHis cheerful greeting told Morgan that Harry didn't know about his plans at all, so he smiled and shook his hand before saying, \"Sure, but if you don't mind, can we talk on the bench rather than go inside? The ladies are probably still sleeping. I was surprised to find them here.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes. Of course.\"\n\nThe two saloon owners walked to the nearest bench and after they sat down, Harry said, \"I don't know if anyone has told you, but I own the other two saloons in town, The Thirsty Coyote and Harry's House. Now, you don't seem to be of the same character as your brother, so I expect that you would be eager to rid yourself of The Wet Gulch. I'm prepared to make you a very generous offer.\"\n\nMorgan thoughtfully nodded before asking, \"How much would you be willing to pay me?\"\n\nHarry danced inside as he answered, \"Five thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it's worth much more than that, Mister Freeman.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But I don't believe you'll get any other offers, at least not for a few months.\"\n\nMorgan pretended to think about it for thirty seconds before he asked, \"What about the working girls? Are they included in the price?\"\n\n\"I'll add another five hundred for the women. Six of them are already at work in my two establishments.\"\n\nMorgan tried to keep a straight face as he sat quietly for another minute. He didn't even glance at Harry. He wanted to let him sweat and see if he upped his offer before he was turned down.\n\nHarry had expected Bill's brother to jump at his first offer. But he had been prepared to offer as much as ten thousand, which was still less than its worth, even without the whores.\n\nSweat was actually beginning to bead on his florid face when he said, \"I'll tell you what, Mister Kane. I think I can give you seven thousand dollars, but that would include the women.\"\n\nMorgan sighed, then shook his head before he stood and towered over Harry.\n\n\"I reckon I'll just keep the place and see what I can do with it. It's a bit drab and needs some updating, but I have more than enough money to make it into a really classy operation. But thank you for your generous offer.\"\n\nHarry popped to his feet and exclaimed, \"Don't be so rash, Mister Kane! Running a saloon is difficult and filled with unexpected problems. I can offer you eight thousand but that's as high as I can go.\"\n\nMorgan tipped his hat then replied, \"It might be fun to run a saloon. Good day, Mister Freeman.\"\n\nBefore Harry could make another desperate offer, Morgan stepped away and soon reached the front door then quickly unlocked and opened it.\n\nHarry Freeman was surprised and frustrated as he watched Bill's brother enter the saloon and close the door behind him. He stood frozen near the bench for another minute before he stomped past the entrance and headed for Harry's House. He didn't think that Morgan would last a month, no matter how much money he spent fixing up his brother's saloon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Once he was inside, Morgan locked the front door but didn't see any of the women. He headed for the apartment figuring that's where he'd find them. There was still a chance that they could be back in their rooms catching up on the sleep they'd lost when they felt obligated to match his schedule.\n\nThe apartment door was open, so he just passed through the doorway and heard their voices coming from the kitchen. They stopped talking as soon they realized that he'd returned.\n\nMorgan entered the kitchen and had to say, \"Please, don't let me interrupt you,\" when they began to stand.\n\nStella returned to her seat and asked, \"Did you visit Mister Dunhill after you talked to the sheriff?\"\n\nAs Morgan stepped to the cookstove to pour himself a cup of coffee, he replied, \"Yes, ma'am. I was impressed with Mister Dunhill's operation, and I'll go back tomorrow to get his estimate.\"\n\n\"How much do you think it will cost?\"\n\n\"I'd guess around three thousand dollars for his work, but I figure it'll run me another two thousand in other expenses. The good news is that my brother will be paying for all of it.\"\n\nHe wrapped a towel around his hand before he picked up the hot coffeepot and filled his cup.\n\nStella asked, \"Morg, can you let us spend some of the money to buy more respectable clothes?\"\n\nHe set the coffeepot back on the cookstove and smiled as he replied, \"I'll give you each fifty dollars and you can buy whatever you like. I'll almost be sorry to see you wearing less-revealing dresses, but I'll survive.\"\n\nThere was a brief, pregnant pause before Stella started laughing and the other, even Carlotta joined in.\n\nRuby asked, \"When can we go shopping?\"\n\n\"Have you already had lunch?\"\n\nStella replied, \"No. But we'll fix something shortly.\"\n\n\"After lunch, I'll give you the cash and escort you to the general store.\"\n\n\"You don't have to protect us, Morg. We do shop there, you know.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you do, Stella. But guess who else I chatted with this morning?\"\n\n\"If I had to guess, I'd say Harry Freeman.\"\n\n\"Then you'd win a prize. When I returned, I found him looking in the window. After he introduced himself, he asked me if I'd talk to him. I said that you were all asleep, so we used the bench. He seemed so happy, that I was sure he didn't know that I was going to keep the saloon. I don't even think he knew I was a lawyer, either. Anyway, it didn't take long before he offered to buy the place.\"\n\nStella quickly asked, \"How much did he offer?\"\n\n\"His first offer was five thousand dollars.\"\n\nRose asked, \"It's worth a lot more than that; isn't it?\"\n\n\"Much more. Then I had a little fun with Harry and asked him if his offered price included the women whom I had found living in the place.\"\n\nFannie exclaimed, \"You really did?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. He added another five hundred dollars, so I guess you are each worth a hundred because he didn't know Carlotta was here. I let him believe that I was thinking of accepting his offer which he quickly upped to seven thousand, including all five working girls. I told him that I'd run it myself, then he warned me it was hard to make money with a saloon. When I stood up to leave, he made one final offer of eight thousand dollars, but I just left him standing on the boardwalk.\n\n\"The sheriff told me that he didn't think that Harry would cause me any trouble, but I don't want him or his boys to give you any problems. That's why I'll escort you to the store.\"\n\nCarlotta quietly asked, \"What about me, Morg?\"\n\n\"You can stay in the apartment while we're gone. You can lock the door for added security. It'll only be for a couple of hours. I'll have Stella pick out some more clothes for you. Okay?\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nRose and Ruby stood to cook lunch and Morgan took his seat at the head of the table. He wasn't sure if the sheriff was right about Harry Freeman, but he had to depend on him and his deputies to keep the ladies safe while he was gone.\n\nAfter he sat down, he sipped his coffee and answered more of their questions about the upcoming changes. Even though they had all decided to accept the lower pay by running the gambling tables, they didn't tell Morgan of their decision yet. Stella had made all of them, including Carlotta, promise to wait until he returned from San Antonio. She wasn't totally convinced that he would return at all. Now she wasn't sure that he hadn't accepted Harry's offer but didn't want to tell them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Harry stomped into his office behind the bar in Harry's House. He slammed the door and tromped behind his desk then plopped onto his chair. He thought that Kane would readily accept his first offer. In those rare times when Bill mentioned his younger brother, it was in derisive tones. He made it sound as if his kid brother was afraid of butterflies. Even after he met Morgan, he still expected him to jump at his first offer. While he still wasn't worried about competition from The Wet Gulch, he would have preferred to have no competition at all.\n\nHe was still fuming when Carl Flowers entered his office without knocking. Harry normally didn't mind, but he was in a foul mood as Carl would soon discover.\n\nHarry glared at him as he snarled, \"What the hell do you want, Carl? And why didn't you knock?\"\n\nCarl lurched to a stop as he said, \"Sorry, boss. You seemed kinda put off when you came in and I was wonderin' what happened with Bill Kane's kid brother.\"\n\n\"That big bastard turned me down. I figured he'd take anything to get back to San Antonio, but he actually thinks he can run the place.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to lean on him, boss?\"\n\nHarry stared at Carl for a few seconds before he smiled and said, \"There's no need. In a few months, that boy will jump at two thousand dollars for the place.\"\n\nCarl was grinning as he turned and left the room. Harry knew what he was doing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Despite the women spending almost every dime of the money on clothes and accessories, the shopping trip took less time than Morgan had expected. They returned to the saloon in about an hour.\n\nThe spending frenzy wasn't disturbed by any uncomfortable incidents or even a nasty look. In fact, the folks they met were either polite, in the case of the women, or friendly if they were men. He wasn't sure if it was because the ladies' faces were bereft of makeup or the rumor of his plans for the Bluebonnet had begun to circulate. Regardless of the reason, it had been a pleasant, yet hectic experience. Watching the women laughing and chatting as they made their selections was worth every dime. They could have been mistaken for members of a church choir if they hadn't been wearing their revealing dresses.\n\nWhen they entered the saloon, Carlotta stepped out of the apartment and asked, \"Didn't you buy anything?\"\n\nStella laughed before she replied, \"We bought so much that it needs to be delivered. We all picked out some nice things for you too, Carlotta.\"\n\nCarlotta looked at Morgan and asked, \"Did you buy me some men's clothes?\"\n\n\"No, I didn't. You shouldn't have to disguise yourself. You'll wear one of your new dresses, and I'll be proud to be seen escorting the prettiest girl in town to the train station.\"\n\nCarlotta exclaimed, \"But those men! They'll try to hang me!\"\n\nMorgan stepped closer to Carlotta and put his big hands on her small shoulders.\n\nHe looked into her terrified brown eyes as he said, \"I promise you, Carlotta. Not one man will even threaten you with a mean look. You need to be brave. Make your little girl proud of her mother.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath then replied, \"What is your middle name?\"\n\nMorgan grinned then leaned forward and whispered in her ear.\n\nWhen he stood straight, she smiled and asked, \"Did you make that up?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. When we get to San Antonio, you can ask any one of my friends about it. They sometimes call me that when they want to get my attention.\"\n\nSally asked, \"What is it, Carlotta?\"\n\nShe shook her head as she replied, \"Morg said that he'd tell you himself when he thought it was the right time. But I don't think I'll use it for my little girl, either.\"\n\nRuby laughed then asked, \"What if it's a boy?\"\n\n\"She's not a boy. She's going to be a perfect little girl.\"\n\nMorgan was relieved that Carlotta seemed happy to be having the baby. He'd been concerned that she might want to give the child away because of the father. He'd told her that she'd be having a girl because he believed that Carlotta would more readily accept the baby if it had no chance of growing up to be a man like Bill. Now he was sure that once she saw her newborn child, she'd still love the baby even if he had exterior plumbing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Twenty minutes later, after their massive purchases were delivered in assorted crates and sacks, he left them to sort out their things and move them upstairs to their rooms while he went to the apartment. He stopped in the bedroom and tossed his hat onto the big bed. He hadn't removed the linen but had made the bed, so it looked somewhat normal. He stepped to the side table and picked up the bag of Bill's belongings. He hadn't even examined the contents yet. He almost thought about giving the Webley to the sheriff but decided a good cleaning would be sufficient to absolve the weapon.\n\nHe left the apartment, glanced at the ladies' clothing melee then unlocked and opened the office door. He closed it behind him and set the bag on top of the polished desktop. He opened the drawer above the double doors that hid the safe and pulled out a box of Webley .44 short rimfires and the fancy gun maintenance box.\n\nAfter sitting behind the desk, he opened the small cloth sack. He pulled out the shoulder holster and the pistol then Bill's wallet. He opened the wallet and found a thick wad of bills. The largest was a ten-dollar note, but Morgan suspected his brother just kept the money to hand out as tips when he wanted to impress someone. He slid the wallet into his other jacket pocket before looking back into the bag.\n\nHe found Bill's gold pocket watch and opened the lid. The second hand was still moving, so Morgan wound the knurled stem to keep it running. He didn't see a photo in the inside, but hadn't expected to find one, unless it was of Bill smiling back at himself. There was no inscription, either. But it was a better watch than his rugged but still handsome timepiece, so he slipped it into his jacket pocket.\n\nThe bag was empty, so he folded it and set it aside to start cleaning Bill's pistol. He unloaded the Bulldog and was surprised that there was only one empty casing. He would have expected Bill to empty all of the chambers into Carlotta's father. The double action of the Webley would have let him fire all five rounds in just three seconds. As he began to disassemble the pistol, Morgan figured that once Bill saw her father hit the floor, he was more concerned about convincing the patrons that he'd acted in self-defense than he was about ensuring that Senor Montoya was dead.\n\nIt took him just thirty minutes to almost overhaul the revolver before he filled each of the chambers with a cartridge from the box. He left the four live rounds and the empty brass on the desk and returned the maintenance box and ammunition to the drawer. There was enough space for his brother's Webley and shoulder holster, so he wrapped it into a ball and wedged it into a corner.\n\nAfter closing the drawer, he looked at the two Winchesters and two shotguns and decided to ask Sheriff Brown if he wanted them. He'd use the racks for his own rifles and shotgun when he returned. He had included a workroom in the changes he'd be making to the saloon, so hopefully this would be the only time the desk would be used as a workbench.\n\nHe closed the office door behind him as he left but didn't lock it. He walked to one of the tables in the empty saloon took a seat. He could hear the women in their rooms and wondered if they were changing into their new wardrobes. He'd find out when they came downstairs.\n\nMorgan continued to just listen to the cacophony of sounds drifting from the second floor. He was curious if any of the five who were staying had decided what she would do when The Bluebonnet opened. There were still a few hours before sunset and he couldn't think of anything he needed to do before leaving for San Antonio. He'd ask Stella if there was something she might need but began to think about leaving on tomorrow morning's train.\n\nKerrville was at the end of Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe's spur. So, as soon as the train arrived from Bandera, they'd just fill its water tanks and coal bunker, do some quick maintenance, then turn it around and send it back. The morning arrivals followed the afternoon departures. He could be back in San Antonio by four o'clock.\n\nIf he did decide to leave on that train, he'd send a telegram to his clerk to let him know he was coming. He wouldn't give Jim much information but would have him bring the buggy to the station rather than just one of his horses. He hadn't even taken a travel bag with him when he left, but he was returning with a lot more than just a set of saddlebags.\n\nIt was just five minutes later when Carlotta appeared on the stairs. He wasn't surprised that she was the first to leave her room but was almost stunned when he saw her. Now that she was wearing a nice dress, she seemed so incredibly young.\n\nShe was smiling as she sat down across from him and said, \"Thank you for all you have done for me, Morg. I feel much better now that I don't look like... well, I feel better.\"\n\n\"You look very pretty, Carlotta. I was just thinking that we should leave on tomorrow's train. I already arranged for the start of the construction, and I don't see any reason to stay. Is that alright with you?\"\n\nShe seemed startled as she looked back at him but after a few seconds, she nodded and replied, \"I guess another day won't matter. Are you sure that I don't need to at least wear a shawl?\"\n\n\"You can if it makes you feel more comfortable. We won't need to buy any travel bags because I found three in my brother's closet.\"\n\nShe glanced at the empty staircase before asking, \"Can you tell me about the family who will take me in?\"\n\n\"Their names are Horace and Lillian Cooper. They're about fifty years old and are very nice people. Their house is empty because their three sons have already started their own families. Well, actually only two of them are married. Their youngest son, Jim, is my law clerk. Lillian never had a daughter and I know that she'll be thrilled when she meets you. I've been to their home many times and I'm sure that they'll be very happy to have you live with them.\"\n\n\"But I'm Mexican and they're Anglos!\"\n\nMorgan's mouth dropped open before he exclaimed, \"Why I didn't even realize that! You are of Mexican heritage?\"\n\nCarlotta's brown eyes shot wide, and her eyebrows skyrocketed as she stared at Morgan in stunned disbelief. Her shock only lasted for a few seconds before she started laughing.\n\nMorgan was enormously pleased to hear her laughter and just smiled as he watched her.\n\nBy the time she stopped laughing and was wiping very different tears from her eyes, Morgan heard the rapid footsteps of the other five women racing down the stairs.\n\nBefore they reached the barroom floor, he said, \"I'll tell you more when we're on the train, Carlotta.\"\n\nShe was still smiling as she nodded just as the others arrived at the big table and began filling the chairs. Morgan found that each of them had undergone a similar, but less dramatic change than Carlotta. Stella was close, though.\n\n\"What did you tell Carlotta to make her laugh?\" Stella asked.\n\n\"I was simply letting her know about the couple she would be staying with when we got to San Antonio. She seemed somewhat nervous that they were Anglos until I explained that they were really just nice ogres.\"\n\nCarlotta started to laugh again but much more quietly as Morgan said, \"Stella, I'm planning to leave on tomorrow's train. I can't think of anything I need to do here until I return. What do you think?\"\n\n\"We'll be fine as long as none of Harry Freeman's men try to break in.\"\n\n\"I left the office open and there are two twelve-gauge shotguns hanging on the wall. I'll make sure they're loaded before I leave. Do you know how to shoot a shotgun?\"\n\n\"Yes, and so do Sally and Fannie.\"\n\n\"Good. But I'm going to go to see Sheriff Brown in a little while, and I'll ask him to keep an eye on the place. If you have to use the shotgun, it'll be legal because the intruder would be breaking and entering and posing a threat. You wouldn't even be charged with a crime.\"\n\n\"I wasn't worried about it. Do you have an idea of when you'll return?\"\n\n\"I should be back in about a week. When I do come back, I'll be bringing my clerk and my four friends. I employ them as investigators for my clients, but they'll be very helpful in The Bluebonnet. I think they're all getting a bit bored because San Antonio has become so civilized.\"\n\nSally grinned and asked, \"Are they all unattached?\"\n\nRuby and Rose both giggled before Morgan answered, \"Yes, ma'am. I'm sure that they will be very happy to meet so many pretty young ladies.\"\n\nStella quickly asked, \"Will they have to pay us three dollars to make them happy?\"\n\nMorgan looked at Stella and assumed that she had made her choice, so he replied, \"If you want to charge them ten dollars, it's up to you, Stella.\"\n\nWhen Morgan had seemingly suggested that his friends would see them as women and not whores, Stella was convinced that he was just trying to make them believe they could change. Now she realized that her sardonic question had an unintended effect and she needed to repair the damage.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Morg. I shouldn't have asked that question. It's just that I found it hard to believe that any good man could see us as anything other than what we are.\"\n\n\"You are exactly what I just said you were. You are very handsome young women, and you need to stop thinking of yourselves as anything less. Why didn't all of you join those who left to work for Harry Freeman? You had no idea what I would be like. I could have been even worse than my brother.\"\n\nStella glanced at Rose before saying, \"I guess we hoped you'd treat us better.\"\n\n\"I think each of you had much deeper hopes that maybe you could find something more. You wanted more than just a normal life, too. You wanted to be loved as a woman needs love.\"\n\nRuby said, \"But none of us can have babies anymore. Even if a man wanted to marry us, we couldn't give him a family.\"\n\n\"That's for him to decide, Ruby. If a man really loves you, it won't matter. To be honest, I know quite a few men who would prefer having a wife who wouldn't fill the house with babies.\"\n\nFannie simply asked, \"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. My friends are all good men who have earned my trust. You'll get to meet them soon and I wouldn't be surprised if each one of them are smitten within a few hours. If it sounds as if I'm hoping that you choose to work as card dealers, then I'll confess that I would rather see you on the floor of the saloon than taking men up those stairs.\"\n\nStella smiled and said, \"We already decided to use the rooms for sleeping, Morg. I just convinced the others to wait until you returned before letting you know. I wasn't even sure if you would return.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm coming back with five single men. How is that for coincidence?\"\n\nAs the others giggled, Stella asked, \"Don't you mean six, Morg? You forgot about yourself.\"\n\nMorgan returned her smile as he replied, \"I always forget about myself, Stella. I'm going to talk to the sheriff and pick up two tickets for tomorrow's train. Then I'll send a telegram to my clerk and return just in time to eat the big dinner you'll have waiting for me.\"\n\nHe quickly stood and walked to the apartment to retrieve his Stetson. He heard the women chatting behind him but didn't pay attention to what they were saying. He was already wondering how many of his men would be married before the end of the year. He wouldn't be surprised if all of them, including Jim Cooper, were no longer single when 1889 arrived." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "That night, as Morgan stretched out on top of the quilts, he tried to encompass all that had happened in the short time since he'd stepped off the train. He'd expected to just bury his brother and put his saloon up for sale. Then, little by little, his plans began to change until none of the original one existed. When he met the women, especially Carlotta, he felt an enormous responsibility to make amends for what Bill had done to each of them. He hadn't questioned Stella and the others how they'd come to work for his brother but wasn't about to ask. He couldn't imagine loathing Bill any more than he did already.\n\nWhen he returned to San Antonio, he'd arrange for shipment of all of his personal possessions from the house and his office. He'd bring his two horses and the buggy as well. He'd have to notify all of his clients and recommend new attorneys but luckily, he didn't have any court cases pending. He wanted to get it all done as quickly as possible, so he wouldn't have to worry about the ladies. He'd loaded both shotguns and the two Winchesters as well. But even with Sheriff Brown's promise to make sure that no one bothered them, Morgan still felt nervous about leaving them alone.\n\nHe was sure that Carlotta would be welcomed by the Coopers and wouldn't be surprised if Lillian did a little matchmaking before Carlotta's condition became noticeable. He even had a good idea who would be the target of Lillian's romantic assault.\n\nWhile he expected The Bluebonnet to be a financial and social success, he still wanted to build a strong client base in Kerrville. If he was able to build the same reputation in Kerr County that he enjoyed in Bexar County, he hoped to draw clients from the surrounding counties as well.\n\nBy the time he drifted off to sleep, his mind was at ease with all of the changes that would soon be coming." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Chapter 3 \u2014 The Ranch\n\nSeptember 18, 1889\n\nDouble D Ranch\n\nSoutheast of Junction City, Texas\n\nKimble County Sheriff Finn Lusk and two of his deputies turned their horses onto the access road. The Double D was so large that they wouldn't even see the main ranch house for another twenty minutes.\n\nBut before they spotted the house or any of the ranch's many outbuildings, the ranch foreman and two cowhands approached them from their right.\n\nThe sheriff and his deputies pulled up and waited for John Bridges and the other two riders to reach them.\n\nWhen John pulled his chestnut gelding to a stop, he asked, \"What brings you and your boys to the Double D, Sheriff?\"\n\n\"I need to talk to Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\n\"What about?\"\n\n\"It's none of your business, John.\"\n\nJohn didn't argue but glanced at the two deputies' stern faces before he turned his horse away and waved Paul Kelly and Herb Lee to follow as he began to ride toward the ranch house. He may have been annoyed with the sheriff but still wondered what could be so important that he had to have two of his four deputies with him. He couldn't imagine why Sheriff Lusk felt he needed backup. He was ornery enough on his own. But John was sure that whatever had forced the sheriff to make the ride from Junction City, it wasn't good news for Mrs. Driscoll.\n\nThirty minutes later, the six men pulled up before the large ranch house and dismounted. Sheriff Lusk seemed surprised that the foreman hadn't ridden back to one of the herds but didn't say anything. He waited until his deputies flanked him before he stepped onto the wide front porch.\n\nBefore he could knock, John passed around him, opened the door just a few inches, then shouted, \"Mrs. Driscoll, Sheriff Lusk is here with two of his... deputies.\"\n\nHe didn't fully open the door but stood holding it where it was to prevent the sheriff from entering. He'd added the pause before saying 'deputies' to let them choose the appropriate adjective. It would probably be much better than the one he would have used.\n\nA few seconds later, he heard footsteps on the other side of the doorway and released his grip.\n\nThe door opened and Mrs. Driscoll looked past her foreman and glared at Sheriff Lusk.\n\n\"What do you want, Sheriff?\"\n\n\"I need to talk to you in private, ma'am.\"\n\nShe looked at John and said, \"It'll be alright, John. You and the boys can head back.\"\n\n\"If you say so, ma'am.\"\n\nJohn shot one warning glance at Sheriff Lusk before leaving the porch.\n\nMrs. Driscoll left the door open and walked into the large great room and sat on the couch with her children. The children's nanny sat in a chair near the fireplace.\n\nThe sheriff closed the door then walked into the room. He and his deputies soon took seats in three of the easy chairs.\n\nThe sheriff set his hat on his lap, then slid a thick envelope from his inside jacket pocket.\n\n\"Mrs. Driscoll, I have a court order from Judge Davis. It says that you've gotta vacate most of the Double D within sixty days.'\n\nGeorgette shot to her feet and shouted, \"What the hell are you trying to pull, Sheriff?\"\n\nSix-year-old Timmy and four-year-old Lucy almost jumped out of their skins when their mother yelled at the sheriff. Lucy began to cry, so her older brother slid close to her and wrapped her in his thin arms.\n\nSheriff Lusk was almost as stunned as her children but quickly held up his hand and loudly said, \"Sit down, Mrs. Driscoll. I'm just doin' my job.\"\n\nGeorgette was still seething but returned to the couch and hugged her children as she replied, \"I'm sure you're doing your job just as you always do, Sheriff. What are you even talking about? I paid the taxes just a month ago.\"\n\n\"It ain't got nothin' to do with taxes. You just ain't got a legal right to live here.\"\n\nGeorgette almost leapt to her feet again before she exclaimed, \"I have every legal right to live here! Donald's father founded this ranch almost forty years ago. I have a deed to the land filed at the county courthouse. I'll get my copy so you can read every word. That assumes you can read at all.\"\n\n\"There ain't no call for insults, ma'am. Mister Arnold of the Long Star Land Company showed up last month. His company bought a Spanish land grant that gives them the rights to most of the Double D. It was certified and the judge agreed that it was all legal and proper. The good news for you is that there's about eight sections in Kerr County that ain't part of the land grant. You can move all your cattle and horses down there and sell some of the herds to build a new place. You should be grateful that the judge gave you the sixty days. Mister Arnold wanted you off the land by the end of the month.\"\n\nMrs. Driscoll snapped, \"I should be grateful that I'm losing my home and four hundred and eighteen square miles of land? Are you insane as well as dishonest, Sheriff? Eight sections can't support a thousand head of cattle even if it had good water which it doesn't.\"\n\nThe sheriff stood then tossed the envelope onto the center table before he pulled on his hat.\n\n\"You have sixty days, Mrs. Driscoll. If you're still here on the 17th of November, it's gonna get ugly. You wouldn't want your young'uns to watch all of that, now would ya?\"\n\nHe didn't wait to hear her expected harsh reply, but quickly turned and almost jogged out of the rooms with his deputies trying to catch him. He wouldn't be surprised if she hurled something at them, either.\n\nOnce they were on the porch, Sheriff Lusk turned to his deputies and said, \"Well, that went better than I figured.\"\n\nDeputy Joe Clarkson snickered then said, \"I guess we're kinda lucky she wasn't packin' iron.\"\n\nAs they walked to their horses, Deputy Willie Potts said, \"She was dressed like a cowhand, so maybe she just forgot to put on her gunbelt this mornin'.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk was grinning as he climbed into his saddle. He scanned for the foreman but didn't see him before he wheeled his horse around and set him back down the long access road." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "After the sheriff left the house, Georgette picked up the heavy envelope and extracted the judge's order and its supporting paperwork.\n\nAs his mother read the legal document, Timmy asked, \"Are we gonna have to leave, Mama?\"\n\nShe looked into his fearful blue eyes and smiled as she said, \"No, dear. We aren't leaving. This is our home and our ranch.\"\n\nLucy hugged her mother as she said, \"The sheriff scared me, Mama.\"\n\nGeorgette kissed Lucy on the forehead before saying, \"He's not scary, sweetheart. He's just a big windbag.\"\n\n\"What's a windbag, Mama?\"\n\n\"It's someone who talks really loud trying to make himself feel important. Now don't you be afraid of someone like that. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nGeorgette continued reading the judge's order and aside from the plainly written paragraph that ordered her to vacate most of the Double D, she couldn't fathom the legalistic language that comprised most of the page. She then examined the documents that were used to substantiate the Long Star's claim and found them just as confusing.\n\nAs she was reading, Millie rose from her chair and approached the couch.\n\nGeorgette set the paperwork on the table then glanced at Millie before she said, \"Let's go have some milk and cookies and wait for John to come back.\"\n\nShe stood and waited for Timmy and Lucy to slide to the floor. After she took their hands, she headed for the long hallway with Millie walking silently behind.\n\nAs they stepped across the floor, Timmy asked, \"Can Mister Bridges stop the sheriff, Mama?\"\n\n\"We'll see, Timmy.\"\n\nGeorgette wasn't about to let John or any of the men engage in a battle with the sheriff. She had thirty-two full-time ranch hands but none of them were hired to get into a shootout. She didn't believe that the sheriff and his four deputies would be the only ones to show up on the Double D if she was still here on the 17th of November. She was sure that the land company had a small army of its own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Ten minutes later, as she and Millie were sharing the milk and cookies with her children, there was a knock on the back door.\n\nShe stayed seated as she shouted, \"Come in, John.\"\n\nThe foreman opened the door, took off his hat and closed it behind him before he stepped across the room and took a seat at the large table.\n\n\"What did our noble sheriff and his two thug deputies want, ma'am?\"\n\n\"It seems that some land company arrived in Junction City with an old Spanish land grant. They convinced Judge Davis that it was legal, and the judge generously gave me sixty days to vacate most of the Double D.\"\n\nJohn stared wide-eyed at her for a few seconds before exclaiming, \"He can't do that! Mister Driscoll's father built this ranch before I was even born.\"\n\n\"That's what I told the sheriff, but the judge seems to believe the land company. I wanted to know what you thought I should do. I want to keep the Double D, but I won't allow you or any of the men to risk their lives just to hang onto it.\"\n\n\"You know the boys would do all they could to help.\"\n\n\"I know they would. But even if they were all good shots, I wouldn't want them to get into a gunfight. I think the land company will be prepared to send a small army to force me off the land. The sheriff said that I should be grateful that the land grant didn't include eight sections that stretched into Kerr County. You and I know that even if it had good water, we'd still have to sell six thousand head. I don't think the pens at the railhead in Kerrville could handle five hundred, so that's not even an option.\"\n\n\"How do you figure on stoppin' 'em?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure. I can't even understand all that legal mumbo-jumbo in the court order.\"\n\n\"You could take it to Mister Jacobs and ask him what it means and maybe he can figure out how to beat it.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed lightly before saying, \"He's worthless on a good day. And I'd be surprised if Abner Jacobs isn't already on the Long Star Land Company's payroll.\"\n\n\"Long Star? Don't you mean Lone Star?\"\n\n\"No. That's what the sheriff said, and the court order uses the same name. I guess there was already a Lone Star Land Company before they started this one.\"\n\n\"I heard there's a good lawyer down in Kerrville now. Do you want me to ride down there and ask him to help?\"\n\n\"Do you think he'll have enough... strength of character to come here and deal with that bunch?\"\n\n\"It can't hurt, Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\nShe sighed then said, \"I suppose it won't hurt to have him examine the court order.\"\n\n\"I'll ride out of here first thing in the mornin'. I should get there just a little after noon and should find this feller pretty quick.\"\n\n\"I'll get the court order for you. Maybe this new shyster can find a loophole.\"\n\nShe stood and walked with John to the main room to retrieve the court order. She wasn't even sure if the lawyer in Kerrville could even translate the legal wording, but as she told John, it wouldn't hurt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "John rode across the Double D as the sun rose. He didn't use the access road but followed their more commonly used southwestern trail to reach the road to Kerrville. He'd be crossing those eight sections that the land company had graciously allowed Mrs. Driscoll to keep. He felt sick as he rode his buckskin mare across the rough ground. He knew that she was right about the amount of power the company and their bought sheriff could use to take the Double D. He had no doubt that even if all of the ranch hands were armed with Winchesters, they wouldn't stand a chance. Most of them even got squeamish about shooting injured horses or cattle.\n\nHe kept his mare at a fast trot as he followed the familiar trail. He hoped that Mrs. Driscoll was wrong about the lawyer. Maybe he'd come back with him and prove to the judge that the land company's claim was worthless." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Morgan had no idea that he may soon have a new client as he smiled and set the letter onto the desktop.\n\nStella asked, \"May I read it now, Morg?\"\n\n\"No. It's private, Stella. She specifically said not to let that old witch read it. I assumed she meant you.\"\n\nStella laughed as she picked up the letter and began to read.\n\nMorgan watched her and waited for her to reach the fourth paragraph of Mrs. Brinker's letter.\n\nStella suddenly lowered the letter as she exclaimed, \"She's already pregnant again!\"\n\n\"I was kind of surprised myself. I thought that couldn't happen while she was nursing little Mary.\"\n\n\"Neither did I. I wonder if she'll have a boy this time. She even asked you to tell her.\"\n\n\"I know. I was lucky the first time but didn't want to press my luck.\"\n\nShe then grinned as she said, \"I didn't see any warning about not allowing the witch to read it, either.\"\n\n\"You know I made that up, Stella. How are things over at The Lonely Armadillo?\"\n\n\"I had an issue with one of Harry Freeman's old employees a couple of days ago. He accused one of the dealers of cheating and if he'd had a pistol, he would probably have used it. But Tyler stopped it before it got out of hand.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised he wasn't watching the man more closely. I guess you still keep him distracted.\"\n\nStella smiled and said, \"I hope so. To be honest, I never believed you when you made that joke almost a year ago that your friends would be smitten with us when they arrived.\"\n\n\"After I predicted that Carlotta would have a little girl, you should have known of my mystic powers.\"\n\n\"Mystic powers, Morg?\"\n\n\"Well, it was just a good guess about Carlotta, but I really did expect that at least two of my friends would be so impressed that they'd finally get married. But I'll freely admit that even I couldn't have imagined that all five of them would choose one of you. What made it even stranger was that there weren't any serious disagreements about who would marry whom.\"\n\nStella set the letter back on the desktop as she asked, \"But what about you, Morg? You sleep alone in that apartment each night and spend most of your days in your law office seeing clients. Why haven't you found anyone?\"\n\nHe smiled as he answered, \"I guess you just set the bar too high, Stella.\"\n\n\"Now you're just being coy, Mister Kane. Do you know how many women have asked me why you still lived alone? I lost count at fifty.\"\n\n\"You're exaggerating, Stella.\"\n\n\"Maybe a little, but not that much. Tyler told me a lot about your life before you moved to Kerrville, but he didn't know much about your wife other than she died in childbirth. You never mentioned any female relationships, either. You still wear a wedding ring, but you don't talk about your wife. Is she the reason why you've practically become a monk?\"\n\nMorgan leaned back, put his big hands behind his neck and stared at the ceiling. He didn't like talking about Barbara. But he was as close to Stella as he'd ever been to anyone, so he decided to answer her question.\n\nHe sat straight again then said, \"I was only sixteen when I met Barbara. She was very pretty as you might expect, but she was much more. She was smart and witty, and I couldn't spend enough time listening to her. She never flirted or said silly, girlish things. She was a woman long before I became a man even though she was a year younger than I was. We became so close that I felt empty when she wasn't there. I was studying the law under my father, and he told me that we couldn't marry until I passed the bar.\n\n\"I resented him when he set that condition, but when I told Barbara, she said it wasn't a restriction at all. She said that by the time I became a lawyer, we'd know and love each other even more. I didn't think it was possible but soon learned that she was right. I also poured more energy into learning the law so I could pass the bar and then marry her. We were married on the nineteenth of September in '78. I was the happiest man on the planet that day.\n\n\"My law practice grew quickly, mostly because my father was a well-known and respected lawyer and judge. Barbara was growing, too. She didn't even have morning sickness before she went into labor on the seventeenth of August. I wasn't even worried like most expectant fathers. Barbara assured me constantly that she would soon present me with our perfect son. She even threatened to name him after me to get me laughing.\n\n\"But we didn't have a perfect son. She had a baby girl, but I never even heard her cry. I didn't even know anything was wrong until Doctor Schmidt walked into the kitchen. The moment I saw his face, I realized that I would never hear Barbara's laugh again.\n\n\"I suppose I should have broken down into a blubbering mess, but I didn't. I knew that Barbara would never forgive me if I did. I even held back my tears at her funeral Mass. It was only that night as I slept alone in our bed that I was able to let my grief overwhelm me. I was back in my office the next morning and I'm sure that many people believed me to be a cold-hearted bastard. But I didn't care what they thought. The only soul that mattered would understand why I returned to work so soon after her loss.\"\n\nStella waited until she was sure that he'd finished before quietly asking, \"Do you believe that she would want to live alone as you are now?\"\n\n\"No. She's probably angry with me for not remarrying. I just don't believe I'll ever feel the same way about another woman as I did about Barbara.\"\n\nStella quietly said, \"You aren't even looking, Morg. How would you know?\"\n\nThen he smiled and said, \"Maybe you're right and the one woman who will inspire me will walk through the door to The Bluebonnet in another minute.\"\n\nStella laughed then said, \"Good luck with that, Morg. But if you do meet her, tell her that you'll break at least six hearts when she marries you.\"\n\n\"I admit that I was a bit jealous when I witnessed each of your marriages, Stella. But I'm very happy for you and Tyler as well as the other ladies of The Bluebonnet.\"\n\n\"I'm happy too, Morg. You've been nothing but one surprise after another since you arrived, but what you just told me was probably the most touching.\"\n\n\"I don't think I have any more in store for you, Stella.\"\n\n\"I think you do. You haven't bought The Thirsty Coyote and converted it to a nice place, yet.\"\n\n\"I don't think that dump is worth a plug nickel. I'll let Harry keep his pigsty.\"\n\nStella was about to ask him another question when Jim Cooper stuck his head in the door and said, \"Morg, you may have a new client in my office. He rode down from Kimble County.\"\n\nStella stood and asked, \"Can I bring Carlotta's letter to show the other girls?\"\n\nHe handed her the letter and after she winked, Stella walked out of the office. She may have been touched by Morgan's revelation, but she decided to talk to Jim Cooper. He knew Morgan when he was married and would probably be able to shed more light on Morgan's decision to wear his wedding ring and avoid women.\n\nJim waved John Bridges into Morgan's office then closed the door.\n\nJohn had been receiving a steady dose of surprises since he rode into town twenty minutes ago. His first was when he rode past The Lonely Armadillo which was much different than it had been the last time he'd been to Kerrville, and it had been named Harry's House. Then he saw The Bluebonnet and was amazed by its transformation from The Wet Gulch. At least the sheriff's office had been the same. But when he asked where he could find the lawyer, he thought that the sheriff was joking when he said that the best lawyer that he knew could be found at The Bluebonnet saloon. Then he realized that the sheriff was serious and felt sick thinking that the only lawyer who might help Mrs. Driscoll was a drunk.\n\nNow, as he stood in Morgan's office, he was past being surprised and nearly reached shock level as he stared at the tall attorney.\n\nMorgan smiled at John and asked, \"Mister Bridges, it appears that you've had a long ride. Why don't you take a seat?\"\n\n\"Okay,\" John said as he sat down and regretted not dusting off his britches before entering the well-appointed saloon.\n\nMorgan leaned back in his big leather chair and asked, \"What brings you down to Kerrville, Mister Bridges?\"\n\n\"I'm the foreman of the Double D ranch that's mostly in Kimble County, but some of it's in Kerr and Mason Counties, too. I reckon you've heard of it.\"\n\n\"I have. I think it's about four hundred and some odd sections; isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Yesterday, Sheriff Lusk showed up with two of his deputies to deliver a court order to Mrs. Driscoll. She owns the ranch after her husband died five years ago. Anyway, Judge Davis is orderin' her to get off the ranch 'cause a land company has an older Spanish grant.\"\n\nMorgan's eyebrows peaked as he asked, \"Do you have the court order with you?\"\n\nJohn nodded as he said, \"Yes, sir,\" then opened his light jacket, pulled the envelope from his vest pocket and handed it to Morgan. He watched the tall attorney pull out the sheets of paper and followed his eyes as he read. He expected the lawyer to take at least ten minutes to finish reading all three pages and was surprised when Morgan set the papers on the desk after just three.\n\n\"Did the sheriff show her the original land grant?\"\n\n\"Um, no. I don't think so.\"\n\nMorgan then asked, \"Would you like some lunch, Mister Bridges?\"\n\n\"Lunch?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"That meal that some folks eat around the noon hour. I figure that you must have left the ranch early this morning to get here so soon. Let's have something to eat while I think about the court order.\"\n\n\"Do you think you can stop it?\"\n\n\"Probably. Let's fill our stomachs while I figure out the best way to do that.\"\n\nMorgan stood and stepped around the desk as John rose.\n\nAs John followed him out of his office, he hoped that the lawyer could help Mrs. Driscoll.\n\nWhen they stepped into the very impressive barroom, Morgan waved to Tom Henderson and held up two fingers before heading to the apartment. After he entered, he left the door open and walked with John down the short hallway to the kitchen. John felt like a spy but couldn't keep his eyes from wandering when he passed the open door to the bedroom. The bed was the largest he'd ever seen and didn't realize that it was about half as wide as the one it had replaced. He was puzzled when he glanced into the bathroom, too. It looked like there was a privy inside, but there wasn't any smell to identify it as such.\n\nMorgan pulled out a chair for John before sitting in his usual seat.\n\n\"Our lunch will be here shortly. How much did Mrs. Driscoll understand about the court order?\"\n\n\"Only the part that said she had sixty days to move out.\"\n\n\"I thought that might be the case. It's not because I believe Mrs. Driscoll to be slow-witted. It's just that it seems that whoever drafted the order intentionally used convoluted logic and legal terminology. What I found most interesting was that there was nothing that provided for an appeal. When did she learn about Long Star's claim?\"\n\n\"Yesterday, when she got the court order.\"\n\n\"Really? She wasn't notified that they were filing the claim with the county before the judge issued the order?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\nMorgan just grunted before asking, \"And she never saw the supposed Spanish land grant either. This smacks as nothing more than a scam to take the ranch. I've never even heard of the Long Star Land Company. I've actually had court cases involving the Lone Star Land Company but don't recall seeing that other company's name on the list of accredited Texas land agents. Of course, they could have formed the company in the past two years, but it still stinks to high heaven.\"\n\nJohn was growing excited as he asked, \"Do you think you can stop them, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"I think so, but you've got to stop calling me Mister Kane. Call me Morg and I'll be a lot happier.\"\n\n\"I appreciate it, Morg. I'm John.\"\n\n\"Okay, now that we have that settled, tell me about the Double D. All I know is roughly its size and location.\"\n\nJohn nodded and began describing the ranch, starting with the size of the herds.\n\nMorgan listened and even though he understood how large it was, he had underestimated by half with the number of cattle on the giant spread. He was already impressed with Mrs. Driscoll as well. How she could manage to keep such a large operation going without a husband was a measure of her determination.\n\nBefore John began talking about the Driscolls, Sally brought in a large tray with their lunch.\n\nMorgan said, \"Thank you, Sally,\" before she set it down on the table, smiled at Morgan then silently left the apartment.\n\nAfter she'd gone, John said, \"Is she a working girl?\"\n\n\"We don't have any working girls in The Bluebonnet. We have four very nice young ladies at The Lonely Armadillo but most of the painted ladies work at Harry Freeman's Thirsty Coyote.\"\n\n\"Oh. I wasn't looking for a lady, but she was pretty and I... well, I'm sorry if I said somethin' wrong.\"\n\n\"It's okay. She wouldn't be offended if she heard you ask.\"\n\nJohn took a long drag on his beer before he asked, \"Didn't Harry Freeman own The Lonely Armadillo, too? It used to be called Harry's House.\"\n\nMorgan set his beer down as he replied, \"It was, but after I took over my brother's saloon that used to be The Wet Gulch, I made a significant number of changes. I thought it would take a while to make any money, so I was surprised when the place was crowded the first night. We have the men check their pistols when they enter, and once they understood why we had the rule, they seemed more willing to enjoy themselves.\n\n\"That spurred even more business and Harry's House began to lose business. But more importantly, it was who was leaving and who was staying. He began losing money and I bought it just four month ago. We fixed it up some, but not as much as The Bluebonnet. We have the same rules about guns, and it's popular, but not as much as The Bluebonnet.\"\n\nJohn had just taken a big bite of his chili con carne then chewed quickly and swallowed before asking, \"And you own both of 'em?\"\n\n\"I own The Bluebonnet, but I'm only a partner in The Lonely Armadillo. The young lady who brought our lunch and her husband are partners as well.\"\n\nJohn had his beer mug in his hand as he stared at Morgan. He was certainly a lawyer, but he wondered how he could still manage to run a large saloon at the same time.\n\nMorgan continued to eat as he thought about the court order and the Long Star Land Company. He hadn't been to Kimble County yet, but he knew about Sheriff Lusk and his four deputies. Most of his information came from his good friend, Sheriff J.R. Brown, who admitted to a touch of jealousy as Kerr County had twice the population of its northern neighbor, yet half the number of deputies. He'd heard other stories from his clients who didn't have any reason to exaggerate. He figured it would be time to pay a visit to Junction City and introduce himself to Sheriff Lusk and Judge Davis.\n\nIt wasn't a hard decision because it was one of his favorite legal issues. Spanish and Mexican land grants had been a contentious issue even before the Mexican War. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war was supposed to solve the problem by guaranteeing the validity of those grants. But even before Texas became a state, if anything, the question of land ownership became more heated. They established a commission to certify each of the claims, but documentation was often difficult to authenticate. Most were still certified, but Texas and the Federal government began handing out their own land grants and that often led to armed conflict.\n\nHis father had been involved in many of the court cases over the disputes and Morgan had found them intriguing. When he passed the bar, some of his first clients were fighting an earlier claim on their land. He'd won each of those cases, but even he admitted that, in part, some of those victories were because his father had been the judge.\n\nBut this was almost 1890 and he couldn't imagine a new Spanish land grant suddenly rising out of the ashes, especially in this part of Texas. Most of the grants in question were in the area between the Rio Grande and the Nueces River. Between the late timing and the shady legal aspect of the court order, Morgan was convinced that the Long Star Land Company was a fraud. They were using the power of Sheriff Lusk and Judge Davis in their attempt to steal Mrs. Driscoll's ranch.\n\nHe washed down the spicy chili with the last of his beer then said, \"John, I'm pretty sure that there is no legal basis for that court order. I want to do some research before I come to the ranch and talk to Mrs. Driscoll. When you return, tell her that I'll do all I can to help. If the sheriff shows up before I get there, have her just tell him that all communication from now on will be through her attorney.\"\n\nJohn nodded as he asked, \"Are you sure you can stop them from takin' her ranch, Morg?\"\n\n\"I'm sure I can stop the legal action. But I don't know anything about the Long Star Land Company. They could be just a bunch of outlaws who came up with this scheme and paid off the sheriff and the judge. That would pose a different, but not unsolvable problem. But whatever happens, I don't want you or your ranch hands to do anything but your regular work. Okay?\"\n\n\"That's what Mrs. Driscoll said.\"\n\n\"She must be a smart lady. Tell her I'll probably show up sometime tomorrow or the day after. Will I be able to find the access road to the Double D easily?\"\n\n\"Yup. After you cross Elm Creek, it's about another ten minutes on the right. There's a sign, but it's not a big one like some ranch owners seem to like.\"\n\n\"Are you going to stay the night, John?\"\n\n\"I reckon I'd better head back. It's only a five-hour ride and I know Mrs. Driscoll is kinda anxious. Before I leave, can I ask you how much you charge? I know she won't care if you can help, but she might ask.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"Tell her I'll charge her a dollar a day and I'll handle my own expenses.\"\n\n\"A dollar a day? Even my newest ranch hand makes that much.\"\n\n\"This isn't about money, John. It's one of those rare challenging cases that keep my life interesting.\"\n\n\"I hope you can stop 'em without gettin' shot, Morg.\"\n\n\"So, do I, John.\"\n\nMorgan stood and after John rose from his chair, they walked down the hallway and entered the saloon.\n\nJohn scanned the well-appointed barroom and couldn't believe that he was standing in a saloon in Texas. He'd seen pictures of some of the fancy places in big cities, but never thought he'd visit one.\n\nMorgan watched John mount then wave before he turned north and rode away. He had a lot to do before going to the Double D. First, he'd have to tell Jim to round up his four investigators so he could tell them about their newest client. They had hired enough good men to handle the security of The Bluebonnet and The Lonely Armadillo for a few days. Only one of them would have to leave Kerrville, but he suspected he may need all of them to stop the land grab." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "An hour later, Morgan was half-sitting on the desk in his office. Jim Cooper, Tyler McFadden, Homer Cox, Pete Drummond and Felipe Torres were sitting on straight-backed chairs arranged in a semi-circle. What made the group unusual was that not one of the five men was under six feet tall. Morgan was still the tallest by two inches. He'd just finished telling them about the situation in Kimble County.\n\nPete said, \"I gotta agree with you, Cap. It sounds like nothin' more than a land grab.\"\n\nHomer chimed in, saying, \"So, do I.\"\n\nFilipe asked, \"How do you want to handle it, Cap?\"\n\n\"Tyler, I want you to take tomorrow's train to Austin. I'll give you a list of what you'll need to do when you get there. It shouldn't take long. If you find the evidence I need, then visit Judge Riddle. I'll write a letter for you to give to him. Before you leave Austin, send me a wire.\n\n\"I won't need anyone else to do anything for a while. I just wanted you to understand what was happening. While I don't think it will be difficult to expose their fraud, I am concerned about how they'll react when their scheme falls apart. So, if it becomes necessary, I'll send word for all of you to come to the Double D. If I can't send a telegram from Junction City, then I'll have the foreman send a ranch hand.\"\n\nPete asked, \"Are you sure you don't want a couple of us to come with you right now?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"I'm sure. I figure you boys are all busy keeping your wives happy. But the real reason is that I don't want to spook anyone. I know about Sheriff Lusk and his four deputies, but I have no idea of who is running the Long Star Land Company or how many shooters he has working for him. I want to appear to be just a quiet, country lawyer who poses no threat to anyone when I ride into Junction City.\"\n\nHomer snickered before he said, \"Good luck with that. Maybe you oughta lose a few inches and about forty pounds.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean, Homer. That's all for now. Everybody can leave except Tyler.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Thirty minutes later, Tyler left the office carrying the letter to Judge Riddle. He wouldn't arrive in Austin until late tomorrow, but he should finish his quick search the following morning. By mid-afternoon, he expected to send the telegram to Morgan but was supposed to address it to Mrs. Driscoll on the Double D ranch. The language was a bit odd, but he understood why Morgan had been specific about the terminology.\n\nAfter his office was empty, Morgan began writing a list of things he'd be taking with him to the Double D. He'd only used his modified buckboard once on business just to try it out. But now it would prove to be very useful.\n\nThe only weapon he'd have on his person was the Webley. He wouldn't even carry any spare ammunition for the small pistol. It was useful for unexpected self-defense and nothing more. His serious weapons would be in the buckboard's hidden compartments.\n\nMorgan may be a polished attorney, but as he often said, he was a Texan long before he was a lawyer. He always thought that love of guns was in every Texan's blood, and he was no different. There was one difference, though. Unlike most residents of the Lone Star (not Long Star) State, he had the means to buy the latest and best rifles and pistols. He usually gave his older models to his friends who hoped that Winchester, Remington or Smith & Wesson would come out with a new design every week.\n\nHe would bring his Smith & Wesson Schofield with its long seven-inch barrel. It fired the .45 caliber Smith & Wesson cartridge. It had a lot of power, was more accurate than the shorter barreled revolvers and could be reloaded very quickly. It wasn't a new model, but Morgan hadn't found one that he liked better. Its biggest drawback, and what was probably the reason that the Colt '73 had been chosen by the army was that it couldn't fire Colt's .45 cartridge, but the Colt could use Smith & Wesson's. The other less noticeable problem was that he had to modify his holster for the Schofield to make sure that when he pulled it free, the edge of the leather didn't tug the switch that opened the pistol for reloading. It wouldn't be pleasant to face another shooter with his Smith & Wesson cracked open and all of the cartridges already flying through the air.\n\nHe'd bring three of his long guns. His favorite was his new Winchester Model 1886 with the thirty-inch barrel. It looked like the earlier models, but inside it was very different. It used a much stronger locking-block design that enabled it to use the .45-70 government cartridge. But he used the even more powerful Winchester .45-90 cartridge. It didn't have as many rounds in its tube as the '73 or even the '76, but he thought it was a good trade.\n\nWhile he could hit targets as far away as four-hundred yards with the Winchester, it was only about a third of the range of his other rifle. He bought the Sharp-Borshadt in San Antonio when he returned from his three-year hiatus. It wasn't new, but it hadn't been fired often. It was chambered for .45 caliber ammunition, and he had four boxes of Sharps .45-100 cartridges left. Now that Sharps was out of business, he'd have to reload his own or buy third party offerings. When he bought it, he had the gunsmith add a few touches including a nice Malcolm scope for serious shooting. He'd only used it for target practice and hoped that he wouldn't need it for any other purpose.\n\nHis third long gun wasn't a rifle. It was a shotgun, but not one like the two that he'd found in Bill's office. He'd given them and the Winchesters to Sheriff Brown. His shotgun was a ten-gauge Winchester Model 1887. What made it very different was that it looked like a fat Winchester. It was a lever-action repeating shotgun. It could hold five shells in its tube with another in the chamber. It was much harder to cycle than any of the company's rifles, but it was a very effective weapon.\n\nHis modified buckboard would provide rolling storage for his weapons and ammunition. It had shallow chambers that ran along each side of the bed. Each of them had straps on each interior wall to secure a rifle. The Sharps-Borshadt with its valuable telescopic sight would be stored in one and the Winchester repeater and shotgun would share the other. The guns were protected from dust and moisture by the chambers' padded leather interior. His gunbelt with its Schofield was hidden in a box under the driver's seat which also held all of his spare ammunition and other equipment. To all appearances, his buckboard didn't appear that much different.\n\nDespite the common appearance of the buckboard, he knew that he could hardly be considered innocuous. Even if he wore a dark suit and had a flowery travel bag on the buckboard's bed, he wouldn't be mistaken for a traveling preacher when he drove into Junction City.\n\nWhile he hoped that none of his hidden firepower would be necessary, he had one more weapon at his disposal that might prove to be more effective if the Long Star Land Company didn't accept his legal solution. He had a badge that carried a lot of weight in the state.\n\nJust a few months after Barbara died, his father was gunned down in the street by the friend of a man he'd sentenced to be hanged. The shooter was arrested and joined his friend on the gallows, but Morgan had been devastated. He felt he wasn't doing enough as a lawyer, so he joined the Texas Rangers.\n\nHe was made a captain because of his reputation and his standing in the community. For three years he rode with the Rangers until he thought that some of the other companies were getting as bad as the outlaws they chased. He returned to his law practice in '83 and was still a Ranger but was no longer on the state's payroll. Four good friends from his company followed him back to San Antonio and had joined with him when he moved to Kerrville. He'd used them as investigators and now might need them as Rangers.\n\nIt was only after he returned to open The Bluebonnet that he told Sheriff Brown and the ladies about their status as Rangers. J.R. didn't seem as surprised as the women had been.\n\nHe had no more clients for the day, so he left his private office and waved to Jim as he passed his desk before entering the saloon. Customers were beginning to arrive, so he just headed for his apartment to begin packing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "John knocked on the door and waited for Mrs. Driscoll or Millie to open the door. Millie had been widowed for almost eight years when Don Driscoll was mauled by an angry bull. Mrs. Driscoll hired her two days after he was buried. She knew she had to run the ranch and would need more help than John's wife, Wilma, could provide. Timmy was almost two years old when his father died, and Lucy was delivered five months later. Wilma had acted as her midwife.\n\nWhile the foreman knew that Mrs. Driscoll was smart, he had been almost shocked when she quickly demonstrated her strength of her character. Even while she was nursing Lucy, she took control of the ranch. Within a year, John thought she was a better boss than her husband had been. She began dressing like a ranch hand when she started riding out with him to inspect the herds. While she was as confident as any man he knew, no one would ever confuse her for a male of the species.\n\nLess than a minute after he knocked, the door opened.\n\nMrs. Driscoll quickly said, \"Come in, John. I wasn't expecting you to return so quickly. Didn't you find the lawyer?\"\n\nJohn removed his hat and stepped inside as she closed the door then walked behind him.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I didn't have to look very hard. He had his office in a saloon.\"\n\nGeorgette was about to sit on the couch when she stopped and exclaimed, \"He works in a saloon?\"\n\nJohn waited for her to sit before he took a seat and replied, \"Yes, ma'am. But it's not what you think. He owns the place and has his office inside.\"\n\nShe sighed and said, \"I guess I'll have to handle this problem by myself after all.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. Mister Kane told me that he'd probably come here tomorrow. He said to tell you that he's sure that this Long Star Land Company is phony and they're payin' off Sheriff Lusk and Judge Davis to steal the Double D.\"\n\n\"Do you really believe some drunk lawyer can stop them, John?\"\n\n\"He's not a drunk, ma'am. He's probably more sober than I am. He's really smart, too.\"\n\n\"How would you know? You probably only spent an hour with him.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, that's about right. But he seemed pretty sure of things. We met in his office, then we talked longer when we had lunch in his apartment.\"\n\n\"Is his apartment in the saloon as well?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But you gotta trust me. I'm sure that he'll be able to stop them from takin' the ranch.\"\n\n\"I suppose I can afford to wait and see if he shows up.\"\n\n\"He said that if the sheriff shows up before he gets here you should tell him that he could only talk to your attorney.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as she said, \"Even if your mysterious saloon lawyer doesn't show up, I may tell that to the sheriff to see his reaction.\"\n\n\"He'll show up, Mrs. Driscoll. Oh, and there's somethin' else you gotta know about him. He's a real tall feller. I reckon he's gotta be about six inches taller than me.\"\n\n\"Really? Is he a scarecrow?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am.\"\n\n\"What did he say he'd do if he comes?\"\n\n\"He said he'd stop the court order right fast, but he seemed to be concerned that it might not be enough. He never heard of the Long Star Land Company and figures they might be a bunch of outlaws who won't care if their scheme didn't work.\"\n\n\"It sounds as if he might have second thoughts after you left his saloon.\"\n\n\"He told me that before he said he'd be comin'. I don't reckon it worries him all that much.\"\n\n\"We'll see. I just don't know what I'll do if he decides to stay put in his saloon.\"\n\nJohn stood and said, \"Well, I need to take care of my horse and get some chow.\"\n\n\"Thank you, John. Let's hope the saloon lawyer can help.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nAfter John left the house, Georgette walked to the kitchen to finish her supper. Timmy and Lucy should already be finished, so she'd be able to let them play while she talked to Millie." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "No one visited Morgan in his apartment that night as they all knew he needed time to think. As he sat at the kitchen table, he didn't even hear the saloon symphony being played just outside his apartment's door.\n\nHe assumed that within three days, he'd get the telegram from Tyler, but he'd have to wait to get the restraining order from Judge Riddle before he could challenge the Long Star Land Company. So, for the next week or so, he'd get to meet his client and the men who were trying to steal her ranch.\n\nJohn hadn't described Mrs. Driscoll, but it wasn't important. All that mattered was that greedy men were trying to take what wasn't theirs. It was just a question of how greedy they were and what they would do when that greed wasn't satisfied." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nMorgan drove his buckboard out of Kerrville early the next morning. His tall sorrel gelding was in harness and his smaller saddled black gelding was trailing. His large leather travel bag was on the bed behind him, and a canteen was laying on the driver's seat.\n\nThe sorrel was named Oscar and he called the saddle horse Felix. There was no particular reason for either of their names other than Morgan had never met a man named either Oscar or Felix. So, it wasn't likely that either horse would be insulted if he ran into a slovenly Oscar or an annoying Felix.\n\nWhen he bought Felix, some folks probably questioned why such a tall man would ride such a small horse. Those who knew his first name never had to ask why he chose the handsome young Morgan.\n\nHe was making good time and expected to reach the access road before noon. According to John, he'd spend another forty minutes on the access road before he reached the ranch house. It was one of the largest ranches in Texas, which was pretty impressive. He knew that Mrs. Driscoll owned the Double D but wondered if she ever rode out to inspect her large herds. He didn't know how old she was or even if she had children, but it was possible that she had a son who could do much of the hard work.\n\nAs Oscar pulled the buckboard north, Morgan was almost hoping that the men who owned the Long Star Land Company didn't slink away when he stopped them. He didn't want them to use the same plan on another unsuspecting rancher. But he admitted that the real reason that he didn't want them to fold up their tent was because he missed the thrill of danger when he'd been riding with the Rangers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Georgette sat on the couch in the front room flanked by Timmy and Lucy while Millie sat across from her.\n\nMillie asked, \"Do you really think he can help, George?\"\n\n\"I don't know, Millie. Part of me hopes he can, but the rational part of me argues against it. If he shows up today, then I'll have a better idea.\"\n\n\"If he does arrive, where will he stay?\"\n\nGeorgette blinked then replied, \"I hadn't even thought about it. We have room in the house, but I'm not sure I'd want him living with Timmy and Lucy.\"\n\nMillie smiled as she said, \"You didn't seem to be worried about yourself.\"\n\n\"I can protect myself, Millie. I just don't want Timmy or Lucy to be exposed to a man who might imbibe.\"\n\nMillie nodded, but didn't say anything. It was a sore spot for Georgette because it was Don's weakness for whiskey that had had caused the rift between them. It had also been the major factor that resulted in his death when he thought it would be funny to lasso the bull while he was spreading his seed.\n\nTimmy then looked up at his mother and asked, \"What does imbibe mean?\"\n\nShe smiled as she replied, \"You'll learn all about it when you're older.\"\n\nHe frowned as he said, \"You always tell me I'll figure things out when I'm older, Mama.\"\n\nLucy giggled then said, \"You are old to me, Timmy.\"\n\nMillie said, \"I never heard of him. and I've been to Kerrville a few times.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"When was the last time you were down there?\"\n\n\"Sometime last summer. I don't recall seeing any nice saloons, either.\"\n\n\"I should have asked John a few more questions, but I guess it doesn't matter. If he shows up, I'll be able to make my own judgement.\"\n\n\"I'll admit that I'm a bit curious myself.\"\n\n\"I'm much more than curious. If he's not as good as John seems to believe, I could lose the ranch.\"\n\nTimmy hugged his mother and said, \"I'll help, Mama.\"\n\nShe kissed him on his forehead before saying, \"I know you will.\"\n\nLucy jumped onto her lap and squealed, \"Me, too!\"\n\nHer mother laughed before kissing Lucy's forehead and giving her a big hug. She was more worried about her children's future than just losing the ranch. The ranch was her father-in-law's creation and she sometimes felt as if she was a stranger on the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Morgan crossed Elm Creek and began looking for the access road. He hadn't passed any traffic which was a bit surprising, but at least he hadn't bumped into Sheriff Lusk or one of his deputies. He didn't want to make their acquaintance until after he talked to Mrs. Driscoll.\n\nWhen he spotted the sign for the enormous ranch a few minutes later, he smiled because it was nothing like he had expected. Even though John had said it wasn't a grand overhead sign, he thought it would be nicer than the amateurish scrawled 'DOUBLE D RANCH' nailed to a post near the end of the access road.\n\nHe was still smiling as he turned right onto the access road. He wasn't expecting to see the house or barn but thought that John or some of the ranch hands might be nearby waiting for him. He spotted one of the herds a good two miles to the northeast, but no riders were working the cattle.\n\nHe kept scanning the rolling hills which were either grassy or rocky with a spattering of bushes. There were more trees than he expected to find and that meant there was water nearby although he couldn't see it. He continued his inspection and the more he saw, the more he was impressed.\n\nMorgan still hadn't seen the ranch house before he spotted two ranch hands at his two o'clock position. He took off his Stetson and waved it over his head. By the time he pulled it back on, both riders had waved back. One turned away and headed east while the other set his horse in his direction.\n\nHe kept the buckboard rolling along the access road and waited for the ranch hand to pull up beside him.\n\nWhen he was riding alongside, Morgan said, \"Howdy. I'm Morgan Kane.\"\n\n\"I'm Paul Kelly. John said you'd be comin', but Mrs. Driscoll wasn't sure you'd show up.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess she'll be disappointed.\"\n\nPaul chuckled then said, \"I reckon not. John said you were a big feller, but you're bigger than I figured. Do you really think you can stop those bastards from stealin' the ranch?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\nPaul looked at the buckboard then asked, \"You're kinda brave to be ridin' without a pistol. You couldn't get to that Winchester on your horse if you needed it fast.\"\n\n\"I'd put it down more to ignorance than bravery.\"\n\nPaul snickered then pointed down the access road and said, \"There's the barn.\"\n\nMorgan saw the roof of the barn, and just a few seconds later the lower buildings began rising over the horizon. He thought it looked like a good-sized settlement. It would have to have a decent population with all of the ranch hands and other workers necessary to keep the big ranch operating.\n\nHe began seeing more cattle and riders but focused on the ranch house. He'd seen many ranch houses, and this one wasn't much different. It was noticeably larger than most ranch houses, but he'd almost expected to find a grand mansion at the center of the Double D. A ranch this size must deal with large sums of cash, and he wondered if Mrs. Driscoll trusted the bank in Junction City or stored the ranch's money in a safe.\n\nHis curiosity continued to grow as he approached the ranch house and soon spotted John standing near the front of the house. No one was waiting on the porch, so he wasn't sure if Mrs. Driscoll even knew he was coming. He would have been surprised if the good folks of the Long Star Land Company had already abandoned their claim.\n\nFive minutes later, he pulled the buckboard to a stop and set the handbrake. Paul waved to John and rode off as Morgan stepped down and stretched.\n\nJohn stepped closer and said, \"Mrs. Driscoll figured you weren't gonna show up.\"\n\n\"That's what Paul told me. Does she know I'm here?\"\n\n\"Nope. I told the boys to let me know. I figure it would be better if I introduced you.\"\n\n\"You're probably right. So, I'll let you introduce me to Mrs. Driscoll, and we'll see if I can make her feel better.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Mrs. Driscoll hadn't been waiting in the main room with her children because she still wasn't convinced the lawyer would arrive. But Millie had been checking the access road every few minutes and had spotted the buckboard being escorted by Paul Kelly.\n\nOnce she realized it was probably the lawyer, she hurried into the kitchen and said, \"You were wrong, George. He's coming down the access road. I think he's driving a buckboard.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"Is it moving in a straight line or snaking its way here?\"\n\n\"You're being awfully judgmental about a man who is your best hope for saving the ranch.\"\n\n\"I guess you're right. Ever since Lusk and his deputies showed up, I've been expecting nothing but bad news.\"\n\n\"You have enough time to put on a dress, George.\"\n\n\"I don't think he cares what I look like. He knows he can demand a high fee for just showing up. If he asks for too much, I can send a telegram to Dallas or San Antonio for a good lawyer. Or at least one who has a respectable location for his office.\"\n\n\"You're being judgmental again. At least sit in the front room with the children.\"\n\nGeorgette still expected to be disappointed, but said, \"Alright,\" then stood and walked with Millie down the hallway.\n\nWhen Morgan and John stepped onto the porch, Millie was just a few feet from the door and Mrs. Driscoll was sitting on the couch with Lucy. Timmy was standing next to the closest chair to the door waiting to see the man who imbibed but still might help his mother.\n\nMillie was smiling as she opened the door just before John was about to knock.\n\nHer smile froze as she looked up at Morgan. John said he was tall, but she was still stunned by his appearance. He was the most masculine example of manhood she'd ever met.\n\nMorgan almost said, \"Hello, Mrs. Driscoll,\" but John kept him from making the social faux pas when he said, \"Howdy, Millie. This is Mister Kane.\"\n\nMillie was still smiling as she said, \"Hello, Mister Kane. Won't you please come in?\"\n\nMorgan removed his hat and entered the room. He had expected John to follow, but when Millie closed the door, he was the only adult male in the large room. Before his eyes found Mrs. Driscoll, he spotted Timmy gripping a cushioned chair and staring at him with big eyes.\n\nHe stepped closer then stopped, smiled down at the boy and said, \"Good afternoon, sir.\"\n\nTimmy's neck was straining as he quietly replied, \"Hello.\"\n\nGeorgette had almost the same reaction as Millie when she saw him enter the room. He was nothing like her imaginary lush lawyer. He had a commanding air about him and for the first time since she'd been handed the court order, she began to believe that she might not lose the ranch.\n\nMorgan was still smiling at Timmy when Millie said, \"My name is Millie Williams. I'd like to introduce you to Mrs. Driscoll, the owner of the Double D.\"\n\nHe smiled at Mrs. Driscoll and Lucy and said, \"I wish I'd met you under better circumstances, Mrs. Driscoll. I'm Morgan Kane.\"\n\nGeorgette replied, \"I hope you can help us, Mister Kane. Please have a seat.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am.\"\n\nMorgan took a seat facing the couch while Millie returned to her favorite chair.\n\nGeorgette said, \"John tells me that you own a saloon in Kerrville.\"\n\nMorgan was a bit surprised she'd mentioned the saloon before she asked what he could do to stop the Long Star Land Company from taking her ranch. But he could understand why that might have concerned her.\n\n\"That's right. It was my older brother's place. He died last October, so I improved it and moved my practice to Kerrville.\"\n\n\"Have you been a lawyer for very long?\"\n\n\"I opened my law office in San Antonio more than ten years ago.\"\n\n\"Why did you move to a saloon in Kerrville?\"\n\nMorgan felt as if he was being cross-examined but replied, \"I liked the town.\"\n\nMillie was staring at Georgette wondering why she was interrogating Mister Kane. But she wasn't the one who might lose her ranch, so she just watched and listened.\n\nMrs. Driscoll finally asked, \"Do you really believe that you can stop them from taking the Double D?\"\n\n\"As I told John yesterday; I'm sure I can have the court order voided within a week. It's what they do after they lose the legal skirmish that has me concerned. Didn't he tell you?\"\n\n\"He did, but I wanted to hear you explain why you think you can stop the court order so easily.\"\n\n\"My father was a judge and adjudicated many of the land grant cases. So, I'm very familiar with the appeal and certification process. Spanish and Mexican land grants are much less common this far north than they are near the Rio Grande. All of them should have been verified or dismissed by now. I also know most of the land companies that are buying up the certified claims. I never heard of the Long Star Land Company, and I believe it's as phony as their Spanish land grant.\n\n\"Then there's the improper legal method they used to even obtain the court order ordering you to vacate your ranch. It's a violation of the rights granted to you by the Constitution. Not even the President or the Supreme Court can order you to give up your property without due process. If the Long Star Land Company was legitimate and had a genuine land grant, they would need to have the grant verified by the state, then file a claim in court. You would have been notified and would be able to hire your own lawyer to fight their claim.\n\n\"When John told me what happened, I found it almost impossible to believe. I'm sure that they bribed the sheriff and the judge, but they must have greased the palm of any other attorneys in the county as well. Did you talk to any of them before sending John to Kerrville?\"\n\n\"There was no point. Other than the county prosecutor, the only other lawyer in Junction City is Abner Jacobs and he's afraid of his shadow.\"\n\n\"I don't know if they bribed Mister Jacobs, but they must have believed that you wouldn't look for help outside of Kimble County. If I had to guess, the boys who created the Long Star Land Company knew that you were a widow and assumed that they'd be able to cower you into giving up without a fight.\"\n\n\"You're probably right, but they were wrong in their assumption. I wasn't going to leave the Double D even if it meant using my Winchester.\"\n\n\"But you're also a mother with two beautiful children to protect. You wouldn't risk your ranch hands to stop them, either. John told me you'd already made that decision. They wanted you to believe that they had all the power. They added the incentive of those eight sections to make your decision less painful. That's why I'm concerned about what they might do once their court order is proven worthless.\"\n\n\"How can you stop the court order?\"\n\n\"I already have one of my investigators on his way to Austin to check on the Long Star Land Company and the existence of any Spanish grants filed for this land. I'm sure that he'll find that neither exists. Then he'll visit Federal Judge Wendell Riddle and have him issue a restraining order which will stop all proceedings until the question of legality is settled in court where it should be. I told him to send a telegram to me here when he gets the restraining order. I should receive the telegram within three days. Then I have to wait for him to bring it to me before I visit Judge Davis and Sheriff Lusk to deliver the bad news.\"\n\nGeorgette's earlier assessment of the saloon lawyer vanished as if it had never existed. But now that she believed that the court order was no longer a problem, she shared his concern about the men who owned the Long Star Land Company as well as Sheriff Lusk and his four deputies.\n\n\"What do you think they'll do when they find out?\"\n\n\"Once I show up with Judge Riddle's restraining order, they'll know that they can be charged with fraud. If they were rational, they'd fold up their tent and move their land grant circus to another county. But they must have invested a lot of money in bribes to get this far, and it is more likely that they'll try a different approach.\"\n\n\"You mean they'll just have a lot of gunmen ride onto the ranch and take it by force.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. While I'm waiting for my investigator's telegram, I'll visit Junction City and see if I can learn how many men make up the Long Star Land Company and get an idea of how serious they are.\"\n\n\"If they decide to ignore your judge's restraining order, there's nothing I can do; is there?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. But I can. By the time I get the restraining order, I'll have a good sense of what to expect when I hand it to the sheriff. I'll have my investigator return to Kerrville and come back with my other three investigators. We'd be able to prevent them from taking your ranch.\"\n\nGeorgette exclaimed, \"But you're a lawyer, not a lawman!\"\n\n\"I am an attorney, Mrs. Driscoll,\" he replied as he pulled his badge from his jacket pocket and said, \"And I'm also a captain in the Texas Rangers. All of my investigators are Rangers as well. We're just not assigned to a company anymore and aren't paid by the state.\"\n\nTimmy's high-pitched voice interrupted the pregnant pause when he shouted, \"You're a Texas Ranger?\"\n\nMorgan grinned at the boy as he handed him his badge and said, \"That's what it says on the badge, son.\"\n\nTimmy reverently held the metal star in his hands in absolute awe as Morgan looked back to Mrs. Driscoll and said, \"Don't worry about that phony land company or the sheriff, ma'am. They won't take your ranch no matter how hard they try.\"\n\nGeorgette's mind was chaotic. She had gone from worrying about losing the ranch to not expecting much from the lawyer to being relieved that the court order was invalid. Then she quickly shifted to a much more intense concern about a possible violent takeover. Now she had a very different dilemma; one she couldn't have thought possible fifteen minutes ago.\n\n\"I can't ask you to risk your life and those of your men, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"It may not be necessary, Mrs. Driscoll. But if it does, you won't have to ask. I made that decision before I left Kerrville this morning. You need to keep your ranch for your children and all the folks who call it home. They have no right to take it from you.\"\n\nShe didn't know how to reply, but Millie gave her a respite by asking, \"Would you like something to eat, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"I'd appreciate it, ma'am. But I've got to take care of my horses first. I'll ask John where to leave them and my buckboard.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"He can have a ranch hand do that for you, Mister Kane.\"\n\nMorgan stood and replied, \"I have an obligation to my four-legged friends, ma'am. I'll be back shortly then you can tell me more about Sheriff Lusk and his deputies. I only have stories about them and don't even know about Judge Davis.\"\n\n\"I know them too well.\"\n\nMorgan turned then smiled down at Timmy and said, \"You can hang onto that badge until I need it, son.\"\n\n\"I can?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Maybe one of these days, you'll have one of your own.\"\n\nHe ruffled Timmy's hair before walking to the door and leaving the house.\n\nAfter he'd gone, Georgette looked at Millie and said, \"I don't know what to think now. I was shocked when I saw him then was relieved when he told me that he'd be able to stop the court order. But then the likely threat of violence changed everything. What do you think?\"\n\n\"Mister Kane seems pretty confident that he'd be able to handle the sheriff and the men from the land company. I don't believe that you could convince him to change his mind, either. I guess all we can do is wait to see what happens.\"\n\n\"I suppose so, but I still don't think it's right. He and his men shouldn't risk their lives because of my problem.\"\n\n\"I don't think that he sees it that way. But I wonder how he could be a lawyer for all those years and still be a Texas Ranger. He said he was a captain, so he was probably already a lawyer by the time he joined the Rangers. Maybe you should ask him how he managed to do both.\"\n\n\"He said he wouldn't get the telegram from his investigator for three days, so I imagine we'll find out more about him while he's waiting. I didn't even ask him how much he'll charge for his services.\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"I guess not, but maybe I'd feel better if he asked for a thousand dollars. Before we met him, I thought he might be one of those shysters who would demand a lot of money just to talk to me. Now I have a feeling he won't ask for nearly as much as he's worth. And that's just for getting that restraining order. There isn't enough money in the whole county to reimburse him if he and his men have to defend the Double D from the sheriff and those land company bas... , I mean men.\"\n\nMillie laughed then looked at Timmy who was sitting in the chair recently used by Mister Kane and still admiring the badge. She didn't think Lucy would have noticed her mother's slip of the tongue.\n\n\"I'll start preparing lunch. Are you coming, George?\"\n\nGeorgette nodded and said, \"I'll help,\" then stood and took Lucy's hand.\n\nThey walked down the hallway leaving Timmy alone in the main room. His mother doubted if he'd even heard them leave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Morgan had unharnessed Oscar and was pulling Felix's saddle from his back as John asked, \"So, what did Mrs. Driscoll say?\"\n\n\"She seemed a bit surprised when I told her that I was sure I'd be able to get that court order rescinded. But then she was upset about what might happen when their legal scheme collapsed. I guess she hadn't started worrying about that because she was concentrating on the court order.\"\n\n\"When we were having lunch in your apartment, you told me that you'd handle anything they might try. But can you really do that? I mean, Sheriff Lusk had four deputies and I don't know how many shooters that land company has.\"\n\n\"I didn't tell you about my friends when you visited me in Kerrville. I have four men that I pay as investigators. But they're much more than just investigators. They're all experienced lawmen. Each of them is a Texas Ranger. I spent three years as a captain in the Rangers and when I left to return to my law practice, they came with me. I'd trust each of them with my life.\n\n\"I told Mrs. Driscoll that when I get the restraining order which will void Judge Davis's eviction order, I'd have all four of them come here before I visited the sheriff. I don't want you or any of your men to get involved. Is that understood?\"\n\nInstead of answering, John asked, \"You're still a Ranger?\"\n\n\"I'm not assigned to any company, but I'm still a sworn Ranger and so are all of my friends. We'll be able to take care of the sheriff, his deputies and however many men the phony land company has. If it comes to a shootout, I would appreciate it if you and some of your men were in the house protecting Mrs. Driscoll and her children. Millie and any other women should be in the house as well. You're married; aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. My wife's name is Wilma. We've been married for twelve years now. We live in that house over yonder. We never did have any young'uns, though.\"\n\nMorgan folded the horse blanket and set it on the buckboard's bed with the rest of the tack as John asked, \"Will they bring more guns with 'em? You don't have any at all.\"\n\n\"They'll bring their own, but I have enough firepower to stop a small army. Well, maybe just a squad.\"\n\n\"I don't see any.\"\n\nMorgan opened his jacket and showed him the Webley which drew the expected snicker from John when he spied the small pistol.\n\nHe was still smiling when Morgan opened the long, narrow lid of the left gun chamber. He unstrapped the Winchester '86 and handed it to John.\n\nJohn examined the repeater and said, \"This seems a bit different than most Winchesters.\"\n\n\"It's an 1886 model. It's much more robust than the earlier versions. I use the .45-90 Winchester cartridge and get good results at four hundred yards.\"\n\nJohn whistled as Morgan pulled the Winchester shotgun from the same chamber.\n\nWhen John saw the lever action, he quickly said, \"That's a Winchester?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. It's their new lever-action shotgun. This one is a ten-gauge. It holds five shells in the tube and another one in the chamber. I've never fired more than three in a row because it has a nasty kick. You need to use a lot more force to work the lever, too. It makes sense when you think about it.\"\n\nThey switched Winchesters as John said, \"I reckon so.\"\n\nMorgan returned the '86 to its home and was strapping it down when John asked, \"Do you have more of 'em in the other box?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nJohn was disappointed before Morgan opened the lid on the second long box and carefully unstrapped the Sharps-Borshadt.\n\nJohn's mouth dropped open as Morgan lifted it from its leather and wood prison and said, \"This is a Sharps-Borshadt. It's bored for .45 caliber and I have a few boxes of .45-100 cartridges. A thousand yards is well within its range, and the telescopic sight makes it much easier to put that .45 where you want it to go.\"\n\nJohn hesitated to ask, but Morgan held it out to him and exchanged the shotgun for the long-range rifle. He let John caress it as if it was a beautiful woman while he returned the shotgun to the left side box.\n\nJohn was stroking the Sharps-Borshadt's stock as he said, \"I reckon you've got a bigger pistol in there somewhere.\"\n\n\"I have a Smith & Wesson Schofield in a box under the driver's seat. That's where I have all of my ammunition as well. When this is all over, we'll do some target shooting and you can try all of them. Okay?\"\n\n\"I can't wait to fire this one.\"\n\n\"That's because you're a Texan, John.\"\n\nJohn chuckled as he regretfully handed the Sharps-Borshadt back to Morgan then watched him return it to the padded box.\n\nAfter he closed the lid, returning the buckboard to its innocent state, Morgan said, \"Don't tell anyone, not even your wife, about the guns, John. I hope I don't need to use any of them, but if I do, I don't want to find one missing.\"\n\n\"I won't tell anybody, but I trust all my boys, Morg.\"\n\n\"How long have you known them?\"\n\n\"The newest hires have been here more than a year.\"\n\n\"Who are the new ones?\"\n\n\"I hired Charlie Jones a year ago in April and Jonas Cook a month later.\"\n\n\"Did you know them before they started working here?\"\n\n\"Nope. But they're all right. Why are you askin'?\"\n\n\"If lead starts flying, I don't want to have to worry about somebody switching sides.\"\n\n\"You won't have to worry about 'em.\"\n\nMorgan nodded as he asked. \"Do you have room in your bunkhouse for me?\"\n\n\"Sure, but ain't you stayin' in the ranch house?\"\n\n\"I don't believe Mrs. Driscoll would be comfortable having me sleeping in a nearby room. Does Millie Williams have a room in the house?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. We got a spare room in our place. I'm sure Wilma won't mind if you use it.\"\n\n\"I'd just as soon stay in the bunkhouse, so I can meet the ranch hands. I'll join them for chow, too. It'll be good to hang around with a crowd of regular men again.\"\n\n\"You own a saloon, Morg. Don't you spend time with all of those fellers?\"\n\n\"Nope. I'm usually busy with my clients or running the business.\"\n\n\"Don't you ever have any fun? You said you weren't married, so you don't have to worry about upsetting the missus.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"This is fun, John. I enjoy my work, and this is about as good as it gets.\"\n\n\"I can't figure you out, Morg. You gotta have a lotta money and you're a good-lookin' feller, if you don't mind my sayin' so. If I was in your shoes, I'd be spendin' all my time in my saloon with a pretty gal on my lap.\"\n\n\"My older brother was that way and it got him killed. I'm nothing like him.\"\n\n\"Oh. Sorry.\"\n\n\"It's alright. Now, where can I put my horses?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Five minutes later, Morgan knocked on the ranch house's front door. He couldn't recall if Mrs. Driscoll had given him permission to enter without knocking but was pretty sure that she hadn't.\n\nJohn hadn't talked about her or her children at all, but because she was a widow and running the ranch, he had assumed she was between forty and fifty years old. So, when he'd seen her sitting on the couch wearing denim britches and a checkered flannel shirt, he'd been surprised. But it was her age more than her wardrobe that had been unexpected. She was still a very handsome young woman. But her appearance didn't matter. She was his client now and needed his help.\n\nWhen the door opened, Millie smiled and said, \"Lunch is ready, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am. Please call me Morg.\"\n\n\"And you must call me Millie.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Millie.\"\n\nHe pulled off his hat, entered the room, and after Millie closed the door, he walked with her to the long hallway. When they entered the kitchen, he smiled at Timmy who still clutched his Texas Ranger badge.\n\n\"Howdy, Ranger Driscoll.\"\n\nTimmy giggled then Lucy said, \"Are you going to shoot the bad men?\"\n\n\"Not if your brother keeps my badge, Princess Driscoll.\"\n\nLucy looked at her older brother before she started giggling.\n\nMillie said, \"Have a seat, Morg, and I'll start serving lunch.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nMorgan sat in the chair beside Timmy then looked at Mrs. Driscoll and said, \"I told John that I'd take one of the empty spaces in the bunkhouse. I want to get to know the ranch hands.\"\n\nGeorgette was surprised but relieved as she said, \"I understand. Will you be having your meals in the chow house with them as well?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I'll only come to the ranch house if I have news. If you need to ask me anything, I shouldn't be hard to find.\"\n\nShe smiled as she said, \"You do stand out from most men, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"It's been that way before I first set foot in a classroom. It had the added disadvantage that I always lost when we played hide and seek.\"\n\nTimmy laughed before Lucy joined in without understanding what her brother thought was funny.\n\nMillie began setting plates of food on the table, so Mrs. Driscoll stood and opened a drawer to take out their utensils.\n\nMorgan then turned to Timmy and said, \"I'll bet you can hide from your sister.\"\n\nLucy exclaimed, \"No, he can't! I'm better at hiding than Timmy!\"\n\n\"Is that Ranger Driscoll's first name, ma'am? What should I call you, Princess Driscoll, if I don't bow and call you 'your highness'?\"\n\nThe little girl smiled and said, \"I'm Lucy, but I'm not a princess.\"\n\n\"Sure, you are. You just forgot to put on your crown this morning.\"\n\nLucy turned to look at her mother as she giggled.\n\nGeorgette said, \"I apologize for not introducing you to my children.\"\n\n\"You had a lot on your mind, Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\nAfter setting cups of coffee on the table, Millie and Georgette sat down. Morgan waited until each of the women began to eat before picking up his knife and fork. He wasn't sure if Mrs. Driscoll would say grace and didn't want to be rude.\n\nAs he cut his thick slice of ham, he asked, \"Can you tell me about Sheriff Lusk and his deputies? I don't even know what the sheriff or the deputies look like.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nShe began describing the sheriff and each of his four deputies with the background noise of knives and forks clinking on plates. When she finished with their physical appearance, Georgette began expressing her poor opinion of the lawmen even before it had taken a massive nosedive when Sheriff Lusk and two of his deputies arrived to deliver the court order. She then shifted to Judge Leonard Davis. She admitted that she didn't know him nearly as well and until he signed that court order, she didn't put him in the same despicable category as the sheriff.\n\nMorgan asked an occasional question but just to give Mrs. Driscoll a break so she could manage to eat something. He hadn't heard anything unexpected about the sheriff or his deputies other than their appearance. He'd met other lawmen much like Sheriff Lusk when he was active with the Rangers.\n\nWhile he may not have been to Junction City before, he couldn't discount the possibility that he'd be recognized by someone when he visited the town tomorrow. He might even have met one of the deputies when they visited Kerrville and possibly The Bluebonnet. He wouldn't assume a false identity, but he'd look more like a ranch hand than an attorney when he arrived. He'd ride Oscar because he was tall, and he'd be wearing his Schofield. He'd have the ubiquitous Winchester '73 in his scabbard as well.\n\nHe was so busy concentrating on what he'd be doing tomorrow that he almost forgot about everyone else at the table. It was Timmy who reminded him of their presence.\n\n\"Do you really live in a saloon, Mister Kane?\"\n\nMorgan blinked then looked at the boy and replied, \"Yes, sir. I used to live down in San Antonio in a grand house that used to belong to my father. But my older brother, who owned the saloon, died. So, I left San Antonio and was going to just sell the saloon, but I liked the town. I fixed it up and stayed there. The saloon already had a place to live and an office for me to work, so I just moved in rather than build a house.\"\n\n\"Do you drink a lot of whiskey?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I have a cold beer now and then, but I never liked whiskey very much. You don't drink whiskey; do you Ranger Tim?\"\n\nTimmy grinned as he shook his head, then replied, \"No, sir. I'm never going to drink whiskey. I don't want to make mama sad.\"\n\n\"It will make you a better Ranger, too. Whiskey makes you do stupid things. Beer can make you that way too, but it takes a lot more.\"\n\nTimmy was about to say something else when his mother said, \"Timmy, why don't you and Lucy go play in your room? Mister Kane and I need to talk about grown-up things.\"\n\n\"Okay, Mama.\"\n\nHe slid from the chair and took his sister's hand then said, \"Bye, Mister Kane.\"\n\nLucy added her, \"Bye,\" before Morgan said, \"Goodbye Ranger Tim and Princess Lucy.\"\n\nThey both smiled before quickly disappearing into the hallway.\n\nMorgan was smiling as well when he said, \"You have beautiful children, Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mister Kane. Do you really abstain from liquor?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I think 'abstain' sounds somewhat moralistic. It isn't that I believe alcohol is evil and should be outlawed. I just don't want to lose control of my senses. I probably lost a client or two when they assumed that I was my saloon's best customer. And judging by your first questions when I arrived, I imagine that you must have expected to see me weave and stumble my way onto your porch.\"\n\n\"I'll admit that when John told me you had your office located in your own saloon, I almost expected you to be somewhat befuddled.\"\n\nMorgan chuckled before saying, \"Befuddled is a polite way of saying snockered, but I'm not in the least bit offended.\"\n\n\"I still shouldn't have been so judgmental. Especially as you were my only chance for stopping the Long Star Land Company.\"\n\n\"Speaking of those boys; I'll be riding into Junction City tomorrow morning, and hopefully, I'll be able to talk to them. What I say will depend on what I find when I get into town.\"\n\n\"Will you tell them that you're a lawyer and that you're representing me?\"\n\n\"They may already know by now. It's one of the reasons I want to stay in the bunkhouse. John said he trusts all of the ranch hands. He can afford to trust them, but I can't. You have a lot of men working on your ranch and the Long Star Land Company has been spreading around a lot of money to steal your ranch. I wouldn't be surprised if they spent some of that money to have one or two of your hands provide them with information.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Millie and asked, \"Do you think that any of them would turn on us, Millie?\"\n\n\"It depends on how much they offered for the information, George.\"\n\nMorgan smiled when he heard Millie address Mrs. Driscoll, but said, \"It's not just the bribe of money that is the incentive, Millie. They'd promise to promote him to foreman when they took over or maybe even give him a few sections to start his own small ranch. Promises are cheaper than bribes, especially when you have no intention of honoring them.\"\n\nMrs. Driscoll quietly said, \"I never even thought about that.\"\n\n\"You've only known about the scheme for a few days, ma'am. That court order was your primary concern as it should have been. I have no intention of telling the ranch hands of my suspicions, and I'd appreciate it if you kept it a secret as well. If you have a spy on the ranch, then I'll find out when I get to Junction City. I may not get a name, but I'll probably be able to flush him out when I return.\"\n\nMillie said, \"You sound more like a Ranger than a lawyer, Morg.\"\n\n\"Arguing cases in court can be interesting and rewarding, but it can be frustrating as well. When I left my practice, I found a great deal of satisfaction enforcing the law. I probably would have stayed with my company if some of the Rangers weren't beginning to get too big for their britches. One of the reasons I moved to Kerrville was that I believed I could do both. That's why I told John that this case was perfect for me. I have an opportunity to use all of my skills to stop those thieves from stealing your ranch.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"I'm still not comfortable with the idea that you'd get into a gunfight with the sheriff, his deputies and the land company men, even if you have your friends with you.\"\n\n\"I can't change that, ma'am. But look at it this way. Say you had a bunch of rustlers descend on your ranch and make off with a few hundred head of cattle heading west and soon left Kimble County. Even if Sheriff Lusk was an honest lawman, he'd contact the nearest Ranger company to hunt down the rustlers. We may not be assigned to a company, but we're still Rangers. We're just doing our job. The only real difference is that I'm doing some preliminary legal work.\"\n\n\"That's very logical, but far from accurate. The only reason you're here is because I sent John to ask you to fight the court order.\"\n\n\"And that's what I'm going to do, ma'am. It's just a question of what they do.\"\n\n\"I suppose I should just say 'thank you' and stop whining about it.\"\n\n\"I don't think you're whining, Mrs. Driscoll. You're just expressing your concerns.\"\n\n\"At least present me with a proper bill for your services.\"\n\n\"I'll give you one when you feel safe on your ranch again.\"\n\nEven though she'd only known him for a couple of hours, Georgette was convinced that if he did give her a bill, it wouldn't be nearly as much as it should be. She just prayed that he'd survive this 'perfect case'.\n\nMorgan stood and said, \"I'm going to go talk to John again while he gives me a tour of the ranch.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"He's probably at his house having a late lunch. It's the small house between the barn and the bunkhouse.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am. I think I'll take some time to saddle my horse before I head over there. I don't want to give him a bellyache.\"\n\nHe picked up his Stetson then left the kitchen and the house through the back door. Once on the porch, he pulled on his hat then hopped to the ground and turned right. He'd saddle Felix because Oscar did all the work this morning and would carry him to Junction City tomorrow.\n\nAs he walked to the big barn, Morgan was looking forward to spending some time exploring at least some of the enormous spread. He'd been on quite a few large ranches but never one quite as big as the Double D. He had seen their ranch hands driving herds of cattle to Kerrville's holding pens and thought that the ranch must have needed a large infusion of cash. It was only when John told him how many cattle called the Double D home that he realized the scope of the operation. He was sure that John was critically important to Mrs. Driscoll, but he was almost in awe of her ability to manage the place.\n\nHe glanced at the foreman's house before entering the barn. He could hear the blacksmith pounding iron in his smithy next door as he began saddling Felix. Aside from the blacksmith who was also the farrier, the ranch employed two wranglers to manage the remuda that must have at least a hundred horses. The large corral behind the barn had about two dozen animals, so there were probably more corrals scattered around the ranch. There were two cooks to keep the men fed, so altogether, Morgan figured that there were around forty people living on the Double D. He didn't know if there were any married employees other than John on the spread, but he'd ask.\n\nHe finished saddling Felix and led the Morgan back into the sunlight. He looked at John's house and didn't see the foreman but still headed that way. If he hadn't finished his lunch by now, then he must be a slow eater.\n\nWhen he reached the house, he just laid Felix's reins over the hitchrail before he stepped onto the porch and rapped on the door.\n\nThirty seconds later, the door swung open, and Morgan smiled before saying, \"Hello, Mrs. Bridges. I'm that saloon lawyer that John probably warned you about. Is your husband in?\"\n\nShe smiled back as she replied, \"No, I'm afraid he's already gone. You'll probably find him with the western herd.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am.\"\n\nAs he turned to leave, Wilma quickly asked, \"Mister Kane, could I speak to you for a few minutes?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Please come in and have a seat.\"\n\nMorgan pulled off his hat, said, \"Yes, ma'am,\" then entered the house and waited for Mrs. Bridges to enter.\n\nWilma closed the door and walked past Morgan into the front room before Morgan stepped to the nearest chair and sat down.\n\n\"Mister Kane, as you might imagine, I'm concerned about all that's going on. When I ask John about it, he tells me everything will be fine, but I think he's just saying that to keep me from worrying so much. John is such a good man who will do anything to keep the sheriff and those land company men from taking the Double D. I'm terrified that I might lose him. He said that you would handle everything, but I'm a bit skeptical. What if they come riding in here with guns blazing?\"\n\n\"I already told Mrs. Driscoll what I would do if that happened. I was also adamant that I didn't want anyone on the ranch to confront the sheriff, his deputies or the land company men. Your husband wasn't just trying to assuage your fears, Mrs. Bridges. He was simply passing along what I told him.\"\n\n\"Can you really do that?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. You can talk to Mrs. Driscoll for the details.\"\n\n\"I'll do that. Thank you, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. But please call me Morg, ma'am.\"\n\nWilma seemed at least somewhat relieved as she nodded, so Morgan stood and said, \"I'll ride west and see if I can find John.\"\n\n\"Good luck, Morg.\"\n\nHe smiled then turned and walked to the door. He left it open as he stepped onto the porch, pulled on his hat and leapt to the ground. He mounted Felix, turned him west and set off at a medium trot. He hoped that he didn't have to keep talking about his plans. He would have been surprised if the Long Star Land Company didn't have a spy on the Double D and it wouldn't be long before the sheriff knew his plans." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "As Morgan rode out to find John, Sheriff Finn Lusk was talking to Phil Arnold, the representative of the Long Star Land Company. While the sheriff may have had his doubts about the legitimacy of their Spanish land grant, he still believed that the company itself was both legal and prosperous. One of the reasons that gave him that confidence was the size of their donation.\n\nMister Arnold had explained that the president of the Long Star Land Company wanted this issue resolved quickly and at any cost. He had complete authority to do whatever was necessary to rapidly transfer ownership of the ranch. The sheriff would have helped them for much less than he'd been paid because he never liked Donald Driscoll and thought he didn't deserve to inherit the ranch in the first place.\n\nBut now that he knew how much they'd be willing to spend to get the Double D, Sheriff Lusk figured he may as well milk them as much as possible over the next sixty days. He wouldn't share any of his added payments with his deputies or the judge, either. He believed they'd paid more to Judge Davis anyway.\n\nPhil Arnold leaned back in his chair and asked, \"What do you know about this lawyer she hired?\"\n\n\"He showed up today from Kerrville. His name is Morgan Kane, and he has his offices in his saloon. He got it when his brother got killed by some whore.\"\n\nPhil snickered then said, \"I guess we don't have anything to worry about. What does he look like?\"\n\n\"All I know is that he's really tall. I don't know anything else. I should be able to tell you more tomorrow or the next day.\"\n\n\"Alright. He might show up in town tomorrow. If he does, just let him be. Maybe he'll stop here, and I'll get a measure of the man.\"\n\n\"I'll tell my boys.\"\n\nWhen the sheriff didn't show any indication of leaving, Phil reached into his inner jacket pocket, pulled out his wallet and handed him a twenty-dollar bill.\n\nSheriff Lusk stuffed it into his pocket before he stood and said, \"See you when I get more information on this lawyer.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you will, Sheriff.\"\n\nAfter he'd left the office, Phil turned to Lou Crump and said, \"That bastard isn't going to give me the time of day without putting his hand out.\"\n\nLou snickered then replied, \"I'd be willin' to cut it off when you tell me, Phil.\"\n\n\"Not yet. But if this lawyer is going to be a problem, I might need you to do something more than just cut off his hand.\"\n\n\"I'd be more'n happy to do that. You know I don't like lawyers or judges.\"\n\n\"I'm not fond of them either. Tell Charlie and Pokey to come in, so I can tell them what to do if that lawyer shows up tomorrow.\"\n\nLou nodded, said \"Okay, Phil,\" then turned and left the office.\n\nPhil returned his wallet to his inner pocket and muttered, \"Idiot sheriff.\"\n\nHe may have been irritated with Sheriff Lusk, but he still needed the lawman for the next couple of months. If that lawyer showed up tomorrow, he'd see how much he'd want to head back to Kerrville and his saloon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "In the Double D ranch house, Georgette and Millie were sitting in the great room with Wilma. Georgette had just finished telling Wilma about Mister Kane's plans.\n\nWilma asked, \"Do you really believe that he can stop all those men?\"\n\n\"I didn't think it was possible at first, but if he has the other four Rangers join him, I believe that they can handle it. But there is one thing that he told me that has me worried. I hadn't even thought about it until he mentioned it. He thinks that the men from the land company might bribe one of the ranch hands to keep watch over what happens. The more I thought about it, the more I believed it was possible.\"\n\n\"John said that Morg had asked him if he trusted the ranch hands. I guess now I understand why. I would think that if they did start looking for someone to bribe, John would know about it.\"\n\n\"That makes sense. I guess we'll just have to leave it to Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"He is quite a man; isn't he, George? Do you know if he's married?\"\n\n\"I didn't ask, but I find it difficult to believe that any wife would allow her lawyer husband to own a saloon. I didn't check if he was wearing a wedding ring, either. I had other things on my mind.\"\n\nMillie asked, \"Do you think that he has prostitutes working in his saloon?\"\n\nWilma laughed before she replied, \"John told me that a pretty young woman brought them their lunch and he asked Morg if she was a working girl. He was embarrassed when Morg said she was married to one of his friends.\"\n\nGeorgette sharply asked, \"Her husband let her work in the saloon?\"\n\n\"I guess so. John didn't ask any more questions after that. Maybe you can ask him.\"\n\n\"I don't want to know. I already accused him of overindulging in alcohol. That was bad enough.\"\n\nMillie said, \"Not all men are like Don, George.\"\n\n\"I know. It's just that when I heard he owned a saloon, I jumped to the wrong conclusion. He didn't seem bothered about it, though.\"\n\nWilma said, \"Well, he's only been here for a few hours, so maybe we'll learn more about him before he gets that telegram.\"\n\nLucy interrupted their conversation when she rushed into the front room and dropped behind Wilma's chair. Then they heard Timmy loudly counting and waited for him to reach ten.\n\nThe three women were smiling as they waited for Timmy to enter the room to search for his sister. Georgette knew that he'd pretend he didn't know where she was despite her muffled giggling. He'd soon ask his mother if she had seen Lucy knowing she'd deny all knowledge of Lucy's whereabouts. She wasn't surprised that they felt almost obligated to play the game of hide and seek after their chat with Mister Kane.\n\nTimmy stomped loudly into the room and began lifting cushions on the unoccupied chairs then walked to the fireplace, dropped to his knees and peered up the chimney.\n\nWhen he stood up, he asked, \"Mama, have you seen Lucy? I know she's somewhere in the house because I didn't hear a door open.\"\n\n\"No, dear. I haven't seen her anywhere. Maybe she's in the bathtub.\"\n\nBefore Timmy could take one step toward the bathroom, Lucy popped to her feet and laughed before she pointed at her older brother and exclaimed, \"I won!\"\n\nTimmy threw up his hands and said, \"You always beat me, Lucy. It's just because you're small enough to hide anywhere.\"\n\nLucy ran to the couch and hopped onto her mother's lap while Timmy took a seat on one of the cushions that hadn't served as Lucy's hiding place.\n\nLucy looked up at her mother and asked, \"Is Mister Kane coming back soon, Mama?\"\n\n\"Maybe. Why don't you both go play outside for a while?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nShe slid from her mother's lap then waited for her brother to take her hand before leaving the room to use the back door.\n\nWilma said, \"Lucy seems to be very fond of Mister Kane already.\"\n\n\"I think Timmy is ready to join the Rangers, too. I'm sure that it's just because he's new and different.\"\n\nMillie said, \"It sounds as if you don't even want them to like him, George.\"\n\n\"I just don't want them to get too attached to him if something bad happens. Besides, even if everything works out, he'll soon be going back to Kerrville and living in his saloon.\"\n\nMillie glanced at Wilma but didn't say anything." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Morgan found John with eight other ranch hands working the western herd that must have had a population of more than eight hundred animals. He'd passed one of the remote remuda corrals on the way and counted twenty-six horses. There was a small barn attached to the corral as well. He was beginning to think that they didn't have enough ranch hands, or cooks for that matter.\n\nJohn must have spotted him because he soon detached himself from the others and headed towards him.\n\nWhen they met, John was grinning as he asked, \"What brings you out to visit, Morg? Did the ladies kick your butt outta the house?\"\n\n\"I didn't let it get that far, John. I wanted to see some of the Double D before the sun sets and needed to milk your brain at the same time.\"\n\n\"I reckon your udder is a lot fuller than mine, but let's head to the north herd.\"\n\n\"Is it as big as this one?\"\n\n\"It has about three times as many critters 'cause there's more water and grass up that way.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and shook his head as he turned Felix, and they rode to visit the even larger herd. He wasn't about to ask about the other herds.\n\nAs he scanned the landscape, he could understand why the Long Star Land Company wanted the big ranch. The Double D had more than a quarter of a million acres of land, and while less than half of it could be grazed by the cattle, the ranch had much more water access than average in this part of Texas. Those eight sections the fake land company had offered Mrs. Driscoll was more typical for the area.\n\n\"So, what did you need to talk to me about, Morg?\"\n\n\"Did you mention that I had asked you about your ranch hands' loyalty?\"\n\n\"Only to Wilma. I still reckon none of 'em would join up with the sheriff, but I figured that you wouldn't want me to tell anyone else.\"\n\n\"I should have asked you to keep it to yourself, but I forgot to mention it. Your udder isn't nearly as empty as you claimed, John.\"\n\n\"Did you hear somethin' that bought you out here?\"\n\n\"No, but I did want to tell you why I'm more concerned about it than I let on when I first asked you. I'll be riding into Junction City in the morning to do some reconnaissance. If the land company has a spy on the ranch, then I don't want to walk into a hornet's nest.\"\n\n\"How can I help you to avoid gettin' stung?\"\n\n\"Yesterday morning, when you handed out assignments, did any of them ask to be sent to the northern herd?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nMorgan then asked, \"Did anyone wander off for a while?\"\n\nThe foreman thought about it for almost a minute before he replied, \"The only one who was outta sight for a couple of hours was Jonas Cook. He had to hunt down some strays that wandered past Reed's Creek. I only know about it 'cause Herb Lee was tellin' me that he figured Jonas was takin' a siesta. Do you reckon Jonas is their spy?\"\n\n\"Maybe. How far is it from that creek to Junction City?\"\n\n\"It's about a fifteen-minute ride. I sure hope you're wrong, Morg.\"\n\n\"He's one of the two new hires; isn't he?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\n\"Where did he work before he was hired on here?\"\n\n\"I can't recall. Do you want me to ask him? He's workin' the north herd.\"\n\n\"No. I don't want him to get nervous. Don't treat him any differently, but it sounds as if he might be on the Long Star's payroll. I'll assume that they know about me, but not much more than you contacted me in my saloon. I got the impression from Mrs. Driscoll that she expected me to show up half-sober. If that's what their spy believes then it might be to my advantage. If they don't have a spy, then they won't be expecting me.\"\n\n\"Are you gonna tell them you're Mrs. Driscoll's lawyer?\"\n\n\"I will if they ask. But I won't be dressed like this when I ride into town. I'll look less like an attorney and more like a ranch hand. I won't shave tomorrow, either.\"\n\n\"Are you gonna bring one of those hidden guns of yours?\"\n\n\"Only my Schofield. I'll have my Winchester '73 with me because it would look odd not to have a rifle. On a different subject, how many women are on the Double D? I can't believe that there are only three women and somewhere around thirty-six men.\"\n\n\"Eight of the older hands have wives and a passel of kids in what they call Double D Town. You just can't see their houses from the ranch house. The one Mrs. Driscoll is livin' in now isn't the first one. Don Driscoll's father built the first house closer to Junction City. When more ranch hands began to get hitched, he added more houses for their families. He had a regular settlement goin' when he decided to move to the new house. He said he needed more space, but I figure he didn't like bein' crowded. The folks who live in Double D Town like it 'cause it's closer to Junction City.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised that more of the children don't visit to play with Timmy and Lucy. They're very lively youngsters.\"\n\n\"It's a good eight miles away, Morg. You'll see the houses before we spot the herd.\"\n\n\"This is a big ranch, John.\"\n\nJohn grinned as he replied, \"You get used to it.\"\n\nMorgan nodded but still thought it was odd that the ranch settlement seemed to be so isolated from the main buildings. Maybe Jonas wasn't going into town at all but was visiting one of the wives. It wasn't likely in a close community, but it was possible. He'd still assume that Jonas was bending Sheriff Lusk's ear. To do otherwise would be inviting disaster." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Phil Arnold followed his three partners out of their temporary office and headed to The Tumbleweed Saloon to have a beer. He made it clear that they should ignore any tall strangers if the lawyer showed up in Junction City. He hoped that he did ride into town and pay him a visit. He wanted to get a read on the man before he made his first offer. He didn't want to spend too much.\n\nPhil had decided that if he was amenable to a bribe, he wouldn't pay him to leave town. If he left, then Mrs. Driscoll could send someone to San Antonio and hire a new lawyer. He'd pay the saloon lawyer to stay around and pretend to fight the court order until her time expired. He might be willing to make her a better offer that the lawyer would recommend she accept. He'd run it by Mike Hilliard tonight. Mike was his real partner but preferred to remain in the background. He said it allowed him to discover more. Phil hated to admit that Mike was smarter than he was, but still considered himself to be Hilliard's equal.\n\nIf Mike did agree with his plan, it was just a question of how much it would cost them. But if by some miracle, the lawyer turned down his offer, then he'd have their three hard boys eliminate the problem. It would be messier and more expensive, so he'd much prefer that the lawyer take the bribe and procrastinate. He believed that there was only one reason for the saloon lawyer to refuse his offer.\n\nHe'd never met Mrs. Driscoll, but the sheriff said that she was still a handsome young woman. A pretty woman who owned more than four hundred square miles of Texas with over eight thousand head of cattle. That lawyer might think he could woo her and have it all. Phil knew a few shysters and they didn't care about their clients nearly as much as they did about their fees. He hoped this one didn't have his eye on the biggest fee imaginable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "It was almost sunset when Morgan and John approached the main ranch buildings after their tour. Most of the ranch hands were already lining up in the chow house, so when they reached the barn, John continued to his house and Morgan dismounted.\n\nHe unsaddled Felix and let him have his supper before walking to his buckboard and leaving his tack on the bed. He quickly checked his hidden gun spaces even though he was sure they hadn't been opened. He always left a small pebble on each of the lids when he was away from the buckboard armory and neither had moved.\n\nWhen he'd met the hands working the larger northern herd, he didn't make a point of searching for Jonas Cook. But when John had introduced him to each of the men, he'd simply looked into Jonas' eyes a little bit longer. It wasn't noticeably longer, but it was enough to convince Morgan that Jonas was the ranch's Judas. He was the only one of the dozen ranch hands who had looked away after their eyes met.\n\nHe was looking forward to joining the men in the chow house because after they began talking, their questions would let him know how much they knew about him. He wanted to be sure that Jonas couldn't have told the sheriff of his plans. He'd visit the ranch house after chow to tell Mrs. Driscoll what he'd learned.\n\nWhen he entered the large and noisy chow hall, he smiled because it reminded him of The Bluebonnet on a Saturday night.\n\nThe noise abated somewhat when the men saw him enter, so he grinned and said, \"My name's Morgan Kane, and I'd appreciate it if you all call me Morg. But don't pay me much attention. I'm just a saloon-owning shyster seeking supper.\"\n\nThe room erupted in laughter as he walked past them to the long shelf stacked with plates and utensils. He soon found an empty spot along one of the benches and set his full plate and mug of hot coffee on the thick pine table. It wasn't coincidence that Jonas Cook was sitting on the other side, just one place to his right.\n\nAs he sliced into the thick, mouth-watering steak, the loud but innocent interrogation began.\n\nSlim Wilson, who truly earned the moniker as he was around six feet tall but probably weighed around a hundred and thirty pounds, began the questioning when he asked, \"Do you have to pay for your drinks?\"\n\nMorgan held his fork-filled chunk of savory beef in the air as he replied, \"Kinda. I pay for the bottles and barrels when they come in on the wagons.\"\n\nThey laughed as he greedily ripped the steak from the fork and as he chewed, the next question came from the wrangler, Al Perkins.\n\nMorgan wasn't surprised when he asked, \"Do you have to pay the whores?\"\n\nHe swallowed before replying, \"Nope. Of course, that's because I don't have any working girls in either of my saloons.\"\n\nThe men seemed surprised, but Charlie Jones exclaimed, \"You got two saloons?\"\n\nMorgan answered his question then mixed eating and giving more responses to their onslaught of queries. But with each question, he became more confident that all they knew was that he was a lawyer from Kerrville who owned one saloon and part of a second. He'd taken an occasional glance at Jonas to watch his reaction to some of their questions but didn't believe that he learned anything that would inspire him to make another trip into Junction City with more news.\n\nHe finished his coffee then stood and said, \"I'll be seeing you boys in the bunkhouse in a little while. I need to see my client for a few minutes then you can ask about anything else that comes to mind before I get there.\"\n\nAfter leaving his plate, utensils and mug in the large, water-filled bucket, he left the chow house. He couldn't spend much time with Mrs. Driscoll as he didn't want any of the men to think he was doing anything other than talking. He had been more than just mildly surprised that she was still a widow after almost five years. Even if she was much older and not nearly as pretty, he would have thought that there would have been a line of suitors riding down the access road within days of her husband's burial. He imagined the only reason she was still unmarried was that she deeply loved her husband and believed that no man would ever make her nearly as happy.\n\nWhile he was convinced that it was her primary reason for remaining unmarried, he believed that she had another very good reason. She must have realized that any suitor would also have his eye on the bigger prize of the Double D. She wouldn't take the risk of losing the ranch or having a man in the house who didn't love her children as much as she obviously did.\n\nHe stepped onto the front porch, then knocked on the door and waited for Millie.\n\nWhen it opened, he smiled as he looked down at Timmy and said, \"Howdy, Ranger Tim. May I enter your jail and talk to your mother? You haven't locked her in a cell; have you?\"\n\nTimmy giggled as he shook his head and opened the door. After Morg stepped into the room, he took off his hat and waited for the boy.\n\nWhen they began walking, Timmy said, \"She's in the kitchen with Lucy. Did you have supper, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I can smell something good, so I bet that Millie made you a good supper, too.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But my mama baked an apple pie and that's even better.\"\n\nAs they entered the hall, Morgan asked, \"Did you eat it all?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Mama wouldn't let us have any until you did. Me and Lucy hoped you came here before we had to go to bed.\"\n\n\"Then I'm glad I decided to pay a visit.\"\n\nWhen they entered the kitchen, he smiled at Mrs. Driscoll and Lucy who was standing on a chair so she could see past her mother.\n\nGeorgette sat Lucy back down then asked, \"Did you enjoy your tour of the ranch, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But it wasn't so much a tour as an investigation. May I sit down?\"\n\n\"Oh, of course.\"\n\nAs he took his seat, he smiled at Lucy and said, \"I don't want to keep her highness from enjoying her queen mother's apple pie.\"\n\nMillie laughed then stood and walked to the shelf where she began taking down small plates.\n\nThe queen mother asked, \"What did you need to investigate?\"\n\n\"Remember I mentioned that I was concerned about a possible turncoat among the ranch hands? I talked to John and discovered that it was likely that one of the new hires was passing information to the sheriff. I met the suspect with the northern herd and after John introduced him, I was convinced that he'd told the sheriff that I was here.\"\n\n\"Which one was it? Do you want me to have him fired?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. That would be the worst thing you could do. I don't want him to have a hint that I'm onto him. I'm going into Junction City in the morning, and I intend to take advantage of what they know. I talked to the men during chow, and I'm convinced that none of them know more than that I'm a lawyer who owns a saloon in Kerrville. Judging by their questions, they also believed that I was my own best customer. I'd like to leave it that way, so I'd appreciate it if you and Millie could keep my plans secret.\"\n\n\"Of course. But why go to town tomorrow if you know that the sheriff and those men at the land company know why you're here? What if they shoot you along the road?\"\n\n\"I suppose that's a possibility, but that would be a risky proposition. If they shot me, but didn't kill me, then their scheme would blow up in their faces. They went through a lot of trouble to come up with the Spanish land grant scheme and probably have already invested quite a bit of money. It wouldn't be worth the risk to shoot me first. If they believe what your ranch hands do, I suspect that if I meet the man behind this scam, he'll try to buy me off. It's how they've operated so far.\"\n\n\"I still think you're taking an unnecessary risk, Mister Kane. Why don't you just wait for the telegram from your man you sent to Austin?\"\n\n\"I don't want to ride into Junction City with four of my men and the restraining order if it's unnecessary. I want to understand the men involved, so I might be able to handle it without anyone getting shot.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nMille set the first two plates with small slices of pie before Lucy and Timmy and Georgette automatically began cutting Lucy's piece for her.\n\nMorgan stood to help Millie with the other plates and coffee cups while Mrs. Driscoll chopped Lucy's dessert into bite-sized pieces.\n\nMillie said, \"Thank you, Morg. Did your wife train you to help like this?\"\n\nMorgan paused before he answered, \"I'm not married, Millie. You must have figured that out already. What woman would allow her husband to leave his successful law practice in San Antonio to move to Kerrville and set up his new law office in a saloon?\"\n\nShe laughed as she set Georgette's plate and coffee on the table then added two glasses of milk for the children. Morgan placed Millie's plate in front of her empty seat along with her cup of coffee before carrying his with him to the table.\n\nAs Timmy attacked his pie, Morgan said, \"This smells wonderful, Mrs. Driscoll. Timmy and Lucy seem to like it, so I'm sure it tastes just as good.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I enjoy baking.\"\n\nMorgan took his first bite and agreed with Timmy and Lucy's assessment. As he enjoyed his dessert, he understood why Millie assumed that he was married. He hadn't removed his wedding band since losing Barbara. It served as a tiny shield to deflect interest from interested women. He hadn't lied to Stella when he had told her about his tragically shortened marriage. He knew that Barbara would probably be furious with him for not remarrying, but she wasn't here to burn his ears. But as much as he missed his wife, he felt almost cheated for never being able to hold their daughter. She would have been older than Timmy by now.\n\nLuckily, the only unmarried woman on the ranch was Mrs. Driscoll, and she still seemed to be in mourning for her late husband. While he had no intention of changing his mind, he had to admit that one of the few women who could tempt him to slip the ring from his finger was sitting a few feet away. It was one more reason for his decision to spend his nights in the bunkhouse.\n\nHe finished his pie and coffee then said, \"Thank you for the pie, Mrs. Driscoll. I'm going to bring my things to the bunkhouse and answer more of the boys' questions.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that they'll keep you awake for a while.\"\n\nHe stood and said, \"I'm sure that you're right, Mrs. Driscoll,\" then picked up his Stetson and used the back door to leave the house.\n\nMillie glanced at Georgette but didn't say anything as she removed Morgan's plate and coffee cup from the table. She did notice that Mrs. Driscoll was still staring at the closed door. What piqued her curiosity was that it seemed that she was the only person on the Double D who didn't address him as Morg." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Morgan stopped at the buckboard to retrieve his large travel bag and check the pebbles. They had rolled a bit, but not enough to cause suspicion. The wind probably just nudged them away from their original location. He picked up his travel bag but before he walked to the bunkhouse, he checked the sky for clouds. There hadn't been any serious rainfall for three weeks and they were overdue for a soaking thunderstorm or a tornado. The stars and moon were unobscured by even a whisper of a cloud, so Morgan headed for the bunkhouse.\n\nWhen he entered, he thought he'd walked into an army barracks. There were four evenly spaced lamps hanging from the ceiling. He quickly counted twelve bunks along each of the walls with a matching footlocker. The bunks were mostly occupied, but he found one near the door and set his travel bag on top of the footlocker.\n\nAl Perkins said, \"We figured you'd want that one, Morg. We always leave those two for visitors.\"\n\nMorgan tossed his hat onto the bunk as he asked, \"Do you get many?\"\n\n\"Nope. You're the first one in a while.\"\n\nMorgan pulled off his jacket and placed it on top of his travel bag. As he began to remove his shoulder holster, Joe Brumfield laughed and said, \"And here we were all thinkin' you weren't packin' iron.\"\n\n\"It's not as impressive as your Colt, but it serves its purpose.\"\n\nSome of the men began to crowd around him, so Morgan pulled out the Webley and began to explain why he carried it. He was relieved that none of them knew about his collection of much more impressive firepower hidden in the buckboard.\n\nIt was another hour and a half before Morgan stretched out on the bunk. A few of the men were already snoring before the last lamp was extinguished. Even though he'd already told them that he didn't have any painted ladies working in his saloon, most of their follow-up questions revolved around that topic. Not one had asked him about his law practice.\n\nBut as he waited for sleep to arrive, he found himself thinking about the six women he'd helped to leave that profession. Carlotta was now happily married in San Antonio and was already pregnant with her second child. When he'd returned with his four friends and his clerk, he wasn't at all surprised when they were all smitten by the ladies. He was just relieved that there hadn't been a battle royale when two of them were attracted to the same woman. He suspected it might have been the case, but the dispute had been settled without his knowledge.\n\nHe may have been pleased that the women were just as happy as his friends, but he never let anyone, especially Stella, know just how much he wished that Stella hadn't married Tyler. But he'd gotten over his disappointment and was happy for both of them. He just wished that they could have children. He would have enjoyed watching one of his big Rangers changing a diaper.\n\nHe hoped that he wouldn't have to disturb their marital bliss by having them come to the ranch. He knew that they wouldn't hesitate to come, but he didn't want to have to tell Stella, Ruby, Rose, Sally or Fannie that she was a widow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nMorgan rode down the long access road after sharing a big and noisy breakfast with the ranch hands. He hadn't stopped to see Mrs. Driscoll because there was no need to visit the ranch house. He was wearing his light jacket and his gunbelt but left his shoulder holster and the Webley in the cabinet under the buckboard's seat. He had moved the buckboard into the barn when he made the switch because he didn't want anyone, especially Jonas Cook, noticing his stored weapons. The hands had already headed out to the herds before he opened the hidden box, but it was a precaution he believed to be necessary.\n\nHe was riding Oscar as he headed west along the access road. He could have cut the angle and saved some time, but he wanted to use that time to prepare for what might happen in Junction City. While he was reasonably sure that they didn't know him or his reputation, he couldn't assume that he hadn't met at least one of the men who comprised the fictitious Long Star Land Company. Even if he hadn't run across any of them, if they were criminals, then it was very possible that they were familiar with the Kane name. His father may have sentenced one of them to prison. While he still didn't believe that they'd resort to gunplay before talking to him, he had to at least prepare for that possibility. He didn't regret not taking one of the long guns from the buckboard. Between his Schofield and the .44 caliber Winchester, he'd be able to defend himself. The other weapons would be needed to defend the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "By the time Morgan turned onto the road to Junction City, Tyler was walking into the Texas Hall of Records in Austin. He expected to be able to determine the legitimacy of the Long Star Land Company within an hour or two. If he was lucky, it would take him most of the afternoon to discredit the Spanish land grant. Those records were still a mess, but the location of the Double D made success more likely. If he could find it before the records repository closed, he might even be able to see Judge Riddle and get the restraining order before the end of the business day. He suspected that the judge would be willing to issue the order without the proof because the request had come from Morgan. But he knew the boss would never put the judge in that awkward legal position.\n\nRealistically, he expected to visit the judge tomorrow morning and send the telegram to Mrs. Driscoll at the Double D ranch outside of Junction City, Texas by noon. He'd leave on the next morning's train with the restraining order, and he'd send Pete Drummond to the ranch the next day. He already missed Stella, and he figured that she wouldn't let him leave again anyway.\n\nAfter showing one of the clerks his Ranger badge, he headed for the hall with the business records. He was still amused by the wording of the telegram he was supposed to send when he had the restraining order. Anyone who read it wouldn't have a clue to its real meaning." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "By taking the long access road, it was already midmorning when Morgan entered Junction City. If they knew he was there to overturn the eviction order, they would expect him to visit the county courthouse or the jail when he rode into town. But he wanted to see if the Long Star Land Company had an office first. So, he'd make a slow ride through town and hope that they spotted him. Then he'd turn around to visit Sheriff Lusk but hope they wouldn't let him get that far.\n\nHe walked Oscar down the main street and found the usual assortment of businesses and could see the courthouse ahead. The sheriff's office was next door, and he was surprised that it was so small. They had five lawmen, yet the jail was half the size of Kerrville's.\n\nWhen he reached the jail, across the street he spotted a storefront with LONG STAR LAND COMPANY painted in block letters on the large glass window. Whoever had done the writing wasn't an artist or craftsman. At least he hadn't misspelled any of the words. He looked through the window but couldn't see much in the shadows. If he hadn't at least tried to look, they would have been suspicious.\n\nAfter he passed the courthouse, he saw two of the sheriff's deputies walking towards him on the opposite boardwalk. He didn't acknowledge them but they both stared at him as he passed. Even though their interest was because he was a stranger, and a tall one at that, it was more likely that their boss had told them to be on the lookout for him.\n\nHe kept Oscar moving north to finish his exploration of the town and to give the thieves time to prepare to meet him when he made his ride back to the courthouse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Phil Arnold didn't need any preparation time. He had Lou, Charlie and Pokey in the office and all of them had watched as Morgan rode past their temporary office.\n\nPokey exclaimed, \"That's gotta be him, Phil!\"\n\nPhil replied, \"I'm sure it is, so you boys just stay here and watch. If I can talk him into comin' inside, I want you all in the back room as soon as you see him start to dismount. Okay?\"\n\nCharlie said, \"Okay,\" as he watched the saloon lawyer ride away.\n\nLou said, \"He looks a lot different than I figured. I thought he'd be kinda sickly.\"\n\nPhil replied, \"A man can be sick from whiskey inside and still look okay. I'm headin' outside and wait for him to turn around. I don't want him talkin' to that crooked sheriff or the judge if I can help it. If Lusk gets to talk to him first, it'll cost us more money for nothin'.\"\n\nCharlie asked, \"How much do you reckon the lawyer will take to ride it out?\"\n\n\"Too much. That widow can pay him a lot more than I'm willin' to give him, but I figure he'd do it for somethin' other than cash. That ranch hand settled for twenty bucks and a promise of a few dry sections of the Double D. I figure I can offer that lawyer five hundred head of cattle if he just keeps her waitin' for two months.\"\n\nLou snapped, \"That's over ten thousand dollars, Phil!\"\n\nPhil was grinning as he walked to the door and replied, \"If he gets to collect it.\"\n\nThe others laughed as Phil left the office and stood near the street waiting for the lawyer to return." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Shortly after Morgan made his U-turn, he spotted the man standing in front of the newly established headquarters of the Long Star Land Company. He didn't focus on the man as he walked Oscar toward the courthouse. He would be shocked if the man didn't call out to him when he was close.\n\nWhen he was about fifty feet away, Morgan turned his eyes to the fairly tall, well-dressed man. If he wasn't convinced that their company was nothing more than a gang of outlaws, the man could pass as a normal businessman.\n\nAs expected, the man stepped into the street and just before Morgan reached him, he waved and loudly said, \"Excuse me. Can I speak to you for a minute?\"\n\nMorgan pulled Oscar to a stop and looked down at him with obvious disdain and said, \"I don't know if I oughta. I'm headin' over to visit Judge Davis. If you work for the Long Star Land Company, I reckon I'll be talkin' with you later.\"\n\nPhil was smiling inside as he replied, \"I think I can help you avoid botherin' the judge. You're a lawyer; ain't ya?\"\n\nMorgan narrowed his eyes as he answered, \"I was hired by Mrs. Driscoll to stop you fellers. Are you gonna offer her more than those eight dry sections if I talk to you?\"\n\n\"Come into my office and we'll see what we can figure out between us men.\"\n\nMorgan glanced toward the courthouse for effect before turning Oscar to the left and walking him to the front of their office.\n\nHe dismounted and carefully tied off his reins before looking at the man and asking, \"What's your name and what do you do with that land company?\"\n\n\"My name is Phil Arnold, and I'm the northern Texas representative of the company. I have the authority to make deals. What's your name?\"\n\n\"I'm Morgan Kane. I have my law offices down in Kerrville.\"\n\n\"Let's go inside, Mister Kane. I'm sure we can come to an agreement that will make you happy.\"\n\nMorgan nodded as he stepped onto the boardwalk behind Mister Arnold. He wasn't sure if it was his real name or not, but it didn't matter. What did was that he was expecting him. Jonas Cook had done his job, so now he'd do his.\n\nOnce inside the small office, he noticed the scarcity of furniture. There wasn't even a file cabinet. When you're only planning to steal one ranch, it's an unnecessary expense.\n\nHe took off his Stetson and after Mister Arnold sat down behind his small desk, Morgan sat in one of the three other chairs. That meant that there were probably at least four of them involved.\n\nMorgan asked, \"Well, tell me why I don't hafta see the judge, Mister Arnold.\"\n\n\"We have a certified Spanish land grant from 1788. The judge agreed that we own that land, so there's no use fightin' us, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"Are you a lawyer?\"\n\n\"No, but I've hired Mister Jacobs and if I need more, they'll send a couple from Dallas. You may as well head back to your saloon in Kerrville, Mister Kane.\"\n\nMorgan appeared to be worried for a few seconds before he said, \"Um, can I see that land grant? Mrs. Driscoll said the sheriff never let her look at it.\"\n\n\"The judge still has it with him. He has a trial today, so you won't be able to talk to him anyway. Let's be frank, Mister Kane. I heard about you. Your office is in your own saloon; ain't it?\"\n\nMorgan snapped, \"What difference does that make? I'm still a lawyer. I promised Mrs. Driscoll that I'd do what I could to stop you fellers and I aim to do it. Y'all can't just ride into town with a piece of paper and take her ranch. It ain't right!\"\n\nPhil smiled then said, \"I reckon you can look at it that way, but you're gonna disappoint Mrs. Driscoll one way or the other. How much is she payin' you?\"\n\nMorgan exclaimed, \"That ain't none of your business!\"\n\n\"Now, Mister Kane, don't get riled up. I'm just askin' so I know how much you expected to have in your pocket when you rode back to your saloon.\"\n\nMorgan glared back at Phil for a few seconds before he quietly said, \"Five hundred dollars.\"\n\nPhil was surprised that the widow was spending that much for such an incompetent lawyer. He was almost as bad as that idiot Jacobs. He had to come up with a non-cash bribe and quickly decided to make an offer similar to the one he'd given to Jonas Cook.\n\n\"I'll tell you what I'm gonna do, Mister Kane. You can keep that five hundred but if you forget about visitin' Judge Davis or Sheriff Lusk, then I'll arrange for you to add a lot more to your bank account.\"\n\nMorgan opened his eyes wide but paused for ten seconds before asking, \"How much more?\"\n\nPhil was enormously pleased as he replied, \"Say, twenty times as much.\"\n\nMorgan looked to the ceiling as he appeared to be working the math problem then shifted his eyes back to Phil and asked, \"Do you got that kinda money?\"\n\n\"The company does, but what I figure on doin' is after we get the ranch, we'll sell most of the cattle and just five hundred of them will get you ten thousand dollars. How's that for a bonus?\"\n\nMorgan opened his mouth as he stared at Phil in apparent disbelief.\n\nAfter an acceptable delay, he closed his mouth and asked, \"How do I know you're gonna do that once you got the ranch? I ain't stupid, Mister Arnold. You can just sell them critters and forget all about me.\"\n\n\"I don't think you're stupid, Mister Kane. You are a lawyer, after all. Why would I stiff you when we'll be able to make so much money?\"\n\n\"Just 'cause you could. If we're gonna make this deal, I want it in writin'.\"\n\nPhil leaned back in the chair as he studied Morgan. He was close to going to the second, violent option when he decided that it wasn't necessary. He could promise the lawyer the moon because he'd have to stay around for sixty days until the widow was evicted. That was plenty of time to handle the lawyer.\n\n\"Okay. I'll do that. But you need to make sure that she keeps thinkin' that you're gonna stop the court order. Can you do that?\"\n\nMorgan hesitated before replying, \"I reckon I can.\"\n\nPhil grinned as he took out a blank sheet of paper from the drawer, then picked up the pen and dipped it into the bottle of ink.\n\nBefore he started writing, he said, \"I'm gonna have a man keepin' an eye on that ranch to make sure you don't skedaddle.\"\n\n\"I ain't goin' anywhere. My saloon will be waitin' for me when I get back.\"\n\nPhil chuckled as he began writing the short note.\n\nWhen he finished, he slid it to Morgan and asked, \"You got many whores in that saloon of yours?\"\n\nMorgan looked at the note but let it sit to dry as he replied, \"Not many, but probably more than you got men workin' for you.\"\n\n\"Maybe so. How many do you have?\"\n\n\"Four.\"\n\nPhil snickered then replied, \"Good guess, Mister Kane. But I reckon my three boys outweigh your four whores.\"\n\nMorgan picked up the page, blew on the ink, then folded it and slid into his pocket as he said, \"Don't go bettin' on it, Mister Arnold. Old Bertha is closin' in on two hundred pounds, but a lot of those cowhands like large ladies.\"\n\nPhil laughed as Morgan stood and then offered his hand which seemed to surprise Phil.\n\nAfter they shook hands, Morgan grinned, then turned and left the shop. He'd learned a lot more than he could have hoped. He didn't look back as he untied Oscar's reins, mounted and turned him south. It wasn't even noon yet.\n\nHe set Oscar to a medium trot and soon left the town. He'd save a few minutes on his return ride by taking the direct, cross-country route. He was still undecided what he'd do about Jonas Cook now that his suspicions had been confirmed. But that could wait until he received the telegram from Tyler. He was smiling when he imagined Mrs. Driscoll's reaction when he told her of the meeting with Mister Arnold. Maybe he'd ask John to send someone to visit The Bluebonnet just to give them an update. They'd be able to keep Sheriff Brown in the loop as well." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Tyler was having more difficulties finding any record of the Long Star Land Company than he'd anticipated. Part of the problem was that the business records were filed by county and then years. The other issue was that he was not expecting to find it at all. He knew that there would be a separate file for companies who could distribute or certify Mexican, Spanish, Texas and Federal land grants. But while there was a short list of those who could do that for the Federal and state grants, he couldn't find one for those who could validate the older grants.\n\nHis earlier estimate of when he'd be able to see Judge Riddle was being extended with each frustrating page he turned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Georgette asked, \"Do you think it was a good idea for Mister Kane to go to Junction City on his own, John?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. He knows what he's doin'. He's more'n likely foolin' those boys at the phony land company into believin' he's a bad lawyer like Mister Jacobs. He'll be okay.\"\n\nMillie said, \"John's right, George. Morg knows how outlaws think, and I'm sure that he'll be able to stop them from taking the Double D.\"\n\n\"I'm just concerned that they might shoot him on his way to town. Why wouldn't they? He was sure that they already knew he was here. If they did, then they could keep him from even reaching Junction City. They could set up an ambush on the road and they'd win with just one bullet.\"\n\nJohn glanced at Millie before saying, \"He told me before he left that he'd be watchin' for an ambush. He had a Winchester, so they wouldn't have an advantage.\"\n\n\"I still wish you sent a couple of men with him.\"\n\nMillie smiled as she said, \"I think Timmy would have volunteered. He wanted to wear Morg's badge this morning, but I told him he had to keep it secret.\"\n\n\"I know. He asked me to override your order. I made him feel better when I told him that Mister Kane was the one who had given the order and that as a Ranger-to-be, he had to obey the captain.\"\n\nJohn said, \"He sure is mighty fond of Morg after just one day but it's only natural. A boy needs a father and he never got to know his pa.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Millie and knew what she was thinking. She probably thought that Timmy not knowing his father was a good thing. He would have been disappointed by the time he was eight or nine.\n\nThat thought had crossed Millie's mind, but it hadn't lingered. She already wished that Georgette paid more attention to herself than her children or the ranch. For almost five years, she'd watched Georgette grow from a young, confused widow into a strong, confident ranch owner. But she had been so focused on her responsibilities that she hadn't given a single thought about her own needs.\n\nShe believed that Georgette would be losing what may be her only chance for happiness if she continued to see Morgan Kane as a lawyer and not a man. While she considered herself Georgette's friend, she still didn't believe she should express those thoughts. There was still that invisible barrier between employer and employee.\n\nBut while Millie was right about Georgette's dedication to her children and the Double D, she was wrong about how she thought of Morgan. She was fully aware of his masculinity and her long-displaced desires had kept her awake well into the wee hours of the morning. She didn't have a clue about his background other than he was an unmarried lawyer and Texas Ranger who had his office in his saloon. She simply wasn't sure if she wanted to know anything more about him.\n\nShe expected that he would defeat the Long Star Land Company quickly then return to his saloon and his law practice. She'd continue as if nothing had happened and watch her children grow into young adults. Timmy would become Tim and take control of the ranch's operation. He'd get married and have his own family. Then Lucy would marry and become a mother. Then she would be the smiling granny who baked cookies and apple pies for her grandchildren.\n\nShe didn't even notice that John had already left the house until Millie asked, \"Did you want to sit with me on the porch rocking chairs?\"\n\n\"Alright. It's already getting stuffy in the house. I'll be able to watch the children playing in the front yard while we rock our lives away.\"\n\nMillie smiled as they stood and walked to the front door but was curious about Georgette's unusual verbiage that sounded almost fatalistic." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Morgan had checked his backtrail a few times as he headed south even though he thought it would be a while for Phil Arnold to have one of his three men show up to keep an eye on the ranch. He wasn't even sure it was necessary as he could have Jonas report his whereabouts. He wasn't convinced that there were only four members of the Long Star Land Company, either.\n\nHe believed that he'd bought some time by agreeing to take the bribe. More importantly, he had the signed note that confirmed all that he'd suspected. If they were a legitimate operation and had a valid Spanish grant, there was no reason at all for them to make the offer. He was sure that they had no intention of honoring it even if they believed he would cooperate.\n\nBut that was irrelevant. He did enjoy himself as he played the part of the witless alcoholic lawyer that they expected him to be. It also gave him a measure of relief that none of them knew his name or reputation. He shouldn't need to return to Junction City again until he had the restraining order and was accompanied by his four Ranger friends.\n\nAll in all, it had been a very successful morning and he was anxious to tell Mrs. Driscoll what he'd learned." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Timmy was showing Lucy how to shoot a marble as their mother watched from the porch.\n\nMillie said, \"I can't believe how fast they're growing. It seems like you were nursing Lucy just a short time ago.\"\n\n\"I know. When Timmy talked about being a Ranger like Mister Kane, I could almost see him as a tall young man with a badge on his chest. Pretty soon, he'll start noticing girls; won't he?\"\n\nMillie laughed, then decided to test her friendship when she said, \"Not for a few more years, George. But you won't have to worry about Timmy nearly as much as you will when Lucy starts to attract boys. She's a pretty girl and I imagine she looks a lot like you when you were her age. You're still a very handsome young woman and you shouldn't be the one to walk Lucy down the aisle.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at her and said, \"I can let John do that, Millie. I have a ranch to run and children to raise.\"\n\n\"I know. But trust me. The years go by much more quickly than you can imagine. It's been almost thirteen years since Jack died and I thought I'd remarry within a few months. Then when I started working for you, I thought that one of the ranch hands might be interested. But here I am on my way to old widowhood. I just don't want it to happen to you.\"\n\nGeorgette watched Timmy toss a large agate as she replied, \"I'm not in any rush. You were here when those greedy men began arriving just a few days after Don died. They didn't even care that I was about to have a baby. You know that they only wanted the Double D, Millie. At least I haven't been bothered for a year now. Everything was fine until Sheriff Lusk showed up with that court order.\"\n\nMillie thought she'd pressed her luck far enough, so she said, \"Hopefully that problem will go away soon without a single shot being fired.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\nLucy hopped to her feet and giggled after her marble bounced off of her brother's agate. She grinned at her mother before dropping back to her knees and scooping up another one of her marbles." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Morgan spotted the ranch house and expected to see the ranch hands riding to the chow house for lunch, but when he pulled out his pocket watch, he was somewhat surprised to see that it was already after one o'clock. He smiled when he reminded himself that the Double D was so large that he'd ridden more than twenty miles today and spent thirty minutes at the Long Star Land Company office.\n\nIt was just five minutes later when he saw Timmy and Lucy on the ground doing something. He focused on the small children as Oscar carried him closer to the ranch house. He didn't see the two women in their rocking chairs as the porch roof kept them hidden in its shadow.\n\nThat changed when he was about four hundred yards out and Millie and Mrs. Driscoll stepped down from the porch. He waved and after they returned his wave, he slowed Oscar to keep the dust down. He'd been leaving a large cloud in his wake courtesy of the heat and lack of any recent rainfall.\n\nHe soon slowed Oscar to a walk then pulled him to a stop and dismounted. He smiled when Timmy and Lucy both ran towards him and dropped to his heels to be at their eye level when they reached him.\n\nTimmy had matched his smaller sister's speed in a show of brotherly love, so both arrived at the same time.\n\nTimmy excitedly asked, \"Did you have to shoot anybody, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I did meet a bad man, but I just talked to him. I need to tell your mama what he said.\"\n\n\"Can I listen?\"\n\n\"It's not up to me, Tim.\"\n\nHe stood and led Oscar behind the children until they reached their mother and Millie.\n\nGeorgette said, \"I was worried that you might be ambushed. Did you have any problems?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. If you want to wait on the porch while I unsaddle Oscar, I'll tell you about it when I'm finished.\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nBefore he could leave, Timmy asked, \"Mama, can we listen to what Mister Kane says?\"\n\n\"I'll let you know when Mister Kane finishes taking care of his horse.\"\n\nMorgan smiled at Timmy and winked before he led Oscar away. He was surprised that the boy didn't follow him to the barn.\n\nOnce inside the barn, he checked his buckboard before he began to strip Oscar. He didn't return his Schofield to the storage box because he'd rather have the advantage of its power and added range.\n\nAfter he left the barn, he scanned the ranch and didn't see anyone other than Al Perkins, who was working with the horses in the corral. He hadn't asked John to keep an eye on Jonas but suspected that he would probably give him a job at the east end of the ranch.\n\nWhen he passed the front corner of the house, he saw Lucy and Timmy sitting on the porch steps looking back at him. He smiled as he stepped closer and wondered if Mrs. Driscoll would let them listen to what he had to say. Before he reached the porch steps, the children hopped to their feet and hurried to stand near their mother's rocking chair.\n\nHe trotted up the steps and when Mrs. Driscoll began to stand, he waved her down then leaned on the nearby porch rail.\n\nHe slid his hat back on his head before saying, \"When I rode into town, I continued down the main street and found a small storefront emblazoned with the name of the Long Star Land Company. It was almost directly across the street from the jail. Do you know what it was before they moved in?\"\n\nMillie replied, \"It was Peter Wendt's first apothecary. He moved to a bigger shop last year.\"\n\n\"I was just curious. Anyway, I continued to the end of town and turned around to give them time. If they didn't know I was here, I would have had to introduce myself. But if they were waiting for me, I'm sure that they wouldn't want me to visit either Judge Davis or Sheriff Lusk.\n\n\"After I turned Oscar around, I saw a man who turned out to be the leader of the scam waiting on the boardwalk in front of their office. The name he gave me was Phil Arnold. He waved me down, and after he asked me if I was a lawyer, he invited me inside. I went out of my way this morning to appear to be just a ranch hand, yet he already knew my profession. That reinforced my earlier suspicion of a potential informant.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"Did you learn his name?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I'm sure he's the one I suspected, but I'll flush him out later. It didn't take long to realize that he already knew I owned and lived in a bar, so I used that to my advantage. I used a more rustic verbiage and appeared dimwitted to let him believe he had the advantage. We talked for just a few minutes, and he gave me much more than just subtle hints of their intentions.\"\n\nGeorgette quickly asked, \"What did he say?\"\n\n\"Once I was confident that he judged me to be inadequate, he did as I expected. First, he asked me how much you were paying me to represent you, and I gave him an astronomical sum. He offered me twenty times that amount as a bribe.\"\n\n\"He offered you a lot of money to leave?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. He wanted me to stay on the Double D for sixty days to prevent you from hiring another lawyer. Then the sheriff and his four deputies would be able to force you off your ranch. I imagine Mister Arnold and his three accomplices would arrive with them.\"\n\n\"There are only four of them?\"\n\n\"There might be more, but I believe that four is the most likely number.\"\n\n\"How much is twenty times your astronomical fee?\"\n\nHe pulled the folded sheet from his pocket and handed it to her.\n\nGeorgette quickly read the short note then quickly looked up at him and asked, \"He was going to give you five hundred head of cattle? What would you do with a herd of cattle?\"\n\n\"I'm sure he has no intention of giving me a single heifer. He and his boys were probably having a good laugh before I was fifty yards down the road. When I told him that you were paying me five hundred dollars, there was a momentary look of worry in his eyes. I imagine the bribes he already shelled out to get this far didn't leave him enough capital to pay me even that much.\n\n\"When he made that offer, I told him that I didn't trust him and wanted it in writing. Even a sodden, incompetent attorney would have asked for a written contract. He didn't even hesitate to write the note because once I agreed to take the bribe, I couldn't show it to anyone. That note alone is enough for me to get a restraining order. I want you to hide it for me in case I need it as evidence.\"\n\n\"Alright. What are you going to do now?\"\n\n\"Wait. Right now, Mister Arnold is breathing easier because he believes that I'm going to stay on the Double D. He said that he'd have one of his men watching the access road to make sure I don't leave. I was a bit surprised because he already has a spy in place. But even if he doesn't, it won't be long before he starts to worry again. So, I'm going to set up a watch of my own. I'll have John pick a few trustworthy hands to do that.\"\n\n\"What about the informant?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"I'm going to try to turn him into a double-crossing spy.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure that Mister Arnold only paid him a small amount of cash but promised him a piece of the ranch for his services. I'm going to convince him that he signed his own death warrant when he agreed to spy for Mister Arnold. I'll approach him without any of the other men around, so he won't be worried about being an outcast or being thoroughly beaten for his duplicity. If I can convince him to switch sides again, then I'll learn a lot more about Mister Arnold's bunch, too.\"\n\nMillie asked, \"How long will it be before you get the telegram from your investigator?\"\n\n\"Hopefully by tomorrow or the day after. I was thinking about having John send someone down to Kerrville to tell my other investigators what's going on but decided not to take the risk. If one of Arnold's boys sees him leave, he might trail him part of the way and put a bullet in his back.\"\n\nHe then asked, \"Mrs. Driscoll, do you have a room that can be locked?\"\n\n\"Yes. There's an office just off the main room. Why?\"\n\n\"I'd like to move two of my long guns into the office. I can't be sure that Mister Arnold doesn't have two spies and I don't want to find them missing at a bad time. Would it be alright for me to store them in your office?\"\n\n\"Of course. When will you move them?\"\n\n\"If you don't mind. I'd like to bring them in while the ranch hands are out with the herds.\"\n\n\"That's fine. Do you have more to tell me?\"\n\n\"Not much, ma'am. I'll be right back.\"\n\nHe stood, automatically ruffled Timmy's hair then patted Lucy on the head before leaving the porch and walking to the barn. He would move the Sharps-Borshadt and the Winchester shotgun to her office. He'd keep the Winchester 1886 with him and store the '73 in the buckboard. He hoped it was an unnecessary precaution.\n\nTimmy and Lucy had returned to their game of marbles after Morgan left and were a bit disappointed that Mister Kane hadn't shot the bad men who were trying to steal their mother's ranch.\n\nMillie asked, \"What do you think will happen now?\"\n\nGeorgette stared toward the barn as she replied, \"I'm not sure. But knowing Sheriff Lusk, I'd be shocked if he just sits by and patiently waits. I suspect that he'll convince Mister Arnold that he can't trust Mister Kane and offer to eliminate him for a price.\"\n\n\"You should tell Morg what you think, George.\"\n\n\"I'll mention it when he comes back with his rifles. John was pretty excited about the guns and I'm anxious to see them, too.\"\n\n\"Are you going to ask to shoot one of them?\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as she answered, \"If he'll let me. I wonder if he's one of those men who believes that a woman's place is in the kitchen, and we shouldn't do such manly things like shooting.\"\n\n\"You did bake him a pie, George. But I doubt if he fits into that category. He didn't even seem to notice your unwomanly choice in clothing. I'll bet you a dollar that if you ask him, he'll hand you one of them and start gushing about the rifle.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"You have a bet, Millie. But to win it, he has to do each of those things. You don't win if he just agrees to let me fire one. Okay?\"\n\n\"Make it two out of the three. He might not give you one or sound like a gun salesman.\"\n\n\"Two out of three,\" Georgette said before offering her hand to seal the wager.\n\nMorgan had the shotgun lying on the backboard's bed when he carefully removed the scoped Sharps-Borshadt from its home. He left the monopod support in the box before he closed the lid, picked up the Winchester scattergun and left the barn. He scanned for ranch hands and only spotted the wrangler, but he wasn't looking in his direction. He quickly walked to the house carrying the two weapons. He was still fifty yards from the porch when Timmy spotted him and forgot about the marbles. He jumped to his feet and raced to meet Morgan.\n\nHe slowed and exclaimed, \"Wow! I never saw a gun like that before!\"\n\n\"Not many folks have. I'm going to hide them in your house, but you need to make sure that no one but me touches them. Okay?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Do you want your badge back now?\"\n\n\"Not yet. You keep it to protect my guns and your family until I need it again.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nMorgan and his small deputy were joined by Lucy before they reached the front of the house. The two women abandoned their rocking chairs and walked to the open doorway as Morgan and the children stepped onto the porch.\n\nGeorgette said, \"I'll unlock the office, Mister Kane.\"\n\nMorgan nodded but waited for everyone else to enter the house before he stepped over the threshold. He crossed the front room behind Mrs. Driscoll and waited for her to take out her key ring and open the office door.\n\nHe followed her inside the stuffy room and looked for someplace to store his guns when he spotted the almost obligatory Texas gun rack. It was filled with four Winchester '73s and four double-barreled shotguns of varied bore sizes. Unlike the repeaters and scatterguns that he'd first found in The Wet Gulch, these all appeared to be used often but well-maintained. He wouldn't have been surprised if Mrs. Driscoll was the person who not only pulled their triggers but kept them in such good condition.\n\nHe asked, \"Where can I place my guns? Your rack seems to be fully populated.\"\n\n\"May I see one? I've never seen either of those models. Is that a lever-action shotgun?\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he held it out to her and said, \"Yes, ma'am. This is Winchester's 1887 model ten-gauge.\"\n\nShe took the repeating shotgun in her hands and asked, \"How many shells does it have in the tube?\"\n\n\"It has five in the tube and one in the chamber. I've got #3 buckshot in it right now, but I have birdshot and slugs in my buckboard. I'll let you try it out later if you'd like. Just to warn you, the lever action is longer and requires much more force than their cartridge repeaters. That only makes sense when you figure it's moving a large shotgun shell.\"\n\nShe glanced past Morgan at Millie before handing the shotgun back to him and saying, \"I'd like that. You can move the two bottom shotguns from their racks and just lay them on the ammunition chest beneath them.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am. Did you want to hold my Sharps-Borshadt?\"\n\n\"That's a Sharps? It looks almost like an overgrown Henry without the brass.\"\n\nMorgan laughed as he handed her the heavy rifle and said, \"That's what I thought when I first saw it. Let me tell you about the rifle and what it can do while I take down those two shotguns.\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nWhile she could care less about the dollar, she was very impressed with the large rifle. She may have enjoyed shooting, but she wasn't sure she'd be able to keep the heavy barrel steady enough to put the bullet where she wanted it to go. But she still studied the Sharps-Borshadt as Morgan spoke almost lovingly of the rifle's features while he removed the two double-barreled shotguns and replaced one of them with the repeating ten-gauge.\n\nHe was still talking about the long-range rifle when he turned, and Georgette handed it back to him.\n\nThen he surprised her when he asked, \"Would you like to send a few rounds downrange with this beast, Mrs. Driscoll?\"\n\n\"I would if I thought I'd be able to keep the sight steady.\"\n\n\"I have a monopod in my buckboard. I need it myself when I want to do some seriously long-range shooting.\"\n\nShe smiled as she said, \"In that case, I'd love to try it. Will that be after Mister Arnold and his men are no longer a problem?\"\n\n\"It might be much sooner. It'll depend on whether or not I can make your spy mend his ways. I'll let you take a few shots with my new Winchester, too. It's the latest model and while it looks like the '76, it's very different where it counts. It fires the .45-70 government cartridge, but I use Winchester's even more powerful .45-90. You'll feel the sharper kick when you fire it.\"\n\n\"I've only fired the '73s you see on the rack. They're very good weapons, but that pistol cartridge it uses does limit its range. How much more do you get out of the '86?\"\n\nMorgan was grinning as he replied, \"I have good results past four hundred yards. I'm sure it could take down a large buck deer at that range. Of course, that's only about a third of the Sharps-Borshadt's reach. Do you have a target range?\"\n\n\"I do. It's about a mile south of the barn, but it's only marked out to four hundred yards.\"\n\n\"I guess we'll just have to find some more distant targets when we get the opportunity to do some shooting.\"\n\n\"I hope that opportunity arrives soon.\"\n\n\"So, do I, ma'am.\"\n\nHe placed the Sharps-Borshadt on the lowest rack before turning around and saying, \"I'll be back in a while to let you know how my chat with the sheriff's informant goes.\"\n\nMillie asked, \"Would you like me to fix you something to eat, Morg?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I appreciate your offer, but I'll just see what I can rustle up in the chow house.\"\n\nHe stepped to the doorway but had to wait for Millie and the children to back away before he left the office.\n\nWhen he reached the children, he looked down and grinned as he said, \"Don't even think of asking your mother if you can shoot one of my guns. Maybe after you sprout a couple of feet, you can ask.\"\n\nTimmy laughed before saying, \"I wasn't gonna ask, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"Oh. I was talking to Lucy.\"\n\nAs Lucy added her giggles to her brother's laughter, Morgan tapped each of them on their heads then walked past them toward the front door. He was already thinking of the approach he would take when he talked to Jonas Cook. He'd explain his plan to John and ask his opinion first. If it worked out as he hoped it would, then he might be able to send false reports to Mister Arnold.\n\nAfter he left the house, Millie was all smiles as she accepted the silver dollar from Georgette." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "In Austin, Tyler's luck had drastically changed when one of the clerks noticed his frustration and offered to help. Just ten minutes after telling the recordkeeper what he needed, he found that the Long Star Land Company wasn't registered in Texas. When he'd thanked the man, he thought it would take him the rest of the day to search land grant records. But with the clerk's able assistance, it was less than an hour later that he was able to verify that there was no Spanish or Mexican land grant in Kimble County. He'd been so pleased with Mister Flanders' help that he gave the underpaid civil servant a five-dollar gold piece. Then Mister Flanders added one final gift when he filled out a form for Tyler that confirmed his findings. Tyler would have offered him an added bonus, but Mister Flanders told him that it was just standard practice.\n\nSo, as Morgan was hunting for food in the chow house, Tyler was leaving the hall of records and headed for the state office buildings to see Judge Riddle. If he wasn't able to meet the judge today, he'd set up an appointment for tomorrow. He was almost giddy when he entered the large building where he asked a receptionist for the location of the Federal judge's offices." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "In Kerrville, Stella was in Morgan's office talking to Jim Cooper. She didn't expect her husband to return from Austin for another two days at the earliest, but he'd send her a telegram to let her know when he'd be arriving.\n\n\"I'm a bit worried about Morg, Jim. I know he's only been gone a couple of days, but I wish he'd taken Pete or Felipe with him. I've heard a lot of bad stories about Sheriff Lusk and his deputies and I'm not sure that he'll be able to handle this with just a legal paper.\"\n\n\"I agree with you about the sheriff, Stella. But we have to trust Morg. I've known him for a long time and if he needs help, he can send one of the ranch hands to let us know. It's only a four-hour ride to the Double D at a decent pace. He'll be all right.\"\n\n\"I'm just nervous. But I'm not the only one. Ruby, Rose, and Fannie feel the same way. I'm sure that Sally already told you about her concerns. Their Ranger husbands all told them what you just said to me, but I wish there was something we could do. Don't you think it would be a good idea to send one of the men up there to make sure he's safe?\"\n\n\"No. I think it would be a bad idea, Stella. Morg was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible because he suspected that they had someone watching the ranch. Having a second stranger arrive might trigger a much bigger problem for Morg. That's what I told Sally last night and I'm surprised that she didn't mention it.\"\n\n\"I've been busy at The Lonely Armadillo, so I haven't seen her today. I didn't see her out front, either. Where is she hiding?\"\n\n\"She's back at the house. She was knitting a baby blanket for Carlotta's next one. She chose blue yarn because she's convinced that she'll have a boy this time.\"\n\nStella smiled as she said, \"I asked Morg for his prediction when he got her letter and he refused because he didn't want Carlotta to be disappointed if he guessed wrong this time.\"\n\n\"As long as she doesn't name him after Morgan.\"\n\nStella then asked, \"When he first asked her not to name her child Morgana, she asked him for his middle name. He whispered it to her, and she laughed. When I asked her what it was, she wouldn't tell me. Do you know his middle name?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Well, what is it?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you, but if he finds out that you know, I'll disavow my part in revealing his secret.\"\n\n\"I'll blame Tyler. That's what husbands are for. Well, that and other things.\"\n\nJim grinned then said, \"Whistler.\"\n\nStella laughed then exclaimed, \"Whistler? As in a man who whistles?\"\n\n\"His father owned one of James Whistler's paintings. He had already chosen Morgan for his Christian name, and he wasn't kind enough to name his second son Morgan James.\"\n\n\"I can understand why Morg wouldn't want any poor boy to be christened Whistler.\"\n\n\"Just remember that you didn't learn it from me.\"\n\n\"I promise. Does Sally know?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but I have a feeling that she will when I see her this evening.\"\n\n\"I'll stop by to see how she's progressing on the blanket before I head back to The Armadillo.\"\n\nShe was still smiling as she stood and left the office. Wait until the girls hear this one.\n\nShe was so amused when she'd learned Morg's middle name that she forgot about her earlier concerns. But even if she was still worried, there was nothing she could do but wait." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Sheriff Lusk was irritated as he crossed the street with Pokey Jones. He was grateful for the money they paid him but didn't like to be summoned by the likes of Phil Arnold. Especially not in broad daylight. What made it even more annoying was when he'd asked Deputy Ollie Adams to join him, and Pokey had practically ordered him to come alone. He resented being treated like a toady and was going to reinforce his authority when he spoke to Arnold.\n\nWhen he entered the small office, he found Phil sitting behind the desk with both Charlie McDonald and Lou Crump standing behind him with their arms folded. He figured that they were trying to intimidate him but wasn't about to let that happen.\n\nAs Pokey walked around the desk to stand next to Lou, Sheriff Lusk stepped before Arnold but didn't sit down as he snarled, \"What do you want, Arnold?\"\n\nPhil then disarmed the sheriff when he smiled and said, \"Have a seat, Finn. I have some good news for you.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk glanced at the three men behind Arnold then slowly lowered himself onto one of the chairs.\n\n\"What's this good news?\"\n\n\"I'm sure that you noticed that the saloon lawyer came into town a few hours ago and I invited him inside for a chat.\"\n\n\"I heard about it.\"\n\n\"I was expectin' you to stop by and ask about it, but when you didn't show up, I sent Pokey over. I arranged it so that lawyer ain't gonna be a problem at all, Sheriff.\"\n\n\"How'd you do that?\"\n\n\"Just like I convinced you and the judge to help me get the Double D. Well, it's more like how I convinced Jonas Cook to help. I bribed him with just a promise.\"\n\n\"He was that stupid to throw in with you because you promised him somethin'?\"\n\n\"Almost. He may not be as smart as most lawyers, but he's still a lawyer. He agreed but made me write it down.\"\n\nFinn snickered before he said, \"Even my deputies wouldn't fall for that. What is he gonna do for that worthless piece of paper?\"\n\n\"He's just gonna stay on that ranch and tell the widow that he'd gonna help her until we can ride there and toss her out of her big house.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk leaned forward as he said, \"You figure he's gonna keep her waitin' for two months? That ain't likely, Phil.\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but did you see him?\"\n\n\"Nope. What's that got to do with it?\"\n\n\"He's a good four inches taller than you and a lot better lookin'. I figure that widow's pretty lonely livin' alone in that big house. I bet that he'll keep her from even thinkin' about that court order pretty soon.\"\n\nThe sheriff shook his head as he said, \"I don't care what he looks like. You don't know Mrs. Driscoll like I do. She's still pretty young and a mighty handsome woman, but that don't matter none. After that whiskey-lovin' husband of hers got himself killed by a pissed-off bull, she musta been visited by every single feller in six counties. I reckon that some of 'em were still married and would toss their wives down a well if she even smiled at 'em. She never let one of 'em into the house.\n\n\"Now she's got two young'uns to keep her busy when she ain't out ridin' the herds with the cowhands. She ain't about to let any man visit her, much less a lousy lawyer who owns a saloon. She's a strong-willed woman, too. I can't see her puttin' up with him if he doesn't do nothin'.\"\n\nPhil glanced up at Pokey before he looked back at the sheriff and asked, \"Do you know how much she's payin' him?\"\n\n\"Nope. I imagine it ain't much.\"\n\n\"He said it was five hundred dollars. That's why I offered him five hundred head of the Double D's cattle. I figured the most she would be payin' him would be a hundred. But if you're right about her, then we'll have to figure out how to deal with it. We should have at least a week or so before she gets frustrated, or am I wrong?\"\n\n\"Nope. She may be a fighter, but she got more patience than most folks.\"\n\n\"We gotta come up with a way to make her start movin' before the end of the month. I don't want her sendin' for another lawyer, either. I want to keep an eye on the ranch to keep anybody from ridin' south. Between my three men and your four deputies, we should be able to do that.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk snapped, \"I'll decide what to do with my deputies, Arnold!\"\n\n\"I'm just askin', Sheriff. You don't want to lose a big payday; do you?\"\n\nThe sheriff stared at Phil because he'd never mentioned a large payout before. He quickly began estimating how much he could expect. He had four deputies to include in the total but would let Judge Davis fend for himself because he controlled the firepower. He didn't know how good Arnold and his three stooges were with their pistols and Winchesters, but he not only outnumbered them, he also trusted in his and his deputies' skills with their Colts and repeaters.\n\n\"What kind of payday are you talkin' about? I need enough for my deputies too. I don't care about the judge or anybody else you paid off.\"\n\n\"I know that. After I get the Double D, we'll clean it out and drive the cattle down to Kerrville. Then I'll sell you the ranch for a hundred thousand dollars, but only on paper. You oughta be able to sell it for at least that much and right fast, too. After we pull up stakes, you'll be the richest man in the county, Sheriff.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk was stunned. He couldn't even imagine having that much money and simply sat in an almost catatonic state as he tried to picture his life with so much wealth.\n\nAt that moment, Phil knew he could have told the sheriff to take his four deputies and shoot every living soul on the Double D, including the widow's children. He would be satisfied with just having the lawmen watch the access road.\n\nWhen he was able to see the world around him again, Finn Lusk said, \"Alright. Let's set up the watch then I'll go and talk to my boys.\"\n\nPhil grinned as he pulled a pencil and sheet of paper from the desk and said, \"It's a pleasure doin' business with you, Finn.\"\n\nThe sheriff watched as he began writing down the times and didn't care who was going to be scheduled to keep watch. He was already planning on how to spend his fortune." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Morgan hadn't eaten a big lunch, despite Corky Miller offering to pile a mass of leftovers onto his plate. After leaving the chow house, he spotted some ranch hands riding in from the west and waited to see who was coming.\n\nWhen one of them waved his hat over his head, he waved back knowing he had to be John Bridges. While he was on friendly terms with most of the other men, he didn't believe that any of them would be so anxious to see him.\n\nHe stood by the chow house as he watched them draw nearer. He expected that Jonas Cook was among them as John probably wanted to keep an eye on him. It was almost a minute later when he identified the turncoat but wouldn't treat him any differently for the time being.\n\nJohn had separated himself from the others and was dismounting before they arrived.\n\n\"How did your visit in town go, Morg?\"\n\n\"Better than I figured it would. I need to talk to you alone for a few minutes, so let's head to the barn.\"\n\n\"Okay. We'll swing by the corral so I can give my horse to Al.\"\n\nMorgan nodded and walked beside John as he led his buckskin mare toward the corral. By the time they reached the fence, Al Perkins was already waiting with his hand extended. So, John just laid his reins across his palm before he and Morgan continued toward the barn.\n\n\"You are gonna tell me what happened in Junction City; ain't ya?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But I'm not going to tell the ranch hands until after I talked to you and Jonas Cook.\"\n\nJohn's eyebrows peaked as they entered the barn. After they leaned on the buckboard, Morgan quickly explained what he'd learned during his short visit with Phil Arnold.\n\nWhen he finished, he said, \"What I intend to do now is to have a one-on-one talk with Jonas. I don't want any of the others to know about his treachery. Alright?\"\n\n\"I can understand why you don't want 'em to know. He'd be lucky if he ever was able to climb into a saddle again. Do you want me to fetch him?\"\n\n\"Yup. But just tell him that I needed help greasing my buckboard's wheels and you didn't want to get your hands dirty.\"\n\nJohn snickered before saying, \"He might not believe it, but I'll tell him.\"\n\nMorgan replied, \"I'll stop by your house to tell you how it goes after I talk to Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\nJohn waved then turned and walked out of the barn.\n\nAfter John left, Morgan just sat on his buckboard's bed and waited. He thought that he had a reasonably good chance at flipping Jonas because he was young and more prone to errors in judgement. Morgan's biggest concern was how afraid Jonas was of the men who had bribed him.\n\nJonas wasn't surprised when the foreman had chosen him to assist the lawyer with greasing his buckboard's wheels. He was the newest hire and was usually given the worst jobs. But he was nervous as he walked to the barn. He didn't think that the lawyer suspected him but was worried that he might say something to give himself away. He tried to calm his nerves as he neared the open barn doors.\n\nWhen he entered the shadowed barn, Morgan hopped down from his buckboard's bed and smiled at him.\n\n\"I apologize that you got saddled with this. John seemed unwilling to stick his clean fingers into my bucket of black grease. Your name is John too; isn't it?\"\n\n\"No, sir. It's Jonas. Jonas Cook.\"\n\nMorgan snapped his fingers and replied, \"That's right. Sorry for my mistake. I'll get the jack and the bucket of grease out from under the buckboard.\"\n\n\"I'll get 'em,\" Jonas said but Morgan waved him away then dropped onto his back and slid beneath the buckboard.\n\nHe slid the shallow bucket of grease across the floor and then detached the jack and pushed it away before rolling out from beneath the buckboard.\n\nAs he stood and brushed off the hay and dirt, he grinned and said, \"I suppose I should have done this earlier, but I had to ride into Junction City.\"\n\n\"You went into town?\"\n\n\"Yup. I wanted to meet the men who are trying to steal Mrs. Driscoll's ranch. I'm pretty sure that I can get a restraining order to negate their court order. But I still wanted to meet them to get an idea of what they were like. I had to know if they'd just pack up their tent and skedaddle or if they'd use a more drastic method to take control of the Double D.\"\n\nJonas was fighting to keep sweat from flooding his face, but still had to take off his already wet Stetson and use his shirt sleeve to dry his forehead.\n\nHe grinned as he pulled his hat back on and said, \"It's really hot; ain't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nMorgan then picked up the jack and said, \"You're not going to believe what they did when I talked to them.\"\n\nJonas quietly asked, \"What did they say?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"Their leader, a man named Phil Arnold, offered me a bribe to just pretend to be helping Mrs. Driscoll for another couple of months. Then they'd ride down that access road with the sheriff and all of his deputies and take the ranch.\"\n\n\"What did you do after he tried to bribe you?\"\n\n\"I smiled and took his offer. Because I'm a lawyer, I convinced him to put it on paper.\"\n\n\"He really wrote down that he was trying to bribe you?\"\n\n\"Yup. I wasn't surprised because I'm sure that once he gets the ranch, he'd only pay me with a slug of lead. I wouldn't be surprised if he shot everyone who had helped him in the scheme, either. He'd ambush the sheriff and all of his deputies then if he was feeling generous, he'd just scare Judge Davis into silence. I'm not going to let it get that far.\"\n\nAs Morgan explained why Phil had been so willing to write the note, Jonas felt his entire gut engage in open rebellion. When he stopped speaking, Jonas didn't hear any sounds at all as he stood like a statue.\n\nMorgan had watched the young cowhand slide into a stupor and felt a little guilty for having put him there. He knew it was time to be more honest with Jonas.\n\nHe set the jack back on the barn floor then asked, \"Are you all right, Jonas?\"\n\nJonas slowly nodded but didn't reply.\n\nMorgan stepped closer to him and quietly asked, \"How much did Arnold pay you to let him know what Mrs. Driscoll was doing?\"\n\nJonas stared at Morgan and was about to deny it when he saw the almost paternal look in the lawyer's dark green eyes.\n\nHe whispered, \"He gave me forty dollars and said he'd give me a hundred head of cattle and four sections when he got the ranch. Are you gonna tell John about me?\"\n\n\"He already knows, Jonas. But he's the only one and I told him not to let any of the others know. It made you feel like a skunk; didn't it?\"\n\nJonas nodded and felt even worse.\n\n\"If you didn't feel bad about it, then I'd tell Mrs. Driscoll and the others. But it's your guilt that tells me that you aren't a bad man like those four bastards or the sheriff and his four thug deputies. You made a mistake, but you have an opportunity to make amends now. I want you to help me save the Double D for Mrs. Driscoll. Will you do that?\"\n\nJonas perked up as he replied, \"Yes, sir. But how can I help? Arnold is paying the sheriff and he's the law.\"\n\n\"He's not the law, Jonas. He's not even a real lawman. I'm a lawyer but I'm also a lawman. I'm a captain in the Texas Rangers and I can arrest the sheriff and his deputies for malfeasance. I won't need you or any of the other ranch hands to help with the sheriff or Mister Arnold. I have four other Rangers who work for me in Kerrville. I expect that one will arrive in three days with the restraining order. Then I'll have him go back to Kerrville and return with the other three. When all four of them are here, we'll end this.\"\n\n\"You're a Ranger?\" Jonas asked with wide eyes.\n\n\"Yes, sir. I let Timmy hold my badge. He has ambitions to be a Ranger now, and hopefully, by the time he's old enough, the Rangers will have returned to being honest lawmen.\"\n\n\"So, what can I do to help, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"Call me Morg, Jonas. For now, just keep up your regular routine. I don't expect anything to happen for at least a couple of days but I'm pretty sure that they'll set up a watch to keep me from heading back to Kerrville. How do they contact you if they want information?\"\n\nJonas sighed then answered, \"The first time, I was in the Tumbleweed having a beer with Charlie Jones. He had to leave to use the privy and I was sitting by my lonesome when Arnold sat down and said he'd buy me a beer. I reckon he saw the brand on our horses. Anyway, we got to talking and he asked me if I wanted to have my own spread. Most of us kinda dream about it, so I thought he was joshing me when he told me that he could make it happen. By the time Charlie got back, I was already excited. So, I stuck around after Charlie left, and Arnold bought me another round and then paid one of the whores to spend some time with me.\n\n\"It was when I was finished with Annie that he let me know how I'd be able to get my own spread. I was gonna tell him I wouldn't do it when the sheriff came in and asked Arnold if I was gonna help. If I didn't, he was gonna arrest me. I didn't even do anything wrong! I said I'd help, and the sheriff left. Then he told me what he wanted me to do and gave me the forty dollars. That was all before the sheriff showed up to give Mrs. Driscoll that court order.\"\n\n\"Does he expect you to keep him informed about what I do?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But only if it's important.\"\n\n\"Okay. I won't do anything that they would consider important, so you won't have to visit them again. What you can do is tell me all that you know about Mister Arnold and his men. I only met the boss, so I don't even know how many are in that little office. I guessed it was four altogether. Was that a good guess?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. He has three others with him, but I never talked to any of 'em.\"\n\n\"Just tell me what they looked like.\"\n\nJonas nodded and began describing Charlie McDonald, Lou Crump and Pokey Jones.\n\nMorgan listened carefully so he could identify them when he had to return to Junction City. Nothing that Jonas told him was a surprise, but he had one more question he needed answered.\n\nWhen Jonas finished, Morgan asked, \"Did they hire anyone else on the Double D to keep them informed?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I don't think they wanted to spend any more money.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he placed his large hand on Jonas' shoulder and said, \"Thank you, Jonas. You can sleep peacefully now. You may have made a mistake, but it sounds like they had you in a trap. You're a good man and maybe you'll have that spread of your own one of these days.\"\n\nJonas felt as if a fully-grown bull had been lifted from his shoulders as he smiled and said, \"Thank you, Morg. I sure feel a lot better.\"\n\n\"Good. I don't need to grease the wheels, so you can head over to the chow house. When I show up, I'll tell them about my visit, and you can act as surprised and as angry as the other boys.\"\n\nJonas nodded then turned and almost waltzed from the barn.\n\nMorgan was just as relieved that Jonas wasn't a real turncoat, but simply a young man who'd been forced into a horrible position. Maybe he'd let John and Mrs. Driscoll use his long guns tomorrow.\n\nAs he left the barn to tell Mrs. Driscoll about Jonas, the telegraph set in Junction City was clicking out a message for her from her aunt Sadie in Austin. Another telegram was being delivered to Stella McFadden in Kerrville from her husband who also happened to be in Austin.\n\nMorgan stepped onto the porch and stopped before the open door. He didn't see anyone inside the main room, so he rapped on the doorjamb and waited for permission to enter. While he was certain that Jonas believed that he was the only one who had been coerced into passing information, there was another possibility.\n\nAs Jonas had mentioned, many of the other hands had dreams of owning their own ranch. One of them might see an opportunity to make that dream come true by paying a visit to Mister Arnold with much more valuable information. When he told them about his plan in a little while, he'd make some modifications that would serve his purpose and not Phil Arnold's.\n\nWhen Timmy and Lucy came trotting to the door, Morgan smiled and asked, \"May I enter your jail, Ranger Tim? Or do I have to ask your permission to cross your drawbridge, Your Highness?\"\n\nLucy giggled as Tim grinned and said, \"Mama said you don't have to knock, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't want to be rude, sir. And as you are a Ranger-in-waiting, you should address me as Captain Kane.\"\n\nTimmy was still grinning as he made a six-year-old's version of a salute. Morgan returned his salute, took off his Stetson, then followed them into the house.\n\nAs they entered the kitchen, he found Mrs. Driscoll and Millie sitting at the large kitchen table having tea.\n\nLucy and Timmy quickly climbed onto their chairs as their mother asked, \"Were you right about the spy?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Could you please sit down, Mister Kane? My neck would appreciate it.\"\n\nMorgan smiled, took the seat at the other end of the table and said, \"He explained what happened and I think it was more coercion than bribery. Mister Arnold bought him some drinks and an hour of private entertainment at the saloon to soften him up. Then Sheriff Lusk arrived to let him know that he'd throw him in jail if he didn't cooperate.\"\n\n\"How much did he tell the sheriff?\"\n\n\"Nothing more than what I expected. Right now, Arnold feels more confident, but that won't last long. To be honest, I'm a bit surprised that they didn't demand that Judge Davis' write that court order to have you evicted in less than thirty days. Anyway, he did help me a lot by confirming that there were only three others with Arnold. He gave me their names and descriptions as well.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to fire him?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. He's a good man who was put into a bad position. He was close to tears when he realized that I knew about his dealings with the sheriff. He looked like a sinner leaving the confessional when he walked out of the barn. I imagine that he'll be your most trusted ranch hand now.\"\n\n\"You never told me his name.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. That was intentional. If he denied it and accused me of lying, I'd let you know who he was. He'd be tied up in the barn, too. But as I said, he's a good man and I don't want you to distrust him. I asked him if Arnold had recruited any others, and he told me that they hadn't. I believe him, but that doesn't rule out the possibility that one of the others might take advantage of the situation. When I tell the men of my discussion with Arnold and my plans in a little while, I wouldn't be surprised if one of them decides to sell the information to the sheriff.\"\n\n\"That would change everything; wouldn't it?\"\n\n\"I'm sure it would. But I only need three or four more days. That's why I'll modify my plan when I talk to them. I'll tell them that I expect the restraining order to arrive in another week or so and not mention my four Ranger friends. To be sure that one of them doesn't sneak off before then, John and I will set up a watch of our own. I'll have the men in pairs in case one of them decides to ride to Junction City. We can keep an eye out for the sheriff's observers, too.\"\n\n\"What will you do when you get the restraining order and are joined by your friends?\"\n\n\"The next morning, we'll ride into Junction City. I'll have two of them go into the jail and arrest Sheriff Lusk and his deputies. I'll take the other two with me to arrest Mister Arnold and his three associates. Even though there are only four of them and Sheriff Lusk has four deputies, I think Arnold will prove to be more difficult.\n\n\"He's invested a lot of time and money into his scheme, and I imagine that he didn't come by that money honestly. If I had to guess, he probably took other ranches using the same method. I didn't recognize his name from any wanted posters, but I've been out of the enforcement side of the law for years. He might be using a cover name, too. Either way, I'm certain that he won't just throw up his hands and be led to the jail to join the sheriff and his deputies.\"\n\n\"So, you're expecting them to start shooting if they see you ride into town wearing badges.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But just expecting them to be set up for an ambush is to our advantage. When my friends arrive, we'll finalize our plan for taking them all down.\"\n\n\"This is getting nerve-wracking. I almost regret letting John go to Kerrville to ask for your help.\"\n\n\"You shouldn't have any regrets, Mrs. Driscoll. It's why I was almost eager to come to the Double D. I rarely get the opportunity to be both a lawyer and a Ranger at the same time. I would regret it if you hadn't asked for my help, and I heard about your problem from another source.\"\n\nGeorgette looked into his green eyes as she asked, \"You really would have; wouldn't you?\"\n\nMorgan nodded then said, \"The good news is that tomorrow morning, you'll get to try out my long guns. I'll come by with my buckboard after the men leave for the herds. Is that alright with you?\"\n\nShe smiled as she replied, \"I'll be waiting. Bring plenty of ammunition.\"\n\nMorgan said, \"Yes, ma'am,\" then stood, waved to Timmy and Lucy and walked down the hallway.\n\nTimmy excitedly asked, \"Can we come to watch you shoot, Mama?\"\n\n\"No, dear. You and Lucy will stay with Aunt Millie. Maybe the next time.\"\n\nTimmy's enthusiasm evaporated before he softly replied, \"Okay.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Morgan didn't believe that all of the ranch hands had returned yet as he walked to John's house. He could see some of them riding in from the west, so he had plenty of time to bring John up to speed.\n\nHe spent twenty minutes with the foreman explaining his talk with Jonas, what he'd tell the men and his concern about another potential informant. By the time they headed for the full chow house, they had worked out a schedule for the watch.\n\nAs they walked away from his house, John asked, \"Are you still gonna let me get a crack at those guns of yours?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. But I believe that Mrs. Driscoll was more excited about it than you were. Where did she learn to shoot?\"\n\n\"She showed up with her own Winchester, so I reckon her pa musta shown her. She used the target range more than Don did, too.\"\n\n\"I noticed that her Winchesters and shotguns were all well-maintained. I assume that she does that as well.\"\n\n\"She does.\"\n\nThen he snickered and said, \"Millie and my Wilma are always tryin' to get her to wear dresses more, but she ignores 'em. I reckon she doesn't want to attract any more fellers. There was a whole parade of 'em after Don died.\"\n\n\"I imagine so.\"\n\nThey reached the chow house and stopped after passing through the open double doors.\n\nJohn loudly said, \"Morg has somethin' to say to you chowhounds. You can still stuff your faces but keep the noise down.\"\n\nMorg watched all their faces turn towards him before saying, \"I'm going to tell you how I plan to stop the Long Star Land Company. I'm certain that there's nothing legal about what they're doing. That Spanish land grant is almost certainly a fake and so is their company. Before I left Kerrville, I sent one of my investigators to Austin...\"\n\nNot one of the ranch hands took a single bite as Morgan told them his modified plan. As he spoke, he watched their faces. He wasn't sure he'd be able to pick out any potential opportunists, but he still studied each of them. He saw startled looks when he told them he was a captain in the Texas Rangers. He knew that many of them wanted to ask questions but was grateful that they held their tongues. He didn't spend any extra time looking at Jonas, but when he did, he was pleased that Jonas wasn't reacting any differently than the others.\n\nWhen he finished, he said, \"I'll answer your questions after I fill my own plate. I'm a bit parched, too.\"\n\nThere was a lot of murmuring as he took a plate and piled on the food. He filled a large mug with coffee and headed for one of the open spaces.\n\nAfter John sat beside him with his cup of coffee, Morgan smiled when he heard Herb Lee's question.\n\nHe asked, \"Can we try that Winchester shotgun, Morg?\"\n\n\"Sure. But it might not be a few days. Mrs. Driscoll asked to try it tomorrow, and she's the boss, so I couldn't say 'no'.\"\n\nThen the more expected queries began filling the room and Morg had to blend eating and answering for the next forty minutes. He was able to avoid making a verbal miscue and revealing his plan's real details. But the nature of the questions gave him more confidence that none of the men would fall prey to the temptation of offering the information to Phil Arnold. He let John explain the lookout schedule but would give them their assignments in the morning. By the time he and John left, most of the men had already gone to the bunkhouse.\n\nAs they walked beneath the deep red sky, John asked, \"What happens on Saturday?\"\n\n\"We'll worry about that on Saturday morning. I'm actually looking forward to doing some shooting tomorrow. I haven't had a chance for a week now. I hope I don't embarrass myself. How good is Mrs. Driscoll with her Winchester?\"\n\n\"She's already kinda humbled all of us, so you gotta take careful aim.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"Thanks for the warning, John,\" then turned to the bunkhouse as John continued walking." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "In the telegraph office in Junction City, the message from Mrs. Driscoll's aunt lay in the box of telegrams that needed to be delivered. It hadn't been marked urgent and they only had one messenger who was old enough to ride to the ranch.\n\nThe almost full moon illuminated the main street of Junction City as the lamps in most of the businesses blinked out. The only lively place was The Tumbleweed Saloon.\n\nPhil Arnold was in a good mood as he shared a table with his three visible partners. He didn't believe that the lawyer could convince Mrs. Driscoll that he'd be able to help her for more than two weeks, but between his men and the sheriff's deputies she wouldn't be able to hire another one.\n\nHe preferred a bloodless takeover, but he'd be willing to use the method that he'd found necessary with the Ericsson ranch down in Concho County. The biggest difference was that the Double D had many more ranch hands. But the sheriff convinced him that very few of those cowboys would put up much of a fight. After all, they had no reason to risk their lives. It wasn't their ranch, but he was sure that soon it would be theirs. It was the biggest prize of all, and it would make him rich.\n\nWhen he'd told Mike Hilliard about his meeting with the lawyer, Mike had agreed that writing the bribe wasn't a problem. He suggested that now that the lawyer was on their side, they could have the ranch sooner. If they made a slightly better offer, the lawyer could convince her to take it and sign over the deed within a week. Phil had said that he'd feel the lawyer out the next time he came into town." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Sheriff Lusk was alone in his room at the boarding house. He was still wearing his boots and gunbelt as he lay on his bed. He was in deep thought as he stared at the dark ceiling. He wasn't having a pang of conscience for his part in trying to take the Double D from Mrs. Driscoll. He was concerned that Phil Arnold might double-cross him.\n\nWhen he said that the note that he'd written for the lawyer was just a useless scrap of paper, Finn realized that the promises Phil had made to him were just as worthless. Now he had to figure out a way to make sure that he'd come out of this with a lot of money and no chance of being hanged. The problem was that there was no one he trusted who was smart enough to help him with a solution. He didn't even trust his own deputies. Not that they were close to being smart.\n\nKimble County Sheriff Finn Lusk finally realized that he had to go along with Phil Arnold's scheme because he was in too deeply now. It was a sickening revelation." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Stella walked into The Bluebonnet and found Homer Cox near the door watching the busy floor.\n\nHe asked, \"What brings you by, Stella? Business slow at your place?\"\n\n\"No, it's fine. I just got a telegram from Tyler. He'll be arriving tomorrow afternoon with that restraining order. The train is scheduled to show up just after two o'clock. You'll probably want to have someone ready to ride out to the Double D to give it to Morg.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'll take care of it. I reckon you're pretty happy that Tyler's coming back earlier than you expected.\"\n\nStella winked then replied, \"More than Rose would be if you left, Homer.\"\n\nHomer laughed and was going to argue her point when Stella quickly left to return to her saloon. He was almost as relieved as she was when he heard that Tyler would be returning with the restraining order. All of Morg's friends had been anxious about the situation at the Double D.\n\nAs he watched the floor, he decided that it might be wiser if all of them went to the ranch with the restraining order rather than just one acting as a courier. He'd talk it over with the others tomorrow morning and see what Tyler thought about it when he arrived. He hoped that Stella wouldn't be too upset because if she was, then Rose and the other ladies would soon follow suit." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nThe ranch hands had gone to their respective assignments, including two who assumed the first watch near the end of the access road.\n\nMorgan had managed a bath in nearby Reed's Creek and shaved off his two days' worth of stubble. Oscar was in harness as he drove the buckboard to the ranch house to pick up his Winchester shotgun and the Sharps-Borshadt. The Winchester '86 was in its assigned slot inside the buckboard's long cabinet.\n\nHe pulled the buckboard to a stop, set the handbrake and clambered down. He had barely set his boot onto the ground when the front door opened, and Mrs. Driscoll exited carrying the Sharps-Borshadt. Millie walked behind her bearing the Winchester shotgun in her hands.\n\nMorgan walked to the porch steps and after Mrs. Driscoll stepped down from the porch, he took the rifle from her hands and said, \"I'll put this where its safe, but you can hold onto the shotgun while we drive to your target range.\"\n\nShe smiled, said, \"Alright,\" then turned and took the Winchester from Millie.\n\nMorgan carefully laid the scoped rifle into its leather-covered home and strapped it down before closing the lid. By the time he finished, Mrs. Driscoll was already in the driver's seat with his repeating shotgun in her hands. He wasn't about to ask how she'd managed to get there while carrying the shotgun.\n\nHe walked to the other side of the buckboard and climbed to the driver's seat. After he released the handbrake, Mrs. Driscoll said, \"I may need a cold bath when I return, Millie.\"\n\nMillie laughed and asked, \"Is that because of the bruises you expect from firing that big gun or something else?\"\n\nMorg smiled but just snapped the reins before Mrs. Driscoll could offer a sharp retort.\n\nOnce the buckboard began rolling, she said, \"Go around the back of the house then head between the corral and the chow house. The target range is another mile or so past the corral.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Did you bring more ammunition? I didn't see any.\"\n\n\"You're sitting on it, Mrs. Driscoll. I have more than enough for all of my guns.\"\n\nShe looked between her legs and said, \"I guess that means you don't smoke. Dropping a lit match might be a problem.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I don't chew tobacco either even though it won't set off any cartridges.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed lightly then said, \"For a man who owns a saloon, you seem to have a severe lack of bad habits.\"\n\n\"Just the ones that folks can see, Mrs. Driscoll. I keep all the big ones to myself.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that you do. But why do you continue to address me as Mrs. Driscoll. You also never asked me to address you by your Christian name yet everyone else on the ranch calls you Morg. Why is that?\"\n\nMorgan replied, \"You're my client, Mrs. Driscoll. I represent you and don't want you or anyone else to believe that I have ulterior motives. You've already suffered enough from men who wanted to take your husband's place. They probably wanted to take the ranch even more.\"\n\n\"Do you act so formally with all of your clients?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. It depends on the client. Your case is unique in that respect.\"\n\n\"How is that?\"\n\n\"I never had a case where the defendant was a wealthy widow who was in danger of losing her property. Even if you were older and less attractive, it would still be a delicate situation. If I had to challenge the Long Star Land Company in court, their attorney could argue that I had dishonorable motives for representing you. I have to ensure that not one hint of impropriety can be introduced into the case.\"\n\n\"But we're alone now. Couldn't that be construed as improper?\"\n\nMorgan looked at her and asked, \"Do you want me to turn the buckboard around, Mrs. Driscoll?\"\n\n\"No. I was just asking why you don't feel that this is acceptable yet using our Christian names isn't.\"\n\n\"I guess it no longer matters as this case is never going to see a courtroom.\"\n\n\"So, may I call you Morg?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But if it's alright with you, I'd rather not call you Georgette.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't have expected you to use my full name. Everyone calls me George, or haven't you noticed.\"\n\n\"I noticed, but I don't think it suits you either. What's your middle name?\"\n\n\"That's even worse. It's Beulah.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he said, \"It sounds like your parents wanted a boy and gave you that middle name, so you'd have to use your first name.\"\n\n\"It was my grandmother's name on my father's side. Georgette was my other grandmother's name. So, you're stuck with calling me George.\"\n\nThe buckboard had passed the corral when Morgan said, \"I guess it isn't so bad after all. But if it makes you feel any better, your middle name isn't as bad as mine.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at him and asked, \"You've got to be kidding? What is it?\"\n\n\"I kept it a secret from my good friends for years but took a lot of ribbing when they found out. I confessed it to one of my lady friends before I returned to San Antonio to close my practice there, so I assume that they all know it now. When I tell you, feel free to laugh as much as you'd like.\"\n\n\"Quit procrastinating and tell me what it is.\"\n\n\"Whistler.\"\n\nShe blinked and asked, \"Whistler?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. My father admired the painter's work and stuck me with his surname. You can imagine how many puns it can generate.\"\n\nGeorgette just laughed lightly for a few seconds before saying, \"I was more amused when I began creating some of those puns. But I do admit that it surpasses Beulah.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure. Personally, I'd even prefer Whistler. Of course, I'm grateful that my father didn't name me Georgette when I was born.\"\n\n\"That would be a disaster. But you said that your father was the one who named you. Didn't your mother have any say when they chose your name?\"\n\n\"My mother died giving me life, so it was left to my father.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. Did he remarry?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. He had his share of mistresses who pretended to be our nannies, but he never remarried. I never asked why he didn't, and he never offered an explanation.\"\n\nShe nodded as the buckboard rocked and bounced across the uneven ground.\n\nAfter a short pause, she said, \"I noticed that you wear a wedding band, but you said that you aren't married. Were you married at one time?\"\n\nMorgan didn't want to go into as much detail as he had with Stella, so he answered her question by saying, \"I married the same month I was admitted to the bar. My wife died in childbirth the following year.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I asked, Morg. It's just that I was curious why you wore a wedding band. Now I understand.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that you would because you've suffered the same loss, George. But you have two beautiful children to comfort you.\"\n\n\"They do more than just comfort me. They are my life now. What happened to your child?\"\n\n\"She died with her mother.\"\n\n\"So, now all you have is your father. Is he still a judge?\"\n\n\"No. Just a few months after my wife died, he was gunned down in the street by the friend of a man he'd sentenced to hang. That's when I left my practice and joined the Rangers.\"\n\n\"Oh. I'm sorry. It seems as if all I've been doing is apologizing for asking all the wrong questions.\"\n\n\"It's alright. So, where's the target range?\"\n\nGeorgette pointed to their two o'clock position and said, \"See that big stump? That's my reloading table.\"\n\n\"Let's do some shooting, George.\"\n\nShe smiled at him and said, \"Let's.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Before they reached the stump, a rider was heading down the long access road. He hoped that Mrs. Driscoll would give him a dime or maybe even a quarter for bringing her the good news about her aunt Sadie.\n\nDeputy Sheriff Willie Potts and had watched Freddie Jenkins ride by, but Willie knew who he was and wasn't concerned. He'd still mention it to the sheriff when he was relieved by Hank Brown in a few hours.\n\nFreddie had seen the deputy just sitting a few yards off the side of the road and understood why he was probably there. He pretended that he hadn't seen him because he didn't like any of the deputies or the sheriff either.\n\nJoe Brumfield and Paul Kelly both waved to Freddie Jenkins as he rode past, and he returned their wave before he continued along the access road. Neither of them had seen Deputy Potts and the deputy had no idea that they were there either. Only Freddie had seen all of the watchers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Morgan handed the Winchester '86 to Georgette then said, \"When you set the sights on the hundred-yard target, expect the bullet to hit about six inches higher than your '73.\"\n\n\"Six inches? Really?\"\n\n\"Maybe a bit more. You already know about the stronger recoil.\"\n\n\"I'm ready. Is there a cartridge in the chamber?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. Just cock the hammer and you'll be ready to fire.\"\n\nMorgan stepped behind her as she cocked the hammer and settled the sights on the target. He wasn't worried that she'd fall from the kick but wanted to watch her technique more closely. He was impressed with how she kept the sight motionless as she slowed her breathing.\n\nGeorgette knew that Morgan was close behind her and hoped his presence didn't affect her aim. She kept her sights steady as she squeezed the trigger.\n\nThe Winchester slammed into her shoulder as it spewed smoke and flame after the .45 caliber bullet blasted out of its muzzle. The recoil was noticeably harder than her '73, but not as bad as she'd expected.\n\nMorgan saw a hole appear on the cloth target and said, \"You're two inches high and three to the right, George. That's pretty good for a first shot with a new rifle. Let's see how you do with your second shot.\"\n\n\"It's more powerful than I expected, but the kick isn't bad.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as she cycled the lever then brought her sights onto the target.\n\nGeorgette didn't take as long for her second shot because she was more comfortable with the Winchester and was growing more aware of having Morgan so close.\n\nShe fired her second shot and Morgan said, \"That's even closer, George. Just another inch to the left and you'd hit dead center.\"\n\n\"Do you want to take a few shots, or can I move to the two-hundred-yard target?\"\n\n\"Try the two-hundred-yard target. John said that I'd be embarrassed if I tried to outshoot you.\"\n\nShe smiled as she replied, \"I'll admit that I have put many of them to shame, but I thought that they were just letting me beat them because I was their boss.\"\n\n\"I don't know of any man who'd willingly lose a shooting contest even if the other shooter was the pope.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed before asking, \"Have you gone to Rome to meet the pope, Morg? I wouldn't be surprised.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I sent him an invitation to the grand opening of my saloon, but he never even sent a reply. I had to have Father Velasquez bless it before I opened the doors.\"\n\nShe looked at him but didn't ask about his saloon before turning her attention downrange. She made the necessary adjustments for the longer distance and fired.\n\n\"You're a little high again, George. Only an inch or so, but you're eight inches to the left.\"\n\n\"You can see those holes from this far away?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But I'll need to use the field glasses in the box under the driver's seat to watch the longer targets. They're more powerful than the telescopic sight on the Sharps-Borshadt.\"\n\n\"Before you leave to get your field glasses, I want to see you put a couple of new holes in the two-hundred-yard target.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But do you want to use the field glasses to check my accuracy, or do you trust me not to exaggerate?\"\n\nShe laughed then asked, \"How do I find the field glasses?\"\n\n\"Just look under the seat and you'll see a latch. Turn it and the front will open. There are shelves inside with the ammunition. My shoulder holster, the field glasses and a compass are on the other shelves.\"\n\n\"You come well prepared, Morg.\"\n\n\"I hope it's enough, George.\"\n\nShe nodded then walked to the buckboard.\n\nMorgan used the break to pick up the spent brass for reloading. He suspected that she had a reloader on the ranch somewhere, but if not, he'd take them back to Kerrville. He experimented with a few more grains of powder in his reloads to see the impact of the added power. He knew that the new Winchester could handle it and so could the Sharps-Borshadt. He wouldn't dare try it with a '73 or even a '76.\n\nShe returned with the field glasses then stopped near the stump and said, \"Okay, Mister Kane. Let's see if you'll avoid embarrassment.\"\n\nMorgan grinned then said, \"Yes, ma'am,\" and rapidly cycled the lever.\n\nNormally, he wouldn't want to appear to be a show-off, but he wanted to reassure her that he wasn't helpless if his pending visit to Junction City involved gunfire.\n\nHe lifted the Winchester to firing position and let his sights settle for just a second before he fired. Before the smoke stopped leaking from the muzzle, he levered in a fresh round and fired again. He sent two more bullets downrange over the next seven seconds before he lowered the Winchester's hot barrel.\n\nGeorgette had been surprised when she heard the second round because she already had the field glasses focused on the target. By the time Morgan finished firing, she was stupefied.\n\nShe dropped the field glasses from her eyes, turned to Morgan and said, \"You fired four shots in less than twenty seconds and all of them were within three inches of the center.\"\n\n\"I'm more familiar with the '86 than you are, George. I apologize for showing off like that. I only did it so you'd feel more confident that you wouldn't lose your ranch no matter what Phil Arnold or the sheriff did.\"\n\n\"I wasn't worried about it, Morg. I'm just amazed that you can shoot like that. I knew that you must be good because you're a Texas Ranger and seemed to like guns even more than I do. But I've never witnessed anything close to that level of marksmanship before. Can you always do that?\"\n\n\"Usually. A lot depends on the weather, of course. It's not so bad at that range with the '86, but the wind can play all sorts of tricks when I fire at longer distances. Do you want to try the Sharps-Borshadt now, or would you rather experience the Winchester shotgun?\"\n\n\"Let's try the shotgun first.\"\n\n\"Alright. Just remember that this is a ten-gauge. At least it's only one barrel.\"\n\n\"I'll let you go first, so I can see how hard it is to work the lever.\"\n\nMorgan nodded as he set the '86 on the stump and picked up the Winchester lever-action shotgun." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Millie handed Freddie a dime after he'd given her the telegram.\n\nBut as she turned to go back into the house, he said, \"Ma'am, I thought you might wanna know that one of the sheriff's deputies was watchin' this way. He was about halfway between town and your access road and just sitting there. I'm only telling you because I don't like any of those deputies and it looks like you're worried about them, too. Everybody heard about those men who are trying to take the Double D, so I reckon it's got something to do with that.\"\n\nMillie nodded, then reached into her dress pocket, pulled out a silver dollar and handed it to Freddie.\n\nAs he stared at the large coin resting in his palm atop the tencent piece, she said, \"Thank you for telling me, Freddie. On your way back, could you tell our two ranch hands at the end of the access road about the deputy?\"\n\nFreddy looked up, grinned and exclaimed, \"Yes, ma'am!\" before he rammed the large and small silver coins into his pocket then wheeled on his heels and ran from the porch.\n\nMillie watched him mount and ride away before she returned to the main room with the telegram. She knew it was really meant for Morg but wondered what was inside the envelope." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Georgette handed the shotgun back to Morgan and said, \"It wasn't bad, but you were right about the lever action. I'll stick with my double-barreled twelve-gauge.\"\n\n\"I don't blame you. But let's choose a target for the Sharps-Borshadt.\"\n\nAfter they decided to use a gnarled old mesquite that would soon succumb to the next thunderstorm, Morgan spent a few minutes explaining how to use the rare long-range rifle.\n\nGeorgette tried to pay attention but found herself distracted as she stood with her right shoulder touching his left bicep. It had been so long since she'd been this close to a man and Morgan Kane was more of a man than any of those she'd met. She was a bit disappointed that she didn't seem to be affecting him at all.\n\nMorgan was hardly unaffected. He was using all of his ingrained concentration as he described the operation of the Sharps-Borshadt. He kept reminding himself that she was his client. And while she was no longer wearing her wedding ring, he still believed that she was a grieving widow.\n\nShe asked him to take the first shot, so he took his time demonstrating the proper positioning. He didn't use the monopod because the old tree was a mere eight hundred yards away. He'd let her use the support when it was her turn.\n\nGeorgette was watching through the field glasses when he fired, but she still jerked at the loud report. She thought that he'd missed the hit, but after she settled the lenses again, she saw the puff of wood when the .45 slammed into the thin tree trunk.\n\n\"My God! You hit it! How long did it take to get there?\"\n\nMorgan lowered the rifle and worked the lever, ejecting the spent brass as he replied, \"Around two seconds. It's the disadvantage of trying to shoot a bad man at long range. If he's looking your way, he'll have enough time to duck. Even if he's not looking, if he's moving, it's still a very difficult shot.\"\n\n\"Have you ever shot anyone?\"\n\n\"Not with the Sharps. I did get into a few gunfights. One was with a Winchester '73, two were with pistols and four were with Spencers that were popular with the Rangers when I joined. I killed two men who didn't want to hang and wounded six others.\"\n\n\"Have you been wounded?\"\n\n\"Just once. One of those men I wounded pulled a belly gun when I was about to cuff him. He mostly missed before I kicked the pistol out of his hand and stepped on his back to subdue him. By then, one of my men took control and I was able to get the wound closed.\"\n\n\"What does 'mostly missed' mean?\"\n\n\"If it had been another inch to the left, the bullet would have just passed under my left arm.\"\n\n\"But it hit you in the chest?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. He fired a Colt Pocket Navy so the .36 didn't do much damage, either. One of my friends sewed it up before we rode back with our prisoners.\"\n\n\"Is that why you resumed your law practice?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. That gunfight was just six months after I joined the Rangers. I left because a few of the Rangers seemed to forget why they wore the badge. They're getting rid of most of those bad apples now.\"\n\n\"Please don't have any more 'mostly missed' bullet wounds or any at all just to stop those men.\"\n\n\"I hadn't planned on it. But worrying about getting shot makes it more likely that a bullet will find you. I'll be okay and I'll have my friends with me. Do you want to try now? I can get the support from the buckboard to help.\"\n\n\"I'll try it once without the support just to see if I can do it.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he reloaded the Sharps-Borshadt, then handed it to Georgette.\n\nShe mimicked his stance as she lifted the heavy barrel level and peered through the telescopic sight. She watched the reticle dancing before she lowered it again and looked at Morgan.\n\nHe didn't need her to say anything before he turned and walked to the buckboard and lifted out the brace. He slid two of the extensions into his jacket pocket before returning. He set the base on the ground and let her place the rifle's forearm in the leather-cushioned U-shaped support.\n\n\"I have some extensions to change the height, but I think it's about right for you.\"\n\n\"You'll have to show me how it works later.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nShe smiled as she looked through the scope again. The reticle had stopped dancing as she centered it on the distant mesquite. She saw where Morgan's bullet had blasted a hole in the trunk and aimed just above it. The wind was negligible, so she didn't need to make any adjustments.\n\nShe released the first trigger then held her breath before she slowly drew back the second. Morg had told her that it was light, but she was still surprised when the rifle slammed into her shoulder. She lost focus in the scope when the rifle bucked, but as the bullet arced through the Texas air, she knew she had enough time to find the tree in the scope again. The reticles had just centered on the tree when her bullet arrived. It didn't hit the trunk, but she watched a branch explode near its base.\n\nGeorgette turned to Morgan with a big grin and exclaimed, \"I can't believe it! Eight hundred yards on my first shot!\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"I'm very impressed, George. Do you want to try for a thousand yards now?\"\n\nShe lifted the Sharps-Borshadt from the support and Morgan grabbed the monopod as it began to fall.\n\nGeorgette said, \"Sorry. I forgot about that. But if it's all the same with you, I'd rather quit while I'm ahead. You can take a few more shots if you'd like.\"\n\n\"I think we've distracted some of your ranch hands enough by now.\"\n\n\"How far did the sound of those gunshots travel?\"\n\n\"I'd guess a couple of miles or so. I don't see anyone, so the only ones who heard them were near your ranch house. Are you worried that the ears belonging to an adversary might notice?\"\n\nShe smiled as she replied, \"Not particularly. I don't believe I've ever heard anyone refer to bad men as adversaries.\"\n\n\"I can understand it. You hear it often enough in the courtroom.\"\n\n\"Did you have many criminal cases?\"\n\n\"About a quarter of them were criminal. Most of my work was in civil litigation. I only accepted criminal cases if I believed in the client's innocence. That's why I employed my four friends as investigators. I'd interview the client and if I still wasn't quite sure if he committed the crime, I'd have them verify the facts.\"\n\n\"Was that a moral decision?\"\n\n\"Partially. I didn't want an innocent person to come to harm because I was able to convince a jury that a guilty man hadn't committed the crime. It's not as difficult as you might think, either. The other reason is that after a while, prosecutors would sometimes drop charges when he learned that I was going to defend the client.\"\n\n\"Did you have a lot of clients when you were in San Antonio?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But you have to understand that many of them only hired me because of my father.\"\n\n\"Yet you still gave up your practice in San Antonio to move to Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I like the town and none of my clients ever knew my father was a judge.\"\n\n\"But you must have fewer clients in Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I probably have about a third as many, but it's still enough to keep me busy. In fact, my clerk is ready to take the bar exam. When he passes the bar, I'll take him on as a partner and I'll hire a new clerk.\"\n\n\"Won't that diminish your income?\"\n\n\"Of course, it will. But I was well off financially when I left San Antonio and I have a significant flow of income from my saloon, too. That gives me a lot of freedom in my law practice. I only charge legal fees to the clients who can afford it.\"\n\n\"Speaking of legal fees; you haven't told me how much you were going to bill me for your services, Morg. You told Mister Arnold that you were charging me an astronomical sum. What will it really be?\"\n\n\"After John told me of your problem, I told him I'd charge you a dollar a day. But I wasn't going to charge you at all. And that was before I even knew anything about you. I would have probably even paid you for the opportunity to represent you.\"\n\n\"That's absurd, Morg. I can easily afford even your astronomical charges. You're risking your life, for God's sake!\"\n\nMorgan grinned then said, \"Then I'll have my clerk send you a bill if I don't survive.\"\n\nGeorgette snapped, \"That's not funny, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan lost his grin and replied, \"I'm sorry, George. It was a poor attempt to make light of a hazardous situation. But let's start back. We can talk more on the way. Hang onto the Sharps and I'll take the two Winchesters.\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nWhen they reached the buckboard, Morgan just laid the repeater and the shotgun on the bed then accepted the Sharps-Borshadt from Georgette and set it in its box and secured it with its straps.\n\nGeorgette was already sitting in the driver's seat when he clambered up and took the reins.\n\n\"You're not putting the Winchesters away?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I need to clean them when we get back. Where do you clean your weapons?\"\n\n\"There's a room in the back of the barn with a large workbench and a reloader.\"\n\nHe released the handbrake then snapped the reins before asking, \"Do you have a keg of powder?\"\n\n\"There's one full keg and one about half-full. I don't know if we have any lead forms for your guns, though.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to do any reloading. I was just curious.\"\n\nThe buckboard rolled north for a minute or so before Georgette asked, \"Do you mind if I help you to clean the guns? I did help foul them.\"\n\n\"I don't mind. I'd be surprised if you didn't make the offer. You seem to like shooting as much as I do. I saw how well you maintained your weapons, too.\"\n\nThere was a short pause before she asked, \"You don't think that it's unseemly for a woman to enjoy such masculine tasks?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. Why should it be unseemly? I don't think that it's unseemly for men to knit either, although I'm not adept at handling knitting needles with my overly large fingers.\"\n\nShe laughed before saying, \"I can't visualize you even making the attempt.\"\n\n\"Why are you concerned about what others might think? You have every right to do whatever pleases you. The only ones who matter are Timmy and Lucy. And I don't believe that they would love you any less even if you decided to grow a beard. Although I do believe you'd fail in the attempt.\"\n\nShe laughed again then looked at him before saying, \"I know they love me because I love them so much. They're already very fond of you, Morg.\"\n\n\"They're very special youngsters, George.\"\n\nMorgan felt the need to quickly move to a different and totally unrelated topic, so he said, \"One of the strangest cases I ever had was when I agreed to defend a horse.\"\n\n\"You had a horse for a client? I didn't even know that was possible.\"\n\n\"Well, technically, it was the horse's owner who was the client. He was the owner of a cab in San Antonio. His name was Victorio Jimenez, and the cab provided the only income for his large family. He had just dropped off a customer and the man refused to pay. Victorio didn't argue because the man was important and an Anglo to boot. The man was walking in front of the cab and the horse nipped him on the shoulder. His fancy coat was ruined, and he demanded that the horse be destroyed.\n\n\"Of course, it would have devastated the Jimenez family if he lost the horse. But as the man was well-known among the upper crust of San Antonio society, Victorio was convinced that there was nothing he could do but try to hide the horse. Then maybe after a few days, the man would forget about it. He never had the chance. The horse-bite victim hunted down a deputy and ordered him to take the horse.\"\n\n\"Did Victorio ask you to help?\"\n\n\"Nope. I just happened to be in the sheriff's office when the deputy returned with the complainant while leading the horse and cab with Victorio sitting helplessly in the driver's seat. The deputy asked his boss what he should do because he'd never had a situation like this before, but neither had the sheriff. I offered to buy the man a new coat to forget the issue, but he was adamant. He said the horse was dangerous and needed to be destroyed.\n\n\"So, I told the sheriff that I would defend the horse in court if the man persisted. The sheriff was close to having a good belly laugh, but the nipped victim was outraged. He swore that he'd have a judge he knew handle the case and even said that I'd be tossed out of the bar association before he stormed off. I asked Victorio for the details of the incident and thought that the horse had acted honorably. So, I gave him ten dollars for his lost income and told him to take his horse and cab home.\n\n\"I didn't think I'd hear about it again, but the next day, I actually received a notice that the case would be held in civil court two days later. I contacted Victorio who was terrified that he might lose his horse, but he agreed to come to court. I had to explain to him that the horse couldn't appear as a witness.\"\n\nGeorgette was smiling as she asked, \"You aren't making this up; are you?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. When my men arrive, you can ask Felipe Torres. He investigated the case for me.\"\n\n\"So, what happened?\"\n\n\"The plaintiff, whose name was Humphrey Symington, must have arranged for Judge Falstaff to adjudicate because he played bridge with him and his wife. What he didn't know was that the judge had been one of my father's closest friends. It only balanced out the scales of justice and allowed the judge to render a fair ruling.\n\n\"Mister Symington was shocked when I produced two witnesses to the incident. His attorney was simply flabbergasted even though I had given him a witness list. I think he never got past the first name on the list. When he read 'Angela', which was the horse's name, he must have laughed so hard he forgot about reading the other names. I only put the mare's name on the list because I thought the case was frivolous.\n\n\"After the second witness finished giving testimony, Mister Symington's attorney asked for a side bar. He said that his client was willing to settle the case by paying the fare. I refused the offer and told the judge that my client had lost wages and had incurred debts to pay legal fees. The plaintiff's attorney hurried back to Mister Symington and after some frantic whispering, he returned and offered a hundred dollars to settle the case.\"\n\n\"That would be about what Victorio would make in two months just driving his cab; wouldn't it?\"\n\n\"Closer to three. But I asked for two hundred, which raised the judge's eyebrows. The plaintiff and his attorney had another pow-wow while I just stood and stared at Mister Symington. He wasn't happy at all, but eventually he nodded. Judge Falstaff approved the agreement and watched Mister Symington count out the cash and give it to Victorio. He stomped out of the courtroom with his frazzled lawyer, but Victorio just stood there staring at the currency. The judge had another case waiting, so I had to steer Victorio out of the courtroom.\"\n\n\"I assume that you didn't take any payment.\"\n\n\"You'd be right, George. When Victorio kept insisting that I take half of the money, I told him that I'd never had as much fun with a case before. It still took more convincing before he left. The next day, his wife showed up with a roast chicken. She had tears in her eyes as she thanked me. It was the best legal fee I've ever collected.\"\n\nThey were approaching the corral when Georgette said, \"I guess I can never match it if I tried.\"\n\nHe smiled at her as he replied, \"You're not down to your last horse, George.\"\n\nShe returned his smile and said, \"I have almost two hundred to lose before that happens.\"\n\nWhen their eyes turned back toward the ranch house, they spotted Millie standing on the back porch waving a piece of paper over her head.\n\nGeorgette asked, \"You don't think the sheriff dropped off another court order; do you?\"\n\n\"No. It could be the telegram from Tyler. It would be a bit earlier than I'd expected, so I hope it's not bad news.\"\n\n\"You mean the judge would have denied your request for a restraining order?\"\n\n\"No. If Judge Riddle was still the assigned Federal judge, then I'm sure he'd issue it. But it's been a long time since we met, so he might be somewhere else. Let's hope that Tyler was able to get the restraining order even faster than I expected.\"\n\nMillie stepped down from the back porch but only walked a few yards as she waited for them to arrive. After she heard the last of the gunfire, she expected that they would return within a few minutes. Even though they'd been alone for almost an hour, Millie was sure that all they'd done was to fire Morg's guns. She wished she was wrong but knew Georgette too well to expect anything different.\n\nWhen Morg pulled the buckboard to a stop, he climbed down one side while Georgette hurried down from the other.\n\nMillie held out the envelope and said, \"This telegram arrived shortly after you left, Morg. It's addressed to Georgette, but I think it's the one you've been expecting.\"\n\nHe took the message and looked at Georgette and asked, \"It's addressed to you, but do you mind if I open it?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I just hope it's good news.\"\n\nMorgan nodded then ripped open the envelope's flap and pulled out the telegram.\n\nJust seconds after unfolding the sheet, he smiled and said, \"Judge Riddle issued the restraining order,\" then handed it to Georgette.\n\nShe read the message then laughed before saying, \"I'm glad to hear that my Uncle Rupert is recovering and that he and my Aunt Sadie will be paying me a visit in the spring. What would Aunt Sadie's news be if the judge didn't issue the restraining order?\"\n\n\"Alas, your poor uncle would have succumbed to his illness. But did you notice the time that the operator received the telegram?\"\n\nShe looked at the sheet and said, \"It was yesterday at 4:10 PM. Is it important?\"\n\n\"It means that Tyler will probably be arriving in Kerrville later today. He might have one of the men bring the restraining order tonight, so I've got to make sure that he doesn't use the access road. I'll have John send someone down to Kerrville this afternoon to give him directions. He'll be able to fill them in on what I've learned and what we'll need to do. In fact, I believe I should just have all four of them return with the restraining order.\"\n\nMillie then said, \"I almost forgot. Freddie Jenkins, the boy who delivered the telegram, told me that he'd seen one of Sheriff Lusk's deputies sitting just off the side of the road about halfway to town. I had him tell our two men who were at the end of the access road.\"\n\nMorgan glanced at Georgette before saying, \"Thank you, Millie. You're a smart lady. I'm not surprised that someone was watching the road but knowing where he is may prove to be an unexpected bonus. I wish he'd been one of Arnold's boys, but maybe they're sharing the lookout duty.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"What can I do to help, Morg?\"\n\n\"Before we clean the guns, I'll ask Al Perkins to find John and have him come back with a trustworthy ranch hand.\"\n\nMillie said, \"You won't have to ask Al to find him. John is in the smithy with Ox.\"\n\n\"Perfect. I'll head over there.\"\n\nHe looked at Georgette and asked, \"Do you still want to help clean the guns, George?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'll come with you when you talk to John, too. I still run the ranch, Mister Kane.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"Yes, boss,\" then turned and quickly climbed onto the buckboard.\n\nHe waited for Georgette to take a seat before he waved to Millie and snapped the reins.\n\nMillie watched the buckboard roll toward the smithy and wondered if she'd been wrong about what they'd been doing out on the target range. They seemed to be much less formal now than they were just a couple of hours ago. She still believed that it wasn't likely, but it gave her hope for Georgette.\n\nMorgan pulled the buckboard to a stop near the blacksmith's workplace and stepped down.\n\nHe and Georgette entered just as John exclaimed, \"It just doesn't work, Ox!\"\n\nOx Jeffries opened and closed the hinge and said, \"It looks okay to me.\"\n\nJohn put out his hands and said, \"But...\" before he realized that they had company.\n\nOx was grinning as John turned and said, \"I heard the gunfire, so I thought you'd still be out at the target range. Did Millie give you the telegram, Morg?\"\n\n\"Yup. The restraining order is on its way to Kerrville already. My investigator will be arriving this afternoon, and that's what I need to talk to you about.\"\n\n\"Okay. Where do you want to talk?\"\n\n\"We need to clean the guns, so how about if you join us there?\"\n\n\"Can I clean that Winchester shotgun?\"\n\n\"Sure. Let's get started.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Fifteen minutes later, the workroom in the back of the barn was filled with the pungent odor of gun cleaning fluid as Morgan cleaned the Sharps-Borshadt, Georgette removed the corrosive residue from the Winchester '86 and John restored the Winchester shotgun to its usual immaculate condition.\n\nAs they worked, Morgan explained what he needed. John agreed to send two ranch hands to Kerrville as soon as Morgan wrote a letter to take with them.\n\nAfter the guns were cleaned and oiled, Morgan let John admire the Sharps-Borshadt as he continued explaining his evolving plan.\n\nWhen he finished, Georgette asked, \"Where will your men sleep, Morg? There's not enough room for four more in the bunkhouse.\"\n\n\"I was planning on just setting up a campsite. I need to spend some time with them without bothering anyone else.\"\n\nJohn paused his examination of the scoped rifle and said, \"You could just use the loft, Morg.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea, John. Let's get these put away. I'll start writing that letter while you hunt down a couple of men to make the ride to Kerrville.\"\n\nJohn wasn't about to relinquish the Sharps-Borshadt, and Morgan hadn't expected him to just hand it back. He followed Georgette into the barn and returned all three of his long guns to their usual homes on the buckboard. John then headed to the smithy where he'd left his horse while he and Georgette walked to the ranch house.\n\n\"Have you decided what you'll do after your men arrive? I mean after you use the barn as a bedroom, of course.\"\n\n\"I have a rudimentary plan, but I want to ask them for their inputs before we finalize it.\"\n\n\"What is your rudimentary plan?\"\n\n\"When Millie told me about the deputy watching the road, it presented an opportunity to take at least one of them out of the picture before we even ride into Junction City. The morning after they arrive, we'll ride into town but not down the main road. We'll enter from the east, which is part of your ranch. Two of my men will arrest the sheriff and any remaining deputies while the rest of us pay a visit to the Long Star Land Company.\"\n\n\"Isn't that the same plan you had before?\"\n\n\"Pretty much. But if we take out one or two of the watchers, I'll be losing any element of surprise. That's why I want to talk to my friends to ask their opinions. I was only a Ranger for three years but most of them were wearing the badge for at least five years. They have more experience with this kind of operation.\"\n\n\"You're an unusual man, Morg. You're a lawyer and a captain in the Texas Rangers, but you're not afraid to ask other men for their help.\"\n\n\"Why is that unusual? It would be the height of stupidity not to take advice from others who know more about something that you do. I wouldn't ask you how to file a legal brief, but I wouldn't hesitate to ask you how to throw a lasso.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"I noticed you didn't say that I'd show you how to knit.\"\n\n\"Just accept it as a compliment, George.\"\n\n\"I didn't think it was an insult, Morg. Will you stay and have lunch in the house after you use the office to write your letter?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I need to ask Timmy for my badge, too. I may need it soon enough.\"\n\nShe nodded as they approached the back of the ranch house. Everything was happening much faster than she'd anticipated." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Sheriff Lusk had been in a grouchy mood all day, so Willie Potts didn't mention seeing Freddie Jenkins ride past to deliver a telegram. When the sheriff had asked him if anyone left the access road, he simply shook his head.\n\n\"Did you tell Hank that one of Arnold's bastards was gonna relieve him?\"\n\n\"Yup. I didn't know which one was gonna show up, though.\"\n\n\"I don't care which one gets there. I hope he keeps ridin' all the way to Galveston. I'm gettin' mighty tired of Arnold thinkin' he's runnin' my town.\"\n\n\"We're the law, boss. We can just arrest 'em all; can't we?\"\n\nFinn glared at his deputy as he snarled, \"And do you reckon that they'll all come along real peaceful, Willie? Even if we got 'em all in those cells, we'd soon be locked up ourselves.\"\n\n\"But we're the law, Finn!\"\n\nSheriff Lusk closed his eyes and took a deep breath before he opened them and said, \"We wear badges, but there are other lawmen who can ride in here and arrest us like regular criminals. Don't you figure that Mrs. Driscoll would send that saloon lawyer to fetch the Rangers?\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Yeah, oh. Now do you understand why all we can do is wait for this whole thing to blow over?\"\n\n\"It's gonna be a long time before that happens, boss.\"\n\n\"I don't figure Arnold's gonna wait that long. I just don't know what he'd plannin'.\"\n\n\"At least that lawyer is gonna let things be for a while.\"\n\n\"You'd better hope that he does.\"\n\nWillie nodded then said, \"I'm gonna get some lunch, boss.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk waved his deputy away. After he left the office, the sheriff began drumming his fingers on the desk. It seemed like such a grand opportunity when Arnold and his men rode into Junction City. Now everything was unravelling. Arnold had been so damned confident that after Mrs. Driscoll was handed the court order, she'd start moving to the eight sections she was offered. Even though the sheriff had believed that she'd put up a fight, Arnold had assured him that the scheme had never failed. Well, it hadn't worked this time.\n\nHe felt even more trapped than he had been before and began to think that it might be time to take the money he'd already been given and skedaddle. He decided to wait until Monday." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Slim Wilson leaned down from his saddle to take the letter as Morgan said, \"Give this to Jim Cooper at The Bluebonnet saloon. He'll make you welcome, and you can return with my men in the morning.\"\n\nSlim slid the envelope into his jacket pocket then said, \"Me and Joe kinda won the lottery when John asked us to go. The rest of 'em were all jealous 'cause we get to see your saloon.\"\n\n\"Just don't expect to meet any working girls. If you see pretty young women, they're all married to one of my big Texas Ranger friends.\"\n\n\"I reckon we'll be kinda tired anyway, Morg.\"\n\nMorg smiled as Slim waved, then he and Joe Brumfield headed for the southeastern trail that eventually merged with the road to Kerrville.\n\nAfter they'd gone, he and Georgette returned to the kitchen and sat down at the table with Millie and the children. They'd already eaten lunch, but Morgan hadn't even considered going anywhere else.\n\nTimmy asked, \"Are you gonna arrest everybody when your Rangers come here?\"\n\n\"That's what I hope we'll do. Thank you for giving me back my badge, too. I don't want those bad men to think I was just a lawyer.\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Are they all big like you, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I'm a little taller but they're all pretty big.\"\n\n\"How come?\"\n\n\"It just worked out that way. We probably became friends because we could look each other in the eye.\"\n\nTimmy said, \"I still think you're the bravest, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"I'm not even close to being the bravest, Tim. I don't even think I'm as brave as any of the Rangers you'll meet tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Did they have more gunfights?\"\n\n\"They all have been in more gunfights than I have. But being brave has nothing to do with gunfights.\"\n\n\"It doesn't?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Do you know who's the bravest person I ever met?\"\n\nTimmy just shook his head.\n\nMorgan smiled at him then pointed across the table.\n\nTimmy looked at his mother then back at Morgan and asked, \"Mama?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Who is in charge of running this giant ranch?\"\n\nTimmy and Lucy both looked at their surprised mother and jointly answered, \"Mama.\"\n\n\"And who will take care of you even if she was tired or not feeling well herself?\"\n\n\"Mama.\"\n\n\"And who was so brave that when the mean sheriff and two of his nasty deputies came to your home with their badges and their guns and ordered her to leave, stood up to them and ordered them out of the house?\"\n\nThey shouted, \"Mama!\"\n\n\"And then, even though she had a lot of men who worked for her, she didn't ask them to fight because that's not what they do. Instead, she chose to use the law to stop them. That's because she kept her wits when most big men would be crying like babies. Now you know why I think your mama is the bravest person I've ever met.\"\n\nFor almost twenty seconds, Georgette simply stared at Morgan as her children looked at her in awe.\n\nLucy ended the silence when she joyously announced, \"And she's the prettiest lady in the whole world, too!\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"I agree with you, Your Highness.\"\n\nLucy grinned at Morgan then looked back at her mother and said, \"I'm happy that you're our mama.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled at her daughter as she said, \"And I'm even happier that I have a princess for a daughter. Now, why don't you take your Ranger brother to your room and keep him entertained.\"\n\n\"Okay, Mama.\"\n\nLucy hopped to the floor and didn't even look at her brother before she raced down the hallway. Timmy soon chased after her leaving only adults in the kitchen.\n\nGeorgette said, \"Millie takes care of them almost as much as I do, Morg.\"\n\n\"I know. But it was important that Tim understands what really constitutes bravery. I'm sure that the men on the Double D would have willingly ringed the ranch with their Winchesters if you'd asked. But you knew that many of them would die if they did. I'll bet that Phil Arnold was confident that because you're a woman and a mother, you wouldn't risk turning your ranch into a battleground. I would have loved to see his face when the sheriff returned after delivering the court order and told him of your reaction.\"\n\nShe smiled and said, \"The sheriff did seem rather surprised.\"\n\n\"He's a greedy man with nothing but bluster. He's not a brave man, George. I won't be surprised if he disappears before we can lock him in his jail.\"\n\n\"If you lock the sheriff and his four deputies in jail then arrest Mister Arnold and his three; what will you do after that?\"\n\n\"It depends on the sheriff. Once they're all behind bars, I'll have a chat with Judge Davis. If he and the sheriff can convince me that they'll mend their ways, I'll offer them a deal.\"\n\nGeorgette exclaimed, \"You'd let the sheriff keep his badge?\"\n\n\"Maybe. I'd put them all under a form of probation. I'd let the elected officials know that if any of them go astray, to send me a telegram and I'd have an entire company of Rangers pay a visit.\"\n\n\"What about Arnold and his three men?\"\n\n\"I'd stay for their trial, but I'll have one of my men do some investigating about them. I'm sure that they've done it before and it's likely that they had to resort to violence to take a small ranch. If that's true, we'll escort them to that jurisdiction and let them prosecute.\"\n\nShe smiled and said, \"You really are a good lawyer, Morg. And I think you're the bravest person I've ever met, including me.\"\n\n\"You're entitled to your opinion, ma'am. But we'll see how this all works out when we visit Junction City.\"\n\nMillie was amazed as she watched Georgette. It was as if she was a completely different person. And she liked this new, happier version.\n\nMillie turned to look at Morgan and asked, \"What will you do this afternoon, Morg?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. Everything is moving much faster than I expected. Do you have any suggestions?\"\n\n\"No, but maybe George does.\"\n\nMorgan looked at Georgette and waited.\n\nShe said, \"I don't have any suggestions either, but I do have a question that you may not want to answer.\"\n\n\"I promise to answer your awkward question, so let's hear it.\"\n\n\"When you gave the letter to Slim, you said that the pretty women who worked in your saloon were all married to your friends. Did they bring their wives with them from San Antonio?\"\n\n\"No. They met them in Kerrville. I'll admit that I suspected that one or two of my friends might be smitten and decide to propose. But I was surprised when each of them did and so did my clerk. It was a very unusual occurrence, but they all seem to be very happily married.\"\n\n\"Why are they working in your saloon if they're married?\"\n\nHe glanced at Millie before replying, \"They were working in my brother's saloon when I arrived.\"\n\n\"Do you mean 'working' as in working girls?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. It's hard to explain, but I'm very happy to have them as my friends.\"\n\n\"I'm not offended, Morg. But I am curious how it came about. You don't have anything to do, so can you tell us about it?\"\n\n\"It'll take a while, so I'll get a glass of water before I start.\"\n\nMillie said, \"I'll get it,\" then hopped to her feet.\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"I guess I'll start telling you the story. It started when I received a telegram from Kerr County Sheriff J.R. Brown to let me know that my older brother, Bill, had been killed. He'd been shot by one of the working girls after he'd shot her father but hadn't arrested her.\"\n\nGeorgette was already intrigued as Millie slowly set the full glass of water on the table and stared wide-eyed at Morgan.\n\nHe stunned them with each sentence as he narrated the events of his first day in Kerrville. Then he continued the almost unbelievable tale with his decisions about keeping and upgrading the saloon. By the time he reached his return with his clerk and four Ranger friends, he'd emptied the glass.\n\nMillie asked, \"Did your friends know of the ladies' past lives when they met them?\"\n\n\"I told them when I returned to San Antonio with Carlotta. Not surprisingly, they were all very anxious to meet them by the time we headed back to Kerrville.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"How long before they were married? Was it one large ceremony?\"\n\n\"The weddings started just three months after we arrived. One by one, I witnessed each of them. The last pair to tie the knot were Pete Drummond and Fannie Crosby, but that was just minutes after Felipe Torres married Ruby McCall. I had to almost run from St. Rose of Lima to the courthouse to witness both of them. I think they planned it that way just to annoy me.\"\n\n\"It's obvious that you're very fond of them, so were you a bit jealous when you witnessed their marriages?\"\n\n\"I'm not ashamed to admit that I was.\"\n\nThen he smiled and said, \"I even confessed to having more than just a bit of jealousy to Stella before I came here. She's a lot like you, George. She's smart, confident and isn't afraid to say what's on her mind. But she's a very compassionate woman as well.\"\n\nGeorgette quietly said, \"It sounds as if you might have proposed to her.\"\n\n\"I suppose it crossed my mind, but when I returned with my men, it was obvious that she and Tyler were meant to be together. He's my best friend and I am honestly happy for them both. They were the first to be married, by the way.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"That's an amazing story, Morg. So, now each of them is happily married and a partner in The Lonely Armadillo.\"\n\n\"So, am I.\"\n\n\"You're happily married?\"\n\nMorgan laughed then said, \"You know what I meant, Georgette Beulah.\"\n\n\"I was just joking with you, Morgan Whistler.\"\n\nMillie quickly asked, \"Is that really your name?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so. George and I were trying to decide who had the more hideous middle name. What is your opinion?\"\n\n\"I'd say yours is the winner. Or the loser, depending on how you look at it.\"\n\n\"So, do I.\"\n\nHe then had to explain to Millie how he'd been awarded the unusual middle name before he was able to shift the conversation back to the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "It was mid-afternoon when Tyler stepped onto the platform in Kerrville and smiled when he saw Stella walking towards him. He dropped his travel bag to the floor and scooped her into his arms.\n\nHe kissed her then said, \"I'm glad that I was able to get this done so quickly. I hope you aren't planning on returning to work, Mrs. McFadden.\"\n\n\"I hadn't planned to, but I have a feeling that we won't get a chance to be alone until you meet with your friends. They want to talk to you about the restraining order and who gets to take it to Morg.\"\n\nHe released Stella then picked up his travel bag before saying, \"I suppose I can wait for an hour or so. I was going to ask Homer to take it to the ranch.\"\n\nShe took his arm as they began walking to the boardwalk. Homer had convinced the others that they'd deliver the restraining order together, so at least she'd have one night alone with her husband. But as they turned onto the boardwalk to meet everyone in The Bluebonnet, Stella thought that maybe she could extend it longer than one night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "While Sheriff Lusk was contemplating making an escape from what he believed was about to become a full-blown disaster, Phil Arnold wasn't the least bit concerned.\n\nThe deputy had reported that no one had entered or left the Double D, so he was certain that he had that saloon lawyer under control. He expected that within a couple of weeks, Mrs. Driscoll would begin to panic. Then he'd have the sheriff return to the ranch and offer her twenty sections of her own land to move early. He would tell the lawyer to advise her to accept the improved offer rather than lose her entire ranch. He firmly believed that within two weeks, they'd have the deed to the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "The four Rangers, Jim Cooper and their wives were congregating in the front room of Morgan's apartment as Tyler told them of his search in the records section and then his meeting with Judge Riddle.\n\n\"After he read Morg's letter, I don't think the judge even cared about the documentation from the hall of records. He seemed pretty mad about the situation in Junction City, too. You can almost hear him growling when you read the restraining order. Homer, you can take it to the Double D tomorrow morning. Has anyone heard from him since he left?\"\n\nHomer replied, \"Not a peep. But about me going to the ranch. We already decided that we'd all go. Why not? If just handing that restraining order to their judge stops them from stealing that lady's ranch, then we'll simply turn around and come back. But we all know that it is probably gonna be something else. We all heard the same stories about that sheriff and his deputies that Morg did. He'll need us, Tyler.\"\n\nTyler looked at Stella almost asking for permission and immediately realized that she already knew. She also seemed to believe it was a good idea.\n\nHe looked back at Homer and said, \"You're right, Homer. We'll all go. It'll be interesting to see that giant ranch anyway.\"\n\nFelipe asked, \"Did you learn anything else while you were in Austin?\"\n\n\"Not much besides there was no registered Spanish or Mexican land grant and the Long Star Land Company doesn't exist. Or at least the state of Texas didn't give them the authority to deal in grants.\"\n\nPete Drummond started to ask a question when there was a knock on the door.\n\nSally was the closest, so she said, \"I'll get it,\" before she popped to her feet.\n\nWhen she opened the door, she smiled and asked, \"What can I do for you, Sheriff?\"\n\n\"A couple of fellers rode down from the Double D with a letter from Morg. I kinda bumped into 'em and brought 'em here. Mind if I come in and listen?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\nJ.R. entered the apartment followed by a smiling Slim Wilson and an awestruck Joe Brumfield. After Sally closed the door, she returned to her seat.\n\nSlim already had the envelope in his hand as he scanned the crowded room and said, \"Morg asked me to give this to Jim Cooper.\"\n\nJim stood and said, \"I'm Jim Cooper. I guess he didn't think Tyler would be back yet.\"\n\nSlim handed the letter to Jim and said, \"He just got the telegram a few hours ago.\"\n\nAs Jim opened the envelope, Tyler asked, \"What's happening in Kimble County?\"\n\n\"Morg thinks that the men who were trying to steal Mrs. Driscoll's ranch won't just leave after he stops the court order. I think the letter will ask all of you come to the Double D tomorrow.\"\n\nTyler said, \"We just decided to do that. We need to know more about the men who run the phony Long Star Land Company.\"\n\n\"Morg met with the man who runs it. His name is Phil Arnold and he offered Morg a bribe to stay there until Mrs. Driscoll gave up. He even had Mister Arnold put it in writin'.\"\n\nTyler grinned as he said, \"I can't wait to ask him how he managed to get the man to put a bribe on paper.\"\n\nHomer asked, \"Did you say Phil Arnold?\"\n\nSlim replied, \"Yup. That's the feller's name.\"\n\nHomer turned to Felipe and asked, \"Do you remember that story we heard from Wooly Jackson about a rancher in Concho County who the locals claimed had been murdered when a gang took over his ranch?\"\n\nFelipe nodded as he replied, \"I don't remember the name, just the story. Wooly said the folks were really mad that the Rangers didn't do anything. By the time Wooly's crew showed up, they'd already sold the ranch and disappeared. How do you remember the name?\"\n\n\"My aunt married a feller named Will Arnold and I joked with Wooly that maybe he should pay my uncle a visit. He thought I was serious until I told him that my uncle was over fifty years old and an undertaker to boot.\"\n\nJim finished reading the letter, then handed it to Tyler and said, \"I think he'll need all of you. I wish I could come along, but I'd only get in your way. And I think Morg might fire me if he sees me there.\"\n\nPete snickered then said, \"You're gonna be a lawyer yourself soon enough, Jim. He's not gonna fire you, but I reckon you're right that he wouldn't be happy to see you show up.\"\n\nAs Tyler read the letter, Stella stood and looked at Slim as she said, \"We'll talk in the kitchen while we bring you a cold beer and something to eat. I'm sure the sheriff has more important things to do.\"\n\nJ.R. grinned and said, \"I have deputies to do the dirty work, Stella. But I'd like to read Morg's letter before I leave.\"\n\nTyler handed the letter to the sheriff as he said, \"I'll stop by after we finish talking to give you all of the details, J.R.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Tyler. I wish my jurisdiction didn't end at the county line.\"\n\n\"Well, ours doesn't end until we leave Texas and that can take a week depending on the direction.\"\n\nAs the sheriff read Morg's letter, Stella escorted Slim and Joe Brumfield down the hallway to the kitchen while the other women left the apartment to draw two large mugs of cold beer and have the barroom cook prepare some food for their guests." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "After leaving the ranch house, Morgan saddled Felix and rode east for a couple of minutes before turning northwest. He hadn't met any of the deputies or Arnold's men, so he didn't think that they'd recognize him. He was dressed like a cowhand and had even borrowed a pair of chaps and had a coil of rope on Felix's saddle. He had his Winchester '86 in his scabbard rather than the '73, just in case.\n\nHe kept Felix to a slow trot as he angled to the west. The messenger had spotted the deputy about halfway to Junction City, and Morgan hoped that neither he nor his replacement had moved. He only wanted to see him while not being seen. When his friends arrived, they would need to include the lookout in their plans.\n\nHe rode west for another forty minutes then slowed Felix to a walk. If he was spotted by one of Arnold's men, then he'd appear to be a cowhand looking for strays. If a deputy spotted him, he might not be so easily fooled. He probably knew all of the Double D's ranch hands, at least on sight. He was too tall to be confused with one of the hired hands.\n\nThe low sun was in his face but slightly to his left, so he was able to block it with his Stetson's brim. But it would also make it difficult for the watcher as he'd be staring southwest. He was probably bored as well.\n\nIt was another five minutes before he spotted a horse tied to a pine branch and pulled up. The rider was sitting on a rock a few feet closer to the roadway and turning his revolver's cylinder. He was about eighty yards away and hadn't heard Felix's hoofbeats. Morgan just sat in his saddle studying the man for a minute before slowly backing Felix.\n\nWhen he was another hundred yards away, he turned his Morgan around and walked him eastward. He hadn't seen a badge, so the lookout was probably one of Arnold's men. That meant that the deputies were sharing the boring job with Arnold's three partners. Tomorrow, he'd have his shortest friend, six-foot-tall Pete Drummond visit just past sunset to see if they abandoned their post after the sun went down.\n\nBut after he set Felix to a medium trot heading southeast, Morgan almost popped himself in the head. Tomorrow was Saturday. Even though it wasn't payday, it would be unusual for none of the ranch hands to go into town. John had already mentioned that it was likely. He wouldn't need to send Pete or anyone else to check on the lookout. He wouldn't ask Georgette's boys to do anything dangerous, but he was already imagining a few new wrinkles to his plan's foundation." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Georgette and Millie were in the kitchen cooking dinner while Timmy and Lucy sat on the floor playing jacks.\n\nGeorgette was slicing steaks from a slab of beef as she said, \"I wish Morg hadn't gone to find the sheriff's lookout. If he's spotted, then the deputy might shoot him.\"\n\n\"The deputy might ask him what he was doing out there, but he wouldn't shoot him. The sheriff probably told him to just make sure nobody rode to Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I know, but don't you think that's kind of stupid? The Double D extends into Kerr County, and he has to know that we have a trail that can't be seen from north of the access road.\"\n\n\"I wondered about that myself. I hope that they don't have another man watching further south. They might have stopped Slim and Joe from reaching the road.\"\n\n\"I don't think Morg would have asked John to send them if he wasn't sure that there was even a slight chance that they'd be shot. When he returns, we can ask him.\"\n\nMillie grinned as she slid the pan of cut, oil-coated and spiced potatoes into the oven then after closing the door, she said, \"So, now you're sure that he'll return without a new bullet hole.\"\n\nGeorgette flipped her third steak onto the short stack and replied, \"I just wish this was all over, Millie. I want our lives to return to normal.\"\n\nMillie raised her eyebrows slightly before asking, \"You want everything to be just as it was before the sheriff showed up with that court order?\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Millie and understood exactly what she was asking, but replied, \"Morg may think I'm brave, but I've been nothing but a nervous Nellie since that day.\"\n\nMillie had her answer but didn't ask another question. Instead, she just walked to the large pantry to retrieve a jar of pickled onions.\n\nGeorgette cut two more small steaks, then began seasoning them with salt and black pepper. When they were finished, she piled them into a new stack and began cleaning the blood from the cutting stone.\n\nShe'd been pleasantly surprised when Morg had accepted her offer to have dinner with them, but she also had a growing concern. Tomorrow his Ranger friends would arrive and within three days, they'd all return to Kerrville. Her legal troubles would be over, but she knew that she'd soon suffer from a much different problem. One that would only get worse with each added minute she was with Morgan. But despite knowing the danger, she wasn't about to start avoiding him. She would succumb to her weakness and spend as much time with him as she could before he returned to his saloon and law office." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Morgan rode Felix into the barn and dismounted. He set the Winchester back into the box with the repeating shotgun then began unsaddling his gelding. Without realizing it, he was facing the same dilemma as Georgette. While he wished that things could be very different, wishes didn't matter. He knew that as soon as he and his friends had things under control, they'd return to Kerrville. Then she'd return to running her ranch and raising her children. They had their own paths to follow.\n\nHe finished unsaddling Felix and after brushing him, he checked on Oscar before leaving the barn. He walked to the house as the setting sun painted the sky in reds and purples. He glanced at the noisy chow house and smiled. He could almost imagine the most common topics: his guns and the anticipation of a Saturday night in town." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Slim sat back and patted his stomach as he said, \"Thanks, Stella. This was really good.\"\n\nJoe added, \"I appreciate it, too.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. But I didn't cook any of the food. You can thank Henry Ent in the kitchen behind the bar.\"\n\nTyler said, \"Sally will show you to your rooms. We'll be leaving early in the morning, but we'll have breakfast here before we go. Okay?\"\n\n\"I reckon we can talk more on the ride tomorrow.\"\n\n\"We'll tell you all of Morg's little secrets along the way.\"\n\nSlim snickered then stood and waited for Joe before they followed Sally down the hallway.\n\nTyler said, \"Okay, let's get our things together for tomorrow. I reckon we'll have a day or so with Morg before we need to deal with the sheriff and Mister Arnold. We won't be able to round 'em all up on a Sunday.\"\n\nPete replied, \"Okay, Tyler. Let's get going.\"\n\nAs the four Rangers rose from the table, Stella smiled at Tyler but wasn't about to tell him of her own preparations." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "The dirty plates were in the sink soaking and Timmy and Lucy had reluctantly gone to bed. The only light in the house came from the two lamps in the kitchen. The dinner conversation had been lively and shifted into many topics, most of them driven by the inquisitive children. Morgan spent much of the meal telling stories of his life as a Texas Ranger even though it had only taken three years of his life. What surprised him was that Lucy asked as many of those lawman questions as her older brother.\n\nMorgan had his empty coffee cup in his hand as the subject returned to the current situation.\n\nGeorgette asked, \"When do you think they'll arrive, Morg?\"\n\n\"Probably around noon, if not earlier. They're probably already packing what they'll need.\"\n\n\"Millie and I were wondering if the sheriff could have sent a watcher south of the access road. I'm sure he knows that there's a trail that we commonly use that joins the road to Kerrville about five miles south of the access road entrance.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised that he didn't do that. I agree with you that he probably knows about it but if I had to guess, he didn't want to set up two lookouts because he'd be one deputy short all the time. He probably doesn't trust Arnold that much to give him any advantage. He could have just made a mistake and might send another man down there tomorrow, though.\"\n\n\"How do you know that there isn't one there already?\"\n\n\"Our lookouts at the end of the access road would have seen a replacement ride past. They'll spot anyone heading down that way if the sheriff changes his mind. If they haven't seen any of them head south past the access road by noon, we'll call them in and not send any replacements.\"\n\n\"That makes me feel better. I was concerned that Joe and Slim might run into trouble before they even reached Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that they're probably enjoying their time in The Bluebonnet by now.\"\n\nMillie laughed then said, \"I hope they don't enjoy themselves so much that they can't make the ride back tomorrow.\"\n\nMorg grinned as he replied, \"I'm sure that even if they intended to overindulge, Stella wouldn't allow that to happen.\"\n\nAs Millie smiled, Georgette wished that she'd be able to talk to Stella. Morg said that she was the first person he'd told about his wife in detail. She thought that he'd tell her if she asked but didn't want to hear how much he must have loved her. His deceased wife must still own his heart for him to continue to wear the wedding band.\n\nMorg said, \"Thank you for the wonderful dinner, ladies. But I suppose I need to get to the bunkhouse before the boys start having lurid thoughts about where I've been.\"\n\nAs he began to rise from the table, Georgette quickly said, \"They'll have them anyway, Morg. Will you stay for a little while and have some more coffee?\"\n\nMorg sat back down and replied, \"I'll stay, but I'll hold off on the coffee for a while. I don't want to hear any violent protests from my stomach.\"\n\nMillie stood and said, \"I'm going to read for a while before I go to bed. Goodnight to you both.\"\n\nMorgan was surprised that she'd leave so early, but Georgette just smiled and said, \"Goodnight, Millie.\"\n\nMorgan then added his wishes for a peaceful rest before Millie left the kitchen and disappeared down the dark hallway.\n\nAfter he heard the door close, Morgan asked, \"Does Millie usually turn in this early?\"\n\nGeorgette replied, \"Not usually, but I think she's pretty tired after all the excitement these past few days.\"\n\n\"Hopefully, it will all be over by Tuesday and Millie will be able to relax again. If she's tired from the strain, I can't imagine how exhausted you must be.\"\n\n\"I'm not tired at all. I was pretty angry at first, but to be honest, I might even miss the excitement. That probably sounds terrible, but it's true. I wish I could do more, but I don't believe that you'd let me ride into Junction City with you and your friends; would you?\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"No, ma'am. I'd have you tied to a chair if I believed you might do that. It's not because I don't believe that you could be effective, it's just that you have children who need you. Besides, you might distract me at the worst moment.\"\n\n\"Would you let Stella come with you?\"\n\nMorgan was surprised by her question, but answered, \"It would be Tyler's decision. But if she wasn't married, then I'd give her the same answer, even though she's not a mother.\"\n\n\"That's sad; isn't it? All those women deprived of their ability to have children.\"\n\n\"It's more than sad, George. It's criminal. If I'd known that my brother was having that done, I would have ridden to Kerrville years ago and stopped it.\"\n\n\"How? Would you shoot your own brother?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure if I'd go that far. But I would make him wish I did. When I first saw Carlotta in the sacristy, she was terrified that I might shoot her for killing my brother. After she told me what had happened to the other women, I thanked her for shooting Bill and letting me avoid that moral dilemma.\"\n\n\"But she has a little girl now?\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he nodded and replied, \"Yes, ma'am. Her name is Mary and Carlotta is already pregnant again. I received a letter from her just before John arrived to tell me of your problem. Stella asked me to predict whether she'd have a boy or a girl this time because I'd guessed correctly about Mary. I told her that I wasn't going to press my luck.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"You still had a fifty-fifty chance of being right.\"\n\n\"I know. What was odd was that it wasn't until I read her letter about how beautiful Mary was that I realized I was her uncle.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? I mean, she was...\"\n\n\"I know. But Bill used her almost exclusively for the first month that she worked in his saloon. When I found her, she had missed two monthlies, and she'd only been there for three months. Luckily for her, he hadn't noticed the changes yet. She was being protected by some of the other girls, too.\"\n\n\"But you brought her with you to San Antonio and made sure that she was safe and well-cared for before you knew she was carrying your niece.\"\n\n\"She was an innocent victim who almost had her life destroyed by my older brother. I wish I could have had that meeting with him before he found her.\"\n\n\"Can you tell me more about your brother and your father?\"\n\nMorgan nodded and began telling her about his early life with his immoral older brother and judge father. He spoke for almost ten minutes but only two sentences were about his life with Barbara. He didn't even realize that he'd glossed over his marriage as he continued past his father's death and ended with the telegram from J.R. informing him of Bill's death.\n\nGeorgette had expected him to spend much more time talking about his wife but wasn't sure why he'd minimized that part of his life. She still wouldn't ask him about her but wished even more fervently that she would be able to talk to Stella.\n\nAfter he finished, he asked her about her life. Unlike Morgan, she didn't bypass her years of marriage. Nor did she ignore Don's weakness for liquor. But he was never abusive, so she wasn't overly harsh in her description of their life together. But even as she spoke of those years, she didn't tell him the secret, underlying cause of her husband's death. The only time she had ever revealed it was in confession.\n\nAs he listened, Morgan didn't hear the sadness he had expected to hear when she spoke of her deceased husband. Granted he had died five years ago, but when he spoke of Barbara, he still felt a noticeable sense of loss.\n\nWhen he realized that she hadn't remarried because she still grieved about her husband's death, he substituted his more reasonable explanation as the primary reason. Georgette was dedicated to her children and the Double D and wasn't about to risk giving up control over all that she loved.\n\nWhen she finished, she smiled and asked, \"It's not as exciting as your life story; is it?\"\n\n\"I've never had anyone try to steal my ranch, George.\"\n\n\"No. But I wouldn't call that exciting, either.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"I guess depressing, agitating, horrifying or infuriating would all be better adjectives. But all that will end in a few days. Tomorrow my friends will arrive, then Sunday we'll finalize our plan, and then on Monday, we'll pay our visit to Junction City. By noon, the Long Star Land Company will no longer exist.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded and forced a smile to appear pleased that she would soon return to her unexciting life.\n\nMorgan stood and said, \"Well, I need to get back to the bunkhouse, George. And you need to get some sleep.\"\n\n\"I suppose you're right. Goodnight, Morg.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, George.\"\n\nMorgan picked up his hat and left the house through the back door. Once on the small porch, he pulled on his Stetson, then hopped to the ground. He looked at the bright moon overhead, then took a deep breath and headed to the bunkhouse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "In Junction City, Deputy Willie Potts was commiserating with fellow Deputy Hank Brown at their usual table in The Tumbleweed Saloon.\n\n\"This sittin' around and watchin' that road is a waste of our time. All I saw all day was Freddie Jenkins headin' down there to deliver a telegram. I know that little bastard saw me, but he pretended he didn't know I was there. I shoulda made him get off that horse and scare some respect into him.\"\n\nHank snickered then said, \"He ain't worth botherin', Willie. What did the boss say about it?\"\n\n\"I didn't tell him. You know how grouchy he's been all day. He's gonna get worse until that Phil character gets the ranch, and that ain't gonna be for a couple of months.\"\n\n\"I don't reckon he's gonna wait that long. I figure now that he paid off the lawyer, he's gonna make her a better offer and she'll be outta that house in a couple of weeks.\"\n\nWillie grinned as he said, \"He'll give her more of her own land while he still takes almost all of it. There's a good deal!\"\n\nHank laughed then emptied his heavy mug of beer and ordered two more. As they continued to talk, a stranger left his chair and walked out of the saloon. He had been sitting two tables away yet could still clearly hear each word they'd spoken. It wasn't coincidental.\n\nMike Hilliard's greatest advantage was in his innocuous appearance. Even as a stranger in a small town, he was rarely noticed. There was nothing in his features, dress or character that attracted attention. No one seemed to pay him any attention and that suited him perfectly.\n\nHe left the saloon and headed down the shadowed street. He soon crossed to the other side and entered the dark alley beside the temporary offices of Long Star Land Company.\n\nHe turned right at the end of the narrow alley and soon entered the back room which was bright from the light of four lamps.\n\nHe took off his hat and sat down before he said, \"One of the deputies watched a messenger carry a telegram to the ranch and didn't bother telling the sheriff. That could be a problem, Phil.\"\n\nPhil Arnold said, \"Our friend, the sheriff, probably wouldn't have told me anyway. I don't figure it's important, either.\"\n\n\"You may not, but I do. One of the deputies also said that he doesn't think we'll wait sixty days. He said that we'd make a better offer soon to get her off the ranch. Did you tell him that, Phil?\"\n\n\"Hell, no!\"\n\n\"Well, it's still a good idea. I never even saw that lawyer, but do you really think he'll be able to keep her from finding somebody else to help for so long?\"\n\n\"I shoulda convinced that judge to make it thirty days, but I still figured the widow woman would just start sobbing and run off. At least she hired that poor excuse for a lawyer. Maybe I should have someone bring the lawyer here and make the new offer next week. He should be able to convince her that it's the best she can do.\"\n\n\"I think we might have bitten off more than we can chew this time, Phil. Those other ranchers didn't even have enough hands to hold us off even if it came to a fight like it did at the Ericsson place. She's got a small army working on the Double D. Even though she apparently doesn't want any of them to get involved, they could decide to go to war anyway.\"\n\nPhil snorted and said, \"I don't care if we lose all three of the others, Mike. They can be replaced easy enough. This is just too big a prize to pass up. It was perfect. A young widow with two small kids runnin' one of the biggest ranches in the state. Do you want to just run off when we're so close?\"\n\nMike shook his head as he replied, \"No. But I'm still worried about that telegram. The sheriff said that she didn't have any living relatives, so who would send her a telegram? What if it was for that lawyer? Are you sure he's the idiot you claim him to be?\"\n\n\"Yup. If he ain't, then that was one helluva actin' job he put on. Besides, everybody knows that he lives in a saloon.\"\n\n\"Just have the sheriff ask about that telegram tomorrow. He won't have to find out what was in it. He'd could ask who sent it and who was the recipient.\"\n\n\"Alright. If it'll make you feel better.\"\n\n\"Okay. I'm going to return to my hotel room, but tomorrow I'm going to find out more about that lawyer.\"\n\n\"How are you going to manage that?\"\n\n\"I'll ride down to Kerrville. It's only a five-hour ride. I'll be back on Sunday to tell you what I discover.\"\n\n\"I guess it won't do any harm to check. It should be quiet until you get back.\"\n\nMike nodded, then pulled on his hat and left the office through the back door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Tyler shook his head as he said, \"Absolutely not. You can't come along, Stella. You just can't.\"\n\nStella was annoyed that Tyler had caught her packing her saddlebags but didn't bother lying about the reason.\n\n\"Of course, I can. I can and I will. I'm not going to pack iron, Tyler. I just want to be close when you go into Junction City.\"\n\n\"And where do you think you'll be able to stay, Mrs. McFadden? You can't go into Junction City.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Mrs. Driscoll would be a gracious hostess and let me stay with her in her large ranch house.\"\n\nTyler was going to mention Stella's background and how the widow would react but didn't think it would dissuade her in the least. Before they left San Antonio, Morg had told him that he had been very impressed with her and just how determined and confident she was. After just a few minutes of conversation with Stella, he knew that Morg hadn't exaggerated.\n\n\"I suppose that you're not going to change your mind; are you?\"\n\nStella smiled and replied, \"Never. But I promise that I won't get in the way.\"\n\nTyler wrapped her in his arms and asked, \"Are you going to reward me for being a submissive husband?\"\n\nShe answered him with a kiss." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nSaturday morning in Kerrville was hectic as the four Rangers and two ranch hands prepared to leave for the Double D. Tyler hadn't mentioned that Stella would be joining them but only Joe Brumfield and Slim Wilson had been surprised when she began saddling her horse.\n\nIt was before nine o'clock when the seven riders rode out of town heading north. They'd reach the trail that cut across the Double D in less than three hours.\n\nAs they rode, Slim and Joe answered their constant questions about the Double D and the events that had taken place over the past week. Most of Stella's questions were about the young widow who owned the spread." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Morgan had finished his breakfast in the chow house with the men. As they ate, he asked if anyone was planning to visit town after work. He wasn't surprised to find that none of them had enough spare cash to visit The Tumbleweed. Payday was still a week away.\n\nJohn handed out assignments, and with the exception of the two lookouts near the end of the access road, all of the ranch hands had ridden out to the herds. John had stayed with Morgan to discuss preparations for the arrival of his friends and what he planned to do on Monday.\n\nAs they sat at one of the empty benches in the quiet chow house, Morgan said, \"I'll be moving into the barn loft before they arrive. I imagine that they're already on the road. I was hoping that some of your boys would ride into town, so I could mix in a couple of my friends and let them check out the town and their lookout. But that isn't going to happen. So, after my Ranger friends arrive, I'll listen to what they think. We might decide to hand out a few bucks to some of the men so they can enjoy themselves at my expense.\"\n\nJohn snickered then said, \"I had a hard enough time pickin' two of 'em to ride down to Kerrville yesterday. I'd have a riot on my hands if I had to choose a few of 'em to get a free night at The Tumbleweed. But it might look a bit odd if they did go into town. Everybody knows that their payday is a week off and if a bunch rode into town, it might make the sheriff suspicious.\"\n\n\"Thanks for letting me know. The last thing I want right now is to spook the sheriff or Phil Arnold. How about church services? Do any of them go into town on Sunday?\"\n\n\"There are usually ten of 'em that leave to go to church in the mornin'. I drive the carriage for Mrs. Driscoll, her young'uns, and Millie. Wilma comes along, too. I reckon you still want us to go so it looks normal.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I'll probably come along but I won't bring any of my friends with me. I don't want the sheriff or Arnold to see them yet. If they see me accompanying Mrs. Driscoll, it will probably make them more confident that their plan is working.\"\n\n\"I reckon so.\"\n\n\"Which church does Mrs. Driscoll attend?\"\n\n\"She goes to St. Mark's. That's the Catholic church. We got two other hands who got there, too. Me and Wilma are Baptists.\"\n\nMorgan was a bit surprised and asked, \"She's Catholic? She didn't mention it when she told me her life story last night.\"\n\n\"I don't know why she didn't talk about it. She was more of a churchgoer than Don was. He spent most of his Saturday nights at The Tumbleweed, so he was usually still sleepin' it off when she went to church.\"\n\n\"She told me about him last night. That explained why she was almost antagonistic towards me when we first met.\"\n\n\"You shoulda heard her when I told her you owned a saloon and had your office there. I'm glad I didn't know it before I left the ranch or she probably woulda sent me to Dallas.\"\n\n\"I'll ask her about attending Mass tomorrow. Maybe she'll want to go to confession this afternoon. I could escort her to church.\"\n\n\"I don't reckon she has any sins to confess, Morg. She's a real special lady.\"\n\n\"She really is a remarkable woman. Anyway, I'll go talk to her about it before I move to the barn loft.\"\n\n\"See you later, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan waved and headed for the house. He wondered why Georgette hadn't mentioned her faith. He'd told her about Carlotta and Father Velasquez, so she knew he was Catholic. He simply couldn't think of any logical reason why she hadn't told him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Mike Hilliard rode out of Junction City riding his dark brown gelding whose only markings were a wide white slash along his nose and one wide eyebrow over his right eye. The eyebrow seemed to leak out of the center stripe which made the horse's face seem tilted.\n\nHe was a patient man, so he'd followed his normal morning routine before leaving town. He was dressed in typical fashion and wore a Colt Peacemaker at his hip. He carried a Winchester '73 in his horse's scabbard and had a slicker and bedroll lashed behind his saddle. Mike Hilliard was everyman.\n\nThirty minutes after leaving Junction City, he passed one of the sheriff's deputies sitting by the side of the road. It would have looked suspicious for him not to acknowledge the deputy.\n\nSo, he smiled, waved and said, \"Howdy,\" but only got a grunt in return.\n\nHe continued at the same pace and a thirty minutes later, he passed by the access road to the Double D. He spotted the two ranch hands and waved.\n\nHerb Lee and Paul Kelly returned his wave and watched him ride away.\n\nHerb turned and asked, \"Have you ever seen that feller before?\"\n\n\"Nope. I've seen his horse before, but not him.\"\n\n\"Where did you see it?\"\n\n\"In front of that land company office right after they moved in. I though he looked kinda off-kilter. That's why it stuck in my head.\"\n\n\"I reckon Morg might wanna know about him.\"\n\n\"I'll head back there and tell him. Keep an eye out in case he comes back.\"\n\n\"I'll do that.\"\n\nPaul mounted his horse then wheeled him around and sent him down the access road at a rapid pace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "When the front door opened, Morgan smiled and asked, \"May I talk to you, George?\"\n\n\"Of course, please come in and have a seat.\"\n\n\"Could we use the rocking chairs instead?\"\n\nShe nodded then stepped onto the porch and closed the door.\n\nAfter they sat in the rockers, he said, \"I was talking to John about the ranch's routine on weekends. I was thinking of mixing a couple of my friends in with some of the ranch hands who might be going into town tonight. He told me that they were all flat out broke, so none would be visiting Junction City until payday.\"\n\n\"That's true. Do you want me to advance them a few dollars?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. John correctly pointed out that it would look odd for them to show up. It's important to keep a normal routine so we don't create any suspicion. When I asked him how many men went to church on Sunday, he told me that around ten usually left for services. Then he said that he usually drives your carriage to town so you can attend Mass at St. Mark's with Timmy and Lucy.\"\n\n\"I try not to miss Mass, but sometimes it can't be helped. If you want us to maintain a routine, then I assume you'd want John to drive us to town in the carriage as he normally does.\"\n\nMorgan said, \"I told him that I would ride alongside the carriage and escort you into church. I was also wondering if you wanted to go to confession this afternoon.\"\n\n\"I hadn't planned on it. Did you want me to go?\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"John said he'd be surprised if you had any sins to confess. I guess he was right. It's not necessary, but if you were going, I would have come along.\"\n\n\"I'm not a saint, Morg. If it's a sin to have evil thoughts, then I'd spend two hours inside the confessional.\"\n\n\"I never confessed any of my wicked thoughts, George. I think that God knows about them and understands the reason they were there. I'm sure that He agrees with whatever you think of the sheriff and the men claiming to be employees of the Long Star Land Company.\"\n\nShe smiled as she said, \"I hope you're right. Is that what you wanted to talk to me about?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. But I was curious why you didn't tell me that you were Catholic. Surely you figured out that I was Catholic after I told you about Carlotta and Father Velasquez.\"\n\n\"It wasn't as if I was trying to hide it, Morg. It's just that I was so intrigued by your story that I never even thought about it.\"\n\nMorgan was about to apologize when Georgette said, \"I think Paul Kelly has something to tell you.\"\n\nHe turned his eyes to the access road and spotted Paul heading to the house at a fast clip. He stood then stepped down from the porch and waited for the lookout to arrive.\n\nGeorgette soon followed and stood beside him to hear the reason for Paul's hurried approach.\n\nPaul slowed his horse before pulling him to a stop and dismounting.\n\nGeorgette asked, \"What's so important, Paul?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure how important it is, ma'am. But me and Herb figured Morg oughta know about it.\"\n\nHe then looked at Morgan and said, \"We just spotted a stranger ridin' south past the access road. I remember seein' his horse tied to the hitchrail in front of that Long Star Land Company's office last Saturday.\"\n\n\"What did he look like?\"\n\n\"He was brown with a stripe on his nose and one big eyebrow. It makes him look kinda tilted.\"\n\nMorgan grinned and asked, \"No. I meant the rider.\"\n\nPaul smiled sheepishly before replying, \"He looked like, well, like nobody and everybody at the same time, if that makes any sense.\"\n\n\"Actually, it's probably one of the best descriptions I've ever heard. Thank you for telling me, Paul. Let me know if he heads back to Junction City, but I have a feeling that he won't.\"\n\n\"Me and Herb didn't figure he would either.\"\n\n\"I believe that you may have just spotted another member of the Long Star Land Company. It seems that Mister Arnold has a silent partner to keep an eye on the men he'd bribed. I imagine that he's headed to Kerrville to ask questions about me.\"\n\n\"Do you reckon he might run into your friends?\"\n\n\"It's possible, so I'll ask them when they arrive. Thanks for the warning, Paul. It will probably be more important than you can imagine.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, Morg.\"\n\nPaul then hurriedly mounted, waved and headed back to tell Herb what Morg said.\n\nAs he rode away leaving a cloud of dust in his wake, Georgette asked, \"If he was one of Arnold's men, then it will change everything; won't it?\"\n\n\"Maybe. I need to send a telegram to Sheriff Brown to let him know about the stranger. But it can wait until after I talk to my friends.\"\n\n\"He could just go to your saloon. Shouldn't you send one to Stella as well?\"\n\nMorgan smiled at her as he replied, \"I have a feeling that she isn't in Kerrville at the moment. I believe that you'll be meeting Stella in a little while.\"\n\nGeorgette exclaimed, \"She's coming here?\"\n\n\"I'd lay the odds at three to one that she's on her way.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Tyler just returned from Austin yesterday and she probably wants to give me a piece of her mind for asking him to join the others to come here. That, and she's probably curious about your ranch. But more than likely, she's even more curious about you.\"\n\n\"You understand her pretty well; don't you?\"\n\n\"I suppose so. Anyway, I want to tell John about this latest development. Are you coming along?\"\n\n\"Of course, I am. Wait for me to tell Millie where I am.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nGeorgette trotted up the porch steps and soon disappeared into the house. Morgan watched her leave and felt almost like a voyeur when he did. She may be wearing britches and a flannel shirt, but there was no question of her femininity.\n\nShe popped back through the doorway two minutes later, then quickly crossed the porch and stepped to the ground.\n\n\"Sorry it took so long. Timmy wanted to come with me, but I told him that he had to watch Lucy. Then Lucy said she'd come along too, so I had to be a stern mother and order them to stay in the house.\"\n\nAs they began walking to the foreman's house, Morgan said, \"I'm sure that they'll forgive you, George.\"\n\n\"Millie is already soothing their disappointment with cookies and milk.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as they continued walking. He wished everyone's disappointments could be solved so easily.\n\nAfter knocking on John's door, Wilma told them that John was in the corral talking to Al Perkins, so they headed to the barn and its adjoining corral.\n\nGeorgette looked south and said, \"If we don't see them coming in another hour, then your friends will probably meet that stranger on the road.\"\n\n\"It won't matter if they pass him. He'll probably just wave and keep going. They'll just take note of his appearance to let me know that they'd spotted him, but they won't interrogate him at all. He'd just add them to the information he'll be giving to Phil Arnold. That's why I need to send a telegram to Sheriff Brown. He'll probably learn enough about me within an hour of his arrival to convince Mister Arnold that I'm not the idiot he believes me to be. I have to keep him from sending a telegram with that information.\"\n\nAs they neared the barn, he asked, \"The Western Union office is close to the courthouse; isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes. Just a block from the jail.\"\n\nJust as they were passing the barn door, Morgan came to a sudden stop and looked inside.\n\nAs Georgette turned to look at him, he snapped, \"To hell with it! I've got to stop thinking like a lawyer and start behaving like a Ranger.\"\n\nGeorgette quickly asked, \"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe started walking into the barn with Georgette hurrying behind him as he replied, \"I'm going into Junction City.\"\n\n\"Why? Your friends will be here soon, and you need their help.\"\n\nMorgan walked into Oscar's stall and tossed his saddle blanket over his back then picked up his saddle before replying, \"When they get here tell them all that you know, and that I should return within two hours. If I'm not back, have them ride into Junction City wearing their badges.\"\n\nAs he cinched the saddle, Georgette sharply asked, \"What about the restraining order? They'll be bringing it with them.\"\n\nHe stood and began putting on Oscar's bridle as he replied, \"That restraining order means nothing to them. I might as well ride into town with a bouquet of roses.\"\n\n\"Even if that's true, why can't you wait for your friends?\"\n\nHe hung a scabbard on each side of his saddle as he said, \"Even if they're already on the Double D, that lone rider heading south would be able to find out about me and send a telegram before they dismounted. I can't risk having them setting up an ambush.\"\n\n\"They don't have to use the road when you ride into town. You can just ride across the Double D to the north and enter the town from the west.\"\n\nHe slid his Winchester '86 into the left scabbard then grabbed the Winchester shotgun and slipped it into the second. He then tossed his saddlebags behind the saddle seat and tied them down.\n\nAs he backed Oscar out of his stall, he said, \"Right now, they all believe I'm not only an ineffective lawyer, but one who's on their side. I need to take advantage of their ignorance before I lose it.\"\n\nHe led his gelding from the barn and as he put his foot into his stirrup, Georgette asked, \"Do you have your badge?\"\n\nMorgan looked at her, smiled and replied, \"Yes, ma'am. It's in my pocket. I'll pin it on when I need it. Tell Tyler to leave their horses saddled or borrow some of yours. I'll clear the road to Junction City of their lookout, so they won't run into any trouble before they get to town. Hopefully, they won't have any after they arrive, either.\"\n\nHe mounted Oscar then said, \"Tell Tim that I'm a Ranger today.\"\n\n\"I will.\"\n\nHe waved and nudged Oscar into a medium trot.\n\nGeorgette watched him ride away, then hurried to the corral to talk to John." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Deputy Sheriff Ollie Adams wasn't even looking south as he sat on the same rock that Joe Clarkson had used. One of Arnold's men should have relieved him by now, but the road into town was still empty. He was bored, frustrated and just ornery as he whittled a fallen branch into nothing in particular.\n\nThe only thing interesting that he'd seen all morning was that stranger who rode past on his way to Kerrville. He knew that he'd seen the horse before but wasn't sure if he'd seen the rider. But he'd seemed friendly enough, so Ollie soon forgot about him. He wanted some excitement and all he could do was whittle. Where the hell was his replacement?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "Morgan stopped near the end of the access road and said, \"Paul, I need you and Herb to head back to the ranch house. Wait there for my friends. Okay?\"\n\nHerb asked, \"Are you goin' into town, Morg?\"\n\n\"Yup. I'll have a chat with their lookout on the way.\"\n\nHe didn't give them a chance to ask any more questions before he waved and started Oscar toward the roadway.\n\nHe soon turned north and slipped the hammer loop from his Schofield. He expected that the lookout had already seen him but didn't expect him to do anything. He'd probably think that the dumb lawyer was riding into town to visit The Tumbleweed.\n\nOllie could have seen Morgan but hadn't. He still had his focus to the north searching for his replacement. He wasn't sure of the time, but knew it had to be close. But before his replacement arrived, he had more urgent needs. He stood and walked a few feet further from the road and stepped behind the pine that had provided the branches for his whittling. He unbuttoned his britches and sighed as he relieved his protesting bladder.\n\nMorgan spotted the lookout's horse about two hundred yards ahead but didn't see the man. He scanned the area further from the roadway and spotted the back of the man's red plaid shirt behind a tall pine. It didn't take a genius to figure out what he was doing.\n\nHe let Oscar maintain the same pace and waited for the lookout to spot him. He didn't expect him to pull his pistol but was ready if he reached for it.\n\nOllie was buttoning his britches when he heard hoofbeats coming from the south. He quickly stepped back from behind the tree and looked in that direction. He didn't recognize the rider, but soon realized that he was looking at the lawyer. Sheriff Lusk told them that he was really tall and the rider just eighty yards away was the tallest man he'd ever seen.\n\nHe walked quickly to the roadway, but even as the lawyer drew closer, he wasn't sure what he should do. The sheriff said that he was on Arnold's payroll, but hadn't told him to keep the lawyer from going into town.\n\nMorgan slowed Oscar to a walk as he approached the deputy who was looking at him with a noticeable measure of confusion. He couldn't have asked for a better situation.\n\nHe grinned and said, \"Howdy! Is the sheriff in the jail?\"\n\nOllie slowly nodded then said, \"Yeah. Are you gonna see him about somethin'?\"\n\n\"Yup. I gotta ask him about some feller that just rode past. Did you see him?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I saw him. But I don't know him. Do you?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nMorgan then glanced toward town before he looked back at the deputy and asked, \"You been out here long?\"\n\n\"Almost four hours now. One of Arnold's boys is supposed to take over soon.\"\n\nMorgan looked north again then pointed and asked, \"Is that him?\"\n\nOllie's head whipped to his right but didn't see anyone.\n\nAs he turned his eyes back to the lawyer, he said, \"I can't...\" then stopped when he found himself staring down the barrel of Morgan's Schofield.\n\n\"Unbuckle your gunbelt with your left hand, Deputy.\"\n\nOllie snarled and said, \"You're in big trouble, mister.\"\n\n\"I don't think so. Drop your gunbelt and step back.\"\n\nOllie grumbled under his breath as he unbuckled his gunbelt and let it drop to the ground. He then took a few steps backward as he glared at the lawyer.\n\nMorgan walked Oscar off the road and kept his pistol on the deputy as he dismounted.\n\n\"Get on your knees, Deputy.\"\n\nOllie said, \"You're gonna pay for this,\" before he dropped to his knees.\n\nMorgan stepped closer to the deputy and quickly crushed Ollie's hat with his Schofield's barrel before he replied, \"Maybe.\"\n\nHe holstered his pistol, then quickly dragged the unconscious deputy behind the tree he'd just used as his natural privy where he rolled him onto his stomach. He pulled the deputy's belt from his britches and used it to bind his wrists before he trotted back to the man's horse. He looked in his saddlebags and found a pair of socks in dire need of laundering, then led the horse to his rider.\n\nAfter tying off the horse he tied the socks together and used them to gag the deputy. He imagined that when the deputy regained consciousness, he'd have a horrible taste in his mouth.\n\nHe bound the deputy's ankles with his own rope then walked back to Oscar. He climbed into the saddle and thought about waiting for the deputy's replacement but wasn't convinced that he'd be on time. So, he set Oscar to a slow trot as he continued toward Junction City." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "Twenty-two miles south, Mike Hilliard spotted a large group of riders about a mile east of the road. He pulled up and watched them as they headed northeast and wondered who they were. He was too far away to notice Stella but seeing seven riders this far south bothered him. He knew that there were no herds on this part of the ranch, so he suspected they weren't cowhands. They were moving at a rapid pace, too.\n\nHe observed them until they disappeared behind a hill then tapped his horse's flanks and continued along the road. He rode south for a few more minutes as he thought about those riders. He then wheeled his gelding around and headed back to Junction City. He could head to Kerrville tomorrow but believed that the lawyer had probably double-crossed them and sent someone for help. Now the help had arrived, and Phil needed to know before they showed up in town. Even though they were riding faster than he was, he expected them to spend time at the Double D talking to the turncoat lawyer. He and Phil would have a surprise for them when they arrived in Junction City.\n\nMike's only immediate concern was the two men stationed near the ranch's access road. If they saw him returning to Junction City, they would most likely notify the lawyer and if those riders were lawmen, then he and Phil might not have a chance to prepare for their welcome. He'd have to make sure that he wasn't spotted as he passed the access road." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "Before Morgan had even reached Paul and Herb at the end of the access road, Georgette told John to send a rider along the trail to meet Morgan's friends and tell them what he was doing.\n\nThe only one who was nearby was Al Perkins, so John had the wrangler deliver the news before he mounted his horse and rode west to tell the ranch hands to return early. He'd only tell the first group and they'd spread out to tell the others.\n\nGeorgette then returned to the house and met Millie who was preparing lunch.\n\nMillie asked, \"What's happening, George?\"\n\n\"A stranger rode past the access road heading to Kerrville and Morg is certain that he's going to send a telegram to Mister Arnold. Then they'll know that he's a Ranger. I don't know what he's going to do, but he told me to keep his friends here for two hours before sending them into town.\"\n\n\"What about the restraining order?\"\n\n\"He said it didn't matter anymore, and I think he's right. I just hope he returns before his friends leave. I almost wish that he hadn't become involved.\"\n\n\"You don't mean that, George. You weren't about to give in to the likes of those bastards at the Long Star Land Company and Sheriff Lusk.\"\n\nGeorgette sighed then said, \"You're right, of course. But I still... never mind. Where are Timmy and Lucy?\"\n\n\"I think they're in Timmy's room.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded then headed down the hallway.\n\nShe didn't reach Timmy's doorway before her children shot out of the room.\n\nTimmy quickly asked, \"Is Mister Kane going to shoot the sheriff?\"\n\nShe wasn't surprised that they heard her talking to Millie, so she quickly replied, \"No, dear, he's just going to talk to them and send a telegram.\"\n\n\"Why didn't he wait for the other Rangers?\"\n\n\"Because he's their captain, and he wants to make sure that they don't ride into an ambush. Now, I want you both to stay with Aunt Millie in the kitchen. I'll join you when I learn more. Okay?\"\n\n\"Okay, Mama.\"\n\nTimmy took his sister's hand before they walked to the kitchen.\n\nGeorgette then walked to the office and took down one of the shotguns. She checked the load and replaced the bird shot with buckshot shells. Before she left the office, she slipped two more shells into each pocket of her denim britches.\n\nShe left the house and walked to the rocking chairs. After leaning the shotgun against the nearby rail, she sat down and watched the access road just as Paul and Herb arrived.\n\nGeorgette waved them over and after they dismounted, she asked, \"What did Morg say?\"\n\nPaul replied, \"Just that we needed to come here and wait for his friends, ma'am.\"\n\nThen Herb said, \"He said that he was gonna have a chat with their lookout, too.\"\n\n\"Alright. Can you both ride just south of the barn and let me know when you see his friends?\"\n\nPaul replied, \"Yes, ma'am,\" before they remounted and rode away as Georgette returned to her seat on the rocking chair." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "Morgan merged into the busy street traffic of Junction City and was debating about which office should be his first stop. He didn't think he could enter the Western Union office and send a telegram without being noticed, so that narrowed it down to the other two choices. Because Phil Arnold was the only one he had met, he decided to pay a visit to the sheriff's office. They were already down one deputy, and the sheriff might be alone. If Arnold saw him enter the jail, then he might not be overly concerned. After all, he was on their team now.\n\nHe pulled up a block away from the sheriff's office and dismounted. After tying Oscar's reins to the hitchrail, he stepped onto the boardwalk. He didn't even glance at the office of the Long Star Land Company as he approached the jail.\n\nMorgan reached the open doorway then stepped inside and interrupted the two-handed poker game being played by Deputies Hank Brown and Willie Potts.\n\nAs they stared at him, Morgan smiled and said, \"Howdy. Is Sheriff Lusk in his office?\"\n\nHank quickly asked, \"Who's askin'?\"\n\nMorgan ignored his question as he quickly pulled his Schofield and cocked the hammer.\n\n\"You know who I am, Deputy. I'm the lawyer that Mrs. Driscoll hired to stop that land company from stealing her ranch.\"\n\nWillie's eyes narrowed as he said, \"You're supposed to be bought and paid for, mister.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess I'm a poor bargain. Now I don't want to shoot either one of you, so just slowly unbuckle your gunbelts. After they hit the floor, I want you both to enter that first cell.\"\n\nHank said, \"The sheriff and Joe Clarkson will be back before you walk outta here, mister.\"\n\n\"You'd better be in the cell by then or you'll be the first one I shoot.\"\n\nThey shared a quick glance before unbuckling their gunbelts. Only Herb's dropped to the floor while Willie's gunbelt rested on the back of his chair before they stood and slowly walked around the front of the cells.\n\nMorgan followed behind at a safe distance and once they were inside, he slammed the door behind them. After they were incarcerated in their own cell, Morgan quickly stepped down the hallway to ensure that the sheriff wasn't in his office waiting with his pistol drawn. He peeked inside, found it empty, then holstered his pistol and returned to the front room.\n\nHe pulled the key ring from its peg and walked to the desk. After he dropped both of their gunbelts and the keyring into a drawer, Morgan walked to the open doorway. He left it open and stepped onto the boardwalk.\n\nMorgan had no idea where the sheriff and the last deputy were, but he couldn't waste the time to conduct a search. He turned and looked at the small office of the Long Star Land Company. He had to assume that they were inside and had watched him enter and leave the jail. He only hoped that they were only curious about why he'd gone to the jail.\n\nMorgan then took off his hat and scratched his head before pulling it back on and crossing the street. He reached the opposite boardwalk and turned toward their office. When he reached the closed door, he found it locked. He then stepped to the window and looked inside but didn't see anyone in the shadowed room.\n\nHe stepped away from the window and scanned both directions before trotting across the street. He stopped to pull his Winchester shotgun from Oscar before he quickly reentered the jail. He closed the door then stepped close to the cell bars.\n\nWillie glared at him as he said, \"For a lawyer, you're pretty stupid, Kane. You don't know what you're gettin' into.\"\n\n\"You're probably right on both counts, Deputy. But I have an offer for you that will only be valid for an hour.\"\n\nHank snapped, \"What the hell are you talkin' about?\"\n\nBefore he answered, Morgan pulled his badge from his pocket, and showed it to the two angry deputies.\n\nWillie stared at the badge as he asked, \"Where did you get that? I thought you was a lawyer.\"\n\n\"I was a lawyer first but I'm also a captain in the Rangers. In about an hour, four more Rangers are going to ride into town to arrest everyone in that phony Long Star Land Company. You both know I could arrest all of the lawmen in town, too. But I don't care that much about any of you. So, here's the deal. I'll let one of you go to find the sheriff and Joe Clarkson and have them come back here. Then my friends and I will handle Phil Arnold and his boys. Are they in the hotel?\"\n\nWillie glanced at Hank before answering, \"No. They got some rooms in the back of their place.\"\n\n\"Your deputy lookout said that one of them was going to replace him soon. When was he supposed to show up?\"\n\nWillie answered, \"He shoulda been there by now. What did you do to Ollie?\"\n\n\"I just tied him up. My friends will probably bring him along when they ride into town. So, right now all four of them are in the back rooms of their office?\"\n\nHank replied, \"I reckon. Can we have our guns back?\"\n\n\"If you accept my offer, you can have them back after we all leave. I'd strongly suggest that you take my offer because it's the only way you can avoid going to prison for a few years.\"\n\nWillie didn't even ask Hank's opinion before saying, \"Okay. I'll go find the sheriff and Joe.\"\n\n\"Tell him that it's the smart move to accept my offer. And to not even think about visiting Phil Arnold.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nMorgan nodded then walked to desk and took the keyring from the drawer. He took two steps to the front of the jail, looked through the window to check on the land company's office to make sure no one was coming, then stepped back to the jail cell.\n\nBefore he unlocked the door, he said, \"Just as an added convincer, I have a ten-gauge repeating shotgun in my hand in case the sheriff decides to make a bad choice.\"\n\nHank asked, \"That's a shotgun?\"\n\nMorgan nodded as he unlocked the door. Willie quickly exited the cell before Morgan slammed it closed again.\n\nWillie waited until Morgan locked the door before he asked, \"Can I go now?\"\n\n\"You'd better hurry, Deputy. The clock is ticking.\"\n\nWillie didn't reply but hurried out of the jail and turned left after reaching the boardwalk.\n\nMorgan tossed his Stetson onto the desk, then sat down and set the Winchester beside his hat. He could see the front door of the Long Star Land Office and wondered how long it would be before the replacement lookout left." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Herb pulled his horse up before the ranch house and said, \"They're comin' real fast, ma'am. They'll get here in a few minutes.\"\n\nGeorgette rose from her rocking chair and said, \"Thank you, Herb.\"\n\n\"You're welcome, ma'am. I'm gonna head back to Paul to meet 'em. Is that okay?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nAfter Herb rode off, Georgette entered the house and found Millie with Timmy and Lucy in the kitchen.\n\n\"Morg's friends are almost here. I'm going out to the porch again to talk to them as soon as they arrive.\"\n\nTimmy asked, \"Can we come, Mama?\"\n\nGeorgette glanced at Millie before smiling at her son and replying, \"Alright. But you and Lucy need to stay on the porch. Is that understood?\"\n\nTimmy grinned as he nodded and said, \"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nMillie took Lucy's hand as she followed Georgette who was hurrying to catch up to Timmy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "After meeting Al Perkins on the trail, Tyler had the group pick up their pace. As they cut across the Double D, Tyler asked the others about the two-hour delay that Morgan had requested and each of them agreed that it was already at least that long since he'd left the ranch.\n\nThey had the ranch buildings in sight when they met Paul and Herb and slowed down.\n\nAl Perkins asked, \"Anything new, Paul?\"\n\n\"Nope. Mrs. Driscoll is waitin' on the porch.\"\n\n\"I reckoned that she might be.\"\n\nAl turned to Tyler and said, \"We'll water your horses while you talk to the boss.\"\n\nTyler said, \"Thanks, Al,\" as the large group of riders approached the barn.\n\nWhen Georgette saw them, she smiled when she noticed a woman riding among them. Morgan had been right about Stella's determination. She was impressed with the size of each of the Rangers but focused on Stella. She was amazed that even though Stella had ridden more than thirty miles, she still had an almost elegant appearance.\n\nStella was wearing a dark blue riding skirt and a light blue vest over her white blouse. She had a white Stetson over her blonde hair that she wore in a ponytail. Georgette felt like a chimney sweep in her denim britches and blue and green plaid flannel shirt.\n\nWhile Georgette studied Stella, Stella was examining Mrs. Driscoll. While Georgette may have been almost embarrassed by her appearance, Stella had a very different opinion.\n\nEven though Joe Brumfield and Slim Wilson had described the widow, Stella was still surprised when she'd first seen Georgette. Stella had expected her to be wearing men's clothing, but Georgette was far from the mannish ranch-owning woman Stella had expected to meet. Even in her denim britches and flannel shirt, Georgette was a very attractive young woman. So, before she even pulled her gelding to a stop, Stella wondered if Morgan had been as impressed with Mrs. Driscoll as she was.\n\nThey slowed their horses and then halted fifty feet from the porch. After the Rangers and Stella dismounted, their horses were led to the large trough by the ranch hands.\n\nTyler took Stella's hand as they approached the porch steps with Homer, Felipe and Pete.\n\nGeorgette quickly said, \"I'm very glad that you made it. Did you see a rider pass by heading for Kerrville?\"\n\nTyler glanced at the others before saying, \"No, ma'am. Did you send another ranch hand to find us?\"\n\n\"No. Morg thinks he was one of the men from the Long Star Land Company and was going to Kerrville to find out more about him. But it doesn't matter. I'm just concerned about Morg. He left here about an hour and a half ago. I don't think you should wait.\"\n\n\"We were just gonna water our horses and head out, ma'am. This is my wife, Stella. I couldn't convince her to stay behind. Could you keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn't follow us?\"\n\nGeorgette smiled at Stella as she replied, \"I'd be happy to do that, but I don't believe she plans to chase you.\"\n\nTyler kissed Stella before he and the others turned and hurried to remount their watered horses.\n\nStella watched Tyler leave before she turned and said, \"I assume that you know more about me than I do about you, Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\n\"Please call me George. I'm sure that I know much more, but we can change that over lunch. I have many questions to ask you as well.\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to answer all of them.\"\n\nGeorgette hooked her arm through Stella's then said, \"Let me introduce you to my children and Millie, my best friend.\"\n\nAs they stepped onto the porch, the four Rangers rode past and headed down the access road." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Mike Hilliard had turned off the roadway a couple of miles before the access road and had to slow his tired horse as it wound through the more difficult terrain. He kept looking to the east to ensure that he wasn't spotted. But when he had ridden another twenty minutes, he knew he had to have passed the access road, so he shifted to the northeast to return to the road." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "Sheriff Lusk and Deputy Joe Clarkson were battering Hank Brown with questions as the three men walked along the boardwalk. It had taken Hank more than twenty minutes to find them, then when he did, it took another ten to explain what had happened. He wasted more time convincing them that they had no choice.\n\nNow, as they approached the jail, Hank just hoped that Sheriff Lusk didn't pull his pistol when they opened the door. He'd told them that the saloon lawyer had a ten-gauge shotgun but wasn't sure the sheriff believed him. It could be even worse. He might send him in first with his pistol in his hand.\n\nHe breathed easier when Sheriff Lusk just opened the door and stepped inside with Joe walking behind him. He entered and as he closed the door, he saw the Ranger/lawyer sitting behind the desk with his Winchester shotgun laying on top. He didn't have his pistol in his hand, either.\n\nMorgan hadn't seen anyone leave the land company's office, but the replacement lookout could have used the back door. But now that the sheriff and his two uncontrolled deputies were here, that was of secondary importance.\n\nHe stayed sitting as he said, \"Sheriff Lusk, I hope that your presence means that you've accepted my offer. Is that right?\"\n\nThe sheriff was still unsure that the man he believed to be a weak, sodden lawyer was really a Ranger. But if he was, and if his offer was genuine, then it would be a godsend.\n\n\"It all depends. How do I know this isn't all some trick to get me to help?\"\n\n\"I don't want your help, Sheriff. I just don't want you to provide any assistance to Phil Arnold or his men. If you agree to just sit this one out, then after we take care of the Long Star Land Company, you can go back to being a sheriff.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk slowly asked, \"What's the catch?\"\n\n\"The catch is that I expect you, your deputies and Judge Davis to behave like officers of the court. I'll leave word with a few folks here to contact me in Kerrville if you don't.\"\n\n\"That's all?\"\n\n\"That's enough. Will you agree to my terms?\"\n\nThe sheriff's distrust vanished as he looked at Morgan's face, so he replied, \"Alright. Can you let my deputy out of the cell now?\"\n\nMorgan replied, \"You can,\" then tossed him the keyring.\n\nAs the sheriff walked to open the cell, Morgan stood and picked up his Winchester.\n\n\"I'm going to have a chat with Phil Arnold. You can watch if you'd like.\"\n\nDeputy Clarkson asked, \"Ain't you gonna wait for the other Rangers?\"\n\n\"I'll see if I can convince them to give up rather than have a gunfight in your town.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk quickly said, \"If they see you with that badge, I don't reckon they'll talk to you, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're right, Sheriff,\" Morgan replied as he pulled off his badge and stuck it in his pocket.\n\nHe snatched his Stetson from the desk and left the jail. After returning the shotgun to Oscar's scabbard, he scanned the street to the south. He didn't see any riders leaving nor did he see his friends. But he expected that they'd be showing up soon, and they might even bump into the new lookout on the way. While they wouldn't know that he'd bound and gagged the deputy, he was sure that they'd find him. Whether they brought him along was up to Tyler. Then he wondered if Stella had convinced him to come along and smiled.\n\nHe trotted across the street and soon reached the closed office of the Long Star Land Company. He rapped loudly on the door and waited for Phil or one of his partners.\n\nAfter almost a minute with no response, Morgan again scanned the street before he walked to the narrow alley and turned right. As he strode through the shadows, he wondered if somehow, Phil had realized his precarious situation and escaped.\n\nWhen he entered into the bright sunlight again, he turned right and spotted a hitchrail. He immediately noticed a large number of hoofprints and piles of fresh dung which added to his suspicion that the four men had gone.\n\nHe reached the door but before he tried to open it, he released his Schofield's hammer loop. He slowly turned the knob and wasn't surprised when the door opened.\n\nHe stepped onto the threshold and shouted, \"Mister Arnold, this is Morgan Kane. Can I talk to you?\"\n\nTen seconds of silence followed before Morgan entered the empty back room. There was a door leading to another room, but he doubted that anyone was there.\n\nHe left the room and walked to the hitchrail. He counted five sets of hoofprints and followed their trail as they headed east.\n\nThey could have shifted to the north after a few hundred yards, but he had to be sure.\n\nSo, he raced back to the alley and soon popped back into the main street. He didn't slow as he dodged traffic and soon reached Oscar. After quickly untying his gelding, he mounted and headed south to the first intersection then turned left.\n\nOnce he left the last of the buildings, he shifted northeast and hoped to pick up their trail. After just a couple of minutes, he spotted it and was worried because it was still going east.\n\nHe turned Oscar to the east and kept him at a fast trot, knowing he couldn't see those tracks at this pace. He knew that their trail would soon be on Double D land. If they shifted slightly to the south, they'd reach the small settlement occupied by the wives and children of the ranch hands.\n\nAs he rode, he tried to understand what had driven them to leave so suddenly, and what mischief they planned to create on the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "After Mike told him about the telegram last night, Phil decided to ask about it himself rather than having the sheriff handle it. He figured it would save him some money. He'd visited the Western Union office and invested ten dollars to learn that it was sent to the widow from her aunt. But the sheriff had told them she had no relatives. That had been suspicious enough, but he knew he was in trouble when he learned that it had come from Austin.\n\nAfter telling the others about his strong suspicion that they'd soon be visited by a squad of Rangers, they'd packed and prepared to move. Phil expected that Mike Hilliard was more than halfway to Kerrville by now, so he'd be okay.\n\nBut as they were preparing to leave, they had to settle on their destination. The rational choice would be to head north to Menardville. But Phil thought that it would be a good idea to make a profitable stop before they rode north. He wanted to pay a visit to the Double D ranch house.\n\nPhil believed that even if the lawyer had asked for help, he wouldn't do anything more than wait for the Rangers to arrive. He didn't know of any Ranger companies within a hundred miles of the ranch. So, if that telegram was sent from Austin yesterday, they wouldn't arrive until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. That was more than enough time to extract something from their failed scheme.\n\nTheir biggest advantage was that only the lawyer had met any of them. Phil convinced the others that maybe they should pay a visit to the ranch house to remind the lawyer of their agreement. While there were a lot of men on the ranch, he was confident that none would even pay attention to them.\n\nThey decided to avoid using the road because of the sheriff's lookout and the likelihood that the lawyer had probably asked the widow to station their own lookouts on their access road.\n\nSo, less than an hour before Morgan realized they weren't in their office, the four men rode east out of Junction City. They were riding at a normal, non-threatening pace to avoid being noticed. They weren't familiar with the terrain or the exact location of the ranch house, but Phil had studied the map of the extensive ranch thoroughly, so he wasn't concerned.\n\nPhil Arnold, Lou Crump, Charlie McDonald and Pokey Jones soon passed the settlement and had even waved at some of the women as they rode by." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "When Morgan spotted the group of houses and barns, he slowed to check for the five tracks. That rider heading to Kerrville could have turned around and joined them to account for the extra set of prints. They could be made by a packhorse, too.\n\nBut the extra hoofprints didn't matter for the time being. So, once he spotted the trail, he nudged Oscar into a fast trot again.\n\nWhen he reached the houses, he slowed and approached two women who were hanging laundry.\n\n\"Excuse me, ladies. I'm Morgan Kane, Mrs. Driscoll's lawyer. Did you see four or five men ride past a little while ago?\"\n\nThe older women shield her eyes as she looked up at him and said, \"Yes, sir. Four men and a packhorse passed by and waved at us. I didn't know who they were, though.\"\n\n\"They were the men who were trying to steal the Double D. How long ago did you see them?\"\n\n\"About ten to twenty minutes ago.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am.\"\n\nShe was about to ask a question when Morgan tapped Oscar's flanks and rode off.\n\nHe expected to see them soon when the terrain allowed him a clear line of sight. They'd be passing the herds, but he expected that all of the ranch hands had already been called in. The only riders should be the four criminals.\n\nHe pinned his badge on again as he headed south at a fast pace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "In the ranch house, Georgette and Stella were alone in the kitchen after sharing lunch with Millie and the children. Millie hadn't even been asked to take Timmy and Lucy outside. As soon as the table had been cleared, she simply took their hands and almost dragged them down the hallway.\n\nThe conversation during lunch had been more general in nature, but now that they were alone, it took a decided shift into a more personal realm.\n\n\"Morg told me a lot about you, Stella.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that he did, George. Did he limit it to our time after he made us partners in The Lonely Armadillo?\"\n\n\"No, he began with when he first met you and the other women. At the time, I thought it was because he wanted to see if I'd be shocked or appalled by what he said. But now, I believe that he was just telling me what happened. Is that right?\"\n\nStella smiled and replied, \"On that first day, we didn't know what to make of him. He was Bill Kane's brother and we all thought he was just a younger, bigger version. But each of us had a small bit of hope that he would treat us better than his brother had, or Harry Freeman would. Harry owned the other two saloons in town and had many more working girls than we had in Bill's place.\"\n\n\"Morg told me about him and how he bought one of his saloons and turned it into The Lonely Armadillo.\"\n\n\"Not only that; he made me and my sisters part owners along with our husbands. He told you about the offer he made to us that first day; didn't he?\"\n\n\"Yes. But of all of those stories, the most surprising was when he explained how each of you married one of his friends. You were the first to get married; weren't you?\"\n\n\"Tyler and I were married just three months after they arrived. I have to admit that it was even more surprising to me and the other ladies. Each of them knew of our past and that we could never give them children, but it didn't bother them at all. Each of us considered ourselves to be the luckiest women in Texas just by having enough hope to stay and meet Morg. Finding good men who still respected us enough to marry us was beyond our dreams.\"\n\n\"He's a remarkable man, and after hearing how he spoke of you, I'm surprised that you didn't expect him to propose before Tyler did.\"\n\n\"I already loved him before he had to leave to close his law offices in San Antonio. And I'm sure that each of the others did as well, including Carlotta. But when he returned with his friends, I knew that Tyler and I were meant to be together. Did he say anything that led you to believe he would consider marrying me?\"\n\n\"I suppose he won't mind if I tell you. He explained that he admired you immensely and was thinking about proposing. But when he returned and saw you and Tyler together, he knew you could make each other happy. He considers you and Tyler as his best friends and is pleased that you found each other.\"\n\nStella smiled as she said, \"I thought so. He's too noble for his own good sometimes.\"\n\n\"He still wears his wedding ring, even though he's been a widower for ten years. He didn't tell me much about his wife, but I guessed that he loved her so much that he never believed that he'd find another woman to match her.\"\n\nStella sighed then said, \"When he told me about Barbara, those were almost his exact words. While I'm sure that he did love her very much, Tyler and his other friends have a different opinion of why he hasn't married again.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"Why would they think he was saying something different?\"\n\n\"I'm sure that Morg wasn't inventing an excuse. He may even believe it to be his only reason for remaining unmarried. But I've only known him for a year while Tyler and his friends have been with him much longer. But he could tell them things about his life that he would never tell me, or any of the other ladies.\"\n\n\"I thought he trusted you.\"\n\n\"He does. But he's also very considerate and stays away from any subjects that he believes would make us uncomfortable. While he told me how his wife died, I think he wasn't even aware that I was in the room. After I talked to Jim Cooper about it, he was very hesitant to tell me what he believed. But after I wore him down, he told me what he believed was the real reason Morg hadn't remarried. After listening to his theory, I was convinced that he was right. I think when Morg gave me his answer, he was hiding his real reason, even from himself.\"\n\n\"Then what is the reason?\"\n\n\"Did he tell you how his mother died?\"\n\n\"Yes. He said that he never knew her because she died giving him life.\"\n\nStella nodded, then softly said, \"Then his wife died giving birth. Jim believes that Morg doesn't want to risk another woman's life by marrying her.\"\n\nGeorgette had come to that conclusion even before Stella had finished speaking. But it also inspired a very personal question she was hesitant to ask.\n\nStella smiled and said, \"You want to ask why he didn't propose right away knowing that I couldn't get pregnant.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded before Stella said, \"Once he saw me and Tyler together, he knew we were meant to be together. He could have proposed to one of the others before they were enamored with one of his friends but didn't. I think it was just because none of them met Barbara's standards. I could be wrong.\"\n\n\"No, I don't think so. It's sad, isn't it?\"\n\n\"We all think it's nothing less than a tragedy. What about you, George? Why haven't you remarried?\"\n\nGeorgette spent ten minutes talking about the stream of suitors who began arriving within days of her husband's burial. She explained her husband's failings and her dedication to her children and the ranch. But even though she already trusted Stella, she couldn't bring herself to tell her the full story. She couldn't admit what she had done to drive her husband to get drunk and then face the angry bull.\n\nStella listened closely and everything that Georgette said only reinforced Stella's belief that Mrs. Driscoll was even more in love with Morg than she was." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "Morgan spotted the four riders and their packhorse about a mile ahead, but they were still riding south when they should have already changed to a westerly heading. The ranch house was about three miles to their right, and they should be able to see the barn's roof by now.\n\nHe wasn't surprised that they didn't know he was behind them because they didn't expect him to be there. But because they would probably see the ranch buildings at any moment, he shifted Oscar to the southwest to cut them off. Then he pulled his Winchester that fired cartridges rather than shotgun shells." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "Just a short time after Morgan had changed direction, Lou Crump, who was riding on the right spotted the barn's roof, then pointed and shouted, \"It's way down there!\"\n\nThey all pulled up and as three of them stared to the south, Lou looked to his right and spotted Morgan.\n\nHe then loudly said, \"We got a rider comin' from behind us!\"\n\nThe others' eyes all turned in that direction and after a short pause, Phil Arnold said, \"I think it's that lawyer.\"\n\nPokey Jones squinted and asked, \"Is he wearin' a badge?\"\n\nCharlie McDonald replied, \"It looks like it. But he's got a Winchester, too. What do you wanna do, Phil?\"\n\nPhil was puzzled by the badge, but as soon as he'd recognized that saloon lawyer, he believed that their luck had gone from bad to great.\n\n\"Let's go introduce ourselves,\" he replied as he pulled his Winchester.\n\nThe others drew their repeaters then they started their horses towards Morgan." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "When he'd seen them point at the barn, Morgan had asked Oscar for more speed. Then just a few seconds later, he slowed him when he found one of their fingers pointing in his direction. Now they were all heading straight at him with their Winchesters in their hands.\n\nHe pulled Oscar to a stop and dismounted. He couldn't trust his gelding to stay put when it got noisy, so he slid the shotgun from his scabbard and stepped away from Oscar. He walked about twenty yards before he took off his Stetson and dropped it to the ground. Then he lowered the shotgun's barrel into his hat before cocking the repeater's hammer.\n\nHe stood with his feet spread apart and his Winchester's barrel resting on his right shoulder as he watched the four men draw closer. They were already within range of his '86, but he didn't want to risk any of them making it to the ranch house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "Charlie shouted, \"What's he doin'?\"\n\nPhil yelled back, \"He's figurin' we're gonna ride into Winchester range before we open up. But we're gonna spread out before then. We'll come at him from three directions. Pokey, you take the right and Lou, you take the far left and Charlie, you go between me and Lou.\"\n\nPhil slowed his gelding before they could reply then watched as they separated. He kept going straight toward the standing lawyer until he was about two hundred yards away and suddenly pulled up.\n\nHe dismounted, then checked to his left and right to wait for the others to step down. He'd let them get closer and when the lawyer started firing, he'd hit the dirt and wait to see if they scored a hit. He'd save his ammunition." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "As the drama in the eastern pastures of the Double D was unfolding, his four Ranger friends were escorting two prisoners into Junction City. Tyler and Pete had spotted a rider entering the road in front of them as Felipe and Homer were removing the deputy's stinky gag. They suspected that he was the stranger that they'd been told about, so after a brief interview, they had decided to play it safe and bound his wrists.\n\nBy the time they entered the jail to deliver their prisoners, it was much too late to be able to help Morgan." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "Morgan was impressed that they hadn't been stupid enough to charge him with their Winchesters blazing. Even a great marksman would have to be very lucky to hit a man-sized target from the back of a running horse at that range. But now he faced four men on foot and hoped that none of them had any of Winchester's newer models. But even if they had the most popular model of the repeater, the 1873, they could send a .44 across the two hundred yards that separated them. He hoped that he wouldn't need to apologize to Georgette about getting shot, especially on her ranch.\n\nHe studied each of them as they approached. He only could identify Phil Arnold and wasn't surprised to find him directly in front. He noticed that the leader was also further away and slowing down. Each of the others was already closer.\n\nBut he wanted to give them a chance to surrender, even though he suspected they'd just answer with gunfire.\n\nHe left his Winchester's barrel on his shoulder as he shouted, \"Mister Arnold, I'm a captain in the Texas Rangers and I'm giving you a chance to throw down your rifles and give yourselves up. Right now. you're just guilty of fraud, so you won't hang for your crime. Why risk death if it's unnecessary?\"\n\nPhil stopped walking and yelled, \"If you were really a Ranger, then you woulda known that we'll all hang for what happened in Concho County. So, I reckon you're lyin' about ownin' that badge. I bet you're lyin' about bein' a lawyer, too.\"\n\n\"Believe what you want, Arnold. I have four more Rangers coming and I already convinced Sheriff Lusk and his deputies to stay out of the fight. If you're confessing to a murder, then I guess you'll hang in Concho County if you don't die on the Double D.\"\n\nPhil shouted, \"You're the one who's gonna die, Kane. Then we'll pay a visit to the widow and see what she's willin' to pay to keep her ranch. Maybe she'll give us the whole ranch if we promise not to hurt her kids.\"\n\nMorgan's jaw muscles tightened as he pulled his Winchester into his hands and shouted, \"You're not going to hurt anyone, Arnold.\"\n\nPhil expected Morgan to start firing. So, before the lawyer could even bring his rifle into a firing position, Phil flopped onto his belly and aimed his carbine at the self-proclaimed Texas Ranger.\n\nWhen Pokey saw Phil drop, he quickly aimed at Morgan and fired. The echo of his shot touched off the explosion of rapid firing.\n\nThey were still about a hundred and fifty yards away when they began firing, but Morgan heard one of their .44s buzz past his left ear as two more burst into the ground nearby.\n\nHe had to ignore the bullets as he aimed at the man who had fired first. His sights had barely settled when he squeezed his trigger.\n\nPokey had just fired his second shot when Morgan's .45 ripped into his chest. It splintered two ribs then mangled his left lung before it buried itself in the body of the fifth thoracic vertebra. He collapsed to his knees then rolled onto his side. He was still alive but was having difficulty breathing and bleeding profusely.\n\nPhil watched Pokey fall and was startled by the damage he had witnessed. But in the staccato of gunfire, he hadn't noticed the different sound made by Morgan's Winchester.\n\nOn the far left, Lou Crump hadn't seen Pokey go down as he was concentrating on his target as he fired and continued to walk closer. He didn't even notice that Phil was on the ground or that Charlie had stopped moving. Charlie was still firing but had seen Pokey fall in his peripheral vision and wasn't about to make himself a better target. His mistake was believing that Pokey had been hit by a lucky shot from a Winchester like his.\n\nMorgan had shifted his sights to the closest target on his right. He had him in his sights when he felt a punch and a slam on the outside of his right thigh. He avoided wasting a round but had to reacquire his target. He could feel warm blood flowing down his leg but ignored it as he settled his sights and fired. He saw the second man spin and fall to the ground before he quickly shifted his sights to the only one of them who was still standing.\n\nWhen Charlie saw Lou's violent reaction to being hit, he suddenly realized that it hadn't been a lucky shot that had dropped Pokey. His Winchester's barrel was already hot, but he had just levered in a fresh cartridge, so he decided to take one last shot before following Phil's example and getting on his belly.\n\nHe aimed at the lawyer and just as he prepared to fire, he saw a blast of gunsmoke erupt from Morgan's muzzle. Almost in the same instant, he felt a hammer blow in the center of his chest then watched as the blue, sunny sky filled his vision. He fell onto his back and just stared as he felt the sun's warmth embrace him.\n\nPhil knew he was alone, but he also saw the bright red stain on the lawyer's right leg. While he knew that he was already in range of the man's rifle, Phil believed that it wouldn't be long before the lawyer passed out from blood loss. But he didn't want to wait him out. He was sure that all the gunfire would soon bring others, so he took the chance to make his break.\n\nHe jumped to his feet and quickly raced back to his horse, keeping a shifting, zigzag path as he sprinted. He had expected that Kane would start firing as soon as he stood, but Phil hadn't heard a single gunshot as he sprinted to his horse.\n\nHe didn't waste time looking behind him as he ran. Pokey's horse was attached to the packhorse, so he'd mount his animal then take Pokey's reins. Once he was in the saddle and moving, he'd check on the lawyer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "The reason Morgan hadn't fired was that Phil was running away, and Morgan wasn't about to shoot him in the back. He picked up his shotgun, then held both Winchesters in his big right hand before he pulled on his half-crushed Stetson. He limped to Oscar who, thankfully, hadn't moved very far and slipped the Winchesters into their scabbards.\n\nAfter seeing Phil heading for his horse, he opened his left saddlebag and pulled out a small towel and a pigging string. He ripped open the hole the bullet had left in his soggy pants then stuffed the towel into the expanded tear. He loosely tied the pigging string around the crude bandage and looked south. Arnold was already riding away and hanging onto one of the other horses which was attached to the packhorse.\n\nHe painfully mounted then took a few seconds to reshape his hat before he set Oscar to a medium trot. He didn't feel light-headed and suspected that the slug in his leg had partially plugged the hole to keep most of the blood from leaking out. But he knew he was still losing blood and he needed to have the bullet removed and the wound cleaned and sutured soon. He also had to decide whether to chase Phil Arnold or let his men handle it.\n\nHe was about four hundred yards behind Arnold when he started the chase, and Morgan was sure that he wouldn't turn toward the ranch house. They both knew that many of the ranch hands had probably heard the gunfire and Arnold knew they'd be waiting for him if he headed west.\n\nMorgan still hoped that he turned right because he had the angle, but he soon realized that Arnold was riding due south.\n\nAs he passed the three bodies, he said, \"I'll leave this mess to you, Tyler.\"\n\nHe was riding slightly slower than Arnold and his three horses, so by the time he passed the other two horses, he was almost five hundred yards back. He didn't want to push Oscar, so he just kept the same pace.\n\nHe looked west and saw the barn's roof on the horizon. Hopefully, he'd be sleeping in its loft with his friends tonight. Felipe would have to remove the bullet and suture the wound first, but he was a talented medical fixer upper.\n\nAs he continued to follow Arnold, he wondered if his men had already started following him. He assumed they had brought the lookout deputy back to the jail and after talking to the sheriff, had trailed after him. He suspected that Tyler and Felipe would follow his trail and Homer and Pete would head back to the ranch house using the road. But whatever actions they took, Morgan was confident that they'd take care of the messes he left in his wake. They always had." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "After they'd led their two prisoners into the jail, it didn't take long for Sheriff Lusk to convince Tyler that Morgan had made them an offer to avoid prison. Tyler knew it was something that the lawyer side of their boss would do. After they put the protesting Mike Hilliard into a cell, the four Rangers crossed the street to check out the office of the Long Star Land Company.\n\nWhen they found the front door still locked, they walked around the back, spotted the open doorway and it was Pete who discovered the trail heading east.\n\nThey retrieved their horses and Tyler told Pete and Homer to quickly return to the ranch house and tell them what happened. He and Felipe would follow Morgan's trail and hope that Felipe didn't need to patch him up.\n\nBy the time the Rangers left Junction City, the distant gunfire had ended." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "John knocked on the back door and waited for Mrs. Driscoll or Millie.\n\nGeorgette and Stella were still talking in the kitchen, so when they heard his loud knock, Georgette left the table and soon opened the door.\n\n\"Do you have news, John?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, ma'am. I just figured you oughta know. I've got the boys set up in kind of a ring around the house like Morg said. Jonas and Charlie told me that they heard what sounded like gunfire from the east. It only lasted a minute or so, but none of the others heard it at all. It could have been their imagination. But I wanted to ask you if you wanted me to send a couple of men out that way to check.\"\n\n\"No. I don't want them to take the risk. We'll know soon enough.\"\n\nJohn nodded and replied, \"I'll let you know if we hear anything else,\" then turned and walked back to his waiting horse.\n\nGeorgette left the door open as she returned to her seat.\n\nStella looked at her worried face and said, \"You made the right decision, George. Morg would have been displeased if he saw two ranch hands trying to do his job.\"\n\n\"But I'm still worried. I know he's a Ranger and an excellent marksman, but I still wish he'd waited for his friends to join him before going into town.\"\n\n\"I think he made the right decision, too. If they learned who he was then he, Tyler and the others would be riding into a disaster. I'm sure we'll see them riding down your access road within an hour.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\nStella smiled and said, \"Your children seem just as anxious for his return as you are.\"\n\nGeorgette quietly replied, \"They think the world of him. He makes them laugh and feel proud of themselves. Neither of them ever knew their father. I guess that was a blessing.\"\n\n\"Maybe. But children need a father as much as a mother, and boys even more so.\"\n\n\"At least we have an abundance of men around.\"\n\n\"It's not the same, George. I know that I can never be a mother, but I remember what it was like when I was growing up. I had two older brothers and my father died when I was three. My mother didn't remarry, but we had a string of so-called 'uncles' who lived with us. My brothers grew more rebellious with each new uncle and finally ran off with one of them. They were both killed when my uncle's gang tried to hold up a train.\"\n\n\"Then you lived alone with your mother?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. My uncles continued to stay with her and soon, they started visiting me in my small room. I begged my mother to keep them away, but she didn't. I was sixteen before I learned that my mother was charging them for the visits. That's when I ran away and entered the profession for which I was already well-trained.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Stella.\"\n\n\"I thought I was going to die sick and alone, but then Carlotta shot Bill and Morg arrived. I may not be able to have children, but I still thank God every day for sending Morg to save us. We all do.\"\n\n\"Do you really believe that he is God's instrument?\"\n\n\"Maybe not like a prophet or an angel, but God gave him an enormous amount of compassion and generosity. I can't imagine another man doing all that he's done just because he thought it was the right thing to do. He told us that it was to balance what his brother had done, but none of us believe it. We know he wouldn't have acted any differently if he had arrived in Kerrville as Bill's lawyer and not his brother.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're right. He's done so much for me, and I know he's not even going to send me a bill. He even said that he would have paid me to handle the case. I'll never be able to repay him for everything.\"\n\nStella smiled as she took Georgette's hands and said, \"I think you already have, George. Did you see the letter he sent to Tyler?\"\n\n\"No. Did you read it?\"\n\n\"Of course. I'm not going to reveal its contents. But suffice it to say that it was just a few lines in that letter that inspired me to come with Tyler. I wanted to meet you, George.\"\n\nGeorgette sighed then said, \"But he'll be returning to Kerrville in a couple of days. He has his law practice and the saloon, and I have to run the Double D and raise my children.\"\n\nStella could sense her frustration, so she simply replied, \"We'll see.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "Phil looked back and was surprised that Kane hadn't turned to the ranch house to get his wound treated. He was almost a half a mile ahead now, so he decided to slow a bit to keep the lawyer following. He expected to see him fall from his horse within an hour. Then he'd head back and finish off the bastard. He had no idea that there were two more Rangers ten miles behind them.\n\nMorgan checked his wound and found that it was leaking blood past the soaked towel. It was only a trickle, but he had hoped to find none at all. He was already a good hour from the ranch house and still heading south. He had passed another large herd and a corral of horses but hadn't seen a single ranch hand. He may have wanted to find someone but was still pleased that they had followed his instructions.\n\nHe was still clear-headed but knew that his heavy perspiration and the intense heat would add to the effect of his blood loss. He decided to close the gap despite the discomfort. He needed to get within range of his Winchester now or Arnold might escape. After Oscar was moving faster, Morgan took a long drink from his canteen to replace some of the fluid he was losing from his pores and his wound." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "Three minutes after slowing down, Phil looked back and was stunned to see the lawyer much closer than he'd expected. The tall rider didn't look like he was wobbly yet, either. So, he added a bit more speed to match Kane's. Now he was confident that the lawyer would keep up the chase." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Tyler looked down at the two women and asked, \"You heard gunfire, ma'am?\"\n\n\"We all did. It was far enough away so we couldn't see who was shooting, but it stopped after a couple of minutes.\"\n\nTyler said, \"Thanks for your help,\" before he and Felipe rode south at a fast clip.\n\nFelipe said, \"I hope we don't find Morg on the ground.\"\n\n\"I'd be surprised if we did, but I just hope we can find him and get some answers.\"\n\n\"Me, too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "John was sitting in one of the rocking chairs when he spotted two riders coming down the access road. It didn't take long for him to identify them as two of Morg's Ranger friends.\n\nHe walked to the door, opened it and found Millie in the front room with Timmy and Lucy.\n\n\"Millie, two of the Rangers are comin'. Can you tell Mrs. Driscoll?\"\n\nBefore she could answer, she heard rapid footsteps from the hallway.\n\nShe said, \"I think she heard you, John,\" just before Georgette and Stella entered the great room.\n\nThe room emptied and soon everyone was waiting on the porch for Homer and Pete.\n\nThey soon pulled up in front of the ranch house and quickly dismounted. Two ranch hands led their horses to the trough as they climbed the porch steps.\n\nStella quickly asked, \"What happened, Pete?\"\n\n\"We were about halfway to town when we found a deputy off the road. Morg had tied him up and gagged him. We put him on his horse then spotted that stranger we heard about and brought him along. When we got to the jail, we talked to the sheriff. I reckon that Morg gave him some kinda deal, so we gave him back his deputy and left the other feller in his jail.\n\n\"The sheriff told us that Morg went to see that Arnold character but didn't find him. He said that Morg mounted his horse and rode off about an hour or so before we showed up. When we checked the place, we found a trail headin' east and figured that Morg was chasin' 'em. Tyler told us to come back here and wait then he and Felipe followed the trail. That's all I know, Stella.\"\n\n\"Some of the hands reported hearing some gunfire from the east but weren't sure about it. I think you and Homer should head that way. You'll probably meet up with Tyler and Felipe.\"\n\nPete said, \"We'll do that,\" then turned and waved to Homer before they hurried from the porch.\n\nTimmy asked, \"Is Mister Kane is chasing those outlaws all by himself?\"\n\nGeorgette looked down as she answered, \"Yes, dear. But I'm sure he'll be all right.\"\n\nTimmy grinned and exclaimed, \"He's gonna get 'em all, Mama!\"\n\nShe patted his shoulder before she took Lucy's hand and entered the house.\n\nStella smiled at the boy and said, \"Let's follow your mother and sister. Maybe your Aunt Millie will sneak you a cookie.\"\n\nTimmy didn't care about cookies at the moment. He'd been surprised when his mother didn't smile when he'd told her that Mister Kane would kill all of the bad men. She seemed sad and he didn't know why." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 102", + "text": "Tyler stood over Pokey Jones' body and said, \"There are three bodies and only two horses. It looks like that last one took two horses with him. I think that one of those horses was their packhorse.\"\n\nFelipe replied, \"I'm sure you're right, Tyler. But it looks like Morg took a hit. That was a good amount of blood on the ground back where he must have been standing. I think he's gonna need my help.\"\n\n\"Let's get moving. He can't be that far ahead.\"\n\nFelipe nodded before the two Rangers mounted and set their horses to a fast trot heading south. There was no need to follow the trail as they should be able to see Morg from a long distance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "He'd been following Arnold for almost two hours before Morgan began feeling the effect of his blood loss. The last time he'd checked, even the trickle had dried into a dark crust. He knew the wound had stopped leaking, but the combination of heat and the massive sweat his body was producing to keep its temperature down was taking its toll. He'd emptied his canteen and now they were on the desert-like southern sections of the ranch and the next creek wasn't until they entered Kerr County.\n\nHe wasn't sure that he could keep up the chase much longer and decided that his best option now was to wait for his friends to arrive. He'd dismount and let Oscar rest while he waited. He expected that Arnold would be ecstatic when he realized he was no longer being chased.\n\nMorgan was only six hundred yards behind Phil Arnold when he pulled back on his reins. He slowly dismounted and pulled his Winchester shotgun from its scabbard, just because it was on the left side. He glanced at Arnold who was still riding away, then pulled off his hat and wiped his brow. After replacing his Stetson, he headed to the only natural seat in the vicinity; a flattened rock about fifty feet away.\n\nAfter he sat down, he looked north in the hope of seeing some of his friends. He continued to watch as he calculated their expected arrival time. It was an imprecise process as he didn't even know the time that they'd reached the Double D. For all he knew, they could still be in Kerrville having a cold beer. He closed his eyes and rubbed his dry lips as he thought about a giant mug of cold beer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "Phil Arnold grinned when he checked his backtrail. The lawyer hadn't fallen from his saddle but must have realized he couldn't go on. Phil released Pokey's horse and turned his gelding back to the north. He pulled his Winchester and set the horse to a slow trot as he watched Kane. If the lawyer was so weak that he gave up the chase, Phil was convinced that he wouldn't be capable of hitting a target unless he was close enough to shake hands.\n\nMorgan had given up trying to figure out when his friends would arrive but was still dreaming about that cold beer as he stared north. He could almost taste the bitter sweetness when he felt as if a bear's paw slapped him in the face.\n\n\"You're woolgathering!\" he mumbled then turned to look south again.\n\nHe was startled to see Phil Arnold just two hundred yards away and coming at him with his Winchester ready to fire. He didn't have enough time to reach Oscar and his repeater, so he had to make do with what he had.\n\nMorgan swore as he cocked his shotgun's hammer then rolled onto his stomach. He didn't lift the Winchester as he wasn't sure he could keep the sights steady. He was grateful that the Winchester he did have didn't require the accuracy of the rifle he had left with Oscar. But it didn't have the range and Arnold would be able to start firing soon.\n\nPhil slowed his horse to a walk to make keep his Winchester from bouncing. When he saw the lawyer roll onto his stomach, Phil was sure that the man was so weak that he couldn't stand. He was already in range, but Phil wanted a better angle, so he held his fire as he passed within eighty yards.\n\nMorgan still didn't lift his Winchester as he watched Arnold slowly approach. He didn't understand why the outlaw hadn't fired yet but was grateful for whatever reason that made him hold off pulling his trigger.\n\nHe continued to watch and hoped that he wouldn't have to fire a second shot because he wasn't sure he'd be able to lever in a new shell.\n\nWhen he was around fifty yards out, Phil aimed his Winchester at the prostrate lawyer. He squeezed his trigger and watched his .44 explode into the ground just eight inches from the lawyer's right elbow. He quickly levered in a fresh cartridge and fired his second shot.\n\nHe expected to hear the lawyer scream in pain when he didn't see any nearby bullet strikes. He didn't bring another round into the chamber as he stared at the unmoving lawyer. Maybe he'd killed him almost instantly.\n\nMorgan knew exactly where that second shot had gone. It had burrowed into the earth near the junction of his legs. He wasn't about to hope for another miss. He knew that Phil was close enough, so he had to risk taking his shot now.\n\nPhil's horse was still walking closer to the lawyer when Phil saw the man that he thought to be dead suddenly lift his head and his rifle. He was close enough to realize that he wasn't looking down the bore of a repeater. He hurriedly rammed his lever forward when he saw the lawyer's shotgun bellow a massive cloud of gunsmoke. Just a small fraction of a second, he was unable to see at all as eighteen pellets of lead blasted into his face and shoulders. He couldn't scream in pain as he fell back across his horse's rump.\n\nHis boots were hooked into his stirrups as he bounced on the haunches of his startled horse. His lifeless arms flopped as the horse began to twist until Phil's left boot popped free. His body then fell off the right and was dragged for another fifty yards before the ankle snapped and Phil Arnold finally came to earth in a dusty heap. The horse calmed after he felt free of the man and soon turned to rejoin the others.\n\nMorgan had seen Arnold fall but just laid his shotgun down then closed his eyes and rested his head on his forearm. He was simply too tired to move. He hoped that his friends would arrive soon, but he needed a nap before they showed up." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "Tyler and Felipe hadn't heard the gunfire because they were too far away, so they just maintained the same speed.\n\nHomer and Pete spotted them in the distance and picked up the pace to catch up.\n\nFive minutes later, when Tyler checked their backtrail, he spotted them.\n\nHe loudly said, \"Homer and Pete are coming,\" then pulled off his hat and wheeled it in wide circles to have them follow. He and Felipe didn't slow down but continued to ride south hoping to see Morgan soon.\n\nMorgan was another five miles south as he slept under the hot Texas sun. His hat's wide brim protected the back of his neck and the left side of his face from its burning rays." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "As they continued to ride without seeing Morgan, Tyler loudly said, \"I think we're closer to Kerrville by now. You don't think he chased him that far; do you?\"\n\nFelipe yelled back, \"I wouldn't put it past him.\"\n\nTyler was about to reply when they crossed over a rise, and he spotted horses then bodies.\n\nHe shouted, \"Son of a bitch!\" then he and Felipe spurred their horses into a gallop.\n\nPete and Homer had cut the gap to about a mile when they saw their friends shoot away. They knew that there was only one reason for them to torture their horses, so they both urged their animals to a faster pace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "Morgan didn't even hear their horses' loud hoofbeats as they pounded the Texas ground fifty yards away.\n\nTyler and Felipe pulled their exhausted horses to a dusty stop and hurriedly dismounted believing that Morgan was dead.\n\nFelipe was the first to reach him and quickly dropped to his knees, He pressed his open palm against Morgan's chest and felt a strong heartbeat\n\nHe looked up at Tyler with a grin and exclaimed, \"He's alive!\"\n\nMorgan slowly opened his eyes and croaked, \"Felipe?\"\n\nTyler ripped his canteen from his saddle, hurried to Morgan's side, then knelt beside Morgan while Felipe pulled the bloody towel from beneath his ripped britches. The dried blood had glued the cloth to his skin, so when he yanked it away, Morgan grunted in pain.\n\nFelipe quickly said, \"That slug is still in there, Tyler. I can see the bottom of the bullet.\"\n\n\"Let me give him some water.\"\n\nFilipe said, \"Okay. I'll need some to wash the wound when you're finished.\"\n\nTyler had to roll him onto his side before he lifted his head and carefully began to pour water down his throat.\n\nMorgan greedily swallowed the lifegiving liquid and his face appreciated the water that didn't make it into his mouth.\n\nWhen Tyler handed the canteen to Felipe, he asked, \"What happened, Morg?\"\n\n\"They didn't want to give up. They wanted to shoot it out. They should have just surrendered.\"\n\n\"They murdered a rancher in Concho County, Morg. They were going to hang if you arrested them.\"\n\nMorgan sighed before saying, \"That's what Arnold said. I guess I should have known that. I'm better now. I can ride.\"\n\n\"Felipe will let you know if you can. Pete and Homer will be here in a minute.\"\n\n\"Good. I guess I have to apologize to George. I promised her that I wouldn't get shot again.\"\n\n\"I'm sure she'll forgive you.\"\n\n\"Don't you think she's a special lady, Tyler?\"\n\n\"I didn't get to talk to her much, Morg. But I'll take your word for it. You told me that Stella was special, and you were right about her.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you noticed.\"\n\nFelipe handed the canteen back to Tyler and said, \"I could take out the bullet and sew it up here, but I think he'd do better if we took him to Doc Nagy. Kerrville's only about another hour's ride.\"\n\n\"Alright. We'll collect the other horses and send Pete and Homer back to the ranch with the news. We'll help Morg back to town.\"\n\nMorgan said, \"I left you a real mess, Tyler. Sorry.\"\n\n\"That's alright, Morg. I'm just gonna pass the cleanup on to Pete and Homer anyway.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and was going to comment when he heard Pete and Homer approaching.\n\nTyler stood and walked a few feet away from Morgan and waited for them to pull up.\n\nWhen Pete and Homer quickly dropped to the ground, Tyler said, \"Morg took a bullet in his right thigh. It was at long range, so it's not too bad. He lost a good amount of blood, so we're gonna take him into Kerrville to see Doc Nagy. It's closer than the ranch anyway.\"\n\nPete asked, \"What do you want us to do, Tyler?\"\n\n\"I need you to gather the bodies. Pete, you take them to Junction City. Leave the bodies with the sheriff but bring their horses back to the ranch. Homer can ride to the ranch and tell them what happened. We'll take their packhorse with us because I'm sure that Morg will want to check it for evidence. I don't want that last one we locked up to get off because they believe his claim that he wasn't one of them.\"\n\nHomer asked, \"What do we do after we get back to the ranch?\"\n\n\"Stay there overnight. Have Stella drive Morg's buckboard back to Kerrville in the morning. Don't have Felix pull it. Use one of the horses that will be carrying a body to town.\"\n\nHomer said, \"Okay, Tyler. Mind if we talk to Morg for a minute before we start pickin' up bodies?\"\n\n\"I reckon he won't mind.\"\n\nTyler only granted Pete and Homer a little more than a minute of conversation with Morgan before he sent them to work.\n\nAs they mounted, Tyler and Felipe helped Morgan to his feet. Then Tyler picked up the Winchester shotgun.\n\nMorgan protested, saying, \"I'm okay. I'm just a bit hobbled.\"\n\nTyler looked at Felipe who shrugged. After they released his arms, Morgan straightened his hat and took a deep breath. He didn't want to make a liar out of himself and fall flat on his face.\n\nHe slowly walked toward Oscar knowing that Tyler and Felipe were just a couple of feet behind him waiting to grab him if he started to fall. He focused on his gelding and was able to maintain a staggered but straight line.\n\nWhen he reached Oscar, he grabbed his saddle horn and relaxed. Now came the painful job of getting into the saddle. He set his left boot in the stirrup, leaving all of his weight on his injured leg. It wasn't nearly as bad as he had anticipated, which bothered him. He quickly mounted and after setting his right foot into his stirrup, he looked down at Tyler and smiled.\n\n\"Let's pick up that packhorse and pay a visit to Doctor Nagy.\"\n\nTyler slid the shotgun into its scabbard then growled, \"Stay there and wait for us to get mounted, Morg.\"\n\n\"I'm anxiously waiting, sir.\"\n\nTyler wondered why Morg seemed so cheerful, but he and Felipe turned and quickly mounted their horses.\n\nFelipe rode ahead to take the packhorse while Tyler pulled up beside Morgan.\n\nMorgan was still smiling at him as they started riding south at a medium trot. The reason Morgan was acting almost as if he'd had one too many beers was that he was concerned about his wound and didn't want to appear worried. It should be hurting much more than it did.\n\nHe'd been shot before, and the others were much more painful after the adrenalin left. This one seemed almost numb which made no sense to him. The bullet had only penetrated an inch or so into his muscle. It hadn't hit an artery because he had stopped the bleeding. He'd talk to Ed Nagy when he was laying on the doctor's table." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "Homer and Pete had covered Phil Arnold's face and head with his slicker before hanging him over his saddle and tying him down. They tied the other saddled horse behind the one carrying Arnold and headed north.\n\nBefore they reached the other bodies, they were met by four ranch hands John had sent to help if necessary. So, Pete and the four cowhands headed north while Homer rode to the ranch house to tell them what happened on the Double D's eastern range." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "Georgette had been anxious when John told them that two of the men had heard gunfire, but then grew more so after learning that Morgan had chased after all four of the outlaws by himself.\n\nShe and Stella had dragged chairs from the kitchen onto the back porch and were watching for anyone to appear on the horizon with news. Despite Stella's reassurances, by the time they spotted a lone rider in the distance, Georgette was a nervous wreck. They stood and watched until he was close enough to be identified.\n\nStella said, \"That's Homer. He'll let us know what happened.\"\n\nGeorgette stared at the distant rider and asked, \"Why didn't Morg come with him?\"\n\n\"You've got to stop worrying, George. Morg is probably staying to clean up his mess. He'd just send one of his men back to let us know what happened.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded but didn't believe a word she said. She felt responsible for anything that happened to Morgan. She honestly wished she had just accepted the court order and sold every single four-legged creature on the Double D. She'd split most of the proceeds with the men and leave with Timmy and Lucy. The ranch wasn't worth any good man's life, and Morgan was the best man she'd ever met.\n\nThe Double D may have been legally hers, but she never felt as if she really owned it. Don had inherited it from his dedicated father. She believed that had her husband lived, Timmy would inherit a much-degraded Double D, if he inherited anything at all.\n\nBy the time Homer reached the ranch house, John and Wilma had arrived. Georgette had asked Millie to keep Timmy and Lucy in the main room in case he delivered bad news.\n\nHomer soon pulled up and dismounted.\n\nStella calmly asked, \"What happened, Homer?\"\n\n\"Morg caught up with 'em a few miles east of here. He dismounted and told 'em to throw down their guns. He didn't know that they were wanted for murder down in Concho County. They knew they'd hang, so they musta figured that if they killed Morg, they'd be able to escape. He got three of 'em, but the top man, that Phil Arnold feller, ran off. Morg took a long-range hit in his right leg before he chased the last one.\"\n\nGeorgette quickly asked, \"How bad is it?\"\n\n\"Not bad, ma'am. Felipe said he could see the bullet. But they were so far south when we found him that it was faster to take him to Kerrville.\"\n\nStella said, \"I assume that Morg didn't lose the last gunfight.\"\n\nHomer smiled as he replied, \"No, ma'am, he didn't. Me and Pete loaded up Arnold's body and were gonna pick up the others when we ran into the four ranch hands. They were gonna help Pete pick up the other three and take 'em to town. They'll bring the horses back here when they're done. I reckon that'll be in about three hours or so.\"\n\nStella asked, \"Did Tyler say what he wanted us to do after they returned?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. He said for us to stay the night. Tomorrow, when we leave, you should drive the buckboard using one of the four outlaws' horses in harness. You know Morg wouldn't want Felix to tug it all the way to Kerrville.\"\n\nJohn said, \"I'll have one of the men take care of your horse and you can come inside to answer any questions Mrs. Driscoll might have.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nHe tied his tired gelding's reins to the hitchrail, stepped onto the small porch then followed everyone inside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "Ninety minutes later, Doctor Edward M. Nagy examined Morgan's bullet wound and said, \"This is going to hurt, Morg.\"\n\n\"I didn't think it would be fun, Doc.\"\n\nDoctor Nagy snickered then looked at Felipe and said, \"You were smart not to pull the bullet out, Felipe. It's going to bleed profusely when it stops being a cork. He can handle more blood loss now, but I'm not sure he would have made it if you tried to remove it out in the open range.\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure, but I reckoned you'd do a better job anyway.\"\n\nJ.R. looked at Tyler and said, \"I'm going to go through the loads on the packhorse. Are you coming?\"\n\n\"Sure. Felipe can go to The Bluebonnet and tell Jim and the ladies why we had to bring Morg here.\"\n\nAfter they'd all gone, Doctor Nagy started working on Morgan's wound. His wife stood nearby to assist.\n\nWhen he stuck his forceps into the wound to grab the bullet, Morgan passed out, which was a blessing. After the bullet was dropped into a porcelain bowl, the doctor had to explore the wound for any remaining foreign materials that would fester and cause an infection." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "Homer left the ranch house to share some much-needed chow with the ranch hands. He expected that he'd spend a lot more time answering their questions.\n\nMillie was cooking their supper while Stella sat at the kitchen table with Georgette and her children.\n\nStella was sure that Georgette wanted to talk to her privately, but that would have to wait until Timmy and Lucy were put to bed. But Timmy's first question was what Stella believed was probably foremost in Georgette's mind.\n\n\"Mama, is Mister Kane coming back?\"\n\nGeorgette glanced at Stella before replying, \"I don't know, dear. He has to get better and when he's strong again, I'm sure he'll have to help other people with their problems, too.\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Then he's never coming back?\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Lucy as she replied, \"I don't know, sweetheart,\" then shifted her eyes back to Stella.\n\nStella smiled at Lucy before saying, \"Mister Kane is a very busy man, Lucy. But I know how much he likes you and Timmy. I'd be surprised if he doesn't visit you soon.\"\n\nBoth children grinned as Lucy said, \"Good. I like Mister Kane. He says that I'm a princess and Timmy is a Ranger like him.\"\n\n\"I think he's right.\"\n\nLucy then asked, \"Do you have a little girl, too?\"\n\n\"No, dear. But if I did, I would want her to be as pretty and as sweet as you.\"\n\n\"I think you would make a good mama. Just like ours.\"\n\nStella leaned over and kissed Lucy on the forehead and wished Bill Kane was roasting in the deepest part of hell.\n\nGeorgette knew that Lucy was just being a sweet, innocent child, but had seen the flash of pain in Stella's eyes. She was certain that Stella and the other women Morg had rescued all endured that same sense of loss. It probably only surfaced when each of them was reminded of what they could never have.\n\nBut Timmy and Lucy were both happy knowing that Mister Kane would return to visit, and that allowed Georgette to change the topic. She chose the very unmotherly subject of the shootout. She suspected that Timmy would take over the conversation until suppertime if not until they were tucked into bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "Morgan opened his eyes and turned his head to the right.\n\nTyler grinned and said, \"Glad to have you back, Morg. The doc said we could take you to The Bluebonnet when you woke up. How do you feel?\"\n\n\"I'm okay. So, I guess we can head over there. But I don't want to cause a lot of ladies embarrassment when I walk through town without my britches.\"\n\nFelipe laughed before he said, \"I don't think the ladies would be afraid to watch, Morg. But you can put these on,\" then tossed a pair of pants onto Morgan's chest.\n\nMorgan sat up and swung his legs off the table. He was relieved when he felt a sharp stab of pain from his wound.\n\nTyler said, \"We left Oscar in your barn then cleaned and reloaded your guns and put them back where they belong.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Tyler. Let me get these on.\"\n\nPulling on the britches wasn't as difficult as he'd expected. Once he was on his feet, he found his boots, hat, and jacket on a nearby table.\n\nBefore he left, he settled Doctor Nagy's exorbitant ten-dollar bill and was given the .44 that had been pulled from his leg. The doctor gave him his standard instructions about possible infection and when to return to have his sutures removed, then Morgan limped out of the doctor's office with Tyler and Felipe.\n\nWhen they entered The Bluebonnet, Morgan was greeted by his friends who escorted him to his apartment's bedroom. After they entered, the women stripped him of his jacket and hat before they made him lay down in his large, but not enormous, bed.\n\nThey had already moved most of the chairs from the kitchen into the bedroom, so once he was on his bed, he found himself surrounded. Before they began asking him their questions, one of the new dealers arrived with a large tray of food, complete with a thick steak as ordered by Doctor Nagy. They sat silently as he devoured his meal, and he didn't mind having them watch. When he finished, Sally set the tray on his bedside table and the questioning began.\n\nThe interrogation wasn't as intense as he expected as Tyler and Felipe had already told them most of the story. But what did surprise him was that most were about Mrs. Driscoll and not the shootout." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "When Pete and the four ranch hands returned with the horses, Al Perkins assigned them to stalls in the barn. After they were unsaddled and settled, Pete joined Homer in the chow house. With Morg back in Kerrville, there was enough room for them in the bunkhouse when they finished chowing down and swapping tales." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "Stella and Georgette had moved to the main room after Timmy and Lucy had been put to bed. Millie had remained in the kitchen to clean up after dinner.\n\nStella was surprised by Georgette's first question when she asked, \"Have you driven the buckboard before?\"\n\n\"Um, yes. It's not difficult. I'm sure we'll reach Kerrville by early afternoon.\"\n\n\"Good. Can you write to me in a few days to let me know how Mister Kane is doing?\"\n\n\"Of course. But you could visit and ask him yourself.\"\n\nGeorgette shook her head as she said, \"I can't leave until I'm sure that Sheriff Lusk doesn't come up with some other scheme.\"\n\nStella's eyebrows rose as she asked, \"You think he was behind the whole Long Star Land Company plot?\"\n\n\"It's just a suspicion. But I wouldn't be surprised if he had requested Mister Arnold to come to Junction City. Please don't tell Mister Kane that I mentioned it. He'd probably leave his sickbed and ride to Junction City to interrogate the sheriff.\"\n\nStella didn't miss Georgette's use of 'Mister Kane'. She'd been calling him 'Morg' since they met, but for some reason, she had reverted to addressing him as if he was a stranger. She didn't understand why Georgette had made the shift but wasn't about to ask.\n\nInstead, she simply said, \"You're probably right. If I told him when we return tomorrow, he'd be on the road within an hour.\"\n\n\"Do you and Tyler share many meals with him?\"\n\n\"Not many. Normally, one of the women who work in The Bluebonnet brings him his supper and he dines alone.\"\n\nStella then added, \"He sleeps alone, too. Tyler said he can't recall Morgan ever spending any private time with a woman.\"\n\nStella thought she had inspired Georgette to ask more about Morg's lack of experience with women, but she didn't.\n\n\"Mister Kane said that he wasn't going to bill me for all he did. I know that he doesn't need the money, but can you ask his clerk to send a very large bill to me?\"\n\n\"Maybe. I'm not sure that Jim would do it and risk Morg's ire just before he took his bar exam.\"\n\n\"Please ask him anyway. When you write your letter, let me know if he refused and I'll send you the draft. Okay?\"\n\n\"You'd get me in trouble if you did, George. Just let it go. Morg doesn't charge many of his clients and he'd be embarrassed if not ashamed to learn that you'd sent a large draft.\"\n\n\"I don't understand, but I'll do as you ask.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"He said that he inherited all of his father's estate but had given a good amount of money to his older brother when he'd asked. Is that why he doesn't charge clients?\"\n\n\"Mostly. He makes a good living from The Bluebonnet and his share of The Lonely Armadillo now, too. We think he's still trying to make amends for his older brother. Did he tell you about Carlotta?\"\n\nGeorgette nodded as she replied, \"Yes. He explained how he'd found her in the church and managed to sneak her out of Kerrville. He left her in San Antonio with a good family and she's married now. She had a little girl and is already pregnant with her second.\"\n\n\"That's right. But I'm sure that he didn't tell you about his father's house.\"\n\n\"Only that he'd inherited it. Is there more?\"\n\n\"Much more. When he moved to Kerrville, he didn't sell the large house where he'd had his offices. He waited until he received a letter from Carlotta letting him know that she was getting married. Then he arranged to give the house to her and her new husband. So, Carlotta is now living with her husband and little Mary in the same house where Morgan spent his childhood.\"\n\n\"He just gave it to her?\"\n\n\"The house and all of its contents. He even left the nice carriage and team in the carriage house.\"\n\nStella was disappointed again when Georgette steered the conversation back to Sheriff Lusk and his still unidentified prisoner." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "Morgan was allowed his privacy and the first thing he did was to draw a hot bath. When he stripped, he removed the blood-spotted bandage and checked his newly sutured wound. It was swollen and discolored, but he didn't think the hot, sudsy water would hurt it. Doctor Nagy had given him four more bandages, but he didn't think he'd need them all.\n\nAs he soaked in the tub, he was surprised when he discovered how utterly tired he felt. He blamed his advancing years. He'd be thirty-three next March but felt as if he was sixty-three.\n\nAfter he carefully exited the tub, he drained the water and wiped the porcelain surface. He replaced his bandage then donned his thick robe and crossed the hall to his dark bedroom.\n\nOnce inside, he tossed his robe aside and slid beneath the quilt. He didn't have time to think of anything as his mental and physical exhaustion quickly drove him into a deep sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 116", + "text": "Stella didn't have much trouble falling asleep, either. She was anxious to return to Kerrville and spend some private time with Tyler. But she still wondered why Georgette had apparently lost all interest in Morg.\n\nTwo doors down the hall, Georgette was finding sleep difficult. She hadn't lost interest in Morgan at all. But after Stella had told her the real reason why he hadn't remarried, she knew that what she felt for him didn't matter. Even if he did want to marry her, she wasn't about to put him through nine months of constant worry.\n\nShe saw how much he enjoyed spending time with Timmy and Lucy, and it was nothing short of a tragedy that he wouldn't have any children of his own. Yet she wasn't about to go to Kerrville and see him. She'd pretend to be noble just as he was and let him go. Then there was her other, secret reason for not going to Kerrville." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 117", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nStella kissed Lucy and shook Timmy's hand before she smiled at Georgette and said, \"I'll post that letter soon. Maybe you should write one to Morg, too.\"\n\nGeorgette replied, \"Maybe I will,\" but Stella suspected that she never would.\n\nShe stepped down from the porch and climbed into the waiting buckboard. After she released the handbrake, she took the reins in her left hand and waved to Georgette, Millie and the children. They all waved back before she snapped the reins and turned the buckboard toward the access road.\n\nPete and Homer had waited for her to start the buckboard rolling before they waved and followed.\n\nGeorgette watched them head down the access road, then sighed and took Lucy's hand and returned to the house with Timmy walking beside her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 118", + "text": "In Kerrville, Morgan managed to dress in his suit and leave the quiet saloon on his own. He limped down the boardwalk and greeted the townsfolk he met but didn't stop to chat.\n\nHe removed his hat and entered St. Rose of Lima. After dipping his fingers in the bowl of holy water, he blessed himself and walked to the nearest pew. He grabbed the armrest and slowly genuflected with his teeth clenched.\n\nHe slid into the pew and didn't think God would object if he prayed while sitting. He wasn't sure if he'd kneel during the Mass, either.\n\nNo one seemed to mind when he sat while the rest of the congregation knelt, but he did have to kneel when he took communion. After Father Velasquez placed the host on his tongue, he laid his hand on Morgan's shoulder but didn't say a word before moving to the next supplicant.\n\nWhen Morgan exited the church, he was pleased by his decision to attend Mass. He pulled on his hat and just watched the parishioners leave. It was a beautiful morning and if he wasn't hobbled, he might even go for a ride. But he was definitely hobbled, so he began walking back to The Bluebonnet.\n\nBefore he reached his saloon, he spotted Sheriff J.R. Brown standing in front of the doorway.\n\nWhen he gimped his way close to J.R., he asked, \"What brings you by so early?\"\n\n\"I've been pounding on this door for ten minutes. I figured you might be dead after the first five minutes. Doesn't anybody else live in there?\"\n\n\"Sure, but they're all probably still asleep upstairs in their rooms. It's always busy on Saturday nights. So, what do you need?\"\n\n\"You'll be happy to know that the man that your boys locked up in Junction City is wanted for murder down in Concho County. His name is Mike Hilliard, and he was supposed to be the leader of that gang.\"\n\n\"It wasn't Arnold?\"\n\n\"Not according to the wanted posters. When Tyler told me the whole story, I checked my stack of posters and found all of 'em. They were pretty old, so I didn't even remember they were there. I've already sent a telegram to Concho County to let them know he's being held in Junction City.\"\n\n\"I'll leave it to Sheriff Lusk to handle the transfer.\"\n\n\"Do you think that poor excuse for a lawman has seen the light?\"\n\n\"Believe it or not, I think he has. I could be wrong, but we'll see. I'm not too sure about his deputies, though. I did tell them that I'd pay attention to what happens in Kimble County.\"\n\n\"At least you have jurisdiction. I'm gonna head back to the house. You can stop by the jail to give me the whole story when you feel up to it.\"\n\n\"I guess I'll see you next March.\"\n\nJ.R. chuckled, then waved before he walked past Morgan and headed home.\n\nMorgan unlocked the door and entered The Bluebonnet. It was still quiet, which wasn't unusual. He was mildly surprised that none of his friends had stopped by.\n\nHe entered his apartment and closed the door then walked to the kitchen. He usually made his own breakfast on Sundays, but he wasn't going to do much cooking. He'd make some coffee and have a big slice of the apple cake Sally had baked while he was gone.\n\nAfter filling the coffeepot and setting it on the hot plate, he started a fire then took a seat at the big table.\n\nHe set his Stetson on the table and stretched his legs under the table to alleviate the throbbing.\n\nAs he waited for the water to boil, Morgan studied his hat. It wasn't badly damaged, but it was getting a bit old. He picked it up and looked inside. The sweat stains had left an irregular white pattern, so maybe it was time to replace it.\n\nHis eyes shifted slightly to his left hand and his mind shifted as well. He set the hat on the table and splayed the fingers on his left hand and began to rotate his wedding band with his right thumb and index finger.\n\nMorgan hadn't spent much time thinking about Georgette since he left the ranch to ride into Junction City. But now that he wasn't having to focus on chasing outlaws or avoiding bullets, he let those recent memories fill his mind.\n\nHe kept twisting his wedding ring as he thought about her. She was the most remarkable woman he'd ever met, eclipsing Barbara and even Stella. But she had a ranch to run and children to raise while he lived in a saloon. It was an impossible situation.\n\nHe glanced at the coffeepot and saw steam pouring from the lid. As he stood to make his coffee, he slipped his wedding ring from his finger and dropped it into his pocket." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 119", + "text": "Morgan was in his office reading the accumulated legal paperwork when the office door opened, and Jim Cooper entered.\n\nHe set the paper on the desk and asked, \"What prompted the visit, Jim? It's Sunday, and I'm catching up on the mess you left for me.\"\n\nJim sat down then replied, \"Stella, Pete and Homer just got back. They all had things to do, so they said to let you know that they didn't have any problems after you left. They'll probably stop by and see you tomorrow. Tyler had to almost beg Stella not to bother you today.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"I imagine it took more than just begging to convince her. Did anything else happen while I was gone that I don't know about?\"\n\n\"Not much, but I do have a question. Why did the women ask you so many questions about Mrs. Driscoll? The guys seemed to understand why they did. But I'm the only one of your male friends who didn't meet her, so I didn't have a clue. They seemed disappointed in your answers, too.\"\n\n\"You know that all of them, including you, are hoping to get me married off. She's a handsome young woman but still a client. So, I spent a lot of time with her. I imagine that is what inspired the questions.\"\n\n\"It's not more than that? Tyler said that you thought she was special.\"\n\n\"I'll admit that she's a remarkable woman, Jim. But I ended her legal troubles, so she can raise her children and run her ranch in peace.\"\n\nJim nodded but had known Morgan a long time and knew when he was obfuscating. But he also understood that further questions would only lead to more defensive replies.\n\nHe asked, \"How is your wound?\"\n\n\"It's not happy and I look like a pirate with a pegleg when I walk. I'm sure that I'll be moving normally by the time November rolls around.\"\n\n\"Either that or you'll have a pegleg that goes all the way to your hip.\"\n\nMorgan laughed then said, \"Maybe I'll use my Winchester '73 to take the place of my missing appendage.\"\n\n\"Just keep an eye on it, Morg.\"\n\n\"I am. Trust me.\"\n\n\"I'll let you finish reading the paperwork. I'm going to spend a peaceful Sunday afternoon with Sally.\"\n\n\"See you in the morning, Jim.\"\n\n\"Then we'll be deluged with your impatient clients.\"\n\n\"All six of them.\"\n\nJim grinned as he stood then left Morgan's office and closed the door behind him.\n\nMorgan finished reading the last of the papers and didn't see anything that required his immediate attention. He left his office and soon returned to his apartment." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 120", + "text": "He had no more visitors for the rest of the day, which was understandable. He imagined that his male friends were spending the day with his female friends, who also happened to be their wives.\n\nThe barroom was mostly quiet as well. The Bluebonnet and The Lonely Armadillo didn't open on Sundays, which cost them business, but put them in good standing with the churchgoers. Harry Freeman's saloon was the only public place to imbibe on the sabbath which was just another day for most of his customers.\n\nIt was well after sunset when he finished his self-prepared supper, washed the dishes, then returned to his bedroom. He lit one lamp before he sat on his bed and pulled off his boots. After removing his socks and dropping them into his hamper, he carefully removed his pants. As he folded them, his wedding ring fell out of his pocket, then bounced and rolled under the bed.\n\nHe finished folding his britches and set them on his dresser before taking off his shirt. He folded it as well, then sat on the bed and debated about searching beneath the bed for his ring. In the shadows, it would be difficult to find, so he decided to wait until the morning.\n\nMorgan made a pile of pillows then swung his legs onto the bed. After he was reasonably comfortable, he reached to his side table and grabbed his copy of Henry Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. He'd only read the first two chapters before leaving. He preferred adventurous and exotic fiction when he read for pleasure. He spent enough time reading boring legal documents and tomes during the day.\n\nHe opened the book and dropped his bookmark on the quilt until he needed it again. As he resumed reading where he'd left off, he found it difficult to recall the plot. He snapped up the bookmark, set it in place and closed the novel. After he returned it to the side table, he stared at the binding, puzzled by his inability to remember the first two chapters. He'd never had the problem before, even after longer and more stressful interruptions.\n\nHe blew out the lamp and after removing two of the pillows, he slipped beneath the covers. He finally attributed his concentration problem to his weakened physical and mental state.\n\nMorgan pushed the minor irritant aside and began to plan for tomorrow; his first normal day back in Kerrville. He was sure that his first visitor wouldn't be a client. He expected to see Stella before breakfast and knew what she would probably say." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 121", + "text": "Morgan awakened earlier than usual and almost forgot about his wound until he automatically flipped back the covers and swung his legs from the mattress.\n\nAfter thanking his thigh for reminding him to check the bandage, he pulled back the bandage and didn't see any blood stains, so he left it in place.\n\nBefore he walked across the hall to the bathroom, he carefully dropped to his hands and knees and peered under the bed. He spotted his wedding ring just a few feet away and was able to reach it without having to lay on his stomach and slide underneath the bed. He snatched the ring from the dusty floor and slowly stood.\n\nAs he stared at the gold band, he didn't even think about slipping it back onto his finger. He understood why he'd removed it. It wasn't because Barbara had whispered to him that it was time to move on. He had made that decision on his own. He opened the small drawer on the side table and set it inside before leaving the bedroom and stiffly walking across the hall.\n\nHe quickly made good use of the water closet before washing and scraping off his stubble. He tried not to hurry but still picked up a few more minor wounds courtesy of his straightedge razor.\n\nMorgan was able to dress, start a fire in the cookstove and put on the coffeepot before he heard a single knock on the apartment's door. He didn't bother hobbling to the front room but stepped toward the table. He hadn't taken his second stilted step before the door opened, then closed and he heard Stella's distinctive footsteps crossing the parlor floor. They were only easily identifiable when she was about to lecture him.\n\nHe loudly said, \"Good morning, Stella,\" then reached his chair and sat down.\n\nStella waited until she entered the large kitchen, and she found him at the table before she said, \"Good morning, Morg. How are you feeling?\"\n\n\"I'm doing better. The water for the coffee should be hot in a couple of minutes.\"\n\nShe sat in the chair next to him and said, \"I'll bring you some breakfast after we talk.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he said, \"I was surprised that Tyler was able to convince you to let me recover for a day.\"\n\n\"It wasn't that hard. I was up early and spent a few hours driving your buckboard. Besides, I wanted some private time with my husband.\"\n\n\"Did they unload the buckboard? Jim didn't bring the Sharps-Borshadt with him yesterday.\"\n\n\"No. After we returned, Felipe and Pete unharnessed the new horse and left him and Felix in the barn. I don't think anyone will try to steal your rifle or ammunition.\"\n\n\"I was just curious.\"\n\n\"Georgette asked me to write her a letter to let her know if you were all right. Did you want to write it yourself?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. You can handle it.\"\n\n\"I think she'd rather receive a letter from you, Morg.\"\n\n\"Did she ask me to write one?\"\n\n\"Well, no. But she did expect to receive a large bill and doesn't want any excuses.\"\n\n\"You know me better than that, Stella.\"\n\n\"I know you better than anyone, even your brother Rangers, Mister Kane. You're my dearest friend. A friend who has given me a life I never dreamed possible. I owe you more than I can ever repay.\"\n\n\"You owe me nothing, Stella. Neither does Sally, Ruby, Rose or Fannie. It gave me immense satisfaction watching you transform your lives. I am proud of each of you.\"\n\n\"Then you won't mind if I give you some advice?\"\n\n\"I have a good idea what it is; but go ahead.\"\n\n\"Before I tell you, can you tell me why you've never remarried? You've certainly had your chances, but you never even spent a night with a woman since Barbara died.\"\n\n\"I've given you my reason, Stella.\"\n\n\"Maybe you believe it, but none of us do. We think you won't remarry because you're almost terrified that you might lose your new wife during childbirth.\"\n\nMorgan paused before asking, \"You believe that I've been lying all these years?\"\n\n\"No. You weren't lying. I'm sure that you've convinced yourself that's why you remain unmarried. But if you look deep down into your heart, you'll find the truth.\"\n\nMorgan didn't need to delve deeply. He may not have been lying, but he knew that what he'd first told Stella was a secondary reason.\n\nHe said, \"I assume that it is Mrs. Driscoll who inspired your visit.\"\n\n\"She loves you, Morg. I don't believe that it's one way, either. I knew that when I read your letter. You wrote as much about her as the situation. You need to push aside your worries and at least talk to her.\"\n\n\"Even if you were right about my concerns, none of it matters. Mrs. Driscoll has a ranch to run and her children to raise. I'm a lawyer with an office in a saloon. We each have our own paths to follow.\"\n\n\"That's nonsense! Don't you love her?\"\n\nMorgan glanced at the stove, then said, \"The water is boiling.\"\n\nStella glared at him then stood and marched to the cookstove. She used her skirt as an oven mitt and slid the hot pot from the hotplate.\n\nShe didn't bother adding the coffee grounds, but quickly stepped back to the table and sat down.\n\n\"Now that it's no longer boiling, Mister Kane, answer my question.\"\n\n\"If we were opposing attorneys in a trial, I would object on the grounds you were badgering my witness.\"\n\n\"And I'd overrule your objection.\"\n\n\"You have no precedence to make that ruling, Your Honor.\"\n\n\"You won't win your argument, Morg. Just give me a simple yes or no answer. Do you love, Georgette?\"\n\n\"I've already told you. It doesn't matter, Stella.\"\n\nShe threw up her hands and snapped, \"Of course, it matters! It's all that matters! You're just making excuses. You know you could move out of the saloon tomorrow. I'm just as convinced that if you asked, George would happily join you in Kerrville with Timmy and Lucy.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he looked at her frustrated, yet still determined face then said, \"I don't suppose you'll leave until I make a concession.\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving this chair until I hear much more than a concession.\"\n\n\"I'll visit Mrs. Driscoll as soon as the danger of infection is past. Alright?\"\n\n\"Is that the best you can do?\"\n\n\"That offer is only on the table for fifteen seconds.\"\n\n\"I'll accept your promise, but don't expect me to forget it, either. I want you on your way to the Double D within a week. I don't want to hear any excuses that you're still worried about infection, either.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. Now can we share breakfast? I'll make the coffee.\"\n\nStella smiled as she shook her head and said, \"I hate it when you twist things around like that. You know how to avoid answering a simple question. I guess that's what makes you a good lawyer.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"A good lawyer needs to use obfuscation as a tool. But when they turn it into an art form, they become politicians.\"\n\nStella laughed then stood, kissed him and left the kitchen.\n\nAs he watched her leave, Morgan was certain that she wasn't going to let him forget his promise. While he might have been reticent to make the offer, he admitted that he was anxious to make that ride north. He felt an overwhelming need to simply be with Georgette. It was a desire that he'd never felt before. Even Barbara hadn't inspired such a longing. It was as if he'd left part of his soul on the Double D.\n\nBut he still didn't believe that Stella was right and that she'd be willing to leave her ranch." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 122", + "text": "Life appeared to be normal on the Double D that Monday morning. After chow, the ranch hands rode to the herds to do their assigned tasks for the day.\n\nAfter everyone in the ranch house had finished breakfast, Millie cleaned up and Georgette helped Timmy with his reading lesson while Lucy sat nearby.\n\nAs Millie washed the dishes, she debated having a more intense conversation with Georgette. After Stella and the others had gone, Georgette had been noticeably quiet. Even her normally buoyant tone when she talked to her children was missing. She seemed lifeless and it didn't take a giant brain to understand its cause. Millie was unsure if Georgette would even stay in the room when she heard Morg's name.\n\nEven Timmy and Lucy noticed the change in their mother's mood but didn't understand it.\n\nThe only one in the house who didn't seem to recognize Georgette's lack of enthusiasm was Georgette." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 123", + "text": "Morgan was able to see his first impatient client before nine o'clock. Joe Fritz spent more time asking about the shootout than his dispute with his brother over his father's estate.\n\nHe saw three more clients before lunch, but only had one more scheduled for the early afternoon. At two o'clock, he left The Bluebonnet and slowly made his way across the street to see J.R. Brown. He was surprised that the sheriff hadn't stopped by to hear the full story.\n\nAs he hobbled along, Morgan was determined to keep his thigh muscle from getting stiff. The stitches wouldn't come out for a week or so and he wanted to be able to walk normally by then. The only restriction that Doctor Nagy had placed on him was to avoid making long rides. He could have used that as an excuse to give to Stella this morning, but she would have told him to use the buckboard. Then he reminded himself to remove his Sharps-Borshadt from the buckboard and return it to his gun rack.\n\nHe soon entered the sheriff's office and found Deputy Joe Bixby at the desk.\n\nJoe grinned and said, \"The boss is in his office talking to Rob. He'll be finished in a minute.\"\n\n\"I'll just take a seat and wait. What did Rob do that needed a private chat?\"\n\nAs Morgan sat, Joe replied, \"He didn't do anything bad. It's just that he's kinda nervous about Jennie.\"\n\n\"Is she having problems?\"\n\n\"Nope. Doc Nagy told him that she'll have a healthy baby in another week or so and to stop worrying. J.R. is trying to get him to calm down. He doesn't want him making a mistake because he's so distracted.\"\n\n\"If you had as many deputies as they do up in Kimble County, Rob could just be assigned to the desk.\"\n\n\"I figure we're better off not having that many if they were like the ones Lusk hired.\"\n\n\"You're right about that.\"\n\nAs Joe was about to ask Morgan to tell him about the shootout, Sheriff Brown and Deputy Hobart left his private office. Morgan noticed that J.R. had his hand on Rob's shoulder. They looked more like a father and son than a sheriff and his deputy.\n\nJ.R. grinned when he saw Morgan and said, \"I thought I heard you out here. Are you gonna tell us what happened now?\"\n\n\"That's why I left my sickbed and painfully hobbled all the way to your jail, Sheriff Brown.\"\n\nJ.R. laughed before he and Rob Hobart pulled up chairs and sat down to hear Morgan's story." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 124", + "text": "Morgan left the sheriff's office almost an hour later. He had to wait for traffic to clear longer than usual as he wasn't able to jog across the street. When he safely reached the other side, he turned right and soon entered The Bluebonnet. He waved at the customers as he passed by and headed for the back door. Most saloons didn't even open before late afternoon, but his establishment also served as a diner for breakfast and lunch. That also gave some of the married men an excuse to visit The Bluebonnet. He was sure that their wives only tolerated those visits because they knew that Morgan didn't employ working girls or tolerate excessive drinking.\n\nHe left the saloon and crossed Houston Street as he headed for the small barn next to the house he'd inherited from his brother. He had tried to give it to Stella and Tyler as a wedding gift, but she had graciously turned down his offer because it still conjured bad memories. He would have sold it if he didn't need the barn. So, he had rented the place to the Hammerstein family who had lost their home in a fire. He only charged them five dollars a month because he explained it would cost him money to have it kept clean anyway.\n\nHe entered the small barn and after greeting Oscar and Felix, he spent a few minutes with the new horse that had been enlisted to pull the buckboard.\n\nAs he rubbed the handsome black gelding's neck, he said, \"I figure that Stella must have picked you out because she thought I'd decide to keep you. She knows me pretty well; doesn't she? I may as well give you a name now. You've already met Oscar and Felix, so they probably told you why I gave them their names. Let me try to come up with another name of a man I've never met.\"\n\nAs he continued to stroke the gelding, Morgan began saying names that might work. He admitted that his first name was unusual, and his middle name was nothing short of outlandish. But his names were off limits. But after reaching his own name on his alphabetized list, he found a good choice.\n\nHe grinned and patted the horse's nose and said, \"Welcome to the family, Murray.\"\n\nHe left Murray and stepped over to his buckboard. He opened the box under the driver's seat and retrieved his Webley. He then removed his jacket and donned the shoulder holster. After putting his jacket back on and closing the door, he walked to the back to open the Sharps-Borshadt's chest.\n\nHe swung the lid up and stared at the empty chamber. Even the monopod support was missing. He slowly closed the top and tried to imagine where it was. He was certain that no one had taken it after the buckboard had been stored in the barn. Only his friends knew that he had the rifle and even if someone else had seen it, they wouldn't expect him to leave it in the buckboard.\n\nHe slowly limped out of the barn and crossed the street still confused about its absence. He thought the most logical answer was that someone had taken it while the buckboard was in the Double D's large barn. If that was true, he didn't believe it was malicious. He suspected that John might have borrowed it and had it in his house for safekeeping after he'd gone to Junction City. He probably forgot that he had the rifle in the excitement that followed.\n\nAs he entered The Bluebonnet, he was convinced that John must have the Sharps-Borshadt and had expected him to return soon. He may have been surprised to find the rifle missing, but he was pleased to have a genuine excuse to visit the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 125", + "text": "Mille was standing at the cookstove stirring the large pot of beef stew. She had tried to cheer up Georgette all day and had only made marginal improvements in her somber mood. She wished she could tell her that Morg would be returning soon but knew it would inspire questions. Questions that would probably expose her secret. She and Wilma had promised Stella not to let anyone else know about her plan.\n\nBecause Stella understood Morgan so well, she wasn't sure that she'd be able to convince him to return to the Double D, even after he was healthy. So, she had decided to add an incentive. She and Millie had removed his Sharps-Borshadt, the monopod support and one box of ammunition. Wilma had provided the hiding spot in her house. No one else on the ranch knew that the rifle was there, and Wilma explained that even if John looked in her closet, he wouldn't be able to see the rifle and its accessories behind her heavy coat and galoshes.\n\nMillie's biggest concern was that she wouldn't be able to keep the secret for much longer if Georgette continued to mope.\n\nBut even as Millie was in the kitchen worrying that she might spill the beans, Lucy and Timmy would soon help her to avoid that possibility.\n\nGeorgette was still ignorant of her malaise as she sat in the great room with her children. She was absently watching as they half-heartedly played jacks.\n\nLucy let Timmy snatch the jacks from the floor then turned to her mother and asked, \"Mama, why are you so sad?\"\n\nGeorgette blinked and asked, \"What did you say, sweetheart?\"\n\n\"I asked why you were sad.\"\n\n\"Oh. It's just that I'm still distracted. We had a lot of excitement happen in the last couple of weeks; haven't we?\"\n\nLucy nodded then Timmy asked, \"Is Mister Kane going to come back soon?\"\n\n\"I don't know, dear. We'll see.\"\n\nBut even as she answered, Georgette realized the impact her selfish mood had on her children. She knew why she was so morose but resolved to maintain a more cheerful outlook.\n\nShe smiled then left her chair and knelt between Timmy and Lucy and asked, \"Can I challenge the winner?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 126", + "text": "After he returned to his office, Morgan hadn't asked Jim about the Sharps-Borshadt. Stella didn't know it was missing, so he was sure that neither Jim nor the others would.\n\nBut when he sat down in one of the plush chairs in the outer office meant for clients, he asked, \"When do you want to take the bar exam, Jim? You're ready.\"\n\nJim seemed startled and quickly asked, \"Are you sure, Morg?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Do you want me to arrange it?\"\n\nJim grinned as he replied, \"Can we make it next week? I need to talk to Sally. I can't wait to give her the news.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"I'm sure she'll be excited. You can visit Carlotta and see little Mary when you're there, too.\"\n\n\"Speaking of Carlotta, did you hear about her family?\"\n\n\"The Montoyas? What about them?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Montoya must have been getting tired of the treatment she and her boys were getting in town, so they sold all their cattle and returned to Mexico to live with her parents.\"\n\n\"How did I not hear about that?\"\n\n\"I only found out when I was talking to Jeff Chalmers at the bank. He's handling the sale of the ranch and asked me if I knew anyone who might be interested. It's a hard sell with no cattle.\"\n\n\"How much are they asking?\"\n\n\"I think it was twenty-two thousand. That's what makes it so difficult to find a buyer. He'd have to spend a lot more to fill those pastures. Even if they offered a mortgage, it would be hard for a buyer to make any money for a few years.\"\n\n\"That's a good-sized spread. I think it's sixteen sections and has good water, too.\"\n\n\"Yup. Are you interested, Morg? It's only a mile out of town.\"\n\n\"Why would I want a ranch?\"\n\n\"Just asking.\"\n\n\"Well, go and tell Sally that you'll be taking her to San Antone next week to become a full-fledged attorney at law. When you return, we'll draw up partnership papers and hire a new clerk. Do you know anyone who might be interested?\"\n\n\"You already know who will take the job, Morg. I'll talk to my brother after I pass the bar.\"\n\nMorg grinned, then stood and shook Jim's hand before leaving the office.\n\nHe was about to turn right to go to his apartment when he turned left and headed for the door. He didn't see the harm in just talking to Jeff Chalmers about the Montoya spread.\n\nThe bank was about to close when he entered. As he was their biggest depositor, he didn't think they'd be upset with his late arrival.\n\nHe spotted Jeff Chalmers and limped in his direction.\n\nJeff was smiling when he spotted Morgan. He suspected that Morgan was the only one who might have the interest in the Montoya property and the resources to buy the place. He just thought that he'd be laid up longer after being shot.\n\nAs they shook hands, Jeff asked, \"Are you here about the Montoya ranch?\"\n\nMorgan smiled and replied, \"I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask about it.\"\n\n\"Let's sit down and give your leg a rest.\"\n\n\"I appreciate it. It's been a bit ornery lately for some mysterious reason.\"\n\nAfter sitting down, Morgan asked, \"How much are they asking?\"\n\n\"They wanted twenty-two thousand, but I can go as low as fifteen. I know Mrs. Montoya would rather sell it quickly than keep it in her family's name. So, if you'd be willing to subtract fifteen thousand from your account, you'd make her happy and the bank would be grateful. I'll admit that Edna will be pleased with my commission, too. It's a nice spread, Morg. It's worth the money, but it'll take more investment to make it profitable.\"\n\n\"I understand. So, if I decide to buy the place, you'd just withdraw fifteen thousand from my account and transfer the deed? Mrs. Montoya won't know that a Kane bought the place?\"\n\n\"She doesn't place the blame on the Kane family, Morg. She knows what you've done to help Carlotta and is very grateful. But it still doesn't diminish what Bill did.\"\n\n\"I know. I'll take a ride out there tomorrow and check it out. Do I need keys?\"\n\n\"Hold on.\"\n\nJeff opened a drawer and pulled out a heavy key ring and set it on the desk.\n\nAs Morgan picked it up, Jeff said, \"She made a lot of money when she sold the cattle, so she left everything else on the ranch. There might be a few strays, but not more than a dozen.\"\n\nMorgan stood and said, \"I'll let you know tomorrow, Jeff.\"\n\nJeff rose and shook his hand again then replied, \"I hope you take it off my hands, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan smiled then turned and walked out of the bank. He heard the heavy doors close and lock before he took his second step.\n\nAs he walked back to The Bluebonnet, he knew that unless they had burned every building down on the Montoya ranch, he'd probably buy it. It was close enough to Kerrville that he could have his law office there. With Jim as a partner, he could specialize in criminal law. But the real reason was that he hoped that Georgette would be more willing to leave the Double D if he wasn't living in a saloon.\n\nWhen he entered The Bluebonnet, he passed the growing crowd of customers and headed for the door to his apartment. He made a point of not acting as the saloon owner and mingling with the men enjoying the games and liquor. It wasn't because he thought he was better than they were. It was because he didn't want to be anything like his older brother.\n\nAfter entering his apartment and closing the door he entered his bedroom and took off his jacket and the shoulder holster. He dropped his britches and sat on the bed to examine his wound. When he lifted the bandage, he thought he'd find spots of blood, but the cloth was still clean. He thought about removing the bandage and not replacing it, but decided he'd wait another day or two.\n\nHe pulled his pants back up and fastened his belt before leaving his bedroom and heading to the kitchen where he started a fire in the cookstove.\n\nMorgan sat down at the large, empty table and thought about his missing Sharps-Borshadt. He found it hard to believe that if John had moved it into his house to keep it safe, he would have forgotten to give it to Stella before she left. He began to wonder if it had been taken by one of the ranch hands. He hadn't counted the boxes of Sharps cartridges under the driver's seat. But if somebody had wanted the rifle, he would have taken them as well. He decided to check in the hidden box tomorrow when he saddled Oscar to visit the Montoya property." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 127", + "text": "As they shared the beef stew and fresh cornbread, Millie was relieved when Georgette seemed to be her old self again. She didn't know what had inspired the welcome change but was pleased to see her smiling again. It had only been a day and a half but had seemed like a week.\n\nMillie smiled and said, \"I need to go to town tomorrow. Do you need anything while I'm there? Or do you want to come along?\"\n\nGeorgette shook her head as she replied, \"I don't need anything. Will you have someone as an escort? I'm not sure that Sheriff Lusk is reformed.\"\n\n\"I'll have Al Perkins with me. I think the sheriff is too afraid of Morg coming back to give us a problem. He should feel lucky not to be heading to prison.\"\n\nTimmy exclaimed, \"Or maybe Mister Kane would shoot him!\"\n\nLucy giggled as Georgette said, \"Even if Sheriff Lusk is worried, I'm not so certain about some of his deputies. I'll believe it in another month or so.\"\n\nTimmy said, \"Mister Kane will come back soon, Mama. You can tell him that you're worried about them.\"\n\nShe smiled at her son and said, \"If he returns, then I'll let him know. Now eat your stew, mister.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nMillie noted the 'if' and almost told her that Morg would definitely return but didn't want to risk being interrogated. She believed that it would devastate Georgette if she believed that Morg had to be tricked into returning to the Double D." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 128", + "text": "After dinner, Morgan returned to his office and wrote Jim's letter of recommendation for Judge Spellman. Judge Harold M. Spellman had examined him for acceptance into the bar, and even though he was a family friend, the judge had thoroughly tested Morgan's knowledge of the law.\n\nWhen he gave the letter to Jim tomorrow, he'd explain what type of questions to expect from the judge. Jim had known Judge Spellman for years and was on friendly terms with him. But he didn't want Jim to expect soft questions. If he wanted to pass his bar examination, he had to be well-prepared. Jim had the knowledge, but it was important to understand the mindset of the questioner.\n\nHe finished the long letter and set it aside to dry. He'd send a telegram to Judge Spellman in the morning letting him know that James L. Cooper was applying for membership in the bar. He smiled when he thought about adding that Jim had been working in a bar for almost a year. Judge Spellman had a wry sense of humor and might appreciate it. When he'd closed down his law office in San Antonio, he and the judge had a long and interesting conversation about Bill and the saloon.\n\nThe ink was dry, so Morgan folded the three sheets and sealed them in an envelope. As he placed it in his outgoing correspondence box, he began to think of accompanying Jim and Sally to San Antonio. He hadn't met his niece and by then, he might own the Montoya ranch. Maybe Carlotta would like to return to her home with her new family. She might not be able to convince her husband even if she did. He decided that he'd mention it to Jim and Sally before they left, and they could ask Carlotta. He might not even buy the ranch. It would break Jeff Chalmers' heart if he didn't, but he wasn't sure bankers had hearts anyway.\n\nAs he stood to return to his apartment, he said, \"Of course, they say the same thing about lawyers.\"\n\nHe snickered as he left his office then passed through the outer office before entering the noisy saloon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 129", + "text": "As he lay in his bed, Morgan tried to think of anything else that was pressing. He had no court cases pending. It wasn't as if J.R. hadn't been arresting troublemakers, it's just that they always paid the fine rather than hiring an attorney. There were a few civil cases that needed resolution, but when Jim returned from San Antonio, he could handle them. Most of their legal work was routine and Jim did most of that paperwork already. While he knew that he was far from redundant, he understood that having Jim as a partner, would allow him even more flexibility.\n\nHe began to envision another momentous change in his life. One that would have a greater impact than joining the Rangers or moving to Kerrville. He just wasn't sure if he'd be able to convince Georgette to leave her ranch." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 130", + "text": "Georgette may have managed to keep a cheerful fa\u00e7ade for the rest of the day, but now that she was alone in her bed, her depressing mood returned. She felt empty and her somber mindset convinced her that Morg wouldn't return at all. She felt almost trapped on her own ranch with her worries about the sheriff and his deputies. What shamed her the most was when she heard her mind whispering that if she didn't have Timmy and Lucy, then she would be free to just leave the ranch. What kind of mother was she?\n\nShe closed her eyes and reaffirmed her commitment to keep a pleasant demeanor. She owed it to her children." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 131", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nWhen Jim walked through the door the next morning, he was surprised to find Morgan in his office already. He prided himself on showing up early each workday, and it was rare to be the second to arrive.\n\nHe hung his hat and jacket on the coat rack, then entered Morgan's office and said, \"You're early, Morg.\"\n\n\"Have a seat, Jim. I have your letter of recommendation for Judge Spellman, but I want to tell you what to expect. That assumes that Sally approves of your entering the shadowy world of sneaky shysters.\"\n\nJim chuckled as he sat down then said, \"She was dancing before I even finished telling her.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll send the judge a telegram this morning letting him know that next week, he'll have you as his next victim.\"\n\n\"I'm ready, Morg.\"\n\n\"I know you are. But don't expect Judge Spellman to give you an easy time. He'll ask hard questions and expect sound answers. What's important for you to know is that, unless he asks specifically, don't give him any case precedence. To the judge, that smacks of rote memorization. He'll give you a test case and ask you how to either defend or prosecute based on the law. That's when too many hopefuls start spouting about past case law.\n\n\"He hates it when the examinee replies something like, 'in Winterbottom v. Summertime, presiding Judge Gavel Banger decided for the defense based on the ruling of Judge Old Fart in the famous Old Gray Mare v. Young Stud case'. He would rather hear you provide sound reasoning based more on your interpretation of the law. If he wants to hear legal precedence, he'll ask for it. Okay?\"\n\nJim smiled as he nodded and replied, \"Yes, sir. I'll remember that. If I pass, do you want me to return with my brother?\"\n\n\"If he wants the job.\"\n\n\"He will.\"\n\n\"By the time you and Sally visit Carlotta, I may own her family's ranch. If I do, ask her if she and Theo want to move here. I'd build them a new house on the ranch if they do. But don't push her. Just mention that I bought the place and see how she reacts. Kerrville may be the last place on earth she wants to see and that goes double for her parents' ranch.\"\n\n\"Alright. Are you really going to buy the ranch?\"\n\n\"I'm leaning that way. I'm leaving shortly to do an inspection. It's only a mile out of town, so it's not a long ride.\"\n\n\"It would give you some privacy, too.\"\n\n\"That's the idea. I'm going to head to the barn and saddle Oscar. I should be back in three hours or so.\"\n\n\"Okay, Morg. I hope it works out for you.\"\n\nMorgan handed Jim the letter of recommendation and said, \"Good luck, Jim. I expect to have you as my partner two weeks from now.\"\n\nJim accepted the envelope and simply smiled.\n\nMorgan stood then stepped around his desk and left his office. He felt like Santa Claus when he gave Jim the letter. He had confidence that Jim would soon be sitting in the big office with his younger brother acting as his clerk. He hoped to be moving his office to the Montoya ranch." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 132", + "text": "In Junction City, Sheriff Lusk was talking to Deputy Ollie Adams.\n\n\"I just got a telegram from Sheriff Brown in Kerrville. Concho County is sendin' two deputies to his office and will escort our prisoner from there. You'll be takin' him down to Kerrville tomorrow. I want you back on Thursday. Got that?\"\n\n\"Alright. Why can't they come here to take him?\"\n\n\"Because the railroad ain't here yet. They ain't bringin' their horses, so we need to take him. Just do what I tell ya.\"\n\nOllie glanced at Mike Hilliard who didn't seem to care and replied, \"Okay, boss.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk grunted before he returned to his private office. He'd be glad to be rid of the last vestige of the Long Star Land Company. He never wanted to see another Texas Ranger for the rest of his life.\n\nMike Hilliard was far from uncaring about their conversation. He was actually very interested when he realized that the sheriff was assigning just one deputy to guard him on that long ride to Kerrville. But what made it even better was which deputy he'd selected. He knew that Deputy Adams intensely disliked Morgan Kane. The saloon lawyer had humiliated him and turned him into a laughingstock.\n\nMike didn't think he'd need to resort to any desperate measures to affect his escape. He'd simply use what he knew about the man to convince the deputy to change his career. He'd be surprised if it took an hour. After he had his new partner remove his restraints, the hard part would be to get him to hand over a loaded gun." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 133", + "text": "Morgan rode Oscar out of Kerrville to make the short ride to the Montoya ranch. He'd checked his buckboard before he left and found one box of Sharps cartridges missing. That was puzzling in itself. If someone had stolen the rifle, why leave the other boxes? The .45-100 cartridges were expensive and hard to find. Maybe John did borrow it after all. He'd been promised to be given a chance to try the Sharps-Borshadt, so he'd only need a few cartridges.\n\nWhatever the reason, he hoped to find the rifle when he visited the Double D. It might be as early as tomorrow if things worked out with the ranch. His leg was still a nuisance, but it wasn't showing any signs of infection and it had been three days.\n\nHe turned down the access road and saw the familiar buildings. He'd never visited the Montoya family for obvious reasons.\n\nThe ranch buildings mostly used a standard wood frame construction. The exception was the main house which was a large adobe structure. He didn't see anything moving but wouldn't have been surprised to see a wandering cow or horse. He did notice the working windmill behind the house for pumping the well.\n\nHe soon pulled up in front of the house and dismounted. After tying Oscar's reins to the nice hitching post, he stepped onto the tiled porch and walked to the heavy oak door. After trying three keys, he finally unlocked and opened the door.\n\nOnce he stepped into the silent house, he felt somewhat uneasy. He entered the large great room with its enormous fireplace set on the northern wall. The floor was a decorative mix of various shades of red tile. The furniture wasn't exactly to his taste, but it was functional and well-made. He walked to the right, opened a door and was pleased to find a good-sized office. He wouldn't need an outer office because he wouldn't have a clerk.\n\nThere were plenty of bookshelves but not many books. There was a large dark desk that was either mahogany or stained maple. He closed the door and headed for a large arched entrance. After passing through the entrance, he was impressed with what appeared to be a courtyard. It wasn't open to the sky but acted as a hub for the other rooms.\n\nThe arrangement gave common access to the large central room which had a large table in its center surrounded by six chairs. There were six more doors around the courtyard. He tried to imagine the floor plan as he began opening the other doors.\n\nThe furthest from the great room opened to a hallway that led to the kitchen and a dining room. Four were bedrooms and the last was a very large bathing room with a large, tiled bathtub.\n\nEach of the bedrooms was still furnished. He assumed that the largest had belonged to the parents. The two brothers' rooms were marked by the minor damage done to the walls. Carlotta's room was very different. There was a dressing table with a winged mirror and brocaded chair. But what marked it as unique was that unlike the other bedrooms, the bedding was still in place.\n\nMorgan stared at the room's interior. Carlotta had been gone for more than a year and yet it looked as if she had just gone to Kerrville for the day.\n\nHe stepped into the room and walked to the dressing table. He slid open each of the drawers and found a young woman's accessories. After he closed the drawers, Morgan walked to the large dresser and began opening each of its drawers. When she'd gone to meet Bill, she only took one change of clothes. The rest of her wardrobe was in the drawers awaiting her return. Her mother hadn't burned them or given them to charity. She hadn't taken them with her when she left, either.\n\nMorgan glanced at her closet and saw two coats and some shoes. He had been very impressed with the house until he entered Carlotta's room. Now his shame for what his brother had done resurfaced.\n\nHe stared at the bed and said, \"After you said your prayers and slipped beneath that quilt, you closed your eyes and dreamt of finding love and happiness. My brother gave you a glimpse of those dreams then turned them into a nightmare. I'm so very sorry, Carlotta.\"\n\nHe slowly walked out of the room and stepped down the hallway to the kitchen. He knew that Carlotta had a good life now, but was she happy? Did she really love Theo or was she simply content? It wasn't a question one could ask, but he hoped that she had found the love and happiness that she had been denied.\n\nHe shook off his feelings of guilt as he entered the large kitchen. He had to disassociate the house from what Bill had done to Carlotta.\n\nThe kitchen and dining room were just as impressive as the rest of the house, so he headed back to the courtyard and then passed through the great room before leaving the house. He locked the door and mounted Oscar then rode to the barn. Morgan stayed in the saddle as he peered into the shadowed interior and found nothing surprising.\n\nHe didn't bother checking the bunkhouse, smoke house or the chow house before heading out to the pastures. He passed the empty corrals and soon found the large creek that flowed through the center of the ranch. The grass was already recovering from the constant grazing, and he imagined that it would be knee high within a few weeks.\n\nHe didn't bother riding the range looking for any strays but turned Oscar back to the access road. He was satisfied that it was well worth the investment.\n\nWhen he reentered Kerrville, he passed The Bluebonnet and headed for the Kerrville Bank of Texas to see Jeff Chalmers but would make a stop to send the telegram to Judge Spellman." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 134", + "text": "J.R. growled, \"That idiot is only having one deputy bring Hilliard down here tomorrow. He's got four deputies and is gonna let three of 'em just hang around starin' at the walls.\"\n\nDeputy Rob Hobart asked, \"Do you want me and Joe to go up there and bring him back?\"\n\n\"Nah. He should be here by early afternoon tomorrow. It just annoys me. Morg may have made him a bit more honest, but he sure didn't make him any smarter.\"\n\nRob looked at snickering Joe Bixby and winked. He'd only asked the question to hear the sheriff's reply knowing how much Sheriff Lusk annoyed their boss.\n\nRob then asked, \"When are the deputies from Concho County comin'?\"\n\n\"Friday. They'll take him back on the same train that brings 'em here.\"\n\nJoe then said, \"I wonder if he'll even make it all the way from Junction City.\"\n\nJ.R. looked at his deputy and had the same question." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 135", + "text": "Jeff shook Morgan's hand and said, \"I'll just need a couple of minutes to finish the paperwork, Morg. I really appreciate you taking this off my hands, but I think you got a good deal. It's the third largest ranch in the county.\"\n\n\"Without any cattle or horses.\"\n\nJeff chuckled before asking, \"Are you going to buy some cattle and become a rancher?\"\n\n\"I'm heading to the Double D tomorrow and I'll ask Mrs. Driscoll about it.\"\n\n\"She must be an impressive lady, Morg. But I hear that you already know that.\"\n\nMorgan was surprised that the rumor had already reached the bank. But then he realized it was such a hot topic that it would have moved to the front of the gossip express.\n\nHe ignored Jeff's last comment and said, \"If I add the cattle and horses, I'd add rancher to my current occupations of lawyer, Ranger, and saloon owner. Maybe I'll add banker to round it out.\"\n\nJeff laughed then stood and carried the completed paperwork to the row of cashier windows." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 136", + "text": "Twenty minutes later, Morgan was gimping away from the county courthouse after filing the deed with the county land registry.\n\nAfter he returned to The Bluebonnet and entered his law offices, he found Jim at his desk but no clients waiting.\n\nJim looked up from his usual pile of papers and asked, \"So, did you buy the ranch?\"\n\n\"Yup. It was worth every dime, too. If you don't fail to impress Judge Spellman, then you can move into the big office.\"\n\n\"Are you really going to use the ranch house as your office? I thought you were just kidding. I thought you might knock down that side wall and use one of the rooms in your apartment.\"\n\n\"No, I was very serious. And you and Sally can have the apartment, Jim. I'll use the office in the ranch house.\"\n\nJim quickly asked, \"Are you sure, Morg?\"\n\n\"Of course. I imagine Sally already asked about the apartment when you told her I was looking at the Montoya spread.\"\n\nJim replied, \"She didn't ask about the apartment, but she did ask me why you were thinking of buying it. I told her I didn't know your reason, but I'm pretty sure she believes it has something to do with Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\n\"I was going to head to the Double D tomorrow. My Sharps-Borshadt wasn't in its special cabinet in the buckboard. I think it's still on her ranch. While I'm there, I'll ask her about cattle and horses.\"\n\nJim nodded but was sure that Morgan was obfuscating. It was Morg who had taught him the technique, and he hoped to become as good at it as Morgan.\n\nMorgan pulled the keyring from his pocket, laid it on the desk and said, \"Oh, and while I'm gone, I need to have you do something for me. These are the keys to the ranch house. I need to have it prepared for the move. Three of the bedrooms need linen and the pantry and cold room are empty. Check everything else and buy whatever you need. I'm sure Sally and the other ladies will be happy to help. I'll move my personal things to the ranch when I return.\"\n\n\"We'll all pitch in. It'll be ready in a couple of days.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Jim. Is there anything else I need to know about?\"\n\n\"Nope. You can go off galivanting for a couple of days. That will give me more time to prepare for my examination.\"\n\n\"That's a good way to spend your time. I'm going to have a late lunch, but I should be back in thirty minutes or so.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 137", + "text": "Wilma stepped onto the back porch and knocked on the door. When Millie opened it, she smiled until she saw Wilma's face.\n\nWilma waved Millie outside and after Millie joined her on the back porch, she closed the door.\n\n\"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"John discovered the rifle after lunch. I knew he couldn't see it, but he smelled the cleaning fluid and oil. I had to tell him why it was there.\"\n\n\"He's not going to tell Georgette; is he?\"\n\n\"No, but he might tell one of the others about it and it could leak back to her.\"\n\n\"I hope that doesn't happen.\"\n\n\"Does it really matter? Maybe it would be good for her if she knows that Morg will be coming back soon.\"\n\n\"If she thinks that he only returned to pick up the rifle, then it might have the opposite effect. We'll just have to wait. I don't believe it will be that long anyway. If you'd seen them together then you'd feel the same way. I tried to tell Stella that the missing rifle wasn't necessary. She thought Morg might need an added incentive to get past his other hidden worries.\"\n\n\"What worries?\"\n\nGeorgette had confided to Millie what Stella had told her about Morg's very personal reason for not remarrying. So, Millie glanced through the kitchen window before telling Wilma." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 138", + "text": "Joe Bixby was still grinning as he finished telling the sheriff and Rob Hobart that Morg had bought the Montoya ranch.\n\nJ.R. snickered then said, \"I don't reckon he's gonna stay out there all by his lonesome, either.\"\n\nJoe said, \"Jim told me that he's gonna ride to the Double D tomorrow to ask Mrs. Driscoll about buyin' some cattle. But Jim doesn't think that's why he's headin' up there at all. He figures he wants to ask Mrs. Driscoll somethin' else.\"\n\n\"He's ridin' up there tomorrow?\"\n\n\"That's what Jim said.\"\n\nJ.R. stood and grabbed his hat from the desk before saying, \"I think he should know that one of Lusk's deputies will be escorting Hilliard down that road. I'll be back in a little while.\"\n\nSheriff Brown quickly left the jail and crossed the street. Two minutes later, he entered The Bluebonnet. He scanned the barroom without seeing Morgan, so he headed for his law office.\n\nAfter stepping into the outer office, he found Morgan talking to Jim Cooper.\n\nMorgan smiled and asked, \"What brings you by, J.R.? I hope you aren't filing for a divorce.\"\n\n\"Nope. I don't need a last will and testament, either. I heard that you were ridin' up to the Double D tomorrow.\"\n\n\"That's the plan. I guess you also heard that I bought the empty Montoya spread.\"\n\n\"Yup. But I just stopped by to let you know that Lusk is havin' just one of his deputies bring Hilliard down here tomorrow. You might cross paths and I wouldn't want you to be surprised.\"\n\nMorgan's eyebrows arched slightly as he asked, \"He's only sending one deputy? Do you know which one?\"\n\n\"Yup. Ollie Adams. Of the four poor excuses for deputies, he's at the bottom of the barrel.\"\n\n\"I'll grant you that. He was the one I conked on the head and then gagged him with a pair of his nasty socks. Thanks for letting me know.\"\n\n\"So, are you gonna be a rancher and not a lawyer now?\"\n\n\"I'm always going to be a lawyer. I'll be moving my office to the ranch after Jim passes the bar. He's heading down to San Antonio next week to do that. When he returns, I'll make him my partner and he'll move into the big office.\"\n\nJ.R. looked at Jim and said, \"I won't congratulate you until you get back, Jim. But I reckon you won't have any trouble.\"\n\n\"I hope not. Sally is already planning on new decorations for the apartment.\"\n\n\"Well, I've got to get back to the jail.\"\n\nMorgan said, \"Thanks for letting me know about Hilliard and the deputy, J.R.\"\n\nJ.R. waved, then turned and left the office.\n\nAfter the sheriff left, Jim asked, \"Are you still going, Morg? You could wait a day. Your leg might be better, too.\"\n\n\"I don't think I'll have any problems.\"\n\nJim nodded before Morgan entered his private office to clear his desk of paperwork.\n\nMorgan was pleased that J.R. had warned him about Deputy Adams being Mike Hilliard's only escort. From what he'd been told about Hilliard, he was the brains of the outfit. He wouldn't have to use all of his talents to flip Ollie Adams to becoming his new lackey. He just wondered if Ollie was stupid enough to give him a weapon after cutting him loose. If he did, he wouldn't be Hilliard's lackey or anything else much longer.\n\nHe had planned on driving the buckboard in case he found the Sharps-Borshadt. With the potential of trouble, he decided he'd ride Felix instead. The Morgan had a smoother gait than Oscar and was much nimbler. If Hilliard was able to convert Ollie Adams, he didn't want to be caught sitting on the buckboard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 139", + "text": "Morgan had already packed for tomorrow's ride before he dined alone in his apartment's kitchen. But before he had a chance to wash his dishes, his apartment was invaded.\n\nHe heard the apartment's front door open without any warning knock. Then the sounds of a human herd echoed from the parlor and Morgan smiled.\n\nHe snatched the towel from the rack, dried his hands and headed down the hallway then limped into the crowded front room.\n\nStella smiled and said, \"I hear that you bought an empty ranch today and are planning to ride north tomorrow, Morg.\"\n\n\"You're well informed, ma'am. Of course, it seems that half of the town knows that by now. If all of you want to sit, then you can go bring some chairs in from the kitchen. I lay claim to my favorite chair.\"\n\nTyler and the other men were all grinning as they walked past him to retrieve their chairs while the women chose the cushioned seating.\n\nFor the next two hours, the large parlor was filled with lively conversation. The news of his purchase of the Montoya ranch and his decision to ride to the Double D in the morning took center stage. Jim's pending bar examination played third fiddle.\n\nWhat was absent from the chatter was any mention of Mrs. Driscoll. It was that omission that convinced Morgan that each of his friends understood why he was making the visit to her ranch." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 140", + "text": "It was almost midnight when Morgan was able to slip beneath his covers. He expected to be on the road by eight o'clock and arrive at the Double D shortly after noon. He wasn't overly concerned about meeting Deputy Adams and his prisoner but hoped that they just passed a greeting and not bullets." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 141", + "text": "John pulled Wilma close and said, \"I'll have you know, Mrs. Bridges, that I didn't tell a soul about the plot you women cooked up.\"\n\nWilma kissed him then replied, \"I'm surprised. You're a bigger gossip than any woman I know.\"\n\n\"Do you agree with Stella that Morg needed to have an excuse to come back?\"\n\n\"I didn't until Millie told me what Stella told Georgette about him.\"\n\n\"What did she say?\"\n\n\"If I tell you, you need to understand that it's a bigger secret than that rifle in my closet. Okay?\"\n\n\"I'll keep it a secret. I just hope Morg returns soon 'cause my trigger finger is achin' to fire that Sharps-Borshadt.\"\n\nWilma laughed before explaining Stella's theory." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 142", + "text": "Georgette had maintained her pleasant fa\u00e7ade all day. She was certain that even Millie believed she was back to normal. But as she lay in her bedroom with the soft shafts of moonlight coming through the window, she no longer needed the pretense.\n\nShe closed her eyes and remembered each minute she'd spent with Morg and immersed herself in those memories. She prayed that he'd return. But after what Stella had told her, she thought it was more likely that he'd remain in Kerrville. All she could to was to continue to pray and hope that he'd overcome his fear." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 143", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nMorgan saddled Felix shortly after sunrise. He wore his Schofield at his waist and had his Winchester '86 in his scabbard. His Webley Bulldog was nestled in his shoulder holster hidden beneath his jacket. He didn't bring the shotgun, but did have an empty scabbard for the Sharps-Borshadt in the hope that he'd find it on the Double D.\n\nHe ignored the dull, throbbing pain in his right thigh as he stepped into the saddle.\n\n\"I'll see you in a couple of days, Oscar. You and Murray can get better acquainted while I'm gone.\"\n\nHe chuckled then walked Felix out of the small barn and headed north." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 144", + "text": "Just twenty minutes after Morgan rode out of the barn, Sheriff Lusk and Deputy Adams put Mike Hilliard on his horse. They bound his wrists and lashed his feet to the stirrups.\n\nAfter his deputy mounted, Sheriff Lusk looked up and said, \"I wanna see you back here tomorrow afternoon, Ollie.\"\n\nOllie replied, \"I'll make it, boss,\" then started his gray gelding at a slow trot.\n\nSheriff Lusk watched them leave then returned to his jail. He'd been surprised when Ollie had volunteered to take the prisoner to Kerrville. None of his deputies ever volunteered. He suspected that Ollie might want to see Kane's saloon.\n\nMike Hilliard hadn't said much since they rousted him from his cell. He wasn't going to start a conversation with the deputy until they were past the access road to the Double D. If the deputy wanted to chat, then he'd oblige him. He wanted to get a better read on the man before choosing the best path to turn him. If he had started the conversation, he would have discovered that Ollie was already more than halfway there." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 145", + "text": "Morgan was moving a good pace. He expected to find the shortcut that his friends had used in less than two hours. Then it would be another ninety minutes or so before he spotted the ranch house.\n\nAs he let Felix watch the road, Morgan took the reins in his right hand and studied his left. He stared at the narrow band of untanned skin on his ring finger. When he'd removed his wedding ring, he was telling himself that it was time to push those hidden fears aside. If he didn't, he'd regret it for the rest of his life.\n\nHe took a deep breath and felt better. Now he just had to convince Georgette to leave the Double D.\n\nAs he continued heading north, Deputy Adams and his prisoner were passing the Double D's access road. There were twenty-one miles between them and Morgan. That gap was closing at a rate of more than twelve miles per hour." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 146", + "text": "After they'd left the access road behind, Mike said, \"We almost got that ranch, you know.\"\n\nOllie was surprised to hear his voice and missed most of what Hilliard said, so he turned and asked, \"What did you say?\"\n\n\"I said we woulda had that ranch if it wasn't for that lawyer.\"\n\n\"That bastard hit me in the head when I wasn't lookin'. Then he tied me up and gagged me with my own dirty socks.\"\n\nMike knew the story and said, \"I reckon he was joking with those friends of his about it, too. He thinks you're a joke, Deputy.\"\n\nOllie snapped, \"I ain't no joke!\"\n\n\"I don't think you are either. You're smarter than Phil Arnold and those other three that I hired for the job.\"\n\nOllie looked at him and asked, \"You hired 'em? I thought Arnold was in charge.\"\n\n\"That's the whole idea. I hire men to do the job and pay them well. I even let Phil think he was my partner. If it hadn't been for that lawyer, we would have all been rich. I only spent a small part of my stash on the job, but it would have been one helluva payoff.\"\n\n\"You got more money?\"\n\n\"A lot more. I just won't get to spend a dime of it now. I guess in a year or so the state will just take all twenty thousand dollars.\"\n\nOllie exclaimed, \"You got that much money?\"\n\nMike had nothing close to that amount. He'd invested almost everything into this scheme. Most of the remaining balance had been taken by the others when they ran and was now in the hands of that saloon lawyer.\n\nHe grinned at the deputy and replied, \"A little more than that.\"\n\nWhen Ollie turned his eyes back to the road, Mike knew he was close to taking that last step. He was still unsure if the deputy would give him a gun, but now began to think about his choice of destinations.\n\nHe couldn't return to Junction City, and he didn't want to see Kerrville, either. Their sheriff was waiting for them, and that lawyer who lived there was a Ranger and had four Ranger friends. He didn't expect to get much out of the deputy after he was dead and that added more limitations. But no one on the ranch had seen him and what had made it such a good target in the first place was the young widow owner. He knew that the lawyer was laid up in Kerrville with a gunshot wound and assumed that the ranch had returned to its routine.\n\nAs Ollie worked up the courage to make the leap, Mike Hilliard was already a few steps ahead.\n\nThey rode in silence for another ten minutes before Ollie looked at Mike and asked, \"Where do you have your money?\"\n\n\"Why should I tell you? You're taking me to hang and if I told you, you'd just steal every dime.\"\n\nOllie glanced at the road then said, \"You don't gotta hang.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"I don't like bein' a deputy anyway and I'd be willin' to cut you loose and join up with ya if you pay me a thousand dollars.\"\n\nMike pretended to be surprised and after he stared at Ollie for a good thirty seconds, he said, \"It's worth more than that to keep me from hanging. But I'm not going to tell you where my money is until I can trust you.\"\n\n\"You gotta trust me. If you don't, you're gonna hang.\"\n\n\"Alright. But prove that I can trust you first by cutting me loose.\"\n\nOllie paused before nodding and saying, \"Okay.\"\n\nHe then pulled his gelding to a stop and dismounted.\n\nMike watched the deputy slide his knife from his sheath then begin cutting the ties around his left ankle. After he freed his right foot, Mike held out his wrists and Ollie sliced through the bindings.\n\n\"Thanks. Your name is Ollie; isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yup.\"\n\n\"Call me Mike, Ollie. Now that you're on my side; where do we go from here?\"\n\n\"Let's keep ridin' south while we figure it out.\"\n\nMike grinned and said, \"You're the boss, Ollie.\"\n\nOllie smiled as he slid his knife home then mounted his horse. When they resumed the ride, they kept the same pace.\n\nJust a few minutes later, Mike asked, \"What happens if we run into one of those Rangers?\"\n\n\"They're all down in Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I just feel kinda naked without a gun. What did you do with mine?\"\n\n\"The sheriff has it. It was better than his.\"\n\n\"Do you like the Colt or the Remington?\"\n\n\"I like Colts better.\"\n\n\"Are you a good shot?\"\n\n\"You're damned straight I am! I was shootin' before I could walk.\"\n\nMike laughed then said, \"I'm not that good. Can you hit a tin at fifty feet?\"\n\n\"Of course, I can. I reckon I can knock four tins off a fence rail at thirty yards with just five shots.\"\n\n\"Wow! That's really good. I'd like to watch you shoot one of these days.\"\n\nOllie grinned, then pulled his Colt and cocked the hammer.\n\n\"We're ridin', so it's a lot harder to hit a small target.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nOllie appeared to be searching for a target as they continued riding. He didn't want to embarrass himself and was trying to come up with an excuse for holstering his Colt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 147", + "text": "Morgan was searching for the trail that cut across the Double D. He should see the well-traveled path soon and wasn't surprised that he hadn't spotted Deputy Adams and his prisoner. He suspected that they hadn't left Junction City as early as he'd departed from Kerrville. He thought they'd be passing the ranch's long access road about now.\n\nHe spotted the cutoff two minutes later and turned Felix off the road. If he'd continued following the roadway, he would have seen the two southbound riders in just another three minutes. They were just five miles north." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 148", + "text": "Ollie had been scanning the left side of the road for more than three minutes and didn't notice Mike drifting closer to his right side.\n\nOllie began slowing his horse to improve his chances and soon had him at a walk.\n\nHe spotted a melon-sized rock about fifty yards away and without taking his eyes from his target, he said, \"When we get a little closer, I'll unload on that rock. Watch how many hits I get.\"\n\nMike was within reaching distance of Ollie's Winchester when he replied, \"I'll be watching. If you hit it with all five shots, I'll give you another five hundred dollars.\"\n\nOllie grinned as he settled his sights on the rock. It was about twenty yards away when he fired. He saw his .44 ricochet off the top of the small boulder before he quickly cocked the hammer and fired again. He was growing more confident as his second shot sent shards of limestone flying. He quickly fired his third and fourth rounds.\n\nAs he cocked his Colt again, which would empty the pistol, Mike carefully slid the deputy's Winchester from his scabbard. He expected Ollie to notice but would still take that last shot. But Ollie was so intent on making that last, five-hundred-dollar hit, he didn't even notice his Winchester's departure.\n\nHe was still grinning after he watched the boulder suffer another blast. He finally turned to Mike to brag about his prowess and was startled to be staring down the barrel of his own Winchester.\n\nHe stammered, \"Why... why do you have my rifle?\"\n\nMike's reply was a .44 traveling at over a thousand feet per second. It only needed to cross forty-two inches before it slammed into Ollie's face, just below his nose. It wasn't a straight on shot, so after the slug ripped through his sinuses, it quickly spun through the left side of his brain and exploded out of his skull just above his left ear. His Stetson was ripped from his head before he tumbled off the left side of his horse and landed on his shattered head.\n\nMike quickly slid the Winchester into Ollie's scabbard, then dismounted and took Ollie's reins. After tying them to his own saddle, he returned to Ollie's body to strip him of his gunbelt and reload his pistol." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 149", + "text": "Morgan had been startled when he heard Ollie's first shot and pulled Felix to a sudden stop. He was momentarily confused after hearing four more shots in rapid succession. It sounded like target practice. Then after a short delay, he heard the crack of a Winchester.\n\nWhile it was possible that a couple of ranch hands were engaging in some target practice, he believed that Ollie had just lost his prisoner. The shots had come from his ten o'clock. But before he headed in that direction, he thought about the situation.\n\nIf Hilliard had just killed Deputy Adams, then he wouldn't return to Junction City. He couldn't continue to Kerrville either because they were expecting him. It took him less than a minute to decide to continue riding to the Double D. He hoped that Hilliard would just continue riding south and bypass Kerrville, but he suspected that he'd probably pay a visit to the ranch. He would need money and supplies. No one on the ranch had ever seen him and the ranch hands would all be working with the herds. He could pass himself off as a friend, maybe even one of Morgan's acquaintances.\n\nBecause he was following the well-traveled trail, he was able to keep a fast pace. He had to get to the ranch house before Hilliard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 150", + "text": "Mike had reloaded the Colt and walked his horse into some trees where he tied him off. He dragged Ollie's body into the same cluster of pines then mounted Ollie's horse and returned to the road.\n\nHe walked the horse over the large blood stain then turned the gelding north. He set off at a medium trot to avoid attracting attention.\n\nAs he rode, he began formulating the story he'd use when he arrived. He knew that the ranch hands should have already eaten their noon chow by the time he reached the house. Even if they were some hanging around, they wouldn't pay him much attention. So, he decided to be a cowhand looking for a job. He was sure that unemployed men arrived at the giant ranch often, and his wardrobe was close enough to pass scrutiny." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 151", + "text": "Most of the ranch hands stayed out with the herds rather than make the long ride back for chow. The few who had made a shorter ride were hurriedly eating before heading back.\n\nGeorgette was in the great room with Millie while Timmy and Lucy played marbles in the front yard.\n\nDuring breakfast, Millie had finally noticed that Georgette's improved mood was just for show. All morning, she had been debating about telling her that Morg would be coming soon because his special rifle was in her closet. She was still concerned that revealing the plot might backfire.\n\n\"George, why don't you take one of the Winchesters and do some target shooting? You haven't even been out of the house in days.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as she replied, \"We don't have a privy in the house, Millie.\"\n\nMillie lightly laughed before saying, \"I think shooting an innocent piece of cloth might be good for you.\"\n\n\"I'm really not in the mood. If I do any shooting, I'd like to aim at targets further out than a hundred yards.\"\n\nMillie knew she'd chosen a poor topic, so she asked, \"Why don't you take the buggy and visit the families? Timmy and Lucy haven't seen any of the other children in weeks.\"\n\n\"I'd have to drive through Junction City to get there, and I don't trust the sheriff or his deputies yet.\"\n\nMillie gave up trying to push Georgette out of the house and switched to what she believed to be a safer topic.\n\n\"Timmy will be going to school next year. Is he excited?\"\n\n\"I think he's still too focused on becoming a Texas Ranger.\"\n\nMillie nodded and decided to let Georgette pick the direction of the conversation." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 152", + "text": "Morgan hadn't expected to see any ranch hands before he spotted the barn. Most of the herds were north and east of the buildings. Unless some of them were searching for strays, the first person he spotted would probably be Hilliard.\n\nHe knew it was still very possible that he was completely wrong about everything. But even if he was wrong, he'd still be arriving at the ranch house sooner than he had expected. If he was right, he had to be prepared.\n\nHe soon picked up the barn's roof just slightly off to his right. He didn't change direction because he wanted to arrive at the end of the long access road." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 153", + "text": "Mike had turned onto that access road thirty minutes earlier. He had never been on the ranch before and was impressed that he still didn't see any of the buildings.\n\nHe had Ollie's gelding moving at a medium trot as he scanned the landscape. There were more trees than usual for this part of Texas and the rolling hills still had plenty of grass despite the large herds. He felt a surge of anger because he was so close to owning the ranch. He wished he could put a bullet into that damned lawyer but wasn't about to go looking for him.\n\nHe and that damned lawyer were now about four miles apart and on a collision course. Unfortunately for Mike Hilliard, only the attorney was anticipating the meeting." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 154", + "text": "Ten minutes later, Morgan was just a few hundred yards from the barn and had seen Timmy and Lucy playing in front of the house. He slowed Felix and smiled. He must have been wrong about Hilliard. After he talked to Georgette, he'd ride to Junction City and send a telegram to J.R. asking if Deputy Adams had delivered his prisoner.\n\nHe was still smiling when he picked up movement in his peripheral vision. He turned and saw a rider approaching the house from the access road. He hadn't met Hilliard, but the rider didn't look right. After nudging Felix into a fast trot, he pulled his Winchester. Hilliard was about a thousand yards out and Morgan knew that he'd soon be spotted." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 155", + "text": "Mike hadn't noticed the rider coming from the south because he was concentrating on the ranch house and the other nearby buildings. The only humans he could see were the two children playing in the front yard, and they hadn't noticed him yet.\n\nHe morphed into his innocent cowhand persona and continued his approach. He couldn't believe he was this lucky.\n\nHe was about four hundred yards away from the house when he made one last search for ranch hands. He looked to the north and quickly scanned to the east. It was when his eyes turned south that he finally saw an approaching rider. He didn't recognize Morgan, but the ranch hand had a Winchester in his hand and was riding quickly in his direction. He knew he couldn't risk a shootout, so he wheeled Ollie's horse around and raced back down the access road.\n\nMorgan had hoped that Hilliard would do just that rather than try to use Timmy and Lucy as hostages. When Hilliard whipped his horse about, Morgan shifted Felix to the left to cut him off. He was just six hundred yards behind when he began the chase.\n\nTimmy had just spotted the incoming rider and was about to tell Lucy to go into the house and tell mama when the rider suddenly turned and raced away.\n\nTimmy giggled then pointed at the disappearing stranger and exclaimed, \"Look, Lucy! I think I scared him!\"\n\nLucy stood then peered down the access road and asked, \"Who is he?\"\n\n\"I don't know. But he sure looks like he's afraid. Maybe he thinks I'm a Ranger.\"\n\nLucy grinned and was about to correct her older brother when Timmy shouted, \"Lucy! It's Mister Kane!\"\n\nLucy quickly turned just as Morgan shot toward the access road.\n\nTimmy grabbed Lucy's hand and exclaimed, \"We gotta tell mama!\"\n\nThe two children ran to the porch as Morgan reached the access road and was soon hidden by his dust cloud.\n\nGeorgette and Millie had heard Timmy's shouts, so they were already walking to the front door when the children hurried up the porch steps.\n\nWhen he saw his mother, Timmy turned and pointed down the access road and breathlessly said, \"Mama! It's Mister Kane! He's chasing somebody!\"\n\n\"Morg is here?\" she asked with wide eyes.\n\n\"Yes, Mama. I just saw a rider coming and he turned around really fast. Then I saw Mister Kane coming from that direction. He had his Winchester out, too. I think the other man musta seen Mister Kane and was scared.\"\n\nGeorgette looked down the access road and caught a glimpse of Morgan before she turned to Millie and said, \"Go tell John or Al Perkins to bring in some hands. Send two of them down the access road with their Winchesters ready just in case. Morg might need help. He was just shot a few days ago.\"\n\nMillie quickly replied, \"I'll go and tell him.\"\n\nShe hoisted her skirt, trotted down the porch steps and jogged toward the foreman's house.\n\nGeorgette then looked down at her son and said, \"You and Lucy will stay in the house until I tell you it's safe. Go.\"\n\n\"Okay, Mama.\"\n\nTimmy was still holding Lucy's hand, so he tugged her through the doorway.\n\nNow that her immediate concerns were over, Georgette stared down the access road and wondered why Morgan had suddenly appeared. If he had been chasing the stranger, then why would he come from the southwest trail while the man he was chasing used the access road? Her other question was: who was he chasing?\n\nShe watched for another minute before reentering the house to get a shotgun." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 156", + "text": "After Mike took a short glance behind him, he knew he only had one advantage over his pursuer. He could afford to drive Ollie's horse to exhaustion before he switched to his own fresh animal. But his horse was still a few miles away, so he had to manage the pace to keep Ollie's gelding from collapsing too soon.\n\nWhile Mike still didn't know who was chasing him, he assumed he was just a cowhand. Mrs. Driscoll was probably still on edge after the recent gunfight on her ranch and had told her men to drive off any strangers.\n\nThe ranch hand was only about two hundred yards back and Mike felt reasonably safe as long as he maintained that gap. He looked back again and noticed that the man chasing him was riding a smaller horse and was probably already tiring. He slowed Ollie's horse just enough to match his pursuer's speed. He expected that the ranch hand would soon turn around after he had done as Mrs. Driscoll had ordered.\n\nHe wasn't about to get into a gunfight with the ranch hand. He may have been reasonably proficient with a Winchester, but why take the unnecessary risk?\n\nMorgan had noticed Hilliard's slight drop in speed but hadn't been surprised. He was pushing Felix and was sure that Hilliard's horse was just as tired. He knew that they had another five miles of access road to travel, but Felix wouldn't be able to maintain even this pace for that distance. He had to get Hilliard on the ground. He was pretty sure that he was riding Deputy Adams' horse and if he reached his own animal, he'd make a successful escape.\n\nHe let Felix's reins drop and cocked his Winchester's hammer. He brought his sights level and began to anticipate the bounce which was as regular as a pendulum. He believed he'd only get one shot and hoped he didn't hit the horse.\n\nMorgan waited for the Winchester's muzzle to reach the correct location and fired.\n\nHis .45 slug of lead spun from the muzzle at over twelve hundred feet per second. It had five hundred and eighty-three feet to travel as it fought through the warm Texas air, and gravity tugged it to the dry Texas earth. By the time it reached Mike Hilliard, the air had slowed its speed to under nine hundred feet per second and gravity had pulled it almost four inches closer to the ground. Morgan had accounted for both before he squeezed his trigger.\n\nMike Hilliard heard the crack of Morgan's Winchester just as the bullet slammed into his lower back, shattering his fifth lumbar vertebral body and lodging in his spinal cord. He screamed in shock then fell from his saddle and tumbled onto the dirt road.\n\nMorgan slowed Felix and slid his Winchester home as he approached Hilliard. He pulled his Schofield as he drew closer but didn't cock the hammer.\n\nMike Hillard had heard the gunshot before he'd fallen but didn't realize that he'd been shot. He'd never been shot before and thought he'd just been thrown from his horse. The reason for his fall didn't matter. He wasn't going anywhere now because he already knew that his right forearm was broken. He didn't want to look, but the almost overwhelming pain drew his eyes to the horribly angled limb. As he stared at the grossly fractured bones, he felt more pain coming from his left shoulder. But it was the absence of pain below his waist that frightened him.\n\nWhen he was within a hundred feet, Morgan saw the hideous angle of Hilliard's right forearm, so he holstered his pistol. He soon pulled Felix to a stop and dismounted.\n\nMike glared at the tall cowhand and snarled, \"Who the hell are you?\"\n\n\"Morgan Kane. You're Mike Hilliard; aren't you?\"\n\n\"You're the lawyer?\"\n\n\"Right now, I'm a captain in the Texas Rangers. Where's Deputy Adams?\"\n\nMike was about to lie but realized it didn't matter now. He may as well hang in Kimble County rather than make the long ride to Concho County and give them the honor.\n\nInstead of answering Morgan's question, he asked, \"Did you shoot me?\"\n\n\"I couldn't let you escape, Hilliard. You already shot the deputy who was taking you to Kerrville; didn't you?\"\n\n\"Of course, I did. He's lying in some trees with my horse. If you shot me, why don't I feel where the bullet hit?\"\n\n\"Because it's lodged in your lower back. You can't feel anything below your waist; can you?\"\n\nMike didn't answer as he realized the nature of his injury. It was a worse punishment than any judge's sentence. He wished that Kane had been a better shot and just killed him.\n\nHe looked up at Morgan and said, \"You shouldn't have missed, Kane. So, go ahead and finish me. I'm going to hang anyway. Save the county some money and put me out of my misery.\"\n\n\"I can't do that. It would be illegal, immoral, and too compassionate. And you don't deserve any compassion. I didn't miss, either. It was one of the best shots I've ever made. I'll arrange to have you returned to Junction City where I'll testify in your trial.\"\n\n\"You're a real bastard, Kane.\"\n\n\"Hardly. But I'm not going to try and put you on your horse because you'd just fall off the saddle. I'm not going to play doctor and try to fix that arm of yours, either. We'll just wait for some ranch hands to arrive.\"\n\n\"You're just going to let me bleed to death?\"\n\n\"Nope. One of the reasons I wanted to put that slug in your lower back was that it won't bleed very much. Now, if I'd missed, you'd probably already be dead. I figure Mrs. Driscoll already has some of her men on the way, so it won't be long. Do you want some water?\"\n\nMike would have preferred to spit at the lawyer, but he didn't have any saliva, so he just nodded.\n\nMorgan walked back to Felix and pulled off his canteen. After unscrewing the cap, he took a few swallows then returned to Hilliard.\n\nWhen he took a knee, his right thigh reminded him of his own recent gunshot before he handed the canteen to Hilliard. As Mike began drinking, Morgan pulled the Colt from his holster. He half-cocked the hammer and opened the loading gate. He turned it on end and began emptying the chambers. He wasn't surprised to find six cartridges laying on his palm. He dropped them into his jacket pocket then tilted the pistol skyward and peered down the fouled barrel. After reloading the Colt, he slid it under his belt.\n\nMike had already emptied the canteen, but rather than giving it back to Morgan, he tossed it away.\n\nMorgan had expected something of the sort before he slowly stood, hobbled to the canteen and plucked it from the ground. He carried it back to Felix, hung it in place, then put the deputy's pistol in his right saddlebag.\n\nHe was going to mount then ride to find and retrieve Ollie's horse when he noticed three riders coming from the direction of the ranch house. He may have expected them but was surprised that they arrived so soon.\n\nHe stood beside Felix and waited for them to draw closer. He soon recognized John Bridges, Paul Kelly and Jonas Cook.\n\nAfter they hurriedly dismounted, John asked, \"What happened, Morg?\"\n\n\"That's Mike Hilliard, the last of the Long Star Land Company. He was going to pay a visit to the ranch house when I spotted him and had to chase him down.\"\n\nJohn looked at the wounded outlaw and grimaced when he saw the angle of his forearm.\n\nWhen he turned his eyes back to Morgan, he asked, \"How did you know he was coming here? I thought he was in jail.\"\n\n\"He was in jail until this morning. He was being escorted to Kerrville by Deputy Adams and I imagine he convinced the deputy to join him. After he was free, he got Adams to empty his revolver before he shot him with his own Winchester.\"\n\n\"But how did you even know he was here? You were using the southwestern trail; weren't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. I knew that he was being brought to Kerrville, so I expected to pass them on the road. I didn't see them, but when I heard all the gunfire, I realized there was only one reason for it. I figured he couldn't go back to Junction City or south to Kerrville, so the most logical place to go was the ranch house. So, I headed that way to cut him off. I spotted him about six hundred yards away from the house. When he saw me, he turned around and tried to run.\"\n\n\"How did you get him off his horse? I heard one gunshot, but the only damage I can see is that ugly broken arm.\"\n\n\"I hit him in the small of his back. He's paralyzed from the waist down and can't move. He won't cause any trouble, but we need to get him back to Junction City.\"\n\n\"What do you want us to do, Morg?\"\n\n\"I'm going to find Deputy Adams' body and Hilliard's horse. Leave Jonas here to watch him. I'll need someone to bring a wagon back here so we can move Hilliard into town.\"\n\n\"Okay, Morg. Are you coming back after you take the deputy's body into town?\"\n\n\"Yup. That's where I was headed before I heard those gunshots.\"\n\nJohn grinned and asked, \"I reckon you missed your Sharps, and Stella was right after all.\"\n\nMorgan looked at John but didn't ask why Stella was included with his admission about having the Sharps-Borshadt.\n\n\"Let's get this mess cleaned up, John.\"\n\n\"Okay, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan mounted Felix and headed west. Choosing Jonas to guard Hilliard wasn't because he knew his name. He wanted to show his confidence and trust in the young ranch hand.\n\nAs he continued along the access road, he revisited John's remark about Stella being right about the Sharps-Borshadt. It didn't take long for him to conclude that Stella was playing matchmaker. By the time he returned to Kerrville, he'd have to formulate a suitable form of retribution." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 157", + "text": "After John had gathered Jonas and Paul then raced down the access road to help Morg, Georgette and Millie had returned to the front porch with Timmy and Lucy. She had leaned the shotgun against the porch rail before she and Millie sat in the rocking chairs. She pulled Lucy onto her lap and let Timmy sit on the porch steps.\n\nThey were just a few minutes into their vigil when they heard the single, distant gunshot.\n\nTimmy had immediately exclaimed, \"Mister Kane got him!\"\n\nGeorgette hadn't replied but desperately hoped that her son was right. For the next forty-five minutes, she was on edge as she stared down the access road.\n\nWhen she spotted John and Paul Kelly returning, her heart began thundering against her ribs. She lowered Lucy to the porch then stood and walked to the steps behind Timmy. She clenched her left fist and placed her right palm on her chest as she watched them approach. She stared at John and hoped that when he was close enough, she could see the look on his face which would give her an indication of what had happened.\n\nWhen they were about a hundred yards away, Georgette still hadn't been able to make that determination. Then John continued straight toward them while Paul headed to the barn. She hadn't even noticed when Millie arrived and stood beside her.\n\nShe was still unsure of what John would say when he dismounted. It wasn't until he started walking to the porch that she realized he wasn't going to deliver tragic and heartbreaking news.\n\nBefore she could ask, John quickly said, \"That was the last of that Long Star Land Company crowd that Morg was chasin'. Deputy Adams was takin' him to Kerrville and somehow, he got hold of the deputy's Winchester and killed him. Morg wounded him, but he can't move. and we're sending a wagon to take him into town. Morg left to pick up the deputy's body.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"How did he know the man was coming or how he managed to shoot the deputy?\"\n\nJohn had an attentive audience as he began repeating all that Morgan had told him. Before he finished, Paul and Ox Jeffries drove by on one of the ranch's wagons.\n\nAfter John ended his explanation, Georgette quickly asked, \"Is he coming back?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. He said he was on his way here when he heard the gunfire.\"\n\n\"Did he say why he was coming?\"\n\nJohn glanced at Millie who quickly shook her head, so he replied, \"No, ma'am.\"\n\nGeorgette then turned to Millie and said, \"He'll be hungry when he arrives.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of it, George. You can stay on the porch and wait.\"\n\nShe looked down the access road as she said, \"He won't return for at least a couple of hours. I'll come with you.\"\n\nThen she looked down at Timmy and said, \"You'll let me know when you see Mister Kane coming; won't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am!\"\n\nLucy then added, \"Me too, Mama!\"\n\nGeorgette smiled at her children before she and Millie entered the house. Her heart had stopped pounding, but it hadn't returned to a normal rate. Morg was returning when he encountered the outlaw. Soon, she'd learn why he felt it was necessary to visit so soon after he'd been shot. She hoped it wasn't just to bring her a bill.\n\nJohn glanced at the disappearing wagon, then headed to his house to tell Wilma. He hadn't told Mrs. Driscoll about Hilliard's injuries, but he'd tell Wilma. He wanted to talk to Morgan about that shot. He really hoped that he'd remember his offer to do some target shooting with the Sharps-Borshadt." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 158", + "text": "After he'd found Deputy Adams' body and hung it over Hillard's saddle, Morgan headed north to deliver it to the sheriff. When he reached the access road, he looked east and spotted the wagon carrying Mike Hilliard accompanied by one outrider. The deputy's horse was tied to the back of the wagon.\n\nHe pulled up and waited for it to reach him. As he sat in his saddle, he stared north toward Junction City. He wondered what Sheriff Lusk and his other three deputies would do when he arrived with Adams' body.\n\nAs the wagon drew closer, he recognized Jonas who was riding alongside and Paul Kelly and Ox Jeffries, the blacksmith, in the driver's seat.\n\nAfter they pulled up, Morgan said, \"When we get into town, take Hilliard to the doctor and I'll visit the sheriff.\"\n\nHe then looked into the wagon bed and noticed that Hilliard wasn't moving, so he asked, \"Is he still alive?\"\n\nPaul glanced at their passenger before he replied, \"He passed out when we moved him. He's not bleedin' much but that arm sure looked ugly enough to knock him out.\"\n\n\"Okay. Let's get him to the doctor and let him at least straighten out that arm.\"\n\nJonas asked, \"Did you want me to stay with you, Morg?\"\n\n\"No. I want to have a private chat with the sheriff. Just stay with the wagon. Can you tie the deputy's horse to Hilliard's?\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nMorgan waited until Jonas moved Deputy Adams' horse to Hilliard's single eyebrow gelding before he tapped Felix's flanks and had him moving at a slow trot. He didn't want to pull away from the wagon.\n\nHe wasn't sure what he'd tell Sheriff Lusk but wished that he had one of his Rangers with him. He had almost accepted Jonas' offer to join him but didn't want to put him in danger if the sheriff or his deputies gave him trouble. He didn't expect Sheriff Lusk to be a problem, but he wasn't sure about his remaining deputies. Maybe seeing one of their friends draped over a saddle will convince them to behave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 159", + "text": "Thirty minutes later, Morgan dismounted in front of the jail as the wagon and Jonas continued down the main street. Townsfolk lined both sides of the road as if it was a circus parade. He waited until the wagon turned right at an intersection and disappeared before he tied Felix's reins to the hitchrail and stepped onto the boardwalk.\n\nThe jail's door was open and before he even crossed the threshold, Morgan spotted all three of his deputies sitting around the desk. He assumed the sheriff was in his private office.\n\nHe stepped inside but didn't bother taking off his hat. After the deputies looked to see who had entered, he walked to the desk and stopped.\n\nMorgan looked at the one behind the desk and asked, \"Is the sheriff in?\"\n\nJoe Clarkson stared at Morgan for another three seconds before asking, \"What are you doin' back already? I thought you went back to Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I did, but I had to return to the Double D to pick up something I left behind. Could one of you get the sheriff and I'll tell you why I'm here.\"\n\nWillie Potts stood, took two steps toward the hallway and shouted, \"Hey, boss! That saloon lawyer is back and needs to talk to ya!\"\n\nMorgan didn't comment on his poor manners but just folded his arms and waited for their boss.\n\nSeconds later, Sheriff Lusk trotted past the cells and stopped next to the desk as Deputy Potts returned to his seat.\n\n\"What brings you by, Mister Kane? I figured you'd be laid up for a while.\"\n\n\"I'm good enough to ride. I have Deputy Adams' body draped over Hilliard's saddle outside. Hilliard is on his way to the doctor.\"\n\nEach of them was stunned by the news, so Morgan continued, saying, \"I was on the cutoff trail to the Double D when I heard five pistol shots then one from a Winchester. Before I left Kerrville, Sheriff Brown told me that Deputy Adams was escorting Hilliard to Kerrville, so I figured that Hilliard had somehow gotten hold of your deputy's rifle and killed him. I guessed that he'd be heading down the Double D's access road and spotted him when he was about a half a mile from the ranch house. I cut him off and chased him down the access road.\n\n\"I followed him for a couple of miles and my horse was lagging. So, I had to take a shot at distance, or I'd lose him. After I hit Hilliard, he fell from the horse and broke his arm. I had some Double D ranch hands get a wagon and bring him to the doctors. He couldn't walk because my .45 is lodged in his spine. You need to take care of Deputy Adams' body and send someone to the doctor's office to learn the condition of your prisoner. His horse is tied off behind Hilliard's.\"\n\nAfter a few seconds of silence, the sheriff asked, \"Did Hilliard say how he got the Winchester?\"\n\n\"I didn't ask. But I examined your deputy's Colt that I took from Hilliard. He must have reloaded it, but it was pretty foul from being recently fired. Hilliard didn't have any wounds other than the one I gave him, so I don't think that your deputy was aiming at him. The bullet that killed Deputy Adams entered in the center of his face and exited through the back of his head. Hilliard must have shot him at very close range because there were powder marks on your deputy's shirt.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk growled, \"I'm gonna make sure that bastard hangs for this!\"\n\n\"I don't know if your prosecutor will even put him on trial, Sheriff. In fact, I'd recommend that you ask him not to charge him with murdering your deputy.\"\n\nThe sheriff glared at Morgan and exclaimed, \"Why the hell not?\"\n\n\"One of the first things he said to me was to almost beg me to shoot him. He wanted me to put him out of his misery. I think he'd be grateful if you hanged him. He's never going to walk again, and he'll be miserable for the rest of his life.\"\n\nSheriff Lusk nodded then said, \"I reckon you're right. I wouldn't wanna just lie around with nothin' to do.\"\n\n\"It'll be worse than just being immobile, Sheriff. He'll need help with all of his normal bodily functions, too. But what happens to him is up to you and your prosecutor. I'm going to send a telegram to Sheriff Brown to let him know what happened. Then I'll ride back to the Double D. I'll stay there until you let me know of his decision. Okay?\"\n\n\"Alright. Thanks for stoppin' that bastard and bringin' back Ollie's body.\"\n\nMorgan nodded then turned and left the jail as Sheriff Lusk ordered two of his deputies to take Ollie's body and the third to head over to the doctor's house.\n\nHe mounted Felix and waited while Joe Clarkson untied Hilliard's horse. After they led the two horses away, he turned his Morgan toward the Western Union office.\n\nAfter spending a few minutes to send long telegrams to J.R. and another to Stella, he remounted Felix then let him drink at the common trough before he left the town.\n\nTwenty minutes later, as he turned onto the access road, he looked back toward Junction City. He was surprised that he didn't see the wagon and Jonas Cook. He figured that they must have headed over to The Tumbleweed Saloon to have a beer after cleaning out the wagon's bed. He didn't blame them, either.\n\nHe knew that Felix was exhausted, so he kept him at a slow trot. That also gave him added time to decide what he would say to Georgette." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 160", + "text": "While their mother and Aunt Millie were in the kitchen, Timmy and Lucy were sitting on the porch floor playing checkers. Timmy had sent his sister into his room to retrieve the boxed set because he had to stay and watch the access road.\n\nTimmy had just executed a triple-jump when Lucy suddenly hopped to her feet and shouted, \"It's Mister Kane!\"\n\nTimmy forgot about the game as he looked down the access road, saw a lone rider then jumped up. There was no mistaking the tall man on his small horse.\n\nHe exclaimed, \"Go tell mama!\"\n\nAs Lucy raced into the house, Timmy began scooping up the checker pieces.\n\nThe young boy wasn't the only one watching. John had told Corky Miller to let him know when he spotted Morg then take care of Morg's horse when he arrived. So, as Lucy ran into the house, Corky turned and jogged to the foreman's house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 161", + "text": "Lucy hadn't slowed until she reached the kitchen. Then she walked to the table where her mother and Aunt Millie were having tea.\n\nAfter taking a deep breath, she said, \"Mister Kane is coming, Mama.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled and replied, \"Thank you, sweetheart.\"\n\n\"Are you coming to wait with me and Timmy now?\"\n\n\"You go ahead. I'll be there shortly.\"\n\nLucy nodded, then turned and quickly walked back down the long hallway.\n\nMillie said, \"You should have put on a dress, George. You know he's very fond of you. You need to at least give Morg a hint that you're interested.\"\n\nGeorgette replied, \"It doesn't matter, Millie. I told you what Stella said. He's never going to remarry. Even if he has feelings for me, letting him know that I'm interested will only make things worse for him.\"\n\nMillie sighed then said, \"I think Timmy and Lucy will be disappointed.\"\n\n\"That's a low blow, Millie.\"\n\n\"It wasn't intended to be. I'll get Morg's food ready while you join your children on the porch.\"\n\n\"Alright. But don't try any matchmaking when he gets here.\"\n\nMillie honestly replied, \"I won't,\" then watched Georgette stand and head for the hallway.\n\nAs Georgette left the kitchen, Millie hoped that Stella's matchmaking scheme using the missing rifle wasn't the reason for Morg's rapid return." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 162", + "text": "Morgan was tired, thirsty, hungry and his right thigh was loudly protesting all the activity. But when he spotted Timmy and Lucy on the porch waving, all of his discomforts vanished. He pulled off his Stetson and waved it over his head. By the time he tugged it back on, he saw Georgette step out of the house.\n\nHe didn't wave again but kept Felix at the same pace. He then saw John and a ranch hand walking from John's house. He imagined that John was surprised that he was the only one returning and wanted to hear what had happened in Junction City. That would have to wait until after he talked to Georgette.\n\nWhen he pulled up in front of the ranch house, he carefully dismounted. Before he could tie off Felix's reins, Corky Miller took them from his hands, smiled and led Felix away.\n\nJohn said, \"We'll take care of your horse, Morg. Are the others on their way back?\"\n\n\"Probably. I left Deputy Adams' body at the jail, and they took Hilliard to the doctor's office. I figured that they probably stayed to clean the wagon's bed.\"\n\n\"Maybe they did, and I reckon that they decided to have a beer before they headed back. You can tell me what happened later. I figure that you need to talk to Mrs. Driscoll now. She's kinda worried about you.\"\n\n\"Thanks, John. I need to talk to you about the Sharps-Borshadt, too.\"\n\n\"I reckon so.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he walked to the house and stepped onto the porch.\n\nBefore he could say a word, Georgette said, \"Let's go to the kitchen. You must be hungry.\"\n\nMorgan nodded as said, \"Thank you, Mrs. Driscoll.\"\n\nShe replied, \"You're welcome, Mister Kane,\" then took Lucy's hand and entered the house.\n\nMorgan looked down at Timmy, then grinned and said, \"You seem bigger than I remember, Tim. You must be growing even faster than a tadpole.\"\n\nTimmy giggled then grabbed Morgan's hand.\n\nMorgan stopped to hang his hat on the coat rack, then he and Timmy followed Georgette and Lucy down the hallway and soon joined them at the kitchen table.\n\nAs Morgan sat down, he looked at the large layout of food and asked, \"This isn't all for me; is it?\"\n\nMille took her seat and replied, \"It is. Don't be embarrassed by eating in front of us, either.\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nMorgan closed his eyes and silently said grace before he picked up his knife and fork.\n\nGeorgette asked, \"Is your wound healing?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I need to get the sutures out next week. It's just slowing me down a bit.\"\n\n\"Will you be leaving soon?\"\n\n\"I told the sheriff to let me know what the prosecutor decides to do about Hilliard. He could put him on trial for murdering Deputy Adams, but I recommended that they don't even charge him. Because of Hilliard's condition, they'll probably just send him to a state hospital for the rest of his life. I'll stay until they let me know. If there's a trial, I'd have to testify, so it could be as long as a week.\"\n\n\"Do you know why he was coming to the ranch house?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I just knew it was the only logical place he could go. If I had been wrong, then I'd have to search for him after I told John what had happened.\"\n\n\"Why did you come back so soon?\"\n\nAs he cut his thick pork chop, he answered, \"There were several reasons. When I returned, I couldn't find my Sharps-Borshadt. Nobody knew where it was, so I figured I might have left it here.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"I don't believe it's on the Double D. If someone found it, they would have told me.\"\n\n\"John told me that he has it in his house.\"\n\nGeorgette was startled and sharply asked, \"You don't think that he stole it; do you?\"\n\nMorgan shook his head as he swallowed his well-chewed pork then replied, \"No. I believe that before she left, Stella gave it to him or Wilma to hide. She wanted to give me an added incentive to return to your ranch.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Millie and asked, \"Did you know about this?\"\n\nMillie nodded as she said, \"Actually, Stella asked me first. Then we brought Wilma into the plan because she had a good place to hide it.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\"\n\n\"We had our reasons, George.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you did.\"\n\nGeorgette then turned to Morgan and said, \"I'm sorry, Mister Kane. If I had known about it, I would have had someone return it to you.\"\n\n\"I would have come back to the Double D even if you had sent it back. As I said, it was just one of several reasons. I'll explain the others after I stuff my stomach.\"\n\nAs Morgan quickly consumed his food, Timmy looked at his sister, then the children slid from their chairs and left the kitchen. This was grown-up talk that wasn't exciting at all.\n\nGeorgette didn't dare to think about those other reasons. But as she looked across the table, she was convinced that Millie was hoping that at least one of them was of a romantic nature." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 163", + "text": "When he had sent as much food down his esophagus as his stomach would tolerate, Morgan stood and looked at Georgette.\n\n\"After I pay a much-needed visit to your privy, I'll explain my other reasons for returning. Can we talk in your office?\"\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nAfter Morgan had stepped through the back door, Millie said, \"I don't believe he wants me there when he returns. I think he wants to talk to you privately, George.\"\n\n\"That was my impression as well. I wonder why he asked to use the office. We could talk privately in the great room or even on the porch. I think it might be some legal issue. I noticed that he addressed me as Mrs. Driscoll, so maybe he decided to give me a bill after all.\"\n\n\"You called him Mister Kane, George.\"\n\n\"I know I did, but that's, well, that's different.\"\n\nMillie was confused by the pair of them as she said, \"I don't think it has anything to do with business. I guess you'll find out soon enough.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded as she stared at the kitchen door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 164", + "text": "Morgan hadn't obfuscated about his need to use the privy. He was enormously relieved to have hobbled the two hundred feet to the small house and arrive with reasonably clean britches.\n\nWhen he left the malodorous outhouse, he reminded himself to have water closets installed in his new ranch house. It was one of the best modifications he'd made to The Bluebonnet.\n\nHe stepped onto the back porch and walked through the open door and found only Millie in the room. She was wiping off the kitchen table and turned when he entered.\n\nHe grinned as he said, \"I thought my gimpy walk might slow me down enough to cause me problems, but I made it in time.\"\n\nMillie smiled and said, \"I don't think you'd come into the house if you hadn't. She's waiting for you in the office, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan nodded then stepped to the hallway. He was already anxious as he made his way toward the great room. He still glanced into Timmy's room and waved at him and Lucy who had resumed their game of checkers.\n\nAfter entering the large front room, he turned left and limped to the open office doorway. After he entered, he closed the door.\n\nGeorgette was sitting behind her desk with her hands folded on the desktop as she tried to maintain a formal appearance. She may have hoped that his reasons were personal but needed to believe that Morgan was just here to discuss business.\n\nMorgan pulled one of the straight-backed chairs closer to the desk and sat down.\n\nShe asked, \"Why did you need to speak to me in the office?\"\n\n\"Because I wasn't sure how you'd react when I told you why I needed to return to the Double D.\"\n\n\"You were worried that I might be offended?\"\n\n\"Maybe not offended, but I didn't want to put you in an uncomfortable situation. I know that you feel indebted to me for stopping the Long Star Land Company's scam. And I don't want that sense of obligation to make you accept an offer that you normally would refuse.\"\n\n\"So, if you're not here to give me a bill, then what is this offer that concerns you?\"\n\n\"Let me back up a bit. When I returned to Kerrville, I spent a good amount of money buying something that might surprise you.\"\n\n\"What did you buy?\"\n\n\"I know that I told you all about Carlotta and how my brother practically kidnapped her from her family's ranch. As you might suspect, her widowed mother was ashamed by what Carlotta and then her husband had done. Since that happened, her mother was growing more uncomfortable with the way she was being treated by some of the folks in Kerrville. A few days ago, I learned that she decided to return to Mexico with her two sons. They sold all their cattle and horses and put their empty ranch on the market, so I bought it.\"\n\n\"I know about the Montoya ranch. It's around sixteen sections and has good ground and water. Is that why you returned? Did you come to buy some cattle and horses?\"\n\n\"No. I bought the ranch because I knew that I'd soon be making many changes in my life. I already mentioned that my clerk is ready to become an attorney. Next week, he'll be going to San Antonio to take his bar examination which I'm sure he'll pass. When he returns, I'll make him a partner and give him my office and the adjoining apartment. I plan to move to the ranch and use the ranch house as my office. It's only a mile or so from Kerrville, so it won't be a problem. But I'd like to make other, more important changes as well.\"\n\nGeorgette was too nervous to ask, so she just waited for him to tell her of those other changes.\n\nMorgan quietly said, \"When I heard about the ranch, I realized that it solved my problem of where Jim Cooper could set up his new law office. But that wasn't my primary motive for buying it. I wanted to have a proper home for a family.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"But Stella thought that you'd never remarry because your wife and mother both died in childbirth. Was she wrong? Or were you lying to her and everyone else that you wouldn't remarry because you loved your wife so much?\"\n\nMorgan sighed then said, \"No, she wasn't wrong, but I wasn't lying either. I may have been obfuscating, but not intentionally. Let me tell you the full story behind my hidden, unreasonable fear. It started when I was very young.\n\n\"My father never talked about my mother, so I didn't know that she had died when I was born until I was five years old. It was Bill who told me in the harshest way imaginable. One day, he found me reading a book. I didn't know that he couldn't read yet, even though he was almost seven.\n\n\"I was surprised that he seemed mad and asked him why. He simply yelled, 'You killed our mother!' then ran away. I was horrified and asked my father why Bill had said such a terrible thing. He finally explained that our mother had died after giving me life. I felt sick. I was in a funk for weeks and I think Bill understood that he now had a weapon to use when he felt the need to put me in my place.\n\n\"Over the next few years, whenever Bill was mad at me, he'd call me a 'mother murderer' or a 'mom killer', but never in our father's presence. I pretended to ignore his taunts even though they still hurt. He finally stopped when he was around twelve or so because he began to notice girls and I no longer mattered. So, during my teenage years, I was able to let that undeserved guilt slide into the back of my mind.\n\n\"Then Bill ran off when he was eighteen and I met Barbara. I told you how happy I was with her. When she went into labor, I didn't worry any more than most husbands.\"\n\nMorgan took a deep breath and his voice dropped in volume as he said, \"Then I lost Barbara and thought I was cursed. I was morose and grieved for more than three months. I finally decided to talk to my father about my illogical feelings. Before I could talk to him, he was gunned down in the street. In one short period, I'd lost Barbara, our baby girl and my father.\n\n\"That's when I gave up my law practice to join the Rangers. I left my wedding band on my finger as a shield. I convinced myself that it was because of my deep love for Barbara, so that's what I told everyone.\"\n\nGeorgette softly asked, \"Did you know that it was to mask your real reason?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. I honestly believed that it was the real reason. I knew that I still had that other, darker concern, but thought it was in my past. It was also a lot easier to use the noble-sounding reason than to admit to an irrational fear.\"\n\n\"So, you wore your wedding band and told everyone that it was your love for your wife that kept you from remarrying.\"\n\n\"Yes. But it wasn't much of a problem for the past ten years. I wasn't exaggerating about how special Barbara was. I never met another woman who was close to matching her qualities.\"\n\n\"Until you met Stella.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"Until I met Stella. Stella was the first woman I'd ever met who was Barbara's equal.\"\n\nThen he paused, reached across the desk and wrapped his large hands around hers as he quietly said, \"Then I met you, Georgette. I knew almost from the moment we met that you are a remarkable woman. It didn't take long for me to realize that you were the most exceptional woman whom I had ever met or ever would meet. I felt blessed for each minute that I was able to spend with you. Despite being shot, those were the best days of my life. It was then that I realized that I had to confront my long-hidden fears.\"\n\nGeorgette's heart was beating almost as fast as a hummingbird's wings as she let her light brown eyes drift down to his left hand.\n\nShe whispered, \"You aren't wearing your wedding ring.\"\n\nMorgan looked at their hands and said, \"When I returned to Kerrville, I knew that I had a simple choice. I could keep it on and live the rest of my life alone. Or I could take it off then return to the Double D to talk to you. It wasn't a difficult decision. I don't want to lose you, Georgette. My only concern was that I wouldn't be able to convince you to leave the Double D. When I learned about the Montoya ranch, I thought it was providential. That's why I bought it.\"\n\n\"The Double D isn't that important to me, Morg. This is my father-in-law's creation. I only stayed because it was home to Timmy and Lucy. I wish I had known how you felt. All you had to do was ask.\"\n\nHe smiled and asked, \"Even if I still lived in a saloon, Georgette?\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then replied, \"I'll admit that it would be a problem, but I think we could have found another solution. You didn't have to buy a ranch.\"\n\nMorgan said, \"When I was riding to the Double D this morning, I was imagining all sorts of ways to ask you to move to my new ranch. I even thought about acting like a real estate lawyer and ask if you would be willing to merge our two ranches. But the moment I saw you when I rode down the access road an hour ago, I knew I had to stop being a lawyer or a Ranger. It was time for me to be just a man. A man who is in love with you, Georgette.\"\n\nGeorgette briefly closed her eyes before she said, \"I've been denying how I felt about you because I thought you wouldn't return. After Stella told me your secret, I was convinced that you would never come back.\"\n\n\"You didn't know about her Sharps-Borshadt matchmaking plot, but I think it's better that you didn't. Is that right?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is. If I had known that Stella had given Wilma your Sharps-Borshadt, just to force you to return, I would have felt as if I was nothing but a pawn in their game.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"You're probably the only woman I know who would say, 'Sharps-Borshadt' instead of rifle or gun. You are a very special woman, Georgette.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled back at him as she said, \"Even in my flannel shirt and denim britches, Morgan? Millie has been urging me to change into a dress almost from the day you arrived.\"\n\n\"You're still one of the most feminine women I've ever met. And don't forget my female acquaintances down in Kerrville.\"\n\n\"Do you really believe that?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\nShe quietly asked, \"So, where do we go from here?\"\n\nHe smiled as he replied, \"I told you that I didn't want to lose you, and the only way I can prevent that from happening is to marry you. But all I can do is ask. Will you marry me, Georgette?\"\n\nGeorgette squeezed his hands as she whispered, \"Yes. I'll marry you, Morgan.\"\n\nMorgan released her hands, then stood and walked around the desk as Georgette stood to face him.\n\nAfter he made his second limping turn, Morgan wrapped her in his arms. He looked down into her light brown eyes before he kissed her. It wasn't a gentle, introductory kiss. He believed that Georgette would have been disappointed if he held anything in reserve.\n\nGeorgette was stunned by her reaction, even though she had been hoping for a powerful flood of passion. She'd been married to Don for almost five years, yet nothing had prepared her for this amount of raw excitement. She threw her arms around his neck and lifted herself from the floor to add her own explosion of desire.\n\nFor almost thirty seconds, nothing else in the world mattered. The ranch house could have burned around them, and neither would have noticed.\n\nWhen their lips finally parted, Georgette whispered, \"I never felt so alive.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he looked down into her light brown eyes then said, \"I'm a bit overwhelmed myself, Georgette. But I think we have to part.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"You're too much of a temptation. I'm worried that if I don't release you within fifteen more seconds, I'd carry you into your bedroom. If that happens, it might make Tim and Lucy believe that we were fighting.\"\n\nGeorgette didn't release her hold on his neck but laughed and said, \"We can always use the desk.\"\n\nMorgan stared at her for a few seconds before he laughed, released her, then had to pull her hands from his neck to take that single backward step.\n\nHe waited until Georgette returned to her chair before he leaned on the desktop and asked, \"Are we going to tell Tim and Lucy now?\"\n\n\"I think they'll be the happiest children in the world when we do. But before we leave the office, can we talk about how this will all work? I'm sure that you had at least a semblance of a plan before you engaged in one more shootout on the Double D.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"I have to stay for at least two days while the sheriff and prosecutor decide what to do about Hilliard. That means that we can finally just spend some time together without a dark cloud hanging over our heads. I was hoping that you and the children would return with me to Kerrville. The ranch house will be ready by the time we get there. Then you can settle in and meet everyone.\"\n\n\"And where will you be while I'm getting settled in, sir?\"\n\n\"I'll be setting up my new law office.\"\n\nShe smiled then asked, \"I mean, where will you be sleeping? You just proposed and I accepted. When will we be married?\"\n\n\"I wish I could marry you tomorrow, but I'd prefer that Father Velasquez marries us in Saint Rose of Lima church. Is that alright?\"\n\n\"I think it's a wonderful idea. We won't have to wait for all the bans to be read and all of the other Catholic restrictions; will we? That could take months.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. Father Velasquez is much less formal because it's a necessity. He's a good man.\"\n\n\"What about the Double D? Do you want me to sell it?\"\n\n\"No. I was thinking that you could appoint John as the ranch manager. He and Wilma could move into the ranch house, then he could appoint a foreman. We'll talk to him about all of the details before we leave.\"\n\nShe smiled as she said, \"I would have just given it away if you'd asked.\"\n\n\"I know. It's still yours to do with as you wish, but we have time to work it out. I think the most important thing for us to do right now is have a very interesting talk with Tim and Lucy.\"\n\nGeorgette stood and said, \"This will be fun.\"\n\nMorgan took her hand then said, \"Before we go, I have to warn you about something I did when I was in Junction City.\"\n\n\"Was it bad?\"\n\n\"No, it wasn't bad. But it might cause some anxiety down in Kerrville. I wanted you to know about it because it might even prompt another visit by Stella.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I had to send a telegram to Sheriff Brown to let him know what had happened to Deputy Adams and his prisoner. I sent a second message to Stella with much of the same information which she would pass on to the others. But I also wanted to retaliate for her matchmaking scheme. So, I included a couple of lines to make her believe that her plot had backfired.\"\n\n\"What did you tell her?\"\n\n\"I just added that I'd be staying a couple of days and would be buying an engagement gift for you and your betrothed.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled and shook her head before asking, \"And who was my fianc\u00e9, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"I thought it would be most appropriate to choose another attorney, so I had you engaged to Abner Jacobs.\"\n\nGeorgette exclaimed, \"Abner Jacobs? Is that the best you could do?\"\n\n\"I could have married you off to Sheriff Lutz, but she would never have believed it. I'm pretty sure she'll figure out it's just a tweak before she finishes reading the telegram. I just wanted to let her know that I had discovered her plot.\"\n\n\"As long as she doesn't think I had anything to do with it. I just wish I could see her face when she reads the telegram.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he said, \"So, do I. Let's go talk to Tim and Lucy.\"\n\nAs soon as they stepped out of the office holding hands, they found six eyes peering back at them. Millie slowly rose, but Lucy and Timmy bolted from their chairs and raced across the great room floor.\n\nGeorgette and Morgan were both smiling before they arrived, and Lucy attached herself to her mother's legs.\n\nTimmy stopped before Morgan, looked up at him and exclaimed, \"Are you gonna marry our mama?\"\n\nMorgan glanced at Georgette before dropping his eyes back to Timmy and saying, \"Your queen mother has graciously accepted my proposal of marriage, but I still need your permission, Prince Timothy. So, I beg you, Your Highness, that you grant me this incredible boon. If you approve, then I will dare to approach your noble sister, Princess Lucy the Exalted, to plead for her endorsement.\"\n\nTimmy giggled then as he looked at his mother's smiling face, before he nodded.\n\nLucy vaguely understood some of what Morgan had just said. But when she saw her brother's face and heard him giggling, she looked up at Morgan and asked, \"Do I have to say something now?\"\n\n\"No, sweetheart. I just asked Tim if I could marry your mother and he said it was okay. Now, I need you to tell me that you are happy if we get married, too.\"\n\nLucy's face exploded with joy only found in young children as she quickly said, \"It will make me very happy, and mama, too!\"\n\n\"Thank you, Your Highness. Now, may we all sit down? Don't forget that I was shot a few days ago.\"\n\nTimmy didn't say a word before he snatched Lucy's hand then tugged her back to the large chair they had shared. Millie sat back down and waited for Morgan and Georgette to reach the couch.\n\nAfter Morgan and Georgette sat down, Morgan looked at Millie as he said, \"I expect that I'll learn the prosecutor's decision no later than tomorrow. But I'll still stay for a couple of days. Then we'll all be moving to my new ranch. We have a lot of details to work out before we leave. I'm sure that you have many questions.\"\n\nMillie knew that she would have a lot of questions but was too stunned to think of any. She had been hoping that Morgan had confessed his deep affection for Georgette but hadn't expected so much to happen so quickly.\n\nShe stared at them for a few seconds before she quietly asked, \"Am I coming with you, George?\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as she replied, \"Of course, you are. Unless you'd rather stay here with John and Wilma.\"\n\n\"No, I'd rather come with you and the children. Is that alright, Morg?\"\n\n\"I would have been surprised if you decided to remain on the Double D, Millie. You and Georgette can talk about it while I go and find John. The men who carted Hilliard into town should be back by now and I'll need to find out what happened.\"\n\nHe then looked at Georgette and found her already staring at him. He hoped that she wasn't expecting a second kiss in front of everyone, especially not like the one they'd shared in the office.\n\nShe seemed to have read his mind, as she barely pursed her lips before she smiled and said, \"We'll be in the kitchen when you return, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"I won't be long, Georgette,\" then slowly stood and gimped across the great room.\n\nHe snatched his Stetson from the rack then shuffled out of the house.\n\nAs soon as the door closed, Millie began releasing her stored questions." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 165", + "text": "Stella and the other ladies were putting the final touches on Morgan's new home. Tyler and the men had unloaded the wagons and filled the pantry and cold room. The kitchen was fully functional, the beds were all made, and even the linen closet next to the bathing room was stocked with towels and soaps.\n\nThey were about to leave when Jim walked through the front door.\n\nStella said, \"We're about to lock the place up, Jim. What do you need?\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure when you'd be leaving, but this telegram arrived a little while ago from Morg. I thought you'd want to read it right away.\"\n\nAs she accepted the envelope, she asked, \"Why did he send it to me? Did you get one, too?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, but the sheriff did. He told me what was in his, but I'll wait until you read yours before I let you know about it.\"\n\nStella had a crowd gathering behind her as she opened the envelope and removed Morg's message.\n\nAfter reading the first two lines she gasped and exclaimed, \"He got into another gunfight?\"\n\nShe then smiled and handed it to Tyler.\n\nAs Tyler read the telegram, Jim said, \"J.R. told me that the deputy who was escorting Hilliard must have cut him loose and then Hilliard shot the deputy. Morg chased Hilliard down and is waiting for their prosecutor's decision. Did Morg tell you anything else, Stella?\"\n\n\"He claims to be buying an engagement gift for Mrs. Driscoll and her fianc\u00e9, Abner Jacobs.\"\n\nBefore any of the others could react, Stella quickly said, \"He's just letting me know that he wasn't happy with my clumsy attempt at matchmaking. I know him pretty well and I'm also sure that there is only one man that Georgette Driscoll would ever consider marrying.\"\n\nSally asked, \"Do you think he's going to ask her, Stella?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure, but if he doesn't, I'm not going to be so subtle the next time. But I don't think that I'll need to try again. Let's do some more rearranging. We'll move that dressing table and chair into the big bedroom. Then I'm going to add some personal items for Georgette. She may have worn britches and a flannel shirt on the Double D, but I'll give her a much better choice after she marries Morg.\"\n\nTyler asked, \"You really think he's going to marry her and bring her to Kerrville?\"\n\n\"No. I think he's going to bring her, the children and probably Millie here. Then he'll have Father Velasquez marry them. We have a lot to do and not much time. Let's get started.\"\n\nAs Morg's telegram was hastily passed around, they entered the second and unexpected stage in preparation for Morg's return." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 166", + "text": "John glanced at Wilma before asking, \"Will you be taking any of the ranch hands with you, Morg?\"\n\n\"I haven't had time to talk to Georgette about particulars yet. We'll all get together to discuss the details. But I'm going to recommend that we don't worry about cattle, horses or ranch hands until next spring. I just stopped by to let you and Wilma know about me and Georgette and to find out about Hilliard.\"\n\n\"At least you won't have to hear his name again. Jonas thinks that the deputy killed him when the doc left the room after fixin' his arm. Maybe Hilliard even paid him to do it.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be surprised.\"\n\nHe smiled as he looked at Wilma and asked, \"Are you happy about moving into the ranch house, Wilma?\"\n\n\"I guess so. But I'll miss Millie, George and the children.\"\n\n\"We're only a few hours away. I imagine your thoughtful husband will appoint a married foreman who might have some children of his own.\"\n\nShe smiled at John then said, \"I already have a good idea of his choice, and I know I won't be lonely for very long.\"\n\nMorgan stood and said, \"I'm glad to hear that. I'm going back to the house and start working out some of those details with my fianc\u00e9e. You can tell the boys the news and after they head out to herds tomorrow, why don't you and Wilma come over to the house and we'll continue sorting things out.\"\n\nJohn and Wilma both rose and as John shook Morgan's hand, he asked, \"Can we get some target shooting done before you leave?\"\n\nMorgan grinned and replied, \"I'm sure Georgette will want to take a few shots herself.\"\n\nHe then leaned over, kissed Wilma on the cheek, and picked up his Stetson before gimping out of the house. He wasn't surprised that Hilliard had found a way to take the easy path from what he expected to be a miserable existence. Men like Hilliard were essentially cowards who were afraid of facing the daily hardships of life. It took courage to make the most of what life gives you. It was why he wasn't even close to obfuscating when he'd told Timmy and Lucy that their mother was the bravest person he'd ever met.\n\nWhen he entered the kitchen, he saw her sitting at the table in her denim pants and flannel shirt talking to her children. He knew that if she had been injured as badly as Hilliard, she wouldn't bemoan her fate. She'd continue facing her problems as she always had. And she'd handle them all.\n\nShe smiled and asked, \"What did John and Wilma say when you told them?\"\n\nHe removed his hat and replied, \"They sat like statues for a minute or so before they could find their voices. Once they recovered, they seemed very happy with what I told them.\"\n\nAs he sat down, she asked, \"Are they coming over in a little while?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. It's going to be sunset soon and I asked them to stop by tomorrow morning. We still have a lot to talk about before then.\"\n\n\"Yes, we do.\"\n\nMillie said, \"I'll cook dinner. Why don't you go to the great room and start that conversation?\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Morgan and said, \"I think that's a good idea.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he stood, then after she rose, he took her hand.\n\nHe looked at Timmy and said, \"Well, Ranger Tim? Are you and Princess Lucy coming or not?\"\n\nTimmy grinned then bounced off his chair just before Lucy hopped down.\n\nGeorgette smiled at Morgan before they began walking to the hallway with Timmy and Lucy trotting behind.\n\nWhen they reached the main room, Morgan waited until Georgette took her seat near the center of the couch then sat close beside her leaving room for one child on each side.\n\nTimmy and Lucy had almost reached their chosen chairs when Morgan said, \"Are you already ashamed that I'm going to be your papa?\"\n\nLucy looked at her older brother before she turned and trotted to the couch and plopped onto the cushion beside Morgan. Timmy was grinning when he walked to the couch and sat beside his mother.\n\nTimmy leaned past his mother and said, \"We're happy that you're going to be our papa, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"Then you're going to have to stop calling me Mister Kane. None of my friends call me Mister Kane and you and Lucy are more important than anyone else except your queen mother.\"\n\n\"We are?\" asked a wide-eyed Lucy.\n\nMorgan put his big arm around the little girl and said, \"Of course, you are. You and Tim are very special.\"\n\nLucy smiled as she said, \"Mama is even special-er.\"\n\nMorgan laughed before saying, \"She most certainly is.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"I may be many things, sir, but I am not the queen mother. If you want to call me a queen, that's one thing. But saying that I'm a queen mum is hardly complimentary.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"I beg your pardon, Your Majesty. I will not repeat my social faux pas. Now that we've determined the royal lineage, let's talk about your new home.\"\n\nTimmy excitedly asked, \"Will we live with the other Rangers?\"\n\n\"No, sir. But you'll see them a lot. You'll meet all of my other friends, too.\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Will Mrs. McFadden be there?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. She'll probably visit more often than anyone else. You'll have four other aunts who will want to treat you like a princess, too.\"\n\nLucy giggled then looked at her brother and stuck out her tongue.\n\nTimmy didn't seem to take offense, but Morgan realized that he'd have to ask Georgette about how to explain Stella and the other ladies to the children. He'd become so accustomed to thinking of them as nothing more than good friends that all memories of their past had faded. With Tim starting school in Kerrville next year, he had to anticipate that some other student would taunt him about his 'aunts'." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 167", + "text": "Morgan and Georgette tucked the children into their beds then left their bedroom holding hands.\n\nAs they passed her bedroom, Georgette quietly asked, \"Where are you sleeping tonight, Morg?\"\n\n\"I'll head over to the bunkhouse after we talk some more.\"\n\nThey entered the great room and Georgette said, \"I don't blame you. If you used the spare bedroom, I'd probably be tempted to sneak in during the night.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't let that happen, Georgette.\"\n\nAs they sat on the couch, she asked, \"How could you stop me? There isn't a lock on the door.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't let it happen because before you tried to sneak into my bedroom, I'd already be lying beside you in your bed.\"\n\nShe laughed then said, \"I don't believe that you would just be stagnantly lying there, either.\"\n\n\"Sure, I would. It would just be about an hour and a half after joining you under your blankets.\"\n\nShe stared at him and in a hushed voice, exclaimed, \"An hour and a half? You're joking; aren't you?\"\n\nHe smiled as he replied, \"It wasn't a joke, but you're probably right that ninety minutes would be unrealistic, especially as I haven't been with a woman in ten years. I'd be lucky to hold out for thirty minutes on our wedding night. You're a very inspirational woman beneath that flannel shirt and under your denim britches, Georgette.\"\n\nShe gawked at him for a few seconds before quietly saying, \"Even thirty minutes would be, well, let's just say I'd be very happy. I never... , I mean not once did I... , well, I guess I'll just have to fantasize for another week or so; won't I?\"\n\nMorgan was surprised by her admission. He couldn't imagine that her husband hadn't been as inspired as he'd been. Now he just hoped that he'd be able to fulfill her new fantasies.\n\nHe had to put those pleasant thoughts aside before he said, \"Georgette, when Lucy asked about Stella, I realized that sooner or later, Tim and Lucy would learn about Stella and my other lady friends. You know that each of them will want to be like an aunt to Lucy and Tim. But I don't want the children to think any less of them than I do. Do you think we should talk to them before we go to Kerrville?\"\n\n\"I hadn't thought about it either. I really like Stella, despite her poor attempt at matchmaking. I'm sure that I'll like the others, too. I think that you'd be able to tell the children about their past better than I could. But we can wait until they've met all of their new aunts. Wouldn't that be better?\"\n\n\"Yes, I believe it would be. It's a funny thing. When I first met them, they were dressed like working girls and had their pretty faces covered with makeup. When they stripped off their war paint, each of them looked prettier and younger. When they traded in their provocative dresses for more conservative ones, they looked like nothing more than pretty young women.\n\n\"For a while, there were a few incidents with some of the menfolk in Kerrville, but after each of them married one of my big Ranger friends, that all stopped. I'm sure that the biddies and self-proclaimed do-gooders in town still looked down their noses at them, but not one would dare say anything bad about them.\n\n\"The longer they seemed to be accepted, the less I thought about their past. I only see them as dear friends and wives to my close friends. But there's always that one issue that still haunts me.\"\n\n\"That none of them can have a child.\"\n\nMorgan nodded then said, \"What makes it even worse is that they can't legally adopt, either. They know that all it would take is one righteous citizen protesting their immoral behavior to stop any adoption proceedings. Stella asked me about it shortly after she married Tyler. She simply asked about the chances, and I had to give her an honest answer. She seemed to accept it, but I know it still hurt. It still pains me, Georgette. They're all such good, compassionate young women who had the ability to be mothers stolen from them.\"\n\n\"Did you ever find the woman who had done the abortions?\"\n\n\"Her name was Lizzie Best, but I didn't have to find her. After I took Carlotta to San Antonio, the witch realized that I'd probably come back and have her charged and convicted. She was planning to take the next train and just disappear, but she never got to use her ticket. Rob Hobart, one of J.R.'s deputies, found her body in an alley the next morning. She'd been stabbed several times. When I returned, J.R told me that he hadn't found any clues at the scene, so he just let the case drop. Our county prosecutor didn't ask about it either. It seems that everyone knew what she did for a living and her death was considered to be a just sentence and not a murder.\"\n\n\"Do you think that Stella and the others did it?\"\n\n\"I'm sure that they didn't. They were gratified when they learned about it, but I know that they didn't do it. I'm pretty sure I know who did kill her, but I'll never tell anyone.\"\n\n\"Will you tell me?\"\n\nMorgan looked into her brown eyes and said, \"It was Mrs. Montoya's two sons, Paco and Esteban. They were very good with their blades. They learned about Carlotta's condition after we left Kerrville and I'm sure that they were outraged knowing what Lizzie Best was going to do to their sister.\"\n\n\"They're in Mexico now, so does it matter if you tell anyone?\"\n\n\"I guess not, but it wouldn't serve any purpose either.\"\n\n\"So, after Timmy and Lucy meet their new aunts, will you be able to talk to them?\"\n\n\"I'm sure I can. You've done a remarkable job raising them, Georgette. They're wonderful children.\"\n\nShe smiled and took his hands in hers as she said, \"There's only so much a mother can do. They need a father, but not just any man. They need a man who loves them and who they can respect. They'll need you as much as they needed me, Morg, especially Timmy. I noticed that you don't call him Timmy. You call him Tim. Is that intentional?\"\n\n\"I suppose so. He's six years old now, and I wanted him to start seeing himself as more than a little boy. It won't be long before he starts meeting other, bigger boys in school. Then he'll need to have confidence and understand how to behave. One of the things I noticed in my years of dealing with criminals is that the really bad ones either had an abusive father or no father at all. It takes a strong woman like you to raise a boy to be a good man. Unfortunately, there aren't very many women who can deal with a rebellious son.\"\n\nShe smiled and said, \"But now I don't have to worry about it. He'll have his new papa to teach him how to be a good man.\"\n\nMorgan smiled back at her then said, \"I never thought I'd be a father. I didn't believe that I'd ever meet a woman who would make me remove that wedding band from my finger. But Lucy was right. You are special-er.\"\n\nThey shared a long, silent gaze before he quietly said, \"I'd better get some sleep.\"\n\nGeorgette whispered, \"Will you kiss me again before you go to the bunkhouse?\"\n\nDespite the risk, Morgan pulled her close and kissed her just as he had the first time.\n\nGeorgette felt the same explosion of emotion as she wrapped her arms around his neck then leaned back.\n\nMorgan let her pull him to the couch until he felt her underneath him. He knew that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, but they'd have to wait until they were married.\n\nWhen their lips parted, he stayed just inches from her face as he quietly said, \"I wish I didn't have to leave, Georgette.\"\n\n\"And I wish you didn't have to go, Morg. I'm going to be in agony until our wedding night.\"\n\nHe kissed her softly then said, \"I was limping before, but now I don't know if I'll be able to walk at all.\"\n\n\"We can just stay like this for a while.\"\n\n\"Like that's going to help.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as Morgan slowly pushed his torso up from the couch and awkwardly managed to stand.\n\nHe looked down at her and said, \"I'll see you in the morning, Georgette. I don't know if I'll get any sleep, though.\"\n\n\"I know I won't. Goodnight, Morg.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, my love.\"\n\nMorgan turned then slowly walked across the great room, took his hat from the rack and left the house without looking back. It had taken all of his willpower to leave Georgette on the couch and if he turned and saw her again, he wasn't sure he'd be able to leave.\n\nGeorgette was sitting and staring at the door after he'd gone when Millie entered the great room.\n\nShe smiled and asked, \"Are you happy, George?\"\n\nGeorgette took a deep breath before she smiled up at Millie and replied, \"I'm in heaven, Millie." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 168", + "text": "Morgan didn't get much sleep, but it wasn't for the reason he expected. He was kept up by the lengthy and in-depth questioning by the ranch hands. They asked about the shootout, his pending marriage to their boss, his new ranch and just about everything else except his middle name.\n\nBy the time he was able to crawl into his bunk and get his much-needed rest, it was just three hours before dawn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 169", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nAfter one intense day of planning, they had a more leisurely second day of packing with some target practice mixed in. On their last night on the Double D, they had a celebration dinner in the chow house with all the hands and even the families from the settlement. Morgan and Georgette had maintained a party-like atmosphere rather than let it slide into a gloomy farewell party. Georgette got them all laughing when she told everyone that she would still be the boss even after the wedding. Morgan hadn't objected.\n\nDuring those two days of planning, they included much more personal conversation. They did manage to keep their expressions of affection to the basics, but it had the expected impact on each of them. Aside from the physical and mental frustration and anguish, the next two nights were filled with vivid, lusty dreams.\n\nGeorgette still wore her britches and flannel shirts on both days. It was only that morning, when they were boarding the carriage, that Morgan first saw her wearing a dress. It wasn't a fancy, well-fitted dress, but he was still amazed at the transformation. It wasn't as dramatic as Carlotta's, or the other girls' had been, but she was even more special-er." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 170", + "text": "It was early afternoon as the carriage approached Kerrville. Morgan was handling the reins with Georgette sitting close beside him on the carriage's front seat. Millie was flanked by Timmy and Lucy on the back seat.\n\nTrailing Georgette's carriage was a wagon filled with all that she'd chosen to take from the Double D. Jonas and Paul Kelly were on the driver's seat. Morgan had suggested Jonas as one of the drivers and let John select the second. Felix was attached to the wagon and carried two scabbards. One with the Winchester '86 and the other with the Sharps-Borshadt.\n\nIt had been a pleasant, uneventful drive that they'd filled with pleasant conversation. Morgan knew they'd spot Kerrville's northernmost buildings soon.\n\nGeorgette smiled and said, \"I think John was sadder when you took the Sharps-Borshadt than he was about us leaving.\"\n\n\"He'll get over it. I'll buy him the Sharps that Ernie Whiteman has been trying to sell me for six months. It's not as nice as my Sharps-Borshadt, but he reconditioned it. After I have him add a scope, I'm sure that John will be happy.\"\n\n\"Does it shoot the same ammunition as the Sharps-Borshadt, or is it one of the Big Fifties?\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he replied, \"You are so perfect, Georgette. It's chambered for the fifty caliber cartridges, but I prefer the .45 anyway. The fifty has more punch up to about four hundred yards, but the .45 is more accurate and penetrates better after that.\"\n\n\"You will let me shoot it before you give it to him; won't you?\"\n\n\"Of course. I'm not about to disappoint my bride.\"\n\nShe leaned closer and whispered, \"I know that you won't disappoint her on her wedding night.\"\n\nMorgan just smiled rather than risk having his prepared lewd reply being overheard.\n\nGeorgette then asked, \"Do you really think that they'll all be at the ranch house?\"\n\n\"I'd be shocked if they weren't. You read the telegram I sent to Stella. You aren't nervous; are you?\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"Not at all. I just thought your message was a bit cryptic, yet you seem to be confident that she understood what you meant.\"\n\n\"I'm positive. When I wrote 'RETURNING TO NEW RANCH HOUSE TOMORROW. SB DIDN'T MATTER. I WIN.', I'm sure that she'll figure it out.\"\n\n\"You're probably right. She's a remarkable woman, Morg.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is. And so are you, Georgette. That's why you liked each other so quickly.\"\n\n\"She told me about how you offered them a chance to change their lives and become card dealers. What did you do after they married your friends?\"\n\n\"That's another interesting story. They were doing well, but I needed more workers, so I had Stella join me for the interviews.\"\n\n\"Did you hire more women or just men?\"\n\n\"Both. As long as they understood how I wanted The Bluebonnet run, their sex was unimportant. I didn't want any professional gamblers or prostitutes who wanted to meet men with more cash in their pockets. But you'd be surprised what happened after a few months.\"\n\n\"I doubt if you could tell me anything that would surprise me anymore.\"\n\n\"Maybe not. But it wasn't long before some of our new female hires began receiving marriage proposals.\"\n\n\"That doesn't surprise me.\"\n\n\"What was odd was that the first one approached me to ask permission, but it was more like asking for a father's blessing. After I told her it was alright, she almost danced out of my office. Then it became almost routine. After the fourth one, I had Stella take over as the saloon's matchmaker. Maybe that's why she thought her Sharps-Borshadt ploy was a good idea.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed again then asked, \"Do any of the men come to ask permission?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. We don't get many lady visitors to The Bluebonnet. What is interesting is that we began to get new applicants from widows and other young women who seemed to be more interested in finding a husband than dealing cards.\"\n\n\"Did you still hire them?\"\n\n\"If they passed Stella's scrutiny. We have two saloons to keep operating and because we're selective, we can't afford to pass up any qualified applicants.\"\n\n\"Are you still going to run The Bluebonnet after we're married?\"\n\n\"I don't run it now, Georgette. I own it and make some of the decisions, but I turned that job over to Tyler six months ago. I'm just a lawyer now.\"\n\n\"A lawyer and a Ranger.\"\n\nMorgan smiled at her and said, \"And soon to be your husband and Tim and Lucy's father.\"\n\nShe leaned over and kissed him before turning and looking back at Mille and her children, who were all grinning back at her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 171", + "text": "Tyler asked, \"Are you sure that's what he meant in that telegram, Stella?\"\n\n\"If I'm wrong, then it'll be the first time.\"\n\nSally smiled and said, \"Do I have to remind you about the Sharps-Borshadt?\"\n\n\"I created that as nothing more than a secondary motive. It was just an added nudge to give him an excuse to return. I suspected that he'd be heading back there as soon as he could anyway. I'm pretty sure that he'll be returning within an hour with Mrs. Driscoll and her children. He'll probably have Millie with him, too.\"\n\nRose asked, \"Do you want to make a bet, Stella?\"\n\n\"Alright. What's the wager? It can't be anything as mundane as money.\"\n\n\"Um... if we don't see him arriving with Mrs. Driscoll and the children within an hour, then I win. Okay?\"\n\n\"Fine. But you didn't tell me what the bet was.\"\n\nBefore Rose could answer, Sally stepped close and said, \"I hope you're right, Stella. I can't wait to meet Lucy.\"\n\nStella looked at her husband and said, \"You should go and talk to your male friends.\"\n\nTyler smiled as he nodded then turned and left without saying a word.\n\nStella looked at her four sisters and said, \"Let's all go to the big bedroom.\"\n\nShe turned and after she and the others entered what she believed would be Morgan and Georgette's marital bedroom, Stella closed the door.\n\nShe said, \"When I first met Lucy, she asked me if I had a little girl. It was just an innocent question, but you can imagine how it made me feel.\"\n\nRose asked, \"What did you tell her?\"\n\n\"I said that I didn't, but if I did, I'd want her to be just like her. It was the truth, too. I just wanted you all to be prepared if she asks you.\"\n\nRuby asked, \"Do you think the children know about us?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. But when they arrive, I'll ask Morg. After the first mass greeting, I want you to show the children and Millie their rooms. I'll show Georgette this bedroom.\"\n\nSally looked at the bed and asked, \"Are you a little jealous, Stella? I know I am and I'm not ashamed to admit it.\"\n\n\"We all are, Sally. Now, let's get back out there and get ready for their arrival.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 172", + "text": "As the carriage entered Kerrville, Lucy and Timmy were gawking at their new hometown as they stood on the carriage seat with Millie's arms wrapped around their knees.\n\nTimmy pointed and asked, \"Is that your saloon, Mister... I mean, Papa?\"\n\nMorgan loudly answered, \"No, sir. That one belongs to a man named Harry Freeman. He's not very friendly.\"\n\nGeorgette asked, \"Does he give you any trouble, Morg?\"\n\n\"Not much. We had a few minor incidents for the first two months, but he's behaved himself since. It helps that I'm on good terms with Sheriff Brown.\"\n\nA few seconds later, he pointed to the left side and said, \"That's Saint Rose of Lima church. We can talk to Father Velasquez after Mass tomorrow. Okay?\"\n\n\"Do you believe he'll let us marry on Tuesday and not require the reading of banns?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. When you meet Father Velasquez, you'll understand. I've been in his good graces since our first meeting in his sacristy.\"\n\nGeorgette took his arm and looked down the road for The Bluebonnet. Morgan pointed out The Lonely Armadillo before they rolled past the park which created high-pitched giggling from the back seat, then passed the new brick county courthouse and the jail. Georgette was surprised when she finally saw The Bluebonnet. She didn't think it looked anything like a saloon.\n\nShe turned to Morgan and said, \"It looks like a nice store or maybe a library.\"\n\nMorgan smiled as he replied, \"That was the impression I was hoping to make. One of these days, I'll show you the apartment.\"\n\n\"I'd like to see it, too.\"\n\n\"I noticed that none of my friends were waiting near the door, so that means that they're all at the ranch house. I suspect that J.R. is there as well. So, prepare for a loud welcome when we arrive.\"\n\n\"I may not have been nervous before, but I am now.\"\n\nHe grinned as he said, \"This from a woman who faced down a sheriff and his two deputies and who put a bullet on target at eight hundred yards.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"It's a new experience for me, Morg.\"\n\n\"It's very different for me, too. But I have the advantage of knowing everyone who is probably waiting in the room. You only met Stella and my Ranger friends. But I think that Stella will act as your buffer.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\"\n\nThey soon left Kerrville behind, and Morgan pointed to the access road.\n\n\"Unlike the Double D, you'll see the ranch house and other buildings as soon as we turn onto the access road.\"\n\nGeorgette was still nervous as Morgan turned the carriage onto the road with the wagon trailing behind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 173", + "text": "Felipe had watch duty behind one of the front windows and shouted, \"Here they come!\"\n\nRose quickly asked, \"How many?\"\n\nFelipe kept his focus on the approaching vehicles as he replied, \"It looks like Morg is driving her carriage, but he has Mrs. Driscoll with him in the front seat and Millie and the children in the back. They have a loaded wagon trailing and Felix is tied to the wagon.\"\n\nStella didn't gloat, but said, \"I want you all to be considerate to Georgette and the children. They've had a long day, and this is the first time they've left the Double D.\"\n\nTyler grinned as he said, \"Yes, boss.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 174", + "text": "Even though Morgan had described the ranch house as a large adobe hacienda, Georgette was still surprised at its size. The Double D's ranch house was large, but not this big. What made it stranger was that the Double D was such a bigger spread.\n\nShe then noticed the absence of horses or buggies, so she asked, \"Are they really there, Morg? I don't see any horses.\"\n\n\"The barn doors are closed, so I imagine they're all inside. I hope that they don't expect us to be surprised. I guess we'll find out soon enough.\"\n\nMorgan soon pulled the carriage to a stop and pulled the handbrake. As he wrapped the reins around the brake handle, Georgette opened the carriage door and stepped onto the ground.\n\nMorgan slowly and awkwardly exited the carriage as Georgette helped Lucy down. After Millie left the carriage, Timmy hopped to the ground and took his sister's hand.\n\nJonas and Paul walked from the wagon and Jonas asked, \"Are we comin' inside, Morg?\"\n\n\"Of course, you are. We'll let my big Ranger friends unload the wagon. Let's head inside.\"\n\nMorgan smiled at Georgette then took her hand before they started up the stone steps to the tiled porch.\n\nThey had just walked onto the porch when the heavy door swung open, and Stella smiled as she said, \"Welcome to your new home, George. And it's wonderful to see you again, Lucy. You're even prettier than I remembered, and your brother seems bigger, too.\"\n\nLucy giggled and Timmy smiled at Stella before she turned and reentered the house.\n\nBefore they even entered the great room, Georgette's nervousness had evaporated after receiving Stella's warm welcome.\n\nMorgan approached Stella and said, \"I found my Sharps-Borshadt, by the way.\"\n\nStella smiled as she replied, \"It was just a nudge, Morg.\"\n\n\"I know, but it was an unnecessary nudge.\"\n\n\"Obviously.\"\n\nThe mass greeting then followed, but following Stella's dictate, it was very cordial and reserved.\n\nDespite their concerns, Lucy didn't ask any of the ladies about their children. She was simply in awe of her new home and all the new people. Timmy was just as impressed but wanted to embark on a journey of discovery.\n\nAfter their initial introductions, Felipe, Homer, Pete and soon-to-be-attorney, Jim Cooper, left the house to start emptying the wagon. Tyler pried Morgan from Georgette, and had Jonas and Paul join them in the kitchen for some coffee and apple cake.\n\nStella then guided Georgette across the atrium to the large bedroom while Sally, Ruby, Rose and Fannie led the children and Millie away to show them their rooms.\n\nGeorgette was still amazed at all she saw in the very different ranch house as they entered the large bedroom she would share with Morgan.\n\nStella closed the door and smiled as she said, \"This is your bedroom, George.\"\n\nGeorgette let her eyes pass over the mirrored dressing table, the large chest of drawers another, smaller dresser, before she let them rest on the large, quilted bed.\n\nShe quietly said, \"This is much nicer than I expected.\"\n\n\"We all pitched in to make it as nice as possible. We set up the other bedrooms as well. Millie's bedroom is at the end and then there's the children's bedroom with the two beds. Morg's bedroom is next door.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at her and said, \"Morg said that you'd know we'd all be coming because you understand him so well.\"\n\n\"I do. But I think you'll get to know him better than anyone else.\"\n\n\"I hope so. We've only known each other for such a short time, but it was more than enough to grow to love him.\"\n\n\"This is the first time I've seen you wearing a dress, George. I imagine that when Morg first saw you, he was speechless for a while.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as she replied, \"It's not an overly pretty dress, but he seemed to be pleased.\"\n\nStella stepped over to the large dresser and opened the top drawer. She pulled out a shiny, emerald-green dress and let it unfold.\n\nGeorgette slowly walked closer and asked, \"Is that one of the dresses you wore in your days as a working girl?\"\n\n\"It is. I think it would fit you perfectly, too. The good news is that you won't need to wear a corset. You have a perfect figure and are more voluminous where it matters.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"That is a side benefit from having two babies, but it is offset by the stretch marks. Do you really think Morg would like to see me wearing it?\"\n\n\"He may be a lawyer and a Ranger, but he's more man than any other I know, including my husband. He'll melt if he sees you wearing this. Just don't let your children see you.\"\n\n\"I won't. I hope he doesn't melt, either.\"\n\nStella laughed, then folded the dress and returned it to the drawer. She closed the top drawer, then opened the second and lifted an almost glowing, ivory garment from inside.\n\nShe let it drop open and Georgette gasped before asking, \"Is that silk?\"\n\n\"Yes. I have another one, so this one is yours. I didn't think that you already owned anything that a bride would need for her wedding night.\"\n\nStella held it out until Georgette carefully took the almost weightless shimmering cloth nightgown.\n\nShe whispered, \"I've never had anything so beautiful before.\"\n\n\"You already have two beautiful children and I'm sure that Morg will soon give you more.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Stella as she asked, \"He told me he had overcome his secret fear, but do you believe that he has?\"\n\n\"He wouldn't have asked you to marry him if he didn't. He must love you very much, George.\"\n\nShe nodded as she handed the silk nightgown back to Stella.\n\nAs Stella returned it to the drawer, she asked, \"Did you or Morg talk to the children about what we did before we met Morgan?\"\n\n\"No. Morg said he'd talk to them. I think he could explain it better than I could.\"\n\n\"I agree with you. I hope he has the talk soon because it's bound to come up before long.\"\n\n\"I'll mention it to him when we're alone. We're going to Mass tomorrow and meet with Father Velasquez about having the wedding on Tuesday.\"\n\nA giant smile filled Stella's face before she exclaimed, \"Let me be the first to congratulate you, George! That's wonderful! I'm sure that Father Ramon will agree. He and Morg are good friends. He would have been here if he didn't have to hear confessions.\"\n\nGeorgette was smiling as much as Stella as she nodded and said, \"I just hope I can avoid sneaking into Morg's bedroom before Tuesday night.\"\n\n\"You don't think it's accidental that I arranged for his bedroom to be next door; do you? I had pink, flowered curtains put in the far bedroom so Morg wouldn't dare choose it for his temporary room. Then after putting the two beds in the next room for the children, that left the one next door. I don't think Father Velasquez believes that any way of sharing love, including physical intimacy, is a sin. You can ask him tomorrow if you dare.\"\n\n\"I won't, but I might mention it to Morg after I ask him to talk to the children.\"\n\nStella asked, \"You do know how jealous we all are; don't you?\"\n\n\"He told me that he was a bit jealous when each of you married, but it was more than that when you married Tyler.\"\n\n\"I know. But don't let any of that bother you. You are the woman who made him remove his wedding ring.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded then said, \"Thank you for the dress and nightgown, Stella. I promise to put them to good use.\"\n\nStella laughed then hooked her arm through Georgette's as she said, \"I'm sure you will. Now, let's go back and join the crowd.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 175", + "text": "The rest of the afternoon and early evening were spent eating and talking. Timmy and Lucy were the center of attention yet none of the expected awkwardness arrived.\n\nThe discussions included their wedding, the unexpected encounter with Mike Hilliard, and their plans for the two ranches. By the time all of the visitors, including Jonas and Paul, had returned to Kerrville, it was close to bedtime for Timmy and Lucy.\n\nGeorgette had managed to spend a few private minutes with Morg and had asked him to talk to the children.\n\nAfter they waved goodbye to their friends, Morg knew it was time to have the chat and while he agreed with Georgette that he should tell them, he was still unsure of how to do it. He had argued many difficult cases before juries but trying to explain what their new aunts did and why they couldn't have children would be much more difficult.\n\nGeorgette smiled at him as he entered the children's new bedroom then she and Millie headed down the hallway to the kitchen.\n\nTimmy and Lucy were already in their nightshirts as they sat cross-legged on Timmy's bed playing marbles on the quilt.\n\nThey both looked at him with big smiles as he sat on Lucy's bed and Timmy said, \"We like our new house, Papa. It's even nicer than our old one.\"\n\n\"I'm happy to hear that. When you get a little older, you'll have your own rooms, too.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nLucy then asked, \"Where will our baby sister sleep?\"\n\nMorgan blinked before he smiled and replied, \"She'll stay with me and your mama for a while. Then we'll start moving everyone around.\"\n\nTimmy snapped, \"I'm gonna have a brother first, Lucy!\"\n\n\"No, you're not!\"\n\nMorgan laughed then said, \"Enough! I'm laying down the law. I need to talk to you about your new aunts.\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Like Aunt Stella?\"\n\n\"Yes, Lucy. You just met Sally, Rose, Ruby and Fannie. They are all married to my Ranger friends except for Sally, who is married to Mister Cooper. He will soon be a lawyer just like me.\"\n\nTimmy asked, \"Are they all gonna be our aunts?\"\n\n\"Not real aunts because they aren't related. But they all want to be even better than real aunts because they already like you so much.\"\n\nLucy tilted her head and asked, \"They do? Why?\"\n\n\"One reason is because your mother raised you to be such wonderful children. The other reason is that none of them can have babies of their own.\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Why doesn't God want them to have babies?\"\n\nMorgan sighed then said, \"It wasn't God who is stopping them from having babies. You don't understand how mamas and papas have babies; do you?\"\n\nLucy shook her head, but Timmy replied, \"Don't they just get married and the lady grows a baby in her tummy?\"\n\nMorgan restrained his smile as he replied, \"Well, that's part of it, but it's not that simple, Tim.\"\n\nHe paused as their four small eyes stared at him. If they were a little older, this would be much easier.\n\n\"Let's forget about how mamas and papas make babies. That's a very hard thing for youngsters to understand and it's not why I want to talk to you about your aunts. Okay?\"\n\nThey both nodded as they continued to stare at him with big eyes.\n\n\"Good. I told you how I became the owner of the saloon when my brother died. My older brother did many bad things. Some of them were how he treated ladies. Each of the ladies you met this afternoon were tricked by my brother into doing things they didn't want to do. Even worse, my brother hired an evil woman to hurt them so they couldn't have babies. It made each of them very sad.\"\n\nTimmy snapped, \"I'm glad somebody shot him!\"\n\n\"So, was I. He was shot by one of the ladies who worked here after my brother shot her father in the saloon. Even though my brother was so mean to them, none of your new aunts blamed me. That's because they are all kind, gentle, good-hearted people. And I'm very proud to call them my friends.\n\n\"Why I'm telling you this is because someday, probably when you're in school, someone will say something mean about your aunts. It will make you mad, but they're only saying it to make you mad and make themselves feel better. But just ignore whatever anyone says. Just tell me or your mama about it.\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Will they say something bad about mama?\"\n\nMorgan smiled and replied, \"No, dear. No one, not even the meanest outlaw in Texas would dare to say anything bad about your mama.\"\n\nLucy looked at her brother and firmly said, \"Good!\"\n\nMorgan stood and said, \"Okay, folks. Let's put away the marbles and get ready for bed.\"\n\nTimmy nodded, said, \"Okay, Papa,\" then began scooping up the marbles and dropping them into their small stringed pouch.\n\nWhen the quilt was free of marbles, Timmy dropped the bag onto the side table and Morgan helped Lucy to the floor.\n\n\"Now, say your prayers and get under the covers.\"\n\nLucy looked up and asked, \"Do we have to say the Our Father? It's a long prayer and I'm sleepy.\"\n\nMorgan grinned and replied, \"No, sweetheart. You don't have to recite any prayers at all. Just quietly talk to God as a good friend. Tell Him how thankful you are for having the best mama in the whole world. I'm sure He already knows that, but He would like to hear that you know what a wonderful gift He gave you.\"\n\nLucy smiled as she stepped to her bedside, then slowly dropped to her knees. Timmy was already kneeling, and soon, each was murmuring a semi-silent prayer.\n\nMorgan smiled as he watched and listened. He didn't pick up much of their conversation with God, but he did notice two words: mama and papa.\n\nThey soon popped up and squirmed under the quilts.\n\nAfter they had their heads on their pillows, Morgan said, \"Goodnight, Princess Lucy and Ranger Tim. I'll see you in the morning.\"\n\nThey echoed, \"Goodnight, Papa,\" before Morgan turned and slowly left their bedroom. He left the door open because he expected Georgette would want to say goodnight to her children.\n\nHe barely passed over the threshold before he found Georgette and Millie standing just two feet to the left.\n\nHe was still smiling as he said, \"I thought you'd want to give them a goodnight kiss.\"\n\nGeorgette replied, \"I will, but we were really just eavesdropping. We wanted to hear you explain the birds and the bees.\"\n\n\"Sorry to disappoint you.\"\n\n\"You may not have explained the facts of life, but you certainly didn't disappoint me, Morg.\"\n\n\"I'll go have a cup of coffee while you visit the children.\"\n\n\"I'll be back shortly.\"\n\nMorgan nodded then he and Millie walked to the hallway that led to the kitchen while Georgette entered her children's new bedroom.\n\nAs they walked down the short hallway, Millie said, \"You sit down, and I'll get your coffee. You were shot ten days ago.\"\n\n\"I keep getting reminded by my abused right leg. Thank you for your consideration, Millie. I need to see Doctor Nagy on Monday and have him take out those stitches.\"\n\nAs Morgan sat at the kitchen table, Millie said, \"That would be advisable if you're planning on getting married on Tuesday. You wouldn't want those threads tickling George at an inopportune moment.\"\n\nMorgan suspected that Millie thought he might blush, so he replied, \"Maybe you could help me test that possibility later tonight, Millie.\"\n\nMillie almost dropped the coffeepot from her hand as her eyes snapped to look at him. When she saw his grinning face, she laughed and shook her head.\n\nThey each had a cup of coffee in front of them when Georgette entered the kitchen and walked to the cookstove.\n\n\"What was so funny?\"\n\nAs she filled her own cup with coffee, Morgan said, \"Millie was just reminding me that I needed to have my stitches removed.\"\n\nGeorgette sat down next to Morgan and asked, \"What's so funny about that?\"\n\n\"I'm sure Millie will be happy to explain later.\"\n\nMillie laughed, then stood and said, \"I'll make my escape now and hope you forget to ask, George.\"\n\nShe set her coffee cup in the sink then wiggled her fingers as a goodnight wave before leaving the kitchen.\n\nGeorgette waved back then after Millie was gone, she said, \"This is a really nice house, Morg. It's a lot different than the ranch house on the Double D.\"\n\n\"It's different than any other ranch house or hacienda I've visited, too. But I like it, and it's our home, Georgette.\"\n\nShe sighed then said, \"Our home.\"\n\n\"Did you notice Stella's subtle arrangement of the bedrooms?\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then replied, \"She told me why she set them up this way. I'm sure that you understand her motive as well.\"\n\n\"I do. I imagine that she left you some of her more revealing garments, too.\"\n\n\"She did. Stella must not have been satisfied with just matchmaking. She seems to have believed that I didn't even own a dress and if I did, it would be frumpish.\"\n\n\"You couldn't look frumpish if you wore a burlap sack, Georgette.\"\n\n\"I'd be too busy scratching.\"\n\nThen she smiled and softly said, \"When I listened to you talking to Timmy and Lucy, I was amazed. I didn't know how you could do it.\"\n\n\"When I started, I focused on trying to explain how babies are made. It took me a little while to realize that it wasn't necessary. After that, it was easier.\"\n\n\"You explained the issue in a way they could understand. You told them that their new aunts were good people who had bad things happen to them. When they're older, they can learn the rest.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"I may have to have that talk with Tim in nine months.\"\n\nShe took his hands before asking, \"Have you really put your fears behind you?\"\n\n\"Yes, I have. They may try to sneak up on me, but I have the perfect shield now. Actually, I have two. And they're both sound asleep in their new bedroom. Whenever I have the first hint of that irrational fear trying to emerge from its hiding place, I'll just look at our children. Just seeing them will slam that door. I'll lock it and throw away the key when I see you with our first baby.\"\n\n\"Will we give them a brother or a sister?\"\n\nMorgan laughed then replied, \"I'm not going to make that guess. You heard Tim's reaction when Lucy predicted she'd have a sister.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled and said, \"They did seem set in their opinions. I hope Father Velasquez lets us marry on Tuesday. I want to start working on procreation as soon as possible.\"\n\n\"You won't need to wear Stella's gifts to inspire me, Georgette. But we will have to endure three more frustrating nights.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean we have to be strangers in our own house; does it?\"\n\nMorgan stood then after Georgette rose from her chair, they reenacted their first embrace and kiss. While it was almost identical, it was even more inspirational to each of them. It was also more dangerous. The bed that they would soon share was just forty-four feet away and their intense desires were close to become undeniable demands.\n\nMorgan whispered, \"I love you, Georgette. And I want you more than you can imagine.\"\n\n\"I don't have to imagine anything, Morg. I have never wanted anything so much. The temptation is overwhelming; isn't it?\"\n\n\"It's even more than overwhelming. I'm not sure there's a word in the English language to describe it. I know that if I kissed you again right now, my willpower would shatter.\"\n\nGeorgette looked up into his green eyes and quietly said, \"I'm even closer to surrendering. It won't take another kiss.\"\n\nMorgan was a heartbeat away from leading her to their new bedroom when he took a breath and said, \"I have an extra Webley Bulldog. I think you'd like it better than a full-sized pistol. Would you like to have it?\"\n\nWhile her dominating desires didn't disappear, they did diminish enough for her to smile and reply, \"It's double-action; isn't it?\"\n\nHe smiled back as he said, \"Yes, ma'am. It only has five cylinders and uses a smaller round than the Winchester .44-40.\"\n\nThey were still locked in their embrace when they began laughing but soon separated.\n\nGeorgette asked, \"Are we taking the carriage to Mass tomorrow?\"\n\n\"I think we'll take the buckboard. I'll have it ready to go by eight-thirty. Okay?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. Millie will watch Timmy and Lucy.\"\n\nMorgan left a safe gap between them as he said, \"Goodnight, Georgette.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Morg. Just to let you sleep better, I'll be sleeping in my thick flannel nightdress until our wedding night.\"\n\n\"As if that will help.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then waved and walked out of the kitchen. Morgan carefully returned to his seat and stared at his empty coffee cup. He was so incredibly light and happy that he began to suspect that something bad was in the offing.\n\nTomorrow, they'd meet Father Velasquez to arrange for their wedding on Tuesday. Monday, he'd have his sutures removed and maybe do some target shooting with Georgette. They'd be married on Tuesday, then Jim and Sally would leave for San Antonio on Wednesday. When they returned on Friday, he'd finish the partnership paperwork and turn over his office and apartment to his new law partner. He'd let Jim figure out where to house his brother and clerk. Ernest Cooper was two years younger than Jim and unmarried, so it shouldn't be difficult. He could stay in one of the open rooms in The Bluebonnet.\n\nAs he worked through the upcoming week's events, Morgan couldn't see where there could be a problem. Sheriff Lusk and his three remaining deputies were out of the picture. He doubted if they'd cause any trouble for John on the Double D. His only real adversary in Kerrville was Harry Freeman. But he and his few remaining minions seemed to be satisfied with his last saloon.\n\nMorgan sat at the table for another ten minutes just trying to imagine anything that could go wrong. He finally grinned, then stood and carried his and Georgette's cups to the sink. After washing them and setting them on the drying rack, Morgan blew out the lamp and limped down the short hall.\n\nBefore entering his bedroom, he glanced at Georgette's closed door and assumed she was already in her heavy flannel nightdress and tucked beneath her quilts.\n\nHe smiled as he stepped into his room and closed the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 176", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nThe entire town had been buzzing about Morgan and Mrs. Driscoll, owner of the giant Double D ranch. Father Ramon wasn't surprised to see them in the first pew at Mass and understood that they'd want to meet with him after he gave the congregation his final blessing.\n\nSo, after Mass, Morgan and Georgette walked with Father Velasquez to his rectory.\n\nAs they walked, Father Ramon said, \"I hear that you had another gunfight on the Double D, Morg.\"\n\n\"It wasn't exactly a gunfight, Father. I took the only shot.\"\n\n\"I hope you don't feel guilty for what you did.\"\n\n\"No, Father, I don't. I don't believe that the Bible's commandment means 'thou shall not kill'. Sometimes killing is necessary to stop evil. I think it should read, 'thou shall not commit murder'.\"\n\n\"That's how I understand it as well.\"\n\nAs they entered the small rectory, Morgan took off his hat and looked at Georgette who appeared understandably nervous. He had no idea what was really causing her stress. When she looked at him, he took her hand, smiled then winked. She tenuously returned his smile as they followed Father Velasquez into his small study.\n\nAfter they sat, Mrs. Duffy entered and asked, \"Would you like me to serve breakfast, Father?\"\n\n\"Could you bring us coffee and biscuits, Delores?\"\n\nShe smiled at Morgan and Georgette before replying, \"Of course,\" then quickly leaving the room.\n\nMorgan then looked at the priest and said, \"Father, Georgette and I would like to be married as quickly as possible. It's not for the usual reason that requires rushed weddings, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I lust after my intended.\"\n\nGeorgette was astonished as she looked at Morgan. Then she heard Father Ramon laugh and quickly shifted her eyes back to the parish priest.\n\n\"You are as honest as always, Morg. Since I first saw your face on the other side of the sacristy door, I knew you were a good man. You've done so much good since you've been here that I've always hoped to have a chance to reward you somehow. I would be honored to marry you and Georgette without having to read the banns or spend days instructing you on your responsibilities to God and the Church.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Father. You know me well enough to understand that lust isn't the reason I want to marry Georgette. I love her more than I believed possible. I can't imagine living without her. I need her as much as any human being needed another.\"\n\n\"A blind man could see how you feel, Morg. After we have our coffee and biscuits, we'll make the arrangements. I'll hear your confessions when we're finished.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Father.\"\n\nGeorgette set aside her dilemma as she said, \"Thank you, Father. Morg told me that you'd understand but I was a bit apprehensive. Father Masson would insist on reading banns and extensive instruction.\"\n\nFather Velasquez smiled as he said, \"He's a good man, but he's also a Jesuit. His order tends to be more diligent in following the rules. I am a Franciscan, and we are more flexible in our interpretations.\"\n\nMrs. Duffy soon arrived with their coffee and biscuits. After setting the tray on the center table, she quietly left the room and closed the door behind her.\n\nAs they broke their fast, Morgan told Father Ramon about the confrontation with Mike Hilliard and the aftermath. They had finished their coffee and biscuits before he finished answering the priest's questions.\n\nWhile Morgan had been talking, Georgette was debating about what she would say in her confession. She knew that even by Church law, she didn't need to confess her great sin. But she felt a responsibility to let Morgan know what she'd done before he married her.\n\nBefore he heard their confessions, he said, \"I don't expect you to confess for the shootings, Morg. Nor do I want to hear a word about lust from either of you. I don't consider it a sin to harbor such desires for the one we love. Now, Morgan, I'll hear your confession.\"\n\nMorgan bowed his head and began the ritual he'd performed hundreds of times in his life. Yet this time, it was much more as his future wife was sitting beside him. But to anyone listening, it would have sounded as if he was hiding some dark sins. Morgan only confessed using the Lord's name in vain and harboring hate for some men. For a lawyer, Ranger and saloon owner, it was an amazingly short confession.\n\nBefore Father Velasquez absolved and blessed him, Georgette knew that she must include her one mortal sin to her short list of venial sins. Her only fear was what Morgan would think of her after he heard her confession. Would he still respect her?\n\nWhen Father Ramon looked at her, she lowered her head and closed her eyes.\n\n\"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been three weeks since my last confession.\"\n\nShe began by confessing her smaller sins that were similar to Morgan's. But then after she told of how she'd harbored hate in her heart for Sheriff Lusk, she stopped.\n\nAfter a short pause, she said, \"Father, I have already confessed my greatest sin. I was absolved and performed my penance. But I still feel shame and guilt for that sin. I feel the need to confess it again with Morgan listening.\"\n\nFather Velasquez quietly said, \"I understand.\"\n\nGeorgette nodded as she continued her confession, saying, \"When I was married, I invited another man into my bed and committed the sin of adultery. I did this more than once and only ended the affair because the man was afraid of being caught and left. I believe that my husband knew about it, and it drove him even deeper into the bottle. My infidelity may have been the reason he was drunk and was gored by the bull and died. I have lived with my shame since that day. But what makes it so much worse is I know that Lucy is a product of that sin.\"\n\nShe could almost feel Morgan's eyes burning into her but was too ashamed to look. Everything had been so perfect until now. She could have kept her secret but decided that she couldn't let Morgan marry her without letting him hear of her weakness and guilt.\n\nFather Ramon wasn't surprised as he waited for Georgette to continue. While he waited, he looked at Morgan to see his reaction. He knew Morgan wouldn't cancel the wedding or even be angry at Georgette but just hoped that he wouldn't lose his respect for her.\n\nMorgan looked at Georgette with her head bowed and her eyes closed and understood why she was so worried. He had done nothing but praise her since they met, and she must believe that he had put her on a pedestal. Now she was terrified that he would not only toss her from that pedestal but drop her into a dark abyss.\n\nWhen she hadn't spoken for almost a minute, Father Ramon asked, \"Do you have any more sins to confess, Georgette?\"\n\nShe shook her head, so Father Velasquez granted her absolution but assigned her no penance. He knew that she was still suffering, and only Morgan could help her now. As he blessed her, Morgan reached over and gently took her hand.\n\nGeorgette felt his big hand engulf hers then slowly lifted her head, opened her eyes and looked into his. He wasn't smiling, but his gentle face and compassionate, understanding eyes gave her the answer she thought was undeserved.\n\n\"After hearing what I just said, do you still want to marry me, Morgan?\"\n\n\"Of course, I do. You haven't changed, Georgette. You're the same woman I loved when we entered the rectory. I don't love or respect you any less now.\"\n\nGeorgette used her free hand to wipe away a few stray tears before asking, \"Do you mean that, Morg? I committed adultery.\"\n\n\"I was listening, Georgette. We can talk on the way home.\"\n\nShe nodded then looked at Father Velasquez.\n\nHe smiled and said, \"I'll see you both on Tuesday morning at nine o'clock.\"\n\nThe priest then stood, moved the empty cups and plates to the tray and carried it out of the room.\n\nGeorgette had hoped to feel some relief after confessing her greatest sin for a second time, but it still hadn't arrived. She slowly stood before Morgan rose from his chair. He was still holding her hand as they left the rectory. He pulled on his hat as before they silently began walking to the buckboard.\n\nHe helped her climb into the driver's seat and then carefully stepped up and sat beside her. He didn't release the handbrake or take the reins as he turned and looked at her sad, brown eyes.\n\n\"Georgette, I'm going to tell you something that I've never told anyone, not even Stella. No one, not even my father or Jim Cooper knows about this. Alright?\"\n\nShe nodded then Morgan said, \"When I lost Barbara and our baby girl, I was crushed. But there was something that made me feel like a charlatan as I grieved in silence during their funeral Mass. You see, I wasn't sure if the baby was mine. She probably was, but there was a chance that she wasn't.\"\n\nGeorgette's eyes widened as she looked at Morgan who continued his story.\n\n\"We had been married for just a few weeks when I had to go to Austin for a week to meet with Judge Riddle. I returned a day early and found one of my wealthy clients in my house having coffee with Barbara. She had dismissed the housekeeper and was still wearing her nightdress even though it was early afternoon.\n\n\"My very nervous client said he stopped by to talk to me about a new legal issue but never did tell me what it was. He left quickly and I pretended that nothing had happened. I never asked Barbara about it, and she never offered an excuse. But I had no doubt of what had been going on in my absence.\n\n\"My client was a reasonably handsome man and a well-known womanizer. Barbara was a very pretty young woman and had had a weakness for flattery. But we both acted as if nothing had changed. I'm sure that she wasn't unfaithful after that incident and two months later, she told me she was pregnant. I was honestly overjoyed.\n\n\"I was devastated by her and the baby's deaths and then just a few months later, I lost my father and joined the Rangers. Believe it or not, I never spent a moment wondering about the baby's parentage in the past ten years. It simply didn't matter. It was only when you confessed your sin that the memory returned to the forefront of my mind. In that silent minute after you confessed to the adultery, I examined how I might have reacted if Barbara and the baby had lived. How would I behave toward our little girl if I suspected that she wasn't mine?\"\n\nGeorgette quietly asked, \"Did you answer your own question?\"\n\nMorgan shook his head and replied, \"No, I didn't. I don't know how I would have treated her. I would like to believe that I would have loved her as much as I would had I been absolutely convinced that I was her father. But I won't speculate on what I might have done.\n\n\"What I do know is that you love Lucy as much as any mother could love a child. Your sin was a weakness brought on by loneliness. Judging by what I've heard, your husband was already a heavy drinker before you were married. Is that true?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll admit that he was fond of whiskey. But...\"\n\n\"No buts, Georgette. As long as you're being so brutally honest with yourself, you should do the same for your husband. He was a drunk and I know that married drunks are more interested in making love to a whiskey bottle than to their wives. You probably felt neglected and sought affection. I've seen it many times over the years.\n\n\"I've seen those frustrated, lonely women I call whiskey widows and know the type of men who see them as prey. If a man is heavily into drink, they hang around his wife and tell her how she deserves better. I don't blame any of the wives for seeking the love and comfort that their whiskey-loving husbands don't provide. I accuse the selfish bastards who take advantage of her.\"\n\nGeorgette had never looked at the affair from a man's perspective before. She suddenly felt like a fool for listening to Edgar Sullivan. He'd sweet-talked himself into her bed and she had been blaming herself ever since.\n\nShe quietly asked, \"Did you cheat on her in retaliation?\"\n\n\"I thought about it, but I didn't. It wasn't because I was being noble. It was for a much more practical reason. I had just started my law practice and my father was a respected judge. I didn't want to risk the scandal.\"\n\n\"I'm such a fool,\" she said under her breath.\n\n\"I'm not going to argue the point, Georgette. But you were still young and na\u00efve. You had a baby boy and a negligent husband. You needed affection more than anything else and your husband wasn't providing for that need. I will always love you, Georgette. I'll show you how much I love you each day for the rest of our lives.\"\n\nShe smiled then wrapped him in her arms and laid her head on his chest.\n\n\"I love you so much, Morg. Thank you for telling me about Barbara. I know it was incredibly difficult, but it did something that even two priests' absolutions didn't. It freed me from my guilt and shame. I promise not to tell anyone your secret, either.\"\n\nMorgan had his arms around her as he said, \"I know you won't. I don't want to hear about your one great sin again, either. Lucy is too precious for her to ever hear a whisper.\"\n\n\"I know. She is special.\"\n\nMorgan kissed her forehead and said, \"But you're special-er.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then sat up and watched Morgan take the reins in his hands then release the handbrake.\n\nAs he turned the buckboard toward their new home, Morgan wondered if he'd have to make another confession to Father Velasquez before the wedding. His story about Barbara had been the biggest lie he'd ever told, but he knew it was necessary. He would have made himself the adulterer in his lie but thought Georgette would be much less likely to believe him if he had. She knew him but Barbara would always be a mystery to her. He trusted Barbara's good, compassionate heart would understand and forgive him for defaming her.\n\nAs they rolled out of Kerrville, they passed Paul and Jonas heading back to the Double D on the wagon. Neither vehicle stopped as they exchanged pleasant greetings.\n\nMorgan had the buckboard rolling slowly when Georgette said, \"I was surprised that your confession was so, um, innocent. You sounded like a little boy who was making up sins just because you were ordered to go to confession. You don't drink, don't use tobacco and don't womanize, Morg. Don't you have any faults at all?\"\n\nMorgan laughed before saying, \"Of course, I do. I just don't confess things that I don't consider a sin and the Church does.\"\n\n\"For example?\"\n\n\"The most glaring is lust. It's considered a sin, but if that was true, then there would be a never-ending line of men at the confessional. We'd enter the confessional, be forgiven for our sinful thoughts, then commit them again the moment we saw a handsome woman waiting in the pew. Then we'd just return to the end of the line. Preachers say that we shouldn't have lust in our hearts, but I think we only have love in our hearts. Lust comes from someplace else.\"\n\nShe laughed then asked, \"Women commit the same sin, Morg.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you believe that it's the same, but it's not. Trust me. Women have no concept of how much men think about having sex. I think the only reason we have wars is to eliminate the competition. We also do outrageously stupid things to push those thoughts aside for just a little while.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled and asked, \"And what are some of those stupid things that you've done, Mister Kane?\"\n\n\"When I was a boy or a fully grown man?\"\n\n\"Tell me your last truly stupid thing that you did.\"\n\n\"The best example was when I was active in the Rangers. I was out hunting wild boar. If you had come along, you would have used the most powerful a rifle you could find. That's because it's logical. But because it makes no sense, I used a pistol at close range. The idea was to let the angry beast charge and put a bullet into his skull when he was within range. That in itself is pretty stupid because wild boars are nasty creatures with foul tempers. But I had done it before with my Schofield.\n\n\"Well, one day, I decided to impress my fellow Rangers and rather than use my Schofield, I told them I'd use my Webley Bulldog. They told me I was nuts, which of course convinced me that I had to prove I could do it. Have you ever seen a wild boar up close?\"\n\n\"I have and I can't imagine that you'd try to stop one with a bullet with less stopping power than a Henry .44.\"\n\n\"Then you already understand what an incredibly stupid idea it was. Anyway, we're out in the bushes and tracking a couple of big boars. My closest friend was about fifty feet away. I had my Webley in my hand and could hear the pigs grunting. When I spotted them, I'll admit that I began to have misgivings about leaving my Schofield in my holster.\n\n\"But being a man, I left it tied down as I stalked the two boars. When I was about thirty feet away, they spotted me. The smaller one waddled off, but the big boy glared at me with his beady eyes. I continued to slowly step forward until he began pawing the ground. Then I stopped and aimed my Bulldog. I had my sights on the boar's head when he snorted and charged. I held my fire until he was about twenty feet away then I fired at his massive head.\n\n\"I actually saw my slug ricochet off the front of his skull. It didn't even phase him. But the double action of the Webley let me fire a second and a third within a couple of seconds. Each of them bounced off his head as if it was made of steel. He was just four or five feet away when I fired my fourth shot. I wouldn't have stopped him if I'd been on target. But the third shot made him twist his head slightly and my last bullet hit him in his right eye.\n\n\"He squealed in pain and twisted away just as I hopped to my right to avoid his charge. He was still alive, but on the ground, so I was able to finish him with my knife. By then my friends had arrived and were all gushing about my incredible, manly deed. At least I was honest and told them I was damned lucky that the boar hadn't won the day.\"\n\n\"Did you ever try it again?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I may be a man, but sometimes even we learn our lessons. My new job will be making sure that I pass those lessons on to Tim.\"\n\n\"I hope he listens.\"\n\nAs they turned onto the access road, Morgan said, \"If he doesn't, then he'll learn just as we all do. Even women have to learn from their mistakes. They just don't make as many as we do.\"\n\n\"At least I won't make my big mistake again.\"\n\n\"And you won't mention it ever again, either. But speaking of the Webley, I asked you last night if you'd like to have one. I'd have to modify the shoulder holster to wear like a normal gunbelt if you want it.\"\n\n\"I'd like that. Maybe we could do some shooting this afternoon. I'm unpacked and we'll be pretty busy tomorrow. You have to get your sutures out, so you don't tickle me on our wedding night.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he said, \"Millie surprised me with that observation.\"\n\n\"She was very pleased with herself, too.\"\n\n\"I'll get that shoulder holster modified when we get back and then we'll do some target shooting. We can talk while we're wasting lead.\"\n\n\"You can tell me about more of your manly blunders and how you manage to restrain your lustful cravings.\"\n\n\"It involves a lot of cold water. But I won't keep them shackled Tuesday night, Georgette.\"\n\n\"I have no intention of restraining mine, either.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 177", + "text": "Georgette helped Morgan unharness Murray before they left the barn and walked to the house holding hands.\n\nShe asked, \"We don't have any visitors waiting for us; do we?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I ordered them to stay away until Monday. We need a day to settle down.\"\n\n\"And do some target practice.\"\n\nMorgan laughed then replied, \"We don't have a proper range set up yet, but we can make do.\"\n\n\"I want to try out my new Webley.\"\n\n\"Let's go and tell Tim, Lucy and Millie about our successful visit to Father Velasquez. Then while you finish putting everything away, I'll modify your holster. You'll get to kill some unsuspecting bush after lunch.\"\n\nWhen they walked through the front door, Lucy and Timmy mounted a two-pronged attack.\n\nLucy leapt into her mother's arms and as Georgette pulled her close, Lucy kissed her mother then asked, \"Are you going to marry papa now, Mama?\"\n\nGeorgette smiled and replied, \"Yes, sweetheart. We're going to get married on Tuesday.\"\n\nTimmy had stopped in front of Morgan and as he looked up, was prepared to ask the same question. But before he could utter a word, Morgan scooped him from the floor and hoisted him onto his right shoulder.\n\nLucy looked up at her brother then giggled.\n\nTimmy smiled down at his sister and exclaimed, \"I'm a giant, Lucy!\"\n\nLucy asked, \"Will you let me sit up there, too, Papa? I'm not heavy like Timmy.\"\n\n\"He's not heavy, Lucy. He's your brother. But if you'd like to join him, ask your special-er mama to help get you up here.\"\n\nLucy didn't have to ask before Georgette transferred Lucy to Morgan's left shoulder.\n\nMorgan then walked carefully across the great room with his precious cargo as his right leg kept reminding him to have his sutures removed.\n\nGeorgette and Millie were both smiling as he carefully let Tim and then Lucy slide off his shoulders onto the couch.\n\nAs they scrambled to sit at opposite ends, Morgan sat down leaving room for Georgette.\n\nMillie finally asked, \"So, it's all arranged?\"\n\nGeorgette snuggled in between Morgan and Lucy as she replied, \"We'll be married Tuesday morning at nine o'clock.\"\n\n\"Is it going to be a big affair?\"\n\nGeorgette glanced at Morgan before replying, \"No. We'll just have our wedding Mass then come back here for lunch with our friends.\"\n\n\"That's still going to require some planning, George. Now that you're back, I'll start making lunch.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Millie.\"\n\nMillie smiled then left the great room.\n\nMorgan looked down at Timmy and said, \"Ranger Tim, I need to change a shoulder holster into a regular gunbelt for your mama. Do you want to come along?\"\n\nTimmy grinned and exclaimed, \"Yes, sir!\"\n\nBefore Lucy could feel neglected, Georgette said, \"While the menfolk are doing that, can you help me get my things ready for the wedding, Lucy?\"\n\nLucy nodded then said, \"Okay, Mama.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 178", + "text": "Three hours later, Georgette and Morgan walked out past the barn with Timmy and Lucy trailing behind. She was wearing her denim britches and flannel shirt but with the accessory of a thin gunbelt without any spare cartridge loops.\n\nAs she scanned the area for potential targets, she said, \"This feels eerie to be walking on a ranch without any cattle or horses.\"\n\n\"It doesn't bother me because I'm not accustomed to living on a ranch. But that will all change by next summer; won't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. We need to meet with John to work out the details, but it'll be interesting. You have to set up your office, too.\"\n\n\"We have a lot to do over the next few months and then you'll probably be sidelined for a while.\"\n\nShe smiled as she said, \"I won't be off my feet that long, Mister Kane.\"\n\n\"I expect not. Besides, you'll have Millie and five aunts to help you change diapers.\"\n\n\"You aren't going to give it a try?\"\n\n\"I'll make that decision when it becomes necessary.\"\n\nBefore Georgette could take it another step down that topical path, Timmy pointed and shouted, \"That's a good target!\"\n\nMorgan and Georgette spotted the small stump and stopped walking.\n\nMorgan said, \"It looks like it was an ash or maybe even a black cherry.\"\n\n\"How close do you think we should get, so I don't embarrass myself?\"\n\n\"Let's stop about thirty feet out.\"\n\nWhen they reached their chosen firing line, Morgan took Lucy and Timmy's hands and waited for Georgette to start shooting.\n\nMorgan felt their two small hands grasping his tightly and smiled. Since losing Barbara and their baby, he never thought he would remarry and have children. Now as his future wife was preparing to unleash destruction, he already felt the joy of being a father.\n\nAs Georgette began firing, Timmy and Lucy started bouncing. With each shot, they would happily proclaim the hit or bemoan the miss. When their mother fired her final bullet, she slid her pistol into her holster and turned to face her audience.\n\nMorgan released their hands as he said, \"Pretty good, Georgette. Three out of five at that range is much better than average.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir. Are you going to shoot your Schofield now? I don't believe Timmy will let you go back to the house if you don't.\"\n\n\"I guess that leaves me no choice. If you'll take hold of our children's hands, I'll punish that poor stump.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as Lucy and Timmy took her hands and Morgan stepped to the firing line. She hadn't missed his use of the plural possessive pronoun.\n\nMorgan pulled his Schofield and cocked the hammer in one smooth motion. His sights had barely settled on the stump when he squeezed his trigger. Ten seconds later, the large cloud of gunsmoke was being wafted away by the northern breeze and the stump had been decorated with five more holes.\n\nAfter he holstered his Smith & Wesson, he smiled and asked, \"Now may we return to the house so I can clean our pistols, ma'am?\"\n\n\"I will clean my own gun, sir.\"\n\nMorgan laughed then took Georgette's hand before the family began walking back to the house.\n\nTimmy and Lucy were happily chatting about Morgan's prowess as they stepped along, and Georgette was almost waltzing beside him. Everything was so perfect that Morgan's earlier sense of pending disaster reemerged.\n\nEver since John had entered The Bluebonnet seeking legal help for Mrs. Driscoll, he hadn't had many worry-free days. There was no reason to assume that something bad was about to happen, but that nagging feeling of doom still persisted. But it was so illogical that before they reached the house, Morgan shook it aside.\n\nYet even as he dismissed the notion, less than two miles away in a quiet room in Kerrville a secret plan was well underway." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 179", + "text": "The rest of Sunday was as normal as could be expected after such momentous changes in each of their lives.\n\nAfter the sun set, Timmy and Lucy had been put to bed and an hour later, Millie retired for the night. On the couch in the atrium, Georgette was snuggled in under Morgan's right arm.\n\nGeorgette said, \"Tomorrow will be a busy day.\"\n\n\"At least we don't have to visit Father Velasquez again. If he'd been more devoted to the rules, we'd be living in his rectory for another month.\"\n\nShe smiled as she said, \"I've been through that process, and I was incredibly relieved when Father Ramon said it was unnecessary.\"\n\n\"He just didn't want to get into a legal argument with me. I'd state precedence after precedence where those proscriptions were voided or ignored. It's either that or he understands that if he didn't marry us quickly, we'd pretend we were anyway. And we'd pretend several times each night.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed lightly then asked, \"We aren't going to pretend tonight; are we?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be pretend, Georgette. I was going to have Lucy sleep with you tonight and tomorrow night to act as a small chaperone just to be safe.\"\n\n\"But you didn't. Does that mean you're going to end my frustration?\"\n\n\"I wish I could, Georgette. Lord knows how much I want to end mine as well. But I promised myself a long time ago that if I ever met the one woman who would fill my life, I wouldn't make love to her until we were married. That vow was reinforced after hearing Carlotta's story. She thought he was going to marry her, and he almost destroyed her life. While I know that I would never hurt you in any way, I want to honor that vow. Do you understand, Georgette?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do. It will make our wedding night even more exciting; won't it?\"\n\nHe smiled, then kissed her without reserving any of passion. Georgette almost pulled herself onto his lap as she gave him another sample of what to expect in forty-eight hours.\n\nAs he held her close, Morgan was close to breaking his promise. He had to command his right hand to stay in place as the softness of her body reminded him of the wonderful differences between men and women.\n\nWhen their long kiss ended, Georgette whispered, \"I think I'd better go to our bedroom... alone.\"\n\n\"Quickly.\"\n\nShe rolled onto the couch, then stood and smiled at him before hurrying away and entering their bedroom. Morgan just watched as she closed the door.\n\nHe quietly said, \"Thank God you weren't wearing Stella's green dress, Georgette.\"\n\nHe stayed on the couch for another minute before slowly standing and walking awkwardly to his temporary bedroom. Georgette had told him about Stella's gifts, and he had tried to shake off the vision of Georgette wearing that low-cut, satin dress ever since." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 180", + "text": "It was midmorning as Doctor Nagy pulled out the last of the threads and said, \"You're all set, Morg. You should be able to start exercising that leg more now. Your only restriction is putting up with the pain. But I guess that you won't even notice it when you start your new exercise regimen.\"\n\nMorgan smiled then said, \"There's exercise and there's exercise, Doc.\"\n\n\"So, Tuesday morning you'll get married and break the hearts of a few dozen women in Kerrville.\"\n\n\"I doubt that. But it wouldn't matter anyway.\"\n\nHe stood, pulled up his britches then shook the doctor's hand before leaving his office.\n\nWith his medical issues resolved, he had another injury that might need healing, so after mounting Felix, he rode down Main Street to Saint Rose of Lima church.\n\nHe spent fifteen minutes in the rectory with Father Ramon explaining why he had lied to Georgette. While Father Velasquez didn't consider it a true lie because Morgan had only used it to help Georgette, he still absolved him of the sin.\n\nHe briefly stopped at the jail where he asked J.R. if he'd heard any rumblings of potential trouble in town or in Junction City. The sheriff told him everything was quiet, which should have eased Morgan's concerns, but didn't.\n\nHe then stopped at The Bluebonnet where he met with one of his clients before asking Jim Cooper the same question. Jim gave him the same answer. Then Jim told him that Sally and the rest of Lucy's new aunts were out at his new ranch house with Georgette to prepare for the wedding. He added that he and Sally would be leaving for San Antonio on Wednesday. Morgan reminded him of Judge Spellman's distaste for spouting precedence before he left the saloon to visit The Lonely Armadillo.\n\nNone of his fellow Rangers knew of any likely danger, but he had to stay to endure thirty minutes of wedding night 'suggestions'.\n\nAfter leaving The Lonely Armadillo, Morgan stopped at Laufenberg's Fine Jewelry. He picked out a wedding band set that bore no resemblance to the ring he'd removed from his finger a week ago.\n\nAs he turned onto his access road, Morgan spotted three buggies in front of the porch. He smiled knowing that Stella and the other ladies were inside and probably telling Georgette all sorts of stories about him. Then he wondered why they had needed three buggies when two would have sufficed.\n\nThat nagging feeling of dread resurfaced and he automatically released the hammer loop securing his Schofield. He slowed Felix to a walk as he scanned the area around the house and listened for any unexpected sounds.\n\nHe hadn't seen anyone or heard anything ominous as he dismounted then tied Felix's reins to a buggy's rear wheel. Morgan slowly stepped onto the tiled porch and walked to the heavy door. He paused and listened for a few more seconds before he opened the door with his left hand in case that he needed his right to draw his pistol.\n\nWhen the door opened, he was pleasantly surprised to find everyone in the great room and apparently having a good time. Georgette and Stella were sitting on the couch with Timmy and Lucy.\n\nEveryone in the room turned to look at him as Georgette asked, \"Did you get your stitches removed?\"\n\nHe smiled as he removed his hat, hung it on the coat rack and replied, \"No, ma'am. I had him put in new ones with bright pink threads for your entertainment.\"\n\nThe room was filled with high-pitched laughter as he walked to the closest empty chair and took a seat.\n\nHe looked at Stella and asked, \"Why did you use three buggies? I didn't even know you had three.\"\n\n\"You forgot about the one you gave to Jim and Sally because you thought that a lawyer should make a good first impression.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then said, \"As opposed to the impression you made when you drove down the Double D's access road on your buckboard.\"\n\n\"If I'd been driving a fancy carriage, you still would have expected me to be weaving my way to your house.\"\n\nTimmy exclaimed, \"But you don't imbibe, Papa!\"\n\nAll the women looked at the boy before they either laughed or giggled.\n\n\"No, sir. But I sure would appreciate a glass of cold lemonade.\"\n\nMillie said, \"I'll get you one, Morg,\" then stood to leave the room.\n\nBefore she took a step, Morgan said, \"I'll get one in a little while, Millie. I'm sure that you have questions about my extended stay in town this morning.\"\n\nStella asked, \"What did you do after seeing Doctor Nagy?\"\n\nMorgan told them of his visits but not his inexplicable sense of danger. There was no reason to infect Georgette with his irrational thoughts.\n\nNaturally, they all wanted to see the rings, but he refused to open the box, telling them that they could see them on his and Georgette's fingers after the wedding.\n\nIt was almost one o'clock when the ladies left, and Morgan was able to have his lemonade with his lunch. As they shared their cold meal, Morgan consciously avoided being distracted by his growing concern.\n\nAfter Timmy and Lucy trotted away to play checkers in their room, Morgan looked at Georgette and said, \"Tomorrow morning, we'll be husband and wife. Then we'll have to complete the forms demanded by the great state of Texas.\"\n\n\"And is that a problem?\"\n\n\"No, but I realized that I don't even know your family name. Isn't that odd?\"\n\nGeorgette smile as she replied, \"I guess it is. You called me Mrs. Driscoll for the first few days and then George for a couple before you reverted back to Mrs. Driscoll. Now you only call me Georgette. Why is that?\"\n\n\"The return to Mrs. Driscoll was an attempt to remind myself that you were a client. I know that sounds silly, but I didn't think you'd ever leave the Double D. I thought it might help to address you more formally. As to my use of your full Christian name, well, I just didn't want to get used to calling you George.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"It would have sounded odd during the throes of passion. At least to me.\"\n\nGeorgette and Millie laughed before Georgette said, \"You could always call me Beulah.\"\n\nMorgan grinned as he shook his head then said, \"That would be worse. I'll have to come up with something original. But you still didn't tell me your family name.\"\n\n\"It's O'Rourke. Are you surprised? After all, I don't have curly red hair or blue eyes.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not surprised. Not all Irish women have those characteristics. You aren't related to Fein O'Rourke; are you?\"\n\n\"He was my father's younger brother. Does that bother you?\"\n\n\"Not at all. My older brother was much worse than your uncle but appeared to be a good old boy. Your uncle was more honest about his uncivilized nature.\"\n\nMillie looked at Georgette and said, \"I never heard about your uncle. What did he do?\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Morgan who replied, \"Fein O'Rourke led a gang of outlaws that terrorized West Texas for almost six years. They robbed stagecoaches, banks and killed dozens of people. It was my Ranger company that caught up with them outside of Brackettville. It was the longest gunfight I ever witnessed. We chased them over thirty miles and engaged them four times over three days. We lost two Rangers before we killed the last of them.\"\n\nMillie asked, \"Did you get shot?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I was one of only four who didn't get hit. I had a few close calls, but none of them drew blood. We brought our two Rangers and their bodies into town and everyone in West Texas breathed a lot easier.\"\n\nGeorgette said, \"My father was even more relieved when he heard the news. My uncle would show up occasionally looking for a handout, but my father knew it was only a matter of time before he decided to take more than just a few dollars. We knew it had been the Rangers who had stopped him, but not which company. I wish I'd know that it was you, Morg.\"\n\n\"At that time in my life, I wasn't very pleasant company, Georgette. But it's all in the past now. We have our whole lives in front of us now. One with no Fein O'Rourke or Long Star Land Company problems.\"\n\nShe smiled and said, \"I'm already very happy with our lives, Morg. And I know it will only get better after tomorrow.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and hoped that she was right. While the news of her relationship to Fein O'Rourke didn't diminish his respect for her, it did boost his eerie sense of disaster.\n\nHe still maintained a pleasant fa\u00e7ade as they continued to talk about tomorrow's wedding. Georgette told him that Stella and the other ladies had helped her to alter one of Sally's less-revealing dresses to be her wedding dress. Because they were being married in the church, she would wear a lace mantilla rather than a veil.\n\nMorgan would wear his light gray wool suit which might be stuffy but would do a good job of hiding his shoulder holster." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 181", + "text": "By the time the children were tucked into bed, all of the details for tomorrow's wedding were set. Morgan and Georgette spent two more hours closely linked on the couch but used the time mostly for talking.\n\nMorgan came close to telling her of his unfounded concerns but didn't want her to believe that he was having second thoughts.\n\nAfter a few minutes of very inspiring non-verbal communication, Georgette stood and smiled down at him.\n\n\"Tomorrow night we won't have to be apart any longer.\"\n\nHe smiled back and replied, \"Never again, sweetheart.\"\n\nShe sighed, then tantalizingly began unbuttoning her dress as she walked away.\n\nMorgan closed his eyes and waited until he heard her door close before he opened them again. This would be the longest night of his life and he prayed that he'd get some sleep. In those last few spectacular minutes, his mind's mutterings of doom had been silenced and the erotic images of Georgette wearing Stella's green dress kept them away.\n\nSo, as he slipped beneath his covers on the last night he would sleep alone, he let those exciting imaginings fill his mind.\n\nWhile he lived in his Georgette fantasy world, the last stages of the secretive scheme were falling into place. He would only learn of its existence when it was carried out tomorrow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 182", + "text": "The Wedding Day\n\nDespite all their planning, the morning was still hectic. The only blessing was that they had to fast before Mass, so breakfast wouldn't cause a delay.\n\nMorgan drove the carriage out of the ranch at 8:30 with Georgette sitting beside him on the front seat. Millie was in the back seat with Lucy and Timmy. Lucy was wearing a new, light blue dress with darker blue flowers while Timmy was uncomfortable in his new dark gray suit. Morgan had been able to convince his mother that a tie was going too far.\n\nGeorgette was wearing Sally's altered ivory satin dress with a dark blue sash. Her mantilla was over her shoulders, but she would use it to cover her head when she entered the church.\n\nMorgan's mind was so occupied with Georgette that it had no room for any thoughts of danger. He even forgot about the Webley Bulldog under his suit jacket.\n\nAs they drove down Main Street, Morgan didn't even look at the buildings on either side but focused on Saint Rose of Lima church beyond the city park. He could already see a line of guests entering the white adobe structure.\n\nGeorgette had noticed it as well and was surprised by the massive turnout, but Morgan wasn't. He had created two almost prestigious gathering places in The Bluebonnet and then The Lonely Armadillo. The upscale establishments had raised the overall character of the town and were appreciated by the citizens. It didn't hurt that Morgan himself was even more popular. His habit of not billing clients who needed his legal help was one reason. His latest foray into the enforcement side of the law didn't hurt either.\n\nThere was also a good number of visitors from the Double D, including John and Wilma.\n\nWhen their carriage came to a stop, Tyler, Pete. Felipe, Homer and Jim Cooper, all dressed in dark suits, stepped close and waited in line while Morgan set the handbrake. Morgan grinned when he thought they resembled a group of pallbearers.\n\nHe stepped down and offered his hand to Georgette to assist her to the ground. His friends helped Millie and the children exit the carriage.\n\nTyler said, \"The women are inside holding seats for us.\"\n\nMorgan replied, \"You won't be sitting much, Tyler.\"\n\n\"I reckon not. I've never been to a Catholic church before.\"\n\n\"Unless you've learned Latin in the last couple of days, then you won't have a clue about what's going on for most of it. Then again, neither do most Catholics.\"\n\nTyler snickered as Morgan took Georgette's hand and asked, \"Are you ready, Georgette?\"\n\nShe smiled and nodded as she quietly replied, \"Yes, Morgan. I'm ready.\"\n\nThe couple then walked to the church and soon entered the dark interior. They walked down the aisle past the packed pews until they reached the empty pew in front and waited for Millie, Lucy and Timmy to slide into the pew. After Georgette and Morgan sidestepped into the pew, Father Velasquez nodded to the organist and the wedding Mass began." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 183", + "text": "Twenty minutes later, Morgan stood beside Georgette as Father Ramon followed the traditional marriage ritual. He quietly tapped his right jacket pocket to verify that he hadn't forgotten the rings. Then he shifted his eyes to his right and looked at the heavy oak door to the sacristy.\n\nLess than a year ago, he had stood outside that door convincing Father Velasquez that he was there to help Carlotta. Now she was happily married and would soon have her second child. While he understood that he had done all he could to help her, he still felt as if it wasn't enough. She had her dreams destroyed and had to leave her home because of what his brother had done. Morgan wasn't sure if he would ever be able to balance the scales.\n\nHe looked at Georgette and found her already gazing back at him. He smiled and was rewarded with a warm smile that washed away his concerns.\n\nThe marriage ceremony followed the same routine, yet incredibly powerful path that most followed and soon Morgan kissed Georgette as his wife. It was their first reserved kiss and hopefully their last.\n\nAfter the newlyweds left the church, they waited until they were joined by Tyler, Stella then Millie and the children. They circled around the church and entered the rectory to complete the required paperwork.\n\nAs the crowd of attendees left the church to return to their homes and businesses, the unsuspected scheme was almost complete. It now only needed for the newlyweds to return to their home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 184", + "text": "As the family walked back to the carriage, Morgan had Lucy riding on his left shoulder and Timmy on his right.\n\nGeorgette couldn't have imagined a more perfect way to begin their new life together and Morgan hadn't let a whisper of ill tidings spoil his ebullient mood. All of their friends had already gone to the ranch house to set up the much-needed tables of food and beverages.\n\nTimmy was grinning as he pointed and exclaimed, \"I bet if those buildings weren't there, I could see all the way to Mexico!\"\n\nLucy leaned forward to see her brother past Morgan's tall Stetson and said, \"I don't care. This is fun!\"\n\nMorgan smiled at his wife and said, \"I figured I'd take advantage of their small size while I could. I imagine Tim will be too big before he starts school. I guess we'll have to get him his own rifle, too.\"\n\nTimmy shouted, \"Really, Papa? You're gonna give me a gun!\"\n\n\"Of course, I am. You're a Texan. We'll show Lucy how to shoot as well as her mother does, too. She may be a pretty princess, but she's a Texas princess.\"\n\nLucy giggled as they approached the carriage and Morgan had to carefully unload his precious cargo.\n\nAfter the children and Millie were seated, he turned to Georgette, removed his hat and said, \"May I assist you, Mrs. Kane?\"\n\nShe laughed, then took his hand and climbed into the front seat before Morgan bounded onto the carriage.\n\nAfter releasing the handbrake, he snapped the reins. He soon turned onto Main Street and headed south.\n\nGeorgette snuggled in a little closer before she said, \"I've never been so happy, Morgan.\"\n\nHe leaned over slightly before whispering, \"I promise to make you happier tonight, my love.\"\n\nHe had intended it to be a private comment, but when Millie laughed, he knew he'd whispered a bit too loudly.\n\nGeorgette didn't seem to mind as she rested her right hand on his uninjured left thigh. Morgan just glanced at her smiling face before he grinned and refocused on the road. It should be a momentous night in the Kane household.\n\nHe may have been watching the road ahead, but he wasn't really seeing it. His mind was filled with thoughts of his bride. If a herd of angry cattle was stampeding towards them, he might not have noticed.\n\nBut there was no herd of cattle, angry or otherwise before he turned the carriage onto their access road.\n\nThere were horses, buggies and buckboards scattered in front of the house, but all of their riders and passengers were waiting inside.\n\nGeorgette said, \"It's going to be a noisy house for a while.\"\n\nMorgan didn't bother whispering as he replied, \"It'll be even noisier tonight, ma'am.\"\n\nGeorgette and Millie both laughed but Timmy just looked at Lucy and shrugged.\n\nJust before they reached the house, Jonas stepped out, crossed the porch then hopped to the ground and waited for them to arrive.\n\nWhen Morgan pulled the carriage to a stop, Jonas said, \"I'll take care of the carriage, Morg. Everybody's waiting.\"\n\nMorgan said, \"Thanks, Jonas,\" then quickly climbed down and helped Georgette to the ground.\n\nMillie lifted Lucy from the carriage and Timmy jumped out before Jonas climbed up and took the reins.\n\nMorgan then took Georgette's hand and said, \"Sorry, Ranger Tim and Princess Lucy. You'll have to walk into the house.\"\n\nThe children giggled as Millie took their hands then followed the newlyweds onto the porch.\n\nWhen they passed through the open doorway, the crowded room exploded in applause.\n\nAfter a few seconds, Morgan held up his hand and said, \"Thank you all for coming, but if I don't eat something soon, I may not have enough energy tonight.\"\n\nHe and Georgette then walked through the laughing gathering and reached the food tables. Once they filled their plates the others formed a civilized queue.\n\nAs Morgan and Georgette started eating their delayed breakfast, he asked, \"Where is Stella and the rest of Lucy's new aunts?\"\n\nGeorgette scanned the room of people before replying, \"I don't know. Maybe they're in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"Maybe. Did you see any of them other than Stella at the wedding?\"\n\n\"No, sir. I was distracted for some inexplicable reason.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and said, \"There could have been a herd of wooly mammoths in the church, and I wouldn't have noticed.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then resumed eating. Morgan forgot about the missing women as he shifted his attention back to his new wife.\n\nAfter they finished, Georgette stood and waited for Morgan. When he rose, she took his hand and without saying a word, began towing him out of the great room and into the atrium.\n\nAs Georgette continued to pull him across the central courtyard, they were greeted by the folks who were sitting at the temporary tables.\n\nIt was when they were more than halfway across that Morgan realized that unless Georgette quickly changed course, they were heading to the master bedroom.\n\nWhile he was highly anticipating their first night together, he couldn't imagine that Georgette was so anxious that she'd want them to consummate their marriage with a houseful of guests.\n\nThey were almost to the door when he spotted Stella waiting nearby. She was smiling and Morgan immediately suspected that he was about to become a victim of another of her plots. He looked at Georgette and wasn't surprised to find her smiling at Stella. So, his bride was in on the scheme, too!\n\nHe was about to tell Stella that he wasn't going to fall for whatever scheme she'd devised when Georgette intervened.\n\nThey stopped before the bedroom door and Georgette said, \"Stella asked me for a favor, and I agreed.\"\n\n\"May I ask what this favor involves?\"\n\n\"I'll tell you shortly, husband.\"\n\nGeorgette opened the door and escorted her spouse into the bedroom. Stella followed and closed the door behind her.\n\nGeorgette then said, \"Stella pointed out that it's become almost a tradition for men to kiss the bride after the wedding. She asked that we make a modification.\"\n\nMorgan looked at Stella and said, \"I can imagine what it is. I assume that I am now the target.\"\n\nStella smiled and replied, \"Yes, you are. We're all married now, but we never had an opportunity to fulfill our fantasies. Georgette graciously agreed to let us each have one kiss and promised that she wouldn't be the least bit jealous.\"\n\nHe looked at Georgette as he asked, \"You won't hold this against me, Georgette?\"\n\n\"I promise. Besides, it may add even more inspiration for tonight.\"\n\nMorgan looked back at Stella and said, \"Alright. Where are the others?\"\n\n\"They're waiting outside. They'll enter one at a time.\"\n\n\"Are you first?\"\n\nStella laughed then replied, \"Oh, no! I want to go last.\"\n\nHe glanced at Georgette one more time to be sure, then waited for Stella to begin the new ritual.\n\nStella walked to the door, opened it then after Sally entered, she closed it again.\n\nSally smiled at Georgette before she stepped close to Morgan, put her hands around his neck and kissed him as if he was her beau.\n\nMorgan had automatically wrapped his long arms around her and didn't deny that he was already aroused.\n\nAfter Sally finished, she stepped back and smiled as Stella opened the door again. This time, Fannie entered and matched Sally's passionate kiss.\n\nWhen Fannie stepped beside Sally, Stella opened the door and Rose stepped inside.\n\nAfter Ruby had released Morgan, she sighed then smiled and joined her sisters.\n\nStella didn't walk to the door but seductively stepped in front of Morgan. He looked into her intense blue eyes and realized how close they had been to taking that final step. When he felt her arms around him, he didn't wait for her to initiate the kiss. He wanted her to know that she was special. Stella shared the same thoughts and put all of her stored passion into the only kiss they would ever share.\n\nWhen the kiss ended, she whispered, \"Thank you for everything, Morg. But I'm very happy for you and Georgette.\"\n\nMorgan released her and nodded before taking Georgette's hand and saying, \"I want to thank each of you for being my good friends and so much more.\"\n\nHe then smiled at Stella and asked, \"Now can we return to the great room before I throw my wife onto the bed? I'm a bit, um, ready.\"\n\nThe women all laughed, but Stella soon said, \"No. We have one more surprise. It took a bit of planning, but we know it will make you happy.\"\n\nShe then turned and walked to the door. When she opened it, Morgan had no idea what to expect. But just three seconds later, when he saw dark brown eyes smiling at him, he knew that Stella was right.\n\nHe took one step closer as he said, \"Carlotta, I'm so happy to see you again. Is this Mary?\"\n\nCarlotta stopped before him then looked down at her baby as she said, \"I'd like you to meet your niece, Morg.\"\n\nMorgan gently touched her cheek and said, \"She's perfect, Carlotta. Is Theo here?\"\n\n\"Yes. He's in the kitchen with Millie and your children. We received Stella's telegram on Sunday and barely made Monday's train. I was so very happy to hear that you were getting married. You, of all the people I know, should not be alone.\"\n\n\"It took me a while to understand what I was missing, Carlotta. But once I met Georgette, I knew I couldn't live without her.\"\n\nCarlotta then smiled at Georgette and said, \"You must be a wonderful woman and I'm sure you will give Morgan the love and happiness he deserves.\"\n\n\"I will and I know he'll do the same for me.\"\n\nShe then looked back at Morgan and asked, \"Would you like to hold your niece?\"\n\nHe grinned as he said, \"I promise not to break her.\"\n\nCarlotta smiled as she carefully laid the squirming baby into Morgan's big arms.\n\nAs he gazed at the small human he held, he felt a moment of sadness knowing that he'd lost his own little girl ten years ago. But as he looked into her dark eyes, Morgan felt his brief sense of loss vanish. This was God's greatest gift. For ten years, he had denied himself the joy of holding his own child. But despite what some might consider lost time, he was grateful for the delay. It was as if he had just been waiting for Georgette.\n\nHe turned and smiled at his wife and asked, \"Would you like to hold Mary?\"\n\nShe glanced at Carlotta who nodded before Morgan transferred the baby to Georgette's more experienced arms.\n\nMorgan then looked at the plot's mastermind and said, \"Thank you for your perfectly planned and deeply appreciated conspiracy, Stella. It's much better than your Sharps-Borshadt scheme.\"\n\nStella laughed then Georgette returned Mary to her mother and Fannie opened the door.\n\nStella then winked at Georgette before she followed her sisters out of the room and closed the door.\n\nMorgan smiled at Georgette and said, \"Did you know about this?\"\n\n\"Not really. Stella just told me to lead you to the bedroom where she and the others had a surprise for you. I was pretty sure what it was but didn't know about Carlotta.\"\n\nHe wrapped her in his arms and asked, \"Was getting me all hot and bothered part of her scheme?\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then replied, \"I have no idea, but as much as I'd love to take advantage of the situation, I don't suppose it would be a good idea.\"\n\n\"I suppose not, but I don't think I'll be any less enthusiastic tonight.\"\n\n\"I hope not. But before we rejoin the crowd, can you please give me a kiss like the one you gave to Stella?\"\n\n\"I had every intention of doing just that.\"\n\nGeorgette would never admit to the twinge of jealousy that she felt as she watched Morgan kiss each of the women, especially the powerful one that he had shared with Stella. But the tiny green monster died an immediate death as he kissed her.\n\nThen he let his lips slip to her neck and she gasped as she put her hand behind his head. She'd never experienced such unbridled desire, and he was only kissing her.\n\nMorgan was almost out of control and wanted to carry her to the bed and let their visitor be shocked and entertained by the loud sounds of their lovemaking.\n\nBut he used his last reserves of restraint to step back and take a deep breath.\n\n\"That was close, Gee.\"\n\nGeorgette sighed before replying, \"I wouldn't have objected to a short trip to the bed, but I suppose we don't want to offend our guests.\"\n\nMorgan grinned and said, \"No, ma'am.\"\n\nShe then asked, \"Did you call me Gee?\"\n\n\"I did. I told you why I didn't want to call you George, but I thought Georgette was a bit too formal. So, is it alright if I call you Gee?\"\n\n\"You can call me anything but Beulah.\"\n\nMorgan chuckled before taking her hand and saying, \"Let's join our friends.\"\n\nWhen Morgan opened the door, they were greeted by a loud mix of laughter and whistling. He glanced at Georgette who didn't seem the least bit shaken before the newlyweds returned to the atrium to celebrate their marriage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 185", + "text": "The rest of the afternoon and early evening passed quickly, even for the anxious newlyweds. The first to leave were Theo and Carlotta. They were leaving on tomorrow's train with Jim and Sally, so they made their farewells and returned to their hotel room. After they departed, the crowd continued to thin. By sunset, the ranch house was finally empty of visitors.\n\nAs the family sat at the kitchen table sharing a dinner of leftovers, Lucy asked, \"Are you and papa going to make a baby now, Mama?\"\n\nGeorgette stared at her daughter for a moment before asking, \"What made you ask that question, Lucy?\"\n\n\"I was telling Aunt Carlotta how pretty her baby was, and she said that you and papa would have a pretty little girl, too. Then she told me that she was going to have another one already. I didn't know where it was, so she patted her tummy. I laughed 'cause it was silly. But then she said that when people get married, they make babies there. That's when she said that you and papa would be making a baby tonight.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Morgan who just stared back at her letting her know that he had no intention of being part of the conversation. She then turned her eyes to Timmy who was already focused on his mother waiting for an answer.\n\nMillie was working to corral her laughter.\n\nGeorgette finally said, \"Yes, dear. We'll do all we can to make a baby. We'll even ask for God's help.\"\n\nThen as she looked at her husband, she added, \"So, if you hear me shouting, 'Oh, my God', then you know that we're trying very hard.\"\n\nMorgan's jaw muscles tightened as he fought back his reaction, but it wasn't enough. He exploded with laughter which released Millie's restraints. Georgette followed suit and soon all three adults were laughing so hard that a flood of tears spread across the tabletop.\n\nLucy looked at her brother and realized that he was just as confused as she was.\n\nThe adults continued to laugh, so Timmy took Lucy's hand and led her out of the kitchen. At least playing marbles made sense.\n\nWhen the tears and laughter subsided, Morgan said, \"When I explain the facts of life to Tim in a year or two, then maybe he'll understand your joke. Either that or he'll just make a face and run away.\"\n\nGeorgette was drying her cheeks as she said, \"You can explain the birds and bees to Lucy, too. But did you hear what Carlotta told her about having a daughter?\"\n\n\"I noticed. Maybe it's just because I told her she was going to have a pretty little girl when I was talking to her in the sacristy. I was trying to lift her spirits. I told her she was going to have a girl because I knew that my brother was the father, and I didn't want her to worry that her baby would grow into a man like Bill. I had a fifty-fifty chance. I figured if I was wrong, it wouldn't matter once she saw her son.\"\n\n\"So, you don't think she meant it?\"\n\n\"I have no idea, but if we do have a girl, I have a name already picked out.\"\n\nGeorgette quietly said, \"I thought you might. I think Barbara is a pretty name.\"\n\n\"No, I didn't want to name her after anyone. I want our bonnie Irish lass to have her own name. What do you think about Lauren?\"\n\nGeorgette smiled as she replied, \"That's perfect. What if we have a boy?\"\n\n\"Now that's your decision. I sure don't want him to be named Morgan.\"\n\nGeorgette then said, \"I've always liked Sam.\"\n\nMorgan took her hand as he nodded and said, \"You have good taste, Gee.\"\n\nMillie stood, said, \"I'm turning in so you can start making babies for Lucy,\" then began giggling as she left the kitchen.\n\nAfter she'd gone, Morgan said, \"I guess we've got work to do, Gee. I think we should spend the rest of the night on the job until we're satisfied.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed then stood and waited for Morgan to leave his chair. After blowing out the lamps in the kitchen, they walked hand in hand down the short hall to the atrium." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 186", + "text": "It wasn't much longer before Georgette's loud and grateful exclamations filled the bedroom. While Morgan wasn't able to keep his promise of thirty minutes for their first consummation, Georgette was far from disappointed. What was a very pleasant surprise was when Morgan initiated a second round of baby-making just twenty minutes later. Their second consummation was much longer, and Georgette's cries of exultation were louder and more frequent.\n\nIt was almost midnight as Georgette lay stretched halfway across Morgan's torso. They were both slippery from their efforts but neither noticed.\n\nGeorgette had her head resting on Morgan's left shoulder as she said, \"You surprised me, Morgan. I didn't know that men could recover that quickly.\"\n\nMorgan smiled and replied, \"The doc said that the wound was healing faster than he'd expected.\"\n\nGeorgette laughed and slapped him on his chest before saying, \"You know what I meant, mister.\"\n\n\"I know. But it's been a long time, Gee, and you're very inspiring.\"\n\n\"You weren't bothered by my stretch marks?\"\n\n\"I didn't notice them at all. I was too focused on other areas.\"\n\n\"Do you want me to stand up and show them to you?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I'll let my fingertips find them in a little while. I need to take a short break.\"\n\n\"Aren't we going to get some sleep now?\"\n\n\"If that's what you want, then we can slide beneath the quilts.\"\n\n\"You don't mean that you can still...\"\n\n\"As I just said, Gee. You are a very inspiring woman. But it's more than just your wonderful body that creates that inspiration. It's because I love you so much and want to make you happy.\"\n\n\"You make me happier than I could have ever dreamed. I can't imagine what my life would have been like if John hadn't suggested that he ride to Kerrville to ask you to help.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't have let him see me if you knew I had my office in a saloon, either.\"\n\nShe sighed as she let her fingers trace circles on his chest then said, \"No, I wouldn't. But none of it matters anymore; does it? We're married and have our whole lives before us.\"\n\nHe kissed her damp forehead and said, \"And in nine months we'll have little Lauren.\"\n\nShe smiled up at him and was about to remind him of that he was the one who said Lucy was only guessing. But when his hand began caressing her left breast, she forgot about everything but the man she loved.\n\nThe man who was a lawyer, Ranger, saloon owner and now a rancher. But much more importantly, the man who was now her husband." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 187", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nJuly 2, 1890\n\nGeorgette clutched Morgan's hand as she cried out from the pain of the massive contraction.\n\nMorgan had refused to leave her side after she went into labor despite Doctor Nagy's assurance that everything was normal, and she wouldn't deliver the baby for another eight to ten hours. It had already been twelve hours but even he knew that their baby would arrive soon.\n\nGeorgette had been surprised that she'd been in labor for so long. Timmy had arrived in just nine hours and Lucy in only seven. While she was confident that she and their baby would be fine, she was worried about the strain it was putting on Morgan.\n\nAfter she told him of her pregnancy, he had been as overjoyed as any expectant father would be. As their baby grew inside her, he hadn't shown any excessive levels of concern. But now, as she prepared to give birth, she could almost feel his fears.\n\nThere was nothing she could do but pray that their baby would soon be in her arms.\n\nMorgan thought he'd hidden his resurgent terrors as he watched Georgette labor. He had convinced himself since that day he'd removed his ring that he had to overcome his irrational fear. Then when he held Carlotta's baby in his arms, he was confident that he would be nothing but a supportive husband and a normally concerned father-to-be. Yet now, as he felt her vicelike grip when she experienced a contraction, the guilt and sense of doom had returned.\n\nIt was almost sunset when Doctor Nagy exclaimed, \"Once more, Georgette! I can see the baby's head.\"\n\nGeorgette looked at Morgan as she squeezed his hand and pushed.\n\nMorgan was watching her brown eyes and didn't see Doctor Nagy slide their baby into the world.\n\nAs the child wailed, the doctor smiled and said, \"You have a beautiful baby girl, Morg.\"\n\nHe looked at the doctor as he cut and tied the umbilical cord then handed the baby to Millie. She wrapped the child in a cotton blanket and carried her to Georgette.\n\nGeorgette finally released Morgan's hand as Millie laid their daughter into her mother's waiting arms.\n\nMorgan smiled at Millie then looked at his wife's tired, sweating face.\n\nGeorgette whispered, \"Isn't Lauren one of the prettiest little girls you've ever seen?\"\n\nMorgan fingertips barely touched his daughter's cheek as he replied, \"Yes, she is. She has a beautiful mother to thank for that.\"\n\n\"I'm exhausted and thirsty, but I'm incredibly happy, too. Can you get me some water, Millie?\"\n\nMillie smiled as she walked to the side table and half-filled a glass from a pitcher. When she returned to the bed, she handed it to Morgan.\n\nHe nodded and lifted Georgette's head slightly before putting the glass to her parched lips.\n\nAfter she'd emptied the glass, Morgan set it on the floor and said, \"I'm going to let you rest now. I think Lucy and Tim are waiting to hear if they have a sister or a brother.\"\n\nGeorgette smiled and said, \"I'm sure that Stella and all of the other aunts will want to know, too.\"\n\nHe smiled as he rose from the chair, then kissed her on her forehead and then looked at their daughter again before walking to the door.\n\nHe left the bedroom and closed the door behind him before he approached the large gathering.\n\n\"We just welcomed Lauren Kane into the world and she and her mother are both fine.\"\n\nHe then approached their older children and sat on his heels as he said, \"You have a sister.\"\n\nLucy giggled as she looked at her older brother and exclaimed, \"I told you Aunt Carlotta was right!\"\n\nTimmy wasn't disappointed at all and smiled back at Lucy as he replied, \"Maybe we'll have our brother Sam next year.\"\n\nLucy giggled again then took Timmy's hand and said, \"Can we see her, Papa?\"\n\n\"Not yet. Mama has to feed her in a little while. Aunt Millie will let us know when we can all visit her.\"\n\n\"Okay.\"\n\nAs the children disappeared into their own room, Stella led the other aunts and uncles closer.\n\n\"We're all going to head back to our homes now, Morgan. We'll be back tomorrow to meet Lauren.\"\n\n\"I'll see you then.\"\n\nShe then kissed him on the cheek which started a chain of quick busses before the male side began giving him congratulatory handshakes and pats on the back.\n\nJim Cooper was the last and as they shook hands, he said, \"Latimer Roper wants to sue Freeman for letting his son get so drunk he almost died. He claims that Freeman is adding formaldehyde to his whiskey. Do I take the case?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Let's have someone get a bottle from his place and have it analyzed.\"\n\n\"Okay, Morg. It'll be interesting and it might shut Harry down altogether.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\nJim and Sally followed the others out of the house leaving Morgan alone with just two men.\n\nMorgan smiled at his foreman and said, \"You may as well tell the boys, Chuck.\"\n\nChuck Brumbaugh grinned and slammed Morgan on his left shoulder before hurrying out the front door.\n\nHis clerk then asked, \"Are you going to assist Jim with the case?\"\n\n\"If he asks, and I'm pretty sure he will. Do you want to have some coffee while we talk about it?\"\n\n\"That sounds like a good idea.\"\n\nAs they walked to the kitchen, Morgan asked, \"Do you miss mixing with the cattle and ranch hands, Jonas?\"\n\n\"Not as much as I figured I would. I'm still surprised that you asked me to be your clerk. I mean, all I've ever done is work with cattle and horses.\"\n\n\"You could read and write and had a good head on your shoulders. I knew you wanted more out of life and decided to give you the opportunity.\"\n\n\"Even after what I did with the Long Star Land Company? I almost cost Mrs. Kane the Double D.\"\n\n\"No, you didn't. It was never going to work, even if John didn't pay me that visit.\"\n\nAs they entered the kitchen, Jonas asked, \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because Judge Davis had a fit of conscience and gave her sixty days to evacuate. It wouldn't be a month before the greedy bastards began to run out of bribery cash and had to resort to more violent means to get the Double D. Once that happened, I'd be notified as a captain in the Rangers and end it pretty much as it did.\"\n\n\"But there would be shooting and probably deaths.\"\n\n\"I know. That's the second-best reason for John's decision to visit me.\"\n\nJonas grinned and said, \"I guess finding Mrs. Kane was the best reason.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was. Now let's have some coffee and talk about Harry Freeman's demise.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 188", + "text": "The case against Harry Freeman never made it to court. Three days later, two of his customers died from formaldehyde poisoning and he vanished from Kerrville. His last saloon was shut down and never reopened.\n\nTwo months later, Morgan sold The Bluebonnet to Jim Cooper and Sally for a very good price and gave up his share of The Lonely Armadillo. So, by the time autumn arrived, Morgan was no longer even a partial owner of a saloon. Oddly enough, even though Jim Cooper was now the owner of The Bluebonnet and still had his law offices there, he was never spoken of as 'the saloon lawyer'.\n\nWhile he and Jim were still partners, Morgan spent almost all his time on the ranch with his family. They still owned the Double D, and their smaller ranch was just an extension of the giant spread up north.\n\nJohn Bridges ran the big ranch and even after the railroad reached Junction City, Morgan and Georgette didn't visit it very often. He did remember to have that Sharps Big Fifty fitted with a telescopic sight for John. But before they brought it to the Double D, he and Georgette were obligated to put a few rounds downrange to test it.\n\nA year after Lauren's birth, Sam Kane entered the world. Morgan was only marginally nervous but still stayed with Georgette as she progressed through her shorter labor of seven hours.\n\nAside from the family's weekly target practice, Morgan never needed to fire a gun at another outlaw. True to his word, Tim soon joined Morgan and Georgette with his single-shot .22. Two years later, Lucy inherited Tim's rifle when he moved up to a Winchester repeater.\n\nSheriff Lusk lost his next election, and his three deputies weren't hired by his replacement. They all left Junction City and disappeared into the vast expanse of the Lone Star State.\n\nWhile part of Morgan may have missed the danger of chasing killers, it wasn't nearly enough to make him do anything that might cause Georgette, or their children worry.\n\nHer greatest concern was when he asked, \"Gee, do you want to go hunt some wild boars?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 189", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Brokeback Mountain.txt", + "author": "Annie Proulx", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, \"Give em to the real estate shark, I'm out a here,\" dropping the keys in Ennis's hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.\n\nThe stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.\n\nThey were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high school dropout country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life. Ennis, reared by his older brother and sister after their parents drove off the only curve on Dead Horse Road leaving them twenty-four dollars in cash and a two-mortgage ranch, applied at age fourteen for a hardship license that let him make the hour-long trip from the ranch to the high school. The pickup was old, no heater, one windshield wiper and bad tires; when the transmission went there was no money to fix it. He had wanted to be a sophomore, felt the word carried a kind of distinction, but the truck broke down short of it, pitching him directly into ranch work.\n\nIn 1963 when he met Jack Twist, Ennis was engaged to Alma Beers. Both Jack and Ennis claimed to be saving money for a small spread; in Ennis's case that meant a tobacco can with two five-dollar bills inside. That spring, hungry for any job, each had signed up with Farm and Ranch Employment\u2014they came together on paper as herder and camp tender for the same sheep operation north of Signal. The summer range lay above the tree line on Forest Service land on Brokeback Mountain. It would be Jack Twist's second summer on the mountain, Ennis's first. Neither of them was twenty.\n\nThey shook hands in the choky little trailer office in front of a table littered with scribbled papers, a Bakelite ashtray brimming with stubs. The Venetian blinds hung askew and admitted a triangle of white light, the shadow of the foreman's hand moving into it. Joe Aguirre, wavy hair the color of cigarette ash and parted down the middle, gave them his point of view.\n\n\"Forest Service got designated campsites on the allotments. Them camps can be a couple a miles from where we pasture the sheep. Bad predator loss, nobody near lookin after em at night. What I want, camp tender in the main camp where the Forest Service says, but the HERDER\"\u2014pointing at Jack with a chop of his hand\u2014\"pitch a pup tent on the q.t. with the sheep, out a sight, and he's goin a SLEEP there. Eat supper, breakfast in camp, but SLEEP WITH THE SHEEP, hunderd percent, NO FIRE, don't leave NO SIGN. Roll up that tent every mornin case Forest Service snoops around. Got the dogs, your .30-30, sleep there. Last summer had goddamn near twenty-five percent loss. I don't want that again. YOU,\" he said to Ennis, taking in the ragged hair, the big nicked hands, the jeans torn, button-gaping shirt, \"Fridays twelve noon be down at the bridge with your next week list and mules. Somebody with supplies'll be there in a pick-up.\" He didn't ask if Ennis had a watch but took a cheap round ticker on a braided cord from a box on a high shelf, wound and set it, tossed it to him as if he weren't worth the reach. \"TOMORROW MORNIN we'll truck you up the jump-off.\" Pair of deuces going nowhere.\n\nThey found a bar and drank beer through the afternoon, Jack telling Ennis about a lightning storm on the mountain the year before that killed forty-two sheep, the peculiar stink of them and the way they bloated, the need for plenty of whiskey up there. He had shot an eagle, he said, turned his head to show the tail feather in his hatband. At first glance Jack seemed fair enough with his curly hair and quick laugh, but for a small man he carried some weight in the haunch and his smile disclosed buckteeth, not pronounced enough to let him eat popcorn out of the neck of a jug, but noticeable. He was infatuated with the rodeo life and fastened his belt with a minor bullriding buckle, but his boots were worn to the quick, holed beyond repair and he was crazy to be somewhere, anywhere else than Lightning Flat.\n\nEnnis, high-arched nose and narrow face, was scruffy and a little cave-chested, balanced a small torso on long, caliper legs, possessed a muscular and supple body made for the horse and for fighting. His reflexes were uncommonly quick and he was farsighted enough to dislike reading anything except Hamley's saddle catalog.\n\nThe sheep trucks and horse trailers unloaded at the trailhead and a bandy-legged Basque showed Ennis how to pack the mules, two packs and a riding load on each animal ring-lashed with double diamonds and secured with half hitches, telling him, \"Don't never order soup. Them boxes a soup are real bad to pack.\" Three puppies belonging to one of the blue heelers went in a pack basket, the runt inside Jack's coat, for he loved a little dog. Ennis picked out a big chestnut called Cigar Butt to ride, Jack a bay mare who turned out to have a low startle point. The string of spare horses included a mouse-colored grullo whose looks Ennis liked. Ennis and Jack, the dogs, horses and mules, a thousand ewes and their lambs flowed up the trail like dirty water through the timber and out above the tree line into the great flowery meadows and the coursing, endless wind.\n\nThey got the big tent up on the Forest Service's platform, the kitchen and grub boxes secured. Both slept in camp that first night, Jack already bitching about Joe Aguirre's sleep-with-the-sheep-and-no-fire order, though he saddled the bay mare in the dark morning without saying much. Dawn came glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis's breakfast fire. The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite.\n\nDuring the day Ennis looked across a great gulf and sometimes saw Jack, a small dot moving across a high meadow as an insect moves across a tablecloth; Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Jack came lagging in late one afternoon, drank his two bottles of beer cooled in a wet sack on the shady side of the tent, ate two bowls of stew, four of Ennis's stone biscuits, a can of peaches, rolled a smoke, watched the sun drop.\n\n\"I'm commutin four hours a day,\" he said morosely. \"Come in for breakfast, go back to the sheep, evenin get em bedded down, come in for supper, go back to the sheep, spend half the night jumpin up and checkin for coyotes. By rights I should be spendin the night here. Aguirre got no right a make me do this.\"\n\n\"You want a switch?\" said Ennis. \"I wouldn't mind herdin. I wouldn't mind sleepin out there.\"\n\n\"That ain't the point. Point is, we both should be in this camp. And that goddamn pup tent smells like cat piss or worse.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't mind bein out there.\"\n\n\"Tell you what, you got a get up a dozen times in the night out there over them coyotes. Happy to switch but give you warnin I can't cook worth a shit. Pretty good with a can opener.\"\n\n\"Can't be no worse than me, then. Sure, I wouldn't mind a do it.\"\n\nThey fended off the night for an hour with the yellow kerosene lamp and around ten Ennis rode Cigar Butt, a good night horse, through the glimmering frost back to the sheep, carrying leftover biscuits, a jar of jam and a jar of coffee with him for the next day saying he'd save a trip, stay out until supper.\n\n\"Shot a coyote just first light,\" he told Jack the next evening, sloshing his face with hot water, lathering up soap and hoping his razor had some cut left in it, while Jack peeled potatoes. \"Big son of a bitch. Balls on him size a apples. I bet he'd took a few lambs. Looked like he could a eat a camel. You want some a this hot water? There's plenty.\"\n\n\"It's all yours.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm goin a warsh everthing I can reach,\" he said, pulling off his boots and jeans (no drawers, no socks, Jack noticed), slopping the green washcloth around until the fire spat.\n\nThey had a high-time supper by the fire, a can of beans each, fried potatoes and a quart of whiskey on shares, sat with their backs against a log, boot soles and copper jeans rivets hot, swapping the bottle while the lavender sky emptied of color and the chill air drained down, drinking, smoking cigarettes, getting up every now and then to piss, firelight throwing a sparkle in the arched stream, tossing sticks on the fire to keep the talk going, talking horses and rodeo, roughstock events, wrecks and injuries sustained, the submarine Thresher lost two months earlier with all hands and how it must have been in the last doomed minutes, dogs each had owned and known, the draft, Jack's home ranch where his father and mother held on, Ennis's family place folded years ago after his folks died, the older brother in Signal and a married sister in Casper. Jack said his father had been a pretty well known bullrider years back but kept his secrets to himself, never gave Jack a word of advice, never came once to see Jack ride, though he had put him on the woolies when he was a little kid. Ennis said the kind of riding that interested him lasted longer than eight seconds and had some point to it. Money's a good point, said Jack, and Ennis had to agree. They were respectful of each other's opinions, each glad to have a companion where none had been expected. Ennis, riding against the wind back to the sheep in the treacherous, drunken light, thought he'd never had such a good time, felt he could paw the white out of the moon.\n\nThe summer went on and they moved the herd to new pasture, shifted the camp; the distance between the sheep and the new camp was greater and the night ride longer. Ennis rode easy, sleeping with his eyes open, but the hours he was away from the sheep stretched out and out. Jack pulled a squalling burr out of the harmonica, flattened a little from a fall off the skittish bay mare, and Ennis had a good raspy voice; a few nights they mangled their way through some songs. Ennis knew the salty words to \"Strawberry Roan.\" Jack tried a Carl Perkins song, bawling \"what I say-ay-ay,\" but he favored a sad hymn, \"Water-Walking Jesus,\" learned from his mother who believed in the Pentecost, that he sang at dirge slowness, setting off distant coyote yips.\n\n\"Too late to go out to them damn sheep,\" said Ennis, dizzy drunk on all fours one cold hour when the moon had notched past two. The meadow stones glowed white-green and a flinty wind worked over the meadow, scraped the fire low, then ruffled it into yellow silk sashes. \"Got you a extra blanket I'll roll up out here and grab forty winks, ride out at first light.\"\n\n\"Freeze your ass off when that fire dies down. Better off sleepin in the tent.\"\n\n\"Doubt I'll feel nothin.\" But he staggered under canvas, pulled his boots off, snored on the ground cloth for a while, woke Jack with the clacking of his jaw.\n\n\"Jesus Christ, quit hammerin and get over here. Bedroll's big enough,\" said Jack in an irritable sleep-clogged voice. It was big enough, warm enough, and in a little while they deepened their intimacy considerably. Ennis ran full-throttle on all roads whether fence mending or money spending, and he wanted none of it when Jack seized his left hand and brought it to his erect cock. Ennis jerked his hand away as though he'd touched fire, got to his knees, unbuckled his belt, shoved his pants down, hauled Jack onto all fours and, with the help of the clear slick and a little spit, entered him, nothing he'd done before but no instruction manual needed. They went at it in silence except for a few sharp intakes of breath and Jack's choked \"gun's goin off,\" then out, down, and asleep.\n\nEnnis woke in red dawn with his pants around his knees, a top-grade headache, and Jack butted against him; without saying anything about it both knew how it would go for the rest of the summer, sheep be damned.\n\nAs it did go. They never talked about the sex, let it happen, at first only in the tent at night, then in the full daylight with the hot sun striking down, and at evening in the fire glow, quick, rough, laughing and snorting, no lack of noises, but saying not a goddamn word except once Ennis said, \"I'm not no queer,\" and Jack jumped in with \"Me neither. A one-shot thing. Nobody's business but ours.\" There were only the two of them on the mountain flying in the euphoric, bitter air, looking down on the hawk's back and the crawling lights of vehicles on the plain below, suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours. They believed themselves invisible, not knowing Joe Aguirre had watched them through his 10x42 binoculars for ten minutes one day, waiting until they'd buttoned up their jeans, waiting until Ennis rode back to the sheep, before bringing up the message that Jack's people had sent word that his uncle Harold was in the hospital with pneumonia and expected not to make it. Though he did, and Aguirre came up again to say so, fixing Jack with his bold stare, not bothering to dismount.\n\nIn August Ennis spent the whole night with Jack in the main camp and in a blowy hailstorm the sheep took off west and got among a herd in another allotment. There was a damn miserable time for five days, Ennis and a Chilean herder with no English trying to sort them out, the task almost impossible as the paint brands were worn and faint at this late season. Even when the numbers were right Ennis knew the sheep were mixed. In a disquieting way everything seemed mixed.\n\nThe first snow came early, on August thirteenth, piling up a foot, but was followed by a quick melt. The next week Joe Aguirre sent word to bring them down\u2014another, bigger storm was moving in from the Pacific\u2014and they packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep, stones rolling at their heels, purple cloud crowding in from the west and the metal smell of coming snow pressing them on. The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in a slow-motion, but headlong, irreversible fall.\n\nJoe Aguirre paid them, said little. He had looked at the milling sheep with a sour expression, said, \"Some a these never went up there with you.\" The count was not what he'd hoped for either. Ranch stiffs never did much of a job." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"You goin a do this next summer?\" said Jack to Ennis in the street, one leg already up in his green pickup. The wind was gusting hard and cold.\n\n\"Maybe not.\" A dust plume rose and hazed the air with fine grit and he squinted against it. \"Like I said, Alma and me's gettin married in December. Try to get somethin on a ranch. You?\" He looked away from Jack's jaw, bruised blue from the hard punch Ennis had thrown him on the last day.\n\n\"If nothin better comes along. Thought some about going back up to my daddy's place, give him a hand over the winter, then maybe head out for Texas in the spring. If the draft don't get me.\"\n\n\"Well, see you around, I guess.\" The wind tumbled an empty feed bag down the street until it fetched up under his truck.\n\n\"Right,\" said Jack, and they shook hands, hit each other on the shoulder, then there was forty feet of distance between them and nothing to do but drive away in opposite directions. Within a mile Ennis felt like someone was pulling his guts out hand over hand a yard at a time. He stopped at the side of the road and, in the whirling new snow, tried to puke but nothing came up. He felt about as bad as he ever had and it took a long time for the feeling to wear off." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "In December Ennis married Alma Beers and had her pregnant by mid-January. He picked up a few short-lived ranch jobs, then settled in as a wrangler on the old Elwood Hi-Top place north of Lost Cabin in Washakie County. He was still working there in September when Alma Jr., as he called his daughter, was born and their bedroom was full of the smell of old blood and milk and baby shit, and the sounds were of squalling and sucking and Alma's sleepy groans, all reassuring of fecundity and life's continuance to one who worked with livestock.\n\nWhen the Hi-Top folded they moved to a small apartment in Riverton up over a laundry. Ennis got on the highway crew, tolerating it but working weekends at the Rafter B in exchange for keeping his horses out there. The second girl was born and Alma wanted to stay in town near the clinic because the child had an asthmatic wheeze.\n\n\"Ennis, please, no more damn lonesome ranches for us,\" she said, sitting on his lap, wrapping her thin, freckled arms around him. \"Let's get a place here in town?\"\n\n\"I guess,\" said Ennis, slipping his hand up her blouse sleeve and stirring the silky armpit hair, then easing her down, fingers moving up her ribs to the jelly breast, over the round belly and knee and up into the wet gap all the way to the north pole or the equator depending which way you thought you were sailing, working at it until she shuddered and bucked against his hand and he rolled her over, did quickly what she hated. They stayed in the little apartment which he favored because it could be left at any time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The fourth summer since Brokeback Mountain came on and in June Ennis had a general delivery letter from Jack Twist, the first sign of life in all that time.\n\nFriend this letter is a long time over due. Hope you get it. Heard you was in Riverton. I'm coming thru on the 24th, thought Id stop and buy you a beer. Drop me a line if you can, say if your there.\n\nThe return address was Childress, Texas. Ennis wrote back, you bet, gave the Riverton address.\n\nThe day was hot and clear in the morning, but by noon the clouds had pushed up out of the west rolling a little sultry air before them. Ennis, wearing his best shirt, white with wide black stripes, didn't know what time Jack would get there and so had taken the day off, paced back and forth, looking down into a street pale with dust. Alma was saying something about taking his friend to the Knife & Fork for supper instead of cooking it was so hot, if they could get a baby-sitter, but Ennis said more likely he'd just go out with Jack and get drunk. Jack was not a restaurant type, he said, thinking of the dirty spoons sticking out of the cans of cold beans balanced on the log.\n\nLate in the afternoon, thunder growling, that same old green pickup rolled in and he saw Jack get out of the truck, beat-up Resistol tilted back. A hot jolt scalded Ennis and he was out on the landing pulling the door closed behind him. Jack took the stairs two and two. They seized each other by the shoulders, hugged mightily, squeezing the breath out of each other, saying, son of a bitch, son of a bitch, then, and easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came together, and hard, Jack's big teeth bringing blood, his hat falling to the floor, stubble rasping, wet saliva welling, and the door opening and Alma looking out for a few seconds at Ennis's straining shoulders and shutting the door again and still they clinched, pressing chest and groin and thigh and leg together, treading on each other's toes until they pulled apart to breathe and Ennis, not big on endearments, said what he said to his horses and daughters, little darlin.\n\nThe door opened again a few inches and Alma stood in the narrow light.\n\nWhat could he say? \"Alma, this is Jack Twist, Jack, my wife Alma.\" His chest was heaving. He could smell Jack\u2014the intensely familiar odor of cigarettes, musky sweat and a faint sweetness like grass, and with it the rushing cold of the mountain. \"Alma,\" he said, \"Jack and me ain't seen each other in four years.\" As if it were a reason. He was glad the light was dim on the landing but did not turn away from her.\n\n\"Sure enough,\" said Alma in a low voice. She had seen what she had seen. Behind her in the room lightning lit the window like a white sheet waving and the baby cried.\n\n\"You got a kid?\" said Jack. His shaking hand grazed Ennis's hand, electrical current snapped between them.\n\n\"Two little girls,\" Ennis said. \"Alma Jr. and Francine. Love them to pieces.\" Alma's mouth twitched.\n\n\"I got a boy,\" said Jack. \"Eight months old. Tell you what, I married a cute little old Texas girl down in Childress\u2014Lureen.\" From the vibration of the floorboard on which they both stood Ennis could feel how hard Jack was shaking.\n\n\"Alma,\" he said. \"Jack and me is goin out and get a drink Might not get back tonight, we get drinkin and talkin.\"\n\n\"Sure enough,\" Alma said, taking a dollar bill from her pocket. Ennis guessed she was going to ask him to get her a pack of cigarettes, bring him back sooner.\n\n\"Please to meet you,\" said Jack, trembling like a run-out horse.\n\n\"Ennis\u2014\" said Alma in her misery voice, but that didn't slow him down on the stairs and he called back, \"Alma, you want smokes there's some in the pocket a my blue shirt in the bedroom.\"\n\nThey went off in Jack's truck, bought a bottle of whiskey and within twenty minutes were in the Motel Siesta jouncing a bed. A few handfuls of hail rattled against the window followed by rain and slippery wind banging the unsecured door of the next room then and through the night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "The room stank of semen and smoke and sweat and whiskey, of old carpet and sour hay, saddle leather, shit and cheap soap. Ennis lay spread-eagled, spent and wet, breathing deep, still half tumescent, Jack blowing forceful cigarette clouds like whale spouts, and Jack said, \"Christ, it got a be all that time a yours ahorseback makes it so goddamn good. We got to talk about this. Swear to god I didn't know we was goin a get into this again\u2014yeah, I did. Why I'm here. I fuckin knew it. Redlined all the way, couldn't get here fast enough.\"\n\n\"I didn't know where in the hell you was,\" said Ennis. \"Four years. I about give up on you. I figured you was sore about that punch.\"\n\n\"Friend,\" said Jack, \"I was in Texas rodeoin. How I met Lureen. Look over on that chair.\"\n\nOn the back of the soiled orange chair he saw the shine of a buckle. \"Bullridin?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I made three fuckin thousand dollars that year. Fuckin starved. Had to borrow everthing but a toothbrush from other guys. Drove grooves across Texas. Half the time under that cunt truck fixin it. Anyway, I didn't never think about losin. Lureen? There's some serious money there. Her old man's got it. Got this farm machinery business. Course he don't let her have none a the money, and he hates my fuckin guts, so it's a hard go now but one a these days\u2014\"\n\n\"Well, you're goin a go where you look. Army didn't get you?\" The thunder sounded far to the east, moving from them in its red wreaths of light.\n\n\"They can't get no use out a me. Got some crushed vertebrates. And a stress fracture, the arm bone here, you know how bullridin you're always leverin it off your thigh?\u2014she gives a little ever time you do it. Even if you tape it good you break it a little goddamn bit at a time. Tell you what, hurts like a bitch afterwards. Had a busted leg. Busted in three places. Come off the bull and it was a big bull with a lot a drop, he got rid a me in about three flat and he come after me and he was sure faster. Lucky enough. Friend a mine got his oil checked with a horn dipstick and that was all she wrote. Bunch a other things, fuckin busted ribs, sprains and pains, torn ligaments. See, it ain't like it was in my daddy's time. It's guys with money go to college, trained athaletes. You got a have some money to rodeo now. Lureen's old man wouldn't give me a dime if I dropped it, except one way. And I know enough about the game now so I see that I ain't never goin a be on the bubble. Other reasons. I'm gettin out while I still can walk.\"\n\nEnnis pulled Jack's hand to his mouth, took a hit from the cigarette, exhaled. \"Sure as hell seem in one piece to me. You know, I was sittin up here all that time tryin to figure out if I was\u2014? I know I ain't. I mean here we both got wives and kids, right? I like doin it with women, yeah, but Jesus H., ain't nothin like this. I never had no thoughts a doin it with another guy except I sure wrang it out a hunderd times thinkin about you. You do it with other guys? Jack?\"\n\n\"Shit no,\" said Jack, who had been riding more than bulls, not rolling his own. \"You know that. Old Brokeback got us good and it sure ain't over. We got a work out what the fuck we're goin a do now.\"\n\n\"That summer,\" said Ennis. \"When we split up after we got paid out I had gut cramps so bad I pulled over and tried to puke, thought I ate somethin bad at that place in Dubois. Took me about a year a figure out it was that I shouldn't a let you out a my sights. Too late then by a long, long while.\"\n\n\"Friend,\" said Jack. \"We got us a fuckin situation here. Got a figure out what to do.\"\n\n\"I doubt there's nothin now we can do,\" said Ennis. \"What I'm sayin, Jack, I built a life up in them years. Love my little girls. Alma? It ain't her fault. You got your baby and wife, that place in Texas. You and me can't hardly be decent together if what happened back there\"\u2014he jerked his head in the direction of the apartment\u2014\"grabs on us like that. We do that in the wrong place we'll be dead. There's no reins on this one. It scares the piss out a me.\"\n\n\"Got to tell you, friend, maybe somebody seen us that summer. I was back there the next June, thinkin about goin back\u2014I didn't, lit out for Texas instead\u2014and Joe Aguirre's in the office and he says to me, he says, 'You boys found a way to make the time pass up there, didn't you,' and I give him a look but when I went out I seen he had a big-ass pair a binoculars hangin off his rearview.\" He neglected to add that the foreman had leaned back in his squeaky wooden tilt chair, said, Twist, you guys wasn't gettin paid to leave the dogs baby-sit the sheep while you stemmed the rose, and declined to rehire him. He went on, \"Yeah, that little punch a yours surprised me. I never figured you to throw a dirty punch.\"\n\n\"I come up under my brother K.E., three years older'n me, slugged me silly ever day. Dad got tired a me come bawlin in the house and when I was about six he set me down and says, Ennis, you got a problem and you got a fix it or it's gonna be with you until you're ninety and K.E.'s ninety-three. Well, I says, he's bigger'n me. Dad says, you got a take him unawares, don't say nothin to him, make him feel some pain, get out fast and keep doin it until he takes the message. Nothin like hurtin somebody to make him hear good. So I did. I got him in the outhouse, jumped him on the stairs, come over to his pillow in the night while he was sleepin and pasted him damn good. Took about two days. Never had trouble with K.E. since. The lesson was, don't say nothin and get it over with quick.\" A telephone rang in the next room, rang on and on, stopped abruptly in mid-peal.\n\n\"You won't catch me again,\" said Jack. \"Listen. I'm thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it'd be some sweet life. Like I said, I'm gettin out a rodeo. I ain't no broke-dick rider but I don't got the bucks a ride out this slump I'm in and I don't got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen's old man, you bet he'd give me a bunch if I'd get lost. Already more or less said it\u2014\"\n\n\"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain't goin a be that way. We can't. I'm stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can't get out of it. Jack, I don't want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don't want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich\u2014Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They'd took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel.\"\n\n\"You seen that?\"\n\n\"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it. Me and K.E. Dad laughed about it. Hell, for all I know he done the job. If he was alive and was to put his head in that door right now you bet he'd go get his tire iron. Two guys livin together? No. All I can see is we get together once in a while way the hell out in the back a nowhere\u2014\"\n\n\"How much is once in a while?\" said Jack. \"Once in a while ever four fuckin years?\"\n\n\"No,\" said Ennis, forbearing to ask whose fault that was. \"I goddamn hate it that you're goin a drive away in the mornin and I'm goin back to work. But if you can't fix it you got a stand it,\" he said. \"Shit. I been lookin at people on the street. This happen a other people? What the hell do they do?\"\n\n\"It don't happen in Wyomin and if it does I don't know what they do, maybe go to Denver,\" said Jack, sitting up, turning away from him, \"and I don't give a flyin fuck. Son of a bitch, Ennis, take a couple days off Right now. Get us out a here. Throw your stuff in the back a my truck and let's get up in the mountains. Couple a days. Call Alma up and tell her you're goin. Come on, Ennis, you just shot my airplane out a the sky\u2014give me somethin a go on. This ain't no little thing that's happenin here.\"\n\nThe hollow ringing began again in the next room, and as if he were answering it, Ennis picked up the phone on the bedside table, dialed his own number." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "A slow corrosion worked between Ennis and Alma, no real trouble, just widening water. She was working at a grocery store clerk job, saw she'd always have to work to keep ahead of the bills on what Ennis made. Alma asked Ennis to use rubbers because she dreaded another pregnancy. He said no to that, said he would be happy to leave her alone if she didn't want any more of his kids. Under her breath she said, \"I'd have em if you'd support em.\" And under that, thought, anyway, what you like to do don't make too many babies.\n\nHer resentment opened out a little every year: the embrace she had glimpsed, Ennis's fishing trips once or twice a year with Jack Twist and never a vacation with her and the girls, his disinclination to step out and have any fun, his yearning for low-paid, long-houred ranch work, his propensity to roll to the wall and sleep as soon as he hit the bed, his failure to look for a decent permanent job with the county or the power company, put her in a long, slow dive and when Alma Jr. was nine and Francine seven she said, what am I doin hangin around with him, divorced Ennis and married the Riverton grocer.\n\nEnnis went back to ranch work, hired on here and there, not getting much ahead but glad enough to be around stock again, free to drop things, quit if he had to, and go into the mountains at short notice. He had no serious hard feelings, just a vague sense of getting shortchanged, and showed it was all right by taking Thanksgiving dinner with Alma and her grocer and the kids, sitting between his girls and talking horses to them, telling jokes, trying not to be a sad daddy. After the pie Alma got him off in the kitchen, scraped the plates and said she worried about him and he ought to get married again. He saw she was pregnant, about four, five months, he guessed.\n\n\"Once burned,\" he said, leaning against the counter, feeling too big for the room.\n\n\"You still go fishin with that Jack Twist?\"\n\n\"Some.\" He thought she'd take the pattern off the plate with the scraping.\n\n\"You know,\" she said, and from her tone he knew something was coming, \"I used to wonder how come you never brought any trouts home. Always said you caught plenty. So one time I got your creel case open the night before you went on one a your little trips\u2014price tag still on it after five years\u2014and I tied a note on the end of the line. It said, hello Ennis, bring some fish home, love, Alma. And then you come back and said you'd caught a bunch a browns and ate them up. Remember? I looked in the case when I got a chance and there was my note still tied there and that line hadn't touched water in its life.\" As though the word \"water\" had called out its domestic cousin she twisted the faucet, sluiced the plates.\n\n\"That don't mean nothin.\"\n\n\"Don't lie, don't try to fool me, Ennis. I know what it means. Jack Twist? Jack Nasty. You and him\u2014\"\n\nShe'd overstepped his line. He seized her wrist; tears sprang and rolled, a dish clattered.\n\n\"Shut up,\" he said. \"Mind your own business. You don't know nothin about it.\"\n\n\"I'm goin a yell for Bill.\"\n\n\"You fuckin go right ahead. Go on and fuckin yell. I'll make him eat the fuckin floor and you too.\" He gave another wrench that left her with a burning bracelet, shoved his hat on backwards and slammed out. He went to the Black and Blue Eagle bar that night, got drunk, had a short dirty fight and left. He didn't try to see his girls for a long time, figuring they would look him up when they got the sense and years to move out from Alma." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "They were no longer young men with all of it before them. Jack had filled out through the shoulders and hams, Ennis stayed as lean as a clothes-pole, stepped around in worn boots, jeans and shirts summer and winter, added a canvas coat in cold weather. A benign growth appeared on his eyelid and gave it a drooping appearance, a broken nose healed crooked.\n\nYears on years they worked their way through the high meadows and mountain drainages, horse-spacking into the Big Horns, Medicine Bows, south end of the Gallatins, Absarokas, Granites, Owl Creeks, the Bridger-Teton Range, the Freezeouts and the Shirleys, Ferrises and the Rattlesnakes, Salt River Range, into the Wind Rivers over and again, the Sierra Madres, Gros Ventres, the Washakies, Laramies, but never returning to Brokeback.\n\nDown in Texas Jack's father-in-law died and Lureen, who inherited the farm equipment business, showed a skill for management and hard deals. Jack found himself with a vague managerial title, traveling to stock and agricultural machinery shows. He had some money now and found ways to spend it on his buying trips. A little Texas accent flavored his sentences, \"cow\" twisted into \"kyow\" and \"wife\" coming out as \"waf.\" He'd had his front teeth filed down and capped, said he'd felt no pain, and to finish the job grew a heavy mustache." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "In May of 1983 they spent a few cold days at a series of little icebound, no-name high lakes, then worked across into the Hail Strew River drainage.\n\nGoing up, the day was fine but the trail deep-drifted and slopping wet at the margins. They left it to wind through a slashy cut, leading the horses through brittle branchwood, Jack, the same eagle feather in his old hat, lifting his head in the heated noon to take the air scented with resinous lodgepole, the dry needle duff and hot rock, bitter juniper crushed beneath the horses' hooves. Ennis, weather-eyed, looked west for the heated cumulus that might come up on such a day but the boneless blue was so deep, said Jack, that he might drown looking up.\n\nAround three they swung through a narrow pass to a southeast slope where the strong spring sun had had a chance to work, dropped down to the trail again which lay snowless below them. They could hear the river muttering and making a distant train sound a long way off. Twenty minutes on they surprised a black bear on the bank above them rolling a log over for grubs and Jack's horse shied and reared, Jack saying \"Wo! Wo!\" and Ennis's bay dancing and snorting but holding. Jack reached for the .30-06 but there was no need; the startled bear galloped into the trees with the lumpish gait that made it seem it was falling apart.\n\nThe tea-colored river ran fast with snowmelt, a scarf of bubbles at every high rock, pools and setbacks streaming. The ochre-branched willows swayed stiffly, pollened catkins like yellow thumbprints. The horses drank and Jack dismounted, scooped icy water up in his hand, crystalline drops falling from his fingers, his mouth and chin glistening with wet.\n\n\"Get beaver fever doin that,\" said Ennis, then, \"Good enough place,\" looking at the level bench above the river, two or three fire-rings from old hunting camps. A sloping meadow rose behind the bench, protected by a stand of lodgepole. There was plenty of dry wood. They set up camp without saying much, picketed the horses in the meadow. Jack broke the seal on a bottle of whiskey, took a long, hot swallow, exhaled forcefully, said, \"That's one a the two things I need right now,\" capped and tossed it to Ennis.\n\nOn the third morning there were the clouds Ennis had expected, a grey racer out of the west, a bar of darkness driving wind before it and small flakes. It faded after an hour into tender spring snow that heaped wet and heavy. By nightfall it turned colder. Jack and Ennis passed a joint back and forth, the fire burning late, Jack restless and bitching about the cold, poking the flames with a stick, twisting the dial of the transistor radio until the batteries died.\n\nEnnis said he'd been putting the blocks to a woman who worked part-time at the Wolf Ears bar in Signal where he was working now for Stoutamire's cow and calf outfit, but it wasn't going anywhere and she had some problems he didn't want. Jack said he'd had a thing going with the wife of a rancher down the road in Childress and for the last few months he'd slank around expecting to get shot by Lureen or the husband, one. Ennis laughed a little and said he probably deserved it. Jack said he was doing all right but he missed Ennis bad enough sometimes to make him whip babies.\n\nThe horses nickered in the darkness beyond the fire's circle of light. Ennis put his arm around Jack, pulled him close, said he saw his girls about once a month, Alma Jr. a shy seventeen-year-old with his beanpole length, Francine a little live wire. Jack slid his cold hand between Ennis's legs, said he was worried about his boy who was, no doubt about it, dyslexic or something, couldn't get anything right, fifteen years old and couldn't hardly read, he could see it though goddamn Lureen wouldn't admit to it and pretended the kid was o.k., refused to get any bitchin kind a help about it. He didn't know what the fuck the answer was. Lureen had the money and called the shots.\n\n\"I used a want a boy for a kid,\" said Ennis, undoing buttons, \"but just got little girls.\"\n\n\"I didn't want none a either kind,\" said Jack. \"But fuck-all has worked the way I wanted. Nothin never come to my hand the right way.\" Without getting up he threw deadwood on the fire, the sparks flying up with their truths and lies, a few hot points of fire landing on their hands and faces, not for the first time, and they rolled down into the dirt. One thing never changed: the brilliant charge of their infrequent couplings was darkened by the sense of time flying, never enough time, never enough.\n\nA day or two later in the trailhead parking lot, horses loaded into the trailer, Ennis was ready to head back to Signal, Jack up to Lightning Flat to see the old man. Ennis leaned into Jack's window, said what he'd been putting off the whole week, that likely he couldn't get away again until November after they'd shipped stock and before winter feeding started.\n\n\"November. What in hell happened a August? Tell you what, we said August, nine, ten days. Christ, Ennis! Whyn't you tell me this before? You had a fuckin week to say some little word about it. And why's it we're always in the friggin cold weather? We ought a do somethin. We ought a go south. We ought a go to Mexico one day.\"\n\n\"Mexico? Jack, you know me. All the travelin I ever done is goin around the coffeepot lookin for the handle. And I'll be runnin the baler all August, that's what's the matter with August. Lighten up, Jack. We can hunt in November, kill a nice elk. Try if I can get Don Wroe's cabin again. We had a good time that year.\"\n\n\"You know, friend, this is a goddamn bitch of a unsatisfactory situation. You used a come away easy. It's like seein the pope now.\"\n\n\"Jack, I got a work. Them earlier days I used a quit the jobs. You got a wife with money, a good job. You forget how it is bein broke all the time. You ever hear a child support? I been payin out for years and got more to go. Let me tell you, I can't quit this one. And I can't get the time off. It was tough gettin this time\u2014some a them late heifers is still calvin. You don't leave then. You don't. Stoutamire is a hell-raiser and he raised hell about me takin the week. I don't blame him. He probly ain't got a night's sleep since I left. The trade-off was August. You got a better idea?\"\n\n\"I did once.\" The tone was bitter and accusatory.\n\nEnnis said nothing, straightened up slowly, rubbed at his forehead; a horse stamped inside the trailer. He walked to his truck, put his hand on the trailer, said something that only the horses could hear, turned and walked back at a deliberate pace.\n\n\"You been a Mexico, Jack?\" Mexico was the place. He'd heard. He was cutting fence now, trespassing in the shoot-em zone.\n\n\"Hell yes, I been. Where's the fuckin problem?\" Braced for it all these years and here it came, late and unexpected.\n\n\"I got a say this to you one time, Jack, and I ain't foolin. What I don't know,\" said Ennis, \"all them things I don't know could get you killed if I should come to know them.\"\n\n\"Try this one,\" said Jack, \"and I'll say it just one time. Tell you what, we could a had a good life together, a fuckin real good life. You wouldn't do it, Ennis, so what we got now is Brokeback Mountain. Everthing built on that. It's all we got, boy, fuckin all, so I hope you know that if you don't never know the rest. Count the damn few times we been together in twenty years. Measure the fuckin short leash you keep me on, then ask me about Mexico and then tell me you'll kill me for needin it and not hardly never gettin it. You got no fuckin idea how bad it gets. I'm not you. I can't make it on a couple a high-altitude fucks once or twice a year. You're too much for me, Ennis, you son of a whoreson bitch. I wish I knew how to quit you.\"\n\nLike vast clouds of steam from thermal springs in winter the years of things unsaid and now unsayable\u2014admissions, declarations, shames, guilts, fears\u2014rose around them. Ennis stood as if heart-shot, face grey and deep-lined, grimacing, eyes screwed shut, fists clenched, legs caving, hit the ground on his knees.\n\n\"Jesus,\" said Jack. \"Ennis?\" But before he was out of the truck, trying to guess if it was heart attack or the overflow of an incendiary rage, Ennis was back on his feet and somehow, as a coat hanger is straightened to open a locked car and then bent again to its original shape, they torqued things almost to where they had been, for what they'd said was no news. Nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger.\n\nThey had stood that way for a long time in front of the fire, its burning tossing ruddy chunks of light, the shadow of their bodies a single column against the rock. The minutes ticked by from the round watch in Ennis's pocket, from the sticks in the fire settling into coals. Stars bit through the wavy heat layers above the fire. Ennis's breath came slow and quiet, he hummed, rocked a little in the sparklight and Jack leaned against the steady heartbeat, the vibrations of the humming like faint electricity and, standing, he fell into sleep that was not sleep but something else drowsy and tranced until Ennis, dredging up a rusty but still useable phrase from the childhood time before his mother died, said, \"Time to hit the hay, cowboy. I got a go. Come on, you're sleepin on your feet like a horse,\" and gave Jack a shake, a push, and went off in the darkness. Jack heard his spurs tremble as he mounted, the words \"see you tomorrow,\" and the horse's shuddering snort, grind of hoof on stone.\n\nLater, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they'd never got much farther than that. Let be, let be." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Ennis didn't know about the accident for months until his postcard to Jack saying that November still looked like the first chance came back stamped DECEASED. He called Jack's number in Childress, something he had done only once before when Alma divorced him and Jack had misunderstood the reason for the call, had driven twelve hundred miles north for nothing. This would be all right, Jack would answer, had to answer. But he did not. It was Lureen and she said who? who is this? and when he told her again she said in a level voice yes, Jack was pumping up a flat on the truck out on a back road when the tire blew up. The bead was damaged somehow and the force of the explosion slammed the rim into his face, broke his nose and jaw and knocked him unconscious on his back. By the time someone came along he had drowned in his own blood.\n\nNo, he thought, they got him with the tire iron.\n\n\"Jack used to mention you,\" she said. \"You're the fishing buddy or the hunting buddy, I know that. Would have let you know,\" she said, \"but I wasn't sure about your name and address. Jack kept most a his friends' addresses in his head. It was a terrible thing. He was only thirty-nine years old.\"\n\nThe huge sadness of the northern plains rolled down on him. He didn't know which way it was, the tire iron or a real accident, blood choking down Jack's throat and nobody to turn him over. Under the wind drone he heard steel slamming off bone, the hollow chatter of a settling tire rim.\n\n\"He buried down there?\" He wanted to curse her for letting Jack die on the dirt road.\n\nThe little Texas voice came slip-sliding down the wire. \"We put a stone up. He use to say he wanted to be cremated, ashes scattered on Brokeback Mountain. I didn't know where that was. So he was cremated, like he wanted, and like I say, half his ashes was interred here, and the rest I sent up to his folks. I thought Brokeback Mountain was around where he grew up. But knowing Jack, it might be some pretend place where the bluebirds sing and there's a whiskey spring.\"\n\n\"We herded sheep on Brokeback one summer,\" said Ennis. He could hardly speak.\n\n\"Well, he said it was his place. I thought he meant to get drunk. Drink whiskey up there. He drank a lot.\"\n\n\"His folks still up in Lightnin Flat?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah. They'll be there until they die. I never met them. They didn't come down for the funeral. You get in touch with them. I suppose they'd appreciate it if his wishes was carried out.\"\n\nNo doubt about it, she was polite but the little voice was cold as snow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "The road to Lightning Flat went through desolate country past a dozen abandoned ranches distributed over the plain at eight-and ten-mile intervals, houses sitting blank-eyed in the weeds, corral fences down. The mailbox read John C. Twist. The ranch was a meagre little place, leafy spurge taking over. The stock was too far distant for him to see their condition, only that they were black baldies. A porch stretched across the front of the tiny brown stucco house, four rooms, two down, two up.\n\nEnnis sat at the kitchen table with Jack's father. Jack's mother, stout and careful in her movements as though recovering from an operation, said, \"Want some coffee, don't you? Piece a cherry cake?\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am, I'll take a cup a coffee but I can't eat no cake just now.\"\n\nThe old man sat silent, his hands folded on the plastic tablecloth, staring at Ennis with an angry, knowing expression. Ennis recognized in him a not uncommon type with the hard need to be the stud duck in the pond. He couldn't see much of Jack in either one of them, took a breath.\n\n\"I feel awful bad about Jack. Can't begin to say how bad I feel. I knew him a long time. I come by to tell you that if you want me to take his ashes up there on Brokeback like his wife says he wanted I'd be proud to.\"\n\nThere was a silence. Ennis cleared his throat but said nothing more.\n\nThe old man said, \"Tell you what, I know where Brokeback Mountain is. He thought he was too goddamn special to be buried in the family plot.\"\n\nJack's mother ignored this, said, \"He used a come home every year, even after he was married and down in Texas, and help his daddy on the ranch for a week, fix the gates and mow and all. I kept his room like it was when he was a boy and I think he appreciated that. You are welcome to go up in his room if you want.\"\n\nThe old man spoke angrily. \"I can't get no help out here. Jack used a say, 'Ennis del Mar' he used a say, 'I' goin a bring him up here one a these days and we'll lick this damn ranch into shape.' He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin and help me run this ranch and bring it up. Then, this spring he's got another one's goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He's goin a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says. But like most a Jack's ideas it never come to pass.\"\n\nSo now he knew it had been the tire iron. He stood up, said, you bet he'd like to see Jack's room, recalled one of Jack's stories about this old man. Jack was dick-clipped and the old man was not; it bothered the son who had discovered the anatomical disconformity during a hard scene. He had been about three or four, he said, always late getting to the toilet, struggling with buttons, the seat, the height of the thing and often as not left the surroundings sprinkled down. The old man blew up about it and this one time worked into a crazy rage. \"Christ, he licked the stuffin out a me, knocked me down on the bathroom floor, whipped me with his belt. I thought he was killin me. Then he says, 'You want a know what it's like with piss all over the place? I'll learn you,' and he pulls it out and lets go all over me, soaked me, then he throws a towel at me and makes me mop up the floor, take my clothes off and warsh them in the bathtub, warsh out the towel, I'm bawlin and blub-berin. But while he was hosin me down I seen he had some extra material that I was missin. I seen they'd cut me different like you'd crop a ear or scorch a brand. No way to get it right with him after that.\"\n\nThe bedroom, at the top of a steep stair that had its own climbing rhythm, was tiny and hot, afternoon sun pounding through the west window, hitting the narrow boy's bed against the wall, an ink-stained desk and wooden chair, a b.b. gun in a hand-whittled rack over the bed. The window looked down on the gravel road stretching south and it occurred to him that for his growing-up years that was the only road Jack knew. An ancient magazine photograph of some dark-haired movie star was taped to the wall beside the bed, the skin tone gone magenta. He could hear Jack's mother downstairs running water, filling the kettle and setting it back on the stove, asking the old man a muffled question.\n\nThe closet was a shallow cavity with a wooden rod braced across, a faded cretonne curtain on a string closing it off from the rest of the room. In the closet hung two pairs of jeans crease-ironed and folded neatly over wire hangers, on the floor a pair of worn packer boots he thought he remembered. At the north end of the closet a tiny jog in the wall made a slight hiding place and here, stiff with long suspension from a nail, hung a shirt. He lifted it off the nail. Jack's old shirt from Brokeback days. The dried blood on the sleeve was his own blood, a gushing nosebleed on the last afternoon on the mountain when Jack, in their contortionistic grappling and wrestling, had slammed Ennis's nose hard with his knee. He had staunched the blood which was everywhere, all over both of them, with his shirtsleeve, but the staunching hadn't held because Ennis had suddenly swung from the deck and laid the ministering angel out in the wild columbine, wings folded.\n\nThe shirt seemed heavy until he saw there was another shirt inside it, the sleeves carefully worked down inside Jack's sleeves. It was his own plaid shirt, lost, he'd thought, long ago in some damn laundry, his dirty shirt, the pocket ripped, buttons missing, stolen by Jack and hidden here inside Jack's own shirt, the pair like two skins, one inside the other, two in one. He pressed his face into the fabric and breathed in slowly through his mouth and nose, hoping for the faintest smoke and mountain sage and salty sweet stink of Jack but there was no real scent, only the memory of it, the imagined power of Brokeback Mountain of which nothing was left but what he held in his hands." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "In the end the stud duck refused to let Jack's ashes go. \"Tell you what, we got a family plot and he's goin in it.\" Jack's mother stood at the table coring apples with a sharp, serrated instrument. 'You come again,\" she said.\n\nBumping down the washboard road Ennis passed the country cemetery fenced with sagging sheep wire, a tiny fenced square on the welling prairie, a few graves bright with plastic flowers, and didn't want to know Jack was going in there, to be buried on the grieving plain." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "A few weeks later on the Saturday he threw all Stoutamire's dirty horse blankets into the back of his pickup and took them down to the Quik Stop Car Wash to turn the high-pressure spray on them. When the wet clean blankets were stowed in the truck bed he stepped into Higgins's gift shop and busied himself with the postcard rack.\n\n\"Ennis, what are you lookin for rootin through them postcards?\" said Linda Higgins, throwing a sopping brown coffee filter into the garbage can.\n\n\"Scene a Brokeback Mountain.\"\n\n\"Over in Fremont County?\"\n\n\"No, north a here.\"\n\n\"I didn't order none a them. Let me get the order list. They got it I can get you a hunderd. I got a order some more cards anyway.\"\n\n\"One's enough,\" said Ennis.\n\nWhen it came\u2014thirty cents\u2014he pinned it up in his trailer, brass-headed tack in each corner. Below it he drove a nail and on the nail he hung the wire hanger and the two old shirts suspended from it. He stepped back and looked at the ensemble through a few stinging tears.\n\n\"Jack, I swear\u2014\" he said, though Jack had never asked him to swear anything and was himself not the swearing kind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Around that time Jack began to appear in his dreams, Jack as he had first seen him, curly-headed and smiling and bucktoothed, talking about getting up off his pockets and into the control zone, but the can of beans with the spoon handle jutting out and balanced on the log was there as well, in a cartoon shape and lurid colors that gave the dreams a flavor of comic obscenity. The spoon handle was the kind that could be used as a tire iron. And he would wake sometimes in grief, sometimes with the old sense of joy and release; the pillow sometimes wet, sometimes the sheets.\n\nThere was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can't fix it you've got to stand it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Gunpowder Tea", + "author": "Margaret Brownley", + "genres": [ + "The Brides Of Last Chance Ranch Series Book 3" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "HEIRESS\n\nWANTED\n\nLooking for hardworking, professional woman of good character and pleasant disposition willing to learn the ranching business in Arizona Territory. Must be single and prepared to remain so now and forevermore." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\nPinkerton National Detective Agency: We never sleep.\n\nNew Orleans, 1897\n\nMiranda Hunt drew a linen handkerchief from the sleeve of her black mourning frock and dabbed the corner of her eye. Only the most discerning person would spot the foot tapping impatiently beneath the hem of her skirt. Or guess that her respectfully lowered head hid a watchful gaze.\n\nAs far as anyone knew, she was exactly who she purported to be: Mrs. James Kincaid the Third, friend of the deceased.\n\n\"Such a modest man,\" one of the mourners, a middle-aged woman, lamented, looking straight at Miranda. \"Wouldn't you agree, Mrs. Kincaid?\"\n\n\"Most definitely,\" Miranda replied. From what she knew of Mr. Stanton, he had much to be modest about.\n\nEverything in the stately mansion from the polished marble floors to the gold filigree ceilings was due to Mr. Stanton's marriage to the heiress of a flypaper empire. The rich knew how to live, and judging by the carved oak coffin edged in gold and lined in silk, they also knew how to die.\n\nAn elderly gray-haired man approached her chair and put up his monocle. \"Would you care to pay your last respects, Mrs. Kincaid?\" He was stoop-shouldered and spoke with a lisp.\n\nMiranda stood with a solemn nod and crossed the elegantly furnished parlor to an alcove near the grand piano. Tall palms stood like sentries guarding the open coffin. The deceased was perfectly laid out in a fine tailored suit, his white mustache and hair neatly trimmed. Had it not been for the silver coins concealing his eyes, one might think him merely asleep.\n\nThe last few petals of Miranda's rose fluttered to the floor but she dutifully laid the wilted stem by the dead man's side. She allowed a ladylike sob to escape and drew a handkerchief to her cheek\u2014all for the benefit of the monocle-eyed man.\n\nLike all operatives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, Miranda was an expert in disguises. Blending in was the key to nabbing an unsuspecting criminal and that took a certain amount of concentration, attention to detail, and, of course, acting ability.\n\nToday, it took considerably more. It took a steadfast stomach to eat the Russian fish eggs and liver paste that the rich called food.\n\nReturning to her seat, she strained to hear three young women whisper among themselves. A private detective had to listen to an amazing amount of gossip, which went against Miranda's Christian upbringing. But between the \"he dids\" and \"you won't believes\" was where an operative often gleaned the most useful information. Certainly God made allowances for those fighting for law and order. At least Miranda hoped He did.\n\nThe hands on the longcase clock swept away another hour and Miranda's spirits sank, but her vigilance remained. So far this week she had attended two weddings, three funerals, and a baptism without a sign of the man known as the Society Thief.\n\nThough he excelled at what he did, he was considerably more than just a criminal; he was her stepping-stone to bigger and better assignments.\n\nHe had been a bane to the city's upper class for more than a year. No jewel was safe from his sleight of hand; no wealthy man's corpse immune to his pilfering fingers. Catching him red-handed would prove to the Pinkerton brothers once and for all that she was ready for more than the jobs no other operative wanted. At the age of twenty-four, she was ready for a real challenge.\n\nShe had just about decided that this funeral was a waste of time when she spotted the straw boater. It was always the details that tripped up a person and today it was the hat. Senses alert, she studied the latecomer. The fact that he'd failed to give his head-covering to one of the servants like the other male guests made him suspect. There was always the possibility that he planned on using his hat to conceal a dastardly deed. Or perhaps he simply kept it so as to make a quick escape.\n\nSlender of build, he had short black hair and a pointed beard. He was immaculately dressed in a black sack coat over gray trousers and vest. A short turnover collar showed above a floppy bow tie.\n\nThe other male guests wore silk suits and linen shirts, appropriate attire for a warm spring-like day, but this man wore wool\u2014the fabric of choice for pickpockets. Wool didn't rustle like other fabrics, allowing the wearer to move without detection.\n\nThe man's gaze met hers and she gave her fan a coquettish flick and smiled. Confident enough to think she was flirting, he smiled back. The scene was set.\n\nA rush of excitement raced through her as it always did whenever she was about to nab a suspect. You should see me now, Papa. Maybe then you wouldn't have been so against me becoming a detective. She moved across the room, but the deceased's widow reached his side first.\n\n\"I'm Mrs. Stanton,\" she said. \"And you are...?\"\n\n\"Harry Benson. Your husband and I were business acquaintances. I apologize for being late.\"\n\nA rehearsed response if Miranda ever heard one. He lowered his head and said something more, but his voice failed to reach her straining ear.\n\nThe widow blushed. \"Thank you, Mr. Benson. That's very kind of you to say.\" She gestured toward the enormous table of delicacies. \"Do help yourself.\"\n\nWith a swish of her black taffeta skirts, Mrs. Stanton walked away. A snap of her fingers sent servants scampering to the kitchen for more plates of p\u00e2t\u00e9 and caviar. Had the woman realized that Mr. Benson had taken her quite literally and helped himself to her diamond brooch, she might have been less inclined to worry about his appetite.\n\nMiranda quickly moved toward her prey. \"Mr. Benson,\" she said by way of greeting. \"I'm Mrs. Kincaid. Perhaps you know my husband?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not.\" Raking her over, his gaze settled for a split second on her diamond necklace before belatedly meeting her eyes. The necklace had been borrowed from a local jeweler and the Pinkerton agency would have to pay quite handsomely should it disappear. Miranda meant to see that it didn't.\n\n\"Would you care for some refreshments, Mrs. Kincaid?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, thank you.\"\n\n\"Allow me.\" The nature of the crime required a pickpocket to make physical contact with his target, so it was no surprise when Mr. Benson, or whatever his name was, offered his bent elbow.\n\nSince a detective needed to get as close as possible to a perpetrator, she slid her arm through the crook of his.\n\nThey strolled like two old friends to the refreshment table. A pickpocket's second order of business was to distract his intended victim. Mr. Benson did this by \"accidentally\" spilling cider on her dress.\n\n\"Oh, forgive me.\" He drew out his handkerchief and quickly dabbed at her skirt. Like any good victim, Miranda allowed him to do so.\n\n\"How clumsy of me,\" he murmured. \"I do apologize.\"\n\nIn the blink of an eye, he had expertly relieved her of her jewels\u2014a true professional if she ever saw one. Any pickpocket worth his salt took pride in his work and would never be so inelegant as to cut a lady's dress or a gentleman's apparel. While he pocketed the necklace with one hand, Miranda just as efficiently matched his professional pride by slipping a handcuff on his other.\n\nHis mouth dropped open but it was the gun that turned him pale as the corpse.\n\n\"It w-was an accident,\" he stammered. He cast a nervous glance around the room but no one paid them any heed. \"I'll be happy to make compensation for the d-dress.\"\n\n\"This old thing?\" She smiled. \"You needn't worry about it, but you might be a tad bit concerned about your pockets.\"\n\nOne eye twitched and sweat dotted his forehead. \"Who... who are you?\"\n\n\"A thief's worst nightmare,\" she replied, raising a palm to reveal her Pinkerton badge. \"It might interest you to know that the police are waiting for my call.\"\n\nBefore Miranda could clamp the second cuff around his wrist, a female servant dropped a tray and screamed, \"She's got a gun!\"\n\nA collective gasp rose from the mourners but before anyone had a chance to move, the pickpocket grabbed for Miranda's weapon.\n\n\"Stop,\" she hissed.\n\nThey struggled and the derringer arched back and forth between them, the loose handcuff swinging from his arm. The gun went off with a deafening bang. Overhead, the crystal chandelier shattered and glass sprayed down like silver rain.\n\nGuests scrambled beneath the buffet table. Others dived behind sofas and chairs. One robust woman fainted dead away.\n\nThe weapon went off a second time.\n\nThe pickpocket was good at his craft but was no match for Miranda. With a well-placed knee and a perfectly aimed blow, she gained control of the gun. Doubled over in pain, the thief could do nothing to prevent her from snapping the second steel bracelet around his wrist.\n\nHer derringer in one hand, she pulled an array of watches, bracelets, and necklaces from his pocket with the other and dumped them on the buffet table. The palm nippers used to snip jewelry free from an unsuspecting neck or ear, she kept. One never knew when such a tool might come in handy.\n\n\"Calm down, everyone.\" Miranda held her badge over her head for everyone to see. It was now just a matter of calling the police. \"Everything's under control.\"\n\n\"Not everything,\" the widow cried. She had thrown herself across the coffin and her feet flopped about like newly caught fish. \"You shot my husband!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Miranda's stomach churned as she hurried down Fifth Street to the three-story building housing the Chicago headquarters of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. One hand tucked in her muff and the other holding on to her hat, she kept her head down. The icy wind blowing off Lake Michigan sliced through her gray woolen skirt and chilled her to the bone.\n\nSummoned to the office posthaste, she dreaded her meeting with Mr. William Pinkerton. She was definitely in trouble. A large black-and-white eye on the face of the building seemed to confirm it. Today the firm's logo appeared to glare down at her.\n\nShe battled the heavy door leading to the lobby. It was still early, which meant that none of the other operatives or secretaries had arrived yet. She alone had to face the principal.\n\nInside the building, she straightened her hat, wiggling the hat pin in place. She then held her chin high, ready to explain and, if necessary, defend her actions. Thus braced, she took the elevator to the top floor and marched right past the detective room and into the principal's wood-paneled office.\n\nWilliam Pinkerton greeted her with a curt nod and waited for her to be seated. He then paced back and forth in front of her, hands clasped behind his back.\n\nHe shook his head, his heavy jowls jiggling and his walrus mustache drooping. \"You shouldn't have shot the dead man.\"\n\n\"Yes, that was most... unfortunate. But as I explained to the widow, except for the hole in his head and dislodgement of coins at his eyes, her husband's... uh... condition remained unchanged.\"\n\nPinkerton regarded her from beneath slanted brows. \"The last thing the agency needs is more bad press and now Mrs. Stanton threatens to bring about a lawsuit.\"\n\nShe grimaced. \"I... I don't know what to say. The man was dead when I got there and dead when I left.\"\n\n\"You should never have tried to restrain the thief yourself. Your instructions were to identify him and then call the police. That was all.\"\n\n\"If I had called the police first, we would have lost him. I caught the Society Thief and that's more than Stands or Masters did.\" The two operatives had worked on the case for six months without success.\n\nPinkerton stopped pacing. \"Many believe that a woman has no business fighting crime.\"\n\n\"Including your brother,\" she said. She'd heard the two arguing over that very subject not long ago.\n\nHe nodded. \"Including Robert. But unlike my brother, I believe women have an advantage over men when working undercover.\" Pinkerton sat on the edge of his desk and rubbed the back of his neck. \"I promised Charles to watch out for you, but I can't do that if you continue to take unnecessary risks.\"\n\nA dark cloud entered the room at the mention of her father. If it hadn't been for a careless Wells Fargo detective, her father might still be alive. \"Papa was one of your best operatives. He taught me everything I know about detective work.\"\n\n\"That doesn't make me feel any better,\" Pinkerton said. \"Your father took his share of unreasonable chances.\"\n\nMiranda tightened her fingers around her fur muff. She still hadn't gotten over her father's death three years earlier. Her only consolation was carrying on the work he loved so much.\n\n\"My father might have taken unreasonable chances, as you call them, but he captured more criminals than all your other operatives put together.\" She leaned forward. \"I want to be treated like every other agent. If I were a man, we wouldn't be having this conversation.\"\n\nPinkerton blew out his breath. \"You're your father's daughter through and through.\" He folded his arms across his chest.\n\nMiranda chewed on her lip. \"You aren't thinking of letting me go, are you?\" She feared that more than anything in the world. To be relieved of her duties would be an affront to the memory of her father. It would also break her heart to give up the work she loved.\n\n\"On the contrary. The governor of Arizona Territory has asked for our help. He wants to hire us to track down a man who has terrorized the county for more than a year. I'm sure you've heard of the Phantom.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. \"You want me to track down the Phantom?\"\n\n\"Normally this would be handled by the Denver office, but they lack relevant personnel,\" he said. \"If you're successful, it would put a shine on our tarnished reputation.\"\n\nShe frowned. Relevant personnel seemed like an odd term to use and she had no idea what it meant. \"But the law\u2014\" Pinkerton agents were accused of employing bullying tactics during the union riots and using undue force. That led to Congress passing a law preventing the government from hiring private detective firms. The law had cut into the agency's work, but so had the increase in competition.\n\n\"The Anti-Pinkerton law prevents the U.S. government from hiring us. It says nothing about territories.\" He stood and walked over to a map pinned to the wall. Arizona Territory was riddled with black Xs.\n\nHe jabbed the map with his finger. \"All the robberies committed in the last year are marked.\"\n\nMiranda joined him. Doing a quick count, she stopped at twelve. Even the James gang in their glory days hadn't been that active.\n\n\"As you can see, the robberies are centered in the southeast portion of the territory\u2014in Cochise County, to be exact. They tend to be centered around... here.\" He pointed to a blank space between Tombstone and a little town called Cactus Patch.\n\nShe squinted at the tiny dot that marked the town. \"Doesn't look like there's much there but desert.\"\n\n\"That's why the governor asked for help. The long-range man-hunt is taxing local authorities.\" His finger made a circle on the map. \"This is a cattle ranch called the Last Chance. As you can see, it's the most centrally located to the robberies. Unless I miss my guess, that's where we'll find the leader of the gang. And even if he's not hiding out at the ranch, he's got to be somewhere nearby.\" He plucked a newspaper clipping from his desk.\n\n\"It gets even more interesting,\" he continued. \"The ranch is owned by an old lady named Eleanor Walker. I believe she's a bit soft in the head.\" He read the piece aloud. \"Heiress Wanted.\" He chuckled and stroked his mustache. \"Now I ask you. Does it sound normal for someone to advertise for an heiress?\"\n\n\"It does sound odd,\" she agreed.\n\n\"Yes, but also fortunate.\" He read the rest. Not only was the \"heiress\" expected to learn the cattle business, but she also had to promise to forgo marriage. \"So how do you feel about cattle ranching?\"\n\nHe didn't have to ask how she felt about forgoing marriage. No man would be so foolish as to marry a Pinkerton operative. \"I think ranching is a dirty business but someone's got to do it.\"\n\n\"Yes, and as it turns out, that someone is you.\"\n\nShe gaped at him. \"You want me to answer that advertisement?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, though he didn't look happy about it. \"Miss Walker might be fey, but I'm sure she would notice if a male operative showed up wanting to be her heiress.\"\n\nAha! Relevant personnel meant female. For once her gender worked for and not against her. She forced herself to breathe. It was the assignment of a lifetime. It was what she wanted, had prayed for, and worked so hard to achieve. Still, there was a big difference between tracking down criminals in a city like Chicago, Boston, or New Orleans and hunting for them in the Wild West. Every horror story she'd ever heard from other operatives came back to taunt her.\n\n\"But... but I know nothing about cattle or even ranching.\"\n\n\"The advertisement clearly states that the ranch owner is looking for someone willing to learn. While you're learning, you will track down Mr. Phantom, whoever he might be.\" He gave her a stern look. \"That's all you will do. Track him down. Once you identify him, you will then notify local law enforcement. You are not to go after him yourself. Is that understood?\"\n\n\"Perfectly.\"\n\nHe reached across his desk for a thick portfolio. \"Here is a complete dossier on Miss Walker and the ranch and what little we know about the gang leader. You'll also find your train tickets and expense money in here.\" He put the thick binder in her hands. \"The ranch owner has been notified and is expecting a Miss Annie Beckman, which, of course, is you. As usual, you will send daily reports on your progress to the name and post office box listed in your dossier, in cipher. Any questions?\"\n\nSurprised to find herself shaking, Miranda forced herself to breathe. Finally, finally she had gotten her wish. Too stunned to think, let alone ask questions, she stared at the manila folder in her hands.\n\n\"None at the moment.\"\n\n\"Then I'll let you get to work. Your train leaves first thing in the morning.\"\n\nThat didn't give her much time to study the material and plan a new identity. \"Thank you. I'll do my best.\" If only Papa could see me now!\n\n\"I expect nothing less, but I mean it\u2014you're to take no unnecessary chances.\"\n\n\"I understand, sir.\" She headed for the door but he called after her.\n\n\"One more thing, Miss Beckman,\" he said, addressing her by her new name. \"Don't shoot any more dead men.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nA gullible fool can locate a swindler faster than the smartest private eye in the world.\n\nArizona Territory\n\nThe Southern Pacific ripped through the desert with unnerving speed. The smell of burning wood and red-hot steel pervaded the car with a sense of urgency. The train was late and the engine driver seemed determined to make up for lost time.\n\nMiranda stared out the window while going over her new identity. From this moment on, she couldn't just think of herself as Annie Beckman. She had to be Annie Beckman. With her golden-brown skin, dark hair, and high cheekbones, she could hardly hide the Indian blood inherited from her Kickapoo mother but most everything else was fabricated... except for perhaps her age and propensity for sweets.\n\nWatching the scenery fly by, Miranda mentally let her true identity slip away with it. By the time she pulled her gaze away from the mindless blur beyond the smoky windows, the transformation was complete. She was Annie Beckman.\n\nAnnie dug in her drawstring purse for her gold pocket watch. It was only twenty minutes later than when she last looked. It seemed like an hour.\n\nThankfully, the man on the seat next to her was deep in slumber but he was no less obnoxious in sleep than awake. His mouth hung open, allowing the most despicable hog-like sounds to escape. At least now he wasn't puffing away on his vile cigar. His neatly patched trousers and pressed boiled shirt told her he was married, which made his unseemly passes all the more disgusting.\n\nShe sighed and dropped the watch back into the satiny depths of her purse. A short, skinny man walked down the aisle, unaware that he had dropped an envelope. She lifted her hand to call to him, but not wanting to wake the man by her side or the one across the aisle, she changed her mind. She stood and grabbed the back of the seat in front of her in an effort to gain her balance.\n\nShe reached the owner of the envelope just as he took his seat. \"Sir, you dropped this.\" He gave her a cursory glance before grabbing it out of her hands and slipping it into his vest. He didn't even bother thanking her.\n\nMost would blame his curtness on bad manners, but her Pinkerton training came into play and now, as always, she dismissed the obvious. Unless she missed her guess, whatever was in that letter was important and he was irritated at having so carelessly dropped it.\n\nShe made her way back to her seat, aware that the stranger across the aisle was now awake and staring at her. His blue-eyed gaze seemed to penetrate her very thoughts. Neither his rugged whiskers nor ragged cut of sandy hair took away from his good looks.\n\nNormally Annie could glance at a person and know immediately his or her marital status, profession, and financial circumstances. She guessed that the pale-faced woman in back was a mail-order bride on the way to an unknown future; that the pock-faced man seated directly behind her with the toothbrush sticking out of his waistcoat pocket was a traveling salesman; and that the middle-aged man next to him a land developer.\n\nBut the blue-eyed stranger was an enigma. He sat tall, shoulders straight, fingers tapping impatiently on his lap. He was dressed like a cowpuncher in dark trousers, striped shirt, and vest, his boots scuffed and his red kerchief wrinkled. Such casual attire didn't seem to belong on his rigidly alert frame. Only the gun at his side seemed at home.\n\nHe appeared to be waiting for something. Or perhaps he was simply anxious for the trip to end. If so, that made two of them.\n\nShe pretended to ignore him. It wasn't the first time she'd caught him staring. For one brief moment, she considered the possibility that he'd guessed her occupation but immediately discounted the thought. Both her powers of observation and her careful attention to every last detail were beyond reproach. That was why she always got her man or, in some cases, her woman. Though this was the most challenging assignment she'd ever embarked upon, she was completely confident that she would succeed.\n\nShe took her seat and tried to ignore the porcine sounds emitting from the sleeping man next to her. The clickety-clack of the train had a lulling effect and her lids soon drifted downward. There was nothing much she could do before reaching Cactus Patch so she might as well catch a little shut-eye. The nature of her job sometimes required her to grab sleep at odd times.\n\nShe had just about drifted off when something startled her into full wakefulness. Two male passengers were on their feet rushing up the aisle. Confusion\u2014a curse\u2014and a collective gasp.\n\nA man stood in front of the swaying car holding a gun. \"Don't anyone move!\"\n\nAnnie drew in her breath. She was almost positive he was the man with the envelope. The traveler next to her opened his eyes and blinked. For once his open mouth produced no sound.\n\n\"I said don't move,\" the gunman bellowed, brandishing his weapon toward a male passenger in the front seat. With his hat low and kerchief high, it was impossible to see much of the outlaw's face\u2014just enough to know he meant business. He was joined by two others, all three faces hidden behind red kerchiefs.\n\nAnnie resisted the urge to reach for the weapon secured beneath her skirt. Could this be the Phantom gang she'd heard so much about? Possibly. Still, she couldn't afford to blow her cover until she had tracked down the leader. Until that time, her job was to observe and act like just another hapless traveler.\n\n\"Empty your pocketbooks,\" the gunman ordered. He spoke in a lazy drawl that contrasted oddly with his quick movements and darting gaze.\n\nAn older woman seated two rows back from the bandits shook her head like she was scolding a wayward child. \"Heavens to Betsy. Can't a body go anywhere without being robbed?\"\n\nAnnie had noticed the woman earlier. It was impossible to miss the face paint and the bright purple skirt and shirtwaist. The attire would be shocking for someone much younger, but on a woman old enough to be her grandmother, it was downright scandalous. Clearly she was a woman with no reputation to protect. The way she argued with the gunman suggested she wasn't all that concerned about her physical safety either.\n\n\"I demand that you stop this nonsense right this minute, young man. If you don't, I'll\u2014\"\n\nThe gunman whirled around to face her straight on, the muzzle of his pistol practically in her startled rouged face. \"If you don't shut up, they'll be one less passenger on this train.\"\n\n\"Well, I never...\" The woman gave a disgusted nod and glanced around as if to see how many troops she could rally. Seeing none, she fell silent.\n\nHaving made his point, the masked bandit signaled his partners with a toss of the head. The other two outlaws set to work gathering loot from the passengers and dumping the jewelry and cash into burlap sacks.\n\nAnnie clutched her purse tightly. There was nothing inside to identify her, of course. No Pinkerton operative would be so careless. The only personal item she carried was her father's gold watch. Ever so slowly she slipped her hand into her purse and curled her fingers around the timepiece. With a quick glance at the armed bandit, she slid it into the folds of her skirt.\n\nGradually, one of the outlaws worked his way to her side. \"Your purse, ma'am,\" he said as politely as if asking her to dance.\n\nThe lower half of his face hidden by the triangular fold of his kerchief, only his blue eyes gave him away. She frowned. She hadn't pegged him as an outlaw, nor had she noticed his seat empty. Either she was losing her touch or he was extremely clever. Neither explanation offered much comfort.\n\nSwaying slightly with the movement of the train, he took her purse and riffled through it, his hands almost too big for the task.\n\nHe gave her a questioning look. \"Your watch, ma'am.\"\n\nShe imitated the shocked, frightened look of the other passengers. \"Please.\"\n\nHe thrust out his hand. \"Your watch.\" He sounded almost apologetic but no less persistent.\n\nThe watch would command but a quarter of its worth. If this was indeed the Phantom gang, they were nothing more than a bunch of petty robbers, one notch higher than pickpockets.\n\nShe sucked in her breath and reached beneath the fabric folds of her skirt. He took the watch, but instead of adding it to his bag, he slid it into his vest. She frowned. A thief among thieves.\n\nHe seemed amused by her reaction. Or perhaps she only imagined the slight incline of his head and wry twist of his mouth. The outlaw returned her purse and, without bothering to relieve her seatmate of his belongings, moved away.\n\nWhile one masked man kept guard in front, the other two worked with quick, efficient movements up and down the aisle, stopping only long enough to collect watches, rings, pendants, and money from the other travelers.\n\nThe entire operation was over almost as quickly as it had begun.\n\nAs if on cue, the train slid into the Cactus Patch station and rolled to a stop, announcing its arrival with a piercing whistle. The outlaws pushed past the dark-skinned porter and left the train with their ill-gotten booty before anyone else had a chance to move. A collective sigh rose from the passengers, followed by muttered curses.\n\n\"Land sakes!\" exclaimed the matronly woman with the painted face. \"There ought to be a law against such scoundrels.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, there is a law,\" bellowed an indignant Englishman, caning his way to the exit.\n\n\"Harrumph!\" The woman picked up her satchel and followed him down the steps to the open-air platform, complaining all the while.\n\nEvery passenger left the car, even those who planned to continue on to Flagstaff.\n\nAnnie rose to let her seatmate pass but was the last to leave the train. After checking to make certain her weapon was secured to her leg, she straightened her plain but practical felt hat and brushed the cinders off her blue traveling suit. Dark hair secured into a tidy bun, she looked like a woman on the way to a job interview, which was exactly the plan.\n\nShe quickly rehearsed her story. Her father never started a new assignment without prayer and neither did she. God, give me wisdom and courage as I track down that no-good scoundrel of a Phantom. And, oh yes\u2014tell Papa I'll get his watch back. Amen.\n\nThus braced, she left her seat, though she wasn't anxious to join the noisy crowd on the platform. Stepping outside was like walking into a hot oven. It had been a brisk forty degrees when she left Chicago five days prior. Cactus Patch had to be at least fifty degrees warmer.\n\nBlinded by the sun, Annie tried to make sense of the chaos that greeted her. Everyone was talking at once.\n\nA male voice thundered, \"Quiet! All of you.\" The travelers fell silent and turned toward the marshal standing on a soapbox. As if to introduce the speaker, hissing steam belched across the platform, forcing travel-weary passengers to scramble out of the way.\n\nObviously relishing the moment, the marshal waited until he had everyone's attention before speaking. The mustache drooping down to his jaw gave him a comical look.\n\n\"I'm Deputy Marshal Morris,\" he said. He blew on his knuckles and gave the shiny badge on his leather vest a quick rub. \"All three of the outlaws have been arrested and will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.\"\n\nThe news was greeted by applause and murmurs of approval, the woman in purple the most vocal. \"It's about time the marshal earned his keep.\"\n\nIt was then that Annie noticed the three men in handcuffs lined up in front of the baggage room and telegraph office. She couldn't believe how quickly the bandits had been apprehended. Lawmen in Arizona Territory were evidently more efficient than in other parts of the country.\n\n\"I say hang them,\" someone yelled.\n\n\"When do we get our belongings back?\" another demanded.\n\nThe older woman shook her fist, her rouged face fraught with outrage. \"They took my wedding ring. It's a crying shame that a body can't take a trip without being molested.\"\n\nThe marshal looked in her direction. \"You'll get it back, Bessie.\"\n\n\"See that I do.\"\n\nThe woman named Bessie leaned toward Annie. \"Are you all right, dear? You look so tense.\"\n\nAlert was more like it but Annie afforded the woman a withering smile. \"I'm fine, thank you.\" She fanned her face. \"It's just so hot and I've never been robbed before.\"\n\nThe woman commiserated with a pat on the arm and a sniff of her well-powdered nose. \"Don't worry. You'll get used to it.\"\n\nThe other passengers began moving away. Some left the platform and headed for horses and rigs parked nearby. Others returned to the train but the woman named Bessie remained by Annie's side. Curiosity seeped through the paint on her face like sun peering through clouds.\n\n\"Are you heading for Flagstaff?\" Bessie asked.\n\n\"No. I'm heading for the Last Chance\u2014\"\n\n\"Mercy me!\" Bessie's hand flew to her chest. \"Not another one!\"\n\nAnnie drew back. \"Another... what?\"\n\n\"Heiress, of course. That makes how many now? Ten, twelve... I've lost track.\"\n\nAnnie blinked. \"Are you saying other women have applied for the... job?\"\n\n\"Yes, but none stayed for very long.\" Bessie puckered her red lips and lowered bright blue eyelids. \"Never in all my born days did I hear of advertising for an heiress. Not till Miss Walker got it into her fool head to ignore good taste and proper manners.\"\n\nThe woman with her garish paint and purple dress was a fine one to talk about good taste and proper manners, but of course Annie kept such thoughts to herself.\n\nBessie looked her up and down like a dressmaker taking measurement.\n\n\"Do you have any idea what you're letting yourself in for?\" she demanded more than asked. \"A little bit of a thing like you... having to deal with the likes of Miss Walker.\"\n\nStanding five foot eight in bare feet, Annie could hardly be called little, but she tried to act appropriately worried. \"Is Miss Walker really that difficult?\" There wasn't much Bessie could tell her that Annie didn't already know. The dossier William Pinkerton supplied gave an in-depth portrait of both the ranch and ranch owner and Annie had practically memorized it.\n\nBefore Bessie could reply, a passerby wearing a derby and spectacles called over his shoulder, \"If I had a choice between facing Miss Walker or a charging bull, I would take the bull.\" He kept walking.\n\n\"Don't pay any attention to Mr. Green. Miss Walker won't gore you. I'll say that much for her. By the way, most everyone calls me Aunt Bessie. What do I call you?\"\n\n\"My name is Annie Beckman.\" Her new name fell flawlessly from her lips, thanks to hours of rehearsal.\n\n\"Annie it is. My sister's over there with a wagon and you can ride to town with us. From there you can rent a rig to take you to the ranch.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of you.\" The town appeared to be about a mile away and she didn't relish walking that distance in the sizzling desert heat. But getting to know the chatty woman was the real reason for accepting a ride. \"I just need to get my carpetbag.\"\n\nShe turned and headed toward the baggage room where the porter had tossed trunks and baggage into an unorganized heap.\n\nShe neared the outlaws. Handcuffed and tied to a single rope attached to the back of the marshal's horse, the thieves could cause no harm. Still, the blue-eyed bandit staring straight at her gave her pause. If she didn't know better, she would swear he could read her thoughts.\n\nAt least a head taller than his two accomplices, he showed no remorse at his capture\u2014unlike his partners, who looked dead serious and glared at Annie as if their current predicament were entirely her fault.\n\nThe marshal greeted her. \"Ma'am?\"\n\nShe pointed to the tall outlaw. \"He stole my watch.\"\n\n\"And your name is...?\"\n\n\"Annie Beckman.\"\n\nThe marshal turned to the tall, staring bandit. \"Is that true?\" asked the marshal. \"Did you take this lady's watch?\"\n\n\"I do believe the woman is lying,\" he said, his voice as smooth as warm syrup.\n\nIt seemed from the gleam in his eyes that he wasn't talking about the watch and Annie shot him a visual dagger. He couldn't possibly know her identity but his accusation was nonetheless unnerving. Something about the man didn't sit right but she couldn't put her finger on what it was.\n\n\"I'm sure the marshal knows better than to take the word of a thief,\" she said.\n\nA hint of humor suffused the outlaw's face and Annie had the strangest feeling she was cornered, much like a mouse trapped by a cat.\n\n\"If he's wise, he'll be equally cautious about believing everything the lady says,\" the thief replied in a lazy drawl that hardly seemed to suit him.\n\nThe marshal made an impatient gesture. \"All right, that's enough.\" He turned to Annie. \"If you're leaving for Flagstaff, give your address to my deputy and your belongings will be mailed to you.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary,\" Annie said. \"I'm heading for the Last Chance Ranch.\" This got no response from the marshal but she sensed a subtle reaction from the outlaw. What was it about this man that had her on tenterhooks?\n\n\"Come into the office in a day or two and I'll make sure that your property is returned,\" the marshal said.\n\n\"Thank you, I'll do that.\" Whenever a Pinkerton started a new assignment, the first order of business was to notify local law enforcement. The outlaw had no way of knowing it, but he actually did her a favor by stealing her watch. That gave her a legitimate reason to visit the marshal's office and would draw no suspicion.\n\nShe glanced at the outlaw whose gaze never left her face. \"Is this the Phantom gang I've been reading so much about?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's them, all right,\" the marshal said with more than a little pride. \"Some of 'em. Unfortunately, the leader is slippery as a greased hog. Even his men don't know who he is. But I'll catch him. You can be certain of that.\"\n\nNot if I catch him first. Out loud she said, \"Good luck, Marshal.\"\n\nReins of his horse in one hand, the marshal grabbed the cantle and swung onto his saddle. With a click of his tongue the gelding moved forward and the prisoners shuffled behind.\n\n\"Yoo-hoo!\" Bessie called. \"Over here.\"\n\nPulling her gaze away from the departing outlaws, Annie hurried to the baggage room, her mind still on the train robbery and the puzzling\u2014but no less handsome\u2014thief." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nA private eye's best friend is a woman with a secret too good to keep.\n\nDavid Branch, aka Jim Taylor, aka John Crankshire, aka Tom Kindred, leaned against the dull steel bars. The jail cell measured a stingy eight by six feet and barely accommodated one man, let alone three. It had adobe walls, a dirt floor, and a low ceiling hardly high enough to contain his six-foot stature. Mexico had better hoosegows than this and that was saying something.\n\nHis real name was Jeremy Taggert but that name seemed as surreal as the hundreds of aliases he'd used through the years.\n\nThe man known as Grady sat on the single lumpy cot. His face disfigured by smallpox, he had the physique of a bird and disposition of a rattler. He made up for his short stature by acting unbearably superior, a flaw that Taggert intended to use to full advantage.\n\n\"Somebody squealed.\" The man named Squint stared at Taggert with buttonhole eyes. \"That's the only 'xplanation.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\" One shoulder against the wall, Taggert hung his thumbs from his waistband. \"Or maybe the marshal decided to greet the train as a precaution.\"\n\nSquint's face puckered like a prune. \"Makes sense, I guess. We have been kinda active.\"\n\nGrady gestured with his arm. \"You two don't know whatcha talkin' about.\"\n\nSquint glared at him. \"I suppose you do?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I do. I've been around a lot longer than either one of you. I know how the Phantom operates.\"\n\nTaggert remained silent and waited, careful not to reveal undue interest. He still didn't have a clue as to who the Phantom was and only a hint of where he might be hiding. Far as Taggert could tell, Grady was the only one who had actually met the man.\n\n\"Suppose you tell us how he operates,\" Squint said. \"Or you just mouthin' off to hear yourself yak?\"\n\nTaggert decided to add a little more fuel to the fire. \"He just likes everyone to think he knows more than he does.\"\n\nIt worked, or at least Grady's face grew red and the veins in his neck stuck out like thick blue cords. He glanced around as if checking for eavesdroppers. \"Him and me... we made a deal.\"\n\nTaggert narrowed his eyes. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I was to round up a couple of guys and keep the authorities hopping from place to place by robbing trains and stages. It worked out well till Barnaby got himself shot.\" Barnaby was the gang member Taggert replaced.\n\n\"That's why you recruited me,\" Taggert said. Several weeks of hanging around saloons and hinting that he was on friendly terms with some well-known outlaws got Grady's attention.\n\n\"Like I told you, we can keep the jewelry but the Phantom gets the cash.\"\n\nTaggert shook his head. \"I still don't understand why we can't just keep it all. What do we need the Phantom for?\"\n\nGrady's eyes rounded with greed. \"He told me there was somethin' bigger down the road. Something real big. And if I did what I was told, I'd be rich. We'd all be rich.\"\n\n\"How do I know you're telling the truth?\" Taggert's gaze traveled between the two men. \"I only have your word that we're working for the Phantom. You can't even describe him.\"\n\nGrady glared at Taggert. \"I told you, I only met him the one time. It was dark and the Phantom kept his head down.\"\n\nSquint cursed beneath his breath. \"Now what?\"\n\nGrady lowered his voice. \"I'll tell you what I think. I think the boss leaked the train robbery to the marshal.\"\n\nSquint frowned. \"Why would he do such a thing?\"\n\nGrady's eyes glittered. \"So the marshal would be occupied while the boss robbed the bank.\"\n\nSquint looked flabbergasted, or at least his eyes opened the widest Taggert had ever seen. \"Are you sayin' we ain't nothin' but a bunch of de-coys?\" Squint kicked the wall, his boot leaving a scuff mark. \"Now ain't that grand? He's got the money and we're in jail.\"\n\n\"The boss will get us out,\" Grady said, though he didn't sound all that certain.\n\n\"If he doesn't leave town first,\" Taggert said, throwing another verbal log into the already heated discussion.\n\n\"Oh, he ain't gonna do that,\" Grady said. \"He's got hisself a good safe hideout.\"\n\n\"In Cactus Patch?\" Squint asked. He made a face. \"It's foolhardy to rob a bank in the town you call home.\"\n\nGrady gave a mirthless laugh. \"The Phantom don't know it, but after I dropped off the loot one night, I hid and waited for him to retrieve it.\" He lowered his voice to a whisper. \"And he headed straight for a ranch.\"\n\nTaggert folded his arms. \"Sure he did.\" According to everything he'd heard, the Phantom didn't leave enough tracks to trip an ant.\n\n\"It's true,\" Grady insisted.\n\nSquint gave him a look of disdain. \"You don't know nothin' 'bout nothin'.\"\n\n\"You got that right,\" Taggert muttered. \"Grady just likes us to think he knows.\"\n\nIt was a challenge Grady couldn't pass up. He leaned forward. \"I'm tellin' you, the boss hides out at the Last Chance Ranch. That's his headquarters.\"\n\nSquint regarded Grady with disbelief but Taggert showed no emotion. \"The Last Chance, eh?\" That pretty much confirmed what Taggert already suspected but he was careful to hide his excitement behind a disinterested yawn. It was the second time Taggert heard the ranch mentioned that day and a vision of a dark-haired beauty came to mind. He had never seen eyes like hers, a mixture of caramel brown and dark green that reminded him of dense forests and deep waters.\n\nHe recalled Miss Beckman handing something that looked like an envelope to Grady and that made her suspect. Perhaps the Phantom was finally feeling the heat. If so, he may have found another way to communicate with his men. That would certainly explain the envelope and the lady's interest in the ranch.\n\nTaggert didn't dare confront Grady with this theory as it would only arouse suspicion.\n\nSo what had she given him? Directions as to where to leave the loot collected from the train passengers? Instructions for the next heist? And what had he done with the envelope? His pockets had been empty when the sheriff checked.\n\nJust as important, what was Miss Beckman's business at the Last Chance?\n\nThe woman had secrets, no doubt, and uncovering secrets was what Jeremy Taggert, aka David Branch, did best." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Bessie's sister, Lula-Belle, drove the wagon through town slow as water traveling uphill. Sitting between the two older women, Annie had to keep swiping the feathers from Lula-Belle's hat away from her face.\n\nLula-Belle's dour expression matched the drab gray color of her dress. The two women were such complete opposites in dress and disposition it was hard to believe they were sisters.\n\nEarlier, Annie persuaded Lula-Belle to stop at the post office, where she arranged for a mailbox, another crucial task at the start of a new assignment.\n\nShe was now anxious for her journey to end. The sooner she arrived at the ranch and settled in, the sooner she could get to work. If only it wasn't so hot. Perspiration ran down the side of her face and she dabbed it away with a handkerchief.\n\nCactus Patch was a town of sun, sand, and shimmering air. Adobe buildings with false-faced fronts lined the street on both sides. They passed several saloons, a general mercantile store, and a hotel. Opposite the hotel was a doctor's office and, at the end of the street, a windmill and stables. Tall green posts rose above the rooftops, draped with a network of wires.\n\n\"Those posts belong to the Arizona Telephone and Telegraph Company,\" Aunt Bessie explained with a prideful look. \"Cactus Patch now has the telephone and I'm in charge of central.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Annie knew that nearby Tombstone had telephones but hadn't expected Cactus Patch to have them too. Perhaps the little desert town wasn't as behind the times as she'd imagined. That would certainly make her job easier.\n\n\"Just got back from St. Louis for special training,\" Aunt Bessie continued.\n\nLula-Belle made a disgusted sound from the driver's seat. The feathers on her hat drooped in such a way as to match the disapproving curve of her mouth. \"A woman's place is in the kitchen, not minding everyone's business.\"\n\nAunt Bessie lifted her nose. \"For your information, the telephone company prefers women operators to men or boys.\" She turned to Annie to explain. \"Women are much more dependable. You'll never catch us drinking beer or using profanity. And we're always on hand.\"\n\n\"That's true,\" Annie said. \"We used to have telephone boys in Chicago but they left their posts to play in the snow and were replaced by girls.\"\n\n\"Are you from Chicago?\" Aunt Bessie asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Annie said, though she was actually from Peoria. It was essential to stay close to the truth without giving too much away. In any case, it wasn't always easy to hide the nasally vowels and dropped letters of her native Illinois dialect.\n\nBessie's sister opened her mouth to say something but was distracted by a man waving for them to stop. News had traveled fast and already a crowd lined the street and clamored for details of the town's latest robbery.\n\nLula-Belle glowered as she tried to steer around the mob but Bessie appeared to be in her glory and broke into a buttery smile. The sudden attention didn't make her look younger than her sixty-some years but certainly more spry.\n\nShe answered questions left and right. \"Yes, there were three of them,\" she yelled.\n\n\"Never saw any of them before in my life,\" she shouted at a woman in a poke bonnet.\n\n\"Yes, of course I feared for my life.\"\n\n\"Her name is Annie Beckman and she's Miss Walker's latest heiress.\"\n\nAnnie smiled and waved. People back home were much more circumspect. At least they didn't shout one's business out in public. Aunt Bessie showed no qualms in telling one and all everything she knew and a few things she didn't. She was, in essence, an operative's best friend.\n\nA tall, skinny man with a thin mustache ran up to the wagon.\n\n\"'Xcuse me, ma'am. Name's Stretch. I'm headin' for the Last Chance now. If you'd like a ride, I'd be happy to take you there.\"\n\nIt was an offer too good to pass up. \"Thank you,\" Annie said. \"I'd be most grateful.\"\n\n\"Now isn't that nice?\" Bessie's head bobbed up and down with approval. She slanted a blue-lidded gaze at the ranch hand. \"See that Miss Walker doesn't give her a hard time.\"\n\nStretch lifted his hat and raked a hand over his black curly hair. \"The boss lady will give her a hard time, all right. Ain't nothin' I can do 'bout that.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Moments later Annie was seated in a buckboard behind a black gelding next to the man named Stretch. She glanced in the back of the wagon. It was filled with what looked like newly purchased supplies, including cans of kerosene, boxes of leather soap, and a roll of barbed wire.\n\n\"Help yourself to some water,\" Stretch said, indicating the canteen on the seat between them.\n\nAnnie removed the canteen cork, wiped off the opening, and took a long sip.\n\nShe pushed the cork back in place. \"Is it always so hot here?\" It was only March but already it felt like summer.\n\n\"It's hot here, all right. Some say God uses this as a backup for below.\" He chuckled. \"Think I'm kiddin', eh? Tell that to the soldier who died out here and was sent below to atone for his sins.\"\n\nThe man evidently liked to talk and for an undercover detective that was a good thing. \"So what happened?\" she asked, playing along.\n\nStretch glanced at her sideways before delivering the answer. \"He sent back for his blanket.\"\n\nAnnie laughed, mostly to be polite. She needed information\u2014not jokes. \"How long have you worked at the ranch?\" she asked as they drove out of town.\n\n\"Four years,\" Stretch replied. \"Before that, I worked on a ranch in the Panhandle.\"\n\n\"Tell me about Miss Walker.\"\n\nStretch shrugged his bony shoulders. \"They ain't no words to describe the boss lady,\" he said. \"'Cept to say she's a tough old bird. Has to be, to run a ranch. Many have tried to run a successful ranch out here and failed, but the boss lady just keeps goin'. I reckon she'll outlive us all.\"\n\nHe then launched into another tall tale and then another, each one more outrageous than the one before. Annie finally managed to steer him back to talking about the ranch.\n\n\"We've got two thousand of the finest beeves in the west,\" he said, with more than a little pride.\n\nThe number was consistent with the Pinkerton report. She squinted against the glare of the sun. \"But it's nothing but desert.\"\n\n\"I guess that's what you call a blessing,\" Stretch said. \"It keeps most, though not all, competition away. Like I said, many have tried to ranch out here but only a few make it.\" He slapped the reins against the horse's back and they picked up speed.\n\nShe fanned herself with a kid glove. \"Who else works at the ranch?\"\n\n\"Well, let's see. There's Ruckus and Wishbone and Michael. He's our blacksmith and Bessie's nephew. Then there's O.T., short for Old Timer, Brodie our horse trainer, Mexican Pete, and Feedbag.\"\n\nIt appeared that most of the ranch hands went by assumed or \"summer\" names, which meant they were probably running from something, most likely the law. Though this was not unusual, it made her job more challenging.\n\n\"There she is, ma'am,\" he said at last, pointing ahead. \"The Last Chance Ranch. And for some of us, it really is the last chance.\"\n\nThe note of seriousness creeping into his voice made Annie take a closer look at his hollow-cheeked face. Everyone hid behind something and Stretch hid behind tall tales, jokes, and laughter. Could he be the leader of the Phantom gang? Or was his presence in town during the train robbery simply a coincidence?\n\nShe gazed at the ranch house. Nothing in the Pinkerton report prepared her for the size of it. \"It's so... large.\" It was by far the largest building she'd seen since arriving in Cactus Patch.\n\n\"The boss lady had to rebuild after the '87 earthquake. It's even got inside plumbing.\"\n\nThat was a luxury Annie hadn't counted on. \"Thank you for the ride.\"\n\n\"Think nothing of it. Enjoyed the company.\" He jumped from the wagon, reached for her carpetbag, and set it on the ground. \"You sure do travel light, ma'am. You should see how much baggage some of the other heiresses brought.\"\n\nHe held out his hand to help her down. She lifted her skirt to just above her ankles and stepped to the ground.\n\n\"Thank you. I can handle it from here,\" she said.\n\nHe swept off his hat and bowed. \"Good luck, ma'am.\"\n\nShe thanked him again. He slapped his hat on top of his head and climbed into the seat. Taking hold of the reins, he drove away in a cloud of dust.\n\nWith a combination of excitement and nervousness, she turned to face the two-story ranch house. This was it, the moment she'd been waiting for. Her first significant assignment.\n\nA balcony ran the length of the second story, providing shade for the veranda below. The red tile roof shimmered beneath the blazing afternoon sun.\n\nAcross the way, the barn and outbuildings were guarded by a tall windmill, all in pristine condition. The sails turned slowly in the unrelenting hot breeze. Horses grazed in the pastures and from the distance came the low mooing of cattle and baying of dogs.\n\nPicking up her carpetbag, she walked through the little courtyard and up the steps to the veranda dotted with wicker chairs. Even the carved oak door looked intimidating.\n\nAnnoyed by the tremor in her stomach, she threw back her shoulders and gave the rope a determined tug. A bell sounded inside, seeming to echo through what she imagined were large rooms and a maze of hallways. She waited a moment before giving the rope another yank but still no one answered.\n\nShe knocked and the door sprang open a crack, bidding her to enter. She glanced around and, seeing no one, stepped into the dim, cool entry. It felt good to be out of the heat but it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.\n\n\"Hello. Anyone here?\" She closed the door behind her and called again.\n\nHer voice bounced from wall to wall and was met with silence. She set her carpetbag in a corner out of the way and glanced around, taking careful note of doors, windows, and room layout to familiarize herself with the environment.\n\nShe crossed the red tile floor to the large parlor. A stone fireplace commanded one wall, a stuffed steer head guarding the mantel with ferocity. Two walls were lined with bookshelves, each volume lined up with perfect precision. Turquoise and red Indian rugs added bright splashes of color to the otherwise plain adobe walls. A stiff-backed leather couch faced a low dark table and was flanked by two matching chairs.\n\nAnnie could tell a lot about a homeowner by how a room was furnished. This particular room with its rigid order and daunting furniture confirmed every negative thing she'd heard about Miss Walker.\n\nOne wall opened up to a dining room with a table long enough to seat twelve. A pitcher of water surrounded by several clean drinking glasses was centered on the sideboard. She poured herself a glass and drank, the cool water soothing her parched throat as it quenched her thirst.\n\nA half-open door revealed an office with an oversized desk, more bookshelves, and an Acme safe. Setting her empty glass on a tray, she wandered back to the entry hall.\n\nShe glanced up the stairs. She longed to freshen up and use the facilities but didn't want to appear rude or forward.\n\nShe waited and when no one arrived after twenty minutes, she decided her need took precedence over good manners. She collected her carpetbag and climbed the stairs to the second floor.\n\nA hall ran the length of the house. Some doors were closed but others stood ajar, revealing empty bedrooms. Only one room seemed to be occupied and she guessed it was the ranch owner's room.\n\nThe upstairs furnishings were plain but adequate and offered a pleasing contrast to the over-furnished rooms in Illinois. She glanced around before darting inside the lavatory and closing the door.\n\nSunlight streamed through an open window and was greeted by whirling dust motes. The room had a sink, toilet, and portable bathtub. She gazed longingly at the tub but didn't dare avail herself of such luxury until gaining permission from the ranch owner.\n\nAfter answering nature's call, she washed her hands and face in the sink and opened her purse. Surprised to find her money still intact, she counted her bank notes and palmed the gold coins. The bandit had taken her watch but hadn't bothered with her money. How odd.\n\nThe marshal claimed that the train robbers belonged to the Phantom gang. Hard to believe. Shrugging, she dumped the coins back into her purse and tightened the drawstring. She still couldn't get over the feeling that she'd missed something and there was more to the tall bandit than she knew.\n\nShe retied the ribbon on her shirtwaist and worked a wayward strand of hair into the bun at the back of her neck. If she held her carpetbag just so, no one would notice the travel stains on her skirt.\n\nFeeling refreshed and more like herself, she cracked the door open and listened. Dead silence. Used to city sounds, she'd never known such quiet. The ranch would take some getting used to on many levels.\n\nCarpetbag in hand, she retraced her way along the hall and decided to wait for Miss Walker in the large room downstairs.\n\nShe turned the corner just as a man reached the landing. Startled, Annie gasped and the man jumped, his face twisted in surprise. Much to Annie's horror, he reared back and tumbled down the stairs.\n\n\"Oh no!\" Annie dropped her carpetbag. She didn't wait for the man to hit bottom before racing down the stairs after him.\n\nHe hit the floor with a sickening thump and Annie fell to her knees by his side. \"Sir? Are you all right?\" She shook him. \"Sir?\"\n\nTrained to stay calm during emergencies, she quickly worked the string loose from his chin and removed his hat. Staring at the leathery face, she sat back on her heels. A groan confirmed what her horrified eyes had already told her. It was a woman. An older woman dressed in men's clothing.\n\nPlease, God, don't let it be true. Please don't let this be her. But it was\u2014she knew it was. The woman lying flat on her back had to be none other than Miss Walker herself. The owner of the Last Chance Ranch.\n\nThis was clearly the time to panic. Annie jumped to her feet, rushed to the front door and yelled at the top of her lungs. \"Help! Somebody! I need help!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nSign outside private detective's door:\n\nIn God we trust; all others will be treated as suspects.\n\nBessie Adams had seen a lot of changes in her sixty-plus years, some good, some bad, some both good and bad. She remembered life before the Singer sewing and ice-making machines, and it was no picnic. Had to sew everything by hand and drink warm lemonade.\n\nShe still hadn't made up her mind about the train and telegraph. It wasn't natural to travel at such high speeds and it took three people to put her on the train to Kansas. Telegrams didn't begin to take the place of real letters written with pen and ink on fine linen stationery. But nothing amazed her as much as the telephone, not even the doctor's horseless carriage.\n\nWhen Dr. Fairbanks opened his medical dispensary, he suggested that Cactus Patch have its very own telephone company. At first, people laughed at him. For what possible reason would anyone wish to talk over a wire? But then poor Mrs. Miller died before the doctor could get to her and people saw the benefit of fast communication.\n\nBessie's nephew Luke helped raise poles and string wires until all that was needed was an operator, popularly called a \"hello girl.\" At the ripe age of sixty-something, it didn't hurt Bessie one bit to be called a girl. That alone made turning her dining room into a central switchboard worthwhile, but it wasn't the only reason she insisted she was the right person for the job. Who but she could be trusted to listen in to other people's conversations without blabbing all over town?\n\nIt's true that at times she lost her patience; not that anyone could blame her. People who wouldn't think of being rude if they saw you on the street thought nothing of being obnoxious and demanding on the telephone. After one such occasion, Bessie gave the offending party a thorough tongue-lashing. This made the man so mad he pulled out all the wires from the telephone pole in front of his house.\n\nAfter that, her nephew insisted she travel to Kansas for training while he took over in her absence.\n\nThe trip was a waste of time. The city manager of the Kansas City telephone exchange insisted that each call be answered \"What number?\" in a pleasant voice with rising inflection. He made Bessie practice numerous times until she could practically do it in her sleep. He then carried on at great length about the importance of saying \"Who is this?\" as opposed to the more strident \"Who are you?\"\n\nHe also lectured on ways to turn away wrath with a gentle answer. Ha! Some people didn't know a gentle answer from a turnip.\n\nKnowing her nephew, he probably let people get away with murder during her absence. Calling all hours of the day and night... making more than their share of calls in a single day... tying up the lines... calling to ask the time...\n\nAs if to confirm her thoughts, the battery-operated light on number sixteen lit up. She plugged the answering cord into the jack, threw the back key forward, and switched her headset into the circuit. \"What num-BER?\" She spoke into her mouthpiece with her most pleasant and inflected voice.\n\nJimmy Drake's deep baritone practically blasted her out of her seat. Why did people insist upon yelling into the phone? \"Give me Cynthia Noble.\"\n\nIt was all Bessie could do to remain civil. \"What do you want with Miss Noble?\"\n\n\"It's none of your business what I want. Now connect me.\"\n\n\"You are a married man,\" Bessie scolded, \"and have no right to call another woman.\" Politeness and inflection were all well and good but some callers needed to be put in their places.\n\n\"I have business with her and\u2014\"\n\n\"You can take your business elsewhere!\" With that Bessie pulled the wire, disconnecting Jimmy midsentence. \"Harrumph!\"\n\nBessie gave a self-righteous nod. Not only was she the town operator, she was also a fine Christian woman. That made her an authority on proper behavior and good moral standards. As long as she was in charge, the telephone would not be used for reprehensible, unprincipled, or illegal purposes. Proper inflection indeed!\n\nNumber thirteen lit up. Now what did that annoying Mrs. White want this time?\n\n\"What num-BER?\"\n\n\"Connect me with Mabel.\"\n\n\"You talked with her not an hour ago.\"\n\n\"So what business is it of yours when I last talked to her?\"\n\nBessie heaved a sigh. What she had to go through. \"The telephone is for emergency purposes.\"\n\n\"This is an emergency,\" Mrs. White insisted. \"I can't remember how much butter to put in the recipe she gave me.\"\n\n\"Then why don't you go next door like a civilized human being and ask her to her face?\" Bessie snatched the wire, disconnecting Mrs. White.\n\nAlmost immediately the entire switchboard lit up. \"Now what?\" she muttered, connecting a line at random.\n\n\"What num-BER?\" And then, \"This better be important, Millicent,\" she added. \"This is the third call you've made today!\"\n\nMillicent's excited voice screeched into her ear. \"Did you hear about Miss Walker?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Annie paced outside the closed bedroom door and alternated between wringing her hands and fighting exhaustion. The doctor had been with Miss Walker for hours and it was almost midnight. She paused beneath a softly hissing wall sconce.\n\nOhhhhhhh. Just wait till Mr. Pinkerton heard what she did this time! Annie's stomach knotted just thinking about it. Causing an old lady serious injury was far worse than shooting a dead man. Not only did she feel terrible, she also felt doomed, her future career as a Pinkerton operative hopelessly in peril. Worse, should Miss Walker file a lawsuit, it could well bring financial ruin to the entire agency.\n\nMiss Walker's angry voice cut through Annie's thoughts. \"Doctor, I demand that you leave at once!\"\n\nAnnie whirled about to stare at the closed door. If the ranch owner suffered pain or shock, it was not evident in her vocal cords.\n\nThe doctor's murmurs were steady and calm but too low for Annie to make out his words. She marveled at his patience. As bad as she felt for causing Miss Walker to fall, she felt worse for the doctor.\n\nIt took three men to hold the old lady down just so the doctor could stabilize her leg. Never had Annie seen such a commotion. Everything she'd ever heard about Miss Walker turned out to be true.\n\nSomething crashed against the door and Annie jumped back. Miss Walker's voice snapped through the air. \"How am I supposed to run a ranch with my leg in the air?\"\n\n\"You're lucky a broken leg is all you have,\" the doctor said. \"A woman your age\u2014\"\n\nAnother crash. \"My age, my age. You make me sound like a fossil.\"\n\nThe door suddenly flew open and the doctor glanced at Annie before looking back over his shoulder. \"I'll check on you tomorrow. Now get some sleep.\"\n\nHe stepped from the room and greeted Annie with a weary nod. He held his hat and black leather case in one hand and closed the door with the other.\n\n\"I'm sorry we didn't get a chance to talk earlier. I'm Dr. Fairbanks.\" Even in the soft yellow light he looked young for a doctor, probably in his early thirties. Despite having to deal with a wildcat patient and the lateness of the hour, his demeanor was calm; only his appearance was ruffled. His ruddy brown hair stood on end and exhaustion showed in his watery red eyes. A stubble beard shadowed a firm, strong jaw and his shirtsleeve was torn.\n\n\"That's quite all right, Doctor.\"\n\n\"And your name is...?\" he asked.\n\n\"Annie... Annie Beckman.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Miss Beckman.\" Something banged against the door and the doctor shook his head. \"I should have been a veterinarian.\"\n\nAnother thud made Annie jump but the doctor only shrugged.\n\n\"Will Miss Walker be all right?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's a femur break,\" he said as if that were answer enough. \"Did you know that the femur is the longest and strongest bone in the body?\"\n\n\"No, I didn't\u2014\"\n\nDespite the lateness of the hour, he went on at great lengths about the marvels of the femur bone. Annie was exhausted and in dire danger of falling asleep on her feet. She nevertheless forced herself to listen politely.\n\nMiss Walker would be well within her right to order Annie off the property. If not, then Mr. Pinkerton would probably summon her back to Chicago the moment he heard how she caused the ranch owner's accident. Either way, her days on the ranch, and maybe even hours, were numbered.\n\nStill, she couldn't stop thinking like an operative. For that reason, she was determined to cultivate a friendship with the doctor. If by some miracle she was allowed to stay, anyone who talked as much as the doctor might very well come in handy.\n\n\"The femur is perfectly engineered,\" the doctor continued. \"It's also the last bone you want to break. It does, after all, make up a quarter of a person's height.\"\n\n\"Th-then it's serious?\"\n\n\"Serious enough,\" he conceded. \"Eighty percent of broken femurs result in a patient's demise.\"\n\nAnnie's jaw dropped. Covering her open mouth with both hands, she peered at the doctor over her fingertips. \"You mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Not Miss Walker. She's too stubborn to die. I should specialize in stubborn patients. They're a pain in the gluteus maximus but they seldom die, which does wonders for a doctor's reputation.\"\n\nUnable to make up her mind whether the doctor was serious or not, Annie pulled her hands away from her face.\n\nHe dug in his black bag and handed her a brown vial. \"I gave her something to help her sleep. This is for pain. Give it to her in the morning if she's uncomfortable. She should eat something light at first and curtail visitors, at least for a couple of days. The most important thing is to keep her calm. Don't let her get upset.\"\n\nIt seemed a bit late to worry about upsetting her but Annie glanced at the closed door and said nothing. All was quiet, at least for now.\n\nDr. Fairbanks stalked down the hall toward the stairs and Annie chased after him.\n\n\"Wait!\"\n\nHe turned.\n\n\"You want me to take care of her?\" She was trained to hunt down criminals, not play nursemaid.\n\n\"Someone has to. Since her housekeepers have returned to Mexico, there's no one else to care for her but you.\"\n\nAnnie struggled to find her voice. \"Surely one of the ranch hands\u2014\"\n\n\"Miss Walker won't hear of it and probably for good reason. The only way a ranch hand knows to deal with a broken leg is to shoot the unfortunate victim. We can't have that, now, can we?\"\n\n\"No, but... but what if something happens? What if she's in a lot of pain or... How do I get hold of you?\"\n\n\"Send someone into town to fetch me. It's a pity the telephone line hasn't yet reached the ranch but they're working on it. Meanwhile, get some sleep while you can. I have a feeling you're going to need it.\" He donned his hat and started down the stairs. \"Good luck.\"\n\nIt was the second time that day someone had wished her luck.\n\nHe paused at the bottom of the stairs and glanced up at her. \"One more thing,\" he called. \"When you enter her room, be sure to duck.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nAn undercover agent is only as good as his (or her) disguise.\n\nAnnie's body ached from exhaustion but she still couldn't sleep. Closing her eyes meant having to relive the horror of watching Miss Walker tumble down the stairs time and time again. The deadly sound of the woman's body hitting the ground floor seemed to rise from the very pillow at her head. No matter how much she twisted and turned, she couldn't make the memory go away.\n\nBy the time the rising sun turned the desert sands red, she'd been sitting in a chair for hours, a manila folder marked GTF in her lap. Operatives, or Pinks as they were commonly called, were taught to keep detailed records. Every fact had to be recorded with utmost accuracy; every question duly noted, every action scrupulously documented. Notes were to be written on small pieces of paper and attached to reports.\n\nThe strict training not only helped professionally, it also impacted her personal life. Some people kept diaries; Annie kept dossiers.\n\nReverend Jones, the pastor of her church back home, once accused her of treating God like a suspect. She continually bombarded the pastor with questions that even he, with all his seminary training, couldn't answer. It was an odd thing for him to say since he had no idea she was a Pinkerton. Telling anyone, even her pastor, what she did for a living would mean immediate dismissal from the company. The Pinkerton guidelines were clear on that.\n\n\"God is bigger than our minds can comprehend,\" Reverend Jones said on more than one occasion. \"Even if we knew all the answers, we wouldn't understand them.\"\n\nQuestions without answers were called enigmas and nothing disturbed a detective more. For that reason, she kept jotting notes in her GTF folder, writing questions, underlining and crossing out words. Today she wrote, Miss Walker? Why did something so awful have to happen, God?\n\nShe was so well versed in writing in cryptic that it came naturally to her, even when she wrote something meant to be seen by her eyes only.\n\nShe closed the folder with a sigh and put it aside. GTF\u2014for God the Father.\n\nAs usual, He offered no answers, only more questions.\n\nHer body stiff, she stood and stretched her arms over her head, then bent to touch her toes.\n\nAnxious to check on the old lady and nervous about meeting her face-to-face, Annie hurried through her morning ablutions and dressed in a dark blue skirt and white linen shirtwaist.\n\nThe last thing she did was lift her skirt and strap her leather gun holster around her thigh. The derringer was a gift from her brother Travis, following the successful fulfillment of her first assignment. It was his way of saying she was an operative in every sense of the word, even if their father didn't agree.\n\nAt the moment, she didn't much feel like one. This was her first time outside the States and never before had she been required to work in such a remote location. The cattle ranch was nothing like the cities or large towns that offered endless resources for catching criminals.\n\nEven if by some miracle Miss Walker didn't throw her off the ranch, there was still the problem of how to submit the mandatory daily reports to the main office. Annie didn't even know how to contact the marshal in a hurry and she felt very much alone.\n\nShe straightened her skirts and could almost hear her father's stern voice: \"You wanted a challenge, Miranda, and now you have one. So quit your complaining.\"\n\nShaking the thought away, she held her head high and shoulders back. With outward confidence and inner doubt, she followed the smell of bacon and coffee downstairs to the kitchen. The man standing in front of the stove had introduced himself the previous night but she couldn't remember his name.\n\n\"Mornin', ma'am,\" he said, wielding a spatula. A crooked-teeth smile flashed against his freckled skin and ginger hair curled from beneath a wilted white hat. His smile made her relax. At least his was a friendly face.\n\nAnnie responded in kind. \"I'm sorry, you told me your name but\u2014\"\n\n\"Everyone calls me Able. Got the name when I was a chuck wagon cook.\" A note of pride crept into his voice. \"No cowboy ever went hungry with me around. Wind, rain, snow\u2014you name it\u2014and I was able to whip up a fine meal.\" He emphasized his words with a nod of the head.\n\n\"Sounds like Miss Walker is lucky to have you,\" Annie said.\n\nHe scoffed. \"Cooks don't get the same respect they used to.\" He turned to the cookstove and in a voice barely audible added, \"There was a time when being a cook meant something, but those days are long gone.\"\n\nNot knowing how to respond or even if she was expected to, she glanced around. The kitchen was furnished with the most modern equipment and even had running water. The cooking range was equipped with several burners, a large oven, and a high shelf. On the opposite side of the room, a dry-air refrigerator stood nearly eight feet high.\n\n\"Do you want to take up her breakfast or do you want me to do it?\" he asked.\n\nShe'd rather not face Miss Walker so soon but putting it off wouldn't make it any easier. \"I'll take it up to her.\" She may as well face the music and get it over with. \"I feel terrible about what happened.\"\n\nHe wrinkled his nose. \"If you ask me, Miz Walker was an accident waitin' for a happenin'. No woman her age should carry on like she does. She can outride and outrope any man and she ain't slowin' down for nothin' or nobody.\" He flashed his teeth, his smile as ready as his opinion. \"Except for maybe a broken leg.\"\n\nHe turned back to the stove and scooped a hotcake from the skillet. With a flick of his wrist, he added it to a plate already piled high with food.\n\n\"Her breakfast is ready.\"\n\nThe plate held enough food to feed a family of four. As if guessing her thoughts, Able chuckled. \"Four scrambled eggs, a quarter pound of bacon, a stack of hotcakes, and coffee strong enough to picket a wild horse. Just as Miz Walker likes.\"\n\nAnnie studied the tray. \"Perhaps this morning she would prefer something a bit lighter.\" The doctor had sedated her and it was doubtful that she'd recovered from either her fall or the medication enough to enjoy such a grand feast.\n\nHe sniffed and it was obvious by his frown that he took her request as criticism. \"That is a light breakfast.\"\n\n\"And a very fine breakfast it is. But I'm afraid it's better suited for a cowpuncher than a convalescent. I think some soft-boiled eggs and tea would do quite nicely. Perhaps some dry toast.\"\n\nAble looked like he'd been punched in the stomach and his freckles seemed to turn yellow. \"Boiled eggs. Dry toast?\"\n\n\"Yes. And tea. Not too strong.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"This is a cattle ranch, not a tea parlor. We don't even have tea leaves.\"\n\n\"Never mind. We'll use mine.\" She shot out of the kitchen and upstairs to the room she'd claimed as her own. Having learned the healing powers of tea from her grandmother, she never traveled without a good supply, all serving a different purpose. White willow was good for pain, calamus for indigestion, and horsetail for bone-knitting. For good measure, she also selected a packet of chamomile. She decided to leave the gunpowder tea for another occasion. Thus armed, she hastened back downstairs.\n\nAble looked even more dubious than before. \"Miz Walker ain't gonna take kindly to someone messin' with her coffee.\"\n\n\"I'm not messing with her coffee. I'm simply substituting it with a more favorable beverage. At least while she's convalescing.\"\n\nHis face suffused with doubt, he wiped his hands on his stained white apron. \"The only tea I know how to make is Southern sweet tea, and Miss Walker's got no patience for that.\"\n\n\"That's all right. I'll make it. First I need hot water.\"\n\n\"Hot water I can do.\" He picked up a kettle and carried it over to the sink.\n\nAnnie glanced around the kitchen. \"Where would I find a teapot?\"\n\nAble looked blank. \"If we have one, it will be in one of the cupboards.\"\n\nAnnie opened the cabinets one by one. She found a teapot so covered in grime she doubted it had ever been used. Satisfied that she had solved her immediate problem, she scrubbed it clean and dried it. She couldn't find a tea strainer but the cheesecloth found in a drawer would do quite nicely.\n\nShe snipped the cheesecloth into little squares with scissors. \"How long have you worked here, Able?\"\n\n\"Almost two years.\"\n\nWhile waiting for the water to boil, she picked up a dime novel from the kitchen table and thumbed through it. The rather lurid cover read Miss Hattie's Dilemma. Able glanced at her and his face, already red from the heat of the stove, turned another shade darker.\n\n\"Yours?\" she asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"That was given to me by the lady writer. She was an heiress just like you. Her name is Kate.\"\n\n\"Really?\" She set the book down. \"How interesting. What happened to her?\"\n\n\"She married the blacksmith. Far as Miz Walker's concerned, that's like a hangin' offense.\" He cut the bread and placed a single slice on the griddle. \"Miz Walker won't allow no married woman to inherit her ranch.\"\n\nAnnie, of course, knew the requirements of the job but she let the cook talk. In short order she had a complete rundown on all the women who had tried to be Miss Walker's heiress and failed. It wasn't encouraging. Even without causing the ranch owner's accident, her chance of staying on the ranch long enough to track down the Phantom didn't look good.\n\n\"The water's boiling,\" he said after a while.\n\n\"The water must be hot enough to cook a lobster,\" she said.\n\n\"I reckon that water's hot enough to cook a whole rack of 'em.\" Protecting his hand with a flour sack towel, Able lifted the kettle off the stove.\n\n\"You must always start by heating the pot,\" she explained. He poured a dollop of water into the pot and she swished it around and dumped it out. She then carefully measured out tea leaves and signaled for more water.\n\n\"That's it,\" she said. Curling steam tickled her nose with the smell of tea. Horsetail tea tended to be bitter but a little honey would take care of that. She turned the pot around slowly three times. Something else her grandmother had taught her. \"One for the Father, two for the Son, and three for the Holy Ghost,\" she explained.\n\n\"You better add a fourth one for protection,\" Able said, looking even more dubious. \"'Cause you're gonna need all you can get when Miz Walker takes a sip of that.\"\n\nDreading the thought of having to come face-to-face with the ranch owner, Annie shuddered. \"Is there anyone we can summon to take care of Miss Walker until her leg is healed?\" The doctor insisted that no one was available but she had to make certain. \"A friend or relative, perhaps?\" According to the dossier, Miss Walker's only relative was an estranged brother whom she hadn't seen in three decades.\n\nAble shook his head. \"Miss Walker ain't got no relatives. Least none that anyone knows. She's not big on friends much either, not the kind you're talking 'bout.\" He picked up a large spoon, scooped the boiled eggs out of a pan, and turned them into a small bowl.\n\nAnnie arranged the teapot and cup and saucer on the tray with trembling hands, along with the plate of food, linen napkin, and spoon. Spotting a cowbell on the counter, she added it to the tray as well.\n\nAble grunted. \"I want you to know I'm doing this under protest.\" He arranged two slices of toasted bread on a plate. \"Yes-siree, under protest.\"\n\nTray in hand, she faced the doorway. The cold knot in the pit of her stomach doubled in size. \"That makes two of us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Annie stood outside Miss Walker's bedroom door. Knock or just walk in? She couldn't make up her mind so she decided to do both.\n\nJuggling the tray the best she could with one hand, she rapped a knuckle against the door. Nothing. Was Miss Walker asleep or...\n\nRecalling the doctor's dire statistics for femur breaks, she felt beads of perspiration break out on her forehead. Please, please, please don't let her be... dead.\n\nHeart pounding, she threw open the door and stared at the bed. Heavy draperies kept out all but the dimmest light.\n\nMiss Walker lay flat on her back with her leg suspended in mid-air. Annie walked to the bed on what seemed like wooden limbs. The gentle rise and fall of the older woman's chest told Annie her worst fears had not been realized. Praise God!\n\nAn apparatus the shape of a large wooden horse loomed over the bed. The sight took her breath away. Now all the lumber delivered to the room, followed by incessant hammering, made sense. If she didn't already feel guilty for having caused the accident, she now felt downright mortified.\n\n\"Well? Are you going to stand there all day?\" Miss Walker's strident voice made Annie jump and the bone china cup and saucer rattled on the tea tray.\n\n\"I thought\"\u2014Annie cleared her throat\u2014\"I thought you were asleep.\"\n\n\"How am I supposed to sleep with my leg in a noose?\"\n\nAnnie glanced at the cumbersome splint contraption. A good question indeed.\n\nShe set the tray on the bedside table, her gaze lighting on the shotgun next to the bed, butt end down.\n\nThe old woman squinted as if trying to see more clearly. Annie walked around the bed and ripped open the draperies. Streams of sunlight poured through the squares of the leaded glass door. The desert that had looked so forlorn and dreary from the train now resembled a master painting in the early morning light. She opened the door and a slight breeze cooled her heated cheeks.\n\nIf only she hadn't turned her head toward the eastern sky. The sun's red eye glared down in silent accusation, much like the Pinkerton eye stared at her whenever she was called on the carpet. Even now, three years after her father's death, his blame persisted. Her mother had delivered five bouncing boys and remained in robust health, but delivering one scrawny baby girl had sent her in a downward spiral from which she never recovered. Her father never outwardly blamed her, of course. He was too much of a gentleman for that. It was the elephant in the family that was only mentioned in whispers.\n\nToday the whispers of the past got louder. Annie had put yet another life at risk. Leaving the door ajar, she turned to the bed to find Miss Walker's rigid gaze still on her.\n\n\"You!\"\n\nMiss Walker didn't appear the least bit fey or soft in the head as Mr. Pinkerton had suggested. Indeed, she looked as bright and alert as a rattler about to strike.\n\n\"I can't tell you how sorry I am. I... I\u2014\"\n\n\"Sorry!\" Crevice-like lines deepened on Miss Walker's forehead. Her sun-baked skin appeared more ash-colored than tan. The studied gaze offered a contrast to the gray hair falling across her pillow in wild abandon. Had it not been for the vivid blue of her eyes, she would have looked every bit her sixty-five-plus years.\n\n\"You near scared the life out of me. Who are you and what were you doing sneaking around my house?\"\n\n\"I wasn't sneaking. My name is Annie Beckman. I believe you were expecting me.\"\n\nA shadow flitted across Miss Walker's face as if she was trying to place the name. \"That gives you no right to walk into my house uninvited.\"\n\n\"I apologize, but there was no one here when I arrived.\" The woman's eyes narrowed and she looked about to argue, but Annie continued, \"I had a difficult journey. Just before we arrived in Cactus Patch, the train was robbed.\" When this news brought no reaction, she added, \"I needed to use the facilities. I meant no harm. Certainly I never meant to harm you.\"\n\n\"You cause me serious injury and yet you have the audacity to march in here this morning as if you have every right.\" Miss Walker's nostrils flared and her voice quivered with fury.\n\nAnnie hardly marched into the room but she wasn't about to argue semantics. Somehow she needed to get the woman on her side. \"The doctor said there was no one else to take care of you.\"\n\nThe older woman's eyes glittered. \"So you took on the task yourself.\"\n\n\"It's the least I can do after...\" Annie glanced at the upraised leg and grimaced. Anxious to fill in the strained silence, she turned to the bedside table. \"I brought you breakfast and a bell. If you need anything, just ring.\"\n\nMiss Walker's gaze flew to the tray. Considering her situation, she was surprisingly intimidating. \"You call that breakfast?\"\n\nAnnie placed a piece of cheesecloth over the cup and poured the tea, careful not to spill it. \"Your body is probably still in shock and\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't tell me what my body is!\"\n\nAnnie set the teapot down with a clatter. \"Are you in pain?\"\n\nMiss Walker grimaced. \"Of course I'm in pain.\"\n\n\"The doctor left medicine\u2014\"\n\nThe old lady's curse made Annie blush but she held her ground. \"If you don't want medicine, the tea will do quite nicely.\"\n\n\"Tea?\" Miss Walker made it sound like something that crawled from under a rock. \"You want me to drink... tea?\"\n\n\"This isn't just any tea. It's a special blend that will help knit broken bones.\" Annie carefully bundled the leaves in the cheesecloth before adding a dollop of honey to the steaming brew. Turning, cup in hand, she noticed a small book of Shakespeare on the bed.\n\n\"What a pity the Bard made no mention of tea in his plays. A terrible oversight, don't you agree?\"\n\nMiss Walker frowned. \"If the man was as smart as he wrote, then coffee would have been his beverage of choice.\"\n\n\"Like Balzac?\" Annie had read somewhere that Balzac was addicted to coffee. \"I do believe that Shakespeare wrote with all the sensibilities of a tea man. Balzac, on the other hand, was quite an awkward writer.\"\n\n\"If Shakespeare was a tea man as you say, then perhaps that explains why Hamlet is such an incessant talker. The man never would have survived here in the West.\"\n\nAnnie giggled at the thought, which garnered a look of rebuke from the direction of the bed. Miss Walker's expression was every bit as intimidating as the shotgun by her side.\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Oh, I do apologize.\" Annie slipped an arm beneath the ranch owner's neck and ever so gently lifted the woman's head off the pillow. Miss Walker took a sip of the hot beverage and wrinkled her nose before pushing the cup away.\n\n\"Dishwater couldn't taste worse.\"\n\nAnnie straightened and set the cup on the saucer. \"It's not my favorite tea, but like I said, it does help heal bones.\"\n\n\"Coffee is the glue that holds these bones together and that's what I want. I want it now and I want it strong.\"\n\n\"The doctor said\u2014\"\n\n\"Fiddlesticks! I don't care what Dr. Fairbanks said,\" Miss Walker snapped. \"What does he know? A man barely dry behind the ears. Anyone who drives a heap of\u2014\"\n\n\"I believe it's called a horseless carriage,\" Annie said.\n\n\"I don't care what it's called. Horsepower should be left to horses. It's noisy and smelly and riles the cattle. Anyone with the bad sense to drive around in one has no right to dictate what I should and should not do.\"\n\nIgnoring the woman's protests, Annie picked a spoon off the tray and scooped up a bite of soft-boiled egg. She faced the woman with her most determined stance. Miss Walker looked about to argue but apparently thought better of it.\n\nAnnie slipped the spoon between Miss Walker's thin, parched lips. The woman sputtered and coughed and pushed Annie's hand away. \"Dishwater and lye soap.\" She spit it out. \"Enough of that garbage!\"\n\nAnnie set the spoon down. She reached for the linen napkin and wiped egg off the blanket. \"If you prefer, I'll have Able make you oatmeal.\"\n\n\"Oatmeal?\" Miss Walker made it sound like arsenic. \"Forget food. Don't just stand there, girl. Get my coffee. And after that you can fetch my foreman.\" She stopped and grimaced as if in pain but then picked up where she left off. \"Tell him I want to see him pronto.\"\n\nAnnie sighed. It appeared that tracking down the leader of the Phantom gang would be easy compared to caring for the old lady. \"The doctor said you need to rest.\"\n\n\"I don't have time for such nonsense. I've got a ranch to run! After I finish with my foreman, bring pen and paper from my office. I need to dictate a letter. Then I'll meet with each ranch hand individually. I don't want them thinking they can slack off just because I'm temporarily indisposed. Oh, and make sure Ruckus takes proper care of my horse.\"\n\nNever had Annie met a woman more stubborn\u2014or demanding. \"I'll write your letter for you, but you will be allowed no more than two visitors a day until the doctor says otherwise.\"\n\nMiss Walker's chest heaved beneath the covers, but then she suddenly surprised Annie by laughing.\n\nFrowning, Annie straightened Miss Walker's pillow and covers. On second thought, perhaps two visitors would be too many.\n\nMiss Walker's expression grew serious. \"I guess you'll do anything to prove that you'll make a worthy heiress, even if it means putting up with my demands.\" She twisted her head to look Annie square in the face. \"Don't think I don't know what you're up to.\"\n\nMiss Walker pushed hard but apparently she liked people who pushed back in kind. Annie met the woman's gaze. \"I guess that makes us equal.\"\n\nMiss Walker narrowed her eyes and snapped her mouth shut. Fearing she might have overstepped the line, Annie picked up the tray and moved away from the bed. \"You'd best get some rest.\" Without another word she left the room, closing the door just in time to avoid the thrown clock." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nThe path of least resistance often leads to the hoosegow.\n\nJail fare consisted of hardtack and cold coffee and Taggert didn't have the stomach for either. He marveled at how the other two men attacked the stale, dry biscuits with such relish.\n\nTo quench his thirst, he finished the last of the dark brew and spit out the grounds. \"So when's the boss gonna spring us?\" Grady had talked half the night but said little of any consequence. The man was of no use. He knew a tenth of what he claimed to know, maybe less.\n\nAs if on cue, Marshal Morris entered the office and Taggert set his cup on the tray. It was about time.\n\nMorris plucked the keys from a hook by the door and ambled over to the cell. \"I decided to give one of you a suspended sentence,\" he announced.\n\nGrady's eyebrows shot up. \"Does that mean you're gonna let us go?\"\n\n\"Let you go?\" The marshal chuckled. \"A suspended sentence is just a fancy term for a good ole-fashioned hangin'. Haven't had one of those in a while. Should liven things up a bit. Hangings don't eliminate crime but they sure do stop repeaters.\"\n\nSquint turned three shades of gray and for once Grady's bravado deserted him, or at least he fell silent.\n\n\"You ain't got no right to hang any one of us without a trial,\" Squint said. \"It's the law.\"\n\nThe marshal shrugged. \"You know the law and I know the judge. I guess that makes us even.\" He scratched his belly and studied each man in turn. \"Don't feel bad. It's been my experience that outlaws are greatly improved by death.\"\n\n\"So are martyrs,\" Taggert muttered.\n\nIgnoring his comment, Morris let his gaze travel from man to man. \"So who's itching for improvement? You choose or I choose. Don't matter much to me.\"\n\n\"It's gotta be one of them two,\" Grady said with as much graciousness as a host offering a guest refreshment. \"I've got what you call seniority.\"\n\n\"If that's what we're goin' by, then he's the one,\" Squint said, pointing at Taggert. \"He was the last to come on board.\"\n\n\"That true?\" the marshal asked, staring at Taggert. \"You the last to join the Phantom gang?\"\n\nTaggert glared at his two cellmates. \"Yes, which means I have less restitution to make.\"\n\nGrady waved his hand. \"This ain't about restitution. It's about feeding the wolves.\"\n\n\"To be fair, we should draw straws,\" Taggert argued.\n\n\"I ain't drawing no straws,\" Grady said. \"He's your man, Marshal. It's two against one.\"\n\n\"Sounds fair to me.\" The marshal pulled out his Peacemaker. \"Now step back, all of you.\" He waited for the three men to crowd against the back of the cell. Gun in one hand, he unlocked the door with the other, keys jiggling. He motioned to Taggert.\n\n\"All right, now move. And keep your hands up.\"\n\nHands raised shoulder high, Taggert shuffled out of the cell. The marshal slammed the door shut, locking in the other two. \"Turn around and put your hands behind your back.\"\n\nTaggert did what he was told and the marshal snapped a pair of handcuffs around his wrists, the iron bracelets cold against his flesh.\n\n\"It was nice knowing you,\" Grady called.\n\n\"Wish I could say the feeling was mutual,\" Taggert muttered, casting a dark look at his former partners in crime.\n\nThe marshal pressed the muzzle of his gun against Taggert's back. \"Move. Try anything and I'll shoot you full of lead. Makes no difference to me if we improve you here or wait till you get to the gallows.\"\n\n\"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather hang,\" Taggert replied. \"These are the only clothes I've got and they don't need no improving.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Eleanor Walker stared at the ceiling. There wasn't much else to look at when one lay flat on one's back. Of all the ridiculous and aggravating things to happen. A broken leg!\n\nNow that she'd flung the mechanical clock across the room, she didn't even know what time it was. It seemed like hours since that annoying woman traipsed out. It had to be at least noon, if not later. And the pain. The pain!\n\nWhere was the doctor? Where, for that matter, was anyone? And where, for pity's sake, was that cowbell?\n\nShe ran her hand over the bedside table, knocking the bell to the floor.\n\nShe had just about reached the brown glass dropper bottle the doctor left when a tap sounded at the door. It was about time.\n\nThinking it was her foreman, she moved her hand away from the pain medication and barked, \"Come in!\"\n\nThe door opened and the woman named Annie stuck her head through the crack. \"Someone here to see you. A Mr. Stackman.\"\n\nRobert Stackman was Eleanor's banker and friend\u2014and would be so much more if she would let him. At the moment, he was the last person she wanted to see.\n\n\"Tell him I'm occupied,\" she said.\n\nRobert's voice drifted from beyond the door. \"You can tell me that yourself.\" He walked into the room and bowed to Annie. \"Thank you. I'll take it from here.\"\n\nEven in his sixties, Robert cut an impressive figure with his silver hair as neatly trimmed as his mustache and goatee. Eleanor never saw him when he wasn't impeccably groomed in dark trousers, white dress shirt, vest, bow tie, and polished oxfords. Robert had been after her for years to sell the ranch and marry him. A bad idea on many counts.\n\nHe closed the door and stooped to pick up the clock. \"I see time's trying to get away from you,\" he said, grinning. He set the clock on the bedside table. It was a little after 11:00 a.m.\n\nHe picked the bell off the floor and set it next to the timepiece. \"I see you have a leg up. Trust you to be ahead of the competition.\"\n\n\"I'm in no mood for your jokes,\" Eleanor snapped. \"What did you come here for? To gloat?\"\n\n\"I heard you had a nasty fall and I came to see how you are. It might surprise you to know that's what friends do.\"\n\n\"If you are truly a friend, I trust you won't say 'I told you so.'\"\n\n\"I wouldn't think of it.\" He lifted a chair and moved it to the side of the bed. He then sat, pulled off his straw hat, and balanced it on his knee. \"I see you have another heiress.\"\n\n\"Yes, and I plan to get rid of her as soon as possible.\" If she had her druthers, she would have ordered Annie out of the house that very morning. \"Not only is the woman a menace, she's as stubborn as a cornered rattler.\"\n\nRobert arched his brow. \"Then you two should get along quite famously.\"\n\nEleanor made a face. \"She gave me boiled eggs and weak tea for breakfast. Now, I ask you, does that sound like someone who can be trusted around cattle?\"\n\nRobert chuckled before growing serious. \"Actually, this isn't entirely a social call.\"\n\n\"I should have known.\" It wasn't like him to travel to the ranch during bank hours just to be friendly.\n\n\"I hesitate to mention this while you're... indisposed, but I suspect there'll be all hell to pay if you found out I kept something from you.\"\n\n\"Oh dear.\" She brushed aside a strand of hair. \"This sounds ominous.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it is. I don't know if you heard but the Phantom gang struck again. The train and bank were robbed yesterday.\" Resting his elbow on his crossed arm, he stroked his goatee. \"It's odd that two robberies occurred on the same day, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Odd, but not too surprising.\" Arizona Territory had gone through many changes since her family settled in the area more than forty years earlier during the '50s. But one thing that never changed was the criminal element. As a ranch owner, she'd battled her fair share of renegade Apaches, cattle rustlers, fence cutters, and water snipers.\n\nShe placed her hand on her forehead. She felt groggy and so unlike herself that she had difficulty concentrating. \"That annoying girl mentioned something about a train robbery.\" Or at least Eleanor thought she did. Or maybe it was the doctor. \"But the bank too?\"\n\n\"The marshal apprehended some, but by no means all, of the men responsible.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" She studied him. \"So how does this affect me?\"\n\nRobert glanced at her suspended leg and hesitated.\n\n\"Speak up,\" she snapped. \"I will not be treated like an invalid.\"\n\n\"And I wouldn't think of treating you like one.\" He coughed and cleared his voice. \"I don't want to upset you.\"\n\n\"Then stop beating around the bush.\"\n\nHe drew in his breath. \"The marshal believes the Phantom is connected in some way to this ranch.\"\n\nEleanor stared at him. Did he just say what she thought he said? \"How do you mean, connected?\"\n\n\"Morris thinks the Phantom is using the ranch as a hideout.\"\n\n\"Hogwash!\"\n\nHe splayed his hands. \"I'm just telling you what he thinks.\"\n\n\"That's absurd.\" She had little regard for the marshal. He hadn't even been able to capture the outlaw Cactus Joe. It took a dime novelist from Boston\u2014and a woman at that\u2014to capture the man. \"I'd know if my ranch was being used for nefarious purposes.\"\n\n\"You employ many ranch hands. Any one of whom could be the Phantom.\"\n\n\"I know my men.\" True, she suspected that some had checkered pasts, but she demanded hard work and loyalty from them and she got it. Anyone caught loafing or breaking the law was immediately dismissed. \"No one working at the ranch has time to play outlaw.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I just want you to be on guard.\"\n\n\"I'm always on guard.\" One didn't run a successful ranch without due vigilance.\n\n\"I will feel a whole lot better once the telephone reaches the ranch. Had you allowed it to be installed when I first suggested it the doctor could have reached you much sooner.\"\n\nEleanor made a face. Robert called the telephone progress; she called it an invasion of privacy.\n\n\"The day will soon come when the whole country will be connected to a single exchange. Just think, Eleanor. You'll be able to talk to cattle buyers in New York or Chicago as easily as we are talking now.\"\n\nThe thought made Eleanor's head swim. She couldn't imagine talking business through a wire. \"The telephone didn't do much for your bank,\" she pointed out. \"You were still robbed.\"\n\n\"But only because someone called to inform Morris that a train robbery would occur. While the marshal was at the station arresting the thieves, someone managed to sneak into the bank vault. Perhaps the Phantom himself.\"\n\n\"It sounds like the criminal element has found a better use for the telephone than you have.\"\n\nHe blew out his breath. \"There is one more matter,\" he said. His hesitation indicated that he was about to broach a touchy subject and Eleanor's gaze sharpened.\n\n\"Someone wishes to purchase your property and has made an offer. It's a modest one but, considering the times, quite adequate.\"\n\n\"I'm not selling.\"\n\n\"You're not getting any younger, Eleanor, and this plan of yours to find an heiress is turning out to be a bust, to say the least.\"\n\nThis was an old argument and they had hammered it out relentlessly in the past. There was nothing more to be said, so she was surprised that Robert seemed intent upon revisiting the subject. He glanced at her elevated leg. \"It's time.\"\n\n\"Horse feathers!\"\n\n\"It's time.\"\n\n\"I'll decide when it's time.\" Eleanor studied him and tried not to think of her throbbing leg. \"Just out of curiosity, who is this buyer?\"\n\n\"I have no idea. The buyer wishes to remain anonymous. It's all being handled by a lawyer back east.\"\n\nEleanor frowned. She had no patience for people who hid behind lawyers. \"You can tell Mr. Anonymous what he can do with his offer.\"\n\nRobert heaved a sigh. \"So you're still determined to keep the ranch?\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't I be?\"\n\nHe studied her with grave concern. \"I thought perhaps your fall down the stairs would have knocked some sense into you.\"\n\n\"Sorry to disappoint you,\" she said.\n\nHe raised a silver eyebrow. \"Has it ever occurred to you that the good Lord might be trying to tell you something?\"\n\n\"If that's true, He'll have to speak louder.\"\n\nRobert's gaze followed the wooden framework that loomed over her. \"I shudder to think what He would have to do to get your attention.\"\n\nShe shooed him away with a wave of her hand. \"You've had your fun for the day. Now go. I have a ranch to run.\"\n\nHe ran a finger across his upper lip and made no move to leave. \"But, Eleanor, you haven't got a leg to stand on.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"Enough of your bad jokes.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Robert stood. \"I'll let you get back to... running your ranch.\" He donned his hat. \"Have a good day, Eleanor.\"\n\nHe walked out of the room and closed the door.\n\nShrugging away the loneliness that followed his departure, Eleanor reached for the bottle of medicine and rang the cowbell. Where was that annoying girl?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nWarning: Peering through a keyhole can give you a private eyeful!\n\nReport #1: Miss Walker is not at all fey or even shy of tongue. She is a formidable woman with a will of iron, the temperament of a mule, and the aim of a charging bull.\n\nAnnie looked over what she had written. She would, of course, have to include every detail of Miss Walker's accident, including her own unfortunate role.\n\nThe Pinkerton General Order book gave explicit instructions on how to write a report. The reports had to be written in ink or indelible pencil. Descriptions must include all physical traits, clothes, jewelry, and habits. Conversations had to be recorded verbatim with detailed information as to time and locations. All arrivals and departures had to be accurately noted.\n\nThe cowbell rang and Annie tossed down her pen. Now what did Miss Walker want? At this rate she would never get her report written, let alone accomplish what Pinkerton had sent her to do." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "During the next week, Miss Walker ran Annie ragged. It was hard to imagine that one old lady could require so much care. Annie hardly had time to think about the investigation and her frustration grew with each passing day.\n\nWorse, she had yet to figure out a way to send daily reports back to the main office. Not that she had anything of value to report, but Mr. Pinkerton insisted upon daily updates regardless. He would not be satisfied with the occasional letter Stretch or the doctor mailed for her. She also needed to identify herself to the marshal and collect her watch, but going to town seemed unlikely until Miss Walker had somewhat recovered from her injuries. None of the ranch hands or Able was willing to take care of Miss Walker, even for a few hours.\n\nAdding to her frustration was the constant ringing of the cowbell. Miss Walker insisted upon meeting each ranch hand regular as clockwork and, with the doctor's approval, Annie relented. One by one, she ushered each cowboy into the house and up the stairs.\n\nEach man walked into the ranch owner's bedroom, hat in hand, as if expecting to be hung. Each man came out looking as if he had been.\n\nEven Able had lost his good humor after being closeted with Miss Walker for the better part of an hour. Annie followed him into the kitchen.\n\n\"Able, what's going on?\"\n\nHe slammed a skillet onto the stove top. \"Miss Walker thinks that the leader of the Phantom gang is one of us.\"\n\nAnnie was careful not to react. \"I don't understand. Who is this gang?\"\n\n\"They're the ones who robbed the train and bank last week. They've been terrorizing the county for nearly a year.\"\n\nAnnie widened her eyes to feign surprise. \"And she thinks that one of the thieves works here? On the ranch?\"\n\n\"That's what she said. Heard it loud and clear with my own ears.\"\n\n\"Do you think it's possible?\" Annie asked.\n\nAble shrugged. \"Anything's possible, I suppose. But I know all the ranch hands. I know that Stretch likes his meat cooked all the way through and Ruckus likes his rare. I know that O.T. has a sweet tooth and Feedbag is seriously prejudiced against veg'tables. Wouldn't you think I'd know if one of them was him?\"\n\n\"I don't know if it's possible to completely know another, Able.\" She couldn't count the times she heard a family express shock and disbelief over a loved one's arrest. \"Do you think Miss Walker is in any danger?\"\n\nAble's eyes twitched. \"Why would you think that?\"\n\n\"She's an old lady. There's not much she can do, now that she's flat on her back.\"\n\n\"I don't see why anybody would want to do her harm.\" He frowned. \"If so, they'll have to deal with me first.\"\n\nThe ringing bell brought their conversation to an end. Able glanced upward before dipping a measuring cup into a sack of flour. \"You better go see what Miz Walker wants this time.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "After taking Miss Walker her noon meal, Annie escaped to her room to add to the fast-growing file that included detailed information on each ranch hand. Most of the men went by assumed names, making background checks difficult. Identifying someone solely by physical description was tough, but the agency had successfully done it in the past and she hoped would do so again.\n\nHaving learned from Able that the ranch hand going by the name of Ruckus was married with two children, she neatly printed the information on his file. His wife's name was Sylvia. His daughter was married to a rancher and his son attended seminary back east. It was hardly the kind of family one would expect of an outlaw but she wasn't ready to rule him out. He seemed sincere enough and led the others in prayer each morning before starting work, but such religious fervency could be a ruse.\n\nShe tossed her pencil down with a sigh and closed her files. She then left her room and hid her files in a vacant bedroom two doors away, where no one would think to look. It was a trick learned from her father and one that had served her well through the years.\n\nReturning to her room, she checked to make certain she hadn't left anything that could provoke suspicion. Something shiny caught her eye and she crossed to the bureau to see what it was.\n\nHer father's pocket watch lay on top of the dresser next to her hairbrush. How odd. She glanced around. The timepiece hadn't been there that morning, which meant the marshal must have dropped it off sometime between breakfast and the noontime meal.\n\nShe picked up the watch and lifted it to her ear. The marshal even thought to wind it.\n\nIt bothered her that the lawman appeared at the ranch house without announcing himself. Even worse, he had walked into her bedroom.\n\nShe tucked the watch into the top drawer and hastened downstairs and out the front door. No carriage or even a horse was in sight, save the wild mustangs in the corral across the way. Some of the ranch hands had left early that morning and hadn't been seen since.\n\nShe walked around the house to where Able tended the vegetable garden. Several small service buildings were located in back. The icehouse and laundry were closest to the main house, the granary and smokehouse a distance away. Next to what appeared to be an unused barn stood an old springboard wagon.\n\nA vegetable garden spread between the buildings, a scarecrow rising from its midst. The soil was kept moist by irrigation ditches.\n\nAs she approached, Able looked up and tossed a bunch of carrots into a wicker basket. His freckles looked like orange polka dots in the afternoon sun. \"Thought I'd make some gumbo soup,\" he said. \"It's the only dish Miz Walker will eat that's not made with beef.\"\n\n\"Sounds good,\" Annie said, though it seemed too hot for soup. She watched him pull a bunch of carrots from the soil. Carrots? Already? In Chicago the ground was still frozen.\n\n\"Did you happen to see the marshal today?\"\n\nAble glanced up. \"Marshal Morris? Nah. Is there a problem?\"\n\n\"Just wondering. I... was curious to know what happened to the train robbers.\"\n\nAble shook dirt away from the carrots. \"I reckon they'll spend the rest of their born days behind bars.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're right.\" She hesitated. \"Anyone else at the house today? Other than Dr. Fairbanks, I mean.\"\n\n\"Just Ruckus and O.T. Why?\"\n\n\"No reason.\" She left him and walked around to the front.\n\nShe let herself in the house just as Miss Walker's foreman, O.T., descended the stairs. A wiry man with restless, and some might even say shifty, eyes, his sun-baked face placed him in his late forties. He'd removed his spurs before entering the house to comply with house rules but his gun remained and the holster sagged on his hip.\n\nO.T. afforded her a look of pity. \"I don't envy your job, ma'am. The boss lady is loaded to the muzzle and ready to shoot.\"\n\n\"I guess we can't blame her,\" she said. She never meant the old lady harm and felt sorry for her. It must be frustrating, lying in bed day after day, especially for one apparently as active as Miss Walker.\n\n\"O.T., something was taken from me during the train holdup\u2014a watch.\" She studied him as she spoke. If he had placed her watch on the bureau, she didn't want to sound ungrateful, but neither did she want men walking into her room.\n\n\"Sorry to hear that, ma'am. You better talk to the marshal about it.\"\n\n\"The watch has been returned,\" she said. \"I just found it on my bureau.\"\n\nNot a flicker of emotion crossed his face. \"Good to hear.\"\n\n\"I was wondering if you happened to see the marshal.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nope. Can't say that I have.\"\n\n\"If he's still here at the ranch, I want to thank him for returning my watch,\" she said.\n\n\"If I see him, I'll tell him you're lookin' for him. Anything else I can do for you, let me know. Soon as the boss lady's on her feet, we'll start learning you the ropes.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe tugged on his hat. \"If you're gonna be the new heiress, you gotta know how to work a ranch. You ride, right?\"\n\nShe nodded. Actually, she was a good rider, thanks to her brother's patient tutoring.\n\n\"That's something, I guess. You'd be amazed how many women come to this ranch not knowing the front end of a horse from its tail.\" He narrowed his eyes. \"Know anything about cattle?\"\n\n\"No, but I did stay at a sheep ranch once.\"\n\nHe reared back with a look of disdain. \"Well, if you know what's good fer you, you'll tuck that news under your hat and keep it there.\" He hastened to the door as if she were still carrying the stench of sheep with her.\n\n\"Scares me to think what kind of heiress will turn up next,\" he muttered. With that he left the house.\n\nAnnie had no idea whether or not he was the Phantom, but either way, O.T. was a strange one.\n\nShe went to secure the door after him but there was no lock. That meant that anyone could walk in day or night. With an uneasy feeling, she headed for the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nA detective without a clue is like a cowboy without a horse; both are in for a lot of footwork.\n\nAnnie walked into the bedroom the following morning to help Miss Walker with her usual morning ablutions. The day before, Stretch had ridden into town to fetch the mail and the bed was piled high with correspondence. He also mailed two letters for Annie.\n\n\"Time for your bath,\" Annie said cheerfully.\n\n\"Well, get on with it, then.\" Miss Walker continued to rip through the wax seals one after another with a letter opener. After perusing each letter, she scribbled notes onto the margins with a pencil, presumably to remind herself how she wished to respond.\n\nAfter giving Miss Walker a sponge bath and helping her into a clean nightgown, Annie reached for the hairbrush. The best way to contain Miss Walker's long gray hair was to work it into a single plait.\n\nAs she interwove the strands, she planned her day. She still hadn't talked to all the ranch hands; the blacksmith, Michael, was first on her list. If he was half as talkative as his aunt, he might have something useful to say.\n\n\"Why, the nerve!\" Miss Walker's body shook and the bed springs groaned. \"That's the second time in two years the county's tried to raise my taxes and I won't have it.\"\n\nAccustomed to the woman's outbursts while reading her mail, Annie paid little heed as she quickly contained each silvery strand. Reaching for a blue ribbon, she tightly wound it around the feathery-tipped braid.\n\nAnnie was about to leave the room when Miss Walker stopped her. \"Go to my office and fetch paper and pen. I need you to write letters. And hurry. I haven't got all day.\"\n\nAll day was exactly what Miss Walker had but Annie wasn't about to contradict her. Instead she hastened downstairs to the office.\n\nAble had left earlier to go into town for supplies and she missed the cheerful sound of pots and pans, along with his merry whistling.\n\nAnnie walked through the large room but something made her stop. She distinctly remembered leaving the door to Miss Walker's office open and now it was closed. Strange. Ear against the wood, she listened. Nothing. Out of habit, she reached into the false pocket of her skirt to feel for her weapon.\n\nShe turned the knob and flung the door open. Curtains fluttered at the window. The wind had evidently caused the door to close. Mystery solved, she headed straight for the desk. The penholder was empty. She knew she had replaced the fountain pen the previous day.\n\nShe opened the top drawer, hoping to find a writing implement, but instead found a tintype of a young girl. Odd. The photograph wasn't there when she did a previous search of the office looking for personnel files.\n\nShe lifted the image out of the drawer and held it to the light. The picture was dark and faded but not enough to hide the child's pretty face. She turned it over but the back was blank. She discounted the idea that it was a photograph of Miss Walker as a child; tintypes weren't available until the late 1850s.\n\nAnnie replaced the photo and checked the other drawers for a pen. Except for the photograph, nothing else seemed out of order. Still, she had the strangest feeling that someone had searched the desk. The question was why.\n\nA soft scraping sound startled her. \"Who's there?\"\n\nA man emerged from behind the door and Annie shrank back in her chair. He elbowed the door shut, trapping them both inside the small office.\n\nHe poked at the brim of his Stetson and pushed it upward. Cobalt eyes met hers and it was all she could do to catch her breath. She would know those eyes anywhere.\n\n\"Wh-what are you doing here?\"\n\nNo question about it; this was the outlaw who stole her watch on the train. The thief caught her unawares, which gave him the upper hand, but she would relieve him of his advantage as quickly as possible. Surreptitiously, she slid her hand into her false pocket.\n\nFinger to his mouth, he motioned her to stay quiet. \"Take it easy. I'm not going to hurt you.\"\n\nShe squeezed the grip of her derringer. He didn't know it, but it was his own skin in danger, not hers.\n\n\"It's Miss Beckman, right? Miss Annie Beckman.\"\n\nUnder normal circumstances she might have been flattered that he remembered her name, but today she felt no such pleasure. \"Why aren't you in jail?\"\n\nThe man flashed a smile, revealing perfect white teeth. He looked different somehow and it took her a moment to figure out why. The last time she saw him, he had a mustache and whiskers. Today he was clean-shaven. His lack of facial hair revealed a previously unnoticed cleft on his fine chiseled jaw and made his eyes look even bluer, if that was possible.\n\n\"You're not alone in wanting to see me there,\" he said. \"Sorry to disappoint you.\"\n\n\"It's where you belong.\" Her legs trembled and that was not a good sign. An operative couldn't afford to be nervous or anxious during a confrontation. To remind herself that she had everything under control, she squeezed the grip of her gun tight.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes and studied her. Imagining that most women in her spot would look for an escape or, at the very least, a weapon, she let her gaze fly to the paperweight on the desk.\n\nHis gaze followed hers. \"Ah, a lady willing to defend herself. I like that.\" He gave another smile and her heart skipped a beat. The dimple on his right cheek matched the soft impression on his chin. With very little effort, he could probably charm the hide off a steer.\n\n\"But you needn't bother,\" he continued. \"If you do as I say, neither of us will get hurt.\" He moved closer and tossed a pen on the desk. \"I believe you were looking for that. A bad habit of mine, I'm afraid. I tend to keep every pen I lay my hands on.\"\n\n\"One of many bad habits, I would think,\" she said, determined not to let his charming ways or pleasing looks distract her. \"What do you want? What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I'm the new ranch hand. If we should happen to bump into one another, you are to act like you don't know me.\"\n\nThe nerve of the man. Who did he think he was, coming here and giving her orders? \"You're out of your mind.\"\n\nHe arched a brow. \"That is neither here nor there. Do we have an understanding?\"\n\nThe man's audacity might have been amusing under other circumstances but today it was plain unbelievable. \"Why would I do the bidding of an outlaw?\"\n\n\"I believe the lady has a few secrets of her own that she would prefer not to have known.\"\n\nShe studied him. He couldn't possibly know she was a Pinkerton detective. So what did he think he had over her? She decided to call his bluff. \"I have no secrets.\"\n\nHe arched an eyebrow. \"None?\" He feigned a look of disappointment. \"A woman without secrets is like a rose without fragrance.\"\n\nShe smiled; she couldn't seem to help herself. \"We can now add bad poetry to your list of crimes.\"\n\n\"And we can add evasiveness to yours. I saw you handing one of our gang members an envelope on the train.\" He studied her as if measuring her reaction. \"So I know you're a member of the Phantom gang too. I'm sure our mutual boss would frown on you turning me in\u2014a member of your own family, so to speak.\"\n\nAnnie's mind spun. He accused her of belonging to the Phantom gang? It wasn't just absurd, it was downright laughable. Only her considerable acting skills allowed her to keep a straight face. Still, if she played her cards right this might work in her favor. What better way to pump information from him than to let him think she was one of them.\n\n\"Perhaps you're right,\" she said.\n\n\"You know I am.\" Amusement danced in his eyes.\n\nLord forgive her for thinking it, but he was a handsome, devilish rogue. Had she met him under any other circumstances, well, who knows what might have happened? Dismayed by the thought\u2014and even a little ashamed\u2014she gave herself a mental kick and clenched her jaw. It wasn't like her to let her mind wander when working a case.\n\nHis eyes hardened. \"You keep quiet about my identity and I'll extend you the same courtesy.\" He shrugged. \"Sounds reasonable, wouldn't you say?\"\n\nShe pretended to consider his offer. Bright sunshine slanted through the open window, making him look deceptively honest. Thank goodness she had the sense to know it was the lighting and not the man giving the impression of integrity.\n\n\"How did you escape?\" It seemed like a reasonable question given that he now considered her practically family.\n\nHe shrugged. \"You'd be amazed what you can do if you know the right people.\"\n\nShe wondered if by \"right people\" he included the marshal. It would certainly explain his release and, unfortunately, she was no stranger to corrupt lawmen.\n\nShe matched his frank scrutiny with equal regard. \"I assume it was you who returned the watch.\"\n\n\"I had no choice. It doesn't seem right to steal from one's family, so to speak.\" He hung his thumbs from his bullet-studded gun belt, drawing her gaze down the length of him. He certainly took full advantage of his clothing. His wide shoulders and well-muscled chest stretched the fabric of his well-worn shirt to the limits. His long legs looked as sturdy as tree trunks.\n\nShe took a deep breath; she didn't want to think about this.\n\n\"So what do you say?\" he asked. \"Do we have a deal?\"\n\nShe pretended to hesitate. If she appeared too anxious he might become suspicious. \"I'll keep your secret, Mr...\"\n\n\"The ranch hands call me Branch. Just plain Branch.\"\n\n\"I'll keep your secret, Mr. Branch, but if you dare hurt a hair on that old lady's head...\"\n\nBranch reared back, his face suffused with surprise. \"Considering the way she treats you, I can't imagine that you care.\"\n\nThe only way he would know how Miss Walker treated her was by eavesdropping. That was something that the Pinkerton brothers frowned upon, along with offering sexual favors in exchange for information. She would never consider using such tactics, of course, but she wouldn't put it past this man to utilize his considerable good looks to his own advantage any way he could.\n\n\"I'll keep your secret,\" she said. \"For now.\"\n\nHis crooked smile made her heart skip a beat. She reminded herself that he was a thief and trespasser and that the two of them were about to embark on a dangerous, if not altogether lethal, liaison.\n\n\"I'm sure our mutual boss will approve,\" he said.\n\nShe moistened her lips. The way his gaze clung to her mouth told her it wasn't just business on his mind. The thought wasn't altogether unpleasant and warmth crept up her neck. She gave herself a mental shake. They were on opposite sides of the law and she'd best not forget it.\n\nRegaining control of her senses, she leaned forward. \"I do have a small request.\"\n\nHe raised a dark eyebrow. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I would rather that you didn't mention our meeting to... our mutual boss.\" The moment he mentioned her to the Phantom, the game would be over, for then both men would know she was playing a role.\n\nShe could almost see the wheels turning in his head. \"And why is that?\" he asked.\n\nShe had to think fast. \"It was careless of me to be seen with that envelope. And you know how our... mutual boss... despises carelessness.\"\n\nShe tried to read the calculating look that flashed across his face. Did he believe her?\n\n\"It seems that you have more secrets than a spinster's diary,\" he said.\n\nRelief washed over her. Confidence restored, she relaxed and pulled her hand out of her false pocket. Elbows on the desk, she steepled her fingers. It was a masculine move learned from her father and one that signaled power.\n\n\"I won't reveal who you are, Mr. Branch, but you can be certain I'll watch you like a hawk.\"\n\nA devastating smile inched across his handsome face. \"And I'll watch you,\" he drawled. \"In fact, I look forward to it.\" Without another word, he turned and walked out of the office." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Taggert paused at the gate of the courtyard outside the ranch house. \"I won't reveal who you are, Mr. Branch.\"\n\n\"No, I don't imagine you will, Miss Beckman.\"\n\nMost women would have panicked or fainted dead away upon being confronted by a man perceived to be an outlaw. For the most part the lady remained calm and held her own.\n\nInteresting.\n\nThere was something exciting about a woman like that. Enticing, even. Seductive.\n\nOne thing was clear: not only did the Phantom know how to hide his identity, but if Miss Beckman was an example, the man also had great taste in women. Such an appreciative eye for the fairer sex could very well lead to the mystery man's downfall.\n\nTaggert intended to see that it did.\n\nMeanwhile, a slew of questions ran though his mind. What was Miss Beckman doing at the ranch? And was Miss Walker's fall really an accident or something more sinister? His guess was the latter, which led to yet another question: For what purpose did the Phantom need the ranch owner incapacitated?\n\nAnnie Beckman. He would bet that wasn't her real name but she wasn't alone in that regard. Most of the ranch hands had assumed \"summer\" names. The unwritten law of the West was not to ask questions. The past was the past. Whatever a man\u2014or woman\u2014might be guilty of was his or her business and no one else's. This made Taggert's task more difficult. Anyone poking around in another's history could well end up riddled with bullet holes.\n\nYes, Miss Beckman, or whatever her name was, might very well be his key to success, but he must tread with care. She was a complication he hadn't counted on\u2014though admittedly a very pretty complication.\n\nSomething made him turn toward the house. Miss Beckman stood on the balcony watching him. A woman of her word.\n\nIt didn't seem possible that such a shapely package could contain so much fire. Her raven hair, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes, coupled with her smooth honey skin, gave her an exotic look that was most appealing. No doubt Indian blood ran through her veins. Under normal circumstances, his interest in the lady would be more personal. Fortunately, he knew a deceptive web when he saw it, but that didn't make the temptation any easier to resist. God help him.\n\nHe saluted her and, much to his amusement, she returned the favor. A worthy opponent indeed.\n\nTugging on the wide brim of his hat, he turned and walked away. If things worked out as planned, the lady would point him straight to her leader.\n\nThe hunt for the man had occupied him day and night for the last several weeks and he fervently hoped that the chase was close to an end. He had no fondness for cattle and the sooner he could track down the Phantom and leave, the better.\n\nHe glanced one last time at the Phantom's woman. Even from this distance he could feel her big, green eyes drawing him in. Ah, but she was a clever one. Cagey. She promised to keep his secret but she would mention him to the Phantom; Taggert would bet on it. That could only make the leader nervous. A nervous criminal made mistakes and that was bound to give him away.\n\nTaggert sucked in his breath. He'd waited this long. He supposed he could wait awhile longer. With this thought, he stomped into the bunkhouse, but not without casting one last look at the pretty woman on the balcony." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nMaking accusations without proof is like throwing a rope without a loop.\n\nThe encounter with the bandit was very much on Annie's mind when she escaped the ranch house the following morning. Walking helped her think and she needed time to plan her next move.\n\nThe sky was clear and the sun hot, but after the summer humidity of Chicago, she welcomed the dry heat.\n\nShe began her walk just as a gust of wind swept across the desert, carrying with it the smell of sage, cattle, and heated earth. A tumbleweed rolled past and clung to a fence post momentarily before blowing away. The blades of the windmill turned atop the spider-legged tower and the mill rotated as if welcoming a guest.\n\nHorses grazed in a nearby pasture; ears twitched and long tails swished. One mustang lifted its head to gaze at her with soulful brown eyes before burying his nose back into the brown grass.\n\nShe followed a trail up a hill behind the horses and came across a little cemetery. Weathered crosses marked four graves. Kneeling by the smallest cross, she wiped away a layer of sand and read the inscription.\n\nRebecca Abbott, beloved daughter. 01 April 1866 \u2014 21 September 1871.\n\nAnnie sat back on her heels. The little girl had only been five when she died. That was about the same age as the little girl in the tintype. So who was she? A family member?\n\nAnnie stood and examined the other graves. Mary and Harold Walker\u2014Miss Walker's parents. The fourth and newest grave was marked Ralph Abbott, who died two years ago. The little girl's father, no doubt.\n\nShe straightened and turned slowly, surveying the land and buildings that made up the ranch. Miss Walker was a force to be reckoned with but she knew her business. Knew how to run a cattle ranch\u2014no one could deny that. She probably also knew her ranch hands like no one else. Miss Walker dictated business letters and issued orders but she wasn't given to idle gossip. Getting her to talk was a challenge but Annie had to keep trying.\n\nShe started down the hill and stopped. A strange, unsettling sensation came over her, as if she was being watched. But no one was around. Shaking the feeling away, she hurried to the ranch house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Later that same day she questioned Able about the little grave.\n\nThe cook pushed a rolling pin to the edge of the pastry dough spread across the wooden table before replying. \"That was way before my time, but I heard talk that Miz Walker lost her daughter to smallpox.\"\n\nAnnie frowned. \"I didn't know Miss Walker had any children.\" Nothing like that had shown up in the Pinkerton file.\n\nHe sprinkled flour on the dough and rolled again. As he worked, his white floppy hat rocked back and forth in a sea of ginger curls. \"Far as I know, she just had the one. Her husband's buried up there too.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker was married?\"\n\n\"And divorced,\" Able said. \"But you didn't hear that from me.\"\n\nAnnie blew out her breath. Divorced. Great Scott! That must have raised some eyebrows. \"Stretch said Miss Walker rebuilt after the earthquake.\"\n\n\"From what I heard, the quake flattened pretty near everythin' within miles. What was left standing was destroyed by fire, except for the barn and stables. Most people around here left after that, but not Miz Walker.\"\n\n\"I can't imagine what she must have gone through.\"\n\nAble set his rolling pin aside and reached for a tin biscuit cutter. \"She's a tough old bird, that's for sure.\" He dipped the cutter into flour and pressed it into the dough. \"But if she likes you, consider yourself one of the lucky ones. If not, watch out.\"\n\nNo doubt Able spoke the truth, but given her present predicament, Miss Walker would have a hard time finding another caretaker.\n\nAnnie had questions galore but that was all Able knew, or at least, all he was willing to talk about. Obviously there was more to Miss Walker than met the eye." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Less than a week after her confrontation with the train robber who called himself Branch, she stood on the balcony of her room waiting for him to leave with the other cowpunchers. It was just after dawn but Annie was dressed and ready to search the bunkhouse the moment the cowpunchers left for the day.\n\nThe horses were saddled and ready to go. The air was perfectly still. Already it promised to be another hot day and the men were eager to get an early start. They stood in a circle while O.T. laid out the chores for the day.\n\nShe could hardly take her gaze off Branch and it had nothing to do with his pleasing looks, although admittedly that made her job more agreeable. No, the reason for such close observation was that something about him kept nagging her. He reminded her of a wolf in sheep's skin. Careful observation told her he could ride a horse and lasso a steer with the best of them. Then again, he had looked equally confident robbing a train.\n\nHis lazy smile and studied gaze belonged on a ranch, but he walked and moved with a city swagger. His clothes were worn in all the right places but hardly seemed to go with his long, lean form. Cowpunchers had a tendency to tilt forward when they walked, but not Branch. Instead he walked tall and straight, as if he had a broom-stick for a spine or perhaps even military training.\n\nRuckus led the morning prayer. Even Branch took off his hat and looked respectful. Anyone not knowing his true identity could easily mistake him for a man of faith.\n\nShe curled her hands at her sides. \"You might fool the others, but you can't fool God,\" she muttered. Or me.\n\nRuckus finished the prayer and yelled, \"Let's go!\"\n\nThe cowpunchers broke away from the circle and hastened to their horses with jingling spurs.\n\nBranch mounted with one fluid move. Instead of taking off with the other men, he lingered behind and glanced at the balcony where she stood. She didn't bother to duck. He knew she watched him and even seemed to derive perverse pleasure from her doing so.\n\nShe couldn't see his face in the early morning light but she didn't miss the hand touching the brim of his hat. The simple gesture made her heart flutter. Never had she known an outlaw so brazen or cocky, or a man who exuded such charm. Like a woman sending her man to war, she returned his salute with a wave. The expression in his eyes was hidden, but not the flash of white teeth. She returned his smile. She couldn't help herself.\n\nHe turned his horse toward the rising sun and galloped off, leaving her bereft and more than a little shaken. Her papa once said that a person had only one important decision to make in life and that was whether or not to follow the Lord; everything else was secondary. Branch had chosen crime and that put them on opposite sides no matter how much she might wish otherwise.\n\nSighing, she waited until the horsemen were out of sight before leaving the house and walking to the empty bunkhouse. Her heart could flutter all it wanted, but she had a job to do and she'd best not forget it.\n\nThe smell of saddle leather, alcohol, adobe, and sweat greeted her as she opened the bunkhouse door. The building was divided into two rooms. One room was for sleeping and the other, judging by the large wooden table, was mainly for eating.\n\nThere wasn't much in the large room except a stack of old newspapers and some dime novels, including Miss Hattie's Dilemma by the local author. The book made her laugh; who said men didn't read love stories?\n\nA stuffed steer head hung over the stone fireplace. The skin of a rattlesnake draped from the mantel and saddle blankets were scattered about the floor for rugs.\n\nThe second room was furnished with bunk beds. According to Able, only the single men lived here. Married men like Ruckus had their own places. Able, of course, slept in the ranch house in the room next to the kitchen.\n\nKnapsacks hung haphazardly from the backs of chairs or hooks on the wall. She stood in the middle of the room considering each bunk in turn. It was always the details that tripped a person and today it was the bedroll. Only one was rolled military-style and had been placed at the bottom of the bed. No cowpuncher worth his salt would leave such a tidy space. But a military man would.\n\n\"Got you, Branch!\"\n\nA thorough check of Branch's mattress, bedroll, and knapsack revealed nothing remotely useful or even personal. No photographs, no letters, no notes, no paper\u2014but lots of pens. The man hoarded pens like a dog hoarded bones.\n\nA quick search of the knapsacks belonging to the other ranch hands revealed nothing of any interest. A couple held photographs of pretty young women. Chips of wood on the floor marked Wishbone's bed. She never saw the man when he wasn't whittling.\n\nAfter rummaging through each man's belongings, she stood in the center of the room. Hands on her waist, she turned slowly, regarding each man's space one by one. Had she missed something?\n\n\"Kin I help you?\"\n\nStartled, Annie spun around. Wishbone stood in the doorway staring at her from beneath a ten-gallon hat. His knees were so far apart a cow could walk between them and turn around. His knife and ever-present piece of wood was in hand. He greeted her with a nod of his head and then resumed whittling, chips of wood falling to his feet.\n\nTrained to have an explanation handy for just such an occasion, she quickly explained her presence. \"Miss Walker is in need of a new housekeeper and asked me to check to see how much work was needed.\"\n\nWishbone's steer-horn mustache twitched. \"No housekeeper ever set foot in here,\" he said with a worried glance around.\n\nShe wrinkled her nose. \"Yes, I can believe that.\"\n\nHe slid his knife down the length of his wood. \"I've worked my share of ranches and I ain't never known a housekeeper to step foot in the ranch hands' livin' quarters.\"\n\nShe forced a smile. \"I reckon there's a first for everything.\"\n\nHis brows slanted downward. \"I don't think the boys will cotton to someone rearranging their stuff.\"\n\nShe couldn't decide if that was a warning or a general statement against housekeepers. \"Then perhaps it would be best if the housekeeper's job is confined to the main house.\"\n\n\"Maybe so.\" He looked relieved. \"Maybe so.\"\n\n\"I'll suggest that to Miss Walker.\" She tossed a nod at the stick in his hand. \"What are you making?\"\n\n\"Makin'?\" He held the stick up. \"I'm not makin' anything. The point of whittlin' is to enjoy the journey and not worry about the dest'nation.\" He looked at her with squinty eyes. \"You ought to give it a try sometime. The way you zip around, you'd think there was a hangman on your tail. A little whittlin' would do you a world of good.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'll try it sometime.\" It was hard to imagine doing something just for the sake of doing it. She had always been goal oriented, even as a child. Everything was done with a purpose in mind, mostly in an attempt to gain her father's approval.\n\nFollowing an awkward silence, she started for the door. \"I'd better go. It's time for Miss Walker's breakfast.\"\n\nShe brushed past him and he didn't try to stop her. Outside she filled her lungs with morning air. Could Wishbone be the Phantom? She glanced over her shoulder but the ranch hand was nowhere in sight, no doubt still enjoying his journey to nowhere." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Able greeted Annie that afternoon with less than his usual exuberance. His honor had been questioned and he took it hard. He wasn't the only one. None of the ranch hands liked being suspected of being the Phantom.\n\n\"Hmm. Something smells good,\" she said.\n\n\"Gingerbread cookies,\" he said. \"Fresh out of the oven.\"\n\nShe helped herself to one and sank her teeth into the still-warm confection. It tasted every bit as delicious as it smelled.\n\n\"Where did you learn to cook like this?\" she asked between bites. She had never tasted so many delicious desserts. The ranch was a sweet tooth's paradise.\n\n\"I grew up on a farm with three brothers. After my ma died, we drew straws to see who would take over as cook.\"\n\n\"And you won.\"\n\n\"At the time I thought I'd lost.\" He shrugged. \"I left home at eighteen, came west, and landed a job as a chuck wagon cook.\" He paused, his face lit with a wistful expression. \"That was the life. My wages were twice what the cowpunchers earned and everyone knew to treat me right, even the wagon boss. I was the king of the range.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" she asked.\n\n\"What happened?\" His eyebrows disappeared beneath the band of his hat. \"I'll tell you what happened. The train!\" He practically spit out the words. \"It's now cheaper to send cattle to market by train than herd them there. Now I'm nothing but a kitchen lackey.\"\n\n\"That's not true.\" She helped herself to another cookie. \"I think if you asked any of the ranch hands they would say you're still king.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nah. These men don't 'preciate good cooking. As for Miss Walker, all she wants is beef, beef, and more beef!\" He shook his head.\n\nHe obviously objected to being confined to such a limited menu. Perhaps that explained why he put so much culinary energy into his desserts. It was the one area where he was given free rein.\n\nShe finished the last of her cookie and brushed the crumbs off her hands. \"Have you met the new ranch hand?\"\n\n\"Branch? Yep. He likes his meat cooked medium. You can tell a lot about a man by how he eats his meat.\"\n\nIt was an interesting thought. The Pinkerton brothers preached the importance of details but never asked how a suspect liked his meat cooked. \"And what does that tell you about Mr. Branch?\"\n\n\"It tells me he's a nonviolent man.\"\n\nInteresting if true. \"What about Wishbone?\" she asked.\n\n\"What about him?\"\n\n\"How does he like his meat?\"\n\n\"He don't eat meat at all,\" Able said.\n\n\"Like Shelley,\" she said.\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Never mind.\" Able read dime novels but she doubted he had much use for poetry. \"It's hard to believe that someone can work on a cattle ranch and not eat meat.\"\n\nAble shrugged. \"Probably why he looks like he's on a horse even when he ain't.\"\n\nShe giggled. \"How long has Wishbone worked on the ranch?\"\n\n\"Awhile. He was here long before me. At least five years.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" She reached for another cookie. \"I think I'll take some to Miss Walker, along with a pot of lovely tea.\"\n\nAble made a face but he put water on the stove to boil. \"Gingerbread and tea,\" he muttered. \"That's like mixing sheep and cattle.\"\n\n\"You'd better not let O.T. hear you mention sheep in the same sentence as cattle.\" After arranging a cup and saucer on a tray, she put several cookies on a plate and brewed the tea.\n\nShe was halfway out of the kitchen when he called to her. \"I almost forgot. Happy All Fools' Day.\"\n\nShe glanced at the Hood's Sarsaparilla calendar on the wall next to the icebox. Was it April already?\n\nAble glanced at the calendar too. \"Time sure does fly.\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed it does.\" In little more than two weeks it would be Easter. Time was whizzing by and she had yet to figure out a way to send daily reports back to the home office. Mr. Pinkerton would have her head.\n\n\"Do you have a small candle?\" she asked.\n\nHe pointed to the china cabinet. \"In the middle drawer.\"\n\nAnnie set the tray on the counter and opened the drawer he'd indicated. She pulled out a thin candle and stuck it into a cookie's soft dough. She then pocketed a box of safety matches.\n\nAble shook his head. \"If it's her birthday, you best not mention it. Women can be mighty touchy about their ages. Miz Walker ain't no different.\"\n\nShe lifted the tray. \"It's not her birthday. It's her daughter's. I always light a candle on each of my parents' birthdays and I find it very comforting. I hope this comforts Miss Walker.\"\n\nHis freckles seemed to fade beneath his doubtful expression. \"Miss Walker don't like to think about the past. What's gone is gone and that includes people.\"\n\nAnnie hadn't been able to get the little grave on the hill out of her mind. She thought about her dear mama's grave. Her papa's. The past wasn't something you could remember or forget at will; it stayed with you, was part of you. Unless she guessed wrong, it was part of Miss Walker too." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "The old lady was reading when Annie walked into her room. \"It's about time.\" She laid her book facedown on the bed. \"What is that?\"\n\nHolding her hand around the lit candle to protect the flame, Annie set the tray on the bedside table. \"Tea time.\" She crossed to the window to adjust the draperies against the hot afternoon sun.\n\nMiss Walker slumped back against the pillow and rolled her eyes. \"Dishwater time, more like it.\" She regarded the lit candle as one might eye a coming storm. \"So what are we celebrating? Your birthday?\"\n\n\"My birthday is in October.\" Annie turned from the window. \"It's a memorial candle.\"\n\nMiss Walker grimaced. \"And what are we memorializing?\"\n\n\"It's April first,\" Annie said quietly. She waited and when Miss Walker showed no reaction, she wondered if perhaps Able had been right.\n\n\"It's your daughter's birthday.\"\n\nMiss Walker's eyes bored into Annie like two burning coals. \"How dare you!\" she sputtered. \"What gives you the right to poke your nose into my business?\"\n\n\"Please don't be angry. I happened to come across the little grave and\u2014\"\n\n\"Get out!\" Miss Walker pointed at the door. Veins stuck out from her neck and her face turned an alarming red.\n\nAnnie held her hands up, palms out, in an effort to calm the ranch owner, but the woman only grew more agitated.\n\n\"Get out and don't come back! And take your dishwater with you!\"\n\nNot wanting to upset her any more than she already had, Annie fled the room without the tray. What have I done, God? Oh, what have I done?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nSuspicion ain't proof unless you're married.\n\nAnnie rushed down the hall to her room, biting back tears. Now she'd done it.\n\nThe assignment of a lifetime; her chance to prove that she could do a man's job and honor her father's memory, and she'd failed. Miserably.\n\nFirst she caused Miss Walker's accident and now this. The ranch owner had every reason to throw her out on her ear.\n\nEven worse, she had let William Pinkerton down. He had trusted and believed in her when no one else would. Wait till he heard what a mess she'd made of things. The thought cut through her like a knife. Odd as it seemed, she also felt like she'd let her father down. Not even death had severed the need to try to please him.\n\nShe reached for the door handle and just as quickly pulled her hand away. It was no time to get careless. Since finding the watch on her bureau, she never left the room without first inserting a thread between the door and casing. It was a trick from her father.\n\nShe ran her hand down the length of the crack but could find no thread. She checked again to make certain but there was no mistake. The thread was gone and that could only mean one thing. Someone had entered her room during her absence.\n\nHand in her false skirt pocket, she curled her fingers around the gun. She pressed her ear to her bedroom door but heard nothing. Whoever had entered her room was probably long gone, but she couldn't afford to leave anything to chance.\n\nShe placed her hand on the brass handle, silently counted to three, and threw the door open.\n\nBranch looked up from her desk. \"Ah, Miss Beckman.\" He looked so relaxed it was almost as if he belonged there or, at the very least, was invited.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she demanded. Her GTF file was open in front of him and her cheeks flared. She rushed to the desk. \"What gives you the right to go through my private papers?\"\n\nHe didn't even have the decency to look apologetic. Instead he closed the file. \"You went through my things and I was simply returning the favor.\"\n\nShe studied him with wary regard. She had taken special care to leave everything exactly as she found it in the bunkhouse.\n\nHe grinned. \"You might have fooled Wishbone with all that nonsense about a housekeeper but you didn't fool me. You were nosing through my things. Admit it.\"\n\nShe lifted her chin. \"Why would I be interested in anything of yours?\"\n\n\"Why indeed? Unless, of course, our leader put you up to it. Ah!\" He pointed his finger at her and practically yelped with certainty. \"He did, didn't he?\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask him yourself?\"\n\nHe gave a nod of satisfaction. \"I'll do that.\"\n\n\"Good!\" And make it soon! The only chance she had of redeeming herself after the fiasco with Miss Walker was if Branch led her to the Phantom. \"Now if you would kindly leave my room\u2014\"\n\n\"Not until I'm ready.\" He tapped his finger on the manila folder. \"GTF? Give to Phantom?\"\n\n\"You really ought to work on your spelling,\" she said.\n\nHe shrugged. \"I get by. So what does GTF stand for?\"\n\n\"It's none of your business.\"\n\n\"I might be a poor speller, but I know business starts with a b.\"\n\nShe grabbed the file but he stayed her hand with his own. Pressing her palm against the desk, he rose from his chair, his nose practically in her face. He stared at her with bold regard and a fiery charge shot up her spine.\n\n\"Why is it coded?\" he demanded. He was so close she could feel his warm breath. He smelled of bay rum, leather, and hot desert sands. The heady fragrance complemented his strength and power.\n\n\"So that people like you can't read it,\" she retorted.\n\n\"You're lying, Miss Beckman.\"\n\nShe returned his stare with equal boldness. \"So are you, Mr. Branch.\" It looked like neither of them would back down. Certainly she had no intention of doing so.\n\nHe finally released her hand. \"Stay away from my things.\"\n\nShe stepped back, but the disturbing memory of his touch remained. \"And of course you'll show me the same courtesy.\"\n\nFor several moments he held her gaze and she would have given anything to know what thoughts went through his head. Finally, he touched the brim of his hat in a one-finger salute. \"Always a pleasure,\" he said and headed for the door.\n\n\"The pleasure is all yours,\" she called after him.\n\nA grin flashed across his face before he left the room.\n\nShaken by the worrisome power he held over her, she paced the floor. Why had he gone through her things? What could he possibly be looking for? But those weren't the only questions on her mind.\n\nThe feeling that something about him didn't register refused to go away. If only she could figure out what it was. Perhaps then she would be better able to fight the worrisome hold he had on her.\n\nHe was a puzzle in more ways than one. Most criminals breaking out of jail took off quicker than a hound with a tail afire but Branch stayed. Except for cutting off his mustache and availing himself of a haircut, he didn't even bother disguising himself. It was hard not to admire a man that sure of himself, that bold. Was that what had turned her head? Surely not.\n\n\"He's a sneak and a thief,\" she said out loud.\n\nHe was also the most pleasing-looking man she'd ever set eyes on, if not the most arrogant.\n\n\"He's nothing but a crook and a liar.\"\n\nStill, there was definitely an attraction. Not that such a thing was all that unusual; some Pinkerton operatives did forge a bond with criminals. Even the agency's founder befriended criminals he'd once pursued and had been known to loan money to some who promised to toe the straight and narrow.\n\nThe trouble was, Branch hadn't shown the least inclination to change his reprehensible ways. She had no business being attracted to such a man\u2014God forgive her\u2014none." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "It was late that afternoon by the time Annie braced herself enough to enter Miss Walker's room again. The tray was still on the bedside table where she'd left it. The candle had burned to the nub and the cookies and tea had not been touched.\n\nThinking Miss Walker was asleep, she tiptoed into the room and picked up the tray. She was wrong. One cookie was missing on the plate but she wouldn't have noticed had she not counted. Even more surprising, the cup wasn't quite as full. Smiling, she turned and traced her way back to the door.\n\nMiss Walker's voice stopped her. \"No one ever remembered my daughter's birthday.\" After a moment she added, \"Only you.\" The normally strong, strident voice had been replaced by a hoarse whisper.\n\nAnnie turned. She could handle the woman's wrath and biting tongue. Could manage Miss Walker's obstinate ways but this... this was something altogether different. This was the voice of a grieving mother. Had Annie known the depth of the woman's pain, she never would have lit that candle.\n\n\"Forgive me,\" she said. \"I lost my mother and father. I always light a candle on their birthdays.\"\n\nThe ranch owner said nothing; she only stared into space as if looking at something that only she could see.\n\nAnnie guessed that something was a pretty little girl with light-colored hair." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The day Annie lit the memorial candle for Miss Walker's daughter marked a change in the old lady's demeanor. The ranch owner was still her usual demanding and difficult self, but without the same critical air or harshness. Or maybe Annie simply had grown used to the ranch owner's ways.\n\nMiss Walker made no mention of that day and neither did Annie. But it was as if the candle still burned, binding them together in an invisible glow. Never was this more evident than during afternoon tea.\n\nToday Miss Walker greeted Annie with her usual snide remark. \"What poison do you have planned this time?\"\n\n\"Darjeeling,\" Annie replied. \"From India.\"\n\nAnnie had just finished pouring their tea when the peaceful quiet was interrupted by angry voices.\n\n\"What in the world?\" Miss Walker turned her head to stare at the open door leading to the balcony.\n\nAfter setting the teapot down, Annie hurried outside and leaned over the railing. Wishbone and the man she recognized as Feedbag stood practically nose to nose. Feedbag's square-cut beard did indeed look like a nose bag worn over a horse's muzzle.\n\n\"When I get through with you, you'll be scratchin' the back of your neck with your front teeth,\" Wishbone yelled.\n\n\"And I'm gonna turn your Adam's apple into cider,\" Feedbag shouted.\n\nWishbone stepped back and rolled up his sleeves. Head down, arms windmilling, he barreled into Feedbag's middle.\n\n\"Oomph!\" Feedbag tried to fight him off and the two men fell to the ground and rolled.\n\nAnnie shook her head in disgust and stepped inside. \"It's Wishbone and Feedbag.\"\n\nA flash of annoyance crossed Miss Walker's face. \"Well, don't just stand there. Make them stop at once! I will not have my men fighting.\"\n\nAnnie left the room and rushed down the hall to the stairs. Having grown up in an all-male house, she'd done her share of making peace. But the sibling blackmail that had worked so well on her brothers would have no effect on the cowhands.\n\nBy the time she reached the courtyard, more men had entered the fray and the sickening sound of pounding fists made her flinch. Stretch swung his arm in a wide arc and his fist just missed the man wearing a black leather apron. No doubt he was the blacksmith, Michael, who also happened to be Bessie Adams's nephew.\n\nOne man fell backward and another jumped on top of him.\n\n\"Stop it!\" she yelled. \"Please, please stop it.\"\n\nBranch walked up from behind and held out his Peacemaker. \"Politeness is more effective when combined with a gun.\" His voice in her ear was as smooth as silk, and chills slithered down her spine.\n\nShe pushed his gun away. \"Don't tempt me.\"\n\nThe sharp report of a shotgun split the air and Annie jumped. The men on the ground froze and all heads turned in the direction of Miss Walker's balcony.\n\nA grayish-brown prairie falcon fell to the ground, dead.\n\n\"Well I'll be a beaver's uncle.\" Still flat on his back, Stretch stared at the bird, which was mere inches from his head. He stood and brushed himself off. \"The boss lady still is the best shot in the terr'tory.\"\n\nBranch holstered his gun, his gaze still on the balcony. \"Miss Walker did that? But isn't she still confined to her bed?\"\n\nAnnie couldn't help but laugh. \"Yes, but she keeps her shotgun by her side.\" Anyone who thought the old lady helpless would be sadly mistaken.\n\nThe blast brought Ruckus and O.T. running and even Able rushed outside to see what all the racket was about.\n\n\"What's going on?\" O.T. demanded.\n\nWishbone held his jaw. \"Feedbag accused me of being the Phantom.\"\n\n\"I did no such thing,\" Feedbag said. \"I said you looked like him.\" He pulled a circular out of his pocket, unfolded it, and held it up for all to see. The word WANTED was written in bold letters across the top of the handbill. \"These are posted all over town.\"\n\nThe image was dark and fuzzy. The man pictured might or might not have a mustache and maybe even a beard. It was hard to tell.\n\nWishbone read out loud, \"Twenty-five-hundred-dollar reward for the capture and conviction of the Phantom.\"\n\nO.T. whistled. \"That's a lot of money.\"\n\n\"Does it say how tall he is?\" Stretch asked.\n\nWishbone scanned the paper in his hand. \"It says he's between five foot eight and six foot two.\"\n\nStretch made a face. \"Heck, that can be any one of us.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but you and Branch are the only ones taller than six feet,\" Wishbone argued.\n\nEveryone turned to Branch and the air crackled with tension.\n\nHe gave a casual shrug. \"That makes the odds in our favor.\"\n\nStretch laughed and gave Branch a friendly slap on the back. \"You got that right.\"\n\nRuckus held up his hands and his crooked nose twitched. \"Enough with the accusations. If a member of the gang worked here, the boss lady would know about it. She don't miss nothin'. If the good Lord ever needed help keeping track of his flock, Miz Walker would be a good candidate.\"\n\nOne by one the men wandered away, some limping, some grumbling.\n\nAnnie kept her gaze on Branch while he walked to the barn with the others.\n\nNext to her Able said, \"What a shame.\"\n\nShe swung her head around to face him. \"What?\"\n\nAble tossed a nod at the dead falcon, his white cook's hat flopping back and forth like a building about to topple. \"That bird ain't good for nothing. Tough as doornails and tasteless as paper. It's a shame Miz Walker didn't down a bird we could eat.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nOld gumshoes never die; they just escape detection.\n\nIt was early Tuesday morning when Annie stepped out on Miss Walker's balcony to shake out a feather duster. Her hand froze the moment she set eyes on Branch. Today, instead of riding out with the men, he and Ruckus stayed behind. Curious as to why, she stood watching the two of them.\n\nHow Branch fit into the scheme of things she didn't know, but somehow he held the key to the mysterious man behind the train and bank robberies.\n\nHe was easy to pick out even at night since he stood taller than all the other ranch hands save Stretch and sat straighter in the saddle. He also walked with long, easy strides, head held high, shoulders back. The long days in the saddle chasing cattle had yet to take their toll as they had on the other cowhands.\n\nAs if feeling her gaze, Branch turned his head to look over his shoulder. He smiled and tipped his hat as if they were playing some sort of game. She refused to back down and forced him to break visual contact first.\n\nThe Pinkerton eye never slept, but in this case, neither did it see. For no matter how much she tried, no matter how much she asked for God's guidance, she was no closer to identifying the Phantom than on the day she arrived and her frustration grew daily.\n\nThough she had little to report to the Chicago office, every piece of correspondence from Mr. Pinkerton held the same terse orders: continue investigation.\n\nEasier said than done.\n\nMost of the men were gone all day except for the blacksmith, Michael, and horse trainer, Brodie. The men's absences didn't make her job any easier. She needed to get on a horse and ride the range with them. That was the only way she would ever get to know them, but that would mean leaving Miss Walker alone all day.\n\nBranch walked into the stables behind Ruckus. Moments later Branch appeared with his horse in tow. The steed limped slightly and Branch headed toward the blacksmith shop. One mystery solved.\n\nFeeling oddly depressed and out of sorts, she walked back into the bedroom.\n\nMiss Walker was quick to sense her change of mood. \"What's wrong with you? You look like your horse died.\"\n\nDenying it wouldn't do any good, so Annie said what she thought any fledgling heiress would say. \"All this talk about the Phantom has upset me.\"\n\n\"It's a good thing you weren't around when renegade Apaches terrorized the area.\" Miss Walker got a faraway look in her eyes, as if traveling back in time. \"I shot three right from that very balcony.\"\n\nAnnie shuddered. She had been thoroughly trained to fire a gun but had never shot anyone, other than a man already dead. She hoped she never had to. \"Weren't you scared?\"\n\nMiss Walker made a face. \"Who has time to be scared? You do what you have to do and get on with it.\"\n\nAnnie flicked the feather duster across the chiffonier and wash-stand. Earlier, Stretch and Feedbag had lifted Miss Walker off the bed while Annie smoothed clean sheets over the mattress.\n\n\"What you need is a housekeeper,\" she said. The ranch's former housekeepers had returned to their native home just prior to Miss Walker's accident and she didn't seem in any hurry to replace them. Annie had assumed some of the chores herself, but keeping up a large house and taking care of the old lady cut into time needed for her investigation.\n\nMiss Walker scoffed. \"I don't need anyone else gawking at me. And I certainly don't have time to conduct proper interviews.\"\n\n\"I'll do it for you, if you like.\" She slid the feather duster into the pail of cleaning supplies.\n\n\"And what do you know about hiring a housekeeper?\" Miss Walker regarded her from beneath a knitted brow. \"Have you ever hired one?\"\n\nAnnie folded an extra blanket and laid it in the oak chest at the foot of the bed. \"No, but I don't imagine it would be that hard.\"\n\nMiss Walker narrowed her eyes. \"Just exactly what did you do prior to coming here?\"\n\n\"Do?\" Annie fluffed an extra pillow and slid it under Miss Walker's head.\n\n\"To support yourself.\"\n\n\"I worked in a bakery,\" Annie replied.\n\n\"A novelist, a dance hall girl, and a woman barber all tried to persuade me that they had what it takes to run a ranch. And now a baker.\"\n\n\"I didn't say I was a baker. I said I worked in a bakery.\" That part was true. What she didn't say was that she was only twelve at the time and the bakery was run by her English grandmother on her father's side. \"That's where I learned the fine art of tea.\"\n\n\"Art and tea should never grace the same sentence,\" Miss Walker muttered, and Annie laughed.\n\nOdd as it seemed, she had grown quite fond of the old lady and had a sneaking suspicion the feeling was mutual. Normally, the rapport between them would bring her pleasure. Instead it filled her with guilt, and that made her job that much harder. She hated having to lie to the woman about who she was and her reasons for being at the ranch. Hated having to measure every word, every thought, and every action for fear of revealing more than was wise.\n\n\"Was your grandmother Indian?\" Miss Walker asked.\n\n\"No, she was my paternal grandmother.\" It was the truth. Her Pinkerton training had taught her to answer as honestly as possible without giving too much away. This made undercover agents sound credible and helped avoid inconsistencies.\n\n\"So your mother was Indian. But you said you lived in Chicago.\"\n\nAnnie nodded. \"Her tribe was moved to Indian Territory in the '70s, but since she was married to a white man she stayed behind.\" She didn't mention Kickapoo. Had Miss Walker pressed for the name of the tribe, Annie would have told her Chickasaw or Shawnee. Sometimes even truths had to be kept vague or wrapped in fabrication.\n\nWhen Miss Walker made no comment, Annie asked, \"Does my being a half-breed bother you?\"\n\n\"Why should it?\"\n\n\"It bothers some people.\" Actually, it bothered many.\n\nMiss Walker discounted this with a wave of her hand. \"So does being divorced.\"\n\nAnnie appreciated Miss Walker's open mind but she resented the comparison. A divorce wasn't noticeable at a glance but her Indian heritage was the first thing people saw. Many didn't bother looking for anything else.\n\n\"Enough idle chatter,\" Miss Walker snapped. \"Let's get to work. Bring me my checkbook so I can pay my men, and don't forget pen and paper.\"\n\nAnnie welcomed the change of subject. \"We're out of stationery.\" That wasn't entirely true but she needed an excuse to go to town. Not only did she need to telegraph headquarters, but her talk with the marshal was long overdue.\n\nMiss Walker flung up arms. \"Well, don't just stand there. Ride into town and purchase some.\"\n\nIt was exactly what Annie hoped Miss Walker would say. She hadn't wanted to leave her, but anyone able to shoot a bird out of the sky from her bed wasn't as helpless as Annie imagined.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, Miss Walker added, \"While you're there, tell the marshal to get off the stick and find the Phantom before my men kill each other. And don't you dare say one thing about my condition. As far as anyone need know, I'm on the mend.\"\n\n\"Of course you are,\" Annie said, gathering the pail of cleaning supplies. \"I'll ask Able to bring your lunch. I'll be back in time for afternoon tea.\"\n\n\"Good heavens, I hope not.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Dressed in a rust-colored skirt and lace-trimmed shirtwaist, Annie donned her white gloves as she walked into the barn and called to Ruckus. \"I need to go into town.\"\n\n\"He's not here.\"\n\nThe smooth, easy drawl made her heart flutter even before its owner stepped into view. \"They had some problems with one of the windmills.\" Branch leaned against the post, arms crossed. \"Perhaps I can help.\"\n\n\"I doubt it,\" she said. Turning, she walked out of the barn.\n\nHe followed her. \"I could drive you to town. In fact, I insist.\"\n\nShe spun around to face him. \"What makes you think I would go anywhere with you?\"\n\nHe tilted his head. \"Since you seem to derive such pleasure in watching my every move, I thought I'd make it easy for you.\"\n\nShe angled her gaze. Irritated that she had to keep reminding herself that the handsome and yes, even charming, man was in fact an outlaw, she glared at him.\n\n\"Aren't you afraid someone might recognize you in town? Perhaps the marshal?\"\n\n\"Everyone will be too busy looking at you to pay any heed to me.\"\n\n\"And why is that?\" she asked. Too late she realized she had fallen into his little trap.\n\n\"You look mighty fetching today, ma'am. All decked out like that.\" He tugged on the brim of his hat as his gaze traveled the length of her. The approval on his face obviously had less to do with her attire than the way the fabric followed the peaks and valleys of her feminine form.\n\nShe blushed but nonetheless managed to keep her composure. \"I'd be more than happy to call attention to you.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you won't. Loyalty to family and all that. I'm like a brother.\"\n\nShe almost laughed in his face. No brother ever affected her the way he did\u2014or made her feel so womanly. \"You seem very certain of what I will or will not do.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"So what's the big rush to get to town?\"\n\n\"Miss Walker needs stationery.\"\n\n\"Ah, so that's your excuse. For your information, I happen to know that there's plenty of stationery in Miss Walker's office.\"\n\n\"How thoughtful of you to keep track of our office supplies,\" she said lightly. \"Speaking of which, that wouldn't happen to be Miss Walker's pen, would it?\"\n\nHis hand flew to his vest pocket. \"I do believe it is.\" He pulled it out and handed it to her. Their fingers barely touched but it was enough to send warm ripples shooting up her arm. Hoping he didn't notice how he affected her, she took her time tucking the pen into her drawstring purse. Only when she had contained her rampant emotions did she dare lift her head.\n\nHis mouth twitched with humor. \"I have a tendency to walk off with pens.\"\n\n\"Among other things,\" she said. He lifted an eyebrow, which she took to be acknowledgment.\n\nHe shifted his weight. \"Now that we've established an adequate stationery supply, perhaps you would care to enlighten me as to your real reason for going to town.\"\n\n\"I don't owe you an explanation as to my comings and goings.\" Too late she realized that the way her eyelashes fluttered could be misinterpreted as perhaps a bit coquettish. It had been purely unintentional, of course, but the knowing look on Branch's face was not.\n\n\"It seems to me that we gang members should stick together,\" he said, a smooth, suggestive tone in his voice. \"You never know when an unwanted lawman might pop up.\"\n\n\"I don't need your help.\" She was careful to keep her expression perfectly composed and did not blink or otherwise appear flirtatious or compliant. The last thing she needed was him looking over her shoulder while she sent a telegram to headquarters.\n\n\"I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself.\" She walked away.\n\n\"Yes, I can see that,\" he called after her.\n\nShe stopped. \"What exactly do you mean by that?\"\n\nWhen he failed to answer, she glanced over her shoulder. He was gone. The way he tended to appear and disappear without notice kept her on her toes, but not as much as her traitorous heart." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Annie got a later start to town than she intended. It was after eleven by the time Ruckus returned and hitched up a wagon. So much for making the journey before it grew unbearably hot.\n\nHer meeting with Branch was still very much on her mind. Nothing disarmed a targeted victim more than good manners and charm, and most criminals had made an art form out of both. But none had mastered charm better than Branch. His smile alone had probably relieved more women of their jewelry than any weapon ever could.\n\nStill, for an escaped criminal, he didn't seem particularly worried about being caught. Come to think of it, he acted more like a hunter than the hunted. Why else would he search her bedroom or even Miss Walker's office? Or listen in on private conversations?\n\nWhen she reached town she planned to send a telegram inquiring as to whether anyone matched Branch's description. She couldn't imagine what was taking Pinkerton so long to find a file on him. It had been weeks since she sent full descriptions of Branch and the other ranch hands and she'd received nothing in return.\n\nThe sky was clear and the air shimmered with heat. Wiping her damp forehead with the back of her hand, she shook the reins, forcing the horse to pick up speed. Branch wasn't the only cause of her frustration. She still didn't have a clue as to the Phantom's identity. Her report to headquarters would be mighty sparse indeed.\n\nIt was this thought, along with the relentless sun, that kept her company as she drove into town.\n\nMain Street fairly bustled with activity, forcing her to park her wagon several buildings away from her destination. She was positive she hadn't been followed but even so, she glanced around and carefully weighed each individual before dashing into the marshal's office.\n\nThe marshal looked up and tossed what looked like a wanted poster onto his desk. His crossed feet were perched on the desktop, the worn soles of his boots plainly in sight.\n\nHe greeted her with a nod. \"Miss Beckman, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Annie replied. It was normal procedure for operatives to identify themselves to local lawmen when on assignment, but something made her proceed with caution. She glanced at the empty jail cell. \"I notice the train robbers are gone.\"\n\nHe dropped his feet to the floor, sat forward, and folded his hands on his desk. \"Not to worry. They were safely delivered to Tombstone where they will stand trial.\"\n\n\"All of them?\" she asked.\n\n\"Just the train robbers. I still don't know who robbed the bank.\"\n\nAnnie studied him. Was it possible that he didn't know that one prisoner had escaped? She doubted it and, for that reason, decided it best to keep her true identity secret.\n\n\"I came to thank you for returning my watch.\" His mustache twitched but otherwise he was without expression. \"I found it on my bureau,\" she said with emphasis.\n\nHe pushed his chair back and stood. \"That was all that was taken from you, right? Just your watch?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She hesitated. Obviously he had no intention of volunteering information. \"You did say all the train robbers were in Tombstone, right?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"That's a relief,\" she said.\n\nThe marshal rubbed his nose, which meant that he either had an itch or was lying. She guessed the latter. The question was why. She tried another tactic.\n\n\"There's talk that the Phantom himself might be hiding at the Last Chance. I'm sure you can understand my concern.\"\n\n\"Rest assured that we're doing everything possible to check out the rumors,\" he said.\n\nAs far as she knew, neither the marshal nor his deputy had questioned anyone at the ranch, so she doubted he had done everything.\n\nHe plucked his Stetson off a wooden peg. Donning his hat, he tugged the brim low on his forehead. \"Speaking of the Last Chance, how's the old gal doing?\"\n\n\"Miss Walker is doing very well, thank you.\"\n\n\"Be sure to give her my best. Now if you'll excuse me, I have business to attend to.\" Moments earlier he hadn't seemed all that concerned about business, or anything else for that matter. Now he all but hustled her out the door. He couldn't seem to make his escape fast enough. He untied his horse from the hitching post, mounted, and galloped away.\n\nAnnie stood on the boardwalk and watched him with a sense of unease. She could think of only one reason why the marshal would lie: he was involved in some way with the Phantom. Perhaps was even the Phantom himself. It was a good thing she hadn't revealed her true identity.\n\nUnfortunately, corruption in law enforcement agencies was not that unusual. Her father often spoke of the fraud that ran rampant in the Chicago Police Department in the '70s, but the problem existed in almost every large city. The agency had taken much criticism for using harsh methods, especially during all that union trouble, but Pinkerton operatives were honest and never took a bribe. Too bad the same couldn't be said for some lawmen.\n\nShe went over every word she and the marshal exchanged. He had to know she had seen Branch and still he lied. That made her job even more difficult. Now she had to work without the support of local law enforcement." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "After leaving the marshal's office, she checked her post office box and eagerly fingered the letter waiting for her. She'd sent careful descriptions of every man working at the ranch to the main office and hoped the letter would offer answers.\n\nTearing the seal on the envelope, she perused the neatly ciphered handwriting. A man matching Wishbone's description had served time for forgery. No other matches were found in the Pinkerton Rogue Gallery.\n\nShe folded the letter and tucked it into her handbag. Pinkerton's criminal photograph file was the largest collection in the country but it was nowhere near complete. Still, she'd hoped for more\u2014a lot more.\n\nMost criminals started small, committing petty crimes before advancing to more serious transgressions. It was hard to believe that the Phantom didn't have some sort of criminal record.\n\nHad Wishbone gone from forging checks to robbing banks? Possibly. Still, it was hard to imagine that the most wanted man in Cochise County was really the slow-paced whittler.\n\nNo one was in the telegraph office when Annie arrived except for the youthful operator. She stepped to the counter and he looked up from beneath his visor. Unlike the well-dressed telegraph operators in the East, he was dressed shabbily in canvas pants and a wrinkled shirt rolled up at the sleeves.\n\n\"What can I do for you, ma'am?\"\n\n\"I wish to send a telegram.\"\n\nHe pulled a yellow sheet of paper from a low shelf and handed it to her. He was an awkward-looking lad who appeared to be all legs and arms and pimply skin. He pointed an ink-stained finger at the pen and inkwell.\n\nShe thanked him and set to work. The telegram she addressed to Octavo at Napthia, cipher for Principal William at Pinkerton. As concisely as possible, she explained that she was suspicious of the marshal and then asked for another file check on Branch, giving the same description as before.\n\nShe signed the telegram Unicorn, her cipher name." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nFor a job that supposedly doesn't pay, crime has no lack of employees.\n\nThe battery-operated switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree and Bessie Adams shuffled to the dining room. Now what? Can't a body have a moment of peace? Never would she have agreed to have the switchboard installed in her home had she known people would take advantage of her good nature.\n\nPlanting her generous form on the stool, she donned the head-phones and stuck a peg in number twelve. \"What num-BER?\" Her voice might not have passed Bell Telephone standards for pleasantness but she remembered to inflect her voice at the end.\n\n\"This is Agnes.\" Agnes worked in the assay office.\n\n\"I know who you are. What number?\"\n\n\"I don't want any number. I called to tell you that Miss Walker's new heiress is in town. You told me to let you know. I saw her walk into the marshal's office.\"\n\nBessie pursed her lips. Hmm. No doubt she was collecting the belongings taken from her during the robbery. \"Let me know when she leaves.\"\n\n\"You're planning to match her with your nephew,\" Agnes announced. \"Admit it.\"\n\n\"All right, but don't go blabbing it all over town.\" Now that her older nephew, Luke, was married, finding the right wife for his brother, Michael, was of prime concern.\n\n\"I wouldn't think of blabbing, but it seems to me that a man should pick his own wife,\" Agnes said, her voice sharp with disapproval.\n\nBessie sniffed. What an absurd thing to say. \"A man picking out a wife is like asking a cow to pick out a farmer.\"\n\n\"And you think you can do better, of course,\" Agnes said.\n\n\"With a little help from the Lord.\" Fine Christian woman that she was, Bessie didn't like to take all the credit.\n\nNumbers seven, three, and fifteen lit up. \"I've got to go.\" She pulled the peg to disconnect Agnes and blinked. Mercy. Cactus Patch only had sixteen telephones. How did operators in large cities like Boston or Chicago manage thousands of them?\n\nDuring the next several minutes, every light lit up\u2014and every call was in regard to Annie.\n\n\"What num-BER?\"\n\n\"I thought you'd want to know that Miss Walker's new heiress just left the telegraph office.\"\n\nFor the next fifteen minutes the switchboard was quiet except for the hypochondriac spinster, Miss Whitehead, calling with her latest organ recital.\n\nFinally number eight lit up.\n\nBessie placed the cord into the jack and threw the back key forward. \"What num-BER?\"\n\nMrs. Daniel's voice crackled over the line. \"I just saw Miss Walker's heiress walk into the mercantile. Thought you'd want to know.\"\n\nBessie smiled. Now they were getting somewhere." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "While waiting for Mr. Green to fill her order, Annie happened to look outside and spotted someone who looked like Stretch on the opposite side of the street.\n\nShe walked to the window to get a better look. It was Stretch, all right. She'd recognize that tall, awkward form anywhere. The ranch hand looked around as if making certain he wasn't seen before dashing into the barbershop.\n\nAnnie frowned. What was he doing in town on a Tuesday? Stretch was the only cowpuncher she knew who had been in Cactus Patch during the robberies. That made him a suspect from the start. Still, unless he was planning to hold up the barbershop, it didn't explain his presence in town today.\n\nNo sooner had Stretch vanished than she spotted Wishbone. He, too, dashed into the barbershop, followed by Feedbag. What was everyone doing getting a haircut at the same time?\n\nThe door flew open, followed by a woman's hearty voice. \"Why, Annie Beckman. Imagine meeting you here.\"\n\nAnnie smiled. \"Nice to see you, Mrs. Adams.\"\n\n\"My friends call me Aunt Bessie. If surviving a train robbery together doesn't make us friends, I don't know what will.\" She lifted a bar of Pear's soap from the counter and sniffed it. \"And how is Miss Walker these days?\"\n\n\"She's on the mend,\" she replied carefully. Annie eyed the jars of hard candies. With all the desserts she'd eaten lately, she didn't dare avail herself of more sweets.\n\nMr. Green returned from the storeroom with a box of stationery. \"The finest we have,\" he announced in a nasally voice. He set the box on the counter and glared at Bessie. \"Shouldn't you be manning the phones?\"\n\n\"I can take a break if I want to,\" Aunt Bessie snapped. It was obvious that no love was lost between the two.\n\n\"I'd better take two boxes,\" Annie said, purposely sending the store owner scurrying away.\n\nWanting to take full advantage of his absence, Annie wasted no time. \"How well do you know the marshal, Aunt Bessie?\"\n\nBessie looked surprised by the question. \"Fairly well. Why do you ask?\"\n\nNot wanting to seem overly interested, Annie picked up a tin of gunpowder tea and examined it before setting it on the counter next to the other items she wished to purchase.\n\n\"I was just curious. If I recall, you said something at the train station about it being time he earned his keep.\"\n\nBessie made a face. \"Let's put it this way. If I were an outlaw, the last person I would be afraid of is Marshal Morris.\"\n\n\"He did catch the train robbers,\" Annie said.\n\n\"Yes, but through no fault of his own. He got an anonymous tip that the train would be held up. While he was at the station, someone robbed the bank. I'll bet my feathered hat that it was the Phantom.\" She lowered her voice and her eyes grew wide as wagon wheels. \"Some think the gang leader is hiding out at the Last Chance.\"\n\nDelighted that Aunt Bessie mentioned the Phantom first, Annie asked, \"Is that what you think? That one of the ranch hands is the leader?\"\n\n\"Ranch hands, my foot,\" Aunt Bessie muttered, looking self-righteous. \"I think the old lady herself is the gang leader.\"\n\nAnnie stared at her. \"You can't be serious. Miss Walker?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be the first time a ranch owner became known for duplicity. Several years ago the owner of the Redfield ranch turned out to be the leader of a group of highwaymen. And he was a respected ranch owner.\"\n\nAunt Bessie didn't come right out and say it, but her meaning was clear: Miss Walker was held in no such esteem. Bessie held up her hand and crossed two fingers. \"She's this close to the bank president, which means she probably has inside information.\"\n\n\"But from what I've been told, Miss Walker seldom ever comes to town,\" Annie pointed out.\n\n\"That's true. Far as I know, she's only been to town once in twenty years. She conducts all her business in Tombstone.\"\n\n\"Why is that?\" Annie asked. Cactus Patch was so much closer and didn't have Tombstone's bad reputation.\n\n\"I don't remember all the details, but she got into some sort of hassle with the church ladies' auxiliary over her divorce. But that isn't to say she wouldn't send others to do her dirty work.\" The older woman sniffed. \"It makes perfect sense, when you think about it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Could Miss Walker be the Phantom? The idea was ridiculous. Crazy. Still, Annie hadn't been able to think of anything else since leaving town.\n\nCertainly female criminals and gang leaders were not all that rare. Hell-Cat Maggie came to mind, as did river pirate Sadie Farrell. Still, Annie had a hard time imagining someone as blunt-spoken as Miss Walker doing anything underhanded.\n\nThe moment Ruckus stepped out of the barn to unhitch the horse from her wagon, she bombarded him with questions. \"Did you know that some of the ranch hands are in town?\" she asked.\n\n\"Shh.\" Finger to his mouth, he glanced around. He was a compact man with a horseshoe mustache and a quiet, modest demeanor. No swagger here. Not like some men she knew and immediately a vision of Branch came to mind.\n\n\"Don't say anything to the boss lady. They're pretty riled up about the acc'sations flyin' around. I sent them to town to blow off steam. Maybe then we can get some work done around here.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"That makes sense.\" Though the barbershop seemed like a strange place to blow off steam.\n\nShe waited for Ruckus to unbuckle the reins before broaching the topic foremost on her mind.\n\n\"How is Miss Walker managing the ranch? Financially, I mean?\" She had gone through the ranch ledgers and had seen nothing amiss, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. If Miss Walker was stealing to support her ranch, there could well be a second set of ledgers somewhere, perhaps locked in the safe.\n\nRuckus lowered the shafts to the ground and glanced at her sideways. \"Many have shown up hopin' to be the boss lady's heiress but you're the first to inquire 'bout finances.\"\n\n\"I hope you don't think I'm being forward.\"\n\nHe straightened and removed the horse's bridle. \"Nah. It just tells me you got a good head on your shoulders.\" Holding the horse's mane, Ruckus let his gaze wander for a moment. \"We've had our share of tough times,\" he said. \"Kind of makes me think of Job in the Bible. Ranching makes 'Jobs' out of us all. But you ain't finding any better than the boss lady. She's run this ranch for forty years. And if she can find the right heiress, I don't doubt it will go on for another forty.\"\n\n\"Even though beef prices have dropped and you're going through a drought?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Prices go up and prices go down. Rain comes and rain goes. But the Good Book tells us that no matter what happens, we need to store our trust in God's stables instead of our own. And that's what's gonna keep this ranch goin'.\"\n\nRuckus struck her as a true man of faith and she felt guilty for suspecting him. Suspicion was like walking through the desert at night. Everything that moved was suspect, even one's own shadow.\n\n\"Has she no family to take over the ranch?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"I heard talk that she had a brother. From what I gather, he was more interested in gamblin' than in running a ranch.\"\n\n\"Do you believe the rumors? Do you think the leader of the Phantom gang is here somewhere?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Don't take much stock in rumors. If the Phantom was on the premises, I'd know about it. But out there...\" He tossed a nod toward the distant mountains. \"That's a mighty big desert. Anything's possible.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "A pall had fallen over the ranch. At no time was it more evident than that night as Annie made her way to the bunkhouse with a tray of Able's sweet cakes.\n\nShe had taken up the habit of bringing the men nightly dessert. It was a good way to get to know them better and build up a rapport. For the most part, she liked the cowhands and enjoyed their teasing banter. She enjoyed even more the occasional slip of the tongue that revealed a man's background or history. Still, she resisted forming any sort of friendship\u2014ultimately, she would have to betray one if not more of them.\n\nTonight the bunkhouse was eerily silent. No laughter. No whining sound of a fiddle or mouth organ. Nothing.\n\nFeedbag greeted her at the door and for a moment she didn't recognize him. His square black beard was gone, leaving his face two-toned, the upper half the color of leather and the lower half white as a frog's underbelly.\n\nHe wasn't the only one sporting a clean-shaven face. Stretch and Wishbone had shaved, too, and not a beard or a whisker was in sight, though plenty of pockmarks had been uncovered. Now she knew what they were doing at the barbershop earlier that day.\n\n\"What do you think?\" Feedbag ran his hand over his clean-shaven jaw. \"Did you notice that my whiskers and face have parted company?\"\n\n\"I'd have to be blind not to notice.\" Her gaze traveled over Feedbag's shoulder to Branch. Their eyes locked for a moment before he winked. Cheeks flaring, she quickly turned her attention back to Feedbag.\n\n\"You all look so... different.\" Strange, more like it.\n\nFeedbag grinned. \"That's the idea.\" He took the tray of confections from her and motioned her inside with a toss of his head. No sooner had he set the tray on the long wooden table where Aunt Bessie's nephew Michael sat writing in a notebook than the men all helped themselves to sweet cakes.\n\n\"Careful,\" Wishbone muttered, brushing the powdery sugar off the table with a feather duster. \"We don't want the boss lady sending a housekeeper over here.\"\n\n\"So what's going on?\" she asked. \"Why no beards or mustaches?\"\n\nEven Ruckus had changed his appearance since that afternoon. His crooked nose twitched above the ghostly white outline left by his mustache.\n\nFeedbag lowered his voice. \"Friday night when we were all in town we heard a rumor that Wells Fargo is sending a detective to snoop around. We decided none of us best resemble any of those wanted posters hangin' in the post office.\"\n\nAnnie clenched her fists. Just hearing the words Wells Fargo detective made her stomach turn. If the rumor was true, her job had just gotten that much harder. She had a very personal reason for detesting Wells Fargo detectives, but today her alarm was purely professional. The presence of one would no doubt force the Phantom deeper underground.\n\n\"Yep. Every outlaw has himself face cover,\" Feedbag said. \"Beards and mustaches go with the terr'tory.\"\n\nStretch wiped crumbs off his mouth with the back of his hand. \"We decided to make things easier on the detective by cutting off our facial hair. That way the real outlaw would stand out like a sore thumb.\"\n\nAnnie frowned. \"Are you sure that's the real reason and you don't have anything to hide?\"\n\n\"Ain't got nothing to hide,\" Feedbag assured her. \"Least not that I know of.\" He helped himself to another cake. \"That's why I had myself a good shave. If you have something to hide, you grow a beard. If you're not hiding anything, you cut it off.\"\n\nWishbone set the feather duster on the mantel and reached in his pocket for his whittling knife. \"Simple as that.\"\n\nHer gaze shifted to Branch, who was watching Wishbone too. As if sensing her gaze, he looked her way and the corners of his mouth quirked upward. Whether he was amused at the rather odd logic or something else, she couldn't say.\n\nShe walked back to the ranch house with a feeling of unease. Of all the bad luck! A Wells Fargo detective. That was all she needed. Please, God, don't let it be true." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nOutlaws are so prevalent in some western towns you can walk from one end to the next without leaving the scene of a crime.\n\nWhat poisonous brew have you cooked up this time?\" Miss Walker asked when Annie walked into her room with a tray.\n\nToday Annie had chosen Earl Grey. She poured the hot tea and handed a cup to Miss Walker. \"This was created especially for Charles Grey, the second Earl Grey and prime minister of England. I heard that it's Queen Victoria's favorite tea.\" She then poured a cup for herself and took a sip. \"Hmm. I love that citrusy taste, don't you? The bergamot orange is what gives it that taste.\"\n\nMiss Walker took a sip of her own tea and made a face. \"Perhaps if the queen drank less citrus she would be less of a prude.\"\n\nAnnie sat on a chair next to the bed. \"How prudish can one be with nine children?\"\n\nMiss Walker grunted but said nothing. She would never admit it but Annie suspected the old woman looked forward to afternoon tea. On more than one occasion, Annie caught her staring pointedly at the clock whenever tea was late.\n\nThe other operatives laughed at her habit of serving tea when interviewing suspects or witnesses. They could laugh all they wanted, but it worked. Something about tea made people lower their guards. Perhaps that's why tea and gossip were synonymous. Miss Walker didn't gossip but she did reminisce.\n\nToday she talked about the beginnings of the Last Chance. \"My mother nursed an Englishman to health and he repaid her with a heifer. My mother saw it as her last chance to take care of the family. Instead of butchering it to feed us, she started a cattle ranch.\"\n\n\"What about your father?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"He was a drunk, a gambler, and a philanderer, and those were his good qualities. Unfortunately, they were also the qualities my brother inherited.\" Miss Walker made a face. \"Enough about me. What about you?\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\nMiss Walker arched her brows. \"I know so little about you.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid you'd find me quite boring.\"\n\n\"I doubt that.\" The old woman studied her. \"You do know that I require an heiress to sign a legal document agreeing not to marry.\"\n\n\"I'm aware of that,\" Annie said.\n\n\"So why would an attractive woman like yourself agree to such a thing?\"\n\nAnnie expected the question and had a ready answer. \"I'm a follower of Miss Nancy Rosewell.\"\n\n\"Never heard of her.\" Frown lines deepened at her brow. \"Don't tell me she's one of those\u2014what do you call them? Suffragettes?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. She believes that women have the right and, indeed, the obligation to adapt nontraditional roles if they so choose. That includes remaining single.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Since I require that of my heiress, it appears that I was a woman before my time.\"\n\n\"Indeed.\" Annie set her cup on the tray and rose to straighten the bed. \"Perhaps you'd like to take a nap.\"\n\nMiss Walker protested. \"That's all I do, eat and sleep.\"\n\n\"And dictate letters,\" Annie teased.\n\nAnnie took the cup from Miss Walker's leathery hands and set it on the tray next to her own. Today the ranch owner had finished half a cup. Perhaps Annie would make a tea drinker out of her yet. \"It won't be for much longer.\"\n\nMiss Walker narrowed her eyes. \"Since you refuse to talk at any great lengths about yourself, could you at least answer me one question?\"\n\n\"I'll try,\" Annie said, drawing the sheet up to Miss Walker's shoulders. \"But then you must rest.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Miss Walker's gaze impaled her. \"Do you think one of my men is the Phantom?\"\n\nAnnie kept her face perfectly composed. \"Do you?\"\n\n\"I asked you.\"\n\nAnnie debated how to answer. Sometimes the best way to glean information from someone was through surprise. \"There's a rumor in town that you are the Phantom.\"\n\nMiss Walker stared at her, incredulous. \"Me?\"\n\nAnnie nodded.\n\nThe ranch owner's eyes crinkled and she laughed so hard that Annie feared she would pull the leg apparatus down. \"Why, that's the most absurd thing I ever heard,\" she said between guffaws.\n\nAnnie laughed too. \"I quite agree.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Robert arrived at the ranch the next day bearing a bouquet of spring flowers.\n\nEleanor waved the spray away. \"Flowers are for funerals and I'm not in my grave yet.\"\n\nAccepting the rebuff with his usual good humor, Robert laid the flowers on the dresser. \"I'm happy to see that you're in pleasant spirits.\"\n\n\"I'm always pleasant.\" She eyed him with curiosity. \"To what do I owe this visit?\" She raised a hand. \"Don't tell me. Another offer to purchase my ranch?\"\n\nRobert moved a chair to her bedside and sat. \"Actually, it's the same one as before. Only this time the interested party has increased the offer.\" When she made no response, he asked, \"Don't you want to know by how much?\"\n\n\"I'm not interested,\" she said. \"Did you not convey my message?\"\n\nRobert ran his finger along his silver mustache. \"I conveyed your message, though not in your precise words.\"\n\n\"Ah, that explains it, then,\" she said. \"This time I trust you'll tell the party in no uncertain terms what they can do with the offer.\"\n\n\"If that's what you wish,\" he said, his voice thick with disapproval.\n\n\"I do have some other business I wish you to take care of.\" She hesitated. \"I don't want you to think you came all this way for nothing.\" In a lower voice she added, \"That girl, Annie... She's up to something.\"\n\nHe leaned forward. \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"I don't think she's who she pretends to be.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Just a feeling. For one thing, she refuses to talk about her family or background. That's always a bad sign.\" It pained her to say it. The truth was, she really liked the girl and felt a kinship with her she'd not felt with anyone in years, save Robert. After being disappointed by so many people in the past, she had to make sure that Annie was someone she could trust. The future of the ranch depended on it.\n\nRobert sighed. \"So what do you want me to do?\"\n\n\"Her last name is Beckman and she says she's from Chicago. I want you to find out whatever you can about her.\"\n\nHe sat back in his chair and crossed one leg over the other. \"Eleanor, you've entertained several women during the past couple of years and never once did you bother checking their backgrounds. Why now?\"\n\nThe answer was simple: she felt vulnerable. She hated to admit the truth even to herself and certainly had no intention of taking Robert into her confidence. Perhaps even more worrisome, she felt scared. Through the years she'd fended off more enemies than a dime novel heroine and now she could barely fend off a fly. Shooting that bird from the sky was pure luck, nothing more. The truth was that she had never felt so helpless.\n\n\"The timing bothers me,\" she said. That part was true. \"She breezes into town on the very same day there's both a train and a bank robbery.\"\n\nRobert's eyebrows rose. \"You think she was involved with the robberies in some way?\"\n\n\"Who knows? There's a rumor in town that I may even be the Phantom.\"\n\n\"You?\" Robert chuckled.\n\n\"I guess it stands to reason. You told me yourself the marshal suspects the outlaws are connected to the ranch.\"\n\n\"So I did.\" He pulled a gold fob out of his vest pocket and flipped the hinged case cover open with his thumb. \"I'll see what I can find out. A bank detective is in town. I'll ask him to look into this.\" He closed his watch and slipped it back into his pocket. \"As for the offer...\"\n\n\"You can put it in the trash along with the flowers.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nDuring surveillance, a detective must remain inconspicuous.\n\nNo loitering sober in a saloon or reading a newspaper on a horse.\n\nAnnie stood outside the corral watching Brodie put a palomino through its paces. The wrangler didn't talk much but he had a way with horses. His long sandy hair, tied back with rawhide, swung back and forth like a mare's tail. A scraggly beard made him look older than his years, which she guessed was probably early thirties.\n\nA shadow drew her attention away from horse and trainer. Branch had sidled up next to her. He hung his hands over the top fence rail and rested a boot on the lower one. \"I trust you enjoyed your trip to town.\"\n\nShe peered at him from beneath the brim of her hat. \"Yes, very much so. I dropped by the marshal's office.\" After a moment she added, \"It's always nice to drop in on other gang members.\"\n\nHe looked momentarily surprised but quickly recovered. \"Yes, isn't it?\"\n\nHe neither confirmed nor denied the marshal's involvement, but what she didn't understand was his surprise. Did he think her so dumb that she couldn't figure out how he escaped jail?\n\nThe palomino bucked past them. Kicking his hind legs, he whipped up a cloud of dust.\n\nShe brushed the dust away with a wave of her hand. \"What do you think about the rumor that there's a Wells Fargo detective in town?\"\n\nBranch turned to face her, his elbow hooked over the railing. \"I don't take much stock in rumors.\" His eyes shone with amusement as if playing a game. \"Are you worried?\"\n\n\"Wells Fargo detectives don't worry me in the least. I'd be more concerned if it was... say... a Pinkerton.\" She was treading on dangerous ground, but playing it safe had gotten her nowhere.\n\n\"Would you now?\" His voice was calm, yet rife with challenge.\n\nHad she expected a reaction, she would have been sorely disappointed. \"Most definitely. And you? Are you worried?\"\n\n\"The only ones who worry me are mysterious women,\" he said. With that, he pulled his arm from the fence and walked away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Taggert walked with long strides to the barn. Other gang members? What did Miss Beckman mean by that? Certainly she couldn't have meant the marshal. He knew she went to the mercantile, but the question was, where else did she go?\n\n\"Branch!\"\n\nAt the sound of his name, he slipped into the barn and out of sight. Men were needed to oil windmills but he had no intention of riding out to the range. Right now his main concern was sending a message, but slipping away from the ranch unnoticed was never easy.\n\nThe solution came moments later when Michael Adams walked by with his saddled horse. He was usually dressed in a leather apron and covered in black soot. Today the blacksmith wore a neatly pressed shirt and pants, his shoulder-length hair oiled and combed, his chin newly shaved.\n\nTaggert stepped out of his hiding place. \"Are you going into town?\"\n\nHad Michael been sneaking out of a married woman's bed he couldn't have looked guiltier. He hesitated before answering. \"Yeah, why?\"\n\n\"I need to get a message to the bank.\" By way of explanation he added, \"My folks are having some financial difficulties.\"\n\n\"Who isn't?\" Michael said.\n\nTaggert pointed to the pencil and notebook in Michael's shirt pocket. \"Do you mind?\"\n\n\"Yeah, sure.\" Michael pulled the writing tablet out of his pocket and handed it to him. The pencil needed sharpening and Taggert used the pen in his vest pocket instead.\n\nAfter scribbling his message in code, he tore the sheet of paper out of the tablet, folded it, and handed it over, along with the pencil and notebook. \"Much obliged.\"\n\nMichael slipped all three back into his pocket. \"Tell your folks not to worry. President McKinley's only been in office since March. He'll get the economy booming again.\"\n\n\"Sure hope you're right,\" Taggert said. Hard times generated more crime and Wells Fargo could hardly keep up with the number of stage, bank, and train robberies in recent years as it was.\n\nMichael mounted his horse and rode away like he couldn't leave the ranch fast enough. Had they been in the city, Taggert would already be on his tail, but without buildings and vehicles to hide behind, the territory made it impossible to trail anyone unnoticed.\n\nFrustrated by the physical limitations the desert presented, he considered everything he knew about the blacksmith. Bessie and Sam Adams had raised Michael and his brother, Luke, after the death of the boys' parents. Michael went to church every Sunday the preacher was in town but that could be part of his cover. He was also a fiction writer and hoped one day to give up the smithy business and write full-time. Taggert had read one of his published stories and had all but discounted him as a crook. It didn't seem possible that a man who wrote with such emotion could be the Phantom. Now Taggert wasn't so certain.\n\nCleaned up and hair combed, Michael wasn't half bad to look at. A woman might even think him handsome. Taggert couldn't remember seeing Miss Beckman and the smithy together, but that didn't necessarily mean anything.\n\nHe turned and there she was, standing by the windmill. Speak of the devil. Never had a woman affected him more or made him feel more like a man.\n\nFrom this distance it was hard to tell if she was watching him or Adams. The thought did nothing for his presence of mind. As much as Taggert hated to admit it, he sincerely hoped she was watching him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Ruckus drove Annie to church early that Easter morning in his wagon. It had been more than a month since she first arrived at the ranch and she felt restless and out of sorts. Miss Walker's demands were many; between caring for the old lady and working on the case, Annie hardly had a moment to herself.\n\nAt first she had declined his offer to drive her to church. Miss Walker's spirits seemed low of late and Annie didn't want to leave her. Then Ruckus's wife, Sylvia, offered to stay home and check in on her.\n\nStill, as they pulled away from the ranch house, Annie couldn't help but cast an anxious glance over her shoulder.\n\n\"Quit your worryin',\" Ruckus said. \"Sylvia can handle the boss lady. If she needs any help, Wishbone and Stretch are in the barn.\"\n\n\"Don't they go to church?\" she asked.\n\n\"Everyone tries to go whenever the circuit preacher is in town and, of course, today, being Easter.\" He shrugged. \"But we got a calf about ready to pull.\"\n\n\"Pull? As in deliver?\"\n\nHe tossed a glance in her direction. \"If you're gonna be the boss lady's heiress, you gotta learn the language.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" she said. \"Pull.\" She focused her attention on the wagon up ahead carrying the other ranch hands. She strained her neck trying to pick out Branch. She was curious to know if he would chance showing his face in town.\n\nRough voices rose up in a heartfelt though tuneless rendition of \"Rock of Ages,\" but all she could make out over the back side of the wagon were bobbing hats.\n\nAfter a while they pulled up behind a long line of buckboards and wagons. A crowd gathered outside the adobe church building. Children dressed in their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes chased each other while the adults greeted each other and chatted.\n\nNo sooner had she climbed out of the wagon than she spotted Branch and an unwelcome jolt of womanly awareness rushed through her.\n\n\"Annie!\" Aunt Bessie's voice rose above the murmurs of the crowd. \"How nice to see you.\"\n\nAnnie turned. \"Nice to see you too.\" Bessie was painted to the hilt and her blue eye shadow and red lip rouge clashed with her yellow-green frock.\n\nShe took Annie by the hand. \"I have someone I want you to meet.\" She led Annie over to a pretty blonde, who greeted Bessie with a radiant smile.\n\n\"This is my daughter-in-law, Kate Adams,\" she said. \"She's so important she not only has a married name, she also has a pseudonym.\"\n\nKate laughed. She was in a family way and her carefully draped shawl did little to hide her expanded waist.\n\nAnnie and Kate shook hands.\n\n\"Ah, so you're the new heiress I've been hearing so much about,\" Kate said.\n\n\"Yes, and I've been hearing a lot about you too,\" Annie said. \"I see your books everywhere.\"\n\n\"You absolutely must read them,\" Aunt Bessie said. \"Especially the one banned in Boston.\"\n\nObviously used to Aunt Bessie's outrageous statements, Kate gave her husband's aunt a fond pat on the arm. \"I wanted to stop by and see Miss Walker, but Dr. Fairbanks won't let me travel that far.\" She rubbed her extended middle. \"He thinks it's twins.\"\n\n\"How exciting. Congratulations,\" Annie said, surprised to feel a flash of envy. Marriage and family were out of the realm of possibility for a female operative. No man would put up with the demands of her occupation and she could never give up the work she loved so much.\n\n\"Please give Miss Walker my best,\" Kate said.\n\n\"Come along.\" Aunt Bessie took Annie by the arm and guided her through the crowd. \"I want you to meet another former heiress.\" They walked up to a raven-haired woman whose pretty green eyes matched her bright emerald dress.\n\n\"This is the doctor's wife, Molly Fairbanks.\"\n\nLike Bessie, Molly wore face paint, but with a lighter touch that enhanced her delicate features. \"My husband speaks highly of you. I understand you're doing a great job taking care of Miss Walker.\"\n\n\"And so is the doctor,\" Annie said.\n\nAt mention of her husband, Molly's rouged lips spread into a wide smile. \"How do you like the ranch?\"\n\n\"I love it there,\" Annie said. She always considered herself a city girl and she was surprised by just how much she had come to like the ranch.\n\n\"I meant to stop by and see Miss Walker, but I'm afraid she's never forgiven me for getting married.\"\n\n\"Molly was once a dance hall girl but now she sings in the choir,\" Aunt Bessie explained. She lowered her voice. \"She sings better when she's allowed to wiggle her hips.\"\n\nMolly gave Aunt Bessie an affectionate tap with her folded fan. \"Shh, don't tell Reverend Bland.\"\n\nAunt Bessie pointed to a nice-looking young man in a wheelchair who was in animated conversation with the preacher. \"That's her brother, Donny. He's also Dr. Fairbanks's assistant. And Molly here works in the dispensary.\"\n\nMolly smiled. \"I'm better suited to caring for patients than herding cattle.\"\n\n\"We might have something in common in that regard,\" Annie said. She hoped to identify the Phantom soon and avoid having to work with cattle altogether.\n\n\"I'd better go,\" Molly said. \"It was nice meeting you.\" She hurried to join her husband as he wheeled her brother into the church.\n\nAunt Bessie waved to her sister. \"Lula-Belle, look who's here.\"\n\nLula-Belle hobbled over, the feathers on her hat doing a wild dance above a pinched face. \"What is that ghastly color you're wearing?\"\n\nAnnie looked down at her floral rust skirt before she realized that Lula-Belle was addressing her sister.\n\nAunt Bessie arranged her frilly neckline. \"It's chartreuse and it's the latest rage.\"\n\n\"It makes you look like a seasick cow.\" Lula-Belle rolled her eyes and added, \"If you want a good seat, you'd better come.\" She shuffled away without another word, the outlandish feathers on her hat keeping time to the ringing of the church bells.\n\nAunt Bessie didn't seem the least bit put off by her sister's rudeness, but Annie couldn't remember meeting a more unpleasant person. It was hard to believe that the two women were related.\n\n\"I think you look quite lovely,\" Annie said.\n\nAunt Bessie's rouged cheeks turned a shade redder and she quickly changed the subject. \"I've been meaning to invite you to the church bazaar. It's only a couple of weeks away.\"\n\nAnnie didn't want to promise something over which she had no control. She didn't even know if she would be around that long. It all depended on how successful she was in tracking down the Phantom.\n\n\"I'll try,\" she said.\n\nAunt Bessie seemed satisfied with her answer and didn't press further. Instead she exclaimed, \"Well, count my stars, look at that!\"\n\nAnnie followed the older woman's gaze to Lula-Belle, who was actually laughing. Even more surprising: she was laughing with Branch.\n\nAunt Bessie squinted as if to get a better look. \"Do you know the man talking to my sister?\"\n\n\"His name is Branch.\" Apparently Aunt Bessie didn't recognize him from the holdup but that wasn't too surprising. He looked quite different without his whiskers. \"He's new at the ranch.\"\n\n\"What a nice-looking man. He really must be something for my sister to take a liking to him.\"\n\n\"Oh, he's something, all right,\" Annie said. If only Aunt Bessie knew the half of it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nAn honest thief is about as rare as clean socks in a bunkhouse.\n\nAnnie settled Miss Walker down for the night and retired to her own room. Seated at her desk, she went through each man's profile one by one. She crossed off the words beard and mustache next to every description and wrote none.\n\nShe studied her notes for some previously unnoticed clue as her mind recalled a verse from John 9. \"I was blind, now I see.\" Oh, God, if only I could. There's got to be something here I missed...\n\nSnatches of dialogue she'd carefully recorded, word for word, revealed nothing of value. Cross-referencing each man's schedule, she looked for odd patterns, unexplained absences, and inconsistencies.\n\nSeeing nothing new or enlightening, she tossed her pencil on the desk and walked out to the balcony. Though it was only a little after nine, already the bunkhouse was dark.\n\nThe wind had died down and after the heat of the day, the cool air felt refreshing.\n\nStars winked merrily from a black velvet sky and a full moon bathed the desert in a silvery glow. Cattle mooed and dogs bayed. From the distance came the wail of wolves.\n\nAnnie sighed. It was beautiful outside, so serene, like a church meeting. Perhaps a little walk would help her sleep. She hadn't slept well for several nights. She kept waking up and mentally reviewing her notes, pondering the many questions that kept her twisting and turning. Yes, a walk would do her a world of good.\n\nShe returned to her room and reached for her shawl. Wrapping it around her shoulders, she hastened to the door.\n\nThe hall was dark except for a gas wall sconce that lit the way with a flickering light. Soon it would run out of fuel like the other sconces and the hall would be cast in darkness. She paused in front of Miss Walker's room, but all was quiet.\n\nSomething\u2014she couldn't say what it was\u2014made her pause at the top of the stairs. For the longest while she stood in place, not daring to move. She had just about decided she was imagining things when a man stepped out of the shadows on the floor below and into a beam of moonlight slanting through a narrow window. Holding her breath, she drew back. She'd caught only a glimpse of the intruder but she knew it was Branch, no question. She would recognize his tall, straight form anywhere.\n\nBut what was he doing here? Going through Miss Walker's office again, no doubt. She could barely hear the front door open and close over the pounding of her heart.\n\nCuriosity directed her feet down the stairs. She opened the door a crack and peered outside. Not a soul was in sight. Stepping onto the veranda, she closed the door behind her ever so quietly. Soundlessly she walked down the steps and through the courtyard. She pulled the shawl tight around her shoulders, more for comfort than for warmth.\n\nShe spotted Branch walking away from the bunkhouse on the main road. Certain he was about to meet the Phantom, her breath grew ragged with anticipation. Ducking behind the adobe wall, she waited until he had moved a distance away before hurrying to the gate. The moonlight was both a help and a hindrance. She would have to take special care not to be seen.\n\nShe clutched her shawl and followed at a discreet distance. Saguaros rose from the desert floor, arms twisted in grotesque shapes. She made good use of the oddly shaped cacti, pausing behind each one until certain she had not been spotted. Something moved and she jumped. A rabbit.\n\nNo longer able to see Branch, she stood perfectly still. A wolf's howl rolled from the hills and the lonely cry sent cold shivers down her spine. She crept forward.\n\nSuddenly she heard a man's voice. Branch was no longer alone but she couldn't tell how far away the voices were. With so few obstacles to muffle noise, sounds carried in the desert. They could be close or some distance away. It was impossible to tell.\n\nHeart pounding, she darted behind a tall, hat-rack-shaped saguaro, her boots sinking into the soft soil. The voices grew louder. It sounded like an argument but the actual words escaped her.\n\nHidden behind a thick pleated stem, she peered beneath a spiny arm. Branch stood next to a man on horseback. They were about forty or fifty feet away. One of the other robbers? Bent at the waist, she moved closer and ducked behind yet another tall cactus.\n\n\"The timing's not right.\" The sound of Branch's voice snapping through the air made her jump. \"This can't be rushed.\"\n\n\"Get it done, Taggert,\" the other man growled. \"Now!\"\n\nShe recognized the second voice at once as belonging to Miss Walker's friend, Mr. Stackman, the banker. Eyes wide, she covered her mouth with her hand. What was he doing here?\n\nShe moved closer and gravel crunched beneath her foot. She froze and waited, not daring to breathe. The argument continued and relief flooded through her. \"I'll handle Miss Beckman,\" Branch said. \"The last thing we want to do is show our hand.\"\n\n\"See that you do before it's too late,\" the banker shot back.\n\nAnnie's jaw dropped. Branch and Mr. Stackman were arguing about her!\n\nTheir voices faded away, but she'd heard enough to know that Branch was reluctant to do the banker's bidding, whatever that might be. Stackman's abrupt departure spoke volumes and she sensed Branch's frustration even though she couldn't see him.\n\nWas Mr. Stackman the Phantom? It was hard to believe but not all that surprising. It wouldn't be the first time that a bank had been robbed by a trusted employee.\n\nThe pounding sound of horse's hooves faded away but she didn't dare move. Branch would have to pass by on the way back to the bunkhouse and she couldn't take a chance on being seen.\n\nAnd so she waited. Minutes passed. What was taking him so long? The air was still and even the wolf had fallen silent as if sensing danger.\n\nHad Branch walked in the opposite direction? It didn't seem likely but it was possible. She peered around the cactus. The cool desert sand seemed to glow beneath the bright full moon. She couldn't see anyone. No moving shadows. Nothing out of the ordinary.\n\nShe backed away, careful to avoid the gravelly patch, and stopped to listen again. She had just about decided to head back to the ranch house when someone grabbed her by the waist. It happened so quickly she barely had time to think.\n\n\"Let go of me,\" she cried.\n\nBranch spun her around in his steel-like arms and she pounded on his chest with her fists.\n\nShe was no match for his strength. He quickly pinned her arms to her sides and her shawl fell away. He held her so close that no defensive move was possible; she couldn't even reach for her weapon. Perhaps it would be better not to fight him. Maybe then he would let her go.\n\nHe didn't and that caused yet another problem. No longer struggling, she was now extremely conscious of his strong body next to hers. An unwelcome surge of warmth coursed through her.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" His voice was low but held an iron-hard edge.\n\n\"I... I was taking a walk,\" she stammered, drawing in a breath. She deliberately tried to ignore her awareness of him and frantically drew on her years of training as a detective.\n\n\"You were eavesdropping.\"\n\n\"That's your specialty, not mine.\" She forced herself to stare up at him without flinching. \"Is that what you were doing in Miss Walker's house earlier? Eavesdropping?\"\n\nHe didn't even bother denying it. \"Spying on me is a habit with you.\" His voice was less harsh, the dangerous edge less sharp.\n\n\"I told you I intended to watch your every move.\" She managed to speak with the slightest of tremors, which belied her quivering insides and paid tribute to Pinkerton's thorough training.\n\nSomething passed between them. A shadow? A light? Whatever it was, it was more than awareness, more than attraction, and more than a physical response.\n\nAs if he, too, felt something, he inclined his head, his moonlit face suffused with indecision. His quick intake of breath sounded as if he were battling for control.\n\n\"And what have you discovered about me so far?\" His low baritone caressed her ears with velvet smoothness.\n\nThe slight but masculine scent of bay rum hair tonic was intoxicating and a shiver rippled through her. \"You mean other than the fact that you're an arrogant outlaw?\"\n\n\"You say this even after I returned your watch and have shown you nothing but the utmost courtesy?\"\n\nShe laughed, but more out of nervousness than humor. \"Is this what you call courtesy? Holding me hostage?\"\n\nHis fingers dug deeper into her flesh. \"You probably wouldn't like the alternative.\"\n\nShe didn't like the sound of that but refused to back down. \"It would take a great deal more than the return of stolen property for me to change my opinion of you.\"\n\nTheir bantering had taken on an intense air but the verbal wall failed to counter his nearness. She was aware of every flex of his muscles, every flicker of expression, every inhaled breath.\n\nHe angled his head and their gazes locked. The pale moonlight made his eyes look more amber than blue. Surely if he intended to do her harm, he would have done so by now. The thought gave her little piece of mind.\n\n\"What a rarity. A woman slow to change her mind.\"\n\nShe moistened her lips and immediately regretted it, for the action only drew his gaze to her mouth. It was only a glance but it felt like so much more; it felt like the beginning of a... kiss.\n\n\"I... I wish I could return the compliment,\" she stammered. \"But there's nothing rare about a common thief.\"\n\n\"I wonder what it would take to change your opinion of me.\" His hands moved slowly up her arms and the sensation sent warm shivers racing along her flesh.\n\n\"There's n-nothing you can do to change my opinion,\" she said, her denial sounding false even to her own ears.\n\n\"Ah, now that's a challenge too good to pass up.\"\n\nHe pulled her so close his breath on her face felt like a warm ocean breeze. Her pulse skittered. She closed her eyes. If he was going to kiss her, she wished he would hurry up and do so.\n\nA warm chuckle filled the air. \"Ah, an easy conquest if I ever saw one.\"\n\nShe opened her eyes and glared at him. \"I wouldn't be so certain of that!\"\n\nHis grin broadened and he let her go. \"What did you hope to find out when you visited the marshal?\"\n\nShe scooped her shawl from the ground, shook away the sand, and wrapped it around her shoulders like armor. Having regained her professional state of mind, she answered his question with one of her own.\n\n\"Why were you discussing me with Mr. Stackman?\"\n\nRound and round they circled, hammering away at each other like dueling lawyers.\n\n\"What were you looking for in the bunkhouse?\" he asked.\n\n\"What were you doing in the ranch house earlier?\" she countered.\n\nThey weren't getting anywhere and she soon grew tired of the game. The feeling was apparently mutual because he stopped moving. They stood a good ten feet apart but it felt much closer.\n\n\"Why are you really here, Miss Beckman?\"\n\n\"To make your life miserable, Mr. Taggert!\"\n\nThe use of the name spoken by the banker seemed to stun him\u2014or at least render him speechless. When she turned to leave, he didn't try to stop her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "By the time Taggert got over the shock of hearing Miss Beckman call him by his real name, she had long disappeared. He could have followed her, of course, and easily caught up with her, but he decided to let her go. For now.\n\nDrat! What had Stackman been thinking, to use his real name? He kicked a rock, but instead of relieving his frustration, he hurt his toe.\n\nHe gritted his teeth. Stackman wasn't the only one to put him in a foul mood. The woman was a problem in more ways than one. After holding her in his arms, he now knew she packed iron, but that was the least of it. Never had a woman attracted him more.\n\nThe sheen of her shirtwaist paled in comparison to the glow that came from the woman herself, but that wasn't all; a man could get lost in those vibrant eyes of hers. Never had he seen such thick, long lashes. And those full, sweet lips had parted just for him... Thinking about them quickened his pulse. It had taken a great deal of willpower not to answer the invitation so plainly written on her finely sculptured features.\n\nThe woman obviously felt the same attraction.\n\nNot good, not good at all. The last thing he needed was a diversion, especially one as fetching as Miss Beckman.\n\nBusiness! Must concentrate on business. So far, his time on the ranch had turned up nothing in the way of useful information. He was no closer to blowing the Phantom's cover now than when he had first arrived. Stackman was running out of patience and Taggert couldn't blame him.\n\nHis reputation as a Wells Fargo detective was on the line; Taggert needed answers and he needed them now.\n\nHe didn't start out as an investigator. Had it not been for his father's violent death, Taggert probably would have pursued a law degree. Not that he was complaining. Working under Chief Special Officer James B. Hume, Taggert had the privilege of catching desperadoes from San Francisco to St. Louis and recovering enough stolen loot to keep the company solvent. The same dogged determination used to track down ten-thousand-dollar bandits was utilized to hunt down fifty-dollar embezzlers.\n\nHe meticulously avoided distractions whenever he was on assignment. Some even said he had a one-track mind. That and his powers of observation made him a force to be reckoned with. But to tell the truth, he was sorely out of practice. His gut feeling wasn't all that sharp, not like it used to be. No surprise there. For more than two years he did nothing but push paper around a desk. A man's skills could get mighty rusty from lack of use.\n\nAfter what happened with the Vander case, he never thought he would be in the field again. He no longer had the stomach for it. But that was before his best friend and Wells Fargo detective Paul Lester disappeared without a trace while working on the Phantom case. Not only did Taggert intend to uncover the outlaw's identity, but he wouldn't rest until he found out what had become of his friend.\n\nThat was easier said than done. None of his previous assignments had been as challenging as the current one. The Phantom was either exceptionally clever or exceptionally lucky. Cleverness only went so far and luck always ran out, and that was what Taggert counted on.\n\nMiss Beckman might hold a clue to the man's identity or simply be an innocent bystander. Whatever the answer, he could not, would not permit himself to be further distracted by the lady's considerable charms.\n\nHe started for the bunkhouse with long, even strides. He was so deep in thought and the moon was so bright that he almost missed the flash of light on the distant range." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Running most of the way, Annie finally reached the courtyard, chest rising and falling beneath her labored breathing. She rested her hand on the gate and glanced back. No sign of Branch.\n\nShe lowered her shawl and fanned her face with a flick of her hand, trying to calm her rebellious emotions.\n\nTry as she might, she couldn't shake away the memory of being held by Branch. A gal could get lost in those strong arms of his. And what about those shoulders and that chest? Although he hadn't kissed her, it wasn't hard to imagine his lips pressed against hers and her mouth quivered as if in anticipation.\n\nAppalled at the direction her thoughts had taken, she pressed her fists to her forehead. Stop it! What was wrong with her? She was here for one reason and one reason alone. She had no time for foolish notions.\n\n\"Get it done, Taggert. Now.\"\n\nThe memory put her thoughts back on track. Why was the banker interested in her? Had Miss Walker said something?\n\nShe didn't know whom to trust. The ranch hands? Could she trust any of them? Normally when she worked a case, she was in constant contact with the Pinkerton home office or, at the very least, local law enforcement. Neither was possible out here and she felt isolated and very much alone. She tried to think what her father would have done had he been assigned to the case. When no answers came, she said a silent prayer.\n\nOkay, God. What am I missing? What am I not seeing?\n\nShe finished her prayer with a sigh and stepped through the gate. A flash of light caught her eye and she stopped to take a closer look. The light was barely larger than a corn kernel. It glowed for a moment and then went out.\n\nOdd. She thought all the ranch hands had returned after sundown, but maybe not. Or maybe she was simply imagining things. With a backward glance, she hurried into the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nThe only person to get into trouble for following a good example is a counterfeiter.\n\nAnnie peered out of the glass door that afternoon as she pulled gray hair from the bristles of Miss Walker's hairbrush. Still shaken by last night's encounter with the man she now knew as Taggert, she tried to calm her rampant emotions.\n\nThe rumbling sound of Dr. Fairbanks's horseless carriage offered a welcome relief from her wayward thoughts. The doctor's vehicle pulled in front of the house with a boom that shook the glass panes.\n\n\"Good heavens,\" Miss Walker called from her bed. \"It's not bad enough that you make me wear this confection. Now I have to put up with Sawbones and his old clunker. Can't a woman be left alone?\"\n\nAnnie turned away from the door. \"You look very pretty today.\" Earlier she had washed Miss Walker's hair in a basin, brushed it, and tied it back with a blue ribbon.\n\nWhat Miss Walker called a confection was in reality a nightgown Annie found tucked in a bureau drawer in her room. Miss Walker denied it was hers and said it had probably been left by one of her failed \"heiresses.\" No matter, the gown was a vast improvement over the plain nightshirts Miss Walker favored. The blue brought out the color of her eyes.\n\nMiss Walker was still grumbling when Annie left the room and hurried downstairs to let the doctor in. Chatting amiably, he followed her up to the second floor and into Miss Walker's room.\n\nHe greeted his patient with a cheerful smile. \"Good morning.\" He set his black bag on the floor. \"How are we today?\"\n\nImpatience crossed Miss Walker's face. \"We should only be used by politicians, expectant mothers, and people with tapeworm.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind,\" Dr. Fairbanks said good-naturedly. He pulled off his hat and tossed it onto a chair. \"I have some good news. We can get rid of this apparatus.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful,\" Annie exclaimed. It was the news she had been waiting for.\n\n\"Does that mean I can also be rid of this annoying cast?\" Miss Walker asked.\n\n\"The wooden horse goes but the cast remains,\" he said. \"At least for a couple more weeks.\"\n\n\"Weeks!\"\n\nFairbanks shrugged. \"It takes a good twelve weeks for a bone to heal properly, and at your age\u2014\"\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Miss Walker glared up at him. \"Like any woman my age, I'm not a day over fifty!\"\n\nThe doctor chuckled. \"I'll let you and your bones argue that point.\"\n\nAnnie gave Miss Walker's shoulder a reassuring squeeze. \"Just think. You'll be able to sit up and move around.\"\n\n\"I want to do more than sit.\" Miss Walker threw off her covers. \"Don't just stand there,\" she snapped at the doctor. \"Get on with it.\"\n\nWithout further ado, Dr. Fairbanks unhooked the leather straps attached to the cast and gently lowered her injured leg onto the bed. \"There you go. You're not ready to dance yet, but it's a start.\"\n\n\"I don't want to dance,\" Miss Walker growled. \"I want to get out of bed.\"\n\nFairbanks scratched his head. \"Very well. I have a pair of sling-top crutches in my office. They were designed for wounded soldiers but I've yet to find any crutch safer.\"\n\n\"Now! I want to get out of bed now,\" Miss Walker insisted. \"And I want to go downstairs.\"\n\nFairbanks considered her request for all of two seconds. \"In that case we'd best get some help. Miss Beckman, would you be kind enough to fetch a ranch hand or two?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\nMoments later Annie found Ruckus, Stretch, and Branch sitting in the shade of the veranda. It was unusual to find the ranch hands sitting around so early in the day, but then, it was exceptionally hot.\n\n\"We just got through pulling twin calves,\" Ruckus explained.\n\nStretch mopped his forehead with his kerchief. \"It was like pulling a locomotive uphill.\" Ruckus grinned. \"They're in the barn if you want to see them.\"\n\n\"I do,\" she said. \"But first we need help carrying Miss Walker downstairs.\"\n\n\"Downstairs, eh? She's making progress.\" Ruckus stood. \"Come on, Stretch. You too, Branch.\"\n\nHer heart skipped a beat. \"Oh no, I mean...\"\n\nRuckus looked from Branch to her. \"Is there a problem?\"\n\nBranch's face darkened dangerously and he looked ready to pounce. What was he so afraid she would say? His real name? Or that he and the banker were in cahoots?\n\n\"Two of you should be enough,\" she said. She gave Branch a meaningful glare. We won't be needing you.\n\nOblivious to the undercurrents, Ruckus persisted. \"We might need an extra hand taking that apparatus apart.\"\n\nBranch's gaze remained on her face. \"Let's not keep the boss lady waiting,\" he said with a few visual daggers of his own.\n\nSeeing that it would do no good to argue, Annie spun around and led the way into the house and up the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Leaving Stretch to dismantle the apparatus over the bed, Branch and Ruckus carried Miss Walker down the stairs and planted her on the leather couch in the large room.\n\nDr. Fairbanks lifted her injured leg ever so carefully and propped it upon a footstool. The plaster cast encased the entire leg, leaving only her toes showing.\n\nAnnie placed a pillow behind her back. \"How's that?\"\n\n\"Fine, fine,\" Miss Walker snapped, though she sounded out of breath. \"Now stop fussing, all of you.\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks arched his brows. \"You do know you'll have to go through the same ordeal tonight when you retire?\"\n\nMiss Walker ran her hand over the pillow by her side. \"I'll sleep down here if necessary.\"\n\nAnnie felt Branch's gaze and her face burned. Avoiding his eyes, she kept her focus on the doctor. \"Do you know if Mr. Stackman will be coming to the ranch?\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks shook his head. \"I heard he's in Tombstone on business. Won't be back for a day or two.\"\n\nThis time she did glance at Branch but his closed expression revealed nothing. Her mind scrambled. She couldn't be certain if Mr. Stackman was truly the Phantom, but she now knew that he and Branch were in cahoots. For that reason alone, it would be interesting to know the nature of the banker's business.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, Branch's gaze sharpened and his eyes grew dark. The visual warning to watch what she said couldn't have been clearer had he spoken aloud.\n\nAnnie quickly looked away.\n\n\"Ruckus, how's my horse?\" Miss Walker asked. She never failed to query her ranch hands on her horse's care.\n\n\"Like I told you, Miz Walker,\" Ruckus said. \"Baxter has been groomed and exercised every day.\"\n\nMiss Walker gave a brusque nod. \"I should hope so.\"\n\nStretch walked into the room. \"I took all the wood down and carried the lumber outside. Anything else you need me to do?\"\n\n\"That's it.\" Ruckus turned to Miss Walker. \"If there's nothing else, me and the boys will mosey on back to work.\"\n\n\"Not so fast.\" Miss Walker's demeanor had improved considerably now that she was downstairs and she took full command of the room. \"What's going on?\"\n\nRuckus and Stretch exchanged glances. \"Goin' on?\"\n\n\"You both look like you've been attacked by a hay cutter.\"\n\nRuckus wiped a hand across his clean-shaven face. \"There's a Wells Fargo detective on the loose and word is he's looking for a man with a beard and mustache.\"\n\nMiss Walker's eyes narrowed. \"Why should a detective be of any concern to you?\"\n\nRuckus clutched his hat to his chest, his face as red as an overripe tomato. \"The truth is... I haven't always been picking grapes in the Lord's vineyard. As a lad, I stole tobacco from a general store.\"\n\n\"Oh dear.\" Miss Walker pushed a strand of hair away from her face. \"A hanging offense if I ever heard of one.\"\n\n\"And when I went to the owner's house to make amends, he thought I was seeing his wife.\" Pointing to his crooked nose, he continued, \"I didn't even see his fist coming.\" He lifted his gaze to the ceiling. \"As God is my witness, I swear I never even thought about smoking after that.\"\n\nMiss Walker leveled her gaze at Stretch. \"And what dreadful crimes are you guilty of, pray tell?\"\n\nStretch cleared his throat, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down like a rubber ball. \"I'm a wanted man, but it's all a misunderstanding. All I did was walk into a bank and a woman teller thrust a bag of money at me.\"\n\nMiss Walker narrowed her eyes. \"Why would she do that?\"\n\n\"She mistook me for an outlaw. That's 'cause it was a windy day and I wore a kerchief over my face to keep from swallowing dust. I tried to explain but everyone in the bank dropped to the floor.\" He shrugged. \"I figured, heck, if they're gonna throw money around, who am I to argue?\"\n\nAnnie couldn't make up her mind if Stretch spoke the truth or was simply weaving one of his tall tales. Probably a little of both.\n\nMiss Walker waved her hand in dismissal. \"Who indeed?\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks began examining Miss Walker, asking her a series of questions. Stretch and Ruckus left but Branch stayed.\n\n\"You can go now,\" Annie said, keeping her voice low. \"Unless, of course, you also have a confession to make.\"\n\n\"Confession might be good for the soul but it doesn't do much for one's reputation,\" he whispered back. \"What about you? Anything you dare confess?\"\n\n\"I have a perfectly clear conscience,\" she said.\n\nHis gaze settled on her mouth. \"And not so much as a wayward thought ever crossed your mind?\"\n\nShe refused to let him intimidate her. \"Not a one.\"\n\nHis eyes met hers. \"What a pity.\"\n\nHe moved away. Shaken, she stared at his back. How did he do that? One look from him and she was a quivering mess inside. She tightened her hands into fists. Whatever his little game, it had to stop. Now!\n\nDr. Fairbanks finished checking Miss Walker's pulse and blood pressure. He folded his stethoscope and stuffed it into his black bag. \"See that she doesn't overdo. I'll be back in a day or two.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor.\" Annie fingered the envelope in her pocket, which she hoped he would mail for her. She wrote to ask Pinkerton to check the files for the name Taggert. \"I'll see you out.\"\n\n\"You needn't trouble yourself,\" Branch said, stepping between her and the doctor. \"I'll be more than happy to do the honors.\"\n\n\"Don't rush off.\" Miss Walker arranged a pillow behind her back. She looked tired, her face strained, but she showed no sign of giving in. \"Stay and join us for afternoon tea. You too, Branch. I haven't had a chance to get to know you.\" She swung her gaze to Annie. \"What poison do you have planned for today?\"\n\nAnnie stared straight at Branch. \"Gunpowder.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Sounds lethal.\"\n\nIt took every bit of willpower not to be charmed by his crooked smile. \"Not lethal enough.\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks donned his hat. \"Thank you, but I'm due back in town. I have patients scheduled for this afternoon. Come along\u2014Branch, is it? I'll show you how to crank up the car.\"\n\nThe two men walked out of the room.\n\nAnnie wanted to scream. Branch knew she wanted to be alone with the doctor. It was as if he could read her mind.\n\n\"Well? Don't just stand there.\" Miss Walker waved Annie away. \"Go do your tea thing. We've got letters to write.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Able shook his head as Annie set cups and saucers on a tray. The kitchen was hot and beads of sweat battled with the freckles on his forehead. Even his cook hat seemed to droop more than usual.\n\n\"Pity sakes, Miz Annie. You're hoppin' around like a mad toad. The way you're taking it out on the dishware, we ain't gonna have none left.\" He pointed to a bowl on the counter covered with a moist cloth. \"Why not put all that fury to good use and knead my dough?\"\n\nFeeling guilty for taking her frustration out on Able, she apologized. It wasn't his fault that Branch flustered her the way he did. She washed her hands and sprinkled them with flour. She then lifted the cloth and worked the soft mound of dough with the heels of her palms. Her efforts probably did wonders for the bread but failed to calm the knot of emotions churning inside.\n\nAble covered the bowl with the cloth. He attended his dough like a mother with a newborn babe. \"So what's got you so riled up?\"\n\n\"Nothing. I'm just anxious to get back to Miss Walker. She's no longer in traction but she still has a cast.\"\n\n\"Sounds like your days as a nursemaid are numbered.\" He poured boiling water into the teapot, swished the pot around, and emptied it.\n\nHe waited for her to measure out the tea leaves before filling the pot with hot water.\n\n\"Gunpowder tea from China,\" she said. The tea was rolled by hand to protect the fragile leaves. She loved the little popping sounds the pellets made as they unfurled.\n\nAble set the kettle on the stove and added a plate of freshly baked cookies. \"Do you want me to do the hocus-pocus thing of yours?\"\n\n\"I'll do it.\" Hocus-pocus indeed! She placed her hands on the teapot and turned it slowly. She inhaled the smoky smell that drifted from the spout and thought of her grandmother, whom she still missed after all these years. \"In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.\"\n\nFeeling more in control, she carried the tray out of the kitchen and down the hall. The sound of Miss Walker's laughter was followed by what sounded suspiciously like the whinny of a horse.\n\nWhat in the world...? Annie stepped into the entry hall, her mouth open. Miss Walker's red roan, Baxter, stood in the middle of the large room.\n\nBranch was the first to speak. \"I thought Miss Walker would like to see for herself how her horse was doing in her absence.\"\n\nThe man never failed to surprise her and was unlike any criminal she'd ever pursued. Why would a man capable of such kindness to an old lady choose a life of crime? He was like two separate people rolled into one.\n\nMiss Walker smacked her lips and ran her hands along her horse's withers. It did Annie's heart good to see the ranch owner looking contented and less like an invalid.\n\nThe horse dipped his head and buried his nose in her hand. Laughing like a schoolgirl, Miss Walker stroked his muzzle. \"You old crow bait. They been taking good care of you?\" Right on cue the horse's head bobbed up and down.\n\nAnnie was still staring at the horse and its owner when Branch stepped in front of her. \"May I?\" Without waiting for a response, he took the tray from her hands and set it on the low table. The chairs had been moved aside to make room for the animal.\n\nShe sidled up to him. \"What you did for Miss Walker... it's very thoughtful of you.\" She kept her voice low.\n\n\"Yes, wasn't it?\"\n\nShe frowned. His mocking tone made her wonder if perhaps he had an ulterior motive for seeking Miss Walker's favor. Like a mother shielding her child, she felt a protective surge rush through her. Whatever his game, he'd better not involve the old lady.\n\n\"I'm surprised she didn't give you a tongue-lashing about damage to her floors,\" she said, though it was doubtful that anything could harm the red terra-cotta tiles.\n\n\"Considering the company she keeps, the floors should be the least of her worries,\" he whispered back.\n\n\"I quite agree,\" she replied coolly, or at least as coolly as her trembling limbs would allow.\n\n\"Did you recover from your late-night outing?\" he asked.\n\nNo. Aloud she said, \"Yes, thank you.\"\n\n\"A woman shouldn't wander about the desert at night.\" The dark look in his eyes belied the concern in his voice. \"It could be... dangerous.\"\n\n\"So I discovered,\" she said.\n\n\"Can I take that to mean we're in accord and that from now on you will confine your walks to daytime?\"\n\nNo such accord prevailed. \"Is that an order?\" she asked. What was he afraid she'd discover? She'd already caught him with the banker. Who else might she find him with?\n\nHe folded his arms and regarded her from beneath a furrowed brow. \"Just a bit of friendly advice from one family member to another.\"\n\nA warning if she ever heard one. \"Your advice is... well taken,\" she said. Over my dead body.\n\nSeemingly satisfied with her answer, he glanced at the tray. \"Do you mind if I help myself to some of that... what did you call it?\"\n\n\"Gunpowder tea.\" She picked up the teapot. \"Oh dear, you'll have to forgive me. I only brought two cups.\"\n\n\"He can have mine,\" Miss Walker called from the couch.\n\nThe man whose name she now knew was Taggert cracked a crooked, heart-pounding smile. \"Care to join me, Miss Beckman?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "That night Annie couldn't sleep and after hours of twisting and turning, she finally gave up. She checked her watch in the light of the moon. It was a little after 3:00 a.m. Sighing, she walked out onto the balcony. The night air was brisk but felt good against her fevered brow.\n\nIf only she could quiet her raging thoughts. Names ran through her head like sand through a sieve. Stretch, Ruckus, Feedbag... could any of them be the Phantom? Then there was Wishbone and\u2014 Before she could run through the entire list of suspects, the sound of galloping hooves alerted her. The horse came to a stop and the rider slid from the saddle.\n\nWho was out riding at this time of night? She leaned over the railing to get a closer look but horse and rider had disappeared into the stables.\n\nShe rushed into her room, quickly threw on her clothes, and grabbed a shawl. Moments later she crept through the courtyard. Light shone through the cracks between the wooden boards. The night rider had lit a lantern.\n\nShe peered through a knothole. Michael!\n\nShe drew back. What was he doing out so late? Aunt Bessie's nephew was the one person she hadn't seriously considered a suspect, which was why she hadn't pursued him. She didn't want to consider him even now.\n\nIt was moments like this when she hated her job.\n\nThe light went out and Michael emerged. She stood perfectly still while he headed in the opposite direction toward the bunkhouse. A strong smell of bay rum drifted toward her and her nose twitched.\n\nHe vanished into the building. Moving away from the barn, she hurried to the house. She paused at the gate to glance around and a cold shiver ran down her spine.\n\nThe strangest feeling came over her and hairs stood up on the back of her head. A dark form standing a distance away told her that someone else stood watching too." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nA con artist is usually a man of many convictions.\n\nMr. Stackman stopped at the ranch house on his way home from Tombstone, bringing with him the Sunday Epitaph. He also had other news to share: The buyer from the East was determined to purchase the ranch and had increased his two previous offers. Again, Miss Walker refused to consider selling.\n\nAfter the banker left, Annie sat on a chair opposite Miss Walker and broached the subject with care. \"It sounded like a generous offer,\" she said, though she couldn't imagine why anyone would want to purchase a cattle ranch in the current economy.\n\nMiss Walker glanced up from the newspaper. \"My daughter is buried here and so are my parents.\" She said nothing about her former husband. \"One day I will be buried here too.\"\n\nAs if to announce the subject closed, she turned back to her newspaper and groaned. \"There they go again, suggesting that we ranchers build fish ponds.\"\n\nAnnie frowned. \"Fish ponds?\"\n\n\"It's the latest madness. Not long ago it was all about barbed wire. That was going to save us ranchers. Now it's farming fish. That's all we cattle ranchers need to worry about. Fish!\"\n\n\"Is there anything in the paper about the train robbers?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Miss Walker said. \"Not a thing.\"\n\nAnnie hesitated a moment before venturing forth with the next question. \"How well do you know Mr. Stackman?\"\n\nMiss Walker lowered the newspaper. \"Robert? I've known him for years. He's a good friend. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"I was just... curious.\" Curious hardly described Annie's interest in Mr. Stackman. He now topped her list of suspects.\n\nMiss Walker folded the newspaper and tossed it aside. \"If he had his way, I would have married him years ago.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"The ranch.\" Miss Walker sighed. \"It's my life and no man wants a wife who puts her work first.\"\n\nAnnie knew from experience that what Miss Walker said was true. Every man who'd ever courted her had soon grown weary of her sudden disappearances and long absences. Of course, it didn't help that she had to keep her occupation secret. After a while, she ran out of excuses for having to leave town. One man decided she had too many \"sick\" relatives for his liking and ended the courtship. Another beau accused her of seeing someone else.\n\n\"Is that why you insist that your heiress sign a spinster pact?\" she asked.\n\nMiss Walker chuckled. \"Never thought of it in those terms, but yes. It's either the ranch or a man. You can't have both.\"\n\n\"Lots of male ranchers are married,\" Annie said.\n\n\"Yes, but that's only because most women are fools. They'll take whatever a man dishes out, even neglect. Men are far more demanding and far less forgiving.\"\n\nAnnie wondered if any of the Pinkerton operatives would agree. The nature of the detective business made it impossible to have any sort of normal life, even for men. Many who ventured into marriage ended up divorced or estranged\u2014her father the exception, though who knew how long her parents' marriage would have lasted had her mother not died of consumption at such a young age.\n\n\"Do you think that's true of all men?\" she asked.\n\n\"All that I've ever met.\" She studied Annie. \"As you no doubt know, I was married once. Years ago. Once you go through a divorce... trust me. You don't ever want to go through that again.\"\n\n\"It must have been very difficult,\" Annie said.\n\n\"You have no idea, but Ralph gave me no choice. He said it was either him or the ranch.\" Her gaze sliced through Annie like a bullet. \"Having second thoughts?\"\n\nAnnie frowned. \"About what?\"\n\n\"About the stipulations that will prevent you from marrying, should you become my heiress.\"\n\nAnnie couldn't imagine anyone signing such a document but her job required her to play her role to the hilt. Such deception was, after all, for the greater good. Wasn't that what she always told herself? Only this time it didn't work; she hated being dishonest, especially with the old lady.\n\n\"Well, are you?\" Miss Walker snapped. \"Speak up, girl.\"\n\n\"No. No second thoughts,\" Annie said, but the words tasted like acid on her tongue.\n\nMiss Walker gave her a piercing look. \"You seem to be on friendly terms with the new man, Branch.\"\n\nAnnie's face blazed. \"I was just thanking him for bringing your horse to you.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Makes me wonder which of us he was trying to impress. Me or you.\"\n\n\"It would do him no good to impress me,\" Annie said. \"The man's a\u2014\" She caught herself just in time. Revealing that he was an outlaw would serve no real purpose at this time, and might even hinder her investigation.\n\n\"Go on,\" Miss Walker said. \"You were saying?\"\n\n\"I was just going to say he strikes me as a... ladies' man,\" Annie said.\n\nMiss Walker greeted this news with raised eyebrows. \"In that case, I'd better watch my step.\" Offering no clue as to whether she was joking, Miss Walker abruptly changed the subject. \"Would you mind asking Able to help me upstairs before he turns in?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Annie rose and thought of something. \"I meant to ask you, what's on the range east of here?\"\n\nMiss Walker stifled a yawn. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Occasionally I see a light at night and I was just wondering what was out there.\"\n\n\"Nothing's out there, just desert and cattle. Perhaps what you saw was a windmill. Sometimes moonlight bounces off the steel blades.\"\n\n\"That must have been it,\" Annie said, though she was almost positive that it wasn't." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "The following morning Annie crossed to the barn looking for Ruckus. She found him sitting on a stack of hay, his crooked nose buried in a letter.\n\nRuckus shook his head but didn't look up.\n\nShe sat on the hay by his side. \"Bad news?\" she asked. It was unusual to see him look so serious.\n\n\"My son. He's now officially an ordained preacher.\"\n\n\"Why, that's wonderful, Ruckus. You must be very proud.\" She studied him. The skin that previously supported a mustache was now sunburned. \"So why do you look so downhearted?\"\n\n\"I counted on him settling down in Cactus Patch and preaching at our church. We need a new preacher. Don't get me wrong; I like Reverend Bland, but he's a circuit rider and can only make it here every other week or so. We need a full-timer.\"\n\n\"Where does your son plan to preach?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"Africa. Would you believe such a thing? His mother will have a conniption.\" Ruckus folded the letter and tucked it into his vest pocket. \"I don't know why he has to preach the gospel in a foreign country. We got all the sinners a body could want right here in Cactus Patch.\"\n\nAnnie patted his arm. \"Have you told him how you feel? Perhaps if he knows how much you want him to preach here, he'll change his mind.\"\n\n\"It don't matter how I feel. It's not my son's job to please me. It's his job to please God, and he told me plain out that this is what God means for him to do.\"\n\nShe drew her hand away and said nothing. She didn't know what to say. She'd spent nearly her entire life trying to please her father. As the only girl, she'd had to work ten times harder than her brothers to gain her father's attention. Old habits died hard. Even now, three years after his death, she never stopped trying to earn his approval. Not once in all that time had she thought to ask whether God had another plan.\n\nHis eyebrows met. \"Sorry,\" he said. \"Don't mean to bother you with my troubles. You look like you got enough of your own. The boss lady giving you a hard time?\"\n\nShe shook her head. Miss Walker was the least of her troubles. \"I guess all this talk about the Phantom has made me nervous,\" she said, though in reality she was frustrated by her lack of progress in tracking him down.\n\n\"You don't have to be nervous. Me and the boys won't let anything happen to you or the boss lady.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"It's hard not to worry. Maybe if I was able to lock the ranch house doors, I could relax more. As it is, anyone can walk in.\"\n\n\"If it's locks you want, then it's locks you'll get. I'll have Michael take care of it today.\"\n\nShe had no idea it would be that easy. \"Thank you, Ruckus. I feel better already.\"\n\nHe grinned, his normal good humor restored.\n\nShe gave careful thought to what to say next. As much as she wanted to believe that Ruckus was as honest and forthright as he seemed, she couldn't take a chance. It never paid to underestimate a criminal, especially one as cunning as the Phantom.\n\n\"Another thing... the other night I saw lights on the east range. I was just wondering what was out there.\"\n\nShe studied him, but his only reaction was a shrug. \"Not much of anything. Cattle, cactus, and old bones. Far as I know, none of them carry lanterns.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Miss Walker suggested it was moonlight glancing off a windmill.\"\n\n\"Could be.\" He cocked his head. \"You weren't thinking it was the Phantom roaming the desert?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I don't know what I was thinking.\"\n\n\"That's the problem with suspicion. Once it takes root there ain't no stoppin' it. Colors everythin'. Suspicion makes every rock look like a monster.\"\n\nWhat Ruckus said was true; it was an occupational hazard.\n\n\"Reminds me of a story my son told me,\" Ruckus said after a while. \"A traveler stopped by a church and inquired as to the kind of people who worshipped there. Said the people at his former church were a bunch of hypocrites.\n\n\"The old minister shook his head and said, 'You won't find any different here,' and the traveler moved on. A little while later, another traveler stopped by and inquired as to the kind of people belongin' to the church. He 'xplained that his former church was filled with warm and carin' people and it saddened him to move away. The minister shook the traveler's hand and said, 'You'll find the same kind of people here.'\"\n\nShe eyed him thoughtfully. \"Are you saying we should all don rose-colored glasses?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"What I'm sayin' is that we see what we want to see. Some of the boys see the Phantom in everyone, and that's asking for trouble.\"\n\n\"They're not alone. Aunt Bessie even suggested that Miss Walker was the Phantom.\"\n\nRuckus chuckled. \"That's about as dumb as settin' a milk bucket under a bull. You better not let the boss lady hear that.\"\n\n\"She already knows and she thought it was a fine joke.\" She picked up a piece of straw and twirled it in her fingers. \"It's hard to know what to believe or whom to trust.\"\n\n\"It's times like this that you best put your trust in the Lord.\" Ruckus slanted a glance at her. \"God's as trustworthy as an old bloodhound.\"\n\nAnnie smiled at the image that came to mind. \"You still feel that way? Even though He called your son to Africa?\"\n\nRuckus nodded. \"I still feel that way. Oh, I rant and rave sometimes 'bout God's will, but in the end it always works out for the best.\"\n\nShe wished she had Ruckus's trusting faith. Hers was a questioning faith. At times she interrogated God like He was one of her suspects. If You're so good, God, why do You allow so much evil to exist? Her job required her to mingle with criminals, and after a while it took its toll. Even her father made that complaint and said it was the thing he hated most about being an operative; after a while you saw nothing but bad in people.\n\nShe tried to combat the problem by constantly reminding herself of all the good in the world, but it was hard and sometimes even impossible.\n\nShe brushed pieces of straw from her skirt. \"So do you think the Phantom is on the ranch?\"\n\n\"Nah. I'll vouch for each and every one of the boys.\"\n\n\"Even the new man, Branch?\" she asked.\n\nBefore he could answer, a voice rang out, \"What about me?\" Taggert stepped into the barn.\n\nHer pulse skittered and suddenly she couldn't breathe. Somehow his very presence seemed to suck the air out of every space he entered.\n\nRuckus stood. \"She was just asking me if I thought you were the Phantom.\"\n\nBranch's brows lifted. \"And how did you plan to answer?\" He asked the question of Ruckus but he kept his gaze squarely on her.\n\n\"I was about to say that if you were an outlaw, I'd eat my hat.\" Ruckus stretched out his arms and sauntered away, spurs jingling. \"Come on, we have work to do.\"\n\nTaggert stared at her a moment, a puzzled look on his face, before turning to follow Ruckus.\n\n\"I'd hate to think that a fine Christian man like Ruckus should have to eat his hat,\" she called after him.\n\nTaggert stopped, his back to her. \"Perhaps we should suggest a straw hat.\" He cast a glance over his shoulder, his hooded eyes impossible to read. \"They're easier to digest.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nTo a pickpocket, the world is at his fingertips.\n\nTaggert kept a detailed log on all the ranch hands. He knew what time each man left in the morning and how they spent their days. He'd searched Miss Walker's office and had even managed to open her safe one night, but could find no personnel files.\n\nHaving no written records, he had to depend on astute observation and an attentive ear. It was a slow but effective process. He knew where each man had started on the road of life and had a pretty good idea how each wound up at the Last Chance.\n\nIt was possible to tell where a cowpuncher came from by the way he rode his horse. Those from the northern country of Montana and Wyoming sat back on the rig with stirrups in front. Cowboys from the South sat straight up from head to feet. The differences between northern and southern cowboys showed up in all areas of ranch work, from the way a man roped a steer to the way he rigged his horse.\n\nHe knew which cowpunchers were quick to anger and which were even-tempered. He could pretty much guess who went to church with a faithful heart and who went to socialize.\n\nHe'd narrowed the suspects down to three, four if he counted Old Timer. Stretch, Wishbone, and Michael headed his list.\n\nThe question that plagued him was where Miss Beckman belonged on his list of suspects. The woman was like a butterfly flitting from bloom to bloom. In the last twenty-four hours alone, Taggert had found her laughing with Stretch, discussing politics with Wishbone, helping Brodie calm a skittish mustang, and discussing family and God with Ruckus.\n\nTaggert even caught a glimpse of her the night Michael returned home in the wee hours of the morn, and it wasn't the first time he'd seen the two of them together at odd times.\n\nShe seemed perfectly at ease around men and didn't so much as blush when one of the cowpunchers forgot his manners and used a curse word in her presence. Either she was raised with brothers or had spent a great deal of time around males.\n\nThough she remained perfectly ladylike in speech and manner, the intensity in her eyes at times puzzled him. It was as if she was out to prove herself to someone or something. The Phantom? It was hard to know.\n\nAt other times she gazed at him with what could only be described as sadness. Was it sadness for him or for herself? Either way, he had to resist a nearly overwhelming urge to take her in his arms and comfort her.\n\nNo question, the lady had gotten under his skin. The thought made him wince. Not good, not good at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Ruckus was as good as his word. By late that afternoon, Aunt Bessie's nephew Michael had installed locks on the ranch house doors.\n\n\"There you go,\" he said, handing Annie two keys. \"One is for the front and one for the back. You only need the keys to open the door from the outside.\" He showed her how to turn the inside bolt to lock and unlock the door.\n\n\"Are these the only keys?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yep, so you better not lose them.\" He stooped to gather his tools and dumped them into a wooden box one by one.\n\nDressed in overalls, his hair uncombed and a two-day growth of stubble on his chin, he looked nothing like he had the other night. He even smelled different; instead of bay rum he smelled of tobacco, horses, and heated iron.\n\n\"Michael, I couldn't help but notice that you sometimes keep rather late hours.\"\n\nHe looked up from beneath the brim of his hat, his cheeks stained red. His scarlet face spoke volumes in Michael's favor. Certainly no one as daring as the Phantom would blush.\n\n\"Did Miss Walker say something?\"\n\n\"No. She doesn't know you've been keeping late hours.\"\n\nMichael studied her. \"I didn't mean to disturb your sleep.\"\n\n\"You didn't. I was already awake. But I am curious as to who is keeping you up all hours of the night. A young woman, I imagine.\"\n\nHe gave her a shy grin. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"I can't think of any other reason why a man would wander around at night doused in bay rum.\"\n\nHe rubbed the back of his neck. \"Her name is Charity, Charity Chase. I'm sure you'd recognize her if you saw her. Not only is she the prettiest gal in church, she reads all my stories and poems.\"\n\nAnnie couldn't help but smile at his enthusiasm. \"I would like very much to meet her.\"\n\nA frown erased his silly grin. \"I'd rather you not mention this to my aunt. She's not particularly fond of Charity and doesn't believe a man is capable of picking his own wife.\"\n\nThat sounded like Aunt Bessie, all right. \"Don't worry. I won't say a word.\"\n\nHe tossed a screwdriver into his toolbox with a clunk and snapped the lid shut.\n\n\"Michael, when you come home late at night, have you noticed anything strange?\"\n\n\"Strange?\" He stood with his toolbox in hand. \"No. Can't say that I have. Why? Have you?\"\n\n\"Every so often I see a light east of here, but everyone tells me there's nothing out there.\"\n\n\"Far as I know, there isn't.\" He shrugged. \"The desert can sure be deceiving at times. I've found some quartz out there. Some copper too. Could just be moonlight reflecting off rocks.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's a possibility,\" she said.\n\n\"Anything else you need?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, Michael. Thank you. That's all.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Annie's official training began early that Monday morning. Miss Walker insisted she no longer needed a nursemaid and that it was time Annie learned the ropes if she had a mind to ever become a rancher.\n\nAnnie was given a brown mare named Caper. The horse had a thick mane and a star on her forehead. She also had a gentle disposition.\n\n\"We'll see how you do with Caper before we put you on a horse with more gumption,\" Ruckus said.\n\n\"I can handle any horse you give me,\" she said.\n\n\"I'll be the judge of that.\" He stood over her like an old mother hen while she saddled her horse and mounted.\n\n\"Well, what do you know?\" he said with a nod. \"You'd be surprised how many women are helpless as a cow in quicksand around horses. One of Miz Walker's past heirs didn't know how to ride nothin' but sidesaddle. A steer sees you on one of those cockeyed saddles, he's likely to laugh his hide off.\"\n\nHolding on to the reins, she grinned down at him. It felt good to be on a horse. Riding with the ranch hands afforded her a chance to observe and perhaps get to know them better. A person could tell a lot about a man when he didn't know he was being watched.\n\nShe adjusted her hat's stampede string. Miss Walker insisted she dress properly in a divided skirt and man's shirt, and told her to take whatever she needed from the wardrobe.\n\nIt took needle and thread to make Miss Walker's clothes fit and a snip with scissors to create a false pocket for her weapon. Though all the ranch hands packed guns, she had no intention of letting anyone know she did too.\n\nRuckus raised his arm and gestured for Branch. Branch rode over on a black steed.\n\n\"Miss Beckman,\" he said with a slight dip of his head.\n\n\"You two stay with me,\" Ruckus said. \"Still got some soon-to-be mamas out there. Keep your eyes and ears open for any of 'em in distress and we'll pull 'em in. Let's go.\"\n\nStretch and Wishbone took up the lead and the others fell in line. They followed cattle trails across the desert, kicking up dust and sending prairie dogs diving for cover.\n\nRuckus explained the different cattle. \"That's a weaner,\" he said, pointing to a young grazing bovine. \"He and his mama recently parted company. And that there is a first-calf heifer.\" He pointed to a brown-and-white animal whose sides stuck out like saddlebags. \"Looks like she's about ready. Heifers about to give birth are called springers.\"\n\nRuckus's depth of knowledge amazed her. He knew his cattle like most people knew their children. He had the observation skills of a private eye and only his trusting nature made him unsuitable for the job.\n\n\"What you see out here is God's hand at work,\" he said.\n\nShe glanced at his profile. \"Do you ever have doubts?\" she asked. \"About God?\"\n\nHe glanced at her. \"I reckon everyone has doubts.\"\n\n\"There's so much I don't understand. Like, for example, why God allows evil to exist.\"\n\nWhenever she asked such questions of her pastor in Chicago, he made her feel guilty. \"You must have faith, child.\" That was his answer for everything.\n\n\"If God was small enough to understand, I reckon He wouldn't be big enough to worship,\" Ruckus said.\n\nShe smiled. \"You should have been a preacher, Ruckus.\"\n\nHis expression grew serious. \"I would have been if it weren't for my feet.\"\n\nShe blinked. \"Your feet?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Years ago I appeared before a church committee in Texas and asked to be considered for the preacher job. Back then you didn't need no special training. All you needed was a call from God. The committee quoted Romans 10:15, which talks about the beautiful feet of those who preach. Then they made me take off my boots, took one look at my ugly dogs, and sent me on my way. Fortunately, my son has his mother's feet.\"\n\nAnnie shook her head. \"I never heard anything so ridiculous.\"\n\n\"Ignorance of God and the Bible ain't unusual. The world is full of misinformed Christians.\" Ruckus shrugged. \"Anyway, who needs a pulpit to preach? I can do all the preachin' I want from right here in my saddle.\"\n\nHe sounded optimistic but she detected a note of regret. \"Maybe this is what God wanted you to do all along.\"\n\n\"Maybe so. Maybe so,\" he said, his voice wistful.\n\nStretch called to him and Ruckus galloped away. Without Ruckus's ongoing commentary, it was even harder to ignore Taggert, who rode just ahead. Her gaze swept across his broad shoulders and strong back. He looked perfectly relaxed and in tune with his horse, yet he managed to exude a restless power that both excited and intrigued her.\n\nHe looked over his shoulder. Heat rushed to her face but she forced herself not to look away. He reined in his horse, allowing her to catch up to him.\n\n\"How are you enjoying the... scenery so far?\" he asked.\n\nShe glared at him. He couldn't possibly read her thoughts, could he? \"I've seen better.\"\n\nHe grinned and her heart skipped a beat. There should be a law against handsome thieves.\n\n\"Are you referring to GTF?\" he asked.\n\nThe reference to her \"God the Father\" file startled her. If only he knew...\n\n\"No one can even come close to GTF,\" she said. \"Especially you.\"\n\nRuckus stopped ahead next to an enormous steel windmill. \"All right, men. Spread out.\"\n\nTaggert flashed his white teeth. \"I believe he means the lady too.\"\n\n\"I know what he means.\" Tugging on her reins, she pulled away from him and turned her horse in Stretch's direction. If anyone could still her rampant thoughts, it was the lanky cowpuncher and his tall tales.\n\nAway from the others, Caper showed more spunk, but the mare had a smooth, even gait and needed very little direction.\n\nAnnie pulled alongside Stretch's gelding. He gave her a nod and pointed to a calf wobbling on spindly legs. \"Can't be more than an hour or two old,\" he said.\n\nShe had no fondness for cattle, but the young ones never failed to make her smile. The mother eyed them with suspicion, then nuzzled her calf with her nose as if trying to steer him away from them.\n\nAnnie waited until they were a distance away from mother and babe before asking her question. \"I heard that some of the married men live in cabins.\"\n\n\"That's right. Why? You planning on getting married?\"\n\n\"No, it's just that sometimes at night I see a light.\" She pointed in the general direction.\n\n\"Ruckus is the only married man, and his cabin is that way.\" He pointed a thumb over his shoulder.\n\n\"Then what do you think I saw?\" she asked.\n\nHe gave her a lopsided grin. \"Maybe you saw the Red Ghost.\"\n\nShe should have known Stretch would launch into one of his tall tales. \"I'm serious.\"\n\n\"So am I. Years ago there was something called a U.S. Camel Corps. The army imported the animals to help forge a way to California. After the war, the camels were sent to carnivals and zoos, but some have been spotted roamin' this here desert, including the Red Ghost.\"\n\nShe glanced around. Camels in Arizona? Could that possibly be true? \"Why is it called the Red Ghost?\" she asked.\n\nHe spit out a wad of tobacco juice. \"Because of its red fur. Some farmer supposedly shot him dead a few years ago. 'Course, there're still camel sightings from time to time, but I haven't seen any myself.\"\n\n\"That still doesn't explain the lights,\" she said.\n\n\"I reckon not.\" He tugged on his reins to study a group of cattle peacefully grazing. None appeared to be distressed.\n\nSpotting Feedbag ahead, she pressed her knees in her horse's sides and took off in his direction. Something caught her eye, a movement. She veered off the trail and over to a patch of sage.\n\nA bovine staggered around dragging its hind legs. The animal appeared to be blind, or maybe just confused. Pressing her head against a boulder, the critter threw her head back, teeth grinding. She then fell to the ground with a strange strangling noise.\n\n\"Oh no!\" Annie waved frantically for help and Taggert was the first to arrive. He quickly dismounted and leaned over the fallen animal.\n\nHe pulled off his hat and grimaced. He didn't say a word. A shake of the head said it all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Annie and the cowhands stood in a circle around a fly-covered carcass while Ruckus checked it over. Hats had been removed out of respect and everyone spoke in low tones.\n\nSo far that morning, sixteen dead cattle had been found, all within a short distance from the windmill the men called Job, after the biblical figure.\n\nO.T. dipped his finger in the water trough and raised it to his lips. \"Salt!\" He spit out the word with a stream of saliva.\n\nAnnie looked from one man to another. No one moved and she was the first to speak. \"What does that mean?\"\n\nStretch slammed his hat on his head. \"It means that someone poisoned the cattle on purpose.\"\n\nPoisoned? Annie felt sick to her stomach. \"I don't understand. Don't cattle need salt to live?\" They had passed several salt licks so far that morning.\n\n\"Yeah, but too much salt will kill 'em,\" Feedbag explained.\n\n\"Who'd want to go and do a thing like that?\" Taggert asked. He looked every bit as shaken as she felt.\n\n\"I don't know, but let's stop jawing and get to work.\" O.T. spun around and walked away, issuing orders. \"Bury these bodies and keep the live ones away from that water.\"\n\nStretch thrust a shovel in her hands. The sound of spades hitting the soil reminded her of the day her father had been buried. It had been cold and rainy that morning, a fitting atmosphere for a sorrowful event.\n\nToday, in contrast, the sun blazed merrily overhead and the unrelenting heat made her feel lightheaded.\n\n\"Here.\" Taggert held out a canteen of water. \"Better drink this.\"\n\nPerhaps it was the shimmering air rising from the desert floor, or maybe it was the stench of death all around her. Suddenly she had the craziest feeling that Taggert wanted to take her in his arms. She was equally positive that had he done so, she wouldn't have objected.\n\nIt was a dangerous notion and not one she could afford to entertain. She did not dare think about anything but putting him and his cohorts away for good.\n\nShe stood her shovel upright and took the canteen. The water soothed her throat but did nothing to banish her dark thoughts.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said in a shaky voice and handed the canteen back.\n\n\"Maybe you'd better sit,\" he said.\n\nShe shook her head. An operative never backed down from a job, no matter how unpleasant. Right now her job was to make the others believe she was capable of becoming Miss Walker's heiress. \"I'm all right.\"\n\nHe stepped away without a word but the concern on his face spoke volumes. Looking at him, she felt as if her breath had been cut off.\n\nHe hung the canteen from his saddle, rolled up his sleeves, and reached into the back of a wagon for a shovel. From beneath lowered lashes, she watched him dig, admiring his power and strength.\n\nStop it, she screamed silently. Swallowing hard, she tore her gaze away.\n\nA glance at a nearby carcass turned her stomach. She gripped the handle of her shovel tight. It was times like this that she wished she'd followed her father's wishes and had become a teacher. Or married what's-his-name, the law student her father liked so much. She hesitated momentarily as she remembered something Ruckus said. \"It's not my son's job to please me. It's his job to please God.\" Why his words came back to her at that particular moment she had no idea.\n\nWith grim determination, she plunged her spade into the soft sandy soil and tried to put her troubled thoughts to rest." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nWells Fargo Detective Agency: We never forget.\n\nA half-moon lit the nighttime sky, but it was warmer than in previous weeks. For this, Annie was grateful. She shifted in her saddle and Caper nickered. She had been sitting on her horse for the last two hours, waiting. Stakeouts were her least favorite part of the job. She preferred action to sitting around and hoping for something to happen.\n\nOf course, stakeouts in the city were far different from stakeouts in the desert, where there were so few places to hide. She stayed in the shadow of the barn so as not to be seen from the bunkhouse, but should Miss Walker happen to look out the window, she might well wonder what Annie was doing.\n\nIt had been a horrible day. It was late afternoon by the time the corpses were buried, the salt water replaced with fresh, and the other water outlets checked.\n\nMiss Walker had taken the loss of cattle in stride. She blamed the other ranchers in the area. \"I install and maintain windmills and they want my water,\" she said by way of explanation.\n\nIt didn't seem that far-fetched to think that some mean-spirited rancher might have dumped salt into the water trough. The fight for water rights was not new and the recent drought had made things progressively worse.\n\nStill, something about the whole affair didn't sit right with Annie. For one thing, the location of the windmill seemed all wrong. An outside rancher would have had to pass two windmills before reaching the one called Job. It made no sense. Why not poison the water closest to the property line? Why take a chance on trespassing and being caught?\n\nHer guess was that the perpetrator was someone from the Last Chance and she intended to find out who that person was\u2014if it killed her.\n\nA light flashed in the distance and her thoughts scattered like field mice. Feet pressed hard into the stirrups, she rose half out of the saddle. Another light flicked on and off, followed by a steady glow. She lowered herself. Someone was out there.\n\nThe question was, did that same someone poison the water? And if so, what, if anything, did it have to do with the Phantom?\n\nMr. Pinkerton's voice echoed in her head. \"I mean it\u2014you're to take no unnecessary chances.\"\n\nShe hesitated, and as if sensing her indecision, Caper whickered and bobbed her head.\n\nThe pinpoint of light beckoned like a beacon and the temptation grew too strong to ignore.\n\nMaking up her mind, she jerked on her horse's reins and kicked her sides. \"Gid-up!\" Caper sprang forward and carried her swiftly along the dusty trail.\n\nShe traveled for about a mile before the light went out. \"Whoa.\" She brought her horse to a standstill, her gaze focused straight ahead. Caper gave a low whicker. \"It's okay, girl.\"\n\nThe stars were bright, the half-moon orange, and the air still. The lone cry of a wolf broke the silence, followed by a cattle's long lowing as if to warn the herd of danger.\n\nAt first, she thought the pounding was her heart. She then realized the sound was coming from behind. Stretch's tale of a red camel came to mind but she quickly pushed the thought away. Unless camels wore iron shoes, the racing hooves belonged to a shod horse.\n\nNot wanting to be caught out at this time of night, she slapped the reins and Caper took off. The light in the distance flashed again and she headed straight for it.\n\nShe urged her horse to go faster but the horse behind her still gained. Spotting the dark outline of a windmill a short distance away, she made a quick decision. She veered off the trail and made her way through the milling cattle and reached the windmill without mishap. Dismounting, she hid in the shadow of the water tank, though it probably wasn't necessary since several cattle stood between her and the trail. With luck, the horseman would whiz by too fast to notice her or her horse.\n\nShe got her wish. The black steed shot past, and though she only got a glimpse of the rider's dark form, she knew it was Taggert. No question.\n\nSo what was he doing out here this time of night? Who was he in such a hurry to meet?\n\nShe slid her gun into the holster at her thigh and mounted. She then followed in Taggert's wake." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Taggert dismounted and pulled his Peacemaker out of his holster. This was where he thought he saw the light, but maybe not. It was hard to tell. Distances could be deceiving at night, especially in the desert. He staked his horse and circled the granite wall rising from the desert floor. The jagged spires stood out against the star-pocked sky. The shadows of the lower buttes looked like animals ready to spring.\n\nHe crept forward slowly, cautiously, stopping from time to time to listen. Every desert creature seemed to be holding its breath. He stayed in the shadow of the granite peaks and was just about to turn back when he heard something: the slow, steady drip of water.\n\nHe holstered the gun and reached into his pocket for safety matches. Striking a match on the sole of his boot, he held it shoulder high. The flickering flame revealed what looked like the mouth of a cave. It was hard to tell how deep the cave went, but he guessed it was deep enough for a hideout. Was this where the Phantom lived? He would know more tomorrow when he checked out the cave in the light of day.\n\nHe blew out the match before it burned his fingers.\n\nThe crunch of gravel made him reach for his gun again.\n\nSomething or someone was coming from behind. He pulled his Peacemaker from his holster and whirled about.\n\nStaying close to the rocky wall, Taggert walked ever so slowly. Something snapped beneath his boot and he froze. Whoever was on the trail had obviously heard it, too, and stopped moving.\n\nTaggert's ears strained to pick up the softest sound. From a distance came the muffled beat of hooves. Someone was getting away but there was nothing he could do about it. Someone else stood between him and his horse.\n\nHe gripped his gun, but otherwise didn't move a muscle. Come out, come out, whoever you are.\n\nAt long last the shadow moved forward and stepped into the stream of moonlight.\n\nTaggert practically dropped his gun. \"Miss Beckman?\"\n\nShe froze, her gun pointed straight at him. \"Hello, Taggert.\"\n\nThey stared at each other like two wily animals meeting at a watering hole.\n\nHe drew in his breath. \"I didn't expect to see you here.\" She was, in fact, the last person he expected to see. The moonlight bounced off her weapon but it was too dark to make out much more than its pocket size. \"Plan on shooting anything with that toy?\"\n\n\"John Wilkes Booth managed and his was a Deringer with one r. This one has two.\"\n\nShe was right in that regard. The original derringers were spelled differently and had only one shot. Imitations such as hers had two shots. \"You might be interested to know that this is a Peacemaker\u2014with one r\u2014and I've got a good mind to arrest you. I believe that's two r's.\"\n\nShe surprised him by laughing. \"You're joking, right?\"\n\n\"No, I'm pretty sure that's the correct spelling,\" he said.\n\n\"You have no authority to arrest anyone.\"\n\nHe hadn't expected to blow his cover so soon, but his investigation was going nowhere, fast. He didn't know how Miss Beckman fit in the scheme of things, but he meant to find out and there was no time like the present.\n\n\"I'm working undercover. As you unfortunately know, my name is Taggert. Jeremy Taggert. I'm a Wells Fargo detective.\" He held up his badge with his free hand.\n\nEven in the pale moonlight the shock was evident on her face. It took her a full moment to recover or at least lower her weapon.\n\n\"Th-that still gives you no authority to arrest me,\" she stammered.\n\nShe was right, of course, but he had no intention of letting such a small detail deter him. \"We can remedy that by a trip to town. The marshal has all the authority we need. Not only are you a nuisance, but your presence here tonight allowed someone, perhaps even the Phantom, to get away. So I suggest you start talking and begin by telling me your real name.\"\n\n\"Arresting me would be a grave mistake,\" she said, \"even if you could.\"\n\n\"Really. Suppose you give me one good reason why.\"\n\nShe reached into her waistband and held up her palm, revealing a shiny shield. \"I'm also working undercover. Pinkerton National Detective agency.\"\n\nThat was a good reason, all right, but a blow to the head couldn't have stunned him more. \"A Pinkerton?\" He could barely get the words out. \"You're kidding, right? But... but you're a woman.\"\n\n\"Yes, that has been brought to my attention,\" she said.\n\nOf all things, a woman detective. Great guns! What an unexpected turn of events. He holstered his weapon. \"Okay, I take it back. I won't arrest you.\"\n\n\"How considerate of you.\" She tilted her head. \"So that's how you escaped jail. Am I right in assuming that the marshal knows your true identity?\"\n\n\"He does.\" The hanging was a setup from the start and it worked like a charm. \"And so does the bank president.\"\n\n\"Mr. Stackman.\" She frowned. \"It seems like everyone knew your true identity but me.\"\n\n\"I consider it a compliment to my skills that you didn't figure it out,\" he said. No doubt she was just as annoyed as he for failing to pick out a fellow detective.\n\n\"No one told me there was a second undercover agent.\"\n\nShe sounded angry and he couldn't blame her. It was imperative that a detective be aware of any other agents in the environment. A lack of such information could result in embarrassment or even tragedy. He knew that from painful experience.\n\n\"Did you inform the marshal of your presence?\" he asked. Notifying local law enforcement was the first order of business for a Wells Fargo detective. He would be willing to bet Pinkerton operatives were required to follow the same procedure.\n\n\"I suspected you and the marshal were in cahoots, but never did I imagine the possibility that you were working on the right side of the law.\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows. \"You thought Morris was a crook?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"You were walking around free. What else could I think?\"\n\nHe blew out his breath. \"It seems like we've been working at cross-purposes.\"\n\n\"Yes, haven't we?\"\n\nHe still couldn't believe he'd been so easily fooled by her. \"Miss Walker's accident? That wasn't planned?\"\n\nShe gasped. \"You don't think that I\u2014\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"The thought did occur to me.\"\n\n\"I would never\u2014\" She angled her head. \"So how did you manage to work your way into the Phantom gang?\"\n\n\"With a golden tongue and a loose purse. You can talk your way into anything if you ply others with enough drinks.\"\n\n\"I see. And what exactly are you plying out here in the middle of the night?\"\n\nThumbs hooked onto the belt of his holster, he considered how to use this rather surprising development to his own advantage. \"If you're who you say you are, then you already know the answer to that.\"\n\n\"You saw the lights too.\"\n\nThey eyed each other and he noted that she still held her gun. Was that because she didn't want him to know where she kept it, or did she still not fully trust him?\n\n\"Who do you think the Phantom is?\" he asked.\n\n\"Do you think I would tell you?\" She paused a beat. \"A Wells Fargo detective?\"\n\nCompetition between the two agencies led to hard feelings and the Vander affair made relations even more strained, but Taggert suspected another reason for her reticence.\n\n\"In other words, you haven't the vaguest idea.\"\n\nShe lifted her chin. \"I didn't say that.\"\n\n\"Didn't have to. If it'll make you feel any better, I haven't got a clue either.\"\n\nShe considered this for a moment. \"What makes you think the Phantom is here, at the Last Chance?\"\n\n\"One of our detectives sent a telegram to the head office telling us he'd tracked the Phantom to the ranch following a holdup. That was the last we heard from him.\" It was the disappearance of his colleague and friend that had brought Taggert out of semi-retirement. He tilted his head. \"And you? What makes you think he's here?\"\n\n\"Mr. Pinkerton mapped out the robberies and this seemed to be the most centralized location.\"\n\n\"Ah. An admirable deduction.\" His mind raced. \"What do you say we combine resources?\"\n\n\"Sorry, not interested.\" She turned and quickly walked away. He followed.\n\n\"Think about it.\" They reached the horses and he prevented her from mounting with a hand on her arm. Her gun was no longer in sight.\n\n\"Two heads are better than one. If we help each other, we'll capture the guy in half the time. Then we can both go home.\" He didn't mind detective work, but working with cattle was pretty near killing him.\n\nShe looked up at him. In the soft moonlight her eyes sparkled like stars and her skin looked as smooth as fine silk. He still couldn't believe she was a Pinkerton.\n\n\"And Wells Fargo will take full credit,\" she said.\n\nOf course it would, but somehow he had to convince her that the benefits of working together far outweighed the negatives. He lowered his head and her warm, womanly fragrance momentarily made him lose his train of thought.\n\n\"That's negotiable.\" Over his dead body. \"So what do you say?\"\n\nStars blazed like fire in her eyes. \"I say forget it.\"\n\nHer voice sounded almost as husky as his. He didn't need his detective skills to know that she was affected by his nearness. Of course, he'd be in a better position to negotiate if her nearness didn't muddle his own thoughts as well.\n\nNevertheless, he moved closer. Mere inches separated his mouth from the soft curve of hers. He inhaled her sweet, warm breath. Her lips trembled and he could sense her quickening pulse.\n\n\"We're both working on the same side of the law.\" He kept his voice low, smooth, persuasive.\n\n\"What a pity,\" she said. \"I was so looking forward to turning you in.\"\n\n\"If that's a no, you'll regret it, I promise you.\"\n\nShe flashed a smile. \"I don't think so.\" She moved away, breaking the strange spell that held him in its grip.\n\nShe mounted her mare with one smooth move and stared down at him. \"It's been most enlightening.\"\n\n\"Yes, hasn't it?\"\n\nShe turned her horse in the opposite direction and trotted away.\n\n\"Good luck,\" he called after her. \"And may the best man\u2014or woman\u2014win.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nTurning temptation into opportunity is what a thief does best.\n\nAnnie returned to the ranch in a daze. A Wells Fargo detective. She still couldn't believe it. Why hadn't she figured that out before now or at least suspected it?\n\nShe knew from the very beginning that Taggert didn't fit the picture of a criminal, but a lawman? That never even entered her head.\n\nI was blind.\n\nWe never see things as they really are, her brother once said. It was his way of explaining why her father was so against her being a detective. \"In Pa's eyes you'll always be his little girl and in need of protection.\"\n\nPeople didn't only see what they wanted to see; they saw in others what they needed to see. As long as Taggert was an outlaw in her eyes, he was off limits. She could then more easily control the worrisome feelings his nearness invoked. Now it was going to be a whole lot harder to ignore the way he affected her, if not altogether impossible.\n\nShe unsaddled Caper and one by one checked each stalled horse. None were overheated or gave any other indication of having been recently ridden. Odd. She distinctly heard someone ride away while she and Taggert were tracking each other.\n\nMoments later she stood in the courtyard with only the night sky for company and tried to make sense of her ambiguous thoughts. Taggert wasn't an outlaw but he worked for Wells Fargo, and the very thought made her cringe.\n\nWells Fargo detectives were Pinkerton's biggest competitors, but that wasn't why Annie harbored such contempt for them. Her reasons were far more personal and ran deep as the ocean. It was a Wells Fargo agent who had caused her father's death.\n\nShivering against the memory, Annie slipped into the ranch house, surprised to find Miss Walker downstairs on the couch surrounded by thick ledgers.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Annie asked. She had made certain that the ranch owner was settled in her room before leaving. \"You didn't come downstairs by yourself?\"\n\nMiss Walker waved away her concern. \"I couldn't sleep. I wanted to add up the loss of those cattle.\" She stared at Annie. \"Where were you, and why do you look all flushed?\"\n\nAnnie flopped in a chair opposite her. \"I needed some air.\" That part was true at least.\n\n\"Hmm.\" Miss Walker exchanged one ledger for another. \"You now have an inkling what it means to be a ranch owner.\"\n\nOnly an inkling? Annie drew in her breath at the memory of dead cattle. It had been a strange day on many accounts. \"Aren't you worried that whoever poisoned the water will try again?\" she asked.\n\nMiss Walker shrugged. \"All we can do is keep checking the water supply and hope we catch the culprit.\"\n\n\"You don't suppose it's the Phantom?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"What earthly reason would he have for doing such a thing? It makes no sense.\" Miss Walker made a notation with a pen. \"I hope your unfortunate experience hasn't discouraged you. Are you still interested in learning the ranching business?\"\n\nAnnie wanted to tell Miss Walker her real reason for being on the ranch, but that would be grounds for immediate dismissal. Mr. Pinkerton was clear on that. \"Of course.\"\n\nMiss Walker didn't pursue the matter, and for that Annie was grateful.\n\nShe hated lying, especially to the old lady. God forgive her. It was the thing she hated most about her job.\n\nShe was only ten when she attended a Christmas party with her father as he worked undercover. That was when the agency was at its peak. Some of the guests were militant mine workers suspected of being Molly Maguires and her father posed as a sympathizer.\n\nShe complained at having to pretend to be something she wasn't and her father told her that everyone at that party was wearing a false face. The hostess pretended not to notice her husband flirting with a younger woman. The stuffy bank president acted as if he were having a good time. The man drinking too much and laughing too loudly wanted everyone to think he was successful and not about to lose his job.\n\n\"The only difference between an operative and the rest of the world is that we get paid to pretend,\" her father told her.\n\nMiss Walker worked on her ledgers, making notations, checking bills of sale, and adding figures. Even with her leg in a cast, she looked determined, businesslike, commanding, content. No doubt she was pretending too." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "All night long Annie chided herself for missing the boat as far as Taggert was concerned and she didn't sleep a wink. The time wasted watching him could have been better spent elsewhere. She might have already figured out the identity of the Phantom had it not been for the distraction.\n\nIt was still dark when she gave up any hope of putting her troubled mind to rest and catching some shut-eye. Instead she rose and stood on the balcony waiting for the sun to appear. At long last, golden rays of light trickled down the distant hills like warm honey over freshly baked rolls. Sage and some aroma she couldn't identify seasoned the cool morning air.\n\nFrom the distance came the crow of a rooster and the barks of dogs waiting for their morning meal. Normally she wasn't an early riser, but the desert mornings had become her favorite part of the day.\n\nShe sighed and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. One by one, she considered each ranch hand.\n\nShe was pretty certain Ruckus wasn't involved. Stretch? She hated to think that might be true. She liked the tall, rather gawky, always affable man. How could she not? Feedbag? Possibly. O.T.? And what about the horse trainer, Brodie, who kept pretty much to himself?\n\nShe had no proof that the gang leader was anywhere near the ranch. The principal Pinkerton had simply based his theory on a map and Wells Fargo based theirs on one man's word. Both agencies could be wrong and that meant she and Taggert might very well be on a wild-goose chase.\n\nThat, basically, was what she had written in her latest report. Pinkerton wouldn't like it but she had to report the truth. Either the evidence was there or it wasn't.\n\nShe was just about to go inside when she spotted Taggert riding away, headed in the same direction as the lights. She should have known he would check out the area at daybreak. \"Oh no, you don't!\" she yelled out.\n\nShe flew into her room, dressed quickly, and strapped her pistol in place. Not wanting to take the time to twist her hair into its usual bun, she stuffed her flowing tresses into her hat. Pulling the stampede string tight, she left her room and headed for the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Annie urged her horse along the now-familiar cattle trail. Things looked different in daylight, less menacing, but even so, she stayed alert.\n\nThe cool morning air nipped at her cheeks like a playful puppy, but the blazing sun rising over the distant mountains promised another hot day. Prairie dogs popped in and out of holes and grazing cattle lifted broad faces to stare as she raced by.\n\nShe had just about given up looking for Taggert when she spotted his black steed hidden in the shadows of the towering rock formation.\n\nAfter tying her horse to a bush next to his, she followed the same trail taken the night before. This time she noticed something she'd missed: a cave.\n\nShe cautiously ducked inside and stood perfectly still. The sound of dripping water echoed from the hollow depths but otherwise all was quiet.\n\nSomeone had built a campfire in the center of the main chamber but the ashes were cold. A rusty canteen and an old boot were scattered on the ground along with a book.\n\nAnnie picked up the dime novel and recognized the title: Miss Hattie's Dilemma by K. Mattson. Aunt Bessie's daughter-in-law and former \"heiress\" seemed to have quite a following. Judging by the dog-eared pages, the book had been well read.\n\nShe tossed it to the ground and moved to the back of the cave. The ground slanted downward and led to what appeared to be an underground tunnel. Fresh wood shavings dotted the entrance. Wishbone's? She couldn't be sure.\n\nA moving light shone in the center of the otherwise dark passageway and she held her breath. Someone was coming this way. She turned, looking for a place to hide. It was probably Taggert but she couldn't be certain. She scraped the wood shavings away with the toe of her boot. Let Taggert find his own clues.\n\nHer back against a rough rock wall, she slid her hand into her false pocket and wrapped her fingers around her gun.\n\nTaggert stepped out of the passage and she exhaled. \"Imagine meeting you here.\"\n\nHe swung around. If he was surprised to see her, he kept it to himself. Instead he gave her a crooked smile. \"Does this mean you've decided we'd best pool our resources and work together?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\" She moved away from the wall. \"Find anything?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Just some pickaxes and shovels. Looks like our mystery lights belong to a prospector.\"\n\n\"Would you tell me if you'd found anything else?\" she asked.\n\nHe laughed and the warm, pleasant sound bounced off the rocky cave walls all around her like a dozen rubber balls. \"Would you?\"\n\n\"You know I wouldn't,\" she said, though oddly enough she felt guilty for hiding the wood chips.\n\nHe extinguished the light and hung the lantern on a hook jutting from the rocky wall. Half of his face was in shadow, and even now that she knew his true identity, much of him remained a mystery.\n\n\"What made you become a detective?\" she asked. Everyone had a reason for doing what they did, and it was usually personal.\n\nIt took a moment for him to answer, as if he wasn't sure that he wanted to. \"My father was shot and killed during a bank robbery,\" he said at last. \"I was fifteen at the time.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry.\" She knew what it was like to lose a father to a violent death and her heart went out to him.\n\nHis eyes clouded with visions of the past. \"When the police failed to find his killers, I found them myself and brought them to justice. The day the three men sat on trial was the day a Wells Fargo representative offered me a job. I was nineteen.\"\n\n\"So young.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Never thought of myself as young.\" He regarded her with a speculative gaze. \"What made you become a detective?\"\n\n\"Operative,\" she said. After the word detective became synonymous with bullying tactics, the Pinkerton founder had devised a new word.\n\n\"Nothing like a new name to erase negative public opinion.\" He stared deep into her eyes and for the first time in her life, she felt like someone could see the real Miranda Hunt.\n\nShe started to say something but he stopped her. \"Don't tell me. Let me guess. You followed in a relative's footsteps. Probably your father's.\" He lifted an eyebrow. \"How am I doing so far?\"\n\n\"Not bad. My father was an operative until he died.\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"I'm sorry. It seems like you and I have more in common than we knew.\"\n\n\"Except, unlike you, I have no military training.\"\n\nHe drew back, obviously surprised by her observation. \"Does it show that much? The military part?\"\n\n\"Sometimes,\" she said.\n\nHe considered this for a moment. \"I was sent to military school at the age of twelve to learn discipline.\"\n\n\"Just as I thought. A delinquent.\"\n\nHis gaze made a slow sweep over her face as if to memorize every plane. \"You were the only girl in the family and so you had to prove you were every bit as good as your brothers.\"\n\nHe was good, no question, and not to be outdone, she continued the game, keeping her tone light. \"Let's see... the way you pronounce certain sounds tells me you're from the East. Not Boston. Closer to New York, but not the city.\"\n\nLike a worthy challenger he didn't miss a beat. \"And the way you speak tells me you're from Illinois, not Chicago. Closer to the southern border. Probably Peoria. Which means one of your parents, most likely your mother, was Kickapoo. Either your father or his parents were British.\" He slanted his head and studied her.\n\n\"My father's mother was born and raised in London,\" she said.\n\n\"There had to be a reason for all those afternoon teas,\" he teased.\n\n\"Spying again, no doubt.\" When he neither denied nor confirmed the accusation, she changed the subject. \"Since you're so good at reading people, why didn't you know I was a Pinkerton operative?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Why didn't you know I worked for Wells Fargo?\"\n\n\"Probably because you looked so utterly believable as a thief.\"\n\nHis mouth curved in a half smile. \"Is it true that Pinkerton operatives never sleep?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said. \"And Wells Fargo agents never forget, right?\"\n\n\"Absolutely. Since we're being honest with one another, how about at least telling me who GTF is?\"\n\nReminded of how she found him going through her things, she lifted her chin. \"Most certainly not!\" It was a good thing she wrote even her most personal thoughts in cipher. She had been taught well.\n\n\"Is GTF the big man?\" Taggert asked.\n\nShe almost burst out laughing. \"Most definitely.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"So you do know who the big man is.\"\n\n\"Let's just say I have an idea,\" she said. If only he knew...\n\nHe pondered this for a moment. \"Tell me who hired you.\"\n\n\"I'm not at liberty to say.\" It wouldn't do to let a competitor know a Pinkerton's business.\n\n\"Ah, that must mean you're working for the governor.\"\n\n\"It means nothing of the sort,\" she snapped.\n\nHe laughed. \"The lady doth protest too much, methinks.\"\n\n\"You can think all you want,\" she said, \"and you would be wrong.\"\n\nHe moved a step closer, effectively blocking her escape. \"And what else would I be wrong about?\" he asked softly.\n\nShe sucked in her breath. \"I don't know what you mean.\"\n\n\"If I said you want me to kiss you, would I be wrong?\"\n\nHer heart jolted and her cheeks flared. \"Most definitely.\" Her voice hoarse, she swallowed hard and began again. \"Why would you even think such a thing?\"\n\nShe lifted her hands to his chest to push him away but he caught her by the wrists. He gazed at her for a moment before gently but firmly pulling her all the way into his arms. Her hat flew off and her hair tumbled to her shoulders and fell down her back.\n\nLights of approval flared in his eyes. \"Call it my powers of deduction.\"\n\nHe angled his mouth onto hers and everything went blank except for the taste and feel of him. His lips were gentle at first, persuasive, like a musical note starting soft and increasing in volume. Warm sensations flooded through her, filling an aching need, while at the same time creating another. Rising on tiptoes, she thrilled to the way her body molded neatly to his. Throwing caution to the winds, she flung her arms around his neck to deepen the kiss.\n\nHe lifted his mouth from hers and gazed into her eyes. \"Who knew kissing an operative could be so much fun?\"\n\nHad he slapped her he couldn't have hurt her more. Feeling like she'd suddenly been doused with ice water, she pulled out of his arms. \"Oh no you don't!\" she stormed.\n\nThe Pinkerton Agency frowned upon the use of romantic or sexual favors to gain information, but obviously Wells Fargo detectives had no such qualms. She bent to pick up her hat and rushed past him.\n\nHe chased after her. \"Annie! What did I do?\"\n\nShe whirled about to face him and they almost collided. \"You're not using me to gain information.\"\n\nHe drew back. \"Is that what you think I was doing?\"\n\n\"That's what I know you were doing, but it's not going to work.\"\n\n\"Annie, listen to me\u2014\"\n\n\"No, you listen to me. We are not working together. Just the fact that you know I'm working undercover goes against Pinkerton policy. I could lose my job.\"\n\n\"And you don't think I can't? We're both in the same boat and we either row together or sink. It's your call. But what happened back there... that had nothing to do with us professionally.\"\n\n\"What happened back there... can't happen again.\" She turned and hurried to her horse and this time he didn't follow.\n\nThe sun beat mercilessly against her back as she raced her horse back to the ranch house. Tears blurred her vision and ran down her cheeks.\n\nMemories overwhelmed her. Tired of childhood chants from her brothers that she was only a girl, she devoted her teens to proving she was as good as any man. She learned to ride better than her brothers, shoot better than they, and, should her job as a Pinkerton require it, could even play a mean game of poker and faro.\n\nBy the time she was twenty, men looked at her like one of their own. She was never asked out to dances or church socials like the other girls, but that never bothered her. Instead she was invited to target shooting and horse racing and other male endeavors. Until today, that had been enough.\n\nShe had her job and that was all she ever wanted\u2014that and her name posted along with Pinkerton's best. This sudden desire for a man to look at her like a woman surprised her. More than that, it frightened her.\n\nTaggert made her aware of feelings never before acknowledged. She now knew how it felt to be kissed\u2014really kissed\u2014by a man. His kiss accomplished what no amount of sleuthing or following in her father's footsteps had done; it filled the hole in her heart, if only for a short while.\n\nBut the damage was done and things would never be the same. Now she wanted a man to admire her for who she was and not because she could outride or outshoot him. She wanted a man to love and cherish her and to keep her under his protective wing.\n\nAnd she wanted that man to be Taggert." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Taggert watched her ride away and grimaced. Her accusations still stung. Did she really think he was so shallow as to kiss her to gain information? Nothing had been further from his mind. He kissed her good and he kissed her hard for all the right reasons.\n\nStill, he shouldn't have done it. Big mistake. Not only professionally, but personally. He blew out his breath. Kissing her sure hadn't done much for him physically either, except make him want to kiss her again.\n\nNow that he knew the sweetness of her lips and how neatly she fit in his arms, it would be that much harder to stay away from her. But stay away he must.\n\nThe lady wanted what he wanted: to capture the Phantom. Only his reason was more personal; he had to find out what happened to his friend. Only one of them would succeed, and he intended to make sure it was him. And if that meant depriving himself of the pleasure of her company, that's what he intended to do. God help him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nSilence is golden except during an interrogation.\n\nAnnie tossed and turned that night. The burning torch of Taggert's kiss seemed to sear her very soul. She hated that he tried to use his considerable charm to obtain information. Hated even more that he made her long for things that, for her, didn't\u2014couldn't\u2014exist.\n\nHers was a world of make-believe, filled with pickpockets pretending to be upright citizens and private detectives acting like criminals. Nothing was as it seemed, not even love. No one was real and sometimes she even wondered if GTF was.\n\nRealizing the futility of trying to sleep, she flopped on her back and stared at the ceiling.\n\nFrowning, she lifted her head off the pillow. It was still dark, yet weird-shaped shadows danced across her bedroom wall. From the distance came the tinny, yet urgent, sound of the triangle calling bell.\n\nShe was halfway out of bed when she caught a whiff of smoke. She rushed across the room and flung open the balcony door and gazed in disbelief at the sight that greeted her. The stables and barn were ablaze.\n\nFlames shot upward and battled the sky with fiery swords. A line of men worked a fire brigade and buckets quickly moved from hand to hand between the water tanks and burning buildings. Other cowhands led blindfolded horses out of the stables and away from danger.\n\nShocked wide-awake, Annie darted inside and grabbed her dressing gown. Shoving her arms in the sleeves as she ran, she raced out of her room. Miss Walker was in the hallway on crutches.\n\n\"Stay here,\" Annie said, rushing past her and down the stairs.\n\nMiss Walker said something in reply but Annie kept going. She practically collided with Able in the entry hall as they reached the front door at the same time.\n\n\"It's bad, real bad,\" he said. He dashed outside ahead of her and stopped to stomp on the glowing embers in the courtyard before running to help the others.\n\nPillars of thick smoke burned her eyes and her throat closed in protest. The fire sizzled beneath the onslaught of water. Flames crackled and sparks flew in the still-dark sky like fireworks on Independence Day.\n\nTaggert emerged from the stables with a blindfolded horse and she ran to his aid.\n\n\"I'll take him!\" she croaked. It was Miss Walker's horse, Baxter.\n\nTaggert thrust the rope in her hand and dashed into the next stall.\n\n\"Be careful,\" she called, but her voice was drowned out by the crackling fire, shouts of men, and whinnies of frightened horses.\n\n\"You're all right, boy.\" She rubbed her hands along Baxter's slick neck and then led him to the pasture. He seemed to sense safety inside the enclosed area and stopped trying to pull away. She removed the rope from his neck and pulled off his blindfold.\n\nShe let herself out of the gate just as several frantic horses thundered past her. The roof of the barn and stables collapsed amid shouts and men scrambling out of the way.\n\nHands to her bosom, she prayed, God, don't let anyone be hurt. Taggert...\n\nSmoke burned her eyes and her watery gaze flitted from man to man. Stretch, Wishbone, and Able were still tossing buckets of water onto the flames while Mexican Pete and Ruckus put out nearby fires with shovels. Brodie battled to hold on to a rope around the neck of a frenzied stallion.\n\nThe men frantically worked to keep the fire away from the ranch and bunkhouse.\n\nTaggert was nowhere in sight and icy fear twisted her heart. Spotting Stretch by the windmill, she raced to his side. \"Where's Branch?\" she cried.\n\nStretch, face black with ashes, dipped his bucket into the water before answering. \"Why, he's right there, Miz Annie.\"\n\nShe whirled about just as Taggert looked up from hauling bales of hay away from the flames. She noticed for the first time that he was dressed in long johns and was suddenly conscious of her own state of undress. But it was Taggert all right, blackened face and all. She would recognize that quick, arrogant smile anywhere." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "She found Taggert digging in the still-hot ashes the next morning. Nothing of the barn remained except for pieces of charred metal and a scorched leather saddle. Fortunately, no one had been injured and every last horse was saved. The men had also managed to haul out most of the saddles and harnesses in time.\n\nTaggert glanced up as she approached. For a brief moment, she imagined herself back in his arms. Judging by his grim face, no such pleasant memories drifted through his mind, only the stark reality of the ashes at his feet.\n\nShe picked her way through the smoldering rubble. Tendrils of smoke curled upward and the acrid smell of ashes scorched her throat and stung her eyes.\n\nThe sun had yet to rise but the silvery light of dawn slowly uncovered the extent of the damage. Except for a quick glance in her direction, Taggert kept his head lowered. He seemed focused and efficient\u2014every bit the detective.\n\nFollowing his lead, she picked up a stick of her own. If he could act like nothing had happened between them, so could she. At least she could try.\n\n\"Arson,\" she said in a crisp, no-nonsense voice. She could never understand the power that some people derived from setting fires. Never having worked an arson case, she nonetheless knew what to look for. Black smoke indicated a fuel accelerant, but her assumption was also based on how quickly the fire had spread.\n\nHe responded with a grunt and continued to poke around with his stick. After a while, he lifted a piece of blackened fabric out of the ashes. He pulled the cloth off the stick with thumb and forefinger, sniffed it, and tossed it aside.\n\n\"But why?\" she asked. \"What reason would anyone have for burning down the barn and stables?\" It made no sense, but then, neither did poisoning cattle.\n\n\"There are only two reasons for arson.\" He paused for a moment before locking eyes with hers. \"To hide something or gain something.\" He stood the stick on end. \"Let's start with the gain.\"\n\n\"If you're thinking insurance fraud, you can forget it,\" she said. She'd seen the ledgers, and though the ranch barely made a profit during the last year, it was still in the black. \"I don't think Miss Walker even carries insurance.\" Few people outside the city did. \"And even if she had insurance, she'd have a hard time setting a fire while on crutches.\"\n\nHe lifted one shoulder in a half shrug. \"Unless she paid someone to do it.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"She wouldn't do that. This ranch means everything to her.\" Her gaze traveled beyond the horse pasture to the little cemetery on the hill. It wasn't just the old lady's roots that went deep, it was her heartstrings.\n\n\"She won't even consider selling the property and has turned down two offers that I know of,\" she added.\n\nTaggert poked at a tin can with his stick and pushed it aside. \"Does she have any enemies?\"\n\nShe knew what he was thinking. Arson was often a crime of revenge. \"Most definitely,\" she said. \"Miss Walker can be brusque and brutally frank. Such traits could make foes out of choir boys.\"\n\n\"That makes it easy, then. There's nothing more exasperating than a victim who claims to have no enemies.\"\n\nShe stepped over a charred beam. \"Do you think there's a connection between the poisoned cattle and the fire?\"\n\n\"I sincerely hope so,\" he said. \"I'd hate to think we have two crazies running around intent on ruining the ranch.\"\n\nHer thoughts exactly. She studied him. \"Do you think it's the Phantom?\"\n\nTaggert poked at the pile of ashes at his feet. \"What would be his motivation?\"\n\nGood question. If the Phantom was indeed hiding here, why would he want to draw attention to himself? It made no sense.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Once they knew the motivation, finding the culprit should be easy. \"We can't discount the possibility.\"\n\n\"I'm not discounting anything,\" he said. He stabbed at something with his stick.\n\nThinking he'd found something more in the ashes, she moved closer. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Nothing... I was thinking.\" He looked straight at her. \"You said Miss Walker turned down some recent offers. What if someone was trying to force Miss Walker to sell?\"\n\nIt was something she hadn't considered. \"Anyone who thinks poisoning cattle and burning down the barn will get Miss Walker to sell doesn't know her very well.\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but we don't know what the person will do next.\"\n\nThe thought made her shudder. \"It's hard to imagine anyone destroying property they wish to purchase.\"\n\n\"There's got to be some sort of connection,\" he said. \"The timing is too coincidental. Do you know who made the offers?\"\n\n\"Someone back east. Your boss would know.\"\n\n\"Stackman?\"\n\n\"He's the one handling the offers,\" she explained.\n\nHe took a moment to consider this. \"I'll ride into town and talk to him.\"\n\n\"I'll go with you.\"\n\nHe stared at her for a moment, his expression inscrutable. Only the light in his eyes gave him away. \"Do you realize we're actually working together?\"\n\nHe caught her by surprise. They had fallen into such easy rapport she'd momentarily forgotten that he was a competitor and not a Pinkerton colleague with whom she might readily exchange theories.\n\n\"We're discussing a fire,\" she said with a toss of her head. She welcomed the reminder because as long as they remained competitors, there was little danger of repeating what happened in the cave. \"Nothing more.\"\n\nShe tried her best to maintain a serious demeanor, but there was nothing\u2014absolutely nothing\u2014to be done about her flip-flopping heart." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Annie stood at the counter of the telegraph office and printed her message in code. She and Taggert had parted company the moment they reached town, agreeing to meet at the bank at two.\n\nSince code could easily be misinterpreted, it was necessary to print so the operator did not send the wrong message. In cryptic she wrote: Fire at the ranch; arson suspected.\n\nTaggert sidled up to the counter and she glanced at him in surprise. She hadn't expected to run into him so soon. He arched his neck and tried to read what she wrote.\n\nSince her note was written in cipher, it wouldn't do him any good. Nevertheless, she moved away from him, sliding her note along the polished wood counter.\n\nHe reached for a sheet of paper of his own and began to write. Keeping her head lowered, she cast a sideways glance in his direction. The bold strokes of his hand were followed by the scratching sound of his pen, but she was too far away to see what he wrote. No doubt his message to his home office was similar to her own.\n\nAfter finishing her report, she handed it to the telegraph operator at the same time Taggert handed over his.\n\n\"Ladies first,\" she said.\n\n\"That's true only for sinking ships,\" Taggert said. He slapped a gold coin on the counter and the youth's eyes widened.\n\nNot to be outdone, Annie reached into her purse and pulled out two gold coins.\n\n\"I... I have some telegrams ready to send ahead of yours,\" the youth stammered.\n\nA third gold coin did the trick. \"Send it collect,\" she said. The youth snatched the paper out of her hands and sat down on his stool.\n\nShe turned to face Taggert. \"You did it again,\" she said. She tapped her chest to indicate his pocket. \"You stole the fountain pen.\"\n\nHe drew the writing implement out of his pocket and stuck it in the penholder. He then slapped two coins on the counter in front of her.\n\n\"What's that for?\" she asked.\n\n\"It seems only fair that I share investigation expenses.\"\n\n\"We're not working together.\" She pushed his money toward him. \"I agreed to join you to talk with Mr. Stackman, but that's as far as I'll go.\"\n\nHe stayed her hand with his own, sending waves of warmth up her arm. \"You have no idea what you're missing. Two heads are better than one, and the same can be said for private eyes.\"\n\n\"Sorry, but this eye prefers to work alone.\"\n\nHe released her hand. \"What a pity.\" For one brief moment it seemed as if they were no longer talking about the Phantom or the fire or even mystery buyers from the East, but rather something far more personal, and her mouth went dry." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\nYou can learn a lot from a stakeout, mainly what bad company you are.\n\nLess than twenty minutes later, Mr. Stackman hustled Annie and Taggert into his paneled office. The mere mention of a problem with Miss Walker seemed to unsettle the otherwise businesslike banker.\n\n\"Have a seat.\"\n\nStackman sat behind a conservative oak desk, hands folded. The desk was equipped with fountain pen, inkwell, and rocking ink blotter but was otherwise bare.\n\n\"What is this about? Is Eleanor all right?\" The banker's expression was suffused with concern.\n\nTaggert pushed his hat back. \"Miss Walker is fine. There was a fire at the ranch last night.\"\n\nStackman frowned. \"The house?\"\n\nTaggert shook his head. \"Just the barn and stables.\"\n\nStackman started to say something and stopped. He glanced from Taggert to Annie.\n\n\"You can speak freely,\" Taggert assured him. \"Miss Beckman is a Pinkerton operative.\"\n\nStackman sat back in his chair and blinked. \"You can't be serious. A Pinkerton?\"\n\nAnnie leaned forward. \"It's essential that no one else knows my true identity,\" she said. \"And that includes Miss Walker.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course, of course. I won't breathe a word, but... Eleanor... Miss Walker will kill me if she finds out I've been keeping something like this from her.\" He sighed. \"So what can I do for you?\"\n\n\"We want to know the name of the person who made an offer on the ranch,\" Annie said.\n\n\"Ah, don't we all? I tried to find out but the attorney refused to tell me. He cited client/attorney privilege or some such thing.\"\n\nAnnie thought about this for a moment. \"Why would a prospective buyer not wish to have his identity known?\"\n\n\"It's not as unusual as you might think,\" Stackman explained. \"Some people wish to keep their assets hidden. Then, too, speculators are snapping up property left and right. They hope value will increase should Arizona become a state. If word got out, it could start a land rush and that's the last thing these land grabbers want.\"\n\nAnnie glanced at Taggert. \"Perhaps you're right. Maybe someone is trying to force Miss Walker off her ranch.\"\n\nStackman frowned. \"Why would you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"For one thing, the fire was no accident,\" Taggert said. \"And someone poisoned the water, causing the loss of more than a dozen cattle.\"\n\n\"Good heavens!\" Stackman's gaze flitted back and forth between Annie and Taggert. \"And you think the buyer has something to do with it?\"\n\n\"Right now we don't know what to think,\" Taggert said. \"But we have to consider every possibility.\"\n\nStackman rubbed his temples. \"What does any of this have to do with the Phantom?\"\n\n\"That we don't know,\" Annie said. \"Maybe nothing.\"\n\n\"Or maybe everything,\" Taggert added.\n\nAnnie glanced at him. Did he know something she didn't? She wouldn't put it past him.\n\nStackman wagged his head. \"I'm sorry I can't be of more service.\" He hesitated. \"My main concern is Eleanor's safety. Is there a chance that she might be in any sort of danger?\"\n\n\"We'll keep an eye on her,\" Taggert promised, meeting Annie's gaze.\n\n\"Yes, we will,\" she said. But she sent a visual message that said, That's all we'll do together.\n\nAs if to read her thoughts, Taggert frowned before turning his gaze back to the banker. \"We won't take up any more of your time.\" He slapped both hands on his thighs and stood.\n\nAnnie stood too, as did Mr. Stackman.\n\n\"I'll see if I can speed up the telephone work,\" Stackman said. \"I'll feel a whole lot better when the telephone is installed at the ranch.\"\n\nTaggert checked his watch. \"That would be a great help.\"\n\nAnnie offered the banker her hand and he took it. \"A Pinkerton, eh. I never would have guessed it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "If the astonishment on Marshal Morris's face was any indication, he obviously hadn't guessed Annie's profession either.\n\n\"Well, I'll be a skunk's uncle.\" He lowered himself on the chair behind his desk, his eyes wide beneath his craggy brows. \"I should have known something was up that day you came in here and started asking all those questions.\"\n\n\"She thought you and I were in cahoots,\" Taggert said and laughed.\n\n\"Which of course you were,\" Annie said, \"but not how I imagined.\"\n\nThe marshal shook his head. \"If we can't figure out the good guys, how in tarnation will we ever figure out the bad?\" He stared at her like he still couldn't believe it. \"What would make a woman decide to be a Pink?\"\n\n\"My father was an operative.\"\n\n\"I guess that explains it, then.\"\n\n\"Nothing on this end, eh?\" Taggert asked.\n\nThe marshal clasped his hands. \"No clues as to who the Phantom might be, but I'm afraid I do have some bad news. I checked out the deserted cabins north of town and I found a corpse. We were able to identify the body as the missing Wells Fargo detective.\"\n\nTaggert sat forward and the blood drained from his face. \"How did he die?\" His voice was ragged and sounded unlike him.\n\n\"Blow to the head.\"\n\nTaggert sucked in his breath.\n\nAnnie frowned. \"Do you think the Phantom had something to do with it?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't be surprised if he did.\" The marshal's gaze traveled between the two of them. \"And if so, that means we're not just dealing with a thief, but a killer as well.\" His horseshoe mustache twitched. \"If you know what's good for you, you'll watch your backs. Both of you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Taggert shot out of the marshal's office like cannon fire. He'd suspected his friend was dead, but that hadn't made the news any easier to bear.\n\n\"Branch!\" He stopped at the sound of Annie's voice but didn't turn around. He wanted\u2014needed\u2014to be alone.\n\nShe caught up to him and the concern in her eyes pierced the heaviness of his heart. \"He was a friend, wasn't he? The Wells Fargo agent was your friend.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" Forcing the word out was like pushing a boulder up a mountain. He swallowed and tried again. \"He was a friend.\" Not only was Paul Lester his best friend, Taggert had talked him into becoming a Wells Fargo detective.\n\nHer face darkened with emotion and her thick lashes lowered as if in prayer. \"I'm so sorry,\" she whispered. After a moment she touched his arm. \"We'll find who did this.\"\n\nWe. She said we. A short time ago he wanted to work with her, but not now. With one undercover agent dead, the stakes were now a whole lot higher.\n\nHe touched a hand to her cheek and nudged away a tiny strand of hair from the side of her face with his fingertip. \"You must leave the ranch,\" he said, his voice hoarse. \"It's too dangerous.\"\n\nShe pushed his hand away and he could almost see a determined streak race across her face. \"I know it's dangerous.\"\n\n\"No, you don't know.\" He grabbed her roughly by the arms, his fingers digging into her flesh. \"Go home, Annie. This is no job for a lady.\"\n\nAnger flashed in her eyes and she pulled away. \"I'm every bit as capable as a man.\"\n\n\"Which means you're also capable of getting yourself killed.\" The thought of anything happening to her nearly crushed him. \"Annie, please...\"\n\nShe lifted her chin. \"I'm staying.\" She whirled about and stormed away.\n\n\"Have it your way,\" he yelled after her. He pounded a fist into the palm of his hand. Fool, stubborn woman!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "That afternoon Annie walked into the parlor, tray in hand. Miss Walker looked up from her writing tablet and grimaced. She looked every bit the ranch owner in her divided skirt, masculine shirt, single booted foot, and wide-brim hat. Even her plastered leg didn't take away from her cool, efficient appearance.\n\n\"What poison do you have planned for me this afternoon?\" she asked.\n\nAnnie set the tray on the low table in front of the sofa. \"Jasmine. It has a lovely aroma that should help take away the awful smell.\" She'd kept the windows and doors tightly shut and candles lit but the smell of ashes permeated the house.\n\nMiss Walker set her pencil and notebook next to the tea tray.\n\nAnnie reached for the pad. The page was filled with lines and boxes. It was a simple drawing, almost childish in nature. \"What's this?\"\n\n\"My new barn and stables,\" Miss Walker replied.\n\nAnnie stared at the sketch, her detective mind spinning like the works of a clock. The ashes weren't even cold and already Miss Walker had drawn up plans, but that didn't mean she had instigated the fire. The woman had somehow managed to turn every setback of the past into an advantage. Evidently she intended to do so now. It was one of the things Annie most admired about her.\n\n\"It looks enormous.\" There were at least twice as many horse stalls.\n\n\"Of course it does,\" Miss Walker assured her. \"What good is a fire if something bigger and better doesn't come out of it?\"\n\nAnnie set the sketch down and picked up the teapot. \"Branch... believes that it was arson,\" she said carefully.\n\nMiss Walker didn't look the least bit surprised or even disturbed. \"Hmm. An arsonist.\" She shrugged. \"Then I owe him my most profound gratitude. I wanted to rebuild and now I shall.\"\n\nMiss Walker's casual attitude would normally be cause for suspicion, but unless there was insurance money involved, there would be no need to resort to such tactics. Had she wanted to rebuild that badly, Miss Walker would have simply done so.\n\n\"Does the ranch have fire insurance?\" Annie thought she knew the answer, but she had to make sure.\n\nJust as she suspected, Miss Walker shook her head no. \"Insurance for what? Stucco and sand? An old wooden barn that should have been replaced when I built the ranch house?\"\n\nAnnie poured the tea and handed a cup of the steaming brew to Miss Walker. She tried to think how best to phrase the next question but then decided to come right out with it. \"Do you by chance have any enemies?\"\n\nMiss Walker's eyes shone with a wry but indulgent glint. \"Of course I have enemies. Making enemies is so much easier than making friends, and they're far less trouble to maintain.\"\n\nHer answer was just what Annie had come to expect from her. She filled her own cup and sat in the chair opposite. \"Is there anyone in particular who might wish to see you harmed?\"\n\n\"No, but I daresay many would gladly dance on my grave.\" She laughed at Annie's expression. \"Some people say to forgive your enemies. My plan is to simply outlive them.\" Miss Walker took a sip of tea and grimaced. \"That is, if you don't poison me first.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nImitation might be the sincerest form of flattery, but to a forger it's also the quickest route to riches.\n\nAnnie had just finished serving Miss Walker her breakfast in the dining room when shouts sounded from outside.\n\nMiss Walker's fork stilled. \"Don't tell me my men are fighting again.\"\n\n\"I'll go and see.\" Annie hurried from the room and stepped onto the veranda. A group of men was gathered in front of the bunkhouse. Wishbone, already on his horse, flew by the ranch house, kicking up dirt in his wake.\n\nShe strained to get a better view and Miss Walker joined her on crutches.\n\n\"It looks like someone's hurt,\" Annie said.\n\n\"Well, don't just stand there,\" Miss Walker snapped. \"Go and see who it is.\"\n\nMoments later Annie broke through the ring of men circling the injured man. It was Taggert. She covered her mouth and watched in mute wretchedness as the men struggled to lift him off the ground.\n\nStretch held Taggert under the arms and Feedbag held him by the feet. He was breathing but unconscious.\n\n\"What happened?\" she managed.\n\n\"Thrown from his horse,\" Ruckus said. \"Looks like he's got himself one of them there concussions. Wishbone's on his way to town to fetch the doctor.\"\n\nShe turned to the black steed tethered to the hitching post in front of the bunkhouse. Her detective skills dulled by the fog of worry, her instincts nonetheless remained sharp. Frowning, she ran her hand along the horse's slick neck.\n\n\"Wait,\" she called, stopping the two men. \"Take Branch to the main house. He can stay in one of the guest rooms.\"\n\nStretch and Feedbag exchanged looks.\n\nO.T. stepped forward, his craggy face all serious. \"I don't know that the boss lady will like a cowhand staying in her house like he's a guest or somethin'.\"\n\n\"He's injured,\" Annie said in a tone that forbade further discussion. She didn't want to tell them that she feared for Taggert's safety.\n\nO.T. shrugged and tossed a nod toward the ranch house. Stretch and Feedbag reversed directions and Annie led the way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "The two men carried Taggert up the stairs and placed him in the room next to Annie's. They didn't bother to undress him except for his boots and holster. The bed seemed too small for Taggert's large form and his feet hung off the edge of the mattress.\n\n\"Would you ask Able to bring me some ice?\" she asked.\n\n\"Sure thing,\" Stretch said. The two men left the room, leaving the door ajar.\n\nMoments later Able entered wearing a flour-covered apron and carrying a chunk of ice wrapped in a towel. It looked like he'd been working over a hot stove and his face was almost as red as his hair. \"Is he going to be all right?\"\n\nShe took the ice from him. \"I think so. Would you let the doctor in when he arrives?\"\n\nAble nodded. \"I'll make gumbo soup,\" he said, and she smiled. Gumbo soup was Able's cure-all for everything. \"And I'll put on a kettle for tea.\" He glanced at Taggert. \"For when he's conscious. Any special kind?\"\n\n\"Gunpowder tea,\" she said. \"And make it strong.\" That will wake him up.\n\n\"Just let me know when you want it.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Able.\"\n\nAfter the cook left, she leaned over the bed.\n\n\"Say something,\" she urged. Taggert's eyes fluttered open for an instant, but only enough to let her see the whites of his eyes.\n\nShe shook him gently but he didn't respond. Her eyes blurred and a tear trickled down her cheek. Already she missed his crooked smile. If anything happened to him...\n\nThe last words she said to him were spoken in anger and she regretted that more than she regretted anything.\n\nShe leaned over and pressed her lips on his forehead. \"Say something. Speak to me. Please.\"\n\nTaggert didn't move. She pulled back and wrung her hands. Where was the doctor? What was taking so long?\n\nNeeding something to do, she filled a basin from the pitcher on the dry sink and wet a washcloth. Ever so gently she cleansed the wound on his head and then arranged the pillows so the ice pack covered the worrisome lump.\n\nAnd then she waited in silent prayer.\n\nIt was almost an hour later before the rumbling of Dr. Fairbanks's horseless carriage drifted through the open window, followed by the sound of its horn. Ah-ooh-ga.\n\nMoments later two taps on the bedroom door made her rise to her feet. Dr. Fairbanks entered the room. \"Well now, what have we here? His name is Branch, right?\"\n\nShe moved the chair away from the bed. \"Yes.\"\n\nThe doctor set his black bag on the floor and leaned over Taggert's motionless body. He removed the ice pack and checked the wound. One by one he lifted Taggert's eyelids and peered at his retinas. He then pulled his stethoscope out of his black bag.\n\n\"It's a concussion, all right,\" he said. \"Some people call it a bruised brain.\"\n\nThe doctor started to expound on the marvels of the organ and she quickly stopped him. \"Is it serious?\"\n\n\"Any trauma to the head is serious,\" Fairbanks said. He lifted Taggert's shirt and planted the chest piece of his stethoscope on the upper torso. He then pulled away, letting the medical instrument dangle down the front of him. \"Got a good strong heart.\"\n\nAnnie pressed her hands together. She knew about the good part. Maybe she always did, even when she suspected him of being a criminal.\n\nAfter Fairbanks had affixed gauze to the wound at the back of the head, Taggert opened his eyes. Annie clasped her hands together. Thank You, God, thank You!\n\n\"Ah, there you are,\" Dr. Fairbanks exclaimed. \"From what I understand, you and your horse parted company.\"\n\nTaggert blinked as if trying to clear his vision. He looked pale and his gaze batted around the room, as if he didn't know where he was.\n\nFairbanks tossed his scissors and gauze into his black case and straightened. \"Suppose you tell me your name?\"\n\nTaggert frowned as if trying to pull something out of the recesses of his mind. \"Taggert,\" he slurred. \"Jeremy...\"\n\nAnnie froze. Oh no! He really was out of his head. Under no other circumstances would an undercover detective reveal his true identity unless absolutely necessary.\n\nFairbanks drew back. \"I thought your name was Branch.\"\n\n\"He doesn't know what he's saying,\" Annie said quickly. \"Taggert's the name of his friend.\" She hated lying to the doctor, but she really had no other choice.\n\nTaggert thrashed from side to side as if trying to sit up.\n\nFairbanks held him down by the shoulders. Taggert was strong but so was the young doctor. \"Whoa, there! You aren't going anywhere. At least not for a while.\"\n\nTaggert sank back on the pillows and shook his head as if to clear it.\n\n\"Hello, Branch,\" she said with emphasis. \"You certainly gave us a scare, Branch.\"\n\nHe gazed up at her but she couldn't tell by his blank expression if anything she said made sense to him.\n\nDr. Fairbanks gave her a strange look and bent over his patient. \"Now that we've established who you are, perhaps you can tell me the name of the president of the United States?\"\n\nTaggert pinched his forehead and groaned. \"Lin... coln.\"\n\nFairbanks straightened. \"We'd better not let our southern friends know he's still president or we may have another war on our hands.\"\n\nAnnie chewed on a nail. \"Is... is he going to be all right?\"\n\n\"We'll have to wait and see. Let him rest for a while but watch him. Don't let him sleep for long periods of time. Wake him every hour or so. If the swelling in his brain doesn't go down, I'll have to drill a hole to relieve the pressure.\"\n\nAnnie shuddered and swallowed hard.\n\n\"Don't look so worried. Did you know that trepanning is the oldest known surgery to man?\" The doctor chuckled. \"Can you imagine cavemen drilling holes in each other's skulls? That must have been something.\"\n\nKnowing that the surgery had been around for thousands of years did nothing to relieve her anxiety.\n\nThe door flew open and Miss Walker hobbled into the room. \"So how is he?\" she demanded.\n\nDr. Fairbanks gave a quick but no less thorough rundown on Branch's condition. He picked up his black bag. \"If he gets worse, have someone come and get me.\" He turned to Miss Walker. \"I may as well check you out while I'm here.\"\n\n\"I don't need you checking me out. I need to get rid of this cast.\"\n\nThe two left the room arguing and Annie drew a chair next to Branch's bed. His eyes were closed, but his breathing sounded normal. The doctor said to wake him every hour but she didn't want to wait that long.\n\nShe leaned forward and took his hand in hers. It was a large hand, his fingers nicely shaped. She squeezed it tight. If anything happened to him... She couldn't bear to finish the thought and tears burned the backs of her eyes.\n\n\"Who... who did this to you?\"\n\n\"How do you know anyone did?\"\n\nShe dropped his hand with a gasp. He peered at her through one eye before opening the other.\n\n\"You... you were faking!\" She jumped to her feet and glared down at him, hands on her waist. She couldn't make up her mind whether to hug or shake him. \"You nearly scared the life out of me.\"\n\nHe looked like he was trying to smile but grimaced instead. He pressed his hand against his forehead and groaned. \"I didn't know what else to do.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"When I first woke I was confused. After I realized I had given the doctor my real name, I decided I'd better not let on that I was of sound mind. So I continued to act confused. For your information, McKinley is the president. See? Perfectly normal.\"\n\n\"You're lucky the doctor didn't drill a hole in your head,\" she said.\n\nThis time he did manage a wan smile. His boyish grin melted away the last of her annoyance and she smiled back. She couldn't help it.\n\nHe grew serious. \"Okay, it's your turn.\" He spoke slowly as if he had to search for each word. \"How do you know someone did this to me?\"\n\n\"You're a good horseman. The best.\"\n\n\"No horseman's so good he can't be thrown,\" he said.\n\n\"True. But it takes real talent to be thrown before mounting.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Your horse wasn't even saddled.\" During the confusion of finding Branch on the ground, no one seemed to have paid any attention to his black steed.\n\nHe rubbed his forehead as if trying to recall the order of events, but he didn't fool her.\n\n\"Come on, Taggert. 'Fess up. What really happened?\"\n\nHe let out his breath. \"I couldn't sleep. I kept going over everything trying to figure out what I might have missed. The fire, the cattle...\" He paused for a moment as if trying to remember. \"I decided to check out the cave again, but as I was getting dressed I heard something. I let myself outside, but everything was quiet. I decided to check the horses to see if any had been ridden. Stretch's horse was still warm.\"\n\nA shadow flitted across his face and he grimaced. \"That's all I remember.\"\n\nShe lowered herself onto the edge of the bed. \"Do you think Stretch hit you?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Was he in the bunkhouse when you left?\"\n\n\"It was dark and it never occurred to me to do a bed check.\"\n\nDark? That meant he'd been unconscious for a while before anyone discovered him. The thought sickened her and her mind raced.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"I can see the wagon wheels turning.\"\n\n\"That's how the other Wells Fargo agent died\u2014a blow to the head.\"\n\n\"Thank you for reminding me.\"\n\n\"Do you think your assailant knows you work for Wells Fargo?\"\n\n\"I doubt it.\" He reached for her hand. \"It could have been you that was attacked, and if anyone hurt you, I\u2014\"\n\nHe held her gaze and the concern in his eyes reached deep inside to a previously untouched part. No one had ever made her feel the way he did. Never had she felt so feminine, and in her mind this translated to vulnerability, perhaps even weakness. As a Pinkerton operative, she couldn't afford such feelings. She had a job to do and nothing could be allowed to interfere.\n\nShe pulled her hand from his and straightened the bedcovers, but all too soon she ran out of diversions. \"While you're resting, I'll look around the crime scene.\" She doubted she would find anything but she had to make certain.\n\n\"I wish you weren't working the case,\" he said.\n\n\"It's my job.\"\n\n\"It's dangerous. I don't think Pinkerton would have sent you had he known just how dangerous it was.\"\n\n\"But he would have sent a man, right?\" she snapped.\n\n\"That's not what I meant. One man is already dead and we still don't know who or what we're up against.\"\n\nSomething tiptoed on the back of her mind, but it slipped away before she could grasp it. \"I have the feeling we have all the pieces of the puzzle. They just haven't fallen into place.\"\n\nHe stared at her for a long moment, but his expression offered no clue to his thoughts. \"Annie...\"\n\nHis low voice forced her to lean closer. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Be careful. I\u2014\"\n\nShe quickly covered his mouth with her fingertips. \"Don't talk,\" she whispered and a silent plea exploded inside. Don't say anything we will both come to regret. Don't say the words that my heart longs to hear.\n\n\"Y-you need to get some rest.\" She pulled her hand away and stood, her cool, efficient manner belying the knot of emotions nearly tearing her apart. \"I'll go and look around.\"\n\nHe started to laugh but ended up grimacing in pain.\n\nHands on her waist, she gazed down at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"Do you realize we're working together?\"\n\nShe relaxed. His teasing banter she could handle. As long as they remembered their roles as private detectives, they were on safe ground.\n\n\"What a pity,\" she said. \"You're still confused. Looks like the doctor is going to have to drill a hole in your head after all.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Since the fire, the ranch hands kept their horses tied to the hitching post in front of the bunkhouse.\n\nSitting on her haunches, Annie checked the ground. The sandy loam was covered in footprints and U-shaped hoofprints.\n\nBy the looks of Taggert's wound, she suspected he'd been hit with the butt end of a gun. She nonetheless checked for rocks and other possible weapons, but found none.\n\nShe did find an impressive pile of hand-rolled cigarette butts by the side of the building.\n\nSomeone had obviously been standing in that spot for quite some time. The question was why. She mentally counted off the ranch hands who smoked. Most did, including Michael. Stretch chewed tobacco. Only Ruckus was without a tobacco habit.\n\nShe picked up a butt and examined it. The cowhands sat in the shade almost every afternoon and smoked. It would be a simple matter to find a cigarette that matched. She slipped the butt into her pocket.\n\n\"You looking for something, Miz Annie?\"\n\nThe voice made her jump and she swung around to find Feedbag standing at the door of the bunkhouse. She still couldn't get over how odd he looked without his black square-cut beard.\n\nHer training came into play. \"Branch asked me to make sure his horse was taken care of.\"\n\nFeedbag's gaze drifted to the steed and back again. No doubt he was wondering why she was by the side of the bunkhouse and not by Branch's horse. \"Me and the boys will take care of him.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Thank you.\"\n\nOne cheek bulged with a wad of tobacco. \"Is Branch gonna be okay?\"\n\nHe looked and sounded genuinely concerned. \"Yes, Feedbag, I believe he is.\" She hesitated. \"Do you know who found him?\"\n\n\"That would be me. I walked outside to saddle my horse and there he was. I would have bet a month's salary he was ready to be laid out all respectful-like in a cigar box.\"\n\nThe thought nearly tore away her tightly held emotions. \"Branch wasn't thrown from his horse. Someone hit him over the head.\"\n\nFeedbag's eyes widened. \"You don't say.\"\n\nShe studied him. \"Who do you think would do such a thing?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Maybe Branch caught someone trying to steal our horses. Could have been a drifter. Wouldn't be the first time someone tried to take off with our stock.\"\n\nIt was a plausible theory, and had it not been for all the strange happenings, she might have given more credence to the idea.\n\nHe spit out a stream of tobacco juice and it hit the ground with a plop. \"You weren't thinking it was one of us?\"\n\n\"I don't know what to think.\" She turned and walked back to the ranch house. Pausing by Dr. Fairbanks's horseless carriage, she glanced back. Feedbag hadn't moved. She was too far away to see his face beneath the brim of his hat, but she nonetheless felt his gaze." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nA man who keeps looking o'er his shoulder is probably only two jumps ahead of the sheriff.\n\nThe telephone wires reached the ranch the following week and by Thursday afternoon the instrument had been installed on the wall in the entry next to the staircase.\n\nThe ranch hands crowded by the front door to admire the wondrous new contraption. Not everyone was so enamored. Miss Walker sat in a chair Annie had arranged for her and glared at the phone box as if she expected it to attack.\n\nTaggert had fully recovered from his injury. Annie envied his ability to appear relaxed even as his sharp, assessing gaze traveled around the room.\n\nEach time his gaze met hers it lingered for a moment before moving on. He stared at the cigarette dangling from Wishbone's mouth and sent her a message with a raised eyebrow. It wasn't a match for the cigarette butts found outside the bunkhouse.\n\nThey read each other's expressions like lawyers reading briefs. It didn't take much\u2014a quirk of his brow, twist of the mouth, or narrowing of the eye and she immediately knew what he was thinking.\n\nNot good, not good at all. Not only did working with a Wells Fargo detective go against Pinkerton company policy, she never thought to work with the competition, not after what happened to her father. But, God forgive her, never had she enjoyed herself more.\n\nWishbone moved halfway up the stairs and leaned over the stair rail. \"Ladies and gentlemen, it's now official. We have entered the nineteenth century.\"\n\n\"And it's not a moment too soon,\" Taggert whispered in her ear. His warm breath on the back of her neck sent goose bumps rippling down her spine. \"Since the twentieth century is right around the corner.\"\n\nMiss Walker glared at the bill Ruckus handed her. \"There goes free speech.\"\n\nO.T. stroked the walnut box like one would stroke a prize horse. \"Never thought I'd see the day we'd have a telephone all the way out here.\"\n\n\"How does it work?\" Able asked. He wiped his hands on his apron, releasing a cloud of flour. Today he smelled like cinnamon and Annie's mouth watered just thinking of the dessert he was no doubt concocting for dinner.\n\n\"It's simple,\" Ruckus said, \"but it seems only right that Miz Walker try it out first.\" He lifted the horn-shaped receiver and held it out to her.\n\nMiss Walker pushed it away. \"The telephone has only just been installed and already it's turning out to be a nuisance.\" She rose on her crutches and hobbled into the large room.\n\nShrugging, Ruckus lifted the receiver to his ear and turned the hand crank. He grinned when a voice came over the line. He spoke into the mouthpiece. \"I don't want a number, Bessie, I'm just testing the phone.\"\n\nHe hung up.\n\n\"Let me,\" Wishbone said. He did what Ruckus showed them to do. \"Hello, hello, hello, hello.\" He kept yelling into the mouthpiece and turning the crank.\n\n\"You only have to say hello once,\" Feedbag said, snatching the receiver away.\n\nOne by one, the other ranch hands tried it out. \"Your turn, Branch,\" Ruckus said after a while.\n\n\"I'll pass,\" Branch said. \"But we should let Miss Annie try it.\"\n\nAnnie was quite familiar with the telephone. The Pinkerton Agency led the way in utilizing the telegraph, railroads, photography, and telephones in the fight against crime. Nonetheless, she decided it was best to play along.\n\nThe voice on the other end of the line sounded impatient. \"What num-BER?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Adams\u2014Aunt Bessie\u2014it's Annie Beckman. We're just testing the phone.\" She cast her gaze among the expectant faces. \"Would you like to speak to your nephew?\"\n\n\"That would be mighty nice,\" Aunt Bessie responded in her ear.\n\nAnnie handed the receiver to Michael.\n\n\"Not bad,\" Branch said under his breath. \"For a beginner.\"\n\n\"Who said I was a beginner?\" she whispered back.\n\n\"My mistake,\" he said quietly, and something in his voice made her pulse race.\n\nBy the seventh or eighth test, Bessie's voice shot out of the earpiece like the blast of a horn.\n\nStretch dropped the receiver and pounded the side of his head with the palm of his hand.\n\n\"Ours must be the only telephone with two cranks.\"\n\nRuckus caught the swinging receiver and placed it on the hook.\n\nFeedbag raised his hand. \"Hey, this is the first thing we've ever done that Ruckus hasn't gone and quoted the Bible.\"\n\nStretch rolled his eyes. \"You ninny! That's 'cause they ain't nothing in the Bible about telephones.\"\n\n\"Sure there is,\" Ruckus said. \"The Lord called his people all the time. And if I'm not mistaken, He's calling us back to work right now.\"\n\n\"But I didn't get a chance to talk,\" Brodie complained. It was the first complete sentence Annie had ever heard the horse trainer say.\n\nRuckus held the door open. \"Tomorrow the phone will be hooked up to the bunkhouse and you'll get your chance then. Now git, all of you!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Taggert waited for Annie to return from taking the nightly tray of sweets to the bunkhouse before stepping out of the shadows. \"Psst.\"\n\nShe spun around and he moved in front of a lit window so she could see him.\n\nShe glanced around to check for eavesdroppers. \"What are you doing here?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I know who the cigarette butts belong to.\" He kept his voice low.\n\nFlashing him a smile, she set the empty tray on the veranda steps. \"You sure do know how to get a girl's attention.\"\n\nHe stepped closer and caught a pleasant whiff of lavender. \"Don't I, though?\"\n\nShe gazed up at him. \"Well? Are you going to tell me or not?\"\n\nThe way she looked all smiling and warm, he would have told her anything she wanted to know. \"They belong to Feedbag. They're from Egypt. Some of the boys don't like the strong odor so they make him smoke outside. What I don't understand is how he can afford Egyptian cigarettes on a ranch hand's salary.\"\n\n\"They were a gift from his brother,\" she said.\n\nAh, so she was testing him. \"He doesn't have a brother. Since obviously you've checked up on the man, you must know that his real name is Willard Day.\"\n\n\"Willard R. Day from Indiana,\" she said without missing a beat. \"His father was a flatboats man.\"\n\n\"And his mother a teacher,\" he added.\n\n\"He left home at sixteen,\" she continued. \"Went to Mexico and eventually wound up in Texas.\"\n\n\"Where he worked for a time on the King Ranch.\" He couldn't remember enjoying himself more. He didn't touch her, at least not physically, but it wasn't hard to imagine her in his arms. Imagine kissing her. He shook the thought away.\n\nShe gave her head a slight toss. \"He left the ranch under suspicious circumstances.\"\n\n\"Nothing suspicious about them. He was having an affair with one of the owners' daughters.\"\n\nHer eyes turned the light from the ranch house window into stars. \"And was later tried and almost hung for horse theft.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"But obviously got away.\"\n\n\"So do you think he's the Phantom?\" she asked.\n\n\"Do you?\"\n\nHer lips curved into a smile. \"Let's just say I'm keeping an open mind.\"\n\n\"An open mind is good.\" He lifted his hand to her face and ran a knuckle down her silky soft skin. \"So where does this leave us, partner?\" He lowered his head but stopped short of capturing her mouth with his own.\n\nShe pressed her hands against his chest and her touch seemed to burn right through him. \"We're not\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" he breathed. \"I'm not going to kiss you. I don't want to be accused of using you to gain information.\" It took every bit of effort he could muster to pull away. \"The next time I kiss you\u2014and there will be a next time\u2014there must be no question as to my real motive.\"\n\nHe turned and walked away. Hearing her quick intake of breath, he smiled. Unless he missed his guess, she craved his kiss every bit as much as he craved hers.\n\n\"You're wrong,\" she called after him. Her voice was loud enough for him to hear, but too low to carry much beyond the courtyard walls. \"Feedbag does have a brother. A half brother.\"\n\nHe kept walking. He might have been wrong about Feedbag, but he wasn't wrong about the lady." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nYou can't take it with you\u2014but an embezzler will try.\n\nOn the day of the church bazaar the temperature soared into the high eighties. Despite the heat, Annie enjoyed the festivities.\n\nHeld outside on church property, the bazaar's main purpose was to raise funds for the Children's Aid Society. It also afforded townsfolk the opportunity to catch up on the latest gossip.\n\nAs head of the decorating committee, Aunt Bessie had left no stone, cactus, or telephone pole unadorned. Planks of wood strung across whiskey barrels served as booths and were decorated with ribbons and colorful fabric. Even the church steeple was wrapped in red, white, and blue bunting.\n\nAnnie felt bad that she hadn't been able to talk Miss Walker into coming, but the ranch owner refused to even consider it.\n\nAccording to Ruckus, it was because some church ladies protested her divorce by refusing to buy her beef. \"After that she even stopped going to church,\" he'd explained.\n\nWhat a pity. It would do the ranch owner a world of good to get out of the house and socialize. Since nothing could be done about Miss Walker, Annie concentrated on her own reasons for coming.\n\nSocial affairs often proved valuable to operatives. The best way to glean information was when people's guards were down, and that was usually when they were having a good time. However, it wasn't the chatter around her that commanded attention\u2014it was Taggert. No matter how many times she pulled her drifting thoughts together, she couldn't seem to stop looking at him.\n\nA small group of musicians struck up the band and music filled the air, adding to the festivities. She recognized some but not all of the musicians. Stretch played the fiddle, Able the harmonica, and Wishbone a drum.\n\nAnnie held her parasol at an angle so she could watch Taggert unseen. He had his disguise down to perfection. Everything from his well-worn boots to his work-stained hat pegged him as one of the many migrant cowpokes who drifted from ranch to ranch taking whatever work was available.\n\nMen ate up his joking banter, women blushed and giggled at his smile, and Annie's heart ached with envy. God forgive her, but she wanted Taggert all to herself.\n\nHe moved from group to group like a friendly puppy looking for a treat. His sharp glances and attentive ear told Annie he was on full investigative alert, though no one would ever guess it by his easy smile.\n\n\"The next time I kiss you...\" The memory of those words filled her with such longing she could hardly breathe.\n\nWith a shake of her head she strolled from booth to booth.\n\nShe avoided the crowd lined up in front of the baked goods. Able's cinnamon rolls and macaroons were selling fast. When he wasn't playing in the band, the affable cook seemed to enjoy swapping recipes with some of the older women.\n\nSpotting Michael, she hurried over to join him. She had to do something to take her mind off Taggert.\n\nThe smithy greeted her with a polite tip of his hat. \"Miss Beckman.\"\n\n\"Michael.\"\n\n\"Do the locks work to your satisfaction?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, thank you. They work just fine.\" She followed his gaze to a small group. \"Your young lady... is she here? You must point her out to me.\"\n\nMichael's face turned tomato red. \"Yes, ma'am, she's here.\" He cast a worried glance at his aunt before pointing her out. \"That's her over there.\"\n\nThe object of his affection was a pretty blonde dressed in a blue gingham dress. The perfectly coiffed hair beneath a flower-trimmed hat seemed almost too staid for such lively features.\n\n\"I'm going to ask Charity to marry me.\"\n\nJudging by the attention the girl was drawing from a bevy of other young men, Michael had better do it soon. \"She's very pretty,\" Annie said, bringing a grin to Michael's face. \"You really ought to tell your aunt. She's going to find out sooner or later.\"\n\n\"She thinks she knows better who I should marry.\" He made a face. \"You won't believe the women she's picked out for me.\"\n\n\"Your aunt means well.\"\n\nCharity's high-pitched laughter drew Michael's loving gaze.\n\nAnnie gave him a little shove in the girl's direction. \"I have a feeling she needs to be rescued from that annoying man.\" The man in question was clinging to Charity's every word. \"You'd better go and save her.\"\n\nAfter Michael left, she made a valiant but fruitless attempt to ignore Taggert. Accepting defeat, she scanned the crowd and spotted him in deep conversation with the banker. Both men looked serious and she wished she could hear what they were talking about.\n\nAunt Bessie sidled up to her side. \"I'm so glad you could make it, dearie.\"\n\n\"So am I.\" Annie drew her gaze away from the two men and checked out the display of aprons, embroidered linens, and bonnets for sale at one of the booths. \"How are you?\"\n\n\"Busy.\" Aunt Bessie ran her hand over a quilt. \"Now that the telephone has reached the ranch, I hardly have a moment to myself.\"\n\nAnnie frowned. \"But Miss Walker refuses to use the phone.\"\n\nAunt Bessie rolled her eyes. \"The ranch hands more than make up for it.\"\n\n\"Really? I wouldn't think they'd have that many calls to make.\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised. That new man, Branch, is always calling the bank. Doesn't it seem strange that a cowhand would have so much financial business to discuss? And what they discuss never makes sense. It's like they're talking in a foreign language. Not that I listen in, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Annie said politely.\n\n\"Then of course there's Stretch. He calls twice a day to ask if Miss Winston has a phone yet. Then O.T. is always calling Green's to see if some order has arrived.\"\n\n\"Sounds like the town's going to have to hire a second hello girl,\" Annie said.\n\n\"They've already talked about hiring Charity.\" Not even Aunt Bessie's heavy-handed face paint could hide her disapproval. \"What an annoying girl.\" She pointed to the object of Michael's affection. Every last suitor seemed to be mesmerized by the girl, Michael most of all.\n\n\"She looks like a very nice person,\" Annie said.\n\n\"Maybe so,\" Aunt Bessie muttered, \"but she hasn't got a brain in that head of hers. I'd sooner spend my days with a dumb mule.\"\n\nIt appeared that Michael had good reason to worry about his aunt's opinion. Annie picked up a dime novel, which earned Aunt Bessie's approving nod. The title of the book was Cactus Joe: Master of Disguise.\n\n\"That was written by my nephew's wife.\"\n\n\"Oh yes, I met her at church. Is she here?\"\n\n\"Yes, but she doesn't plan to stay long because of the heat.\" Aunt Bessie pantomimed a rounded belly with her hand. \"I'm sure she'll be happy to sign it for you.\" She chose a book from the stack. \"This one is better,\" she said in a hushed tone. She shoved it into Annie's hand. The title read Miss Hattie's Dilemma.\n\n\"That's the one I told you was banned in Boston.\" Aunt Bessie fanned her face with her hand and Annie laughed.\n\nAnnie reached into her purse for her money. \"I guess that explains why it's so popular. I've seen it in the most unexpected places.\" The memory of the cave and Taggert's kiss brought a flush to her already heated face.\n\n\"Oh dear, I made you blush, but don't worry. It's not that bad. It's just very romantic.\"\n\n\"I look forward to reading it,\" Annie said, paying the woman behind the counter.\n\n\"Oh, there's that nice-looking man again.\" She pointed to Taggert. \"The one who's always calling the bank. Do you think I could interest him in Miss Chase?\"\n\n\"The one who hasn't got a brain in her head?\" Annie asked.\n\nAunt Bessie didn't look the least bit chagrined. Instead she turned her gaze on her nephew in the distance and frowned. \"I've got to do something to get her away from Michael.\"\n\n\"I don't think Branch plans on staying in Cactus Patch for very long,\" Annie said, surprised by the sudden surge of emotion that rushed through her upon thinking of Taggert with another woman. Not jealousy. It couldn't be jealousy. God, please don't let it be jealousy, because that would mean...\n\nMichael had managed to pull the young woman away from the others and the expression on Aunt Bessie's face looked like a storm cloud. \"What on earth does Michael see in the girl?\"\n\n\"Michael said she reads the stories he writes,\" Annie said. \"That seems to mean a lot to him.\"\n\n\"Harrumph. I didn't even know she could read.\"\n\n\"It would seem like the two of you have a lot in common. You didn't know she could read and she doesn't know what a kind, charitable woman you are.\"\n\nAunt Bessie scoffed. \"Like I said, hasn't got a brain in her head.\"\n\nAnnie sighed. Michael had his work cut out for him. She tucked her newly purchased book in her purse, excused herself, and made a beeline to the lemonade stand where Taggert had just purchased a drink.\n\nShe armored herself with an air of professionalism, but he immediately disarmed her with his smile. \"Having a good time?\"\n\nShe fought for composure. \"Not as good as you're having.\"\n\nHe turned to the youth in the booth and tossed a coin on the counter. \"Pour one for the lady.\"\n\nThe youth filled a glass with lemonade and handed it to Annie.\n\n\"Thank you.\" She took a sip of the cool, sweet beverage. They moved from the booth and away from the music where they could talk.\n\nShe sensed his disquiet. \"Find out anything?\"\n\nTroubled eyes met hers. \"There was another bank robbery.\"\n\nShe stiffened. \"When?\"\n\n\"Day before yesterday. Stackman and I decided to keep it quiet for now.\"\n\nThursday. \"What do you know? Lightning does strike twice,\" she said. \"Any ideas?\"\n\n\"A couple.\" He took a sip of his beverage. \"Ladies first.\"\n\n\"Always a gentleman.\" She purposely kept him waiting while she took a long drink. \"Sorry, I can't help you. I left the ranch early that morning.\" Now that Miss Walker was on crutches, Annie was expected to learn ranching. \"Ruckus and I repaired fences and checked the water on the north boundary.\"\n\n\"See anyone else while you were out there?\" he asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"No one.\" She waited and when he failed to volunteer any information, she inclined her head. \"Your turn.\"\n\n\"I saw you talking to Michael.\"\n\nKnowing he'd been watching her made her feel all tingly inside.\n\n\"I think it's him,\" he continued. \"Do you?\"\n\nOkay, so he hadn't been watching her; Michael was his object of interest.\n\n\"No!\"\n\nHer emphatic response made him draw back. \"Me either.\" When she didn't respond, he added, \"Still, we can't discount him completely. He wasn't at morning prayer that day, nor did he show up for work until noon.\"\n\nMichael was definitely not an early bird, but for good reason. According to Ruckus, if Michael wasn't with Charity, he stayed up late writing. She started to explain Michael's absence but a nearby group of youths playing mumblety-peg yelled out, drowning her voice. Another boy stepped forward to take his turn throwing the knife and the group fell silent.\n\n\"Michael has taken a fancy to that young woman over there in blue.\" Annie pointed to one of the game booths where Michael and Charity were taking turns tossing rings onto milk bottles. \"I can assure you that robbing banks has never crossed his mind.\"\n\n\"Is that the opinion of a private eye or simply women's intuition?\" he asked, and the intensity in his eyes made her blush.\n\n\"Both.\"\n\nHe cleared his voice and looked away as if the shared moment had been as powerful for him as it was for her. \"And I don't remember seeing Stretch.\"\n\n\"Stretch drove into town that day for supplies.\" She remembered distinctly because he mailed a letter for her. \"He likes to get an early start.\"\n\nHe seemed to weigh her words. \"Stretch just happened to be in town during both bank robberies. He's in town almost as much as Michael. And don't forget, the day I was attacked, Stretch's horse appeared to have been ridden.\"\n\nHer gaze drifted over to where Stretch danced with a short red-headed woman. Miss Winston, no doubt. The tall ranch hand was practically doubled over to accommodate their differences in height. Was he the one? She fervently hoped not, but she couldn't allow personal feelings to interfere with an investigation.\n\n\"Do you think it's Stretch?\" she asked.\n\n\"He did admit to robbing a bank.\"\n\n\"Accidentally robbing a bank.\" She still couldn't shake the nagging feeling that she'd missed something. \"The time element bothers me. The robberies are getting closer together.\"\n\n\"I've been thinking the same thing.\" Taggert thought for a moment. \"He now seems more interested in robbing banks than trains and stages, which means he's probably working alone.\"\n\n\"It seems like our guy is under some sort of pressure and he's starting to take risks.\" She took a sip of lemonade. \"Do you think all that talk about a Wells Fargo detective being in town has him running scared?\"\n\n\"If that's true, he has a funny way of showing it. If I was scared I wouldn't be robbing banks. I'd lay low.\"\n\nWhat Taggert said made sense.\n\nHe finished his lemonade and set his empty glass on a tray. \"Stackman is meeting me tomorrow at the bank so I can have a look around.\"\n\n\"I'll be there too,\" she said, though she doubted they'd find anything.\n\nHis brows drew together. \"That won't be necessary. I'll... let you know if I uncover any clues.\"\n\n\"How very thoughtful of you.\" She had no intention of being shut out. \"But if you don't mind, I prefer to do my own investigating.\"\n\nShe set her glass down on the counter and turned to leave. He stopped her with a hand to her arm.\n\nHis eyes caught hers and held. \"Annie\u2014\"\n\nA high-pitched scream pierced the air and a woman's voice yelled, \"Help! We need a doctor.\"\n\nThe music stopped and a hushed silence followed as all eyes turned to stare at the home goods booth where a matronly woman frantically waved her arms.\n\nDr. Fairbanks rushed to the woman's side and dropped to his knees. That's when Annie saw the banker, Mr. Stackman, lying facedown on the ground." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nRunning a shady business is no way to live a sunny life.\n\nPoison!\" Miss Walker's face turned almost as gray as her hair. \"You can't be serious. Is Robert all right?\"\n\nAnnie sat on the sofa. \"He's at the dispensary, but he's going to be fine. Fortunately he received excellent medical care.\" Thank God the doctor was nearby, saving precious time.\n\nShe took hold of Miss Walker's hands. The palms were calloused, the nails square cut, and the skin brown as old leather and almost as tough.\n\n\"Was it something he ate? I told him not to eat any beef but mine.\" Miss Walker's voice held its usual sharp edge and only the tremor and coldness of her hands gave her away.\n\n\"It wasn't beef.\" Annie hesitated. \"Dr. Fairbanks believes it was arsenic.\"\n\n\"Arsenic!\" Miss Walker pulled her hands away. \"That means it was no accident.\"\n\nAnnie nodded. \"I'm afraid that's exactly what it means.\"\n\nMiss Walker made a funny choking sound. \"But who in heaven's name would want to poison Robert?\"\n\nIt was a good question and Annie had no answer. Never had she felt so inadequate. \"We don't know, but the marshal is doing everything possible to find out.\"\n\nMiss Walker sniffed. \"That old tin badge couldn't catch a wolf in a chicken coop.\" She would never admit it but she was obviously shaken. Still, Annie had a job to do and there was no time to waste.\n\n\"Does Mr. Stackman have any enemies?\"\n\n\"Of course he has enemies,\" Miss Walker snapped with an impatient wave. \"He's a banker.\"\n\nAnnie debated on how little or how much to say. \"I wonder if there's a connection between what happened to Mr. Stackman and what's been happening on the ranch.\"\n\nMiss Walker's thin brows rose. \"Certainly you don't mean the fire and poisoned water?\"\n\n\"I do. And don't forget someone attacked Mr. Branch.\" She made no mention of the dead Wells Fargo detective. \"Everything that's happened recently, including Mr. Stackman's poisoning, could be the work of a single person.\"\n\n\"But that makes no sense,\" Miss Walker sputtered. \"Robert has no connection to the ranch.\"\n\n\"Except through you,\" Annie said. \"Someone may be trying to get to you through him.\"\n\nThe older woman seemed to shrink before Annie's eyes, as if someone had taken the stuffing out of her. \"Why would anyone want to do such a thing?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" That very question had been burning in Annie's mind since Robert collapsed. She and Taggert had discussed it at great length while waiting for the doctor to finish examining the banker. \"I have a feeling that once we figure it out we'll have the answer to all our questions.\"\n\n\"Take me to him.\" Miss Walker reached for her crutches but Annie stayed her.\n\n\"There's nothing you can do for him. He's in good hands and he's resting.\" She searched for something to say, for something to do that would put Miss Walker's mind at ease.\n\n\"Would you... like to pray with me?\"\n\nMiss Walker didn't say anything, but she didn't resist when Annie took her hands a second time. \"God the Father, please comfort and heal Mr. Stackman...\"\n\n\"And tell Him to put an end to all the nonsense that's been going on at the ranch,\" Miss Walker interjected.\n\nAnnie peered at Miss Walker through lowered lashes. \"Would you like to tell God that yourself?\"\n\n\"Why would I want to do that? You're doing just fine.\" She clamped her mouth shut. After a moment she added, \"What are you waiting for? Go on, tell Him.\"\n\nAnnie resumed her prayer. \"And please, God, help\"\u2014she almost said me\u2014\"the marshal catch the... culprit who's been causing all the trouble at the ranch.\"\n\n\"And tell Him to get on the stick.\"\n\nAnnie opened her mouth to say something but changed her mind. Talking to God through a third person was better than not talking to Him at all. She finished her prayer and released the older woman's hands.\n\nMiss Walker sank back, eyes closed. She claimed that nothing meant as much to her as the ranch, but Annie had seen beyond the rigid exterior. The poisoned cattle and fire hardly fazed her, but she still grieved the loss of her daughter and was clearly shaken by her banker friend's near brush with death.\n\n\"If anything happens to Robert...\" Miss Walker didn't finish; it wasn't necessary.\n\n\"I'll have Able make us some tea,\" Annie said, standing.\n\nThe old lady's eyes flew open and the piercing gaze seemed to bore a hole through Annie. \"Before you go, answer me one question. Who are you, really?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Taggert wrapped the reins of his horse around the hitching post in front of the bank. Stackman's medical emergency had postponed their meeting, which meant having to conduct his investigation during bank hours.\n\nAnnie was nowhere to be seen. Professionally, he was relieved. Personally? That was another matter. He missed her when she wasn't around and worried about her safety, but nothing he said convinced her to leave the ranch. She was determined to see the job through to the end. Stubborn woman.\n\nStackman greeted him the moment he entered the bank. He still looked a bit peaked around the eyes, but otherwise appeared to have recovered from his ordeal.\n\nTaggert shook the banker's offered hand. \"It appears that Miss Beckman won't be joining us.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. She's been here for ages.\" Stackman turned and led the way through the bank. \"Checked out all our customers' shoes.\"\n\nTaggert winced inwardly. He should have known she would want to get a head start on the investigation. Were his personal feelings making him careless?\n\n\"Did you say shoes?\"\n\n\"Yes. Miss Beckman explained that bank robbers often wear low-heeled shoes so as not to get caught on the metal bar leading to the vault. Did you know that?\"\n\n\"Can't say that I did.\" Taggert didn't like having another detective show him up, even one as competent as Annie.\n\n\"I'm happy to tell you that all today's customers are well-heeled.\" Stackman laughed at his own joke and a couple of bank employees looked up to stare from behind the bars of the teller cages.\n\nStackman ushered Taggert into his office where Annie sat waiting. She quickly closed her notepad and dropped it into her handbag along with her pencil.\n\nTaggert would give anything to see what she'd written. He abandoned his cowboy swagger and donned his efficient detective persona, matching Annie's. It was easier to concentrate that way. He sat in the chair next to hers, careful not to get too close.\n\n\"I didn't see your rig,\" he said.\n\nShe afforded him a slanted glance that hid more than it revealed. \"I didn't think it wise to let anyone know we were at the bank together.\"\n\nIt never failed to amaze him how her mind worked, but that didn't make him any less concerned for her safety. If only she would listen to him.\n\nStackman sat on the corner of his desk and folded his arms. \"As I was telling Miss Beckman before you arrived, we didn't even know we'd been robbed until we counted the money after closing.\"\n\n\"Even so, I don't believe it's an inside job,\" Annie added.\n\n\"We can't rule it out,\" Taggert said, though he suspected Annie was right; most dishonest bank clerks targeted customers, not the bank. It was a simple matter to shortchange a distracted client either at the teller booth or counting table. \"Show us where the robbery occurred.\"\n\n\"This way.\" Stackman slid off the desk and opened a second door.\n\nThey followed him down a hall to the bank vault behind the cashier cages. It was an older vault with concrete walls, typical of the kind prevalent in most western towns. Eastern banks had newer vaults with combination locks and cast-iron doors that, unlike the cheaper metal doors, were torch-proof.\n\nWithout such modern amenities, this particular strong room offered better protection against fires than thievery.\n\n\"This is the day door,\" Stackman explained. \"After hours we set the night door.\"\n\nTaggert examined the lock. \"Who has access?\"\n\n\"Each teller has a key.\" He pulled out his own key and opened the door. \"As you can see, the door has a spring lock. It locks by itself.\" He swung the door shut to demonstrate.\n\nTaggert put his hand out to Annie. \"Quick, give me your hair clasp,\" he said beneath his breath.\n\nWithout question or argument, Annie reached for the wooden barrette holding her bun and handed it to him. Her fingers brushed his and their gazes caught. Her hair stayed in place, but the memory of lush dark tresses falling to her shoulders flashed through his mind, along with the kiss that had followed.\n\nForcing the memory away, Taggert turned to Stackman. \"Pretend you're a teller. Go to the vault. Show us how it's done.\"\n\nStackman inserted the key into the keyhole and unlocked the door. The tall heel of his shoe caught on the iron bar as he stepped inside. Taggert glanced at Annie but said nothing.\n\nThe door swung shut and locked. After a moment, Stackman opened the door and emerged. Before it locked, Taggert quickly inserted Annie's hair clasp in the casing. This he did with such finesse that Stackman didn't seem to notice\u2014but Annie did.\n\nTaggert would have missed the quick upturn of her mouth had he not been looking straight at her.\n\n\"So what do you think?\" Stackman asked.\n\nBefore Taggert could reply, a bespectacled young man dressed in dark trousers, vest, and bow tie called to Stackman. \"Sir, I need your signature.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Stackman said and walked away.\n\nTaggert pushed the vault door open. Annie's hair clip fell to the floor and he scooped it up with one quick move and slid it into his vest pocket. He then took Annie's hand and pulled her inside the concrete vault. He closed the door but didn't shut it all the way. A stream of light filtered through the crack.\n\nIn such close quarters, he could smell her sweet lavender fragrance.\n\n\"Very clever of you,\" she said softly.\n\n\"An old trick,\" he said without the least bit of modesty.\n\n\"Do you think this was the work of the Phantom?\" Only half of her face was visible in the vault's dim light, but it was enough to know that she had not dropped her professional air.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. He ached to reach beyond her studied expression. Longed for those dark eyes of hers to gaze at the man and not the detective.\n\n\"Maybe,\" he said, his voice hoarse. \"Maybe not.\"\n\nShe gazed up at him through a fringe of dark lashes. \"How can you be so sure?\" she teased.\n\nHis grin was rewarded with a smile that practically turned his heart inside out. He felt himself sink into the velvet softness of her eyes and everything went out of his head but her nearness.\n\n\"If I kiss you, will you still accuse me of having ulterior motives?\" he asked.\n\n\"Probably,\" she whispered and in a stronger voice added, \"Yes.\"\n\nThen she did something totally unexpected. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him fully on the mouth.\n\nHe crushed her in his embrace and her hat went flying. Hands pressed against her back, he smothered her lips with an urgency that left them both breathless.\n\nHe pulled his mouth away but only to brush kisses across her silky smooth forehead. \"Who are you?\" he whispered, burying his face in her sweet-scented hair.\n\n\"What kind of question is that?\" With her arms still around his neck, her expression seemed to beckon for more. \"You know who I am.\"\n\nHe kissed her again before answering. \"You know my real name, but I don't know yours.\" It suddenly seemed imperative that he know everything about her.\n\nShe hesitated and he knew why. An undercover agent could never be too careful.\n\n\"Miranda,\" she whispered.\n\nAt that moment he knew that she trusted him, not only with her name but with her life. No one had ever given him a greater gift. \"Miranda,\" he lipped silently to show he would never betray that trust by saying her name aloud. He pulled her closer still and could feel her heart beat next to his.\n\nShe nestled her head against his chest. \"Hunt. Miranda Hunt.\"\n\nNo sooner were the words out of her mouth than he felt like the ground had caved beneath his feet. Had she suddenly stabbed him with a knife the pain wouldn't have been more intense.\n\nHe pulled back and stared at her. \"Hunt?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"It's a good name for an operative, don't you think?\"\n\nIt can't be. God, don't do this to me. \"Your father...?\"\n\n\"My father's name was Charles Hunt.\" She tilted her head and her smile died. She said something more, but his mind was a blank. \"Is... something wrong?\"\n\nHe worked a finger along his collar but he still couldn't breathe. Feeling as if the walls of the safe were closing in, he tore open the door and staggered out of the vault.\n\nStackman's mouth dropped open. \"How did you get in there?\"\n\nTaggert moved as far away as possible from Annie. He needed air. He needed to think. \"An old t-trick,\" he stammered.\n\n\"It would seem Mr. Taggert is full of tricks,\" Annie said, her face suffused with confusion and hurt.\n\nStackman's gaze swung from Annie back to Branch as if he sensed the strain between them. \"I'll instruct my tellers to make certain that the door is closed and locked before they leave.\"\n\n\"The Phantom seldom uses the same M.O. twice,\" Annie said. The banker didn't seem to notice the tremor in her voice but Taggert did. \"That's what makes him so difficult to catch.\"\n\n\"M.O.?\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" She took in a deep breath as if trying to brace herself. \"Modus operandi. It's a method of operation. Like a calling card. We're all creatures of habit, and that includes criminals. But in this case, no one modus operandi has been established. Salt, fire, and arsenic hardly sound like the workings of one man.\"\n\n\"Which means what, exactly?\"\n\n\"It means that if this is the work of a single man, he's extremely clever,\" she explained. \"Or there's a pattern we've yet to identify.\"\n\nWhile Annie and Stackman talked, Taggert's thoughts shot back in time three years to that fateful day that made him question himself and God's purpose for him. He had been dispatched to the Wells Fargo bank in Chicago. He worked the case for two weeks before finally catching one of the bank clerks stealing notes from an unsuspecting customer. His name was Sam Vander.\n\nTaggert had stepped in front of Vander, badge in hand. The man panicked and ran. Taggert chased after him. Vander dashed outside the bank just as a band of union picketers walked by.\n\n\"Don't let him get away,\" Taggert yelled.\n\nVander pulled out a gun, and in the scuffle that followed, a shot was fired and what turned out to be a Pinkerton undercover operative fell to the ground. Taggert now knew that man was Annie's father.\n\nThe death of an innocent man took a toll on him and reminded him in the worst possible way of his own father's death. He'd joined the agency to protect people like his father, who was shot down for no reason; instead he caused an innocent man's death. For two years he refused to accept an assignment, choosing instead to work at a desk.\n\n\"Branch?\"\n\nStartled, Taggert looked up to find Annie and Stackman staring at him. \"I'm sorry\u2014\"\n\n\"I was just asking what we should do to increase security,\" Stackman said.\n\n\"Uh...\" Taggert cleared his throat. \"Just stay alert. It might be a good idea to post someone by the door to keep watch.\"\n\nTwo lines of worry filled the space between Stackman's eyebrows. \"I'll be sure to keep my guard up. You too. Both of you. I don't want to lose another detective.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Annie drove the wagon back to the ranch. Her heart still raced with the memory of Taggert's kiss. So what happened?\n\nAfter their meeting with Stackman, he refused to look her in the eyes. Even more puzzling, he took off without so much as a good-bye.\n\nShe went over every word exchanged in the bank vault, every look, every nuance. Something had triggered a strong reaction in him, but what? Certainly not their kiss.\n\n\"If I kiss you, would you still accuse me of having ulterior motives?\" Her pulse skittered.\n\nA sudden thought made her yank on the reins to slow the horse. Had he figured out who the Phantom was? That would certainly explain his haste in leaving the bank and why he refused to look at her. The thought nearly crushed her. Was all that business of working together just a ruse?\n\nHe wanted to catch the Phantom and evidently would do anything to reach that goal\u2014even if it meant using her. To think otherwise was just plain foolish." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Taggert wasn't a drinker. No detective could afford to take a liking to alcohol, but today he was tempted. Something had to dull the pain that seared through him like a piercing bullet.\n\nMiranda Hunt. He couldn't believe it.\n\nThe saloon was crowded, a lively game of faro in progress. He bellied up to the bar and the bartender placed a shot of whiskey in front of him. Taggert picked up the glass but memories of Annie were reflected in the amber liquid.\n\nShe would never forgive him. How could she? Her father was cut down in the prime of life, because of him.\n\nThe image of Charlie Hunt lying on the ground in a pool of blood would forever be engraved on his mind. At the time, he thought the dead man was another rioting union worker. He didn't find out he was an undercover Pinkerton operative until much later.\n\nHe had wanted to quit then and there, but his boss talked him out of it. \"You're a good detective. We need you.\"\n\n\"Good detectives don't get innocent people killed,\" he'd argued, but in the end he stayed. Instead of field work he settled for an office job. He handled stagecoach holdup reports and dispatched detectives as needed. He also sent out wanted posters and issued reward checks.\n\nHe'd asked for God's forgiveness and through God's grace had learned to live with his guilt... more or less. Nothing he did could justify an innocent man's death, but upon learning of his friend's disappearance he pledged himself anew to physically fighting crime. His days of hiding behind a desk were over.\n\nIt was a decision he now regretted. Learning the dead man's identity was horrific enough, but nothing compared to finding out that Annie was the man's daughter. Had Hunt reached from the grave to seek revenge, he couldn't have exerted worse torture.\n\nTaggert shook the glass and the amber liquid whirled around. Annie...\n\nEvery moment spent with her left him wanting more. He admired her intensity when she puzzled over something. Loved the rare occasions she dropped her professional persona and allowed him to see the passionate, beautiful woman beneath the cool exterior. At such times her eyes lit up whenever they met his.\n\nThey did light up, didn't they? Or was it his imagination playing tricks on him? Crimes must be solved, a friend's killer brought to justice, and here he was thinking of Annie yet again\u2014the last woman in the world he should be thinking about.\n\nIf only he hadn't kissed her; if only he hadn't held her in his arms. Perhaps then he would be better able to put her out of his mind.\n\nWith a groan, he slammed the shot glass down, spilling the untouched whiskey. He then tossed a bill on the counter and stomped outside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Chapter 27\n\n\"Elementary, my dear Watson.\"\n\nAnnie couldn't sleep. Instead she stood on the balcony staring out at the thick darkness of night. She wanted to talk to Taggert in the worst possible way, but it seemed as if he had purposely avoided her.\n\nShivering, she walked inside, closed the glass door, and lit the kerosene lamp. She reached for her GTF file and flipped through the pages until she found her favorite scriptures.\n\nShe traced her finger over the sentence written in cryptic. \"I was blind, now I see.\" It seemed like the perfect biblical verse for a private eye. She closed her eyes and forced herself to concentrate on the words. But, God, what don't I see? Something...\n\nSo many questions; so many unsolved puzzles, but none had anything to do with her low spirits. What depressed her\u2014scared her\u2014was the gnawing suspicion that no amount of problem solving or detective work could fill the empty hole that festered inside.\n\nFor as long as she could remember it seemed as if part of her was missing. At first she blamed it on her mother's early death. During her teens she was convinced her father's aloofness created the void inside. Later she blamed it on a lack of meaningful work assignments. The petty thief cases assigned to her weren't challenging enough. What she needed and wanted was to sink her teeth into a \"real\" case. Then the hollow in her heart would go away\u2014or so she thought.\n\nHer current assignment had turned out to be more challenging than she ever could have imagined and it had truly fulfilled her, at least for a while. But then Taggert entered the picture and the feeling of emptiness became want... and want became need.\n\n\"I was blind...\"\n\nWhen she was a child she heard the minister of their church talk about God's plan and she asked him what that meant.\n\n\"How do you know what God's plan is?\" She still remembered her pastor's answer.\n\n\"Follow the joy. You know God's plan by doing the things that give you great joy.\"\n\nThe day she told her father she intended to follow in his footsteps would forever be ingrained. \"You're a girl,\" he said as coldly as a tormentor might point out a cripple's useless legs.\n\n\"I wouldn't be the first woman in the agency,\" she'd argued. That honor went to Kate Warne, who joined the firm in '55 and was instrumental in helping the agency's founder foil a plot to assassinate Lincoln.\n\nHer line of reasoning held no water with him and he continued to ignore her. It was her brother Travis who taught her to use a gun, ride a horse, and defend herself.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to do this, sis?\" he asked one day after sneaking up behind and grabbing her by the waist.\n\nShe reached for his hand and bent back his finger.\n\n\"Ow!\" he cried, letting her go.\n\nShe whirled to face him. Her brother had taught her well and she was ready to tackle the world. \"Yes, I want to do this.\" She would prove to her father she was every bit as capable of being an operative as a man. Maybe then he would see her, not as a child to ignore, but as the woman she had become.\n\nWilliam Pinkerton hired her on the spot, but only because she was Charlie Hunt's daughter.\n\nBy the time her father learned that she had joined the firm, she had already completed the extensive training program, which included dramatizations of crime scenes and lessons on disguises. He stormed into the principal's office and their raised voices could be heard throughout the building, but William Pinkerton's decision prevailed and Miranda was allowed to stay.\n\nFrom that moment on, she never questioned God's will for her. She was certain that God had removed the blinders from her eyes so she could follow the path He had set for her.\n\nIf only she hadn't met Taggert. If only she hadn't experienced such joy when they were together. Like a thief in the night, he stole her heart and all that remained now was an empty space. She didn't know exactly when or how it happened, but there it was, plain as day.\n\nYears of training had taught her to control her feelings. She learned to control body language, words, and facial expressions so as to conceal her true identity. But the womanly part\u2014the part that craved Taggert's touch and kisses\u2014that part she didn't know how to control.\n\nBut she had to find a way. Otherwise her goal of restoring the Hunt name to its former glory as Pinkerton's best and finest would be in jeopardy.\n\nShe stared at the open Bible in her hands, but no answers materialized. It was as if God had snatched the road map of her life away and purposely left her in the wilderness to fend for herself.\n\nShe set the Good Book on the desk with a sigh and reached for the dime novel purchased at the church bazaar. Perhaps a little light reading would put her mind to rest and help her sleep. There was nothing to do until she could talk to Taggert.\n\nFor the next hour she was thoroughly engaged with the lively story.\n\nMiss Hattie's Dilemma was a romantic tale of a woman torn between two men, but it was also a story of the lust for gold. Mrs. Kate Adams, who wrote under the pseudonym K. Mattson, was a good writer. Descriptions of the cave where gold was found seemed so real it felt like Annie was there on the spot. She could almost hear the drip of water, see the indentations on the cave wall, the light in the dark tunnel.\n\nFeel the kiss...\n\nStartled, Annie dropped the book on her lap. Maybe the cave seemed familiar for a reason.\n\nThe cave in Kate's novel was almost identical to the cave on Miss Walker's ranch. She shook her head\u2014that was crazy. This was fiction, pure and simple, written before its author even set foot in Arizona Territory.\n\nShaking the thought away, Annie turned the page and tried to concentrate, but the words kept blurring together. Flashes of memory bombarded her. Was it just coincidence that a copy of the book had lain in plain sight on the cave floor?\n\nWork the clues. How often had she heard William Pinkerton utter those very words?\n\nGo back to the beginning.\n\nShe considered everything that had happened during the past several weeks. The mysterious lights, the poisoned cattle, the fire, Mr. Stackman, even the train and bank robberies. Slowly, the crazy, mixed-up puzzle pieces fell into place and a disturbing picture began to emerge.\n\nShe jumped out of bed and threw on her clothes. Fingers trembling, she had trouble fastening the hooks and eyes at her waist, and it took every bit of effort to buckle the holster around her thigh.\n\nIn her hurry, she accidentally knocked her GTF file on the floor. She stooped to pick it up and her gaze fell on the verse \"I was blind, now I see...\"\n\nShe dropped the folder on the desk. Indeed she did see, and what she saw, she didn't like.\n\nWilliam Pinkerton accused her of taking unnecessary risks, but she had no intention of doing so tonight. There was too much at stake. She needed Taggert's help. More than that, she wanted his help.\n\nShe crept along the hallway in the dark. She stopped to listen but could hear nothing over the sound of her pounding heart. She treaded ever so carefully down the stairs and avoided the middle where they were most likely to creak.\n\nReaching the bottom, she felt her way through the darkness to the telephone. She lifted the receiver to her ear and turned the crank. She hated waking Aunt Bessie in the wee morning hours, but she didn't dare leave the house. Through the horn-shaped receiver plastered to her ear came a ringing sound that seemed to go on forever.\n\n\"Come on, come on,\" she muttered beneath her breath. \"Answer.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "The incessant ringing of the switchboard woke Bessie out of a deep slumber. Ignoring it, she buried her head beneath her pillow. It was probably some lovesick goon calling and wanting to be connected to his lady friend.\n\nIt was shameful, that's what it was, the goings-on in this town. Men calling women, women calling men, and it didn't seem to matter what time it was. When she first agreed to be the hello girl, she was told the phone would be used primarily for emergencies. Ha! Emergencies, my foot!\n\nShe turned over and gave her pillow a good thump, but it did no good; the switchboard kept ringing and her husband kept snoring and her overactive mind began to imagine the most awful things. What if it really was an emergency?\n\nFinally she slipped out of bed, but more out of curiosity than a sense of responsibility. Walking barefooted from the bedroom to the dining room, she paused to light a lamp.\n\n\"All right, all right. Hold your horses.\" She sat on the stool and donned her earphones. Much to her surprise, it was the Last Chance calling. The main house, no less.\n\n\"What num-BER?\"\n\n\"Please connect me to the bunkhouse.\"\n\nBessie Adams recognized the hushed voice immediately. She glanced at the long clock in the corner of the room. It was a little after 2:00 a.m. \"At this time of night? What is it with women today? Why, in my day\u2014\"\n\n\"It's Annie. Please hurry. It's urgent!\"\n\nThe line suddenly went dead. Bessie played with the switch, checked the jack, and tried ringing the ranch number back with no luck.\n\nShe slammed her headset down. For this she was awakened from a sound sleep! She knew something was going on between Annie and that new man, Branch, and now her suspicions were confirmed. A body would have had to be blind not to notice the way the two gazed at each other at the church bazaar, or how they snuck off together afterward. No wonder Annie's nose was out of joint when Bessie suggested she introduce Branch to Charity.\n\n\"Harrumph! If Mr. Bell knew how his instrument would be put to use, he might have thought twice about inventing it.\"\n\nShe turned off the lamp and shuffled back to bed. Tomorrow she'd ask her nephew to check the new lines going out to the ranch for problems. Then she intended to give Annie a motherly talk.\n\nHer husband, Sam, snorted twice and rolled over. \"Who was calling at this hour?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it. Go back to sleep.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "The line dead in her ear, Annie dropped the receiver. A man's form stood no less than ten feet away. Though it was dark, she knew immediately who it was. She reached into her false pocket for her gun.\n\n\"Hello, Able.\"\n\nHe stepped forward into the circle of moonlight streaming through a narrow window.\n\n\"How did you know?\"\n\nSomething in her voice must have told him it would do no good to act innocent. She pulled her derringer slowly out of her pocket, careful to keep it hidden behind the folds of her skirt. \"That you're the Phantom?\"\n\n\"How did you know?\" he repeated.\n\nIn retrospect, there had been so many clues, but she had failed to put them together.\n\n\"The night of the fire. Something always bothered me about that night, but I couldn't put my finger on it. You and I reached the front door at the same time, but you went out first. I always turn the lock before retiring, but the door wasn't locked when you went out. That meant that someone had left the house prior to the fire, and that someone could only have been you.\"\n\n\"Foiled by a lock,\" he said.\n\n\"That wasn't the only thing. You always go to town on Tuesday for supplies,\" she said.\n\n\"So? What does that have to do with anything?\"\n\n\"I arrived at the ranch on a Thursday and you were nowhere to be found. I rang the bell and called, but the house was empty. It turns out that was the same day the bank was robbed.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"Then there was the night Branch and I were at the cave. We heard someone leave, but when I checked the horses, none appeared to have been ridden. That bothered me, but I think I solved the puzzle. The day in the garden when you were digging for carrots, I noticed an old barn. That's where I'll find your horse. Am I right?\"\n\n\"No one uses that barn anymore. Miz Walker said I could keep my horse there.\"\n\n\"Then there was the dime novel. I first saw it in the kitchen but it never occurred to me that the one in the cave was the same copy.\"\n\n\"How careless of me.\"\n\n\"Yes, wasn't it?\" Her mouth dry, she forced herself to continue. \"What I don't understand is the significance of the book. It's fiction.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought. But then one day I happened to come across the cave and what do you know? It was almost identical to the one in the book. So I started digging.\"\n\nAnother piece of the puzzle fell into place and she nodded. \"And you found something.\"\n\n\"I found gold, just like it said in the book.\"\n\n\"Then why bother with robberies?\" she asked. \"If you found gold, you're already rich.\"\n\n\"Not me. Miss Walker. The gold belongs to the boss lady.\"\n\nAh, more pieces of the puzzle. \"So you decided to buy the ranch,\" she said. \"And you needed money. But why rob? Why not just mine the gold?\"\n\n\"To mine that much gold I'd need proper equipment, and that would have drawn attention to the cave.\"\n\n\"You had to have known Miss Walker would never sell.\"\n\n\"Everyone's got a price, and I figured Miz Walker couldn't hold out forever. Once the ranch was mine, I could start mining.\"\n\n\"But you couldn't do it on your current salary,\" she said. \"So you hired others to do the dirty work.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but it took too long. That's 'cause they were cheating me out of money. So I got rid of them.\"\n\n\"By getting rid of them, you mean you called the marshal.\" How the marshal knew to greet the train always puzzled her. \"That's why he was waiting for them when the train pulled into the station.\"\n\n\"They got what was coming to them.\" He shrugged. \"Besides, it was quicker and more lucrative to rob the bank. Didn't need anyone for that. What I needed was the ranch.\"\n\n\"But Miss Walker refused to sell, so you decided to scare her off by poisoning her cattle and burning down the barn and stables.\" When he didn't deny it, she continued, \"What about the Wells Fargo agent? Why did you kill him?\"\n\n\"I didn't know who he was. All's I know, he was following me.\"\n\nHis matter-of-fact tone filled her with contempt. Sometimes criminals were found in the most unlikely places. In the last year alone, the agency had uncovered a pickpocket priest, a counterfeiting doctor, and an arsonist fireman. Still, it was hard to believe that the same hands that created such delectably light pastry could kill a man in cold blood.\n\n\"What about Branch? Why did you knock him out?\"\n\n\"He's been nosing around and I figured he wasn't who he said he was. I don't know where he was heading, but I sure didn't want him going back to the cave.\"\n\n\"And Mr. Stackman? How does he fit into the picture?\"\n\n\"Everyone knows he wants the old lady to sell the ranch and marry him. I figured if she thought she was gonna lose him, it might scare her into taking him up on his offer.\"\n\n\"You thought of everything, didn't you?\" she asked. \"Except for this.\" She raised her arm and pointed her gun straight at him.\n\nAt that moment, the light came on in the big room, revealing the gun in Able's hand.\n\nUndaunted, she said, \"Drop it!\"\n\nHe gave her gun a cursory glance. \"My barking iron's bigger than yours.\"\n\nJust then Miss Walker hobbled into the entry on crutches, her gaze darting from gun to gun. It was obvious she'd been sleeping on the sofa in the big room. Less obvious was how much she'd heard.\n\n\"What in the name of Betsy\u2014\"\n\nIn one quick movement Able wrapped his arm around the old lady's neck and pressed the muzzle of his gun against her temple. Miss Walker's crutches fell to the floor with a clatter.\n\nHe glared at Annie. \"Now will you drop that can opener you call a gun?\"\n\nAnnie lowered her weapon to the floor.\n\nMiss Walker's face grew red from the pressure of his arm and her eyes bulged. \"What is wrong with you, Able? What's going on? Answer me!\"\n\nHis laughter held no mirth. \"I have the gun, so that means for once I give the orders, not you. Once again I'm the king of the range. Me!\"\n\nHis manic voice made Annie's flesh prickle with cold shivers but she willed herself to remain calm. The freckles she once thought gave him a boyish look now stood out like angry ink blots. How had she previously missed the cruel, tight mouth and cold, fish-stare eyes?\n\nHe backed into the living room, dragging Miss Walker with him, and motioned Annie to follow with a toss of his head. He glanced around, face grim, a wild look in his eyes. He made no effort at deception now, although he'd certainly managed to dupe everyone in the past with his easygoing manner and fine cookery.\n\n\"Pull the cords off the draperies,\" he ordered, and Annie did as she was told. She could hardly do anything else, not with a gun pointed at Miss Walker's head.\n\nHe forced the ranch owner down onto a ladder-back chair. \"Now tie her hands and feet,\" he ordered.\n\nMiss Walker glared at him. \"You can't do this. You're the cook.\"\n\nHis eyes glittered. \"And you're the goose.\"\n\nAnnie kneeled in front of Miss Walker. \"Sorry,\" she mouthed.\n\nAble kept his gun pointed at her while she wound the cord around Miss Walker's one good leg and cast. Just as Annie tied the last knot, someone pounded on the door.\n\n\"Annie!\"\n\nIt was Taggert. Relief escaped in one long breath. Never did she think to hear a more welcome sound.\n\nAble momentarily froze. With a shake of his head he motioned her with his gun. \"Make him go away.\"\n\nWiping damp hands on her skirt, Annie rose and walked out of the big room, through the entryway, and to the door. The lock designed to keep intruders out now seemed like a coffin nail keeping them in.\n\nShe leaned her forehead against the wood. \"It's late... What...\" She glanced over her shoulder and Able motioned her to continue with a wave of his gun.\n\nShe faced the door. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"Annie, are you all right?\" Taggert called, his husky voice failing to mute his concern. \"Mrs. Adams asked me to check. She said you tried to reach the bunkhouse and it sounded urgent.\"\n\nWhen she didn't respond, Able moved so close she could feel his breath in her hair.\n\n\"Get rid of him.\" He slammed the muzzle of his gun into her back. Startled, she gasped and squeezed her eyes shut.\n\nSwallowing hard to clear her voice, she called, \"Everything's all right. I thought I heard something, but it was just... nothing.\" Keep talking, got to keep talking. \"I couldn't sleep and\u2014\"\n\n\"Annie, we need to talk about what happened earlier\u2014\"\n\n\"Make him go away,\" Able growled. \"Now!\"\n\nHer heart pounded and she was shaking so hard her knees threatened to buckle. She placed her hand on the door for support. For some reason the action reminded her of the day Taggert held her palm to her desk.\n\n\"GTF? Give to Phantom?\" he'd asked.\n\n\"You really ought to work on your spelling,\" she'd said.\n\nThe memory gave her an idea. \"You've... Got... To... Forget.\" She emphasized each word, spacing them out evenly. Such an unnatural speech rhythm would alert a Pinkerton operative, but would a Wells Fargo agent detect her plea for help?\n\nShe held her breath and waited. The silence that followed seemed to stretch on forever, sapping her of all but the slightest hope.\n\nApparently satisfied that the immediate threat had been resolved, Able gestured her back to the big room. Reluctantly she pulled away from the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "Chapter 28\n\nEvery cattle rustler, horse thief, and crooked politician deserves a fair trial, followed by a respectful hanging.\n\nTaggert pressed his hand hard against the door. It was as if some magnetic force held his palm in place. Even with a thick wood plank between them, he could feel her presence, and when he closed his eyes he could visualize her. You've got to forget.\n\nForget? What exactly did she want him to forget? That he was responsible for her father's death? But how would she know that? No, it couldn't be that. It had to be something else. His friend's death? Work related, perhaps?\n\nMaybe it was their kisses she wanted him to forget. Or the way she felt in his arms. No matter; he could no sooner forget the few precious moments he'd held her than he could forget his own name.\n\nThe truth was, he had fallen head over heels in love with her and nothing would make him forget that.\n\nHe pulled away from the door and headed back to the bunkhouse. God, why did You do this to me? All the women in the world I could have loved\u2014why did it have to be the one woman who would never forgive me enough to love me back?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "The drapery cords cut into Annie's flesh. Able had tied her to a chair, the rope so tight around her chest she couldn't breathe. It took every bit of strength she possessed to wiggle her body; the chair moved but the cords remained intact.\n\nHands damp from gripping the palm nippers, she continued working. Confiscated from the New Orleans Society Thief, the tool was designed to cut through delicate chains. The tiny wire clippers were a boon to pickpockets, but they weren't much help in cutting through thick cord. She finally resorted to moving the blade back and forth in a sawing motion.\n\n\"He's crazier than a sheepherder,\" Miss Walker hissed. Able was in her office, and by the sound of the slamming drawers, he was searching for something. This seemed to annoy her more than being bound hand and foot. \"What is he looking for?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Annie held the palm nippers still. The cord cut into her flesh with each sawing motion. The pain shot up her arms and brought tears to her eyes. She gripped the clippers tighter and again attacked the cord. The woven cloth cable was thin, yet strong enough to swing a locomotive.\n\n\"I was good to that man,\" Miss Walker muttered. \"I hired him and gave him a home. I never thought\u2014\"\n\nAnnie grimaced. She couldn't blame Miss Walker. If two trained detectives couldn't see past the ruse, how could anyone else?\n\n\"Gold\"\u2014gritting her teeth, she worked the palm nippers harder\u2014\"does strange things to a person's mind.\"\n\nMiss Walker's head spun in her direction. \"What are you talking about? Gold?\"\n\nAnnie quickly filled her in the best she could without going into details. She kept her voice low and spoke quickly. \"That's why he's been trying to buy your ranch.\" She stopped sawing to catch her breath.\n\nMiss Walker's eyes widened. \"There's gold on my property? But this is a cattle ranch.\"\n\n\"Shh.\" Annie glanced at the office door. \"I don't think the cattle care one way or another.\"\n\n\"But I don't understand. How could Able afford to buy my ranch? None of this makes sense.\" Miss Walker's voice was low but didn't waver. Did she not understand the dire predicament they were in?\n\nAnnie pressed the tiny clippers harder. \"Mostly by robbing banks and hiring others to rob trains and stages.\"\n\n\"Are you saying that he's the Phantom?\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I'm saying.\"\n\n\"Well, he sure fooled me.\" Miss Walker snapped her mouth shut.\n\n\"He fooled all of us.\" Annie pressed harder still and the clippers cut into her hand. Thank God Papa couldn't see her now. The thought gave her pause; she was no longer a little girl needing her father's approval. Come to think of it, she hadn't been for a very long time.\n\nShe continued hacking at the cord behind her back. Please, please help us! She glanced at the ranch owner. And, God, please get on the stick.\n\nMiss Walker studied her. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nAnnie clenched her mouth tight. \"I. Will. Be.\"\n\n\"I still can't believe that Able\u2014\" She narrowed her eyes. \"How do you know all this?\"\n\n\"I'm a Pinkerton operative. I was sent here to work undercover.\"\n\nMiss Walker stared speechless while Annie explained how Kate Adams's dime novel helped solve the mystery. The cord gave way and in her haste to work her hands free, she dropped the clippers and they fell on the rug by her chair.\n\n\"I don't know what surprises me more,\" Miss Walker lamented. \"To find out that my cook is the Phantom or my heiress is a detective.\" She shook her head. \"What I don't understand is how Kate knew about the gold.\"\n\nWith one eye on the office and the other on the clippers in plain sight, Annie unraveled the rest of the cord. \"I don't believe she did. She wrote the book before coming to Arizona. The cave she described in her novel just happened to match one on your ranch. After reading the book, Able decided to do some digging. He got lucky.\"\n\nThe cord fell away, but before she could reach for the clippers, Able walked into the room. Annie froze and Miss Walker clamped her mouth shut.\n\nThe palm-sized clippers on the floor seemed to stand out like a blaze of light. How could he not see them?\n\nBehind her back she rubbed the rope burns on her wrists and tried to think. Her hands were free but her feet were still tied. Pinkerton operatives were taught how to avoid such situations, not how to escape them.\n\nAble barely glanced her way before turning his attention to Miss Walker. \"I don't know what it is about this place, but someone keeps walking off with the pens. Do you ladies know where I can find something to write with?\"\n\nMiss Walker threw back her head and let go a string of curses that could fry bacon. \"What do you want a pen for?\"\n\nHe thrust a paper in the ranch owner's face. \"So you can sign this bill of sale giving me full ownership of the ranch.\"\n\nMiss Walker clenched her jaw. \"Over my dead body.\"\n\nAble straightened. \"First things first. You sign.\" He pointed his gun at her. \"Then we'll discuss the rest.\"\n\nConsidering her dire situation, Miss Walker continued to keep her calm demeanor. \"You'll never get away with this.\"\n\n\"Oh, I think I will. After Mr. Stackman was taken ill, you decided there were other things in life besides cattle. So you finally agreed to sell your ranch, and then when you realized what you'd done, you decided to end it all.\" He looked straight at Annie. \"You tried to take the gun away from Miss Walker but\u2014oops!\u2014it went off and you both ended up knockin' on the pearly gates.\" An evil smile followed his words. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"I think you've been reading too many dime novels,\" Annie said. Got to keep him talking. \"No one would believe such a story.\" Certainly Taggert wouldn't.\n\n\"Of course they'll believe it. Everyone knows how much this ranch means to the boss lady.\"\n\n\"That's why no one will believe she sold it,\" Annie said.\n\nAble faked a sad face. \"And she never would have, had Mr. Stackman not visited death's doorstep.\"\n\nAnnie blew out her breath. The man's brain fairly dripped with dime novel phrases, but the plan was clearly his own.\n\n\"You forgot one thing,\" she said. \"People might wonder how you could afford to purchase the ranch on a cook's salary.\"\n\n\"Oh dear. That is a problem.\" He thought for a moment. \"How about this? My uncle recently died. The war affected his mind... yes, that works. Everyone thought him dirt-poor but he left piles of money hidden under the mattress. Old war wounds make people do the strangest things.\"\n\nAnnie's spirits plummeted. He just might get away with his crazy plan.\n\n\"All right, ladies, let's start again. Where can I find a pen?\"\n\nAnnie's mind raced. \"There's one upstairs. On the desk in my room.\" If she could get him to leave the room for even a few moments, she might be able to free her legs. Taggert's habit of stealing pens might be a lifesaver.\n\nAble's gaze shifted back and forth between them. \"Don't go anywhere, you hear?\"\n\nHe shoved his gun in his waistband and left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "\"You've got to forget...\"\n\nTaggert turned over in bed. Annie's voice kept repeating in his head. Something...\n\n\"You've got to forget...\"\n\nIt seemed like a strange thing to say to a Wells Fargo agent, whose very motto is never to forget. He flopped over again, the cot squeaking beneath his weight. Even if he hadn't been indoctrinated with company policy, he could never forget Annie. Didn't want to forget her.\n\nHe frowned. Got to forget... got to forget... got\u2014\n\nHe sat up. Got... To... Forget: GTF!\n\n\"Is he the big man?\" he'd asked Annie, referring to the manila folder he found on her desk.\n\n\"Most definitely,\" she'd replied.\n\nHe jumped up off his cot and stubbed his toe. Hopping around on one foot, he reached for his trousers. \"Stretch. Wishbone, Feedbag, Michael, wake up!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Annie retrieved the clippers and frantically hacked at the cords around her ankles.\n\n\"He's coming,\" Miss Walker said, keeping her voice low.\n\nAnnie quickly straightened and flung her hands behind the back of her chair. Her heart pounded and beads of sweat rolled down the sides of her face.\n\nAble walked into the room waving a pen. His face looked flushed and his reddish hair stood up on end. \"Success!\" he announced. \"Now we can get down to business.\" He pulled out a knife and worked on the cords at Miss Walker's wrists.\n\nA pounding on the door was followed by Taggert's voice. \"Annie!\" He pounded again.\n\nAble dropped his knife and reached for his firearm.\n\nFearing that Taggert was about to break down the door, Annie screamed, \"Watch out! He's got a gun!\"\n\nSwinging his body around, the cook glanced about the room, eyes darting.\n\nThe banging increased. \"Open up!\"\n\nAble slammed his back flat against the wall. He held his gun with both hands, the barrel pointing upward.\n\n\"You'd best give yourself up,\" Annie said. \"You'll never get away now.\"\n\n\"Shut up!\" He stuck his gun in his waistband and pulled a second knife from his boot. He started toward her and she drew in her breath.\n\nTaggert's hammering fists now caused the windows to rattle and a wall hanging crashed to the floor. Eyes filled with panic, Able hesitated for a moment, knife posed, then spun around and dashed from the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "While Stretch and the others covered the front of the house, Taggert raced around the side to the back. A door opened and someone stepped out.\n\n\"Put your hands up!\" Taggert yelled.\n\nThe man fired a shot before disappearing inside. Bent at the waist, Taggert raced to the door and grabbed the knob; it held tight. He hadn't been able to identify the gunman in the dark, but it had to be either the cook or Ruckus. All the other men had been in the bunkhouse with him.\n\nHe kicked an imaginary rock and a silent cry rose from his depths. Not again, God, not again. He'd caused Charlie Hunt's death, but he had no intention of letting anything happen to the man's daughter.\n\n\"Psst. Is that you, Branch?\" The hushed voice belonged to Michael.\n\n\"It's me.\"\n\n\"You okay?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Taggert said. As okay as possible under the circumstances. \"Stay here and keep watch. I'm going in.\"\n\nHe holstered his gun and patted his shirt pockets, hoping to find a pen. Instead he found Annie's barrette\u2014the one he could never bring himself to return. It was just what he needed. He straightened the clip and, working blindly in the dark, finally managed to fit the pin into the lock. It took some jiggling but the tumblers clicked and the door sprang open. He shoved the barrette back into his pocket and pulled out his gun.\n\nWalking on the balls of his feet, he stalked quietly through the dark kitchen and down the hall. The big room was lit and light spilled into the entry. He paused, his body alert. Only the sound of his pounding heart broke the silence. Where was she? God, let her be all right.\n\nSweat trickled on his forehead. He crept past the stairs.\n\nThe telephone receiver dangled from its cord. He stopped to pick up Annie's gun and stuffed it in his waistband. He stepped over Miss Walker's crutches.\n\nHis back against the wall separating the big room from the entry, he held his Peacemaker in both hands. He waited a beat, then whirled his body into the doorway. Both women were tied to chairs but he only had eyes for one.\n\n\"Annie!\"\n\nShe greeted him with a smile. \"It's about time you got here, partner.\"\n\nNever could he think to see a more welcome sight. He glanced around. \"Where?\" he mouthed.\n\nShe lifted her gaze to the ceiling. \"Upstairs.\"\n\nHe stuffed his firearm in his holster and set to work. Dropping on one knee in front of her, he drew a knife from his boot and cut the cord away from her ankles.\n\nShe practically threw herself in his arms. \"I was so afraid you wouldn't understand my cryptic message.\" Her voice was hoarse and he could feel her tremble.\n\nHolding her tight, he buried his nose into the sweet fragrance of her hair and cursed himself for not understanding sooner. \"Thank God you're all right. But... who...?\"\n\n\"Able.\"\n\nHe drew back. \"But how\u2014?\"\n\nSpeaking in a whisper, she quickly filled in the details.\n\nHe shook his head. Hard to believe. To think that his friend's killer had been under his very nose all these weeks. Still, it made some sort of crazy sense. \"But why did he poison Stackman?\" he asked, his voice low.\n\n\"Everyone knows that Miss Walker refuses to marry him because of the ranch.\"\n\nHis mind raced. \"But if she thought she'd almost lost him for good\u2014\"\n\n\"Exactly. She would sell the ranch and marry him. At least that's what Able hoped.\" Her gaze softened. \"I thought I'd never see you again...\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"If he had hurt one hair on your head...\"\n\nMiss Walker's strident voice cut through their hushed whispers. \"Now that we've established that you two are glad to see each other, would you mind giving an old lady a hand?\"\n\nAnnie inhaled and pulled out of his arms.\n\n\"Here.\" He put Annie's gun in her hands. \"You might need this.\" As an afterthought he added, \"Partner.\"\n\nHe hurried over to Miss Walker and cut through the cords on her hands and feet. She rubbed her good ankle. \"Don't tell me you're a Pinkerton detective too.\"\n\n\"Wells Fargo,\" he said.\n\nMiss Walker groaned. \"Next you'll be telling me that my cattle are really sheep.\"\n\nHe slipped his knife in his boot and pulled out his gun. He checked the entry before walking out to fetch her crutches.\n\nA moment later he was by Annie's side.\n\n\"You okay?\" he asked.\n\nNodding, Annie flexed her foot in an effort to get the blood flowing. She glanced at the ceiling but all was quiet. \"Do you think he's still in the house?\"\n\n\"The house is surrounded. He can't get away.\" His gaze flew to the open office door. \"Take Miss Walker in there and lock the door. Don't leave until I tell you it's safe.\"\n\nHer eyes flashed. \"And miss all the action? I certainly will not!\"\n\nHe frowned. It was no time to argue. \"Annie\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't you 'Annie' me.\" Her hushed voice failed to dampen the angry sparks. \"I have a job to do and I intend to do it.\"\n\n\"Wells Fargo takes priority over a Pinkerton.\"\n\n\"Since when?\"\n\n\"Since I said so.\"\n\nShe tossed her head and the look on her face made him wish she wasn't carrying a gun. \"I'm the one who figured out it was Able.\"\n\n\"Exactly. So I should take it from here. It's only fair.\"\n\n\"Fair my\u2014\"\n\n\"He killed my friend!\" he said in a hoarse whisper.\n\nThe determined look on her face softened, but only slightly. \"I know.\"\n\n\"Then you must also know why I have to do this.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"You're too personally involved. One of us has to keep a straight head and that someone is\u2014\"\n\nA thump followed by a groan made them both spin around. Able was sprawled on the floor facedown. Miss Walker stood over him, crutch held high, ready to clobber him again if necessary.\n\n\"Now you can both take credit,\" she said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Chapter 29\n\nIf the wages of sin is demise, an outlaw would be wise to quit before payday.\n\nThe eastern sky was edged with the silver thread of dawn. It was cold but Annie hardly noticed. So much had happened in such a short time.\n\nAble was handcuffed and tied to the saddle. He still looked dazed when the marshal hauled him outside, but whether from the bump on his head or knowing that his outlaw days were over, it was hard to tell.\n\nMichael and the rest of the ranch hands had returned to the bunkhouse. Only Taggert remained. He stood beside her in the courtyard and together they watched Marshal Morris ride away with his prisoner in tow.\n\n\"You all right?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes.\" She didn't want to worry him, but she was anything but all right.\n\nHer assignment was complete, but instead of elation, her heart churned in sadness. She liked Able and even considered him a friend. It took a long time to see through his guise, but his failure was greater. He was a talented cook and valued employee, but he measured success by worldly goods and allowed himself to be blinded by gold.\n\nThe marshal and his prisoner were mere dots in the distance and she pulled her gaze away to study Taggert's profile. She could hardly see his features in the dim light of dawn, but she felt his strength and her heart ached. Now that the Phantom was caught, she and Taggert would go their separate ways. It was a job requirement.\n\nLike tumbleweeds in the wind, private detectives traveled from town to town, state to territory, and sometimes even country to country. Love didn't last long when separated by time and distance, as many of her colleagues had learned the hard way.\n\nMarriage, home, and family were luxuries she couldn't afford. Not now. Not when everything had gone her way. She had proven she could do a man's job. No longer would she be dispatched to track down petty thieves. Pickpockets and the ilk would be left to inexperienced detectives yet to prove their worth.\n\nAt long last, she felt like she had earned the right to be called a Pinkerton, and that was all she'd ever wanted. The job required sacrifices, but she always knew that, had willingly made them in the past and would do so again.\n\nIf only it didn't hurt so much.\n\nMarshal Morris and his charge vanished in the folds of darkness and she shivered. \"I'd better go in. I want to make sure Miss Walker is all right.\" She hated the thought of leaving the ranch, but her job was done and she had no reason to stay. \"Then I'll write my report.\"\n\n\"I have to write mine too,\" Taggert said. His voice sounded oddly distant.\n\nA lump rose in her throat and she battled back tears. It wouldn't do to get sentimental. \"Are you taking all the credit for capturing the Phantom?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said. \"And you?\"\n\n\"Naturally.\"\n\n\"I might give you some credit,\" he said. \"A little bit, just to be fair.\"\n\n\"That's mighty considerate,\" she replied.\n\n\"Don't forget, I did figure out your cryptic message. GTF. The big man.\" He turned to face her, his head outlined with fading stars. \"So how did you get GTF out of Able? Do the initials stand for his real name?\"\n\nShe laughed. She couldn't help it. His expression remained hidden, but she sensed the intensity of his eyes.\n\n\"What's so funny?\" he asked.\n\n\"GTF stands for God the Father.\"\n\n\"But you said\u2014\" Suddenly it dawned on him and he laughed too. \"The Big Man.\" He pointed upward.\n\n\"The Big Man,\" she agreed.\n\n\"And it had nothing to do with the Phantom?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not a thing,\" she said.\n\n\"Hmm.\" He was silent for a moment. \"You keep a dossier on God?\"\n\nShe was grateful for the darkness that hid the rush of heat to her cheeks. \"It's more of a study guide,\" she explained.\n\n\"Do you have a study guide on me too?\"\n\n\"Of course.\" She tilted her head. \"Do you have one on me?\"\n\n\"Naturally. But God... never thought to keep one on Him. You got me there.\"\n\nAfter a moment he stepped closer. \"Annie.\" There was something heart-wrenching in the way he said her name, as if he, too, knew they had come to the end of the road.\n\nShe cleared her voice. \"I... I guess this is good-bye\u2014\"\n\nHe didn't wait for her to finish. He pulled her into his arms and once in the warmth of his embrace, she had no desire to leave. His lips brushed her forehead ever so gently and her pulse quickened.\n\n\"If anything had happened to you...\"\n\nSomething in his voice made her pull away. The sky was gray now, almost silver, but his eyes were dark as night. He didn't sound like a man who had just seen a criminal hauled off to jail; he sounded like he was about to face a firing squad.\n\n\"There's something you don't know.\" His voice was ragged. \"Something you need to know.\"\n\nHer heart thudded and apprehension coursed through her. \"What... do I need to know? You're scaring me. Is it about Able?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It's about... your father.\"\n\n\"My fa\u2014\" She stared at him. What could he possibly know that she didn't?\n\nHe rubbed his chin. \"I was there the day he died. The Wells Fargo agent that\u2014\"\n\nShe gasped. \"Don't say it!\"\n\nHe grabbed her by the arms. \"You have to hear this and you have to hear it from me.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No!\"\n\nHe told her anyway. He described how he spotted Vander in the bank and chased him outside just as a parade of union workers passed by. \"I'm the one who caused your father's death.\"\n\nShe pulled away. \"And you're just now telling me this?\"\n\nHis shoulders sagged and his chest caved in like a deflated pillow. His military training was no match for the weight that seemed to crash down on him. \"I just found out myself, the day in the bank vault. I didn't even know your real name until then and\u2014\" He reached for her.\n\nShe moved away. \"Don't touch me.\"\n\n\"Annie, please, I can't tell you how sorry I am. Please forgive me.\"\n\n\"Don't.\" She put her hands on her head. This wasn't happening. God, please let this be a nightmare. She turned and ran up the veranda steps and into the house, her way blurred by tears." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "Annie couldn't stop shaking. It was all she could do to keep her hand steady while offering Miss Walker a cup of tea. \"It's chamomile and it's very calming.\"\n\nThe ranch owner scoffed. \"I just found out that my cook is a madman. I don't want to be calm.\"\n\nHolding on to the teapot with both hands to keep it steady, Annie poured herself a cup, spilling tea all over the tray. Miss Walker didn't seem to notice. For a woman her age, she seemed to be holding up remarkably well, but Annie was nonetheless worried about her.\n\nShe placed her teacup on the low table and sat. It wasn't quite six o'clock in the morning. Only four hours had passed since encountering Able in the entryway, but it seemed a lifetime ago. So much had happened; so much had changed.\n\n\"I'm sorry I had to lie to you about my real reason for coming here.\"\n\nMiss Walker took a sip of tea, grimaced, and put the cup down. \"I guess this means you're leaving.\"\n\n\"Just as soon as I receive my next assignment.\" Annie leaned forward. \"I'll help you find a new cook and housekeeper, if you like. I don't want you to be alone.\"\n\n\"I'm not alone. I have two thousand cattle to keep me company.\"\n\n\"Yes, but can any of them make a pot of tea?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"I sincerely hope not.\" Miss Walker quirked a thin eyebrow. \"What about your Wells Fargo friend?\"\n\n\"He's leaving too.\" Just thinking about Taggert made her nearly double over in pain. She reached for her cup. \"We'll go our separate ways.\"\n\n\"Because of your father?\"\n\nAnnie spilled her tea. She set her cup on the saucer and reached for a linen napkin. \"You heard?\"\n\nMiss Walker shrugged and offered no apology. \"So how did it happen?\"\n\nAnnie dabbed at the damp spot on her skirt and explained. \"He asked me to forgive him.\"\n\n\"In the name of Sam Hill, what is there to forgive? He was only doing his job.\"\n\nAnnie blinked. \"He put lives in danger. My father's\u2014\"\n\n\"The thief put lives in danger. Branch or whatever his name is was simply trying to stop him.\" In the early morning light, Miss Walker's eyes looked more gray than blue. \"Are you saying you wouldn't have done the same thing?\"\n\n\"I wasn't there. I don't know what I would have done.\"\n\n\"Hmm. I think you do.\" Miss Walker swiped a strand of hair away from her face. \"I always thought forgiveness overrated, but then, so is Shakespeare. So, for that matter, is tea. But these last few weeks I've had a generous dose of all three and I have to say that forgiveness is perhaps the least painful. You might want to try it.\"\n\n\"I thought you said there was nothing to forgive. He was doing his job.\"\n\nMiss Walker gave a wry smile. \"He's a man. There'll always be something to forgive.\"\n\nAnnie studied her. \"Does that mean you'll forgive Able?\"\n\nMiss Walker thought for a moment. \"That remains to be seen. He did a lot of damage to the ranch and county, but you wouldn't have come here otherwise. For that I am grateful.\"\n\n\"Even though I caused you to break your leg?\" Annie asked.\n\n\"I could have done without the broken leg, but then I wouldn't have found out how stubborn you are.\"\n\nAnnie fought to keep her tears at bay. If she hadn't seen the suspicious gleam in Miss Walker's eyes, she might have succeeded." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Annie finished packing her carpetbag and glanced around the room one last time. She would miss the ranch, miss the wide-open spaces, and miss the easy banter of the ranch hands. Mostly she would miss the old lady.\n\nA private eye's existence was a lonely one. The secretive nature of the job prevented getting too close to any one person. She had no friends and didn't even have a home. In between assignments, she bounced from one brother's house to the next, like a ball in a game of catch.\n\nShe had accepted her lot in life as a necessary part of the job she loved so much. Yet in a matter of a few weeks, the ranch had come to feel like home and Miss Walker like family. How careless of her to grow so attached to any one place or person. She was a professional and there was no room for sentimentality.\n\nAs for Taggert...\n\n\"I'm the one who caused your father's death.\"\n\nGrief ripped through her like a metal blade and her knees nearly buckled. She thought she was over her father's death, but now she wasn't so sure. So much had been left unsaid between them. They should have talked about the elephant of her mother's death but now it was too late.\n\nShe grabbed hold of the desk chair to keep from falling. After a while, the sharp, excruciating pain abated, but the dull throb in her heart remained.\n\nShe picked up the GTF folder from her desk and flipped through the pages.\n\n\"I was blind...\"\n\nThe words jumped out at her and she realized the world looked a whole lot different since coming to Cactus Patch. She once saw only the bad in people; now she saw the good. She'd learned to look past Miss Walker's bullheaded ways to see the caring, lonely woman inside. She had come to admire and respect Ruckus's faith, Stretch's love of story, and Feedbag's loyalty. She even saw that Aunt Bessie's bossy way was how she expressed love.\n\nThe eye: We never sleep. Maybe not, but the Pinkerton eye saw only the worst of human nature, and now she knew it was a very narrow focus. She might never fully understand God's ways or find the answers to all her questions, but she'd much rather see the world through His eyes than Pinkerton's." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Chapter 30\n\nThou shalt not steal\u2014unless, of course, it's another's heart.\n\nFour days later Annie walked into the bank to cash her check. Signed by Robert Pinkerton, the check covered her salary, plus expense money for her next assignment.\n\nIt was noontime and only two teller cages were open. The pale-faced clerk pushed his spectacles up his nose. \"Good day, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Good day.\" She slid her check through the pigeonhole beneath the iron window grill.\n\nAlready she was about to be dispatched to her next job. As soon as the dossier on James Flanagan, aka the most cunning counterfeiter the country had ever known, arrived, she would head to Denver, Colorado, to track him down.\n\nFlanagan. She couldn't believe her luck in landing such a plum assignment. So why did she feel so downright miserable? So utterly distraught?\n\nChasing down the Irish counterfeiter would surely cure her melancholy\u2014or at least, she hoped so.\n\nHe was every bit as big as that \"king of counterfeiters,\" William Brockway, and had proven to be as difficult to catch. Already three Pinkertons had pursued him to no avail; the Irishman could smell an operative a mile away, no matter how good the disguise. Would he be as good at detecting a female operative? That question kept running through her mind.\n\nThe clerk finished counting out her money. \"There you are, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" She slid the stack of bills into her handbag and turned away from the teller cage. Taggert stood at the next cage and it was all she could do to breathe. He'd left the ranch the day of Able's arrest and she had hoped he'd also left town. As painful as his absence was, it hurt even more to see him.\n\nBut there he was, bigger than life. He looked much more rested than when she saw him last, and every bit as handsome.\n\nHe met her gaze and tossed a nod in the direction of the counting desk where an elderly man stood verifying the count of a bank teller. A much younger man, probably in his thirties, hovered a short distance behind him, presumably waiting to check his own money.\n\nAt first glance, he looked like a salesman. He wore a white flannel suit and a derby hat. His black mustache and hair offered a startling contrast to his pale skin. On the floor next to him stood a brown leather sample case.\n\nTaggert lifted his foot to draw attention to the young man's shoes.\n\nAnnie glanced downward and could barely contain a smile. The drummer wore shoes with no heels.\n\nTaggert completed his business and walked toward her. \"Good to see you, Miss Beckman,\" he said with a tip of the hat and in a voice clearly meant to be heard by one and all.\n\nLike an actor on stage, she spoke her lines as if they had been rehearsed. \"Good to see you too, Mr. Branch.\" The prospect of catching a thief in action paled in comparison to the joy of seeing Taggert again, but she nonetheless played her part to the hilt. Sarah Bernhardt couldn't have done better.\n\n\"I thought you'd left town,\" she said.\n\n\"I had to arrange for a burial.\"\n\nShe drew in her breath. \"Your friend.\"\n\nA shadow flitted across his face. \"Reverend Bland performed a simple ceremony.\"\n\n\"I... wish I could have been there,\" she said.\n\nHe studied her. \"I shipped his belongings to his widow.\"\n\n\"I'm sure she'll be most grateful.\"\n\n\"Annie...\" For a moment it seemed as if he'd forgotten their purpose for standing there.\n\nShe reminded him with a slight toss of her head and he quickly changed the subject and increased the volume of his voice. \"So what brings you to town today?\"\n\nKeeping the drummer in sight, they stood talking like two old friends. Their chatter took a light turn, but the glances they exchanged were filled with meaning. After they had run through a litany of polite amenities and exhausted the subject of the weather, the conversation turned to the ranch.\n\nAnnie, I'm sorry, his eyes seemed to say. Out loud he said, \"I hope Miss Walker has recovered.\"\n\n\"Yes, she's doing quite well.\" Don't make this any harder than it already is. \"Dr. Fairbanks plans to take the cast off next week.\"\n\n\"Ah, next week, you say?\" His gaze settled on her lips. Do you remember the times I kissed you?\n\nHow could I possibly forget? Feeling her cheeks grow warm, she lowered her lashes and that's when she noticed the pen. \"That wouldn't happen to belong to the bank, would it? In your pocket?\"\n\nHe slapped his hand to his chest. \"I believe you're right.\" He pulled the pen out of his pocket and tossed it onto a nearby desk. \"Some habits are hard to break.\"\n\nWhile his voice still held its neutral tone, the tenderness in his gaze told a different story, and she felt a tingling in the pit of her stomach.\n\nCatching a subtle movement from the corner of her eye, she slid a sideways glance at the two men on the opposite side of the bank.\n\nThe drummer casually dropped a bill and it fell three feet from the old man's left foot. It was a good thing the suspect had made his move\u2014a very good thing, for she didn't know how much longer she could continue acting her part.\n\nAfter dropping the bill, the younger man stepped forward and politely tapped the older man's stooped shoulder. \"I believe that's yours, sir,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you. You're very kind.\" The unsuspecting victim did what anyone would do; he reached down to pick up the bill. While he was occupied, the thief quickly snatched a handful of money from the pile on the desk and headed for the door. He was too smart to take all of it. By the time the older man discovered his funds missing and recounted to make sure there was no mistake, the thief expected to be long gone.\n\nAnd he would have been, too, had he not had the misfortune of meeting up with Annie and Taggert. Standing side by side, they blocked the door.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" the thief said roughly, his face hidden by the brim of his hat.\n\n\"What you did is beyond excuse.\" Taggert grabbed the thief by his collar. The man raised his sample case like a weapon but his slight frame was no match for Taggert.\n\nWith one easy move, Taggert grabbed the man's raised arm before he could do any damage and knocked the case to the ground. He then pushed the man against the wall and held him there while Annie snapped the handcuffs he handed her around the thief's wrists.\n\n\"Do you want to turn him over to the marshal or shall I?\" Taggert asked.\n\nAnnie pulled a wad of bills from the man's vest pocket. \"I think we should both turn him in. That way we can both claim credit.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "The thief's name was Walt Mason and he turned out to be a known bank robber. After he was locked in a cell, Annie and Taggert left the marshal's office together.\n\nOnce outside, Taggert dropped his professional air. \"Annie, about your father. I can't tell you how sorry\u2014\"\n\nShe shook her head. She had done a lot of praying in recent days, and a lot of thinking. \"Don't say any more, Taggert. I don't blame you.\"\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. \"You don't?\"\n\n\"What you did... I would have done the same thing.\"\n\n\"You would have chased a criminal into a group of innocent people?\"\n\n\"I would have chased him to the ends of the earth. So would my father.\"\n\nTaggert looked dumbfounded. \"I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to be said. My father died doing what he loved best.\"\n\nTaggert sucked in his breath and rubbed his chin. \"Have... you received your next assignment?\"\n\n\"Y-yes,\" she squeaked out. The heaviness in her chest made it difficult to breathe. She cleared her throat. \"And you?\"\n\n\"I'm due in Denver at the end of the week.\"\n\nHer jaw dropped. \"Did... did you say Denver?\"\n\nTaggert leaned against a telephone pole, arms folded. \"You sound surprised.\"\n\n\"It's just... it wouldn't have anything to do with James Flanagan, would it?\"\n\n\"What makes you think\u2014?\" He straightened and dropped his arms to his sides. \"As a matter of fact, it does. Don't tell me. You're\u2014\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nHe burst out laughing. \"What do you know? If that doesn't take the cake. It looks like we're going to be working together again.\"\n\nShe stared at him, speechless.\n\nHe grew serious. \"He won't be an easy catch. He's a clever one.\"\n\n\"Extremely so.\" Personally she was a mess, but professionally she could still hold her own. \"He's passed more than a million dollars of bogus money in the last two years alone.\"\n\n\"A large portion of which he used to bribe police,\" Taggert added.\n\n\"Few men have succeeded in copying the scrollwork on treasury notes so precisely,\" she said. His ability to bleed the color from small-value notes to make larger-value notes was nothing short of genius.\n\n\"Like I said, it's not going to be easy.\"\n\n\"Agreed.\" She gazed up at him through a fringe of dark lashes. \"So may the best man\u2014or woman\u2014win.\" She started down the boardwalk and he fell in step by her side.\n\nHe glanced both ways to check for eavesdroppers before pulling her to the side of an adobe building. His hand on her arm felt warm and strong.\n\n\"We need to talk.\" He released her. \"I'm not kidding, Annie. Flanagan's a tough bird. The Secret Service hasn't had any more luck capturing him than Wells Fargo or Pinkerton.\"\n\nWhat he said was true. Created following Lincoln's death to suppress counterfeit currency, the Secret Service had, for the most part, done a good job. But if Secret Service agents couldn't capture Flanagan, what chance did she have?\n\nShe afforded him a guarded look. \"So what are you saying? That I'm not up for the task? Because I'm a woman?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that either one of us is up to the task.\" He rubbed his forehead. \"First, I have to know. Did you mean it when you said you didn't blame me for your father's death?\"\n\n\"I blamed you at first,\" she said honestly. \"But then I realized I was doing the same thing to you that my father did to me.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"I don't understand. What did your father do?\"\n\n\"He blamed me for my mother's death. She never fully recovered from my birth and died when I was two.\" She sighed. \"Some things just happen, you know.\"\n\n\"Did it ever occur to you that it wasn't you he blamed, but himself?\"\n\nHer brother had said something similar, but coming from Taggert it sounded more plausible. \"That doesn't explain why he was so against me being a Pinkerton operative. Had it been one of my brothers...\"\n\nTaggert shook his head. \"Annie, he loved you and was worried about you. Just like I\u2014\"\n\nHer heart thudded. \"Just like you... what?\"\n\nHe took in a deep breath. \"If I could go back and change what happened...\"\n\n\"I know.\" She laid her hand on his arm. \"You're a good man and a good detective.\" She couldn't resist adding, \"For a Wells Fargo agent.\"\n\n\"You're not bad yourself... for a Pink.\" He grew serious again. \"Of course, if we combine our talents...\"\n\nShe pulled her hand away. \"Don't say it. Don't even think it. We're not working together.\" Not only would that make life more difficult for her personally, but William Pinkerton would never allow an operative to join forces with its competition.\n\n\"We just did.\"\n\n\"That wasn't planned,\" she said.\n\n\"If we can work so well together by chance, think what we could do if we actually sat down and made a plan.\"\n\n\"It's not going to happen.\"\n\n\"At least hear me out.\" He hesitated and his galvanizing look made her senses spin. \"What if we go as a newlywed couple? Denver's a great place to honeymoon. So what do you say?\"\n\n\"I say you're... you're out of your mind.\" She would do almost anything to catch Flanagan, but compromising her morals was where she drew the line. \"We'd have to share the same hotel room and...\"\n\n\"That's what honeymooners usually do.\" He lowered his voice to a silky whisper. \"They share a lot of things. Think about it. Flanagan will be looking for a single agent, not two. And you know yourself that those Secret Service men don't know how to work undercover.\"\n\n\"I know no such thing.\"\n\n\"It's true,\" he said. \"A child could pick one out a mile away.\"\n\n\"It won't work. Flanagan will see right through our disguise and\u2014\"\n\n\"Disguise?\" He drew back. \"Who's talking disguise? I'm talking the real thing.\" Hands at her waist, he drew her near. \"Marry me, Annie. Marry me, Miranda.\"\n\nAnger flared inside her and she pulled away from him. \"Do you think this is some sort of game...?\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\n\"Marriage is sacred. It's not something that you can fake or\u2014\"\n\n\"I love you.\"\n\n\"And another thing\u2014a Pinkerton operative does not work with Wells Fargo\u2014\"\n\n\"The reason I never guessed you were a Pink is because I was too busy falling in love with you.\"\n\n\"And another thing\u2014\" She stopped midsentence as the full force of his words hit her. Was the same true for her? Had she been too busy falling in love with him to notice what was now as plain as the nose on his face? Was that why she failed to pick out a fellow detective?\n\n\"I love you.\" He pulled her a tad closer. \"What's more, I'm willing to bet the feeling is mutual. Why else would you so readily forgive me?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes. She was shaking so hard she could hardly think. Love. Why did he have to say love? She fought for composure. It was no time to waver. She chanced a look at him\u2014big mistake.\n\n\"I... I never said I loved you,\" she stammered. She knew she had feelings for him but she never admitted to love. Didn't dare.\n\n\"You don't have to. I'm a detective.\" His hands moved up her arms. \"I can read smiles.\" His hands moved to her shoulders. \"I can read eyes.\" He cupped his fingers around her face. \"I can read lips.\"\n\nWhat few defenses she had left deserted her, along with all pretenses. Through the years, she had worn so many disguises she'd almost forgotten who the real Miranda Hunt was. All she knew was that the woman standing in her place right then was real and she didn't have to prove anything to anyone.\n\n\"It's true,\" she said softly. \"I do have certain feelings for you.\"\n\nHis eyebrows rose. \"Feelings?\"\n\n\"All right, I admit it. I love you too.\" If she didn't know it before, she knew it now. \"Are you happy that you made me say it?\" She clenched her fists. This was so hard\u2014so very hard, and he wasn't making it any easier.\n\n\"Annie... Miranda...\"\n\n\"Don't... please... don't.\" She backed away. \"Private detectives can't be married. You know that. It never works. We'll both be in Denver this time. But what about the next time and the time after that? We may not see each other for months. Years.\"\n\n\"There's one simple solution,\" he said.\n\n\"Forget it.\" She shook her head. \"I'm not giving up my job.\"\n\n\"I'm not asking you to. I say we get married, go to Denver, and track down Flanagan. After that, we resign from our respective jobs and start our own detective agency.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. \"Are you out of your mind?\"\n\nHe moved his hand through the air as if reading an invisible sign. \"Taggert and Wife: Detective Agency. In memory of your father, Charlie Hunt, our slogan will be 'We Hunt the Bad Guys.'\"\n\nShe couldn't help but laugh. \"That's dreadful.\"\n\nHe shrugged and lines crinkled at the corners of his eyes. \"Okay, we'll work on the slogan, but I think even GTF would approve the rest.\"\n\nThe mention of God brought another thought to mind. Never before had she been able to see a future without the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, but maybe, just maybe, God had opened another door.\n\nShe tilted her head sideways. \"Are... are you serious?\"\n\n\"Never been so serious in my life. I may be out of a job soon. The newer safes are harder to break into and stagecoach robberies are becoming few and far between. And what about your job? The Pinkerton Agency is heading into the security business. Your future there will be preventing crime, not tracking down criminals. Somehow I don't think Charlie Hunt's daughter would relish spending time as a security guard.\"\n\nTaggert spoke the truth. It was something she hadn't wanted to think about. Oddly enough, being the best and brightest Pinkerton operative held less appeal than it once did.\n\nBut owning her own agency? It never occurred to her that she could have it all; she could still pursue outlaws without having to give up the man of her dreams.\n\nThe very thought would have made her heart pound had Taggert's declaration of love not already done so.\n\n\"Well, what do you say?\" he asked, his voice husky. \"Will you marry me, partner?\"\n\nShe gazed up at him. \"How do you know what God's plan is?\"\n\n\"That's simple, my child. Follow the joy. That's how you know God's plan for you.\"\n\nJust the thought of being Mrs. Jeremy Taggert filled her with unspeakable joy. She loved this man and wanted to spend the rest of her life proving it to him. As for his plan\u2014it could work. It would work. She would make certain of that.\n\nIt took every bit of willpower not to run into his arms. \"Taggert and Taggert Detective Agency. And the first Taggert's me.\"\n\nHe blew out his breath. \"You drive a hard bargain.\"\n\nShe put out her hand. \"Do we have a deal?\"\n\nHe took her hand in his own, then weightlessly pulled her into his arms and locked her in his embrace. \"Deal.\" He then sealed it with a heart-pounding, breathtaking kiss." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "Chapter 31\n\nThe way some people carry on about weddings should be a crime.\n\nIt's beautiful,\" Annie cried. She stared at herself in the mirror and fingered the delicate lace that hugged her figure. The wedding dress had been loaned to her by Aunt Bessie's nephew's wife, Kate, and it only took a few stitches to make it fit perfectly.\n\n\"Do you think it's too fancy? We're just having a simple wedding.\"\n\nAunt Bessie stood back. \"Simple wedding or not, you have to look like a bride. This dress is perfect for you with your dark hair and honey skin. It's like it was made for you.\" She sighed. \"Too bad your family can't be here.\"\n\nAnnie thought about her father. Getting married was perhaps the first conventional thing she'd ever done. Somehow she knew he would approve. The thought brought a smile to her face and a satisfied nod from Aunt Bessie.\n\n\"I wish you weren't in such a hurry to get married.\" Bessie glanced at Annie's waist. \"You're not in a family way, are you?\"\n\nAnnie blushed. \"Oh no, of course not.\" The real reason the marriage had to be rushed had to be kept secret. Only a few people, including Miss Walker, the marshal, and Mr. Stackman, knew her and Branch's true identities, and that was how it had to stay. To make it all legal, they would sign the paperwork with their real names in private.\n\n\"It wouldn't be the first time a bride was accompanied down the aisle.\" Aunt Bessie reached for the wreath of white flowers on Annie's head and straightened the flowing ribbons. \"Mary Hopkins practically burst out of her seams when she walked down the aisle, and she didn't tell anyone she had the baby until months later.\"\n\n\"As I explained, Branch has business... out of town.\" Miss Walker was given full credit for Able's capture, and no outsiders knew what really happened.\n\n\"Well, it's a crying shame. You haven't seen anything until you see the weddings I put on. Of course, after Molly's wedding to Dr. Fairbanks, that no-good marshal put a moratorium on weddings for a year, but that's about to end.\"\n\nAnnie turned away from the mirror. \"Why would he do such a thing?\"\n\nBessie stooped to straighten Annie's train. \"He doesn't like me insisting that the saloons close the night before a wedding. It's the only way to keep everyone sober so that there're no mix-ups at the altar. Why, Harry Laine was so drunk at his own wedding he nearly married the bride's sister by mistake.\"\n\nAnnie reached for her bridal bouquet and sniffed the sweet scent of roses. \"I can see why closing saloons might cause ill feelings.\"\n\n\"Maybe, but the marshal also disapproves of the way I decorate the town.\"\n\n\"You decorate the town?\" Annie laughed. \"Now I really am sorry we don't have time to experience one of your productions.\" She pecked the old woman on her rouged cheek. \"You're very kind. I really appreciate all you've done for me.\"\n\nNot even the heavy paint on Bessie's face could hide her pleasure. \"I just want you to be happy. And you'd better come back and visit us.\"\n\n\"I will, I promise.\"\n\n\"Come along now. Let's not keep your handsome groom waiting.\"\n\nJust then Lula-Belle rushed through the door, the feathers on her hat doing a wild dance. \"The wedding's off,\" she announced.\n\nFists on her hips, Bessie whirled about to face her sister. \"What crazy talk is that?\"\n\nLula-Belle looked down her nose at her sibling. \"I'm just telling you what the marshal said.\"\n\nBessie glared back. \"And why is that, pray tell?\"\n\n\"He said that Annie and Branch can't get married. It's against the law!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "Eleanor Walker felt every one of her sixty-seven years. Her housekeepers had left, her cook was in jail, and Annie was gone.\n\nShe missed Annie the most. Even more than she missed Kate Tenney and Molly Hatfield after both had upped and married. But a Pinkerton operative\u2014Eleanor still couldn't believe it.\n\nA ringing sound made her turn her attention to the telephone. Apparently someone was using the one in the bunkhouse. What in the world did her ranch hands have to jabber about in the middle of a workday?\n\nEarlier her telephone rang but she refused to answer it. If anyone wanted to speak to her, they could jolly well do so to her face.\n\nShe sighed. The world was changing so fast she could hardly keep up. Telephones, automobiles... even raising cattle had changed from open to closed range. What would be next?\n\nNot one to feel sorry for herself, she reached for her crutches and hobbled out to the veranda. Fresh air would do her a world of good. Dr. Fairbanks said the cast could come off as early as next week and she couldn't wait. She longed to be back in the saddle again. Now that all the excitement was over, perhaps they could get some work done.\n\nShe sat in the rocker and reached for a stick she kept for the purpose of scratching her leg. The worst part of wearing a cast was the itching.\n\nThe chugging sound of Dr. Fairbanks's automobile caught her attention.\n\n\"Now what?\" Far as she knew, the doctor wasn't scheduled for a visit.\n\nThe car sputtered to a stop and backfired. A chicken squawked and flew away. Dogs barked. The doctor and his newfangled auto had once started a stampede. If he started another, she'd have his head.\n\nMuch to her surprise, it was Robert and not the doctor who jumped out of the auto and dashed toward the house. Fairbanks remained seated behind the steering column.\n\nAlarmed, she reached for her crutches, but before she was able to stand, Robert bounded up the steps. \"What are you doing here? And why are you running? A man your age!\"\n\n\"If you'd answer the blasted telephone I wouldn't have to run,\" he said. \"There's a problem in town. Annie needs your help.\"\n\n\"What does she need my help for? Isn't she supposed to be getting married or some such thing?\"\n\n\"That's just it. Morris won't let her wed.\"\n\n\"Why not? What business is it of the marshal's what Annie does or does not do?\"\n\n\"He said he has no choice but to uphold the miscegenation law. Annie is part Indian, and as you know, it's against the law for an Indian and a white to wed.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous.\" She was wrong: some things never changed. \"Annie is just like you and me. She was like a daugh\u2014\" She stopped but not soon enough.\n\nRobert arched a silver brow. \"Why, Eleanor, I never thought I'd hear you say such a thing.\"\n\nNor did she ever think to say it. Her gaze drifted to the distant hill where her one and only child was buried. She'd always wanted a family, and when she lost her little girl and her marriage fell apart, she thought that was the end of it. It wasn't until years later that she got the idea to advertise for an heiress. She hoped to find one young woman to take the place of her daughter. Some came close, but Annie came the closest.\n\nAware that Robert was staring at her, she pulled her gaze away from the hill. \"So what do you want me to do about it?\"\n\n\"Some of our public officials are coming up for reelection. I thought perhaps you might wish to make a friendly donation to the cause. Providing, of course, they waive certain unfavorable laws.\"\n\n\"You want me to bribe officials? Why, Robert, I'm shocked.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"No, you're not.\"\n\n\"Well, I should be.\"\n\n\"So what do you think?\" he asked.\n\n\"It would take too long\u2014Annie and Taggert have to leave soon.\" She thought for a moment. She recalled reading something recently in the Tombstone newspaper about a similar situation. \"I have a better idea.\"\n\nShe inched herself to the edge of the chair and pushed up on one foot. She then tucked the tops of her crutches beneath her arms. \"Quick, call the marshal and tell him to meet me at the church. Tell him to make sure that Annie, Taggert, the preacher, and the justice of the peace are present when I get there.\"\n\n\"You want me to use the telephone?\" he asked.\n\n\"Unless your voice can carry five miles, I don't see what choice you have.\"\n\nRobert's mustache twitched. \"What do you plan to do?\"\n\n\"You'll see. Now make the call...\" She stopped at the top of the steps and stared at the horseless carriage. Mercy! Was she really going to ride in that thing?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "Chapter 32\n\nStealing another man's wife is a serious crime, second only to horse rustlin'.\n\nAnnie couldn't stop crying. Clutching her bridal bouquet, she sat on a church pew while Taggert and the marshal argued.\n\nTaggert's angry voice seemed to rattle the stained glass windows. Reverend Bland wrung his hands and tried to keep the peace.\n\n\"I don't make the laws,\" Marshal Morris said, sounding peevish. \"I just uphold them.\"\n\nShe'd been so eager to marry Taggert she hadn't even thought to ask about miscegenation laws in Arizona Territory. She didn't even remember her Kickapoo mother and identified with her father's side of the family, who raised and educated her. She never thought of herself as Indian or even white.\n\nTaggert moved to her side. \"It's all right, partner. We'll get married elsewhere. Fortunately, not every state or territory has such ridiculously dumb laws.\" He shouted the last part for Morris's benefit.\n\n\"I know, but these are my friends.\" She waved her hand to indicate the ranch hands gathered in back of the church, casting sympathetic glances her way. \"Getting married in a strange place won't be the same.\"\n\nAunt Bessie came bustling down the aisle and plopped herself next to Annie. \"I tried to call Miss Walker and she didn't answer, but Mr. Stackman kindly agreed to drive out to the ranch. He just called and said to stay here at the church. Miss Walker is on her way.\"\n\nAnnie dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. Knowing how Miss Walker felt about the town, it was hard to believe she was coming. \"Thank you, but there's nothing she can do.\" There was nothing anyone could do.\n\nTaggert dropped down on one knee in front of her. \"Don't cry. We can marry elsewhere.\"\n\n\"What good will that do?\" Annie wiped away a fresh tear. \"Our marriage will be legal in some states but not others. We won't be able to travel the country as husband and wife.\"\n\n\"Blast it!\" As if recalling they were in church, Taggert lowered his voice. \"I don't care about that. I just care about us.\"\n\n\"Being married in some states is better than not being married at all,\" Aunt Bessie said, her expression less convincing than her voice.\n\nRuckus had just joined them. \"And if you marry before God, that's the only authority that counts.\"\n\nAnnie smiled at the ranch hand. \"That's very kind of you to say.\"\n\n\"It's the truth, Miz Annie. Just as soon as I become an official preacher, I'll marry you.\"\n\nAnnie dabbed at the corner of her eye. \"You're going to become a preacher?\"\n\nRuckus got all red in the face. \"This town needs a full-time preacher, and since my son's got his heart set on Africa, I reckon it's up to me. Ugly feet and all!\"\n\nShe left her seat and threw her arms around him. \"Oh, Ruckus. That's wonderful news.\"\n\nA rumbling, growling sound, followed by a loud bang, announced the arrival of Dr. Fairbanks and his automobile.\n\nA short while later the church door flew open and Miss Walker hobbled through it on her crutches, followed by Mr. Stackman and Dr. Fairbanks.\n\nAnnie didn't think it possible to march on crutches, but somehow Miss Walker managed to do just that. She looked like a soldier marching to war. Even the ranch hands stood at attention like military men waiting to pass inspection.\n\nMiss Walker positioned herself directly in front of the marshal and looked him straight in the eye. \"What's this nonsense about not marrying these two?\"\n\nMorris threw up his hands. \"As I explained\"\u2014he glanced around the church\u2014\"and explained, Miss Beckman has Indian blood. According to Arizona law, that means she cannot marry a white man.\"\n\n\"Horsefeathers!\" Miss Walker exclaimed. \"Where's the justice of the peace?\"\n\nA short, skinny man stepped forward. \"Here, ma'am. Harvey Wilson at your service.\"\n\nMarshal Morris shook his head. \"I don't make the law and neither does Wilson.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter because the law doesn't apply here. Annie is my daughter and that makes her white no matter what color her blood.\"\n\nA stunned silence followed Miss Walker's declaration and no one moved. Even Wishbone stopped whittling.\n\nOnce the shock of her words passed, Annie leaned toward Taggert and whispered in his ear, \"Did she say what I think she said?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" he whispered back.\n\nThe marshal was the first to recover. \"Your daughter?\"\n\n\"My adopted daughter, and I'll sign an affidavit to that effect.\"\n\nThe marshal turned to Wilson. \"Is that legal? Does an adoption make a person white?\"\n\nThe skinny man nodded. \"Well... there have been a couple of cases in the territory where a judge ruled an Indian white by way of adoption.\"\n\nThe marshal scratched his head. \"Well, I'll be a son of a gun. As soon as we get the paperwork out of the way, it looks like we're going to have ourselves a wedding.\"\n\nRuckus led a cheer and Stretch pulled out his harmonica. Annie flung her arms around Miss Walker. \"Thank you, thank you... Mother!\"\n\nMiss Walker looked positively stunned, but then her face softened into a broad smile. \"Well now. It looks like at long last I have my heiress.\"\n\nTaggert stepped up and slid his arm around Annie's waist. \"And it looks like I am about to have a wife.\"\n\nMichael, who had been watching from the sidelines, joined the group, pulling Charity along with him. \"Me too,\" he said. \"Charity and I plan to get married too.\"\n\n\"Why, that's wonderful,\" Annie exclaimed. Seeing the frozen look on Aunt Bessie's face, she slipped her arm around the older woman's waist. \"Now you can put on another wedding of the century.\"\n\nMuch to her relief Aunt Bessie rose to the occasion. A bright smile broke through her face paint. She pulled free from Annie and took Charity under her wing. \"What do you think about a July wedding? And you know those awful telephone lines. I was thinking we could drape satin ribbons over them and...\" Her voice faded as the two walked away. Charity looked overwhelmed by the plans Aunt Bessie had for her wedding but managed a respectful nod or two.\n\n\"It looks like things are going to work out just fine,\" Annie said.\n\nMichael scratched his head. \"I can't believe that Aunt Bessie accepted my choice of a bride, just like that.\"\n\n\"Maybe she simply opened her eyes and saw the same traits in Charity as you do.\" If she hadn't yet, she soon would\u2014Annie was convinced of it.\n\nMichael grinned. \"Well now...\"\n\nTaggert stepped forward and held out his hand. \"Shall we?\"\n\nIt took nearly an hour to complete the paperwork. After everyone, including all the ranch hands, signed as witnesses, Taggert took her hand in his. Together they walked up to the altar and everyone formed a circle behind them.\n\nWhile they waited for Reverend Bland to locate the missing Book of Common Prayer, Taggert leaned over to whisper in her ear. \"Flanagan was born in Edinburgh.\"\n\n\"One of seven children,\" she whispered back, not wanting to be found remiss.\n\n\"His father was a businessman.\"\n\nShe took the bouquet of flowers from Aunt Bessie and held them in front like a proper bride. \"But not a very good one. His mother was an art forger who supported the family by selling 'original' copies of the Mona Lisa.\"\n\n\"He started his life of crime at the tender age of ten,\" he continued.\n\n\"No surprise there,\" she said, as Aunt Bessie straightened the gown's train. \"Pinkerton did a study that showed most evildoers started their life of crime between the ages of ten and sixteen.\" She often wondered what could be done to better protect children.\n\n\"What a shame.\" He shook his head before continuing. \"Flanagan got his start manufacturing bogus coins and quickly advanced from there.\" His voice sounded like velvet in her ear.\n\n\"He was married three times and fathered, in all, twenty-three children,\" she whispered back. Astonishment crossed his face and she laughed. \"Got you!\"\n\n\"What are you two yammering about?\" Miss Walker demanded.\n\n\"Probably making plans for their honeymoon,\" Stretch called out.\n\nTaggert grinned down at Annie and her heart fairly danced with excitement. \"Do you think our newlywed status will work?\" he asked.\n\n\"I do,\" she said, forgetting to keep her voice low.\n\n\"I do too,\" he replied.\n\nNeither had noticed Reverend Bland in front of them until he spoke. \"I'm the preacher and you can't say 'I do' until I say you can say 'I do.'\"\n\nTaggert winked and tucked her hand in his. \"Are you ready to marry me, partner?\" he asked.\n\nShe smiled and her heart felt about to burst with happiness. \"More than ready.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nThat's done,\" Eleanor said. She and Robert were the only two remaining at the church. It had been a long time since she'd stepped foot inside a house of worship and she wasn't in any hurry to leave.\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" Robert said. \"I have to say, Annie or Miranda or whatever her name is made a beautiful bride.\" He shifted in the pew to look directly at her. \"You did a fine and noble thing by adopting her, Eleanor.\"\n\n\"Fiddlesticks! You make it sound like I raised the dead or something.\"\n\nHe chuckled and ran a finger over his mustache before growing serious. \"Since you're in the wedding mood, I wonder if you would reconsider and marry me.\" He cleared his voice. \"I love you. Always have. Always will.\"\n\nShe stared at him. It wasn't the first time he'd proposed. Heavens, no. He'd proposed every year on her birthday for the last fifteen or more years. But never once in all that time had the word love escaped his lips.\n\n\"Aren't you getting sentimental all of a sudden?\"\n\n\"Blame it on the poison,\" he said. \"When you're lying at death's door, you tend to think about all the things you never got around to doing, all the words left unsaid. The one thing I regretted was not telling you how much I love you. I guess I was afraid you'd scoff.\"\n\n\"Oh, Robert, I wouldn't scoff. If you must know, I... well, you know, feel the same way.\" They were words she never hoped to say or hear, because now it was so much harder to keep her resolve.\n\n\"And what way is that?\" he asked.\n\nShe gave him a sideways glance. \"You know.\" And because it seemed only fair, she added, \"I have feelings for you too.\"\n\nHe drew back. \"I can't believe my ears.\"\n\n\"Blame it on this confounded leg. Nothing makes you face mortality quicker than weeks of confinement.\" She lifted her chin. \"But I'm still not selling the ranch.\" Now that she had a daughter, she couldn't sell even if she wanted to. Though there was little hope of her new heiress ever running the ranch.\n\n\"I don't want you to sell.\"\n\n\"You don't what?\" She stared at him, stunned. They'd fought over this very thing for years. It was the main reason she never accepted his marriage proposals.\n\n\"I just want you to sell the cattle. The ranch, we keep.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? If I sell the cattle we won't be able to maintain the ranch.\"\n\n\"Ah, but that's where you're wrong. I had someone check out the cave that Able was so determined to mine. Eleanor, you are about to become the richest person in the territory.\"\n\nEleanor gaped at him. \"You can't be serious.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"You know me. Where money's concerned, I don't joke.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it. There's actually gold on the ranch? I thought that was a figment of Able's imagination.\"\n\n\"Believe it, my dear. And if it wasn't for Kate's dime novel, we might never have discovered it.\" He grinned. \"What do you think about this\u2014the Last Chance Mining Company?\"\n\n\"Hmm. It has a nice ring, but I insist upon keeping a few cattle for old times' sake.\"\n\n\"Very well. The Last Chance Mining and Cattle Company. How's that?\"\n\n\"The Last Chance Ranch and Mining Company,\" she said. \"And that's not negotiable.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Very well. Do we have a deal? Will you agree to be my wife?\"\n\n\"Oh, why not?\" she said. \"But first, I think you should know I always wanted a large family.\"\n\nRobert's eyes nearly popped out of his head. \"At our age?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking of adopting Kate and Molly. Donny as well.\" Donny was Molly's brother. When the wheelchair-bound boy lived at the ranch with his sister, Eleanor had grown quite fond of him. Maybe Donny would agree to oversee the ranch should, heaven forbid, something happen to her. The more she thought about it, the more she liked the idea.\n\n\"What do you think? That way the future of the Last Chance Ranch\u2014\"\n\n\"And Mining Company,\" he interjected.\n\n\"\u2014will always be in good hands.\"\n\nRobert frowned. \"They aren't going to move in with us, are they? All these children of ours?\"\n\n\"Not if I can help it.\" She reached for her crutches. \"Now that we've settled our future together, let's go home. It's time for my afternoon tea.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Woodcutter, The.txt", + "author": "R.O. Lane", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Prologue\n\nChicago, July, 1876\n\nSarah Sloan strolled into work Wednesday morning, light on her feet as always. She went directly to her office and laid her wet umbrella in the corner to dry. As she did, she glanced over and saw a note on her desk.\n\n\"Mister Barry wants to see you as soon as you arrive.\"\n\nTaking no thought for her appearance after coming in from the rainstorm, she headed for Barry's office with a notebook and pencil. She wondered what was so urgent. She knocked on Barry's office door and heard the muffled words, \"Come in.\" When she opened the door, her boss looked up at her through his reading glasses, which made his eyes larger than usual.\n\n\"Had a note that you wanted to see me, boss,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Yes... have a seat, Miss Sloan.\" That was Barry through and through, always formal in relations with his subordinates in the Chicago Office.\n\nBarry pulled over a file from the corner of his desk and opened it and took his time reading it. Eventually, he said, \"We've been hired by a man to find his long-lost son, and you're assigned to the case.\"\n\n\"Who is he?\" Sarah asked.\n\n\"He's lives on 186 South Prairie Avenue if that gives you any clue,\" Barry said.\n\nSarah's eyes lit up. \"That's one of the mansions.\"\n\n\"Exactly! So go visit with the old man. His name is Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh. All the details are here in the file.\" He handed her the folder. \"Give reports to the client whenever he demands it and copy me on all communications. I'm told cost is no object. Spend whatever it takes but find his son. Pinkerton's reputation depends on it, and I'm depending on you, Sarah.\"\n\nAn hour later, Sarah got out of the cab and looked up at the yellow sandstone mansion with its wide chiseled steps leading to the enormous front doors, made of the finest mahogany and lacquered to a gloss finish. She took the steps and pulled a tasseled red velvet rope at the side of the doors, which rang a bell inside the mansion.\n\nSarah waited some time and was about to pull the velvet rope once again, but the door opened and a liveried servant said. \"Yes, Miss?\"\n\n\"I'm here to see Mister Gridleigh,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Is he expecting you, Miss?\" the servant asked.\n\n\"Yes, he is,\" she said. \"I'm Sarah Sloan from the Pinkerton Detective Agency.\"\n\nThe servant stepped aside and said, \"Come in, Miss.\" She stepped into an enormous hallway with a parquet floor of beautiful squares of marble laid diagonally to the front door. The servant advanced down the hall and said, \"Follow me, Miss.\"\n\nHe took her into an elegantly furnished room where everything was decorated in royal velvet. \"Wait here, Miss, and I'll let the master know you're here.\"\n\nSarah waited, looking at the enormous number of books that lined the walls of the room. Must be the library, she thought. She was engrossed studying the titles on one wall when a voice asked, \"You like books, Miss Sloan?\"\n\nShe turned quickly and found a wizened old man standing near a door at the other side of the room. He was dressed in an elegant black suit and his cravat was perfectly arranged.\n\n\"Well, yes, I do,\" Sarah said. \"I read all the time. I assume you're Mister Gridleigh.\"\n\n\"That's correct,\" the man said. \"Come over and sit down, young lady. Make yourself comfortable. I have a story to tell you.\"\n\nSarah strode over and sat down on the sofa where Gridleigh motioned, and Gridleigh himself sat in a chair at the side.\n\n\"I told Barry I wanted his very best operative,\" Gridleigh said, \"and I wasn't expecting it to be a woman, but I'm very glad to meet you.\"\n\n\"I'm very good at what I do, Mister Gridleigh,\" Sarah said. \"I've read the file with all the details you've given Mister Barry, and I have to say, I'm not sure we can find your son.\"\n\n\"At least you're honest,\" Gridleigh countered.\n\n\"Well, if he's changed his name, and many do, especially on the western frontier where some people don't want to be found, it'll be virtually impossible. Having said that, however, if he can be found, I'll find him. I'll leave no stone unturned, no clue unchecked.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Gridleigh said. \"It's very important to me that he be found, and there are lots of details that are not contained in your file. My intention is to give you all the details, even the sordid details, because whatever I say might help you in your investigation.\n\n\"Let me start at the beginning,\" Gridleigh said. \"Do you have any idea what a landgrave is, Miss Sloan?\"\n\n\"No, I'm afraid I don't,\" she said.\n\n\"Not surprising. Almost nobody does. My ancestor was named Theodosius Gridleigh, and he came to South Carolina in 1669 from England, the second son of Viscount Gridleigh of Norfolk. The powers that be at the time intended to set up an aristocracy in the new world much like that of the old world. And they actually did set up such an aristocracy, but it has not survived. At the top were what were called landgraves, like a count or an earl. Each landgrave was given 48,000 acres of land. And the landgraves added the title to their names, so my ancestor became Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh.\n\n\"And since that time down to me, we've all had the same name, Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh. I'm the eighth in line, and the line will die with me unless you find my son, who would be ninth in line.\n\n\"My father, the seventh landgrave, was smart enough to sell all his holdings in South Carolina in the late 1850s. He moved to New York City and increased the family fortune immensely by teaming up with Jay Gould and trading gold. When the Union Army won a battle, the price went up. When the Union Army lost a battle, it went down. Gould and my father manipulated the price of gold unmindful of what it might cost others. At one point, they shipped gold to England to cause a shortage in the states, and they made money when gold went up or down. Made no difference to them.\n\n\"I lived in South Carolina before moving to New York City with my father, and I participated with him in these money-making schemes. After he passed in 1866, I retired and moved to Chicago and built this house, and now I'm sick. Doctors say I have anywhere from six months to a year to live at most. It's important to me that my son be found because he'll inherit everything I have, a fortune that varies from day to day, but is in the range of $30 million.\n\n\"I never married, Miss Sloan, but I must admit I had numerous love affairs. I always thought most women cared for me because of my wealth. There was one time I seriously considered marrying a woman named Lila Milburn, but then I was too scared to actually get married and share my life with someone. When I let her know I wouldn't marry her, Lila left and I never saw her again.\n\n\"A lot of people seek me out for donations to their causes. A few months ago, I had a visit from Father Michael Walsh of St. Anthony's parish. He's been there a good number of years and recently was ordained a monsignor, and now he's in charge of both the parish and the orphanage. He came seeking a donation for a campaign to refurbish the orphanage. While we were talking, he told me an interesting story.\n\nHe said, 'When I first became a priest I was assigned to St. Anthony's, and one morning, I walked into the sanctuary to find a little boy asleep on one of the benches. Couldn't have been more than two years old. He had a sign pinned to his coat that said, 'I'm sorry I can't keep my son. I don't have enough money to buy food for myself or him. His name is Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh Milburn. Please take care of him.' I still have that note in my files somewhere, but I remember it almost word for word.\n\n\"I realized then that there was a strong possibility that Lila Milburn had given birth to a son that I'd fathered. She was from Chicago, but I'd met her in New York City before moving here. When Father Walsh told me about the boy, I was filled with a deep sadness that I'd misjudged Lila. She'd never sought a single thing from me even though she was penniless, but she wanted her son to know where he came from, so she'd given him my name. At least I think that's what happened.\n\n\"Father Walsh said they'd never found a stable home for the boy. He'd lived with several families, but the one constant in his life was St. Anthony's parish and school. He attended school there from the first grade until he was booted out for fighting when he was 16. Father Walsh said that the boy hadn't been at fault, but the other boys had wealthy parents who insisted the boy be expelled, which Father Anselm, the priest in charge at the time, had done. Since then, nobody seems to know what happened to the boy.\n\n\"Now it could be that this is all a mistake and that I'm really not the father, but my deepest instincts tell me different. I want you to find this man, who'd be something like 25 years old now. If you can, I'd like you to coax him to come and speak with me. And I don't care what it takes. If he insists, you're authorized to pay him any amount up to $50,000 if he'll come and see me.\"\n\n\"That's quite a story, Mister Gridleigh,\" Sloan said.\n\n\"And it may be just a tall tale, but I have to find out. If I have a son, I want to meet him urgently.\"\n\n\"I'll give it my best effort,\" Sarah said, \"and I'll certainly keep you informed along the way. As soon as I leave here, I'll start the search. There will be no delay.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "1\n\nBerea, Ohio, March, 1873\n\nHe arrived at the sandstone quarry one spring day, his floppy black hat in his hand, and asked for a job. He was broad in the shoulders and slim at the hips with a grim face that showed little evidence he ever smiled. His voice was deep like thunder on the horizon and there seemed to be an earnestness about him.\n\n\"Had any experience?\" the foreman asked.\n\n\"No sir,\" the man murmured.\n\n\"You're big alright, and you look strong, but what makes you think you can do the work?\"\n\n\"I've been working as a woodcutter for the last three years, sir, wielding a five-pound double-bit ax from sunup to sundown bringing trees down and splittin' 'em for rails.\"\n\n\"And you did that for three years?\" the foreman asked.\n\n\"Six days a week I did it for three years. Yessir, I did.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Up in Michigan, sir.\"\n\nThe foreman offered his hand. \"Congratulations,\" he said as he clasped the woodcutter's hand and felt his iron-hard palm. \"Your hand testifies that you're tellin' the truth. I've never felt a harder hand. You're hired.\"\n\nWhen they'd asked his name he'd told them it was Grit Milburn. His real given name... well... he hadn't used it since he was six years old and kept the secret of it to himself. It was the only legacy from his mother... and he detested the name because he'd been teased unmercifully about it when he was younger.\n\n\"Never heard of a man named Grit,\" the office clerk said.\n\n\"It's not common, sir,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Anyone ever asked if you had true grit?\" the clerk asked with a chuckle.\n\nGrit hesitated before saying, \"No sir. You're the first person clever enough to put those two together.\" His jaw clenched at the lie he'd told. He'd heard the joke dozens of times, and he lied because he needed the job and the money so that he could buy food to eat.\n\nThe man glanced up to Grit, suspecting he was being sarcastic, but there wasn't a hint of it on his face. \"We'll put you on the payroll as True Grit Milburn.\"\n\n\"No, that would be wrong,\" Grit said. \"Just put Grit Milburn if you please, sir.\"\n\n\"Okay, you can get to work,\" the man said. He watched Milburn go out the door, and he doubted he'd ever seen anyone so profoundly grim and somber, but Milburn looked like he could work, and that's all the job required. He spoke seldom, but he seemed respectful and courteous when he did speak.\n\nHis shirt was homespun, and he appeared a little undernourished. His cheeks were hollow and he seemed all muscle and sinew with not a smidgen of fat anywhere on his body. His thick brown beard and full head of hair made him look both older and younger than his 23 years.\n\nWhen Grit climbed down into the quarry, they handed him a spike maul and said, \"The object is to hit the drill while it's being held by your little partner there. He'll rotate the drill between each strike. Don't miss or you could break his arm.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Grit said. He picked up the maul and slammed it down on the drill, harder than anyone the foreman had ever seen do it, and Grit hit the drill accurately time after time. The foreman, whose name was Henry Newman, was more than a little impressed. He'd never seen an inexperienced man do what Grit had just done. He was a marvel of hand-eye coordination. And Newman soon found that Grit and his partner could drill holes in the sandstone far faster than any other crew.\n\nHis partner was a young boy named Paulie Samson, who seemed a kind lad who sometimes got teased about his surname. Grit knew all about getting teased about names. He guessed Paulie was maybe 15 or 16, but he hadn't asked because it was not his nature to inquire into other people's business, but Paulie was a slight lad with a nice laugh.\n\nGrit settled right into the work, coming day after day and doing the nine-hour shifts as regular as clockwork six days a week and never slacking off like some of the other men. When each week was over, he climbed out of the sandstone quarry, drew his pay and left. Nobody had any idea where he went.\n\nFact was Grit had found an elderly lady living on Bagley Road who'd long ago moved from a small cabin into a larger house. He was passing by one day, and it was obvious that no one was living in the cabin behind the house, for a rusty old wheelbarrow with flowers blocked its front door.\n\nSo Grit had knocked at the house, and when the woman opened the door, he said, \"Good morning, ma'am. My name is Grit Milburn, and I'm lookin' for a place to stay. I don't need much, but I'm wondering if I might stay in the cabin behind your house. I'd be happy to do some chores around the place on my day off if you'd consider it.\"\n\n\"Well I... I don't see why not,\" she said. \"I'm Mrs. McCaskey, and I could use a little help around the place. I used to live in the cabin and was quite comfortable, but my husband built this house for us before he died. I haven't been in the cabin in a long while. You'll have to clean it up.\"\n\n\"I'll do all that, ma'am, and I won't give you any trouble a'tall.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "He'd cleaned the little cabin completely and moved himself into it. It had a cookstove, and Grit used his pay to buy groceries to feed himself. His only other expense was a book he'd seen in Conroy's General Store called Around the World in Eighty Days by a man named Jules Verne.\n\nOn Grit's first Sunday off, he'd taken one of the three double-bit axes that he owned and chopped Mrs. McCaskey enough wood to last for a month, and it had taken him a little over an hour. Afterward, he still had some time, and he saw that there were weeds in various parts of the yard, and he got on his hands and knees and pulled them all, making sure the gardens around the house looked clean and neat.\n\nOn Monday morning, he'd reported for work at 7 a.m. and had worked until 4:30 drilling into the sandstone to facilitate splitting the stone into large blocks. The quarry had five derricks to move the blocks and place them on railroad flat cars. There was no need to tie down the huge blocks of stone. They were so heavy they weren't going to move until they reached their destinations.\n\nGrit learned that the Berea sandstone was prized all over the country for its ability to withstand huge amounts of weight and not fracture. So it was used in the foundations of many buildings all across the East. One of the men said that the sandstone shelf ran all the way down the state of Ohio, but the sandstone became finer as the shelf trended south and was mixed with clay. The man said the southern stone was outstanding for making fine-textured grindstones to sharpen tools.\n\nHaving been a woodcutter, Grit had long ago recognized the importance of having a good grindstone because having a sharp ax made all the difference in downing a tree and limbing it, cutting firewood or splitting rails.\n\nHe'd been there two months when he took his noon break for dinner. He'd made no friends other than his partner, Paulie. Grit grabbed the sack he'd brought along, plunged his hand into it and brought out one of his thick roast beef sandwiches. Paulie sat down beside him, reached into his sack and pulled out a handful of sand.\n\nSomebody had taken his sandwich. As he pulled his hand out covered with sand, Paulie heard some of the men nearby laughing at him.\n\n\"Hey, boy, you enjoy your lunch?\" a hefty man known to Grit only as Turk yelled. Turk was big but Grit could tell he was soft, and he was always slacking off one way or another. Grit wondered why the foreman kept the man and his friends on the payroll.\n\nPaulie got up and started to walk away. Turk ran over and grabbed Paulie's shoulder. \"I asked you if you enjoyed your dinner, boy.\"\n\n\"Not much,\" Paulie said. \"Now let me go.\"\n\n\"Or what?\" Turk said.\n\n\"Leave 'im alone, or you'll deal with me,\" Grit said, his voice like rumbling thunder.\n\n\"You stay outta this,\" Turk said. \"Ain't none of your business.\"\n\nPaulie tried once more to walk around the man, but Turk stepped in front of him.\n\nGrit stood and said, \"I told you to leave him alone. I won't be tellin' ya again.\"\n\n\"Oh really,\" Turk said. \"Hey fellas, he won't be tellin' me again. Ooh, I'm scared, I am.\"\n\nTurk walked toward Grit, looked back at his men and swung a looping shot at Grit's face. Grit caught the fist in his left hand and started twisting. Turk turned clear around trying to relieve the pressure on his arm, and when he did, Grit brought Turk's arm up behind his back and pressured it severely. He said, \"A bit more leverage and I could dislocate your arm. You'd never get over it your whole life. It's something no doctor can ever fix. Don't mess with the boy ever again.\"\n\n\"Ow, ow, ow, okay, I won't!\" Turk yelled. Grit shoved him toward his buddies, and he fell to his knees.\n\n\"Same goes for all of you. Don't ever mess with the boy again, or you'll regret it.\"\n\nHe grabbed the sack with his sandwiches and said, \"Let's go, Paulie.\" They moved off aways and sat down together.\n\n\"Here, Paulie, take this sandwich,\" Grit said, \"I have two.\"\n\n\"You sure, Grit?\" Paulie asked. \"You work so much harder than I do.\"\n\n\"That's ok. I'm sure. One's plenty for me today.\"\n\nGrit and Paulie worked all afternoon and when they knocked off at 4:30, Paulie asked, \"Would you mind if I walked downtown with you, Grit? I'm a little scared of those men.\"\n\n\"No, I wouldn't mind.\"\n\nWhen they walked down the road from the quarry, Grit saw there were three of them waiting, and it looked like they had clubs in their hands. He was tired and not up for a fight, but it was being forced on him, so he said, \"Paulie, you stay behind me. Don't try to fight these men. They'll hurt you. Just let me handle it.\" Paulie did exactly what Grit had told him and hung back a bit.\n\nGrit walked right down the road, and when he came to the three, he said, \"Three's not nearly enough. Get out of our way or somebody's gonna get hurt bad.\"\n\nTurk pulled up the iron pipe about two feet long and started whacking his left palm with it, and the other two men pulled out similar weapons.\n\n'\"I reckon three plus these three iron pipes oughta be enough,\" Turk said.\n\nThey came at Grit from different directions, and Grit turned to Turk whose arm was coming down with the pipe. Grit grabbed the pipe in mid-swing, pivoted and jerked Turk between him and the other two assailants. One of the men swung the iron pipe at Grit but instead hit Turk. There was a crunch of broken bone, and Turk screamed in agony and grabbed his collarbone.\n\nWhile Turk howled, Grit shoved him aside and turned to face the other two. Then Paulie saw Grit do the strangest thing. He slung Turk's iron pipe into the woods and stood with his hands at his side.\n\n\"I don't need an iron pipe to whip you two,\" he said. He rushed at them a few steps, and they dropped the pipes and ran off down the road, scurrying like mice let out of a cage and leaving Turk there by himself.\n\n\"There go your friends, Turk,\" Grit said. \"Stop howling and get after 'em.\"\n\nGrit stomped his foot and glared, and that was all it took. Turk jumped back and scrambled after his friends, holding his right arm close to his body and yelling in pain with every step." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "As they walked downtown, Grit asked, \"Where do you live, Paulie?\"\n\n\"Ain't really got a place,\" Paulie said, \"but old Buzz lets me bunk at the stable.\"\n\n\"Where's your family?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I's raised by my Uncle Steff and Aunt Bertha, who live over in Olmsted Falls. My aunt was always complainin' about how much I cost 'em, how much I ate, how I never helped even though I did all I could... all of that and more. So one day when I's 13, I just up and walked out of the house. Been on my own for two years now.\"\n\n\"And they never came after ya?\"\n\n\"Nope, ain't never seen either one since that day.\"\n\nAs they passed Dolly's Restaurant, Grit said, \"Let's get some dinner, Paulie.\"\n\n\"Nah, I'll cook myself sump'm down at the stable.\"\n\n\"I'm buyin',\" Grit said. \"Come on in.\"\n\nGrit didn't often eat out, but he was so famished, he thought he'd make an exception, and he was sure Paulie was as hungry as he was.\n\nA waitress, a comely young woman about Grit's own age, came with two glasses of water and said, \"Need a menu?\"\n\n\"Not really,\" Grit said. \"What's the special?\"\n\n\"Roast beef with mashed potatoes and peas and carrots with dinner rolls,\" she said.\n\n\"Sound okay, Paulie?\"\n\n\"Sounds fine, Grit.\"\n\n\"Bring us two of the specials,\" Grit told her.\n\nShe brought him silverware, a chunk of butter for his rolls and napkins. \"We have beer on draft if you'd like one.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am, I would,\" he said. \"You want a beer, Paulie?\"\n\n\"Yessir, if you think it's okay.\"\n\nShe brought two beers, and by the time their plates of food came, they'd drunk it all.\n\n\"Want refills?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" they both said.\n\nAs they ate their meal, there wasn't much talking, just the resolute sounds of chewing and silverware scraping their porcelain plates. Grit had begun to think of what he could do to earn enough money to go west and build some sort of future. Seemed like such thoughts were always on his mind lately. He was paid a fair wage at the quarry, and he was grateful for it. In Michigan he'd never received a penny for the work he'd done. Now he was on his own, and he constantly thought of the best ways to get the most out of life.\n\n\"Would you like a piece of pie,\" the waitress asked as she came to take away their plates. \"We have coconut, chocolate and apple.\"\n\n\"Coconut, if you please, ma'am,\" Grit said.\n\n\"I'll have chocolate,\" Paulie said, looking at Grit for his okay.\n\nGrit nodded, and the waitress brought huge pieces of pie, and they enjoyed every morsel.\n\n\"I ain't been this full... well, I can't even remember when,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"I've never had a better slice of pie,\" Grit said. Of course, he reflected that there hadn't been many times when he'd ever had pie of any kind.\n\nAfterwards, he settled the bill of a dollar and fifty-five cents and left 15 cents as a tip for the young woman who'd served them. He said goodbye to Paulie and headed home to clean up, wash some clothes and read a while. In the new book he'd bought, Phileas Fogg had bet his fellow members of London's Reform Club half his fortune that he could make it around the world in 80 days, and Grit was anxious to see if Phileas really could do it.\n\nThe next morning, Grit was up in the dark loading the stove with wood so that he could cook eggs and bacon for breakfast. First he put on the coffee pot and threw in a handful of Arbuckle's Ariosa coffee. It was the newest thing on the market, pre-roasted perfectly and sold in air-tight packages.\n\nWhile the coffee was boiling, he washed up and got dressed before cooking a half dozen eggs and six strips of bacon. He cut thick slices of bread from the loaf he'd bought at Gimbel's bakery downtown and placed the slices into the fry pan to brown while soaking up the bacon grease.\n\nHe fixed his coffee with a touch of cream, a luxury he'd seldom had before, and a chunk of sugar off the loaf, another luxury he'd rarely had in his life. As he ate his breakfast, he idly thought of the fracas he'd had yesterday, not bothered by it but just wondering if the men would give him any more grief.\n\nWhen he'd been booted from the orphanage in Chicago at the age of 16 for fighting, he'd gotten a variety of labor jobs, and he'd always prided himself on his ability to work hard. In the orphanage, he'd learned to cipher, write legibly and read well. If his compositions were not written just right, or his ciphering not done correctly, Sister Jane would smack his knuckles with a hardwood ruler. But through it all, he'd learned to love to read and could never find enough books to satisfy him, so he read the old ones over and over, finding that he got joy from second and even third readings.\n\nAt work that day, Turk never showed, and his crew kept their distance. Grit kept his sandwiches in his coat pocket, which he took down into the quarry with him. He and Paulie worked all morning and were about ready to quit for lunch when the foreman hailed him and asked that he come up. When he'd climbed from the quarry, he saw there was a policeman there.\n\n\"Are you Grit Milburn?\"\n\n\"That's me.\"\n\n\"We've had a complaint filed against you by a Mister Turk Osgood.\"\n\n\"For what?\"\n\n\"He claims you hit him with a steel pipe and broke his collarbone.\"\n\nGrit turned around and said, \"Paulie, tell 'im what really happened.\"\n\n\"Turk and his two buddies were waiting for us after work with iron pipes,\" Paulie said. \"They came for Grit, but he grabbed the iron pipe from Turk, and turned Turk to protect himself. One of Turk's friends hit Turk with the iron pipe while trying to hit Grit. When Grit faced the two men who were still holding their iron pipes, he tossed the pipe he'd taken from Turk into the woods saying he didn't need an iron pipe to fight them. Grit ran 'em all off and never swung an iron pipe at anybody, and that's the gospel truth of it.\"\n\n\"Well, now, that puts a different light on the story,\" the policeman said. \"Looks like it's his word against yours, but be careful. Turk's father has friends, and his friends are sayin' you hit Turk.\"\n\n\"What Paulie has told you is the truth,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Oh, I believe you, but I'd be careful if I were you.\"\n\nWhen they were eating their sandwiches together, Paulie said, \"I'm sorry I've got you in trouble, Grit.\"\n\n\"Aw, it's nothin',\" Grit said. \"Even so, I think I'll be headin' out.\"\n\n\"Goin' where?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Grit said. \"Somewhere out west, I suppose.\"\n\n\"I know it's a lot to ask, but could I go?\"\n\nGrit looked at him. \"You got nobody here, no family, nobody?\"\n\n\"I got my aunt and uncle, but they don't care 'bout me. In fact, they're glad to be rid of me, just like I told ya.\"\n\n\"Okay then, we'll leave Friday after work,\" Grit said.\n\n\"How we gon' travel?\"\n\n\"Ah, we'll catch a train west.\"\n\n\"I ain't got no money for a train,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"I got some money but not for a train ride. We'll jump into an empty rail car.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "2\n\nThursday night, Grit cleaned the cabin and packed everything he owned into two old carpetbags that he'd found discarded before he left Jackson, Michigan. He thanked Mrs. McCaskey, his landlady, and told her he'd be leaving.\n\n\"I've left the place clean as I can so you can rent it to someone else,\" Grit told her. \"And I've chopped enough wood to last at least a coupla more weeks.\" She thanked him and wished him well.\n\nWhen he got to work, he stacked the two carpetbags near his work so that he could keep his eye on them, and he placed his three heavy-duty axes on top. When Paulie arrived, Grit asked, \"You ready to roll on outta here?\"\n\n\"Got all my stuff packed,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Alright, we'll be off right after work,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Is it dangerous catching a ride on the railroad?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Comin' down here from Michigan, I had a run-in with the railroad bulls\u2014that's the railroad police more or less.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"I only had $5, so I had no way to buy a ticket. I jumped in an empty railcar and was sleepin' when I heard the freight door slide back. Two of the big bulls jumped on with cudgels. I got up to face 'em, and they came after me.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"They were tellin' me how they were gonna break my legs and arms and smash my skull, and I think they really intended to do that before throwing me out of the car. I was a little scared, but when the first one swung that stick, I caught the oak cudgel he had and slammed it into the head of the other one, then into the head of the first. I waited until the train started, then I made 'em both jump off in Chicago. I didn't realize they had guns, and as soon as they hit the ground, both of 'em were firin' shots at me.\n\n\"I rode the train and got off just shy of Toledo. It's good I did too 'cause I walked on down to the rail yard and found out those two bulls had telegraphed ahead, and there was a crowd of ten bulls and policemen to meet me at the station. I waited till later that night and caught another train into Cleveland, then to Berea.\"\n\n\"Oh, I hope we don't have trouble with 'em,\" Paulie said. \"I'm no good at fightin'.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"I'll take care of it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "On the train that night, they jumped into a cattle car as the train stopped in Berea.\n\n\"They shoveled out all the manure,\" Paulie said, \"but it still stinks.\"\n\n\"I've smelled worse,\" Grit said.\n\nOnce they were settled and the train was moving south, Grit pulled out the loaf of bread and said, \"Let's eat.\"\n\n\"What are we eatin'?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I got some fresh bread from the bakery and some slices of roast beef here,\" Grit said. \"Make yourself a sandwich.\"\n\nThey ate together, chomping away at the thick fresh beef sandwiches. \"Good thing you thought of this, or I'd be starvin',\" Paulie said. \"Only thing I brought was a tin of sardines.\"\n\nBoth were exhausted from their work that day, but they had to change trains in Cleveland, so they stayed awake and jumped off in the Cleveland rail yard an hour later. It took some time wandering around and hiding in the rail yard, but they eventually found a train headed west to Chicago.\n\nIn an empty freight car, they both fell asleep on the floor. There were water stops every few miles, but they had no real trouble until the train was coming into Toledo. They both awoke and Grit said, \"I'm thinkin' this is a big town, and we may have some problems here.\"\n\nPaulie sat up and said, \"I slept pretty good for about four hours, so I'm ready to jump off if we have to.\"\n\nGrit stood, slid the door open a crack and stuck his head out. \"Uh oh,\" he said. \"There's a man coming with a lamp, and he's got a bunch of guys with him. We better jump out the other side.\"\n\nThey slid the opposite-side door open just wide enough to get through it, jumped down and ran into the rail yard and hid behind the steel wheels of the rail cars. They hunched down and watched as the railroad bulls searched every car on the train.\n\nGrit could hear them talking but caught only a word or two here and there. As the train got ready to leave a little later, the conductor came down swinging his red light, and the train started to chug away.\n\nWhen the conductor jumped aboard one of the cars down the track, Grit said, \"Come on, Paulie. Let's catch it.\"\n\nThey threw their bags into the rail car. Grit jumped in and pulled Paulie up into the car.\n\n\"We made it,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Yep, now you can get some sleep.\"\n\nPaulie set his blankets out and dropped off into a dead sleep. Grit was tired too, but he sat up thinking how elated he was that he was finally free and in charge of his own life. Grit had grown up in an orphanage, more or less, and from an early age he'd been told what he could do and what he couldn't do. Now he was free to make his own decisions, to make a life, and he was determined to make a good one by the iron force of his will and his iron-hard muscles.\n\nA week later when he and Paulie hopped off the train in Omaha, he was still exulting in his own freedom.\n\n\"Now we gotta decide what we're gonna do,\" Grit said. \"I think we oughta go up the Missouri River to Dakota Territory and find us a good spot with lots of trees, and we can sell firewood to the riverboats.\"\n\n\"But what do we do in the winter?\"\n\n\"Before the snow flies,\" Grit said, \"we'll have to spend every spare minute building a cabin, then we'll have to make a trip to the nearest town and stock the cabin with all the supplies we'll need until spring. As long as we're well-situated and have warm clothing, we can cut wood through the winter and be ready when the boats start coming as soon as the ice breaks on the river.\"\n\n\"Where are we gonna get all the money to do this?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"We have to cut wood for the rest of the summer and sell it,\" Grit said. \"We'll have to spend the rest of our money to get enough to buy you a couple of three-pound axes, a good grindstone, maybe some files, and enough food to last a month or so until we get some wood sold.\"\n\n\"But I heard there's Indians up there in Dakota Territory,\" Paul said. \"Ain't we gonna need some rifles?\"\n\n\"That's a good point, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"I hadn't thought of needing a rifle, and we could use some mules, harnesses and chains to haul the logs. Until then, we'll just have to cut the trees where we drop them.\"\n\n\"If we had a tarp it might be easier for me to drag cut logs up to the river bank and stack 'em,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"You're just full of good ideas,\" Grit said.\n\nThey bought a new Winchester '73 for $18, bought the two three-pound axes for $1.65 cents each, bought files to sharpen the saws, and a round grindstone weighing nearly 30 pounds. They bought enough food for two months and after paying, Grit said, \"I only have $65 left, not enough to buy much of a horse.\"\n\n\"Why don't you let me go down and see if I can get us a horse?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"No reason,\" Grit said. \"If you think you can get us one, go ahead.\"\n\n\"I need to have at least some money to get a horse,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" Grit said. \"I'll give you $50. That's all we can afford.\" Grit watched from an alley as Paulie went into the stable." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Paulie walked into the stable and said, \"I'm tryin' to get west, and I need a horse, but I got so little money. What's the cheapest horse you got?\".\n\nThe liveryman looked at Paulie with his winning smile and said, \"Well, youngster, I got this bay a coupla days ago. Man riding him said he was in a fight with some Cheyenne Indians, and they shot the horse, whether accidentally or on purpose he didn't know. Anyway, the shot took a big gouge out of his rump. The guy wanted another horse right away. So I offered him $20 for this horse, and he took it. I could let you have him for $25 if you don't ride him for a while. He can carry a small load, but he can't carry a man yet.\"\n\n\"Is that wound gonna heal up?\" Paulie asked. \"I don't know much about horses.\"\n\n\"Of course it is,\" the liveryman said. \"You put Pratt's Healing Ointment on it morning and night, and in two or three weeks, that horse'll be good as new.\"\n\n\"Is he a good horse?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Judging by his teeth, he's about six or seven years old, near as I can tell, son, but I'd say he's a good horse,\" the liveryman said. \"I could keep him, heal 'im up and sell 'im for $75 or more, but if you want 'im, it's $25. I don't know why I'm doin' this deal, but occasionally the soft spot in my heart overwhelms me.\"\n\nPaulie stuck out his hand and the liveryman took it and they shook. Paulie said, \"Thank you and your kind heart, sir.\"\n\n\"You'll need to buy some panniers,\" the liveryman said, \"and I wouldn't put more'n 65 or 70 pounds on the horse for at least three weeks.\"\n\nWhen Paulie walked out of the stable with the horse, Grit smiled, which felt strange for him. He'd not had anything to smile about for a long time, but Paulie had talked that liveryman into what looked like a good horse.\n\nHe met Paulie in the alley behind the general store. \"Looks like a good horse,\" Grit said. \"How'd you talk the stable owner outta him?\"\n\n\"It's a long story,\" Paulie said, \"but the horse is injured.\" Paulie pointed to the deep gouge across the horse's hindquarter.\"\n\n\"Oh my,\" Grit said. \"Looks like somebody shot 'im.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I got 'im for $25,\" Paulie said, \"and the stable owner says we can't ride 'im, but it's okay for him to carry 60 or 70 pounds. All we have to do is buy some panniers at the store. We also gotta get a can of Pratt's Healing Ointment and put it on the horse's rump morning and night. He says the horse will heal up fine in three weeks.\"\n\nGrit looked at Paulie and said, \"You've done right well, Paulie. We were gonna walk anyway. Let's get the panniers and load up. And I got enough left over to buy us another Winchester.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I'd feel better if we had two,\" Paulie said. \"And we could use a good bucksaw and a handsaw too.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Grit said. \"Plus wedges and a couple of sledge hammers. Let's see if they have what we need.\"\n\n\"We'll need the saw to make the doors to the cabin,\" Paulie said.\n\nGrit looked at Paulie and said, \"You're a right smart young man, you know that?\"\n\n\"Sometimes I am,\" Paulie said with a smile.\n\nThat very afternoon, they left Omaha following the Missouri River north. They passed through Yankton four days later, and two days after, they stopped at Fort Randall.\n\nA sergeant named Seamus O'Doyle greeted them at the fort and asked where they were going.\n\n\"We're lookin' for a place on the river to cut and sell firewood to the riverboats,\" Grit said.\n\n\"You'll have to be sure and get beyond the Yankton Reservation,\" O'Doyle said.\n\n\"Okay, but how're we gonna know?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"It's pretty well marked on the trail,\" O'Doyle said. \"Beyond that, you can settle anywhere up there. Lots of that land can be homesteaded.\"\n\nOn the ninth day, they were well beyond the reservation when they saw where some woodcutters\u2014Grit assumed it was men from one or two of the riverboat crews\u2014had been cutting trees along the edge of the river, and Grit said, \"That looks like a good place for us to set up our business, or somewhere close by.\"\n\n\"Where are we?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Somewhere up in the Dakota Territory,\" Grit said. \"Let's walk five miles on up the river. We can come back if this is the best place.\" Farther on, they found where the forest thickened with hardwood trees of all kinds, bur oaks, maples, beech and elm trees, black walnut and huge cottonwood trees. They scouted around and found a small spring up on the slope above the river.\n\n\"We could clean this spring out and have a good water source right next to the cabin we need to build,\" Grit said. \"The water from the spring is a lot cleaner than water from the river.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it's a perfect place,\" Paulie agreed.\n\n\"We'll start cuttin' right away, and we'll stack up the logs at the side of the river. The river channel is on this east side, so the boats will have to come close to this shore, and the river here has nary a bend for a mile or so, and the other boats will be able to see an anchored boat and either stop or go around.\"\n\n\"I'll unpack the horse and stake him out to graze,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Good, I'll take my axes and one of the rifles and start felling trees,\" Grit said.\n\nAs Paulie grabbed his two three-pound axes, he heard Grit's ax strike the trunk of a tree. He grabbed his axes and ran down toward the river, where he saw Grit sinking his ax into a large bur oak.\n\n\"Some of the toughest wood there is,\" Grit said. \"When the tree comes down, I'll attack the big limbs and you get the smaller ones, then we'll start sawin' the trunk.\"\n\nWithin an hour, Paulie stopped and looked at his hands. \"Got blisters,\" he said.\n\n\"Your hands'll toughen up,\" Grit said. \"I knew it would happen. That's why I bought these for ya.\" Grit handed him a pair of cowhide gloves.\n\n\"Thanks. This'll make it a lot less painful,\" Paulie said.\n\nAs night came on, they stopped and pulled out their supplies for dinner. It turned out Paulie was a pretty good cook, and he'd taken over the chore. While he cooked, Grit grabbed the horse and staked him out in a better spot.\n\nPaulie cooked side pork before chopping up peaches and mixing them in the pancake batter. Before long, he had a dozen pancakes, and they served them with syrup, slabs of side pork and cups of strong coffee with a little lump of sugar.\n\n\"This is great, Paulie,\" Grit said.\n\nThey ate together sitting on a log about two feet in diameter and six feet long that they'd dragged into the camp site.\n\nAfter swallowing a mouthful of pancakes with syrup, Grit said, \"Once we get the river bank cleared and a big pile of logs, we'll be ready for business. Then maybe we can spend a day or two laying the foundation for our cabin. We'll cut logs most of the day, then work on the cabin in the evenings.\" For the first time in his life, Grit was feeling excited to build something for himself and Paulie.\n\nThe next morning, Grit spent a couple of hours with the handsaw and made a push-pedal holder for the grindstone he'd bought. He hooked it all together and when he pressed on the pedal board underneath with his foot, it activated the round stone by a wooden arm on the side, and he could use both hands to sharpen his axes. Some of the woodsmen in Michigan had shown him how to build such a contraption, and it made sharpening the axes so much easier.\n\nWhen he was done, he threw his ax overhand at a tree about 15 feet away, and it plunged into the tree and hung there. When he turned around, Paulie was staring at him with an open mouth. \"How did you do that?\" he asked.\n\n\"Oh, takes some practice,\" Grit said, \"but we used to have contests all the time in Michigan.\"\n\n\"Would you teach me to do it?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Yeah, sure, get your three-pound axes, and I'll show you how to throw 'em.\"\n\nWhen Paulie came back with his axes, Jake said, \"Easiest way to throw is two-handed. You'll wanna put your dominant hand on the bottom and your other hand on top, so since you're left-handed, you'll do the opposite of me. Then you rock back bringing the ax over your head and rock forward releasing the ax just as you start to come forward.\"\n\nGrit swung the ax forward and it flipped through the air three turns and the point stuck perfectly in an elm tree. \"Go ahead and try it.\"\n\nPaulie did it as he'd been shown, and his ax stuck in the tree just like Grit's. \"Did you see that? I actually got it to stick in the tree.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"Yes, you did, and with a little practice you can do it every time. When you get stronger, I'll show you how to do it one-handed.\"\n\nAs time went on, they practiced a few throws each day, and Paulie's accuracy did indeed improve." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Two weeks later, they had logs piled up all along the river bank and a riverboat came up the river and stopped. The name on the side read Warsaw. Grit and Paulie stopped work and stood on the shore as one of the mates came ashore with a crew.\n\n\"How much you want for the wood?\" the mate yelled.\n\n\"It's top quality, all hardwood, and we want top price,\" Grit yelled.\n\n\"Name your price, man,\" the mate yelled.\n\n\"Seven dollars and fifty cents a cord,\" Grit yelled.\n\n\"Done,\" the mate yelled. \"We'll be needin' 40 cords. You got that much?\"\n\n\"We got 42 cords,\" Grit said to the mate as he walked up the bank.\n\n\"Then that means, we'll be owin' you $300 for the 40 we need.\" The mate pulled out a roll of bills and handed Grit the money. With that, the mate waved his arms and other rowboats headed ashore to carry the wood back to the riverboat.\n\nAfter a few moments, Grit looked over at Paulie and gave him a rare smile. He handed Paulie the money and said, \"You ever seen $300?\"\n\n\"No, I never have,\" Paulie said with a laugh. \"Till now.\"\n\n\"Me neither,\" Grit said.\n\nGrit walked over to where the mate was directing the work and asked, \"Do you think you could maybe sell us some flour, baking soda and a Dutch oven?\"\n\nThe mate took off his cap and scratched his head, \"I think so. I'll get one of the men on the next trip to bring it back to you. I'm not sure we have a Dutch oven, but if we do, I'll get it for ya.\"\n\n\"How much will I owe you?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Ah nothin'. We'll give it to ya.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll be thankin' you for whatever you can do.\"\n\n\"I'll let the other boats know about your place here,\" the mate said. \"I'm not sure if any more boats will be coming up this year, but there'll be lots comin' down. You'll need to get busy and cut some more wood. You can sell all you cut, I'll guarantee that.\"\n\nLater one of the men came back with a 25-pound bag of flour, two boxes of baking soda and a large Dutch oven of cast iron. And that became Grit's practice with every riverboat. He'd try to cadge what food he could from them, and what he couldn't get for free, he bought. And that's how they survived without having to leave their work and get supplies at one of the forts or in Yankton.\n\nThat night, Paulie used the Dutch oven to cook rolled soda biscuits, which they ate loaded with maple syrup while drinking Arbuckles coffee. Each was so tired that no amount of coffee could keep either from falling into an exhausted sleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "One day, when the wood was stacked high on the river bank, Grit said, \"Paulie, I think it's time we learned to use these rifles. Let's put a sign up that says, 'Wood, $7.50 a cord. Leave money under this log,' and we'll take the day off and see if we can find some sort of meat to add to our diet.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'd like that, Grit.\"\n\n\"Go make the sign with a piece of charcoal, Paulie, and we'll be off to hunt down a bison or deer. Let's go up onto the plains and see what's up there once we're out of the river valley. I've always wondered what it was like up there.\"\n\nThey wandered up out of the river valley and saw a vast plain with isolated patches of fir and pine trees. About two miles from their camp, they topped a hill and saw five Indians skinning two bison.\n\n\"Get down,\" Grit said. \"I think they're friendly, but I don't know anything about these Indians.\"\n\nAs they crouched down, Paulie said, \"We didn't have any trouble with the Yankton Sioux, but these Indians seem a different sort.\"\n\nThey sat and observed for some time as the Indians butchered the buffalo. \"Look at that,\" Paulie said. \"They're eatin' that meat raw.\"\n\n\"I think that's the liver they're tearing into,\" Grit said.\n\nEventually, the two hunters eased back down the hill and walked down into the river valley. \"Well, so much for hunting,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Let's go back, and I'll cook some dinner for us,\" Paulie said. As they were approaching the campsite, they came through the woods and saw a lone doe eating grass right near the bay horse. They both stopped and got down low.\n\n\"She's yours, Paulie,\" Grit whispered. \"Line up your shot and hit her right behind the front leg.\"\n\nGrit aimed at the doe just in case, but Paulie fired and the doe took two steps, stumbled and dropped.\n\n\"I got her,\" Paulie said. \"We'll have some meat tonight.\"\n\n\"That was a nice shot, Paulie,\" Grit said.\n\nThey both enjoyed their time around the fire that night. They were exhausted but full of venison and were having an extra cup of hot Arbuckles before going off to their blankets.\n\n\"How's the horse comin'?\" Grit asked. \"I was lookin' at him today, and he's got a powerful scar, and I guess he always will have, but it looks like he's about healed up.\"\n\n\"Yeah, he's about healed,\" Paulie said. \"But he still shys when I touch the wound, so I dab on the ointment with a little stick and leave him. Sometimes I give him a little chunk off the sugar loaf, and he takes it right out of my hand. I wish we had a saddle. I'd ride him a little. Not that I have time to ride, but maybe I could take an hour now and then.\"\n\n\"That's a great idea,\" Grit said. \"When we go back to Yankton, we'll get you a saddle.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "3\n\nEach day Grit and Paulie worked from sunup to couldn't see, and the riverboats coming down bought all the wood they could cut until the Octavia arrived in mid-September.\n\nThe mate came ashore and said, \"We'll take 30 cords, and just so you know, we're the last boat comin' down the river this year from Fort Benton.\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" Grit said. \"Well, I'm sorry to hear it and glad to hear it at the same time. We're a little tired. The wood's $7.50 a cord, and it's all the finest hardwood.\"\n\nGrit's clothes were hanging on him he'd lost so much weight. And Paulie was the same, though he'd grown taller and stronger.\n\nWhen the mate paid for the wood, Grit handed it to Paulie and said, \"Put it with the other, Paulie.\"\n\nWhen the Octavia left, Grit said, \"We're outta everything. We gotta go get some supplies, and I mean lots of supplies. We gotta get us a wagon and another horse. When we're in Yankton, I wanna file on this property as a homestead, and you should file on the one next to it.\"\n\n\"I'm only 16 years old,\" Paulie said. \"Be 17 in three months.\"\n\n\"You look older, but it's up to you,\" Grit said. \"Far as I'm concerned, you're a man doing a man's work, and that entitles you to it just like it entitles you to drink a beer.\"\n\n\"Then I'll do it,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"You're keepin' track of the money, Paulie? How much we got?\"\n\n\"Off the top of my head, $2,746,\" Paulie replied. \"But that doesn't include what you just gave me.\"\n\n\"Well, Paulie, that's almost $3,000. I don't have to tell you that's hard-earned money, and we got the calluses on our palms, and barks on our knuckles to prove it.\" Grit drew near to Paulie, placed his hand on the boy's shoulder and said, \"And I can't help noticing you're growin' like a weed and got muscles pokin' out all over.\"\n\nThey both laughed and Paulie said, \"It's all the hard work we been doin'.\"\n\n\"Well, now it's time to spend some of our money. Let's clean up and store our tools away, then we'll walk down to Yankton. It's only about a hundred miles. We can make it in two days, three at most. We'll take the bay and see if we can get another horse with a sweet temperament like him.\"\n\nTwo days later as the sun was setting, Grit and Paulie walked into Yankton. They dropped off the bay at the livery and walked down to 3rd Street, where they saw the Misery River Saloon.\n\n\"Funny name, 'Misery River,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Yeah, I guess it is a misery for some, but not for us.\"\n\nThey walked inside the saloon and Grit said, \"Four beers, if you please.\"\n\nWhen they got their beers, Grit said, \"Let's get a table, Paulie. Something in the back.\"\n\nThey sat down at a table and had just finished their first beers when a man stepped up and said, \"You fellas lookin' for work?\"\n\n\"No, can't say we are,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Are you a fighter?\" the man asked.\n\nGrit looked the man over and asked, \"What kind of fighter?\"\n\n\"Bare-knuckle,\" he said. \"We got a promoter that's in town, and he says his boy will take on all comers. If you beat his guy, you get a thousand dollars.\"\n\n\"Not enough for me to do it!\" Grit said. \"No, we're not lookin' for work, even though we may look like we're down and out. We been workin' hard all summer. And no, we're not fighters.\" He winked at Paulie before saying, \"And we're not wild bull riders either. Just a coupla guys enjoyin' a well-earned beer.\"\n\nPaulie laughed and said, \"We wouldn't mind seein' some guys beat up by the bruiser who's takin' on everybody.\"\n\n\"My name's Harris Sweat. I'm in charge of the Dakota Southern Railroad maintenance shop here in Yankton. One of our guys is gonna take him on. He's a tough customer... and big. But the real reason I'm stoppin' here is that I need a few more good men. We pay top wages.\"\n\n\"Not us,\" Grit said. \"We work for ourselves.\"\n\n\"Can I ask doing what?\" Sweat asked.\n\n\"We're woodcutters,\" Grit said. \"We've come down to stock up for the winter.\"\n\n\"You could work here during the winter,\" Sweat said. \"Winters are awful cold, and being out by yourselves might prove dangerous.\"\n\nPaulie was enjoying this interplay, so he asked, \"How is it dangerous?\"\n\n\"Lots of violent snowstorms and blizzards,\" Sweat said. \"A man could get lost and freeze to death out on the prairie.\" Paulie and Grit both chuckled. \"Happens every year.\"\n\n\"Maybe... but not to us,\" Grit said, \"We're gonna cut wood all winter. By the time spring comes, we'll be way ahead of what the boats need. And besides that, we kinda like profiting from our own labor.\"\n\n\"Sometimes there's renegade Sioux up the river,\" Sweat said.\n\n\"We haven't had trouble all summer, but we're prepared,\" Grit said. \"If trouble finds us, we'll handle it.\"\n\n\"You got a cabin?\" Sweat asked.\n\n\"Not yet, but we'll get one built in the next few weeks,\" Grit said. \"We've been working so hard cuttin' wood this summer, we haven't had time to work on a cabin, but we'll get 'er nice and tight before hard winter strikes.\"\n\n\"Well... good luck to ya,\" Sweat said. \"Maybe see ya at the fight.\"\n\n\"Not fightin' you won't,\" Grit said with a chuckle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Later they found a restaurant and had steak dinners before getting a hotel room with two beds. They washed their faces, hands and bodies and fell into the beds exhausted after their 100-mile walk.\n\nAfter breakfast the next morning, they found Plunkett's General Store on Capital Street and bought wool coats and lined leather gloves, brown canvas pants, shirts, longhandles, socks, new work boots, stocking caps and bandanas. When each had what they wanted, they walked down to the barbershop and got haircuts and beard trims before having baths. Paulie was proud of his beard, though it was a mite thin.\n\nAs they each sat in tubs of hot water, Grit said, \"Nothin's finer than a good hot bath. I wish we could do it more often. Sometimes I can't stand the smell of myself.\"\n\n\"I feel the same,\" Paulie said. \"Maybe we should get a copper tub, and we could heat water and have a bath occasionally.\"\n\n\"That's a grand idea, Paulie. We got the money, and let's get a stove for the cabin, a heat stove and a small cook stove. It'll make things a lot easier.\"\n\nLater at the livery, they looked at an oak wagon with thick iron tires. \"This'n looks heavy duty, and I like these high sides on it,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Yeah, it looks stout alright,\" Paulie said, \"but once she's loaded, will two horses be enough to pull 'er back to our camp?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Grit said. \"I don't suspect it'll be that heavy, and we've only got to travel a hundred miles.\"\n\nThey bought the wagon before wandering over to the livery and buying a four-year-old dun that looked like a sturdy farm horse and seemed very easy to handle. Once they had the bay and dun harnessed, the horses seemed perfectly at ease, as if both of them had been called on to pull a wagon before. Grit and Paulie rode around town and on the south side, they found where the men had built the boxing ring.\n\n\"Looks like they're gettin' ready for this afternoon, Paulie,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Yep, and I don't wanna miss it,\" Paulie said.\n\nThey sat and watched for a short time as men inside the ring and underneath were putting the finishing touches on the ring construction. One man bounced against the ropes to make sure the corner-posts held.\n\n\"I think it's fine, Mac!\" he yelled.\n\nSomebody's reply from underneath was inaudible.\n\nGrit dropped the wagon off at the livery and he and Paulie went to Steadman's for lunch. The waitress came over, took their order and asked, \"You two gonna watch the big fight today?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" Paulie said. \"We're lookin' forward to it.\" Grit was happy to see Paulie so eager about the fighting that afternoon, but he knew Paulie had no idea of how brutal the sport was. Bare-knuckle fighting was vicious and bloody, and even though they gave a nod to the Queensberry rules, not many observed them.\n\nEye-gouging, head butting, kneeing in the groin during clinches were inflicted on the unwary. The referee might warn a fighter but almost never disqualify one. In the ring, a man was fighting for his life, and if he didn't die, he was often maimed and his face disfigured for life.\n\nIn the restaurant, they filled up on chicken-fried steaks, mashed potatoes and gravy before heading over to the fight, where people were already jostling for the best places to view the day's events. Grit guessed there were easily five hundred people there, mostly men, but also lots of young boys were running around.\n\nThere were temporary bars set up to buy beer, whiskey and sandwiches. Bryn's Bakery was selling sandwiches and all kinds of custards, sweet rolls and other desserts.\n\nAt 1 o'clock, the promoter jumped through the ropes with a giant red megaphone for the introductions. \"Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure to welcome all of you here today for this afternoon of supreme entertainment.\n\n\"We have as our guest today one of the world's great bare-knuckle pugilists, all the way from Ireland by way of New York City. Known as the 'Dublin Haymaker,' here's the man who's landed a haymaker on hundreds of other fighters and put their backs on the canvas, John P. Falmouth.\"\n\nFalmouth ducked between the ropes and entered the ring flexing his biceps as the crowd burst into applause, and it was deafening. When the raucous crowd quieted somewhat, the promoter yelled in his megaphone, \"The 'haymaker' is taking on all comers today, no matter their size. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.\n\n\"Step right up to the table here, and sign up to fight Mister Falmouth. We've already got six brave men who are willing to fight the 'Dublin Haymaker' and see if they can hit him with their own haymakers. Anyone who defeats Mister Falmouth will immediately be awarded one thousand dollars.\n\n\"The charge to enter is only $25, and you may place your bets right here at ringside at the same table where you sign up to fight the champion. We are prepared to accept bets in any amount. So step right up and make your bets.\"\n\nFalmouth was bare-chested. He had a good physique, but Grit could tell he was going to seed. Too many drinks, too many beefsteaks and too much fat on his body. Perhaps the fat gave him some cushion against his opponents' blows, but Grit suspected the man was living off past glory, his reflexes still quick enough to defeat the country bumpkins he faced in towns across the West, but no longer quick enough to face the tough opponents in the big eastern cities.\n\n\"Our first opponent for Mister Falmouth is Douglas Williams, who represents your own Dakota Southern Railroad. Place your bets, gents. Looks like Mister Williams can get the job done. Look at the size of the man.\"\n\nA giant of a man, maybe 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds lumbered into the ring to the delight and loud applause of dozens of his supporters. The promoter, having finished his job, jumped down from the ring and the referee took over. The referee called the boxers to the middle of the ring for their final instructions, no kicking, no gouging, no wrestling, and the men returned to their corners to await the bell.\n\nWhen it rang, the men stalked and circled each other throwing jabs before Williams threw a powerful right that Falmouth ducked. He came up inside Williams's arms and smashed a powerful left-right combination to the man's midsection before dancing away. When Williams missed with a second punch, Falmouth gave him a jolt on the chin and he went down to end the round.\n\n\"Did you see that?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"That was just a little love tap,\" Grit said. \"Nothin' serious. Falmouth wants to keep the fight goin'.\"\n\nGrit realized that Falmouth was playing with Williams. He could have come up and delivered that first combination to his opponent's chin and ended the fight right there, but that wasn't good for business.\n\nIn the second round, Williams continued to flail away, but Falmouth took most of the blows on his shoulders and arms. Both men's upper torsos became splotchy red. Grit saw that Falmouth was an expert at blocking punches, and that's the way he survived in the ring. He also had good vision, always keeping his head up and eyes open to see flaws in his opponent's defense.\n\nA couple of minutes into the second round, one of Williams's punches landed to the side of Falmouth's head, and it seemed to shake the pugilist. Once that happened, he clinched and recovered. From that point, Falmouth went after Williams's big body, sending punishing blows repeatedly into his belly and ribs. Suddenly, he switched to Williams's face and sent a staggering blow to the man's nose, which started to bleed all over the canvas. As he continued to attack the face, Williams suffered cuts above and below his right eye and the blood leaked into his vision and obscured his sight. A straight right cross to the chin sent Williams down and out. His seconds came out and tried to revive the man, but he couldn't answer the bell for a third round.\n\nPaulie turned to Grit and said, \"I didn't realize boxing was so ferocious and savage.\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Grit said, \"and sometimes it's worse than that.\"\n\n\"What could be worse?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Sometimes a fighter dies,\" Grit said, \"and when it happens, it doesn't seem like much of a sport.\"\n\n\"You've seen it?\" Paulie asked.\n\nGrit nodded, \"Yeah, I've seen it.\"\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"In Michigan.\"\n\n\"Would you tell me about it sometime?\"\n\n\"I'm not anxious to relive it, Paulie.\" It was obvious to Grit as he stood there that many felt exactly like Paulie. Men were rushing to the table, having had a change of heart about taking on Falmouth after seeing the destruction he'd dished out to Williams. They were trying to get their entrance fees back, but the promoter's people were giving no refunds.\n\nThe promoter jumped into the ring once more and yelled through his megaphone. \"I see some of the faint of heart have turned into chickens, suddenly afraid to fight Mister Falmouth, but let me assure you, all it takes is one lucky blow to the head, and our champ here is down for the count. I've seen it happen in other cities and sadly I've had to pay the thousand dollars. Don't be afraid, just step right up. The champ is tired now, and you'll be fresh coming into the ring. Our next fighter is Boris Popov, the pride of Russia.\"\n\nPopov was a different type of fighter. He had no thought of feeling out his opponent but instead wanted to obliterate him. He swarmed over Falmouth throwing blows from every direction, and he was pretty good. He hit Falmouth hard, but the wise old fighter covered his head, slipped many of the punches and took the others on his shoulders and arms. Inevitably, though, some got through and Falmouth clinched and held on until the referee separated the fighters and Falmouth had recovered a bit.\n\nThrough it all, Falmouth looked for an opening, and when it came, he tagged Popov on the chin with a right uppercut that staggered the Russian and took some of the starch out of his approach. He clinched and hung on repeatedly to Falmouth in order to survive, but when the referee separated the fighters, Falmouth stepped in and tagged Popov once more on the jaw with a devastating left hook, and he was down for the count.\n\nFive more fighters got into the ring and all lost pretty quickly, and the number of those willing to get into the ring with Falmouth dwindled to nothing. After the last knockout, the promoter jumped into the ring with his spiel telling everyone that knocking Falmouth out only took one punch.\n\n\"That's all it takes,\" the promoter said. \"One lucky punch, and you get a thousand dollars. Come one, come all!\"\n\nWhen there were no volunteers, the promoter's demeanor changed. He became belligerent. \"I got no takers in this town? What kind of men we got here, a bunch of cowards? I thought when we came here we'd see some real men, but now I see we got nothin' but milksops and mama's boys.\"\n\nWithout warning, the man pointed his finger at Grit, who was standing in the crowd with Paulie. \"You there, have you got the guts to get into the ring with the champion?\" Why he picked Grit nobody ever knew. Perhaps his eye lighted on the first stranger he saw. Quickly, everybody around Grit pushed back and left him standing alone with Paulie.\n\n\"Have you, or are you just another namby-pamby like the rest of the men in this town?\"\n\nGrit was tongue-tied. He wanted to say he had no desire to fight, but he was standing there and everyone was staring at him or trying to get a look at him. His face flushed and he held up his hand and waved the man off while shaking his head.\n\n\"Just as I thought, a weakling without the guts to take on the champion. C'mon, I won't even charge you the $25 entrance fee. Just get up here and show us what you got.\"\n\nThe shaming of Grit was too much. His face reddened in anger and his mouth set in a determined grimace. Paulie watched Grit turn into someone he'd never seen before. Grit started toward the ring, only half-hearing Paulie yell, \"No, Grit, don't do it.\" But once committed, Grit pulled himself up into the ring and said, \"Alright, bring on your champion.\"\n\n\"Now, you see, I was wrong,\" the promoter said. \"This man's got more guts than anybody else in this town. Good luck, my man.\"\n\nGrit reached into his pocket and pulled out $25. \"Here's the entrance fee,\" Grit said as he waved it in the air and handed it to the promoter. \"You get your thousand dollars ready.\" The promoter smiled piteously at him.\n\nHe pulled his shirt out of his pants and slipped it off over his head. When the crowd saw the great slabs of muscle on Grit's body, the onlookers were in total disbelief. Everybody started cheering for him and some even placed bets on him to win. He leaned over the ropes and yelled, \"Paulie, put a thousand dollars on me to win. Do it now!\"\n\n\"Are you sure, Grit?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Yes, I'm sure. Do it 'fore it's too late.\"\n\nGrit stared at Falmouth who stared back at him as the referee gave his instructions. He walked back to his corner, and something took over. He'd never understood what it was, but he had no fear, except for a slight apprehension that he might really hurt Falmouth. But that's what it was all about, this bare-knuckle fighting. He looked down at his huge, calloused hands and knew he could command them to do whatever he wanted.\n\nThe bell rang, and Grit didn't hesitate. He shuffled to the center of the ring and snapped off a crisp left jab that caught Falmouth above the left eye, and it split the skin open. Grit faked another left jab to the same eye, and when Falmouth raised his hands to block the jab, he also lowered his head, thinking the jab would hit the top of his head, the hardest part of the skull and capable of breaking a man's hand, but when Falmouth lowered his head, Grit came through with a right uppercut that tagged the professional flush on the jaw, and he went down, ending the round.\n\nFalmouth's seconds rushed out to help him to his feet, but he was wobbly as he went back to the corner. When the bell rang for the second round, Falmouth seemed to have recovered, so he went for a headshot with a right cross. Grit slipped it by his head and gave a titanic blow to Falmouth's left ribs. The power in the blow was devastating, and Grit knew it would be. He'd given it everything he had. Realizing Falmouth was hurt bad, he gave him another right to the ribs, and Falmouth went down again gasping for breath.\n\nHis seconds once more rushed out to help the out-of-shape professional back to his corner. They washed his face with a sponge, but it wasn't his face, it was his ribs that were the problem. Those busted ribs allowed him only to take the shallowest of breaths. Grit was whispering to himself, \"Don't come out. Throw that sponge into the middle of the ring. I don't wanna hurt you anymore.\"\n\nBut the old professional answered the bell, though it seemed like it was with reluctance. Grit danced around, tagging Falmouth repeatedly on his nose, his eyes, his cheeks, his chin. His bare knuckles forced the thin facial skin against the sharp bones around Falmouth's eyes and gaping wounds opened up. Falmouth was bleeding all over the canvas. He raised his arms to fend off the blows to his face, and that's when Grit gave him a left hook to the right ribs, and the man went down for the third time. His seconds rushed out, dragged him back into his corner and sponged off his face to find it had cuts all over. They covered the cuts with petroleum jelly, but it couldn't stop the bleeding.\n\nAs the bell rang, the promoter was screaming at the seconds. \"Get 'im on his feet! Get 'im on his feet! Get 'im out there!\" Instead, the trainer threw the sponge into the middle of the ring, and the fight was over.\n\nGrit looked down and saw Paulie, who was scrambling between bodies toward the betting table. Grit grabbed his shirt and jumped from the ring, shoving his way to the table and arriving just as Paulie did.\n\n\"Here's the wager stub, Grit,\" Paulie said.\n\nTurning to the man handling the wagers, he said, \"I want the thousand dollars we bet, the thousand I won and the thousand for winning the fight. Give it to me now.\"\n\nThe promoter ran over screaming, \"No, we ain't payin'! You're a ringer!\"\n\nGrit grabbed him by the collar. \"You pulled me out of the crowd, told me I was a coward. How could I be a ringer? Now pay me, or I'll beat you worse than I did your fighter.\"\n\n\"Alright, alright, pay him the money,\" the promoter said. \"But listen, Mister, I wanna promote you, make you rich. You're the best I ever seen. You could be the world champion.\"\n\n\"I don't wanna be the world champion,\" Grit said. \"Not now, not ever.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "4\n\nGrit slipped on his shirt and tucked it into his pants. \"Let's get goin', Paulie. We'll get the wagon and buy all the stuff we need, then we'll head out tonight.\"\n\n\"But we gotta file homesteads, remember?\"\n\n\"Alright, we'll do it right now,\" Grit said.\n\nYankton was the capital for the entire Dakota Territory all the way to Canada, and Paulie asked around, and they soon found the recorder's office where homesteads were filed.\n\n\"We wanna file homestead claims,\" Grit said to the clerk.\n\n\"Okay, sir, we've got 'em numbered here on this map,\" the clerk said. \"Where is the homestead located?\"\n\n\"On the Big Muddy just beyond where there's the tree-studded island in the river,\" Grit said.\n\nThe clerk consulted a map and asked, \"This one right here?\" He showed Grit the map, who looked at it carefully.\n\n\"That's the one, number 526 on your map,\" Grit said. \"And I want to pay the $1.25 an acre and own the homestead outright.\"\n\nThe clerk filled out the form, signed it and gave it to Grit. \"That'll be a total of $210. That's $200 for the land and a $10 filing fee.\"\n\nWhen it was done, Paulie stepped up and said, \"And I'd like to file on the one next to his to the west, number 527.\"\n\n\"How old are you, young man?\"\n\nPaulie hesitated a moment before lying, \"Eighteen.\"\n\nThe clerk eyed him, seeming to suspect Paulie might be lying, but he filled out the proper papers and asked, \"You want to pay for the property?\"\n\n\"Yes, same as him.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "As they started walking toward the hotel, Grit sighed. \"Okay, we got our land. Now we can load the wagon and leave.\"\n\n\"I was hopin' we could stay over,'' Paulie said. \"But could I ask you a question?\"\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Where did you learn to fight like that?\"\n\nGrit sighed heavily and said, \"It's a long story, Paulie, but when I got kicked out of the orphanage for fighting, a boxing promoter named Weeb Dyson, a Canadian from Windsor, Ontario... that's a little village right across the river from Detroit City... took me under his wing, and I learned the fight game. I had a handful of professional fights around the Great Lakes, and I won all of them except the first one, and it was a close decision.\n\n\"One night I was in a bar in Detroit after winning a fight. I was just having a beer with a coupla friends, and this drunk who'd seen me boxing decided he wanted to take me on. I had no intention of fighting, but he pressed it and started slapping me around, calling me all kinds of names. At the end of it, he stepped back and said, 'You ain't got no balls, boy!' and he kicked me in the nuts. He didn't hurt me bad, but I'd had enough, so I gave him a right cross to the jaw. He went down and hit his head on the brass foot rail of the bar, and he didn't get up.\n\n\"Next thing we noticed was that he lost his bladder, which was no big deal ordinarily. Happens to boxers all the time when they're knocked out in the ring. They sent for a doctor, and he said the man was dead. I got arrested, and they charged me with manslaughter. I was found guilty and sentenced to three years at hard labor in the Michigan State Prison in Jackson. Said my fists were lethal weapons.\n\n\"Shortly after I got there, I volunteered for the wood cutting detail. We were all trustees but still guarded while we did our work. For three years, I cut wood every day and was never paid a nickel. Several times, men wanted me to escape with them, and I turned them all down. I wanted to finish my sentence and get on with my life. Only good thing about it. The woodcutters got special meals because we burned up so much of ourselves doing the hard work. That's the only way I stayed alive and out of trouble.\n\n\"I found out later that the warden made a pile of money using prisoners to cut and deliver logs and rails to various businesses, but I never saw a penny of that. I worked three years for nothing but three meals a day. I got fed barely enough to maintain my weight and keep working, but it was better than the other prisoners got.\n\n\"When I had served my time, I wanted nothin' to do with the state of Michigan. I wanted a fresh start, so I hopped a train down to Ohio, and that's when I got the job at the quarry. But I've never forgotten those boxing lessons I learned, and over the years, I've gotten a lot stronger and more powerful. I don't suppose I could beat a top-notch professional fighter, but that one today had gone to seed and he was tired. I regret hurting him as bad as I did, but I was angry at the promoter for forcing me to fight because after serving my time in prison, I wanted nothin' to do with the fight game.\"\n\n\"But you did win $2,000,\" Paulie said, \"and that's worth something.\"\n\nGrit ruffled Paulie's hair and said, \"Anything you particularly want?\"\n\n\"How about we talk to a builder and get him to come up to the site and build us a real house instead of us building a cabin?\" Paulie asked. \"We could spend our time cutting logs and making improvements to the place.\"\n\n\"Hmm, I kinda like that idea,\" Grit said.\n\n\"And maybe he could build us a barn for the animals too,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Another good idea,\" Grit said.\n\n\"And a walkway to the outhouse so we don't have to brave the wind and snow to do our business in winter,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"You're anxious to spend all our money, aren't you?\"\n\n\"No, no, but we could talk to a builder right now,\" Paulie said. \"I already asked, and there's several in town. I don't think it'd cost too much.\"\n\n\"You've been busy,\" Grit said. \"Okay, partner, let's see the builder. Then I wanna check all the general stores in town for books to read this winter.\"\n\n\"Come this way,\" Paulie said, \"and we'll talk to him.\"\n\nThey walked down to a building that had a sign, \"Otto Webber Construction Co.\"\n\nWhen they walked in, a tinkling bell over the door rang, and a man walked out from the back. With a heavy German accent the man asked, \"May I help you?\"\n\nPaulie took right over and said, \"We'd like to talk to someone about building a house for us a hundred miles from here.\"\n\n\"Distance is no problem,\" Weber said, \"but it'll cost a little more.\"\n\nGrit chuckled and said, \"Of course it does.\"\n\nThey looked over house plans and Paulie said, \"I think we need three bedrooms.\"\n\n\"Why three?\" Grit asked. \"There's only two of us.\"\n\n\"We might have some visitors,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Like who?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Paulie said, \"but it would be nice to have a cook maybe one of these days.\"\n\n\"Alright, three bedrooms it is.\"\n\n\"Good,\" Paulie said. \"When can you start?\"\n\n\"We can leave in a week, and we'll arrive at your site four days later, then we'll be there and finish in maybe three weeks,\" Weber said.\n\n\"And that includes the barn, the outhouse and the walkway?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"All of it for $725,\" Weber said.\n\n\"We'll need a tight smokehouse with a good stove,\" Grit said. \"How much you want down?\"\n\n\"Three hundred for buying the materials,\" Weber said. \"An extra $25 for the smokehouse.\"\n\n\"Give him the three hundred twenty-five, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"And there's one other thing. Do you think you could bring up the stoves for the house? We'll need one for each room and a huge one for the living room, and the one for the smokehouse and one for the barn. And we'll be needin' you to transport the furniture, beds, tables, chairs and such.\"\n\n\"We can bring that,\" Weber said. \"Cost you $10 for the freight.\"\n\nPaulie paid Webber the extra $10 and was surprised when Weber asked Grit, \"Aren't you the man who beat that old pug today?\"\n\n\"That I am, but I'm not proud of it,\" Grit said. \"He wasn't much of a fighter.\"\n\n\"Sure took him apart,\" Weber said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "As they walked away, Grit said, \"We may as well wait for tomorrow to get our supplies and load up the wagon, but paying him to take the stoves and furniture will lessen our load. Let's go to the general store and look for some books. We're gonna have lots of time on our hands this winter.\"\n\n\"I thought we's choppin' wood all winter,\" Paulie said.\n\nGrit chuckled, \"We can't chop wood in a blizzard or a heavy snowstorm, and I hear they have some doozies up here. Of course, we'll have to get out and feed the animals.\"\n\n\"I heard about the big storms, but I doubt they're worse than those in Ohio,\" he said.\n\n\"We'll soon find out, but during the winter I intend for us to work no more than six or eight hours a day. That's a lot in the cold, and we'll have to eat more to stay warm, so we'll need to buy extra flour, cornmeal and other supplies. And we'll need to buy lots of oats for the horses.\"\n\n\"Okay, let's visit the stores and make a list,\" Paulie said. \"Then you can look for books.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and you can look for books too, my boy,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Why?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"You know, Paulie, you're a nice young man. You're everything I'd ever want in a brother. I been thinkin' about it, and I want a better life for you.\"\n\nPaulie looked at Grit askance. \"What kind of better life?\"\n\n\"Down in Nebraska,\" Grit said, \"I hear they got a state college in Lincoln. That's a little west of Omaha, and I think you should go there and get educated.\"\n\n\"Where did all this come from?\" Paulie asked, his forehead creased with worry and apprehension.\n\n\"I got lots of time to think while we're cuttin' logs, Paulie, and I want you to have a better life than this. You don't wanna be strugglin', cuttin' logs for the rest of your life. You could be a lawyer or doctor or businessman. There's lots of opportunity for a man with an education, and you wouldn't have to be slavin' away cuttin' wood.\"\n\n\"I like cuttin' wood, and I don't wanna leave you,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"You think about it this winter,\" Grit said, \"and we'll talk about it later.\"\n\nThey loaded the wagon the next day, having bought everything they thought they'd need during the long, cold winter ahead. Grit had a nice stack of books he intended to read that winter, and he'd selected some for Paulie, hoping he'd want to study math, literature and science. He'd also bought himself a Sharps buffalo rifle and two Colt .45s.\n\n\"How much money we got left?\" Grit asked Paulie.\n\n\"Four thousand, one hundred and some, but we still gotta pay for the rest of the house.\"\n\n\"Okay, you see that Dakota Bank there?\"\n\n\"Yeah, what about it?\"\n\n\"Let's put $3,200 in there,\" Grit said. \"That'll more than pay for four years of college for you if you decide you wanna go.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I trust banks,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Well, I trust 'em, so hand over $3,200, and we'll still have enough to pay off the house and buy any additional supplies we need during the winter.\"\n\nPaulie pulled out the little leather sack and reluctantly counted out the money.\n\nWhen Grit came back from the bank, he climbed into the driver's seat of the wagon, put his arm around Paulie's shoulder and pulled him close. \"I put the account in both our names. You can't blame me for lookin' out for ya.\"\n\n\"No, it's not that,\" Paulie said. \"It's the thought of leavin' you. I've never felt like I belonged anywhere... and now I do.\"\n\n\"That's not gonna change, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"You'll always have a place wherever I am. Here, take this bank book and put it with the money in the leather sack. That's your education money, and we'll wanna add to it next year. I been thinkin' maybe we could both go to college and come back and cut wood in the summers to support ourselves.\"\n\nWhen they got back to the homestead, Grit started scouting the riverbank for sandstone, and a short distance up the river, he found a ledge that was just right. In Yankton, they'd bought picks, drills and shovels, and they started harvesting enough sandstone, which they carried up by the wagon load so that when the workmen arrived, it would be there for their use. With good mortar, the stones would make a solid foundation for each of the buildings and keep the wood from rotting.\n\nAs the lumber wagons pulled up, a hefty man jumped down and said, \"I'm Oleg Andersen, foreman of the building crew. Tell me where you want to build the house.\"\n\n\"We've staked it out there,\" Grit said. \"And over there to the left is where the barn will be. Build the house where the stakes are, facing the river. We've brought up the sandstone to make the foundations. We want it all up off the ground. And the barn too. I don't want the lumber rotting next to the ground.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Andersen said. Grit and Paulie helped the builders unload all of the lumber and other supplies before taking the scythe they'd bought in Yankton and starting to harvest the prairie grasses against the winter to come. They took turns using the scythe while the other bundled the grasses and stacked them in the wagon. They carried them back and stacked the bales in the area next to where the barn would be built.\n\nDay after day while the workmen built the house and barn, Grit and Paulie brought in more animal fodder for the upcoming winter. As soon as the barn was complete, they took the wild hay into the barn and stored it in the attic.\n\nWhen the house and outbuildings were complete, they paid off the carpenters, walked up the steps and sat down on the front porch in the two rocking chairs and looked off at the Missouri River far below.\n\n\"Well, Paulie, it'll take a while to make this house our home,\" Grit said. \"Sure is a beautiful view out across the river valley.\"\n\n\"Sure is, but I'm more excited about sleepin' in a bed,\" Paulie said with a laugh. \"And having a stove to cook on. I'll have a pot of stew on the stove all the time.\"\n\n\"How about we go down to the reservation and see if the Yankton tribe will sell us some buffalo robes,\" Grit said.\n\n\"We got plenty of blankets,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Yeah we do, but not for the floor, and we didn't buy any rugs.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "5\n\nThe next morning, they settled the new saddles on the horses, shoved their Winchesters into the scabbards and mounted.\n\n\"I would think we'd be there by noon, Paulie.\"\n\n\"It'll be a rare thing to see the country from my own horse.\"\n\n\"Yep, that liveryman gave you a steal on that bay,\" Grit said.\n\nWhen they traveled across the reservation, they saw several small villages with teepees, but they traveled on until they found a large village which had what looked like at least 50 teepees that ran along a lake which appeared to be an attraction for ducks and geese. It looked as though the other side of the lake was more like a marsh where the birds liked to congregate, but now all the ducks and geese were stopping only briefly before heading farther south.\n\nAs they rode into the village, there were onlookers who stopped to watch them. They didn't seem hostile, for which Grit was grateful. He thought they were merely curious about why these white men had come to the village.\n\nGrit stopped beside a man standing outside his teepee and said, \"We'd like to buy some buffalo hides and thought someone in the village might sell us some.\"\n\nThe man looked at Grit and Paulie like he didn't understand. Grit shrugged and moved on and stopped by another man. \"Is there someone here who speaks English?\" This man also stared at Grit as if he didn't understand.\n\nPaulie yelled, \"Anybody here speak English?\"\n\nA woman came forward and asked, \"What is it you want?\"\n\nGrit looked down on a Sioux woman with a serene face who had long black hair held in place with a leather clasp with a sharp stick through holes in the leather. She was wearing a deer hide dress with blue beadwork at the front and on the shoulders. She wore moccasins with the same blue beadwork.\n\n\"We were hoping we could buy or trade for some buffalo hides,\" Grit said, \"that is if the tribe has extras you don't need this winter. If you don't have extras, then we'll move on along.\"\n\n\"I am called Sunset,\" she said. \"How many buffalo hides do you want?\"\n\n\"We could use five or six,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Do you live around here?\" Sunset asked.\n\n\"We live west of here,\" Grit said. \"We've bought land from the government and built a house.\n\n\"Oh, you're the ones,\" Sunset said. \"We know all about your house on the river.\" Grit glanced at Paulie.\n\n\"Our men have seen it, but don't worry,\" Sunset said. \"We won't trouble you. Come with me.\"\n\nShe led the way down through the village and stopped in front of a teepee where an elderly man sat on a blanket. \"This is Chief White Eagle, chief of the tribe. You can get off your horses now.\" Then Sunset turned to the chief and spoke in the Siouxan dialect.\n\n\"The chief wants to know what you have to trade,\" she told Grit.\n\n\"We have paper money only,\" he said.\n\nSunset spoke once more with White Eagle, then turned to Grit. \"How attached are you to the rifle you have? Chief White Eagle would like to trade for it.\"\n\nGrit looked at Paulie who shrugged. \"I guess we could do that. How many buffalo robes would he be willing to give me for the rifle?\"\n\nShe spoke once more with the chief and turned. \"He'll give you four robes for the rifle.\"\n\nGrit was about to shake his head 'no,' but refrained. \"Tell the chief I'll need at least nine buffalo robes for the rifle.\"\n\nSunset smiled at Grit before turning to the chief and speaking with him. \"Chief White Eagle says he might be willing to give five robes.\"\n\n\"Then I guess I'll keep the rifle,\" Grit said.\n\nSunset hesitated. \"You have to understand, bargaining is part of a process that Sioux men enjoy. If I tell him what you said, he'll be offended.\"\n\nGrit thought for a few seconds before saying, \"Thank you for tellin' me that. Tell him I might be willing to accept eight buffalo robes for the rifle, but that does not include cartridges.\"\n\nShe smiled at Grit once more and turned to the chief. After speaking with him, she said, \"Chief White Eagle says he might give six buffalo robes for the rifle and 50 cartridges.\"\n\n\"I couldn't accept less than eight buffalo robes,\" Grit said, \"especially now that I'm giving up 50 cartridges.\"\n\n\"How 'bout I just ask him if he'll meet in the middle at seven buffalo robes?\" she asked.\n\nGrit nodded, and she discussed it with the chief who agreed. He stood and thrust his hand forward and grasped Grit's wrist and Grit did the same.\n\n\"Now, you have a deal,\" Sunset said. \"It's like a contract in your land.\"\n\n\"So that means I have to give him my Winchester?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Correct,\" Sunset said with a smile, \"and the 50 cartridges.\"\n\n\"Well, tell him there's 17 in the rifle's magazine, and... ,\" Grit said as he reached into his saddlebags and came out with a box of cartridges, \"... and I'll give him the rest of this box, which in total makes more than 50.\"\n\nHe handed the rifle and cartridges to Chief White Eagle. He raised them high into the air and yelled, \"Wash-tay.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"It means 'it is beautiful.' He's speaking of the rifle, of the deal. It's a way of celebrating,\" Sunset said as she smiled. \"He believes he got the best of you in the deal. I think you both did fine. Come with me, and we'll get your buffalo robes.\"\n\nLater they rode from the camp with buffalo robes rolled up and tied onto their horses while Grit and Paulie walked. \"These hides are heavy,\" Grit said. \"I'm bettin' these bull hides weigh close to 40 pounds.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Once settled in their house, they began cutting wood once more and stacking it up at the bank of the river.\n\n\"By the time springtime comes,\" Paulie said, \"we'll have enough wood to sell to all the riverboats that come.\"\n\n\"That's the idea, Paulie. You know we've only had that one riverboat man from the Sapphire argue about the price of our wood, which tells me most riverboats make so much money they don't care what wood costs, so we'll stick with our price of $7.50 a cord. I'm told that's pretty high, but we only give them the best hardwood. And I don't have to tell you how hard we work for it.\"\n\n\"No you don't,\" Paulie said, \"I'm thinkin' at that price we could make four or five thousand dollars next year. We got a late start this year.\"\n\nThey continued to cut wood steadily every day and stopped an hour before dark. They cleaned up, had supper and Grit read by lamplight. Paulie either read or did some math problems from the books Grit had bought. Sometimes Grit would read a short story for Paulie that they both enjoyed.\n\nOver the past few months, Grit hadn't had much time to read about Phileas Fogg and his trip around the world, and now he was eager to do so.\n\nFogg and Passepartout, his faithful servant, started their epic journey by taking the Orient Express train which departed from London. They traveled across France and the Alps to reach Venice. They moved on to Brindisi on the coast of Italy where they caught a steamer that brought them across the Mediterranean sea to Suez in Egypt.\n\nGrit was deeply engrossed in the tale when he yawned and realized his eyes were drooping. He looked over and saw that Paulie was already asleep on the settee. He smiled at the boy, heaved himself up off the buffalo hide rug on the floor and woke Paulie.\n\n\"Time to hit the hay, Paulie.\"\n\n\"Huh? Oh yeah, I guess I fell asleep.\" He mumbled, \"It's all those math problems you make me do.\"\n\n\"Gotta get ready for college.\"\n\n\"But I ain't decided if I wanna go.\"\n\n\"Your decision. I already told you that, but just in case you're going, we need to write a letter of application to the college.\" Grit had assured Paulie it was his decision, but he thought that deep down Paulie wanted to go. It would certainly put more work on Grit because Paulie had turned into quite a woodcutter. He wasn't as strong as Grit, but he could hold his own with any other woodcutter Grit had seen, and he was getting better and stronger by the day. And with enough food during the winter, he'd grow even stronger." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "\"Let's take the day off and go huntin', Paulie,\" Grit said the next morning.\n\n\"Really?\" Paulie was delighted. \"Okay, you can use your Sharps, and I'll use my Winchester.\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Grit said. \"I'll buy myself a new Winchester next time we go to Fort Randall or Fort Sully. I feel naked without a lever-action rifle next to me when I'm workin' in the woods.\"\n\n\"No problems yet, and we been here almost six months,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Yeah, but best be prepared,\" Grit said.\n\nThey ate a breakfast of hotcakes, grits, bacon and coffee with Borden's condensed milk and a little chunk of sugar. When they'd cleaned up, they stepped outside into the crisp morning air. The trees were losing their leaves quickly now, and they closed and locked the door, saddled their horses and rode north away from the river valley and up onto the prairie.\n\nIt was a beautiful day, and it seemed as if they could see forever across the grassy prairie. They'd ridden about an hour north when Paulie pointed and said, \"Look, is that a house over there?\"\n\n\"Judging by the smoke from the stove pipe, I'd say yes,\" Grit said. \"Let's ride by and see who lives there.\"\n\nWhen they arrived at the little sod house, which had been dug into the side of a hill, there was a man turning up the brown prairie soil with a plow and two mules. When he got to the end of the row, he stopped, wiped his hands on his pants and said, \"Howdy, what can I do for ya?\" He had a strong accent which sounded like Swedish or maybe Norwegian.\n\n\"We're out doing some huntin',\" Grit said. \"We live about an hour south near the river, and we just wanted to get acquainted.\"\n\n\"I'm Leif Knudsen, and this is my wife, Inga, and our daughter, Astrid.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet all of you. I'm Grit Milburn, and this is Paulie Samson.\"\n\n\"Please step down,\" Inga said. \"We seldom see anyone out here.\"\n\n\"We're woodcutters,\" Paulie said. \"How old is Astrid?\"\n\n\"She's two,\" Inga said.\n\n\"Winter's comin' on,\" Grit said. \"It's kinda late to be plantin' crops, isn't it?\"\n\n\"A little late, but we'll have a nice crop of wheat next summer if all goes well,\" Leif said.\n\n\"How're you gonna stay warm this winter?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"By jingo, I have to start cuttin' firewood,\" Leif said. \"There's not enough hours in the day, but we do have a nice little grove of trees at the back of our land that I can cut down. Soon's the plowin's done, I'll be cuttin' wood.\"\n\n\"Do you have sufficient food for the winter?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"We've got some stored, and I'll be doin' some hunting,\" Leif said.\n\n\"Well, we're an hour south,\" Grit said. \"We'd be glad to help any way we can. Just let us know.\"\n\nTheir visit was short and concerning for both men as they rode away. Paulie said, \"The man's crazy. He and his family will freeze to death and starve.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" Grit said. \"We gotta help or they'll die.\"\n\n\"How?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"When we get back, I'll load up the wagon with as much wood as our horses can pull, and we'll deliver a load, but that won't be nearly enough.\"\n\n\"No, it won't,\" Paulie said. \"How many loads will be enough?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Grit said. \"And where's he gonna put the mules?\"\n\n\"Yeah, they'll freeze to death out in the open,\" Paulie said. \"And what's he gonna feed 'em?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "6\n\nGrit and Paulie forgot about hunting and hurried home. They loaded the wagon with firewood, all the wagon would carry, and rode out and back to the Knudsens.\n\nAs they were unloading it, Leif said, \"I don't think we need all this help. It's not that we're not grateful, but we'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Trust me, Leif, you need all the help you can get,\" Grit said. \"Or you and your family will die this winter, and so will your mules. They can't be left outdoors, and what are you gonna feed them this winter? Tell me that!\"\n\n\"Well... I... I don't know,\" Leif said. \"I thought they could paw away the snow and get to the grass underneath.\"\n\n\"No, they can't,\" Grit said. \"It'll be solid ice. You have no chance of even surviving. How much food have you got? Let me see it.\"\n\n\"Okay, show him, Inga,\" Leif said.\n\nGrit went into the little sod shanty and saw a barrel of flour, maybe 50 tins of canned goods, some pork side meat, a small bag of cornmeal and some dried corn. When he removed the lid from the barrel of flour, he saw it was half empty.\n\n\"Your family will consume all this food in two weeks, and then what're you gonna do?\" Grit asked. \"You need help or you won't make it. Don't you have relatives that you can count on?\"\n\n\"No,\" Leif said. \"They're over in eastern Minnesota.\"\n\n\"You should be hitching up your wagon and heading there right now before the first snow hits,\" Grit said. \"By then it'll be too late.\"\n\n\"No, by golly, we're stayin',\" Leif said. \"We'll tough it out. This is my land. We're grateful for the wood, but now you can leave us alone.\"\n\nGrit looked at Leif and said, \"If I ride off and leave you on your own, you're gonna die, and so will your family.\"\n\n\"No, we'll be fine,\" Leif said, \"and so will the animals.\"\n\nGrit looked at Paulie and said, \"Let's go, Paulie. Nothin' more we can do here.\" Turning back to Leif, Grit said, \"When you're starvin' and freezin', I hope you're not too proud to come down and ask for help because we'll share what we have. Do it for your wife and daughter if not for your own self.\"\n\nClimbing onto the wagon seat, Grit lifted the reins and turned the wagon around. He and Paulie arrived back at the house just as it was getting dark. Paulie jumped off at the house to fix supper while Grit took care of the horses.\n\nAs they were eating bowls of stew later, Grit asked, \"How much money we still got?\"\n\n\"About six hundred dollars.\"\n\n\"In the morning, we'll drive to Fort Sully and spend some of it on supplies. It's likely we'll be feeding the Knudsen family all winter.\"\n\n\"But he said he didn't want any help,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"You know, Paulie, sometimes it doesn't matter what people say. We know they'll need help, and we're the only ones to provide it. If we don't do that, they'll die, and I don't want that on my conscience. We can't let that woman and child suffer just because they're hooked up to a cantankerous man. And overall he's probably a good man. I don't want him to suffer either.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "It was their first visit to Fort Sully, which was located on a high bluff overlooking the Missouri River Valley. The fort was well-maintained with barracks built of cottonwood logs. On a terrace below the main fort were stables, a granary, a sawmill, a smithy and a tavern where the troopers spent the largest share of their $13 a month in pay.\n\nIn addition to the two long barracks for the troopers, there were separate quarters for the laundresses and nine separate buildings of wood on brick foundations for the officers.\n\nAt the sutler's store, they bought what food they thought two adults and a child would eat throughout the winter. They bought all the staples, flour, dried pinto beans, sugar, salt, coffee, baking powder, soda, tins of peaches and pears, pickles, relishes, rice, oatmeal, raisins, dried apples, peaches and apricots and apple cider and white vinegar.\n\n\"You wanna get potatoes, onions and carrots?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"If we do, we'll have to dig out a root cellar,\" Grit said. \"But then we could also get some heads of cabbage too. So yeah, do it!\"\n\nPaulie carried out bags of potatoes, onions and carrots, and he got two dozen heads of cabbage which could be used for soups. When they were done, the wagon was full once more. They loaded 20 extra bags of oats for the horses and possibly the mules.\n\n\"One last thing, I'll have that new Winchester you got there and four boxes of cartridges,\" Grit said. \"Oh, and I'll need six more of the wool blankets, best you've got.\"\n\n\"All told,\" the merchant said, \"that'll be $238.15.\" Paulie pulled out the sack of money and paid the man.\n\n\"Got any idea who sells hogs?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Yeah, there's a farmer north of here a couple of miles named Christian Nilsen, and I think he'd sell you a hog.\"\n\nAs he was walking out the door, Grit heard a voice say, \"Hey, aren't you Grit Milburn?\"\n\nGrit turned and saw a young woman that he recognized. \"Yeah, that's me, and I remember your face, but I'm sorry I can't remember your name.\"\n\n\"It's Colleen Byrne,\" she said. \"You were in the parochial school in Chicago.\"\n\nGrit grinned in spite of himself. \"Yeah, I was. You were there too.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I was a year behind you,\" she said. \"I graduated and couldn't find a job. We Irish are told not to apply for lots of jobs, so I'm doin' laundry for the troopers here.\"\n\n\"That doesn't seem right,\" Grit said. \"You got a good education, Colleen.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, doesn't matter, I guess,\" she said. \"In this life, we do what we have to do. I remember when you got kicked out of school. Wasn't your fault either. What happened to you?\"\n\nGrit blinked rapidly, not sure he should say. \"Well... I got into the fight game, boxing you know, and anyway, I ended up hitting a man and killing him. They sent me to the Michigan State Prison for three years.\"\n\n\"Oh, no!\"\n\n\"They put me on a wood cutting crew, and I cut wood for three years. Now I cut wood for the riverboats down on the Missouri, just about 25 miles south of here.\"\n\n\"You got a cabin?\" she asked.\n\nPaulie walked up and Grit said, \"This is my partner, Paulie Samson. Paulie, this is Colleen Byrne. We attended parochial school together in Chicago. To answer your question, Colleen, Paulie and I have a house down on the river. We just had it built this year. Real nice view of the river valley.\"\n\n\"You're doin' alright then,\" she said.\n\n\"We're doin' fine, but we ran across a neighbor who's got a family, and they're gonna die this winter if they don't get some help.\"\n\n\"Oh, so you gotta help 'em,\" she said.\n\n\"It's the only thing to do... no other choice, even though the husband says he doesn't want our help,\" Grit said. \"It's all about the wife and baby girl. Like you say, you do what you have to do.\"\n\n\"I'd love to talk to you some more,\" she said. \"Wednesdays and Saturdays are my days off.\"\n\n\"Oh? I'll have to remember that, Colleen,\" Grit said. \"It's good to see you again.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "In the wagon on the way home, Paulie asked, \"An old friend, huh? And not bad lookin'.\"\n\nGrit smiled. \"I didn't really know her that well, but she remembered me, prob'ly because I got in trouble all the time.\"\n\n\"Why was that?\"\n\n\"I was big and some older boys wanted to teach me my place,\" Grit said. \"Only I was tougher'n they all were, and so they ganged up on me, and I still won, except I got kicked outta school for fightin'. Didn't seem to matter that they started it, and there were four of 'em.\"\n\n\"If I'm goin' off to college, like you think I am,\" Paulie said, \"I want to know how to take care of myself. Will you teach me how to fight?\"\n\n\"Sure... we can do that this winter,\" Grit said. \"I'll set up a place in the barn. That way when I tap you on the chin, you can fall into the hay, and it won't hurt so bad.\"\n\nPaulie started laughing. He pulled in a lungful of the cool afternoon air, and he started coughing. After the coughing passed, he said, \"That's pretty funny. What if I hit you?\"\n\n\"You are gettin' stronger, no question,\" Grit said, \"and I'll bet you could pack quite a wallop.\"\n\nWhen they got to the Nilsen farm, Grit and Paulie both hopped down. The farmer came from behind his house and asked, \"What can I do for ya?\"\n\n\"We have a new smokehouse,\" Grit said, \"and we're stocking it for the winter to come. You got any pork for sale?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I'll sell you a whole smoked hog for $22,\" Nilsen said.\n\nGrit looked at Paulie who said, \"We'll take it.\" He paid Nilsen, and they tied the smoked hog on the wagon and headed south. When they got home that evening, they strung the hog up in the smokehouse and put the wagon full of the other goods into the barn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "The next day when they'd stowed away all the food, they took on the task of digging a root cellar. They dug into a bank not far from the house.\n\n\"How far do we gotta dig?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I'm not real sure,\" Grit said, \"but I've heard the temperatures stay the same all year round about five feet down. Let's dig that far.\"\n\n\"This diggin's easy work, not nearly as hard as cuttin' down trees,\" Paulie said.\n\nWhen they got a hole dug about five feet square and five feet deep, they placed all the potatoes, onions, carrots and cabbage in the bottom, built a ladder and then a solid shelter over the top from wood left over from construction of the barn and house. They finished it off with a slim door that gave them access to the cellar.\n\n\"That should do it,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Why'd you wanna buy so much cabbage?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I don't know exactly why,\" Grit said, \"but if you eat cabbage in winter, you don't get what they call the scurvy, which is some kind of deficiency disease that is cured by eating fruits and leafy vegetables. Same reason English sailors keep limes aboard their ships. I read about it in a book.\"\n\n\"How long do cabbages last in a root cellar?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Oh, five or six months.\"\n\nAfter they'd dug the root cellar, they went back to cutting down trees and stacking wood along the riverbank. They'd given about two cords to the Knudsen family, and both men felt like they needed to replenish that, and so they worked hard for about 10 days when the dark clouds rolled in from the Canadian north, and the temperatures dropped below freezing.\n\n\"We need to go down to Yankton before snow flies and see if you have a letter from the college,\" Grit said. And so the next day, they set off on the horses and made it to Yankton two days later. When Paulie checked, he found there was a letter.\n\n\"What's it say?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Says I got to go down there and take a test,\" Paulie said. \"It's not worth the effort.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" Grit said. \"We'll put you on the train and you can be back here in three or four days.\"\n\n\"Can't you come with me?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I guess I could,\" Grit said.\n\nSo they stabled their horses and bought tickets to Lincoln, Nebraska. They arrived 12 hours later after changing trains in Omaha. Paulie went to the University Hall and inquired about taking an admission test.\n\nA male secretary said, \"When can you take it?\"\n\n\"How long does it take?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"Depends how smart you are,\" the man with a laugh. \"Usually it's two or three hours.\"\n\n\"Okay, well, I got time right now,\" Paulie said. He was put into a nearby office and took the test, which included an essay on why he wanted a college education. Paulie thought he'd done fairly well, but he didn't know.\n\n\"When will I know if I can come?\" he asked.\n\n\"We'll have a professor read it tonight, and you'll know tomorrow morning,\" the secretary said.\n\n\"Okay, I'll be here in the morning, then I have to head back to my job up in Dakota Territory,\" Paulie said.\n\nHe and Grit got a hotel that night and had supper together. \"Tell me about the test,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Well, it had some math problems, some words to define, some questions about history, geography and science, then the essay,\" Paulie said. \"I'll get the results in the morning, either a yes or no.\"\n\nAfter breakfast the next day, they waited around for an hour until the office opened, then Paulie went back to the office.\n\nThe secretary said, \"Well, young man, you scored 82 out of a hundred. Go over to the registrar and put down a deposit. We'll expect you in the fall. If you don't show, you'll forfeit your deposit.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "When it got cold, they'd usually quit work about mid-afternoon, and true to his word, Grit set up a training area in the barn, where he had stuffed a double gunny sack with barley. \"There are a few punches you need to learn to be a good boxer. Number one is the jab. It's a sudden flick out with the fist to keep an opponent away from you. If you're left-handed, which you are, it's natural to throw a right jab. With me, it's a left jab. You being left-handed is an advantage because most people face right handers, so they'll be confused by a left-hander, and you can take advantage of it.\n\n\"Go ahead and put on those cowhide gloves and practice your jab on the burlap bag.\"\n\nGrit watched Paulie awhile and then said, \"You see, you can flick it out, not trying to cause much damage, or you can put yourself into it.\" Grit demonstrated on the bag.\n\n\"If you put a lot into the punch, it becomes a right cross or left cross,\" Grit said. \"That's a knockout punch.\n\n\"Other punches are left and right hooks. If you see a man with his fists up to guard his face, you hook around his hands to get to his head or around his arms to get into his body. Go ahead and practice, and I'll watch. Sometimes with a hook, you'll leap to get the best leverage.\"\n\nAfter a time, Grit said, \"The only other punch is an uppercut, which means you come from down low and up into the body or the head. Go ahead and practice that.\"\n\nWhen Paulie had practiced all the punches, Grit said, \"Okay, try to hit me with any of those punches you want.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes, really!\"\n\nIn the next few minutes, Paulie tried again and again, but Grit blocked every punch thrown.\n\n\"In addition to blocking punches, you can dodge them or take them on your shoulders where it doesn't hurt too much.\"\n\nAfter a time, Grit asked, \"You wanna try to block my punches?\"\n\n\"Okay, but don't hit me too hard,\" Paulie said.\n\nGrit laughed. In the next half hour, Grit showed Paulie how to get through any defense, how to take advantage of fake punches and how to clinch when he was in trouble.\n\n\"Now don't get discouraged,\" Grit said. \"We're just gettin' started. Next time we go to town, we'll see if we can get some gloves, and that'll soften the impact a little when we spar, but don't you worry, I won't hurt you much.\"\n\n\"It'll be worth it to learn how to take care of myself,\" Paulie said. \"I've always been timid because I never knew how to fight. Once I've mastered this, I won't have to be afraid.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "When they came out the next morning to work, Grit looked to the north and Paulie said, \"You're vexed on account of those folks, aren't you?\"\n\n\"Yep, we could have another storm from Canada any day, and if the temperature drops below zero, those mules are likely to die.\"\n\n\"Let's load up some supplies and visit again,\" Paulie said. \"It's the only thing we can do. I guess we could haul some logs up and make a dwelling for the animals, but he doesn't have anything to feed them.\"\n\nWhen they arrived at the Knudsen household, Grit tried to be friendly. \"Well, neighbor, how are things goin'?\"\n\n\"Not enough hours in the day,\" Leif said, \"and the days get shorter and shorter.\"\n\n\"How're you dealing with the cold?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"We're doing alright, thanks to the wood you brought,\" Leif said.\n\n\"This time we've brought you some poles,\" Grit said. \"We thought we could sink them in the ground and form a structure so that we could pile sod around them and make a barn for the mules to keep them out of the wind and snow.\"\n\n\"Why're you doin' all this?\" Leif asked.\n\n\"Because you need help even though you're too stubborn to admit it,\" Grit said. \"And neighbors help each other.\"\n\n\"Alright, let's build a barn,\" Leif said.\n\nAs they started to unload the poles, Leif asked, \"What's all this other stuff?\"\n\n\"Ah, just a few things to keep your wife and daughter warm and happy,\" Grit said.\n\nPaulie carried the supplies into the little sod shanty as Inga held the baby and thanked him profusely.\n\n\"And here's six wool blankets to help you stay warm when the really cold weather comes,\" he said. \"And we have extra buffalo robes, so we've brought along two of those.\"\n\n\"What is that big sack?\" she asked.\n\n\"Pinto beans,\" Paulie said. \"Just like the red beans you already have, but I think these taste better. With biscuits, they make a meal all by themselves. They'll keep ya alive this winter.\n\n\"Sorry we can't offer you any butter, but here's a case of canned milk for the baby and for your coffee. I know it's not as good as having a cow, but it's the best we can do this winter. And here's 25 pounds of coffee. I hope it'll last you for a while. There's some sugar loaves there as well.\"\n\n\"Thank you more than I can say,\" Inga said. \"Leif is a good man, but he doesn't understand what we're up against out here.\"\n\n\"We know that,\" Paulie said. \"We'll help you get through this winter. What is it you need more than anything?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Inga said. \"Some days... nearly every day really... I wish we'd never left Opplanden... that's in Norway. Leif was a farmer there and we were happy.\" For a few moments she was lost in memories of her homeland before saying, \"But I can't dwell on that. I take care of the baby and have food ready for my husband. And I help with the farm work when I can.\"\n\nFor the rest of the day, the men worked to get the barn built. When night closed in, Grit said, \"We'll be back tomorrow with the other logs we need to complete the roof of the barn, then the mules will be protected against the blizzards. But you'll have to feed them sparingly. We've left you some oats, but you can't give the mules more than two scoops a day. If you do, there won't be enough to last the winter. If you have time, harvest some of the prairie grasses and stow them under a tarpaulin at the side of the barn.\"\n\n\"I don't have a tarpaulin,\" Leif said.\n\n\"We'll bring one for you tomorrow,\" Grit said.\n\nGoing back, Paulie said, \"Neither of us realized how unprepared they are. No tarpaulin, no feed for the animals, no food for themselves.\"\n\n\"And without the buffalo robes, they'd never stay once the fire goes out in the stove during the night,\" Grit said. \"We'll do what we can.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "7\n\nThe weather was kind that December of 1873, but snow finally came, and it covered the land. As the temperature dropped, the snow iced over and the animals could no longer forage for themselves. The Knudsen family was as ready as Grit and Paulie could make them. They'd bought all the supplies the little family needed, and Grit and Paulie had more to share with them when the new year came.\n\nThe Saturday before Christmas, Grit said, \"Paulie, I'm going to ride to Fort Sully tomorrow early in the morning.\"\n\n\"Ah, you're going to see that little Irish lady, Colleen, aren't you?\" Paulie teased.\n\n\"Well, there's always the possibility I could run into her,\" Grit said with a smirk, \"but I'm figuring on getting a few things so that we can celebrate Christmas.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, that'll be nice,\" Paulie said. \"If you see any books you think I might like, you might buy me one. It would be nice to have a checkerboard too. And if you can figure a way to bring back some beer, that would be even better. You takin' the wagon?\"\n\n\"No, I'll ride the dun horse, but I'll stay over Sunday night too and come back Monday,\" Grit said. \"You're welcome to come if you want.\"\n\n\"No, I think I'll stay here and keep warm,\" Paulie said. \"I'll be fine.\"\n\nThe ride in the frigid morning air was cold for both the dun and for Grit, but he made it to Fort Sully shortly after noon. He asked one of the sergeants if there was a place where he could spend the night, and the sergeant showed him a private little room at the end of one of the barracks.\n\n\"We let visitors stay here occasionally,\" the sergeant said. \"So consider this room yours for the night. You can leave your saddlebags here. Anybody bothers 'em will answer to me.\"\n\nGrit walked down to the sutler's store and found it was closing in a half hour.\n\n\"Yeah, we close early on Sundays,\" the sutler said with a chuckle. \"Gives everybody a little rest. That's mainly me.\"\n\n\"Where's the housing for the laundresses?\" Grit asked.\n\nThe sutler eyed him. \"You got some business down there?\"\n\n\"I know one of them... Colleen Byrne.\"\n\n\"That's okay then,\" the sutler said. He gave Grit directions before saying, \"Kinda cold out to be walkin' with a lady friend.\"\n\nGrit walked down and knocked on the door. A woman opened the door and asked, \"Who you lookin' for, mister?\"\n\n\"Colleen... Colleen Byrne.\"\n\n\"I was hopin' you were lookin' for me,\" the woman said with a cackle. \"I'll get Colleen for ya.\"\n\nInside the apartments, he heard the woman yell, \"Colleen, there's a man waitin' for you.\"\n\nA few moments later, Colleen rushed out and smiled broadly. \"Grit, you remembered!\"\n\n\"Yes, I did,\" Grit said. \"This is your day off, but it's too cold to even walk outside.\"\n\n\"Oh, come in,\" she said. \"We have a sitting room where we can receive visitors.\"\n\n\"Let me take your coat and hat.\" Grit shrugged out of his coat and handed his hat and coat to Colleen who hung them on a coat rack.\n\n\"Sit down, sit down,\" Colleen said. \"So what brings you to Fort Sully?\"\n\n\"Well, I was going to pick up a few things for Christmas and thought I'd come a little early and visit with you for a few minutes.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm glad you did,\" she said.\n\n\"So... how's it goin'?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"You want the truth?\" she asked.\n\n\"Well... uh... I don't know, do I?\"\n\n\"There's a sergeant here named Casper Atlock who thinks I'm a loose woman, and he's after me at all hours of the night and day. I'll be washin', look up and there he is starin' at me. The other day I was coming out of the outhouse, and there he was waiting. He's the biggest nuisance around. And you should be careful. If he knew you were here talkin' to me, I don't know what he'd do.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"Don't worry about me. I can take care of myself.\"\n\n\"The problem is, I don't care for him at all,\" Colleen said. \"I wish he'd just leave me alone.\"\n\n\"What are you doing for Christmas?\"\n\n\"Nothin' special, that's for sure,\" she replied.\n\n\"I wonder if you could get a few days off and come visit Paulie and me.\"\n\n\"I wish I could, but then someone else would have to do my work.\"\n\n\"Surely they can spare you three or four days,\" Grit said.\n\n\"What would we do?\"\n\n\"We could play some games, read some stories, sit around the fire and get acquainted. We have a well-stocked pantry. Maybe you could show Paulie how to cook a few new things. Our diet is pretty limited.\"\n\n\"Where would I sleep?\"\n\n\"Well... we have a guest room with a nice bed.\"\n\n\"Does it have a lock on the door?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Now you're teasin' me!\"\n\n\"Yes, I am,\" she said. \"I could ask Lettie, I suppose... tell her I've met an old friend, and we'd like to spend Christmas together.\"\n\n\"Well, see what she says, but only if you want to,\" Grit said. \"I don't want to put any burden on you.\"\n\n\"No, no, I'll go ask right now,\" she said.\n\nAs Grit waited, he looked out the window and saw a soldier with sergeant's stripes staring through the window. Grit chuckled and waved at the man, who turned and walked away.\n\nColleen came back and said, \"She said I could have a whole five days. I guess I'm not very important around here.\"\n\nGrit smiled at her. \"Can you leave in the morning?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'll get my things ready,\" she said. \"Do you think Paulie will be okay with it?\"\n\n\"He'll be overjoyed to have somebody to talk to 'sides me,\" Grit said. \"By the way, I think I saw your Sergeant Atlock watching outside the window. I waved and he walked away.\"\n\n\"Be careful,\" she said. \"He might come after you.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"Don't worry about that.\"\n\n\"But I do worry,\" she said. \"He can be mean. I've seen him deal with some of the troopers.\"\n\nThey chatted away and late in the afternoon, a woman came in and said, \"Will your friend be joining us for supper, Colleen?\"\n\n\"Yes, he will,\" Colleen said, \"and thank you Izzy.\"\n\nWhen suppertime came, Colleen introduced Grit to the other laundresses, and they all had a very pleasant supper, chatting away about things happening at the fort, the weather and each other.\n\nAt one point, Izzy said, \"So tell us, Grit, what are you doing in this part of the country?\"\n\n\"I'm a woodcutter and sell firewood to the riverboats,\" Grit said. \"I have a partner who helps me fell the trees and cut the wood.\"\n\n\"Is it profitable?\" Brenda asked.\n\n\"It can be if you work hard, but it's pure labor,\" Grit said. \"In the summer, we work at it from dawn to dusk. In the winter, we put in about six or eight hours each day.\"\n\n\"So you have a house or cabin?\" she asked.\n\n\"We have a house, had it built this fall after the last riverboat came down from Fort Benton.\"\n\nWhen supper was over, Grit asked Colleen, \"Do you suppose the army would loan me a horse for you?\"\n\n\"I'm sure they would,\" she said. \"Just ask Corporal Tompkins. He's in charge of the livery.\"\n\n\"I'll see about it in the morning,\" Grit said.\n\nWhen he left Colleen, Grit headed over to the barracks in the darkness. His feet crunched in the snow, and the whole base was well lit from the moonlight reflecting off the snow, which covered the ground.\n\nSuddenly he heard a rush of crunching steps behind him, and he turned with his right fist raised, and he connected with a trooper's face. His left got another face before the other three overwhelmed him. He went down in the snow on his back, but his right fist lashed out and landed in the middle of one trooper's face.\n\nHe saw another face, and he crushed it with a left hook. The men tried to grab his arms, but he was too strong. He felt a boot crash into the side of his head, and he was dazed, but he shook it off, and when the next boot came, he grabbed it and twisted it off the man's foot. Holding the top of the boot in his right hand, he started swinging the heel and sole at faces.\n\nThe troopers were cursing and swearing, frustrated at their inability to subdue Grit, who saw another boot coming for his head and jerked one of the trooper's down, and the trooper took the boot toe right in his face. Grit twisted away and got to his feet. Now, his fists were flying, and he was in his glory, lashing out and battering heads.\n\nAnd then it was over as the men picked themselves up and fled across the snow. Grit stood there wondering what had just happened. Obviously someone had sicced those troopers on him, and the most likely candidate was Sergeant Casper Atlock. The only evidence of the fight was the one boot that lay in the snow and a few drops of blood from smashed noses.\n\nWhen Grit walked into the barracks, some of the troopers glanced at him as he passed through into the room he'd been assigned. He looked at himself in the wash stand mirror and saw that his head was bruised and chafed where the boot had caught him upside his head, but otherwise he seemed to be okay except his knuckles were banged up. He'd caught one of the men in the teeth with his right fist. He took the ladderback chair and propped it under the door handle, undressed and pulled out Around the World in 80 Days and read until he'd finished. It was his second time through, and he loved the ending when Phileas discovers he's actually made the trip in a little over 78 days and won the bet. He put the book away, blew out the lamp and went to sleep.\n\nGrit got in the chow line the next morning and ate breakfast with the troopers. He saw a few troopers across the dining hall who looked like they'd been in a fight, but he ignored them. When he was done, he walked over the livery stable and found Corporal Tompkins.\n\n\"You bet we'll get you a horse,\" Tompkins said. \"We'd do anything for our laundry women and especially Colleen.\"\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Well, they got a thankless job, and all the troopers benefit from their work. And they're mostly friendly and easy-going, Colleen most of all. How do you know Colleen?\"\n\n\"We went to school together back in Chicago,\" Grit said.\n\nTompkins saddled a fine-looking chestnut gelding and said, \"This one's real gentle. He'll carry Colleen there and back.\"\n\nGrit led the horses down to the laundresses' quarters and Colleen was waiting for him. She opened the door and said, \"I'm ready to go. Just help me get up on the horse, please.\"\n\nWhen they were mounted, Grit said, \"I was hoping we could stop at the sutler's store and you'd help me buy some things to make Christmas a little special.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah, good idea,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"I was thinkin' you might wanna cook some Christmas dish, and we'd need to buy whatever you needed.\"\n\n\"I hadn't thought about what I could cook,\" Colleen said. \"But being in the store might give me some ideas.\"\n\nOnce in the store, Colleen said, \"My mother always made cinnamon rolls for Christmas, so maybe we could get all the ingredients you don't already have.\"\n\n\"Sounds great,\" Grit said. \"We have plenty of flour and sugar.\"\n\n\"Do you have brown sugar?\"\n\n\"No, just loaves of white sugar.\"\n\nColleen gathered brown sugar, cinnamon and a few other spices. Grit found the checkerboard that Paulie wanted and some poker chips in red and black for the checkers. He also found a couple of books he thought might interest Paulie, and he bought two decks of cards thinking that maybe Colleen or Paulie might know some games. He himself had never had time for card games." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "8\n\nWhen they arrived at the house, Paulie ran out and said to Colleen, \"What's all this? I didn't know you were coming, but I'm glad Grit invited you. I hope you're spending Christmas with us!\"\n\n\"That's the idea,\" she said. \"I have five whole days off.\"\n\n\"Welcome to our place,\" Paulie said. \"It's so good to see you again. Come on into the house. It's cold outside. Let me take your bag for you. Grit can take care of the horses.\"\n\nJust as Grit had thought, Paulie was more excited to have Colleen visit than he was. He unsaddled and rubbed down the horses before going into the house.\n\nPaulie had already shown Colleen to her room. When Grit walked in, Paulie said, \"See, wasn't it a good idea to have a three-bedroom house?\"\n\nGrit laughed, \"Yes, it was. You were right about that.\"\n\nAs Colleen walked out of her room, she said, \"This is so nice. I never imagined you'd have a place like this.\"\n\n\"It's a little rough yet,\" Grit said. \"We could use something for the walls, but we just moved in a few months ago.\"\n\n\"I love the bear-skin rugs,\" she said. \"Nice on our feet. And you have a cook stove and a heat stove. This is going to spoil me.\"\n\nPaulie had a pot of stew on the stove. Soon he fixed a fresh batch of biscuits, and they all sat down to dinner.\n\n\"Good stew, Paulie,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"I've had a lot of practice,\" he said. \"We eat stew most of the time around here. We both enjoy it, and it's filling.\"\n\n\"What kind of meat is this?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"Venison,\" Paulie said. \"I shot a doe yesterday down along the river, and I saw a cougar just after sunset. There's all kinds of wild animals around here.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "On Christmas eve, Colleen cooked six batches of cinnamon rolls. As she was letting the last batch rise, she asked, \"How far away does the family live that's needed your help?\"\n\n\"About an hour from here,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Only an hour? Why don't we take them some cinnamon rolls? I'm sure it would bring joy to their Christmas.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea,\" Grit said. \"How soon can you be ready?\"\n\n\"No more than a half hour,\" Colleen said. \"I'll put the last batch in the oven right now.\"\n\nPaulie was outside splitting firewood. When Grit walked out and told him they were going to the Knudsens, he said, \"Okay, I'll load up the wagon with firewood, and we could take them whatever else you think they'll need.\"\n\n\"We have to be careful with what we offer,\" Grit said, \"so let's take them the firewood, some more cabbages, a bag of potatoes and carrots and two bags of oats for the mules.\"\n\nWhen they were ready, they all sat on the wagon seat, each dressed in the warmest clothes possible. They gazed across the wide rolling prairie as they traveled, a vast sea of ice that wind blew skiffs of snow across.\n\nThey'd been traveling about a half hour when Paulie said, \"Would you look at that?\" He pointed to four elk feeding on aspen bark in a secluded ravine. \"They'll be runnin' soon. Lemme get the Sharps.\"\n\nGrit stopped the wagon and Paulie jumped down and pulled up the rifle. Grit and Colleen watched as Paulie pulled up the Vernier sight and took aim. He fired and at first, it seemed as if nothing had happened. Then a cow dropped as the other elk fled in utter terror while the gunshot still ricocheted over the undulating white plains.\n\n\"Good shot, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"Let's go get 'er.\" Paulie hopped back into the wagon, and Grit popped the reins as they headed toward the cow.\n\n\"She's a big one,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"We gotta skin her out right here,\" Grit said. \"We can't lift her onto the wagon.\"\n\nThe skinning took nearly an hour, but by then they had a hide packed full of meat.\n\nWhen they pulled up at the Knudsen place, Leif was outside splitting wood. As they pulled up, Grit said, \"How're you doin', neighbor?\"\n\n\"We're gettin' by,\" Leif said without any show of welcome. Inga had heard the wagon approaching, and she came out of the sod shanty with Astrid following behind holding onto her skirt.\n\n\"Leif and Inga, I'd like you to meet my friend, Colleen Byrne,\" Grit said. \"She's brought you folks a Christmas goody.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, I made some cinnamon rolls,\" Colleen said, \"and I brought your family a plate of them to enjoy over Christmas.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank you so much,\" Inga said. \"We really appreciate it. I wish we had something for you.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about that,\" Colleen said. \"In fact, Grit and Paulie have some other things for you.\"\n\nGrit said, \"Go ahead and tell 'em, Paulie.\"\n\n\"Coming over here, we spotted an elk, which I shot. We've butchered it out, and you can take all the meat you'd like. We'll take the rest home, but please help yourself. You can have an elk roast for Christmas.\"\n\n\"No, no!\" Leif shouted out. \"You've done enough. We'll accept no more of your charity.\"\n\nEverybody stared. Inga walked toward Leif and said sternly, \"Leif, they're only being neighborly.\" Turning to Grit, she said, \"We're very grateful. Please unload the things you've brought. We hope someday to do something for you.\" Leif turned and walked away.\n\nGrit and Paulie unloaded the wood and other items from the wagon quickly while Colleen spoke with Inga and tried to make friends with Astrid, who kept hiding behind her mother's skirt.\n\nOn the way back to the house, Grit said, \"Well, Colleen, you see what we're up against, but we keep comin' back.\"\n\n\"He's a proud man who feels like he's failed,\" she said.\n\n\"At least Inga's sensible,\" Grit said.\n\n\"I'll put our elk roast on when we get home,\" Colleen said. \"By the way, Paulie, that was a terrific shot to get that elk.\"\n\n\"Once you understand the Vernier sight,\" Paulie said, \"it's a very accurate rifle. Grit and I read a little booklet on how to use the Vernier sight, and then we practiced a little. Cartridges are three cents each, so we don't waste too many.\"\n\nOn Christmas, Colleen served the elk roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots, cabbage rolls and biscuits. For dessert, they had sweet potato pie and cinnamon rolls with hot coffee. All during the meal, Paulie kept up his comments on how good everything was, and Colleen luxuriated in the praise that came from both men.\n\n\"This is one of the best ideas I ever had, inviting you to share Christmas with us.\" Grit said to Colleen as he gave her an appreciative glance.\n\nDuring the day, they played checkers and later whist and hearts, card games that Colleen taught Grit and Paulie. For supper, Colleen served leftovers.\n\n\"I sure hope the Knudsens had a good day,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"We've done all we could,\" Grit said. \"I thought of inviting them to come here, but I'm sure Leif would have turned me down.\"\n\n\"Well, we know they had plenty to eat,\" Paulie said.\n\nLater that night, Paulie announced he was tired and going to bed. Grit settled down on the settee, straightening up the cards and putting away the checkerboard while Colleen straightened things up in the kitchen. Soon she came and sat down beside him.\n\n\"What will you do when the railroads come and take the place of the riverboats?\"\n\n\"Won't happen for a few years,\" he said. \"When it happens, I suppose we'll have to move some place where we can make a livin'.\"\n\n\"It's so nice to be here in this lovely little house,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm glad you decided to come,\" Grit said. \"It's been lots of fun. Are your folks still in Chicago?\"\n\n\"Yeah, still living there on South Water Street as far as I know,\" she said. \"I haven't heard from them in a while.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "That night, Grit awoke to the sound of the wind howling and snow battering the house, and he knew a winter blizzard had begun. He arose and added wood to the stove in the main room of the house. He hoped the storm wouldn't be too bad, but as he slumbered, the snow piled up against the house, the barn and the other buildings.\n\nIn the morning, Grit and Paulie got the stoves in the house roaring away and then headed out to the barn.\n\n\"Let's get those canvas tarps we bought and tie 'em around the horses,\" Grit said. \"It'll help them hold their body heat.\"\n\n\"Yeah, it feels like the temperature dropped 20 degrees overnight,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Sounds about right,\" Grit said.\n\n\"I wonder how the Knudsens are doin'?\"\n\n\"They should be fine, but it would help those mules if he'd wrap one of those wool blankets around each of them.\"\n\nAs they left the barn, they checked the thermometer and found that it was 16 degrees below zero. But the real problem was the wind-driven snow that blinded them. From the barn 20 yards away, they couldn't see the house at all.\n\n\"I hope it doesn't get too much colder,\" Grit said.\n\nWhen they got back inside, Colleen had fixed a breakfast of bacon and hotcakes, which they ate with maple syrup. During the day, they played games and listened to the wind battering the side and back of the house. Shortly after noon, Paulie got on his coat and went back out to the barn.\n\nWhen he returned, Grit asked, \"How bad is it?\"\n\n\"It's dropped to 24 below,\" Paulie said, \"and the snow's piling up. I can't see six feet in front of my face.\"\n\nThat night the blizzard continued, and the temperature dropped to 30 below zero.\n\n\"We can't take you back to the fort, Colleen, until this storm's over,\" Grit told her.\n\n\"I know,\" she said. \"We'd never make it.\"\n\nWell after midnight, Grit awoke to an eerie stillness. He got up and looked out the front window and saw that the wind had died back and the snow had mostly stopped falling. He added wood to the stove in the main room of the house then went back to bed.\n\nNext morning, the men checked on the horses, and they seemed to be doing fine. Grit forked down hay, and Paulie shoved it into the feed boxes before adding scoops of oats. It was so cold that even the air seemed brittle. Every exhalation from the men and the horses was evident in the still air of the barn.\n\n\"I guess we oughta go see about the Knudsens,\" Grit said.\n\nPaulie headed toward the snow-covered woodpile saying, \"I'll load the wagon with wood while you get everything else ready.\"\n\n\"Wait on that,\" Grit said. \"I don't think there's any way we can get there in the wagon. It would probably take us all day. Look at the size of those drifts. Some of them are higher than we are.\"\n\n\"I'm worried, Grit,\" Paulie said. \"I think we should try to reach them on the horses if nothing else.\"\n\n\"It'll be hard on the horses breaking through all that snow,\" Grit said, \"but let's get 'em saddled.\"\n\nBefore leaving, Grit told Colleen they were going to try to get through to the Knudsens, and it might take four or five hours there and back.\n\n\"I'm not sure we can make it, but we'll try,\" Grit told her. \"I've filled the wood box, so stay inside and keep warm.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't worry,\" she said, \"I will. And I'll have a nice hot dinner for you and Paulie when you get back.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "9\n\nGrit led the way as the horses shoved their way through the 18-inch snow. He rode around the large drifts, some of them eight feet high. Fortunately, the snow had not yet developed much of a crust, and the horses blundered along, sometimes high-stepping, but all-in-all moving steadily forward. After an hour and a half of all-out effort, they could see the lump in the snow that was the home of the Knudsens.\n\n\"Something's wrong,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Yeah, no smoke coming from the stovepipe,\" Grit said.\n\nAs they rode up, Grit shouted, \"Hello, the house! Anybody home?\"\n\nThey sat their horses and watched as skiffs of snow blew across the prairie in the silence of the frigid morning. Paulie looked at Grit and both men knew that something bad had happened to the Knudsen family.\n\nPaulie jumped down and ran to the front door of the house, which was drifted over with snow.\n\n\"Let's see if there's a shovel with the mules,\" Grit said. They both moved back toward the sod stable. \"Why didn't we think to bring shovels?\"\n\n\"We'll have to try and kick the snow aside with our boots,\" Paulie said as he began to shove the snow aside. After a few minutes, they managed to get one of the doors to the stable open and found the mules, weak and shaking from the cold with no food in their feed boxes.\n\n\"Shove some oats in those feed boxes, Paulie, and we'll try to get in the front door of the house.\"\n\nOnce he'd put out scoops of oats for the mules, Paulie grabbed a short-handled shovel and rushed to the front of the house to help Grit, who was shoveling away with a long-handled pointed shovel. In a few short minutes, they had cleared the snow and opened the front door.\n\n\"Hello in here,\" Grit yelled. \"Anybody home?\"\n\nIn the hush, Grit and Paulie heard a rustle from the corner before a tiny voice said, \"Papa?\"\n\n\"Oh my God,\" Paulie said. \"Astrid is the only one here.\" He rushed to the corner and there underneath two buffalo robes were little Astrid's eyes peeking out at Paulie.\n\n\"Hello there, Astrid. Are you okay?\" She shook her head. \"I'll bet you're hungry, aren't you?\"\n\nAstrid nodded her head, \"Uh huh!\"\n\n\"Paulie, you take care of her,\" Grit said. \"Get her something to eat and drink. I'm going to look around and see if I can find Leif and Inga.\"\n\nGrit walked out and gazed at the blinding snow across the prairie. He walked over to the outhouse and kicked the snow away from the door. He jerked open the door and found nothing. Not in the house, not in the stable, not anywhere around.\n\nHe walked over and swung onto his horse and began to ride, fear mounting that he was going to find Leif and Inga frozen to death. Far off in the western quarter of the land, maybe a mile from the house, he encountered a lump in the snow, which could have been anything. When he got to it, he dismounted as anxiety and trepidation churned his gut. He knelt and pushed the snow away with his hand and saw the icy face of Inga Knudsen. Staring down at the visage, he tried to comprehend it. Why did she leave the house and her baby?\n\nGrit stood and looked across the prairie but could see nothing but the flat snowy plains. He mounted his horse once more and began to scout. He worked at it for more than an hour. Finally, about a half mile east of the house he saw a slight mound in the snow and feared he'd found Leif. He dismounted and knelt to push away the snow and found the Norwegian's body frozen stiff.\n\nHe could only surmise that Leif had gone out for some reason, to the outhouse, to feed the animals or something, and when he hadn't returned, Inga had gone out to look for him, and they'd both lost their way and had no idea how to find the house in the blizzard. Grit's shoulders slumped. He could not dig a grave in the frozen soil, and now little Astrid was bereft of parents.\n\nWalking slowly back to the house and trailing his horse, he could see from the smoke that Paulie had a fire going in the heat stove. Before going inside, he gathered two large buckets of snow, which he set beside the stove.\n\nPaulie looked at him and asked, \"You were gone a long time. Find anything?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Grit said quietly, \"found their bodies.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Paulie asked plaintively.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Grit said. \"Maybe Leif went out in the blizzard and got lost, and she went after him and also got lost. It's all I can figure. Remember you said you couldn't see six feet in front of your face. I think they got confused and walked the wrong way until they were exhausted. \"\n\nTurning to Astrid still cuddled in the buffalo robes, Paulie said, \"She seems to be okay, but she'd eaten. I opened a can of peaches for her and fried some meat and potatoes. While she's been alone, she's been eating the cinnamon rolls that Colleen brought over, and until yesterday when it froze, she drank from a bucket of water her mother had brought into the house.\"\n\nGrit grabbed two of the blankets they'd brought over for the family earlier and said, \"I'm going out and put these blankets on the mules. I think they've been without food for two or three days. I doubt they'll live. They're awful weak.\"\n\n\"Maybe if we break trail with the horses, they can follow along,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"I'm hoping so,\" Grit said. \"Lemme know when that snow melts, and I'll start to water 'em. Before we head back, they'll need lots of water.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Some four hours later, Grit led the mules into the barn while Paulie took little Astrid into the house. Colleen greeted Paulie at the door.\n\n\"What's the little bundle you have there, Paulie?\" she asked.\n\n\"Little Astrid was all alone, but now she's going to stay with us awhile.\"\n\nColleen took the little girl into her arms and said, \"Oh my, Astrid, we are so glad to have you visit us.\"\n\n\"Where's my mama?\" she asked in a pitiful voice just loud enough to be heard.\n\nColleen hesitated before saying, \"Mama has gone on a trip. Let's get your coat off and get you something to eat.\"\n\nWhen Paulie got back to the barn, he asked, \"You think the mules will make it?\"\n\n\"Doubtful,\" Grit said. \"They're not built to go without food for long periods, but we'll feed 'em and give 'em lots of water, and we'll see how it goes. I don't know enough to do anything else except to walk them every so often. I'm no equine doctor, that's for sure.\"\n\nLittle Astrid seemed to have periods when she was happy, then she'd go into funks where she'd cry for her mother. Colleen held her often and so did Paulie when he was around.\n\nThe men walked the mules regularly, and they shoveled the snow from the corral so that the horses could get outside. The day after, they came out in the morning to find one of the mules thrashing around on the ground.\n\n\"What's wrong with him?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"You're askin' the wrong man, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"I'd say he has colic, but I really don't know. Let's see if we can get him up and walk him around the corral for a half hour and see if that helps.\"\n\nAfter the long walk, the mule seemed improved, and he got even better after he stopped near the end of his walk, stood stiff-legged, dropped a load and passed an enormous amount of gas.\n\n\"I don't know, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"Maybe that'll help him.\"\n\n\"I hope so,\" Paulie said, \"but what are we gonna do with the baby?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" Grit said. \"I guess I'll go back to the Knudsen place and see if I can find anything with the address of a relative, but even if we find an address, how're we ever going to get Astrid over to Minnesota or wherever the relatives might live?\"\n\n\"I guess we'd have to wait till spring, but we can't afford the time to take her over there,\" Paulie said. \"Maybe they could come and get her.\"\n\nLater that day, Grit walked the other mule, and he also emptied his bowels and passed gas repeatedly during the walk.\n\n\"It's a good pair of mules if we can get 'em over this,\" Grit said to Paulie. \"We could use 'em to haul the logs after they're cut.\"\n\n\"If they live,\" Paulie said. \"They were a long time without food, and it's upset their guts a lot.\"\n\nStrangely enough, the mules got better with a regular diet of hay, oats, fresh water and exercise several times a day. And Astrid became a little chatterbox, always asking questions of everyone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "A few nights later, after Astrid and Paulie were in bed, Colleen sat down at the opposite end of the settee from Grit and said, \"I suppose the trail is tamped down enough for me to go back to the fort, but who's going to care for Astrid?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Grit said. \"I wish you didn't have to go back.\"\n\n\"Suppose I did stay?\" Colleen asked with a smirk. \"As what\u2014the maid, the nanny, the laundress?\"\n\nGrit smiled at her. \"I'd offer to marry you, but I'm an ex-convict and not much of a catch.\"\n\n\"I'd say you were quite a catch,\" Colleen said with a smile. \"I've never known a man who worked harder, but I've always thought a couple should love each other before getting married.\"\n\n\"It's an age-old problem,\" Grit said. \"Does love come before or after marriage?\"\n\nColleen moved down the settee close to Grit. \"Do you have any feelings for me?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course I do,\" Grit said. \"And I have great respect for you too.\"\n\n\"Would you always be faithful to me?\" she asked.\n\n\"I could never be unfaithful,\" he said. \"It's just who I am.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\nGrit was surprised as Colleen leaned into him and kissed him. The kiss became passionate, and it was prolonged. \"Oh my, I do have feelings for you, Colleen.\"\n\n\"Well?\"\n\n\"Would you marry me?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Yes, yes I will,\" Colleen said as her lips sought his once more. When the kiss ended, she said, \"There's a chaplain at the fort who could marry us.\"\n\n\"I thought maybe you'd want a priest,\" Grit said.\n\n\"A priest is far away, and I don't wanna wait,\" she said.\n\n\"There's something you should know,\" Grit said.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"I've put enough money away to send Paulie to college, and I'll still want to do that.\"\n\n\"That's fine.\"\n\n\"Just so you know,\" he said. \"It's the only obligation I have except to take care of Astrid.\"\n\n\"When we get an address for her relatives, I'll write them a letter wherever that may be, and we'll see what comes of it.\"\n\n\"If they want her, they have the right.\"\n\n\"Exactly, but if they don't, we'll raise her. Is that alright with you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Grit said with a smile. \"I've grown to like her a lot. Maybe we'll have to send her to college too.\"\n\n\"What about me?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'd be willing to send you, if that's what you want,\" Grit said. \"I'd work and pay for it all if you wanted to go.\"\n\n\"Hmm, that's a good offer,\" she said. \"I've always wanted to go to college. It's been a dream of mine all my life.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "10\n\nWhen Grit told Paulie that he and Colleen intended to get married, Paulie was excited. \"Really? That means you'll be around all the time, Colleen, and that's what I want. When are you getting married?\"\n\n\"We'd like for everyone to go to Fort Sully,\" Grit said, \"but I don't think we can get the wagon through all the snow, so we'll have to go on horses, and it would be hard on Astrid. Would you be willing to stay with her while Colleen and I go to the fort and back?\"\n\n\"Yeah, of course,\" Paulie said. \"I mean, I'd like to be there, but I understand. I'll take care of Astrid and you two go and get married.\"\n\nWhen they got ready to leave, Grit put his arm around Paulie and said, \"Paulie, you're like a brother to me. Don't think this marriage changes anything. You'll always be welcome in this house, or any house where Colleen and I live. Our house will always be your house. I hope you know that.\"\n\nPaulie turned to Grit and said, \"Thanks, Grit, that means everything to me to have a place where I belong.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "At Fort Sully, Colleen was greeted by the other laundresses, who were delighted for her when they learned she was getting married.\n\nNell said, \"We'll just have to all get dressed and attend your wedding tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Well, that would be nice, but can you all take the time?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"Of course we can,\" Lettie said. Lettie Nyberg was the chief laundress and what she said, nobody disputed, not even the post commander. That is, they didn't dispute it if they wanted their clothes cleaned in any type of timely fashion.\n\n\"Grit... that's not your real name, is it?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"No, but it's the name I've chosen, and the one I want on my tombstone.\"\n\n\"What's your given name?\"\n\n\"Ah, please don't make me reveal it,\" Grit said.\n\nColleen laughed. \"Come on. It can't be that bad.\"\n\n\"No, I can't do it,\" Grit said. \"You'll torment me with it when you're angry with me.\"\n\n\"I will not,\" Colleen said. \"Now let's have it.\"\n\n\"No, tomorrow you'll be marrying Grit Milburn and nobody else.\"\n\nColleen sighed, \"Alright, you're just being a stubborn mule.\"\n\n\"See, you're already calling me names.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm happy to be marrying Grit Milburn. Do you think I'll ever know what your given names are?\"\n\n\"Maybe when I'm old and past caring,\" Grit said.\n\nThat afternoon, January 2, 1874, the chaplain at Fort Sully, The Reverend Silas J. Mortensen, officiated at the wedding of Grit Milburn and Colleen Anne Byrne with only the seven remaining laundresses in attendance, dressed in their finest. Afterward, Grit invited everyone to the tavern for a celebration. It was unusual for the women to be in the tavern, but since most of the troopers didn't arrive until after 5 o'clock, the wedding party had the place to themselves for a couple of hours.\n\nAs they walked to the tavern, Grit noticed an overcoated trooper staring at them. \"There's your friend.\"\n\nColleen said, \"If I never see Casper Atlock again, it'll be far too soon. I'm afraid of him.\"\n\n\"You don't need to fear him,\" Grit said as he put his arm around her.\n\nGrit and Colleen spent the night in Colleen's room where the other laundresses were housed.\n\n\"We may as well get used to it,\" Colleen said. \"When we get home, we'll have to control our whoops and hollers in our lovemaking to keep from waking Paulie and Astrid.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"It's a strange family we've got, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" she said. \"It's what life has dealt us, and I'm content with it. Of course, we'll undoubtedly have a few children of our own sooner or later, and it's a comfort knowing you'll be such a good papa.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"It's obvious from the way you treat Paulie and Astrid,\" she said.\n\nWhen they arrived back home, their faces were glowing red from the cold, but it didn't take long to warm up as Paulie and Astrid welcomed them both with hugs.\n\nAstrid was excitedly bouncing on the settee in her stocking feet when Grit said, \"We have something tasty for you, Astrid.\"\n\nShe ran to him and asked, \"What is it?\"\n\nGrit handed her a small paper bag of candy. She opened it and said, \"Oh, it's sukkert\u00f8y. Can I have one?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course you can,\" Colleen said. Sometimes Astrid used Norwegian words mixed with English.\n\nFor Paulie, Grit had found a used copy of Little Men by Louisa May Alcott at the fort sutler's store. Paulie had begun to enjoy reading almost as much as Grit, and when he saw the new book, he was curious. \"What's it about?\"\n\n\"It's the second volume after Little Women,\" Grit said. \"We already read that. I haven't read this one, but I will after you're done.\"\n\n\"I see the mules are doin' okay,\" Grit said. \"You walkin' 'em?\"\n\n\"Twice a day for 20 or 30 minutes,\" Paulie said. \"They don't show any signs of colic, and they're eating normally.\"\n\n\"Wonders never cease,\" Grit said. \"I thought sure they'd both die, and I was wondering how we'd get 'em buried.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "The next day the men went back to felling trees and stacking wood by the side of the river.\n\n\"How many cords have we got?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I think there's 56,\" Paulie said. \"By the time the first boat comes, we should have at least two hundred more. While you were gone I sharpened all the saws and my axes, so they're all ready to go.\" He hadn't sharpened Grit's double-bit axes because he knew Grit liked to do it himself.\n\n\"That's good,\" Grit said. \"What did you do with Astrid while you worked?\"\n\n\"Oh, I bundled her up, and she played in the woodyard and asked me a thousand questions,\" Paulie said. \"I swear she's the most curious child I've ever known.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"I've noticed that.\"\n\n\"You think we could make five thousand dollars this year?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"If we work hard, we could, but we'll have to take some time off to resupply too,\" Grit said.\n\nOver the next few weeks, they fell into a routine, working when the weather permitted for six or eight hours a day. Colleen fixed excellent meals, took care of Astrid and washed clothes and hung them about the house during the day.\n\nWhen they were together inside, they played games and read stories to Astrid, who loved all the attention. She was a sweet girl who wanted to please, and she was obedient when asked to do something. Colleen worried that everyone was growing very attached to her. Astrid had blonde hair and a pale complexion that in daylight seemed almost translucent. Her blue eyes never missed a thing, and she always had a question on her mind.\n\nIn the early morning hours, Astrid had taken to waking up, leaving her room and crawling quietly into bed with Paulie before falling back to sleep. At daylight, Colleen and Grit would often hear the two of them talking, or they'd hear Astrid giggling.\n\nColleen had written a letter to an address in Minnesota that they'd found on an envelope in the Knudsens' sod house. Grit had given the letter to an Army patrol, who'd taken it to Fort Randall, then on to Yankton, where it would go by train to Minnesota.\n\nSecretly, Colleen was hoping they'd never hear anything, but she feared somebody would come and tear Astrid away from them someday. She was sure that either Leif's or Inga's relatives would undoubtedly want to raise Astrid. Colleen did her best to maintain a neutral attitude toward the little girl as if she were only a nanny, but it was hard not to love Astrid. She was a beautiful child, usually cheerful, and she seemed to blossom with all the attention she received.\n\nGrit worked out with Paulie for an hour almost daily in the barn to develop the boxing skills Paulie wanted so badly. Sometimes Colleen and Astrid came out to the barn to watch.\n\n\"You're getting lots better, Paulie,\" Grit told him in mid-February. \"You may not realize it, but you can block most of my punches now, and you're growing stronger every day. I'm thinkin' they may have a boxing team at the college, and if they do, you should join it.\"\n\nThey wrapped their hands in thick rags each day and sparred. It was something they both enjoyed, even though Grit pulled his punches, refusing to hit Paulie hard, but Paulie exulted each time he got through Grit's defenses.\n\n\"Ha, I gotcha that time,\" Paulie said after he'd managed to hit Grit's nose.\n\nGrit laughed. \"Yeah, I gotta watch you. You're gettin' kinda sneaky.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "The weeks turned into months and when spring came, Grit said, \"All the river ice will be gone soon, and the riverboats will be anxious to carry goods to the mines in Montana, so we need to get into Yankton and resupply so that we can cut wood all summer.\" Colleen and Astrid were excited to get out of the house after being cooped up during the long winter.\n\nThey hitched up the mules and tied the horses behind the wagon. Inside the wagon, they had two of the buffalo robes as a bed for Astrid, who still needed a nap in the afternoons.\n\n\"Will there be grass for the horses and mules?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" Grit said with a smile. \"Some grasses are already sprouting. We'll stay close to the river. They'll have plenty to eat.\"\n\nThe trip took three days including two nights of camping, and they were all tired when they arrived in Yankton. They got rooms in the hotel, and Colleen ordered a bath for herself and Astrid while the men headed down to the barbershop for haircuts and baths.\n\nOnce they were clean, they visited Frank's Eatery. Paulie said, \"Well, Miss Astrid, what would you like for supper?\"\n\n\"Sukkert\u00f8y!\"\n\nThey all laughed. Paulie wagged his finger at her and said, \"Not for supper. We'll buy you some sukkert\u00f8y tomorrow.\"\n\nThey ate elk roast with candied sweet potatoes and carrots and peas with sweet bakery rolls and butter. Astrid was a good eater, and she ate everything on her plate.\n\n\"Did you get enough, Astrid?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"See my plate, I ate it all,\" she said.\n\n\"You want some pie or cake?\" Colleen asked.\n\nAstrid nodded vigorously, \"Pai,\" she said. Though spelled differently, the Norwegian word was pronounced similar to the English word. They all had chocolate pie, except for Grit who had apple.\n\n\"Was yours good?\" Colleen asked Grit.\n\n\"It was alright,\" he said with a smile, \"but not nearly as good as yours.\"\n\n\"I must say, you've caught onto this husband thing quite well,\" Colleen said with a laugh as she grabbed hold of his arm." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "The next day after breakfast, Colleen walked down to the post office, which was located in Tallcott's Drug Store, and found she had a letter from an Arne Knudsen in Babbitt, Minnesota. She opened the letter with trepidation and read:\n\nDear Mrs. Milburn,\n\nWe were sad to hear about the deaths of Leif and Inga. We advised them against going so late in the season, but Leif was determined. I am working in the iron mines near Babbitt, and I cannot get away to come for little Astrid. My wife has been ill all winter, and the wages in the mines are barely enough to keep my own family.\n\nI'm sorry to tell you all this, but if things change, I will write again and let you know. It's nearly 700 miles over difficult terrain to get to where you are, and then, of course, the trip back. All in all, it would take near two months there and back, and I can't go without working for that long. There's not much we can do. Please tell Astrid I'm sorry. I hope you'll take good care of her. I regret we can't do it ourselves.\n\nSincerely,\n\nArne Knudsen\n\nThe dear man had paid 12 cents to mail the letter, 12 cents he probably didn't have to spare. Colleen was saddened by the letter and the desperation of the Knudsen family, but she understood. So it looked as if she and Grit had a responsibility to Astrid. She hurried from the drugstore and rushed over to Conroy's General Store to show the letter to Grit.\n\nWhen she walked up, Grit said, \"We've been gathering all the things on your list, and we're almost done.\"\n\nColleen held out the letter and said, \"This letter was waiting for us at the post office.\"\n\nGrit read the letter slowly, looked up at Colleen and asked, \"Does this mean they're leaving her for us to raise?\"\n\n\"It seems that way,\" she said, \"but I'd really like to get a court order or something so that nobody can take her away from us later.\"\n\n\"Let's buy all the things we need, and we'll see a lawyer,\" Grit said. \"He can probably advise us.\"\n\nAs they were gathering their purchases, Paulie found two pairs of leather boxing gloves in a back corner of the store. He grabbed them and took them up to Grit.\n\n\"Just what we need,\" Paulie said.\n\nGrit smiled and examined the gloves. \"They look like they'll last awhile. Buy 'em, and we'll start doing some real sparring.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "11\n\n\"It appears that you've contacted the family, and they've abrogated their responsibilities to care for the child, so I think we could make a good case for adoption,\" Simon Cloud told them. Cloud was an attorney who had an office over Tallcott's Drug Store.\n\nGrit looked at Colleen and said, \"Yes, that's what we'd like to do.\"\n\n\"I know the judge, and we should be able to get this done fairly quickly,\" Cloud said.\n\n\"How quickly?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I'd say a month or so,\" Cloud replied.\n\n\"No way we can get it done today?\" Grit asked.\n\nCloud laughed. \"No, I'm afraid not. The process for adoption takes a while. We'll have to advertise in the local papers.\"\n\n\"How much is your fee for this?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"My fee is $35, but there'll be some court costs and advertising costs. Fifty dollars should cover it.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Grit said. \"We've spent all our money on supplies, but we have a bank account, and I'll withdraw sufficient to cover all this.\"\n\nWhen they got back to the wagon where Astrid and Paulie were waiting, Grit asked, \"How much money have we got, Paulie.\"\n\n\"Sixteen dollars and some change,\" Paulie said. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I have to get $50 for the lawyer,\" Grit said. \"I'll run over to the bank and get $200. That'll still leave enough for your college expenses. And by the way, we should write to the college at Lincoln and confirm to them that you'll be coming.\"\n\n\"You're determined to get rid of me, aren't you?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"You know it's not that,\" Grit said. \"Listen, Paulie, I never took to that Catholic religion although I got a bellyful of it in parochial school, but if I've got a religion, it's education. It's the way to a more prosperous life, believe me, and that's what I want for you. You've got a first-class mind, and you shouldn't be lookin' at a future as a woodcutter.\"\n\n\"Well, what about you?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"In due time, when I have the money, I'd love to go to college, but it's not my time. It'll be your time in the fall. Don't you wanna go?\"\n\n\"Well, I do... and I don't.\"\n\nGrit stared at him. \"Explain that to me.\"\n\n\"I'd like to study and get an education, but I love being part of the family.\"\n\nGrit nodded and said, \"I understand that. You'll always be a big part of this family, and it's your decision, Paulie, but the money will be there if you do wanna go.\"\n\nAs Grit turned to go to the bank, he heard a man's voice that stopped him in his tracks. \"Hey, ain't you the laundress at Fort Sully?\"\n\nColleen said in her usual pleasant voice with a little Irish lilt, \"Used to be, some time back.\"\n\n\"Well, why don't you come over and have a drink with us,\" the man said.\n\n\"No,\" Colleen said, \"I never was much of a drinker.\"\n\n\"Aw, c'mon just a wee drink,\" the man said.\n\n\"Nope, sorry, can't do it. I'm a married woman.\"\n\n\"Married? You're makin' that up. Atlock said you's quite a tiger in bed.\"\n\nColleen was too stunned to speak.\n\n\"Hey, talk like that could get you hurt bad,\" Grit said as he walked back toward Colleen. \"You said it right, she's too good for the likes of you, so quit botherin' the lady.\"\n\n\"And who might you be?\" the man asked.\n\n\"I'm her husband,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Oh, her husband,\" the man said. He looked over his shoulder and smirked at his pals by the hitching post. \"I heard she was quite the little tart at Fort Sully.\"\n\nGrit reacted without thinking. His left uppercut to the chin set up the man's face for the right cross that fractured his cheekbone. The man was catapulted back, hit so hard he landed on his back with a whoosh of lost air from his lungs. The man's five friends rushed toward Grit, all of them ready to fight.\n\nPaulie, sitting up on the wagon seat with Astrid, said, \"You stay right here, little sis. Don't go anywhere.\"\n\nHe jumped to the ground without thought for his own safety. When the men came, Grit and Paulie struck fast and hard, but five against two was hard to defeat. Some of the men's blows got through, but Grit and Paulie's blows, powered by steel-hard muscles, were brutal and devastating. In a short time, all six of the men lay in the dust of the road.\n\nPaulie turned to Grit, blood streaming from his nose. He smiled and said, \"My first real fight. How'd I do?\"\n\nGrit reached out with one arm and hugged Paulie. \"You did just fine. They mighta got the job done on me if you hadn't joined in.\"\n\n\"Nah, never happen,\" Paulie said. \"You didn't need me, but I was glad to be part of it.\"\n\nColleen came over and said, \"Well, I never knew those boxing lessons in the barn would come in so handy! I don't have to worry about havin' a man around to take care of me, do I?\" Grit and Paulie both laughed.\n\n\"No you don't,\" Grit and Paulie said at the same time.\n\nAfter paying the lawyer, they loaded up and headed home. Grit sat on the wagon seat with Colleen, and Paulie rode the bay horse with Astrid sitting in front of him. She was excited and kept pointing at things they passed along the trail. About an hour out, Paulie felt Astrid's little blonde head go limp, and knowing she was asleep, he rode up and Grit stopped the wagon. Paulie handed Astrid to Colleen who lay her on one buffalo robe and covered her with a blanket and another buffalo robe.\n\n\"It's been a long trip for our little darlin', and she's tired,\" Colleen said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "When they got home, Grit pulled out the push plow they'd bought in Yankton and plowed up a huge garden spot near the house while Paulie started digging holes for the fence around the garden. A fence was necessary to keep the deer and raccoons out mainly but other animals as well. After the plowing, Colleen and Astrid planted tomatoes, spinach, leaf lettuce and peppers. A day later they finished the fence by winding five-foot tree limbs in wire. Later, they'd plant beans, beets, carrots, potatoes, cucumbers and corn.\n\nWith the garden taken care of, Grit and Paulie went back to downing trees for more firewood. A week later, the first of the riverboats came churning up the river, blowing huge plumes of smoke out of its twin stacks. As it drew closer, Grit said, \"She's not gonna stop, Paulie.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Look at her decks,\" Grit said. \"She's just bought wood somewhere downriver. Her decks are stacked with it. I got no idea where she bought it, but it can't be far.\" The passengers on the Liberty waved vigorously as they powered on upstream. Grit and Paulie simply stood and watched in their disappointment.\n\n\"But that's all part of the Yankton reservation down there,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Let's ride downstream a bit, Paulie,\" Grit said.\n\nThey saddled their horses and rode along the river. About six miles down, they heard the sound of axes, lots of axes. When they rode on down, they sat their horses and saw four lumberjacks felling trees and cutting them into firewood.\n\n\"Looks like they got us outmanned,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Yep, let's ask how much they're charging.\"\n\nThey rode down and one of the men stopped work and walked over. \"Howdy,\" he said, \"what can I do for ya?\"\n\n\"We're just getting acquainted. We've got property up the river aways. Name's Grit Milburn, and this is Paulie Samson. Y'all own this property here, do ya?\"\n\n\"No, we figure the trees are here for the taking,\" the man said.\n\n\"You're on the Yankton reservation,\" Grit said. \"Do they know you're here?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" the man said.\n\n\"How long you been here?\"\n\n\"It'll be a week tomorrow.\"\n\n\"If you don't mind me askin', how much for the wood?\"\n\n\"Six dollars a cord.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll be goin',\" Grit said. \"Good luck to ya.\"\n\nTwo days later, a riverboat anchored in the river by Grit and Paulie's huge piles of firewood. They sent a rowboat to shore, and a man in the bow of the boat jumped out and asked, \"I'm Cole Slate, second mate on the Columbia. How much for the wood?\"\n\n\"It's all prime hardwood at seven dollars and fifty cents a cord,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Holy smokes,\" Slate said. \"Downriver a bit here they're sellin' it for $6 a cord.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you buy from them?\"\n\n\"They don't have any wood right now,\" Slate said. \"There was a troop of cavalry there, and it looked like the troopers were running the men off, but their sign said $6 a cord.\" Grit looked at Paulie who started laughing.\n\n\"You see, that's the thing,\" Grit said. \"When we don't have any firewood, it's only $6 a cord. When we do have it, it's $7.50 a cord, and right now, we have nearly 300 cords ready to sell at $7.50.\"\n\nSlate laughed. \"Okay, I get it. We'll take 40 cords.\" He pulled out a leather bag with a roll of cash and counted out $300. Paulie accepted the money and stuffed it in his pocket.\n\n\"How come you let junior take your money?\" Slate asked Grit.\n\nGrit laughed, winked at Paulie and said, \"He's the bookkeeper, and he does a good, honest job of it.\"\n\nIt turned out to be a glorious spring and early summer in southern Dakota Territory. The third riverboat to stop brought a letter from the lawyer in Yankton that contained all the adoption papers. Grit and Colleen were now the legal guardians and parents of Astrid Knudsen, and the judge had included an addendum to the adoption of a name change to Astrid Milburn.\n\n\"Well, I'm relieved,\" Colleen said. \"Now we know her future, and nobody can take our little sweetheart from us.\"\n\nDuring the spring, the riverboats made regular stops going up the river. Colleen and Astrid explored the countryside, saw all kinds of wildlife and picked flowers nearly every day. They found blackberries and huckleberries and wild plums. Nearby they found a grove of black walnut trees and picked up a basket of fresh walnuts and brought them back to the house.\n\nColleen got Grit to make a table for the porch, and the whole family started having dinners and suppers outside. In the evening, they would sit outside and look across the verdant river valley at the beautiful sunsets while enjoying a late-night cup of Arbuckles.\n\nIn mid-June, Grit said, \"We've gotta stop for a day or two, Paulie, and cut the wheat that Knudsen planted. I don't want it to spoil in the field. For three days, they worked from dawn to dusk cutting the wheat and stacking it in shocks to dry in the field. They then carried wagon loads of shocks back to the barn and stored it so that it could completely dry.\n\n\"We'll leave it there, Paulie, until the last boat comes from Fort Benton, then we'll thresh it and carry the bags of wheat to the mill in Yankton.\"\n\nIn early August, Colleen cut herself a fishing pole one day and told Grit she was taking Astrid down to the river to get a mess of fish.\n\nOnce she was out of sight, Grit said, \"Paulie, go with them and make sure everything's alright. I'm sure there's no danger, but the river's treacherous. Just watch out for 'em and keep Astrid safe.\"\n\n\"And what are you gonna do?\" Paulie asked.\n\nGrit smiled. \"Cut wood! What else?\"\n\nWhen they came back from fishing, Colleen had a nice string of fish, and Astrid was riding on Paulie's shoulders, holding onto his head for dear life, laughing and yelling, \"Giddyup, hossy.\"\n\n\"We ran into two men down along the river,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"Oh? Who were they?\"\n\n\"They said General Custer has found gold in the Black Hills, and they're goin' out there.\"\n\n\"I don't know much about it, but isn't that Sioux territory?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but if it is, it won't stop these men,\" Colleen said. \"They said thousands of men are getting ready to come into the Black Hills next year. The newspapers back east are saying there's gold nuggets in every stream out there. Of course it's a lie, but I think the men believe it.\"\n\n\"They believe that because that's what they wanna believe,\" Grit said, \"but men will chase their dreams.\"\n\nLate in August, sitting on the porch near dark, Colleen said, \"There are a few supplies we need, and I think I could get them at Fort Sully.\"\n\n\"Okay, we'll take the wagon and go tomorrow,\" Grit said.\n\n\"I know you're low on firewood to sell, and you and Paulie need to work. It's such beautiful weather, I could drive the wagon up with Astrid, spend the night and come back the next day.\"\n\n\"You think you'd be okay doin' that?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I'm sure I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Okay, Paulie and I'll hitch the mules up for you tomorrow morning,\" Grit said. He smiled at her, \"I'm gonna miss having you around.\"\n\n\"I'll miss you too, sweet darlin', but only for one night.\"\n\nThe next morning, Grit and Paulie had the team of mules hitched and ready to go right after breakfast. Astrid was excited about the trip, and Colleen had packed a picnic lunch for them to have along the way.\n\nAs they left, Astrid stood in the back of the wagon and yelled, \"Bye Papa, bye Paulie.\"\n\nIt was the first time she'd called Grit Papa, and he waved back with tears in his eyes.\n\n\"She's a little sweetheart,\" Paulie said. \"I'm going to miss her when I go off to college.\"\n\nGrit thought it was good for Colleen to leave and have a few moments with her old friends and at the same time show off her little girl of whom she'd grown so fond. She'd buy Astrid some sukkert\u00f8y and most likely she'd get her a few new things to wear if the sutler's store had any. Astrid was quickly outgrowing her clothing, and they'd soon have to go to Yankton and buy her a new wardrobe for the coming winter.\n\nGrit was glad that money was not a problem. He and Paulie went back to felling trees and sawing them into the right lengths for firewood. They worked steady and ate from two pots of stew and biscuits that Colleen had fixed before she left.\n\nAs they walked together back down into the wood yard that afternoon, Paulie said, \"Only three weeks until college starts in Lincoln, and I find I'm looking forward to it.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"I'm glad you've decided to go, Paulie. The money's there for you, but I hope you'll come home for Christmas and summers.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, and I'll be here in the summers to help,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"If it works out, be glad to have ya, but if you get an opportunity to work and learn on the job somewhere else, I want you to do that,\" Grit said. \"You know you're always welcome here any time you have a chance to come home.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "12\n\nThe next morning they worked until noon, but from about 11 o'clock on, Grit kept glancing toward the house hoping to see Colleen and Astrid. The two men stopped for lunch and had big bowls of stew, but when they had finished eating, there was still no sign of Colleen and Astrid.\n\n\"I'm starting to worry, Paulie. Put out the $7.50 sign at the wood pile,\" Grit said. \"I'll start saddling up. After you put out the sign, get us a thousand dollars and hide the rest of the money where nobody'll find it.\"\n\nA quarter hour later, both men were on their horses headed toward Fort Sully. They drove the horses as hard as they could but still didn't arrive at the fort until after 4 o'clock that afternoon. They went directly to the laundry. When Grit swung off his horse, Lettie, the chief laundress, came running toward him wiping her wet hands.\n\n\"Oh Grit, it's just awful,\" she said.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"Sergeant Atlock and two troopers deserted last night,\" she said. \"They kidnapped Colleen. The post commander has sent a troop of cavalry after them, but we haven't heard anything since they left early this morning.\"\n\n\"Where's Astrid?\"\n\n\"Oh, we've got the sweet little thing,\" Lettie said. \"She was sleeping when they forced Colleen to go with them.\"\n\n\"Okay, where do they figure Atlock is going?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"The fort's commander ordered all the troopers questioned, and they said Atlock had been talking about going to the Black Hills to search for gold, and so the troopers headed northwest along the river, as I understand it.\"\n\nGrit turned and said, \"Paulie, you stay with Astrid. In the morning, take her home and wait for me to return with Colleen. Don't worry about cutting more wood, just sell what we have, but above all, take care of Astrid.\"\n\n\"You're goin' after 'em?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I have to,\" Grit said. Quietly he said, \"Give me $800, and I'll be heading over to the sutler's store to supply up before I hit the trail, and I'll be wantin' to take your horse. You drive the wagon with the two mules back to the house.\"\n\n\"I'd like to go with ya,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"I know you would, and I'd like to have you, Paulie. I could use your help and counsel, but Astrid needs you,\" Grit said. \"She trusts you more than anybody. Be alert and don't let anything happen to her or yourself.\"\n\nAs Grit headed to the sutler's store, a trooper intercepted him and said, \"Mister Milburn, sir, the post commander would like to speak with you.\"\n\n\"Alright, lead the way,\" Grit said.\n\nWhen Grit stepped into the headquarters building, a man of medium height and slim build came from his office. \"Mister Milburn, I am Colonel Lazelle, and I'm very sorry about what's happened with your wife. I've sent a troop of cavalry after the deserters, and I'm hopeful they'll be able to overtake them.\"\n\n\"I appreciate what you've done, Colonel,\" Grit said, \"but I'm going after 'em myself as soon as I get my supplies at the sutler's store.\"\n\n\"I don't advise doing that, Mister Milburn,\" Lazelle said. \"Our troopers will bring the deserters back with your wife.\"\n\n\"I don't have your confidence in your troopers, Colonel,\" Grit said. \"I'm sure they're good men, but my wife is not as precious to them as she is to me. And I'm a free man to make my own decisions.\"\n\n\"The Black Hills are promised to the Sioux, and until that little problem is cleared up, no white men are permitted in the entire region,\" Lazelle said.\n\n\"I'm not planning on going into the Black Hills,\" Grit said. \"I figure to catch your deserters before they get there. I'll only go into the Black Hills as a last resort.\"\n\n\"Can't stop you, but General Custer's soldiers might,\" Lazelle said.\n\n\"I heard Custer was on his way back,\" Grit said.\n\n\"That's right, but he's left a small force of soldiers out there,\" Lazelle said.\n\nAt the sutler's store, Grit filled two sets of saddlebags with enough provisions for a week, including a generous supply of coffee to keep him awake and moving. He also bought 300 cartridges for the Winchester and 30 for the Sharps. He had one rifle in a scabbard on each of the horses, and he carried four blankets rolled behind his saddle and a new winter coat and gloves.\n\nAs he was leaving the store, the sutler asked, \"You got a good map?\"\n\n\"No, got none a'tall,\" he said.\n\n\"Take this one,\" the sutler said. \"You needin' some field glasses? I got a pair of old Army glasses here I'll let you have for $2,\" the sutler said.\n\n\"I'll take 'em, might come in handy.\"\n\nBefore mounting up, Grit said goodbye to Paulie and gave Astrid a hug. As he held her, he said, \"Paulie will take care of you, little sweetheart, until Mama Colleen comes back.\"\n\n\"Okay, Papa,\" she whispered.\n\nHe rode out due west before trending slightly north to intercept the Cheyenne River, which is what the map showed was the shortest way into the Black Hills. If one followed its course, it would take him right into the heart of the country that the Sioux considered sacred. It was land where Sioux hunting parties often roamed in search of buffalo, and so he stuck to the low ground where possible in order to avoid skylining himself.\n\nSome of the Sioux were friendly, maybe even most, but others it was said were getting more and more cantankerous about white men invading their territory. And the discovery of gold in the Black Hills would attract gold-seekers like a magnet. Fear of the Sioux would dissuade only the cowardly. Others, indefatigable in their zeal for riches and lacking in common sense, would come to the country with no idea what to expect or how harsh it could be, especially in the winters.\n\nDespite knowing the dangers involved, Grit didn't give himself a moment to think about what might happen. His aim was to find Colleen, free her from Atlock and bring her home. His only other aim was to punish the troopers who'd kidnapped Colleen, and for Atlock at least, that most likely meant his death.\n\nGrit rode for two hours over the rolling prairies with grass six inches high before letting the horses graze for a quarter hour. He then changed from the bay to Paulie's dun and rode on. The sun set shortly after, but he kept on moving, riding into the night. Near midnight, he made camp by a small stream and staked out both horses. He lit a small fire in a gap that hid the flames, made coffee and heated a can of beans, which he wolfed down directly from the can. Afterward he doused the fire and slept.\n\nHe rekindled the fire in the dark the next morning, boiled a pot of coffee and ate another can of beans before saddling the two horses and riding out in the dimmest of morning light. At mid-morning, he reached the Cheyenne River and began to search for tracks, which he found were plentiful along the banks of the river. The tracks were made by shod horses, and he figured he was now following the cavalry troopers... and the three deserters with Colleen.\n\nFor all their dedication, it was not surprising that those troopers didn't care nearly as much about Colleen as he did. And it wasn't so much the troopers as the shavetail lieutenant, not long out of West Point. For him, it was probably a station on the frontier that he didn't want, but it was a job, a duty. Grit appreciated the protection the troops provided, but for him it was about the woman he'd grown to know and love, and he was ready to follow the deserters to the lowest depths of hell to get Colleen back. He simply wouldn't come back without his wife, and as he rode on he decided he was prepared to kill anybody that stood in his way. Soon he would find himself having to do just that to save his own life.\n\nAn hour later, he skirted a herd of hundreds of bison grazing peacefully in a lonely hollow with thick green grass. As he rode around the herd, the bison seemed not to notice. They continued to graze away contentedly. He rode on through the lonely country, resting the horses when needed, but moving on after the tracks of the shod hooves.\n\nAt noon, he sat on his bay horse on a small rise viewing the country to the west along the Cheyenne River. He thought he saw some dust far, far away on the horizon, and he took out his field glasses and saw men riding in a column. He rode toward the dust as he followed along the river. As he suspected, the dust was being raised by a troop of cavalry coming toward him, and his hopes soared, praying that they'd found Colleen and arrested the deserters.\n\nWhen Grit drew closer, he waited off the direct path of the troopers and counted 24 soldiers in formation. No, they hadn't found either the deserters or Colleen, and they had turned around and were returning to the fort. The lieutenant in charge led the troop to the little rise where Grit waited.\n\n\"Good afternoon, sir. I'm Lieutenant Higgins. And who might you be out here all by your lonesome?\"\n\n\"Grit Milburn.\"\n\n\"Oh, so you're the woman's husband?\"\n\n\"That's right. You're goin' the wrong way, Lieutenant.\"\n\n\"There was a bison stampede,\" Higgins said, \"and it destroyed any evidence of shod-hoof tracks. We have no idea where our deserters are going at this point.\"\n\nGrit stared at the lieutenant for long moments in disbelief and disdain. \"Well, I can tell ya one thing for sure, lieutenant. She won't be found in the direction you're travelin'.\" With that, Grit started to ride on. He'd been right all along. They'd ridden out and given up, prepared to come back home empty-handed.\n\n\"I wouldn't advise going on, sir,\" the lieutenant shouted. \"Our scouts are telling us that some of the renegade Sioux and Cheyenne warriors are worked up about all the white men coming into the western Dakotas, and there are roving bands of war parties.\"\n\nGrit rode on because he knew Colleen would expect him to come. She was counting on him, and nothing in his being would allow him to disappoint her\u2014not even the imminent prospect of death. It just wasn't in him to go back. Wasn't even a thought in his mind.\n\nAn hour or so later he saw where the bison tracks had wiped out any evidence of shod ponies, and he kept moving west following the herd. He continued to ride in the lowlands, trying never to be at a high point where he could be seen from great distances.\n\nLate in the day, he found the herd of about 200 bison peacefully grazing in a valley filled with grass grown to the bisons' hocks. Grit rode around the herd to the western side and began casting about for the tracks of shod horses. He felt confident Atlock would stick close to the river, but he could have taken any one of the feeder streams that would still take him west toward the Black Hills. Grit figured if Atlock were smart, that's exactly what he would do.\n\nHe was looking hard at the ground when the bay horse he was trailing behind him suddenly jerked hard on the reins, and Grit looked up to find himself facing four Sioux warriors no more than 50 yards away. Grit's first thought was to grab his rifle but he didn't want to seem threatening, so he left the rifle in his scabbard and raised his hand, palm out as a sign of peace.\n\nThe warriors continued to stare at him, and then they started to talk among themselves. Grit imagined they were talking about whether to kill him or not, and he knew there was nothing to prevent them from attacking if they took a notion. He was wearing one of the Colt .44s he'd bought in Yankton, but he knew he wasn't very proficient in its use. He could draw and fire the six-gun, but he wasn't much for accuracy. As he sat there, he vowed that if he lived through this encounter, he'd find someone to teach him how to use the Colt and use it well. Grit thought it was funny what crazy thoughts went through your head in times of trouble.\n\nGrit saw the Indians separate, two going right and two going left, and then they charged, whooping and hollering like crazy men. He pulled the rifle from the scabbard, took aim and blew one warrior to his left right off his horse. The other warriors kept coming, but he paid no attention to their war cries. He jacked in another shell and fired at another, but must have missed. Now all three were riding right at him.\n\nHe swung his leg over and when he hit the ground, he looked over his saddle, levered in another shell and kept firing at the warriors. He knew that remaining calm and aiming carefully was the only way he'd survive. He aimed and hit one of the Sioux warriors on his right as he felt a bullet tug at his left arm. The wounded warrior clung to his horse's neck.\n\nGrit jumped away from his horses, bellied down in the grass, aimed carefully and brought down another warrior who was coming at him headlong on his horse. The warrior right behind rode at him and leapt from his horse. Grit pivoted and caught the warrior in mid-air, crashing the butt of the rifle into his head.\n\nHe turned and saw the wounded warrior leaning over his horse's neck and riding off. \"No you don't,\" he said. He knew he couldn't let the warrior escape and bring help. He aimed carefully, led the warrior and blew him right off his paint horse.\n\n\"Damn you all to hell,\" he said. \"I never asked for trouble, but you brought it on yourselves.\"\n\nHe stood in the stink of gunpowder and looked carefully at the nearest warrior to make sure he posed no threat, then he walked to the others and found them all dead but one. He'd been shot through the belly and had no chance of surviving. The warrior still alive had scooped dirt onto his wound to halt the bleeding, and when Grit approached, he stared at him with a malevolent glare, expecting Grit to kill him. Instead, Grit picked up the man's rifle, which lay about 10 feet away.\n\n\"Why?\" he asked. \"I didn't want to fight you.\"\n\nThe warrior looked up with glazed eyes, not comprehending what Grit was saying. \"I'm sorry,\" Grit said as he walked off.\n\nAll told, Grit found two Winchester 73s and two Springfields. He stood looking out at the surrounding hills wondering where the Sioux were getting all the rifles. He wrapped the Winchesters in a blanket and tied them with rawhide behind the saddle of the dun. The two Springfields he reluctantly ruined by slamming one against the other until he'd bent them so that they were of no use to anyone.\n\nHe could understand the frustration of the Indians as they saw more and more of their traditional hunting grounds invaded by white men, but there was nothing he could do about that. All he wanted to do was find Colleen and bring her back. He didn't care about anything else.\n\nThat night, he camped in a stream bottom with a scant few cottonwood trees, his spirits as low as he'd been the day they'd sent him to prison. In the center of the endlessly rolling plains, hunting for Colleen and the kidnappers was like hunting for a black cat in a coal mine. Still he had to keep looking. Fortunately, Paulie had enough money to take care of himself and Astrid for months, or even years, and Grit himself had enough to continue the hunt for weeks if necessary, but he was still hoping he could pick up a trail and find Colleen soon." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "13\n\nPaulie stayed the night at the fort and kept Astrid with him through the night. In the morning, he gathered the supplies Colleen had bought, put them in the wagon bed and made a little bed for Astrid right behind the driver's seat because by mid-morning, he knew she'd want her snack and would soon be yawning and want to lie down for a nap.\n\nWhen they got on the wagon seat, Paulie put his arm around Astrid and pulled her close.\n\n\"I have a surprise for you,\" he said.\n\n\"Sukkert\u00f8y?\" she asked excitedly.\n\n\"How did you ever guess?\" Paulie handed her a little sack with a few pieces of candy in it. She popped one into her mouth before holding up one and putting it into Paulie's mouth. They happily rode along eating the candy. After a couple of hours, he gave her some cookies he'd bought at the sutler's store and a drink from the canteen. Soon thereafter, just as he'd predicted, she crawled into the bed of the wagon, covered herself and fell asleep for the rest of the journey.\n\nWhile Paulie unloaded the supplies and carried them into the house, Astrid sat on the front steps, her chin cupped in her hand. When Paulie was finished, he came out and sat down beside her.\n\n\"When's Mama and Papa comin' back?\" she asked.\n\n\"I hope it'll be real soon, but we'll have some fun while they're gone. You want a piggyback ride?\"\n\nShe climbed onto his back and put her arms around his neck. \"Let's go down and see our woodpile.\" He carried her down on his back, alternately galloping and walking as she laughed. He saw that at least two riverboats had stopped and gotten wood, and sure enough, they'd left money underneath the log. He counted it and found it amounted to $520.\"\n\n\"Well, darlin',\" he said, \"we're doin' good.\"\n\n\"Look, here comes another riverboat,\" Astrid said as she spied the twin stacks shoving dark gray smoke into the air.\n\n\"Sure is,\" he said as he shoved the money into his pocket. He looked carefully up the river, and it looked like this was the boat they'd had trouble with last year. Sapphire it was called. Grit had handled an unruly boatswain's mate then, but Paulie might have to handle the same man. Paulie wasn't sure he'd have trouble, but he wanted to be prepared.\n\n\"Let's walk back up to the house so's I can get my rifle.\" He picked her up and cradled her like a baby and ran for the house. She laughed the whole way.\n\n\"Why you need your rifle?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm sure I don't,\" he said, \"but I don't like to be without it when I'm dealin' with men I don't know, sweetheart.\"\n\nHe and Astrid walked back down to the bank of the river and stood behind the stacked wood as the boat dropped anchor in the river. Roustabouts shoved off the boat in a rowboat, and there was a mate in the bow.\n\nPaulie said, \"Astrid, sweetheart, could you wait behind that big tree over there?\"\n\n\"Why, Paulie?\"\n\n\"The men... uh... they might be throwin' wood around, and I don't want you to get hurt.\"\n\nObedient as always, Astrid walked over and stood by the tree. Paulie smiled at her, and she smiled back.\n\nWhen the boat arrived at the shore, the mate said, \"We'll be needin' some wood.\"\n\n\"You see our sign,\" Paulie said. \"Take all you want at $7.50 a cord payable in advance.\"\n\n\"Seven fifty a cord!\" the mate said. \"Now, that ain't right for highway robbers like you to overcharge for wood. Your big pal did this to me last time, but I ain't takin' it from you. We're payin' $6.50!\"\n\n\"Sorry, can't help ya,\" Paulie said. \"You might find somebody up the river that'll sell ya wood for that amount, but not me.\"\n\nThe mate looked out at the river, then back at his three roustabouts. When he turned back to Paulie, his face was hideous and malevolent. \"Listen, you little ratbag. You're still wet behind the ears. We're payin' $6.50, and you're takin' it.\"\n\nPaulie smiled and said, \"Nope, sorry, but I'm not.\" Paulie picked up his rifle and held it in the crook of his arm. \"In fact, I'll not be selling you any wood whatever... now or any time. Get in your rowboat and head back. This is my homestead, legally bought and paid for.\"\n\n\"We gotta have wood!\" the mate shouted. \"We're about out!\"\n\nPaulie laughed. \"That's a problem alright, but not mine. Now get outta here and don't come back.\"\n\nOne of the roustabouts had started taking a few steps so that he could get around the four-foot-high wood pile at Paulie, who lifted the rifle, jacked in a shell and said, \"You'd best leave if you know what's good for you.\n\n\"Alright,\" the mate said. \"We'll pay the $7.50.\"\n\n\"No... I meant what I said. You'll get no wood from me. Now get outta here. And... you'll not be cutting any wood for the next half mile up the river. We own all that property, paid the government for it.\"\n\n\"Come on, you hornswoggler,\" the mate said. \"What am I gonna tell the captain?\"\n\n\"Be interesting to hear that,\" Paulie said, \"but I'm sure you'll be lyin' to make yourself look good.\"\n\n\"Alright, men, let's go,\" the mate said. He walked a few steps and turned back. Jabbing his finger, he said, \"I'm gonna tell every boat up the river not to buy wood from you, and you'll go broke.\"\n\nPaulie waved his hand and said, \"Do your worst, Mister.\"\n\nHe waited for the riverboat to steam upriver after the rowboat made it back, but after a time, another man climbed into the rowboat and the roustabouts started rowing toward the river bank once more.\n\nThe man climbed out of the boat, and removing his cap, said, \"Hello, young man. I'm Captain Winston of the Sapphire, and I understand we've had a terrible misunderstanding.\"\n\n\"No misunderstanding at all, Cap'n,\" Paulie said. \"I simply don't sell wood to anyone who insults me and calls me names.\"\n\n\"Ah, a nasty business that is, and I'm sorry about that,\" the captain said. \"Is there any way I can apologize and buy the wood for the price you're asking.\"\n\n\"Yessir, I'll be happy to sell it to you... and only you, but don't ever send your boatswain's mate here. He's a bully, and he didn't like it when I wouldn't let him bully me, and I didn't appreciate the language he used around the little girl either. It's hard work cutting the wood, and it's worth $7.50 a cord. I realize some sell for less, but we don't.\"\n\nThe captain said, \"Thank you, son. I'll take care of the mate in my own time.\" He pulled out a purse and handed over $300. \"We'll be needin' 40 cords. I'll have my men load the wood now.\"\n\n\"Fine, sir,\" Paulie said. \"I'll be standing by to make sure they get all 40 cords loaded.\"\n\nAstrid sat in Paulie's lap and watched the roustabouts load the wood into rowboats before rowing out and stacking it in on the lower deck of the Sapphire. When the boat steamed on upriver, Paulie said, \"Come on, sweetheart, let's get you some supper.\" She held out her arms, obviously tired, and he picked her up and carried her to the house as her little blonde head rested on his shoulder." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "When Grit got to the junction of the Belle Fourche River with the Cheyenne, he looked carefully at the map trying to figure which way the deserters would go. He'd long ago given up looking for tracks, believing as he did that the deserters had followed one of the Cheyenne River feeder streams, and he had no way of knowing which one. The Belle Fourche went almost due west while the Cheyenne turned almost due south and into the Black Hills.\n\nAccording to what he'd learned at the fort, gold had been discovered at French Creek, which was a tributary of the Cheyenne way down in the south part of the Black Hills. He decided he'd go on south, passing through the heart of the Black Hills, one of the many men daring the Sioux to attack and kill them. Only the other travelers were usually smart enough to stay in groups to help fend off the Sioux.\n\nAs Grit headed south, he began to see more and more of the ponderosa pines, which from a distance were so dark green, they looked almost black. He could understand why the Sioux called the area the black hills. What he didn't understand was why the Sioux considered the area sacred, but he realized he'd probably never understand much about the tribe.\n\nHe moved on south following the river. From the Belle Fourche junction, Grit figured he was about 120 miles more or less from French Creek, where he expected to run into a slew of other miners and probably some of General Custer's soldiers. He figured that eventually the deserters would bring Colleen to where the gold had been panned.\n\nThat afternoon, it started to rain, and Grit pulled out the oil cloth slicker he'd bought at the sutler's place. It covered his body and most of his saddle. Over the saddle on the spare horse, he tied a large piece of canvas to cover the saddle, saddlebags and Winchesters. It rained steadily throughout the rest of the day and into the night. Grit kept moving south along the river through the steady downpour, but as night came on, he began to search out a place where he could build a fire and dry out a little.\n\nOver against a bluff, he found an overhang that gave him shelter from the rain. Others must have stayed there because there was ample dry wood to start a fire at one side of the overhang. He unsaddled the horses and brought them out of the rain. From the saddlebags, he took out a bag of oats, and he fed the horses by hand. While he was still wet, he walked out into the high grass and cut bundles of grass for the horses and brought the bundles back under the overhang. After the horses were unsaddled and rubbed down, he took off his own pants and covered himself with a dry blanket.\n\nHe did his best for an hour to dry the legs of his pants near the fire as he put on a pot of coffee then ate his last can of beans while he fried some sowbelly. He ate the pork, then used the grease to make hotcakes, which he slathered in syrup and washed down with hot coffee. He sat by the fire in his longjohns, drinking coffee and turning from front to back to dry and warm himself as he went over his weapons, including the two Winchesters he'd gotten from the Sioux, cleaned them as best he could and reloaded them.\n\nWhen he'd finally dried his socks, he looked over at his steaming pants on the boulder that shielded his fire from any onlookers. He heard the call of coyotes in the far distance but none seemed near. Once he thought he heard the whining growl of a cougar. The fire would keep the animals away, Grit knew, but he had only enough dry wood for about another hour.\n\nLater he pulled on his socks and partially dried pants, settled his blankets around him and slept. He awoke in the chill of the morning, stamped into his boots and staked both horses out to forage in the still-wet grass.\n\nUnder the overhang, he turned up enough dry sticks for a small fire, over which he made coffee. After drinking a cup, he opened a can of tomatoes, drank the juice and ate the tomatoes. He had two more cups of coffee, scattered the fire and walked out to saddle the horses.\n\nAs he was saddling the bay, he looked off through the ponderosas and saw a trail where somebody had walked through the wet grass. His heart started beating faster knowing he'd left the rifles back under the overhang. He grabbed the bridles of the two horses and led them back to the overhang.\n\nHe picked up his Winchester, and kept it ready nearby as he finished saddling both horses, his eyes constantly roving the landscape where men could be hidden by any number of ponderosa pines. He was about ready to climb aboard the dun when he saw a man, obviously an Indian, who stepped out from behind the trunk of one of the ponderosas.\n\nGrit gripped the Winchester, not knowing what to think, but slowly the man raised his hand with his palm out. Stepping away from the horse, Grit lowered the rifle and returned the same signal, whereupon the Indian started walking toward him.\n\nAs he approached, he said, \"I'm Little Elk of the Absarokee.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Grit said. \"What do you need?\"\n\n\"Am scout for Custer,\" he said. \"Sioux found me and Great Bear, kill him but I escape.\"\n\nGrit knew that Absarokee was the native word for the Crow tribe. \"How can I help?\"\n\n\"I have much hunger.\"\n\n\"Well, let me see what I got,\" Grit said. From his saddlebags, he removed a handful of venison jerky that he'd bought at the sutler's store and handed it to Little Elk, who took a bite off of a piece and chewed it with a smile.\n\n\"Where you go?\"\n\n\"Down to where they found gold,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Custer gone, but I take to French Creek,\" Little Elk said as he mounted the bay horse. Grit looked up at him, uncertainty in his face.\n\n\"Trust Little Elk. Two days, we be there.\"\n\nGrit wasn't sure how much to trust the Indian. He took a deep breath, mounted and said, \"Okay, Little Elk, lead out. I'll be right behind you all the way.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "14\n\nLittle Elk had coal black hair braided down to below his shoulders and tied off with leather ties, but otherwise he was dressed much like a white man, denim trousers, a long-sleeve dirty white shirt with a black vest of wool. He was soaked, but he didn't seem to be suffering from the cold. He wore high-top moccasins with white and blue beads, and he was a little bow-legged. As he rode ahead of Grit, he could tell that Little Elk was born to a horse. It was as if he and the bay were one.\n\nWithin two miles, Little Elk led Grit into the Cheyenne River, which they crossed and kept going west along Box Elder Creek. It was a lonely and isolated land, but Little Elk seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go. He led Grit down game trails barely discernible through never-cut ponderosa forests so thick no wagon could have made it through.\n\nAfter a time, Little Elk stopped, and they rested the horses. Within a minute of stopping, Little Elk had assembled a fire. \"You have match?\" he asked. Grit lit the fire before pulling out the coffee pot. He filled it with water from his canteen and set it on a rock beside the fire and added a handful of Arbuckles.\n\nAfterward, Grit got out his frying pan and began cooking side pork, which they ate right out of the pan. Afterward, they ate hotcakes with syrup and drank all the coffee in the pot.\n\n\"Why you out here?\" Little Elk asked. \"For gold?\"\n\nGrit shook his head. \"No, I don't care about the gold. Some Army deserters, three of 'em, stole my wife. Word is that they were coming out here looking for gold.\"\n\n\"Not good. What you do?\"\n\nGrit chuckled. \"What should a man do?\"\n\n\"Kill 'em is only thing!\"\n\n\"I agree with you, Little Elk,\" Grit said. \"They're not fit to live.\"\n\n\"No law out here.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind,\" Grit said. \"I have to find them first.\"\n\n\"Hokay, let's go,\" Little Elk said.\n\nThey rode on and into a little valley with a stream, surrounded on all sides by hills filled with ponderosas. The grass was high, and a small herd of maybe 30 bison grazed. On the other side, there was a herd of elk and deer that looked up at the two riders as they crossed the valley but soon returned to cropping at the grass. On the far side, there was a waterfall as the stream fell from the hills to the west.\n\nSuddenly, Little Elk stopped and said, \"Into the woods.\"\n\nHe reined his horse back the way they'd come and into the forest. When he was deep in the ponderosas, he leapt from his horse and looked back. Shortly after, a party of six Sioux warriors rode into the valley on the far side. Grit and Little Elk watched as the warriors crossed the little valley.\n\n\"Are they a hunting party?\" Grit asked in a whisper.\n\n\"Yes, but they have all meat can carry,\" Little Elk said. \"See packhorses with loads.\"\n\n\"So why do we hide?\" Grit asked quietly.\n\n\"Absarokee and white man,\" was all Little Elk said, meaning it was dangerous for both of them. They watched until the Sioux warriors had crossed the valley and disappeared into the forest on the far side.\n\n\"Hokay, can go now,\" Little Elk said.\n\nLittle Elk led Grit along the edge of the valley and up into the hills of ponderosas so thick that only a man walking or on horseback could travel through them. There were no trails, but Little Elk moved ahead steadily making his own trail.\n\nAs they rode on, Grit asked, \"Where are most of the miners found?\"\n\n\"Not many, but a few along French Creek ,\" Little Elk said. \"Some go other places, but is dangerous. Sioux know can kill lone white men and nobody know. Many Sioux friends, but some outlaws.\"\n\nThat night, they camped along a stream flowing from a mountain to the west, a peak that appeared to be the highest in the region and looked like solid granite.\n\n\"How far away from French Creek are we?\"\n\n\"Ten hours on horse... maybe.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Grit found French Creek to be much like the other creeks he'd crossed in the Black Hills, varying from 10 to 20 feet across in most spots with verdant banks filled with high grass perfect for the horses.\n\n\"Where are all the men?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Up creek,\" Little Elk said. \"Hokay, we go now.\"\n\nAs he followed Little Elk up the creek, Grit felt like he'd been traveling forever, but he thought this was only his sixth day. He tried not to think about Colleen and her situation because he couldn't do anything for her, but he grew more sullen and angry about what Atlock had done.\n\nThey soon found two old-timers panning in French Creek about a mile up. When they saw Little Elk, a man grabbed a rifle and Grit rode ahead and said, \"Hold up there. This man's an army scout helping me. He means no harm.\"\n\n\"Wal, you never can tell,\" the old man said. \"Best to shoot first and ask questions later. Our motto... only good Indian...\"\n\n\"Yeah, yeah, I've already heard it,\" Grit said. \"I only have one question. Have you seen three men, could be in Army uniforms or reg'lar clothes, with a woman about 21 years old.\"\n\n\"No, ain't seen nobody like that lately,\" the man said.\n\n\"Alright, we'll be movin' on,\" Grit said as Little Elk once again led out.\n\nGrit asked the same questions of every man they met riding up French Creek, and he was surprised at how few men there were. Some\u2014the smarter ones\u2014were busy building cabins against the coming winter. Most were solitary souls, or had only one sidekick they trusted. Either they were already there in the Black Hills in violation of the treaty giving the lands to the Sioux, or they'd been close by when news of Custer's men finding gold had hit the newspapers. If the Sioux took it into their heads, they could drive out every man of the Black Hills.\n\nThat night around the fire, Grit got out the map and showed it to Little Elk. \"Where do you think the Army deserters would go?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I think they come French Creek, but you here first,\" Little Elk said.\n\nGrit nodded. \"So you think we've beaten them here, but they'll still come here?\" Little Elk nodded as he drank from the coffee cup the men shared. Grit stared at the map awhile before handing the map to Little Elk. \"Which way do you think they'll come?\"\n\n\"Oh, down big river, what you call Cheyenne.\"\n\n\"Okay, in the morning, we're gonna set up down there along the river and maintain a vigil in a place where we cannot be seen. We'll have to kill some meat because I'm about out of supplies. I do have plenty of coffee and salt and a little sugar, so we'll have to eat what we can find.\"\n\n\"Let me use rifle for shoot deer,\" he said.\n\nGrit trusted him enough that he reached over and uncovered the two Winchesters he'd taken from the Sioux warriors. \"Okay, use this rifle. I took it from a Sioux warrior.\"\n\nLittle Elk gave him a sharp look of unease. \"He dead!\"\n\n\"They attacked me, and I shot 'em down,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Where?\"\n\n\"Probably 150 miles up the Cheyenne.\"\n\nLittle Elk looked over the rifle. \"Good, no sign for owner. Tomorrow, I'll kill deer.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "The next morning, Grit and Little Elk made their camp behind a granite outcropping that hid them from river travelers from the north, but gave them a view from the top of the outcropping of the trail along the Cheyenne as the travelers passed.\n\n\"This is the perfect spot right here, Little Elk,\" Grit said. \"I'll keep watch. You go ahead and hunt.\"\n\n\"Hokay,\" he said as he swung aboard his bay horse.\n\nGrit lay on his belly on top of the outcropping and watched the trail through the field glasses from early morning until Little Elk returned shortly before noon with a deer hide full of meat.\n\nAs he dismounted, he said, \"Hokay, we eat!\"\n\n\"Good,\" Grit said from atop the granite as he continued to watch.\n\nLittle Elk built up the fire and soon had two chunks of venison roasting over the fire on sharpened sticks. The smell of meat cooking made Grit's stomach rumble and his mouth water. He took one last look with his field glasses and backed himself off the granite shelf and onto the ground.\n\n\"You no see?\" Little Elk asked as he handed Grit a chunk of cooked venison.\n\nGrit shook his head. He took a bite of the meat, swallowed it and said, \"Thanks for this.\" He held up the meat on a stick before taking another bite. The venison tasted delicious, especially so since he'd had little meat for a week except bacon because he'd done no hunting, fearing the gunshots might alert the deserters or the Sioux.\n\n\"Soon's I eat, I'm thinkin' of ridin' up the river and seein' what I can find,\" Grit said.\n\n\"No, wait,\" Little Elk said. \"They come.\"\n\nGrit had no idea how Little Elk was so certain, but sure enough that afternoon, as he lay on the top of the granite outcrop, Grit saw four riders in the far distance, but even with his field glasses, he couldn't make out whether one might be a woman. Even so, Grit's heart quickened, his eyes glued to the field glasses praying that he'd finally found his Colleen.\n\nHis hands were rock steady holding the field glasses, but his eyes were misted with tears at the thought that it might be his wife. He pulled the field glasses aside and wiped his eyes, then looked once more and saw his beautiful Colleen, her face bruised and dirty. He gripped the field glasses even tighter as he slid from the granite shelf, anger causing hot bile in his throat.\n\n\"You were right,\" Grit said. \"That's them.\"\n\n\"What you do?\" Little Elk asked.\n\n\"I don't know yet,\" Grit said. He stood at the side of the granite outcrop and looked again with the field glasses. One of the troopers had a rope hooked to his saddle. Grit wondered where he'd gotten it because cavalry troopers never carried ropes. He focused on Atlock who was in the lead, followed by Colleen and then the two troopers.\n\nTurning to Little Elk, Grit asked, \"Where can I intercept them with the least danger to my wife.\"\n\n\"Come,\" Little Elk said. \"Follow me.\" He began running with his Winchester in his right hand and Grit followed. He ran fast and led the way to a thickly wooded spot by the river.\n\n\"When come, can shoot from here,\" Little Elk said.\n\n\"No, I can't endanger my wife.\"\n\n\"Then we walk across river.\" Little Elk led the way down into the river, which was no more than 20 feet wide and three or four feet deep. When they got to the other side, Little Elk said, \"I cover behind. You take man in front.\" Grit nodded.\n\nThrough the bushes and small trees, Grit watched as Atlock led the little party ahead. Soon he heard the horses' shod hooves hitting the ground, and when he did, he walked out in front of Atlock, who jerked back on the reins of his horse, some 20 feet away from Grit.\n\nHolding the rifle to the shoulder and aimed right at Atlock, Grit said, \"Get off the horse!\"\n\n\"How... how in hell... how did you get ahead of us?\" Atlock asked.\n\nGrit fired the rifle and hit Atlock in the shoulder. He jacked in another shell. \"I said, 'get off the horse!'\"\n\nAtlock was in anguish, holding onto his shoulder. He held out his hand, \"Okay, okay, I'll get down.\"\n\nGrit fired again and hit Atlock in the other shoulder, knocking him from the horse. Atlock screamed as his body plunged to the hard-packed earth.\n\nThen he heard another shot. Grit looked up and saw one of the other troopers on the ground, and Little Elk had the corporal covered with his rifle.\n\nAtlock was moaning as Grit took all his weapons and tossed them aside. He walked back to where Colleen was sitting on the horse, and tears ran down his face as he looked at the blackened eyes, cut lips and bruised face of his sweet wife. Somebody had beaten her severely.\n\n\"Oh, Grit, knowing you would come is the only thing that kept me going,\" she said hoarsely as she fell from the horse into his arms and wept. He held Colleen as she sobbed and sobbed. When her tears finally ceased, she looked up at him through her nearly closed eyes. \"What are we gonna do?\"\n\n\"First, we're gonna get you settled and comfortable around the fire, then I'll take care of these men,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't wanna know,\" she said.\n\n\"No, you don't,\" he said. \"It's something I have to do.\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nTurning to Little Elk, Grit asked, \"Is that trooper dead?\" Little Elk nodded. \"Let's tie up the other two.\"\n\nAs Atlock screamed and cursed, Grit tied him up and then tied the corporal before staking out the three horses so that they could forage. Grit lifted Colleen back onto her horse and said, \"We'll take you to our camp and get you some food. This man helping me is Little Elk of the Crow tribe. He's one of Custer's scouts.\"\n\nAtlock screamed, \"One of Custer's scouts? You're one of us, and you're dead when I report you to the Army.\"\n\nLittle Elk smiled, made his fist into a pistol with his index finger pointed at Atlock, and lowered his thumb. Grit smiled, \"That'll give Atlock something to think about,\" he whispered to himself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "15\n\nLittle Elk led the way once more down into the cold waters of the Cheyenne River and walked across. Grit followed, leading the horse with Colleen aboard. When they reached the campsite, he lifted her down and said, \"Now what can I do to help?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know,\" she said. \"I'm so sore and beat up. I must be a sight.\"\n\nHe pushed back her hair from her forehead and said, \"You're the most beautiful sight I ever saw, and that comes straight from my heart. We'll get you well, then we'll head back home.\"\n\n\"You're a good liar, and I love your for it,\" she said.\n\n\"I'm about out of everything to eat,\" he said, \"but we've got some venison we can cook, and I still have plenty of coffee and some of the sugar loaf left.\"\n\nWithin a few minutes, he'd cooked her a portion of venison and served it cut up on his only plate with a cup of coffee with sugar. She ate as he built up the fire and puttered around the campfire.\n\nWhen she had finished eating, she said, \"I'd like to get clean, but I got nothin' to wear.\"\n\n\"Well, I've got some blankets, and you could wash in the river, and I'll wrap you in my coat and your legs in blankets. I'll wash your clothes, and we can hang 'em by the fire to dry.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't mind a nap while they dry,\" she said.\n\n\"Good, let's do it,\" Grit said.\n\nAfter her bath, Grit wrapped her up and carried her back up to the campsite. He washed her socks and her dress as best he could. He noticed that her underpants had a lot of dried blood. He soaked them for some time in the river and was able to get most of the stain out. It was the best he could do with no soap. He drove two tree limbs into the ground and lashed a longer limb across them, from which he hung the clothing back from the fire so that it would dry sooner. Colleen watched him as she lay nearby in the warmth of Grit's coat and his blankets.\n\n\"You just rest now, and I'll be back soon,\" he said. \"Nobody will bother you, so rest easy.\" Colleen nodded and closed her eyes.\n\nLittle Elk led the way back across the river and the two men they'd left tied there. When Grit approached Atlock he said, \"Atlock, we're gonna get you on your horse.\"\n\n\"I can't get on no horse,\" Atlock said.\n\n\"Okay, then you'll have to walk,\" Grit said.\n\n\"To where?\"\n\n\"To the bank of the river.\"\n\n\"What for?\"\n\n\"You'll find out.\"\n\n\"I ain't walkin' nowhere,\" he said.\n\n\"Okay,\" Grit said. He grabbed the rope off the dead trooper's horse and walked back to Atlock. Before Atlock knew what had happened, Grit had tied a loop around his ankles. He got on Atlock's horse and dragged his body over to the cottonwood tree by the side of the river as the man kept screaming that he was in pain. Grit got down, untied the rope from Atlock's ankles, then quickly tied it around his neck.\n\n\"You can't hang me,\" Atlock shouted. \"I'm a U.S. cavalry trooper, and I'm a wounded man.\" He cursed Grit in the most vile terms possible. \"You Indian lover, you consort with that heathen.\"\n\nAs Grit threw the rope over a limb, he said, \"Little Elk is a better man than you'll ever be. He doesn't kidnap, rape and beat women. You are the lowest form of human life, Atlock.\" Grit pulled Atlock straight up into the tree and tied the rope off.\n\nThen the corporal began begging with all his being. \"No, no, no. I don't wanna hang. I never done nothin' to the woman. It was all Atlock's idea. We never touched her.\"\n\nGrit glared down at him and said, \"Did you ever stop Atlock from what he did to her?\"\n\n\"No, but he was in charge. He's the sergeant. We couldn't stop him.\"\n\n\"So... you let that monster beat and rape my wife, and you did nothing!\"\n\nThe corporal moaned on and on, knowing it was clear he hadn't done anything to help Colleen. And then he started crying like a stricken baby. Grit paid him no mind. He grabbed his collar and dragged him to the tree. He lowered Atlock's body, removed the rope from his neck and put it around the corporal's neck and lifted him straight up.\n\n\"You bury 'em now?\" Little Elk asked later as they stood by the cottonwood.\n\n\"No shovel,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Hokay, I drag in trees,\" Little Elk said.\n\nThe next morning, Colleen's face was pale, the bruises more evident, and her eyes were still half-closed from the swelling, but she told Grit she wanted to leave.\n\n\"I wanna see Astrid and get home where I can get a good hot bath,\" she said. \"I wanna heal.\"\n\nGrit was ready within a half hour. He lifted Colleen onto the horse, and they crossed the river. \"Find us the quickest way to Fort Sully,\" Grit told Little Elk." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "A few miles from the fort, Little Elk said, \"I go Fort Sully, deliver army horses, then find Custer. You go home from here. Can I keep rifle?\"\n\n\"Absolutely, you can,\" Grit said. \"I owe you much, Little Elk. I couldn't have gotten my wife back without you, and I'll always be grateful.\"\n\n\"Hokay, friend forever,\" Little Elk said with a smile as he extended his hand.\n\nGrit shook hands and nodded, \"Yes, friend forever.\"\n\nThree hours later, Grit and Colleen rode up to their house. They could hear the sound of an ax, and Grit knew Paulie must be cutting wood. He lifted Colleen from her horse, and they both walked down to the woodyard and found Astrid sitting astride a log watching Paulie chop limbs from a bur oak with his ax. Paulie stopped, looked up and quickly dropped the ax. He ran toward them, grabbing Astrid as he ran by.\n\n\"Look who's home, Astrid!\" he yelled.\n\nShe looked up and screamed, \"Mama! Papa!\"\n\nPaulie gently handed Astrid over to Colleen, and he hugged Grit. \"It's so good to see you both. Astrid and I were worried. That's why I was cutting wood\u2014to stay busy so I wouldn't worry so much.\"\n\n\"Well, we're back now,\" Grit said.\n\nPaulie looked at Colleen's face and said, \"I'm so sorry, Colleen, for what they did to you, but I thank God you're back.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Paulie. It's so good to be back and see you and Astrid and our lovely home.\"\n\nThat afternoon, Colleen had a long bath as Grit heated the water for her and kept adding hot water while she soaked. For the first time in two weeks, she washed her hair with real soap.\n\n\"It's that lovely chestnut color again,\" Grit said as he smiled at her.\n\nWhile Grit took his own quick bath after Colleen got out, she dressed in clean clothing. \"I think I'll just throw out these old things.\"\n\n\"Fine with me,\" Grit said. \"I'll build a fire and burn 'em.\"\n\nAfter they were both dressed, she hugged Grit and said, \"Have I told you lately how much I love you?\"\n\n\"Not lately, no, but I should be telling you too. I do love you, my sweet Colleen.\"\n\n\"You know what kept me going out there?\"\n\n\"Tell me,\" he said.\n\n\"I knew nothing on earth would hold you back. So through it all, I knew those men would get their just punishment.\"\n\nGrit held her to his chest in the middle of the parlor until they heard Paulie and Astrid on the porch outside. Leaving Grit, Colleen walked over and opened the door.\n\n\"Come on in, my sweet Astrid,\" Colleen said. \"We're heating fresh bath water for you to have a soak in the tub.\"\n\n\"No, I don't need a bath,\" Astrid said. \"Paulie and I swam in the river.\"\n\n\"Oh, did you now?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"Yes, and it was so much fun,\" she said. \"We saw some ducks swimming, and a mustrat too.\"\n\n\"Oh, a mustrat. I don't think I've seen one of those, but you still need a nice, warm bath... with soap,\" Colleen said, \"and we need to wash your hair.\"\n\n\"Aw, do we have to?\"\n\n\"Yes, we do,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"We'll go do the chores,\" Grit said. \"I'll set the water buckets right outside the door.\"\n\nIn the few days before Paulie's leaving, he and Grit threshed the wheat and put the kernels in gunny sacks for transport to the mill in Yankton.\n\nFour days later, Paulie rode off on the bay horse for Yankton to buy the clothes and other things needed for college. He had to have three dress suits made. The rest of the family packed up two days later to meet Paulie and buy supplies for the coming winter.\n\n\"Are we all ready?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"I think we are,\" Grit said.\n\nThe trip took three days, and on the third day, they dropped off the wheat to be threshed at the mill before going on into Yankton.\n\n\"We'll pick up our flour on the way back,\" Grit told the miller.\n\n\"Then I'll pay for your excess when I see you,\" the miller said.\n\nAs usual, they got baths and cleaned themselves up in Yankton before going to supper. Astrid ran to Paulie when she saw him, saying, \"Paulie, I missed you.\"\n\n\"You did?\" She nodded. \"Well, I missed you too.\"\n\nAt supper that night, Colleen asked, \"Paulie, are you excited to go off to college? I know I would be.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm excited, but I'm a little apprehensive too,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Why?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"I'll be in school with men older than me,\" Paulie said. \"I hope I can keep up with my studies. So I'm a little worried about that, and I know I'm gonna miss everyone.\"\n\n\"You'll be fine,\" Colleen said. \"You have a good mind, and you can study as well as anyone. I wish I could go to college with you. I've always wanted to go to college.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I've always dreamed of being a teacher,\" Colleen said.\n\nThe next morning after breakfast, Grit took out the draw-string bag with their money in it, and he removed a thousand dollars. \"Alright, we earned a little over $4,500 this year, so you take a thousand dollars and open yourself a bank account in Lincoln. Take out money when you need it.\"\n\n\"I don't need that much,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Maybe not, but I want you to have it,\" Grit said. \"I don't want you to be the poorest young man in college. There will be some activities you'll wanna do, and I want you to take advantage of those. All your education doesn't come from books.\"\n\nAt the train depot the next morning, Colleen and Astrid were crying and so was Paulie. \"I already miss you, Paulie,\" Astrid told him through her tears.\n\n\"I know, and I'll miss you too, my little sweetheart,\" Paulie said. It was a tearful farewell, but for Grit it was a satisfying one. Paulie was going to get the education that Grit himself had never gotten and most likely never would. When Grit hugged Paulie just before he got on the train, his only words were, \"Make us proud.\"\n\nGrit and Colleen turned from the train station and went directly to Plunkett's General Store where they intended to get all the supplies they'd need for the winter ahead.\n\nAs they walked into the store, Grit said, \"C'mon, Astrid, let's get you some candy. You point to the ones you want, and the clerk will put 'em in a sack.\" She pointed and finally got her little sack of candy. Grit pulled a handkerchief and wiped the trails of tears from her eyes.\n\n\"It'll be alright,\" he told her as he squatted down to her level. \"Paulie will be back for Christmas. Let's go get you some new books.\"\n\nOn the way to see about the books, Astrid stopped dead in her tracks at the sight of a beautiful little doll about a foot high that strangely enough looked a lot like Astrid with her blonde hair. Astrid didn't touch it, but stood eating a piece of candy and staring at the doll. Grit stepped over to Colleen and pointed to Astrid.\n\n\"Oh my, can we get it for her?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"Of course we can,\" Grit said. \"You go get it for her.\"\n\nColleen walked over, leaned down and spoke with Astrid, who was astonished when Colleen took the doll from the shelf and handed it to her. She cradled it in her little arms and kept staring down at it. Suddenly, she looked up at Colleen and asked, \"Can I have her?\"\n\nColleen nodded, \"She's going home with you.\"\n\nWhen they had all their supplies and had loaded them in the wagon, Grit said, \"There's one other thing I wanna do.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"I'm going to the bank and add $2,000 to our account,\" he said. \"And you need to come so that your name can be on the account too.\"\n\nWhen the banking was done, Grit said, \"It's close enough to dinner time. Let's get one last meal at Frank's before we leave, and maybe we'll get some supper to take with us.\"\n\nTwo days later, they pulled onto their property and Grit said, \"You two ladies can go into the house. I'll unload the wagon.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Colleen said as she took Astrid in her arms.\n\nAs Grit watched her go, he found himself worried. Colleen had periods when she seemed to be in another world. She did everything required of her, but she seemed burdened, not at all happy and light-hearted like she had been before she'd been kidnapped. He thought maybe she was having a difficult time forgetting the awful things done to her, and he could understand that.\n\nIt had taken Grit an hour to put all the supplies away, including the apples, heads of cabbage, potatoes, carrots and onions in the root cellar. When he came in, Colleen had supper cooking. Astrid had already eaten and had been tucked into bed. He walked over to her room and opened the door. He found Astrid already asleep and in her left arm was the new doll. He smiled to himself and closed the door.\n\nAt supper, he asked Colleen, \"Is there anything I can do for you, any chores you want me to do?\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact,\" she said, \"you could plow the garden under for the winter and put horse manure on it.\"\n\n\"Okay, I'll do it tomorrow,\" he said. \"We won't have any more riverboats this year, so I've got all the time in the world. If you think of other things, just let me know.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "16\n\nOver the next few days, Grit started getting ready for winter. He cut wood and brought up a large supply for the months to come, split it expertly for the kitchen stove and kept the firebox full. He plowed the garden, spread the horse manure, then plowed the manure into the soil. It would result in lots of weeds in the spring, but he could hoe those out that grew after the garden was planted. He sharpened the push plow after using it, making it ready for spring, and he did the same to the saws and axes that he planned to use that winter to get a supply of wood for the spring.\n\nHe made sure there was always a fresh bucket of spring water on the porch, and when necessary he carried water for baths and for washing clothes. In addition to his own labors, he did everything possible to ease Colleen's burdens, but nothing seemed to lift the cloud of gloom that overtook Colleen at times. She did everything expected of her, but he sensed that his sweet wife was burdened, and he wasn't sure what he could do. In the silent chambers of his heart, he had a constant prayer that time would allow her to heal.\n\nThat fall Grit went to work, putting in long hours so that he might have wood ready to sell come springtime. He figured that even without Paulie, he could earn maybe $3,000 next summer, which would allow him to have gracious plenty to support his little family.\n\nThroughout the fall, he did his own work and as much of Colleen's as she would permit. He thanked the good Lord each day for his remarkable strength and ability to earn his own living.\n\nIn October, an Army courier coming from Yankton to Fort Randall and on to Fort Sully dropped off a letter from Paulie. Grit was working down in the woodyard when the courier came, so Colleen saved the letter, which had been written two weeks before, and they opened it together at supper time. Colleen read it aloud.\n\nDear Grit, Colleen and Astrid,\n\nI have moved into a rooming house in Lincoln that provides me with breakfast and supper, and I've started classes at University Hall, which is just north of the town. My first class, English composition and grammar, begins at 8 a.m., so I have breakfast early and walk to the college. There are only 21 first-year students, and we have all our classes together. My other classes include Latin, mathematics, geography, American history and business studies.\n\nSo far, things seem to be going well. I like all of the professors, but some more than others. My Latin teacher knows his subject well, but he's not a particularly good instructor. Even so, I'm learning a lot. Two of the first-year students are women, and they seem serious-minded and very capable.\n\nOne of the women students, Mary Beth Parkins, lives in the boarding house next to mine, and we sometimes walk to University Hall together in the mornings. She's from Bellevue, a town along the Missouri River below Omaha. Her father is a merchant with stores in Bellevue and Papillion. She's learned bookkeeping by doing her father's books for the last few years.\n\nOther than that, I've made friends with several of my classmates, and I find our association to be quite pleasant. My last class ends at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and I usually stay and study until it's time to leave for supper. In the evenings, I'm often doing compositions which satisfy the demands of Mister Emerson, our instructor in English. He requires that we have excellent handwriting and won't permit any erasures in the papers we turn in. It's a rigorous course of study, but I'm learning a lot and mostly enjoying myself. Even though it's challenging intellectually, it's a lot easier than chopping wood all day.\n\nI miss all of you. Colleen, please give little Astrid a hug for me and tell her how much I love and miss her.\n\nLove to you all,\n\nPaulie\n\nAfter the letter was read, Astrid sat in her chair at the end of the table, and she seemed to be in deep thought. \"I miss Paulie,\" she said. \"When does he come home?\"\n\n\"He'll be here for Christmas, I think,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"But that's a long time,\" Astrid said.\n\n\"You're right, it is,\" Colleen said. \"Would you like to write Paulie a letter?\" Astrid nodded her head. \"Okay, we'll do it right after supper.\"\n\nIt was at that moment that an idea sprang into Grit's mind. What if he moved to Lincoln where Colleen could go to college next year? Maybe the prospect of that could lift her spirits and get her to focus on a brighter future. People in Lincoln had to have wood to burn for their stoves, and he could supply that wood, or surely a hard-working man could find some way to support a family.\n\nHe didn't mention anything about his idea to Colleen right away. He wanted to think about it, and he had nowhere better to think than when he was cutting firewood. He worked hard for an entire week, putting in long hours each day.\n\n\"You're working so hard, you'll have to start eating more,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"I probably need it,\" Grit said. \"Maybe you could fix me some sandwiches for the mid-morning and mid-afternoon.\"\n\n\"That would be no problem at all,\" Colleen said. \"But you don't have to make up for Paulie not being here.\"\n\n\"Not trying to, but I've been thinkin' maybe we should move toward the end of next summer,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Move where?\" Colleen asked, alarm evident on her face.\n\n\"Well, I was thinkin' they got a lotta trees in Canada, and we could make some money up there,\" Grit said, a small smile on his lips.\n\n\"Ah, you're pullin' my leg,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"Yeah, I am,\" he said. \"How about moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, so that you could go to college.\"\n\n\"Me? Go to college? And who'll take care of Astrid?\"\n\n\"We could find somebody to keep her during the day,\" he said, \"but if you don't want to, I'll quit thinkin' about it.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a novel idea,\" she said, \"and you've just sprung it on me. Give me a chance to think about it.\"\n\n\"Take as long as you want,\" Grit said. \"We don't have to do it, you know, but I can cut Nebraska wood as good as Dakota wood. I'm sure I could make a living for us down there.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" Colleen said. \"How long have you been thinking about this?\"\n\n\"Oh, been in the back of my mind for a while,\" he said. \"Been in the front of my mind for a coupla weeks.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me before now?\"\n\n\"I wanted to be sure it was something I was willing to do.\"\n\n\"And why are you willing to do it?\"\n\nHe smiled at her. \"Because I think you want it, and I want you to have it.\"\n\n\"Want what?\"\n\n\"To go to college,\" he said. \"Don't you?\"\n\n\"I can't deny it,\" he said.\n\n\"Then you should think about it,\" Grit said.\n\nGrit went back to work the following day with sandwiches to eat morning and afternoon. He'd been laboring so hard and so long that he was losing weight. He'd had to pull his belt in two notches to hold up his pants, and his shirt was fitting loosely on his frame.\n\nWith the sandwiches he found he was able to work longer and do more without getting tired. When he came in a few days later, he saw a change in Colleen. She was happier and the burden seemed to have been lifted. At first, Grit thought it might be his imagination, but the new Colleen continued all that week. On Friday, after a full day of labor and after eating a huge dinner, he asked, \"So, have you done any thinking about us moving?\"\n\n\"I have, and I think it's a marvelous idea,\" she said. \"Maybe I can go to school, but even if I don't, it would be nice to live in a town where I could have female friends, and we could have some stores closer. I think it would much improve our lives if we lived in a community, so to speak.\"\n\n\"Alright, then it's settled,\" he said. \"We'll be moving late next summer.\"\n\nThat night, after they'd both had a bath, Colleen snuggled up to Grit and began to kiss him. It was the first time it had happened since she'd been kidnapped. They'd had sex a few times, and she'd professed to enjoy it, but that night was different. She was her old self, initiating sex and letting him know she wanted him urgently.\n\nThe next morning, Grit said, \"Okay, let's you and I and Astrid take a trip.\"\n\n\"To where?\" she asked.\n\n\"To Lincoln,\" he said. \"I'd like to check out the possibilities of having my own business and of supporting the family. Meanwhile, you could look over the town, see Paulie, and see about getting into the university.\"\n\nShe turned from the stove and said, \"You're just full of good ideas, aren't you? I'll get everything ready. When can we leave?\"\n\n\"In the morning.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "When they arrived in Lincoln, Astrid was giddy with excitement to see Paulie, but he was in classes until 2 o'clock, so Grit got them settled in a hotel room. As Colleen looked out the hotel window, she said, \"I see one big problem already.\"\n\n\"What's that?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"There are no trees on the Nebraska prairie,\" she said.\n\n\"I noticed that when I came over here with Paulie,\" he said, \"but there are trees on the Missouri River, which is only 50 miles east, so I'll cut the wood there and deliver it in Lincoln. I'll work something out.\"\n\n\"Maybe you could start up a lumber store,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"Now, that's an idea I hadn't thought of before.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Grit took Astrid for a walk around town while Colleen visited with the registrar to determine if she would be admitted to the university.\n\n\"If we can get the record of your high school graduation,\" the registrar said, \"and if your grades are as good as you say, you'll be admitted without an entrance exam. So your next step would be to get your high school records sent to us. When we receive them we'll notify you by mail of your acceptance.\"\n\n\"What if I am heavy with a child?\" Colleen asked. \"I'm a married woman. So far we only have the little girl we adopted, but I expect one day I'll have a baby.\"\n\n\"You might have to skip a term, but being with child is not a problem as long as you can do the work,\" he said.\n\n\"I have no doubt I can do the work,\" she said.\n\nWhen she came out of the registrar's office, she saw Grit and Astrid sitting on a bench near the side door of University Hall.\n\n\"Everything okay?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Seems to be,\" she said. \"I need to get St. Anthony's in Chicago to send my records to the university. He said with my grades I could be admitted without an entrance exam.\"\n\n\"Then that settles it,\" he said. \"We'll be moving here and getting settled before school begins.\"\n\n\"Are you really gonna do that?\" she asked.\n\nGrit laughed. \"I said I was. Didn't you hear me?\"\n\n\"Yes, but I can't believe you're doing all that for me.\"\n\nGrit leaned down next to Colleen's ear and whispered, \"Believe it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "A little while later, they stood outside Paulie's classroom. \"Just watch that door right there,\" Grit said to Astrid. \"Paulie will come out when class is over.\" The door opened and several young men came through the door, but no Paulie. After most had exited, Astrid peeked in and saw Paulie talking with another student. She waved, then ran to him.\n\nHe scooped her up into his arms, hugged and kissed her before asking, \"Where did you come from, you little beauty?\" She pointed to the door where Grit and Colleen were standing. Paulie walked over and hugged everyone. \"This is a surprise. What are you all doin' here?\"\n\nAstrid said, \"We're movin' here.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nGrit looked at Colleen, who said, \"Grit says we're moving here next fall so that I also can attend the university.\"\n\nPaulie looked at Grit for some explanation. \"Well, she wanted to go to college, and we can afford it, so why not? I'll find something to do to support the family.\"\n\n\"It was a joyful reunion, but Paulie had his studies, and the following day, Grit and Colleen headed back home with Astrid. In Yankton, Colleen sent a letter to St. Anthony's to have her transcript sent to the University of Nebraska. And she wrote a letter to her mother and father in Chicago." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "17\n\nThe next few months passed quickly, and they all endured another Dakota winter. Grit worked hard getting cords and cords of wood stacked along the banks of the river. Colleen tried to tell Grit to slow down and not work so hard, but he was like a man possessed. If there was daylight, he worked and Colleen fed him huge meals to fend off the cold and maintain his weight.\n\nPaulie came home for Christmas and brought a letter for Colleen telling her she'd been accepted into the university. Paulie helped with the cutting of wood, and Astrid spent every minute she could with Paulie, whether he was inside or outside, and she was saddened once more to see him leave.\n\nIn the spring, the riverboats came to buy hundreds of cords of wood. And with the riverboats came lots of travelers, on horseback, on foot and in wagons traveling to the Black Hills in search of the riches that the eastern newspapers described in expansive terms. Grit would often wave and occasionally speak to the gold-seekers, but mostly he ignored them.\n\nPaulie arrived back home in early June, and he went to work as if he'd never left. He'd grown two inches and filled out in the last year. His skill with the axes was as good as it had ever been, and he was stronger, but his hands blistered, and he had to wear gloves until his hands developed callouses.\n\nIn late summer, they found they'd earned nearly $5,000, and they finally shut it all down and got ready to leave for good in late August. The whole family packed everything up and rode out in the wagon for Yankton. Paulie rode the bay horse and Astrid, now four years old, rode in front of him until she got tired and took her nap in the wagon. When they arrived in Yankton, Grit and Paulie asked Simon Cloud, the lawyer who'd handled the adoption of Astrid, if he would advertise and try to sell both homesteads.\n\n\"Get what you can for 'em,\" Grit told him. \"If we get a thousand dollars, we'll be about even, but we'll take whatever we can get.\"\n\n\"We did quite well in Dakota Territory,\" Grit said with a laugh. \"Paulie and I came out here from Ohio, a couple of tramps on a cattle car. We had nothin' but the clothes on our backs, a few dollars in our pockets and a willingness to work. Now we've got two of our number going to college.\"\n\nColleen hugged him and said, \"I've never seen anybody work as hard as you do. And Paulie is just like you.\"\n\n\"Well, we've all contributed, and we've done alright,\" Grit said.\n\nThey'd discussed the best ways to travel, and decided Coleen, Astrid, and Paulie would take the train to Lincoln and Grit would follow in the wagon with their belongings. Grit waved goodbye to everyone as they left on the train from Yankton. He'd given Colleen money to buy or rent a house and to buy whatever else she and Astrid needed, and he'd given Paulie a thousand dollars for his next year's college expenses. He left $5,000 in the Yankton bank and was carrying $3,600 with him. He hid all but a hundred dollars in an iron box bolted underneath the bed of the wagon. The box wasn't much bigger than the $50 bills, so it would be difficult for any thieves to find.\n\nRight after his family left, Grit followed in the wagon pulled by the two mules they had and two more they'd recently bought. Both the dun and bay horses were tied to the tailgate. He figured it would take him roughly a week to get to Lincoln with all the family's belongings, but it was the cheapest way to do it because he thought he might need the mules and wagon in any business he set up. As he rumbled down the road toward the ferry that would take him across the wide Missouri, he didn't see the two black-bearded men mount their horses and follow.\n\nGrit paid his money and drove the wagon onto the ferry, which utilized the river's current for power and took him down and over to the other side of the Missouri in about 20 minutes. He rode off the ferry and headed south toward Lincoln. He hadn't gone too far when he overtook a man walking in the middle of the road. The man moved aside to let Grit pass, but otherwise didn't offer any greeting.\n\nAs Grit passed, he looked down at the pedestrian, and he just kept walking, seeming not to notice that the wagon was even there.\n\n\"Want a ride?\" Grit shouted.\n\nThe man looked up and said, \"Yessir, I'd appreciate one.\"\n\nGrit stopped the wagon, and the man climbed up onto the seat by Grit, stowing his haversack and rifle in the wagon. \"So where you goin'?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Goin' to Lincoln, see if I can find some work,\" the man said.\n\nGrit held out his right hand and said, \"Grit Milburn.\"\n\n\"Casey Daws,\" the man said as he took Grit's hand.\n\n\"What kinda work you do?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"'Bout any kind, I guess,\" Daws said, \"if it'll pay me enough to live on.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm goin' to Lincoln, so I can take you there.\"\n\n\"Much obliged, Mister,\" Daws said.\n\n\"Probably be faster if you walk, but you'll wear out a lot of shoe leather,\" Grit said.\n\nDaws laughed and said, \"True, and I can't afford another pair of shoes.\"\n\nWhen they stopped to rest the animals at midday, Daws jumped right in and did his part. He helped Grit unhitch the mules and then staked the horses out to forage. Daws built a fire and got water from a nearby stream. Grit had his chores but he noticed that Daws was wanting to do his part, and he was impressed.\n\nAs they sat around the fire drinking coffee and preparing a meal, Daws said, \"Two horsemen just topped that ridge, then reined their horses back around.\"\n\n\"Yeah?\"\n\n\"Like they saw us and didn't want us to see them.\"\n\n\"There's all kinds on the plains,\" Grit said. \"For now, let's eat the venison and beans.\" Within an hour, they were moving south once again, sitting on the high seat together. They crossed several small streams. It seemed eastern Nebraska was dotted with them, which was good for the mules and horses. Grit knew that every hot day, working hard like that day, the animals might need 10 gallons of water each.\n\nThey stopped that night near a small stream and prepared their camp. The mules had worked hard and had given Grit nary a problem. He got out a gunny sack to rub them down.\n\nDaws said, \"Let me do that.\" He watered each of the animals, gave them a rubdown with the gunnysack before staking them out to forage.\n\n\"This venison is gonna spoil if we don't cook it,\" Grit said, \"so we'll be having the same meal as we had at noon, but we'll share a can of peaches for dessert. How's that?\"\n\n\"Sure better'n I woulda had by myself,\" Daws said. \"I appreciate not only the ride but the meal.\"\n\nWhen they bedded down for the night, Grit kept his rifle next to him. As he was drifting off to sleep, he thought better of it and moved away from camp and into a small swale about a hundred feet away from camp. He was a heavy sleeper, and he slept soundly for a few hours until he was awakened by voices.\n\n\"We gotcha covered,\" a voice said. \"Don't move.\"\n\nIt was followed by another, much deeper voice, \"Where's the other guy.\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Casey said. \"He was right on the other side of the fire when I went to sleep.\"\n\n\"Roll over,\" deep voice said. \"We gotta tie your hands before we find the other guy.\"\n\nGrit peeked over the edge of the swale, but there was cloud cover, and he could see almost nothing, only the dimmest of shadows. He saw the shadow of a man, lifted his rifle and fired. When he did, he got instant return fire and something struck his head, and then there was only... nothingness, a part chopped out of his life.\n\nWhen Grit regained consciousness, it was still dark, but he could tell he was alone. The first hint of dawn was evident in the east, and he had the most awful headache he'd ever had in his life. He eased his hand to his head and felt a bloody patch and realized a bullet had creased his skull. Struggling to his feet, he wandered down to where he'd left the wagon, but it was gone. He turned and stumbled over something, then he realized it was a body.\n\nHe looked closely and saw the body was that of Casey Daws. \"Ah no,\" he mumbled. \"Why would they kill the poor man?\" He remembered he'd heard them tie Casey up, and he was still tied in death, which meant they'd killed him in cold blood, shot him in the head.\n\nGrit couldn't even conceive it. The evil, misbegotten bastards had killed an innocent man trussed up like a turkey. He stood and his head swirled. Suddenly he turned and had the dry heaves. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.\n\n\"I gotta get after those blackguards,\" he said to himself. He wandered back over to the swale where he'd slept and found his two blankets, but they'd taken his rifle. As the dawn lit his surroundings, he looked around and found his three-pound ax and his hand ax, both still sharp.\n\nGrit walked down to the little stream and lay on his belly to drink. He drank all he could before getting up, steadying himself and starting to follow the tracks of the wagon, which led east. Ordinarily he could walk 50 miles in a day, but in his condition he wasn't sure how fast he could go.\n\nAnd then he thought about the money. He reached into his pocket, and all his money was gone, as was the $3,500 that was in the steel box under the wagon. He had to get it all back. It was so important for the education of his family. He'd only known Casey Daws for a few short hours, but he could tell the man was honest and hard-working, a quality human being.\n\nAfter a time, he hit his stride and got into a rhythm, but he had no canteen, so thirst became a problem. Off to his right, he saw some trees, so he headed that way. No trees would be growing out here without water. He found a skimpy little stream but it was icy water clear as the sky, so Grit drank his fill, then drank some more and got back on the trail of the wagon. The tracks cut deep into the soil because the outlaws were not following a road. No, they'd taken off across the prairie like they knew where they were going.\n\nHe walked heavy-footed, steadily watching the horizon but saw nothing. He walked on and on throughout the day, following the tracks of his wagon, and stopping at every little stream to fill his belly with water. He was hungry, but he'd been hungry before, and he willed himself to go on, to keep moving. His determination to exact his revenge and recover his money and goods was greater than any amount of hunger.\n\nIn mid-afternoon, Grit saw where the men had stopped to rest the mules and horses. He couldn't believe the men were so stupid that they'd work the mules to death, but this was the first stop Grit had been able to identify. He got his drink from a little creek under the cottonwood trees.\n\nHe pulled out the little map he'd carried in his back pocket. They'd apparently only searched his front pockets. He figured maybe the men were going to Sioux City to try and sell off his goods, but he knew he'd reach them before they got that far.\n\nThe sun finally went down and it was a mite cooler, but not by much. He walked on into the night and near dark he saw in the distance the wink of a fire, like maybe he was seeing it through the leaves of a tree. He went straight for it and approached it stealthily. He saw his wagon and smiled. The horses were staked out to the right and the mules to the left.\n\nAround the fire, the men sat drinking coffee laced with liquor. He could see the whiskey bottle beside one of the men. \"That there man shoulda had more'n a hunnerd dollars on 'im. I wonder where he hid the rest.\"\n\n\"We'll find it, by damn,\" deep voice said. \"Ma\u00f1ana we'll take that wagon apart and see what kinda treasure we got in there.\"\n\nGrit lay about 30 feet away behind a large cottonwood tree, with its huge roots. He peeked above the giant tree's roots and could see both men at ease around the fire. They looked like brothers, dark hair, dark beards, and their accents sounded like they'd come from somewhere in Texas. Grit had had a friend in prison who'd come from Corpus Christi, and the men's accents sounded the same.\n\n\"You boys keep right on drinkin' so that you'll sleep soundly,\" Grit thought to himself. He eased himself back from the roots of the cottonwood and found himself a place to sleep on the wide prairie. He looked up at the sky and felt a lot like he'd felt when he was waiting for Colleen's kidnappers. He knew he could take these killers in to the authorities in Sioux City or somewhere, but he was the only witness, and they'd probably get off. No, that couldn't happen. He owed it to Casey Daws and himself to make sure it didn't happen, and when those men went to sleep... well, he didn't know how it would turn out, but he knew these men deserved no mercy whatever.\n\nGrit slept for a few hours and awoke in the middle of a starlit night. As he rolled over, his head started to hurt and he felt the dizziness return. He finally managed to stand and waited a few seconds for the dizziness to pass. He fell to his knees, rolled up his blankets and picked up his ax and hatchet before heading toward the campsite.\n\nAs he crept toward the campsite, he heard one of the horses neigh loudly. Might have been the bay recognizing his scent on the wind. Stopping dead in his tracks, Grit knelt by the back wheel of the wagon. One of the men sat up in his bedroll. He pulled his revolver and said, \"What was that?\" But the other man continued sleeping. \"Bart, wake up,\" the man said.\n\n\"Wha... wha... what is it?\" Bart asked.\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said. \"Somebody's out there. One of the horses whinnied.\"\n\n\"Aw shit, Leo, go back to sleep. Prob'ly a coyote.\"\n\n\"I'm gon' look around,\" he said as he stood, his revolver in his hand.\n\n\"Be my guest,\" Bart said. \"I'm goin' back to sleep.\"\n\nWhen Leo crept down the side of the wagon, Grit was kneeling at the back wheel on the other side, and he thought he'd be easy to find, so he determined on a course of action. When Leo came around the back side of the wagon, looking out at the prairie, Grit rose from behind the wheel and threw the hatchet. Leo must have seen the motion of the throw, for he turned slightly and the hatchet buried itself in the left side of his forehead. He fell over backward, dead before his body hit the ground. His fall didn't make much noise, but he emitted a loud groan.\n\nInstantly, Grit heard the other man ask, \"Leo, are you alright?\"\n\nGetting no response, Bart jumped up from his blankets and yelled, \"Leo, answer me! Leo?\"\n\nBart pulled his revolver and ran down beside the wagon. When he saw Leo's body, he knelt beside it staring at the ax in Leo's head. \"O my God no, Indians!\" he said.\n\nAs an arm slipped around Bart's throat, Grit said, \"No, not Indians. It's the avenging angel of the man you murdered.\" Using only a pittance of his great strength, Grit jerked the head sideways and broke the man's neck. As Grit dropped Bart's body to the ground, the sightless eyes were open with a look of surprise in them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "18\n\nAfter Grit had stirred up the fire and devoured a can of beans and another of peaches, he grabbed a shovel from the wagon and started to dig. An hour later, as the dim rays of daylight lit the horizon, he dragged Bart by the collar into the grave. He searched the pockets and found $60 and some change. When he dragged Leo to the grave and searched him, Grit found the rest of the money the murderers had stolen. He shoveled dirt onto the bodies and filled in the grave.\n\n\"That's better'n both of you deserve,\" Grit said to himself as he walked away.\n\nBy daylight, he'd fixed himself some side pork and a huge stack of pancakes with syrup, and he'd washed away the blood from his head. The bullet had struck the top back of his head, so it was impossible to see it even with a mirror, but he could feel the wound with his fingers and knew he'd have a scar, and there wasn't a thing he could do about it. By the time the sun arose, he was on his way south. He was troubled by what had happened, but he couldn't see how it could have been avoided.\n\nThe trip south was long, but it was also routine. Grit didn't push the mules, just let them set their own pace. He rested at mid-morning, noon and mid-afternoon and stopped at what he thought might be 6 o'clock each evening. He crossed the Elkhorn River, where he found a well-used ford, but when he came to the Platte three days later, he had to ride east 10 miles to find a ferry.\n\nBy the end of the week, the wagon crested a hill, and in the distance, he saw the little town of Lincoln and the two-story state capitol, looking lonely in the middle of the prairie all by itself at the north end of town. When he drew closer, he saw that somebody had planted small trees around the capitol, but the trees had not leafed out much and had a lot of growing to do.\n\nNot knowing where to find Colleen, he pulled up in front of Paulie's boarding house at just about supper time. Paulie ran out to greet him.\n\n\"Ah, you made it,\" Paulie said as he hugged Grit. \"Have any trouble?\"\n\n\"No, not much really,\" Grit said. \"Do you know where I can find Colleen and Astrid?\"\n\n\"Yeah, she's rented a house on the east side of town,\" Paulie said, \"but why don't you come in and have supper with us.\"\n\n\"I'd love to do that some time, Paulie,\" Grit said. \"You know I would, but I'm anxious to see Colleen now. I know you understand.\"\n\nPaulie laughed, \"Not fully, but I have a girlfriend, and I'm starting to understand what it is between a man and a woman. You go on, and we'll talk things over later.\"\n\nGetting the directions from Paulie, Grit drove the wagon over to the house. As he drove, he thought about Paulie growing up. He supposed that was part of college. Three years before, Paulie had depended almost solely on Grit. Now, he was becoming his own man, and Grit couldn't help but feel a little pride for his part in making that happen.\n\nAs he pulled up in front of the rented house, Colleen and Astrid rushed out to see him. When he stepped down from the wagon, he had to turn to step on the spokes of the wheel, and Colleen saw the back of his head.\n\n\"What's happened to ya then?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh, I had a little trouble,\" Grit said. \"It's all over, and I'm just fine.\" He gently picked up Astrid and said, \"So how's my favorite daughter, huh?\"\n\n\"I'm just fine, Pa,\" she said as her little hands grasped his cheeks. \"Ma got us this house, and we really like it.\"\n\n\"Why don't you show it to me,\" he said, \"then I'll unload everything and put away the animals.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "For the next few days, Grit rode up and down the streets of the town, talking with merchants about the needs of the town of Lincoln. He received job offers from several businesses, but the pay was usually $40 or $50 per month.\n\n\"Sorry, I'm sending two of my family to the university,\" Grit told one man, \"and I can't live on $50 a month. Besides, I'm worth a lot more than that.\" He spoke to the owners of the two lumber stores in town. The first was Augie Anselm, who seemed pleasant enough.\n\n\"I'm here because I know this town is gonna grow,\" Augie said. \"We've got the state capital here, the state prison, state insane asylum, the state university, and we now have three railroads serving the town.\"\n\nThe other was a gruff, rough-looking man named Eddie Butts, whose business seemed to be struggling. Grit went into the lumber office and asked to speak to Mister Butts, and a man came from an office and asked, \"Whaddaya need?\"\n\n\"I'm new in town,\" Grit said. \"I'm a lumberman trying to get some advice on what kind of business I could start in town.\"\n\nBefore Grit could say another word, Eddie Butts was in his face. \"You sure better not be startin' no lumber store, or I'll whip your ass.\"\n\nGrit took a step back. \"I didn't come here to fight. As I said, I just wanted to do some talkin' and see what businesses might be most successful.\"\n\n\"Listen, I ain't into givin' advice,\" Butts said. \"But stay away from the lumber business, or I'll burn you out. I ain't toleratin' no more competition. I'm havin' a hard enough time as it is.\"\n\nGrit nodded and said, \"I can see why.\"\n\n\"What the hell does that mean?\" Butts asked, his face red and ugly.\n\n\"Nothin',\" Grit said. \"I'll be goin' now.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and don't come back for no advice,\" Butts said.\n\nMeanwhile, Colleen had found a lady with a young girl the same age as Astrid who was willing to look after her while Colleen attended school in the morning and early afternoons. Astrid was delighted to have a friend her own age. So both Colleen and Paulie started attending the University of Nebraska.\n\nShortly after they'd moved in, Grit suggested Colleen send the laundry out to be done.\n\n\"You think that's okay?\" she asked. \"It would reduce my workload enormously.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"You've done enough laundry to last a lifetime, and I don't want you doing any more... ever. As long as I've got the money, I'll pay for it to be done. You can use all that time to study.\"\n\n\"You're too good to me, Grit,\" she said.\n\n\"Colleen, please don't say that or think that,\" he said. \"You're as fine a person as I've ever known, and it pleases me to treat you well.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Grit kept trying but couldn't seem to find anything that would suit him for work. One day he was speaking with a foreman at one of the lumber companies who said, \"Why don't you form your own company?\"\n\n\"Doing what?\"\n\n\"Logging. You could buy acreage, log it off, sell the logs to a lumber mill for the right price. Or, even better, you could form your own lumber company, saw the logs and sell the lumber.\"\n\nThe more Grit thought about it, the more he thought it was right for him. And then he saw an advertisement in the Nebraska State Journal, published in Lincoln:\n\n\"The Burlington & Missouri River R.R. Company of Nebraska own the alternate sections, in whole or in large part, in every township within the areas north of the Platte, and south of the Platte. These embrace 2,500,000 acres, of which over 1,000,000 acres are sold. The remainder comprising some of the finest lands in the west, are for sale on very long credit, very low interest, and at very low prices, with large discounts for improvements and for cash.\"\n\nGrit came home that evening and told Colleen, \"I'm going into the lumber business, and I need to travel to Omaha and buy the land I need from the railroad.\"\n\nColleen surprisingly had lots of questions, and Grit answered them fully, grateful that she had such an interest in what he wanted to do. Afterward, Colleen said, \"I think it's perfect for you, something you can really sink your teeth into.\"\n\nAfter traveling by rail to Omaha, Grit met with the railroad officials and got several maps for various properties. He spoke with T. J. Woody, manager of all land sales for the railroad.\n\n\"Look over the maps, and I'll give you a railroad pass that you can use to travel and assess the acreage. It's a big decision, so look over each parcel carefully.\"\n\nGrit spent a week and found more than 10,000 acres he wanted to buy, but if he couldn't afford the full acreage, he'd identified nearly 5,000 acres that he wanted more than the rest. When he returned to Omaha, he asked, \"How much for the acreage?\"\n\n\"That much land we'll sell for two dollars an acre,\" Woody said.\n\n\"What kind of loan can I get?\"\n\n\"Ten percent down and two percent interest on the balance.\"\n\n\"In that case, I'll take 10,000 acres,\" Grit said. \"I've marked the sections I'd want on this map.\"\n\nAs he rode home after signing all the papers, he thought, \"Now I have to find a buyer for my logs or build a sawmill and find a buyer for the lumber.\"\n\nWithin a matter of days, he'd found a buyer in Omaha for every log he could supply. But then he found a wholesale buyer for all the lumber he could provide and his profits would double if he supplied lumber instead of logs. Days later, he found a used but very serviceable portable steam-powered sawmill and an industrial planer. He could burn the waste from the trees to create the steam for the sawmill and planer.\n\n\"So where does all this lead?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"It leads to us setting up a sawmill on our land along the Platte River at a rail siding and starting to deliver and sell lumber. Once we start getting paid, the whole thing will come together... I think.\" Grit laughed. \"It'd better work, or we're gonna be broke, and I'll have to get a real job.\"\n\nColleen laughed. \"So, are you going to be gone a lot?\"\n\n\"For a while I will be, no question,\" he said. \"But after two or three months, I'll be supervising and home most of the time. I'm going to hire good people.\"\n\nDespite his travel, Grit had noticed that Colleen was happier than he'd ever seen her. She'd taken to college with glee. She and Astrid skipped out of the house each day, Colleen to the university and Astrid to her little friend, Emily's, house. It did Grit's heart good to know he'd brought such happiness into Colleen's life. Grit had asked, but Colleen couldn't explain why she wanted more education; she just knew that she was happiest when she was learning.\n\nThen Grit was on the go again. He hired a mechanic to keep the sawmill and planer working properly, a German named Harry Heins, and he hired a lumberjack foreman named Pete Early, whom he charged with hiring six other lumberjacks and getting onto the property they were about to log off. He hired a full-time cook for the men and had to buy incredible amounts of food because of the toll the hard work took on the men.\n\nA week later, Heins had set up the sawmill and planer in a temporary building the new lumberjacks had helped him construct with a metal roof to keep the saw and planer dry. The building and equipment could be taken down and moved to wherever the logs were being cut. There was lots of equipment needed, and Grit had set up an account at Johnson Hardware in Omaha so that Early and Heins could get any equipment needed.\n\nGrit figured it was best to work with the lumberjacks and establish himself as one of them because it was the part of the business that he knew best. He'd brought up his four mules and chains to haul the logs.\n\nEarly had done a good job with hiring. Every one of the lumberjacks seemed solid, but there was one named Ralph Frampton who was cocky and seemed to have a bad attitude. When things didn't go just right, he was cursing and swearing to the high heavens, but he was a good worker.\n\nThey'd been out a week when Frampton got angry with Alex Simko, a short Hungarian with muscles to match anybody. He spoke only broken English, but he understood perfectly when Frampton started cussing him out, and he was ready to fight.\n\nGrit happened to be nearby and walked over and got between the men. \"Enough, get back to work,\" he said.\n\n\"If he doesn't shape up, I'm gonna pound that little Hunk into the ground,\" Frampton said.\n\n\"You start a fight, you lose your job, so think before you do it,\" Grit said.\n\nWhen Frampton turned around to walk away, Grit said to Simko, \"Grab your ax and come with me, Alex.\" He worked with Alex the rest of the day and found no fault with his work or his attitude.\n\nWhen Grit got into camp that night, he told Early to keep an eye on Frampton. \"You may have to fire him. I'm gonna work another week with the men, then I've got lots of other things to do to keep this business alive and prospering.\"\n\n\"Working with the men was a good idea, Grit,\" Early said. \"They know you're the boss and not somebody to trifle with.\" Early chuckled and added, \"They also know you can outwork any two of 'em.\"\n\nMeantime, Grit got word that the homesteads had been sold, both his and Paulie's for a total of $1,050. After deducting the lawyer's fees, it added another thousand dollars to the Yankton bank account." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "19\n\nAfter another week working alongside his lumberjacks, Grit took the train home to be with his family a few days. When he came home after being away, Colleen and Astrid greeted him with hugs and kisses, which made him want to be home and stay home.\n\n\"Well, my dear husband, it's so good to have you back at home,\" Colleen told him as they prepared for bed that night. \"I have some news for you.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"We can expect a baby next June,\" she said. Grit's response was a look of concern.\n\n\"Aren't you happy about it?\" she asked.\n\n\"Well, yeah, I'm delighted, but what about your classes?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll keep going to school,\" she said. \"I may have to alter my schedule to see that the baby gets fed, but I'll work it all out.\"\n\n\"You sure?\"\n\n\"Of course I'm sure,\" she said. \"June is the perfect time for me to have our baby. Now, let's celebrate. I have a need for you tonight.\" Grit was happy to oblige his sweet Colleen.\n\nThe next day, Grit started looking around for a place where he could build a lumber store, figuring he could supply his own lumber much cheaper than the other stores and could undercut their prices if he wanted, or he could maintain prices and pocket the difference. He found 10 acres on the east side of town with the railroad running along the north boundary of the property.\n\nRemembering his conversation with Eddie Butts, he was a little leery of starting a new lumber store, but he convinced himself that he couldn't worry about idle threats from a competitor. At least he hoped the threats were idle. If not, he supposed he'd have to deal with that too.\n\nWithin two weeks, he'd contracted to have a lumber office built with an attached hardware store and a large warehouse for storing the lumber. He bought another steam-powered saw and planer and was in business when the first load of lumber arrived early in November from Grit's holdings along the Platte. He called the place Milburn Lumber and Hardware.\n\nWhen he told Colleen he was ready to hire help at the lumber store, she asked, \"Any chance you've got room for a widow woman?\"\n\n\"I don't know, why?\"\n\n\"There's this woman I met,\" Colleen said. \"She's in her 50's, and lives down the street and needs the work. I think she could do a good job taking orders at the store.\"\n\n\"I was planning to hire men,\" Grit said. \"All our customers will be men.\"\n\n\"You'd have to meet her,\" Colleen said. \"She's a big woman, and I doubt she'd take any guff off any of the men. Yet I think she could relate to them.\"\n\n\"Okay, if you think so, I'll give her a try as office manager, but she'll be on probation,\" Grit said.\n\nHer name was Asa Woodley, and she came to the lumber store for an interview. Grit was reluctant to hire Asa, but he'd told Colleen he'd give the woman a try, so Asa came to work the next day. Within a month, she'd taken over not only the office but the entire lumber yard. From the day it opened, the lumber store was busy with one order after another. Grit hired several men to help because he was overwhelmed with all the orders. And Paulie started working on Saturdays.\n\nAsa held meetings with Grit and the men each morning and gave them the orders that needed filling. She also took over the bookkeeping for all the Milburn businesses, and she accounted for every penny that came in or out. After two weeks, Grit had to start ordering lumber from other wholesalers because his men couldn't supply all the lumber he needed and keep his own wholesaler happy.\n\nMany of the customers wanted lumber delivered to their work site, and as Grit contemplated buying wagons and a whole cavvy of workhorses, Asa said, \"I have another idea if you want to hear it.\"\n\n\"Of course I wanna hear it,\" Grit said.\n\n\"We're not in the freighting business, so why not hire Conn Freighting to do all our deliveries. We'll add the delivery charge onto each customer's bill, and if they're a good customer we could occasionally offer free delivery maybe.\"\n\n\"That's a great idea,\" Grit said. \"That solves all our problems. Would you set it up with Lewis Conn?\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to make all the arrangements,\" Asa said.\n\nGrit had almost forgotten about the threat of Eddie Butts when the man showed up one day with two bulky friends. He charged into the office venting vile threats.\n\n\"Where is he? Where is this Milburn? I'm gonna burn this place to the ground.\"\n\nAsa said, \"May I ask who you are, sir?\"\n\n\"I'm Eddie Butts, and I told your damn boss not to start a lumber business in this town, or I'd burn him out. Now where is he?\"\n\n\"One moment, sir. I'll be right back.\" And back she came with a loaded .44 revolver in her hand, cocked and ready to fire. She held the revolver in perfect stance and said, \"You, sir, will leave this store immediately. If you don't, this may be your last day on earth.\"\n\nEddie's two friends started toward the door, but Eddie didn't believe Asa's warning. \"You wouldn't dare.\"\n\nAsa lowered the weapon slightly and pulled the trigger. She shot Eddie in the thigh and immediately recocked the weapon for a second shot while Eddie lay on the floor bleeding and breathing out more curses and threats.\n\nGrit came running in the back door and immediately knew what had happened. Asa said to Butt, \"You, sir, have the filthiest mouth I've ever encountered, and you are bleeding on our floor. Tell your two friends to get you outta here. I'll send you a bill for the cleanup.\" Grit watched as the two men hauled Butts out of the store.\n\nWhen they had left the office, Grit said, \"I'm sorry about that, Asa. I should have warned you of his threats.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it, Grit,\" Asa said. \"I think the problem's solved. He won't be so lucky if there's a next time.\"\n\nThat afternoon, a reporter came from the Nebraska State Journal and wanted to know about the shooting. Asa gave him the story matter of factly, then got back to her job.\n\nThe next day, the sheriff came by and interviewed Grit and Asa. \"It's just like she said, Sheriff. Butts came in threatening to burn our place down, and Asa confronted him with a revolver. She told him to leave. He refused, so she shot him. The shooting was justified.\"\n\n\"It appears so except that Butts was not armed,\" the sheriff said.\n\n\"If there are any charges brought against Asa, we'll hire the finest lawyer in the state of Nebraska to defend her, and she'll be found not guilty,\" Grit said.\n\nThe whole affair seemed not to bother Asa in the least, and the story on the front of the Nebraska State Journal brought in even more business. Soon Grit removed the word \"office\" from Asa's title and gave her a $20 per month raise in pay. She was no longer the office manager, she was simply the manager of Milburn Lumber and Hardware.\n\nWhen somebody asked Grit how something should be done, he'd often say, \"Ask Asa!\" in order to reinforce her authority among the men. Of course, he consulted with her regularly and enjoyed working in the yard himself, but when he was away, he knew the business was in good hands." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "As winter closed in, Grit once more took his axes and bought a rail ticket to be with his crew of lumberjacks on the Platte River. He found Jim Early, who reported that things were going good, and they were delivering lumber to the wholesalers at a record rate.\n\n\"I've had to hire a few more men,\" Early said. \"I hope that's alright.\"\n\n\"If you need 'em to keep the lumber rolling, it's alright,\" Grit assured him.\n\n\"I had to fire Frampton, just like you predicted,\" Early said.\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\n\"One night at supper, he got in a fight with John Troup, and it was pretty nasty. I fired Frampton, and then he wanted to fight me because it was him getting fired and not Troup.\"\n\n\"I refused the offer to fight him,\" Early said, \"and the next morning he was gone.\"\n\n\"It's just as well,\" Grit said. \"I'm sure things are a lot more tranquil. At least you're not waiting for the next angry outburst.\"\n\n\"You're right, and things are going well,\" Early said. \"All our crews are working well together.\"\n\n\"I see you're leaving some of the trees, as I suggested,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Yeah, we could start clear-cutting, but...\"\n\n\"No, do it just the way you're doing it,\" he said. \"I've got one other request. I'm thinking of building a house, and I want all the walnut you cut to be sent on the train to me. I'm going to use a lot of it inside my house.\"\n\n\"Will do,\" Early said.\n\nGrit worked with the lumberjacks for a week, enjoying the hard, physical labor and having time to think. He thought about the changes that the baby would bring to his household. Would it be a boy or girl? Wouldn't make much difference, he supposed, but he had to admit that it would please him if he had a son, somebody to carry on the name... but not the name his mother had given him. No son of his would ever have such a name." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "20\n\nPaulie and Colleen saw each other most days, and she usually had a double lunch, one for herself and one for Paulie. They didn't share any classes, but they'd eat lunch together in one of the spare classrooms and keep up with what was going on in the family.\n\n\"Oh, Grit's always busy,\" Colleen said. \"You know how he is.\"\n\n\"'Course I do,\" Paulie said as he laughed. \"That's why we're in college because Grit's the way he is.\" Paulie took a bite of his sandwich and looked out the window, lost in thought.\n\n\"Lots to remember, huh?\" Colleen asked.\n\n\"Yeah, all the good times, the hard times,\" Paulie said. \"Grit taught me to be a man, brought me from boyhood to adulthood. And because of him, I think I can handle about anything that comes in life.\"\n\n\"You've grown up before our eyes, Paulie,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"Well, I've got a lot to learn, but from Grit I've learned to just go ahead and tackle a problem. Once you get to doing it, it's not nearly as hard as you think it'll be,\" Paulie said and laughed.\n\n\"You have made the whole family proud,\" Colleen said. \"And Grit still thinks the world of you and worries about your welfare.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Paulie said. \"He worries about all of us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Grit was sitting in his office in mid-December reading the Nebraska State Journal, something he'd taken to doing every day for just a few minutes. Asa walked in and said, \"There's a woman here to see you.\"\n\n\"What does she want?\"\n\n\"Don't know. She says it's personal.\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"I got almost no personal business, but go ahead and send her back.\"\n\nGrit stood and a blonde woman came to the office door. \"Have a seat, Miss,\" Grit said.\n\n\"I assume you're Grit Milburn,\" she said.\n\n\"That's me,\" Grit said.\n\n\"I'm Sarah Sloan with the Pinkerton Detective Agency.\"\n\n\"Okay, what can I do for you?\"\n\n\"You have a deep voice,\" she said, trying to establish some sort of rapport with this giant of a man who had more muscles than any man she'd ever seen.\n\nGrit laughed. \"Just the luck of the draw. What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"I've been looking for you for more than three months,\" she said. \"You've made yourself hard to find.\"\n\n\"Look, Miss,\" Grit said. \"I have no idea what you want, so you better tell me before I head off to work.\"\n\n\"Pinkerton was hired by your father to find you,\" Sloan said.\n\nGrit laughed. \"You got the wrong man. I have no idea who my father is, and neither does anybody else.\"\n\n\"Well, is your full name Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh Milburn?\"\n\nGrit was shaken, but his face was a mask of serenity. \"Never heard of the guy,\" Grit said.\n\nSarah gave him a brilliant smile before saying, \"I know you're lying, Mister Milburn. I've tracked you all over the country, and I know... know... I'm not mistaken. I'm a very good detective.\"\n\nGrit looked out the window into the lumber yard. \"Look, Miss Sloan. I've got a nice life here. I've built it with hard labor, and I've been lucky. I've got a beautiful wife, a little girl at home, and we've got a baby on the way. I don't wanna do anything to upset that.\"\n\nSarah sighed, \"Doesn't have to upset your life. Your father wants you to make a trip to Chicago. He'll pay for everything. He'll even pay you to come. Just name your price, but he's not well, and he wants to meet you before he dies. That's not a lot to ask. He found out that he was your father only a few months ago. A Catholic priest told him about finding you in the sanctuary of the church when you were two with your name pinned to your coat.\"\n\n\"Father Walsh.\"\n\n\"That's right.\"\n\n\"Who is the man who thinks he's my father?\"\n\nSarah smiled sadly, \"You know his name quite well. He's Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh.\"\n\nGrit looked out the window once more and said, \"You have no idea how much I hated that name. I even refused to tell my wife my real name.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it was quite a weight for a little boy,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"You'll never know, but listen, I'd only make the trip if my wife came along,\" Grit said, \"and she's enrolled at the university. She can't miss her classes.\"\n\n\"It's only a two-day trip or at most three days,\" Sloan said. \"You could leave in the morning and be there that evening, see him and come back the next day. If you don't do this, Mister Milburn, you'll always wonder.\"\n\nGrit blew out a long breath before saying, \"I guess you're right. Do you know where my mother is?\"\n\n\"I don't know where Lila Milburn is,\" Sloan said. \"We've not been asked to find her, but if you ask your father, I'm sure he'd hire us to find her.\"\n\n\"You report back and tell him that I'll come on one condition,\" Grit said, \"and that's that he hires you to find my mother or find out what happened to her. When you locate her, I'll want him to pay for me to see her.\"\n\n\"I don't have to tell him that,\" Sarah said. \"He'll do it. He'll do anything in the world to see you.\"\n\nWhen he told Colleen, she said, \"I can't miss my classes for that long, but you have to go, Grit, and put aside any resentments you've had. You'll need a suit and you'd look so much better if you shaved your facial hair.\"\n\n\"My mustache too?\"\n\nColleen nodded.\n\n\"But you've always said you liked it.\"\n\n\"I do, but I'm sure your father would love to see your face.\"\n\n\"Alright, I'll get ready and leave day after tomorrow. I'll try to be back in two or three days. If there's any delay, I'll send you a telegram.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "When he arrived in Chicago, it was late in the evening. Sarah Sloan met his train when it arrived and greeted him warmly.\n\n\"Did you have a good trip?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, it was very pleasant,\" he said.\n\n\"I've arranged a suite for you at the Palmer House,\" she said. \"It's the newest and nicest hotel in town. If you're hungry, we could go to dinner there.\"\n\nThe Palmer House had one of the finest restaurants in the world, and Grit was impressed. He enjoyed a chateaubriand with new potatoes and peas. Sarah ordered a red wine to go with the dinner.\n\n\"You have an appointment in the morning to see your father,\" she said.\n\n\"I don't mean to offend you, Sarah, but I've never had a father, and I don't have one now. Just call him Mister Gridleigh.\"\n\n\"Right, I didn't mean to presume...\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Grit said. \"It's alright.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Grit was up early the next morning and ate breakfast in the Palmer House restaurant before walking over to St. Anthony Church. He walked into the sanctuary that he knew so well, the same one where his mother had left him so many years before.\n\nHe walked down to the front and dropped to his knees and crossed himself, exactly as he'd been taught when he'd been a little boy. As he arose he saw a priest come from the south transept that he recognized.\n\n\"Father Walsh, how are you?\"\n\n\"Well, I... do I know you?\" Grit stuck out his hand and when the priest shook it, he said, \"Grit Milburn, it is you, isn't it?\"\n\nNodding, Grit said, \"It's nice to see you again, Father. It's been a long time.\"\n\n\"Well, it's nice to see you too,\" he said. \"Come with me into my office, and we'll talk for a while.\"\n\nThey had a nice long talk, and Grit told Father Walsh all about his life. \"I'm doing right well now, Father. My businesses are succeeding, so money is no longer a problem, and I have a lovely family.\"\n\n\"So why are you in town?\" the priest asked.\n\n\"I'm here because of you apparently,\" Grit said. He then related the story of Gridleigh wanting to see him after Father Walsh had told him the story of Grit being found in the church as a young boy.\n\n\"He thinks you're his son,\" Father Walsh said. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"It's a good possibility, but I won't know until the Pinkertons find my mother, if she's still alive. If she isn't, then we'll never know for sure.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "From the church, Grit took a cab to Gridleigh's mansion, paid the driver and turned around to admire the building. He stepped up to the front door and pulled the red velvet cord and heard the bell ring inside.\n\nA servant showed him into the library and within half a minute, Gridleigh appeared through a side door. The two men looked at each other and Gridleigh said, \"I'm not sure what to say at a time like this, but please have a seat on the sofa. I'd love to have a long talk with you.\"\n\nGrit smiled and said, \"That's why I'm here, and I hope our conversation will be most cordial.\"\n\n\"Oh, it will be,\" Gridleigh said. \"First, I'd like to show you some photos of my father as a young man.\" Gridleigh handed Grit the first photo, and Grit stared open-mouthed. It was almost as if he were looking at a photo of himself.\n\n\"Very interesting,\" Grit said. Gridleigh handed him another photograph of the same man a few years later with a beard and mustache, and again it was as if Grit were looking at himself with the beard and mustache he'd shaved off before leaving home.\n\n\"Incredible likeness, don't you think?\" Gridleigh asked.\n\n\"Yes, it's like I'm looking at photographs of myself,\" Grit said. \"The resemblance is stunning.\"\n\n\"Does that convince you we're related?\" Gridleigh asked.\n\n\"It's persuasive but not convincing,\" Grit said. \"Only my mother, whom I don't remember at all, could tell us for sure. And I don't know if she's still alive.\"\n\n\"Sarah Sloan is looking for her right now,\" Gridleigh said. \"I'd like to see her too. If I'd known she was so destitute, I would've helped. Really I would have.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that's true, but I'm like my mother in that regard,\" Grit said. \"If I'd been turned away once, I wouldn't have asked.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, you can't know how much I regret that,\" Gridleigh said.\n\n\"I'm not blaming you at all,\" Grit said. \"You didn't know you'd fathered a child, and quite frankly, I wouldn't change anything knowing what I know now.\"\n\n\"I could have given you so many advantages in life,\" Gridleigh said.\n\n\"But I wouldn't be the same person I am now,\" Grit said. \"I wouldn't have met my wife, or my little adopted girl, both of whom I love with my whole heart, and I wouldn't have met my best friend. And I might not have the same character I have now.\"\n\n\"What does that mean?\" Gridleigh asked.\n\n\"I don't know exactly, but I like who I am,\" Grit said. \"I'm honest, faithful to my family and obsessive about creating a good life for my family and myself. If I'd had a life given to me, I doubt I'd have those qualities and the satisfaction of achieving my own goals. Maybe you can understand what I mean.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes indeed,\" Gridleigh said. \"I do understand. If you had all the money in the world, would you live in a house like this?\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"No offense, Mister Gridleigh, but no, I wouldn't. I like a smaller house where there's activity and closeness among family members. I love my wife and child so much that I want to be near them. I wouldn't mind having a baby crawling around at my feet. This kind of house doesn't suit me, and again, no offense, but it's far too ostentatious for me.\"\n\nGridleigh smiled. \"You've grown up to be the kind of man I wish I'd been.\"\n\nThe two men had lunch together and Grit left in the afternoon after shaking hands with Gridleigh and wishing him well.\n\n\"Thank you for coming,\" Gridleigh said. \"If you're ever in Chicago, please come back and visit me. I'd love to meet your wife and daughter.\"\n\nAs he left the mansion on South Prairie Avenue, Grit was almost sure that Gridleigh was his father. He asked the cab driver to take him to an address on the south side of the city. It was a two-story in a workingmen's section of town. He walked up the steps and knocked loudly on the door.\n\nA woman came to the door and said, \"Yes?\"\n\n\"My name is Grit Milburn, Colleen's husband, and I'm visiting in Chicago. Colleen asked me to come by and introduce myself. She couldn't come because of her classes.\"\n\n\"Oh, come in, come in,\" the woman said. \"I'm Alice Byrne, and my husband will be coming home shortly, but we can talk until he comes. Would you like a cup of coffee?\"\n\n\"I would,\" Grit said. \"That would be very nice.\"\n\nAs she brought the coffee, Alice asked, \"So how is Colleen?\"\n\n\"She's doing very well, goin' to college, ya know.\"\n\n\"College? What college?\"\n\n\"The University of Nebraska,\" Grit said. \"She's getting a degree in education.\"\n\n\"How's she payin' for all that?\"\n\n\"Oh, we've got two of our family goin' to the university,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Two? And you're payin' for it?\"\n\nGrit laughed. \"Well, sort of. Colleen is much happier when she's learning, so I suggested she go to college.\"\n\n\"Imagine that!\" Alice said. \"She never wrote me about it!\"\n\n\"She's pretty busy. We have the four-year-old girl we adopted. Her name is Astrid, and then Colleen's carrying our first child and studying for all the courses she's taking.\"\n\n\"Oh, my land sakes,\" Alice said. \"So Colleen's expecting.\"\n\nLater Pat Byrne came in from his work with the city, and they all chatted amiably for about an hour until Grit said, \"Well, it's a real pleasure to meet both of you. I hope to get Colleen and our daughter out here to visit when Colleen's got time off from college. Tonight, I have a meeting that I have to attend, so I'll say my goodbyes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "When he returned to the Palmer House that evening, Sarah Sloan was waiting. \"We've found your mother,\" she said.\n\n\"So she's alive?\" Grit asked.\n\n\"Yes, but she doesn't want to see you,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"She thinks I'll blame her for abandoning me.\"\n\n\"I think that's it, yes.\"\n\n\"So where is she?\"\n\n\"She's here in Chicago, lives on North Lakeview Avenue,\" Sarah said.\n\n\"Married?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sarah said. \"Your mother remarried 20 years ago, and she has two other children. Her husband knows nothing about her past, and she doesn't want him to know. You understand\u2014a child out of a wedlock and all the societal disapproval.\"\n\n\"Did you ask her about my paternity?\"\n\n\"Yes, she says Mister Gridleigh is your father, but she was abundantly clear she didn't want to see you.\"\n\n\"Well, I guess that's all I need to know, isn't it? She gave me away when I was a child and now refuses to see me. No love lost there.\"\n\n\"Yes, it's very sad,\" Sarah said. \"I'm' terribly sorry. Your mother is married to a city councilman who hopes to be the mayor of Chicago.\"\n\n\"I get it,\" Grit said.\n\nSarah offered to accompany him to dinner, but he said, \"I think I'll order a sandwich to eat in my room tonight and catch the earliest train back in the morning. I appreciate all your help, Sarah.\"\n\nGrit ate his turkey and bacon sandwich and was propped up in bed with his shoes off reading Mysterious Island by Jules Verne when there was a knock at his room door. And suddenly he knew exactly who was knocking.\n\nHe opened the door and looked into the face of a most beautiful middle-aged woman who had a large black scarf covering her head. He said, \"Hello Mother, won't you come in?\"\n\nShe swept into the room and took off the scarf as she turned to face him. \"Do you hate me?\" she asked in a tiny, feminine voice.\n\n\"No, of course not,\" he said. \"It's good to see you again after all these years.\"\n\n\"You don't even remember me, do you?\" she asked.\n\n\"Only in the vaguest portion of my memory,\" he said. \"I do remember waking in the sanctuary of the church and wandering up and down the pews in the dark looking for you and calling, 'Mama, mama.' Little snatches here and there of memory, but I didn't recall what you looked like. If I'd met you on the street, I wouldn't have known you.\"\n\n\"I am sorry, but at the time, I was so poor that I could not feed you or myself. My leaving you in the church was an act of desperation in the hope you'd have a better life. Later on, I found my footing and all these years, I've wondered what happened to you. Have you been happy?\"\n\n\"Happy is a relative term,\" he said. \"I went to prison for three years for killing a man in a fight. It was an accident, but that was a low point in my life. I served my time, got out and have built a pretty good life. I have a beautiful wife, an adopted daughter, and we've got another child on the way. So yes, I'm happy with the life I've built for myself and my family.\"\n\n\"I'm so very glad,\" she said. Slowly she removed a photograph from her pocket and said, \"I brought this for you.\" She handed him a photograph that showed her posed in a chair with a man standing behind and a little to the left side and two children at the other side. \"That's my family. I've worked hard to build a new life, and I hope you won't...\"\n\n\"Don't worry yourself, mother,\" Grit said. \"I won't cause you any trouble. I'm going back to Nebraska in the morning to my own family, the only one I've ever been a part of, and it's a happy family.\"\n\nShe nodded, \"I am sorry, you know, about everything.\"\n\nGrit nodded. \"I spoke with Gridleigh.\"\n\n\"Yes, Sarah told me,\" she said. \"What did he say?\"\n\n\"He's got a cancer deep in his bowels, he says. Could live another six months or, maybe not that long.\"\n\n\"Are you going to inherit?\"\n\n\"We didn't talk about it. I hope not,\" Grit said. \"I've built a good life out in Lincoln, and I don't want anything to interfere with that.\"\n\n\"But the money could give you an even better life,\" she said.\n\n\"I seriously doubt that,\" Grit said.\n\n\"Do you have any other questions of me?\" she asked.\n\nGrit shook his head, \"No, I guess not, but if you ever need me, just send me a telegram in Lincoln.\"\n\nShe drew close and placed her head on his chest. He put his arms around his mother and drew her close. \"Life has done you wrong, my sweet son, but you've made it come out alright. I'm so happy for you.\" She pulled back, looked at his face and kissed his cheek before saying, \"I have to get back to my life now.\" She opened the door, put on the scarf that partially hid her face, and walked away. Grit turned and closed the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "21\n\nWhen fall break came the first week of November, the whole Milburn family got on a train for Chicago, and when they arrived, they took a cab to the home of Colleen's family, and for the first time in four years, Colleen was able to see her mother and father. It was a joyous reunion, and Astrid was a little restrained at first around these new people, but soon she was her usual self asking all kinds of questions.\n\nLater that evening, Astrid said, \"Grandpa and Grandma have lots of wrinkles, but they're so nice that I love them anyway.\"\n\nOn their third day in the afternoon, Grit took Colleen and Astrid to meet Gridleigh. Astrid and Colleen were awed by the size of the mansion. And when the servant came to the door dressed in red and gold livery, they were without words. The servant led them all into the library and told them the master would be down shortly. They waited nearly 10 minutes before Gridleigh finally came through the side door.\n\nIn a weak voice, he said, \"I'm sorry... to keep you waiting. It takes me... some time... to get dressed... these days.\"\n\n\"It's okay, father,\" Grit said. \"I'd like you to meet my wife, Colleen, and our daughter, Astrid.\"\n\n\"Oh, so happy to see you,\" Gridleigh said. \"Have... a seat.\"\n\nThey all sat down, and Gridleigh sat in his usual chair, but his movements were slow and shaky.\n\nAstrid, always full of questions, stood and walked over to stand beside Gridleigh's chair. It was obvious he was quite taken with her, but he didn't know what to say. Astrid broke the ice by asking, \"Are you my Grandpa?\"\n\n\"Well... yes, I am your Grandpa, and I'm proud to be your Grandpa.\"\n\n\"Do you like living in this great big house, Grandpa?\" Astrid asked.\n\nGridleigh chuckled, \"Well, I've been here 10 years, and it's comfortable for me, I suppose, but your father told me he wouldn't like living here.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"We have a very small house, but it's nice, and we like it. I have my own room, and Papa is building us a new house right now. It's a little larger than the one we're in now, but nothing like yours.\"\n\n\"I hope you'll be very happy in the new house.\"\n\n\"Oh, we will be,\" Astrid said. \"We most always are happy, except when I lost my doll and couldn't find her.\" Astrid looked around and said, \"You sure have a lot of books.\"\n\n\"I've collected them over a long period of time,\" he said. \"Some of them are quite valuable.\"\n\n\"I like reading, but I can only read a little,\" Astrid said. \"I don't know all the words yet, but Mama is teaching me.\"\n\nGrit sat and marveled at Astrid. She had Gridleigh enthralled, and she was doing nothing but being herself.\n\n\"Well, Colleen, it's so nice to meet you,\" Gridleigh said as his strength and awareness seemed to improve. \"Tell me about your life.\"\n\n\"I'm a student at the University of Nebraska, studying to be a teacher,\" she said. \"I was born here in Chicago and attended school with Grit when we were younger.\"\n\n\"Oh, so you've known each other a long time.\"\n\n\"We weren't really close in school, but we met at Fort Sully out in Dakota Territory, where I was a laundress for the soldiers.\" Grit smiled. Colleen didn't pretend to be anything but herself. No airs at all and no hiding her past, a trait that Grit appreciated most about his wife.\n\n\"Oh... interesting,\" Gridleigh said. \"So you have family here.\"\n\n\"My mother and father live on the south side,\" she said. \"Papa works in the city's streets department.\"\n\n\"Well, you sure make a nice couple,\" Gridleigh said. \"And Grit tells me you're expecting your first child.\"\n\n\"Yes, in June,\" she said. \"We're all excited about it.\"\n\nSoon, a servant rolled in a table with tea and cookies. They all sat at the tea table and Gridleigh asked Astrid, \"Do you drink tea?\"\n\n\"I don't think I've ever had tea, but sometimes Mama lets me drink coffee if there's lots of milk and sugar in it.\"\n\n\"We have lots of milk and sugar, so maybe your mother could prepare your tea the way you like it,\" Gridleigh said.\n\n\"Oh, I'm quite able to do it myself,\" Astrid said as she reached for the little pitcher of cream.\n\nIt was a very cordial afternoon, full of bonhomie and good wishes. As they departed, Grit said, \"Father, I'm sorry we didn't know each other better, but if there's anything I can ever do, you have only to ask.\"\n\nThe old man looked up into Grit's eyes, \"No, there's nothing anybody can do, but it was good to meet your family before I pass into the next world. I appreciate your taking the time to bring them over. Is there anything I can do for you?\"\n\n\"No, we're all getting along fine,\" Grit said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "A few weeks later, Grit was outside working in the lumber yard when Asa brought out a telegram to him. He opened the envelope and read that Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh had died and that the funeral would be in the First Presbyterian Church in Chicago on Friday. One of Gridleigh's servants, Loyal Trimball, had sent it.\n\n\"Friday,\" Grit said, \"three days from now.\"\n\nThe next day, Grit got a telegram from the law firm of Bigelow and Storrs indicating that the reading of Gridleigh's will would take place on Friday afternoon after the funeral, and since Grit was a named beneficiary, he was encouraged to attend.\n\nGrit talked it over with Colleen and later that day he got on a train for Chicago. He arrived Thursday evening and stayed once more at the Palmer House. The morning of the funeral, he walked over to the Presbyterian Church and found there were quite a number of people in attendance.\n\nAs Grit walked in, a man dressed in a black suit asked, \"Are you family, sir?\"\n\n\"Yes, I guess I am,\" he said.\n\n\"What is your relation to the deceased?\" the man asked.\n\n\"I'm his son.\"\n\n\"Come with me,\" the man said, and escorted Grit to the front row of pews, where he sat alone. Eventually others came and sat in the same pew but apart from him. He presumed they were family as well, but he had no idea who they were, and none of them made any effort to introduce themselves.\n\nThe service itself began with a song by the choir, all draped in high-collared maroon robes. Accompanied by the organ, they sang Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide. The Presbyterian minister offered an opening prayer, then spoke about the resurrection and eternal life before praising Gridleigh as a good Christian who supported so many community causes, including an addition to the Presbyterian church itself. There were two other speakers with equal praise for Gridleigh's generosity of spirit in supporting so many of the city's charities. The choir sang Beautiful Savior and Amazing Grace before the pastor offered a closing prayer that, in Grit's estimation, was far too long and wordy.\n\nAs Grit stood, a man walked over and introduced himself, \"I'm Rolf Gridleigh. Are you related to my cousin?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Grit said.\n\n\"May I ask what relation?\"\n\n\"I'm his son,\" Grit said.\n\n\"But my cousin was a bachelor,\" Gridleigh said.\n\nGrit laughed. \"You've lived a sheltered life if you think bachelors can't father children.\"\n\n\"Well, who's your mother?\"\n\n\"A fine lady who shall remain unnamed.\"\n\nGrit left shortly without standing around to grip hands and chat with others who had attended the funeral. He was glad to be out in the sunshine, even though it was cold outside. He found a restaurant close to the address of the law firm, stepped in and ordered a hot roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. After eating, he wandered over to the law firm and was shown into a room where several others were sitting, including Rolf Gridleigh and his family.\n\nGrit sat down on the back row, and at exactly 2 o'clock, in came two suited men who sat down at the table in front.\n\n\"Good afternoon,\" the older man said, \"and thank you all for being here. I am Joshua Bigelow, personal attorney for Mister Gridleigh, and sitting beside me is Isadore Storrs, my partner in the firm.\n\n\"We're here today to read the will of Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh. The will is long and has multiple parts. I'm going to summarize rather than read the entire contents, but we have printed copies for any of the family who may want one.\n\n\"First, Mister Gridleigh has appointed this legal firm, Bigelow and Storrs, as executors and administrators, and we're here this afternoon in that capacity.\n\n\"Mister Gridleigh was a bachelor his entire life, but he did have a son whom he acknowledges in the will. His son is Landgrave Theodosius Gridleigh Milburn, who goes by the name Grit Milburn and is a resident of Lincoln, Nebraska. He also has a granddaughter through Mister Milburn named Astrid Milburn. These are the only direct descendants that are acknowledged in this will.\n\n\"Before getting to the bequests, I should say that the will includes a provision that affects anyone who may contest the will. Any such person will forfeit anything he could have or would have received as part of the will.\n\n\"Now to the bequests, 'To my faithful servants, John Saunders, Loyal Trimball, Reginald Simon and Polly Benjamin, I leave to each of you the sum of $35,000 and my good wishes and thanks for your loyal service to me over many years.\n\n\"To the Presbyterian Church I leave $20,000 to be used any way the church sees fit.\n\n\"To St. Anthony's parish, I leave $20,000 to be used to refurbish the orphanage.\n\n\"'To my cousin, Rolf, I leave the sum of $50,000, knowing that his family has ample funds from their own investments.\n\n\"'To my granddaughter, Astrid, I leave my library of books in the house at 186 South Prairie Avenue and the sum of $100,000 to be held in trust for her until she has attained the age of 21 years. I appoint my son, Grit Milburn, to be the sole trustee of the trust for my granddaughter. Also I leave another $300,000 as part of the same trust to be used as gifts to any other issue that may come to Grit Milburn and Colleen Milburn, his wife. The gifts will accrue to the children at age 21 years.\n\n\"\"I had intended to give all of the remainder of my estate to my son, but I've discerned from conversations with him that he feels such a bequest would be a burden and would change his life too much. As a consequence, to my son, Grit Milburn, I leave the sum of a million dollars and my mansion at 186 South Prairie Avenue in Chicago. This I devise with all of its contents and appurtenances other than the books in the library that I have given to my granddaughter. I devise this property because my son has expressed such a love for the house.'\"\n\nGrit could not help himself. He started laughing, which interrupted the proceedings.\n\n\"Mister Milburn, is there something wrong?\" Bigelow asked.\n\n\"No, sorry to interrupt. It's just that I told my father how much I disliked his mansion, so he gave it to me. Makes me laugh!\"\n\n\"You're one of the few who know about his sense of humor,\" Bigelow said. \"Now to the rest of the will:\n\n\"'The remainder of the estate will be used to establish the Gridleigh Foundation, which will have a board of directors that will use funds generated each year to make donations to worthy causes throughout the country. I've left separate instructions for the administration of the foundation.'\"\n\nWhen the reading of the will was done, Grit asked the lawyers where he could obtain the key to the mansion at 186 South Prairie Avenue. When Joshua Bigelow gave him the key, Grit asked, \"Where could I find an honest appraiser for the books and the mansion and its other contents?\"\n\n\"T. Parkinson and Sons on Michigan Avenue will give you an appraisal of the books and the contents,\" Bigelow said. \"For the mansion itself, our firm does real estate appraisals and sales, and we could handle that for you... for a price, of course.\"\n\nGrit smiled, \"Of course. I'll want to sell it with all the furnishings intact. I may wanna take out some of my father's personal items. Plan to give me an appraisal and find me a buyer as soon as you possibly can. I'm going over now and talk to Parkinson and Sons.\"\n\nLater Grit spoke with Theodore Parkinson and said, \"I want Gridleigh's whole library... every book... conserved in a secure location for the next 20 years. At that time, my daughter will take charge of the library and may do what she wishes with the books.\n\n\"Please appraise the rest of the contents in the mansion and provide me with a list and the value of each item. Someone told me he has quite a nice collection of watches, so you may have to bring in a specialist to appraise those.\"\n\n\"It may take a month,\" Parkinson said, \"but our work is meticulous, so our estimates of value will be very close to the real value.\"\n\n\"That's fine. Take your time and do it right.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "When Grit returned to Lincoln and told Colleen what had happened, she said, \"So now I'm married to a millionaire?\"\n\n\"Yes, but we don't want anybody else to know that,\" Grit said. \"I've spoken with an investment firm in Chicago, and they'll invest the money for us, and our lives will go on just as they have.\"\n\n\"You're sure that's the way you want it, Grit?\" she asked.\n\n\"Of course, don't you?\" he asked.\n\n\"That's exactly what I want,\" Colleen said. \"And I don't want our children to know we're wealthy, not even a hint of it.\"\n\n\"Okay, it'll be our secret then, and we'll raise our family just like we're doing right now... like ordinary folk.\"\n\n\"Like you and me,\" Colleen said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "22\n\nAfter Grit got his inheritance, it was as if he'd never received one. He got up every morning and went to work at the lumber yard, which grew along with the capital city. His mind and body craved work, so a year after building the first lumber yard, Grit built a second one on the west side of Lincoln, and the business kept growing.\n\nIn early June, right after Colleen had finished classes for the year, she gave birth to a sweet little boy that they named Rory, and two years later, she had Luke, who seemed to be a carbon copy of Rory. Grit was as happy as Colleen had ever seen him. He loved coming home and playing with his little boys and talking with Astrid, who seemed more grown up by the day.\n\nWhen Paulie graduated from the university in 1878, Grit asked with a laugh, \"So what are you gonna do now that you're all educated.\"\n\n\"I'm gonna get married,\" Paulie said. \"I've waited long enough.\"\n\n\"And then what?\"\n\n\"I've got lots of job offers, but I've heard you need somebody to keep track of your finances, and I'm your man if you'll have me.\"\n\n\"Just like old times,\" Grit said smiling.\n\n\"Yep, only then we kept everything in a leather bag with a drawstring.\"\n\nA few weeks later, Paulie married his college sweetheart, Mary Beth Parkins, who'd graduated from the university in the same class. The wedding was held in Mary Beth's hometown of Bellevue, 50 miles east of Lincoln, and Grit's whole family attended. When they returned from their honeymoon in St. Louis, Grit and Colleen introduced them to a house not far away, all furnished and decorated just for the newlyweds.\n\nGrit worked wherever he was needed, at the east side lumber yard or the west, and occasionally he'd leave for a week or so to check on the lumberjacks who were working on the acreage he'd gotten from the railroad.\n\nOne day, Grit found out that Willie Abbott, a negro man who'd been one of Grit's first hires, was going to lose the small frame home where he lived with his wife and four children. The bank had notified him they were going to foreclose on it. Grit paid off the loan and brought the deed back to the office.\n\nWhen Willie got his weekly pay, Asa gave him an envelope containing the deed to the house and the surrounding property. When he pulled the deed from the envelope, Abbott swallowed hard, then looked across the lumber yard to keep Asa from seeing his tears. He wiped his eyes with the back of his work-hardened hand and said, \"Nobody ever done nothin' like this for me before. You be sure and tell Mister Grit how much I 'preciate it.\"\n\n\"He already knows, Willie,\" Asa said. \"He did it 'cause you're such a good worker.\"\n\nWillie nodded and walked out the gate that night with a lighter step as one big worry had been lifted from his life.\n\nThat simple act of charity became a pattern for Grit. He was generous by nature, and he seldom missed an opportunity to help somebody when he knew they needed it. Most of the widows near the lumber yards got bags of groceries delivered to them at Christmas, and none ever knew where the packages came from. They were dropped off by a messenger from the grocery store.\n\nWhen Colleen started teaching school in 1879 after graduating from the University of Nebraska, Grit built a small cottage behind the house and Colleen hired a housekeeper named Celia Gomez to help with the children. Things at home worked out quite well.\n\nWhile teaching, Colleen would sometimes see a student who obviously came from a poor family, and Grit would learn what he could about the family and then provide the help needed. Most often, it was food and clothing, and he anonymously sent a gift voucher the family could spend at the store just like cash to get what they needed.\n\nThe summer after Colleen's first year of teaching, she gave birth to Samuel, and it was obvious from the moment he was born that there were problems. A new physician in town, Dr. Aaron Wright, was attending, and Colleen asked him what the problem was with the baby.\n\nHe told her straight out, \"He's what's called a Mongolian child.\"\n\nColleen was stunned. She'd studied about the feeble-minded at the university. So she said, \"Which means he'll not have normal intelligence.\"\n\n\"That's right, his head size is a little small, and there are issues with his palate. It's probably best that you put him in an institution that can care for him. I'm not sure what could be done for him at home.\"\n\nColleen was so overwrought she didn't know what to think, and when Grit came into the room to see the new baby, Colleen burst into tears and told him the baby would be feeble-minded, and the doctor thought they ought to put him in an institution. Grit sat on the bed and held Colleen's hand for a long while.\n\nAfter a time, Grit said, \"We're a loving family, and we always will be. We'll welcome the little fella into our home so that he can feel our love for him. No institution can give him that. I got a feeling our love will make him blossom and be all he can be.\"\n\nAnd so they brought Samuel home and loved him. Colleen quit teaching to take care of Samuel, who proved to be both a challenge and a blessing in her life. He was slow but he learned to feed himself and pretty much take care of himself. Astrid and his brothers were very kind to him, and so was Celia, the housekeeper. Samuel didn't have angry outbursts, though sometimes he'd retreat into a corner and cry or sulk. One of the family would have to comfort him and tease him out of his distress.\n\nSamuel learned to speak pretty well and could comprehend most of the things he was told. He was obedient but easily distracted and often wouldn't finish what Colleen asked him to do. In the evenings, Grit would lie on the floor and play games with Samuel, stacking blocks and putting together six-and eight-piece wooden puzzles that Grit had made and painted different colors. When Samuel could consistently put together his first puzzles well, Grit made puzzles of 10, 12 and then 18 pieces and had Astrid paint a picture on the puzzle pieces so that putting it together made sense to Samuel.\n\nAs he grew up, he begged to go to work with Grit, and it scared Colleen a little. \"You won't let him get hurt, will ya?\"\n\n\"No, I won't,\" Grit said. \"Don't worry.\"\n\nAfter the first day, Samuel wanted to work with Grit every day, and when he could, Grit took him and let him play in areas that presented no danger. But it was a trial for Grit because he couldn't do his own work.\n\nEventually, they worked out an arrangement where Colleen taught Samuel in the mornings and in the afternoons, he'd go with Grit to the lumber yard where Grit had fenced off and made a small lumber yard for Samuel with stacks of lumber everywhere. On his third day in his very own lumber yard, Grit came back to check on him and Samuel had arranged every piece of lumber by its length and stacked them at the side of his \"lumber yard.\" Grit praised him.\n\n\"You're such an amazing little boy. Look what you've done.\"\n\nSamuel soaked in all the praise and wanted more lumber so that he could arrange the boards in what he considered to be the right order.\n\n\"One thing we got around here is plenty of lumber,\" Grit said.\n\nAs time went on, Samuel became obsessed with the lumber yard and wanted to work there all the time. Grit started taking him down on Sunday afternoons with Rory and Luke, and they'd do various odd jobs, cleaning up and getting things ready for Monday mornings. Grit had employees to do all that work, but he was trying to teach Samuel to start and finish whatever job he was given.\n\nGrit had Rory and Luke keep an eye on Samuel, and when a job seemed too difficult for him so that he might want to quit, they'd encourage Samuel to finish it and help if necessary. This worked out well until one day, Samuel wanted to use the saw, and Grit had to say \"no.\" Samuel retreated into his shell and Grit brought him home all out of sorts.\n\nGrit told Colleen what had happened, and she sat down and explained it over and over to Samuel. \"You could get hurt,\" I told him, \"and that's why Papa says 'no.'\" The other children started playing with him, and he was his usual self by suppertime.\n\nIn summers, both Rory and Luke did odd jobs around the lumber yard for a little spending money. Both boys tossed around big boards and stacked lumber most of the day, and they'd grown strong and tall.\n\nOne summer afternoon after working, Rory and Luke were headed downtown to get an ice cream cone and Samuel wanted to go. He was only nine at the time, but Colleen gave her permission.\n\nEver-protective of her youngest, she said, \"Rory, you and Luke watch out for him.\"\n\n\"Yeah, we will, Mama,\" Rory said.\n\nAt the drugstore they ran into a group of older boys that Rory and Luke didn't know, and one of them started making fun of Samuel.\n\n\"Hey, boy, you wanna run a race?\" he asked.\n\nSamuel said, \"No, I can't run fast. I just want my ice cream.\"\n\nAfter he got his ice cream cone, the boy bumped into Samuel and pretended it was an accident. He caused Samuel to drop his ice cream cone, and he started to cry.\n\n\"Aw, I didn't mean to make the little moron cry,\" the boy said.\n\nRory drew Samuel aside and said, \"Come on, Samuel, we'll get you another one.\"\n\n\"No, I want that one,\" Samuel said, looking at the cone on the ground.\n\n\"No, it's dirty, Samuel, we'll get you another one.\"\n\n\"No,\" the boy said. \"Let 'im eat the one on the ground.\"\n\nRory said, \"Shut up and leave us alone.\"\n\n\"Who's gonna make me?\"\n\nBefore the boy could say another word, Rory's fist hit the boy's mouth and kept striking him until he had the boy on the floor with a badly bloodied nose and torn lips.\n\nRory stepped back, pointed down at him and said, \"I told you to leave us alone. Next time maybe you'll listen.\"\n\nWhen the Milburn boys got home, Samuel ran to Colleen to tell her all about it. When she asked Rory about the incident, he said, \"Aw Mama, Samuel's exaggerating. It was nothin'.\"\n\n\"Oh, why are your knuckles all skinned up?\"\n\nRory smiled and said, \"Skinned 'em on some guy's teeth.\"\n\nColleen shook her head and said, \"Oh boy, just like your father and Uncle Paulie.\"\n\nShe turned to leave and Rory said, \"Wait, wait, Mama. What does that mean?\"\n\nColleen debated whether to tell Rory or not. \"One time, years ago, a man said some inappropriate things to me in Yankton, Dakota Territory, and Papa knocked him silly. The man had five friends with him, and they all came after Papa. Uncle Paulie jumped into the fray, and he and Papa stood back to back and left all five of the men in the dust of the street. Uncle Paulie wasn't much older than you are. They bloodied his nose, but he was smiling after the fight.\"\n\nThat night, the boy from the drugstore came to the door of the house with his father, who was threatening revenge. The boy's face was such a mess, it was hard to look at it. Right after it happened, Grit had heard from several people who couldn't wait to run over to the lumber yard and tell him about what Rory had done.\n\nWhen he answered the door, Grit listened to the father's rantings and said, \"I know all about what happened today, and here's the truth.\" Grit stepped out onto the porch and shut the door behind him. \"Your boy made fun of my disabled son and knocked his ice cream cone out of his hand and then suggested my son eat it off the ground. My older son told your son to leave them alone. And your son said, \"Who's gonna make me?\" So Rory taught your son a lesson. What your son deserves is a strap across his backside.\"\n\nThe father turned to his son and asked, \"Did you do that?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but he had no right...\"\n\n\"Get on home,\" the father said. \"Sorry to have bothered you, Mister Milburn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "When the 1880s drew to a close, Astrid began her studies at the University of Nebraska. She was a strikingly beautiful young lady, the only one of the family with naturally blonde hair. After classes started, she had young men over to the house nearly every weekend courting her, and she was nice to all of them, but she wasn't inclined to accept any of their attentions. Grit thought that if they only knew how rich Astrid was going to be, she'd have ten times as many suitors, but Astrid had no idea about the money coming to her when she was 21.\n\nWhile all this was going on, building in Lincoln began to slow as the economy seemed to go into a tailspin. Some men left the lumber yard to look for other work and were not replaced, but Grit was determined to keep the long-time employees if he could. Paulie gave him regular reports and things were not looking good. Profits dropped month after month, and Grit economized every way he could.\n\nBy 1893 when Astrid graduated from the university with a degree in mathematics, the nation had fallen into a severe economic depression and thousands of Lincoln residents moved out of the city. Paulie met with Grit and said, \"We can't keep operating at a loss.\"\n\nGrit smiled and said, \"How much money do we have in our accounts?\"\n\n\"Oh, we've got about $40,000 in various accounts, but business has dropped off severely.\"\n\n\"I've shut down the lumberjacks and given our long-time employees a bonus to help them until they get another job,\" Grit said. \"We'll buy our lumber from wholesalers. So we won't have that expense any longer. This economic depression can't last too much longer, can it?\"\n\nPaulie sighed, \"Grit, it could last for years, and we're selling very little lumber or hardware.\"\n\n\"Well, when you need a cash infusion, let me know,\" he said. \"These men have been loyal to me, and I wanna keep paying them as long as they want to work and as long I can.\"\n\n\"Are you planning to borrow money to keep paying them?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"No, I won't have to borrow it,\" Grit said. \"I have other sources of money I can tap. I can't talk about it, but all I can say, Paulie, is do not worry. We'll make it through this.\"\n\n\"Are you going to keep Asa on?\" Paulie asked.\n\n\"I'm planning on it.\"\n\n\"Then she and I should take a pay cut of at least 30 percent each, and we should put the men on four days a week,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Alright, do it, but give the men what they earn, and we'll give them a loan for the extra day they'll miss,\" Grit said. \"If we do that, how long will the $40,000 last?\"\n\n\"Maybe a year if things don't pick up,\" Paulie said.\n\n\"Alright,\" Grit said. \"To ease your mind, I'll have $100,000 transferred into the company account.\"\n\n\"A hundred thousand?\" Paulie exclaimed. \"From where?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Grit said. \"I'll have it in the account within a week.\" Grit placed a call to Otis and Company in Chicago and spoke with James Otis.\n\n\"How much has my investment grown?\"\n\n\"It did quite well until just recently,\" Otis said. \"Your balance now is a little over three million dollars.\"\n\n\"Okay, sell everything and go to cash as soon as you can, including those investments in the children's trust account,\" Grit said. \"And I'll need you to send $100,000 to my account at the First National Bank of Lincoln. I need it to run my business and pay my employees.\"\n\n\"We'll wire it out tomorrow and start liquidating today.\"\n\nWhen Grit got off the phone, he realized that he hadn't thought much about his account at Otis and Company for years, but even so, it had tripled in value. And when he needed the money, it was there.\n\nOtis called a week later and told Grit they'd sold the last of his stocks, and the $100,000 was in the bank account in Lincoln. \"By the way, we just got word this morning that the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the National Cordage Company are bankrupt, and there's a run on the New York Stock Exchange. Stocks are plummeting.\"\n\nGrit smiled. \"I'm relying on you, James, to reinvest my money at the very bottom of the market.\"\n\n\"I'll monitor it daily and we'll start reinvesting when we think there's the best value in some of the stocks.\"\n\nThere was no way Grit could have known about the run on the market, but he was glad he was out of it. Just a lucky call at the right time. The time would come to get back into the market, but he'd wait for Otis's call before doing so. He knew nothing about investments or the stock market, but he'd hired a good firm whose expertise had rewarded him.\n\nThe year Astrid graduated, Rory enrolled at the University of Nebraska, and two years later, Luke joined him. Samuel worked at the lumber yard every day with Grit, and though his coordination was not the best, he did the jobs required of him and seemed quite happy with his regular wages. He'd go shopping with Grit or Colleen and enjoyed picking out the things he wanted.\n\nGrit was as proud of Samuel as he was of his other children. The boy had learned to read and write quite well, and he had certain books that he read over and over and enjoyed, and Grit knew that Samuel had overcome obstacles other children would never experience.\n\nOne day as they walked home from the lumber yard together, Samuel asked, \"Papa, why am I so different from the others?\"\n\nGrit had contemplated the question many times, and knew there was no answer. Why? Nobody knew why. Grit pulled him close and said, \"I don't know why, Samuel, but you'll always be my best buddy. The others have all gone to college, but you and I, we were meant to be workers, I guess.\"\n\nThe economic depression lasted four long, hard years. Farms were foreclosed on by the dozens, businesses disappeared and were never seen again, hundreds of houses were empty as the city population declined by more than 30 percent. Prices for food, clothing, services and necessities plummeted. People just didn't have any money. Everyone suffered.\n\nAnd in the middle of it all, Grit said to Colleen, \"I've got to take Astrid to Chicago and show her the money she's got coming to her.\"\n\n\"Can't you just tell her?\"\n\n\"I suppose I could, but it's just a figure on paper if I do that,\" Grit said. \"She needs to meet the people who invest her money and make some decisions about what she wants to do with it, and she needs to decide about the books too.\"\n\n\"You could just show her the inventory,\" Colleen said.\n\n\"I could, but the money and books are hers now, and so I need to follow the requirements of the trust and turn it all over to her,\" Grit said. So Grit, Colleen, Samuel and Astrid took the train back to Chicago and left Celia to cook for Rory and Luke, who had to attend classes each day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "23\n\nOn the train back as Grit sat beside Astrid, he handed her an inventory of Gridleigh's books. \"Your Grandfather Gridleigh left you his entire library. I've had professionals store it, and it's waiting for you in Chicago. You'll note that some of the items are extremely rare.\"\n\n\"He left me the whole thing?\" she asked.\n\n\"Every book you saw when you were a young child.\"\n\nAs she looked at the list of items, she said, \"An original copy of the Declaration of Independence?\"\n\n\"Yes, but there's some items more valuable than that,\" Grit said.\n\n\"A copy of Shakespeare's First Folio,\" Astrid read from the list, \"the Gutenberg Bible, and John James Audubon's The Birds of America, and an original copy of Don Quixote de la Mancha. These are world treasures.\"\n\n\"Yep,\" Grit said. \"Your grandfather told you at the time that some were quite valuable, and he was not kidding, Astrid. You have to decide what you wanna do with all your books. You charmed your grandfather that day. You probably don't even remember it.\"\n\n\"I remember it only vaguely,\" she said.\n\n\"Well, he left you his library and $100,000, which has grown to over $300,000. We'll find out the exact amount when we visit with James Otis.\"\n\n\"But that means I'm rich. Really rich!\" Astrid said. \"How will I ever know if a man loves me or my money?\"\n\n\"Don't tell any of them until you're sure,\" Grit said.\n\nWhile Grit and Astrid visited Otis and Company, Colleen and Samuel visited with her aged parents. At Otis and Company, Astrid was given a complete accounting of her money and how it had grown over the past 16 years, and she decided she'd let Otis continue to invest the money for her.\n\n\"Any time you need money from the account, young lady, you can let us know, and we'll wire it to any bank you designate.\" Astrid left satisfied that her fortune was in good hands.\n\n\"Now, you have to decide what you want to do with the books,\" Grit said.\n\n\"They're so precious... some of them... what do you think I ought to do?\"\n\n\"If it were me,\" Grit said, \"I'd auction them off to a museum, which would protect them and display them to the public. Of course, you could keep whatever ones you wanted for your personal use.\"\n\n\"Oh, but I'd be afraid to even touch them,\" Astrid said. \"Papa, why didn't you tell me about all this earlier?\"\n\n\"Mama and I made the decision long ago that we didn't want to rear our children thinking they were rich and privileged,\" he said. \"When you rear children like that, they oftimes feel superior to others, and we didn't want our children to feel like that simply because we were rich, so we've hidden the fact all these years.\"\n\n\"I don't want my children to feel that way either,\" Astrid said.\n\n\"Then you'll need to do what Mama and I did.\"\n\n\"Okay, let's arrange to auction off the books,\" Astrid said. \"Is there someone we can hire to do that?\"\n\n\"Oh yeah, they'll want 10 percent of whatever the auction price is,\" he said.\n\n\"Let's do it anyway, but first I want to see the books for myself,\" Astrid said. \"At least I can say I held them at one time.\"\n\n\"Okay, they're being maintained by Leonard Ames, which also is an auction house. Let's go over there now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "\"Just this way, Miss Milburn,\" Ames said. They walked into a large concrete vault, and all of the books were stored on shelves, but the very expensive books were stored flat in separate cases. \"Any book that we deemed to be worth more than a thousand dollars is stored separately in a flat container,\" Ames said. \"Those are the ones I'd think you'll want to see and handle.\"\n\n\"How many of those are there?\" Astrid asked.\n\n\"If I remember right, there were 45 of them when we evaluated them 20 years ago, but there may be more now.\"\n\n\"What's the whole collection worth?\" Astrid asked.\n\n\"At auction, could be $200,000 or more,\" Ames said. \"It's hard to say what the auction price might be. Depends on how much the museums want the books. We may also get some rich, private investors who'll want to buy. We've got a list, and we'll invite them all. I think we'll get at least $20,000 for the Gutenberg Bible, and maybe the same for the Audubon collection.\"\n\nAstrid and Grit spent several hours viewing the books and tenderly turning the pages. \"It's hard to let these treasures go, but it would be better if they were preserved by professionals in a museum.\" She told Ames to go ahead and set up the auction.\n\nOutside, Astrid asked, \"Papa, do you think I could go to San Francisco? I've always wanted to go.\"\n\nGrit laughed, \"You've got enough money to go anywhere you want, San Francisco or anywhere else, all thanks to your grandfather.\"\n\n\"I'll want to make sure that Samuel is taken care of, even after you and Mama may be gone,\" she said.\n\n\"Don't worry about that,\" Grit said. \"Your grandfather left enough money for all the rest of the children too. They'll get about what you got, not including the books, of course. Samuel will be well-provided for. Your grandfather saw to it.\"\n\n\"That's good to know, Papa, but I want to ease your mind about Samuel. Even after you're gone, I'll make sure Samuel is treated well and taken care of properly.\"\n\n\"I'm glad to have you as my partner, Astrid,\" Papa whispered. \"Don't ever let anybody put Samuel in an institution where there's no love. He'd wither and die.\"\n\nWhen they got back to Lincoln, Astrid asked again about San Francisco, and Grit said, \"Well, I'd worry about you if you went by yourself. How about if you and Mama go together and enjoy a coupla weeks in California all to yourselves. Go to plays and take boat rides and do everything possible out there. It'll be a lot more fun if there's the two of you.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yep, Mama deserves it and so do you.\"\n\nWhen Colleen heard about it, she was ecstatic. \"Oh my, I don't have anything to wear.\"\n\n\"Oh, you do too,\" Astrid said. Then she giggled and said, \"Besides that, Mama, we can buy the latest styles in San Francisco.\"\n\nBefore they left, Grit gave each of them a thousand dollars with only one instruction, \"Have fun, and if you need more money, send me a telegram, and I'll wire it right out to you. Don't hesitate to do anything your hearts desire, and if you wanna stay more than two weeks, just give me a phone call and let me know.\"\n\nThe Milburn women enjoyed a glorious three weeks in California, taking in the sights and traveling by train and buggy up and down the coast. They attended plays and concerts and took day trips on the train to visit two vineyards in Sonoma Valley. Both got a little tipsy from sampling the wine and giggled all the way back to town.\n\nWhen Colleen got back to Lincoln, she couldn't stop talking about all the fun they'd had, and it seemed to Grit as if she were rejuvenated. She had several new dresses and women's suits which she wore to social events around town, and seemed a different person, making Grit happy he'd suggested she go.\n\nFinally, toward the middle of 1897, things began to get back to normal with the local and national economies, and sales increased at the lumber yard enough to pay regular wages to the men who'd remained on the payroll.\n\nWhen Rory graduated, he took a job with the First National Bank of Omaha and within a year was an assistant cashier. When Luke graduated the whole family went to the ceremony thinking it would be the last one they'd ever attend. Luke had a degree in business and had been hired prior to graduation by the Bankers Life Insurance Company of Nebraska with headquarters in Omaha. Of course, it wasn't the last one the family attended. They also saw each of Uncle Paulie's four children graduate from college.\n\nAfter graduating, Luke said, \"Well, Papa, you've sent five of us to college. Maybe it's time for you to go too. Samuel heard it and looked over at his Papa, wondering if he'd finally be all alone as the only one not a college graduate.\n\n\"No, Luke, I'm not cut out for that.\" He winked at Samuel and said, \"Samuel and I are proud to be surrounded by all you college graduates, but we're just workers. Aren't we, Samuel?\"\n\nSamuel smiled and said, \"Yeah Papa. Just workers, you and me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nAugust 8, 1926\n\nThe day of the funeral, there must have been at least 200 people standing behind us in the hot sun as we watched Rory, Luke, Samuel and my husband, Brock, carry Papa's casket from the hearse to the grave. All the people were there to pay tribute to a man who helped almost every one of them in one way or another.\n\nAt the funeral, which had concluded about a half hour before, Pastor Bartholomew Wilcox had spoken eloquently of death and the resurrection for those who'd lived a Christ-centered life, but the real story of Papa's life was told by several other speakers who knew him well or who had been touched in various ways by his magnificent spirit.\n\nUncle Paulie told of how Grit and he had worked in a sandstone quarry in Ohio and had come west together.\n\n\"He took me, a homeless boy, as his partner, and he always treated me as an equal even though he was older and knew so much more than me. When we started making money he turned it all over to me to take care of it. I was the bookkeeper for our partnership.\"\n\nUncle Paulie told about the boxing match where Papahad whipped the professional pugilist and won $2,000. \"Then Grit had promptly taken $3200 of our hard-earned money and plopped it into a Yankton bank account. \"\n\n\"That's for you to go to college,' Grit told me.\n\n\"'I don't wanna go to college,' I told him.\n\n\"'Well, it'll give you a much better life, so you think about it,' he said.\n\n\"A year later, I went off to the University of Nebraska and he'd convinced me that I'd made the decision when the truth was it was all his idea. I stayed for four years and graduated. Then when I was done, he gave me the purse strings again, and I became the accountant for our business for the next 48 years. We remained friends all our lives since, and all that time, we never had a single argument.\"\n\nThe next speaker was one of Papa's most loyal employees, Willie Abbott. As we went through the list of those to speak, the pastor suggested we could eliminate Willie Abbott, and Mama said, \"No, he's a good friend. I want to hear what Willie has to say.\"\n\nWillie stood, one of the few negroes attending the funeral, and said, \"The bank was gonna foreclose on my house, and somehow Mister Grit found out and paid it off. When Miss Asa gave me the deed to my house, I had tears in my eyes. I had no other place to live, and Mister Grit knew that and took that worry right off my shoulders. Then he gave me the lumber to fix up the house and make it secure against the winter winds. He said the lumber was just excess, and he'd be giving it away anyway, but I knew it was the finest lumber he had in the yard.\n\n\"During the hard times of the 1890s, he kept paying employees like me when he shoulda let us all go because the lumber yard wasn't making any money. Instead, he kept us on and paid us. If he hadn't, my family and I would've gone hungry. So I'm here today to pay tribute to a big man with an even bigger heart.\"\n\nA widow, Fanny Penrod, arose and limped to the front with her cane. She was aged, and her head canted a little to the side. She said in a shaky voice, \"Years ago, when my husband died, I started getting these deliveries from the grocery store, every week they came, and if I hadn't gotten those, I don't know what I would have done. My house was a little south of the lumber store, and most times a boy from the store would deliver the package, but one morning I couldn't sleep, and I looked out the window and there was Grit Milburn delivering the bags of groceries himself. Only that time, the package also had a $20 bill in it. And I put two and two together and knew who'd been responsible for getting me those groceries all those years. And he wanted nobody to know it was him. I learned later that lots of widows had been getting regular grocery deliveries from an anonymous donor.\n\n\"Later on, I got a leak in my roof, and I went down to the lumber yard and asked if there was anybody who could fix it. The very next day, there was a crew there that put new cedar shakes on the whole house, and I never got a bill.\"\n\nAll in all, eight people spoke before Samuel arose and looked out at the congregation of the church until everyone was a little uncomfortable, wondering when Samuel would say something. Finally, he said with a smile, \"I was Papa's best buddy. He told me so lotsa times, and it always made me feel good. All of you know I'm disabled, not smart enough to go to college. I asked Papa why I was different from my sister and two brothers.\n\n\"Papa said he didn't know, but that I'd always be his best buddy. He said, 'Maybe some people are just meant to be workers like you and me.' My brother Lukie, when he was done with college, said maybe it was Papa's turn to go to college, but Papa told Lukie that he and I were workers. I think Papa did it because if he'd graduated from college, I woulda felt bad being the only one that didn't go.\n\n\"I'm gonna miss Papa... a lot... but I have my memories, sweet memories of how he always treated me. Papa loved all of us, but I know he gave up more for me than any of the others. I don't have a single bad memory of him, not even one, and he was my best buddy for nearly 50 years.\"\n\nWhen Samuel finished, I had tears rolling down my cheeks, and I looked down the aisle and everyone else did too. Then I saw Rory and Luke get up to speak, and I didn't know what to think.\n\nRory walked to the podium and said, \"Everything that Samuel has said is true, and I don't wanna take away from anything he said, but I wanna say that Papa never neglected his other children. He was intimately involved in our lives. He'd come into our bedrooms almost every night and want to know what we were studying in school and how he could help.\n\n\"He took us on lots of hunting and fishing trips, often with Uncle Paulie. And in winter, he'd haul us up into the hills north of town so that we could sled down the hills, and we always cut our own Christmas tree every year. It was a family picnic in the middle of December that we usually did with Uncle Paulie's family. And he took me and Luke up into the woods and gave us lessons in how to fell trees, passing along his hard-won knowledge. We worked with him one summer in his logging camp, and I never worked so hard in my entire life. It gave me an appreciation for how hard things were for Papa in the early years. He was a great father closely involved in our lives, and we loved him for it.\n\n\"And Papa had the best helpmate ever. Our sweet mother was the mainstay for all of us, Papa included. She comforted us and loved us and served us every day of our lives. She was right by Papa's side in helping all of us achieve our dreams. We never wanted to disappoint her, and I don't think any of us did.\"\n\nWhen Rory sat down, Luke stepped up and said, \"I echo everything Rory said. From the time he could talk, Samuel has always called me 'Lukie,' and when we were little, we played together all the time. We've always loved Samuel, and we all tried to help take care of him. Papa made us partners in looking after him and helped us feel special about it. Papa devoted a lot of time to Samuel, but he didn't neglect us in any way, and I know my sister would say the same thing.\n\n\"Papa has 13 grandchildren, and they all felt of his love. We have family reunions almost every year, and he played games with the grandchildren like he was half his age. He'd play baseball and run the bases with the best of them.\n\n\"Now I don't want anybody to think Papa was perfect. He had times when he was a little grouchy and when things weighed him down, but those times were few and didn't keep us from looking up to him. I asked him one time why he'd never whipped any of us children like some fathers did, and he said. \"I was always afraid I'd hurt one of you, as strong as I am, and I never thought beating a child did any good. If I couldn't get you to see the light by reasoning with you, my cause was lost anyway.\"\n\nMama said later she was so proud of Samuel because his little talk had captured the very essence of Papa, but she also appreciated Rory and Luke talking about how Papa loved all his children and grandchildren so much.\n\nAnd so, we buried him that afternoon, a man whose own mother had given him up to an orphanage, but by sheer strength of will, he'd made it all come out right. When life gave him and Mama a little orphan girl whose parents had died in a winter blizzard, they took me in like I was their very own, and I became their very own. When life gave him and Mama a disabled child, Papa made that come out alright too because he loved that child just like the rest of us, if not more. And if it was more, it was only because Papa saw that Samuel needed it more.\n\nAstrid Milburn Templeton, 1926" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "", + "author": "Johanna Lindsey", + "genres": [ + "Callahan-Warren 1" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Rose warren stopped crying before her daughter, Tiffany, opened the front door of their brownstone town house, but she couldn't get out of her mind the words that had provoked the tears. Come with her, Rose. It's been fifteen years, haven't you tortured us long enough?\n\nShe usually let her daughter, who had turned eighteen last month, read the letters from Franklin Warren. Frank usually kept them impersonal so she could share them with their daughter. This time he didn't, and she wadded the letter up in her fist and stuffed it in her pocket as soon as she heard Tiffany's voice in the hall. The girl didn't know the real reason her parents didn't live together. Frank didn't even know the real reason she'd had to leave him. After all these years, it was best it remain that way.\n\n\"Tiffany, join me in the parlor, please!\" Rose called out before Tiffany could go upstairs to her room.\n\nThe afternoon light glinting in her shiny reddish-blond hair, Tiffany removed her bonnet as she entered the parlor, then the short, thin cape from her shoulders. The weather was too warm now for a coat, yet a lady in New York City still had to be respectably dressed when she left the house.\n\nAs Rose gazed at Tiffany, she was once again reminded that her little darling was not so little anymore. Ever since Tiffany had turned eighteen, Rose had said more than one prayer that her daughter would stop growing. She was already well above average height at five feet eight inches and often complained about it. Tiffany got that height from her father, Franklin, and got his emerald green eyes, too, she just didn't know it. She got fine bones from Rose and delicate features that made her more than pretty, but she'd only partially gotten Rose's red hair; Tiffany's was more a coppery hue.\n\n\"I've had a letter from your father.\"\n\nNo response.\n\nTiffany used to get so excited over one of Frank's letters, but that had been so long ago\u2014about the time she'd stopped asking when he would visit.\n\nIt broke Rose's heart to see the indifferent attitude her daughter had adopted toward her father. She knew Tiffany had no memories of him. She'd been too young when she and Rose had left Nashart, Montana. Rose knew she should have let them meet over the years. Frank had been magnanimous in sending the boys to her, though she was sure he had done it to make her feel guilty for not reciprocating and allowing their daughter to visit him. She'd been too afraid Frank wouldn't let Tiffany return home to her. It wasn't a groundless fear, it was her worst nightmare. In his rage he'd threatened to keep their daughter. He'd threatened so many things to try to make his family whole again. And she couldn't even blame him for that effort! But it wasn't going to happen, it couldn't. And now she was going to face her greatest fear: that once Tiffany got to Montana, Rose would never again see her.\n\nShe should have insisted that Tiffany's fianc\u00e9 come to New York to court her. But that would have been the last straw for Frank. He'd honored Rose's wishes for fifteen years and stayed away, but this was the year she'd promised him Tiffany would live under his roof again. Rose couldn't, in good conscience, keep them apart any longer.\n\nTiffany stopped in front of her and held out her hand for the letter. Rose directed her to the sofa instead. \"Sit down.\"\n\nTiffany raised her brow at being denied the letter, but took the seat across from Rose. The room was large. The town house was large. Rose's parents had come from old-world wealth, all of which was hers now. When Rose had returned from Montana Territory with her three-year-old daughter, she'd found her mother recuperating from a series of illnesses that had left her an invalid during the five years Rose had been away. Rose's mother had only lasted four more years, but at least Tiffany had gotten to know her grandmother.\n\nThat had been a painful time in Rose's life. She'd had to give up her husband, give up her three sons, then she'd lost her only remaining parent. But at least she'd had Tiffany. She would probably have gone mad with grief if she'd had to give up Tiffany, too. But now the day for that had come as well...\n\n\"Is it time for the Talk again?\" Tiffany asked in a bored tone.\n\n\"You've gotten sassy since you turned eighteen,\" Rose noted.\n\n\"If that's what you want to call this resentment that's been eating away at me, fine. Sassy it is.\"\n\n\"Tiffany\u2014\"\n\n\"I won't go to Montana, Mama. I don't care if it means bloodshed. I don't care if it means I won't ever see my brothers again. I refuse to marry someone I've never met.\" Tiffany crossed her arms over her chest and jutted out her chin defiantly. \"There, I've finally said it and I'm not changing my mind.\"\n\n\"I quite agree.\"\n\nTiffany's eyes widened before she squealed in relief. \"Thank you! You can't imagine how miserable I've been over the prospect\u2014\"\n\n\"You should let me finish. I agree you're not going to marry a man you've never met. You're going to go to Montana to meet him. You will have several months to get to know him. At the end of that time if you have no liking for him, then, yes, you can end this engagement and come back to New York before the weather turns bad. I give you my word on that, Tiffany.\"\n\n\"Why did you never tell me I would have a choice about this marriage you and my father arranged for me when I was just a baby?\"\n\n\"Because I hoped you would honor this commitment I made for you of your own volition. I wanted you to grow accustomed to the idea, hoped you might even be looking forward to it by now.\"\n\n\"But Montana isn't even civilized yet!\"\n\n\"Can we have this conversation without the shouting, please?\" Then Rose added with a slight grin, \"The Territory of Montana is not as uncivilized as you think. I thought your brothers convinced you of that. And it's some of the most beautiful country I've ever seen. You might actually like it there.\"\n\n\"I like it here, where I've grown up, where my friends live, where you live,\" Tiffany mumbled, then said louder, \"where men don't wear guns on their hips because there's always something that needs shooting, including people. How could you even agree to this arrangement in the first place, Mama?\"\n\n\"I'm the one who suggested it.\" She'd never told her daughter that before, and looking at Tiffany's widely rounded emerald eyes now, she wished she'd been able to explain some other way. But there was no other way.\n\n\"So you're the one throwing me to the wolves?\"\n\n\"Oh, good grief, Tiff, don't be so melodramatic. It was the only thing I could think of to end the feud between the Callahans and the Warrens. That strip of land with the water on it between the two properties isn't even what started it, but both sides are using it to keep the feud alive, both claiming it's theirs. I've never seen such pigheadedness, on both sides. Anytime they got near that water at the same time, shots were fired. If any cows wandered across it, they weren't given back, which caused more shooting. Giving it to you and Hunter Callahan as part of your marriage agreement will end the contention over it.\"\n\n\"So you took it upon yourself to end a feud you didn't start by sacrificing your only daughter?\"\n\nRose made a sound of exasperation. \"For your information, young lady, Zachary Callahan is one of the most handsome men I've ever met. I had no doubt that his young sons would grow up to be just as handsome, considering the pretty wife he married. I didn't think I was sacrificing you at all, I was quite sure you'd be thrilled with a Callahan for a husband. But then as an outsider, I saw things differently. The ranchers were aggressive, even possessive, yes, but I don't think that was unique to the area. Frank and Zachary were just two strong-willed men who weren't willing to concede an inch. Bad history started it, and that water on the border between the two ranches wouldn't let it end. Personally, I don't think the Callahans are bad people. Zachary might be a competitive, ornery cattleman, but he has a reputation of being a devoted husband and a good father, which says a lot for a family.\"\n\n\"It wasn't up to you to end the feud, Mama. Why did you even try?\"\n\nShe wasn't going to burden Tiffany with the horrors she'd lived through back then. Shots were fired so often she was afraid one of her children was going to catch the next bullet. Then a simple idea had occurred to her: to end that feud through marriage. When she'd first brought up the idea to Frank, she didn't know that she and Tiffany wouldn't remain in Montana. She'd imagined Tiffany and Hunter growing up together, being friends first, then falling in love naturally...\n\nShe tried to explain in simpler terms. \"I hated that feud, but, yes, I tried to ignore it, until the night your father was carried home half-dead. It wasn't a Callahan that shot him, but one of the Callahans' hired hands. A funny thing about the West: employees take sides, too, and some of them don't follow orders too well. But regardless, your father came close to dying, and I was so desperate to put an end to the bloodshed that I'd try anything. And the betrothal did exactly that. There's been a truce ever since. Your brothers got to grow up without having bullets flying at them every time they went out on the range.\"\n\nRose waited breathlessly for Tiffany's response. What she'd told her daughter wasn't all a lie, only partial truths. But it was exactly what they'd all thought when Frank had been shot. But the shooter didn't work for the Callahans. He had another employer, one much more ruthless, who was pulling his strings. When she found that out and learned she couldn't put the blame where it belonged, she did the only thing she could think of to stop Frank from retaliating once he recovered: she brought up the idea of a truce through marriage again, a sure means of ending that deplorable feud for good, and insisted on it this time.\n\nShe was the only one who knew what really happened that night and why. It had to remain that way. But Tiffany's accepting an arranged marriage could really be the salvation of two neighboring families that were too stubborn to agree to share water rights instead of fighting over them. But Rose wouldn't force her daughter to solve a generations-old problem. She could only ask her daughter to give Montana and Hunter Callahan a chance.\n\nThankfully, Tiffany's expression turned a little curious. \"So what happens if I do call the marriage off? They're back to trying to kill each other?\"\n\nRose cringed. \"I don't know. I'm hoping these fifteen years of getting along has made them realize they never should have carried on a fight their grandparents started that has nothing to do with them.\"\n\n\"What did start it?\"\n\n\"I'm not even sure. Something about a wedding that turned into a shooting instead.\"\n\n\"You mean the two families were supposed to have been joined through marriage two generations ago?\"\n\n\"Apparently.\"\n\n\"That doesn't portend well for your idea of trying it again,\" Tiffany pointed out. \"In fact, a marriage between the two families is more likely fated to never happen.\"\n\nRose gave her daughter a stern look. \"It won't happen with that attitude. Will you at least meet this man without prejudice? Give him a chance, Tiffany. He could make you very happy.\"\n\nTiffany mulled that over for a few moments before she allowed, \"Now that I know I don't have to marry him if I don't want to, I suppose I can try and look at this from a new perspective\u2014as a two-month summer holiday in a different part of the country. When are we leaving?\"\n\n\"I'm not going\u2014well, not all the way. I'll accompany you as far as Chicago and stay there to await the outcome of your courtship.\"\n\nTiffany's shoulders slumped with that news. \"Why bother, if you're not going all the way?\"\n\n\"Because I want to be relatively close by in case you need me, and with the rail lines connecting all the way to Nashart now, Chicago is pretty darn close. Anna will be going with you, of course. And I've arranged for a retired US marshal to meet us in Chicago to escort you on the last leg of the journey, right to your father's door.\"\n\nRose was going to start crying in a moment if Tiffany didn't stop looking so sad about this impending separation. \"You aren't even a little excited about this trip?\" she asked hopefully.\n\n\"No,\" Tiffany replied tonelessly as she stood up to leave the room.\n\n\"About seeing your father again?\"\n\n\"Again?!\" Tiffany swung around with a snarl. \"I don't remember him, and you and he made sure I'd have no memories of him. So I'll be honest, Mama. If I could get this over with without laying eyes on Franklin Warren, I would.\"\n\n\"Tiffany!\"\n\n\"I'm not kidding, and don't give me all those excuses about why I've grown up without a father. If he'd really wanted to see me, he would have found a way. But he didn't. And as far as I'm concerned, now it's too late.\"\n\nRose saw the angry tears welling in Tiffany's eyes before Tiffany bolted out of the parlor. God, what had she done to the people she loved the most?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Tiffany hated fighting with her mother, hated it so much the painful lump of emotion was still in her chest when she went downstairs for dinner that night. But her mother took one look at her and understood, holding out her arms. Tiffany flew into them for a hug. Both of them laughed after a moment because Tiffany, who was above average in height, had to bend over slightly to get her hug.\n\nRose put her arm around Tiffany's waist and led her into the dining room. Dinners were formal in the Warren household, guests or no, and mother and daughter dressed accordingly. Tiffany's evening gown was coral with ivory sequins outlining the square neckline. Rose's was navy blue with black lace, but her bright red hair countered the rather somber colors. Only one of the four Warren siblings had Rose's dark-red hair, Roy, the third oldest. The other two boys were blond like their father. Only Tiffany with her reddish-gold hair got a blending of both parents' hair colors.\n\n\"We won't talk about it anymore until it's time to pack,\" Rose assured Tiffany as they took their seats at one end of the long table.\n\n\"It's all right, Mama. I convinced myself I wouldn't be going. Now that I am, I have a few questions that are long overdue.\"\n\nTiffany realized she probably shouldn't have added the overdue part. A flash of wariness crossed her mother's face before Rose smiled and said, \"Of course.\"\n\n\"I know that the Transcontinental Express can cross the country all the way to California in a record-breaking four days, and Chicago isn't even half that distance. I appreciate that you're going to travel with me that far, but why are you really going to stay in Chicago rather than return home to await the outcome of this courtship?\"\n\n\"Is that really what's on your mind?\"\n\nTiffany chuckled. \"No. I just feel if you're going to go that far, I don't see why you can't go all the way to Nashart. Why spend two months in a hotel when\u2014\"\n\n\"Chicago is the closest big city that offers the comforts I'm accustomed to.\"\n\n\"Fine, but doesn't Nashart have a hotel?\"\n\n\"It didn't the last time I was there, just a boardinghouse. It might have one now, but I can't hide in a town that size. Too many people will remember me. Frank would find out and he'd be breaking down doors.\"\n\nTiffany looked at her mother incredulously. \"Breaking down doors? You're exaggerating, right?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't he come here and break our door down?\" Tiffany demanded, her tone taking on an angry note that, fortunately, her mother didn't seem to notice.\n\n\"Because he knew I'd have him thrown in jail.\" Then Rose added in disgust, \"In Nashart, no one would blink an eye over such rambunctious behavior.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I'm still his wife and they all know it.\"\n\n\"Why is that, Mama?\"\n\nThere it was, floating in the air between them, the question that interested Tiffany most and that had never been answered to her satisfaction. Her parents had been separated for fifteen years but they hadn't gotten a divorce so they could remarry. And Rose was still a beautiful woman. She wasn't even forty yet.\n\nTiffany's parents had met in Chicago when Rose had gone to visit her great-aunt, now deceased. Her last evening in the city, Rose had gone to a dinner party given by a friend of her aunt's, who was the lawyer Franklin Warren had hired to negotiate some cattle contracts he'd come to the city to arrange, so he'd been invited to the dinner, too. After talking with each other that evening\u2014all evening, actually\u2014Frank impulsively got on her train the next day and followed her all the way to New York and began a whirlwind courtship that swept Rose off her feet. They were married a month later. And that's about all Tiffany knew about her parents' marriage.\n\nWhen Rose didn't answer the question, Tiffany added reproachfully, \"I assumed when I turned eighteen, you'd finally tell me why I'm living here with you and my brothers are living in Montana with our father.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to tell,\" Rose said evasively, and began eating her soup, which had just been served. \"Your father and I just weren't suited to each other.\"\n\n\"You were suited long enough to get married and have four children.\"\n\n\"Don't be impertinent.\"\n\nTiffany flinched. \"I'm sorry. That really was uncalled for. But, Mama, please, I'm old enough to hear the truth, and I'd like to hear it before I actually meet him.\"\n\nRose continued eating. It looked as if she was going to pretend they weren't having this conversation. Tiffany hadn't touched her own soup yet.\n\nShe was debating whether to turn mulish or give up when Rose finally said, \"We married too quickly, Tiffany, before we found out how little we had in common. And he didn't warn me ahead of time about that feud that was going to intrude on our marriage. I still tried to make a go of it. I did love him, you know.\"\n\nAnd still did, Tiffany guessed, but she didn't say that. Rose was still evading the question. Telling her that she and Frank had nothing in common was purely an excuse so she wouldn't have to discuss the real reason she'd left her husband.\n\nRose added, \"I would have divorced your father if I'd found a reason to.\"\n\n\"You mean another man?\"\n\n\"Yes. But that never happened. And actually, I'm not sure I can even get a divorce. Not long after I snuck off, taking you with me, he said he would fight a divorce.\"\n\n\"You snuck off?\"\n\n\"Yes, in the middle of the night, so I could catch the stage first thing in the morning to get a head start on Frank. The railroad hadn't connected to Montana yet. And my maid delayed him from finding out I'd left by telling him I wasn't feeling well.\"\n\nTiffany was fascinated. This was the first she'd heard that her mother had fled Montana stealthily. But if Frank hadn't woken up and found her gone, then...\n\n\"You weren't\u2014sharing the same room?\"\n\n\"No, not by that point.\"\n\nTiffany wasn't blushing over the subject, but she wondered why her mother suddenly was. Rose hadn't blushed even once a couple of years ago when she'd given Tiffany all the information she would need to know about married life. But if her parents' marriage had deteriorated to the point of their not even sharing the same bed, then Tiffany pretty much had part of the answer. Rose must have stopped wanting her husband\u2014in that way. Either that or Franklin Warren had simply turned into a bad husband, one that Rose couldn't stand living with anymore. And the latter was something Tiffany wanted to know before she showed up at his ranch. What if he prevented her from leaving if she decided not to marry Hunter Callahan, the same way he'd tried to prevent Rose from leaving?\n\nBut she gave her mother a reprieve from answering that question since Rose seemed uncomfortable with the subject. And Tiffany was still curious about how her mother managed to escape, especially since Tiffany now wondered if she might have to do the same thing.\n\n\"Isn't a horse faster than a stagecoach?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, and I knew Frank would catch up to us, so in the next town I bought a stage ticket to the nearest train depot, but we didn't get on it. I hid us in that town instead.\"\n\n\"I have no memories of that trip, none at all.\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised, as young as you were.\"\n\n\"So he got ahead of us?\"\n\n\"Yes. It was much less nerve-racking knowing where he was than constantly having to look over my shoulder. I telegraphed my mother so she knew to expect him and turn him away. I wasn't able to go directly home because of his stubbornness. For two days he didn't sleep, he just stood across the street from this house, waiting for us to show up. For three months he stayed in New York, banging on the door to this house daily. One day he even forced his way in.\"\n\n\"Were we here yet?\"\n\n\"No, I wasn't about to go home until he actually left the city. You and I stayed with an old school friend nearby. Mama had Frank arrested, of course, for pushing past our butler and searching the house from top to bottom. She was furious with him by then because his persistence was keeping us from coming home. She let him rot in jail for a week before she dropped the charges at my request. He finally gave up after that and returned to Montana.\"\n\n\"Maybe he hasn't divorced you because he still hopes you'll come back to him,\" Tiffany said.\n\n\"Oh, I've no doubt of that. No matter what I said, no matter how nasty I got about it, he continues to think I'll return to him someday.\"\n\n\"Will you?\"\n\nRose lowered her eyes to the table. \"No.\"\n\n\"And you don't think that the fact that you haven't tried to get a divorce gives him false hope? Surely after this long he wouldn't still fight it, would he?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He said he'd go to his grave married to me. He's a stubborn man. He just might. But like I said, I've never had incentive to find out.\"\n\n\"You two write to each other,\" Tiffany said incredulously. \"Why haven't you simply asked him?\"\n\nRose smiled wryly. \"We don't write about 'us' in those letters, Tiff. We did for a while, at least he did. He was angry that I left without telling him, then he was heartbroken when I refused to go back, then he got angry again. He finally got the message that I would only write about you children and nothing else. The one time he wrote about our marriage, I didn't answer him for a year. When I finally did, I warned him you would be reading his letters from then on, so he confined himself to neutral subjects.\"\n\nAll those letters Tiffany got to read were friendly in tone. Some were even funny, indicating that her father had a sense of humor. But all he ever wrote about were the ranch, her brothers, and people she didn't know, friends of his and her mother's in Montana, people she'd probably meet once she got there. Never in those letters did he address Tiffany directly, other than to say, Give Tiffany my love. But she also got to read Rose's letters to him, and her mother always asked her if she wanted to add anything to the letters. She used to. She told him about learning to ice-skate with her best friend, Margery, and that Tiffany thought it was fun when she fell through the ice, but no one else did. She told him about David, a boy who lived on her block, and how she felt so bad for accidentally breaking his nose, but that he forgave her, so they were still friends. She told him about the kitten she found and lost and how she and Rose searched for it for weeks. She shared a lot in those letters\u2014until she began to resent that he never visited her, not even once.\n\nThat resentment got worse, especially when her brothers would arrive at the town house alone. She used to stand at the door, staring at the coach that dropped them off, waiting for her father to step out of it, too. He never did. The coach would drive off. Empty. After the second time that happened, that's how her heart felt anytime she thought of Franklin Warren. Empty.\n\nShe stopped standing at the front door with hope in her heart and tears in her eyes, and she stopped reading Frank's letters, or adding anything to Rose's. She'd been nine or ten at the time, she couldn't remember exactly. She only pretended to read them after that, so her mother wouldn't know how painful she found her father's rejection of her. It was the only way she could shield herself from something that hurt that much. She tried to put her father so far out of her mind that he didn't exist\u2014until she got a letter from one of her brothers that mentioned their father and clearly conveyed how much they loved him. Then the tears would stream down her cheeks before she finished reading it.\n\nHer brothers didn't know how she really felt either. The boys still talked about their father when they visited. They loved him. Of course they did, he hadn't abandoned them as he'd abandoned her. They just didn't notice that she wasn't listening to them, or that she interrupted them to get them to talk about something less painful. She hated it when they had to leave to return to Frank. She had so much fun with them when they were here\u2014playing with them, riding with them in the park, being teased by them. It felt as if they were a real family. Their departure always proved they weren't.\n\n\"Did you lie to me, Mama? Do you actually hate him?\"\n\n\"That's a strong word that isn't at all appropriate. He's an infuriating man. His stubbornness rivals my own. He had the sort of arrogance that I suppose comes with carving an empire out of nothing. He was at war with his neighbors. Sometimes I think he actually enjoyed the conflict. Some days I was afraid to even leave the ranch, but his attitude was for me not to worry my pretty head about it. You can't imagine how exasperating that was. I got so angry I could have ridden over to the Callahans' and shot the lot of them. I might even have tried it if I actually knew how to use a rifle. No, I didn't hate him, I just couldn't live with him anymore.\"\n\n\"And you're not going to tell me why, are you?\"\n\n\"I did\u2014\"\n\n\"You didn't! He cheated on you, didn't he?\" she guessed.\n\n\"Tiffany!\"\n\n\"Just tell me yes. It's the only thing that makes any sense.\"\n\n\"It was simply two people who couldn't live compatibly in the same house anymore. I cared enough about him to leave, so he could find someone else.\"\n\nNearly in the same breath alluding to fighting then just the opposite, that Rose cared too much? What was so horrible about the truth that Rose was making up so many excuses, none of them with the ring of truth to them?\n\nAnd then Tiffany threw out another guess, \"Or you found someone else and it just didn't work out?\"\n\n\"Tiffany, stop it. There was no other man. There was no other woman. It was a tragedy, it still is. Why are you making me relive it?\"\n\nThat was the one question her mother knew would make her back off. And Tiffany did just that. She loved her mother so much. But she'd lived too long with the hurt of her father abandoning both of them. And now that she was finally going to meet him, she was afraid that all that hurt would spill out in recriminations when she got there, because while her mother might not hate Frank Warren, Tiffany was sure that what she felt for him had to be hate. It was too strong to be anything else.\n\nOh, God, she'd managed to put ice around her heart and pretend to be indifferent to her father's rejection. Now all that pain was suddenly back, welling in her chest, and she felt like the little girl standing at the door again, staring at an empty coach.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said to her mother. \"I was actually hoping you could give me a reason not to hate my father and you haven't done that. I'll go to Montana to honor the commitment you made, but I don't want to see him any more than you do.\"\n\nShe wasn't shouting it this time, which warned her mother it wasn't just an emotional statement, she actually meant it. And she added, \"Callahan can court me from town, can't he? I don't actually have to stay at Papa's ranch, do I?\"\n\n\"And how will it look to the Callahans if you're at war with your father? Not exactly reassuring that the feud will come to an end, is it?\"\n\n\"Fine,\" Tiffany grumbled ungraciously. \"I'll tolerate him.\"\n\nRose actually burst out laughing. \"Baby, you'll be gracious and polite. You've been raised to be a lady. Now we're changing the damn subject,\" she added, quite unladylike herself. \"Eat your fish. It's probably the last you'll be having for a while. Cattlemen eat beef and nothing else.\"\n\nTiffany nodded, but she wasn't used to feeling so frustrated. Despite everything her mother had just said, she still didn't know why her parents had separated. But if her mother wouldn't tell her, maybe her father would..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"And I was so sure I could get used to traveling,\" Anna huffed indignantly on Tiffany's behalf. \"Your mama should have warned us that fancy Pullman car she rented wouldn't be coming with us on the last leg of the trip.\"\n\nTiffany grinned at her maid across the table in the dining car. \"Mama spoiled us with the Pullman car. This is how most people travel across the country.\"\n\nAnna Weston had been Tiffany's maid for four years now. Blond, brown-eyed, she was only five years older than Tiffany, though her cherubic looks made people think she was much younger. Despite being only twenty-three, Anna had more accomplishments under her belt than most women who had to work for a living. In addition to her being well read and having beautiful penmanship, one of her brothers had taught her how to lay wallpaper seamlessly, her father had taught her how to build and repair furniture, and her mother had taught her to play four different musical instruments. The agency that had placed Anna with the Warrens had gotten her two other job offers: one as a governess and another as a teacher. So Anna had her choice of employment.\n\nTiffany didn't know that until after Anna had come to work for them. She didn't know either that Anna had almost turned down the job because Tiffany had made her laugh during the interview. It wasn't that Anna didn't have a sense of humor, only that she did not think it appropriate to reveal it to her employer. But Anna was practical, too. In the end, she accepted the job in the Warren household because it paid much more than the other two choices she'd had at the time. But the maid prided herself on being strictly professional at all times, even to the point that she refused to call Tiffany anything other than Miss Tiffany. But that didn't stop Tiffany from trying to break down Anna's stiff formality. She saw no reason why she and Anna couldn't be friends as well as employer and employee. Only on rare occasions did Tiffany think her efforts might be working.\n\nBut while Anna wouldn't call herself Tiffany's friend and probably never would, she was fiercely loyal to Tiffany. And protective, which made her a fine chaperone. If a man even looked sideways at Tiffany, Anna gave him her hell-hath-no-fury look. And thankfully she was adventurous\u2014well, until they left Chicago she had been. She'd agreed to travel to the \"Wild West\" because she'd admitted that she'd always wanted to see more of the world. Tiffany wanted to travel, too. She wanted to go on a grand tour of Europe like other young ladies her age, or even up to her friend Margery's cottage in Newport, where she'd spent a good deal of time last summer. But she certainly didn't want to go to uncivilized Montana Territory.\n\n\"The seats on this train aren't that uncomfortable, just not as lushly padded as those in the Pullman. At least this train has a dining car,\" Tiffany pointed out.\n\nAnna's expression turned even more sour, telling Tiffany the seats weren't the problem. Of course they weren't. Anna's real complaint was how crowded the train was, and the heat and the stench that came with such overcrowding. The long seats in the passenger cars were designed for two to three people, but they were now occupied by four or even five, including children and screaming infants. Tiffany would have been complaining if Anna hadn't beaten her to it, which made it quite difficult for her to see the bright side of their situation. This was such a far cry from having that fancy private Pullman all to themselves, which had been like riding in a small parlor!\n\nRose certainly wouldn't have let them get on this train if she'd known they'd be traveling in such deplorable conditions. But then the long line of farmers hadn't boarded in Chicago but after they'd crossed the border into Wisconsin. The conductor had apologized to Tiffany and Anna, explaining that the high number of passengers was quite out of the ordinary, but nonetheless, they were now operating as an immigrant express train. It was just their rotten luck that a new tract of farmland had opened up in Montana and had been advertised in the East, causing hundreds if not thousands of immigrants to pour into the territory to start new lives. While the influx of farmers was good for Montana's growing population, which needed more food crops, it made the train ride into the territory uncomfortable.\n\n\"Look on the bright side,\" Tiffany said to Anna as their lunch was served. \"We're actually going to arrive a few days early because the train is no longer stopping at every depot to pick up more passengers, merely to refuel and resupply as needed. And Mama said the ranch house is big and finely furnished, thanks to her. She's sure we'll feel right at home when we get there.\"\n\nAfter reading Frank's last letter, Rose had also said, \"They've already started building your house on the contested land\u2014and come to blows. It was a mistake to think they could work together before the marriage takes place. But that's your father for you, quite the optimist.\"\n\nHer mother had said that with such a fond expression on her face it sparked all sorts of new possibilities in Tiffany's mind, including one she used to think about often when she was little, before she'd turned bitter\u2014getting her parents back together.\n\nBefore the waiter finished setting their plates down, he leaned slightly toward Tiffany and whispered, \"I'm sorry, miss, but due to the long line, we won't be able to finish serving before the dinner hour is over if we don't fill every seat at the tables now.\"\n\nIt wasn't the first time Tiffany and Anna would have to dine with strangers. If the train hadn't turned into an express line to deal with the land giveaway, they could have taken advantage of restaurants at the station stops. As it was now, they were barely given twenty minutes to stretch their legs when the train stopped, sometimes not even that. But at least they still had the dining car, crowded though it was.\n\nTiffany nodded her understanding to the waiter. Anna sighed. A young woman named Jennifer, whom they had met the day before, sat down with a chuckle. Blond, rather pretty, she was dressed similarly to Tiffany, just without the high-fashioned bustle and in much less expensive material. Still, she was obviously a city girl, not one of the farmers' wives dressed in faded calico dresses. Jennifer also seemed to be traveling alone, which Tiffany thought was quite brave of her.\n\nA moment later, a young farmer joined them, too, wearing overalls and a misshapen hat that he didn't remove. The harried waiter set down two more plates for him and Jennifer before rushing back to the kitchen. The farmer didn't say a word, just gave them the briefest of nods before he lowered his head bashfully and started eating. He was probably embarrassed to be seated with women he didn't know, or afraid they might be offended if a strange man spoke to them. Anna probably would have been, so it was just as well he didn't try.\n\nJennifer, on the other hand, was gregarious. \"We meet again,\" she said to Tiffany. \"Now that we're making a habit of this, I should probably introduce myself properly. Jennifer Fleming of Chicago. I'm a housekeeper by trade. My agency is sending me to Nashart for a year\u2014or longer if I find I like it there.\"\n\nTiffany's eyes widened, recalling what her mother had told her while helping her pack for the trip. Tiffany had asked Rose, \"Why the new clothes, Mama? I'll have no use for them on a ranch.\"\n\n\"You will use them. You will not change your routines just because you will be in Montana. I citified your father while I was there. He became used to a house full of servants, formal dinners, and the finer things in life. He may have regressed after I left, but you need only remind him of what you are accustomed to and I have no doubt he will adjust accordingly, if he hasn't already. He wrote that he's hiring a housekeeper from Chicago to make you feel more at home.\"\n\nTiffany hadn't read that in his last letter, so it must have been in an earlier one that Rose hadn't let her read. Could this young woman sitting next to her be that housekeeper? How many housekeepers from Chicago could be going to a small town like Nashart?\n\nTiffany laughed. \"This could be quite a coincidence. I wonder if it is my father who has hired you. Franklin Warren?\"\n\n\"Indeed!\"\n\n\"I was under the impression you were already at the ranch,\" Tiffany said.\n\n\"I should have been. I had to placate my family, and my fianc\u00e9, who wanted me to wait until he could come with me. It was his idea that we start our lives together on this side of the continent. Though he favors California, he's willing to give Montana a try if I like it there. He's still quite annoyed at me for not waiting for him, but I couldn't pass up this opportunity when my agency offered it to me because it pays so well. Your father must be quite rich.\"\n\nTiffany had no idea if her father was rich, so she merely smiled in reply. Anna was giving Jennifer a disapproving look. Anna had met her fair share of housekeepers; so had Tiffany for that matter. Neither had met one who was such a chatterbox, or as young as Jennifer. But these were unusual circumstances, their traveling together on a hot, crowded train into a part of the country that was barely civilized. It could just be nervous chatter. Besides, Jennifer wasn't working yet, so maybe she didn't think she had to adopt a formal, professional manner with the daughter of her new employer until she reported for duty.\n\nJennifer continued to chatter about the trip. The farmer never said a word, didn't even introduce himself, just kept his head down the whole while. It was highly inappropriate that he even be sitting at their table, but understandable considering more men than women were on the train. Anna made her disapproval known though, at least to Tiffany, giving her all sorts of glances and nods directed at her plate. Tiffany almost laughed at the maid's facial contortions, but she got the message: to finish eating quickly so they could leave. She did, and after they said good-bye to Jennifer, who said she'd walk up to their car for a visit later that afternoon, they returned to their seats, where they found Thomas Gibbons, their well-armed escort.\n\nThe retired US marshal was on the back end of middle-age and not very friendly. The little that Rose had said about him before he joined them in Chicago was that he'd been recommended by the Pinkerton Agency, which she'd contacted. He worked for them occasionally if a job led anywhere near the Rocky Mountains, where he used to be stationed. He ate only twice a day, breakfast and dinner, so he hadn't joined them for lunch. While he took his job seriously, he let them walk around the train on their own. Anytime they left the train, though, at watering holes or depots, he was right beside them, his hand never far from the gun he wore on his hip.\n\nThey were a long way between towns, weren't due to reach the next one until evening, and Tiffany hadn't heard yet if they would even be stopping there. The farmers were supposed to disembark tomorrow morning, which would give her and Anna some peace and quiet for the last few hours of their trip.\n\n\"We should have waited until the line for the dining car was gone,\" Anna said, getting in one more complaint as Mr. Gibbons stood up and stepped into the aisle to allow Tiffany and Anna to reach their seats closer to the window.\n\nHe had gallantly taken the aisle seat, where he had to put up with a good deal of jostling as people walked down the aisle unsteadily while the train was moving. Since their car was pretty much in the middle of a long line of cars, many people walked through it on their way to and from the dining car.\n\n\"And risk their running out of food again?\" Tiffany replied as she waited for Anna to take the seat closest to the window. \"I didn't mind sharing the table.\"\n\nWatching the countryside pass by was the highlight of the trip for both young women, so they were taking turns in the window seat. The view from the middle seat wasn't obstructed, but the window seat provided a more panoramic view.\n\nThe train had cut through the southern part of Wisconsin where wheat fields abounded, but Tiffany had heard the farmers talking about how the land there was becoming less fertile, which was why so many of them were excited about starting fresh in Montana. Well, the men were. She'd caught some of the wives crying over having to leave homes that had been in their families for generations.\n\nThe terrain in Minnesota had been more interesting, with many pretty lakes and prairies, though it, too, had its fair share of farms. The Dakota Territory, in comparison, was sparsely settled and was still mostly wilderness and open plains. She'd seen a few settlers near their small sod houses. She'd seen her first buffalo! But what she'd seen that morning when she'd had her turn at the window had been a little unnerving: two men, sitting on horses with no saddles on a bluff, just staring at the train as it passed. The men were bare-chested and wore their long, black hair in braids. She'd craned her neck to continue watching them until they were out of sight.\n\nAnna had been napping at the time, her head resting on Tiffany's shoulder. Tiffany hadn't woken her to show her the Indians and had decided not to mention it to her, either. Rose had assured her the Indian wars were over in Montana, the last major battle having occurred six years ago. The cavalry had lost, but a year later the soldiers had chased down the tribes and forced them to move to reservations outside the territory.\n\nAs Tiffany settled into her middle seat, the train lurched to a stop and Mr. Gibbons was almost thrown off his feet before he could resume his. Tiffany was confused by his worried expression as he sat down slowly.\n\nAnna didn't notice and was saying in exasperation, \"Now what? I'll warrant the train has broken down due to all this extra weight.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Tiffany said. \"It's probably just something on... the... track.\"\n\nIt was neither. Tiffany's words died off at the sight of the man who entered the car with a gun in his hand and a bandanna wrapped over the lower half of his face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"Don't be making no sudden moves now, hear?\"\n\nThe marshal started swearing foully under his breath. Tiffany's mouth had dropped open. Anna was frozen and silent\u2014for the moment.\n\nJennifer was dragged into the car by another train robber who came in behind the first. Tiffany thought the second man looked somewhat familiar, though she was too alarmed to figure out why. Jennifer must have been passing between the cars when she ran into him. The housekeeper was in tears as she hurried to an empty seat where she crouched down. She looked terrified, poor woman.\n\nTiffany didn't feel too brave herself. The feelings that overcame her as soon as the surprise wore off were like nothing she'd ever before felt, almost like a wave of heat that left a slight trembling behind. Her palms began to sweat, her heart was racing. She wanted to slide down in her seat as Jennifer had done, but she couldn't move!\n\nAnna gripped Tiffany's hand\u2014to gain courage for herself, or to give some to Tiffany? Were train robbers violent, leaving no witnesses alive? No, the robbers wouldn't have covered their faces if they intended to kill people\u2014would they? The thought didn't give Tiffany much comfort, didn't end her paralysis either. She couldn't even close her eyes. She just watched in helpless, fearful fascination as the scene unfolded.\n\nWith her eyes riveted on the pair of robbers at the front of the car, it finally dawned on her why the second man looked familiar. She recognized his clothes and that misshapen hat. He was the farmer who had sat at her table in the dining car! But obviously he'd merely been disguised as a farmer so he would blend in with the other men on this train. No wonder he'd kept his head down during the entire meal and hadn't said a single word that would draw her or Anna's eyes to him. He didn't want them to be able to describe him to the authorities. Tiffany clung to that hopeful thought, that they'd survive this terrifying experience and be able to give an account of it.\n\n\"Just hand over all valuables, then we'll leave, and you'll get where you're going in one piece,\" the first robber instructed in a gruff tone. \"Something from everyone, and don't try to pretend you don't have any money or jewels. If we think you're holding back, we'll just take your clothes as well. So if you don't want to arrive buck naked in the next town, fill the sack and do it quickly. But first, place all your weapons on the floor and slide them into the aisle. Now!\"\n\nWith a few thuds and the sound of metal skittering across the wood floor, guns started landing in the aisle. Thomas wore two, but he only offered up one. The other he tucked under the edge of Tiffany's wide skirt on the seat. She was too terrified to think about what he was doing. The passengers in front of her were turning their heads, looking at the back of the car. Tiffany turned, too, and saw a third robber coming down the aisle holding a sack out to each passenger he passed. He held the sack in one hand and a gun in the other to make sure the passengers complied. Tiffany noticed a fourth man, gun in hand, too, who was guarding the back door. Purses, watches, rings, money clips, all were hastily being dropped into the sack. More women were crying loudly and more passengers were hiding low in their seats, out of the line of fire in case any shooting started. At least one baby had started screaming.\n\nWhen the robber with the sack had reached them, the marshal dropped a money clip and a watch in it, but Tiffany could still barely move and her eyes got rounder as the thief looked at her directly, waiting for her to contribute her share to the sack. It wasn't that she didn't want to oblige. She didn't have much of value on her, wasn't even wearing jewelry for the trip. She had a little traveling money in her purse and a little more pinned to her petticoat, but not much since her mother had transferred all she might need to the Nashart bank long before they'd left home. She simply couldn't move!\n\nThomas took charge, lifting the purse from her lap and dropping it in the sack. Anna was another matter; her purse wasn't visible and she wasn't moving either. She was scrunched tightly against the window, as far from the outlaw as she could get. But the robber hadn't seemed to have even noticed Anna yet; his eyes were still on Tiffany.\n\n\"I've a mind to take you with us,\" he said to Tiffany. \"I'd say you're the most valuable thing on this train, fancy piece like you.\"\n\nTiffany was sure her heart stopped beating, she was so scared. Oh, God, he was serious! She could see it in his dark eyes and feared he wasn't talking about taking her for ransom...\n\n\"Get on with your business,\" the marshal growled at the man. \"She's not\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, old man,\" the outlaw said, but that wasn't enough, he actually raised his hand holding the gun to hit Thomas with it.\n\nHorrified, Tiffany shot to her feet without thinking. \"Stop it!\"\n\nShe was desperate to keep the man from hurting the marshal. He was the only one who could keep these robbers from dragging her off the train, and he wouldn't be able to help her if he was unconscious! But while she got the outlaw's eyes back on her, she had no idea what to say or do, now that she'd stopped him. But she didn't have to do anything else.\n\nThe moment she stood up, the gun her skirt had concealed on the seat was left in plain view, so she pretty much forced Thomas into action. He snatched the weapon up with one hand, yanked her down with the other, and shot the robber holding the sack in the belly. Almost in the same breath, he shot the man at the back door, too.\n\nWith no robbers behind him now, he ducked down behind the back of the seat in front of them, taking cover from the bullets that immediately came his way. Anna had already pushed Tiffany to the floor and fallen on top of her to protect her, screaming, \"You're crazy, you're crazy, you're absolutely crazy!\"\n\nYes, she was. If she had thought about it even for a moment, she would never have deliberately drawn the robber's attention back to herself. She would castigate herself later for doing something so impulsive\u2014if they survived this ordeal.\n\nThere was more gunfire, quite a bit of it. Some of the other passengers had grabbed their guns back from the floor, inspired by Marshal Gibbons to join in the fight. As Tiffany lay with her face pressed against the floor and Anna wailing hysterically on top of her, she prayed for the deafening gunfire to end. She didn't want to die! Suddenly, there was silence, although she heard shots in the distance.\n\nThen she heard a short bark of laughter and a man say, \"Good work, men, but this isn't over yet. The engineer caught sight of one of them robbers racing toward the train, leading eight horses. He got off a lucky shot so the horses scattered, leaving the thieves with just the wagon they brought to cart away their loot. The horse count suggests there's four more outlaws at the back of the train needing to be dealt with. I'll welcome volunteers.\"\n\nTiffany had no doubt that the marshal would be one of those volunteers. In fact, he leaned down and told her, \"This won't take long, I reckon. Just stay where you are and you'll be safe.\"\n\nWith the immediate danger over, Tiffany sighed with relief. And she could move again... well, not exactly. After a moment when Anna's weight didn't budge from her back, Tiffany said, \"I'm sure he didn't mean that literally. You can get off of me, you know. I'll be the first to hug the floor again if those criminals come back this way.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure what came over me,\" Anna said as she got back into her seat and helped Tiffany up. \"But what on earth came over you, to confront that man like that?\"\n\nTiffany wanted to say it had been a good plan since she knew what Thomas was going to do, but of course that would be a lie. So all she said was \"I was protecting our protection.\"\n\n\"You could have been shot instead!\"\n\nTiffany was distracted for a moment by the sight of several of the male passengers and train attendants removing the dead bodies of the four outlaws from the car. She couldn't help shivering and then turned back to Anna.\n\n\"Didn't you hear what that outlaw said? He was going to cart me off with the rest of the valuables as if I were a bauble! I was desperate to prevent that from happening. So I panicked. And since it worked out rather well, stop fussing about it.\"\n\nAnna sighed at that point, confessing, \"I was so scared. I've had my purse snatched before. I've been pickpocketed twice. My father's house was robbed while we were sleeping in it! So it's not as if I haven't experienced my fair share of robberies. I've just never had a gun pointed at me before.\"\n\nTiffany knew exactly what Anna meant. There was a lot of crime in New York City, but Tiffany had always been sheltered from it. This was the first time she'd come face-to-face with a robber holding a gun. They'd been in serious danger. She refused to think about what could have happened if the marshal and those other brave passengers had lost the gunfight.\n\nBut the makeshift posse ended up winning the day with the help of the railroad employees, who were used to dealing with train robbers and traveled armed. The passengers in Tiffany's car cheered when the train started moving again. Some of them were laughing and some of them were jeering as they crowded around the windows on the side of the car that afforded a view of two robbers who had just jumped off the moving train and were racing to catch up with the wagon full of stolen trunks and valises that was speeding away.\n\nTiffany kept looking at the back door expecting Marshal Gibbons to return. The passengers quieted down when one of the train attendants announced that several of the passengers who had fought back were injured. Tiffany's heart sank when she learned that Marshal Gibbons was one of them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "The marshal didn't regain consciousness before the train reached the next town. Tiffany was beside herself with worry because one of the train attendants who was attempting to treat the wounded passengers told her the marshal might not make it. She didn't know him well, he'd barely spoken with her, but he'd guarded her life admirably today. She would feel horrible if he didn't recover. His critical condition made the loss of all but one of her trunks in that robbery seem inconsequential.\n\nWith the help of the stronger male passengers, the three wounded men were carried straight to the local doctor. The marshal's wound was the most serious, so he was treated first. Tiffany and Anna waited anxiously to hear the doctor's verdict. They paced up and down the entrance hall of the doctor's home office for almost half an hour before the doctor approached them and said, \"He's starting to come to, so you can see Mr. Gibbons now, but only for a few minutes. I'm sorry if this isn't your final destination because Mr. Gibbons isn't going anywhere for a while. I'm confident he'll recover, but he won't be on his feet anytime soon.\"\n\n\"Are we going to stay and wait for him?\" Anna asked after the doctor walked back into the ward.\n\n\"We can't when we don't know how long that will be,\" Tiffany replied. \"But we'll be fine. This is the last stop in the Dakota Territory. We'll be in Nashart tomorrow. I'll visit with the marshal while you go find out how much time we have before the train pulls out.\"\n\nAnna didn't budge and gave her a pointed look. \"Are you sure you want to go on alone?\"\n\nTiffany tsked. \"What are the odds of another train robbery happening?\"\n\n\"Probably higher than we'd like.\"\n\n\"Nonsense.\"\n\nAnna hesitated another moment before she nodded and left the building. If they hadn't been so close to their destination, Tiffany knew Anna would never have given in.\n\nTiffany found Thomas with his eyes open and on her as she approached his cot in the doctor's one-room ward. \"You're a hero,\" she said softly as she sat in the chair beside him. \"Thanks to you and a few other brave men, those farmers can go on to their promised land and still afford to start their farms. The doctor says you'll be fine, but you won't be leaving this bed for a while.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Miss Warren. I know your father is expecting you on time and will raise hell if you\u2014\"\n\n\"I've already telegraphed him,\" she said, interrupting Thomas. \"He has a friend in town who will escort me the rest of the way. So you can rest easy.\"\n\nThank God Anna wasn't there to hear that lie, Tiffany thought, but still she couldn't help blushing. She didn't make a habit of lying, yet this was the second time she'd lied to the good marshal. The first time had been when the farmers boarded the train and the conductor had told them that because of the unusual circumstances and the train's going express to Montana, they'd actually arrive at her destination three days early. Thomas had suggested she telegraph her father to let him know. She'd told him she would, but she hadn't informed her father. She had blushed then, too.\n\nShe might have agreed to two months of purgatory in the wilds of the West, but she knew the worst part of it wasn't going to be being courted by a man she didn't know, it was going to be living under her father's roof. She didn't want him to meet her at the train depot, where she was afraid she might cause a scene. She honestly didn't know if she'd start screaming at him for not visiting her while she was growing up... or cry and hug him. Considering the resentment that had built up in her over the years, it was likely to be the former. But either way, she'd prefer not to meet her father in public, so she was glad he didn't know that she'd be arriving early.\n\nAnd Marshal Gibbons didn't seem to suspect her of lying this time either. He said with a sigh, \"I had a feeling there'd be trouble after the farmers boarded. It was just too convenient, that many people crowded in one place, most of them bringing their life savings with them to buy the materials they'd need to start their farms. This land giveaway has been big news in the territory. Figured it might draw outlaws out of their holes to take advantage of it.\"\n\nTiffany nodded and patted the marshal's hand, glad the ordeal was over. Now she knew firsthand how dangerous the West really was. Had she really told her mother that she would view this trip as a holiday? She'd hated every minute of it since she'd parted from Rose. She just wanted to go home!\n\nTiffany stayed with Marshal Gibbons until Anna returned and told her they had to leave now or else they would miss the train. Tiffany had thought there would be a longer delay, considering what had happened. But the dead outlaws had been removed from the train, the wounded had been taken to the local doctor, the train's engineer and head conductor had informed the local sheriff of the robbery, and now the train was ready to go on its way.\n\nTiffany hesitated over leaving the marshal's bedside. She felt so guilty about his painful injuries, which she was responsible for since he wouldn't have been on that train if not for her. She almost decided to remain there to nurse him back to health. Almost. But saner thoughts prevailed, mainly that she didn't know much about nursing, so how much good could she do? And she couldn't bear staying in this primitive territory a day longer than she had to. She might get stuck in this tiny town if more express trains that wouldn't take on new passengers were going to come through.\n\nSixty days and no more she'd promised her mother, then she could return to the civilized part of the world. Well, she'd promised to be open-minded about Hunter Callahan, too, but really, how long would that take? Mere minutes, she didn't doubt.\n\nShe and Anna rushed back to the depot and got there with moments to spare. But they nearly missed the train anyway because of the Warrens' new housekeeper. Anna had already stepped on board. Tiffany had one foot on the step herself when Jennifer yelled at her to wait as she ran toward her and shoved a piece of paper in Tiffany's hand.\n\nTiffany didn't try to read it, there wasn't time, so she just asked, \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"Give that to your father, please,\" Jennifer said anxiously, her expression full of misery\u2014or was it guilt? \"Tell him I'm sorry!\"\n\nThe whistle blew, the train started to move, and Tiffany got her other foot off the ground before she was left behind. Jennifer was waving good-bye to her, but the housekeeper looked relieved now. Tiffany wondered why and glanced at the note before she took the last step up to join Anna.\n\n\"What was that about?\" the maid asked.\n\nTiffany handed the note to her. \"See for yourself. Meeting up with Western outlaws was too much for her. She's running back to her fianc\u00e9.\"\n\n\"Why do you look like you envy her?\"\n\n\"Maybe because I wish I had the option of turning tail like that,\" Tiffany grumbled.\n\n\"The time to refuse to go to Montana was before you agreed to do it, not now when we're almost there.\"\n\nTiffany sighed. \"I know. You just should have seen how relieved Jennifer looked, probably because she anticipated that I'd try to talk her out of going home and I didn't.\"\n\n\"Would you have?\"\n\nTiffany's lack of options suddenly overwhelmed her. \"No!\" she said vehemently. \"She's the lucky one right now. I don't blame her one little bit for going home when I don't want to be visiting this part of the country either. Even if my father had succeeded in hiring a housekeeper for me, I'm going to hate visiting him anyway.\"\n\n\"Then let's go home!\" Anna said, sounding exasperated.\n\nTiffany looked at the maid. Of course Anna wanted to go back East. She wasn't obligated to stay. She hadn't promised she would!\n\nStiffly Tiffany said, \"You can, I can't. Honestly, Anna, I wouldn't blame you for going back where we belong.\"\n\nAnna actually turned a little indignant over the offer. \"I won't deny I thought about it while those bullets were flying. But the robbery is over and it is probably the worst thing we'll encounter. I'm staying\u2014if you are.\"\n\nTiffany would have hugged the maid if Anna wouldn't have gotten all stiff and huffy about it. Instead she laughed and shook her head. \"I hate to think of what type of servants they have out here if the good ones have to be hired from back East\u2014and quit before they even arrive!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Tiffany and Anna were the only passengers who disembarked in Nashart, Montana Territory, and they were still arguing when they stepped off the train. Tiffany's stubbornness had kicked in, and although she knew deep down that Anna was right, she was in the grip of the emotions that were clamoring inside her\u2014fear, resentment, even anger\u2014all because she was supposed to come face-to-face with her father, Franklin Warren, today.\n\nBut early that morning an idea had occurred to her of how she might put off that reunion a little longer. The dream she woke up to gave her the idea. In it she'd been standing in front of a door that was slowly opening to her, seeing a man on the other side of it who didn't actually have a face since she had no idea what he looked like. But she knew it was her father, and she started screaming until Jennifer was suddenly there, urging Tiffany to escape with her. Then she was running away from him with Jennifer beside her, holding her hand. They ran all the way back to New York, which was impossible, silly even, but it was just a dream, after all. Yet her fears had come to the surface in that dream, and before it started to fade from her mind, she realized she now had the means to avoid facing those fears\u2014for a few days more.\n\nShe just needed her maid to go along with her plan because it wasn't going to work if Anna didn't agree to help her. She wasn't really asking for much, just a day or two of anonymity when she could talk to her father and observe him without his knowing who she was. They were three days early, so he wasn't even expecting her yet! It wasn't as if she weren't going to show up at the Warren ranch or intended to hide in town for three days. But Anna had balked and was proving to be quite stubborn about it.\n\n\"This will give me some time to talk to my brothers first before I introduce myself to Papa,\" Tiffany explained. \"It's been five years since I saw Roy, longer since Sam and Carl visited. They were all still boys then. They're men now. I want to know how they feel about Papa, now that they're grown.\"\n\n\"You could ask them that in private, without pretending to be the housekeeper they are expecting.\"\n\nTrust Anna to be forthright and logical. \"Damnit, I'm not ready to be Frank Warren's daughter when I don't know anything about him and don't even know why Mama left him. I thought she would tell me the truth when I came of age, but she didn't. She gave me a bunch of excuses instead. I know she wouldn't have let me come here no matter the reason if she believed he was a bad man. But he must have done something bad to make her leave him, and I'm not as forgiving as she is. I don't know if I can reunite with him without accusing him of all sorts of things that might not even be true, and that's a horrible way for us to get acquainted, isn't it?\"\n\nAnna pursed her lips. \"You haven't thought this through. He'll know you. He'll know\u2014\"\n\nFinally sensing victory, Tiffany cut in, \"But he won't! He hasn't seen me since I was three years old. He sent the boys to New York, but not once in all these years did he ever come with them to see me. And I don't really look enough like Mama\u2014do I?\u2014for him to think I'm his daughter. This will work. My brothers might recognize me, but I'll convince them to play along. Two days, that's all I'm asking for.\"\n\n\"You didn't let me finish,\" Anna admonished. \"It's your hair he'll recognize. There's no way anyone can forget the color of hair like yours.\"\n\n\"Then we'll\u2014\"\n\nTiffany paused as a porter carried a few crates off the train and set them down next to them, forcing them to move out of the way. Her only remaining trunk was set down, too. She hadn't cried when she'd been told that most of her belongings had been stolen by the train robbers. They could be replaced. It was just one more thing to add to the list of complaints she was going to send off to her mother as soon as she had a chance to write her. Anna had been luckier. Her luggage, which she'd borrowed from her family, was so old and tattered that the robbers had ignored it.\n\nTiffany responded to Anna's remark about her hair, saying, \"Then we'll dye it.\"\n\nAnna was horrified. \"No... we... will... not!\"\n\n\"If you won't help, I'll do it myself. With black hair, my brothers might not even recognize me, but my father certainly won't. Black hair will throw him off completely, so no suspicion will enter his mind. Please, Anna. I don't know him at all, and he's disappointed me most of my life by refusing to be a part of it. I would as soon stay in town for this courtship I'm not interested in and not lay eyes on my father at all. But since my mama shot that idea down, I'd like a few days at least to find out what he's really like.\"\n\nAnna tried a different tack to talk Tiffany out of her scheme. \"You won't find hair dye in a town this small. Look over there, there's only one general store on the street and, by the looks of it, only one street!\"\n\nTiffany finally turned around and looked at the town of Nashart, Montana. Anna had exaggerated. Several streets led off the wide main one, though they appeared to be mostly residential. And the one main street, which was lined with stores and businesses, was at least long. The town had obviously doubled in size since the time Rose had lived there, no doubt due to the arrival of the railroad.\n\n\"Well, that's a surprise,\" Tiffany said. \"Nashart is bigger than I expected based on my mother's description of it. We can't even see to the end of the street. There could be all sorts of other stores down there\u2014oh, my, they have a theater!\" Tiffany said excitedly when she saw it. \"And a restaurant next to it!\"\n\nAnna wasn't impressed. \"One is open, the other is closed according to the sign on the door, so don't get your hopes up, Miss Tiffany, in that regard. Actors live in cities. They only travel to a small town for a few performances and then move on to the next small town.\"\n\n\"Yes, but we still might get lucky and see a troupe pass through in the two months we'll be here. Now, since it looks like Nashart does have a hotel, I'll get us a room while you find some dye. If the general store doesn't have any, you can try the barbershop.\"\n\n\"If they have one,\" Anna grumbled. \"You know you will be stuck with dyed hair for many months to come, and you will look silly with hair that is two different colors until your hair grows out\u2014or you cut it all off.\"\n\nTiffany was horrified at the notion of cutting her hair and threw up her hands in defeat on that score. \"I concede. I'll wrap it in a scarf or hide it some other way. We'll think of something.\"\n\nAnna shook her head. \"You're not considering all the consequences of this deception. Your father will be pleased to have you show up at his door early, surprising him. He will not be pleased when you show up at his door deceiving him. And what reason will you give him when you're done with the charade and admit who you are?\"\n\n\"The truth. I'll try to present it without rancor, but I will tell him the truth. I've been harboring too much resentment not to.\"\n\n\"Fair enough. Just remember you said without rancor. I suppose you want me to remain in town while you carry out this trickery?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because housekeepers don't travel with personal maids,\" Anna replied.\n\nTiffany frowned. \"That won't do.\"\n\n\"It would for one day. I won't agree to more than that because anything longer and it becomes a deception rather than a surprise.\"\n\nHaving won, Tiffany couldn't keep the grin off her face. One day was long enough for her to find out how she would respond when she first clapped eyes on Franklin Warren." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "\"That's got to be her,\" Cole told his older brother, John.\n\n\"Like hell,\" John blustered. \"She's dressed far too fancy.\"\n\n\"She's an Easterner. Did you think she'd show up in calico?\"\n\n\"Too pretty, too,\" John mumbled. \"You want to take the chance of bringing home the wrong gal?\"\n\nCole chuckled, pointing out, \"We're not going to just grab her and run, so maybe you should just let me do the talking. Better yet, why don't you go borrow us a wagon while I sweet-talk the lady. Damned inconvenient time for our good one to break down when we got more'n one thing to pick up that came in on the train today.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nCole sighed at that adamant response. \"Can you be reasonable for once? You're too intimidating when you get in a surly mood, and you're never diplomatic. First sign of opposition and you start throwing punches! What are you so all-fired grumpy about today anyway?\"\n\n\"Pa might think this is hilarious, I sure as hell don't,\" John said.\n\nNeither did Cole, and he was the one who'd been shot at recently. Roy Warren swore he didn't do it, but Cole wasn't going to just take a Warren at his word. John was hot-tempered even on the best of days, so he should never have come along to carry out this task. They both took after their pa with brown eyes, but John had Pa's height, too, being well over six feet, while Cole was considered the runt in the family at only six feet. Cole got his smaller stature from their ma, as well as her brown hair, while the rest of the men in the family had black hair.\n\n\"We should hurry this up,\" John added as he glanced down both sides of the street. \"I don't see any Warrens yet, but that could change at any moment. And I can't promise you I won't push back hard if they show up and start pushing.\"\n\nCole nodded, but he was starting to get worried, and not about the Warrens. \"They might not've been told about the train's early arrival like we were,\" he said, then voiced his sudden unease: \"What happens if she don't agree?\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't she?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but what if she don't?\" Cole repeated.\n\n\"Pa said one way or the other, she comes home with us. We'll do what we have to do.\"\n\n\"Pa didn't figure on every eye in town being on her when he said that. You want to end up in jail?\"\n\n\"How 'bout we just talk to her first 'fore you try to jump over all these obstacles we ain't run into yet?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "In the middle of the street, Tiffany finally managed to stop sneezing long enough to glare at the two cowboys who'd stirred up the cloud of dust she was choking on. But it wasn't really their fault, they'd merely ridden past her rather quickly, then come to a tearing halt nearby, which could well have been her fault.\n\nAnna had already pointed out that they were causing something of a sensation in the town, which was why they'd been hurrying across the street to get out of sight inside the hotel. People had been coming out of stores to look at them, leaning over balconies, pointing fingers. Tiffany was a little surprised to see so many women dressed plainly in homespun clothes and so many men in work clothes wearing guns. High fashion had obviously not traveled this far west, but did Nashart get so few visitors that the sight of two strangers would cause such a stir?\n\nTiffany put a handkerchief to her nose and kept it there. One more thing to hate about the West. Dust. It settled on her clothes, discoloring them, and it made her sneeze. It was controllable in the city, but how did they control it here with their dirt streets?\n\n\"I only wanted to change out of these clothes we've been wearing for days, but now I need a bath, too,\" she complained to Anna.\n\n\"You actually think you'll find one here?\"\n\nTiffany turned to stare at the maid aghast, only to find Anna pointing at a sign farther down the street: TIDWELL'S BATHHOUSE, HOT WATER AND SOAP.\n\n\"Wonderful,\" Tiffany groaned. \"Boasting that they have soap, as if no one else in town does. I think we should get back on the train before it leaves.\"\n\n\"The bathhouse is next to a tavern, which, by the way, this town appears to have too many of, so it's probably for men who don't plan to reside in the hotel.\"\n\nAfter that dust cloud they had both just endured, Tiffany wasn't in a mood to hear tepid encouragement. Nothing short of a hot, steaming bath in a private room was going to appease her right now. \"They call them saloons here, and if you were trying to relieve me, it didn't work.\"\n\n\"You'll get a bath at the hotel. I would wager a week's salary on it.\"\n\nTiffany finally noticed the slight grin on Anna's face. The maid was teasing her and trying not to laugh. \"You're just full of surprises today, Anna Weston. You're lucky I didn't fire you for arguing with me over my decision. I still might. Now let's get out of the sun, and the dust.\"\n\nAnna put her head down because she really couldn't hide that grin anymore. \"Yes, Miss Tiffany.\"\n\nTiffany snorted indelicately and finished the trek across the wide street. She was just about to open the door to the hotel when a deep voice behind her said, \"Are you the housekeeper, ma'am?\"\n\nShe wasn't surprised that someone from the Warren Ranch had been sent to town to meet Jennifer. The housekeeper had probably sent word ahead to her new employer as soon as they'd been told how much sooner they would be arriving because of the farmers. Tiffany turned around, expecting to see one of her brothers standing there. Well, she could hope, since this would be a perfect opportunity to warn them she'd like her secret kept for a day, even if they didn't recognize her right off. Despite the years that had passed since she'd seen the three boys and the chance she might not recognize them either, she knew that blond and red hair wouldn't turn black or brown, and none of her brothers had brown eyes.\n\nIt was those two cowboys who had just stirred up the dust cloud she'd almost choked on, both of them now tipping wide-brimmed hats to her. Well, she reminded herself, she was just a servant, or about to pretend to be one. So she shouldn't be surprised that her father would merely send a couple of hired hands to collect a new employee.\n\nTiffany answered, \"Yes, I've been hired by\u2014\"\n\n\"We know who sent for you, ma'am,\" the brown-haired young man cut in. \"We're here to talk you into working for us instead.\"\n\nTiffany frowned, glancing between them. They were both young, tall, and actually rather handsome. They even bore a slight facial resemblance to each other, suggesting they were brothers. But why had they approached her if they weren't her father's men?\n\nJust to make sure of that, she asked, \"You're not from the Warren Ranch?\"\n\n\"No, but can we step inside the hotel to finish this deal? Please, before any Warrens show up?\"\n\n\"We don't have a deal\u2014\"\n\n\"We will.\"\n\n\"No, we will not,\" Tiffany said with finality, turning her back on them, and entered the hotel.\n\nAnna barricaded the door with her body when the men started to follow Tiffany inside, her arms spread out to either side of the doorway. Her message was clear. They were not to bother Tiffany any further. The two men actually pushed right past her as if they didn't even see her there!\n\n\"Ma'am, you really need to hear us out.\"\n\nTiffany swung around, amazed the two cowboys had followed her into the hotel. Anna, behind them now, looked angry enough to start swinging her purse at them, which probably wasn't a good idea with both men wearing gun holsters.\n\nTiffany was exasperated. This was ridiculous. She was in dire need of a bath, and she didn't want to have to scream for help to get rid of two obnoxious young men. The hotel lobby was empty, except for an elderly man sweeping the floor at the back of the large room. She held up her hand to stop Anna from becoming aggressive in her defense of Tiffany and turned to the brown-haired cowboy, who had been doing all the talking.\n\n\"As briefly as possible, say what you have to say, then leave.\"\n\n\"You're awful uppity for a servant, ain't you?\" the other man suddenly said.\n\nTiffany's mouth nearly dropped open. Her eyes flared wide for a moment. He was getting annoyed with her? But before she could lambaste him, his companion took off his hat and hit his friend with it.\n\n\"What part of fancy Easterner didn't you understand?\" he growled.\n\n\"She's still just a servant\u2014\"\n\n\"A fancy servant, as fancy as they get. And when Pa hears you messed this up by shooting off your mouth, he'll tan your hide.\"\n\nThe black-haired cowboy who'd just got upbraided turned red in the face, but Tiffany didn't think it was from embarrassment. He was furious, possibly because he looked older than the other man and didn't like being reprimanded by a younger man. She hoped she wasn't blushing as well, having just had it spelled out rather plainly that she had no business sounding so imperious with them after going along with their assumption that she was the expected housekeeper.\n\nHat still in hand and looking conciliatory, the brown-haired man said to her, \"Beg pardon, ma'am. Name's Cole Callahan. This here's my brother John. That ornery old cuss who hired you ain't the least bit friendly with us, but we're his closest neighbors.\"\n\nTiffany was reeling from the knowledge that these two men were her fianc\u00e9's brothers. Anna immediately looked contrite. Tiffany guessed Anna had indeed been about to swing her purse at them and would have regretted it because these were two of Tiffany's possible future in-laws.\n\nTiffany was also surprised to hear them refer to her father as an ornery old cuss. Was that why her mother had left Frank? He simply turned out to be too unpleasant and high-handed to live with? Rose did have a bit of a temper. She wouldn't have put up with orneriness for long. But old? Well, these two young men might consider anyone over forty old.\n\nHighly curious now, Tiffany took a closer look at the men, wondering if Hunter looked like either of them. She had dozens of questions, none of which she could ask since she wasn't supposed to know about the Callahan family!\n\nIn a much milder tone she said, \"I'm pleased to make the acquaintance of my employer's neighbors, even if you aren't the best of friends with each other.\"\n\n\"That's an understatement,\" John mumbled. \"Thieves and liars who can't be trusted, the lot of them. You're lucky we aim to rescue you.\"\n\nTiffany stiffened indignantly on her brothers' behalf, so her tone was sharp when she replied, \"And why would I take your word for that?\"\n\n\"Now, John,\" Cole cautioned his bigger, older brother.\n\nTiffany didn't care if the older Callahan didn't like her questioning him. If he was going to hand out insults to her family, he had to expect some back. Oh, good grief, was this how feuds got out of hand?\n\nBut all John did was yell at someone behind her. \"Hey, Billy, vouch for me. Am I or am I not an honest man?\"\n\nTiffany looked behind her and realized John Callahan had called out to the skinny, old man who was sweeping the lobby floor. \"Except when you're playing poker,\" Billy snickered.\n\n\"Answer the damn question,\" John said impatiently.\n\n\"Honest as the day is long in the summer, you betcha\u2014except when you're playing poker,\" Billy said again, but with another snicker he quickly walked away, disappearing into the back of the hotel.\n\nShe noticed John hadn't asked the hotel worker to confirm that the Warrens weren't honest, because they were, but she wasn't supposed to know that yet. And considering John's size and intimidating manner, she wouldn't be at all surprised if he got the same affirmative response, true or not, no matter whom he asked to vouch for him.\n\nSo she went along with what he was trying to assert and simply said, \"Thank you for the warning, gentlemen, but I am committed, so if that was your only reason for detaining me, I'll be on my way. Good day.\"\n\n\"How 'bout a rescue?\" John snapped. \"Seems like a damn good reason\u2014\"\n\nCole elbowed his brother to silence this time before saying, \"What you probably don't know, ma'am, is the Warrens don't need a housekeeper, but we do. We even just lost our cook. So we figured to kill two birds with one stone and steal you out from under Frank's nose and get us some extra help to boot.\"\n\n\"Steal?\" Tiffany gasped in alarm.\n\nJohn actually shoved his brother halfway across the lobby just to have his say without any more interruptions. \"What my brother means is, we'll pay you double what old Frank offered if you come work for us instead.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Tiffany could barely keep from laughing. Positively priceless. What servant would turn down a double salary? Jennifer certainly wouldn't, not when money had been her motive for coming here. She'd mentioned that she and her fianc\u00e9 wanted to accumulate a nest egg before they got married. Logically, Tiffany had to accept the Callahans' offer, didn't she?\n\nTwo birds indeed, but the Callahan brothers didn't know they were her birds. Tiffany could now avoid meeting her father altogether, but still abide by the promise she'd made to her mother. A huge weight was lifted from her shoulders with that realization. She could also find out what kind of man Hunter Callahan was without his knowing she was his fianc\u00e9e. She felt so relieved that she barely noticed how tense the brothers were, waiting for her answer. She avoided meeting Anna's eyes because she wasn't going to discuss this decision with the maid.\n\nBut she still had to put herself in Jennifer's shoes. While she already knew that the Callahans were a prominent family of ranchers, the housekeeper didn't. And wouldn't Jennifer present some conditions first?\n\nShe thought of one. \"I was assured I would have my own room\u2014\"\n\nJohn cut in, \"Don't see why you'd need to share one when we've got extra.\"\n\n\"With a lock on the door.\"\n\n\"Pretty sure they've all got locks.\"\n\n\"And I will expect my wages to be paid promptly each week,\" she added.\n\n\"Pa pays the help. I'll mention it to him.\"\n\n\"Very well, I accept your offer.\"\n\nJohn smiled at her for the first time. His relief was unmistakable, making her wonder what might have happened if she had turned them down. \"You won't regret it,\" he assured her.\n\nAnna had started to sputter. Tiffany quickly added, \"Just give me a few minutes to say good-bye to the friend I made on the train, then I'll join you outside.\"\n\nThe Callahan brothers glanced around to find her \"friend,\" then tipped their hats at Anna. The door had no sooner closed behind them than Anna lit into her.\n\n\"Have you lost your mind?\"\n\nTiffany took Anna's arm and led her away from the hotel's entrance. \"Keep your voice down!\"\n\nThe maid glared at her. \"Your charade was only supposed to last a day!\" she pointed out in a softer though no less exasperated tone. \"And it was only your father you wanted to fool, not the entire town.\"\n\n\"Yes, but who would have expected an opportunity like this to fall into my lap,\" Tiffany said excitedly. \"Anna, don't ruin this for me. It's already set in motion. I'm going to be Jennifer\u2014what was her last name? I can't remember after only hearing it once.\"\n\n\"Fleming.\"\n\n\"You're sure it was Fleming? This won't work if I give the wrong name.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm sure, and, no, it still won't work. You don't have a wardrobe suitable for a housekeeper for an extended time.\"\n\nTiffany laughed, relieved that was the only objection Anna could come up with this time. \"They aren't going to know what I should or shouldn't wear, I doubt they even know what the duties of a housekeeper are. Besides, most of my wardrobe is littering the countryside, including all of my evening gowns. I can use the excuse that my work clothes were stolen in the train robbery if they think my few remaining day dresses are too fancy.\"\n\n\"Are you forgetting that your father expects you?\"\n\n\"Not for another few days he doesn't, which is long enough for my mother to let him know I've been delayed.\"\n\n\"And how is she going to know to do that, or even agree to do that?\"\n\n\"Anna, I never promised Mama that I'd meet my father, just that I'd give Hunter Callahan a minimum of two months. I'll let Mama know what I'm doing. I'll telegraph her before I leave town so she can arrange a 'delay' for my arrival at my father's ranch.\"\n\n\"And that will have her catching the next train here, I don't doubt.\"\n\nTiffany sighed. \"I wish it would, but it won't. But I'll get a letter off to her tomorrow with a full explanation. Unlike you, she'll understand this is a much better way for me to handle this horrid situation.\"\n\n\"Or she'll be furious because now she's going to have to lie to your father to give him a reason for you not showing up.\"\n\nTiffany winced. \"It won't be the first time. She lied to him before to get him out of her life. She admitted it to me. So now she can do the same for me.\"\n\n\"I simply don't understand why you would even want to do this.\"\n\nThat struck such an emotional chord Tiffany almost blurted out the truth, that she was terrified of coming face-to-face with Franklin Warren. Years ago all she wanted was to meet this faceless father of hers. Now she had no desire to know him. Her being in Nashart, Montana, had nothing to do with him. The engagement wasn't even his idea. He obviously couldn't care less if he ever met her. He just wanted to end the feud with the Callahans. That was the only reason he wanted her to show up.\n\nBut Anna didn't need to know all that. \"Have I let on even once that I'm pleased with this situation?\" Tiffany demanded. \"No, I haven't. I've been viewing this trip to Montana as a two-month prison sentence, and the very moment the cell opens, we'll be back on a train going home.\"\n\nAnna frowned. \"I thought you told your mother you'd be open-minded about your young man.\"\n\n\"He's not my young man. And, yes, I'm going to be open-minded for all of one minute when I meet him. That's all the time it will take me to decide he won't do. He's a cowboy, Anna. Can you really see me married to a cowboy?\"\n\nAnna tsked. \"You do realize that is not the definition of open-minded?\"\n\n\"Two months and not a day more,\" Tiffany gritted out adamantly.\n\n\"You make this sound like a punishment, but I certainly don't see it that way.\"\n\n\"You're not the one being asked to marry a stranger.\"\n\n\"True, but then neither are you. You're not going to be rushed straight to the altar. He won't be a stranger for very long. And you could view this from a different perspective, you know. I agreed to come along because, unlike you, I thought I'd enjoy such an interesting new experience. New sights, new people, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. And other than that train robbery, I have been enjoying it. You've lived in the city your whole life, too. Aren't you the least bit curious about how people live in this part of the country?\"\n\nNo, she wasn't, but Tiffany was tired of butting heads with Anna. For someone who hadn't wanted to be her friend, Anna was sure overstepping herself on this trip. Yet the maid could ruin everything if she refused to go along with this, so Tiffany did need to give her a reasonable explanation.\n\n\"You haven't considered all the ramifications, have you?\" Tiffany said. \"What if I do like my fianc\u00e9 and think I can stomach it here for love's sake, but after the marriage I find out he's a horrible man? Then what? Run away like my mama did? And how will I know what he's really like if he has to come to the enemy camp to court me? He's either going to be extremely wary and not himself, or out to impress me with artificial behavior, so again, not really himself. But suddenly I have this perfect opportunity to find out what he's really like before he puts his best foot forward. I don't want to find out what the other foot is like after the wedding, when it will be too late to back out. So let me get to know these people before I have to deal with their insincerities.\" Tiffany raised her chin stubbornly. \"And if you don't think that's a good reason, well, too bad.\"\n\nAnna seemed to think about that for a few moments before she pointed out, \"Sounded to me like they assume a housekeeper is also a cook.\"\n\nNot expecting that simple reminder but a torrent of objections and disapproval, Tiffany realized that Anna was conceding and burst out laughing. \"So? I'll set them straight on the duties of a housekeeper. Now, you still have the money Mama gave you, right?\" Anna nodded. \"So you should go ahead and get yourself a room as we planned, but just plan for a longer stay. You can consider this a holiday for the duration. I'll visit you tomorrow when I come back to mail Mama's letter and let you know how wonderfully this is going to work out.\"\n\nTiffany gave Anna a hug and walked out of the hotel before Anna could change her mind and voice any more objections. Only one of the brothers was waiting for her outside the hotel. She was glad it wasn't the grouchy one.\n\n\"I'll need a coach for my trunk,\" she told Cole. \"It's rather heavy.\"\n\nHe stared at her blankly for a moment. Tiffany sighed to herself. She probably shouldn't be giving him orders. She was going to have to be more careful about that if she hoped to fool them into believing she was a servant.\n\nCole laughed, explaining, \"No coaches round here, ma'am. John's gone to borrow a wagon and pick up the new wheels for our broken one. He'll meet us at the train station.\"\n\n\"Excellent. And if you could point me toward the telegraph office in the meantime? I need to let my family know I've arrived safely.\"\n\n\"Don't have a telegraph office, but we do have a telegraph. I'll show you to it.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nIt was a short walk back across the street. At least no other riders went by just then to stir up any more dust clouds. He was taking her to the Nashart Stage Depot. Scribbled on the lower half of the large sign above it were the words AND TELEGRAPH.\n\n\"I'm surprised the railroad didn't put the stage line out of business,\" Tiffany remarked.\n\n\"Still towns north and south of here that the tracks don't reach. If you don't mind, I'm gonna wait out here to keep an eye out for any Warrens. Rather not get in a shoot-out over snatching you out from under them.\"\n\nThat was an alarming statement, but since he grinned as he said it, Tiffany decided he wasn't serious and went into the office without him.\n\nShe marched up to the counter to send the telegram, but paused when she realized the man she was giving it to might warn her father. Didn't everyone know everyone else in a small town? So she arranged to have the message, which she didn't sign, delivered to R.W. at the hotel in Chicago where Rose was staying. How many guests could they have with those initials?\n\nThe telegram read, \"Change of plans. Give Papa excuse for extended delay. Letter explaining to follow.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Tiffany said nothing to the Callahan brothers about the vehicle they were forcing her to ride in, but she was highly indignant about having to travel anywhere in a freight wagon! The driver's bench she sat on had no backrest, and no canopy either to protect her from the June sun, which was getting hotter as the day progressed. She had the appalling thought that she might start sweating by the time they reached the ranch or, even worse, get sunburned!\n\nIf she knew whether her parasols were in her remaining trunk, she'd ask the brothers to stop so she could take one out, but she hadn't done the packing so she didn't know, and she'd be embarrassed if she made them wait while she dug through that trunk and then came up empty-handed. Her fancy bonnet was a fashionable wardrobe accessory and was of little use in protecting her from the sun, so she settled for using her hand to shield her face. It was obvious now why men in the West wore hats with such wide brims. She'd even seen a couple of women in town wearing hats like that.\n\nAs Cole drove the wagon and John rode alongside, Tiffany sat stiffly erect as was proper, but her back was already getting sore from the effort. Her mother would cry if she could see the discomfort Tiffany was suffering because of a promise Rose had made. No, actually, Rose would probably just say something encouraging like \"You can laugh and tell your grandchildren about this someday.\" Tiffany would have scoffed because her grandchildren were going to be proper New Yorkers who would be horrified that she had to endure this. But she heard Rose whispering in reply, \"Or a pack of little cowboys who would be horrified that you would even mention it.\"\n\nThis truly was absurd. She should be at home enjoying the social whirl in New York City with her friends, going to wonderful parties, meeting proper young gentlemen who'd never heard of outlaws, much less Indians! She shouldn't be here! And for what? Because two neighbors couldn't get along and be neighborly?\n\n\"Any riders come toward us, you drop down in the back and hide,\" Cole said.\n\nThat was a rude awakening from her miserable thoughts. \"Why?\" she gasped.\n\n\"Could be a Warren.\"\n\nShe bit her tongue to keep herself from answering immediately. What would Jennifer say? Wouldn't the housekeeper welcome the opportunity to tell the Warrens that she'd decided to work for the Callahans instead because they'd offered her double the wages? How ignoble, yet that was probably what the real Jennifer would have done if she had gotten the offer. But Jennifer was on her way back East.\n\nWhile Tiffany didn't want to risk running into her father or any of her brothers yet, she had to reply the way Jennifer would. \"I should let them know I've decided to work for your family instead. It's the honorable thing do to.\"\n\nCole snorted. \"Warrens don't know the meaning of honor, so don't you worry your pretty head about that. 'Sides, this was our pa's idea, poking this little thorn in old Frank's side by luring you away from him, so you let Pa do the gloating when he's ready to.\"\n\nThat remark made her realize she couldn't send Frank Jennifer's note about deciding to return to Chicago, not if the Callahans intended to let him know Jennifer was with them. It could make him suspicious, might even bring him straight to her, demanding an explanation about why she would lie to him. But she was beginning to wonder if Frank had been honest with Rose in the letters he had written her. It sounded as if the feud had heated up again and was worse than he'd led Rose to believe. The way these Callahans spoke of her family with such derision made her wonder if even a wedding could end the feud. Maybe the Callahans had already called it off and she didn't need to be here at all!\n\nThat was something she needed to know right now. \"You said you weren't friendly with your neighbors, but it sounds more like I'm walking into the middle of a war. Am I?\"\n\nCole chuckled. \"No, ma'am. A man can hate his neighbors without killing them.\"\n\nSo much for a quick excuse to go home. Nor had he mentioned the feud, so she couldn't ask specifically about that, either, when Jennifer wouldn't know about it. But she could find out more about his family. The housekeeper would be curious about the people she was working for.\n\nCole had glanced at her a few times while they were talking, but he finally noticed her difficulty with the sun and added, \"Here, change sides with me.\" He stopped the wagon and took her hand to help her get around him to the right without losing her balance. \"I reckon I can give you some shade.\"\n\nAs tall as he was, he actually did somewhat block the sun, but he wasn't done. He also plopped his wide-brimmed hat down on her head, right over her bonnet, which kept it from sliding down over her eyes. She almost laughed at the image of what she must look like. Almost. But the hat did get the sun off her face as soon as she tilted it a little in that direction. She was more than a little grateful for Cole's thoughtfulness. It made her think a little more kindly of the Callahans, at least this one.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, giving him a smile as he resumed driving the wagon. \"By the way, how did you know I was coming to town?\"\n\n\"Heard it from one of Warrens' disgruntled employees.\"\n\n\"But how did you know I'd be there today, when the train is three days early?\"\n\n\"Didn't. We had an order to pick up at the depot for our brother.\" He gestured to the back of the wagon. Tiffany turned around and saw a couple of crates that looked like the ones she'd seen unloaded from the train. \"They let us know to expect it today. We hoped you might be on that train, too, but we didn't think we'd get this lucky.\"\n\nHer father should have been there, though, for her! Tiffany thought. But obviously he didn't care enough to check on the train's schedule to find out she'd be arriving early.\n\nShe shook off the hurt that caused her and asked, \"What sort of household will I be running? How many servants?\"\n\n\"Two maids. Probably could use more, but they're hard to come by.\"\n\nShe was incredulous. Why did they hire a housekeeper when they didn't have a staff large enough to warrant one? But since they had given her this opportunity to fulfill her promise to her mother to at least meet Hunter Callahan and yet avoid her father, she wasn't going to point that out.\n\nInstead she said, \"Can you tell me a little about your family and where you're taking me?\"\n\n\"We're cattlemen, same as the Warrens. We own the Triple C Ranch, which comprises five hundred acres, and over a thousand head of cattle.\"\n\nShe was impressed, but wondered aloud, \"Is that enough land for that many cows?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Course it ain't, we don't keep the herds on the ranch. This is open-range country in all directions.\"\n\n\"What does that mean exactly?\"\n\n\"Free grazing for the herds.\"\n\nSo the two families obviously weren't fighting over land, just water, but she hadn't seen any bodies of water yet. They had taken the north road out of town. Tiffany gazed at the green, grassy fields that flowed on either side of the road and the huge snowcapped mountains in the distance. She'd never seen mountains that impressive except in paintings and picture books. They passed a forest with a logging camp nestled in the center of it. They passed a New England\u2014style house sitting all by itself, an odd reminder of home. It was built of stone, so there must be a stone quarry nearby. She'd heard that industry was moving into the territory, but with so much open land it didn't intrude on the beauty of the wilderness.\n\nShe had to admit it was pretty country, though she would never admit that to Anna. But Cole still hadn't said anything about his family or Hunter, in particular, whom she was most interested in.\n\nHoping to get him to mention her fianc\u00e9, she asked next, \"How big is your family?\"\n\n\"I have three brothers. I'm the youngest, Hunter's the oldest. Morgan, that fool, got gold fever and took off on us last year when yet another gold strike was found over near Butte, one of the bigger mining towns in the territory. Pa had a fit, but Morgan's stubborn, and he did find some gold, not enough to get rich over, but enough to keep him from coming home.\"\n\n\"And why does that make him a fool?\"\n\nCole snorted. \"We're cattlemen, and there's already more miners in Montana than you can count. Hell, copper was discovered on our land this year. Pa figured that might get Morgan back. Told him if he's going to disgrace us by being a miner, he can do it at home. That hasn't worked either\u2014yet.\"\n\nThere was no opening in what he'd just said to question him specifically about Hunter. She'd have to wait until she actually met him to find out what he was like.\n\nUp ahead she saw a large pond\u2014or was it a small lake?\u2014surrounded by meadows of blue and gold flowers. Even a few shade trees were near the lake. This lovely, peaceful setting was the sort of place one might search for to have a picnic.\n\nThe road led straight to the little lake and forked to either side of it. The stream that fed it was quite wide and looked too deep to cross right now, probably still swollen from the winter melt. Farther north along the left side of the meandering stream was a long, dark-brownish mass that stirred her curiosity.\n\n\"What is that?\"\n\nCole followed her gaze. \"The Warrens' herd. It's their time of the day.\"\n\n\"Their time?\"\n\n\"To bring their cattle to water. Morning for them, afternoon for us. The families decided long ago not to tempt fate by meeting up across the stream at watering time.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"No point in spurring tempers\u2014or tempting someone to take a shot at the other side. Even one shot fired could cause a stampede. Used to happen a lot.\"\n\nShe barely heard his answer, her eyes caught by the riders in the stream who were keeping the herd from crossing it. When she realized those riders could be her brothers, that she could be this close to them, her breath quickened. But the cowboys were too far away for her to tell. Then the wagon turned and she lost sight of the herd and the cowboys, but caught sight of a building under construction. It was a ways back from the lake and had no walls yet, just framing. It was going to have an incredible view...\n\nOh, my, Tiffany thought, this had to be the strip of land under contention that both ranches were claiming as theirs. And that had to be the house the two families had been building for her and Hunter that they'd stopped working on because they couldn't get along. Just as well, she thought, since she didn't intend to live in it.\n\nThe thought made her uncomfortable. The people here expected her to end their feud. That house would sit empty when she didn't marry Hunter. In all likelihood, it would probably never be finished. A weight settled on her shoulders. She shook it off in annoyance. It wasn't her responsibility to bring peace to the area, it really wasn't!\n\nBefore long they turned off the road and were driving up to a large house with a long, covered porch. Two stories high, built of smoothly cut boards, the Callahans' house wasn't the little log cabin she had half expected. There was nothing rustic about this house. Well, not on the outside anyway, as long as you didn't notice the spittoon placed between two chairs at one end of the porch or the mud tracks leading right up to the door.\n\nJohn dismounted, and after she handed Cole's hat back to him, she let John help her down from the wagon. The moment her feet were on the ground she said, \"I would like to get settled and have a bath before I meet the head of your household. Is there a butler who can\u2014\"\n\n\"A what?\" Cole interrupted as he came around the wagon. \"There's no shortage of rooms. Pa expected more'n four children, so he built the house bigger than it needed to be when he first expanded it. The bedrooms downstairs are taken, but there's plenty more upstairs. Help yourself to one you find empty. The bath is downstairs, though, next to the kitchen. And you don't have to go out to the well for water, we've got pumps.\"\n\nThat was more information than Tiffany needed to hear. The part about the bath had her groaning to herself. It was going to be intolerable if everyone in the household used the same bath. Almost too intolerable. Perhaps her charade wasn't such a good idea after all.\n\nCole suddenly looked over her head and yelled, \"Could use some help here, Hunter.\"\n\n\"Hell no.\" Laughter rumbled behind her. \"It wasn't my idea to get the Warrens riled up again. You kidnapped their fancy servant, you deal with her.\"\n\nTiffany swung around to catch her first glimpse of her fianc\u00e9. But two men were riding past the wagon, not one, and she had no idea which was Hunter Callahan. The men didn't stop so she didn't get a good look at them.\n\nThen Hunter's words struck her forcefully and she turned her wide eyes to Cole. \"Kidnapped?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Cole Callahan didn't answer Tiffany immediately, but he was certainly red-faced. He tried to take her arm to escort her up to the door, but she jerked it away. He finally said in a contrite tone, \"Didn't come to that, now did it?\"\n\n\"But it might have?\"\n\n\"Settle down. Pa said to get you here one way or the other. We wouldn't have kept you long, just long enough to frustrate the Warrens.\"\n\nThat despicable feud. But it was just as well that she and the Callahans had the same agenda, sort of, or this opportunity wouldn't have presented itself to her. But she was sure she wouldn't have liked being held hostage here. That would have forced her hand to say who she really was, and they would have taken her straight to her father, which was not going to happen if she could help it.\n\nSo she merely gave Cole a baleful look and asked cuttingly, \"Are you ranchers, or outlaws? I really would like to know before I step into your\u2014lair.\"\n\n\"We abide by the law, ma'am,\" he said in a defensive tone.\n\n\"It sounds more like you skirt it.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't be paying you twice what you're worth if we were trying to skirt anything, now would we?\"\n\nShe got a little pink-cheeked over that answer herself, so she left him with a curt nod and crossed the threshold into her temporary home. And stopped short. And sneezed. And sneezed again. The Callahans didn't need a housekeeper, they needed a new house. This one had gone to hell.\n\nDried mud was tracked halfway down the short foyer that opened into a large main room where several couches and chairs were scattered about. Obviously they'd been shipped in from the East and had once been handsome pieces of furniture, but they were so old that the upholstery had faded to a dingy gray. Smoke from a soot-blackened fireplace had probably backed up into the room too many times. The paintings on the walls were crooked, some very crooked. The hardwood floor was covered with a layer of dust so thick that footsteps were actually outlined in it. Were there no servants at all in this house?\n\nTiffany turned to ask Cole that question, but shrieked instead when she caught sight of herself in an oval mirror hanging on the foyer wall. Her complexion was a pasty gray riddled with streaks! She hardly recognized herself. She immediately took out her handkerchief and scrubbed at her face, but without water all she was doing was moving the dust and the dirt around.\n\n\"See a mouse?\" Cole asked, coming in the front door carrying her large trunk with John's help. \"Sounded like it.\" When she just stared at him blankly, he added, \"You screamed.\"\n\n\"I did nothing of the sort,\" she corrected him indignantly. \"I merely squeaked delicately.\" But then she warned, \"I won't tolerate mice. If you tell me you are infested with them, I'll tell you to put my trunk back in the wagon.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"No mice, not that I've ever noticed. Now run along upstairs and figure out which room you want us to put this heavy thing in.\"\n\n\"You may put it down where you are. There is only one priority right now: that you show me where I can bathe. I can't abide for another moment this veil of dirt you and your brother\u2014\"\n\n\"Take it on upstairs, Cole. I can show the lady where she wants to go.\"\n\nCole looked beyond her to say, \"I thought you\u2014\"\n\n\"Curiosity got the better of me,\" the newcomer interrupted, and headed back the way he'd just come, so by the time Tiffany turned toward him, she merely saw a broad back. \"Come along, Red. The bath is this way.\"\n\nShe wouldn't have budged an inch under normal circumstances. Did he really just give her a nickname based on the color of her hair? But she was starting to feel itchy from all the dust that must have gotten into her clothes.\n\nShe hurried after the tall man. He had unfashionably long, black hair. She would have thought him a household servant if he weren't wearing a gun belt, or did even servants wear them in Montana?\n\nThe hall had narrowed and dimmed once they passed the stairs to the upper floor, but at the end of it light came from a door that had been left open. Which was where the man led her, into the kitchen. Tiffany took one look and closed her eyes tight. And started counting to ten in her mind. And prayed she wouldn't start screaming. Whoever had last cooked here had left the kitchen strewn with dirty pans and dishes.\n\n\"I agree with you, you're in dire need of a scrubbing,\" a deep voice said with a laugh.\n\nHer eyes flew open. She located her amused escort standing in front of another door he'd opened. Only vaguely did she see a porcelain tub beyond him because her eyes locked on his face and stayed there. Powder-blue eyes contrasted with his black hair and darkly tanned skin. A twinkle of laughter was still in those blue eyes, suggesting he was good-humored. With a strong nose and a wide brow, his was a masculine face and much more handsome than she was accustomed to. Tall, lean, and muscular, he wore a long-sleeved, black shirt and a blue bandanna tied around his neck, dark-blue pants, and muddy black boots.\n\nHe nodded toward the room behind him. \"The tub actually drains. The pipes lead out to the garden Old Ed tended behind the house. It keeps the ground moist if occasionally soapy.\"\n\nHe had to be joking about the soapy garden so she ignored that and asked, \"Who is Old Ed?\"\n\n\"The cook we sorely miss. He couldn't be talked into staying. Ornery cuss just said it was time to move on to see more of the world.\"\n\n\"Not too old to do that?\"\n\n\"Not old at all, midthirties maybe.\"\n\n\"Then why was he called Old Ed?\"\n\n\"His hair turned gray years ago after he had a run-in with a grizzly. He was out hunting for his supper, so was the bear. Ed was sure the bear was going to go home happy that night when it startled him into dropping his rifle.\"\n\nDefinitely not a subject for delicate ears, yet her curiosity kicked in. \"But he got away?\"\n\n\"Ran like hell and even faster when he heard the bear shooting at him.\"\n\nShe stared hard at the man. \"That's absurd\u2014isn't it?\"\n\nHe laughed, she was sure at her, which had her back stiffening indignantly. For a cowboy, he was too friendly and too impertinent. But she supposed a man this attractive was in the habit of flirting with the ladies.\n\n\"Course it is,\" he answered. \"Old Ed was just scared enough at the time to have that crazy notion. He went back the next day to find his rifle on the ground and one bloody pawprint by the barrel. The bear probably swiped at the shiny thing that had been left for him and shot himself in the foot. But Ed did wake up with gray hair that morning.\"\n\nWhich reminded her. \"My hair isn't red.\"\n\n\"Close enough,\" he disagreed with a grin. \"If you want some hot water added to that tub, light up the stove. If not, you're all set. A pump was added for the tub a few years back at Ed's insistence. He got annoyed with everyone filling buckets at his sink when he was trying to cook dinner. Real annoyed. Wouldn't cook another meal until he got his way. That second pump went in pretty darn fast.\"\n\n\"I can't wait that long. I fear I will be screaming any moment now if I don't get this grime off me.\"\n\nHe shrugged and stepped away from the door so it no longer appeared that he was blocking her way from the little bathing room. \"Suit yourself.\"\n\nSuit herself? She realized she'd been doing just that. She'd been having a conversation with a perfect stranger when she knew very well how improper that was, at least before introductions! This was so unlike her. She blamed him, of course. She'd simply never encountered a man this handsome before.\n\nAnnoyed now, more with herself for allowing him to fluster her like this, she started forward. \"Who are you? Do you work here?\"\n\n\"Everyone here works. Speaking of which, aren't you a bit young to be a housekeeper? I have a feeling you're gonna wash up pretty\u2014and young.\"\n\n\"Not at all. I'm much older than I look, likely as old as you are. How old are you?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"If I answer that, will you?\"\n\nWhy was she still talking to one of the hired hands? \"Never mind.\"\n\nHe grinned back. \"That's what I thought. I'll guard the door for you. On second thought, maybe you better lock it\u2014so you'll be safe from me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Tiffany was sitting in the tub of cold water shivering, but she was barely aware of it. She was still thinking about the fellow who'd teased her about locking the door. Was he still out there, waiting to see her \"cleaned up,\" as he'd put it? She was a bit bothered that the thought pleased her\u2014no, it excited her.\n\nShe wished he'd told her who he was... oh, good God, could he be Hunter Callahan? No, of course not, not with those light-blue eyes, when the two brothers she'd met both had brown eyes. Besides, Hunter had left the ranch. She'd seen him ride off herself.\n\nShe tsked at herself and got out of the tub, then groaned when she realized she had nothing clean to wear. She was so used to having a maid anticipate her needs that she hadn't thought that far ahead. But she was not going to put those dusty clothes back on. She wrapped herself in a towel and opened the door a crack to call for help and saw her trunk sitting there. Cole, bless him. He was thoughtful enough to have realized she'd need it.\n\nA while later she glanced in the oval mirror above the shaving stand to make sure she was finally presentable. Clean, yes, but hardly presentable, at least not to her standards. She hadn't taken the time to carefully sort through the clothing in her trunk when someone might walk into the kitchen at any time, but she did get a yellow day dress in the armful she grabbed. She wasn't sure she'd managed to secure all the buttons up the back, though, nor could she twist around enough to tell. And the best she could do with her damp hair was to tie it back. It was dawning on her how much she depended on a maid because she couldn't even pin up her own hair!\n\nSighing, she opened the door and saw Cole standing there about to knock. He just stared at her though without saying a word, so she said, \"Well, I've finished making use of your pretty tub.\"\n\nCole managed to tear his eyes away from her fresh-scrubbed face and glanced at the tub. \"Ma ordered that contraption from a fancy catalog she got from St. Louis. You should've heard the laughter when it arrived, but I gotta admit, it beats the hell out of getting splinters in your ass.\"\n\nShe made no comment about his improper language because she'd heard worse from her own mother. Rose had picked up a colorful vocabulary from her years in the West.\n\n\"Thank you for bringing my trunk in here. I'll choose a room now so it can be\u2014\"\n\n\"Wasn't me who brought it in. And my pa\u2014\"\n\nThat was as far as he got before he was simply gazing at her again. It wasn't an unusual reaction. She'd had men stare at her like this before, but not men she'd already met. She was tempted to tell him to close his mouth, but that would, of course, embarrass him, and she'd rather not. Although it was his fault that her appearance had been so distorted by dirt and dust.\n\nTiffany tried not to grin when she prompted him to continue, \"Your father?\"\n\n\"Wants to\u2014\" he started, but, apparently still amazed by how she looked, he said, \"Never seen a gal as pretty as you.\" Then he blushed profusely. \"Sorry. Pa wants to meet you now. He sent me to fetch you.\"\n\n\"By all means. Lead the way.\"\n\nCole nodded, though his cheeks were still red.\n\nTiffany didn't try to keep up with his long-legged stride. But he didn't get too far ahead of her and stopped at the front door, holding it open for her. He was taking her outside? She started to frown until he pointed toward the end of the porch where an older cowboy sat\u2014well, probably not a cowboy, but a man dressed like one. This had to be the owner of the ranch, her fianc\u00e9's father.\n\n\"Just got home,\" the older man said to Tiffany as she slowly approached him. \"Was surprised to hear my boys were successful. Name's Zachary Callahan. What's yours?\"\n\nShe was suddenly so nervous she couldn't recall the name she was going to use! This was her father's worst enemy, and, she realized, her enemy, too. She might not love her father, but she loved the rest of her family. And this man could actually end the feud with them if he wanted to. He must be somewhat open to the idea, or he would never have agreed to end it through marriage, would he? What was that housekeeper's name?\n\n\"Jennifer Fleming,\" she finally blurted out.\n\nHe didn't seem to notice her nervousness. He pointed to the seat next to him. He didn't stand up. He might have stood up for a lady, but obviously not for an employee. Tiffany ignored the chair since it was covered with dust and Zachary was smoking a cigar, the smoke blowing right across the second chair.\n\nHe appeared to be in his midforties, though his hair was still coal black. Dark brown eyes with lots of lines fanning out at the sides of them. Laughter lines, Rose called them. They did usually hint at a good-natured temperament. And he was quite a handsome man, which wasn't surprising. Rose had said he was. And Tiffany had seen the evidence in two of his sons.\n\nShe shook off her unease, reminding herself she had a role to play. \"Why did your last housekeeper leave, if you don't mind my asking?\"\n\n\"Never had one, and we just lost our cook, so we're plumb tickled you're here. You're not going to sit?\"\n\nShe was going to have to address his assumption that she would be his cook, too, but she didn't quite have the nerve to do that yet, so she merely said, \"No offense, sir, but I can't abide the smell of smoke.\"\n\n\"None taken. My wife won't let me smoke in the house. I abide by that rule even though she don't come downstairs anymore.\"\n\nTiffany was incredulous. He had a wife? With the condition of the house, she'd naturally assumed his spouse must be deceased.\n\n\"Why am I not speaking to Mrs. Callahan then? My job would fall into her domain.\"\n\n\"We don't bother Mary with trifles. She took a bad fall some months back and is confined to bed until her bones mend. If you need anything or got questions, you see me or my oldest boy, Hunter.\"\n\nAsk her fianc\u00e9 for help with her job? She pictured the two of them scrubbing floors together, side by side, on their knees, and had to quickly tamp down a hysterical laugh. And it would take too long for just two people to tackle a house this size. It would take an army to put this place to rights.\n\nShe didn't mince words on that account. \"The condition of your house is atrocious. I was told you have maids, but I see no evidence of that.\"\n\nZachary started to frown. She'd undoubtedly offended him. She stiffened, waiting for him to put her in her place and afraid she might lose her temper over it and quit, before she'd even begun.\n\nBut he suddenly laughed instead. \"Mighty assertive for a servant, ain't you?\" That amused him? He added, \"Don't know what that atrocious means, but I reckon it ain't good. I've got eyes, gal. I know the place is messy, but we've been a might shorthanded the last few days. When Old Ed left us without warning, he took his kitchen helper with him. Pearl cleans downstairs, but her sister took sick, so she asked for a week off to help with her sister's younguns. And Luella, who sees to the upstairs, said she'd quit if she had to do Pearl's job, too. Couldn't have that when we're in the middle of this damn quitting spree. But now you're here to get us cleaned up.\" He ended that with a grin.\n\nTiffany was even more aghast. It was bad enough he was down to only one servant, albeit temporarily, but even the four he'd had weren't enough for a house this size, and certainly not enough to require a housekeeper to supervise them.\n\n\"Are you aware, sir, what a housekeeper actually does?\"\n\n\"Never had one, never even heard of one till we heard Frank was bringing you in from Chicago and I got the idea to deprive him of your talents, whatever they are.\"\n\nHe chuckled when he said that. Apparently he saw it as a one up on the Warrens. Had both sides resorted to pranks like this during the truce? Anything to discomfit the other side was permissible? But she wouldn't remark on that. After all, it was better than bloodshed.\n\n\"As the name implies, I keep a house in order,\" Tiffany explained. \"However, I don't actually clean a house. I am what might be considered a luxury for the lady of the house, allowing her to devote her time to her children or other pursuits. I make sure her house runs smoothly, that it's spotless, that all the servants are doing what they are supposed to be doing. A housekeeper is rarely needed unless there is a large staff of servants, since it would be my duty to oversee them. I would also look after your valuables personally, things like your good china, silverware, whatever you wouldn't trust to the hands of an ordinary maid.\"\n\nZachary mulled that over for a moment. \"Well, we ain't got no good china. Mary had some fancy cutlery, but she considered it too fancy to actually use, so it rusts up in the attic. Ain't gonna have a passel of servants for you to rule, but since you'll have to do the cooking, I reckon you'll be kept busy enough.\"\n\n\"I don't cook,\" she said firmly.\n\n\"Yeah, I heard. It ain't in that description you just gave. But since I'm paying you double, and you don't intend to lift a broom, you're gonna be our new cook, too.\"\n\n\"You misunder\u2014\"\n\n\"'Sides, Frank Warren ain't got a passel of servants either. He would've been asking you to pitch in on some other tasks as well, without paying you double for it like I am. So why ain't you sounding more grateful, huh?\"\n\nTiffany's cheeks turned red. Was she about to be fired? But how was she supposed to do something she didn't know how to do? This wasn't going to work out. She'd been insane to think it would. A housekeeper's job wasn't so difficult that she couldn't have done it for a couple of months. A cook's job was much more hands-on and required knowledge she didn't possess. She didn't even need more than one hand to count the number of times she'd stepped into a kitchen before today. Her mother employed more than one chef and a half dozen helpers to assist them. The food they prepared was exquisite, always interesting, but she'd never been curious enough about how it was prepared to venture into their domain, which was the hottest, messiest room in the house.\n\nShe could learn to cook, she supposed, but not without instruction or\u2014a cookbook! She wondered if the general store in town even sold books, much less a specific kind, or for that matter if the owner could even read. Besides, even if she could miraculously find a cookbook in a town as small as Nashart, that wouldn't help her tonight if these people expected her to feed them. And it was already late in the afternoon. Dinner should probably already have been started!\n\n\"Why ain't you married, pretty gal like you?\"\n\nThe question cut into her thoughts and brought her eyes back to Zachary. She almost smiled when she answered, \"I'm engaged to be.\" Only she would find that amusing since it was true for Jennifer and herself, Tiffany.\n\nBut to go by his sour expression he didn't like that answer and was quick to say why. \"You ain't gonna up and leave us when you get hitched, are you?\"\n\n\"I\u2014I agreed to a two-month trial period here. If I like the area and the job, then my fianc\u00e9 has agreed we can start our marriage here, instead of in California, which is his preference.\"\n\n\"He actually let you come here alone?\"\n\nShe told him what Jennifer would probably have said. \"It was a matter of necessity. We're both saving toward a nest egg, so we can buy our own house once we're married.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"So I'm actually helping you to get hitched all the sooner? Well, don't you worry, you'll earn every penny and then some. We're even expecting a visitor from the East sometime this summer, and Mary's been worrying about having fancy food on hand and some new curtains sewn for the parlor, but you'll have time to get all that figured out.\"\n\nTiffany groaned inwardly, afraid the visitor he was talking about was her. He actually wanted to impress Hunter's fianc\u00e9e? Or was it just his wife who did?\n\nShe decided to find out, asking carefully, \"Do you often get visitors from so far away?\"\n\n\"Ain't a damn thing ordinary 'bout this visit,\" he said in a grouchy tone.\n\nShe knew she was overstepping her bounds, that a housekeeper wouldn't be so bold, but she couldn't keep herself from asking, \"Who is it?\"\n\n\"That's a sore subject, gal. Gives me indigestion just thinking 'bout it,\" he said with a grimace. But when he saw her staring at him with such wide eyes, he amended, if evasively, \"It's just someone involved in an old business arrangement. You just worry 'bout getting the house in order.\"\n\nHe was talking about her. She was sure of it. And he obviously found the marriage arrangement as distasteful as she did. Was he regretting that he'd agreed to it so long ago? Why didn't he just call it off then? Was it a matter of honor? Or maybe these Callahans had been hoping she wouldn't survive to adulthood to marry their heir. She wished she could ask, but without Zachary's actually mentioning her name or the betrothal, she couldn't. But the lack of staff in his household was still a major problem and she could most definitely mention that.\n\n\"What I saw while walking through your house was much more than the accumulation of dust and dirt due to one servant's absence for a few days. Your downstairs maid obviously hasn't been doing her job.\"\n\nZachary's eyes narrowed. \"Don't even think of firing her, gal. Maids don't grow on trees out here.\"\n\n\"Firing and hiring would of course be at your discretion. I would merely make suggestions.\"\n\n\"And expect me to agree to them?\"\n\nHe didn't look pleased. But at least he didn't look angry either. Flustered was more like it. He was a rancher unfamiliar with the hierarchy of servants. And considering how few household servants he actually employed, that wasn't surprising.\n\n\"We can address this issue after I've met your downstairs maid and find out if she's lazy or simply ill trained. But since it sounds as if she won't be returning soon enough for the job that needs immediate attention, I'm requesting the use of some of your hired hands to help get this house into a manageable condition.\"\n\nZachary burst into laugher. \"They won't clean a house! They're cattlemen, not maids. Actually, they might if you asked 'em.\" He laughed again at that notion.\n\n\"You won't insist that they help me?\"\n\n\"Hell no. I ain't risking good cowhands up and quitting on me 'cause you don't know how to swing a broom.\"\n\nThere came the blush again. It wasn't a matter of knowing how, she thought indignantly, it was a matter of drawing the line, and this was where she drew hers. She'd hire and pay the maids herself if there were any to be had, but it sounded as if there weren't. Obviously, he didn't care that he was risking her up and quitting on him. She almost did. This was intolerable. His house was a pigsty!\n\nIt was on the tip of her tongue to confess who she really was and demand to be taken back to town when he looked over her shoulder and said, \"Hunter, take our fancy housekeeper to the bunkhouse. Let her find out the hard way that cowboys ain't gonna scrub floors for her.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Tiffany had actually seen out of the corner of her eye a group of men riding from the open range toward the house. They'd been too far off for her to tell if they were cowboys, then they were gone from view toward the back of the house. And while she'd thought she heard footsteps behind her a little later, she'd been too involved in her conversation with Zachary to turn around and confirm it.\n\nSwinging around now to finally see who her fianc\u00e9 was, she once again saw two men, not one. The teasing charmer was one of them. He was half sitting on the porch rail, wrists crossed over his bent knee, hat tipped low to shade his face. The other man was leaning against the wall next to the door, arms crossed over his chest. He was almost as tall as the charmer, which was probably still over six feet, and surprisingly, just as handsome. Something unsettling about him caused her to stare for a moment. A distinct air of... danger? Surely not, yet for some reason he made her think of an outlaw. The Callahans wouldn't harbor criminals, would they? Yet she couldn't help imagining this was what an outlaw would look like when he wasn't trying to disguise himself for a robbery.\n\nLike the charmer, he also had black hair, though his was a little shorter and a lot neater. His boots weren't scuffed, they were almost shining. The spurs certainly were. And he wore a black jacket more suited to a city street than a Montana ranch, a white shirt under it, and a thin cravat at his neck rather than a bandanna. His gun belt was much fancier, too, the black leather etched with a swirling design and adorned with silver studs. He didn't dress like a cowboy, so why was he on a ranch? Was he a visitor from town? Or\u2014was he Hunter? The thought nearly paralyzed her.\n\nNot once, in all her musings about the man she was to marry, had she considered the possibility that she would be afraid of her husband. That was the \"something\" she sensed about this other man. He was clearly dangerous. And that settled that. If he was Hunter Callahan, she was leaving.\n\nNeither man had yet moved. They both simply stared at her, not quite the way Cole had stared, but it was staring nonetheless. Powder-blue eyes roved over her in a lazy, appreciative manner. Stormy-gray eyes locked on hers and moved no farther. Both men were unnerving her. And she still didn't know which one was Hunter!\n\nThe son should at least have said something to his father when he arrived, but he was probably more interested in listening to his father's conversation with her. Or had they even heard it? It was a long porch, so maybe not.\n\nThen both men straightened at once, leaving her still glancing expectantly between them, holding her breath.\n\n\"Come along, Red. This will be amusing.\"\n\nHer breath whooshed out. Hunter was the charmer and her relief was immediate, but only because the dark, dangerous one wasn't her fianc\u00e9. As for Hunter, she wasn't sure whether she was glad he was the charmer. But she couldn't think about it now, when he wasn't waiting for her and was already heading down the steps. The other man didn't budge, at least not until she rushed past him to catch up with her fianc\u00e9.\n\nHunter glanced back and stopped before he rounded the corner of the house, but it wasn't her he was looking at or talking to when he said, \"Thought you were going to beat me to a bath, Degan?\"\n\n\"That was before something occurred to break the tedium,\" the dark, dangerous man replied in cultured tones.\n\n\"You're just going to make the boys nervous,\" Hunter warned.\n\n\"So?\"\n\nHunter chuckled. \"Suit yourself.\"\n\nHunter didn't seem to fear him, although implying that the hired hands did confirmed her suspicions that the man standing too close behind her was as dangerous as she'd guessed. She wanted to move away from him. She actually had an urge to run back to the house. Irrational fears, she chided herself. Then she realized Hunter was glancing down at her.\n\nHe tipped his hat back with a finger and said in low tones, \"I had a feeling there was a butterfly inside that cocoon of dust, but, damn, woman, you are one hell of a surprise. I suppose you're married?\"\n\nThe way he was looking at her was more than a little disturbing, as if she were a meal and he were famished. \"Not yet, I mean, I do have a fianc\u00e9.\"\n\nHe gave her a slow grin that set her pulse to racing. \"Not yet works for me.\"\n\nTiffany blushed. Was he actually flirting with her? That would be more than just the charming nature she'd guessed at, that would be highly inappropriate, particularly since he'd just been told she had a fianc\u00e9 and she knew he did, too. Her. Was Hunter Callahan the Western equivalent of a ladies' man? She didn't like the thought and pushed it aside and focused on her mission.\n\n\"You heard what I require, Mr. Callahan?\"\n\nHe continued along the path but took her arm gently to make sure she kept up with him this time. \"Sure did. And call me Hunter.\"\n\n\"You may call me Miss Fleming\u2014not Red.\"\n\nHe actually laughed before he asked, \"What goes with Fleming?\"\n\n\"Jennifer, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Jenny might do,\" he allowed with a grin. \"And keep in mind, this ain't the city. We're a lot less formal out here, but you'll get used to it.\"\n\nLess formal was an understatement. But she had to admit he had a point. She wasn't just pretending to be a different person, she was assuming a role, that of an employee. She had to adjust to the Callahans, do things their way, not the other way around. At least, when they insisted, as Hunter seemed to be doing with the annoying nicknames he kept giving her.\n\nWhen they reached the back of the house, she saw the ranch spread out before her\u2014stables, corrals and holding pens, the bunkhouse where they were heading, the vegetable garden that Old Ed had apparently planted and fenced in before he left. There were other outbuildings, storage sheds, even a washhouse for laundry and lines spread with bedding and male apparel. She wondered if her father's ranch looked like this, almost a self-sufficient community.\n\n\"How many cowboys are available?\" she asked, hoping for the small army she was going to need.\n\n\"There's seven hands who just rode in with me from the range. Three other men stay out with the herd at night.\"\n\nShe was expecting a much larger number. \"That's enough men for a herd as large as Cole said you have?\"\n\n\"More'n enough when my brothers and I work, too.\"\n\n\"Does their day usually end this early?\"\n\n\"It ain't early, but we do start early. Now are you ready to be disappointed?\" Hunter asked with a grin.\n\nTiffany grit her teeth. His humor, in this case, was annoying. \"You said this will be amusing?\" she remarked as he reached for the door to the bunkhouse. \"That implies you don't think it's possible?\"\n\n\"Sure don't.\"\n\n\"You like living in a pigsty?\"\n\n\"Stop exaggerating. We work outdoors. Can't help tracking a little mud in the house after a rainy day.\"\n\nYet one word from him would correct the matter before the sun set. He was the owner's oldest son, after all. The cowboys might complain, but they'd do as he ordered. It was actually Hunter she needed to convince...\n\n\"It's far more than\u2014\"\n\nShe didn't get a chance to clarify her point. The moment Hunter opened the door, he pulled her inside and said to the room at large, \"Listen up. The lady here has something to say to you.\"\n\nHe might as well have added, \"Don't laugh too hard.\" The curve of his lips said it clearly. But the cowboys weren't laughing yet. Some were lying on their cots, some were playing cards in the back of the long building, and some were filling plates from a cauldron hung in the fireplace. There was a cook on the premises? But suddenly all of the cowboys were simply staring at Tiffany. She just needed to be concise\u2014and maybe smile.\n\nShe started with the smile. \"This may seem like an odd request to you, but I need some volunteers to work briefly at the big house. If everyone pitches in, we could be finished in a few hours.\"\n\n\"What sort o' work?\" someone asked.\n\nEncouraged, she said, \"A lot. The furniture will need to be taken outside, scrubbed with soap and water, and the cushions aired out. The chimney is going to have to be cleaned and then the resulting soot removed from the room. The floors need to be scrubbed until they shine. The kitchen won't be used until it's thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom. I haven't even seen the other rooms yet, but they can't be in worse condition than the kitchen and the parlor.\"\n\nNo one else said a word. She glanced at Hunter to help, but he obviously wouldn't. He seemed to find it too funny that she wanted to put cowboys to work doing a maid's job. The men pretty much all took their cue from him. The blatant amusement on his face finally started them all laughing.\n\n\"I'll help.\"\n\nThe laughter stopped immediately. Tiffany was stunned. That had been Degan's voice. She glanced back and saw him leaning against the wall just inside the door, arms crossed over his chest, just as he'd been standing on the porch. Those stormy-gray eyes were slowly roving over the room, and not a man there didn't suddenly appear afraid for his life\u2014with the exception of Hunter and the cook in the back of the room, who simply wasn't paying attention to anything other than the meat he was chopping.\n\nThe cowhands rose up in mass and started filing out of the bunkhouse. There were numerous comments, some polite, some complaining.\n\nA short, bowlegged cowboy with a mustache so long the tips of it reached his chin, yelled toward the back of the room, \"Jakes, keep the pot hot!\"\n\nAnother stocky fellow growled at the man behind him, \"You tell anyone I did housework and you're a dead man.\"\n\nTiffany was blushing and smiling in turn. She had her small army\u2014no thanks to Hunter.\n\nShe knew very well their fear of Degan had swayed the men, but she still gave Hunter a smug look and whispered, \"I'm glad you were wrong.\"\n\nHe gave her a long, appreciative look. \"Not wrong, just outmaneuvered by a pretty smile. You do have persuasive powers, Red. It will be more fun if you turn them on me the next time you need something.\"\n\nHe was talking about seduction! The way his eyes were roving over her left no doubt about that at all and had her blushing furiously even as she bristled. Her fianc\u00e9 was flirting with Jennifer!\n\nWhen the last cowboy had left the bunkhouse, Degan said to Hunter, \"You coming?\"\n\n\"Hell no, I'm going to grab some of Jakes's stew. I have a feeling Miss Fancy won't be doing any cooking tonight. Don't worry, I'll bring the rest of it to the house later.\"\n\nTiffany glared at Hunter before she marched stiffly out of the building, wanting to get as far away as possible from that infuriating man. Unfortunately, Degan followed her and kept step with her on the way back to the house. Nonetheless, she hurried. It felt strange to be frightened of this man and yet grateful to him at the same time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "\"Thank you.\"\n\nTiffany felt compelled to say it. She'd waited until they'd reached the house so she could hurry inside before Degan could reply. She didn't make it inside the house though before Zachary's laughter drew her attention.\n\n\"Damn, gal, I really didn't think you'd pull this off. If you can turn cowmen into maids, I reckon you can accomplish anything. I'll let my Mary know she can stop worrying 'bout that fancy party of hers.\"\n\nTiffany didn't expect to feel so good about receiving a compliment from Zachary Callahan. A bit embarrassed because of it, she asked him, \"Where might I find the cleaning supplies for the house?\"\n\n\"There's a closet near the kitchen. Think the brooms and buckets are kept there.\"\n\nShe went inside to distribute the cleaning supplies and assign tasks before she started on one herself. She would have liked the walls scrubbed down, too, but that would probably be asking too much. Nor would she ask the men to polish the floors. That could be done later by the maid whose job it was. The hired hands were being nice enough to help, she wasn't going to overburden them. And she couldn't not pitch in herself. She'd already realized that. Much as she deplored the thought of getting dirty, how could she not do what she was asking the cowboys to do? Cleaning a house was as strange and repugnant a task to them as it was to her.\n\nShe started with the long-mustached cowboy. \"Please take all the rugs outside and beat them with a broom to get all the dust off them. I suppose you can hang them over the porch rails to do that\u2014on the opposite side of the porch from your boss, though. Let's not annoy him any more than we have to.\"\n\nThe cowboy laughed. \"He's letting you get away with this, hell, don't bother me none if we annoy him a little.\"\n\nShe handed another man a broom and then gave a mop and bucket to the man standing next to him, saying, \"The entire lower floor, please. Soon as one room is swept, mop it. And I'll need a volunteer to clean the fireplace and the chimney, which will be the hardest job.\" That request was met by silence. \"Please?\"\n\n\"I'll do it,\" a skinny cowboy spoke up. \"My ma made me clean the chimney when I was this high, so I know how.\"\n\nHe'd put his hand down to his knee to show how small he'd been at the time, obviously an exaggeration, but it got the other men laughing. Tiffany even grinned before she tasked the last three men with carrying out the furniture for scrubbing and handed one of them a jar of beeswax for polishing the tables.\n\nWith all the cowboys busy now, she decided to tackle the kitchen herself. It was apt since they expected her to work in it. She just had to count to ten first. And get up the nerve to pick up the first dirty dish.\n\n\"You might want to fill the sink with water first,\" said a deep voice behind her.\n\nShe swung around in the doorway, but Degan was already stepping around her and entering the kitchen. She was still glued to the spot. He'd said he'd help, but somehow she didn't think he'd meant that literally, which was why she hadn't dared to assign him any tasks. Besides, he'd already helped by getting the hired hands to do the heavy cleaning.\n\nHe started pumping water into the sink, then threw in a handful of soap chips from a box sitting on the windowsill above the work area.\n\n\"Some of this will wash up easier with a little soaking first.\"\n\nDirty dishes were piled high on the worktable in the center of the room. She shuddered at the thought of touching them and didn't reply to his suggestion. Although she had dozens of questions she'd like to ask him, she just couldn't get up the nerve to talk to him. All she could do was picture him robbing trains or a stagecoach or even a bank. Were outlaws that versatile?\n\nDegan took off his jacket and hat and hung them on a hook by the back door. Then he rolled up his sleeves. The man looked so out of place in the kitchen with his wide shoulders, bare, muscular forearms, and the gun still on his hip. He started scraping what was left on the dishes into a large pot and slid the dishes into the soapy water. Seeing him do menial kitchen work made him seem less intimidating\u2014for the moment\u2014and loosened her tongue.\n\n\"Mr. Degan\u2014\"\n\n\"It's Degan Grant.\"\n\n\"Mr. Grant\u2014\"\n\n\"Degan's fine.\"\n\n\"Humor me, please. I can't abandon the etiquette of a lifetime overnight. Mr. Grant, I know this is a long shot, but do you know anything about cooking?\"\n\nHe almost smiled, she could have sworn he was about to, but he didn't. \"I know once water boils, you should do something with it. I know that bread requires yeast, but I have no clue what else.\"\n\n\"Neither do I,\" she said with a sigh. \"When I told Zachary Callahan that I don't cook, I wasn't just pointing out that it's not part of my housekeeping job, I meant it literally. I'm not sure if he heard me or if he just chose not to hear me, more likely the latter.\"\n\nShe took the hint that he didn't really want to talk when he filled another bucket with water and set it on the wide work board next to the sink, then told her, \"You wash and rinse, I'll dry.\"\n\nShe pushed up her own sleeves as far as they would go, which wasn't far with her tight cuffs. Her yellow dress was going to be ruined. She already knew it.\n\nIf Rose could see her now, she'd think Tiffany had lost her mind. Was getting to know Hunter on the sly worth this drudgery? Maybe not, but not knowing the man who'd caused her so many pointless tears did make it worthwhile. Two months. Just two months and she'd go home without meeting her father.\n\nGritting her teeth over what she was about to do, she came forward to accept the cloth Degan was holding out to her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a wooden box\u2014a bread box\u2014on the table in the corner. That gave her an idea of how to solve the cooking problem. \"Bread! There was a bakery in town. I can have bread delivered!\"\n\nShe didn't realize she'd said it aloud until Degan replied, \"I highly doubt the Callahans are going to buy something they expect you to make. Besides, you can't just feed them bread.\"\n\nCringing at his response, she stuck her hands in the water and lifted a dish to scrub before saying, \"I'll look for a cookbook tomorrow in town.\"\n\n\"Good luck with that.\"\n\nShe didn't think he was being sarcastic. She glanced at him to be sure, only to find him standing much too close to her. She wanted to put a little more space between them, but she was afraid he'd notice and be insulted. Heaven forbid she insult an outlaw!\n\nBut at the moment, he didn't look like an outlaw. In fact, his expression was simply inscrutable. And when he took the plate out of her hand to begin drying it, she almost let out a nervous giggle. What had he said? Oh, yes, she wasn't likely to find a cookbook in town. Anna had already pointed out that the general store probably only carried essentials. But where did that leave her?\n\nDesperately she said, \"The man named Jakes can't cook for the Callahans?\"\n\n\"Was already asked and refused. He cooks for the hands, on the range and in the bunkhouse. Besides, his plain fare might be filling, but it's generally tasteless.\"\n\nShe was reaching her wit's end on how she was going to cook for these people without some sort of instruction.\n\nShe handed him another plate. Their shoulders touched that time. Her stomach flip-flopped with fear. Yet it appeared he didn't even notice. But she inched away from him so it wouldn't happen again.\n\nScrubbing the next dish a little harder, she said, \"I'm posting a letter to my mother tomorrow. I can ask her to send me a cookbook.\"\n\n\"And in the meantime?\"\n\nNearly every word Degan Grant said was pointing her toward the door. And his proximity to her was shoving her in that direction. Leave, she told herself, dilemma solved\u2014the cooking dilemma anyway.\n\nOne last option occurred to her. \"I'll talk to Mrs. Callahan. She must have some old family recipes she can impart. I'll explain to her how unreasonable her husband has been.\"\n\n\"The woman is probably partial to her husband. You might not want to say things like unreasonable in reference to him.\"\n\nTrue. And she didn't really want to consult Mary Callahan. The woman would end up telling her husband, then Zachary would have to face that he was paying Tiffany double for nothing. His lack of staff had already negated the job of housekeeper. Cook was all that was left. And if she couldn't succeed at that job, she might just get fired. What an appalling thought. Not once since she'd come up with this scheme had she imagined that could happen.\n\nBlatant failure\u2014that possibility was more unsettling than giving up. Maybe she could spend more time in town tomorrow than she'd planned on. Someone there should be able to help her.\n\n\"I'll figure something out.\"\n\n\"Other than quitting?\"\n\nShe glanced up at him again. He was looking directly at her this time, which was more than a little disconcerting, though surprisingly, not actually frightening. The man was obviously dangerous, but good grief, he really was handsome in a dark sort of way.\n\nShe blushed at the thought and handed him the last dish to dry. \"Yes, other than that.\" She moved to the table to gather up two pots to bring to the sink. They'd barely made a dent, which prompted her to add, \"Why is this room such an appalling mess? Did one of the Callahans try to cook in here?\"\n\nAn image of Hunter came to mind, standing in front of the cast-iron stove stirring pots, and her lips turned up slightly in a smirk. Degan didn't notice because he was stacking the cleaned plates in a cupboard.\n\n\"No, Ed left angry. He made one of his fancier meals, to soften the blow that he was quitting. It had the opposite effect. He made his announcement while we were still eating. Zach got furious. They had words, loud ones. Ed took off without cleaning up that night.\"\n\n\"Mr. Callahan should have controlled his temper better,\" she mumbled to herself.\n\nDegan returned in time to take the first pot from her. Feeling a little more comfortable with him, she said, \"What do you do here, Mr. Grant, if you don't mind my asking?\"\n\n\"I don't herd cattle.\"\n\nHe said nothing more. And suddenly he looked dangerous again. She shouldn't have asked. What was she thinking!? She started scrubbing the remaining pots with a vengeance. She didn't look up until she heard someone behind her say, \"You have got to be kidding!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Degan must have recognized the voice behind them because he didn't turn around. Tiffany thought it might be Hunter sounding so incredulous, but she wasn't sure, so she glanced over her shoulder. Hunter was standing in the kitchen doorway, staring at Degan's back as Degan dried dishes.\n\nTiffany looked back at Degan. He was completely unperturbed, not the least embarrassed to be found working in a kitchen. Still without turning, Degan said, \"Seemed the thing to do if we ever want to get a decent meal around here again.\"\n\n\"You're just not used to trail food,\" Hunter pointed out.\n\n\"Thankfully,\" Degan replied drily.\n\nTiffany moved to get the last pot that had been left on the stove, which drew Hunter's attention to her. \"Didn't actually expect to see you pitching in, Red,\" he said in a lazy drawl. \"Figured you'd just be cracking the whip.\"\n\nShe stiffened over that snide remark. \"If you aren't going to help, Mr. Callahan, then I suggest you leave.\"\n\n\"Hell no. This is where the entertain\u2014\"\n\nFed up with his teasing, she tossed a wet rag in his direction. It landed short of his feet. She wished it had hit his chest, though she would probably have ended up regretting it if it did. \"Then you help. And you can start by scrubbing down that table.\"\n\nHe didn't refuse. In fact, he was smiling as he came farther into the room, rag in hand. Did he find everything amusing? Then it occurred to her that she had reacted as Tiffany, not as Jennifer. The new housekeeper would never have given the owner's son an order like that.\n\nDegan finally turned around and leaned back against the work board while he finished drying a pot. Tiffany guessed he just wanted to see for himself if Hunter would really help. To be fair, she knew she wouldn't if she were in Hunter's place. It's what hired help was for, even if the Callahans didn't have the right sort of help right now.\n\nBut Hunter surprised her. He started scrubbing the table. And serious for the moment, he nodded toward the door before he told Degan, \"The boys are slacking off. They'll never get any sleep tonight at this rate. They need incentive. You're incentive.\"\n\nDegan didn't argue with that reasoning. He set the pot down and left the room.\n\nTiffany didn't pretend not to know what Hunter had meant by incentive. \"Why are they afraid of him?\"\n\n\"Why are you whispering?\"\n\nShe didn't realize she was. Louder she said, \"Would you answer, please?\"\n\n\"He's a killer. They know it.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"So he is an outlaw?\"\n\nBack came Hunter's amusement. He laughed. \"No, he's just fast enough with a gun that he makes his living at it. Outlaws live outside the law. Degan doesn't go around shooting people just for the fun of it\u2014well, not that I've ever seen. Around here, he abides by the law.\"\n\n\"What is his profession actually called?\"\n\nHunter shrugged. \"Gunslinger, hired gun, peacemaker, take your pick.\"\n\nTiffany was intrigued by the last description. \"How does he go about making peace?\"\n\nHunter chuckled. \"By scaring off the opposition.\"\n\n\"You aren't afraid of him?\"\n\nHunter seemed genuinely surprised by that question. \"Why would I be? He works for us, not the Warrens.\"\n\nShe didn't like the sound of that. \"So if he worked for them instead, you'd be worried?\"\n\n\"Maybe\u2014if I didn't know him. He's not a bushwhacker. He doesn't start fights. He's too fast for that. Simply wouldn't be fair.\"\n\n\"You actually know this, or it's just your opinion?\"\n\nHunter was suddenly frowning. \"Why so many questions about Degan?\"\n\n\"If I'm going to work here\u2014\"\n\n\"If?\"\n\n\"Yes, if I am, I need to know that it's safe to do so. So why did your father hire him?\"\n\n\"There was an altercation a few months ago that put a dent in the truce we have with our neighbors. My brother Cole gave Roy Warren a shiner when they were working on my house together. A few days later, Cole's ear was nearly shot off. We've no doubt it was Roy trying to get even. But sending Sheriff Ross over to talk to Roy set off the Warren brothers' tempers.\"\n\n\"Something else occurred?\"\n\n\"The oldest boy, Sam, came looking for a fight because of it. Damn obvious, too, with him showing up at the Blue Ribbon Saloon. We frequent that watering hole, Warrens usually stay away from it. He sat in on a poker game with my brother John and accused him of cheating. John won't take that from anyone, much less a Warren. They went outside to square off in the street. One of them would've died that night if the sheriff didn't arrive to break it up and toss them both in jail for the rest of the night. Sam apologized in the morning, said he was so drunk he couldn't see straight.\"\n\n\"And your brother's excuse?\"\n\nHunter raised a brow. \"John's a might hot-tempered, but he didn't need an excuse. Cheating at cards isn't taken lightly in these parts, and being accused of it when it ain't so\u2014the surprise was that John didn't shoot Sam right there at the table for an insult like that. If that wasn't enough to start up the war again, someone took a potshot at me when I was in town one morning picking up a new saddle. I'd just left the saddle shop when the shot was fired and knocked me back through the shop window.\"\n\nTiffany gasped. \"You actually took a bullet?\"\n\nHunter started to laugh. \"My new saddle did. I just came away with a few scratches from the broken glass.\"\n\n\"Who shot at you?\"\n\n\"Never did find out. There were a few drifters in town that morning, but the train was also in the station and a handful of passengers were roaming about town, too. But Carl Warren was also in town that day.\"\n\nTiffany had to bite her tongue to keep from defending her brothers\u2014when she wasn't supposed to even know them. Nonetheless, she pointed out, \"It sounds like a lot of assumptions without much proof.\"\n\n\"Maybe not much proof, but they're assumptions based on reason. When Pa heard that Degan Grant was in the area, he tracked him down and hired him.\"\n\n\"To kill the Warrens!?\"\n\nHunter snorted at her guess. \"No, to keep them from killing any of us. Pa would rather it didn't come to bloodshed, when we're so close to a permanent truce through marriage.\"\n\nShe didn't need to ask, but Jennifer probably would have. \"Who's getting married?\"\n\n\"The Warrens have a daughter.\"\n\nShe waited for him to elaborate. She hoped to find out what he thought of being engaged to a stranger all these years. Did he hate the idea as much as she did? If he did, they could be allies! Two heads would be better than one at figuring out how to keep the truce without sacrificing anyone at the altar. But he obviously wasn't going to discuss it. His eyes had been on her all this time, rather than on the job he was supposed to be doing. Now his eyes were on the table and he went back to scrubbing it. While she was getting some of her curiosity about these people satisfied, it wasn't proper to ask him his personal feelings\u2014not yet anyway.\n\nShe got back to the gunslinger, whom Hunter apparently didn't mind talking about. \"So in this case, Mr. Grant is acting as a guard?\"\n\n\"You could say that. Pretty damn annoying though. Ain't like we can't take care of ourselves.\"\n\nSo Degan was just a deterrent. She could see how he was suited for that task, she just didn't see why he was needed. Roy would never do what Hunter had just claimed, and neither would Carl. Sam, on the other hand...\n\nShe didn't know her brothers as well as she'd like, she hadn't seen any of them for the last five years, but they'd continued to write to her. She was fairly certain none of them would take potshots at someone, heated temper or no. Least of all Roy, whom they were accusing of starting these altercations. He was a dreamer. He wrote poetry. He was only ten and a half months younger than she was. But she could see Sam getting so angry at the Callahans' accusing Roy of something he didn't do that he'd want to take the fight to the Callahans. As the oldest of the four, Sam saw himself as their protector. But even Sam was only nineteen! And she couldn't imagine any Warren siblings trying to shoot someone on the sly, and not just once but twice!\n\nWhich was why it occurred to her to ask, \"What did your sheriff have to say about those shootings?\"\n\n\"Ross deals in facts, not speculations. Whatever his opinion is, he won't share it until he has proof one way or the other.\"\n\nIt was too bad Hunter's family wasn't of a like mind, but she wasn't going to insult him by saying so. Instead she asked, \"Is your family at odds with any of the other ranchers in the area?\"\n\n\"Everyone in and around Nashart, with the exception of the Callahans and the Warrens, has always gotten along just fine. There's even common ground these days, with everyone banding together against the miners who moved into the area recently. A lot of the townsfolk are worried Nashart is going to turn into another Virginia City, Helena, or Butte, big mining towns west of here that lure in a bad element.\"\n\nShe was surprised. \"This is the first I'm hearing that Nashart is a mining town.\"\n\n\"One mine doesn't constitute a mining town, at least not yet. Earlier in the year, copper was found in a gulch just east of us, a bit too close for comfort. Butte is one of the biggest mining towns in the territory. One of the mine owners there by the name of Harding sent one of his crews here. A mine was in operation pretty much overnight before anyone in Nashart even heard of the find.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"Two veins were found. One of them runs under our property. We didn't even know they were digging under us until one of their tunnels collapsed and left a damn big hole that a few of our cattle got injured in. Pa was furious, but Harding's foreman claimed they didn't know they'd trespassed. So they tried to buy that strip of land from us, tried to lease the mining rights, even offered to make us partners. Pa said no on all counts. He's a cattleman through and through. He could care less that we're sitting on a rich copper vein. And, yes, it's already occurred to me that Harding wouldn't mind if we up and moved\u2014or died.\"\n\nTiffany felt anger rising and her tone with it. \"So you've got a mine owner who wants your land, but you naturally assumed it was young boys who took those shots at you and Cole? When it could have been a miner instead?\"\n\n\"What makes you think the Warren boys are young?\"\n\n\"I just assumed, since Cole is and he and Roy had that first altercation.\"\n\n\"After those two fought, yeah, it was natural to assume that. Still is. Harding was told no. The sheriff was called in. Ain't nothing they can do but finish off the vein they got and move on. Gold, silver, copper, it's all been found in Montana, too much to kill for it.\"\n\n\"Maybe Mr. Harding doesn't see it that way.\"\n\n\"Then he'd be a fool!\"\n\n\"Who says he isn't?\" she shot back angrily.\n\n\"Is it my turn to say, 'You've got to be kidding'?\"\n\nDegan was back, leaning against the doorframe. He didn't look amused, merely curious. Hunter threw down his rag and walked out of the room without another word. Tiffany faced the sink again to hide her blush. Did she really just participate in a shouting match with the owner's son?\n\nStiffly she said to the man behind her, \"Are you going to inform Callahan senior that I should be fired?\"\n\n\"You want to be fired?\"\n\nShe swung around. \"You don't think I should be? I'm sure Hunter does now.\"\n\nThere it was again, that slight turning up of the lips that could have been a smile but wasn't. \"Because you had an opinion?\"\n\n\"It was an inappropriate disagreement. I should have kept my thoughts to myself.\"\n\n\"If Hunter wants to fire you, he'll do it himself\u2014but I guarantee that's not what he wants.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Tiffany retired early that night to the bedroom she'd picked out earlier, a rather nice room, if spartan and small. A tall bureau, a standing wardrobe with a narrow mirror on the inside of one door, a double bed with a side table and lamp, an unlit brazier for the winter. So maybe it was a little too spartan. She might ask Anna to build her some extra furniture since at least she was going to have a lot of spare time in the coming weeks. She smiled tiredly with the thought. While Anna might have confessed she could do things like that, Tiffany just couldn't picture the petite maid sawing boards and swinging hammers. But then she couldn't really picture herself cooking, either.\n\nThis corner bedroom at the back of the house was directly over the kitchen. She'd selected it because it had three windows, which would let in more breeze if needed. She stood at one of the two windows that faced east. It was so dark outside she could hardly see anything, except the moon and the stars. How different from the nighttime view she was used to from her bedroom at home. There she could see streetlamps, elegant town houses, large coaches plodding down the street, even late at night. Here she saw a few flickering lights from the bunkhouse and more stars than she'd ever seen in her life. And heard an animal howling in the distance. A dog? Surely not a wolf.\n\nAt least she was satisfied that the house, while not spotless, was clean enough to live in. She was grateful to the cowhands. Now she could walk down the hall without sneezing. They'd done as she'd asked and in only a few hours. While they'd complained when they'd started cleaning the house, they'd actually looked worried about having done it right while she inspected the rooms.\n\nOne of them even surprised her. Slim, the cowboy with the exceptionally long mustache, had rushed into the main room carrying a jar of wildflowers. She'd been inspecting the furniture, running her fingers along the backs of the chairs and the dining table, when he'd handed her the flowers, saying, \"My ma liked flowers in the house. Didn't see any here, not even dried-up dead ones.\"\n\nShe'd been so touched her eyes got a little misty. But she definitely got a little carried away with her role when she promised that the first cake she made would be for them. The cowboys were thrilled, hooting and calling out their favorite kinds of cake. She'd groaned over her impulsiveness, remembering that she had to learn how to cook first!\n\nShe still didn't know how she was going to do that, but after eating Jakes's stew that night, which Hunter had brought to the house as promised, it became her third goal, along with ending the feud and going home. The stew had been tasteless, the bread stale. At least the butter hadn't been rancid. But then she'd had to wash dishes again!\n\nHunter actually came in to help her this time. She wished he hadn't. Standing close to him at the sink was worse than standing near Degan, though she wasn't sure why and was too tired to give it much thought.\n\n\"You look a little overwhelmed,\" he said by way of explanation for his help.\n\nWhat a polite way to say she looked as exhausted as she felt! She agreed, \"It was more than I expected, when I accepted the job.\"\n\n\"Did I mention this is my favorite room in the house?\" She gave him a sharp, skeptical look. He chuckled. \"Let me rephrase that. It's now my favorite room. You do brighten up the place, Red, you surely do. I have a feeling you're going to find me underfoot\u2014a lot.\"\n\nWas he flirting with her again, or just being friendly? It was hard to tell with a man who laughed as much as he did. \"Then you can hope I don't step on you too hard.\"\n\nHe'd grinned at that rejoinder. She was too exhausted to care. She wasn't just tired when she got upstairs, she ached from doing things she'd never before done. She would have liked to just drop into the bed, but she still had to write to her mother, and it was going to be a difficult letter to write.\n\nTiffany knew if Rose were there, she would never have allowed Tiffany to undertake this deception. Yet Tiffany still felt she needed her mother's permission\u2014after the fact. Not for a moment did she consider lying to Rose, though she might leave out the part about Zachary's insisting she cook, simply because she knew her mother would be indignant about it on her behalf.\n\nShe would probably have cried if her stationery hadn't been in her only surviving trunk, but it was. She was too tired to unpack, but a quick rummage through her trunk indicated that she'd lost all but one of her evening gowns, many of her dresses, and all of her nightgowns, which meant she'd have to sleep in her drawers and camisole. But she still had her jewelry box, not that she could wear any of her expensive jewels in her new guise. But she allowed herself a tired smirk that the most valuable trunk on that train hadn't become a prize for the outlaws, probably because the robber who'd emptied most of the baggage car was saving the heaviest baggage for last, then ran out of time.\n\nWith no desk or even a vanity surface to write on, she had to write on the top of her stationery box while sitting on the bed.\n\n\u2002Dear Mama,\n\n\u2002I miss you so much! I just heard a wolf howling outside my window. Someone told me about a grizzly bear that scared a young man so bad it turned his hair gray. Wild animals, Mama\u2014I'm finding out firsthand that Montana isn't as civilized as you told me it was. I feel so frightened and out of place, but I know you're worried about that telegram I sent, so let me explain.\n\n\u2002It was so unexpected! There I was, so nervous about meeting my father that I almost didn't get off the train, and who should show up but two members of the very family you want me to marry into. They mistook me for the housekeeper their father hired, who did happen to be on my train. But the West overwhelmed her, too. She'd already done what I wanted to do, go back home. I didn't. I'm not forgetting my promise. But the opportunity that the Callahans presented me with was just too intriguing to ignore. They hired me to be their housekeeper. They don't know who I really am. And don't laugh, despite how amusing you might find their mistake to be, but I think this presents an ideal situation, however unconventional, for me to get to know my fianc\u00e9, the real Hunter Callahan, not some artificial, cleaned-up version of himself that he'd pretend to be when he courts me at my father's house. It was your idea for me to give him a chance. But how can I if I don't trust him to be honest and forthcoming about what he thinks about this marriage? Here, in his house, I can find out what he's really like and what his real feelings are. And by the way, you were right. He did turn out quite handsome and he appears to be good-natured, too.\n\n\u2002And annoying. And too quick to jump to conclusions, but she didn't add that. If her mother thought she might like him, then she'd be much more amenable to Tiffany's staying right where she was for a while.\n\n\u2002I'm not asking to stay here the whole two months, Mama, just long enough to form an opinion of my fianc\u00e9. I don't know how long that will take, but I don't feel I'm ready to meet my father yet, anyway. He's waited fifteen years to meet me, so a few more weeks won't make a difference to him. But it will to me. I promise I won't keep up the charade too long, not when I'm dying to see my brothers again. But this will give me a chance to get to know these people and acclimate myself to Montana as well, before I have to deal with meeting my father for the first time. And you already know how I feel about that. It was too much all at once\u2014this frightening place, a fianc\u00e9 I don't know, a father I don't know. Let me get through half of that at my own pace. I know what I'm doing. So please find an excuse to delay my arrival a little longer. Be vague. And, so I don't starve in the meantime, would you please send me a few cookbooks that I can give to the Callahans' cook? Yes, I'm exaggerating about starving, but not about needing the books. He's a trail cook. I'm sure you can imagine how unappetizing his meals are.\n\n\u2002Love,\n\n\u2002Tiffany\n\nSatisfied that she'd stated all the pertinent reasons in making her case, Tiffany knew she was still going to be anxious until she heard back from her mother. The trouble was, if her mother was really against what she'd decided to do, Rose might just come to Nashart, despite her own obscure reasons for not wanting to, and drag Tiffany out of there\u2014and straight to Franklin. Or worse, she'd simply telegraph Frank where to find her. But she was too tired to worry about that tonight. Too tired to undress, too. With her letter ready to go, she simply lay back on the bed and was asleep within minutes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Tiffany woke up to the sound of a cock crowing and sunshine streaming in through the bedroom windows. She felt refreshed and rested. After washing, she unpacked the few dresses she had left, her riding habit, which she doubted she'd have enough leisure time to use, all her shoes and boots, and plenty of parasols. She was relieved to find her underwear, which was made of the softest spun silk and likely irreplaceable in Nashart. She donned a pale-blue walking dress, which, thankfully, had a tailored jacket that covered up the gaps in the dress's back that she couldn't button up herself. The jacket flared and ended just above the bustle, which had come back into fashion recently, though not in a style as pronounced as it had once been.\n\nWhile she'd thought her day dresses would suffice for her role as a housekeeper, they wouldn't really do in her role as a cook and dishwasher. She would have to look for a seamstress today. What if Nashart didn't have one! But she definitely needed more serviceable dresses, ones she could don without a maid's assistance.\n\nShe found a blue ribbon for her hair and simply tied it back again. Maybe she could ask Anna to show her how to pin it up today when she visited her. If there was time. Her list of errands for town today was getting pretty long.\n\nShe debated whether to knock on Mary Callahan's door before she went downstairs. She should introduce herself to the lady of the house before she was summoned to do so. But that wasn't going to be an easy meeting, especially if Tiffany had to tell the woman who was worried about impressing her, the real her, that the new cook didn't know how to cook. She decided to put off that meeting until later in the day. Her only hope was to find help in town today. Someone there had to have a cookbook, and she'd be willing to pay a fortune to borrow it!\n\nLast night at dinner Tiffany had told Zachary she needed to go to town this morning, and Cole had said he would take her. So she was unpleasantly surprised to see Degan waiting on the porch for her instead of Cole, the borrowed wagon hitched out front.\n\n\"Zachary wants me to accompany you,\" Degan informed her. \"He's worried you'll run into a Warren or two and they'll figure out who you are and try to steal you back.\"\n\nSound reasoning, she supposed, but she didn't want to be alone with him again! She didn't budge. Being alone with him in the kitchen yesterday had been nerve-racking enough. She did not want to experience it again. \"What happened to Cole?\"\n\n\"I told him I'd take you,\" Hunter said from behind her as he stepped out of the house. \"My brothers might fight amongst themselves, but they tend to defer to the eldest without question.\"\n\nShe turned to catch his grin\u2014no, it was a definite smirk. He enjoyed his role as oldest brother and the advantages that gave him. She wouldn't know how that felt. She'd grown up without her siblings. But she was relieved that he was taking her. With Degan she would have been nervous the whole trip. With Hunter, she just had to worry about getting into another shouting match.\n\n\"Then Mr. Grant doesn't need to\u2014\"\n\n\"Degan tags along,\" Hunter cut in. \"Didn't I mention I can't go anywhere without the guard dog?\"\n\nSuch a derogatory term, and said with the same disgust she'd heard in his voice when he'd used it last night. She glanced quickly at the gunslinger to see if he was insulted. He didn't appear to be. Without expression, he sauntered down the steps and mounted a palomino horse with a flaxen mane and tail, a color not often seen in the East. It had been tied to the hitching post in front of the porch.\n\nThe one horse hitched to the wagon had a distinctive coloring. She'd only seen it once before, in a painting her mother owned of a herd of Western horses. Rose had called it a pinto, a two-colored horse with large patches of brown and white that Tiffany found quite beautiful. But with just one horse, she wondered how she was supposed to get back to the ranch.\n\nShe could rent a horse just for today. She'd noticed at least one stable in town yesterday. But then the horse would need to be returned to Nashart, too. She could have bought one or rented one for her entire stay if she weren't pretending to be a woman who was pinching every penny so she could get married. She enjoyed riding, had learned in Central Park before it had even been completed, though as big as that project had been, the huge park had been opened to pedestrians and riders long before the extensive landscaping was finally completed. She sighed to herself. In her guise of servant, she probably wouldn't find time to ride anyway.\n\nHolding a folded parasol and a reticule containing her letter to her mother, Tiffany went down to the wagon to climb aboard. The step leading to the long wooden seat was rather high, though, designed for a man's long legs, but she could reach it if she stretched a little. She'd just got one foot on it when she felt hands reach through her bustle to her arse and push. She gasped, \"Mr. Callahan!\"\n\n\"Be quiet, Red. How else did you think you were getting up there?\"\n\nShe was standing on the step now and maneuvered herself onto the wooden perch. Hot-cheeked and her posture stiff, she gazed straight ahead, ignoring Hunter.\n\n\"You need to unbend a little,\" he said as he climbed up and sat next to her. \"You're in Montana now.\"\n\nOh, God, one more reason why she didn't want to remain here. Had the hardy settlers who'd moved West left all propriety behind? Little had survived as far as she could see. Kidnapping housekeepers\u2014very well, possible kidnapping\u2014banditry, private wars, ruthless mine owners.\n\n\"Why exactly are you returning to town so soon? Our pantry is well stocked.\"\n\nHe wanted to converse after what he'd just done? He'd already cracked the reins to get them moving, and now she felt his light-blue eyes on her. Lovely eyes, though she couldn't seem to keep from getting annoyed with him long enough to gaze into them for any length of time. Nor did she try now.\n\nStiffly she answered, \"For a number of reasons. I have a letter to post. I need to see a seamstress since my wardrobe isn't suited for dishwashing. I need to buy some other essentials I seem to be missing. Your father mentioned that the person who previously helped your cook quit when Ed did, so I'm going to hire a replacement if I can find one. Oh, and I'm going to have a decent meal while I'm there, breakfast or lunch, which is why we're leaving early. I shudder to think of what Jakes served up this morning. And I'm going to visit a friend I made on the train.\"\n\nHe was looking at her incredulously. She didn't know that until she heard, \"Hellfire, woman, that's going to take all day!\"\n\nShe turned a frown on him and tsked. \"No, it won't. I'm very efficient.\"\n\nHe snorted at her confidence. \"I can take one thing off that long list. The only people looking for jobs around here are cowboys, miners, and drifters. Women tend to get snatched up real fast.\"\n\n\"You mean hired for work?\"\n\n\"Work, wife, amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?\"\n\nShe disagreed, \"Out here, possibly, but not where I come from.\"\n\n\"Now that simply ain't true, unless you're talking about rich folks.\"\n\nAlthough she was gazing straight ahead at the dirt road, she could feel his eyes on her again. That was a blunder she shouldn't have walked into. \"Yes, of course,\" she agreed. \"I've known several cooks who told me their husbands married them for their skills in the kitchen.\" Which wasn't true either, but he wouldn't know that.\n\nHe chuckled. \"A common motivator for a man. How are you at those skills?\"\n\nShe tensed. Talking about wives and cooking in the same breath, was he suddenly viewing her as a prospective wife? When he had a fianc\u00e9e? Was he too impatient to wait for his fianc\u00e9e to arrive? Or totally opposed to the marriage as she was? She wished she could discuss that with him, but she couldn't until someone actually told her that Hunter was engaged.\n\nBut he was waiting for her to answer his question. Briefly she repeated what she'd told Degan last night about his father refusing to believe she couldn't cook. All Hunter did was laugh.\n\nGritting her teeth, she returned to the subject of finding help for the kitchen. \"So what you're saying is, there is a shortage of women in the territory?\"\n\n\"You got that right. Always has been. And if you keep sashaying around town, we're going to end up with an army of wife-hunting men beating down our door. You're about as prime a catch as it gets.\"\n\nCompliments didn't usually make her blush. She wasn't sure why that one did, unless it was because his tone got a little sharp as he said it, as if she should apologize for being pretty. But she didn't like the damper he was putting on her finding help when she'd been counting on it. Then it occurred to her that Hunter might be basing his negative opinion on the likelihood that a woman out here would probably opt to marry rather than work for the low wages of a kitchen maid. And no doubt he was right. He just didn't know that she would pay whatever it took to get that help. Nor could he know. Tiffany had deep pockets, Jennifer didn't.\n\nBut to prepare him ahead of time for her success, she drew on Jennifer's probable experience, telling him, \"I have been tasked with hiring before. I can be very persuasive.\"\n\n\"I bet you can. You could probably talk me into anything\u2014if you tried.\" Then he leaned closer to whisper, \"Want to try?\"\n\nShivers ran down her back because of his warm breath on her neck. It wasn't because of what he'd said to her, of course it wasn't. But why wasn't she outraged over what he was implying? She should be!\n\nShe responded much more primly and properly than she guessed Jennifer would have. \"I will assume that you are accustomed to indulging in meaningless flirtation. I am not. Please keep in mind that I have a fianc\u00e9.\"\n\n\"But he's in Chicago, which might as well be on the other side of the world, while I'm here. And what sort of man would let you get away from him like this?\"\n\n\"You make it sound as if I've escaped him, when that isn't the case at all. We thoroughly discussed my coming here. It was a mutual decision. We both want to save up a nest egg before we marry.\"\n\n\"You didn't answer my question. What's he like?\"\n\nJennifer hadn't told her anything about the man she was going to marry! All Tiffany could think to do was to describe the sort of man she hoped to marry one day. \"He's noble-hearted. Kind and sensitive. Brave and very loyal. He's been devoted to me since the day we first met. He wouldn't think of being unfaithful.\"\n\nHunter raised a brow at her. Well, she shouldn't have mentioned that last part or made it sound like a reference\u2014to him. But he wasn't done criticizing her choice in men.\n\n\"His first mistake was wanting to wait to marry you, no matter the reason. His second mistake was letting you come here alone. I'd never let my fianc\u00e9e leave me. In fact, I'd marry any woman I want to stake my claim on right away, not come up with excuses to wait.\"\n\nShe was a little indignant\u2014on Jennifer's behalf. Hunter's family was rich, even if they didn't exactly live like it. He didn't know what it was like to be of the servant class that worried constantly about money. Neither did she, but he'd finally given her an opening to ask about his own engagement, and she wasn't passing that up to point out his opinion was biased.\n\n\"You're talking as if you have a fianc\u00e9e. Do you?\"\n\nHunter mumbled something under his breath before he said, \"I've had enough conversation for this morning. Let's get to town. Hold on to your hat, Red.\"\n\nHe cracked the reins so hard that the horse and wagon suddenly sped up. Tiffany gritted her teeth. Why wouldn't he admit he was engaged to her?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Jumping down from the wagon the very moment he stopped it behind the freight company in town, Hunter snarled at Degan, \"I need a drink. You stick to her like glue. Well, not that close, but make sure no one bothers her.\"\n\nThen Hunter just walked off and disappeared around the corner of the building. Tiffany sighed, but managed to get down from the wagon on her own before Degan could dismount to help her. If she hadn't gotten Hunter angry, she wouldn't be stuck with Degan again. It was her own fault.\n\nBut she wasn't sure why Hunter was angry. Because she didn't agree with his point of view about her fianc\u00e9? Or because he had one and hated it so much he refused to talk about it at all? She didn't know him well enough to guess. She realized too late that she never would if she kept being offended by his brand of friendliness. And disturbed by his husky whispers. She had to get better control of her reactions to him. She didn't want to like him. She wanted to go home to New York. And she didn't want to be excited by words he shouldn't even have said to her!\n\nDegan fell into step beside her as she walked in the direction Hunter had gone to reach the main street. Degan led the two horses and tied them to the first hitching rail they passed.\n\n\"I'd like to post my letter first,\" she said when he joined her on the long, boarded walkway that fronted all the buildings along the street.\n\n\"This way.\"\n\nShe followed him past a few businesses, but stopped at the one where delicious aromas were wafting out its open door. Without telling Degan, she entered the small bakery. The single-room kitchen had ovens lining the back wall and a few tables in the front laden with long loaves of bread and pastries.\n\nThe owner closed one oven and smiled at her. \"What I help you with, eh?\"\n\nShe didn't really expect the businesses in Nashart to provide the services she was accustomed to in the city, but she still had to ask, \"Do you deliver?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I'll pay you handsomely.\"\n\n\"No, no time to deliver. You want bread, you come here to buy it.\"\n\nDisappointed that she couldn't get what she wanted even if she paid extra for it, she said, \"Then can you at least give me a recipe to make bread? I'll pay you for that.\"\n\nHis smile vanished. \"Give away my secret? No!\"\n\nHer exasperation was rising. \"Not your special bread, just plain, everyday bread.\"\n\nHe raised a brow. \"You really don't know how?\" He started to laugh. \"What sort of wife will you make, eh?\"\n\n\"One who hires a baker like you,\" she snapped, and marched out of his shop.\n\nDegan didn't say a word about her failure. However, he did caution her about any more detours, brief or not. \"I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't encourage you to take care of your business quickly and leave any extra errands for another day. I want you out of town before the trouble starts.\"\n\nTiffany halted abruptly. \"What trouble?\"\n\n\"It's Saturday. There's always trouble of one sort or another on Saturdays, but it's gotten worse since the Harding mine opened. And cowboys will be riding in later today to raise some hell like they always do. The miners don't get paid much, which makes for frayed tempers, and cowboys and miners don't mix well because they have nothing in common.\"\n\nAt Degan's mention of trouble, Tiffany thought of the gunfight on the train. \"The sheriff should outlaw guns in town.\"\n\nThe slight change in Degan's inscrutable expression told her he would have laughed at her remark\u2014if he ever laughed. \"Why? No one's been murdered, no one's been shot unfairly. Trouble around here isn't usually at the point of a gun unless some braggart rides in looking to make a name for himself. The miners don't carry guns; the cowboys who do are mostly decent men. They won't draw on an unarmed man. But that gives the miners an advantage. They're damn good with their fists. Like those two across the street there with their eyes on Hunter.\"\n\nTiffany followed his gaze to the two men he'd just mentioned. They were not tall, but were quite muscular and broad-chested. And they definitely looked disgruntled.\n\n\"Hunter told me a little about the miners,\" she said. \"I think it's absurd that some of them might be carrying a grudge against his family when the Callahans were here first.\"\n\nDegan shook his head. \"Not absurd when it's nearly unheard of for someone to turn down what amounts to free money, like Zachary did. Harding even offered to give him a percentage of what the mine earned, but Zachary turned that down, too. If you ride out that way, you'll see soot coating the range from their smelters. Zachary wants them gone, not to be partners with them. And they think I was hired to see to it, which just got them even more angry.\"\n\n\"I know why you were hired,\" she said in a disagreeable tone.\n\n\"You object to me keeping the peace?\"\n\nShe was positive this time that she heard a note of amusement in his voice. He might think he was keeping the peace, and maybe he was for now, but she suspected that peacekeeping could lead to bloodshed in too many ways. And those two miners were still deliberately provoking Hunter by staring at him.\n\nShe saw that Hunter had stopped in front of the general store, which was in the opposite direction she was headed. He seemed not to have noticed the miners because he was talking to a dark-haired woman with a voluptuous figure. Her low-cut blouse was nearly indecent, it showed so much cleavage, and her red skirt was guaranteed to draw every man's eye. The skirt had no bustle and wasn't the least bit fashionable, though come to think of it, Tiffany still hadn't yet seen a single woman in town wearing one, so she was actually the one standing out like a sore thumb.\n\nHunter was definitely engrossed in his conversation, no doubt a flirtatious one. He had the woman trapped there with his palms flat against the wall on either side of her, preventing her from walking off, not that it appeared she wanted to leave him when she had one arm draped loosely over his shoulder. Tiffany was sure that they were about to kiss. Whose idea it was she couldn't tell. Their faces were too close. Tiffany was holding her breath, watching as her fianc\u00e9 was about to be unfaithful to her, and she couldn't take her eyes away..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Tiffany barely heard Degan as he continued explaining why she shouldn't have come to town today of all days. \"The miners have been warned not to start anything, so they won't approach Hunter, but they're hoping he'll come their way so they can trip him or say something nasty that will provoke him. As long as he lands the first punch, they won't get tossed in jail. And those miners are strong. Comes from wielding a pick all day. Hunter could take one, but not two at a time.\"\n\n\"His ladylove?\" she asked, still gazing across the street at Hunter and the dark-haired woman.\n\nShe realized she'd just asked Degan a question completely unrelated to what he'd been talking about. She didn't blush though. She was feeling too\u2014she didn't know, but it certainly wasn't embarrassment.\n\n\"That's Pearl, the missing Callahan maid,\" Degan said. \"But don't read anything into that. Hunter's engaged to someone else.\"\n\nFinally someone had mentioned that pertinent fact to her. She planned to use it as ammunition to keep Hunter from making any more inappropriate overtures to her. \"Who is he engaged to?\"\n\nDegan took her arm to continue them on their way. \"Someone he's never met, which is why Pearl doesn't think anything will come of it and tempts the hell out of him.\"\n\nNow Tiffany blushed. She should never have broached the subject of Hunter's love life, and certainly not with the gunslinger. To get quickly off that subject, she recalled she had something else she wanted to ask Degan.\n\n\"What happens when the Warrens and the Callahans come to town at the same time?\"\n\n\"They don't frequent the same saloon\u2014at the sheriff's insistence\u2014but it can get loud if they cross paths here or near the lake. The truce they had has been falling apart for months now.\"\n\n\"Do you think the Warrens have been shooting at the Callahans recently, like Hunter does?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Roy, he wasn't afraid to fight. So he got a shiner. What man hasn't? That's no cause to break out a rifle. As for the shot at Hunter, there were too many strangers in town that day to hazard a guess, but whoever it was, he was either a lousy shot, so not from around here, or he wasn't shooting to kill.\"\n\nHer thoughts exactly. \"So you don't think it was the Warrens either.\"\n\n\"I don't think the Warrens are taking potshots, but I do think they're out to cause trouble. There was no doubt about Sam Warren's motives when he called John a cheat. That boy was looking for a fight.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"John had been the loudest in accusing Roy, and Sam was damn mad about it. But it was John who picked guns for that fight. Sam probably only wanted to beat the hell out of John. Those two might still have another go at it, the next time they cross paths.\"\n\nWhat an alarming thought. \"It sounds like there's no longer any sort of truce.\"\n\nDegan shrugged. \"The elders still like to think so. This started up when it became clear the Warren boys don't want to see that house by the lake finished.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because the house is for Hunter and his fianc\u00e9e, the Warren boys' sister.\"\n\nTiffany had to force herself to appear surprised, now that she was finally hearing whom Hunter was to marry. \"Star-crossed lovers then?\"\n\n\"They haven't even met yet.\"\n\n\"Oh, well, that sounds\u2014awkward.\"\n\n\"By all accounts, the Warren boys would like to keep it that way. It's obvious they think their sister, a fancy Easterner, is too good for Hunter. Mr. Warren might want to abide by the marriage agreement to secure a permanent truce, but his boys are more concerned about their sister.\"\n\nTiffany was so touched by her brothers' protectiveness toward her that tears welled in her eyes. Her father didn't care about her happiness, but her brothers did.\n\nWithout thinking she gushed, \"That's so sweet!\" Degan gave her an odd look, making her realize Jennifer had just disappeared, leaving only Tiffany standing there. She tried to quickly salvage her mistake, adding, \"I mean, I wish I had brothers like that. How does Hunter feel about this arranged marriage?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but I suspect that as the eldest son, he will feel obligated to do what's best for the family and the ranch, even if it means sacrificing his heart.\"\n\nTiffany stiffened indignantly. How dare he refer to Hunter's having to marry her as a sacrifice. She almost marched off in high dudgeon until she heard Degan add with a shake of his head, \"Nonetheless, there's no mistaking it, the Warren boys aren't going to let their sister become a Callahan without putting up a fight. But don't worry. It's my job to make sure it doesn't get too bloody.\"\n\nDid he have to say that?! Tiffany groaned to herself, wishing she'd never broached the subject, at least not with him. Don't worry? She was even more worried now about the situation between the two families. While the older generation saw the betrothal as a means to secure a longer-lasting truce, the second generation, at least her brothers, viewed it as another source of conflict between the families.\n\nShe was going to give herself away completely if she didn't get her reactions under control, so she said no more to Degan and hurried off to do her errands as he'd suggested. After posting her letter, she headed to the hotel to see Anna, but they had to pass by the general store again to get to the hotel. Now that Hunter was no longer seducing women in front of it, she could go in. Even though she had no hope of finding what she needed, she knew it would bother her later if she didn't at least ask.\n\n\"One minute,\" she told Degan, and slipped inside the store before he could complain about another detour.\n\nShe didn't waste time looking around the large, cluttered room for what she wanted. She went straight to the owner and asked, \"Do you have any cookbooks for sale?\"\n\n\"Sorry, miss, but I don't stock books.\" Hearing what she'd feared she would hear, she tried not to appear as disappointed as she actually was, but the owner must have remembered something because he stopped her from leaving. \"Wait a minute.\" He opened a drawer behind him and handed her a thin book. \"My wife ordered this a while ago, but no one ever bought it. Glad I didn't throw it away.\"\n\nTiffany read the book's title: The Basics of Cooking. She could have kissed the man! She quickly paid for the book and was so excited that she showed it to Degan when she left the store.\n\n\"Basics?\" he said, clearly not impressed. \"Let's hope that's not where Jakes learned his cooking skills. Are you about done?\" He was glancing up and down the street. \"More miners have shown up and I've lost sight of Hunter, though he's probably in the Blue Ribbon Saloon for that drink he mentioned.\"\n\nDegan actually sounded a little concerned, which prompted her to suggest, \"Go ahead and find him. I still have a lot to do.\" She gave him her agenda, ending with \"And I need to hire a woman to help me in the kitchen, though Hunter doesn't think I'll have any luck finding one.\"\n\nHe didn't budge from her side as she walked to the hotel, but he did agree with Hunter. \"He's right.\"\n\nTiffany frowned. Old Ed had had help. Why couldn't she? She considered asking Anna to take the job, but quickly discarded that idea. It was too lowly a job for Anna, who would likely complain and argue with her. The maid might even blurt out the truth to the Callahans, and Tiffany couldn't risk that. The look of disappointment on her face was probably what made Degan add, \"You said a woman. Why aren't you considering a man instead? Plenty of them around looking for jobs.\"\n\nShe skeptically raised a brow. \"To wash dishes? I really can't see\u2014\"\n\n\"That restaurant you plan to eat at is completely staffed by men. Ed's helper was a man, too.\"\n\nA little more encouraged, Tiffany said, \"Well then, if you know of anyone looking for work whom you would consider trustworthy, do point him out. Oh, and I should have said this sooner, but please tell me if you see any of the Warrens in town today. I would be so embarrassed if I were to come face-to-face with any of them after I abandoned my job with them.\"\n\n\"Why did you?\"\n\nTrying not to show that he had flustered her, she said, \"My intended and I agreed we should delay our marriage until we save up enough money to buy our own house.\"\n\n\"So the more money you make, the sooner you get to the altar. I get it. What I don't get is how your young man would be willing to wait\u2014for any reason. Whose idea was that?\"\n\n\"Mr. Grant! Really, you\u2014\"\n\nDegan's stormy-gray eyes met hers. \"If he really exists and you love him, I'll warn Hunter to back off. Just say the word.\"\n\n\"If he exists? You think I'm lying?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't be the first time a woman claims she's spoken for to avoid unwanted attention. Which is what Hunter thinks. So maybe you better set him straight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Tiffany had no idea what the gunfighter was insinuating about Hunter, but she had no trouble recognizing that he suspected she was lying about having a fianc\u00e9. She felt like laughing because, ironically, she was being completely truthful in that regard. Jennifer had a fianc\u00e9 and so did she! She pretended to take offense at his even broaching a matter this personal with her. Quickening her step and walking away from him sufficed to let him know that. She hoped. While she'd have no difficulty upbraiding anyone else for such impertinence, she wouldn't tempt fate and do so with a man who reeked of danger.\n\nBut there was no getting rid of Degan Grant. He followed close behind her, though he did wait outside when she entered the hotel. After she asked the clerk where she could find her friend Anna Weston, she got her annoyance under control before she knocked on Anna's door. Unfortunately, it came right back with the first thing Anna said to her.\n\n\"You've come to your senses? I knew you would.\"\n\n\"I'm just visiting to let you know how wonderfully my plan is going.\"\n\n\"You're being sarcastic, aren't you?\"\n\nOf course she was, but she didn't intend to complain to Anna, so she avoided answering and said, \"I've already learned a lot. There's still bad blood between the Callahans and my family. That truce they have is tenuous at best. I have a feeling it won't take much at all to break it. And there are some miners who might be trying to stir things up in that regard.\"\n\n\"From the Harding Mine?\"\n\n\"How did you know?\"\n\n\"I met a Harding executive last night in the hotel's dining room, a Mr. Harris. He seemed like a nice gentleman. His boss owns mines in Montana and elsewhere. It's Mr. Harris's job to travel between them to solve problems and make sure each mine is producing as expected.\"\n\n\"I doubt the Nashart mine has turned out as expected for them.\" Tiffany explained briefly what she knew about it. \"If you should see Mr. Harris again, maybe you can find out what his boss plans to do, now that they aren't getting access to all of the copper they came here for. But I don't have much time in town today, so let's talk while I look for a local seamstress.\"\n\n\"That would be Mrs. Martin. I asked the clerk downstairs. You wouldn't have found her otherwise because she doesn't have a shop, just works out of her home. I can show you where it is.\"\n\nWhen they left the hotel, Degan was waiting for them. Tiffany knew it would be rude not to introduce Anna to Degan, but when she made the introductions, she only referred to Anna as a friend from the train trip and Degan as a worker at the Callahan ranch. She hurried Anna along when she saw how uncomfortable the gunslinger made Anna.\n\n\"Who is he?\"\n\n\"I told you, he works at the ranch and he's my escort today. You don't have to whisper, he's not following us that closely.\"\n\nAnna glanced back to make sure of that before she said, \"Why haven't you said anything about your fianc\u00e9 yet? You have met him, haven't you? Oh, and were they very annoyed when you told them you wouldn't cook for them?\"\n\nTiffany mumbled, \"I'm going to cook.\"\n\n\"You? In a kitchen?\"\n\n\"Don't make it sound so ridiculous.\"\n\n\"But you don't know how!\"\n\n\"I intend to learn.\"\n\nTiffany held up the book she'd purchased, then quickly stuffed it back into her reticule before Anna could see how thin it was. She couldn't help wondering how much information it could contain if she could fit it in her purse. But she'd definitely surprised Anna.\n\n\"You're really going to do this? I was sure you would have given up this notion of impersonating a housekeeper by now and demand to be taken to your father's ranch.\"\n\nAnna might view her as a spoiled, pampered rich girl who'd never lifted a hand to help herself, but she was failing to take into account Tiffany's stubbornness. \"I'm not quitting and I will learn to cook. Besides, whether I hate my job or not, it's still better than meeting my father.\"\n\nAnna shook her head sadly. \"Is it really?\"\n\nOh, God, Tiffany suddenly felt the urge to cry. She'd thought she was done with tears on his account. She glanced away without answering, concentrating on keeping the tears at bay. They had already turned onto a side street with small houses on both sides, yet another stable farther down, and a quaint church at the end of the street.\n\nAnna opened the fence gate at the second house they came to, then glanced behind them once more, apparently to make sure Degan was still maintaining a discreet distance, before she said, \"You still haven't mentioned Hunter Callahan.\"\n\nThis subject definitely quelled the urge to cry. \"Because I've already found out that he's a philanderer. He's even trying to seduce me.\"\n\n\"That's a good thing, isn't it? It means he likes you.\"\n\n\"You're missing the point. He doesn't know I'm Tiffany Warren, so it means he's cheating on me! And I also saw him flirting with one of the Callahan maids today in town.\"\n\n\"Why do you sound so indignant about it? You haven't 'officially' arrived yet. Did you really think he would remain celibate all these years? It's what happens after the marriage that counts, not before\u2014well, not before the couple even meets.\"\n\nTiffany could see the logic in what Anna was saying, but logic had no place in the welter of emotions she was experiencing. It was almost as if she considered Hunter to be hers, when she didn't want that at all!\n\n\"I wonder if your two months in Montana have even begun yet,\" Anna added. \"As long as you're pretending to be someone other than yourself, no courtship can commence.\"\n\n\"My mother stipulated that time period for me to decide if I want to marry Hunter, not for him to decide if he wants to marry me.\"\n\n\"But how is he going to woo you if he doesn't know it's you?\"\n\nTiffany didn't want to answer that because her answer would be she didn't want to be wooed, at least not in Montana. Her goal was to go home to New York so she could live a normal life, the life she'd been raised to expect. But she did have one other goal she hadn't completely thought through yet, so she didn't want to mention that either. She wanted to hear both families' views of the feud to see if she could find a way to defuse it without having to marry a cowboy. In that she was thinking of her brothers' safety, not just the promise she'd made to her mother.\n\nWhen she didn't answer, Anna pointed out, \"You don't have to pretend with these people, you know. So you don't want to stay with a father you don't know. Fine. But the Callahans are expecting you, too. They'll be pleased to have you under their roof. Having been betrothed to the eldest son your whole life, you're practically like family already.\"\n\nTiffany rolled her eyes. \"That negates my plan of getting to know what they are really like.\"\n\nTiffany put an end to the irritating conversation by knocking on the seamstress's door. Agnes Martin was a sweet old lady who led them into her parlor and offered them tea. Tiffany was surprised to find that she already knew Anna.\n\n\"Have you decided to work for my husband, Miss Weston?\" was the first thing Agnes said.\n\n\"I'm still thinking about it, ma'am,\" Anna replied, then blushed when Tiffany gave her a questioning look.\n\n\"Good, he could really use the help and\u2014\"\n\nA gasp from the hall drew their eyes to a young man holding a broom. He was a little taller than Tiffany, but she could tell from his face and his scrawny physique that he was a few years younger than she was.\n\nThe seamstress was immediately contrite. \"I'm sorry, Andy, I know you wanted that job, but my husband is too old to teach someone his trade. Miss Weston is already an experienced carpenter.\"\n\nEmbarrassed, Agnes excused herself and left the room to get the tea. Tiffany, incredulous, asked the maid, \"How did that come about? You've only been here a day!\"\n\nAnna grinned. \"I explored the town yesterday after you left. I was passing the furniture store and heard the hammering inside. I love the smell of fresh-cut wood and couldn't resist going in. The Martins were both there and we started talking. The moment I mentioned my father is a carpenter and that he taught me a thing or two, the owner offered me a job.\"\n\n\"You're not actually considering it, are you?\"\n\n\"Do you know how rare it is for a woman to get offered a job like that? It would never happen back East. So, yes, I am thinking about it. It would give me something to do until you come to your senses.\"\n\nAs Agnes was returning with a tea tray, Tiffany heard her say to her helper as she passed him in the hallway, \"I don't have anything else for you to do today, Andy, after you finish up the sweeping. You can check with me again next week.\"\n\nTiffany, mindful that Degan was waiting for her outside, told the seamstress what she needed and was taken to the back room where Agnes worked. Although she only wanted a few skirts and blouses, and nightgowns, measurements still had to be taken and materials selected. She was too impatient to look through Agnes's design books though and simply told her to make something suitable for kitchen work and offered to pay her extra if she could finish the order in just a few days.\n\nThen it occurred to her to ask, \"Does that boy need a job?\"\n\nAgnes nodded. \"Indeed he does. He even mucks out the stable in exchange for feed for his horse and a bale of hay to sleep on. He's tried to obtain more gainful employment everywhere in town, but he's not experienced in anything other than odd jobs, and there aren't even many of those around here. I've been letting him do some of my own chores because I feel sorry for him.\"\n\n\"Is he reliable? Trustworthy?\"\n\n\"Yes, and polite, too. He arrived in town a few weeks ago. Hails from Wisconsin. He's not a drifter, but I expect he won't be around any longer than it takes him to earn enough to move on. He's just not having any luck with that. Do you have a job for him?\"\n\n\"I might, for a couple of months at least\u2014but not if he's going to leave before he barely gets started.\"\n\nAgnes shrugged. \"Ask him. He came West to find his father, has been going from town to town looking for him, but some steady work might convince him that earning more'n his next meal for a while might help him achieve his goal. Let me fetch him for you before he leaves, and you two can figure it out. Oh, and if you're interested in marriage, keep our sheriff in mind. He's a good man. We'd hate to lose him just because he's hankering for a wife and can't find one here.\"\n\nTiffany was not going to reply to that gossipy tidbit, but Agnes didn't seem to expect her to, and a few moments later the lanky teenage boy, broom still in hand, came in to meet her. He had freckles, sandy-brown hair, and brown eyes. Tiffany understood now why he was so skinny\u2014he probably wasn't getting a meal every day, much less three. But he was presentable, clean, and Agnes must have told him he was going to be offered a job because he looked so eager.\n\nTiffany smiled at him. \"I'm Jennifer Fleming.\"\n\n\"Andrew Buffalo, ma'am,\" he offered bashfully.\n\n\"Well, Andrew, I've been hired to cook at a ranch near here and I need a kitchen helper. The job doesn't require experience, just hard work and diligence. Are you interested?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am!\"\n\nTiffany was nearly as excited as the boy appeared. She had accomplished all of her errands after all. So much for Degan's and Hunter's both scoffing at her intention to find a helper.\n\nBut before she celebrated a victory she had to learn more about Andrew. \"I do require that you keep the job for two months at least\u2014or as long as I do.\" When the boy nodded, she continued, \"So tell me a little about yourself. Mrs. Martin said you came West to look for your father. Do you have reason to think he's in Montana Territory?\"\n\n\"Well, the last place he wrote from is a ghost town now. But that was several years ago. Heard the land up here is rich with ore. Figured he would have heard it, too, so I thought I should at least check some of the bigger mining towns like Butte and Helena. Just haven't earned my way that far West yet.\"\n\n\"He stopped writing?\"\n\n\"Yeah, after the last of us kids were grown. I finally figured out he wasn't coming home. Him and my ma never did get along. She never expected him to come back.\"\n\n\"So you don't know if he struck it rich, or\u2014or if he's even still alive?\"\n\nAndrew shook his head. \"I don't think he's dead, but I don't think he's trying to strike it rich anymore either. His last letter was full of despair, said he got claim-jumped, that it was too dangerous to go it alone anymore, so he was going to mine for someone else.\"\n\nThat was so sad, and Andrew's mission seemed next to impossible. The West was just too big a place to find his father if he had no trail to follow.\n\n\"You haven't thought of giving up and going home?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Yeah, I think of it each time my belly growls. I take work when I can find it, long enough to save up enough to hit the next town. I'd really like to at least see my pa once more before I go home, maybe beat the tar out of him for leaving us for something that never did pan out. I don't know. Each time I think I've had enough, I get the gumption to go on. It's not as if I'm needed back home. My sisters are married and my ma is fine, she's a hatmaker with her own shop. But maybe my pa needs me.\"\n\n\"You're a good son, Andrew,\" Tiffany said with a smile. \"If you're agreeable to my terms, gather your belongings and meet me at the restaurant for lunch. It's my last stop before we return to the ranch.\"\n\nHe gave her a big smile and rushed out of there so fast she nearly laughed. She rejoined Anna in the parlor, so pleased with her success she had to share it. But mindful that Degan might soon be banging on the door, she invited the maid to lunch.\n\nAnna declined. \"Agnes already asked me to share hers. Besides, do you really want your employers asking me questions over lunch?\"\n\nTiffany winced. \"No, I'll see you in a few days then when I pick up my work clothes.\"\n\n\"No wincing and no complaints. You can end this charade at any time.\"\n\nTiffany walked away in a huff, and when she stepped outside, it wasn't Degan sitting on the porch steps waiting for her. Hunter had taken his place." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"Did Mr. Grant return to the ranch?\" Tiffany asked as Hunter stood up.\n\n\"No, he had a few errands of his own, and since you've already taken up half the day with yours, I told him to go ahead. He'll be meeting us at the restaurant. I hear you're still determined to stop there for a meal.\"\n\nHis tone sounded aggrieved, but she was feeling too good about her accomplishment not to share it. \"I've hired a boy named Andrew Buffalo to help in the kitchen. You may have seen him running out of here.\"\n\n\"Yeah, couldn't help noticing when he nearly tripped over me. But what do you mean you hired him? Didn't think you'd find anyone, but since you did, you should've just let Pa know so he could decide whether to hire him.\"\n\n\"I wasn't asking for permission. Your father can pay him or I will. But your previous cook had a helper. If you think I won't insist on the same, think again.\"\n\nSince she was pretty much butting heads with him, the last thing she expected to hear at that moment was his laugh.\n\n\"You're damned bossy\u2014for an employee,\" he said with an engaging grin.\n\n\"Thankfully I don't work for you, but for your father,\" she retorted.\n\n\"Do you really see a difference? Around here, a Callahan is a Callahan.\"\n\n\"Where I come from, a housekeeper isn't a cook.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I definitely like the idea of you working for me,\" he said with another laugh.\n\nWhy would that remark so amuse him? Or were they even still talking about the same thing? Feeling suddenly out of her depth, Tiffany headed back toward the restaurant and what would hopefully not be her one and only good meal for the next two months.\n\n\"You said his name is Buffalo, huh?\" Hunter said as they returned to the boardwalk on the main street. \"You know that's a fake name, right?\"\n\n\"Is it? Does it matter?\"\n\n\"No, as long as he's not running from the law.\"\n\n\"Don't be absurd. He's just a boy.\"\n\n\"So? I've seen them younger than him in gunfights. You'd be amazed at how many boys come West looking for excitement and, when they don't find any, create some of their own. But it's usually only the ones that run into trouble that change their names.\"\n\n\"If he were an outlaw, he'd likely be well fed, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Not necessarily.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Martin has vouched for him,\" she gritted out.\n\n\"Agnes did? Well, hell, why didn't you just say that to begin with? I'll trust her judgment.\"\n\nHis approval came too late. Whether he'd meant to or not, he'd put a damper on how good she'd been feeling about hiring Andrew, and now she was annoyed with Hunter. So when he tried to take her arm to cross the street, she pulled her arm back and kept walking down the boardwalk. The restaurant was still nearly a block away, and someone had just ridden by, stirring up dust, so she was not crossing the street just yet. Then she realized they were approaching one of the town's saloons, where a few men were loitering out front. Miners by the looks of them. They'd just passed two other hefty men leaning against a storefront who made her think of the two miners she'd seen earlier who'd been trying to provoke Hunter with their stares. They might even be the same two...\n\nShe heard Hunter's exasperated sigh. \"I haven't killed anyone lately. I guess I'm due.\"\n\nTiffany immediately did an about-face, even though she was sure he was exaggerating. He had to be! But she was willing to concede the point he was making with that alarming statement. \"Let's cross the street now.\"\n\n\"You're sure you don't want to walk us straight into trouble?\"\n\nShe finally noticed his grin. She could have hit him for deliberately frightening her like that.\n\n\"I'm glad to see you haven't left town yet, Mr. Callahan. Might I have a few moments of your time?\"\n\nThey both turned and saw a middle-aged man who had come up behind them. His stiff-crowned hat with the short brim and his expensive business suit were more suitable for the city than a small ranching town. Dressed in fashionable, Eastern-style clothes, the man stood out as much as she did. Then it occurred to her, could this be the mining executive Anna had mentioned?\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Hunter replied curtly. He obviously knew the man and didn't like him. The two hefty miners who had been leaning against the storefront walked over and stood a few paces behind the well-dressed man. \"If you have anything else to say, you know where to find my pa.\"\n\n\"Your father hasn't been a reasonable man. As his eldest son, your opinion could sway him.\"\n\n\"What makes you think my opinion isn't the same as his? Your smelters are spitting out a crazy amount of soot. There's no way to prevent it from floating across the range.\"\n\n\"The range is vast, you certainly don't need it all. You're being offered a fortune to concede that point.\"\n\n\"Our answer isn't going to change, Harris. Why don't you just cut your losses and move on?\"\n\n\"We could ask you the same question.\"\n\nThe man no longer looked so affable as he turned and walked away. Executive? More like a strong-arm for the mine owner. But the moment he left, those other two men who had been close enough to hear what had been said both stepped forward to confront Hunter. One, the taller of the two, actually tried to shove him!\n\nHunter must have expected something because he quickly knocked the man's hand aside. Without taking his eyes off the man, he told Tiffany, \"Go on to the restaurant while I take care of this. I won't be long behind you.\"\n\nShe stepped out into the street to get out of the way, but she didn't go far. He might be confident that he could defuse their aggression, but she wasn't so sure, especially when more miners were at the saloon down the street and two of them, obviously drunk, were weaving their way over to see what was going on.\n\n\"You're making a big mistake, boy,\" the shorter man said. \"We got no work, thanks to you and your family.\"\n\n\"Then why haven't you left town?\"\n\n\"We been told to stick around, that there\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, Earl,\" the other cut in, then said to Hunter, \"We got a message for your pa. Not for you to deliver, mind you,\" he added with a snicker. \"He'll figure it out when they carry you home.\"\n\nTiffany winced when Hunter doubled over. He'd blocked the first punch, but both men swung at him at the same time! What happened to the miners just baiting and not throwing first punches as Degan had said? Because a porchful of witnesses in front of the saloon would back them up that Hunter started it? Were they forgetting that she was there to say otherwise? Or didn't they care? But Hunter's having to fight two at a time was ridiculous. Her hand gripped her parasol a little tighter, for what purpose she wasn't sure, but she wasn't going to let these two brutes beat him senseless. Where was the town sheriff?\n\nShe'd been holding her breath, but let it out a little when she saw how fast Hunter was. He kicked one man back, which gave him a little leeway to deal with the one named Earl, and quickly landed some punches to Earl's face and belly, and then an uppercut that sent Earl to the ground. Hunter now had some time to lay into the other man. But then Earl was back on his feet, furiously charging at Hunter. She gasped. If they got Hunter down, he wasn't likely to get back up! Incredibly, Hunter shoved the other man into Earl's path instead, so both miners went sprawling. And were even more angry now. But managing to keep the men staggering back or falling to the ground, Hunter somehow kept the advantage. It looked as if he was actually going to win!\n\nThen she saw the flash of sunlight on metal. One of the drunks had drawn a little gun from his pocket and was pointing it at Hunter's back.\n\n\"Hunter, behind you!\" She threw her parasol at the man even as she yelled the warning. And missed. But instinct must have made Hunter drop to the ground and pull his gun before he even looked back. Almost in the same breath he fired a single shot. The little gun fell to the ground and the man started screaming and gripping his upper arm, which was turning red with blood. Either Hunter's aim was off or it was really accurate and he'd only meant to disarm the man.\n\n\"I wouldn't,\" Hunter warned when the other drunk bent down to pick up the gun on the ground.\n\nThat miner raised his arms and backed off immediately. With a roll, Hunter got to his feet. He didn't holster his own gun yet, just aimed it at the two men who'd attacked him. They started stepping backward, but didn't get far with the sheriff finally showing up, drawn by the gunfire. Hunter had a few words with the lawman before picking up Tiffany's parasol and joining her in the street. She watched the sheriff, who was only leading the wounded man away.\n\n\"Why isn't he arresting them all?\" she wanted to know.\n\n\"Because the jail is already overflowing with troublemakers, and I don't feel like lodging a complaint today.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" she demanded indignantly. \"That was two against one, and they started it.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Were you worried about me?\"\n\n\"Certainly not,\" she quickly denied.\n\n\"Well, thanks for the warning, Jenny. Those Deringers might be tiny, but they can still kill a man.\" He laughed as he handed her the parasol. \"Did you really throw this at a man with a gun in his hand?\"\n\nAn insane moment on her part! Was this how Hunter was when Degan wasn't around to caution restraint? Up for any challenge? She was exasperated that he hadn't drawn his gun sooner to make the two miners back off, before the drunk drew his gun. Had the whole thing been a setup arranged by Mr. Harris? She was beginning to think the Callahans had a lot more to worry about than her family..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "\"Did you send me off just so you could get shot at?\" Degan said drily as he came up behind them.\n\nHunter chuckled. \"How'd you guess?\"\n\nDegan wasn't any more amused than Tiffany was and asked her pointedly, \"Are you ready to go home now?\"\n\nTo her real home, absolutely, but she still had fifty-nine days to spend in this purgatory. Just an ordinary day in Nashart, she supposed. For them. If she had any intention of staying, she might try to convince herself to get used to it. Not a chance. Yet these men seemed much too nonchalant about the fight she'd just witnessed.\n\nStiffly she said, \"I'm not leaving yet. I'm going to pretend this is a civilized town and still have lunch in it.\" And to Hunter: \"If you tell me it isn't safe to do that, then I will go to the train station instead and buy a ticket home. Is it safe, Mr. Callahan?\"\n\n\"Yes, for now. But do us all a favor and don't ask to come to town on a Saturday again.\"\n\n\"Oh, believe me, I've already figured that out. But your answer wasn't the least bit reassuring.\" She marched off in the direction of the restaurant.\n\nHe fell into step beside her. \"I won't let anything happen to you, Red, I swear.\"\n\nShe heard confidence in his tone, and a sincere desire to keep her safe. Did Hunter have a bit of a chivalrous nature? That would have been quite reassuring\u2014if she had any intention of marrying him, which she didn't. So besides his engaging humor, his incredible good looks, his courage, which she'd just witnessed, he had this good quality, too? She had hoped that while carrying out her charade as Jennifer she would discover more bad qualities than good ones. Of course, the possibility that he was trying to cheat on her by seducing Jennifer was bad enough. But that hadn't been proved yet.\n\nAndrew Buffalo was waiting for Tiffany outside Sal's Restaurant. She introduced him to her escorts. The boy was so happy about getting a real job that he wasn't even leery of Degan. Tiffany had been a little worried that the restaurant might be too rustic for her tastes, but she was pleasantly surprised by the decor inside. White, embroidered tablecloths, even little bouquets of daisies on each table, though they were stuck in jars instead of vases. And the dining room was crowded, but then it was around lunchtime and there were only ten tables.\n\nThey were shown to the last one available. Hunter was stopped a number of times on the way, with friends asking after his mother. He might have introduced Tiffany if she had stopped with him. Then again, he might not have because she was just a servant in his household. She wouldn't introduce a servant to her mother's friends, so Jennifer would understand even if Tiffany might get huffy about it. But Degan didn't give her the chance to find out which side of her would have reacted, taking her directly to their table instead. She needed to get a better handle on the part she was playing. She was behaving and speaking up too quickly without forethought, as herself instead of the housekeeper.\n\nBut some reactions just weren't controllable. Her reaction to Hunter after he sat down was one of them. It was by far one of the most uncomfortable meals she'd ever had, when it shouldn't have been. Hunter grilled Andrew while they ate. She'd expected that and couldn't object to it, since Andrew would be living at the ranch. And at least Hunter did it in a friendly manner. But Tiffany was only half listening.\n\nShe had been doing her best all day to ignore how handsome Hunter was. It was fairly easy to do when she wasn't looking directly at him, but in the restaurant, sitting across the table from him, it stopped being easy. She knew why. Because he was looking at her even while he was talking to Andrew. It made her nervous. It made her blush. While she wanted to tell him to stop it, she didn't want him to know how much it was bothering her.\n\nAs she'd been finding out lately, she chattered a little too much when she got nervous. When the \"interview\" paused briefly, she jumped in, saying, \"When I first saw the sign outside the restaurant, I thought Sal would be short for Sally, but Degan mentioned today that only men work here.\"\n\n\"You were right about the name.\" When her eyes widened, Hunter laughed. \"No, the man's name isn't Sally. Sally was Tom's wife. He owns the place. He named it for her and didn't change it after she died. The whole town was saddened by the loss because Sally was a wonderful woman. We were afraid Tom might pack up and head back East, but Sarah Wilson offered to help. She spits out kids like chewing tobacco, so she had milk to nurse Tom's newborn.\"\n\n\"You're confusing even me,\" Degan said, \"so I can't imagine what Miss Fleming is thinking.\"\n\n\"Sorry,\" Hunter said, his eyes back on Tiffany. \"Sally died in childbirth their second year here.\"\n\n\"Nashart doesn't have a doctor?\" Tiffany asked.\n\n\"We do, but men with that type of learning are pretty rare out here. For as far back as I can remember, we've had the only doc for miles around. But he frequently gets called away to other nearby towns, so he isn't always on hand for our own emergencies. Like complications in childbirth, which is what happened with Sally.\"\n\nThe remark made her realize she was hearing about another danger in the West, for women specifically. Had her mother had help with the births of her four children? How brave Rose was to face that, knowing she might have to do it alone and could die because of it!\n\nHunter had been right to begin with, the tale was sad, so Tiffany tried changing the subject. \"Sarah Wilson, how many children does she actually have for you to have described it so\u2014colorfully? Five? Six?\"\n\n\"Twelve by last count.\"\n\n\"And she hasn't shot her husband yet?\"\n\nHunter burst out laughing. Tiffany almost grinned herself, but she hadn't been joking. That poor woman!\n\n\"You don't like kids?\" he asked curiously.\n\n\"I\u2014I don't actually know. I haven't had occasion to be around them very often.\"\n\n\"No, I guess I was getting at, how many do you hope to have someday?\"\n\n\"A much more moderate number.\"\n\n\"You'd make some beautiful kids,\" Hunter said with an admiring look, then leaned closer to whisper, \"Want to make some?\" She gasped. He laughed. \"Figure out when you're being teased, Red. You take things much too seriously, even for an Easterner.\"\n\nShe decided to tell him the truth. \"I don't\u2014usually. I actually have a nice, even temperament.\"\n\n\"Where've you been hiding it?\"\n\nShe blushed. He was probably teasing again, though maybe not this time. But then, she couldn't exactly discuss with him the debacle her life had become\u2014when he was the cause of that.\n\nShe quickly changed the topic of conversation again. \"Well, I'm glad Tom decided to stay and raise his child here. This chicken dish is exquisite.\"\n\nIt was, but the creamy sauce was what made it special. If she hadn't had such a bad experience with the town baker, she might have asked Tom for the recipe. But as she gazed around the restaurant, watching Tom move from one table to another, accepting compliments on the food and money from happy diners, she belatedly realized that a baker or a cook wouldn't want to share his recipes because the food those recipes helped them produce was their source of income. She noticed that all three men had ordered beef in some form, though Degan's steak was different, accompanied with a dark sauce. She had a feeling that he was as accustomed to refined food as she was. If her thoughts went down that path, she'd be crying, because she didn't think she'd ever be able to cook anything as delicious as this.\n\nHunter somehow read her mind! \"Don't worry, we don't expect you to start with anything this fancy. You have to get the hang of it first.\"\n\nShe gave him a slight smile. It did relieve her a little to hear him say that. But then he added, \"Tom came from Chicago. Does his food make you feel homesick?\"\n\nYes! She'd been homesick since the day she'd left New York City. But she didn't say so. Instead she asked, \"Why did Tom leave Chicago and travel this far west to open a restaurant?\"\n\nHunter shrugged. \"Money, or the lack of it, brings a lot of people out this way. Tom couldn't afford to open his own restaurant back East. Here, it cost him next to nothing; in fact, just the building materials, and even half of those were donated. The folks in town were so pleased to get a real restaurant in Nashart, they all pitched in and this place went up in a day.\"\n\nThey were about finished. If they had stood up a few moments sooner, they would have run into disaster at the door, because the worst thing that could happen did happen: one of her brothers walked in. Tiffany froze, paralyzed with indecision. She should bolt out of there, but she had no excuse to do that! She wasn't supposed to know that was Sam Warren standing by the door with two other young men she didn't recognize. She could be wrong. It had been six years since she'd seen her oldest brother. He'd changed so much in that time...\n\nBut as she gazed at the man, she knew it was Sam. His face was more masculine now, he even sported a mustache, but that was her brother\u2014his blond hair, his green eyes. And, oh, God, she wanted to hug him so badly it almost brought tears to her eyes!\n\nThen she heard Degan say to Hunter, \"I'll distract him while you get her out of here the back way.\"\n\nSo she wasn't the only one who had noticed a Warren had entered the restaurant. Hunter stood up as Degan did and came around the table to take her arm, saying quietly, \"Don't make a fuss, but a Warren just walked in. Pa wants them to find out. That was the point, after all, of winning you to our side. But Pa wants to savor this victory for a spell, so we'd prefer they not find out this soon.\"\n\n\"I would prefer it never happen,\" she whispered back. \"I'll feel terrible if I have to explain my decision to them in person.\"\n\nHunter put his arm around her neck and held her close to shield her from Sam's view. She didn't object. She didn't want to be found out. Thankfully, she was out the back door without hearing anyone call her name\u2014her real name." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Hunter hurried Tiffany down the street to the hitching post where Degan had left their horses, but he didn't wait for the others to join them. He mounted his pinto and leaned down to offer her a hand up. She didn't protest because the only thing on her mind was escaping. She was still too upset over such a close call, and they weren't out of town yet. If Sam had recognized her, she'd be facing her father\u2014today. But a small voice reminded her, \"And be reunited with your brothers.\" Could she stomach Franklin for that? No, not even for that. The hurt that man had caused her ran too deep. She'd have to figure out some other way to visit with her brothers before she left the territory.\n\n\"We need to do this more often.\"\n\nIt took a few moments for Hunter's remark to break through and make sense to her. Was he talking about her practically sitting on his lap? Oh, good grief, why was she?\n\n\"Wait! I thought you were taking me to the stable in town. I was going to rent a horse for the ride home.\"\n\n\"You're already riding home.\"\n\n\"But this is highly improper.\"\n\n\"Me taking you home is improper? You sure get some silly notions, Red.\"\n\nShe snapped her mouth shut and gritted her teeth. They were out of town already, so she wasn't surprised he'd say that. Yet he had to know what she was talking about. Etiquette in the West couldn't be that different from the rules of social decorum she'd been taught. But even worse, the position he'd put her in was far too intimate. He hadn't placed her behind him or astride in front of him, he'd set her down sideways, right across his lap, so she couldn't miss his gazing down at her. And grinning.\n\nHe was mighty pleased with himself, the cad, while she was distinctly uncomfortable. She turned her head away from his glance and looked at the road ahead. The long mane of his pinto blew across her hand. Such a beautiful animal. She wanted one just like it. Before she left the territory, she was going to purchase one to ship home. She'd be the envy of all her friends as they rode around Central Park. Most of her friends didn't know about her dilemma. She'd been too ashamed to tell them where she was going. They would have been so shocked.\n\nOh, good grief, she couldn't think about home now, or having seen Sam, because she'd start crying, and she couldn't let Hunter and her proximity to him fluster her. She had to focus on being Jennifer, the housekeeper, and engage in normal conversation. That would calm her down.\n\nKeeping her eyes off him, she said, \"This is a pretty horse.\"\n\nHunter's snort made her glance back at him. He grimaced as he told the horse, \"Don't listen to her, Patches, she didn't really just call you pretty.\" He then leaned down to her and whispered, \"Don't insult him again, he's damn touchy.\"\n\nShe didn't believe a word he'd said, but she couldn't help laughing. Until she realized Hunter was just creating an excuse to bring his face down close to hers. With those lovely powder-blue eyes so close now, she stopped breathing. If he kissed her\u2014oh, God, she didn't know what she'd do.\n\nShe blurted out, \"I like riding, but I like holding my own reins. You should have taken me to the stable in town so I could rent a mount for myself.\"\n\nHe leaned back, the moment he might have kissed her gone. She could breathe again. Relief should have rushed in, yet she felt disappointed instead. What was wrong with her! It would be better for her if she didn't know what it was like to be kissed by Hunter Callahan.\n\nBut he was still looking down at her. \"Wouldn't have taken you for a rider. I thought all you city folks just travel around in carriages.\"\n\nFinally a distracting topic that should compose her. \"Not at all. I lived near a big park, possibly the biggest in the world. I was quite young when I was taught to ride. Perhaps you might let me borrow your Patches sometime?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"A man bonds with his horse, it's like family.\"\n\nShe burst out laughing, but cut it off when she realized he might actually be serious.\n\nHe was quick to remark, \"That's a beautiful laugh you've got, Jenny. Why don't I hear it more often?\"\n\nBecause she was in constant turmoil, anxiety, worry, but worse, the man she'd come here to disdain was proving to be likable. Occasionally. When she didn't catch him seducing women, including herself. But of course she couldn't say any of that.\n\nPrimly she said, \"A housekeeper must be reserved at all times.\"\n\n\"Stop it.\" He chuckled. \"That might have been the case in those fancy homes you worked in back East, but you're in Montana now.\"\n\nDid he have to keep pointing that out? She got back to the subject that had briefly calmed her, and his silly\u2014or not\u2014remark about his horse. She asked, \"Were you joking about Patches? I've only owned two horses. I confess I never considered either one a pet.\"\n\nHis expression turned curious. \"Horses ain't cheap. How'd you even afford one?\"\n\nShe groaned to herself, but quickly thought of a reasonable excuse. \"A good friend of my father's was a horse breeder. The man he worked for wasn't very nice. Any horses that didn't meet his standards, he ordered put down. Our friend didn't like doing that and gave them away instead whenever he could.\"\n\n\"Easterners,\" Hunter said with some disdain. \"Out here, we'd just set them free. We've got a few extra horses at the ranch. You can ride one of them. Just let me know when you feel like riding and I'll take you out.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"I would prefer not to be restricted to your schedule. I'd like to ride out when I feel like it\u2014alone.\"\n\n\"Can you shoot a gun?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"A rifle?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"Then you don't ride alone.\"\n\nShe would have argued if his tone hadn't suggested it would be pointless. Perhaps she could learn to shoot a weapon. No, why bother when she wouldn't be here that long.\n\nThen it occurred to her: \"If you have extra mounts, why didn't you bring one for me today?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"And miss you sitting in my lap for the trip back? Hell no.\"\n\nSo he'd planned this uncomfortable situation she found herself in? He was grinning at her, obviously patting himself on the back for arranging this intimacy. Why? Was he like this with every young woman who crossed his path? More to the point, was he enjoying some innocent flirtation or was he actually bent on seducing her\u2014Jennifer, she corrected herself. She ought to find out, but how could she if she kept taking offense at his style of friendliness. She could be nicer to him, she supposed, perhaps even go along with his flirting just to see where it would go. No, that smacked of tempting him to be unfaithful. She couldn't in good conscience use that against him to get out of this arranged marriage, not if she provoked it. It had to be his idea and serve as proof of his philandering nature that she could present to her mother.\n\nLost in her thoughts, she realized she'd absently been gazing at Hunter all the while, long enough evidently to make him think she might welcome an overture from him now because he was slowly leaning down toward her, his eyes locked on hers, so blue, so sensual. Her stomach flipped over, her breath caught, and she couldn't stop what was happening, couldn't even move. She inhaled his masculine scent\u2014a mixture of leather, pine trees, and something she couldn't identify. But she liked it and wondered what he would taste like. Her world would change drastically if she let him kiss her because she might like it. He might like it... and he might want more. It would be business as usual for him, a daily seduction or two. And she was probably right on the mark with that number because she remembered Pearl's arm wrapped around his shoulder in town...\n\nThat memory ended the alarmingly hypnotic state she'd been in the grip of. \"Stop!\"\n\nShe meant to stop him from kissing her, but he must have thought she wanted him to stop the horse! Patches did stop. Tiffany was too frazzled to upbraid Hunter yet for trying to kiss her. She looked around and saw that they were near the lake and not far from the abandoned house.\n\nAfter taking a deep, calming breath, she said, \"I saw that house yesterday. Could I take a closer look?\"\n\n\"Jenny.\"\n\nThat's all he said, yet she knew he was still thinking about kissing her. Now that she'd gathered her wits, she had to nip that idea in the bud.\n\n\"Don't mention what shouldn't have happened\u2014and don't let it happen again. I may work for your family, but that doesn't mean you can take advantage of me.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't.\"\n\nEvery word she'd said had been building up steam and she couldn't seem to stop the tirade now. \"And never mind my curiosity about the house. Just take me back to the ranch. You and I shouldn't be keeping company like this\u2014alone. It's beyond improper and do you see why? It gives you the wrong idea!\"\n\n\"It must be the red hair,\" he said under his breath, and slid her off his lap to the ground before he dismounted. \"Come on.\"\n\nWith the reins in one hand, he grabbed her hand with the other and he led her through the trees toward the water, and the building that was no longer being built. She tried to get her hand back. Twice.\n\nHe must have noticed she was still annoyed because he actually said, \"Shake it off. There's no call to get in a snit over a harmless kiss\u2014that didn't happen.\"\n\nDid he see it that way? Harmless? Without meaning? Maybe she did overreact. She needed to have a care about how she dealt with this man. Mindful of who she really was tempered with who he thought she was, she needed to juggle the two identities so she didn't lose her job\u2014or a possible ally. Because it occurred to her that if Hunter Callahan was as carefree and generous with his affections as it was beginning to appear he was, then if anyone could help her avoid this marriage, it would be him.\n\nThey'd reached the house, or rather, the framing. Its layout indicated it was going to be much bigger than it appeared from a distance. She was going to ask him about his engagement and what he thought about it, now that Degan had mentioned it to her, which is why she'd asked to see this house. Discussing the house and whom it was for was a perfect opportunity to get him to talk about that betrothal, without her own anger getting in the way. But if she couldn't calm down, then maybe this wasn't such a good time, after all. No, anger or no, she had to learn his thoughts on the matter.\n\n\"I've heard this house is being built for you and your fianc\u00e9e. That's another reason why I don't want you trying to kiss me.\"\n\nHe let go of her hand and gave her a sharp look. \"Who told you about that?\"\n\n\"Degan mentioned it, when I asked him about the feud this morning while we were in town. It's true then? You are engaged to a Warren?\"\n\n\"So? I'm supposed to stop living while waiting for that woman to show up? I've never met her, Red. There's no attachment.\"\n\n\"But you're going to marry her.\"\n\n\"Now that remains to be seen. My pa hopes I'll like her, but he won't force me to marry her if I don't.\"\n\n\"It sounds like you've always known it would be your choice in the end. And what? That everyone expects it to happen is just too damn bad?\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" he snapped. \"And I sure as hell won't pretend I'm married before I actually am!\"\n\nHis attitude amazed her. She hadn't expected this. He was talking about the impending marriage as if it were a noose around his neck.\n\nBut he must have noticed how surprised she was because he continued in a calmer tone, \"I've had this burden all my life. The day I started noticing girls, Pa pulled me aside to tell me, 'You can touch, just don't get attached, you got a wife handpicked for you.' What the hell, this is the nineteenth century. Who the hell gets stuck with a handpicked wife these days? And for what? Because two men can't sit down and say this ain't our fight, why the hell are we still shooting each other? And why are you smiling now? You think this is funny?\"\n\nShe was surprised she wasn't laughing, because what he'd just said echoed her own thoughts, but she couldn't say that. \"Not at all. I was just wondering, what if your intended feels the same way you do?\"\n\n\"I can sure hope,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"But have you never considered that?\"\n\n\"No, can't say that I have. I figured she'd do as she's told.\"\n\n\"Maybe you figured wrong,\" she snapped, and started to turn away.\n\nHe stopped her. \"What's your hurry? Do you really think she won't like me?\"\n\n\"If she's anything like me, she's used to refined city gentlemen, not brash, overconfident cowboys who don't know when to give up.\"\n\nHe gave her a half grin. \"Overconfident with reason.\" He stepped inside the framing. He stood there, his hands on his hips, gazing around at the beginnings of a house that might never be finished. She started to follow until she noticed how dark his expression had turned. She'd never seen him look like this. Angry. Very angry. Not at her\u2014well, actually, maybe at the real her. This might not have been the right place to discuss the betrothal, when the house was such a blatant reminder of it.\n\nThat thought was reinforced when he suddenly raised his leg and kicked at a corner post. It took two more kicks before it cracked in two. He got out of the way as framing from overhead started coming down, though nails kept it from falling all the way to the floor. It just hung there now, misshapen. Ruined.\n\nIncredulous, she asked, \"Why'd you do that?\"\n\n\"Because the damn thing never should have been started when it might never be lived in. I've been meaning to tear it down.\" Then he grabbed her hand again. \"Come on, it was a mistake stopping here. Let me get you back to the ranch.\"\n\nShe didn't object. He didn't know it, but he'd just given her the best news she'd heard since arriving in Montana. He hated the betrothal as much as she did. Then why wasn't she ecstatic? Was she so vain that she could be annoyed that he didn't want her?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Hunter's mood didn't improve in the short distance they had to travel to reach the ranch. Tiffany's feet were on the ground in front of the porch before she noticed Zachary leaning against a post there. Glancing back and forth between Hunter and her, the older man didn't seem too pleased that they had ridden in alone. Did at least someone here besides her realize how improper it was?\n\n\"My Mary's been asking after you, gal,\" Zachary said gruffly to Tiffany. \"Go on up and make her acquaintance.\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"I'll introduce you,\" Hunter offered.\n\n\"She can manage,\" Zachary disagreed. \"I want a word with you, boy.\"\n\n\"I'll be back in a minute, Pa,\" Hunter said, and ushered Tiffany inside and straight upstairs.\n\n\"Wait!\" Tiffany said when he was about to knock on Mary's door. \"I need to at least make sure I'm presentable before I meet your mother.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"You're beautiful. Relax, she isn't going to bite you.\"\n\n\"I didn't think she was, but first impressions\u2014\"\n\nHe lifted her chin to examine her face, then pretended to wipe a few smudges of dirt from her cheeks. She knew he was pretending because he did it too slowly, too gently, his hands practically cupping her face, his fingers caressing her rather than wiping. Heat spread all over her. Caught by his eyes, so intense, Tiffany sucked in her breath.\n\nShe heard Hunter groan as he pulled his hands away from her. He turned and opened the door to his parents' bedroom, mumbling, \"Trust me next time I say you look fine.\"\n\nThat wasn't what he'd said at all! He'd thrown her off-balance by telling her she was beautiful. Abruptly, she was escorted into the large corner bedroom. So much light flooded into the room from the two walls of windows, all of which were open and had their curtains drawn, that it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to it. The room was big but was cluttered with furniture. Tiffany was delighted to see that vanities weren't foreign to the West after all. Mary had a frilly one, and a writing desk, and a small, round dining table where she and her husband probably shared meals on occasion while she was recuperating. The room also contained bookcases, several straight-back chairs, and one comfortable-looking stuffed chair that had been drawn up next to the bed, no doubt for Mary's visitors.\n\nHunter's mother was sitting propped up in the big four-poster bed, a half dozen pillows at her back. Her long brown hair was braided, one braid on each side. She was wearing a long, plain white, short-sleeved nightgown designed for comfort. It was too warm to be under the covers. Even her feet were bare. Rose had said Zachary had a pretty wife. She was still a handsome woman, sturdy, not delicate at all, with keen blue eyes. Hunter's eyes.\n\nHunter went straight to the bed and leaned over to kiss his mother on the cheek. \"I've brought you Jenny, Ma. If she seems a little stiff, remember she's an Easterner.\"\n\nHe said it in his usual teasing tone, accompanied by a grin, so Tiffany didn't take offense. Mary grinned, too. \"Run along and let us get acquainted. She's not going to be reserved with me.\"\n\nHe was no sooner out the door than Mary said, \"I heard what you did.\" Tiffany's heart skipped a beat until Mary added with a smile, \"Zach says you did an amazing job, getting the downstairs back into shape. I didn't know it had gotten so bad, though I should've expected as much, with Pearl away so long. To be honest, I never would have thought to ask the hired hands to help. Sit and tell me how you managed that.\"\n\nTiffany was amazed at how quickly her nervousness vanished with Mary's friendly manner and smile. She even chuckled before admitting, \"I don't think it had anything to do with me. I asked the cowboys if they would help and they were about to laugh, but then Degan Grant said he'd help. Suddenly they were all willing to help, too.\"\n\n\"Well, that explains that. That man can be a powerful motivator. Polite, can't deny that, but I'm glad he won't be needed after the wedding and will be moving on.\"\n\n\"Your son's wedding?\"\n\n\"Yes. You and I will have a lot to do to smarten up the place before then. That Warren gal is rich, was raised in the lap of luxury. We just hope she hasn't been so pampered and spoiled she can't settle in here\u2014well, I do. My menfolk expect the worst, but they've never had a kind thing to say about her family, so that's to be expected. Her father sure is looking forward to seeing her again, though.\"\n\nTiffany managed not to sound incredulous. \"He told you that?\"\n\nMary tsked. \"Haven't spoken to him in years. Heard it from the town gossips who visit me from time to time. It's all he's been talking about for months now.\"\n\n\"You're\u2014worried about impressing her?\"\n\n\"Hell yes, I am. I'll be treating her with kid gloves. A lot rests on this wedding, gal. A lot. Which is why I'm so glad you're here to help with it. So tell me why someone who looks like you isn't married yet?\"\n\nNo beating around the bush for Mary Callahan, obviously. Tiffany suddenly felt uncomfortable about deceiving the Callahans because Mary had just sounded so pleased about the wedding. Nonetheless, she once more repeated Jennifer's story, though it was beginning to sound a little trite to her own ears by now. She was even inclined to agree with Hunter's assessment of Jennifer's relationship with her fianc\u00e9. If they really loved each other, wouldn't they have opted to marry first and save up for a house later?\n\nBut Mary surprised her with a new take on it. \"I remember what it was like back East, how things could be thought out and worried to death before decided on. Too many choices were the problem. Here in Montana it's just the opposite. There aren't enough choices, so a man has to be impulsive when he sees what he wants or risk someone else snatching it up.\"\n\nIt sounded as if Mary was describing Franklin Warren's situation. Was that all her parents' romance had been? Impulsiveness on Frank's part because of the scarcity of women out here? Impulsiveness that didn't work out, she reminded herself. But she hadn't expected Mary Callahan to be an Easterner, too.\n\n\"I somehow assumed you grew up around here like your husband,\" Tiffany said.\n\n\"Goodness, no, but Zach wasn't born here either. No one but trappers and Indians lived around here back then. Zachary's father, Elijah Callahan, was a rancher in Florida; mine was a butcher who did business with him, which is how we met.\"\n\nTiffany was surprised. Why had she thought these people had been here so much longer? Was the feud not that old either?\n\n\"So you actually moved here with your husband?\"\n\n\"Yes, and with his father, with whom we lived. Elijah's wife had just died. Elijah had no reason to stay in Florida after that, and every reason to leave. Bad blood with his neighbor was what really drove him away.\"\n\nMary had almost whispered that last part, yet Mary couldn't be talking about Warrens, so why would she add that so quietly, as if it were a secret Tiffany shouldn't know about? But she wanted to ask Mary about the feud, and this was somewhat of an opening to do so.\n\nCarefully she said, \"How... ironic, since your son Cole said your neighbors here aren't friendly either. It would seem it's the bane of your family to have\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, it's worse than that, but we're hopeful that it will be over soon. Well, I'm hopeful. Zach is more skeptical. Seeing is believing, you know? But who can blame him when it was she who followed us here and instilled that hatred of hers into the rest of her family.\"\n\n\"Who did?\"\n\n\"Mariah Warren. Has no one told you about the feud?\"\n\nTiffany choked out, \"I was going to ask, since I seem to have landed in the middle of it. Who is Mariah Warren?\"\n\n\"Elijah Callahan's one true love. She was Mariah Evans back then when they lived in Florida. Elijah and Mariah were to marry.\"\n\n\"But they didn't?\"\n\n\"No, they surely did not.\" Mary sighed. \"The night before the wedding, Elijah's best friend got him drunk and thought it a fine joke to dump him in a whore's bed so he'd wake up there and think the worst. But Mariah wanted to talk to him that night. Some people think she was having wedding jitters, others think she didn't want to wait for the wedding night. She spent hours at Elijah's ranch, waiting for him to come home. Finally, she went to town to find out what was keeping him. When she entered his favorite tavern, looking for him, everyone got quiet. At the point of her musket she demanded to know where Elijah was, and someone told her he was upstairs.\"\n\nTiffany gasped. \"She shot him?\"\n\n\"Not that night. That night she was just in shock. But she shot him the next day when he came to explain. She didn't believe he didn't have relations with the tavern floozy. She meant to kill him; she just wasn't a good shot and left him with a permanent limp instead. But that jealous rage that took hold of her that night never did let go. Within the week she married an old suitor, Richard Warren, just to spite Elijah. That's when Elijah got jealous, too. It took him longer to find a wife, yet he married for the same reason, just to spite Mariah.\"\n\n\"Why couldn't they both just let it go?\"\n\n\"You'd think, wouldn't you? That would have been the sensible thing to do. But their love for each other was powerful. That's why it turned into such powerful hatred. Jealousy can do that to a person, you know, when it festers like that, and hers festered for the rest of her life.\"\n\n\"How did both families end up here?\"\n\n\"Elijah was trying to get us as far from Mariah as it was possible to get. Mariah's husband, Richard Warren, had died early in their marriage. He gave her three children, but only Frank survived to adulthood, and she raised him to hate us, too. They followed us here... well, she did. To be fair, Frank didn't know that's what his mother was doing. She was a little crazy by then, she had to be, to come all this way just to finally have it out with Elijah.\"\n\n\"An actual confrontation? How did that turn out?\"\n\n\"As might be expected. They couldn't live together but they died together.\"\n\n\"Indians?\"\n\n\"Goodness, no, the Indians in the area weren't at war with the white man yet. They were mostly friendly or we never would have built here when there was only a fur-trading post nearby.\"\n\n\"Then how did Elijah and Mariah die?\"\n\n\"They shot each other.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "The story of Mariah and Elijah might be old news to Mary Callahan, but it was a fresh tragedy to Tiffany. She had trouble getting the tale out of her head. They shot each other. How could anyone get so angry they'd want to shoot\u2014well, obviously, that happened all the time. Duels, war, gunfights here in the West. But to leave that legacy to your children and their children? How dumb was that? And now she was supposed to pay for her grandmother's lunacy?\n\nShe felt bad now, since it sounded as if her family was ultimately to blame. Or was it? She'd only heard one side of the feud today, the Callahans' side. Yet to hear the other side, she'd have to talk to her father. No thank you. Besides, what else could he add? That Elijah wasn't eloquent enough to make Mariah see reason? Or that Mariah was a little crazy to begin with to keep that fury alive for so many years?\n\nTiffany hadn't expected to like Mary Callahan. She didn't want to disappoint the woman by admitting she couldn't cook and asking for help. She decided to give it a try on her own first. So she spent the rest of the afternoon reading her little cookbook, which didn't take long as thin as it was, and making a list of the ingredients she would need. She went through the pantry thoroughly and discovered the ice cellar next to it. It was packed with large chunks of pond ice and a lot of salted meat. None of the ice was melting yet, with summer only just beginning.\n\nShe couldn't find a few of the ingredients mentioned in the cookbook.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Andrew asked as he came in the back door.\n\nTiffany realized she must have been frowning. She held up the cookbook she was reading. \"Several of these recipes call for eggs and I can't find any in the ice cellar.\"\n\n\"I think I heard some chickens when Jakes was getting me settled in the bunkhouse.\"\n\n\"Really? Let's go find out.\"\n\nThey found the henhouse behind the barn. It held quite a few adult birds, but she didn't see any eggs lying around. There were also dozens of chicks, some perched on the planks where the nests were lined up, others picking at seeds on the ground. She was fascinated. She'd never seen live farm animals before, or dead ones ready for cooking either.\n\n\"Get away from there!\" Jakes barked at her, coming around the corner of the barn with a basket on his arm. \"Those gals belong to me.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to disturb them,\" she assured the trail cook with a smile, while she was thinking, such a grouch!\n\nJakes wore a full beard, brown streaked with gray, but he wasn't that old, maybe in his forties. He was skinny, bandy-legged, short, and obviously cantankerous. But he could probably give her tips on cooking, so she didn't want to get on his bad side.\n\n\"I was just curious about eggs,\" she said.\n\n\"I bring two dozen to the house each day. If you need more, just tell me. But by no means do you ever bother my hens. They don't like strangers. Upsets them. Then they don't produce.\"\n\nThat was fine with her, since she didn't know how to get an egg out of a hen anyway. \"What about cows for milk?\"\n\n\"Two dairy cows are kept in the barn. The hens and Myrtle are mine, the cows ain't, so you're on your own with them.\"\n\nOh, no, she wasn't! \"Andrew?\"\n\n\"Be glad to, ma'am.\"\n\nShe beamed at the boy for reading her mind. He was already earning his keep, but his quick reply made her wonder, \"How are you acquainted with farm animals?\"\n\n\"My oldest sister married a farmer. I got to spend one summer with her in the country before I came West. I liked it. Even thought about taking up farming myself, till I got the notion to find my pa. So here I am instead.\"\n\n\"If you're done admiring my gals, take your jabbering elsewhere,\" Jakes grumbled.\n\nTiffany grit her teeth to keep from berating the fellow for his rudeness. \"Are there any other cooking resources I should know about?\"\n\n\"The lake's got fish, but cattlemen don't fish. If you want any, you'll have to do the fishing yourself like Old Ed did.\"\n\nThat actually sounded interesting. She wouldn't mind visiting that pretty lake again, so she didn't delegate that chore to Andrew yet. But with the ice cellar so well stocked, she didn't need to try fishing right away.\n\nHowever, she did want to make sure she didn't trespass on Jakes's domain, so she said, \"You mentioned Myrtle was yours?\"\n\n\"Her you can meet. Come along, I'll introduce you.\"\n\nShe blushed. She'd misunderstood and thought Myrtle was an animal! Did the man have a wife? If he did, the woman must have the temperament of a saint to put up with him. But it made her wonder if any of the cowboys had wives, too. Were there other houses on the property for employees' families?\n\nJakes wasn't waiting for her to follow him, so she had to hurry to catch up. But he stopped next to the pigsty on the back side of one of the sheds.\n\n\"Myrtle's the sow,\" he said proudly. \"Won her in a poker game. Kept her to dispose of food scraps. Beats the heck out of digging daily holes to bury the stuff so it don't lure in wild animals. Mrs. Callahan figured to make even better use of her and bought her a mate. This new batch of piglets will taste good later this year.\"\n\nNow Tiffany was blushing for thinking Myrtle might be Jakes's wife! The two adult pigs were huge in comparison to the little piglets running about. So Myrtle was a pet... well, maybe not, since Jakes was practically smacking his lips over the thought of eating her young when they were grown. She tried not to feel disgusted at the thought, reminding herself the piglets had been bred to end up on the dinner table\u2014at Mary's suggestion, too! But they looked so cute! One piglet had even squeezed under the lowest plank on the pen fencing and was sniffing at her boots.\n\nShe was not going to think about their being dinner someday and said to Jakes, \"Shouldn't they be better contained?\"\n\n\"They don't wander far, and don't be throwing them no rotten food, neither, just fresh scraps. You can pick him up and set him back inside if you're worried 'bout it.\"\n\nPick up a pig? She stared at him aghast. \"I wasn't worried, and thank you for giving me the information I needed.\"\n\nShe hurried back to the house with Andrew, who was full of surprises. He couldn't cook other than to roast meat over a campfire, but he did know how to grow vegetables. The garden behind the house was already fully planted, but she assigned the task of tending it to him and thought she might ask him to teach her about gardens until she saw him dig his hands into the dirt. She was willing to cook food but not to grow it.\n\nShe was sitting at the table reading when Degan came in the back door of the kitchen and dropped a large sack next to her on the table. \"Start with something simple to go with this,\" he suggested.\n\nThe word FLOUR was stamped on the front of the sack, yet she knew from the delicious aroma what was inside it and gave him a delighted smile. \"You brought bread from the bakery!\"\n\n\"Sorry about the sack, but most people who go to the bakery bring their own baskets. Just dust the extra flour off the loaves.\"\n\nShe was so pleased she actually teased him with a grin. \"You expected my first meal to fail?\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to bet on it. But there's one thing I do know about bread. If you want any, you have to start it the night before you eat it. Maybe you've already learned that from your cookbook.\"\n\nShe shook her head. She hadn't, but she had selected a recipe for a simple meal for that night, chicken soup\u2014she'd just have to substitute beef for chicken\u2014which would go quite well with the bread he'd brought.\n\nHe continued on to the bathing room. \"I'll clean up now before the brothers show up. We'll be heading back to town tonight.\"\n\nShe was surprised. He'd told her today that the cowboys rode to town for hell-raising, but she hadn't expected the Callahans to be included in that group. Maybe they weren't. Maybe just Degan was.\n\nShe asked, \"Who is we?\"\n\nHe paused before closing the door. \"All the men who aren't married. That would include the brothers.\"\n\n\"To raise hell, as you put it? What exactly does that mean?\"\n\n\"Drinking, poker...\" He started to add something else, but finished with merely, \"More drinking. Drunks tend to get in fights, and saloons get busted up. Just ordinary Western fun.\"\n\n\"So you're babysitting again? Keep a better eye on Hunter then. It looked, and sounded, as if those miners wanted to kill him today.\"\n\n\"Sounded?\"\n\n\"They said he'd be carried home. I think they meant dead\u2014as a message for Zachary to give in and give them what they want.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you haven't let your anxiety over what you witnessed spark your imagination?\"\n\n\"You said the miners don't carry guns, but one of them pulled a gun on Hunter. Or maybe he wasn't really a miner, only pretending to be one. That would be one way to get rid of the Callahans, to kill them off one by one in gun challenges.\"\n\n\"An interesting conclusion.\"\n\nShe had a feeling he would have laughed if he ever laughed. But at least she'd stated her concern. \"Will you keep it in mind?\"\n\n\"I keep all possibilities in mind, Miss Fleming. It's my job. But please don't let Hunter hear you call me a babysitter. He already dislikes my tagging along.\"\n\n\"Then why does his father feel it's necessary?\"\n\n\"Because he's actually trying to keep the peace with the Warrens until the wedding. And while Hunter might be a charmer with the ladies, he can get a bit aggressive when it comes to the Warrens. I temper that.\"\n\n\"You hold him back?\"\n\n\"No, my presence stays his hand.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"I was hired to protect the Callahans. He won't start any fights with the Warrens if he thinks I'll draw my gun and start shooting them. He enjoys a good fistfight but he's not out to kill anyone.\"\n\nShe didn't like the sound of that. \"Would you shoot the Warrens?\"\n\n\"Hasn't come to that.\"\n\n\"But would you?\"\n\nHe closed the door instead of answering. She hoped he simply hadn't heard her repeat the question rather than refusing to give a direct answer. Then she got so busy making her soup that she didn't even notice when Degan finished his bath and left the room.\n\nFortunately, she did notice when Hunter showed up for his bath, or else she might have burned herself when he pressed himself against her back as he leaned over her shoulder to sniff what she was stirring. She stiffened her posture in an effort to push him away.\n\n\"Smells like I'll be eating in town tonight,\" he teased.\n\n\"Would you have gotten this close to your previous cook?\" she demanded.\n\n\"I couldn't lean over Old Ed. He was too tall.\"\n\n\"Don't do that again.\"\n\nUnrepentant, he said, \"Don't take away my excuse to do this.\"\n\nThis was his placing a kiss on the side of her neck. Then another, and one more even lower. She gasped and tried to ignore the gooseflesh his kisses were causing but couldn't, since now her skin tingled so deliciously all the way down her back. She closed her eyes, fighting the pleasurable sensations rising inside her that she'd never before felt. It would be so easy to turn around and... oh, God, what? Put her arms around him? Encourage him? Was she insane?! That was no way to deal with a fianc\u00e9 she wanted to get rid of.\n\nInstead, she swung around with her spoon raised like a weapon, but he'd already jumped backward, his grin wide.\n\n\"Besides,\" he added before he disappeared into the bathing room, \"you smell better than what's in the pot!\"\n\nShe didn't smile, but she didn't get angry either. She simply picked up her cookbook and walked out of the kitchen to the porch, where she intended to stay long enough to avoid seeing Hunter when he came out of the bathing room. The incident made her realize she had to do or say something to make him stop treating her in such a cavalier, playful manner. Innocent flirtation or not, not only was it inappropriate for the son of the house to be taking advantage of one of the servants, but he was so charming and handsome that she was beginning to worry he might succeed. Did he even care how many hearts were going to be broken when he married his intended?\n\nHer plan was working better and more quickly than she'd expected. She was finding out what kind of man Hunter was\u2014and not liking it one bit. All signs indicated he would make a lousy husband." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Her first attempt at making dinner, and no one was going to be there to eat it. Tiffany was surprised that she felt disappointed about that\u2014until she actually tasted her soup. It was watery and the meat she'd added was too tough to chew. She almost threw the cookbook away until Andrew suggested she might have missed something in the recipe. She read it again and found the part about letting soup cook all day. A few hours simply wasn't enough.\n\nBut at least she could serve Zachary and Mary, who were staying home for dinner, some of the best bread she'd ever tasted, thanks to Degan. Andrew brought out some canned beans to go with it and carried the large pot of soup down to the ice cellar, where it would keep overnight so she could continue cooking it tomorrow. Thank goodness for Andrew. She would have just thrown the cookbook away if he hadn't suggested she reread the recipe. She mentally patted herself on the back again for hiring the boy. He'd even offered to get the bread started for her tonight after she'd read in the cookbook that you had to let bread dough rise overnight. Degan had been right about that. It was supposed to magically puff up and be ready to bake come morning. She'd believe it when she saw it.\n\nShe went out to the front porch for a break before she finished cleaning up the kitchen. She was so surprised by what she saw that she stood transfixed for a moment. The sky nearly made her gasp. The tree line was far enough back from the house that she had an unobstructed view of bright oranges and reds filling the sky. Now this was something she'd never see in a city of tall buildings.\n\nShe sat down on the long swing that hung from the porch roof. She didn't even think to dust off a spot first before she did. She was going to have to make a habit of coming out to enjoy the sunset each evening\u2014while she was there. She wouldn't be seeing things like this when she went home.\n\nA group of the hired hands rode past the house on the way to town. She didn't see Hunter with them. Another group came around the other side of the house. Degan and Hunter's brothers. He wasn't with them, either, but they had his horse, Patches. They stopped to wait for him, and in unison they tipped their hats her way. Then the door opened next to her and she turned to see Hunter looking at her with his powder-blue eyes.\n\n\"Wait up for me, Red?\"\n\nShe stiffened at the sensual tone he'd just used, a clear indication of what he wanted her to wait up for. More teasing or was he serious this time?\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I promise to make it worth your while.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHe shrugged and was soon riding off with his brothers. She wished she could follow them to see how cowboys truly raised hell, since she was sure Degan had left out a few particulars. No, that wasn't entirely true. She wanted to spy on Hunter. She had no doubt he was heading straight back to Pearl.\n\n\"Am I really supposed to take bread and beans up to Mary for dinner?\"\n\nTiffany winced. She'd forgotten about serving dinner to the owners of the ranch. Zachary was standing in the front doorway. He didn't look disappointed, but he certainly sounded it.\n\n\"Mr. Callahan, I warned you. I know as much about cooking as you do. Actually, you probably know more. I am determined now to learn, but today's effort failed because I didn't read the fine print. I'll prepare a tray\u2014the bread is delicious, by the way\u2014for you and Mrs. Callahan. If I can't do better by the end of next week, I'll fire myself so you won't have to.\"\n\nHis lower lip quirked upward a little. \"I saw the book you left on the table. You'll figure it out.\"\n\nFamous last words, she mumbled as she went to the kitchen, where she served up the Callahans' meager dinner and handed the tray to Zachary.\n\nShe went back to the porch for a few more minutes, enjoying the last of the bright colors on the horizon before they all faded to dusk. But she nearly screamed when she felt something move against the back of her ankle, just above her shoe. Thinking of snakes, she yanked her legs up so fast the swing swayed under her. It took a moment for her to get up the nerve to bend over to look under the seat. Then she laughed when she saw the little, chubby, white body with the flat, pink nose and big ears.\n\n\"So you don't wander far, huh?\" she said aloud, remembering Jakes's earlier remark. \"And I bet you missed your dinner, too. Jakes would have already gotten rid of his slops, and we didn't exactly have any today. Come on, I'll get you a bowl of beans, but you can't have any of that delicious bread when we're going to be eating every last crumb of that.\"\n\nShe was halfway down the hall before she realized the little pig wouldn't have understood a word she'd said to it. She started to turn around, deciding to just take it back to its pen instead, only to hear the patter of little, cloven feet on the hardwood floor behind her. It might not have understood her, but for some reason it still wanted to follow her. Then she realized it was probably tracking dirt into the house and immediately scooped it up in her arms. The pig held itself stiff for a moment before it melted against her. She glanced down and saw that it had even closed its eyes. It looked so content it would probably be purring if it were a cat! It made her laugh again. It had been so long since she'd had anything to laugh about, she was actually grateful to a pig. Even that made her laugh!\n\nHolding the piglet with one arm in case its little feet were dirty, she scooped out the last of the beans onto a plate and set them both just outside the kitchen door. It wasn't a lot of food, but probably enough for such a small animal. She had no idea how old it might be, but it wasn't even a foot long yet. She left the door open to let in a little extra breeze while she finished cleaning up the kitchen, but a few minutes later a strong gust of warm wind blew it shut. She quickly closed the window on that side of the room, too, wondering if a storm was brewing. She hoped the pig would go home.\n\nShe turned away from the window, only to find the animal at her feet again, looking up at her expectantly. She shook her head, scooped it up once more, and walked it back to its pen. It wasn't full dark yet and she could see that most of the piglets were nursing from their mama. She chuckled at herself for thinking the wandering one would go hungry tonight when the sow was still feeding her young.\n\nTiffany didn't stay long to watch. The wind wasn't steady, but from time to time it gusted from the north, strong enough to whip her tied-back hair over her shoulders and play havoc with the hem of her dress. She hurried back to the house. At least the clouds hadn't blown in before sunset." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Tiffany couldn't sleep, even though she was tired. She stood at the open window for a while, which faced the back of the house and all the outbuildings, not that she could see any of them in the darkness other than the bunkhouse, where a lantern was still burning. Her room was uncomfortably warm tonight because, as she'd done in the kitchen, she'd had to close the two windows on the north wall of the bedroom when a gust of wind came in so strong it knocked an old painting off the wall. She was hoping to catch a little breeze at the back window, the only one she'd left open, but the wind was blowing in the other direction.\n\nThe rain hadn't started yet, but thick clouds were racing past the moon, obscuring it. She wouldn't see the men when they returned unless they lit a lamp at the stable, and she doubted that she'd hear them either with the wind howling occasionally. But as late as it was, it didn't look as if they would come back tonight. Women and booze. The booze probably made it unsafe for them to ride home until they sobered up. Or the threatening storm would make them decide to stay inside where it was dry. She could just imagine where Hunter was keeping dry tonight.\n\nHe was the reason she felt so unsettled tonight, and knowing that he'd gone to town to see his paramour. He was probably with Pearl at that very moment. He'd asked her to wait up for him when he was on his way to see another woman!\n\nAnna might be right, that what he did prior to the wedding was irrelevant, yet he was cheating on her right before he was supposed to start courting her! He should be wrapping up his casual affairs instead of trying to start a new one with Jennifer. But was he really doing that? He'd almost kissed her today, yes, but he might consider that nothing to raise a brow over. And he'd obviously just been teasing her with those kisses on her neck in the kitchen. He couldn't know the powerful effect they had had on her.\n\nEven though she didn't care for his behavior, she hoped Hunter could help her defuse the feud without her having to sacrifice herself to do so. His cavalier, seductive behavior and what he'd told her at the unfinished house by the lake actually suggested that he did not want to honor the arranged marriage either. Once she stopped impersonating Jennifer, she needed to discuss that with him without letting her anger get in the way. And why the devil was she even angry at him when he was supplying her with the perfect reason for why she wouldn't marry him. She ought to let him prove it beyond a doubt. He was certainly trying to\u2014if it wasn't all innocent play with him.\n\nShe went back to bed and started counting sheep. She was still tossing and turning a little while later when she heard a voice in the hallway.\n\n\"Jenny, did you wait up?\"\n\nOh my God, Hunter wasn't really knocking on her door in the middle of the night, was he? He had to be seriously intoxicated. She put her pillow over her head until she couldn't hear him anymore. So he didn't spend the night with Pearl? That didn't mean he didn't bed her though. But so much for hearing him ride in or enter the house. That annoying wind was blocking out all other sounds.\n\nBut he was back. She smiled for some reason and suddenly her exhaustion caught up with her. She turned over with a yawn, sure she'd fall asleep now. She didn't. This was ridiculous. She'd never had such trouble sleeping before. Of course, she'd never experienced such an eventful day before, either. Sensual excitement, that jolt of fear when she saw the gun pointed at Hunter, getting so emotional when she saw her brother Sam, hearing Hunter talk resentfully about his fianc\u00e9e\u2014her! And listening to Mary Callahan's version of the tragic story that started the feud and the lies about her father's being excited to see her. All combined, it was much too much.\n\nShe started counting, numbers now instead of sheep, to calm herself. She was only up to ten when she smelled smoke. It had to be Hunter having a cigar before bed. Not very wise of him if he was as drunk as she thought he was. Nor had she known her room was close enough to his for her to smell the smoke wafting from his window to hers.\n\nShe got up to close the last window. It had been pointless leaving it open, with no breeze coming in tonight from the east. She'd have to move to a different room tomorrow. There were still a few empty ones upstairs she could pick from, where Hunter's bedtime habits wouldn't bother her like this.\n\nShe immediately saw the light. It wasn't bright, but it was definitely illuminating the backyard directly below her room. It was coming from the kitchen. So was the smell of smoke. Had someone lit the stove again?\n\nHer first thought was that it had to be Andrew trying to surprise her. He was so grateful for the steady job she'd given him that he felt he had to do more than she was asking of him. He would consider baking the bread tonight so it would be ready for her in the morning, a delightful surprise. Was it that close to dawn already? Not according to the sky it wasn't, and her window did face east so she'd be able to tell, though those thick clouds might extend to that horizon, too. Then she actually saw the smoke billowing past her window, far too much for the stove to account for it.\n\nShe blanched and ran out of the room, screaming, \"Fire!\" She raced along the hall and down the stairs. For a split second, every instinct she had urged her to go out the front door to safety. She resisted. She wasn't even sure if anyone had heard her yell. The fire might not be as bad as the smoke indicated. A simple bucket of water might put it out before it got out of control. If not, she had to go back upstairs to make sure no one was sleeping through this. She nearly cried at the thought.\n\nShe pushed open the hallway door to the kitchen. Its having been closed was the only reason no smoke was in the hall yet. She started coughing as soon as she opened it. The room was so full of acrid smoke her eyes stung.\n\nThe smoke eliminated even the thinnest sliver of moonlight at the window. It was so thick she couldn't tell where the fire was. But she looked toward the stove, where she assumed it would be. On top of the stove she saw flames flickering out of a black pot that hadn't been there when she went to bed. So someone did light up the stove again to cook something, then just left the pot there to catch fire? Who would do something so dangerous and irresponsible? The flame in the pot was rising higher. She prayed it wouldn't reach the wall or the ceiling.\n\nShe ducked into the bathing room and closed the door to keep the smoke out while she filled a bucket with water. She heard someone else in the kitchen before she opened the door again. She headed straight for the stove, glad that someone had brought a lantern so she could see.\n\n\"Hell, don't do that!\" Hunter yelled at her, startling her into dropping the bucket. Water splashed over her feet and halfway up her bare calves.\n\nHe was bent over the cupboard and rose with a lid in hand that he slammed over the pot. The flame simply disappeared under it.\n\nAmazed, she asked, \"How does that put it out?\"\n\n\"Smothers it. Learned that from Jakes out at the range camp after a few trees caught fire when we used water to put out a lard fire. If there's any fat involved, water just splashes the fire around.\"\n\nHe grabbed her arm as he explained that, dragging her out the back door. More smoke followed them out.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Hunter asked as he grasped her chin to examine her face.\n\nShe swatted his hand away. \"My feet are wet.\"\n\n\"Then you're all right.\"\n\nHe glanced back at the kitchen. Most of the smoke had cleared out with the door left open. When he looked back at her, his eyes didn't stay on her face, but traveled slowly down her body. Until that moment, she hadn't realized she was wearing only her underclothes.\n\n\"You could have grabbed a robe,\" he said, his tone suddenly surly.\n\nBlushing, she said defensively, \"I thought the house was burning down!\"\n\nShe noted indignantly that he was a fine one to talk. His shirt was completely unbuttoned, his feet were bare, and without a belt to hold them up his pants were slipping down his hips! But she didn't point that out as he reentered the kitchen. She followed behind him. There wasn't any actual damage, just a lot of soot on the walls and a large puddle of water on the floor, thanks to her. It could have been so much worse.\n\n\"Go back to bed,\" he said as he found a couple of cloths and lifted the hot pot off the stove. After he placed it outside on the flagstone walkway, he said, \"We'll get it cleaned up in the morning.\"\n\nAs she walked slowly to the door to the hallway, it dawned on her that no one else had come to help. \"You're the only one who heard me yell?\"\n\n\"I wasn't asleep yet, and you only yelled once, outside my door, so I doubt my parents heard you at the other end of the hall.\" He'd glanced her way when he'd said that. Again, his eyes stayed on her and moved slowly up and down her body before he added, \"Scream louder next time.\"\n\nMortified that he kept reminding her of her lack of proper attire with the direction of his gaze, she said, \"There better not be a next time. Do I need to put a lock on the kitchen when I leave it?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"No, you just need to make sure the stove top is cold or at least don't leave anything on it, not even the coffeepot.\"\n\nShe was about to say it had been cold and empty when she retired for the night, but she thought of Andrew again. If he had carelessly caused this fire, he would lose his job, so until she found out if he was responsible, she'd rather not mention that the stove had been refueled after she'd gone to bed. It probably had been Andrew, just a careless accident. She'd have to shoulder the blame instead. Apparently, Hunter already thought it was her fault.\n\nHe followed her out to the hall. \"Good thing I came home tonight. If you had used that water, the walls would've caught fire.\"\n\nShe shuddered at the thought, but it also reminded her of those hours she'd spent sleepless tonight\u2014and why. He'd fallen into step beside her. She suddenly leaned a little closer to sniff him for evidence of where he'd been. He wouldn't notice.\n\nHe did! \"What? Do I smell like smoke?\"\n\nTight-lipped, she said, \"I was seeing if you smelled like Pearl.\"\n\nHe burst out laughing. \"Jealous, Jenny? I spent the night playing poker. Won, too.\"\n\nShe wasn't going to dignify that with a response. As she walked away from him a little too quickly, her wet, bare feet nearly slipped on the smooth wooden floor.\n\nHe grabbed her arm to prevent it. \"You need me to carry you upstairs?\"\n\nDetecting concern in his voice, she thought he was serious, so she simply said, \"No.\"\n\n\"Be happy to.\"\n\nThat wasn't serious. The humor was back in his voice. If she glanced back, she knew exactly where she'd find his eyes, too. Where they shouldn't be.\n\n\"No! And get your eyes off me.\"\n\n\"Hell no.\"\n\nHis laughter followed her up the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "The kitchen was filled with Callahans when Tiffany came downstairs the next morning. Andrew was there, too, and he didn't look at all guilty when he met her glance and smiled in greeting. The Callahan brothers and Andrew were washing the soot off the walls while Zachary sat at the table supervising. They were nearly done and were even joshing around. Cole threw a wet rag at John and was laughing as she walked into the room.\n\nHunter noticed her immediately. \"Coffee's hot.\" His light-blue eyes lingered on her, slowly sweeping down the length of her cream morning dress and back up. The grin that followed said clearly that he was remembering her scanty attire from the night before.\n\nShe managed not to blush. It wasn't as if she'd chosen to let him find her in her lacy chemise and drawers.\n\nThe younger men greeted her. Zachary didn't. As he stood up to leave, he put on his wide-brimmed hat that he'd been holding. His nod in her direction was rather curt. \"Accidents happen, but this one could have been very serious. Make sure it doesn't happen again, Miss Fleming.\"\n\nHe blamed her? She waited for someone else to take responsibility, but no one did. Yet she knew the stove had been down to embers behind its iron grate last night, the surface no longer warm to the touch. She knew that since she'd wiped the stove down before retiring. Yet someone had restarted the fire after everyone else had gone to bed.\n\n\"It wasn't me, Mr. Callahan,\" Tiffany said stiffly. \"I wiped down a cold and empty stove before I turned out the lanterns and went up to bed.\"\n\n\"Then who would have been in the kitchen in the middle of the night?\" Zachary asked.\n\nAll the Callahans were suddenly looking at Andrew.\n\nThe boy blanched. \"I didn't, I wouldn't, I love it here! After Miss Fleming and I finished making the bread dough, I spent the evening in the bunkhouse with Mr. Jakes. You can ask him. He called me a new audience. Talked my ears off a good part of the night, he had so many stories to tell. He was still at it when the first of the cowboys wandered in.\"\n\n\"That would have been Billy, who rode back with me,\" Hunter remarked.\n\nZachary said to Andrew, \"His first name is Jakes, and we aren't blaming you, boy. If someone wanted to burn us down, they'd just throw a lit torch through a window. It's summer and we keep most of them open at night. So why bother to make it look like an accident?\"\n\nHe addressed that question to Tiffany, evidently still believing she was responsible.\n\nBut Hunter answered, \"Because whoever set the fire wanted it to look like an accident, not arson. Most of us were in town last night, including the hired hands, so chances were no one would discover there was a fire in a deserted part of the house in time to put it out before it burned out of control. And in case one of us did get to it in time, it could be chalked up to carelessness in the kitchen. And you know who might want to do this without getting blamed for it.\"\n\nTiffany's eyes flared wide. Oh, good grief, they weren't really going to accuse her family of this, were they?\n\nBut John confirmed that they were. \"A Warren,\" he said, looking quite angry.\n\nTiffany groaned to herself, aware that this could get out of hand real quick. \"Have your neighbors ever tried to burn your house down before? In all these years?\"\n\n\"No, they're more straightforward than that,\" Zachary answered. \"And after it rained at dawn, we aren't going to have any tracks to follow. So I'll pay Frank Warren a visit. If he wants the shooting to start again right before the wedding\u2014\"\n\n\"Then there won't be a wedding,\" Hunter finished the thought.\n\n\"Maybe a funeral instead,\" John growled.\n\nTiffany was horrified to see how angry they all looked now, even Zachary. Desperately she offered an alternative: \"It could have been one or both of the two men Hunter fought with yesterday.\"\n\nZachary stared at his son. \"When were you going to get around to mentioning you were in a fight?\"\n\nHunter shrugged. \"It was nothing, just a couple out-of-work miners blaming me for their woes.\"\n\n\"Ah, so you failed to mention it because their woes are my fault, not yours. What happened?\"\n\nHunter simply said, \"They lost.\"\n\nZachary snorted. Tiffany stared in disbelief at Hunter. Really? That was all he was going to say about that altercation? What about the shooter? And no one was taking into consideration her view of who might have set the fire?\n\n\"We're going with you, Pa,\" John said. Hunter and Cole nodded.\n\nZachary looked grim. His eyes moved from Hunter to John, and finally to Cole. \"Okay, boys, let's go.\"\n\nTiffany stared in disbelief as they all filed out the back door. \"Wait! Don't do anything rash. You don't know that the Warrens did this!\"\n\nAll the Callahan men, even Hunter, ignored her and continued to head to the stable. Tiffany leaned back against the counter.\n\n\"I don't know these people, but\u2014but it sounds like they have enemies. Is it safe to work here?\"\n\nTiffany glanced sharply at Andrew. He looked as frightened as he sounded, but she couldn't blame him after he'd heard the Callahans angrily talking about getting justice. And how could she reassure Andrew when she couldn't reassure herself?\n\nShe still tried. \"They'll probably have one of their men stand guard now just to make sure no one is sneaking around late at night.\" If they didn't, she'd suggest it herself\u2014if anyone came back alive today...\n\nShe blanched with that thought, but the boy had turned so he didn't see it. \"I'll fetch the soup pot from the cellar to get it simmering again.\"\n\nSuch an ordinary thing to do when she was so frantic with worry for her family that she couldn't think straight. Was there no way to stop the Callahans?\n\nShe suddenly heard the sound of horses galloping past the kitchen. She ran down the hall to the front porch to see four men with rifles riding away. She sat down on the porch swing and put her head in her hands. \"I hate this damn feud!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Rose's expression was bleak as her coach moved along the streets of Chicago. She felt the same way she'd felt the first time she had gone to the grand mansion fourteen years ago. Nervous, afraid, desperate. She didn't have much hope that she would succeed this time when she had failed so miserably before.\n\nThe hatred this man harbored was crazy. Every time she had gone to his home over the years to try to make Parker see reason, she'd been turned away. He refused to hear her pleas a second time. He refused to give her back her life. She had hoped time would make this go away, but it never did. The threat still hung over Frank's head\u2014and hers. God, wasn't fifteen years long enough for the bastard to savor his twisted revenge?\n\nShe was still the only one who knew. That had been Parker's stipulation for letting her husband live. Frank could never be told the real reason she'd left him. She guessed that Parker had hoped Frank would die of a broken heart\u2014history repeating itself. But Frank was too strong for that.\n\nEvery time she came here, she ended up reliving Parker's first act of vengeance and how Franklin almost died because of it. She'd blamed herself for so long, but was it really her fault?\n\nShe'd raced to Nashart to get the doctor herself that night. She'd screamed at him to hurry. She was in shock. Frank's wound had looked so serious. The doctor ran to get his horse at the stable. Before she could remount hers, she was stopped and dragged to the side of the house, a hand over her mouth. The man didn't take her far, just into the shadows. She didn't recognize his voice. She never saw his face.\n\n\"This was a warning,\" he told her. \"Leave your husband or he dies.\"\n\nShe didn't understand. She'd thought one of the Callahans had shot Frank. Everyone was going to assume that. But what the man had just said had nothing to do with that damn feud.\n\n\"You're not a Callahan?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then what do you have against my husband?\"\n\n\"Nothing personally. I work for Parker\u2014\"\n\n\"My old neighbor from New York?\" she interrupted incredulously. But she realized that was a crazy conclusion on her part even as she said it.\n\nOnly it wasn't. \"I see you understand.\"\n\n\"No, I don't. I was engaged to his son Mark!\"\n\n\"An engagement you should have honored instead of breaking. The boy is dead\u2014because of you. His father wants revenge.\"\n\n\"That makes no sense. I broke that engagement five years ago. If Mark just died, I'm sorry, but how could his father possibly blame me for that?\"\n\n\"You don't know?\"\n\n\"Know what? I haven't seen that family for years. I know they sold their house and left New York not long after I married Franklin, but I don't know where they moved and I never saw Mark again after I told him I couldn't marry him.\"\n\n\"Parker moved his family to another state because he thought it would help his son get over you. It didn't. The boy turned to drink to forget you, then recklessness when that didn't work. He finally killed himself. The note said he couldn't bear the heartache anymore. Parker sent me to kill your husband. He's in a grief-stricken rage.\"\n\nIf she wasn't already horrified, that last statement tipped the scale. \"You said it was a warning! Now you're saying you were paid to kill him?!\"\n\n\"Not paid. I've worked for Parker for years. He did everything he could think of to pull Mark out of the despair you left him in. So did I, for that matter. Nothing worked. And now he's dead. But I'm not a cold-blooded killer. Neither is Parker\u2014usually. Wanting to kill the man who stole you from his son was his first reaction, but I managed to talk him into a less bloody revenge.\"\n\nShe struggled in that moment, rage finding her. \"You call what you did tonight less bloody!?\"\n\nHe swung her around. The gun that had been pressed deeply into her back to keep her from screaming was now pressed to her belly. She still couldn't see his face in the shadows, not that it mattered when it sounded as if he was just Parker's lackey.\n\n\"Would you rather he be dead?\" he hissed at her. \"Make no mistake, Parker didn't get where he is today without having a ruthless streak, and he blames you and your husband for his loss. He will have revenge. I couldn't dissuade him from it. It's just a very simple one now. If Mark couldn't have you, no man will. So are you willing to save your husband's life?\"\n\n\"By leaving him?\" She started crying. \"Please don't ask me to do this.\"\n\n\"Someone has to pay, Mrs. Warren, by death or despair. The choice is yours.\"\n\nShe couldn't stop crying, but it got even worse. \"There is one stipulation,\" the man added.\n\n\"This isn't enough?!\"\n\n\"No, the pain of your desertion has to cut deep. So you can't tell your husband the real reason you're leaving him.\"\n\n\"Then I'll need a little time. If I go while he's recovering from that wound, he'll never believe it's what I want.\"\n\n\"Three weeks, not a day more.\"\n\nShe'd hoped in that time she could find some way out of that nefarious bargain, but she didn't. Every time she saw Frank favor his side where he'd been shot, she was reminded that his life was in her hands. She left. She didn't have a choice. But at least she'd taken a part of Frank with her, their little daughter, and she'd protected her sons before she snuck off, arranging that truce with their neighbors. She would have gone insane with worry if she still had to worry about the Callahans, too.\n\nRose stared out the coach window. Such an interesting city, one she could have enjoyed if she didn't hate it so much because her tormentor lived here. And her view was blurred. Tears again. Every single time the memories surfaced, she cried.\n\nIt had taken her nearly a year to find out where Parker had moved. He had so many interests and businesses across the country and was constantly traveling between them. She wasn't surprised he'd picked a more central location in Chicago. And she was going to kill him. She'd thought about it long and hard. He was causing too much pain and suffering. He wasn't the only one who could enact revenge.\n\nShe hadn't been sure he'd even see her when she'd called on him. A butler had shown her to his study. He was sitting behind his desk, his arms crossed. His short, brown hair was starting to gray, but that was to be expected of a man in his late forties. Rose was disappointed to see that he still looked quite robust. If he was sickly, she might have considered waiting for him to die naturally. But she wanted her husband back! She wanted her family to be whole again.\n\nHe didn't offer her a chair. \"Still calling yourself Mrs. Warren?\"\n\n\"I haven't divorced him.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. Him, some other man\u2014you do understand you're to have none? Ever.\"\n\n\"You've had your revenge. Let it go.\"\n\n\"I'm curious,\" he said. \"Did you really never tell him the truth?\"\n\n\"No, I protected him with lies. He was devastated!\"\n\n\"You say that with such anger when all of this points to you.\"\n\n\"You're insane to blame me for your son's weakness.\"\n\n\"You dare! He loved you! He'd always loved you! You gave him hope, then ripped it away.\"\n\n\"Mark and I were childhood friends, nothing more. I shouldn't have let him talk me into marrying him. I had doubts from the start, but he was so sure we'd be happy, I didn't have the heart to turn him down. I did care about him, I didn't want to hurt him. Finding real love showed me the difference. Mark even agreed with my decision to end our engagement!\"\n\n\"No, he didn't, he only pretended to. It was a lie! He never stopped loving you, and that love destroyed him. So how do you think it isn't your fault, when you did say you'd marry him and then dropped him for another man?\"\n\n\"I think I've suffered enough. This has to end. Now.\"\n\nShe pulled the pistol from her pocket and pointed it at him. She didn't get the reaction she'd hoped for. He actually laughed at her.\n\n\"Go ahead. My life lost all meaning when my only child died. But my death doesn't end this for you, Rose Warren. The men I pay to follow you now will continue to follow you after I'm gone. It's in my will. And the very day you try to live with your husband again, or take another, is the day your line ends, just as you ended mine.\"\n\nOh, God, it was worse than she'd thought. She'd hoped that his death would be the end of it.\n\nNonetheless, over the years, she'd still tried to make him see reason. She'd come back here so many times, but all uselessly. She'd never been let back into the house again. He'd only agreed to see her that one time to ascertain for himself whether his vengeance was successful.\n\nAs the coach drew up to the Harding mansion, Rose steeled herself for disappointment. She had to try again to convince Parker to give up his vengeful bargain. She would keep trying until the day she or Parker Harding died. As she stepped down to the street, she saw that she was still being followed..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Tiffany somehow managed to bake bread that morning and make lunch for the household when most of the household wasn't there to eat it. She barely remembered doing anything she was so preoccupied and worried about what was happening between the Callahans and her family. The men hadn't yet returned, or maybe they had and were out on the range. She was dying to know what had happened. Were her brothers all right? Had anyone been wounded? She wished she could ride over to her father's ranch and find out. But all she could do was hope that no one would shoot before any questions could be asked.\n\nAs if she weren't already fretting enough, she nearly had a crisis with the upstairs maid that afternoon. She had merely wanted to make sure Luella was doing her job properly, but the moment Tiffany mentioned changing the bedding daily, Luella threw up her hands. \"I quit!\"\n\n\"Wait!\" Tiffany quickly followed the maid out of the bedroom she had been cleaning. \"Why?\"\n\nLuella swung around. Short, chubby, possibly twice Tiffany's age, the woman was bristling. \"It already takes a full day to wash all the bedding from up here. A full day! Then I have clothes to wash, too. All these rooms to clean, beds to make, and Mrs. Callahan to see to. You will not give me even more to do!\"\n\nGood grief, that was three separate jobs the woman had just described. Tiffany had never heard of one servant doing two of them, much less three!\n\nAppalled, Tiffany said sympathetically, \"I quite agree. I had no idea.\"\n\nYet she should have. She'd already seen that servants were far too scarce in the territory. She wouldn't be in this house enacting this charade if they weren't.\n\nBut her response had the maid giving her a suspicious look now. \"My sister told me about you housekeepers. She said you just stand around cracking whips all day, and you even get paid for it.\"\n\nTiffany had to bite back the urge to laugh. \"That's not true, really it isn't. But as you may have heard, without a large staff to manage here, I've been given other tasks myself, same as you.\"\n\nBut she was suddenly reminded that she was going to have extra time on her hands, now that she had a kitchen helper. Aside from an occasional ride, she had thought she might try fishing for the family's dinner, so she could provide something other than beef and more beef. Cowboys might not expect anything other than that meat since it was what their jobs were all about, but she did. Yet riding and fishing wouldn't be daily outings.\n\nImpulsively, she offered some of that extra time to this overburdened woman. She couldn't dust, not when the slightest stirring of it made her sneeze, but how hard would it be to make up some of the beds, straighten up some of the rooms, even help carry the dirty laundry to the washing shed? She said as much. And left the maid incredulous.\n\nLuella admitted, \"Pearl does share half the wash load\u2014when she's here,\" but then she added in disgust, \"and when she's not cleaning her nails instead of getting them dirty.\"\n\nA bit of rivalry there? Tiffany wondered. Or had she just been warned to expect some trouble from the downstairs maid when she returned to work?\n\n\"For now, I'll finish the room you were in,\" Tiffany offered. \"And in the morning, I can make the beds on this side of the stairs.\"\n\nLuella gave her a brilliant smile. \"Hunter was due fresh sheets. I brought them. I really appreciate this, Miss Fleming.\"\n\nHunter's room? But Luella had already hurried off before Tiffany could take back her offer. She made a face. Going into his bedroom probably wasn't a good idea. But as long as he wasn't in it, what harm could come from it?\n\nIt was a masculine room. A rack of rifles hung on one wall. The three paintings on the other walls each depicted a Western scene\u2014a herd of cows, a cowboy trying to ride a bull, a group of cowboys sitting around a campfire. An ornately carved wood chest, quite lovely, was at the foot of the large bed. With the clean bedding left on top of it, she guessed it contained more bedding and peeked inside. She was wrong. It was filled with cowboy gear, ropes, chaps, spurs, some extra long-barreled guns, another gun holster much more fancy looking than the plain one Hunter usually wore.\n\nTwo wide-brimmed hats were hung on pegs next to a dark-wood wardrobe, one black, one cream colored. She resisted opening the wardrobe. A brown stuffed chair sat with its back to one of the two windows, faded, worn in the seat; it looked entirely too comfortable. She pictured Hunter sitting in it reading and eventually nodding off. Had he taken naps in it? Had this always been his room? If it was, no evidence of his childhood was left in it.\n\nShe recognized the two medium-size crates stacked in a corner as the ones John and Cole had picked up at the train station the day she'd arrived. So it was something Hunter had ordered shipped in? Then why hadn't he opened the crates yet? But she'd snooped enough, too much. She shouldn't be so curious about the man.\n\nLuella had already stripped the bed and tucked in the bottom sheet. Tiffany grabbed the folded top sheet. A lovely knitted coverlet in dark browns and blues, thin for summer, was to go on last. She wondered if Mary had made it and decided to ask her when she saw her next.\n\nShe was opening the top sheet and letting it flutter across the bed when she heard Hunter remark, \"I'd wondered where you'd gone off to. Never expected to find you waiting for me in my room.\"\n\nTiffany jumped. He'd startled her enough that she'd let go of the sheet. It floated across the bed and landed on the floor on the other side. It should have been obvious what she was doing there, so he was just being him with a remark like that. She glanced behind her to tell him that her being there had nothing to do with him. She gasped instead and looked away immediately. He was standing in the doorway wearing nothing but a towel!\n\n\"Good God, why aren't you dressed!?\"\n\n\"Got knocked on my ass and I was a little too muddy to wait for a bath. That rain came down hard this morning. It will take a few days to dry up.\"\n\nShe hadn't been outside to notice\u2014did he get muddy fighting with her brothers? \"What happened when you went to the Warrens' ranch?\"\n\n\"Don't know. We ran into Degan coming home from town while we were riding over there. Pa decided to just take the guard dog with him and sent the rest of us back to check on the herd. If the Warrens are on the offensive, rustling would be another kind of attack.\"\n\n\"Are you missing any cattle?\"\n\n\"Doesn't look like it. We'll have to wait until dinnertime to learn what Pa found out today. If you didn't start that fire, and a Warren didn't, that just leaves our new neighbors to the east.\"\n\n\"Once again, we are in complete agreement. I am becoming quite amazed by it.\"\n\n\"Surprise and sarcasm in the same breath, Red?\" He chuckled, but then asked curiously, \"When was the first time you agreed with me?\"\n\nWhy did it sound as if his voice was getting closer to her? Nervously she said, \"Never mind that, I'd like to know why you didn't say that to your father this morning? After everything I've heard about the miners, and what I witnessed yesterday for myself, they were certainly my first guess, not my second. It's not just the owner of that mine who would benefit from driving your family off, but every miner who works there. Doesn't your father know that?\"\n\n\"He knows, but we got a judge involved who made a ruling. They have to clear out as soon as that lesser vein is gone, which won't be long now. So while they might be angry enough to start something, they don't stand to gain from it.\"\n\n\"Anger was enough to drive your family over to the Warren ranch this morning, wasn't it?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Point made.\"\n\n\"There are a lot of variables to consider. Which is why you might want to post a watch here at night.\"\n\n\"Intended to,\" he said. \"But no need for you to get worried about it.\"\n\nAfter the worry she'd gone through today, that statement just annoyed the heck out of her. \"Don't be obtuse. I work here. So what happens here does affect me.\"\n\n\"But I told you I wouldn't let anything happen to you. Did you think I didn't mean it?\"\n\n\"What I think is you concern yourself too much with me. I'm not yours to protect, Hunter.\"\n\n\"Do you want to be?\"\n\nHe said it so softly she wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly. But she finally remembered why she was keeping her eyes off him and got even more red-faced, mortified that she was still in a room with a half-naked man! She should have bolted out of there immediately. She should have waited until he'd put on some clothes to ask her questions. He must think by now that she didn't mind his undress.\n\nBelatedly she said, \"I'll only be a few minutes if you can wait.\"\n\n\"Wait for what?\"\n\n\"Wait outside for me to finish.\"\n\n\"You've got some really silly notions, Red. It's my room. I need my clothes.\"\n\nShe turned to say, \"Then I'll come back later to\u2014\"\n\nShe didn't get to finish, couldn't. He was standing right in front of her now, so close she might have collided if instinct hadn't made her back up instead. Too quickly. The bed was in the way and her balance deserted her. She fell back.\n\nA slow grin turned his lips. \"When you put it like that...\"\n\nHer hands shot up to keep him from leaning in close, which he started to do. Such a paltry defense and it didn't stop him. He merely leaned slowly into her hands. When she realized it might appear to him that she was caressing his chest, she yanked her hands back as if burned. That's when he got really close.\n\n\"I know kissing you is a bad idea. I'm probably going to regret it till the day I die, because I'll never forget it. What about you?\"\n\nWords wouldn't come out of her mouth. A gasp did when his lips actually touched hers. She turned her head to the side, she couldn't let this happen! Across her cheek, his lips followed her. A tingling sensation spread along her neck, down her shoulders. Her heart started to pound.\n\n\"Hunter...\"\n\n\"When you whisper my name, it ties me in knots. How do you do that, Jenny?\"\n\nHis breath was hot on her cheek. He put a hand under her head to guide her mouth back to his. It was such a gentle kiss, yet what it did to her was anything but gentle\u2014more like a maelstrom bursting inside her. She felt it in places that were nowhere near her mouth! She felt urges that were not in her nature! She wanted to put her arms around his neck and pull him in even closer. That's when she knew she was in trouble.\n\n\"I'm going to smack you if you don't let me up!\"\n\nHunter rolled off her with a sigh. \"I thought I left the cold water downstairs.\"\n\nShe didn't answer him. Keeping her eyes closed until she was off the bed, she did what she should have done sooner and bolted straight out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "She was furious when she returned to the kitchen. She banged more than one door, including the oven door when she shoved the bread in for dinner. This might be Hunter's house, he might be used to walking around in it like that after a bath, but, good grief, she wasn't! The kitchen was run by a woman now, not Old Ed, who wouldn't blink an eye over such a display. She was going to have to insist on some house rules. Leaving that bathing room in just a towel had better never happen again. Kissing her better never happen again. Oh, God, that's what she was really angry about. She'd let him get to her. She hadn't ended it instantly as she should have. And she knew he would have let her. It was all a game for him, the teasing, the risqu\u00e9 remarks, even the playful kissing.\n\nShe was suspicious, too, of his excuse for that scandalous display of bare skin. The man probably wanted to show off his muscles to her. Hadn't he mentioned wondering where she was at? Because he'd expected her to be in the kitchen to ogle him! Did he think she'd fly into his arms, unable to resist his amazing physique, if she saw him half-naked?\n\nNo mud was on the kitchen floor to support his claim that he'd gotten muddy. She glanced in the bathroom. Very well, the pile of clothes he'd left on the floor looked muddy. No boots though. Was he actually thoughtful enough to take them off outside so he wouldn't track mud on her floor? She peeked outside, then opened the back door wider. His muddy boots were there. So was the little piglet, who was currently rolling all over the boots and seemed to be in ecstasy. At least someone around here was happy.\n\nTiffany rolled her eyes and, without really thinking about it, picked up the pig, held it as far away from her as she could, and carried it inside to set it in the sink. It squealed when she pumped water over it, but quieted when she rubbed the mud off him.\n\n\"Like petting, do you? We are not making a habit of this,\" she warned.\n\nShe dried it off with a kitchen towel, then set it back outside and pushed his rump in the direction of the pigpen. Once again the little animal had lightened her mood. All the anger was gone\u2014for now. But it would probably return if she clapped eyes on Hunter again today.\n\nIt didn't. And he was already in the room. She didn't know how long he'd been standing by the other door watching her, but it was long enough for him to have seen her carrying the pig outside.\n\n\"Dinner visits us now?\" he asked with a chuckle.\n\n\"Don't even think it.\"\n\nHis brow shot up. \"Don't tell me you've made friends with a pig?\"\n\nThe notion was absurd, yet her chin rose defiantly. \"Of course not, but what if I did?\"\n\n\"You're about as standoffish as it gets, Red, all Eastern prim and proper, so making a pet out of an animal that's going to get big, really really big, more'n six hundred pounds big, it just...\"\n\nWhat it did was make him laugh so hard he couldn't even finish. It was almost contagious, so she couldn't quite manage to get annoyed over his assessment. The man truly enjoyed life and could find humor in the smallest things. But she'd looked at him too long. The image of his wide, bare chest came back into her mind somehow. She lowered her eyes, remembering it\u2014and what had come after it. Her heart beat a little faster.\n\nShe hurried to the stove and picked up a large spoon to start stirring the soup vigorously, so vigorously the soup was sloshing out of the pot. Laughter gone, he was suddenly standing next to her, but just to pour himself a cup of coffee. Yet he didn't walk away with it after he set the coffeepot back on the stove.\n\nShe kept her eyes off him, but could feel his on her. Was he always going to make her this nervous? Was it even nervousness he made her feel? Whatever it was, it was disturbing. Maybe talking would take her mind off the image of his naked chest.\n\n\"How did you get so muddy?\"\n\n\"One of our older hands, Caleb, caught a wild mustang near his place. He wasn't part of your broom-pushing crew, so you haven't met him yet. We don't have many married cowboys working here, but we built a few houses on the north end of the property for the ones that get hitched and still want to stay on with us. Caleb is one of them. He's expecting his second kid anytime now. Anyway, he brought the mustang in today and I had a go at breaking it in. Could have picked a better day for it. Knew I'd get tossed off him a few times before he gave up the fight.\"\n\n\"So why didn't you wait?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Because I'm still trying to break Sam Warren's record.\"\n\nShe went still at the mention of her brother and asked carefully, \"What record would that be?\"\n\n\"Sam challenged me to a horse-breaking contest a couple years ago in town. He brought in a string of six wild ones he'd caught. Even suggested the sheriff do the timing, since we wouldn't trust anyone in either family to be impartial about it.\"\n\n\"Timing of what?\"\n\n\"How long it took us to break one of them. Best two out of three would win. We never got to the tie point. He beat me in half the time on the first two. I should've known I was being set up to lose since he claimed to have caught all six of them. I found out later he's been breaking wild ones for years. Does it just for fun, so he's damn good at it.\"\n\nShe actually recalled Sam's telling her about that unusual hobby of his. He tracked wild herds. The challenge he enjoyed so much was catching one of the mares without alerting the stallion that guarded them. He also rescued new mustangs before the herd stallion got aggressive enough to fight them or run them off.\n\nBut what Hunter had just described Sam as doing sounded so much like what Zachary was doing in depriving Franklin of his housekeeper. A prank. So both sides enjoyed pranks? That didn't sound like a killing feud to her. It made her wonder if the feud might have petered out on its own if the approaching marriage hadn't riled up her brothers. Had it just simmered down to distrust, name-calling, and pranks until this year? Was the very thing that had brought about the truce all those years ago going to be its downfall? But she was forgetting the water under contention, the damn water they didn't want to share. And how angry the Callahans had been this morning when they rode off to confront her family. No, it wasn't over, and it wasn't harmless.\n\n\"If you do manage to beat his record, do you intend to challenge him again?\"\n\n\"Depends how this year plays out. I could be challenging him in other ways instead.\"\n\nTiffany blanched, seeing him put his hand on his gun as he said that. A shoot-out? With her brother!?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "\"Worried about me, Red? Don't be. You saw for yourself I'm handy with my fists. Sam might be nearly as tall as me and fast, but it'll only take one good punch to knock him out, as skinny as he is.\"\n\nColor flew back into Tiffany's cheeks. Fists, not guns. She should have remembered she'd seen Hunter rest his hand on his gun before, so it was probably just habit for him to do that. Now she was embarrassed because he'd seen her look so horrified and he had assumed it was on his account. She could at least correct that impression.\n\n\"I wasn't worried. I just don't like violence of any sort.\" Then she snapped, \"If you aren't going to marry Sam Warren's sister, you should let his father know it.\"\n\nHe gave her a long, sweeping look that ended with a slow grin. \"Yeah, I probably should.\"\n\nOh, God, he'd do it for the wrong reason, because he was attracted to her! That wasn't going to end the feud, it would just end the truce!\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said quickly. \"I have no business making suggestions like that. And logically, you should make peace with the Warrens before you do something that rash.\"\n\nHe snorted. \"That ain't going to happen. But you were right, this isn't your business, so why are we even discussing it?\"\n\nShe stiffened. \"I agree. We should be discussing your lack of decorum instead. Perhaps some pegs are needed in the bathroom so you men can hang your robes there?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"I don't own one.\"\n\n\"Then buy one.\"\n\n\"And we're supposed to change our habits why?\"\n\nWas she being unreasonable in making such a simple request? Oh, God, she was because once again she was reacting like Tiffany, not Jennifer. Jennifer would never ask her employers to change their ways!\n\nShe was forced to compromise. \"I will simply go outside when you men bathe and stay outside until you're done.\"\n\n\"Why is this a problem for you?\"\n\n\"Are you joking? It's beyond inappropriate, it's scandalous for you to parade yourself naked in\u2014\"\n\n\"I wasn't naked. You're complaining about a bare chest? When a man doesn't think twice about taking his shirt off on a hot day?\"\n\n\"Where I come from\u2014\"\n\n\"Isn't here. It was the kiss, wasn't it? That's what's got you riled up. Got you thinking you've been unfaithful to your far-off beau? Or maybe you've figured out you made a bad choice there and should be thinking about new choices\u2014here?\"\n\nShe wasn't going to dignify that with an answer, but she had a feeling it was all just teasing when he changed his tack and sniffed the air over the stove before he added, \"Do I need to eat in town again?\"\n\n\"It's not done yet,\" she lied in a grumbling tone.\n\nHunter turned to leave. Finally.\n\nHis crack about eating elsewhere hurt though. The soup had thickened and she'd had high hopes for it, until now. Why would he suggest it wasn't edible? She'd been afraid to actually taste it yet, but she sniffed it now as he'd done. Then sighed. It had no aroma. That's why he'd said that.\n\nThe recipe called for two spices, but since she knew absolutely nothing about spices, she'd thought she'd play it safe by not adding them. She decided now to try adding one, so she tossed in a handful. Steeling herself, she tasted the soup and bit into something that made her eyes water. It was too spicy now, spicy hot! She lost track of the time as she picked out all of the peppercorns she'd added.\n\nCole showed up at the door to point out the hour had gotten late. \"Dinner's not ready yet?\"\n\nThe bread! She'd forgotten it was in the oven. Afraid to look, she squinted as she opened the oven door, then sighed in relief. The bread looked fine. The crust was a little darker than she would have liked, but otherwise it was fine. She took out the six loaves and put three in a basket to take to the dining room, along with a crock of butter.\n\nThe men were sitting there waiting, all five of them, Hunter and his brothers, Zachary, even Degan. She'd already set the table with soup bowls. She slowed her step though when she heard the topic they were discussing.\n\n\"And you believed Frank?\" John was asking his father.\n\n\"I did. Told you, it ain't their style.\"\n\n\"So what'd he say when you told him we have Miss Fleming working for us?\" Cole asked, his eyes on Tiffany. He was grinning. His brothers were, too. They were all enjoying this prank they were playing on her father... with her help.\n\nBut Zachary surprised them all with his answer. \"Decided to wait. I could almost see him squirming when I asked how his new housekeeper is working out. Had a hell of a time not laughing when he mumbled that she hadn't got here yet. I was about to tell him why when he said his daughter's arrival is going to be delayed. He didn't even try to hide how disappointed he is. Almost had me feeling sorry for him. Seems she sprained her ankle on the trip from New York City and will be staying in Chicago to recover.\"\n\nTiffany couldn't help looking down at her ankle and wiggling it. But Zachary wasn't finished. \"But that delay could give Frank time to bring in a new housekeeper before his daughter gets here, and he might try that if I tell him too soon that we got the first one here. So I need to time my confession closer to when his daughter is expected.\"\n\nTiffany was surprised that she felt a little guilty about deceiving everyone until John snidely remarked, \"The daughter seems a might delicate if a simple sprained ankle put the brakes on her getting here.\"\n\nThat annoyed Tiffany. She got even more annoyed when Hunter said, \"Any delay suits me just fine, but what do you expect from an Eastern lady? A pinprick would probably make her swoon.\"\n\nShe stared at him incredulously. He didn't notice because Zachary held his attention, telling him, \"Be nice, Son. Frank says she's looking forward to meeting you. Bringing a fancy wedding dress with her, too. I'm afraid to mention that to your ma. She's gonna get all upset that you haven't got yourself a fancy suit yet for the wedding.\"\n\nTiffany nearly slammed the basket of bread down, she was so angry now. Her father was lying about her? Rose would never have told him that she was looking forward to meeting Hunter when it was anything but true. How dare he lie about her! She did have a wedding dress. She'd wanted nothing to do with it, but Rose had had it made for her anyway. She'd refused to bring it with her and had told Anna not to pack it. Too bad. If she'd brought it, the outlaws would have it now. She turned to go back to the kitchen to get the soup pot with the ladle in it so they could serve themselves. They'd be lucky if she didn't pour it on them instead.\n\nSomeone yelled, \"Hey,\" at her before she left the room. She turned to see John holding up one of the loaves to show her it was solid black underneath. Hunter was chuckling as he pounded his knuckles on another loaf. It sounded as hard as rock.\n\nShe glared accusingly at Zachary. \"I warned you I wasn't a cook!\"\n\n\"You're a woman, all women can cook,\" he said matter-of-factly. \"You're just nervous. It's understandable. You'll do better with the next meal.\"\n\nShe sputtered. This was the next meal. Somehow she didn't cry, but now misery was mixed in with her anger. She hurried back to the kitchen to get the soup. The pot was so heavy she almost dropped it before she got it to the dining table. Hunter was still grinning at her. Was he amused at her failure? That's when she turned her anger on herself for even thinking she could master cooking. She had no skills, no work experience. All she'd been raised to do was to dress fashionably, converse properly with people of her own social class, and conduct herself as a lady. Feeling frustrated and defeated, she picked up one of the loaves of bread and hit it hard on the edge of the table. It took three more tries before the loaf finally cracked. Then she tore out chunks of the soft bread inside the rock-hard crust and tossed them into the soup pot.\n\n\"We get the idea,\" Cole said. \"Don't drown it all. Leave some for us to dip in butter.\"\n\n\"Don't be discouraged,\" Degan offered. \"Keep reading that cookbook. You'll figure it out.\"\n\nHe might as well have added, \"Because you're a woman.\" She had no doubt he was thinking it. But what sort of logic was that!? All she'd figured out was that getting angry and eschewing table manners had enabled her to salvage some of the bread!\n\nAs she turned to go back into the kitchen, Zachary asked, \"This is just the first course, right? What else are you serving us tonight?\"\n\nFirst course? That's when she cried." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Tiffany's soup turned out not to be so bad after all. It didn't have much flavor, but it was definitely filling. And Hunter, Cole, and Degan had second helpings. So it wasn't anger or disappointment that was keeping her awake tonight. She simply couldn't get out of her mind that image of Hunter standing in his room wearing just a towel around his hips. She hit her pillow and shook her head, trying to rid her mind of him. But there he was, hair wet, chest damp, long legs and bare feet, and that broad, muscular chest.\n\nHe was the most attractive man she'd ever met, and she got these strange flutterings in her stomach and felt a little nervous\u2014no, not nervous really, just more aware of everything when he was around. He would never know that, not if she could help it. But, good grief, when he was smiling, which was usually the case, he was too handsome, far too handsome. She didn't want to feel this attracted to him, but she couldn't figure out how to change her feelings. But it wasn't changing her mind. She still wasn't going to marry him. Be stuck here with gunfights, outlaws, too much dust to tolerate, and no servants to hire? And never seeing her mother again? No!\n\nBesides, Hunter wouldn't like her when he found out who she really was, saw how she really behaved and lived her life. She'd heard him and his brothers' scorn when they'd talked about Tiffany Warren at the dinner table. Hunter liked more down-to-earth working women such as Pearl and Jennifer. It was too bad she couldn't just enjoy her time here and really be more like Jennifer. Would Miss Fleming be able to resist Hunter's attractiveness? Would she even want to? The real housekeeper probably wouldn't have turned away from him today when he showed up wearing only a towel around his hips. She probably wouldn't have run from his kisses, either, not when they made her feel so...\n\nOh, God, her thoughts were going down a dangerous path. She brought them back under control by picturing cows jumping over a fence and counting them, which eventually put her to sleep. But not for long. Sometime later a noise woke her. No, it wasn't a noise, it was a voice quietly whispering, and right next to her bed!\n\n\"Miss Fleming, I'm here to help you. Miss Fleming, please wake up!\"\n\nShe would probably have screamed immediately if sleep hadn't been clogging her mind. Someone was kneeling beside her bed. The offer of help made her think there was another fire and one of the Callahans was trying to get her out of the house. Then why was he whispering?\n\n\"What's wrong? Who are you?\" she asked warily, trying to make out the man's features in the darkness.\n\n\"Sam Warren, ma'am.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath. Oh, God, her oldest brother here in her room? He shouldn't be here! How had he found out? She wanted to hug him but she couldn't! He'd called her Miss Fleming so he didn't know it was her, his sister.\n\n\"I finally figured it out,\" Sam said. \"That it had to be you I saw at Sally's place. I only saw you from behind, but it was your dress that got me thinking. No one wears clothes like that around here. And it looked like you were being coerced out of the restaurant. This is just like the Callahans, to pull a stunt like this. But I'm here to help you.\"\n\nEvery word out of his mouth just made her want to hug him even more. Sam to the rescue. That was so sweet of him. And lying now, to make him go away, was probably going to make her cry.\n\n\"Are they keeping you prisoner here? With the downstairs doors locked, I was afraid your room might be locked, too, but I guess they figured that guard circling the house is enough to make sure you don't leave.\"\n\n\"That guard is there because someone set a fire here last night.\"\n\n\"I heard about that, but I swear my family didn't set it.\"\n\n\"How did you get past the guard?\"\n\nShe imagined he was grinning, he sounded so proud when he said, \"I'm fast. Left my horse off by some trees and snuck my way closer, then dashed for the back door only to find it locked. But with the guard at the other side of the house I made it to the front to climb up to the porch roof. The windows above it are wide-open, including the one at the end of your corridor. 'Sides, it's good and dark tonight, dark enough that the guard's patrolling with a lantern so he's easy to see.\"\n\n\"But if they find you here, they'll think your family set that fire and you're here to try it again.\"\n\n\"No, they won't. My pa already told Zachary he was full of it, to even think we'd do something like that.\"\n\n\"How did you know which room was mine? You didn't enter them all to find me, did you?\"\n\n\"Course not, didn't need to. Saw you at your window before you turned out the light. There aren't any other women in this house on the upper floor, least that can stand at a window, so it had to be you up here.\"\n\n\"How would you even know the sleeping arrangements in this house?\"\n\nSam chuckled low. \"My brothers and I used to dare each other to come here to spy on the Callahans when we were younger.\"\n\nTiffany rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. He couldn't see that because he wasn't exaggerating about how dark it was. There was no moonlight tonight with yet another storm rolling in.\n\nShe mustered the determination to say what she had to. \"You need to leave. I'm here by choice. I'm not proud of it, but I was swayed by money. The Callahans offered me much more than my job is worth to work here instead. I was too embarrassed to explain that to your father.\"\n\n\"Well, hell, if it's just a matter of money, we can better whatever they offered.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"No. This is starting to feel like a tug-a-war. I have to draw the line somewhere.\"\n\n\"But you don't understand,\" he persisted. \"They probably just did this to be ornery, while my family actually needs you. My sister is coming here for the first time since she was a tyke. You were hired to make her feel at home. She's used to butlers and housekeepers and more maids than you can count. It's really important to my father that she feel comfortable here. That's why he sent for you.\"\n\nAnd that's when the tears started. She hoped she could keep them silent. No such luck. He quickly struck a match when he heard the sounds she was making. With a gasp she yanked the covers over her head. She wasn't quick enough.\n\n\"Tiffany? What the hell?!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Tiffany slowly lowered the covers. Sam was staring at her incredulously\u2014until the match started to burn his fingers. He dropped it, lit another, then lit the lamp next to her bed. Ignoring the frown on his face, she gave in to the urge she'd had since he woke her. She threw her arms around his neck and hugged him.\n\n\"I can explain,\" she whispered.\n\nSam set her back from him. She feasted her eyes on him, feeling so happy to see him after so many years. Blond, green-eyed, and so handsome now. She'd asked him once why he didn't look like her. He'd proudly said he took after their pa. That was back when she'd craved any and all knowledge about her father, and she'd childishly envied Sam that day because he looked like Frank and she didn't\n\nThe expression on his face had darkened. \"So they did kidnap you. Why didn't you just say so?\"\n\n\"Because they didn't. They thought the same thing you did\u2014that I'm Jennifer Fleming. And what I told you is true, they think they've lured me to work here with a double salary.\"\n\n\"But why didn't you set them straight?\"\n\n\"Because this is where I want to be.\"\n\n\"Tiff...\"\n\n\"Sit down.\" She patted the bed beside her. \"Just listen to me, please. I didn't want to come to Montana at all. I definitely don't want to marry a cowboy. But Mama arranged this betrothal, and while she won't insist that I go through with it, she did make me promise I'd stay here two months to give Hunter a chance. This is where I want to do it.\"\n\n\"Me and the boys don't want you to marry Hunter either. It's just the elders that want the marriage to secure the truce. But that's ridiculous. It ain't like we can't take care of ourselves\u2014hell, we can kick the Callahans' butts any day.\" Sam laughed scornfully. \"They must think so, to bring in a notorious gunslinger like Degan Grant to protect them. Old Zachary even dragged him along this morning to accuse us of setting a fire. We're not afraid of hired guns, Tiff.\"\n\nIn this case his confidence scared the heck out of her. \"You should be afraid! That man is dangerous\u2014\"\n\n\"Never mind him. You can't imagine how much we've all been looking forward to your arrival, and now to find you here.\"\n\nShe winced. \"And I've wanted to see you just as badly. But more than that\u2014\" She bit back the words. She couldn't tell him how she felt about Frank, that she'd taken on this charade just so she could put off having to come face-to-face with their father. Sam simply wouldn't understand because he loved Frank.\n\n\"What?\" he said, waiting for her to go on.\n\n\"I've been here a few days, long enough to know this life isn't for me.\"\n\n\"A few days is nothing, and\"\u2014he suddenly seemed to realize\u2014\"you're spending them as a servant, so of course you'd hate it!\"\n\nShe grinned and pointed out, \"A housekeeper's duties are minimal.\" She was not going to mention cooking. \"And besides, I'm talking about this part of the country. I've already met train robbers, been shot at, saw dead men carried off the train, lost most of my luggage, saw Hunter almost shot in the back... that's actually more than enough. Out here\"\u2014she waved a hand\u2014\"this is your life, it's not mine.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"I do know what you're talking about, Tiff. Every time we visited you and Ma we felt so out of place. We didn't belong, we knew that, it was blatant everywhere we went. But you know Roy, who visited the most? When he came back that last time, he said he actually missed the city, that it was growing on him. Just takes time to get used to a new place.\"\n\n\"Maybe for a man, but every time I turn around I witness violence of some sort.\"\n\n\"Sounds like you just had a rotten run of luck. Really, we can go months without hearing a gunshot, and then it's mostly just someone shooting a snake.\" Tiffany made a face. \"Outlaws are a dying breed. US marshals show up to hunt them down these days. We're becoming more and more lawful every year thanks to the railroads.\"\n\nShe patted his hand. No reassurance he offered could change what she'd already seen. Becoming wasn't being.\n\nHe must have figured that out because he looked so frustrated. \"That's why you should come home to us. We'll show you a grand time. We'll go fishing and riding, take you out to see some real mountains, show you what it's really like here. And Pa is longing to see you.\" Tiffany raised a skeptical brow, but Sam misunderstood, saying, \"Yeah, he wants to marry you off to a Callahan, but don't worry, we won't let him. And maybe Ma will come out and visit, too, if she hears you're enjoying yourself here.\"\n\nHer brothers had obviously anticipated quite a different kind of visit than she had if they expected her to have fun in Montana and for their mother to join them. None of that was going to happen. Tiffany suddenly felt furious with her parents and their secrets. Their strange relationship was still hurting her brothers, even now when they were grown men.\n\nBut she didn't mention her frustration to Sam. Instead she asked him, \"Why did you all stop coming to New York? It's been five years since any of you visited us.\"\n\nHe actually looked surprised by the question. \"I mentioned that in my letters, didn't I? We grew into more responsibilities. We started going on trail drives to get the cattle to market. I got to go on my first one when I was thirteen. Of course, the railroads arriving in the territory last year have almost put an end to that. We still have small drives from nearby towns that aren't connected to the rails yet, but just a couple men can handle those. And then there was school.\"\n\n\"But that didn't stop you before.\"\n\n\"Because we didn't actually have school before. Pa used to teach us when he had time. But then Nashart actually got its own teacher, a real bona fide teacher, and they built a schoolroom for him. We weren't forced to attend, but Pa figured it would please Ma if we did, so we went. Every darn day.\"\n\n\"I loved school, you didn't?\"\n\n\"The learning was okay, but being stuck in a room with John and Cole Callahan every day was hell.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She tried not to laugh. Then she realized that wasn't a laughing subject, though it should have been. But her brothers hadn't grown up with normal childhood difficulties. They'd had real enemies living nearby, and mostly all older than them. If they got into a scuffle with a Callahan, they probably never won. How horrible.\n\n\"Like I said,\" Sam was saying, \"things are rapidly changing in the West now. Nashart has even doubled in size in just the last couple years.\"\n\nShe winced again. He was still trying to convince her to like it here. But she suddenly realized she needed to do some convincing of her own, just not about that.\n\n\"Sam, I have to figure out a way to end the feud without being part of the solution. I'll have a better chance of doing that here in this house with these people. Mary Callahan is probably the key. If anyone can talk some sense into this family, it would be her. I just need time to work her around to that way of thinking. And I don't want Papa shoving me down the aisle to the altar with Hunter just because he's impatient to end the feud. So\u2014so I want you to keep it a secret that I'm here, from Frank, even from our brothers.\"\n\nSam shot to his feet. \"You can't ask me to lie to Pa. You just can't!\"\n\n\"Not lie, just don't say you saw me.\"\n\n\"That's the same as\u2014\"\n\n\"Sam, this is my life, not yours. I need some time to figure this out. If you tell anyone I'm here, anyone in our family or even this one, I swear I'll get on the next train home, promise or not. Then there won't be a truce anymore. Do you even know what it was like before the truce? Of course you don't, you were too young, same as I was. But Mama knows. She lived here then. She told me about it. And she hated it!\"\n\nHe looked stricken. \"Is that why she left?\"\n\nTiffany blinked. \"You don't know why?\"\n\n\"I asked Pa. I even asked her. Do you know how much it hurts when you know your parents are lying to you? They aren't very good at it, you know. But I never had the heart to press. Pa always got so sad looking. Ma just got angry, though I swear it was fake, just to cover up that she was sad, too. Which doesn't make a damn lick o' sense.\"\n\n\"No, it doesn't.\" Tiffany vowed again to make her parents come clean about their separation. She wasn't a child any longer. She had a right to know. She'd had enough of their lies. But for now she had to get Sam to agree to her plan. \"So will you keep my secret?\"\n\nHis lips thinned out. He was obviously wrestling with his decision. She held her breath.\n\nThen he said, \"We were so hoping you'd loathe Hunter but love Montana so much that you'd stay here anyway and live with us. Just think, we could see each other all the time.\"\n\nFighting back tears, Tiffany shook her head. \"Sam\u2014\"\n\nHe looked angry as he stood up. \"This isn't over, Tiff. It's not right you lying to Pa and impersonating a housekeeper for the Callahans. You think about that. But I won't say anything\u2014for now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Tiffany was too nervous to stay in bed after her brother slipped out of her room. She should have escorted him out of the house to make sure he made it safely. But she'd realized that too late, so she walked back and forth between her two corner windows instead even though she couldn't see a darn thing out in the yard other than the guard walking by with his lantern.\n\nThe sudden light coming from the kitchen below made her blanch, it was so similar to what she'd seen the night of the fire. But no one would dare try that again with the house being guarded now. It could just be the guard, but she hadn't thought he was patrolling inside the house, too... Oh, God, had Sam been caught? She had to find out!\n\nTiffany threw on her petticoat and grabbed her traveling jacket\u2014why hadn't she thought of telling Mrs. Martin to make her a robe, too!? She looked ridiculous. She didn't care. At least she wasn't flying downstairs in her underwear again.\n\nShe burst into the kitchen just as Hunter was stepping out the back door. He must have heard her because he turned and asked, \"What are you doing down here?\"\n\n\"I heard a noise.\"\n\n\"Yeah, so did I. It was nothing, go back to bed.\" He didn't look as if he thought it was nothing. He looked tense, and he'd been going out to investigate\u2014where he might run into her brother...\n\nShe had to give Sam time to get away! Desperate to keep Hunter from going outside, she ran across the room and threw her arms around his neck. \"Don't leave me alone!\"\n\nHe put his arms around her, not hesitating even a moment. But she was obviously confusing him and he asked, \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"You\u2014that is, the light you brought into the kitchen. I could see it from my window. It made me think we were on fire again.\"\n\nHe choked out a laugh. \"We just might be.\" At her gasp he said, \"I didn't mean that literally\u2014never mind. Come here.\"\n\nHe led her to a kitchen chair, sat down on it, and pulled her onto his lap. He kept one arm around her back while he began to rub her shoulder and arm soothingly with his other hand. He wasn't exactly caressing her, but it seemed as if his touch could easily become a caress, and she was leaning against his chest\u2014his very bare chest. He'd come downstairs in just his pants tonight. She was beginning to feel embarrassed for having thrown herself at him, no matter the reason. Or was she just too shy to admit she was glad to have had an excuse to do that?\n\n\"I'm surprised you were scared, considering how brave you were last night.\"\n\n\"That was different.\"\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"That fire was already burning. I reacted without thinking. I just wanted to put it out before it got any bigger.\" She took a deep breath, inhaling his distinctive scent of leather and pine trees. She loved the way he smelled.\n\n\"You're braver than you think\u2014but I kind of like you coming to me when you think you aren't.\"\n\nShe didn't have to see his smile to know it was there when he said that. She felt a little bad for deceiving him tonight. Not that she hadn't been frightened\u2014for her brother. Sam should have made his escape by now. It was time to get up and go back to her room.\n\n\"I guess it will just take a little while to get over being jittery at every noise or unexpected light in the house,\" she said with a smile, leaning away from him.\n\nThat was probably her biggest mistake because now she could see just how attractive he was, and she wasn't hurrying to get off his lap. She gazed in fascination at his bare, muscular chest and arms, his strong, wide shoulders, the thick cords of his neck, and his handsome face. His blue eyes captured hers and wouldn't let go. Was that the heat of desire in his eyes or a reflection of the lantern light? It was a breathless moment. She reminded herself that he didn't know who she was and that he wouldn't like her if he did. But he liked Jennifer. Why couldn't she be the real Jennifer for just a little while tonight?\n\n\"Jenny,\" he said softly.\n\nIt was as if he'd just answered her question, given her permission to do as she pleased. She didn't stop him from drawing her closer to him again; no, she threaded her fingers through his long, dark hair and held on tight as his mouth claimed hers.\n\nHis kiss was gentle at first, then turned strong and probing as his tongue pressed against her lips until they parted. Passion exploded for both of them. For long moments it engulfed them and neither of them seemed able to get enough of the other. Hunter ran his hands up and down her back as he deepened the kiss. Her hands clutched his shoulders as every nerve in her body sizzled with each thrust of his tongue. He was the one who finally tempered it, probably because he didn't want to frighten her. He didn't know she was beyond that point. But she was too inexperienced to do anything other than let him be her guide.\n\nHe pushed back her jacket and the straps of her chemise with it, then put his mouth on her bare shoulder, kissing her and leaving a mark before he moved his lips to her neck. She was trembling inside as Hunter continued to kiss her and softly stroke and caress her. He excited her in ways she'd never dreamed of. He was so big, so strong, more handsome than any other man she'd ever encountered\u2014and he wanted her.\n\nShe felt him pulling the ties to her chemise, loosening it, and then his large hand was cupping one of her breasts. She gasped. His fingers moved to her nipple, gently circling it, igniting hot sensations that skittered through her body and made her gasp even more loudly. They both heard the footsteps at the same time. She inhaled sharply and started to get up, but he pulled her closer to him to cover her bare breasts as the guard passed by the kitchen windows.\n\nHer heart was pounding. She was still panting as the footsteps faded and she leaned back again.\n\nHunter gave her a regretful smile. \"Probably just as well. I was getting a little carried away.\"\n\nWhat an understatement\u2014that's what she wanted to say but she couldn't get any words out. She simply clutched the edges of her chemise closed and hurried out of the room and back upstairs. Now she was assailed with a double dose of guilt, for asking Sam to keep her secret and for giving Hunter the wrong impression. For God's sake, she'd only met the man three days ago! And she had no intention of marrying him. How could she give in to forbidden urges? She'd even talked herself into allowing it! What was wrong with her? She was playing with fire.\n\nThis had to end, and sooner than fifty-seven days from now. She was going to write another letter to her mother tomorrow. This time she'd tell her everything, all the horrors she'd witnessed, the fear she'd suffered, and what she was having to endure, dishwashing and all, just to avoid Frank Warren and find a way to end the feud without marriage. She'd tried to spare her mother additional worry, but it was too much for her to bear alone anymore. If Rose heard it all, she would release Tiffany from her promise. Before she left, she'd set these people down at a table and get them to resolve what should never have become a feud in the first place. Then she'd go home without a single regret..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Tiffany's second letter to her mother was long and had to be worded just right. She couldn't finish it all in one sitting because she had to prepare her first breakfast for the entire household. She served eggs, fresh-baked bread that came out perfect this time, and beef that Andrew offered to grill in the backyard so they wouldn't have to overheat the kitchen by lighting the fireplace. It turned out so well that not even Hunter's risqu\u00e9 remark that the eggs weren't the best thing he'd ever tasted in the kitchen, a reference to what she'd foolishly let happen last night, didn't ruin her good mood.\n\nIt did embarrass her, though. A little. What had embarrassed her even more was her first sight of Hunter that morning and realizing how eager she'd been for it. She'd played with fire last night, and that flame would burn out of control if she couldn't tamp down these inappropriate feelings he kept stirring in her.\n\nBut her day was full enough to keep those thoughts away. After breakfast she had to get dinner started early, since she was going to make a roast. Just to make sure it didn't turn into another disaster, she visited Mary again.\n\nTiffany was still trying to avoid telling Hunter's mother that she couldn't cook, but she'd figured out a way to get some help from her without directly asking for it.\n\n\"I'm going to make a roast tonight. There are many ways to do so, but I wondered if you had a favorite recipe of your own that I could try out?\"\n\n\"I have many, but it'd be hard to explain them unless I was right there with you in the kitchen. I didn't actually cook for my family, you know. Zachary's father, Elijah, had his own cook, and she made the trip here with us. When she retired, I thought I might start cooking for the family. My mother did teach me how. But Zachary went and hired another cook, and, well\u2014I'd actually rather be out on the range, anyway.\"\n\n\"You\u2014work with cattle?\" Tiffany asked incredulously.\n\nMary smiled. \"Herding isn't hard work, dear. Lets me spend more time with Zach, and I love the outdoors. I don't get involved with the spring branding, but roping stray calves to bring them back to their mothers is fun. You should have one of the boys show you how sometime.\"\n\nTiffany decided this ludicrous idea didn't merit a comment, and she'd gotten sidetracked. She needed recipes, not tips on roping cattle. That cookbook she'd bought just gave her bare basics or too many choices to vary a dish by adding this, or this, or that, but never saying just how much of those ingredients to add. Of course the book did sort of stress up front the value of experimenting, but she didn't have time for experimenting. She wanted her dishes to come out right the first time around, not five ruined meals later.\n\n\"So you don't actually have any suggestions for the roast tonight?\"\n\n\"My mother preferred to prepare her roasts in a Dutch oven, with just a bay leaf, garlic... oh, and she always poured in some red wine, about half a cup.\"\n\nSo that's why there was wine in the pantry! But Mary suddenly frowned thoughtfully, adding, \"Old Ed had his own Dutch oven, but he probably took it with him. The one my mother left me is in the attic. You might want to fetch it, unless you traveled with your own?\"\n\nTiffany stared at her blankly. Travel with an oven? Would she even know what a Dutch oven was if she saw it? Andrew might. She could send him up to the attic for it. But while she had a sort-of-recipe for tonight, that wasn't going to help her tomorrow.\n\nSo she shook her head in regard to having her own oven and said, \"I'll try adding the wine tonight. Do you have any other recipes you'd care to share?\"\n\n\"As I said, my mother taught me and she was a damn fine cook, but it's all up here.\" Mary pointed at her head.\n\n\"Perhaps you could write a few down for me?\"\n\nMary chuckled. \"It's hard to describe a pinch of this and a dash of that when it comes to spices. And it's all in the measurements, you know. Put in too much and you ruin a dish, put in too little and you also ruin it. But I'll be back on my feet before the wedding. I can show you then.\"\n\nThe damn wedding. And that wasn't going to help Tiffany now. Actually...\"You might consider trying to sort out those dashes and pinches on paper,\" she remarked with a smile. \"Imagine what a wonderful gift it would make for your future daughters-in-law.\"\n\nShe'd managed to surprise Mary. \"I'll be damned, gal, that is a right fine idea. I'll see what I can figure out and then you can make copies for yourself, too.\"\n\nTiffany stood up to leave, pleased she was going to get what she came for\u2014hopefully soon. But then she remembered the letter to her mother that she'd started. If it got her the desired result, which was permission to go home, Mary here was probably the only one who could make her trip home guilt-free.\n\nTo that end she impulsively said, \"There's another gift that would be even better, Mary, at least for the daughter-in-law you're expecting soon. Well, if it was me, I'd certainly think so.\"\n\nMary perked up. \"What?\"\n\n\"End the feud with her family before the wedding. That would be a magnanimous gesture, don't you think?\"\n\nMary slumped back against her pillows. \"Indeed it would. It's such a shame. My boys should've been best of friends with Frank's. Heck, we practically live within shouting distance of each other.\"\n\n\"Then why depend on a marriage to end it? Why not just end it?\"\n\n\"You think I haven't tried? Rose wanted the hostilities ended, too. We both did. It just ain't right, us carrying on something we had no part of starting.\"\n\n\"Rose?\" Tiffany fought hard to keep the blush down, for asking something she already knew.\n\n\"Frank Warren's wife. I'd talk to her whenever we crossed paths in town. She was such a friendly young girl, never put on airs, coming from the big city like she did. She fit right in because she wanted to, but then she and Frank seemed so happy together, always touching, laughing\"\u2014and in a whisper\u2014\"even kissing in public. Then I heard she turned high-strung and started complaining about ranch life after Frank got shot. She just up and left one day, taking their little girl with her. Never understood that. To this day, I still don't. But at least the truce lasted, even with her gone.\"\n\n\"Perhaps\u2014perhaps she missed city life too much.\"\n\nMary actually snorted. \"No, that gal loved it here, really loved it, and her man. I wasn't surprised when she arranged the betrothal, and the truce, demanded it actually.\" Another whisper: \"I think she scared Zach a little that night she came over here by herself. She was in such a rage she was crying. Least, she definitely confused him. But I seen it coming, her doing something like that. She wasn't afraid to butt heads with the menfolk over the water access. I knew it infuriated her that they couldn't just share it. Did me, too. I just never had the nerve to put my foot down the way she did that night. She had fire and gumption, that girl. Must've been that red hair... ,\" Mary said, gazing at Tiffany's long hair." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "\"Do you never stay in your pen anymore?\" Tiffany asked when she felt the nudge on her shoes and glanced down to find the piglet on the porch with her again.\n\nIt stood still, staring up at her. She leaned down to pet it, but it continued to stare. She finally gave in with a roll of her eyes, picked it up, flipped it over on her lap, and began to rub its belly while she got back to watching the sunset.\n\nNo summer storm had showed up today to ruin the glorious details of this one, such bright streaks of pink and yellow. The trees along the skyline looked as if they were aflame, with so much red behind them. She had time to enjoy it while the bread baked.\n\n\"Don't mind me, gal,\" Zachary said as he stepped out of the house and headed down the porch to his favorite chair for his evening smoke.\n\nHe didn't comment on the piglet in her lap, which meant he hadn't really looked at her. She was just another servant to him. Invisible. Actually, he did vaguely know she was there, so she probably shouldn't tar him with her own brush. Her mother's house was full of servants, but how often did she actually notice any of them other than Anna? This role she was playing was giving her insight into herself that she wasn't all that comfortable with. But she could ignore Zachary as he, apparently, intended to ignore her. And she didn't mind sharing the porch with him. With the breeze blowing his way, she wouldn't notice the smoke either.\n\n\"Something smells damn good, coming from the kitchen,\" he yelled her way before he lit up his cigar and enjoyed the sunset, too.\n\nTiffany smiled. Dinner tonight was going to be a cause for celebration... well, for her, anyway. Mary's cast-iron Dutch oven turned out to be an amazing covered roasting dish. It was shallow enough to fit on the stove's baking shelf. It had handles so Tiffany could simply bring it to the table and serve from it. It even came with a platform it could rest on, so it could be used over a fire, too. It was on the kitchen table right now, the roast inside it simmering in its gravy while the bread baked.\n\nShe'd left a note on the lid that simply read, Don't touch. It was going to be her surprise, her first good meal, and she wanted to be the one who revealed it. Of course the aroma that had filled the kitchen for most of the afternoon was a good indication. Still, presentation was everything, and she'd arranged the vegetables that Andrew had brought in and washed for her just right, circling them around the huge roast. And timed them perfectly, not adding them too soon.\n\nIt had been a busy day, but it had gone smoothly\u2014well, mostly. That unease she'd felt after leaving Mary's room was long gone now. She'd been foolish to think even for a moment that Mary had somehow guessed who she really was when she'd mentioned Rose's red hair and had stared at Tiffany's\u2014red hair. But the shades weren't similar! It was absurd to think the woman might have made the connection. Even if it did occur to her, she would quickly have scoffed at the notion. Which is what Tiffany should have done sooner, instead of letting it make her uneasy for half the day. What really bothered her was what Mary had said about Tiffany's parents...\n\nHappy, so in love, and yet Rose just up and left. Why? Was no one ever going to answer that question for her? But this was the first she'd heard about how happy Rose had been here, which just made it all the more confusing. And made her realize for the first time, too, that she'd be a different person if Rose hadn't taken her away from here. Tiffany would have grown up knowing Hunter and would probably be looking forward to marrying him, would probably be head over heels in love with him by now. It wasn't such a horrible thought anymore; it was a bit sad because it hadn't been destined to happen.\n\n\"I'd like to see you hold him like that six months from now. Didn't hear my warning about size, did you?\"\n\nThinking of the devil, she gave Hunter a smile. He was leaning in the doorway, a book in hand and freshly washed, by the look of his damp hair. He'd spoken quietly enough that Zachary hadn't noticed him yet.\n\n\"I don't fetch him,\" she said in her defense. \"He seems to find me whenever a door is opened or I step outside.\"\n\n\"I know just how he feels.\"\n\nShe blushed and glanced back at the sunset. She should go back inside. He'd probably come out to talk to his father; he just wasn't moving in that direction yet. And she didn't move yet either.\n\nShe even delayed him by nodding at the book he was holding. \"Where did you get your schooling\u2014or did you get any?\"\n\n\"Thinking I'm not up to your standards, Red?\"\n\n\"No, I just wondered.\" Her talk with Sam last night had got her curious about the boys from both families growing up together, but she couldn't mention that. \"Where I come from, schools are plentiful. It occurred to me that isn't the case out here.\"\n\n\"Ma taught us boys. She was going to be a teacher herself, but got married instead. But Nashart did finally get a schoolroom. And I brought this out for you.\" He put the book down on the swing next to her. \"Figured you might enjoy some fiction set west of the Rockies\u2014if you find time to read.\"\n\nShe probably would since she didn't expect every day to be as busy as today, but her curiosity wasn't satisfied yet. \"A single schoolroom implies you had to attend with your hated neighbors. Did you ever pick on them? Were you a bully growing up, Hunter Callahan?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"If I'm going to fight someone, he needs to be my size or bigger. I don't mind bigger. The Warren boys never fit the bill. Even with Sam full grown now, I've still got a lot of weight on him.\"\n\nYes, he was definitely bigger, more muscular, broader in the shoulders, stronger in the legs... she got her eyes off him fast and shot to her feet. She started back into the house, but stopped when she remembered the piglet in her arms. She turned to take him back to his mama.\n\nHunter held out his hands. \"I'll take him. I'm sure you've got a table to set or other things to finish up before dinner.\"\n\nShe nodded and handed the animal over. She was just inside the door when she heard Zachary say, \"What the hell is that doing here? Jakes needs to be more careful with the food stocks.\"\n\nTiffany yelled as she marched down the hall, \"He is not going to be dinner! Ever!\"\n\n\"Did I hear her right? She can't\u2014\"\n\nShe missed the rest of what Zachary said because his voice was drowned out by Hunter's laughter." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Hunter continued to watch Jennifer as she marched down the hall, her bustle swaying, her copper hair tied at the neck, but still so thick it spread across her back all the way to her waist. Those emerald eyes were probably flashing right now, proving she'd do battle for a pig. She would, too. He didn't doubt it, and it kept the grin on his lips even after she'd disappeared into the kitchen.\n\nHe'd laughed when he'd read the note she'd left on top of the Dutch oven. She didn't even have to be in the room and she could make him laugh...\n\n\"Stop it. Stop it!\"\n\nHe turned toward his father to find Zachary sitting forward in his chair, glowering at him. Hunter moved to the end of the porch to half sit on the rail, one leg dangling, the pig tucked under his arm. \"Stop what?\"\n\n\"Looking at her like that.\"\n\nHunter wasn't abashed when it was something he seemed to have no control over. He said as much with a shrug. \"Can't help it.\"\n\n\"You sure as hell can.\"\n\nHunter chuckled. \"I guess you don't remember what it was like, when you were young.\"\n\n\"I'm not that old,\" Zachary grumbled. \"And this ain't amusing.\"\n\n\"Now that's where you're wrong, Pa. I've never laughed so much in my life as I have since Jenny got here. It's like when she walked in the house, joy walked in with her. Everything about her makes me want to smile.\"\n\n\"Damnit, Hunter, you need to nip that in the bud right now. You think I don't know where this is heading?\"\n\nHunter put both feet back on the porch. \"And what if it is?\"\n\n\"She's already got a man, and you've got a gal coming across the whole country for you.\"\n\n\"You know how I feel about that, Pa.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I do. I hate it just as much as you do. But Rose Warren got me to agree to it... well, it was mostly your ma who did, taking Rose Warren's side in it. Now it's a matter of honor.\"\n\nHow many times had Hunter heard that? But no one else was the sacrificial offering here, just him. While he'd never done more than complain about having this all set up for him before he was old enough to have a say in it, he'd never had reason to simply refuse either\u2014until now. Actually, he didn't have that reason yet, just hoped he would. He sighed.\n\n\"We give them back their steers that wander over,\" he reminded his father. \"They do the same. It's been mostly peaceful around here for fifteen years other than those fights between Cole and Roy, and John and Sam, and simple squabbles before that. Peaceful, Pa. We don't need a marriage to keep it that way. Make a damn agreement with Franklin already. You're not Grandpa, who wouldn't even talk to one of them.\"\n\n\"Can't trust Frank to honor a mere agreement. It's got to be signed with a blood bond. His wife knew that. It's why she put that card on the table.\"\n\n\"You've got four sons. Any one of them will do.\"\n\n\"Well, Rose picked you. We agreed it'd be you because you're the oldest.\"\n\n\"So disagree on that point.\"\n\n\"We've had this discussion before, Hunter. I could've sworn we settled it. You meet her first, then you decide if you want her or not. In the meantime, keep your hands off the hired help. I raised you better than to trifle with a woman already spoken for.\"\n\nZachary had to pull out that card? Hunter threw up his hands in defeat or started to, until he nearly dropped the pig. \"Fine,\" he snarled, and left the porch, heading around to the back of the house.\n\nHe should have gone the other way. Zachary leaned over the railing to say as Hunter passed by, \"Maybe the Warren girl don't want to marry you either. Did you think of that? Maybe you're getting all riled up over nothing. But you two can figure that out when she gets here.\"\n\nHunter kept on going without replying. He didn't like arguing with his father. He knew the choice would still be his in the end. Zachary had made that clear. Hunter shouldn't even be trying to settle the matter before he met the Warren daughter. It would just have been nice to have peace without a time limit on it, so their neighbors didn't get up in arms when he did finally end that dumb betrothal.\n\nHe didn't find Jennifer in the kitchen when he got back to the house. One look at her and this annoyance would go away, he was sure. It did when he entered the dining room and found her just setting the roast on the table and the rest of his family already seated. She passed him to head back to the kitchen. With Zachary raising a brow at him, he managed not to follow her with his eyes and took a seat instead.\n\nSo he was surprised to hear Zachary tell him as he stood up to cut the roast, \"Fetch her back. Smells like she did good tonight. She can start sharing meals with us like Ed did. And she might teach you boys some table manners you've forgotten since your ma got laid up.\"\n\nThat was a concession on his father's part\u2014for Hunter. He nodded before heading back into the kitchen. Jennifer was standing by the sink, her back to the room.\n\nShe heard his step and glanced over her shoulder. \"I forgot to mention, save some for the rest of us. I didn't want to ruin the presentation by cutting into it yet.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I guess that Don't touch note was for yourself, then?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"No, I just... what?\"\n\nShe'd rooted him to the spot with the merry sound she'd just made. Had he never heard her laugh before? If he had, it certainly hadn't affected him like this. How was it possible for her to get even more beautiful?\n\nHe found his voice. \"Makes you sparkle, when you laugh. Lights you up like a candle. Give me a frown, Jenny, so I can move again.\"\n\nShe gave him another laugh instead, apparently thinking he was teasing. He wasn't sure he was. But she'd turned her back on him and was facing the sink as she said, \"Go eat while it's hot.\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"Well, then, you need to return to the dining room for that to happen. Come on, Red. Pa won't eat until you're seated.\"\n\nShe turned, even took a few steps before she stopped to point out, \"It isn't appropriate for hired help to sit with the family. Do the maids eat with you?\"\n\n\"No, but you're not exactly a maid. And Old Ed ate with us, so does Degan. 'Sides, Pa thinks you might teach us boys some table manners. So no arguing.\"\n\nHe returned to his seat, leaving the choice to follow up to her. Actually, he didn't trust himself to touch her right now, not even her hand. But she entered a moment later, not the least bit embarrassed as most servants would be to be included in the family dinner. She carried herself as if she owned the room. Come to think of it, there wasn't a subservient bone in that girl and had never been. He wasn't really surprised by that. Jennifer Fleming was aware of her own worth.\n\nShe stopped behind the empty chair directly across the table from Hunter. She didn't touch it. Lesson number one. Hunter started laughing, he simply couldn't help it. It got worse when Cole, Degan, even John, all started to get up to help seat her. But Cole was the quickest and the closest and pulled the chair out for her.\n\nShe gave him a brilliant smile of thanks, which started Cole blushing. Zachary was still cutting the roast, and taking so long at it, Hunter had a feeling his father was wary of messing it up, which would disappoint the cook. They started passing their plates down his way.\n\n\"Don't everyone talk at once,\" Zachary said.\n\nA few nervous laughs and throat clearings ensued. Jennifer introduced a topic to put them at ease with her presence. She was causing their nervousness. It was her dress. She simply didn't look like a servant in her fancy duds, and with her sitting there so properlike, it was as if they had some rich lady at the table. None of them were used to that! Not even their father.\n\n\"Perhaps someone can tell me a little more about Nashart? Mrs. Callahan said the town didn't exist when your family moved here. It was merely a trading post?\"\n\nZachary answered, \"Yeah, that was all. For a long time, too.\"\n\n\"But didn't being so far from markets for your cattle make business difficult?\"\n\n\"That actually wasn't a deciding factor, since we expected it would take quite a few years to build the herd back up. We only brought a hundred head of cattle with us and lost a quarter of them on the trip.\"\n\n\"The trip was that difficult?\"\n\n\"Not really. We came most of the way by river, first on the Mississippi, then the Missouri to Fort Union. That's a ways northeast of here, but while the Missouri continues west and steamboats travel that route now, they didn't back then.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you settle near Fort Union?\"\n\nZachary chuckled. \"My pa wanted more isolation than that. We'd already made our fortune ranching in Florida, where some of the oldest ranches in the country are located. Truth is, cattle rustling got really out of hand down there. Too many ranches too close to each other. We aimed to get away from that\u2014among other things. So we weren't looking for a well-settled area, just the opposite. Yet we couldn't go too far from water, either, so we followed the Yellowstone River. Couldn't raft it since it flowed north into the Missouri, but we never strayed too far from it or its spouts. The creek that flows by here almost year-round and feeds the lake is why we put down roots here, that and finding the trappers trail to the trading post in the area.\"\n\n\"Almost year-round?\" she asked.\n\nJohn answered as Zachary began to hand the plates back, \"It dries up some late in the year; one year, it dried up all the way.\"\n\n\"It would freeze here in winter, wouldn't it?\" she questioned. \"How do your cattle get water then?\"\n\nCole piped up, \"We crack the ice at the edges of the lake for the cows that are too dumb to lick snow for their water.\"\n\nJennifer nodded. \"So when did the town of Nashart actually come into being?\"\n\n\"My boys can answer that. I'm going to share this fine dinner with Mary,\" Zachary said as he picked up two filled plates and started out of the room.\n\nJennifer looked around her, waiting for an answer, though Hunter noticed she was doing a good job of not looking at him. He spoke up anyway. \"With our ranch springing up near the trading post, it didn't take long at all for a saloon to be built. Still, I hear it was just those two buildings for a few more years. There just wasn't enough traffic through here to warrant more\u2014heck, none at all other than trappers and Indians back then.\"\n\n\"What changed that?\"\n\n\"Gold. Before it was discovered in the western part of the territory, Nashart barely had a handful of buildings. Folks struck with gold fever came from all over the country and from all walks of life, most of them too late, with news traveling so slowly back then. Some from the East passed through here on their way to get rich because by then we'd delivered cows a few times to Fort Union, so there was a pretty good trail between here and there. And they came back through here on their way home when it didn't pan out for them.\"\n\n\"And stayed?\"\n\n\"Some, yes. They'd see construction going on here. The trading post was already being converted to a general store to take advantage of the new traffic passing through. And progress, it can be as infectious as gold fever. Tiny shops went up fast, those that didn't take much to get going\u2014barber, laundry, carpenter, to name a few.\"\n\n\"So that's when Nashart became a real town?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but it was still not even a quarter the size it is now. It continued to grow, though, just more slowly until a stage line went in. Wasn't surprised to see that happen despite the rush being over. Butte, Helena, even Virginia City, they got so big, they were drawing in new businesses instead of new prospectors.\"\n\nHunter had talked so much, he was surprised to find only himself and Jennifer left at the table. He was about to turn the conversation in a more personal direction, now that they were alone, but she became aware of that, too, and stood up to leave.\n\nShe did so politely, though, ending their conversation with the thought \"I wonder if this territory will ever see statehood, or be nothing but ghost towns after the ore runs out.\"\n\n\"You underestimate the power of the railroad. There are towns now that aren't mining towns, and more and more will spring up along the lines.\" He stood up to follow her. He felt a powerful urge not to lose her company just yet. \"Let me help you clean up.\"\n\n\"No!\" she said a little too quickly, amending, \"I mean, Andrew is waiting to do that. And we have bread to get started for tomorrow. You'd just be in the way.\"\n\nHe raised a brow. \"Help is help.\"\n\n\"Not when it's a distraction.\" Her tone was starting to turn annoyed. \"I don't want to spend all night in the kitchen, thank you.\" She blushed as soon as she said it. She was obviously remembering last night. He'd barely been able to think of anything else today. \"But if you want to be helpful, you could arrange for me to have a horse to use tomorrow.\"\n\nHe smiled. She considered him a distraction! \"So you're ready for a ride with me?\"\n\n\"No, I just need to go to town to pick up the clothes I ordered. Andrew can accompany\u2014\"\n\n\"I think we had this talk about you not going anywhere without me.\"\n\n\"Fine!\" she huffed, and flounced off.\n\nHe started laughing to himself. Jennifer definitely had a problem with not getting her way. Life with her would never be simple. Life with her... was he really thinking that far ahead?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Tiffany was amused that Hunter didn't get his way any more than she did about her outing to Nashart. He seemed quite disgruntled when Degan insisted on tagging along yet again. She enjoyed being back on a horse though, and she was dressed appropriately for the occasion in her one remaining riding habit. Made of emerald-green velvet, it was a bit warm for the weather and missing the splendid hat that went with it, but none of her hats had survived the train trip. This time she had no intention of staying in town any longer than she had to, so she wasn't even going to risk stopping to visit Anna. In and out, before she ran into any more of her brothers, was her plan today.\n\n\"Only two stops,\" she assured the men on either side of her as the three of them rode down the main street into town. \"I have a letter to post first, but that will only take a moment.\"\n\n\"Another letter?\" Degan said.\n\n\"To my fianc\u00e9,\" Tiffany lied.\n\n\"Figures,\" Hunter said, and did an about-face, heading in the other direction.\n\nDegan sighed as he turned to gaze at Hunter. \"You could have lied.\"\n\nShe did lie! And did again when she replied, \"No, I couldn't. He needs to be reminded that I have one.\"\n\n\"Point taken.\"\n\nShe posted the letter to her mother and was back on the horse as quickly as she'd said she would be. And back off it just as quickly when she spotted her brother Roy across the street. Had he been looking directly at her? God, she hoped not. Hiding on the other side of the animal, head ducked low, she walked with it that way, trying to make it far enough up the street to an alley between two of the buildings so she could dash between them and skirt around the back way to Mrs. Martin's house.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Degan asked as he followed her, still mounted.\n\n\"Working off a cramp in my leg.\"\n\n\"I would have guessed the cramp was in your neck. Are you hiding from someone?\"\n\n\"Of course not. I'm just watching where I'm walking.\"\n\nShe made the dash without incident, quickly remounted, and rode behind the buildings on the main street to reach Mrs. Martin's house. Her heart was still pounding, though. She was going to have to stop coming to town, she realized. It was too risky.\n\nDegan waited out front with the horses. Agnes already had Tiffany's order bundled and ready to go, she just had to fetch it from the back. Tiffany paced, waiting for the seamstress to return. Roy obviously hadn't seen her, but that had been too close. And then she froze. It wasn't Agnes coming back down the hall toward her. Roy had noticed her after all, and he looked livid. And, oh, my, had he grown!\n\n\"I can explain!\"\n\nHe wasn't interested. Roy grabbed her by the hand and dragged her out of the house the back way. He was almost her age, just ten and a half months younger, but he was already as tall as their older brother Sam, which was at least six feet. And he was strong. It was a wonder he hadn't won that fight with Cole. Maybe he had and had gotten a black eye to show for it. He was too strong! She had no chance of getting her hand back from him.\n\n\"You're hurting me,\" she said as they reached the backyard.\n\nThat actually worked. He let go, swung around, and demanded, \"What the hell are you doing with that gunfighter? He works for the Callahans!\"\n\nHe was shouting. She winced before whispering, \"I know. So do I.\"\n\n\"Like hell you do.\"\n\n\"It's complicated, Roy. I don't have time to explain, but go find Sam. He knows what I'm doing and why. Just don't tell anyone else you saw me.\"\n\n\"Is this a joke?\" He grabbed her hand again. \"You're coming home with me.\"\n\nShe dug in her heels. \"No, I am not!\"\n\n\"She really isn't,\" a new voice said calmly in a deadly tone.\n\nThey both glanced to the side and saw Degan slowly walking toward them from the side yard. And he'd drawn his gun! Tiffany blanched and leapt in front of her brother, putting her back to Degan.\n\nShe told Roy in a desperate whisper, \"He doesn't know who I am, but he will protect me. Don't ruin what I'm doing. Go. Find Sam. And don't talk to anyone else about this or\u2014or I'll never forgive you.\"\n\nFor the briefest moment he looked hurt that she'd say that, but then he gave Degan a fulminating glare before he angrily walked off. She hoped he'd talk to Sam right away. But another layer of guilt settled on her shoulders because he was so angry with her and she hadn't been able to give him the explanation herself. But she was horrified when Degan stopped Roy from leaving...\n\n\"Warren.\"\n\nRoy turned back around slowly. His chin was jutted out defiantly by the time he faced Degan. Tiffany could have throttled her brother for his bravado when he said, \"You going to shoot me into silence?\"\n\nShe was about to jump back in front of Roy when Degan replied, \"It's a thought... or I could just convince Pearl to stop seeing you. Tell me, which would you prefer?\"\n\nA number of emotions crossed Roy's face\u2014anger, confusion, some definite frustration\u2014before he said, \"What's it to you?\"\n\n\"Simple loyalty to my employer. Zachary has every intention of telling your father that Miss Fleming works for him. So we're going to let him do that in his own good time. Neither elder needs to know about this incident, which would only embarrass Miss Fleming.\"\n\nRoy glanced at her again. Her entire expression was pleading with him. He might still say who she really was and was probably thinking about doing just that, he stared at her so long. She was going to have to see her father before she left the territory, whether she wanted to or not, but damnit, not like this, not dragged home by her angry brother.\n\nBut Roy finally eased his aggressive stance and told Degan, \"She's already asked me to say nothing and I won't\u2014for her, not because of your threats.\"\n\n\"Good enough,\" Degan replied. \"Don't make me regret trusting you on this matter.\"\n\nRoy just snorted before he left. Degan holstered his gun. Now that the danger was over, Tiffany glared at the gunman. \"Would you really have shot him?\"\n\n\"Over a prank and when it gets sprung? Of course not.\"\n\n\"Did you mean what you said, that you aren't going to tell Zachary about this, either?\"\n\n\"I'll tell him the day he rides over to the Warren ranch to do his gloating. I'm not going to let him get egg on his face during that encounter. But for now, I don't see much point in mentioning it.\"\n\n\"You really are loyal, aren't you?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, just led her to their horses. What a complex man he was... He seemed to make his own rules." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "The rest of the week passed slowly, with her waiting to hear back from her mother when she knew it was still too soon. Pearl returned to work that week and just in time, since Tiffany had started sneezing again that very morning. But it was an unpleasant first meeting.\n\nPearl sauntered into the kitchen, took one look at Tiffany in her new, appalling work clothes, and said accusingly, \"You stole my clothes?\"\n\nSince they were wearing the same style of skirt and blouse, Tiffany could certainly understand the woman's mistake. The maid was much more curvaceous than Tiffany and filled out the low-cut blouse provocatively. Tiffany didn't doubt that Pearl wore that type of blouse because it abetted her seductions. With black hair worn loose to her shoulders and gray eyes, she was pretty in an earthy sort of way. Now that Tiffany was seeing Pearl close up, why Hunter would be tempted by her was obvious.\n\nTiffany quickly explained, \"When I ordered new work clothes from Mrs. Martin, I didn't specify the style. She obviously patterned mine after yours. Believe me, I would never wear anything this revealing if I had a choice.\"\n\nTiffany had filled in the ridiculously low neckline though. It had taken her several hours in Mary's sewing room to fashion an insert that covered her upper chest. It was fastened behind her neck and tucked into the low, loose bodice. She'd had to give up on wearing her chemise with the blouse because the straps would show due to the short, capped sleeves that hung off the shoulder.\n\nBut Pearl had picked up on the insult, intended or not, and angrily said, \"Stay away from Hunter, he's mine!\"\n\nWhere that came from, Tiffany wasn't at all sure, but she replied, \"Yours?\"\n\n\"He belongs in my bed.\"\n\nAghast that she was even discussing something so personal with a stranger, Tiffany told the maid stiffly, \"I have a fianc\u00e9.\"\n\n\"Good, see that it stays that way.\"\n\nEmbarrassed, green eyes narrowed, Tiffany said, \"I'm the new cook. I'll be making your food. You might want to keep that in mind.\"\n\nAs retaliatory threats went, that one had been quite weak. It infuriated her that she hadn't done better. That was the only reason she was so angry that day, she assured herself. But if Hunter had shown up before she'd calmed down, he would have gotten an earful about his paramour.\n\nDegan did though, and Tiffany was still too angry at the time to realize she shouldn't mention it, even to him, especially to him. But he did shed some light on a question that had been bothering her.\n\n\"She doesn't really want Hunter, you know. What she wants is to be the lady of a house like this. That will never happen here while Mary Callahan lives, so Pearl would actually rather have a Warren for a husband. She wouldn't even be working here if they had hired her over there. It's Roy Warren she's got her matrimonial sites on.\"\n\nTiffany had feared her brother was somehow involved with the maid when Degan had used Pearl as leverage with him in town the other day. When she was out of this mess, she was going to have to warn Roy against that abrasive, conniving, two-timing woman. Would he listen, as angry as he was with Tiffany right now? Or was it already too late? It made her wonder just what Roy had been doing in town in the middle of the week, when Pearl had been there, too.\n\nThe next day, the piglet showed up at the house again, but in Jakes's arms this time, and the trail cook was angry about it. \"You never should've made friends with him. He's been crying for you since he can't get out no more.\"\n\n\"You added more fence planking?\"\n\n\"Had to,\" Jakes had grumbled. \"Never had a dang problem with the babies wandering till they got a whiff of you. Here, he's yours now.\"\n\nHe shoved the animal at her and marched off. Tiffany was surprised, but not actually displeased. She'd never owned a pet before, and this one did seem to have a calming influence on her. Of course now that the piglet was her pet, she had to name it. She decided on Maximilian, a noble name to counter its mud-loving nature. But an even greater benefit of the unexpected gift was that the piglet's being underfoot in the kitchen all day kept Pearl out of it. The maid had some sort of aversion to the animal that had her hurrying in the opposite direction if the pig even looked as if it might approach her.\n\nTiffany's cooking continued to improve that week, though it was hard to outdo that roast she'd made that everyone had thanked her for the next day. But amazingly, she actually started having fun cooking\u2014well, not the cooking part, since the days kept getting warmer and so did the kitchen. Sweating was such an appalling new experience! But she found that experimenting with spices was fun. She just reserved the results for lunches, which most of the household didn't ride in for. And she kept notes! Even that was fun. She was making her own recipes! And anything that tasted good got moved to the dinner menus.\n\nHunter didn't go to town that next Saturday night with the rest of the men. He stayed home to teach Tiffany how to play poker, which he could have done any night, but he used the excuse that Saturday was the only time he ever played poker, so it had to be that night or never.\n\nShe hadn't wanted to. Spending the evening with him didn't seem like a good idea when she already saw far too much of him every day. He'd even started joining her on the porch in the evening for the sunset, sitting companionably on the swing with her and Maximilian, not always talking, but, when he did, always making her laugh. But he cajoled her into the card game that night.\n\nThey used the poker table in the parlor. Just the two of them in that high-ceilinged room, their laughter echoing loudly, so loudly that Zachary yelled at them from the top of the stairs to quiet it down. But she couldn't win a game no matter what decisions she made about the cards in her hand. She began to suspect Hunter was cheating. Even that was funny!\n\nShe had to stop having fun with the man. She shouldn't be feeling so comfortable with him now that she constantly got roped in by his humor. Roped. That was another amusing memory now. She'd actually roped a cow!\n\nIt had happened the day he invited her out for a ride. He'd let her choose in which direction to ride. She wanted to see the damage the copper mine was doing to the range, so they rode east. The Callahans hadn't been exaggerating. The grass above the gulch where the mining camp was set up was blackened with soot. The cave-in had created a large hole in the ground. They didn't approach the edge of it until they heard the cow. Yet another one had gotten trapped in the deep hole. Luckily, this one had only fallen to a ledge about four feet down and was stuck there. It didn't look injured, but it wasn't getting out without help.\n\nHunter dismounted and grabbed the rope hooked on his saddle. When she saw that he was going to lasso the animal rather than just drop the loop down over its head, she remembered that Mary had told her she enjoyed roping stray calves, so she asked Hunter if she could try it. He was surprised she'd want to, but he showed her how. Mary had been right. It was fun once she got the hang of it and stopped wrapping the rope around herself instead of the cow's head.\n\nBut it definitely delayed their return to the ranch. Sunset had started, and she started drifting away from Hunter as she watched it.\n\n\"Pay attention,\" he told her, \"or do I need to take your reins to lead you?\"\n\nShe grinned at him. \"I'm sorry, it's just so beautiful out here, and the sunsets are spectacular.\"\n\nHe'd laughed. \"I already figured you liked them. When you've lived with them your whole life like me, you don't tend to notice them as much.\"\n\n\"Lucky you. In the city, with buildings all around, you never get to see the horizon. Maybe a little pale pink high in the sky before it sinks low, but nothing like this.\"\n\nA perfect end to an enjoyable day. When she had that thought, it disturbed her a little. When had she started to enjoy spending time with Hunter? She hadn't even been here two weeks yet, though it was getting close to that. But she was no closer to finding a peaceful solution to the feud that didn't include marriage. Hunter could\u2014if he would.\n\nThat stayed on her mind as they left the horses in the stable. As they strolled back to the house, she actually asked him, \"Have you given any thought to arranging a permanent truce with your neighbors without marrying one of them\u2014since you said you didn't want to?\"\n\n\"Didn't say I didn't want to marry, just not her.\"\n\n\"Even if she's pretty? Er, that is, I've heard her mother is beautiful.\"\n\n\"The daughter probably is, too, but it won't matter, not when I've lived with this hate for that family all my life. I don't think anything's going to make that go away. It's always going to be deep down, under the surface. Anything she does wrong, it will probably burst out, and it won't even be her fault.\" He'd suddenly looked surprised. \"I never mentioned that to anyone before, that particular fear.\"\n\nTiffany hurried inside the house. She wished he hadn't mentioned it to her, either." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Another successful meal had Tiffany climbing the stairs that night with a half smile on her lips. It was still early. She thought about writing letters to her friends back home. She could have someone else post them for her. She couldn't tell her friends what she'd been up to, but she could tell them some positive things about Montana\u2014as long as they didn't tell her mother. Rose had to continue thinking her daughter abhorred everything about the territory.\n\nTiffany believed her mother had received her second letter by now. She'd half expected an immediate telegram saying simply, \"Come home,\" but her mother probably wanted to express her thoughts more articulately in a letter. Rose would have self-recriminations to address, apologies to make, but hopefully not an \"Are you certain?\" Tiffany still worried that Rose would do what Sam had done\u2014try to convince her that she'd merely had some bad luck in witnessing so much violence in such a short time. Maybe it was bad luck, but that wasn't changing her mind.\n\nShe untied her hair, shook it out, then laid out one of the new nightgowns to get comfortable in before she started her letters. At least Mrs. Martin had made her two normal nightgowns, one long-sleeved for winter, one short-sleeved for summer. But she wasn't going to be here come winter, so she'd cut off the long sleeves so she could use both now.\n\nShe removed the insert from her blouse, then went over to the wardrobe mirror to have a look at herself without it. She shouldn't have. With her hair loose around her shoulders and that silly blouse, she didn't even recognize herself. The image made her blush and slam the wardrobe door closed.\n\nThis would never have happened if the men hadn't rushed her that Saturday she ordered the clothes. She should have spared a few more minutes to pick her own designs\u2014no, that would have taken much longer than a few minutes, as particular as she was. But she should really have taken the blouses right back to Mrs. Martin, and she would have if she weren't so afraid to venture into town again.\n\nShe moved back to the bed to finish undressing but stopped midway when someone pounded a bit too loudly on her door. Oh, God, now what? A number of disasters came to mind, including the thought that a member of her family was pounding on her door, which had her leaping toward the door to open it.\n\nBut it was just Hunter, who looked unusually harried. He didn't even say anything, just grabbed her hand and started pulling her down the hall. She smelled for smoke. None. She couldn't think what else would have him rushing like this.\n\nHalfway down the stairs she asked, \"Where are you taking me?\"\n\nHe didn't pause, didn't even glance back as he said, \"Caleb just rode in, and, my God, he's in a panic. He needs a woman and fast, and you're the closest one.\"\n\n\"What?!\"\n\n\"For his wife, Shela. She's having her baby tonight, but our doctor isn't due back in town for another few days.\"\n\n\"She can't wait?\"\n\nAs panicked as he seemed, he still managed to chuckle. \"No, she really can't.\"\n\n\"But I know nothing about childbirth!\"\n\n\"You don't have to. Shela does. This is her second. Didn't I mention that to you last week? You just need to be there to catch the baby when it comes out.\"\n\n\"Caleb knows his wife\u2014intimately. So why can't he do that?\"\n\n\"You'd think, wouldn't you? But he tried it with the first one and fainted before it came out. No, he's useless in that regard.\"\n\nWhat made Hunter think she wouldn't faint, too? Just because she was a woman? Was this another of those situations these men believed a woman could handle due to her natural feminine instincts? Probably.\n\nThey'd reached the stable before Tiffany remembered what she was wearing and her cheeks lit up. \"I'm not dressed to go anywhere. Let me go back and change.\"\n\n\"There's no time for proper tonight, Red.\"\n\n\"I at least need a jacket! Or your shirt. Yes, that will do nicely.\"\n\nHe tossed his jacket at her, then tossed her up on a horse. Someone had already saddled two for them. Caleb must have woken one of the hands to do so before he raced back home.\n\n\"I sent Cole to town, just in case the doc got back early,\" Hunter said. \"But that isn't likely when he's more often late than on time.\"\n\nShe put the jacket on quickly before she grabbed her reins. She still wanted no part of this. \"Why didn't you get Pearl or Luella instead? They probably know much more\u2014\"\n\n\"Couldn't,\" he cut in as he mounted. \"Luella visits her folks twice a week. Tonight's one of those times. And Caleb won't let Pearl near his place after she tried to seduce him when Shela was eight months pregnant with the last kid. That leaves you.\"\n\nThat hussy! How many men was Pearl sleeping with? Tiffany had to warn Roy before he succumbed to her wiles.\n\nThey rode out. The moon on the unclouded horizon to the east provided light so they could see the narrow trail. She couldn't count the lightning flashes that rent the northwestern night sky. They were so far in the distance, the storm they heralded could easily dissipate and not affect the Triple C.\n\nShe kept asking Hunter how much longer, but he probably didn't hear her they were riding so fast. Yet her nervousness was building just as fast. She couldn't do this. It was so far out of her realm of experience, she was sure she'd faint just like Caleb, and then who would help the baby?\n\nShe was frozen with that fear when they reached Caleb's cabin. Hunter actually had to drag her off the horse and pull her inside. But the first thing they heard when they walked into the main room was the cry of a baby. Tiffany's relief was instantaneous!\n\n\"Looks like you're off the hook, Red.\" Hunter moved to one of two doors in the room and knocked on it.\n\nCaleb opened the door. He wasn't tall, but he was a handsome man around Hunter's age\u2014which explained why Pearl had tried to tempt him when she wouldn't get anything from him other than sex. He was holding a bundle in the crook of one arm and stepped out into the room with it, closing the door behind him.\n\n\"It's a boy this time,\" he said proudly, beaming at them. \"I didn't know Shela was this close. She'd had one false go last week, when she thought the baby was coming, but the pains were gone before I got home, so she didn't even mention it, foolish woman. But she thought this one was false, too, since it's early, so she didn't tell me when I rode in for lunch today. It scares the heck out of me when I think it could have happened when I rode for help.\"\n\n\"Ma told me once, only the first one takes forever,\" Hunter remarked. \"The rest pop out easier and much quicker. Usually. Least they did for her.\"\n\n\"And you couldn't mention that to me?\" Caleb replied.\n\nHunter shrugged. \"Figured Shela would know that.\"\n\nThere it was again, his assumption that women instinctively knew everything about home and family matters. Tiffany rolled her eyes. Hunter took a moment to introduce her properly to Caleb before she asked, \"So the baby didn't need catching?\"\n\nCaleb grinned bashfully at them. \"I managed not to faint this time I was so shocked when I walked in the door and she screamed at me, 'Get your ass over here!' \" After he and Hunter enjoyed a good laugh, Caleb said, \"Would you mind, ma'am?\" and handed the bundle to Tiffany before she could reply. \"I've cleaned him up, but I want to check on Shela. Poor thing, she's exhausted and is falling asleep.\"\n\nHe disappeared into the bedroom. Hunter was heading to the front door, saying, \"I reckon we'll be here a bit, so I need to put the horses away. Be back in a minute.\"\n\nSuddenly she was alone with a baby. Oddly, she didn't panic this time. She walked slowly about the room. There wasn't much space to do so. This house was more what she'd expected the Callahans to be living in, minus logs for walls. It was just one big, open room with parlor furniture in one corner, a dining table in another, and a kitchen in yet another, with just two bedrooms tucked into the last corner. There was no stove for cooking, which was probably why the fireplace was still lit and made the room uncomfortably warm. But it was big enough for a small family, she supposed, and homey looking, with crocheted doilies everywhere, even little round ones under the knickknacks.\n\nShe finally sat down on the sofa and pulled back the blanket a little when the baby made a noise. It was so tiny! And funny looking with no hair and a face that was nearly red. His hands were moving, at least the one that was out of the blanket, though his eyes were closed. He was adorable and she started whispering silly things to it. Which is what Hunter caught her doing when he came back in.\n\n\"You're going to make a good mother,\" he whispered so he wouldn't disturb the baby. She grinned even as she blushed at the compliment. She guessed some things did come naturally to women after all.\n\n\"I think he's awake,\" she said. \"I'm not really sure, since he won't open his eyes.\"\n\nHunter sat down next to her to have a look at the baby, so close that their shoulders touched. He was grinning, too. He liked babies?\n\nThen he added, \"Let me check on their little girl. Don't think she's much older than four. She might be lying in her room terrified, after all that screaming.\"\n\n\"What screaming?\"\n\n\"Birthing can get pretty loud.\"\n\nHe disappeared again, but was back in a moment. \"She must have slept through it, or she's back to sleep again now that it's quiet.\"\n\nTiffany nodded and stood up. \"Can you hold him for a moment? With this jacket and a blanket in my arms, I feel like I'm going to melt, it's so hot in here.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said without hesitation, and took the infant from her.\n\nShe quickly shrugged out of the jacket and draped it over the back of the sofa, then held her arms out for the baby again. Hunter didn't immediately move, his eyes on her half-exposed breasts. She'd kept the jacket buttoned, so he hadn't seen what she was wearing until now.\n\nShe'd thought she could take off the jacket without blushing, but she was wrong. \"I warned you I wasn't dressed to go out.\" She moved closer to him and took the baby from his arms. Holding the little bundle in such a way that it blocked Hunter's view of her breasts, she sat on the sofa again.\n\n\"Sorry, that was just\u2014unexpected,\" he said, and moved over toward the fireplace. But when he turned to face her again, he actually drew in his breath. His eyes were on her face, so she didn't understand until he said, \"Your hair lights up like a flame in the firelight. I'm glad I didn't have to wait until winter to see that.\"\n\n\"It's just\u2014just your imagination.\"\n\n\"Is it?\" he said huskily. \"What about your eyes gleaming when you look at me? That's not my imagination, Jenny.\"\n\n\"A reflection\u2014\"\n\nShe was too tongue-tied to go on, with his looking at her like that. Fire was reflected in his eyes, and yet\u2014the fire was behind him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Tiffany didn't know what might have happened if the rain hadn't arrived with a vengeance. It sounded like a stampede of animals approaching before it pounded so loudly on the roof she thought for a moment that the house was coming down. The baby even started crying, though she was able to quickly quiet it with soothing assurances.\n\nBut she couldn't quiet her own panic, which had nothing to do with the summer storm. She was beginning to like this man, too much. And what she'd just felt with his looking at her so sensually, what was that? She was still a little breathless from it.\n\nShe needed to get out of here, not the house, but the territory, before her feelings for Hunter got even stronger and she started thinking it might not be so bad to actually marry him. But it was going to be another day or two before she heard back from her mother on her first letter, and another few days after that before she heard on the second letter. Before the end of the week, surely. Then she could jump on the next train out and put all this behind her.\n\n\"We'll have to sleep here tonight,\" Hunter said, looking a little exasperated now.\n\nWhere? she wondered. This house was too small to accommodate guests, and this room was still much too hot to sleep in. She'd just as soon ride home in the rain\u2014no, she wouldn't. It had blown in fast and the trails were surely muddy. Maybe it would blow out just as fast and they could still get back to the Triple C tonight.\n\n\"Had a feeling that storm was heading our way,\" Caleb said as he rejoined them. \"Least you didn't get caught in it.\"\n\nHunter shrugged. \"To be expected at this time of the year.\"\n\n\"This is the rainy season?\" Tiffany asked.\n\n\"Midspring to midsummer, so we're still smack in the middle of it,\" Hunter replied.\n\n\"You're welcome to sleep here for the night,\" Caleb offered.\n\nHe took the baby from Tiffany. She immediately crossed her arms high over her chest.\n\n\"It's too warm in here,\" Hunter declined. \"The barn will do.\"\n\n\"Let me get you some blankets then.\"\n\nIt was easier to just turn her back on Hunter when Caleb left the room. Actually, if they were going outside, she ought to put his jacket back on. She did, but she almost took it back off again because the jacket smelled like him, that distinctive scent of leather and pine trees. That's what she smelled whenever she was close to him, and the idea of being close to him all night was giving her shivers all over!\n\nCaleb returned with the blankets, even one pillow. Thanking them for coming, he promised breakfast in the morning. Hunter handed her the blankets, keeping one to flip over their backs. He held it up and spread it wide in front of them. \"Stay next to me or you'll get drenched.\"\n\nThere were already puddles in the yard everywhere. Tiffany was stepping in them before she saw them, soaking her shoes. At least she took the precaution to bunch her skirt up to her knees with one hand so the hem wouldn't get wet, but they were both laughing like children by the time they reached the barn. Hunter tossed aside the wet blanket and lit a lantern, revealing that the barn also served as a stable, with four stalls, all of them filled now, one with a dairy cow.\n\n\"We'll get up high, away from the smell of the animals,\" he said, looking up. \"There are some bales of hay in the loft. I'll open one to make us a soft bed.\"\n\n\"Two beds.\"\n\n\"We only have two dry blankets left, one to lie down on and one for a cover. So don't be a prude tonight, Red. I don't hanker catching a cold for this good deed.\"\n\nIt wasn't the least bit cold! Of course she was the one wearing his jacket, so she didn't argue about it. The temperature was likely to plummet during the night, rain or no, so he wasn't exaggerating. Each night she'd left her windows open at the ranch, she'd woken in the morning buried under her blankets, the room chilled.\n\nHe hooked the blankets around his neck before climbing the ladder, then had her toss him the pillow so she could follow him up. But throwing something wasn't as easy as it looked, at least not over her head. She missed five times getting the pillow to go in Hunter's direction, which had them both laughing before she made it.\n\nLight from the lantern under the loft reached most of the exposed rafters, but the loft itself was left in dim shadows, though it was certainly enough light to see by. She helped Hunter lay the blanket after he spread the hay. The remaining stacked bales enclosed the makeshift bed like a wraparound headboard.\n\nHe removed his gun holster first, then his belt, before he sat down on the blanket to take off his boots and socks and toss them aside. He then stretched out on his back on one side of the blanket. She'd been looking at him. She hadn't meant to, but she was getting a little nervous over this sleeping arrangement. When he opened the top button on his pants, her eyes flared wide.\n\nShe gasped. \"What are you doing?!\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Not what you think. Just getting a little more comfortable. I'm not exactly used to sleeping in my clothes, but don't worry, they're staying on.\"\n\nShe swung around to give him her back and hide her embarrassment. Had he deliberately planted that image of his undressing in her mind? It was definitely there, and she was suddenly sweltering from heat again.\n\nShe slid out of the jacket, but that didn't seem to help. She finally sat down and took off her shoes. She wasn't about to get under the blanket yet, as hot as she was now.\n\n\"You could share that pillow,\" he suggested idly behind her. \"I'm told I have a soft arm you could use as one.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"My chest is even more comfortable.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"Worth a try.\"\n\nShe couldn't see it but she could hear the grin in his tone. She relented enough to toss him his jacket. \"Use that for a pillow.\"\n\nShe caught his sigh as she lay down on her side of the blanket, as far away from him as she could get, barely an inch from the edge of the blanket. There had to be at least a foot or two between them. Then why did it feel as if they were touching?\n\n\"Snuggle if you get cold, Jenny. I promise I won't mind.\"\n\nHumor was in his tone, but he'd turned away from her as he said it, so she didn't bother answering. She did try to sleep, she really did. But she simply couldn't get comfortable. Her nerves were frayed. Her skin felt so taut. Even her breathing wouldn't settle down. She was aware of and embarrassed by every sound she was making simply because he was making none.\n\nIt must have been an hour later that he said, \"Get some sleep, Red. It will be morning before you know it, hopefully with some sun shining.\"\n\n\"I've never in my life had to share a bed,\" she whispered back. \"I'm not doing it very well, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"There's nothing to it. Cuddle if it's cold. Stay as far apart as possible if you're too hot. Kick me if I snore. I'll try not to do the same if you snore.\"\n\nShe almost laughed. She did relax a little, so she knew that was his intent and thanked him silently. But ten minutes later she was tossing again. She at least tried to do it more quietly now since she realized she'd been keeping him awake, too.\n\nThis was such a bad idea. If she knew how to saddle a horse, she'd ride back to the ranch house herself despite the rain. She had to resign herself to not getting any sleep tonight with this man so close to her.\n\nThen she heard him snoring softly. She opened her eyes. She was facing him. Big mistake. Having had her eyes closed for so long, that dim lantern light below seemed much too bright now. She could see Hunter too clearly. It was actually the first time she could look at him for any length of time without his knowing it and her feeling embarrassed. She took full advantage of that.\n\nHe was on his back again, an arm behind his head. His shirt was mostly unbuttoned. His body was so long! And hard, the muscles so clearly defined. He'd given her leave to snuggle, an excuse to touch him. No, no! She didn't dare. She remembered what had happened when she'd sat on his lap that night in the kitchen. If she got closer to him and started touching him, she had a feeling she might not stop, and then he'd wake and... and... She shied away from that thought, but it still spread heat all over her and turned her breathing heavy.\n\nAnd she still couldn't take her eyes off him. She even looked where she'd never dared to before, at the bulge between his legs. She knew what it was. Her mother had been thorough in explaining the intimacy of the marriage bed to her, even describing the male body and the changes it would undergo in that bed. On Hunter it looked a little too big. That had to be uncomfortable for him. Then her eyes flared wide. Did it really just move?\n\nSeveral minutes later she realized he wasn't snoring anymore. Her gaze shot up to his face to find his eyes open and staring at her.\n\n\"You weren't asleep?\" she whispered.\n\nHe groaned before he admitted, \"I faked it, so you could relax. Why aren't you asleep?\"\n\nShe didn't answer. She didn't know! She was just so pent up with what he made her feel, and he hadn't even been trying to make her feel anything, just the opposite. But it was still there, the heat coursing through her, the high tempo of her pulse, the fraught tension, as if something inside her were going to explode if it didn't get out.\n\nIt must have been some yearning in her expression that made him groan again. \"It was killing me, but I swore I wouldn't take advantage of you tonight.\"\n\n\"Swore to whom?\"\n\n\"Myself.\"\n\n\"Unswear.\"\n\nDid she really say that? She must have because she met him halfway in the middle of that blanket. The explosion did occur, all her inhibitions let go. She was kissing him, aggressively, passionately, and soaking in every nuance of his doing the same. But it wasn't enough. God, she couldn't get close enough to him.\n\nHe tore off his shirt, pulled her loose blouse off so quickly she barely noticed. His skin was so hot she was afraid to touch it, but she did anyway, had to, thought she would scream if she couldn't. Something was still building in her. Kissing him was immensely pleasant, deeply satisfying, but it still didn't stop the clamoring inside her for something else.\n\n\"How do you make me feel like I'm going to die if I don't taste you? All of you.\"\n\nEven as he said it he began to do that. It was too much and yet she wouldn't have stopped him for the world. Down her neck and shoulders, to her breasts and beyond. He'd been serious, he intended to kiss and taste every inch of her. He even licked her palms and sucked on every finger! Everything tingled even as she was scalded by the heat of his mouth.\n\n\"Help me,\" she gasped when she could catch a breath. She couldn't catch many she was panting so hard.\n\n\"Anything. Just tell me\u2014\"\n\n\"Now!\"\n\nShe didn't even know what she was begging for. An end certainly. It was too much pleasure all at once and yet, not enough. That didn't even make sense in her frazzled mind. But he knew, and an ecstatic cry was wrenched from her as he gave her what she needed, him, in the deepest part of her. She held on tightly to him, her arms wrapped around his neck as the throbbing waves were soon flowing through her clear to her curling toes. She could never have imagined something so beautiful and perfectly satisfying to burst from so much frantic yearning.\n\nShe continued to marvel at what he'd given her even as she heard him reach his own ecstasy. After a few more moments he moved to her side, pulling her with him. She felt his lips soft on her brow and then a final kiss, so tender, so\u2014loving. She would probably have cried from the emotion it inspired if she weren't still surrounded by such lush languor she couldn't move, couldn't speak. She'd sort it out in the morning, but right then, she finally felt comfortable enough to snuggle against him and fall asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Tiffany woke first but didn't move an inch. She was facing away from Hunter but could still feel the length of him pressed to her back and curled legs. Her head was on an arm he'd extended. His hand rested on the pillow she was staring at on the far side of the blanket. Neither of them had ended up using that pillow. That might have made her laugh if she wasn't feeling so\u2014so\u2014like tears were imminent.\n\nShe was going to have to lie to him, a lot. She'd have to tell him that what had happened was a mistake and that it couldn't happen again. Fianc\u00e9, honor of that commitment, she'd break out every excuse, even the truth if she had to. Because what they'd done was a mistake.\n\n\"Ready to go find a preacher?\"\n\nShe blinked. That didn't sound like a philanderer talking. He was probably just teasing. Of course he was, that was his forte, after all. By the end of the week she would be gone with her mother's permission. Hunter would never have to find out who she really was. He would forget her completely\u2014and why did she feel like crying?\n\nHe suddenly leaned up to kiss her bare shoulder, then her cheek. \"You're going to be the prettiest bride the territory has ever seen.\"\n\nOh, God, he was serious? Tears filled her eyes, he sounded so happy! What had she done, giving herself to this incredible man she couldn't have? He didn't even know who she really was. If he did...\n\nShe stood up abruptly and started dressing. \"I can't talk about this right now. I\u2014I didn't expect this to happen.\"\n\n\"I understand. You're probably feeling bad because of that man you said you'd marry, but don't. He was a fool to let you get away. You have to know by now he wasn't right for you.\"\n\nEvery word he said was making her feel worse. He wanted to marry a woman who didn't exist.\n\nShe swiped at her cheeks to remove the wetness before she said, \"I want to get back to the ranch before anyone discovers we were out all night.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I've got a lot of explaining to do to my pa, but I don't care, I'm telling him I'm marrying you, not Tiffany Warren.\"\n\nThe tears returned with a vengeance. She continued to swipe at them. He didn't notice since he was dressing.\n\n\"So you don't want Caleb's breakfast first?\"\n\n\"I'm not hungry,\" she lied, praying her stomach wouldn't betray her. \"If you could just saddle me a horse, I can probably find my way back easy enough.\"\n\n\"You know that's not happening, you riding alone. But we can head out now if you want. Come to think of it, I'd rather have your cooking anyway, as good as it's gotten.\"\n\nShe didn't get a chance to reply to that compliment. He suddenly swung her about, right into his arms, and kissed her lazily.\n\n\"Good morning, Red.\" He grinned down at her. \"It is, ain't it? Best damn morning ever!\"\n\nHe let her go with a gentle swat to her rump, shrugged into his shirt without buttoning it yet, and headed down the ladder. She dropped to her knees as soon as he was out of sight and let the tears flow freely. Why did he have to be a cowboy? Why couldn't she have met him in New York? Of course then everything she liked about him wouldn't be there. He wouldn't be Hunter, teasing, laughing, charming, carefree, courageous, gallant\u2014Hunter.\n\nIt was a short ride back to the ranch. Not actually short, just much faster than last night's ride. He stopped at the front porch so she could go on inside before he put the horses away. She was off the horse before he could dismount to help her. But she didn't make it inside the house before he could detain her.\n\nHe did that with the suggestion \"How about joining me on a picnic at the lake sometime this week?\"\n\nShe groaned to herself. But she needed to act naturally, say what he expected to hear. She couldn't tell him yet why she wouldn't marry him. She would start crying again if she tried. Last night had been so beautiful! Why did she have to find that out?\n\nSo she turned and said, \"If you'll fish for dinner.\" Then, realizing Jennifer wouldn't have said that, she added, \"I suppose you expect me to fill a basket with food for it?\"\n\n\"No, of course not!\" He was lying, he'd obviously thought just that. \"I can arrange for a basket from town.\"\n\nIt might have been a fun thing to do if she didn't have new dilemmas to deal with now. But it might also be her last opportunity to talk him into doing something about the feud that didn't include violence. Obviously she couldn't do it now. She was simply going to slip away in a few days and be gone without any good-byes, and maybe without having to meet her father at all\u2014which was the only bright spot in all this bleakness.\n\nShe nodded and slipped inside, but didn't get far enough away not to hear, \"Red, get my pa. Looks like trouble is riding in.\"\n\nShe peeked back outside and looked in the direction Hunter was facing. A small army, still a few minutes away, was riding fast toward the ranch. She raced upstairs to pound on Mary's door. It was still early enough that Zachary might still be in there.\n\nMary bid her enter. Tiffany said immediately, \"Your husband?\"\n\n\"In the kitchen making me some breakfast. Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"There's a very large group of men riding this way. Hunter called it trouble.\"\n\nMary threw back her covers. \"Hand me that hobbler.\"\n\nTiffany was surprised, but did as requested. \"You can get out of bed?\"\n\n\"I'm almost mended. Still need support though, and still too soon to attempt the stairs. Go on and let Zach know. And you stay out of the way, gal. Don't want you getting hurt if this turns nasty.\"\n\nTiffany rushed back out of the room. Violent was what Mary had meant, and Tiffany immediately thought of the miners. Were they coming en masse to slaughter the Callahans? Total massacre, leaving no evidence behind to point the blame on them? And her family would probably end up getting blamed.\n\nShe glanced at the rifles hung on the parlor wall as she flew back downstairs. She wished she'd asked Hunter to teach her how to use one. But she'd grab one anyway and use it if she had to. But first she found Zachary, told him what Hunter had said, and followed him back toward the front porch, just more slowly. But the shouting had already started.\n\n\"Zachary! The gossip in town says you've got an Easterner under your roof that should be under mine. Get out here and prove me wrong!\"\n\nTiffany froze. His roof? Oh, God, don't let that be her father!\n\nBut whoever it was, Zachary was amused. He was chuckling before he stepped out on the porch. \"So you found out?\"\n\n\"Then it's true?\"\n\n\"We offered her more money than you did. She works here now, and this is where she's staying, so don't even think of topping my offer. She's needed here. She's not needed at your place.\"\n\n\"You expect me to believe that? You're holding her prisoner!\"\n\nZachary snorted. \"That's pure nonsense.\"\n\n\"Prove it!\"\n\n\"You calling me a liar, Frank?\" Zachary asked in an ominous tone.\n\nHe was standing at the top of the porch steps. Tiffany saw him draw his gun with that last question. She couldn't see much of the riders spread out in front of the house. There were too many of them. Frank had come to do battle. He'd brought his sons and all his hired hands with him, and he'd come here angry. Now Zachary was angry, too. And Tiffany couldn't move! That her father was out there had her rooted to the spot.\n\n\"You are a liar, Zach! You had your chance to say she was here when we last spoke. You didn't because\u2014\"\n\n\"I think what ya'll are going to do is get the hell off my property and right now, before Frank takes the first bullet!\"\n\n\"You'll be dead before you fire,\" Frank countered.\n\nA new voice intervened, somewhat angry, too, but not as angry as the voices of the two elder men. \"We just need to hear it from her, that she's here by choice.\"\n\nThat was her brother Roy! She was going to kill him. He knew what would happen if they saw her. But would it? Frank had no idea of what his own daughter looked like. He'd never bothered to find out. So Roy must be trying to force her hand, so she'd go home with them. He wouldn't think it a betrayal of her confidence, but it was!\n\nThen she heard Hunter say, \"He's right. I'll fetch her.\"\n\nRun! Run out the back, get a horse and ride to town. Now! Now!\n\nShe was still frozen in place when Hunter took her arm to escort her outside, saying softly, \"Just tell them you're not here against your will, Jenny, and they'll go away.\"\n\nShe looked up at him frantically. \"Don't make me go out there, please!\"\n\n\"It'll be fine, I promise.\"\n\nShe dug in her heels. He still pulled her out on the porch anyway. He didn't understand. He figured he could protect her. He'd be throwing her to the wolves himself in a moment. This could make the feud escalate, if they all didn't kill each other right there. It could be history repeating itself!\n\n\"Tiffany?!\"\n\nIt wasn't Sam or Roy or her father who said her name in utter amazement. It was her brother Carl, and every eye was on her now. It was easy to spot Franklin front and center in the group. The oldest of the riders, he was also a combination of her brothers in looks. Blond and broad shouldered. A handsome man. A furious man. No wonder her mother had left him. He looked as if he were going to kill someone, and that someone might even be her.\n\nBut it was Zachary he turned his heated green eyes on, accusing, \"You son of a bitch, you knew all along, didn't you?\"\n\n\"What the hell are you talking about?\" Zachary demanded, then turned his gaze on Tiffany. \"What's going on here, Miss Fleming?\"\n\nTiffany couldn't have answered if she tried, she was so shocked by the anger and accusations, and then she heard Hunter's voice beside her: \"Jenny? Tell them they're making a mistake.\" Oh, God...\n\n\"She's my daughter,\" Frank said furiously. \"Stop pretending you didn't know. She looks too much like Rose for you not to!\"\n\n\"Like hell,\" Zachary snarled back. \"Rarely saw your wife to remember what she looked like. Bastard! You sent your girl here to spy on us? Like that ain't obvious. The wedding is off and that dumb truce with it!\"\n\n\"Damned right it is! Should have known better than to trust a Cal\u2014\"\n\nA single shot was fired. A half dozen hands reached for their own guns, but only in surprise. The sound had come from above. The riders were all looking at one of the windows upstairs. Zachary even stepped off the porch to stand next to Frank's horse so he could see above the porch roof himself.\n\n\"Now, Mary,\" he began in a conciliatory tone.\n\n\"It's my turn, Zach, so hush up,\" Mary said. \"The men in our two families never did have a lick of sense where the old feud was concerned, but us women knew better. The wedding will go on, just as Rose and I arranged it years ago. And, Frank, since you're going to be depriving us of the best cook in the territory, we'll be coming to your place tomorrow night for dinner. We can get this sorted out then\u2014peacefully, hear?\"\n\nFrank didn't agree or refuse, but he did put his shotgun away before he said to his sons, \"Get your sister.\"\n\nAll three of her brothers started to dismount, but no one had to get her. Numbly, Tiffany walked to Sam's horse. He extended a hand and she got on it behind him. She didn't look at her father again, didn't care what he thought, didn't care how angry he was with her. Once she got over the shock of being discovered, she intended to tell him exactly why she'd done something this drastic\u2014because of him!\n\nThe two main antagonists said nothing more to each other. Mary was still leaning out of a window upstairs, a rifle cradled in her arms, though she did wave at Tiffany as they rode off. Hunter was still on the porch. The last thing she saw was his expression. Along with the hurt in his eyes, he looked absolutely furious." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "The Warren ranch looked much like the Triple C. The house was just as big, but it was made of stone instead of wood. Tiffany knew it couldn't have been like this twenty years ago when Rose had come here as a bride, yet her mother had said Tiffany would feel right at home here. Frank must have built a bigger, more comfortable house just for Rose to give his new wife a home that was more like what she was accustomed to. Tiffany found it hard to believe that her sophisticated mother, who lived a luxurious life in New York City, had ever lived here. Tiffany had lived here, too. But she'd been so young then she had no memories of it. She sure didn't feel as if she was coming home.\n\nSam had tried to tell her on the ride to the ranch, \"It wasn't me,\" but she hadn't responded. The hurt she felt was like a fist tightening around her heart. What had she expected? For Frank to gather her in his arms in front of all those Callahans and his own hired hands and tell her how much he loved her, missed her, wished Rose had never taken her away? Why not? He was her father! But he hadn't said one word to her!\n\nWhen they arrived at the house, she hurried inside with Sam close on her heels. She was frantic. If Frank came in and said anything to her right then, all the pain and rage she was feeling would spew out, so she begged her brother, \"Show me to my room and quickly. Please!\"\n\nThe note of panic in her voice must have convinced him to go along with her plan, and he led the way upstairs. She was going to barricade herself until she heard from Rose, then just sneak off as her mother had done. Sam could do the explaining for her. There wouldn't be any dinner with the Callahans. There wouldn't be a confrontation with that heartless man who had sired her. And she certainly wasn't going to marry Hunter even if he could forgive her. Actually, she hoped he wouldn't. It would be so much easier to leave here if she didn't have to see him again.\n\nSam said it again as he followed her into the room he'd opened for her, \"It wasn't me or Roy who told Pa, but Roy wanted to. He argued with me like crazy about it. I finally had to pound on him some to get him to agree to silence. But I think I would have told Pa anyway pretty soon. Guilt was eating me up, keeping silent. It just wasn't right, Tiff. You belong here with us.\"\n\n\"And now everyone's angry,\" she replied tonelessly.\n\n\"Pa sure was this morning,\" he agreed. \"We were riding out to the range when Herb, one of the hands, got up the nerve to tell him what he heard in town over the weekend. You were seen more'n once with the Callahans. Doesn't take much to start townspeople to speculating and gossiping about new folks. No one guessed it was you, but they did think you were the expected housekeeper lured to the wrong camp. I think Pa was more angry that Zachary didn't tell him about his one-up prank when he had the chance to. But Hunter looked hurt before it sunk in and he got angry, too. Understandable, when you'd been eavesdropping in plain sight over there. Was it worth it?\"\n\nTiffany stiffened, her guilt showing up. She'd made such a mess of things. The Callahans already had a low opinion of her, and now? So very much worse.\n\nBut to answer his question, she said, \"Yes, actually. They're no different than you are. They're nice people when you get to know them. But because of that old feud, neither side ever got the chance to. Because of it, they feel like you do. Hunter even admitted to me that he couldn't trust himself not to hate me if we married.\"\n\n\"You mean hate the woman he hadn't met yet?\"\n\nShe blushed. \"Yes, but he said no matter what he felt about her\u2014me\u2014the hate would always get in the way because he's lived with it all his life.\"\n\nSam mulled that over. \"I never liked Hunter because of who he is, but I respected him. He never picked on me or my brothers when he could have. He was so much older and bigger than any of us. John now, that man seems to be angry at the world, and he was the same when he was a boy. He goaded us every chance he got, hoping for a fight. But one of his brothers always stopped him. Most often it was Hunter who did. I think their parents had a standing order going, to leave us alone\u2014because of the truce.\"\n\n\"Some truce,\" she muttered, \"when both sides still revile each other.\"\n\nSam actually grinned at that. \"It's hard to let go of something that entertaining.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed on him. \"What did you just say?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"Don't know about our parents, but the boys on both sides have pulled our fair share of pranks.\"\n\n\"You don't remember the shootings, obviously, or you wouldn't say that.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I grew up with the truce, Tiff, same as Hunter and his brothers. We never witnessed anyone getting killed. That was before we were born. Now I'll send one of the men back to fetch your belongings today. I assume Mary Callahan will let him do that. She's always been friendly when we'd run into her in town\u2014not like her menfolk.\"\n\n\"I don't want to see anyone, Sam.\"\n\n\"You mean Pa?\"\n\n\"Yes, I mean your father.\"\n\n\"He's yours, too.\"\n\nThat statement hit her hard. \"He's not mine! When has he ever been mine?!\"\n\n\"When I held you after you were born,\" Franklin said softly from the doorway. He nodded Sam out of the room before he continued, \"When I fed you before you could hold a spoon. When I rocked you to sleep at night. When I sat by your bed all night long when you caught your first cold, because your mother was terrified you'd choke in your sleep. When I kept you from falling when you took your first wobbly steps. When\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop it!\" Tiffany cried, the pain tightening, choking her. \"You expect me to believe things I have no memory of? I have no memories of you! Not one! Where were you when it would have mattered? Where were you when I needed you? And now it's too late. You want to know why I really pretended to be someone else? Because I'd rather live with your enemies than with a father who cared so little about me that he couldn't visit even once in all these years!\"\n\nShe turned her back on him so he wouldn't see the tears she couldn't hold back any longer. They streamed down her cheeks, pouring out with the pain of his indifference, the pain of his absence, the pain...\n\n\"This was your room,\" he said in that same soft voice. \"At the beginning of the year I had it readied for your return, but until then, it still had all your baby things in it. I would come in here every night before bed to tuck you in\u2014in my mind. I knew you weren't here, but I could imagine you were. I missed you so much, Tiffany. It was a double blow, when Rose left me, taking you with her.\"\n\nIt sounded sincere, but she wasn't fooled. My God, did he really think she would believe his lies at this point? Why couldn't he just admit the truth? He might have doted on her as a baby, but he forgot about her as soon as she was gone. She would never believe otherwise because she had the proof, fifteen long years of proof.\n\nShe couldn't bear any more of this\u2014of him. Barely getting the words out past the lump in her throat, she said, \"I must ask you to leave my room. I'll stay here for the time being, but I would prefer that you and I dispense with the pretense. If you can't respect my wishes, then I will stay in town until I hear from my mother.\"\n\n\"Tiffany\u2014\"\n\n\"Please! Not another word!\"\n\nThe door closed. She glanced back to make sure he was gone before she collapsed to her knees where she was. She put a hand over her mouth to silence the sobs. She didn't understand. This shouldn't still hurt so much after all these years. She should be rejoicing instead that she'd finally shown him that she didn't care either..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Zachary had wanted to talk. Hunter didn't. His horse was still hitched to the post in front of the house. As soon as the Warrens rode off, he did, too. Zachary yelled at him to stop. In moments Hunter couldn't hear him anymore.\n\nHe rode to town in a straight path that avoided the stretch of road where he'd seen the Warrens. At the Blue Ribbon Saloon he ordered a bottle of whiskey. Someone spoke to him at the bar, laughing and drunk. His fist flew. He didn't even know whom he'd hit, didn't care whom he'd have to apologize to later. He just grabbed the bottle and left. But he hoped he'd see a few of the miners on the street. He'd be happy to take out what he was feeling on them. He didn't get lucky, didn't spot a single one.\n\nHe left Nashart and rode all day, he couldn't even remember where. By noon half the bottle was empty. It hadn't done what he wanted. Her image stayed with him, riding off with her family, expressionless, not one bit of guilt or remorse on her face for what she'd done. He finished the rest of the bottle and continued to ride aimlessly.\n\nThe second half of the bottle worked, just not nearly long enough. But it opened a flood of other memories. Jenny roping a cow and laughing at herself over how long it took her. Jenny making beds, washing dishes, cooking for them. It was a wonder she hadn't poisoned their food. Jenny trying to put out a fire even when she didn't know how\u2014or would the truth come out now, that she had started it?\n\nWas this her idea of fun, snooping on his family? Had she been laughing at them all along for believing her housekeeper story? And what an idiot he was, telling her how he felt about his fianc\u00e9e\u2014her! He wouldn't put anything past that woman who'd tricked him into... There was no point in denying it. Her deception was killing him because he was in love with her. And it had happened so fast! He'd seen it coming and had tried to stop it. But seeing her with Caleb's newborn son had clinched it. He was in love with a woman who didn't exist!\n\nHe was sober again before he let Patches find their way home. The sun was setting. My God, he'd never see a sunset again without thinking of her and her enjoyment of them. That he could believe, but nothing else.\n\nHe entered through the kitchen. A mistake. He was going to have to avoid that room like the plague when he could see her everywhere in it. Andrew was the only one there now. He was reading Jenny's cookbook as he stirred whatever was in the pot on the stove. So he was going to take over her job?\n\nMaximilian rushed into the room at the sound of the door's opening, then disappeared back down the hall when he saw it wasn't his mistress coming home. Hunter wanted to laugh every time he saw that pig following Jenny about. She hadn't taken it with her. No, course she wouldn't, it had all been an act, especially her affection for a pig\n\nWarily, probably because of Hunter's expression, Andrew whispered, \"I didn't know\u2014\"\n\n\"Shut up, kid\" was all Hunter said as he passed through the kitchen.\n\nHe thought he could get away with slipping up to his room unnoticed and locking the door. But his parents were in the parlor, both of them. Both were staring at him the moment he came into view by the stairs.\n\nHe was surprised enough to stop. \"How'd you get down here, Ma?\"\n\n\"I carried her down,\" Zachary grumbled. \"We've been waiting here all day for you! She refused to go back upstairs, afraid you'd try to sneak in without us noticing.\"\n\n\"I tried,\" Hunter admitted with a shrug. \"I don't want to talk.\"\n\n\"Sit down,\" Mary said softly.\n\nIt was one thing to disobey Zachary. Hunter did that often enough, two males butting heads. But it was quite another thing not to comply with his mother's dictates. He sat down, but he immediately changed seats to sit next to his mother on the sofa so the poker table wouldn't be in his view. More damn memories of fun and laughter with Jenny that just made him even angrier now. Could she really have faked it all? He'd even thought that night that he'd never go to town on a Saturday night again if he could spend them all with her instead. What a fool he'd been!\n\n\"Don't pretend you're not going to be a happy groom now,\" Zachary began. \"You were all over that gal from the moment she got here.\"\n\n\"All over Jenny, yeah,\" Hunter said coldly. \"But that's not who rode off from here today.\"\n\n\"So what if she fooled us,\" Zachary replied. \"We got to see what she's really like, and let me tell you, I'm damned glad she's not the snooty, high-muck-a-muck society gal I was expecting.\"\n\n\"Isn't she?\" Hunter asked angrily. \"You haven't figured out yet that she was acting a part? What you saw and heard wasn't the real girl, just a role she was playing.\"\n\nThe pig clip-clopped down the hall at the sound of their voices, apparently still hoping to find his mistress. Max stopped there at the bottom of the stairs staring at them, almost accusingly, as if he were blaming them for her absence. Zachary threw one of Mary's small, embroidered pillows at it, making it squeal and trot off upstairs.\n\n\"That damn pig,\" Zachary grumbled. \"You need to take it to her tomorrow, Hunter.\"\n\n\"Why? She'll just send it to their kitchen for dinner. Do you really think she befriended a pig of all animals? It was just another part of her deception. In fact, I don't doubt she was meticulously deliberate in doing the exact opposite of what she'd really do, just so we wouldn't make the connection between Jennifer Fleming and Tiffany Warren.\"\n\n\"What connection?\" Zachary demanded gruffly. \"Them both arriving from the East at the same time? Them both having that pretty red hair? We would have just thought it was coincidence.\"\n\n\"Yeah\u2014unless she behaved the way she usually behaves, then we would have guessed pretty damn quickly. It hasn't sunk in yet, Pa? She is that cold, snooty Easterner you were expecting her to be.\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Mary disagreed. \"Keep in mind, your brothers approached her, she didn't approach them. And for whatever reason she went along with it, she came to us expecting to be just a housekeeper, which isn't a strenuous job in the least, but we put her to work instead, real work. If she's the spoiled, uppity rich gal you're both now thinking she is, she would have quit right away. Society ladies don't get their hands dirty. They always have a personal maid close to hand, too.\"\n\nHunter snorted. \"Now you mention it, she's visited a woman at the hotel in town. Said she was an acquaintance she met on the train, but it's probably her maid. The real Tiffany Warren wouldn't have traveled this far alone, would she?\"\n\n\"No, she wouldn't,\" Mary agreed, but reminded him, \"We don't know why she did this yet.\"\n\n\"To spy for her pa, of course,\" Zachary reasserted his earlier guess.\n\n\"To what purpose?\" Mary interrupted. \"We have nothing to hide. If anything, this smacks more of a prank and a whopper, to top any her brothers ever pulled. The Warren boys might even have talked her into it, but her father certainly wouldn't have. Yet, I don't really believe that, either. It's just far more likely than spying.\"\n\n\"Does it matter why?\" Hunter said. \"The fact remains, she's a liar and a damn good one. We'll never be able to believe a word she says now.\"\n\nMary patted his hand. \"I know you're angry. You have every right to be. You can even direct some of it at me because I could see Rose in her, not clearly, but enough to make me wonder. Yet I said nothing.\"\n\n\"Why the hell not?\" Zachary asked.\n\n\"Because you stubborn jackasses would have gotten all up in arms about it,\" Mary replied, staring at her husband pointedly. \"And because I figured she had her reasons. And also because I sensed kindness in her. She'd have to be the best actress in the world to fake that.\"\n\nHunter stood up to leave. His head was starting to ache from all the possibilities, none of them good. \"I'm going to bed.\"\n\n\"You're not going to eat first? Your pa talked that boy into taking over Jenny's, that is, Tiffany's job.\"\n\n\"I've got a bottle of rotgut in me; food doesn't have a chance of staying down tonight.\"\n\nMary nodded, promising, \"This will look better in the morning, Hunter. And tomorrow night\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not going with you.\"\n\n\"Of course you will,\" Mary said. \"You'll probably even ride over sooner because you won't be able to stand it, not knowing what her motives were.\"\n\nHunter nodded for his mother's sake, but he didn't agree. He went upstairs and there was the pig again, standing outside Jenny's door, waiting, hoping she'd open it, probably feeling as bereft as he was. Without even thinking about why he did it, Hunter picked Max up and carried him to his room for the night." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Tiffany was enjoying a happy reunion with her brothers at least. That painful knot in her chest eased throughout the day as one by one her brothers visited her in her room, expressing their happiness at seeing her again. Sam must have told Carl and Roy her reasons for staying with the Callahans, the ones she'd told him anyway, because they didn't mention what she'd done, not once.\n\nCarl was adorable. He was so bashful. He'd slicked back his blond hair to show her he was a man now, though he was only sixteen. But he'd always been shy, so it would probably take a few days for him to relax around her.\n\nShe'd expected Roy to be a little more vocal, but dreamer that he was, maybe he understood better than anyone else why she had done something so drastic. He slipped her a poem before he left her, his way of apologizing for being so angry at her in town that day.\n\nBy early afternoon one of the Warrens' hired hands had delivered her trunk of clothes. At Tiffany's request, Sam had gone to town and brought Anna to the Warren Ranch.\n\n\"About time,\" Anna had started to crow in an I-told-you-so tone until she noticed Tiffany's red eyes. Then she amended, \"So it's not your choice to be here then?\"\n\nTiffany had shaken her head. \"And meeting my father was as horrible as I knew it would be. But I'm sure I'll only have to endure it for another few days.\"\n\n\"What's happening in a few days?\"\n\n\"I'm going to get a reprieve and go home where I belong. Will you come with me, or do you prefer working with hammers and saws now?\"\n\n\"I enjoyed it for a few days, but that's how quickly we ran out of work to do, so I was getting bored. This town is still too small for a full-time furniture maker, though it's something I could pitch in on occasionally if you were sticking around. But Mr. Martin didn't really need a helper, he was just lonely, spending every day in his shop by himself.\"\n\nThere was one other surprise. When Sam had gone to town to fetch Anna, he'd run into the postmaster, who told him a package for Tiffany had arrived on the train that morning. It was her mother's response to her first letter. Her mother's having addressed it to Tiffany at the Warren Ranch was indicative of how angry Rose was. Tiffany didn't think her mother had intended to expose her charade because in all likelihood Frank would merely have thought it was something they'd had shipped early to make sure it would be there when Tiffany arrived.\n\nShe was delighted to see it was the cookbooks she'd asked for, French, Italian, even New York favorites, thick volumes all three of them. But no letter was included with them. Tiffany was certain the letter had been addressed to Jennifer Fleming at the Triple C Ranch. How ingenious of her mother. She wanted to make sure Tiffany contacted at least one of her brothers to get the cookbooks. She'd probably been hoping they would make her see how foolish she was being. But Tiffany wasn't eager to read that first letter. Even on paper, Rose was quite capable of shouting. It was the next letter from her mother that she was anxiously awaiting because that was the one that would rescue her.\n\nShe was impatient to join her brothers for dinner and tried to rush Anna in preparing her, but then she laughed at herself. Had she gotten a little too used to how quickly this went without a maid dressing her and styling her hair? She took a deep breath and kept her mouth shut because the result would be worth it. Looking at her reflection in the mirror before she left the room, she was right. She looked like Tiffany again, the real Tiffany." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "She was laughing with her brothers when Franklin walked in to join them. The boys continued to talk excitedly, telling her funny stories and more about what they'd done in the last years since she'd seen them. No one noticed that she'd stopped participating in the conversation. She knew then it had been a mistake to come down for dinner. She'd just been unable to resist her brothers' company.\n\n\"What do you think, Tiff?\" Roy asked her. \"Tiff?\"\n\nHe finally got her attention, though she'd missed the original question. \"Pardon? What did you say?\"\n\n\"How about going for a swim in the lake sometime this week?\"\n\nThat god-awful lake! It was the very reason she was here, contention over water rights. She was bitter enough to say, \"You don't think we'll get shot at?\"\n\nThat definitely put a damper on the merry atmosphere at the dinner table. All three boys looked contrite, when it wasn't even their fault. It was Franklin's fault though, and he didn't look the least bit apologetic for his part in that feud. A little exasperated maybe over her remark. It was obvious now why Rose had married him. Blond, eyes as green as Tiffany's, apparently quiet in demeanor as opposed to tempestuous the way Rose was, and still incredibly handsome, even in his early forties.\n\n\"Can you at least give us one evening to enjoy your company without dredging up the past?\" Frank asked.\n\nShe wished she could, she really did, but not with him sitting at the table. She almost asked him to leave. Almost. But her brothers would no doubt leap to his defense and be upset with her, so she didn't.\n\nInstead, she reminded him, \"It's the only reason I'm here. The past. A feud that none of you have had sense enough to end. I've heard the Callahans' side of it. I'd like to hear your side now.\"\n\n\"We can discuss that if we must.\" Frank even offered a slight smile. \"Not exactly good for the digestion though. Can it wait until after we eat?\"\n\nLevity when his presence infuriated her? But a servant came in with a big bowl of salad that the girl started serving them as the first course. At least Frank had a decent cook, and many servants for that matter. Most of them appeared to be Indian or of Indian descent. After two servants who had looked more Indian than white had filled Tiffany's tub today, her own tub, she'd asked Sam about them. He'd explained that twenty years ago it hadn't been uncommon for Indians to trade their women to the first trappers in the area. The women couldn't go back to their tribes after that, and by the time the Indian wars began, they already had families of their own and weren't involved in the fighting. But because many white men had died in those wars, the prejudice against the Indians intensified, even after the tribes were driven out of the territory. The offspring of those interracial unions had had trouble finding work after the wars. Frank, apparently, didn't share that prejudice, but then he'd been trading with the tribes long before the animosity had started. Which was probably why the Warren Ranch had been spared during the hostilities.\n\nTiffany managed to hold her tongue for the meal. The main course arrived, a chicken casserole smothered in freshly churned cheese. It looked and smelled delicious and made her wonder what Hunter was eating tonight. She hoped it wasn't Jakes's cooking.\n\nThe boys continued talking and laughing. She smiled tepidly when they tried to include her. Frank watched her quietly. Every time she caught him at it, that pain in her chest got worse. It was a wonder she could get any food down, even the cherry cobbler that arrived for dessert. All it did was remind her that she hadn't yet made dessert for the Callahans, or that cake she'd promised the hired hands after they'd cleaned the house.\n\nBut when the last fork was set down, she was done waiting. Her brothers realized that. Sam nodded them out of the room to give her some privacy with her father. She hadn't counted on being alone with him and almost railed at him again, but there was no point. He'd had his chance this morning to mend their breach, but all he'd spoken of was \"thinking\" about her. A fat lot of good his thoughts had done her growing up.\n\nSo she stayed focused on her goal and said, \"I want your feud to end without a marriage because I can't live here. I've led a genteel life. Not once, ever, was it marred by violence until I came here, where I've had guns pointed at me, seen men die in front of me, seen men fighting on the street. I'm going home just as soon as Mama agrees that she never should have sent me here. So before the Callahans come over tomorrow, I want to know why I had to get tangled up in this.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you had to witness\u2014\"\n\n\"Please,\" she cut him off coldly. \"Sam's already mentioned it was probably just bad luck. Whether that's so or not, the fact remains that a marriage isn't going to end what's gone on for three generations. It would stand no chance of succeeding if the only reason for it is to end this feud.\"\n\n\"I didn't think that would be the only reason,\" Frank said. \"I was positive that you would like Hunter. You don't?\"\n\nShe felt like groaning, she was so tired of hearing that question. \"I do, but he's spent his whole life hating Warrens. That will always get in the way. So explain it to me. Why did he have to grow up hating you?\"\n\n\"I suppose the Callahans blamed us when they told you about it?\"\n\n\"I know your feud didn't start here, that it began with a practical joke on Elijah Callahan that went seriously wrong. And your mother, Mariah, shot him the day they were to marry.\" Tiffany recounted the full story Mary Callahan had told her.\n\nHer father nodded. \"She shot him because he cheated on her, plain and simple. That's why she was so furious she married someone else so soon. My father, Richard, even suspected she still loved Elijah, but he still wanted her enough to marry her. However, he ended up hating the Callahans because of it. My God, she had a powerful hate.\"\n\n\"And infected you all with it?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I think some of it was self-directed though, because she knew she was incapable of forgiving the man she loved. She loved him with all her heart. That's why she never let it go...\"\n\nSo her family wasn't entirely to blame? Had Mary purposely left out the part about Elijah's actually cheating on Mariah, or had Elijah been too ashamed to tell his family about his indiscretion? But that didn't explain why the feud moved to Montana.\n\n\"Elijah tried to get away from her,\" Tiffany said. \"Moved his family across the whole continent. Why did she follow him here?\"\n\n\"My mother was a strong, courageous, passionate woman who withstood a lot of heartache and loss in a short time. My father and two brothers died within five years, and she shouldered all the responsibility for our ranch while I was young. After so many deaths in our family, her obsession with Elijah intensified. She was furious when she learned he was moving away from Florida. I didn't know it at the time, but she hired a man to follow him and find out where he settled. Then she started complaining about Florida and suggested we move West to Montana. I was barely eighteen. I didn't suspect she was playing me, to get me to agree to pull up stakes and move up here, though it wasn't actually a bad idea.\"\n\n\"To follow them?\"\n\n\"No, to leave Florida,\" Frank said. \"There were too many ranches fighting over too little land and far too much rustling. Those were her excuses, which were accurate, but easier than telling me the truth, which I would never have agreed with. I was as surprised as the Callahans were to find us settling on land so close to theirs.\"\n\n\"You didn't confront her about it?\"\n\n\"Of course I did. All she said was she needed resolution. Peace. I should have known her definition of peace wasn't the same as mine. Her peace meant killing him. She'd said it enough times over the years, that she should have killed him that fateful night before they were to marry.\"\n\n\"When did they shoot each other?\"\n\n\"It was almost a year after we got here. Zachary came over one morning, demanding to be told where his father was. I didn't know until then that my mother was missing, too. It took us the whole day, but we finally found their trail. They were in an old trapper's cabin. They were lying in each others arms. Their weapons, both of which had been fired, were still in hand or close to it. Theirs were the only fresh tracks up there. We don't know exactly what happened. Maybe they hoped to find happiness together in the next life because they sure couldn't find it together in this one. I can only hope they were able to forgive each other in the end.\"\n\n\"So all you are fighting over now is the water?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. The Callahans blamed my mother for everything, shooting Elijah instead of marrying him, following him here, killing him in the end. The water is just a side issue. I was only eighteen when we came here, Zach was a few years older. He and I couldn't get near each other without accusations flying. I was weaned on hate, Tiffany, we both were. It was hard to let that go even after our parents were gone.\"\n\n\"Do you still hate them?\"\n\n\"More than ever.\"\n\n\"But why?\"\n\n\"Because they drove your mother away.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Tiffany was suddenly reeling. Her father had just given her a reason to hate the Callahans. How could she talk their families into a truce with that now on the table?\n\nBut a few moments later, she frowned. The feud couldn't be the reason her mother had left. That was something Rose could easily have admitted when Tiffany had asked her, but she hadn't\u2014unless she'd kept it from Tiffany because she was afraid her daughter would use the same excuse not to marry Hunter.\n\nBut before Tiffany took up the gauntlet, she demanded, \"Did she actually tell you that?\"\n\n\"No, she wouldn't lay that guilt on me. She came up with so many other excuses instead. Each time I shot one down, she'd drop another on me. She said she hated it here, yet she'd never been happier than when she was designing this house. She said she missed her mother too much, yet we visited her every year and the old gal even came here once. She said her mother finally convinced her she'd made a mistake. She said she'd been told another child would kill her after having too many too quickly. She used that one to move out of my bedroom, yet she couldn't keep her hands off me. She even used that excuse after she was gone, for why she left. It was the only one I believed for a while. So many excuses\u2014and anger, when I tried to talk her into coming back.\"\n\nTiffany shook her head at him. \"So you now blame the Callahans for something you're not even sure they should be blamed for?\"\n\n\"Nothing else makes sense. Fifteen years ago they nearly killed me. It was shortly after I took that bullet that Rose snuck off with you. I think she just realized she couldn't bear to live through something like that again.\"\n\n\"Or she was kind enough not to tell you she'd stopped loving you.\"\n\n\"Don't say that, Tiffany. Please don't.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath. He looked as if she'd just devastated him. She should be pleased, not feel that knot swell in her throat again for hurting him. She leapt to her feet and headed for the door before he noticed the tears gathering in her eyes. She only paused for a moment.\n\nWithout looking at him again she said, \"I don't know why she left any more than you do. But I know why I want to leave. I'm going to suggest tomorrow that your truce with the Callahans become permanent immediately, that both families share the water from now on. Will you agree to it?\"\n\n\"I won't agree to share it without establishing a blood tie between our families that will secure access to the water for future generations. Your mother had the right idea. I want my sons and grandsons to be able to raise cattle on this land we love well into the future.\"\n\nHer cheeks already wet with tears of frustration, she ran out of the dining room. She had to find somewhere private to let the pain out before she rejoined her brothers. She slipped into an empty room. She hoped it was empty. She shouldn't have asked Franklin that question when she already knew the answer. Because like everyone else, he expected her to marry Hunter. How was that going to end anyone's hatred? How could it not just make everything worse?\n\nShe'd only just managed to wipe the blurriness from her eyes and dry her cheeks when Franklin said behind her, \"The Callahans are going to be here tomorrow. I need to know why you pretended to be their housekeeper before they get here.\" His tone was firm now.\n\n\"I'll give them my reasons.\"\n\n\"Letting them in my house is going to be difficult enough, Tiffany. I won't be dealt any more surprises. Why?\"\n\n\"I wanted to see for myself what they're really like because I didn't think they'd behave normally with me due to the feud.\"\n\n\"That's all?\"\n\nShe could have left it at that, but didn't. \"No. Mainly I didn't want to meet you. I didn't think you'd mind, since you never wanted to meet me either.\"\n\n\"If I didn't think you'd tell Rose, I'd give you the whole of it,\" he said in frustration. \"But she can't know.\"\n\n\"Know what?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. As she'd thought. He just wouldn't own up to the truth, that he hadn't cared about her. \"I gave you your answer, now leave me alone.\"\n\nShe didn't hear him leave. She made a point of ignoring him by gazing around the room. It was a study, lightly furnished in oak. A small lamp had been lit on the desk that held many picture frames. Pictures of what? She was curious enough to pick one up, but sucked in her breath when she saw it was a framed letter in a childish scrawl\u2014a letter from her. She picked up another. Another of her letters to the father she'd loved, and missed. He'd framed them all and kept them in his office all these years? He must recently have taken them out of some musty, old box to impress her. With what? The idea that he cared, when it was so obvious that he didn't?\n\nThe tears were starting again. Oh, God, she couldn't cry now, not when she wasn't sure he'd left and was afraid to look! She concentrated fiercely on the room's decor to push back the emotion. Burgundy velvet drapes, her mother's favorite color. Had Rose picked them out? Were they that old? A few bookcases, a liquor cabinet, paintings of Western scenes on the wall, except for one that stood out oddly. Her eyes went back to it and slowly widened. It was a wintery city scene of a girl skating on a frozen pond in a park. It was a painting of her. Her mother had never mentioned having it commissioned. But how else would Frank have it unless Rose had sent it to him?\n\n\"He was the best artist in New York,\" Franklin said quietly, having followed her gaze. \"I found him my last trip there. It took him all winter to finish it. You didn't skate much that year.\"\n\n\"You were in New York?\" she asked in a small voice. \"Why didn't you tell me this earlier when I accused you of never visiting?\"\n\n\"I shouldn't be telling you now, but this misconception you seem to be under can't continue. Your mother made me promise never to return to New York again. I broke that promise, but I couldn't let her know that, or she would have stopped writing to me. So I couldn't even let you know, couldn't take the chance that you might mention it to her, even inadvertently. I lived for her letters, Tiffany. They were all I had left of her. Can you keep this secret for me?\"\n\n\"You still love her?\"\n\n\"Of course I do, I always will. Just as I love you. Yet I've been afraid to even hug you, you've been so angry since you got here. All these years, I never imagined you would think I didn't care, Tiffany. I poured out my love in my letters. You didn't believe me?\"\n\n\"I stopped reading your letters. It hurt too much that you never came to visit when the boys did.\"\n\n\"But I did, every trip, and even a few other times. I just couldn't get close to your house. There was a man watching it, a guard your mother no doubt hired to keep me from approaching. So damned unfair of her to do that. But I yearned for the sight of you both, so I disguised myself, and once I did that, I realized I could see you, talk to you\u2014I just couldn't tell you who I was. You don't remember Charlie?\"\n\nShe had to sit down. Old memories flooded her mind of that friendly, old gentleman in the park she and her friend Margery frequented, never in the summer, only briefly in the winter\u2014whenever her brothers would visit. Would he even have introduced himself if he hadn't had to rescue her when she was a child? It had been the first year she'd tried to ice-skate at the park. Rose was supposed to be there for it and had asked her to wait until she could be, but Margery wasn't waiting, so Tiffany couldn't bear to either.\n\nIt had been a disaster. Her mother was going to teach her how to skate. Without that instruction she'd promptly fallen and sprained her ankle. Charlie had seen the accident and rushed onto the ice to carry her to her servants. He'd seemed more upset than she was over that sprain. He'd asked after her injury the next time he saw her in the park with Margery and told them an amusing story about an injury of his own. There were many funny stories over the years. When Tiffany was older, she was sure none of them were real. Charlie just liked to make people laugh, but that's how he was, a kind, caring man, one who wouldn't hesitate to help someone in need\u2014the kind of man she'd wished her father was...\n\nShe looked up at him now, saw the tears in his own eyes, and burst into sobs as she flew into his open arms. \"Oh, God, Papa, I wish you had told me! It was so painful, thinking you didn't care!\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Tiffany,\" he said, hugging her tightly. \"I wanted to tell you\u2014I would have, if I'd known what you thought.\" Then: \"Do you think I liked dyeing my hair gray for those trips and having to endure the wisecracks from the hired hands about it when we got back? They called me a grayhorn! Do you even know how insulting that is?\"\n\nShe did know because years ago her brothers had explained to her what a greenhorn was. But she knew her father was just trying to introduce a little levity to ease her remorse for the horrible way she'd treated him since she'd got there. It worked. He could still make her laugh!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Tiffany had exactly one evening gown, which she had Anna dress her in for what was likely to be an uncomfortable dinner. She hadn't even unpacked it at the Callahans since she couldn't wear it there. Even if there had been an occasion for it, it was far too expensive for Jennifer to afford. It was one of her older gowns, which is why it had ended up in her accessories trunk. Pale blue silk with pearl edging, silk shoes to match. Finally she could wear her jewelry again. Her fingers, wrists, neck, ears, even the pins in her elegant coiffure, sparkled with sapphires. The Callahans might think they knew her already, but they didn't. Tonight there would be no trace left of Jennifer Fleming.\n\nShe joined her brothers in the parlor before their guests arrived. Roy laughed when he saw her radiance. \"Did you cast some spell to whisk us to New York? You know you don't have to dress up fancy here, don't you?\"\n\n\"I know. My maid calls it 'armed for battle.'\"\n\n\"Well, least Ma ain't here to make us wear them fancy duds, too,\" Sam said. \"That was pure hell, Tiff, having to dress up like that for every dinner in the city.\"\n\n\"You're expecting a battle?\" Carl asked, picking up on that single word.\n\n\"Considering what I'm going to ask the Callahans to agree to, yes.\"\n\nThey already knew what she intended to do tonight. They knew, too, that her issue with their father had been resolved last night. Her brothers actually shouldered some guilt over her misconception, since they had kept it secret, that Frank had always traveled with them to the city. It all came out at breakfast that morning, which had been a wonderful family experience that could only have been more perfect if Rose had been there, too. Of course, that was never going to happen.\n\nFrank walked in and stopped short when he saw her. \"My God, you look like her done up like that.\"\n\nTiffany grinned. \"Did Mama make you suffer formal dinners every night?\"\n\n\"No, just a few times a week. She actually loved being more relaxed here. But you should have warned us you expected tonight to be formal.\"\n\n\"Not at all. If we all turned out elegant, then the Callahans would be embarrassed by it. This\"\u2014she waved a hand at her gown\u2014\"is merely the easiest way for me to show them that I'm not really the woman who was living in their house\u2014in case they're actually thinking I'm anything like her.\"\n\nRiders were suddenly heard arriving out front. Tiffany's nervousness arrived with them. Would Hunter even bother to come? Probably not, considering how angry he'd looked the last time she saw him. But it was only Zachary she needed to talk to tonight. And she wasn't alone. Her family was here. She didn't have to be nervous. She stood between Sam and Roy while their father went to let in\u2014the enemy.\n\n\"Jesus, Frank, what's this shiny stuff on your floor?\" Tiffany heard Zachary ask out in the hall.\n\n\"Marble.\"\n\n\"Your wife's doing, huh? It ain't going to crack if we walk on it, is it?\"\n\nNeighbors for more than twenty years and the Callahans had never stepped foot in this house before, not even once? But then, Frank probably hadn't been in theirs either. Such a stupid feud.\n\nZachary entered the parlor carrying his wife. The first thing Mary said when she saw Tiffany's elegant attire was \"I take it you didn't cook dinner?\"\n\nCole came in next with Mary's crutches in hand, but stopped cold when he saw Tiffany. John pushed him out of the way, then he, too, didn't move another inch.\n\nSeeing the two brothers released some of Tiffany's tension\u2014because Hunter wasn't with them. But maybe she shouldn't have worn the evening gown, after all. She hadn't meant to surprise them this much, merely to stress, without putting it into words, that she wasn't meant to live on a ranch in Montana.\n\nPolitely she said to Mary, \"Welcome to the Warren Ranch. My father already has an excellent cook.\"\n\n\"That Buffalo kid is going to cook for us now,\" Zachary said as he set Mary down in the nearest chair.\n\n\"My mother sent me some cookbooks. Perhaps Andrew can make use of them.\"\n\n\"Right kind of you,\" Mary said.\n\n\"Not at all. And please, let me take a moment to apologize for\u2014\"\n\nShe stopped when she heard the pig squealing out front. They'd brought the piglet to her? What a generous gesture, after what she'd done! Smiling brilliantly, she excused herself and rushed out of the room. She found Maximilian tied to a rail on the porch and picked him up immediately to cuddle him, giving no thought to her attire.\n\n\"So Red's still here? She's not completely gone?\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath at the sound of that deep voice and turned abruptly, smack into Hunter's kiss. Well, he helped it happen, his hand behind her neck pulling her head closer for it. She didn't stop him, too aware that this might well be her last taste of him. It made the kiss bittersweet!\n\nThen Max squirmed when Hunter got a little too close. She leaned back, flustered. That shouldn't have happened, she shouldn't have let it happen. She was supposed to make an impression tonight, that Jenny\u2014Red, whatever he'd called her\u2014was gone. She wasn't real. If he expected to find her here, he was wrong!\n\n\"Thank you for bringing Max to me,\" she said politely.\n\n\"Had to. With you gone, he thought he could take over my room.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"I let him last night, but one night's enough. For some reason he thought he could sleep in my bed, too. Were you letting him do that?\"\n\n\"I didn't mind.\" She rubbed Max behind one ear. \"I've never had a pet before\u2014well, I don't count the kitten I brought home once, since it ran off before I had a chance to get used to it. Can you untie him for me, please, so I can bring him inside?\" She wasn't going to let the pig down yet, afraid that Hunter would try to get close again if she did.\n\nHe untied the pig. \"Your pa won't mind him in the house?\"\n\n\"No, he's not the uncaring man I was trying to avoid.\"\n\nHunter gave her a sharp look. \"Is that why you did it?\"\n\n\"Yes, no\u2014mostly. I'll explain to you and your parents at dinner. You\u2014you aren't coming inside?\"\n\nWhen he didn't say anything immediately, her heart skipped a beat. She didn't want him to leave. She had to admit to herself she felt happy to see him. He looked so handsome tonight in a clean, white, pressed shirt and dark trousers, and clean black boots. He leaned back against the wall next to the door, raising one knee and resting the sole of his boot on the wall. She was so used to that posture of his. She often saw it in her mind\u2014when she wasn't picturing him wrapped in a towel or buck naked making love to her! She closed her eyes briefly to banish those images.\n\n\"Still thinking about it,\" he answered. \"Figured I had time to make up my mind, that you'd be out back watching the sunset. Too bad this house faces east. You're going to miss sitting on a porch watching them.\"\n\nShe almost grinned but caught herself in time. It was too easy to fall back into the relaxed familiarity she'd had with him. That hadn't been her! But Jennifer had been from the East, too. And Jennifer should have stuck to her guns and given him proper at every encounter, instead of allowing him to give her nicknames and flirt with her and kiss her and...\n\nShe mustered a prim tone. \"I won't miss the sunsets because there is a small porch out back. Papa said it was my mother's idea, to build it, that she loves the sunsets, too, and they spent every evening on it before dinner.\"\n\n\"Rumor was he beat her and that's why she left. Was that true?\"\n\n\"Of course not!\" she said sharply in her father's defense.\n\n\"Then why'd she leave him?\"\n\n\"I was hoping he could tell me. He actually blamed your family for it\u2014well, the feud. One more reason for him to hate Callahans.\"\n\n\"That would be\u2014incredibly unfortunate if it's so.\" Hunter's powder-blue eyes were gazing at her intently.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because that's a dumb reason for a woman to abandon her husband and sons. Because you and I could have grown up together if she hadn't run off. Because we'd be married by now.\"\n\nHow dare he assume such a thing! Indignantly she said, \"Do not presume that would have happened if I had grown up here. If I had, it's much more likely that I would have fallen in love with your brother Cole, since he's more my age.\"\n\nShe marched back into the house before he could reply to that." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Tiffany was sure Hunter had left after all, but he came inside a few minutes after they'd adjourned to the dining room. Hearing the sound of boots on the polished wood floor, she peeked over her shoulder and saw him standing behind her in the doorway. He was just in time to hear her apology.\n\n\"I assure you I didn't plan to impersonate a housekeeper,\" she was saying to Zachary and Mary, who were sitting next to each other. \"When your sons assumed I was Miss Fleming and offered me the job, I realized it was an opportunity to get to know your family without the feud modifying your behavior in my presence.\"\n\n\"But your pa didn't even know,\" Zachary said, then turned to Frank. \"Or did you?\"\n\n\"No, she wasn't ready to meet me yet. But that's a private matter\u2014\"\n\n\"It's all right, Papa. They have a right to know. The fact is that I didn't know my father. I had no memory of him. My brothers would visit me in New York, but Frank never did.\"\n\n\"Now that ain't so,\" Zachary disagreed. \"We know where he went when he took off with his boys. Came home every time with gray hair. We figured Rose was scaring the bejesus outta him,\" Zachary ended with a snicker.\n\n\"It was a damn disguise,\" Frank mumbled.\n\n\"So you did beat her while she was here? Threatened to shoot you if she ever saw you again, eh? Figured as much.\"\n\n\"Don't be an ass,\" Frank retorted.\n\nZachary didn't take offense. He was chuckling to himself over getting Frank's goat. Tiffany gave both of them pointed looks so she could get on with her apology.\n\nShe addressed the Callahans again. \"Mama made me promise to come here, but I didn't promise to stay with my father. You gave me the means to avoid him, for which I was grateful at the time. I was certain he didn't care about me\u2014and because I thought that, I had convinced myself that I didn't care about him either. I was wrong on both counts.\"\n\n\"So all patched up?\" Mary said with a smile.\n\nTiffany smiled back. \"Indeed.\"\n\n\"Apology accepted, gal,\" Zachary added gruffly. \"No harm was done\u2014\"\n\nHunter cut in, \"Depends on how you define harm.\"\n\nNo one wanted to address that remark, least of all Tiffany. They assumed he was referring to how angry he was over the deception, but she was afraid he was talking about compromising her. If he got all noble and told her father about it...\n\nStanding behind Tiffany, he dropped a letter from her mother on her plate now before he took the seat across from her. She stared at it, tried to resist opening it, pretty much knew what it would say. She couldn't resist.\n\nHave you taken leave of your senses? were the first words on several pages. Do you realize how hurt your father is going to be if he finds out you'd rather stay in the enemy camp than with him?!\n\nTiffany read no further and quickly stuffed the pages back in the envelope. \"Bad news?\" Hunter asked, watching her.\n\nShe glanced across at him. \"No\u2014it's just my mother has a bit of a temper.\"\n\n\"A bit?\" Franklin said, and even grinned slightly.\n\n\"More like a volcano in britches,\" Zachary said, actually agreeing with Franklin.\n\nTiffany blinked at the oldest Callahan. \"My mother wore britches here?\"\n\nHer father answered, \"She did occasionally when she was in a hurry to go riding.\"\n\n\"She was wearing them when she came to my place to tell me I was going to give my boy to you in marriage,\" Zachary added. \"Said she'd shoot me, too, if I didn't honor a truce till then.\"\n\n\"I wasn't aware she threatened you,\" Franklin said to Zachary.\n\n\"He's exaggerating,\" Mary put in. \"Well, she did say that, but it was after he'd already agreed to the match.\"\n\n\"That was your doing,\" Zachary reminded his wife.\n\n\"It was a good idea,\" Mary insisted.\n\n\"But she must not have thought you'd honor it, or she wouldn't have left,\" Franklin said coldly.\n\n\"Now hold on,\" Zachary growled. \"You ain't putting the blame for that on us!\"\n\nTiffany intervened with marked disapproval, even tapping her fork against her empty wineglass in case someone didn't hear her. \"If you please, a civil tone will be maintained at any table I sit at. And my father was mistaken. It is embarrassing to admit it, but we don't actually know why my mother left Montana.\" Then she abruptly changed the subject, telling Hunter, \"There will likely be another letter from her in the next day or two delivered to your ranch. Papa already telegraphed her to let her know I'm with him now, but her second letter will have already been dispatched.\"\n\nTiffany was still eager for that second letter and Rose's permission to leave. As much as she'd like to spend more time with her father and brothers now, her feelings for Hunter were too powerful. She had to get away from them, away from him, and the sooner she did, the sooner she could start forgetting him. Because she still couldn't marry him. Her mind hadn't changed about that. Her own reasons paled in comparison to the one he'd given her himself. It didn't matter what she looked like, wouldn't even matter if he thought he loved her. Deep down, the hate he'd lived with all his life would always be between them.\n\nIronically, she would never have found that out if she hadn't impersonated Jennifer. But then that's who he was actually attracted to, a woman who'd done things for effect, for the role she'd been playing, a role that had allowed her to behave with abandon and do things Tiffany would never otherwise have done. She tried not to blush but she felt her cheeks growing warm. He wasn't going to like the real her, her sophistication and elegance, and her adherence to propriety. She hoped he'd figure that out before the night was done.\n\nShe had planned to introduce the dreaded subject of the feud with dessert, so as not to spoil the dinner, but no one was comfortable at the table after they had nearly just come to blows. She still tried to delay it, introducing a few neutral subjects, but only Hunter, or occasionally his mother, replied. His brothers were still staring at her as if they'd never seen her before. Zachary was sitting there with a deep frown now. Frank was tight-lipped. Her brothers were, too, for that matter. Hunter\u2014well, she tried to keep her eyes off him, even when he replied to something she said.\n\nAt least they were eating, if not talking. Frank must have told his cook to outdo himself tonight. Was it universal, the need to impress one's enemies? The appetizer was French, individual bowls of onion soup crusted with cheese. The main course was English, a large roast so pink it was nearly rare, with a half dozen baskets full of Yorkshire-pudding buns added to the table.\n\nTiffany's own stomach was tied in knots. What she said tonight could end the feud\u2014or make it worse. With most of them almost done with the roast, she gave up trying to wait any longer.\n\n\"I would like to discuss the future\u2014and the past,\" she said, glancing between Frank and Zachary. \"There may be some things our two families aren't aware of. I've heard both sides of the story of the feud now. I wonder if anyone else here can say that.\"\n\n\"We lived it, gal,\" Zachary said with a snort. \"What's not to know?\"\n\n\"That facts may have gotten lost over the years or were never revealed. For instance, did you know that Elijah was actually unfaithful to Mariah that night? He did cheat on her, which was why she shot him the next morning.\"\n\nZachary didn't answer, but she could see in his expression that she'd surprised him. \"So many people have suffered over this because those two couldn't work things out. They're dead, and their only legacy is to still cause suffering?\"\n\n\"She never should have followed us here,\" Zachary finally spoke up. \"Never seen my pa so furious. That wasn't an easy move, and he did it just to get away from her, but she shows up here? That was nuts!\"\n\n\"I think even she knew it was,\" Frank chimed in. \"I was as surprised as you were to find us neighbors again.\"\n\n\"Then why didn't you leave?\" Zachary shot back.\n\n\"Because she convinced me she'd never find peace without some sort of resolution.\"\n\n\"Is that some fancy name for killing my pa?\" Zachary nearly shouted.\n\nFrank glowered. \"They were intimate before they shot each other. You were there to see it. Who's to say she didn't intend to put an end to the animosity?\"\n\n\"And changed her mind afterwards?\"\n\n\"You never told me they made love, Zach,\" Mary piped in.\n\n\"Because I didn't believe it,\" Zachary mumbled.\n\n\"They were barely dressed, Zachary,\" Frank said.\n\n\"Doesn't matter, I don't doubt she shot him first.\"\n\n\"I don't doubt it either,\" Frank said.\n\n\"Stop agreeing with me, damnit. Ya'll tore down our fences!\"\n\n\"No, actually, my herd did that with no help from me,\" Frank replied. \"A cow wants water, it's going to damn well get to it. You know that.\"\n\n\"And which time are you talking about?\" Zachary growled. \"The first, or the fifth?\"\n\nMary intervened, asking her husband, \"Does it matter? That first fence went up just because Elijah had a point to make, that the Warrens shouldn't have followed us here. It continued to go up out of pure orneriness. But you and Frank finally had it out, as I recall. That was a nasty fight, but at least you two didn't bring your guns to the table.\" Then she glanced at Tiffany to explain, \"Warrens tore down the fence, Callahans put it back up. That went on for nigh six months. It ended up that both sides would just keep any cattle that crossed over the creek. That didn't decimate either family's herd, just gave the cowboys something to brag about.\"\n\n\"Until the night Zachary had someone shoot me, and my wife left less than a month later,\" Frank said bitterly.\n\n\"I didn't tell anyone to shoot you!\" Zachary denied hotly. \"And if Rose was so all-fired upset about it, she would've mentioned it when she came to my ranch that night. She didn't say a single word about you being shot. She was only interested in getting a truce going. I'll warrant she already knew she was leaving and was just doing what she could to protect her boys.\"\n\nSilence followed that particular speculation. Tiffany was actually inclined to agree with Zachary. But since only Rose could confirm or deny it, and she wasn't there to do that, it wasn't pertinent to what they needed to discuss tonight. And it was time to say it.\n\n\"I'm going to suggest a permanent end to a feud that never should have started,\" she began carefully.\n\n\"We've already agreed to an end,\" Zachary reminded her.\n\n\"With stipulations, because even with your parents dead, you still found something to fight over. But let me ask you, did your father really claim a whole lake as his? Wouldn't you have built closer to it if he did? Or did he only claim it after my grandmother arrived, so she'd know how furious he was that she'd followed him here?\"\n\n\"We were here first,\" Zachary said.\n\n\"Yes, and in loyalty to your father, you weren't willing to share a natural resource. You've both enjoyed a truce for fifteen years. You expect it to become permanent through a marriage. Go one better and just end your feud now. Because if you both can't admit you were wrong to let this go on for two more generations, no marriage is going to help that.\"\n\nZachary frowned. \"You calling off the betrothal?\"\n\nTiffany groaned to herself. Had he heard nothing she'd said? And why hadn't Hunter jumped in to agree with her? He'd hated the burden of their marriage all his life. It should not be a prerequisite for peace! So what if wars had been ended throughout history with marriage alliances. Were they ever happy marriages?\n\n\"I'm just asking you to think about what I said,\" Tiffany answered.\n\n\"What I'm thinking is we've overstayed our welcome,\" Zachary replied, and stood up.\n\nNo one disagreed with him. In fact, the exit was rather quick. Mary said a few polite things in parting, but she was obviously embarrassed. Had she thought they'd be discussing wedding plans tonight?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Hunter was the only Callahan who didn't leave the dining room immediately. Tiffany glanced at him to discern what he thought of her suggestion, but the look she got back was pensive, a little curious, utterly lacking in humor. It told her nothing.\n\nBut he must have intended to share his thoughts because when he did stand up, he said, \"Come out to the porch with me to say good night.\"\n\n\"Not if you're going to kiss me again.\"\n\n\"You strike a hard bargain, Red.\"\n\n\"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that,\" Frank said, actually sounding amused as he left the room to see his guests out.\n\nHunter came around the table and held out his hand to her. She stared at it a long moment before she took it. They did need to talk. If it wasn't obvious to him yet, she had to make it clear to him that she wasn't Jennifer\u2014and without making him angry, because his support was paramount to ending the feud. So she led him out of the room and started to follow her father to the front porch, but Hunter pulled her in the opposite direction.\n\n\"That one's too crowded. Show me where you'll be watching the sunset.\"\n\nShe nodded and led him down the hall, which branched to a T at the back, then down another short passage between a couple storage rooms at the left corner of the house, quite a different design from the Callahans' home. The outbuildings here were even on the right side of the house instead of behind it. The small porch at the end of that passage was private, with no windows looking out on it. It wasn't completely dark outside. The sun had set, but the moon was on the rise, looking quite beautiful since it was nearly full tonight.\n\nTiffany ignored the two comfortable, short chaise longues that were placed side by side. They were new. Her father had told her he'd had to replace them every few years due to weathering, but they were the exact same design Rose had picked out so long ago. Tiffany had pictured her parents leaning back in them as they watched the sunset, holding hands.\n\nShe moved to one of the corner posts and leaned against it, staring up at the moon.\n\n\"Your mother had good ideas,\" Hunter remarked as he moved to stand behind her. \"You're going to want a porch like this, too, aren't you, Red?\"\n\nShe would have if her future home were going to be in a place that had sunsets as spectacular as they were here, but it wasn't. \"You have to stop calling me that. My name is Tiffany.\"\n\n\"That's the problem. In my mind, it's not. And maybe it's not in yours, either. Would the woman you're trying so hard to convince me you are have mentioned kissing me in front of her whole family?\"\n\nShe tsked. \"I know you're trying to make a point with that logic, but among family is the only time I don't have to watch what I say.\"\n\n\"But with everyone else you do?\"\n\n\"Certainly, as is only proper.\"\n\n\"Do you like living that way?\"\n\n\"It's ingrained in me. It's as natural to me as being blunt is to you. What wasn't natural was my trying to be Jennifer, the housekeeper. That was\u2014difficult. That was wrong. I apologized to your family, Hunter, but that didn't express how sorry I am for deceiving you. I know you're angry. You have every right to be.\"\n\n\"I was,\" he said softly, and put his hands on her shoulders. \"But do I sound angry now?\"\n\nShe quickly stepped to the side to get out of his reach and turned to face him. \"You sound like you still think I'm Jennifer Fleming, but I'm trying to tell you that I'm nothing like her. I might have gotten a little carried away with the charade, but it's over. Who you see now is the real me, Tiffany Warren, and this isn't who you want. You even told me\u2014\"\n\nThe words caught in her throat as he grasped her waist and lifted her, setting her down on the porch railing next to them, far enough from the post that she couldn't grab it to get her balance. She had to grab him instead. But he made that easy, lifting her gown enough to move in between her legs to trap her there.\n\nShe gasped. \"Stop this.\"\n\n\"Hell no. We're going to find out who you're trying to convince of what, because I don't need convincing of anything, but you apparently do.\"\n\nShe didn't have a chance to reply. He held her face as his mouth slanted across hers, so quickly reminding her of that night in the barn when she'd abandoned everything for what he made her feel. It was there again, that passion, blinding her to reason and logic, negating everything she'd just tried to tell him, and she didn't care! This was the one perfect thing they had between them, where their families didn't matter, where nothing mattered except each other...\n\nHe leaned in closer. She held on tighter, deepening the kiss herself. It was ecstasy to hold him again like this, taste him again. How was it possible to want someone this much?\n\nShe was still thinking that when he pulled her away from the railing and she slid down his hard, strong body. She would have crumbled, her legs were so wobbly, if he hadn't been holding her tenderly now.\n\n\"I'll do anything for you\u2014except make love to you on your father's back porch.\"\n\nHe sounded as shaky as she felt. Was she really going to walk away from this? From him? But she had to! God, what had she just done? She couldn't even upbraid him for it when she needed him on her side right now.\n\nShe latched onto what he'd just said, asking hesitantly, \"Will you talk to your father and get him to agree to my suggestion?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nHer eyes flew up to his. \"You just said\u2014why not?\"\n\n\"Who says I want it ended that way? Maybe I like the idea now, of marriage being the cornerstone of a new foundation.\" He let go of her and leapt over the railing.\n\nShe yelled after him, \"You do not!\"\n\nHe continued to head toward his horse out front, but she heard him laugh. \"Now you sound like my Red.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Tiffany was out of breath, from laughing, from drowning. And her brothers, who surrounded her in the lake, wouldn't give up on trying to dunk her. Not that she had a chance of winning when they were so much stronger than she was. She finally crawled out of the water to catch her breath. The boys continued their antics, pulling each other under the water.\n\nSam had loaned her one of his shirts to swim in. Long-sleeved, buttoned up the front, it fell to her knees. She wore her longest bloomers with it. Not exactly proper swimming attire, but then no one was going to see her except her brothers.\n\nShe sat on the grass, leaning back against a tree trunk, as she watched them, though she wasn't actually seeing the boys now. Removed from the horseplay, she felt an onset of the sadness that had come over her last night. She was actually going to miss things about Montana when she left: the beauty, the openness, summer storms lulling her to sleep, even days like this, so crystal clear. And most of all Hunter. No one had ever treated her the way he did, no one ever would again. The teasing and the laughter that so easily broke down her defenses, the way he didn't hesitate to speak his mind with her. The man truly had an enjoyment of life to find humor in the smallest things, and it was infectious when she was around him. She'd never felt so close to anyone else, the way she did to him. But then he'd given her the most incredible experience of her life when he'd made love to her.\n\nShe wished she could package him up and take him home with her, but Hunter wouldn't be Hunter in the city. She couldn't ask him to make that sacrifice. They simply weren't meant to be. They'd known it all their lives. The attraction they shared wouldn't survive the differences in their ways of life and the hard feelings and animosity that had been bred into their families. Last night had proved that, when neither family could get through one simple dinner without arguing and the Callahans had left angry because of it.\n\nThe framing of the house that was supposed to be hers one day caught her eye across the lake and deepened her sadness. She could see the broken corner post and the pieces of framing hanging down. Hunter had said he'd tear it down.\n\nIt would have been so much easier if he'd stayed angry with her for deceiving him and his family. But after what had happened last night on the porch, and, worse, his mention of cornerstones and marriage, she knew he wasn't. She was going to have to be blunt and tell him that wasn't happening\u2014and remind him why he should be relieved that it wasn't.\n\n\"Your logic confuses me, Red,\" Hunter said behind her. \"I got the distinct impression last night that you were trying to convince me you're nothing like my Jenny, yet here you are behaving like a hoyden with your brothers.\"\n\nShe leapt to her feet and came around the tree to find him leaning against it. \"How long have you been here?\"\n\n\"Long enough to see that you could have used some help against your brothers.\"\n\n\"Don't guns get too wet to shoot in the water?\" she quipped.\n\nHe chuckled. \"You know I didn't mean that kind of help.\"\n\nShe was embarrassed that he was seeing her like this, her hair dripping wet, clothes clinging to her. \"Go away. This is a family outing.\"\n\n\"And we're going to be family.\"\n\nOh, God, that sounded nice, but he wasn't being logical. \"You know you don't really want that. You've hated this betrothal as much as I have. Don't turn stubborn now just because you think I'm someone I'm not. I\u2014I won't marry you. I'm going to go back where I belong. Be glad that I'm letting you off the hook.\"\n\nHer own words started to cut deep. She hadn't thought it would hurt saying them! But his expression arrested her. He didn't believe her? He actually smiled.\n\n\"Your pa followed your ma back East,\" he said, coming away from the tree to maneuver her against it. \"He did his courting there. You going to make me do that?\"\n\n\"Courting at this point isn't appropriate.\"\n\n\"She didn't fight him every step of the way, Red. Why are you fighting me?\"\n\nShe lifted her chin stubbornly. \"She didn't know what the West was like yet.\"\n\n\"Do you really think she cared? She was in love. She just wanted to be with her man.\"\n\n\"Yet she left him,\" she stated, thinking she'd made her point.\n\nHe didn't think so. \"Don't use that excuse when you admitted you don't know why she left. And you don't really want to leave, either.\"\n\n\"I\u2014I do.\"\n\n\"Prove it,\" he whispered as he leaned in closer.\n\nShe could have turned away in time\u2014no, she just didn't want to. She wrapped her arms around his neck, let him lure her into a few moments of bliss. It was. His kiss was pure magic. How could she give this up, what he could make her feel? Did she dare be selfish and marry him when she knew they'd both end up regretting it eventually?\n\n\"This is beautiful,\" he said against her lips. \"This is two people meant to be.\" Then he stepped back, but he left his hand tenderly on her cheek. \"Go tell your ma what you feel, what you really feel. She'll tell you this is where you belong.\"\n\n\"I can't, she's not\u2014\"\n\n\"She's in town. One of the hands just rode in and mentioned it. Half of Nashart remembers her, it's all they're talking about. I was riding over to warn you, in case you didn't know. The sound of laughter in the lake distracted me.\"\n\n\"But she said she'd never step foot in this territory again!\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Maybe she felt she had to come to straighten you out.\"\n\nTiffany winced. \"No, she's probably come to rescue me. If she's here now, then she left before she got my father's telegram. But she will be furious when she finds she came for nothing, that he and I are on the best of terms now.\"\n\n\"Need me to protect you? My pa might have been intimidated by her, but I've got more at stake. I'll fight the dragon for you.\"\n\nTiffany almost laughed. \"She's not a dragon, she just doesn't mince words when she's angry.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Rose stood at the window of her room in the Nashart hotel. She'd gotten a room in order to make herself presentable. She had to look her best today. She didn't see anyone outside waiting for her. They'd always been there, the watchers, and always in plain sight, no hiding. Parker had wanted her to know. The ones who had been watching her for years sometimes even nodded to her respectfully when she ventured out, they'd followed her for so long. Most didn't last a year before they were replaced or quit. It was a boring job, after all. It felt so odd, not having them following her anymore, so odd it would probably be a long time before she stopped glancing over her shoulder to look for them. But they were really gone. She had her life back. She might even get her husband back\u2014if he could forgive her.\n\nShe couldn't believe how close she'd come to not finding out that this nightmare was over. She'd been in her hotel suite packing for her trip to Montana to find out what had made her daughter sound so panicked in her last letter and beg to be allowed to go home. There hadn't really been time for one more visit to Parker's house when her train was leaving in a few hours. She'd already been to that mansion five times since she'd arrived in Chicago, and each time she'd been turned away. There hadn't been any point in trying one more time. Yet she did. And she'd gotten in the door. And heard the last thing she expected to hear. Parker was dead.\n\nHe'd died two days ago when she'd felt so despondent she hadn't even left her hotel suite to take a walk or buy a newspaper. His household was in mourning, or at least giving that impression. The man had made her believe his death wouldn't make a difference, that his vendetta would continue from the grave. He hadn't counted on his wife, Ruth, not honoring his wishes.\n\n\"I can't give you back the years you lost, but I can assure you I won't throw good money after bad,\" Ruth had told her when she received Rose in her parlor that last day in Chicago. \"My husband was wrong. He did many bad things that I was aware of, but I think this was the worst. He couldn't accept that our son was weak. He had to blame others for Mark's death when it was Parker's own fault for coddling the boy his whole life. To be honest, Rose, Parker's death isn't just your liberation, it's mine.\"\n\nRuth had said a lot more that day and offered what apologies she could, even mentioning a large sum of money. She called Parker brilliant when it came to business, but a fool when it came to family. She claimed she'd stopped loving him soon after they were married and admitted, \"He never knew, that's how insensitive he was.\"\n\nRose had listened in a haze of shock.\n\nThat first day on the train was nothing but a blur. So many emotions made that grueling trip to Montana with her, hope, worry over Tiffany, even anger that Parker hadn't died sooner, but only one arrived with her in Nashart. Excitement.\n\nNow, she was bubbling with it like a schoolgirl as she hurried down to the hotel lobby. A buckboard was waiting outside to take her to the Callahan ranch. She was going to collect Tiffany and take her straight to Frank. And then? She didn't know. She'd been given her life back. What happened today would determine if it could once again be a life worth living...\n\n\"Well, well, you didn't waste any time, did you, Mrs. Warren?\"\n\nShe knew that voice, that horrible voice. It wiped the color from her face as she slowly turned to face the man who'd threatened her all those years ago. The man who had shot Frank and promised to kill him if she didn't do exactly what he told her to do. She knew who he was, too. She'd spent a lot of money finding out. She'd wanted to put him so deep in prison that he'd never see the light of day again. But she'd been blocked at every turn. His boss was too powerful, had too many officials in his pocket. And William Harris had been Parker Harding's right arm.\n\nShe slipped her hand into her purse to grip the derringer she had in it before she said, \"I spoke with Ruth Harding, Parker's wife. His vendetta is over.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"She even had any mention of it stricken from his will. Their lawyer was a personal friend of hers, not his.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"Then what are you doing here, Mr. Harris? And I'd be very careful with your answer. If you think to blackmail me into compliance again, for any reason, I'll kill you myself.\"\n\nHe had the gall to tsk at her. \"Now is that really how you want to spend your homecoming? In jail for shooting an unarmed man? Perhaps you should know that I was never a gun for hire, Mrs. Warren. No set salary could compensate me adequately for what I do. Parker knew that. I earned a percentage of all the businesses I handled for him and will continue to handle for his estate. The more they earn, the more I earn. His wife knows my value. She's already assured me the deal I had with her husband will continue.\"\n\n\"But not the deal you had concerning me, so why are you telling me this? Parker's vendetta died when he did. Mrs. Harding has already dispatched notices of termination to the men following me and my husband. This is over!\"\n\n\"I just find it ironic,\" he said in that same smug, unperturbed voice. \"All these years watching Warrens, then we run into trouble with their enemies. Parker didn't know that yet. He was just told there was trouble with his new copper mine and gave me leave to fix it in my usual, efficient way. I'm here on business. Now that you're here, too, I'm seeing more options for how I might solve a few business problems.\"\n\nHe laughed as he walked away. Rose's hands were trembling. She should have shot him. He was just as guilty as Parker Harding was, for ruining her life fifteen years ago." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Tiffany came to an abrupt halt at the top of the stairs when she saw her parents in the hall below. She'd taken too long getting ready! But she'd been sure Rose would go to the Triple C looking for her first. Even if Hunter had steered her this way instead, she didn't think her mother would actually come here.\n\nAs she started to call out to Rose, her brother Sam whispered, \"Shh.\"\n\nShe glanced to her left and saw Sam peeking from behind a wall at the drama unfolding in the entrance hall. He slipped around her and sat on the step directly below her. She joined him on the step and whispered, \"No shouting?\"\n\n\"Neither one has said a word yet.\"\n\n\"How long have they been staring at each other like that?\" Tiffany whispered.\n\n\"'Bout five minutes now, by my reckon.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"Without a word?\"\n\nSam grinned. \"Yeah. He probably doesn't believe it's her. Probably thinks she'll disappear if he says anything.\"\n\nTiffany jabbed Sam with an elbow. \"Why didn't you warn him she was in town?\"\n\n\"I figured once we caught up with her, we should give you a little time with her first. Didn't expect her to just walk in the door.\"\n\nNo one did, least of all Franklin. He looked so incredibly surprised. And Rose\u2014Tiffany had never seen her mother with such an expression...\n\nTiffany suddenly burst out, \"Oh, my God, you both still love each other!\"\n\nTheir eyes immediately turned in her direction. Rose started toward the bottom of the stairs. \"Tiffany, come down\u2014\"\n\nFranklin cut her off, simply swinging Rose around and kissing her. There was no hesitation on Rose's part. She wrapped her arms around her husband\u2014grabbed him hard was more like it.\n\n\"Well, who would've thought,\" Sam said with a chuckle, and elbowed Tiffany this time. \"Want to go swimming again?\"\n\n\"You mean leave them alone?\"\n\n\"I don't think they're going to notice anyone else for a while.\"\n\nThey didn't go swimming again. Tiffany had been far too embarrassed when Hunter had found her doing that. They did vacate the stairs, though, to give their parents some privacy. But Tiffany was too curious to leave the house. She wanted to be available the moment her mother was ready to talk. She didn't expect to have to wait until dinner that night!\n\nRose and Franklin came into the dining room laughing, their arms around each other's waists. It was as if they hadn't lived the last fifteen years apart. Their children stared at them, speechless for a moment, then noisily fired off questions at the same time.\n\nRose held up her hands and in her usual indomitable way said, \"Be quiet, children. Your questions will be answered if you still have any when I'm done explaining. I was under a threat of death, your father's death, to say nothing. But that threat is finally dead and buried. I've already told your father. So let me tell you now why I was forced to leave here all those years ago.\"\n\nIt was almost funny, how many times Tiffany's brothers opened their mouths to interrupt Rose as she told her tale, only to clamp them shut again. But Rose wasn't an adept storyteller. In trying not to leave anything out, she said things out of context. But she did finally piece it all together for them. It took most of the meal to do so.\n\nTiffany barely touched her food. She was shocked and horrified by the old man's cruelty and the violence he had resorted to, to get his revenge for something her parents hadn't been responsible for. His ruthlessness had touched them all, dividing their family, making sure they wouldn't even know why. That was the worst part of the whole tragedy\u2014that Rose had had the burden of keeping this secret all these years, even from the people she loved.\n\n\"You should have told me, trusted me to deal with it,\" Frank finally grumbled.\n\nRose raised a brow at him. \"How many times are you going to say that today? We both know exactly what you would have done. You would have hunted Parker down and killed him. But you can't kill a man that rich and powerful without paying the ultimate price for it. If you must know, I almost did myself. But he convinced me even his death wouldn't end it. He just didn't know his wife despised him and had no intention of carrying out his final wishes. My God, I wished I'd known that sooner.\"\n\n\"I thought those men watching your house were your guards,\" Frank said.\n\n\"No, they were Parker's men, and they had orders to kill you on sight. Why do you think I told you I'd shoot you if you ever showed up at my door again?\"\n\n\"You were angry enough when you said it that I didn't doubt you meant it.\"\n\n\"Of course I was angry. I'd had to leave you to save your life, and part of his damn revenge was that I not tell you why. But you wouldn't let it go, and that was just making the pain so much worse.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Frank said, putting his hand over hers.\n\n\"Don't be. It's not your fault. I wish I could have found some way to tell you, but Parker was too thorough. He didn't just have men following me to make sure you and I never met up anywhere, he had you followed, too. You didn't know you were being watched?\"\n\n\"How would I? I had no reason to suspect anything. If I did, I would have just figured it was the Callahans up to no good. I did see flashes in the hills every so often, like sun glinting off binoculars, but when I reached the spots to investigate, no one was around.\"\n\nSam interjected, \"I guess it's a good thing you disguised yourself, Pa, when you came to New York with us.\"\n\n\"You didn't!\" Rose gasped, and threw her napkin at Franklin.\n\nHe chuckled and handed the napkin back. \"You think I could really go fifteen years without gazing on you?\"\n\n\"I had to!\" Rose exclaimed.\n\n\"But you knew why you had to, I didn't.\"\n\n\"But a disguise? So you did suspect something?\"\n\n\"No, that was just so I could meet Tiffany. Well, it also made it easier for me to follow you around the city when you left your house. I did stay out of sight of your guards\u2014thinking they worked for you.\"\n\n\"You're lucky whoever followed you never figured out what you were up to.\"\n\n\"It was a good disguise, Mama,\" Tiffany said. \"He looked like an old man. I don't think even you would have recognized him.\"\n\n\"Why did you never tell me, baby?\" Rose asked her.\n\nFranklin answered. \"She didn't know. You were pretty clear about my not coming to New York for any reason.\"\n\n\"I had to do it that way!\" Rose cried. \"You understand why, don't you?\"\n\n\"Yes, now we do. But it didn't help Tiffany, thinking I didn't care enough about her to even visit over the years.\"\n\n\"I was afraid that if you showed up in the city even once, and Parker found out about it, that he'd change his mind about the revenge he'd settled on and simply have you killed instead. That was his first intention, you know. An eye for an eye. It was William Harris who talked him into this longer, never-ending revenge instead. Harris might even have thought it was a kinder version. At least you could have found someone else. It was only I who was never to have anyone ever again. But no one was to die as long as I remained alone.\"\n\nTiffany was nearly in tears. She'd listened to it all, but it was so unfair! Her parents had never stopped loving each other, and they would never have gotten back together if Rose didn't have that chance meeting with Ruth Harding. Rose could have gone on forever thinking she didn't dare be in the same room with Frank.\n\n\"No one has paid for causing our family this heartache,\" Tiffany said angrily.\n\n\"Harding is dead,\" Frank replied gently. \"He'll never hurt us again.\"\n\n\"But he died naturally. He didn't get what he deserves. And Mr. Harris is still walking around, as if he had no part in it, still causing trouble for people. It's not fair they got away with this.\"\n\n\"Some things never are fair, baby,\" Rose said. \"I have no proof Harris was involved. It's just my word against his.\"\n\n\"Which is all the proof I need,\" Frank said ominously, his anger apparent now. \"That man nearly killed me and he ran you out of the territory. He robbed me of fifteen years with my wife and daughter!\"\n\nRose glanced at Franklin sharply. \"He's as ruthless as Harding, but he was still just a lackey following orders. Do you really want to stir up that pot now when this is over, when we can finally be together? Don't make me worry about you again.\"\n\n\"I won't go looking for him, but he better pray he never crosses my path.\"\n\nTiffany watched her parents. Rose put her hand over Frank's for that half concession. Tiffany had a feeling her mother wouldn't leave it at that, that she'd have more to say to him about it when they were alone. Tiffany could even understand why Rose wanted to leave it alone. She'd suffered enough. But it still wasn't fair!\n\nRose addressed her children again. \"Ruth Harding did try to make amends. She offered me an incredible amount of money, which I turned down, of course. I have all I could ever want or need, my husband back. She's giving the money to you children instead, since you also suffered because of her husband's unconscionable actions. Small compensation for splitting a family apart, but I didn't turn down her offer.\"\n\n\"I don't want her guilt money,\" Tiffany replied bitterly.\n\n\"Then it can rot in a bank somewhere, so don't give it another thought.\" Rose stood up. \"Now, come show me your room, Tiff. You and I haven't had a chance yet to discuss what you've been doing since you got here.\"\n\nTiffany groaned to herself, but led the way upstairs to her room. \"Very nice,\" Rose remarked as she walked around it. \"I knew Frank would make sure you felt comfortable here. Don't you feel silly now for trying to avoid him?\"\n\n\"Mama, I had those feelings for the longest time. They weren't going to go away simply because you asked me to come here with an open mind.\"\n\nRose sighed and sat down on the bed, patting the spot next to her for Tiffany to join her. \"All this suffering because I was too kindhearted to tell Mark Harding no when he asked me to marry him. It is my fault, you know. I tried to spare his feelings. I thought we'd do fine together just because we were friends. I did care for him. I just didn't love him, didn't even know what real love was, until I met your father. Now\u2014cooking? Really?\"\n\nTiffany laughed at her mother's exaggerated appalled look. \"It was frustrating at first, but I was actually starting to have fun, figuring it out.\"\n\n\"I almost sent a cook to you instead of those books. But that would have been helping out the Callahans instead of pointing out to you that you weren't where you were supposed to be.\"\n\n\"But you wanted me to get to know Hunter, to give him a chance.\"\n\nRose winced. \"Not really.\"\n\n\"What?!\"\n\n\"If you wanted him, I wasn't going to dissuade you, but I was too selfish to want you to settle here when I didn't think I could ever come here again. I used the betrothal as an excuse to give you some time with your father. I had kept you from him all these years. It was time for me to share you. I know I should have just told you that. Instead I tried to manipulate a bad situation\u2014which I hear you tried to fix. I commend you for your effort to put an end to the feud once and for all. I've actually had years to think about this. I even have a letter that I wrote to Zachary long ago that I would have sent to Zachary after you returned to New York, suggesting he continue the peace I arranged despite the marriage being called off. Now that I'm here, I can talk to him myself and add my sentiments to yours. But that's nothing you need to worry about now.\"\n\nTiffany frowned. \"So you really don't care if I marry Hunter or not?\"\n\nRose gave her a long look. \"You know, regardless of Parker Harding's threat I was coming here to drag you home. I was going to sneak into town and sneak you out of it, without Frank knowing. I never dreamed you would run into the worst the West can show you.\"\n\n\"I know, a stream of bad luck,\" Tiffany said with a roll of her eyes before Rose did.\n\n\"Possibly. It won't be long before you don't even hear about train robberies like the one you witnessed, much less get caught in them. It was worse when I lived here. But you take the good with the bad, and the good far outweighed... I digress. The choice was, and still is, yours, Tiffany. Your father and I want you to be happy. If that isn't going to happen here, we'll take you back to New York and stay with you until you find your perfect man and get married there.\"\n\n\"Stay with me? It doesn't sound like you'll be staying in New York after I'm married.\"\n\n\"We won't. I fell in love with Montana as much as I did with your father. The happiest years of my life were spent here. Of course, I would have had that happiness anywhere, as long as I was with Frank. But there was something about this place that charmed me from the very beginning. I didn't have to stop myself from trying new things, fun things, just because someone would frown on it. People don't do that here. They aren't judgmental about superficial behavior.\"\n\n\"It's more relaxed here,\" Tiffany said, remembering Hunter's words.\n\n\"Exactly!\"\n\n\"You can wear britches and wide-brimmed hats if you want to.\"\n\nRose chuckled. \"They told you about that, did they?\"\n\n\"And rope cows if you want to.\"\n\n\"Well\u2014\"\n\n\"And keep pet pigs.\"\n\n\"What? No!\"\n\n\"Come here, Max,\" Tiffany called.\n\nThe piglet poked his head around the tub screen from where he'd been napping. He immediately trotted to the bed. Tiffany picked him up and rubbed noses with him.\n\nRose stared incredulously at them for a moment before she started laughing. \"I guess you've already figured it out.\"\n\n\"I guess I have.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "The Warrens rode to town that Saturday for the dance, either on horseback or in wagons, the family, the cowboys, even the servants, including the cook. No barn or building in town was big enough to hold everyone, not when people were coming in from all over the county for the event. There were no social barriers: cowboys, miners, lumberjacks, young and old, everyone was welcome.\n\nLights were strung in a field just outside town; a large square-dance floor had been built there for the occasion. Long before they arrived they could hear the musicians playing, not exactly music or instruments Tiffany was familiar with, but banjos, fiddles, and harmonicas. A few couples were already dancing, though the dance hadn't been scheduled to officially start until the sun went down and the heat of the day had passed. Dusk was just approaching. But dozens of tables were already laden with food and drink, with aromatic smoke from a half dozen roasting pits wafting over the area.\n\nTiffany thought the site looked and smelled wonderfully festive! It seemed to her much more like a fair than merely a dance. Children were running about, mostly chasing each other. A horse race was taking place between three cowboys. Some lumberjacks were having a tree-climbing contest, which seemed rather silly with only four trees nearby and none of them tall. Even a drinking contest was taking place, which didn't bode well for those participants' doing any dancing later.\n\nIt definitely wasn't what Tiffany had been expecting, but it was no wonder Rose had been excited as soon as she'd heard about the social event. Tiffany wasn't sure if her mother just loved country gatherings or just loved being back in Montana with her family. Maybe it was a little of both. Tiffany was surprised to see her mother like this, so exuberant, so full of laughter and cheer\u2014so unreserved. And not the least bit proper. Tiffany actually thought she wouldn't stand out like a sore thumb in her sophisticated clothing for once, not with her mother along. But Rose had surprised her in that regard, too, coming downstairs wearing a skirt and blouse with no bustle in sight.\n\n\"I left here fifteen years ago with just you and a valise, and it was half filled with your things,\" Rose said. \"Your father stored everything I left behind in the attic, never giving up hope that I'd come back and wear those clothes again. I had my maid air some out, but I think it all needs a washing.\" Rose sniffed her own shoulder. \"I smell a little musty.\"\n\n\"You have time to change,\" Tiffany suggested.\n\n\"Oh, no. I'll take comfort over fashion any day, even if it is a little musty.\"\n\nWhile Rose was dressed in plain, everyday styles, her garments were elegantly tailored from expensive materials. Trust her mother to fit in here yet still retain her uniqueness. Tiffany, on the other hand, had donned her best day dress, replete with bustle, and she'd had Anna put her hair up. But she had nothing else in her limited wardrobe that would do, certainly not her kitchen outfit, which she wasn't going to be caught dead in again. Besides, she still had to make Hunter come to his senses and figure out on his own that silk and spurs just didn't go together.\n\nNashart's founders and people who had known Rose when she'd lived there converged on her as soon as they arrived. Tiffany had hoped to stay close to her mother, but the crowd of people welcoming Rose got too big.\n\nRoy pulled her away and appointed himself her protector for the evening. He turned away the first three men who asked her to dance before she could say a word to them. He seemed to be disgruntled, but she realized it had nothing to do with her when she caught him staring at Pearl dancing with another man. Which reminded her...\n\n\"Do you want to talk about it?\" she asked her brother hesitantly.\n\nRoy glanced down at her. \"Huh? Oh, her. No. She made it clear I was barking up the wrong tree.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" Like hell she was.\n\n\"But maybe you can tell me what she meant when she said that I've got too many women in my house. There's always been women in our house. Most of the servants are women. Don't make a lick o' sense.\"\n\nShe put her arm through his, then she bumped her shoulder against his. \"You weren't really looking to settle down yet, were you?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Not really.\"\n\n\"Then don't give it another thought. More women come West every day... well, maybe not every day, but there should be more choices by the time you're ready.\"\n\n\"Or maybe I'll start a Warren tradition and just do what Pa did.\"\n\n\"It's nice to have choices.\"\n\n\"What's yours going to be? And answer quick, 'cause he's headed this way.\"\n\nShe spotted him at the same time Roy did. Hunter was weaving his way through the crowd in her direction. She tugged Roy toward the wooden platform. \"Dance with me.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Hell no, I don't dance.\"\n\nA cowboy nearby overheard Roy and said, \"I do, and she owes me for making me scrub her floors.\"\n\nRoy looked at her quizzically, and before he could object, one of the Callahan cowboys pulled her the rest of the way to the dance floor. He was all teeth, his grin was so wide. \"First one to get you on the floor,\" he crowed. \"I'm going to be bragging about this for a year or two\u2014if the boss don't kill me for it.\"\n\nShe remembered him, just not his name. But he was definitely an exuberant dancer. She was actually almost out of breath before he relinquished her to another partner. She didn't actually get off the dance floor, just went from one partner to the next. She might even have danced with a miner, though it was hard to tell with the men all done up fancy in their Sunday best. With each boisterous twirl around the floor, she caught sight of Hunter, arms crossed, hat tipped low, patiently waiting. For what? For her to come to him?\n\nShe wasn't sure why she wanted to avoid him. Maybe because she was feeling a little vulnerable and too close to giving in to him. Despite everything that screamed they weren't right for each other, one thing whispered they were. She'd gone and fallen in love with Hunter Callahan.\n\nDegan Grant was her next partner. She almost declined. Despite how many conversations they'd had, the man could still make her nervous. She would have guessed he wasn't familiar with any sort of dancing, and that this boisterous country dancing just didn't suit the gunman. Yet he did know how.\n\n\"I'll be moving on soon,\" he told her. \"In case I don't see you again, I wanted to say it was a pleasure meeting you, Miss Warren.\"\n\n\"Moving on? Does that mean Zachary has agreed to a permanent truce?\"\n\n\"That goes hand in hand with the wedding, doesn't it? But Zachary is here if you wanted to discuss it.\"\n\nMaybe she ought to. He'd had enough time to think about her suggestion. It would probably be a good idea to hear his answer before her mother gave him her opinion about it. Rose might make the situation worse. Zachary might turn mulish instead of agreeable if Rose lit into him again.\n\n\"You should be sheriff here,\" she said to Degan.\n\n\"This town can't afford me. Besides, once the miners leave, Nashart will return to the peaceful town it used to be.\"\n\nBut they weren't leaving, and when had Nashart ever been peaceful with the Warrens and the Callahans living there? She decided to head off another disaster and seek out Zachary. But she was too late. When she finally spotted him, he was leading Hunter over to meet her mother.\n\nTiffany groaned to herself and turned about abruptly\u2014and smacked right into someone. She started to apologize, but her arm was grasped and he started leading her away.\n\n\"There's a man with a rifle aimed at your father,\" he said in a chilling voice. \"If you don't come with me quietly, he's going to pull the trigger.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "They didn't even give her a light, just shoved her in a storage room deep in the mine and left her there, taking the lantern with them. There was light beyond the heavy iron door, though. She could see it from the crack at the bottom of the door, and the shadow of someone's feet, whoever had been left to guard her.\n\nMany people were at the dance, her entire family, but no one seemed to have noticed her being led off to the long string of horses, it had happened so quickly. Hunter, who had been watching her all evening, would have noticed if his father hadn't distracted him. He'd been waiting for her to leave the dance floor, and why the devil had he just been waiting? Why hadn't he claimed her for a dance himself? If he had, she knew this would never have happened. Or would they have taken him, too, if they couldn't get her alone?\n\nShe wasn't gagged, wasn't even tied, but she wasn't surprised that they hadn't taken that precaution. She'd seen all those buildings in the gulch\u2014bunkhouses, offices, sheds. If anyone came looking for her here, they would search those buildings first. No one would think to look for her deep in the mine tunnel. No one would hear her either, if she got around to screaming. She hadn't yet. She'd been too afraid for her father as well as herself. That man who'd hied off with her had sounded so merciless. She'd actually been terrified of him, not knowing who he was or why he'd taken her\u2014until they arrived at the mining camp. She prayed her father wasn't still in danger of being shot by one of Harding's miners because her mother had returned to him. Her family would be looking for her by now, and they'd have the law with them. Sheriff Ross had been at the dance tonight; she'd seen him swinging arm in arm with Mrs. Martin.\n\nWhile she was still frightened, she was feeling angry now, too. That damn copper. What else could it be? She was beginning to wonder if these people were even real miners, or just criminals posing as such. More likely the latter, considering whose name was on the mine. Harding.\n\nThe door opened. She shielded her eyes from the sudden burst of light. \"Just making sure they grabbed the right woman,\" she heard a masculine voice say. \"I would have been annoyed if your mother was here instead of you, Miss Warren, especially since my note is being delivered to her.\"\n\nHe actually started to close the door again. \"Wait! What has my mother to do with this?\"\n\n\"She's going to assure me that the law stays out of it. In exchange, I'll give you back to her and abide by Mrs. Harding's wishes to let your father live. Your mother will once again be free to do as she pleases.\"\n\n\"She was already free to do that\u2014\"\n\n\"No, she only thought she was. All those years I worked for Harding, do you think I wasn't loyal to him? That I wouldn't honor his final wishes? He made me rich. A lot of money can buy a lot of loyalty.\"\n\n\"Honor? I don't think you care about honoring anyone's wishes or anything else, Mr. Harris. I think you just want this copper at any cost.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Very astute of you, but then copper isn't the poor substitute it used to be, and the vein here is worth millions.\"\n\n\"The Callahans have already refused to deal with you. The sheriff and the county judge both know that. You won't get away with this.\"\n\nHe tsked. \"Of course I will. People change their minds all the time\u2014with the right incentive. The Callahans are cattlemen. They don't give a damn about the copper.\"\n\n\"They care about the damage you've caused to the range.\"\n\n\"They'll get over it.\"\n\n\"That was you who tried to burn their house down, wasn't it?\" she guessed.\n\nHe laughed. \"No, that wasn't my idea. My foreman here was just trying to be helpful.\"\n\n\"You call that help?\"\n\n\"Yes, actually. Too bad it didn't work.\"\n\n\"Did you have one of your men shoot Cole Callahan?\"\n\n\"I think you ask too many questions.\"\n\n\"You did, didn't you?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"That was an idea that just didn't pan out. Your family and the Callahans were supposed to be enemies; they just weren't acting like it enough to suit me. Figured to give your menfolk a little nudge to get the killing started so you Warrens could get rid of the Callahans for me. Problem solved. Still not sure why that didn't happen. But this is much more simple. You'll be released as soon as the mining rights are signed over, and Callahan should be here at any moment to do that. Your fianc\u00e9 makes sure you come out of this unscathed, while your mother will have already convinced them not to retaliate. Everyone wins. I'll even still give them my original offer, just to keep it all nice and legal.\"\n\nIt was utterly galling, how pleased he sounded with himself. If he hadn't been blocking the doorway so she couldn't see beyond him, she might try pushing past him to get out of here before his plan succeeded. But she couldn't tell how many guards were out there.\n\n\"There's nothing legal about abduction and blackmail. For all your spit and polish, you're just a fancy-dressed outlaw.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I'm a businessman.\"\n\n\"You're no better than a common thug! Oh, and let's not forget kidnapper, arsonist, blackmailer, and murderer!\"\n\n\"Oh, come now, I only shot your father once,\" he sneered. \"The trick, Miss Warren, is not to get caught. I do pride myself\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped. Tiffany wasn't sure why, but Harris suddenly looked a little sick to his stomach. She didn't know he had a rifle barrel pressed to his back.\n\n\"I think I can dent that pride some, Mr. Harris,\" Sheriff Ross said in a lazy drawl, \"for all the things the little gal just mentioned and then some. Funny thing about our judge. He gets mighty ticked off when his rulings are ignored. And for everything else I can now lay before him, they'll be tossing you in jail and throwing away the key.\"\n\n\"Tiffany?!\"\n\nHunter shoved Harris aside to get to her, drawing her hard against him. \"Tell me you're all right? That he didn't hurt you?\"\n\n\"I'm fine\u2014now,\" she assured him, though she was holding on to him just as tightly. Even with the sheriff's arrival, she hadn't felt relief until now. \"How long were you listening?\"\n\n\"The sheriff held me back. You were getting such a nice confession out of Harris, he wanted you to give him enough rope to hang himself.\"\n\n\"My parents must be frantic.\"\n\n\"They're outside tearing the place apart, along with our brothers, looking for you.\"\n\nThe sheriff's voice was fading as he prodded Harris and the guards out of there.\n\n\"Come on, I'll take you to them,\" Hunter added, but he didn't move, didn't unwrap his arms from her either.\n\n\"How did you know to find me back here?\"\n\n\"Andrew's father led us to this back section. It would have taken us much longer to find you if he hadn't, they've got so many tunnels down here, including one around the cave-in that's on our land. Ross saw it on the way in. That's a direct defiance of the court order against them and is going to get them shut down for good.\"\n\n\"Completely? Well, it's nice that something good came out of this, aside from Harris going to jail. But Andrew's father? Don't tell me their last name really is Buffalo?\"\n\n\"No, it was just obvious, they look so much alike. He was leaving, in fact, most of the miners were. Harris was overheard planning your abduction and the word spread through their camp tonight. They didn't sign on for things like this.\"\n\nHe still wouldn't let go of her. \"Hunter?\"\n\n\"I know.\" He started to release her, but suddenly squeezed her tighter, confessing, \"I've never been so scared, Tiffany. I was the first one here. I didn't know where to look. Ross caught up to me just as Andrew's father did, to point us this way. I almost drew on the sheriff for trying to stop me from charging in here. I don't ever want to feel that kind of fear again. Marry me tomorrow\u2014tonight. I don't think I'll ever sleep peacefully again if you aren't where I can protect you. Don't make me sleep on your porch tonight.\"\n\nShe almost smiled. He hadn't calmed down yet. It was making him unreasonable. \"It's such a small world. That mine owner, Mr. Harding, ruined our lives long before he tried to ruin yours. I'm glad this happened, that Harris is going to be held accountable, after all. It really bothered me when I thought he wouldn't. But please, I have to let my parents know I'm safe. Get me out of here. We can discuss 'us' later.\"\n\n\"Porch it is, then.\"\n\nShe only half thought he was joking. He wasn't." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Rose had been furious that William Harris had threatened another member of her family and had tried to manipulate her once again. She simply thrust the ransom note at Zachary and told him, \"Get my daughter back.\" But she'd calmed down after being assured that Harris was going to prison this time, along with a handful of his cohorts. Thanks to his arrogance in thinking he could get away with anything out West, they had so many charges to bring against him that he would be put away for good.\n\nZachary had been furious, too, but then he wasn't used to anyone's daring to manipulate him. He would have signed the papers, sent Tiffany on home, then shot Harris. But he felt better after Sheriff Ross assured him the mine would be shut down and gave him permission to close the mine entrance the easy way, with dynamite. Zachary lit the fuse himself.\n\nThe Callahans actually followed the Warrens home. Rose passed out the whiskey glasses, keeping one for herself. Tiffany didn't object that she wasn't included in that round of drinks. She could have used one earlier, but with Hunter still in the room, she was enveloped in feeling safe. She'd always liked and appreciated his adamant desire to protect her no matter what, even before he knew who she was.\n\nThere was no mention of going back to the dance. Tiffany was the only one disappointed by that. Her brothers assured her there would be several more dances before the end of summer. They assumed she'd be there for them. They didn't yet know that Rose was willing to take her back to New York now. But then Rose didn't yet know that Tiffany no longer wanted to go back. However, her staying was dependent on Hunter. She still wasn't sure she'd be doing the right thing by either of them if she let just her own wishes decide their future\u2014or lack of one.\n\nRose found a moment to tell her privately, \"I like Hunter, in case you were wondering. If I had to pick a Callahan again, now that they're grown, I'd still pick him. He didn't blush, even a little, when he told me how he felt about you.\"\n\n\"Was that before you got that note?\"\n\n\"Which he snatched out of his father's hands. I've never seen a man that big move so fast. His horse was long gone before we even got to ours. He's yours if you want him to be, you know.\"\n\nRose told Zachary the tale of the night she first met William Harris and how he'd blackmailed her into leaving her husband. They shared another round of drinks to celebrate his downfall. Nothing could ever bring back the lost years, but at least one of the villains in that old tragedy had gotten what he deserved.\n\n\"It felt good, us being on the same side tonight,\" Zachary admitted as the Warrens walked the Callahans to the door. \"I'm willing to put the past to rest if you are, Frank.\"\n\nFranklin offered his hand. It was a momentous occasion, the first time those two men ever shook hands. \"I would have moved to New York to make my wife happy, but she is partial to this place, and I'll do anything to make her happy. Thank you.\"\n\nRose went one better and hugged the eldest Callahan, which actually made him blush. \"Good, good,\" he mumbled. \"Now maybe Mary will talk to me again.\"\n\nTiffany's brothers left with the Callahans to head back to town. It was still Saturday night, after all. Her parents hugged Tiffany for a long moment, now that they had her alone. They didn't say anything, just showed her how much they loved her.\n\nThen Rose said with a yawn that Tiffany was sure was fake, \"What a long day. I'm ready for some sleep.\"\n\n\"Sleep?\" Frank chuckled as he followed his wife upstairs.\n\nTiffany watched them for a moment with a smile, then started up the stairs herself, but stopped when she remembered Hunter's silly remark about sleeping on the porch tonight. Just to be sure he'd been joking, she stepped outside.\n\nAnd there he was. He'd already removed Patches' saddle so he would be comfortable for the night. It was on the floor next to the uncomfortable wooden chair Hunter was sitting in.\n\nHe smiled up at her. \"What took you so long?\"\n\nShe leaned back against the wall near him, even raised one knee the way he always did. \"Because I didn't think you were really serious.\"\n\n\"Course you did, or you wouldn't be out here.\"\n\nShe didn't deny it. \"Should I get you a blanket?\"\n\nHe gave that a little thought before saying, \"Today was one of the hottest days of the summer. Don't expect it to get too chilly tonight\u2014or you could sleep here with me so we won't notice if it does.\"\n\n\"In the chair with you?\"\n\n\"Why not? Well, you can sleep. I don't expect to get any.\"\n\n\"You really think there will be any more trouble? The worst offenders are in jail, and the sheriff said he'd arrange for the railroad to ship the rest out, east or west, in the next few days.\"\n\n\"I meant with you on my lap, I won't be getting any sleep.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\nThe porch lamp wasn't lit, but ample light came from the parlor windows. However, for once, Tiffany didn't care that she was blushing a little.\n\nShe did look down, though, before she said, \"Why didn't you ask me to dance tonight?\"\n\n\"Because I was having too much fun watching you get the hang of it. Because I wanted you to have a good taste of one of our shindigs and see that we can have as much fun out here in the West as you do back East. Because I knew once I did have my arms around you, I wouldn't be letting go\u2014and I can't wait any longer for that.\"\n\nHe leaned over to reach her and drew her onto his lap. With one arm about her waist to support her back, he tilted her chin so she'd look at him. She almost gasped, so much heated emotion was in the powder-blue eyes looking back at her.\n\n\"I want to marry you, Tiffany. I've never wanted anything in my life as much as I want you to be my wife.\"\n\n\"That's twice now you've called me Tiffany.\"\n\n\"Is it? Guess I'm getting used to it. But you know it doesn't matter what you want to call yourself, you're still the woman I fell in love with. I knew it the night I saw you with Caleb's new son, saw how sweet and tender you really are. There was nothing fake about that. It wasn't some role you were playing. That was you, plain and simple. Didn't take more'n a day for me to figure that out, that it was all you. Your daring to come to the enemy camp on your own, that took a great deal of courage. So did trying to put out a fire instead of running away from it. Wanting to rope a cow and laughing at yourself for how long it took. Befriending a pig of all things. Admit it. None of that was a lie. The only thing you lied about was your name.\"\n\n\"Maybe...\"\n\n\"Maybe? That's all you have to say? You've been trying to convince me I don't really know you. I just proved I do. And I just asked you to be my wife! Not because we're already betrothed. And certainly not because your last name is Warren. I love you!\"\n\n\"I love you, too, but\u2014\"\n\nThat's all he needed to hear to silence her with a kiss. Tiffany didn't want to wait any longer to taste him, either. To hell with her reservations. To hell with what he'd told her that day they went riding, told Jennifer, about why he didn't want to marry the Warrens' only daughter. And she'd thought too long that she couldn't have him. Now with that glimmer of hope that she could, it was like a dam opening, releasing all her emotions at once.\n\nHis kiss was exquisitely passionate. Her hand gripped his neck, but the position wasn't to her advantage, she couldn't feel enough of him. The one nice thing about that uncomfortable wooden chair was that it had no arms to keep her from straddling his lap. She moved rather quickly when she realized that. He was a bit surprised, but she was now facing him, her breasts pressed hard to his chest, her hands now holding his head, which was more even with hers. And she could feel him, between her legs, that hard bulge. She could even rub against him and she did. He was driving her crazy\u2014no, she was driving herself crazy, because she could almost feel that dizzying excitement and overwhelming pleasure that she'd felt that night in the barn. It was there, wanting to spiral out of control, but just out of reach. So much passion, so much need, and she couldn't quite get to it.\n\nShe had no idea how he did it without actually moving her or breaking that kiss, pulling on a string, pushing down loosened drawers, but he was suddenly inside her, really inside her. His hands moved to her hips to guide her, but she didn't need help. She knew exactly what to do. It all converged at once, everything he evoked\u2014passion, hope, love\u2014bursting the spiral, wrapping her in bliss.\n\nThey sat there unmoving, breathing still heavy. Her hair had come loose, lay over his arms as he held her against him. She didn't want to stir yet, didn't want to give up a single inch of him. It was a remarkably comfortable position for such an uncomfortable chair.\n\nUntil she realized, \"Oh, my God, on the porch?\"\n\nHis laughter shook her body, still pressed to his. \"Barns, porches, does it matter?\"\n\nShe turned her head and lay it on his shoulder and kissed his neck tenderly. \"No.\"\n\n\"I heard that but earlier,\" he said carefully. \"That wasn't a 'yes, I'll marry you,' was it?\"\n\nShe sighed. \"I can't deny I have one last reservation, but it's a big one.\"\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\n\"It was the day you told me why you didn't want to marry a Warren, that what you felt for them would always be there, deep down, under the surface. And it would get in the way, whether you liked her\u2014me\u2014or not.\"\n\nHe smiled wryly. \"You would have to remember that. It's not that I didn't think it. I did, every time I was looking for excuses not to have to marry a woman I didn't love. Other times, I'd look at it from a more positive side, that, who knows, maybe I'd end up adoring her. So I actually did some shopping for her\u2014well, ordering. Some odd catalogs come through here from time to time. I bought her some things I thought an Easterner might like. Don't laugh, but I've got crates of fine English china stacked in my room, vases, pretty little knickknacks, fancy painted porcelain teacups, when I had no idea if she even drank tea. I went overboard, on my optimistic days. Then I'd think of chucking it all in the fire, on my not-so-optimistic days. You drove me crazy before I even met you.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"It's ironic that a few of those crates arrived here the same day I did.\"\n\nHe moved her back so he could hold her face in his hands. \"Why don't you ask me why I shared those fears with you?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because I was already thinking of you in a permanent way, and I didn't want you to think you were breaking up something that was fated to be. The real irony is that it was fated to be, we just didn't know it yet. Well, I didn't. You, on the other hand, cheated. You got to meet me long before I met you.\"\n\n\"Are you ever going to let me live that down?\"\n\n\"I won't say another word\u2014tonight.\" She laughed, but he added, \"The suspense is killing me, Red. Are we getting hitched tomorrow or not?\"\n\nShe kissed one cheek. \"My mother did have a wedding dress made for me.\" She kissed his other cheek. \"I just refused to pack it, since I had no intention of marrying you.\" She kissed his lips. \"It will take at least a week to get it here.\"\n\nHe kissed her long and hard before he said, \"Next Sunday then?\"\n\n\"Next Sunday sounds wonderful.\"\n\n\"You'll have to move a bed to the porch for me.\" She rolled her eyes, but he added, \"I'm not kidding. But next Sunday is a nice date. We might even get our house built by then.\"\n\n\"Now that's absurd. There's no way\u2014\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised, actually, I guess you will be. We've got carpenters, even masons, and one heck of a lot of people who will want to pitch in to see it happen. A barn can be built in a day. A fancy house will take a few days more. And you can design it however you want\u2014if you want one here.\"\n\nHe was suddenly looking a little worried, for having jumped the gun. She assured him by saying, \"I thought we might take a trip to New York after the house is finished. We can pick out furniture together. And I can show you where I grew up, introduce you to my friends\u2014\"\n\n\"And talk me into staying? I will, you know, if that's what you want. I don't care where we live, as long as we're together.\"\n\n\"You'd do that for me?\"\n\n\"I'd do anything for you.\"\n\nShe wasn't really surprised that he'd say that. It was part of his charm, just one of the many reasons she'd fallen in love with him.\n\n\"Lucky for you, I'm partial to Montana sunsets,\" she teased. \"Among other things. And I think we can find an empty bed for you in the house.\"\n\nDrawn by his looks, roped in by his charm, her heart had been won by this man. It made her smile quite brilliantly to realize that her grandchildren were going to be cowboys after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Undercover Bride.txt", + "author": "Margaret Brownley", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Where there is no counsel, the people fall; but in the multitude of counselors there is safety.\n\nPROVERBS 11:14" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\nArizona Territory, 1882\n\nMaggie Taylor spotted the thief the moment she stepped off the Southern Pacific train and onto the open-air platform.\n\nAs a Pinkerton operative, she'd dealt with her share of pickpockets through the years, but this one put the profession to shame. He made no attempt at discretion; he simply bumped into a male passenger and walked away with the man's gold watch.\n\nNormally Maggie wouldn't hesitate to pursue the culprit, but today she had bigger fish to fry. Chasing after a third-rate thief could jeopardize months of hard work and careful preparation, and she couldn't take the chance.\n\nThat is, until he targeted a young mother with three small children. Maggie changed her mind. He had to be stopped.\n\nThreading her way through the crowd, she reached the woman ahead of the thief and picked up the drawstring handbag she'd carelessly left next to a carpetbag.\n\n\"Your purse, ma'am. There are thieves around. Better keep an eye on it.\"\n\nThe harried mother took the bag from her. She looked no older than nineteen or twenty. \"Thank you,\" she murmured, as if thieves were the least of her problems.\n\nSatisfied that the pickpocket's latest attempt at larceny had been thwarted, Maggie pushed him from her mind and swung her gaze over the crowd. Never before had a new assignment filled her with such anxiety. But then again, never had she attempted such a daring venture.\n\nWould she recognize the suspect on sight?\n\nAccording to Pinkerton files, Garrett Thomas stood six feet tall, was forty-five years of age, and had dark hair and blue eyes. His one outstanding feature was a scar along the side of his face\u2014a war wound. He was also extremely clever. Some said even lucky. A suspected thief and murderer, Thomas had endured the Battle of Gettysburg and a year in the Andersonville rebel prison\u2014an impressive record of survival by anyone's standards.\n\nThough he was suspected of committing a daring train robbery, his most notable achievement was evading Pinkerton's best detectives for nearly two years. We'll see how long your luck holds out this time, Mr. Thomas. Eventually even a cat runs out of lives.\n\nAfter checking that her feathered hat was angled just right, she pushed a strand of auburn hair behind her ear and smoothed the bun at her nape. Her wardrobe had been chosen with utmost care, and her demeanor meticulously polished.\n\nThe goal was to look fashionable but not ostentatious: to act domesticated without appearing dull. At all times she had to be charming, well spoken, and industrious. In matters of politics, religion, and finances she must take care not to express a contrary view as she was often inclined to do. In other words, she had to look and act like a woman that any man would be proud, indeed anxious, to wed.\n\nGiven her somewhat opinionated and independent spirit, curtailing her impulsive nature would be her greatest challenge. She couldn't afford to do or say anything without careful consideration of the consequences. Not this time.\n\nNot only did she have to make a fine impression but one that would throw no suspicion her way. \"Dazzle Thomas with your charm and good looks,\" Mr. Pinkerton had said. \"He won't suspect a thing.\"\n\nIn her current state, she'd be lucky to dazzle a horsefly. She was hot and she was hungry and more than anything, travel weary.\n\nDespite the desert heat, she donned her kid gloves and smoothed the wrinkles from her blue velvet-trimmed suit. Steam hissed across the platform, and passengers sidestepped the heated blast.\n\nA barefooted boy of nine or ten raised a folded newspaper in the air and yelled something about a fire. \"Readallaboutit!\"\n\nA man bumped into her and almost knocked her off her feet. Regaining her balance, she pivoted just in time to see the same thief she'd spotted earlier snatch the paperboy's money bag and dart into the crowd. The nerve! It wasn't bad enough trying to steal from a young mother, but a child?\n\nThe youth's face turned red. \"That man took my pouch!\" His eyes brimmed with tears, though he tried not to let them fall. \"Now I gotta pay the money back.\"\n\nMaggie hesitated. If only the boy didn't look so needy. His tattered shirt was a size too small, and his threadbare trousers fell six inches short of his dirty bare feet. \"Stay here!\" she said and took off after the robber.\n\nThe thief moved at a fast clip, but the crowded platform and a limp kept him from altogether running. His long dark coat was more suitable for cold weather, and it made him stand out among a crowd dressed mainly in calico dresses and boiled white shirts.\n\nSomething was definitely wrong with his left leg. He dragged it along, toes pointing away from his body. She'd almost caught up to him when a dark-skinned porter pushed a cart of baggage in her path, momentarily blocking her way.\n\nBy the time the cart moved, the pickpocket had vanished. She ran to the end of the platform and immediately spotted him lumbering along the railroad tracks. Had he been physically able to run she might have given up the chase, but he looked like an easy mark.\n\nJumping to the ground, she raised her skirt above her ankles and took off after him. Here I go again, tossing common sense to the wind. But she couldn't seem to help herself. Not where children were concerned.\n\nRunning on the gravel in high-button shoes and a straight skirt wasn't easy, but she quickly gained on the man. She just hoped he didn't force her to pull out her pistol.\n\nNo more than a couple of yards separated them when the heel of her boot caught on a wooden railroad tie. All at once her feet flew from beneath her. Arms and legs windmilling, she fell facedown on the ground.\n\nThe wind knocked out of her, she fought to gather her wits. Now look what she'd done. Grimacing, she ever so slowly pushed to her feet and squinted against the blazing sun. On the left side of the tracks a bleak desert stretched for as far as the eye could see. Since the thief was nowhere in sight, he'd probably ducked through the adobe brickyard that paralleled the tracks on the right.\n\nWhat kind of town was this anyway that a man could steal from a young boy in plain sight and get away with it?\n\nGritting her teeth, she stared down at her stylish blue traveling suit now covered in dust.\n\nShe brushed herself off with quick angry swipes and straightened her feather hat. When would she ever learn? One impetuous moment could jeopardize six months of careful planning.\n\nThe sound of crunching gravel made her whirl about. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood but a few feet away staring at her with eyes the color of a deep blue sea.\n\n\"Is everything all right, ma'am?\"\n\nHer mouth fell open, and her hand flew to her parted lips. The red scar slicing down the side of his handsome square face told her he could be no other than the suspect Garrett Thomas, the man she had traveled all this distance to wed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Maggie's mind scrambled. Normally able to think on her feet, she had a hard time coming up with a plausible explanation for standing on the railroad tracks. God, don't let me mess up this job. Not like she did the Madison case, which had landed her in jail. This time she would get her man if it killed her. Reminding herself to \"dazzle,\" she lifted her chin with a brilliant smile.\n\n\"I'm quite all right, thank you.\" Taller than she'd expected, he towered over her five-foot-seven-inch height by more than six inches. He was clean shaven with high cheekbones and a straight nose. His brown hair, neatly trimmed to just above his collar, was combed from a side part.\n\n\"Mr. Thomas, right?\" she said, extending a gloved hand. At least the Pinkerton report got the color of his eyes right, though listing the color as merely blue hardly did them justice.\n\nHe stared at her for a brief moment before his hand swallowed hers in a firm grip. His wide shoulders filled his boiled shirt and low-cut vest with no room to spare. A large-brim hat shaded his face.\n\n\"And you must be Miss Taylor.\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She smiled and lowered her lashes as she imagined a woman meeting her fianc\u00e9 for the first time might do. Under Allan Pinkerton's guidance, she had answered this man's advertisement for a mail-order bride and corresponded with him for nearly six months.\n\nMuch to her dismay, he didn't look particularly dazzled. Instead he frowned. \"What are you doing here on the railroad tracks?\"\n\n\"I was hoping to... convince a thief to return his haul.\" Sticking as close to the truth as possible was the key to creating a realistic illusion. She'd worked long and hard to arrange this meeting and would play her role to the hilt.\n\nAs if suddenly aware that he still held her hand, he released it. \"And how, exactly, did you intend to do that?\" His eyes shone with amusement. \"Convince him, I mean.\"\n\nWith a strategically pointed gun, if necessary. Of course she couldn't say that aloud. \"With charm and goodwill,\" she said instead.\n\nHe hung his thumbs from his vest pockets and grinned. \"I don't know how it is in your hometown, ma'am, but here in Arizona, charm and goodwill won't get you the time of day.\"\n\nSo much for the principal's dazzle theory. \"What will?\" she asked, feigning a look of innocence.\n\n\"A firearm and a good left hook.\"\n\nShe would have felt a whole lot better had he said it with a smile like the one she'd seen before, but he looked serious. Dead serious. Nevertheless, she maintained her composure. \"I didn't know that Arizona was so... civilized.\"\n\nThis time he did smile, which only emphasized his nicely shaped mouth. \"Oh, we're civilized all right. We haven't had a shootout since last Wednesday.\" He crooked his arm and inclined his head. \"Shall we? My rig's over there.\"\n\nShe slipped her arm through his and forced herself to breathe. It hardly seemed fair for a suspected killer to be so attractive, but she wasn't about to be fooled by his charm or good looks.\n\nShe willed the knot in her stomach to go away as they approached his horse and wagon. Her bout of nerves was annoying and totally uncalled for. He had no reason to suspect she was anyone other than who she pretended to be: an innocent farm girl and mail-order bride.\n\nAll she had to do was act like the perfect little fianc\u00e9e until she found the proof to put him away and she'd be home free. It sounded easy enough during the planning stages, but now that she'd met him in person, something told her that nothing about this man would be simple." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nGarrett Thomas was surprised to see his Aunt Hetty on his doorstep later that day. Yesterday she was on her deathbed declaring, \"This really is the end.\" And here she was no more than twenty-four hours later, dressed in her Sunday-go-to-meeting best and looking spry as a young hen.\n\nNormally he would be delighted to see her up and about, but he knew from experience that any time his aunt donned feathers and silk midweek, it was never a good sign. Either this really was her last day on earth or she was about to put her nose where it didn't belong. The appearance of Reverend Holly could mean either one of his suppositions was correct.\n\n\"Don't tell me you're planning your funeral again,\" Garrett said wryly, bracing himself for her usual long and tiresome list of physical complaints, or what he called her \"organ recital.\" Her last recitation started at the big toe and worked up from there to the cranium.\n\nBut she surprised him. No palpitating heart complaints today. No sciatic grievances. Nor any rheumatism updates. Instead, his aunt pushed past him in a cloud of rustling brown silk and lavender perfume.\n\n\"No, but now that you mention it, I do wish to make some changes.\" She pulled off her kid gloves as she spoke and gave them an emphatic shake. \"I'll not have that awful Grace Lytton sing at my funeral.\" Aunt Hetty was a small, birdlike woman whose sharp tongue had, at one time or other, alienated everyone in town.\n\nThe minister splayed his hands and shrugged before following her inside the house with an apologetic air. He was a short, barrel-chested man with a goatee. Red suspenders held up his trousers, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbows. His one concession to formality was his ever-present bow tie with the pointed ends.\n\nHis aunt planted herself on the divan as if intending to take root, and the minster took the nearby upholstered chair.\n\nBefore Garrett had a chance to find out what was really going on, his five-year-old daughter, Elise, ran into the parlor, her face bright with delight.\n\n\"Aunty!\" she squealed.\n\nAunt Hetty wrapped her arms around the child's small frame, but other than a quick glance at Elise, her attention remained on Garrett. \"Be careful of my back, precious, and watch my bad knee. Oh, and we must do something with your hair. We can't have you looking like a waif for your father's wedding.\"\n\nGarrett stared at his aunt. So that's what this visit was about. He should have known.\n\n\"What's a waif?\" Elise asked.\n\nGarrett kept his irritation in check, as much for his daughter's sake as for the man of God. He didn't have much use for the church, but the reverend deserved respect, as did any guest in his household.\n\n\"I'll tell you later. Now run along like a good girl.\" She patted Elise on the backside. \"I wish to speak to your father.\"\n\nAnd Garrett wished to speak to her.\n\nAunt Hetty meant well, but he and he alone would decide if and when he married. Miss Taylor's letters had looked promising; she wrote with intelligence, warmth, and wit. But after meeting her in person, he had grave concerns about her lack of judgment. Chasing after a thief, of all things... She could have gotten herself killed. In the name of Sam Hill, what had she been thinking? And what other character flaws did she possess?\n\nHe waited until Elise had left the room. \"As I explained the other day, Miss Taylor and I wish to wait until we've had time to get to know each other.\" Selecting a new wife was not a task to be taken lightly, especially when his two children were involved.\n\n\"Wait too long and I might not be around to enjoy your wedding. You know how my back has been acting up and\u2014\"\n\n\"A bad back is not generally a cause of death,\" Garrett argued.\n\nAunt Hetty stared down her pointed nose. \"That's not all that's wrong with me and you know it.\"\n\nThe minister, apparently sensing she was about to run through another shopping list of ailments, interrupted. \"Speaking of weddings, when do we get to meet the bride-to-be?\"\n\n\"Good question.\" Aunt Hetty leaned forward, both brown-spotted hands atop her cane. \"We stopped at the hotel and the clerk told us there was some sort of mix-up.\"\n\n\"There was a mix-up all right.\" The room he'd reserved for Maggie a month ago had been given to someone else. \"No rooms are available.\"\n\n\"Hmm. How odd.\" Aunt Hetty gave him a questioning look. \"So where is she staying?\"\n\n\"Right now she's staying here.\"\n\nHer eyebrows shot up. \"Then there's no time to waste. I won't have you living in sin around my grandniece and grandnephew.\"\n\nThe reverend mopped his damp forehead with a handkerchief but refrained from comment.\n\nAunt Hetty sniffed. \"It's a good thing I dragged myself out of a sickbed to come over here. I probably shortened my life by\u2014\"\n\n\"You shouldn't have done that,\" Garrett said.\n\n\"Nonsense. I promised your dear mother that I would take care of you.\"\n\n\"And no one could have done a better job than you.\" His widowed mother died when he was six, and his aunt devoted herself to his upbringing at great sacrifice. That's what made it so difficult to stand his ground now.\n\n\"Surely you see the advantage of getting to know my bride first before we tie the knot. Let the children get to know her.\"\n\n\"Hogwash! There'll be plenty of chances for the children to get to know her after you've made an honest woman of her.\"\n\nThe reverend tucked his handkerchief in his pocket. \"It seems to me that the bride should have something to say about this.\"\n\nGarrett inclined his head toward the bedroom where Miss Taylor had been closeted since they'd arrived home. \"She's resting from her journey.\"\n\n\"Did you tell her about Toby?\" his aunt asked.\n\nGarrett inhaled. His eight-year-old son had become a sore subject between them. He wasn't a bad kid, just curious and adventuresome and far too active for his aunt to handle.\n\n\"There's nothing to tell.\"\n\n\"Tell me what?\"\n\nAll eyes turned toward the young woman standing at the entranceway. Suddenly Garrett had trouble finding his voice. Miss Taylor's good looks hadn't escaped his notice, of course, but nothing prepared him for the way she appeared at that moment\u2014all rested and dewy-eyed. If her big blue eyes and wide smile weren't enough to make a man notice, her auburn hair and delicate features certainly were. He had the sudden need to protect her, not only from his aunt's critical eye but also from all the ugliness of his past.\n\nAunt Hetty gave an impatient nod. \"Well, aren't you going to introduce us?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Surprised to catch himself staring, he motioned Maggie to his side. She barely came up to his shoulders, and her every move released a delicate fragrance that reminded him of spring. Her easy smile seemed at odds with the alert way she carried herself. She had a dainty nose, a wide, curving mouth, resolute chin, and a graceful, long neck. Her slight but shapely form hardly seemed strong enough to contain her indomitable demeanor. A woman of contradictions.\n\nWhy would such a pretty and intelligent woman consider being a mail-order bride? His mail-order bride.\n\n\"Aunt Hetty, Reverend Holly, it's my pleasure to introduce Miss Maggie Taylor.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nMaggie smiled as Thomas introduced her. She'd dealt with her share of hard-nosed criminals through the years, but it was hard not to be intimidated by the old woman's sharp-eyed gaze. The Pinkerton file described Garrett's aunt as a no-nonsense type and marked her as being perhaps the most difficult to fool. Maggie had hoped to settle in before coming face-to-face with her, but since that was no longer possible, she would simply have to make the best of it.\n\nShe greeted the older woman with an extended hand. \"Pleased to meet you.\"\n\nHis aunt had a surprisingly firm grip. After a quick shake, the older woman withdrew her hand. \"Never thought you'd marry a Southerner,\" she said, surprising Maggie.\n\nShe was born in the South, but her family moved north when she was four. That made her a Yankee through and through. No one other than Thomas's aunt had detected anything in her manner or speech tracing back to her early roots.\n\nReminding herself to dazzle, Maggie kept a smile plastered on her face. Nothing was wrong with the old lady's hearing. And the way Thomas's aunt stared at her, as if seeing right through her, there was nothing wrong with the woman's eyesight, either.\n\n\"What difference does it make, Hetty?\" the reverend asked, breaking the brittle silence. \"The war's been over for a good many years.\"\n\nGarrett nodded. \"Yes, it has been.\"\n\n\"But the effects linger on,\" his aunt said, her gaze boring into her nephew's scar. He frowned. Taking the hint, she shifted her attention to Maggie. \"How old are you?\"\n\n\"Aunt Hetty!\"\n\nMaggie turned to Garrett. \"It's all right. I have nothing to hide.\" Much. \"I'm twenty-six.\" She could have said she was younger and probably gotten away with it, but it was wiser to stick with the truth whenever possible. Less to remember that way. Less chance of getting caught in a lie or fabrication.\n\nAunt Hetty slanted her head sideways. \"That's rather old for a bride, wouldn't you say? Why have you waited so long to marry?\"\n\n\"My family needed me at home,\" Maggie replied. Her real name was Maggie Cartwright, and she had no family. Not anymore.\n\nAssuming a new identity was never easy. One of the jobs of an undercover agent was to prepare in advance for every possible question or situation. She couldn't just pose as a mail-order bride; she had to be a mail-order bride.\n\nAunt Hetty's eyes narrowed. \"And I take it your family no longer needs you now?\"\n\nIn her letters to Thomas she'd written at length about her loving family and the Indiana farm where she grew up\u2014fiction, all of it.\n\n\"No, but this little family does,\" Maggie replied with a quick glance at Thomas. Had she said the right thing? Or had she been too presumptuous? It was hard to tell by his stoic expression.\n\n\"Hmm.\" The older woman's face showed reluctant acceptance. \"Shall we get on with it, then? Where's Toby?\"\n\nMaggie's stomach knotted. \"Get on with what?\"\n\n\"Why, your wedding, of course,\" his aunt replied.\n\nMaggie felt Garrett stiffen by her side. Obviously he was even less happy to hear this than she was. \"I told you we intend to wait,\" he snapped.\n\nMaggie glanced at Garrett's rigid profile. Waiting was one of the stipulations made clear in her letter to him, but his vehemence worried her. Did he suspect something? Had he changed his mind? Not that she would blame him, of course. After that fiasco at the train station, she wouldn't be surprised if he called the whole thing off.\n\nAunt Hetty's brow creased. \"Have you any idea how it would look, a man and woman living together without benefit of God's blessing?\" His aunt gave a determined shake of her head. \"If Miss Taylor stays here, you'll both be the talk of the town.\"\n\n\"I don't care what people say, and I care even less for God's blessing.\" Belatedly Thomas added, \"Sorry, Reverend.\"\n\nHis aunt refused to be deterred. \"If you don't care about your reputation, then think about the children's. Miss Taylor can stay with me. In fact, I insist upon it.\"\n\n\"Oh no!\" Maggie's outburst raised even the preacher's eyebrows. She cleared her throat and started again, this time in a more ladylike tone of voice. \"What I mean to say is, I don't want you to go to any... bother on my account.\"\n\nAunt Hetty discounted her concern with a wave of her hand. \"No bother at all.\"\n\n\"What about your health, Hetty?\" Reverend Holly asked. \"Your heart might not be able to stand the strain of having a guest.\"\n\nAunt Hetty sniffed. \"A little strain is a small price to pay for saving my nephew's reputation.\"\n\nGarrett opened his mouth to say something, but Maggie laid her hand on his arm and smiled up at him. His aunt had expressed concern for the children. Maggie hoped that was the key to getting the old lady to back down.\n\n\"We want the young ones to get to know me first before I become their stepmother. I'm sure you'll agree that would be in their best interests. Staying here might be\"\u2014akin to sitting on a keg of lit dynamite\u2014\"a blessing in disguise.\"\n\nA shadow of indecision flitted across the older woman's face, and she glanced at the reverend as if seeking his counsel. \"I... I don't know.\"\n\n\"Sounds reasonable to me,\" Reverend Holly said. \"As long as you and Garrett here conduct yourselves in a\"\u2014he cleared his voice and stroked his goatee\u2014\"godly manner.\"\n\nSince the minister was staring at her hand still on Garrett's arm, Maggie quickly pulled it away. \"Rest assured that we would never do anything to shame the family or harm the children,\" she said with schoolmarm primness.\n\n\"Then it's settled.\" Reverend Holly slapped his hands on his thighs and stood.\n\n\"Not so fast,\" Aunt Hetty said, intent upon having the last word. \"It's not settled until we set a date.\" She hesitated as if doing a mental check of her calendar. \"June's a lovely time for a wedding, don't you think? And it's such a healthy month. Doc Coldwell told me he treated fewer patients that month than any other time of year. What about... the fifteenth?\"\n\nA quick calculation told Maggie that was little more than a month away. Five weeks at the most. She glanced at Thomas, hoping he would object, but he remained silent.\n\n\"That doesn't give us much time,\" she said. She hoped that was all the time needed to do the job she was sent to do, but things always took longer than planned. \"The children\u2014\"\n\n\"That's a long time in a child's life,\" Aunt Hetty said in a voice that indicated the matter settled, at least in her own mind. \"And if we wait much longer, I might not be around.\"\n\n\"Are you moving away?\" Maggie asked.\n\nThe older woman gave her a fish-eyed stare. \"I'm dying,\" she said in a straightforward tone that one might use to express a matter of less concern.\n\nMaggie drew back, hand on her chest. \"I\u2014sI'm sorry,\" she stammered. She glanced at Thomas, but he offered no help. If anything, he looked oddly unconcerned about his aunt's health.\n\nAunt Hetty put on her gloves and stood. \"Maybe this works out for the best. Now we can plan a proper wedding.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nWhen Thomas's aunt left with the minister, Maggie let out a sigh of relief.\n\nWith her piercing looks and pointed questions, Aunt Hetty would have made a fine detective. Never had Maggie felt more like an insect beneath a microscope. It was a good thing his aunt didn't know her real reason for being there. That was one foe she'd rather not tackle.\n\nAfter the two children finished waving good-bye, Thomas shut the door, and she could have sworn she heard him mutter something beneath his breath.\n\n\"I apologize for my aunt,\" he said.\n\nIt seemed like an odd thing to say about a woman whose days were numbered. \"She's just concerned about you. I only hope the wedding isn't too much for her.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about Aunt Hetty.\" His eyes were so clear, so blue, so intense as he studied her, she feared he could see right through her disguise and know she was a fraud. \"She'll outlive us all. But she just can't seem to leave well enough alone.\"\n\nShe frowned, not sure she'd heard right. \"Are you saying your aunt isn't dying?\"\n\nHis mouth quirked upward. \"Let's just say she suffers from an embarrassing lack of ailments to go with her pains.\"\n\nLaughter bubbled out of her unexpectedly; she couldn't help herself. So seldom did she get to laugh in her profession. Criminals were not known for their sense of humor.\n\nHis eyes warmed to her laughter, but his attention was soon drawn to his young daughter tugging on his arm. Elise's hair was more gold than blond, and her eyes a lovely pale blue. She probably took after her mother in appearance.\n\nIn contrast, eight-year-old Toby was the spitting image of his father. His eyes were the same deep shade of blue, and brown hair fell across his forehead from a single part. He looked like a normal active boy, but Thomas's aunt had indicated otherwise. So what had Thomas not told her?\n\n\"Let's go outside and give Miss Taylor some privacy,\" Thomas said. He opened the door and brushed the children through with a sweep of his arm. \"If you need me\u2014\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I'll know where to find you.\" The blood that rushed to her face surprised her. Either she was a better actress than she thought or the desert heat was adversely affecting her.\n\nWith a quick smile and slight nod, he turned and followed the children outside.\n\nGrateful for the reprieve, she drew in her breath and wiped her damp hands on her skirt. The hardest part was over\u2014or at least she hoped it was. Now all she had to do was find the seventy thousand dollars stolen during the Whistle-Stop train robbery and leave.\n\nBacking away from the door, her skirt brushed against a chessboard, and several pieces fell over. Not knowing how to play, she had no idea where the pieces belonged. She stood the ivory chessmen upright across the board and hoped for the best.\n\nShe walked to the children's room she now shared with Elise. Toby would bunk across the hall in his father's room. It was a simple adobe house with two bedrooms, a parlor, and a kitchen. It also had a separate small room furnished with a cast-iron horse trough. Bars of soap and folded towels told her this was a bathing room, a luxury she hadn't counted on.\n\nSurprised and overjoyed to find such a convenience, she gazed longingly at the tub. What she would give for a hot bath. Later... Closing the door, she moved away.\n\nIt appeared that the hall, bedrooms, and bathing room had been added to the original house. Outside there was a privy, barn, well, small corral, and vegetable garden.\n\nSearching a house this size would take no more than a few short hours, and her spirits lifted. With a little luck, she'd find enough incriminating evidence on Garrett Thomas to quickly complete her task. If all went as planned, she could be on her way back to the States in a day or two\u2014a week at the most.\n\nThe house was comfortable but needed work. The gingham curtains were faded, the furniture dull, and the carpets looked like they could use a good beating. The house had once been cared for but now looked as forlorn as a child's outgrown toy.\n\nShe finished unpacking her few belongings and glanced around the tiny room. Laughter coaxed her to the window. Thomas and the children were playing a lively game of hide-and-seek. A frisky white dog chased after them, its yippy barks mingling with their happy whoops.\n\nFrom the window she had a clear view of the desert and the distant mountains. The sun rode low in the sky, casting purple shadows across the stark landscape. Tall, stately cacti seemed to beckon with upraised arms, and she was tempted to answer the call.\n\nThe closest neighbor was a good mile away, and she felt completely alone and isolated. An unfamiliar bout of nerves surged through her. It was as if the hot desert air had burned away her usual confidence.\n\nIn an effort to reassure herself, she checked the derringer holstered to her thigh. Reaching for it was just a matter of sticking her hand into the false pocket of her skirt. Tomorrow she would travel to town and meet with her colleague.\n\nThe Pinkerton principal thought the job too dangerous to send a woman alone and had dispatched another operative to work with her. For that she was grateful.\n\nMost of her assignments had been in large cities like St. Louis, New Orleans, and Boston. This job was unlike any she'd ever known. If something should go wrong... If Thomas came to suspect her real identity...\n\nShuddering, she said a silent prayer. Placing her worries squarely in God's hands forced her negative thoughts away.\n\nThomas ran past the window, and her eyes tracked his long, lean frame around the yard. He bore little resemblance to the stoic man who had driven her home from the station. A playful smile softened his granitelike features, and not even the red scar took away from his good looks. A slight desert breeze rippled through his hair. The strand falling across his forehead gave him a boyish look that was hard to resist.\n\nElise fell, and he was by her side in an instant, checking her over for injuries and soothing her with hugs.\n\nHe appeared to be a doting father, and that was a complication Maggie hadn't expected. It wasn't all that unusual for criminals to be good family men, of course. Some, like the head of the McMurphy gang, were downright neighborly and invited friends and family in for gala parties. But the Pinkerton file on Thomas pegged him as possibly psychopathic, and so far nothing about him seemed to fit that description.\n\nShe dropped the curtain in place with a sigh and moved away from the window. However much she felt sorry for the children, she had a job to do.\n\nShe glanced around the small but tidy room. Two beds occupied opposite walls, separated by a single bureau.\n\nThe Pinkerton principal would no doubt object to her staying at Thomas's house rather than the hotel as planned. The mail-order-bride ruse was dangerous enough without the added risk of staying at the suspect's house. But she was far more likely to meet with success here than in town. Especially now, for thanks to his aunt, she had only a few short weeks in which to conduct her investigation. Aunt Hetty had accepted the decision to postpone the wedding, but Maggie doubted she would again.\n\nA wall shelf contained a McGuffey's Reader piled on top of books on civil government and penmanship. A metal locomotive the length of a bread box rested on a second shelf. It was a remarkably accurate model down to the last detail.\n\nThe room smelled like peppermint candy, reminding her that she hadn't eaten since breakfast. Walking out into the hall, she paused outside the closed door directly opposite the children's room. She could hardly wait to search it, but now wasn't the time. Thomas could enter the house at any moment.\n\nStomach growling she walked to the kitchen. It was well equipped with an icebox, cookstove, water pump, and coffee grinder. A butcher-block table seated four, and a large window over the sink gave a panorama view of the fast-setting sun over purple mountains.\n\nThomas had indicated earlier that there was fresh chicken for supper, along with garden vegetables. She'd heard it said that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. But it wasn't Thomas's heart she was interested in as much as his secrets, and there was nothing like a good meal to loosen the tongue.\n\nOne by one she opened cupboards and drawers to get the lay of the land.\n\nNever had she seen so much tinware. Cooking utensils, metal plates, and cups crammed practically every shelf. Some even hung from hooks on the wall. Garrett Thomas was a tinker by profession, and the GT stamped on the bottom of each pot and pan confirmed it.\n\nIt was this very stamp that had led to Thomas in the first place. A man fitting his description had emptied the safe of an eastbound train. The train had stopped at the Holbrook station for water and fuel. Passengers, engineer, and trainmen had disembarked for a thirty-minute supper break, leaving only the guard aboard.\n\nWithout warning, the train suddenly backed out of the station. Though the engineer and his crew gave chase, the train was soon a distance away. The guard was forced to open the safe, and by the time the crew reached the train, they found the man dead and the thieves long gone, along with seventy thousand dollars. It was the largest heist of its kind.\n\nTrain robberies were still relatively rare. Outlaws preferred robbing stagecoaches to trains. Maggie suspected that would change when more track was laid. That's why Pinkerton put his best people on this case. If this particular robbery went unsolved, it would send the wrong message to any would-be thieves.\n\nIt had been a daring robbery, and after a preliminary investigation, the railroad hired the Pinkerton detective agency. Allan's son, William, had walked the tracks where two men had been seen prior to the holdup. It was during this initial investigation that he found a money clip marked with the initials GT right next to the tracks.\n\nThis led to a two-year investigation that had stymied Pinkerton's best detectives. A witness described one of the men seen boarding the stopped train as having a scarred face. That, along with the money clip, pointed to Thomas, but they still lacked tangible proof. Scarred faces were a dime a dozen in the West, and anyone could have dropped the money clip.\n\nThe investigation went nowhere until six months ago when suddenly five one-hundred-dollar bills showed up in Furnace Creek during a school fund-raiser. That was more money than anyone living in a small Arizona town was likely to afford. The fact that the money happened to show up at the school where Garrett Thomas's children attended was too much of a coincidence to ignore.\n\nOddly enough, the money appeared around the same time Thomas had placed an ad in a popular mail-order-bride catalog, providing investigators with a daring plan.\n\nIt was now Maggie's job to find enough evidence against him to satisfy a court of law.\n\nPushing her thoughts aside, she found a woman's apron in one of the drawers and tied it to her waist.\n\nHer detective work left neither time nor the inclination to improve her culinary skills. Since a mail-order bride would be expected to be well versed in the art of homemaking, Pinkerton arranged for training. Her teacher was a widow named Mrs. Cranston who insisted that oil heated to just the right temperature was the mainstay of life.\n\n\"Even manna from heaven tasted like oil,\" she'd declared.\n\nMaggie stared at the chicken laid out on the counter waiting to be plucked. She sure did hope Mrs. Cranston was right." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nAn hour and a half later, the four of them gathered around the butcher-block table that took up half the kitchen. Thomas sat at the head and Maggie took the chair opposite him at the foot. The children sitting on either side cast curious glances at her.\n\nToby had a strange-looking bowl-shaped hat on his head with coiled pieces of wire sticking out in every direction.\n\n\"That's an interesting hat you're wearing,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"That's his thinking cap,\" Elise explained.\n\n\"Oh, I see.\" Maggie spooned peas onto Elise's plate. \"I dare say, we could all use a thinking cap on occasion.\"\n\nNothing on the table could pass as manna, but the chicken had been fried to a crisp golden brown and the peas cooked to perfection. The potatoes and gravy were almost but not entirely lump-free; hopefully no one would notice.\n\nThomas and the children dived into their food without benefit of grace. Had Thomas known her inexperience as a cook, he might have been more inclined to ask for the Lord's blessing.\n\nMaggie said a silent prayer, and when she opened her eyes she found both children staring at her.\n\n\"Are you going to take care of us?\" Elise asked.\n\nMaggie glanced at the far end of the table. Thomas was smothering his food in salt with the same intent as one might use to put out a fire.\n\n\"Yes, I am,\" she said and smiled.\n\nShe just hoped her domestic responsibilities didn't interfere with her investigation. Fortunately, both children attended school, so her days should be free.\n\nElise considered Maggie's answer with a worried frown. \"Are you going to be mean like my teacher?\"\n\n\"I'm only mean to children who don't do their chores or schoolwork,\" she said.\n\nThomas set the salt dish down. \"Well, it seems that Miss Taylor and I are in accord.\"\n\n\"What's accord?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"It means that they like each other,\" Toby said, the metal wires on his head waving back and forth.\n\nMaggie dabbed her mouth with a napkin. \"Actually, accord means that your father and I are in agreement.\"\n\nElise's head turned from one to the other. \"So does it mean that you don't like each other?\"\n\n\"We like each other just fine.\" She lifted her lashes to find Thomas watching her, and heat rushed to her face.\n\nShe quickly looked away. She needed to keep her wits but for some reason couldn't seem to even control her breathing. Maybe she was just tired. The trip to Arizona had been long. After a good night's sleep she was bound to feel like her usual confident self again.\n\nSatisfied that she had solved the mystery of her uncharacteristic behavior, she reached for the neglected plate of corn bread. \"Would anyone care for some?\" she said a bit too brightly.\n\nToby glanced at his father. The wires on his thinking cap quivered. \"We're n\u2014not allowed to\u2014\"\n\n\"Eat the bread,\" Thomas said, interrupting his son's protest.\n\nToby's bottom lip stuck out. \"You said that corn bread\u2014\"\n\n\"I said eat it.\" Thomas looked up. \"Or go to your room.\"\n\nToby regarded the bread with grave suspicion but, prompted by his father's stern look, reached for the smallest square. He dropped it on his plate and stared at it with downcast eyes.\n\nMaggie sent a glance of inquiry to Thomas. \"Is there a problem with the bread?\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it. You had no way of knowing.\"\n\n\"Knowing what?\" she persisted.\n\n\"We can't eat corn bread,\" Elise said, her eyes round as saucers. \"It's poison.\"\n\n\"Poison?\" Maggie set the plate of bread down and took a piece for herself. Biting into it, she said, \"See? It's perfectly safe.\" A bit dry, perhaps, but tasty.\n\nBoth children stared in round-eyed horror as if they expected her to topple over at any moment. No one else touched the bread, and they finished their meal in silence.\n\nLater, as she cleared the table, she discovered Toby's corn bread tucked inside his napkin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Thomas surprised her after supper by helping clear the table. A widower for two years, he obviously knew his way around the kitchen.\n\nWhile they waited for the water to heat, he leaned his tall form against the doorframe, arms crossed, watching her. His presence seemed to fill the room, and she was extremely conscious of his every move.\n\n\"That was a mighty fine meal,\" he said, his voice warm with approval. \"I didn't expect you to take over the household chores on your first day here.\"\n\n\"I don't mind.\" She turned to the iron cookstove just as a funnel of steam rose from the kettle spout.\n\n\"Let me get that for you,\" he said.\n\nBefore she could turn down his offer, he stepped to her side. His elbow brushed against her arm as he easily lifted the kettle off the cast-iron stove and poured the hot water into two basins in the sink. One was for washing, the other for rinsing. Returning the kettle to the stove, he lifted a pail of cold water and poured it into each basin to lower the temperature.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said. Oddly aware of his strength, she reached for the stick tied with strips of linen. She swiped the swab against a bar of hard soap and swished it in the hot water until foamy suds bubbled up.\n\nHe grabbed a clean flour-sack towel from a hook. \"I'll dry,\" he said with quiet authority.\n\nShe washed a plate, rinsed it off, and handed it to him. His fingers brushed against hers, and she quickly drew her hand away and plunged it into the warm water.\n\nThey worked for several minutes without speaking. Questions she wanted to ask about his past would have to wait until she'd earned his trust, but she felt safe querying about the children.\n\n\"I'm confused as to why your children think corn bread is poison.\"\n\nThe question hung between them a moment before he answered. \"I spent a year in the Andersonville prison camp, and all they fed us was corn bread. I'm afraid Elise and Toby have picked up my aversion to it.\"\n\nHe'd never mentioned his wartime experiences in his many letters to her, and she couldn't let on that she already knew about his confinement. Instead, she afforded him a sympathetic look.\n\n\"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nRaw pain glittered in the depth of his eyes. \"I don't like to talk about it.\"\n\nSurprised by a surge of sympathy, she set to work scrubbing a plate clean. She didn't want to feel anything for him. Certainly not empathy.\n\nStill, she knew from painful experience that the mere act of putting some things into words was akin to ripping open a wound. That's why she never talked about her outlaw father.\n\nAt the tender age of twelve, she'd watched him hang from the gallows, and the shame never left her. Tracking down criminals was her way of making up to society for her father's heinous crimes, and right now, Garrett Thomas was on the top of her list.\n\n\"I would hope that my corn bread tastes better than what they served in prison,\" she said, breaking the awkward silence.\n\n\"You're an excellent cook,\" he said.\n\nHoping he didn't think she had been fishing for compliments, she glanced at him sideways. \"Is that why you dumped an entire salt dish on your food?\"\n\n\"A bad habit, I'm afraid. Acquired after the war. Salt was a rare commodity then and nonexistent in Andersonville.\" He shrugged. \"It's since been my salvation. I can't stand my own cooking without it.\"\n\nShe laughed. She didn't mean to; it just bubbled out of her. A grin inched across his face, and a moment of rapport sprang between them. It was the very thing she had hoped to accomplish. Still, that one unguarded moment worried her. She'd been trained to control her emotions, but at the moment was having a hard time managing even her thoughts.\n\nTurning her attention to the dishwater, she practically scrubbed the painted design off a dinner plate. When she agreed to take on this job, she thought her biggest challenge would be hiding her loathing for him. The opposite appeared to be the case, and that was a problem. Liking a suspected killer was not an option\u2014no matter how blue his eyes or devastating his smile.\n\n\"Is there anything else I should know?\" she asked, staying focused on the task at hand. \"Anything I should avoid besides corn bread?\"\n\n\"That about covers it. Just don't let Toby talk you into going to the moon.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid the boy's imagination runs away with him at times. He's now working on a contraption to take him to the moon.\"\n\n\"Oh, I see.\" Since he had introduced the topic of his son, she felt confident in pursuing it. \"I got the feeling from your aunt that there's... something I should know about him.\"\n\nHe took his time answering. \"He's got an inquiring mind,\" he said at last. \"I'm afraid he was too much for Aunt Hetty to handle. The housekeepers, too, which is why I couldn't keep one.\"\n\nHis inability to keep a housekeeper explained the shabby condition of the house but hardly explained the difficulty with Toby. Since that seemed to be all he was willing to concede, she let the matter drop.\n\n\"Would you object to my teaching the children to say grace before meals?\" If things worked out the way she hoped, she would soon have proof enough to send him to the gallows. Without their earthly pa, Toby and Elise would need their heavenly Father more than ever.\n\n\"If you feel you must.\" He hesitated. \"You should know I have no regard for religion.\" This time his voice had a steel-like edge. She'd gathered as much but remained silent. If a suspect wanted to talk, you let him talk.\n\n\"I hope you can live with that,\" he said. Without another word he tossed down his towel and left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nWhat kind of work was required of a tinker after hours? Maggie couldn't begin to guess, but that was the excuse Thomas gave for locking himself in his room for the remainder of the evening.\n\nIn a way she was grateful. Tonight she was feeling oddly vulnerable and in no condition to deal with him. She couldn't afford to make a mistake. Not this time.\n\nAfter overseeing that both children had washed their faces and brushed their teeth, she settled down on the divan in the parlor, a child on each side of her. Elise read a story from McGuffey's. She struggled with every word, and the going was slow. Toby's reading skills were better, but he was far more interested in working on a sketch.\n\n\"What are you drawing?\" Maggie asked.\n\nHe held his paper up so she could see. \"A catapult to take me to the moon.\"\n\n\"The moon is a long way away,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"That's why the catapult has to be big.\" His eyes grew round. \"As big as a mountain.\"\n\n\"I would imagine so.\" It was hard to believe that this was the very same boy who gave his father's aunt such a bad time. \"Why do you want to go to the moon?\"\n\n\"So I can see everything that's happening on Earth.\"\n\nThe thought made her smile. \"Just like God.\"\n\nElise looked up from her book. \"Is God on the moon?\"\n\nMaggie leaned over and tapped Elise's cute button nose with her finger. \"God is everywhere.\"\n\nAfter the children finished reading to her, she stood and yawned. \"Okay, pumpkins, time for bed.\"\n\nElise giggled. \"We're not pumpkins.\"\n\n\"You're not? Well, you could have fooled me. Come along now. It's late.\"\n\nActually, it was only a little after eight, but she looked forward to trying out that bathtub, after which she planned on hitting the sack. It had been a long and nerve-racking day.\n\nMoments later she tucked Elise in bed. \"Do you want me to hear your prayers?\"\n\nElise shook her head.\n\nFlat on his stomach on the floor, Toby looked under the bed and pulled out his slingshot. \"You only have to pray if you've been bad or want something,\" he said.\n\n\"Actually, I think God would be disappointed if those are the only times we talked to Him,\" Maggie said. \"He wants us to talk to Him when we're happy, lonely, or sad.\" How odd. Aunt Hetty had insisted that her marriage to Thomas be performed by a minister but neglected to teach the children the simple basics of communicating with God.\n\nElise looked confused. \"You mean we can talk to Him even if we haven't been bad?\"\n\nMaggie brushed a strand of hair away from Elise's face. \"Most definitely.\"\n\nElise pondered this for a moment. \"But I only know what to say when I'm bad.\"\n\n\"Is that so? Hmm. Come and kneel next to me.\" Elise scrambled out of bed and dropped to her knees by Maggie's side.\n\n\"Fold your hands like this.\" Maggie steepled her hands together.\n\nElise followed her example. \"Why do we have to kneel when we pray?\"\n\n\"It's so God knows we're talking to Him and not to someone else,\" Toby said, scrambling to his feet, slingshot in hand.\n\nMaggie resisted the urge to explain how kneeling showed humility and put God above all else. Better to let Toby think he had the world figured out. He would learn soon enough that he didn't; no one did.\n\n\"What should I say?\" Elise whispered.\n\n\"You can thank God for giving you good food and a nice soft bed to sleep in. You can also ask Him to help you with your reading. You can pray for your brother and for your mother in heaven. You can pray for your teacher and your father, too.\" God knows, he needed all the prayers he could get. They all did.\n\n\"Just say what I say. God bless...\" Maggie said a simple prayer, and Elise repeated after her. \"Amen.\"\n\nElise's eyes flew open. \"You forgot to pray for yourself.\"\n\nMaggie smiled. \"You can do it for me.\"\n\nElise clasped her hands together and squeezed her eyes shut. \"God bless Miss Taylor, and don't let her die. Amen.\"\n\n\"What makes you think I might die?\"\n\n\"You ate corn bread,\" Elise said, her voice hushed. \"People always die when they eat corn bread.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "The following morning, Maggie walked into the kitchen to find that the children had already eaten breakfast and dressed for school.\n\nGarrett greeted her with a smile and handed her a cup of coffee. \"Morning.\"\n\n\"Morning,\" she said, taking the cup from him. \"I'm sorry, I don't usually sleep in.\"\n\n\"You must have needed the extra rest after your trip.\" He set a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon on the table. \"Here you go.\" He pulled out a chair for her.\n\n\"I didn't expect you to fix my breakfast.\" She wasn't used to being waited on, especially by a man.\n\n\"Hold your thanks till you've tasted it.\" He waited for her to be seated before lifting his voice. \"Toby, Elise. Come and say good-bye to Miss Taylor.\"\n\nElise raced into the kitchen and grabbed a schoolbook from the table. \"Good-bye, Miss Taylor.\"\n\nToby called from the other room. \"Bye.\"\n\nThomas hesitated at the doorway. \"If you need anything laundered, leave it for Lila. She comes tomorrow.\"\n\nThat was a relief. Washing clothes was one chore she'd sooner not tackle. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Anything else you might need?\" he asked.\n\n\"I'd like to go into town later. Would it be all right if I use the buckboard out back?\"\n\n\"It's yours,\" he said. \"Would you like me to hitch it for you?\"\n\n\"I think I can handle it.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I'll pick the children up from school.\"\n\n\"All right.\" Had he expected her to pick them up? Having so little knowledge of domestic affairs, she hadn't even considered that carting them back and forth to school might be her responsibility.\n\nElise called to him, and with a final good-bye he followed his children through the parlor. The front door slammed shut, and moments later the rumbling sound of wagon wheels drifted through the open window and finally faded away.\n\nThen all was blissfully quiet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Maggie quickly washed the breakfast dishes and scrubbed the sink. Should Thomas arrive home unexpectedly to find dirty dishes and an untidy house, he might wonder what she had done with her time. Not wanting to blow her cover, she was as diligent with the household chores as she was in her detective work.\n\nAnxious to get started on her investigation, she decided to search Thomas's bedroom first. Finding the stolen money hidden there seemed like a remote possibility; the most she hoped to find was a bankbook or key to a safe-deposit box.\n\nWhipping off her apron, she tossed it on a chair and hurried down the hall to his room. The door was locked. Surprised, she drew her hand away from the brass knob. Why would Thomas lock the door to his room unless he had something to hide? Maybe there was a key somewhere.\n\nA quick search of the house soon relieved her of that hope. Since she couldn't search his room, she decided the next best thing was to drive into town and make contact with her Pinkerton partner. He'd arrived in town ahead of her.\n\nYesterday, while Thomas argued with the hotel desk clerk about the room he'd reserved for her, she'd wandered about the lobby hoping to make visual contact with her partner. Unfortunately, he was nowhere to be seen. She hoped to have better luck today." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nIt was after ten by the time she'd harnessed the black horse in the barn to the buckboard and drove into town. Already it was hot, and the air shimmered from the heated ground. She was grateful for having the good sense to forgo her more stylish outfits for a lace-bibbed calico frock.\n\nThe main business area of Furnace Creek occupied two streets. A livery stable and blacksmith shop anchored the town on the north, the railroad station the south. An assortment of businesses, including a bank, hotel, icehouse, and general store, were strung from one end of town to the other like wash on a clothesline. The adobe buildings were fitted with false wooden fronts and faded signs that creaked in the slightest breeze.\n\nShe glanced at the sheriff's office housed in a freestanding building. Usually, the first order of business for a Pinkerton detective was to introduce him-or herself to local lawmen. But Sheriff Summerhay had a run-in with Pinkerton detectives a few years back and now refused to work with them. It was better to stay out of his hair until she and her partner had uncovered tangible proof of Thomas's guilt.\n\nHorses tethered to hitching posts swung their tails to ward off flies, and wagons rumbled by filled with produce, dairy products, and other provisions.\n\nShe parked the buckboard across from the two-story hotel and set the brake. She was anxious to find her partner, but she had to do it discreetly. No one must see them together.\n\nA familiar voice assaulted her ears. \"Readallaboutit.\" It was the same paperboy seen at the train station.\n\nHe was a sorrowful sight. Unless she was mistaken, his were the same clothes worn the day before. Same patches, more wrinkles. He showed no sign of recognizing her.\n\nShe stepped onto the boardwalk next to him. \"Why aren't you in school?\"\n\nHe stared at her through a curtain of dirty, stringy hair. \"Don't get paid for goin' to no school.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"What's your name?\"\n\n\"Linc,\" he said. \"Short for Lincoln.\"\n\n\"Lincoln what?\"\n\nJones.\"\n\nHis parents must have once had high hopes for the boy to name him after a president. \"Your ma and pa dead?\" she asked. It was the only explanation she could think of to explain the boy's neglected appearance.\n\nHis eyes gleamed with suspicion. \"How'd ya know that?\"\n\nShe shrugged and reached into her drawstring handbag. \"How much money did that thief take from you yesterday?\"\n\nHe glanced at her bag, and a calculated look crossed his face. \"Ten dollars.\"\n\nShe raised an eyebrow. He'd have to sell a hundred newspapers to earn that much, and his bag wouldn't hold many more than a dozen or two.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes to show she meant business. \"The truth.\"\n\nHe adjusted his canvas bag. \"How'd ya know that's not the truth?\"\n\n\"Your nose turned blue,\" she said.\n\nHis hand flew to his nose and his face turned red. \"Two dollars,\" he said.\n\nShe drew a bill from her purse and stuffed it in his hand. \"The lie gets you only one.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Thomas's Fine Tinware was shoehorned in between Ben's Saddles and Jake's Gunsmith shop. She waited for the sprinkler wagon to pass before crossing the street, the heels of her high-button shoes sinking into the muddied ground. She opened the door to the jingle of bells and wiped her feet on the doormat before entering.\n\nAngry voices greeted her. An argument raged in the back room of the shop.\n\n\"I told you I know nothing about it,\" Thomas yelled. \"Now get outta here.\"\n\nA man emerged and stormed through the shop. He didn't so much as acknowledge her. She barely got a glimpse of his angry red face when he brushed past her and out the door.\n\nShe whirled to find Thomas watching her. \"I'm sorry. I came at a bad time.\"\n\n\"No, no, not at all.\" He looked genuinely happy to see her, and once again she was forced to conquer her unwelcomed response to his smile. \"I'm glad you came.\"\n\nShe pointed a finger over her shoulder. \"An unhappy customer?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I wish it was that simple. That was Charlie Cotton, my former brother-in-law.\"\n\nShe managed to hide her surprise behind an expressionless face. Nothing in the Pinkerton files suggested Garrett's dead wife had a brother; things just got a whole lot more interesting. \"Why was he so angry?\"\n\n\"He thinks I have something of his.\"\n\nBefore he could explain further, the shop door opened and a portly man walked in. \"Got my order ready?\" he called. He was dressed in a gray suit, vest, and bow tie.\n\nThomas touched her arm, and a brief shiver rippled through her. \"Don't go away,\" he whispered. He then walked behind the counter and addressed his customer. \"Right here.\"\n\nThe shopper acknowledged Maggie with a nod and doffed his hat. \"I don't believe we've met.\" The gleam in his eyes revealed more than just a passing interest. \"You must be new in town.\"\n\n\"She came all the way from Indiana,\" Garrett said.\n\n\"Is that so? Name's Benjamin Mooney, president of the Bank of Arizona.\"\n\nShe knew who he was. He had no way of knowing it, of course, but the Pinkerton National Detective Agency had initially investigated him along with all bank employees. The money stolen during the Whistle-Stop robbery was a bank transfer, and the chance of it being an inside job could not be ignored.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Mooney,\" she said, holding out her gloved hand. \"I'm Maggie Taylor.\"\n\nHe took her hand and held it like a piece of delicate china. \"Indiana, eh? That's a ways away, all right. I'm from Mizz-zur-rah myself.\"\n\n\"Are you now?\" she said, smiling. Missouri was the train holdup capital of the country, and she'd spent a lot of time there in recent months. Of course, she would never say as much.\n\nHis carefully waxed mustache curled upward, as did the corners of his mouth. \"Perhaps you would allow me the pleasure of giving you a tour of our little town.\"\n\n\"That would be very kind of you,\" she said.\n\n\"But totally unnecessary.\" Thomas stepped between them, forcing the banker to release her hand. \"Miss Taylor is my guest,\" he said in a tone that left no room for argument.\n\nMooney looked from one to the other. \"I see.\"\n\nMaggie wasn't sure what the banker thought he saw, but he quickly backed away.\n\n\"Your package is ready,\" Thomas said, and Mooney followed him to the counter.\n\nWhile the two men conducted their business, she wandered around the well-stocked shop. Never had she seen so many household goods in one place. Tin dishes, pots, pans, and candleholders were piled high on counters and shelves in no particular order.\n\nEvery imaginable kind of lantern hung from hooks. Tin cabinet panels and ceiling tiles were stacked against the back wall. One section of the store was devoted to toys. Tin soldiers, toy animals, and small wagons surrounded a train engine similar to the one in the children's room.\n\nThe banker finished his business and stopped to chat with her on the way out. \"If Thomas here doesn't treat you right, you know where to find me.\" With that he left, package in hand.\n\nShe glanced at Thomas but couldn't tell much from his bland expression.\n\nShe drew his attention to the toy engine. The man suspected of being one of two Whistle-Stop bandits was evidently interested in trains, though there was nothing in his background that suggested he knew how to operate one. That meant his partner in crime probably manned the engine while Thomas emptied the safe and shot the guard. As bad as the crime was, it seemed even more horrendous now that she'd met him and knew him as a warm and loving father.\n\n\"You made that?\" she asked, studying the model.\n\nHe walked around the counter and joined her. \"I did. I started by making toys for Toby and Elise. Much to my surprise I discovered a market for them.\"\n\n\"Ever wish you could drive a train?\" she asked, watching his face.\n\n\"Not me,\" he said and laughed.\n\nShe ran her fingers over the engine and marveled at the details.\n\n\"It's beautiful. I do believe you have a gift from God.\" She groaned inwardly. Knowing how he felt about religion she really did need to watch what she said.\n\n\"A gift?\" He studied her. \"You're the first one to accuse me of that.\"\n\n\"Why, Mr. Thomas. You make a gift sound like a bad thing.\"\n\n\"Calling me Mr. Thomas is a bad thing. I'd prefer that you call me Garrett.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" His insistence on informality had to be a good sign. For the first time since coming to Furnace Creek, she relaxed\u2014or at least as much as she dared. \"Garrett it is, but to be fair, you must call me Maggie.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"It's a deal.\" He inclined his head. \"So tell me, Maggie. What brings you to town?\"\n\n\"Nothing special. Just wanted to look around. Meet some of the residents.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I don't have time to accompany you.\"\n\n\"That's all right.\" The last thing she wanted was to have him tag along while she was working.\n\n\"If you need anything\u2014groceries or personal items\u2014just tell the shopkeepers to add it to my account.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\" Considering he had no way of knowing whether she was a spendthrift or thrifty, it was a surprising offer. Shouldn't a small-town tinker be more careful with his money, especially one who lived as modestly as he did? Of course, if he really was the Whistle-Stop bandit, then he'd have no reason to worry about what she spent.\n\n\"Do you know Linc?\" she asked, changing the subject.\n\n\"The paperboy? Only that his parents were killed a few years back during the Indian uprising. The boy is living with his grandmother. Why?\"\n\n\"He should be in school.\"\n\n\"A lot of children should be in school. Unfortunately, for some families, that's not possible. Some live too far out of town. Some simply dropped out following the fire.\"\n\nShe didn't let on that she knew about the fire or the fund-raiser that led the investigation to his doorstep.\n\n\"There was a fire?\" she asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"The schoolhouse burned to the ground. It's been rebuilt, this time from brick and adobe.\"\n\n\"But why doesn't Linc attend?\"\n\n\"His grandmother needs him. His income supports the two of them.\"\n\nShe now felt guilty for withholding the dollar. On the other hand, it wouldn't do the boy any good to get away with a blatant lie.\n\n\"Couldn't the church do something to help?\" she asked.\n\nHis mouth dipped in a frown. \"Been my experience that what happens in church, stays there.\"\n\nHis harsh tone rendered her speechless. She thought the kindly minister who helped her through those difficult years of her youth was representative of all churchmen, but maybe not.\n\n\"My apologies.\" He grimaced. \"I have no right to saddle you with my personal views.\" He moved to the counter and reached into the cash box. \"Do you know how much Linc lost yesterday in the robbery?\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary. I reimbursed him this morning.\"\n\nHe looked surprised. \"That was a kind thing you did.\"\n\n\"I guess you could say I have a soft spot for children.\" She wasn't just saying that to impress him. Had she not been a private detective she might have become a schoolteacher.\n\n\"You're all Toby and Elise could talk about when I drove them to school this morning.\" He chuckled. \"It's Miss Taylor this and Miss Taylor that.\"\n\n\"They're very sweet, your children,\" she said. Recalling her own growing-up years as a daughter of an outlaw, she pitied them. It was always an outlaw's family that suffered most.\n\n\"If Toby gives you any trouble, let me know.\"\n\nToby again. \"He strikes me as a very bright boy,\" she said. \"And most imaginative.\"\n\nJust then the door flew open and a tall, thin man stepped into the shop carrying a crate. \"Only half our order arrived,\" he called and seeing her, stopped. \"Sorry.\"\n\nGarrett beckoned with his hand. \"Come on over and I'll introduce you.\"\n\nThe man lowered the crate to the floor and ambled toward her. Dressed in dark denim pants and a checkered shirt, he wore a strange fabric hat gathered on top like a woman's nightcap. The hat was tied beneath his chin with rawhide laces.\n\n\"I want you to meet my fianc\u00e9e, Miss Taylor,\" Garrett said. \"Maggie, this is Panhandle.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you,\" she said politely. \"Mr.\u2014\"\n\n\"Panhandle, ma'am,\" he drawled. \"Just plain Panhandle. Great name for a tinker, don't you think?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I guess it is.\"\n\nPanhandle gave her a yellow-toothed grin.\n\n\"You can start cutting tin for the Stewart order,\" Garrett said.\n\nPanhandle backed away. \"Will do, boss.\"\n\nBy the time he picked up the crate and vanished in back, the store was full of customers. Some stopped by to pick up orders, others just to browse.\n\nPretending to study a skillet, Maggie watched from the sidelines. Garrett seemed to know his customers well and even asked about their families.\n\nHe appeared to work hard and was successful at what he did. He also lived a modest life. So what had he done with the money stolen from the train?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Garrett worked behind the counter as he watched his fianc\u00e9e exchange pleasantries with his customers. He didn't mean to stare, but her smile was a magnet drawing his attention to her pretty pink mouth without any effort on his part.\n\nWith a start he realized he wasn't the only one who seemed mesmerized by her. Not only had she caught the eye of his apprentice, but all seven male customers in his shop. Each man made it his business to walk up to her and introduce himself. Never had Garrett seen so many red-faced stammering fools in his life.\n\nNot that he could blame them. A looker like her was bound to bring out the wolves. No doubt she could have her pick of men without scars or a soldier's heart. Men with no children to care for. Men without blood on their hands.\n\nThe thought gave him pause. What right did he have for judging her so harshly? All she did was chase after a beggar in an effort to retrieve the paperboy's money. While he...\n\nHe pushed the painful memories away with a shake of his head. A woman like her could have her pick of anyone she wanted. If he had the brains of a grasshopper, he'd marry her before she figured out what a bad choice she'd made." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nMaggie left Garrett's shop with more questions than answers. Why was Garrett arguing with his brother-in-law? \"He thinks I have something of his.\"\n\nHis share of the holdup money, perhaps?\n\nWhat was his name? Cotton, that was it. And why did that name sound familiar?\n\nPicking up her pace, she headed for the hotel. Her first order of business was to make contact with her Pinkerton partner.\n\nA red and yellow box wagon pulled by a dapple gray mare was parked in front of the land office. DR. KETTLEMAN'S MIRACULOUS CURE-ALLS was written in big bold letters on the paneled siding.\n\nA man stood next to the wagon dressed in a top hat and green checkered coat with a matching bow tie. \"May I interest you in a bottle of snake oil, ma'am?\"\n\n\"No thank you,\" She walked past him and stopped.\n\n\"Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and I will detect what ails you and offer you a miraculous cure.\"\n\nShe should have known. Smiling, she turned and took a closer look at the salesman. This time she had no trouble seeing past the phony mustache and bold-colored suit.\n\nHis real name was Chuck Greenwood, and he, too, was a Pinkerton operative. Privately, she called him Rikker and he called her Duffy. Rikker was the name of the orphanage cat that used to curl up at the bottom of her bed. She pretended he protected her while she slept. Duffy was what Rikker called his favorite sister who died in childbirth.\n\nTheir pet monikers saved them from having to remember each other's assumed names, which changed with each new case.\n\nA portly man with a pox-marked face and close-set eyes, this latest disguise suited him to a T. Not only did he look like a snake-oil doctor, he had his sales pitch down pat. She couldn't help but laugh\u2014talk about hiding in plain sight.\n\nLooking left and right and seeing no one around, she closed the distance between them. Rikker was more than just a coworker; he was also a good friend and mentor. Secretly, she considered him the earthly father she wished she'd had.\n\n\"What took you so long to find me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Long? I've only been in town for a day.\" Rikker was as impatient as he was clever. Nothing he hated more than sitting around waiting even though that was a very large part of a detective's life.\n\n\"How much did it cost you to bribe the hotel clerk into putting up a no vacancy sign?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not as much as it'll cost me when our boss finds out you're staying at Thomas's house.\"\n\n\"He doesn't have to know. At least not yet.\"\n\n\"I'd hate to be you when the old Scotsman finds out,\" Rikker said.\n\n\"Allan Pinkerton worries too much.\" Since his stroke, his sons managed the company, but he was still very much involved in the planning and execution of investigations.\n\n\"That makes two of us.\"\n\nIt wasn't just her safety that worried the principal. This case was a thorn in Pinkerton's side. They had been working on it for two years, and that didn't speak well for an agency that had sustained much criticism in recent years for what some thought were bullying tactics. Allan and his sons were anxious to get some good press for a change, and catching the Whistle-Stop bandits would certainly serve that purpose.\n\n\"I'd feel a whole lot better if you were staying at the hotel. If anything happens to you...\"\n\nHis concern touched her. \"Nothing's going to happen. At least not in front of the children.\"\n\n\"If our suspicions are right, we're not only dealing with a thief, but also a killer. And I'm not just talking about the railroad guard. For all we know, he also killed his wife.\"\n\nThe memory of Thomas playing tag came to mind. His tenderness toward his daughter when she fell had seemed real. It was hard to believe that such a doting father could be a cold-blooded killer. But then, criminals came in all disguises.\n\n\"Her death was an accident,\" she said. That was the official ruling, and she had no reason to suspect otherwise.\n\n\"I don't believe in accidents, and if you know what's good for you, you won't believe in them, either.\"\n\n\"That's what I like about you, Rikker. A person is always guilty until proven innocent.\"\n\n\"And I'm usually right.\"\n\nBefore she could reply, a matronly woman walked out of the mercantile carrying a basket in one hand and holding on to a small child with the other.\n\nRikker shoved a bottle of snake oil into Maggie's hand, and right on cue she pretended to read the label.\n\nLifting his voice for anyone within hearing distance, he started his spiel. \"That magical bottle contains the purest and most refined healing oil this side of the Miss'sippi. One teaspoon of this elixir and your troubles will be a thing of the past.\"\n\nThe woman walked by them without stopping, and when she was out of earshot he lowered his voice. \"Watch your step. If he tries anything... sexual-wise, I mean, I want you out of there.\"\n\nHeat rushed to her face. \"Since when have you ever worried about my virtue?\"\n\n\"Since you insisted on moving into an outlaw's house.\"\n\n\"Don't worry. He might be a thief and murderer, but where women are concerned, he's a perfect gentleman.\" With the declaration came the memory of blue eyes and a crooked smile\u2014a disconcerting thought she quickly banished from her mind.\n\n\"I'm sure his wife appreciated being killed by a gentleman,\" he said wryly.\n\n\"We don't know that Garrett killed her.\"\n\nHis eyebrows rose. \"So now it's Garrett.\"\n\n\"He insists I call him by his Christian name.\"\n\n\"The word Christian and Thomas should never be mentioned in the same sentence.\" He glanced around. A man was unloading a wagon at the end of the block next to a windmill, but no one was close by. Still, taking no chances, he stabbed the label of elixir with his finger as if trying to sell it to her.\n\n\"So what have you uncovered so far?\" he asked.\n\n\"Since I've only been here for less than twenty-four hours, not much. But I do know he has an overbearing aunt and two adorable children.\"\n\n\"That was in the report.\"\n\n\"Not the overbearing and adorable part,\" she said. \"Also, he has a brother-in-law. I heard the two of them arguing earlier. That's the first I heard that his dead wife had a brother.\"\n\n\"Interesting. What were they arguing about?\"\n\n\"He thinks Garrett has something of his. His name is Cotton.\"\n\n\"Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Mr. Cotton was confined to Andersonville the same time that Thomas was there. He was one of the men who tried to escape with Thomas. The other man was shot dead.\"\n\nThat's why his name sounded familiar. \"Do you think that's where they first met? In prison?\"\n\n\"Actually they met before the war while Thomas was attending medical school. He might have even introduced Thomas to his sister.\"\n\nIt made sense. \"It sounds like they must have been good friends at one time.\" Nothing made two people closer than sharing an ordeal. \"We know there were two men involved in the robbery.\" One man backed the train away from the station and one robbed the safe and shot the guard. \"Do you think Cotton was the second man? That would explain the bad blood between them.\" It wasn't unusual for criminals to have a falling-out.\n\n\"Could be,\" he said. \"Have you sent a report to headquarters?\"\n\n\"Not yet. I'll send one tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Drop it off here, and I'll mail it for you. I've arranged to send regular shipments to the States so no one will think anything of it.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"That will help.\" Though everything was cryptically written, mailing daily reports without rousing suspicion always proved to be a challenge. She leaned closer. \"Your mustache is crooked.\"\n\n\"It's part of my charm,\" he said, but he straightened it. \"Be careful. You know where to find me if you need me.\"\n\nTwo men stepped out of the nearby general store, and Rikker took the snake oil out of her hands. Holding the bottle up, he hawked, \"Step right up, gentlemen. Step right up.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Smiling in amusement, Maggie left Rikker and walked to Grover's Mercantile to purchase a cookbook just in case things took longer than she hoped. Everything she knew about cooking could fill a postage stamp.\n\nSeveral women were gathered around a single bolt of calico. As Maggie neared they turned and stared at her as if she'd given off some sort of signal.\n\n\"You must be the mail-order bride everyone's talking about,\" one woman exclaimed, and the five women closed in around her like the drawstring of a purse.\n\n\"Yes, that's right. I'm Maggie Taylor.\"\n\nThe matron in charge said, \"Nice to meet you. I'm Miriam Higginbottom.\" A barrel-shaped woman with steel-gray hair, she fixed Maggie with a pop-eyed stare through a lorgnette suspended from a gold chain around her neck.\n\nShe quickly introduced the other four women. She talked so fast it was difficult to grasp their names. Mrs. Higginbottom then issued invitations to join the church quilting bee and ladies reading club.\n\n\"Though you don't have to be able to read to join,\" Mrs. Higginbottom assured her.\n\n\"Tell her about the dance.\" This from the woman with tight, springy curls and a jutting posterior that had no need of a bustle.\n\n\"Oh, yes.\" Mrs. Higginbottom described the upcoming dance in great detail. \"You and Mr. Thomas must come.\"\n\nMaggie had never been to a dance and had no intention of attending one. She was here to work, not socialize. \"I'll mention it to him,\" she said vaguely when she could get a word in edgewise, but by then Mrs. Higginbottom had already changed subjects.\n\n\"So when is the wedding?\"\n\n\"Not till next month.\"\n\n\"Are you staying at the hotel?\"\n\n\"I'm... eh... staying at the house,\" she said.\n\nThe five women stared at her, and for a moment no one spoke.\n\nMaggie broke the strained silence. \"There was no vacancy at the hotel, so I'm sharing a room with Elise.\"\n\n\"Of course you are,\" Mrs. Higginbottom exclaimed. \"I mean... it makes perfect sense.\"\n\n\"Such a dear, dear man,\" one of the other women said, filling in the awkward silence. \"What happened to his wife was dreadful.\"\n\n\"Just dreadful,\" the other four murmured.\n\n\"If you don't mind my asking,\" Mrs. Higginbottom began. \"Why would such an attractive woman as yourself agree to marry a man sight unseen? Not that there's anything wrong with Mr. Thomas, mind you.\"\n\nOne of the other women\u2014Mrs. Trotter\u2014looked appalled.\n\n\"Miriam.\" Miriam Higginbottom didn't look the least bit apologetic. \"I have the right to know,\" she said, and her friends accepted her contention without further discussion.\n\n\"Some men fare better sight unseen,\" Maggie said lightly.\n\nThis brought appreciative laughter from the others. Mrs. Higginbottom, in her usual take-charge way, continued. \"I just hope that the boy doesn't give you a bad time. Such a handful. Hetty's lucky he didn't burn down the barn.\"\n\n\"He set her barn on fire?\"\n\n\"No. Just the chicken coop. But that was bad enough. He made a hot-air balloon and was trying to send it to the moon or some such thing.\"\n\n\"Instead it landed on Hetty's chickens,\" Mrs. Trotter added. \"Never saw so many feathers fly in my life.\"\n\n\"Yes, and he confiscated the clothesline from Louise Martin's backyard,\" Mrs. Higginbottom continued.\n\n\"On wash day.\" Mrs. Trotter rolled her eyes. \"Said he was just borrowing it.\"\n\n\"Well, if he was my son, he would have gotten a good licking.\" Mrs. Higginbottom sniffed. \"If you ask me, Garrett is too lenient with the boy.\"\n\nShe said more, a lot more, but very little of it was of any use, and some of it bordered on just plain gossip about people Maggie had no interest in. By the time she managed to purchase a cookbook and leave the shop, her ears were ringing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nMaggie returned from town determined to do a methodical search. The house had no cellar, but it did have an attic. Doubting she'd find the key to Garrett's bedroom on the uppermost floor, she decided to tackle the attic last.\n\nOther than to learn about Garrett's brother-in-law and locate Rikker, her expedition to town had revealed little, except to answer her questions about Toby. Next to the mischief her brothers used to get into, Toby's escapades sounded mild in comparison.\n\nIf she was lucky, the house search would reveal something more useful. But where to start?\n\nRecalling how a map found in a dictionary helped solve the case of a museum's stolen artwork, she settled on the crammed bookshelf in the parlor, next to the ivory chess set.\n\nGarrett had a wide taste in reading. Moby Dick was shelved in between Uncle Tom's Cabin and Journey to the Center of the Earth. Medical books shared space with philosophy, science, and history.\n\nStooping in front of the bookshelves, she flipped through each tome looking for letters, bank receipts, or hidden compartments. A book of poetry was inscribed to G love from K.\n\nShe had just started on the last shelf when a knock on the door startled her.\n\nQuickly replacing a book, she stood and opened the door.\n\n\"Aunt... I mean...\"\n\n\"That's all right. Call me Aunt Hetty. I insist.\" The older woman ambled into the house with her walking cane, stabbing the floor with its tip as if checking the foundation's integrity. \"Land sakes, it's hot out there.\"\n\n\"Yes, I can't get over the weather. Is it always this hot?\"\n\n\"You've not seen anything yet. Wait till July and August.\"\n\nFortunately, Maggie had no intention of sticking around that long. \"Would you care for some lemonade?\" she asked.\n\n\"That would be nice. Long as it's not too sweet or too sour.\" Aunt Hetty followed Maggie into the kitchen and collapsed onto a chair. Her face flushed from the heat, she pulled off her bonnet and used it to fan herself. Wisps of white hair had escaped her topknot.\n\n\"Misery loves company, but trust me, it's better to have a pain in one hip than two,\" she said, rubbing her sides.\n\nMaggie reached in the icebox for the pitcher of lemonade. \"You shouldn't be out on such a hot day,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"No, I shouldn't. Especially in my condition. But you know what they say? What can't be cured must be endured.\" She laid her cane on the chair next to her. \"What a pity that the wedding was postponed. I just hope I last that long.\" Obviously she intended to hold Maggie responsible should she not.\n\nMaggie placed the pitcher on a tray and reached into the overhead cupboard for two glasses. \"Is there any reason to think that you won't?\"\n\nAunt Hetty looked startled. \"Of course there is.\" She then recited everything wrong with her and, Maggie suspected, a great deal more. She brushed her forehead with the back of her hand. \"Of course, no one will believe how ill I am until I'm dead and buried.\"\n\n\"What does the doctor say?\" Maggie asked, setting the tray on the table.\n\nAunt Hetty made a rude sound. \"It seems that everyone has a cure for what ails me but my doctor.\" She lowered her voice. \"Would you believe he had the nerve to accuse me of being perfectly healthy?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"I jest you not.\" She lifted her shoulders and sighed. \"I suppose I should be happy that you postponed the wedding. Now we can prepare for more than just a simple ceremony. It will be my parting gift to you both.\"\n\nMaggie had no time to plan a wedding, but she had to play along. \"I certainly hope you stick around awhile. The children will miss you, I'm sure.\"\n\n\"That's why I'm delighted that Garrett is marrying again. Seeing him settled will help me die a happy woman.\" She rubbed the small of her back and groaned. \"They say the Arizona heat is good for what ails you, but you wouldn't prove it by me.\"\n\nSensing that another list of physical complaints was imminent, Maggie quickly changed the subject. \"I'm sorry I don't have any baked goods to offer you.\"\n\n\"That's quite all right. You're just settling in. I should have thought to bring something.\" She pulled a small writing tablet and pencil out of her purse.\n\nMaggie took a seat opposite her and filled both glasses with lemonade. Today, Aunt Hetty wore a dark skirt and matching shirtwaist. She looked determined and efficient as she opened her notebook and, except for her flushed face, robust. Maggie hoped she looked as well when she was Aunty Hetty's age.\n\n\"I went ahead and booked the church.\" Aunt Hetty made a little check on the page to indicate the task was complete and moved to the second written line. \"I also spoke with the dressmaker. She'll need to take your measurements.\"\n\nAunt Hetty had no way of knowing it, of course, but she had done Maggie a favor. Male operatives spent much of their time in saloons and barbershops where men gathered and talked. Female detectives had to find other ways to glean information. Since few secrets could be kept from one's dressmaker, Maggie found that the town seamstresses generally knew everyone's business, and most were happy to share it.\n\nAunt Hetty continued down her list\u2014and what a list it was. Invitations, food, guests, music, decorations... Even in her sickly condition, she'd thought of everything.\n\nMaggie hated to put so many people to work for a wedding that would never take place, but she couldn't help but marvel at the woman's efficiency.\n\n\"Garrett and I agreed to keep things... simple,\" she said carefully. His aunt meant well, and it made no sense to alienate her.\n\nAunt Hetty sat back. \"But why? It is your first marriage, is it not? So why would you not want to do something special?\"\n\nMaggie slid a glass of lemonade across the table. \"Under the circumstances, we thought it best. For the children's sake.\"\n\n\"What circumstances?\" Aunt Hetty asked, looking baffled.\n\n\"Garrett is a widower and\u2014\"\n\nAunt Hetty discounted this with a wave of her hand. \"His wife died two years ago, and it does him no good to wallow in the past. Time marches on and so should he.\"\n\nMaggie took a sip of lemonade. Fortunately, Garrett's aunt talked without prompting, stopping now and again to complain about her back, hip, or knee. She glanced down at her list. \"Where was I?\"\n\n\"You said that his wife didn't like it here.\"\n\nAunt Hetty rolled her eyes. \"Katherine hated it here, and that's the God-honest truth. She wanted to take the children back East to get a better education, but of course Garrett opposed.\"\n\nMaggie thought of the paperboy, Linc, and could understand a mother worrying about her children's future.\n\n\"How did she and Garrett meet?\"\n\n\"Actually, they knew each other before the war. Garrett met her while attending school in Philadelphia. My sister\u2014his mother\u2014died when he was six, and he was convinced that had she had proper medical care, she would have lived. So he decided to become a doctor. A real doctor, not just a shingle-on-the-door one like Doc Coldwell.\" She rolled her eyes. \"The man doesn't know a disease from a mule's backside.\"\n\nFearing another anatomy lesson, Maggie quickly brought the conversation back to Garrett. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"The war happened, and of course young men his age were conscripted. I offered to give him money to avoid the draft, but Garrett wouldn't hear of it. I was ready to take out a bank loan if necessary or even sell my property.\" Avoiding the draft involved either paying three hundred dollars or hiring a substitute. \"He refused my offer. Said it wasn't fair to the men who couldn't afford the commutation money.\" She paused before adding, \"Then came the Battle of Gettysburg.\"\n\n\"Garrett said he spent time in a rebel prison. Was that when he was captured?\"\n\n\"Yes, along with Katherine's brother.\" Aunt Hetty sipped her lemonade. \"After the war, Garrett came home to recuperate. He was in pretty bad shape, and I nursed him back to health. Katherine knew him before the war and apparently thought him dead. But when she heard from her brother that he was still alive, she traveled out here to see him. What she found was not the man she knew before the war, but a man with a broken spirit. He'd even given up his dream of becoming a doctor.\"\n\nAunt Hetty worked her neck back and forth. \"Not that I blame him, of course. He'd seen too much sickness, too many deaths.\" As an afterthought she added, \"At first I think Katherine had reservations about marrying him.\"\n\n\"But she did anyway.\"\n\n\"She probably felt sorry for him, having to spend time in that horrid prison and all.\"\n\nMaggie took a sip of lemonade. It was hard to believe that a smart, educated woman would marry a man out of pity. It was harder still to think that a man who refused to avoid the draft out of fairness would suddenly board a train, shoot a guard, and take off with seventy thousand dollars.\n\nMaggie set her half-empty glass down. \"How did Katherine die?\" She already knew the answer\u2014or at least what was in the coroner's report\u2014but it might appear odd if she didn't show curiosity about his first wife.\n\nAunt Hetty pursed her lips before answering. \"The fool woman went outside during a storm. She fell and hit her head.\"\n\nThere was something in the woman's voice that made Maggie wonder if there was more to the story. \"What a terrible thing. It must have been very hard for Garrett and the children.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was. And totally unnecessary, if you ask me.\"\n\nThe off-hand comment provided an opening too good to let pass. \"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"The accident occurred in the middle of the night while her husband and children slept. Now I ask you, who in their right mind would wander outside on a stormy night?\"\n\nWho, indeed? Maintaining a casual air, Maggie sipped her lemonade, but there was nothing casual about her thoughts. The peculiar circumstances of Katherine Thomas's death had been in the Pinkerton report, but not the time at which it occurred. This new information led to all sorts of questions.\n\nWhat had possessed her to leave the house on a stormy night? With that thought came another: Was her death really an accident as reported, or was Rikker correct in suspecting something more sinister? And what part, if any, did Garrett play in her death? The possible ramifications sent chills down her spine.\n\nAunt Hetty had little nice to say about Garrett's first wife and went on at great lengths to say it. She especially disapproved of the woman's extravagant taste in clothes.\n\n\"She was one of those... what do you call them? Modern women.\" She sniffled and reached into her drawstring purse for a lace handkerchief. \"She had this fancy education and resented letting it go to waste.\"\n\nKatherine wasn't the only woman who felt that way. Society was changing\u2014especially in large cities. College-educated women now questioned traditional female roles, and even the church had gotten into the debate. To hear some clergy tell it, working women were leading society down a wanton path.\n\n\"She even thought women should have the vote.\" Aunt Hetty shook her head in disgust. \"Can you imagine? As if we don't have enough things to worry about.\"\n\nMaggie clamped her mouth shut. She was a big believer in a woman's right to vote, but she didn't dare voice a dissenting opinion. She needed Aunt Hetty on her side.\n\nInstead, she listened quietly and politely and nodded in agreement whenever Aunt Hetty's rants called for it. But the more the woman carried on, the more Maggie wondered if perhaps Katherine Thomas's death was more than just an unfortunate accident.\n\n\"Now, let's see. Where were we?\" Aunt Hetty said at last. \"Oh yes, your wedding gown.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nGarrett was in good spirits that night at supper and soon had the children roaring with laughter with his antics and riddles.\n\n\"Two bodies have I,\" he said with a twinkle in his eye, \"though both joined in one. The stiller I stand, the faster I run.\"\n\n\"I give up,\" Toby said after several wild guesses ranging from twins to bodies of water.\n\n\"An hourglass,\" Garrett replied.\n\n\"Ah, gee,\" Toby complained, folding his arms across his chest. \"Nobody uses hourglasses anymore.\"\n\nGarrett winked at her. \"Okay, how about this one? My nose is long, my back is broad and round, and in cold weather of use I'm found. No load I carry, yet I puff and blow, as much as heavy loaded porters do.\"\n\n\"A big bad wolf,\" Elise guessed.\n\n\"Bellows,\" Toby said.\n\n\"You're right,\" Garrett said, nodding at his son. Elise's face dropped, and he added, \"You're both right.\"\n\nMaggie laughed. \"And I was just about to say the wind. Does that make me right, too?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" he said and smiled.\n\nOddly enough, she'd never enjoyed herself more. This was how she always pictured a real family in her mind. Sharing a meal together. Laughing. She couldn't remember laughing with her own family. They were too busy staying ahead of the law.\n\nPushing her thoughts aside, she was startled to find that she had almost forgotten her real purpose for being here\u2014and it wasn't to have fun." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Later as she and Garrett finished washing and drying the dishes, she tried to think of how to broach the subject of his locked bedroom.\n\n\"Your aunt stopped by today,\" she said, pulling off her apron.\n\n\"You should feel honored. That's the second time this week she left her deathbed, and all because of you.\"\n\n\"I suspect your aunt is just lonely,\" she said.\n\nLoneliness was something with which she was all too familiar. Her job required her to be constantly on the move, forcing her to live the life of a gypsy. She had no real home, no family. She hadn't seen her brothers since the day her father was hung. Hadn't even looked for them, out of fear that one or more had followed in Papa's footsteps.\n\nGarrett hung the dish towel on a rack to dry. \"I suspect my aunt misses my uncle more than she lets on.\" He leaned against the counter, arms folded. \"What brought her here today?\"\n\n\"She's planning our wedding.\"\n\nHe raised a dark eyebrow. \"Do you mind?\"\n\nTrying to be tactful, she hesitated. She needed to earn his trust, and criticizing his aunt would likely defeat her purpose.\n\n\"I don't mind going for a fitting, but your aunt plans on making a big fuss, and\"\u2014she bunched the apron into a ball\u2014\"I hoped for something simple.\" Preparing for a wedding that would never take place would take up too much time.\n\nGarrett studied her. \"Believe me, the last thing I want is a big church wedding, but Aunt Hetty means well.\"\n\n\"I know that.\"\n\n\"And I'm her only living relative.\" He hesitated. \"After my parents died, she raised me. I owe her a lot, and I know that planning our wedding would give her a great deal of pleasure. But if you're really against having a big affair, I'll talk to her.\"\n\nShe felt trapped. If she insisted on having her own way she would look childish\u2014maybe even selfish. But if she granted his request, she would be putting a lot of people to work for nothing. Still, she was paid to do a job, and her allegiance was to the company paying her wages. That meant doing whatever was necessary\u2014even if it meant planning a fake wedding\u2014to get the job done.\n\n\"Very well,\" she said. \"We'll do it your aunt's way.\"\n\nHis crooked grin was as engaging as it was disturbing, and she struggled not to fall under his spell.\n\n\"Then it's settled,\" he said.\n\nIt was far from settled, but she nodded mutely and, encouraged by his smile, decided to raise the subject of his bedroom. \"I measured some of the windows for new curtains.\" The sun had faded the gingham curtains almost white. \"I hope you don't mind.\"\n\n\"This is your home now.\"\n\nThe word home sliced through her like a knife. She never really had a home. Not a real one. For the first twelve years of her life, her family had been on the run. They traveled from town to town, state to state. Sometimes they shacked up in a deserted cabin and once even lived in a cave.\n\nAfter her father's death on the gallows, her mother couldn't keep the family together any longer. Maggie spent her teen years in a cold, drafty, and regimented orphan asylum, run by a head mistress determined to pound the three Rs into her charges' heads. She wasn't unkind, just strict and had no patience with anyone who slacked off. Fortunately, the woman also taught her how to sew, though she never attempted to make anything so complicated as a dress or shirtwaist.\n\n\"Do you have a sewing machine?\" she asked.\n\nHe nodded. \"Yes. In the attic. I'll fetch it down for you.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You aren't going to hang lace curtains, are you?\" he asked.\n\n\"Certainly not,\" she said, with unfeigned indignation. \"That's like hanging one's undergarments in the windows for all the world to see.\"\n\nNo sooner were the words out of her mouth than she grimaced. Now why did she have to mention something so personal in his presence?\n\nHis gaze slid down the length of her, and his mouth softened. \"We wouldn't want to do that.\" Something intense flared in his eyes. \"Hang undergarments in the windows, that is.\"\n\nFace blazing, she cleared her throat. The air between them suddenly seemed thick with double meanings, but she refused to be deterred.\n\n\"I would like to measure the windows in your bedroom.\" Her voice wavered even as she struggled for control. \"If... if that's all right.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. It'll soon be your...\" He corrected himself. \"Our bedroom. Do you want to measure the windows now? I'll help you.\"\n\nSince she had no intention of marrying him, it never occurred to her to think of his room as theirs. Having him help her measure for undergar... uh... curtains was the last thing she wanted.\n\n\"Th\u2014that's all right,\" she stammered. \"I need to see that the children have finished their schoolwork. Tomorrow will be soon enough.\" Tomorrow when everyone was gone, including him.\n\n\"I'll leave the door unlocked. Like I said, it will soon be our room.\"\n\nHe watched her closely as he spoke. The smooth, rich timbre of his voice was both soothing and disconcerting. She felt guilty for her deceit, and that was odd. Working undercover had never bothered her before. But neither had children been involved, and for some reason that made her feel worse.\n\nFolding the now wrinkled apron, she managed to squeak out a thank you. She left the apron on the counter and backed toward the open doorway.\n\n\"I\u2014I better go and check on Elise and Toby.\" They'd been playing outside and both could use a bath.\n\n\"Would you mind taking them to school in the morning? I have an early delivery to make.\"\n\nGrateful for the change of subject, she nodded. \"I'd be happy to.\"\n\nHis mouth curved. \"Much obliged. I'll hitch the horse to the wagon before I leave.\"\n\n\"That... would be most helpful.\" She turned and fled down the hall. Gaining access to his room had been easier than she expected, and she breathed a sigh of relief.\n\nDashing into the children's room, she turned to find two pairs of eyes watching her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nWhen Maggie awoke the following morning, Elise's bed was empty. She quickly attended to her ablutions, dressed, and wound her braided hair into a coronet at the back of her head. Thus braced, she stepped into the hall.\n\nThe door to Garrett's room stood ajar. She hesitated briefly but didn't dare search it until everyone had left for the day.\n\nShe followed the smell of coffee to the kitchen where she found Toby at the table by himself, an empty plate pushed aside.\n\n\"Good morning,\" she said, ruffling his hair. Today his thinking cap was missing, and he was busy sketching with a charcoal pencil.\n\n\"Where's your father and sister?\"\n\n\"Pa left for work and Elise is out back in the tree house,\" he said without looking up from his sketch.\n\nShe poured herself a cup of coffee from the metal pot on the stove. \"You have a tree house?\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"How is it possible to have a tree house without a tree?\" She'd yet to see a tree since coming to the Territory. If she ever spotted one in this arid land, she'd be tempted to hug it.\n\n\"You don't need a tree to build a tree house,\" he assured her.\n\n\"Is that so?\" Both children lived in a make-believe world; no doubt that was how they dealt with their mother's death. She wouldn't have survived her own childhood without flights of imagination. She'd even made up an elaborate fantasy about her father and pretended he was a hero instead of an outlaw. That particular fantasy ended the day he hung from the gallows.\n\nShuddering at the memory, she inhaled the brew's rich aroma before taking a sip. It was just as she liked it: neither too strong nor too weak. \"May I visit your tree house?\"\n\nToby looked up from his drawing. \"We only let special people inside.\"\n\nThe back door flew open and Elise ran into the kitchen, her round cheeks as shiny as two red apples. The little white dog padded in behind her.\n\nMaggie knelt down to pet the animal. He was all wagging tail and licking tongue.\n\n\"Have you had breakfast?\"\n\nElise nodded. She glanced at her brother as if sharing a secret. Or perhaps she thought she was in some sort of trouble. \"And Whitewash and Patches had breakfast, too. I fed them while Toby milked the cow.\"\n\n\"Whitewash. Is that your dog's name?\"\n\nElise nodded. \"Uh-huh.\"\n\n\"And who is Patches?\"\n\n\"Patches is our horse. Pa's horse is named Brownie.\"\n\n\"Let's see if I have them right. Whitewash, Patches, and Brownie. Any other names I should know?\"\n\n\"The cow's name is Milk Can, but the chickens don't have names.\"\n\n\"What? No names? Well, we'll have to come up with some. Meanwhile, we need to fix your hair. We don't want to be late for school.\"\n\nElise raced to the bedroom, and Maggie followed. She reached for the silver-handled hairbrush on top of the bureau. Elise's hair was long, almost to her waist, and had a natural curl.\n\n\"Your brother was telling me about your tree house,\" she said as she worked the bristles through Elise's long locks.\n\n\"Shh. We don't want the boogeyman to hear.\"\n\nPlaying along, Maggie lowered her voice to a whisper. \"Absolutely not.\" She glanced out the window, pretending to look for lurkers. \"The coast is clear,\" she said and proceeded to brush Elise's thick hair. \"So I think it's okay to talk. I always wanted a tree house.\"\n\nElise's watched her in the mirror. \"You did?\"\n\n\"Yes, indeed.\"\n\n\"Ouch!\" Elise cried out, grabbing the side of her head.\n\n\"Sorry.\" Maggie worked the knot gently out of the child's tresses and quickly weaved the hair into two braids. She then tied both with a blue ribbon. \"There, all done.\"\n\nShe held up a hand mirror so Elise could see the back of her head. She really was a pretty child, though far too serious for such a young age.\n\nElise looked pleased by her reflection. \"Papa doesn't know how to make braids. He makes them all crooked.\"\n\nMaggie tapped Elise's pert nose with her finger. It was hard to believe that a man who could bend metal into the most amazing shapes was stymied by a little girl's hair.\n\n\"Don't tell anyone, but I think that it's a job for a woman.\"\n\nElise giggled. The child seemed to thrive on secrets.\n\n\"Get your books. We don't want to be late.\" Maggie was anxious to take the children to school so she could have the house to herself. It was time to do some real detective work." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Maggie dropped the children off and drove straight home. A mule-driven wagon was parked in front.\n\nCurious, she walked around the back of the house and was greeted by Whitewash. She petted the dog. \"Down, boy.\"\n\nSidestepping a mound of dirt where the dog had been digging, she moved to the porch. A small Chinese woman was bent over a metal tub scrubbing a pair of Toby's trousers on a washboard.\n\n\"You must be Lila. I'm Maggie Taylor.\"\n\nLila straightened and nodded. She wore a blue tunic with contrasting borders and loose sleeves. Her shiny black hair was parted in the middle and her bun anchored with what looked like knitting needles.\n\n\"Very pleased to meet you,\" she said in a singsong voice. It was hard to know how old she was, but Maggie guessed her early twenties.\n\n\"I'm pleased to meet you, too,\" Maggie said, her detective mind at work. Perhaps the woman could shed some light on Katherine's mysterious death. \"How long have you worked for Mr. Thomas?\"\n\nLila nodded her head again. \"Thank you, good-bye.\"\n\nMaggie tried again, enunciating each word with care. It soon became clear that the girl spoke very little English and had memorized only a few polite phrases.\n\n\"I'll let you get back to the wash,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"Very pleased to meet you.\"\n\nWith a smile and a nod, Maggie entered the house through the back door, anxious to get to work.\n\nShe made certain the front door was locked before attempting to search the bedroom. She didn't want anyone walking in unannounced. Several chessmen were scattered on the floor, and she stooped to pick them up.\n\nOdd. The pieces weren't on the floor when she left to take Elise and Toby to school. She glanced toward the kitchen. Had Lila knocked them over? The dirty laundry had been placed in a basket and put on the porch next to the washtub. Far as she knew, the laundress had no reason to enter the house. Still, the chess pieces didn't fall by themselves. Someone had entered the house in her absence\u2014if not Lila, then someone else.\n\nBut who? And why?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Garrett's bedroom was larger than the children's. A double bed occupied one wall; a wardrobe, small desk, dry sink, and ladder-back chair another. The room lacked anything of a personal nature. No pictures on the wall. No daguerreotypes of his deceased wife and mother of his children.\n\nHad Garrett removed reminders of his first marriage knowing she planned to enter the room? It was a possibility. It would also explain why the room had been locked. Maybe he didn't want her seeing signs of his first wife.\n\nShe stepped over the bedroll on the floor that made up Toby's bed and opened both wardrobe doors. The scent of bay rum hair tonic, moth balls, and old oak greeted her. On one side Garrett's clothes hung from wooden pegs. The second half contained four drawers, and these she opened one by one. The drawers stored socks, handkerchiefs, and neatly folded shirts but, again, nothing of interest.\n\nShe closed the wardrobe doors. Hands at her waist, she glanced around the room and then moved toward the desk. A chessboard dominated the desktop, and the arrangement of the pieces suggested a game in progress.\n\nCareful not to disturb the board, she sat at the desk. The top drawers held stationery and writing supplies. Much to her surprise, she found her letters to him tied with a piece of rawhide and stacked in the back of a drawer. Fiction, all of them, the contents spun as cleverly as a spiderweb.\n\nAfter putting a shadow on Garrett Thomas, Allan Pinkerton learned the suspect had placed an ad for a mail-order bride and approached Maggie with a daring plan.\n\nAt first Maggie thought the idea foolhardy. The chances of Garrett choosing her out of dozens and perhaps even hundreds of women looking for a husband seemed remote. But Allan was convinced that he knew enough about Garrett Thomas to make the plan work, and he was right.\n\nUnder Allan's tutorage, she answered the ad, and much to their delight, Garrett wrote back. So began a six-month correspondence. He wrote about the children, the weather, and the town, but little about himself. Her letters to him were equally impersonal. She didn't want to chance forgetting what she'd written and later say something that would contradict the letters.\n\nGarrett finally asked her to come to the Arizona Territory so they could meet in person and allow his children to get to know her. He even sent her money for travel expenses. All expenses incurred from the investigation were paid by the railroad and bank, but Allan thought it might look odd if she didn't accept his monetary offer, and so she did.\n\nSeeing how her letters had been so carefully saved filled her with guilt. Lying was a necessary part of her disguise, and she was only doing her job. Surely God made allowances for those working undercover for law and order.\n\nThe second drawer revealed something of much more interest: a leather notebook.\n\nShe pulled the notebook out. Turning to the first page, she quickly scanned the bold masculine handwriting that was all too familiar. Was this what he did at night after locking himself in his room? Write?\n\nShe sat back and began reading. At first she thought it was a novel, but it soon became clear that this was no made-up story. Garrett had written about the year spent at the Andersonville Rebel Prison. It was a story of survival, courage, and quiet desperation. He wrote about the lack of sanitary conditions and food. About disease and death. Escape and capture. Not only was Garrett a gifted tinker but also a gifted writer.\n\nHe wrote about successfully nursing a soldier\u2014a boy, really\u2014through an illness. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she read the rest:\n\nThe boy was shot by a guard for simply reaching beyond the swamp that ran through camp for fresh water. As long as I live I shall never forget this day or that boy who died too young." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Her breath caught in her chest upon reading the next sentence.\n\nI knew only the boy's first name\u2014Toby." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "So Garrett had named his son after a boy soldier who died in that awful prison.\n\nIt was well after noon by the time she finished reading the manuscript, and his harrowing tale left her emotionally drained.\n\nGarrett Thomas had no record of criminal activity prior to the war, and that was unusual. Almost every serious criminal she'd known had a history of unlawful activities, many starting in early childhood.\n\nBut after reading Thomas's diary, she could well understand how even the most virtuous of men could change. That's what war did to people. It changed habits and beliefs and turned good and evil upside down. The warrior mind-set could remain long after the battle cries faded away. After killing on the battlefield, robbing a train or even a bank might seem mild in comparison. Perhaps that explained why every war was followed by a crime wave. This was as true for the Napoleonic Wars as it was for the War between the States.\n\nMany veterans returning from that awful war were said to have a Soldier's Heart\u2014a poetic name that failed to describe the sometimes horrific changes that made these men strangers even to their own families.\n\nDid Garrett have a Soldier's Heart? His war journal suggested he might. If that was true, had the emotional scars cut so deep as to blacken his soul?\n\nAllan Pinkerton was so convinced of it he had even written as much in Garrett's file. Not only was the Scotsman a good detective, he was also an expert on the criminal mind. He blamed the war for producing criminals such as the James, Reno, and Farrington brothers.\n\nHe'd traced the prevalence of \"holdup\" thieves all the way back to the gold mining camps. Prospectors too lazy to work robbed the more successful miners. When the mines closed, these same thieves graduated to stages and eventually trains. He'd also traced cattle rustling back to early cowboys who grew tired of riding the range for low wages.\n\nGarrett's journal and Allan's teachings were very much on her mind as she wrote a detailed report back to headquarters." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nAfter picking the children up from school, she drove to Mrs. Button's dressmaking shop on the corner of Main and Jefferson.\n\nMrs. Button was a pleasant, middle-aged woman with a body as round and plump as a pincushion. Dressed in a floral dress with a frilly white cap atop her white head, she greeted each child with a buttery smile and a handful of penny candy.\n\nThe small, cramped shop was as colorful as a patchwork quilt. Fabric and sewing notions were scattered across a table next to a treadle sewing machine. Gowns, skirts, and petticoats hung from wall pegs or were fitted on wooden forms in various stages of completion.\n\nMrs. Button released the children and peered at Maggie over her wire-framed spectacles. \"You must be the lucky bride-to-be. Maggie, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's right. I hope this is a good time.\"\n\n\"Couldn't be better.\" The dressmaker rubbed her hands together. \"Hetty also ordered outfits for the children to wear at the wedding, so I'll need to measure them, too.\" She regarded each child in turn. \"Who wants to go first?\"\n\nElise raised her hand. \"I do.\"\n\n\"Come on along then. Step on my magic stool.\"\n\nElise's face lit up at the word magic, and she giggled. Mrs. Button helped her onto the stool and circled her small waist with a cloth measuring tape. Elise watched with wide-eyed curiosity as the dressmaker wrote the measurements in a notebook.\n\nToby had no interest in new clothes and practically had to be pulled away physically from the marmalade cat perched in front of the sunny window. While standing on the stool, he squirmed and wiggled so much he fell off twice.\n\nAfter duly recording all necessary measurements, including Maggie's, the seamstress showed them a wedding dress she had just completed for the butcher's daughter. The white silk gown had an intricately embroidered bodice, and the sleeves and neckline were edged with lace. A soft paneled train fell from a large satin bow set below the bustle in back.\n\nElise stared at the gown with shiny bright eyes. \"Are you going to wear a dress like this, Miss Taylor?\"\n\n\"Not quite as fancy,\" Maggie said. Even under different circumstances she couldn't imagine wearing anything so elaborate or confining. \"And I don't wish to have a train.\"\n\nMrs. Button nodded. \"This would be too much for your dainty figure, but I think we can find something that will wipe the worried look off your face.\"\n\n\"I'm not worried,\" Maggie said, irritated at herself for not staying in character and playing the part of a happy bride. In the past, she'd had no trouble playing the roles required by her job. \"I'm just not used to making such a fuss over clothes.\" At least that part was true.\n\nOnce she had even managed to manufacture real tears while pretending to be a grieving widow. But a mail-order bride was the hardest role yet, especially now, after reading Garrett's story. How could she not feel sorry for what he'd experienced?\n\nStill, an innocent man had died during the Whistle-Stop holdup, and his family deserved to see justice. Nothing Garret Thomas had gone through justified the taking of a life.\n\nElise's giggles snapped her out of her reverie. \"Can I have a caboose on my dress?\"\n\nMrs. Button laughed. \"We're not talking about that kind of train. It's what we call a long piece of fabric attached to the back, like this.\" She held out the fabric panel. \"You're too young for a train, but you can have all the ruffles you want.\"\n\nSatisfied with the answer, Elise skipped across the room to join her brother at the window.\n\nMrs. Button pulled a bolt of white satin from a shelf. \"So when is the big day?\"\n\n\"June fifteenth,\" Maggie replied.\n\n\"Oh my. That doesn't give me much time, does it?\"\n\n\"We could change the wedding to a later date, if you like,\" Maggie said. Like maybe a year from next Tuesday. But even a week or two would give her more time to conduct her investigation. She was beginning to think it might take longer than planned.\n\nMrs. Button immediately discounted the idea with a wave of her hand. \"I wouldn't think of asking you to postpone your wedding.\" She lowered her voice. \"Having a case of cold feet, are we?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head. \"No, it's just... there's so much to do.\"\n\nThe dressmaker patted her on the arm much like a mother might comfort a child. \"God always provides enough time to get the important things done. And Hetty will help all she can, even with her health problems. I know her nephew's wedding will make her very happy.\"\n\nIt was just the opening Maggie had hoped for. \"Did you know his first wife?\"\n\n\"Everyone knew Katherine.\" The seamstress shook her head until her neatly stacked chins wobbled. \"It was a terrible thing. A woman that young and beautiful...\"\n\n\"Aunt Hetty said it happened while the family was asleep.\"\n\nMrs. Button pushed her glasses up her nose. \"That's the oddest thing. No one could figure out what she was doing outside on such a stormy night.\" She lowered her voice. \"Don't pay any attention to what some are saying, because none of it is true.\"\n\nMaggie ran her hand casually across a bolt of blue velvet. \"What exactly is everyone saying?\"\n\nMrs. Button glanced at the children still playing with the cat before answering. \"Just before her death, Garrett and Katherine were heard arguing. Right there in his shop.\"\n\n\"Do you know what they argued about?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"No, but I've known him since he was a wee lad, and he wasn't the same after the war. He was much more serious, if you know what I mean. Hardly ever smiled.\"\n\nNo surprises there. After reading the horrors in Garrett's notebook, Maggie could well understand why. \"He smiles now,\" she said. Time healed some wounds, but not all.\n\n\"Not like he used to as a young lad. As for Katherine, she never really fit in, if you know what I mean. She never liked it here. Said it was too hot and uncivilized.\"\n\n\"Is that what they argued about?\"\n\n\"I'm not really sure what their last argument was about, but some think she was seeing someone else.\"\n\nMaggie frowned. \"You mean like another man?\"\n\nMrs. Button nodded. \"I never believed it, of course. On the other hand, it would explain what she was doing out in the middle of the night, wouldn't it?\"\n\nMaggie had considered every possible explanation she could think of for Katherine going out during a storm\u2014but a romantic rendezvous? That one never entered her head. If the rumors were true, the question was, did Garrett know?\n\nHe did seem rather protective of her the day she visited his shop. Did that mean he had a jealous streak? Jealousy as a motive for murder dated back to Cain and Abel and caused half of all domestic crimes on Pinkerton files, so the idea wasn't all that far-fetched.\n\nThe bells on the door announced the arrival of another client; a young mother with an infant in her arms needed a dress tailored to fit her new shape.\n\n\"I won't take up any more of your time.\" Maggie thanked Mrs. Button and motioned to the children. \"Come along.\"\n\nNo sooner had Maggie and the children left the shop when they encountered a barefooted man in ragged trousers and dirty shirt sitting on the boardwalk. He sat with his back against the building, his face half hidden by a salt-and-pepper beard. Long, unkempt hair fell from beneath a brown slouch cap.\n\n\"Can you afford a pittance, miss?\"\n\nShe recognized the voice at once. Rikker!\n\nThe man never failed to amaze her. Successful disguises involved far more than just appearances. They required the right attitude and demeanor, and Rikker had perfected both to a fine art. She reached into her purse for a coin and leaned over to hand it to him.\n\n\"What happened to the quack doctor ruse?\" she whispered.\n\n\"That's my morning job,\" he whispered back. \"Your fianc\u00e9 mails a letter every other day or so on the way to work. Find out who he's writing to.\" Louder, he said, \"Thank you, ma'am, and may God bless you and your young'uns.\"\n\nA man with a cane tossed a coin in Rikker's hat as he walked by. Rikker pocketed the money and winked. He was obviously enjoying himself. With a fond smile, she hustled the children away.\n\n\"How come you gave that man money?\" Elise asked after settling on the front seat of the buckboard.\n\n\"'Cause he's a beggar,\" Toby said, climbing in back.\n\nElise peered up at Maggie from beneath the brim of her sunbonnet. \"What's a beggar?\"\n\n\"A begger is a person who has fallen on hard times. And the reason I gave him money is because God wants us to help those in need.\"\n\nElise thought about this for a moment before asking, \"Why doesn't God help them Himself?\"\n\nMaggie grabbed the reins and released the brake. \"Because God doesn't want to keep the fun of helping others all to Himself.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nThe following morning, Maggie stopped at Grover's Mercantile and purchased several yards of pretty floral calico. Since she'd made an issue about measuring windows, Garrett might think it strange if he didn't see new curtains in the works.\n\nShe then hurried home, intent on tackling the attic. Garrett's house was unusual for it was one of the few houses in the area with a second floor.\n\nThe attic had a single window for ventilation. The thick cover of fine sand told her that no one had been in the attic for months, maybe even years. The chances of finding the missing money up there seemed remote.\n\nStill, she did a thorough search. All she found was a treadle sewing machine and a couple of old trunks filled with women's clothing. Katherine's, no doubt.\n\nMaggie had never paid much attention to fashion, but it was hard not to be impressed with the quality of the gowns and hats. Most of the outfits were dated, favoring the straight sheaths and draped skirts of the seventies, but all were well tailored.\n\nShe was so intrigued with the colorful finery that she almost missed the envelope at the bottom of one of the trunks. It was addressed to Katherine's brother but wasn't stamped. It looked like the letter had never been mailed.\n\nShe broke the seal, pulled the single sheet out of the envelope, and unfolded it. Written in an ornate script, it read:\n\nDear Charlie,\n\nThe matter we discussed has given me grave concerns. Mama and Papa would turn over in their graves if they knew. I will not be a party to this. You have a week to take care of it, or I will." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "The letter was signed simply Katherine.\n\nMaggie folded the paper and slipped it back into the envelope. Take care of what? The letter was undated so there was no way of knowing when it was written.\n\nShe put the envelope back into the trunk and slammed the lid shut. Careful to smooth out any traces of foot or handprints, she returned to the first floor." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Two days later, Garrett joined her in the kitchen while she prepared the children's breakfast. She hid her frustration at not finding any condemning evidence in the house beneath a bright smile.\n\n\"Morning,\" he said cheerfully. He ruffled his son's hair and tweaked his daughter's cheek before taking a seat at the table. Toby was laboring over a drawing and didn't look up.\n\n\"Morning,\" she said. Now, as always, his presence struck a chord in her that was hard to ignore. Why he affected her so, she had no idea. She only knew he did.\n\n\"I set the sewing machine up in the parlor for you,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, filling his cup with coffee. Confound it! Now she would have to make those blasted curtains.\n\nA stamped envelope stuck out of his vest pocket, but she couldn't read the address. She spilled the coffee, and he jumped back.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" She quickly set the pot back on the stove and reached for a towel.\n\nTheir hands touched as he took the towel from her. The brief contact, along with his clean manly scent, sent warm shivers rippling through her, and her mind whirled in confusion.\n\n\"You okay?\" he asked.\n\nChiding herself for being so careless, she blinked and forced a smile. Every movement, every word, every facial expression had to be carefully guarded so as not to give him cause for suspicion. Whatever hold he had over her must stop.\n\n\"I'm fine. Just clumsy.\" She wiped her hands on her apron. \"You're not working today?\"\n\nHe tossed the damp towel onto the counter and took his seat. \"I open late on Saturdays.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" She couldn't believe it was already the weekend. Never had she known time to fly by so quickly.\n\nHe dropped two sugar cubes into his coffee and stirred. \"What's that you're working on, son?\"\n\nToby lifted his pencil off the paper. \"It's a slingshot. It'll be two miles high and three miles wide.\"\n\n\"A slingshot, eh? Why so large?\"\n\n\"It's gonna send a man to the moon.\"\n\n\"Can I go to the moon, Toby?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"Nah, you're a girl,\" Toby said. \"Girls can't do anything.\"\n\n\"If a boy can go to the moon, then so can a girl,\" Maggie said.\n\nElise spit her tongue out at her brother. \"So there!\"\n\nThe corners of Garrett's mouth quirked up. \"We're going to have to watch our step, son. It's now two against two.\" He sipped his coffee before adding another lump of sugar. \"So what are you three doing today?\"\n\nThe moon forgotten, Elise brightened. \"Let's go on a picnic, Miss Taylor. Pleeeeease.\"\n\nGoing on a picnic was the last thing Maggie wanted to do. As much as she enjoyed the children, caring for them meant less time spent investigating, and that was a downright nuisance.\n\nGarrett watched her over the brim of his coffee cup. \"A picnic sounds like a grand idea, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Yes, doesn't it?\" Maggie turned toward the stove and poured batter onto the hot skillet. \"Too bad you can't join us.\"\n\n\"Maybe I can.\"\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder and met his gaze. For some reason, she suddenly had trouble breathing.\n\n\"I think Panhandle can manage the shop for an hour or two,\" he said. \"Pick me up at noon.\"\n\nElise squealed with delight as she wrapped her arms around her father. The child never failed to bring a smile to his face, and today was no different.\n\nTurning back to the stove, Maggie scooted the spatula under a flapjack and flipped it over. It was strange the way his relationship with his children made her own loss seem so poignant.\n\nAs a child she'd prayed her father would change his outlaw ways, but he never did. He didn't even acknowledge her on the day he hung from the gallows. As they lowered the rope around his neck she yelled, \"I love you.\" She wanted so much to hear those same words from him, but they never came. Instead, he cursed her in that hateful way that he cursed everyone\u2014even God.\n\nPutting criminals away helped to alleviate her shame, but that was before she met Garrett Thomas. Now the thought of taking him away from the children who adored him nearly broke her heart.\n\nGarrett sent Toby and Elise out of the room and joined her at the stove. \"Smells good,\" he said.\n\nObviously he had something on his mind, and her mouth went dry. Had she misspoken or made him suspicious?\n\nForcing an outer calm, she asked, \"Would you like me to mail that letter for you?\" She'd searched but failed to find an address book anywhere in the house.\n\n\"No need,\" he said, patting his pocket. \"I'll drop it at the post office on the way to the shop.\" He hesitated. \"As you know, my former brother-in-law is back in town.\" He paused, and she relaxed. Her secret identity was still safe.\n\nHe cleared his throat before continuing. \"He might try to see Toby and Elise, and it's imperative that he stays away from them.\"\n\nHer eyes widened in alarm. \"Are you saying he means them harm?\"\n\n\"No, nothing like that. It's just... he blames me for Katherine's death, and I don't want him planting ideas in the children's heads.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Why does he blame you?\"\n\n\"He doesn't believe her death was an accident,\" he said, his voice harsh.\n\n\"Why would he think such a thing?\"\n\n\"Probably because it's true.\"\n\nSurprised by his unexpected admission, she stared up at him. Most confessions came after a skillful interrogation by an investigator, but this one fell in her lap. Still, it was only a small breakthrough; it was her job to elicit the rest.\n\n\"What happened that night?\" she asked. Her voice, the way she looked at him, her very stance was adapted to invite his trust.\n\nBefore he could answer, black smoke spiraled up from the stove.\n\n\"Oh no!\" Removing the skillet from the flame she dumped it into the sink. The flapjacks were burned to a crisp. Worse, their conversation had been interrupted at a most inopportune time.\n\nGarrett flung the windows open, and Maggie wielded a towel to clear the air until only a thin haze of blue smoke remained.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said, hoping to reestablish their earlier rapport. She reached for the bowl of batter.\n\nHe stayed her hand with his own, and she felt her pulse thud. \"Don't worry about it,\" he said, removing his hand. \"I'll get something to eat in town.\"\n\nShe turned to ask him not to go, but he'd already left.\n\nSlamming the bowl down, she glared at the soggy mess in the sink." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Maggie drove the buckboard through town, reaching Garrett's shop twenty minutes before the prescribed time.\n\nThe children climbed out of the wagon, whispering among themselves.\n\n\"What are you two pumpkins up to?\" Maggie asked.\n\nToby gestured to his sister. \"Ask her.\"\n\n\"Ask me what?\"\n\n\"Can we go to Mrs. Button's shop?\" Elise glanced at her brother. \"She always gives us penny candy.\"\n\n\"All right. But don't be long.\"\n\nThe two children ran along the boardwalk toward the dressmaker's shop.\n\nShaking her head fondly, she glanced up and down the street. Rikker was nowhere in sight, though his bright-colored medicine wagon was still parked near the hotel.\n\nToby and Elise returned smelling of peppermint just as Panhandle and Garrett walked out of the shop together.\n\nPanhandle regarded Toby. Even though it was a warm day he still wore his funny cap, the rawhide ties hanging loose. \"Hello, Aloysius Pepperpot,\" he said and turned to Elise. \"And you, young lady, must be Penelope Peachpit.\"\n\nElise giggled. \"I told you my name is Elise.\" Apparently this was a standing joke between them. \"And that's Toby.\"\n\n\"Ah, Toby. How could I forget?\" Panhandle said, looking straight at Maggie. \"Nice to see you again, Miss Taylor.\"\n\n\"Nice seeing you, too,\" Maggie said. She slid over and, taking the hint, Garrett heaved himself up to the driver's seat.\n\n\"I shouldn't be any longer than a couple of hours,\" he said, taking hold of the reins.\n\n\"Take as long as you want.\" Panhandle backed away from the buckboard.\n\n\"Gid-up!\" Garrett called, and the rig rolled forward.\n\nMaggie eyed Garrett's profile, their interrupted conversation very much on her mind. What did he mean when he said Katherine's death wasn't an accident?\n\n\"How come Mr. Panhandle always wears that funny hat?\" Elise asked from the backseat.\n\n\"He doesn't want anyone to know he's bald,\" Toby said.\n\n\"When I'm bald I'm not wearing a hat like that,\" Elise said.\n\n\"Girls don't get bald, silly,\" Toby said, his tone edged with brotherly exasperation.\n\n\"Are you going to be bald, Papa?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"Maybe.\" Garrett said, his eyes warm with humor. \"You know what they say? Hair today, gone tomorrow.\"\n\nMaggie laughed. She couldn't help it. At that moment it was difficult to believe him guilty of anything but an all-too-intriguing smile\u2014and some very bad jokes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "It didn't seem possible to find water in that dry desert land, but after an hour's drive Garrett pointed to a river that cut through an outcrop of red rock and wound its way between two ribbons of sand.\n\nOverhead the sky was azure blue and the air crystal clear.\n\n\"That's the Gila River,\" Garrett said. \"Flows all the way to the Colorado.\" He pulled on Patches's reins and set the brake. \"Caught me a four-pound squawfish awhile back. Tasted almost as good as salmon.\"\n\nHe looked relaxed, and Maggie was hopeful that they could pick up their earlier conversation.\n\nToby and Elise jumped out of the wagon with whoops and hollers. Leaving their shoes and stockings scattered on the sand, they ran toward the water's edge.\n\n\"Watch for snakes,\" she called after them.\n\nGarrett lifted the picnic basket from the back of the wagon, and she reached for the blanket.\n\n\"You're beginning to sound like their mother,\" he said.\n\nNot sure how to take his comment, she quickly apologized. \"I'm sorry. I don't want you to think I'm trying to take Katherine's place.\" Though she had to admit the thought of being a wife and mother held a surprising appeal. A foolish notion at best. She'd seen too many broken families to think that domestic bliss was possible, given her profession.\n\n\"I meant it as a compliment,\" he said. \"The mother part I mean.\"\n\nShe drew in her breath. \"Oh. I thought\u2014\"\n\n\"Papa! Hurry!\"\n\nHe waved at Elise. \"Coming.\" He waited for Maggie to spread the blanket on the sand in a spot of shade cast by a boulder. After setting the basket down, he pulled off his boots and rolled up his trouser legs. Growling like a bear, he dashed after the children.\n\nElise and Toby screamed at the top of their lungs with feigned terror and splashed him with water.\n\nMaggie gathered the children's shoes and stockings and arranged them neatly next to Garrett's boots. Watching the three of them romp in the water, laughing together, filled her with mixed feelings. Never had she seen a man enjoy his children more than Garrett.\n\nTheir early morning conversation streamed through her head for perhaps the hundredth time. \"He doesn't believe her death was an accident.\"\n\nIf not an accident, what did his brother-in-law think it was?\n\nGarrett was thoroughly soaked by the time he joined her. She tossed him a towel, and he wiped himself dry and plopped down on the blanket next to her.\n\n\"I'm famished.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I burned your breakfast,\" she said, hoping he would take the hint and finish where he'd left off that morning before they were so rudely interrupted.\n\nHe wiped his face dry and draped the towel around his neck. His mussed hair gave him a boyish look that did nothing for her peace of mind.\n\n\"No need to apologize. It was my fault,\" he said.\n\nShe waited for him to continue. When he didn't, she reached for the picnic basket and pulled out slices of roast beef left over from last night's supper.\n\nIt probably wasn't wise to wheedle a confession from him there, in the middle of nowhere. Anything could happen, and the last thing she wanted was to pull out her gun, especially with the children present. Still, a detective had to make the best of every opportunity, no matter how small.\n\nAs if to fill the gap between them, she spread plates of cheese, bread, and wild strawberries across the blanket. She then poured lemonade into two tin cups.\n\nHe picked up a fork and stabbed a slice of roast beef.\n\nThe roast beef had been cooked exactly as he liked it, with just a hint of pink in the center. Thank God for Mrs. Crowen and her American Lady's Cookery Book.\n\nThe little ways Maggie had come to know him struck her as odd. Not since leaving the orphanage had she known another person's likes and dislikes to such an extent.\n\nShe knew Garrett preferred his eggs over easy, his bacon burned to a crisp, and his coffee hot and strong. His preferences came to mind so easily she was momentarily struck by surprise.\n\nThat's not all she knew. He liked two lumps of sugar in his coffee\u2014and on some days even more\u2014and salted his food as freely as a farmer scattered seed. He had trouble sleeping and often paced the floor between one and three in the morning. In little less than a week, his habits were almost second nature to her.\n\nWhat she didn't know was how to reconcile this loving parent and talented craftsman with the outlaw written up in the Pinkerton report.\n\nAs if sensing her gaze on him, he looked up and frowned. \"I guess you're wondering about this morning.\"\n\nThat was putting it mildly. \"You can't drop a cannonball like that and expect me not to wonder.\"\n\n\"I apologize.\" He stabbed another piece of meat. \"I don't know why Katherine left the house that night.\"\n\nShe studied his profile. \"You said it was your fault.\"\n\nA look of resignation crossed his face. \"Earlier that day we'd argued. Katherine never liked Arizona. That night she told me she was going back to Philadelphia with or without me and taking the children with her. That would have meant giving up my business and starting over. It also meant leaving Aunt Hetty here without family to watch over her. I didn't want to do that, and I told Katherine as much. We argued, and she slept in the parlor.\"\n\nHis voice grew hoarse. \"Had she been in our bed that night, things might have turned out different.\"\n\n\"You mean she might not have gone outside?\"\n\nHis face was fraught with pain. \"That's exactly what I mean.\"\n\n\"But why did she? Your aunt said there was a storm.\" Supposedly it wasn't a night for man or beast. It didn't seem likely that she'd leave the house in such weather to meet someone, even a lover.\n\n\"I don't know why. I've gone over that night a million times, and I still can't come up with an answer that makes sense.\"\n\nHe sounded sincere, and she believed him. He might be a thief and murderer, but he was also a grieving husband, and that's the man she reached out to comfort. She laid her hand on his arm, and he covered it with his own.\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" she said softly. \"I didn't mean to bring it all back.\"\n\n\"You have a right to know what happened that night.\" He squeezed her hand. \"I wish I knew myself.\" His gaze traveled to the distant horizon as if looking back in time.\n\n\"There was another reason I didn't want to leave Arizona. A selfish reason. I spent a brutally cold winter in Andersonville, and hundreds of men froze to death.\" His jaw tightened, and she heard his intake of breath. \"I never wanted to see another winter like that. Never again wanted to know that kind of cold.\" He gave her a sheepish look. \"Like I said. Selfish.\"\n\n\"I don't think it's selfish at all.\" She shuddered at the thought of men freezing to death. No war could justify such inhumanity. \"Did Katherine know how you felt about the cold?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"She never liked me to talk about the war.\"\n\nThe silence that followed was broken by Elise's excited voice. \"Miss Taylor. Over here!\"\n\nMaggie drew her hand away from his arm and waved. \"I'll be right there,\" she called back. She turned to Garrett. \"Anything else I should know?\" she asked. Like what you did with all that money?\n\n\"Only that you better watch your step.\" Just like that the darkness left his face, and he grinned like a schoolboy. \"Toby and Elise are about to get you wet.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nAlready it was hot that Sunday morning as she pulled the buckboard behind the long row of wagons parked near the Furnace Creek Community Church.\n\nDespite his negative opinion of organized religion, Garrett didn't object to her taking the children to Sunday worship, but neither did he offer to join them.\n\nElise, as usual, was full of questions. \"If God is everywhere, why do we have to come to church?\"\n\n\"It's easier for God to keep track of us if we're all together,\" Toby said.\n\nMaggie smiled. It seemed the boy had an answer for everything. \"Worshipping with others also helps us grow stronger in our faith. Just like spending time together makes a family strong.\" That last thought caught her off-balance. Since when had she become an expert on families?\n\nShe set the brake and straightened her hat. \"Come along, children.\"\n\nChurch bells began to ring and a raven flew out of the bell tower, squawking in protest. With a child on either side, she walked up the graveled path to the carved wooden doors. People greeted them warmly as they threaded their way down the center aisle to the empty pew in the middle row. Sun streamed through the stained glass windows, bathing the giant cross in front with bright rays of light.\n\nThe church was packed and only a few empty pews remained. Mrs. Higginbottom and her friends waved from across the aisle, and Maggie acknowledged them with a smile.\n\n\"There's Aunty,\" Elise said, pointing to a front pew occupied by Aunt Hetty and several other women.\n\n\"Shh. You can talk to her after the service.\"\n\nNo sooner had they settled into their seats than the choir director turned to the congregation. \"Please stand and turn to page one fifty.\"\n\nMaggie reached for the hymnal and flipped through until she found the right page. Standing, she held the book so the children could follow along. The organ ground out a few mournful chords, and the choir director turned to the choral group, arms raised. Right on cue, voices lifted in song.\n\n\"Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee...\"\n\nFor once Toby stood perfectly still. He seemed mesmerized by the choir and never took his eyes away from the altar. Today he looked more like his father than ever. For once his shirt was tucked into his waistband. His hair fell neatly from a side part, except for the cowlick that resisted all efforts to tame it.\n\nElise coughed, and Maggie reached into her drawstring purse for a piece of hard candy. Elise woke her up coughing last night, but she seemed perfectly all right this morning.\n\n\"Here, suck on this.\"\n\nThe last chords echoed away and the congregation was told to sit.\n\nReverend Holly took his place behind the pulpit. Today he was dressed in a black robe that afforded him a commanding presence that his short stature otherwise failed to provide.\n\n\"Let us pray.\"\n\nThe reverend didn't lack for words. On and on he went, asking for God's help with every possible affliction known to humankind\u2014or at least known to Aunt Hetty.\n\nElise tugged on her arm and whispered something. \"Shh,\" Maggie hushed. \"Tell me later.\"\n\n\"Amen,\" the minister said at last, and a collective sigh rippled through the sanctuary.\n\nThe moment Maggie opened her eyes she noticed the empty pew next to Elise. \"Where's your brother?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I don't know.\" Elise looked up with a worried frown. \"That's what I was trying to tell you.\"\n\nMaggie gave her a loving pat on the leg. \"Don't worry. I'm sure he'll return any minute.\" Despite her confident tone, she shot an anxious glance to the back of the church, craning her neck to see around the tall feathered hats blocking her view. The doors were closed and an usher stood on either side.\n\nToby had probably left to use the facilities. No reason for alarm. Still, she worried. Garrett trusted her with his children's care, and she felt responsible for their well-being.\n\nReverend Holly launched into his sermon, his voice rising and falling as easily as the tide. Minutes passed and still no sign of Toby. Where was he? During the five years she was an operative, she had tracked down some of the most difficult outlaws. And here she was having trouble keeping track of one young boy.\n\nElise grew increasingly restless, and Maggie couldn't blame her. The minister seemed to think that God's eternal words required an everlasting sermon. Anyone taking note of the number of nodding heads might surmise that the congregation was in total assent. The heavyset man seated next to her began to snore.\n\n\"God spoke to Moses, and He speaks to us,\" Reverend Holly said, switching to a quiet monotone voice more conducive to putting babies to sleep than inspiring a spiritual awakening. \"Show us a sign, God. Show us a sign.\"\n\n\"Stay here,\" Maggie whispered in Elise's ear. But before she could leave her seat, a gasp swept through the church and a woman cried out.\n\nMaggie glanced at the front of the church and her mouth dropped open. Unless she was seeing things, the cross on the wall behind the organ was swinging from side to side like a pendulum.\n\n\"A sign from God!\" someone yelled.\n\nThe man next to her awoke with a start. \"Lord, have mercy.\"\n\n\"Hallelujah!\" shouted an older woman who jumped to her feet then fainted dead away.\n\nReverend Holly looked startled, but apparently thinking his message was the inspiration behind the congregation's sudden outbursts, decided to make the most of it. Lifting his voice, he raised his arms and looked like a raven about to take flight.\n\n\"Speak to us, O mighty God!\" he cried, and the worshippers went wild.\n\nEyes rounded in fear, Elise grabbed hold of Maggie's arm and had a coughing fit.\n\n\"Don't be afraid.\" Maggie pulled her onto her lap to comfort. \"Let's go and find you a drink of water.\"\n\nShe was just about to carry Elise up the aisle when she caught a movement behind the organ, just to the left of the cross. Blinking she sat forward. That couldn't be... Please don't let it be\u2014\n\nToby!\n\nWith Elise in her arms, Maggie rose to her feet for a better look. It was hard to see much behind the waving arms and swaying bodies in front.\n\nThe cross was no longer moving, but the congregants continued to plead for mercy and forgiveness. Aunt Hetty tossed her cane away and flung her arms around one of the church elders\u2014an older man with stooped shoulders and muttonchop whiskers.\n\nThe worshipper sitting next to Maggie recited his sins, making it necessary to cover Elise's tender young ears. Another man was pulling money out of his pocket and flinging it in the air.\n\nElise held her arms tight around Maggie's neck. \"Are... are we gonna die and go to heaven?\"\n\nMaggie glanced at the pandemonium around her, looking for a way to escape. How would she ever explain Toby's behavior to Garrett?\n\n\"I'm afraid not, pumpkin. I'm afraid not.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Garrett looked up from the chessboard, his face a mask of disbelief. \"Toby did what?\"\n\nHands on her hips, Elise harnessed all the righteous mortification a five-year-old could muster. \"He tried to steal the cross.\"\n\nGarrett shot to his feet. Chess pieces flew to the floor, startling Whitewash and sending him scampering from the room. \"Is this true?\" he asked, facing his son. \"Did you try to steal the church's cross?\"\n\nFeeling a maternal need to protect the boy, Maggie hastened to intervene. \"He didn't mean any harm.\"\n\nIgnoring her, Garrett stared at his son. \"Answer me!\" he thundered. Toby flinched.\n\n\"I only wanted to borrow it,\" Toby said. He looked close to tears, and Maggie felt bad for him. Fortunately, she managed to drag the children away from church before anyone discovered the \"miracle\" was a fraud.\n\nGarrett drew back. \"You wanted to borrow the cross?\" He looked incredulous. \"Why?\"\n\n\"For my slingshot.\"\n\nGarrett's eyebrows shot up. \"What in the name of Sam Hill were you thinking? Don't you know that the cross is sacred? You can't just take it and do with it as you please.\" He raked his fingers through his hair. \"What did Reverend Holly say?\"\n\n\"He started shouting,\" Elise said. \"And a lady died.\"\n\n\"She didn't die,\" Maggie hastened to explain. \"She merely fainted.\" Suddenly, the affair struck her as funny, and laughter bubbled out of her like water from a well.\n\nGarrett turned to her, his forehead creased. \"May I ask what you find so amusing?\"\n\n\"It's just that\u2014\" She covered her mouth and gazed at him over her fingertips. \"I don't believe I've ever seen so much ardor and reverence in church.\"\n\nHe tilted his head. \"Is that so?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She had to control her mirth before she could continue. \"One man swore off alcohol for good, and another promised to give up gambling. And you won't believe this, but your aunt tossed her cane away.\"\n\nHis eyebrows rose. \"Aunt Hetty did that?\"\n\n\"Oh, Garrett. I wish you could have been there. When the congregation saw the moving cross they thought it was a sign from God.\" Despite the stern look on his face, she burst into another peal of laughter. \"Reverend Holly called it a miracle.\"\n\nGarrett rubbed the back of his neck, and a shadow of indecision flitted across his face. \"Drat, Maggie. Now I don't know if I should praise the boy or punish him.\"\n\nShe afforded him a beseeching look. \"He didn't mean any harm and might have done some good.\"\n\nHands behind his back, Garrett paced the room, stopping once to eye the scattered chess pieces. Finally, he faced his son. \"I'll give you a pass this time, but if anything like this happens again, you won't get off so easy.\"\n\nRelief crossed Toby's face as he backed across the room. \"Thank you, Pa.\"\n\n\"Don't thank me. Thank Miss Taylor.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Taylor,\" Toby called as he turned and ran from the room, Elise at his heels.\n\nMaggie waited until the children were out of earshot. It was hard to judge by Garrett's stoic face what he was thinking. \"You made a wise decision,\" she said, hands folded primly in front.\n\n\"We'll see.\" He picked the chess pieces off the floor and rearranged them on the board. \"From now on I'll accompany you to church. That way I can keep an eye on Toby myself and save you the trouble.\"\n\nKnowing how he felt about organized religion, the offer surprised her. It also delighted her. Attending church with their father was one more memory the children could hold on to after his arrest.\n\n\"As you wish.\"\n\nHe looked up with knitted eyebrows. \"I agreed to attend Sunday worship, but that doesn't mean I've changed my mind about church. So you needn't look so pleased.\"\n\n\"I'm trying not to,\" she replied. \"Look pleased, that is.\"\n\n\"Well, try harder.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nThat Monday, she was about to leave for town to mail her report when suddenly the front door burst open and Garrett stormed into the house with Elise in his arms.\n\n\"The school sent someone to fetch me.\" He hurried past her and raced down the hall to the child's bedroom, calling over his shoulder, \"She's burning up with fever.\"\n\nAlarmed, Maggie ran to the kitchen and quickly pumped water into a basin. Grabbing a washcloth from the hall cupboard, she hurried to Elise's room. By the time she reached the bedroom Garrett had already pulled Elise's shoes and stockings off and had undressed her down to her petticoat.\n\nMaggie set the bowl on the bedside table. Dipping the cloth into the basin she squeezed out the excess water and ever so gently dabbed Elise's heated face with the cool, wet cloth. It wasn't the fever that worried her as much as Elise's labored breathing.\n\nShe had seemed perfectly healthy that morning, except for a slight cough. It was hard to believe that a few short hours later she could be so desperately ill.\n\n\"We need the doctor.\"\n\n\"I sent Panhandle to fetch him,\" he said, pacing the floor like an expectant father. \"He should be here soon.\"\n\nShe ran the wet cloth down Elise's arms and legs. \"She'll be all right,\" she whispered. She had no way of knowing that for sure, but he looked so worried she had to say something to relieve his mind.\n\nHis gaze met hers for an instant before returning to his daughter's flushed face. \"I hope to God you're right.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "It was almost an hour before Whitewash's frantic barks announced the doctor's arrival.\n\nMaggie left Elise's room to let the doctor in. An older man with white shoulder-length hair and neatly trimmed beard, he carried a black leather bag.\n\n\"I'm Dr. Coldwell,\" he said by way of introduction.\n\n\"Thank you for coming, Doctor,\" she said. \"This way.\" He pulled off his top hat and followed her.\n\nGarrett greeted him with a handshake and stood aside so the doctor could examine Elise.\n\nDr. Coldwell set his bag and hat on a chair and leaned over the bed. He thumped on Elise's chest, cocking his head intently. \"Pneumonia,\" he said grimly.\n\nThe very word struck terror in Maggie. Many at the orphanage had died from the illness, including her best friend, Alice.\n\n\"Boil water and get some steam in here,\" Coldwell said. \"It'll help her breathe.\"\n\nShe glanced at Garrett's tight expression, and she ached inside\u2014not for the man, but the father. She turned to the doctor. \"Is she going to be all right?\"\n\n\"We won't know that until the fever breaks. Right now all we can do is make her comfortable.\" He prescribed a flaxseed poultice and strong tea. \"As much as you can get her to drink.\"\n\nAfter the doctor left, Maggie hurried to the kitchen. She ground the flaxseed, added hot water, and stirred until it was a fine paste. She then carried the bowl into Elise's room. While Garrett applied the poultice to Elise's chest, Maggie returned to the kitchen to make tea and refill the basin with hot water.\n\nElise's labored breathing could be heard even before Maggie reached the room. Her respiratory difficulties now racked her small body and tinged her lips blue.\n\nGarrett left to wash his hands and then returned to hold Elise upright while Maggie spooned tea down her throat.\n\nElise turned her head away. \"Come on, pumpkin, just a little bit more,\" Maggie said. \"This will make you feel better.\"\n\nWorking together, they finally got the rest of the tea down Elise's throat. Garrett sat on a chair next to his daughter's side, his face drawn. Maggie knelt on the floor next to him.\n\n\"She's going to be all right,\" she whispered. God, please make it so.\n\nHe raised his hands to cover his face. \"We don't know that.\"\n\n\"That's what we must believe,\" she said. \"Hope is the anchor God sends down whenever we need it, and that's what we have to hold on to.\"\n\nHe lowered his hands, and she thought she saw a flicker of optimism in his eyes. Or maybe it was just wishful thinking on her part.\n\nElise coughed, and her slight body shook the bed.\n\nGarrett leaned over her. Talking softly, he stroked his daughter's head until she grew still again.\n\nThey took turns sponging Elise's face, rubbing her back, soothing her coughs, applying the poultice, and forcing liquids into her. Hardly a word passed between them; there was no need to speak. They worked in perfect harmony, each seeming to know what to do and when.\n\nMaggie had just finished filling the bowl with boiling water when Garrett surprised her by talking about his time in prison.\n\n\"We lost a lot of men in Andersonville from pneumonia.\" His voice sounded distant, as if coming from a source buried deep within. \"Hundreds.\"\n\n\"This isn't the same, Garrett. Those men lived in terrible conditions.\" She never knew how bad those rebel prisons were until reading his journal. \"Elise is a healthy child.\"\n\n\"If anything happens to her\u2014\" His voice broke.\n\nShe laid a hand on his arm. She knew how he felt about church, but did he have similar feelings about God?\n\n\"Garrett, would you pray with me?\"\n\nHe pulled back from the bed as if it had burst into flames. \"Pray?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"It might help.\"\n\nHis jaw tightened. \"I prayed over many sick soldiers in prison and never once saw a prayer answered.\"\n\nShe was all too familiar with unanswered prayers. She couldn't begin to count the times she'd asked God to save her father. Even after her father hung from the gallows, she continued to pray for his soul and had no way of knowing if even that prayer had been answered.\n\n\"I don't know why God answers some prayers and not others,\" she said softly. The minister who worked at the orphanage had told her that even when God didn't answer prayers, He worked through them to change lives. \"All I know is that we have to keep praying.\"\n\nShe heard his intake of breath. \"The entire time I was in the stockades not one Christian church showed us prisoners any mercy or care.\"\n\n\"It was war,\" she said. \"You were the enemy.\"\n\n\"That didn't stop the Southern Masons from sending provisions to Northern Mason prisoners. Should, God forbid, there ever be another war, my advice to soldiers would be to forget the church and join the Masonic lodge.\"\n\n\"The church isn't perfect,\" she said. \"It was never meant to be perfect, and yet, God works through it, just as He works through our imperfections.\"\n\nShe might not have survived those turbulent years with her family had God not worked through her obsessive need to save face.\n\nGarrett said nothing, and they sat in waiting silence, deep in their own thoughts. She didn't want to think about the past, but once the door had been opened, there was no stopping the memories.\n\nHer family fled to the United Province of Canada during the war, along with thousands of American draft dodgers. Running away from conflict was not much different than running away from the law, so the move hardly affected her. It wasn't until after returning to America and her father's death that the full impact of the War between the States become evident. By then she had joined the ranks of war-orphaned children.\n\nShe soon learned that wartime losses were socially acceptable; hangings were not, so she invented a new past. She told everyone she lost her family in the North\u2014South conflict. It was the only way she knew to fit in with the hundreds of other orphans. The only way she knew how to preserve any sort of dignity.\n\nHer pretense provided ample training for her job as an undercover detective. Making up a good cover story was the least of it. An operative had to live the deception, and the only way to do that was by repetition. State a lie enough times and soon even the most outrageous falsehoods seemed like the truth.\n\nNo longer wishing to dwell on the past, she leaned over and pressed her hand gently on Elise's forehead. She still felt hot to the touch. Maggie ran her knuckles along the child's flushed face.\n\n\"Our Father,\" she whispered, and the words fell from her lips as if of their own volition. \"Who art in heaven.\" Heal this precious child. \"Hallowed be Thy name.\" Protect her and make her strong. \"Thy Kingdom come.\" Help her to grow in her faith even when it seems like You have deserted her. \"Thy will be done.\" Help her to follow Your plan for her. \"On earth as it is in heaven.\"\n\n\"Give us this day, our daily bread.\"\n\nHer eyes flickered open at the sound of Garrett's voice. She waited for him to say the next line, but when he didn't, she said it for him. \"Forgive us our failings as we forgive those who fail us.\" They finished the prayer in tandem, after which there was nothing left to do but wait.\n\nBut as they kept vigil, something happened in that room; something changed. The very air around them seemed to move more freely. At times, in the past, they had acted cautiously with each other. Wary, even. But not now. Their concern for Elise was the bond that united them in a way no pretense ever could.\n\nMaggie studied his profile as he leaned over his sleeping daughter. He would have made a wonderful physician. She shouldn't be thinking such thoughts but couldn't seem to help herself.\n\n\"Why did you choose to become a tinker?\" she asked. That was a long way from his original desire to pursue a medical career.\n\n\"Actually, I didn't,\" he said quickly, openly, without his usual circumspection. \"The profession chose me.\" He paused for a moment before continuing. \"There were no utensils, plates, or even cups in prison. Someone gave us rice, but we had nothing to cook it in.\" He reached into the basin of water for a washcloth and squeezed it out before continuing.\n\n\"I was able to make a pan from my canteen. From there, I learned how to make spoons from brass buttons and cups from wood. Eventually I traded what I made for extra rations. That helped keep me alive.\"\n\n\"It must have been hard,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Hard doesn't even begin to describe it.\"\n\nHe talked about the war, his imprisonment, and the difficulty of adjusting to civilian life. The scar on his face was the result of trying to break up a prison fight. It was as if his daughter's illness had uncorked memories that had long been bottled up inside.\n\n\"The town greeted me like a hero when I got home,\" he said. \"But I sure didn't feel like one.\" He pressed the cloth on Elise's forehead, and Maggie heard his intake of breath. \"She's so little.\"\n\n\"Yes, but she's strong,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"It's odd but some of the biggest and the strongest men in prison were the first to die. Scrawny men were the most likely to survive.\"\n\nThe same was true in the orphanage, though she hadn't really thought about it until then. It was as if those who'd led a hardscrabble life had somehow acquired an extra layer of protection against physical stresses.\n\n\"You survived, and you're strong.\"\n\n\"I guess you could say I was just lucky.\" He tossed the washcloth in the basin and rubbed his neck as if to work out the kinks. \"Let's talk about you.\"\n\nA knot tightened in her stomach. \"Me?\"\n\n\"I'm curious. Why would a woman as... attractive as you answer an advertisement for a mail-order bride?\"\n\nHis compliment made her blush. \"I could ask the same of you,\" she said, throwing the verbal ball back at him. \"Why would you place such an advertisement? I'm sure you could have your pick of local women.\"\n\n\"A scarred widower with two children? Not likely.\"\n\nShe studied him and felt a worrisome shift of allegiance. Her job required her to uncover the truth no matter the circumstances. There was no better time to question a suspect than when his defenses were down. But she had no desire to play detective. Not today. Taking advantage of Garrett's vulnerable state would be like shooting an unarmed man, and that she could never do.\n\n\"You underestimate yourself,\" she said.\n\nHe discounted this with a shrug. \"You still haven't answered my question,\" he said. \"I imagine you could have had your pick of suitors.\"\n\nShe felt another rush of warmth to her cheeks. \"An old maid like me?\"\n\nHe laughed.\n\n\"What's so funny?\"\n\n\"I was just thinking about the day I picked you up from the train station. I have to admit to having second thoughts. I worried that a woman who willingly put herself in danger might be too impulsive for my family's needs.\" After a moment he added, \"I was wrong.\"\n\nHer pulse quickened. \"What... changed your mind?\"\n\nHe glanced at her hand lovingly stroking Elise's forehead. \"That.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nAt four o'clock she left the house and drove the buckboard to the edge of town to pick Toby up from school. Worried about Elise and shaken by her confused feelings, she imagined herself falling into a bottomless pit with no means of escape.\n\nPulling up in front of the school, she forced her worrisome thoughts aside.\n\nToby greeted her with a frown, his slouch cap askew. It must have scared him to see his sister being carried out of the classroom, and she wished now she had thought to pick the boy up earlier.\n\n\"Is Elise gonna die?\"\n\nShe didn't want to answer the question\u2014not even to herself. \"Dr. Coldwell told us Elise will be fine once the fever breaks.\"\n\nHe scrambled onto the seat next to her, his eyes narrowed. \"What's wrong with her?\"\n\n\"She has pneumonia.\" Since she wasn't sure if he knew what pneumonia was, she added, \"Her lungs are sick. She needs our prayers.\"\n\nToby tightened his hands into fists and closed his eyes. \"God, if You make my sister better, I'll let her go to the moon. Promise.\"\n\nShe waited for him to finish his prayer. \"She'll like that,\" she said with a nod of approval. Releasing the brake, she flicked the reins. The buckboard trembled as the wheels began to roll.\n\nToby leaned forward as if urging Patches to hurry.\n\nShe glanced at his stern young face. If she didn't watch out, this kid would grow on her. The whole family would grow on her\u2014if it hadn't already\u2014and that was a problem she didn't know how to handle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "For five days and four nights, Garrett and Maggie hardly left Elise's bedside except to take Toby to school and to open the door to church members dropping off casseroles, thanks to Aunt Hetty who had sounded the alarm.\n\nSome offered to sit with Elise, but Garrett always turned them down, his manner brusque.\n\n\"They just want to help,\" Maggie said, gently, after one such episode.\n\n\"They only want to help when it suits them,\" he said and stalked away.\n\nAnother time she found him in the parlor staring at the dish that someone from the church had just left.\n\n\"That smells good,\" she said.\n\nHe shoved the casserole into her hands and returned to Elise's room.\n\nDuring the course of the days and nights, they spent hours talking. Garrett spoke of his childhood, and the words flowed when he spoke about growing up with Aunt Hetty and Uncle Harry. It was harder for him to talk about the war, and long pauses accented his speech.\n\n\"The prison was designed to hold ten thousand men, but there were more than thirty thousand of us cramped together. That's another reason I didn't want to move to Philadelphia like Katherine wanted. I couldn't bear the thought of living in a crowded city. I like looking out the window and seeing nothing but land and mountains and sky.\"\n\nKnowing what he went through, Maggie couldn't blame him. But neither could she blame Katherine for wanting a better education for her children.\n\n\"Your turn,\" he said.\n\nMaggie didn't want to speak of her childhood for fear of giving too much away, but he persisted. \"The day my father died was the worst day of my life,\" she said. That was the truth as far as it went. What she didn't say was how he died.\n\nHe studied her as if detecting something in her voice. \"Were you close to him?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"Not at all.\"\n\nHe looked at her with sympathy or maybe even compassion. \"Sometimes those are the hardest deaths to deal with.\" Following a stretch of silence, he asked, \"What about your mother?\"\n\n\"We weren't close, either,\" she said a tad too quickly. She could never understand why a woman would stay with a man as mean-spirited as her father. Even more puzzling was how a woman could abandon her own children. At the age of seventeen she found out her mother had remarried. Though her new husband was well-to-do, her mother never bothered fetching her from the orphanage or tracking down her sons. In some ways, Maggie envied her mother's ability to wipe the slate of her past clean and start over. But it hurt Maggie to think she could so easily be forgotten. It hurt a lot.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" he said.\n\nA lump rose to her throat, and a heavy mass settled in her chest. Not because of his understanding or empathy, but because she couldn't tell him the rest." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "On the morning of the fifth day, Maggie awoke to find a thin sliver of dawn slicing through the curtains of Elise's room. She lifted her head from the foot of Elise's bed and rubbed her stiff neck.\n\nGarrett was still in his chair, his head on the mattress next to hers. He was so close she could feel the warmth of his body, smell the sweet, spicy fragrance of his aftershave.\n\nThough she had persuaded him to go to bed, he had returned sometime in the night to be by his daughter's side. Even in sleep his hand never left Elise's. The tense set of his jaw remained, as did his furrowed brow.\n\nElise's breathing no longer sounded labored. Feeling a surge of hope, Maggie tiptoed around Garrett's chair and laid her hand on the child's forehead. Tears of relief sprang to her eyes.\n\n\"Garrett,\" she whispered, shaking him.\n\nHe lifted his head from the bed and blinked away the haze of sleep.\n\n\"Her fever broke.\"\n\nHe stared at her a moment then sprang to his feet and felt Elise's forehead for himself.\n\n\"She's going to be all right,\" Maggie assured him. \"Praise the Lord!\"\n\nGarrett looked terrible. He hadn't shaved, and dark stubble shadowed his jaw and cheeks. His hair was mussed and his clothes wrinkled.\n\nShe was in no better condition. Her hair, usually so carefully coifed, fell down her back in tangled curls. But none of that mattered as they stood smiling at each other like a couple of children sharing a secret.\n\nHe reached for her hand. \"Thank you,\" he whispered. And just that quickly he pulled her into his arms.\n\nEmotions spent, she clung to him, and he buried his face in her hair. A sob rumbled through him. \"Thank you,\" he said again. His heart pounded in her ear matching the fast rhythm of her own.\n\n\"For... for what?\"\n\nHe lifted his head. \"For being here. For being you. For caring. For giving me hope.\"\n\nFor a moment\u2014a brief and surprising moment\u2014she saw a woman reflected in his eyes that she didn't recognize. Garrett and his children brought out a part of her she hadn't known existed; a nurturing, loving, and warm part far removed from the cool and relentless detective she had prided herself on being all these years.\n\nShe pulled out of his arms, but only because she feared losing herself completely to the woman\u2014the stranger\u2014she hardly recognized as herself. That woman could never do what had to be done. She could never lie to him, betray him, or plot against him.\n\nNo, the woman reflected in his eyes didn't exist, but oh, how Maggie wished that she did." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nElise's illness had put a hold on the investigation, and now Maggie had to make up for lost time.\n\nShe'd just completed a rather sketchy report to headquarters when she heard a knock. Thinking it was Aunt Hetty, she quickly slid the report under a chair cushion, smoothed the bun at the nape of her neck, and hurried to the door.\n\n\"Howdy, ma'am. Have you got any rags for me today?\"\n\n\"Rikker!\" Garrett was at work and Toby at school, but just in case Elise woke from her nap, Maggie stepped onto the porch. She left the door ajar so she could hear Elise should she cry out.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\"\n\nHe moved his burlap sack from one shoulder to the next and threw the question back at her. \"What are you doing? Haven't seen hide or hair of you for days. I wouldn't have even known you were alive had I not heard in town that Elise was sick.\"\n\nShe felt a surge of guilt. Her mind had been so occupied with concern for Elise, she'd hardly given her partner or the case more than a passing thought. That went against everything she'd been taught.\n\n\"Then you must know that Elise has been ill.\" The child still had a slight cough but otherwise had made a fast recovery, though she had yet to regain her appetite.\n\nRikker dropped his persona. \"Your purpose here is not to play nursemaid.\"\n\n\"I know what my purpose is,\" she snapped.\n\nHe reared back. \"Oh my. Testy, aren't we?\" Eyes narrowed beneath his furrowed brow, he studied her like he would a suspect.\n\n\"You look terrible.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I needed to hear that.\" Even now that the crisis had passed, she'd hardly been able to sleep.\n\n\"What's really going on?\"\n\nShe blew out her breath. Drat! He always could read her like an open book. She rubbed her face with her hands. \"I don't think Garrett Thomas is our man.\" It was the first time she admitted her doubts out loud.\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. \"What makes you say that?\"\n\n\"It's just\u2014\" Rikker would expect her to think and act like a detective, but it was hard. So hard. She had come to know Garrett quite well these last few days as they watched over Elise. Could a man so kind, so gentle and loving, really be the coldhearted killer she was sent to investigate? Or were personal feelings getting in the way of good judgment?\n\n\"I haven't found anything to substantiate his guilt.\" For a man who stole that much money, Garrett lived a comfortable yet modest life.\n\n\"Need I remind you that a witness put him at the scene of the crime?\"\n\n\"You know as well as I that witnesses aren't always reliable.\"\n\n\"This witness was quite credible. He described one of the men as having a scar, and his description fits Thomas to a T.\" He ran his finger the length of his face to indicate. \"In any case, how do you explain the money clip left behind with the initials GT?\"\n\n\"He's a tinker.\" The principal's orders were to follow the money clip, and that's what they'd done. \"He's probably sold dozens of them. Anyone could have left it behind.\"\n\n\"And the five large bills that showed up at the school fund-raiser? How do you account for that?\"\n\n\"I can't,\" she admitted. \"It's just so odd. I mean, the money suddenly showing up like that.\"\n\n\"Did it ever occur to you that Thomas was testing the waters to see if the money was marked? It's not the first time something like that happened.\"\n\nShe'd considered that possibility at length. \"Garrett's no fool. He must have known that five Lincolns would draw attention. Especially since banks are no longer issuing them.\" The last legal tender banknotes in hundred-dollar denominations were issued in 1880, the year of the robbery. \"All the other donations had been smaller bills, fives and tens.\n\n\"Maybe he thought enough time had passed. Or perhaps he was just pressing his luck. In any case, we can't discount the clues.\" Holding up his hand, he ticked them off on his fingers one at a time. \"Money clip, witness, and five banknotes.\"\n\nShe did a mental count of her own. Garrett was thoughtful, gentle, and kind, but such traits would hardly hold up in a court of law. \"I've searched this house from stem to stern and found nothing.\"\n\nRikker blew out his breath. \"Found nothing at his shop, either. Nor is there a safe box at the bank belonging to him.\" He shrugged in frustration. \"I also checked the banks in Yuma and Phoenix. Nothing.\"\n\nShe arched a brow. \"You've been busy.\"\n\n\"One of us has to keep the investigation going.\" He shifted his bag of rags. \"It's got to be here at the house somewhere.\"\n\n\"Or maybe there isn't any money. Maybe Garrett is exactly what he seems, a hardworking man and loving father.\"\n\nRikker's gaze sharpened. \"Has it ever occurred to you that the real reason he sent away for a mail-order bride is because he plans to leave town? Maybe he just wants someone to care for his children while he disappears and lives high on the hog somewhere else.\"\n\nIt was a shocking thought, but not all that far-fetched. Many outlaws had left the country to do exactly that. Some had to learn the hard way that no place on earth was out of Pinkerton's reach. Recently an operative had crossed the Atlantic in an attempt to catch a jewel thief, cornering him in Rome.\n\n\"I don't know\u2014\"\n\nThe door opened, and Elise stood in the entryway rubbing her eyes.\n\n\"Oh, there you are pumpkin.\" Maggie smoothed the hair away from Elise's face. She still looked pale with none of her usual sparkle. \"Wait for me in the kitchen, and I'll fix you something to eat.\"\n\nElise vanished inside the house, and Rikker waited until she was out of earshot.\n\n\"I have a plan.\"\n\n\"You always have a plan,\" Maggie said. \"What is it this time?\"\n\n\"Thomas is growing careless. He's already spent five bills that we know of. It's possible he's spent more that we haven't caught.\"\n\n\"We don't know the money came from him,\" she said stubbornly.\n\n\"No, we don't, but I think I know how we can find out. If the school donation came from your fianc\u00e9's stash, then we might safely assume he has a weakness for a good cause.\"\n\nShe eyed him warily. \"So what's your plan?\"\n\n\"You, my dear, will tell him that the wedding is off. Your family is about to lose their farm and are in desperate need of money.\" He thought for a moment. \"So what do you think? Brilliant, huh?\"\n\nMaggie rolled her eyes. \"Your brilliance is second only to your modesty.\n\n\"You'll change your tune once you see how well this works. Tell Thomas you have to leave to help save the family farm. I'm willing to wager he'll give you money on the spot to wire home.\" He smiled. \"What do you say to that?\"\n\n\"It's a good plan,\" she said, reluctantly. It wasn't as elaborate as most of his plans, but the simple plans were always the ones that worked best. If only the idea of setting a trap for Garrett didn't make her feel so downright miserable.\n\nRikker was too busy congratulating himself on this latest scheme to notice her depressed state of mind. \"Unless I miss my guess,\" he all but crowed, \"Thomas Garrett isn't about to let his bride-to-be out of his sight. He'll give you the money to save the farm. Mark my words.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Later that night, Maggie tucked Elise in bed and listened to her prayers. Earlier Garrett had raced through the house with his daughter on his back. It did Maggie a world of good to hear Elise's childish giggles.\n\nThe doctor said she could return to school Monday, and that was a relief. Maybe things could go back to normal\u2014or as normal as circumstances allowed.\n\nShe thought about Rikker's plan. It was a good one, easy, uncomplicated. She had nothing to lose if Garrett didn't fall for it and everything to gain if he did. So why was she so reluctant to put it into action?\n\n\"Sleep tight,\" she whispered. Dropping a kiss on Elise's forehead, she walked out of the room.\n\nThe door to Garrett's room stood wide open. Toby sat on the floor, building some sort of contraption from scraps of metal from his father's shop.\n\nHe was too engrossed in his project to notice her. She watched him for a moment, unseen. Being the daughter of an outlaw had been difficult, but how much harder might it be for a son? Sighing, she moved away from the bedroom door.\n\nShe found Garrett in the parlor bent over the chessboard. Elbows on his lap, his hands were folded beneath his chin. Earlier he and Toby had played a game. For such a young child, Toby was able to hold his own, and the game ended in a draw.\n\nGarrett glanced up as she neared, an easy smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. \"You play?\"\n\n\"'Fraid not,\" she said.\n\nHe considered her answer for a moment. \"I learned to play chess while in the rebel prison. We drew a board in the dirt and used stones for chess pieces. Playing chess helped keep our minds sharp.\"\n\n\"Staring at stones did that?\" she teased.\n\nHe chuckled. \"Sounds crazy, I know. But there's actually a lot of mental work that goes into the game. It was also a great way to know my fellow prisoners. Know who to trust. Who was motivated. Honest. Know who was most likely to rob me.\"\n\nShe arched her eyebrows. \"You can tell all that from a game of chess?\"\n\n\"Pretty amazing, huh?\" He moved a piece across the board. \"The goal is to force your opponent to yield.\" He looked up. \"I'd be happy to teach you, but only if you promise not to beat me at my own game.\"\n\n\"Since I always play to win, I'm afraid that's a promise I can't keep.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" His eyes clung to hers. \"Actually, I like a woman who plays to win.\"\n\nHad he known the game she was playing he might feel quite different.\n\n\"Take a seat,\" he said, pointing to the chair opposite him. \"I want to get to know you one square at a time.\"\n\nA warning voice whispered inside, but still she sat. \"What do you hope to learn about me?\" she asked, the thought as worrisome as it was intriguing.\n\nHis eyes twinkled. \"What do you want me to learn?\"\n\n\"That I'm a good loser.\"\n\nHis grin widened as he reached across the board for a red piece. \"Did you know that chess was once a game of courtship?\"\n\n\"Really? I thought it was a game of war.\"\n\n\"Some would say there's no difference between war and romance. Both require disarming the opponent and being aware of the dangers. I've even heard it said that love is a battlefield.\"\n\nHer colleagues might well describe love that way. Maintaining a marriage or even a romance was almost impossible for a private investigator. Of necessity, secrets must be kept and an operative was always on the move.\n\n\"Do you agree?\" she asked.\n\nHe shook his head. \"I've been on a battlefield, and there's no comparison.\" He moved the remaining pieces into place. \"Some people are lucky in love, but never in chess. That's because it's a game of skill.\"\n\n\"And yet you say that chess was once a game of love.\"\n\n\"We have two queens on the same board as thirty men. How can love not flourish?\"\n\n\"I never thought of it that way,\" she said, charmed by the idea.\n\n\"Chess matches were once quite common between a woman and her suitor. The purpose of the game is to mate. Actually, the word checkmate comes from an Arabic word meaning 'to submit.'\" The intense look he gave her sent a shiver of awareness down her spine. \"The king is the weakest piece and the queen the most powerful.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Just as it should be.\"\n\nHe smiled, too. \"It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the game changed. Rather than a social affair it became a competitive game. That's when most women lost interest.\"\n\nHis expression held both a challenge and a promise, and she quivered with anticipation.\n\n\"Chess is all about making the right moves,\" he continued. \"Just like life.\" He put the last piece in place and sat back. \"Ready?\"\n\nShe studied the chessboard. Chess had been described as the game of life, but nothing in life was as black and white as that chessboard. \"Checkmate,\" she said. It was the only chess term she knew.\n\nGarrett laughed. \"Not yet, my dear. Not yet.\"\n\nHis term of endearment surprised her. More than that, it warmed her. Despite her best efforts to remain alert and on guard, she found herself relaxing.\n\nAfter he explained a few basic rules of play, they began. He described several possibilities for each move.\n\nHe corrected her gently when she slid a bishop sideways instead of diagonally. She playfully accused him of cheating whenever he captured one of her men.\n\nHe never lost patience and was quick to praise her on the rare occasion she did something right. \"With a little practice, you'll be a champ,\" he said.\n\nShe doubted it. \"So what have you learned about me so far?\" she asked.\n\nHis mouth curved. \"You're smart and quick to learn. You refuse to back down when faced with trouble. Your fighting spirit won't let you give up even when your plan goes awry. You simply change course and attack from another direction.\" He folded his hands beneath his chin. \"How am I doing so far?\"\n\nShe smiled. He just described the traits necessary for a detective. \"Not bad,\" she said.\n\n\"So what have you learned about me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hmm, let me think.\" She tapped her chin with her finger. \"You're clever, focused, and never make a move without careful thought.\" He was also handsome, charming, and fun to be with, but she thought it best not to mention such traits. \"You're also highly motivated and goal-oriented. Oh yes, and patient.\"\n\nNever could she remember enjoying herself more and was completely taken by surprise when the clock chimed the hour of eleven.\n\nIt was his turn to move, but after a moment he looked up and shook his head. \"Stalemate,\" he said.\n\n\"What does that mean?\" she asked.\n\n\"It means,\" he said, rearranging the pieces on the board, \"that neither of us has to submit to the other.\" His gaze held hers, and she felt herself sink into the dark depths of his eyes. \"At least not tonight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nShe woke the following morning with a smile on her face. The memory of the evening spent playing chess flashed through her mind. \"Actually, the word checkmate comes from an Arabic word meaning 'to submit.'\"\n\nNever had she submitted or surrendered to a man. Her faith kept her virtue intact, and her job prevented her from becoming emotionally involved. Still, she had to admit the idea did capture her imagination. Her smile died abruptly, as did her thoughts. What was she thinking?\n\nPalms on her head she groaned. She had completely forgotten about Rikker's plan.\n\nOh, God, what is happening to me? I've never had trouble doing my job before. Why now, Lord? Why now?\n\nChess was a game of skill, but so was the cat and mouse game she played. Remaining objective was essential. Impartiality was crucial to any investigation. Bias could prevent her from correctly weighing information and drawing accurate conclusions. A detective must never force the facts to fit a theory.\n\nJumping out of bed, she hurried through her morning ablutions. She then woke Elise and helped her dress in the clothes laid out for her the night before.\n\nShe found Garrett sitting at the kitchen table with his coffee and newspaper. \"Morning.\" The magnetism of his smile almost made her forget her resolve.\n\nTurning abruptly toward the stove, she murmured, \"Morning.\" She poured herself a cup of coffee and sat opposite him. Elise and Toby were outside feeding the animals, so she had his full attention.\n\nHe folded the paper and laid it on the table. \"I hope I didn't keep you up too late last night playing chess.\"\n\n\"Not at all.\" She kept her attention focused on the cup. Actually, the game was only half the problem. Recalling how she had shamefully returned his flirtatious glances, she felt her cheeks redden. Such nonsense must stop. She had a job to do, and like it or not, she intended to do it. Bracing herself with a sip of coffee, she set her cup down.\n\n\"I do have a problem, though.\" She moistened her lips. \"I should have mentioned it before, but... I'm afraid we'll have to postpone our wedding.\"\n\nHis brow furrowed. \"Why?\" He reached across the table for her hand, but she quickly pulled away and pretended to fumble in her sleeve for a handkerchief.\n\nHis jaw tensed. \"You aren't having second thoughts, are you? Have I done something to upset you?\"\n\nShe dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. Oddly enough, the single tear that rolled down her cheek was not faked. \"You haven't upset me\u2014\"\n\n\"Is it Arizona?\" He tilted his head. \"Don't you like it here?\"\n\n\"I like it here just fine,\" she replied, surprised to find herself speaking the truth. Maybe it was the wide-open spaces or the desert warmth. Perhaps it was the adobe house\u2014the closest thing to a home she'd ever known. She didn't want to think what else it could be.\n\n\"It's my f\u2014family,\" she stammered. She'd written about her make-believe family in her letters to him, and she hoped he'd remember enough so she didn't have to go into detail. She dropped her hands to her lap and fought to hide her inner turmoil with an outer calm. \"They're unable to pay the taxes on the farm and have asked for my help.\"\n\nThe lie felt like acid on her tongue, and it was all she could do to continue. \"I can't do that from here. I'm afraid I must go home.\"\n\nHe rubbed his hand across his chin. \"How much do they owe?\"\n\nShe'd considered the amount of money to ask for at great length. Asking for too much might cause suspicion. But if she asked for too little, he might not have to draw from the stolen cache.\n\n\"Five hundred dollars.\"\n\nHe let out a low whistle. \"That's quite a bit of money.\"\n\nIt was hardly the kind of response she would expect from a man who supposedly had so freely donated that very same amount to the school. She kept her features composed so as not to give away her thoughts, and nodded in agreement.\n\n\"Yes, it is a lot of money,\" she said. \"I'm not sure how I can help, but I have to try.\"\n\nHe studied her for a moment before pushing back his chair. \"Wait here.\" He stood and walked out of the kitchen.\n\nHer stomach clenched, and she clasped her hands together in a silent prayer. Would this be the moment the case was finally solved? It's what she wanted, what she had worked for all these months. So where was the jubilation normally felt whenever she came close to solving a case? Where was the joy?\n\nInstead she felt torn by conflicting emotions. The children\u2014oh, dear God, the children. They would hate her, just as she had hated the United States marshal who had arrested her father. Years passed before she realized how misdirected her anger had been.\n\nHow can I do this to Toby and Elise? God, will You tell me that? But it wasn't just them. It was\u2014oh, how she hated admitting it\u2014Garrett himself.\n\nSome criminals were pure evil, but not all. Some were good family members and were even active in church. But never had she met one with more basic goodness than Garrett.\n\nOr maybe she was just too close to the family to see the truth. That was her greatest fear.\n\nHearing Garrett's footsteps advance down the hall toward the kitchen, she squeezed her eyes shut and prayed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nMaggie hesitated at the entry to the hotel dining room and scanned the tables. The breakfast rush was over and only two diners remained, including Rikker, who sat at a corner table reading a newspaper. She gnashed her teeth. How like him to look perfectly relaxed while she was an emotional wreck.\n\nShe stormed toward him.\n\nHe looked up surprised, and no wonder; when two operatives worked a case it was imperative that they not be seen together, but this assignment wasn't like most.\n\nShe slammed her hand on the table.\n\nHe folded the paper and set it aside. \"I trust things didn't go as planned.\" She moved her hand, and he stared at what she left behind. \"What's that?\"\n\nShe pulled out a chair and sat. \"That is a check for five hundred dollars drawn on Garrett Thomas's business account.\"\n\nRikker's eyebrows shot up. \"He gave you a check?\" He thumped the table with a fist, rattling his cup and saucer. \"Blast it! The man's as sly as a fox.\"\n\n\"Or he doesn't have the money.\" She was convinced of it.\n\n\"Just because he gave you a check doesn't mean he's not our man. You should have asked for more. Then he would have had to reach into his stash.\"\n\nThe waiter came over to the table. \"Can I get you something, ma'am?\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" she said without looking at him. \"I'm not staying.\"\n\nThe waiter left, and she leaned forward. \"Why write a check for me but not for the school building fund? It makes no sense.\"\n\n\"Unless he suspects something.\"\n\nA cold chill settled in the pit of her stomach. Had she given Garrett a reason not to trust her? Had she slipped up somewhere? Had all that talk about playing games been a veiled warning?\n\nShe sat back. \"Do you think that's why he wrote a check? Because he suspects something?\"\n\n\"You know him better than I do.\" He watched her over his cup as he sipped his coffee. \"Would you have asked for the money had you thought him guilty?\"\n\nShe frowned. \"What kind of question is that?\"\n\n\"A necessary one.\" He set his cup on the saucer. \"You know the dangers of getting personally involved.\"\n\n\"I don't need a lecture.\"\n\n\"And I don't need a partner with her head in the clouds.\"\n\nThey glared across the table at each other, neither wanting to give an inch.\n\nFinally he picked up the newspaper and tucked it under his arm. Tossing two coins on the table he stood. \"All I can say is that you better watch your step. Or should I say heart?\" With that he walked away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "On the way home, Maggie spotted the paperboy Linc walking into a small adobe house at the end of town. She steered the buckboard to the side of the road and set the brake.\n\nThe house was run-down. Not only was the front window boarded up, but the weathered fence leaned to one side and the gate hung from a single hinge. Tumbleweeds vied for space in the small enclosed yard, along with a broken water pump, wagon wheel, and other trash.\n\nThe old woman who answered Maggie's knock was dressed in a tattered housecoat. Unfocused eyes stared from a thin, deeply lined face. Her hair fell to her shoulders in a matted white mass.\n\nMaggie was just about to introduce herself as a friend of Linc's when the woman's face lit up. \"Come in, come in,\" she said as if she'd been expecting her. She waited for Maggie to enter the house before closing the door. The one unbroken window provided some light, but not much. The air smelled of decay.\n\n\"Carolyn, how nice of you to visit. Where's the baby?\"\n\nIt took a moment for Maggie's eyes to adjust to the dim light. \"I'm not Carolyn. My name is\u2014\"\n\nBut the woman ignored her protests. \"Don't look at the place,\" she said as she removed clothes and dishes from tables and chairs. She tossed the clothes into a corner and carried the dirty dishes into the kitchen, talking all the while. \"It's seems like forever since I've seen you. Is the baby sleeping through the night yet?\" she called from the kitchen. \"I hope he doesn't take after his mother. You didn't sleep through the night until you were six months old.\"\n\n\"Like I said, I'm not\u2014\"\n\nThe woman returned to the room. \"Would you care for some tea?\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" Maggie said. It was hot and she would have preferred something cool, but she didn't want to put her host to any trouble, especially in her confused state.\n\n\"I came to see Linc.\"\n\nThe woman gasped. \"You think I have your baby?\"\n\nShe looked so alarmed that Maggie reached out to pat her thin arm. \"No, of course not. How silly of me.\"\n\nJust then Linc walked into the room. He glanced at Maggie and quickly hid his hands behind his back, but not quick enough to hide the half-eaten apple, which no doubt he'd stolen.\n\nHis grandmother regarded him as if he were little more than an acquaintance. \"Carolyn is my daughter,\" she said. \"And she has a darling baby named Lincoln.\"\n\nLinc didn't look the least bit surprised by his grandmother's confusion. \"How come you're here?\" he asked, his eyes gleaming with suspicion.\n\n\"I came to see you,\" Maggie replied.\n\n\"I ain't going to no school.\"\n\nHis grandmother's gaze darted around the room as if she was trying to make sense of her surroundings. \"What are you talking about, boy? You can't go to school. It's time for my meal.\"\n\nLinc backed toward the kitchen. \"I'll fix you something to eat.\"\n\n\"Fix Carolyn something, too,\" his grandmother called after him.\n\n\"No, that's all right,\" Maggie said. \"I'm not staying.\"\n\n\"Oh, but you must. I so seldom see you since you had the baby.\"\n\nThe woman wouldn't take no for an answer, and finally Maggie relented. \"Very well. Why don't you sit down and rest, and I'll see if... he needs help.\"\n\n\"That would be very nice.\" The old woman slumped into a chair as if it took all her energy to do so.\n\nMaggie stepped into the kitchen and was appalled by the filth. The counter, table, and even the stove were piled high with dirty dishes, and flies swarmed everywhere.\n\n\"How long has your grandmother been like this?\" she asked.\n\nLinc set two pieces of bread on the grimy table. \"She's been old for a long time,\" he said. \"Since before I was born.\"\n\n\"I'm not talking about her age. How long has she been so forgetful?\"\n\nHe put some moldy-looking cheese onto the bread. \"Sometimes she's not forgetful. Sometimes she even knows I'm Linc.\" He glared at her. \"She's not crazy. She's not. And I'm not letting her go nowhere with you. So you can leave.\"\n\nMaggie realized that the boy wasn't just defiant; he was scared. \"I'm not here to take your grandmother away,\" she said gently.\n\nWariness replaced the suspicion in his eyes. \"You're not gonna put her in an asylum?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. Why would you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"Some people want to.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"The woman from the Orphans Society.\"\n\n\"Oh, Linc.\" He was the age that many criminals first turned to illegal activities. Some began stealing as a matter of survival. Others knew no other way of life. Linc was at a crossroads, and if something wasn't done to help him, he might one day end up on Pinkerton's mostwanted list.\n\n\"Don't you have any other family who can help you?\" If only life could be played like chess. If only it were possible to protect someone from temptation as one might protect a king.\n\n\"It's just me and Granny, and I ain't letting 'em take her away.\" With that he ran from the room.\n\nNo sooner had he departed when his grandmother walked into the kitchen shaking her head. \"That boy will be the death of me yet.\"\n\nConsidering the moldy cheese, stale bread, and grimy table, the old lady was closer to the truth than she probably knew.\n\nShe looked at Maggie, and this time her eyes were clear and focused. \"What did you say your name was, dearie?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "That night over supper, Maggie told Garrett about her visit to Linc's house. She was so incensed by what she'd found there, she pushed Rikker's warning to be careful to the back of her mind.\n\n\"I don't understand why someone hasn't stepped in and helped them. The church\u2014\"\n\nAs soon as she said it, she regretted her words. Garrett already thought poorly of organized religion. \"There must be something that can be done.\"\n\n\"I had no idea that things were that bad,\" he said. He looked every bit as concerned as she felt.\n\nBad didn't begin to describe the poor conditions of the house. \"Would you mind if I gave Linc some of Toby's outgrown clothes?\" Toby was large for his age, and though his clothes might be a tad too small for Linc, they were better than anything the boy currently owned.\n\n\"That's a good idea. I'm sure Toby won't mind, will you, son?\"\n\nToby shook his head. \"Long as you don't give away my thinking cap.\"\n\n\"I can give Linc one of my dolls,\" Elise offered.\n\n\"Boys don't play with dolls,\" Toby said.\n\nMaggie smiled at her. \"No, but it's very kind of you to offer.\"\n\nGarrett looked up from cutting his meat. \"Purchase whatever else he and his grandmother need. Just bill everything to my account.\"\n\nMaggie dabbed her mouth with her napkin. It was a kind and generous offer, but she couldn't think about that. She had to keep a clear mind, an unbiased mind. The truth was that she couldn't have planned this whole thing better had she tried.\n\nIf she ran Garrett's accounts up high enough, he would have to dip into the stolen money to pay them. No doubt Rikker would approve the plan. She only wished the idea of taking advantage of Garrett's generous nature didn't make her feel so utterly wretched." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Maggie got to work the very next day. Her first stop was Grover's Mercantile where she purchased crates of tin goods, along with safety matches, lye soap, candles, and kerosene. She ran up such a large bill that the bespectacled clerk behind the counter added the numbers three times to make sure he hadn't made an error.\n\nThe next stop on her list was Adams's Boots and Leather shop to purchase a pair of black boots for Linc. She also bought yards of gingham fabric from Murphy's Dry Goods.\n\nThe shopkeeper had recommended a young Mexican housekeeper who agreed to clean Linc's house for a fee. She spent a full day just organizing the kitchen.\n\nConvincing Linc to take a hot bath at the hotel bath house was the real challenge\u2014that, and getting him to sit still in the barber chair.\n\nAfter the barber cut Linc's hair, she stood him in front of a store window where he could see his reflection. \"What do you think?\"\n\n\"It don't look like me,\" he mumbled. \"Granny won't recognize me.\" Considering the old lady's condition, it was a strange thing to say, but the boy looked dead serious.\n\n\"She'll recognize you,\" Maggie said, smoothing his hair to one side. \"Just like always.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Linc and his grandmother were very much on her mind that night as Maggie stood at the stove stirring the stew. She was especially worried about the boy. He was far too young to shoulder so much responsibility.\n\nIf something happened to his grandmother, he would probably end up in an orphanage, but few institutions did little more than turn out vagrant and unlawful people. The number of former orphans who turned up in the Pinkerton files was no accident.\n\nThe word orphanage was actually a misnomer; a surprising number of children had a parent or parents who couldn't or wouldn't take care of them. Much like her own mother refused to take care of her and her brothers.\n\nSome orphanages did try and even taught their charges a trade. She had been lucky. Her orphanage was run by a Christian organization, and though the headmistress was strict, almost everyone who left turned out to be a responsible citizen. But homes like that were rare. Most directors ran highly regimented facilities that applied corporal punishment and shaved children's heads. They were also dangerous places, and the mortality rate was often the same as it was for urchins living on the streets.\n\nHurtled back to the present by the mouthwatering smell rising from the stew pot, she sniffed in appreciation. She'd found the recipe in her new cookbook. The liquid was thick and savory and not watery like the stew served at the orphanage.\n\nAfter putting the ingredients together, she carefully hid the cookbook. God was in the details, and the same was true of cloak and dagger operations. An Indiana farm girl would most certainly know how to make lamb stew and wouldn't need a recipe.\n\nIt surprised her how much she enjoyed cooking. Mealtime at the Thomas house was nothing like the silent orphanage meals where no one was allowed to talk except in whispers.\n\nIn contrast, the evening meal here was boisterous and full of laughter. She ached to think it would soon be coming to an end, and she would once again face an endless panorama of impersonal hotel rooms and poor eating establishments.\n\nThe telegram she'd received earlier from headquarters was curt and to the point: keep investigating.\n\nThe problem was, she was quickly running out of time. The wedding was little more than three weeks away. She felt conflicted, at odds, and so unlike herself.\n\nShe set the spoon down and walked over to the table where Elise sat doing schoolwork. She was learning about plurals and having trouble with words ending in y.\n\n\"Oops! You got baby wrong,\" Maggie said, peering over Elise's shoulder. \"Remember, you have to change the y to i and add the letters e and s.\"\n\nElise erased what she'd written and tried again.\n\nThe front door slammed and Garrett's voice thundered through the house. \"Maggie!\"\n\nGrimacing, Maggie turned to face the doorway as Garrett stormed into the kitchen. He waved a bunch of bills in her face.\n\n\"Twenty pounds of beans? Two dozen boxes of...\" On and on he went, his voice rising with each item, along with his eyebrows.\n\n\"Three cans of kerosene, fifteen boxes of tea, and ten bars of lye soap.\" He looked up from the bill of goods. \"Does Linc even know what to do with soap?\"\n\nShe wiped her damp hands on her apron. \"I'm afraid I may have gone overboard.\"\n\nHis eyebrows rose so high they practically disappeared into his hairline. \"You didn't just go overboard, you sank the whole confounded ship!\"\n\nAs if suddenly realizing that Elise was present, he lowered his voice. \"When I said to purchase whatever Linc and his grandmother needed, I didn't mean for you to run us into the poor house!\"\n\n\"I'm sorry\u2014\n\n\"Sorry!\" He shook his head, sputtered, and left the room.\n\nMaggie blew out her breath, surprised to find herself shaking. At least he didn't make her take her purchases back.\n\nElise looked up from her paper. \"What's a poor house?\"\n\nToby walked into the room and grabbed a slice of bread from the counter. \"It's a place you go when you're not rich.\"\n\n\"Are we going to a poor house?\"\n\n\"I'm not,\" Toby said. \"I'm going to the moon.\"\n\nElise chewed on the end of her pencil. \"Is Papa going to the poor house?\"\n\n\"No,\" Maggie said. \"Your papa's not going to the poor house.\" Jail maybe, but not the poor house.\n\n\"There,\" Elise said after a while. She held up her paper. \"I made the plural of poor house.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nSupper wasn't the usual happy occasion. No jokes or riddles tonight, though Garrett did question the children about their day. Maggie could sense the barely contained anger coiled within him, but he did his best to maintain a civil tone for the children's sake. They both did.\n\nAs usual, Elise was more than happy to share what she'd learned that day. \"Miss Taylor taught me how to make babies,\" she said.\n\nA startled look crossed Garrett's face. \"Did she now?\" His narrowed eyes bored into Maggie as he pushed his empty plate away. \"It would seem that Miss Taylor has had a busy day.\"\n\nBefore Maggie could explain, he rose from the table and retired to his room. She hated that he left such a void. Hated even more that she missed him when he was gone.\n\n\"Is Papa angry?\" Elise asked, looking worried.\n\nMaggie rose to clear the table. \"Maybe a little. But not at you.\"\n\nShe glanced at Toby who was busy trying to balance a fork on his nose.\n\nLater, after the dishes were done, Maggie walked into the parlor and found the children whispering among themselves.\n\n\"Who wants to read first?\"\n\n\"I do,\" Elise said.\n\nElise's enthusiasm brought a smile to Maggie's face. Their nightly reading sessions had paid off and already Elise had shown improvement, though she still struggled with some vocabulary.\n\nMaggie settled on the sofa next to Elise. \"Tomorrow, can we stop in town after school for ice cream?\"\n\n\"I guess we can do that,\" Maggie said.\n\nMidway through the story, Whitewash started barking furiously outside.\n\n\"Toby, open the door for Whitewash, will you?\"\n\nElise looked up from her book, her eyes wide. \"Maybe it's the boogeyman,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Or maybe Whitewash just wants to come in,\" Maggie whispered back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "The next day, Maggie headed for the dressmaker's shop to drop off the fabric she'd purchased from the dry goods store. After his initial outburst, Garrett had made no more mention of the bills, and things had returned to normal between them that morning at breakfast. Apparently he didn't hold grudges. Not like her father used to do... She blew out her breath. But would Garrett pay his debts with stolen money? Oh God, please no!\n\nMrs. Button greeted her with a mouthful of pins.\n\n\"I was hoping you'd have time to make some nightgowns for Linc's grandmother,\" Maggie said.\n\nThe seamstress nodded and quickly finished pinning up the hem on a skirt.\n\n\"Will next week be soon enough?\" Mrs. Button said, stabbing a pin back into the pincushion.\n\n\"That will be fine,\" Maggie said. She set the bolts of cotton on the table.\n\n\"While you're here, we can do a fitting for your wedding dress.\"\n\nMaggie had neither the time nor inclination to try it on, but the dressmaker insisted.\n\n\"It won't take but a few minutes, and it will save you a trip later.\"\n\nRefusing to take no for an answer, Mrs. Button rose and vanished into the back of the store. She reappeared a moment later carrying a white satin gown.\n\nMaggie's mouth dropped open. She didn't know what she expected, but it wasn't this. It was a simple, yet elegant gown, and the fitted bodice was trimmed with white crystal beads and faux pearls. A slight bustle in back fell from a large satin bow, and the sleeves were puffed on top and tapered to the wrists.\n\nShe gasped. \"It's beautiful.\"\n\nMrs. Button looked pleased. \"Try it on and I'll measure the hem.\" She ushered Maggie into a curtained area that served as a dressing room.\n\nAfter Maggie stepped out of her skirt and pulled off her shirtwaist, Mrs. Button helped her into the gown. The satin slid down the length of her body like a soothing cool breeze.\n\nEvery detail, from the delicate lace at the neckline to the fitted sleeves and flared ruffles at her wrists, was exquisite.\n\nMrs. Button laced up the back and fussed with the skirt until it was draped to her satisfaction. She then lifted a wedding veil off a hook and pinned it in place upon Maggie's head.\n\nOverwhelmed with emotion, Maggie stared at herself in the mirror. She looked and felt like she was floating on a cloud. Never had she worn anything so elegant.\n\nThe satin fabric felt soft and smooth to her touch, and whispered with her every move. She imagined herself walking down the aisle and into the arms of the man she loved. Startled by the vision of blue eyes that suddenly came to mind, she quickly turned away from the mirror.\n\n\"Everything all right?\" Mrs. Button asked with a worried frown.\n\n\"Yes, I just didn't expect the dress to look so\u2014\"\n\n\"Perfect on you?\" The dressmaker gave a dimpled smile and pressed her hands together. \"You make a beautiful bride.\" She separated the draperies hanging at the doorway for privacy and stepped out of the small confined area. \"Come and I'll pin up the hem.\"\n\nMaggie lifted the skirt and ducked through the opening.\n\n\"Stand on the stool,\" Mrs. Button said, indicating a four-legged one in the center of the room next to her worktable.\n\nMaggie inched her skirt to just above her ankles and stepped onto the stool. Mrs. Button grabbed her cloth measuring tape and pincushion and dropped to her knees.\n\n\"It looks like we need to take up a good two inches,\" she mumbled around the pins in her mouth.\n\nStill shaken by her thoughts, Maggie held herself rigid and tried not to think or feel. Silly schoolgirl dreams about love and marriage had no place in her life. Certainly she had no right to feel anything toward Garrett Thomas.\n\nShe curled her hands into balls by her side. Mustn't think about the blue eyes staring back at her. Or the crooked smile or...\n\nShe blinked twice, but the vision refused to go away. With a start she realized it wasn't her imagination. It really was Garrett Thomas standing outside Mrs. Button's window, gazing back at her.\n\nSomething intense flared in his eyes\u2014not anger but admiration and something else she dared not name. He looked at her like she was the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world, and at that moment, she believed that what he saw was real." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Maggie?\n\nGarrett stepped closer to the window to peer inside. His pulse quickened, and it was all he could do to catch his breath. Beautiful didn't begin to describe the way she looked in her wedding gown, all soft and dewy-eyed. She looked like an angel.\n\nIt shocked him to realize he'd memorized every plane and angle of her face. Beneath the wedding veil her hair held golden highlights, but he also knew that the shifting light would turn it a radiant auburn at day's end. Just as the sapphire of her eyes as she watched him through the window would later pale to robin's-egg blue on nothing more than a whim.\n\nStunned by the overwhelming feelings that assailed him, he was momentarily riveted to the spot. He'd only known her for a few weeks, but already she'd worked her way into his heart. How was such a thing possible?\n\nHer smiles commanded his dreams. Her laughter seemed to echo, even from the metal he pounded into shape in his workshop.\n\nNothing had gone as planned. He'd never intended to have feelings for another woman. Losing Katherine had been too painful. Her death devastated him. He'd vowed never again to put himself through that much pain and grief and sorrow.\n\nA marriage based on mutual respect was safe and sane. A marriage based on love was not. That's why he'd picked out a wife through a mail-order-bride catalog. That seemed safe enough.\n\nWhat were the chances of falling in love with a woman picked at random, sight unseen? None. Absolutely none. And that's how he had wanted it.\n\nIt took every bit of strength he possessed to finally pull away from the window. Even then, he had trouble walking away, though he knew he must. He needed time to think, to organize his thoughts. Dare he take a chance on love again? Did he even have a choice?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nSomething had changed. Maggie sensed it the moment Garrett walked into the house later that day.\n\nHe made no mention of seeing her in her wedding gown. Nor did he say anything about the bills she ran up, but she noticed him watching her intently at times, noticed a softening in the eyes that regarded her, heard a disturbing gentleness of voice whenever he said her name.\n\nAfter the children had been bathed and tucked in bed, he invited her to join him outside to look at the nighttime sky. His attentive manner told her he had something more than stars on his mind.\n\nRikker's voice echoed in her mind. \"You better watch your step.\" But Garrett looked anything but dangerous tonight\u2014at least not in the way that Rikker meant.\n\n\"It's a beautiful evening,\" he said as if he sensed her hesitation.\n\n\"Let me get a wrap,\" she said.\n\nShe hurried down the hall and tiptoed quietly into the children's room. The light was out, but she was able to locate her shawl.\n\nOut of habit, she reached into her false pocket. Her holstered weapon was loaded and ready. Not that she thought she'd need it.\n\n\"Are you coming to bed?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"Soon, pumpkin. Soon.\"\n\nWrapping the shawl around her shoulders, she left the room.\n\nGarrett held the door open as she walked out to the front porch. He startled her by reaching for her hand.\n\nHe must have felt her stiffen because the light from the open door revealed his questioning look. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nShe nodded. If only his touch wasn't playing havoc with her senses. Her heart thudded, and suddenly she had trouble drawing air into her lungs.\n\nHe reached back to close the door. With a slight nod, he led her down the steps but didn't release her hand until they reached the front gate. Just then a shooting star arced across the northern sky.\n\nHis soothing voice washed over her like a gentle wave. \"Some people believe that a shooting star foretells good fortune.\"\n\nShe shivered. Why did he have to mention the word fortune? \"Some people also believe they bring bad luck.\"\n\n\"I like my version better,\" he said. The light from the house reflected in his eyes, and the slight desert breeze ruffled his hair. \"Look, there's another one.\"\n\nShe looked up just in time to see the tail end of a meteor fade away. He was right; it was beautiful even without the moon. The stars sparkled like diamonds scattered across a silky black sky.\n\nShe couldn't get over the weather. She'd grabbed a wrap out of habit, but didn't really need it. It was like summer, but without the humidity of the East.\n\n\"That's Orion,\" he said. \"And that's the Big Dipper.\" He pointed out several more constellations, some she'd never heard of.\n\n\"How do you know so much about the stars?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not much to do in the stockades but look up.\" She waited for him to continue, but he changed the subject. \"You said you liked it here in the Territory,\" he said. \"A lot of people don't.\"\n\nNo doubt, he was thinking of Katherine. \"I didn't think I would either, at first. I heard so many horror stories.\" Arizona had appeared bleak and desolate from the train window, but she had since come to appreciate the ever-shifting light across the desert sands and mountains. No artist could capture such splendor. \"I was also a bit nervous about the Indian problem.\"\n\n\"I won't lie to you. There are still some small Apache bands causing trouble in parts of the Territory. But most of the Indians abide by the treaties and are peaceful.\"\n\n\"That's good to hear,\" she said. \"Crazy as it sounds, I even like the weather.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"You may change your mind come summer.\" He fell silent for a moment before asking, \"And the children? You like them, too?\"\n\n\"I love them both,\" she said with meaning. Somehow those two little pumpkins had stolen her heart, and there wasn't a blasted thing she could do about it. \"Why all the questions?\" she asked.\n\n\"I just want to make certain,\" he replied, his smooth baritone voice wrapping around her like a velvet ribbon.\n\nShe furrowed her brow. \"Make certain about what?\"\n\nEven in the darkness she could see the flash of his teeth as he smiled. \"You'll see. Let's go inside. I have something for you.\"\n\nShe couldn't help but be curious. \"You've done enough for me already. The check for my family\u2014\"\n\n\"I was glad to help,\" he said.\n\n\"You didn't sound glad last night,\" she said.\n\n\"I take the blame for what happened,\" he said, sounding apologetic. \"We've never discussed money or budgets. You had no way of knowing our limitations.\"\n\nShe stared at him in a mass of confusion. Budgets? He was talking budgets? A man who supposedly stole seventy thousand dollars?\n\nRikker had nearly convinced her she was wrong, that she had let personal feelings get in the way. But what if she was right? What if the agency that was usually so methodical had made a mistake? What if they had their sights set on the wrong man?\n\nThe thought froze in her brain, and she quickly banished it. The Pinkerton Detective Agency didn't make mistakes. Thinking him innocent was only wishful thinking on her part.\n\nMomentarily lost in her reverie, she was startled when he took her by the hand again. \"Come,\" he said softly.\n\nThey walked side by side along the gravel walkway to the porch. Once inside the house, he released her and reached into his pocket for a small square box.\n\nShe stared at the box, and her mouth went dry. \"That's not\u2014\"\n\n\"I think it's time we made our betrothal official. So there's no confusion.\"\n\nIt was all she could do to find her voice. \"I'm not sure what you mean. What confusion?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"You haven't noticed the way other men look at you?\"\n\nShe blushed and shook her head. \"I\u2014I don't know what to say.\"\n\nHe handed her the box and rubbed the back of his neck. \"Hopefully you'll know what to say when you open it.\"\n\nFingering the small box, she lifted the lid. The gold ring etched with ornate scrolls took her breath away. \"It's... it's beautiful.\" She looked up to find him watching her intently. \"You made this?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"It was originally my mother's thimble. My grandmother brought it all the way from England.\"\n\nObviously the ring meant a lot to him, and she was at a loss for words.\n\nHe took the box from her and pulled out the shiny band. Stuffing the box back in his pocket, he held the ring between his thumb and forefinger.\n\n\"I think this is where I'm supposed to recite some poem or say something halfway intelligent. But the only poem that comes to mind at the moment is a silly nursery rhyme I used to recite to Elise about a couple of children tumbling down a hill with a pail of water. That hardly seems to suit the occasion.\"\n\nShe couldn't look away from him even if she'd wanted to; she couldn't even breathe.\n\nHe continued, \"As for saying something intelligent... Miss Maggie Taylor, would you do me the honor of wearing this ring as a symbol of our betrothal?\"\n\nShe moistened her lips. Things were going exactly as planned. Accepting his ring was her job; it was part of the methodical plan Pinkerton had devised. If only the object wasn't a family heirloom. If only she didn't feel like a criminal for accepting it.\n\nStill, she had prepared for this moment. Rehearsed it. After watching a woman accept a marriage proposal in a play, she'd practiced the exaggerated fluttering of hands and eyelashes in front of a mirror.\n\nNow she couldn't bring herself to act so inanely coy.\n\nWhen she said nothing, he arched an eyebrow. \"I think the customary answer is yes.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. I didn't expect\u2014\" She cut herself off. Nothing had changed. They were already betrothed\u2014or at least that's what she'd led him to believe. Still, something about the ring made it all seem so impossibly real that she felt trapped.\n\n\"Well?\" he asked.\n\n\"The ring is beautiful, and yes... It would be my honor to wear it.\"\n\nHis grin widened as he took her left hand in his and slowly slipped the gold band onto the fourth finger. Next to her lily-white flesh, his sun-darkened hand was the color of fine leather. His fingers were long, tapered, strong\u2014and surprisingly gentle. Her pulse pounded in her temple.\n\nThe ring slipped on easily. The embossed metal captured the light from the lamp, which turned it into a dazzling gold star.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" she said, surprised at how much she wanted it to be hers to keep.\n\n\"Beautiful like my bride,\" he said.\n\nAs he spoke, she imagined herself in her white satin gown standing at the altar by his side. A lump rose in her throat. Marriage, family, a home\u2014she'd always dreamed of such things, but never thought they could be hers.\n\nA shudder rushed through her, and she shook the thought away. What was she thinking? None of this was real. It was all make-believe. A carefully devised plan\u2014nothing more. It could never be anything more.\n\nHe released her hand. \"I believe it's traditional for a man and woman to seal a moment like this with a kiss.\" He hesitated. \"Would you mind?\"\n\nHer heart fluttered. She thought she could do this; she thought she could play the blushing bride; she thought she could remain professional and keep her wits about her. She thought wrong. Suddenly she was a mass of quivering jelly.\n\nHe inclined his head, apparently sensing her hesitation. \"If you'd rather not, I understand.\"\n\n\"Oh no.\" She fought to depict an ease she didn't feel. \"I mean... I'd like for you to kiss me.\" As much as she hated to admit it, she spoke the truth. Just don't let my knees give out.\n\n\"All right, then.\" He stepped forward and cupped his hands ever so gently around her face. She quivered at the tenderness of his touch.\n\n\"It won't hurt, I promise,\" he whispered.\n\nShe wasn't afraid of his kiss hurting her; she was afraid of liking it.\n\nThe moment his lips brushed hers she knew she had good reason to worry. Warm currents rushed through her, and somehow her arms found their way around his neck. The pressure of his mouth increased, melting away the last of her resistance.\n\nThe scent of bay rum hair tonic filled her head and a tingling sensation ran down her spine. Her mind went blank and her senses took over. Nothing seemed to exist but the breadth and depth of his mouth on hers.\n\nHe pulled back, and just like that, it was over. He hadn't forced her, hadn't pushed her, hadn't expected anything in return\u2014only what she had been all too willing to give.\n\nAs far as kisses went, it was pretty straightforward. Yet it left her lips burning with need and her heart wanting that which she could never have.\n\nHe studied her with a knitted brow. \"I'm sorry,\" he said, apparently misreading her expression or maybe her silence. \"I should have waited to kiss you.\"\n\n\"N\u2014no,\" she stammered. \"I mean\u2014\"\n\nA moment of awkwardness stretched between them. He rubbed his neck and cleared his throat. She looked away and moistened her still-burning mouth. She tried to think what the actors in that play had said after the couple kissed. Something about his having to leave before her husband returned home.\n\nThe thought made her smile, and he smiled, too, a look of relief on his face. It was a good thing he didn't know she was thinking about an unfaithful wife in a silly stage play.\n\nApparently her smile reassured him, or at least he seemed to relax. \"There's a dance planned for Thursday night. If my aunt agrees to watch the children, I thought it would be a good place to announce our engagement.\"\n\nShe remembered hearing something about a dance. \"Well, I\u2014\" The principal had sent her to Arizona Territory to earn Garrett's trust, and that's exactly what she had done. So why did it suddenly feel like something was happening over which she had no control?\n\nShe cleared her throat and tried again. \"I'm not sure I have the proper clothes for a dance.\" Not that it mattered. If he paid the bills she ran up with stolen money it would all be over by Thursday.\n\nHis eyes traveled down the length of her blue printed dress, but she had the strangest feeling he was seeing her not as she was but rather how she had looked in her wedding gown.\n\n\"What you're wearing is fine. We're very informal around here.\"\n\n\"I guess it's settled then,\" she said.\n\nHis crooked grin tore through her defenses, and her pulse skittered. \"Thursday night it is.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Toby was curled up on the floor asleep when Garrett entered his room. He picked up the tools and pieces of metal surrounding his son's prone body with an amused shake of his head. He then drew the blanket over the boy's shoulders before lowering himself onto the edge of his bed.\n\nHe was too tense to sleep. Every cell in his body was on edge. He hadn't meant to push her. It wasn't like him to act in haste. Certainly he'd never planned to give Maggie the ring so soon. But after seeing her in her wedding gown, he realized how much he wanted to marry her. How much he wanted to make her his wife.\n\nHe also feared losing her.\n\nHe often caught her watching him\u2014studying him\u2014and he couldn't help but wonder what went through her mind. Did he fall short of her expectations? A man with a disfigured face and an even more deeply scarred soul?\n\nHe rubbed his hands together. Her lavender fragrance still taunted him as did the memory of her sweet, soft lips on his.\n\nShe hadn't objected to his kiss and had in fact kissed him back. Still, he felt... what? Reluctance on her part? Hesitancy? She certainly didn't hold back with the children. She hugged and kissed them freely. The tenderness on her face at times as she looked at them made him ache with envy.\n\nWould she ever look at him like that? Would she ever laugh as openly with him as she did with Toby and Elise? Would he ever hear the words I love you fall from her pretty pink lips?\n\nSomehow she had quickly and unexpectedly won his heart, but he hadn't won hers. Not yet. But he would. By jove, he would." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\nThe ring on her finger caught her eye the moment she woke the following morning. Sitting up in bed, she rubbed the band with her thumb. The memory of Garrett's kiss brought a rush of heat to her cheeks, and she touched her fingertips to her lips.\n\nShe'd handled herself as well as could be expected under the circumstance. Never before had she been required to kiss a suspect. Far as she knew, neither had the other operatives. The thought brought a rush of heat to her cheeks.\n\nWhat was wrong with her? It wasn't as if she'd never been kissed. But none of the stolen kisses shared with men in the past compared to Garrett's.\n\nNaturally she'd considered the possibility that he might wish to kiss the woman he planned to wed.\n\nShe thought she could handle it. She thought she could endure a kiss from him without undergoing any kind of emotion. But never before had a kiss affected her so. It was as if he had done more than simply kiss her; somehow he had branded her and reached into her very soul.\n\nIt was less than three weeks to the wedding, but she couldn't stay around that long. She had to get the proof she sought and quickly leave town.\n\nMeanwhile, there could be no more kisses. Nothing like that must happen again. It was too disconcerting. How could she concentrate on doing her job when all she could think about was his full, sensuous mouth on hers?\n\nIf Garrett insisted on repeating the kiss, she would simply say she wished to wait until they were wed. The thought made her groan. For the love of Betsy, why hadn't she thought to say that last night?\n\nShe pulled her fingers away from her mouth, surprised to find the memory of his lips still lingered there.\n\nIf only he wasn't a suspected criminal... If only her job wasn't to find out what he'd done with the stolen money... She sighed and slipped out of bed. No sense wasting time wishing things were different. No sense at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "No sooner had Maggie finished washing the breakfast dishes than she heard a knock. Drying her hands, she rushed from the kitchen to open the door.\n\n\"Aunt Hetty. I... wasn't expecting you.\"\n\nThe woman hobbled past her. \"I have some exciting news.\" She turned to face Maggie. \"Oswald has agreed to sing at your wedding.\"\n\nMaggie closed the door. \"That's... great, but who is Oswald?\"\n\n\"His full name is Oswald Dinwiddie. He's this nice man from church. A deacon. I didn't really know him that well until the day of the miracle. You know when the cross\u2014\" She moved her head from side to side to demonstrate. \"He was kind enough to take me home after the service.\" Her face turned red. \"He even stayed for supper.\"\n\nSurprised to see Aunt Hetty blush, Maggie couldn't help but smile. \"Ah, so now you have a gentleman friend,\" she teased.\n\nAunt Hetty blinked. \"Why, yes, I guess I do.\" She giggled like a schoolgirl. \"Would you believe Oswald's arthritis was cured by the miracle, too? Just like mine was. Of course, he still suffers from palpitations, rheumatism, and gout, but he's not complaining. You can't expect to be completely cured from a single miracle, now can you?\"\n\n\"No, I guess you can't.\"\n\n\"There's a new doctor in town. His name is Dr. Kettleman, and I bought this new miracle cure from him.\"\n\nMaggie blinked. \"Don't tell me you bought from that quack...?\" The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.\n\nInstead of taking offense, Aunt Hetty laughed. \"Oh, you healthy people are all alike. You think every ailment a fake and every doctor a quack.\"\n\n\"Not all,\" Maggie said and then changed the subject. \"You said this man\u2014Mr. Dinwiddie\u2014has agreed to sing?\"\n\n\"He did, and he gave us three hymns to choose from. Personally, I think you should skip the first two. I don't think songs about suffering belong at a wedding.\"\n\n\"I'm sure there are those who disagree,\" Maggie said with a wry smile.\n\n\"Oh my! Is that a ring?\" Aunt Hetty took Maggie's hand in hers.\n\n\"Garrett designed it from a thimble that belonged to his mother.\"\n\n\"Well, now.\" She turned Maggie's hand to better capture the light. \"It sure does look better on your finger than it ever looked on my sister's.\"\n\nAunt Hetty let go of Maggie's hand. \"Garrett asked me to watch the children while you attend Thursday's dance. It'll do you two the world of good to get out and socialize.\"\n\n\"I hope you don't mind. I know the children can be a handful, but it's a school night so they'll have to go to bed early.\"\n\n\"Land o' living, why would I mind? Long as Toby doesn't get into mischief, I'm sure we'll get along just fine.\" She pulled a notebook from her purse. \"There're a couple of things we need to go over for the wedding.\"\n\nAunt Hetty hobbled toward the kitchen and lowered herself onto a chair. \"My back is killing me.\" She spread the notebook open on the table.\n\n\"Perhaps you'd rather wait till you feel better.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. There isn't much time left till the wedding. We need to go over the guest list.\"\n\nMaggie jumped at the opening Aunt Hetty had provided. \"Speaking of the guest list, I wonder if we should invite Katherine's brother.\"\n\nAunt Hetty's eyes widened. \"Good heavens! Whatever for?\"\n\nMaggie sat opposite her and folded her hands on the table. \"He's still the children's uncle, and I thought perhaps Katherine might have wanted us to treat him as family.\"\n\n\"Katherine would have wanted no such thing. She was tired of bailing him out of trouble and thought him a bad influence on the children.\"\n\n\"Really?\" People like Aunt Hetty, who weren't afraid to express their opinions or spread rumors and gossip, really were a detective's best friend. \"What kind of trouble?\"\n\n\"He was always getting into fights and couldn't keep a job to save his soul. I can't tell you how many nights he spent in jail for disturbing the peace. Katherine insisted he wasn't always like that but had changed during the war.\"\n\n\"I guess that's true of a lot of men.\"\n\nAunt Hetty nodded. \"Thank goodness it's not true of Garrett. I mean, he changed but not in a bad way. Now about that guest list...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "The Finnegan dance hall was packed that Thursday night when Maggie and Garrett walked in.\n\nCurious stares followed them as they threaded their way through the crowd, her arm in the crook of his.\n\nShe wore a simple blue print dress, the sleeves and neckline edged with lace. The shoulder to hem panels showed off her trim hips and small waist.\n\nA quick glance around the room put any lingering doubts about her wardrobe to rest. Arizona wasn't Boston, New York, or even Chicago. Local women dressed mainly for comfort and practicality, not fashion. Poor Katherine must have felt like a fish out of water.\n\nA fiddler played a lively tune, his bushy eyebrows moving up and down in time to the music, along with his foot. The lights were low and the dance in full swing. Men and women stood at both sides of the hall clapping for the couples whirling about the dance floor beneath the watchful eyes of matronly chaperons.\n\nA knot of younger women exchanged whispers behind gloved hands and cast flirtatious glances at Garrett. Not that Maggie blamed them. Dressed in dark trousers, white shirt, vest, and bolo tie, Garrett looked especially attractive tonight. His hair combed neatly from a side part, he was one of the few clean-shaven men in the room, and his scar was hardly noticeable in the dim gas lights. Under normal circumstances, Maggie might have considered herself lucky to be escorted by such a tall and handsome man.\n\nGarrett introduced her to several older couples. \"I want you to meet Miss Maggie Taylor,\" he said, rattling off names.\n\nMaggie shook hands and smiled. People seemed less reserved here than in the States and thought nothing of asking pertinent questions.\n\nA blond woman looked her over with a critical air. \"How did you come to know Garrett?\"\n\n\"We corresponded,\" she said vaguely, not sure if Garrett wanted it known they'd met through a marriage broker.\n\nThe questions kept coming and she answered most with confidence, sticking to the background she'd invented, the story carefully composed. Yes, she liked Arizona Territory. Yes, the heat did take some getting used to. She was from Remington, Indiana. No, she wasn't homesick.\n\nShe'd never been to Remington, but one of the other operatives had. He had drawn her maps and drilled her relentlessly on every detail of the town until she felt she knew it inside and out.\n\nAs long as she avoided looking at Garrett, she was able to maintain her composure. She played her part with none of the uncertainties that had plagued her since arriving in town.\n\nMrs. Higginbottom tapped Garrett on the chest with her lorgnette. Her bright floral dress made her look like an oversized flower pot.\n\n\"Hetty said you've set a date for your wedding,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes, and you should all receive an invitation soon.\" He smiled down at Maggie with a look that tore through her defenses. She never really had a beau and wasn't certain how to act with one in public.\n\n\"Show them your ring,\" he said.\n\nMaggie held up her hand, and the women all oohed and aahed.\n\n\"It's beautiful,\" Mrs. Higginbottom declared. Lifting the glasses to her eyes, she added, \"We must announce your engagement tonight.\"\n\nMaggie dropped her hand to her side. \"We don't want any fuss.\"\n\n\"Of course you do,\" Mrs. Higginbottom said. \"It's not every day that a girl becomes engaged.\"\n\nHer husband stroked his mustache. \"Did you ever wonder why we use the word engagement to describe both a promise of marriage and a war battle?\" His comment brought chuckles from the other men and glares from their wives.\n\n\"Don't mind Paul,\" Mrs. Higginbottom said. \"Do you wish to make the announcement now or later?\"\n\n\"Later is fine,\" Garrett said. \"Right now I would like to dance with my beautiful fianc\u00e9e.\" He turned to Maggie with a smile and crooked his elbow. \"Let's show them how it's done.\"\n\nShe slipped her arm through his, and a wave of anxiety rushed through her. She'd helped to chase down some of the country's most dangerous criminals, but never had she been as nervous as she was at the thought of dancing in Garrett's arms.\n\n\"I don't know how to dance,\" she said as they walked away from the group. Life in an orphanage left no room for parties or dances. So far, none of her other assignments had required it of her.\n\nHe ducked beneath the low-hanging paper streamers and led her onto the dance floor. \"Nothing to it,\" he said. \"Just do everything I do, backwards.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"That easy, eh?\"\n\nHe faced her, and her pulse beat erratically. Was it only her imagination that everyone in the room appeared to stand still at that moment as if holding a collective breath? Even the music seemed to hold a longer beat.\n\nPlacing his hand at her waist, he drew her close. His gaze locked with hers. \"Ready?\"\n\nNodding, she placed her left hand on his shoulder and moistened her lips. He closed the distance between them completely by taking her right hand in his. Nervously she followed his movements.\n\nShe felt the rhythm of the music pulse through him as they whirled about the room, his eyes never leaving her face. With a gentle pressure of his hand he drew her around the dance floor as smoothly as a butterfly flitted from blossom to blossom. For such a tall man, he was surprisingly light on his feet.\n\nIt took two turns of the room before she could relax enough to enjoy herself. By the third turn she was almost ready to believe she was a woman with no secrets, dancing with a man with nothing to hide.\n\nThe fiddler finished his frantic tune and switched to a slower-paced melody. Some couples left the floor, but Garrett's hand tightened around her waist\u2014an invitation to stay.\n\nHe held her so close she feared his leg would brush against the gun hidden beneath her skirt. She would have a hard time explaining why she carried a firearm to a dance, especially since all the men had been required to leave their weapons at the door.\n\n\"Where did you learn to dance so well?\" she asked in an effort to distract him.\n\n\"I'm not dancing. I'm just trying to avoid stepping on your toes.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You could have fooled me.\"\n\nThey made a couple more turns around the room, her movements matching his. She couldn't remember ever feeling so lighthearted.\n\nShe threw her head back like a child on a swing. \"Wheee. Look at me, I'm dancing,\" she said, and his smile deepened into laughter.\n\nSurprised at how quickly she'd learned to follow his lead, she didn't want the night to end." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nA man wearing peg-topped trousers and a flaming red shirt took his place next to the fiddler and called out. \"Grab a partner, men. Grab a partner.\"\n\nA flurry of activity followed as people lined up two by two and took to the dance floor.\n\n\"Choose your partner, form a ring,\" the caller chanted in tune to the music.\n\nGarrett grasped her hands, and they shuffled around in a circle. His eyes shone with merriment as he flashed her a smile.\n\n\"How will you swap, and how will you trade? This pretty girl for that old maid?\"\n\nMaggie suddenly found herself partnered with someone else. She hardly recognized the debonair man dressed in a three-piece suit and bow tie.\n\nShe gasped. \"Rikker!\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he cautioned. Interlocking elbows, they made an awkward turn around the dance floor. Dancing with her coworker was like dancing with a centipede. He stepped on her foot, and she grimaced.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she asked. His presence was an unwelcome reminder that she had failed so far to produce any evidence against Garrett.\n\n\"The same as you,\" he said as they circled each other back-to-back in a do-si-do. \"Working. Or at least that's what I hope you're doing.\"\n\n\"You know it is.\" She didn't need him telling her that a detective was always on the job. That had been drilled into all operatives.\n\n\"Either you're a better actress than I gave you credit for or you were having the time of your life.\"\n\n\"There's nothing that says you can't enjoy your work,\" she retorted.\n\nRikker opened his mouth to respond, but the caller said to switch partners, and after several turns around the room she was back with Garrett.\n\n\"When you meet your partner, pat her on the head, if she don't like coffee, give her corn bread.\"\n\nGarrett laughed at the mention of corn bread. Like an old married couple sharing a private joke, she laughed, too. All too soon she was sashaying with another partner\u2014an older man with bowed legs.\n\nSeveral partners later, Rikker grabbed her by the arm and whirled her about with the grace of a bull. \"We have a problem.\"\n\nShe grimaced. \"You always know how to spoil a gal's fun.\"\n\n\"Thomas made arrangements to pay the debts you ran up in installments. But don't worry. Something came up.\" After dropping that piece of tantalizing news, Rikker promenaded off with Mrs. Higginbottom.\n\nShe had to wait until she met up with Rikker again before she found out the rest.\n\n\"It looks like more of the stolen money showed up,\" he said. \"A vagrant purchased tobacco with a stolen hundred-dollar bill. He's locked in jail.\"\n\nThat was an unexpected surprise. \"Where did he get the money?\"\n\n\"Claims he hasn't the foggiest, but I don't believe it. A man hands you a hundred-dollar greenback, you're not likely to forget where you got it.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"So you think he's lying?\"\n\n\"Maybe, maybe not. You know what poor interrogators these desert lawmen are. Most of them couldn't get a confession from a dying man if their life depended on it.\"\n\n\"Swing 'em east and swing 'em west, swing the girl that you like best.\"\n\nAnd just like that, she was back with Garrett. The dance ended, and he led her over to a row of chairs. They were both hot and out of breath.\n\nHe pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed the beads of perspiration from his forehead. \"I'll get us a cold drink.\"\n\nShe gave him a grateful smile. \"I could sure use one,\" she said. \"Thank you.\"\n\nHe walked away with purposeful strides, and she looked about the room for Rikker.\n\nWhat he'd said about the local lawmen was true. The Pinkerton agency was way ahead of most local officials in crime-fighting abilities. Most jurisdictions didn't have the manpower, knowledge, or resources available to the Pinkerton Agency. This created bad blood between the detectives and Arizona lawmen. While most eastern sheriffs and constables were willing to work with the Pinkerton Agency, Arizona lawmen were not.\n\nRikker appeared seemingly out of nowhere, startling her out of her reverie, and took the seat next to her. He leaned over and pretended to tie his shoe.\n\n\"I wondered where you were.\" She glanced toward the refreshment table where Garrett stood in line. \"Something about this whole thing doesn't make sense. Why would Garrett pay his creditors in installments and drop a hundred-dollar bill in someone's hat?\"\n\n\"I don't think vagrants accept installments,\" Rikker said.\n\n\"You know what I mean.\" She sensed they had all the pieces of the puzzle if only they knew how to put them together. \"It's been two years since the train robbery. Then nothing. It was as if the thieves and money vanished into thin air. So why now? Why has the money started showing up now?\"\n\n\"Thomas is getting married. Wives don't come cheap.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't know,\" she said. Rikker had been married twice; one wife died in childbirth, and the other couldn't live with the weeks and sometimes even months he was away from home.\n\n\"So now what's the plan?\" she asked. Nothing they tried had worked so far.\n\n\"I figure that the vagrant might appreciate a little company. An iron-bar hotel can be pretty lonely at times. Perhaps you can give me some pointers on how to get arrested.\"\n\nDuring her last case, the suspect under surveillance had her arrested for being a public nuisance. She took pride in her shadowing ability, and still didn't have a clue as to how he had spotted her.\n\n\"So the plan is to give the sheriff just cause to arrest you, right?\" It wasn't just a lucky guess; she knew how he worked. \"You could always get drunk.\" Drinking on the case was forbidden by the agency, of course, but Rikker didn't need alcohol to play the part of a drunk. He was a natural.\n\nHe inclined his head toward the refreshment table. \"The sheriff might be short a hat size or two, but I doubt he'd believe I got wasted on sarsaparilla.\"\n\n\"You could just come clean and tell the sheriff who you are.\"\n\n\"Knowing how he feels about Pinkerton operatives, that and a nickel won't get me a cup of coffee.\"\n\n\"If you weren't so clumsy, you could start a fight.\" Not only was Rikker uncoordinated on the dance floor, he couldn't punch his way out of a paper bag.\n\n\"Not a bad idea.\" He grinned. \"What's a black eye among friends?\"\n\n\"If poor dancing was a crime, you wouldn't have to start a fight,\" she said.\n\nHe chuckled. \"Not to worry. I'll pick a fight with the smallest, skinniest man in the room.\"\n\n\"You better,\" she said, though it wasn't only this latest plan that bothered her. \"I still don't understand why Garrett would take a chance on giving money to a vagrant.\"\n\n\"Maybe he just felt sorry for the man.\"\n\n\"But he had to know a large bill like that would attract attention.\" The fiddler started playing again, and she leaned toward her partner, her voice low. \"It's almost as if he wants to get caught.\"\n\nRikker finished tying his shoe and sat upright. \"Maybe he has a guilty conscience. He wouldn't be the first outlaw who did. Or maybe the more time that passes, the more confident he is of not getting caught. That's when criminals start making mistakes.\"\n\n\"There were two robbers. How do we know the money didn't come from the other one?\"\n\n\"We don't. But all of the other parents attending the school fund-raiser checked out. Only Thomas remained a suspect.\"\n\nShe glanced at the refreshment table. Garrett was next in line. \"I want to be there when you question your cell mate. Maybe he's not a vagrant. Maybe it's just an act. You know I'm better at picking out frauds than you are.\"\n\n\"And how would we explain your presence to the sheriff?\"\n\nShe hated to admit it, but Rikker was right; showing up at the sheriff's office was bound to raise eyebrows unless she came up with a legitimate excuse.\n\nShe opened her mouth to say something, but Rikker stopped her with a shake of the hand. \"Nice meeting you,\" he said loudly then switched to a softer voice. \"Oops, better go. Your fianc\u00e9 is coming back. See you tomorrow morning. Don't be late.\" With that, he stood and walked away.\n\nShe watched him disappear into the crowd. Don't be late? What did he mean by that?\n\nShe was still wondering about Rikker's puzzling statement when Garrett returned to her side and handed her a glass of sarsaparilla.\n\nShe smiled up at him. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Sorry it took so long.\" The line between his brows deepened. \"Was that man bothering you?\"\n\n\"Man? Oh, you mean...\" She shook her head. \"He was just being friendly.\" She raised the glass to her lips. The cold beverage quickly quenched her thirst but did nothing to settle her thoughts. Every time she convinced herself of Garrett's innocence something happened to make her doubtful again.\n\nHe sipped his own drink more slowly, and when he was done he took her empty glass from her. \"Ready to announce our engagement?\"\n\nShe hid her disquieting thoughts behind a smile, but her lips felt stiff, almost wooden. \"I think so.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I'll only be a minute.\"\n\nShe waited for him to return the empty glasses before glancing around the room. There was no sign of Rikker. Garrett stopped to talk to Mrs. Higginbottom behind the refreshment table, bringing a smile to her face.\n\nMaggie's mind prickled with everything Rikker said. Why now? Why was the money suddenly showing up after all this time?\n\nGarrett returned to her side with a silly grin. \"Mrs. Higginbottom is ready to make the announcement,\" he said. He crooked his elbow. \"Shall we?\"\n\nShe nodded as she slipped her arm through his. Her calm demeanor belied her churning emotions, but she almost lost her composure when he brushed his lips against her ear.\n\nGarrett walked her across the dance floor to the front of the room. He exchanged a few words with Mrs. Higginbottom, and she hurried over to the fiddler, her bustle swinging from side to side. The music stopped, and dance partners pulled away from each other as if suddenly forbidden to touch.\n\n\"Nervous?\" Garrett asked in a hushed voice meant for her ears only.\n\n\"Not at all,\" she said. She wasn't nervous, but she was worried about Rikker. Please, please, please, God, let Rikker's plan work. The sooner they got the answers they sought, the sooner she could be done with this charade.\n\nMrs. Higginbottom joined them. \"Look at you two. Don't you make a lovely couple?\" She pressed her hands together. \"After I make the announcement, everyone will want to see your ring.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" Maggie rubbed her finger and finding it ringless stared down at her hand in horror. She looked up and saw Rikker a short distance away. He held up her ring just before turning away, and her mouth gaped open. Why did he take her ring? What was he thinking?\n\nMrs. Higginbottom lifted the speaking tube to her mouth, and her voice carried over the noise of the crowd. \"Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?\" A hush fell across the room, and everyone turned to face the front.\n\nWhile the woman spoke, Maggie began to panic. How would she explain her missing ring? She glanced up at Garrett, but his attention was focused on Mrs. Higginbottom.\n\n\"Tonight,\" Mrs. Higginbottom continued, her voice cracking, \"we have a very special announcement to make, and\u2014\" The rest of her words were gobbled up by a loud crash.\n\nAll heads swiveled toward the back of the room and loud protests rose from the crowd. Two men were going at it tooth and nail.\n\nOne was Rikker; the other a short, wiry man wearing spectacles. Outranking his sparring partner in height and weight, Rikker appeared to have picked a fight with the right man. Maggie was soon relieved of that notion.\n\nIf only Mr. Wiry wasn't so quick on his feet or so accurate with his punches, Rikker might have had a chance. Much to Maggie's dismay, he appeared to be losing ground\u2014fast.\n\nClutching his nose, Rikker picked up a chair with one hand and flung it at his opponent. Wiry ducked just in time, and the chair hit one of the matronly chaperons on the leg. That's all it took for spectators to jump into the fray. Fists flew in every direction, followed by grunts and groans as men doubled over or landed on their backs.\n\nOne man slid across the floor like an oversized lizard and crashed into the refreshment table. Dishes fell to the floor with a loud clatter. A woman screamed and people stampeded from the dance hall.\n\n\"Let's get out of here,\" Garrett shouted, grabbing Maggie's hand. She didn't want to leave. Her coworker might need help, but Garrett's firm grip left no room for argument.\n\nA blast of cold air greeted them as they joined the throng rushing outside. He helped her onto the buckboard before running around Patches and scrambling into the driver's seat. Grabbing the reins he released the brake and clicked his tongue.\n\nThe brawl had spilled outside, and Garrett was forced to steer the wagon around a knot of men rolling on the ground.\n\nHolding on for dear life as they raced out of town, Maggie glanced back, but there was no sign of Rikker." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nMaggie hardly slept that night. She twisted and turned until her bedding ended up in a heap on the floor. Not only was she worried about Rikker, but something else kept her awake\u2014something over which she had no control. It filled her with guilt as well as pain.\n\nShe couldn't shake the memory of dancing with Garrett. Even staring wide-eyed at the dark ceiling couldn't keep her from reliving every moment spent in his arms.\n\nShe finally gave up trying to sleep and slipped out of bed. Not wanting to wake Elise, she quietly paced the floor.\n\nThe first light of dawn crept into her room, and she heard Garrett's door open. Sensing him pause outside her room, she held her breath. A moment passed. Two. He finally moved away, his footsteps echoing down the hall. She gasped for air, but nothing could be done for her pounding heart.\n\nShe rubbed her finger, surprised to find how much she missed the ring. Not that it meant anything, of course. It was just a prop\u2014part of her disguise.\n\nStill, questions remained. Rikker had taken her ring, but why? He never did anything without good reason. Pressing her hands against her temples she tried to concentrate, and finally the answer came. Of course!\n\nShe pounded her forehead with the palm of her hand. What took her so long to figure it out? With no time to lose, she quickly dressed.\n\nGarrett had an early morning delivery and was already gone by the time she walked into the kitchen. Fortunately he'd made the coffee, and she gratefully poured herself a cup.\n\nThe coffee helped settle her nerves, and so did the children. It was hard not to laugh at their antics. While Aunt Hetty took care of them the night before, she had engaged them with a lesson on human anatomy and all the things that could go wrong.\n\n\"What's a fibula?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"It's a person who tells a lie,\" Toby said.\n\nElise thought about this for a moment. \"Did you know that Aunt Hetty's legs tell lies?\"\n\nMaggie laughed. \"Actually, a fibula is a bone, pumpkin, and we all have fibulas in our legs. We wouldn't be able to walk without them.\"\n\nAfter fixing breakfast and driving the children to school, she waited for them to enter the adobe schoolhouse. A movement in the distance caught her eye. Someone else was watching, too. A man on a brown and white horse was half hidden behind the school privy.\n\nHe was too far away to identify, but there was something vaguely familiar about him. Was he watching the schoolhouse? Or watching her?\n\nOnly one way to find out. Grabbing hold of Patches's reins, she gave them a good shake. No sooner had the wagon rolled forward than the man swung his horse around and took off in the opposite direction, leaving behind a cloud of dust.\n\nFrowning, she watched him ride away, not knowing what to think. His presence at the school could have been entirely innocent, but by the time she reached town, she was fairly convinced otherwise. The presumption of innocence was all well and good in the courtroom, but experience taught her that everyone was guilty of something, and most of her suspicions had proven true in the past.\n\nThere was no sign of a brown and white horse in town, so she forced herself to focus on the task at hand. She parked the buckboard in front of the hotel, which was as far away from her destination as possible. She glanced down the street to where Garrett's horse and wagon was tethered in front of his shop. If by chance she bumped into him or his aunt, she would have a hard time explaining her business with the sheriff.\n\nIt was early and most of the shops were still closed. The street was deserted, except for the mule-drawn sprinkler wagon, allowing her to duck into the sheriff's office without being seen.\n\nThe sheriff looked up from his desk as she entered. A small sign stated his name as Sheriff L. C. Summerhay. He peered at her from beneath bushy black eyebrows that rose and fell like two caterpillars doing push-ups.\n\n\"Can I help you, ma'am?\"\n\nShe glanced at Rikker behind bars. The poor man had two black eyes and a swollen lip. The sleeve of his shirt was torn and his bow tie missing. He probably could use a bit of sympathy, but that would have to wait.\n\nHis cell mate was hunched over on the bunk, head in his hands. Unable to get a look at his face she turned to the sheriff. Though the Arizona sun had baked his skin to a dark leather color and carved deep lines into his forehead and around his eyes, she guessed Summerhay was only in his late thirties.\n\n\"My name is Maggie Taylor,\" she said.\n\n\"I know who you are. You're Garrett's woman.\"\n\n\"Actually, I'm his fianc\u00e9e,\" she replied. So this was the lawman who steadfastly refused to work with Pinkerton detectives. What would he say if he knew her true identity?\n\n\"What can I do for you?\" he asked.\n\nShe pointed at Rikker. \"That man has my engagement ring.\"\n\nSummerhay's eyebrows did a couple more push-ups before he rose to his feet. \"That true?\" he called over to Rikker.\n\nRikker shrugged and tossed the ring on the floor just outside his cell. She walked over to retrieve it. The vagrant lifted his head, and she got a good look at his face. He didn't seem to recognize her, but she sure did recognize him. It was the pickpocket she'd encountered at the train station the day she arrived in town.\n\nShe slipped the ring onto the fourth finger of her left hand and turned. The sheriff watched her with narrowed eyes. \"Do you wish to file a complaint?\"\n\n\"Oh, no, nothing like that,\" she said, giving him her most brilliant smile. \"I dropped the ring last night at the dance and that gentleman was kind enough to fetch it for me. But before he could return it, a fight broke out.\"\n\n\"It didn't just break out. He started it,\" the sheriff said, indicating Rikker.\n\n\"Ha!\" She gave her head an indignant toss. \"Whoever told you that, told you wrong. It was the other man who started the fight. A short man wearing glasses. I saw it with my own two eyes.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" The sheriff looked dubious as he took his seat.\n\n\"Yes, that's so. As for your other prisoner... He stole from a man and a boy at the train station. I saw him do it.\"\n\nThe sheriff rubbed his chin. \"You're just all over the place, aren't you? Well, rest assured. Crankshaw won't be causing any more trouble for a while.\"\n\n\"His name sounds familiar,\" she said. \"Would that be Joseph Crankshaw?\" Since the pickpocket had purchased tobacco with stolen money, he was a suspect in the Whistle-Stop robbery, however unlikely.\n\n\"Harry,\" Summerhay said. \"Harry Crankshaw.\"\n\nShe smiled. No need to spend the night in jail with the man to learn the basics about him. \"My mistake.\" She made a mental note of Crankshaw's height, weight, and possible age, more out of habit than need. It was always hard to estimate a beggar's age. Most looked older than they actually were, especially the ones who had lived on the street for any length of time.\n\nRikker would surely include a full description of him in his report to headquarters, but she was trained to pay close attention to details.\n\n\"Will that be all?\" the sheriff asked. He looked anxious to get back to the paperwork piled on his desk.\n\n\"There is one other matter,\" she said and looked the sheriff square in the face. \"I would like to post bail for the man who was kind enough to return my ring.\"\n\nThe sheriff sat back in his chair and tapped his fingers on the desk. \"Why would you do that?\"\n\n\"It's the least I can do to show my appreciation.\"\n\nSummerhay cast a glance at the jail cell. Rikker shrugged, though it seemed to pain him to do so, and the sheriff turned back to her.\n\n\"Bail is five dollars.\"\n\nShe arched an eyebrow. \"That much?\" Since the sheriff didn't look like he was in the mood to bargain, she reached into her purse, counted out the exact amount, and handed it to him. She could well imagine what the Pinkerton accountant would have to say about this additional expense. She and Rikker were already over budget.\n\nThe sheriff placed the money in a desk drawer. He then stood, reached for the keys hanging from a hook on the wall behind his desk, and unlocked the cell.\n\n\"You're in luck. This little lady just bailed you out.\"\n\n\"That's mighty kind of you, ma'am.\" Rikker pressed a bowler on his head and hobbled out of the cell, rubbing his chin. Whether he was really hurt or putting on an act was anyone's guess.\n\n\"I wonder if you'd be so kind as to keep this little transaction between us,\" she asked the sheriff. The last thing she needed was for Garrett to find out she was bailing prisoners out of jail.\n\nSummerhay slammed the cell door shut. \"Why is that?\"\n\n\"You know what gossips some people are.\" She put on her best damsel in distress look. \"Someone could jump to all the wrong conclusions, and with the wedding so close...\"\n\n\"Don't you worry none, ma'am. No one will hear a thing from me.\" He replaced the keys on the hook and glanced at Rikker. \"And you! Stay out of trouble, you hear?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Maggie left the jailhouse first, and Rikker walked several steps behind her. \"It took you long enough,\" he groused.\n\nShe stopped to look at a display of brooms and shovels in the hardware window and waited for him to pass. Apparently his limp wasn't an act.\n\n\"I got here as fast as I could. I had to take the children to school. Learn anything?\"\n\nHis answer came moments later as he stood by a lamppost lighting a pipe. Her eyes focused straight ahead, she slowed her pace and pretended to look in the window of the barbershop.\n\n\"Claims he was at the train station panhandling,\" Rikker said. \"A number of people tossed money into his hat. Said he paid no attention and didn't know who did the tossing.\"\n\nShe didn't believe that for a second. Pickpockets were experts at targeting potential victims. A stranger tossed a bill into a hat or cup, and the thief immediately knew where the contributor kept his money. He would also have a pretty good idea how much money was his for the taking. It seemed unlikely that Crankshaw hadn't taken careful note of his generous donor.\n\nAt the corner, they stood side by side waiting for a wagon to move out of the way. She opened her drawstring handbag and pretended to look for something.\n\n\"Certainly you don't believe him,\" she said.\n\n\"As a matter of fact I do,\" Rikker replied and stepped off the boardwalk ahead of her.\n\nShe thought about this as she followed Rikker across the street. In any crowd a pickpocket had a choice of ideal targets. A distracted mother; a man carelessly carrying his coat over his shoulder; an enamored couple or trusting youth were all easy pickings.\n\nIt didn't seem likely that he would target Garrett, a man with a military bearing and purposeful walk. Perhaps Crankshaw was watching someone else when Garrett dropped the banknote in his hat. It was a possibility, however slight.\n\n\"Did you find out who Garrett is corresponding with?\" he asked as she passed him moments later.\n\nHe caught up to her in front of the mercantile store where she stopped to pet a black and white terrier tied up in front.\n\n\"Not yet.\" She'd considered asking Garrett outright but decided against it. If it was addressed to the second Whistle-Stop bandit, chances are he would only lie. \"We'll have to intercept his letters at the post office.\"\n\nA half block away he stopped to read a handbill in the window of the assay company. \"You know we can't do that. Can't mess with the US mail.\"\n\nNo, they couldn't. The Pinkerton General Order Book was clear about that; operatives had to adhere to the letter of the law\u2014no exceptions. Rather than tie a detective's hands, however, abiding by the law inspired the most creative crime-solving methods ever devised by humankind. She and Rikker would just have to come up with a lawful way of breaking into the post office and stealing the mail.\n\n\"There's something else,\" she said. \"His brother-in-law's still in town, and there's bad blood between them. I'm more than certain I saw him at the school this morning.\"\n\n\"What was he doing there?\"\n\n\"That's what I want you to find out. While you're doing that, I'll work on the letter angle.\"\n\n\"Make it fast,\" Rikker said. \"The longer this case drags on, the less I like it.\"\n\n\"I don't know what you're complaining about. I'm the one under pressure. You're a free man.\"\n\nAn all too familiar voice from behind made her freeze momentarily before swinging around. Garrett stood only a few feet away, an inquiring look on his handsome square face. He had just stepped out of the bank. Behind him, Rikker quickly dodged into the confectioners.\n\n\"You were saying something about a free man?\" he prompted.\n\nShe was momentarily stymied as to how to explain herself when a hand-drawn sign in the window gave her an idea. \"Fre... mont,\" she stammered.\n\nThe sign was one of many posted in shop windows criticizing the governor for hardly ever setting foot in the Territory. Some citizens were demanding his resignation.\n\n\"Are you referring to Governor Fremont?\"\n\nShe gave a determined nod. \"He should either resume his duties or resign.\"\n\nGarrett regarded her with a tilted head. \"I quite agree.\"\n\nShe eyed him warily. The principal had warned her against expressing views on politics and other male-oriented subjects as she was prone to do.\n\n\"I fear you must think poorly of me for saying as much.\"\n\n\"Actually, I like a woman interested in public affairs.\" He arched a dark eyebrow. \"Do you do that often? Talk to yourself I mean?\"\n\n\"Only when I want to make sure someone's listening,\" she said.\n\nHis appreciative chuckle made her smile in response. She couldn't help it. She glanced over his shoulder, but there was no sign of Rikker.\n\nHe stood grinning at her, and it was startling to find she was grinning back. She couldn't seem to help herself. Though he was dressed in his work clothes and wore a wide-brimmed hat, he looked every bit as handsome today as he'd looked the night before.\n\n\"I really enjoyed the dance,\" she said to cover her embarrassment.\n\nHis eyes flared with warmth. \"I did, too. Aunt Hetty was disappointed that we didn't properly announce our engagement. I'm afraid she's a bit old-fashioned in that regard.\"\n\n\"I'm sure that by now our betrothal is common knowledge,\" she said. Even the sheriff knew who she was.\n\n\"I'm sure you're right.\" As if catching himself staring, he looked away and rubbed the back of his neck before turning back to her. \"I'd like to stay, but I have an appointment.\" He splayed his hand in an apologetic gesture.\n\n\"And I have errands to run.\"\n\nHe hesitated. \"I apologize for last night.\" He hadn't said much on the way home from the dance, and by the time he returned from taking his aunt home, Maggie had retired.\n\n\"It wasn't your fault.\"\n\n\"I know, but I don't want you thinking ill of the town. Our dances aren't normally so rowdy.\"\n\n\"I like your dances just fine,\" she said.\n\nHe studied her for a moment as if judging her sincerity. Seeming to find his answer, he tipped his hat. \"I better go. See you tonight.\"\n\nHe turned and walked away with his usual purposeful strides. Shading her eyes against the morning sun, she watched him.\n\nSo where was he going in such a hurry? She waited until he was a distance away before following him. Shadowing criminals was a big part of her job, but it was far easier to do in a large eastern city than in a small western town. During her training as an operative she had been given the task of shadowing one of the other detectives through the streets of Chicago. All went well until he suddenly halted and turned. She stopped, too\u2014a dead giveaway, and she flunked her first test. Never again did she make that same mistake.\n\nGarrett didn't stop. Instead, he turned down a side street, but by the time she reached the corner, he had vanished.\n\nOnly a few businesses occupied this part of town: an undertaker, the newspaper office, a lawyer. She eyed each business in turn before settling on the lawyer's office.\n\nNot only did it appear that Garrett might want to get caught, but now he was seeing a lawyer. Rikker had suggested that Garrett might be planning to leave the country, but what if he was getting ready to turn himself in? Was that why he sent away for a mail-order bride? To care for his children after he'd been hauled off to jail?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nMaggie hadn't expected Garrett to remember his promise to accompany them to church on Sunday, especially after Elise's illness made them miss a week.\n\nShe was more than a little surprised when he announced that he had already hitched the wagon and if they didn't hurry they would be late.\n\nHe wore his usual work pants, vest, and shirt, for it was too hot in Arizona to dress up like folks did back East. Though women did their best to dress with reasonable regard for the Lord's house, none of the men wore suits or jackets.\n\nGarrett didn't say much during the thirty-minute drive, except to warn Toby to behave himself.\n\nAunt Hetty greeted them in front of the church and could hardly contain her delight at seeing Garrett. \"Oh my,\" she exclaimed. \"First God moves the cross, and now this!\"\n\nElise giggled and looked about to tattle on her brother. Alarmed, Maggie glanced at Garrett. As if reading her mind, he quickly pulled Elise to his side.\n\n\"Let's go in and get a seat,\" he said, but his way was blocked by a tall man with a goatee.\n\n\"Well, well, well. Look who decided to honor us with his presence.\"\n\nAnger flared in Garrett's eyes, but before he could say anything, Aunt Hetty stepped in. \"Maggie, this is Wayne Peterson. He and Garrett practically grew up together.\"\n\n\"How do you do,\" Maggie said.\n\nPeterson gave a curt nod and moved away.\n\nGarrett hustled both children toward the church. Before entering the carved oak doors, he met Maggie's worried frown and winked as if to relieve her concerns.\n\nHeat rushed to her face, and she quickly turned her attention back to his aunt. Distracted by another church member, a matronly woman, Aunt Hetty hadn't seemed to notice the conspiratorial message Garrett sent\u2014a message that seemed every bit as personal and intimate as a kiss.\n\nThe other woman moved away, and Aunt Hetty turned to Maggie. \"What's so funny?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Just wondering what brought such a pretty smile to your face.\"\n\nMaggie quickly covered her mouth with her fingertips. She was smiling? \"Just... something the children said earlier.\"\n\nCertainly it had nothing to do with Garrett or his wink. At least she hoped it didn't. True, they tended to act like an old married couple at times. Oddly enough, they had even started finishing each other's sentences.\n\nEither she was a better actress than she thought or something else was going on, and she didn't want to consider the implications.\n\nAunt Hetty gave her a funny look, and Maggie quickly changed the subject. \"I take it there's bad blood between Mr. Peterson and Garrett.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so. It goes back to their teens when they both took a fancy to the same girl. She chose Garrett. It didn't help that Garrett came back from the war a hero.\"\n\n\"That was a long time ago.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was. But some things don't ever go away. Take Garrett and the church\u2014\" Before she completed her thought, an older man walked up to her and greeted her with a peck on the cheek.\n\n\"Morning, Hetty.\"\n\nLooking flustered, Aunt Hetty blushed like a schoolgirl. \"Maggie, this is Oswald. He's the one I was telling you about. He kindly agreed to sing at your wedding.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you,\" Maggie said.\n\nOswald took her offered hand in both of his. \"The pleasure is all mine.\"\n\n\"Oswald used to work for the railroad,\" Aunt Hetty said. \"He was an engineer.\"\n\nThe offhanded information made Maggie give Dinwiddie her full attention. One of the Whistle-Stop robbers knew how to drive a train, so Oswald's profession was something to consider.\n\n\"You must tell me more,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"Not much to tell.\" If he was surprised by her interest, he didn't let on. \"Had to quit when my back starting acting up. You won't believe the havoc engine vibrations can do to one's body.\"\n\nWhile he explained in excruciating detail the discomforts of an engineer's life, including the dangers of shaking bones and rattling teeth, she made a mental note of his height and weight. He was in his early fifties\u2014a plus in his favor. Most criminals were under thirty. Older men preferred what Allan Pinkerton called \"gentlemen crimes,\" which included forgery, fraud, and other nonviolent transgressions. Still, it was possible that a former engineer would agree to drive a train while a younger partner committed the actual crime.\n\n\"And the burning coal bothered his lungs,\" Aunt Hetty was saying. \"It's a wonder he still has a voice left. And don't forget to tell her about the noise.\" As an aside, she whispered, \"He's almost deaf in one ear.\"\n\nMaggie had already guessed as much. Not only did Aunt Hetty address him in a louder than normal voice, he inclined his right ear to the person speaking.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, \"and you won't believe what the constant change of temperature and drafts can do to a body, and...\"\n\nFortunately, before he could finish describing the entire scope of physical dangers of riding the rails, one of the other church members called to him.\n\n\"You ladies will have to excuse me. It's my turn to usher today.\" With a tip of his hat, he ambled away.\n\nAunt Hetty watched him go with wistful eyes. \"Such a dear man.\"\n\n\"Yes... he seems very nice.\" Maggie hoped for Aunt Hetty's sake that he was exactly what he seemed. \"What did you say his last name was?\"\n\n\"Dinwiddie. Oswald Dinwiddie. I was so hoping that Garrett could meet him. Why do you suppose he was in such a hurry to grab a seat? The service doesn't start for another ten minutes.\"\n\n\"Perhaps he's just a bit anxious. His first time in church in how many years?\"\n\n\"He hasn't been to church since his wedding day.\" Aunt Hetty sighed. \"And then it was only under protest. He wouldn't even come for his children's baptisms.\" She lowered her voice. \"How did you manage it? How did you convince him to come?\"\n\nMaggie wrapped her arm around Aunt Hetty's, and together they walked into the church. \"Let's just say it was a miracle.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Maggie dropped Toby and Elise off at school on Tuesday and drove into town. She and Rikker had planned to meet before the post office opened at nine.\n\nSpotting his snake oil wagon across the street from the post office on the corner of Main and Grand, she parked. Careful to make sure no one was around, she walked to the wagon and handed Rikker her report to headquarters.\n\n\"Did he mail the letter?\" she asked.\n\n\"About an hour ago. And I mailed mine.\" He tossed her envelope into the truck and dug into his vest pocket for his watch. \"But you better hurry.\" He flipped the case open with his thumb. \"You have only a few minutes left.\"\n\n\"Wish me luck.\" She crossed the street to the post office and waited by the night box. Less than ten minutes later the postmaster stepped outside the adobe post office, keys rattling.\n\nFortunately he was a middle-aged man; old enough to want to look good in a young woman's eye and young enough to consider bending a rule or two. Beneath a beaked cap, his peppery sideburns hugged a round red face.\n\nAfter a quick assessment, Maggie greeted him with a worried frown. \"I wonder if you could help me, sir.\"\n\nThe postmaster pushed back the beak of his cap. \"What can I do for you, ma'am?\"\n\nHe gave no indication of knowing she was Garrett's fianc\u00e9e.\n\n\"I mailed a letter and changed my mind.\" She looked at him through lowered lashes. \"I should never have written in... anger.\" She pulled a handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed the corner of her eye. Sniffling, she added, \"I shouldn't bother you with my problems.\"\n\nHe looked flustered, and his face grew a shade redder. \"That's quite all right, ma'am. Don't cry now, you hear?\" He glanced around as if to check that no one was watching. He regarded Rikker's wagon across the street before turning back to her.\n\n\"Let's see what we can do.\"\n\nSquatting down on his haunches, he opened the box with a twist of the key and pulled out the stack of letters. \"Let me know which one is yours.\"\n\nThanks to Rikker, she had no problem identifying Garrett's letter. Rikker had dropped a yellow envelope into the mailbox, timing it precisely so that Garrett's letter was directly beneath his.\n\n\"It's that one there,\" she said.\n\n\"Ah, well there you are.\" The postmaster handed over Garrett's letter. Thankfully he didn't bother looking at the return address. \"Mum's the word,\" he said.\n\nShe afforded him a brilliant smile. \"I don't know how to thank you.\"\n\n\"Just remember, the next time you write a letter in haste, wait a day or two before mailing it. It'll save you a lot of trouble.\"\n\n\"Thank you. That's very good advice.\"\n\nTucking the letter into her purse, she hastened away in the opposite direction of Rikker's wagon. She would circle a block or two before doubling back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Less than fifteen minutes later, she and Rikker stood behind the painted wagon and examined the envelope. While Rikker kept watch from behind the wagon, Maggie studied the address. It was addressed to a Paul Whittaker in Massachusetts.\n\n\"You do realize we're tampering with the US mail, right?\" he grumbled. Rikker wasn't against breaking the law on occasion to get his man, but he considered such tactics beneath him. He much preferred the challenge of working around any legal obstacles that stood between him and justice. He would have made a fine lawyer.\n\n\"Naughty us,\" she said. She held the envelope up to the sun and smiled. \"We're in luck. There's no need to tamper.\" The envelope was constructed of paper thin enough to see through in the bright light.\n\nShe couldn't read all of it. \"It says 'Nxe5 Q' something.\" She frowned. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\nRikker laughed. \"It's a chess move.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Chess. You know king, queen, checkmate.\"\n\nThe mention of chess brought back a myriad of memories, and her mouth ran dry. \"Did you know that chess was once a game of courtship?\"\n\nFortunately Rikker didn't notice her momentary lapse. \"Mr. Whittaker is evidently Thomas's corresponding chess partner.\"\n\n\"You mean people actually play chess through the mail?\" She often saw Garrett studying the chessboard, but never had it occurred to her that he was playing an actual game with someone a distance away.\n\n\"All the time,\" he said. \"Judging from the number of letters Thomas mails, I'd say he has several mail partners.\"\n\nShe thought about this. \"He said he learned to play in prison. Do you think that's where he met these people?\"\n\n\"Possibly.\" He reached into the wagon for a pencil and writing tablet and jotted down the address on the envelope. It would be up to Pinkerton headquarters to check if Whittaker had a criminal record or was in Arizona during the robbery.\n\n\"What have you found out about Dinwiddie?\"\n\n\"Not a whole lot. He lives at a boardinghouse outside of town. Pays his rent on time and had to quit his job with the railroad because of his health. He is currently a trusted bank employee.\"\n\nHer eyebrows shot up. \"He works for the bank?\" He talked about his job as a train engineer but never mentioned his current employment.\n\n\"Yes, and he's also a terrible faro player. Almost as bad as what's his name\u2014Panhandle.\" Rikker had no patience for a man who couldn't hold his own with liquor or cards. \"Dinwiddie blames losing on his sacroiliac. Though what that's got to do with the price of eggs is anyone's guess.\" When she made no comment, he tilted his head. \"What are you thinking?\"\n\n\"Katherine's brother Cotton returned to town shortly after the school fund-raiser. Not many people knew about the five large bills that showed up there.\"\n\n\"But a bank employee would know,\" he said, finishing her thought.\n\n\"A bank employee who just happened to be a former train engineer,\" she amended.\n\nHe pulled out his pipe and a package of tobacco. \"So you think Thomas and Dinwiddie could be in cahoots?\"\n\nShe frowned. That wasn't at all what she was thinking. \"Or Dinwiddie and Cotton.\"\n\n\"Maybe Dinwiddie, Cotton, and Thomas were all involved in the Whistle-Stop robbery.\"\n\n\"There were only two robbers,\" she said.\n\n\"That we know of,\" Rikker said with quiet emphasis.\n\nEarly train robberies almost always required five or more men. In recent years, successful robberies had been committed with fewer men and, in a few cases, lone individuals.\n\n\"There's nothing to indicate that there were three men,\" she insisted.\n\n\"No, but we can't overlook the possibility.\" Thinking out loud, he continued. \"Suppose the money disappeared following the robbery and no one admitted to having it.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"Suppose the thief among thieves was Thomas. That would explain why no one saw hide or hair of the money for two years. Thomas wasn't worried about the authorities finding out he had the money. He was worried about his partner or partners finding out. So after holding on to it all that time, he decided to distribute a couple of bills to see what happened.\"\n\n\"There's one problem with your little theory,\" she said. \"His donation to rebuild the school brought Cotton back to town. Why would Garrett take a chance on releasing more?\"\n\nRikker shrugged. \"I'm rather curious about that, myself. That's a question we'll have to ask him when the time is right.\" He looked at her askance. \"You have to admit, my theory does explain Dinwiddie's sudden interest in Garrett's aunt. Maybe he thinks she knows where Thomas is hiding the money.\"\n\nThat's what she was afraid of\u2014that, and the possibility Rikker's theory could have a semblance of truth.\n\nRikker tossed a nod at the hotel. \"There's Cotton now.\"\n\nMaggie rose on tiptoes to look over his shoulder. Cotton purchased a paper from Linc and walked into the hotel. She couldn't be certain, but it sure did look like the same man on the brown and white horse she had seen outside the schoolhouse.\n\n\"He's staying at the hotel. Room five,\" Rikker said. \"Nothing incriminating in his room, but that doesn't mean anything.\"\n\n\"Have you also checked Dinwiddie's place?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"And you found nothing?\"\n\n\"Not a diddly.\" He took Garrett's envelope out of her hand and slid it into his coat pocket. \"Cheer up, Duffy. Unless I miss my guess, Cotton is now sitting at a corner table in the hotel restaurant and is about to order his usual flapjacks and coffee. I also happen to know he enjoys the company of a pretty woman. I'll mail Thomas's letter\"\u2014he patted his pocket\u2014\"and you go and see what you can pull out of Mr. Cotton.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Moments later, Maggie stood at the entrance of the hotel dining room. As usual, Rikker's information was accurate. Charlie Cotton sat at a corner table reading a newspaper.\n\nHaving made the decision to take the direct approach, she walked over to his table and pulled out a chair. \"Do you mind?\" she asked.\n\nHe looked up, but before giving him a chance to speak she sat. \"Maggie Taylor,\" she said and offered her hand across the table.\n\nHe folded his newspaper and set it next to his plate. \"I know who you are.\"\n\nSince he ignored her hand, she drew it away and pulled off her gloves. \"I thought we should get to know each other,\" she said.\n\nHe gave her a squinty-eyed stare. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I'm about to marry your brother-in-law.\"\n\n\"Former brother-in-law.\" He leaned on the table, and his eyes glittered. \"You should know I blame him for my sister's death.\"\n\nRecalling Katherine's letter, she studied him. What had he done to cause his sister such distress? \"I'm sorry for your loss. It was a terrible thing that happened.\"\n\n\"Is that why you're here? To express condolences?\"\n\n\"Partly. But I must admit I'm a bit curious. Your sister died two years ago. Why come back to Furnace Creek now?\"\n\n\"Maybe I like it here.\"\n\nOr maybe he was lying. He arrived in town exactly two weeks after the school fund-raising event. That seemed like an awfully big coincidence.\n\n\"Do you, by any chance, know Mr. Dinwiddie?\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Oswald Dinwiddie. He's a friend of Aunt Hetty's.\"\n\n\"Never heard of him.\"\n\nShe decided to try another tactic. \"I heard you and Garrett arguing that day in the shop.\" She paused and waited for him to offer an explanation\u2014something\u2014but he said nothing.\n\n\"Do you mind if I ask what you were arguing about?\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask Thomas?\"\n\n\"He's not much of a talker,\" she said, maintaining a conversational tone. \"He doesn't like to talk about the past.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"Why do you care what we were arguing about?\"\n\n\"I hate to see family members at odds with one another.\"\n\nHe leaned forward. \"Any relationship Thomas and I had ended the day my sister died.\"\n\n\"Is that what she would want?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"You know nothing about my sister,\" he hissed.\n\n\"No, but you are her children's uncle.\" When he made no reply, she continued. \"I saw you at school this morning. You're not thinking of causing your niece and nephew harm, are you?\"\n\nHe sat back. \"Course not. I miss them is all. Thomas won't let me see them.\"\n\nHe sounded sincere, but there was something unsettling about his dark, flat eyes. It was like looking into two black holes.\n\n\"I feel I must warn you that if you cause any harm to the man I love\u2014\" The word love escaped before she could think about what she was saying. She coughed to clear her voice.\n\n\"\u2014harm Garrett or his children, and you'll have to deal with me.\"\n\nHe gave her a thin-lipped smile. \"I'm trembling in my boots.\"\n\n\"You should be.\"\n\nStanding, he tossed a single coin on the table and walked away. She watched him leave the hotel dining room with a sense of impending doom." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nMaggie was hardly aware of her surroundings as she left the hotel. Her conversation with Rikker kept running through her head. Was he right about a third man being involved in the Whistle-Stop holdup?\n\nCotton professed not to know Dinwiddie, and she believed him. If she was right, that was the only true word the man had spoken. So if Dinwiddie wasn't his partner, then who was?\n\nShe was so deep in thought she almost missed seeing Sheriff Summerhay drag Linc across the street by the ear.\n\nWorried that the boy might have gotten into serious trouble, she picked up her pace and followed the two into the sheriff's office. Linc, looking pale and close to tears, was emptying out his pockets.\n\n\"What's going on?\" she asked.\n\nThe sheriff looked none too pleased to see her. \"Not that it's any business of yours, but the boy's a thief.\"\n\nShe turned to Linc. \"Is that true?\"\n\nLinc dumped a handful of penny candy and coins onto the desk and shook his head.\n\nThe sheriff pulled something out of his pocket and waved it in front of the boy's face. \"Then suppose you tell me where you got this?\" It was a hundred-dollar bill. To Maggie he said, \"Bought a bagful of candy with it.\"\n\nMaggie stared at the note in disbelief. It was the second bill to show up in little more than a week. What was going on?\n\nThe sheriff tucked the bill in his pocket. \"If you don't want to tell me now, you can sit in that cell over there till you do.\"\n\n\"Wait,\" Maggie said. \"Let me talk to him.\"\n\nSummerhay looked about to object but then changed his mind. \"All right, but make it quick.\"\n\nMaggie placed her hand on Linc's shoulder and looked him square in the eye. \"I won't let anything happen to you, but you have to tell me the truth. Do you understand?\" After getting a reluctant nod, she asked, \"Where did you get the money?\"\n\n\"I found it,\" he muttered.\n\n\"Found it where?\"\n\n\"Right there in front of the barbershop.\"\n\nShe pulled her hand away. \"By 'in front of the barbershop,' do you mean it was on the ground?\"\n\nLinc nodded. \"I was inside selling my newspapers. When I walked outside, there it was. Like I said, right in front.\"\n\n\"Do you know how it got there?\"\n\nLinc shook his head. \"Nope.\" She studied him, and he said, \"Honest.\"\n\nShe turned to the sheriff. \"He's telling the truth.\"\n\nSummerhay made a face. \"The boy doesn't know the truth from the backside of a mule.\" He turned to Linc. \"Sittin' in jail for a while is bound to change your tune.\"\n\nMaggie's temper flared. \"He's responsible for his grandmother's care. Unless you wish to care for her yourself, I suggest you let him go.\"\n\nHe glared at her. \"The boy's a thief.\"\n\n\"His name is Linc, and he told you how he got the money.\"\n\n\"And you believe him?\"\n\n\"I do. So either you let him go, or you'll have to put us both in jail because I'm not leaving without him.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Okay, maybe giving the sheriff an ultimatum was not Maggie's most brilliant idea, but who would have guessed he would have the gall to throw her in jail? And what was taking Rikker so long to come to her rescue? He kept his ear to the ground. Surely he must have heard about her arrest by now.\n\nSo far she'd spent three hours pacing the tiny cell back and forth while Linc alternated between sleeping and complaining of hunger. Finally the door of the sheriff's office flew open. Much to her shock, Garrett, not Rikker, barreled inside, and he looked fit to be tied.\n\nOne glance at her behind bars and he whirled about to face Summerhay. \"What is the meaning of this?\"\n\nThe sheriff scowled from across the desk. \"Your woman insists on putting her nose where it doesn't belong.\"\n\n\"What are the charges against her?\"\n\n\"I told you. Being a busybody.\"\n\n\"If that was a crime, you'd have to arrest half the people in this town.\"\n\nThe sheriff sat back and folded his arms across his chest. \"I don't like people questioning my judgment.\"\n\nGarrett placed his palms on the desk and leaned over. \"And I don't like you throwing your weight around... especially since you're up for reelection. Either release her or you'll have to deal with my lawyer.\"\n\nGlowering, the sheriff rose and pulled the keys off the wall. Muttering beneath his breath, he unlocked the steel jail door.\n\nMaggie motioned to Linc, and the boy walked out of the cell ahead of her. The sheriff started to protest, but one look at Garrett changed his mind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Chapter 27\n\nSuppose you tell me what that was all about,\" Garrett said once they reached the privacy of his shop. He'd turned the sign in the window to read CLOSED. Linc had already taken off, and it was just the two of them.\n\nShe quickly explained about the hundred-dollar bill. \"I think Linc was telling the truth.\" She studied him. \"So where do you suppose the money came from?\"\n\nHe looked as mystified as she was. Of course that could be an act, but somehow she didn't think so.\n\n\"Search me,\" he said. He then surprised her by laughing.\n\n\"What's so funny?\"\n\n\"You should have seen the indignant look on your face when I walked into the sheriff's office.\"\n\n\"It's not every day that one is thrown into jail,\" she said. It was the first time she'd been in jail for at least six months. \"You looked pretty incensed yourself.\"\n\nHe studied her. \"Is this what married life will be like?\" he asked. \"You getting into trouble and me coming to the rescue?\" Glints of humor sparkled in his eyes.\n\n\"It could be the other way around.\"\n\n\"You think I need rescuing?\" he asked.\n\n\"Do you?\" she asked.\n\nHis hands slipped up her arms, and she felt an unwelcomed surge of want and need, and more than anything, excitement. \"Not anymore,\" he whispered.\n\nThe brush of his lips against hers made her senses spin. Leaning into him, she absorbed his manly essence before pulling away.\n\n\"The ch\u2014children,\" she stammered. \"I\u2014I don't want to be late picking them up.\" Before he could respond, she whirled about and dashed out the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "The next day, Maggie glanced at the calendar on the kitchen wall. Only two weeks left until June 15. How quickly time flew! Fourteen days. The clock was ticking.\n\nRikker's theory about three robbers was possible but didn't explain why suddenly the stolen money had begun to surface. Working at the bank Dinwiddie had to know that large bills would attract attention, so his involvement in spreading them around made no sense. Cotton wasn't even in town for the school fund-raiser, so that omitted him. That left Garrett.\n\nDid he think that giving the money away anonymously offered protection? Was it possible that he just wanted to rid himself of the money and be done with it?\n\nThe thought nearly crushed her. No matter how much she wanted to believe in Garrett's innocence, things always pointed back to him.\n\nGarrett's voice floated from the other room, startling her out of her reverie. \"Toby, Elise, in the wagon, or you'll be late for school.\"\n\nHis footsteps echoed behind her. He laid something that looked like a legal document on the kitchen table. \"Some papers for you to sign,\" he said.\n\nShe ran her hands down the front of her apron. \"Papers?\"\n\n\"I had my lawyer draw up a new deed with your name on it. Should anything happen to me...\"\n\nShe stared at him, speechless. Was that what he was doing at the lawyer's office?\n\nHe chuckled. \"Don't look so alarmed. Just a precaution. You never know what the future holds, and I want to make sure you and the children are taken care of.\"\n\n\"I...\" She cleared her voice. \"I don't feel comfortable signing anything until after we're married.\"\n\nHe frowned, and his eyes sharpened. \"Yesterday... in the shop. I didn't alarm you, did I?\"\n\nShe held herself still. Alarm her? No. What he did was confuse her. He kept peeling away her defenses, and that scared her. It made her feel vulnerable and want things that a hard-nosed detective could never have.\n\nHiding her rampaging emotions behind a calm demeanor, she shook her head. \"It was late, and I was worried about the children,\" she said. The words\u2014the lie\u2014left a bad aftertaste. In a couple of short weeks this would all be over, and he would know the truth. Everyone would.\n\nHis gaze latched onto her lips as if he regretted the disrupted kiss as much as she did. \"I'll leave the papers on the table. You can sign them when you're ready.\"\n\nGrateful that he didn't press her, she forced a smile. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"I've got a delivery to make this morning. I'll drop the children off on the way.\"\n\nHe studied her a moment before turning. \"Toby, Elise, hurry!\"\n\nA flurry of activity followed as the children grabbed schoolbooks, gave her quick hugs, and followed their father through the house and out the door.\n\nAll at once it was silent and the walls seemed to close in around her. Maggie picked the document up from the table. Rikker expressed concern about Garrett leaving town after ascertaining his children were in good hands. His willingness to put her name on the deed led her to believe that perhaps Rikker was right. Maybe that had been the plan all along." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Less than two hours later, Maggie pounded on the door of Rikker's hotel room with both fists. They'd agreed that she was not to visit him in his hotel room, but this was an emergency, and she had taken care to make sure that no one had spotted her.\n\nThe door opened and Rikker greeted her with a frown, his jaw covered in white foamy lather. He glanced up and down the empty hallway before pulling her inside. Shutting the door, he turned. \"What are you doing here? Something happen?\"\n\n\"I can't do this anymore.\" She paced a circle around the room, wringing her hands.\n\nHe reached for a towel. \"Do what?\"\n\nShe whirled around to face him. \"This job. This\u2014\" She shook her head, and her voice wavered. \"Don't you ever hate what you're doing? Hate the lies? The deceit?\"\n\nRikker's face darkened. \"I'll tell you what I hate. I hate crime. Last month I helped put a mass murderer away. Did I feel guilty for befriending his wife to get to the truth? Not one bit. It's our job. It's what we're trained to do.\"\n\nHe turned to the dry sink and scraped the lather off his chin with a straight razor. He met her eyes in the mirror. \"What's the matter with you? I've never known you to act this way.\"\n\n\"No job has ever required so much from me.\" She clenched her hands into fists by her side. \"No job ever involved children or\u2014\"\n\n\"Or what?\" He wiped his face off with a towel and turned. \"What happened to get you all riled?\"\n\n\"This morning...\" She swallowed hard and forced herself to continue. \"This morning Garrett handed me papers to sign. The deed to his property. He's putting my name on everything. Don't you see how that makes me feel? It's not bad enough that he trusts me with his children. Now this.\"\n\n\"You knew it was a tough assignment when you took it.\"\n\nShe thought she did know, but she was wrong. Never had she imagined how hard it would be. \"It's not just that.\" She sank into the only chair in the room. \"I don't believe he's the man we're looking for.\"\n\nRikker shook his head. \"We've gone all through this.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Everything points to him.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She closed her eyes. Big mistake, for a vision of a crooked smile came to mind. She looked up at Rikker. \"You always told me to go by my gut feeling, and that's what I'm doing.\"\n\nShe knew he hated it when she tossed his own words back at him, but she didn't care.\n\nRikker flung the towel onto the dry sink \"You're letting your personal feelings interfere with your job, and that's not like you.\"\n\n\"That's not what this is about.\"\n\n\"Isn't it?\" His eyes blazed. \"You're a professional. You have a job to do. Whatever feelings you have for Thomas or his children can't interfere.\"\n\n\"That's easy for you to say!\" she snapped. \"You don't have to live with them. You don't have to tuck the children in bed and hear their prayers. You don't have to see the love and trust in their eyes as they look at you.\" Nor did he have to lie in bed at night and listen to Garrett pace the floor, and fight the urge to go to him and give in to the desires of her heart.\n\nRikker's expression softened, and he blew out his breath. \"I know this is hard, Duffy. But it will soon be over.\"\n\nThat's what she was afraid of. Because no matter what happened, she couldn't imagine a happy ending for anyone. Not for Garrett. Not for her.\n\nRikker pulled his suspender straps over his shoulders. \"If we don't come up with something soon, we'll both have some explaining to do. You know Allan. He wants results, and he won't be happy to hear that his best agents came up empty-handed. Is that what you want?\"\n\n\"What I want is out.\" Her mind suddenly made up, she added in a quieter, more contained, voice: \"I'm leaving on tomorrow's train.\"\n\n\"Don't be a fool!\" He snapped the last suspender into place. \"You mess this job up and your career is over.\"\n\n\"That's the chance I'll have to take.\" She stood and reached for the doorknob. \"Sorry, Rikker.\"\n\nShe hated leaving him in the lurch, but it couldn't be helped. Her only hope was that in time he would forgive her. Opening the door a crack, she peered into the hall. Seeing no one, she slipped out of the room and down the hall." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Chapter 28\n\nA hot breeze blew across the desert when Maggie picked up the children from school later that afternoon. Sand and dust spiraled upward, turning the sky a murky brown.\n\n\"Can we stop for ice cream?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"Not today, pumpkin. It's too windy,\" Maggie replied. The children liked nothing better than to stop in town for an after-school treat. Elise looked disappointed but didn't argue.\n\nFor once Toby's and Elise's chatter failed to raise her spirits. This would be the last day they spent together, and the thought nearly crushed her. She only hoped to get through the night. The worst part was leaving town without an explanation\u2014of simply disappearing. But what could she say?\n\nI'm sorry, but this was all a farce. I never intended to marry you.\n\nShe turned the wagon homeward with a heavy heart. Toby said something, and Elise's laughter barely cut into her troubled thoughts.\n\nConcerned about Elise's still delicate lungs, she handed her a clean handkerchief. \"Put this over your mouth and nose.\"\n\nToby, as usual, was in his own little world. \"Did you know that even when you can't see the moon it's still there?\"\n\n\"Why can't we see it?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"Because the man in the moon turns out the light,\" Toby said.\n\nMaggie smiled through her tears. She was going to miss the boy. Miss both children. She didn't even want to think about missing Garrett.\n\n\"Why are you crying?\" Elise asked.\n\nMaggie swiped away a tear. \"It's the wind. It's making my eyes water.\"\n\nElise peered at her from over the top of the handkerchief. \"Can we have a tea party when we get home?\"\n\nMaggie was just about to say no when she changed her mind. She wasn't leaving until tomorrow. No reason not to make a little girl happy today, especially after denying her request for ice cream.\n\n\"I think that's a very good idea.\"\n\nElise's eyes shone. \"Can we have it in our tree house?\"\n\nMaggie drove the wagon alongside the house and set the brake. A tree house, boogeyman, and a man in the moon; there seemed to be no end to the children's imagination.\n\n\"Toby said that only special people get invited to your tree house.\"\n\n\"Papa said you're special,\" Elise said.\n\nMaggie's breath caught. \"Your... your papa said that?\"\n\nElise nodded. \"Can we have a tea party in the tree house? Pleeeeeeeease?\"\n\n\"It's may we have a tea party.\"\n\n\"May we, can we?\" Elise asked.\n\nMaggie forced her brightest smile. She'd played dozens of roles as an undercover agent, but none were as difficult as the role she now played.\n\n\"A tea party it is!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Much to Maggie's surprise, there actually was a tree house. Not the kind she expected: this one was located in the barn's hayloft.\n\nWhitewash greeted her in the yard with wagging tail, and she bent to pet him.\n\nStraightening, she studied the open window above and stepped back. Whitewash had been up to his old tricks and her heels sank into the newly turned soil.\n\n\"You must train your dog to stop digging,\" she said.\n\nElise's face grew serious. \"It's not Whitewash. It's the boogeyman.\"\n\n\"Whitewash, the boogeyman, whatever. These holes are a hazard.\" She stared up at the ladder clinging to the side of the barn. \"You aren't going to make me climb that, are you?\"\n\n\"It's the only way to get into our tree house,\" Elise assured her. \"I'll show you.\"\n\nElise scampered up the ladder with the ease of a cat climbing a tree. Toby placed the picnic basket in the wooden hay lift next to the ladder. He then scrambled up after his sister.\n\nBoth children hung their heads out of the narrow window above and beckoned to her.\n\n\"You can do it!\" Elise called.\n\nMaggie wasn't so sure about that, but she wasn't about to disappoint the children on her last day in town. Tongue between her teeth, she grabbed hold of the ladder and placed a muddy sole onto the lower rung.\n\nThe ladder trembled beneath her weight and the wind played havoc with her skirt, but somehow she made it to the top.\n\nWith the children's help, she crawled through the loft opening and landed on a prickly bed of hay. Standing, she brushed off her skirt and looked around. So this was the tree house she'd heard so much about.\n\nThe loft was cut off from the barn's first floor by a wood partition. Elise pointed to a corner piled high with scraps of metal and an assortment of tools. \"That's Toby's room,\" she said with sisterly disgust. \"Over here is mine.\"\n\nHer area was much neater and included a doll bed and small rocking horse. A child-sized table and two chairs stood on a rug beneath a hanging lantern.\n\n\"I like your house,\" Maggie said.\n\nToby flung his upper body over the window ledge. Crying out, she rushed to his side and grabbed him by the shirt. \"Be careful.\"\n\nHe turned the hay lift handle. With a grinding of gears and a clank of metal, the picnic basket rose from the ground.\n\nTogether, they hauled the basket inside. \"Cookies and lemonade,\" Maggie announced.\n\nElise frowned. \"I thought we were going to have tea.\"\n\n\"It's a bit warm for that, don't you think?\" Maggie pulled out the canteen. The wind had made the temperature rise, and it felt like summer.\n\nToby returned to his \"room\" and began fiddling with a strange-looking object.\n\n\"What is that?\" she called.\n\n\"A horse,\" he said. \"A wind-up horse that will take you anywhere you want to go.\"\n\nMaggie smiled. \"Now wouldn't that be something? A horse that you wouldn't have to feed.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't have to clean up after him, either,\" Toby added.\n\n\"Can you make a wind-up horse for me?\" Elise asked.\n\nToby shook his head. \"You're too little. You're not strong enough to turn the key.\"\n\nMaggie handed Elise a cookie and whispered, \"Don't worry. When you grow up, you'll be strong enough to do anything you want.\"\n\n\"I want to be big and strong like Papa,\" Elise said.\n\nMaggie's heart wrenched at the thought, and her misery felt like an iron weight. Garrett was strong all right, and she could sure use his shoulders right now.\n\nShe rubbed the ring on her finger. The band would have to come off, of course. Not that it meant anything. It was nothing more than a prop, like in a stage play.\n\nStill... it surprised her, how much she enjoyed wearing it. How special it made her feel, like she finally had a place in the world\u2014a home, a family. A purpose.\n\nThe ring. Oh God, that was the least of it. She'd lied to him, forced herself into his home\u2014into his children's lives\u2014under false pretenses. And for what?\n\nNot wanting to upset the children, she blinked away her tears. Fortunately, they were too occupied to notice her misery. Toby pounded on a piece of metal with his hammer, and Elise pretended to feed her rag doll.\n\nMaggie tried sitting on one of the chairs, but when her knees came up to her chin, she dragged a bale of hay over to the table to use instead. After arranging the cookies on a plate, she placed the picnic basket on the floor and poured the lemonade into three tin cups.\n\n\"What's in the bag over there?\" she asked, pointing to a worn leather satchel. It was the one thing in the playhouse that seemed strangely out of place.\n\nElise looked up from her doll. \"It's a secret,\" she whispered, her eyes wide.\n\n\"Hmm, a secret, eh,\" Maggie said, playing along. \"I'm very good at keeping secrets.\"\n\n\"Toby said we can only open it if it's important.\"\n\n\"I think tea parties are important,\" Maggie said. \"Don't you?\"\n\nElise gave her a dubious look. \"Kind of. But it's not like when the school burned down.\"\n\n\"No, I guess not,\" Maggie agreed. Apparently the school fire had left an impression.\n\n\"Or when Linc needed new clothes,\" Toby called from his \"room.\"\n\nElise nodded. \"And don't forget the beggar with the crooked foot.\" Maggie stared at her. \"What... what did you say?\"\n\nElise looked worried. \"Did we do something wrong?\"\n\n\"No, no, of course not.\" She could think of only one thing that the school, Linc, and the beggar had in common, and that was a Lincoln banknote. Was it possible? Could it be?\n\nWilling her trembling limbs to still, she cleared her throat. \"Will you let me see inside the bag?\"\n\nElise glanced at her brother who shrugged. \"I guess it's okay,\" he said. \"Long as you don't tell nobody.\"\n\nElise hopped off her chair and tugged on the handle. It was heavy, and her brother had to help her drag it to the table. Toby then undid the clasp and opened it.\n\nMaggie's body stiffened in shock, and it was all she could do to breathe. The satchel was packed with money." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "For several moments all she could do was stare. God, no! She'd wanted so much to believe in Garrett's innocence. The moment she had waited for\u2014prayed for, worked for\u2014now felt like a nightmare. The case that had stifled Pinkerton operatives for two years had now been solved. But at what cost? Dear God, at what cost?\n\nNot wanting Elise to think she'd done something wrong, Maggie took hold of her small hand. No matter her feelings, no matter how much it hurt, she had a job to do. Interrogating a witness came easy to her, but never had she questioned one so young.\n\n\"Did you and Toby give money to help build the new school?\" she asked, keeping her tone soft and voice gentle.\n\nElise nodded. \"Our teacher said if they didn't build a new school she'd have to go back to Boston, and that made her sad.\"\n\nAnxious to return to his mechanical horse and completely unaware that his life was about to take an alarming turn, Toby scooted back to his corner on hands and knees.\n\n\"What about the beggar?\" Maggie asked, forcing a light tone. \"Did you give him money, too?\"\n\nAgain Elise nodded. \"You said God wants us to help others.\"\n\n\"He does,\" Maggie assured her. \"I guess that means you helped Linc.\"\n\n\"Uh-huh.\" Elise scratched her side. \"Toby said we can only give money to people who need it. We can't spend it on ourselves.\"\n\nMaggie released the small hand. \"That's... that's good.\"\n\nAll the pieces fell into place, including the sudden and puzzling appearance of stolen money.\n\nShe reached for a packet of greenbacks, but Elise pushed her hand away. \"You can't have any. It's not ours.\"\n\n\"It's not?\" she asked, feigning surprise. \"Well, then whose money is it?\"\n\n\"It's Pa's,\" Toby called with a pound of his hammer. \"The money belongs to Pa.\"\n\nElise fiddled with the clasp. \"And he don't want anyone to know about it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Chapter 29\n\nNormally Maggie would have gone straight to the sheriff after discovering the stolen money, but nothing was normal about this case. Her first thought was for the children. After thinking it over, she hustled them back to the house and, keeping up a stream of mindless chatter so they wouldn't think anything was wrong, she tossed their clothes into a carpetbag and discreetly packed her own.\n\nShe threw the last of the carpetbags into the back of the rig and ordered the children to take their seats.\n\nShe climbed into the driver's seat. \"Toby, hold on to Whitewash. Don't let him get away.\"\n\nThe children had such somber expressions she asked lightly, \"What do elephants and trains have in common?\"\n\n\"I give up,\" Elise said.\n\n\"They both carry trunks.\"\n\n\"Are we going on a train?\" Toby asked.\n\n\"Not today,\" she said, releasing the brake and giving the reins a shake.\n\nA half hour later, she pulled up in front of Aunt Hetty's house. The still-brown sky turned the setting sun to a dull bronze color. The windstorm had ended, leaving behind only an intermittent gust that fanned her fevered brow but did nothing to settle her nerves.\n\n\"Why do we have to stay here?\" Elise asked.\n\n\"It will just be for a short while,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"But why can't we stay with you and Pa?\"\n\n\"They want to be alone so they can kiss,\" Toby said from the backseat.\n\nThe boy's comment was followed by an echo from the past. \"I believe it's traditional for a man and woman to seal a moment like this with a kiss.\"\n\nGiving her head a shake, she clamped down on her thoughts. No matter how much she wished things were different, she could no longer deny the evidence against him. Allan Pinkerton had been right all along. Garrett Thomas was a thief and very possibly a killer.\n\nShe yanked on the wagon brake, but putting a brake on the memory of being in Garrett's arms was harder. Harder still was forgetting the memory of dancing with him.\n\n\"I'm scared,\" Elise said.\n\nMaggie's control began to slip. \"Why are you scared?\" She'd tried hard not to let on that anything was wrong but had apparently failed.\n\nElise's eyes filled with tears. \"I don't know.\"\n\nMaggie took the trembling child in her arms. She had every reason to be scared; they all did. \"I want you to be a good girl for Aunt Hetty and to be brave.\"\n\nElise knuckled the tears away with both hands. \"What does brave mean?\"\n\nToby scrambled out of his seat and ran up the path to the door with Whitewash at his heels. \"It means not telling anyone you're afraid.\"\n\nMaggie retied the ribbon on Elise's braid. \"Actually, it's okay to say you're afraid. It's even better to tell God. Remember how I taught you to talk to Him?\"\n\nElise nodded, and Maggie kissed her on the forehead. \"Come along. Last one to the door is a purple frog.\" Her ploy worked because Elise scrambled out of the wagon and ran ahead of Maggie, laughing.\n\nMaggie sighed. What she wouldn't give for the resilience of a child and the ability to go from tears to laughter as easily as the wind changed directions.\n\nAunt Hetty came to the door in robe and slippers and looked surprised to see them. \"I'm so glad you came.\" She checked that both children were healthy and not harboring any diseases before letting them inside.\n\n\"You can't be too careful with all this wind,\" she said. \"What brings you here on a day like this?\"\n\n\"I have business to take care of.\" Maggie tried to smooth down Toby's cowlick, but only so she didn't have to look the older woman in the eyes. \"I wonder if you'd mind watching the children for a day or two.\" It would be for much longer. The children might even have to stay there permanently, but she didn't want to say that. Not yet.\n\nAunt Hetty's eyes bored into her. \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\"Pa and Miss Taylor just want to kiss,\" Elise said.\n\n\"Oh.\" And after thinking about this for a moment, Aunt Hetty repeated herself, this time with more meaning. \"Oh!\" She lowered her voice. \"You and Garrett promised to wait until after the wedding.\"\n\n\"It's not what you think,\" Maggie said, blushing. \"We... uh... just want to talk.\" She hated lying to his aunt, but she didn't want to upset the children.\n\n\"I see,\" Aunt Hetty said, though it was obvious by her dubious expression that she knew something was afoot. \"It's actually a good thing you came. Would you mind mailing your wedding invitations? I don't dare go outside.\" She waved her hand in front of her face. \"All that dust from the wind.\"\n\nMaggie glanced at the stack of envelopes on the table by the door, and her already low spirits fell another notch. It looked as if the whole town had made it onto the guest list.\n\n\"All you have to do is drop them off at the post office,\" Aunt Hetty added.\n\n\"Yes, all right.\" Maggie turned to the children. \"Be good for Aunt Hetty, and don't give her any trouble. And Toby, stay away from matches.\" Resisting the urge to take both of them in her arms and hold them tight, she rushed to the door before tears threatened to give her away.\n\n\"Don't forget the invitations,\" Aunt Hetty called.\n\nMaggie grabbed the stack of envelopes and raced outside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Garrett was anxious to close up shop and go home to his family. The thought made him smile.\n\nFollowing Katherine's death, he never thought he'd be happy again. Never thought it possible. How lucky can a man get?\n\nMaggie.\n\nJust thinking her name made him want to jump with joy. He never believed that God had a plan for his life, but it sure was beginning to look that way.\n\nIn little more than two weeks they would be husband and wife. Two weeks would be the beginning of a whole new life. Wait till she saw what he planned for their honeymoon.\n\nCounting the minutes until he saw her again, he focused on the task at hand. The sooner he finished this order, the sooner he could leave.\n\nFort Verde wanted three dozen tin drinking cups, and he had only one more left to make to complete the order. Apparently tracking Apaches was hard on utensils as it was the second such order this year.\n\nHis apprentice thought making cups a bore. Panhandle much preferred working on more intricate pieces. That's because he was never deprived of a cup or fork or spoon or plate. A cup\u2014a crudely made cup chiseled out of rotting wood\u2014helped restore human dignity. Nothing boring about it.\n\nThe year spent in Andersonville sure did teach him to appreciate the simple things in life, that's for sure.\n\nWhistling to himself, he shaped the tin on a bar holder and grooved the seam on the Roys & Wilcox grooving machine. Next he turned the lip on the turning machine. He held the cup up to the light, and satisfied, he snipped off a piece of wire.\n\nThe wire made the lip stronger; it also prevented a user from cutting his or her mouth. Stepping over to the wiring machine, he set the tin tube on a roller.\n\nThe jingling bells announced a customer. Pulling away from his workbench, he walked out to the shop and halted in the doorway. The last person he expected to see this time of day was Maggie." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Chapter 30\n\nThe shop was empty when Maggie walked in. It was almost closing time.\n\nNeither the sheriff nor Rikker wanted her to face Garrett alone, but she insisted. She owed him that much.\n\nStepping from his workshop in back, his face lit up at seeing her. Even now, his smile affected her. She tried staying cold and emotionless but failed miserably. Her lower lip quivered and a lump settled in her throat. Even now that she was certain of his guilt, her pulse leaped at the sight of him.\n\nHis smile faded a little, and a shadow of worry touched his forehead. \"You're in town late,\" he said. \"Everything okay? The children?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"They're with Aunt Hetty. I... I had some things to take care of.\"\n\n\"I see.\" He rubbed the back of his neck. \"Maybe she won't mind keeping them for a while longer. We can have supper at the hotel. It will give us a chance to talk. I planned to show you this tonight, but since you're here...\" He reached for a leaflet on the counter.\n\nShe stared at it a moment before taking it from him. \"What is this?\"\n\n\"Flagstaff.\"\n\nShe looked up, and his grin widened. \"There isn't much there, but they have a halfway decent hotel, and it's only a couple of hours away from the most magnificent natural site you've ever seen. They used to call it the Big Canyon, but now they call it the Grand. I thought it would make a perfect place to spend our honeymoon.\"\n\nThe flyer slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the floor.\n\nHe glanced at the leaflet. \"We don't have to go there if you don't want.\"\n\n\"It's not that.\"\n\n\"Then what?\" A worried look crossed his face. He cupped her elbow. \"Maggie? What's wrong? Tell me.\" He released her arm. \"Your family? Have they lost the farm?\"\n\nShe stared at him in confusion. What family? What farm? Her mind was in such a muddle it took her a moment to remember yet another lie she'd told. She shook her head. Oh, God, help me. This is so hard.\n\nShe yanked the ring off her finger and held it out to him. He made no effort to take it from her, but the eyes staring back were dark as night. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Take it!\" she pleaded. \"Take it.\"\n\nHis mouth in a straight line, he took the ring and stared at it a moment before lifting his eyes to hers. \"Are you going to tell me what this is all about?\"\n\n\"I'm not who you think I am.\" Her voice wavered, and forming the words felt like spitting out rocks. \"My name isn't Maggie Taylor.\" She faltered but kept going. \"It's Maggie Cartwright.\"\n\nHe shook his head in confusion. \"I don't understand. Why are you telling me this?\"\n\nBefore she could answer, the door flew open and Sheriff Summerhay walked in, followed by Rikker.\n\n\"I'll take it from here,\" Summerhay said, striding up to Garrett. He reached for the handcuffs hooked to his belt. \"Garrett Thomas, I'm arresting you for robbery and the murder of one Joseph A. Beckett.\"\n\nColor drained from Garrett's face. He looked like a man who'd just been shot. \"What are you talking about? Robbery? Murder? I don't even know anyone named Beckett.\"\n\nThe sheriff scoffed. \"Not much you don't. He's the guard killed during the Whistle-Stop robbery.\"\n\n\"The Whis\u2014\" A look of disbelief crossed Garrett's face. \"Surely you don't think that I had anything to do with that.\" His earnest eyes sought hers. \"Maggie? What's this about? How could you think\u2014?\"\n\nShe wanted to die. She'd insisted on being present at his arrest, but now she knew what a mistake that was. Rikker had tried to talk her out of it. She should have listened.\n\nSummerhay answered for her. \"Case you don't know it, the lady's a Pink.\" He chuckled. \"Don't that beat all? A woman detective, of all things?\" He shook his head as if he still couldn't believe it himself.\n\nGarrett stared at her in astonishment. \"Maggie?\" His voice broke. \"Is this true?\"\n\nShe nodded and struggled to find her voice. \"I was sent here to investigate the train robbery.\" She pulled her metal shield from the waistline of her skirt and held it up for him to see. She indicated Rikker. \"This is my partner, Mr. Greenwood.\"\n\nGarrett glanced at Rikker before turning back to her, incredulous. \"I don't understand. None of this makes sense.\"\n\n\"The money you stole from the train... I found it.\" She practically choked on the words. She wanted to say more, but the sheriff ordered Garrett to put his hands behind his back.\n\n\"What money? What are you talking about? I've done nothing wrong.\"\n\nSummerhay snapped the manacles around Garrett's wrists. \"That's for a judge and jury to decide. Right now, my job is to put you in jail.\"\n\n\"You can't think I had anything to do with that robbery. Maggie, you know me. How could you think\u2014?\"\n\n\"I found the money in the children's playhouse.\" The money was intact except for the few bills Toby and Elise had given out. \"How do you explain that?\" Something snapped inside, and anger flared. \"What were you planning? To leave town? Is that why you sent away for a mail-order bride? So you could leave the children behind?\"\n\n\"Leave the children?\" He spoke like a man in a daze. \"How could you think such a thing?\"\n\nShe faltered. \"What... what do you expect me to think? The money\u2014\"\n\n\"I know nothing about any money!\" The shock and disbelief left his face, leaving behind a look of hurt and betrayal. \"I let you into my home. I trusted you. I\u2014\"\n\nHe shook his head. I held you and kissed you and loved you. That's not what he said, but it's what she heard\u2014what she saw in his eyes, read on his face, heard in her heart.\n\nThe sheriff grabbed him by the arm and shoved him toward the door. \"That's enough.\"\n\nGarrett pulled back. \"What about my children?\" he demanded. \"What's to become of them?\"\n\n\"I'll see that they're cared for,\" she said, ignoring Rikker's disapproving look.\n\nGarrett's cold and unforgiving stare chilled her to the bones. \"I don't want you anywhere near them.\"\n\nHe searched her face, for what she didn't know. Seeming to have found his answer, he pulled his gaze away and walked out the door ahead of the sheriff." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Garrett paced the tiny cell like a caged animal and pounded his fist into his palm. He still couldn't believe the turn of events. One moment he was on top of the world; the next\u2014\n\nIt was a nightmare. Worse than even being locked up in Andersonville. At least then he had known who his enemies were. Knew why he'd been captured. Even during the senseless craziness of war, that much had been clear.\n\nBut this... this was beyond comprehension. And what in the name of Sam Hill was taking his lawyer so long to get here?\n\nHe battled for restraint. He needed to calm down. Crazy thinking wouldn't have gotten him through the war and wasn't about to get him through this. His children's future depended on his keeping his wits about him. There had to be a logical explanation. He just needed time to think and figure out what it was.\n\nHe slumped on the cot, elbows on his lap, and covered his face with both hands. He'd gone over his arrest a dozen times, and none of it made sense.\n\nMaggie a Pinkerton detective? How was that possible? How could he have been so blinded by her smile and those big blue eyes of hers? How could he have been so fooled by her sweet, loving nature?\n\nHe could still hear her voice in his head\u2014cold, hard, uncompromising. \"The money you stole from the train... I found it.\"\n\nA sharp pain started in his chest and radiated outward. What had he ever done to make her think him capable of such a heinous crime? He'd had his problems with the church, but never had he gone against God's commandments. Not since returning from that dreadful war.\n\nHeaving his shoulders, he stood and wrapped his hands around the rough steel bars. Oh, Lord, what's happening to me?\n\nThe bitter taste of gall filled his mouth as he thought of Maggie's accusations. Robbery? Murder? How could she think such things of him? He'd danced with her, held her, kissed her. Would have done anything for her. Given her the moon if such a thing had been possible.\n\nAnd all this time\u2014God, all this time\u2014she had been plotting against him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Chapter 31\n\nOn the morning the trial was scheduled to start, Maggie left her hotel room early to meet Rikker downstairs in the dining room. The sheriff asked them both to stay in town to testify. It wasn't by any means an unusual request. She had testified at other trials but never with such dread.\n\nThough evidence all pointed to Garrett's guilt, many in town had expressed shock and disbelief. No one could believe that Hetty's beloved nephew would do such a thing.\n\n\"It was that terrible war,\" some said. Though the war had been over for a good number of years, many still blamed it for everything bad that had happened since.\n\nRikker waved his hand as she entered the dining room, and she quickly headed for his table. He was already halfway through his breakfast. She envied his ability to eat and sleep no matter what happened.\n\nShe ordered coffee and scrambled eggs with bacon, though she didn't feel like eating.\n\nShe couldn't shake the feeling that something was not right. Too many unanswered questions remained for her peace of mind.\n\n\"Why do you suppose Garrett refuses to name his partner?\" she asked. If Cotton was the second robber as they suspected, Garrett's silence was even more puzzling. Why protect a man for whom he had so little regard?\n\n\"I gave up trying to understand the criminal mind a long time ago,\" Rikker said between bites. He glanced across the table at her. \"Oh no, the look.\"\n\n\"What are you talking about? What look?\"\n\n\"Every theory of yours, no matter how harebrained, is always preceded by a certain look.\"\n\nShe rested her arms on the table and leaned forward. \"If he's found guilty of theft, he'll go to Yuma.\" At half capacity Yuma Territorial Prison was still new enough to have a fairly good reputation. \"Murder... he hangs.\"\n\n\"So what's your point?\"\n\n\"I don't believe him capable of murder.\" His sadness as he talked about the war had been too real. \"So why is he shouldering the blame?\"\n\n\"It wasn't that long ago that you didn't believe him guilty of theft,\" Rikker said.\n\nHe had her over a barrel with that one. How could her instincts have been so wrong? \"I just hate loose ends.\" After a moment she added, \"And I know Cotton's involved.\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he said, slanting his head sideways.\n\nShe glanced over at a corner table where Cotton sat having breakfast alone. She leaned forward. \"Oooooooh. I'm so tempted to go over there and\u2014\"\n\n\"Pray for strength, Duffy,\" Rikker said, buttering his bread.\n\n\"I would, except I'm afraid what I would do to the man if I was any stronger.\"\n\nHe sighed, and she could guess his thoughts. While waiting to testify, neither had stopped working. He shadowed Cotton while she tracked Dinwiddie's every move. They both came up empty-handed.\n\n\"Without Thomas's cooperation, we have nothing but speculation,\" he said.\n\n\"Anything from headquarters?\"\n\n\"Only that Dinwiddie has no criminal record, but they still haven't been able to track Cotton's movement for the last two years.\"\n\nThe waiter came with her order, but she felt even less like eating than before.\n\nWatching her push her food around her plate, Rikker shook his head. \"It'll soon be over, Duffy,\" he said. \"Then we can go home.\"\n\nHome wasn't a place to Rikker; it was the next assignment. Once he got his man, he was ready to move on. Stuck in town for a week waiting to testify had been sheer torture for him.\n\nThankfully, he didn't nag her to eat as he usually did, and he even paid the check without comment. He tucked the receipt into his pocket to be turned in to Pinkerton headquarters later, and reached for his hat.\n\n\"Ready?\"\n\nNo, she wasn't ready; she was shaking, and it felt like ice water flowed through her veins. Nevertheless she nodded, but it took every bit of energy she could muster just to rise to her feet.\n\nAs they walked out of the hotel, they were greeted by Linc's voice. Maggie recognized the trousers and shirt at once as belonging to Toby. Already, the toes of his new shoes were scuffed and his hair slightly mussed, but he no longer looked like a waif.\n\n\"Readallaboutit,\" he yelled. \"It's the trial of the century.\"\n\nRikker stopped to purchase a paper, giving the boy a quarter. \"Keep it,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you, sir,\" Linc said, grinning. He dropped the coin into the canvas apron that he now carefully tied around his waist to prevent theft.\n\n\"How's your grandmother?\" Maggie asked. The boy was still not in school, and that worried her.\n\n\"She's okay,\" Linc said. \"She even knows who I am most days.\"\n\n\"That's wonderful,\" Maggie said.\n\nRikker tucked the newspaper beneath his arm, and they continued on their way. The trial was scheduled for nine o'clock.\n\nSomething made her glance back at Linc. She tugged on Rikker's arm. \"Why do you suppose Cotton is so interested in Linc?\"\n\nRikker turned and squinted against the bright morning sun. \"Maybe he's just purchasing a paper like everyone else. Come on.\" He took her by the arm. \"Don't want to be late.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Furnace Creek's first courthouse was still under construction, so Garrett's trial was to be held on the first floor of a deserted two-story building painted a shocking pink.\n\nThe courtroom was already packed when they arrived. The flocked red wallpaper and scarlet draperies suggested the building had a less-than-virtuous past. Maggie could well imagine what image was hidden behind the carefully draped picture hanging over the mantel.\n\nJudge Campbell sat up front behind a makeshift bench. He was a bald-headed man with muttonchop whiskers and what looked like a permanent scowl. Twelve jurors sat along one wall, while spectators vied for the few remaining seats.\n\nAs witnesses, Rikker and Maggie were directed to sit in the first row behind the prisoner.\n\nGarrett turned to look at her as she took her seat, his eyes as remote as his expression. Hot blood rushed to her face. She didn't want to believe him capable of the charges against him. No matter how many times she sifted through the facts, her heart refused to believe what her head told her was true.\n\nFace grim with cold fury, he held her gaze for a moment before turning away. Her hand found its way to her naked finger, and the weight of a boulder settled in her chest.\n\nThe courtroom was stifling, and a blue haze of cigar smoke hung in the air. If only someone would open the windows. She fanned herself with her gloves, but that offered little relief.\n\nRikker gave her a fatherly pat on the arm. \"Hang on, Duffy,\" he whispered, as if guessing how very close she was to falling apart. \"It'll soon be over.\"\n\nThe trial would end and the jury would make its decision, but she knew it would never be over. Not completely. Not for her. Not as long as the memories remained.\n\nThe last one to take his place in one of the witness seats was Linc. She nudged Rikker's arm. \"What's he doing here?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Probably here to testify about the hundred-dollar bill he found.\"\n\nThe judge banged his gavel. \"Order in the court.\"\n\nA hush fell over the courtroom.\n\nThe judge eyed the prosecutor. \"You may call your first witness.\"\n\nThe prosecutor's name was Leonard Theodore Fassbender, an impressive name for a man who barely stood five feet tall in his stocking feet. But what he lacked in stature he made up for with a strong and vibrant voice.\n\n\"I call Miss Cartwright to the stand.\"\n\nStomach clenched, Maggie rose, squeezed past Rikker, and walked to the front of the room on shaky legs. Placing her right hand on the Bible, she raised her left hand and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. She sat and held her hands together on her lap.\n\nFassbender measured her for a long moment before he began. \"Would you please state your name and occupation for the court?\"\n\n\"My name is Miss Maggie Cartwright.\" She paused to clear her voice. \"I work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.\"\n\n\"In what capacity do you work for the agency?\"\n\n\"I'm an operative.\"\n\n\"And could you please tell the court how you came to be acquainted with Mr. Thomas?\"\n\nHer hands tightened in her lap. \"I answered his ad for a mail-order bride.\"\n\n\"Could you please tell the court why you did that?\"\n\nMaggie explained that it was her boss's idea. God, please let this be over soon. I just want to die.\n\n\"So you traveled here to meet with the defendant,\" Fassbender said. \"Is that correct?\"\n\nShe stole a glance at Garrett and was momentarily silenced by his stony-eyed expression.\n\n\"Is that correct, Miss Cartwright?\" Fassbender repeated, this time louder.\n\nShe lowered her lashes. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"For what purpose did you agree to become his fianc\u00e9e?\" he asked.\n\nShe looked up with great effort. \"To find the money stolen from the Whistle-Stop train robbery.\"\n\nCheeks blazing, she kept her focus on the prosecutor. The lies, the betrayal\u2014they were all part of her job. So why did she feel so ashamed? It was like watching her father hang all over again. Only this time it felt like she was the one who had done wrong.\n\n\"Are you telling this court that you never intended to marry the defendant?\"\n\n\"That's correct.\" She spoke in a suffocated whisper.\n\n\"I ask again, Miss Cartwright, if you ever intended to marry Mr. Thomas. Please speak up so the jury can hear your answer.\"\n\nShe swallowed the lump in her voice. \"That's correct. I... never intended to go through with the wedding.\"\n\nAunt Hetty gave an audible gasp, and a murmur rose from the spectators like a swarm of bees. The judge called for order.\n\nMr. Fassbender continued. \"What led you to believe that Mr. Thomas had the money that was stolen from the train?\"\n\nThe jurors hung on to her every word as she walked the court through Pinkerton's investigation and subsequent findings.\n\nDetermined to mine her testimony for all it was worth, Fassbender continued with the questions. He was good at what he did. Like a Shakespearean actor, he knew when to pause for effect and when to raise or lower his voice.\n\nFinally, the prosecutor turned his attention to the day she found the money in the children's tree house. He wasn't satisfied until every last detail of that awful day had been hammered out of her. By the time she was excused, she barely had enough strength left to stumble back to her seat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Chapter 32\n\nThe next witness to be called for the Territory was Linc. The boy looked scared to death as he took the witness stand. He didn't even know his right hand from his left, and the bailiff had to help him place the correct one on the Bible.\n\n\"State your name for the record.\"\n\n\"Linc Jones.\"\n\nNot only did the boy look scared, he looked vulnerable and seemed to shrink beneath the prosecutor's steady gaze. Feeling a surge of protectiveness toward him, Maggie clenched her hands together and pressed her lips tight.\n\n\"Would you please tell the court how you happened to come across a hundred-dollar bill?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" He stared down at his hands. \"I was selling my newspapers in the barbershop like I do every day. I stepped outside and found the money right there in front of the door.\"\n\nLinc's story was consistent with what Toby and Elise had told her.\n\n\"And do you know how the money ended up in front of the barbershop?\"\n\nLinc glanced at Garrett and then at Katherine's brother sitting in the opposite side of the courtroom. \"I\u2014I do,\" he stammered.\n\nMaggie sat forward and noticed Cotton do likewise. She frowned. Why would he show so much interest in Linc's testimony? It made no sense unless\u2014 She coughed in an effort to capture Linc's attention, and when that failed to work she jumped to her feet. This time he looked straight at her. She rubbed her nose before taking her seat again. The boy's nose didn't turn blue, but his face blazed red enough to hide his freckles.\n\nRikker leaned sideways. \"What was that about?\" he muttered beneath his breath.\n\n\"I'll tell you later,\" she whispered.\n\nThe prosecutor repeated his question. \"Would you kindly tell the court how the money happened to appear in front of the barbershop?\"\n\nLinc glanced at Maggie. \"I\u2014I don't know.\"\n\n\"What!?\"\n\nThe prosecutor's outburst made Linc jump, and murmured voices filled the courtroom.\n\n\"Order!\" the judge bellowed.\n\nFassbender followed his outburst with an apology to the judge. He straightened his bow tie, cleared his throat, and stepped up to the witness stand. \"You are under oath to tell the truth,\" he said in a quieter, though no less emphatic, voice.\n\nLinc glanced at Maggie, and again she rubbed her nose. \"I am telling the truth, sir. I found the money and don't know who dropped it. Honest.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "During the afternoon break, Maggie stepped outside to get some air. Rikker followed her from the courtroom but had since disappeared.\n\nIt was hot and the air still, but the smell of heated soil was a welcome change from the airless, smoke-filled courtroom.\n\nAnxious to talk to Linc, she caught him by the arm as he emerged from the building.\n\n\"We need to talk,\" she said, pulling him aside.\n\nLinc's face paled. \"I didn't tell no lie, honest.\"\n\n\"No, but you were thinking about it.\"\n\nLinc worried her. In the past, he'd had to steal and lie to survive. Thanks to Garrett's generosity, Linc and his grandmother now had plenty of food and clothing. But behavior begun from necessity could easily escalate into a lifetime habit of illegal activities.\n\n\"How much did Cotton pay you to lie?\" It was a guess on her part, but the look on Linc's face told her she was right.\n\n\"He didn't pay me nothing.\"\n\n\"But he was going to.\" When he didn't deny it, she continued. \"What did he want you to say?\"\n\n\"Nothing. He didn't want me to say nothing.\" And with that, Linc took off running.\n\nShe watched him go with a sense of sadness. As soon as the trial was over she would leave town. So there really was nothing more she could do for Linc. Couldn't do much for Elise and Toby, either.\n\nShe turned with a sigh and was just about to reenter the courthouse when she was accosted by Aunt Hetty.\n\n\"You claim to be a Pinkerton detective.\" The old woman stabbed the ground with her cane and her eyes glittered. \"Prove it.\"\n\nMaggie pulled her tin shield out of her waistband and held it up.\n\nAunt Hetty discounted her badge with a shake of her head. \"That tells me nothing.\"\n\n\"Then what will?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"Proving my nephew innocent!\"\n\nSighing, Maggie repinned the shield to her waistband. \"The evidence is stacked against him. The money\u2014\"\n\n\"Anyone could have put it there. It's not like the barn was under lock and key.\"\n\n\"But that would make no sense. Why would anyone hide the money in the tree house and forget about it?\"\n\nAunt Hetty sniffed. \"Why would Garrett? He would never do anything to bring harm to his children. And that includes exposing them to stolen money.\"\n\nShe couldn't blame Aunt Hetty for not wanting to believe Garrett guilty. She was having a hard time believing it herself. And what she said about the children was right on target. It made no sense that he would hide the stolen cache in the playhouse. He had to have known that the satchel would be irresistible to a curious mind like Toby's.\n\n\"I guess we just have to hope the truth comes out in the trial,\" she said vaguely, her thoughts still on the playhouse.\n\n\"You know as well as I that the jury has already made up their minds, and it has nothing to do with truth.\"\n\n\"Aunt Hetty\u2014\"\n\n\"Do you know what Garrett told me after he was released from that awful prison? He said the one good thing that came out of his stay at Andersonville was that it kept him off the battlefield. That's how much he hated the thought of killing. Do you honestly think him capable of killing that guard in cold blood?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head. \"No, I don't think that\u2014\"\n\n\"How much do you charge?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I want to hire you to prove Garrett's innocence. How much do you charge?\"\n\n\"I can't take your money.\"\n\nAunt Hetty's eyes sharpened. \"Can't or won't?\"\n\n\"There's nothing I can do,\" Maggie said.\n\nAunt Hetty studied her. \"Are you absolutely one hundred percent certain of Garrett's guilt?\" She waited for an answer, and when none came, nodded. \"That's what I thought.\"\n\nWithout another word, she ambled away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Garrett's defense began the following day. A tall, thin man with a sweeping mustache, attorney Robert King had done a great job in rounding up people willing to testify on Garrett's character.\n\nCustomers testified that he was a fair and reasonable businessman.\n\nPanhandle took the stand without removing his ever-present pompadour cap. With every question put to him by the defense, he blinked like someone who just woke from a long slumber or stepped out of a cave.\n\n\"Yessir,\" he said. \"Mr. Thomas is a good employer and pays my salary on time. And nope, he never overworked me. No, sir, never did.\"\n\nNext to take the stand was Miss Nancy Riden, the children's teacher. She testified that Garrett was a caring parent who always saw that his children arrived for class on time and turned in their assignments.\n\nA long line of witnesses followed, all testifying to Garrett's good character.\n\nJust before noon, Aunt Hetty was called to the stand. She walked up the aisle with her cane and took her place in front of the court. \"My nephew is innocent of all charges lodged against him,\" she announced.\n\nThe judge's scowl deepened. \"You can't say anything until you've been sworn in.\"\n\n\"Then hurry up and do it,\" she ordered. \"It's nearly time for my medicine.\"\n\nThe clerk hurried to her side with the Bible. \"Raise your right hand...\"\n\nAfter Aunt Hetty had been sworn in, she immediately restated her earlier contention.\n\n\"You're here to answer questions, not give your personal opinion,\" the judge said.\n\n\"That's not my personal opinion,\" Aunt Hetty argued. \"That's the gospel truth.\"\n\nAunt Hetty spent more time arguing with the judge than she spent answering questions. Apparently thinking she was doing his client more harm than good, Garrett's attorney quickly dismissed her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "That night, Maggie sat with Rikker in the hotel dining room. It was their custom to go over every bit of testimony at the end of each day.\n\n\"I give up,\" he said in answer to her question. \"Why would Cotton pay Linc to lie on the witness stand?\"\n\nMaggie set her fork down and reached for the napkin on her lap. Her run-in with Aunt Hetty had bothered her more than she cared to admit, and she'd thought about it ever since. Was she a hundred percent certain of Garrett's guilt? Not by a long shot.\n\n\"You're not helping,\" she said.\n\n\"And you're letting your feelings color your judgment.\"\n\nShe dabbed her mouth. \"If that's true, I'm only doing what you taught me to do.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Do you remember when we were shadowing Jason Wells?\" Wells was suspected of being the notorious Black Hooded bank robber. \"Everything indicated he was about to rob the St. Louis Bank.\"\n\n\"I remember. We had all our men in place to nab him when he did, but you were certain it was a trick.\"\n\nShe nodded. Finding that map in his hotel room had seemed a tad too convenient. \"When I came to you with my concerns, do you remember what you said?\" He shrugged, and she continued. \"You said, 'follow your instincts.'\"\n\n\"Which was probably the last time you took my advice,\" he said.\n\nThat wasn't true, but she let the comment pass. \"Because of your good counsel, we caught him trying to rob a bank in the next town.\"\n\nHe pushed his plate away. \"All right, you made your point. What's on your mind? And it better not involve my wearing a dress.\"\n\nShe laughed. Rikker still hadn't recovered from having to disguise himself as a woman to infiltrate a group of female outlaws.\n\nShe leaned forward. \"I need to see Garrett. I want to talk to him.\"\n\n\"Then talk to him.\"\n\n\"I can't. The sheriff won't allow visitors.\" Summerhay was up for reelection and wasn't happy that two Pinkerton detectives\u2014one a woman and the other a man in his fifties\u2014were credited with solving the Whistle-Stop train robbery.\n\n\"Only his lawyer can see him.\"\n\n\"So what do you plan to do? Disguise yourself as one of his legal mouthpieces?\"\n\n\"Not exactly.\"\n\nRikker mopped the last of the gravy up with a piece of bread. \"Please don't tell me you're going to break into the jailhouse.\"\n\n\"Not me. You.\"\n\nHe groaned. \"That's what I was afraid of.\"\n\n\"It won't be that hard. And just think, you won't even have to wear a dress.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "Chapter 33\n\nIt was almost midnight when Maggie and Rikker walked from the hotel to the sheriff's office. The saloons were in full swing on what the locals called Likker Row. The screech of fiddles kept up a steady whine in the distance, but the main part of town was quiet.\n\nA silent prayer fell from her lips. Even if Rikker managed to break in, there was no guarantee that Garrett would have anything to do with her.\n\nDirectly overhead, the crescent moon seemed to mock them with its yellow smile. A laughing moon Elise called it, and the memory made Maggie ache. How she missed those little pumpkins.\n\n\"Shh.\" Rikker paused in front of the door of the sheriff's office and pressed his finger to his mouth. \"I hear something.\"\n\nMaggie heard it, too. It sounded like a whole army of horses, all heading their way.\n\n\"Hurry!\"\n\nRikker reached into his pocket for a piece of wire. \"I am hurrying.\"\n\nThe sound of hooves grew louder, and Maggie glanced up the street. The horsemen were now in view.\n\nShe tugged on Rikker's sleeve. \"We better hide.\"\n\nTogether they dashed to the alley at the side of the building. Thinking the horsemen would continue down the street to Likker Row, Maggie was surprised when they stopped in front of the sheriff's office. She peered around the corner. The riders dismounted and tied their horses to the hitching post then stormed up the porch steps. There were five men in all.\n\n\"Looks like a lynch mob,\" Rikker whispered.\n\nIcy fear twisted her heart, and she reached for her weapon. \"What do we do? There're only two of us.\"\n\n\"On the outside chance they can count, we better keep that information to ourselves.\"\n\n\"They'll figure it out soon enough.\"\n\nRikker shrugged. \"I've got a plan.\"\n\n\"It doesn't involve fire, does it?\" Last year in Alabama, when she and Rikker were held captive by a couple of outlaws, he'd started a blaze in hopes of creating a diversion. It turned into a three-alarm fire, and they barely escaped with their lives.\n\n\"Don't worry. I'm all out of matches.\" Rikker pulled a knife from his boot. \"Keep me covered.\" Bent low, he moved stealthily toward the horses.\n\nGun in hand, Maggie cast a quick glance around the corner. The men crowding around the door were arguing among themselves and didn't appear to notice Rikker cutting their mounts loose.\n\nShe recognized the brown and white horse and frowned. Unless she was mistaken, that was Cotton's horse.\n\nShe chanced another peek at the knot of men, but it was too dark to pick out any one individual. If she was right about Cotton, that opened up a whole lot of new questions. He missed no chance to blame Garrett for his sister's death, but why take the law into his own hands? The chance of jurors ruling in Garrett's favor were slim if not altogether zero. That meant Garrett would face the gallows without any help from Cotton or anyone else. So why bother with a lynch party? Or bribing Linc to lie? It made no sense.\n\nRikker straightened and slapped a brown gelding on the rump. He then took cover behind a barrel. The horse let out a loud whinny and galloped away. One of the men yelled, but this only spooked the animals more. With a flip of their tails, the rest of the horses raced away, their pounding hooves churning up dust.\n\nThe men jumped off the porch and ran down the street shouting and cursing and waving their arms.\n\nMaggie slumped against the building with a sigh. She shuddered to think what might have happened to Garrett had she and Rikker not been there to stop them.\n\n\"Psst.\" Rikker motioned to her. \"Hurry, before they come back!\"\n\nMaggie slipped her weapon into her leg holster and joined him in front of the sheriff's office.\n\nRikker greeted her with a chuckle. \"Our friends did us a favor.\" He pushed the door open with the tip of a single finger and waved his arm in a gentlemanly manner. \"After you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "It was dark inside the sheriff's office and it took a moment for Maggie's eyes to adjust. \"Garrett?\"\n\nA movement in back made her hesitate.\n\n\"Maggie?\" A short silence followed before he spoke again, this time in a cold, hard voice. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"Talk to him,\" Rikker said, nudging her forward with a hand to her back. \"I'll stand guard.\"\n\nShe moved through the dark office until she reached the steel bars of Garrett's cell. A strong whiff of alcohol floated from the cell next to his, along with loud snores.\n\nA scraping sound preceded the flare of a match, and Garrett bent to light a candle in a candlestick holder on the cell floor. The wick flickered into a steady flame, spreading a circle of light around them.\n\nHe frowned in cold fury. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"We need to talk.\" She hoped her low, unsteady voice could be heard over the loud thumps of her fast-beating heart.\n\n\"I have nothing to say to you.\" His gaze bored into her like a dagger. \"I want you gone.\"\n\nAfter all that had happened, including her testimony in court, his anger was no more than she deserved, but it hurt. It hurt a lot.\n\n\"I'll go,\" she whispered. \"But not till you hear what I have to say.\" She tightened her hold to steady herself. \"I want to help.\"\n\n\"Help?\" His cruel laugh slashed through her. \"If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be here.\"\n\n\"If it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else.\" Once a person was unfortunate enough to land in Pinkerton's orbit, there was no escaping him or his detectives. The agency never slept, and neither did it give up.\n\n\"I wish to God it had been someone else,\" he said. \"Maybe then it wouldn't\u2014\" She heard his intake of breath.\n\nShe pulled away from the steel door and curled her hands into fists. If she had any chance of saving him, she must put her personal feelings aside. But it was hard\u2014harder than anything she'd ever done.\n\n\"Let me help you. If you're innocent\u2014\"\n\n\"If?\"\n\n\"It looks bad, Garrett.\" Her voice broke. \"Real bad.\"\n\nHe stared at her, his eyes too dark to read. \"Then why bother? You got what you came for. Your job is done.\"\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder. Rikker's large form outlined in the doorway renewed her courage. Turning back, she lowered her voice. \"I care because\u2014\" I love you. Startled by the thought that so easily came to mind, she hesitated. She couldn't say that; shouldn't even be thinking it. Aloud she said, \"The children\u2014\"\n\n\"The children?\" he said with a note of sarcasm. \"You weren't thinking of them when you wormed your way into my household under false pretenses!\"\n\n\"I know you're angry\u2014\"\n\n\"Angry doesn't begin to describe how I feel. You wore my ring. You wrote me letters. You...\" His voice shook with rage. \"How can I believe anything you say?\"\n\nShe swallowed, but the lump in her throat refused to budge. If only she could touch him, maybe he'd know she spoke the truth when she said she cared. But even as she longed for these things, something snapped inside.\n\n\"You want to know the truth?\" This time she didn't care who she woke. \"I'll tell you the truth. The day I found the money I planned on leaving town. I told Rikker I couldn't do it anymore. I could no longer lie to you.\"\n\n\"But you did lie!\" he retorted. \"Not only to me but to everyone.\"\n\nShe reached her hand through the bars touching him briefly on the arm. \"Please, Garrett. Your children need you.\" When he made no response she continued. \"You say you're innocent.\"\n\n\"I am innocent.\"\n\nShe withdrew her hand. \"If that's true, let me help you. I'm good at what I do. And Rikker\u2014Detective Greenwood\u2014is the best. If you really are innocent, you'll let us help you.\"\n\n\"Help me how?\" he asked sharply.\n\n\"I don't know how, but I'll find a way.\" And that meant having to think and act like a detective.\n\nTraining and experience had taught her the art of interrogation. Ninety percent of the time people will answer a direct question; not always truthfully, of course, but sometimes even a lie was revealing.\n\n\"First you have to tell me.\" It wasn't good enough to hear him declare his innocence; she needed it spelled out in clear and precise language. \"Did you do the things they say?\"\n\nHow could she in good conscience ask Rikker to put his career on the line if there was so much as a shadow of doubt that Garrett was guilty?\n\n\"Did you rob that train?\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nEncouraged by his quick, emphatic reply, she asked the next question. \"Did you kill the guard?\"\n\nHe thrust his hands through the bars and grabbed her around the waist. Barely able to control her gasp of surprise, she started to protest, but the words stuck in her throat. As if taking her silence for consent, he yanked her closer.\n\n\"Do you really think I did those things?\"\n\nHis ragged, hot breath on her cheek made her tremble\u2014not from fear, but from the overwhelming nearness of him. For a moment she didn't answer, but neither did she pull from his embrace.\n\n\"Do you?\" he demanded with a gentle shake.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"I don't!\"\n\nHis arms around her made it hard to breathe, let alone think, but she knew the moment the words left her mouth that she spoke the truth.\n\nShe longed to push away the lock of hair that fell across his forehead. Smooth away the frown. Touch his mouth with her fingers if not her lips. But something held her back. Perhaps it was pride. Maybe it was shame for the way she'd tricked him. Or simply fear of rejection.\n\nHis face blazed with sudden emotion, and with a groan, he let her go.\n\nHer senses whirled and her mind went blank.\n\nRikker's voice cut through the silence. \"Everything all right back there?\"\n\nReality hit her with a thud. \"Yes,\" she called over her shoulder and took a step away from the cell. She tried putting her thoughts in order as she had been trained to do.\n\n\"The train robbery occurred more than two years ago. In January. I have to ask, Garrett. Where were you on that day?\"\n\n\"That's a long time ago. How can I remember?\"\n\n\"It was a Sunday.\"\n\n\"The shop's closed on Sunday, so I guess I was home.\"\n\n\"Can you prove it?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Katherine\u2014\" He hesitated. \"She always took the children to church and\u2014\" He stopped and combed his fingers through his hair. \"No, I can't prove it. I guess this is my punishment for refusing to attend church.\"\n\n\"God doesn't work that way,\" she said. Silence stretched between them for a moment before she asked the next question. \"How do you think the money got into the tree house?\"\n\n\"Don't you think I've asked myself that question a dozen times since my arrest?\"\n\n\"This isn't helping. I need you to think!\"\n\n\"Anyone could have put it there,\" he retorted.\n\n\"Shh,\" Rikker cautioned from the doorway. \"You'll wake the dead.\"\n\nShe glanced at the cell next to Garrett's, but the loud snores confirmed that the drunk was still in a stupor.\n\n\"The children said the money was yours. Why would they say that?\"\n\n\"They think everything at the house that's not theirs is mine.\"\n\nThat made sense, so she moved to the next question. \"When's the last time you were in the tree house?\"\n\n\"The last time?\" He thought for a moment. \"Not since Katherine died. That was her project. She told me she always wanted a tree house as a child. She and the children took over the hayloft. It wasn't my favorite place. All that small furniture... The last time I was there I banged my head on a rafter.\"\n\nIt was hard to envision him in such a confined area. Even she had trouble sitting on the child-sized chairs.\n\nShe hesitated a moment before asking the next question. \"Do you think Katherine put the money there?\"\n\n\"Katherine?\" The surprise in his voice sounded genuine. \"Why would you think such a thing? She's been gone for two years.\"\n\n\"The money's been there for at least that long.\" Toby had said he didn't know how or when the money got there; he only knew it had been there for a long time.\n\n\"But that meant that she\u2014\" He shook his head. \"Katherine was an honest woman. A good Christian. She would never do such a thing.\" He paused. \"But\u2014\"\n\nShe stiffened. \"What? Tell me.\"\n\n\"Her brother insisted Katherine stored something for him. A satchel of personal papers. Deeds to some properties he owned. That's what we were arguing about that day in the shop. Even after all this time, he thinks I'm keeping it, whatever it is, from him. Maybe the satchel you found was his.\"\n\nShe felt a surge of hope. Could this be the breakthrough she'd been praying for? \"But why would he wait two years before trying to retrieve it?\"\n\n\"He didn't. He first approached me about it before the funeral. Even insisted on following me around the house while I did a search. Made me check the attic\u2014everything.\n\n\"He left town shortly after the funeral, and that was the last I heard from him until\u2014\"\n\n\"After the school fund-raiser.\" The timing always bothered her. She glanced at Rikker, who continued to pace back and forth on the porch watching for trouble.\n\n\"Who else had access to the hayloft?\"\n\n\"No one,\" he said. \"I mean, anyone could have climbed the ladder.\" He frowned. \"Do you suppose Katherine put it there?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe.\"\n\n\"But why hide it in the children's playhouse?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Was that why Katherine went outside on that dark, rainy night? To hide the satchel? \"Maybe she discovered the stolen money inside.\"\n\n\"But why hide it?\"\n\nIt was a good question for which she had no answer. Unless... Recalling the letter she found in the attic, something occurred to her. \"What if she found the money and knew it was stolen. Maybe she wanted to give her brother a chance to turn himself in.\" It would certainly explain the ultimatum she wrote. If Cotton didn't do what she asked, she would go to the sheriff herself.\n\nGarrett thought a moment. \"That sounds like something she might do. She was always trying to get her brother to do the right thing.\"\n\nMaggie felt a surge of hope. She was on the right track. She felt it in her bones. Of course, this left yet another disturbing question. What did any of this have to do with Katherine's death?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "While Rikker fiddled with the jailhouse lock, Maggie poked her head outside. Except for the distant screech of a fiddle, all was quiet.\n\n\"What if they come back?\" The thought turned her insides to ice. She had a real chance of getting to the truth and possibly saving Garrett, but she needed time.\n\nRikker gave the lock a sharp tap before answering. \"I'll stay here and keep watch till the sheriff arrives in the morning.\"\n\nShe patted him on the back. He was such a dear man, and she thanked God every day for bringing him into her life.\n\n\"Let me stay. You have to testify tomorrow, and you need your rest.\"\n\n\"You need your rest, too,\" he said. \"Now quit worrying and go.\"\n\nShe was anxious to run her latest theory by him, but he was already pushing her out the door. \"What about tomorrow night and the night after that?\"\n\n\"Let's get through this night and we'll worry about the rest later.\"\n\n\"Rikker\u2014\"\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nShe continued to argue, but he wouldn't take no for an answer. Finally she gave in and returned to the hotel\u2014for all the good it did her.\n\nInstead of using the few hours left till dawn for some much-needed sleep, she practically paced a hole in the carpet. Would Garrett ever forgive her? And what if she couldn't find the proof needed to save him?\n\nFalling to her knees, she prayed. The truth was out there somewhere, and with God's help, she would do everything possible to find it. As for Garrett... Please, God, help him to forgive me.\n\nWas she asking the impossible? Probably. Why should he forgive her? When had she ever shown forgiveness? No matter how hard she tried, she still felt bitter toward her father.\n\nBut that was the problem, wasn't it? She covered her face with her hands. It's what brought her to this time and place, and look what it got her. Her need to punish her father might well send an innocent man to his death.\n\nHer eyes flew open. Punish?\n\nThe thought set her back on her heels. Tracking down thieves and murderers was her way of making up to society for her father's crimes. Or at least that's what she had always told herself. But were her reasons really so noble?\n\nThe question weighed heavily on her mind as she sat at the desk to write a detailed report to headquarters.\n\nAllen Pinkerton demanded meticulous record-keeping. Reports had to be written in cryptic with indelible ink. She was required to give a full description of a suspect, including every known trait, both good and bad. Every relevant conversation had to be recorded verbatim and the time line accurate to the last minute.\n\nAllan often complained that some of his male operatives didn't put enough details into their reports. Brevity was not Maggie's problem, wordiness was. She never described eyes as merely blue or brown. It was always shades of cobalt (like Garrett's) or nut brown; azure or chocolate.\n\nTonight she described Cotton's eyes as gunmetal gray. Rikker said he had no prior record but there had to be something, and she hoped that a more detailed description would uncover something in the Pinkerton rogues gallery that had been previously overlooked." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Chapter 34\n\nMaggie rose just as a glimmer of light broke through the darkness. Yawning, she stretched her arms overhead, but her limbs felt heavy. No wonder. Disturbing dreams kept her twisting and turning during the short time spent in bed. It was all she could do to drag herself across the room to the washstand.\n\nFollowing her morning ablutions, she dressed and left the hotel. The streets were deserted as she hurried to the jailhouse. It promised to be another warm day, but even the glorious pink sunrise couldn't lift her spirits. Much to her relief, the sheriff's horse was hitched out front and all looked peaceful and quiet.\n\nSpotting Rikker as he left the sheriff's office, she picked up her pace and quickly fell in step by his side. \"Any problems?\"\n\nDespite his whiskered chin and mussed hair, he looked remarkably spry for such an early hour. \"None that can't be fixed with cackleberries, bacon, and some strong hot coffee.\"\n\n\"And Garrett? Is he\u2014?\"\n\n\"He's fine. Though neither one of us got any sleep with all that snoring in the next cell.\" He regarded her with a slanted look. \"You don't look like you got much sleep yourself.\"\n\n\"How could I? I kept worrying about you.\"\n\n\"You were worrying about Thomas.\"\n\n\"I was worried about you both. A man of your age\u2014\" Too late she bit her tongue. She could feel his hackles rise as they tended to do whenever the subject of age came up.\n\n\"I can do everything I could do as a young man,\" he said. \"I'd just rather not, is all.\"\n\nShe glanced at his profile. It was the first time he'd admitted to not wanting to do anything. He wouldn't admit it for the world, but he was obviously feeling his age. A detective's life was hard, even on the young.\n\nQuickly changing the subject, she said, \"I'd feel better if we could put Garrett under twenty-four-hour guard.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, there're just the two of us,\" he said. \"Let's hope for the best. The trial should soon be over.\"\n\nIf he was trying to make her feel better, he failed miserably. Punishment was swift in the West. Once a guilty verdict was announced, a short walk to the gallows quickly followed.\n\n\"Do you think we should wire headquarters for reinforcements?\" she asked.\n\nHe shook his head. \"It'll take too long for anyone to arrive.\" Rikker sounded as frustrated as she felt. \"Besides, the bank has its money. They're not likely to pay Pinkerton to keep investigating a case that appears to be solved. I'm afraid we're on our own.\"\n\n\"We know that two crooks robbed the train. What about the second one?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Like I said. The bank got its money back.\"\n\nShe swallowed her frustration. A man died in that robbery, and his family deserved justice. \"I have a theory.\"\n\n\"Of course, you do, Duffy.\" It was a joke between them; he always had a plan and she always had a theory.\n\n\"I'm pretty certain that Katherine placed the money in the tree house.\"\n\n\"Are we talking about Katherine, Thomas's wife?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I think that's why she was out in the storm the night she died. Cotton apparently asked his sister to hold on to something for him. A satchel... If it's the same one I found in the tree house, then there's no question that he's one of the thieves.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" He gave her a cockeyed look. \"Would you happen to have a theory as to how to prove it?\"\n\n\"Actually, I was hoping you'd come up with one of your brilliant plans.\"\n\n\"You know me. I can't think on an empty stomach.\"\n\n\"You better get some sleep,\" she said.\n\n\"I will. Just as soon as I catch a bite.\"\n\n\"I'll take tonight's shift.\"\n\n\"No, you won't,\" he said as if he expected that to be the final word.\n\nShe stopped mid-step and whirled about to face him, hands on her waist. \"I'm perfectly capable of keeping watch.\"\n\nHe studied her from beneath a crinkled brow. \"I don't doubt it for a moment, but I'm not capable of letting you. If you recall, there were five of them, none of whom looked like a choirboy.\"\n\nShe dropped her arms to her side. As much as she hated to admit it, Rikker was right. The only weapon she packed was a derringer\u2014a handy gun for protecting herself at close range, but hardly practical for holding back a mob.\n\n\"You can't keep staying up all night.\" She was pretty certain he was putting on a show for her benefit. Already he had gone above and beyond what friendship required. Staying up all night was one thing when you were in your twenties or thirties, but not at Rikker's age.\n\n\"What choice do I have? That lynch mob could come back.\"\n\nShe shuddered at the thought. \"I'm still confused about Cotton's motivation. Why try to hang a man who already has his neck in the loop? It makes no sense.\"\n\n\"Revenge seldom does.\"\n\n\"You think that's all there is to it? Revenge?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"He blames Thomas for keeping that money hidden.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" she said. \"Or maybe he's afraid Garrett will take the stand. He's the only one who can tie Cotton to that satchel.\" The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. \"When Linc refused to lie on the stand and say that Garrett dropped that hundred-dollar bill, Cotton must have panicked.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Rikker asked. \"How would Linc's lie have helped him?\"\n\n\"It wouldn't unless Garrett testified that the satchel was Cotton's. Linc's testimony would have placed the stolen money in Garrett's hand.\"\n\n\"Ah, so that's what the lynch mob was about. Keeping Garrett from testifying and implicating Cotton.\"\n\n\"What I don't understand is why he doesn't just leave town?\" she asked. \"Why stay around and take a chance on Garrett implicating him?\"\n\n\"I think I can answer that question,\" Rikker said. \"Katherine's father cut Cotton out of his will. Apparently he was disgusted that his son hadn't done anything constructive with his life. Katherine got everything, but she placed almost all of her inheritance into a trust for the children. So if something happened to Garrett and his aunt, Cotton would be the only living relative. That would make him the conservator.\"\n\nThe thought made her shudder. \"What do you bet the children would never see a penny of that money?\"\n\nThe implications sent a chill down her spine. It certainly explained why Cotton wanted to see Garrett dead. She didn't even want to think about what that might mean for Aunt Hetty.\n\nThey started walking again. The church steeple in the distance gave her an idea. \"Go ahead. I'll catch up with you later.\"\n\nShe quickened her step, and he called after her, \"Where are you going in such a hurry?\"\n\nShe waved her hand over her head and kept going. \"To solve the guard problem.\" And maybe even find a miracle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "The morning sun cast a ray of golden light onto the church steeple as she followed the winding footpath to the back of the church. She found Reverend Holly sprinkling flowers with a gray metal watering can. Even at this early hour he wore a bow tie.\n\nHe looked up when she approached.\n\n\"Ah, the lady detective,\" he said. \"What brings you here on this fine day that God has made?\"\n\n\"Garrett Thomas,\" she said.\n\nThe reverend shook his head. \"I've known Garrett for a long time. Can't believe he did the things they say.\"\n\n\"He didn't.\"\n\nHolly's eyebrows shot up. \"You sound pretty certain.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I am.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Today he was hatless, and his round bald spot shone like a newly minted penny. \"I can't tell you how upset I was when he stopped coming to church. I prayed that he would change his mind. When he showed up that Sunday, I thought God had answered my prayers. But he looked none too happy to see me yesterday when I visited him in jail. Said the only reason he came to church was to keep an eye on his son.\"\n\nThe memory of attending church with Garrett and the children felt like another knife to the heart. \"Did you know he had a bad experience with the church when he was in Andersonville prison?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I did know that.\" He heaved a heavy sigh. \"Funny thing about a war. It almost always changes a man's faith. Sometimes for the good, but not always.\" He tilted the can over a cluster of yellow flowers, and water poured from its spout. \"Never met a lady detective before.\" He looked up. \"It seems that you and I are in a similar business.\"\n\n\"How so?\"\n\n\"The Bible is filled with mystery, and it's up to me to help my flock unravel the clues. I guess that makes me a detective of sorts.\"\n\n\"Never thought about it that way.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Considering the nature of human beings, the biggest mystery is why God loves us so much.\"\n\n\"I often wonder that myself,\" she said. The kindly minister at the orphanage had told her that God even loved her father. She didn't believe it then, and she wasn't certain she believed it now. Why would God love a man so hateful when she, his daughter, could not?\n\n\"Why is God so mysterious?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'll answer that question with another.\" He moved over to water a scruffy-looking shrub with silvery leaves. \"What do you do after you solve a crime and all the questions have been answered to your satisfaction?\"\n\n\"Do?\" She frowned. \"I close the file and go on to the next case.\"\n\n\"You see? That's just it. If there were no mysteries in the Bible, we would close the book and go on to something else. Mysteries require answers, and that's what keeps us searching. God loves a seeker, and if we're diligent enough, He sometimes even rewards us with insight and understanding.\"\n\nMaggie flushed with guilt. She read her Bible faithfully but never really studied it, not like she studied her cases.\n\nHe set the watering can on a tree stump. \"So tell me, what are you seeking today?\"\n\n\"Help,\" she said. \"I'm seeking help.\" She explained the problem as quickly as possible.\n\nReverend Holly shook his head. \"A lynch mob, you say?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes, and we need people willing to stand guard at night. Do you think the church members will help?\"\n\n\"Miracles have been known to happen around here.\" His wink told her that he knew more than he'd let on about Toby and the moving cross. \"Who knows?\" He chuckled. \"Maybe we're in store for another.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Chapter 35\n\nThe morning routine at the jailhouse never varied. Sheriff Summerhay was a man of habit. He greeted his prisoners each day with a surly \"Good mornin',\" then sat at his desk, lit his stogie, and settled down to read the newspaper.\n\nSomeone from the hotel delivered breakfast, and the coffee was consistently weak, the eggs watery, and the bacon tasted like leather. It didn't matter. Garrett had tasted worse; a lot worse. At least he wasn't required to fight off vermin like he did at Andersonville.\n\nAfter breakfast the sheriff walked over to the cell as usual and ordered Garrett to sit on the cot with his hands in front of him. The trial didn't begin till nine, but the sheriff always walked him to court early, before the town awoke. An empty street made it easier to secure his prisoner.\n\nThe sheriff snapped a pair of handcuffs on Garrett's wrists.\n\nGarrett stared at the manacles, and his mind traveled back in time. All those months he'd been held captive in Andersonville, never once had he given up hope. Not even on the darkest of nights or grimmest of days. The determination to survive had burned in his chest like a torch.\n\nToday, it burned like acid.\n\nSomehow he had to prove his innocence. For Toby's sake; for Elise's. His children had lost their mother, and that had been tough enough. But to lose their father, too? God, don't let that happen.\n\nMaggie believed him, and that helped more than words could say. Yes, she'd lied to him. Yes, she'd forced herself into his house under false pretenses and had taken advantage of his trust.\n\nLogically he understood it was her job, but the less rational part of him could never forgive the lies and deception. Still, she had made him the happiest man alive\u2014at least for a short while.\n\nAfter Katherine died, he never thought he'd smile again, let alone love. Losing a loved one was the worst possible torture. He had never wanted to be that vulnerable again; to feel that much grief. That's why a mail-order bride had sounded like the perfect solution. The idea of picking out a wife based on certain requirements appealed to him.\n\nAll he'd wanted was someone to care for his children. That's all. Until meeting Maggie in person, he was willing to consider suggesting a marriage in name only, if that's what the lady wanted. But one look into those big blue eyes of hers and he was hooked.\n\nNot only did she steal her way into his home but also his heart. And there wasn't a blasted thing he could do about it.\n\nHe shook his head in disgust. In the name of Sam Hill, what was he doing? Dwelling on his feelings for Maggie was of no help. His testimony. That's what he needed to think about. Somehow he had to convince the jury he really was an innocent man.\n\nGod, what a mess! What must be going through Elise's and Toby's heads? He trusted Aunt Hetty to be tactful, but children always knew more than adults gave them credit for.\n\nHow could this have happened? Was Katherine involved in the train robbery? Katherine, the mother of his children? It wasn't hard to imagine her brother was involved, but not Katherine. True, she was anxious to leave the Territory; it was the one area they disagreed on, the one flaw in their marriage. But that didn't mean she was guilty of anything other than wanting a better education for her children.\n\nAnd perhaps even a misguided attempt to help her brother.\n\nThe sheriff nudged him, pulling him out of his reverie. \"Time to get a move on. Don't want to be late.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "Outside, the sun was just rising over the distant mountains, and it took a full moment on the porch for Garrett's eyes to adjust to the light. It was a two-block walk to the courthouse, but today something was different. Instead of the usual deserted street, a dozen or more people were gathered outside the sheriff's office.\n\nHe recognized most all of them. Even Wayne Peterson had turned up for his walk of shame. No doubt Peterson was enjoying the sight of him in handcuffs. Just like the rest of them\u2014including those he thought were his friends.\n\nSome, like Peter Fann, had purchased tinware from him. Others had been at church the day he attended with Maggie. A few were at the dance, and one he hadn't seen since Katherine's funeral.\n\nHis mind skipped backward to the day he was led to Andersonville as a prisoner of war. The jeering crowd called the prisoners vile names and flung mud and worse at them.\n\nHe shook the memory away, but the bitterness remained. \"Come to see a condemned man, did they?\" he muttered.\n\nThe sheriff gave him a look of disgust. \"You should be thanking these people.\"\n\n\"Thanking them? For what? Making a spectacle out of me?\"\n\n\"For trying to save your life.\"\n\nGarrett frowned. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\n\"These are all members of the church. They stood guard all night to make sure that no one tied a bow around your sorry neck before it's time.\"\n\nGarrett was stunned. \"They... they did that?\" Even Peterson? He couldn't believe it. All these years he had harbored ill feelings toward the church for its neglect of Andersonville prisoners. And now this?\n\n\"You were the enemy,\" Maggie had said when he tried to explain his aversion to the church.\n\nBut he was the enemy here, too. What else would you call a suspected killer and thief? Yet, here they were: the very church people he had accused of lacking Christian values based on experiences of that awful war. Here they were protecting him and probably even praying for him.\n\nNever had he felt more... what? Grateful? Humbled? Overwhelmed? He was all those things and so much more.\n\nMoisture filled his eyes. He'd failed as a husband, a Christian, a friend, and even a soldier. Yet with all his shortcomings and flaws, he'd expected perfection from the church. Perfection from others... Odd as it seemed, it felt like someone reached inside him and pulled out all the anger, bitterness, and rage that had resided there for far too long.\n\nHe raised his face to the clear blue sky. It had been a long time since he'd felt God's love, but he felt it now, and it burned brighter than the sun.\n\nThe sheriff held him by the arm as they walked down the steps. The church people moved back to give them room.\n\nNo one said a word as he walked by, and only a few acknowledged his nod of thanks with nods of their own. Peterson showed no response, but it didn't matter. His being there was enough.\n\nInstead of turning away from him as he had turned away from his church, all had put his safety and well-being above any personal feelings. That was more than he deserved, and by God, he intended to make it up to them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Aunt Hetty lowered her needlework and gazed up at Maggie. \"Why all these questions about Charlie Cotton?\" She narrowed her eyes. \"I thought you didn't want to work on Garrett's case.\"\n\n\"I'm just tying up loose ends.\" Maggie didn't want to raise Aunt Hetty's hopes. \"We have reason to believe that Cotton knew about the satchel of money.\" She kept her voice low. It was just the two of them in Aunt Hetty's cramped parlor, but the children were only a short distance away in the kitchen.\n\nAunt Hetty's eyes widened. \"You think he put the money in the tree house?\"\n\n\"Not Cotton. Katherine.\"\n\nThis time Aunt Hetty dropped her needlework altogether. \"Are you saying she stole the money?\"\n\n\"No, but I think her brother asked her to keep the satchel for him. She may not have known what was in it at first. When she found out, she hid it.\"\n\nThe lines in Aunt Hetty's face deepened. \"But why hide it in the tree house?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe she didn't want Garrett to find it. Or maybe she was afraid that her brother would search the house.\"\n\nAunt Hetty gave her a knowing look. \"You really care for him, don't you?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"For Garrett. You care for him.\"\n\nMaggie opened her mouth in denial but knew it would be no use. The harder she fought her feelings for Garrett, the more they persisted.\n\n\"Is it that obvious?\"\n\n\"I'd have to be blind to miss the way you look at him.\" After a moment she added, \"He cares for you, too. You know that, don't you?\"\n\nMaggie shook her head. \"He'll never forgive me for deceiving him.\"\n\nAunt Hetty scoffed. \"You'd be amazed what people can forgive if they put their minds to it. I even forgive that no-good, two-timing husband of mine,\" she said, sounding anything but forgiving. Belatedly, she added, \"May his soul rest in peace.\"\n\nMaggie bit her lower lip. There it was again, that old bugaboo: forgiveness. Okay, God, I get it. I get what You're trying to teach me. If only it wasn't so hard.\n\nAunt Hetty's shoulders drooped, and she suddenly looked her age. \"Garrett's a good man. I don't mean any disrespect to my poor dead sister, but I always thought of him as my son. I never was able to have children of my own. I don't know what I'd do if\u2014\"\n\nMaggie reached for Aunt Hetty's hand. \"We have to think positive and pray that the truth will come out.\"\n\nThe sound of Elise's voice drew her attention to the kitchen. \"I need to talk to the children. It's important. They might know something that will help their father.\" The chances were slim, but she didn't know where else to turn.\n\n\"I hope you're right.\" Aunt Hetty set her needlework on the table. Placing her hand on her back, she rose slowly from her seat and reached for her cane." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Elise looked up as they entered the kitchen, and a smile dimpled her cheeks.\n\n\"Miss Taylor!\" she squealed. She ran over to Maggie and wrapped her arms around her. \"Where's Papa?\"\n\n\"He can't come right now.\" For the children's sakes she hid her inner torment behind a bright smile\n\n\"That's 'cause he's in jail,\" Toby said without bothering to look up from the contraption he was building.\n\nAunt Hetty stopped fussing with the kettle on the stove. \"He never heard it from me.\"\n\nElise looked up with a worried frown. \"How come he's in jail?\"\n\nMaggie didn't want to overstep her boundaries, but neither did she want to ignore the question. \"Some people think that he put that money in your tree house. Maybe you can help me prove they're wrong.\"\n\nWhitewash must have heard her voice because he started to bark and scratch at the door.\n\nAfter Elise let him in, Maggie stooped to pet him.\n\nWhitewash greeted her with wagging tail and happy barks. Maggie couldn't help but smile. Crazy as it seemed, she had even grown fond of the fluffy white dog.\n\n\"I hope he didn't dig up your yard,\" she said.\n\n\"No, he's been a perfect gentleman,\" Aunt Hetty said, distracting the dog with a bone.\n\nMaggie led Elise back to the table. Toby was doing something with a pair of wagon springs. Hoping the wagon he'd raided wasn't Aunt Hetty's, she pulled out a chair and sat.\n\n\"Whitewash likes it here 'cause there's no boogeyman,\" Elise whispered.\n\n\"Oh, so that's the reason he's been so good,\" Maggie whispered back.\n\n\"Uh-huh.\"\n\nAnxious to get to the point of her visit, Maggie addressed both children.\" All right, now I need you to put on your thinking caps.\"\n\nToby stopped what he was doing and reached for his metal helmet.\n\nElise's mouth turned downward. \"I don't have a thinking cap.\"\n\n\"Oh dear.\" Maggie glanced around the kitchen. Spotting a saucepan that looked about the right size, she reached for it. She recognized it at once as Garrett's work, and the pan slipped from her hand. The clamor startled Whitewash, who ran under the table with his bone.\n\nShe bent over to retrieve it and quickly placed it upside down on Elise's head. \"There. How's that?\"\n\nElise rewarded her with a wide smile.\n\n\"All right, now I need you to think carefully.\" She paused until she had their attention. She planned to ask them if they had seen their uncle recently, and if so, where? But something Elise said stuck in her brain.\n\n\"Why do you suppose there's no boogeyman here?\" she asked. Didn't children usually take their imaginary friends, foes, and the like with them?\n\n\"He doesn't want Aunt Hetty to see him,\" Elise said. \"He doesn't want anyone to see him. That's why he only comes out at night.\"\n\nMaggie glanced under the table at Whitewash, and something clicked in the back of her mind. No holes. No boogeyman. Could there be a connection? Startled by the thought, she covered her mouth with her hand. What if the boogeyman was real?\n\n\"Tell me about him.\" She rested her hand on her lap and forced herself to breathe. \"What does he look like?\"\n\nElise wrinkled her nose. \"He looks like a giant and has big feet.\"\n\n\"How do you know he has big feet?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"All boogeymen have big feet,\" Elise assured her.\n\n\"Oh, I see.\"\n\n\"And he wears his hair like Aunt Hetty,\" Toby added.\n\nMaggie puzzled over this. \"You mean he wears his hair in a bun like this?\" Maggie turned her head so they could see the back of her head.\n\nElise shook her head. \"He wears it like that.\" She pointed to Aunt Hetty's topknot.\n\nIt was hard to know with Elise where reality ended and fantasy took hold. Toby was more realistic\u2014sometimes alarmingly so.\n\n\"Can you think of anything to add, Toby?\"\n\n\"Nope.\" He was more interested in the wagon springs than in discussing hairstyles.\n\n\"What about you, Elise? Anything else you can tell me about the boogeyman?\"\n\nElise shook her head, and the saucepan fell to the floor. She jumped off her chair to retrieve it and placed it back on her head.\n\nMaggie turned the pan so that the handle stuck out in back. Thinking the boogeyman was anything more than the children's imagination was crazy, but the thought persisted.\n\nShe directed her next question to Aunt Hetty. \"You said you hadn't noticed any holes in the backyard, is that right?\"\n\n\"Not a one. Why?\"\n\n\"Just asking.\"\n\nShe always wondered how such a little dog could do so much damage. Now another thought occurred to her: What if Whitewash hadn't dug those holes? What if it was Cotton or his partner looking for the long-lost money? Was that the mysterious boogeyman the children talked about?\n\nAunt Hetty set a cup and saucer in front of her. \"I don't know about you, but all this talk about a boogeyman is making me hungry. How about some tea and cookies?\"\n\nShe needed to be alone with her thoughts, but rushing off would be rude, and she didn't want to hurt Aunt Hetty's feelings. \"Thank you,\" she said.\n\nShe picked up the steaming china cup, but her hand was shaking so much she could hardly hold it steady. Had she inadvertently stumbled upon a clue? Or was she simply grasping at straws?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Chapter 36\n\nNo sooner did Maggie leave Aunt Hetty's than she raced to the jailhouse.\n\nAlready the gallows were being erected in the empty field behind Main Street. Each pound of the hammer felt like someone was driving a nail into Maggie's heart. What was wrong with these people? Couldn't they have waited until the verdict was read?\n\nThe sheriff greeted her with his usual \"No visitors.\"\n\n\"I'll only be a moment.\" She flashed her Pinkerton badge as she walked by his desk. She no longer had time to play his games.\n\nGarrett sat on his cot writing in his notebook. He looked up as she neared his cell and look surprised to see her. \"The children\u2014\"\n\n\"They're fine,\" she said.\n\n\"I was just writing them a letter.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"They'll like that.\" She wished now she'd thought to have the children write to him.\n\nHe set the notebook on the cot by his side. \"Anything?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe.\"\n\nHe rose to his feet and grabbed the bars. \"That sounds encouraging.\"\n\nShe stepped closer. Casting a look at the sheriff still at his desk glowering, she lowered her voice. \"How long have you had your dog?\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows. \"Whitewash? A couple of years. Why?\"\n\n\"Was he always a digger?\"\n\n\"Not so much as a puppy.\" He rubbed the back of his neck. \"Is that important?\"\n\n\"I don't know much about dogs, but for such a little fellow, he sure does a lot of digging.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"So what are you saying? And what does Whitewash have to do with my trial?\"\n\n\"I don't think he's responsible for all those holes at the back of your house.\"\n\n\"You think it's another animal doing the digging?\"\n\n\"That's exactly what I'm thinking,\" she said. \"An animal with two legs.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "At long last Garrett was called to testify. It's what he'd been waiting for. Now he could tell his side of the story, and by George, the jury better listen. He took his place on the witness stand, and his eyes immediately sought Maggie's.\n\nSitting forward in her seat as if to jump to his defense at the slightest provocation, she gave him an encouraging smile. He hated that even now\u2014even after knowing how she'd lied\u2014he still had feelings for her. It didn't seem possible, but it was true.\n\nHe pulled his gaze away, but only so he could concentrate on his testimony. His lawyer said it wasn't enough to speak the truth; he also had to sound convincing.\n\nHe answered his lawyer Mr. King's questions with a firm, clear voice. He looked at the jury as his lawyer had instructed, but he couldn't keep from glancing at Maggie, who sat so still he wondered if she were even breathing.\n\n\"Your witness,\" Mr. King said, taking his seat.\n\nMr. Fassbender rose and sauntered over to him. He had the same dogged expression as a certain hateful guard he remembered from Andersonville, and it was all Garrett could do to hide his dislike.\n\n\"Mr. Thomas, You testified that you hadn't been in the tree house since your wife died.\"\n\n\"That's correct.\"\n\n\"We heard testimony that you're a conscientious parent,\" Fassbender continued.\n\n\"I try to be,\" Garrett replied, not sure where the prosecutor was heading.\n\n\"Yet, you never bothered to check your children's tree house. Is that true?\"\n\n\"Objection,\" Mr. King said.\n\n\"Overruled.\" The judge turned to Garrett. \"You may answer the question.\"\n\nThe implication that he had somehow neglected his children galled him, but he swallowed his anger. \"I'm not sure what you mean by checking the tree house.\"\n\n\"Most conscientious parents would keep an eye on what their children were doing and make sure their play area was safe.\"\n\n\"It was safe,\" Garrett said. \"We made sure of that.\"\n\n\"Yet, you expect us to believe you never set foot in the place for two years. Not even after knowing what your son was capable of?\"\n\n\"My son?\"\n\n\"It's well known that your son can't be trusted. Not that long ago, he set his aunt's chicken coop on fire\u2014\"\n\nPaternal rage exploded inside Garrett, but before he could respond King had already jumped to his feet. \"Objection. Relevance.\"\n\nFassbender spun around to face the judge. \"Your honor, Mr. Thomas testified that he had no reason to check the children's tree house for safety purposes. I'm simply attempting to understand the logic behind Mr. Thomas's statement. His son set a coop on fire, and yet his father would have us believe that he trusted his son not to do damage to the barn.\"\n\nThe judge banged his gavel. \"Overruled.\"\n\nFassbender turned back to the witness stand, a smug look on his face. The man had no right to drag his son's name through the mud. No right at all.\n\n\"So, Mr. Thomas, would you please explain to the court why you never bothered checking your children's play area?\"\n\nGarrett inhaled. \"It was my wife's project, and going up there was too painful.\" He hated having to admit such a thing, especially in open court, but it was the truth.\n\n\"We've heard testimony that you are a man of honor.\" The change of subject surprised Garrett, but his relief was short lived. \"Yet you allowed Miss Cartwright to live under your roof without benefit of marriage. Do you think it would be safe to say that you're not quite as honorable as you'd like us to believe?\"\n\n\"Objection,\" King said.\n\n\"I'll withdraw the question,\" Fassbender said, but by then the damage had been done. The implication was that a man who had so little regard for a woman's reputation or his own children's safety wouldn't think twice about shooting a man and robbing a safe.\n\nAfter Fassbender finished his questions, King did his best to repair the damage and restore Garrett's credibility, but it was too late.\n\nThe judge banged his gavel. \"Court is recessed for the day. Closing arguments will begin tomorrow at nine.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "The day following closing arguments, Maggie waited in the lobby of the hotel for Rikker. He'd told her to meet him there, but already he was twenty minutes late. What was taking him so long? The verdict could come in at any minute. They had no time to lose.\n\nFinally he walked through the door and greeted her with a questioning look. \"Where is he?\"\n\nShe slanted her head toward the hotel restaurant where Cotton had been sitting for the last hour. \"Let's get to work.\"\n\nCotton was at his usual corner table reading a day-old newspaper. He looked up as they approached, coffee cup in hand. \"Case you haven't noticed, this table is taken.\"\n\n\"We noticed.\" Rikker pulled out a chair and sat. Maggie remained standing.\n\nCotton set his cup down and folded his newspaper. \"What do you want?\"\n\n\"We just want to ask a few friendly questions,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"And maybe a couple not so friendly,\" Rikker added.\n\nCotton looked from one to the other. \"I don't have to answer your questions, friendly or otherwise.\"\n\nRikker drove a fist into the palm of his hand. \"If you know what's good for you, you'll not only answer them but sing like a canary.\"\n\nCotton's mouth twisted into an ugly smile. \"Sorry, the only time this bird sings is for his supper.\"\n\nMaggie slapped her hands flat on the table and leaned forward. \"What were you doing at the jailhouse the other night?\"\n\n\"How'd you\u2014\" He broke off and glanced at Rikker. \"What makes you think I was there?\" He drew a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed his forehead.\n\nMaggie folded her arms across her chest. Well, what do you know? Cotton was sweating bullets. \"So you were there.\"\n\n\"I never said that.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"And why did you offer to pay Linc to lie on the stand?\"\n\n\"If the boy told you that, he's a blasted liar.\"\n\nElbows on the table, Rikker steepled his hand. \"Why are you so anxious to get rid of your former brother-in-law?\"\n\n\"Like I told her.\" He tossed a nod Maggie's way. \"I blame him for my sister's death.\"\n\nMaggie looked him straight in the eye. \"I think there's another reason. What do you think, partner?\"\n\nRikker shrugged. \"I think you're right.\"\n\n\"And what reason is th\u2014that?\" Cotton stammered.\n\n\"I think you're hoping that once Garrett is out of the picture, you'll find the rest of the money,\" she said.\n\nCotton stiffened, and his gaze went back and forth between the two of them. \"What money? Whatcha talking about?\"\n\n\"Oh dear.\" Maggie drew back and patted the bun at the nape of her head. \"I misspoke.\"\n\n\"Don't feel bad,\" Rikker said. \"He'd have found out sooner or later.\"\n\nCotton frowned. \"Found out what?\"\n\n\"That only half of the stolen money was recovered,\" Rikker said.\n\nIt was a lie, of course, but one Maggie hoped Cotton would fall for. It had been more than two years since the robbery. Maybe he was desperate enough to believe anything.\n\nRikker continued. \"That means thirty-five thousand dollars is still at large, and we have no idea where it is.\"\n\n\"Do you?\" Maggie asked. \"Do you know where the money is?\"\n\n\"I don't know anything about no money,\" Cotton said, and he sure in blazes didn't look happy about it.\n\n\"Just thought we'd ask.\" Rikker pushed to his feet. \"Meanwhile, stay away from the jail.\"\n\n\"And stay away from Linc,\" Maggie added.\n\nRikker hammered his palm once again before pivoting.\n\nMaggie and Rikker walked out of the restaurant together. She waited until they had left the hotel before speaking. \"Do you think we overplayed our hand?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\nShe gave him a playful punch on the arm. \"You always know how to make a girl feel good.\"\n\n\"I aim to please.\"\n\n\"So what's next?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'll keep my eye on Cotton. If he fell for our ploy, he's got to be thinking about that missing money and where it might be. With a little luck, he'll lead me to his partner in crime. Meanwhile, go to the stables and get yourself a fast horse. I'll meet you at Thomas's house. Unless I miss my guess, that's where Cotton will head.\"\n\nMaggie felt a surge of hope. Dear God, please help us to make this work.\n\nStill, she knew the odds were against them. So much depended on a plan that was a long shot at best. What if they were wrong about Cotton? What if his only interest in Garrett really was revenge for the death of his sister?\n\n\"If he shows up at the house,\" she said, thinking out loud, \"that doesn't prove a thing. He'll deny he's looking for the money. We need more. A confession.\"\n\nRikker chuckled. \"As you know, I've coaxed more confessions out of sinners than a Catholic priest. So quit your worrying and get ready. It could be a very long and interesting day.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "Chapter 37\n\nGarrett sat on his cot and prayed long and hard. Things looked bad, real bad. But he refused to give in to despair. Maggie said that hope was the anchor God sent down whenever it was needed. If he ever needed something to hold on to, it was now.\n\nThis was worse even than Andersonville. At least then he didn't have two children to worry about. What would become of them? God, if You can't save me, at least answer my prayers to save them.\n\nHe was so deep in his thoughts it took a moment before a familiar voice penetrated his brain. Not sure that he'd heard right, he looked up.\n\nThe last person Garrett expected to walk into the sheriff's office was his former brother-in-law\u2014not after the last angry words they'd exchanged. Maybe he came to apologize. Or simply to wish him well.\n\nThe thought left the instant Cotton pulled out a gun and pointed it straight at the sheriff.\n\n\"Put your hands up.\"\n\nSummerhay looked startled but did what he was told.\n\nStunned, Garrett couldn't believe what he saw. \"What are you doing with that gun?\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" Cotton hissed.\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"I said shut up!\" Cotton stared at the sheriff. \"Put your weapon on the desk,\" he ordered. \"Nice and easy.\"\n\nSheriff Summerhay pulled his gun out of the holster and laid it down.\n\n\"Unlock that empty cell. Now!\"\n\nThe sheriff rose from his chair and reached for the key ring on the hook. He hesitated, and Cotton jammed his gun into the lawman's back. \"I said unlock it.\"\n\nSummerhay fiddled with the keys before inserting one into the keyhole.\n\nCotton took the keys out of his hand. \"Step inside, and take it nice and easy.\" He waited for the sheriff to enter the cell and then slammed the steel door shut with a bang.\n\nGarrett's initial disbelief had faded into uneasiness. Was Cotton trying to help him escape? Was that it? It was hard to believe that his brother-in-law would do anything to help him. They had once been friends, but that was a long time ago.\n\nCotton's talent for wheeling and dealing had come in handy when the two of them were locked in the stockades. Once, Cotton had even tricked a guard into giving them matches one wintry night for a fire.\n\nPrisoners did everything they could to stay alive. They lied, they cheated, and they stole. Garrett did, too, but he hated it. He hated stealing clothes off dead men just to keep warm. He despised having to hide the bodies of men who died in the night just to claim the extra rations. But while he was often wracked with guilt and disgust, he never stopped asking for God's forgiveness. Far as he knew, Cotton felt no such compulsion.\n\n\"You do what you have to do,\" he'd said. That was his motto, even after the war.\n\nGarrett had given him a job in the shop, but he'd lasted for only a few weeks. During that short time, he stole money from the till, was surly with the customers, and took shortcuts that undermined the quality of the tinware.\n\nHe wasn't taking any shortcuts now. He made certain the sheriff was confined in one of the other cells before unlocking Garrett's.\n\nGarrett's mind scrambled. This wasn't the first time Cotton had helped him escape. The last time ended in the Georgia woods after they were chased down by hounds. Garrett had no reason to believe that this time would end any differently. Except perhaps to make him feel like a coward, and that's not how he wanted his children to remember him.\n\n\"Don't do this, Charlie.\"\n\nCotton lifted the barrel of his gun till it pointed straight at Garrett's head. \"Shut your trap.\"\n\nHe looked unbalanced. His eyes were too bright, almost wild looking, and his mouth twisted in an ugly line. Garrett stiffened as a terrifying thought came to the fore. His brother-in-law wasn't there in some misguided way to help him. He was out for one thing and one thing alone\u2014blood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "It took Maggie forever to rent a horse from the stables. No horses were available at first. Finally a gelding was returned, but the animal had thrown a shoe. While the farrier replaced it, Maggie practically paced a hole in the floor.\n\nAfter leaving the stables, she urged the horse along the dirt road at a fast gallop to Thomas's house. Rikker had told her to meet him in front of the hotel, but he never showed. Nor was he in his room.\n\nIf Cotton left town, Rikker would follow him. Maybe she would find them both at Garrett's house.\n\nHer gun was holstered around her waist for easy retrieval. Everyone in town now knew who she was; no need to hide her weapon.\n\nThe sun looked like a big orange ball, and a gentle breeze cooled her brow. A sudden unexpected bout of emotion assailed her. This was the same road she'd traveled to take the children back and forth to school. The same road they'd traveled to church. The same road she and Garrett had taken to the barn dance.\n\nThe stars had looked particularly bright that night and Garrett especially handsome. And, oh, how he could dance. She could almost feel his hand at her waist and his breath in her hair.\n\nShe shook her head and brushed away a tear. Oh no, you don't. You're not going there.\n\nToday could mean the difference between life and death for Garrett. It was no time to be distracted by painful memories or even painful regrets. She had a job to do.\n\nShe occupied her mind by going over the plan. If Cotton was already at the house, adjustments had to be made. If not, she was to hide her horse behind the barn. Her thoughts were interrupted by a movement ahead.\n\nWith a quick tug on the reins, she brought the horse to a halt. She rose from the saddle and craned her neck for a better look.\n\nDear God, no. Please don't let that be Patches. Unless her eyes were deceiving her, that meant that Toby\u2014\n\n\"Gid-up.\" With a flick of its neck, the gelding took off running, stretching his stride as she urged him on. Reaching the house, she slipped out of the saddle.\n\nIt was Patches all right, and the horse looked happy to see her. He swung his tail and nickered as she approached. He nudged her hand with his velvety nose looking for treats.\n\n\"Where's Toby, boy?\" And what was he doing here? No matter. She had to get him to leave, and there was no time to lose.\n\nFortunately, there was no sign of Cotton, but that didn't necessarily mean he wasn't there.\n\nShe tied the rented horse to the hitching post next to Patches and ran to the porch. The front door was locked. She raised her hand to knock but thought better of it. Never had she known Toby to close the door when entering or leaving the house. She doubted he would start now.\n\nShe pulled out her gun. Back pressed against the adobe, she ever so carefully peered through the front window. The house looked empty, but only the parlor and part of the kitchen were visible. She then noticed the scattered chessmen on the floor. The books pulled from the bookshelves. The chair cushions in disarray. Someone had searched the house.\n\nKeeping her head low, she jumped from the porch and ran to the side of the house. She peered into the children's bedroom. The drawers hung open and the mattresses had been pulled off the beds.\n\nThe shades were drawn in Garrett's room. That didn't necessarily mean anything, but it worried her.\n\nShe quietly tested the back door, but it was locked, too. Maybe Toby was in the barn or even the tree house. She measured the distance from the house. The barn couldn't be reached without being seen from the house, but she had to take the chance.\n\nNow, as always, she considered her options. Should she run in a random zigzag or straight line? The zigzag offered less chance of being shot or seriously shot, but running a straight line was faster. She glanced at the bedroom window. The shades were still drawn. Decision made, she ran a straight line to the barn.\n\nBack against the barn wall, she held her gun in front and swung forward into the open doorway. A local farmer had taken the livestock and chickens to his place, so the two horses in the barn spelled trouble.\n\nOne was Cotton's. She didn't recognize the other, but maybe it belonged to his partner.\n\nShe hoped Cotton's presence meant Rikker was somewhere nearby, lurking in the shadows. She hoped; she prayed\u2014Dear God, let it be true. She strained her ears. Cotton's horse snorted, but it was hard to hear much else over the thud-thud-thudding of her pounding heart. If anything should happen to Toby... And blast it, Rikker! Where are you? If he was on-site, he had to know that she was, too. Rikker was an expert in bird calls. So why hadn't he signaled her?\n\nShe strained her ears. Cotton's horse neighed softly, but now there was another sound as well. A soft scraping sound coming from\u2014\n\nShe looked up. Someone was in the tree house. Cotton?\n\nSince the loft had been boarded up, the only way to reach it was from outside.\n\nGun in hand, she peered out the door. Seeing no one, she slipped outside and raced to the ladder at the side of the barn. She glanced around. Still no sign of Rikker, or anyone else, for that matter.\n\nThe hay lift had stopped at the top. She stood at the bottom of the ladder and looked up. It could be a trap.\n\nDreading what she might or might not find in the children's playhouse, she holstered her weapon and grabbed hold of the ladder. Gulping, she lifted her foot onto the bottom rung and started upward." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "Chapter 38\n\nThe climb up to the hayloft seemed to take forever, though in reality it took only seconds. She paused on the ladder before reaching the top. The air was still and the quiet, almost eerie.\n\nThen she heard it again: a soft scraping sound. The hayloft opening was only about eight inches over her head. At that moment it appeared to be a monstrous mouth waiting to devour her.\n\nShe'd burst into her share of outlaw hideouts and other dangerous places through the years, but never on a ladder. She didn't even like heights.\n\nBiting her lower lip, she forced herself to concentrate. Hesitation could be deadly. A detective's best tool was the element of surprise. Holding on to the ladder with one hand, she pulled out her gun.\n\nIt was bright outside, and normally she would close her eyes for a full five minutes before entering a darker area. That's how long it took eyes to fully adjust, but today she couldn't afford such luxury. She needed to stay alert to her surroundings.\n\nShe closed her eyes for only a few seconds. Okay now, one, two, three...\n\nShe pushed up to the last rung in one swift movement and leaned into the window, gun first.\n\nToby looked up from his \"room,\" his eyes wide with surprise. \"Hello, Miss Taylor.\" He still called her by her assumed name.\n\nRelief flooded through her. Toby was safe and Cotton nowhere in sight. She holstered her gun and climbed through the window. In her haste, she tripped over a bale of hay.\n\nPicking herself up, she brushed off her skirt. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I came to check on the house and work on my mechanical horse.\"\n\n\"How long have you been here?\" Toby's inventions would be the death of him yet.\n\nHe shrugged. \"Not very long.\"\n\n\"Did you see anyone else?\"\n\n\"Nope. But someone messed up my things.\" He indicated the scattered tools on the floor.\n\n\"Okay, listen to me, Toby. This is important.\" She waited until she had the boy's full attention. \"Your uncle Charlie is not a very nice man. I'm afraid he might hurt us if we're not careful, so I need you to do exactly what I tell you to do. Understand?\"\n\nHis eyes widened as she spoke, and he nodded.\n\n\"I want you to stay here and not make a sound. Under no circumstances are you to leave until I tell you it's safe to do so.\"\n\nShe moved to the window and gasped. Either her eyes were playing tricks on her or Garrett just stepped out of the house. Cotton was behind him. She couldn't be certain, but it looked like he was holding a gun.\n\n\"Pa!\"\n\n\"Shh.\" She pulled Toby away from the window.\n\n\"You gotta do something,\" Toby whimpered, \"or he'll hurt Pa.\" He sounded close to tears.\n\n\"Okay, now listen to me.\" She pulled her hands away from his shoulders. \"If we're going to save your pa, we have to stay calm.\" She glimpsed outside again before ducking away from the window.\n\nConfound it, where was Rikker? Think. If she could just get close enough to Cotton, perhaps she could disarm or distract him in some way. A dozen different options ran through her mind, but none of them seemed adequate for the task.\n\nIf only there was a way of reaching the first floor without using the ladder outside.\n\nShe knocked on the wood partition with her fist. It sounded as solid as it looked, but it might be possible to pull a panel away. She just needed a crowbar.\n\nToby's tool cache revealed a saw and hammer but no crowbar. She stepped on something: Toby's slingshot.\n\nShe rushed to the window again, careful not to expose herself. Cotton had a gun all right; no question. But what was Garrett doing with a shovel?\n\nAs if reading her mind, Toby said, \"Uncle Charlie is making Pa dig a grave.\"\n\nIt was a chilling thought.\n\nShe considered the area below, estimating distances and possible covers. Sneaking up on Cotton wouldn't be easy, but neither would it be impossible.\n\nShe reached for the slingshot on the floor and shoved it into Toby's hands.\n\n\"Don't let your uncle come up that ladder. Do you understand what I'm saying? If he tries, use your slingshot.\"\n\nDear God, she was asking a boy to bring down a giant with a slingshot. Not that it hadn't been done before, but still... Toby stared down at the slingshot in his hands.\n\nShe squeezed his shoulder. \"I'm counting on you, pumpkin.\"\n\nIf Rikker knew what she was planning, he would have a fit. He never liked a plan with less than a fifty percent chance of success. She preferred closer to seventy-five. She gave this one a ten.\n\nThe hardest part would be climbing down the ladder. Even if she reached the ground safely, she would be exposed for a good fifteen or twenty feet before reaching the privy.\n\nFive. She gave her plan a five." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "She upgraded her plan to an eight upon reaching the ground unseen. Cotton's back was still turned and Garrett was still digging. Cotton shouted something, but she couldn't hear what he said.\n\nOn the count of three, she raced a straight line and dived behind the privy. Peering around the stone facade, she took several deep breaths to calm her nerves. So far, so good.\n\nHad Garrett spotted her? It was hard to know. He was half turned away from her, so it was possible. She glanced back at the barn window. Fortunately the sun slanted off the roof, making it difficult to see the loft window clearly. If she couldn't see Toby, then neither could Cotton.\n\nWas that a bird call? She strained her ears but couldn't be sure. If it was Rikker, where was he? Behind the barn? The house? Where?\n\nShe pulled out her gun but decided to give Rikker another minute or two to make his move.\n\nGarrett said something, and Cotton inched closer. Garrett swung his shovel, hitting Cotton on the chest. Cotton's gun flew out of his hands and landed in the newly dug hole.\n\nSurprised by the sudden turn of events, Maggie left her hiding place and ran toward the battling men." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "Garrett swung the shovel again, but this time Cotton was ready. He dodged, and the spade hit the ground. Before Garrett could recover, Cotton barreled into him headfirst, and the two fell.\n\n\"Stop!\" she yelled, gun aimed.\n\nCotton glanced up, his mouth twisted, and she advanced forward. He rolled away from Garrett, jumped to his feet, and ran. She fired and missed.\n\nHoping Rikker would take care of Cotton, she advanced toward Garrett, dropping by his side, knees first. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nHe squinted at her. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Looks like I'm the one saving you this time. Can you get up?\"\n\n\"I think so.\" He was winded but not seriously injured. Hand on his jaw, he groaned then struggled to sit upright.\n\n\"Take it easy.\" She holstered her gun and pulled a clean handkerchief from her sleeve. \"How did you get out of jail?\" she asked, dabbing his forehead.\n\n\"Cotton. He has some crazy idea that I know where some money is hidden.\"\n\nA surge of guilt rushed through her. The plan she and Rikker had cooked up put Garrett's and Toby's lives in danger. She had underestimated Cotton, but she wouldn't make that mistake again.\n\n\"Thank God you're all right. Can you stand?\"\n\n\"Hold it right there.\" It was Cotton again, and this time he had a shotgun. \"Drop your gun.\"\n\nWhen she didn't move, he repeated the order, this time louder. \"I said drop it!\"\n\nShe laid her weapon on the ground. \"You're not going to get away with this, Cotton.\" She spoke louder than necessary for her partner's benefit. If Rikker was anywhere in the vicinity, now was the time for him to show his face.\n\n\"I've done all right so far,\" Cotton said. \"Just tell me where the money is, and we can all get along.\"\n\n\"There isn't any money. We found all of it.\"\n\n\"You said\u2014\" His eyes glittered. \"You tricked me.\" He leveled his gun. \"I don't like to be tricked.\"\n\nShe had to keep him talking. \"It's over, Cotton. We know you and your partner robbed the train.\"\n\n\"My partner?\" He narrowed his eyes.\n\n\"Yes, the one Detective Greenwood is interviewing as we speak.\"\n\nHis smirk turned into an ugly grin. \"Greenwood's dead.\"\n\nAir rushed from her lungs. Rikker's dead? God, no. Please don't let it be true. But it would certainly explain Rikker's absence. Only from years of training and experience was she able to put her emotions aside and focus. Garrett's and Toby's lives\u2014and her own\u2014depended on keeping her wits and thinking clearly.\n\n\"You killed him,\" she said, her steady voice belying the devastation she felt. \"Just like you killed your sister.\"\n\nShe felt Garrett stiffen by her side, but it was Cotton who commanded her attention.\n\nSurprise crossed his face. \"You think I killed my sister? Why would I do a thing like that?\"\n\n\"Maybe because she'd hidden the money from you.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I didn't know that until after her accident. The town was swarming with US marshals, and I didn't want to keep the money at the boardinghouse. I told my sister someone kept going through my room. She agreed to let me store my things at her house until I made other arrangements.\"\n\n\"Other arrangements meaning to leave town,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, but I thought it would look suspicious if I left right away.\"\n\n\"What was Katherine doing outside that night?\" Garrett demanded, his face marked with loathing.\n\n\"How am I supposed to know? All I knew was that she was dead and the money was gone. I thought\u2014\"\n\n\"What did you think?\" Maggie asked. He didn't answer; he didn't have to. \"You thought Garrett had killed her and hidden the money.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter what I thought.\"\n\n\"It matters to me!\" Garrett snapped, his voice as hard as his face.\n\nShe could feel his tension build, and she didn't want him doing anything foolish. \"No one killed Katherine,\" she said, gently. \"It was an accident.\"\n\nGarrett's head spun toward her. \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Yes, how do you know that?\" Cotton repeated.\n\n\"You're the only one who knew she had the money. So unless you came back that night\u2014\"\n\n\"I didn't.\"\n\nSomehow Maggie believed him. \"I think Katherine discovered what was in the satchel and didn't want it in the house with the children. Or maybe she was afraid you'd come back for it before she had a chance to turn it over to the sheriff.\"\n\n\"She wouldn't do that. I was family. She loved me.\" His face turned red, and his eyes took on a strange, wild look.\n\nWith her peripheral vision, Maggie checked the position of the gun at her feet. She would have preferred Cotton's Colt, but that was at the bottom of the hole. Her derringer would have to do. If only she could find a way to distract him.\n\n\"Enough talk,\" Cotton said. He held the shotgun straight out with his finger on the trigger.\n\nSomething whizzed by Maggie's head and hit Cotton square on the chest\u2014a rock. He jerked back and his arm shot upward, followed by a blast.\n\nMaggie dived for the gun, but Garrett's hand got there first. Before either of them could pick it up, they were staring down the muzzle of Cotton's shotgun." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "Chapter 39\n\nThe rope cut into Maggie's wrists and ankles. Seated on a chair back-to-back with Garrett, she glanced around the parlor looking for something\u2014anything\u2014that could be used to escape.\n\nWiggling her body in an effort to loosen the cords brought an immediate protest from Garrett.\n\n\"Ow! That hurts,\" he grated over his shoulder. \"Can't you keep still? It's like being tied to a bronco. What are you doing?\"\n\nMaggie clenched her teeth. \"I'm exercising my God-given right to escape.\"\n\n\"You think you're going to break through these ropes?\" Garrett asked.\n\n\"Did last time.\"\n\n\"Last...? How many times have you been tied up?\"\n\n\"This is only my third time,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Third!\"\n\n\"I know it seems like a lot.\"\n\n\"Drat, Maggie! For the average person, once would be a lot.\"\n\nCotton made her tie up Garrett first, and that was a blessing. It allowed her to plant her metal Pinkerton badge between her palms before Cotton got around to her. It was just a matter of twisting her hands until she was able to cut through the rope with the badge's sharp edge. Unfortunately, Cotton had tied her in such a way that this was easier said than done.\n\n\"Escaping isn't usually so hard.\" She spoke through gritted teeth. Talking helped her stay focused. \"Providing you remember to expand your muscles while being tied up. It also helps if the rope is old. Even Samson said he would be weakened by a new rope.\"\n\n\"Samson?\"\n\n\"Yeah, you know, the hairy man in the Bible.\" In an effort to work her badge in position, she twisted her wrists until tears sprang into her eyes.\n\n\"Yeah, well, ole hairy didn't have to contend with a former Andersonville prisoner.\"\n\nHolding the badge between two fingers she sawed back and forth. She could hardly move her hands, so she didn't expect to see much progress. At least not for a while.\n\n\"What does that have to do with anything?\"\n\n\"We learned a trick or two from our rebel guards about tying people up.\"\n\n\"Rikker was the real expert. I just wish he was here.\" Just thinking of her partner filled her with such pain she could hardly breathe. \"He always knew how to escape.\"\n\nShe felt Garrett jerk and heard his intake of breath. \"Maggie, I'm sorry about Greenwood.\"\n\nShe blinked away the tears, and anger ripped through her. This was supposed to be a simple, routine job. Now she'd lost the best partner and friend she'd ever had and ever hoped to have.\n\nShe shook her head. Mustn't think about that. There would be time enough later to grieve. Right now she had to concentrate on the task at hand.\n\n\"Of all the women I could have chosen as a bride,\" Garrett said, as if talking to himself.\n\nHer hand stilled. \"How many women answered your ad?\"\n\n\"I don't know. A few dozen.\"\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"Why did you pick me?\"\n\n\"I liked your handwriting,\" he said, his voice hoarse.\n\nFor some reason his answer affected her deeply. The principal had dictated each carefully chosen word, but it was her own hand that caught Garrett's attention.\n\nGripping the shield until her fingers ached, she continued sawing. \"How'd Cotton spring you from jail?\"\n\n\"With a gun. He kept muttering something about money. I didn't know what he was talking about. But then he saw where the earth had been turned over and was convinced that I had buried it. Where do you suppose he got a cockamamie idea like that?\"\n\nShe blew out her breath. \"I'm afraid he got it from Rikker and me. We were trying to force his hand.\"\n\n\"You forced his hand all right.\"\n\n\"Why don't you just come out and say it? You blame me for everything that happened.\" She certainly blamed herself.\n\n\"I'm just as much to blame,\" he said quietly.\n\nShe stilled. \"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"When things seem too good to be true, they usually are. And you\u2014\"\n\nHer vision blurred with tears, but still she resumed sawing. She'd played her part well\u2014too well. And they both fell into the trap she'd set. Oh, God, where are You? Why do You feel so far away? Do You blame me, too?\n\nShe paused to rest her sore fingers. \"I never meant for any of this to happen,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Yeah, you did. You wanted to prove that I did the things they say. Prove me guilty.\"\n\n\"You're wrong.\" She tightened her grip on her shield. \"From the moment I set eyes on you, I wanted to prove you innocent.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because...\" There were so many reasons why, it was impossible to choose just one. Never had she met a man quite like him. Not only was he the kindest man she'd ever known, her body fairly tingled whenever he walked into the room, and he was the reason she smiled in her dreams.\n\n\"Because of the children,\" she said aloud. Admitting the real reason would only result in more rejection. Forcing herself to breathe beneath the confines of the rope, she suddenly remembered something. Toby!\n\nPanicky now, she frantically sawed, but with little progress. At this rate it could take all night.\n\nShe felt something snap and, looking over her shoulder, saw Garrett rise out of his chair.\n\nHer mouth fell open. \"How'd you do that? How did you get free?\"\n\n\"You'd be amazed what you can learn in prison if you put your mind to it.\" He lifted a stocking foot. \"Fortunately, Cotton forgot to remove my shoes before he tied me up.\" Garrett wore the easy slip-off type, an advantage over her high-button boots, and had slipped his feet right out of his shoes and then the ropes.\n\n\"Speaking of shoes, would you mind reaching into my boot for my knife?\"\n\nHe dropped on one knee in front of her and reached into the shaft of her boot. The heat of his fingers reached all the way down to her toes. Knife in hand, his eyes held hers for a moment before cutting her free.\n\n\"Now what?\" he asked.\n\nShe rubbed her sore wrists, but before she could answer, she heard something. Someone was coming. Garrett heard it, too, and he held a finger to his mouth.\n\nEver so quietly she rose from the chair and grabbed the poker from the fireplace. Thus armed, she flung herself against the wall separating the parlor from the kitchen and held her breath." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "Chapter 40\n\nToby burst out of the kitchen. \"Pa!\" He cleared the distance in an instant and threw himself in his father's arms.\n\nMore footsteps and a voice entered the room first. \"You can put the weapon down, Duffy.\"\n\nShe dropped the poker. \"Rikker?\"\n\nHe stepped through the doorway and grinned. \"The one and only.\"\n\nWithout thinking, she flung her arms around his grizzly neck.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Rikker said, looking embarrassed. She pulled away, blubbering like a kid whose candy had been stolen.\n\nRikker handed her a handkerchief. \"Sorry to be late for the party,\" he said. \"I would have gotten here sooner, but I was detained.\"\n\nShe wiped her tears away. \"Cotton said you were dead.\"\n\nHe raised a bushy eyebrow. \"You didn't fall for that old trick, did you?\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" she said with a sniffle. She should have known. Telling a hostage a loved one was dead was one way to ensure compliance. \"So where were you?\"\n\n\"Visiting the stars,\" he said. \"Someone hit me over the head, but fortunately your friend Linc found me. I'd have gotten here sooner, but I met Cotton coming the other way.\"\n\n\"You met Cotton?\" Garrett asked.\n\n\"I did, and I gave him two choices. Either turn himself in like a gentleman or die like a coward. Unfortunately, the man had no sense of pride.\"\n\n\"This generation of criminals never does,\" she said.\n\nAccording to Pinkerton files, no crime was more hazardous than holdup robberies; two-thirds of those engaging in such crimes died with their boots on. Too bad Cotton failed to beat the odds. Now they might never learn the name of his partner.\n\n\"Looks like he took a bit of you with him,\" she said. Rikker had a nasty-looking lump on his forehead.\n\nHe touched his wound and then wiped the blood off his fingertips with a handkerchief. \"I owe this to a certain young man who decided to give David from the Bible a bit of competition.\"\n\nGarrett stared over his son's head. \"Toby did that?\"\n\nToby pulled out of his father's arms. \"I heard him coming up the ladder, and I thought he was Uncle Charlie.\"\n\n\"You did good, Toby,\" Maggie said. \"Especially when you tried to save us from your uncle.\" The rock had barely missed Maggie's head, but it hit Cotton dead center on the chest.\n\nHand on his son's shoulder, Garrett stared down at him. \"We have you to thank for that?\"\n\nToby nodded, and Garrett broke into a grin. \"Well, now. What do you know?\" He hugged his son again.\n\n\"Do you have to go back to jail, Pa?\"\n\n\"I don't know, son.\" He leveled a look straight at Maggie.\n\n\"Do I?\" She glanced at Rikker. \"I'm afraid that's up to the judge.\"\n\nToby pulled out of his father's arms and grinned at her. \"Instead of going to the moon, I'm gonna be a detective just like you and Mr. Greenwood.\"\n\nMaggie smiled and ruffled his hair. \"That sounds like a good plan,\" she said. A hundred percent plan." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "Chapter 41\n\nThe next day Maggie took care of a dozen details. A full report had to be sent to Pinkerton headquarters after which she and Rikker met with the sheriff.\n\nRikker did most of the talking. \"I was shadowing Cotton when someone hit me over the head,\" he explained.\n\nSheriff Summerhay still wasn't happy about working with Pinkerton detectives, but there wasn't much he could do about it. \"Do you know who?\" he asked.\n\n\"Haven't the foggiest,\" Rikker said. \"All I know for sure is that it wasn't Cotton.\"\n\n\"What I don't understand,\" Summerhay said as Maggie and Rikker rose to leave, \"is why Cotton thought there was still money to be found.\"\n\nMaggie shot Rikker her best \"want to take this?\" look.\n\nRikker slapped his hat onto his head. \"Cotton wasn't playing with a full deck. You might even say he was fifty-nine seconds short of a minute.\"\n\nHe grabbed Maggie by the arm. \"Let's go and let the sheriff continue his fine and noble work.\"\n\n\"Fine and noble?\" she said as they stepped away from the building.\n\n\"Would you rather I said what I was really thinking?\" He gave her a sideways glance and rolled his eyes upward. \"Oh no, don't tell me.\"\n\nShe wrapped her arm around his. \"I have a theory.\"\n\nHe sighed. \"Of course you do.\"\n\n\"Hear me out.\"\n\n\"Do I have a choice?\"\n\n\"Let's suppose that Aunt Hetty's friend, Mr. Dinwiddie, was Cotton's partner.\"\n\n\"So we're still stuck on Dinwiddie, are we?\"\n\n\"I can't get past the timing. He's lived in town for years but only recently decided to cozy up to Garrett's aunt.\" Aunt Hetty insisted it was the miracle of the moving cross, but then she had no way of knowing that the Holy Spirit got a little help from Toby.\n\n\"You're forgetting one important aspect of this case. The witness described the man as being at least six feet tall and having a scar. Dinwiddie barely makes it to five foot five, and the only thing he wears on his face are his sixty-something years.\"\n\n\"Well, he's guilty of something,\" she said stubbornly. Strange as it might seem, she had grown fond of Aunt Hetty and didn't want to see her get hurt. \"I intend to find out what it is.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "Linc wasn't home when Maggie stopped at his house to thank him for helping Rikker. Instead, Mrs. Higginbottom opened the door to her knock.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Maggie asked, surprised. \"And where's Linc?\" He wasn't at his usual corner selling newspapers.\n\n\"He's at school.\"\n\nMaggie couldn't believe her ears. \"Really? That's great news, but how?\"\n\nHis grandmother stepped into the room, and Maggie hardly recognized her. Her hair was combed back into a neat bun and she wore a clean frock. Best of all, her faded blue eyes looked focused and clear.\n\n\"I told him that my momma didn't raise no stupid child, and neither would I,\" Linc's grandmother said.\n\nMaggie couldn't get over the difference in her appearance. \"You look wonderful.\"\n\nMrs. Higginbottom lowered her voice to a whisper. \"The doctor said she was suffering from malnutrition and dehydration. That's why she was acting so crazy.\" Aloud she addressed her next comments to Linc's grandmother. \"I better be going. If you like, I can pick Linc up on Sunday on the way to church. You can come, too, if you like.\"\n\nThe older woman looked pleased, but still she hesitated. \"We don't want to be a bother.\"\n\n\"No bother,\" Mrs. Higginbottom assured her. \"I'll be here at nine.\"\n\nMaggie followed Mrs. Higginbottom outside. \"I can't believe the difference in her. She looks and acts like a totally new woman.\"\n\n\"She still has her moments, but don't we all?\"\n\nMaggie smiled. \"I appreciate your watching over Linc. He's a good boy. He just needs some guidance.\"\n\nThe woman patted her on the arm. \"Don't you worry none about Linc. The church's Ladies Auxiliary decided to adopt him. Not officially, of course, but you know what I mean. We'll see that he and his granny are well taken care of.\" She lowered her voice. \"If you ask me, that's what that miracle with the moving cross was all about. Our church had become little more than a social club, and God decided to shake things up.\"\n\nMaggie smiled. \"I guess He did that all right.\" God had worked through Toby's mischievous ways to change an entire church. Now that was a miracle.\n\n\"I heard you're leaving,\" Mrs. Higginbottom said.\n\n\"Yes. My job here is done.\"\n\n\"Too bad. Hetty sure did have her mind set on that big wedding. Nothing she'd like better than to see her nephew happily wed.\"\n\n\"Maybe one day she'll get her wish,\" Maggie said and felt her spirits drop. Some lucky woman was bound to win Garrett's heart. She only wished that woman was her.\n\nMrs. Higginbottom nodded and started down the walkway. \"Maybe so. You just never know what the good Lord has in mind, do you?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Aunt Hetty planned a supper party that night to celebrate Garrett's release. Maggie had two reasons for wanting to be there\u2014or at least two that she would admit. One, it would give her an opportunity to observe Dinwiddie up close. Two, it would probably be the last time she would see the children. She wasn't even sure Garrett would allow her to write to them.\n\nFinagling an invitation from Aunt Hetty for her and Rikker was the easy part. Much harder was ignoring the less-than-welcoming look on Garrett's face as he opened the door to their knock.\n\n\"Come in, come in,\" Aunt Hetty said, pushing her nephew out of the way.\n\nShe'd gone all out to prepare Garrett's favorite roast beef. The table was set with her best dishes, and a delicious smell wafted from the kitchen.\n\nElise sat on the floor watching Panhandle draw funny animals. Even in the house he wore his strange cap. \"Howdy, Miss Taylor.\"\n\n\"Hello, Panhandle.\"\n\nElise looked up and squealed with delight. Jumping to her feet, she ran into Maggie's arms.\n\n\"Hello, pumpkin.\" Aware of Garrett watching, she gave Elise only a quick hug, though she longed to hold the little girl in her arms and tell her how much she was missed.\n\n\"My braids are crooked,\" Elise whispered.\n\n\"They're fine,\" Maggie whispered back, pushing a strand of hair away from her face and retying one of the blue ribbons. \"You look so pretty tonight.\" She wore her favorite floral print dress and black patent shoes.\n\nToby looked happy to see her, too, but he wasn't about to embarrass himself with a hug. Instead he gave her a quick smile.\n\n\"It smells good in here,\" Maggie said.\n\nAunt Hetty looked pleased and assured her that cooking the meal had sapped her energy. \"Probably took weeks off my life.\"\n\nDinwiddie gave her a fond look. \"Never has there been a more worthy sacrifice.\"\n\nRikker rolled his eyes, and Maggie nudged him with her elbow.\n\n\"Dinner's ready,\" Aunt Hetty said, and everyone streamed into the dining room.\n\nThere were eight of them around the table in all. Maggie did her best to ignore Garrett, purposely taking her place between Elise and Dinwiddie, making sure to sit on the side of his good ear. Whether by choice or accident, Garrett sat directly opposite her, which made it hard, if not altogether impossible, to ignore him.\n\n\"Garrett, would you be kind enough to give the blessing?\" Aunt Hetty said. She looked small, almost demure as she sat at the head of the table, but Maggie didn't doubt for a moment that the woman, with her real and imagined ailments, was very much in charge.\n\nMaggie expected Garrett to turn down the request, but he surprised her by lowering his head and giving thanks to God for the good food and company.\n\n\"Amen,\" he said, and his gaze lit on Maggie for an instant before he reached for the bowl of mashed potatoes.\n\n\"So, Mr. Dinwiddie, how long have you worked at the bank?\" she asked, keeping her tone casual.\n\n\"In July it will be three years,\" he said.\n\nShe spread butter on her roll. The Whistle-Stop bandits obviously knew about the bank shipment, so his answer worked in with her theory.\n\n\"Working at the bank is better for the bones but does nothing for my gout,\" he added, helping himself to a generous serving of gravy.\n\nToby and Panhandle were discussing outer space. \"When is the moon the heaviest?\" Toby asked.\n\n\"Haven't the foggiest,\" Panhandle said.\n\n\"When it's full,\" Toby said and laughed.\n\nMaggie laughed, too. Garrett watched her, but his thoughts remained hidden behind a stoic mask. It wasn't the only time she caught him staring at her. Sometimes he looked away first; sometimes she did, but each visual encounter left her shaken.\n\nHe looked especially handsome tonight. The more she had come to know him, the less visible his scar became until she hardly noticed it at all. The only remaining sign of his recent ordeal were the shadows beneath his eyes.\n\nAunt Hetty was in high spirits, and Maggie tried her best not to put a damper on the party. She smiled at all the right times and even contributed to the light banter.\n\nBut her heart ached for Garrett to look at her the way he had the night they'd danced.\n\nAt least he looked at her. That's more than he did earlier when she stood with him before the judge waiting for charges against him to be dropped. The easy rapport they once shared had been replaced by the politeness of strangers.\n\nHe'd even reverted back to calling her Miss Taylor, though he now knew it was an assumed name. It was as if he didn't want her to forget the lies that stood between them.\n\nThe newspaper account declared Toby a hero, and he wore his new status with a wide grin. He even insisted upon being called Detective Toby.\n\n\"Mr. Baker is paying me to find out who is absconding with his chickens,\" he announced with button-bursting pride.\n\nRikker chuckled. \"It looks like my partner and I have some competition.\"\n\nHer laughter sounded forced even to her own ears, but her feelings for Toby were genuine. He didn't do anything without putting his whole heart and soul into it.\n\nDinwiddie was the first to bring up the subject that everyone else skirted around. \"I still don't understand why Cotton broke you out of jail.\"\n\nHe was looking at Garrett all funny-like, and Maggie exchanged a glance with Rikker. Was it simply curiosity on Dinwiddie's part? Or was he worried about what Cotton might have said?\n\nGarrett stared down at his plate as he cut his meat. \"He thought I knew where the rest of the money was.\" He shrugged. \"I had no idea what he was talking about. But I played along. I figured if I didn't, he'd\"\u2014he slanted his head toward his young daughter\u2014\"well, you know.\"\n\n\"He thought Uncle Charlie would kill him,\" Toby said in the matter-of-fact way that only an eight-year-old could muster.\n\nElise looked about to burst into tears. \"I don't want anyone to kill Papa.\"\n\nMaggie squeezed Elise's hand. \"It's okay, pumpkin. No one is going to hurt your father. Or anyone else for that matter. Detective Toby will see to that.\"\n\nAunt Hetty tapped her drinking glass with a spoon. \"Enough of such talk. We need to discuss something more pleasant. Like the wedding.\"\n\nGarrett looked up from his plate and drew a napkin to his mouth. \"There isn't going to be a wedding, Aunt Hetty.\"\n\n\"No wedding?\" Aunt Hetty's glance settled on Maggie before returning to her nephew. \"But the invitations... the dress... the church...\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Garrett tossed his napkin onto the table and stood. \"Miss Taylor and I will not be getting married.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "\"That was certainly an ordeal,\" Rikker grumbled as he and Maggie walked the short distance from Aunt Hetty's house to the hotel.\n\n\"What are you talking about?\" Maggie asked. \"You were having a grand old time.\"\n\n\"I've had a better time sitting in a war zone. I don't know what's worse, watching you and Thomas clash or crossing over enemy lines.\"\n\nSurprised, she glanced at Rikker. In all the years she'd known him, this was the first time he'd mentioned his wartime experiences. \"I don't know what you're talking about. Garrett and I hardly said a word to each other.\"\n\n\"Nevertheless, your message came through loud and clear.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"If that's true, then you know he hates me for what I did to him.\"\n\n\"It sure didn't look like that to me. But then, I never was much good at subtleties. At least that's what my first wife used to say.\"\n\n\"Nothing subtle about it,\" she said miserably.\n\nHe stopped her with a hand to her arm. \"I don't like seeing you suffer like this, Duffy.\"\n\nShe patted his hand. \"I'll be okay.\"\n\nThey started walking again. The orange gas streetlights blurred, and Maggie blinked away the moisture in her eyes. She had no intention of giving in to tears. Nope, wasn't going to happen. After sobbing her heart out at the foot of her father's swinging body, she'd vowed never again to cry over a man. That promise had served her well over the years with only a few lapses, and she saw no reason to change at this late date.\n\n\"Maybe you should talk to him,\" Rikker said.\n\n\"I did talk to him, but we didn't get much past his gout,\" she said.\n\n\"Thomas has gout?\"\n\n\"I'm talking about Dinwiddie.\"\n\nHe gave her an arched look. \"Still suspicious of him, are we?\"\n\n\"He was employed by the bank at the time of the robbery and was an engineer. I can't think of a better suspect.\"\n\nRikker laughed out loud. \"Ah! Now that's more like the woman I know and admire.\"\n\nThey crossed Main. \"You admire me?\"\n\nHe cupped her elbow as they walked up the steps to the boardwalk. \"Yes, but don't tell anyone. It would ruin my reputation.\" He released her and pulled the hotel door open. \"Let's have some hotel pie.\"\n\n\"You just ate.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I've got to do something while you try to persuade me not to leave town on tomorrow's train.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 102", + "text": "For once her persuasion skills failed. Rikker was leaving on the morning train, and there wasn't a thing Maggie could do about it. She didn't want to see him go. As she sat in her hotel room later that night, loneliness closed in on her like a shroud.\n\nRikker was being dispatched to New Orleans, but she had yet to get her next assignment. That's because she had not turned in her final report. She was usually much more efficient, but something held her back. Questions plagued her. Unfinished business kept her twisting and turning at night. One of the Whistle-Stop bandits was still on the loose, and she didn't feel right about leaving town until he was caught.\n\nWas it Dinwiddie? She hated to think that it was, for Aunt Hetty's sake. But who else worked at the bank and knew how to drive a train?\n\nShe went over her notes again, searching for that one thing she might have disregarded or thought insignificant. Even the best of detectives missed vital clues on occasion.\n\nShe once overlooked a woman's dress hanging in a suspect's closet. That was important because they later learned that after each crime the man had made his escape dressed as a woman. Another time she failed to take note of a spiderweb outside a jeweler's window. Had she done so, she would have known immediately that the theft was an inside job and saved herself weeks of work.\n\nNow she studied her notes line by line. Each time she read through the pages, the word boogeyman stopped her. It was a word she never expected to show up in any of her reports.\n\nWas the boogeyman real? Toby and Elise certainly thought so. If they were right, that could explain the overturned soil. She never did believe that Whitewash was responsible for all those holes.\n\nStrangers didn't usually dig uninvited on someone else's property unless burying a body or looking for buried treasure. That would eliminate Cotton as the boogeyman. With all that digging, he would have known the money wasn't there.\n\nShe stared at her notes again. Elise described the boogeyman as being tall with big feet and wearing his hair like Aunt Hetty's. Maggie dipped her pen into the inkwell and underlined the hair part.\n\nFinding nothing of any help in her notes, her thoughts soon turned to Garrett.\n\nDear God, how he must hate her for what she had put him through. The lies and deceit were the least of it. She could still remember the disbelief on his face the day he was arrested. The look of despair at being locked behind bars... What terrible memories that must have brought back.\n\nShe longed to make it up to him, but how? The emotional distance between them was ocean-wide and sky-high.\n\nShaking the thought away, she checked her notes again and after a while gave up. Investigations needed a clear head, and hers was too full of painful memories to do her any good.\n\nShe gripped the pen tighter and pulled out a piece of paper. Sometimes it helped to write things down, especially her prayers. Her daily reports to heaven were just as precise as her reports to the Pinkerton principal.\n\nHalfway down the page, she blinked. She'd meant to start her report with the familiar words Dear God. Instead her pen seemed to have a mind of its own and the salutation read Dear Garrett instead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 103", + "text": "Chapter 42\n\nGarrett opened the door to Maggie's knock and seemed surprised to see her. Never had she seen him look so tired and disheveled. His hair was mussed and he hadn't shaved.\n\n\"Mag...?\" He caught himself with a grimace and rubbed his whiskered chin. \"Miss Taylor.\"\n\n\"My name is Cartwright,\" she said. \"Maggie Cartwright.\" It might not be possible to close the chasm between them, but at least they could do away with any pretense. \"May I come in?\"\n\nHe hesitated a moment before stepping aside. He didn't invite her to sit, but she did anyway. She clutched the letters she spent the night writing. The house seemed uncommonly quiet and oh-so familiar. As much as she hated to think it, it felt like home.\n\n\"Where are the children?\" she asked.\n\nHe closed the door. \"At Aunt Hetty's.\"\n\nThe thought of never seeing them again brought a lump to her throat. But she couldn't think about that. Not now.\n\n\"Is this official business?\" he asked.\n\n\"Partly.\" She moistened her lips before continuing. \"We still haven't identified Cotton's partner.\"\n\nHis forehead creased. \"Any suspects?\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"Maybe.\"\n\nHe arched an eyebrow. \"Anyone I know?\"\n\nIt was hard to think under his intense scrutiny, and she took a moment to gather her thoughts. He wasn't going to like this, but then neither did she. \"How well do you know Dinwiddie?\"\n\nHe looked at her, incredulous. \"Don't tell me that you think he\u2014?\"\n\n\"He doesn't fit the witness description,\" she hastened to explain. \"But there are some things that make him a suspect.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" he asked.\n\nShe quickly explained.\n\nHe shook his head. \"You're wrong about Dinwiddie.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right. For your aunt's sake.\"\n\n\"Is that why you came here today?\" he asked, his voice cold and distant. \"To make more false accusations?\"\n\n\"I came here because...\" Her voice dropped in volume. \"I'm leaving town.\" That morning she had received a telegram with her next assignment. She would be working with Rikker in New Orleans. The news made her partner postpone his journey for a day so they could travel together and work out their new disguises.\n\nShe studied him, but the reaction she'd hoped for failed to materialize. He accepted her announcement with the same cold stare.\n\nShe wanted to go to him, to throw her arms around him and beg for forgiveness, but something\u2014pride perhaps, maybe even shame\u2014held her in place.\n\n\"I understand your anger.\"\n\nHe arched a brow. \"Do you?\"\n\n\"I never wanted to lie to you.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It wasn't just the lies. You wormed your way into my home. Into my children's affections...\"\n\nShe waited for him to say that she'd found her way into his affections as well, but the words she longed to hear never came. \"It was my job\u2014\"\n\n\"That's your answer for everything!\" He rubbed his forehead and started again, this time in a quieter voice. \"No job can justify what you did.\"\n\n\"When I accepted the assignment, I honestly thought you were guilty of the things they said. Had I known the kind of man you were, I never would have\u2014\" She broke off and struggled for composure. \"Tell me how to make this right.\"\n\n\"No one can make this right.\" He swept his hand over the chessboard, scattering pieces everywhere like shards of her heart. \"No one!\"\n\nHe sat back but continued staring at the chessboard. Was he remembering the night they played together? The night they danced?\n\n\"I fell in love with a woman who doesn't exist.\"\n\nLove. He said love. For a moment she couldn't move. All she could do was hold on to the word like a gift too precious to unwrap. When at last she was able to rise to her feet, she moved toward him but fell short of touching him. Tears sprang to her eyes. For someone who didn't exist, the wrenching pain sure did feel real.\n\n\"I\u2014I'm so sorry,\" she whispered.\n\nSince there was nothing more to say, she tossed the stack of letters on the floor at his feet.\n\nHe stared down at them. \"What are those?\"\n\n\"The letters I would have written had I known the kind of man you are. Read them or not.\" Holding herself with as much dignity as she could manage, she added, \"As you choose.\"\n\nTurning to the door she stepped on one of the chessmen\u2014a bishop. How easily the name came to her. It was as if her mind scrambled for some level of sanity by zeroing in on meaningless details.\n\nShe stooped to pick the piece up and was bombarded with thoughts of the past.\n\n\"Did you know that chess was once a game of courtship?\"\n\n\"I want to get to know you one square at a time.\"\n\nShaking away the memory, she set the bishop upright on the chessboard. It was then that Elise's and Toby's words echoed in her head. \"The boogeyman looks like a giant and has big feet. And he wears his hair like Aunt Hetty.\"\n\nShe picked the bishop off the board. When held a certain way, the bishop's headgear did, indeed, resemble Aunt Hetty's hair.\n\nShe gasped for air as a dozen little pieces fell into place, and they all added up to one thing: boogeyman." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 104", + "text": "Aunt Hetty didn't wait to be invited in. No sooner had Garrett opened the door than she stabbed the doorsill with her cane and barreled past him.\n\nHe stared after her. \"The children\u2014\"\n\n\"I just dropped them off at school.\" Leaning on her cane, his aunt faced him. Her whole body fairly shook with rage. \"They're fine. No thanks to their father.\"\n\nHe grimaced. Nothing was worse than seeing Aunt Hetty on the warpath. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"First you call off the wedding\u2014\"\n\n\"For good reason.\"\n\n\"And then you mope around. Panhandle said you haven't been to work for days.\"\n\nHe slammed the door shut and faced his aunt. \"She lied to me.\"\n\n\"For heaven sakes. Do you hear yourself? The girl had a job to do. She also proved you innocent. You should be thanking her.\"\n\n\"Thanking her for what? For accusing me of thievery? Worse? For having me put in jail and standing trial?\" For making me feel things I never hoped to feel again?\n\n\"You can hardly blame her. Most people finding stolen money on your property would have jumped to the same conclusion. Lord knows, if I didn't raise you myself...\"\n\nHe drew back in surprise. \"Are you saying that even you\u2014?\"\n\nShe shrugged but offered no apologies.\n\nHe raked his hair with his fingers. It never occurred to him that even his own aunt might have had doubts about his innocence. Given the evidence, he supposed he could hardly blame her. Still...\"Why are you taking her side?\"\n\n\"If you weren't so mule headed, you'd see that it's your side I'm on. It just so happens to be on the same side as hers.\"\n\nHe curled his hands at his side. \"I know you're trying to help, but...\"\n\nSuddenly his aunt's determined demeanor seemed to desert her, and her shoulders slumped. \"I hate seeing you make a mistake you'll regret.\"\n\nI won't\u2014\"\n\n\"You already have, and once you make up your mind, there's no changing it.\"\n\n\"I change my mind.\" Just because he couldn't think of a specific incident to prove his contention meant nothing. \"Sometimes.\"\n\n\"Once every fifteen years!\"\n\n\"That's not true!\"\n\n\"Isn't it?\" She eyed him sharply. \"You refused to go to church because of what happened during the war. And you wouldn't listen to no one. You wouldn't even attend your own children's baptisms.\"\n\n\"All right,\" he conceded. \"I made a mistake about the church.\" God forgive him. \"But that doesn't mean I'm wrong about Mag\"\u2014he cleared his throat\u2014\"about this.\"\n\n\"How would you know if you're right or wrong? You made up your mind without having all the facts.\"\n\n\"I don't need any more facts. Miss Taylor\u2014\"\n\n\"Her name is Cartwright, and I'll wager the one and only healthy bone in my body that it's the real Maggie you love, not the detective.\"\n\nHe stared at her, dumbfounded. Now she was reading his mind. \"I never said I loved her.\" Okay, maybe he'd mentioned as much to Maggie, but certainly not to his aunt.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"I may have one foot in the grave, but I'm not dumb. And I'm not blind, either.\" She started for the door. \"And neither are you. So quit acting like you are, and go and make this right before you lose her for good.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 105", + "text": "Maggie arrived at the train station to find Rikker waiting for her. She was late, and he didn't look happy about it. \"Where's your baggage?\"\n\nShe didn't need any baggage. \"I know the name of Cotton's partner.\" She'd done some checking around this morning and was certain she was right.\n\nRikker dropped his valise on the platform with a thud. \"See that train? If this is just another one of your theories, I'll be on it in exactly sixty seconds. With or without you.\" He pulled out his pocket watch.\n\nShe didn't need sixty seconds. \"One, the witness described the suspect as having a scar.\"\n\n\"Forty seconds.\"\n\n\"Two, when our suspect learned that one of the stolen bills had suddenly shown up, he sent away for Cotton.\"\n\n\"Proof. I need proof.\"\n\n\"I was wrong about the suspect working at the bank. But the suspect knows someone who does.\"\n\nRikker's eyebrow quirked upward. \"Twenty-nine seconds.\"\n\n\"He's the one who's been digging up Garrett's property. The one the children call boogeyman.\" She even suspected someone had entered Garrett's house in her absence. Like the day she found chess pieces scattered on the floor and blamed Lila.\n\n\"Fifteen seconds.\"\n\n\"Aren't you curious as to who it is?\"\n\n\"Not till you give me something tangible that the sheriff can hang a warrant on.\"\n\nIgnoring him, she continued, \"It's Panhandle.\"\n\nHe lowered his watch and stared at her. \"There's no scar on Panhandle's face.\"\n\n\"What if there was no scar? What if our witness only thought he saw a scar.\"\n\nRikker didn't appear totally convinced, but neither did he look all that skeptical.\n\nHer hopes lifted until the moment the conductor called, \"All aboard,\" and Rikker picked up his valise." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 106", + "text": "Chapter 43\n\nAunt Hetty's visit had put Garrett in an even worse mood. Yes, he had feelings for Maggie. Blast it all; he still had feelings for her. But was it really love? Or merely infatuation?\n\nSomething inside answered love, but good sense argued for the latter. He'd only known her for a few short weeks. That was hardly enough time to get to know a person, let alone fall in love.\n\nAnd yet... He stared at the letters still on the floor where she'd dropped them yesterday. He didn't want to read them. Why would he? After all the lies and deceit... As far as he was concerned, Maggie was dead to him. Yes, it hurt. It hurt a lot and probably would for a long time. But he'd get over it. Just like he'd gotten over all the other hurts in his life.\n\nHe shook his head. Okay, maybe not. The trouble with playing chess is that it sharpened the mind and improved the memory. Thanks to the hours spent at the chessboard, forgetting Maggie would be a monumental chore.\n\nAt the moment he was having a hard time forgetting even the little things\u2014like the way the sun brought out the golden highlights of her hair. Or the way her laughter sounded like music.\n\nForcing the memories away, he gathered up the letters and carried them into the kitchen, intent on throwing them away. The envelopes released a delicate fragrance\u2014her fragrance. It was probably the only thing about her that was real. With the scent came even more memories.\n\nDancing with her; holding her. The days and nights she sat with him by Elise's sickbed. The gentle way she led him back to God through hope and prayer.\n\nHe could almost feel her in his arms as he recalled holding her close. His lips burned with the memory of her sweet kisses.\n\nWith a sigh of defeat he tossed the stack of letters onto the kitchen table. He stared at them long and hard before finally pulling out a chair and sitting. He picked up the first envelope and broke the seal. He hesitated before finally pulling out the delicately scented letter inside and unfolding it.\n\nThe graceful curved script was all too familiar to him. Out of all the letters he'd received from the ad placed in the mail-order-bride catalog, hers stood out because of the handwriting. Given the nature of her job, it was surprisingly feminine. The letters were rounded, open. Honest.\n\nThe last thought almost made him drop the letter, but he didn't. Instead his eyes followed the words across the page as if his eyes had a mind of their own.\n\nDear Garrett, she wrote.\n\nRikker taught me that when things go haywire and nothing makes sense, it's always best to go back to the beginning and start over. I was born in Georgia, and my father's name was Royce David Cartwright. He's the reason I chose to become a detective." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 107", + "text": "She wrote about her father's horrific crime spree, his death, and her determination to make up to society for all the damage he'd done. She wrote about her years in the orphanage and her mother's abandonment. She admitted lying about her family's farm and included the check he'd written with the letter.\n\nThe paragraph that contained her misgivings about his guilt and the pain at finding the money stashed in the tree house was so smeared it was hard to read.\n\nTears had fallen as she'd written those words, just as his own eyes began to mist as he read them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 108", + "text": "It appeared to be a normal day at the train station. A dozen people, mostly peddlers, were lined up in front of the ticket booth. A black porter whistled to himself as he piled baggage onto a cart. The idling train hissed and snorted like a bull anxious to leave its pen.\n\nMaggie sat on a bench dressed in her traveling suit, her trunk at her foot. On the outside she looked like an average passenger waiting to board the train; inside she was a quivering mass of nerves.\n\nWas it only four weeks ago that she met Garrett at this very station? So much had happened since. Attempting to push the memories away, she clenched her hands tight and tried to focus on the milling crowd around her. It was no use. A vision of Garrett's blue eyes and devastating smile\u2014even the sound of his voice\u2014were now part of her, and nothing she did relieved the pain.\n\nHer chest tightened, and the suffocating sensation in her throat threatened to cut off her breathing. Can't think of that now. Can't think of Garrett. If they had any hope of trapping Panhandle, she had to be sharp and on top of her game. Success depended on it.\n\nAfter they nabbed Panhandle, she would take the first train out of town. But there would be no leaving, not completely, for part of her would always remain here in Furnace Creek with Garrett and his two adorable children.\n\nAn old woman shuffled over to the bench, back bent, and flopped down next to her. She wore a bright floral print dress and a floppy bonnet.\n\n\"Ready?\" she asked in a high-pitched tone.\n\n\"I'm sorry\u2014\" Maggie glanced at her and blinked. \"Rikker?\"\n\n\"Shh.\" She\u2014he\u2014grinned. \"What do you think?\" This time he spoke in his normal voice.\n\nShe looked him up and down and laughed. \"You said your days of dressing as a woman were over.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, anyone tries to get too friendly with me this time will end up full of lead.\"\n\n\"Trust me. You have nothing to worry about. For one thing, your... eh... bosoms are uneven.\"\n\n\"That's part of my charm.\"\n\nNow that Rikker was here, she felt considerably better. \"I still wish we told Garrett what we were doing. He has the right to know that his employee is under suspicion.\" If Garrett ever again trusted anyone, it would be a miracle.\n\n\"The fewer people who know, the better. It's bad enough I had to tell the sheriff.\"\n\n\"How did he take it?\" Summerhay's dislike of Pinkerton detectives had only gotten worse after the Cotton affair. He didn't like strangers coming in and cleaning up his town.\n\n\"Like a man about to be hung.\" He chuckled. \"Not to worry. He's up for reelection and wants to look good. He'll do anything for votes, even if it means working with us bullying Pinks.\"\n\nShe sighed. \"Nothing better go wrong.\"\n\n\"You worry too much, Duffy. You deal with Panhandle, and I'll take care of the rest. With a little luck we'll be on our way to New Orleans in no time.\"\n\nTheir new assignment required him to pose as a rich banker with only a few months to live and in need of someone to handle his daughter's finances when he was gone. She, of course, would pose as his daughter. It sounded relatively easy, and after the emotional highs and lows of these past couple of weeks, she needed something simple\u2014something with no complications.\n\n\"I hope that means you'll handle the boss.\" They were supposed to be in New Orleans by now. When the principal found out they were still in Furnace Creek, he'd have a fit. Nothing he hated more than having his operatives take matters into their own hands.\n\n\"Not to worry.\" Rikker sniffled and pulled out a dainty lace handkerchief. \"So how do you feel about playing the part of my daughter?\"\n\nChanging the subject was his way of quieting her nerves. It irritated her on some level that she never had to return the favor. He was always calm and confident as the nighttime sky.\n\n\"I'll live with it,\" she said. She'd pretended to be his daughter enough that it seemed almost second nature to her. \"I just hope nothing goes wrong today.\" There were too many people at the station for her peace of mind.\n\n\"Relax.\" Rikker blew his nose in an unladylike way and tucked his handkerchief in his handbag. \"You might be interested to know that Panhandle's actual name is James Madison Walker. His family's wagon train was attacked by Apaches. He was only eight years old and the lone survivor. No one knows what happened to him after he was found by the cavalry. Or later, after his arrest. Headquarters checked with the railroads, and no one has a record of anyone by his name working for them.\"\n\n\"That doesn't necessarily mean anything. He could have worked under an assumed name,\" she said.\n\n\"We'll know soon enough,\" Rikker said. \"What we do know is that he has good reason to wear that ridiculous cap.\"\n\nMaggie cringed. \"You don't mean he was\u2014\" She couldn't even say it. Nothing seemed more barbaric than scalping, and it was hard not to feel sorry for what Panhandle had gone through at such a tender age. Traumatic childhoods seemed to be the norm for many criminals. It was a pattern she was all too familiar with, not only in her work but in her personal life as well.\n\nHer father had witnessed the brutal murder of his own parents when he was six. It didn't excuse what he did, of course, but it did make her wonder if there was a better way to make up for her father's grisly deeds.\n\nWhat if there was a way to help children at risk like Linc? Help them follow a godly path like that kindly minister had helped her? Garrett had once likened life to the game of chess, and he was right. Both needed a guiding hand.\n\nRikker nudged her arm and slanted his head toward the horse and wagon that had just driven up to the station. \"There he is now.\"\n\n\"It's about time.\" She could hardly wait to see Panhandle's face when he realized the jig was up. Earlier she'd noticed the sheriff hidden behind a stack of crates. After delivering the boogeyman to him, her job would be done.\n\n\"You better get started, Duffy.\" As an afterthought, he said, \"And good luck.\" Keeping his head bent, he rose and lumbered toward the ticket booth.\n\nShe said a quick prayer before leaving the bench and threading her way through the crowd. No one had been allowed to board the train, and all around her indignant passengers grumbled and complained.\n\n\"What's going on?\" someone asked.\n\n\"The engineer was taken ill,\" a middle-aged woman answered.\n\nMaggie walked down the platform steps, watching Panhandle from the corner of her eye. It was important not to be caught staring at him.\n\nRikker had checked to see that Garrett expected the delivery of supplies on today's train. He did. As usual, it was Panhandle's job to pick up any packages that arrived at the station.\n\nShe timed herself so that it would look like she had accidently \"bumped\" into him just before he reached the platform.\n\n\"Morning, Miss Taylor,\" he said. \"Heard you were leaving town today.\"\n\n\"I was,\" she said, feigning a sigh of annoyance.\n\nRight on cue, a woman's scream rose from the knot of passengers waiting to board the train. The sheriff had sounded the alarm as planned, and the platform shook with the pounding of running feet.\n\nPanhandle shaded his eyes against the bright sun. \"What's going on? Why is everyone running?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid there's a problem.\" She placed her hand on her chest. \"The engineer is ill and there's another train heading this way. If they don't clear the tracks\u2014\" She shuddered.\n\nHe lowered his hand. \"Another train, you say? Why don't they just back this train onto the other track?\"\n\n\"No one else knows how to move it,\" she said.\n\nHe stared at her in disbelief. \"That's nonsense. There's always someone else. The brakeman\u2014\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He's new on the job and says he's not qualified.\"\n\n\"That's... that's just plain dumb.\" He hesitated. \"Maybe I can help.\"\n\n\"Oh, if only you could. That would make you... a hero.\"\n\nHe got all red in the face. \"Don't know about that, but if that freight train crashes into this one...\" He shook his head. \"Wish me luck.\" Without another word he bounded across the street faster than she had ever seen him move and stepped onto the station platform.\n\n\"Oh, I do.\" Maggie held her hands together in a silent prayer. \"I do.\"\n\nBy the time Panhandle reached the train, the station was deserted. She watched him board the engine with the ease of a spider climbing a wall. The man knew what he was doing.\n\nMoments later, the train gave a long, low whistle. Smoke spiraled from the stack and steam shot out from the sides. The rods moved and the wheels turned with a clatter. The train slowly slithered backward like a metallic snake and made a gradual turn onto the second track.\n\nMaggie couldn't help but smile. Panhandle knew how to operate a train\u2014no question. Still, that didn't prove he was Cotton's partner, but it was a start.\n\nThe crowd gathered on the street across from the station burst into applause. Some people started forward, but the dark-skinned porter held them back.\n\nPanhandle joined her moments later on the still-deserted platform, grinning like a schoolboy.\n\n\"Excellent work,\" Maggie said. \"I didn't know you were an experienced engineer.\"\n\nHis grin grew broader and then suddenly died.\n\n\"Mr. James Walker,\" the sheriff called as he advanced toward them, gun drawn. \"Put your hands up.\"\n\nPanhandle's eyes bulged. \"What the\u2014\"\n\n\"We know you're Cotton's partner,\" Maggie said.\n\nAn innocent man would have stood his ground, but Panhandle did exactly what they'd hoped; he panicked.\n\nHe took a flying leap off the platform and ran. Shouting for him to stop, the sheriff aimed his gun but didn't fire. Panhandle had disappeared into the crowd.\n\n\"Stop that man!\" Summerhay shouted.\n\nA collective gasp rose from the crowd, and people quickly backed away. A horse hitched to a wagon whinnied and tried to pull free from its traces.\n\nOnly two people remained in the middle of the street: Panhandle and Aunt Hetty. A glint of steel sent a ripple of fear down Maggie's spine.\n\nPanhandle held the muzzle of his gun at Aunt Hetty's neck." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 109", + "text": "Chapter 44\n\nStay back,\" Panhandle yelled. \"All of you.\"\n\nThe color drained from Aunt Hetty's face and her lips quivered. \"B\u2014be careful of my neck,\" she pleaded.\n\n\"Oh, sorry,\" Panhandle said. He adjusted his hold, but the gun stayed in place. \"Is that better?\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you.\"\n\n\"Drop your weapon,\" the sheriff shouted, his gun still aimed.\n\n\"Drop yours,\" Panhandle called back. \"Or Aunt Hetty's neck will be the least of her worries.\"\n\nAunt Hetty let out a funny sobbing sound, and he apologized again. \"Sorry, but it's either you or me.\"\n\nThe sheriff laid his weapon down.\n\n\"That's one,\" Panhandle said, staring at Maggie.\n\n\"I'm not armed,\" Maggie said.\n\n\"A detective without a gun, Miss Cartwright? Surely you jest.\"\n\nGrimacing she slipped her hand into her fake pocket and pulled the derringer from her leg holster. Now that her real identity had been revealed, she was at a disadvantage. She set her gun on the platform.\n\n\"You won't get away with this,\" Summerhay said.\n\n\"You're wrong, Sheriff. Thanks to your thoughtfulness, I have an entire train at my disposal.\" Dragging Aunt Hetty along with him, Panhandle worked his way toward the engine on the second track.\n\nStill dressed as a woman, Rikker emerged from the crowd, hands up, and spoke in a crinkly high-pitched voice. \"Leave Aunt Hetty here, and take me instead.\" He looked and sounded every bit the old woman he purported to be.\n\n\"Stay back,\" Panhandle warned, but Rikker kept advancing.\n\nRikker persisted. \"She could die just like that. Her heart, you know.\"\n\nWhile Rikker kept up a litany of Aunt Hetty's known ailments, Maggie inched sideways in an effort to position herself in such a way as to retrieve her gun. Who would have thought that Aunt Hetty's tiresome health issues would one day come in handy?\n\n\"If you don't want your hostage to drop dead, you better take me,\" Rikker continued in his thin, feminine voice.\n\nPanhandle gestured impatiently. \"All right, then.\" He glanced around. \"But don't try any funny business.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't think of it,\" Rikker said. Head bent, he lumbered slowly toward Panhandle, purse swinging from his wrist.\n\n\"Hurry up!\" Panhandle yelled. \"And you!\" He glared at Maggie. \"Step away from your gun. I said move!\"\n\nMaggie did as she was told. She glanced at Summerhay, but he hadn't moved from his spot. A big help he was.\n\nRikker said something that sounded like, \"Hold your horses, big boy.\"\n\nThe moment he reached his destination, Panhandle pushed Aunt Hetty away and pointed a gun at Rikker's temple.\n\nMaggie let out a sigh of relief. At least Aunt Hetty was safe. Now if Rikker could distract Panhandle long enough for her to reach her gun... No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than she heard something that shook her to the core. \"Maggie!\"\n\nAt the sound of Garrett's voice, she gasped. Oh no! What was he doing here?\n\nThe porter tried to hold him back, but Garrett raced past him and jumped onto the platform.\n\nPanhandle aimed his gun at Garrett, and Maggie yelled, \"Watch out!\"\n\nRikker tried grabbing his wrist, but Panhandle was too quick for him. He hit Rikker on the side of his head with his revolver, and just that quickly Rikker fell to the ground.\n\n\"Hold it, all of you,\" Panhandle said, his weapon pointed. \"Try another trick like that and you'll all be dead.\"\n\nMaggie, Summerhay, and Garrett stood still as statues.\n\n\"You.\" Panhandle gestured to Maggie with a shake of his head. \"You come with me.\"\n\nShe heard Garrett's intake of breath. He looked completely baffled. \"I don't know what's going on. Whatever it is I'm asking you not to do this, Panhandle.\"\n\n\"Shut your trap!\"\n\n\"I thought we were friends\u2014\"\n\nPanhandle sneered. \"Friends? We were never friends. Cotton was so sure you knew where the money was. That's the only reason I worked for you. I figured eventually you'd get careless and lead me to it. Now you better tell your bride to get over here, or someone's gonna pay.\"\n\nGarrett raised his hands to show he was unarmed. \"Take me instead.\"\n\nPanhandle shook his head. \"We tried that little trick.\" He gestured with his gun for Maggie to hurry.\n\nShe moved forward, senses alert. When a plan went awry it was necessary to improvise. Rikker looked like he was out cold, but a slight movement of his pinkie told her otherwise.\n\n\"Make it quick!\" Panhandle's voice was thick with impatience.\n\nHe was so intent on watching the three of them, he seemingly forgot all about Aunt Hetty. That is, until she lifted her cane and clobbered him soundly on the head.\n\nJust as quickly, Rikker grabbed his leg. Diving forward, Maggie knocked the gun from the dazed man's hand. Before Panhandle could recover, the sheriff had already snapped on the handcuffs.\n\nMaggie rushed to Aunt Hetty's side, reaching her at the same time as Garrett.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" they asked in unison.\n\nLooking remarkably well following her ordeal, Aunt Hetty nodded. \"Except for my neck and hip and...\"\n\nMaggie smiled. Never had Aunt Hetty's recital of Gray's Anatomy sounded more welcome.\n\n\"But not to worry. I'll live to see another day.\" Aunt Hetty leaned on her cane and glared at Panhandle, who was being led away by the sheriff. \"No thanks to that awful man.\" She regarded Rikker. \"What you did was very nice. You could have been hurt.\"\n\nRikker rubbed his chin. \"Not me,\" he said in his usual rough male voice. Abandoning his old lady walk, he then took off after Summerhay.\n\nAunt Hetty frowned. \"What a strange woman.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Garrett asked.\n\n\"I heard Maggie was leaving today, and I came to say good-bye.\" As she spoke Aunt Hetty afforded her nephew a meaningful look. \"Why are you here?\"\n\nMaggie held her breath and waited for his reply.\n\n\"I... uh...\" He slid a sideways glance at Maggie and quickly changed the subject. \"I'm still confused,\" he said. \"What Panhandle said\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it's true,\" Maggie explained. \"He was Cotton's partner and the second Whistle-Stop bandit.\"\n\nGarrett shook his head in disbelief. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"Yes, how did you know?\" Aunt Hetty asked.\n\n\"It was the bishop,\" she said. \"The day I came to your house I picked up the chessman, and that's when I knew Panhandle was the boogeyman.\"\n\n\"And you figured this out because of chess?\" Aunt Hetty asked, incredulous.\n\n\"It sounds crazy, I know, but Toby and Elise described his hair as similar to yours.\" She pointed to Aunt Hetty's topknot. \"I just happened to notice that the bishop's ceremonial hat comes to a point just like Panhandle's cap. The problem was, we had no proof. And we'd already made one mistake.\" A mistake that could have been disastrous. She moistened her lips and continued.\n\n\"One of the thieves backed the train away from the station. Few people know how to operate a locomotive, so Rikker came up with a plan to see if Panhandle could do it.\"\n\nGarrett rubbed his forehead. \"That still doesn't explain why the witness described one of the thieves as having a scar.\"\n\n\"That puzzled me, too.\" The scar is what made Garrett their prime suspect. \"Then I realized what the witness had seen was the rawhide straps from Panhandle's hat. The robbery occurred as the sun was going down. I suspect the leather bands cast shadows on the side of his face that the witness mistook as a scar.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll be,\" Garrett said, shaking his head. \"And to think he's been working with me all this time.\"\n\n\"Like he said, he was keeping an eye on you.\" It was easier to talk about the case than to give in to the confusing emotions whirling inside. \"When those large bills showed up at the school fund-raiser, Panhandle contacted Cotton.\"\n\n\"But how did he know about that?\" Garrett asked. \"I attended the fund-raiser and even I didn't know.\"\n\nMaggie glanced at Aunt Hetty. \"As you know, Panhandle and your gentleman friend played faro together. What I didn't know until this morning is that Dinwiddie handled the school fund-raiser, and Panhandle helped him count the donations.\" He must have suspected the hundred-dollar bills came from Garrett and notified Cotton. None of the other parents could afford such a large donation. She shuddered to think what might have happened had the men known the money came from Elise and Toby.\n\nAunt Hetty's eyes widened in alarm. \"You're not saying that Oswald\u2014\"\n\n\"No,\" Maggie assured her. \"Oswald was visiting his ailing mother in Denver during the robbery.\"\n\nAunt Hetty shuddered. \"And here I thought all that talk about the boogeyman was only the children's imagination.\"\n\nGarrett rubbed the back of his neck. \"And to think we blamed Whitewash for all the holes.\"\n\nRikker joined them, grinning from ear to ear. He was still dressed in his old lady outfit, but his wig was crooked and one bosom had fallen to his waist. \"It's over,\" he announced. \"Panhandle confessed to everything.\"\n\nMaggie grinned back at him. Neither one of them had been happy at the prospect of leaving town with so many unanswered questions.\n\nAunt Hetty stared at him. \"Is that you, Mr. Greenwood?\"\n\nRikker pulled off his gray wig. \"It's me, all right.\"\n\n\"I should have known,\" Aunt Hetty said and laughed. She suddenly looked tired, and Garrett slipped his arm around her waist.\n\n\"Come on, I'll take you home.\"\n\nThis time she didn't push him away. Instead, she leaned on him, and relief crossed her face.\n\n\"When are you leaving town, Maggie?\"\n\n\"Not till tomorrow,\" Maggie said. Sensing Garrett's gaze, her voice deserted her along with her smile. \"I just have to tie up some loose ends.\" She would have to write a full report to headquarters and convince her boss that the end justified both the means and added expense.\n\nAunt Hetty reached out to squeeze her hand. \"Stop by and say good-bye to the children.\"\n\nMaggie glanced at Garrett, but the eyes boring into hers let nothing in and even less out. \"I\u2014I don't know that I'll have time,\" she stammered. She was always happy to leave town once a job was complete. But not this time; this time she didn't want to go.\n\n\"Let's get you home,\" Garrett said to his aunt.\n\nAunt Hetty stubbornly held her ground. \"What did you want with Maggie?\"\n\nGarrett frowned. \"What?\"\n\n\"You came running up here like the cavalry calling her name. It must have been important.\"\n\n\"I...\" He hesitated. \"Just wanted to say good-bye.\"\n\nMaggie started to say something, but already he had turned away.\n\n\"We did it, Duffy,\" Rikker said cheerfully, slapping her on the back.\n\nShe watched Garrett escort his aunt to his wagon through a veil of tears. \"Yes, we did.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 110", + "text": "Chapter 45\n\nWhere was he? Maggie paced the station platform with increasing impatience. Rikker should have been here by now.\n\nEarlier, as they'd left the hotel together, he said he had something to do and would catch up with her at the station. It wasn't like him to be that mysterious, but she was too wrapped up in her misery to give the matter much thought until now. What was so important?\n\nWhatever it was, he better hurry. The train was due to arrive in less than ten minutes.\n\nShe shaded her eyes against the sun and stared down the tracks. Sun glinted off the rails and the air shimmered with heat, but so far no sign of the train. Maybe it would be late.\n\nPeople milled around her with an air of expectancy. Mindless chatter filled the air. A baby cried.\n\nThen all at once she saw something that stopped her in her tracks. Crankshaw, the pickpocket, was at it again. As usual he made no effort to hide his dastardly deeds. If she didn't know better, she would think he was purposely trying to get her attention.\n\nShe tried to ignore him, but when he stole a doll from a young child, her mouth dropped open. What was the matter with the man? The little girl screamed, and her mother tried calming her to no avail.\n\n\"I'll get her doll back,\" Maggie shouted and took off running.\n\nGawking over his shoulder Crankshaw jumped off the platform and ran along the tracks, dragging his foot. Maggie chased after him and quickly gained ground. This time she was careful not to trip on the rails.\n\n\"Come back, you scoundrel\u2014\"\n\nSuddenly, Crankshaw did something totally unexpected. Tossing the doll on the ground, he mounted a handy horse and galloped away.\n\nMaggie stopped running and stared after him. Maybe she was seeing things, but that sure did look like Garrett's horse. It wasn't bad enough that she imagined seeing Garrett in the moon and the stars and everywhere else. Now she even imagined seeing his horse.\n\nShe picked up the doll and shook off the dust. She turned and walked back to the station. Something caught her eye. Someone was sitting in the shade of the water tank.\n\n\"Garrett?\" she whispered. Either her eyes were playing tricks on her again or she was losing her mind. But it sure did look like Garrett sitting in front of a chessboard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 111", + "text": "Garrett watched her advance as he arranged the chess pieces on the board, and something stirred inside.\n\nA jaunty feathered hat sat on her head, and she was dressed in the same blue suit she wore the first day he'd set eyes on her. She looked every bit as beautiful today as she had back then. Every bit as intriguing as she'd looked the night they danced. Maybe even more so, now that he'd read the letters\u2014not the mail-order-bride letters but the real ones sprinkled with tears and what had seemed like pieces of her heart.\n\nThe letters convinced him that Aunt Hetty was right. It wasn't Maggie the detective he'd fallen for. It was Maggie the woman.\n\nYears of playing chess had taught him that the start of a game makes all the difference in how it ends. The same was often true of life. Thanks to Rikker for hiring the pickpocket, his plan was to go back to the beginning. Go back to when they first met. This time he hoped for a better ending.\n\nHe waited until her shadow fell across the chessboard before standing.\n\n\"You must be Miss Cartwright.\" Her true name came easy to him. It was as if part of him always knew the real woman behind the disguise.\n\nThe look of disbelief gradually faded from her face. \"Yes,\" she whispered.\n\n\"What are you doing here on the railroad tracks?\" he asked.\n\nRegarding him with misty eyes, she hesitated for a moment then visibly relaxed. \"I was hoping to... convince a thief to return a little girl's doll.\"\n\nHe smiled. She caught on fast. He took his seat again and stood the last of the chessmen on the board. \"And how, exactly, did you intend to do that?\" He raised an eyebrow. \"Convince him, I mean?\"\n\n\"With a strategically pointed gun.\"\n\n\"You might try a little charm and goodwill,\" he said.\n\n\"Do you think such a thing would work?\" she asked. \"After... everything that's happened?\" They were no longer talking about dolls and pickpockets, and the air between them sizzled with meaningful glances and unspoken words.\n\n\"There's only one way to find out.\" He waved his hand over the chessboard. Wars had been raged and won over a chessboard. But today, much more than kings were at stake.\n\nHe gestured toward the empty chair. \"Sit.\" Before this day was over, he intended to know everything there was to know about Miss Maggie Cartwright, one square at a time.\n\nMuch to his disappointment, she hesitated. \"I should return the little girl's doll.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" he said. \"The little girl will soon be clutching a brand-new one.\"\n\nShe smiled, and this time she sat without further ado. \"Did Rikker put you up to this?\" she asked, holding the doll on her lap.\n\n\"No, but he helped me put my plan together.\"\n\nThe corners of her mouth tugged upward. \"Why chess?\"\n\n\"I can think better with a chessboard in front of me. The game brings out my best,\" he replied.\n\n\"That's good because I'm going to need your patience. I'm afraid I've forgotten all the moves.\"\n\n\"Ah. Then you'll be happy about my new rule.\"\n\nShe arched a delicately shaped eyebrow. \"Which is?\"\n\n\"The loser has to grant the winner one wish,\" he said.\n\nShe leveled her clear, observant eyes at him. \"Since I'm only a beginner that puts me at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\"Not if we share the same wish.\"\n\nShe studied him. \"My wish is that you forgive me.\"\n\nThat wasn't the wish he had in mind, but it would do. For now. \"Black or white?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 112", + "text": "Chapter 46\n\nMaggie stood perfectly still while Aunt Hetty pinned the garland of flowers on her head and fussed with the veil. Staring at herself in the mirror, Maggie couldn't stop smiling.\n\nSo much had happened this past week it was hard to believe any of it real. Incredible as it seemed, she was about to become Mrs. Garrett Thomas. Please, God, if I'm dreaming, please don't wake me.\n\nShe would miss Rikker, of course, but her work here was cut out for her. Not only did she intend to be the best wife and mother possible, she planned to open a home for orphans and other at-risk children. Reverend Holly and the church agreed to help, and already a \"multitude of counselors\" as mentioned in the Bible, had volunteered.\n\nShe would no longer be chasing down bad guys. That was Rikker's department. Hers was to try and nip potential criminals in the bud. She could never make up for all the pain her father had caused, but maybe, just maybe, she could put a stop to future hurts.\n\nShe still didn't forgive him, but she now had a better understanding of how his early trauma had affected him. That, at least, was a start.\n\nStepping back, Aunt Hetty clasped her hands and sighed. \"You look beautiful.\"\n\nMaggie smiled at her. Aunt Hetty had been so busy with lastminute preparations she'd quite forgotten to complain about her aches and pains.\n\n\"Thank you for everything,\" Maggie said. Aunt Hetty had fussed over her like her own mother never had. For the first time in her life Maggie felt like she belonged to a real family.\n\nJust then Elise and Toby ran into the room.\n\nElise looked adorable in her pink ruffled dress. Her hat was decorated with silk rosebuds, and her hair cascaded down her back in long shiny curls.\n\n\"You look so pretty,\" Maggie said, bringing a smile to the child's sweet face. \"And you, young man, look mighty handsome and so grown up.\" Toby's lopsided grin was identical to his father's, and Maggie felt a tug inside.\n\nAunt Hetty lifted Toby's thinking cap off his head and tackled his cowlick. She then tucked in his shirt and straightened his bow tie\u2014for perhaps the hundredth time that day.\n\nA knock sounded, and Aunt Hetty opened the door an inch. Seeing Rikker, she flung it open the rest of the way.\n\nHe strolled into the room and stopped short upon seeing Maggie. \"You clean up real nice, Duffy,\" he said. Despite his casual remark, a suspicious gleam shone in his eyes.\n\n\"You're not so bad yourself,\" Maggie said. He had borrowed a dark formal suit from Mr. Dinwiddie and even got his hair trimmed for the occasion. But it wasn't just his clothes and hair that looked different. He seemed more relaxed, with none of his impatient frowns and constant checking of his watch.\n\n\"I'll go see if they're ready for us,\" Aunt Hetty said. She set her hairbrush down and left the room.\n\n\"Did Allan give you a bad time about giving up the New Orlean's job?\" Maggie asked.\n\n\"No. It was the other way around.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"I told him that I quit.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"Allan wasn't happy about losing his two best detectives, but there wasn't anything he could do about it.\" He grinned. \"Meet the new tinker apprentice.\"\n\n\"You? You're working for Garrett?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"You didn't think I was going to let my adopted daughter stay in Furnace Creek without me, did you?\"\n\nWith a whoop of joy, she flung her arms around his neck.\n\nThe door flew open and Aunt Hetty reappeared. Sensing her distress, Maggie pulled out of Rikker's arms.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked. Did Garrett have a change of heart?\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Aunt Hetty said, wringing her hands. \"None of the guests have arrived.\"\n\n\"None?\"\n\n\"Just Linc and his grandmother.\" Garrett had asked Linc to be an usher. \"It makes no sense. The invitations\u2014\"\n\nA horrifying realization struck Maggie, and her hand flew to her mouth. \"Oh no! In all the excitement I forgot to mail the invitations.\" Far as she knew, they were still in the back of the wagon where she'd tossed them.\n\nAunt Hetty looked aghast. \"Oh my! And we have all this cake and\u2014\"\n\n\"I'll be happy to eat the cake,\" Rikker said.\n\n\"This is no time to joke,\" Maggie said. She felt awful. Aunt Hetty had gone to so much work. She looked at Rikker, hoping he'd come up with one of his brilliant plans but then suddenly thought of an idea of her own.\n\nShe turned to Toby. \"Go and fetch Linc,\" she said. \"Tell him we need his help. And hurry!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 113", + "text": "Less than forty minutes later, Aunt Hetty peered through the door. \"Our guests have arrived,\" she said, smiling.\n\nMaggie smiled, too. Linc had raced up and down the street yelling in his loudest newspaper voice for everyone to get to the church posthaste. Amazingly enough, her plan worked.\n\nPeople dropped whatever they were doing and ran down the street to the church, some dragging young children by the hand. Half-shaven men deserted barber chairs and ran to join the throng. Housewives set their brooms aside and bank tellers left their cages. Farmers abandoned wagons and clerks closed up shop.\n\nAll thought another miracle was about to take place\u2014and they were right.\n\nGod had worked through a maze of seemingly unrelated events to bring Garrett and Maggie together. That didn't compare to the swinging cross, but it was still a miracle.\n\nOrgan music rose from the sanctuary, and Rikker crooked his elbow. \"Ready, Duffy?\"\n\nShe tucked her arm in his and smiled. \"Ready, Papa.\"\n\nHe reared back in surprise and then looked pleased. \"Well, now.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 114", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nReverend Holly closed the Book of Order. \"I now pronounce you husband and wife,\" he said. \"You may kiss the bride.\"\n\nGarrett turned to her, and his eyes brimmed with tenderness. Ever so gently he lifted the veil from her face and took her in his arms. With a whispered \"I love you\" he kissed her, his lips warm and sweet on hers.\n\n\"I love you, too,\" she said between kisses, and her heart swelled with happiness. The truth was she had always loved him, but only now was she able to do it freely and without worry or guilt.\n\nGuests jumped to their feet and applauded. Outside, the bells rang, announcing the happy occasion to the world.\n\nHe pulled back with a grin, leaving a delicious tingling sensation on her mouth. \"Checkmate,\" he whispered.\n\nShe smiled. This was one time she didn't mind being captured.\n\nHer hand in his, they turned toward their guests.\n\n\"Ladies and gentleman,\" Reverend Holly said, \"I present Mr. and Mrs. Garrett Thomas.\" Hearing her new name said aloud, Maggie's heart leaped with joy.\n\nMore applause followed as Garrett and Maggie acknowledge their guests with happy smiles.\n\nGarrett tucked her arm in his, and together they walked down the aisle\u2014their first journey as husband and wife. Maggie felt like she was floating on air.\n\nThey'd only made it halfway to the back of the church when Dinwiddie rose from a pew and stopped them.\n\n\"Since everyone is already here. I hope you don't mind if I make a couple of announcements,\" he said.\n\nMaggie glanced at Garrett, but he looked as puzzled as she was.\n\nWithout waiting for consent, Dinwiddie continued. \"As you're all aware, our new courthouse is almost complete.\" Applause greeted his announcement, and no one clapped louder than the judge.\n\nDinwiddie waited for the ovation to die down. \"I'm happy to say that pink monstrosity of a courthouse will now be put to better use.\" He turned to Maggie and handed her an envelope. \"I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I'm its legal owner.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"You are?\" She always knew Dinwiddie was hiding something. But a former bordello? Even Aunt Hetty looked shocked.\n\nHe spread his hand in a shrug. \"What can I say? We can't always choose our family members, and I inherited it from my grandfather. It gives me great pleasure to turn the deed over to you as a wedding present.\"\n\nMaggie fingered the envelope. \"I... I don't know what to say.\" Her eyes filled with tears, and Garrett slipped an arm around her waist to steady her.\n\n\"What's she going to do with that pink bread box?\" someone called out.\n\nMaggie brushed her hand over her damp cheeks. \"I know exactly what I'm going to do with it.\" She glanced at Garrett, and he nodded. \"What we are going to do with it. We're turning it into a home for troubled youth.\"\n\nDinwiddie couldn't have looked more pleased. \"That's exactly what I hoped you'd say.\" He ran a finger across his mustache.\n\n\"Of course,\" Maggie said. She just hoped his next request didn't involve naming the home Dinwiddie. \"What is your other announcement?\"\n\n\"I would like to turn this into a double wedding. I wish to make Hetty my wife.\"\n\nGarrett glanced at Maggie. \"I have no objection.\"\n\n\"Nor do I,\" Maggie said.\n\nDinwiddie grinned. \"Very well, then. Garrett, if you would do me the favor of being my best man, we'll get started.\"\n\n\"It would be my pleasure.\"\n\nDinwiddie held out his hand to help Aunt Hetty to her feet. \"Be careful of my back,\" she moaned.\n\n\"Watch my foot,\" Dinwiddie countered. \"My gout's acting up.\"\n\n\"Oh dear, my hip...\"\n\nTogether they hobbled to the front of the church and took their place in front of Reverend Holly.\n\nAfter exchanging vows and symptoms, Aunt Hetty and Oswald Dinwiddie were joined together in holy wedlock.\n\nAs the guests adjourned to the reception hall for cake and lemonade, Garrett held Maggie back with an arm around her waist. \"According to the rules of chess, this is called a touch and move law,\" he whispered in her ear.\n\nShe smiled up at him. Never did she think it was possible to be so completely and insanely happy. \"Does this mean you're going to move me?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\" And with that he took her by the hand and quickly led her out of the church and into a waiting carriage." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 115", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Cherokee Trail.txt", + "author": "Lois LAmour", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "When the stage slowed to allow the horses to walk up the long grade, Mary Breydon was the only passenger awake. Or so she believed. There was no telling about the man with the hat over his face. Several times during the night, she had seen him move, and his movements did not seem to be those of a sleeping man.\n\nFeeble yellow-gray light was filtering through the fly-specked, dust-filmed windows. She peered out.\n\nThe rolling brown hills were beginning to take shape from the darkness. It seemed a harsh and barren land, this new home of hers, its monotony broken only by occasional outcroppings of craggy sandstone. Somewhere farther west lay the front range of the Rockies, of which she caught an occasional glimpse beyond the low hills.\n\nAside from Mary and her daughter, Peg, there were four passengers caught in the awkward, uncomfortable positions of people trying to sleep on seats designed only for sitting.\n\nThe man with a black hat over his eyes sat in the back of the coach beside Peg and herself. Before he had gone to sleep, she had seen him as a lean, hawk-featured young man with a level, direct gaze from eyes that never seemed to smile. He wore a dark, shabby coat, a plaid shirt, gray pants, and a pistol in a tied-down holster. When he shifted position, she glimpsed a second gun tucked behind his belt, butt forward. A new Henry rifle leaned against the wall of the coach at his side.\n\nShe recognized the rifle at once, although she had little knowledge of such things. She remembered how pleased her husband had been when he had been able to purchase one, and that rifle was now wrapped in a roll of her bedding atop the stage.\n\nOpposite him sat a well-dressed young man in a checkered vest. When he was awake, he had kept trying to catch her eye, and he had a bold, insinuating expression she found difficult to avoid, for whenever she lifted her eyes he was looking right at her.\n\nThe other man on the stage was stocky and powerfully built, wearing a short beard and a store-bought suit. He also carried a gun on his left side, butt forward. The only other person on the stage was an Irish girl only two or three years younger than herself.\n\nAs if sensing Mary's gaze, the Irish girl opened her eyes. She glanced at Peg, who was sleeping with her head on Mary's shoulder.\n\n\"It's a fine lass you have there, mum.\"\n\n\"A very tired one, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"You've come a long way, then?\"\n\n\"From Virginia.\"\n\n\"Ah? 'Tis where the fighting is? This War Between the States they talk of?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is. We've seen some of it.\"\n\nPeg stirred, sat up, and rubbed her eyes. \"Mother? Is it much further?\"\n\n\"Only a little further. We're almost there.\"\n\nThe heavy-set man glanced at her. \"Don't expect much at Cherokee, ma'am. The station's the worst run on the route. It ain't like Ben Holladay to let it get so run-down.\"\n\nHe peered from the window, then added, \"The food's scarcely fit to eat, and Scant Luther, who operates the station, is a mean, brutal man who's drunk half the time. A fine-looking woman like you shouldn't even get off the stage.\"\n\nThe man in the checkered vest leaned toward her. \"Don't I know you from some place? You sure look\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\" Her tone was definite. \"You do not know me. We have never met.\"\n\n\"But I\u2014\"\n\nFrom under the brim of the black hat, the voice was abrupt, impatient. \"You heard the lady, mister. She said you hadn't met. You haven't.\"\n\nThe man in the checkered vest flushed angrily. \"I don't think\u2014!\"\n\n\"That's right, mister, you don't think. If I was you, I'd start thinkin', right now. Think slow and careful. In this country, when a lady says she doesn't know you, she doesn't. Also, it is likely she doesn't want to know you.\"\n\nThe man's lips parted as if to make an angry retort, but the one gray eye he could see was like looking down the barrel of a gun. His face tightened with anger, but some vague intuition of danger caused him to keep silent.\n\nThe heavy-set man's eyes met Mary's, showing faint, shared amusement. \"Scant Luther runs the roughest station on the route, ma'am, and he keeps a bad crowd around him. Always drinking and fighting.\n\n\"Mark Stacy\u2014he's the division agent\u2014he told me Ben Holladay wanted Luther fired, but he was waiting for his replacement.\"\n\n\"Did he say who the replacement was to be?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, he did. He's hired a former soldier, Major M. O. Breydon, formerly of the U.S. Cavalry. Seems the major was invalided out of the army. He'd applied for the job.\"\n\nHer eyes met his. \"I am Mrs. Breydon. I am also M. O. Breydon. The major was killed by guerrillas a few weeks ago, and I am taking the job in his place.\"\n\nThere was a moment of astonished silence, and then the Irish girl spoke. \"Ma'am, beggin' your pardon, I am, but you don't know what you're saying! You an' that sweet little girl in such a place! It's not to be thought of! You can't be serious, ma'am!\"\n\n\"Indeed I am. I am very serious. Nor do I have a choice. A part of the Battle of Bull Run was fought across our plantation. Our buildings were burned and our stock run off. When the war is over, we shall go back, but now I have to make a living.\"\n\n\"Scant Luther,\" the heavy-set man warned, \"is a very disagreeable man. Most of us respect womenfolks, but Luther is drunk half the time.\"\n\n\"He will have no reason to stay after I dismiss him. I am sure we will have no trouble.\"\n\n\"You'll soon know, ma'am,\" the heavy-set man commented. \"That's it, right ahead!\"\n\nMary Breydon leaned forward to see better. They were racing along a road through a small but lovely green valley scattered with trees. Before them was a cluster of gray, weather-beaten buildings, a corral, and more trees.\n\nAs they rolled to a stop at the station, the door banged open, and a big, slovenly man in his shirt-sleeves emerged. \"Howdy, Wilbur! Get down an' have a drink! Tell the folks to come right on in!\"\n\n\"We're runnin' behind time, Scant. Where's the team?\"\n\n\"Aw, don't get yourself in a sweat! They'll be along! Come on in; grub's on the table!\"\n\nWilbur Pattishal stepped down from the box. \"Scant, we've no time to spare. I want that team out here, and I want them now.\"\n\nLuther turned around slowly. \"Well, now. If you're in such an almighty hurry, you just go get 'em yourself!\"\n\nTwo or three rough-looking men were standing about, one of them with a bottle in his hand. He laughed.\n\nMary Breydon stepped from the coach, drawing all eyes. In her hands, she held an open letter that she handed to Wilbur.\n\n\"Mr. Pattishal? Will you read that, please? Read it aloud.\"\n\nWilbur glanced at the letter, then looked around and cleared his throat.\n\nTo Whom It May Concern:\n\nThis letter is authorization for M. O. Breydon to proceed to Cherokee Station and upon arrival to take over its operation. It also authorizes M. O. Breydon to discharge Scant Luther and such others as Breydon shall deem necessary.\n\nMark Stacy\n\nDivision Agent\n\nIn the moment of startled silence that followed, Mary Breydon said, \"Mr. Luther, you are discharged. You will vacate the premises immediately, removing only such articles as belong to you personally.\"\n\nLuther stared, then laughed. \"Ma'am, you're makin' a ruddy fool of yourself! No woman can run a station on the Cherokee Trail! Why this here's the roughest\u2014\n\n\"There's Injuns, outlaws. Ma'am, you wouldn't last two days!\"\n\n\"We are not discussing my qualifications, Mr. Luther. You are discharged. I suggest you take what is yours and leave. And please!\" She gestured toward the hangers-on. \"Take these with you!\"\n\nFor a moment, she thought he would strike her. He took a half step forward, then glanced to the right and left. The heavy-set man stood, hands on his hips, watching. So did Wilbur Pattishal.\n\nThen, for the first time, Luther seemed to see the man in the black hat standing to one side, alone. Something in his manner, in the very way he stood, warned Luther to be careful. He glanced at the man again, then his own stubbornness took control. He backed up and sat down in the doorway, blocking it.\n\n\"All right, lady, if you figure you can fire me, you just go right ahead and do it! This here's betwixt you an' me. If you're good enough to run this station, you're good enough to fire me. You just have at it.\"\n\nHe gestured to his men. \"These here men are out of it, an' so are those who come in on the stage. If they step in, there'll be some shootin', an' somebody will get killed.\n\n\"Now I say you ain't goin' in there. Not you or anybody else least I say so, and I\u2014\"\n\nShe moved so quickly it caught them unawares. One step and she had the whip from Wilbur's hand. It had a four-and-a-half-foot stock and an eight-foot braided lash, and the moment she took it in her hand, it was obvious she knew how to handle a whip.\n\nShe struck swiftly. The whip cracked like the report of a pistol, and the buckskin popper on the end of the lash bit flesh from Scant Luther's neck. With a cry of pain and startled anger, he lunged to his feet, and the second blow of the lash took him over the shoulders, the third on his leg.\n\nHe swore and lunged toward her, but she stepped quickly aside and struck again. Turning, he ran in a stumbling run, the popper ripping his shirt with one last blow.\n\nLuther stumbled and fell. For a moment, he lay in the dust, and Mary gathered her whip. \"Mr. Luther,\" she spoke quietly, \"you are discharged.\"\n\nSlowly, he got up from the ground. The man in the black hat had turned casually, facing him and, beyond him, his men. Blood trickled down his neck, and there was a livid streak across his shoulder and back.\n\n\"I'm goin', ma'am, but I'll be back. You can depend on it. When you least expect me, I'll be back.\"\n\nIgnoring him, she turned toward the passengers. \"If you people will wait, I'll see what there is to eat.\"\n\nOne of the men had lingered, and now she turned her attention to him. \"Is there something you want?\"\n\n\"I'm the stock tender, ma'am. What of it?\"\n\n\"You've got five minutes to get that team out here and hooked up. Otherwise, you can start down the road.\"\n\nHe put his hands on his hips. \"Now what if I did just that?\"\n\n\"I'd hitch the team myself, and I'd pass your name to Ben Holladay. You'd never work another day from St. Joe to Sacramento.\"\n\nHe stared at her; then his eyes fell, and he walked away toward the stable.\n\nShe went inside the station and stopped, appalled.\n\nThe table was stacked high with dirty dishes, and on the very end of the table were some empty plates and a plate of steaks swimming in grease.\n\nMore dirty dishes were stacked in the sink. In a corner was a pair of worn boots caked with dried mud, and several dusty coats hung from nails driven into the wall. At a window, a dirty curtain hung from a broken rod.\n\nTaking off her jacket, she rolled up her sleeves and went to work. First she opened the shutters on the other windows and let light stream into the room; then she put water on to boil and, taking a broom, began sweeping up the worst of the mess.\n\nWhen the water was hot, she washed enough dishes to feed the few passengers and the stage driver.\n\nThe man in the black hat appeared in the door. \"Don't worry about me, ma'am. I'll get something to eat later.\"\n\n\"You're not going on the stage?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. A man left a horse here for me. I figured to pick him up an' ride on.\" He paused. \"Gettin' late to start a long ride. Maybe I'll just throw my bed on the grass under that tree, just for tonight,\" he added as he moved off.\n\n\"Mum?\" The Irish girl stood in the doorway. \"My name is Matty Maginnis. If you'd let me, I'd be glad to help. I've done a sight of it in my time.\"\n\n\"Please, would you?\"\n\nWhen they were working, washing dishes, cleaning up, Mary asked, \"Are you going far, Matty?\"\n\n\"Rock Springs Station if there's no work in Laramie.\"\n\n\"If it is a job you want, why not stay here and work for me? I'll need somebody to help around and to cook.\"\n\n\"I'll do it, mum, and pleased for the chance.\"\n\nWorking swiftly, they wiped off the benches and the table, put clean dishes in place, and dumped out the greasy steaks Luther had provided. It needed a little longer, but when they sat down, it was to a meal they could enjoy.\n\nIt was when she went to the door to call the passengers to the table that she saw the boy.\n\nHe was standing alone by the corner of the barn. He looked tired, and he looked hungry. He was shabbily dressed and barefooted. Suspended from a cord around his neck was a pair of boots, man's boots, hand stitched and polished." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\"You got you a visitor,\" the man in the black hat commented. \"Looks kind of all in.\"\n\n\"Young man?\" she called.\n\nHe did not respond, just stood there looking at her. Who was he? A son of one of the hangers-on? Of Luther's perhaps?\n\nShe knew a little about boys. Not much, but a little. \"What's the matter?\" she asked. \"Are you afraid of me?\"\n\nHe came toward her. \"I ain't a-scared o' nothin', an' you surely ain't nothin' to be a-scared of.\"\n\nHe had no hat; his clothes were more worn and ragged than she had believed. His face was gaunt, his eyes hollow.\n\nThe man in the black hat said, \"You said this lady was nothin' to be scared of. You should have been here a few minutes ago.\"\n\n\"I seen it. If you folks hadn't been around, he'd of killed her. Scant Luther would.\"\n\n\"Do you know him?\"\n\n\"Know of him. He's downright mean.\"\n\nMary held out her hand to him. \"I am Mary Breydon. Do you live around here?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I told you my name.\"\n\n\"I'm Wat.\" He hesitated a moment and added, \"I'm Wat Tanner.\"\n\n\"We're just feeding the passengers. Would you like to join us?\"\n\n\"Don't mind if I do.\" He paused, looked at his hands, and said, \"I'd have to wash up.\"\n\nShe indicated the shelf on the wall of the station just around the corner from the door. There was a tin basin, a bucket of water, a bar of soap, and a roller towel. \"Help yourself. Then come on in.\"\n\nShe turned to the man in the black hat. \"You'd better have something, too.\"\n\nHe glanced at her, then away. \"Later. I'll just set out here for a spell.\"\n\nShe went inside, followed by Wat. The stage driver was coming out, and he held the door for them, seeing Wat for the first time. \"Howdy, son.\"\n\nBelligerently, Wat said, \"I ain't your son!\"\n\nWilbur dropped to his heels, his face grave. He put up a hand to turn the boy for a better view of his face. \"Why! Why sure enough you ain't! But I'd of swore you were somebody's son.\"\n\nThe boy glared. \"Mister, you're just full of\u2014!\" Glancing around, he saw Mary Breydon standing close by. \"I don't believe you've even got a son.\"\n\n\"You'll know him if you see him,\" Wilbur replied. \"He'll be ridin' a grizzly bear. Wears big Mexican spurs an' a top hat.\" Wilbur walked on to the stage, checking the team's harness.\n\nThe heavy-set man emerged from the station holding out his hand. \"Name's Cowan, ma'am. I d'clare, I never saw a prettier sight than you with that whip!\"\n\nMary blushed. \"I'm afraid I\u2014\"\n\n\"You did just the right thing only you be careful now. I travel this route now and again, and that Luther is a mean, mean man. You haven't seen the last of him.\"\n\nWilbur swung up to the box and released the brake, lifting his whip in salute. \"Be another stage through about daybreak.\" He cracked his whip, and the team was off with a lunge. For just a moment, she stood watching the dust cloud and listening to the diminishing sound. That was it, then. She was committed. It was her last touch with whatever had been, and what awaited her must be of her own doing.\n\nThe man with the black hat got up from the step. \"If it is all right with you, I'll eat now.\"\n\n\"Please do.\"\n\nThe door closed, then opened for Wat.\n\n\"Did you have enough to eat, Mr. Tanner?\"\n\nHe glanced at her, hitched his pants, and said, \"Ma'am, you don't have to mister me. I figure we're friends. You can call me Wat.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Wat. I'll do that.\"\n\nHe glanced over his shoulder, then asked, speaking softly, \"Is he a friend of yours?\"\n\n\"We've just met, but he's been very helpful.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, you sure are lucky! Do you know who that is? That's Temple Boone!\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I have never heard of Temple Boone.\"\n\nHe was aghast. \"Ma'am, where d'you all come from that you don't know Temple Boone? You ask anybody, Denver to Julesburg to Laramie, an' they'll tell you about Temple Boone! He scouted for the army, he rode shotgun on gold shipments, hunted buffalo, lived with the Injuns. He's done about all a man can do! Why I reckon he's killed a dozen men, maybe. Only them that needed killin', o' course.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid there's a lot I must learn, Wat.\" She put a hand on his shoulder. \"Will you help me, Wat? You're an old-timer out here, and I'm just a tenderfoot.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, anybody who can horsewhip Scant Luther is no tenderfoot. I seen it! Why nobody ain't dared cross him! Nobody! Not until you came.\"\n\n\"Wat? It's getting late. Won't your folks be worried about you?\"\n\nThere was a long silence. \"I got no folks. Ain't nobody going to be worried about me, and I don't need anybody.\"\n\n\"Everybody needs somebody, Wat. I have Peg, but if you'll let me, I'll have you, too.\"\n\n\"I don't need nobody.\"\n\n\"I know you don't, Wat, but we do, Peg and I. We're all alone, and we are not as strong as you are. If you have no place to go, why not stay here with us? At least until you decide to move on?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014all right. I got to earn me enough to buy a horse. A man without a horse an' saddle\u2014well, he ain't very much, ma'am.\"\n\nThe shadows were long, and the sun was gone. A small wind stirred the leaves, and she shivered, looking around. For just a moment, her thoughts turned homeward, back to Virginia and the plantation before the war. The great white house with its columns, the carriages pulling up before the door, her father greeting the guests\u2014it was all gone, gone forever now.\n\nFrom inside came a rattle of dishes; then a light glowed as a lamp was lighted.\n\nThe night air was cool, and as she looked back along the valley, she smelled the hay from the barns, heard the movements of the horses... Was this to be her world now? Was all the rest really gone? Or would it be what she wanted if a time came to go back?\n\n\"That man,\" she said suddenly, \"said he would come back?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. He'll do it, too. He's got to... or leave the country. He won't leave. He's got too much workin' for him.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, Wat?\"\n\n\"Oh... nothin'. Just seems him bein' around so long, with his friends and all. I just figured he'd not want to leave.\"\n\nIt was not at all what he had been thinking. He had something else in mind when he first spoke, she was sure of that. What did Scant Luther have \"workin' for him\"?\n\n\"Wat? Why don't you go in and help the girls clean up?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am.\"\n\n\"No? Why, Wat, I thought\u2014\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I'll do chores. I'll fetch wood or water. I'll feed the stock. I'll muck out behind the horses, but I won't do woman's work. I got my pride, ma'am. I batched some, doin' my own cookin', washin', and the like, but that's different.\"\n\n\" 'Batched'?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. That's what they call it when a man lives by hisself and does for hisself. Like when he's a bachelor, they call it batching.\"\n\n\"I see. I guess I have a lot to learn, Wat.\"\n\n\"I'll help, ma'am.\" He gestured around. \"I never worked in such a place, but I've been around stock all my life. I can hitch a team, if need be, or saddle a horse or herd cattle. I can carry messages a-horseback, grease wheels, and I don't mind fetchin' an' carryin'.\"\n\nTemple Boone was lingering over his coffee when she went in, and he glanced from her to Wat, a faint, half-hidden smile in his eyes.\n\n\"Found you a man, I see.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Yes, it seems I have. He's going to stay on and help.\"\n\nHer first thought had been for Peg and herself to sleep in the small cottage intended for them, but the more she considered it, the less the idea appealed to her. It would mean leaving Matty alone in the station, and it would be better if they were all together. She had her husband's rifle, and it was loaded. As a child, with her father, she had often hunted ducks or geese along the river, and she could shoot.\n\n\"I wish we had a gun for you, too, Matty.\"\n\n\"It would be better, mum, but there's never a house without its weapons. There's the butcher knife yonder and sticks of stove wood, lids from the stove, and there's pepper in the shaker. As for that, we could keep some water hot. Boilin' water has a way of changin' men's minds. We will have to do with what we have, mum.\"\n\nHands on her hips, she looked around. \"We could take a bit of that clothesline and stretch it across the door not quite so high as a man's knee. When they come in an' trip, we could take the firewood to them or the poker from the fireplace.\"\n\n\"You might kill one of them!\"\n\n\"Yes, mum, but when a body comes in your home of a night, breakin' in or sneakin' in without permission, he's takin' his own chances.\"\n\n\"You're right, Matty. Just for luck, we'll keep some water boiling, too.\"\n\n\"Yes, mum. Many's the man was killed before ever gun was invented, an' not havin' a gun never stopped anybody from killin' who was a mind to. Nor a woman, either.\"\n\nTemple Boone, sipping his coffee in silence, had said nothing. \"Doesn't look like you're goin' to need me,\" he commented.\n\n\"We didn't know you were going to help.\"\n\n\"I sort of had it in mind, but maybe I'll just set around and watch the fun. The trouble is, you may have roped the wrong calf.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Supposin' Scant Luther pays you no mind at all? He doesn't have to come near you to put you out of business. This here station is your responsibility, so what if he just drives off your horses? Or sets fire to your hay?\n\n\"Scant Luther is no fool. He can get himself hung bothering a woman, and he knows it. He might even do that, but if he does, he'll have it happen when nobody is around to see and when he can make it look like Injuns done it or something.\"\n\nOf course, Temple Boone was right. Mary's immediate thought had been that he would want to strike back at her personally, but if she were hidden in the house, awaiting an attack, he could do whatever he wished outside.\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Boone. You are right. We are short of weapons here, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Mum? I do have a pistol. It ain't much for size, but it's a comfort to have about.\"\n\n\"Better leave the barn and corrals to me,\" Boone suggested. \"I'm not going anywhere, and I have a horse out there, too.\"\n\n\"I cannot ask you to do that, Mr. Boone. You might be killed.\"\n\n\"There isn't much a man can do west of the Mississippi where he might not get killed, ma'am. I've seen men gored by steers, killed in stampedes, thrown from buckin' horses, an' dragged with a foot caught in a stirrup.\n\n\"A man can fall off a cliff, have a boulder or a tree drop on him, or his mine tunnel can cave in on him. There's a hundred ways a man can get himself killed out here that has nothing to do with guns or Injuns or outlaws. It's a rough country, ma'am.\"\n\n\"But this is my problem.\"\n\n\"Mine, too. I'll be sleepin' out there, and folks prowlin' in the night worry me some.\"\n\n\"You'll make enemies.\"\n\n\"I've had a few here and there. Enemies are good for a man. Keeps him from gettin' careless with himself.\"\n\nWhen he had stepped outside, Mary closed the door and dropped the bar in place. She went to the table and sat down. Matty brought her some food and a pot of coffee. \"Better eat, mum. It's going to be a long night.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. Where's Peg?\"\n\n\"She was tired, so I made up a bed from the things you brought on the stage. She's fast asleep.\"\n\n\"Who is he, Matty?\"\n\n\"Temple Boone? Don't you be thinkin' about him, ma'am. He's one of those who are just here, there, and around. He'll drift, and you'll see no more of him.\"\n\n\"He's a strange man.\"\n\n\"That he is.\"\n\nShe was tired. Hungry though she was, it was an effort to eat. She turned the wick down so the lamp gave off only a feeble glow. Then she went into the room where Peg lay sleeping and lay down beside her.\n\nTomorrow there would be much to do. First to clean up the mess Luther had left behind, then to organize some efficient procedure for handling the stages, feeding the passengers, and getting them on the road again. She wished she could visit some of the other stations along the Cherokee Trail to see how they were doing it.\n\nIn the darkness, the man called Boone was only another shadow in a maze of shadows cast by the barn, the corral, the house across the road. The only sounds came from the horses, and his senses isolated their vague sounds from the others, leaving a vacant place where strange sounds could register. Near a corner of the corral where the shadows were deepest, he sat on the ground, the rifle stock on the earth between his legs, the barrel leaning against his shoulder.\n\nAnd then, for a long time, there was only stillness, with the wind moving, a soft wind, barely stirring the leaves, a wind so light that its stirring left a place for the faint sounds of a man moving.\n\nInside the house, there was only a dim, reddish glow from the dying embers in the fireplace and a faint glow of light around the turned-down lamp. Outside, the leaves rustled, and Matty turned over on her cot dreaming of the sea rustling on the sands of Kerry.\n\nMary Breydon awakened suddenly. Her eyes flared open, but she lay still, unmoving, listening, every sense alert.\n\nAt first, there was no sound but the whisper from the kettle on the fire. From where she lay, she could see, in the faint glow from the turned-down lamp, the movement of the door latch. Ever so gently, it was lifted. There was a pressure on the door, which held firmly in place; then the latch eased down again.\n\nMary Breydon threw back the blankets and swung her feet to the floor, feeling for her slippers. She stood up, slipping into her robe.\n\nWhat was it Matty had said? Anything was a weapon if you used it as such. Even if much of the water had boiled away, the teakettle should be half full, the coffeepot, also.\n\nSomebody was trying to get in. Scant Luther? Perhaps. Or Temple Boone? After all, what did she know about him? Why had he stayed behind? Did he really wish to help or was he simply\u2014\n\nShe waited, listening. How silly could she be? It was probably only Boone wanting a cup of coffee!\n\nIt must be cold out there, and he was keeping watch. If anyone came to the stage station, he would surely know. She glanced at the window. The shutters were closed. Walking to the fireplace, she added water to the kettle, then replaced the lid and edged it closer to the coals.\n\nShe thought about her rifle. If only it wasn't so long! What she needed was a handgun, something that could not be wrested from her hands. Still, if she could shoot fast enough\u2014\n\nHer husband had said he had heard of men firing a rifle from waist level, but could she? And be sure of hitting anything? Of course, at that distance\u2014\n\nShe sat down at the table with her coffee, suddenly realizing what she had was cold coffee in a cold cup. How silly! She had forgotten to fill her own cup before putting fresh water in the coffee!\n\nWhy not go back to sleep? It had probably just been Boone. Anyway, nothing had happened, and she might have imagined it. No, she had not. She had seen the latch lift!\n\nShe was so tired, so very tired. Nobody could get in with that bar across the door, so why not go back to sleep?\n\nReturning to the bedroom, she lay down again. From where she lay, the door was in view. Her eyes closed.\n\nOutside in the darkness, the wind stirred, and dried leaves skittered across the hard-packed earth of the yard.\n\nThe man named Boone opened his eyes. He had not slept, only closing his eyes, resting a little, but his senses were alert. He heard nothing, yet he was uneasy, and he had learned to trust those feelings. Usually, they stemmed from some subconscious awareness his consciousness had not noted. Luther was a bitter, brutal man, not accustomed to being thwarted in any way. Careful to make no sound, Boone shifted his position, taking the rifle in his hands.\n\nHe looked toward the house. He would like a cup of coffee, but to go there now might frighten them, and that Irish girl had a pistol. He eased his belt gun into a better position and tightened his coat around him. It was chilly, mighty chilly. What had he gotten into this for, anyway? It was none of his business. If a woman wanted to come out here and take a job like that, she should expect trouble.\n\nA very pretty woman, too. And a lady. Anybody could see that. Her way of looking at you, the way she gathered her skirts, the way she moved\u2014\n\nOne of the horses blew softly, showing alarm. Boone took a fresh grip on his rifle and looked around carefully, searching every shadow. Some of those horses were broncs, wild stuff broken to drive. They were as alert as any wild animal would be.\n\nNothing... no sound, no\u2014\n\nIt was just a whisper of sound, some coarse material brushing against something else. The corral bars? Perhaps.\n\nMentally, he swore. He was not in a good position for quick movement. To rise up now would make some sound, however small, and if it was Scant Luther come back, he would not be alone.\n\nThen, so close it scared him, he heard a faint whisper. \"She'll have the door barred.\"\n\n\"I say take the horses an' go. That's a good bunch of stock.\"\n\n\"Like hell! What d'you think I brought this whip along for? We're goin' in there! Hell, that bar don't mean nothin'! I lived here too long! I can get that bar out of the way! What d'you think I done the time Buck passed out in there? Him with the door barred? I got in, didn't I?\"\n\n\"I don't like it, Scant. What about that Boone feller?\"\n\n\"Aw, he's long gone! What would he stick around for?\"\n\n\"Maybe he's gettin' sweet on her. He taken up for her, didn't he?\"\n\nThey moved away, and Boone reached up, grasping one of the corral bars to pull himself erect. He had an urge to shoot, but beyond them was the house, and a bullet from his rifle would go through several inches of pine, and he might injure one of the women or that little girl. A man with a gun had not only to think of what he was shooting at but where the bullet might go if it missed, and almost any kind of a gun might carry up to a mile.\n\nIf he could just get across the corral and come up on their flank\u2014\n\nHe rested a boot on the lower pole, then the next. Quickly, he threw himself over and landed on his feet on the soft earth inside. His boots made a soft thump as he landed.\n\nA boot grated on gravel, and someone whispered hoarsely, \"What was that?\"\n\nLuther's tone was impatient. \"A horse, damn it! Just a horse stampin'!\"\n\nLike a ghost, Boone crossed the corral. They were at the house now. Luther said he could unbar the door from the outside. How?\n\nThere might be a crack in the door through which a stick or a stiff wire might be slipped to lift the bar. Of course, when it fell, it would make a sound, but they would be inside before there could be any reaction.\n\nHe hesitated. Should he take a chance and go over the corral bars? Or should he shoot from the partial protection of the corral? It was a little safety to be traded for increased mobility, and he wanted to go over. They would be doubly alert now. One of them thought he had heard something, and also, as they were nearing the house, their every sense would be alert.\n\nInside the house, Mary Breydon turned restlessly in her half sleep. Her robe, which she had kept on, had tightened around her legs, and irritated by it, she had half sat up to free herself from it when she heard a faint scratching from the door.\n\nInstantly, she was on her feet, tightening her robe. The sound was coming from the door.\n\nFrightened, she stepped into the room. What should she do? What could she do?\n\nSuddenly, unbelievably, the bar seemed to lift of its own volition. It tipped back, then fell to the floor with a thump. Instantly, the latch lifted, and men plunged into the room. Turning swiftly, without thinking, she caught up the coffeepot and with one sweeping, swinging movement, threw the scalding coffee into their faces!\n\nA man screamed as the scalding coffee struck and began pawing at his eyes as if he would tear them out. Another wheeled and plunged through the door, fighting to get out. At the door, he tripped and fell sprawling, and Scant Luther leaped over him to get into the room. Dropping the now-empty coffeepot, Mary grabbed up the broom but did not swing it. At the moment it came into her hands, she remembered something the major had told her long ago, and as Luther lunged to grab her, she thrust hard with the end of the broomstick.\n\nThe thrust caught him in the pit of the stomach, and he stopped, gasping for a breath. Swiftly, she struck again. Out of wind, his wild grasp at the broom failed, and he took a glancing blow to the face that ripped his cheek.\n\nFrom outside, there was a shot, then another one. Luther scrambled for the door, and she struck him again, this time with the business end of the broom.\n\nMatty appeared in her door, pistol in hand.\n\nMary Breydon stopped, staring after them, half sick with fright.\n\n\"They're gone, mum,\" Matty said. \"You did 'em in.\"\n\nFrom outside, there was a sound of running, then of horses charging away into the night.\n\nTemple Boone appeared in the doorway, rifle in hand. He stepped inside, picking up the now-empty coffeepot. \"Now ain't that hell? Just when I wanted a good cup of coffee!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Mary awakened in the first gray light of day and lay still, staring up at the ceiling and trying to organize her day.\n\nShe had moved in and taken charge, and she had survived that and her first night. The word that she was a woman would by now have reached Mark Stacy, who was division agent, and running a stage station was no job for a lady. That would be his first thought. Yet she had taken charge, and she had fired Scant Luther. No man could have done it better.\n\nYet he would be coming soon, and what he must find was a better station. No, not a better one. It must be the best. It must be neat, clean, with good food ready to serve when the stages arrived.\n\nThe teams must be changed promptly, the barns must be clean, all the mess Scant Luther had left must be cleaned up.\n\nHow much time did she have? A day? Two days? She might even have a week. There were other stations, and Stacy was a busy man.\n\nThe station first, for here they would feed the passengers, handle the mail and any shipments there were, and that would be the first place Stacy would notice. Above all, good food, served hot, something passengers could go away talking about.\n\nThey had begun cleaning but had barely touched the work to be done. That needed to go forward.\n\nNext, an inventory of what supplies were on hand and what was needed. A careful check of the stables to see what needed to be done. At that moment, she thought of her father.\n\nSitting up in bed, she swung her feet to the floor, feeling for her slippers. \"Thank God, papa,\" she whispered to herself, \"you never had a son!\"\n\nHe would have been shocked to hear her say it, but had there been a son, she would never have learned how to do so many things that now she knew. He had loved having her ride out with him in the morning, and she had learned how to handle horses, how to keep a stable, even how to use a whip.\n\n\"This will all be yours someday,\" her father had said, \"and you'd better know how to run it. If the man you marry is no better than some of those I've seen coming around here, you will need to know.\n\n\"And, honey, you handle your own affairs yourself. Manage your own money. Let nobody else do it no matter how well they think they can handle it. Always keep your own money in your own hands!\"\n\nLuckily, Marshall had agreed. Even before they were married, he assured her, \"Keep what's your own. Our children will have something to start with no matter what. I'll take care of you.\"\n\nThey had not planned for a war. They had not expected the lovely plantation to be devastated, the buildings burned, fences torn down, stock driven off by guerrillas.\n\nShe would check the supplies in the station storeroom, the tools, the harness, the horses, and the feed situation. In the kitchen, she sat down and made a list of things that would need doing. Only then did she bathe and dress.\n\nWhen she returned to the kitchen, Matty had coffee on and was preparing breakfast. \"I found some bacon, mum, and there's eggs.\"\n\n\"Matty? I don't want to frighten you, but keep your pistol where you can reach it.\"\n\n\"Yes, mum. I don't frighten easy, mum. I grew up with four big brothers and had to fight for it all until they were growed enough to respect me.\" She filled Mary's cup. \"They were troubling times, mum, and there was many a time when I wished for a gun but had none.\"\n\nThere was a tap on the door, and when Matty opened it, Wat was there, and behind him, Temple Boone.\n\nMary hesitated, looking into her cup. It had to be done; she must ask them because she must have them. She could not do it all alone.\n\n\"Wat? Would you like to work for me? Here?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, as long as it's men's work.\"\n\n\"It is. The first thing will be to clean the stable.\"\n\n\"That's a mighty big job for one man,\" Boone protested. \"I mean, the way Luther left it.\"\n\n\"I can do it.\" Wat looked up belligerently. \"I'll want five dollars a month and found.\"\n\n\"Do a good job and I'll pay you ten.\" She lifted her eyes to Boone. \"How about you? Are you looking for work?\"\n\n\"No.\" He spoke quickly, and something seemed to give way inside her. She could not do it alone. The outside work would be too much. \"But I promised myself I'd stay on and see you get settled. I might ride over to Bonner's. I hear tell there's been a man rustlin' work over there.\"\n\n\"Neither of you will probably want to help when you hear what I have planned.\" She paused again. \"I want this job. I need this job. I've got to have this place in such shape by the time Mark Stacy gets here that he'll have no reason to discharge me.\"\n\n\"He's a reasonable man.\"\n\n\"Do you know him?\"\n\n\"I do. He's a widower. No family. Eats, sleeps, and breathes this stage line.\"\n\n\"A young man?\"\n\n\"Depends on where you start countin'. I'd say he's about forty. I'd say he's young enough to see that you're a mighty handsome woman.\"\n\nShe flushed and looked straight into his eyes. \"I am not thinking of that. However I may look is not going to help me one bit on this job. It will be what I do and how well I do.\"\n\n\"You're right about that. Stacy will see you're a pretty woman, but like I said, he lives this stage line. If you're not doin' the job, he wouldn't keep you on if you was Cleopatra.\"\n\n\"I would feel the same way, Mr. Boone. What I want to do is have this place spotless and working efficiently by the time he gets here.\"\n\nShe drank the last of her coffee. \"Matty? Fix him some breakfast. He's going to work.\"\n\nBoone started to speak, then turned toward the table. \"You heard the lady, Matty. Breakfast it is.\"\n\nOutside, the sun was bright. For a moment, she looked around. The cottage over there, that was where she was to live, but that could wait. The corrals, at least, were well built. She walked past them to the barn and hesitated at the door. It was literally a mess.\n\nThe earth floor was covered with old horse manure, with trampled hay and straw. It had not been cleaned in weeks, probably in months. There were no horses in the stalls. Frowning, she turned to look at the corrals.\n\nSix horses... and she had a stage coming in this morning. She looked again. That was the team that had brought her into this station, and they should have more rest.\n\n\"What will I do with the manure, ma'am?\"\n\nWat had come up beside her with a shovel whose handle was taller than he was.\n\n\"Put it out back of the barn for now, Wat. I may use some of the older material to fertilize a garden.\"\n\nHe looked at her. \"A garden, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Yes, Wat. If we are going to feed people here, we have no reason not to raise our own vegetables. At least, we can try.\"\n\nTemple Boone was walking toward her. \"I can help the boy,\" he offered.\n\n\"Mr. Boone? Shouldn't there be more horses? That's the team that brought us in last night. I assume they are fit to take a stage out again, but it would be better if they had more rest. And what if one of them was indisposed?\"\n\nHe smiled at the word but looked thoughtful when he glanced toward the corral. \"There should be more horses here, ma'am. In fact, my horse should be here.\"\n\nHe paused, and glancing at him, she saw his eyes had lost the lurking smile. \"You'd better let me handle this, ma'am. But you're right. There should be at least six more horses in that corral aside from mine. That Luther's been a lot of things, but I didn't think he was a horse thief.\"\n\n\"That's a very serious accusation.\"\n\n\"It is, ma'am, but a man who steals a man's horse can steal his life. Many a time a man's horse is all that's between him and a mighty ugly death. We don't have much patience with horse thieves, ma'am.\"\n\n\"The law\u2014\"\n\n\"Ma'am, I respect the law. We need it, but we don't have any more protection than we can give ourselves. There ain't an officer of any kind within a hundred miles, and even if they were around, they can't act until after the fact, ma'am. After your horse is stole or you're dead, they can hunt down those who done it, but you're just as dead as if there was no law. Any man who steals my horse has bought hisself a ticket.\"\n\nShe was thinking, frowning a little. \"Mr. Boone? Do you think Scant Luther would steal from Ben Holladay?\"\n\n\"He'd be careful, mighty careful. Ben's not a man to fool around with, and Scant's not one to take chances.\"\n\n\"What facts do we have, Mr. Boone? Six horses, seven, including yours, are missing. You say Scant is no fool, so where are the horses?\n\n\"Suppose,\" she suggested, \"he planned to steal them but did not want to take chances? What would he do?\"\n\nBoone pushed his hat back on his head. \"Well\u2014I reckon he might just drive those horses off, not too far, mind you, an' hold them where he could produce them if need be. Then he might wait to see what happened.\"\n\n\"And where would he hold them?\"\n\nTemple Boone looked off down the valley, thinking. After a moment, he said, \"This here's pretty wide-open country. There's canyons here and there, some good hideaways if you know the country, but I'd say the best place would be Steamboat Rock, but that's quite a ways.\"\n\n\"Wouldn't there be tracks?\"\n\nBoone hesitated. \"Could be. Ain't been much rain lately.\"\n\n\"Are you a good tracker, Mr. Boone? I understood you'd been a scout for the army?\"\n\n\"Now see here! What're you thinkin' about?\"\n\n\"I'm going after those horses, Mr. Boone. I am the agent for the company, and I am responsible.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, you're crazy! Off in those hills, alone, that Luther would shoot you down like a dog! You just back off now. You leave this to me.\"\n\nShe turned swiftly away without replying and walked back to the house. Once inside the station, she stood thinking; then she turned to helping Matty prepare for the incoming stage.\n\n\"Matty? I don't know who is on the next stage, but we have to feed them, and Matty, I want to send them away from here talking about it.\" She looked around at Matty. \"Are you a fighter, Matty?\"\n\n\"I'm Irish, mum.\"\n\n\"All right, we're fighting for your job and mine. Let's win.\"\n\nWhen the stage rolled in, the food was on the table, and it was hot. There had been little to choose from, for she had yet to order supplies, but there was ham and beans and two apple pies made from dried apples.\n\nAmong the supplies, she found some bolts of calico for trading with the Indians. From one of them, she cut enough material for a tablecloth. It was bright red, but it was also attractive.\n\nThere were six passengers, one of them a woman; the others were city men and one army officer headed for Fort Laramie.\n\nOne of the city men, a tall, serious-looking man with a beard, paused in leaving, hat in hand. \"Thank you, ma'am. That's the best food we've had on the trip.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir. Come back next week when I've had a chance to order supplies.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"I'll do that, ma'am. I really will.\"\n\nWhen the stage was gone, she took off her apron. \"Matty? You're in charge. I'll be gone for a few hours.\"\n\n\"Hours?\"\n\n\"I've got a job to do, Matty. Some of our horses are missing.\"\n\n\"What\u2014?\"\n\n\"Ma'am?\" Wat interrupted Matty. \"I can track.\"\n\n\"You can?\"\n\n\"I growed up out here, ma'am. I been trackin' lost cows or findin' hid calves since I was able to walk. Anyway, I figure I know where those horses are.\"\n\nFor a moment, she hesitated. \"All right, Wat. Get our horses\u2014Oh, I forgot! We don't have any horses but those from the stage that just came in.\"\n\n\"Can you walk a couple of miles?\" Wat asked. \"It ain't no further.\"\n\n\"All right, Wat. Shall we go?\"\n\nHe hesitated. \"There's liable to be somebody there, an' I think we'd better have a gun.\"\n\n\"I'll get my rifle.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. There's a shotgun in there. It's a spare for the express messenger. I seen it, and I seen some loads for it. You take your rifle and they ain't goin' to pay much attention, but you take that shotgun an' get close\u2014they'll listen to you, ma'am.\"\n\nShe looked at him again and hesitated. She was a fool, and Mr. Boone was right. She would be more than a fool if she went after those horses with nothing but a small boy to show her the way. Nevertheless\u2014\n\nHer jaw muscles tightened. She would go. If a man could do it, why couldn't she?\n\nWat led the way, taking off down a narrow, dusty path back of the corral that led off across the road and under the trees. When they had walked almost a mile, Wat dropped back beside her. \"Ma'am? If you want to say somethin' to me now, you hsst at me. Don't you go to speakin' out. They'll hear you, sure.\"\n\n\"What's there, Wat? Do you know?\"\n\n\"Yes'm. It's just a rope corral an' a place under the trees where they bed down. There's water there, an' stole horses been held there many a time.\"\n\nIt was very quiet. A fly buzzed past her face. She felt a small trickle of perspiration on her cheek. She brushed it away and shifted the shotgun again. It was heavy, heavier than she thought.\n\nWat stopped again, then motioned her forward, and she saw them. There were nine horses in a small rope corral, and beyond them, under a tree, a man was sleeping on his rolled-out bed. Nearby, there were some ashes and a coffeepot on the fire. As she started to step forward, Wat put up a restraining hand.\n\nAnother man came down from the trees, and walking over to the bed, he bent over to pick up his gun belt. Quickly, she stepped out into the open. \"Leave that alone!\"\n\nStartled, the man paused and looked around. He saw only a woman and a small boy. He spoke. \"Bob?\"\n\n\"Lemme alone. I'm sleepin'.\"\n\n\"Bob, we got comp'ny.\"\n\nThe man sat up. \"Huh? What\u2014\" He looked again. \"Hell, it's that woman from the stage station. The one who took the whip to Scant.\"\n\n\"That's right, gentlemen, and I've come for the stage-company horses and also that saddle horse that belongs to Temple Boone.\"\n\n\"To who?\" The seated man got quickly to his feet. \"Damn it, Pike! You never told me that was Boone's horse!\"\n\n\"What difrence does it make? Who the hell is Boone?\"\n\n\"If he finds we got his horse, you'll sure be findin' out who he is.\" He turned toward Mary Breydon, who had walked closer.\n\n\"Lady,\" he started to say.\n\n\"Back up and sit down again. You, too, Pike.\"\n\n\"Now, look here, ma'am,\" Pike started to say, \"I\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Pike, or whatever your name is, I've got an express gun here, it is loaded, and I'm very nervous. If you should frighten me, I am apt to shoot it, and I have done a lot of shooting at ducks. I think it would be much easier to hit you. I hope I don't have to.\"\n\nShe gestured with a movement of her head. \"Wat, get our horses.\"\n\n\"Like hell!\" Pike started to take a step, and her thumb eared back the hammer on one barrel. It was a sharp, very audible click. Pike stopped so quick he teetered on his toes, then settled back.\n\n\"For God's sake, Pike!\" Bob said. \"She means it!\"\n\nWat was running a lead rope from halter to halter with all the skill of an old-timer. Then he caught a mane hold on one of the stage horses and swung to its back.\n\n\"Kid,\" Pike shouted, \"you get off that hoss an' leave them be or by the eternal I'll have your hide!\"\n\n\"You got to catch me first!\" Wat yelled. \"Come on, ma'am! Give 'em a barrel just for luck!\"\n\n\"Not this time.\" She was very cool. \"Stay away from Cherokee Station,\" she said quietly, amazed at her own steadiness. \"I don't want to kill a man again.\"\n\nOnly when she was under the trees did she turn her back to them, and behind her she heard Bob say, \"Did you hear that? She said she didn't want to kill a man again!\"\n\nWat looked down from his horse. \"Who'd you kill, ma'am? Was it one of them sojers who tore up your plantation?\"\n\n\"I have never killed anyone, Wat. I don't know why I said 'again.' It just slipped out.\"\n\n\"It was the right word, ma'am. You surely gave 'em the right word.\" He began to chuckle. \"Wait until Scant Luther hears about this!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "She remembered so well what her father had said, \"Don't waste time worrying about the mistakes of yesterday. Each morning is a beginning. Start from there.\"\n\nAs she had begun, so she continued. Each night, before going to bed, she took a small tablet and planned her work for the next day, thinking out each step that must be taken.\n\nWat, working like a man twice his size, had cleaned the stable. She walked through it, inspecting the job he had done. When she finished, she said, \"Wat? Come back to the station with me.\"\n\nAt the station, she said, \"Matty? There was a piece of that apple pie left. Is it still there?\"\n\n\"Yes, mum.\"\n\n\"Give it to Wat. Let him eat it now. He's just finished a job he can be proud of.\"\n\nAs she was leaving the station, she turned to him again. \"Wat? Can you whittle?\"\n\n\"Whittle? Ma'am, any boy who has a jackknife can whittle. I been whittlin' since... well, I been whittlin' seems like forever.\"\n\n\"All right, in your spare time, or whenever you feel like it, I want you to whittle some pegs about a foot long, about an inch thick, and I want them peeled.\"\n\n\"How many?\"\n\n\"About two dozen, I think.\" At his puzzled expression, she said, \"I want some pegs on which to hang the harness in the tack room.\"\n\n\"You could use nails. That's what most folks do.\"\n\n\"Wooden pegs are better, Wat. They are less destructive of the harness.\"\n\n\"All right, ma'am. I'll sure do it.\" He turned back to the table and the slice of apple pie." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "When Wilbur Pattishal wheeled his stage into the street of Laporte, Mark Stacy was waiting for him on the boardwalk in front of the stage.\n\n\"Wilbur? What's this I hear? Who's that woman running the station out at Cherokee?\"\n\nWilbur's face was expressionless. Only his eyes showed a faint amusement. \"You hired M. O. Breydon. That's her.\"\n\n\"A woman? At Cherokee?\"\n\n\"She fired Scant Luther,\" Wilbur said. \"And man, did she ever fire him! Ran him out o' there with a whip!\"\n\n\"Scant? I don't believe it.\"\n\n\"She done it, though. And that ain't all. Somebody\u2014I ain't sayin' it was Scant\u2014stole a team and Temple Boone's gelding. She went over there afoot an' brought 'em back. She had herself a shotgun, and the way Wat tells it, they didn't see fit to put up any argument.\"\n\n\"Who is Wat?\"\n\n\"Youngster she has workin' for her. She's got an Irish maid, too. Maid an' cook.\"\n\n\"We'll see about that. I gave nobody authority to do any hiring. And a woman? At Cherokee?\"\n\n\"Mr. Stacy? Was I you, I'd walk soft goin' out there. You go in there all hot to change things an' you're liable to lose her.\n\n\"She taken over just about the time you left for Kansas City, and in the two weeks she's been there, she's turned that place around. You go out there an' take a good long look at things before you start firin' people.\"\n\nStacy swore softly, but he was thoughtful. Wilbur Pattishal was a character, no question about that, but he was also the best driver on the line, and he was no fool.\n\nFired Scant Luther? Impossible! Nonetheless, operating a stage station was no job for a woman no matter how big and tough she was.\n\nFired Scant? There had to be something wrong about that. Could be they were working together. There was no question that Scant was a thief, but nobody was in a hurry to accuse him of it.\n\nHe had started into the office; now he stopped. She had recovered Temple Boone's horse. What was Boone doing out there?\n\nMark Stacy knew Boone but slightly. He had come drifting into the country very much a loner and supposedly from Texas. Like many another western man, his past was his own secret, and he never spoke of it. He had worked for other stage lines as a shotgun guard, had trapped some, prospected, rounded up and captured wild horses, and the story around was that he was good with a gun.\n\nWhat was he doing at Cherokee?\n\nWhen Wilbur came out of the office, Stacy turned to him. \"Wilbur? What's Boone doing out there? Is he tied in with Luther?\"\n\n\"The other way around, seems to me. He was on the stage Miz Breydon come in on, settin' back there quiet, mindin' his own affairs.\n\n\"He seen her fire Luther, standin' by, just lookin' on, but I had an idea if she'd needed help, he'd have stepped in mighty quick.\" Wilbur chuckled. \"Only she didn't need help. No way.\"\n\n\"I don't like it, Wilbur. D'you suppose there was some connection between them before?\"\n\nPattishal took out a thin cigar and bit off the end. \"If I was you, I'd not waste time speculatin'. I'd go out there an' see for myself. But I'd step mighty soft if I was you, too. That's no ordinary woman. That's a lady.\"\n\nStacy snorted and walked off down the street. What a mess! Getting rid of Luther was one thing, and he was glad the man was gone, but a woman? At Cherokee, of all places?\n\nWhen he reached the corner, he paused. A big man standing on the corner turned toward him. The man wore a badge on his shirt. \"Howdy, Mark! Hear you got a woman runnin' the station out to Cherokee?\"\n\n\"Not for long. That's no place for a woman no matter how tough she is.\" Stacy paused. \"Marshal? Have you heard anything new about Denver Cross's outfit?\"\n\nThe marshal was watching a rider down the street, and he took his time replying. \"No, not a word.\" He turned his eyes to Stacy. \"But I'd be careful if you're shipping any treasure. They are around somewhere, holed up back in the mountains.\"\n\n\"How about Johnny Havalik?\"\n\n\"There's a story around; some of the boys been telling it in the saloons. The word is that Johnny's dead. The story is that Denver Cross shot him.\"\n\n\"I wish it had been the other way around. Havalik seemed like the best of a bad lot.\"\n\n\"He was a loner, though, and Cross wanted men around who would step to his music. He didn't like loners.\"\n\n\"You don't know where they're holed up?\"\n\n\"No, I don't, and I'm not lookin'. I've trouble enough right here in Laporte and between here and Denver. What happens north of here\u2014\n\n\"The fact is, I've had an idea there was some kind of tie-up between Scant Luther and Cross. I was keepin' an eye on Scant, hoping something would turn up, but now that woman of yours turned him out, so I've lost that chance.\"\n\n\"Luther and Cross? How did you make that tie-up?\"\n\n\"Cross used to waste around down to Fort Griffin. So did Luther. Scant had a saloon down that way where some of the rough crowd used to hang out, and Denver dealt cards there for a while.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "There had been no time to dream, no time to remember. Only at night, when at last she could lie down, could she think back to other days. Yet they were now no more than a memory, almost as if they had never been. The great white house with the pillars, the long green fields, the white fences, the splendid horses, and the long, quiet rides with her father as he rode over and supervised the plantation.\n\nAll gone now. The land was there, and the land was hers, and sometime after the war was over, she would go back; she would rebuild the house, the barns, the fences. Not as magnificently as they had been, for she would not have the money, but she would rebuild and begin again.\n\nThat was all for tomorrow. Perhaps before Peg became a young lady, if they were fortunate. Possibly she, too, could come of age in the beautiful land now so torn and ravaged by war, that land so far away, so lost to her now.\n\n\"One day,\" her father had often said, \"this will all be yours, so you must learn how it functions. Never trust your affairs to anyone else. If you have a foreman or a superintendent, that's fine, but be sure you know what is going on. You give the orders, you check to make sure your wishes are carried out.\"\n\nThe old days were far away now, but the lessons were not. Here the problems were the same, increased by the difficulty that some men simply did not like to take orders from a woman.\n\nHer every muscle ached. Working right along with Matty, she had washed, swept, mopped, and dusted. They had baked bread, made cookies, and she had made up a requisition for supplies.\n\nAt last, she had turned to the cottage where they would live. When it was swept and mopped, she moved their bedding there, put her few books on a shelf, and got out the picture of her late husband.\n\nShortly before stage time, when they were setting the table, she suddenly thought of something.\n\n\"Matty? At first, you did not tell me you had a pistol.\"\n\n\"No, mum, not at first. A woman's not expected to have a gun.\"\n\n\"But you had one?\"\n\n\"Yes, mum, and I kept it hid. You'd best do the same. If they know you have it, they will do their best to get it from you. If they don't know you have it until you need one, it can make all the difference.\"\n\nIt was good advice, and she must have a pistol, a gun she could handle easily and have close at all times. She remembered the shock when she first looked into Scant Luther's eyes and saw the hatred and the violence there. He was a man who would stop at nothing, and the story that he had been horsewhipped by a woman would by now have reached from Denver to Laramie to Julesburg.\n\nThe passengers were boarding the stage when Wilbur Pattishal stopped near her. \"Ma'am? Mark Stacy will be on the stage next time it comes. Or maybe the time after, but he's comin', and he doesn't believe any woman can run a stage station on the Cherokee Trail.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Wilbur. We're ready for him.\"\n\n\"I'd sure hate to lose you, ma'am. All the people are sayin' how good your food is and all. It's the best I ever et.\" He paused. \"Seen some Injuns this side of Virginia Dale. Friendlies, seemed like, but Injuns are notional, ma'am, so you be careful. Remember this, an Injun respects strength an' mighty little else. He respects strength an' honesty.\"\n\n\"I have heard you could trust their word.\"\n\n\"Ma'am,\" Wilbur said patiently, \"Injuns are folks. They're like you an' me and Scant Luther. Some you can trust; some you can't. There's just as many honest folks among Injuns as among white or black. An' there's just as many thieves and liars.\n\n\"Injuns have their decent men like Mark Stacy, an' they have their Scant Luthers, too. There's just no way a body can say anybody is all this or that. You've got to judge each man by himself.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Wilbur.\"\n\nShe watched the stage leave and then turned back toward the stage station. Wat was washing his hands in the basin by the door. She stopped near him.\n\n\"Wat? I want to thank you. No matter what happens here, I shall never forget you. You've been a pillar of strength, and no man could have done better.\"\n\nHe flushed and turned his face away. \"Thanks, ma'am. It was an awful mess when you taken over.\"\n\n\"Wat? Did you ever go to school?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, not exactly. We lived near a preacher one time, an' he taught some of us who lived around to read an' write.\n\n\"Johnny, he used to bring me books once in a while. I never did see him more'n three or four times, but he brought me a book or two. I read them.\"\n\n\"What books, Wat?\"\n\n\"Ivanhoe was one, and then there was Robinson Crusoe. I surely did like them books. It taken me a while to read them, but 'twas worth it.\"\n\n\"Who was Johnny?\"\n\nThe expression left his face. \"Just a feller we knew. He was just a rider-by. Stopped in now an' again.\"\n\n\"Did you live on a ranch?\"\n\n\"Sort of. Pa didn't have money for many cows. He done what he could.\"\n\n\"Where was this, Wat?\"\n\n\"Edge of the mountains. That was the last one. We had us two, three places. One was back in Kansas somewheres. Injuns burned us out, run off the stock. Pa worked in a store for a while. When that job played out, he tended bar in a saloon in Wichita.\"\n\n\"You moved a lot.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. Pa was a mover. He wanted a place of his own. Didn't do him much good when he got it.\"\n\n\"Where was that?\"\n\n\"Edge of the mountains.\" Wat dried his hands. \"All right if I eat now, ma'am?\"\n\nAt her nod, he turned quickly away and went inside, and she looked after him, frowning with irritation. She had learned exactly nothing except that he had once lived in Kansas and that he had read Ivanhoe and Robinson Crusoe.\n\nLater, she asked, \"Did you have many books in your home, Wat?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am.\" He glanced at her, embarrassed. \"Pa never learned to read.\" Then, defensively, he said, \"We had us a Bible, a great big old book. Pa said it had been in the family more'n a hundred years.\n\n\"There was a lot of writing in the back of it, names an' dates an' such. Pa set store by it. Said all the births an' deaths was written in it.\"\n\n\"You should have that Bible, Wat. It is probably a family record.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Where is it now?\"\n\n\"Up there. Edge of the mountains, I guess.\"\n\nFrom outside, there was a pound of hoofs, and when she stepped outside, she saw Temple Boone.\n\n\"Ma'am,\" he warned, \"Mark Stacy's on the stage. He'll be here within the hour!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "For a moment, she stood irresolute. This was the moment she had feared. Stacy had been shocked to hear that a woman had taken over Cherokee Station. He was prepared, so the rumors were, to discharge her and bring in a man, almost any man.\n\n\"Mum? We're fighters, you know, but on occasion we are bluffers, too. He's expectin' a woman, so give him a woman!\"\n\n\"What?\" Puzzled, she turned to look at Matty.\n\n\"You're not only a woman, mum, you're a lady, and a beautiful one with it. He's lookin' to find a woman\u2014the Good Lord only knows what manner of woman he's expectin'\u2014but not you, mum.\n\n\"Go quickly now and change! Put on the blue dress; it's that beautiful no man could withstand it! Put on the blue dress and be awaitin' him! He's expectin' a woman, so give him a lady, a grand lady! All in a lovely gown and all! He'll be speechless, mum!\n\n\"If it is a fight we're in, I say come out a-fightin' with your best weapons! Me old father used to say, 'Never let 'em get set! Take 'em off their feet an' keep 'em so!' It's you, mum, must do it! Be the great lady you are and he'll never have the nerve to fire you! Before he gets his wits about him, he'll be on the stage an' gone!\"\n\nFor a moment, she just stared. Of course! Matty was right, so right!\n\n\"All right! But you, too! You were a maid once, you said. You told me you'd the black dress and the apron left, but that isn't what we want! Just a fresh dress and an apron! Quickly now! And you, too, Peg! Come! We've only minutes!\"\n\nShe ran into the other room of the cottage and changed. Her hair, it looked a fright. Still\u2014she took her brush and comb, looked a moment, and made swift touches here and there.\n\nHer dress was lovely. Fortunately, she'd taken it out for Matty to press only the other day, and it had been hanging ready\u2014ready for what?\n\nShe had barely crossed to the station when they heard a shout and the rattling of chains, the pounding of hoofs. The stage swept up, turned in a cloud of dust, and the weary passengers began to descend.\n\nShe went out on the steps and stood waiting. The passengers started toward the steps, then stopped. \"Gentlemen? And ladies? Welcome to Cherokee Station!\" Gracefully, she stepped to one side. \"If you will come in, please?\"\n\nStaring, they paraded past her, two women and four men. And then at last the man she knew at once was Mark Stacy.\n\nHe was tall, strongly built, not at all bad-looking. He had stepped down from the stage without seeing her and was talking for a moment with the driver. As he turned away, the fresh team was led out by Temple Boone, and as they passed him, he looked up to see Mary Breydon.\n\nHe stopped, his mouth open. Hastily, he gulped, closed his mouth, and, confused, started toward her. He had been expecting a termagant, one of those big, strong women, as forceful as any man, such as one often found in western mining camps. Instead, there was this utterly beautiful young woman.\n\nA lady, they had said, and so she obviously was. Confused\u2014all his carefully chosen words were forgotten.\n\nShe smiled beautifully, graciously. \"Mr. Mark Stacy, is it? Welcome to Cherokee Station! Please come inside. Your food will grow cold.\n\n\"Peg? Will you show Mr. Stacy to his place? Please do.\"\n\nMark Stacy fumbled his way to his seat. The table was covered with a red calico cloth. There were red calico curtains at the windows, the floor was spotless, and the food smelled terrific. He glanced around.\n\nIt was like a different place. Only the old fireplace and the stove that had been added later to give greater warmth, only they were familiar. The windows were in all the right places, but the place itself... he couldn't believe it.\n\nMary sat down opposite him. She passed the plate, heaping with steaks. \"It is buffalo steak, and many prefer it to beef. You're familiar with it, Mr. Stacy?\"\n\n\"I was a buffalo hunter,\" he explained, \"although I never ate a buffalo steak that tasted quite this good.\"\n\n\"They are a feature of Cherokee Station, Mr. Stacy. The meat of the country, you know!\"\n\nMark Stacy was confused and somewhat irritated. He had a feeling of being taken advantage of but could not quite see how it was done. Certainly, no station on his or any stage line had either meals like this or a station manager as glamorous. It was nothing like what he had expected, and he did not quite know what to do about it.\n\n\"I must say, Miss\u2014?\" He was a thin man with a beard.\n\n\"It is Mrs. Breydon, sir. I regret to say I am a widow.\"\n\n\"What I wanted to say was that I've never had food like this on any stage line. Nor a station as attractive. I almost wish I could stop over.\"\n\n\"We haven't the facilities for that, sir, but one day we might. When we do, I hope you come this way again.\"\n\nThe stage driver thrust his head in the door. \"Five minutes, folks!\" The driver turned toward Stacy. \"Will you be goin' on with us, Mr. Stacy?\"\n\n\"I'll catch the next stage. I've some business here.\" He got up hastily and went out.\n\nThe driver was about to swing aboard. \"She's a looker, ain't she, boss?\"\n\n\"She is a handsome woman. Whether she's a station agent remains to be seen.\"\n\n\"Wait'll you see the barn. She's got it fixed like one o' them fancy private stables back East. Anything you want, it's right there, under your hand. She ain't missed a trick.\"\n\nStacy stood, hands on his hips, watching the stage roll out; then he walked to the stable.\n\nWooden pegs in the walls, extra harness all hung, collars on one peg, the rest of the harness on another. The stalls were clean, the tack room free of dust, the harness repair tools all laid out.\n\nHad she known he was coming? Of course, she had. The grapevine always carried such news, and anyone who fed as well as she did was sure to have made friends along the line. Yet, even so, he had never seen a station so clean, so well organized, and she had been here less than three weeks. All this could not have been done in the few hours before his arrival.\n\nHe walked back to the door and surveyed the station. What had that passenger said? That he wished he could stop over?\n\nThe station itself, the corrals, the barn, and the cottage. It was a nice setup, nicely laid out, but he had not really noticed that when Luther was running the place. Woman or not, she had certainly improved the place, but how in God's world had she been able to fire Scant Luther?\n\nHe had planned to do it himself if Major Breydon did not succeed, and he had not looked forward to it. Surely, there would have been a physical encounter.\n\nAnother thought came to him. What was Boone doing here? He had led out the team, then disappeared. And that boy she had hired? What was his name?\n\nHe was not himself doubtful that a woman could run a stage station. He was doubtful that she could command the respect of the men she would need to hire and serve. Or handle outlaws\u2014\n\nThat was another thing. Where was Denver Cross? If he was hid out somewhere in the area, he must be planning a move against the stages. What else was there? And soon gold shipments would be coming down from the mountains. And why was Temple Boone here?\n\nHe glanced toward the station, seeing a flash of blue when Mary Breydon passed the window. He felt a sudden surge of jealousy.\n\nOf course. He'd been a fool. Boone was here because Mary Breydon was. If he kept her on, every loose drifter in the country as well as some of the others would be stopping by. Slowly, thinking the while, he walked back to the station.\n\n\"A cup of coffee, Mr. Stacy?\"\n\nHe glanced at her, then nodded. \"By the way, have you met Preston Collier yet?\"\n\n\"Collier? No, I don't believe I have. Who is he?\"\n\n\"He's a rancher, about the largest ranch in the area, I believe. They've a lovely home just over the hill a few miles. He runs a good many horses, and we've bought from him a time or two. He's a good man. Easterner. New York, I believe.\"\n\nHe sipped his coffee. \"You know, Mrs. Breydon, I hired your husband, M. O. Breydon, not you.\"\n\n\"My husband was killed on the way West. Our initials were the same. I needed the job, and I believed I could do it. Now I am sure I can.\"\n\n\"You seem to have taken hold very well. Might I ask what your background is?\"\n\n\"My father operated a rather large plantation. We had a good many horses, carriages of several kinds, and we entertained a lot. As my father had no son, he tried to teach me how to carry on.\"\n\n\"I see. You know this is Indian country?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"And there are outlaws.\"\n\n\"So I understand.\"\n\n\"What would you do if you were attacked?\"\n\n\"What have the others done before me?\"\n\n\"They defended themselves. Several were wounded or killed.\"\n\n\"And you lost some stock?\"\n\n\"Of course. It is the horses Indians want most of all.\"\n\n\"I have a Henry rifle, Mr. Stacy. As for losing stock, a theft has already been attempted. I recovered the stock. I don't believe you have a man who could have done it better.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not. But a woman of your quality\u2014\"\n\n\"I am a woman who needs a job, Mr. Stacy. We are not talking of quality now, nor really are we talking of the fact that I am a woman. What we are both talking about is the question in your mind: can I do the job?\n\n\"I think I can do it. I have made a beginning. I suggest, sir, you give me time. As for Indians or outlaws, you yourself said some of your men had been wounded or killed. I am prepared to take that risk.\"\n\nHe stared into his coffee. What kind of a mess was this, anyway? He had thought to come down here, tell the woman quietly that it just wouldn't work, and then get somebody else, but he had not expected to find the station in such excellent shape, nor had he expected this kind of a woman.\n\nBefore he could speak, she said, \"I doubt if you have had the time to check my list of supplies. There are several items not usually requested.\n\n\"I have asked for vegetable seeds and potatoes for planting. If we are to feed a large number of people here, I see no reason why we should buy vegetables when we can grow them right out here back of the station.\n\n\"I want to put in a garden, plant potatoes, carrots, onions, cabbage, Indian corn, and a few other things. I believe that I can cut the food bill by at least a third.\"\n\n\"It is a thought. By the way, where did you get the buffalo steaks?\"\n\n\"Mr. Boone killed a buffalo. He was kind enough to bring us the meat.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Temple Boone. I observed that it was he who brought out the team. Have you taken it upon yourself to employ him, too?\"\n\n\"I have not. Mr. Boone merely wished to help. Of course, he is employed by the stage line. That he had not told me until today.\"\n\n\"Temple Boone? Employed by us?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. He told me he had been hired by Ben Holladay to catch and break or trade for horses from the Indians, horses for the stage lines.\"\n\nMentally, Stacy swore. Why hadn't he been told? Of course, why should he be told? The procurement of horses was not necessarily his responsibility, and such horses might be used anywhere along the line from Missouri to California.\n\n\"He should be a good man for the job. I understand he's had a lot of experience with wild stock.\"\n\nMary got up and moved away, and Stacy watched her talking with the Irish girl, then with her daughter. Slowly, sipping his coffee, he began to relax. He liked the smell of cooking, of coffee, and the quiet sounds of the women moving about.\n\nA boy came in and sat down at the table, and the little girl brought him a plate with some cookies on it.\n\n\"Mrs. Breydon? May I speak with you a minute?\"\n\n\"Please call me Mary, Mr. Stacy. All my friends do.\"\n\n\"I must warn you. Somewhere around here some outlaws have found a hideout. We do not know where it is, but we know who some of them are. I want you and all our agents to be aware of them, and they are no common run of outlaw. One of them is a man known as Denver Cross.\"\n\n\"You believe he will try to steal our horses?\"\n\n\"I do not. Denver plays for bigger stakes, and I believe he is getting settled to wait for a gold shipment.\n\n\"There's mining in the mountains now. They've found gold along Cherry Creek and at several other points. Soon there will be a shipment going over our line to the East. I believe that is why Denver Cross is here.\"\n\n\"We will be careful.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "She awakened to a rumble of thunder. For a moment, she lay still. The room was dark, but she knew that daylight was not far off. Slipping from her bed and careful not to awaken Peg, she donned her robe and slippers, then went quietly into the cottage living room and looked across at the station.\n\nThere was a light showing from the window and, to her surprise, a saddled horse at the hitching rail outside. Waiting for a distant flash of lightning, she glimpsed the horse, but it was unfamiliar.\n\nAt this hour?\n\nHurriedly, she returned to her room and dressed. For a moment, she hesitated. She still did not have a pistol, and she would look foolish crossing the road in the rain carrying a Henry rifle. Yet, suppose\u2014?\n\nThere was a swift dash of rain, then a steady downpour. Taking up a thick Indian blanket, she held it over her head and around her shoulders; then, stepping out on the porch, she closed the door behind her and walked swiftly across the road to the station.\n\nShaking the drops from the blanket, she glanced toward the barn. The door was open a few inches. On these chilly nights, that door was always closed and only opened to lead out the teams. It might be opened a little to let a man in or out but not just a crack. Somebody was probably watching from the barn. Wat Tanner slept in the tack room. Turning away, she opened the door to the station and stepped in.\n\nThe man at the long table turned sharply toward the door, his hand going to the opening of his coat; then, seeing a woman, he let the hand fall.\n\nHe was a strong but rough-looking man, his hat pushed back to reveal a swarthy, almost brutal face with high cheekbones and a slight scar at the corner of his mouth that pulled the corner down somewhat. It was a face that once seen, would never be forgotten. And she had seen it before.\n\n\"Mum?\" Matty's tone was even. \"This gentleman's inquiring for a boy, a young lad.\"\n\nThe man's teeth flashed in a smile. \"He was working for me, and he ran away. I've come to take him back.\"\n\nShe folded the blanket and placed it on the end of the bench. \"What if he did not want to go back?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I'd have to take him, anyway, ma'am. The boy was apprenticed to me. He's not finished his time.\"\n\n\"You have his papers?\"\n\n\"His what?\"\n\n\"When there is an apprenticeship, there are forms that have to be filled out.\"\n\n\"I guess I just forgot to bring 'em, ma'am.\" The man's smile was tolerant but amused. \"Next time I'm by this way, I'll show 'em to you. Now I want the boy, and I understand he's here, workin' for you. Name of Wat Tanner.\"\n\nMary Breydon walked around behind the table and filled her cup. \"I am sure the simplest way to arrange this,\" she said, \"would be for us to meet in Laporte where we can see the judge. We can place the matter before him.\"\n\nThe smile left the man's face. He was growing irritated. \"I am afraid I can't wait for that. I've ridden all the way in the rain\u2014\"\n\n\"Where are you from, Mr.\u2014?\"\n\n\"Williams,\" he said. \"I'm from north of here, up nigh the Wyoming border. Now if you'll let me have the boy\u2014\"\n\n\"I am very sorry. You cannot have him. If you wish to meet me in Laporte before the judge, I am sure something can be arranged.\n\n\"Although,\" she added, \"I very much doubt the boy wants to go with you.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, I've come a long way. I'm not goin' back without that boy. Now you turn him over to me, or\u2014\"\n\n\"Or what, Mr. Williams? The boy is here, in my care, and I shall not turn him over to you without an order from a judge.\"\n\n\"What if I just take him?\"\n\n\"You wouldn't take him very far with a belly full of lead, would you?\" The voice was casual, even pleasant.\n\nShe did not turn, keeping her eyes on Williams, the cup of hot coffee in her hand.\n\nTemple Boone moved farther into the room from the door of the pantry. His hat was wet, his jacket dripping.\n\n\"Howdy, Boone.\" Williams's tone was as quiet as Boone's. \"I didn't expect to see you around here.\"\n\n\"Roundin' up stock for the stage line,\" Boone explained conversationally. \"It's a livin'.\"\n\n\"If you like what you're doin',\" Williams suggested, \"I'd say stick with it and you'll do a lot more livin'. We want that boy, Boone.\"\n\n\"Seems like a lot of fuss over one youngster,\" Boone said, \"but like the lady said, you can meet in front of a judge an' make your claim.\" He smiled suddenly, a flashing, handsome smile. \"And I'd bet a new saddle it wouldn't be the first judge you've been up before.\"\n\nSlowly, Williams put down his cup, resting his fingertips on the edge of the table as if about to rise.\n\n\"I wouldn't if I was you,\" Temple said. \"You never seen the day.\"\n\nSlowly, the hands eased back into the center of the table, one of them reaching for the empty cup. \"They won't like it,\" he said hoarsely. \"They sent me for the boy.\"\n\n\"Leave him alone,\" Boone replied. \"He's doing no harm to anybody. You boys push him and he's liable to get scared\u2014or mad. Might make all the difference.\"\n\n\"You tell that to Denver.\"\n\nBoone sat down opposite Williams. \"Denver an' me don't see eye to eye. We never did. You just tell him the boy is doin' all right and to leave him be.\"\n\n\"You wouldn't think a youngster would be that canny,\" Williams said. \"He left just no trail at all. I'd run out of chances until I heard somebody at Virginia Dale Station say there was a boy-kid workin' down here.\"\n\nWilliams drained his cup, seeking for the few last drops. \"You can have him. He's a durned thief, anyways. Stole Johnny's boots off him after he was dead.\"\n\n\"I did no such thing!\" Wat Tanner spoke from the door. \"Johnny asked me to pull 'em off. Promised his ma he'd never die with his boots on. Then he told me they was almost new, and I was to take them.\n\n\"I said they was too big, and he said I'd grow into them. He said some of you boys would steal 'em, anyway. He was the one tol' me to git, said your lot was no fit comp'ny for a boy.\"\n\nWilliams flushed, stealing a shamed look at Mary Breydon. \"I don't believe he said any such thing! Anyway, who was Johnny to talk?\"\n\n\"He was best of that crowd,\" Boone said. \"Why else was he killed?\"\n\nWilliams got up. \"I'm ridin'.\"\n\n\"You do that. And you tell Denver Cross the boy is a friend of mine, and so are the folks at this station. You just tell him that and make sure he hears it.\"\n\nWhen Williams had gone, Mary Breydon accepted the breakfast Matty fixed for her and sat down across from Boone. \"You have some strange friends, Mr. Boone.\"\n\nBoone smiled. \"It's a big country, but there aren't all that many people. Sooner or later, you get to know everybody. Ofttimes the men who are outlaws and those who are the law once worked side by side or fought in the war together.\n\n\"Take you, now. You've just met Williams, and he's an outlaw. You've become mighty important to Scant Luther, another man of doubtful character.\"\n\nHe smiled widely. \"Seems to me, Mrs. Breydon, that you have some strange friends!\"\n\nShe laughed. \"All right. But thank you for speaking up for Wat.\"\n\n\"He'd do as much for me,\" Boone said lightly. \"After all, he's one of the few of us who is really 'western.' Everybody out here is from somewhere else.\"\n\n\"You, too, Mr. Boone?\"\n\nHe ignored the question. \"Seen you unloadin' some books. Do you read books like that?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"Never read me many books.\" He paused, embarrassed. \"Always figured to, sometime. I seen a few around. One time, a long while back, I worked some in a store back in Missouri. They had all manner of books. Folks goin' West used to buy 'em. I just couldn't believe there was so many folks who not only could read but wanted to.\"\n\n\"If one has a book, Mr. Boone, one is never alone. They will talk to you when you want to listen, and when you tire of what they are saying, you just close the book. It will be waiting for you when you come back to it.\"\n\nHe pushed back from the table. \"I'd better get the team ready. The stage will be comin' in.\"\n\nWhen he left, trailed by Wat, she looked after him. \"He's a strange man, Matty.\"\n\n\"Good-lookin', too,\" Matty said, her expression innocent. \"He's a fine figure of a man.\"\n\n\"I suppose so. My husband was, too, and I miss him, Matty.\"\n\n\"You're a young woman.\"\n\nMary flashed her a quick look. \"I wasn't thinking of that. Marshall was a wonderful man. I doubt if I should ever be so lucky again.\"\n\n\"The odds would seem to be against it, ma'am, but some women just seem to attract the good men. Others just attract the good-lookin' rascals.\"\n\nShe went to the stove. \"I'll just warm up some of that stew. It is a wet, unpleasant morning.\"\n\nMary walked to the window and looked down the road. Since arriving, she had been nowhere, done nothing but get the station and the cottage into some kind of shape and find her way in a strange situation. When the weather cleared, she would get a horse and ride down the valley. Or she might even go into Laporte.\n\nIt was an old town, although small. Once it had been mentioned as a possible state capital, but Denver had grown rapidly after the gold discoveries. Yet a visit to Laporte was an essential. There were things she needed and some she could no longer do without. Also, she needed a hostler here at the station. Boone was just helping until they got settled.\n\nThe rain on the roof was a pleasant sound. Matty opened the stove and added some fuel. They used the fireplace only occasionally now, although she had always loved an open fire.\n\nHer thoughts returned to the events of the morning. What did those men want with Wat? Williams, she gathered, was a man of doubtful character, probably an outlaw. And who was Wat? The man called Johnny, of whom they had spoken, was obviously not his father, yet what was the connection? She must ask Boone. He would probably tell her nothing, for these western men were oddly reticent about talking of each other unless they had something good to say.\n\nShe was lonely. Until now, she had been too busy to think of such things, certainly to think of herself. She was lonely for someone with whom she could talk, not just of horses, the station, or of the people here but of books, music, the greater, wider world. Not necessarily, she realized, a better world.\n\nThere was little leisure here, little time for self-examination or things concerned with the self. People here were, for good or ill, too busy doing things, living, building, creating in a physical sense. There was almost no backbiting, little gossip as such. What talk there was concerned events, people, cattle, horses, the prospects in any one of a dozen fields. Nobody seemed to be sitting still; nobody had empty hands. There were some who might only be stirring up dust, but they were trying.\n\nShe must not allow herself to stagnate. There were books, as Temple Boone had reminded her, and she should read to Peg, and to Wat, for that matter. Standing by the window looking out on the rain-wet morning, she turned over in her mind and the men she had met.\n\nOne and all, they seemed inwardly strong; each was responsible for himself. If one of them made a wrong step, he seemed willing to accept the blame, and nobody asked favors of another. Deliberately, intentionally, they were self-reliant.\n\nLater, when Boone came in from the stable, she mentioned it to him. \"Ma'am? You ever notice a child? If he falls down and hurts himself, most times he won't start to cry until he's close to his mama. There's no sense in crying if there's nobody to listen. Out here, a man does for himself, or it ain't done. You just don't wait for somebody to do it for you. And there's no sense in cryin' or complainin' because nobody has the time to listen.\n\n\"If somebody is hurtin', somebody will help and then go on about his business. They'll help you cross a river, pull a wagon out of the mud, splint a broken leg, round up cattle, or whatever. They'll help you, ma'am, but unless you're down sick or somethin', they won't do it for you. Everybody saddles his own broncs out here.\"\n\n\"Mr. Boone? It is probably needless to warn you, but be careful. Be very careful. I recognized the man you called Williams. He was one of the guerrillas who raided my home during the war. While the North and the South were fighting, they were riding, looting, burning, and killing.\"\n\n\"Seems likely.\"\n\n\"My husband saw their leader out here. He started to accuse him, and the man shot him. He killed my husband, Mr. Boone. And my husband was a very good shot.\"\n\n\"Bein' a good shot is one thing. Sometimes it simply ain't enough. People who do their shootin' out here don't waste around.\"\n\n\"I know. I am afraid Marshall was not expecting it just that way. He was prepared to fight, but the other man just drew his gun and shot Marshall.\"\n\n\"I suspect. You know who that other man was?\"\n\n\"His name was Jason Flandrau.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "There was a long moment of silence. A stick fell in the stove, and Matty came in from the cottage. She looked across at them, then asked suddenly, \"Mum? Is something wrong, then?\"\n\nTemple Boone did not respond, but he put his cup down and leaned his forearms on the table. \"Ma'am? Have you any idea why Jason Flandrau shot your husband?\"\n\n\"Perhaps because he expected Marshall to challenge him. Perhaps because he expected to be shot.\"\n\n\"Listen to me now,\" Boone said, \"and listen close. You're a mighty smart woman, and nobody is goin' to have to draw you pictures.\n\n\"Jason Flandrau is callin' himself 'Colonel' Jason Flandrau now, and he's bein' spoken of for governor. He's livin' down to Denver, an' livin' mighty high on the hog, if you know what I mean. He's joined the church. He's been singin' in the choir, takin' a big hand in all the public meetin's.\n\n\"The minute he seen your husband, he saw an end to all that, for once the story got out, he'd be finished. Folks might accept a former Confederate, although there's considerable doubt of that, but nobody has any use for a guerrilla. They'd run him out of the country, maybe hang him. He claimed self-defense, ma'am, and he was surely tellin' the truth. He had to kill your husband before he could talk, and he done it.\"\n\n\"I suppose you are right.\"\n\n\"Doesn't that mean something else to you, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Of course, Mr. Boone. I see that he must kill me, too, as soon as he discovers I am here.\"\n\n\"You ever met him?\"\n\n\"No, I have not.\"\n\n\"No matter. Soon as he hears about you, he will know what he has to do, and he will hear. There's already been a lot of talk up an' down the line about you.\"\n\n\"About me?\"\n\n\"Ma'am, you're a mighty beautiful woman, and beautiful women are scarce in this country right now. Sooner or later, he's goin' to hear about you and make the connection. As far as that goes, Williams will probably rush to tell him. He recognized you, didn't he?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. I do not believe he ever saw me before. I saw him from our window. I was inside the house until it started to burn; then we fled out the back. No, I don't believe he ever saw me.\"\n\nShe paused. \"Mr. Boone? Why did they want Wat?\"\n\n\"Surprised you haven't guessed. They want him because he knows where they are hid out. Don't you see? They've found a place, and that was where Wat ran away from. They're afraid he'll tell the law, or somebody. If they get him, they'll either keep him locked up, or they'll kill him.\"\n\n\"Kill a little boy?\"\n\n\"Ma'am, in Lawrenceville and some other places, they killed women, children, and old men. Besides, the stakes are bigger now. Jason Flandrau has not only been mentioned for governor, he wants to be governor. You've got to get out of here, Mrs. Breydon. You've got to take that little girl of yours and run.\"\n\n\"I can't.\" She looked directly into his eyes. \"This is my home now. This is my job. As far as Jason Flandrau is concerned, he will not be governor if I can help it.\"\n\n\"He'll know that, ma'am. He will also know that with you operating this stage station, you've no place to hide. Any passersby, any passenger on the stage, anybody who wants to lay up in the woods back yonder, any one of them can kill you.\"\n\n\"This is my job. I shall stay here.\"\n\nBoone stared at her, then got up quickly. \"All right, but you be careful, d'you hear?\"\n\n\"He was one of those who came down from the hills and burned my home. He ran off our cattle. He killed a couple of our people who got in his way. And then he killed my husband. Oh, I'll be careful, Mr. Boone, but I shall go down to Denver and tell them.\"\n\n\"He'd laugh at you. So would other folks. Ma'am, didn't you hear me? He's a church member over yonder. He sings in the choir, gives money to good causes. He's a pillar of the community, and who are you? You're just some no-account woman who runs a stage station. Least, that's what they'll say.\"\n\nOf course, he was right. Long after he was gone, she sat in her chair thinking. Matty came up to her and stood across the table. \"Mum? I heard what was said. I wasn't eavesdroppin' or the like. You've got to be careful, mum.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she agreed, \"I must be careful. I have Peg to think of, and Wat.\" She looked up at Matty with a wan smile. \"See? I am already thinking of him as one of the family.\"\n\n\"He's a good lad. I doubt you've noticed, mum, but he's tryin' to improve his table manners. I see him watching you and Peg. He makes his bed ever' morning, too.\"\n\nMary Breydon heard, but she did not reply. Jason Flandrau was evil. He was cruel, vicious, and a thief. To think of him being governor or holding any public office was to shudder. Somehow, someway, she must defeat him. But Boone was right. To many of the women around Denver and Laporte, she would be suspect. She was working at a job usually only held by a man\u2014something not quite \"nice.\"\n\nThe stage came in, and she glanced at the passengers as they stepped down, suddenly aware that she must pay careful attention not only to who they were but to their actions.\n\nTwo of the eight passengers were men obviously bound for the gold camps to the west, one a drummer peddling, as he soon let them know, hand-me-downs for men who bought their suits off the shelf. There was a rather pretty young woman who was, she said, a performer. There was an older woman on her way to Fort Laramie, traveling with her husband, a captain in the army, stationed there.\n\nThe seventh was a tall, very thin man with a neatly trimmed handle-bar mustache and auburn hair. He had the air of a gentleman, but his clothes, although still neat after the long stage trip, were shabby.\n\nHe glanced very quickly at Mary, frowned slightly, and looked away, then back again, as if puzzled.\n\nWilbur came inside behind her and said, \"One man got off right up the line. Preston Collier had a carriage waitin' for him. Englishman, by the sound of him, and some high muckety-muck by the look.\"\n\n\"Collier? He's the rancher, isn't he?\"\n\n\"He is that, rich as all get out,\" Wilbur replied as Boone joined them. \"Has him a ranch home with white pillars and two good-lookin' daughters so prim sugar wouldn't melt in their mouths. His wife's the same type. This here Englishman brought some guns along. Says he's goin' to hunt bears and buffalo and such. He'll be lucky if he doesn't get himself killed.\"\n\nShe laughed, then said, \"Don't jump to conclusions, Wilbur. Some of those Englishmen can really shoot. When I was a girl, some of them used to stop at our house while hunting in the Bull Run Mountains or the Blue Ridge.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, you could be right. There was an Irishman or Englishman named Gore. He come out a few years back and shot everything in sight. He shot up enough wild critturs to fatten a tribe of Shoshones, left most of it lay. Me, I never shot anything least I wanted to eat it.\" Wilbur walked out to check on the horses.\n\n\"Collier's all right,\" Boone said. \"He's a solid man. A good cattleman. I don't always hold with his politics, but his word is as good as his bond.\" Boone hesitated, then commented casually, \"If a man wanted to run for office in this part of the territory, Preston Collier would be a man to cultivate.\"\n\nMary glanced at Boone, but he was looking away, watching the passengers filing in to the table. Was he trying to tell her something? To warn her?\n\nTemple Boone was a puzzle. Just who was he? Where did he come from? There was much about him that puzzled her, yet he said nothing of his background, and the little she had heard was that he had worked at a usual round of frontier jobs. Wat... she must ask Wat. He seemed to know a good bit about everyone.\n\nFor that matter, who was Wat? Had he no family? Where was his mother? A \"sagebrush orphan,\" they called him, a name given to children whose parents had died or disappeared. Usually, they attached themselves to some other family or found work helping on a ranch until they finally drifted on to wherever such people go.\n\nWell, that would not happen to Wat! He was a nice boy, and she would see he had a chance. Peg liked him, and they were close enough in age that they could be companions.\n\nNobody asked questions out here. That was one of the first things she had to learn. Every man was taken at face value until he proved himself otherwise. What you had been before was unimportant.\n\nThe West, she had come to understand, was a place where you started over. When you came West, you wiped off the slate, and whatever you were to be began here and now. If you had courage, did your job, and were a man of your word, nobody cared whatever you might have been. It was a good thing, she decided. There should always be a place for people to begin again.\n\nSome, like herself, had lost loved ones. Some had gone bankrupt, some had gotten themselves into trouble with the law, into debts that were a burden, some were simply men and women who did not fit into any pattern. They were not the kind to become tellers in the corner bank, grocery clerks, ministers, or lawyers. They were born with a restlessness in them, an urge to move, to get on with it. If you proved yourself a responsible person, nobody cared where you came from.\n\nShe was learning, she realized, and ridding herself of preconceived ideas. She had heard the West was lawless, but that had been a mistake. Organized law was, for the most part, remote and far away. However, there were unwritten laws that all obeyed, and if there were a few who did not, the response was apt to be abrupt and very, very final.\n\nThe West was tolerant, to a point. When tolerance reached its limit, there was usually a rope or a bullet waiting.\n\nThe passengers ate, got up, stretched, and walked outside, lingering around, waiting until the last minute to board the stage.\n\nWilbur came to the door, his whip in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other. He stopped beside Mary.\n\n\"Wilbur? Do you know Jason Flandrau?\"\n\n\"I do, ma'am.\"\n\n\"If you see him down this way, tell me, will you?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\" He handed her his empty cup. \"He'll be comin' down soon, ma'am. He'll be wantin' to talk to Preston Collier.\"\n\nShe was not afraid now, yet she knew what fear was, and the only time she had ever been frightened was when Jason Flandrau and his guerrillas had raided their plantation, striking suddenly across the mountains from their hideout in Kentucky.\n\nShe fled with Peg in her arms and a neighbor girl, guided by Beloit, an old black man whom her husband had bought and freed several years before. He hid them in a cave behind some bushes, and they had seen their homes go up in flames, seen the stock driven off, and Beloit, who had run back to get some papers from the house, shot down in cold blood by Flandrau himself.\n\nNow he was here. He had destroyed her home, killed her husband, and to survive and become what he intended, he must kill her.\n\nWhat she had sought here was a new start, to build a new home, to make a living for herself and her daughter, but Flandrau was here, too, and she had no choice. Should she sit by weakly and be destroyed?\n\nLong ago, a soldier visiting her father had said something she remembered. \"The secret of victory is to attack, always attack. If you have ten thousand men, attack. If you have but two men, attack. There is always a way.\"\n\nWas there? What could she do? Yet the idea was right. She must not sit by, waiting to be killed, waiting to be destroyed. She must move herself.\n\nBut what could she, a woman, do? What weapons did she have?\n\nShe had the truth, yet she was not so naive as to believe the truth alone would prevail.\n\nThe truth was a weapon, and if wisely used, it might destroy him. She did not intend to sit by and wait for attack. She would choose her time, and then she would move. But what time? When? How?\n\nShe must have a pistol. Tomorrow. Tomorrow, she would go into Laporte and buy one.\n\nShe watched the dust settle after the departure of the stage; then she walked out to the stable. Wat was there, pitchfork in hand. He was, she noted, keeping things neat and clean. \"Thank you, Wat. Everything looks very nice.\"\n\n\"It's a job, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Wat? You seem to know most of the people around here. How do you happen to know so many?\"\n\n\"I sort of watch and listen.\"\n\n\"Where are your family, Wat?\"\n\n\"I got no family.\" He looked up at her, then quickly away. \"I got nobody.\"\n\n\"Now that isn't a nice thing to say. What about me? What about Peg?\"\n\n\"You ain't kinfolk.\"\n\n\"There is more than one kind of kinfolk, Wat. Some are kin by blood and some by heart. Peg wants to think you are her brother, and I like that. You have a family, Wat, if you want it.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"What happened to your family, Wat? Your father and mother?\"\n\nHe shuffled his feet, then stabbed at the earthen floor with his pitchfork. \"Mama died when I was two, maybe three. I remember her a little. Pa, he was shot.\"\n\n\"Shot? By whom?\"\n\n\"It makes no difrence.\"\n\nThey were interrupted by the sound of hoofs. \"Riders comin',\" Wat said. \"Two of them.\"\n\nShe glanced out of the stable door. Two men on horseback, and they were strangers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Long ago, her father had told her to see. \"Not many do, Mary. Learn to see what you are looking at.\" And about these riders there was something different.\n\n\"They have fine horses,\" she said aloud.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Wat said. \"No cowhand can afford horses like that. They are either mighty well off, or they are outlaws.\"\n\n\"Outlaws?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, an outlaw needs a horse that can run. A horse with stayin' quality, too. He dasn't trust himself to just any ol' crow bait.\"\n\n\"Wat, please go into the station and tell Matty not to mention me. Just feed them and let them ride on. I'll wait until they are inside, and then I'll go over to the house.\"\n\n\"You scared of them?\"\n\n\"Not scared, just careful.\" She put her hand on his shoulder. \"Wat, I am going to tell you something, but keep it to yourself. My husband was shot and killed by a man named Jason Flandrau. He shot my husband because of what we knew about him, and he does not want people out here to know.\n\n\"He killed my husband to keep him from talking, and he may have heard that I am here.\"\n\nWat walked across to the station as the men were tying their horses. She saw the door open and close. The men looked around, then followed him in, and as soon as the door closed, when they would be looking about the room, she crossed to the house.\n\nPeg looked up from the tablet where she was drawing. \"Mama? What's the matter?\"\n\n\"There are some men at the station. I do not want them to see me.\"\n\n\"Did they?\"\n\n\"I don't believe so. We will have to wait and see.\"\n\nInside the station, Wat moved over beside Matty. \"How's about some of that pie? As long as there's only the two of us to eat it\u2014\"\n\n\"You'll have to wait until I feed these gentlemen. They might want some pie.\" Her attention caught at his comment \"only the two of us.\" He was staring at her, his eyes intent as if trying to tell her something.\n\n\"I know you got to feed these fellers, but if there's any left... I mean, you don't eat pie, and that leaves only me.\"\n\nMatty glanced toward the two men, two strong, rough-looking men, both wearing guns. Of course, nearly everybody out here did wear guns, but\u2014\n\n\"Coffee?\" she asked. \"Is it coffee you're wanting?\"\n\n\"And a bite to eat if you've something put by.\"\n\n\"We've a bit of stew left, and we've bread, fresh baked by meself.\"\n\n\"We'll have it.\" The younger man glanced around. \"We heard there was a woman runnin' the station, but I'd no thought she'd be Irish.\"\n\n\"Are you Irish yourself, then? You've a bit of the look.\"\n\n\"Aye, a bit. My grandmother was from Donegal.\" He glanced around again. \"Is it you who runs the station?\"\n\n\"Who else? Could the boy run it, now? He's long in the country, though, and I couldna do it without him.\"\n\nShe put down two cups and filled them. \"But I didna come for that, not for runnin' of a station or what all. I come for the gold they said was lyin' about everywhere.\"\n\nTaking a long-handled wooden spoon, she began dishing up stew. \" 'Twas my wish to go back to Ireland a rich girl and have the pick o' the lads there.\"\n\n\"You're dreamin', girl.\" The older man spoke harshly. \"How much gold have you seen? It's here, but there's only a few of them has it.\"\n\n\"You watch. I shall find my gold and go home a great lady.\"\n\nThe younger one asked, \"Did you come right here from the old country? Or did you stop in Virginia?\"\n\n\"Virginia? I dinna ken the place. 'Twas to Boston I came and worked there until I could get the fare for the stage to come west. It was California where I was bound, but when I heard there was gold in Colorado and it was a thousand mile the closer, I chose Colorado.\"\n\nThere was no more talk. They settled to their eating, and as Matty had noticed, eating in the West was a serious business not to be interrupted by idle conversation. From time to time, she refilled their cups. She knew tough men when she saw them, and these were all of that.\n\nWhere was Mary Breydon? It was unlike her to leave Matty to handle things alone. She glanced at Wat, and he stretched, brushing a finger past his lips as he did so.\n\nTrouble, was it? She refilled the teakettle and stirred the fire. The water in the kettle had been hot, and soon there would be more.\n\n\"Meetin' the stage?\" she asked.\n\n\"Passin' through. Headin' west.\"\n\nOne of them muttered something to the other, and the older man said, \"Ain't likely.\"\n\n\"... what I think,\" the younger man said. \"Some mistake.\"\n\nThey finished eating, and one of the men rolled a smoke. The younger glanced around again. \"Tidy,\" he said, \"right tidy.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir! It's the only way a poor girl can hold a job these days, to do something better than the men.\"\n\nThe younger man got up. \"Come on, Joe. We'll see the boss in Laporte.\"\n\nThey went out the door, stepped into their saddles, and rode away.\n\nWat turned to Matty. \"I thought I knew him! That's Turkey Joe Longman. He's a horse thief and gunman, only he's never been caught at it. I don't know the younger one.\"\n\nWhen the sound of hoofs had died away, Mary came back to the station. Matty turned as she came in. \"Wat says he knows the older one. He's a horse thief.\"\n\n\"So is the younger one.\" Mary Breydon's eyes showed her anger. \"The horse he's riding was one of ours from back home. I know that horse, and he would know me, I think.\"\n\n\"It's been how long, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Almost two years since that horse was stolen. He was one of the last ones driven off by Flandrau's men.\"\n\n\"Can you say for sure it was him?\"\n\n\"I can say it, but I cannot prove it, and he was using another name then. Flandrau was the name he used when he was not robbing and stealing.\"\n\n\"We must tell Mr. Boone, ma'am. He will know what to do.\"\n\n\"What to do is my problem, not his. I'll not be getting him into a shooting because of my troubles. This is for me to do.\"\n\n\"You've made friends, ma'am, good friends. They'll not see you put upon.\"\n\n\"Leave them out of it. I'll handle it.\"\n\nBut how? She could not continue to hide whenever a stranger came by. She had done so this once because she needed time. There was a chance now they would not realize for a few days, at least, that Matty was not the woman in charge. Then they would come back.\n\n\"They'll not be fooled,\" Wat said. \"By now there will be talk of you all along the line. Ma'am, I know cowboys, and I know the West, and by now they will be speakin' of you from El Paso to Uvalde to Salt Lake. A good-lookin' woman who can cook?\n\n\"Word gets around, ma'am. The West has no secrets. There's little enough that's news, and a man in El Paso will know what the town marshal looks like in Denver, he will know there's a card sharp in Kansas City who looks at his watch just before he deals. They know there's something crooked going on, but nobody's caught him at it yet. So they will know you're here.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Wat. I needed a little time, just a little.\"\n\n\"Beggin' your pardon, ma'am, but you're goin' to need a lot more than that. Those are mean men, mighty mean.\"\n\nShe stood looking out the window, looking down the road. Of course, Wat was right. All she had done was to gain a little time, time to think, to plan.\n\nOf course, Jason Flandrau must be careful. To go further with his plans, he must not allow any taint of suspicion to touch him. He must seem to have nothing at all to do with what happened, so it was unlikely he would use any men who were known to work for him or be friendly to him.\n\nWhatever else he might be, Jason Flandrau was no fool. He had acted quickly to kill her husband, but he had no choice, and that was a gun battle, and there were many men in Colorado and the West who had engaged in gun battles. Why even Andrew Jackson had once killed a man in a gunfight!\n\nTo kill a woman was another thing, so it would be done with care by somebody unconnected to him, by somebody... perhaps even a renegade Indian?\n\nShe must get a pistol.\n\nShe would go into Laporte, for, of course, they needed much else. There were odds and ends of clothing she must obtain for Peg and herself and a little other shopping. And she must be thinking of schooling for Peg, and as there were no schools close by, she must handle that herself. For Peg and Wat, she reminded herself.\n\nLong ago, her father had taught her to shoot, and she remembered what he had said. \"A gun is a responsibility. Never shoot blind. Always know what you are shooting at and never shoot unless there is no other alternative. And consider every gun as loaded. Most of them are.\"\n\nShe must think. The first item was clear and obvious. She might never tell anyone about Flandrau's guerrilla activities, but he could not be sure of that. He had killed her husband; now he would kill her. So she must consider how it might be done and who might do it. Coolly, cold-bloodedly, she must consider every aspect and then be prepared.\n\nShe was not a man who might be challenged and killed, as her husband had been. They might hold up the stage and kill her in the process, but already she had learned enough of western ways to know that even the worst of men would hesitate at killing a woman. Kill a man and the West might shrug, but kill a woman and men would arise in their wrath and hunt down the killer and hang him without hesitation.\n\nAmbush... shot while crossing the area from the stage station to her dwelling or moving about between the barn and the corral.\n\nSomebody hidden up in the trees on the low hillside with a horse waiting back in the brush. There could be other ways, but that was the most obvious and the one she must consider.\n\nHer father, an old army man, had once said that a battle well planned was half won. Perhaps. There was always the unexpected, but if one had prepared for every contingency, one could then cope with the unexpected. She must be cool; she must be objective.\n\nNothing in her life had prepared her for this, yet when she came to think of it, she had often heard her husband and father talking of war, Indian fights on the frontier, and there were some things she remembered. She could not, would not, ask for help. That was not the way it was done on the frontier, but even if it had been, what right had she to embroil others in her problems, perhaps at the risk of their lives?\n\nAttack, her father had said, always attack.\n\nTo protect herself was not enough; she must not permit a man of Jason Flandrau's type to come to a position of authority.\n\nWho was it who told her that her neighbor, whom she had never met, was a political power as well as a wealthy rancher? What was his name? Collier, Preston Collier. She must meet him, and soon.\n\nWho would oppose Flandrau in running for office? Who stood to lose most if he won? Whoever he was, he was a potential ally, and she would need all the help she could get. Yet she could not come right out and accuse Flandrau, for how could she prove it? This was far from Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio where he had operated before going West to Missouri and Kansas. Those who might have known of his activities as a guerrilla were scattered, still in the armed forces or perhaps even killed. It would be her unsupported word against his, and he had been making himself prominent in church circles in Denver and elsewhere, had avoided the saloons and gambling halls, and had already won some standing in the area. As for her, she was just a stranger, a woman who, of all things, operated a stage station.\n\nShe turned away from the window and glanced at Wat, eating a piece of apple pie. Wat, that strange, wild boy from only God knew where.\n\n\"Wat,\" she said suddenly, \"if I had a son, I would want him to be like you.\"\n\nStartled, Wat looked up, his face flushing with embarrassment. She crossed to him. \"I mean it, Wat. I mean every word.\"\n\nHe looked down quickly, tears in his eyes. When he looked up, he had blinked them away.\n\n\"Ma'am? If you're goin' into Laporte, I think you should leave me go with you. I could circulate around a little.\"\n\n\"We'll see, Wat. I'll go in tomorrow, I think.\"\n\n\"You goin' on the stage? You take the stage, ma'am. It's safer. Wilbur will be drivin', and he's a good whip.\"\n\nWhat would she wear? Her traveling suit? She could press that, and the white blouse? Crossing the room, she looked critically at her hair. She'd have to do something with it and make a list of things to do, things to get.\n\nAt the head of the list, a pistol." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Laporte lay quiet in the morning sun. At the hitching rail in front of a saloon were two horses, at the hardware store, a wagon and team.\n\nWilbur, glancing along the street, helped her from the stage. \"Now you be careful, ma'am.\" He paused. \"You going to eat in town? If you are, try the boardin' house yonder. They've got a private room for such as you an' Peg. Might be better. Sometimes those boys forget theirselves and talk rough. They'd be ashamed, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Are you protecting them or me?\" She smiled.\n\n\"Both.\" He held out a hand. \"You want me to take that list in to Stacy?\"\n\n\"No, I'll see him myself. There may be some items that call for explanation. In fact, I'll just go in now.\"\n\nWith Peg by the hand, she pushed open the office door and stepped inside.\n\nMark Stacy was seated in a swivel chair at a roll-top desk. Seeing her, he got quickly to his feet and reached for his coat.\n\n\"You needn't, Mr. Stacy. I am not a guest, only an employee!\"\n\nHe bowed. \"Ma'am, here you are always a guest! Out at the station, I'm the guest\"\u2014he grinned\u2014\"and you are an employee!\"\n\n\"This is the list\u2014\"\n\n\"Won't you sit down? Please?\"\n\n\"Well\u2014only for a minute. We have some shopping to do, and I want to get back to the station.\"\n\nWhen she was seated, he shuffled some papers on his desk. \"Never heard so many nice things said about the grub\u2014the food, I mean. You're making a name for yourself, ma'am.\"\n\n\"I hope Mr. Holladay will approve.\"\n\n\"Let me tell you something, Mrs. Breydon. Ben Holladay doesn't care whether you are man, woman, red, black, or yellow as long as the stages run on time and folks don't complain. But you can bet on one thing. He'll come along one of these days when you least expect it.\"\n\nHe glanced at her. \"Ma'am? What happened? With your husband, I mean.\"\n\nShe hesitated, then said quietly, \"Major Breydon was wearing a gun in a button-down holster. He was not a gunfighter. He was not used to western ways. He met a man on the street in Julesburg who had reason not to like him. That man simply drew his gun and fired. My husband was killed instantly.\"\n\n\"You know who killed him?\"\n\n\"It was Jason Flandrau.\"\n\n\"Jason Flandrau! Ma'am, you must be mistaken. Mr. Flandrau is not a gunfighter. He's a very respectable and respected gentleman!\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Come to think of it, I recall some talk of Major Breydon being killed, but his killer wasn't named. Fact is, I doubt if anybody knew who he was.\"\n\n\"I knew, Mr. Stacy.\"\n\n\"Was it some old quarrel? Something that happened back East?\"\n\n\"It was no quarrel. My husband only quarreled with gentlemen, Mr. Stacy, when he quarreled at all, which was rare, indeed. Mr. Flandrau killed my husband because the major recognized him.\"\n\nStacy hesitated. There was something here he did not understand. Jason Flandrau was a very popular man in Denver. Friendly, easygoing, and a free spender who associated only with the most respectable people. Killed because the major recognized him?\n\n\"I am afraid I don't follow you, Mrs. Breydon.\"\n\nShe arose. \"There is no reason why you should. My troubles are my own. One thing I might ask. Do not mention me to Mr. Flandrau and, please, do not repeat this conversation.\"\n\n\"I certainly will not mention it, but I must warn you, ma'am. Mr. Flandrau has many friends. He is a great favorite. More than that\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"He has an office right down the street. Over the bank. I believe he is there now.\"\n\nTaking Peg by the hand, she went out. For a moment, she hesitated. If there had been a way, she would have turned right around and gone back to Cherokee, but there was no way. Not until late in the afternoon. There was nothing to do but do what she came for.\n\nSwiftly, she crossed the street and entered the hardware store. When a man with sleeve protectors came up to her, she said, \"I want to buy a pistol.\"\n\nHe glanced at her. The request was not unusual. \"I have a fine little twenty-two here, ma'am.\"\n\n\"I do not want a twenty-two. I want a navy pistol, thirty-six caliber.\"\n\n\"That's large for a woman\u2014\"\n\n\"I have fired them. My husband taught me.\"\n\n\"Oh? That's different, ma'am.\" He took a pistol from under the counter. \"Brand, spankin' new, ma'am. One of the best.\"\n\nShe glanced at it. \"I'll take it. I want some powder and ball, too.\" She had started to turn away to where Peg was looking at some ribbons when she saw the matched derringers. \"What are they worth?\"\n\n\"Ma'am, they are very fine weapons. Small but very well made. Cost you forty dollars for the pair. And they are forty-four caliber, ma'am.\"\n\nForty dollars? And she was already buying one pistol. Yet how much was a life worth? \"I'll take them. Will you charge them, please?\"\n\n\"You want to carry them loaded, ma'am? I think\u2014\"\n\n\"I am leaving on the stage this afternoon, sir. They wouldn't be much good to me unloaded, would they?\" She smiled.\n\nHe smiled back. \"I guess not. I'll load 'em, ma'am.\" He nodded toward the other side of the store where the dry goods lay. \"Looks to me like your sister has found somethin' she likes.\"\n\nShe smiled again. \"Thank you, sir. The young lady is my daughter.\"\n\n\"Daughter? Say, you wouldn't be Mrs. Breydon, would you? The one who operates Cherokee? They do say you've the finest grub this side of Georgetown.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I am Mrs. Breydon.\"\n\nShe crossed to the other side of the store. In a few minutes, her other shopping completed, she returned for the loaded guns and left the store." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "In the office over the bank, Jason Flandrau stood at the window. He was talking to two men in business suits who were seated near his desk. He turned to face them, his back to the window.\n\n\"Gentlemen, you do me honor! To tell you the truth, I have thought of running for governor. I know a bill was introduced with the idea that Colorado would become a state. In such case, I am sure they would prefer the territorial governor they have now to any newcomer. However\"\u2014he smiled graciously\u2014\"if enough people were to ask me\u2014\"\n\n\"I am sure they will, Mr. Flandrau. Some of us want a change. We feel a change is essential, and such an up-and-coming man as yourself\u2014Well, we are sure you are what the voters want, Mr. Flandrau.\"\n\n\"You gentlemen understand these things better than I. But if the bill passes, then think of me, and if you wish it, I will run.\"\n\nHe turned back to the window, scarcely able to conceal his elation. Of course, they could not know how he had carefully set the stage for just this to happen, and now\u2014\n\nHe looked down into the street. A woman and a small girl were crossing the street, an uncommonly beautiful woman\u2014\n\nHe stiffened, and his hands gripped the curtain pole that crossed the middle of the window so hard it nearly snapped.\n\nMary Breydon! Mary Breydon here! Of all the damned miserable luck! He stared, started to turn away, then looked again, but she was out of sight on the walk below him.\n\n\"Is something wrong, Mr. Flandrau?\"\n\nHe managed a smile. \"No, no, of course not. I was just thinking. We could do a lot together, gentlemen. Now if you'll permit me?\"\n\nThey got to their feet. \"Of course. We are interrupting.\"\n\n\"No, but I do have some business. Let us wait, gentlemen, and see what happens to that statehood bill.\"\n\nWhen they were gone, Flandrau sat down at his desk. Who would ever have believed Mary Breydon would come West? Had she accompanied her husband, or had she come later because of his death?\n\nHe had heard the rumors, of course, but he could not believe that the Mary Breydon he knew would be the woman operating a stage station, yet they had to be one and the same. Turkey Joe had been mistaken then, or he had missed seeing Mary Breydon.\n\nHe swore softly but bitterly. Killing Breydon had been one thing; gun duels were happening all the time. In this western country, if you killed an armed enemy, it was to your credit, but another killing of anyone would begin to raise doubts, and the killing of a woman was not to be considered. Yet die she must. She knew too much, and she had too many well-connected friends.\n\nMajor Breydon had been a well-liked man. Suppose she got an investigation started? Breydon would have had friends at Fort Collins nearby, and they would certainly investigate if there seemed to be doubtful circumstances. So far, there had been no investigation, as it had appeared to be a cut-and-dried gunfight.\n\nBut how? How?\n\nHow to be rid of her without any suspicion being directed toward himself?\n\nA simple holdup in which she was killed by accident? No... if a woman was killed, they'd pursue the killers until they were caught, and before being hung, one of them might talk.\n\nA shot from ambush? He would have the area scouted to see if there was a chance that would also permit an escape. Steal an Indian pony and let the killer ride it until he reached a safe spot to switch to another and better horse, probably in the vicinity of an Indian village or camp?\n\nOr an Indian attack on the station? Or men dressed as Indians?\n\nHe got up from his desk and walked to the window. There was no sign of her on the street, yet he must not risk being seen by her, and damn it! He wanted a drink!\n\nHow long would she be in town? He tried to remember when the next stage left for Cherokee.\n\nStampede the stage? Set fire to the stage station?\n\nLaporte was virtually a one-street town; at least all the shops and stores as well as the saloons were on the one street, so there was small chance of avoiding anyone you did not wish to see.\n\nIf ambush was the way, who could he trust to handle it? Of the old outfit, which had numbered more than sixty men, he had kept but a dozen to bring West with him. The others were scattered, some of them gone to their homes, some slain in the fighting of '63. One by one he considered each man. The killer would have to believe himself in danger, too. Slowly, he began to concoct the story he would tell the man he sent, that if she recognized one of them, she would go at once to the law or to Fort Collins and the army.\n\nOnce the job was done, he would eliminate the man who did it. If he was to be governor or senator, he must have a clean slate. He would grow a beard, slowly change his style of dress to a more sober, dignified habit.\n\nAs for Mary Breydon\u2014\n\nHe would go to Denver and remain there until the job was done. Small chance of her coming on there, and he certainly would avoid Cherokee.\n\nHe scowled. Damn it, what about Preston Collier? The rancher was throwing some kind of a party for some English nobleman who was coming to the mountains to hunt, and Collier had invited him.\n\nIt was the best chance he had to cultivate Collier, who was something of a power in a political sense, always behind the scenes but always in on the action. That was what they said of Collier. Besides, there would be others present, and it would be a good chance to enter that more rarefied social strata where he was still unknown. Yet it was small risk. Collier might think of inviting a woman who ran a stage station, but his wife certainly would not, nor her daughters." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Mary Breydon gathered the last of her packages, her eyes straying toward the small shelf of books on sale. They were, as always, the classics, most of which she had read, but what of Peg? And Wat?\n\n\"You're interested in books, ma'am?\"\n\nShe looked around at the storekeeper, surprised. \"I've only a few, but folks like the very best. They like books they can read over and over. Right down the street, there's a bookstore. He carries quite a stock, along with pencils, paper, notions, and such. That's where Mark Stacy buys his books.\"\n\n\"Mark Stacy? Somehow I did not imagine him to be a reader.\"\n\n\"Some of these folks surprise you, ma'am. You never know who is the reader or who has the education. That's why there's few western towns without a bookstore.\"\n\nThe storekeeper paused, then said, \"He's a mighty fine man, Mr. Stacy is. Single, too. Was I a widow-lady\u2014\"\n\nShe turned around and looked at him coolly. \"Sir, this 'widow-lady' is quite content. I have my daughter, and I have my work to do. Also, my marriage was a very happy one.\"\n\n\"I just thought\u2014\"\n\n\"No doubt you did, sir, but my personal affairs are just that, my personal affairs. Thank you, sir.\"\n\nShe was angry, and it showed. Out on the street, she stopped, fuming. \"That man\u2014!\"\n\n\"I thought he was a nice man.\"\n\n\"He's a busybody. My life is no business of his. Let's go home!\"\n\n\"We aren't going to the bookstore?\"\n\n\"Another time, Peg. Another time.\"\n\nYet she glanced down the street toward the beckoning sign, a narrow, two-story building huddled between a harness shop and a bakery." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Not until she was seated in the darkness of the stage with Peg asleep against her shoulder did she admit she was frightened. Alone in the darkness, she fought back the tears. If anything happened to her, what would become of Peg?\n\nJason Flandrau was in Laporte. He had many friends there and was a respected man. He had both money and power. He was a careful man who knew how to cultivate the most influential people. If she told what she knew of him, who would listen? He need only to smile tolerantly and make some mild comment about hysterical women.\n\nShe was nobody here. Back home she could have gone to a senator, a member of the cabinet, even to the president himself. Now she was just a woman who operated a stage station.\n\nAll that she had been was far away in Washington or Richmond where they were busy fighting a war. If she were killed out here, it would be weeks, perhaps months, before anybody back there even heard of it.\n\nHer father, a prominent man with political leverage, was dead. Her husband was dead. She was alone, with no one to turn to.\n\nOf course, she had friends in Virginia and Maryland, many of them, but they were far from here. By the time they realized her situation, it would be too late. Moreover, they and their families were involved in a war, and she had no right to distract them with her troubles. Nor was it in her to call for help. \"The strongest,\" her father often said, \"is he who stands alone.\"\n\nShe was not weak. She could not be, dared not be. This was her battle, and she must fight it, win it alone.\n\nYet if something happened to her, what would become of Peg?\n\nShe must think of that coolly, realistically. It was all right to be brave, but what if her bravery destroyed her daughter? She was not one of those fools who believe they are invulnerable, that nothing could ever happen to her. Death had no respect for individuals. It came to the good, the bad, and the indifferent with equal indifference.\n\nShe must consider all aspects, for the man who was her enemy was utterly ruthless, would kill her without a qualm... or have her killed.\n\nShe was still thinking of that when the stage rolled into Cherokee Station and the door opened, light streaming from the stage-station door across the legs of the horses, the wheels, and the step she took down into the dust.\n\nWilbur offered her a hand down, then lifted Peg from the stage. Peg awakened, clinging to her hand. \"Mama? Are we home?\" she asked sleepily.\n\nMary Breydon looked at the shabby station. \"Yes, honey, we're home.\"\n\n\"The little one is all in, ma'am,\" Wilbur said. He removed his hat and wiped his brow with a sleeve. \"Ma'am? If there's anything I can do? Are you in trouble, ma'am?\"\n\nShe looked at him with a wan smile. \"Yes, Wilbur, I am in trouble, but it is my trouble. There's nothing, nothing anyone can do.\"\n\nGathering her skirt, holding Peg with the other hand, she took a step up to the stoop, then hesitated. \"There is one thing, Wilbur. If you see any strange riders\u2014you know the kind\u2014will you tell me?\"\n\nWhen she had gone inside, Temple Boone came from the shadows near the corral. \"What's wrong, Wilbur?\"\n\n\"Damned if I know, but something is. She wouldn't admit to it, but she's a scared woman.\" He paused. \"Boone? What d'you know about Jason Flandrau?\"\n\nBoone turned his eyes to Wilbur. \"He's been around. Right now he's bein' so sanctimonious butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, but he's got a way about him. The way he takes in a street, the way he walks, where he sits... somewhere he's given himself reason to be careful. Others may not see it, but anybody who's been on the dodge knows the signs.\"\n\n\"Stacy asked me what I knew about him. She says Flandrau killed her husband over to Julesburg at the time of the Cheyenne trouble.\"\n\n\"I heard the talk. This officer\u2014her husband\u2014called him by name, and Flandrau shot him, quick as that.\" Boone took a cigar from his pocket. \"Flandrau said the officer had threatened to shoot him on sight, but the way I heard it, that officer never even had his holster unbuttoned. He never had a chance.\"\n\nWilbur shrugged. \"You make war talk, you'd better be ready to make war,\" he said. \"You know as well as me that if you threaten to kill a man, he can shoot you wherever he finds you. It's simple common sense. What do we know about Flandrau?\"\n\nBoone lit his cigar. \"What do we know about anybody? Folks don't ask questions out here. It's what you do, not who you were, that matters. The way I hear it, he's a churchgoing man, doesn't waste around with anybody but those who carry weight, who have the power. Only for a churchgoing man he was awful fast with that gun. Folks said he shot only once, but there were two bullet holes not an inch apart.\"\n\n\"That fast, was he?\"\n\n\"Fast and accurate, and you don't get that good unless there's a trail behind you somewhere.\"\n\nTemple Boone went into the barn. He glanced toward the tack room where Wat slept. Softly, he said, \"Are you awake?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\" 'Sir,' is it now?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir. She'd like me to speak respectful.\"\n\n\"Wat. She's a good woman, and she's in trouble.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\" After a moment's hesitation, he said, \"A couple of men rode by t' other day. Nosin' around. One of them was Turkey Joe Longman.\"\n\n\"Know him, do you?\"\n\n\"I know him. The other one is new. Younger, part Irish. Wears his gun on the left side, butt forward.\"\n\n\"Notice his gun?\"\n\n\"One o' them Dance pistols made by the South durin' the war. Looks like a Colt.\"\n\n\"They were copies, but different. You've got sharp eyes, youngster.\"\n\n\"He's slick with it, too. That's what I think. Turkey Joe kind of steps aside for him.\"\n\n\"They didn't see Mrs. Breydon?\"\n\n\"No, sir. She kep' from sight. They talked to Matty, and when they left, they talked like there'd been some mistake.\" After a moment, Wat said, \"They asked Matty if she come West by way of Virginia.\"\n\n\"Thanks, Wat. You go to sleep now.\"\n\nHe was spreading his blanket in the hay when Wat said, \"Mr. Boone? We got to watch out for her. She's new in this country.\"\n\n\"We will, Wat. We will.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Brushing her hair before the mirror, Mary thought back over the day's activities. Mark Stacy, she decided, was a nice man and without doubt a good man at his job.\n\nDeliberately, she avoided thoughts of Flandrau and her own problems. There would be time enough for that. Now she must think of her job. Mark Stacy might be pleasant, but he was also a division agent, or whatever they called them, and with him the division would come first, and that meant every station on the route. The Cherokee Trail, she had heard on the way out, was the toughest division on the Overland Trail. He was obviously skeptical about her ability to handle it. Not just her ability but that of any woman in what had always been considered a man's job, so she would try a little harder.\n\nFood along the line, as she had discovered while traveling it, was far from the best, so that was one mark in her favor. She decided then they would make doughnuts, and she'd make some cookies. It wasn't much but would probably send the passengers on their way, pleased with what they had found.\n\nLater, she would have a patch plowed or dug up, and she would plant a kitchen garden. It would help a little and would vary the fare.\n\nCleanliness first, good food second, and always fast and efficient service and correct timing. Coming West, she had discovered that if one did not rush through a meal, one left much of it behind. Hence, the food must be ready to serve the instant they walked through the door, and she would delay the teams just a little to provide for the time, to eat. Take the first team to the barn before the second was brought out. It was not the policy, but it would provide just the margin of difference. She would time the meals, time the changing of the teams. It could be worked out, she was sure.\n\nPeg... she must think of her education, and there was no school close by. Marshall had read to Peg, and she loved it, so she would do the same. They had a few books, and when those were finished, there was the bookstore in town.\n\nShe asked Temple Boone about it at breakfast. \"Does well, ma'am, mighty well. Folks out here are hungry for something to read. I've seen 'em memorize the labels on tin cans just for something to read.\n\n\"Never read much, myself. Seen a few plays from time to time. That Hamlet now, seen that one twice. There was some mighty fine talkin' in that play, but folks were makin' a lot of what they called his indecision, and that seemed kind of silly to me. After all, he had no evidence of wrongdoin' there, only the word of a ghost.\n\n\"Now a man's got to be reasonable. A man who would attack somebody or even accuse somebody on the word of a ghost would have to be off his trail mentally.\n\n\"A couple of years ago, back in St. Louis, a man killed another man with an ax 'because the Lord told him to,' and they ruled him insane. It's the same thing. Hamlet wasn't indecisive; he just didn't have enough evidence for a sane man, so he tried to lead them to betray themselves.\"\n\nHe sipped his coffee. \"My mother was Danish, and she used to tell me stories, and one of them was a story about Hamlet. That's an old, old story in Iceland, and there are many versions of it.\"\n\n\"I would not have guessed you were Danish.\"\n\n\"I'm not. Actually, although my mother was raised-up that way, it was her mother who was from Iceland. When I was small, I lived where the winters were long, and the winters were for story-telling close to the fire.\"\n\n\"And your father?\"\n\n\"He was from the Isle of Man, born a fisherman and a sailor on the deep waters. We had no books, so it was stories we told to one another, and I miss hearin' those old yarns.\"\n\n\"I am not a story-teller,\" she said, \"but often I read stories to Peg. You're welcome to listen.\"\n\n\"I'll do that.\" He paused. \"Sometimes I think there were only a few stories and men told them over and over until the names were changed and the places. Maybe all the same stories are told in all the lands. I know I've heard an Injun tell stories of Indians that were the same as those I knew.\"\n\n\"The Isle of Man? Then you're a Manxman.\"\n\n\"Maybe. I wouldn't know where to look even if I had a map. Pa said it was somewhere off the west coast of Scotland.\"\n\n\"Some night soon, we will read, and we will not wait for winter to come to tell our stories.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "The stages came and went, and watching the hills and the trees became a habit. Someday a man would come, and with luck she would see him first. What would she do? What could she do?\n\nThe navy pistol she kept close at hand. One of the derringers was always with her. Each of them had two barrels.\n\nTwo shots, and she must be close.\n\nTemple Boone came and went; sometimes, almost without her knowing, he was there and then he was gone. He talked but little, although occasionally there was news. The station at Virginia Dale had been attacked by Indians, a quick, sharp raid. They were there and gone before it was realized, but they drove off the horses, and the stage had to come on to the next station using the same tired horses.\n\n\"Don't get caught outside,\" Boone warned her. \"Get in. Sometimes a shot or two will drive them off. Indians want to steal horses, but they don't want to get killed. They might come at any time, but they prefer an attack at daybreak. Usually, there's just a small bunch of them.\"\n\nOnly a week later, the stage came rolling in on a dead run, and when it drew up at the station, Wilbur dropped to the ground. \"Wounded man inside. Injuns shot at us tryin' to stop the stage. We outrun 'em, but they nailed a passenger.\"\n\nThere were five in the stage, and three had joined the shooting at the Indians, helping to drive them off. The wounded man was a soldier in uniform. \"Headed for Fort Collins,\" he explained as he was helped inside. \"I don't figure I'm hit hard, but I'm losin' blood.\" Mary was working on his shoulder, trying to stop the flow of blood when suddenly he looked at her and said, \"You're Major Breydon's wife! From Virginia!\"\n\nShe turned her eyes to his. He was a stocky, well set up man of perhaps forty years. She remembered him at once.\n\n\"Sergeant Owen? Barry Owen?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I was captured and exchanged on a promise not to fight again in that war, so they sent me out to the frontier. Is the major here?\"\n\n\"No, sergeant, he was shot, killed.\"\n\n\"Oh? I am sorry, ma'am. I didn't know.\"\n\nShe finished binding his wound. Shakily, he got to his feet. \"I am reporting for duty at Fort Collins, ma'am. Maybe I'll get by again.\"\n\nIt was not until the stage was gone that she remembered.\n\nSgt. Barry Owen had been among those who pursued Flandrau's guerrillas!\n\nBut who would know that? Who would guess? Had he ever seen Flandrau? Would he know him if he saw him? Or... worse... would Flandrau recognize him?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "The days were long and hard. There were times at night when she fell into bed exhausted. There were meals to be prepared, the horses to be cared for, and always they were cleaning. Dust settled on everything, and there were times when she almost found herself sympathizing with Scant Luther and the filth in which he had lived. It would have been so easy just to sit down and let the days drift by.\n\nYet there were compensations, too. Matty never complained. She did her share of the work and a little more, she bantered with the passengers and the drivers, she teased, cajoled, and made a fuss over Wat until he finally began to loosen up, yet even then he said nothing of his family, nothing of where he had lived before. One thing he denied vehemently. His father was no outlaw and never had been.\n\nSometimes at night, she longed for the great four-poster in which she had slept at home. She yearned for a quiet afternoon drinking tea with occasional visitors from Washington and the gatherings at her home when officials from Washington mingled with planters from Virginia and occasional travelers from Europe. The beautiful gowns, the uniforms, the music, and the conversation.\n\nOften, she paused in her work and looked with dismay at her hands, once so soft and white, her nails perfect. Now her hands were brown, and there were calluses. Could she ever make them beautiful again?\n\nMost of all, she thought about Peg. What kind of a future would there be for her here? Of course, they still owned the land in Virginia. Battles had been fought over that land, the buildings burned, the stock driven off. It would cost many thousands of dollars to put it in a producing condition and to restock it. Certainly, more than she could earn here running a stage station.\n\nYet somehow it must be done. She wanted for Peg the graceful, gracious, pleasant life she had known when her father was alive and before the war had torn their lives to shreds.\n\n\"Matty,\" she said suddenly, \"when spring comes, we must plant some flowers. I miss them so!\"\n\n\"And I, mum. Last night, I was thinkin' back to Ireland again.\"\n\nMary laughed. \"And I to Virginia! Well, it does no harm to remember. Often I worry about Peg. I am afraid her life is so barren here.\"\n\n\" 'Tis no such thing, mum. She'll see more kinds of folks here than ever she'd see elsewhere!\"\n\n\"Like the Mormon man who wanted you for his second wife?\" she said, teasing.\n\nMatty flushed. \"Ah, he'd no such thought, mum. He was but teasing, as you are now. But he had a nice smile, a smile from the heart, it was. A girl can always make do with a man who smiles from the heart, mum.\"\n\nMatty paused, putting down the cup she was drying. \"Have you noticed Wat, mum? He's taken to combing his hair before meals, and he washes his hands clean before drying them on the towel.\"\n\nMary had been too busy to be lonely, and only occasionally did she stop to remember that life so suddenly gone that it seemed like a dream, like an enchanted time, as indeed it had been.\n\nFor all of that, what she did here was useful. It was essential, and she was essential. Had she been that back in Virginia? She might have become so, but when all went to pieces back there, she was but another pretty young lady with pretty gowns and a lot of would be beaus attracted by her father's plantation, perhaps, as much as by her.\n\n\"It's useful work, Matty.\" She voiced her thoughts suddenly. \"What we're doing here can be important. These are busy people, but they are often lonely people, too. They are making a long, hard trip, and many of them have no idea what to expect at the end of it. We can leave them with a bright, happy memory, and we can give them a friendly welcome when they come.\"\n\n\" 'Tis my thought exactly, mum. Travelers are either lonely folk, all by themselves, like, or they are herded about like cattle, and a kind word is remembered long after.\"\n\n\"We must have a word for each one if we can, Matty, and we must remember those who come again, as some will. It is flattering to be remembered and called by name.\"\n\n\"Aye.\" Matty swept a hand around. \"We've changed it, mum. It was a dull, dirty room when we came, but now, with the tableclothes, curtains, and all, it's a cheerful room. It's a happy room.\"\n\n\"And clean,\" Mary agreed.\n\nMentally, she checked over the stage station, the corrals, the barn, the house. All had been swept, mopped, and cleaned. In the barns, the harness was neatly hung, as in her father's stable. The stalls were clean, and there was fresh hay scattered on the dirt floor in place of the straw they did not have.\n\nTables had been set outside, ready for the incoming passengers, and inside, about the stove and the fireplace, pots were polished and neatly hung. It was a far different place from what they had come upon first.\n\nPeg and Wat had helped, but much had been done by Ridge Fenton, the hostler she hired from Laporte. Grudgingly, at first, because he detested working for a woman, then with more enthusiasm, he accepted her way of doing things.\n\n\"Mr. Fenton,\" she had said, \"you may not like my way of doing things at first, but you are a reasonable man, a man of good judgment and discrimination. Let's try it my way, and then if it does not work, we can always try another.\"\n\nShe paused and then said, \"Mr. Fenton, I understand you are from Virginia?\"\n\n\"West Virginny, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Did you ever get down to Virginia?\"\n\n\"I did, ma'am, a time or two with my pappy. He taken me to see the capital city one time. Gran'pappy fit in the Revolution, and he wanted me to see what come of it and to see Mr. Jefferson's home and Mount Vernon.\"\n\n\"And did you not pass by a plantation named the Harlequin Oaks?\"\n\n\"Surely did, ma'am. One o' the finest places in Virginny. My pappy stopped by there to show me the horses runnin' in the pastures behind those whitewashed rail fences and all. Some of the finest stock I ever did see.\"\n\n\"Harlequin Oaks was my home, Mr. Fenton. My father owned it, and the first of my family settled there in 1660.\"\n\nRidge Fenton took the pipe from his mouth. He was badly flustered. \"Ma'am? You mean, you\u2014\"\n\n\"It was destroyed in the first year of the war, Mr. Fenton. Someday I hope to return and rebuild it as it was, but for the present I must work, make a home for my daughter, and we must survive, Mr. Fenton. My father taught me to be a survivor.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll be\u2014beggin' your pardon, ma'am. I'd no idea.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter, Mr. Fenton. All that is past. Whatever there was at Harlequin Oaks was built by my ancestors. Whatever I have here I must build myself, with your help. And I shall very much need your help, Mr. Fenton. When I first arrived, I had some foolish notion that I must do it all myself, to prove myself. I now realize it cannot be done by one person. You are an experienced man, and Mr. Boone has said you are the best stock tender and blacksmith around. I shall value any suggestions you have to make.\"\n\n\"Thanky, ma'am. I'll do what I can.\"\n\n\"Please do, and if you see something that needs doing, that your experience tells you should be done, do not hesitate.\"\n\nJason Flandrau... she had almost forgotten him, and to forget him even for a minute was a risk. He was somewhere about, and his entire career, even his life, was at stake.\n\nNevertheless, that was her affair. It was not the business of the Overland Stage Company or of Mark Stacy or anyone but herself. Nor must she permit it to interfere with what must be done at Cherokee Station.\n\nEach morning after the first stage had departed, she made a brief tour of inspection of the stables, the corrals, and the horses available.\n\nThere had been Indian raids on several of the stations, and their horses were stolen. If that happened at Cherokee, as sooner or later, it must, what would she do? What could she do?\n\nFirst, to survive the raid. Second, to get on with the business of the stage company.\n\nShe was thinking of that when Temple Boone rode in. \"Mr. Boone, I was wondering what might be done if Indians run off with my horses?\"\n\n\"Be thankful you're alive.\" He stepped down from the saddle. \"You got some coffee on?\"\n\n\"I do, and you're welcome, but what about the next stage?\"\n\n\"Unless you can conjure up some horses, they'd have to go on with a tired team.\" He paused. \"The nearest ranch with any extra stock is Preston Collier's place. Have you met him?\"\n\n\"I have not.\"\n\n\"He runs several hundred head of stock over there. Got himself a big, mighty beautiful house. White columns and all. He's also got a wife and two snooty daughters. Pretty girls, but to me pretty is as pretty does, and they don't do much but go to parties, balls, and teas.\"\n\n\"What is he like?\"\n\n\"Collier? He's a decent enough man, active in politics, ranching, gold mining, and such. Spends a lot of time in Denver. He's a rich man who keeps busy gettin' richer, but he's straight. He'll have no truck with trickery or double-dealin'. He sets store by his horses, won't have them misused. Any stock tender who gets rough with his horses gets his walkin' papers.\"\n\n\"Would he lend me horses if I needed them?\"\n\nBoone shrugged. \"Ma'am, that would be between you and Collier. I know he refused Scant Luther, refused him point blank, and ordered him off the place.\n\n\"Him and Ben Holladay butted heads a few times, so he's got no use for the stage company. Never rides it, either. Has his own teams and drivers, as you'd guess.\n\n\"He must have eight or ten coaches and surreys, and sometimes, when he has folks visitin', they go for picnics back in the hills with servants in white coats to serve 'em. You've never seen the like.\n\n\"Everybody who comes from back East seems to head toward his home. Most times he has three or four visitors there, politicians, army officers, European noblemen huntin' big game, that sort of thing. But aside from bein' bull-headed about anything of Ben Holladay's, he's a reasonable man.\"\n\n\"Then if I needed horses, it wouldn't be much help to talk to him?\"\n\n\"I'd advise you to forget it, ma'am. Even if you got to see him, the fact that you work for Ben would be against you.\"\n\nWhen they were seated over coffee, he asked casually, \"Had any visitors lately? Men ridin' alone?\"\n\nApprehension was her first feeling. Keeping her voice calm, she said, \"No, not really. Should I have?\"\n\nHe drank some coffee. \"Saw some tracks on the trail, but they turned off just before they came in sight of the station. Seems the rider took to the hills, and a thing like that makes me curious. So I sort of follered them. Seems like he scouted around in the brush and trees up yonder, like he was lookin' for a good spot to watch the station.\"\n\n\"An Indian?\"\n\n\"He was ridin' a shod horse, ma'am, and that usually spells white man, although an Indian ridin' a stole horse might have one that's shod. I'd bet on it this was a white man.\"\n\n\"Did he find the place he wanted? If so, could I see it from here?\"\n\n\"You couldn't see it, but if you look up there, you can see that tree, the last one in the row? He'll be somewhere right at the base of that tree, maybe restin' his rifle on the stub of a broken branch or somethin'.\"\n\nCasually, she looked around, located the tree. \"How far would you say? One hundred and fifty yards?\"\n\n\"You're a good judge of distance. I'd guess that would be right close.\"\n\n\"My father taught me to shoot a rifle and shotgun. He used to take me hunting.\"\n\n\"Ever kill anything?\"\n\n\"A deer... I cried.\"\n\nBoone smiled. \"Man's a predator. He's a hunter by instinct. I suspect he's taken his livin' from the wild animals and plants as long as he's been around. But he was a hunter first, bred to be a hunter.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that.\"\n\n\"I didn't suspect you did. But think on it. All the predators have their eyes lookin' forward to keep their eyes on the hunted. The game that's hunted has eyes on the side of their head so they can watch better. You take notice, ma'am, the wolf, the lion, the bear, all animals that hunt others have eyes lookin' straight forward. So does man.\"\n\n\"I don't like to think of that. I hope we've gone beyond such attitudes. Isn't that what civilization does, Mr. Boone? To teach us to live together in peace?\"\n\n\"I reckon that's the ideal, ma'am, but all folks don't become civilized to onct. There's some of us lag behind, some of us have to protect the rest of you civilized folks from those who haven't gotten beyond the huntin' stage. When a man comes at you with a gun or a knife or a spear, you don't have much time to convince him that he's actin' uncivilized, and he isn't likely to listen. That's when you yourself become uncivilized in a hurry or you die.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't want to kill a man.\"\n\n\"No decent-minded person does, but if there's somebody up on that ridge with a rifle who is about to kill Peg's mother, you'd better kill him first.\n\n\"You see, ma'am, when a man sets out to rob and kill, he's strikin' a blow not only at you, at Peg, Wat, and Matty here but at all civilization. He's striking a blow at all man has done to rise from savagery.\n\n\"I'm not a scholar, but the way I see it is that men have learned to become what we call civilized men by stages, and every child growing up retraces that pattern during his lifetime.\n\n\"There's a time when youngsters like to play capture games, a time when they like to build play houses and huts, if it is only to put a blanket over a couple of chairs and crawl under it.\n\n\"There's a time when they like to make bows and arrows, dodging around and hunting each other. Hide-an'-seek is one way of doing it. After a while, he grows beyond that stage, or most of them do.\n\n\"Some folks just lag behind. They never grow beyond that hunting and hiding stage. They become thieves and robbers.\n\n\"Only a few years ago, a young man could go to war, and if he did enough looting or captured enough horses or arms, he could come home a rich man. Most of those who originally had titles over there in Europe had them because they were especially good at killing and robbing and were given titles for doing it in support of their king.\n\n\"Well, we've outgrown that. Or some of us have. The others are still lingering back there in a hunting, gathering, and raiding stage, and if you meet one of them alone in the dark, you'd better remember he's not a human being but a savage, a wild animal, and will act like one.\"\n\n\"So I must descend to his level?\"\n\n\"If you want to be civilized, ma'am, you're going to have to fight to protect it, or all the civilized will be dead, and we will be back in the darkness of savagery.\"\n\n\"You sound like a philosopher, Mr. Boone.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, but out there in the night, sometimes with a campfire, a man has time to think. He can't get his thoughts from books. He has to think things out for himself, and a man likes to understand what life he's living and why he must do some things.\n\n\"I'm not sure all my thoughts are right. Some of them need a lot more thinking, but you don't try to reason with a man who is trying to kill you, or else you will be dead, and violence will have won another victory over peace.\n\n\"You take that man who shot your husband, ma'am. He did it because he saw your husband as a threat to him, and when he tries to kill you, it will be for the same reason.\n\n\"Are you goin' to let him do it?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"What can I do?\" She gestured. \"I have my work to do, and I must move around a good bit. I have to be outside part of the time.\"\n\n\"First thing, ma'am, this Flandrau feller who you think wants you dead wouldn't want it tied to him. He'll try to send somebody to do the job who isn't close to him but somebody who knows his business.\n\n\"That makes it unlikely that he will take a shot at you when the stage is in with folks milling about. Remember, I said it is unlikely, but he might. If he's smart, as I believe, he will try to catch you alone in the yard where there's nobody around to see where the shot came from or to start hunting him.\n\n\"He would like to slip in here, kill you, and get away clean. If he handles it right, that is just what he will do.\"\n\n\"You don't give me much of a chance.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, not unless you use your head. Don't walk across the yard alone in broad daylight. Don't establish any habits. That's what he will be looking for. If you go to the stables at a certain hour each morning, he'll be waiting.\"\n\nShe watched him as he walked away. Who was he? What was he? He was said to be good with a gun, and there was a whisper around that he was a very dangerous man. To her, he seemed merely a quiet, still-faced man who rarely smiled but who went about his business with a cool assurance.\n\nWhat he felt about her or thought of her, she had no idea, yet he had never once suggested this was not her kind of work or that she should get out of this business, as many others had.\n\nShe preferred it that way, yet it nettled her a little, also. Thinking of it, she laughed at herself for being so feminine. He was, after all, a very attractive man.\n\nHer eyes strayed toward the tree, and from the corners of her eyes she studied it. Slowly, then, her eyes swept the yard. Of course, that might not be the position the gunman would take up, but if he did, what places in the yard were beyond his vision?\n\nShe could go from here around the corral to the back of the barn, or she could go from her house to the blacksmith shop without exposing herself to what might be his firing position.\n\nHer father had served in the Blackhawk War, and there were times when he and her husband would talk for hours about tactics, firing positions, and the ranges of various weapons. She wished she had paid more attention, but who would have guessed she would find herself in such a position as she now held?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "In the back room on Larimer Street in Denver, Jason Flandrau sat tipped back in a chair, his boots on the table.\n\n\"She's there,\" he said. \"You boys saw the wrong woman.\"\n\n\"She was Irish as Paddy's Pig, the one we saw,\" Turkey Joe Longman said.\n\n\"She doesn't count. It's the other one we want. If she's still around when I run for office, she will talk even if she doesn't say something before that.\"\n\n\"Does she know your name?\"\n\n\"I've no idea, but she's seen me; she saw me right out in the open. I tried to get her then, but she slipped away, God knows how.\" He swore softly. \"Who would ever think she'd show up out here? Of all places?\"\n\n\"It ain't like back East,\" Longman said. \"You can shoot a man, and nobody blinks. But you even bump into a woman on the street, and you might get hung. I don't like it, Colonel. I don't like it at all.\"\n\n\"Neither do I. Nor do I want to see you hang, which will surely happen if they find out who you are. Or who I am.\" He took his boots from the table and turned in his chair. \"Indians, that's the answer. Run off the horses and kill her while it's being done. Round up a few bad Indians and let them have the horses. In the process, she gets killed, and they are blamed.\"\n\n\"I still don't like it.\"\n\nIrritated, Flandrau turned on him. \"Have you got a better plan? You said yourself you're not getting much of a chance at a shot out there.\"\n\n\"Let me try it a few more days.\"\n\n\"All right. You've always done what you set out to do. But be careful. Be very, very careful. And tell nobody, even our own boys, what you're doing.\"\n\nWhen Longman was gone, he ordered a glass of wine and remained at the table. Returning to Laporte was out of the question when there was a possibility she might see him. Did she realize it was he who killed her husband?\n\nThe trouble lay with Preston Collier. He needed Collier's support if he planned on running for office, and to reach Collier's place he almost had to go through Laporte and then past Cherokee to Collier's ranch. He could circle around, of course.\n\nIf Longman could get rid of Mrs. Breydon, then he would get rid of Longman. He wanted nobody alive who could point a finger at him.\n\nHe got to his feet and flicked some dust from his boots with the end of his handkerchief. Carefully, he straightened his cravat. Anyway, it was time he cut himself free from all of the old crowd. His future was assured, and he was moving in a different direction now and needed them no longer. He went out the back door, closing it carefully behind him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Longman avoided the trail to Cherokee, staying in the back country away from the traveled road. He held to the rolling hills and the grasslands, a route he had used before. Jason was right, of course. Her testimony could get them hung. Neither the North nor the South had any use for guerrillas. Nonetheless, he was tired of doing Jason's dirty work. It wasn't as if he had never killed a woman, for he had killed a dozen or more in raids, but this was different. He had been one of many then, robbing, killing, and raping without discrimination. Now he was alone, going out to shoot a woman with the necessity of escaping afterward and no friends to fight off his pursuers.\n\nOne last time, and he had the spot picked. Move in, await his chance, one clean shot, and a fast getaway. He had even planned that, with a spare horse hidden in a brush corral in the woods.\n\nThe sorrel horse he left in the brush corral was a fine animal, and he was fast. He was also a horse Turkey Joe had never been seen riding. A true beauty, the sorrel was, a horse to take the eye of any man who loved or wanted a fast horse.\n\nTurkey Joe rode a gray horse to the line of trees and tied the horse with a slip knot to some brush right behind him. He slid his rifle from the boot and edged up to the tree where he had found a convenient rest for his rifle over the stub of a broken branch. Then he settled down to wait. Turkey Joe Longman had planned carefully and well. The trouble was that, like many another criminal, he had not considered the imponderables, the accidental, the unexpected." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Mary Breydon came to the door with her Henry rifle and placed it beside the door as she had been doing for the past three days. A dozen times in those three days, she had taken up the rifle and aimed it through the brush and trees at the tree Boone had indicated. Her chances of shooting through all that brush without the bullet being deflected were slight, but at least she could, if still alive, strike back.\n\nShe had been thinking a good deal about Temple Boone's comments and had decided he was probably right. If civilization was to endure, those who believed in it must be prepared to strike back at the dark forces that would destroy it. Aside from that, she was Peg's mother, and Peg's mother had to live to ensure Peg of the education and the chance she should have. For that, she was willing to fight. She poured a cup of hot coffee.\n\nThe stage would be coming soon. She took her apron from the back of a chair and walked to the door, tying it. She had just stepped into the door when, on the hill beyond the trees, Turkey Joe Longman leveled his rifle. In the moment Turkey Joe took aim, the first of the imponderables, the accidental, happened.\n\nPeg turned quickly to speak to her mother and knocked over a cup of coffee. It burned her hand, and she screamed, \"Mama!\"\n\nMary Breydon turned sharply, and the bullet aimed for her heart burned the outside of her left shoulder.\n\nAlmost without thinking, she whipped up the Henry and fired at the target for which she had so often aimed. The bullet missed Turkey Joe but it hit the gray horse. Wheeling about, Turkey Joe hit the saddle, whipping the slip knot free as he passed it, and he was off with a jump.\n\nTemple Boone, throwing one quick glance toward the door, seeing Mary on her feet and Matty beside her, hit the saddle running, Ridge Fenton only a jump behind him on another horse.\n\nAt the tree, there was blood on the leaves where the horse had been tied, and the two were off on the trail.\n\nSwearing, Turkey Joe spurred the wounded horse.\n\nWithin a few miles, the horse began to labor, and Turkey Joe urged it on. His pursuit was behind him but still far enough away, and he had a fresh horse, a fast horse, waiting.\n\nThe second of the imponderables, the unexpected, had happened only minutes before. Bear Walker, a Comanche brave, had come upon the brush corral and the sorrel, and Bear Walker had an eye for horse flesh and a picture of himself riding into the village on such a horse. Bear Walker was no laggard but a man of instant decision.\n\nDust still hung in the air when Turkey Joe, stripping the gear from the bloody gray, stopped, saddle in hand, staring at the open gate in his corral. Behind him, he heard the pound of hoofs. He dropped the saddle and went for his gun.\n\nThe gun came up fast, but not fast enough. The last thing he saw was Temple Boone, gun in hand.\n\n\"Damn you, Boone! I\u2014!\"\n\n\"He's had it comin' for a long time,\" Ridge Fenton said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "\"Vary the hours at which you do things. Avoid patterns.\" He put down his cup and reached for the coffeepot. \"Have you talked to Ridge Fenton about this?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You should. Get him in here, soften him up with a piece of pie or a couple of doughnuts because he's a crusty old codger, as you probably know.\n\n\"Tell him what's happening. Lay it on the line to him because Ridge makes a great fuss about bein' gun-shy. He'll tell you he wants no part of any fight. He wants no shooting around where he is. He's a peaceful man. He will tell you that, but don't you believe him because that old man has ridden with Indian war parties, he's had hand-to-hand fights with Indians, he's guided army patrols, and he's been fightin' since he was knee-high. Believe me, and I've been around the mountain a few times, I'd rather tackle three cougars in your tack room than that old man when he's riled.\"\n\nHe paused, drawing his cup near. \"How about Wat?\"\n\n\"He knows, but he's just a small boy.\"\n\n\"And a mighty tricky one. Don't you forget that he survived on his own for some little time. He listens a lot, misses mighty little, and he can track better than most grown men.\"\n\nHe finished his coffee and pulled back from the table. \"I'll be around time to time. If you need me, Wat will know where I am.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Jason Flandrau was at supper in the hotel dining room when he overheard the conversation.\n\n\"Can't figure it out,\" a man was saying. \"Who would want to shoot a woman? If it had been Scant Luther, I'd not be surprised, but this was a man named Longman. Shot at her from ambush.\"\n\n\"He ought to be hung!\"\n\n\"Too late,\" the first speaker commented. \"Temple Boone caught up with him, and Longman was a little slow.\"\n\n\"What was Longman's connection?\"\n\n\"That's just it. There is no connection of which anybody knows. It seems Longman was by the station at Cherokee just a few days ago, but he didn't see Mrs. Breydon\u2014\"\n\n\"Breydon? Wasn't that the name of that former army officer who was shot over at Julesburg a few months ago?\"\n\nJason Flandrau's back was to them, but he felt a sudden chill. It was getting close, too close. Somebody would be apt to remember who had done that shooting and wonder if there was any connection. For a moment, he sat very still, carefully reviewing his past meetings with Longman.\n\nHad they been seen together? He had tried to be careful, but there had seemed no reason to be too careful until now.\n\nThe worst of it was he would have to move with extreme care. If people were already wondering and anything else happened, they would start not only asking questions but looking for the answers.\n\nShould he move out now? Leave Colorado at once, for Montana, perhaps? Or California? That was stupid. He had established himself here. They were talking of him for governor, perhaps for senator. He had been fortunate here and had fallen in with the right group at the right time. Such a coincidence might not happen again. Could he let one woman stand between him and the wealth that could be his by discreetly using his power as governor? And all the honor and position that would be his?\n\nBut what to do? His strong right hand was gone. At least he had not talked. Thoughtfully, he began considering the men who were left to him, the men from the old outfit. Most of them were simply brutes, tough, lawless men who were loyal enough as long as they had money to gamble and buy whiskey. They knew him, but none of them were in his confidence.\n\nWhat about that young fellow, that friend of Turkey Joe's? He was, Longman had said, very good with a gun, and he was shrewd.\n\nJason Flandrau finished his meal, but he ate without appetite. To attempt to kill Mary Breydon now would be stupid, but he could not afford to let her live.\n\nHe got up and walked into the street, standing there, looking about. He reached into his vest pocket and took out his watch, glanced at it, then returned it to his pocket and walked back to his office. Jordy Neff was waiting for him when he stepped in.\n\n\"That true what they're sayin' about Joe?\"\n\n\"It is. Temple Boone killed him.\"\n\n\"Maybe I better go call on Mr. Boone. Turkey Joe was my partner.\"\n\n\"You were out at Cherokee with him? And you only saw one woman?\"\n\n\"Woman and a boy-kid. It was John Tanner's boy.\"\n\n\"I don't know the name?\"\n\n\"Owned him a ranch over yonder by Bonnar Springs. West of Owl Canyon. Had a few head of cows, some horses, but his place was a natural hideout, and there was a kind of natural rock fortress there, so some of the boys began usin' it for a hideout.\n\n\"Tanner didn't like it much, but there wasn't much he could do. Then, one day, one of the boys hit the kid over some impudence, and Tanner objected. This man\u2014it was Mody Mercer\u2014he damn near beat Tanner to death. Tanner crawled away, and a couple of days later, when he could walk, he came back with a gun. He hadn't much luck that way, either. Mercer killed him. A few days after that, the boy disappeared. Never saw him again until he showed up there at Cherokee.\"\n\n\"This Mercer now? Where's he from?\"\n\n\"Missouri, or so I heard, but that doesn't mean much because around that time Missouri was a sort of a catch basin for anybody runnin' loose.\n\n\"The story was that he rode with Bloody Bill Anderson. He's no gun hand, but he's mean. Shoot you in the back or kill you with an ax... anything.\"\n\nMody Mercer... a name to remember.\n\n\"Jordy? Stay away from Boone. Do you hear me?\"\n\nNeff stiffened. \"Now look here\u2014!\"\n\n\"Neff, I need a few good men, men who can do what they are told and who know how to keep their mouths shut. I had hoped to have Joe Longman around, but since he can't be, I'd been thinking about you.\" Flandrau took two gold pieces from his pocket and placed them on the table. \"It's a lot easier than punching cows or working in a mine and a lot safer than what that crowd at Bonnar Springs were doing.\"\n\nJordy Neff hesitated, thought of the three silver dollars in his pocket, and picked up the gold pieces. \"What do I have to do?\"\n\n\"Just be around, and when I take my watch out of my pocket with my left hand, meet me here, just like today, just like Turkey Joe told you.\"\n\nJordy Neff would be useful. He looked like a nice, clean-cut young man, and he was good with a gun. Maybe, in time, he would let him kill Temple Boone.\n\nIf he could. Temple Boone was, all agreed, very, very fast.\n\nThat was all very good, all very convenient, but the man who interested him was Mody Mercer, and that other man, only now recovered from his wound. The man they called Scant Luther.\n\nScant was drinking more than he should, and Scant was nursing a grudge." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "When the sun went down, Mary Breydon went back inside. Her shoulder was almost healed, although she was still wearing a bandage to cover the wound. It had barely split the skin but had been sore for days and hurt when she forgot and moved her arm too freely.\n\nTurkey Joe Longman, they said his name was, would come no more, but who might be the next one that would be sent?\n\n\"It was well planned,\" Boone commented. \"He'd had a horse waiting, but it was stolen before he could reach it. He had no choice but to make a fight.\"\n\nHe paused. \"Do not think it was only for you, ma'am. He had attacked from ambush, and if we are to have a good life here, such things cannot be permitted. To have arrested him, had there been an officer present, would only mean that he'd be turned loose. Longman had a friend who would have protected him. However, he gave us no choice. It was kill or be killed.\"\n\n\"Will you have supper with us, Mr. Boone?\"\n\n\"I will, ma'am, and gladly. Whether it is Matty or yourself who does it, you set the best table in Colorado.\"\n\n\"That's an exaggeration, Mr. Boone, but thank you.\"\n\nWhen they were at the table, Peg said, \"Mama, tell us about your home. I mean, when you were a little girl.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid Mr. Boone wouldn't want to hear all that. Maybe some other time\u2014\"\n\n\"On the contrary, ma'am. I'd be most interested.\"\n\n\"All right, I will if Matty will.\"\n\n\"My story would be nothing the like of yours, mum, but if it's my story you would hear, I'll tell it, as much as I can.\" She paused, cup in hand. \"But you first, mum. It is your story we would hear.\"\n\n\"It is all gone now, the house where I was born and where we lived. My grandfather named it Harlequin Oaks when he finished it, and my family had lived there one hundred years before the big house was built.\n\n\"The first of us came there in 1660 when it was wilderness. He cut down logs and built a cabin and a barn and plowed land. He chose the site for the big house and cleared the land, leaving the fine big oak trees where they were. He had been an officer in the army, and he brought two of his men with him when he settled, and each of them took land nearby but worked for him.\n\n\"By the time I was born, all the building was done. We had fine horses and carriages\u2014\"\n\n\"Slaves?\" Boone asked.\n\n\"Never! My ancestor who built the first cabin, he had been captured from a ship by Algerian pirates and had himself been a slave\u2014\"\n\n\"But he was a white man?\"\n\n\"Yes, he was, but many whites were enslaved in Algiers, Tunis, and elsewhere. As for that, there had been slaves in Europe for a thousand years before ever they saw a black man.\n\n\"The Romans enslaved the Greeks and later the Gauls, the Jews, whoever they conquered. It was so all over the world, I'm told. When they conquered a people, they killed them or made slaves of them.\n\n\"My grandfather, though, he said slaves were too expensive. It was cheaper, he said, to hire men to do the work than to feed and clothe them the year around.\n\n\"Aside from the house, there were two barns for hay and wheat, four stables for cows, horses, and mules, the carriage house, a smoke house, and an ice house. There was also a walled-in spring.\n\n\"The brick for the house was made right on the place, and the lumber was cut there or in the mountains not far away. My great-grandfather and my grandfather supervised the work themselves, just as they did all the planting that was done.\"\n\n\"Were there many rooms?\" Wat asked.\n\n\"Twenty-eight, I believe, in the main house. As you went in, the study was on the right, and there was a stair to the second floor on the left.\n\n\"One could walk straight through to the garden, but on the right of the hall was the parlor, on the left the dining room.\"\n\n\"Quite a place,\" Boone commented.\n\n\"My father loved to entertain, so we often had people staying with us, and on almost any evening we had from four to eight guests. When people traveled by carriage in those days, they often stopped with friends, and of course we had many of those who came up the Shenandoah Valley who were going on to Washington.\"\n\n\"You still have guests,\" Boone said, \"only you have to share them with the Overland Stage Company.\"\n\nMary looked up at Matty, who had started to clear the table. \"Now it's your turn, Matty.\"\n\n\"Another time,\" Matty said, \"but 'twill be no such tale as yours, nor was I born in a house so grand but in a wee cottage with a thatched roof where we could look westward over the sea.\" She paused, dishes in hand. \"My first memories were of me mother standin' lookin' off to sea, shadin' her eyes for a sight of m' father's boat.\n\n\"The sea gave us our livin', such as it was, but we dinna trust it to bring back those who sailed out upon it, and many's the poor lad from the village who sailed after fish and was seen no more, my father among them.\"\n\n\"He was a fisherman?\"\n\n\"Aye, but a soldier before that. As a lad, he fought in Spain with Wellington and was at Waterloo with a brother of his on the side of Bonaparte. He saved a bit, my father did, and married late and bought the boat, and 'twas a good living we had whilst he lived and before the sea took him, and his boat, too. Only the sea gave us back the boat but not the man.\"\n\n\"On another night you must tell us, Matty.\" She turned to Boone. \"And you, Mr. Boone? You've a story, I am sure. Will we hear it someday?\"\n\nHe smiled. \"What story could I tell? I know little enough of my people, although I've a memory of sitting by a field while my father plowed, the lines about his neck so he could have both hands for the plow. I remember the crops standing tall and my mother crying when the grasshoppers took it all.\n\n\"I was a sagebrush orphan like Wat here. Cholera took my mother and father and my baby sister. My father was wanting to cross the plains to Oregon, but he lacked the money. He had six crow-bait cattle hitched to our old farm wagon, but no wagon train would accept him.\n\n\"That wagon would break down before you'd gone fifty miles if your stock didn't die first. We can't risk it, they all said, to have the wagon train waiting while you made repairs. It would be a risk for us all.\"\n\nHe pushed back from the table. \"They were right, of course. We hadn't supplies enough for the trip. Only pa was figuring on hunting enough to feed us. He hadn't thought how the game would stay away from the wagon trails and he'd see nothing for days.\n\n\"Pa was a good hunter, a dead shot with a rifle and a hard worker, but it just wasn't enough. You have to have luck, too, and pa didn't have it. Year after year, I saw him whipped by flood, frost, drouth, and grasshoppers, and always he'd come back and try again.\"\n\nLong after the last coal-oil light was out, when only embers smoldered on the hearth, when brief flames made the shadows dance on the log walls, Peg whispered, \"Mama? If that man had killed you, would I be a sagebrush orphan?\"\n\n\"He did not kill me, Peg, and he won't.\"\n\n\"But if he had?\"\n\nShe lay wide-eyed, staring up at the rafters. \"Yes, Peg, I am afraid you would.\"\n\nLater, she said, \"Go to sleep, Peg. You'll be all right. Matty would take care of you.\"\n\nAfter a long time, Peg whispered again, \"And Mr. Boone? And Wat?\"\n\n\"Yes, Peg. Mr. Boone and Wat, too. Now go to sleep.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "When morning sent the first gray light through the window, she was up. She went to her purse and carefully counted over what money she had left. She had sold the pearls her father had given her when she became sixteen, sold them to buy their outfit.\n\nMarshall had sold two horses he had managed to keep throughout the war, and they had come West, Marshall first and then Peg and herself. The little money she had was going all too fast, and she could not earn enough here to provide for Peg.\n\nRealistically, she had to think of what would become of Peg if she were killed. People always had an idea such things never happened to them, but she knew otherwise, and it had happened to Marshall, the best, the bravest, the kindest of men.\n\nLooking at the little there was left, she thought of the years before Peg would be a woman. And Wat, she must think of him, too, although he was a solid little fellow, already doing a man's work cheerfully and without question, seemingly glad to just have a home. But Wat was part of the family now.\n\nHe was a good boy, she thought, but too tight, too controlled, too reticent. He was learning to share, even wanting to share now that he was one of them.\n\nIf only she had some of the dresses she used to give away! If only she had the material, the needles, thread, buttons! It was easy to mend and even to create clothing if one had the things to do with, all of which she had so taken for granted at Harlequin Oaks. She had only to wish and to speak and it was there, ready for her.\n\nHer trunks! Of course, why had she not thought of them! They were in storage at the Brewsters', and she could write for them to be sent. Fortunately, to sew was one thing all young ladies learned. It was one of the things you did. Sewing, riding, music, were all considered things a young lady did well, and dancing, of course.\n\nShe smiled grimly. Who would have guessed that what served her best now was what her father would have expected from any stableboy! Yet when she walked through the barn and saw how orderly and efficient it all was, she blessed her father over and over again.\n\nThe trunks... she must send for the trunks. She could remake many of those dresses, some for herself, for Matty, and for Peg.\n\nMatty was kindling a fire as she came out. Matty stood up. \"Wat's gone for an armful of wood. Be careful, mum, if you're goin' outside.\"\n\n\"Be sure and save any newspapers, Matty. Sometimes the passengers leave them behind. We know so little of what is happening in the war. Sometimes I feel ashamed, when they are all suffering so.\"\n\n\"We've troubles enough of our own, mum. There's been no papers, although I put by a book of Mr. Dickens's that was left behind, thinkin' the poor man who left it would be comin' for it. I used to read him in the newspapers. Mr. Dickens, I mean.\"\n\nMatty paused. \"You get no letters from home, mum?\"\n\nMary's lips tightened; then she said quietly, \"No, Matty. I am from Virginia, and most of my friends are with the South. My husband was a Union Army officer; my father was against secession. I am afraid many of my friends think me a traitor.\"\n\n\"I know little of the war, mum. I'd only just come over when the fighting began. Is it about slavery, then?\"\n\n\"Not really, although that is a part of it. Mostly, it is about states' rights and whether the state or the nation shall control. I am ashamed to say I know less about it than I should.\n\n\"There was much talk about it at home, but I was a young girl, busy with riding, dancing, going to parties. I don't think many of us realized how serious it was until it was too late. All of a sudden, all the young men were in uniform, either blue or gray, and they were riding off to war.\n\n\"Some of our old friends did write, but I became irritated, I am afraid. Even when the war was growing worse and worse, there was more talk of promotion and who was getting what command than of the war itself.\"\n\nShe paused. \"I am sending East for some trunks I left behind. Maybe there's something in them we can make over.\"\n\n\"Will they still be there, mum? I mean with the fighting and all?\"\n\n\"I hope so.\" She hesitated, thinking. She would write to Martha Brewster, but it might be well to write to someone else, someone in authority. She considered that. Yes, yes, of course!\n\nShe went outside after a careful look around from the door, then walked around the corral. She must stop that, too. She remembered Temple Boone's warning and something she had heard her father say about avoiding patterns of behavior when fighting Indians, for they quickly grasped the pattern and were waiting for you.\n\nWhen she had gone through the barn where Ridge Fenton was harnessing the team for the incoming stage, she paused at the door. \"Mr. Fenton? Have you heard anything about the war?\"\n\n\"Not much, ma'am. They're still fightin'.\" He straightened up, resting a hand on a horse's shoulder. \"It's so far away, ma'am, and we got so much to think of out here.\"\n\nShe scanned the hills slowly, deliberately, looking for anything that might suggest the presence of an enemy. She was not very good at it, and she might miss what would be obvious to men like Temple Boone or Ridge Fenton.\n\nShe crossed the yard then, her heart pounding. Was it fear she felt? Apprehension?\n\nOnce inside, she looked around the station, wondering what might be done to make it more inviting. From the first, she had understood that she could not compete with old, experienced station agents, not at least until she had more on-the-job experience. What she could do was to create a more restful, homelike atmosphere. On the way out from Missouri, she had noticed most of the stations were untidy, and the food was often just thrown on the tables.\n\nShe was perfectly aware that Mark Stacy had not made up his mind, and Ben Holladay knew nothing about her at all. She could not be just as good as the others; she had to be a little bit better.\n\nWhat of Scant Luther? From time to time, she had heard that he was still around, that he was nursing a grudge.\n\nShe had turned in the doorway when the first of the carriages came into the yard. Under the coating of dust from the trail, it was black and shining, as were the six horses that drew it. There were a half-dozen men and four women in the carriage laughing and chatting.\n\nA moment later, a second carriage pulled up, and someone leaned out and said, \"Why are we stopping? This isn't the ranch!\"\n\n\"No\"\u2014a young man got down from the seat beside the driver\u2014\"but it is the last time you will have a chance to get a cup of coffee or tea before we get there. We've miles to go.\"\n\n\"That suits me.\" A young woman accepted his hand and got down. \"Regina? Are you coming?\"\n\n\"Why don't we wait? This is just a stage station, and their food is awful!\"\n\nThe young man with the curly hair turned to Mary. \"Is that true? Is your food awful?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Why don't you try it? Our coffee is really very good, and we've tea. Won't you come in?\"\n\n\"Archie!\" Regina called. \"Really!\"\n\n\"I am thirsty,\" Archie said, \"and besides that\"\u2014he turned to look at Mary again\u2014\"she's very pretty!\"\n\nOne of the other men stepped down, holding his hand to help another young woman down. \"He's right, Regina. We are thirsty. Even if it is only a few miles, I'd feel better for something to drink, if it is only water.\"\n\n\"Go in, if you like,\" Regina said. \"I shall be served here.\"\n\nShe turned to look at Mary. \"A cup of tea, please.\"\n\nMary Breydon smiled. \"I am sorry. We only serve at the tables.\"\n\n\"But I am Regina Collier!\"\n\n\"How nice for you! But we do serve only at the tables.\"\n\nRegina Collier was angry. Was this stage person being impudent? \"I am afraid you do not understand,\" she said icily. \"I am Preston Collier's daughter!\"\n\nMary Breydon smiled. \"I understand perfectly, Miss Collier. We are very busy here and do not have time to serve people in carriages or stages.\" She smiled again. \"I could not serve you in your carriage if you were President Lincoln. Of course,\" she added, \"he would not ask me to!\"\n\nTurning, she went back to the tables where nine young people had gathered, laughing and talking. Matty was just serving the last of them and had put a platter of cookies on the table.\n\nArchie went back to Regina's carriage. \"Come on!\" he invited. \"The coffee's really very good, and so are the cookies!\" He offered his hand.\n\n\"No,\" Regina said stubbornly. \"I shall stay here. I will not yield to that\u2014that woman!\"\n\n\"Oh, come now, Regina! They have their rules, you know! And she's really a very nice woman!\"\n\n\"You do as you like. I will not be insulted by a common waitress!\"\n\nArchie's smile faded. \"I am sorry,\" he said, and returned to the table, joining again in the excited talk.\n\nMary refilled his cup. \"Thank you,\" he said. \"We haven't far to go, but we were all very thirsty. It's a dusty ride.\"\n\n\"I know. You are going to Preston Collier's?\"\n\n\"Yes, there's a party there, a reception for some chap from England who has come over to hunt and see how the colonials are progressing. He's a nice chap, really, and this is his second trip, although I do not believe he was ever this far west.\"\n\n\"He will enjoy it, I am sure. Is there anything else I can get for you?\"\n\n\"Not at all, and thank you.\" Archie hesitated, then said, \"I must apologize for Miss Collier.\"\n\n\"Please don't. I am not in the least offended. We all have our bad moments, and no doubt she is tired.\"\n\nArchie looked at her, somewhat puzzled. \"You have not been here long, Miss\u2014?\"\n\n\"Breydon. Mrs. Mary Breydon.\"\n\n\"Oh? Your husband is here, then?\"\n\n\"Major Breydon was killed. I am a widow.\"\n\n\"I am sorry. I didn't mean to pry.\"\n\n\"I am sure you did not.\" She glanced around to see the others drifting back to their carriages. \"I hope your weekend is a pleasant one. Now if you will forgive me?\" She turned and went back to the table and began gathering the empty cups and the saucers.\n\nHe glanced after her, still puzzled, then walked back to the carriage.\n\n\"I hope you enjoyed your chat,\" Regina said irritably.\n\n\"I did, indeed,\" Archie replied. \"Your neighbor is a surprising young woman.\"\n\n\"She is not my neighbor! This is merely a station on the Overland Stage Line, and I suppose she works for them. We never stop here,\" she added.\n\n\"Is Sir Charles already at the ranch?\" he asked, changing the subject.\n\n\"Yes, he is. He came down yesterday with father. I believe he wanted to do some shooting this morning. There are always deer, you know, but father says the elk are disappearing. They are going into the high country as the snow goes off.\"\n\n\"He has been here before, you said?\"\n\n\"Some kind of a diplomatic mission, I believe. He was in Washington, D.C., before the war began, but it was only for a few weeks.\"\n\n\"I know something about him, but we've never met,\" Archie commented. \"My brother knew him in Paris when they were at school there. For such a young man, he's become quite a famous diplomat. He's been to Cairo, to Constantinople, to Vienna and Rome on missions of some sort or other.\"\n\n\"Father met him in Washington, and when he expressed a wish to hunt, father invited him out.\"\n\n\"Who else will be there?\"\n\n\"Oh, you know! The usual crowd. The Talbots, the Kings, the Williamses, and some new man whom I've never met, although they say he is both very handsome and very important, a Colonel Flandrau.\"\n\n\"He's been around Denver. I believe he's investing in mines. There are so many new people around now that it's hard to keep up with them. They keep coming and going, investing in mines or cattle or town sites. If it isn't one thing, it's another.\"\n\nArchie glanced ahead. In the distance, at the end of a winding road, he glimpsed the white columns of the Collier ranch house.\n\nPeg stood in the door watching the carriages go by. Four more passed during the hour, then a fifth. \"Where are they all going, mama?\"\n\n\"Mr. Collier is having some friends down for the weekend, I believe.\"\n\n\"Was it like that at Harlequin Oaks when you were a little girl?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was, only the country back there is greener, and there were more carriages, and many people rode over on horseback from neighboring places. We lived closer together than people do here.\"\n\nTemple Boone rode in before noon. \"Mrs. Breydon? Better stay close to the station and keep the youngsters inside. There's a report of an Injun raid on a small place east of Virginia Dale.\"\n\n\"But isn't that quite far off?\"\n\n\"Ma'am, they burned the house and killed two men. They were riding south according to the tracks.\" He swung his horse. \"I'll tell Ridge.\" He looked back. \"You be careful now!\"\n\nIndians... here?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "With the rising sun, there was a change in the weather. The sky, which had been clear, clouded over, and there was a spatter of cold rain, then a brief gust of wind that sent the leaves skittering across the hard-packed ground.\n\nTrees bent before the wind, and a loose door banged. Temple Boone, bowing before the wind, came from the barn, closing the door behind him.\n\nWhen he reached the station, he said, \"Looks like a storm coming.\" There was another brief spatter of rain that ceased abruptly.\n\n\"Where is Ridge?\" Matty asked. \"Is he all right, then?\"\n\n\"He's in the barn, ma'am, and you know Ridge. He'll sleep there.\" Boone rested his rifle against the wall near the window. \"Saw some tracks out yonder a few hours ago. Pony tracks.\"\n\n\"Indians?\"\n\n\"Sioux, I'd guess, and that means trouble.\"\n\n\"Where is Wat?\" Peg asked.\n\n\"He'll stay in the tack room. He'll be with Ridge, and they'll take turns watchin'. That lad's as good as any man when it comes to that.\"\n\nHe held his hands to the fire. \"Wind's cold,\" he said. \"Uncommon for this time of year.\"\n\n\"Will it be safe for the stages?\" Peg asked. \"Won't they have to stop?\"\n\n\"Stages don't stop for nothin', Peg,\" Boone said. \"They carry mail, and they have to keep movin'. Most of the passengers would prefer to keep goin', too.\"\n\nHe added fuel to the fire and edged the coffeepot farther over to heat the coffee. \"I came by Preston Collier's and stopped off to warn them. They'd had the news, but they don't seem worried. Must be forty or fifty people over there to meet that English lord.\"\n\n\"He isn't really a lord, is he, mama? Isn't a 'sir' just a knight?\"\n\n\"You're right, Peg. So many Americans think anyone with a title such as 'count' or 'earl' is royalty. It isn't true. Only members of a royal family are royalty. The others belong to the nobility.\"\n\n\"Never set much store on such things,\" Boone commented. \"A man should be two things. He should be a man, and he should be a gentleman. I mean a gentleman in his behavior. That's the way I was raised.\"\n\n\"How does one become an earl or a count?\" Peg asked.\n\n\"Usually, from service to his king. Once it was a reward for bravery or skill in battle, then for other services to the king. Usually, with the title went a grant of land, and the nobleman was expected to respond on call with a certain number of soldiers to serve his king during a war.\n\n\"Such titles were often passed down from father to son or occasionally to a near relative, always with the expectation of service to the king. Some of the noblemen became so powerful they threatened the power of the king himself. Others had their estates and titles taken from them and given to others.\n\n\"Nowadays, a title is often given for other services, even for diplomatic or business successes, and the titles vary in importance according to the country where they are given.\"\n\nThere was a brief roll of thunder, then, after a moment, a flash of distant lightning.\n\n\"You won't have many travelers in this kind of weather,\" Boone said. \"Probably nobody until the stage comes by in the morning.\"\n\nHe finished his coffee. \"I've got to ride on over to Fort Collins,\" he explained. \"I should be back before daybreak. I'm carryin' dispatches for the army.\" He glanced over at Mary. \"Will you be all right here?\"\n\n\"Of course. You've no cause to worry about us. Ridge is here, and we're armed.\"\n\n\"I've never seen a red Indian,\" Matty said, \"except that old man who came through on the stage. He seemed a fine old man.\"\n\nBoone chuckled. \"Him? You just bet he is a fine old man, but in his day he was a holy terror. He was a Ute. They are mountain Indians, properly speakin', and he's probably taken thirty or forty scalps in his time.\"\n\n\"That nice old man?\" Mary exclaimed. \"He had such an amused expression on his face.\"\n\n\"He probably was amused,\" Boone said. \"He was probably thinkin' how silly some of our ways are, compared to his. Every people seems to think their way is the best, and maybe it is, for them.\"\n\nTemple Boone took his rifle, paused a moment at the door, glanced back at Mary, and lifted his hand. Then he went outside.\n\n\"I'd better get in another armful of wood,\" Matty said. \"It will be a cold night.\"\n\nAs she was going out, they heard the clatter of horse's hoofs, and Temple Boone was gone. \"I wish he had stayed,\" Peg said. \"I feel safer when he's here.\"\n\n\"We all do,\" her mother said, \"but he has his work to do.\"\n\nShe glanced out the window. There were six horses in the corral huddled together against the wind. For a moment, she hesitated. Should she have them put in the barn? With Ridge's saddle horse, there was scarcely room for them all, and they did not have to be harnessed until morning. There was hay in the corral, and these were mustangs, bred to the wild, unused to barns.\n\n\"Come on, Matty, we'll fix supper, and then I'll read a bit to you all. It's a good night to be inside.\"\n\nShe went to the window again and looked out. Nothing moved. From old habit, her eyes scanned the trees and the brush. The thought of Indians worried her, but she did not want to frighten Peg.\n\nHad she been wrong to bring a child to this wild country? Or to come herself?\n\nNo. It had been their only chance, and when spring came, she would find a place and file on some land herself.\n\nWhy not? She could prove up on a homestead as well as anyone, and it would be one more thing Peg would have if anything happened to her.\n\n\"You should file on a homestead, Matty,\" she said suddenly. \"There's nothing like owning land.\"\n\n\"How much could I get, then?\"\n\n\"One hundred and sixty acres, but you have to build a shack, sink a well, and plow some land.\"\n\n\"One hundred and sixty acres!\" Matty was aghast. \"It is a rich woman I'd be!\"\n\n\"Not quite that, Matty, but it is something for yourself, something that would belong to you.\"\n\n\"We'd better fix supper,\" Matty said. \"Mr. Fenton will be hungry.\"\n\n\"I'm hungry, too!\" Peg declared.\n\n\"The light is fading,\" Mary said. \"What there is of it!\"\n\nSuddenly, even as she watched, the corral gate swung open as if of its own volition. She started. \"Why somebody must have\u2014!\"\n\nThere was a shrill whoop, and then the horses came stampeding from the corral, a running Indian behind them. Ridge Fenton's old buffalo gun boomed from the barn, and she saw a dozen mounted Indians come sweeping around the corral and from behind the barn and take in after the stage horses. One of the Indians was clinging to his horse, blood streaming from a wound and turning the side of his horse crimson.\n\n\"Matty!\" she cried. \"They are stealing our horses!\"\n\nShe caught up her rifle and, without thinking, threw open the door and fired. She saw an Indian turn his head toward her, and he waved at her derisively, then was gone. She fired again, too late.\n\nSlowly, she lowered her rifle. She had failed. The horses were gone. What was she to do?\n\nPeg was staring at her, round-eyed. \"You shot at them? Did you hit one?\"\n\n\"I don't think so, Peg. I missed. And the horses are gone\u2014gone! When the stage comes in the morning\u2014!\"\n\nRidge Fenton, rifle in hand, came in from the barn. \"Sorry, ma'am, they was on us afore I realized. Must've been a dozen of them, right out of nowhere!\"\n\n\"It wasn't your fault, Mr. Fenton. At least you wounded one of them.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am,\" Ridge said, \"I killed him. Any time a man bleeds like that, he's a goner. Make 'em more careful next time. But don't you worry, ma'am. Those Injuns know who done it. They know better than to try an' steal bosses when I'm around.\"\n\n\"But they did get the horses, Mr. Fenton, and we have a stage coming in tomorrow morning.\"\n\n\"Nothin' we can do, ma'am, until Stacy gets us some more hosses.\"\n\n\"Doesn't Mr. Collier have horses?\" Matty asked. \"If you were to ask\u2014?\"\n\n\"Wouldn't give you the time o' day!\" Fenton said. \"He's got no use for Ben Holladay. Never did have. Them two just don't get along. Too much alike, I reckon.\"\n\nMary Breydon took off her apron. \"Nevertheless, I'm going to try! I don't want people saying that if a man had been running this station, it wouldn't have happened. I'm going over there.\"\n\n\"Ma'am, it's coming on to storm, and there's Injuns about. You just set down, an'\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Fenton, you take care of things here. And if you would let me, I'd like to borrow your horse.\"\n\n\"Now see here, ma'am! That there's a mighty uneasy animal! He don't take to women no way, and he doesn't like other folks ridin' him.\"\n\n\"Are you saying I can't have him?\"\n\nFenton looked right and left. He rubbed his jaw, glanced sheepishly at her, and cleared his throat. \"No, ma'am, it ain't that. I jest\u2014\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Fenton. I'll get my cape.\"\n\nRidge started to speak, then muttered angrily about \"fool woman!\" and started off toward the barn.\n\nMatty stared at her. \"Ma'am? Do you think you should? There's Indians and all, and Peg here\u2014she's already lost her daddy.\"\n\n\"I have a job to do, Matty. Don't worry. I ride very well, and I shall be back before you realize it. Just you stay inside and keep Peg in.\"\n\nRidge was holding his horse at the door. He had saddled it with her sidesaddle. \"Don't know how you ride one of them durned things!\" he protested. \"Moreover, I don't think Arthur will stand for it.\"\n\n\"Arthur? You call him Arthur?\"\n\n\"He was give to me by a man named Arthur, so I just got to callin' him that Arthur horse, and it sort of worked itself down to just Arthur.\"\n\nShe walked up to the horse and put a hand on his neck. \"Hello, Arthur. We're going to be friends, aren't we?\"\n\nArthur rolled a wary eye at her but did not seem displeased at the soft touch on his neck. Accepting a hand from Fenton, she mounted quickly. Arthur shied at the unfamiliar feel of the skirt against his flank and the different weight, but he recognized an authoritative, knowing hand on the reins.\n\nThe night had grown colder; the sky was still overcast. Arthur seemed ready to go, so she let him have his head. She wore the heavy pistol under her coat and had both derringers in pockets in the rough skirt she was wearing.\n\nIndians...\n\nThey could be anywhere! Suddenly, and for the first time, she was frightened. What in the world had possessed her that she would start off in the middle of the night... but it really wasn't that late, scarcely more than nine o'clock.\n\nThe risk had not entered her mind. Not really. All she thought of was that stage coming in, the horses weary from the long run, another run ahead of them.\n\nShe had to have a fresh team. Whose was the responsibility if not hers? She did not ask herself what Scant Luther would have done or Mark Stacy or Boone. She thought only of what she must do.\n\nThe horse's hoofs pounded on the hard road. The rain had no more than settled the dust. Wind tore at her clothes and lashed the brush into weird shapes. She slowed Arthur, not wanting him to run himself out. She had heard that mustangs could run on and on, but she was accustomed to the finely bred horses of Virginia and Maryland.\n\nArthur slowed at her urging, but he was perfectly prepared to keep running. She patted his neck and talked to him, and he cocked a surprised ear at her and kept going.\n\nAgain, it started to rain, a quick flurry of hard-driven drops, cold as ice. It stung on her flesh and slapped at her cape like angry fingers.\n\nSuddenly, Arthur shied, snorted, and something moved in the woods alongside the trail. Mary reached under the cape and put her fingers around the butt of the pistol.\n\nArthur kept going. Whatever was back there was something he did not like, but he was not about to be stopped by it.\n\nShe rode into the open, and there, atop the knoll before them, was the house, ablaze with lights, lights that reflected on the glistening, varnished sides of the carriages. She rode on, weaving through the carriages to the white railing of the hitching posts. Dismounting, she tied Arthur and ran up the steps.\n\nAt the doorway, she paused, throwing her cape off her hair. A surprised butler, a black man, turned to her. \"Yes, miss? Was there something?\"\n\n\"May I see Mr. Collier, please? It is quite important.\"\n\n\"Are you a guest, miss?\" He noticed her muddy boots and beyond her the cow pony tied at the rail. \"I see you are not.\"\n\nHe was politely apologetic. \"You see, ma'am, Mr. Collier does not like to be disturbed when he is with his guests.\"\n\n\"It is really very important, and I have ridden a long way\u2014\"\n\nThe door was open, and she could see them dancing within. They were playing a waltz, and she was not a guest; she was an outsider. For a moment, she started to turn away; then her lips tightened.\n\n\"Will you take me to him, please? Or ask him to see me?\"\n\nSomething in her voice made him look at her again. Not only her voice but her manner.\n\n\"Certainly, miss, I shall see what I can do.\"\n\nSuddenly, several couples came out on the wide veranda. One of them was Regina Collier. \"What is it, Richard?\"\n\n\"It's a young lady, Miss Regina. She wishes to speak to your father.\"\n\nRegina looked past Richard, and her eyes met Mary's. \"Oh, it's not important, Richard. It's just that woman from the stage station. If it is important, father can stop by there in the morning.\"\n\nMary stepped forward into the light. \"Please, Miss Collier, it is very important. Could I see him now?\"\n\nWhat she might have answered, Mary had no idea. Suddenly, there was a cry from the doorway. A tall man in the uniform of a British officer started toward her.\n\n\"Mary! Mary Claybourne! Of all people! What in the world are you doing here!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "\"Sir Charles!\" She held out both hands to him. \"You are the one who should answer that question! What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I came to hunt buffalo,\" he said, \"and Preston was kind enough to invite me to stay with him.\" He glanced at her clothing. \"But, Mary? You haven't come to the party?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not, Charles. Harlequin Oaks was destroyed early in the war, our horses were stolen, and my father died just before the war.\n\n\"I married Major Marshall Breydon. Do you remember him? The plantation was destroyed, and there was nothing for us to do but find another way to earn a living until the war was over. The land is still mine, of course, but in the meanwhile, I'm operating a stage station.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"But that is charming! You, Mary Claybourne, a station agent?\" He laughed again. \"Only in America!\"\n\nSeveral of the guests had come to the door, and Mary was suddenly self-conscious. \"Really, Charles, I just came to see Preston Collier. It is something of an emergency.\"\n\n\"You know him, of course?\"\n\n\"No, we've never met. I've been here such a short time.\"\n\n\"Mary, I will find him for you, but first you must dance with me!\"\n\n\"Dance? Here, now? Oh, no! I am not a guest, Charles, and I am not dressed for\u2014\"\n\n\"You are my guest! I insist, for old times' sake!\"\n\nThe musicians were playing another waltz. Suddenly, she laughed. \"Why not, Charles? I'd love to!\"\n\nOn the wide veranda, with a light rain falling outside and the other guests watching from the doorways, she danced, muddy boots and all. Suddenly, she felt gay, happy... It was like old times!\n\nFor the moment, all was forgotten, only the music, an old friend from far off, better times, and the steps of the waltz. She had always loved to dance, and Sir Charles was a marvelous dancer. Carried away, she danced as she had not danced in years, and when they stopped, there was a brief spattering of applause.\n\nPreston Collier came up to them. \"Sir Charles? Please present me. I am afraid I have not had the pleasure.\"\n\n\"Preston, this is Mary Claybourne. I mean, Mrs. Mary Breydon. She is an old, old friend from Virginia! Many times when I was in Washington, she and her family entertained me in their home, at Harlequin Oaks.\n\n\"They were the most beautiful parties, and I spent many, many happy hours in her home! Her father was alive then, and he was a remarkable man. Remarkable in every way. Besides that, he had the finest horses I've ever ridden.\n\n\"I just couldn't believe it when I saw her here, of all places.\"\n\n\"This is a pleasure, Mrs. Breydon. Won't you join us?\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Collier, but I am not dressed for it, nor do I, unfortunately, have the time. As a matter of fact, I rode over here in a great hurry to see you on business.\"\n\n\"Business?\"\n\n\"I am the station agent at Cherokee now, Mr. Collier, and we've just experienced an Indian raid. Nobody was injured unless it was one Indian, but they drove off our horses.\"\n\n\"So? I am sorry, but I do not understand.\"\n\n\"I was hoping to borrow six horses from you so the morning stage could leave on time.\"\n\nCollier was embarrassed, and suddenly Mary felt sorry for him. It was unfair to make the request in the presence of a guest, but\u2014\n\n\"I know you are not friendly with Ben Holladay, Mr. Collier, but would you lend the horses to me personally? After the one round trip, I shall return them to you.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Breydon,\" Collier said suddenly, \"I sincerely regret that we have not met before. I am afraid that the loss is ours, and you may be sure we will make amends for the oversight.\n\n\"As to the horses, I shall instruct Burke to deliver them to you at once. The morning stage, you say?\"\n\n\"Yes, and thank you, Mr. Collier.\"\n\n\"Say no more.\" He glanced around. \"Will you join me in my study for coffee? It will take Burke a few minutes to get the horses for you and will give us time to get acquainted?\"\n\n\"I'd be delighted, Mr. Collier.\"\n\n\"You will join us, Sir Charles?\"\n\n\"Delighted!\"\n\nThe study was a small, quiet room off the hall. It was lined with books and had huge leather chairs\u2014a man's room, furnished for comfort. \"Please be seated, I'll have some coffee brought in.\"\n\nWhen he had given the order, he came back and seated himself. \"Now tell me about it. What happened to bring you West?\"\n\n\"My father passed away at the beginning of the war and only a few months after my marriage to Major Breydon. The major was away with his command, and during and after the Battle of Bull Run, the plantation was virtually destroyed; our stock was driven off and the crops ruined.\n\n\"Major Breydon was wounded, lost an arm, in fact, and while he was still in the hospital, our plantation was raided by guerrillas. They stole the few of our horses that remained, burned Harlequin Oaks, and killed some of our people. Fortunately, I escaped.\"\n\n\"I am sorry. Sorry for the destruction but glad you escaped.\"\n\n\"The first part was the fortune of war, Mr. Collier. Our plantation happened to be in the way. The second part, the raid by guerrillas, men who were simply thieves, was another thing entirely. These men were despised by soldiers of both the Union and the Confederacy, men who simply took advantage of a state of war to rob and kill. But there is no need to talk of that here.\"\n\nThe coffee was served with some small cakes. \"It is good to see you again, Mary. You will never believe how much we, who were away from home, loved those long weekends at Harlequin Oaks. Not long ago, I was in Paris, and some of us who had been military attaches in Washington at the time were talking of those soirees at the plantation.\"\n\nThey talked then of riding to the hounds, of horses, and of people.\n\n\"And Major Breydon?\" Sir Charles asked. \"He is here now?\"\n\n\"He was killed in Julesburg only a few months ago. He was shot down on the street.\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry! Who could have done such a thing?\"\n\n\"It was done,\" she replied quietly, \"by the leader of the guerrillas. He saw himself recognized and shot my husband before he could be accused.\n\n\"My husband wore his gun in an army holster with a button-down flap. He was shot without warning, shot on sight.\"\n\nThere was a rap at the door; then it opened. \"Mr. Collier? I was told I would find you here. I wish\u2014\"\n\nIt was Jason Flandrau.\n\n\"If you wish to know who would do such a thing,\" Mary Breydon said, \"you might ask Mr. Flandrau.\"\n\nFlandrau took in the situation at a glance. He had no idea what Mary Breydon was doing here, but that she was among friends was obvious. It was equally obvious that his plan to enlist the support of Preston Collier was no longer a possibility.\n\n\"I am sorry,\" he said. \"I did not mean to interrupt.\"\n\nHe closed the door and stood for just an instant, shaking with fury. This was an end to it, then, all his work, all his planning, his great chance, all gone glimmering. There was but one thing to do now. He turned to the door and called for his horse.\n\n\"Do you mean to imply that Jason Flandrau was the leader of those guerrillas? But he came to me highly recommended! We have mutual friends!\"\n\n\"I do not imply, Mr. Collier. I state it as a fact. You have been away, so perhaps you have not heard. An attempt was made to kill me only a few days ago. The attempt was made by a man referred to as Turkey Joe Longman. He was pursued, and in the gun battle that followed, he was killed. I believe he was one of the guerrillas.\n\n\"A few days before the attempt, Longman came to the stage station with a younger man whose name I do not know, but that younger man was riding a horse stolen from us and on which I still have the papers.\"\n\n\"But can you trace any of this to Flandrau?\"\n\n\"I am afraid I cannot. The killing of my husband was ruled self-defense, as my husband was armed, and Jason Flandrau said my husband made a threatening gesture.\"\n\nA man came to the door. \"Sir? The team is ready, sir. Shall I accompany Mrs. Breydon?\"\n\nMary stood up. \"No, thank you. I shall be all right.\" She extended a hand to Preston Collier. \"You have been most gracious.\"\n\nTurning to Sir Charles, she said, \"You have no idea what this means to me, to see someone from home. I had not realized I missed it so much! If you have a moment, please stop by the station. I can offer you nothing like this, but Matty is a wonderful cook, and the meals are good.\"\n\nAfter she was gone, Preston Collier asked, \"This Harlequin Oaks? It was a fine place?\"\n\n\"There were people who preferred an invitation to Harlequin Oaks to any other place on the eastern seaboard. Claybourne had the finest horses and the best food a man could find and an excellent cellar with it. The home place was about four hundred acres of as fine land as I have seen, but they had more back in the mountains, some six hundred acres of timberland. I know it well, as we often went there to hunt.\n\n\"Once the war is over and the land can be brought back into production, she will be a very wealthy young woman.\"\n\n\"Odd that she would come West and take the kind of job she has.\"\n\n\"Not if you know the family. Very independent, very able. Her father was prepared to accept any responsibility, and after all, there is not much a young woman can do.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "The wind blew cold along the Cherokee Trail, and raindrops blew from the leaves and spattered against her rain cape. It was a long ride back through the rain, yet she felt good, better than she had felt in days.\n\nSeeing Sir Charles was only a part of it, as was the kindly reception from Preston Collier and the defeat of Flandrau. That, she believed, was complete and final as far as his political ambitions were concerned. Even had he planned otherwise, Collier was too wise a man to back the political aspirations of a man liable to such an accusation. The young, ambitious newspapers of Colorado would crucify anyone who supported such a man.\n\nYet it did not lessen her danger. If she were destroyed, he might still have a chance, although a slim one. Especially if she could be eliminated in such a way as not to implicate him.\n\nThinking about it coolly, Mary Breydon faced that fact. Her troubles were far from over, yet she doubted if another attempt would be made with firearms. Now he must be more subtle. Whatever was done must seem to be an accident.\n\nIt was long after midnight when at last she led the horses into the yard at Cherokee.\n\nWat opened the barn door. \"Better bring 'em in here, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Wat! What are you doing up at this hour?\"\n\n\"Me an' Ridge, we been takin' turns watchin' out for you. He just gotten himself to sleep. If'n we're quiet, he'll go right on sleepin'.\"\n\nWhen the horses were stalled, she tiptoed inside and, sitting alone beside the fire, drank a cup of coffee from the blackened pot. It was very hot and very black, and it tasted good.\n\nFor a moment, after she was in bed, she lay awake looking up at the darkness where the ceiling was. She could not remember a time when she had gone to bed so pleased with herself and the situation.\n\nThe horses had been stolen, yet she had found others, and tomorrow the stage would leave on time.\n\nNobody could have done it better, not Temple Boone or even Mark Stacy.\n\nShe was smiling when she fell asleep." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "When the stage had gone and Peg had finished gathering the dishes from the tables, she looked over at Wat, who was looking at something in his hand.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Arrowhead.\"\n\n\"Can I see?\"\n\nHe held it out on his open palm. \"Where did you get it?\"\n\nHe waved a hand toward the hill rising beyond the trees. \"Yonder. There's an old Indian camp.\"\n\n\"Could I find one?\"\n\n\"Maybe. If you look sharp and if you're lucky.\"\n\n\"Will you take me?\"\n\n\"I don't know. What would your mother say?\"\n\n\"She wouldn't mind. It isn't far, is it?\"\n\n\"No, just over yonder. Just a few minutes. I don't know, though. You'd be scared.\"\n\n\"Scared? What is there to be scared of?\"\n\n\"Ghosts. Ghosts of dead Indians. Some say they hang around old camps.\"\n\n\"Have you seen one? A ghost, I mean?\"\n\n\"No, I never. That doesn't say they ain't none. I found a dead Indian once. I found his skull and some bones. Some ribs and the spine.\"\n\n\"What did you do?\"\n\n\"I covered him up again. Pa said never to disturb the remains. He said it was all right to pick up arrowheads but not to disturb their graves. If they were very, very old, he said somebody should study them who understood what he was doing. Somebody who knew what he was seeing.\n\n\"He told me one time that he found a cut bank where a stream had washed away the bank, and there in plain sight were three camps, each one a few inches or a few feet above the other, and each one was different, different kind of arrowheads, like that.\"\n\nHe turned the arrowhead in his fingers, then handed it to Peg. \"You can have that. Some Indian made it a long time ago. Come on, I'll show you where I found it.\"\n\nShe put the arrowhead in her pocket. \"Thank you, Wat. That's the first thing a boy ever gave me.\"\n\n\"Aw, it ain't nothin'! You wait! I know where there's jasper and sometimes other kinds of stones. That ol' arrowhead ain't nothin'.\"\n\n\"It is so. I like it.\"\n\n\"Come on. I'll show you where I found it. It's just over yonder. We won't be gone very long.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't we tell mother?\"\n\n\"It's just over there. You'll be back before she knows you're gone. Anyway, you don't have to be scared. I'll take care of you.\"\n\n\"I'm not scared!\"\n\nWalking together, they started away toward the hill beyond the nearest trees. There was a narrow draw there and a bare place in the midst of the brush and close to one side of the draw.\n\n\"See?\" Wat indicated a circle of fire-blackened stones almost covered with dirt and sand. \"That was where they built their fires. Now if we look around\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you come here looking for arrowheads?\"\n\n\"Not really. The first time it was with pa. That was just after the stage station was built. Pa had his wagon, and we were fetching bones\u2014\"\n\n\"Bones?\"\n\n\"We used to go out and pick up old bones, buffalo bones, antelope, anything like that. When pa got a wagonload he'd drive it into town and sell it.\"\n\n\"Sell bones? Who would want some smelly old bones?\"\n\n\"They weren't smelly! They were old. They grind them up for fertilizer and some other stuff. I don't know what-all.\"\n\n\"People bones?\"\n\n\"No, silly. Buffalo bones, most of them. There were some others. One time pa found a tusk, like from an elephant? Like you see in pictures? He told some people in Denver about it, but they wouldn't come to look. Said it was nonsense. Pa sold it to a peddler for twenty dollars.\"\n\n\"Twenty dollars? For an old bone?\"\n\n\"It was a tusk. Ivory. Pa said it was probably worth more, but twenty dollars was a lot of money, and he didn't know of anybody who wanted it. Pa said he could eat good for two months on twenty dollars.\"\n\nWat stopped suddenly, picking up a piece of stone almost as large as a man's fist. It was chipped along one edge. \"See this here? Indians chip off flakes of stone to make hide scrapers. After they skin a buffalo, they use these to scrape off the fat on the underside.\"\n\n\"Oh... look! I found an arrowhead!\" She held it up for his inspection.\n\n\"You sure did!\" Wat was pleased. Suddenly his expression changed. \"Look! Look yonder!\"\n\nHe pointed to a track just beyond where she had found the arrowhead. It was a boot track, a large boot track.\n\n\"What is it?\" Peg was puzzled.\n\n\"Ssh!\" He gestured for silence. \"Look there! It's fresh!\" His voice was low but intense. \"That was made this mornin'!\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" Disbelief was obvious in her tone.\n\n\"Look,\" he said. \"It rained some last night. Not much, but some. See how the ground is speckled by the big drops? And the wind blew, too.\n\n\"Well, there's no speckles in that track, and the edges are sharp and clear.\"\n\n\"Maybe Mr. Fenton was over here.\"\n\n\"Ridge? Naw, he won't take a step out of the area least he has to or there's a fight shapin' up. He makes like he's scared an' doesn't want to get into a fight, but you just try keepin' him out of one. That ol' codger would tackle a grizzly and give him first swat! No, siree! I know who made that track! It was Scant Luther!\"\n\n\"Wat? Let's go home. I'm scared.\" Then she said, \"How could you tell it's his track? It's just an old boot track!\"\n\n\"I seen his tracks many's the time. See there? That patched place? He fixed that himself. And this place where the heel's run down? He walks like that. You watch him.\"\n\n\"I don't ever want to see him. Wat, let's go home.\"\n\n\"We can't. Least, I can't. I got to see what he's doin', and you can bet your hide he's up to no good. He hates your mama.\"\n\n\"What can we do?\"\n\n\"Foller him a little ways. See where he's goin', then tell Ridge or Temple Boone.\"\n\nEagerly, he started casting about for tracks. \"He's got a long stride, bein' big like he is. Stay behind me now.\"\n\n\"What difference does his stride make?\"\n\n\"Tells you where to look for the next step. About two and a half feet, I'd guess.\" Wat looked around, then suddenly pointed. \"There! In the sand alongside that rock. See? He stepped on the rock, but his foot slid off a mite and made that mark in the sand. Come on, but be very quiet! And don't talk!\"\n\nWat moved swiftly. Scant Luther, not expecting to be trailed, had made no attempt to cover his tracks. He walked swiftly, taking long strides, and if occasionally he stepped on rocks, it was simply because it was easier.\n\nWat stopped suddenly, and putting his lips close to her ear, he whispered, \"I smell smoke!\"\n\nHe started on, then stopped and whispered again. \"If you have to run, run uphill. The station's right over this ridge, and besides, you can run uphill faster'n he can. On the level, he'll catch you. Goin' uphill, he's too heavy!\"\n\nThey started on, tiptoeing through the sand, slipping through the brush to make no sound. Peg was scared, but she was excited, too. This was fun! She had never done anything like this before. What would mama think? And Matty?\n\nSuddenly, Wat lifted a hand. Too late! She was too close behind him, and he stopped so abruptly that she bumped into him, staggering him into a dry bush.\n\nScant Luther, crouching over his campfire, looked up, right into her eyes.\n\nWith a gruff roar, he lunged to his feet, staggering a little. Peg was off like a rabbit, running up the steep hill, dodging brush and rocks. Behind her, she could hear Scant's big boots scratching gravel, but she feared to look back.\n\nOff on her left and a little ahead of her, Wat was scrambling up the same steep hillside. He was just passing a big rock\u2014\n\nHe stopped abruptly and threw himself behind the rock. \"Help me!\" he yelled.\n\nScrambling, she got behind the rock. It moved, it tilted, and suddenly it began to roll, a slow, ponderous roll; then it fell free and started downhill, leaping and bounding, right at Scant Luther!\n\nHe heard it, looked up, eyes bulging. Then he gave a great leap to one side and hit the hillside rolling. Down he went, the boulder tumbling past him, missing by a hair's breadth.\n\nScant started to rise, staggered, and fell again.\n\n\"Quick!\" Wat said. \"The other one!\"\n\nRunning after him, Peg threw herself behind a second, somewhat smaller rock. Down it went, leaping and bounding, followed by a torrent of small rocks, some of them leaping high in the air as they toppled and fell.\n\n\"Come on, let's run!\" Scrambling, they went up the hill and, breathless, paused at the top, hand in hand, to look back.\n\nFrom where they now stood, they could no longer see Scant Luther, only dust rising from the hillside.\n\n\"Let's go,\" Wat said. \"I should never have brought you out here.\"\n\n\"Mama will be angry.\"\n\n\"We've got to tell her,\" Wat said. \"She's got to know he's over there.\"\n\nMatty came to the door to throw out some wash water just as they came into the yard. She stopped, looking at them.\n\n\"So it's trouble you've been makin'?\"\n\n\"How did you know?\" Peg asked.\n\n\"Sure it stands out all over the two of you! A blind man could see it. Now come here an' tell me. What is it you've done?\"\n\nAs she spoke, Ridge Fenton came to the door, a piece of apple pie in his hand. As they explained, he began to grin. \"By the Lord Harry, I'd of give a pretty piece to've seen that! Ol' Scant a scramblin' for his life!\" He slapped his leg, his mouth stuffed with pie. When he could talk again, he said, \"Too bad one o' those rocks didn't bust him on the head!\"\n\nMary, preparing her supply list, listened, half in anger, half relief. Then she got up and came to the door. \"Wat, first I want to thank you for getting Peg safely home, but don't you ever do that again! She is not to leave the yard without telling me. Do you understand? You both might have been killed by that awful man!\"\n\n\"Yes'm,\" Wat said sheepishly. \"I'm sorry, ma'am. It was only a little way, and I didn't reckon anybody was around.\"\n\n\"He's gone by now,\" Fenton said. \"He knows we know, and he don't know but what Boone is around. Boone would go huntin' him, sure as shootin'.\"\n\n\"I don't want you to go, Ridge,\" Mary said. \"We want you here.\"\n\n\"Now don't you worry yourself about that, ma'am. I just don't cotton to goin' off in the hills huntin' Scant Luther. If'n he brings trouble to us, I'll speak my piece, an' it'll be language he understands.\"\n\n\"We must all be careful,\" Mary said. \"We do know he is around, and Wat? I want to thank you for discovering him.\"\n\n\"He's a good boy,\" Matty said when she came inside. \"You cannot blame them, children as they are. It's only natural they should go pokin' about, and certainly I did it myself.\n\n\"We had no outlaws or Indians about, but we had high cliffs along the shore and the sea and the caves in the cliffs where sometimes we went when the tide was out.\n\n\"Lookin' back, I can see it was fearsome risks we took, climbin' about in those caves like we done. It was a wonder the sea never trapped us there, and there were times when we scarcely made it out before the caves flooded. But that's the way with youngsters, mum.\"\n\nAfter they were all inside, she went to the door herself and stepped out in the almost dark and stood in the shadow of the station, looking westward.\n\nThat was where the mountains were, higher mountains than she had ever seen, as high as the Alps but more of them, they said. Someday she must go there. She must take Peg and Wat and go to the mountains, yet even here there was something in the air that was different. It was so clear, so different from what she had been used to.\n\nShe watched the first stars come out, and suddenly she wished Marshall were there, standing beside her, just to feel with her, to realize with her that she was changing, and she knew what the change portended. She no longer longed to return to the plantation. To rebuild Harlequin Oaks... yes. She must do that. She had promised herself that, promised that to the memory of her father and to Peg.\n\nFor herself, she knew now it would never be enough, for she had changed. She had become a western woman." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Jason Flandrau's first instinct was to run, yet he had built too well here, and he had no desire to return to the old days of riding and hiding. Returning to Denver, he studied all aspects of his situation.\n\nAfter all, it was one woman's accusation. Admittedly, he must forget any assistance from Preston Collier, for the latter would not risk his position and prestige backing a candidate whose reputation was tainted. All right, then, Collier must be forgotten. Who were Collier's rivals? Who were his enemies?\n\nFlandrau had already discovered that people were reluctant to think evil of anyone who dressed and talked well and who maintained an outward appearance of respectability. He had a good singing voice, and like almost every boy of his time, he had gone to church regularly, if only to meet the girls, and he knew most of the hymns.\n\nSo he would continue on the course he had set for himself, careful to keep himself to respectable circles. He must develop a mine or ranch where he could hire men and so have contact with those he needed without arousing unwelcome curiosity.\n\nMary Breydon must, of course, be eliminated, but now it must be done by accident or by Indians. Traveling was rough, the horses often only half broken. There were many things that could happen, only he must make sure that one of them happened to her.\n\nScant Luther? If he acted against her, nobody would be surprised, and it would not be linked to Flandrau.\n\nScant... Indians... accident.\n\nOne or the other should provide an answer, and whatever accusations she made would quickly be forgotten. Now he must think, he must plan\u2014\n\nOf course, there was Denver Cross, but Cross he wished to keep out of sight and out of trouble until he, Flandrau, became governor. Cross was no fool and too valuable a man to be wasted. He would be needed later.\n\nScant first... Cross could handle that or, better still, Jordy Neff. Jordy, as Flandrau had been quick to recognize, had a mean streak. He liked to prod about until he found something about which a man was sensitive and then work on it. It was a form of sadistic torture at which Neff was adept.\n\nA few days later, pausing on the street near Neff but without seeming to notice him, Flandrau said, \"See anything of Scant? I wonder how he likes being made a fool of by that woman?\"\n\nNeff chuckled. \"He don't like it much. He's been muttering in his beard, making threats.\"\n\n\"He could save us a lot of trouble, Neff. Prod him a little.\"\n\nFlandrau walked on up the street. There was that little ranch up the river. Maybe he could make a deal for it, a quiet place, out of sight, easily reached, and with trails heading back into the mountains.\n\nHis every instinct warned him that now was the time to leave. There were other places, other times. Yet there was in him a streak of stubbornness, a refusal to be defeated by a woman and the realization that he might never again find such a situation as he had come upon here.\n\nHe was not sanctimonious. He was simply quietly respectful. On several occasions, he had been asked to sing solos and had done so. He was not a great singer but had come from a family where there was much singing, and he had grown up around camp meetings and revivals, so all the hymns, the prayers, the quotations, came easily to him.\n\nHe was a man who believed in nothing, a man totally selfish, totally self-centered, completely ruthless. To be defeated by a mere woman was absurd. Preston Collier would have been useful, but he was not necessary. He would have Mrs. Breydon eliminated and would press on. So far, his name had not appeared in the newspapers, and he wanted it that way. If he could begin by winning a large number of voters, right at the grass roots, when his name was finally brought forward, he would have easy sailing. Carefully, he began considering his next move." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "What was needed was a good rain. Not a piddling few drops but a rain, something to settle the dust, for at Cherokee dust was the enemy and the cause of much of the work that must be done. Every stage and every rider-by started up a cloud of dust, and it settled on everything.\n\nMatty was alone, and she was baking. She loved baking and especially she liked making cookies, pies, and doughnuts. Doughnuts were new to her, for she had never seen one until she came to this land, but she liked making them and liked seeing them eaten. Coming from a large family of healthy boys, she knew what an appetite was. Or she thought she did.\n\nThen there was the day when the Indians came.\n\nMary Breydon had taken Peg and gone off to Laporte to pick up some things needed about the place. Ridge Fenton had gone hunting.\n\nAt breakfast, he had said, \"I'm hungerin' for wild meat. I'm goin' to fetch some. Antelope, maybe, although I don't cotton to antelope. Too stringy, gets in my teeth. Buffler, that's what I want. Come right down to it, I'd rather have a nice fresh lion. Mountain lion. Cougar. Ain't no better meat anywhere than cougar meat.\"\n\nHe glanced across the table at Peg. \"You got to kill 'em first. They're too lively to eat right off the hoof.\"\n\n\"Cougars don't have hoofs!\" Peg said. \"They have paws.\"\n\n\" 'Course they do! Maws, too. I'm that hungry for wild meat I could eat paw, maw, and the kittens. The whole batch.\" He pushed back from the table and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. \"You just set by. I'll take ol' Betsy out there an' run down a buffler, a deer, somethin' of the kind. Maybe I can back an ol' grizzly into a corner.\"\n\n\"A grizzly?\" Wat stared at him. \"Nobody in his right mind wants to corner a grizzly!\"\n\n\"Hate to do it,\" Ridge explained. \"Really hate to do it! Them grizzlies, they know me. Once they see me comin', they know the end is near. Why some of them back up an' cry! They just cry like babies because they know when they see ol' Ridge a-comin' totin' ol' Betsy that their time has come.\n\n\"They know their days of free roamin' is over and they are about to become steaks an' mince meat. Ever eat a mince meat pie made from fresh grizzly? Ain't nothin' better.\n\n\"All summer long, that grizzly has been fattenin' up on nuts, berries, roots, and the like, mixed in with a fresh young buffler, maybe a papoose or two, so he's ready! I mean he's fat.\n\n\"Of course, I never kill a grizzly lest he's fat. Sometimes, when they are runnin' to get away, I have to run up beside them and pinch their ribs to see if they're fat enough. When I pinch 'em, they know why, an' they screech like banshees because they know what's comin', an' they are sorry for all those berries and nuts they been eatin'. Right then, they wished it was less.\"\n\n\"Don't pay any attention, Peg,\" Wat said. \"He's just yarnin'.\"\n\nRidge glared. \"Yarnin', is it? You just wait. One o' these days, I'll take you a-huntin' with me, an' you can pinch 'em for fat your own self! You'll see what I mean.\"\n\nHe rested his hands on his knees, staring at them. \"Ever eat beaver tail? Now that's mighty fine eatin'! Next to cougar, there's nothin' like beaver tail or buffler tongue. Finest meat anywhere!\"\n\nRidge Fenton had been gone for more than an hour when the Indians came. She caught a movement from the corner of her eye and went to the window. There could have been no less than thirty of them, possibly more. At least eight men, ten or twelve women, and some children. They were mounted and pulling travoises piled with their tepees and goods.\n\nMatty was appalled. Since coming to Cherokee, she had heard a dozen stories of how Indians could eat. Three of them had been known to eat a buffalo at a sitting, and those Indians out there\u2014why there'd be nothing left for the stage! What to do?\n\nThey had stopped out by the corral now, and two of them were approaching the station. Matty took up the shotgun and put it beside the door.\n\n\"They respect courage,\" somebody had said, \"and not much else.\" Well, maybe. Matty did not know; all she had was courage. Suddenly, before they reached the step, she jerked open the door.\n\nThe action was so sudden the Indians stopped, startled. \"What do you want?\" she demanded. She had the shotgun by the door but a broom in her hands.\n\n\"Eat,\" one of the Indians said. He was a broad, strong-looking man with his hair in two braids. \"We hungry.\"\n\n\"Go hunt, then,\" Matty said. \"Go find a fat grizzly. Feel of his ribs to see if he's fat enough first.\"\n\nThey stared at her. Straight-faced, hiding the fact that she was frightened, she remembered what Ridge Fenton had been telling the children. \"If he's not fat enough, let him go.\"\n\nOne of the Indians scowled and muttered something to the other, who began to explain. They both turned to look at Matty, who looked right back at them.\n\n\"We hungry,\" an Indian repeated.\n\n\"Find a fat bear or a buffalo.\" She looked beyond the men at the Indian children. Their eyes were wide and dark, their faces round and serious.\n\n\"I won't feed you,\" she said, \"but I'll feed the little ones. The papooses,\" she said, remembering the word from Ridge Fenton and hoping it was the right one. \"Not you or you,\" she pointed at them. \"You can hunt for meat. Send me the little ones, the papooses.\"\n\nThe two Indians returned to the cavalcade and there was much talk, and then slowly the children began getting down from the horses and hesitantly approached.\n\nThere were nine of them. One larger boy, evidently already a man in his own mind, would not come but stood back, disdainfully proud.\n\nSeating them at an outside table, she filled a bowl of stew for each of them. She would have to cook again, but no matter.\n\nShe stood over them while they ate, slowly, solemnly, often looking up at her. The men stayed by their horses, watching. Finally, when they were eating the last of their stew, she told them to wait. Going inside, she covered a tray with cookies and took them outside.\n\nThe children stared at her, then at the cookies. She held up one finger, looking very stern. \"One!\" she said. \"No more!\"\n\nThen she passed the cookies. Solemnly, still without smiling, each one took a cookie, looking up at her to be sure they were doing the right thing but looking hungrily at the rest of the cookies on the tray.\n\nSuddenly, Matty turned and walked out to the waiting Indians and passed the cookies to the men and then the women. Very carefully, each Indian took just one. When the tray was empty but for one cookie, she looked at it, then at them. Then she took up the last cookie and ate it herself. One of the Indians started to chuckle and muttered something to the others, and they all laughed.\n\nThe young ones scrambled back on their ponies or the travoies, and slowly the little cavalcade moved away. As they moved off, she lifted a hand and waved. After a moment, one of the children waved back.\n\nMatty went inside and closed the door. Suddenly, she dropped to a bench, heaving a great sigh. She'd been scared, and she was still scared.\n\nAfter a moment, she got up. \"An' just for that,\" she said aloud, \"I'll spend me mornin' cookin'!\"\n\nHours later, Ridge Fenton came down the road, and when he saw the tracks, he stopped, stared at them, then broke into a run. When he was almost at the station, Matty stepped out, hands on her hips.\n\n\"What is the matter, then? Is it frightened you are? Come in, then, an' be safe.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Ridge demanded. \"Woman, what happened?\"\n\n\"Nothing, nothing at all! Some Indians came by, we talked, and they went on.\"\n\nHe stared at her. \"What happened? Don't tell me you got by without feedin' that lot?\"\n\n\"They all were very nice,\" she said, \"and they had better manners than some others I know.\" She paused. \"I just told them when I wanted fat meat, I pinched grizzlies until I found one fat enough.\"\n\n\"You're funnin' me.\" He stared at her. \"Now see here, woman, I\u2014!\"\n\n\"Go do your chores,\" she said. \"You're late.\"\n\nFour days later, Mary Breydon was sweeping the doorstep when she saw two Indians riding up. One of them had what was obviously a haunch of fresh venison tied up in the deer's hide.\n\nThey reined up at the door. \"Where is Woman-Who-Pinches-Bears?\" one Indian demanded.\n\nHearing them, Matty came to the door.\n\n\"Where papooses?\" one Indian asked solemnly.\n\nMatty turned. \"Peg? Wat?\"\n\nWhen they came to the door, the Indian very solemnly handed the fresh meat to Wat. Then he glared at Matty. \"No for you! Papooses!\"\n\nThen they rode away, but as they reached the place where the road turned, they looked back. Matty waved, and they waved in return." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "There were no days without work, but now the work had fallen into patterns, and each knew what must be done.\n\n\"That Wat,\" Ridge Fenton said one morning, \"if he keeps on the way he's goin', he'll work me out of a job!\"\n\n\"The lad's no blacksmith,\" Matty said, \"although he's good with horses.\"\n\n\"No blacksmith, is it? He watches me all the time, helps when he can. That boy's learnin' too durned fast!\"\n\nLater, Matty asked Wat, \"Is it a smith you're goin' to be? Mr. Fenton says you are pickin' it up an' rarely fast.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I don't figure to be no blacksmith, but every man should have him a trade, something to fall back on in time of need.\"\n\n\"What do you really want to be?\" Mary asked.\n\nWat flushed and looked down at his plate. \"I'd like to write stories like that Sir Walter Scott you read from.\"\n\n\"It's hard work, Wat, and very few writers make a good living.\"\n\n\"That Sir Walter Scott did. Temple Boone said he did mighty well.\"\n\n\"Temple Boone told you that?\" She was surprised.\n\n\"It's true, ain't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is. He was a very popular writer. So were Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare. They all did very well.\"\n\nShe paused. \"How did Mr. Boone happen to tell you that?\"\n\n\"He was readin' him. He was reading a book by Sir Walter Scott. He was slow at it, he said, but he was going to get better and read faster. He said a man could be anything he wants to be if he'll just try hard enough.\"\n\n\"And what does Mr. Boone want to be?\"\n\nWat looked at her slyly. \"He'll most likely tell you hisself when he gets around to it.\"\n\nShe exchanged a look with Matty. \"We can all improve ourselves, Wat. In these days, with books so easily had, there's no reason for anyone not to have an education. And if you want to be a writer, you should be reading a lot and not just the sort of thing you wish to write but other things as well.\"\n\nAfter Wat had returned to the stable, Matty said, \"He's a fine upstanding man, mum. Mr. Boone is a man any girl might set her cap for.\"\n\n\"It is too soon for me to think of that, Matty. I was very much in love with Marshall, and he's never far from my thoughts. Anyway, I must go back to Virginia when the war is over. After all, my home is there, and Peg's future.\"\n\n\"I've been wonderin' about that, mum. You gettin' more western all the time. You've changed, mum, whether you recognize it or not.\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\n\"And there's that nice Mr. Stacy. He's a good man, too, with a good job, and he's one who will do well. Folks talk of buildin' a railroad west after the war, and they say he's mixed up with it somehow.\"\n\nShe straightened up from the washboard where she had been washing clothes. \"What I like about this country is that nobody thinks anything is too big or too hard. If they want to do something, they just take it for granted they can do it, and then they just naturally go ahead.\"\n\nShe scrubbed for a few minutes and then said, \"Although Mr. Boone says, and I think he's right, that the railroads will change the country for the worse. They'll make it richer, but the people will be different.\n\n\"Now it takes them a while to get here, and they hear a lot of talk and pick up a certain way of thinking. Western folks have standards. They have a certain way of behaving toward women and toward each other, and when they make a deal, their word is enough.\n\n\"When the railroads get in, Mr. Boone thinks that will change. A lot of people will be coming West with different ways and ideas. He may be right. I met some people back East I wouldn't want to see out here.\"\n\n\"But all of us came from back East!\"\n\n\"Yes, mum, we did, but the West has a way of weeding out the bad ones, or they don't last. There's a few, like Scant Luther, but mighty few.\n\n\"That outlaw Johnny Havalik, the one who gave his boots to Wat, they say he'd never rob a woman. He'd stop a stage and take the money from everybody else but never from a woman.\"\n\nWhen she had finished ironing and folding the clothes, Mary Breydon walked outside. There was a feeling of change in the air, the first touch of spring, probably, although it was a bit early for that.\n\nShe stood looking down the valley. How quickly one forgot! She could hardly believe there was a war on and that people whom she knew were fighting and dying. It all seemed so far from here, as though it were another world, yet there was a difference, and it was not only in the air.\n\nEverybody who came West was coming to build, some to build in the West, some merely to get rich and get out, but all were intending to do great things, to grow, to achieve. She heard the talk of the stage passengers while they were eating. None of them seemed to have any doubts; none of them seemed worried by Indians, by deserts, mountains, or the wilderness.\n\nThis was their land of Canaan, the land where dreams came true, but here there was a difference, for each one of them seemed sure that he had to make the dreams come true, that it would be the result of something he did.\n\nPeg came out and stood beside her. \"It's nice, isn't it, mama?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is, Peg.\"\n\nHow long before the war was over? How long before they could think of returning? And what about Peg? Her memories would be of Cherokee Station, and when she looked back, it would be at these quiet hills, at these weather-worn buildings, at memories of Matty, Wat, and Mr. Boone.\n\nPeg had been too young. She could scarcely be expected to remember the parties, the balls, the beautifully dressed people, the music and the house with its white columns and its vine-covered walls. She would have no memories of the smartly trotting horses bringing the black, varnished carriages to their door and the people getting down from them and her father welcoming them at the door.\n\nAll in the past, and they were her memories, not Peg's.\n\n\"Matty?\" The Irish girl had come to the door to throw out some water. \"We must find that land, file claims for ourselves. When the war is over, there will be thousands of people coming West, all wanting land.\"\n\n\"Yes, mum, I'd like a bit of land, a place with trees and a stream.\"\n\n\"Maybe we should look further west? In the mountains?\"\n\n\"It's like the rest of them, mum. No matter where you are, there is always something else that might be better, just a little further west.\"\n\n\"It was true, of course. Wandering got into the blood, and there were always those greener pastures that lay over the fence or over the next range of mountains.\n\nHere all was strange and new yet somehow familiar. Western men and women had little time for contemplation, although Temple Boone said he did most of his thinking alongside a campfire or when riding. Western men were thinking of how things could be done; they were used to making do. Since coming to Cherokee, she had heard several stories of men alone who had set their own broken bones, amputated limbs, doing what could be done to survive. Only a few miles away, two sisters had built their own log cabin.\n\nYet she was hungry for news from home. There were few letters, but newspapers were occasionally left at the station, and a couple of men had left books. She listened hungrily to the talk among the passengers. So much was happening in the world, and she heard so little of it.\n\nBack home, there would be talk, much of it idle chatter, of course, but there would be talk of government and policy, of art, music, and books, of what was happening in Europe and occasionally even in Asia or Africa.\n\nHenry Wadsworth Longfellow had just published Tales of a Wayside Inn, Jules Verne had written Five Weeks in a Balloon, and George Eliot had published Romola. In Paris, Bizet had a new opera, Les P\u00eacheurs, and people back East and even out here were singing \"When Johnny Comes Marching Home\" and \"Clementine.\" A man in New York had invented something they called roller skates that had little rubber wheels instead of blades. A French firm had begun selling Perrier water bottled at a spring near N\u00eemes.\n\nAn American writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, had died, and so had the French artist Delacroix. U.S. Grant had been made commander in chief of the Union armies. Mary had never heard of him until some victories were won in the West. He had never been considered among the great generals, like Meade or McClellan. Someone on one of the stages had said that he and Lee had served together in the war with Mexico.\n\n\"We're so far from everything!\" she spoke suddenly, impatiently. \"We're missing so much, Matty!\"\n\n\"Yes, mum, but look about you. We are where so much is happening and where so much is about to happen. I think we are fortunate, mum, because we are among the first. If we look about us, I think we can both become rich women, and I do not mean by simply marrying some man who has it.\"\n\nShe gestured westward. \"They are finding gold and silver in the mountains, mum. There was a man stopped by the other mornin', a man with a horse and two donkeys, and he was headed west, worried about food supplies and blastin' powder, mum.\"\n\nShe twisted the water from a towel. \"I grubstaked him, mum.\"\n\n\"You did what?\"\n\n\"When you put up the money for a prospector's supplies, they call it 'grubstakin',' and if he makes a strike, a find of gold or silver, that is, then you share in it.\"\n\n\"How much of a share?\"\n\n\"One-third, mum.\" She dried her hands and took from her pocket a paper. \"He signed this, mum. If he makes a find, I get one-third of it all, forever.\"\n\n\"What if you never see him again?\"\n\n\"I'll hear it if he finds anything, and if he does na come to me with it, I will surely go to him. He's an Irishman, mum, and although the Good Lord knows there are thieves among us, too, I told him I'd go to Cork and look up his kinfolk there and tell them what a blackguard he'd become. I'd also set the law on him.\" She smiled a little. \"Or maybe Ridge Fenton or Temple Boone.\"\n\n\"How much did you give him?\"\n\n\"All I'd saved, mum, but I shall eat here, and there will be a bit of a wage comin' to me soon, and I'm going nowhere at all.\"\n\nShe took up her tub to carry to the door. \"Here he comes, mum. Temple Boone, I mean, and you'd better fix your hair a mite.\"\n\nMary gave her an exasperated look. \"I shall fix my hair, and thank you for telling me, but I am not, as you phrased it, 'settin' my cap' for Temple Boone!\"\n\n\"You could do worse, mum. He's a bit on the rough and wild side, but a true man, with it all, and mum, they are hard to come by!\"\n\nA quick look in the mirror did show a strand of loose hair here and there. She straightened it with quick, deft fingers. She was not interested in Temple Boone, but nonetheless\u2014\n\nHe paused inside the door, hat in hand, giving her a quick, approving glance, and she was glad she had straightened her hair. \"Mind if I pour myself some coffee, Mrs. Breydon? No reason for me to disturb you, I'm just sort of passin' through.\"\n\n\"Do help yourself, Mr. Boone. Did Matty tell you that the children almost ran upon Scant Luther?\"\n\n\"He's been scoutin' around, ma'am. It's about time I gave him his walkin' papers.\"\n\n\"There's no need. I still have my pistol.\"\n\nHe smiled. \"Havin' a pistol and knowin' when to use it are two different things. Use your best judgment, ma'am, but don't wait too long. Luther has no business here, and the company does not want him around. If he comes, it is because he is fixin' to cause trouble. And don't waste time reasonin' with him. He knows what the game is. Tell him to get off, and if he makes a step toward you, shoot him. It isn't as if he was a stranger. You know him and what he's like.\"\n\nBoone sat down with his coffee. \"There's talk around, ma'am. Your station is makin' a name for itself, and it is being talked of as an overnight station.\"\n\n\"But we haven't room!\"\n\n\"That's just it. They'd build on some sleepin' rooms. Add to the place.\" He sipped his coffee. \"Mean something to you, too, ma'am, because your salary would go up.\"\n\nShe had not thought of that. It would not be much, of course, but it would help.\n\n\"I suppose I must thank Mark Stacy for that.\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. You did it yourself, you and Matty and the others. Whenever you offer good food, good service, and a bright, friendly atmosphere, you will be talked about. Travelers tell each other, and about the bad places, too.\"\n\nHe refilled his cup, straddling the bench beside the table. \"I've been thinkin', ma'am. I mean I've been thinkin' about you. Now\u2014\"\n\n\"Mum? That man Jordy Neff? He's comin' down the road, and he's ridin' with two others.\"\n\nTemple Boone turned sharply to look up the road. Then he reached back and slipped the loop from the hammer of his six-shooter.\n\n\"I see him.\" Mary Breydon's expression changed. \"And he's riding my horse!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Temple Boone watched Jordy Neff dismount. His features were tight and hard. \"Mrs. Breydon,\" even the tone of his voice had changed, \"are you ready for trouble?\"\n\n\"What kind of trouble?\"\n\n\"Shooting trouble,\" he replied.\n\n\"The stage is coming in,\" she said. \"Nothing can happen until it is gone.\"\n\n\"Tell that to Neff,\" he said. \"His kind doesn't wait, and that's Williams and Mody Mercer with him.\" He turned to look at her. \"This is killing trouble. Where's Peg?\"\n\n\"She's across the road, in our house. When the stage comes in, she will come over to help.\"\n\n\"She mustn't. She's got to stay there.\" As Mary started to move, he put up a hand. \"No! Stay here! She will have to take her chances.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? Why should there be trouble?\"\n\n\"Flandrau's been wanting to be rid of you. Jordy is his pet killer, and as for Mercer, he'll stop at nothing, just nothing at all.\"\n\n\"But the stage\u2014!\"\n\nBoone turned to Matty. \"Serve them, serve the stage people, too.\"\n\nMary Breydon stood staring out of the window. \"That horse is mine!\" Suddenly she was angry. \"If they want trouble, they can have it!\"\n\n\"Mary! Mrs. Breydon, think what you're doing. The men you're lookin' at are utterly vicious. You've never seen their like!\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, I have! They raided Harlequin Oaks! They killed some of our people! They ran off our stock!\"\n\nHe stared at her. Didn't she realize there were three of them, and it was he alone against them?\n\nWhere was Ridge Fenton? Where the hell was Ridge?\n\nHe could take\u2014maybe he could take Neff, but what about the others?\n\n\"Mrs. Breydon.\" He spoke softly. \"For God's sake, don't say anything about that horse! Not now!\"\n\n\"I'll do no such\u2014!\"\n\n\"Here comes the stage,\" Matty said. She wiped her hands on her apron, smoothed down her dress. \"Ma'am? The stage is here.\"\n\nIt came around the corner at a spanking trot, swung around the half circle, and pulled up at the station. Jordy Neff and his men were just outside the door. They turned to look.\n\n\"Matty?\" Boone whispered. \"Where's the shotgun?\"\n\nShe gestured toward the bedroom door. \"Right inside my door, left-hand side.\"\n\nHe backed up toward the door, his cup of coffee in his left hand. Jordy first... he would be the quickest one, then Mercer and Williams\u2014\n\nHe was good with a gun, and he knew he was good, but three of them?\n\nAnd a perfect chance for Mary Breydon to be killed, accidentally. An innocent bystander.\n\nThey swung open the door and came in, just ahead of the passengers. Neff stared across the table at Boone. \"Well, what d'you know? Temple Boone! Look what we got here, fellas, Temple Boone!\"\n\nHe stared at Boone, smiling a little. \"You killed Longman, didn't you? He was a friend of mine.\"\n\n\"He was a thief. He had it coming.\"\n\nNeff laughed. \"Of course, he did! He killed his share, Lord knows! Men, women, maybe children, I don't know, but I set store by him. We rode together.\"\n\nThe passengers were trooping in. There were nine of them, at least four of them with the mark of the West on them. Two were strong-looking men wearing gun belts. Two others were business types, but both were armed. All four were tanned and rugged.\n\nMatty moved quickly, quietly, serving them the steaks she had prepared. They were elk meat and very good.\n\nOne of the newcomers glanced from Neff to Boone, then apparently nudged his companion. The man edged over, out of the line of fire.\n\nNeff forked a piece of the steak into his mouth, and Mary Breydon said, \"Mr. Neff, you are riding a stolen horse!\"\n\nHis mouth was full; he was chewing, and he had another piece of meat on his fork, halfway to his mouth. Caught in midmovement, he stared; an ugly glint came into his eyes and passed.\n\nHe put down his fork slowly, chewed and swallowed. \"Ma'am, you bein' a woman\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Neff, I said you are riding a stolen horse. The horse belongs to me. He was stolen in a guerrilla raid on my plantation at Harlequin Oaks.\"\n\nNeff's face was a shade more pale. He glanced briefly at the men across from him. \"There's a lot of horses, ma'am. It's easy to make a mistake, y' know. I\u2014\"\n\n\"This is no mistake, Mr. Neff. That horse was stolen, and he belongs to me.\" She reached into her pocket. \"I had been planning to put these papers in the hands of the sheriff, but as long as you have brought the horse here, there may be no need of that.\n\n\"These papers,\" she added, \"are the pedigree papers for the horse you have been riding. The horse belongs to me!\"\n\nJordy Neff's face slowly began to flush. All eyes were on him. Who did this woman think she was, anyway? Callin' him like this in front of everybody? \"You're makin' a mistake, lady,\" he said. \"That there horse is mine.\"\n\n\"Sir?\" She spoke to one of the men at the table. \"I dislike to disturb your lunch, but would you step out there and look under that horse's mane? Look high up and you will find a C branded there.\"\n\n\"My father's name and mine before I was married was Claybourne. That horse was raised on Harlequin Oaks. She was a pet of mine.\"\n\n\"Ma'am? Are you accusin' me?\"\n\n\"I am not. I am simply saying you are riding a horse that was stolen from me and for which I have the papers. Do you have a bill of sale, Mr. Neff?\"\n\nHis face flushed a deeper red. He was fairly trapped and had no idea what to do. If he drew a gun here, somebody was going to get killed, and he had a feeling that maybe these strangers might take a hand.\n\nMody and Williams were there, but\u2014\n\nWilliams slowly, carefully pushed back his corner of the bench and stood up. \"I am going to pay you, ma'am. Is it two bits?\"\n\nHe spoke carefully to be sure they heard him before he started to put his hand in his pocket. He took out some coins, placed the proper coin on the table, and took a slow step back, then walked quietly toward the door, followed by Mercer, who also paid.\n\nThe man came in from outside. \"The C is there, ma'am. Looks to me like the horse is yours.\"\n\n\"I have the papers here,\" she said, \"and the description of the horse.\"\n\nHorse stealing was a hanging offense. There was a stage driver and a hostler out there; there were several men in here\u2014he could almost feel the rope.\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am. I didn't know the horse was stole. Can I ride him back to town?\"\n\n\"No, you cannot. The horse will remain here. If you will remove your saddle and bridle, please? You may ride the stage into town.\" She paused. \"If you have the fare.\"\n\nNeff's eyes were ugly. \"If you were a man\u2014!\"\n\n\"I'm a man,\" Boone suggested mildly.\n\n\"Not in here!\" Matty had the shotgun. \"Outside with you all! Now!\"\n\nThey moved outside, and some of the passengers began to board the stage.\n\nMercer and Williams stood to one side, about ten feet apart, facing the stage station.\n\nNeff walked toward the barn, then turned sharply around, waiting.\n\nBoone was at the door, but before he could stop her, Mary was past him. \"Gentlemen? Will you board, please?\n\n\"Wilbur? When the passengers are aboard, will you take the stage out, please? At once?\" She turned. \"Mr. Neff? Unless you wish to walk, I'd suggest you get your gear and get aboard.\"\n\n\"I got business here,\" he said, watching the door.\n\nTemple Boone spoke quietly from within the door. \"Ma'am? Don't you see? It's you they want to kill.\"\n\nFor an instant, she stood still. Of course, how could she have been such a fool? Yet how could she now get inside? If she made such a move, would they not kill her at once? The stage started to move.\n\n\"Take them out, Wilbur!\" she said. \"Now!\"\n\nThe stage rolled; dust arose and settled. They could hear it rattling off down the road, the sound slowly receding.\n\nShe stood alone in the bare trail before the stage station, and there were three men whose intention it was that she die.\n\nShe stood very still, head held high, trying to think of a way out. What should she do now?\n\nWalk to the door? Walk toward them? Softly, the voice from the doorway said, \"When I step out, you hit the dirt. Hit it hard, ma'am. It will be your only chance!\"\n\nMatty moved to a window. \"Mr. Boone, I have the shotgun. I will take Mr. Williams.\"\n\nBoone waited, running his tongue over his lips. From where he stood, he could not see Jordy Neff, but he knew where he stood. The advantage was Neff's. The instant Boone's body showed, Neff would fire.\n\nAll right, he told himself. You may have to take one, but kill him! Don't leave these women alone with him. Whatever happens, kill him!\n\nAnother voice suddenly came from the barn. \"All right, Matty, you take Williams. I got Mercer. I got him right in the sights o' this ol' buffler gun!\"\n\nAt that moment, another voice, a strange voice, broke in. \"We three. We kill.\"\n\nThree rifle barrels appeared from the corral bars.\n\nJordy Neff, poised to go for his gun, held his hand. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow. Slowly, very carefully, he lowered his hand. \"Get your horse, Mercer,\" he said after a moment. \"You've got the biggest horse. I'll have to double up with you.\"\n\nMercer crossed the yard, untied both horses, and led them out into the road. Williams mounted up, his features showing the shock.\n\nMercer hesitated, then mounted, and then Jordy Neff swung up behind him. The horse sidestepped at the unusual load, obviously unhappy with it, but they started off.\n\nNeff turned. \"I'll be around, Boone! You can expect me!\"\n\nWhen they were gone, Mary walked into the house and sat down. \"Thank you, Mr. Boone. Thank you, very much!\"\n\nMatty went to the door, shading her eyes. \"Who were the others?\" she demanded. \"Who\u2014?\"\n\nThree Indians rode out from behind the corral, drawing up at the door.\n\n\"You? Oh, thank you!\"\n\nTheir faces were solemn. \"Not for you,\" one said. \"For the papooses!\"\n\nAnd they rode away, laughing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"I d'clare, woman,\" Ridge Fenton said, \"livin' around you is like livin' next to a battleground. I'm an old man, ma'am. I ain't up to all this excitement. I figured I was in for a quiet, peaceful time when I come here. I aimed to settle down, calm my nerves, kind of ease into old age, sort of.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Fenton. When I heard your voice, I knew one man would be taken out of the fight.\"\n\n\"Mebbe. I don't miss very often. Not at that range and with a buffalo gun. I'd have cut him loose from his pockets, b'lieve me.\"\n\n\"It isn't over,\" Boone said. \"I think I should ride into town. It's me an' Jordy Neff now.\"\n\n\"Please... leave him alone.\"\n\nTemple Boone turned toward Mary. \"I do not have much choice, ma'am. This is my country. I live here. I shall always live here. I do not want trouble, but there are some kinds of trouble that cannot be avoided.\n\n\"From now on, wherever I go, there is a chance he will be there, waiting. It is better to get it over with, once and for all.\"\n\n\"Makes sense, ma'am. Of course,'twas me, now, I'd set up on a ridge somewhere and wait for him. He opened the ball, ma'am. He stated it clear that he meant to kill Boone, so as far as Boone is concerned, it's open season on Neff. He laid it down, implied he'd shoot on sight, and when you do that, all the rules are off. You shoot 'em whenever an' however you can. On'y Boone won't do that. He'll go down there to face him fair an' square. That's a good way to get hisself kilt.\"\n\nStages came, and stages left. It was an endless round of meals, stages, passengers of all sorts and kinds. Actors, prospectors, gamblers, miners, hunters, newspapermen, homemakers and shady ladies, whiskey peddlers and weapons' salesmen, Indian agents, drummers, men and women from all over the world, of every sort and nationality.\n\nThe work fell into patterns that made it easier, though never easy. In a time and place when women were scarce, they averaged a proposal every three days, the proposals coming from old men and young men, from established mining, ranching, or business men, from drifting cowhands, prospectors, and every variety of male creature afloat.\n\n\"An' some of them mean it,\" Matty said, \"but there be some who are only talkin' an' would be frightened to their death if you said 'yes' to them! But 'tis a lonely time for folks out here and no pleasure in returnin' to an empty house to hear naught but the echo of your own voice!\n\n\"Here, with us,'tis different, for we're a family-like, and we've each other to share with. A family is a place where a body can share the no-account things, can talk of the little matters important only to ourselves, where we can laugh and cry and tell of the day-by-day happenings and then forget them.\" Matty took off her apron. \"So now I'll be settin' by with a warm cup for myself and to chat a bit.\"\n\nMary Breydon went outside, standing for a moment in the warm sunlight. Suddenly, all this was very familiar, very real.\n\nWas it here, then, that she would make her home? Was Virginia no longer to be a part of her life? Here she was doing something important. She was a part of the westward movement. In her own small way, she was helping to build America, helping to make so many dreams come true.\n\nBefore the war, she knew of this only as a vague place called the West. It was where people went and where so few returned. The East she knew was a place of established families, businesses that had been in operation for many years, children whose great-grandparents had been young together, and it had been a good world in so many ways, a safe world.\n\nThat was not true here. Everything was new; everything was building. It was rough, hard, and unpolished. The law was around but never in the way. Men were expected to handle their own difficulties, and courage was the most respected virtue, with integrity a close second. Many a man whom you might call a thief with impunity would shoot you if you called him a liar or a coward.\n\nTemple Boone came outside and stood beside her. \"It's a good country,\" he said. \"Don't be judging it too harshly. We're young yet. We're still growin' up. Where society doesn't have the organization to handle trouble, we have to handle it for ourselves.\"\n\n\"I know.\" She watched the road. The stage would be coming soon. She smiled to herself as the thought came. Was her life to be governed now by arrivals and departures?\n\n\"I understand,\" she said to Boone, \"that you are an admirer of Sir Walter Scott?\"\n\nHe glanced at her. \"I have read him, although I read badly. The people he writes of are much like us, I think, in temperament and war. My first ancestor in this country was a rebel transported from England to Barbados. I know too little of my family but tradition. That much I've been told, and even the name of the vessel. It was the John Friggat of Bristol.\"\n\nHe glanced up the road. \"Yes, I like Scott. He speaks to us, I think, and in the Carolinas where I once lived and in Georgia, he is very popular.\"\n\n\"We will be reading from him tonight if you care to stay. I've been reading to Wat and to Peg nearly every night.\"\n\n\"I shall be there if all goes well.\" He touched his hat. \"Now I have other business.\"\n\n\"Mother?\" Peg took her hand, watching him walk away. \"Do you like him?\"\n\n\"He is a good man, I think.\"\n\n\"But do you like him?\"\n\nMary smiled. \"Don't be so persistent! I am not ready to think of that yet. Your father is still too close to me, and when I think of a man, I think of him. When I remember the good things, he was always a part of them. I want to keep those memories, for they were the richest and most beautiful part of my life.\n\n\"Besides, I have much to do! I have to keep this station and make it better. I have to find a school for you and Wat and make our home better than it is. I can do this myself.\"\n\n\"I think you like Mr. Stacy.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Are you trying to find a romance for me? Mark Stacy is a good man, too, I think. He's a successful man, and I believe he is a man who will go far.\n\n\"You want to remember, Peg, just romance is not enough. You may often imagine yourself in love, but always remember you have to live with that person from day to day, in sickness and in health, as they say.\n\n\"You will want to be proud of him when you introduce him to your friends, and you want him to be comfortable with them, as you must be with his friends. One must never marry a man thinking he will change or that you will change him. If he does or you do, then he will not be the same man you married, and the less for it.\n\n\"But this is no time to think of that! And I am not even sure I know what I am talking about. Go help Matty set the table for the stage!\"\n\nWhere was Wat?\n\nShe walked across to the stable and looked inside. \"Wat?\" There was no answer.\n\nThe door of the tack room stood open. His bed was neatly made, but there was no sign of him.\n\nStepping outside, she glanced around. Ridge Fenton was sewing a piece of leather.\n\n\"Mr. Fenton? Have you seen Wat?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, not in some time. He's around somewhere. You looked in the barn?\"\n\n\"He's not there.\"\n\n\"Come to think about it, he did say something about huntin' arrowheads. Said he was all caught up on his work, and he wanted to find somethin' special for Peg.\"\n\nOf course! She should have thought of that; still it was not a place she wanted him to go. It was close enough, yet out of sight of the station.\n\nWhat was she thinking about? The boy had run free as a wild animal before he joined them. He was a tough little fellow and knew more about getting along in the wilderness than she did. Perhaps more than any of them, Ridge included.\n\nStill, she was going to read a little later, and she had not told him.\n\nShe turned up the narrow path into the trees. It was only a little way. She'd have to hurry because Temple Boone would be coming back soon.\n\nIt was very quiet. Once around the corner of the hill, if you could call it a corner, all sound of the station seemed to be cut off.\n\nShe went down through the trees. It was an open place, right down there\u2014\n\nThere was a cry from the brush. \"Ma'am! Go back! Run!\"\n\nShe stepped through the trees, and Scant Luther was standing there, feet apart, grinning at her. Nearby, tied in a bundle, was Wat.\n\n\"Figured you'd come lookin',\" he said. \"Been any of the others, I'd just a kept from sight. You, I wanted you to see me. I wanted you to see what you was up against.\"\n\n\"Mr. Luther, you are a very foolish man. If I were you, I'd leave now, while you have the chance. Mr. Boone and Mr. Fenton will be looking for me soon. I am afraid they both have rather short tempers.\"\n\n\"They do, do they?\" He chuckled without humor. \"I reckon I can handle the both of them, settin' back here like I'm gonna be. Settin' waitin' for them.\"\n\n\"I should think, Mr. Luther, that your first experience with us would have been enough. One would think that anybody of intelligence would stay away.\"\n\n\"I came to get even. I'm a gonna start with you an' this boy. I'm goin' to let you see what I do to him, an' then I'll do worse to you.\"\n\n\"Mr. Luther, will you go now? They are expecting me back at the station. I am afraid I cannot wait any longer.\"\n\nOddly, she was not frightened. She knew what she must do and that she had no choice. He was big, a hulking brute, and she hoped\u2014\n\n\"You can't wait no longer? Well, what d'you know? Miss Uppity here can't wait!\n\n\"Won't do you no good to scream. I already know that hill just cuts off any sound. You an' me, we're alone.\"\n\nDesperately, Wat struggled. He almost sat up; then he threw himself at Luther's legs.\n\nScant, with a bored look, kicked him, then kicked him again.\n\n\"Mr. Luther? One more time.\" Her face was very cold. She felt very poised, very still inside. She had expected it to be different than this, but\u2014\n\nHe started toward her, and with one easy motion she drew one of the derringers from her pocket and shot him.\n\nIt was totally unexpected. She had no weapon in sight, and Scant Luther was sure that even if she had one, she would not have the courage or the good sense to use it.\n\nThe derringer was a .44 caliber, and it had two barrels.\n\nHe was no more than fifteen feet away, and the slug staggered him. He backed up two paces. \"Why you\u2014!\"\n\nShe walked around him toward Wat. She paused, the derringer in her hand. \"Mr. Luther, I would suggest you take your wound and get somewhere right away. You are going to need help.\"\n\n\"Damn you! You\u2014!\"\n\nHer heart was pounding heavily, and she could not seem to swallow, but she held the gun steady. Luther took a step toward her.\n\n\"Mr. Luther, I have another barrel. If I must shoot you, I will.\"\n\nHe stared at her, his eyes mean and ugly; then, suddenly, his expression changed. His eyes widened; he gasped, and his skin turned an ugly gray.\n\n\"You had best go where you can get help, Mr. Luther. You're going to need it.\"\n\nHe backed away, then started through the brush in a stumbling run. Beyond, through the trees, she caught a glimpse of his horse.\n\nPutting the gun in her pocket, she knelt beside Wat and began to pluck at the knots with nervous fingers. They were very tight.\n\n\"Ma'am? There's a jackknife in my hip pocket.\"\n\nShe got it out, opened the big blade, and cut him free. When he stood up, she handed the knife back to him. \"Gee, ma'am, you sure fixed ol' Scant! I never seen the like!\"\n\n\"Let's go home, Wat. I\u2014I don't feel well.\"\n\nThey had reached the station when they met Ridge Fenton, rifle in hand, hurrying toward them. Matty was on the steps of the station.\n\n\"We heard a shot,\" Ridge said. Then he added, suddenly concerned at her appearance, \"Ma'am? Are you all right?\"\n\n\"She shot Scant Luther!\" Wat exclaimed. \"Shot him right through the brisket!\"\n\n\"You shot Scant?\" Fenton was incredulous. \"What\u2014?\"\n\n\"Please! Not now. I want to lie down. Matty\u2014!\"\n\n\"Sure, mum. You come along with me now.\" With an arm around her waist, Matty took her inside. \"You just sit down now, mum. A cup of hot tea, that's what you need. It's been a shock.\"\n\nThe cup rattled against the saucer when she took it. A swallow, then another.\n\n\"Matty, it was awful! Awful! That man\u2014he had poor Wat all tied up. He was planning to kill me. He was going to kill Wat first, and then\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't talk about it, mum. It's done. It's over an' done with.\" Matty added tea to her cup. \"Mum? There's another thing to think about.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"You did it, mum. You met him face to face, and when you had to defend yourself, you did it. You stood right on your own two feet and looked him right in the eye, and when there was no help for it, you shot him.\n\n\"It is not easy for a woman to be alone, mum, but you did what had to be done. Nothing can take that away from you, and believe me, nobody is goin' to feel sorry that you shot Scant Luther.\"\n\nShe shuddered. \"I think\u2014I'm going to lie down, Matty. I hate to leave you with everything to be done, but I'm afraid I\u2014\"\n\n\"You just go lie down. Peg an' me, we'll handle it. Won't we, Peg?\"\n\n\"Yes, we will.\" She ran for the sideboard. \"I'll set the table.\"\n\nWith Matty beside her, she crossed to the house and lay down on the bed. Matty returned to the station, and she lay for a long time, staring up at the ceiling.\n\nShe had shot a man.\n\nIt was unbelievable. She\u2014Mary Claybourne, Mary Breydon, had actually shot a man with a pistol.\n\nIt was long after dark when she awakened. She lay still for a minute, listening. Lights were on in the station, and several horses were tied at the corral.\n\nLighting a match, she lifted the chimney from the lamp and touched the match to the wick. When it caught, she replaced the chimney and looked at herself in the mirror.\n\nShe looked a sight, and there were people at the station. Suddenly, she remembered.\n\nShe had not reloaded the empty barrel after the gun was fired. Her father had taught her that, and she had heard Temple Boone mention it, also. She got a cartridge and reloaded the gun, glad the derringer was so easily loaded. Her larger gun was cap and ball and took more time. Some of the older men did not like what they called the \"newfangled\" guns.\n\nShe crossed the street to the station.\n\nMark Stacy was sitting at the table when she entered. With him was Preston Collier. Both men got to their feet promptly.\n\nTemple Boone was there, also, tall, lean, and quiet; his eyes searched her face.\n\n\"Mrs. Breydon!\" Stacy said. \"We've been told what happened! Please join us. We've been worried about you, very worried.\"\n\n\"Why? It is all over now.\"\n\n\"We just wish it were,\" Collier said, \"but we've had word there's trouble coming, serious trouble.\"\n\nShe smiled suddenly. \"We've had trouble here, Mr. Collier, and we've handled it. Whatever is coming, we can handle that, too!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "\"Mrs. Breydon, Temple Boone has assured us you are not easily frightened, so we are going to place the matter before you.\"\n\n\"This is Monday. On Saturday next, there will be a stage leaving Denver carrying at least six men. Four of these men have already paid their fares and are completing their business before starting for Laramie.\"\n\n\"We know, and others know as well, that these men will be carrying rather large sums of money. These men will ride a special stage accompanying the usual run. They are en route to California.\"\n\n\"We also have learned that Denver Cross is aware of this and plans to rob both stages, and if our information is correct, he plans to do it here.\"\n\n\"It seems,\" Collier added, \"that he intends to take care of some unfinished business here at the same time.\"\n\n\"How many men will he have? Denver Cross, I mean?\"\n\n\"We understand there will be six men involved, and we will be prepared for them.\"\n\n\"I think he will have more than that,\" Mary Breydon said. \"I think he will have twice that many.\"\n\nCollier smiled, shaking his head. \"We know who the men are. We also know that is all he has. We know Mercer will be there, and Williams, of course. Neff is believed to be one of them\u2014\"\n\n\"He won't be there,\" Temple Boone said.\n\nThey glanced up at him. \"He won't be able to make it,\" Boone said.\n\n\"Nevertheless,\" Collier persisted, \"we understand there will be six men.\" He glanced over at Mary. \"I am involved because two of the men traveling west are business associates of mine who are also friends. I want nothing to happen to them.\"\n\n\"I want nothing to happen to anyone at my station,\" Mary said.\n\n\"Of course,\" Collier agreed. \"The point is that we expect to have a reception committee awaiting the outlaws, and we would like you and your family to be in Laporte.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"No,\" Mary said. \"This is my station, and it is my responsibility. I will not be away when there is to be trouble.\"\n\n\"We want no harm to come to you, nor your daughter.\"\n\n\"Neither do I, but my place is here. Also, as you must realize, the outlaws would know we were gone and would immediately suspect something was wrong.\n\n\"No, gentlemen, our place is here, and this is where we will be. There may be injuries. The passengers will certainly wish to be fed. Now unless I am mistaken, the outlaws will have one or more men inside the station before the trouble begins.\"\n\n\"That's good thinking, Mrs. Breydon.\" Mark Stacy turned to Collier. \"Of course, she's right. They will have a couple of riders, men strange to Mrs. Breydon, probably, or at least men who will keep her attention on them, waiting here in the station.\"\n\nTemple Boone straddled a chair. \"Look,\" he suggested. \"How are they going to do it? Come charging in here a-horseback, alerting everybody that something is about to happen?\n\n\"I think Mrs. Breydon is right. Suppose they have two men eating in here, innocent as babes. Another man could be getting Ridge Fenton to fix a horseshoe for him or some other little chore.\n\n\"They'll know all about Ridge. He always talks peace and is readier for a fight than any man I know. They'll want one or two men there to put him out of action.\n\n\"A couple of others might come shagging down the pike and ride over to the corral just before the stage comes in. They'd have Ridge out of action, they'd have Mrs. Breydon and Matty Maginnis locked up, and they could open fire on the stage from three directions.\"\n\n\"Open fire?\" Collier exclaimed. \"This is to be a holdup. Why should they open fire?\"\n\n\"Mr. Boone is right,\" Mary said. \"We know who some of these men are. They are former guerrillas, and they kill the weak and helpless as well as others. They will want no witnesses left alive to testify against them or to identify them.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Breydon,\" Collier said, \"I am going to insist that you be away from here. You could go to my ranch. You'd be safe there\u2014\"\n\n\"No, Mr. Collier. A year ago, I might have done just that, but a lot has happened this past year, both before I came here and since. I will be here, where I should be.\"\n\nMark Stacy interrupted. \"Mrs. Breydon? You can be here if you wish, although the stage company certainly does not expect it of you, but if you are to be here, promise me that you'll all get into Matty's room with the door locked the minute that stage rolls into the yard.\n\n\"You see,\" he said, \"that stage will be loaded with deputies, heavily armed, waiting for trouble. That stage is strongly built, and my men will all have shotguns.\"\n\n\"They'll be watching the stage when the passengers get aboard in Laporte,\" Boone said.\n\nCollier smiled. \"Of course. But the passengers they encounter will be a different group of men. Don't worry, Boone. They'll be surprised. We'll get the lot of them.\"\n\nTuesday passed quietly, and Wednesday, yet Mary could feel the tension building within her. Had she been foolish? How could she dare risk the lives of Peg and Wat? Or of Matty? Or even to allow the children to see such a thing or be close to it. No matter what took place, men would be killed or injured, and with all that shooting going on, there was no telling who might be killed.\n\n\"Matty,\" she said when they were alone, \"I am frightened.\"\n\n\"I know, mum. I feel just the same. 'Tis a power of wickedness there is in the world, and too bad that the likes of you an' me must suffer for it. You could go, mum. I'd stay.\n\n\"I'm not suggestin' you're afraid, but it's just that my life has been rougher than yours. I'm used to it now. I'd not want you or Peg to see what will happen.\"\n\n\"No, Matty. This is where I belong. If a man was station agent here, wouldn't he be expected to stay?\"\n\nOn Thursday, the people on the stage were a friendly lot, laughing and gay. They were part of a traveling show that was to perform in Denver.\n\n\"You've the best food on the line, miss,\" the show's manager said. \"I wish we could stay over.\"\n\n\"We've been told there will be sleeping quarters here next year,\" she said.\n\n\"Good! I'll vote for it if you're still here to do the cooking.\" He glanced at Matty. \"Or is it you?\"\n\n\" 'Tis the both of us,\" Matty said. \"If we should come into Denver, could we see the show?\"\n\n\"I'll seat you myself!\" he said gallantly.\n\nTemple Boone stopped by late on Friday. He took a cup and filled it, then said, \"We can't persuade you?\"\n\n\"No,\" she said.\n\nWat had been dunking a doughnut. He looked up and started to speak, but Matty interrupted.\n\n\"You said that Jordy Neff would not be one of them. How could you know such a thing?\"\n\nBoone sipped his coffee. \"Jordy ain't the brightest one around, but he's cunning, like an animal. He's not going to get into any situation somebody else sets up. He'll be in Laporte in plain sight. You mark my words. He's like a coyote, wary of traps.\"\n\n\"It ain't gonna work nohow,\" Wat said. \"That Mr. Collier, he doesn't know that bunch.\"\n\nMary was suddenly all attention, and so was Boone. There was something in the way he spoke\u2014\n\n\"Why do you say that, Wat?\" she asked.\n\n\"Why, those fellers! They been doin' this for years! D'you suppose they ain't seen Collier talkin' to Stacy? An' to those others? Sure, they know something's gone haywire. They got men in that lot that can smell trouble as far as Jordy Neff.\n\n\"Don't you suppose they've got it all figured out? And six men? That ain't the way Denver Cross works, nor his boss, either. There'll be twenty men, maybe more.\"\n\n\"Twenty? But Mr. Collier said there would be but six\u2014\"\n\n\"Where d'you suppose he heard that? Who d'you suppose tipped them off in the first place?\"\n\n\"Wat? What do you know about this?\" Mary asked.\n\n\"When you all were talkin' the other night, I listened,\" he said. \"I know I wasn't s'posed to, but I done it.\n\n\"When Mr. Collier rode up here with Mark Stacy, I knowed somethin' was in the wind. I just set there wonderin' how growed-up men could be so foolish. They got a tip. I can just bet who supplied that tip! I also could make a good bet where they got the idea he'd only six men. I know there's at least twenty, maybe more.\"\n\n\"How could you know that?\" Mary asked.\n\n\"You all kep' askin' where I come from. I lived over yonder near Bonnar Springs. Them outlaws was usin' my pa's ranch for a hideout. I seen all those men layin' about up there, gamblin', killin' time, waitin' until somebody decides it's a proper time to use them.\n\n\"Some of them moved in a good while back. Then a lot come in a bunch just about the time that Flandrau killed your man.\n\n\"Those fellers know what they are doin'. They been through all this many a time. I've heard 'em talk. Just about everything's been tried on 'em before this, so they know what to expect.\n\n\"They are bloody, ma'am. They don't care how many they kill. Look what happened back to Lawrenceville.\n\n\"I like ol' Wilbur, an' he'll be a settin' up there in plain sight, one of the first to get shot. They'll kill 'em all, and your Mr. Collier along with it.\"\n\n\"Wat, how can you be sure?\"\n\nHe glanced around at her. \"Ma'am, I heard 'em talk. They paid me no mind. I was just a no-account youngster hangin' around. It wasn't until after I left there that some of them began to worry for fear I heard too much.\"\n\n\"What will they do, Wat?\"\n\n\"I been studyin' about that, ma'am, but I surely don't know. Only I know they'll do what is least expected. Like killin' Mr. Collier. He doesn't expect that, an' neither do you, but I'll bet they been studyin' how they can do that an' let it be accidental-like. Sort of an innocent bystander.\"\n\n\"Why should they want to kill him?\"\n\n\"If Flandrau still calculates on running for office,\" Boone said, \"Collier would oppose him, and Collier has a lot of power.\"\n\n\"But what will they do? If Wat is right\u2014\"\n\n\"We've got to believe he is. Look, the boy hung around up there for at least a year, maybe longer, just listening to them talk, plan, and connive. Or listening to them talk about what they'd done or how they would do it. He knows a lot more about what they think than either one of us.\"\n\nYet when she turned down the lamp and blew it out, she was no closer to a solution.\n\nShe stood for a moment looking out on the gray area where the stage would stop. What would they do? What could they do?\n\nLying on her back in bed, with Peg sleeping on the cot nearby, she stared up into the darkness. What would they do? What could they do?\n\nShe tried to remember the long talks her father had with various army officers who stopped at the Oaks, when they had talked about surprises, about tactics, about the battles of the Revolution. Couldn't there be a clue in some of that?\n\nWhat were the dangers they must face? If the stage was to be robbed here and the men killed, what was there the outlaws must fear?\n\nSurprise would be in their favor, yet if Wat was right and they had deliberately allowed Stacy or Collier to be tipped off on the robbery, the surprise was lost. So why the tip-off?\n\nTo mislead Stacy and Collier. Mislead them how? If they were warned of the attack\u2014?\n\nShe sat up suddenly. To mislead them as to where the attack was to take place!\n\nBut where, then? If not here, where?\n\nAlong the trail? But if Wat was right and they planned on killing Preston Collier, how could they do that? He would not be on the trail, and he would not be on the stage. The chances were that he would be at the ranch.\n\nOf course!\n\nIt was almost daylight. Rising quickly, careful not to awaken Peg, she began to dress. As she dressed, her thoughts returned to their immediate problem.\n\nWhat were the risks the outlaws would take? What must they guard against if their plan was to succeed?\n\nAn attack on Collier's ranch would be a complete surprise unless she could warn them in time. But they would be depending on surprise, and the attack would be totally unexpected.\n\nCertainly, they would see the men they wanted board the stage. They had arranged to have Collier and Stacy warned against an attack. Of course, the attack would not be on the trail. That would not account for Collier, and there would be too much chance in that wide open country of being seen.\n\nThe stage then would stop at Collier's. The travelers would dismount to be entertained, and some deputies or something of the kind would board the stage and pull out. The attack would come then, the attack and the robbery, not only of the stage passengers but of Collier's ranch home.\n\nAnd then they would come here. As no attack had developed, the deputies would be off guard.\n\nWhat risk remained that the outlaws must guard against? The answer was all too simple.\n\nRidge Fenton and Temple Boone!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "When she walked into the station, she began at once to prepare breakfast. As she worked, she was thinking, realizing what she must do and that so little time remained.\n\nStepping to the door, she saw Ridge Fenton approaching the station.\n\n\"Mr. Fenton? Will you do me a favor? Saddle Nimrod, the horse I recovered from Jordy Neff. Saddle him and bring him to the door.\"\n\nHe merely glanced at her, then turned and walked back to the barn. By the time she had the coffee ready, Fenton was back, and Temple Boone was with him.\n\n\"Mr. Boone? I have been thinking about things, and I believe there will be an attempt to kill you and probably Mr. Fenton before the stage comes in.\"\n\nBoone nodded. \"I been thinkin' the same thing. What's the horse for?\"\n\n\"I'm riding over to Collier's. I had time to think last night, and I believe they will hit there first. I believe, as Wat does, that they tipped Mark Stacy and Preston Collier purposely, guessing what his reaction would be.\"\n\n\"They couldn't count on what he'd do, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Yes, they could. They would decide he would either do what he has done or try to surround the stage with guards. I am sure they have planned for that, too.\"\n\n\"He's got soldiers, ma'am. They came through here after midnight, headed for the Collier place. I talked with 'em. Their sergeant asked to be remembered to you, ma'am. His name was Barry Owen.\"\n\n\"Good! He knows some of these men by sight. And he knows Flandrau.\"\n\n\"He's got seven men with him. Veterans, he said, mostly from the Indian wars. They sized up like a tough bunch.\"\n\nShe took off her apron.\n\n\"Please, ma'am? Better let me go.\"\n\n\"You? I need you here. You and Mr. Fenton. Without you, there'd be nobody.\"\n\n\"Wat could ride over there.\"\n\n\"Yes, he could, but I am not sure they would believe him, and they must! They must believe!\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, ma'am. You can't go now. Here comes Jordy Neff!\" Boone studied the hillside, the area around the blacksmith shop, the corrals.\n\n\"Ridge, I'm going out to meet him. He wants me himself, but I'm betting there's somebody else hid out around. I'll trust you to take care of him.\"\n\n\"I can't see through brush! What d'you think I am?\"\n\n\"A damned good man, and a canny one. If there's anybody out there, he's yours.\"\n\nJordy Neff was tying his horse to the corral; then he started toward the station. Temple Boone did not wait but stepped out quickly. \"Jordy! You lookin' for me?\"\n\nMary Breydon had heard of gunfights, but she had never actually seen one, and she scarcely saw this.\n\nNeff was startled. He had expected to get closer, had expected to surprise Boone, had planned the words he was going to say. It was a story he planned to tell, and he wanted it to sound right. He wanted it to be dramatic. He was going to call Boone and\u2014\n\nHe had demanded this job, insisted on it. He wanted to kill Boone and wanted the name of having killed him. He was thinking of that as he started toward the station, thinking of that when he should have been concentrating on Boone.\n\nHe started to reply, started reaching for those fancy words when he should have been reaching for his gun.\n\nAutomatically, his hand did drop; he gripped the butt, and then something slammed him in the chest. The blow staggered him. His gun came up hip high, arm extended, hammer back and sliding off his thumb.\n\nThe second bullet caught him on the inside of his elbow, glancing off into his side. His own bullet, deflected, went into the dust.\n\nNeff did a border switch, catching the gun deftly with his left hand as another gun boomed in the background. His mind worked with complete clarity now. He knew he had been hit twice, and the last one had broken his elbow. As he caught the gun in his left hand, he fired, saw Boone twitch, and eared back the hammer.\n\nTwo bullets, so closely fired they sounded with one report, hit Neff in the chest, and he fell, dropping his gun.\n\nHe rolled over, trying to rise, groping for a gun that lay just out of reach. His arm gave way under him, and he rolled over on his back, staring up at the sky.\n\nHe'd better not lie here. It was getting dark, and it was going to rain. What was he doing? Lying out in the dirt like this? A big drop hit him in the face; then several others fell into his eyes, but they were wide open, staring up at the sky, and they did not blink.\n\nMary Breydon clutched the windowsill where she stood, staring, her heart pounding. Yet\u2014it was over, all over. How long had it been? A minute? Two minutes?\n\nTemple Boone had done this. He had killed this man, yet the man had come to kill him. She must remember that. And the man who lay dead out there had been one of those who destroyed her home in Virginia. He had stolen her horse, and a man allied to him had killed her husband.\n\n\"I must go,\" she said. \"I must go or I will be too late.\"\n\nShe turned to Matty. \"Don't let Peg see him. Please don't.\"\n\nRidge Fenton was at the door. \"Don't worry, we'll have him out of sight in no time. Won't do to have him lyin' there when those others come in with the stage.\"\n\nHe looked at her again. \"Are you comin' back, ma'am? I mean, after you tell them?\"\n\n\"If I can, Mr. Fenton, if I can.\"\n\nShe had forgotten how good a horse Nimrod was, and even after so long a time, he seemed to recognize his name and even her.\n\nAs she left the station, Wat came out to her. \"Ma'am, there's a trail through the woods. They won't see you if you take it, and it's quicker. Cut the time by maybe fifteen minutes!\"\n\nShe was gone, making the turn into the brush at the point mentioned. Actually, what Wat called a woods was merely a few scattered trees and some patches of brush along some low ground where there had once been a stream. Yet the old trail was good, and Nimrod fancied it. She started off at a good pace and kept the horse to it. One thing she was thankful for. Jordy Neff had known a good horse and had cared for it.\n\nShe left her horse tethered behind the house and came in through the garden. The first person she met was Regina, who was coming down a stairway from the rooms above.\n\n\"You! What in the world\u2014!\"\n\n\"Where is your father? I must see him at once!\"\n\nMutely, Regina pointed toward the library and stepped aside.\n\nMark Stacy, Preston Collier, and Sgt. Barry Owen were there. Swiftly and as concisely as she could, she explained the situation.\n\n\"You mean to tell me you believe they will attack here?\" Collier inquired skeptically.\n\n\"It's like them, sir,\" Owen said. \"Mrs. Breydon knows them, sir, as I do. They're a bad lot.\"\n\nThe stage rolled in, and the passengers dismounted. Quickly, four of the soldiers got in. \"The rest of you wait here. We'll go down around the bend, drop into that fold in the hills, and then we'll get out and come back. Maybe we can settle it all right here.\"\n\nInside the house, Preston Collier opened his gun cases. He had his own assortment of weapons, hunting rifles, and shotguns. He doled them out, passing cartridges to each one. \"Take them alive if we can, but only if we can!\"\n\nThe stage was scarcely out of sight before three men appeared on the trail, walking their horses. Two more showed at the edge of the park to the east of the house. Then two more riders. The first three continued on along the road until past the house, then turned and trotted their horses forward. The other two turned off abruptly, rode up to the gate, and the two dismounted and came up to the door and knocked.\n\nNow several other riders appeared in view.\n\nPreston Collier opened the door wide, and the two men had guns in their hands. They stared into the muzzles of four double-barreled shotguns. \"You'd better drop those guns,\" Mark Stacy advised.\n\nNobody but a fool would have taken the chance, and these men were not fools.\n\n\"Now just come on in very quietly. Leave the door open for the others. We mustn't appear inhospitable.\"\n\nThe next three came in with a rush to face the same battery of shotguns. Without hesitation, they surrendered.\n\nDenver Cross reined in before the house. It was quiet, too quiet. There were women in there, and if he knew his men, they should be screaming by now. He started toward the house, then drew up. A dozen more of his men were coming along the road.\n\n\"Mercer, I think everything's under control. Ride over there and see but don't waste any time. We've got to get along after that stagecoach.\"\n\nMercer glanced at Cross, then shrugged. Why didn't he go himself? He'd always wanted to be in at the start. He rode his horse to the steps and called out. All was quiet, so quiet he was suddenly scared. He started to turn his horse when he saw Owen beside the door, just out of sight of anybody but him.\n\n\"Get down and come in, man. Come quietly!\"\n\n\"Like hell!\" Mercer swung his horse and went for his gun at the same moment and caught two well-aimed rifle bullets before his draw was completed. He fell; his foot hung briefly in the stirrup, then fell free. His horse trotted off.\n\nDenver Cross swore and slapped the spurs to his horse, yelling to his men.\n\nA volley from the house emptied three saddles, and then Cross was away and running. Rounding a bend, he all but charged into the stage, and Wilbur Pattishal, kneeling atop the stage, gave him a charge of buckshot.\n\n\"Neat!\" Collier said. \"Very neat, indeed, thanks to Mrs. Breydon.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "An hour had passed; the soldiers under Sergeant Owen had taken the prisoners away. Mercer and two other men had been buried on the far side of the hill. Cross was still alive, although in a bad way.\n\n\"We won't be able to connect Flandrau with any of it, I'm afraid,\" Stacy said, \"unless one of the prisoners will talk.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure,\" Collier said. \"With the testimony of both Mrs. Breydon and Sergeant Owen as to the previous connection of Flandrau with the outlaws, we may be able to tie him to what happened here.\" He took out a cigar. \"Mrs. Breydon? Do you mind?\" He struck a match. \"That man who was riding your horse, Mrs. Breydon? If we could get him to talk? Most men will talk to avoid hanging.\"\n\n\"I am afraid he has already avoided it, Mr. Collier. Part of this action was to remove Temple Boone from the scene at Cherokee Station. Jordy Neff attempted it and failed.\"\n\n\"Boone killed him?\" Stacy commented. \"I am not surprised. Boone is a dangerous man.\"\n\n\"And a gentleman,\" Mary said.\n\nShe got to her feet. \"I must ride back to the station. They will be worried.\"\n\nCollier arose. \"It is good to have you for a neighbor, Mrs. Breydon. Please do not become a stranger.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nMark Stacy got up. \"The stage is gone, but if I could borrow a horse, Collier, I'd ride along with Mrs. Breydon. We've some business to discuss.\"\n\nHe took up the rifle with which he had been armed. \"We're making a stopover of Cherokee Station. It isn't officially a home station, but the atmosphere is so congenial that our passengers are beginning to insist on it.\"\n\nSitting her saddle, she waited for Mark Stacy to join her. The brief spatter of rain had ended, and the clouds were breaking up.\n\nStacy rode around the corner of the house, and together they started back along the main trail. The air was clear and fresh, and it was a pleasure to be riding. It was almost like old times.\n\n\"You've done a fine job, Mrs. Breydon,\" Stacy said. \"Frankly, I had my doubts. I'd heard of women operating stations in California but never really believed it possible. And you\u2014you're scarcely the type.\"\n\n\"What is the type, Mr. Stacy?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"You've got me there. Only\u2014well, you're a lady.\"\n\n\"I hope so.\" She smiled again. \"I have never found it a handicap.\"\n\n\"This\"\u2014he gestured toward the station that was just coming within sight, although still some distance off\u2014\"will soon be a thing of the past. They'll be building a railroad west as soon as the war is over. Stage lines will only be feeder lines for a while.\"\n\n\"How long, do you think? I mean before they complete a railroad this far?\"\n\n\"Three years, perhaps four. Ben Holladay is already thinking of it, and so am I. I've become involved, in fact. That is where the future is, Mrs. Breydon.\"\n\nThey rode on in silence. \"And you, Mrs. Breydon? What are your plans?\"\n\n\"For the moment, to operate Cherokee Station as best I can. When the war is over, we may go back to Virginia. I have property there.\"\n\n\"Some of us would like to keep you here,\" Stacy said. \"This is a new country. We need people of vision, both men and women. And\u2014well, we need you.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I am not going to think of that now. I've Peg to think of, and Wat. He's become a member of the family. For a while, I am going to live day by day.\" From the crest of a low hill, she could see the sunlight on Peg's hair as she stood outside the station. \"Later, after I've become adjusted, I may think of other things.\"\n\n\"When do you, I hope you will think of me.\"\n\n\"Of course, Mr. Stacy. How could I help it?\"\n\n\"Well,\" he said irritably, \"there's Temple Boone.\"\n\n\"Yes, there is, isn't there? As Matty says, he's a fine figure of a man!\"\n\nMatty was on the step drying her hands on her apron. Temple Boone and Ridge Fenton were walking in from the barn, and Wat was shading his eyes toward them.\n\nThey were all there, at Cherokee Station, and it was good to be coming home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Several hours later and fifty miles away, Jason Flandrau was heading southeast, avoiding the trails. The money belt around his waist was heavy, as were his saddlebags. He had played out his hand in Colorado, but New Mexico lay to the south, and there was new country to the west of it. It was a wise man who knew when to fold his cards and toss in his hand. Down there or in California, he could deal them his own way, in his own time.\n\nHe had been in his office, about to close the window, when he heard them talking in the street. Denver Cross was dead, most of his gang wiped out, but they had some prisoners who, in fear of a hangman's noose, were telling all they knew.\n\nThirty minutes later, he was in the saddle and finding his way out of town through the back streets.\n\nNow, miles away and safe, he smiled smugly. So much the better! There had been no need to divide the money he had promised, and he could afford to take his time and look around. What he had almost done in Colorado, he could do elsewhere. He rode around the base of a low hill and down to the small creek among the trees. He would water his horse and take a breather.\n\nThe Comanche war party was in an irritable mood. They had ridden more than a hundred miles without taking a scalp.\n\nThey were stopped by the stream when they heard the sound of a horse's hoofs. The rider was approaching at an easy gait.\n\nThey were standing in a half circle with arrows in position and bows bent when the rider came through the trees. He drew up sharply.\n\nThere were twelve of them, the first Comanche war party he had ever seen and the last he would ever see. He went for his gun, but the bulging money belt impeded his draw. The Comanches had no such problem.\n\nHe was still partly alive when a warrior stooped over him with a scalping knife.\n\nSomebody, he thought, had dealt him a black deuce." + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "", + "author": "Johanna Lindsey", + "genres": [ + "Callahan-Warren 2" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "\"Thought you'd left the territory, Mr. Grant.\"\n\nDegan looked down at Sheriff Ross, smiling up at him. He leaned forward to soothe his horse before it reared up. The palomino didn't like strangers standing so close to it. Gunshots it didn't mind, strangers it did.\n\n\"I'm leaving today. Just making sure no shots get fired in the church.\"\n\n\"Don't need to worry 'bout that. The feud ended last week, soon as the happy couple agreed to get hitched. So you're coming to the wedding?\"\n\nDegan looked at the church at the end of the street. The two families getting joined today, the Callahans and the Warrens, were already inside it. People from town were still heading toward it to witness the happy event\u2014and steering clear of Degan, who was sitting on his horse in the middle of the street. As much as he might like to do something as normal as attend a wedding, he knew what his presence would do. And he'd already said his good-byes.\n\nSo he shook his head at the sheriff. \"No need for anyone to be nervous on a day like this.\"\n\nRoss chuckled. \"I think folks here in Nashart know you well enough by now\u2014\"\n\n\"That's the trouble. They know me.\"\n\nRoss got a little red in the face. It was odd for a sheriff to treat Degan so affably. Usually as soon as a sheriff learned who he was, the sheriff asked him to get out of his town. Ross hadn't done that, likely out of respect for Zachary Callahan, who had hired Degan to keep the peace until Zachary's son's wedding. Of course the wedding wasn't guaranteed to happen when the Warren bride had been raised in the East in the lap of luxury and was to marry Hunter Callahan, a cowboy born and bred here in Nashart, Montana, whom she'd never met. And Tiffany Warren had definitely tried to get out of the arranged marriage. At the Callahan ranch she'd even pretended to be a housekeeper so she could find a way to end the feud between the two families without sacrificing herself on the altar.\n\nDegan had liked Tiffany from the start because she reminded him of home, a home he was never going back to. But he'd guessed she wasn't really a housekeeper. She'd tried so hard not to be prim and proper, but she just couldn't help it. The elegant and sophisticated real Tiffany constantly slipped out, although she'd made him question his intuition when she'd befriended a baby pig and made him her pet. That had really thrown him off. It had tickled the hell out of Hunter, too. No wonder Hunter had fallen in love with his future wife before he knew who she really was.\n\nDegan had been hired to be a deterrent to bloodshed between the two feuding families. It had worked, his job was done. It was time to move on. But the sheriff was getting that same look on his face he'd had a few days ago when he'd gotten up the nerve to ask Degan to temporarily take over his job while he went back East to find a wife. Weddings in town seemed to have that effect on single men, made men who had been looking for a wife want one even more. And unattached young women were hard to come by in the West.\n\nDegan had declined the sheriff's offer, and now he stopped Ross from making it again, remarking, \"If I ever became a sheriff, it would have to be where no one knows me.\"\n\n\"But it's your name that will keep trouble away,\" Ross insisted.\n\n\"No, it's my name that will bring trouble. You know that for a fact, Sheriff. Until gunslingers are a dying breed, there will always be fast guns wanting to prove they're faster than me. Now go on or you'll miss the ceremony. I'm just waiting to see the bride and groom leave the church before I ride out.\"\n\n\"Well, you'll always have a home here if you want it, Degan Grant. And my job if you want that, too!\"\n\nDegan almost smiled as the sheriff moved off. He'd never had a hankering to settle in one place until he'd come to Nashart. Of course he wasn't usually in one place this long, either. And he definitely wasn't used to being treated like a member of the family as the Callahans had treated him. They'd even given him a seat at their dining table and a bedroom in their house. Usually his employers wanted him as far away from their families as possible. They certainly never socialized with him. He had considered the sheriff's offer, briefly, because he did like the people around here and was going to be sorry to see the last of them. But what he'd just told the sheriff was the truth. With Nashart's mining problem settled and the two feuding families joined in marriage now, Nashart was going to be peaceful for a spell, maybe indefinitely. It wouldn't remain that way if he stayed.\n\nMany people thought the term peacemaker was a misnomer for a man who could draw a gun faster than anyone else. Yet once drawn, a gun was a powerful motivator. It could keep the peace between warring factions even if it wasn't fired. That's what Degan had been in Nashart\u2014a peacemaker. He hadn't had to kill anyone and had only drawn his gun once to make a point with Roy Warren, before he'd known Roy was one of Tiffany's brothers.\n\nAn open-top carriage was making its way down the street accompanied by three men on horseback. Degan had ridden to town with the Callahans and had assumed the Warrens were already inside the church, but apparently not. The bride was riding in the carriage with her parents, her father driving them. Her brothers hung back to keep the dust their horses turned up away from the carriage.\n\nFrank Warren slowed the carriage to a stop, and Tiffany stood and gave Degan a graceful curtsy.\n\n\"You're late for your wedding,\" Degan remarked.\n\nTiffany chuckled. \"Brides are allowed to be late, though I swear I'm not trying to make Hunter worry that I got cold feet. I just wanted to look perfect for him today, and that took a little longer than I anticipated.\"\n\n\"You succeeded. Hunter is a lucky man.\"\n\nDegan envied his friend at that moment. Tiffany was a beautiful woman, and she looked exquisite today in her fancy Eastern wedding gown and gossamer-thin lace veil.\n\n\"Are you sure you won't join us?\"\n\nHe'd ridden over to the Warren ranch yesterday to say his good-byes and had told Tiffany he wouldn't attend the marriage ceremony. \"I'm just waiting to see you two exit the church as man and wife, then I'll be on my way to California.\"\n\n\"Hunter said his father tried to hire you again, to look up his son Morgan while you are in Butte, but you're not going that way?\"\n\n\"Too many people know me in Butte. I'll be taking the northern route that passes through Helena instead. But Zachary wanted me to scare his boy home, which is pointless if Morgan still has gold fever.\"\n\n\"Well, I can't say I'm not glad your job here is done.\" Tiffany grinned. \"You made sure no one got killed while Hunter and I were figuring out we were meant for each other, and for that you have my heartfelt thanks.\"\n\n\"And mine,\" Frank Warren agreed.\n\n\"Indeed,\" his wife, Rose, added. \"My boys admitted they were afraid to\u2014\"\n\n\"Ma!\" Roy Warren cut in, abashed.\n\n\"Well, restraint on all fronts was no doubt a blessing in disguise,\" Rose finished.\n\nFrank cleared his throat. \"I don't think Mr. Grant wants to be likened to a blessing, darling.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Rose huffed. \"He knew what I meant.\"\n\n\"We need to get going.\" Frank pointed toward the church.\n\nDegan glanced down the street and saw Zachary Callahan in front of the church looking around anxiously and gesturing to Frank to hurry up.\n\nTiffany laughed. \"I guess I did make Hunter worry, or maybe just my father-in-law! Be safe in your travels, Degan.\"\n\nShe sat back down. Frank got the carriage moving again and Tiffany's three brothers nodded at Degan as they passed. Then Tiffany called back at him, \"If you ever find this kind of happiness for yourself, bring your wife by so we can meet her!\"\n\nDegan almost laughed. Trust a woman to think only a woman could make a man happy. Degan knew he would never find out if that was true because women feared him. Even Tiffany did. And he didn't know how to change that without ruining his reputation, so he wasn't about to try.\n\n\"Hey, mister, can't make up your mind where you're going?\"\n\nDegan glanced behind him and saw a stranger walking his horse through the center of town toward him. He was wearing a yellow slicker that was pushed back to reveal the gun on his hip, a rather good indication that he was looking for trouble of some sort. As the stranger approached him, Degan could see he was young and slim and his face so smooth-skinned that he could actually be mistaken for a girl.\n\nDegan didn't have to answer the snide question. He could just ride off now and miss seeing his happily married friends walk out of church. But he knew boys of this stamp didn't like to be ignored.\n\n\"How old are you, kid?\"\n\n\"Seventeen, not that it's any of your business, so don't call me kid. Name's\u2014\"\n\n\"Not interested.\"\n\nThe boy looked disgruntled. \"Is everyone in this town as ornery as you?\"\n\nOrnery? Degan raised a black brow. He'd been called a lot of things, but never that. And the boy had stopped his roan horse a few feet from Degan's. He obviously had more to say, and no one else was around to say it to with the main street deserted now that everyone going to the wedding had reached the church. Only the shopkeepers were still in town, at least half of them standing at their windows. Strangers didn't pass through town without being noticed.\n\nDegan told himself he shouldn't be so suspicious of every stranger who approached him, gunfighter or not. There were a lot of friendly people in the West and dozens of good reasons for a man to carry a weapon. Not everyone was out to make a name for himself by challenging every fast gun he heard of.\n\nSo Degan unbent a little and asked, \"Do you need help with something?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I do. Heard from some miners over in Butte that Degan Grant was living here.\"\n\n\"He was just passing through.\"\n\n\"Then I missed him?\"\n\n\"Depends on what you want him for.\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"If you want a showdown with him, this is your lucky day. If you want to hire him, this might still be your lucky day. Any other reason, it's probably not your lucky day. Which is it?\"\n\n\"So you know where I can find him?\"\n\n\"You've already found him.\"\n\nThe boy smiled, quite widely, making Degan wonder for just a moment if his gut instinct was wrong. It wasn't.\n\n\"High noon, tomorrow, right here,\" the boy said, still wearing a confident grin.\n\nThat didn't need any clarification. High noon was when most stand-and-face-your-opponent gunfights happened, a time of day when neither combatant would be disadvantaged by blinding sunlight.\n\nDegan glanced up to see where the sun was before saying, \"It's close enough to high noon right now, so if we're going to do this, let's do it now. Come hitch up your horse if you don't want it catching stray bullets.\"\n\nDegan rode his palomino to the nearest hitching post before he dismounted and tossed the reins over it. The boy followed him and did the same, so he wasn't expecting Degan to come around the horses with his gun already drawn.\n\nNow the boy was glaring at Degan as he slowly moved his hand away from his gun. \"How'd you get your reputation if you cheat like this?\" he spat out.\n\n\"By killing men\u2014not boys. And this isn't cheating, it's saving your life.\" Degan took the boy's gun and emptied it on the ground between them, then handed it back. \"But I guess you don't get it yet. We're still doing this. If you win, you can reload and we'll have another go. If I win, you get to ride off and be glad you're still breathing. Sound fair?\"\n\n\"Hell no. How 'bout we just do this normal in front of witnesses?\"\n\n\"Look around, you're being watched. And I'm offering you exactly what you came here for, a chance to see if you're faster than I am, just without spilling blood in the street, and without you pissing your pants in fear thinking you're about to die. This is actually a much better test of who's faster, if you think about it. You'll be relaxed, without fear, without sweaty palms that might cause you to fumble. And you'll still have your bragging rights if you win.\"\n\nDegan removed his jacket and hooked it over the pommel of his saddle. Just because he lived in the West now didn't mean he had to give up the finer things in life he was accustomed to. Well, he'd had to give up some, but not the way he dressed. His black jacket was finely tailored, the black vest silk, the white shirt made of soft linen. His black boots were highly polished; the spurs weren't tin but real silver. And his gun holster was custom-made.\n\nHe stepped out into the street away from the intersection. He didn't want his friends witnessing this if they came out of the church early. The boy had followed Degan's example and left his slicker with his horse before putting some distance between them. He still looked nervous. Degan wondered if he had done this before or if this was his very first gunfight. It was a shame kids like this didn't learn from their mistakes and just go home. Maybe this one would when they were done.\n\n\"You're not going to empty your gun like you did mine?\" the boy asked hesitantly.\n\n\"No. There are witnesses, remember? I'm not a murderer, just a fast gun. So prove you know how to do this.\"\n\nA few more seconds passed with the boy's hand hovering just over his weapon. He was still nervous, despite Degan's assurances. Degan could see the boy's fingers shaking.\n\nDegan finally sighed. \"I'm giving you an edge, to draw first. Anytime now would be good.\"\n\n\"So you're gonna let me win?\"\n\n\"No, I'm not.\" Degan drew his gun, then slid it back in his holster just as fast. \"See? Now draw.\"\n\nThe boy tried to, but his gun still didn't clear his holster before Degan's was out and pointed at his chest. \"Thing is, kid, I don't miss either. So are we done here?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, we are.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\"Max, wake up. Max dawson!\"\n\nDark eyes opened wide, then blinked a few times before locating the pretty lady of the night pouting beside the bed. \"You don't have to shout, Luella, especially not my whole name.\"\n\n\"Sorry, honey, but I wouldn't have to if you'd just wake up more easily. It's a wonder you can sleep at all in this establishment with all the moaning and groaning going on into the wee hours.\"\n\nMax grinned. \"As long as you're quiet and you don't mind sharing this exquisitely soft bed, everything else sounds like whispering wind.\"\n\n\"It's a wonder you ain't been caught, sleeping that soundly.\"\n\n\"Your door was locked, wasn't it?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"And no one's ever climbed in though your window?\"\n\n\"Just you.\"\n\n\"Well, there you go, perfect safety and a soft bed. This is the only place I can sleep soundly. At my camp in the hills, the slightest noise, a twig's snapping, will wake me. 'Sides, no one's looking for me in these parts.\"\n\n\"Then why'd you want me to wake you at dawn before the deputies make their early rounds? By the way, that was thirty minutes ago. That's how long I've been trying to wake\u2014\"\n\n\"Damnit, why didn't you say so! I hate being in town in daylight.\"\n\n\"But if no one's looking\u2014\"\n\n\"Not actively looking, but the wanted posters have made their way this far north. I snatch them down when I find them, but the sheriff here keeps putting more back up. He must've been sent a pile of them.\"\n\nMax slipped out from beneath the covers fully dressed except for coat and hat, which were grabbed now. The gun holster hadn't been removed either. Luella didn't like sleeping next to a long-barreled Colt even though she was used to guns and kept a small derringer tucked away in her small bureau for emergencies. But she minded something else even more.\n\n\"You could at least remove your damn boots before you go to sleep,\" she said, staring at the scuffed boots that had just left her bed.\n\n\"Can't, case I have to leave fast\u2014like this.\" Max opened the window, climbing onto the porch roof that fronted the bordello, then dropping to the ground.\n\nLuella watched from her window. Standing there in her chemise, she heard a whistle from across the street. She didn't try to cover herself. After all, part of her job was to attract customers to Chicago Joe's bordello. Helena had far too many whorehouses, and the competition was fierce.\n\nToo many bordellos, too many millionaires, too many miners, heck, just too many people. But then Helena was the most populated town in Montana Territory, had been since gold was discovered in the nearby gulch back in '64. Eighteen years later folks were still moving to Helena when most towns that had sprouted up because of gold had turned into ghost towns. Even Virginia City, a ways south, was dying, and it had boasted a population of three thousand during its heyday. But Helena, with hundreds of businesses, didn't rely solely on gold for its prosperity. It was also the capital of the territory, and the railroad was heading this way, too. In another year or two it would probably reach Helena, and that would ensure that the town didn't bottom out when the gold did.\n\nLuella thought Helena would be a nice place to settle down if she could find a man who would have her. She'd only received marriage proposals from miners so far, and miners didn't have their own homes or make much money, so they didn't have the means to start families here. Usually if a man had means, he wasn't interested in taking a whore for a wife when he could bed one for a few coins.\n\nLuella looked over at Big Al, the man who had whistled at her. He was out early, sweeping the porch of his saloon across the street. He was one of her regulars and had always treated her with a gentle hand. She'd actually been considering him as a potential husband until the night Max had rescued her and she had fallen instantly in love. So dumb for someone like her to succumb to that emotion.\n\nBut with Big Al's being a landowner and a businessman, and single, he was still an option. His saloon was one of many in town that never closed its doors. Luella's place of business never closed either. Josephine Airey, or Chicago Joe as most people called her, owned the bordello and many others like it. Quite the landowner, their madam was, and she believed a man who wasn't put on a time schedule\u2014at least when satisfying his amorous needs\u2014was a happy man.\n\nBig Al was giving Luella a cheeky grin now\u2014and not watching where he was sweeping. Dust flew toward one of his customers who was leaning against the porch post, drink in hand. The man, a fancy dresser, was probably a businessman, she thought, until she saw the gun on his hip and quickly took her eyes off him. She figured Big Al must be wary of him, too, if he'd let him take a drink outside to the porch. Big Al never allowed that. Sheriff's orders, no drinking allowed in the streets. Now Al rushed back inside his establishment before the man noticed the dust on the back of his polished boots.\n\nLuella didn't like gunfighters, though Lord knew she'd bedded a lot of them. Gunfighters frightened her because they didn't throw punches when they got mad; they drew guns instead. Max probably did, too, but Max was different. And what wasn't to like about Max Dawson?\n\n\"See you next week, Luella!\" Max shouted up at her now.\n\n\"Sure thing, honey,\" Luella called back, and waved, but Max was already galloping out of town.\n\nShe closed her window and went back to bed. She hoped the gunslinger hadn't noticed her and wouldn't be paying her a visit." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Degan watched the kid race out of town. He'd watched him exit the brothel, too. Anyone departing that quickly through a window usually meant someone else would soon appear with a gun in hand and start shooting, but that didn't happen. Instead a pretty blonde in her undergarments had appeared at the window to say good-bye.\n\nThe little scene was unusual enough that Degan took in more details than he normally would. Not that he wasn't always aware of what was going on around him. He was, but he usually only focused on what he sensed could be dangerous. The long coat the kid was wearing over black pants and shirt wasn't a typical rain slicker but an expensive garment made of soft doeskin. His tan, wide-brimmed hat was either new or well cared for because it hadn't been dented yet. Light brown boots that were scuffed all to hell and a white bandanna revealed that the boy had no sense of style. He had dark eyes, short white-blond hair under the hat, and a baby face. Another boy so young that he hadn't grown hair on his face yet, but was sporting a gun on his hip. Why did they court violence at such a young age?\n\nBut this one appeared to have a love of life. Degan had seen it in the kid's expression as he'd hopped onto his horse and heard it in the laughter that trailed after him as he raced away. A good night with a comely woman could do that, Degan supposed\u2014or young love. And then one of those details he'd only vaguely noticed surfaced in his mind and he stepped back and stared at the wanted poster tacked to the post he'd been leaning against.\n\nHe'd seen it earlier, just hadn't paid attention to it. Whoever had drawn the picture must have known the outlaw because the likeness was uncanny. An outlaw visits a brothel across the street from his wanted poster that offers $1,000 for his capture? Degan shook his head. Boys were far too daring these days. But this one was none of his concern. His gun was for hire but he wasn't about to do the sheriff's job for him.\n\nDegan took his empty glass back into the saloon and stopped at the bar. The only other customer in the room had been sleeping with his head down on a table and still was. Degan wouldn't even have stopped at the saloon if he hadn't ridden all night to get to Helena and the saloon hadn't been the first place he'd passed that was open at this hour. He deplored camping in the wilderness and only did it when he was too far between towns. He didn't like traveling at night either, but he hadn't been tired enough to stop last night, and the lure of a bed and a hot bath had kept him going.\n\n\"I'll take a bottle of your finest to go\u2014and a rag for my boots.\"\n\nThe rag was quickly shoved across the bar as the barkeep's face turned red. The bottle had to be searched for. When the man returned, he said hesitantly, \"I should warn you, there's a law here 'bout drinking in the streets.\"\n\n\"I wasn't planning to.\" Degan paid up, then added, \"I don't consider your porch the street.\"\n\n\"Fair 'nough.\" The man relaxed now that Degan hadn't taken offense.\n\n\"Best hotel in town?\"\n\n\"That'd probably be the International. Big brick building. Hard to miss if you keep heading into town. So you just rode in?\"\n\nDegan didn't answer. It annoyed him that one question from him tended to open the floodgates to his getting questioned in return. He understood it was a nervous reaction of intimidated people who hoped that if he was talking, he wouldn't be shooting. He grabbed the bottle and headed to the door.\n\nThe barkeep called after him, \"You might check with our sheriff if you're looking for work, mister. Folks bring their troubles to him first, but he don't always have the time to help them all, even with eight deputies. This is a big town. Plenty folks round here could use a hired gun\u2014if that's what you are.\"\n\nDegan tipped his wide-brimmed hat at the man, but kept on walking. He wasn't looking for work yet. He had made enough money in the West that he could retire for the next ten years if he wanted to. But to do what? He'd been groomed to take over an empire, but he'd turned his back on that.\n\nThis town was far too big for his liking, he realized, as he continued through it. He preferred small towns, where you could see trouble coming from a mile away. But he was just here for a bath, a bed, and a meal before he continued on to California, which is where he'd been headed when Zachary Callahan had tracked him down and offered him too much money to refuse merely to keep the peace for a few weeks.\n\nIt wasn't the first time he'd been overpaid. In fact, it happened more often than not. It was one of the benefits of having a reputation that preceded him. The only other benefit of that reputation was that he could get a job done without bloodshed.\n\nIt used to bother him, a lot, that he made people so nervous. He used to assure people that they didn't need to be afraid of him. That assurance only worked until they saw him draw his gun. And rarely could he pass through a town where he didn't need to draw it for one reason or another\u2014if people discovered who he was. So he'd stopped being sociable, stopped talking to people if he didn't have to, stopped volunteering his name. Hell, half the time it didn't matter if they knew who he was. He couldn't even walk into a bank without all those in it dropping to the floor, thinking they were about to be robbed. Now that was annoying. Maybe it was time to go back East\u2014just not home.\n\nDegan found the International Hotel easy enough, but he certainly wasn't expecting to run into anyone he knew in the lobby.\n\n\"Well, aren't you a sight for sore eyes, Degan Grant!\"\n\nDegan winced, hearing his name spoken so loudly. \"Keep your voice down,\" he said as he turned, but then he actually smiled.\n\nHe hadn't made many friends in the West, but he could count John Hayes as one of them. John was in his midforties now, but Degan had met him not long after he'd first come West five years ago.\n\n\"What brings you this far north, Sheriff?\"\n\n\"It's US Marshal now.\" John grinned.\n\nDegan raised a brow. \"Does that warrant congratulations?\"\n\n\"It's letting me see more of the country than I ever thought I would, but, no, I wasn't hankering for the position. I got talked into it by an old friend who's a senator now. The railroads have been putting a lot of pressure on the politicians in Washington to clean up the West. They hired Pinkerton detectives years ago to deal with some of the train robberies, but it's not enough. Now our government is taking action, too. But what brings you to Helena?\"\n\n\"I just finished a peacekeeping job in the territory.\"\n\n\"Then you aren't currently employed?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Damn, that's a relief.\"\n\nDegan was amused. \"I still abide by the law, John. Did you really think you would need to arrest me?\"\n\n\"No, course not. But since you're between jobs, I'd like to call in that favor you owe me.\"\n\n\"What favor?\"\n\n\"For saving your life.\"\n\nDegan snorted. \"I was on the mend. You didn't need to drag me to a doctor.\"\n\n\"You were half-dead and still bleeding.\"\n\nJohn had been the sheriff in a town where Degan had been shot. A trio of bank robbers had been trying to shoot their way out of town after the alarm was raised. A lot of people had been on the streets that day. Degan had pitched in to prevent innocent people from getting killed and had ended up catching a stray bullet himself. He'd ridden out of that town wounded. John had tracked him down.\n\nIf he cared to admit it, he supposed he could have died that day if he had continued on his way. The wound hadn't hurt that much\u2014yet. So he hadn't known he was bleeding so much he'd been leaving a trail of blood behind him.\n\n\"I'll allow your doctor did a good job of stitching,\" Degan said. \"It left barely a scar. What favor do you need?\"\n\n\"It will just be temporary, mind you. I need at least three outlaws on my long list brought in over the next couple months. I haven't just been tasked with cleaning up the West, I've been told to do it on a damn time schedule.\"\n\nDegan was a little more than surprised. \"You want to turn me into a bounty hunter? I'm not a tracker.\"\n\n\"You don't need to be. Most of these boys hide in plain sight in crowded towns like this one, or ones too small to have good sheriffs in them. The pay is good and two of the wanted men have been seen in the area. A third was last seen in Wyoming. If you prefer, you can take your pick of who you want to go after. As I said, I have a long list.\"\n\n\"And why aren't you after them?\"\n\n\"Because my ma is dying. I got the telegram yesterday. Already bought our stage tickets to leave today.\"\n\n\"Our?\"\n\n\"My wife and daughters are here with me.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you were married.\"\n\nJohn grinned and boasted, \"Happily for almost ten years now. Our girls are six and seven, and my Meg is expecting another. Because I have to travel so much these days, whenever I know I'm going to be in one place for a while, I take my family with me. The railroads' extending as far west as they do now makes that possible. This trip to Virginia could take me a couple months because I have to get my mother's estate settled. That could cost me my job if I can't cross off at least three outlaws from my list during that time.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about your mother.\"\n\nJohn nodded. \"I knew she was sick, I just didn't know it was this bad.\"\n\n\"I assume you already asked the local sheriff for assistance?\"\n\n\"Talked to him yesterday, but he's too busy, and I'm not surprised. Hell, who would think you could find a town this big in Montana, which isn't even a state yet.\"\n\n\"Gold does that.\"\n\n\"It surely does,\" John agreed. \"So, can you help me out, Degan? I only need three wanted men captured in the next two months. If you finish sooner than that, you can continue on your way. But I will need to make you a deputy marshal while you're acting on my behalf.\"\n\n\"Oh, hell no. If I do this, I won't be wearing a lawman's badge.\"\n\nJohn grinned. \"You don't need to mention it to anyone if you think it will tarnish your reputation. It would just be in case you need to verify that you have jurisdiction, which knowing you, you probably won't have to do. You'll get to keep the rewards being offered. Some might be more lucrative than your usual jobs.\"\n\n\"I doubt that.\"\n\n\"Well, they will be when you add them up. And it won't be that difficult to find these men. I've gathered a lot of information on these miscreants that I'll turn over to you, much more than is mentioned on their posters\u2014known friends and family members, everywhere they've broken the law, any associates they might have, or if they're loners. I've kept a lot of notes, and I've been doing this for a couple years now. I would just ask that you telegraph me in Virginia each time you bring one of them in, so I can let my superiors know that even while I'm taking care of family matters, I'm still keeping to my schedule.\"\n\nDegan nodded. \"As long as your superiors don't track me down afterward to try and talk me into continuing in that line of work.\"\n\nJohn chuckled. \"I'll keep your name out of it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "The leather satchel John Hayes had given Degan resembled a small, thin valise without a handle, but it had a lock and key. Degan didn't open it when he got to his hotel room after bidding John good-bye. He merely dropped it on the floor with his saddlebags and his own valise. Sleep was his first order of business. But when he lay down on the bed, he didn't drift off right away.\n\nThe words lawman and bounty hunter kept running through his mind. Neither occupation suited his temperament, yet he'd still agreed to the job. Because a friend had asked. No, because while he'd never admit it to anyone, he actually liked helping people. It gave a sense of purpose to his wandering. And John Hayes was good people.\n\nWhen Degan woke it was midafternoon, too early for dinner, too late for lunch, but he was hungry. He continued to ignore John's leather satchel and went downstairs and found the hotel dining room closed just as he'd expected.\n\nThe same clerk in the lobby who had checked Degan in gave him the names of restaurants nearby, although he wasn't sure if they were open either. Degan's scowl had the clerk quickly adding, \"But if you will wait in the dining room, I will have something brought to you.\"\n\n\"To my room instead?\"\n\n\"Certainly, sir. Immediately.\"\n\nDegan went back upstairs. His room was nicely appointed, finer than any of the other hotel rooms he'd stayed in since coming West, so he wouldn't mind spending a few days here if he had to. Being able to eat in his room was a nice bonus. The less time he spent in public, the better. He hoped the barkeep he'd met that morning wasn't a gossip. If he was, the sheriff would know by now that Degan was in town. Even though the sheriff wouldn't know his name, that wouldn't necessarily stop him from seeking Degan out.\n\nHe stood at the window for a few minutes. It provided a panoramic view of Helena, which was spread out over the low hills that circled the downtown area. The streets, and there were many of them, reminded him of home because they were so crowded in the late afternoon. The West had always been a place where people could start fresh. But much of the region still wasn't safe for settlers. Soon it would be. John's mission to round up the outlaws who preyed on settlers was important. Progress, real progress, was coming to the West with the railroads.\n\nStill waiting for his food, Degan opened John's satchel and spread out the papers on his bed. He counted twenty wanted posters. Each of them had a page or two of John's scrawled notes attached to it. One poster featured Big Jim Mosley. That was convenient. Degan only had to capture two outlaws now. He could cross Mosley off John's list since Degan had killed the man last year in Wyoming. He hadn't known Mosley was wanted for murder, but since the man had tried to shoot him in the back, he wasn't surprised. Apparently the sheriff of that town hadn't been able to confirm his identity either, which was why Mosley was still wanted by the law. It made Degan wonder how many others on John's list of twenty names might already be dead. Men who broke the law couldn't count on growing old.\n\nBaby-faced Max Dawson wasn't dead and would be an easy find, considering Degan had seen him at the brothel this morning. Kid Cade, another on the list, Degan had also crossed paths with in Wyoming. In his late thirties, the kid was no kid any longer and had steered clear of him, so Degan didn't figure him to be a gunfighter, just a thief. John's notes mentioned Cade had tried claim jumping unsuccessfully, stage robbing successfully, and a bank robbery that nearly got him killed when he tried to pull it off alone. He'd avoided getting caught for that, as well as numerous other robberies in which he'd been identified as the thief. He had last been seen in the area of Butte, to the southwest, a few months ago.\n\nDegan didn't need to read any further. He had intentionally avoided Butte and ridden north to Helena thanks to the miners in Butte who had let it be known that Degan was in the area. He wasn't partial to backtracking, but Cade and Dawson were likely the two wanted men John had said were in the area, and the two Degan could apprehend most quickly. He might just be back on his way to California in a week or two.\n\nBut then another poster caught his eye, the only other one besides Max Dawson's that offered a $1,000 reward. John's notes explained why. Charles Bixford, alias Red Charley, was known to have killed three women, two children, and fifteen men when he blew up a town hall in Nebraska because his wife was in it. She was one of the women he'd killed, and the two children had been his. But that was only the start of his killing spree, which continued across Nebraska, into Colorado, and ended in Utah, where he'd last been seen. Bixford wasn't known to be crazy, yet he'd murdered innocents for no apparent reason. He'd also killed a US marshal along the way who'd tried to apprehend him and had wounded the next one who'd tried.\n\nAnd John needed to catch this killer? John, who was married with kids of his own? What sort of favor would Degan be doing for John if he only captured the less dangerous outlaws on the list? He decided to grab the two who were nearby and throw in Bixford as a bonus before going on to California." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Degan was putting the wanted posters back in John's satchel when there was a knock at the door. He opened it, and a young man in a white apron nervously handed him a platter of fancy sandwiches and hurried away. It was more food than he needed and he only ate half of it. Then he made use of the bathing room at the end of the hall after the male attendant stationed there assured him it was cleaned after every use and handed him a fresh towel. A smaller tub was behind a screen in Degan's room, but it wasn't connected to plumbing and he didn't want to wait for water to be delivered.\n\nAn hour later he was saddling his horse in the nearby stable, which was where Helena's sheriff caught up with him. A tall man, the sheriff appeared confident with a rifle cradled in his arms. And brave, to have come without any of his deputies to back him up.\n\n\"We don't want any trouble here, mister, so I hope saddling your horse means you're leaving our fair town.\"\n\nDegan didn't feel like standing there explaining himself, so he merely said, \"I'm a friend of Marshal Hayes. I believe you know him?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\n\"The marshal asked me to help him with his agenda, so if I bring you an outlaw or two to lock up, I assume you'll have room for them?\"\n\n\"Certainly. That sort of help is always appreciated.\"\n\nDegan mounted up, tipped his hat, and rode out of the stable before the sheriff thought to ask him for his name. Possibly his reputation hadn't reached as far as Helena, but he couldn't count on that when people in Nashart and Butte knew that he was in the area. And the sheriff would know as well as Degan did that his name would bring other glory-seeking gunfighters to town. Whether he stayed there or not, they would still come looking for him.\n\nHe rode directly to the brothel that Dawson favored. The scantily clad women lounging in the large parlor perked up as he entered. He heard syrupy greetings and salacious promises. Two of them even pushed each other to get to him first. A third was seductively walking toward him when she noticed his demeanor\u2014and his gun\u2014and turned around. Her expression must have alerted the others. The women stopped trying to attract his attention. A few of them hurriedly left the room. He was used to that reaction. Women were more afraid of him than men, and they were less inclined to try to hide it, even women like the ones here whose company could be bought by anyone. And they didn't know him, knew nothing about him. Yet one close look at him and their instincts had them averting their eyes.\n\nThe madam, who was also in the parlor, was the only exception. Her job was to make sure every man who entered her domain left happy. Yet even she approached Degan nervously, though she didn't sound it when she said, \"It's not often I meet a man who makes me regret that I'm a married woman now. They call me Chicago Joe. What are you in the mood for, mister?\"\n\nThree blondes were in the room, but none of them were as pretty as the one named Luella whom he'd seen standing at the window that morning bidding Dawson good-bye, and she was the one he was there to see. \"I'm looking for Luella.\"\n\n\"One of our favorites!\" Chicago Joe smiled. \"She's upstairs, but she isn't available right now. Can I offer you a drink while you wait, or perhaps another of our lovely...?\"\n\nDegan didn't wait for her to finish. He headed up the stairs. No one tried to stop him. Luella's had been the corner room facing the street. The door wasn't locked, but she was with a customer. At least only Luella was in the rumpled bed. Her customer was still undressing to join her there. Both glanced immediately at Degan as he stepped into the room.\n\n\"I only need to have a few words with the lady,\" he told the man. \"You can either wait in the hall for her, or find another if you can't wait. But vacate\u2014\"\n\nThe man had already grabbed his shirt and boots and rushed past Degan with his head ducked down. Luella got out of bed and put on a thin robe before she turned to say, \"A few words, huh? And aren't you the handsome one. Remove that gun and we'll get along just fine, mister.\"\n\nDegan could tell she was trying to be brave. Women usually did get bold with him once he removed his gun. But Luella was also inching her way toward her bureau, where she probably kept a weapon. Degan moved farther into the room to block her from doing something stupid.\n\n\"I'm not here for your charms. You're going to tell me where Max Dawson holes up when he's not paying you visits.\"\n\nShe blinked before her brows snapped together. \"No, I won't.\"\n\n\"Are you sure about that?\"\n\nShe rushed to the other side of the bed to put an obstacle between them. Degan realized he'd terrified her with his tone. Unintentionally. He would have liked to put her at ease, but that would defeat his purpose.\n\nSo Degan stated clearly, \"If I have to wait around here for another week for Dawson to crawl through your window again, someone is bound to get shot during the arrest, particularly Dawson if he tries to run. His wanted poster doesn't say dead or alive, but it doesn't say he has to be alive, either.\"\n\n\"How'd you even know to\u2014? Oh, that was you across the street this morning. If you want Max, why didn't you just follow him then?\"\n\n\"I didn't want him then. I do now.\"\n\nThat was met with a few long moments of silence before she asked in a painfully hopeful voice, \"You won't shoot Max if you don't have to?\"\n\n\"No, I won't\u2014if I don't have to.\"\n\nDegan had guessed that young Dawson had feelings for this girl, but he was surprised that she apparently returned those feelings\u2014or at least, there was more between them than her just wanting to protect a paying customer.\n\nSo he added, \"If you can point me in his direction and he can be taken by surprise, I can pretty much guarantee there won't be bloodshed. But if I have to capture him when he visits you again, he could end up lying dead at your feet. Either way, I am going to find him. So do you try to save his life or not?\"\n\nShe sat on the edge of the bed, then looked over her shoulder at him so Degan could see that she was crying. Out of politeness, he managed not to snort, but he sure as hell wasn't gullible enough to fall for tears that could easily be faked. He wouldn't be moved by them even if he thought they were real. You had to feel something for someone to be affected by the person's tears, and he hadn't felt anything like that for a long time.\n\nHe still had to wait while she wrestled with her indecision, bit her lower lip a few times, and pleaded with her pretty blue eyes. Pointlessly.\n\nShe finally figured that out and even made a small, frustrated sound before she said, \"Max found an abandoned shack up in the hills. Some fool miner built it years ago, thinking he could find gold on his own, away from the gulch where everyone else was finding it.\"\n\n\"And how do you know that it was abandoned?\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"Max didn't shoot the miner, if that's what you're implying. There were mining tools left in it, holes dug all around it, even a dirt cave dug out of the hill next to the shack. Max was the one who made the guess, not me.\"\n\n\"So you haven't been there?\"\n\n\"No, I never get out of town. Max merely mentioned that he found it after we met last month and said he would be using it for a while. Said it's got a nice view of Helena, so I figured it must be higher up, probably in the forested hills on the way to the Big Belt Mountains.\"\n\n\"But you're just guessing?\"\n\n\"Well, there has to be game nearby 'cause Max brought us a deer last week and a passel of dead rabbits the week before.\"\n\n\"That's how he pays for your services?\"\n\n\"No, he does it just 'cause he's nice.\"\n\n\"A nice murderer and bank robber?\"\n\nLuella thrust out her chin. \"Max is innocent of those charges.\"\n\n\"That's for a jury to decide, not you or me,\" Degan said before he walked out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Zachary and Mary callahan were having coffee on the front porch of their ranch house when they noticed the cloud of dust heading their way.\n\n\"Were you expecting company this morning?\" Zachary asked his wife.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Well, I don't have friends who would come calling in a buckboard. Can you make out who that is in it?\"\n\n\"They aren't close enough,\" Mary said, squinting. \"But it looks like two bonnets, so I'm guessing it's Rose Warren and her maid.\"\n\n\"Not with guards that aren't Warren men. I'd recognize their horses. And I thought you said Rose visited yesterday while I was on the range?\"\n\n\"She did, but Tiffany and Hunter will be leaving for New York soon. And Rose did a lot of worrying about their marriage. You can't blame her for wanting to see for herself how well it's working out.\"\n\n\"It's only been a week since the wedding. And those two don't come out of the bedroom long enough for anyone to figure out anything.\"\n\nMary chuckled. \"Actually, I'd worry myself\u2014if they did. Or has it been so long you don't remember how we were when we first got hitched?\"\n\nHe leaned over and kissed his wife tenderly. \"If I didn't have a ranch to run...\"\n\nMary giggled. \"I'll remind you tonight that you said that.\"\n\nGlancing back at the dust cloud, he conceded, \"I think you were right. That's a mighty big feather on one of those bonnets. No one in town other than our new daughter-in-law would own a hat like that, except for her mother.\"\n\n\"I've changed my mind. I don't think Rose has even unpacked her bonnets yet. And she never wore them when she lived here before. She prefers wide brims same as I do, to keep the sun off her cheeks.\"\n\n\"Then I give up.\"\n\n\"Good, because if you'll just rein in your curiosity for a few more minutes you'll know exactly who is coming to visit.\" But when the buckboard stopped in front of the porch, Mary added as she stood up to greet their visitors, \"Or not.\"\n\nThe young woman was definitely not from Nashart or any town close by. If the young woman weren't so richly garbed in navy silk, her black hair, blue eyes, and her age, which Mary guessed was midtwenties, would have made Mary think she was the real Jennifer Fleming, whom Frank Warren had hired from Chicago to be his housekeeper, the gal Tiffany had been pretending to be when she was their housekeeper. Mary couldn't take her eyes off the young woman's stylish clothing. Three rows of short ruffles ran down each side of the front of her jacket, from shoulders to waist in exquisite detail, with pearl buttons down the center. Another row of ruffles crossed the front of her skirt where it was draped back to form part of the bustle. It was just a traveling ensemble, and yet it would outshine the fanciest apparel at any of the shindigs in Nashart.\n\nThis was a lady, a rich city lady, and now Mary's curiosity was more rampant than her husband's. Ladies like this didn't come to Montana without a good reason.\n\nThe second woman was older and not as elegantly dressed. The two-man escort who had ridden on either side of the buckboard weren't local boys, either. Wearing city suits, bowler hats\u2014and gun belts\u2014they were definitely guards of some sort. One of them dismounted to help the women down from the buckboard. Zachary rose and walked to the top of the porch steps, Mary following him. Only the young lady and her chaperone walked toward the porch.\n\n\"Mr. and Mrs. Callahan, I hope?\" the young lady asked.\n\n\"There are a lot of Callahans here and more'n one missus,\" Zachary replied.\n\nThe lady seemed delighted despite the indirect answer. \"Then I've come to the right place. I'm Allison Montgomery. This is my maid, Denise. We've traveled all the way from Chicago to find my fianc\u00e9, Degan Grant. The detectives I hired to locate him traced him to your ranch.\"\n\n\"You're a bit late,\" Zachary said. \"Degan was working for me, but his job here is finished. He lit out last week after the wedding.\"\n\nAllison looked distraught. \"He\u2014he married?\"\n\n\"He didn't, our son Hunter did,\" Mary quickly put in. \"But Degan never mentioned he had a fianc\u00e9e.\"\n\nZachary actually chuckled. \"Nor would he. The man never talked about himself.\"\n\nAllison sighed. \"I can't say I'm not disappointed that he's no longer here. Do you know where he was going when he left?\"\n\n\"West, but that could be anywhere,\" Zachary replied.\n\n\"Hunter might know more.\" Mary then added to her husband, \"Why don't you fetch him while I get some more coffee. You're welcome to come into the parlor to wait, Miss Montgomery. It's cooler in there.\"\n\n\"Thank you, you are most kind.\" Allison walked up the porch steps with her chaperone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Upstairs, Zachary knocked on Hunter's door. \"I need you downstairs, boy.\"\n\n\"Go away, Pa, I'm busy!\" Hunter yelled from inside the room.\n\nZachary yelled back, \"So get unbusy and bring your wife. We have\u2014\"\n\n\"Tiffany is busy, too, and I'm not about to interrupt her. Go away!\"\n\nZachary put his ear to the door and heard a giggle, then a passionate moan. He rolled his eyes and pounded on the door again. \"Degan's fianc\u00e9e is downstairs and wants to know where she can find him. This really won't wait.\"\n\nA mere moment later, Hunter opened the door, holding up his unfastened pants, wearing nothing else. \"Degan has a fianc\u00e9e? I don't believe it.\"\n\n\"Come see for yourself.\"\n\nOnce they were dressed, Hunter and Tiffany pretty much ran down the stairs. They came to a halt as soon as the parlor was within view and they saw the women sitting on the sofa. Hunter thought his father had just made up a tall tale to get them out of the bedroom since they'd pretty much been living in it all week. Tiffany knew her father-in-law wouldn't joke about Degan's having a fianc\u00e9e, so she wasn't surprised by the sight of the beautiful young woman in the room and went in to introduce herself.\n\nHunter stopped to give Mary a bashful grin and a kiss on the cheek before she set down the coffee tray she'd just brought into the parlor. \"Morning, Ma\u2014is it still morning?\"\n\n\"You'd know what time of day it is if you hadn't decided to have your honeymoon here.\"\n\n\"New York is going to be a hectic shopping spree. We'll get there eventually.\"\n\n\"Well, behave. We have guests.\"\n\n\"So I see.\" Hunter moved over to sit on the arm of the sofa next to his wife. But he didn't appear the least bit cordial as he stared at Allison Montgomery and said, \"If Degan had a fianc\u00e9e, he wouldn't be selling his gun all over the West. Who are you really?\"\n\n\"Hunter!\" Tiffany exclaimed.\n\nThe woman was blushing profusely now, having just been called a liar. \"I see I'm going to have to explain.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that might be a good idea,\" Hunter agreed.\n\nMary poured her guests cups of coffee, but Allison's was left untouched as she began, \"You are right, Degan and I aren't engaged anymore, but we were, and if he hadn't left Chicago, we would be married now. He doesn't know I forgave him.\"\n\n\"Forgave him for what?\" Tiffany asked.\n\nTears welled up in Allison's eyes but she blinked them back. \"We were childhood friends and so much in love. But Degan had a bit more than a flirtation with another young woman the night of our engagement dinner. I didn't blame him. We weren't married yet, and, well, I understand such things happen. But my parents weren't as understanding. They made me break off the engagement. I didn't want to do it, but I couldn't defy them. I hoped my parents would relent and Degan and I would reconcile, but he left Chicago before my parents could reconsider.\"\n\nIn a friendlier tone now Hunter asked, \"Why have you waited so long to come looking for Degan to patch things up?\"\n\n\"Everyone said to give him a year or two to sow his wild oats, that he'd be back, but it's been five years! I tried to forget about him. I let other men court me, I tried to fall in love with them, but I just couldn't forget about Degan. He and I were meant to be together. I just need to remind him of that and to tell him that I still love him, that I forgive him.\"\n\n\"I never would have took Degan for being a city slicker,\" Zachary remarked.\n\n\"I guessed,\" Tiffany said with a grin.\n\n\"Takes one to know one, Red,\" Hunter teased his wife.\n\n\"Do either of you know where Degan was going?\" Allison asked the newlyweds. \"I'm not just looking for him for me, now. His father is ill. Degan needs to come home.\"\n\n\"He's going to California via Helena, the northern route,\" Tiffany volunteered.\n\n\"But he could stop anywhere along the way and probably will,\" Hunter added. \"He is a gun for hire, after all.\"\n\n\"So I've been told.\" Allison smiled warmly. \"Thank you so much. If I hurry, perhaps I can catch up with him before he leaves the territory.\"\n\n\"Never would have figured a broken heart for the reason Degan came West,\" Hunter said as soon as Allison Montgomery had left.\n\n\"I can't quite imagine him with a broken heart at all,\" Tiffany said.\n\nHunter raised a brow at her. \"I thought you stopped being so wary of him.\"\n\n\"I did, but honestly, can you imagine Degan Grant pining for a lost love?\"\n\n\"No, but I liked Degan, a lot. If that city gal can make him happy, I hope she catches up with him. Speaking of catching up, I'll race you back upstairs.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "It took Degan four days and five evenings to find a shack in the hills. He hadn't trusted Luella to steer him in the right direction. The forest on the way to the Big Belt range was too far from Helena, a full day's ride that would likely require crossing the Missouri River to get to it. While there might be a ferry somewhere along the river, he doubted an outlaw such as Max Dawson would want to spend close to an hour in the company of the ferry operator who might identify him and notify the sheriff anytime Dawson visited Luella. And Degan wasn't going to waste time looking for a ferry. He'd rather wait out the week in town for Dawson to come visiting again before he searched in that direction. But some wooded areas were closer to Helena, so he could look for Dawson there during the day and return to the hotel at night. The two to the southeast and southwest were quite extensive, which was why the search was taking so long.\n\nThen two prospectors at different sites he passed mentioned some old claims farther up a particular hill, which is where he'd been searching today. But he was beginning to doubt that information, too, until he came across two log cabins and a cut-wood house tucked away in the trees before he finally found what was obviously a shack at the top of the hill. Late at night as it was, he might have missed it and headed back to town if he didn't briefly catch the moon glinting off the tin roof. As he drew close to the shack, he saw a dim light emanating from the cracks between the boards that served as walls. Was there a lantern inside? He couldn't tell until he got closer, which he did now.\n\nPut together piecemeal from broken-down wooden crates, boards of different lengths, and other scraps of wood, it was barely wide enough to accommodate a small bed and maybe a table and a chair. It certainly wouldn't keep the cold out come winter with so many cracks in the walls. But in warmer months, it might at least keep the rain out. And it was certainly better than camping outdoors.\n\nHe almost missed the cave Luella had mentioned, at the end of a slightly sloped path, because it was in the shadow of the trees, about thirty feet away from the shack. He investigated that first. It appeared to be no more than a hole dug in the steeper side of the hill. Black as pitch inside it. He'd be annoyed if that's where Dawson was sleeping. He couldn't imagine what the miner who had supposedly excavated it had been thinking. Clear dirt, then dig down until he hit rock, when there might not even be rock under this hill?\n\nDegan took a box of matches from his jacket pocket and struck one as he ducked his head and stepped inside the cave. It wasn't that deep, just enough to fit a horse for the night. The animal swung his head around and glanced at him, but didn't make a sound, so Degan backed out of the hole and made his way back up the path to the shack.\n\nHe walked around the structure and found the entrance. This area had been cleared of trees and brush. He saw the remnants of a campfire, a pan left on a griddle, the fire extinguished for the night. A saddle was on the ground next to it. He wasn't surprised. The shack would block that fire from the view of anyone downhill. The miner had definitely wanted to keep his place hidden.\n\nDegan inched his way to the entrance. If there had ever been a door, it was gone now. The shack was barely as tall as he was. The opening wasn't. He had to duck again to see inside.\n\nLight came from a lantern on the floor, but it was set so low it might as well not have been lit. Still, it provided enough illumination for him to see Dawson lying on the floor asleep. So Luella had tried to steer Degan wrong. Young love, in this case, he thought, was damned annoying.\n\nNearly an hour had passed since Degan had found the place. He'd left his horse at the bottom of the hill so any sound it made wouldn't be heard. And he'd moved slowly, careful to avoid stepping on twigs, which is what had taken so long. There were a lot of twigs. But the moment he stepped inside the shack, wood creaked. Unavoidable when the floor was made of crate scraps.\n\nDawson heard it, but he'd been sleeping on his belly, so even though he reached for his gun, he still had to turn to fire it. Before that happened, Degan said, \"Your back makes an easy target, not that I ever miss what I shoot at. And don't try what you're thinking of trying. It only takes a second to die, kid.\"\n\n\"Can I at least turn over?\"\n\n\"Not with that gun in your hand. Drop it, carefully, and lock your fingers behind your head.\"\n\nThe boy might have done as told, but not quickly enough. He was obviously still considering options that didn't include jail. So Degan moved forward and stepped on Dawson's right wrist until the gun slipped from the boy's fingers and a string of expletives from his mouth.\n\n\"Lucky for you I never lose my temper,\" Degan said casually as he picked up the long-barreled Colt and tucked it in his belt before stepping back. \"But I can get annoyed when I'm tired and I'm damn tired tonight, so you might not want to test my patience again\u2014I still don't see those fingers behind your head.\"\n\nMax had been shaking his right hand to make sure his wrist wasn't broken, but he quickly complied now and locked both hands behind his neck. The kid was probably still swearing, but it was just a mumble to Degan's ears and he didn't really care. He dropped the coil of thin rope that was looped over his shoulder and gave the rest of the room a cursory glance. There was nothing in it other than the lantern, two saddlebags with a rifle propped up against the wall between them, and the tan hat hanging from a peg on the wall. The kid was fully dressed, minus his coat, which he'd rolled up and had been using as a pillow.\n\n\"You sleep on a pile of leaves? Really?\" Degan said with some amusement.\n\n\"Was I supposed to make this rickety crate feel like home? Wasn't planning on staying more'n a few days.\"\n\n\"Yet you did stay longer. Why didn't you just get a room in town so you could enjoy a few comforts? Helena is a big enough town to hide in.\"\n\n\"Not with my face showing up on so many porch posts along the boardwalks.\"\n\n\"So it is you, Max Dawson? Thanks for clearing that up so quickly.\"\n\n\"Well, damn. You weren't sure?\"\n\n\"Sure enough, but there isn't much light in here, is there?\"\n\nDegan corrected that, hunkering down to see if he could get any more light out of the old lantern. He managed to make the light a little brighter.\n\n\"There's not much fuel left in that,\" Dawson warned.\n\n\"We'll survive if it goes out. You can sit up now.\"\n\nMax did so and dusted leaves off his shirtfront before he bent his head and buttoned his leather vest. Other than the vest, he was wearing exactly what Degan had seen him wearing four days ago, including the white bandanna. He looked as if he'd just wallowed in the mud since then. Well, it had rained yesterday as Degan recalled, so the boy might have slipped in the mud up here. It was caked on one of his cheeks, down one sleeve, and on both knees. Some was even in the boy's ash-blond hair, which made it spike up in places.\n\nNoticing the uneven length of the boy's hair, Degan asked, \"Where's the knife you butchered your hair with?\"\n\n\"Don't have it no more.\"\n\n\"If I have to ask again, I'll have to strip you to find it.\"\n\nMax dug the knife out of his boot and tossed it angrily toward Degan's feet before he glanced up with a scowl. The scowl disappeared and the dark eyes rounded, but not with fear. Fear was easy to recognize, but so was surprise, and that's all that was on the kid's face now.\n\n\"Never seen a bounty hunter dressed like you.\" Max dropped his eyes again.\n\nDegan tucked the knife in his own boot. \"I'm not a bounty hunter.\"\n\n\"Never seen a lawman dressed so fancy neither.\"\n\n\"I'm not a lawman, just doing a favor for one.\"\n\n\"You couldn't pick some other time to be so damn generous?\" Max spat out.\n\nDegan actually laughed. God, he really was tired to let that slip out. He couldn't afford to show emotions in his line of work. A smile could be misleading. A laugh could remove fear when he might not want it removed. A scowl could prompt someone already afraid to draw his gun. And Dawson hadn't looked fearful yet, just mad. But then Dawson was a kid, appeared to be no more than fifteen or sixteen. Boys this young could be bold beyond good sense. And this one was staring at him again in owl-eyed surprise because of that laugh.\n\nDegan kicked the coil of rope toward Dawson. \"Tie the end of that around your ankles. If it's loose, you probably won't like how I tighten it.\"\n\nAnother flare of anger across the brow, tight across the lips, and the boy was taking his sweet time in getting a knot tied. Degan was too tired to push it. As soon as Dawson was hog-tied, he'd be getting some sleep.\n\n\"Why did you stick around Helena, kid? Because of the girl?\"\n\n\"What girl?\" Dawson asked without glancing up.\n\n\"You visit more than one in town?\"\n\nBristling, Max tried to stand up, but couldn't manage it with his feet already tied. \"If you hurt Luella\u2014\"\n\n\"Do I look like a man who would hurt a woman?\"\n\n\"Hell yeah, you do!\"\n\n\"When I can find out what I need to know without half trying?\"\n\n\"Because you look dangerous?\" Max snorted. \"Looking like it don't mean much out here.\"\n\nDegan shrugged. \"I merely had words with her. She didn't volunteer much. In fact, she tried to mislead me about where I could find you.\"\n\nDawson grinned at that. \"She's a good friend\u2014and she knows I'm innocent.\"\n\n\"She doesn't know any such thing, simply believes what you tell her.\"\n\n\"But I am innocent.\"\n\nNo belligerence was in the boy's voice, just a sad tone that struck Degan oddly. But then he guessed this was probably how the boy had convinced Luella and anyone else who might recognize him that he wasn't guilty. He should save the performance for the jury.\n\n\"Innocence doesn't show up on wanted posters. Is your lady-love the only reason you stuck around here too long, or were you planning to rob another bank in the area?\"\n\n\"I was making my way to Canada, but when I heard they mostly speak French there, I changed my mind. I can speak Spanish, but not French. Maybe I should go to Mexico instead.\"\n\n\"Where you're going is jail. You have figured that out, right?\"\n\n\"I ain't stupid, fancy man,\" Dawson snarled.\n\nThat was debatable. Breaking the law entailed a measure of stupidity\u2014or desperation. At least for men. But boys like this could also do it simply for fun, because they were too young and reckless to consider the consequences. Max Dawson was finally going to figure that out.\n\n\"Get up on your knees.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nDegan didn't answer, he just waited. It wasn't his habit to talk this much. Ever. The most he'd said in years to one person had been recently to Tiffany Warren when she'd been masquerading as the Callahans' housekeeper. But then Tiffany had reminded him of so many things he'd given up. And she'd been full of questions, despite how nervous she was around him, so it had been hard not to talk to her.\n\nBut Dawson had been something of a curiosity from the moment Degan had seen him escaping through the brothel window in Helena, so full of exuberance and laughter. A happy outlaw. But again, Degan figured young love accounted for that contradiction.\n\nThe boy finally rolled to his knees. Degan knelt behind him to test the knot that had been tied, then wrapped the rope around Dawson's feet a few more times.\n\n\"Your hands now.\"\n\nA few minutes later he had Dawson effectively hog-tied, with the rope extending from his tied feet to his tied hands, a few loops around his neck, and tied off at his feet again.\n\n\"Do you have any idea how uncomfortable this is?!\" Max yelled furiously when Degan pushed him over so he could lie on his side.\n\n\"Can't say that I do. But then I don't break the law, don't get taken by surprise, and I sure as hell wouldn't be shouting about it like a girl. So shut the hell up, Dawson.\"\n\n\"You're not taking me in right now?\"\n\n\"In the morning. I've barely gotten any sleep these last four days since I started searching for your sorry ass.\"\n\nDegan grabbed the boy's rifle before he left the shack to bring his horse up to it for the night. The palomino would warn him if anyone approached, not that he expected company. If Luella had known where Dawson was staying, she would have been up here to warn him long before now.\n\nReentering the shack, Degan saw the boy was exactly where he'd left him, lying in the bed of leaves, though he'd lifted his feet as high as he could to loosen the pressure of the rope around his neck. He hoped the kid didn't strangle himself before Degan fell asleep. There'd be no danger of that if the kid would just lie still, so Degan wasn't going to loosen those ropes. He sat down and gingerly leaned his back against the wall, afraid the shack might tumble over if he leaned too hard against it. But he was asleep in moments." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "The soft creak of wood woke him. Degan opened his eyes to see Dawson tiptoeing out the door with his saddlebags in hand, coat donned and hat on. Degan's failing to check the pile of leaves the outlaw had been using as a mattress proved just how tired he'd been after tying up his prisoner. Any number of things could have been hidden under it. Obviously another knife.\n\n\"I wouldn't if I were you,\" he growled.\n\nThe boy still did, bolting out the door. Degan swore and gave chase, nearly tripping over the saddlebags that had been dropped just outside the door. He didn't draw his gun even with such a clear target in the moonlight. He'd never shot a man in the back and wasn't going to start now. And he had a feeling Dawson was too desperate to stop for a gun right now, even if it was fired.\n\nThe boy didn't head for his horse. Turning the animal around in the small cave where it was hidden would waste too much time. He was simply running down the hill for freedom, zigzagging through the trees, probably hoping Degan would lose sight of him so he could hide, then double back for his mount. It might have worked. There were enough trees to hide behind. But the kid was short and Degan's legs were long.\n\nHe got a handful of the long doeskin coat that was flapping behind the boy and yanked on it. That should have stopped him, but Dawson slipped his arms out of it, leaving the coat in Degan's hand while he kept on running. Degan tossed it aside and closed the distance between them again. He got his hand on Dawson's vest this time, but damned if the kid didn't do it again, slipping his arms out of it so Degan was left with just the stiff leather\u2014and the sound of the kid's laughter floating back at him. So Dawson had planned that one, unbuttoning the garment as he ran? Incredible! This was starting to feel like a joke with Degan as the punch line.\n\nHe hadn't chased anyone like this since he was a child playing with his younger siblings. Since coming West, he'd never encountered a situation where he had to chase anyone. And his gun could put a stop to this nonsense, but he still didn't draw it. But he wasn't falling for Dawson's tactics again when the kid was probably already unbuttoning his shirt for a third slip.\n\n\"Give it up, fancy man!\" Max yelled without looking back. \"You ain't catching me!\"\n\nDegan tackled the boy to the ground. It probably knocked the breath out of him, considering their weight difference. The kid was so still now it might even have knocked him out. Or was he thinking up some other trick? Degan was done playing children's games.\n\nDawson's tan hat had rolled farther down the hill when they'd hit the ground. Degan got off the boy, grabbing a handful of spiky blond hair, pulling Max to his feet. The kid came up swinging his fists. Degan shoved him back to the ground and, getting down on one knee, held him there at arm's length while he searched for the knife the kid had used to cut the ropes. The boy was resisting with fists and knees now. The fists couldn't reach Degan's face and he barely felt them as they struck his chest, but the knees jabbing him in his side were getting annoying. Then Max changed tactics and just tried to get Degan's hand off his belly, but that didn't work either.\n\n\"I could have slit your throat while you slept but I didn't!\" Max snarled at him.\n\n\"Two points for you, kid.\"\n\n\"For your life? That's a hundred damn points if you ask me!\"\n\n\"I'm not asking.\"\n\nThe knife wasn't in the boy's belt, so it was probably in one of his boots. Degan figured he could either knock the kid out and carry him back to the shack to find it, or risk getting a boot to his face if he removed the boots here. For the trouble Dawson had caused him, he opted for the knockout, and he was in a good position to deliver the blow with one hand still holding Dawson down.\n\nBut Max saw the punch coming and used all he had left to avoid it, trying to turn on his side and covering his head with both arms. With the sudden movement, Degan's palm slid up a few inches and touched something soft.\n\nThat brought him to his feet fast. \"What the...?\"\n\nThe kid was still cowering on the ground\u2014like a girl. Oh, hell no. There had to be a money pouch or something else strapped to Dawson's chest that would account for what he'd felt. He was not dealing with a damn girl.\n\n\"Get up,\" Degan growled.\n\nThe kid did with a wary look. Degan clamped his fingers around the back of Max's neck and, keeping him at arm's length in front of him, walked him back up the hill. Degan didn't collect the discarded garments they passed on the way. His thoughts were bordering on furious, which was pretty damn disconcerting since he hadn't been this angry in years.\n\nHe shoved Max into the shack before he let go. The lantern was still burning, and fear was in Max's dark eyes now. About damn time.\n\n\"This is what is going to happen now,\" Degan said in a low tone. \"You are going to remove your shirt.\"\n\n\"The hell I will!\" Max backed away from Degan until the wall got in the way.\n\n\"If I have to do it, there won't be any buttons left on your shirt. If it's the only shirt you've got, too bad. I'm not interested in you, just what's under your shirt.\"\n\n\"So I've got a pair, so what? You don't need to see them when you already felt\u2014!\"\n\n\"No more pretenses for you or assumptions for me, kid. Show me or I show myself. Your choice.\"\n\nDegan saw a flash of blue in the dark eyes glaring murderously at him. He might have been startled by the appealing hue if he wasn't so angry and frustrated. If Max was a girl, what the hell was he going to do with her?\n\nThe shirt was unbuttoned slowly. If there weren't still murder in her eyes, he'd think she was trying to entice him. She pulled one edge of the black shirt to the side, revealing a breast. It wasn't large, but decently plump and incredibly beautiful to his eyes, which warned him he'd been a fool to go so long without having a woman. She started to uncover the other breast. He must have been staring too long. If she hadn't been trying to seduce him to begin with, she was now. He ought to take her up on the offer, show her what happened when she played with fire. Not that she'd get what she wanted out of it.\n\nHe turned around. \"Cover yourself.\"\n\nWhether she did or didn't, she leapt at his back, slamming both fists into it before yelling, \"Happy now, you son'bitch? Doesn't change a damn thing and you know it!\"\n\nDidn't it? Degan wondered. Maybe not. Max Dawson, female, was still an outlaw wanted for murder and bank robbery. What would John Hayes do under these circumstances? His job, of course, and that was to apprehend and bring in the individual so a court of law could decide the matter of guilt or innocence.\n\nThe fists pounding on his back didn't budge him, and since he was blocking the shack's only exit, he didn't turn around right away to confront her. He'd give her time to button up her shirt and himself time to forget what that shirt was covering. When he did turn, she was pacing back and forth across the shack's measly ten feet of space, kicking the cut ropes, kicking the pile of leaves, the only two things on that side of the shack to kick.\n\nThe lantern was in the front corner to Degan's right, the coil of rope to his left, but she didn't go near them. She was staying away from him now, as far as she could get. It was a good thing he'd brought a long coil of rope. He was going to have to use the rest of it now.\n\n\"Take your boots off.\"\n\nShe stopped to give him another glare before she sat down hard and reached for one of her boots. \"Sure! Why not? This shack doesn't stink enough already?\"\n\nTwo knives fell to the floor when the first boot came off. A third fell with the second boot. Degan shook his head incredulously. He knew one of those knives had been stashed under the leaves. She wouldn't have been able to reach her boots when she'd been tied up. She definitely took precautions, carrying so many weapons.\n\nHe looked at her feet and saw dingy gray socks with holes. He wondered if she ever willingly took her boots off. For that matter, he wondered if she ever bathed. He figured she must because she didn't smell bad. But she obviously hadn't washed in the last day since the rain. Her mud-caked face was like a mask, and not a pretty one. Did she know how she looked? Did she even have a mirror?\n\nHe could see the two curves under her shirt, now that he knew to look for them. That stiff leather vest of hers acted as a corset, flattening and concealing what was under it. He should go pick up her things that were scattered down the hill and get her back into that vest. Yet he was still having trouble coming to terms with there being a female beneath that rough, muddy exterior. His eyes roamed over her. Her loose black shirt was tucked into loose black pants, leaving her waist and hips undefined. She'd chosen the right clothing to hide her womanly shape. He would never have believed Max Dawson was a woman if he hadn't seen her beautiful breasts.\n\nHe picked up the three knives and tossed them outside before he said, \"You can put your boots back on, but stay where you are.\"\n\n\"You're all heart, fancy man,\" she replied scathingly.\n\nHe picked up one of the pieces of rope on the floor, one long enough to bind her hands behind her back. He couldn't bring himself to hog-tie her again, but he knew just tying her hands wasn't enough to prevent her from trying to escape again. So he got the remainder of the coil of rope and wrapped it around her arms and torso to keep her arms confined to her sides. Then he hauled her to the back wall and sat her down so she could lean against it.\n\n\"I take it back,\" she snarled. \"No heart at all.\"\n\n\"Shut up,\" he said tonelessly. \"It's this or I tie you to a tree outside.\"\n\n\"I'll take the tree if it means I don't have to be in this room with you.\"\n\n\"I wasn't offering a choice.\"\n\nHe started to sit next to her so he could finish securing her with the rope, but he reconsidered. If he tied their ankles together, they would be sitting side by side, and once she fell asleep, she might lean against him and rub some of that dried mud on his jacket. He went outside to get his canteen of water. He offered her a drink first, which she took grudgingly, then removed the white bandanna from her neck and thoroughly wet it. She tried to avoid the cloth as it came toward her face, but she didn't have room to maneuver and fell over to her side. He dragged her back up so he could finish.\n\n\"I'll need that back before you take me in.\"\n\nHe held up the bandanna to show her how dirty it was. \"It has to be washed first.\"\n\n\"I don't care what it looks like. I have a specific use for it, and it's not to protect my face during dust storms.\"\n\n\"I can guess.\"\n\n\"No, you can't. I use it to cover up the fact that I don't have a lump in my throat like you do.\"\n\n\"Yes, I've already figured that out. And that lump is called an Adam's apple.\"\n\n\"Like I care what it's called? Just put the bandanna back around my neck.\"\n\n\"You can in the morning when it's dry.\"\n\nHe draped the cloth over the peg in the wall. When he turned back to sit next to her, he paused. He'd done his best not to look at what he'd been cleaning, but it was hard to miss now. He didn't castigate himself for not seeing it sooner. He'd come across too many smooth-skinned, late-blooming boys for a girlish face to have warned him, even if hers hadn't been so dirty. Well, maybe not. With the mud and dirt gone, Max Dawson was a little too pretty now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Max opened her eyes and instantly snapped them shut. She hadn't meant to fall asleep. She had wanted one last chance to escape, not that she had any options left other than to wiggle out of that rope and get her hands on one of the knives her captor had tossed outside. He hadn't woken earlier until she'd almost been out the door. If it hadn't been for those damned creaky boards that were barely nailed together, she would have been free, riding away to Mexico, Noble racing his heart out for her. She knew she should have tossed those boards out when she'd moved in, but she was so tired of sleeping on the ground.\n\nShe missed the cabin she'd found in Colorado. She'd made herself so comfortable there for the first winter she'd been on the run that she'd stuck around until the fall and would have stayed longer if the owner hadn't returned. She missed home, too. She'd been gone nearly two years, and after the wanted posters had started showing up, she'd begun to think she was never going to be able to return. But this fancy dresser was going to send her back to Texas. To hang. And what the hell was he, dressed like a city-slick gambler? All in black except for a white shirt that looked softer than anything she'd ever owned.\n\nHe was a handsome man, maybe a little too handsome. Tall with wide shoulders. His clothes fit him as snugly as if they'd been tailored just for him. He didn't have a beard or a mustache, but some dark stubble was on his face this morning. His wavy, black hair wasn't long, but wasn't real short either. His gray eyes were inscrutable. But she'd heard him laugh that one time, before he'd cut it short, and she'd seen a few frowns, too, but otherwise there had been no sign that he had emotions like normal folks did. But he had the prettiest gun belt and holster she'd ever seen. Silver etching? Who gussied up a gun belt like that unless they just wanted to show off?\n\nThe only men she'd ever seen dressed somewhat like him were fresh in from the East, but greenhorns didn't wear a gun the way he did, as if they knew how to use it. This man was too fancy, too competent, and when he frowned, darn right scary. But she was too angry at getting caught to be wary of him.\n\nHe was still sleeping next to her, back to the wall, his legs slightly bent. When she tried to get up she saw why. Damn! He'd tied their feet together, must have done it the moment she fell asleep. Her legs were stretched out. He couldn't stretch his without pulling her away from the wall. And he'd wake up the moment she tried to move. Or would he? He'd complained about being tired last night. Judging by the light coming in through the open doorway, the sun was barely up, so he still hadn't caught up on much sleep yet.\n\nShe leaned forward to see if she could wiggle her foot out of the boot he'd looped the rope around. The rope was tied tight. She could actually feel it pressing through the leather against her ankle.\n\n\"How old are you, Max?\"\n\nShe flinched slightly, startled by the sound of his voice. \"What month is it?\"\n\nHe snorted as if he doubted that she didn't know. She gnashed her teeth, frustrated that he was already awake. There went her options other than to somehow convince him to let her go. But she wasn't sure she could stop growling at him long enough to do that. He was besting her at every turn. No one had ever done that to her before, not even that old bastard Carl Bingham, who got her into this mess for dying when he shouldn't have died.\n\nShe still didn't know how that had happened. She hadn't met anyone she could trust enough to help her correspond with her grandmother until she'd come to Helena. After becoming friends with Luella, she'd finally written to her grandmother and told her to write back to Luella, who would give the letter to Max. She expected Luella to receive her grandmother's reply any day now. But now she wouldn't get it, thanks to him!\n\nShe was frustrated enough to scream and far too furious to even look at her captor, but since he hadn't said anything since asking about her age and hadn't moved yet, she sat back and volunteered, \"If it's July, I reckon I'm twenty. If not, then I will be soon. Don't have a reason to keep track of days, just seasons. And I haven't seen a newspaper since last year. So why don't you keep your skepticism to yourself, fancy man.\"\n\n\"You toss out a word like skepticism, yet you butcher the English language. Where'd you grow up?\"\n\n\"Texas, and if you send me back there, it will be to die. Will your conscience survive that?\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I have one.\"\n\nHe leaned forward and untied their feet, then stood up. With her hands still tied behind her back and the rope still tied around her arms and torso, she couldn't stand, not without a lot of wiggling, so she stayed where she was. He grabbed her bandanna from the wall and tossed it in her lap, implying he'd be untying her hands so she could put it back on. But he didn't. He stepped outside instead.\n\nShe got to her feet as fast as she could and moved to the doorway. He wasn't in sight. Her knives weren't either. His horse was there, but he'd unsaddled it last night, so she couldn't get on its back without first getting her hands loose. And that coil of rope was still around her. She tried to stretch the rope at her wrists so she could get one hand out of it.\n\n\"Why the assumed name, Max Dawson?\"\n\nShe sighed in disappointment. He'd only gone off to relieve himself. \"I didn't assume nothing. I got named after my pa, Maxwell Dawson, since I was his firstborn and there was no guarantee he'd get a son, though he did a few years later. My name's actually Maxine, but my family always called me Max, and the folks in Bingham Hills where we lived only knew me as Max, so that'd be my guess why that name was put on the wanted posters.\"\n\n\"And that's why you're dressing the part? You didn't once think that wearing a dress would conceal your identity better than any hideout could?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I thought of it. But if it ain't obvious to you, it's actually more dangerous to be a woman alone out here than a man on his own who resembles an outlaw. 'Sides, no one takes a girl who wears a gun seriously. And I like to wear my gun. I'm damn good with it, you know. You're lucky yours was already drawn.\"\n\n\"What about your hair? The poster depicts you with short hair.\"\n\n\"I had it cut short long before I had to leave Texas, but Gran cut it better'n I do. Thought it would make me less appealing so the boys in town would stop sniffing around. But it didn't work.\"\n\nHe nodded as if he agreed that short hair wouldn't have made her less attractive to men. It was a bane to have a face like hers when she didn't want to be noticed. But ever since she'd left home, taking her brother's clothes with her instead of her own, she usually only had to wear her wide-brimmed hat, keep her face smudged with dirt, and introduce herself as Max for people to take her for a pretty-faced boy. Even Luella hadn't guessed and had had to be told on their second meeting.\n\nAs if he'd read her mind, her captor asked, \"All things considered, how would you meet someone like Luella?\"\n\nMax actually grinned. \"Obviously not in the usual way. I rescued her the night I first passed through Helena. She doesn't usually leave that brothel, at least not at night and not alone, but one of the girls was sick. She'd been sent to fetch a doctor, and a trio of rowdy drifters thought they could have their way with her in a back alley. I'd been avoiding the main street m'self, skirting around the backs of the buildings. Otherwise I probably wouldn't have heard her crying.\"\n\nHe raised a black brow. \"You ran off three men? Or you shot them?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"Didn't need to shoot. I might look like a kid, but I'm as dangerous as anyone with a drawn gun. They took off and I escorted Luella back to her brothel. It was the first time I'd ever been in one, so I was curious enough to follow her up to her room when she invited me there. Didn't know she wanted to repay me in her usual fashion. Now that I think back on it, it was kinda funny how fast I got out of there.\"\n\n\"So she doesn't know you're a girl?\"\n\n\"Oh, she does now and keeps my secret, but that night she didn't know. I felt bad though, for leaving her without an explanation, so I went back for a visit later that week after I found this shack. Told her who I really was. It was her night off and we talked all night. Never made a friend that fast before. Heck, she's the only friend I've made since I left home. And once a week, when she has a night off, she lets me sleep in her bed. I surely do miss a soft bed.\" Max ended with a grin.\n\nHe came to stand directly in front of her. Looming over her is what it felt like. She was tall for a woman at five feet eight, which supported her guise as a boy, but he still had a good half foot in height on her. She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of looking up at him and backed up into the shack instead.\n\nHe followed her in and picked up her bandanna, which had fallen from her lap when she got up. She turned around so he could cut the ropes on her wrists. He didn't. He put the bandanna around her neck and tied it himself, which had her gritting her teeth again. Was he just going to leave her vest and coat behind? She couldn't put them back on with her hands and arms tied like this.\n\n\"Why doesn't your wanted poster identify you as a woman?\"\n\nShe shrugged, but he might not have noticed, standing so close to her, so she said, \"That poster comes from Bingham Hills, Texas. It's people there who want me back. Maybe they figured out that offering that much money for a woman would set more'n just bounty hunters and lawmen after me, if you know what I mean. Just a guess, mind you. But I'm glad they left out that little detail for whatever reason\u2014or I might've had to kill someone for real.\"\n\n\"Is that your way of trying to convince me you haven't killed anyone\u2014yet?\" he asked, still standing behind her.\n\n\"Did it work?\"\n\nThe man was mighty curious about her this morning, but he didn't bother to answer that. Instead, he asked, \"What sort of food do you have on hand?\"\n\nShe moved farther away from him. \"Nothing. I've been hunting for food as I need it.\"\n\n\"You've been subsisting only on meat up here?\"\n\nHe sounded hungry. Her desperate, impulsive attempt to seduce him with her body last night hadn't worked, which wasn't surprising considering how dirty and angry she was. And thank goodness, because she hadn't given any thought to what would have happened if she'd succeeded. But food! Her gran was fond of saying that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. She even had some spices left in her saddlebags that she could use to make him something special.\n\nShe turned around and gave him a tentative smile. \"It's not exactly safe for me to go shopping in town for anything else. But I can hunt up something for us if you're hungry. I sure am.\"\n\n\"You and your rifle have parted ways for good\" was all he said.\n\nShe was back to gnashing her teeth. She was not going to try to get on his good side again, not when he obviously didn't have one. She'd have to find some other way to escape while they were carting her to Texas for the trial. If there would even be a trial. Accused of killing the beloved founder of Bingham Hills, who was also the mayor of the town, who supported half the town and owned most of it\u2014no, she probably wouldn't even be given a trial. They'd send her straight to the gallows. And she didn't even shoot that bastard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Unbelievable! Max was fuming. the man was actually pulling her along behind him with that damn rope of his, as if she were an animal! He'd tightened the coil wrapped around her, then tied it off and had the end of it in his fist. He collected her horse first and hobbled it by the shack, then dragged her down the hill with him to collect her coat and vest.\n\nHer hat was nowhere in sight, and after only five minutes he gave up looking for it. Max was livid. He should have gotten her things last night, not waited until the wind blew her hat away!\n\n\"What do they call you, fancy man?\" she gritted out on the way back up the hill. \"I want to know who I'm killing when I get loose.\"\n\n\"Degan Grant,\" he said without glancing back.\n\nMax almost choked. \"Holy cow, the gunfighter?\"\n\nHe didn't confirm it, didn't reply at all, but who would use that name if he didn't have to? Folks were claiming he was the fastest gun there was, but she reminded herself that gossip like that was rarely true. She was fast, likely faster than him. She'd like a chance to prove it.\n\nBack at the shack by the fire pit, he still didn't untie her or even let go of the rope as he saddled his horse, so she still got tugged a little as he did that. All she could do was stand there and watch him. That wasn't entirely unpleasant. With long legs, a lean, hard torso, muscles that pressed against the cloth of his jacket as he worked, Degan Grant was finely put together. Maybe a little too fine. No wonder her impulse had been to try seducing him into letting her go. She might not have minded, after all, if she'd succeeded. A worthy trade\u2014her virginity for her life? She wasn't ready to make that trade yet.\n\nShe wondered if he had a sweetheart in every town he passed through. That funny thought had her grinning, because if he wasn't who he said he was, it could well be true. But if he really was the notorious gunfighter Degan Grant, then it might only be true if he kept that information to himself. What woman would want a man destined to die young? Or one as dangerous as this one was reputed to be? Well, she could understand why a woman would be attracted to a man this handsome, but she couldn't understand why a woman would want to fall in love with him. He was what Gran would call a heartbreaker.\n\n\"You find something amusing about your situation?\" he asked.\n\n\"Hell, no. But I'm usually a good-natured sort. Sometimes I even laugh out loud by my lonesome if something funny pops in up here.\" She meant to tap her head. She made a frustrated sound instead, having forgotten, even only briefly, that she couldn't move her hands. \"But you won't be with me long enough to notice, thank our lucky stars.\"\n\n\"So you're still thinking you can escape?\" His tone was amused even if his expression wasn't.\n\n\"I'm thinking Helena's jail is less than an hour away,\" she snapped.\n\n\"So it is. So what had you grinning?\"\n\nShe was annoyed enough to give him the truth. \"Your name, and your probably having trouble getting a woman once she hears it.\"\n\n\"They don't need to hear it when I reek of death,\" he said tonelessly.\n\n\"Really? Just the look of you sends them running? Now I wouldn't have figured on that.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\" 'Cause that's not what would send me running. You, fancy man, are a death sentence hanging over my head. That's more'n enough reason for me to see the last of you.\"\n\nHe started to unwrap the rope that was binding her arms, coiling it back up as he did it. Then he turned her around, she assumed so he could cut her wrists loose, but he didn't. He took his sweet time untying the rope instead. So he could use that piece of rope again? Damned man thought of everything, didn't he?\n\n\"Do you need to relieve yourself before we leave?\"\n\nShe blinked. \"You'd actually let me go off in the bushes by myself?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe was sure she was going to grind down her teeth from gnashing them while in his company. \"Didn't think so,\" she growled. \"So if it's all the same to you, I'll piss my pants. Better'n having you stand next to me for something like that.\"\n\n\"You can use the shack. You won't be coming back up this way, so it doesn't matter.\"\n\nShe was surprised. He was a gentleman beneath that dangerous veneer? But she didn't give him a chance to change his mind. Shaking the stiffness out of her arms almost brought tears to her eyes. She hurried into the shack while he saddled Noble for her. Her chestnut gelding wasn't skittish. Noble only glanced back at Degan once before ignoring him.\n\nWhen she stepped back outside, she saw her vest and coat draped over the saddle of Degan's horse. Relieved to have her clothes back, she went to put them on, but his horse tried to bite her when she got close to it. Her instinct was to punch its nose, but fancy man probably wouldn't like that, even if she didn't hit hard. So she moved to the animal's head and murmured some soothing words and gave it a few tender rubs until she managed to reclaim her garments.\n\nShe put on her vest and buttoned it, then shrugged into her coat. She didn't usually wear the coat at her camp in the summer. She didn't need such a warm garment. She only donned it when she was going to be around other people, and now she was about to be paraded through town. The more clothing that covered her breasts, the better. She still felt naked without her holstered Colt because she'd been wearing it for so long. Even an empty gun could stop someone in his tracks. But Degan wouldn't be giving it back to her.\n\nGoing over to her horse, she saw Degan standing next to the shed. She laughed. He'd had his own gun drawn and pointed at her the whole time. \"I wasn't going to run off with your horse.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't let you.\"\n\n\"Care to wager?\" she asked with a grin.\n\nHe ignored that and said, \"If you have anything stashed around here, now's the time to mention it.\"\n\n\"Don't own anything worth hiding.\"\n\nOut of habit, she grabbed the cold pan and griddle off the fire pit so she could stuff them back in her saddlebags, which were already on her horse. Then she realized she wouldn't be doing any cooking where she was going. The enormity of what was going to happen in the next hour hit her hard. Jail and then a cage in which she'd be carted all the way to Texas to hang for a killing she didn't do. She'd seen a prisoner transport wagon on the road down in Utah. The cage was tiny.\n\nShe turned and looked at her captor, feeling more desperate than she ever had before. \"Don't do this. You don't need the reward, you know you don't. Let me go!\"\n\nHis gun was still pointed at her, obviously because she wasn't tied and was standing next to her horse. \"You might have avoided the bounty hunters so far, but you have a US marshal after you now. I found you easily and I'm not a tracker. Marshal Hayes is.\"\n\n\"But I'm innocent!\"\n\n\"Then you should be glad you'll have your day in court to prove it.\"\n\n\"There won't be a trial, not if Carl Bingham really did die.\"\n\n\"If?\"\n\nShe snapped her mouth shut. Talking to him was like talking to a jackass, and how was she supposed to explain that a murdered man might not be dead? Degan wasn't going to believe that any more than he would believe that she was innocent. She figured he just didn't care one way or the other. She was just a fat reward to him and a means of settling a favor he owed his marshal friend.\n\n\"All right, I'll come along peacefully if you could just do me one favor?\"\n\n\"I already did you a favor,\" he reminded her. \"I didn't shoot you.\"\n\n\"Well, if you're counting still standing here alive, I didn't slit your throat last night either. But you're going to be getting a ridiculous amount of money for me, so the least you could do is one tiny favor for me first.\"\n\nShe squeezed out a few tears to help her plea, but he merely raised a black brow. \"Don't bother, tears have no effect on me.\"\n\nHe didn't display any disgust at her effort to manipulate him. No amusement either. Was he really so dead inside from his line of work that he'd lost the ability to feel? Not her, and she grinned now to show it. \"Well that's a relief. I detest them m'self. Had to try though, you understand?\"\n\n\"Certainly.\"\n\n\"But here's the thing. It's been nearly two years since I left home and I haven't heard how my family is in all that time. Nor was I able to let them know I'm still alive. The one time I snuck back, there were deputies at our house, so I couldn't get close enough to talk to my grandmother. I even waited in the woods for my brother to go hunting, but some other men from town showed up instead, so I couldn't linger there when Johnny might not come that way at all. He never liked hunting like I do. I couldn't risk sending a letter with my name on it to Bingham Hills either, or have one sent back to me, and I never met anyone I could trust to do it for me\u2014until now.\"\n\nStill pointing his gun at her with one hand, he quickly unhobbled her horse with the other. \"I don't stay in one place long enough to receive letters, and you likely won't be in Helena long enough to receive one either. Mount up.\" He took her reins.\n\n\"I wasn't asking for you to do it. Luella's the first friend I've made since I left Texas. She sent my letter off well over a month ago. I expected her to have my grandmother's reply the other day when I visited her. She didn't, but she could have it now. Can we at least stop by her place to see if she's got that letter for me\u2014and give me a chance to say good-bye to her?\"\n\nHe didn't say yes, but he didn't say no either, so she held her tongue as they started down the hill. She was surprised he hadn't retied her for the ride into town and that he thought holding her reins was enough to keep her behind him. Maybe it was, but she was still thinking of ways to get around that. If she spurred her horse forward into a gallop to pass him, the reins would be ripped from his hold\u2014if he was still holding them. He might have tied them to his pommel instead. She couldn't tell with his broad back in front of her. Of course her back would make a large target. Or he might shoot her horse instead.\n\nAs if Noble could read her mind, she leaned forward to rub his neck and whisper, \"Don't worry, I won't do anything to bring bullets our way.\" She wouldn't mind sending them toward Degan though.\n\nHe'd attached her rifle to her saddle, probably because he didn't have a ring for it on his saddle. Gunfighters didn't bother with rifles, and she would bet her horse that Degan Grant had never needed one to hunt his own food. He probably stopped to eat in every town he came to, while she'd had to avoid most towns. She was so sure the rifle was empty that she didn't even bother to check it. But she leaned back carefully to check the saddlebag where she kept her extra ammunition. Her hand came out empty. He'd even thought of that! But she could ride close enough to him to bash him over the head with the rifle...\n\n\"Get your hat and make no mistake. I'm not going to kill you, but I don't have the least qualm about putting a bullet in your leg if you try to run again.\"\n\nMax looked down at the ground and saw her hat lying there between them. She hadn't been looking for it, but he must have been. She quickly retrieved it and remounted. They were nearly out of the hills. The sun had already topped the Big Belt range to the east and she was hungry. She wondered how long she'd have to wait for a meal in jail.\n\nDamnit! She'd done so well avoiding people other than the farmers with whom she'd traded fresh game for vegetables, herbs, and ammunition. Degan might think she only ate meat and berries, but she didn't. She knew how to get by on her own, but it wasn't always so easy to cope with the loneliness that came with it. That was why she'd relaxed her guard in Helena. Because she'd been so happy to make a friend. And she'd stayed there longer than she should have.\n\nDegan rode them into town the way she usually entered it. He might even pass by Luella's brothel. Might. She tried not to get her hopes up. But if he did and he didn't stop, she was definitely hopping off her horse. He might not notice before she was through the door of Madam Joe's.\n\nBut he stopped, dismounted, and tied the two horses to the post out front. Incredulous, Max dismounted slowly, too slowly. He grabbed the shoulder of her coat and shoved her through the brothel's front door. She started toward the stairs, but glanced back to see that Degan was still standing by the door. She gave him a questioning look.\n\nHe nodded at her. \"Five minutes, kid. If I regret this favor, you won't like it.\"\n\nHe was actually going to wait there in the parlor for her? Ecstatic, Max raced upstairs. Escape was just around the corner!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Max didn't close the door to Luella's room quietly. She meant to, but she rushed into the room too fast. But at least the noise woke Luella. She rolled over in bed, started to smile, but ended up wide-eyed instead.\n\n\"What's wrong? You don't usually\u2014\"\n\n\"I need to borrow your gun.\"\n\nLuella nodded toward her bureau. \"Top drawer, but where's yours?\"\n\n\"It got taken\u2014when I got taken. Someone snuck up on me and I only have a minute to get out of here, or he's taking me to jail.\"\n\n\"Oh, God, the gunfighter? He found you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"But I sent him toward Big Belt! I was sure he'd be up there for weeks looking for you, so I'd have time to warn you when you visited next week.\"\n\n\"I guess he didn't trust you any more'n he trusts me.\" Max stuffed the little derringer in her coat pocket.\n\nLuella had leapt out of bed and opened a few more drawers. \"At least let me give you a change of clothes. You're a mess.\"\n\nMax chuckled, picturing herself riding away in her friend's scanty attire. \"There's no time, Lue, except for this.\"\n\nShe gave Luella a quick hug that turned into a long one instead. She was going to miss this girl something fierce. And she'd be crying in a moment if she didn't get out of there. With a last squeeze, she turned and headed for the window.\n\n\"Don't do anything stupid, Max. That gunfighter looked far too dangerous.\"\n\n\"I won't have to if I'm quick. I'll get the gun back to you when I can, after I'm sure he's left the area.\"\n\nMax was halfway out the window when Luella called out, \"Wait! This came yesterday.\"\n\nLuella grabbed the letter from her nightstand and rushed over with it. Max stuffed it into her other coat pocket with a big grin. \"Thanks. If it's good news, maybe I can actually go home now.\"\n\n\"I'll miss you,\" Luella whispered sadly, but Max was already sliding down the porch roof.\n\nShe swung over it on the side where she usually did, dangled for a moment, then dropped to the ground. And froze. Degan was standing there between her and the horses, less than a foot away. Her last damn chance to get away from him and he had to second-guess her again?\n\n\"Don't pat yourself\u2014\" She was reaching for the gun in her pocket, until she noticed his gun was already drawn, so she finished, \"Go ahead then, pat yourself on the back. Just tell me how you knew?\"\n\n\"If you'd spared a little thought before you jumped in with both feet, you would already have that answer. Do you think I questioned everyone in town to find out which brothel you visit and which window you like to leave from?\"\n\n\"You saw me?!\" she yelled. \"Then why didn't you stop me the other day?\"\n\n\"Because Marshal Hayes hadn't yet called in the favor I owe him. I merely saw a happy kid leaving a\u2014friend.\"\n\nEmbarrassment was added to the other furious emotions churning inside her. \"Why'd you even let me go up there alone? Just to test me?\"\n\n\"I guess I'd be disappointed right about now if that were the case.\"\n\n\"Is that a joke? As if you can feel anything. Tell me you wouldn't have done the same thing in my situation? Go on, tell me!\"\n\n\"Exiting through an upstairs window wouldn't be my first choice, no, but then I have other tools at my disposal that you don't have.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, it was my only choice.\"\n\n\"You got the favor you asked for. How about we leave it at that? But you came out of there with more than you went in with. I'll take whatever weapon you collected from your friend.\"\n\n\"I didn't.\" Max took a step back.\n\n\"That's a bad habit you have, lying.\"\n\nHe grabbed her coat and reached into the pocket. She hit him with both fists. He still got his hand on the derringer as well as the undergarments that Luella had apparently slipped into her pocket when they were hugging good-bye. Max didn't blush as he stuffed it all into his own pocket. She landed a punch to his cheek instead, then swore, sure that she'd hurt her hand more than she'd hurt him. But it must have been the last straw for him, because he tossed her over his shoulder.\n\nShe was so surprised she was rendered speechless. For a moment. But then she screeched, squirmed, flailed, and punched his back, but her blows didn't seem to bother him, so she gave up and used her hands to keep her hat from falling off.\n\n\"If you keep wiggling, everyone will figure out you're a girl,\" she heard him say in that deep, infuriatingly toneless voice of his.\n\n\"Like that matters now!\"\n\n\"Well, then, you'll just look like a fool, won't you?\"\n\nShe went still. He must have grabbed the horses' reins because she heard them following him as he walked her down the street like that for what seemed like two, maybe even three humiliating blocks. Every time she tried to lean up to see where he was going, he bounced her on his shoulder so she lost her breath and the will to try again. As if she didn't know where he was going. She wasn't exactly sure where the sheriff's office was, but she couldn't believe he was really going to deposit her there like this.\n\nHe entered a building. She heard people talking, then an abrupt silence. Degan slowly slid her down the front of his body, a little too slowly. Suddenly she became aware of him as a man, rather than just an adversary. Feeling all of his muscular chest rubbing against hers as if they were hugging, smelling his hair and neck, she found his nearness highly disconcerting. She wasn't used to being this close to a man.\n\nShe gasped as she felt Degan's hands move slowly over her derriere, then the back of her waist. His touch was so intimate her stomach fluttered and her breath quickened. Then she realized what he'd been doing. Checking for weapons!\n\n\"You could've just asked,\" she said as her feet finally touched the floor.\n\n\"Asking doesn't work with you.\" He gave her a nudge backward. Breath suspended, she thought she might land on her backside, but she landed in the chair he'd pushed her toward. She huffed until she glanced around and realized they were in a restaurant. Nine people were there having breakfast. They started talking again, and she noticed they made a point of not looking at Degan. Three of them even got up and hurried out of the one-room establishment. A few of them were staring at her. Oh, sure, nothing to fear about her.\n\nShe slid her chair up to the table and cheekily asked, \"You buying? 'Cause I'm broke.\"\n\nHe hadn't sat down yet. \"Take your boots off.\"\n\n\"Again?!\"\n\n\"You were right, it was a mistake letting you go to your friend's room alone.\"\n\n\"I swear\u2014!\"\n\n\"It's already been established that you lie. You just did so again when you said you're broke. I saw the money in your saddlebag.\"\n\n\"That's not mine. I could be starving to death and I wouldn't spend that money.\"\n\n\"A bit extreme,\" he replied drily, then nodded at her feet. \"Just remove the boots, shake them out, then put them back on. You don't eat until you do.\"\n\nShe mumbled a few things under her breath but shoved her chair back and did as ordered. She was amazed he was going to feed her before turning her over to the sheriff. She supposed she should be grateful, but she couldn't quite manage to see him as anything but her worst nightmare, and you didn't thank nightmares for tormenting you.\n\nWhen she slid up to the table again, he walked around behind her and took her hat off. She started to protest but saw him remove his black hat, too, and hook both of them to the coatrack in their corner. The \"gentleman\" in him was showing again. Her grandmother had always swatted her younger brother's hat off, before letting Johnny sit down to dinner. Max knew her brother only kept it on to get a rise out of Gran. God, she missed those two. They were all she had left in the way of family.\n\nShe reached for the letter in her pocket. But as much as she was dying to find out what Gran had written, it was too personal to read in front of this coldhearted gunfighter. It might make her cry, real tears. She was not going to let this man know that sometimes she could be\u2014soft.\n\nDegan ran a hand through his dark hair before he returned to the table. Max didn't bother to do the same. She knew her hair was beyond salvation. She didn't even own a comb anymore. Hers had broken long ago and she'd never gotten around to replacing it.\n\nHe still hadn't sat down. \"I'll take your coat, too.\"\n\n\"Now that ain't hap\u2014\"\n\n\"It's warm in here. And you no longer need to hide what you are, or hasn't that occurred to you yet?\"\n\nConsidering what he'd just made her feel as she'd slid down his body, she snapped, \"Yeah, I do, and don't you be thinking of me like that.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Like I'm a girl.\"\n\nHe said nothing, but he did roll his eyes. At least she was sure he would have if he could unbend enough to show what he was feeling. But he didn't press the issue and sat down to her right in the chair that faced both doors to the room. Cautious no matter where he was? Or just always expecting trouble? Probably the latter, considering that every inch of him screamed that he was a gunfighter.\n\nHe summoned a waiter and ordered for both of them without asking her what she wanted. She didn't care. It had been so long since she had sat down in a restaurant, she'd be happy with whatever was served.\n\n\"Tell me why you think you're innocent.\"\n\nMax went still and stared at him. He'd already implied it wouldn't matter if she was innocent or not, that his job was only to bring her in, not to decide her fate. So why would he even ask that when he didn't believe anything she said?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "\"You toying with me, fancy man? We both know you don't give a hoot what set me on this road.\" Max clamped her mouth shut after saying that. If Degan's upbringing required him to engage in polite conversation at a dining table, he could find some other subject to bedevil her with.\n\n\"Is that what you're going to tell the jury at your trial, Miss Dawson?\"\n\n\"Don't call me that,\" she hissed at him. \"And I told you, there won't be a trial. The people in that town just want me back so they can hang me.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Because Carl Bingham, the man I'm accused of murdering, was the founder of Bingham Hills, the owner of it, the mayor of it, and everyone's best friend\u2014'cept mine. But with him being the landlord of all or most of the people in town, and a benevolent one to boot, everyone loved him. Actually, even I used to admire him. It took guts to build a town so far from any others and with the closest fort over a day's ride away, then just hope he could fill it up with people. Course Carl advertised back East and didn't go broke waiting for folks to show up. He was already rich when he came to Texas, so he wasn't looking to get richer\u2014maybe he was since he kept building the town bigger. He was looking to leave a legacy behind, a peaceful, self-sufficient town in what used to be a not-so-peaceful place. Most folks think he succeeded.\"\n\n\"So why did you kill him?\"\n\nShe gave him a pointed stare. \"You want to hear this or not?\" He didn't answer and his gaze was a lot more pointed than hers was, so she grudgingly continued, \"Life was good in Bingham Hills while I was growing up. I had lots of friends, the boys and girls I went to school with, and we had fun hunting, fishing, and riding. I even enjoyed our sewing circle though I was terrible with a needle, but we did more gossiping than sewing and laughed a lot. But it all changed when I turned sixteen because the boys in town wouldn't leave me alone. I'd filled out by then and had long blond hair. I told you why I cut it, but I couldn't do much to disguise my other attributes\"\u2014his gaze moved down to her vest, bringing a slight blush to her cheeks\u2014\"because Gran insisted I dress properly in skirts and blouses except when I was hunting. The boys were paying me so much attention that my girlfriends got jealous and stopped talking to me. Gran took a broom to the boys more'n once, and my brother, Johnny, would hide in the bushes and shoot rocks at them with his slingshot. Even that didn't stop them from coming around.\"\n\n\"So you didn't always wear a gun?\"\n\n\"Goodness, no. I never would have dreamed of wearing a Colt over my skirts\u2014then.\" She chuckled for a moment. \"I was the hunter in the family after my pa took off and never came back. I never carried my rifle in town, but I started carrying a small gun in my skirt pocket when Bingham junior became more aggressive than the other boys and began making inappropriate remarks and advances to me after I turned sixteen.\"\n\n\"The mayor?\"\n\n\"No, his son, Evan. I used to go fishing with him and his best friend, Tom, when we were kids, until the day Evan bragged that I'd be marrying him someday because his pa told him I would. I didn't believe the mayor had said any such thing, but I avoided Evan and his friends after that. Then he started asking me to marry him. That year, he must've asked about eight times. I wouldn't have said yes even if I wasn't courting the new young man in town at the time.\"\n\n\"Doing what?\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"Do I really need to explain courting to you?\"\n\n\"I think maybe you do.\"\n\n\"I don't mean I would've asked Billy Johnston to marry me, if that's what you're thinking. I'm bold but not that kind of bold. I just let him know I was interested, saved my smiles just for him, that sort of thing. But Billy left Bingham Hills before I was seventeen, and then the mayor himself asked me to marry him. I probably shouldn't have laughed at the old coot's proposal.\"\n\nDegan raised a brow. \"Just how old was this man?\"\n\n\"Heck, he's older than my grandmother by some ten years. Even she laughed when I told her about it. Carl had Evan real late in life. Rumor is he went through four wives trying for a kid till he finally got one. But after I refused him, he must've figured that compromising me would get Gran to insist on a wedding.\"\n\n\"Did it?\"\n\n\"I said he figured it would, not that he actually succeeded. But he sure did try, the bastard. He had his puppet of a sheriff take me to his house late one morning. He even got rid of most of his servants for the day 'cept for his half-deaf cook, who wouldn't hear me yelling. I wouldn't have known the cook was in the house if Carl didn't tell me I could stay for lunch after we were done and that the meal would be ready soon. I think he really expected me to be civil afterward, as if his compromising me were just ordinary business for him. But after some tussling on his sofa, I managed to get my little gun out of my pocket so he'd back off. I even shoved it in his gut so he'd know just how serious I was.\"\n\n\"Then you did shoot him?\"\n\n\"No, but I sure as hell would have. It turned out my brother, Johnny, saw the sheriff dragging me to Bingham's house and followed us. Johnny waited until the sheriff left, then started looking through the windows. What he saw through one of them was Carl trying to force himself on me. But no one died that day. At least Carl was still alive when I left him. And I didn't even shoot him\u2014my brother did through the open window, trying to protect me. But Carl looked down and saw the blood and fainted like a girl. So he probably thought I did fire at him. I was hoping he would think it. I wasn't going to let him have my brother arrested for his good deed. I took off so I'd get blamed for it.\"\n\n\"Which obviously worked.\"\n\n\"Yeah, blamed for a flesh wound on his shoulder, which is all it was and barely bleeding at that. I checked, just to make sure he wouldn't bleed out before someone found him. I was just going to give Carl some time to cool off about the whole incident and come to his senses, maybe marry another young woman, and not blame me for trying to defend myself. But he or his son sent a posse after me. It took me months to lose them. Carl paid well when he wanted something bad. His son, Evan, is just like him. But before the year was out a bounty hunter found me and showed me the wanted-for-murder poster.\"\n\n\"How'd you get out of that?\"\n\nThe waiter arrived with their breakfast so she didn't answer. She couldn't take her eyes off those plates piled high with flapjacks and sausage and the basket filled with toasted sourdough slices and flaky pastries. She was too hungry not to start eating right away and have her plate half-cleaned before she got around to saying, \"I was wearing a six-shooter by then, but the bounty hunter got me to drop my gun. So I convinced him he'd made a mistake by showing him that I was a girl.\"\n\n\"The same way you showed me?\"\n\nHer cheeks reddened. She knew he'd felt her breast when he'd been about to punch her last night. He hadn't needed her to show him. She flushed with heat every time she thought of it, and the instinctive, seductive way she'd shown off her breasts to him. It was so embarrassing. Which was why she was glaring at Degan when she said, \"No, I just had to flirt with the man a little and take off my vest so he could see I wasn't trying to bluff him. My vest, not my shirt. Then I asked him nicely to get the hell out of my camp. I made sure he wasn't following me when I took off.\"\n\n\"You're lying again.\"\n\nShe sat back with a huff. \"Why would I lie about something I didn't have to volunteer?\"\n\n\"Showing him you were a girl wouldn't have changed a bounty hunter's mind when your likeness on that poster is so good.\"\n\nShe grinned cheekily. \"It is, ain't it? On this new poster anyway. This whole episode with the bounty hunter took place over a year ago, and the poster he had wasn't nearly as detailed. The sketch looked like every other immature eighteen-year-old boy. But even after I saw the bounty hunter's reward poster, I still couldn't believe Carl had died from that flesh wound Johnny gave him.\"\n\n\"Wounds can fester.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I know, but Carl would have had the town's best doctors taking care of him. Whether he's dead or alive, I can't go back home now because they'll hang me for sure.\"\n\n\"And in the meantime you took up bank robbery to get by?\"\n\n\"Now that was a joke,\" she grumbled with a snort. \"I was packed up, ready to ride out that day. I stopped at the bank to take my own money out of it, all sixty-four dollars I'd earned from selling meat in town to whoever wanted it. Bingham Hills only had one bank. Carl owned that, too, of course. Wilson Cox ran it for him. It was too small for more'n one employee, so when Wilson took a break to eat lunch, there was no one to help the customers. He didn't bother to close shop though. He likely assumed everyone in town knew better than to try to do any banking at noon. But how was I to know that? I didn't go to the bank often. I walked in and asked for my money. Wilson refused to help me. We argued. He wouldn't budge. He was going to make me stand there and wait for a half hour when he was sitting right there in front of the cash drawer!\"\n\n\"So you robbed the bank.\"\n\n\"No, I did not! But I took out my little gun and told Wilson he could stop eating for two minutes and hand me my money. He stuffed it in a sack and threw it at me, he was so annoyed. Like I wasn't furious at his orneriness? It wasn't until a week later when I emptied the sack that I found an extra hundred and three dollars in it. He couldn't just give me what I asked for, no. In his haste he put my money in a sack that contained someone else's money. The mistake was on his part, probably because he just wanted me gone so he could get back to his lunch.\"\n\n\"Is this the money in your saddlebag that you refuse to spend?\"\n\n\"Yeah, and I'll be giving it back, every damn dollar\u2014-someday.\"\n\n\"You were right. It's laughable\u2014if it actually happened that way.\"\n\n\"It did, so why aren't you laughing?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. Obviously, he didn't believe anything she'd just told him. Not that it would have made a difference if he did. He'd already made it clear that it wasn't his job to decide her fate, merely to turn her over to the law so others could.\n\nHe stood and grabbed their hats. \"Time to go.\"\n\nShe didn't budge. This was it. The sheriff couldn't be more'n a block or two away. Would Degan shoot her right there in front of witnesses if she tried one more time to run?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "\"Whatever you're thinking, kid, stop thinking it. Yes, I will donate a bullet to your leg, and, yes, I will do it right here\u2014in case you were wondering.\"\n\n\"So now you're a mind reader, too?\" Max growled up at Degan.\n\nHe tossed some money on the table and nodded toward the front door. \"We're stopping by my hotel first, so how about you behave and I won't have to put you over my shoulder again to get there.\"\n\nAnother reprieve? Max got up, started to walk to the door, but didn't feel like getting yanked around anymore today, so she stopped to wait for Degan, only to have him bump into her back because he'd already been right on her heels. She heard an aggravated sigh. Oh my God, she'd annoyed him? His emotions could get ruffled? She would have grinned if he weren't throwing her in jail today. Fat lot of good it did her to know he was susceptible to some needling when they would be parting ways shortly.\n\nHe didn't have them mount up, he just picked up the reins before leading her down the street. It was more crowded in the late morning, mostly with miners, but there were businessmen, too, and cowboys riding by. Delivery wagons were being unloaded in front of stores, and women with baskets on their arms were doing their morning shopping. Glancing around, Max noticed that she was drawing no attention, but Degan sure was. People were eyeing him covertly. She chalked it up to human nature that people were so curious about someone as menacing as him.\n\nHe stopped at a stable in the next block and paid to have both horses brushed and fed. While that might not take long, Max still viewed it as another delay for her. She was pleased until she realized the jail could be really close now. In fact, she might not be seeing her horse again. Ever. She hugged Noble's neck one last time and whispered her apologies in case that proved true. They'd been through a lot together. He'd gotten her out of a lot of close calls... Damnit, she didn't want to say good-bye to him!\n\n\"You think they'll let Noble tag along even\u2014?\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"My horse.\"\n\n\"Nice name.\"\n\n\"I gave it to him for encouragement.\" Then she added in a whisper so Noble wouldn't hear, \"He was a mite clumsy when he was younger. But will they let him tag along even if they stick me in a backbreaking cage for that trip to Texas?\"\n\nHe handed her saddlebags to her, but paused to stare at her, probably because she'd just sounded hopeful and chagrined at the same time. While she never tried to hide her emotions and was pretty darn clear about what she was feeling, Degan's gaze was as inscrutable as ever. \"I believe you're talking about prison transports. You haven't been convicted yet.\"\n\n\"Then how will they take me to Texas?\"\n\nHe shrugged and tossed his own saddlebags over his shoulder. \"By train, stage, or horse would be my guess. You can be shackled while using two of those means of transportation. Worried?\"\n\n\"I was worried about my back, yeah. It'll be broken by the end of that long trip. You can't stand up in those cages, you know.\"\n\nHe didn't reply because he simply didn't care. Why would he? She was nothing to him but money in his pocket, and a damn lot of it, too. She was going to make him rich today if he wasn't already.\n\nHis hotel was across the street from the stable. Stepping into it was like stepping into another world. Suddenly, she was surrounded by plush velvet sofas and chairs, carved tables with fancy flower vases on them, huge paintings, shiny marble floors, lit chandeliers! Max looked around with wide eyes as Degan pulled her toward the lobby desk. She'd thought that she would be making him rich with her reward, but he had to be rich already to stay in an elegant hotel such as this.\n\n\"Mr. Grant,\" the hotel clerk said politely, \"a telegram was delivered for you.\"\n\nThe man eyed Max a little too curiously after he handed Degan the piece of paper. She wondered if he'd seen her wanted posters around town, or if he was just too formal and polite to question Degan about his scruffy cowboy companion. She was standing close enough to Degan to be able to read the telegram as he read it. A Pinkerton detective was requesting a meeting tomorrow afternoon about a confidential matter.\n\n\"Friend of yours?\" she asked, tapping the paper.\n\n\"No, it's probably related to the work I'm doing for Marshal Hayes. He mentioned the Pinkertons were investigating train robberies.\" Degan almost sounded annoyed when he added, \"He wasn't supposed to tell his superiors that I was temporarily taking over for him while he's away. It appears that he did anyway.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Or maybe they think you've become a\u2014\" He glanced at her so sharply she didn't finish, admitting instead, \"Okay, bad joke. Besides, the railroads would go out of business if you started robbing\u2014\" His look turned so dark she flinched this time. \"I'll just shut up now.\"\n\nShe was surprised to hear him request that hot water be delivered to his room, but didn't comment on it. Talking to him was actually more aggravating than not talking to him. And she'd been doing far too much of that. She supposed it was nervous chatter. He did make her a little nervous, but only because she couldn't figure him out. With most folks, you had plenty of warning about what they might do. With Degan Grant, you just got surprised.\n\nBut on the way up to his room she began to wonder about that hot water. Was he was going to have a bath before delivering her to jail? That would definitely be odd. Or was he that fastidious? Actually, as polished as his appearance was, she wouldn't be surprised if he was the sort who had to have a bath every day no matter what, and he'd probably missed a day or two while searching for her in the hills. So he might just feel he couldn't wait another minute to get cleaned up. She wished he'd said so, so she could've laughed at him.\n\nShe used to be like that\u2014once upon a time. Now she didn't have that luxury and had gotten used to the grime. But as they neared his room on the second floor, she didn't feel like laughing. She was getting quite nervous. Was he going to strip down in front of her? What if he ordered her to scrub his back? That would mean she'd have to put her hands on that hard, strong, strapping body of his! She couldn't, wouldn't. She'd been disconcerted enough when he'd slid her down his body at the restaurant. What could he be thinking, bathing with her in the room?\n\nMax froze as he opened the door. Now would be the time to run, but as if he'd read her mind, he put his hand on her back and gave her a little push inside. The room was nice, but then it was one of the biggest hotels Max had ever seen, so that wasn't surprising. A large bed with a beautiful burgundy brocade cover, two stuffed chairs in a dark rose material with a low table between them, a small desk, a large wardrobe, and a soft carpet underfoot. If his valise weren't already in the room, she would have thought he hadn't been in it until now, it was so neat and clean. She set her saddlebags down and went over to one of the two windows. They both faced the street, with no porch roof below them for her to hop out on. Damn.\n\nTurning around, she watched Degan stripping the bed of what had appeared to be clean bedding. He crossed the room to drop the whole bundle in the hall outside his door. She raised a brow at him when he turned back around, but he wasn't interested in giving her an explanation. He did leave the door open though. If he would just move farther into the room, she could make a mad dash for it...\n\nThen the water arrived, four buckets carried by two young men, who emptied them in the tub behind a screen in the corner. That was fast, Max thought. But they weren't done. A few minutes later, they were back with another four buckets. She figured the water source had to be closer than downstairs. They left one bucket full for rinsing, then asked Degan if he needed anything else. He shook his head and closed the door after them before giving her his full attention.\n\n\"Get undressed.\"\n\n\"I don't think so.\" She crossed her arms over her chest.\n\n\"I wasn't giving you a choice.\"\n\nHer heart began to pound in alarm as he stepped away from the door. He wanted her to bathe before he bedded her! That's why he'd stripped off the covers, so there'd be no evidence on the bed after he...\n\nShe made a desperate dash to the door only to feel his arm lock around her waist before she could reach it. She twisted around and started punching him, but fell back on the bed when he gave her a light push toward it.\n\n\"If you don't take your clothes off, I'll help you take them off, but one way or another, they're coming off.\"\n\nBlue eyes wide, she watched him lock the door, shrug out of his jacket, and lay it neatly over a chair, then start walking toward the bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Max only had moments to decide her fate\u2014if she could stop panicking long enough to think. Degan obviously wanted her, so why couldn't she turn this to her advantage and make a deal with him, her virginity for her freedom? She scrambled over the bed to stand on the other side to give herself a few more seconds. Could she do it without his realizing how scared she was? She had to at least try.\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"I can undress myself,\" she said with a flirtatious smile as she cocked her hip and began unbuttoning her shirt.\n\nHe raised an eyebrow at her. \"You're going to try that again?\"\n\nMax froze and felt her cheeks turning red. She was so embarrassed she'd misinterpreted his intentions that she was actually speechless.\n\n\"The bath is for you,\" he continued as if he hadn't noticed how mortified she was. \"You can get undressed behind the screen.\"\n\nAll this over a bath she would love to have? But he had to have a reason and not the one she'd mistakenly presumed. \"Why do you want me cleaned up? Are you afraid you won't get the reward if you turn me in dirty?\"\n\n\"Have you looked in a mirror?\"\n\nShe knew how filthy she was, but she wasn't going to blush again. She lifted her chin stubbornly. \"I'm not bathing with you in the room.\"\n\nHe started to come around the bed. She rolled across it again and ran for the screen in the corner. And gnashed her teeth when she heard him say, \"Toss your clothes out here before you get in the tub.\"\n\nShe yanked her boots off, leaned around the screen, and threw them at him. Only one struck him in that wide chest of his. But she caught the frown before she ducked behind the screen again.\n\n\"Maybe I need to check you for weapons again.\"\n\n\"No! You don't!\"\n\nShe'd never undressed so fast, tossing each piece of clothing over the screen, even her drawers, socks, and belts. She wasn't going to give him an excuse to come back here to check that she'd done as he'd ordered. It had been over a year since she'd splurged on a room to get a decent bath. She was not going to fight him anymore over this one when she would have thanked him for it if she didn't hate him so much. Actually, she didn't hate him at all, she just hated that he'd caught her and was going to be the death of her.\n\nA short, narrow table was next to the little tub. It held towels and jars of creamy soap. No rough, homemade soap bars for this fine hotel. She opened one of the towels to see how big it was and snorted to herself. It was soft, but not even big enough to wrap around her.\n\nShe heard the door close and then the distinct sound of a key turning in the lock. She peeked around the screen. He'd actually left her alone in the room. But glancing around the room, she saw that he'd taken everything with him, their saddlebags, her clothes, even his valise, leaving her nothing but tiny towels to cover herself with. But more to the point, he'd left her nothing that she could use to make an improvised rope to aid her in escaping out the window. Now she knew why he'd removed perfectly clean bedding.\n\nHe'd taken every precaution, as if he'd done this before, yet he'd said he wasn't a bounty hunter. He was just too damn smart, preparing for all possibilities. And she drew the line at running through town naked even if she could inch her way along the ledge to an open window. But then, she'd probably fall and die in the attempt, so she wasn't going to try.\n\nInstead, she got into the tub and sank down in it with a dreamy smile. At times when she'd been on the move weeks would go by before she found a decent watering hole to bathe in. There'd been a couple of ponds in the hills by her shack where she'd gotten water for her and her horse, but they weren't secluded enough to bathe in, so she'd been riding over to the big lake to the east every few days to bathe and wash her clothes. But it wasn't an ideal bathing experience, especially since she had to ride back to the shack dripping wet.\n\nShe scrubbed herself from top to bottom. She couldn't even remember the last time she'd felt this clean. And her head! The soap that she toted around with her might get her and her clothes clean, but it irritated her scalp something fierce, so she'd stopped soaping her hair long ago. But merely dousing her head in water when she bathed didn't leave her hair feeling clean. Not like this. Already it was mostly dry, and the slightest shake of her head had her hair floating around it. She even stood up to watch it float in the oval mirror above the shaving stand. And laughed.\n\nShe was feeling a little kindly toward Degan for this gift he'd given her. Just a little\u2014okay, maybe just not annoyed with him for the moment, though she was still wary.\n\n\"Did you fall asleep in there?\" Degan asked.\n\nHearing that and her saddlebags slide across the floor toward her brought her back to the hard facts of her situation, that it was time to go\u2014to jail.\n\nMax turned her head toward Degan's voice. \"No, I was just waiting for my clothes.\" But when she saw that the bags hadn't quite made it to her side of the screen, she realized he might try to fix that and quickly yelled, \"I'll get them!\"\n\nShe stepped out of the tub, dried herself fast, and stuck just an arm around the screen to drag the bags back to her. Pulling out her only other set of clothes, she saw her chemise at the bottom of the bag. It was soft, finely made, and delicate, so she didn't wear it often, but in case they confiscated her bag at the jail she wanted to have her best clothes on her.\n\n\"I forgot these,\" she heard Degan say before Luella's under-garments came flying over the screen. She just managed to catch them before they landed in the tub of water. She'd forgotten, too, that he'd grabbed more than the derringer out of her coat pocket. She put the bloomers on, but she was blushing because Degan had seen how silky they were, had even held them in his hands.\n\nShe finished dressing and stepped out of the bathing corner carrying her bags and a clean pair of socks. Degan's eyes followed her. She didn't have to look at him to feel it. The rest of her clothes had been laid on the stripped bed, her boots on the floor by it. She grabbed the boots and went over to a chair to put them on. She wasn't sitting on that bed for any reason. Just the sight of it reminded her of what a fool she'd been to try seducing him again. The man was impervious to her charms. So be it. She'd rather escape anyway and thumb her nose at him\u2014after she was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "\"It doesn't look so badly butchered now.\"\n\nMax blushed slightly. Degan's remark about her hair proved he had been staring at her and still was. But she took a leaf from his book and didn't reply.\n\nShe had deliberately kept her eyes off him as she crossed the room. She glanced his way now and saw him folding the screen and leaning it against the wall. She found that odd until he stopped in front of the shaving stand near the tub. His hair was wet, so apparently he'd bathed. But he hadn't yet shaved. She realized he'd moved the screen so nothing would be blocking his view of the rest of the room\u2014and her\u2014while he finished grooming himself.\n\nShe casually walked to the door while he was busy in the corner. She had to check. When she tried to turn the doorknob and couldn't, she sighed. He'd locked it again. She was sure he had seen what she had just done, but he didn't remark on it.\n\nShe paced in the middle of the room briefly before she gave in to the urge and watched him shaving. The man really was a fine piece of work. But there was always a balance, wasn't there, since no one was perfect. His balance was too handsome but too dangerous.\n\n\"I used to do that for my pa before he took off,\" she volunteered. \"He liked everything smooth 'cept for the mustache he favored. I'm pretty good at it. Want me to show you?\"\n\nHis laugh was spontaneous, but so brief she wondered if she'd really heard it. Then she realized that it was his way of telling her what he thought of her getting that shaving razor anywhere near his throat. But she was more interested in his having laughed, even if it was just a scoffing laugh, when he obviously didn't want to.\n\n\"Makes you uncomfortable to laugh, doesn't it?\" she speculated.\n\nShe didn't expect an answer because he seemed to be concentrating on his shaving rather than on her, but she got one. \"My profession prohibits emotion.\"\n\n\"Because you kill people?\" she guessed.\n\n\"There comes a point when you're fast enough with a gun that you don't have to kill. On the other hand, I've lost count of how many men I've had to wound, but they don't usually die from it.\"\n\n\"Then you've never killed anyone, even in self-defense?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that.\"\n\nHe didn't say any more about it, either. Of course he was a killer. It was written all over him. She quietly watched him for another minute. He was being particularly slow and methodical now about getting the stubble off his face, maybe because she was ruining his concentration. She smirked. She could have done it quicker for him and without a single nick.\n\n\"So what do you actually do, besides get in gunfights?\"\n\n\"I take jobs where my particular skill is useful.\"\n\n\"A hired gun? And you've never taken a job to kill someone?\"\n\n\"That's not a job, that's murder.\"\n\nShe raised a brow. \"You actually draw the line? That's good to know.\"\n\nNo comment, so she let him finish what he was doing. She wanted to get some of that soap she liked so much before they vacated the room, so she rummaged through her bags, which were behind him by the tub, looking for her little leather pouch. When she found it, she emptied its contents into the tub.\n\nDegan had turned around to look at her, probably because he didn't trust her that close to his back. \"What are you getting rid of?\"\n\n\"Gold dust.\" She grabbed one of the soap jars and carefully poured the creamy soap into the pouch. \"I panned a little when I first came up this way.\"\n\n\"You'd rather have soap than gold?\"\n\n\"That dust ain't likely to be worth much. This soap is more precious\u2014to me.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you just take one of the jars?\"\n\n\"That'd be stealing.\"\n\n\"And taking the soap isn't?\"\n\n\"Course not. How would they know you didn't use it all up on that big, strapping body of yours?\"\n\n\"Perhaps because I've been using the bathing room down the hall and the attendant knows it.\"\n\n\"Oh. Well, so they'll charge you a few more pennies. What's done is done.\" She stuffed the little pouch back in her bag. But then she frowned. \"Will they even let me have a bath in jail?\"\n\nHe'd already turned back toward the oval mirror. \"I have no idea. I've never had occasion to see the inside of a jail cell.\"\n\nCourse he hadn't. He'd probably shoot any sheriff who tried to arrest him. She moved away from him and headed straight for her coat. As long as he was currently distracted, it would be a good time to read her grandmother's letter. She took the envelope out of her coat pocket and ripped it open. Tears sprang to her eyes when she saw her grandmother's handwriting.\n\nDearest Max,\n\nI've been so worried about you! I am overjoyed to hear from you and learn that you are well. I imagine these last twenty months have been even more of a hardship to you than they've been to me and Johnny. We miss you so much. I've been ailing. Please come home. Despite the tragedy that caused you to flee, I know you will be dealt with fairly if you just come home and explain\u2014\n\nMax's heart sank. What did her grandmother mean she was \"ailing\"? And by \"tragedy\" did she mean Carl had died?\n\n\"There's a satchel in my valise.\" Degan's words cut into her thoughts. \"Get it and tell me if you know any of the men on the wanted posters in it.\"\n\nSniffing back tears so Degan wouldn't see them, Max stuffed the letter and the envelope back in her coat pocket. She'd finish reading it when she was alone in jail. She turned around and opened his valise. Removing the thin leather satchel, she saw her Colt under it and picked it up, too.\n\n\"Mind if I wear this?\" she asked over her shoulder, holding the gun up. \"I feel off-balance without the weight of it on my right hip.\"\n\n\"I do mind.\"\n\n\"But you emptied it.\"\n\n\"It's still a heavy weapon.\"\n\nShe made a face. Did he have to think of everything? She shoved it back in the valise and took the satchel over to the chair and opened it. She grabbed the stack of papers out of it and rifled through them.\n\nAfter a moment she glanced his way again. \"And why am I looking at these?\"\n\n\"I need to bring in three of those outlaws before the marshal returns to Montana.\"\n\n\"You planning on collecting us all before you turn us in? That's fine by me.\" She grinned.\n\nNo answer. Figured. She came to her own poster and read the page of notes attached to it. \"Says here I had no schooling.\" She scowled. \"That's a lie.\"\n\n\"It's probably just an assumption based on your atrocious diction.\"\n\nShe raised a brow at him. \"You know it don't matter to me none if you don't like the way I talk.\"\n\n\"I've already figured that out.\" His lips curved slightly. She couldn't tell if it was a smile. Probably not. But she'd definitely heard some irony in his tone.\n\n\"It also says here I'm only fifteen. This information didn't come from Texas. Your friend must've gotten it from one of the farmers near here that I traded with.\"\n\n\"That's possible since he knew you were in the area.\"\n\nShe read aloud, \" 'Max Dawson is more dangerous than he looks.' Now that's funny.\"\n\n\"But accurate.\" Degan rubbed the area on his chest that her boot had struck.\n\nShe rolled her eyes and finished looking at the posters. She'd come across two of these men in her travels. Three others she'd heard about. Only one other had a reward as big as hers, Charles Bixford, a vicious killer of fifteen people, who was also known as Red Charley. It infuriated her that she was likened in any way to such a cruel, dangerous man. It didn't make sense, even if Carl had died from that gunshot wound. Why did the people of Bingham Hills want her back so badly? And why was her grandmother telling her to come home when there was such a high price on her head?\n\n\"So what's in it for me if I help you?\" she asked in a surly tone.\n\n\"I haven't decided yet.\"\n\nWhat the hell did that mean? Of course he wouldn't say even if she asked, so she didn't ask. But she wasn't going to help him, either, when it was obvious he was going to be the death of her. So she stuffed the posters back in the satchel and tossed it over by his valise. And crossed her arms, daring him to ask her again for help so she could laugh in his face.\n\nMax didn't get the chance to scoff at him. He probably got the idea that she wasn't going to help him from the mulish set of her chin, so he didn't mention the posters again. He simply put his shaving gear away, picked up his things, and her coat, then said, \"Let's go.\"\n\nShe was beginning to hate those two words. But she didn't budge and held out her hand. \"My coat first.\"\n\n\"No.\" He tossed the long garment over his shoulder. \"You're clean. Let's leave it that way for a while.\" She still didn't budge, so he added, \"You don't need to hide that you're a woman when you're with me. Besides, your vest does that well enough.\"\n\nShe hated when he was right. The sheriff was going to find out, or more likely be told, that she was a woman anyway, so there was no point in fighting for a lost cause.\n\nShe conceded, but since he appeared to be leaving the hotel for good, she was curious enough to ask, \"Are you forgetting your meeting with that detective tomorrow?\"\n\n\"People I don't know don't get to dictate my schedule. If it's important, the detective can catch up with me. If not, then it wasn't important.\"\n\n\"You really do things your way or no way, huh?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, but he didn't march her straight out of his hotel. Once again, he stopped at the desk in the lobby. She took her last chance to escape, dropping her things and bolting out the door while he was paying for his stay and maybe leaving a note for that detective. She expected to feel the sting of his bullet at any second. She might even have been shot already and just hadn't heard or felt it because her heart was pounding so hard in her ears. But nothing stopped her so she kept on going.\n\nThis town had hundreds if not thousands of places she could hide in until dark. Then she could sneak into the stable for her horse and be long gone before morning. She picked the one place Degan wouldn't look for her, his own hotel.\n\nRacing around to the back of the large building, she made sure Degan wasn't right on her tail before she ducked through the delivery entrance. She took a moment to catch her breath and calm her racing heart, then she grinned. She'd done it! Outfoxed the fox!\n\n\"You're too predictable,\" Degan said behind her.\n\n\"You didn't see me come in here!\" she accused without turning.\n\n\"I didn't need to. I knew you weren't going to run off without your soap.\"\n\nDid the gunfighter just make a joke? She sensed that he found the situation amusing, which snapped her temper. Without replying, she whirled around and elbowed him hard and turned to kick him where it would hurt the most. Unfortunately, he deflected that blow, the one that would have enabled her to race off again. He put a steely arm around her shoulders and walked her back through the hotel. She knew there was no getting out of that grip, but she did try, struggling, all the way to the lobby.\n\nShe supposed she should be grateful that he didn't give her that bullet he'd promised her. Of course he hadn't actually had her in his sights. Or had he? Maybe he had seen her before she'd rounded the corner of the building, which would have been how he'd guessed she'd reentered the hotel. There was nowhere else in that back alley where she could have hidden. Had he resisted the urge to shoot her? It didn't really matter when he'd caught her anyway. Again.\n\nHe let go of her when he stopped at the hotel desk again, but his eyes followed her when she moved to pick up her saddle-bags, which were still in the middle of the lobby where she'd dropped them. She gauged the distance between herself and Degan, then eyed the door. So she was the first to see the pretty lady who walked through it. Black hair wound up in ringlets and coils, an adorable little hat perched atop it. Layers and layers of silk and lace, with a coat swept back to form a bustle behind her. She was gussied up fancy enough for a ball. Max had never seen anyone like her.\n\nThe young woman stopped in her tracks when she noticed Degan, her blue eyes suddenly as wide as they could get. Max was getting used to that reaction to him. The lady would probably bolt back out the door now...\n\n\"Degan?\" the lady said. \"Degan Grant? At last I've found you, darling.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Degan couldn't believe his eyes. This was insane! Allison Montgomery in Helena? He was so sure he'd never see her again, but here she was and looking as beautiful as he remembered. Old memories flowed through him, good and bad. But his last memory of her prevailed because it had haunted him the longest. He closed his mind to it and to her, which was the moment Degan realized Max was gone.\n\nHe ran across the street to the stable where he'd left their horses. He hoped he'd catch her saddling her horse, but he should have known she wouldn't be that dumb. She wouldn't have risked the time it would have taken when she couldn't count on his being distracted for long, and he hadn't been. But the arrival of Allison Montgomery had shocked him, which had been long enough for Max to slip away unnoticed.\n\nHe told the stableman to guard her horse with his life and gave him some extra money to make sure it didn't get stolen. She would want to leave town, so she would try to get to it eventually. She wouldn't steal another. The woman refused to spend money that wasn't hers, so she definitely wouldn't steal a horse. But she could sweet-talk some man into letting her ride with him.\n\nThat thought infuriated Degan, but it was nothing compared to what he felt when Allison entered the stable. She shouldn't be there in Helena. He'd come West to make sure they never crossed paths again. More memories came flooding back. Think of Max, he told himself. Max, murderer or not, was a breath of fresh air compared to his past. And where the hell would she hide while she waited for him to stop looking for her?\n\n\"You just walk away without a single word to me?\" Allison said incredulously. \"Really, Degan?\"\n\nHe did it again, walked away from her and the memories. He needed to search Luella's brothel. It was the obvious place Max would go to hide\u2014maybe a little too obvious. He didn't expect to find her there but he still had to check.\n\n\"Degan, don't you dare!\"\n\nHe swung around as he reached the stable door. \"I don't know what you're doing here and I don't care. Go home, Allison.\"\n\n\"I'm here for you.\"\n\n\"Then you've wasted your time.\"\n\n\"We were friends before we were lovers. And I'm still your fianc\u00e9e.\"\n\n\"The hell you are.\"\n\n\"You can't still be holding that one night against me. After all these years that I've waited for you to come home?\"\n\n\"Waited faithfully for me? Is that going to be your next lie?\"\n\n\"I searched for you! I hired countless detectives. All they brought back were silly rumors that you had become a pistoleer of sorts and were in the habit of killing men. Utterly absurd. I can't tell you how many of them I fired for such incompetence.\"\n\n\"That's not what it's called out here.\"\n\n\"I honestly don't care what you want to call it. None of us believed it, of course. Well, your brother did. Flint thought it was funny, ironic actually, that you might have taken to wearing a gun when you always hated them. He insisted that confirmed that you were never coming back. But I didn't believe it.\"\n\nShe sounded far too triumphant now. \"I'll bite. How did you actually end up here?\"\n\n\"A friend told me that I was probably going about my search the wrong way. He pointed me to the Pinkers Agency, er, Pinkerers.\"\n\n\"Pinkerton?\"\n\n\"Yes, those people. And they have men all over the country apparently. The nice man who helped me simply spent a few days sending off telegrams to his associates. Within a week he informed me I could find you in the small town of Nashart in this rustic territory. But by the time I arrived in Nashart, I learned you'd already\u2014\"\n\n\"Is that who sent me a telegram to arrange a meeting for tomorrow? One of your Pinkertons?\"\n\n\"Yes, but that was only to delay you from leaving this town before I arrived, and I wasn't at all sure I would. It was such a grueling trip. But the Callahans told me that you intended to continue westward in this direction, so I took the chance that I could catch up to you. And here we are.\"\n\nThat was the last time Degan would ever share his intentions with anyone, friend or not. \"I've already said it, Allison, but I guess I need to repeat it. You've wasted your time in coming here.\"\n\n\"But I found you!\" she exclaimed. \"And not just for me. You have to come home before there's no home for you to come back to. Flint is\u2014\"\n\nHe cut in harshly, \"I don't want to hear it. I don't care about anything that happens back there. When I cut those ties it was for good.\"\n\nShe looked appalled. \"You can't mean that.\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nDegan saw her gaze moving over him, stopping at his gun belt. \"You've\u2014changed.\"\n\n\"You haven't.\"\n\n\"You used to listen to reason.\"\n\n\"I used to do a lot of things, be a lot of things, a dutiful son, a loving brother\u2014a devoted fianc\u00e9. But you took all that away from me, didn't you?\"\n\n\"You didn't have to leave!\"\n\n\"Didn't I? Would you like to know what would have happened if I'd stayed?\"\n\nHe slowly walked toward her and put his hands on her shoulders. She immediately wrapped her arms around him and raised her face, obviously thinking he meant to kiss her. He shoved her back. Whatever he might have done, saner thoughts prevailed and he simply walked away.\n\nA shot was fired as he reached the stable doors, a bullet hitting the wall next to him, too close to be a stray. His gun in hand, he took in the scene outside as people scattered for cover. An ambush in broad daylight? That sounded like something Jacob Reed would do, and Reed had been searching for him for several years now. The man was so bent on revenge for the death of his brother at Degan's hands that he was willing to die for it.\n\nAllison had heard the shot, too, and rushed to his side. Degan grabbed her shoulder and pushed her behind the wall. \"Get down before you get shot.\"\n\n\"What about you? This place is so horrible! This wouldn't happen in Chicago, where you should be.\"\n\nHe ignored her and continued to look for the shooter. The rooftops across the way appeared empty but had places to hide. Quite a few open windows across the street, too, especially in the hotel. But the shooter could be anywhere. Or it could just have been a misfire, an accident that no one was laying claim to out of embarrassment. He stepped out of the stable to test that theory, ready for any movement, but there was none. If someone was trying to kill him, he must not be willing to try it when Degan was prepared for it. And he'd wasted enough time when he needed to find Max.\n\nAllison was smart enough not to follow this time. But that didn't mean he could get her out of his mind. He was still beyond surprised to see her in Helena. Why had she, a socialite from one of Chicago's richest families, come all this way to find him? He shouldn't have let her say so much, or maybe he should have controlled his temper and let her say more. What did she mean that he had to go home before there was no home to go back to? Was Flint ruining the family because he didn't know how to handle money? Did that mean Degan's father had died? If that was Allison's news, he wasn't going to let her see whether it affected him. He wasn't sure it would. When he'd left home, he'd expected never to see his family again, or to hear from them. He hadn't cared what happened to them. He hadn't just cut the ties, he'd thrown away the damn ropes.\n\nBefore going to Max's favorite brothel, he detoured to send a telegram to an old acquaintance in Chicago.\n\nJohn's badge came in handy at the brothel, forestalling any protests the madam might have made about her establishment's being searched. It took him a couple of hours because he was thorough. He went through every room, looking under every bed, inside every chest, cupboard, and wardrobe, startling a few customers and many of the women, who were in various stages of undress or were busy getting dressed. But he had been right. Max was too smart to return to the first place he would look for her. So where the hell was she hiding?\n\nBefore he started checking the saloons, caf\u00e9s, and back alleys, he went back to the telegraph office, where he picked up a reply to his telegram. Neither his father nor his brother had died, and both were occupied in the same manner they'd been five years ago. Whatever Allison Montgomery was up to, it pertained solely to her and not his family, or at least it didn't concern his family in any way that mattered to him.\n\nDegan spent the rest of the day searching for Max. His frustration grew steadily because no one had seen her run out of the hotel; no one had seen her going into a saloon or a store or darting into an alley. How was that possible? He stopped showing her wanted poster when two unsavory types overheard him talking with the owner of a stable five blocks away from the one Degan was using. The men thanked him for the tip that Max Dawson might be nearby because they sure could put $1,000 to good use. He didn't like the idea of anyone else capturing Max. She was his prisoner.\n\nWhen he returned to the hotel that night, he didn't run into Allison, but he saw her guard dogs sitting in the lobby watching him. She was traveling with two of them, big and armed. He didn't give her another dark thought.\n\nThe next morning, Degan was up early to search the other side of town. No one he spoke to had seen Max Dawson, but every one of them seemed excited that an outlaw with such a high bounty on his head had been spotted in town and assured him they'd start looking for Max Dawson, too. By early afternoon, Degan rode out to the closest gold camp to question the miners. And got the same answer: no one had seen hide or hair of Max Dawson. He even rode out to the shack, thinking she might have gotten someone to give her a ride out there. But the place was empty.\n\nBack at the hotel, Allison's guard dogs were still planted in the lobby. The clerk at the front desk handed him a note, but he ripped it up when he saw that it was from Allison. As he ate dinner in his room, he concluded that Max had somehow managed to get out of town fast. She was resourceful enough to have managed it without her horse. He hated to admit it, but he was disappointed. He might not have decided yet what to do with her, but he'd begun to enjoy her company. She tried to be so boyish, but when she'd traded gold dust for soft soap, she'd been all woman.\n\nShe didn't have an artful bone in her body, preferred brazen boldness instead. Her first attempt at seduction had been laughable, even though he had been tempted. There were no two ways about it\u2014he was attracted to her. Her gruff bravado and lightning-quick temper that she didn't seem to know how to control were amusing. She was tempestuous\u2014and adorable. Oh, she was more than that. She'd cleaned up far too beautiful for his peace of mind, so he should be glad that he hadn't been able to find her. And yet he wasn't.\n\nHe took out John's satchel and started flipping through the wanted posters. He was done wasting his time in Helena. He had to start making some progress on paying back that favor.\n\nHe checked out of the hotel early and collected his horse. He stared at Max's chestnut gelding for a long minute. He almost decided to take it with him. But she'd succeeded in eluding him. She'd bested him fair and square. He wasn't going to strand her here just to be ornery\u2014if she was still here. He left her coat there, too, with her saddle. She went to extremes to hide who she was under that garment. He understood that. He'd done the same thing, just with a gun instead.\n\nHe had a sack of food from the hotel, enough to last several days, but he needed one more thing before he left town, a bottle of whiskey. He wasn't used to tracking or going off the beaten path, but searching for Kid Cade might require a night or two of camping out. And while the days had been getting uncomfortably hot, the nights could still get chilly, and a dram or two of whiskey could ward off the cold. So he headed straight for the one saloon he knew would be open in the morning, Big Al's.\n\nBefore he entered the saloon, he glanced back at the brothel across the street. The windows were all open but the building was quiet, the girls probably sleeping late. Two men stumbled out the door, apparently having spent the night there. They crossed the street to the saloon instead of heading home and appeared to be having a friendly argument.\n\nDegan ignored them and went inside to pay for his bottle, but he paused on the way back out when he heard the men arguing over who was going to have Chicago Joe's new girl first. He turned to one of the men and asked, \"When did the new girl show up?\"\n\n\"Two days ago, mister. There's already a long waiting line for her, and we're at the head of it.\"\n\n\"Have you seen her?\"\n\n\"No one has yet, but the madam says she's the prettiest little blond whore ever to set foot in Montana.\"\n\nDegan left the saloon, put his whiskey away, and led his horse across the street. Madam Joe was in the parlor. He wondered if the woman ever slept. She was sitting on a sofa with a cup of coffee in her hand, flanked by two of her girls in their morning attire, which was merely their skimpy underwear barely covered by their open robes.\n\nJoe smiled at him. One of her girls did, too, eyeing him from head to toe. Degan knew that familiarity usually calmed people's nerves, and he'd been to the brothel three times now because of Max\u2014without killing anyone. So the women no longer saw him as quite as big a threat. They also seemed to view him as a lawman now.\n\n\"I'm beginning to think you like us, Deputy Marshal,\" the madam purred. \"Pleasure this time, or more business?\"\n\n\"That depends.\"\n\n\"On?\"\n\n\"Whether your new girl is wanted by the law or just by your customers.\"\n\nJoe laughed and winked at him. \"That sweet thing is as innocent as they come. If she's guilty of anything, it's being too pretty.\"\n\n\"I'll have her for the day.\"\n\n\"She's not ready yet. She's still in training.\"\n\n\"Then I'll teach her a few things. I'm not inclined to wait.\"\n\nThe madam frowned slightly as if she were about to argue, but changed her mind and shrugged, nodding toward the stairs. \"Suit yourself. Second door on the right. But don't complain if you aren't satisfied.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "\"You really do need teaching, don't you, honey? You're supposed to pull that down, not up.\"\n\nMax gave up trying to tug the tight, red satin bustier a little higher and glanced at Candy, who was leaning in the doorway, fanning herself with a long, pink feather. Candy loved pink. Her entire wardrobe was pink. The short, ruffled skirt Max was wearing now was Candy's. The dark red bustier belonged to Scarlet.\n\nThe girls at Chicago Joe's were like a big family. They laughed and teased and squabbled, but they cared about each other. And they considered themselves lucky. Not all brothels were as nice to work in. Some were rife with in-house fighting and cutthroat competition, but Luella had assured Max that didn't happen here. All the girls had welcomed her, and many insisted that she borrow their clothes until she made enough money to buy her own.\n\nMax enjoyed trying on the clothes. She'd never worn such bright colors or dresses with such high hemlines and low bodices, or foundation garments that emphasized her curves. They made her look like a completely different person, so different from who she really was that she couldn't help but laugh\u2014at herself. Many of the garments were either too tight, too loose, or too short; few of them really fit her. But she reminded herself she only had to wear them for a few days.\n\nThe girls didn't only visit her to donate to her wardrobe. They also came by to offer advice on how to handle a man and please him.\n\n\"Don't get them mad,\" Scarlet had warned her in one of those sessions. \"Occasionally, that can be interesting, but usually it won't be.\"\n\n\"And compliments!\" a short, chubby girl named Sue Annie had added. \"Men like to feel special even if it ain't true.\"\n\nBut Candy had snorted, \"That can backfire on you, so don't veer too far from the truth.\"\n\nMax had blushed. And a couple of times she'd blurted out, \"Really?\" Luella had tried to shoo the girls out of Max's room, insisting she would teach Max the trade. But the other girls were just trying to be helpful because they didn't know that Max was just using the brothel as a hiding place. So she couldn't exactly tell them to leave her alone.\n\nThis was not how she'd wanted to hide here when she'd snuck in after she'd escaped from Degan. She'd been afraid he wouldn't be distracted long enough by that beautiful woman who'd called him \"darling.\" But he must have been. Max had been able to slip out of the hotel again, but this time she'd grabbed a jacket from the employees' coatroom, so she wouldn't look the same when Degan started looking for her. Keeping her head down and sticking to the back alleys so no one would see her, she made her way straight to the brothel and entered through the back door and ran up the back stairs to Luella's room.\n\nMax had still been in a panic, certain that Degan would arrive at any minute, looking for her, but she needed to borrow some money from Luella so she could get out of town. Then Luella had started undressing her, telling her to put on a dress because she had a plan: Max would hide where the deputy marshal would never expect to find her\u2014among Madam Joe's girls. Max knew it was risky. But so would be anything else she tried in order to avoid Degan till he left town.\n\nLuella had called in a few of the other girls to meet Max without telling them her plan. Luella timed it perfectly because when she heard Degan coming toward her room, she threw a ruffled dress over Max's head so it looked as if she were in the middle of dressing, and it had worked. All he saw of Max was her legs! He didn't even see Luella ducking behind the girls surrounding Max, so he must have thought it was Luella they were helping. And after he looked into her wardrobe, he moved on to search another room. When he finally left the brothel, Luella finished dressing Max and introduced her to Madam Joe as an old friend who wanted to get into the business. The madam was more than welcoming and even agreed to allow Max a few days of training before she put her to work and gave her one of the extra rooms to use.\n\nWith Max feeling so anxious about continuing to evade Degan, and the law in general, she found it disconcerting when the girls walked into her room without knocking as Candy had just done.\n\n\"Joe isn't going to wait much longer,\" Candy warned her now. \"She's already got men lined up waiting for you.\"\n\nMax paled. \"I've only been here two days.\"\n\nCandy chuckled as she sauntered forward and yanked down the red bustier. \"There, that's better. And it doesn't take a few days to figure out how to make a man happy. I don't know what Luella was thinking to suggest you'd need that long.\"\n\nMax had wanted that long. She wanted to make damn sure Degan was gone before she left town herself. Maybe she ought to leave tonight before the madam called her bluff and actually sent a man up to her. But it was a daunting thought. She was going to have to leave on foot\u2014and without any weapons. Even if her horse was still in town, she didn't dare try to fetch him when Degan might have left a guard with him, hoping she would. Damn Degan Grant.\n\nAs soon as Candy left, Max looked down at her breasts to see what the girl considered \"better\" and snorted. Her nipples were almost showing! She pulled the material up once again, hard, annoyed that there still wasn't much give. You would think leaving a little mystery would heighten a man's anticipation, but, no, these girls thought blatantly advertising their wares was the best way to entice a man.\n\n\"Don't do that on my account.\"\n\nMax sucked in her breath. She'd know that voice anywhere. She glanced up to see how angry he was, then drew in her breath softly.\n\nSeeing Degan surprised speechless by that fancy lady at the hotel had been priceless. She'd chuckled to herself every time she remembered it because it had gotten her free. She wasn't chuckling now, even though he definitely looked surprised again\u2014by what she was wearing. And he was slowly taking it all in, her long legs, which were mostly bare since the pink skirt only reached the middle of her thighs. Her arms and shoulders were completely bare. Half of her breasts too. She'd experienced quite a bit of embarrassment the last two days with the girls teasing her and talking so frankly about sex, but it was nothing compared to how she felt now.\n\nSo her cheeks weren't just hot because she was furious at getting caught again. But he had to be angry, too, that she'd escaped and evaded him for two days right here in town. He just wasn't showing it because he was too busy undressing her with his eyes. If this weren't Degan, she'd swear he'd just turned sensual on her.\n\nShe crossed her arms over her chest. \"You weren't supposed to come back here.\"\n\n\"Come back?\" He slowly entered the room.\n\nShe would have smirked if she weren't so angry at him. \"You walked right past me the other day when you were searching the place.\"\n\nHe raised a brow. \"Where were you hiding?\"\n\nShe shouldn't tell him. If he had any sort of curiosity at all, it might drive him crazy wondering. But he didn't, so she admitted, \"I had a dress over my head. All you saw were my legs.\"\n\nHe glanced down at her long legs. \"I didn't know yours were this shapely. You're lucky you weren't exposing your bare breasts because I haven't forgotten what they look like.\"\n\nMax couldn't deal with feeling mortified and angry at the same time, so she stopped covering her breasts long enough to take a swing at him. That didn't work too well. He grabbed her. She struggled against his hold, still hoping to land a decent punch if she could get a little space between them, but that wasn't working out well, either. Then they fell together on the bed, or he pushed her so she would land there and he just followed her down, she wasn't sure which. But she immediately crossed her arms tightly over her breasts again\u2014and that's where his eyes went.\n\n\"No hiding the merchandise I'm paying for.\"\n\nShe gasped. Did he really think she was here for that? She quickly told him, \"If you want a woman, there's half a dozen down the hall.\"\n\n\"And if I only want you?\"\n\nThose words wrapped themselves around her like a warm breeze. It would be too easy to open her arms to this particular man. But he wouldn't bargain! She'd tried that the night he'd captured her, and he hadn't been interested. She'd been ready to cut a deal yesterday morning, and all he'd wanted was for her to take a bath so she wouldn't be dirty when he turned her over to the sheriff!\n\nBut she could be just as clear. \"Too bad.\"\n\nShe pushed away from him so she could get off the bed. He let her, but before she could turn around, he was behind her, his fingers moving over her stomach in a slow, sensual circular motion, pulling her back against his chest.\n\n\"Raise your arms and put your hands behind your head,\" he directed.\n\n\"Are you arresting me?\"\n\n\"Later. Right now I want full access to your\u2014charms.\"\n\nBefore she could get beyond the shock of those words, his hands slid up over her breasts and stopped there to gently squeeze them. He did it again. Oh, God. Coils of heat shot right to her core, immobilizing her for a moment. Even her knees turned to mush. She had to take a few deep breaths. It took every ounce of will she had to turn around so he would stop caressing her like that, but looking up into his eyes and seeing the heat there just aroused her more. She stumbled backward and turned away so she wouldn't see such raw sensuality. Again, he let her.\n\nBut then he said, \"So you're in training but not practicing with a man yet?\"\n\nShe heard the humor in his tone. He wanted her to hear it. He'd just been teasing her? Or rubbing in her choice of hiding places?\n\nLikely the latter because he added, \"This is how you hide? By letting the madam advertise that she has a pretty new blonde on the menu?\"\n\nShe turned to glare at him. \"She wasn't supposed to do that!\"\n\n\"Why not? It's good for business. But if I actually thought you were taking up the red light, I'd put you over my knee and spank the hell out of you.\"\n\nNow that was the Degan she knew, cold and heartless. \"That's not one of your options\u2014ever.\"\n\n\"Not your choice, Maxie. But now it's time to go. You can put your own clothes on, or I'll take you out of here wearing that. I really don't care which.\"\n\n\"I'll change,\" she grumbled. \"Just step outside for a minute.\"\n\n\"Not a chance. There's a window and a door here. You aren't going through either one without me.\"\n\nShe'd had a brief respite from gnashing her teeth in the time she'd been away from him. But now she was back at it. The little room had no screen that she could step behind to change. It was a brothel. No one here hid anything. But she refused to give Degan a show.\n\nShe yanked open the little wardrobe and grabbed her hat and slapped it on her head. She felt like screaming. She'd been so close to avoiding jail. She'd even decided to leave town. She would have been gone by tonight.\n\nShe wondered if a scream would bring Madam Joe's two bruisers upstairs to beat up Degan. They were always on the premises to keep the peace. She could slip away again while he was busy with them\u2014no, he'd just shoot them and he could do that quickly.\n\nKeeping her back to Degan, she stepped into her pants and pulled them all the way up before she unwrapped the little skirt and let it drop to the floor.\n\n\"Mind if I borrow that?\"\n\nMax recognized Scarlet's voice, and for the briefest moment she thought the girl was actually referring to Degan. But when Max glanced around, Scarlet was already picking up the pink skirt, though her eyes were admiring Degan, even when she whispered to Max, \"Good job! When you're done with him, send him to my room.\"\n\nMax protested, \"He's not my customer!\"\n\nBut Scarlet just chuckled as she sauntered out of the room with the skirt in hand, her eyes still all over Degan. Max tried not to gnash her teeth yet again and finished dressing, putting her shirt on over the bustier, then unfastening the tight, red garment and letting it fall, too, before buttoning up her shirt and tucking it in. The rest went on fast now that she was completely covered. She picked up her saddlebags before turning to face him.\n\n\"Now that was disappointing,\" he said as he took the bags from her.\n\nMore teasing? But dressed in her own clothes, she felt like herself again and wasn't going to be carted to jail without a fight.\n\nBut then Luella suddenly rushed into the room, and like a mama hen she stepped between Degan and Max and started yelling at him, \"How can you do this? She's not a criminal! You can't let her hang when she's innocent!\"\n\nHis inscrutable expression didn't change, which might have been why Luella figured out she was wasting her breath. She grabbed Max and hugged her and started crying, so loudly that it drew a few of the other girls into the room. Max tried to comfort Luella, but she was on the verge of tears, realizing she was never going to see her friend again. And the tears were contagious because the other girls started crying, too.\n\nDegan looked pretty exasperated and grabbed Max's arm to tear her away from Luella and lead her out of the room. But all the women followed, crying even louder. Then Max heard Luella shout, \"Don't you dare hurt her!\"\n\nDegan didn't pause, but his tone was ominous when he said, \"Don't worry. Miss Dawson will get exactly what she deserves.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "\"We're going to Butte,\" degan said by her ear.\n\nWe? They were a block away from the brothel. Max stopped struggling instantly, but she sure as hell didn't understand what he was up to. And why couldn't he have told her that sooner? Like two days ago when they'd left his hotel room? His lack of communication was going to be his downfall one of these days.\n\nAnd he wasn't just feeding her hope to get her to stop struggling. He took her straight to the stable to get her horse. But she only got a moment to hug Noble and to be happy to have him back before Degan grabbed her hands and wrapped a rope around them again. She was surprised he'd waited so long to tie her up. Having eluded him, she knew he wasn't going to trust her out of his reach now. She was still able to mount by herself, and with him holding her reins again, he led her out of town along the southern trail, the one that extended all the way to Utah and was used to freight supplies to Montana Territory from the far west.\n\nShe waited until Helena was far behind them before she let her curiosity loose on him. \"You and the sheriff back there don't get along? So you're taking me to another one?\"\n\n\"We'll be in Butte by tonight.\"\n\n\"That's more'n a hundred miles from here!\"\n\n\"Maybe half that, give or take a few. If you had read the marshal's notes, you would know that Kid Cade was last seen around Butte.\"\n\n\"So you are going to collect all three of us before turning any of us in?\"\n\nHe didn't answer that one, but she realized, he wasn't answering her other two questions, either. If she had her own reins, she'd stop right there. But she didn't have that luxury. And she was beginning to figure out that talking to him was not only more aggravation but more trouble than it was worth. So she stopped and just enjoyed that, for whatever reason, she wasn't in a jail cell yet.\n\nHe had been pacing the horses between some brisk cantering, some annoying trotting, and a little walking, so they were making good time without tiring the animals and didn't turn off the road to rest until midafternoon. Her stomach had been rumbling for the last hour, but she'd continued to hold her tongue and was going to keep that up until he got around to asking her something, so she could have the pleasure of not replying. Best-laid plans...\n\nDegan took them to a small knoll with quite a few shade trees and smaller flowering trees and bushes scattered around it. It wasn't so far off the road that they couldn't still see it below them. They had only passed a few other riders so far, mostly to and from the gold camps that were south of Helena, a few wagons, an oxen-driven cart, and beyond the camps a couple cowboys who looked more like drifters and left the road to go around Degan. Max snickered as she watched them. Degan didn't seem to notice.\n\nAfter Degan untied her hands, she dismounted and stretched her legs by walking in circles around the knoll so Degan wouldn't think she was about to run off. In the sunny parts, the ground was covered with purple lupines and yellow black-eyed Susans. Max saw a stagecoach racing down the road below them. Luckily, she and Degan had just missed getting doused in its dust. She wondered about the passengers inside the coach. This was a major route for settlers entering the territory. The stage ran between Virginia City to the south and Fort Benton on the Missouri River up north. They'd already passed the little town of Boulder less than an hour ago, which had grown up around one of the stage stops. Boulder had marked the halfway point to Butte, so they just might reach it by nightfall after all, since the sun didn't set until around nine o'clock at this time of year.\n\nDegan was untying a sack from his saddle. She might have offered to hunt up some food if she wasn't still determined not to talk to him anymore. She smelled the fresh bread before he pulled the loaf out of the sack. He broke it in two and tossed her half. He brought out a round of cheese next and broke that in half, too.\n\n\"Don't toss that!\" She moved forward to take it from him.\n\nShe waited there to see if anything else was coming out of the sack, but he started eating, so she went over to a big oak tree and sat down there, resting her back against the trunk, and did the same. Plain fare and yet it tasted so good. She rarely got to eat bread and cheese, and she savored every bite.\n\nDegan finished eating first and opened his friend's leather satchel and took out all the posters. He came over to the tree she was leaning against and sat beside her. Their shoulders were nearly touching, but she didn't move.\n\nSated and lulled by the sounds of the singing birds and buzzing bees, she momentarily forgot her vow of silence. Glancing at the papers in his hands, she asked, \"What are you trying to figure out?\"\n\n\"I told you that I need three of you before I can call John's favor paid and move on.\"\n\nMax decided it might be to her benefit if he had other outlaws to pick from in case she could still figure out how to talk her way out of being one of the three, so she reversed her earlier decision not to help him and grabbed the papers out of his hands.\n\nThumbing through them, she pulled out a poster. \"This fellow holes up in Colorado. I was in that state long enough to see him more'n once over the course of eight months. He had a young girl with him both times. Seemed like a family man to me, not a bank robber.\"\n\n\"Appearances can be deceiving.\"\n\nShe gave him a nasty look, knowing full well that remark was directed at her, but he was looking at the poster she'd indicated, not at her, so she pointed to another poster. \"This Bixford fellow they call Red Charley, I've heard folks talking about him a few times\u2014in fear. The way he kills, by blowing up buildings and everything in them, you don't see him coming, which is why people hope he gets caught before he wanders up this way.\"\n\n\"An unusual method of killing.\"\n\nWith that being Degan's only comment about the vicious outlaw, she pulled out another poster to show him. \"Now this one actually shared a camp with me early this spring when I was making my way slowly through Wyoming. I stopped before dark to hunt up my dinner, had a rabbit and two trout roasting, which is what drew him my way.\"\n\n\"You fish?\"\n\n\"Not in the usual way, no, least, not since I left home. I used to carry a little net with me until I had to break camp fast one night and left it behind. But I still had the net that day when I was following a stream teeming with fish. Anyways, this man looked hungry, probably was, since we were so far from any towns, and I had more'n enough to share. Didn't know he was wanted by the law. Didn't recognize his name when he gave it. He seemed harmless enough and was traveling alone.\"\n\n\"So you're in the habit of taking in any stray that comes along?\"\n\nShe detected a note of disapproval in his voice. He obviously didn't know what it was like to have to avoid civilization, to not see or talk to another person for months.\n\n\"Hell no. But as you might have guessed, I like to talk, and I hadn't spoken to anyone but myself or Noble in ages, and Noble doesn't exactly talk back, so I made an exception. I didn't sleep that night. I'm not that trusting. But he took off in the morning and I stayed another day in that camp to catch up on my sleep.\"\n\n\"I assume you learned something about him to have mentioned him?\"\n\n\"These notes say he was last seen in Arizona, but he said he spent the winter in Montana getting a spell of gold fever out of his system. He did approach from the north and headed south when he left. But he said he was heading home to Kansas, that his brother had a farm there. You might want to add that to your friend's notes\u2014unless you think I'm lying about that, too.\"\n\nHe didn't confirm or deny it, just asked her, \"Anything else?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Willie Nolan and his gang aren't hitting the railroads in Kansas anymore. These days, he and his boys prefer the Northern Pacific line over in the Dakota Territory just east of here.\"\n\nHe took the poster from her. \"Really?\"\n\n\"You find that interesting?\"\n\n\"A friend of mine was robbed on that train on her way to Nashart this year.\"\n\nHer? So he did have women friends in each town just as she'd guessed? That annoyed her and she wasn't sure why. Of course she didn't need to have a reason to be annoyed with Degan Grant. She'd have more trouble finding a reason not to be annoyed with him.\n\nBut his mentioning women friends reminded her of the one who had inadvertently helped her to escape. \"Who is the fancy lady who was so happy to see you in Helena?\"\n\nHe finally glanced at Max, but she wished he hadn't. She could almost feel the sudden coldness coming off him. \"No one important.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\nHe wasn't going to explain. Instead he asked, \"How do you know the Nolan gang is in Dakota?\"\n\n\"Don't you dare try to pin train robbery on me,\" she growled.\n\n\"It was a simple question, Max.\"\n\nNow she was touchy? She huffed before saying, \"I heard a couple miners talking 'bout it when I went to one of the Helena camps to trade for some lantern fuel. One of them came to Montana on the Northern Pacific and had to sit through one of those robberies. He used to live in Kansas and recognized two of the robbers as members of the Nolan gang.\"\n\n\"It's Will Nolan who's wanted by the law. Did the miner see him during the robbery?\"\n\n\"No idea. I only heard him telling his friend who was leaving the territory not to take anything on that train ride that he wouldn't mind losing, or to use a different route instead. And that's why he went into that long story about getting robbed on that train and who did it.\"\n\nThey both heard the posse riding down the road from the north at about the same instant. So much for her stay of execution. One of the deputies must have recognized her as they rode out of Helena.\n\n\"Don't look so glum,\" Degan said as he stood up. \"They aren't coming for you.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\n\"I recognize that white stallion. Jacob Reed rides one just like it.\"\n\n\"Never heard of him. Who is he?\"\n\n\"I shot his brother a few years back. It was a fair fight. Jacob was even there to see it was, but he's still got a powerful urge to kill me for it. He tried that day, rode after me on that stallion.\"\n\n\"And yet he still lives?\"\n\nDegan shrugged. \"He was in a rage from his grief. I wasn't going to kill him for that. I hoped a couple wounds would make him see reason, but all it did was send him back to town for a doctor. I found out last year that he's been looking for me ever since.\"\n\n\"And getting mighty close by the looks of it. Or maybe he ain't following you today.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't count on it. I've been in Montana too long and a lot of people know it. And someone shot at me in Helena. I had a feeling it might be Reed. Get behind the tree.\" He moved the horses a little farther down the other side of the knoll. \"I'd rather not deal with Jacob and his friends while I have you in tow.\"\n\n\" 'Fraid I'll catch a stray bullet?\"\n\n\"No, afraid I'll have to shoot you when you take advantage of my distraction and run.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Course I would run. But I could've taken care of your Reed problem if you didn't empty my bags of all my rifle bullets. I could have picked off all five of them as they rode by.\"\n\n\"So you are a killer?\"\n\nDid he sound disappointed? Him? She snorted. \"I hit exactly what I aim at, and a wound to each of them would have sent them back to Boulder for the nearest doctor.\"\n\n\"Or started a shoot-out that could have lasted until dark.\"\n\nThat could have been a possibility if she didn't shoot to really hurt them, so she conceded his point and mentioned instead, \"There's a trail near here that will take us through the hills directly south. There's a couple decent-sized lakes down that way.\"\n\n\"How do you know so much about the western part of the territory? I thought you came up here through Wyoming.\"\n\n\"I did, but we're only a few hours' ride from the shack I was using. I couldn't risk going into Helena more than once a week so I kept busy by exploring. It's useful to know where gulches and big rivers and lakes are located. Might take us an extra hour or so before we can wind back toward Butte, but the trail through the hills will keep us from catching up to that bunch on this main route.\"\n\n\"Or we could just wait here a little longer.\"\n\n\"Or you could just go kill Jacob Reed and be done with it. 'Sides, you won't actually find Kid Cade in Butte. He knows he's wanted by the law, so he'll be avoiding towns like I do. But if he's around these parts, he'll need to be near water, and there's plenty tween here and Butte, just east of the road your friends are traveling on. Chances are, you're going to end up searching this area anyway. Who knows, you might get lucky and be able to turn both of us over to the Butte sheriff tonight.\"\n\n\"Come mount up.\"\n\nShe glanced around the tree to make sure Reed and his friends were gone before she started toward her horse. But he grabbed her arm and pulled her over to his palomino.\n\n\"What\u2014?\"\n\n\"You can't lead the way if I'm pulling you along behind me.\"\n\nRide with him? She started to back away, but didn't look behind her first. She tripped on a large rock, fell, and actually rolled a few feet, crushing flowers and getting poked by acorns that had fallen from the oak tree. But that's not all she'd disturbed. She heard the bees before she felt them and panicked at the first sting on her upper arm. She leapt to her feet, slapped at her arms, her head, her legs. She thought she might have gotten them all off her until she felt another sting on the back of her neck and yanked her vest off to use it to swat behind her.\n\nBut one more sting on her back had her yell at Degan, \"Get it out!\" She quickly unbuttoned her shirt and pulled it off her shoulders. \"Hurry!\"\n\nHe pulled the shirt away from her back and looked down it. After a moment he said, \"One just flew off.\"\n\n\"Are there more? It feels like I've been stung all over my back.\"\n\n\"The bees are gone, but I see a few red spots and one on the back of your left arm.\"\n\n\"I hate bees.\"\n\n\"You'll be fine.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure. Gran said I had a bad reaction to a bee sting when I was a tyke. I don't remember it, but she always cautioned me to stay away from bees.\"\n\n\"Maybe she should have warned you not to trip over your feet instead.\"\n\nWas that supposed to be a joke? Or was he just trying to distract her from the burning bee stings? Either way, the remark earned him a glare instead of her thanks.\n\nBut she gasped when he added, \"The one thing I do know about bee stings is that you have to remove the stinger fast or else more venom will get into those wounds. Drop your shirt.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "This had to bE the most uncomfortable ride of her life, Max thought for the tenth time, and not because of the welts on her back and her arm that had developed from the bee stings. Those were still burning, but not as badly as before. As long as her shirt didn't rub against them, she could almost ignore them. Almost. And she hadn't been embarrassed when Degan had removed the stingers for her because she hadn't taken off her shirt. She had merely lowered it and then lifted it so he could get at the spots where she'd been stung. But being this close to him...\n\nSeated in front of Degan, she couldn't relax or she'd be leaning against Degan's chest. She couldn't keep her legs from touching his because there was nowhere else to put hers. Although she was supposedly leading them, he didn't even give her the reins to do so! And his arms kept touching hers as he guided the animal where she told him to.\n\nThis was so unnecessary. The way to go was mostly obvious. Then she started feeling things she shouldn't be feeling. It caught her by surprise. The flip of her heart when his leg moved slightly under hers\u2014like a caress. The tingles when his breath touched the back of her neck as he adjusted the reins. The brush of his shoulder when he turned to look behind them made her flush with heat for no reason. The man needed to sit still!\n\n\"Put me back on my horse,\" she finally demanded. \"I can yell at you when you need to turn.\"\n\n\"Luella didn't have your letter?\"\n\nWhere the hell did that come from? Or was he just trying to distract her from her bee stings? But she did need distracting\u2014from him, so she answered, \"She did.\"\n\n\"Good or bad news?\"\n\n\"Mostly bad, but confusing, too. And I haven't had a chance to finish reading it.\"\n\n\"Then finish it. That might clear up your confusion.\"\n\nHe was right. Even though the letter was disappointing, Gran might have tacked on something hopeful toward the end. Max had taken her coat off when they'd stopped to eat back at the knoll, which was why she'd gotten stung so bad, but she was wearing it now and dug the letter out of her pocket again. A few minutes later she was close to tears. Some of the letter still didn't make sense, but when her grandmother referred again to the tragedy Bingham Hills had had to deal with, the fact that Carl was dead really sank in. She'd clung for so long to the hope that he was alive, that someday she'd be able to go home without having a noose waiting for her. That hope was gone now, and Degan was going to make sure she couldn't avoid that fate any longer.\n\nShe stuffed the letter back in her pocket, too despondent to say a word. The rest of letter was about Gran and Johnny and how they were getting on. Johnny had assumed her role as the hunter in the family and Gran's right hand on the farm, but then he didn't have much choice about it. Max and her brother were nothing alike. She took her licks and didn't complain\u2014much. He was a good shot, but he didn't like to hunt or do farm chores. And Max knew Johnny was too sensitive not to be riddled with guilt for letting her take the blame for shooting Carl. She had known her younger brother wouldn't be able to survive alone in the wilderness as she could. So she'd made Gran promise to keep him from making any foolish confessions about his part in the shooting.\n\nOf course, she'd never thought she'd be gone this long. She was the one who should be taking care of Gran. She'd assumed that role as soon as she learned how to shoot, which was right after their pa took off. Johnny had big dreams of seeing more of the world, of becoming a sailor like their father. If none of this had happened, he would probably have left Texas by now. Maybe his wish would come true this year...\n\n\"Still confused, or is the bad news even worse?\"\n\nThe wide path through a gulch had allowed them to ride at a good speed. But deep in thought, she almost missed the easy way out of it, which slowed them briefly to a walk. And why was Degan suddenly showing some curiosity about her situation? Boredom, probably. But maybe she should share the bad news with him. If he had any sort of conscience under his dispassionate exterior, she might at least make him feel a little guilty for being the death of her even if he wouldn't admit it.\n\n\"Well, Gran was happy to hear from me since she didn't know if I was still alive. But she wants me to come home because she misses me and she's in bad health.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about her health, but is that what confused you? That she would encourage you to go home?\"\n\n\"That's just it, she said that despite Carl's death, she's sure I'll be dealt with fairly if I just come home and explain my actions. That's what doesn't make sense, since she knows I didn't shoot Carl and I made her promise to keep Johnny from making any fool confessions, so she also knows I'll never say Johnny did it. But it also bothers me that she'd even mention her health. She's always been in good health, and even if she did get sick, she wouldn't complain about it.\"\n\n\"So you think she didn't actually write the letter?\"\n\nHer eyes flared. \"That didn't occur to me. I've been too upset that the news wasn't what I'd hoped it would be.\"\n\n\"Is it your grandmother's handwriting?\"\n\n\"It looks like it.\"\n\n\"Did she get mail regularly or would the arrival of a letter for her be a special occasion?\"\n\nMax was beginning to feel a tiny spark of hope. \"That's why I had Luella send my letter, because Gran never gets mail and the whole town would probably know about the letter before it got into her hands.\"\n\n\"Who runs the post office in your town?\"\n\n\"One of Carl's tenants, of course.\"\n\n\"The discrepancies suggest your letter was intercepted and someone replied with a fake one to encourage you to turn yourself in.\"\n\nMax turned and looked at Degan incredulously. \"Are you suggesting Carl might be alive?\"\n\n\"No, he's dead. Bingham Hills has gone to too much trouble to get you back, offering such a large reward for your capture and tampering with the mail, for it to be otherwise. But my guess is that your grandmother is probably still in good health.\"\n\nShe was relieved to hear that, but annoyed that he'd dashed the tiny spark of hope that had barely formed that a noose wasn't waiting for her at home. But she reminded herself that he was the most skeptical man she'd ever met. She wondered if that skepticism came naturally to him or if he'd honed it for his profession.\n\nThen she realized something alarming. \"If you're right, then they know where they can find me now.\"\n\n\"You've already been found\u2014by me.\"\n\nAnd how could she forget that!? She snapped her mouth shut and didn't say another word, deciding to concentrate on a different hope she still had\u2014of getting away from him.\n\nA while later, Degan said, \"You forgot to mention there would be a river in the way.\"\n\nHe sounded annoyed, which got a chuckle out of her. \"This is one of two that run through here, both forks of Little Boulder River, but I know where to cross 'em.\"\n\nBefore they came to the crossing they saw a man fishing for his dinner with a pole in one hand and a rifle in the other. Degan rode toward him to show him Cade's poster. The man shook his head but stared at Max, saying, \"But you look familiar.\" Degan rode on and paused again by a miner panning for gold, to show him the poster. Another shake of the head and they kept on going. They passed two Indian women washing clothes on the riverbank, but Degan didn't pause this time.\n\nAfter they forded the river they were making good time because many beaten trails were on that side. But eventually they had to slow down because they encountered other people on the trails, mostly new miners. With so much ore found around Helena and Butte, the newcomers were persistent in trying to find a claim of their own. Most of them prospected for a few months, and if they weren't successful, they settled into working on someone else's claim or went home.\n\nWhen they reached the second river, they were able to ride even faster because of the long stretch of trail near it. Nonetheless, Max was beginning to think she'd underestimated the time it was going to take to reach Butte. It was early evening already and they hadn't even reached the first lake. She wasn't going to say it, but she suspected they were going to have to sleep under the stars tonight. Actually, she was dreading having to mention it. Fancy man obviously wasn't a camping-out sort of gunfighter.\n\nWhen they reached the wide stretch of flat land north of the first lake, Degan let her get back on her horse. She was too grateful to put some distance between them again to point out they still had a few more trails to follow to get back to the road to Butte. But they rode hard enough now that the big body of water came into view within minutes.\n\nQuite a few camps were around the lake, mostly of miners, some still panning while the daylight lasted, some already cooking their dinner. They passed a family of eight, half of them children, who looked like farmers. Some loners, too, were scattered along the lakeshore. Max smiled as she took in the scene. A regular community was forming here. A lot more folks were here than she'd seen the one other time she had come down this way. The smell of food drifted on the breeze, as well as the sound of someone playing a harmonica.\n\nMax wouldn't mind spending the night there. She just had to tell Degan they couldn't reach Butte before nightfall. They probably could if they started toward it right now, but she could lie and say it wasn't possible. It would give her a chance to wash her other set of clothes. And it would give her one more chance to escape\u2014if Degan couldn't swim. If he couldn't, and she got far enough out into the lake where he couldn't see her anymore, she could slip out of the lake a safe distance away from where he was standing. She didn't favor taking off without her horse or her supplies, but she wasn't in a position to be picky.\n\nBut when they dismounted by the biggest group of miners, who were sitting around their campfire, she wasn't so sure she could swim herself. She'd forgotten about those damn bee stings while she was riding, but was painfully reminded of them when her shirt scraped across the welt on her arm as she dismounted. Maybe the water would soothe the stings. And maybe she was desperate enough to ignore the pain.\n\nShe was debating whether to take the chance when a man said to her, \"Ain't you Max Dawson?\"\n\nHe said it loud enough that more than one of the miners started toward her. She instinctively reached for the gun on her hip, but it wasn't there! But Degan's was. Suddenly he was standing between her and the miners with his gun in hand. He didn't need to say anything. Most of the men sat back down and tried to avoid his eyes. One miner handed him back the poster that had been passed among them, but he did so hesitantly.\n\nAnd then one of the men volunteered, \"Check further down the lake, mister. There was a suspicious fellow that showed up the other day and hasn't left yet, but I can't say I got a good look at him.\"\n\n\"Obliged,\" Degan replied, and nodded to Max to mount up again.\n\nShe did so gladly, only wincing a little as her shirt scraped against the welts again. But so much for staying in this area without her gun\u2014or Degan's protection.\n\nHe led them to one of the loners sitting at a campfire. She didn't recognize the man from any of the posters, so she was surprised to hear Degan ask, \"Kid Cade?\"\n\n\"No,\" the man said warily. \"And I ain't never heard\u2014\"\n\nDegan drew his gun. The man surrendered instantly, arms raised high. \"All right, all right, that's the name I go by! Just don't shoot!\"\n\nMax rolled her eyes. Did Degan have that effect on most men, or just the cowardly ones such as Cade? She dismounted when Degan did and turned to look at the lake while he tied up Kid Cade. Her plan might have worked, despite the bee stings, but not with the miners aware of who she was. They'd no doubt help Degan fish her out. She sighed.\n\n\"Are we staying the night?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, and make yourself useful and put out his fire.\"\n\nShe moved forward to do that, but whispered at his back first, \"How'd you know it was him?\"\n\n\"His age, his demeanor.\"\n\n\"What do you mean 'his demeanor'?\"\n\n\"He's not a killer. He's more a bungling thief.\"\n\n\"I can hear you,\" Cade grumbled.\n\nMax kicked dirt on the fire while Degan saddled Cade's horse. Degan told the man, \"You might actually prefer prison to this. Regular meals, a bed that doesn't get muddy when it rains. When was the last time you ate?\"\n\n\"I ran out of money two days ago. The miners panning along the water were all spread out and fighting over borders like they could stake a claim on a damn lake. But when I showed up, they banded together and started posting a guard at their camps.\"\n\n\"Because you don't look like a miner and didn't come up here with the gear for it,\" Max guessed. \"And you were planning to rob them, weren't you?\"\n\n\"Well, yeah. But I've been trying it their way instead. Even found a few nuggets, just haven't been to town yet to sell them.\"\n\n\"Some prison time might give you a new perspective,\" Degan said.\n\n\"A new what?\"\n\nMax rolled her eyes again. \"He means it might help you figure out this ain't a good way to live.\"\n\nWithin minutes, Degan was leading them away, holding the reins of both her horse and Kid Cade's. Maybe she needed a new perspective herself. Now that she knew Carl was dead and the posse from Bingham Hills was closing in on her. But she still glanced back at the lake wistfully." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "\"I can see now why they call this place the richest hill on earth,\" Max said a little in awe as Degan paused the horses to look down at the huge mining town. \"And I thought Helena was as big as it gets up this way.\"\n\n\"You combed the hills north of here but you haven't been to Butte before?\"\n\n\"I avoid towns, and roads.\" She shrugged, but he appeared to be studying Butte himself. \"What's your excuse?\"\n\n\"I merely avoided this one. Some miners that were temporarily in the last town I stayed at were from Butte and returned here to spread the word that I was in the area. I've already seen the results of that.\"\n\n\"You mean that Reed fellow and his friends were tracking you here?\"\n\n\"Among other encounters. Rumors spread too damn fast in the West.\"\n\nThat was a definite complaint. Even if it wasn't said with inflection, it still made her chuckle. \"What else do folks have to talk about? You, in particular, make juicy gossip of the exciting sort out here.\"\n\nHe glanced at her sideways. She stared back at him with a grin, daring him to deny it. But then Kid Cade grumbled from Degan's other side, \"I'm still starving, lawman. Can we get my ass to jail so I can get fed?\"\n\nDegan hadn't tied Cade's hands behind him for the ride, but in front of him. And Degan had given him half a loaf of leftover bread as they'd left the lake. That would have filled Max up, but then she hadn't gone two days without eating. But she was in no hurry to get to the jail herself.\n\nThey had made better time getting to Butte than she'd counted on. It was only dusk, but at this time of year that was still long past a normal dinner hour, and she was starting to get hungry, too.\n\n\"I don't suppose you're gonna feed us first?\" she ventured hopefully.\n\nDegan didn't ask, Before what? He just said, \"No,\" and led them into town.\n\nShe sighed. Maybe he wouldn't be able to find the sheriff's office. Maybe for once it would be tucked away on some side street instead of in plain sight on the main street. And of course Degan wouldn't unbend enough to ask for directions. Hours could be wasted in the search. She could hope. But this town actually had some signs pointing to places. She stared at one pointing the way to the train station.\n\nShe'd been managing to keep abreast of Degan even without her reins. \"Didn't know the Northern Pacific train had gotten this far. Luella said Helena wasn't expecting it until next year.\"\n\n\"The Northern Pacific isn't here yet, it's still making its way west from Billings,\" Degan said. \"But the Utah and Northern Railway got here late last year. It connects to the Transcontinental Railroad.\"\n\n\"If you knew that, why didn't you take it to head out of the territory?\"\n\n\"You don't see much of the country by train, and I'm in no hurry to get where I'm going.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\nNo answer. She almost laughed. Heaven forbid they actually have a normal conversation that didn't get cut short by his silence. But this time it might be because he'd reached his destination. Max tensed. She hoped the jail here had more than one cell. She didn't fancy the idea of sharing one.\n\nDegan had dismounted and was hauling Cade down from his horse. She got down quickly before he did the same to her. The sheriff or deputy, it was hard to tell which with his badge not showing, had been sitting on his porch, but got up as soon as it was clear Degan was there on business.\n\n\"Sheriff?\" Degan asked.\n\n\"Deputy Barnes.\" The man tipped his hat. \"If you need the sheriff\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't.\" Degan handed over Kid Cade and Cade's wanted poster to Barnes. Degan didn't hand over hers. But the deputy was staring at her standing there at the bottom of the steps behind Degan. \"You look familiar.\"\n\nDegan followed the deputy's gaze and answered before Max did. \"We hear that a lot, but she's with me.\"\n\n\"She?\" The deputy said it. Even Kid Cade said it.\n\nMax could feel the heat racing up her cheeks. But Degan came back down the steps and nudged her back toward her horse before he told the deputy over his shoulder, \"I'll come by for the reward in the morning.\"\n\nDegan mounted up and waited for her to do the same. Rooted in surprise, she needed a few moments to grab her reins and get back in the saddle. Her horse followed his without any urging, already accustomed to it. But she glanced back at the jail as he led them away.\n\nShe had no idea what had just happened and couldn't figure it out no matter which way she tried. He hadn't even taken her reins this time!\n\nShe moved up abreast of him to give him a pointed look. This was the one time she ought to just keep her mouth shut, but she couldn't. She was too incredulous.\n\n\"So why ain't I back there with Cade?\"\n\nHis eyes were on the street, both sides of it. Looking for Reed? she wondered. Or just trouble?\n\nShe wasn't sure he'd even heard her and was about to ask again when he answered, \"I haven't decided yet what to do with you.\"\n\nShe waited for more, but as usual, she didn't get it. But she wasn't letting him get away with that this time. \"Because you believe now that I'm innocent?\"\n\n\"No, because you're a woman.\"\n\nHer eyes flared. Was he kidding? He would turn down a thousand bucks because he used to be a gentleman and putting a woman in jail crossed some invisible line that he still adhered to? How did a man with principles like that ever even strap on a gun?\n\nShe shook her head. \"So what are the choices you're de-bating?\"\n\n\"They aren't up for discussion.\"\n\nShe was surprised he'd even said that much. But as long as he was answering questions, she tried another, \"Why did you tell Deputy Barnes I'm a girl?\"\n\n\"For the obvious reason.\"\n\nShe gritted her teeth. \"Obvious to you ain't obvious to me, or I wouldn't be asking.\"\n\n\"Because he's going to remember why you looked familiar to him, but now he'll dismiss it as just a close resemblance to a boy wanted for murder. Or would you prefer he make the connection and come looking for you?\"\n\n\"Why do you even care?\" she mumbled.\n\n\"I don't. But I have enough people trying to find me. I don't want eager deputies added to the mix.\"\n\nShe had an immediate urge to turn around and ride in the opposite direction. She even had her reins to do so. Of course he didn't care. He did things for reasons that pertained only to him and no one else, certainly not for her.\n\nBut one thing was still keeping her next to him. \"I suppose if I ride off without you, you'll still shoot me?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So you expect me to just stay with you without any explanation of why I should?\"\n\n\"For the time being.\"\n\nShe was beginning to figure out that she had to read between the lines with him, or in this case between the words, because his \"for the time being\" actually said a lot. It said he might let her go\u2014eventually.\n\nThat was enough to soothe her ruffled feathers, even had her asking in a more amiable tone, \"So are we riding out of town now to avoid Jacob Reed?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I don't sleep on the ground when there is a bed nearby.\"\n\nShe blinked. \"That's more important than avoiding getting ambushed by five men?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe started laughing. Fancy man took finicky to a whole new level, he truly did. But now he was giving her a hard look for laughing\u2014at him. \"You have something else to say?\"\n\nShe grinned cheekily. \"Not me!\"\n\nThey had passed a couple small hotels on the way to the jail, no bigger than boardinghouses. He was taking them farther into the town, probably looking for a hotel comparable to that big one he'd stayed at in Helena.\n\nThey came to a newer-looking section of town that had brick buildings with various types of businesses. She guessed that there had been a fire here in recent years. Most towns went up fast, and fast meant building them with lumber. But it only took one fire spreading through a town to get folks to want to rebuild with more durable materials that wouldn't go up in flames before anyone could even muster an effort to put them out.\n\nDegan found what he was looking for and headed right for it, a hotel two stories high and big enough that it probably had at least ten guest rooms available upstairs, maybe even another common bathing room. He would want a bath even though he'd probably had one that morning before he'd found her. But one a day was a luxury for her, so she didn't need one yet.\n\nHe paid for a room and food to be delivered to it, paid for a hotel employee to fetch some medicine for bee stings from the local doctor, even paid to have their horses stabled for the night before leading her to the stairway. She was surprised about the medicine. She thought she'd been hiding her winces pretty well, but maybe not. She was surprised by how many tasks Degan delegated to others that he could do himself. He must have had many servants at his command earlier in his life, and hotels such as this one with a large staff probably reminded him of that. Fancy man really had been a fancy man, so why would he give all that up?\n\nThey were halfway up the stairs when a man called out from below, \"Are you Degan Grant?\"\n\nDegan turned fast, his hand near his gun. He was ready to kill. It was written all over him. The man who had spoken certainly got that message. Blanching, the man threw up his hands and blurted out, \"I thought you should know someone was here asking for you.\"\n\n\"Jacob Reed?\"\n\n\"No, it was a lady. She didn't give her name.\"\n\nThe man ran away. Whether Degan would have apologized for scaring him wasn't clear, but he relaxed now. Max was still a little wide-eyed. Good grief, for such a big man, he could move quickly.\n\n\"Another woman friend?\" she asked as they continued up the stairs.\n\n\"Not likely.\"\n\n\"Someone looking to hire you?\"\n\n\"I currently have a job, so it doesn't matter.\"\n\n\"Actually, you don't, you just have a favor to finish. One of your normal jobs on the side sounds interesting.\"\n\n\"Interesting for you?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Yeah. I've only seen one gunfight. Bingham Hills never had any. We were too far off the beaten trail to have gunfighters visit. The one fight I saw was in Colorado. It was pretty dull, though. One man got shot in the leg, the other in the shoulder. They decided not to try again and went off together to find a doctor. So I wouldn't mind seeing the famous Degan\u2014\"\n\n\"My usual jobs keep me in one place for a while. That currently isn't an option.\"\n\nHer grin got wider. \"But most of your fights find you, don't they?\"\n\n\"Is that how you want your freedom? Through my death?\"\n\nShe didn't see that coming. For the first time, she could tell he was angry. It emanated from him, his eyes gone stormy gray, his jaw squared, his mouth a hard slash. He had to be exhausted to let it show like this, and that was a good guess. He probably hadn't got much sleep the last couple of nights if he'd been searching for her in Helena. Or maybe his guard was down because he'd almost killed an innocent hotel employee.\n\nBut she wasn't about to answer him one way or the other when his death would actually set her free. He'd never believe her, might even get angrier if she said she didn't want her freedom that way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "By the time they reached Degan's room, his anger was gone, completely roped back in. Max wondered how he could turn it off so quickly. Well, it was probably still there, he just wasn't going to let her see it anymore. The man was surprising her too much today. He needed to cut it out or explain himself better. Or was he just so used to being alone that he'd forgotten how to act when he wasn't? But she shouldn't complain. If she was going to be traveling with him, it might as well be interesting. Predictable it wouldn't be.\n\nMax got as comfortable as she could get with what felt like four bee stings on her back and one on the back of her left arm. She draped her coat and vest over one of the two chairs and dropped her belts, socks, and boots on the floor next to it. She wished she could take off her shirt so it wouldn't keep irritating her stings, but she couldn't do that with Degan in the room.\n\nThe room's single window was open and faced the front of the hotel, though not much noise was coming through it. Max didn't bother to check if it was an avenue for escape. She would wait for a better opportunity than jumping from a second-story window and breaking her neck.\n\nThe room had a bureau and a small desk where the other dining chair was pulled up to, but no other comfortable furniture. It definitely wasn't as nicely appointed as his last hotel. The shaving stand and tub in the corner didn't even have a screen, but then maybe the room wasn't meant for two despite the big bed.\n\nBut she glanced at the double bed with a smile. She could definitely get used to Degan's being finicky if it meant she could sleep in a bed every night. But where was he going to sleep tonight?\n\nThe food arrived before Degan finished lighting the lamps in the room. Chicken pies filled the plates, which were set on the small dining table along with a basket of biscuits and a crock of butter.\n\nAnother waiter came in with a bottle of wine. \"Compliments of the hotel, sir, and apologies from the cook. If the fish didn't go bad, we would have had more to offer.\"\n\nMax reached for the bottle. \"I haven't had wine in I can't remember how long.\"\n\nDegan was removing his jacket to hang it in the wardrobe. \"Are you sure you want to drink that?\"\n\nShe grinned and poured some into the empty glasses on the table. \"Unbend a little, fancy man. We're not going anywhere else tonight, right? No gunfights on the schedule? Just to bed?\"\n\nHe didn't reply as he joined her at the table. Only after she took a sip of the wine did she realize he might have read more into her chatter than she'd meant him to, which led her to blurt out, \"I didn't mean together!\"\n\nHe rolled his eyes. He was unbending. He just didn't drink any of the wine. She wasn't surprised. Degan wouldn't take the chance of hampering his reflexes for any reason when those reflexes kept him alive. Which probably meant he hadn't enjoyed a good round of intoxication in years. She had. Rotgut was easy to come by, and loneliness was a good prompt to sneak around to the back of a saloon to get some. But she didn't really want the wine tonight, either. As tired as she was, it might put her to sleep before she finished eating.\n\n\"Tell me about your family.\"\n\nShe glanced at him, her fork pausing midway to her mouth. \"Is it mandatory with you to converse while eating? Does it help your digestion or something?\"\n\n\"You are the most vocal female I've ever met and now you're objecting to conversation?\"\n\n\"Hell no, I was just wondering why the only time you're open to it is when you're eating something.\"\n\n\"Only when I have a companion sharing the meal\u2014unlike someone who admits she talks to herself.\"\n\nShe laughed at his joke whether he meant it to be one or not. \"Your mama teach you that simple courtesy?\"\n\n\"It doesn't need to be taught when it's how you're raised. Your family didn't eat in silence, did they?\"\n\n\"My brother and I were usually fighting at the table. That was a lot of chatter.\" She chuckled.\n\n\"So you didn't get along with your brother?\"\n\n\"Oh, I did\u2014mostly. But I was a bossy, know-it-all older sister who liked to brag about my accomplishments. He was a jealous younger sibling who didn't have any yet. I love him to pieces, but he knew how to rile my temper. I wouldn't call that an accomplishment, but he was good at it.\"\n\n\"Fighting at the dinner table is usually forbidden.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Says who? But I was talking about when Johnny and I were kids. Just typical childish antics. We wouldn't squabble now that we're older\u2014if I were home.\"\n\nShe wasn't going to succumb to melancholy over how much she missed her brother, but she did fall silent. It might have showed on her face, though, because Degan stopped eating and gazed at her.\n\nOut of the blue, he said, \"I knew a pig named Max.\"\n\nHer brows snapped together. \"You calling me a pig?\"\n\n\"A lady befriended it and named it Maximilian, though she merely called it Max. No, I wasn't calling you anything.\"\n\nShe continued eating. After a few mouthfuls her huff was gone. \"A pet pig, huh? I shouldn't be surprised. I fancied a rooster, brought him the best seeds, didn't mind when he woke me earlier than I wanted to get up. I cheered for him every time he challenged the older rooster we had and consoled him every time he lost. But he died in one of those fights. I cried like a baby and almost shot the old bird that bested him, but Gran stopped me and she was right. It's what roosters do and there can only be one boss. But I never got close to another animal after that, except for Noble. I don't like losing anything or anyone I get attached to.\"\n\n\"So you grew up on a farm?\"\n\n\"A chicken farm. My grandparents built their house away from town, so Carl Bingham wasn't their landlord. They asked his permission first, since he did pretty much own the whole town, and he gave it. But the town grew in our direction, so maybe Carl was sorry he let them build there.\"\n\nThere was another knock at the door. \"That should be your medicine.\" Degan got up to open the door. He took the small bottle the hotel worker handed to him, then locked the door for the night. \"If you've had enough to eat, we should put this lotion on your welts.\"\n\nMax stood up and held out her hand. \"I can do it myself.\"\n\n\"Actually, you can't. So come here and lie down.\"\n\nShe stared at the bed. She didn't move.\n\nHe added patiently, \"I know you are used to fending for yourself, but this is something you need help with, since you can't reach the middle of your back. And while I'm quite capable of wrestling you to the bed\u2014\"\n\n\"I know you are! You did that this morning,\" Max couldn't help pointing out, then immediately regretted reminding him of that embarrassing encounter.\n\n\"As I recall, you were taking a few swings at me.\"\n\nShe thought she saw his lips curve upward for a moment, but she wasn't sure. \"Well, you deserved it,\" she said, blushing.\n\n\"I imagine those bee stings are burning pretty badly by now. Is there really any reason for you not to accept my help graciously?\"\n\nPut that way, she would appear utterly childish if she refused. And the stings were bothering her. She moved to the bed, lifting the back of her shirt before she lay down on her stomach and waited tensely for his touch. She couldn't believe she was doing this. She couldn't believe he was doing this. Degan's being nice to her felt\u2014wrong.\n\n\"Remove the shirt.\"\n\nAll sorts of things raced through her mind, but none of them convinced her to take off her shirt for him. \"No,\" she said adamantly.\n\nHe actually sighed. \"I'm not joking. Your shirt will wipe off the lotion I'm going to put on you. You can do without it for one night to give your welts a chance to heal.\"\n\nDid that have to sound so logical?\n\n\"Besides, this is a hotel, not a brothel.\"\n\nDid he have to bring that up again?!\n\n\"I've already seen your back, all of it, when I let that bee escape.\"\n\nMax gritted her teeth. Was he going to remind that he'd already seen her breasts, too?\n\n\"It's a very nice back, but I don't have any designs on it other than to put this lotion on it.\"\n\n\"All right! Just put the lotion on my back.\" She wiggled out of the shirt without sitting up. Degan helped to get it off her wrists, tossing it aside, before he sat down on the bed next to her. She squeezed her eyes tightly closed, preparing herself for the pain that would come when he rubbed the lotion on the stings. But when he touched her, she felt a cooling, soothing sensation, nothing at all painful. She still couldn't relax though, not with him so close and his fingers lightly rubbing her back.\n\n\"Where were your parents while you were growing up?\"\n\nShe felt he was trying to distract her. She didn't think it would work. Nothing would when his touch felt so good, but she answered anyway. \"My ma died birthing Johnny so I don't remember her at all. Pa took us to live with his folks in Texas, so I'd have a woman raising me. He didn't stick around though. A few years later he left and was never heard from again. He'd always said the sea was calling him.\"\n\n\"So you don't know if he's alive or dead?\"\n\n\"No, he died at sea. A package containing his belongings was delivered with a note from a friend of his, saying that he'd drowned.\" She tsked. \"Had such a hankering to be a sailor, but he didn't know how to swim. That was a few months before Grandpa died, which was when I took over hunting and caring for my gran.\"\n\n\"She's an invalid?\"\n\n\"No, she's a tough old girl, but I don't want her living alone or doing more'n she has to. Now it's your turn, fancy man.\"\n\n\"I wish it was\u2014but I didn't get stung.\"\n\nThat's not what she'd meant, but she smiled to herself at the way he avoided saying anything about himself. Luxuriating in the delicious sensations of having her pain relieved by the gentle swirling of his fingertips on her back, her neck, her arm, she was too sleepy and too content to insist he divulge something about himself. She was almost asleep when she thought she felt the brush of lips on her shoulder..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "\"This tall,\" Degan told the shopkeeper, holding his hand to his upper chest. \"And skinny.\"\n\n\"It would be better if you brought the boy in so he could try the shirt on.\"\n\n\"No, it wouldn't. Just see if you have anything that will fit someone that size.\"\n\nDegan waited while the shopkeeper disappeared into the back of his shop. A woman came in with a little girl. When the child pointed at the leg shackles Degan had draped around his neck, the woman turned around and walked back out.\n\nDegan removed the shackles and set them on the counter. If the shopkeeper came back empty-handed, Degan could at least get a sack from him for the iron restraints. Not that he was feeling guilty for asking the sheriff for the shackles when he'd picked up his reward money for Kid Cade. He probably wouldn't need them, at least not for Max. Then again, he might. But she needed a clean shirt today so her welts wouldn't get infected, and he wasn't sure if she had one.\n\nDegan finished his business in Butte, which included sending a telegram to John to inform him of the Kid's capture, and returned to the hotel. Max had still been sleeping when he'd left, and even though it was still early in the morning, she could be gone by now. He'd left it to fate, tying only one of her wrists to the headboard and, to avoid disturbing her, not as tightly as he should have.\n\nHe hadn't gotten much sleep with her next to him, not this time. Not after seeing her in those revealing clothes at the brothel and touching her breasts. Not after riding with her in his lap. And last night, hearing her sighs of pleasure as he'd rubbed the lotion on her back. He couldn't deny how much he'd enjoyed that. He'd let down his guard because she'd been wounded and vulnerable, but it couldn't happen again.\n\nHe entered the room and closed the door before he looked to see if she was still there. Although he'd left it to fate, he wasn't sure now that he wouldn't have been bothered if she was gone. But she was still there sleeping. It was incredible how soundly she slept. He'd put more lotion on her a few times last night without waking her. He'd gotten more pleasure from that than he imagined she did, but it seemed to have worked. Most of the swelling was gone from the bee stings.\n\nHe put the shackles at the bottom of his valise and draped the new shirt over a chair before he took a deep breath and moved to the side of the bed. He stared at Max for a moment, a long moment. She was still sleeping on her stomach, the sheet draped up to the middle of her back where he'd left it, but her head was turned toward him. She was so lovely. So infuriating. He wasn't surprised that she'd gotten under his skin. The surprise was that she'd done it so quickly.\n\n\"Wake up,\" he said as he untied her from the headboard. \"Bathwater is being delivered for us.\"\n\n\"Us?\" she asked sleepily.\n\n\"We'll have to share the tub.\"\n\n\"Share?!\"\n\nIt was amazing how quickly she could jump to erroneous conclusions and get upset by them. \"Separately,\" he clarified. \"We can toss a coin to see who goes first, if you like. Or you can accept the fact that my upbringing leans toward ladies first.\"\n\nShe raised a brow at him. \"You really did used to be a gentleman, didn't you? No, I take that back,\" she added, finally noticing the rope on her wrist. \"Why did you tie me again? You said you aren't putting me in jail yet, so why would I run off?\"\n\n\"Because you don't like me. Because you'd rather be on your own. Because you can't be trusted. Because turning you over to the law is still an option. Take your pick.\"\n\n\"All of them,\" she snarled, and yanked her hand back as soon as it was free. The unruly movement caused the sheet to slip, giving Degan a full view of her breasts. She mumbled, \"I must've dreamed that you were being nice to me last night.\"\n\nDegan smiled to himself, realizing that he could have said the same thing. But he didn't. He watched as she realized she was still wearing nothing above the waist and dragged the sheet off the bed to drape it around her like a cloak before she sat up. How disappointing, he thought. It was too bad her boldness didn't apply to her body.\n\nBut recalling her previous remark, he asked, \"What would you know about gentlemen?\"\n\n\"Bingham Hills wasn't a backwater. We had our share of gentlemen, mostly Southerners, though. Families who lost everything in the war and moved West to lick their wounds. What's your excuse for coming West?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, which had her adding peevishly, \"Oh, yeah, I forgot. Nothing personal\u2014from you. And I don't need a bath today.\"\n\nWas she going to be disagreeable all morning? \"You would turn down a bath for what reason?\"\n\n\"My coat protected me from the dust yesterday.\" But when he simply stared at her, she grouched, \"Fine. I'll go first.\"\n\nTaking the sheet with her, she got off the bed and stretched her limbs under it, then gave him a long look, noting that he was fully dressed, eyeing his gun belt. \"Where'd you go aside from ordering bathwater? Oh, wait, did the woman come knocking at the door?\" Then she chuckled. \"Which one was it this time?\"\n\nIt took him a moment to remember why she would ask about more than one. He'd only wondered briefly about the woman who had asked for him here at this hotel. He'd been hired by a few women before, one who just needed his protection on a journey, the other one a new widow with a brother-in-law trying to lay claim to the property her husband had left her. But as he'd told Max last night, he wasn't taking on any jobs right now. And at least he didn't think the woman asking for him had been his ex-fianc\u00e9e. Even if Allison was fool enough to follow him, it was highly unlikely that she would have gotten to Butte before he did. Actually, stagecoaches traveled pretty fast...\n\nThat thought annoyed him so much he turned around and walked to the window before Max noticed. He heard her tsk behind him. \"That's the most annoying habit I've ever come across.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Your not answering simple questions.\"\n\nHe crossed his arms and faced her again. \"There was nothing simple about yours. You were attempting to provoke me. You shouldn't be so obvious about it.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"But did it work?\"\n\n\"A better question would be, why do you want to?\"\n\n\"Because you aren't as coldly dispassionate as you want people to think. I've seen you slip a few times. And because I like conversation, which has already been established. And while I've admitted that I sometimes talk to myself, I'm telling you right now, I don't really enjoy it all that much.\"\n\n\"And your long-winded point is?\"\n\n\"With you, it seems like I'm always talking to myself,\" she grouched. \"It wouldn't kill you to show the man behind the gunfighter. When it's just you and me and no one else would see if you laughed or run away terrified if they saw you get angry.\"\n\n\"Tell me something\u2014\"\n\n\"Not unless you return the favor.\"\n\n\"Why aren't you afraid of me?\"\n\nShe stared at him for a long moment before she started laughing. \"That's the question you ask after what I just said to you? Really? Or is that just your way of changing the subject?\"\n\n\"From the first night, you haven't been afraid. You revealed desperation once, but not fear.\"\n\nShe raised her brows. \"Do you want me to be afraid of you?\"\n\nDid he? Actually, no. It had been so long since he'd butted heads with someone, he'd forgotten how aggravating, frustrating, but also, at times, quite amusing it could be. A number of times he'd wanted to laugh at something she'd said, a few times he'd been unable to resist the urge. No, he didn't mind at all that he didn't make her nervous. But it certainly confounded him that she'd never been afraid when everyone else was\u2014at least to begin with.\n\n\"It's my business to know people. You don't fall into any of the typical categories.\"\n\nShe threw up her hands. \"And now you're calling me strange?\"\n\n\"No. Either foolhardy\u2014or too courageous.\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Then you haven't given it enough thought. If you want the truth, I'm usually too angry at you to feel anything else.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Fear isn't an exclusive emotion. You can be angry and too afraid to do anything about it.\"\n\n\"Ha! You know that ain't so in my case.\"\n\nTrue. She'd attacked him with her fists repeatedly, kicked him several times, thrown her boots at him, lambasted him vocally, and snarled her rage and frustration at him. She wore her heart on her sleeve, expressing her emotions, but none of them had been fear. Right now her expression showed that she was delighted by his curiosity\u2014which he should have kept to himself.\n\nHer answer hadn't been satisfying. Payback for all the times he hadn't answered her? Or she was learning from him how to avoid a subject she didn't want to discuss.\n\nHe turned to look out the window again to let her know he was done with her avoidance antics. He heard the door to the small water closet open and close. He was surprised the room even had one, when it didn't offer a bathing room as well. The hotel was new, so it should have offered that convenience. But perhaps some of the businesses had been hit hard financially when they'd had to rebuild after the fire he'd heard about. The tub didn't even have a screen. That was going to be interesting...\n\nShe stepped out of the water closet. \"What's taking them so long to deliver the water you ordered?\"\n\n\"My guess would be that they're heating it,\" he said without turning.\n\nShe came to stand next to him at the window. He glanced down at the top of her head. Her hair had felt like silk when he'd touched it last night after she fell asleep. Best not to think of that. And she was no longer draped in the sheet. She'd found the shirt she'd been wearing yesterday and put it back on. He didn't mention the clean one he had for her since she would be bathing soon.\n\nThen she surprised him by getting back to his question. \"You know, I'm not really sure why you don't frighten me, fancy man, but I'll speculate if you like. It might be because you're so handsome I don't see much beyond that. Or it could be because it became clear to me you're not a murderer. There were a few times you could've shot me but you didn't. But mostly it's because you didn't hit me when you started to that night up in the hills, which told me clearly that you won't hurt a woman. My guess would be, that's your answer.\"\n\nDegan didn't hear much beyond her saying he was handsome and was surprised by how much it pleased him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Max saw Jacob Reed riding past the hotel. He was alone, and in no hurry, perusing both sides of the street. A lot of people were out there going about their business. He appeared to be glancing at each of them, not that someone such as Degan couldn't be spotted a block away, if that was whom Reed was looking for. And from what Degan had said, she didn't doubt Reed was doing just that. But why was he alone? Or did he think Degan wouldn't remember him? That was a possibility because there wasn't anything distinctive about the man. He had shaggy brown hair and a bushy mustache and was lean, and not very tall. But his white stallion certainly was memorable.\n\n\"Your friend appears to be looking for someone.\"\n\n\"He's not a friend.\" Degan sounded distracted. Was he still dwelling on their conversation? She was still amazed they'd actually had one! Or did her mention of Reed bring back his anger from last night when she'd admitted she wouldn't mind seeing him in a gunfight? She might as well ask.\n\n\"Are you done being angry at me?\"\n\n\"Do I look angry?\"\n\nShe snorted. As if she didn't know that his appearance offered no clue about what he was feeling\u2014usually. She glanced to the side to remind him, \"You shouldn't have gotten so touchy over my wanting to see you in action. It's not like I'm not sure you'd win.\" Then she grinned. \"Except maybe against me.\"\n\n\"Go ahead, get your gun.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"You know where it is.\"\n\nShe was far too delighted to prove her point to wonder why he'd allow it. She rushed across the room to get her gun belt and strapped it on, then dug into his valise for her Colt and slid it into the holster before turning to face him. He'd turned around but was still by the window, bright light behind him, a disadvantage for her, but she could still see his gun and that he'd moved his jacket back to clear it. She was fast, she'd had almost two years to do a lot of practicing. But she'd never been in an actual gunfight, a real showdown, and Degan looked so deadly standing there waiting, cold, utterly dispassionate.\n\nMax actually began to sweat. This wasn't as easy as she'd figured it would be. She wanted to be faster than him, but she might not be. And her gun wasn't loaded, while his was. What if he fired out of habit, without intending to? She might be faster but could still end up dead.\n\n\"Okay, bad idea. Forget it.\" She turned around, giving him her back.\n\n\"Suit yourself.\"\n\nShe let out the breath she'd been holding and dropped her gun back in his valise. Damnit. Showdowns obviously took the kind of guts she only wished she had, and that hadn't even been a real one! But at least he wasn't rubbing it in, that she'd backed down. She was a woman, after all. He'd probably expected her to do just that.\n\nThe knock finally came at the door. Degan let the attendants in. There were four of them this time, so they were likely bringing all the water in one visit.\n\nAs soon as they filed back out of the room, Degan told her, \"There's a new shirt for you on the chair.\"\n\nShe was surprised. \"You bought it for me?\"\n\n\"To keep your wounds clean until they heal, although most of the swelling is already gone thanks so that lotion.\"\n\nAnd his tender ministrations, she thought. That hadn't been a dream. Degan Grant continued to surprise her. She would have thanked him for his kindness if he didn't add, \"Five minutes, Max, and I'll be back in here.\"\n\nHe wasn't taking her clothes with him this time? \"Ten,\" she bargained.\n\n\"Eight and not a minute more.\" He stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him.\n\nMax didn't even look toward the window. She still didn't fancy breaking her neck going out one. But eight minutes wasn't long for a bath, and she didn't doubt Degan was waiting right outside the door. She took off her clothes fast and stepped into the tub. This hotel didn't have fancy creamy soap, but the soap bars it provided were shaped like flowers and sweet smelling, so Max didn't break out her stash of the other soap. She quickly washed from top to bottom.\n\nStepping out of the tub, she frowned when she realized she was going to have to put on the same pants she'd worn yesterday, but at least she had a clean shirt thanks to Degan. When she donned it, she found that it fit too snugly, which wouldn't do at all. No, it would have to do. She'd just fasten her vest today instead of leaving it open as she usually did.\n\nShe needed more clothes, obviously, or less time in hotels and more time in a camp by a lake or river so she could wash what she had. Traveling with someone who would be doing all the leading wasn't going to give her time for the things she needed to do. But she couldn't afford more clothes. Anytime she got money in her trades, she spent it on more ammunition. Besides, she wouldn't be making any money while she was with Degan because he wouldn't let her hunt.\n\nShe was still drying her hair when Degan reentered the room and headed straight for the tub. He hadn't relocked the door. She thought that was curious until she saw him place his gun on the towel stand within reach of the tub. So she was back to guessing if he would really shoot her if she bolted while he was buck naked. He should have locked the door instead of tempting her like this!\n\nShe watched him as he undressed until he got to his pants. Her eyes widened when she realized he was going to drop them knowing full well she was still looking at him.\n\nShe turned away from him. \"I should wait in the hall like you did.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"This isn't appropriate.\"\n\n\"Nothing about you is appropriate. Sit down. Turn around. Pretend I'm not naked.\"\n\nHer cheeks lit up. Was he naked now? Or was he at least sitting in the tub so she could look his way again? She didn't chance it. Instinctively, she knew the sight of him would be branded in her mind forever. She'd seen naked men before, such as the miners she'd encountered at rivers or lakes who had thought nothing about dropping their clothes and walking into the water with other men around. Of course they hadn't realized she was a female. She hadn't been embarrassed then. But she wasn't even looking at Degan now and her cheeks were hot with a blush. It just wasn't the same when it was a man this handsome\u2014when she wanted to look!\n\nShe looked everywhere but toward his corner, yet she was so flustered that he was undressing behind her that she inadvertently turned and caught a glimpse of him as he added his pants to the pile of clothes behind him. She lost her breath. The sight of his broad, muscular back and firm thighs, and such tight buttocks, brought a wave of heat to her body. For a heartbeat she actually started to put her hand out, wanting to touch him, but she squeezed her eyes shut and turned away. She did not just see that big, beautiful body of his naked. She had to repeat that to herself several times. But she didn't let out her breath until she heard the water splash, telling her the tub was hiding at least some of him now.\n\nShe still wouldn't look again. But taking deep breaths as she kept her eyes on the other side of the room eventually brought back a semblance of calm. He wouldn't need to shave when he was done bathing. Apparently, he'd done that before he went out while she'd been asleep. She felt slightly relieved, knowing that he'd get dressed as soon as he got out of the tub and not stand there half-naked while he shaved.\n\n\"Are we going to hole up here till Jacob Reed leaves town? Or long enough for me to wash my clothes?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But he's out there looking for you right now. You did notice that, right?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"If he's got any sense a'tall, he'll check the hotels for you next.\"\n\n\"I don't sign registers. And I've already warned the staff to forget they saw me.\"\n\n\"It's big news that you're in town. Do you really think they won't brag that you're staying at their hotel?\"\n\n\"People don't usually cross me.\"\n\nShe could believe that. Chattering was helping her ignore that he was naked, so she kept it up. \"I still need a day to wash my clothes. What's the point of bathing if I have to wear dirty clothes? Any body of water will do if we're not staying here.\"\n\n\"You can turn around now, Max.\"\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder cautiously, then turned. His wet hair was slicked back, but he was dressed again, and his gun was back on his hip where it usually was. It occurred to her that he needed to have his clothes washed, too. His valise might be a nice size, but she'd looked inside it and knew it wasn't stuffed to the brim with clothes.\n\nHis gray eyes swept over her before he said, \"We need to find a dress for you that you can wear before we enter a town.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"I don't think so. I can't wear one on the trail, so what's the point?\"\n\n\"I said before we enter a town.\"\n\nShe shook her head at him. \"Too much trouble, and you still didn't say why.\"\n\n\"To keep you from getting arrested or shot by some bounty hunter.\"\n\n\"I can keep my head down like I always do. No one's gonna recognize me.\"\n\n\"This is my decision, not yours.\"\n\nShe gave him a mulish look. \"It ain't your decision if I won't put it on.\"\n\n\"I might find it interesting to do it for you.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"You wouldn't!\"\n\n\"You were hoping things would get interesting, or is my getting shot the only thing you find interesting?\"\n\nHe would dress her. Because he was still mad at her for implying last night that she'd like to see him in action. Or maybe not. Had that been humor in his tone?\n\nHe put his hat on. \"Let's go.\"\n\nShe gritted her teeth over those same two annoying words of his. \"Can you at least add a little something to that? Like, 'Let's go to the train station'? Or, 'Let's go back to Helena'? Or, 'Let's go have breakfast'? Anything that might indicate where we're going?\"\n\n\"Does it really matter where we're going?\"\n\nShe raised her chin. \"It does when I'm hungry.\"\n\n\"Do you really think I won't feed you?\"\n\nThat tiny note of humor was there again, just the slightest indication in his tone, and this time she was sure. She gave up, well aware that he'd still managed not to say where they were going." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "\"There are a number of towns between here and Billings. We can pause long enough in one to find a laundress.\"\n\nMax wasn't surprised to hear Degan finally volunteer that information. They were eating, which was the one time he didn't mind talking.\n\nThe hotel restaurant was a little more than half-filled with other guests or townsfolk. Only two tables had emptied when Degan entered the room. Max was delighted to find a variety of choices for the morning meal. She would have liked to try one of everything if she thought she could eat it all. She settled on sausage, eggs, and half a steak.\n\n\"Why Billings?\" she asked.\n\n\"We'll be catching the train there.\"\n\n\"I thought you didn't like riding them.\"\n\n\"I don't when I'm not on a time schedule. Right now there's someplace I need to go, and the Northern Pacific could get robbed while we're on it. It will save me having to search all over Dakota for where Nolan is holed up.\"\n\nIt was beginning to sound as if she was going to be in his company for a long time. It could take more than a week just to get to Billings. But after he got Nolan, if he got Nolan, he'd have arrested two outlaws and would have to decide if she was going to be the third. So she should probably be glad they were going on a long trip. Lots more chances for her to slip away.\n\n\"Oh, hell no,\" Degan suddenly snarled under his breath.\n\nMax was startled to hear some real anger in his voice, even if his expression didn't show a bit of it. At least his ire wasn't directed at her this time. She glanced over her shoulder to see what he was looking at. Her again? The pretty, dark-haired woman was dressed just as fancy as she'd been in Helena. But today her dress, jacket, and hat were three different shades of blue. Her adorable little hat had no useful brim that would shade her from the sun. It was purely decorative. Max didn't doubt that every woman in the dining room envied the young woman and wished she could wear something that frivolous and pretty. Max sighed to herself.\n\nThe young woman approached their table and sat down. Getting a better look at her, Max realized she wasn't just pretty, she was beautiful. And utterly brazen to sit down at their table without an invitation.\n\n\"How far are you going to make me chase you, Degan?\" she asked petulantly.\n\n\"I'm not making you do anything, Allison. And I warned you, I have nothing to say to you.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you.\"\n\n\"I don't care.\"\n\nHe stood up and nodded at Max to do the same. She gave her plate, only half-empty, a wistful glance, but got up quickly before he yanked her up.\n\n\"Degan, wait,\" Allison said in frustrated tones as he started out of the room. \"Your father\u2014\"\n\n\"Is alive. I've already confirmed it. So whatever game you're playing ends here.\"\n\nHe didn't even stop as he said that, but the woman persisted. \"A man doesn't have to be dead not to be who he was. He\u2014\"\n\nMax couldn't hear the rest of what she was saying as they left the hotel. But the woman wasn't giving up. She followed him outside and yelled, \"Degan Grant, come back here!\"\n\nHe continued walking to the stable on the corner of the next block, while Max was trying to look behind them. Fancy lady looked fit to be tied. Max wasn't surprised. The lady was too pretty to be used to being ignored.\n\n\"Degan, stop!\" she yelled again. \"You have to hear me out!\"\n\nMax rolled her eyes. \"If no one else knew you were in town, they all do now. Are you really going to let her continue shouting your name like that?\"\n\nHe didn't reply, but the damage was already done. Max saw Jacob Reed step off the boardwalk up the street and start walking down the middle of the street toward Degan. He was still alone\u2014or was he? He'd had four men with him when they'd seen him on the road to Butte yesterday. Max glanced around quickly but didn't see any of his friends now. Then she did. Reed must have found out where Degan was staying and set his men up for this ambush ahead of time. She knew those hotel employees wouldn't be able to keep their mouths shut about such an infamous gunfighter staying in their hotel.\n\n\"There's a man on the roof up ahead with a rifle pointed at you,\" she warned Degan. \"This is an ambush.\"\n\n\"I know. I've already spotted two others.\"\n\n\"But that one is out of your range, while you're not out of his.\"\n\n\"It might not matter if I kill Jacob first. This is his fight, not theirs.\"\n\nThis really wasn't the time for him to sound so damn calm or to make guesses. And where was the fourth man? The street was already starting to clear. Two men walking toward each other like this was a dead giveaway of what was about to happen. And \"might not\" didn't work for her.\n\n\"Don't you think it would be better to take cover?\"\n\n\"You are. Get back in the hotel and do it fast.\"\n\nShe didn't need to be told twice and started running to the hotel. Fancy lady wasn't doing the same. She was still following Degan, holding her skirt up daintily just a few inches off the ground, keeping her eyes down to make sure she didn't step in manure. So she probably didn't know what was happening and might not guess until the first shots were fired.\n\n\"There's about to be gunfire,\" Max warned as she passed her.\n\nMax didn't wait to see if the woman turned around. And she didn't enter the hotel to hide. She went straight to the desk in the lobby and told the man there, \"Give me any weapons you've got stashed.\"\n\n\"We don't\u2014\"\n\n\"What you keep for protection. Lie to me and Mr. Grant will be in here shooting up the place in a few minutes.\"\n\nAs threats went, that was a pretty good one. The man bent down and came up with a rifle in his hands. She took it and hid it under her coat, then went back outside to make her way quickly down the boardwalk.\n\nAs she passed Degan and Reed, who were within talking distance of each other now, she heard Degan saying, \"I didn't kill you last time because you were grieving the loss of your brother. You've had enough time to deal with that grief.\"\n\nJacob laughed. \"Pretty confident for a man about to die, Grant.\"\n\nMax kept on going, didn't stop until she was within range of two of Reed's friends, who were squatting on the roofs of two buildings across the street. She knew that as soon as Degan drew his gun, he was going to get riddled with rifle shot. She wasn't going to wait for him to die to get a shot off. But she had begun to sweat. This wasn't like shooting at an animal for dinner. Animals didn't shoot back! But she had no choice. She didn't agree with Degan's thinking that the riflemen on the roof \"might not\" matter. There was no time to have qualms about shooting the men, but still she was too late.\n\nShots were fired in the street behind her. With her eyes on one of the men stationed on the roof, she didn't dare look back to see who had won the gunfight. She just fired her weapon the moment Reed's friend leaned up to take aim. She hit his rifle, breaking it and probably taking off a few of his fingers. He dropped out of sight, but she heard him screaming. She aimed at the second man, but he'd already gotten off one shot and was now hiding behind a chimney. She had to wait for him to show himself again.\n\nMore shots came from behind her, so she figured Degan must not be dead yet\u2014unless some of the local deputies had gotten involved. She still didn't want to look, didn't know what she'd feel if Degan was dead. Actually, she wouldn't like it. Why else would she still be there trying to help him instead of using this perfect opportunity to escape?\n\nThe man behind the chimney left his cover and ran to the edge of the flat roof. Max fired before he dropped to his knee to take up that new position. Her bullet swung him around and he lost his balance. She winced as he fell off the roof. He tried to get up but couldn't manage it, probably having broken a few bones in the fall.\n\nShe steeled herself to look back where the gunfight had taken place, then let out her breath. Degan wasn't there now. Jacob Reed was though, lying prone in the dirt. Even though no one was shooting at the moment, no one was approaching him yet to see if he was still alive. But Deputy Barnes and another man were running toward her from the other end of town.\n\nGun drawn, out of breath, Barnes paused to ask her, \"What happened here?\"\n\nShe nodded toward Reed. \"He and his friends tried to ambush Marshal Grant. There's still two of them unaccounted for.\"\n\nJust as she said it, a body hit the roof of the porch above their heads, then rolled off it to the street in front of them. The man had no bullet wounds, though his nose looked busted up pretty bad.\n\n\"And that just leaves one unaccounted for unless Grant already took care of him, too,\" she added, keeping a grin to herself.\n\nAt least she knew where Degan was now. The lawmen started checking the bodies. Max ran across the street to see if she could spot the last man on the roofs of the buildings on the side of the street where she'd been standing, but a movement by the stable caught her eye first. That would be a good place for him to hide or grab a horse to flee in case none of his friends had survived. A few hay bales were on one side of the big stable doors, and an unhitched wagon on the other side. Then a man peeked up over the rim of the wagon bed and quickly ducked down again.\n\nWith the stable located on the corner of an intersection, Max worked her way around the corner to the stable's entrance on the other street so she could sneak up behind the unhitched wagon. She already had her rifle aimed as she approached it. She was still sweating due to her darn coat and the darn July weather. She was not nervous.\n\n\"Get up, mister. Toss your rifle over the side and do it real slow. A rifle shot at this range might tear a hole in you big enough to put my fist through. I'd rather not, but I will if you make any sudden moves.\"\n\n\"Don't shoot!\"\n\nHe tossed his rifle out of the wagon and then a Colt, before he stood up. Max went around to the front of the wagon to kick his rifle farther away and holstered the Colt. Glancing up at the man, she could see now that he was just a kid, not even as old as she was, and he looked terrified.\n\n\"Are you one of Jacob Reed's friends?\" she asked as he crawled out of the wagon bed. \"Or were you just hiding from the gunfire?\"\n\n\"Jacob saved my life. I owed him.\"\n\nShe hadn't meant to hand him an excuse like that, but he was too dumb to take it. She tsked. \"You should've found another way to repay him a favor, one that didn't include murder. You do know that's what this was, right? What any ambush is? It doesn't get more cowardly than this.\"\n\n\"I think he gets the idea,\" Degan said from behind her as he lifted the rifle from her hands.\n\nMax swung around. One of the deputies was with Degan and led the kid away.\n\nDegan didn't look as if he'd been in a gunfight, or a fistfight on top of a roof, for that matter. Not a hair on his head was out of place. Still, he had a tenseness about him, as if he hadn't wound down from the fight yet. Neither had she, though her nervousness appeared to be gone, replaced by annoyance.\n\n\"Really? The first thing you do is disarm me? No thank-you for saving your life?\"\n\n\"I reap what I sow, so all consequences are mine to bear. This fight had nothing to do with you. You were supposed to be safely inside the hotel.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but something got proved here in case you didn't notice,\" she shot back.\n\n\"That you don't know how to listen?\"\n\nThat had her gritting her teeth, but she was too curious not to ask, \"So is Reed going to heal up and come after you again or did you kill him?\"\n\n\"A doctor is with him now, but I warned him I would kill him next time. Let's go.\"\n\n\"Famous last words,\" she mumbled. \"I'll remember them for your tombstone.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Max thought it had to be the hottest day of the year. There wasn't even a whisper of a breeze or a speck of a cloud in the bright blue sky. If she were alone, she would have found some shade near a lake or a stream and just waited out the heat before moving on. She didn't think Degan would appreciate that suggestion.\n\nShe'd already taken off her coat and laid it on the back of her horse and rolled up her sleeves. That hadn't helped. Now she slipped off her vest and hooked it over the pommel. This was no time to worry about how noticeable her breasts were in the snug new shirt. She even unfastened a few buttons on it. Nothing helped. It felt as if steam were rising from the road, it was so hot and muggy.\n\nTwice they had to move off the road to let a stagecoach pass. If Degan was in such a hurry to get to the train in Billings, he had to realize that a stagecoach could get them there more quickly. The drivers didn't pace their horses, they just traded them out at each stop. He could stable their own horses and pick them up on the return trip. That was if he was coming back this way. Maybe he wasn't. He didn't exactly share his plans.\n\nDegan had to be bothered by the heat, too, because he had removed his jacket and silk vest and rolled up his sleeves. Even without all his formal attire he still looked dangerous. It wasn't his fancy clothes that signaled to people that he was deadly. Clearly, his demeanor told them that he was a man to be avoided, a man to be reckoned with\u2014a man to run from. And she'd saved his life this morning. She must have had a spell of insanity. It had been the worst idea she'd ever had. And she still hadn't received a thank-you.\n\nShe was riding with the confiscated Colt on her right hip. He had to have seen it as soon as she'd taken off her coat. There was no way he couldn't have. So he was obviously going to let her keep it. Was this his way of thanking her for helping him in Butte? Or was it because he knew she wouldn't shoot him any more than he would shoot her? She'd rather have her own gun back, but asking for it again might goad him into taking away the one she did have, so she wasn't going to put that to the test.\n\nHe hadn't said a word to her since they'd left Butte. Silence, especially unnecessary silence, grated on her nerves something fierce.\n\nFinally she said, \"I usually travel through woods and hills. At least there's shade under the trees.\"\n\n\"I prefer roads.\"\n\n\"I don't usually travel when it's this hot, either. Look at the sky, there's not a cloud in sight, which means there will be plenty of moonlight tonight to ride by. I usually hole up on hot days like\u2014\"\n\n\"We're not. We'll sleep when everyone else sleeps so we don't get surprised.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"Everyone else is probably sensible like me and gets out of the heat on days like this.\"\n\nAn hour later she tried again. \"We need some water. I'm going to faint if I can't douse myself soon.\"\n\n\"We'll reach the Jefferson River by tonight.\"\n\n\"Not soon enough. I came this way when I was heading north. There's a small lake about a mile south of the road up ahead. You'd pass right by it if you didn't know it was there.\"\n\nHe didn't answer immediately but finally said, \"Lead the way.\"\n\nShe did. Concessions from him were too few for her not to jump on one when he made it. He didn't like doing things any way but his way. Well, she preferred to get her own way, too, if she cared to admit it.\n\nAccording to her belly, it was two hours past lunchtime when she found the deer trail to the lake. White-barked aspens and a few ponderosa pines grew close to the shore with wildflowers scattered among them, but she didn't immediately notice how pretty a spot it was because her eyes were focused on the deep blue water. As soon as they got there, she headed for the lake, dropping her belts and hat on the way and only pausing long enough to take off her boots before she walked right into the water, socks and all. The water wasn't icy cold, but was definitely cool, and exactly what she needed. She leaned back and floated, sighing with pleasure.\n\nDegan didn't do the same, although she knew he had to want to. But cooling off in a lake on a hot summer day would be relaxing his guard too much and heaven forbid he do something like that. He merely led the horses to the water and splashed some on his face and head. Water dripped down his shirt, drawing her attention to where the wet fine cotton material clung to his muscular chest. She quickly raised her eyes to his face.\n\n\"Your clothes will dry in no time. Come on in.\"\n\nHe stared at her for a long moment before he said, \"Unlike you, I prefer to remove my clothes before swimming.\"\n\n\"Well, don't do that!\"\n\nHe continued to gaze at her but didn't move. She began to picture him undressing as he'd done that morning. Her cheeks started to heat up. It almost felt as if steam were rising around her again, even though the water was perfectly cool. She ducked her head under the water to get the image of his naked body out of her mind.\n\nShe wondered if Degan ever did anything spontaneously, anything fun that made him laugh. Who was she kidding? Of course he didn't.\n\nWhen she came up, she saw that he'd turned away and was opening his food sack. \"Toss me my soap, will you? There's a bar in my bags. My clothes, too, for that matter. Now's as good a time as any\u2014\"\n\n\"No, that can wait until tonight when you'll have time to dry them. Come eat. We're not staying here longer than we have to.\"\n\nShe didn't budge. It felt too good right where she was. And from this distance it let her see all of Degan, without his realizing she was looking at things other than his face.\n\n\"Get out of the water, Max.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Max.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nHe dropped the food sack on the ground and started unbuttoning his shirt. He would, too. Get completely naked. But he wouldn't come in the water to enjoy himself for a bit, he'd come in just to haul her out.\n\n\"You win, fancy man.\" She laughed and walked out of the water.\n\nShe went to her horse and stepped around it before she removed her soaked shirt and opened her saddlebag to get a dry one. A dry dirty one. She made a face and pulled out Luella's chemise instead and slipped it on. It wasn't as dainty and fine as hers was and it wasn't as thin, either, so it could probably withstand a hot day like this.\n\n\"I'll be much cooler if you stay off the roads so I can ride in this.\"\n\nHe came around her horse to see what she was talking about. \"Like hell you will. You might be cooler, but the sight of you is going to heat the blood of any man who sees you, and I'm not in the mood to do any more shooting today.\"\n\nShe blushed. He didn't sound or look angry, but a definite heat was in his eyes as he stared at her breasts, which were clearly defined by the chemise. Had he been referring to himself? Was his blood already heated? Hers was starting to feel that way.\n\nIt was fast, so fast, his drawing her up against him, her feet leaving the ground, her arms wrapping tightly around his neck, his mouth covering hers. She'd never felt such a wild burst of sensations before. Billy Johnston's kisses had been sweet and fun, but full of uncertainty because she made him so nervous. But this was raw passion. This was Degan, a man who probably didn't even know how to be nervous. This was more exciting than she could ever have imagined. The heat, the frayed tempers, whatever had made him kiss her, she didn't want it to stop. He tasted too good and felt even better. He deepened the kiss, thrusting his tongue into her mouth with a sensual urgency that made something unfurl deep inside her, something so incredibly nice that she groaned. But she wished she hadn't! Whether it was the noise she'd made or something else, he put his hands on her waist and set her on the ground at arm's length. Their eyes locked.\n\n\"That's what can happen on a hot day\" was all he said before he walked away.\n\nMax was dazed for a moment. Why did he stop kissing her? Some damn gentleman's code of honor because she was still his prisoner? If so, then he shouldn't have kissed her at all! Her disappointment was still stronger than her embarrassment. And she hadn't even won the argument about what she was going to wear.\n\nBut her disappointment had her yell at his back, \"This has to be the hottest day this territory has ever had!\"\n\n\"That's because there's no breeze today.\"\n\n\"I don't care what's causing it. We should stay right here where there's shade and water to cool off in until the worst is over.\"\n\n\"No.\" He pulled one of his own shirts out of his valise and tossed it at her. \"Put that on.\"\n\nShe threw it right back at him. \"I'd rather wear my wet one. It might keep me cool for about ten damn minutes, before it starts steaming!\"\n\nShe almost added too. But he probably figured that out because he asked, \"Why are you angry?\"\n\nOh, God, she didn't know! It couldn't be because he'd abruptly ended a kiss that shouldn't have happened. It had to be the heat\u2014and his stubbornness. Why did he have to be so dead set in his ways? She was only talking about a brief delay in his journey. But she knew why. The sooner he completed his favor for Marshal Hayes, the sooner he'd be rid of her.\n\nShe took a deep, steadying breath before she said, \"I'm not. And you don't need to apologize for what just happened.\"\n\nHis lips actually curved a tiny bit as he came back over to her. \"I wasn't going to.\" He held out his shirt. When she still didn't take it, he warned, \"You'll get sunburned if you just wear that camisole. Do you want me to rub lotion on you again?\"\n\n\"No, I\u2014well, that was very\u2014never mind.\" She was sure that he was teasing her now.\n\n\"Then put this on, or I will assist you in putting it on.\" He added softly, \"I really don't mind assisting you.\"\n\nShe took the shirt before he proved it, but as soon as she got her arms into it, he proved it anyway, reaching for the buttons. She didn't stop him. He was confusing her more and more. Suddenly she felt shy with him this close to her. Was he going to kiss her again? Maybe he'd only stopped because he was worried about her skin getting burned.\n\nThis attraction she was feeling to him was getting a little too strong. She should be thinking about escaping, not kissing him! Yet she stood there hopeful, letting him button her shirt, feeling all soft inside that he would even want to. She actually liked having him this close and doing something sweet for her. She couldn't deny it, even if this caring side of him puzzled her.\n\nIt was taking him three times longer than it would take her to fasten those buttons, but she didn't make a move to take over and do it herself. Was he staring at her breasts or at the buttons he was slowly fastening near them? She lost her breath when she felt the back of his knuckles brush against her skin. A slip of his hand? But it felt so nice! But then his eyes moved up to hers and stayed there. To judge her reaction? She did blush. She couldn't help it.\n\nHe left the last two buttons by her neck unfastened, but he turned the collar up, his fingers brushing against her skin again, and said, \"That's so your neck doesn't get burned.\"\n\nThen he walked away, leaving her wondering about the tingling sensations running down her back. But he started doing what she'd done earlier, walking toward the lake, except he was stripping off his clothes. He only kept his gun with him, holding it above the water while he soaked the rest of himself. Fascinated, Max couldn't take her eyes off him this time until he left the water and she saw how well built he really was. Then she turned away, blushing again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "For a change, there was no conversation with their quick midday meal. Max didn't try to change that because she was too busy with her own thoughts and castigating herself for falling under a complacent spell. She tried to blame it on the lake. It was so pleasant here and she wished they could stay longer. But it was all Degan. The man fascinated her. He made her feel too many things she shouldn't be feeling. He made her get all girlie and bashful and\u2014hot. But she had to stop thinking about how handsome he was and how much she'd enjoyed kissing him. And he'd been so nice, giving her one of his fancy shirts so she wouldn't get sunburned.\n\nThat was another problem. She had to stop thinking that he was nice and remind herself more often that he was her captor, that he might still turn her over to the authorities. As much as she was coming to like him, she couldn't completely trust him.\n\nA breeze finally showed up when they got back on the road. It wasn't a cool one though. It floated in as if an oven door had just been opened. It made the mugginess worse for a short while, but finally it seemed to break the heat wave, blowing off the worst of it.\n\nWhen it stopped feeling as if she were sucking in heat with every breath, Max got around to mentioning, \"You've been glancing behind us an awful lot today. Do you hear something I don't?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But you took care of Reed, or are there more men like him actively looking for you?\"\n\n\"Probably every fast gun in the country.\"\n\nShe had a feeling that was his way of making a joke even though no smile came with it. \"I don't mean ones that want to outdraw you so they can crow about it. I meant actual enemies that want to kill you any way they can.\"\n\n\"You can't do what I do and not make enemies. That's one reason I keep moving forward, never back.\"\n\n\"Aren't you backtracking right now?\"\n\n\"How would you know that?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Told you, fancy man, you're big news. Even I heard you were in the territory east of here\u2014before you decided to be a thorn in my ass. And you know about the rivers up ahead, so you've crossed them at least once.\"\n\n\"I did a job in Nashart.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. Had he really just volunteered something about himself when he wasn't eating? \"Will we be stopping there?\"\n\n\"No, the train won't be there long. Maybe on the way back.\"\n\nBack? Back to what? Had he already decided what to do with her? Back to a jail for her, or back this way so he could capture another outlaw, which would make three? That was if he captured Willie Nolan in Dakota, who would be number two.\n\nThoughts like that really put a damper on her good mood, so she said no more for the rest of the afternoon. She'd already spotted several rabbits, a possum, and just barely made out the antlers of a buck sleeping in the brush, animals she wouldn't normally have hesitated to kill for her dinner. She was pretty sure they wouldn't be reaching the next town today, so they'd need to make camp.\n\nBefore it got dark, she suggested, \"If you'll hand me my rifle\u2014loaded\u2014I can get us some fresh meat for dinner before it gets too dark.\"\n\nHe was back to not answering her. He must have more food in that sack of his. Why couldn't he just say so? But ten minutes later without warning he drew his weapon and fired it. Max had her hands full trying to calm Noble, who danced around in a full circle before she could settle him down.\n\nDegan had already dismounted and left the road to fetch the rabbit he'd just shot. He came back and tied it to the back of his saddle, then mounted again, all without a word.\n\nMax laughed. \"Bet you've never skinned one.\"\n\n\"You'd win that bet. I'll leave the skinning to the experienced hunter.\"\n\nHe probably didn't realize he was giving her a compliment, but she took it as one. She was back to grinning to herself; her good mood returned. But he continued to glance over his shoulder every so often, and he still hadn't explained to her satisfaction why he was being unusually wary today.\n\nShe finally asked again, \"Who are you expecting to ride up on us?\"\n\n\"Someone took a potshot at me in Helena. If it had been Reed, there would have been a lot more bullets. It was more like a warning shot.\"\n\n\"And you think whoever did it just wanted to run you out of town so they could kill you without witnesses?\"\n\n\"That's one possibility.\"\n\n\"Or it could have just been a stray bullet.\"\n\n\"That's another possibility.\"\n\nBut he obviously leaned toward caution and being prepared for the worst, which would limit surprises. But she wondered if he'd even be worried about it if he were alone or if her presence made him extracautious. Then he stopped his horse and turned it around. Max pulled up and glanced at him.\n\n\"Now what?\"\n\n\"I thought you might want to take a moment to watch the sunset. Women seem to like doing things like that.\"\n\nOh my God, he was being nice again! She hadn't even realized the sky behind them was filling with orange and pink already. It was pretty, but she wondered how he knew women might appreciate such a lovely view\u2014and why he would stop so she could enjoy it.\n\nThey didn't pause long, but she still felt warmed by the gesture. The man continued to amaze her with facets one wouldn't expect to find in a hardened gunfighter. It had to be a throwback to the way he was raised, before he took up a gun. She wished she could have met him then. A debonair gentleman? Maybe carefree? Maybe even charming? No, not Degan. She simply couldn't imagine it.\n\nIt was dusk before they crossed the first of the three forked rivers, and full dark when they crossed the second one, where they made camp close to the riverbank. A few trees were in this area and a lot of scrub grass, some of it butting up to the water, but they found a patch of bare ground. Max got a fire going while Degan unsaddled and rubbed down the horses.\n\nShe paused to watch Degan as he worked. The muscles in his back and shoulders rippled through the damp, thin fabric of his white shirt as he brushed the horses. When he bent down to check one of the palomino's hooves, her gaze moved down to his tight butt and muscular thighs. When it dawned on her that she was watching him instead of getting anything done, she berated herself. She had to stop thinking about how attractive he was. She had to stop liking him! Nothing had changed. She was still his prisoner and she had to keep that firmly in her mind and stop getting so easily distracted by him.\n\nShe got what she needed out of her saddlebags: her pan, the iron griddle with short legs, her small pouches of herbs, which she'd been replenishing anytime she found them growing wild. She found a long stick for roasting the rabbit over the fire and a couple of large rocks on which she could brace it. Then she skinned and gutted the rabbit and rubbed it with herbs before setting it over the fire. She watched it for a few minutes to make sure the flames flaring up from the dripping juices wouldn't burn it.\n\nShe washed her hands in the river before starting the next chore, washing her clothes. Degan had sat down by the fire, leaning back against his saddle.\n\n\"What else is in your sack?\" she asked.\n\n\"Bread, cheese, condiments, sandwiches, fruit. There might even be something for dessert.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"So we didn't need fresh meat?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Not really\u2014but your rabbit smells good.\"\n\nShe looked inside his sack, then shook her head. \"If you're going to raid kitchens before leaving towns, you should get yourself a picnic basket to keep the food separated, so it doesn't get all mashed together.\" Picturing this notorious gunfighter riding through a town with a picnic basket made her laugh. \"Never mind. That would so tarnish your reputation.\"\n\nHe didn't see the humor in that. \"And I prefer to eat at a table.\"\n\nYes, of course he did, just as he preferred to sleep in a bed. But they were probably a good thirty miles from the next town, so he was flat out of luck in that regard tonight.\n\nThe air had cooled after the sun had set, and she knew from experience that the temperature would dip further during the night, but it was still warm enough to wash in her usual fashion. She could sleep in the shirt Degan had loaned her.\n\nShe draped the first set of clothes she washed over a few bushes to dry before she glanced back at Degan and offered, \"I can wash yours while I'm at it.\"\n\n\"We'll reach Bozeman tomorrow. I can wait.\"\n\nHe wasn't watching what she was doing, was just staring at the fire. She glanced back at the slow-moving water, which looked so inviting. She'd feel so much better if she could wash her hair and get the dust and sweat off her body. She went behind the horses to remove most of her clothes, leaving on just her chemise and bloomers, then shook Degan's shirt and left it to air out on the nearest bush. Stuffing the bar of soap down the front of her chemise, she went into the water with the pouch of creamy stuff and dunked her head in before she lathered her face and head, then tossed the little pouch back on the shore to scrub down with the bar of soap.\n\n\"It's not a good idea to sleep in wet clothes,\" Degan said behind her.\n\nSo he had been watching her after all.\n\nShe replied without looking back at him, \"I'm going to put your shirt back on as soon as I'm done. I'm not trying to annoy you, you know. I usually bathe in more clothes than this.\"\n\n\"There's one more clean shirt in my valise that you can use to sleep in.\"\n\n\"I will, thanks.\"\n\nWhen she finished washing herself, she left the water and grabbed his valise, taking it with her behind the horses to change. When she opened the valise, she saw the Colt. She picked up the kid's gun and opened the chamber to take out the bullets and put them in her Colt so she could swap the two weapons. But there were no bullets in the kid's gun. She almost laughed. Degan must have removed them at the lake when she was in the water and not watching him. So much for thinking he was starting to trust her.\n\nShe had to dig deep into the valise to find his last clean shirt. Her fingers touched more metal, and she was curious enough to pull the object out to see what it was. She definitely wasn't expecting to see two iron rings connected to a short, rusty chain.\n\nShe lifted the shackles and stepped around her horse to demand, \"What the hell is this?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Max was furious that Degan would consider shackling her now, after she'd helped him this morning in Butte. But obviously he could. Obviously, he had to protect his interests. She was like money in the bank to him that he didn't want to get robbed of by her trotting off without him while he slept.\n\nShe threw the shackles at him when he didn't answer her immediately. And missed hitting him, damnit. She stepped back between the horses to change. It took her a moment to unclench her fists.\n\nThen she heard, \"I'm not going to use them\u2014if I don't have to.\"\n\n\"But you thought you would?\" she snarled over the back of her horse.\n\n\"I thought I would.\"\n\nThe day had been eventful enough to make him change his mind about shackling her. She still wasn't mollified, not even close.\n\nWearing just her boots, with her socks pulled up several inches above them, Degan's large, white shirt that fell to her knees, her gun belt strapped low over it, and her vest, she knew she looked ridiculous. But no one was there to see her except Degan, and he didn't count. So why did she suddenly wish that she'd left home with at least one pretty nightgown? She'd never thought of that before, and for good reason. Alone on the trail, she had to be prepared to leave at a moment's notice, not bed down as if she were safe at home.\n\nShe was still bristling when she came back to the fire. She spread out her horse blanket to sit on and draped her coat over her legs so she could sit cross-legged as she finished preparing the meal without being accused of tempting Degan again. She'd even buttoned his shirt up to her neck. She'd had to roll up the sleeves. Even with the cuffs buttoned, they hung down over her hands. She could feel his eyes on her, though, as if he were waiting for her to continue railing at him. Instead, she pretended he wasn't there.\n\nShe moved the rabbit away from the fire so it would cool, then rummaged in Degan's food sack and took out a few things, including a couple of peaches. She sliced the bread in her hands, accustomed to working without a cutting board. She could tote only so much around with her, and a cutting board was just too bulky. She laid a few pieces in the pan to warm and crumbled a little cheese on top of them.\n\nShe used to have a tin plate to eat from, but these days she usually ate right out of the pan. Like her fishing net, her plate got left behind one night when the sound of a twig's breaking had made her pack up and leave fast. Not used to being alone and camping outdoors, she had been jittery for the longest time. She'd had to force herself to overcome those fears by taking reasonable precautions and adopting a come-what-may attitude, but she hadn't counted on someone like Degan coming her way, thwarting her at every turn, too perceptive to fall for her tricks. Yet the snap of a twig wouldn't bother her in the least with him around. She felt protected, completely protected, when she was with him.\n\nNow that was an odd thought, considering that he'd kissed her and she'd liked it. She wasn't going to let that happen again. Like hell she would. Kissing a man who had tied her up, who would have chained her up? He was lucky she didn't throw her knife straight at his heart.\n\n\"Stop pouting.\"\n\nShe tossed the knife toward him. \"You better take that back before I find another use for it.\"\n\nHe raised a brow. \"Shall I take back the gun you're wearing, too?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"When you already removed the bullets? You might as well.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I believe you said that you wanted the weight of the gun for balance. And I'm well aware that a gun, with or without bullets, can be a deterrent that you might need on this trip\u2014just not against me.\"\n\nShe did recall telling him that she missed the weight of the gun. And he'd glanced behind them enough times today for her to know he was expecting trouble. He even made it sound as if she'd be doing him a favor by continuing to wear the gun, as long as it contained no bullets. Because he didn't trust her. Because she was, after all, his prisoner.\n\nHe didn't reach for the knife she'd tossed to him. But he did pick up the leg shackles on the ground behind him and throw them in the river. \"You had just eluded me for two days in Helena. Don't question my motives again.\"\n\nFor an explanation, that sure was brief. Then again, since he didn't usually provide one, she realized that was a lot. But something had definitely changed between them. Apparently, he wasn't going to define what had changed. Maybe he didn't know.\n\nBut she pointed out, \"I don't see you tossing your ropes away.\"\n\n\"Ropes have other uses.\"\n\nWas that his way of saying he wouldn't tie her up anymore either? It was time to back down, yet she pushed her luck. \"Will you still shoot me if I take off?\"\n\n\"Walk away and we'll find out.\"\n\nNo absolute yes this time? She supposed that was an improvement. She was mollified, quite a bit actually.\n\nShe ripped the rabbit apart and handed him the bigger piece. For the second time that day, he wasn't initiating a conversation while he ate. For once, she was.\n\n\"You never did say how many men you've killed.\"\n\n\"No, I didn't.\"\n\nHe just wasn't going to admit what his death count was up to. Maybe he didn't know. That was possible. He'd said he'd wounded a lot of men, that he'd lost count of how many. So maybe he didn't stick around to see if the wounds he'd caused healed.\n\n\"You never said how long you've been solving other people's problems, either.\"\n\n\"You never asked.\"\n\nShe almost rolled her eyes. He was damn good at not answering questions about himself, either with his annoying silence or just simple evasion. \"I'm asking now.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"For around five years.\"\n\n\"You weren't born in the West, were you?\"\n\n\"I grew up in Chicago, attended the finest schools, was groomed to take over my father's business.\"\n\nHer eyes flared at that much personal information, even though it came out in such a cold tone. \"Then what the hell are you doing out here?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. She waited a few minutes in case he was figuring out how much to say, but he still didn't get around to answering. He was probably annoyed with himself for saying as much as he did.\n\nShe tried a different approach. \"So you were just a drifter to begin with?\"\n\n\"I set out to see the country. You could say I'm half-done.\"\n\n\"Been to Texas yet?\"\n\n\"No, I was saving that for last.\"\n\nShe almost laughed because she could figure that one out. Texas was huge. It could take years to see all of Texas.\n\nImpulsively she asked, \"So maybe I can hire you to clear up that mess for me in Texas?\"\n\n\"You're rich?\"\n\nShe chuckled. \"Told you I'm broke, but I've got other assets,\" she teased.\n\nHe started to get up.\n\nShe gasped and scrambled to her feet, quickly saying, \"I was just messing with you, fancy man. I'm not trading favors for freedom or anything else.\"\n\nHe ignored her. He had only moved closer to the fire so he could reach one of the slices of bread. If she could have kicked herself right then, she would have. She should not have reminded him about trading favors. But at least he wasn't going to rip apart what she'd just said. But then he did.\n\n\"I recall you intended to do just that.\"\n\nShe managed not to blush, even said cheekily, \"That was before you started liking me enough not to turn me over to a sheriff.\"\n\nHe didn't agree with that assessment, merely said, \"I told you why.\"\n\nYeah, he did, that he hadn't decided yet, and he obviously still hadn't decided, or he would have said so right then. She sat back down near the fire to finish the meal in silence. She was already feeling the drop in temperature. It never failed, no clouds during the day, cold at night. But she had her coat and the horse blanket, and her hair was dry already, so she wasn't worried about being uncomfortable tonight.\n\nShe was still eating one of the peaches when Degan went to wash his hands in the river. When he came back, he held out his own handkerchief to her. It was pristine white and looked soft as silk, the edges delicately embroidered. Someone had made that with loving care for him. A wife? She was surprised the thought that he might have one somewhere hadn't occurred to her before. He'd been a man when he came West, not a kid, so he could have gotten married first. But that was one question she wasn't about to ask him when he might misconstrue it and think she cared either way. But she had to admit she did.\n\nShe wiped her hand on her blanket before she took the handkerchief from him and gave him a questioning look. He was looking at her cheeks when he said, \"Your face, even your hair, is glittering with gold dust. While I don't mind, it will draw attention to you when we get to the next town, so you might want to get rid of it.\"\n\nShe laughed. She'd had no idea the soft soap would soak up whatever dust was still inside the leather pouch. She briskly fluffed her hair with her hands to shake the sparkles loose. But she had to shake out his handkerchief several times to make sure she got all the dust off her face.\n\nShe didn't ask him to inspect her face to make sure she got all the dust off, she just handed the handkerchief back to him when she was done. He didn't take it, said, \"Keep it.\"\n\nSo the handkerchief had no sentimental value? Max figured it hadn't been made by a wife then. Did he have one? Damnit, that question was going to bother her now. Maybe she'd already met his wife. He'd certainly seemed familiar with that woman he'd called Allison. She had behaved in a wifely manner toward Degan. Who else would yell at him like that? An abandoned wife would certainly harbor that much anger.\n\nMax tried to put Degan's marital status out of her mind by continuing with her evening chores. She picked up any food scraps that would lure in wild animals, added more branches to the fire so it would last most of the night, and found a thick bush behind which she could relieve herself. When she returned to the fire, she saw that Degan had moved his horse blanket next to hers and was taking a swig from a bottle of whiskey. Both of those things made her nervous.\n\nBut he offered her the bottle as she approached. \"For the chill.\"\n\nShe relaxed on one count. If Degan got drunk, he could turn dangerous. She started to decline, but she could feel how cool the air was on her bare calves, so she took a swig and managed not to cough. Pure rotgut whiskey. She'd had it before, but she sure didn't like it.\n\nShe handed the bottle back to him and mentioned the second count. \"You've moved too close to my blanket.\"\n\n\"It's up to you. You can sleep next to me, or elsewhere. But if you choose 'elsewhere,' I'll have to tie your hands.\"\n\nShe gasped, outraged. \"You have got to be kidding me! After I saved your life!\"\n\n\"And here I thought you did that because you're growing fond of me. Are you?\"\n\n\"No,\" she snarled. \"I only helped you because I hate to see an unfair fight.\"\n\nShe got up and moved her blanket away from his, then sat down and stiffly held out her wrists because she definitely didn't want to be near such an exasperating man. He came over and tied her wrists. As soon as he was done, she turned her back on him and curled up next to the fire, her coat keeping her legs warm. If anyone was going to get cold tonight it would be Degan since, apparently, he didn't travel with an extra blanket. She didn't either, but her coat usually served that purpose, at least until winter set in. And she hoped he spent a miserable night shivering!\n\nBut the next thing she knew, he was moving his blanket next to hers again. \"Not fair!\" she protested, glaring at him over her shoulder. \"You said\u2014\"\n\n\"You escaped me in Helena. And your explanation of why you helped me in Butte confirms that I have no reason to think you won't try to escape again. At least I'm not going to tie your feet.\"\n\nWas that supposed to be a consolation prize? Odious man.\n\nShe didn't exactly doze off right away. It was early and she was still bristling. It might take hours. But she wasn't going to talk to him anymore.\n\nSo she was actually startled when she heard him say, \"If you get cold, you can use my body heat to warm up.\"\n\nShe blushed furiously even though she knew he didn't mean that the way it sounded. Then she felt him pull her coat up over her shoulders as if he were tucking her in for the night. She didn't thank him when she could have done that herself if he hadn't put the rope around her wrists." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Max sat up abruptly, disoriented for a moment and not sure what had awoken her. She usually slept soundly. Had it been a noise? If so, Degan hadn't heard it. The steady, soft sound of his breathing indicated that he was sleeping. She glanced around the camp. It was the middle of the night, and with the fire having died down, she couldn't see far.\n\nShe wondered if she should wake Degan to investigate. But the horses were quiet, not making any sounds of alarm. If it was a noise that had awoken her, whatever had caused it was already gone. Then she shivered, feeling the cold across her chest and back. Her coat had slipped down to her waist when she'd sat up.\n\nShe reached for it and got the sharp reminder that her wrists were bound together. Still she tried to pull the coat up, but she was having trouble grasping it, so she stretched her hands toward the fire instead. But the breeze was coming from the east, right across the water, and blowing the heat away from her. She almost growled in frustration. She might as well be naked for all the warmth Degan's fine lawn shirt offered her in the chill of the night.\n\nShe looked at the bottle of whiskey Degan had set next to the fire. The bottle was probably warm. What was in it would solve her problem\u2014and probably make her sick. She reached for it anyway, then laughed at herself. She couldn't get the cork out of it! At least the bottle warmed her hands for a few minutes, but she was soon uncomfortably cold again.\n\nShe gazed at Degan. He looked so peaceful asleep. He didn't look at all dangerous now, just like a handsome man getting a good night's sleep. While she was wide-awake and shivering. He was probably toasty warm, too. And why was she still resisting? He'd made the offer.\n\nShe scooted across her blanket and snuggled against his side, careful not to wake him. Much better. He even served as a windbreak for her. But her coat got left behind. Now her legs were feeling the chill. She tried to get her legs closer to his without touching him.\n\nSuddenly he rolled over. She tried to get out of the way but wasn't fast enough and ended up cocooned against his shoulder and chest. His change in sleeping position provided her with a thick arm for a pillow and availed her of more of his body heat\u2014much more than she'd bargained for. She was about to sigh in contentment when she saw his eyes open.\n\nShe quickly said, \"My coat slid off me. I'm cold and you said I could use your body heat to warm up.\"\n\nDegan leaned over her to grab her coat and draw it across her legs before he pulled her closer to him and ran his hand over her arm and shoulder for a few minutes. \"Is that better?\"\n\n\"No, I'm still cold.\"\n\nHe moved his hand to her back and stroked her there. \"Are you warm now?\"\n\n\"That's a little better.\"\n\nHe leaned down and kissed her. His mouth was warm and gentle on hers. She was amazed that such a dangerous, un-emotional gunfighter could kiss so gently yet passionately and stir her up so quickly.\n\n\"Are you getting warm now?\" he asked against her lips.\n\nMax didn't answer immediately because she was reveling in the delicious sensations that his kiss and his nearness were evoking in her. \"That seems to be working, but maybe you should try it again.\"\n\nHe did and began unbuttoning her shirt, too. She started to touch him, but it only brought her bound hands up between them. He paused to untie her without being asked. As soon as she was loose, he was kissing her again.\n\nThis wasn't a quick wildfire of passion like the one that had sprung up between them that afternoon. This slow, steady burn seemed to grow hotter and hotter. Yet the same powerful feelings were evoked, that unwinding deep inside her, the sudden racing of blood that made her almost giddy. He even dragged her leg over his as he pressed her even closer. Yet the kissing was gentle! Open, deep, but a slow, tantalizing exploration for both of them. He wasn't taking, he was giving. Her heart still pounded. She raised a hand to his head and ran her fingers through his hair.\n\nAnother thing that thrilled her about his kisses was that they weren't spontaneous. They were deliberate, controlled, which meant he wouldn't stop. He would leave that to her. How surprised would he be when she didn't?\n\nHis hand was moving briskly along her thigh, over her derriere, even up her back as he kept trying to warm her. He was succeeding\u2014he'd already succeeded with his kisses\u2014but that wasn't the only effect his touch was having on her. Even through the thin fabric of the shirt she was wearing, the movements of his hand over her body felt more like caresses, an intimate stroking that was arousing her.\n\n\"You're warm now,\" he said against her lips. \"Shall I stop?\"\n\nShe moved on top of him in answer, her thighs on either side of his hips. He didn't know yet that she had no drawers on under his shirt. She'd hung her wet ones on the other side of the bush so he wouldn't see them. But what she felt because of that lack of clothing was amazing. A rock-hard bulge was underneath her. She couldn't resist rubbing against it.\n\nHer hands on his neck, her fingers teasing just below his ears, she continued to kiss him much more intensely now, with passion ignited. His hands slipped under the shirt to find her bare skin, creating shockingly sweet, wonderfully hot sensations. She moaned against his mouth as his hands cupped each of her breasts, kneaded them, making them tingle, making her nipples peak. She pressed even harder against him. Breath caught in her throat as the tension built within her.\n\nBut suddenly he was holding her face in his hands, forcing her to look down at him. His eyes were turbulent, his voice raspy. \"Do you know what's going to happen if this doesn't stop?\"\n\n\"Show me,\" she whispered.\n\nWith a groan he turned her over onto her back, settled between her legs, and fought with his pants, quickly removing them. Then that hardness was pressing against her for entry, tantalizing her, teasing her, the most amazing thing just out of her reach.\n\nShe raised her legs and hooked her ankles together behind his back and pressed them against him, drawing him even closer to her. \"Show me!\"\n\nHe slid inside her. It was as if she were shattered and made whole, broken but now complete. Then he started thrusting within her. Nothing had ever felt so right\u2014or so explosive. It happened within moments, a wave of sweet, hot pleasure that engulfed her whole body, rising up, overflowing, pulsing. She was pretty sure she yelled. She definitely held on to his shoulders tightly, moving with him, not letting go until he felt what she'd felt or something equally amazing. Feeling all of his weight on her for a moment told her he did. She melted like jelly then, her limbs sliding off him, a smile on her lips, ecstatic and proud.\n\nFolks shouldn't keep stuff like this such a secret, she thought. Luella had tried to tell her that being with a man could be real nice, but that was such an inadequate description for something this blissful.\n\nHe rolled to the side but took her with him, so she ended up half-draped across his chest. She reached behind her for her coat and pulled it over her legs. She was sure she wouldn't need more than that now. She almost told him that he made a nice furnace, but that would make her laugh. Anything she said right now might make her laugh. She was feeling that good. And his silence was nice for once. She didn't mind it at all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Max awoke first. at least, she figured Degan was still asleep since she was still lying snuggled against him. Her cheeks lit up before her eyes were fully open. Did they really make love? If it was just a dream, she wouldn't have such a silly grin on her lips, would she? She tried to set her lips in a straight line, but she couldn't manage it because they kept curving upward. So it hadn't been a dream. She could either be mortified that she'd crossed every line she could cross last night, or she could pretend nothing had happened.\n\nShe started to get up, but Degan's arm around her back held her down. \"I will marry you, of course.\"\n\nMax was stunned by his words. Marriage? Then she realized it was the gentleman in him again, offering to marry her because he thought it was what he should do\u2014not because it was what he wanted to do. He made it sound like a business deal. Of course! He'd said he'd been groomed to run an empire. Ha! When she married\u2014if she ever did\u2014there'd damn well better be a declaration of love first and a swelling of happiness to go with it, not this businesslike proposal that sounded as if he was honoring an obligation.\n\nShe pushed away from him, grabbing her coat so she could cover herself, and scrambled to her feet. \"Don't do me any favors, fancy man. I needed warming last night. You saw to it nicely. That's all that was, so don't give it another thought and I won't either.\"\n\nShe marched off before she started railing at him. How dare he offer to sacrifice himself on the altar of propriety and try to make her do the same thing? She was still angry when she returned to camp after relieving herself. Degan had gone off to do the same, so she quickly grabbed her dried clothes and got dressed before putting the rest away.\n\nShe was chewing on a chunk of bread when Degan returned. His expression was as stoic as usual, not a single one of his thoughts revealed. It occurred to her that he might not even realize she'd been offended by his dispassionate offer. She should probably keep it that way.\n\n\"I didn't mean to sound ungrateful,\" she said, \"but marriage to you feels like a shotgun wedding. I'll wait for some good, happy reasons to marry, if it's all the same to you.\"\n\nNo answer, not even a glance, so she added, \"Do you ask every woman you sleep with to get hitched?\"\n\n\"Only the virgins.\"\n\nThat could have been an attempt at humor if Degan didn't look dead serious. She still laughed. \"I'm not saying I wasn't one, but it's not that big a deal to me anymore, especially now that I'm headed for a hanging. Heck, I was ready to give it up when I was just sixteen.\"\n\n\"But you didn't.\"\n\nShe found it annoying to have this conversation with him when his back was turned to her, but he'd started saddling his horse and didn't stop what he was doing to talk. \"Only because the man I fancied up and left town. The Binghams probably ran him off. They'd had me pegged for one of them even back then.\"\n\n\"So you say.\"\n\n\"You still think I'm lying?\"\n\n\"I think I'm now obliged to find out.\"\n\nShe stared at him incredulously. The anger was back, but she chomped it down fast. She was not going to look a gift horse in the mouth or snarl at it. Hesitantly she asked, \"Does that mean what I think it means?\"\n\n\"We'll head to Texas after I finish in Dakota.\"\n\nHe was going to help her! Max was ecstatic. And all it had cost her was the most incredibly beautiful night of her life. About damn time her luck changed.\n\nShe was still smiling when he came for the blanket she was sitting on so he could saddle her horse, too. She got up to kick dirt on the cold fire in case any embers were at the bottom of the fire pit, then grabbed her coat and hat. She didn't put the coat on and wouldn't until they got to town. The day was nice so far, not very warm yet, as early as it was, and there was a little breeze, so she hoped there wouldn't be another blistering day like yesterday.\n\nThey got to Bozeman around midafternoon. It wasn't a mining town, so it wasn't likely to vanish once the ore ran out. Soldiers from the nearby Fort Ellis were in town. The hotel was small, but the room they were given was cozy, with homemade doilies on the furniture and vases of fresh flowers on the tables on either side of the large bed.\n\nDegan left her there, merely saying he'd be back in time to take her to dinner. His taking his valise with him suggested he was going to find a laundress. He didn't even lock the door. He knew she wouldn't run off now, not after he'd dangled in front of her the carrot she wanted.\n\nMax had already resolved never again to wash more than one pair of her clothes at a time. She still blamed Degan's thin shirt and her bare calves for that chill she'd taken last night, which had led her to seek warmth in his arms. Staring at the bed, she wondered what Degan's expectations would be after what happened last night. It wasn't going to happen again. From now on, she'd be sleeping in her heavy clothes to make it clear to him that she didn't need or want any warming up.\n\nAn hour or so later a package was delivered for her, along with some bathwater. She waited until she was alone to open it, then laughed when she pulled out a skirt, a frilly blouse, and a few different-colored ribbons. What had he done\u2014bought these garments off someone? Aside from overalls and men's shirts, ready-made clothes, especially women's clothes, weren't easy to come by in the territory's general stores. Women usually made their own clothing or found a seamstress to do it for them.\n\nMax bathed and then put on the new clothes before Degan returned and told her to put them on. She didn't mind. The skirt was a pretty pink-and-yellow floral pattern and had room for petticoats she didn't have. The white blouse had a wide, double ruffle that followed the neckline down the V to where the buttons started. She wore her chemise underneath it so she wouldn't need her vest. She picked up one of the ribbons, a red one, and tied it in her hair. The hotel room didn't have a full-length mirror so she couldn't see how she looked, but she actually felt pretty, something she hadn't felt since leaving Texas. She also washed the clothes she'd worn earlier in the day since there would be time for them to dry before morning. But she was starting to get bored. And hungry. Degan's food sack wasn't there to help with that. He'd told the stableman to dispose of it when they'd arrived in town.\n\nShe was about to go looking for him when he opened the door. His gaze swept over her, but all she got was his usual \"Let's go.\"\n\nShe didn't mind that either. Degan's helping her instead of jailing her changed everything. She had to be careful now not to do anything that would make him reconsider taking her back to Texas. So she didn't complain that he was late, that her belly was growling, that he'd barely glanced at her or mentioned how pretty she looked in the new clothes, which were his idea. He might be helping her now, but one thing hadn't changed at all. He could still be damn annoying.\n\nThe little hotel they were staying in didn't have a restaurant, but one was across the street. They waited for two covered wagons to roll past them and then for a cowboy leading a cow to the butcher to pass. Bozeman was prosperous and appeared to be growing. Max saw a newspaper office down the street and even a library. Well, at least the sign above the drugstore indicated that one could be found upstairs. She hadn't seen that very often, a town with an actual library.\n\nThe restaurant was crowded. For the first time, Max noticed that people were looking at her as well as Degan. He'd buttoned his jacket, which hid his gun from view, so that could have been why. No corner tables were available. Max knew that was where he preferred to sit so he could keep his back to a wall. If he minded that they were seated in the middle of the room, he didn't show it.\n\nHe was back to wanting conversation with his meal, didn't even wait for the food to arrive to ask, \"How big is your hometown?\"\n\n\"Not as big and crowded as Butte, but bigger than this one and more spread out. Bingham Hills was founded back in the forties with just one long main street. It's got over a dozen streets now, five saloons, three stables, two hotels, and a handful of boardinghouses. Carl Bingham took great pride in guiding its expansion. Heck, he even built houses for the tradesmen who wanted more'n a few rooms above their shops to live in. One more reason why that town loves him so much.\"\n\n\"You need to stop thinking the man is alive, Max.\"\n\n\"I know, but I still can't believe he died from that gunshot wound.\"\n\nDegan made a sound of frustration. \"You need to assume he's dead, either by your brother's hand or someone else finished him off and blamed it on you because you fled. There's no other logical reason for your poster to have been distributed across the West.\"\n\n\"Course there is, because they want\u2014\"\n\n\"Listen to me. Posters are based on facts. The bank robbery might have been a misunderstanding, but you still walked out of the bank with more than your own money. Someone thought Bingham was dead\u2014or about to die\u2014in order to get the US marshal system to send that poster out with both charges on it. His son would want revenge, wouldn't he?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me finish. If he's not dead, your town would know it, other people visiting would know it, and any other lawmen in the area would know it, so your poster would have been canceled at least within the first year. But it wasn't.\"\n\n\"Unless it wasn't distributed in Texas.\"\n\nThe look she got was so quelling she mashed her lips together. She knew she was deluding herself with wishful thinking now, simply because she needed to be right. The alternative was a hanging, and not even Degan would be able to stand against an entire town that would want to see her pay for killing their beloved founder.\n\nDegan obviously hadn't considered that because he continued, \"For the time being we're assuming he's dead. We won't know exactly how it happened until we get there. Now, if what you've said is true about what led up to the shooting, there needs to be a reason why the Binghams were so hell-bent on making you a member of their family\u2014and went to such extremes to accomplish it.\"\n\nMax shrugged. \"I just figured they wanted some good-looking babies, since neither Bingham has much in the way of looks.\"\n\n\"That could have been accomplished in any number of ways that didn't have to involve you. Unless one of them was in love with you?\"\n\nShe snorted. \"If they were, they've got a fine way of showing it, putting a target on my back.\"\n\n\"Your wanted poster doesn't say 'dead or alive.' \"\n\n\"It doesn't say 'alive,' either.\"\n\nThey fell silent when the food arrived. They were both trying the chef's recommended fish cakes, three large patties that filled their plates, fried golden with two different sauces, and glazed carrots on the side.\n\nBut as soon as the waiter left, Degan asked, \"What else do you have that the Binghams could have wanted?\"\n\n\"The clothes on my back?\" His eyes actually narrowed a little. She chuckled this time. \"I don't own anything that a rich family like the Binghams would want.\"\n\n\"You have property standing in the way of the town's expansion, if what you said about the town's approaching your farm is true. Or are there other directions in which the town could be developed?\"\n\nShe frowned. \"There are still other ways to go.\"\n\n\"That are being used?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I suppose they are. With hills on the back side and lots of flat land on the other side, Carl was mostly making use of the flat land. But there's a quarry to the east he probably didn't want to get close to, and the woods\u2014actually, the only clear flat land is in our direction.\"\n\n\"So your family's farm is in the way of Carl Bingham's goal to turn his town into a city.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"That ambition is a bit grandiose even for him, although there was talk before I left that he was planning on putting in a railroad spur line to connect Bingham Hills with the Texas and Pacific Railroad at Fort Worth or Abilene. If they manage to do that, yeah, the population of the town could end up doubling pretty quick.\"\n\n\"It might not have been something Bingham originally planned on, but if he's as rich as you say, he would be able to pay any price your family named for the land. Did he offer to buy your farm?\"\n\n\"It's not mine to sell.\"\n\n\"It wasn't left to your father?\"\n\n\"It would've been, but he died before Grandpa did, so it went to Gran. And she'll leave it to Johnny.\"\n\n\"Did Bingham try to buy it from your grandmother?\"\n\n\"If he did, she never mentioned it to us. But she's lived in that house more'n half her life. It's home. She wouldn't sell it.\"\n\n\"Even if she was offered a fortune?\"\n\nMax shook her head. \"You can't put a price on something you love.\"\n\nHe said no more about it, but he'd definitely opened a can of worms in her mind. She'd thought she was the main focus of the Binghams' interest, her personally. But if it had been about the farm all along, what had made Carl think that having her in his family would give him control of the farm? Why would a man everyone else in town loved and respected turn ruthless over a piece of land? He'd even been prepared to rape her to get that ring on her finger. But for that property to come to him through marriage to her, the rest of her family would have to be dead. Oh, dear Lord, Max thought, had the Binghams hurt Gran and Johnny? She tried to calm herself and think clearly. No, if the Binghams were capable of murder, they would have taken action before she'd left Texas.\n\nMax sighed. Degan had given her too much to think about. She'd been so pleased that he was willing to help her, but now she had to wonder if it might get him killed. She knew he could take on outlaws and gunfighters, but how could he take on a whole town? They were still a long way from Texas, so she wasn't going to mention that now.\n\nBack in their room, she saw immediately that a big, puffy quilt had been delivered and placed on the bed. She supposed it would do for a mattress.\n\n\"I'll sleep on the floor,\" Max said.\n\n\"It's a big bed. You can wrap yourself in that quilt so we can share it. If you don't want me to touch you, you only have to say so.\"\n\nShe supposed that would work, but she clarified, \"No touching will be necessary. That quilt will keep me warm. Thank you for thinking of it.\"\n\nHe looked as if he might say something else, but he left the room instead so she could prepare for bed. She removed her pretty new clothes and put on her heavy shirt and pants to sleep in. She probably didn't need them with the quilt, but she wasn't taking any chances. She got into bed and wrapped the quilt around her. This was much better than the floor, but she hoped she wouldn't be too hot now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Max awoke to find a shirtless Degan propped up on an elbow in bed, gazing at her. She took in the sight of his wide, bare chest\u2014maybe a little too long.\n\n\"Have you changed your mind about touching?\"\n\nHer eyes rose to his. It would be so easy to say yes, but she couldn't shake her resolve. What had happened the other night couldn't be repeated. Yet she didn't answer him soon enough. He leaned forward and brushed his lips against hers. She raised her hand to push him back, but the moment she touched his bare skin, she ran her fingers over it instead. His kiss deepened. She groaned at how hard it was to resist this man! But she had to.\n\nGathering her last speck of will, she rolled away from him and right out of bed, then nearly tripped over the quilt on the floor. No wonder he'd thought that she'd changed her mind. She must have been so warm she'd thrown off that quilt in the middle of the night.\n\nShe heard him get out of bed, too. Then the door opened. \"Next time I'm getting you a cot.\"\n\nShe winced as he closed the door behind him, but it was better this way. No strings that he might misconstrue, no jeopardizing his help, no getting so attached that she couldn't walk away in the end\u2014when he did.\n\nThe train ride to Dakota was uneventful, but at least the train didn't get robbed. It was pretty funny to consider that bad luck, but Degan sure did. Max merely enjoyed her first train ride. It was thrilling, moving that fast.\n\nShe still hadn't told Degan that his helping her in Texas might not be a good idea. For him. He would likely disagree, so she should probably just take off on him and make her own way home to face whatever awaited her there. Now that Degan seemed to trust her to a degree, he wouldn't be expecting it. But she was still with him. Each time she'd had an opportunity to slip away before they got to the train station in Billings, she hadn't taken it. She wasn't sure why. Maybe because she enjoyed traveling with him. Maybe because Degan might already have a plan to negate her fears and she ought to find out about that first. It was his profession, after all, to solve problems. And maybe she didn't ask him if he had a plan because she just wasn't ready to see the last of him yet. Probably because she knew she had time. But there had been no more chances to escape once they'd boarded the train in Billings, what with their horses loaded in the livestock car. The horses would remain there until Degan reached his final destination.\n\nThat location hadn't been determined yet, though Degan was leaning toward a town in the center of the territory. He was questioning every railroad employee on the train and at the stations they stopped at. He had found out that only the westbound trains that carried the railroad's payroll were being hit, which was why the train she and Degan were riding hadn't been robbed and likely wouldn't be. One employee had agreed to show him where along the tracks the last robbery had occurred, but that wasn't going to help much in locating where the Nolan gang were hiding. Soldiers, railroad detectives, and other US marshals had been searching for these outlaws for months, and no one had come close to finding them yet, not even when there had been fresh tracks for them to follow.\n\n\"You need a tracker,\" Max pointed out when they finally disembarked from the train at Bismarck, on the east bank of the Missouri in the Dakota Territory.\n\nDegan led them to the animal cars to wait for the horses to be unloaded. \"A hunter who doesn't track?\"\n\nWas he joking? He had to be. She snorted. \"I can track game, but I've never tried to track people.\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter. A tracker would only be useful right after a robbery. What I need is a scout, or at least someone very familiar with this territory who can suggest places where a group of men might hole up.\"\n\n\"Have you been through here before?\"\n\n\"Almost.\"\n\nShe peered at him. \"Almost?\"\n\n\"I had to choose which direction to go in when I left home. I'd heard the railroad had gotten pretty far up here. But winter was approaching so I decided to forgo a northern route. And then I decided to forgo trains altogether and just head West.\"\n\n\"It's hard to imagine you as a greenhorn.\"\n\n\"Then don't.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"But you were, weren't you?\" He didn't answer. Of course he wouldn't. \"Did you leave home with the palomino?\"\n\n\"No. I had a Thoroughbred racer, but he went lame about halfway through Kansas, stranding me on a road between towns\u2014until an old woman came along driving a wagon that looked older than she was. Adelaide Miller, the most cantankerous woman I've ever come across. Bossy, argumentative, and set in her ways, as different from the women I knew in Chicago as night is from day. It took a while to get used to her.\"\n\n\"Rescued by an old woman. I'll never tell,\" she teased.\n\nHe ignored that. \"She took me home with her, promising to take me to town in a week or two when she had to go back there again. Nothing I said or offered would get her to change her mind about that time schedule. It ended up being a month. I figured out pretty quick that she just wanted things done around her place that a man could do easier than she could. At least she was a good cook.\"\n\nMax chuckled over that point's being important to him. \"She lived alone?\"\n\nHe nodded as a railroad employee handed the reins to his horse to him. She was still waiting for hers. \"She raised pigs and a few cows. And had several vegetable gardens. It was a big homestead out in the middle of nowhere, no neighbors in sight, some twenty miles from the nearest town. Her husband had farmed it before he died.\"\n\n\"Don't tell me she had you plowing fields. I'd never believe it.\"\n\n\"No, she only planted vegetable and flower gardens after he was gone. What she could handle on her own. But she wanted some painting done, repairing, fixing, hauling.\"\n\nAs interesting as Max found his tale, simply because he so rarely opened up like this, she began to wonder why he was telling her\u2014until he added, \"Learning to shoot.\"\n\n\"She wanted you to teach her?\"\n\n\"No, she castigated me for not carrying a gun and browbeat me into learning how to use one. She gave me her husband's Colt to practice with and wouldn't let up until I hit everything I aimed at.\"\n\nMax started laughing and couldn't stop. An old woman had taught the fastest gun in the West how to shoot? He walked away from her. She grabbed her reins and hurried after him.\n\n\"Wait up. You have to admit that's funny, so don't get mad at me for laughing.\"\n\n\"Adelaide did me a favor. It wasn't long before I needed that gun, before I even got out of Kansas. But you pegged it right. I came West a greenhorn. I just didn't stay one for very long.\"\n\nShe was incredulous that he'd told her this. She had a feeling he'd never shared that story with anyone else. Why her? Max couldn't help smiling. Was she growing on him? The same way he was growing on her? That was an interesting thought.\n\n\"So are we heading out now?\"\n\n\"One of the station attendants suggested that the Nolan gang might be hiding in the Dakota Badlands.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Then maybe we should just let them rot there. You know areas like that are next to impossible to travel through.\"\n\n\"I didn't say we were going there.\"\n\n\"Good, because it's no place to live for any length of time. I got close enough to Wyoming's Badlands to know I didn't want to travel through them. Sinking sand, steep crags, no greenery to speak of. I doubt the Badlands here are any different. And the gang has been robbing this line in the warmer months for over a year now, eight robberies in all. They aren't going to camp out for that long, certainly not over the winter.\"\n\n\"I know all that, and that Nolan's gang only targets the trains coming west loaded to the brim with new settlers, or the ones bringing in the railroad's payroll. But the Badlands suggestion was just one man's opinion, and since that area is back in the western part of Dakota, which we've already passed, we'll only backtrack as a last resort. Besides, I'm inclined to believe the gang is more centrally located. It's a big territory, after all, and the robberies have occurred up and down the line.\"\n\n\"I enjoyed riding the train.\" She grinned. \"We could just board one of the trains carrying a payroll and wait for the gang to rob us like you were hoping they would.\"\n\n\"That hope was based on my impatience, and it didn't take into account the possibility that innocent people could get hurt. I'd rather find them myself.\"\n\n\"You do realize that they could be hiding in plain sight like I tried to do. They could even be living here in Bismarck and just acting like normal folks. Who would know?\"\n\n\"Someone here will. This is the biggest train hub in the territory. Information about what's on the trains from the east comes through here in advance. Someone here is feeding that information to Willie Nolan.\"\n\n\"So you do have a plan?\"\n\n\"Of sorts.\"\n\nHe didn't elaborate. Actually, she was amazed he'd said as much as he did. But then he added, \"The first item on the agenda is a bath and a good night's sleep. If I get lucky and find the gang's inside man, we might wrap this up quickly. If not, I want to scout out the outskirts of Bismarck tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You could at least hire a scout for that.\"\n\n\"I was already warned the army employs all the good ones and isn't willing to loan them out.\"\n\n\"So find a bad one. Anyone familiar with this territory is better than no guide a'tall.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Jackson bouchard wasn't a scout, but he was familiar enough with the surrounding areas to be a guide for a few days. He was a half-breed Indian. At least, he boasted that he was. Max had her doubts, though, because he looked no different than any other Westerner. He appeared to be in his late twenties, was not tall, and was stocky. He was handsome with remarkable turquoise eyes and short brown hair. He didn't wear a gun on his hip, but he rode with a rifle in one hand and his reins in the other, and he kept the rifle cradled in his arms when he wasn't mounted.\n\nHe expected to be fed and not have to hunt for his dinner. Those had been his conditions aside from his fee. He was nosy, asking a lot of questions. It fell to Max to answer them, or not, since Degan wouldn't. Jackson knew that she was a woman because she hadn't tried to hide that after she'd left Bismarck. That's how safe she felt in Degan's company.\n\nBut Jackson didn't know that she was considered an outlaw. Her wanted poster hadn't reached Bismarck or any of the train stations between Billings and Bismarck. She'd looked. The last place she'd seen one had been in Billings, back in Montana.\n\nShe'd pulled Degan aside yesterday to ask why he'd hired Bouchard if the man wasn't a scout. \"Because he knows the territory. He's going to take us to places he thinks a band of men could hole up in without notice.\"\n\nShe supposed that was one way to go about locating the gang. Then she'd asked, \"So you didn't find the informant last night?\"\n\n\"I checked a few disreputable saloons, but no one would own up to it. But I have a feeling it's Bouchard. He was too quick to offer his help. He either wants us to find the Nolan gang, or he's going to lead us astray\u2014possibly into a trap.\"\n\n\"So we don't trust him?\"\n\n\"No, we don't. But in case he wasn't lying, let's see where he leads us.\"\n\nJackson was too well fed not to have some sort of normal job in Bismarck, yet he hadn't had to quit one to come with them. He'd been evasive when she'd asked him about his work. In fact, for all the questions he asked, he didn't answer many in return, so she was inclined to agree with Degan that he might have ulterior motives.\n\nQuite a few farms were within an hour or two of Bismarck, homesteads established by settlers who'd probably come in soon after the railroad had arrived. But the farther north they went, the fewer thriving homesteads they saw. Most had been abandoned, a few even burned to the ground. Max figured the Indians had still been active in the area when the railroad first came through. Sporadically they spotted cabins, most of which were deserted. Jackson was leading them to the ones he knew were occupied so Degan could stop and question the inhabitants.\n\nThey stopped under a lone tree for lunch the first day of their search. Degan's food sack was filled with the usual fare he favored that would last several days without spoiling. They'd been riding hard, so he rubbed down his horse before eating.\n\nMax sat down and leaned against the tree as she ate. She'd removed her coat as soon as the day heated up, so the gun she wore was in view now. Jackson sat next to her, his rifle across his lap.\n\n\"You know how to use that?\" he asked curiously, staring at her Colt.\n\nMax supposed this was one of those times when it didn't matter that her gun was empty because Jackson didn't know it. All she said was, \"Wouldn't wear it if I didn't.\"\n\nHe watched Degan for a few minutes before he said, \"You and him?\"\n\nShe'd been staring at Degan, whose back was turned to them, and Jackson had noticed it. Sometimes she just couldn't keep her eyes off him. She knew what Jackson was implying.\n\n\"No. I've hired him to do a job,\" she lied. \"He won't do it until he finishes this one.\"\n\n\"But he's a marshal,\" Jackson pointed out. \"Why would he work for you?\"\n\nNot until that moment did she realize that Jackson Bouchard wasn't aware of Degan's reputation as a gunslinger. That surprised her because other people in Dakota they'd spoken to had known exactly who he was. She almost laughed. Not that it mattered. With Degan paying him, Jackson had no reason to be wary of Degan\u2014unless he was exactly who Degan thought he was, which would make him wary of a lawman.\n\n\"We have an arrangement,\" she said offhandedly. \"I help him with this, he helps me with my problem afterward.\"\n\n\"Which is?\"\n\n\"Personal.\"\n\n\"Too bad.\"\n\nThat comment drew her eyes to him because she wasn't sure what he meant by it. Was he interested in her? She hadn't sensed that he might be. Until now.\n\nBut he got up before he added, \"You should go back to town. I can get him where he needs to go.\"\n\nThat was said a little too confidently. She no longer doubted that Bouchard was somehow involved with the Nolan gang, either as their informant or one of the actual robbers. He obviously knew where they were. And his pointing his rifle at her and Degan and turning them over to Willie Nolan could well be his plan. But Degan was prepared for that. Jackson wouldn't get away with it, even though he always kept his rifle in his hand. If he tried, he would be surprised by how fast Degan was.\n\nThey slept in a trapper's shed on the edge of a small woods that night. It was mostly empty except for a few metal traps with dried blood still on them. The trapper, Artemus Gains, lived in a small cabin next to the shed. Strung up between the two buildings were lines hung with animal pelts of all sizes.\n\nStarved for company, Gains had invited them to share his dinner and offered them the shed for the night. He knew Jackson. At least they talked as if they were old friends. Artemus even tried to get Jackson to stay for a week or so to keep an eye on his place, so he could go to Bismarck for supplies and to visit his brother. Max couldn't understand why he was so worried that someone would try to move into his little, one-room cabin while he was gone. But Jackson promised to return when his current job was done.\n\nThe next morning they rode for hours without seeing any dwellings. But close to noon they spotted a small ranch in the distance. Cattle were grazing in the fields around it, maybe fifty head. Max saw a pen of horses, a barn, and a few other outbuildings. No one appeared to be working outside, but smoke coming from the chimney suggested food was being cooked for someone.\n\nMax had hung back just enough to keep her eye on Jackson, so she was the first to see him turn and ride hell-bent in the opposite direction. Degan swung his horse about, but he didn't comment on their fleeing guide other than to say, \"Now I'm curious about why he would lead us right to Nolan and his gang if he wasn't setting up a trap.\"\n\n\"You think they're at that ranch?\"\n\n\"Why else would Bouchard take off like that? Looks like you're not the only one who favors hiding in plain sight. A ranch makes a good cover for a large group of men, especially since no one lives nearby to notice if they're working the cattle or not. Come with me.\"\n\nHe rode off the way Jackson had gone. She caught up and said drily, \"The ranch is back that way.\"\n\n\"And you're not getting anywhere near it.\"\n\nShe groaned to herself. \"Tell me you're not going to ride in there alone.\"\n\n\"I'm not riding in.\"\n\nShe relaxed until he reined in behind a small copse and handed her his saddlebags. All of the ammunition he'd taken from her the night they'd met was in those bags. She laid them across her lap and quickly loaded her rifle and Colt, stuffing the rest of the cartridges in her pockets before handing his bags back to him.\n\nShe looked back at the ranch house. \"We can barely see anything from here.\"\n\n\"Which makes it a good place for you to wait.\"\n\n\"Degan! I can help, you know. At least if I'm within range, which I'm not here.\"\n\n\"For once will you do as I ask?\"\n\n\"Then why give me bullets if you don't want my help?\" she demanded.\n\n\"In case something goes wrong and you have to make your way back to town alone.\"\n\nShe blanched at that possibility, and it could very well come true if he confronted the gang alone. And he didn't have to! He had other options that didn't include her. She mentioned the most obvious one. \"You're a deputy marshal. You could gather a posse in Bismarck now that you know where the Nolan gang is hiding.\"\n\n\"If there are too many of them I will, but I won't know that until I get closer. There were at least ten of them at the last robbery, though that was the first one that went bad for them. They lost six men that day.\"\n\nHer panic eased a little. \"So you think there're only four of them left here?\"\n\n\"No, they would have recruited men to replace the ones they lost. Maybe not all, but some. But this isn't going to be a showdown, Max. If I come up with a reasonable head count, I'll circle around behind the house and take them by surprise. Chances are, no guns will need to be fired. And if I find any of them in the outbuildings, I can probably disable a few of them before I even get to Willie Nolan. But I can't do this efficiently if I spend half my time worried about you. So I want your word that you'll wait here out of harm's way.\"\n\n\"Fine,\" she mumbled, and dismounted.\n\n\"I didn't hear you.\"\n\n\"I promise!\" she snarled.\n\n\"But can I believe you?\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"You've never had a promise from me before because I don't break them. But here's another one. If you die today, I swear I'll never forgive you.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\"\n\nMax kicked a clump of grass next to her, thinking about pigheaded mules as she watched him ride off to find a vantage point where he could observe the ranch. He'd be fine. She knew he'd be fine. He was used to dealing with situations like this. She wasn't. She would have caused him to\u2014did he really say he would have worried about her?\n\nMollified a little and with Degan no longer in view, she decided to get comfortable for a long wait. She took a swig from her canteen, then dribbled some water in Noble's mouth. But she tensed when she heard a horse approaching from the direction they had come. Was Jackson returning? She wished it were him when she looked around and saw two men riding straight toward her. What were the chances of their not being members of Nolan's gang? Slim.\n\nShe quickly ran a hand over Noble's dusty flank and then across her cheek and chin, before tipping her hat low. She almost reached for her gun but was glad she didn't when she noticed both men had theirs out and aimed at her. She took the initiative instead.\n\n\"Howdy, fellas. I'm Max Dawson. A Mr. Bouchard pointed me in this direction. He said Willie Nolan might have a job to offer a man of my talents. Have I come to the right place?\"\n\n\"You could have rode in to find out,\" one of the men said.\n\n\"Max Dawson, huh?\" the other said, then grinned. \"Ain't you wanted for murder in Kansas? Pretty sure I saw your wanted poster there.\"\n\nHe was probably testing her, but this wasn't something she needed to lie about. \"I'm wanted in Texas, but that poster gets around. So do y'all have a job that pays good or not?\"\n\n\"We might, but it's Willie's decision. Come along and meet him.\" He rode ahead to the ranch house, while the other man waited for Max to follow so he could keep her in his sights. She hoped Degan wasn't witnessing this and thinking she'd just broken her promise.\n\nShe dismounted in front of the porch and saw no sign of Degan coming to her rescue. But she might not need rescuing. Weren't outlaws more trusting of other outlaws? At least one of them knew who she was.\n\nThe porch had a roof for shade, but it wasn't raised off the ground, so it had no steps or railings. She really wished Degan would come around the corner of this house right then with his gun drawn. She might appear confident, but she wasn't. She'd never had to bluff her way through something like this. And nothing delayed her entry into the house because the man behind her pushed her inside.\n\nShe stepped into a large room with a kitchen and a dining table on one side and a sofa and chairs on the other side. A hallway in back probably led to a few bedrooms, but it was dark. Two men sat at the table, playing cards. A young man who looked no older than Max was stirring a pot in the fireplace. Another man who looked enough like him to be his older brother sat slumped against the wall next to him. He looked angry.\n\nMax had a sinking feeling. She counted six men in the house. Degan wasn't going to be doing any disabling as he'd hoped, not when it appeared that most if not all of the gang were in the house. But she still had to make sure they didn't shoot her in the meantime. She sauntered into the room, maneuvering until none of the men were behind her. If Degan barged in, commanding their attention, she could at least take out a few of them before they remembered she was there. But she had their full attention for the moment.\n\nOne of the two men at the card table stood up. He was on the late side of thirty and lanky. He was frowning when he asked, \"Who's this?\"\n\n\"Jackson sent him.\"\n\n\"Since when does Jackson send us men?\"\n\n\"Since he found out I was looking for a job with a big payoff,\" Max quickly put in. \"And I don't care much how I get it.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" the older man asked, still frowning at her. \"And just who are you?\"\n\n\"Max Dawson. If you haven't heard of me, your friend has.\"\n\nThe one who had recognized her spoke up. \"He's wanted for murder and something else, I can't remember what.\"\n\n\"Bank robbery,\" Max volunteered. \"And if you're Willie Nolan, I'd like in on your next robbery.\"\n\n\"I take it you won't mind killing to get your pay? The trains have been doubling up with guards lately.\"\n\n\"Don't mind a'tall as long as there's a big payout. I'm tired of being broke.\"\n\n\"You're not going to get rich around here,\" the kid's brother who was sitting by the fireplace grumbled.\n\n\"Shut up, Bart,\" Nolan snapped.\n\nThis train-robbing bunch didn't sound like a happy crew. Max wondered if she could add to the discord.\n\nShe tried by saying, \"What sort of split are we talking about?\"\n\n\"As the newest member you'll get a smaller share of the take until you prove yourself,\" Nolan answered. \"But you'll still be looking at a nice haul\u2014as long as you pull your weight.\"\n\nThe last was added with a disgusted look toward Bart, whose face twisted in anger. Whatever the brothers had done wrong, it appeared the leader of the gang wasn't going to let them forget it. That's when Degan made his presence known.\n\n\"Who owns this spread?\" he called loudly from the front of the house.\n\nNolan immediately looked at Max. \"This place is getting mighty busy today. Or did you bring someone with you?\"\n\n\"No, I didn't.\" She added cheekily, \"But I can take care of this if you like.\"\n\n\"Stay here.\" Nolan started toward the door, but he didn't have to go outside.\n\nDegan appeared in the open doorway. So much for taking the gang by surprise. He'd removed his jacket. With his tooled gun belt and his Colt in full view, and his expression about as unfriendly as it could get, he appeared even more dangerous than usual. But when his eyes lit on Max first, she was afraid he was more interested in getting her out of there than in a showdown. Yet this was going to get ugly if he let on that he knew her, after she'd just said otherwise.\n\nShe was about to say something that would disassociate them when he tipped his hat up only slightly and repeated, \"Who owns this spread?\"\n\nMax let out her breath. Of course. In that brief glance at her, Degan had ascertained that she wasn't a hostage because no guns were trained on her and she wasn't tied up.\n\n\"That would be me,\" Nolan said to Degan. \"And you don't look like a cowpuncher, so what brings you out this way?\"\n\n\"Name's Degan Grant.\"\n\n\"The gunfighter? That Degan Grant?\" Nolan actually chuckled. \"Maybe you're looking for work of a different sort?\"\n\n\"If you're Willie Nolan, then my job is almost done.\"\n\nMax winced. That was a little too direct even to her ears, and Nolan no longer looked amused. But he still looked confident. The numbers were on his side, after all.\n\n\"I have no fight with you, gunfighter. What do you want with me?\"\n\n\"Just doing a friend a favor.\"\n\n\"For a measly reward?\"\n\n\"The reward just covers my costs. You in jail covers the favor. You don't need to die, Nolan. You can come with me instead.\"\n\n\"I'll pay you double the reward if you ride out of here and pretend you never saw me. And that's damn generous, considering the alternative.\"\n\n\"The thing is,\" Degan said tonelessly, \"no one else has to die. Just you\u2014if you insist.\"\n\n\"My brother Jimmy and I didn't sign up for this,\" Bart said, jumping up and running toward the back of the house.\n\nHe didn't even make it to that dark hallway before Nolan shot him. His own man? Jimmy, who was still by the fireplace, cried out in rage and drew his own gun. And that's when everyone started firing their weapons.\n\nMax dove behind the sofa before she drew her gun. But with no one else taking cover, the shooting was over in seconds. She stood up slowly and holstered the gun she hadn't even needed to fire.\n\nBodies littered the floor. Jimmy was still alive and crying over his brother's body. Degan was still standing, thank God, but it appeared everyone else was dead.\n\nThen she heard those famous last words, \"Let's go,\" before Degan walked out of the house.\n\nIncredulous, Max ran after him. But he'd gone straight to his horse on the side of the house and was already mounted.\n\nMax went up to him. \"We're not going to bury anyone?\"\n\n\"Is Nolan dead?\" Degan spoke more softly than usual.\n\n\"Yeah, shot in the back. Definitely dead. I think the boy did it, the one crying over his brother. You didn't see that?\"\n\nDegan didn't answer, just turned his horse around and rode off. That's when she saw the blood on the ground where'd he'd been standing before he mounted." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Max rode hard to catch up with Degan. She tried to assure herself that he couldn't be hurt bad if he could ride. He was sitting up straight in the saddle, his shoulders squared as usual. If she hadn't seen the blood on the ground, she wouldn't think anything was wrong with him.\n\nActually, that wasn't true. His abrupt departure was odd. She would have thought that he'd want to take Willie Nolan's body back to Bismarck to prove he was dead. But she supposed sending the sheriff back this way would suffice. Jackson, that coward, could lead the sheriff back here\u2014if she didn't shoot the man first. He'd led them to Nolan's lair to be slaughtered, and they might have been killed if that kid Jimmy hadn't reacted to Nolan's shooting his brother the way he did.\n\nShe rode a little ahead of Degan so she could look back at him, but she couldn't tell where he'd been wounded. She saw no expression of pain on his face, either. Would a man who never showed his feelings show that he was in pain? He hadn't put his jacket back on and his vest was made of black silk. If blood was on it, she might not see it at a glance.\n\nSo she reined up and simply asked him, \"How bad are you hurt?\"\n\n\"Not so bad that I can't ride.\"\n\nThat should have reassured her. It didn't, not when she'd been hoping he hadn't been shot at all. \"Stop and let me have a look.\"\n\n\"No.\" A moment later he added, \"If I get off this horse, I might not get back on.\"\n\nThat meant he was badly hurt. A debilitating wave of fear washed over her.\n\n\"We should go back to that ranch house. It will only take a few minutes. They've got to have a bed in there. You need a bed!\"\n\n\"No, I need to get to town. So stop taxing me with your prattle and ride.\"\n\nHe took off ahead of her at a gallop. If he was so hell-bent on getting to town, then he knew he was hurt bad enough to need a doctor. But town was more than a day's ride away. Could he make it that far? Not if he was still bleeding.\n\nWhen he slowed down again, he was no longer sitting quite so erect in the saddle. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw him sway a little.\n\n\"You're not going to faint, are you?\" she demanded sharply. He gave her a nasty look, so she quickly said, \"I meant pass out.\"\n\n\"If I do, you can find your way back to town, right?\"\n\n\"Yeah, but I'm not leaving you alone out here, so don't even\u2014\"\n\n\"You may not have a choice.\"\n\nPanic was rising up in her. He couldn't be seriously wounded. Not Degan. What could she do to help him? She'd never had to deal with anything like a bullet wound before, just scrapes and bruises, and even then she'd had her grandmother's full arsenal of salves and cure-alls at her disposal. And Gran's knowledge. Gran knew how to fix anything!\n\n\"That trapper Artemus Gains can help,\" she said desperately. \"He can take the bullet out of you. He might even have some sort of medicine for emergencies, something to ease the pain at least.\"\n\n\"Who says I'm in pain?\"\n\n\"Aren't you?\"\n\n\"Not anymore.\"\n\nShe didn't know if that was good news or really bad news. But she guessed they were no more than an hour's ride from the trapper's cabin, which was on the way to town. Surely Degan could make it that far. Surely he'd agree to stop there. But thirty minutes later he swayed again, this time so far to the side she was afraid he'd already passed out.\n\n\"Degan!\"\n\n\"What?\" he growled.\n\n\"I thought you\u2014never mind.\"\n\n\"Start prattling again, Max.\"\n\n\"We're almost to that cabin. Don't fall off your horse, damnit!\"\n\nShe asked him a dozen inane questions, anything that would require an answer from him, and snapped at him when he didn't give one fast enough. Every time he swayed to the left or the right now, her heart leapt. She wouldn't be able to stop him from falling, but she knew if he did, he could end up hurting himself even more.\n\nFrantically she said, \"Hold on, Degan. The cabin is in sight now. Just a little farther, then you can faint all you want to.\"\n\n\"I don't\u2014faint.\"\n\nHe stayed on his horse long enough to reach the cabin. But by then he was leaning over the palomino's neck. Max dismounted quickly and yelled, \"Mr. Gains! I could use some help out here!\"\n\nBut Jackson Bouchard opened the door. He didn't ask what had happened, just went straight to Degan, got him off the horse, and lugged him into the cabin and dropped him on the trapper's bed.\n\nDegan made what sounded like a groan. Max pushed Jackson away and hissed at him, \"You couldn't be gentle about it?\"\n\nJackson shrugged. \"He was about to\u2014he's already passed out.\"\n\nShe peered at Degan. Jackson was right. Degan had lost consciousness. She could see the blood now. The left side of his vest and his pants were soaked in it. She grabbed one of Artemus's blankets and tucked it underneath Degan to absorb the blood.\n\nWhen she turned, Jackson was handing her a small pouch. \"For the wound. An old Indian recipe from my grandmother. She was one of two women my grandfather traded for when he came down from Canada.\"\n\n\"I'm not interested in your family history.\"\n\n\"It draws out poisons.\"\n\n\"Degan's not poisoned.\"\n\nHe shrugged again. \"She said it helps infections, too.\"\n\nMax didn't take it. She didn't trust Jackson. She was furious at him, knowing that Degan might not be wounded right now if this man had stayed to help instead of running off like a coward.\n\n\"Where's the trapper?\"\n\nJackson tossed the pouch on the foot of the narrow bed. \"Artie took off for town as soon as I returned. He'll probably be gone a week or more.\"\n\nShe nodded toward the door. \"You can take off, too. I'll watch his place for him.\"\n\n\"I promised\u2014\"\n\nShe drew her gun on him. \"Get. Your friends are dead.\"\n\nHe picked up his gear. \"They weren't my friends.\"\n\n\"But you were working for them, weren't you.\" She didn't phrase it as a question.\n\nHe shrugged once more. \"They paid good for information. Too good not to take it\u2014at first. But then they killed someone in one of those train robberies. After that, I tried to end the arrangement, but Nolan said they'd hunt me down.\"\n\n\"There was a reward. Why didn't you just lead the law to them?\"\n\n\"Because they said they'd take me down with them. I didn't want to end up on the run for doing a stupid thing just because I needed the money.\"\n\nShe raised a brow. \"So you hoped Degan would solve that problem for you?\"\n\n\"Didn't he?\"\n\n\"You should have helped.\"\n\n\"I don't kill people, good or bad. Never have, never will.\"\n\n\"What about saving them? He needs a doctor. Is there one closer than Bismarck?\"\n\n\"No, and he won't last long enough for the Bismarck doc to get here, if the doc's even in town.\"\n\nShe shouldn't have bothered to ask when the man couldn't be trusted. \"Ride out. Your secret is safe with me. And Degan was only after Willie Nolan, so he won't care.\"\n\n\"Come with me?\"\n\nShe cocked her gun. He closed the door on the way out." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "\"You gut animals, you can do this.\"\n\nDegan startled her. She didn't realize he'd regained consciousness. She wished he hadn't. She'd been standing next to him frozen in place with her knife in hand, staring at the wound, which was still bleeding. It was on the left side of his waist, right above the belt line. She was going to have to dig the bullet out of him. She couldn't just leave it in there. Actually, she'd started to think she could. If she could just get the bleeding to stop, maybe she could still get him to a doctor in Bismarck.\n\nGetting Degan's shirt off him had taken nearly ten minutes because he was dead weight. She'd had to pull it up beneath him to his shoulders so she could then yank it off his arms. That must have woken him, although he'd made no sound or said anything until now.\n\nMax slowly met his eyes. They were half-closed but still staring at her. \"I\u2014I've never done this before,\" she warned him.\n\n\"I have every confidence that you'll do fine.\"\n\nHe did? Why didn't she?\n\nShe marched outside, gathered their saddlebags and his valise, and brought them into the cabin. She found Degan's bottle of whiskey. It was only half-full.\n\nShe shoved the bottle at him. \"Drink this.\"\n\n\"I don't need it.\"\n\n\"But I need you to drink it. If you start yelling at me, I might slip and gut you for real.\"\n\nHe still didn't reach for the bottle. \"Pour some of that on the blade first, and on the wound, then I'll drink some.\" But before she got out the door, he added, \"And wash your hands.\"\n\nThat's what she was going outside to do. It sounded as if he knew more about removing bullets than she did. When she came back in, she poured a little whiskey over the hole on his left side. He merely hissed softly, but it still felt as if a rough board had just scraped over her nerves. She took a swig of the whiskey herself before she handed it to him again. Wincing, he leaned up and took the bottle this time and gulped down a good amount of whiskey.\n\n\"Can you see the bullet?\" he asked.\n\nShe peered at his wound and shook her head. \"Too much blood.\"\n\n\"Find it with your finger.\"\n\n\"Hell no!\"\n\n\"Max.\"\n\nShe sighed. She raised her index finger, and letting it hover over the bullet hole, she squeezed her eyes shut.\n\n\"You're making me feel less confident about you.\"\n\nHe was joking. He had to be joking. \"I'm making sure nothing distracts me,\" she growled.\n\nShe inserted her finger into the hole. One knuckle, two knuckles. She was afraid she was going to have to try again with a longer finger when she finally felt it. Degan made no sound, but then she'd been exceedingly careful to follow the path of the hole. She removed her finger and wiped it on one of Degan's clean handkerchiefs and took up the blade that she'd laid on his chest.\n\n\"Now would be a good time for you to pass out again.\"\n\nHis eyes were closed but he said, \"I'd tell you to hurry up and get this over with, but\u2014\"\n\n\"But I'd tell you to shut up.\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"Please don't yell.\" She pressed the knife into him.\n\nThe wound wasn't shallow. Because she was being as careful as she could be, it took her forever to get the knife in position to start easing the bullet out of him. And then the bullet kept slipping! She was sweating profusely by the time she got it out, even though Degan hadn't made another sound. She glanced at his face to see why and saw that he'd been fortunate enough to pass out again. Now she needed to hurry to sew him up while he was out.\n\nShe tore through his belongings. He had to have a needle and thread in one of his bags. As fastidious as he was, he'd want to fix any loose buttons or tears in his clothing. So she reasoned, but she didn't find anything. She went through every drawer and container the trapper had, too, but there weren't many. The cabin was small and sparsely furnished with just the narrow bed, one chair at a small table, one cupboard with supplies filling the shelves, and a chest containing both the trapper's clothes and his bedding. He didn't have a needle either. She knew of only one other way to close the wound and stop the bleeding.\n\nShe got a fire going in the fireplace and stuck her widest dagger in the fire\u2014and closed her eyes. She didn't know how long to leave it in the fire or how long to press it against the wound once it was hot. She couldn't ask Degan because he'd passed out. But that was a blessing for him, if not for her.\n\nWhile the blade heated, she ripped up one of Artemus's clean sheets for bandages. She wouldn't be able to replace it. Maybe he wouldn't notice until they were gone. She also got the rest of Degan's clothes off so he'd be comfortable. She would have left him his smallclothes, but the blood had seeped through his pants. She stared up at the ceiling until she got a sheet draped over him. Tempted as she was to give him a full look, she didn't dare get distracted until she was finished with his wound.\n\nShe took Degan's bloody clothes outside, put them in a bucket, and pumped water from the well into it so the clothes could soak. She was surprised the trapper had even dug himself a well when a small pond was nearby. But she supposed he hunted by the pond because animals went there to drink, and he wouldn't want his scent all over the place to make them wary. She'd have to test that theory before sundown.\n\nShe was delaying a task she didn't want to do, but she knew she had to do it. The blade had to be hot enough by now. She wrapped one of her shirts around her hand before she lifted the dagger out of the fire. It had a leather handle, but metal was underneath it, so it might be hot.\n\nThe handle wasn't hot, but she still rushed to the bed and pressed the hot blade against Degan's wound. The sizzling sound and the smell of burning flesh and blood made her gag. Degan's eyes opened wide, and for the barest moment he started to sit up, but then he dropped back, passing out again, thank God. Unable to stand the smell any longer, Max pulled the blade away and ran outside to puke. She prayed that she'd done the right thing and left the blade on Degan long enough to cauterize his wound. If she had to do that again, she would die." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "That afternoon Degan opened his eyes a couple of times but quickly fell back to sleep. Max considered that a good thing. Sleep would help his body heal. And she had a lot to do. She found the trapdoor to a root cellar behind the shed. More dried and salted meat was in it than vegetables, which wasn't surprising considering Artemus's occupation. He would have told Jackson to help himself to the stored food, but she had to feed two, so she would replace some of the meat. But for now, she took what she needed to get a stew started for dinner.\n\nShe scrubbed Degan's clothes and hung them to dry. She refilled the water trough behind the cabin where the trapper obviously kept his horse when he was home. He'd even erected a rickety partial roof over it that would only half cover an animal. What was the point of that? Just to keep snow out of the trough in winter? Or maybe he'd just run out of wood to extend it. A long leather tether was attached to the cabin so the horse could graze on the grass back there. She needed two, so she fashioned one for her horse out of Degan's ropes. She left the animals unsaddled and rubbed down back there.\n\nThe pond was just beyond the trees, but still quite a distance down the edge of the woods in the direction of Bismarck. She almost hadn't noticed it yesterday when they'd ridden in with Jackson. This morning she'd hoped to slip away and bathe in it, but she wasn't the first one up so she couldn't manage it. She did that now, and to heck with scaring off the wild animals that drank at the pond.\n\nWith Degan out cold, no neighbors for miles, and, more important, no riders passing by this way, she stripped down for the bath. Then castigated herself for it afterward. The boy Jimmy might be coming this way to get to Bismarck after he buried his brother. Jackson might sneak back this way, too, for whatever reason. And she didn't know what was on the other side of the woods. There might be dwellings there. She decided to find out for herself.\n\nDressed again, and with just her rifle, she headed deeper into the woods. With the trapper expecting Jackson to return so he could leave to do his visiting, she figured he had probably removed any traps he had laid in the woods. Still she stepped carefully in case he hadn't. The last thing she needed was to get stuck with a trap on her foot that she couldn't open without help.\n\nA lot of small animals were in the woods, but no signs of any deer. She took careful aim at a plump quail. She'd throw it in the cellar for lunch tomorrow. The other quail scattered. She searched for their eggs and used her bandanna as a sack to carry four of them. She saw a family of wild turkeys, too, but she steered clear of them. Plucking birds that big was tedious, and wild ones usually had tough meat.\n\nShe didn't reach the other side of the woods since it stretched farther than she'd figured and was far deeper than it was wide. But she could see no other dwellings. She picked berries on the way back. If Artemus had anything sweet to cook with, she could make a sauce for the quail with the berries\u2014if she didn't eat them all before she reached the cabin.\n\nAlthough the sun would be setting soon, Degan was still sleeping. She stopped by the bed, moved a lock of his hair off his brow, and just gazed at him for a few minutes. The man was too handsome. Even laid low like this, nothing about him was unappealing. He'd scared the heck out of her today, taking that bullet. She didn't like what it had made her feel. But they would be parting ways eventually. Would he return home to Chicago where the beautiful Allison lived, now that he knew Allison wanted him to return? Max didn't like that thought either and thrust it away.\n\nShe'd only covered him to his hips with the sheet. Without any salve she was leery of bandaging the wound even though she winced whenever she looked at the blackened skin around it. But the cauterizing had worked. The wound had stopped bleeding, although a lot of dried blood was on his side.\n\nShe wet a cloth and warmed it in her hands before she dabbed at the dried blood. She did it slowly and carefully so she wouldn't wake Degan. Nonetheless, he stirred. He even started to sit up before dropping back to the pillow.\n\n\"What the hell?\"\n\nMax winced at the accusing tone. He'd lifted his head high enough to get a look at his charred flesh.\n\nShe quickly said, \"I looked for a needle and thread, I really did. Tore through this place and your bags. I almost carved a needle from wood, even started to, until I realized you might get splinters from it.\"\n\nHis gaze swiftly shifted to her. \"You're joking, right?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"It still sounds like I put you to a lot of trouble. You should have just fetched a doctor.\"\n\n\"I thought about it. But it would have taken two days, getting there and back. I'm pretty sure you would've bled out by then.\"\n\nShe glanced back at the wounded area. She'd tried to press the blade only against the bullet hole, but she'd still burned about an inch of skin on either side of it.\n\n\"I don't suppose it's still numb?\" she asked hopefully.\n\n\"Still?\"\n\n\"On the way here you said you didn't feel any pain. That really worried me.\"\n\n\"Not something you need to be concerned with now.\"\n\nShe winced again, imagining the pain he was experiencing, and turned toward the fire. \"Food's hot if you think you can sit up a little to eat it. Or I suppose I could spoon-feed you.\"\n\nHe snorted. That was a reassuring sound and one he'd never before made in her presence. It figured he'd let down his guard a little in his weakened condition.\n\nShe brought him a bowl of stew and dug into his food sack for the remaining bread so Degan could dip it into the stew. She needed to go through Artemus's supplies to see if he had the fixings for more bread, or if he just existed on meat, fruit, and wild vegetables as she'd been doing. She'd seen a lot of mushrooms and dandelions in the woods. She could bring some of those back tomorrow.\n\nDegan had managed to sit up a little to eat, leaning back against the wall behind the bed with just a pillow to cushion him. The bed had no headboard and just a box frame, but at least he had a mattress. It was better than the floor, which is where she would be sleeping. She had no idea how long it would take for him to recover and be able to ride again. But he was a strong, healthy man, so maybe no more than a week or two. Just seeing him sitting up holding a bowl of stew made her happy.\n\nShe got another bowl of stew for herself and dragged the one chair over to the bed so she could eat with Degan. At least he had an appetite. That was a good sign, she supposed.\n\n\"What did you put in this?\"\n\nShe grinned. Conversation! \"Plantain, mushrooms, and dried rabbit meat, so don't expect it to be tender. I'll take stock of what's here and make something fresher tomorrow. Already have quail soup planned for lunch.\"\n\n\"You went hunting?\"\n\n\"Not really. I was just scouting out the woods a little. But I surprised some quail. Got one before they all scattered.\" Then she took a chance that his guard was down enough for him to talk about himself some. \"You think your lady friend has given up on you and gone back home?\"\n\n\"She's not a friend\u2014anymore.\"\n\n\"But she used to be?\"\n\n\"My siblings and I grew up with her.\"\n\nHis tone had turned frigid, so she steered away from his old friend Allison. \"How many siblings do you have?\"\n\n\"My sister died in her teens. It's just my brother, Flint, and me.\"\n\n\"Is he anything like you?\"\n\n\"No, we're nothing alike. We never were.\"\n\n\"So Flint laughs, smiles, and doesn't end up killing folks in his line of work?\"\n\nShe said it with a smile so he'd know she was just teasing, but he still gave her a nasty look. \"He doesn't work.\"\n\n\"Ah, that's right, your family lives in the big city and is rich. What does that make him, a pampered do-nothing?\"\n\n\"Are you trying to rile me up by asking about my family?\"\n\n\"No, I just have no idea what that sort of life is like. It sounds boring. Is it? Is that why you came West?\"\n\nHe didn't answer that. She supposed he found his brother a more palatable subject because he said, \"Flint is a charmer. He could survive on that alone, rich or not. He'd make an excellent politician if he had any ambition, but our father never pushed him in that direction.\"\n\n\"So you were groomed to take over, as you said, but he wasn't?\"\n\n\"He should have been, but, no, he wasn't. Which my father probably regrets now.\"\n\n\"Tell me about your father and why you hate him?\"\n\n\"I don't hate him.\"\n\n\"You just don't care about him one way or the other?\"\n\n\"We merely had a falling out.\"\n\n\"About?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, merely handed her his empty bowl. She headed to the door and the water barrel outside, so she barely heard him say, \"He asked something of me that I wasn't willing to do. He was adamant, but so was I. That's why I left.\"\n\nJust like that? Max thought, perplexed. What kind of disagreement between a father and a son could be powerful enough to make a man turn his back on wealth and privilege\u2014and everything he'd been groomed for?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Degan was kissing Max, but he knew he shouldn't be. He'd sworn he wouldn't do that again. He had better resolve than this. What had happened to change his mind? He couldn't think, didn't want to when she was clinging to him so sweetly. But then he smelled the roses mixed with the scent of hay. Max didn't smell of roses...\n\nHe glanced up and saw the hay spread out around them and Allison lying beneath him. He shouldn't be making love to her in the stable, but she'd kissed him there and it was the happiest day of his life, the day she'd picked him, so he couldn't help himself.\n\nShe was his first love. She was his only love. Flint had loved her, too. Their competition had been fierce but friendly, but it had gone on too long, from the time they were children, when they'd started vying for her attention, to the present, when they both wanted to marry her. She'd encouraged their rivalry because she enjoyed having the two most eligible men in town pursuing her.\n\nDegan and Flint had fought over Allison, even coming to blows a few times. But while they both wanted her, they were still brothers. Their bond was stronger. Degan would have been sorely disappointed but still glad for Flint if Allison had chosen him instead. And Flint had given in graciously when she'd finally chosen Degan to be her husband. Degan had expected no less.\n\nDegan's happiness faded. Adelaide Miller was yelling at him, \"If you can't hit it, you die. Pay attention, boy!\"\n\nHe didn't like guns. The last one he'd held had been his father's dueling pistol. After what he'd done with it, he'd sworn never to touch another gun again. But it was in his hand now. And there it was again, the scream that had caused him to fetch it from the study. He ran upstairs to find out why she was screaming, up the curved stairs, the endless stairs. Why couldn't he get to the top of them? And the heat was everywhere. It felt as if the house were burning down it was so hot. Was that why she was screaming? But no smoke filled the air, just the smell of roses. Her smell. Leading him upstairs. Her scream, and he couldn't get to her no matter how fast he ran! But he had to save her. She meant everything to him, but the damn stairs wouldn't end...\n\n\"I wasn't going to use it,\" a female voice was saying. \"Don't trust him farther than I can spit. It could have been poison. But I got desperate when your fever got worse instead of better. Can you hear me? Damnit, Degan, I thought you were waking up.\"\n\nIt was Max's voice, and her endearing annoyance, which made him want to smile. Degan could feel her moving a cold, wet cloth over his chest. He didn't open his eyes. He wasn't sure if he was still dreaming. If he was, he'd rather continue with this dream than that nightmare.\n\n\"Don't trust who?\"\n\n\"Oh, thank God!\" Max gasped. \"You need to eat this while you can.\"\n\nHe opened his eyes to see her thrusting a bowl at him. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Turkey and dandelion soup, with some nettle stalks.\"\n\nHe carefully leaned on his side to eat her soup. He still wasn't sure if he was dreaming, and she still looked anxious. \"Did something else happen?\"\n\n\"You wouldn't wake up for two days, Degan,\" she said accusingly. \"Scared the bejesus out of me. Now drink the soup. You need to regain your strength. Having some food will help you to sleep normally.\"\n\nHe did, and thankfully without any more dreams. When he woke again, the cabin was mostly dark, only a low light coming from the fireplace. Max was sleeping on the horse blankets laid out on the floor in the corner. She wasn't covered, for with the windows and door closed, the fire kept the room warm. She was fully dressed, curled on her side, using her coat for a pillow. She was probably worn-out, tending to him. One more thing he owed her for.\n\nTaking the sheet with him, he carefully made his way outside to relieve himself. He couldn't remember ever feeling so weak before. He swayed quite a bit. He wasn't even sure he could make it back to the bed, he felt so drained. And sore. He ached all over, not just on his left side. But Max would be angry with him in the morning if she found him passed out outside, so he forced himself to get back to the bed.\n\nHe managed not to wake her and sat for a few minutes staring at her. She should just look adorable lying there so innocently, curled up like a child, her feet bare. But she looked sexy, too, with her bandanna off, her shirt unbuttoned to her breasts, one curve partially visible\u2014and he was never going to get that night they'd shared in Montana out of his mind.\n\nAfter their first kiss that hot day in Montana, he wasn't at all surprised by what had happened that night. Too much had led to it, too many times seeing her in scanty attire, too many times wanting her even when she was fully dressed. Like now.\n\nIt had been the hardest thing he'd ever done in his life, asking her that night if she wanted him to stop. And the next morning she wouldn't let him do the honorable thing, had even gotten angry about his offer to marry her. So be it. It had been a mistake and she wasn't going to let it lead to a bigger one. What had she said? That she'd wait for some good, happy reasons to marry. She was absolutely right. That was the only right reason to marry\u2014because you'd found the person who could make you truly happy and you believed the other person felt the same way about you.\n\nMax had probably saved his life by taking that bullet out of him. She might have saved his life in Butte, too. He owed her a resolution to her problem in Texas, not more complications.\n\nHe slept again, and the nightmare returned. But this time he reached the top of the stairs..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Max woke up drenched in sweat. She probably shouldn't have closed the windows before going to sleep last night. But the flies hadn't wanted to leave Degan's wound alone. It had taken her over an hour to kill them all, and then she'd been afraid the cool night air might bring back his fever.\n\nShe headed to the pond with her bar of soap for a quick scrubbing. She wanted to be there when Degan woke up again because she was still worried about him. The past two days had been awful! She'd thought he was going to die on her. She'd never felt anyone that hot before. And when he wouldn't wake up no matter how loud she yelled at him, she'd been terrified. She'd even cried, she'd felt so inadequate to nurse him. She'd almost opened his wound again, had even thought of cauterizing it again. Rubbing his chest and face with cold cloths didn't work either. Nothing helped!\n\nFinally, she'd been desperate enough to try Jackson's powder yesterday afternoon. It had worked faster than she could have hoped. The redness fanning out around his wound had started to recede, and this morning the last signs of the inflammation were gone. And after three days, scabs were forming, so maybe she hadn't burned him as badly as she'd thought.\n\nWhen she returned to the cabin feeling somewhat refreshed, she found Degan still asleep. She considered heating some water and bathing him with a cloth before he woke. She hadn't wanted to do it last night. With him finally sleeping peacefully, she didn't want to disturb him. That fevered sleep had been exhausting for both of them. He'd tossed, he'd talked, he'd even yelled at one point, all the while delirious. And she'd been afraid to leave his side, had even slept in the chair next to him until she fell out of it and bruised her elbow.\n\nRubbing him down with a cool cloth when he was in the throes of delirium was one thing. But doing something so intimate when he could wake and his eyes could land on her was a different thing altogether. She decided against it. If he really was better, he could wash himself. So she went to cook instead.\n\n\"I need a bath.\"\n\nMax smiled to herself. Awake and sounding normal, he could do some real recovering now. \"No baths for you, fancy man. You don't want to get your scabs wet. I'll bring you some water to wash with after you eat this.\"\n\nShe handed him a bowl of corn mush, then grabbed one for herself and sat down in the chair she'd kept by his bedside since the fever had started. \"So how do you feel this morning?\"\n\n\"Tired, like I haven't slept in a month.\"\n\n\"Yeah, fevered sleep isn't restful sleep. I had a fever when I was a kid, but Gran knew how to get rid of it fast. Wish I'd asked her how.\"\n\n\"How long did I have a fever?\"\n\n\"Nearly three days.\"\n\n\"And I was poisoned?\"\n\n\"Huh?\"\n\n\"You said something about poison, or did I dream it?\"\n\n\"Oh, that. You might recall Jackson was here when we arrived. He helped me get you into the bed and left me a pouch of powder. He said it was good for wounds, but I didn't believe him so I didn't use it\u2014until nothing I did helped. Turns out the powder worked well.\"\n\n\"Is he still here?\"\n\n\"No, he left. I sort of insisted.\"\n\n\"Why, because he's a coward and a liar?\"\n\n\"Yeah, he admitted he was the Nolan gang's town man. Said he tried to quit when he heard they killed someone, but they wouldn't let him. He used you to solve that problem for him. He should be paying you for the job, if you ask me, not the other way around.\"\n\n\"Thank you for taking care of me.\"\n\nShe blushed a little, uncomfortable with his gratitude. \"Don't mention it.\" But then she grinned and teased, \"I was just ensuring that you stay alive long enough to help me out in Bingham Hills.\"\n\n\"That didn't require such tender care.\"\n\nShe really blushed now. She hadn't been all that tender with him. She'd been so frantic and afraid of losing him that she'd even hit him at one point to make him wake up.\n\nShe quickly changed the subject. \"So who smells like roses?\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"You said I didn't and I know I don't, so who were you talking to that smelled like roses?\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"In your sleep.\"\n\n\"I don't remember.\"\n\nDid he just lie to her? His guard must still be down if he was so obvious about it. She might be able to get him to talk about himself again if she casually led him into it. And if it wouldn't tax him. His recovery was more important than her curiosity right now.\n\nBut he wanted to know, \"What else did I say?\"\n\n\"Not much. You had such a high fever most of what you said was garbled. You said you hated guns. I thought that was pretty funny. You really used to hate them?\"\n\n\"Where's mine?\"\n\nShe chuckled as she fetched his Colt and put it on the small crate beside the bed that the trapper had been using as a nightstand. \"Don't think you're not answering my question,\" she warned teasingly.\n\nHe stared at her for a moment. She wondered if he was actually debating with himself about answering her. If he was, he probably wouldn't. But then he did. \"I never had cause to think about guns in Chicago. They aren't worn or carried in the city except by officers of the law\u2014or criminals. My father had a pair of dueling pistols that he kept loaded in his study, but they were merely for show, a prized possession that had belonged to his own father in the days when dueling for honor was still practiced. Father never had occasion to use them himself. But then my sister, Ivy, was shot and killed, caught in the crossfire of a fleeing thief and the law officer chasing him down a city street.\"\n\nMax gasped. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"It shouldn't have happened. My mother had taken her shopping. Ivy had just stepped out of a store. Mother was right behind her and saw it happen. She blamed herself.\"\n\n\"Why? Something like that is tragic, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Because Ivy was supposed to ride with Flint and me in Lincoln Park that morning. Mother usually shopped alone, but that day she wanted company and insisted that Ivy join her. I suppose I hated guns because a gunshot killed my sister.\"\n\nYet he'd taken them up when he came West, even became notorious because of them, Max thought. So he must have hated something else even more, something that had sent him in this direction to a completely different way of life.\n\n\"Is your mother still alive?\"\n\n\"No, she died less than a year later. She let her health decline, just lost the will to live. She couldn't let go of the guilt.\"\n\nMax sighed. She would never have guessed that Degan had experienced so much tragedy in his life. No wonder he kept his emotions locked away. Had he done that for so long that he'd lost the ability to feel anything? Well, she knew he could still feel passion. She could vouch for that! But that was more a natural reaction, an instinct rather than an emotion. Maybe she was reading too much into his sister's death. Maybe he didn't show his feelings because of what he'd implied to her before, that he couldn't afford emotion in his line of work.\n\nShe took his empty bowl and refilled it. After handing it back to him, she sat down again and said casually, \"You mentioned that your father probably regretted not raising your brother the way he raised you. But couldn't he have remedied that by teaching your brother everything he taught you? It's never too late to learn.\"\n\n\"It is when you grow up without taking responsibility for anything and never expect to have any responsibilities. Flint's biggest decisions concerned which party to attend\u2014and who to bed afterward. He shies away from anything more serious than that.\"\n\n\"It sounds like you begrudge him his carefree nature.\"\n\n\"Not at all. My brother and I were close.\"\n\n\"Were?\"\n\n\"When I lived at home.\"\n\n\"You realize, don't you, that we're not all that far from Chicago now. With the extension of the railroad Chicago is probably no more'n two days away. I wouldn't mind a short delay if you want to find out\u2014\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe thought she was doing him a favor by suggesting it, but obviously not. She gave him an exasperated look. \"I heard what your lady friend yelled at you, even if you didn't, that a man doesn't have to be dead to not be who he was. That sounds like something bad happened to your father.\"\n\n\"Allison is good at exaggerating. You could say it's her forte.\"\n\n\"So that's why you ignored her? Because you just didn't believe her?\"\n\n\"If my father wanted me back, he would have come and found me, not sent Allison Montgomery to do it.\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes at him, remarking, \"You are very odd, you know.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\"Of course you are. You have no curiosity as well as no emotions? Why didn't you just ask her what's wrong with him?\"\n\n\"I confirmed he's alive. Anything else is irrelevant since I'm not going back. Ever.\"\n\nHe took his eyes off her and concentrated on eating. She supposed that was a pretty good clue that he was done talking about his family. It was as if he'd divorced them the way a man would divorce a...\n\n\"Are you married?\"\n\nHis eyes came back to her slowly. \"Would I have asked you to marry me if I was?\"\n\n\"You didn't ask me. You just said you would marry me. Big difference there, fancy man.\"\n\nShe marched out of the cabin because she couldn't deal with how frustrating he could be. She walked far enough away that he wouldn't hear her mumbling about it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "They'd been at the cabin for ten days. Max expected the trapper to return at any time\u2014unless Jackson had found Artemus and told him that he had other guests. He might not hurry back then, might want to wait until he was sure he could have his bed back. She hoped that was the case.\n\nBut Degan was already talking about leaving. He was able to walk now at a steady if slow gait. But he was still in pain. He didn't tell her that, but she caught him wincing every so often. Riding was a lot more strenuous than walking. Even if he could keep his horse from trotting, she worried that the jarring motion would rip open his wound. So she convinced him to stay until Artemus returned, or at least a few more days.\n\nIt had been a companionable time. They talked about things that didn't strike any nerves, and they'd gotten in the habit of watching the sunset together each evening. Dakota had some real pretty ones that filled up the sky with deep reds and oranges, with no trees or hills to obstruct the view from their location. She would take the chair outside for him, then sit on the ground next to him. He always glanced down at her to catch her smile just as the sun slipped below the horizon, and she would look up at him. She liked the way he looked at her at that moment. For some reason, when their eyes met, she found it more intimate than kissing.\n\nIt would have been a good time to warn him that helping her might not be as easy as he thought. She had been counting on Carl's being alive, but Degan was convinced he wasn't, and she could no longer cling to her hope that Degan was wrong about that.\n\nBut he didn't know just how revered Carl had been by the people in town, so much that no one there would need a trial to be convinced of her guilt. The moment they saw her, they'd probably drag her to the nearest tree and lynch her, and not even Degan could protect her from an angry lynch mob that numbered in the hundreds. Evan Bingham was going to be flat out of luck at getting a ring on her finger then, wasn't he? Well, at least in the end the Binghams wouldn't get what they wanted, though she wouldn't be around to gloat over it.\n\nBut that was a nerve-striking subject, so she continued to avoid it. Still, she'd have to tell Degan before they started south. She didn't want to take him out of his way and then convince him to let her go on alone. Or just sneak off. That was still an option, too, and one that wouldn't include an argument.\n\nShe'd been giving the latter option more thought. How could she not when now would be the perfect time to slip away? Degan was better. He could take care of himself now. He could even get back to Bismarck, where he could continue his recovery in comfort. She'd like to leave him a note though to thank him for his offer of help and explain why helping her could get him killed. In convincing her that Carl was dead, he'd also convinced her that her plight was hopeless. She wouldn't tell him that, though. Unfortunately, the trapper didn't have any writing materials. In the end, she couldn't bring herself to ride away without leaving Degan a note.\n\nToday she'd exercised the horses by racing them up and down the wide, open stretch that led to Bismarck, and then she'd gone hunting and done some cooking and baking. It was nearing dusk now and she decided to take her horse with her to the pond. After bathing she planned to ride to the other side of the woods to see what was over that way. She'd be real annoyed if she found a town that Jackson had failed to mention.\n\nShe'd already served Degan an early dinner: roasted pheasant, stewed mushrooms, and misshaped corn muffins she was able to bake with Artemus's bread tin. But Degan had eaten so much he had fallen asleep before she'd even cleaned up, so they probably wouldn't catch the sunset tonight. She should still be back in time for it in case he woke up.\n\nMax stripped down and entered the pond with her bar of soap. Degan knew where she was bathing every day. He didn't like her going there alone and had been walking her to the pond the last few days\u2014yet another sign that he was getting better, asserting his druthers again and getting away with it. Even without his full strength, Degan could be adamant. He hung back about twenty feet or so from the pond, within shouting distance, so she could have her privacy.\n\nShe was wading toward the edge of the pond to get out when she saw that she was no longer alone, and froze. The man was tall, stocky, and already had his gun drawn and pointed at her. He'd come out of the trees from the south. The ones along the western edge shaded him, so she couldn't quite make out his face. Then another man appeared behind him, then a third. They had their guns drawn, too, and all three were walking slowly toward her.\n\nShe had nowhere to run. The pond was too small to help her in any way. One of them could reach her before she got to the other side of it\u2014or shoot her for trying. Without her clothes she couldn't even bluff them into accepting her outlaw persona, much less try to convince them she was a boy. In a moment or two they'd see that she was a woman, if they hadn't already.\n\nShe'd brought her saddlebags only because she didn't want to carry the wet bar of soap back in her hands. But they were nearly empty, containing only her ammunition. She'd already removed the clean clothes she'd brought, which were hanging on a bush near the edge of the pond next to her dirty ones. All of her other belongings\u2014her cooking gear, her spices, her creamy soap that she only used every three days so it would last longer\u2014were at the cabin. She also had her money. There'd been no reason to unpack it, which was too bad, since it was probably about to be stolen.\n\nMaybe the strangers would be satisfied with that. Or maybe they wouldn't. They definitely weren't friendly with their guns already drawn. Fear was sneaking up on her pretty fast. She'd probably be dead already if they didn't want something else from her...\n\nShe was too far from the cabin for the sound of her scream to reach it, even if Degan was awake to hear it. He'd hear a gunshot, though. Her gun belt was hanging on her saddle pommel, under her vest and coat. But the three men now stood between her and her horse.\n\nThen the closest one to her said, \"It's time to go home, Max.\"\n\nShe tensed and peered at the speaker more closely, then suddenly felt a wave of dread wash over her. \"Is that you, Grady Pike?\"\n\nHe didn't answer, but she recognized him now. Black hair worn longer than usual, probably because he hadn't paused long enough in getting up here to cut it, green eyes drawn close together in a frown. Knowing who it was didn't remove her fear, though; it just added to it.\n\nGrady Pike was Bingham Hills' sheriff and had been Carl Bingham's puppet. Nearing forty, he'd been sheriff for as long as she could remember. Carl had made sure of that. As mayor, Carl had determined when and if elections would be held, and if anyone had started talking about running for sheriff, he had changed his mind pretty quick.\n\nGrady used to be a nice guy when he was younger. He'd toss her a jawbreaker candy whenever he saw her in town, used to keep a pocket full of them. When she was a kid. Before Carl had run into roadblocks like her and had started doing underhanded things to get around them. And all without anyone knowing. But Grady knew.\n\nGrady's deputy, Andy Wager, was the second man. Short, chubby, with curly, brown hair and brown eyes, and around thirty now, he was another who followed orders without question. Andy had led the posse that had chased her all the way to Kansas. He didn't usually have much gumption, so he must have been promised something special to have gone that far, maybe Grady's job when he retired, not that she could imagine Grady ever retiring from a job that appeared to be his for life.\n\nShe didn't recognize the third man, who looked younger, maybe twenty-five, with blond hair, blue eyes, and a slight limp in his right leg. A tracker they'd hired? How else had they found her out here?\n\nShe asked that first, \"How did you find me?\"\n\n\"Get out of the water,\" was all Grady said.\n\nMax shook her head. \"Not without some privacy to dress.\"\n\nShe was pushing her luck. Grady probably didn't want to let her out of his sight. Yet he signaled the men to turn around and did the same. He was still standing between her and her horse, though, so she quickly got out of the water and dressed.\n\nWith her pants and shirt on, she asked again, \"How did you find me?\"\n\nAll three turned toward her again, and Andy answered, \"We probably wouldn't have if you weren't traveling with Degan Grant. It's easy to follow him, as memorable as he is.\"\n\nDegan was right. Gran's letter had been tampered with. They'd obviously followed it straight to Luella. She must have told them that Max was with Degan, or Madam Joe had provided the information. But that didn't explain how they had found her in the middle of nowhere in Dakota. Grady and Andy were town men; they weren't trackers.\n\nGrady was frowning. Apparently, he didn't approve of Andy's talking to her. He waved his gun toward her horse and told his deputy, \"Get her weapons,\" and said to her, \"You don't get to ask questions. We didn't enjoy coming up here, and then you weren't even in Helena when we got there. You're more trouble than you're worth, so just keep your mouth shut or you can go home in chains.\"\n\nShe bristled. This was the man who'd dragged her to Carl's house that fateful morning. She had no doubt that he had known what Carl had been up to and had still done it.\n\n\"You can at least tell me if Carl's dead or alive,\" she demanded.\n\n\"Maybe you should have stuck around to find out,\" Grady growled. \"Chains it is then.\"\n\n\"All right!\" she conceded.\n\nAndy went through her saddlebags. He'd dumped her coat and vest on the ground and looped her gun belt over his shoulder.\n\nMax was fuming as she put on her vest and coat, then sat down to put on her boots. She was glad she had her coat with her. She had a feeling they would be riding hard to put as much distance as possible between them and Degan. Or were they confident because they outnumbered him? Or did they think their badges would keep Degan from killing them?\n\nShe decided to test that, asking, \"Can I at least get the rest of my things and say good-bye to Degan?\"\n\n\"Now that's funny, it really is,\" Andy replied.\n\nHe didn't look amused. And she caught him glancing nervously in the direction of the cabin. Had they been watching it and waiting to get her alone? They knew who Degan was, what he was. They wouldn't have risked apprehending her in front of him when that might not have worked out in their favor.\n\n\"Rich, ain'tcha?\"\n\nHer eyes went back to Andy, holding her wad of money. \"That belongs to Bingham Hills' bank. Wilson Cox gave it to me by mistake.\"\n\n\"So you kept it all this time to give it back?\" Andy asked incredulously.\n\n\"Course I did.\"\n\nAndy snorted. \"Yeah, sure.\"\n\nWith her hat and boots on, Max glanced in the direction of the cabin. With most of her belongings still at the cabin, Degan wouldn't think that she had left of her own accord, would he? Or would he think she'd sacrificed her belongings so that he'd waste time looking for her in the woods first?\n\nShe couldn't see the cabin through the trees, but if she could just get closer to it, Degan might hear her yell. Or would they shoot her in the back for trying? He'd definitely hear a gunshot, but it wouldn't do her much good if she was already dead.\n\nStill, she had to try. Grady's not telling her what she could expect in Texas could only mean one thing. If they admitted they were taking her home to hang, they would expect her to fight tooth and nail the whole trip, and it was still a long way to Texas. But did they really think she'd be docile not knowing? Maybe. False hope could make you do dumb things\u2014such as ride along peacefully with your executioners.\n\n\"You don't want to make me angry, Max,\" Grady said as he clamped a hand on her arm.\n\nWas he a mind reader now, knowing she'd been about to run? He already looked angry. She supposed she would be, too, if she'd had to travel this far to collect someone. But she'd lost her chance to get closer to the cabin. Grady was now leading her in the opposite direction.\n\nShe spotted their horses through the trees about a minute later. A fourth man was standing with them. When he turned, she recognized who had led Grady right to her.\n\n\"You son'bitch!\" she yelled at Jackson Bouchard.\n\nShe charged toward him, ready to rip him apart, but Grady yanked her back.\n\nJackson looked completely unperturbed. The bastard even shrugged. \"You never said you were wanted by the law.\"\n\n\"Sure, I'm a killer and a bank robber. I go around telling that to anyone who will listen. And if I get loose, I'm going to add you to my list of dead men.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't she be tied up?\" Jackson asked.\n\nAndy chuckled. \"You were guarding the ropes, Mr. Bou-chard.\"\n\nShe did get tied then. But getting gagged, too, infuriated her even more. They rode through the trees for a while until they were so far from the cabin that it couldn't be seen when they left the woods to ride hard toward Bismarck. As they'd mounted up, Grady had said something about getting there before the morning train departed. If they managed that, she knew Degan would never catch up\u2014if he even tried." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Degan wasn't surprised he'D slept so long. He was going to get fat and lazy if they didn't leave soon. Eating and sleeping was all he'd been doing here. He supposed his body needed it, but Max made too much food. But then she didn't have much else to do here except cook and nag him to eat and rest. She was good at nagging, and chattering\u2014and enticing him without even trying. He smiled. She was good at a lot of things.\n\nIt had been a long time since anyone had taken care of him the way she had. He could get used to it, could get used to living with her. Never a dull moment. A life full of surprises and sweetness and strong passions. Being with Max, in or out of bed, was like holding wildfire in your arms\u2014or trying to. They wouldn't live in a rustic cabin like this, but in a house, in town, any town would do. Nashart came to mind. He wondered, how much trouble would he bring to that town if he accepted Sheriff Ross's offer and settled there?\n\nIt was dawn and he lay in bed while light slowly entered the cabin. There were no sounds, inside or out, except for the early birds singing, which meant Max was still asleep. Usually, she started a fire first thing to get the chill out of the cabin. He could do that for her this morning.\n\nHe sat up and immediately saw that she wasn't there. When he went outside to find her, he saw that her horse was gone, too, so he started walking toward the pond. She wouldn't have gone hunting, not this early. Besides, she'd gone out yesterday and had brought back all sorts of game. She'd told him that she'd spotted a lone buffalo, which he'd been relieved to learn she'd left alone. So he knew she wouldn't have to hunt for another day or two. He hoped they wouldn't be here that long. He was sure he could ride now with minimal discomfort. Well, at least he wouldn't fall off the horse because of it.\n\nIt was early for her to be bathing, but where else could she be? As he approached the pond, he called out to her. There was only silence. She wouldn't leave now that he had recovered. No, that thought shouldn't even have occurred to him. The woman wouldn't help him as many times as she had, then abandon him when it was his turn to help her. She just wouldn't.\n\nWhen he reached the pond, he immediately saw the tracks in the dirt that surrounded it, a lot of them, bootprints much larger than hers. One or two men, maybe more. There were too many bootprints for him to ascertain the number. And evidence that a horse, most likely hers, had been led south through the trees. With the ground being dry, these tracks could have been made yesterday before dark.\n\nDegan didn't like what he was feeling. It was alien to him. It resembled panic and dread, emotions that weren't going to help get Max back, so he pushed them aside and returned to the cabin. He gathered his things, and hers, saddled his horse, and ignored what turned out to be a little more than minimal discomfort as he followed the tree line until he found the spot where more horses had left the woods, heading south. He rode hard in that direction.\n\nHe reached Bismarck just before dusk. He went straight to the sheriff's office to see if bounty hunters had turned Max in for the reward. But she wasn't in jail, and the sheriff had left a note that he would be out of town for a few days. If bounty hunters had taken her, that could be why she hadn't been turned in yet. They might still be in town waiting for the sheriff to return.\n\nHe went to the train station next. It was closed for the night, but the short schedule was posted on the wall. A westbound train left early every morning, one bound for the east every evening. It appeared he wouldn't find out until tomorrow morning how many passengers had departed today and in which direction. But he could search the hotels in the meantime. If Max was still in Bismarck, he would find her.\n\nHe stabled his horse first, which turned out to be a stroke of luck. His horse was familiar with Max's. They nickered at each other in passing, which made Degan examine the chestnut gelding more closely. While her horse wasn't distinctive, it did have a small white patch on the neck just under the mane where it wouldn't usually be noticed. But he'd rubbed down her horse enough times to notice it.\n\nHe called the stableman over to him and nodded toward the chestnut. \"Who left this horse here, a man or a woman?\"\n\n\"Jackson Bouchard did.\"\n\n\"Who was with him?\"\n\n\"No one. He came in this morning with his horse and this one. Mr. Bouchard always stables here. He asked if I wanted to buy the gelding off him, but I didn't. Don't want more horses than I need.\"\n\nDegan's panic spiked so he reverted to instinct and simply ran to the boardinghouse nearby where he'd been directed when he asked around for a scout after he and Max had arrived in Bismarck. He was afraid she was dead. Nothing else occurred to him as an explanation for why she no longer needed her horse, but then nothing sensible was running through his mind just then, no thought other than getting his hands on Jackson Bouchard. She hadn't trusted the supposed half-breed. She knew Jackson had been working with the train robbers. He wouldn't want to leave loose ends like that. But why wait so long to come back for her? Unless it took him that long to find men willing to help him. No, if Jackson had wanted to kill Max, he could have killed her when they'd come back to the cabin and Degan was passing out.\n\nDegan didn't knock, he just kicked Jackson's door in as soon as he got to it. The man was sitting in a small tub naked. No one else was in the room. He'd started to reach for his rifle on the floor next to him, but stopped when he saw Degan's gun was already drawn and aiming at his heart.\n\n\"She's not dead!\" Jackson blurted out.\n\n\"Where is she?\"\n\n\"On the train heading west.\"\n\nDegan cocked his gun. \"You're lying. She wouldn't leave her horse.\"\n\n\"She didn't have a choice!\"\n\n\"Talk fast, Bouchard.\"\n\n\"I thought you were wounded.\"\n\n\"Wounds heal. Say something I need to hear while you still can.\"\n\n\"They were lawmen, a sheriff and two deputies. I heard they were asking around town for you and her. I found them and asked why. They showed me her wanted poster. That was a lot of money to ignore.\"\n\n\"So you led them right to us?\"\n\n\"To her. They didn't want to deal with you if they didn't have to. We rode all night so they could catch the train this morning.\"\n\n\"They're taking her to Texas?\"\n\n\"That's what they said.\"\n\n\"Why would they go west to go to Texas?\"\n\n\"They wanted the first train out so they wouldn't be here when you arrived. They figured you would go east.\"\n\n\"Why is her horse still here?\"\n\n\"They didn't have horses themselves. They came all the way from Texas by stage and train, so they didn't need them and thought they wouldn't\u2014until they got here. Took half a day to find them a few they could rent or borrow. They didn't want to buy them. When we got back to town, they tossed me her reins and said I could keep her horse as a bonus for helping them finish their business without bloodshed.\"\n\n\"You're not keeping it.\"\n\n\"No, of course not.\"\n\n\"I'll take that money they gave you, too. You don't get to profit from this.\"\n\n\"But she's an outlaw!\"\n\n\"No, she isn't, and I was going to get that cleared up for her. Your interference has done nothing but make me want to shoot you right now. If they've hurt her, I will come back and kill you. Now where's that money?\"\n\n\"I don't have it,\" Jackson admitted. \"The sheriff wasn't here to help them out with that. And their town doesn't have a telegraph. But they said they would send the money here as soon as they got home.\"\n\n\"Gullible as well as despicable.\" Degan turned to leave.\n\n\"Hey! What about the money you owe me?\"\n\n\"You're kidding, right?\" Degan didn't pause to hear the answer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "\"You're not from Bingham hills, are you?\"\n\nIt was Max's first opportunity to talk to Saul Bembry alone, well, at least without Grady or Andy within listening range. And they'd finally removed the gag from her mouth. Grady had gotten annoyed pretty quick at her yelling at him so much. He also didn't like her describing how Degan was going to kill him when he caught up with them, so he was keeping her gagged unless she was being fed.\n\nThey were at a stage stop on the long stretch east of Bozeman. There had been many stops after they'd left the train at Billings. Not all of them were in towns. Unlike Boulder, which had grown up around a stage stop, this stop only had a trading post next to it. They only had about fifteen minutes to eat and relieve themselves before the stage departed again with fresh horses and a new driver.\n\nSaul had been left to guard her while she was sitting at a table, since only her hands were tied in front of her, not her feet. Grady and Andy were getting them some food.\n\n\"Am now,\" Saul answered her. \"Moved there this year with my wife and kids. Never been made to feel so at home in a place so fast. I'm a carpenter by trade.\"\n\n\"Then what are you doing with these two?\"\n\n\"I moved to Bingham Hills because I heard it was growing, but it wasn't by the time I got there. I tried making furniture for a while, but there wasn't much call for that either.\"\n\nMax didn't like hearing that. It confirmed that Carl wasn't around any longer, and Evan must not be carrying on with his father's agenda. Evan might even have moved away. Rich now and out from under his father's thumb, why would he stick around? But if the town was stagnating now, everyone would blame her for that, too.\n\n\"But I got talked into staying,\" Saul continued. \"Was promised that building was going to start up again soon. And I was offered the deputy job in the meantime. Didn't expect to have to travel for it, though. I miss my family.\"\n\nShe almost snorted at him. He'd been gone less than a month, while she'd been gone nearly two years. She missed her family. She wondered if they would let her see Gran, or if they would lynch her immediately.\n\n\"Have you met my grandmother? Your wife probably cooks with her eggs.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Who hasn't met Widow Dawson.\"\n\n\"How is she?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"She was fine the last I saw her.\"\n\nMore proof that her grandmother's letter had been tampered with. \"What about my brother, Johnny?\"\n\n\"Can't say if I've met your brother.\" Saul glanced at Grady and Andy, then down at the table. \"I think you should stop\u2014\"\n\nStop what? Asking? Worrying? Caring? Probably asking. He obviously had orders not to tell her anything, even about her family. Grady's orders. And with Grady sitting down next to her right then, she wasn't going to be able to ask any more questions of any kind.\n\nShe picked up a piece of bread from the plate Andy had put before her, then glanced behind her at the entrance as if she'd heard something outside. She'd started doing that a few towns back. It got results. It made them nervous and they'd started watching the door of whatever canteen or restaurant they were in. It was her little way of getting even, reminding them that Degan might be following them. That really worried them.\n\nIf he was following them, he wouldn't be able to catch up. Common sense should have told them that, considering they hadn't run into a single delay. If Degan even took the right train, somehow figuring out that Grady was going west before heading south in order to keep him off their trail, he'd be a day behind them. He couldn't outride one. The stages were slower than trains, but still faster than a horse because they didn't slow down to rest their animals, just swapped them out at each stage station. He could outride a stage, but only if he left his palomino behind, swapping for new mounts along the way, and she couldn't imagine him doing that. Besides, he'd have to sleep sometime, and the stages weren't stopping for that, either. At only one stop had a fresh driver not taken over for a tired one. So any way you looked at it, they would still be a full day ahead of Degan\u2014if he was following.\n\nShe needed to escape so she could hide out along the road somewhere and wait for Degan to pass, or delay them somehow. But escape didn't look promising. If she wasn't sitting down with a guard next to her at the rest stops, Grady's hand was clamped to her arm, taking her in and out of them. Even in the coach she ended up sitting between two of the three of them. Grady expected her to try something and was making sure she couldn't.\n\nShe'd barely finished her meal when Grady stood up. \"Get up, it's time to go,\" he said before he tied the gag back over her mouth.\n\nAs Grady practically dragged her to the stagecoach with Andy and Saul following close behind, she tried to come up with a plan. They'd probably reach Butte sometime tomorrow or late tonight and be back on a train again. Butte would be her last chance to escape. She was going to have to feign some sort of sickness in advance of their arrival there, like today. Something that would require Grady to take her to a doctor when they arrived in Butte. If she could make them miss just one train departure, Degan might roll into town on the next stage. But without some obvious symptoms such as a fever or vomiting, Grady wouldn't buy it. She'd been unable to think of anything else except maybe fainting. But she wouldn't put it past Grady to punch her to see if she was faking. That's how despicable the sheriff had become.\n\nGrady got into the stage first, then Andy pushed her up into it. Grady had her sit between him and Andy, and Saul took the last spot on the bench next to Andy. Across from them sat a dark-haired man dressed in trousers and a suit jacket and a woman with a big bonnet and her young son, who amused himself by playing with a big wooden toy horse. They'd joined them at the last stop, and the man didn't appear to be traveling with the woman and the boy. A cowboy joined them at this stop, tying his horse to the back of the coach.\n\nThe coach was full now, which might slow it down a little. The dark-haired man mostly slept and didn't say much when he was awake. The older woman had given Max some disapproving glances when she'd seen that Max was gagged and her hands were tied. The little boy had stared at her and asked his mother why the man had a scarf tied over his mouth. \"Don't look at him, Tommy. He's an outlaw,\" the mother had said. Grady nodded.\n\nNow, the cowboy was staring at Max with interest. \"Why's he being restrained and gagged?\"\n\nGrady merely showed him his badge in answer.\n\nMax wondered if Grady would punch her in front of these witnesses if she tried fainting right there in the coach. It wouldn't be as dramatic as it would be if she were standing. She'd just have to slump over Grady or Andy. They'd have to conclude that something was wrong with her when they couldn't revive her. She'd have time to do it again before they reached Butte just in case they doubted that she was ill.\n\nShe was waiting until they were about halfway between stops before she tried it. But someone else had been waiting for that moment, too. The coach slowed and came to a stop. The dark-haired man had already drawn a gun. Grady was looking out one window, Saul the other, to see why they'd stopped. She was probably the only one who had noticed that the gun across from them hadn't been drawn in self-defense; it was pointed at them. They were being robbed from inside the coach?\n\n\"Drop your weapons,\" the dark-haired man said.\n\nMax would have grinned if she weren't gagged. With their money stolen and no quick way to get any more, Grady and his men would end up stranded in Butte for weeks! Well, that was, if they remained alive. But from the expression on Grady's face she could see he had realized that, too, and he wasn't about to get robbed without putting up a fight.\n\nHe didn't immediately reach for his gun. Saul had already dropped his on the floor. Andy, apparently, had decided to be the hero; he drew and aimed. He got shot for it. Which was when the woman, instead of screaming, hit the dark-haired man, who was sitting next to her, with her purse. And she hit exactly what she was aiming for, too, the hand holding the gun.\n\nThe stage robber's weapon didn't fall out of his hand, but it got pointed toward the floor. That was when Grady drew and shot the robber. Grady then jumped out of the coach to deal with whoever had stopped it. Saul quickly retrieved his gun and went outside to help Grady. Andy was slumped forward, still holding his gun, although it was lax in his hand, now lying on the seat. Right next to Max...\n\n\"I wouldn't,\" the cowboy warned her.\n\nWell, hell, Max thought. Now he had his gun drawn? She couldn't tell if he was with the robbers or just doing a good deed for the lawmen. Probably the latter, since he didn't say anything else. The woman with the lethal purse only gave him a brief glance before she gathered her boy in her arms to shield him from the dead body on the seat next to her.\n\nMax leaned forward to see if Andy was still alive. He was. His eyes were still open and his face was contorted in pain. She looked for the wound, then winced, finding it near his heart. He was going to need a doctor\u2014as long as he didn't die before they could get to one." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "There had only been two stage robbers, and now both of them were dead, their bodies tied to the top of the coach. They would be turned over to the sheriff in Butte for burial.\n\nThe failed robbery hadn't delayed them long, only about twenty minutes. Andy passed out soon after the stage starting moving again, but he was still breathing. Saul was pressing a cloth the woman had given him to the wound to stanch the blood flow.\n\nOne more stage stop was before Butte, but it was just a house and a stable. Still, Max lowered her gag long enough to suggest they pause there to take the bullet out of Andy. Grady didn't answer, just lunged toward her to put the gag back in place. She did that before he could reach her. Bastard. It wasn't as if she couldn't remove the gag herself with her hands tied in front of her, but every time she did it, Grady tied the gag even tighter. Which hurt.\n\nShe finally got the message and stopped trying. But the last time he'd also warned her that he would tie her hands behind her back if she removed the gag again. The only reason he hadn't done that to begin with was because they'd have to untie her and retie her every time they ate, which would have been too much trouble.\n\nThey arrived in Butte early the next morning. Andy was taken straight to the doctor on a stretcher. Saul took his bag and Andy's with him and went to find the local sheriff to inform him of the attempted robbery. Grady picked up his own valise and her saddlebags and, with her arm in his other hand, followed behind the stretcher.\n\nOn the way, she heard the train whistle blow. Grady swore, hearing it. She would have laughed, was almost tempted to remove the gag so she could. They would probably have just managed to catch that train if the stage robbers hadn't shown up and shot Andy.\n\nGrady still went to the train station, dragging her with him once the doctor started treating Andy's wound. That worried her. He wouldn't leave Andy behind, would he, just to catch the next train? He and Andy were friends, had worked together for years. Of course he wouldn't leave him. That would be too coldhearted, even for Grady.\n\nThe train schedule was posted. The next one wasn't leaving until tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. Grady bought three tickets. That answered her question. He was going to leave without Andy. But this delay might still be all that was needed for Degan to catch up. If he'd found out in which direction she'd gone in time to catch the next train in Bismarck. If he'd taken the same stages she'd taken after that. If he was even following her. That was too many ifs to ease her anxiety.\n\nThey returned to the doctor's office to await news about Andy's condition. When Saul joined them a while later, Grady sent him to get them a room at the nearest hotel. One room. Max started making noises under her gag, a lot of them. She needed a damn bath. She hadn't had one since they'd captured her at the pond a week ago.\n\nGrady finally lowered her gag to demand, \"What?\"\n\n\"I need my own room.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Then I need time alone in the room for a bath. You do, too. We all stink.\"\n\nHe couldn't dispute that. He put her gag back in place and took her to the hotel. Saul was still at the desk checking in. Grady left her and the bags with him.\n\n\"See that she gets a bath, but don't leave her alone in the room,\" he told Saul, then left to go back to the doctor.\n\nRed-faced, she followed Saul up the stairs. But he was even more embarrassed than she was. As soon as the water arrived, he got a chair, took it to the window, and just sat there, looking out at the street with his back to her. She could have told him not to bother, she wasn't taking her clothes off. She did take the gag off. She ended up dripping water all over the floor, too, when she got out of the tub. She didn't care. Didn't apologize either when Saul used one of the towels to wipe the floor.\n\n\"You should change into dry clothes at least,\" he mumbled.\n\n\"I shouldn't be here at all,\" she mumbled back. \"Degan was already taking me home, you know.\"\n\n\"Yeah, sure. Jackson Bouchard said the gunfighter was wounded bad.\"\n\n\"Jackson was a train-robbing liar,\" she retorted. \"Degan had mended enough to travel. We were leaving for Texas the next day. All you accomplished in stealing me from him was to piss him off. Betcha can guess how that's gonna turn out when he finds you.\"\n\nSaul backed away from her. \"Grant won't think we headed west to go to Texas. Grady outsmarted him. I think you should put that gag back on before Grady gets here.\"\n\nShe ignored the suggestion and went to stand at the window, letting the warm breeze help her clothes to dry. It was pointless to lie to Saul. He might be gullible enough to believe her every word, but what good would it do her? Grady was the one in charge, and Grady wouldn't leave her ungagged long enough to let her say anything to him. Nor would he believe her if she did. None of which mattered. The deed was done. She was in their custody now. And Degan would come or he wouldn't." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Grady and Saul let Max have the bed that night. She was surprised until she saw where they were sleeping. Grady stretched out in front of the door despite its being locked. Saul lay down in front of the window. She supposed that was one way to make sure she didn't sneak off while they slept. But if there had been something hard in the room that she could have used to hit Grady over the head without waking Saul, she would have tried. But there wasn't, at least not anything that wouldn't make too much noise when it broke. So she was the first to drift off to sleep, and the last to rise.\n\nSaul took her downstairs to eat breakfast while Grady went to visit Andy. Saul told her Andy was lucky. The bullet had lodged against one of his ribs before it could hit his heart. He had a cracked rib as well as a gunshot wound, but the doctor was optimistic and had assured Grady that Andy would make a full recovery with proper care\u2014which didn't include traveling anytime soon.\n\nGrady obviously did care about his friend, but something was driving him to get back to Texas immediately, and it wasn't her. Bingham Hills had waited nearly two years to hang her. A few extra weeks wasn't going to make a difference. She suspected Grady's fear of Degan was making him hurry. It had to be.\n\nDid Grady expect to be killed the very moment Degan spotted him, no questions asked? Maybe. But then he didn't know Degan, just that he was a gunfighter, dangerous, and fast. Reputations got exaggerated and tales got tall, depending on who was doing the telling, and Grady could have heard one of the more colorful tales about Degan that included body counts and the names of other famous gunfighters he'd supposedly killed. Either way, Grady wouldn't know that Degan had a code of honor that demanded fair fights, and she wasn't about to volunteer that information. Grady, worried, suited her just fine.\n\nGrady returned before Saul and she finished eating and hurried them out of the hotel. By her reckoning they had about thirty minutes before the train departed. She was running out of time to come up with a plan to avoid getting on it. She gazed up and down the streets, looking for Degan. He'd be so easy to spot. But he wasn't there, and the station was now in sight, the small building that housed the ticket-sales window and the telegraph, the platform where quite a few people were waiting to board or saying their good-byes, and the long train stretched out behind it. Degan wasn't there either, the one place she figured he'd be\u2014if he was in Butte.\n\nShe hadn't done much fighting when she was put on that first train because her hands had been tied behind her back and the gag had been so tight. But knowing she was a dead woman the minute she stepped on this train, she yanked off her gag and started screaming and trying to yank her arm away from Grady. People began coming out of the shops to see why. Grady didn't like that. She was making a spectacle of them. He was about to slap her into silence, drew his hand back for it. A shot was fired.\n\nThe sound wasn't near them, but it was loud enough to give Grady pause. Max stopped screaming and tried to figure out where the shot had come from. She looked behind them, expecting to see the local sheriff or Deputy Barnes, but neither man was there. Ahead, the people on the platform had scattered and her heart leapt. Degan was stepping off the train. He'd heard her screaming! He'd been on the train making sure she hadn't already boarded it.\n\nShe started to run toward Degan, but she'd forgotten about Grady's hand on her arm, which had just tightened. So she swung around and slammed her bound hands toward his head. Damn, that hurt, but his grip went slack enough for her to pull away. She raced toward Degan before Saul tried to stop her. She wanted to throw herself into Degan's arms but stopped short when she actually reached him. She wasn't nuts. You didn't do that to a man like him, especially when he might be getting into a gunfight at any moment. Actually, she was nuts. She couldn't stay away from him and looped her arms around his neck. His arms moved around her and she heard him whisper, \"Maxie.\" Surrounded by his strength, she felt safe and happy.\n\nHe lifted her bound wrists from the back of his neck and set her back from him so his eyes could roam over her from top to bottom. They lingered on the gag at her throat that lay against the top of her bandanna. She brought the knot around to untie it. He moved her hands aside and did it for her.\n\nShe was grinning now, widely. He'd come for her! And he'd had to travel the same way they had, without stopping for baths or shaving or changing his clothes, without a decent night's sleep. He wasn't his usual spotlessly clean self, either. He was as dusty as they'd been when they'd got off the coach yesterday. He had to hate that, as fastidious as he was, but still he'd put up with it to travel the fastest way possible\u2014to rescue her.\n\nShe still wanted to throw her arms around him, but caution prevailed. \"I didn't think you'd get here in time.\"\n\n\"Did they hurt you?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Are they legitimate?\"\n\n\"Yeah, straight from Bingham Hills.\"\n\nHe threw the gag on the ground behind him. His eyes were back on Grady and Saul, who were approaching so cautiously they weren't even halfway there yet.\n\n\"Four tickets were bought in Bismarck,\" Degan said to Max. \"Where's the third man who was with them?\"\n\n\"Andy Wager got shot. He's with the doc here in Butte. They're in such a hurry to get home, they're leaving him behind.\"\n\n\"Did you do it?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"It was stage robbers, who didn't survive the attempt. I haven't been able to get my hands on a gun since I left the cabin in Dakota. They have mine. I'd like it back. They gave away my horse, too, the bastards.\"\n\n\"But otherwise you're fine?\"\n\n\"Aside from some chafing on my wrists from the ropes tying my hands, yeah, I couldn't be better\u2014now.\" She smiled up at him.\n\n\"How did they manage to keep you gagged if you were able to reach the gag?\"\n\n\"With threats of tying it tighter each time I did remove it,\" she huffed.\n\n\"Don't tell me you didn't want to shut her up, too,\" Grady said to Degan. \"She jabbers incessantly.\"\n\nMax stiffened. She hadn't heard their footsteps behind her. Grady had just sounded jocular. Really? This was how he was going to deal with Degan? She turned. Their weapons weren't drawn. Smart of them. But they had to know they weren't getting her back.\n\n\"It's not what you think, Mr. Grant,\" Grady continued hesitantly when Degan didn't say a word to him. \"They want her back in Texas for a different reason. But that's not your concern.\"\n\n\"Isn't it? When you stole her from me?\"\n\n\"If it's a matter of the reward\u2014?\"\n\n\"It's not.\"\n\n\"Good, because all charges against her were dropped last year.\"\n\nOh, sure, him they tell. Max snarled at Grady, \"And why couldn't you tell me that?\"\n\nBut Degan pointed out, \"You didn't need to take her as you did if that's true.\"\n\n\"No offense, Mr. Grant, but after what we heard about you, we didn't want to butt heads with you out in the wilderness. And I wasn't sure if you'd believe us when I told you that there is no longer a reward for her return.\"\n\n\"I'm not a murderer,\" Degan said coldly. \"And I'd prefer not to become one today. So I suggest you tell me pretty quick why you took her at all\u2014if she's no longer wanted by the law.\"\n\nGrady started to reach inside his coat. Degan proved how fast he was with his gun. It was simply just there in his hand before anyone even saw him draw it.\n\nGrady threw his hands up in the air quickly, saying, \"The document in my coat will explain it.\"\n\nDegan didn't holster his gun yet. \"Get it and give it to Max\u2014after you take that damn rope off her.\"\n\nWith a wary eye on Degan, Saul stepped forward to cut the rope from her wrists. Max was amused that Degan sounded offended that they'd tied her when he'd done the same thing himself. But she didn't show it. Both Grady and Saul looked tense. None of this made a lick of sense. The charges against her had been dropped? She couldn't believe it! She was free? Unless Grady was just making a lame attempt to get Degan to simply walk away by feeding him some lies. But he could have done that at the cabin in Dakota if the charges against her had really been dropped. Actually, they had no business even being here if she was no longer wanted by the law.\n\nGrady handed the folded document to her. She opened it and started reading, but didn't get far. Wide-eyed, she looked up at Grady.\n\n\"Carl's alive? I knew that old fart was too ornery to die!\"\n\n\"Have some respect for our mayor\u2014and your guardian,\" Grady said testily.\n\nMax paled. \"My gran is dead?\"\n\n\"No, she's not. But the court ruled her incompetent to raise you.\"\n\nMax exploded, \"Like hell she is!\"\n\n\"It's true,\" Grady assured her. \"Read the rest of the legal document and you'll understand why. Ella Dawson let you grow up a wild tomboy. No one doubts she loves you, but she still let you do as you pleased instead of giving you proper guidance. She even let you take off on your own. Since there's no male adult in your family, you and your brother were appointed a new guardian by the court. And I was tasked with bringing you home so you could get some proper rearing.\"\n\n\"Why was Carl appointed?\" she demanded.\n\n\"He was willing to take on the responsibility when no one else was.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed on Grady. \"Do you even know how old I am, Grady Pike? I don't need a guardian.\"\n\n\"You're not twenty-one years old yet or married. And the law requires you to be in the care of a responsible adult until you are.\"\n\nDegan took the document from her, but was still staring coldly at Grady. \"Wards aren't supposed to be treated as prisoners, Mr. Pike.\"\n\n\"It's Sheriff Pike, and they are when they won't come along peacefully.\"\n\n\"Did you even ask her if she would?\"\n\n\"He wouldn't tell me a damn thing, Degan,\" Max put in, \"because he knew I wouldn't believe him if he did.\"\n\n\"You would have disappeared the first chance you got if you knew who your new guardian was.\" Grady turned to Degan. \"That document is legal, Mr. Grant.\"\n\n\"The same way those wanted posters were legal?\" Degan asked.\n\nGrady turned red with anger and embarrassment.\n\nMax demanded, \"Why was I charged with murder when no one died?\"\n\nFuming, Grady said, \"You shot a man and he almost died.\" But then he told Degan, \"Show that document to the local judge if you still have any doubts. I knew Max would fight it, so we didn't tell her. It's that simple.\"\n\n\"So is this,\" Degan said. \"She stays with me.\"\n\nGrady stiffened. \"We can't go home empty-handed.\"\n\n\"You won't.\" Degan put his gun away. \"I finished my business in Dakota. We would have been on our way to Texas, would have been married by now, too, if I didn't get shot\u2014and you didn't interfere.\"\n\n\"You were going to marry her?\"\n\n\"I still am.\"\n\nIt was a pretty good bluff, Max thought with a smirk.\n\nBut Grady called him on it. \"Prove it.\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"If she's not married by the end of the day, she comes with us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "\"In case you were wondering, I think your chatter is charming,\" Degan said with his usual deadpan expression as they walked away from the train station.\n\nMax burst out laughing. The remark definitely eased her tension. She wasn't sure how Degan was going to get them out of this mess, but he must have something planned.\n\n\"I have your horse,\" he added.\n\nShe squealed in delight and threw her arms around him again. He put his arms around her and squeezed her briefly, maybe a little too tightly, then let her go. His hands didn't leave her though. They lingered on her waist. She liked the way they felt there. But she knew Grady was behind them, had begun following them the moment they'd left the train station. Degan was just putting on a show for him, no doubt, trying to convince him they were a happy couple. But he couldn't appear too affectionate. He had his reputation to maintain, after all.\n\nWhen they started walking again, she thought to ask, \"How'd you get my horse back?\"\n\n\"Bouchard was happy to return him.\"\n\n\"Happy?\"\n\n\"He felt obliged. Also felt obliged to tell me Grady was so desperate to get out of Bismarck he took the early westbound train.\"\n\nShe grinned, but then groaned in disappointment. \"But you couldn't bring Noble with you, could you? If you took the stage to get here as fast as you did, you couldn't have brought our horses along. They wouldn't have had a chance to sleep.\"\n\n\"The stage driver solved that dilemma. He suggested attaching a wagon bed to the back of the coach. He'd done it before, just not for such a long distance. But it worked. The wagon only needed to be replaced once because it wasn't as sturdy as the coach. And since I bought all the seats in the coach, there wasn't a lot of extra weight for the stage horses to pull.\"\n\nMax was amazed that he'd gone to so much trouble and expense for her. It smacked of his being desperate, yet she couldn't imagine Degan Grant desperate.\n\n\"I really didn't think you'd get here in time because I was sure you wouldn't leave your palomino behind. I'm glad you figured out a way not to.\"\n\n\"We'll visit Noble after I have a bath.\"\n\nThe church was in sight now and he was leading her toward it. \"You were just kidding, right?\"\n\nDegan merely said, \"I'd like to know what all my options are.\"\n\nThey entered a plain, little church with a white steeple, but no one was there. Max sighed with relief until Degan took her hand and led her to the house next door. Max heard women talking and laughing inside.\n\nDegan's knock on the door was answered by an older woman, whose eyes widened at the sight of him. \"Is this the preacher's house?\"\n\n\"Yes, it is, but he's not home right now. I'm his wife. Perhaps I can help you?\"\n\nTwo of the woman's friends had joined her at the door. One held knitting needles and a spool of yarn in her hands. They'd apparently interrupted a sewing circle.\n\n\"I need the preacher to perform a marriage ceremony,\" Degan explained.\n\n\"Your names?\"\n\n\"Degan Grant and Maxine Dawson.\"\n\nThe woman's eyes widened even further, and one of her friends whispered something in her ear. The woman then smiled at Degan. \"My husband should be home by five o'clock. I'm sure he'll be able to oblige.\"\n\n\"That's fine, as long as he can marry us before sundown.\"\n\nMax knew Degan added that for the benefit of Grady and Saul, who were still following them at a discreet distance. Max and Degan continued on to find a hotel. Max directed Degan away from the one she'd stayed at the previous night with Grady and Saul. Degan ordered bathwater. In their room, he sat down to read the guardianship decree. Grady had asked him to give it back, but Degan had ignored him. It was nice to know she wasn't the only person Degan ignored.\n\nBut it was too bad his bluff had been called. He wouldn't have been expecting that.\n\nShe moved to the window and saw Grady standing across the street watching the entrance to the hotel. Saul was probably around back doing the same thing. She and Degan wouldn't be getting out of there before dark without being seen and stopped.\n\nWhen Degan set the document aside after reading it, she asked, \"Are you going to find a judge to verify that? Is that why you kept it?\"\n\n\"I studied law at the college in Chicago at my father's insistence. He wanted me to be capable of dealing with his lawyers as well as the ones they dealt with.\" Degan waved a hand at the document. \"I don't doubt that the document is legitimate. But Carl Bingham's means of obtaining it probably wasn't.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Bingham Hills doesn't have a resident judge, just a circuit judge that comes by from time to time. He always stayed with the Binghams. Grady is in Carl's pocket, the judge probably is, too.\"\n\n\"Whether he is or whether he merely did his 'host' a favor is irrelevant. The document needs to be negated, and it specifically states what will do that, your reaching the age of twenty-one or your marrying. So we get married today.\"\n\n\"But you weren't serious about that!\"\n\n\"I am now.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"It's the safest way to get you back to Texas and find out why Carl Bingham is so determined to control you. Don't worry, it doesn't have to be a marriage in every sense of the word, merely one of legal convenience. I haven't forgotten your prerequisite for marriage\u2014some good, happy reasons I believe you said. Besides, there are ways to get 'unmarried' after we find out what's going on in Bingham Hills.\"\n\n\"You're talking about an annulment?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nHe tapped the document with his finger. \"This is just another means of getting you under their control. What needs to happen is for Bingham to stop coveting whatever prize it is that you can bring him. The prize needs to become unavailable to him.\"\n\n\"So if I'm already married, that ends it?\"\n\n\"It should.\"\n\n\"Or it makes you a target instead,\" she couldn't help pointing out.\n\nBut she was incredulous to see him actually smile at that prediction. \"I've been a target for a number of years now. I'm used to it.\"\n\nBut she wasn't used to him being one. But the temporary marriage could work, she supposed. Until now she would have been easy to manipulate if either of Carl's schemes had worked. But he'd have to deal with Degan now, and men dealt with each other differently from how they dealt with women. Carl would have to be more cautious.\n\nThe water arrived. Degan suggested she bathe first behind the screen while he shaved. He also told her to open his food sack. No food was in it, but she was happy to find her belongings that she'd left at the cabin, including the floral-patterned skirt and white blouse that Degan had bought for her, which she could wear to the church that afternoon.\n\nThey had lunch at a restaurant nearby, where Grady and Saul sat down at another table. Those two weren't even trying to hide their surveillance. Degan didn't appear to mind. Max felt he was even amused by it when he said, \"Maybe I should invite them to join us.\"\n\nHe didn't, but he extended their lunch another hour with coffee and a second helping of dessert to see if the lawmen would leave first. They didn't.\n\nAfter the long lunch they stopped at the telegraph office. Degan explained about having to keep Marshal Hayes apprised of the outlaws who could be removed from his list, including her, now that the charges had been dropped. He'd sent John news about Kid Cade before they'd left for Dakota, but he hadn't had time until now to let him know that Willie Nolan and his gang wouldn't be robbing any more trains. Then Max was delighted when Degan took her to the stable to visit Noble.\n\nThe gelding appeared to have weathered the trip fine. So had Degan. She'd asked about his wound when he was bathing\u2014and she was trying to keep her mind off it. He'd assured her it caused him barely a twinge now, but she doubted that he would tell her if he was still in pain.\n\nWhen it was nearing five o'clock, they continued on to the church. Max started having doubts about what they were about to do, and those doubts grew stronger when the church came into view.\n\n\"Are you sure you want to do this?\" she asked Degan.\n\n\"I told you, it's just a temporary measure\u2014and it avoids bloodshed.\"\n\nHe'd shoot Grady for her? Well, not shoot to kill, but he probably wouldn't hesitate to disable him.\n\nThis certainly wasn't the way Max had pictured getting hitched, with no family present and a gun on the groom's hip. But it wasn't real\u2014well, it was, just not real enough to last. She had to keep that uppermost in her mind\u2014and forget how much this felt like a shotgun wedding.\n\nThey couldn't miss the crowd of people outside the church, but didn't understand what was going on until they got closer and heard someone shout, \"There he is! There's the famous gunfighter who's getting married today!\"\n\nPeople in the crowd were craning their necks to get a look at Degan and his bride. Max realized Degan was a celebrity to these people after his recent gunfight with Jacob Reed in this town. Even Deputy Barnes was there. Max was stunned by the turnout. Degan seemed annoyed by it and forged ahead, trying to get them inside the church.\n\nBut then the reason why they were there stepped forward with his sidekick. \"Hold up,\" Grady said to Degan. \"It's occurred to me that you probably need her guardian's permission for this.\"\n\nDegan turned and drew his gun. \"No, I don't.\"\n\nThe crowd gasped and stepped back in unison, but no one left, every eye avidly on Degan. Grady didn't back down. Saul, white-faced, tried to drag him away, but Grady seemed rooted in place.\n\nWhich might be why Degan added, \"I'm doing exactly what you requested, Sheriff Pike, marrying Max before sunset. And it's going to happen right now\u2014one way or another.\"\n\nThe threat was implicit. It looked as if Grady wanted to say more, but the crowd was suddenly applauding Degan. Max almost laughed. Grady had been a sheriff for so long; he wasn't used to having his dictates, or suggestions, for that matter, ignored. But Bingham Hills was a peaceful town. No one like Degan had ever passed through it. Grady was simply out of his depth in dealing with a gunfighter of this caliber. And he'd certainly never experienced a crowd swayed against him like this, either.\n\nDespite Grady's sour expression, Degan considered the matter settled and escorted Max into the church. Grady and Saul still followed them and pushed their way into a front pew between two women already seated there. One of the women was dabbing at her eyes, exclaiming to everyone around her, \"I just love weddings!\"\n\nThe church quickly filled with people eager to watch the ceremony. Degan shook hands with the preacher, who introduced himself, and then asked, \"Why the sudden rush for a wedding, Mr. Grant?\"\n\n\"My bride has been tied up for the past week; now she's free.\"\n\nDegan glanced back at Grady as he said that. Max had to bite back a laugh when she saw Grady turn red with fury.\n\nThe preacher, unaware of the byplay, began the ceremony. \"We're here today to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony. If anyone objects, speak now or forever hold your peace.\"\n\nMax held her breath, refusing to look at Grady. If he said anything now, she might shoot him herself. But she heard the tussle behind them and glanced back. Grady had stood up, but the two women sitting next to him had yanked him back down.\n\nThe preacher didn't notice this and continued, \"You have the rings?\"\n\nDegan didn't reply. Max groaned to herself, catching Grady's smirk because the wedding was going to stop right now. Of course Degan didn't have rings for them. She hadn't thought of it either!\n\nBut then an elderly man stood up. \"My wife and I are happy to lend you ours for the ceremony. There's fifty years of good luck in these rings.\"\n\nA collective sigh of relief was released from the crowd, Max's included. While this marriage might not be real, she found herself wanting it to happen more than anything. To put an end to Carl's plans, she assured herself. Then why was she so thrilled when she heard Degan saying his vows?\n\n\"I, Degan Grant, take you, Maxine Dawson, to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish until death do us part.\"\n\nAfter she repeated those vows to Degan, they were pronounced man and wife, and Degan quickly kissed her. Goodness, she could hear all the old ladies gushing over that! Then they got another surprise.\n\n\"My wife and her friends would like you to come out back if you would,\" the preacher said. \"Please don't disappoint her or I'll never hear the end of it. Follow me.\"\n\nThe last was said quite loudly, an invitation extended to the whole gathering. Degan and Max saw why when they stepped out of the church's back door. Tables laden with food had been set up in the yard and fiddlers were starting to play. The church ladies had made a party for them!\n\nMax was touched by these strangers' thoughtfulness and generosity, and delighted, too. She'd thought her wedding was going to feel as fake as it was intended to be, but it certainly didn't now. Everyone was talking and laughing, and having fun\u2014well, everyone except Grady. Max even caught him getting his hand slapped by one of the women when he reached for a plate of food. Because he'd been set on obstructing the union of the happy couple, no one there was pleased by his presence.\n\nThat's when he came over to her and Degan. Max hoped it was to say good-bye, since he obviously wasn't welcome there and knew it, but she should have known better. With no congratulations, no surprise that they'd actually gone through with it, and still looking extremely disgruntled, he just asked if they would be on the train in the morning.\n\n\"Usually I take offense when someone calls me a liar, Sheriff Pike.\"\n\nGrady started to assure him, \"I didn't\u2014\"\n\n\"But it's my wedding day, so I'll make an exception. I already told you we were going to Texas. Your doubting me is the same thing as calling me a liar.\"\n\n\"You didn't say when you were going,\" Grady grumbled in his defense.\n\n\"Because it's irrelevant, and in point of fact it stopped being any concern of yours the moment Max was pronounced my wife. However, I assume she would rather visit her family than go on a honeymoon right away, so in all likelihood we will start south in the morning. But do us both a favor and don't question me again.\"\n\nMax thought that watching Grady get his hands tied like that was such a nice wedding gift. It was a wonder she didn't laugh out loud. But she didn't doubt that Grady and Saul would still follow them all the way to Texas, despite what Degan had said to Grady. He was too devoted to Carl Bingham and his interests not to.\n\nThe merriment continued. Max was sure everyone there had already come forward to congratulate them, but then someone else did. And she heard Degan say, \"Well, I'll be damned.\"\n\nShe stared at the man approaching Degan with his hand extended. He was tall and handsome with black hair and powder-blue eyes. She whispered, \"You know him?\"\n\nThe question got answered when the man reached them and introduced himself, \"I'm Morgan Callahan.\"\n\n\"I guessed as much.\" Degan shook the man's hand.\n\n\"Yeah, Hunter and I hear that a lot, how much we look alike. Congratulations on your wedding, but please tell me you're not here because of me.\"\n\n\"I'm not, but why would you think so?\"\n\n\"I heard from some miners here that you were working for my father. I know he hates that I prefer mining to working with my family on the ranch.\"\n\n\"That's between you and Zachary\u2014and it's not why he hired me.\"\n\n\"So it's true? You actually brought about my brother's marriage to the Warren girl?\"\n\n\"I'd say Hunter managed that on his own.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised. He really hated having that arranged marriage hanging over his head. I figured it wasn't going to happen unless he was dragged kicking and screaming to the altar.\"\n\n\"Believe me, nothing would have kept Hunter away from that wedding. You'll understand why when you meet his wife.\"\n\nMorgan smiled. \"I'm sorry I missed all the fun, but I struck it rich and will be going home for a visit as soon as I settle a dispute with a rival lady miner. And, no, I'm not asking if I can hire you! But maybe I can kiss this bride since I missed kissing my brother's new wife?\"\n\n\"Not a chance.\" Degan put his arm around Max's waist.\n\nMax wasn't sure if Degan was serious or if this was just his way of joking, but Morgan laughed, insisting, \"I'm not like Hunter, who charms every woman in sight! But I'm not going to argue with the notorious Degan Grant, either. Have a happy marriage, you two.\"\n\nAs Morgan sauntered off, one of the ladies was bold enough to come over and tell Degan to dance with his wife. Wide-eyed, Max was afraid of his reaction to that. But he surprised her by leading her to join the other couples dancing next to the musicians. A Western rendition of a waltz was being played. It was faster than a traditional waltz but not as boisterous as most of the fiddlers' music had been. The tempo slowed a little as they started dancing, and Degan pulled Max close enough that she could rest her head on his shoulder. Her smile turned dreamy. And then she yawned\u2014and laughed at herself.\n\n\"You're tired,\" he said, having heard it.\n\nShe'd been through a lot this last week as Grady's prisoner and experiencing the emotional roller coaster of being reunited with Degan and becoming his wife, even if in name only. \"A little,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Let's go.\"\n\nFor once she didn't object to those two words. Amid lots of good wishes and happy tears from the ladies who loved weddings and a comment from the preacher's wife about how this celebrity wedding had tripled the size of the church's congregation, Degan led a sleepy Max back to the hotel." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\"Your Sheriff is already suspicious, and with everyone in town knowing we got hitched, we can't risk having a cot delivered to our room.\"\n\nMax had assumed that Degan had already arranged for one as he'd done at the other hotels they stayed at after Bozeman. But she couldn't fault him for forgetting after everything that had happened today.\n\n\"I can sleep on the floor,\" she offered.\n\n\"We can share the bed\u2014as long as you stay on your side of it.\"\n\nShe recalled what had happened that morning in Bozeman when she'd awakened to find him bare chested and watching her. And the kiss... She wished now she hadn't remembered that. She'd probably think of nothing else now.\n\nYet he'd pretty much just implied it might happen again, so she reassured him it wouldn't by teasing, \"You think Grady will break in here in the morning to inspect the sheets?\"\n\n\"I don't think he has a death wish, no.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Grady can be damn determined, especially if he gets it into his head that our marriage is only a legal convenience.\" Max yawned, but continued to tease, \"I'll guard the sheets with my life. I'll even take them with me in the morning. But I should probably strip down a little more than I usually do, just in case he does have that death wish\u2014or climbs up to peek through the window in the middle of the night, which we probably wouldn't hear.\"\n\n\"Are you trying to make me laugh?\"\n\nShe grinned. \"It's not working, huh?\"\n\n\"Stripping down sounds interesting.\"\n\nWas he teasing her now? Or had the same thing that had occurred to her occurred to him\u2014that no one except them would know if they did actually make love? The marriage could still be annulled. They'd just have to lie a little...\n\nYet he was walking toward her and looked a bit more determined than usual. Not at all sure what he was about to do, she took a few steps back until she ran out of space and her back was pressed to the wall.\n\n\"You know you're not afraid of me, Maxie, so what are you doing?\"\n\nDid he really just sound amused? \"You don't usually want to get this close to me.\"\n\n\"There's a good reason for that.\"\n\n\"Then what are you doing?\"\n\n\"Making an exception to give you what you missed at the church\u2014a wedding kiss.\"\n\n\"But you did kiss me.\"\n\n\"I wasn't sure you even noticed, it was so quick. And that one didn't count with that unfriendly witness present. I thought you might like a real one for this first marriage of yours.\"\n\nReminding her that this wouldn't be her only marriage in the same breath that he wanted to seal it with a real kiss? Was he kidding? He probably was. She should know better than to tease him. He got even.\n\nShe put a hand up to his chest. \"We can leave it the way it's supposed to be\u2014a fake marriage.\"\n\n\"It's as fake as you want it to be, Maxie,\" he said quietly as he leaned in a little closer. \"But you're still getting this kiss. Consider it a memento.\"\n\nAs if she could ever forget anything having to do with him. But she couldn't dodge his mouth. She didn't try very hard. And quickly, she found out that this kiss wasn't the kind he could have given her in a church. Not even close.\n\nHe lifted one of her legs and wrapped it around his hip as he leaned in even closer. His tongue was in play immediately, swirling around hers, tempting a response from her. No coaxing was necessary. Her body responded to him as it always did with the sensual stirring that flipped around as if it were trying to find him but couldn't. Her hands could. She put one behind his neck and quickly moved it up into his hair. The other she slipped under his jacket, but his vest was still in the way. Would he stop long enough to let her get rid of it?\n\nHe stopped longer than that. He stepped back so fast she almost stumbled.\n\nHeat was in his eyes, and yet his voice was as toneless as it usually was when he said, \"There. In case they're up on the roof across the street looking this way.\"\n\nMax blinked. \"That was just for show?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nShe felt like hitting him. \"I'm too tired to play any more games today!\"\n\nShe pushed away from the wall and pulled her blouse off over her head and threw it on a chair. She yanked her boots and socks off next. That took some hopping, but she was too frustrated to sit down to do it. She unfastened her skirt and just let it pool at her feet before she marched to the bed and yanked the covers down. Then she crawled to the center of the bed and stretched out as if she were waiting for him to join her. But she sure as hell wasn't\u2014until a bare-chested Degan lay down beside her.\n\n\"That was for Grady,\" he said softly. \"This is for us.\"\n\nMax sputtered, \"What\u2014what do you think you're doing?\"\n\nHe kissed her before he said, \"Relax and turn over so I can rub your back.\"\n\nAs tired as she was, that sounded too nice to refuse. She rolled over for the massage, but it felt so divine she got more and more drowsy until he turned her onto her back and started kissing her again. His mouth moved lower and he nibbled at her neck, sending pleasant tingles rippling through her body. He kissed her shoulder as he touched her breast, running his finger around her nipple ever so lightly until she gasped. But he didn't stop. He kept stroking her as his mouth moved lower again, leaving a trail of kisses until his tongue was flicking at the tip of her other breast. She groaned as heat rushed through her, running her fingers through his hair, rubbing the back of his neck. Degan was kissing both of her breasts now, directing his attention to first one and then the other, his hands caressing her, too.\n\nHis mouth kept moving lower, kissing her midriff as he stroked her hips and thighs. What was he doing? Was he going to kiss her all the way down to her toes? She couldn't think beyond that, all she could do was luxuriate in the pleasure his hands and mouth were giving her. The sensations got so intense she had to take deep breaths and close her eyes. But when he gently pushed her legs apart and kissed her thigh, her eyes flew open. And when he reached the most sensitive spot on her body, she climaxed.\n\nShe was totally shocked, amazed, delighted, yet too exhausted to grasp what had just happened. As she drifted off, she thought she heard Degan say, \"Good night, Mrs. Grant.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Cole Callahan rode hard to get back to the ranch. He didn't have his mother's bonnet, which he'd been sent to town to fetch. Ever since that Allison Montgomery woman had paid his parents a visit, Mary had been pining for a pretty new bonnet like hers and had ordered one from back East. And he'd been sent to town every day to see if it had arrived. That Eastern lady had made quite an impression on his parents. He wished he'd been home that day to meet her.\n\nHis parents had just ridden in from the range for lunch. He caught them leaving the stable for the house and hopped off his horse next to them. Mary looked disappointed when she didn't see a hatbox tied to his saddle, but he knew he could fix that with his exciting news.\n\nGrinning, Cole exclaimed, \"I've got a telegram from Morgan!\"\n\nZachary humphed as he took the sealed telegram from his son. \"After this long that boy finally lets us know he's still alive?\"\n\n\"You were worried he wasn't?\" Mary asked.\n\n\"Course not, but he didn't know that.\"\n\n\"I knew I should've just opened it,\" Cole said impatiently. \"Pa, what are you waiting for?\"\n\nZachary opened the telegram, but his eyebrows shot up after reading the first line. \"Well, I'll be damned. Morgan struck it rich.\" Then with a sigh he said, \"I was hoping for better news.\"\n\nCole was laughing. \"What's better than that?\"\n\n\"That he's ready to give up this mining nonsense and come home for good.\"\n\n\"Pa, striking it rich means he won't be doing the mining himself anymore, he'll have crews to do it for him.\"\n\nBut Mary wanted to know. \"What else does he say?\"\n\nZachary read further. \"I think he's gone daft. 'Who knew thorns could be so nice?' What does that mean?\"\n\nMary snatched the telegram out of her husband's hands. \"Some thornbushes must have led him to his ore discovery,\" she guessed.\n\n\"Or he's in love with someone who annoys the hell out of him,\" Cole said with a grin.\n\nMary scoffed, \"Morgan in love? That would be wonderful, but I highly doubt it. He's been too single-minded in this mining obsession of his. When would he have time to fall in love?\"\n\n\"Well, someone we know did,\" Zachary said with a grin of his own. \"Read the last line, Mary.\"\n\nShe did, then exclaimed, \"Oh, my! Degan got married!\"\n\n\"Sounds like Morgan knows Degan was working for me. Why else mention his wedding?\" Zachary said.\n\n\"Are you kidding?\" Cole put in. \"Anything to do with Degan Grant is big news and worth sharing, which I'm going to do right now.\" He mounted his horse and started off toward town, yelling back, \"Don't wait on me for dinner!\"\n\n\"I liked that Allison girl,\" Mary said as she and Zachary continued walking to the house. \"I'm so glad she was able to catch up with Degan.\"\n\n\"Did your eyes stop on the word married?\" Zachary teased. \"Morgan says Degan married a pretty blonde, which Miss Montgomery isn't.\"\n\nMary's brows went up before she sighed. \"I suppose I should hope now that Allison doesn't catch up with him. Whatever is that gunfighter up to, marrying someone he barely knows instead of his long-lost love?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Max had lost interest in the scenery the train was passing and it was only their first day of the trip to Texas. With this being her third train ride now, after the trip to Dakota and back, the thrill of riding so fast had passed. She even thought about taking a nap, though she wasn't tired.\n\nAt least she didn't have to be alone with Degan. She still blushed when she thought about what had happened on their wedding night. The girls in the brothel hadn't told her about that. Degan had sensed her embarrassment this morning and had said, \"There's no need to blush about what happened last night. That's what married people do. I told you this marriage can be as fake as you want it to be, and that's how it will be until you tell me otherwise.\"\n\nThe train they were riding wasn't fancy with private compartments; they were seated with all the other passengers and would be day and night. Grady and Saul were on the train somewhere. She'd seen them board it in Butte. They'd just made sure to sit in a different car. Or maybe Degan had seen to that.\n\nThis first leg of the trip was much shorter than Max had figured it would be. They would be reaching the main junction in Ogden, Utah, later that night, where they would switch to the train going East that would eventually connect with a Texas-bound train.\n\nBut over dinner in the dining car that evening, Degan told her, \"We may have some trouble with our friend Pike to-morrow.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"He's no friend of ours. But why? Those two have been avoiding us.\"\n\n\"They will expect us to catch the eastbound train tomorrow, but I'm thinking about spending a few days in the Ogden area instead of continuing on immediately.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"I need to finish some business.\"\n\nShe wasn't letting him get away with such a brief explanation. \"What business?\"\n\n\"John Hayes sent me a telegram in Butte, saying he got word from the US Marshals Service that Charles Bixford was spotted near Ogden. He's one of the outlaws John needs to apprehend.\"\n\n\"I remember the notes on Red Charley.\"\n\n\"They haven't been able to get a marshal out there yet, and the local sheriffs are reluctant to confront Bixford on their own.\"\n\n\"So you're going after him?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nDegan's changing their plans didn't please Max at all. She was in a tearing hurry to see her grandmother and to get Johnny out from under Carl's thumb, which was where she imagined he'd been since the signing of that damn guardianship decree. She hadn't expected this delay in getting home.\n\nShe stewed over what Degan had said, but as soon as they finished the meal and returned to their seats in the passenger car, she mentioned other options. \"I know you still need to capture one more outlaw to pay back your friend, but why would you go after the worst of the lot? As I recall, there are a couple in Wyoming, which we'll be passing through on the way to Texas, and a couple more in Colorado, which we'll also be passing through. Why Red Charley?\"\n\n\"I don't need to go after any more of them. Three have already been crossed off.\"\n\n\"Because they dropped the charges against me?\"\n\n\"No, because one of the two outlaws in Wyoming is already dead.\"\n\nShe didn't ask how he knew that. He had to have witnessed it or been involved himself. But now that she knew he didn't have to go after the worst of the lot, she was even more perplexed by his decision.\n\n\"You didn't tell me why,\" she reminded him.\n\n\"Because Charles Bixford kills just for the heck of it, and he's already killed one marshal who tried to apprehend him. And because John has a family. He'll be going after Bixford if I don't.\"\n\nAnd Degan didn't have a family? No, of course not. She didn't count, and the family he'd left behind didn't either. A family man such as John Hayes counted. A friend. She got it, she just didn't like it.\n\nShe said, \"Grady used to be a real sheriff before he became Carl's 'do anything' man. Maybe he can help.\"\n\nDegan leaned his head back and closed his eyes. She recognized that as his answer. He was done discussing it. If she thought they were going to stay together any longer than it took to get to Texas, she would make an effort to break him of that irritating habit. Yet, she had to admit that Degan had changed since she'd met him. The time they'd spent alone in Dakota had opened him up some. They didn't converse only over a meal. And he didn't often clam up like this anymore, at least not with her\u2014only when she said something dumb such as implying that he could use some help." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "\"Really? No bath first?\"\n\nDegan was leaving the hotel room they'd just entered so he could do some questioning in town. His forgoing a bath first gave her the impression that he was hoping to finish his business here today so they could go on to Texas tomorrow.\n\n\"Ogden is a big town,\" he added, \"but I should know before dinner if Red Charley is here. And lock the door.\"\n\nShe would have snuck out and done some questioning herself to help him if his remark about locking the door didn't remind her that Grady and Saul had checked into the same hotel right after them. Although Grady had witnessed the marriage ceremony, she wouldn't put it past him to snatch her away if he caught her alone. Carl had ordered Grady to bring her back. Letting her waltz into Bingham Hills with Degan would indicate that Grady hadn't done his job. This was the first time she and Degan had been apart since he'd rescued her in Butte.\n\nShe took a bath and then stood by the window, hoping to see Degan on his way back to the hotel. But seeing no sign of him up or down the street, she considered sneaking out to help him. She had her gun back and had been wearing it since they'd left Butte. She could handle Grady as long as he didn't surprise her. But she didn't leave the room because she didn't want Degan to return and find her gone.\n\nThen she spotted a big mountain of a man who could actually be Red Charley. He had red hair, a rat-nested bush of it sticking out all over his head and a full red beard to go with it. His teeth gripped a short, fat cigar, and he was wearing a tattered jacket over farmer's overalls that looked so well worn they might have been the same ones he'd been wearing when he left Nebraska. He was just walking down the middle of the street, laughing when people scurried out of his way.\n\nA man of that size wouldn't be easy to apprehend. Shooting him might not stop him, either. With all that excess flesh, he probably wouldn't even feel a bullet. And Degan was too straightforward. He'd expect a man to go down if he had to shoot him, not come charging at him in rage, which is how Max imagined the big redhead would react.\n\nShe hoped the man wasn't Red Charley. She hoped Degan wouldn't think he was if he spotted him. But he did. She saw Degan step out from under the porch of a building down the street from the hotel. He called Bixford's name. Max gripped the windowsill when the big man in overalls stopped and slowly turned.\n\nDegan already had his gun drawn. Charley didn't appear to be wearing one, with no belt of any sort needed for his overalls. He didn't look the least bit concerned about Degan. Everyone else was wary around Degan, but not this man. He just casually took a fresh cigar out of his pocket and replaced the short one with it, lighting it with the stub\u2014and tossed it at Degan. It landed at Degan's feet. That's when Max realized the cigar had a short fuse attached to it.\n\nIt was a stick of dynamite! Degan dived toward a water trough across the street. But the explosion occurred too quickly. She blanched, not knowing if Degan had gotten behind the trough in time or if it even mattered since the trough blew up. The porch posts behind it were also blown away, causing the roof to collapse. The windows of the shop had shattered, too. And that mass-murdering bastard just continued down the street with his barrel laugh floating behind him.\n\nFrantically searching the debris with wide eyes, Max didn't breathe until she saw Degan slowly getting to his feet. Water had flown everywhere, dousing him, but incredibly, the back of the trough was still standing, though the other three sides weren't. And Degan's gun was still in his hand.\n\nHis first shot hit the fleshy part of Charley's leg. All that did was turn him around again. The second shot hit the hand reaching for another stick of dynamite. That only kept the hand out of his pocket. But the big redhead reacted the way Max had imagined he would. Red Charley charged toward Degan. The third shot hit his other leg at the knee. That had to hurt. It still took another long moment for him to topple over when that leg buckled.\n\nDegan should have just shot him in the head. Max would have. Who would miss a killer like that? But Degan had effectively disarmed Bixford with the shot to his hand, keeping him from setting off any more explosions. And Degan wouldn't kill an unarmed man even if no one would thank him for letting this one live.\n\nMax raced downstairs and out into the street. She didn't hesitate to throw her arms around Degan when she reached him, despite the crowd of people that had gathered there, including the local sheriff and the Texas lawmen.\n\nShe arrived in time to hear Grady grumble, \"It would have been nice if you'd mentioned you're a marshal.\" He'd obviously just noticed the badge Degan was wearing today.\n\n\"Why?\" Degan replied indifferently. \"It makes no difference to your task, or to mine.\"\n\nThe local sheriff said, \"Bixford blew up a mine down in Coalville to the south that killed five men, but I wasn't sure it was him. I confronted him, but he denied it, so I couldn't lock him up. Had him watched, though, to make sure he didn't leave town. A witness was coming to identify him, but I've been waiting three weeks now for him to get up here. Guess I can let the sheriff in Coalville know we don't need him now. We had no idea he was wanted for so many killings elsewhere. Appreciate the help, Marshal.\"\n\nThere was more talk. Max stopped listening and just kept her ear to Degan's chest. His heartbeat was so soothing to her right then. She was surprised he didn't set her away from him, that he was even keeping one arm around her back. She had to be embarrassing him, hugging him in public with half the town showing up to talk about the explosion. But no one seemed nervous around him right now.\n\nEveryone was thanking him, which he probably wasn't used to. She had a feeling no one around there knew who he was and maybe it wouldn't matter if they did, not after what he'd just done for this town. Max felt Degan could probably fit in anywhere once people found out how nice it was to have him around, but also felt he'd never stick around anywhere long enough to learn that.\n\n\"I've gotten you wet,\" Degan said as he led her back to their hotel, his arm still around her.\n\n\"Is that all you've got to say? You were nearly blown up! You should've shot first and asked if he was Red Charley later, not given him time to throw dynamite at you.\"\n\n\"You were watching?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I saw it happen. And that is not how you're getting rid of me, by dying. So don't do it again.\"\n\nShe knew how silly she sounded, but she wasn't taking it back. And she wasn't mollified when he said, \"I'll keep that in mind.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Three days later when they got off the train for a one-night layover in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and entered a hotel for the night, Degan pointed out in one of his quieter tones of voice, \"If you want your own room, then we need to let your friends think that we're having a fight.\" Then even more softly, he added, \"So slap me.\"\n\n\"Like hell I will.\"\n\n\"Just do it, and before we leave the lobby. We can make up in front of them after the last layover before we get to Texas.\"\n\nMax couldn't bring herself to hit him when she didn't want to. She was getting annoyed by his willingness to humor her and concede to her wishes. In fact, Degan had pretty much been acting like a husband since they got married, in all ways but one, whether they had an audience or not. She could even detect his humor now. She was getting good at recognizing the signs of his amusement. No turning up of the lips, but a softening of his tone and the expression in his usually cold gray eyes. She'd bet he was laughing inside. She sure wasn't.\n\nBut she clamped her mouth shut and glared at that hound dog Grady, who was standing at the entrance to the hotel, watching them check in. Grady had his doubts that their marriage was real, and he was going out of his way to prove it. It hadn't just been a far-fetched possibility that their room\u2014and what they did in it\u2014might be watched. In Ogden, she'd spotted Saul asleep on the roof of the building across the street from their hotel, a spyglass in his hand. She'd pointed him out to Degan. He'd just shrugged. He'd probably been amused by that, too. But then he hadn't seemed to have just spent a hellish night sharing the bed, as she had.\n\nShe'd thought sleeping together without touching each other would bother him as much as it bothered her. But he'd gotten through that night in Ogden just fine, and he wasn't the least bit out of sorts about their having to share a bed again tonight. No, he was amused that she'd even suggested getting her own room.\n\nIf the nights weren't so warm that they needed to leave the windows open, and the curtains weren't so thin that any breeze could blow them out of the way, they wouldn't still have to sleep in the same bed. But she supposed she was jumping the gun this time. This hotel might have thick curtains, unlike the last one.\n\nThey didn't go straight up to their room so she could find out; Degan just had their things sent up to it. The plan was to take the horses out for a ride before getting cleaned up for dinner, and she'd been looking forward to that.\n\nThe animals were getting shortchanged on exercise. They'd taken them out for a long ride while they were in Ogden, and he wanted to do that again today before they caught the southbound train tomorrow. They'd had to come so far east to connect with the trains that would take them all the way to Texas, but riding the Transcontinental Railroad, it had only taken a few days. Max was glad to have a chance to see Council Bluffs, the town that had made history because it was where the cross-country line began, extending the eastern lines that had reached Iowa all the way to the West Coast. She didn't mention to Degan that they were once again only about a day's train ride away from Chicago. She was sure Degan realized that. If he ever did plan to go home again, he wasn't saying. But it wouldn't be before he finished her business. Of that she was sure.\n\nRiding the horses was fun and had a bonus. It worried the heck out of Grady since he couldn't follow them because he didn't have a horse. They stuck to the roads. Too many farms were in the area to do otherwise.\n\nWhen they slowed down to turn back, she mentioned, \"We could get off the train at one of the watering stops in Texas before it reaches Fort Worth. It might only take one extra day to ride the rest of the way instead of catching the stage for the last leg of the journey home.\"\n\n\"Your friends will, too.\"\n\n\"I wish you'd stop calling them my friends. But they don't have horses so they can't follow us.\"\n\n\"Pike is a Texas sheriff. He'll borrow mounts or confiscate the stage horses.\"\n\n\"You really think he'd do that?\"\n\n\"Yes. And I'd prefer not to camp out with them within yelling distance.\"\n\n\"The alternative is to ride the stage with them. That won't be pleasant.\"\n\n\"Then consider that problem solved.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"You're going to shoot them before we catch the stage?\"\n\nHe didn't deign to answer that, but she did get one of his hard looks. She just laughed and raced him back to town.\n\nBack at the hotel, Max discovered that the curtains in their room were thin. But on the positive side, the room had its own bathing room with running water. Of course it would this far east, she realized, but still it was a nice surprise.\n\nThen she got another surprise. After they cleaned up, Degan took her shopping. He found a store that sold basic clothing and accessories for both men and women, even some ready-made clothes, though those were just for men and boys.\n\nSeeing that, he remarked, \"It's too bad we won't be here long enough for you to visit a seamstress.\"\n\n\"I have lots of perfectly fine clothes at home. I don't need more when I'll be home soon.\"\n\n\"We may have different ideas of what constitutes 'perfectly fine.' \"\n\nShe wasn't sure what he meant by that until she remembered his friend Allison and how she'd been dressed. She rolled her eyes. No, she definitely didn't own clothes like that. In Bingham Hills, she would've stood out like a sore thumb if she'd dressed like that.\n\nShe ended up buying new socks and a new bandanna, then gazed for a few minutes at a hat tree that was filled with pretty bonnets. Degan started to reach for one, but Max shook her head and walked away. She didn't need anything frivolous that she wouldn't use. But she laughed when a while later he plopped a wide-brimmed hat on her head, a black one like his, just not as fancy. Then he found a thin, ropelike chain to wrap around the crown and pinned it in place with a pretty cameo brooch. His improvising was amusing, turning a wide-brimmed cowboy hat into a bonnet, yet she was touched that he would do that.\n\nThe bigger surprise was when he slipped a wedding band on her finger before they left the store. He even brought her hand up to his lips and kissed the ring on her finger, which was when she noticed he'd bought one for himself as well. Flustered, she looked around for Grady or Saul, but they weren't there, so he wasn't doing this for their benefit.\n\n\"You didn't have to,\" she said, looking down at her gold band.\n\n\"I know. But now your enemy will see at a glance that you're married. You shouldn't have to dig your marriage certificate out to prove it\u2014and too many men glance your way when you're not trying to hide that you're a woman.\"\n\nShe burst out laughing. \"You're trying to make me think you're jealous?\"\n\n\"It didn't work, did it?\"\n\n\"Oh, I don't know\u2014maybe a little.\"\n\nThey had dinner afterward in a restaurant away from the hotel, a fancy one that offered French cooking, something she'd never before had. Grady and Saul didn't show up, which made it even nicer. Max went through half a bottle of wine, hoping it would help her sleep tonight. Degan only had one glass and only drank half of it. He never relaxed his guard. And he never had trouble sleeping.\n\nBut she didn't think she'd have that trouble tonight either. She was feeling quite mellow after such a nice day. When they returned to their room, she even opened the curtains wide and thumbed her nose in case Saul was out there somewhere with his spyglass. Grinning, she stripped down to her underclothes and got into bed. She was almost asleep by the time Degan joined her.\n\nThen she was wide-awake. The mattress was too soft. It had dipped when Degan lay down on it. She almost rolled right into him. She swore under her breath and gripped her side of the mattress.\n\n\"If you want something, just ask.\"\n\nNo, he didn't just say that, she told herself. \"I'm fine.\"\n\n\"You're sure?\"\n\n\"Yes!\"\n\nSo much for sleeping. It was already happening, that tense sense of anticipation stirring within her as if her nerves had just been shredded. She'd felt Degan's body heat for the barest second before she turned away, yet she still felt warm. Her imagination went crazy when she was this close to him. Was he almost naked again? She hadn't been watching him before he got into bed, and she wasn't going to turn over to look now. He'd turned the lamps off, but the light from the town's fancy streetlamps filtered into the room.\n\nAn hour later she was still staring at the ceiling, still trying not to clench her fists. A walk might help. She needed to do something, but she'd wake him if she got out of bed. He was like that, instantly up at the slightest sound or movement, which was why she was resisting the urge to toss and turn, though she might just scream pretty soon if she didn't. Was he even asleep? She couldn't tell when he was this quiet, this still, as if he was waiting for something.\n\nShe finally turned over and nudged him. \"Will you just make love to me already? This is driving me\u2014!\"\n\nHe was on her so fast she didn't get to finish. If she hadn't just imagined him doing exactly that a dozen times, she might have been surprised by it.\n\n\"No stopping this time,\" she warned.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nHe was grinning at her. He was actually grinning at her! It caused her to give him a beautiful smile and the tightest hug. It caused something else, a wonderful warm feeling that seemed to drain her frustration away. Most of it.\n\nAs their mouths touched, she locked her arms around his neck. That made it a bit difficult for him to get her under-clothes off, but he managed. He just took his time now, caressing her as he did it. He seemed to want to touch her every-where, down her arms and even her fingers, along her side and the full length of her leg, which she had bent against his hip. He didn't even ignore the foot he could reach. His hands made a slow, tantalizing path up and down her body, both soothing her and arousing her further.\n\nShe was reminded of the night he'd tried to warm her up by rubbing her body, an attempt to soothe that had gotten out of control. Was that what he was doing now because he'd sensed she'd been about to burst? No, his touch was more sensual tonight. He was trying to relax her yet not letting her forget for a moment what was coming. And he never stopped kissing her. His mouth could be deeply stirring one moment, then gently nibbling at her lips the next. He seemed to be taking his time so she would know there was more to this amazing intimacy they shared than an explosion of passions.\n\nBut the passion still built steadily, as if it had a life of its own. Her breaths deepened. Her hands trembled as she caressed him. When his hand slipped between her legs, he ignited hot desires that ran through her body the way a flame devours dry brush. She groaned from the onslaught of pleasurable sensations, then half laughed because she hadn't meant to. But she also arched her body toward him. She didn't mean to do that, either. Or maybe she did. Degan must have figured she did because he responded with exactly what she wanted, badly needed. He braced his arms on either side of her as he hovered over her, and it was sublime, feeling him enter her as he looked at her face, watching her reaction. Then she realized that as much as he wanted to see what he made her feel, he was letting her see what she made him feel. He was going to let her watch his climax\u2014oh, God! She went right over the edge, and so did he." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Max didn't want to get out of bed. She felt so peaceful, so\u2014happy. Really? It had been so long since so many good feelings had bubbled up in her this way that she wasn't sure. She guessed it was the lovemaking that had rid her of all the jittery frustration that had been haranguing her. The lovemaking was nice, well, better than nice with Degan.\n\nLast night had been the most special night of her life, almost like a real wedding night. She didn't think she'd ever feel or see anything that wonderful or blissful again. And since she'd crossed the line in starting it, she wasn't going to step back over the line. She and Degan wouldn't be together much longer. Why jump back into hell when she could enjoy paradise with him for the time they had left?\n\nHe might have other ideas though. She'd have to wait to see if he apologized for last night. Or maybe she should apologize\u2014no, she wouldn't. If he hadn't figured out that she'd enjoyed what they'd done last night, she'd spell it out. But damn, that would be embarrassing.\n\nHe was in the bathing room but had left the door open. It sounded as if he was shaving. She quickly dressed and moved over to the doorway, but her cheeks lit up a little before she got there, and a wave of shyness came over her when she saw him. He was only half-dressed in his pants, boots, and gun belt. His chest was bare.\n\n\"Are you ever going to let me do that for you?\"\n\nHe glanced at her. \"Probably not.\" But then he added, \"Not that I don't trust you.\"\n\n\"Then why not?\"\n\n\"Because one of us won't be thinking about shaving, if you get that close.\"\n\nThere it was, he did still want her, and he wasn't apologizing for last night. She would have smiled if it weren't such a touchy subject. This attraction they had was powerful, maybe a little too powerful, especially when it got out of control. He wouldn't like that, when he always had to be in control. But he hadn't complained about it last night. Behind a locked door, he could let down his guard a little.\n\n\"So that\"\u2014she sort of nodded toward the bed\u2014\"didn't change anything, right?\"\n\n\"A little.\"\n\n\"I mean, we're still getting the marriage annulled? Even though you'll have to lie now?\"\n\nHe continued shaving. \"You needn't worry about that. I'll lie for you\u2014if that's what you want.\"\n\nHe was doing it again, humoring her, conceding to her wishes, making it seem as if it were only up to her whether they stayed married. She supposed it was. He did offer to marry her after their first slip, and he was honorable enough to make the best of it now, if she wanted to stay married. But she couldn't do that to him. It wouldn't be fair if it wasn't what he wanted.\n\n\"Then I remove my objections to bed sharing\u2014in case you were wondering.\"\n\nShe turned away as soon as she said it, her cheeks bright red from a blush. But he stopped her from moving any farther by placing a hand on her shoulder. Gooseflesh and a pleasant arousing sensation tingled down her arm. For crying out loud...\n\n\"You don't need to be embarrassed with me, Maxie,\" he said softly. \"You've never had trouble speaking your mind. I like that about you.\"\n\nHe did? But then there was mind speaking and being too bold, and she'd just been the latter. But he obviously didn't want her to be embarrassed about it.\n\nShe was about to put her hand over his when he moved his hand up into her hair gently, in a caressing way\u2014until he suddenly fluffed it. \"We have time to find a barber for you.\"\n\nHe definitely had a knack for putting her at ease when he wanted to. She turned with a laugh. \"They tend to shave you bald if you don't keep a close eye on them. I can wait till I get home. Gran does a good job cutting my hair.\" But she started backing away before she added with a grin, \"You might want to let her take the scissors to you. I promise she won't cut off anything you don't want her to.\"\n\nHe actually laughed. She stared at him wide-eyed. \"Stop it,\" he said, but she could still hear the humor in his tone. \"That's not the first time you've heard me laugh.\"\n\n\"Two times ain't much.\"\n\n\"I laugh a lot, you just don't see it.\"\n\nHe walked back into the bathing room to wash his face. She turned around smiling. Her husband was definitely relaxing his guard\u2014with her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Max thought her return to Texas would be more poignant, more emotional. After all, it was her home, what she knew, what she'd yearned to go back to. She was sure she'd be overwhelmed by emotion when she saw her family again, but she'd been gone from Texas long enough not to consider it anymore the only place to live. It was her family she'd missed, not Texas. Despite the excitement of the pending reunion, she was also feeling a little despondent the closer they got to Bingham Hills.\n\nHer problems might soon be put to rest if Degan was successful in dealing with them, but she wasn't sure she wanted to live there anymore. She had a lot of good memories of that town, a lot of people she liked there, but she had bad memories of it now, too. And how would she be able to stay once Degan left? Wouldn't she go right back to facing the same dilemma of Carl's scheming to get what he wanted from her? That actually didn't worry her as much as that she'd be parting ways with Degan pretty soon. That was the real reason for her despondency. The reason why a tight knot had settled in her chest and wouldn't go away.\n\nBut she had to ignore it and pretend she was just fine. Degan watched her too closely. He'd know something was wrong if she wasn't herself. So she still teased, still joked, still tried to make him laugh with her usual lack of success. But it was hard to do when she didn't feel cheerful.\n\nIt was sweltering hot during the day, but they had to light the coach brazier for the night ride. When Degan had said she should consider the problem of getting stuck in a stagecoach with Grady and Saul solved, she never figured that he would buy up all the seats so they could ride alone. She couldn't stop laughing about it. But knowing Grady, he'd probably only be about half a day behind them, maybe less, since Degan had convinced the driver to extend their last two stops so their mounts could rest.\n\nBut it wasn't that long a trip from Fort Worth to Bingham Hills, less than two days. They left the stage a few miles out from Bingham Hills so they could circle around on their horses and get to the farm without passing through town. She wanted a peaceful reunion with her family before Carl found out she was home.\n\nThen she saw it\u2014the house she'd grown up in. She'd never realized how dilapidated it looked from a distance, which was how Degan might be viewing it. But it wasn't. It just needed a fresh coat of paint that she hadn't been there to see to.\n\nBuilt mostly of lumber, only the front of the house had a stone facade, which had been added after Carl had set up his quarry right near town. One story but decent-size, the house faced the woods and the rest of the property on which her grandfather had never gotten around to planting crops. On one side was Gran's vegetable and herb garden, and on the other side was a small stable that housed their three horses and the buckboard her grandmother used to go to town to sell her eggs. Max had always preferred to walk when she did the deliveries, even before the town had grown and edged closer to the farm.\n\nThe chicken coops were at the back of the house, facing the road into town. She could see now why Carl might get so annoyed by the sight of the coops that he'd want to do something about it. Maybe Degan was right that Carl's interest in her stemmed from his desire to get his hands on her family's farm\u2014so he could get rid of it. But that just meant someone was going to end up unhappy. She still couldn't see any resolution to the problem that would satisfy everyone.\n\nThen she saw her grandmother in the backyard on her way back to the house with her basket of eggs in her hand, a sight Max had seen hundreds of times before, so familiar, so heartwarming. She didn't see any deputies posted at the house, but then Carl thought he'd won when he'd gotten that guardianship decree, so they were no longer needed.\n\n\"Are you crying?\" Degan asked, standing beside her.\n\n\"No.\" She laughed as tears of happiness rolled down her cheeks. \"But I'll race you home.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "\"Gran! Gran, I'm home,\" Max shouted as she ran to her grandmother.\n\nElla was so surprised to see her that she dropped the basket of eggs in the yard and rushed toward Max with tears running down her cheeks. \"Finally! I wasn't sure if this day would ever come.\"\n\n\"Me either. I've missed you so much!\" Max cried as she held her grandmother tightly in her arms. God, she'd missed the smell of this woman, her gentle touch, her boundless love.\n\n\"Thank the Lord you're home. I've been so worried about you!\"\n\nMax's tears wouldn't stop, neither would Ella's, yet they were laughing, too, as Ella led Max through the back door into the kitchen. Ella immediately went to the stove to pour them coffee while Max sat down at the kitchen table. She glanced around the room. She'd missed this house, too. It was filled with everything her grandparents had collected over a lifetime. Every wall was covered with pictures Ella had painted. She used to paint a lot before Max's grandpa had died. She didn't find much time for it after that.\n\nElla was only in her early sixties. She'd married young, had her kids young. Of her children, only Maxwell had survived to give her grandkids. Her blue eyes were still sharp, her hair only just starting to turn gray, which was hard to see since her hair was ash blond like Max's. But she looked thinner than Max remembered And had more frown lines than before Max had left. These last two years had taken a toll on the Dawson family.\n\nElla joined her at the table, bringing a slice of peach cobbler for Max to go with the coffee. Max smiled. Ella was a firm believer that food wasn't just good for the body but also for the soul. She always had some sort of pie or pastry ready to serve. Grandpa might not have wanted to farm here in Texas, but he'd still planted a lot of fruit trees for his wife.\n\n\"How long can you stay?\" Ella asked.\n\n\"I'm not going anywhere.\"\n\n\"Didn't Sheriff Pike bring you back?\"\n\nMax grinned. \"He tried to. But I have a good friend who's helped me to get around the mayor's newest scheme.\" Then she whispered, \"Degan Grant married me to put me out of Carl's reach\u2014but it's just temporary until we find out what Carl really wants.\"\n\nElla's eyes flared, then started to water. \"You're married? And I didn't get to witness it?\"\n\nThey were holding hands across the table. Max squeezed Ella's tightly. \"It wasn't a real wedding... well, it was, but we did it knowing it wasn't going to be permanent. We may have to wait until I'm twenty-one to annul it, though, if Carl won't give up.\"\n\nElla sighed. \"I know what the mayor wants, but I didn't when you left. It had been so long since he tried to buy the farm that it didn't occur to me yet that he was trying to get it a different way\u2014through you. I realized it after I got summoned to court for those ridiculous incompetency charges. I didn't even get to say a single word in my defense. I just had to sit there listening silently to what a terrible parent and grandparent I was.\"\n\n\"You were no such thing!\" Max said hotly.\n\n\"It doesn't matter now. You figured out a way to ruin his plans. Rumors were swirling around town that Carl distributed wanted posters for you outside of Texas in order to get you back here. But no one had the gumption to confront him about it.\" Ella shook her head. \"I've lost respect for a lot of people in Bingham Hills. I confronted him about those posters, but he told me I was crazy and then he filed those charges against me.\"\n\n\"It's true, Gran. Carl turned me into an outlaw with a thousand-dollar price on my head.\"\n\n\"I despise the man, but I'm so proud of you, Max, for surviving on your own and figuring out a way to best him.\"\n\n\"It wasn't my idea to marry, it was Degan's, but, yeah, Carl won't like it that he got outsmarted by a simple clause in the document he finagled to get drawn up. But how does his being my guardian get him the farm?\"\n\n\"It gave him the power to marry you to whoever he wanted, including himself or his son, if he ever comes home, and it wouldn't matter what you had to say about it.\"\n\n\"Wait, what happened to Evan?\"\n\n\"He left town shortly after you did for parts unknown. I believe he really cared for you, Max, and hated what his father was doing to you. Anyhow, once one of the Binghams married you, Carl would be the oldest male in our family, which would give him the legal right to make decisions for all of us. No one would bat an eye if one of those decisions was to tear down this place.\"\n\n\"That's not going to happen, Gran. Degan is now the oldest male in our family.\"\n\n\"Where is this temporary husband of yours?\"\n\nMax knew Degan was giving her some private time for her homecoming and to explain why he was with her. \"He's seeing to the horses. You'll meet him shortly.\" But then she warned, \"He's a gunfighter, Gran, but you don't need to be nervous around him.\"\n\n\"Is he capable of butting heads with the mayor?\"\n\nMax chuckled. \"Dealing with trouble like this is his line of work, Gran. But why did you never say that Carl tried to buy the farm from you? When was that?\"\n\n\"You and Johnny were still children. It was right after your grandfather died. Carl offered me a decent price for the farm, then a higher price, then a ridiculous price.\"\n\n\"You never considered it?\"\n\n\"I love this house, but more\u2014\"\n\nElla didn't get to finish. Degan appeared in the doorway, all six feet three inches of him filling it. He tipped his hat to Ella before removing it, then to Max's amazement, he smiled at her grandmother. Max quickly introduced them, but it still took a moment for her grandmother to find her voice. Even with that smile, at first glance you just knew he was a dangerous man.\n\nBut then Ella ordered, \"Sit. For whatever reason you're helping Max, you have my gratitude.\"\n\nMax grinned. \"He's probably going to want a bath first, Gran.\"\n\n\"You read my mind,\" Degan agreed.\n\n\"Second door on your right, and we have pumped water for the tub, just not hot,\" Max told him. \"But I'll heat some for you now.\"\n\nShe got up to do that while Ella suggested, \"You can put your things in my grandson's room, Mr. Grant.\"\n\nMax swung back around. \"He's not going to share a room with Johnny.\"\n\n\"It's fine, dear. Johnny sleeps elsewhere.\"\n\n\"Degan shares with me. We have to keep up appearances, Gran.\"\n\nDegan backed out of the room, merely saying, \"Let me know what you decide.\"\n\nMax glared at his back before he disappeared. He obviously wanted no part of this explanation. She put her arm around Ella's shoulders and whispered, \"It's okay. We had a wedding night.\"\n\n\"Maxine Dawson!\"\n\nMax winced and decided lying might be the quickest way to end this embarrassing conversation. \"We had to. Grady was spying on us. If Carl finds out this marriage isn't real, then I'm going to get stuck under his thumb and he wins\u2014everything.\" But then Max admitted in an even lower whisper, \"Besides, I\u2014I like sharing a bed with my husband.\"\n\n\"So you're keeping him?\"\n\n\"No, but\u2014\"\n\n\"You're keeping him,\" Ella cut in with finality.\n\nMax rolled her eyes. She was never good at butting heads with Ella. Max could explain later, after Degan moved on, why keeping him hadn't been an option.\n\nRight now she wanted to know \"Where is Johnny?\"\n\n\"At the mayor's house, I reckon. He likes it there. The mayor's got him bamboozled with fancy new clothes and servants waiting on him, and talk of sending him to school in the East come fall.\"\n\n\"That's really his choice after he shot that man for me? He's not being forced to stay there because of that dumb guardianship decree?\"\n\n\"It's a change for him, Max, and I don't begrudge him that. He was so lonesome and bored after you left. All he ever talked about was going to sea like his pa.\"\n\nMax frowned. \"He wasn't going to leave you here alone, was he?\"\n\n\"No, he was waiting for this nightmare to end, for you to come home\u2014one way or another. The mayor assured him you'd be here before he left for school. And he still comes by every day to help me with the chores, so you'll see him tomorrow if not sooner.\"\n\n\"But he can come home now. Degan's being a part of our family negates that damn guardianship decree for both of us.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure Johnny will want to come home. In fact, if he thinks you're back for good, he'll probably head for the nearest port.\"\n\nUnlike her father and her brother, Max had no desire to visit other countries. She'd already seen far more of her own country than she'd ever wanted to see. But Johnny had told her about his dream to see the world. So she wasn't all that surprised by Ella's speculation.\n\n\"Whatever he decides, he's old enough to be on his own, so you won't have to worry about him, Gran.\"\n\n\"I'll always worry about the two of you,\" Ella grumbled. \"Habit.\" Then she tsked and headed for the sink. \"And you haven't even started that water for your man.\"\n\nHer man? How was she going to convince Ella that Degan wasn't when Max wished he were?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "\"Gran is making something special for your dinner. She went out to get two chickens for it. I suspect she thinks you're a big eater.\"\n\nDegan turned as Max joined him at the end of the porch, the side that caught a view of town. He thought she made a much better view. She'd changed into one of the dresses she'd left behind, a blue-and-green gingham that brought out the blue in her eyes. She looked beautiful, even in an old dress, even with butchered hair, but he'd like to see her in silk, just once, before...\n\nHe didn't finish the thought. Usually he looked forward to moving on, but not this time.\n\n\"Your grandmother reminds me of Adelaide Miller.\"\n\n\"Are you calling her cantankerous?\"\n\n\"No, just bossy.\"\n\nMax grinned as she put her hands on the porch railing next to him. \"Maybe a little. But she'll grow on you.\"\n\nThe way Max had grown on him? She'd definitely gotten under his skin. She'd broken down his barricades, too, which wasn't necessarily a good thing. He couldn't remain aloof anymore. Not with her.\n\nHe looked back toward town and the house on the hill behind it. Like a lordly manor, it had full views of the domain the man inside it ruled. Was he a flawed leader or an ironfisted tyrant? Degan would be finding out soon. He nodded toward the house. \"I assume that's your mayor's residence?\"\n\n\"He calls it a mansion.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't.\"\n\n\"He does, just 'cause it's got more'n five bedrooms in it. Gran said he just kept adding to it over the years, spreading it all over that hill.\" But then she warned, \"You need to have eyes in the back of your head while you're here, Degan. There's no telling what Carl will do when he finds out you thwarted him.\"\n\n\"Do I look worried?\"\n\nShe glanced up at him. \"Would you look worried? Ever?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. He fluffed her hair instead. \"She hasn't cut it yet.\"\n\n\"Give her time, we just got here. And she did notice. She picked up a lock and humphed. I expect she'll come after me with the scissors tomorrow.\"\n\nThey both saw Grady Pike riding toward them from town. Max leaned a little closer to Degan. He put his arm around her shoulders. He didn't like the way Pike made Max nervous, didn't like the way the man had treated her, either, all in the name of Bingham's trumped-up law. It was a wonder he hadn't shot the man. He'd certainly had the urge to and still did.\n\nGrady pulled up his horse below them at the side of the porch. \"The mayor would like a word with you, Mr. Grant. You've been invited to dinner at his house.\"\n\n\"Do you like being an errand boy, Pike?\"\n\n\"This is official business,\" Grady insisted.\n\n\"No, it isn't. And I'm having dinner with my wife's family tonight. But I'll pay your mayor a visit afterward. You can tell him I'm looking forward to it.\"\n\nGrady gave him a hard look before he yanked his horse around and rode back to town. Beside Degan, Max said determinedly, \"I'll go with you.\"\n\n\"No, you won't. You don't have the temperament for this meeting.\" Then he lightened his tone before adding, \"But if I end up in jail, you can rescue me.\"\n\n\"He wouldn't dare!\" she growled, but after a glance at him, she snorted. \"Oh, you were joking.\"\n\n\"I'm actually not discounting any possibility. But then all I know about Carl Bingham is what you've told me, and you're known to exaggerate. And you have another visitor.\"\n\nShe followed his gaze and then squealed, \"Johnny!\" She ran down the porch steps to meet her brother. Degan leaned against the railing, watching them as the young man lifted Max and swung her in a full circle around him before giving her a bear hug. It was easy to tell they were siblings. They both had the same ash-blond hair and the same bone structure, which made one beautiful and the other quite handsome. While the boy might be younger by a few years, he was now the taller by a half foot.\n\nMax remarked on it. \"Look at you! You sure sprouted, baby brother.\"\n\n\"You've been gone a long time.\"\n\nThe censure in the boy's tone earned him a punch in the arm. \"Not by choice!\"\n\nAbashed, Johnny said, \"I know, it's just been horrible around here without you. I expected you back last year when the mayor became our guardian.\"\n\n\"I didn't know about that, and if I did, I would have been running even farther in the opposite direction. He might've dropped the charges against me, but how was I to know when he didn't bother to have the wanted posters canceled?\"\n\nAs they approached the porch, Johnny caught Degan's eyes on him. \"Holy cow, it's true? You brought a husband home with you?\"\n\n\"Who told you?\"\n\n\"Carl sure didn't,\" Johnny complained. \"I heard his servants gossiping about it after the sheriff visited.\"\n\n\"Gran said you were planning to go off to college in the fall. Was that your idea?\"\n\n\"Yeah, not that I really want more schooling. But I figured it would prove what a fraud Carl is if he refused to send me. But he didn't, and it's better'n staying in Bingham Hills. Anywhere would be better'n here.\"\n\n\"Then you didn't like living in Carl's house?\"\n\n\"Are you kidding?\"\n\nMax rolled her eyes. \"You sure fooled Gran. She thinks you like it there.\"\n\n\"I put on a good show for her. I don't want her to worry about me.\"\n\n\"We'll figure things out, Johnny, I promise. I don't think Carl can still claim guardianship of you now that we have a new head of the family. Come and meet him.\" Then she added in a whisper that Degan still caught, \"Don't be afraid of him. He's on our side.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Degan rode his horse up the hill. It was steep enough that it would be a tiring walk for someone Bingham's age, which was probably why a buckboard and two horses were left out front. The man had wanted to be up high enough to easily survey the town he'd founded, but he hadn't considered how inconvenient that would be. His two-story house was built of stone and had a wide front porch that ran the length of the house.\n\nDegan was shown to a grand parlor. It could have been a parlor in Chicago. Not very tasteful in decor, a little grandiose, but obviously every piece of furniture had been freighted in from the East. It probably didn't get much use and had likely been decorated for show, to impress the locals. Degan wasn't left there long. Another servant appeared and escorted him to the mayor's study. Bingham was already there.\n\nHe wasn't as old as Max had led him to believe, possibly approaching seventy, yet still robust with few wrinkles on his face. He had a full head of white hair, side whiskers, and light green eyes that showed no malice. Degan found it hard to credit that this man had ever frightened Max. He appeared utterly harmless, but Degan sensed it was an illusion, the man's public persona, not his true nature. No wonder he'd fooled this town for so long.\n\n\"I assume we can dispense with introductions?\" Carl said, waving a hand toward the comfortable chair across from the large desk. \"You might be notorious in the rest of the West, Mr. Grant, but down here, we haven't heard of you\u2014until now, that is.\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\"\n\n\"I suppose not. Whiskey?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nThe bottle and two glasses were on the desk. Carl still poured one for himself. As long as the mayor kept his hands above the desk, Degan would keep his gun holstered. Threats would be pointless. They wouldn't last after he rode out of Bingham Hills. But one thing still needed saying.\n\n\"If you had raped Max, this meeting would be for a different reason. You know that, right?\"\n\nCarl was only discomposed for the briefest moment before he replied confidently, \"You wouldn't kill me.\"\n\n\"Yes, I would.\"\n\nConfidence gone, the man's true colors showed when he complained hotly, \"She shot me!\"\n\n\"Self-defense. You were in the wrong, Mayor, she wasn't. But I'm here for an explanation. I want to know why she had to leave home for close to two years because of you.\"\n\nCarl sighed and sat back, a glass in his hand though he didn't drink from it. \"I'm used to getting what I want. That's why I founded this town so long ago and built it into what it is today. And someday, in my lifetime mind you, it will rival Fort Worth. This is my town. I control what happens here. I thought Max would be thrilled to marry my boy once she was old enough. She'd have servants waiting on her hand and foot, all the fancy dresses she could've wanted, anything her little heart desired. Not once did I think she'd thumb her nose at all this.\" Carl waved a hand to encompass his house. \"You know I could've done worse things to get rid of that eyesore farm of theirs, but I didn't. I'm not as ruthless as she seems to think I am. I might've gotten a little carried away, trying to compromise her to the altar, but I was desperate at the time.\"\n\n\"What warranted desperation?\"\n\n\"The gal had turned into a beauty. Half the men in town were in love with her. Someone else was going to snatch her up before much longer.\"\n\n\"You're wrong, you know. Force her to do something she doesn't want to do, and she'll fight you tooth and nail. And that's a fact I've seen verified.\"\n\n\"Well, stubbornness runs in that family. I offered Widow Dawson a fortune for that farm of hers. I even offered to take it down piece by piece and put it back up anywhere she wanted, and she would've got rich to boot. That woman isn't reasonable. She wouldn't even discuss it. But my offer still stands.\"\n\n\"In the time Max has been gone, you could have whittled down some of your hills to the south or turned your woods into a park and built around it. Did none of that occur to you, Mayor?\"\n\n\"Of course it did, but that farm is still going to be an eyesore, butting up against town as it is now. It's standing in the way of progress. This affects the whole town, not just me. I love this town, there isn't much I wouldn't do for it.\"\n\n\"Including forcing Max to marry you or your son.\"\n\n\"She would've been happy in the end. All women are enamored of wealth.\"\n\nDegan shook his head at that reasoning. \"Then you would have forced her to get her grandmother to sell to you?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't have had to do any such thing. Max in my family makes me the head of hers.\"\n\n\"A position that is now mine.\"\n\nCarl actually chuckled. \"Let's face it, Mr. Grant, this town is too peaceful for a man of your talents. And we both know you aren't going to take up chicken farming.\"\n\nDegan laughed to himself. \"No, I'm not.\"\n\n\"I don't just want the Dawson land, I still want Max. Maybe I haven't made that clear, Mr. Grant. I need someone with her courage and spirit in my family. Damn, the gal survived almost two years in the wild on her own. Max can give me the kind of sons who will carry on my legacy.\"\n\nDegan forced himself not to reach for his gun. \"You have a son, don't you? What happened to him?\"\n\n\"The damn fool left. Said he didn't want to be pinned down here, said I was asking too much of him.\" Carl waved a hand in frustration. \"I'm prepared to pay you any amount you name to sign these divorce papers I've had prepared\u2014\"\n\nDegan stood. \"Max isn't for sale. If you ever suggest again that she is, or if you ever go near her again, you'll not only see how fast I can draw a gun, you'll feel it.\"\n\nHis face red with anger, Carl stood, too. \"Then what are your intentions?\"\n\n\"I have a proposal for you.\" Degan handed Carl a piece of paper on which he'd written the price he thought Ella should ask for her farm.\n\nCarl looked down at the paper. \"Are you crazy?\"\n\n\"That includes compensation for Max for your robbing her of two years of her life and endangering her with those phony wanted posters you sent out.\"\n\nStill fuming, Carl said, \"If I agree to this, you'll get the hell out of my town and never come back?\"\n\n\"I plan to take Max out of town for a while. Other than that, I have no intentions that would concern you.\"\n\n\"I hope you're taking your womenfolk with you\u2014all of them.\"\n\n\"There are only two.\"\n\n\"I believe he was including me in the number,\" Allison Montgomery said peevishly from behind Degan. \"I seem to have worn out my welcome here.\"\n\nDegan closed his eyes. Not again..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "\"Aren't you tired, baby girl, after traveling all day to get here?\"\n\nMax didn't turn as her grandmother came up beside her at the end of the porch. Max wouldn't take her eyes off the path from town by which Degan would be returning. And dusk had fallen. He'd already been gone longer than she figured he would.\n\n\"Tired, yeah, but there's no way I'll sleep until we know what happened with the mayor. Degan went there without any options to lay on the table. He can make threats and that might be enough to work while he's here. But once he leaves, Carl could go right back to scheming.\"\n\n\"Unless he gets what he wants.\"\n\nShe glanced at her grandmother sharply. \"That's not an option. Carl doesn't get to win, not after everything he put us\u2014me through.\"\n\nElla put an arm around her waist. \"Will you leave when your husband does?\"\n\n\"I haven't thought that far ahead. Because of Carl, there's a time stamp on my marriage, at least for another year.\"\n\n\"Because of Carl, you met your husband.\"\n\nMax started, hearing that. She supposed it was true. But then she sighed. \"I'm not so sure that can be considered a favor, Gran.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Ella scoffed. \"You've already admitted you desire Degan, and that's a special thing, you know. It's what tells you a man is right for you. It's what tells you love might be growing.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Well, not always, but most of the time it does. You could want a man you don't like, but that just opens up a nasty can of worms, so it's better to hope that doesn't happen. But you like this fella?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I always feel like laughing when I'm around him. And it drives me up-a-wall crazy how much I want him. And I get scared for him, really scared, when he's facing danger, like he's family, like\u2014\"\n\n\"You love him.\"\n\nThat tight knot swelled in Max's chest again. \"I hope not, Gran, 'cause it's not that nice a feeling.\"\n\nElla chuckled. \"If it's not returned, yes, it can be awful. But if it is returned, it can be the most wonderful thing in the world. So be sure about it, honey, before you let him go.\"\n\n\"I don't think I'm going to have much choice in the matter. I can't imagine a man like Degan settling down in one place, and he isn't going to want me tagging along as his sidekick indefinitely. I'm like a job to him, and when he finishes a job, he moves on.\"\n\n\"How does he feel about you?\"\n\nMax rolled her eyes. \"Funny you should ask. Degan's a closed book that might as well have a lock on it. No one ever gets to read those pages, myself included.\"\n\nElla kissed Max's cheek. \"I'm going to make a fresh pot of coffee. If your man doesn't return soon, we'll need it.\"\n\n\"I think I'm going to go find out what's taking Degan so long.\"\n\n\"Then take Johnny with you. I don't want you getting near Carl Bingham alone.\"\n\nMax nodded and went to her bedroom to strap her gun belt on over her dress, then grabbed her rifle, too, for good measure. Johnny was waiting for her at the front door. He laughed when she handed him her rifle.\n\n\"Feels like old times, Max,\" he teased.\n\n\"Let's hope not. I just want to make sure Carl hasn't thrown Degan in jail.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "\"How the hell did you know I was coming here?\"\n\nIt had taken Degan a moment to absorb the shock of seeing Allison in Bingham Hills and apparently a guest of the mayor's. Carl didn't bother to correct her statement that she was no longer welcome, he just cleared his throat and hurried out of the room. Leaving them alone in it.\n\n\"The private guards I hired are good,\" Allison said as she moved closer to him. \"Though one might be a little overzealous since he fancies himself in love with me.\" Degan merely stared at her without comment, which apparently disappointed her enough for her to explain, \"If you must know, he foolishly thought that shooting at you in Helena might chase you home to Chicago as I wanted. I was furious with him, of course. He might have hit me that day!\"\n\n\"Or was it your idea?\"\n\n\"Don't be absurd. I still love you, darling. I would never hurt you.\"\n\n\"It's too bad you didn't always feel that way.\" He ignored her blush. \"Just get to the part about how you managed to get to this town before I arrived.\"\n\n\"Well, while one of my guards stayed with me as protection, Miles, to make amends for that Helena fiasco, promised to track you\u2014at a safe distance, of course. He followed you to Dakota, where he lost you, but he picked up your trail when you returned to Butte. I was back in Chicago when I got the telegram from Miles stating that you were bringing an outlaw home to Bingham Hills. I was able to catch the train to Fort Worth and arrive a few days before you. Though I wish you had gotten here first. Waiting here, even for just two days, has been deplorable.\"\n\n\"And how did you get invited to the mayor's home?\"\n\n\"Without trying. He was agog that someone of my stature would visit his small town. They only have one hotel here, you know, if it can even be called that. So I wasn't adverse to accepting his hospitality for my short stay when he offered it.\"\n\n\"Have you really worn out your welcome?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"I might have complained a little.\" At his raised brow, she added, \"Very well, a lot, but you can't believe how boring this town is, and that pompous old man was determined to impress me, as if anything here could.\"\n\n\"So the mayor knew I was coming before I got here?\"\n\n\"You, just not you.\" Then she laughed, realizing how odd that sounded. \"I was amazed how easy it was to have you followed. People don't only notice when you enter a town, Miles told me they notice when you leave it, and in which direction you're headed. They're happy to share that information. Apparently, you are quite infamous\u2014except down here in Texas. I did give Mayor Bingham your name when I told him I was here to meet a friend, but he didn't recognize it and I didn't feel inclined to enlighten him. I just didn't know he was waiting for your prisoner until I heard him speaking with the sheriff earlier today.\"\n\n\"She isn't my prisoner, she's my wife.\"\n\nAllison's mouth dropped open in shock. \"You married her? How could you marry someone like her? I didn't believe it when Miles told me there was talk that you got married in Butte!\"\n\n\"Go home, Allison, and start a new life,\" Degan said before walking away.\n\nHe left the house, but Allison followed close on his heels. \"Degan, please, I can't live without you anymore. You belong in Chicago\u2014with me.\"\n\nHe didn't stop. \"No, I don't.\"\n\n\"But we were so good together. You know we were. And we can be again.\" She rushed in front of him so he would stop. \"You have to come home!\"\n\n\"You can't believe I'm still in love with you. What's your real motive, Alli, for tracking me down like this?\"\n\nSeveral emotions crossed her face, frustration, regret, even anger, but then she sighed. \"Our families have always had ties, and the scandal has touched us all.\"\n\n\"That can't still be a topic of gossip, that we didn't marry.\"\n\n\"Not that. It's your father. I tried to tell you but you refused to listen. He's become a laughingstock. He hasn't left the house sober in years, yet he thinks he can still go on as before. It's cost him his business, clients, even property that he failed to make payments on because he was too drunk to remember that payments were due.\"\n\n\"He has Flint.\"\n\n\"Flint did try to take over for him. I'll give him that. He made the effort and tried to fill your shoes. But he has no head for business, as you well know. All he did was make it worse, and now he's also become a pathetic drunkard. Two peas out of the same pod, those two. And all because you turned your back on your family.\"\n\n\"How do I get blamed for this when you're the reason I left?\"\n\n\"That's just it, you didn't have to leave. It devastated your father. You were his pride and joy. You were his legacy. With you gone, he stopped caring about anything important, and now his empire is falling into ruin. Only you can fix this, Degan. Now do you see why you have to come home?\"\n\nDegan believed she was exaggerating. She'd always been melodramatic. \"As I said before, I cut my family ties permanently, including my ties to you. No more pathetic attempts to rekindle a dead love, Alli. You made your choice when you\u2014\"\n\nAllison exploded, \"I tried to reason with you! I tried to persuade you nicely. But obviously the only thing you understand these days is guns!\"\n\nShe took a derringer out of her dress pocket and pointed it at him. She looked furious enough to use it.\n\n\"And what do you intend to do with that one?\"\n\nTwo shots were fired. Glass shattered. Allison screamed and dropped her gun while Degan drew his. She was staring in shock at the side of the house. Still facing down the hill, Degan saw Max running up it with her gun drawn and smoking, her brother right behind her. He swung around to see whom Max had shot, afraid it was Carl Bingham. But the man rolling on the ground clutching his hand in pain was young. A Colt had already fallen from his bloody hand, likely the cause of the second shot.\n\n\"He was aiming at your back!\" Max said as she reached Degan. \"And what the hell is she doing here? Trying to kill you now?\"\n\n\"God, no!\" Allison swore, horrified.\n\nBut that's when Carl came out on his porch, drawn by the gunfire, to demand, \"What's going on? Who shot my window?\"\n\nBut when he noticed Max next to Degan, his bluster turned into a big smile. Grady, having followed Carl outside, put his hand on Carl's shoulder and cautioned him, \"Careful, she probably came here to shoot you again.\"\n\nThey all heard that, but the second Max saw Carl, she couldn't control her fury. Waving her gun at Allison and the wounded man, she shouted at her nemesis, \"You've been wanting a hanging for two years, Carl Bingham! Now you can have two!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Carl walked down the porch steps and headed for Max. \"I want someone to tell me what all this shooting is about and I want to talk to you, Max.\"\n\nDegan hadn't put his gun away yet. \"I told you, Mayor, I would shoot you if you ever went near her again. Want me to prove that?\"\n\nCarl's face contorted in anger but he stopped. Still, he directed his words at Max. \"Who did you shoot this time?\"\n\nGrady had gone over to the wounded man and helped him to his feet. Max saw that he was big and young, dressed like a city slicker in a suit and string tie. \"Him!\" she spat out, pointing at the man. \"He was about to shoot Degan.\"\n\n\"Miles, how could you?\" Allison cried, looking angry now. \"How dare you shoot my friend?\"\n\n\"I saw you pull the derringer on him. I was just defending you. He would have drawn his gun on you. You don't need him, Allison.\" Miles tried to pull free of Grady's grip and get closer to her, but Grady held him back. \"He's a no-good gunslinger! I can take care of you. I love you!\"\n\n\"No,\" Allison shook her head. Sobbing, she stepped closer to Degan and almost collapsed, but Degan caught her.\n\n\"What's going on?\" Johnny asked Max.\n\nMax couldn't tell him because she didn't know, but she felt a sharp pang of jealousy as she watched Degan talking softly to the distraught woman in his arms.\n\nCarl's servants had come out on the porch and were asking him if there was anything they could do. As Grady led Miles away, Max heard Grady say to Carl, \"Looks like his bullet went astray and hit one of your windows.\"\n\n\"Put him in jail for now,\" Carl ordered. \"We'll figure out later when to kick him out of town.\"\n\nWith his arm still around Allison, Degan walked over to Carl. \"You better take your guest inside.\"\n\n\"She's not staying here,\" Carl protested. \"She was about to shoot you.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is, and, no, she wasn't. She was just trying to scare me.\"\n\nMax saw Carl raise an eyebrow skeptically. Even Grady must have heard that because he turned his head and rolled his eyes.\n\n\"I'm not pressing charges against her and her guard,\" Degan continued. \"She's agreed to take the first stage out of town tomorrow. See that she gets on it.\"\n\nCarl grumbled, \"You bet I will. I should have known she'd be trouble.\" He gingerly took Allison's arm, but his gaze strayed to Max.\n\nDegan must not have liked the yearning look in Carl's eyes any more than she did because he said, \"That's the last look you're ever getting at Max Dawson, Bingham.\"\n\nCarl glared at Degan and took Allison back to the house.\n\nDegan turned to Max and Johnny and said, \"Let's go.\"\n\nMax was glad to hear him say those words.\n\nJohnny quickly rode back to the farm ahead of them to keep their grandmother from worrying. Degan insisted that Max mount up with him on the palomino, which she did, but at least she was the one holding Noble's reins this time.\n\n\"You seem to be making a habit out of saving my life,\" he remarked quietly.\n\n\"I thought Carl, not your lady friend and her guard, would try to get rid of you.\"\n\n\"So that's why you came to Carl's?\"\n\n\"You were taking too long.\"\n\n\"Because I didn't expect Allison to be there. She figured out where I was going before we got here. Bingham offered her his hospitality, but he was quick to regret it. Apparently Alli can be quite a snob when she's out of her natural environment.\"\n\n\"You didn't know that about her?\"\n\n\"That she's not adaptable or the least bit tolerant? No, I didn't.\"\n\n\"And smells like roses?\"\n\nHe actually frowned a little. \"It was her favorite scent, but why\u2014?\"\n\n\"You dreamed about roses, remember? And apparently of her.\"\n\nHe leaned closer and she felt his breath against her ear. \"You sound jealous.\"\n\nShe snorted. \"Of that bloodhound?\"\n\n\"A good comparison. But if you're interested, she's my ex-fianc\u00e9e. If I dreamed of her during that feverish delirium in Dakota, it was a nightmare. That's all she is to me now, a nightmare that I wish would go away.\"\n\nMax was amazed that he'd finally got around to mentioning his previous relationship to that woman, but her curiosity was still going through the roof. \"Did she end it between you two, or did you?\"\n\n\"She did\u2014when I walked in on her being unfaithful before the wedding.\"\n\nShe winced for him, offering the lame rejoinder, \"Better before than after.\"\n\n\"That's one way to look at it.\"\n\nShe tried to sound blas\u00e9 when she asked, \"So you don't have any feelings left for her?\"\n\nHe raised a brow. \"Now you think I can feel?\"\n\nShe rolled her eyes. \"You know what I meant. And you can't convince me you were always made of stone. I think we've already established that your lack of feelings is job related. So do you still have feelings for her?\"\n\n\"Other than disgust and the occasional spark of leftover anger, no. In fact, if she's not in the same town, she ceases to exist, that's how rarely I think of her anymore.\"\n\nThat definitely said a lot. Max had to fight not to smile quite happily, aware that he wouldn't appreciate it with the woman's still being such a bad memory for him.\n\n\"Allison foolishly pulled that gun on me because she's desperate to get me back to Chicago for some reason. She suspected her guard had become infatuated with her, but she was as surprised as I was when he took a shot at me.\"\n\nMax wondered if that was true, but she just said, \"You have no idea why she's hell-bent on getting you back to Chicago?\"\n\n\"No, but you've nagged me enough to\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't nag,\" she sputtered. \"I suggest. Big difference, fancy man.\"\n\n\"Very well, you suggest. But in either case, I had already decided to take you for a visit to Chicago when we were done here\u2014to get you a new wardrobe.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You surely do like wasting your money, don't you?\"\n\n\"Why? You might decide you like it there and want to stay.\"\n\n\"Me in a big city? Would you be staying?\"\n\n\"Probably not. I'm no longer suited to that life. But I suppose I can check on my family while we're there.\"\n\nProbably not wasn't a no. Everything could change once he got there and saw his family again. She was the one not suited to his old life, not him. Maybe she should have left well enough alone...\n\nThey reached the farm and put their horses away. Walking to the house, Degan asked, \"Do you think your grandmother is still up?\"\n\n\"I'm sure she's dying to find out what Carl had to say.\"\n\nMax was, too. With everything that had happened at Carl's house, she still didn't know what he and Degan had said to each other about the hunt for her, the guardianship decree, and the farm.\n\nReaching the porch, she said, \"I bet she's in the kitchen with Johnny. Come.\"\n\nShe started toward the door and extended her hand to him. It was a natural mistake. She was in her home, back with the people she loved. It's what she would have done with them. She didn't even realize she'd done it until Degan put his hand in hers.\n\nIt embarrassed her, how easily she was treating him like family, like a husband\u2014and how easily he was accepting that role. She didn't want him to feel trapped by his gallantry. He didn't expect to stay married to her, he'd made that clear before the wedding. Then why was he taking her to Chicago? She'd like to think it was because he didn't want to part company with her yet, but clothes shopping was a silly excuse. Unless they all needed to get out of Texas before more shooting started. His meeting with Carl could have gone badly. No, he would have said so immediately if it did.\n\nShe let go of his hand in the kitchen when Ella rushed toward them. \"I'm so glad you're both safe! Johnny told me about the shooting. But I still want to know, is Carl going to leave us alone?\"\n\n\"That remains to be seen,\" Degan answered as they sat down at the table. \"I told him nothing definitive. It's not my place to make decisions for you. But from a business perspective, I understand his motives. You are a roadblock for him. If a town doesn't expand, it eventually dies. But you were also right, Max. Carl did still have hopes of turning you into a Bingham and even offered me a bribe to divorce you. The man is despicable.\"\n\n\"You won't hear any argument about that at this table,\" Ella said.\n\nMax turned to her grandmother. \"Degan told Carl he would shoot him if he ever came near me again.\" Ella smiled widely and Max added with a grin, \"Yelling at that man tonight felt really good.\"\n\n\"I doubt he wants to marry you any longer after seeing tonight how well you can shoot,\" Degan said. \"But he is still desperate to have this farm. I didn't promise him that you would sell it, but I told him what I would advise you to ask for it, including financial recompense for Max for what he did to her. I can get you enough from him to build a new farm anywhere you want, any size you want, or to live wherever you please. It will be enough so you can be more than comfortable and never have to work again.\"\n\n\"That might be nice,\" Ella said. \"As long as Max is with me or nearby and Johnny has a room for when he comes home to visit.\"\n\nMax shot to her feet to protest, \"But you love this place, Gran!\"\n\n\"I love you and your brother,\" Ella corrected her. \"And, yes, even the stuff that's in this house that I've collected over a lifetime. But not the wood surrounding us, baby girl. The fact is, when the mayor first offered to buy me out all those years ago, I expected you to get married here one day and be living close by, and that's why I told him no. I wasn't going to move way out in the countryside where I'd barely see you anymore after you got hitched. Besides,\" Ella added bitterly, \"over the past two years I've lost my love for this town. So if you want to leave, just tell me when and I'll start packing.\"\n\nIncredulous, Max turned to Degan. \"I guess that settles that.\"\n\nHe didn't seem surprised. \"You can come with me to Chicago to see how the other half of the country lives. There are many pleasant farming towns outside of the city you might like. I can also suggest other locations. I've come across some nice towns in my travels, some that are even quite peaceful.\"\n\n\"You mean after you've passed through them?\"\n\nHe actually chuckled. \"And that don't have mayors with grandiose schemes running them.\"\n\nJohnny concluded with a chuckle of his own. \"Sounds like a plan.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "The Mayor actually enlisted a good portion of the town to come over and help them pack up. Max saw it as Carl's wanting them out of town as quickly as possible. Ella saw it as his attempt to make amends. At least he didn't come to bid them good-bye as most of the townspeople did. As long as Max didn't have to see Carl Bingham again, they could depart without further incident. She went to the bank and gave Wilson Cox back the money he'd erroneously given her, as well as a tongue-lashing. The ornery coot took back the money but other-wise ignored her. Still, getting that old irritation off her chest left her in a good mood for the trip.\n\nThere were some tears. Ella's. She'd come to Bingham Hills when there had been no more than one short street. She knew everyone in town by name, and that was a lot of names these days. Max started to have misgivings about taking her away from the place where she'd lived for so long, until Ella hugged her and whispered that she was excited about living someplace new and getting to visit a city as big as Chicago was reputed to be\u2014and she was looking forward to painting again. Which made Max guess that Ella might not want another farm after all, not after Degan had mentioned she was rich enough now never to have to work again.\n\nWhen the stagecoach reached Fort Worth, they had to spend an extra day there to wait for the two wagons to catch up. Max had thought they would need more than two, but Ella had decided to leave all her furniture behind, giving it to a young family who had been especially kind to her during Max's absence from home.\n\nNot until that overnight stay in Fort Worth, when Max was sharing a room with her grandmother instead of Degan, did it finally hit her\u2014the threat from Carl Bingham had ended. She didn't have to wait until she was twenty-one to get her marriage annulled. Degan was probably going to take her to a lawyer to get the process started as soon as they got to the city.\n\nShe cried herself to sleep that night. She managed to do it silently so Ella wouldn't know. Somehow she got through the rest of the trip without letting on just how miserable she felt. Johnny's excitement helped. Degan had apparently taken him aside for a talk and convinced him that he could go to sea anytime, but now was the better time to further his education if he had any inclination to do so.\n\nChicago was amazing. It was like nothing Max could have imagined\u2014the bustle, the endless stream of people, and the buildings, some five stories high! Degan took them straight to a hotel. She was disappointed. She'd thought she was going to meet his family while they were there. Then she was surprised to see that Degan was going to stay in the hotel, too, but really surprised when he escorted her to her room and came inside to put his valise down in it.\n\n\"I think I would have changed hotels if I couldn't get three rooms this time,\" he admitted.\n\n\"This time?\"\n\n\"We had to improvise in Fort Worth. They had only two rooms available.\"\n\nMax felt relieved and happy. She'd thought he hadn't slept with her in Fort Worth because he wanted to quit being her husband right then. But they were still married in more than just the legal sense, and she was going to enjoy every minute of it until they weren't.\n\nBut then he headed toward the door again.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"We are going to take your grandmother to a bank to set up an account and find you both a seamstress.\"\n\n\"But we just got here!\"\n\n\"It takes time for clothes to be made. And thieves in the city aren't as easy to spot as they are in the West. I'll feel better when Ella's money is safely deposited, and I'm sure she will, too.\"\n\nMax laughed. \"I don't think she knows you carried it here.\"\n\n\"I wasn't going to leave it in Bingham's bank. While the sale was legal and the documents are signed, he still paid a hundred times over what that property is worth. He might regret that eventually, if he doesn't already.\"\n\n\"Just desserts and small recompense for what he\u2014\"\n\n\"Did you want me to kill him?\"\n\n\"Would you have?\"\n\n\"You already know the answer. He is a politician and a businessman\u2014who doesn't carry a gun.\"\n\n\"And you are armed with a business education.\" She laughed. \"Possibly a more deadly weapon to use against him. I bet he wasn't expecting that from a gunfighter.\"\n\n\"No, he wasn't.\"\n\nThey went to the bank first. For such a huge city with thousands of people in it, Max was dumbfounded that every single employee at the bank greeted Degan by name. All of them were deferential, a few were even friendly, too, but none of them were nervous even though he hadn't yet put his gun away or changed his clothes to look more citified.\n\n\"I take it you used to come here often?\" she asked as they walked through the large building to the manager's office.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThen the manager rushed forward, exclaiming, \"Thank goodness you're home, Mr. Grant. Your father hasn't attended a board meeting for years, and your brother has so little interest in them that he simply accedes to the majority vote.\" And then in a whisper: \"I don't think he realizes that he is the majority vote.\"\n\n\"I'm not here for a board meeting, I'm here to set up an account for Mrs. Dawson. Attend to it for me.\"\n\n\"Certainly, sir.\"\n\n\"And quickly.\"\n\n\"I understand.\"\n\nMax pulled Degan back as the manager escorted Ella into his office. \"You own this bank?\"\n\n\"It's one of several my family founded, yes.\"\n\n\"You couldn't warn me?\"\n\n\"Why? Would you have picked another? This one is solid. And despite the apparent lack of leadership recently, the board members have a vested interest in keeping it that way.\"\n\nIt sounded to Max as if Degan had been needed here, though he didn't appear surprised to find that out. Allison Montgomery must have told him something about his family that he hadn't shared with her. And now Max was more curious and interested in meeting his family than ever. But she ended up spending the rest of the day at the elegant shop of a French seamstress who had a small army of assistants.\n\nDegan left her there with her grandmother, telling her, \"Follow their advice. They know exactly what is needed.\"\n\nNeeded by whom? Certainly not by her. This was a frivolous waste of money as far as Max was concerned. But Ella was having fun, and although Max wouldn't admit it, she was, too, after a while. They were even served lunch! A cart was rolled in from a restaurant across the street, and the waiter actually remained to serve them. She had so many choices to make, though she didn't realize it could have been much worse if she had been taken to the stockroom. Instead, swatches of material were brought out to her, only a few per dress. But an argument ensued when the seamstress suggested that velvet only be used as a trim. Max fell in love with that material and wanted all of her new clothes to be made of it.\n\nThe seamstress flatly refused. \"It is for winter, madam. Return in the fall and we will show you all of the velvets.\"\n\n\"What if I'm not here in the fall?\" The seamstress didn't have an answer to that, so Max added, \"Just make me one velvet dress or I'm leaving.\"\n\nShe won the argument, but Ella tsked at her as soon as the woman left the room. \"She's right, you know. You will swelter in a velvet day dress in this weather.\"\n\n\"I was wearing doeskin and leather in this weather just a few weeks ago, Gran. Anything is cooler than that. But why did she concede to use it for nightwear? I don't want to sleep in it.\"\n\n\"An evening gown isn't for bed. Relax, baby girl. City folk are accustomed to wearing clothes for each part of the day, morning gowns, day gowns, walking gowns, evening gowns.\"\n\nMax masked her surprise and simply said, \"How silly.\"\n\nAnd then the bonnets arrived..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "The next few days in Chicago were a whirlwind. Degan kept Max so busy she didn't have time to wonder when he was going home or if he'd already been there. He drove her around the city in an open carriage, pointing out sites of interest. She was sure she could live there for months or more and still not see everything there was to see.\n\nHe took her to restaurants that featured foreign food that she refused to comment on, though at a few of them she had to drink a lot of water after the meal. They rode through parks he used to frequent, even went to a horse race at a large track, though they didn't stay for all the races. Too many people recognized him and plied him with questions he wasn't willing to answer. He got good use out of the word undecided that day.\n\nWas he really undecided about going home, about staying in Chicago, about taking her to a lawyer? He still hadn't mentioned any of that, and she was hesitant to bring it up when they were sharing the same bed again and not just sleeping in it. Max looked forward to lying down beside him every night, feeling the warmth and strength of his big body, looking up in the darkened room and seeing his face so close to hers. She loved touching him and the way he touched her, and all the kissing they did. Inevitably, it got both of them hot and led to lovemaking that still surprised her with all its different kinds of sensual delights. She couldn't bear to think about giving all that up. But they were going to have to talk about it, and soon. Ella had already confided to Max that she was enjoying her first trip to a big city, but she'd be uncomfortable settling down here. Max felt the same way, but she would stay if Degan was going to stay\u2014if he wanted her to stay.\n\nThe new clothes had begun trickling in as well as boxes of shoes. Max hadn't even noticed that her feet had been measured at the seamstress's shop. And one round box for each of the bonnets was delivered. She'd bought them all! The dresses she could hang in the small wardrobe\u2014well, until the rest of them arrived\u2014but the hotel room was still getting crowded with all the boxes.\n\nDegan didn't mind, but he did say, \"We may have to move to my home just so you can have a room for all your purchases. Some dressing rooms are as big as a bedroom.\"\n\n\"No one needs that many clothes. I'll manage just fine. But are you ready to go home?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"We will visit my brother today. By now, he must have heard that I'm in the city. I don't want him to think I'm avoiding him.\"\n\n\"And your father?\"\n\n\"He will likely be home, but I'd rather not subject you to that meeting. According to Allison, he's developed an addiction to drink. While I've spoken to a few of his old friends, they didn't confirm it, but they did say they rarely see him anymore, and one said he'd gone daft, obsessed with some business venture that couldn't possibly turn a profit. So I'm not sure what to believe.\"\n\nMax wanted to hug him so bad, but was afraid he'd see it as pity. She still said hesitantly, \"I'm sorry. This should have been a pleasant homecoming for you.\"\n\n\"It was never going to be that. I only hope it's not too late for my father to recover. But come here. Before you meet Flint, I should explain why the meeting might be hostile.\"\n\nHe was sitting in one of the two armchairs. He'd just put his boots on. She was already dressed in one of her new walking gowns, which Degan had had to fasten for her because the buttons were in the back. She'd planned to tell the seamstress not to make her any more like it until Degan had finished fastening the gown with a kiss on her shoulder. Maybe she wouldn't mind asking him for assistance after all.\n\nThe dress was made of lovely lavender silk and was accessorized with a stylish purple jacket that formed part of the bustle, a lacy, purple parasol that she wasn't sure how to open, and an adorable bonnet with a fluffy lavender feather on it. It was hard to tear herself away from the full-length mirror where she was admiring herself. If Bingham Hills could see her now, they would not recognize her!\n\nBut she walked over to Degan, who drew her onto his lap. She wasn't expecting that, and as usual when she got this close to him, her body began to respond, her thoughts flying away, and...\n\n\"It's not pleasant to remember what ended my engagement to Allison.\"\n\nThat name was like a dousing in cold water. \"You don't have to tell me if it's still painful.\"\n\n\"It's not and it hasn't been for a long time. I thought the anger was gone, too, until Allison turned up like a bad penny and reminded me.\"\n\n\"Wasn't she merely concerned about your family? That is the impression she gave for coming after you.\"\n\n\"Yes, I just haven't figured out why. But the night that my world fell apart, I arrived late at the small dinner party my father had arranged at our home to celebrate my and Allison's engagement to marry. I found out later he had been detained at the bank by business, and Allison's parents had left early, angry that both my father and I weren't present. I had no excuse for arriving so late.\"\n\n\"Then why did you?\"\n\n\"To be honest, I simply forgot about the dinner. And if I hadn't had a few drinks with a friend before I got home, that night might have ended quite differently.\"\n\nMax went very still. She was guessing ahead and realizing that Allison must have been angry, too, that he could overlook something as important as their engagement dinner. But to retaliate by cheating on him? Wasn't that spiting herself more than him? Unless...\n\n\"Good grief, you didn't actually tell her you forgot, did you?\"\n\nHis sigh was drawn out. \"No, when I arrived home, it was later than I thought. The dining room was empty. Most of the servants had already gone to bed. And then a scream echoed down the stairs. I panicked, thinking it was Allison, that she'd waited for me, but someone had broken into our house and was hurting her. It wouldn't have been the first time we were robbed at night. So I grabbed one of my father's pistols and raced upstairs and shot the man who was attacking her. I thought I was saving her, but I wasn't. Her screams had been from pleasure.\"\n\nMax put her arms around his neck and squeezed tightly. She hated that he was reliving this.\n\n\"It occurred to me after I'd left Chicago that I didn't really love her. She was merely a prize I'd competed for and won, and Father wanted a Montgomery in the family. He didn't care which of us married her. But at the time, I was devastated.\"\n\n\"But your anger cooled eventually, so why didn't you come back sooner?\"\n\n\"Because I shot my brother that night\u2014in the back. He might have died. He nearly did die. And I felt such rage at him, at both of them.\"\n\nMax leaned back, eyes wide. \"It was your brother Allison was unfaithful with?\"\n\n\"Yes. But then my father made it even worse when he insisted I still had to marry her. Our engagement had been announced. He didn't want the scandal. I'd felt betrayed by both my father and my brother, the two people closest to me, the two I thought I could depend on. The only thing I could do was leave, before I hurt someone even worse.\"\n\n\"Time hasn't really healed this wound, has it?\"\n\n\"On the contrary. I've recovered, but they apparently haven't. I do wish I'd known sooner how they reacted to my defection, but once I left, I never looked back.\"\n\n\"You were the one betrayed, on all fronts. You have nothing to blame yourself for.\"\n\n\"You consider that a wifely duty, don't you? To defend me?\"\n\nShe ignored the rare smile he was giving her and said honestly, \"You really think I would do that if you didn't deserve it?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nShe snorted, but more at herself because maybe she would. But in this case she said, \"I stated a fact based on what you just told me\u2014unless that wasn't everything?\"\n\n\"It was. You know as much as I do... Shall we go? I want to catch Flint early.\"\n\nHe stood up and set her on her feet, but didn't remove his arm from around her waist as he walked with her to the door. He did that a lot lately, maintaining contact with her in one form or another. It seemed husbandly to her. Though she refused to let it go to her head, it still left her smiling on the inside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "The Grant home was in a pretty neighborhood away from the noise and bustle of the crowded downtown. Max had expected a mansion, but it was just a stately town house, no different from the others lining the street. But when the butler let them in, Max realized the house's exterior was deceptive. It looked like a mansion inside. The butler didn't appear to recognize Degan, but he didn't ask them whom they were there to see, as if he had been told to expect callers. Max stared at the grand curved staircase at the end of the huge, well-appointed foyer, imagining Degan as a young man running up it with a pistol in his hand. That one night had changed his way of life. But he was back now. He could fit right back in if he wanted to, and she still didn't know if he did want to. For all her brazenness, she was afraid to find out what his plans were for himself\u2014for her.\n\nThe butler led them to a formal dining room. It was early enough that the family might still be having breakfast, but only two people were seated at the dining table, Allison Montgomery and a young man who looked so much like Degan that Max knew he had to be Flint Grant. He was casually dressed in trousers and a brocade robe with no shirt under it.\n\nAllison, elegantly attired as usual, was peering at Max and said cattily, \"You clean up nicely\u2014for an outlaw.\"\n\n\"I left my gun at the hotel.\" Max replied. \"Should I have brought it?\"\n\nAllison actually laughed before turning her attention to Degan. \"Excellent timing, Degan. You've managed to catch him before he has a drink in hand.\"\n\n\"My father?\"\n\n\"No, your brother.\"\n\n\"Degan,\" Flint said stiffly, then saw the gun holster Degan was wearing. \"Come to shoot me in the back again?\"\n\nDegan ignored that and, with a nod toward Allison, demanded, \"What's she doing here?\"\n\n\"Where else would my wife be? Though I frequently damn her to Hades, she just won't go.\"\n\nDegan's gaze swung toward Allison. Max's swung toward Degan. He didn't like surprises. While some of the old friends and acquaintances Degan had run into since he'd returned to Chicago had told his family that he was in town, none of them had bothered to mention to him that his brother had married his ex-fianc\u00e9e. Max figured those people had assumed he knew about it.\n\nBut his tone was only a little terse when he said to Allison, \"You could have said you were my sister-in-law instead of implying otherwise.\"\n\n\"So I lied a little. I was willing to try or say anything to get you to return to your responsibilities here\u2014and telling you that I had married your brother would have been rubbing salt in the wound.\"\n\n\"That wound has healed.\"\n\nShe huffed, \"That wasn't the impression you gave when we were in that awful stable in Helena and you looked like you wanted to kill me.\"\n\n\"She does inspire that emotion in a man, doesn't she, brother?\" Flint sneered.\n\nAllison tsked. \"What happened that night wasn't planned, Degan. Flint and I had too much to drink while waiting for you. But if you want the truth, I'm glad now that it happened because you and I never would have gotten along. You would have been like your father and mine, all business, rarely home, never available for the social functions I need to attend. I was drawn to you or I wouldn't have said yes to your proposal, but as soon as I did agree to marry you, I began to have doubts. Flint was the one I needed, not just to make me happy but to keep me happy. I realized that soon after we married. But then everything went from bad to worse because he started doubting that I love him.\"\n\nFlint snorted at that declaration. Degan didn't appear impressed by it either. Max decided to pretend she wasn't avidly listening to the conversation and helped herself to a plate on the sideboard, which held enough food to feed an army. She didn't sit down, though. Taking food that was going to go to waste wasn't as rude as sitting at their table when she hadn't been invited to.\n\n\"Where is father?\" Degan asked.\n\nFlint shrugged. \"He's rarely home anymore.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you put a stop to this, Flint?\"\n\n\"Tell him what to do? Is that a joke, brother?\"\n\n\"No. He needs help, not tolerance. I shouldn't have had to come home to see to it.\"\n\n\"That isn't fair,\" Allison said, defending her husband. \"Flint has been overwhelmed trying to fill your shoes when they don't fit him!\"\n\n\"It wasn't necessary for him to try,\" Degan replied.\n\n\"Of course it was,\" Flint mumbled. \"But I wasn't raised to take over, I was raised to marry well and sire children.\"\n\n\"You have children?\"\n\n\"No, that would require two people who actually like each other.\"\n\nAllison flinched. \"Flint!\"\n\nThe younger brother ignored his wife. \"Father forced me to marry her, you know. Claimed we'd wronged her. Blamed me for seducing her when it was a mutual damned thing. And now her family isn't doing so well, which is why she's fighting so hard for this one.\"\n\n\"I fight for this one because I love you,\" Allison insisted. \"If you'd stop feeling so guilty for driving your brother away, maybe you'd figure that out.\"\n\n\"If you loved me, you'd listen to me,\" Flint said angrily. \"I forbade you to locate Degan, but you did it anyway.\"\n\n\"You were just too riddled with guilt to face him. But it's not as bad as you thought it would be, is it? I was trying to help, for you, so you'd stop tormenting yourself, because you're not alone, Flint. Whether Degan straightens this mess out or not, you are not alone.\"\n\n\"For what it's worth, Flint, I believe her,\" Degan said. \"And I forgive you\u2014both of you. So don't use me as an excuse not to mend your fences. As for Father, he can either be restrained here until his addiction passes or\u2014\"\n\nFlint cut in, \"What addiction?\"\n\nDegan looked directly at Allison. She gave him a look of exasperation rather than contrition. \"I told you I lied a little.\"\n\n\"A little?\"\n\n\"It got you here, didn't it?\"\n\n\"So he's not a drunkard?\"\n\nFlint started laughing.\n\nAllison tsked. \"He might as well be for all the attention he pays this family. He is obsessed with his silly new venture to the exclusion of everything else. And it's not even profitable! All his old businesses have suffered because of it, because he simply has no interest in anything else. That wasn't a lie.\"\n\nDegan looked at his brother again. \"What about you?\"\n\n\"What about me? Oh, did she claim I'm a drunkard, too? I'm not surprised since I tend to head for a bottle as soon as she enters the room. But, no, I might drink a tad more than I used to, but with good reason. I suppose you were looking forward to having me restrained as well?\"\n\n\"You should know better than to say that.\"\n\nFlint sighed and even offered a conciliatory half smile. \"I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. I still seem to be defensive, a habit I've acquired that I truly deplore.\"\n\nThat was the first indication Max had seen that Flint might be the charming man Degan had described to her. Then Flint rose and went over to his brother to give him a hug. That seemed to remove the last of the tension from the room. Max thought it would stay that way if Allison kept her mouth shut. For the moment, she seemed content that the Grant brothers were on better terms.\n\n\"I've missed you, Degan,\" Flint admitted.\n\n\"We'll see if you still feel that way after I give you a quick education in dealing with the rest of Father's empire, in case he really has retired for good to pursue other interests. He was always hands-on. He expected me to be hands-on. But, in fact, his empire can run itself with the right managers in place. Responsibility can be delegated, Flint. You and I don't need to be hands-on.\"\n\n\"You aren't staying, are you?\" Flint guessed.\n\n\"What I just said applies whether I do or don't.\"\n\nMax was quick to note that a perfect opportunity to learn what Degan's plans were had just flown by. He wouldn't even tell his family? That made her realize the only reason he could be keeping those plans such a guarded secret was because she wasn't going to like them. He was going to just ride off into the sunset without her or send her packing down the trail. Like hell he was.\n\nShe knew what she had to do, but not while he was having this reunion with his family. He closeted himself with his brother for a couple of hours, and they came out of the room laughing. While the men were in the study talking business, Max got to have lunch with Allison. That was quite uncomfortable. Although they were sisters-in-law for the moment, they had absolutely nothing in common other than the men they were married to.\n\nMax had to stew a little longer about her own future since Degan had to make one more stop after they left the Grant home. Flint had given Degan the address of their father's new business venture. When they got out of the carriage in front of it, she was surprised.\n\n\"This is what Allison disdains?\" Max said with a laugh as she read the writing painted on the window advertising the publisher's latest western novel.\n\n\"She obviously assumes dime novels can't possibly turn a profit.\"\n\n\"Then she doesn't know how popular these little books are. Or maybe she's just not good with math.\"\n\n\"Dime novels have been around for a while. What surprises me is that my father is devoted to publishing only those set in the American West.\"\n\n\"Did Flint tell you that?\"\n\nDegan nodded. \"And that Father knows where I've been these past five years. I would have thought he would despise anything to do with my new life, including where I'm living it.\"\n\nMax frowned, feeling nervous and not knowing what to expect as they entered the publishing offices. She'd never met a publisher or a financier before, let alone a man who was both. And this was Degan's father! Would he be as intimidating as his elder son? Or even more so?\n\nA young man neatly dressed in business attire was seated at a desk in the front room. \"May I help...\" His eyes widened.\n\n\"I'd like to see Robert Grant,\" Degan said.\n\nThe young man scrambled around the desk. \"Yes, sir. Of course, Mr. Grant. Please follow me.\"\n\nThey were shown to a back room, where Robert Grant's name was tastefully painted in gold on the door. When the young man opened it, a deep male voice barked, \"New submissions go on the fifth pile, not on my desk!\"\n\nThe young man gestured for Degan and Max to enter, then left, closing the door behind him.\n\nThe older man didn't even look up from the pages he was reading. Thin, brown-paper packages littered his desk, with more arranged in piles all over the floor. With mussed black hair turning silver at the temples, his shirtsleeves rolled up, and spectacles perched on his nose, Robert Grant didn't look the way Max expected a wealthy banker to look.\n\n\"I can count at least fifteen piles in here,\" Degan remarked drily, \"but I can't tell, which is the fifth?\"\n\nRobert looked up, amazement spreading across his face, and slowly rose to his feet. He removed his spectacles. \"Degan! Degan Grant, the most infamous gunfighter of all,\" he said proudly. \"Welcome home, son.\"\n\nDegan was obviously disconcerted, especially when his father came around the desk to hug him. Max stepped back to give the two big men space.\n\n\"You know how I've been living, not just where?\"\n\n\"Of course I do. I've wrestled with my pride many times,\" Robert said in a softer voice, \"and, sadly, my pride always won. I didn't think you'd listen to me if I contacted you myself and asked you to come home after the way we parted.\"\n\n\"You were furious.\"\n\n\"I know, and I am truly sorry for that. I never should have tried to force you to marry Allison or take over at the banks for me when you obviously wanted a different sort of life. I sent detectives to find you that first year after you left, and several times more since then to keep me informed of your welfare. I can't tell you how proud I am of you for striking out on your own, becoming a man of adventure, and thriving in such a tough, dangerous environment. You're quite famous now.\"\n\n\"Not here I'm not.\" Max couldn't believe her eyes. Was Degan actually blushing?\n\n\"You would be if you let me publish you.\" Robert grinned.\n\nDegan snorted. \"I'm not a writer.\"\n\n\"I've had twelve submissions about you since I started this business three years ago. There are people already writing about you, Degan, fascinating, exciting stories of danger and daring, heroism and courage, on the frontier. I don't know if they are all based on actual events, since writers do tend to embellish, especially the author of this latest one that arrived yesterday that depicts you marrying a female outlaw. But while I would love to publish every one of them, fact or fiction, I wouldn't do that without receiving your permission first.\"\n\n\"I did marry an outlaw.\"\n\nMax grinned and stepped forward. \"That would be me, recently wanted for murder and bank robbery, erroneously, of course.\"\n\nRobert's eyes lit up. \"This is delightful! And I thought Calamity Jane was the only woman having adventures out West.\"\n\n\"Who?\" Max asked.\n\n\"Martha Jane Canary?\" But when Max still looked blank, he said, \"Never mind, you're going to have to tell me all about yourself!\"\n\nMax enjoyed the visit with Degan's father much more than she did the one with his brother. Allison had certainly exaggerated about Robert Grant. He might be overzealous about his publishing business and spend all of his time reading submissions for it, but he obviously loved what he was now doing.\n\nBut by the time Max and Degan returned to the hotel later that day, she hadn't changed her mind about what she was going to do about her marriage. It was far too important to wait any longer.\n\nIn their room she immediately removed her jacket to get rid of the bustle so her gun belt would fit. Degan raised a brow at her as she buckled it on.\n\n\"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"We're having another showdown.\"\n\n\"I thought you agreed that wasn't a good idea.\"\n\n\"It is now. And there are stakes on the table. If you win, we go find a lawyer and end this. If I win, we stay married for good. Are you ready?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nShe heard the humor in his tone. He expected her to back down again, but she wouldn't this time. This time was too important.\n\n\"Then get ready,\" she warned. \"Wait a moment.\"\n\nShe paused to empty the bullets from her gun. She wasn't going to let a sweaty finger shoot him by accident. He wouldn't have that trouble. He didn't get nervous.\n\nSliding her gun back in its holster, Max shook her hands briefly before positioning her right hand just above her gun. She could do this. The rest of her life depended on it. \"Okay, I'm ready.\" She finally glanced at him. He hadn't just sounded amused, he looked it, too.\n\n\"This isn't\u2014\"\n\n\"One.\"\n\n\"\u2014necessary.\"\n\n\"Two.\"\n\n\"Max.\"\n\n\"Now!\"\n\nFor once, she was pretty damn fast, but that's not why she ended up wide-eyed. He drew on her like a tinhorn, about as slow as it was possible to be. Her smile lit up the room. He wanted to stay married!\n\nShe dropped her gun and raced across the room to leap at him. And sighed in bliss when he wrapped his arms tightly around her.\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me?\" Max exclaimed as she sprinkled kisses over his face.\n\n\"Because you had stated conditions that hadn't been met yet. It didn't matter that I love you, Max. I still would have let you go if you didn't have your happy reasons for staying married.\"\n\n\"Oh, my God, I love you so much! How could you not figure that out, fancy man?\"\n\n\"I was fooled once before. Understanding a woman's heart is not something I wanted to guess at ever again. But I would have courted you as soon as my family issues were settled. I wasn't going to give up on you easily.\"\n\nShe held his face gently. It was still hard to believe that this man, hard and cold on the surface for everyone else, had let love in for her. \"You'll never have to guess again\u2014well, unless I'm teasing you. But you like being teased, don't you?\"\n\n\"No.\" He sounded serious until he added, \"But I like making you happy, so I'll put up with it. As long as you don't mind the consequences.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" He swept her up in his arms and carried her to the bed. Max laughed as he dropped her on it. \"I'm going to have to tease you more often.\"\n\nThey spent the rest of the day and the night in bed. Degan caught a maid passing in the hall and ordered food to be brought up to their room before the hotel kitchen closed for the night, and they ate that in bed, too. Then an unexpected knock came at the door. Degan put on his pants to answer it. Max burrowed under the sheets. But she wasn't at all pleased to hear Allison's voice.\n\n\"Flint is sleeping peacefully for the first time in years. I thought you might want to know that.\"\n\nDegan didn't open the door enough to allow entry. \"It could have waited until tomorrow.\"\n\n\"I wanted a chance to speak to you alone.\"\n\n\"I'm not alone.\"\n\n\"I know your wife is here. I meant without Flint hearing me. I just wanted to assure you that your brother is going to be okay now. He never believed that I loved him. That was half of his difficulty. The guilt for betraying you was the other half.\"\n\n\"Was he the real reason you wanted me here\u2014at any cost?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry for the lies, I truly am. Not that your father hasn't gone batty,\" Allison added with a laugh.\n\n\"He's hardly that. He merely turned in one way of life for another, just as I did. And he's happy doing what he's doing, which is really all that matters.\"\n\n\"I suppose, though we still worry about him. You know he gets so engrossed in reading those stories that he loses track of time and even sleeps in his new offices half the time. And he won't even talk to his old friends anymore, since all they do is ridicule him about this venture. He's become a laughingstock, which is scandalous.\"\n\n\"I really don't think he cares, nor should you.\"\n\nAllison tsked. \"Exactly why I didn't tell you any of this to lure you home. It amuses you, doesn't it?\"\n\nDegan laughed. \"A little.\"\n\nAllison sighed. \"I didn't come here to argue about your father's odd hobby. I was sure you wouldn't help me with the real problem if I told you that single indiscretion five years ago was still ruining our lives, which was why I resorted to lies instead. Flint wouldn't admit he loves me when he hated himself so much for driving you away. Thank you for forgiving him. It's made a world of difference for him.\"\n\n\"We're not going to be staying, Alli. But we won't be so far away that we can't visit from time to time.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Degan, for fixing this.\"\n\nMax smiled to herself as Degan closed the door on his ex-fianc\u00e9e. He was good at fixing things, even broken families. But she wondered, \"Where are we going that we won't be so far away?\"\n\nHe returned to the bed and pulled her close again. \"Nashart, Montana, I think. I already know the people, and there's actually a job waiting for me there. I always figured by the time I got around to seeing Texas it would be time to decide if there was anywhere in the West I might want to settle, or if it was time to head back East.\"\n\n\"Do you want to stay here?\"\n\n\"No, not any longer than we have to. I don't feel like I belong here anymore. I might have missed fine cuisine and sleeping in a soft bed every night instead of once a month if I got lucky, but cooks can be hired. I did miss having a permanent residence to come home to. And my stay with Zachary Callahan's close-knit family this year made me wonder if I was ready for one of my own. Then I met you and it all simply fell into place perfectly.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nHe hugged her closer. \"I stopped wondering. I knew.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "\"Hunter told me once that a house could be built here in a day if everyone pitched in. I didn't believe him, certainly not a house this size.\"\n\nStanding next to Degan with his arm around her, Max admired her new home, but she was as surprised as he was that it was almost done. It seemed as if every time she blinked today, another room was finished. But the whole town had turned out to support their new sheriff. When Degan had told her he had a job in Nashart, she'd thought he meant one of his usual in-and-out jobs, not a permanent one such as sheriff.\n\n\"They should break for the day,\" Max said. \"It's not as if we can move in tonight. And the food is almost ready.\"\n\nZachary Callahan had donated a cow for the barbecue that was set up in the yard. Long tables had been carried over to hold the fixings other townsfolk had brought.\n\n\"I know,\" Degan agreed. \"The artisans won't arrive for another day or so anyway to put on all the finishing touches. And it still needs to be painted and wallpapered, carpets laid, furniture moved in. I figure by the end of the week we'll have our first dinner here.\"\n\nThey'd spent a few extra days in Chicago buying furniture and picking out colors and patterns for the walls and floors. She would have liked to have had more time with so many choices to pick from, but Degan had assured her she could change anything she didn't like later, as often as she wanted to. She'd thought that was one of his jokes, but it wasn't. He wanted this house to be just right for her. It already was, simply because it was theirs.\n\nFive bedrooms: one for Ella, one for Johnny when he got school breaks, and a couple more for the children they hoped to have eventually. Until then they would serve as guest rooms. Degan's father had warned them at a big dinner party he had hosted for them in Chicago that he planned to visit often. Flint had expressed interest in visiting them in Montana, too, but Max doubted that Allison would ever come West again. And after Max sent off a telegram to Luella to let her know where Max could now be reached, she'd gotten a reply. Luella had actually married Big Al and was now the co-proprietor of Big Al's Saloon. She promised to visit, too. Maybe five bedrooms weren't going to be enough, after all.\n\nBut the house was built on the edge of town, so they could expand if they needed to. The yard was a decent size, too, in case Ella wanted to putter around in a garden. Degan had also included an extra room whose walls were mostly windows just so Ella would have good lighting when she did her painting. Ella was delighted with Nashart and with Degan.\n\nMax was delighted with Nashart, too. It was a nice, peaceful town filled with friendly people where she could ride for miles if she wanted and go hunting whenever she felt like it. Though she'd heard all about the Callahan-Warren feud that had ended earlier this summer, having met both families, she found it hard to believe that they'd ever been enemies. The young men in both families behaved as if they were the best of friends. And Tiffany and Hunter, whose marriage had ended that feud, were so in love Max couldn't help smiling whenever she saw them together.\n\nBut Hunter Callahan took some getting used to. Max had never met anyone who teased and laughed as much as he did. She took to his wife, Tiffany, right away. Despite their different upbringings, Max already considered her a good friend.\n\n\"I used to be so nervous around Degan when he and I were staying with the Callahans,\" Tiffany had confided. \"That was prior to Hunter's finding out I was his promised bride. But Degan fairly reeked of danger. Weren't you scared of him when you first met him?\"\n\nMax grinned. \"No.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"He wondered about that, too. I'd like to think that I knew, deep down, that he was the man for me. But I didn't. I just knew he wouldn't hurt me.\"\n\n\"He's changed,\" Tiffany marveled. \"You've changed him. Goodness, I even saw him laugh yesterday!\"\n\nMax had smiled. Degan did that a lot lately. The gunfighter wasn't guarded around her anymore, and he'd let his guard down here, too, with these people, because he considered them friends. Already, he thought of this town as home. Max knew it made a big difference when you felt you belonged.\n\nA few days after the house went up, they learned that the carved moldings that Degan wanted at the top and the bottom of every wall, in every room of their house, were going to take longer than they'd figured, even though the craftsman had brought two assistants with him and the local carpenter had pitched in, offering his shop for them to work in. But with everything else done, they moved in at the end of the week anyway and invited the Callahans to dinner to celebrate their first night in their new house. The cook and his assistants, as well as the two maids that Degan had hired in Chicago, weren't due to arrive for another week, so Ella had volunteered to cook with Max's help.\n\nDegan had brought so much here from the East, even servants, that Max worried he was only settling down in the West for her sake. Until he told her about the scarcity of women in Montana and if they wanted servants before the next century... She got the idea.\n\nSam Warren and John Callahan had both applied to be Degan's deputy. He hadn't made up his mind yet which one he was going to choose.\n\n\"You could just hire them both,\" Max suggested.\n\n\"The town doesn't need that many lawmen.\"\n\n\"Or you could hire me instead.\" She batted her eyes at him.\n\nHe swatted her backside. \"You might be good with a gun and intimidating as all hell\u2014\"\n\n\"I am not!\"\n\n\"\u2014but I can't protect the town if I'm protecting you instead. Besides\"\u2014he drew her into his arms for a long kiss\u2014\"you're far too distracting.\"\n\nShe'd been on her own for so long that she knew it was going to take time to get used to having someone else looking out for her. But she adored Degan's protectiveness. She adored his strength and tenderness. She adored everything about her husband.\n\nAs for deputies, while Degan probably didn't need any help, she'd feel better if he had it, since she felt as protective of him as he did of her. Luckily, the town was peaceful, though it might not stay that way for long. She knew Degan expected trouble to find him here. She thought he must have confided the same thing to Hunter when the cowboy stopped by the day after the dinner party and she joined them on the porch, catching the tail end of their conversation.\n\n\"You worry too much,\" Hunter was saying. \"Once it gets around that you turned lawman, and it will get around, the glory hunters will stop seeking you out. They'll be afraid you'll just jail them instead of giving them their showdown.\" But then Hunter spotted Max behind them and exclaimed, \"Maxie! I don't think Killer here is very happy.\"\n\nHunter got back on his horse, laughing as he rode away, and she frowned. \"What are you not happy about?\"\n\nDegan rolled his eyes. \"He wasn't referring to me. He was talking about his housewarming gift for us. At least he didn't bring us a pig!\" Degan grinned as he handed her the puppy in his arms.\n\n\"Oh, how sweet!\" Max cooed in delight, and yelled after Hunter, \"Thanks, Callahan!\" Then in a whisper to Degan: \"But we're changing his name.\"\n\n\"I agree since it's a female.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Your friend is ornery.\"\n\n\"No, he's just happy. But so am I. I never thought I would end up with everything I could want in this life. Thank you for loving me, Maxie.\"\n\n\"I didn't have a choice, fancy man.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Stagecoach to Hell and Back_ A Historical Western Adventure Book.txt", + "author": "Derek Levine.", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Prologue\n\nStockton, California\n\nFelix Allen was fourteen years old when he knew exactly what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. But no one starts out at the prestige of stagecoach driver. It took courage and experience. Felix remembered the moment his life changed forever.\n\nHe had grown up without a father and only hints at the man's whereabouts or his profession. Felix's mother never gave any indications to his father's Christian or surname. So, following his absent father's career wasn't expected or encouraged by his doting mother.\n\nHis mother grew up on the cusp of the Mexican-American War and never let Felix forget that they owed their lives to the brave men who had seized California from Mexico and had made a home in one of the many mission towns north of San Diego. Felix spent his juvenile years in San Jose before his mother found work as a cook in Stockton at the Grant Hotel.\n\nFelix's mother had made sure he understood the value of education and paying attention. She had learned a smattering of Mexican Spanish because most people in the area were refugees seeking asylum. Felix learned both English and Spanish fluently because his friends from the school were children of war-tired parents.\n\nFelix learned to read and write. He stayed in the school until his mother took him on that fateful trip that had changed his life forever. One day, while on his way home from school, he passed by a busy workshop he had assumed was a smithy with the clanging metal and gaggle of noisy men standing around the double doors of the two-level business on the corner of Main Street and Weber Avenue.\n\nMost of the men eagerly enjoyed each other's company, cherishing cigars and toasting some unknown success that didn't include Felix. Curiosity piqued, and traveling alone instead of with the gangs of street urchins, Felix took up a post near a rain barrel on the side of the building. He stayed clear of the packs of orphans and school-aged children who ran from education instead of embracing it. Because he had loitered alone, Felix got noticed.\n\n\"Hey kid, bring me that spring bar,\" a man called from inside the shop. He had shouted loud enough for the other five men in business suits standing at the mouth of the shop to take notice of Felix. One of them stared at Felix, waiting for him to run off or jump into action.\n\nThe man lay on the floor under a coach and had his hands full. Felix didn't notice anyone until someone shouted for assistance. The man under the wagon base stared eagerly at Felix while the businessman outside the doors waited for Felix to move.\n\n\"Go on, boy, give him a hand,\" the tall man said. He had a thick cigar pinched in his fingers and used it as a pointer.\n\nFelix left the cover of the rain barrel and stepped inside the workshop. It wasn't a forge. Felix saw several stagecoaches in various states of assembly on the work floor. He picked up the heavy curved piece of steel and dragged it to where the man lay on the floor under the belly of a new coach.\n\n\"Here, lift it up and hold it.\" The laborer never offered his name, only demands.\n\nFelix was tall and robust at fourteen, his height giving him an advantage over other boys the same age. Without hesitation, Felix climbed under the wagon with the worker. He used his back to help lift and wedge the steel spring into place while the laborer bolted the piece into place with clamps.\n\nOnce completed, Felix lingered, waiting for further orders. He saw the man with the cigar watching him while still standing in the group outside the warehouse. Every time the worker gave Felix an order, he responded. He didn't talk unless it was a question about a tool, and he took orders without delay or interruption.\n\nAfter the group of businessmen wandered off, Felix stayed behind. He worked alongside the laborer until the sun stopped showing through the open doorway.\n\n\"I need to go, sir,\" Felix said finally. He had grease covering most of his arms and part of his face. His clothes stank of petroleum. He had a metallic taste in his mouth.\n\nThe man wiped his hands on a rag before offering a handshake to Felix. \"You did good today,\" he said. \"I'm Elmer.\"\n\n\"Felix, sir,\" he said, still eager to help.\n\n\"Mr. Henderson will have work for you tomorrow. Be here at six in the morning. You know who Mr. Henderson is, right?\" Elmer pushed his grimy fist into a pocket and brought it out again.\n\n\"Sure, I do,\" Felix had said. But he didn't know. Before that day working with Elmer, Felix had no idea what men did inside the large building he had walked by on his way back and forth to school.\n\nFelix received two dimes from the laborer's pocket after the handshake and the offer. It was more money than Felix had ever had. He ran the rest of the way home to show his mother the reward for hard work and listening.\n\n\"He told me to come back in the morning,\" Felix had said, still fondling the coins Elmer gave him. \"There's a man named Mr. Henderson that will have work for me.\"\n\nHis mother gave Felix a lingering look he knew meant she had considered his future. Receiving further education outside the mission school was a rare opportunity presented to a young man who had a lot to offer. A boy needed focus, and a career didn't come along every day.\n\n\"You need to pay attention and do what you're told,\" his mother had said. Felix remembered her words as vivid as a new day. \"If you listen, if you don't talk back, you will succeed in anything you set your mind to do. This isn't a game, Felix. Life's made up of choices. Each time we make a choice, we need to live with the consequences.\"\n\n\"I want to do this,\" Felix had said.\n\nAt fourteen, Felix began his apprenticeship as a maker of the finest carriages on the west side of the Mississippi. Milton P. Henderson had first ventured across the wilderness country from Maine in '52 with an inspired plan to build horse-drawn coaches rivaling the Concord stagecoach. His was the first installed shock-absorbing thoroughbraces revolutionizing the way overland stagecoaches transported people smoothly.\n\nInside M.P. Henderson's office and factory warehouse, Felix learned everything there was to know about how to build the perfect carriage. Over the years of his apprenticeship, Felix knew how to construct a stagecoach from the ground up. He grew up strong and paid attention.\n\nWhen the War Between the States happened and a few stagecoach builders left to fight on both sides, Felix began another apprenticeship phase. He began working in earnest with Elmer, his mentor, to modify the designs of the carriages. They began working with Mr. Henderson's approval to build many diverse vehicle styles that had different functions.\n\nWhen it wasn't about the comfort of passengers, they modified the rails and frames for additional support. Stage working carriages transported more than people over the years. Mail services and transporting goods overland were a cost-effective way for many boomtown businesses and communities to get their supplies promptly.\n\nWhen the war ended, Henderson began expanding his overland stagecoach enterprise. Felix started giving orders to up-and-coming warehouse workers instead of taking them. By eighteen, Felix had the responsibility of foreman and inspector for the newest carriages.\n\nHis pay had increased substantially. He had managed to find a small house on the corner of Eldorado and Rose Streets to share with his mother. She didn't need to work any longer with Felix's salary.\n\nFelix thought he'd spend the rest of his formative years manufacturing and redesigning overland carriages for Mr. Henderson. And then came the day when Milton P. Henderson and his investors decided it was time to expand their manufacturing into transporting goods and services. Over the years, they had supplied military and civilians with their carriage needs, from transporting people across hostile territories to carrying mail and supplies to growing towns all over the region.\n\n\"So, Felix, how would you like to make $100 this week?\" Mr. Henderson said when he wandered into the warehouse. \"I got two grand coaches that need transporting up to Copperopolis. You know how to drive a carriage, don't you, Felix?\"\n\n\"Sure, I do, sir,\" Felix had said. One thing he had learned in the years since joining M.P. Henderson's manufacturing was to pay attention. When another choice presented itself, it was time for Felix to rethink his career path.\n\nWhen Mr. Henderson announced the merger with the Overland Stage Company, he contracted Cleveland McDowell. Felix learned most people called him Old Ephraim. The man carried a heavy reputation. And that's when Felix's life took another turn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Old Ephraim rose through the ranks from shotgun messenger at fifteen to coach driver by eighteen \u2014 Felix's age in '66. Old Ephraim first met Felix at the warehouse when the man had arrived wearing dungarees, a deerskin jacket, and a holster that carried a whip, not a pistol.\n\nThe ornate handle stood out of the holder almost four feet. At first, Felix thought it was a saber made of wood. When the driver got closer, that's when Felix saw the coil of strap that wound around the shaft. Old Ephraim had a squint and leathery face and hands from spending most days outside under the California sunshine.\n\nWhen Mr. Henderson introduced Felix to Old Ephraim, it was an experience he'd never forget. It was the first time Felix heard a man wearing lower-class apparel call Henderson by his Christian name. No one inside the warehouse ever addressed the owner with such familiarity. As Felix listened to the ongoing conversation about the newest changes to the latest designs in carriages, he saw Old Ephraim talk to Henderson jovially, laced with foul words Felix hadn't heard except outside the taverns around Stockton.\n\nInstead of correcting Old Ephraim about the cussing, Henderson appeared tolerant, even amused. But the moment Henderson brought Old Ephraim to meet Felix face to face, it changed his life forever.\n\n\"If you lie to me, kid, I will see it,\" Old Ephraim said upon introductions. The grizzled driver had a handshake like a bear trap that didn't release immediately. \"You ever drive a coach before?\"\n\n\"Sure, I\u2014\"\n\nThe trap squeezed Felix's hand until knuckles cracked. Henderson stood back, watching the interaction and interviewing under duress with mute fascination. Old Ephraim used muscle leverage and a dead-eye stare to strip away Felix's pretenses and get to the root of the young man's integrity.\n\n\"Only in and out of the warehouse, sir,\" Felix answered.\n\n\"Have you ever stolen anything from here or a merchant?\" Old Ephraim asked.\n\n\"No, sir,\" Felix said without hesitation.\n\n\"You know how to shoot?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" he said.\n\nFelix glanced at Henderson, whose furrowing brow deepened with each question fired off.\n\n\"Can you follow directions and learn how to drive a team of horses without breaking their spirits?\" Old Ephraim asked.\n\n\"I will do my best,\" Felix said.\n\nOld Ephraim released his grip. Felix rubbed the circulation back into his hand and glanced at Henderson, expecting to lose his job after the revealing truths.\n\n\"He'll do,\" Old Ephraim said. \"Let's get him down to the post office and take the Oath of Mail Contractors and Carriers.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\nIn July of Felix's eighteenth year, he learned what it meant to do the job of a stagecoach driver. With Old Ephraim at the helm, leading two conjoined carriages with a team of eight horses, Felix got his first lessons in managing horses and education about managing people.\n\n\"A lot of uninformed people think a lawman or teamster got the hardest profession out here,\" Old Ephraim said.\n\nThey left Stockton headed east to Copperopolis. Founded in '60 by William Reed and a few investors, the Calaveras County mining town was the second largest deposit of copper on the west coast, second to the nearby township of Telegraph City. Reed sold off his rights to the mine and built a toll road between the two boomtowns. The road, dubbed Reeds Turnpike, connected the main stage road to Stockton and outlined a route to Sonora and Sacramento.\n\nReed got richer, charging for the use of the toll road into Copperopolis until '65. After the end of the war, Reed opened the road and retired somewhere in the south.\n\nThe copper route to Stockton got a lot of travel from Copperopolis. The railroad had yet to move into the area, so carriage transporting was the only option to get copper to the barges that took it to San Francisco via the San Joaquin River. Copper got loaded on larger ships in the San Francisco seaport to sail around Cape Horn until the ore eventually ended up in smelters on the east coast.\n\nAll of the carriages used for transporting copper ore came from M.P. Henderson's factory. The few wagons Felix saw headed in the opposite direction he had personally helped create. It was a gratifying experience seeing his hard work put to practical use.\n\nIt was a forty-mile trip from Stockton to Copperopolis. With the second large luxury carriage pulled behind the first, Old Ephraim wanted to keep the jarring to a minimum on the new vehicles. It was Henderson's wish to get the coaches delivered with nominal road damage. Along the way, Old Ephraim spewed stories of his years as an expert driver.\n\nIt took a strong character and fierce dedication. It took courage and a constant vigil for bandits and a sharp eye in a hostile Indian country.\n\n\"This is one job that women can do just as good as men,\" Old Ephraim said. They were approaching the third leg of their journey. They had fresh horses from a stage stop three miles behind them and a clear starry night ahead. Old Ephraim wanted to get another two miles into the trip before they stopped overnight.\n\n\"Not everyone can do this job. Yeah, I've seen women driving horses and carriages better than some men. They got good business sense and don't let their lives get in the way of being great reinsmen. Ain't but two things that will make a shitty operator,\" he said. \"Drinking too much and letting your pecker get in the way of your thinking.\"\n\nThe Stockton route to Copperopolis traversed through old-growth forested areas and arid countryside that kicked up dust that lingered for hours. They got through the worst of the dusty area before sunset, and Felix wanted to know how Old Ephraim managed to see through the team of horses to the road ahead.\n\n\"I can smell the road,\" Old Ephraim said, tapping the side of his bulbous nose with a deerskin glove, leaving a greasy mark behind. \"The fact is, I know most of the routes north of El Camino Real. I drove the six hundred miles with stage stops at twenty-one Spanish missions twice in my lifetime.\"\n\nFelix listened, gripping the rail and back of the seat as the horses found a rhythmic gait that kept them moving forward without winding the animals. The roiling dust clouds kicked off the horses' backsides and made it impossible to see the road ahead.\n\n\"You started when you were my age?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Yup, I was eighteen when I got my first whip. I got it from the man who trained me, and if you want to do this kind of work, you inherit a whip from someone who sees you got what it takes.\"\n\n\"You got a whip in your holster,\" Felix said. It took a few days with Old Ephraim before he brought it up.\n\nThe driver patted the handle that poked from the custom leather pouch. \"I never needed a gun.\"\n\n\"Has anyone ever held up the coaches?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Well, sure, lots of times,\" Old Ephraim said. \"But mostly highwaymen want the gold or banknotes. You hand it over, and they never give you much mind.\" He looked thoughtful for a while as if remembering something. Felix tried to keep his eye on the roadway, but it proved too tricky with the horse team's grit and dust washing over the carriage. \"A few times, I've lost horses to Indians. I lost a few horses to Mexicans. I lost a few messengers to gunmen.\" Old Ephraim winked at Felix, but he wasn't sure if it was out of fun or because of the dirt.\n\n\"You can carry a gun, a club, or anything that will make you feel safe. But it ain't up to you whether you live or die when it comes to bandits. It's up to them,\" Old Ephraim said.\n\n\"Have you ever been shot?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Oh sure, a few times,\" he said, chuckling like it was a joke between them. \"I got shot during the war on the Butterfield Overland Mail. But back then, Congress ordered its use for livestock and personnel. They changed the name to the Union-held Central Overland Trail. The contract lasted six years. I ran it for five of those years. We took it through the oxbow route below the Rocky Mountains to keep away from the winter snows.\"\n\n\"Was that a long way?\" Felix asked, finally more interested in the history than the path ahead.\n\n\"Yup, it takes about fifty-two days to cover one thousand four hundred and seventy-five miles,\" Old Ephraim said.\n\n\"You carry the whip, but I never saw you use it on the horses,\" Felix said.\n\n\"A good Jehus don't need to use the whip on their horses.\"\n\n\"Jehus?\" Felix asked, never hearing the term before that moment.\n\n\"It's after King Jehu of Israel,\" Old Ephraim said, giving Felix a sideways look through the dust cloud. \"Don't you know nothing from your Bible, boy? He was a great and powerful king that led furious attacks with teams of horses and chariots.\"\n\nOld Ephraim took the whip from the holster. He showed it to Felix. \"Now, a good Jehus is the captain of this vessel, and he's sober \u2014 leastwise while driving a team of horses anyhow,\" he added with a jab to Felix's ribs. \"But this whip is worth more than its weight in gold.\"\n\nFelix thought Old Ephraim meant him to touch it. But when he reached for it, the driver shoved Felix hard enough to almost topple him out of the messenger seat.\n\n\"Never touch another man's whip, boy. That will get you killed.\" He held it in a way for Felix to see the handcrafted silver ferrules on the hickory handle. \"This whip is part of me, and if I die before I hand it off to the next reinsman, I expect it to be buried with me.\"\n\nIt had buckskin lashes with a hickory handle that was as long as Old Ephraim's arm. \"Now, I get draft horses or stallions. I don't want nothing else. And if you mistreat the animal too much, you'll get an ornery horse that will slow the rest of the team. A good crack of the whip will get them moving. But if you're whacking the horses on the ass, you'll end up with a lot of pissed-off meat that will get infected in the sun and maybe trample you the minute they get the chance.\"\n\nOld Ephraim tucked the whip into the handmade holster again. \"A good team will last you a full twenty miles without stopping. You push them too much, and you'll lose a horse to drying out, or its heart will up and explode. You get caught out on trails not used too often, and you'll end up losing your contracts with the mail.\"\n\nOld Ephraim shrugged. \"You do that, and you might want to bite the bullet. If you're running coaches for someone like Mr. Henderson, you take an oath to do what's right.\" He nudged Felix. \"That mail carrier oath you took ain't something to just piss away. That gives you power, that shows people you got integrity, son.\"\n\nThe horses slowed, and the first set back to bank around a right corner. Old Ephraim switched the reins and shifted slightly in the seat beside Felix. He read the road ahead without needing to see it.\n\n\"Now, see how the wheels are rattling some?\" Old Ephraim asked. \"We're on the hard ground right now. You can look to the sides if you need to see ahead of us. But these horses know where they're going.\"\n\nFelix pressed the palm of his hand on the bench between them, feeling the vibrations come through the steel ring tires into the wagon wheels. He leaned to the left, trying to see beyond the brown cloud pouring over the trail from the horses' hooves. Slightly ahead and below the driver's seat, the front left wheel spun over the uneven ground with precision. It had perfect balance with no wobble.\n\n\"Now, if we had a lot of hills we needed to cross, we'd have a few sandbags in the rear boot,\" Old Ephraim said. \"You can use the burlap bags to rest on the wheels going downhill to keep the brakes from getting too hot. And you can use the sand along the stretch if you need the extra traction.\"\n\nWhen Felix glanced up again at the road ahead of them, a thicket of bushes on each side of the road looked like the pathway opened like a dirt track tongue waiting to consume the new carriages. Someone stood in the center of the roadway, still too far to get a good look at him. But Felix didn't expect to see anyone on the route that far out from a stage stop.\n\n\"Um, Ephraim,\" he said. \"Someone is standing in the road ahead.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nFelix never expected his life to turn around so much in a few short years. He had made a substantial wage from working for Mr. Henderson. He got the opportunity of a lifetime to learn a trade in building stagecoaches for one of the wealthiest men in California.\n\nAnd on his first time away as the helper to Old Ephraim, the new stagecoaches got held up. The best Jehus in the whole territory faced off with the masked bandit. At the same time, Felix sat rigid in the shotgun messenger seat, quivering with fear, anticipating his life to come to a sudden and violent ending.\n\nThe teams of horses drew to a stop, the first set of animals whinnied uneasily at the sight of the single man in the middle of the road. He had a shotgun slung between his arms but hadn't pointed it at the driver's box. Old Ephraim set the hand brake.\n\nSince they had eight horses, the highwayman had to lean to the right to see Old Ephraim. The bandit started walking the horses' length, approaching the driver's box on the first of the two carriages. He lifted a gloved hand.\n\n\"Why didn't you just drive the horses through the trail?\" Felix asked in a hurried whisper. He looked around under the driver's box. \"Where's your gun?\"\n\n\"I ain't needed a gun in all the years I drove,\" Old Ephraim said and nudged Felix, using his head to motion toward the trees surrounding the roadway.\n\nThat's when Felix saw the rifle barrels sticking out of the foliage.\n\n\"Evening,\" the bandit said. He wore a water-stained flour sack over his head with eye holes cut in the fabric. On his head was a black steed derby with a red satin band. He wore a dirty flannel shirt and canvas trousers. The double-barrel shotgun cradled in his arms had both hammers pulled back.\n\nFelix leaned back behind Old Ephraim because if the first highwayman shot the driver, he'd take his chances with the other nine men waiting in the treeline. He glanced to the other guns pointed at the carriage and horses. None of them moved except when a light breeze pushed the leaves on the branches. Felix thought he saw more flour sacks hidden by the shrubberies.\n\n\"Evening,\" Old Ephraim said in return without a hint of panic. He sat unmoved and unnerved. \"Can I help you?\"\n\n\"You sure can,\" the bandit said. \"It would be good if you dropped your guns for a start and got everyone out of those coaches. I don't want to put bullets in you to get through to you that we mean business.\"\n\n\"Well, I sure want to oblige you, sir,\" Old Ephraim said. \"But we ain't got any guns. And we sure don't have any passengers. You are welcome to look.\"\n\nThe bandit shifted on his feet. Felix watched over Old Ephraim's shoulder as the masked man wandered by the driver's box and got close enough for Felix to see a glinting of his eyes through the flour sack holes. He looked in the cubby under the driver's compartment. After a few seconds, he wandered back to the coaches.\n\nThe horses got antsy, standing still for too long. They had another five miles to get to the next stage stop, according to Old Ephraim's estimation. Felix wondered if he jumped off the carriage, could he make it without getting shot? The rifles in the trees twitched, but the other bandits remained hidden.\n\n\"How about you two get off that coach and come over here?\" the masked man asked. He had a refined voice, like an educated man.\n\nOld Ephraim climbed out of the driver's box and stretched his legs like he got ready to end his shift. The masked bandit got a better view of Felix. He used the double-barrels to let Felix know that it was better to cooperate than the alternative.\n\n\"So, what's all this about?\" the bandit asked once Felix joined Old Ephraim on the ground by the carriage. \"You don't have passengers, and you've got two nice-looking coaches. Where are the bank boxes hidden? We don't want to spend a lot of time looking for them. It will be dark soon, and that frustrates me when you're not working together with me.\"\n\n\"You see those carriages?\" Old Ephraim said. \"Those are all we got with us. There's no money, no bank boxes. We're delivering them up at Copperopolis to some wealthy man named\u2014\" He nudged Felix. \"What's that fellow's name again?\"\n\n\"Mr. Poole,\" Felix said. \"He's expecting the stagecoaches delivered to his offices.\"\n\nThe derby-wearing bandit stood very still, watching Felix and Old Ephraim. For the second time, Felix considered running at the risk of getting shot. The movements in the bushes near the front horses caused them to snort and stamp the ground.\n\n\"We ain't got nothing on us,\" Old Ephraim said. \"You are welcome to search the coaches. I got the order in my pocket.\" He pulled the bill of sale out of the top pocket of his shirt and handed it over.\n\nThe masked man drew closer to the coach. The gun barrel wavered in the air as he reached for the folded bill of sales.\n\nThe bandit shifted the shotgun and took the receipt. He opened it, read it, and looked up at Old Ephraim again.\n\n\"You're headed into Copperopolis?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, sir, we're due there by tomorrow morning.\" Felix watched as the flour sack turned in the direction they were headed and then back the other way. \"Did you think we were coming back from Copperopolis? That makes sense you're looking for passengers and money.\" He shook his head. \"We ain't got nothing like that.\"\n\nFelix felt the breeze pass over his sweaty face. He wondered if dying on the side of the road meant his mother might have his body to bury. He wondered how long before the next stagecoach found them. The sun began to set, and a deep shadow crawled over the roadway. He couldn't see the others waiting in the bushes, but Felix had no doubt they debated about spending time shooting them and taking the carriages and horses.\n\nIt was impossible to read a man wearing a flour sack and derby hat. But by shifting the man's shotgun again, the lead bandit had made up his mind about what to do with Felix and Old Ephraim. The bandit handed back the bill of sale to Old Ephraim. And then he removed another scrap of paper and handed it directly to Felix, who took it with trembling and clammy fingers.\n\n\"So, we'll leave you here. If you try anything after I go, my men will shoot you dead,\" the bandit said. In a brash move, the flour sack turned away from them and marched back to the front of the horses. The horses bobbed their heads and snorted.\n\nFelix saw the masked man disappear in front of the teams. He stared at the shadowy foliage where the other highwaymen waited in the dark. The tips of the rifles still protruded from the leafy cover.\n\n\"How long are we supposed to wait here?\" Felix whispered. \"I got to go pee now.\"\n\n\"We might want to wait a little longer,\" Old Ephraim said. \"I think those boys aren't too pleased they're leaving here with nothing. They ain't moved from the bushes.\"\n\nFelix had to press his knees together and groaned as he bent forward some, trying to hold his bladder. It lasted another ten minutes, long enough for darkness to fall over the countryside.\n\n\"I can't wait,\" he said, finally sprinting to the side of the road to relieve himself.\n\nHe half expected someone to shout at him. Maybe a few of the camouflaged gunmen would rush at him. He had forgotten about the slip of paper the bandit handed to him. If they let him get that far off the road, what was to stop him from running away? He contemplated the idea. He could run, but that meant leaving the carriages and Old Ephraim behind. After all the lecturing and the fact he took an oath made Felix decide it was better to die a noble man than run like a coward. His mother would appreciate his moral obligations.\n\nOld Ephraim took a deep breath and began walking along the side of the horses. He patted their flanks and talked to them. Felix came out of the wooded area. He saw Old Ephraim disappear in the hazy dark at the front of the team. His heart hammered as Felix continued to sweat with fear.\n\nWhen he didn't hear anyone yelling or gunshots, Felix took deliberately slow steps toward the roadside brush.\n\n\"Ephraim, is everything alright?\" Felix asked. He still didn't see the driver. He pressed his hands on the horses' rumps and sides as he walked, soothing them from stress and the long drive. Their skin rippled with the contact. \"Ephraim, you there?\" he called louder.\n\n\"Yup,\" he said and hooted with a laugh. When Felix reached the horses, he saw Old Ephraim carrying a stack of black sticks and shovel handles back to the carriages. He tossed them on the side of the road and pointed. \"That there is the rest of the bandits hiding in the bushes.\" Old Ephraim continued laughing as he checked the horses' straps and harnesses in the dark.\n\nFelix walked with him back to the first carriage. Old Ephraim lit the bull's eye railroad lantern mounted on the side of the driver's box. The concave glass on one side of the case focused the light on spilling forward more than illuminating the coach's sides. He continued lighting the rest of the lanterns, laughing and shaking his head.\n\n\"Get up there,\" Old Ephraim said. \"We need to get to the next stop and get these horses out of the yokes.\"\n\nOnce back in the messenger seat, Old Ephraim led the horses over the small graded hillside and used the brake to keep the carriages slow behind the eight horses. When the trail leveled out again, Old Ephraim let the animals lead the way through the dark. He continued grinning and shaking his head like he got a joke that Felix didn't understand.\n\n\"There weren't any others waiting in the trees?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Nope, that son of a bitch tricked us with sticks,\" Old Ephraim said. He hooted again and slapped his knee. \"That there was one of the most interesting stage robberies I ever went through.\" He frowned at Felix. \"What was that paper he gave you?\"\n\nFelix had squeezed it in his fist before uncurling the crinkled paper. He had to move to the edge of the driver's box, utilizing the available lantern light to read what was on the scrap.\n\n\"I'm not sure what it is,\" he said.\n\n\"Can you read it?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Felix said. He turned the page face to the light.\n\nI rob the rich to feed the poor\n\nWhich charity is a sin,\n\nA widow ne'er knocked at my door\n\nBut what I let her in,\n\nSo blame me not for what I've done\n\nI don't deserve your curses\n\nAnd if for any cause I'm hung\n\nLet it be for my verses\n\nBlack Bart the P08\n\n\"That is what it says?\" Old Ephraim asked.\n\n\"That's it. He signed it. Black Bart,\" Felix said. He had turned over the page several times to make sure no other words showed up on the backside.\n\n\"Well, that there is it. I am ready to hang up my whip, son.\"\n\nFelix frowned at Old Ephraim. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"You don't know who that was, do you?\"\n\n\"No, but he signed it.\"\n\n\"You keep that paper, son. That is good luck right there.\"\n\n\"We were held up,\" Felix said. \"I don't think that was good luck.\"\n\n\"We're alive. We still got the horses, and the carriage ain't full of buckshot. I only heard about Black Bart one other time. He took a bank box filled with $3,000 in gold.\" Old Ephraim continued laughing and shaking his head as they traveled the last miles to the stage stop.\n\nBefore they reached the destination, he got somber. \"I am serious about calling it quits,\" Old Ephraim said. He looked at Felix a long time as if sizing him up. \"You showed courage out there. You didn't run away or cry like a child.\"\n\n\"Truth told, sir. I thought about running. I wanted to cry. I was real scared.\"\n\n\"Well, that's understandable, son. I was a little scared myself. But you took an oath, and even though we weren't carrying any mail, I know you'd have stayed your ground if it came to it.\" Old Ephraim nodded. \"Yup, I saw a lot of men twice your age done up and fit to be tied in a bow facing down a gun like that out here. I don't carry a gun, but I got this whip. If I knew it was just one man, I would have taken my chances with him. But he got the better of the two of us. I feel good knowing I wasn't the only witness.\"\n\n\"Why give me the note?\" Felix asked. \"Why give away his name like that?\"\n\n\"It's a poem as near as I can tell. And that ain't his Christian name. It's a name he uses to let you know who robbed you.\"\n\n\"I don't see how that's important.\"\n\n\"Well, maybe not to you or me, but it was sure important enough for him to write it down and hand it over to you.\"\n\n\"We don't have much to give the sheriff for a description.\"\n\n\"Copperopolis has got marshals, and we'll give them the best description we can. I think he got turned around out here. I think he expected us to be coming from Copperopolis, not Stockton.\"\n\n\"That makes him not too smart.\"\n\n\"Well, he was smart enough to make us think he had a gang with him. You sure you want to make that claim to the marshals?\"\n\n\"I suppose not.\"\n\n\"Well, you keep that note. You remember this, I ain't saying it's a lesson, but I think you learned something today. You kept your head and earned my respect,\" Old Ephraim said, offering his leather glove to Felix.\n\nThey shook hands, and he continued holding the loose reins, letting the lead horses find their way to the stage stop. Felix sat beside the seasoned driver listening to the rattle of the harnesses and the night critters in the fields surrounding the road.\n\n\"When we get back to Stockton, I plan to tell Mr. Henderson that I am done driving carriages,\" Old Ephraim said. \"I'm thirty-nine, did you know that?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Felix said. Old Ephraim looked much older.\n\n\"Yeah, this is a young man's trade, son. This seat will make your ass grow tough, but you'll have bad knees and a sore back. You'll look like me in ten years if you don't take care,\" he said. \"I think you got a lot more to offer than overland travels. But I don't know you for spit. Maybe today was a good day for you and a one-off.\"\n\n\"Well, thank you for letting me be a part of your last ride,\" Felix said. He couldn't think of anything else to say, but by the silence between them and the look of satisfaction on Old Ephraim's face, Felix had said enough." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nWoodland, California 1876\n\nSally had spent her whole life working hard, anticipating an opportunity that came along once in a lifetime. She'd lived the first eighteen years of her life in Marysville and personally knew the woman named Mary Murphy, who had a whole town named after her.\n\nMary was Sally's inspiration to make something of herself. The woman had survived being trapped in the snowbound Sierra Nevada mountain range. Sally had heard the stories about the horrible events from other people who lived in Marysville \u2014 Mary Murphy never talked about it herself.\n\nMary, aged fourteen, and her brother William, aged ten, were rescued by seven able-bodied men in February '47 when they traversed the Fr\u00e9mont Pass to search for the survivors waiting out the heavy snows. Their mother was the first to hear the stomping of snowshoes overhead of the snow-buried cabin. She had asked the rescuers if they were from California or if they came from Heaven.\n\nSally had heard the tales of the doomed pioneers lost in the snowy mountains after following the rerouted trail from an entrepreneur named Lansford Hastings. He turned out to be a failed explorer turned Confederate soldier.\n\nThe man had sold the mapped route as a cut-off and shortened trail to California. What had started with over five hundred wagons and a well-funded expedition west in the spring of '46 turned into a horrid account of survival by the means that no one wanted to experience.\n\nMary and family were part of a group of thirty-two members with nine wagons that took up the tail of the wagon train west from Independence, Missouri. Led by George Donner and James Reed, the men of their group decided to veer from the main wagon train hoping for a better selection of free government land by racing ahead of the others. They had purchased the map from Hastings with the belief the man had surveyed the route personally.\n\nLater, they learned Hastings had never traveled the area before setting out ahead of Reed and Donner, leaving notes along the way about the woes he had run into during the maiden travels. Hastings never apologized for the mishap and lived in disgrace for the rest of his years, while Mary had watched friends and family die and later consumed by others to stave off starvation long enough, hoping help would arrive.\n\nThat kind of determination inspired Sally every day to rise with the chickens and labor throughout the whole day until she fell asleep on her feet. Sally had heard the tales. She had listened to how Mary Murphy and the other survivors endured living. While Sally understood the morals of the party's plight, she knew nothing so extreme needed to happen for her to make a difference in her life.\n\nIt was in the summer of Sally's eighteenth year; she had met a man traveling through Marysville searching for untold and easily accessible wealth. He was one of many young men looking for their fortunes, riding the riverboats from San Francisco and Sacramento.\n\nMarysville had become Gateway to the Gold Fields, nestled on the riverbank of a confluence of two rivers that turned into the most productive gold mining operations in Northern California. And the man Sally eventually married, Morris Laners, wanted a part of what he thought would turn around his life. But, like many other disheartened young men of the time, he had learned mining for gold was backbreaking laborious work.\n\nMorris fell in love with a dream and found out that other wealthy and greedy men had already staked their claims. Any gold Morris removed from the mines already belonged to someone else. He only received a minor percentage of the take-home he thought he deserved.\n\nSomehow, Sally met Morris along the way, and they didn't exactly fall in love by the time she learned of her pregnancy. Sally never chided Morris for his choices, but when it came time to marry Sally, he had decided in a manner that was halfhearted at best.\n\nBy the time William came along, Sally had begun considering how she could contribute to the future for the family of three. Growth in Marysville continued though the natural landscape created architectural obstacles because of the gold mining operations.\n\nAs ironworks, mills, machine shops, and churches began taking over the available space, the city's foundations \u2014 with an estimated population of ten thousand people \u2014 became vulnerable to flooding during spring run-off from heavy winters.\n\nHydraulic mining north of Marysville raised the riverbeds of the Yuba and Feather Rivers. The city had erected a levee system that sealed off the area from future flooding. The embankment preserved the region, but it also made Marysville impossible for future growth.\n\nSally had sense enough to see the hydraulic mining debris continued to cause problems. The run-off from the mines that had choked the city, forcing engineers to build the levee, never stopped. She knew, eventually, the waterways that hauled away tons of gold from the mines wouldn't sustain the output. Once the rivers closed off from sediment caused by the mining slurry, the only other viable route south was overland.\n\nWagons and coaches had used the overland trail south to Knight's Landing for decades. It was a rugged trail that went through flood lands and around foothills that cropped up in the surrounding valley. Going over the mountains was never an option for transporting heavy shipments. If the waterways closed up, Sally knew the only other viable alternative was the railroad. But no one saw that far ahead. Men still had fickle ideas that barges and rivers were the superior solutions.\n\nSally was a new mother with a baby on her hip when she convinced her newlywed husband, Morris, to commit to purchasing several acres of land along the wagon trail between Knight's Landing and the Davis cut-off to Sacramento.\n\nDisillusioned by the prospect of striking it rich, Morris begrudgingly agreed. They agreed to name the stage station Woodland and had abundant resources to build a stage stop for the overland stagecoaches, bringing people up from Sacramento, Vallejo, and Napa.\n\nIt was arduous and exhaustive work, but Sally had more determination than Morris to make it succeed. She had shared her plans with him in a way that piqued his young heart into believing the small stage stop would eventually become a flourishing route that railroad gentlemen wanted to use as a whistle-stop for their expanding rails. When that didn't happen immediately, Sally and Morris spent more time apart after a few years than together.\n\nRaising William with an active father in his life proved harder than running the staging post for Sally. Morris never took any interest in his son. After three years, when they had used Chinese immigrants to help expand the surrounding area, Woodland grew with the reputation of catering to passengers as well as mail coaches.\n\nSally had the determination to make the place successful despite the railroad not building a line north through Solano County. River transport continued to work for Marysville, and Morris felt Sally had used him to purchase the land.\n\nHe began to resent the continued hard work it took to run the overnight inn that was Sally's idea to help make passengers comfortable while traveling the long distances between cities. Sally believed women were the foundation to all things important. They were as significant to innovations without getting credit. Sally couldn't own the property outright because governing laws forbade women from owning land. Woodland had Morris' name on the deed. But Morris didn't want to wait for the future to come to him.\n\nSo, whenever Sally had ideas for expansion and prosperous intentions, she thought about a woman's comforts. Woodland began gaining a reputation for having the cleanest rooms at Laners Inn. The posting station had a free room and something to eat available any time of the year for letter carriers. Mail coaches frequented the relay station more than most travels.\n\nSally wanted to establish a strong repartee with the United States Post Office Department. She knew to succeed in expanding Woodland and make it more favorable to railroad investors, solidifying a trustworthy relationship with the Post Office meant to give incentives to mail coach operators. A free meal, a clean bed, and the best hot baths south of Marysville helped promote Woodland. But it never seemed good enough for Morris.\n\nInstead, when William was four years old, Morris took a stagecoach headed south with the pretense that he had made a business arrangement with a man who wanted to revolutionize steam engines used for grain harvesting. The man had passed through Woodland from Marysville after securing an investment from a mining company owner.\n\nMorris was eager to get away from the pastoral countryside and move back to city life. Sally never saw her husband after that day. And William grew up without a father, living on a piece of property that belonged to him because Sally stuck to her convictions." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nSally had wanted Morris to be a part of her son's life, especially in the formative years. Instead, eight years had passed since Morris' departure from Woodland. In all that time, William never asked about his father's disappearance. Sally never had to explain to her son why his father went away. Sally didn't know if she had the courage to tell William anything about Morris.\n\nSally watched William run across the compound when the latest stagecoach slowed the four-horse team and turned into the well-worn gravel path leading into the well-managed staging post. Sally recognized the Overland Stage Company carriage and the handsome driver that brought the passengers up from Sacramento.\n\nIt was a two-stop route between the cities, with Woodland serving as the halfway point. The carriage rolled under the ranch gate arch Sally had made that said Welcome to Woodland.\n\nWilliam habitually greeted passengers when they disembarked the stagecoaches. Most men and women traveling the countryside were eager to stretch their legs and get a bite to eat at Laners Inn while the driver switched out horses.\n\nUsually, Sally stayed out of the way, working as a background host to accommodate the hungry passengers. She had upwards of fifteen to twenty transient Chinese laborers working at the station. Most were impecunious immigrants that came to California to make a living like most settlers.\n\nSally grew up in a town with an expansive Chinese labor force, so hiring workers passing through the area meant she had a reputation for taking in people who others often turned away because of their skin color and cultural differences that sometimes bothered guests at the Laners Inn. Sally did her best to make everyone comfortable.\n\nMost people liked her because Sally knew to try to make everyone feel welcomed. It helped offset having a sizeable Chinese workforce that made sure everything was immaculate and well managed.\n\nWhen the maroon coach with gold wheels, and an ornately painted eagle on the doors, arrived, Sally removed the apron and straightened the folds of her dress. It pleased her whenever Sally saw the passenger coach arrive at the staging post. It had everything to do with the gentleman who always found time for William whenever the boy wandered around the coach.\n\nWilliam knew not to bother the passengers. Most men and women traveling overland only did so to get to their destination without much fuss. But four to five hours inside a stifling coach during the summer made people ornery.\n\nThey had to endure each other's company and odors until the fortunate break in the monotony that came with trading out the horses. So, William sometimes walked with the stablemen, leading the horses into the paddocks once they came off the harnesses attached to the coaches. It was a treat for William, and no one minded him trying to help.\n\nBut between three and four in the afternoon on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, William got more excited about helping because the stagecoach driver wasn't some grizzled curmudgeon who yelled at everyone. The man employed by the Overland Stage Company recently began driving the route that spring.\n\nHe was kindhearted, good-natured, and had more than a tolerance for William wandering around the carriages and horses. He actively greeted Sally's son with a proper handshake and showed no disinterest in stories William rambled on about other passengers and wagons that traveled through Woodland.\n\nIt was a rare sight for Sally to see a man taking an interest in her son. Most men took an interest in her, right up until she let them know her marital status. Then they typically wandered off to go about their business. Occasionally, some men considered her wedding band a sign of something to overcome.\n\nTraveling businessmen sometimes stayed overnight at the inn, expecting Sally to keep them company well into the night. But Sally never led them on or obliged them with anything more than kind words or sharp wit when they thought she was part of their purchase when it came to rooms and services.\n\n\"Hello, Mr. Laners,\" the driver said as he dismounted from the driver's box.\n\nHe took the time to shake hands with William before getting the horses ready for changes. Sally smiled at the driver when William ran off to tend to the horses. The stablemen, two Chinese men, hurried to unbuckle and get the horses out of the breeching dees, hame chains, and collars.\n\nSally counted twelve passengers, a full stagecoach. Some of them could only afford fares that allowed them to ride on the roof of the elegant carriage, not inside. Sally watched as the driver helped down his passengers from the top if they hesitated to disembark by themselves.\n\nShe smiled inwardly, watching the handsome gentleman with the shaggy mane of mahogany under the diamond top hat with the low curved brim. He had a day's growth of stubble on his chin when Sally saw him most days. It meant that he shaved on other days when she didn't see him. He wore a maroon shirt that resembled the color of the company carriage and dungarees.\n\nAs Sally approached the driver, he removed his gloves and hat. \"Afternoon, Mrs. Laners,\" he said. He ran his fingers through his hair. Dust came off him when he slapped his hat against his thigh.\n\n\"Good afternoon, Mr. Allen,\" she said, smiling. Felix Allen was always polite when he came through the area. Sally wished other drivers were as well-bred.\n\n\"Do you think we can get a team hooked up to the coach and bring over to the work shed?\" he asked. He led Sally to the carriage and pointed to the rear wheel. \"I got a loose brake I need to tighten up. I have some tools, but I'm curious if your workers might have a better solution.\"\n\n\"I can talk to them for you. We'll get some men to get the carriage over to the shop.\"\n\nWoodland had everything they needed to make minor repairs. Sally didn't have a forge, but a few of the laborers working on the property were adept at improvising and making necessary parts, sometimes out of scraps. Felix wasn't afraid to utilize the specialized tradesmen Sally employed. Some stagecoach drivers didn't like anyone else touching their carriages, but Felix liked the help, and he encouraged William to ask questions about the coach's operations.\n\n\"Can I get you some water and some lunch, Mr. Allen?\" she asked.\n\nWilliam helped lead the tired horses to the paddock, and Sally waved over one of the stablemen to explain what Felix needed. She saw a few of the passengers had wandered into the roadside inn while others went around the pathway to use the available outhouses.\n\n\"That is very kind, ma'am.\"\n\n\"It's never a problem for you,\" Sally said.\n\nSince Felix's coach arrived a little after three, the passengers had until four in the afternoon to get something to eat, freshen up if they were so inclined, and relax in the countrified surroundings with the shady oak trees. The passengers who ignored the stagecoach driver sometimes lost their seats because the coach calendars followed the mail delivery system.\n\nThey had to keep schedules to maintain the post office contracts. The Overland Stage Company received the awarded mail route between Marysville and Sacramento since Sally built Woodland. She knew it was one step closer to further expanding and developing the property.\n\nWagoners, cattlemen, and settlers all found their way to Woodland. Some stayed for a few days, some for an hour or two. Sally never had any problems with people passing through the area. All overnight guests abided by the strict house rules of no loud noises at night. The only stipulation that Sally maintained was the limit of spirits on the property. Sometimes, guests brought whiskey with them when they traveled. Sally didn't sell it, and it wasn't encouraged to share with fellow guests at the inn. Rarely, men broke the rules.\n\n\"Are you enjoying this route, Mr. Allen?\" Sally asked when she returned to the shop where Felix had rolled up his sleeves to work on the coach brakes. He accepted help from the Chinese laborers without a second thought. Sally liked Felix's easy-going nature.\n\nSally offered a slice of buttered bread and a cup of water. He wiped the dust and grime from his hands before accepting the bread.\n\n\"I think you got the best stage post I've visited since I've been an operator,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Have you been doing this a long time?\" she asked.\n\n\"I got started working for Mr. Henderson when I was fourteen.\"\n\n\"Wow, fourteen,\" William repeated when he appeared from in front of the carriage. \"That's only two more years older than me.\"\n\n\"Three years,\" Sally said.\n\n\"Ah, Mama, I got my birthday coming next week. Can't I fib this one time?\"\n\n\"Next week,\" Felix said. \"Well, I'll have to remember that. I'll bring you something special.\"\n\n\"Really?\" William's eyes turned into saucers as he beamed up at Felix.\n\n\"You don't have to do anything special, Mr. Allen,\" Sally said. She tried pulling at William's shirt collar to get it away from the carriage and Felix. But William managed to keep out of reach with every attempt.\n\n\"You were driving a carriage like this when you were fourteen?\" William asked.\n\n\"No, I started working in the factory in Stockton. I worked as an apprentice for a man named Elmer. I wasn't a driver until I was eighteen. Do you know what an apprentice is?\" Felix asked.\n\nSally watched as William gazed up at Felix with something akin to admiration. William didn't have a role model in his life. Many of the Chinese laborers Sally employed were not comfortable with William wandering around the property free-spirited. Sally didn't get into lengthy conversations with the immigrants, but the lack of women and children with them made her suspect they had families who missed them somewhere.\n\nSally saw a man who got to make his own choices throughout his life. Felix turned stagecoach driver at the same age Sally got pregnant with William. There they were twelve years later, and Felix still had a passion for carriage driving.\n\nWhen William shook his head, Felix explained, \"I had to listen to everything Elmer told me about building carriages. He showed me everything I needed to know about how they operated. I had to put them together from the ground up.\"\n\nWilliam stood very still, listening to Felix. Sally saw how Felix had enthralled her son with a few words about his past. Sally paid attention to Felix's story because it gave her a glimpse into his character.\n\n\"It takes long hours and a lot of work to be an apprentice,\" Felix said.\n\n\"I could do it,\" William said. \"I'm going to drive a mail coach when I get bigger.\"\n\n\"You're plenty big now,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Am I big enough to drive?\" he asked eagerly.\n\n\"Well, maybe,\" Felix said. He glanced at Sally to make sure she approved of the conversation.\n\n\"William sometimes leads the horse when we take the wagon into town for provisions,\" Sally said.\n\n\"Yeah, I get to hold the reins,\" William said. \"Mama lets me walk the horse. But we don't got a whip like that one. Mama doesn't like when some men use the whip on the horses.\" He had pointed to the horsewhip that stood upright in a sheath on the driver's box.\n\nSally saw that Felix had the whip most reinsmen carried. She knew all about the use of the whip on the horse teams. But when Felix climbed up the step to retrieve the hickory-handled whip for William to get a better look, she expected him to talk about how horses needed a good whipping sometimes to show the animal who was in charge.\n\nInstead, Felix said, \"I never had to use my whip on a horse.\"\n\n\"Not once?\" William asked. \"There are a lot of horses with scars on them that come through sometimes. Mama says it's from getting whipped. I never been whipped either. If it leaves scars like that, I don't want to get whipped, ever.\"\n\n\"I've seen horses like that,\" Felix said. There was a surprising tenderness to his tone. He held the well-oiled strap loose against the ornamental handle. William continued to look at the whip in Felix's hand but knew better than touch it. \"I find if I can't get a horse to do what I want it to, I poke them with the end of the whip, but I don't use it on them. They know their jobs. They were apprentices, just like I was when I started.\"\n\nWilliam laughed. \"Horses can't be apprehences,\" he said.\n\n\"Apprentices,\" Sally said, correcting her son. \"And I think what Mr. Allen means is that young horses learn from older horses when they're first harnessed to the rest of the team.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" Felix said, smiling at her. Sally felt her face flush. \"So, maybe next week, I'll let you climb up in the driver's box. I'll let you be my shotgun messenger while we switch out the horses if that's okay with your mother.\"\n\n\"Can I, Mama?\" William asked.\n\nSally couldn't think of a better gift for a twelve-year-old boy on his birthday. Felix's offer was a lot better than what she intended for William. She had knitted him a few pairs of winter socks and new mittens. But a few minutes in the sacred driver's box was a memory William could keep forever.\n\n\"I don't think that will be a problem at all.\" Sally smiled again at Felix, which was easy to do. Her heart lightened when Felix spoke to William with seriousness.\n\n\"Now, young man, it is imperative \u2014 that means very important \u2014 that between now and then, you listen to your mother and do whatever she asks without giving her fuss,\" Felix said. His thick brown eyebrows knitted as he added, \"If I get a report from your mother that you misbehaved, I don't know if I can let you ride on the carriage without you listening.\"\n\n\"I will,\" William said. \"Do I get to use the whip too?\"\n\n\"No, son,\" Sally said. \"No one ever touches a driver's whip. I've told you that before.\"\n\n\"I don't mind,\" Felix said. He presented the whip to William.\n\nBefore the little boy took it from Felix's open palm, he looked at his mother. Sally had never met a man like Felix. She nodded with amazement. When William took the whip handle, Sally saw the sparkles in her son's eyes.\n\nThe boy had minimal features to his father but had similar characteristics to his grandfather, which Sally appreciated. It meant that looking at William didn't remind her of Morris. Instead, she saw attributes of a man who had died too young but meant the world to Sally.\n\nFelix and William stepped out of the work barn, and Felix gently turned William so he couldn't hurt anyone if he started swinging the whip.\n\n\"Now, that's a special whip,\" Felix said. \"I got that from a great man named Cleveland McDowell. But no one called him by his Christian name. He taught me everything there was to know about being a stagecoach driver. He went by the name Old Ephraim.\"\n\nWilliam listened to Felix as the tall man stood beside her son while Sally watched them together. It was everything she had wanted for William but never got from Morris. Felix guided William's hand on the handle.\n\n\"Now, a good driver will know that whipping a horse isn't necessary,\" Felix said. \"Eventually, you might find yourself in a bad way with a horse if they think you're going to be mean to them all the time. It's like a dog ready to bite someone because they get kicked around.\" Felix turned and flicked his wrist, still holding William's hand.\n\n\"Now, Old Ephraim showed me the best way to get a horse to move was to poke them like I said, or snap that whip next to their ear. It's loud and gets their attention. If I have to do it, it's usually only once to get the team in line.\"\n\nWilliam couldn't snap it. But Sally knew it was attention and just holding the whip that was special to her son.\n\n\"I need to get back to working on those brakes, Mr. Laners,\" Felix said. He held out his hand for William to give back the whip. \"Maybe next week, if you listen to your mother, I'll let you use the whip again, as long as it's okay with Mrs. Laners.\"\n\nShe nodded and sniffled. Morris had never spent any time with his son.\n\n\"Can you snap it?\" William asked once he handed over the whip.\n\n\"I don't know. I don't want to scare anyone around here.\"\n\n\"We get drivers here that like to show off sometimes,\" Sally said. It wasn't preferred, but better than anyone shooting their rifles or pistols for no reason.\n\n\"Well, stand over there with your mother,\" Felix said.\n\nHe stepped away from Sally and William. A few passengers took an interest in Felix stretching the whip to its full length, letting it nestle on the dirt like a thin braided snake in the sunshine. He took another look around to make sure there wasn't anyone or anything close to the strike zone. Anticipating the noise, William held his hands over his ears and quivered with excitement standing beside Sally.\n\nFelix's arm moved so fast that Sally didn't see it. But the crack that came off the end of the flayed strap was as loud as a gunshot. People flinched and ducked at the sound. William squealed with glee. The whip snap continued to echo off the nearby hills as Felix returned the whip to the carriage.\n\n\"That was louder than anything I heard before,\" William said.\n\nFelix laughed and turned his finger inside his right ear. \"Yeah, that was a lot louder than I thought it'd be. Sorry about that.\"\n\n\"That was very impressive, Mr. Allen.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am,\" he said and returned to fixing the brakes.\n\nWhen it was time for the overland stagecoach to head out of Woodland, Sally made sure William stayed out of the way. The passengers climbed aboard. The extra spry young men climbed on top of the high coach roof.\n\n\"Maybe next time I see you, Mr. Laners, I'll tell you the time Old Ephraim and I got held up by Black Bart,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Now, you're fibbing,\" Sally said. She didn't mind when people told stories, but William tended to believe everything he heard.\n\n\"It's true, ma'am,\" Felix said. He reached into his pocket and removed a small leather purse.\n\nHe opened and gently removed a folded piece of scrap paper. He handed it to Sally. The expectant look on Felix's face showed that he cared for the article like it was a treasure. She carefully unfolded it and read. It was a poem. It had a signature like she had seen lithographed in a few newspapers.\n\n\"This is real?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" he said. \"Black Bart held up Old Ephraim outside Stockton and Copperopolis. Now, we think he got turned around because he expected us to have a carriage full of gold. Instead, we had two brand new carriages from Mr. Henderson's factory that we took up to some wealthy miner.\"\n\n\"That is astounding,\" Sally said. She watched as Felix tucked the paper back into the rigid leather pouch and put it in his pocket.\n\n\"I keep it for good luck,\" he said. He shook hands with William again before climbing up to the driver's box. Felix nodded and touched the brim of his hat. \"Good to see you again, Mrs. Laners.\"\n\nSally watched as Felix pulled the reins and guided the horses back out the gate. He whistled through his teeth to encourage the team of horses to pick up their gaits. Felix's whistle echoed off the nearby mountains." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nThe new route from Sacramento to Marysville gave Felix a little time, each way, to spend with Mrs. Sally Laners. He liked the four-hour ride leaving Woodland because it gave him more time to think about how Sally looked on a given day. That day was special because Sally looked exceptionally pretty with her rose pink floral prairie dress. Felix liked Sally's simplicity with the handmade apparel with the drop waist yoke, button front bodice, and flounce skirt.\n\nSally wore black boots that sometimes showed when the wind blew across the courtyard. Sally's prominent turquoise eyes gave way to an average perky nose over a thin upper lip and fuller bottom lip. Felix liked her heart-shaped face and pronounced cheekbones that sometimes squished her blue-green eyes when she laughed. In the summer sunshine, Sally's cheeks and nose sprouted freckles.\n\nShe sometimes wore a round top hat with a wide brim. Other times, Sally wore her gingerbread-colored hair pulled back at the sides and braided at the back. Sally was a beautiful woman that the men talked about for some time together on top of the carriage.\n\nFelix didn't include himself in the conversation. Most of the passengers didn't talk to the driver, and that suited Felix. Most stagecoach drivers had reputations as bitter, foul-mouthed quarrelsome men who liked shouting at people and whipping horses.\n\nOld Ephraim had a reputation that carried on the tradition. But Felix considered himself a man that did the best job he could, and sometimes that meant talking to passengers in tones more favorable than shouting and cussing.\n\nEvery time Felix saw Sally, his heart fluttered. But he understood that a married woman with a child had moral obligations that he wasn't interested in imposing upon. Felix had never met Sally's husband, but that didn't mean anything.\n\nMen spent most days away working hard and returning after nightfall. Since Felix had a different overnight route leaving Marysville or stayed in Sacramento to haul passengers across town, he never met Mr. Laners. Sally took care of the business, and Felix enjoyed her company.\n\nHe didn't want to ruin their new friendship by getting to know Sally's husband. Men saw other men as competition or troublemakers. Felix had no romantic intentions, but her beauty drew a lot of attention from other men. Her husband likely knew his wife had many admirers, but the man's constant absence didn't bother Felix.\n\nOnce he dropped off the passengers at the stage depot that night, Felix took the carriage back to the Overland Stage Company stables, where two stablemen took care of the horses.\n\n\"Can you have someone look at the brakes on that carriage,\" Felix said when he collected his satchel from the cubby under the driver's box. Felix took his whip. \"I had to replace the rub blocks on this one.\" He pointed out the modifications that were temporary at best.\n\n\"Sure thing, Mr. Allen,\" the stableman said. \"You need to go to the office and see Mr. Reese.\"\n\n\"I need to get a bath and some food,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Mr. Reese told us to make sure you go see him as soon as you got in tonight.\"\n\n\"It's after nine; I doubt he's in the office this late.\"\n\nThe stableman shrugged. \"He told us to tell you, sir.\"\n\n\"That's right,\" the other added.\n\nIt was a few blocks to walk on sore feet with an aching back. Felix set out to hike across the busy streets on Tuesday night. He didn't have to go. There was a reason stagecoach operators had reputations as difficult men. They followed the rules when it came to their routes and expected everyone else to follow directions. If something disrupted their schedules, they had obligations to the post office or owners of the carriages. There was a lot of money involved in managing and operating a stagecoach business.\n\nFelix liked being a part of it. Old Ephraim considered himself as a spoke in a wagon wheel. Without him, the coach didn't roll. His mentor wouldn't go to the office that late at night. Old Ephraim typically found some food, paid for a whore, and maybe took a bath every few days. Felix remembered sometimes the flies buzzed Old Ephraim more than the horses.\n\nYet, Felix felt Old Ephraim put on a show for the passengers and the owners. Mr. Henderson never had an unkind word to say about Old Ephraim. They spoke to each other cordially. But if someone had asked Old Ephraim to do something outside of his scheduled time, he wouldn't do it unless bonus money was involved. And sometimes, he wouldn't do it out of spite, keeping up the reputation.\n\nWhen Felix knocked on the office door, he saw the standing clock inside showed the time was ten minutes to ten. Someone had left the small lantern burning on one of the desks. Felix knocked again and was ready to go to the hotel when Charlie Reese walked out from a doorway leading to the back door. Charlie had a smile for Felix when he unlocked the door.\n\n\"Come in, Felix. Did you have a good trip?\" Charlie asked. He locked the door behind Felix. \"Have a seat. Can I get you a whiskey? I was about to have some tea. I planned on waiting for you as long as it took.\"\n\nFelix sat down and listened as Charlie spoke rapidly and asked overlapping questions too fast to answer. Once in the chair, Felix felt fatigue begin seeping into his joints and muscles. Stagecoach driving was a young man's game. Felix had held the reins for the last twelve years. At thirty years old, he knew the miles wore down his hands and spine, and the weather took its toll on his joints and muscles.\n\nOld Ephraim was thirty-nine when he handed over his whip to Felix. He had looked like an old man with sun-bleached whiskers and leathery hands and face. Old Ephraim stooped when he walked and sometimes had to wait a minute or two after climbing off the driver's box to walk away.\n\nFelix didn't want that kind of life. He had fulfilled his ambition. He had conquered the dreams of a fourteen-year-old boy. But that was a lifetime ago, and Felix began thinking about the next twelve years, hoping it didn't include transporting people to fulfill their aspirations while Felix wasted away out in the elements.\n\n\"I'll have tea if you got more,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Sure, yes, of course,\" Charlie said. He waved to Felix to follow him through the doorway leading to another part of the office.\n\nThe windowless room had a pantry, potbelly stove, and cases full of books and carriage parts. Charlie Reece ran the satellite office for Henderson's factory. Mr. Henderson had sense enough to ensure a representative was in each hub location wherever the Overland Stage Company had destinations. Working with local government officials, federal government people, and Post Office Department workers kept Henderson's stagecoach company lucrative. He wanted to have representatives available and hired local businessmen in each city.\n\nCharlie used the same infuser with loose leaf tea in both cups. Felix got the weaker blend, but that was fine for him. He sipped the tepid tea and waited for Charlie to explain why he needed to see Felix that late at night.\n\n\"I need you to take a coach back to Vallejo for us tonight,\" Charlie said.\n\nInside Felix's head, he could hear Old Ephraim cussing and sputtering. Instead of following in the old man's footsteps, Felix felt it was an excellent chance to express interest in making a move within the company. He hadn't worked for Charlie long, but Felix trusted Henderson. He suspected that anyone working for the factory was an upstanding merchant.\n\n\"That's more than fifteen hours from here by coach,\" Felix said. \"Even without staying a full hour at the stage stops, I never did that run. And I never took the trail at night. So, it could take longer for me, Mr. Reese.\"\n\n\"That works fine for us, Mr. Allen. You can even find a place to stay for a few hours if you needed. But it would be best if you left here by midnight. The coach needs to be in Vallejo by midnight tomorrow. That should give you more than enough time to reach the city.\"\n\n\"Mr. Reece, it's not my business,\" Felix said. He knew Old Ephraim would be fit to be tied if Charlie gave him a task with a deadline he wasn't used to. \"Why the urgency?\" he asked instead of listening to his mentor's phantom voice shouting in his head.\n\n\"Well, it's not the coach that needs delivering, Mr. Allen. It's the cargo.\"\n\n\"I don't have a messenger with me on this route, Mr. Reece. I haven't worked with a messenger that I don't know personally. Hauling something valuable puts me in a vulnerable spot without someone traveling with me.\"\n\n\"Well, as it happens, you won't be alone. A man named Leo Griffith will ride in the coach with the cargo. He'll be armed.\"\n\n\"Does he work for the post office?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Let's not bring in labels here, Mr. Allen. It doesn't matter the business Mr. Griffith has. What's important is getting him to the train platform in Vallejo before midnight tomorrow. Can you do it?\"\n\n\"What about my other route?\" Felix asked. \"I'm supposed to take the northbound passage out of here. I don't go back south until the day after tomorrow.\"\n\nCharlie's face knitted up in frustration. \"I wouldn't ask you to do this. Normally, I have my regular errand driver take the special runs. But Mr. Kelly had another obligation that he couldn't miss.\"\n\nFelix nodded. Raymond Kelly had a reputation that made Old Ephraim appear warm and fuzzy. He was a hard-nosed driver who had physically removed passengers from his carriages on more than one occasion if they sassed him. He was like a fart lingering in a closed room long after someone had left it. No one wanted to be around him.\n\n\"This is a special consideration that deserves better compensation,\" Charlie said. \"You'll get $100 for your time. That should make you feel better about missing the other route tomorrow. I can get someone else to cover that, don't worry about it.\"\n\nFelix had a monthly salary from Overland Stage Company of $124. The additional funds weren't something to pass on lightly. But it was a good opportunity for Felix to address his prospects for advancement in the company.\n\n\"Sure, I can do it for you, Mr. Reece,\" he said.\n\n\"Oh, thank God.\"\n\n\"I would like the opportunity to talk to you about getting back to Stockton to meet Mr. Henderson.\"\n\nCharlie looked worried. \"Why do you need to speak to Mr. Henderson?\"\n\n\"Well, I'd like to get back to working in the factory, perhaps. Or maybe working in one of the satellite offices, like this,\" Felix said.\n\nHe saw Charlie's face change from worry to surprise and finally settle on suspicion. Felix suspected the man thought he wanted to take over the position in Marysville, but Felix had no intention of taking Charlie's job.\n\n\"I could work anywhere Mr. Henderson needed someone. I'm willing to go wherever he needs me.\"\n\nCharlie's face smoothed over again. There was smugness about him as he leaned back and sipped the tea. He lifted his head slightly. Felix got the impression the man looked down on Felix because he drove carriages for a living. It was a thankless profession, not well respected. People on the outside of the industry didn't fully appreciate what it took to be a stagecoach operator.\n\nFelix saw how Charlie's confidence filled him as he sipped from the teacup. \"Running an office like this takes a certain kind of man,\" Charlie said. \"It takes an educated man. I can send a telegram to Mr. Henderson and let him know you're interested in furthering your employ, but let's face it, Mr. Allen.\" He took a breath, finished the tea, and put down the cup.\n\n\"You don't have what it takes to do what I do.\" He stood and nodded at Felix. \"I'll tell Mr. Griffith you'll take him. You have a few hours before you leave. Do whatever it is that you do,\" Charlie said, swishing his hand at Felix. They walked to the front of the office, where Charlie opened the door for Felix. \"You're a good man, Mr. Allen. I will be sure to let Mr. Henderson know you're a valuable asset to the company.\"\n\n\"What about my money?\" Felix asked before Charlie closed the door between them. It wasn't him asking. It was the mental monster, Old Ephraim coming out of Felix's mouth. He deserved payment upfront for the change in routes.\n\n\"Your money?\" Charlie repeated with a hint of skepticism.\n\n\"Yes, I'd like my $100 now.\"\n\n\"You'll receive your payment in Vallejo when you transport your cargo safely.\"\n\nThe door closed and locked. He saw Charlie rushing around inside the office, gathering his coat and hat before turning down the light. Felix wandered back to the stables cussing under his breath. He wanted a bath. He needed something to eat.\n\nBut all he could think about was how Charlie saw him as a blunt object instead of a company benefit. Felix had ambition and talent. He knew it took dedication and hard work to do a good job. He needed to tell Charlie that, but it was too late. And the man saw what he wanted to see in Felix. He didn't see Felix as a company man, only a paid servant.\n\nFelix knew he needed to get in front of Mr. Henderson again if he wanted to do more than just drive coaches until his knees buckled, his back hunched, and his knuckles swelled with the cold weather.\n\nHe just received the new route, and it was nice seeing Sally every other day of the week. He wondered if driving over the next ten years would bring them closer together. One thing Felix knew for sure: he'd eventually meet Sally's husband. And he wasn't looking forward to that moment.\n\nHe allowed himself some excitement at the prospect of staying a few hours at Woodland. Felix could get a bath at the inn. If Mr. Griffith complained about staying too long at the stage stop, Felix could muster some encouraging words Old Ephraim taught him when dealing with difficult passengers. It occurred to Felix that maybe stagecoach drivers all started like he did, na\u00efve and cocksure. They had the determination and believed in the oath. But in the end, the miles and weather made them jaded. It was a young man's adventure and an old man's curse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nAfter Felix left Woodland with the afternoon stagecoach, Sally watched William running through the compound with bubbling delight. He wandered into the nearby copse of trees and emerged with a sapling that was long and thin. He presented it to Sally like Felix had presented the horsewhip to William.\n\nWhen William asked to turn the stick into a whip, Sally was apprehensive, but William had conviction when he promised not to chase the chickens or switch the horses with it. One of the Chinese laborers took time to wrap the handle with linen and extended the end of the sapling with a thin hemp rope braid. It was the kind of attention Sally appreciated from the men working on the property.\n\nShe didn't understand their language, but they were respectful and always showed kindness to William. Sally demanded as much from her son too. She saw him give the elderly a slight bow, mimicking what William saw between the others. Sally welcomed the interaction. She didn't need someone around telling her that mixing cultures was unhealthy. She saw what happened when a country got divided about traditions.\n\nThe Chinese laborers were eclectic only because their customs varied from how she was brought up. But growing up in Marysville with an abundant Chinese immigrant population, seeing William acting respectfully toward the gentleman made Sally confident that the interaction didn't corrupt his morals. He grew up closer to many of them because there wasn't much else to do in Woodland when they weren't catering to the passersby.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, there are men outside waiting,\" Hop Chang said when he emerged in the doorway of the inn's kitchen.\n\nHearing his voice startled Sally because she had been working side by side with the Chinese women, cooking dinner for the overnight guests. She had three travelers headed north. Two men in a wagon headed south. One man on horseback went north. She wasn't expecting another coach the rest of that night.\n\n\"Oh, thank you, Mr. Chang,\" she said, quickly recovering from his sudden appearance and loud voice. He smiled, gave Sally a slight bow, and retreated from the kitchen.\n\nThe women spoke in hushed dialogue. Mostly, they didn't talk around Sally because it wasn't their tradition. They had far fewer opportunities talking in their homes because of customs. As a woman, Sally understood the tribulations that came with the responsibility. The three women in the kitchen with Sally were dedicated cooks and house servants. Their husbands were table waiters and worked at the front counter.\n\nSally never had to train anyone on their duties. Everyone knew exactly what needed doing. Often, they got to work before Sally and worked later than she could, even with her long hours and very little sleep. It was the same for the other laborers who lived and worked at Woodland. They had carved out a home in the background of the sometimes-bustling stage stop.\n\nThey kept to themselves in the tents and cabins on the outskirts of the property. Whenever Sally had a guest passing through that was ill, a traditional Chinese remedy sometimes found its way into her hands. They were reliable and resourceful. Sally never had to worry about tending the gardens or milking the goats and the few cows they had on the property. There was an abundant pig herd several hundred yards from the main bunkhouses and Laners Inn. They tended the drifts and passels, separating the males and females. They took care of castration and the killing.\n\nHog farming was a messy and necessary commodity. The chickens and ducks were plentiful on the property and took care of the ticks in the area, which helped keep the rest of the livestock healthy. Woodland was a thriving stage stop that many repeat visitors appreciated and looked forward to in their travels.\n\nSally had allowed the Chinese laborers to sell trinkets and baubles to the traveling passengers. She never got involved with the haggling, as long as it wasn't too pricy. They kept any money made with the transactions. She paid everyone $10 a month and gave them free board, even the women, which she knew was some contention with some of the laborers.\n\nThey got one day off a week but rarely took any time off. They were artists and craftsmen. They had skills well beyond taking care of the inn, milking, and tending to the livestock. They were manufacturers and gardeners. Sally knew she owed much of the success to the tireless labor force and men like Hop Chang.\n\nSally removed her apron and hung it on a hook before leaving the kitchen. She had to get away from the aromatic foods because Sally sometimes found herself snacking and overindulging. The pastries and confections made by her cooks were intoxicating and rich. No one needed a nip of brandy or whiskey when she had sweet rice balls, black sesame soup, or egg tarts.\n\nSally pulled at the hair sticks that kept her hair out of the way. They were a gift from one of her female workers. She cherished them. They were helpful when Sally didn't want to spend a long time with her hair. It was easier to sweep it up and to the back, held in place with sticks.\n\nShe had removed the braid after Felix left earlier that day. Trying to look pretty wasn't too high on Sally's list most days, but whenever the new driver for Overland Stage Company came through, she liked putting some added touches to make herself more presentable.\n\nOutside, William continued to use his makeshift whip. The sapling had no weight, and the hemp rope was harmless. He knew to stay away from anyone and all the animals.\n\nFour men had arrived: two on horseback, two in a buggy. Over the years, Sally got familiar with different types of wagons and carriages. She knew money when she saw it. The new buggy came out of California. It wasn't a Henderson Concord and wasn't designed for long trips, but they had used it to reach Woodland without much trouble along the way.\n\n\"Good evening, gentlemen,\" Sally said, smiling. \"Welcome to Woodland. Can I have someone get your horses cooled off and watered?\"\n\n\"That would be splendid,\" one said from the buggy. He climbed out and stretched.\n\nThey wore expensive suits. Three of them wore frock jackets and sack coats, the fourth on horseback wore a black canvas duster. He also wore a slim black gambler hat and a smile under a waxed mustache for her. The other three had bowler hats and various fashionable facial hair, from muttonchops to full beards, and one had a Van Dyke beard with its regal goatee. Sally didn't care for the style because she had a tribe of goats, and several of the male goats wore the same design without the fuss of visiting barbers.\n\n\"Tell us, how did you get this stop so immaculate?\"\n\n\"I owe much of this to my helpers.\" Sally waited while the two men dismounted from their horses. \"We'll have the horses watered for you.\"\n\nWithout having to ask, Sally saw Lee and Don hurried to the compound center and led the three horses to the barn.\n\nThey weren't out of earshot when one of the men sniffed and said, \"Yes, we noticed you have an abundance of Chinamen on the property.\"\n\nSally knew better than to say anything that didn't align with the man's disdain. Instead, she decided on a redirect. \"So, where are you headed today, gentlemen? Are you planning to stay overnight? We have fresh linen and the best hot baths this side of Marysville.\"\n\n\"Oh? Yes, a hot bath would be splendid.\" It was the second time the man used the word, and Sally bit her tongue. He had put on airs. His pretentiousness was the kind of charade some men used trying to impress her. \"We will stay the night.\"\n\nIt wasn't a question. None of the other men seemed surprised by the statement. Three of them continued to scan the property, looking at the various flower gardens, the stone walls, and wooden fences. Sally had spent just as many hours as her workforce creating the perfect rest stop for weary travelers. She didn't have to tout its heavenly appeal. Woodland spoke for itself.\n\n\"I will have supper ready for you, gentlemen. You're welcome to follow me inside to get registered.\" Sally turned from them, but they huddled together, ignoring her. She waited and glanced back to see how they pointed to various buildings and the outlying territory. She decided to wait for them on the steps of the public house.\n\nAll around her, the laborers were busy with the nightly routines and chores. Everyone kept busy and out of the way. Many more of them kept out of sight. Sally tucked her hands in front of her and attempted to look expectant but wasn't in the mood to be overly friendly when they had already insulted her helpers.\n\nWilliam ran across the compound, flicking the pretend horsewhip in the air. He hopped and held phantom reins like a stagecoach Jehus headed downhill and into an adventure. The men watched him, amused by William's childhood bliss.\n\n\"Mama, can I go to the pond and\u2014\" William started.\n\n\"It's time for supper,\" Sally said, quickly derailing William's overactive plans. Sometimes he needed an immediate cut-off from the stream of words that came out like fizz from a shook-up bottle of ginger beer. \"You need to go wash up and sit down. Have Mrs. Jung fix you something. I need to make sure these gentlemen have everything they need for the evening.\"\n\n\"Are they staying?\" William asked.\n\nHe liked when men stayed overnight. Sometimes they spent time in the lounge, with the firelight, and played cards or told stories. Anything that broke up the daily routines for William was exciting for him. Sally had to gauge many of the guests. Some were more tolerant than others when it came to having a child around.\n\n\"They are staying, but it is best you keep out of the way.\"\n\n\"Aw,\" William said, started to whine but immediately hushed when he saw his mother's glaring stink eye. He knew better than cause a fuss when she had business.\n\n\"Go inside, but leave your whip on the veranda, please.\"\n\nWilliam coiled the rope around the sapling shaft and leaned it in the corner behind the rocking chair. He went around Sally and inside the inn. Sally continued waiting for the four men to join her. When they discussed something in the small group, Sally stepped off the porch and wandered across the yard. The man in the duster watched her walk into the barn.\n\n\"The gentlemen are staying for the night. You can pull their saddles and unharness their horse,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes,\" Lee said with a slight bow.\n\nDon had already pulled the saddles from the horses. Lee got the other horse out from the buggy. When Sally went to grab the leather suitcases inside the buggy, Lee stopped what he was doing to retrieve the bags.\n\n\"You don't have to do that, Mr. Lee.\" Sally didn't know if it was his surname or Christian name. They were private and respectful people but not friendly enough to have long conversations about their families or homelands.\n\n\"It is good,\" he said. \"I got the bags.\" English was secondary to all of the laborers. Lee's English was better than others. Many of them used others as interpreters when they had questions for Sally.\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Lee.\"\n\nDon continued to work with the horses. Sally knew each of the animals was in for a better night than they probably got at other stalls. Don and a few of the other stablemen brushed the horses and made sure their shoes were tight. Sometimes, they groomed the animals or washed them when the road dust clotted on their muzzles and around their eyes.\n\nLee followed Sally back out of the barn. The four men continued to have a private conversation in the middle of the compound, showing no urgency to get inside. It was a lovely end to a nice day, and Sally returned to the porch to wait patiently. The sky to the west had purple streaks that fanned out over the mountaintops. To the northeast, black clouds began a slow creep over the horizon. They'd get rain before dawn.\n\nShe didn't see any of the chickens or ducks wandering the barnyard or paddock. That meant someone anticipated the rain too and had already herded the fowl into their coops for the night. The goats were bedded down in their lean-tos while the horses had coverage in the paddock and the stalls. Sally had contracts with the Overland Stage Company and the post office to care for and feed their horses. Chinese farmers well managed the animals at Woodland.\n\nFinally, the four men walked the gravel path to the steps leading inside. Sally stood with a smile for them.\n\n\"I can have hot bathwater drawn and ready for you,\" she said. \"Supper is available, and there are clean sheets on all the beds. Welcome, gentlemen.\" Sally moved to open the door, but Mr. Jung held it. Jung's specialty was inside. He had an injury that gave him a limp, but it didn't affect his ability to move around or help guests with their needs.\n\nLee had carried the bags inside and left them on a small side table near the front desk. The scent of roast duck and fresh bread filled the lobby. She saw the change in the men as they made their way inside, one at a time. The man in the duster was last and had removed his hat.\n\nWhen he shrugged out of his duster, Lee retrieved it, gathering each of their coats and hats. He hung them respectfully on the door side hooks and coat rack.\n\nWilliam peeked out at Sally from the end of the hallway near the kitchen. There was a small servant room with a table and chairs where they had supper and breakfast together. Sally and William never shared table space with any of the laborers because there was some cultural divide that Sally didn't understand. It wasn't her choice to dine alone with William, but she respected their customs.\n\n\"I'm Sally Laners, gentlemen. You are welcome to any of our accommodations. Please let me know if there is something extra we can get for your rooms. I will have someone show you to the bathhouse and other necessities,\" she said. It was a routine that sometimes got tiresome, but Sally believed much of her success came through the gossip of travelers. It meant she did her best to keep up appearances even when she got lonely or tired.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners?\" one asked. He was the upstart with the attitude toward her laborers.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said.\n\n\"My name is Scott Russell,\" he started and introduced the others. \"This is Mr. Quinn, Mr. McCoy, and Mr. Peterson.\"\n\nOne by one, they shook Sally's hand and added their Christian names with each handshake. Peterson's light handshake lingered as he gave Sally some version of a smoldering look. She abided the attention without any flirtatious behavior.\n\n\"We've been admiring the view and the upkeep of the property,\" Steve McCoy said. He had hazelnut-colored hair and dark brown muttonchops. It was a contrast from the hair on his head, but Sally didn't judge a character by their appearance.\n\n\"Well, we've done our best to make Woodland stand out,\" she said. She used we in the formal context because Sally didn't make the place respectable by herself and believed in giving credit where it was due.\n\n\"It is a very nice touch seeing the namesake over the entrance,\" Eddie Peterson said. His Van Dyke facial hair had wax to help keep its shape. But sometimes, men's hair products were better at collecting dust than grooming. His beard had grit while he smiled at her. \"This is a wonderful staging post that we've heard about.\"\n\n\"Oh? You've heard of Woodland?\" Sally liked when strangers knew about the place before they arrived. It meant others talked about it. She never had to purchase an advert in any of the newspapers that made their way through the mail coaches. \"It's getting better every day. We do our best to make sure everyone finds comfort when they come through here.\"\n\n\"You've been here for how long now?\" Steve McCoy asked. He wore his hair parted to the right, oiled and plated to his scalp. It left a vast high dome above his eyes like a waxing gibbous moon.\n\n\"Well, let's see, my husband purchased the property in '67. We've been developing it ever since then. So, nine years now.\" Sally sighed. It was modestly profitable as long as Sally didn't take more than she needed for supplies. She did her best to save coins every month. She wanted to set aside something for the future if the area never grew beyond the stagecoach stop.\n\n\"Yes, where is your husband, Mrs. Laners?\" Bob Quinn asked. He had the least amount of facial hair but more hair on his head, stuck to his scalp with oils. The fragrance of liniment oil and pomade almost overwhelmed the roast duck and baked bread. \"We saw his name on the property deed.\"\n\nSally's heart fluttered at the statement. She felt a rush of heat pour through her. \"The property is free of any loans with the banks. We paid off the debt four years ago.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, there's nothing to worry about. We're not here with the bank, Mrs. Laners,\" Russell said. \"My associates and I are with the California Pacific Railroad. We've been traveling a few of the stage routes to determine where to put down the next line.\"\n\nSally felt her sinuses sting with tears of joy, but she held back and kept from sniffling. Her hammering heart caused her to perspire, and she felt beads of sweat on her chest under the fabric. Sally kept up the appearance of indifference, but inside her head, she screamed with joy and jumped up and down. She had already danced a jig in her thoughts and kissed each of the four men on the mouth.\n\nSally cleared her throat and her head of the last image. \"The railroad?\" she asked innocently. \"Are you thinking of bringing the railroad through Woodland?\"\n\n\"Well, we're still looking at other routes,\" McCoy said. \"Don't get too anxious about it.\"\n\n\"Prospects are favorable,\" Peterson said. His eyes scanned over Sally with no hesitation. \"We still need to do some surveying of the area before making our final determination.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Peterson and Mr. Quinn will need to stay here for a few days,\" Russell said. \"That reminds me; I left the cartography equipment in the wagon.\"\n\n\"It's alright, Mr. Russell. I will have someone collect anything you had in the buggy.\" Sally only had to glance at Lee, standing like a silent sentinel near the front desk. He immediately moved around the four men in the lobby and slipped out the front door.\n\n\"So, you have an abundance of Chinamen on the property, I see,\" Peterson said. \"Don't they get underfoot?\"\n\nSally's teeth clenched at the question. She smiled sweetly and said, \"I find them unquestionably dedicated to their tasks.\"\n\n\"They're filling up the harbor in San Francisco,\" McCoy said. \"The city is practically overrun with them.\"\n\n\"We've opened up ourselves to a surge of refugees with the end of the war. The blacks got their freedom, and sympathizers amended the Constitution to allow black men to vote,\" Quinn said. \"It won't be long before the Chinamen want the same privileges.\"\n\n\"Some of them in San Francisco are filthy foreign devils,\" McCoy added. \"I've seen them fighting over scraps like dogs. They'll eat anything. I've watched them dine on fish heads.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's ghastly,\" Quinn said.\n\nSally endured it. Her jaw muscles worked, but she averted her eyes when she saw Peterson staring at her reaction to the dialogue. Sally had sampled a traditional dish of fish head tofu soup. She found it flavorful. Some of the men caught bullhead and sunfish in the pond on the property. They never let anything go to waste.\n\n\"We run a very immaculate establishment, gentlemen. I can assure you that fish heads will not be on the menu this week,\" Sally said.\n\nThe men laughed.\n\nShe saw movement at the end of the hall. The others in the lobby didn't see Mrs. Chang retreating to the kitchen. William continued watching from the doorway at the end of the hall. He knew better than say anything.\n\n\"So, can I show you to the dining room or have someone take you to the bathhouse to wash up? I will have fresh water brought to your rooms.\"\n\nLee returned with the leather satchel, handed it with both hands to Russell with a slight bow, and backed away again. Sally let Lee know about the rooms, and he quietly disappeared again.\n\n\"Where is your husband, Mrs. Laners?\" Peterson asked.\n\n\"It will do us a world of good to have a conversation with him regarding the number of stagecoaches that pass through here. I assume he's kept records of the route traffic,\" Russell said.\n\n\"Oh yes, every wagon, coach, or rider that comes to Woodland, we like to keep tabs on,\" Sally said. \"We keep daily logs on the coaches. We have the schedules.\"\n\n\"You hold any contracts with the post office?\" Quinn asked.\n\n\"Those contracts are valuable to the railroad as well as the stage stop,\" Russell said. \"A few stations we've already visited don't have contracts.\"\n\n\"Oh, we have contracts with the post office, the Overland Stage Company, and Wells Fargo,\" Sally said.\n\n\"My, my, your husband has quite the enterprising business sense. That is splendid.\"\n\n\"Yes, well, we understood that to gain trust with the government, and to make ourselves favorable, we needed to show the companies that we were willing to do whatever it took to get Woodland on the map,\" Sally said.\n\n\"Is your husband going to join us for dinner?\" Quinn asked. \"Do you have something special, like a wine we could indulge?\"\n\n\"We don't carry any hard beverages, I'm afraid. Guests can bring them, but it's too much to manage with beer and whiskey taxes.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, the government does have greedy and overreaching hands, don't they,\" Russell said.\n\nSally saw William's one eye peeking out at her, listening to the group continue to ask about his father. She couldn't tell from the distance whether William was sad or just curious.\n\n\"I'll have supper brought out to the dining table, gentlemen. Mr. Jung will show you to your rooms.\"\n\nSally left the group in the lobby and walked down the narrow hallway. To the left was the closet room where she and William ate their supper. He hadn't touched his food.\n\n\"You need to sit down and eat,\" Sally said.\n\n\"They were talking about Papa,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, they were.\" Sally sighed and pursed her lips, watching William's expectant face. \"How do I explain to you that I need you not to bring up your father around those men?\"\n\n\"What do you mean? Do they know Papa?\"\n\n\"No, they don't know your father.\" Sally put her hands gently on William's shoulders as she looked into his caramel-colored eyes. \"They are from the railroad. They're here looking over the property. This means a lot to me, and I need you to stay away from them while they're here.\"\n\n\"Why, Mama?\"\n\n\"William, please, don't ask me a lot of questions about this. It is very important to me. Do you understand?\"\n\nWilliam bit his lip. He nodded. But Sally knew his little mind didn't fully process what she needed from him. She didn't have time to go into more detail, hoping to take up again once she put him to bed that night.\n\n\"Did you wash up?\"\n\n\"Yes, Mama,\" he said, rolling his eyes.\n\n\"Good.\" She combed his hair with her fingers. \"Sit down and eat. I will be back to join you in a few minutes.\"\n\nSally left William at the little table and closed the door. She went into the kitchen. \"Can you have someone set out plates for four guests, Mrs. Jung?\"\n\nJung's small round face smiled, and the woman bowed.\n\n\"This is one time I wish I had a bottle of whiskey stashed somewhere.\"\n\n\"Excuse me, Mrs. Laners,\" Mrs. Chang said. She stood beside Jung in the kitchen. \"There is Shaoxing wine.\"\n\nSally frowned. \"What wine?\"\n\n\"It is rice wine. Very good,\" Chang said, nodding quickly.\n\n\"Where did it come from?\" Sally asked. \"Can I get a bottle?\" There was a spark of unexpected luck.\n\n\"Mr. Chi and Mr. Dang make it,\" Chang said. \"It is very good.\"\n\nSally noticed the look of sheer terror molding on Jung's face with the admission of breaking the rules. Sally never had anyone on the property wandering around drunk. If they had wine with their dinners and it didn't affect their work, she willingly looked the other way.\n\n\"If you think it is good enough to serve the men from the railroad, I am glad to have it. Don't worry about thinking you needed to keep it a secret. I'm not angry with you. I trust you,\" she said and slipped away, feeling relieved.\n\n\"Now I have to figure out how to get Morris back here before they leave,\" she said. No one was close enough to hear her. She needed to say it aloud because it was an impossible feat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nFour men from the railroad plied with traditional high-proof Shaoxing wine and filled with roast duck, rice, vegetables, and soy milk pudding, were well under Sally's influence. She maintained the thoughtful and complimentary hostess during their supper that lasted from six until after nine.\n\nShe divided her time between having a bite to eat with William in the back room away from the men and listening to the banter get louder and cheerful as the night wore on. The rice wine was a blessing. The men drank the entire bottle, much to the horror on Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Jung's faces.\n\nWhen Sally joined them briefly in the kitchen, Jung said. \"That is no good.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"The wine, all gone,\" Jung said. She had learned much of her English from the others, including William when he had the patience to sit still long enough to help.\n\n\"Is that bad? Will they be alright?\"\n\n\"It is much wine. More wine than anyone drink at one time,\" Chang said. She shook her head in disbelief.\n\n\"Well, they won't get anymore. It won't make them go blind or kill them, will it?\" Sally asked. She knew homemade spirits sometimes turned lethal when mismanaged. Chang and Jung glanced at each other, and Jung shrugged lightly.\n\n\"They will be good,\" Chang said, nodding. But Sally had a hard time believing her after the way the women responded to the consumed bottle of spirits.\n\nSally needed to continue with her duties and hoped to pick up the pieces later. \"Mr. Peterson is interested in taking a bath. Can one of you make sure the bathwater is still hot? I'll go back in there and make sure none of them die on me tonight.\" Sally had meant it in humor, but Chang and Jung shared looks again that gave Sally more doubt. \"Oh, Lord,\" she whispered as she left the kitchen. She went through the door across the hallway. \"You need to get ready for bed.\"\n\n\"Oh, Mama, I can hear those men. Can't I stay up with them?\"\n\n\"Remember what I said earlier?\" she asked. Sally was exhausted from playing the consummate hostess and dancing around the topic of her absconded husband. The longer she could avoid it, Sally thought, eventually, she'd find some solution to his absence. She sighed and kissed his forehead. \"I need you to listen to me and do what I say.\"\n\nAnd then it occurred to her. \"Do you remember what Mr. Allen said to you about listening to what I say? Remember, he expects you to be on your best behavior.\" Sally made a face to show suspicion. \"What happens when he comes back and finds out that you didn't follow directions?\"\n\n\"Okay, Mama, I'll go.\" William hurriedly got out of the chair. Sally snagged him by the shirt before he could get out the door, wrapped her arms around him from behind, and kissed his head. \"Ugh, mister, you need a bath. It's too late now. But tomorrow, you will get a bath.\" She opened the door and walked behind him upstairs to the second floor. \"I will probably have to burn those sheets you're sleeping on tonight.\"\n\nWilliam giggled. He opened the door and lit the lantern.\n\n\"You smell like our goats,\" Sally said, squeezing her nose. \"Tomorrow, you need a bath. Make sure you wash up before bed.\"\n\n\"Can I draw tonight, Mama?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, you may.\" She collected the ink well and nib pen. Sally kept any scrap paper available because William needed to practice his penmanship, and sometimes drawing took him hours and gave her time to relax. She had paper and a pen for him. \"Please be careful. Don't spill the ink.\"\n\n\"I'm going to draw Mr. Allen on the stagecoach with Black Bart.\" It seemed like an overambitious undertaking, but William got settled at the small writing desk and dove right in.\n\n\"I'll be up as soon as I get everyone situated.\"\n\nWilliam didn't look up from the drawing. The tip of his tongue poked out of his lips as he was already lost with the bandit facing off with the strapping stagecoach operator. Sally closed the door to their room. They shared the space. In a year or two, he'd have to have his own room. Sally hoped they had additional space by then, or maybe something more aspiring for their home together.\n\nWhatever happened, Morris wasn't a part of it. He never sent word about his whereabouts. He never sent letters to his son. Another birthday would go by for William, and Morris had no interest. Sally didn't know if he was alive or dead.\n\nWhen he first left, some Chinese laborers got word among others as they followed the stagecoach trails and passed through Woodland. Sometimes they brought news about Morris. Mrs. Chang or Mr. Lee would tell Sally his whereabouts. But as the years went on, fewer Chinese laborers passed through the area, and none of them brought anything new about her reckless and irresponsible husband.\n\n\"Is there anything I can get you gentlemen before I retire for the evening?\" It was almost ten. Sally typically helped in the kitchen or laundry until late. She enjoyed a midnight bath from time to time. It helped her unwind, but all she wanted that night was to get upstairs before they asked about Morris again.\n\n\"If you could show me where the bath is, I would appreciate it.\" Peterson stood from the table, holding onto the back of the chair for a moment. The effects of Shaoxing wine worked through his system.\n\nHe followed Sally through the hallway to the side door that led to the bathhouse. It was a private space with a stone floor and two large steel tubs. Sally had indulged in the biggest tubs she could order through the catalog and had them shipped from Seattle. Whenever she got into the hot bathwater, she knew it was worth every penny and washed with homemade honey and jasmine soap.\n\nPeterson walked behind Sally through the hallway keeping his hands on the walls to guide the way. When Sally led him outside, cool nighttime air invigorated him to stand on his own. They had left three drunken men sitting at the dining room table. Red-faced and inebriated, they each had to find their way to their rooms. Peterson stumbled behind Sally.\n\nInstinctually, Sally turned and put her hand on his chest to keep him upright. He leaned on the wall outside the bathhouse. Around them, crickets roared in the grass and forest. Peterson looked down at Sally with hooded eyes in the dark, and she felt his hand snake around her waist.\n\nSally opened the door and stepped back. Peterson had to brace against the wall to keep from falling forward. He missed the step up to the floor inside and almost fell again. The room smelled like warm soap. Two lanterns inside illuminated the windowless space. The tub water steamed. The small steel fire pit under the bathtub kept the water hot without boiling.\n\n\"I believe, Mrs. Laners, that wine you gave us was powerful medicine,\" he said, his words running together.\n\nHe sat on the stool inside the bathhouse. There was enough space inside for a group of people. The male laborers bathed together, and the same went for the women. Sally bathed alone. By the look on Peterson's face, he expected company.\n\nIt took an effort for him to remove his boots, then the wool socks.\n\n\"I will close the door. Would you please take a moment and turn out the lights when you're done? There is fresh linen on the counter over there.\" Sally pulled the door.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, where is your husband?\" Peterson asked. He unbuckled the gun belt and draped it over the back of the chair. He stood watching Sally as he pulled the hem of his shirt from the waistband of his trousers.\n\n\"He's still working on some projects in the shop,\" Sally said quickly. It was a mistake. It implied that Morris was somewhere in the compound. It was the first time she had to lie about Morris' whereabouts. She knew it wouldn't be the last.\n\nUnabashedly, Peterson unbuttoned his shirt as he spoke.\n\n\"I am under the impression that your husband isn't nearby,\" he said. Peterson had a flat stomach, broad shoulders, and had some hair sprouting across his chest. He draped the shirt over the gun belt on the chair. \"In fact, I believe that your husband isn't around at all. Nor has he been for some time.\"\n\nSally swallowed the dust in her throat. It had been a very long time since she saw a man shirtless. It was impossible to forget and hard to turn away. Peterson wasn't unattractive, but he had a swagger about him that made Sally uncomfortable. His current state of undress suggested that marital stations weren't part of his personal interest.\n\n\"Morris is most certainly here, Mr. Peterson.\" Sally had to go on the defense. But she had to do it in a way that kept him from getting too angry with her.\n\nWoodland was at stake, and Sally had to keep focused. She was willing to do whatever it took to ensure the railroad company wanted to make Woodland a whistle-stop between Marysville and Sacramento. She'd do anything for Woodland, but she wouldn't do that. \"I do not appreciate what you're implying. And I think your current state of drunkenness makes you lack judgment when it comes to speaking to a married woman.\"\n\nSally had almost closed the door when Peterson spoke again.\n\n\"You do realize that if California Railroad decides to use Woodland as a stop, the contract needs to come through your husband.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am aware of that.\" Sally held the door handle as she stared inside again. Peterson stood near the tub. He leaned over and ran his fingertips through the water and hummed.\n\n\"You see, without your husband's signature on the contracts, we won't be able to move forward on putting a line down this side of the river.\" Peterson stood up again. Sally had to endure watching the muscles across his abdomen as he explained the deepening dilemma.\n\n\"Putting down miles of railroad tracks is time-consuming and costly. It takes months of preparation and several hundred men working together to put in the line.\" He stretched some and lifted his chin while Sally tolerated his narrow hips and refined naked torso. \"That doesn't include the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on steel and timber. And shipments,\" he said, shaking his head. \"All that investment so we can have over eighty miles of railroad track put down. But without your husband, we might have to bypass this place altogether.\"\n\n\"Mr. Peterson, I am well aware of what you're explaining. Morris and I have done everything to make Woodland appealing to travelers. I know if the railroad wanted to use our stagecoach stop as a station for a train, well, we would benefit, of course,\" Sally said. She had to swallow the chalk in her mouth. \"But don't think for a moment that it will make a difference to Morris or me if you decide to go a different direction. We will do our best to make Woodland prosper with or without the train.\"\n\nSally had almost got the door closed between them, but Peterson said, \"We'll have to discuss everything with your husband, Mrs. Laners. You understand this is a man's business.\" Peterson smiled at Sally peeking in on him again. \"We could perhaps work out some details if we needed.\"\n\nSally frowned but kept her mouth shut. Her lingering was uncharacteristic of her. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Everything had come down to the moment when four men arrived unannounced and began making plans to bring Sally's vision to fruition. What did it take to seal a contract? Sally knew what Peterson had in mind as a bargaining chip, but Sally wasn't a poker player. She knew how to bluff but wasn't willing to go all-in on the bet.\n\n\"Mr. Peterson, I understand this is unorthodox. I am a simple woman, but I believe in the integrity of marriage as much as I believe in the integrity of a man's word. My husband will not hear about this moment right here and now,\" she said. \"I believe if my husband knew you had made some attempt at coveting his wife, I don't know how he would react to it. He's not typically a jealous man.\"\n\nThere was a change in Peterson's demeanor. It was subtle, but Sally saw his ego shriveling. She pressed him further.\n\n\"He is an expert marksman. And living out here away from the posh accommodations of the city has hardened him, sharpening his marksmanship more. He's reasonably even-tempered, but when something does bother him, or if he thinks someone has done him wrong, I've seen him break another man's will.\"\n\nThat had sealed it for Peterson. She saw the vulnerability in his shifting eyes. He looked shrunken and meek. He wasn't too drunk to understand that trying to seduce Sally wouldn't win him any favorability with her husband; or her. Morris would never know about it, but it had crawled into her and took root.\n\nSally did her best to smile warmly at him. \"Please turn out the lights when you're finished, Mr. Peterson. Have a good night. I will see your colleagues in the morning.\"\n\nSally closed the door and exhaled with intense frustration. Had she allowed that to happen? What was the matter with her?\n\nSally wandered across the stone path back into the inn, closed the door, and sighed.\n\n\"Shit,\" she whispered. It was everything she had hoped. It was years in the making. It could all undo in a matter of a few days. \"Damn you, Morris William Laners.\" Morris had abandoned Sally and William, and how was she supposed to make him suddenly return to Woodland when she didn't know where the hell in the world he had gone.\n\nThunder rumbled somewhere to the north. The rain was on its way to Woodland. Once Sally put on her nightgown and climbed into bad, she felt tears of vexation rolling down her cheeks as she stared at the rafters. The lantern flame was nothing more than a yellow flicker, casting a refraction from the glass globe around it on the ceiling.\n\n\"Why are you crying, Mama?\" William asked. He lay in the small cot a few feet from Sally's bed. The heavy blanket covered him so only his head poked out, watching her.\n\n\"Oh, I am a little angry, that's all,\" she said and sniffled, dragging fingers over her eyes, trying to smile for her son.\n\n\"Is it because of Papa?\" he asked.\n\nSally pressed palms against her eyes, trying to hold back the frustration. She did her best to continue smiling for William. She had two jobs in her life: take care of William and see to his future. The presence of the railroad men crumbled her aspirations. \"No, of course not, why would you say that?\" Lying to a child to protect him was something a mother needed to do from time to time.\n\n\"Well, I hear you crying sometimes at night after you turn down the light. I know you miss Papa like I do. I thought you were crying because of him,\" he said quietly, like it was his fault.\n\n\"You miss your Papa?\" she asked. Sally put her chin on her knees watching William sit up in bed to talk to her.\n\n\"Well, sometimes I think about him.\" His face squinted. \"I don't really remember his face. I sometimes wonder what he sounds like because I can't remember his voice.\"\n\nHearing William talking about his missing father hurt Sally more than the prospect of losing Woodland.\n\n\"Sometimes, I get lonely, I guess,\" Sally admitted. \"I don't want you to think it has anything to do with you.\"\n\n\"I know, Mama.\" He pursed his lips in deep thought. \"Does seeing Mr. Allen make you happy?\" he asked.\n\nThe question surprised Sally, and she laughed. \"Why would you ask that?\"\n\n\"Well, I see that sometimes when he is here you look like you are happy.\"\n\n\"Do I look sad when he's not here?\" she asked.\n\nWilliam nodded. \"You only smile when I am close by,\" he said. \"But mostly, you look sad.\"\n\nSally did her best to appear thankful. There was a flood of tears pressing against her eyelids that she hoped would dam the flow in his presence. This time when she smiled at William, Sally was conscious of how he paid more attention than he ever let on. \"I'll try to do better. I'll turn down the light. Try to get some sleep.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Mama. I love you,\" William said, settling in the warm comfort of the heavy blankets. His bed squeaked with the movement.\n\n\"I love you too, little man,\" she said. Sally snuffed out the bedside lantern and sighed. William saw more of her emotions than she realized. Did she cry a lot at night? Sally wondered. But what made her think more about William's unfiltered view of his mother: Did Sally enjoy the company of Felix Allen enough to make an impression on her son?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nThe thunderstorm swept through the area, rattling the clapboard siding on the stagecoach stables with the sheets of pounding rain. Felix wanted to get on the road before the sweeping winds ahead of the thunderclouds spooked the horses.\n\nWhen Griffith didn't show up for twenty minutes, Felix wanted to lock up the company livery and go back to the hotel. Reece never left the confines of the warm, dry office. Felix never saw Reece visit the stables. That night was no different.\n\nTheo collected the messenger shotgun in the cabinet.\n\n\"Shit,\" he hissed. Someone hadn't kept the cabinet stocked. He had a gun but one shotgun shell. The small ammunition box had gunpowder dust and no extra cartridges. He had his trusty whip and one shot; it was the perception that mattered more than the ammo. He knew it was unlikely anyone wanted to rob the coach, but traveling overnight had added unforeseen dangers. Felix heard the grumbling of Old Ephraim in his head. The old man rarely carried a gun, but he was quick to point out that change in routines needed extra measures. It included carrying firearms.\n\nAlone, harnessing the horses, Felix had left Reece's company and went directly to the livery. Felix decided to pick the best horses for driving in the rain if he wasn't getting a bath or any sleep at the hotel. Since his routes were daytime trips, Felix hoped the same horses had a good sense of their nighttime surroundings.\n\nOld Ephraim's voice helped Felix stay focused on checking the breeching, traces, and shaft. It helped calm Felix and the horses. Then lightning flashed, followed by thunder crashes, and the four-horse team Felix had hand-picked for the overnight ride, needed more soothing, waiting on the single passenger with special treatment.\n\nLyle Griffith didn't show up at the depot on time. That was two parts of the man Felix immediately disliked. He knew better than showing disdain for the trip or directly at the man, but when Griffith showed up, stumbling into the livery half past midnight, he appeared irritated with Felix. When he finally showed up at the stables, Griffith dragged a medium-sized steamer trunk through the mud.\n\nGriffith dropped the trunk. It splashed in the puddle soaking through the straw on the floor. He had a second, smaller leather case that had a strap over his shoulder. It kept the small leather satchel close to his chest like a bandolier for small luggage.\n\n\"Your company man told me you'd wait outside the hotel,\" Griffith said, appearing in the doorway soaked to the skin with an icy rain. He shook out his heavy wool coat and bowler hat.\n\n\"Mr. Reece never said anything about picking you up,\" Felix said. He detected the bitterness on his tongue and did his best to swallow it. \"Are you ready to depart, Mr. Griffith?\"\n\nFelix patted the muzzle of the horses. He had a two-horse team instead of four horses because he had a smaller coach for the single passenger, but Griffith had reservations about the stagecoach.\n\n\"I was under the impression that I had a bigger coach. I intended to get some sleep during the trip,\" he said. \"This is relatively small.\"\n\nFelix sighed and kept from shaking his head in disappointment. \"Mr. Griffith, my name's Felix Allen. I'm your driver. This isn't my normal route. Mr. Kelly\u2014\"\n\n\"Yes \u2014 yes, I spoke to Raymond Kelly about the trip yesterday. I bought the man a drink. I expected to see him waiting at the hotel tonight with a larger coach,\" Griffith said, interrupting Felix and adding a backend insult.\n\n\"Well, Mr. Kelly was unable to take you. I'm here,\" Felix said. \"That storm's heading southeast by the look of it. We'll likely be in it during the whole trip. I'm making a stop at Woodland. It's a very nice place, and we can get a few hours' sleep. If we leave right now, I can get you there around four in the morning, depending on the road conditions and the weather.\"\n\nFelix lifted the steamer trunk with ease, two-handed, and carried it to the boot of the stagecoach. The heavy leather curtains over the rear boot kept heavy rains off the parcels and packages.\n\nSince Felix didn't have mail to carry, only the special guest, he didn't want the added problems of luggage strapped to the roof. Griffith said nothing about keeping his steamer trunk dry but wasn't interested in securing it either. He climbed into the stagecoach, grumbling about the cloth interior seats.\n\nEven with the medium-sized trunk in the boot, there was plenty of additional space, but Felix had nothing to add to it. He strapped down the luggage and sealed the curtains.\n\nFelix closed the door, made sure the waterproof leather curtains covered the windows and doors. He secured the handles. Felix put on his canvas duster and a slouch hat before leading the horses out of the dry livery.\n\nRain pelted him and the fidgety horses. Lightning flashed overhead, causing the animals distress. When the thunder came, Felix held fast to the bridles. The horses swished their heads at the sound. The blinders over the horses' eyes caused further discomfort in their ability to see through the falling rain.\n\nFelix cooed the animals and walked the length of one horse to set the stagecoach brakes. He had to close up the livery doors. As he walked by the coach door, Griffith opened it, glaring at him.\n\n\"Mr. Allen, it's best if we get started,\" he said. \"We're going to fall behind schedule. We won't have time to stop as you suggest. I have an appointment to keep in Vallejo. I cannot miss my train tomorrow at midnight.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" he mumbled.\n\nAs he lit the collection of railroad lanterns on the stagecoach, Felix calculated the ride time from Marysville through the pass and down the trail west to Vallejo. If he maintained a moderate speed, he could get there and still have enough time to catch a nap in Woodland. Even with Mr. Griffith's insistence of passing through without stopping.\n\nFelix knew better than explain his responsibilities when it came to the security of the Overland Stagecoach Company. Griffith was the kind of man who made others wait and blamed them for his tardiness. It wasn't worth arguing with a man who had some clout with the company above Felix's station. He wanted to keep his job. The additional bonus money eased his frustration.\n\nFelix locked up the livery and climbed into the driver's box. He pulled the waterproof apron over his lower half and buttoned it. At least, he'd have relatively dry boots by the time they reached Woodland. The only thing that helped ease Felix's frustrations with the unscheduled trip was the idea that he might see Sally again.\n\nThinking about her helped pass the time most days. But on a dark and stormy night, Felix had to concentrate on the road. Two bull's eye railroad lanterns barely illuminated the ground or wet horsebacks. Felix kept quiet and eased the horses ahead with the gentle switch of the reins." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nLyle Griffith was a braggart, and in Felix's view, that made him an untrustworthy man. To that end, the only reason Felix learned anything about Griffith's journey came with the man's change of heart when it came to traveling inside the stagecoach at night.\n\nAn hour into their trip, Felix had to stop the coach because Griffith continued to pound on the front wall. After a brief confrontation with the man, Felix realized that Griffith wasn't comfortable in the confined space.\n\n\"I have a dreadful time in there, Mr. Allen,\" Griffith said when he finally settled in the messenger seat beside Felix. \"Thank you for allowing me to share the driver's seat with you.\"\n\nGriffith had settled into the driver's box to Felix's left with little room to spare between them. His irritating and unapologetic attitude turned warmer when he realized the trip over the rough ground inside a closed shell wasn't appealing. Without someone to complain to inside the carriage, Griffith requested to join Felix in the driver's box for the duration, or at least as far as Woodland.\n\n\"Just sit tight, Mr. Griffith, we're got few hills ahead, and it might be best you get out to walk if I think the ground's too slick,\" Felix said. The play in the reins was something he'd learned from Old Ephraim.\n\nThe horses' rhythm came back through the deerskin gloves Felix wore. The animals chose their gait without Felix interrupting their strides. They found a rhythm between them that kept moving forward without him coaxing the horses. The rain fell steadily and slanted from the black sky. Mud kicked over the waterproof leather skirt on the driver's box.\n\nThere was a mild satisfaction that Griffith got as muddy as Felix during the trip. The man had an air of affluence, but the situation had humbled him.\n\n\"Oh, I see you have the obligatory whip\u2014\"\n\n\"No, please, don't touch that,\" Felix said as Griffith reached for it. After the rain, Felix habitually dried out the whip and, in this case, the shotgun. It needed care and management that included lubrication to keep the leather from buckling under the sun once the rain dried. He'd oil the gun to keep it in working order before returning it to Marysville depot.\n\nGriffith sat back, making sure his coat covered the leather satchel against his chest. Felix never got involved with the passengers. Even when they sometimes rode upfront with him if there wasn't room inside or on the roof, Felix didn't ask. It seemed important enough to Griffith to keep it on his person during the trip.\n\n\"Is it true what they say about a reinsman and his whip, Mr. Allen?\" Griffith asked after a few more minutes of quiet between them. \"Do you go everywhere with it?\"\n\n\"It's special to each of us, I suppose,\" Felix said after some thought. \"That once belonged to the man who I apprenticed for; it's important for what we do. He gave it to me when he retired from the stagecoach business.\"\n\n\"What of the business, Mr. Allen?\" Griffith asked, pressing the conversation limits by ending talking.\n\nFelix didn't want the man on the driver's box with him, but it was a necessary evil and served two purposes. Having the man up top with him kept Felix awake. It had been a long day, and falling asleep in the box \u2014 even in the pouring rain \u2014 was a potential danger for drivers. It happened sometimes, and bad things followed when horses went on their own devices.\n\nBut Felix knew, traveling some of the switchback parts of the road might not give him enough time to retrieve a passenger at night in the slick rainfall. If they needed to abandon the carriage, Felix could do it quickly. In the driver's box, Griffith saved steps if Felix had to throw the man overboard to save his life.\n\n\"Do you have a gun, Mr. Allen?\" Griffith asked.\n\nFelix didn't answer immediately. Some passengers carried guns. The stagecoach company didn't have provisions against people carrying firearms, but it wasn't a passenger's business knowing what the driver had in protection. Felix had built up a reputation as a firm but fair driver.\n\nRepeat passengers enjoyed his attitude \u2014 sometimes the best in the business when it came to coachmen. But he rarely had trouble with riders. He never had to deal with any hold-ups. Besides his encounter with the enigmatic and renowned Black Bart, Felix hadn't worried about highwaymen when he rode with Old Ephraim.\n\nIt put Felix on edge. He wasn't interested in talking about the stagecoach security.\n\n\"You're in good hands, Mr. Griffith,\" he said finally. \"I haven't lost a passenger.\"\n\n\"I only asked because Mr. Kelly had a sidearm. I see you don't have a gun belt.\"\n\n\"Well, if we need something, I know what to do,\" Felix said without providing details that didn't concern the passenger. \"You're in good hands, Mr. Griffith.\"\n\nThe man leaned against the side railing and looked at Felix's profile. For the first time since his accompaniment, he got quiet. Then the man pointed at the reins in Felix's hands.\n\n\"Why do you hold those like that?\"\n\nFelix sighed. But as long as he wasn't asking about guns, indulging the man's company helped pass the time. The winding stretch of road five miles out of Marysville still had smatterings of settlers. People liked living off the road, close enough to a well-traveled path kept them close to help if they needed it. Felix knew the area well enough to see they still had another two miles before the elevation. Once they started the climb, it was impossible to tell if the road got slick in the downpour.\n\n\"This is the off-lead hand,\" Felix explained, holding his right hand up in the available lantern light. \"Each of these lines is for the right side drive. If I got a four to eight-horse team, I'd have more lines. It's important to keep them separate but together. Off lead is in my top fingers. Off swing is under my middle finger. Off wheeler is between my ring finger and small finger. I got a feel on the horses and the terrets with the bearing rein hooks. If the horse moves its head too much, I'll feel it here.\" Felix gestured with his wrist without releasing the reins.\n\n\"It's the same for my left hand,\" he said. \"This is the near lead on top, near swing in the middle, and near wheeler on the bottom. You want to keep control and don't let the horses think you're not paying attention, or they might find a new route you're not looking to take.\"\n\n\"That is fascinating. You seem like a studious young man,\" Griffith said. \"Do you intend to spend the rest of your formative years working for the company?\"\n\n\"I started with Overland Stage when I was fourteen. I enjoy the driving, sir.\" It was once the truth. Old Ephraim had stories of the coach rides over the years he had shared with Felix. Some of the things the old man saw in the seat on top of the stagecoach were undeniably precious. Felix shared some of those sights with Old Ephraim. But it was his time alone in the driver's seat that humbled him.\n\n\"There are parts of this job I don't like, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix said. \"This is one of those moments that never settle well with me. Driving in the rain isn't any good. My mother taught me that rain is necessary to keep us respectful of the world. Without it, we'll die. With too much of it, we'll die. But I think on that when the weather dumps a river on my head out here.\"\n\nThe steady rainfall took on a new emphasis as they sat together in the driver's box. Lightning flashes illuminated the countryside. When the prairie flashed, Felix saw the lay of the nighttime land.\n\nThunder chased them through the pass leading to the elevated roadway that hugged a steep escarpment. It wasn't the kind of place Felix wanted to encounter at night. Now he had to do that and in the rain. He used the conversation with Griffith as a distraction.\n\n\"I've seen things I can't explain out here. Sometimes I see stars falling in the daylight. I've seen animals I don't know. I've seen lakes so still that they've captured the blue sky and clouds overhead. I know I'm the man I am because of what I do,\" Felix said. \"I don't regret my choices.\"\n\n\"That is a marvelous answer, young man.\" Griffith shifted on the bench. He patted the leather pouch against his chest. \"Do you know what I do?\"\n\n\"I don't, sir. Mr. Reece mentioned that you got special treatment. My job was to take you to the train station in Vallejo. I don't get too involved in passengers' lives.\" Felix hadn't meant to sound blunt, but as long as the passengers followed the rules, they rode without his input or getting involved with their passing lives.\n\n\"I am just like you, Mr. Allen. I am a courier. My job is to assist people in getting what they need. I work for the mining company out of Copperopolis,\" Griffith said. He leaned back and opened the top of his coat, showing the rain-soaked collar of his expensive shirt and the black leather case on the strap. \"I deliver essential documents to very wealthy people. That's what I'm doing tonight.\" He nudged Felix with his shoulder. \"That's why I took the overnight coach. I wanted to keep confidentiality. You can't travel regular avenues with what I do, Mr. Allen.\"\n\n\"Pardon me for saying so, Mr. Griffith, but shouldn't you keep something like that to yourself,\" Felix said. \"It's not any of my business what you do or where you're going. I'm getting paid to take you to the train station. That's all I need to do.\"\n\n\"How much did Mr. Reece pay you?\" Griffith asked. He nudged Felix's side again with his elbow. \"Just between us, you can tell me.\"\n\n\"Well, I didn't get paid yet. Mr. Reece told me he'd settle up when I get you to where you need to go.\"\n\n\"Alright, but how much?\" Griffith asked again.\n\n\"I'll get an extra $100 for this trip,\" Felix said.\n\nGriffith laughed as he bragged. It was loud and obnoxious and wasn't any of Felix's business.\n\n\"How much do you make driving a stagecoach?\"\n\nFelix wasn't comfortable discussing his finances with anyone outside his family. Only his mother knew the money he brought home because Felix sent her $50 a month to hold or use when she needed it.\n\n\"You're welcome to ask me how much I make,\" Griffith said. \"You can ask.\" He waited. Thunder rumbled overhead. The horses seemed relatively stable, and Felix felt the moderate shift in the road. The trail began its slow ascent up the hillside. He squeezed the reins and rolled his shoulders back. Griffith wasn't interested in their travel, but Felix wasn't interested in the conversation either.\n\n\"I made $30,000 last year, Mr. Allen. I'll bet that's more money than you'll make in ten years doing this,\" Griffith said.\n\nFelix couldn't help feeling miserable in the conditions and the company. If he kicked Griffith off the driver's box at that point, it wouldn't change anything. Sometimes there were things in life one never forgot. Felix knew he'd never forget Griffith's salary.\n\n\"I made that money doing what I'm doing right now,\" he continued. \"I get the company to pay for trips, I get paid well to carry documents between affluent businessmen, and they reward me with good fortune.\"\n\n\"I m glad for you, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix said, though it wasn't true. He never compared himself to other men. Felix didn't need to measure himself by money or employment. Every person had to do what was required to get by. Some people just got lucky. If Felix hadn't wandered by the factory that day, he wouldn't be driving an overnight coach to a distant stop off his main route.\n\n\"You have a good sense about you, Mr. Allen. You stepped up to do the job when your associate wasn't interested,\" he said. \"Mr. Kelly told me he had prior commitments.\"\n\n\"It's a coachman's privilege to make their way as they see fit.\"\n\n\"Well, Mr. Reece mentioned you were a young man not afraid to do the job,\" Griffith said. \"I'll overlook the fact you neglected to come to the hotel for me. I can let that go between us. I won't bring it up in my review of your performance.\"\n\n\"Review?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Well, since I travel individually with some companies, they like me to assess their employees. You're alone out here. You could say and do whatever you wanted to the passengers. They have to listen to you.\" He nudged Felix again. \"You're like a captain of a small vessel out here. Look around us.\" He presented the dark and rain as if it wasn't present to Felix. \"You can do anything you want as a driver. You could, if you wanted, take this carriage to San Francisco. You could go to Texas or New York. You could continue picking up passengers and taking them places and never share the fares with your company. If you were so inclined,\" he said.\n\nGriffith elbowed Felix in the ribs again.\n\n\"I took an oath, Mr. Griffith.\"\n\n\"Doesn't that only apply to carrying parcels for the mail company?\" Griffith asked.\n\n\"It does, but I took that oath as part of my job, sir,\" Felix said. \"I believe in keeping that oath. I do what's asked of me. I don't take side trips. I don't take advantage of passengers. When someone gets unruly, I will correct their behavior as I see fit. I believe integrity matters when it comes to doing a job, and I think it has much to do with how we live our lives.\"\n\n\"That is extremely noble of you, young man.\"\n\n\"Didn't you take an oath?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"No, why would I need to do that?\"\n\n\"Well, if you're a courier, you should be held accountable for the contents of the package. Whatever you're carrying means enough to the recipient and the sender that your employer pays you considerably for your time and integrity.\" Felix shook his head lightly to clear the raindrops from his face. \"I'd think your employer might find it necessary for you to keep your word regarding the transportation of the documents.\"\n\nGriffith sat quietly for a time next to Felix. The carriage swayed some on the road. Felix felt the left hitch in his hand pull at the reins, bucking its head some. He clicked at the horses and called to them as Griffith sat silent.\n\n\"Perhaps I don't need to take an oath,\" he finally said.\n\n\"Or maybe it hadn't occurred to your employer.\"\n\n\"Well, regardless, I do the job they pay me to do,\" Griffith said. \"These documents, do you know what they are?\"\n\n\"Is that something you should share with me?\" Felix asked, genuinely surprised at the conversation. He'd hauled thousands of dollars in gold for the banks. Not once did he feel inclined to share the contents of a locked bank box with the passengers. Griffith was a man who took Felix's integrity and lost it somewhere in the dark along the trail.\n\n\"Well, between us, you might find it interesting,\" Griffith said.\n\nBut Felix wasn't interested. He had to concentrate on the path. Griffith needed some justification that promoted his stature above Felix. Instead, it belittled the man. Felix saw a man who stumbled into a lucrative position without considering what it meant to keep secrets.\n\nFelix had heard about mail missing from carriages of other drivers. Packages too enticing to pass up sometimes never reached their destination. Felix was never inclined to steal mail or snoop in private envelopes. He wasn't interested in Griffith's pouch, but the man needed to make himself appear more critical than Felix.\n\n\"I have Wells Fargo Mining Company capital stocks in my bag,\" Griffith said.\n\nWhile Felix didn't ask, he found out anyway. Now that he knew it, he had a question about it. \"I didn't know Wells Fargo had a mine. I thought they were a stagecoach company. They do banking now too. Didn't they start as the Overland Mail Company?\"\n\n\"Well, sir, I do believe you're right about all that,\" Griffith said. \"But the mining company uses the trusted name to acquire a new interest in the mine. Wells Fargo Mining Company has more impact than something mundane. It's the name that gets businessmen interested. I'm taking this lot to a man in San Francisco.\" Griffith waited for Felix to say something.\n\nFelix had no interest or understanding of stocks. But he suspected that if Griffith's employers or the gentleman he delivered the documents knew he had a ne'er-do-well attitude about something important as stocks, they might not have the confidence to keep him employed.\n\n\"This transaction is extraordinary because the stocks I have are blank.\"\n\nGriffith waited for Felix to coax him on about the importance of blank stocks. Instead, Felix felt the carriage shift slightly under them. The wheels slipped on the watery ruts, sliding in the mud. Felix pulled back on the reins to slow the horses.\n\n\"I have ten blank certificates here. That means someone can put whatever amount they want on the shares. Why, if we were wayward men, we could take these stocks all the way to New York and become two extremely wealthy men. They already have the signatures of the secretary and the president of the company. As soon as I pen the name of the businessman on the certificate, they become invested owners of mine property and materials.\"\n\n\"Mr. Griffith, it seems to me that your sole purpose is to hand-deliver those important documents without giving away the contents of your bag. What if I wasn't an accountable man?\"\n\n\"Well, you are, Mr. Allen. I can tell that about you. I am good at reading people. You have a level head on your shoulders. Your direct work with these ungodly animals gives me confidence that you're going to keep this conversation strictly between us.\"\n\nIt was the conversation Felix didn't want to have, and it caused him more distress because Griffith talked too much. It sometimes took very little to make desperate men do unspeakable things. Felix wondered if Griffith shared his knowledge with other drivers. What if he gave away details to Raymond Kelly?\n\nFelix stopped himself from thinking anything untoward about his fellow stagecoach driver. Kelly was a miserable soul and a lazy man, but he took the same oath as Felix, which meant he was legally responsible for the passengers and their property. No matter how inappropriate the conversation, Kelly took his employ seriously \u2014 when it suited him \u2014 as long as it wasn't raining and an overnight trip. Felix felt he should have asked for more money from Reece.\n\n\"What happens if someone takes one of those certificates and makes more of them?\" Felix asked. It wasn't necessary, but they closed on the crowning point of the hill. Once they went down the other side, it was up to the horses and the road conditions that either kept them alive or ended Felix's career in one fatal mistake.\n\n\"You're talking about counterfeiting,\" Griffith said in an all-knowing tone. \"That can't happen with these certificates. They are special documents with watermarks and embossing. The design is entirely unique, and I dare say visually striking, impossible to replicate.\" Griffith nudged Felix again. \"Did you know that a black man designed the Wells Fargo Mining Company stock certificates? Can you believe such a feat?\" Griffith seemed surprised by the trivial information. \"I met him once. He's a man named G.T. Brown, and he was wiry and bespectacled. I thought it was impressive.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nFelix pulled hard on the reins until the horses stopped trotting forward. They snorted and shook their manes. The driver's box felt slightly uneven and very close with Griffith's company under the leather skirt. Felix let out enough leather straps to reach down and activate the stagecoach brake. He had had time to check the coach ahead of their departure. Unlike his regular coach, the smaller one had good working brakes.\n\nHe hooked the reins to the driver bar and pulled the fasteners on the leather apron covering their legs.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Griffith asked in a panic. He clutched the coat over his chest like it was more important than his life.\n\nFelix stood on the floorboards of the driver's box. He leaned over Griffith and spun the bull's eye lantern to shine down to the ground on the left side of the stagecoach. Griffith moved under Felix's outstretched arm. He craned his head to follow the direction of the light.\n\n\"Good Lord,\" Griffith said.\n\nThe man tried moving away from the railing of the driver's box, bumping into Felix. Felix grabbed the roof railing to stop from falling off the platform. Below the left side of the stagecoach, the ground gave way to darkness. The wagon wheels poised precariously close to the embankment that dropped away into the dark and sluice runs of muddy water.\n\n\"Mr. Griffith, please, relax,\" Felix said, keeping his voice calm but loud enough over the splashing rain on the wood, leather, and fabrics. \"I need you to step around me and climb off the carriage.\"\n\n\"You're going to leave me here?\" he asked in a panic.\n\n\"No, sir,\" Felix said. He put his hand on Griffith's shoulder. \"We've reached the top of this trail. It's downhill from here.\" Felix turned the bull's eye lantern to face forward again. The light disappeared a few feet over the horses' backs, showing nothing but open black night and falling rain. Lightning flashed, giving them a panoramic bird's eye view of the valley below.\n\n\"Good Lord, Mr. Allen, we are high up,\" Griffith said, still not moving from the bench.\n\n\"Yes, we are, and if you don't climb off the coach, you and I might both die if it topples over the edge on the way down. If you do climb off, then you'll survive this, and maybe tell the next driver what happened to me.\" Felix tried smiling for Griffith. Despite the rain all around them, his throat went dry because it wasn't humorous and troubled him.\n\n\"What should I do once I climb off?\" Griffith asked.\n\n\"You stay behind the carriage. Keep to the right. Stay away from the ledge. All this rain will make it slippery on the way down. You'll get wet, you'll get muddy, but you'll stay alive.\"\n\nReluctantly, Griffith shuffled around Felix on the platform and climbed out of the driver's box.\n\n\"What about those documents?\" Felix asked. \"Did you want to put them inside the carriage to keep them dry?\"\n\n\"The case has folded inlays. The documents can't get wet.\" Griffith stood on the wet ground. The rain on his bowler hat made his head sound hollow.\n\nFelix climbed down next to Griffith and went around the coach with a lantern he disconnected from the rear. Griffith followed Felix as far as the left side and stopped before he got too close to the edge that fell away into the dark.\n\nFelix returned to Griffith standing in the mud.\n\n\"Take this,\" he said, handing over the railroad lantern. Follow the carriage. Don't get too close. If you can stay back far enough, I can see the light from the driver's box. That will help me know where you are and the road behind me.\"\n\n\"You won't leave me out here, will you, Mr. Allen?\" Griffith's pale face was wet and shiny in the lantern light. His eyebrows disappeared under the short brim of the bowler.\n\n\"No, of course not, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix said. \"One hundred dollars might not sound like much to you, but that's a month's salary for me. I can get that in one trip, and your life is worth far more than that amount.\"\n\nGriffith's face went slack. He nodded and stepped away from the carriage as Felix climbed into the driver's box. He stood on the platform, planting his boots under the bottom board facing forward. There was enough space between the floorboard and the railing wall to anchor the tips of his toes like a set of stationary stirrups. He removed the whip from the pocket and let it uncoil. Felix gave his wrists a turn after threading the lines through his fingers. With the whip handle tight in his right grasp, Felix leaned over and released the brake.\n\n\"Come on, girls, let's get off this hill alive,\" he said.\n\nThe horses responded to the flick of the reins against their backs. The carriage reached the top of the hill, and Felix felt it tilt forward. Immediately, the weight of the stagecoach caused the harnesses to loosen. The wooden shafts that kept the carriage from colliding with the horses put a strain on the breeching dees and the backbands. The horses whinnied and brayed.\n\n\"Easy girls,\" Felix called. He put his foot on the brake lever and let the brake foot press against the rear wagon wheels. As the coach continued downhill, Felix increased the pressure on the brakes. The rear wheels sometimes locked up, skidding in the mud, as the stagecoach slid sideways.\n\nFelix glanced behind him. Griffith's lantern looked like a flickering candle in the rain. \"Come on, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix shouted. \"I need you to keep up.\"\n\nStanding on the platform high above the ground, Felix couldn't see the bottom of the bank. Rainwater eroded the edges. Sluice trails carved down the pathway.\n\nThe horse on the left took the wrong step. She stumbled, tipping sideways toward the escarpment. The horse neighed, trying to get its hoof back on solid ground, but the sludge broke away, and the animal screeched as she went down, both hooves over the side.\n\n\"No, no, no,\" Felix shouted.\n\nThe weight of the carriage pitched sideways to the left, making Felix fall to the right. The right horse, unable to pull away from its falling mate, whinnied in fear as it slid forward inside the harness.\n\n\"Jump, man, jump!\" Griffith's voice reached Felix's ears moments before the front of the carriage first pulled sideways, tipping precariously over enough to throw Felix off-balance before the two horses reeling with the weight and the hillside pulled the right front wheel off the shelf.\n\nFelix didn't have time to jump. Instead, he squeezed the reins and the whip handle. He jammed his foot on the brake lever and gritted his teeth as he felt the weight of the carriage against his back. The stagecoach teetered, swaying left and right as the springs took the stress of the shock.\n\nFelix had lost all sense of the location. He didn't know how far down the embankment went before it leveled off again. One of the lanterns smashed against a sapling on the hillside. Lamp oil ignited and splashed against the sidewall of the stagecoach. The fire tracked behind the carriage on the slope before the rain splashed it off.\n\nFelix managed to glimpse Griffith's lantern that looked more like a faraway yellow star pinprick than a significant light source. The horses managed to stay upright for the most part. Their hind legs disappeared under the coach's front. Felix felt the animals' rumps bang against the wood frame. He pushed as much pressure as possible on the brake. Below and beyond, all Felix saw was the blackness of night and the yaw of death.\n\nHe dropped into the seat, planting his left foot on the railing front and his right foot hard on the brake lever. The rear wagon wheels locked up, skidding in the mud instead of turning. The horses screeched and screamed, and something slammed against the underside of the wagon, launching it into the air.\n\nFelix came down in the driver's box, smashing his head against the back wall. The horses stumbled and scrambled to stay upright and continued sliding down until they suddenly came upright, and the carriage leveled off.\n\nFelix pulled on the reins, halting the horses. They snorted and panted in the rain. He set the brake and let go of the leather straps. His hands cramped up as he exhaled in relief. His head pounded, with his heart somehow beating from inside his throat.\n\nHe breathed deep, lifting his head, face to the sky, letting rain splash on his face as he gave a little prayer. Felix dismounted the stagecoach and unhooked one of the remaining lanterns to assess the damage and check on the horses. The spooked animals were in no hurry to move again.\n\nFelix walked through ankle-deep slush checking the horses. He ran his hands over them, under them, and found scrapes and missing hair. One of the horses had a gash on her knee. It was a few inches long and probably needed stitches. But as long as they hadn't broken their legs or backs, they were otherwise healthy.\n\n\"You two are amazing,\" Felix said as he rubbed their muzzles.\n\nHe looked to the distant single light above them. Its tiny flicker disappeared from view and reappeared a little larger. Griffith made his way down the hillside, avoiding the shortcut off the edge. While Felix waited, he continued to check on the carriage. The wagon wheels appeared stable. The underbelly looked intact. He didn't care about the carriage's interior because it didn't matter if a seat came loose. There was no one inside.\n\nAfter several minutes and feeling confident the horses could manage their duties, Felix led the horses along the bank base. The area had a lot of scrub brush but was otherwise free of large rocks and boulders.\n\n\"That was an amazing feat of superior horsemanship, Mr. Allen,\" Griffith said when the two joined near the roadside.\n\nFelix navigated the horses back to the main road. Once on familiar territory, he used two lanterns to examine the mare's leg again.\n\n\"That looks deep,\" Griffith said, holding the bull's eye on the injury.\n\n\"She's tough. I think she's doing okay,\" Felix said. He retrieved rolled linen from the junction box on the stagecoach, gently began wrapping the wound, and increased pressure until it covered completely. He tied it off and rubbed the horse's chest.\n\n\"Are you ready to go, Mr. Griffith?\" Felix asked. \"I checked the carriage. It's in working order.\"\n\n\"Mr. Allen, you are worth far more than this company pays you.\" Griffith shook Felix's hand. \"Young man, you saved my life. And I never saw a better captain of a vessel. I will tell every\u2014\"\n\n\"Mr. Griffith, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather keep this between you and me. My employer doesn't need to know the danger I put you in,\" Felix said. He knew Reece or even Kelly had no qualms about reporting the incident in a manner that might make Felix accountable for the mishap. \"I will detail the damage to the carriage and the wounded horse, but those things happen more than my attempt at riding the stagecoach down the cliff wall.\"\n\nGriffith chuckled at Felix's account. \"It was an amazing sight that I witnessed. It is a shame that it wasn't daylight or not raining. It would be a spectacle to behold.\"\n\n\"I don't think I have it in me to repeat, Mr. Griffith. We haven't lost too much time. With the rain letting up, we'll make better time. I think we'll reach Woodland before five in the morning or a little after.\"\n\n\"That suits you for our time?\" Griffith asked. He had lost the condescending attitude of talking to Felix. Time together gave Griffith a new perspective on the stagecoach reinsmen. And now he had a story to recount for his acquaintances, as long as Felix's employer didn't know about the recklessness.\n\n\"At least, the rain's stopping,\" Griffith said.\n\n\"Do you want to ride inside now?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"No, sir, I'd rather sit with you if that suits you?\"\n\nFelix only nodded. His head ached from bouncing his skull on the boards. He hoped Griffith had lost his vitality in the aftermath of the accident. Felix needed a break from the man's ramblings, but he couldn't deny Griffith the seat next to him, not after what happened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nIt wasn't the thunderstorm that kept Sally awake most of the night. It was the idea that after all the love and sweat she put into Woodland, there was a chance that she could lose it all because her absentee husband lost his faith in building a life together. The lightning illuminated the room around her. She saw William sleeping like a deaf pig. Nothing could wake him when he wore himself out playing most of the day.\n\nWhat would it take to make everything right again? Sally wondered. The worry made her pensive. The thunder reminded Sally that she still had responsibilities beyond the managing of Woodland. She had to make a future for William. No matter the outcome of meeting the railroad men, Sally had to keep believing that everything would work out.\n\nSally laid in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking about Eddie Peterson's advances. He was a handsome man, a man of confidence, and a kind of charm that took time appreciating. Sally didn't like his cavalier attitude toward Sally's marital status when he laced his words and actions with innuendoes. She didn't question Peterson's forwardness. Other men had made similar suggestions to her. Sally was a woman of morals, but she was a woman too.\n\nMarriage was a bond between two people, but what happened when one of them abandoned the other? Sally knew Morris wasn't coming back. Even when they were together, Sally felt separate from him. They didn't share the same values. She couldn't hate the man. It took too much effort to fill up her heart with hatred.\n\nIf it weren't for Morris, Sally wouldn't have William. The boy was a spark in her life that kept Sally working hard every day. She wanted to build a life for William that allowed him to flourish. They could do that outside Woodland, if it came to that, but Sally wanted to keep the place that meant so much to her.\n\nAggravated with the sudden appearance of the railroad men and the inability to get restful sleep, Sally got up. She dressed quietly for the new day and left William still sleeping like a hibernating bear in their room.\n\nIn the hallway, Sally smelled the pleasing aroma of brewed coffee. Mrs. Chang or Mrs. Jung began breakfast for the laborers and early morning guests if anyone woke up after drinking the potent rice wine the night before. It was a little after five by the standing clock in the downstairs hallway, and Sally first went into the kitchen.\n\n\"Good morning, ladies,\" she said. Chang and Lung gave Sally worrisome looks. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"There are men outside,\" Chang said. \"They show up very early. But they will not come inside.\"\n\nSally frowned as she headed for the hotel's front door.\n\nOutside, the predawn light had a gray coating from the passing storm clouds. The heavy dampness in the air brought layers of fog that covered most of the compound. Sally saw the men still on horseback, waiting together just inside the entrance marker. They were too far away to get better looks.\n\nMr. Lee stood like a stoic sentinel on the veranda, watching the men on horseback.\n\n\"Are they the men from yesterday?\" Sally asked. \"It is Mr. McCoy and the others?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am,\" Lee said. \"All the guests are asleep still.\"\n\nLee would know. Sally never saw the man sleep. He didn't have to work all the time, but he never left the hotel.\n\n\"I go talk to them,\" Mr. Chang said when he appeared in the doorway. Sally continued watching the four men. He had come through the hotel from the back door to stand with Sally and Lee.\n\n\"No, I'll go.\" She walked off the steps, pulling at the hairpins keeping her hair away from her face. Her legs felt heavy from lack of sleep.\n\nHalfway across the wet gravel, the four men all stared at Sally. Their behavior was odd, but nothing leading Sally to believe they intended anything unsettling. It was a stage stop, not a town. They were travelers, and without money in their pockets, they likely suspected Sally wasn't a gracious host.\n\n\"Good morning, gentlemen,\" Sally said, raising her hand to them.\n\nBefore she got too close, the four men turned their mounts south and rode off at speed. Sally stood in the mud, watching them go. It didn't bother her. Some wagoners traveling the road didn't stop at Woodland. Some cattlemen had no interest in staying somewhere that didn't have a saloon or steers. A few more people passing by didn't have anything to do with Sally's worry about the future of the place.\n\nShe turned from the entrance to Woodland and took in the rest of the property. Sally had made a welcoming world for the weary travelers. She saw the potential. The location had appeal, and the railroad was another step to bringing a stage stop into a new age of travel. She saw Chang and Lee talking together on the veranda. The rain had stopped, and puddles filled the compound and the rain barrels at the corner of every awning.\n\nWith the railroad came more people. They needed rooms and food. Sally imagined a small mercantile building. She could get a loan from the bank when the train decided to use Woodland. They needed more people to work on the property.\n\nChinese immigrants and black laborers built most of the roadways and then put down thousands of miles of railroad tracks across the territory. Sally could hire more transient workers willing to earn a decent wage while building their homes in and around the area.\n\nIt all came down to Morris returning to Woodland because without his signature on the contracts, it remained a staging post. But how long before more people took the train over stagecoaches? Sally could make it her home, but it was always her intent to turn Woodland into a thriving little village. She knew it could grow to the potential of Marysville \u2014 her inspiration \u2014 but it was something to leave her legacy.\n\n\"They weren't interested in our hospitality,\" Sally said when she returned to the porch where Chang and Lee waited.\n\n\"There is an early coach coming,\" Chang said. He had ears like a fox.\n\nIt was a few seconds before Sally heard the distinct rattle of a stagecoach. They had a familiar noise that she grew to know over the years. The weight of the wheels, the chains and hoofbeats, all came through the compound before the stagecoach emerged through the morning fog.\n\nOn the driver's box were two men, looking wet and miserable. One of the two horses had a linen wrap around its front leg. The coach slowed and turned as it reached the steps to the inn.\n\n\"Why, Mr. Allen, I didn't expect to see you this morning,\" Sally said, feeling her heart start racing.\n\n\"Good morning, Mrs. Laners. This is Mr. Griffith. Could you have someone show him to the bath if it's not too much of an inconvenience.\" Felix climbed off the stagecoach.\n\nGriffith looked like a muddy banker. Grime covered more of his coat than fabric. He climbed out of the driver's box, and Felix assisted him to reach the ground on unsteady feet. His catalog shoes weren't the kind of footwear someone usually wore through that part of the country.\n\n\"Mr. Griffith, this is Mr. Lee,\" Sally said introducing the two men.\n\nLee attempted to accept the leather case attached to the strap around Griffith's shoulder, but the man turned away, hugging it to his chest. \"I will manage this, my good man,\" Griffith said. He looked at Felix, ignoring Sally. \"How long before we leave here, Mr. Allen?\"\n\n\"It will be an hour, maybe two,\" Felix said. Sally waited until the men finished their conversation.\n\n\"Will that still give us enough time?\" Griffith was the kind of guest Sally didn't like because he appeared demanding.\n\nFelix walked to the rear of the coach and unfastened the leather curtains on the boot. He reached inside and removed a steamer trunk. Sally saw how the shoulders and the biceps on his wet shirt clung to Felix's upper body. He had mud on his face and streaked through his hair.\n\n\"I can take that,\" Chang said, rushing to help Felix.\n\nIn an attempt to pass it between them, Chang couldn't hold the weight, and it dropped to the ground, splashing in the muck.\n\n\"Damn it, man, that is my wardrobe,\" Griffith said. \"I thought all you Chinamen were strong fellows.\"\n\n\"Mr. Griffith, I'll carry your trunk into the bathhouse,\" Felix said. He picked up the steamer trunk effortlessly and held it in his strong arms as he spoke. \"I'd appreciate it if you took Mrs. Laners' hospitality into consideration. I'd like you to be respectful to her and her laborers. Mr. Chang is a vital resource around here. I know you won't come through here again, but this is part of my route. I'd like Mrs. Laners to continue hosting the Overland Stage Company for as long as she's willing and able.\"\n\n\"Of course, Mr. Allen,\" Griffith said with a modest nod. He removed the bowler from his hat. The hair beneath stuck to his scalp with brown crusty mud as a hair tonic. \"I apologize for my manners, Mrs. Laners. It has been an unpleasant trip, and we still have miles to go before it ends.\"\n\n\"It is alright, Mr. Griffith. Mr. Chang will show you directly to the bath,\" Sally said. \"The water is clean, and we try to keep it hot for guests any time of the day.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am,\" he said.\n\nGriffith followed Chang up the stairs into the inn. Sally waited, taking her time walking behind Felix as he carried the steamer trunk upstairs and into the place. He moved around like it weighed nothing, but the fatigue showed through the mud that covered his face and neck." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nSeeing Felix arrive on an off-scheduled day gave Sally some joy at a crucial time. Listening to him handle the rude single passenger made the early morning visit even better.\n\nFelix walked out of Laners Inn entrance and rejoined Sally standing with Lee.\n\n\"What happened to this poor girl?\" Sally asked. She got a better look at Felix in the predawn light. They still had a few hours before sunrise crawled over the mountain range to the east. There was enough twilight to see Felix had some difficulties since she last saw him. \"And what happened to you?\"\n\nFelix sighed with some force. His face softened like he pushed down his irritation as he joined Lee looking at the horse's leg wound.\n\n\"We got caught in the storm, and I think we managed to follow it most of the way,\" Felix said. He squatted in front of the horse and watched as Lee removed the bandages.\n\nSally sucked air through her teeth. \"Well, she'll be okay if you can leave her with us. Mr. Lee will take her to the stalls and make sure he mends.\"\n\n\"I would greatly appreciate that, ma'am,\" Felix said. He helped Lee remove the harness and buckles from the horses. Lee led the two animals away from the stagecoach as Felix began a thorough inspection of the coach.\n\nSally stayed close by, watching the man work. His trousers were soaked, and his shirt had a tear on the side. His coat hung on the handbrake lever. By the look of it, the canvas duster took most of the rain and mud.\n\n\"Mr. Allen, can I get you something to eat or drink? There is fresh coffee brewed, and the ladies in the kitchen started making breakfast.\"\n\nThe look on Felix's face showed gratitude on a level Sally hadn't seen in a long time.\n\n\"There's a room available if you want to get some sleep. You know where the bathhouse is,\" she added.\n\nFelix stood up, pressing on his lower back to stretch. \"I would love a bath and a few hours sleep, but I don't think there's time. My passenger needs to be in Vallejo by midnight tonight.\"\n\nSally frowned, calculating the time and miles in her head. \"If you left in three hours, you'd still have plenty of time to reach Vallejo on time.\" When Felix continued working, checked the undercarriage of the coach, Sally got closer. She touched his elbow gently. \"Please, Mr. Allen, you look exhausted. At least, come inside and get some food in you. You can wash up.\" She saw her stablemen waiting patiently by the horse barn for Sally to give them directions. She waved them over to the carriage. \"Mr. Don and Mr. Chi will make sure the coach is safe for travel. Please, come inside. You look ready to fall over, not drive another fifty miles.\"\n\nFelix gave Sally a thin smile and a slight nod. He tossed the slouch hat in the driver's box. \"It's all yours, gentlemen,\" he said as Chi and Don arrived. \"I think the rear axle needs attention. I'll go with Mrs. Laners. If you need me, please let me know.\"\n\n\"They'll be fine,\" Sally said. \"You're in good hands. They're better craftsmen than anyone south of Marysville.\"\n\nSally led Felix into the front door. He paused momentarily to wipe the boots on the porch floor before stepping over the threshold.\n\n\"We have guests today. I expect them up any time now,\" she said. But it wasn't important. Sally didn't know why she gave away trivial information. She hoped the railroad men stayed in bed until after Felix and his passenger left again. She feared interaction with Felix might lead to more questions about Morris' whereabouts.\n\nFor some reason, butterflies had awoken in Sally's belly, and she felt giddy with Felix so close. He followed her through the lobby and down the corridor to the rear door with the pitched roof over the walkway. The carpentry skills among the laborers were second to none. Sally knew without Chang and Lee, with their wives, she couldn't operate the business. They were essential to the success of Woodland. They helped create a pleasing environment.\n\nThe bathhouse had two separate rooms joined by the heated water tank and the steel bathtubs mirrored each other inside. From the closed side, Sally heard Felix's passenger splashing in the bathwater.\n\n\"Mr. Griffith has his trunk in there,\" Felix said. He kept his voice low. \"I'll collect it as soon as he's done cleaning up.\" He stepped through the door, steam and lavender scent escaped the room. \"This is very nice, Mrs. Laners. If I had some clothing with me, I'd take a bath.\"\n\nSally considered his words and immediately thought of a solution. \"If it's no trouble, I might have something for you.\"\n\nFelix's smile broadened for her. He went into the clean room, sat on the stool near the tub, and removed his boots. \"I would be in your debt, ma'am.\"\n\nSally closed the door gently and slipped away. She hurried through the hallway and ran upstairs. Inside the bedroom she shared with William, Sally went to the armoire and opened the bottom drawer quietly. She squatted on the floor and went through the modest collection of clothing she hoped would fit Felix.\n\n\"Mama.\" William's sleepy voice called to her from across the room. She saw him lying on his stomach with his face peeking out from the blankets. \"What are you doing?\"\n\n\"It's nothing,\" she whispered. \"Go back to sleep.\" Sally had folded clothes in her arms and closed the base draw on the cabinet. She stood up.\n\n\"Those are Papa's,\" William said. Sally had hoped he missed the collection of apparel in her arms.\n\n\"Yes, but never you mind. Go back to sleep.\"\n\nInstead, spurred by the sight of his mother's excitement and fast movement, William pushed himself upright, sitting in the bed. \"Is Papa here?\"\n\n\"No, William, please, I can't do this right now. I need you to go back to sleep. I will talk about this later.\" She got as far as the door. The look on his sweet face was close to tears. Sally sighed, tilting her head at his vulnerability. \"I need the clothes for someone else,\" she said. Lying to William wouldn't solve anything. He had coveted most of the items left behind by Morris, but the man was a mystery to him. Clinging to clothes and toiletries didn't make for a father. It only lent to more questions for William. \"I promise, very soon, you and I will have a big talk about your papa. But right now, I need to help someone. I need you to behave. Please, stay in bed, get some sleep. If you can do that for me, I'll see if Mrs. Jung will make you flapjacks with preserves later.\"\n\nWilliam's face brightened. The last vestiges of sleep drained away. Sally realized she had prompted him with visions of morning delights. In the hallway, Sally paused listening at the door in case William hopped out of bed right away.\n\nShe hurried away, down the hall. When Sally passed by Eddie Peterson's room, the door opened. The handsome man looked pasty and worn out, standing at the doorway. Sally had a moment of satisfaction thinking the rice wine had caused Peterson some discomfort after his advances the night before.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, can I have a moment of your time?\" he asked. His voice sounded like he had sand in his throat. \"I want to apologize for my behavior last night. I should not have been so forward with you.\"\n\nHe leaned against the doorjamb but stayed inside the room. Sally didn't want to waste time with the man but leaving Peterson without allowing him a moment of contrition wouldn't help Sally's dilemma with her absentee husband. As much as she wanted to leave him standing in the doorway, Sally waited while the businessman composed himself.\n\nHe wore a clean nightshirt and stood barefoot. Sally suspected Peterson wasn't ready to leave the suite. He was the kind of man who didn't want others to see him out of the expensive suits. Likely, his failed attempts last night to bed Sally didn't mean he remained shy around her. Sally got a good look at the man's feet. They were small and unimpressive. His toenails were too long.\n\n\"You've said your piece, Mr. Peterson. I appreciate the sentiment. If you will excuse me, I have other guests that need my attention.\" Sally turned from him, ready to leave the upstairs, but Peterson hooked his fingers around her elbow.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, I want you to know that I am not going to recommend Woodland for a water stop.\"\n\nSally's feet couldn't move from the runner in the hallway. It was as if the thin rug had gobs of animal glue that caught her boots, refusing to release her. She faced Peterson again.\n\n\"Mr. Peterson, I know Woodland is a prime location for the railroad,\" she said boldly. Sally didn't raise her voice. She hugged the folded clothing to her chest, stepping closer to the door. Peterson stepped inside the room, and Sally got as far as the doorway and stopped. \"If you turn your back on this location, you will waste resources and more time by deviating off the stagecoach trail. This is a well-traveled avenue,\" she said.\n\n\"That may be all well and good, but you fail to realize that without your husband's signature on the contracts, we cannot move forward legally.\" Peterson sat on the edge of the bed. He wasn't shy about exposing his naked legs to his knees.\n\nSally had already made up her mind about the gentleman. His vanity and garish behavior suggested that he was a man who got whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it.\n\n\"I have ledgers dating back to the first coach that ever stopped here, Mr. Peterson,\" Sally said, trying to keep her temper in check. \"I kept meticulous track of every horseman, every wagoner, every wandering cattleman, or carriage that passed through Woodland. We see more people here than any other stage stop in fifty miles. I make sure my guests remember the hospitality and good food, the hot baths, and clean beds. I know how good it is here because I live here, and I make everyone who comes here feel like they belong here.\"\n\n\"I see that includes the Chinamen living on your property,\" Peterson said.\n\n\"What of it?\" she asked. \"I grew up in Marysville, Mr. Peterson. I spent my life around these people. They have every right to have what any other settler wants. Everyone who lives on the property works for their room and board. They earn a wage and contribute to keeping Woodland the best stage stop in all of California. Frankly, I'm surprised it took the railroad this long to take notice. I've done all the work here. Adding Woodland to the line only increases travelers to want to come this way. I know how important this place is to people. Even without the railroad, it will succeed.\"\n\nPeterson remained quiet for a long time while Sally trembled with anger. It was impossible for him to look smug in the nightshirt, but it didn't stop Peterson from trying. He leaned back on his palms and clicked his tongue at Sally.\n\n\"I noticed during your impassionate speech that you continued using I instead of we,\" Peterson said. He smiled at her with a smarmy glee. \"Where is your husband, Mrs. Laners?\"\n\n\"He's around,\" she said quickly \u2014 too quickly, and Peterson picked up on it.\n\nHe pushed off the bed and walked to her. Sally wanted to leave the room, but her feet remained fixed to the floor like she had tracked the glue into the room and could not break free.\n\nPeterson got intimately close to her. His foul breath smelled like stale rice wine and day-old roast duck. His fingers gliding against Sally's arm felt like eels that had crawled out of a dry well. He didn't pay attention to the clothes in her arms, and Sally hugged the shirt and trousers tight to her breasts.\n\n\"Now, we're going to stay here a few more days,\" he said. His right hand traveled up her arm until his cold, sticky fingers reached her neck. \"We're going to continue surveying the area. A train runs best over level land, as you know. We'll continue to indulge ourselves in your hospitality.\"\n\nPeterson's fingers caressed her cheek. Sally remained rigid and staring at the middle-distance, enduring the man's lurid trespasses. He leaned close to whisper in her ear.\n\n\"You and I both know that your husband isn't around here, Sally,\" Peterson said. \"I think if you intend to continue with this farce about your husband, you and I will not come to a mutual decision about Woodland. It is obvious to me that Mr. Laners hasn't had your company in quite some time. You are a handsome woman, Sally. It is a damned shame that you're willing to throw away any opportunity to do business with the railroad.\"\n\n\"I am willing to have\u2014\" Sally stopped talking when Peterson touched her mouth.\n\nHe pressed his finger against Sally's mouth. She wanted to retreat. She wanted to run from the room screaming. But everything was at stake if she rebuffed his advances. Sally knew whatever future she wanted for Woodland wouldn't happen.\n\nPeterson's finger ran along Sally's lip as his face loomed inches from hers. Sally felt the sting in her sinuses from tears ready to burst the ducts like the heavy rains that fell on Woodland overnight.\n\n\"I believe you and I can come to an agreement, Sally,\" he whispered.\n\nIf he attempted some romantic gesturing, Sally didn't notice. He was repulsive; his finger tasted like ear wax. She felt like a grasshopper trapped in an ant mound. She couldn't get away. Peterson wasn't willing to deal in legitimate business negotiations. So far, Sally suspected he kept his belief that Morris wasn't around. She deduced that Peterson worked for the railroad but did side business when it suited him.\n\nSally was vulnerable to the times, knowing no district court would award her the property ownership directly. If it came to light that Morris was no longer around, California Pacific Railroad could legally seize the property through government holding.\n\nThey'd take Woodland and build the water stop without involving Sally. She'd put in all the work, and one man who did all of his thinking from between his legs could undermine her with a few words.\n\nAs Peterson's hand slipped off her mouth, ran along her neck, around her back, and down to her backside, he pressed against her. Sally shivered at his unwanted advances. Her arms ached from squeezing the clothing against her chest so tight. His lips brushed against Sally's ear as he whispered, \"We'll be out most of the day today, Sally. I'll work up a considerable thirst and a mighty appetite,\" he said. \"When I return with the others, I will expect you to show me that you're willing to do what's needed for me to consider Woodland as a post for the railroad. You and I both know that it's exactly what you want. You might talk like it doesn't matter to you, but I pay attention to a lot more than you think.\" His words were as gut-wrenching as his hand groping her. \"You built up this place to be something special. I know when we get back tonight that you will show me what you're willing to do to keep it.\"\n\nThe sound at the door and the scuff on the hallway runner gave Sally a start. She knew exactly what it was, and the patter or little feet made Sally want to vomit. At the end of the hallway, the bedroom door closed.\n\n\"It looks like your son might know where your husband is,\" Peterson said when he backed away from her. \"A father needs to make sure his son knows best. A husband needs a wife to satisfy him. Tonight, you'll show me what Woodland means to you.\" He waved his fingers underhanded at Sally like dismissing her. \"Run along; I know you want to discipline that boy for spying.\"\n\nSally left the room, closed the door behind her. She looked to the bedroom door at the end of the corridor. What could she say to William? Would he understand what happened between Peterson and her?\n\nAs Sally made her way downstairs again, any excitement she had with Felix's sudden appearance got dashed away by the unwelcomed touches by a man who knew Sally needed his endorsement to keep Woodland. How was she supposed to face her son again if she went through with Peterson's demands?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nIt was impossible to feel a spark of interest in seeing Felix at the door to the bathhouse again. She heard his passenger still splashing around next door, but seeing Felix only made Sally feel disgusted by what she had to tolerate at Peterson's advances. William saw her with Peterson, and that weighed more on Sally than losing Woodland.\n\n\"Is everything alright, Mrs. Laners?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Yes, sorry,\" she said sniffling. \"I have a lot going on right now, my apologies for being late.\" She presented the clothing. \"These belonged to my husband. They should fit you. Morris was heavier than you, but you're taller. If the trouser cuffs are too short, I can let out the hem.\"\n\nFelix accepted the clean clothes. \"I truly appreciate this,\" he said.\n\n\"When you're done with the bath, I can take your dirty clothes. I'll have them washed and ready when you pass through here again.\"\n\n\"That is most generous of you, Mrs. Laners.\"\n\nSally held back from crying. She felt the tears pushing at her eyes, ready to spill. She sniffled again, running her wrist under her nose. \"I will get coffee and breakfast ready for you and Mr. Griffith. You are still welcome to stay a few hours if you want to take a nap.\"\n\n\"I don't know if Mr. Griffith wants to risk the wait.\"\n\n\"Will you be alright on the road?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'll be fine, ma'am. Thank you for asking.\" Felix closed the door between them, but Sally knew he saw the tear start its journey down her cheek.\n\nInstead of returning to the kitchen, Sally needed fresh air and veered off the walkway between the inn and the bathhouse. She wandered toward the paddock, considering how far she needed to go to keep what she had worked so hard to build up.\n\nSally didn't want to face William immediately. It was humiliating enough that he saw her with Peterson. How was she supposed to explain it to a child? He wouldn't understand that everything she worked to make a future for them might not happen if she was unwilling to visit Peterson again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Felix got coffee and a biscuit with egg. He didn't sit down in the dining room with Griffith. Instead, he went back outside to see about the carriage and the horses. Felix carried Griffith's steamer trunk and put it into the carriage boot, lifting it with ease like it weighed nothing. She watched him close up the leather curtains over the rear and then stand with Lee and Chi talking about the stagecoach. Sally left the veranda and joined them in the morning sunshine.\n\n\"Thank you for the bath and the food,\" Felix said.\n\n\"I'll have Mrs. Chang fix you something to take on the road.\"\n\n\"You don't have to do that.\"\n\nSally smiled at Felix, but there was no joy behind it. \"I know. But I want to,\" she said. \"How's the coach?\"\n\n\"It stood up better than I thought.\"\n\n\"What happened? Did you run into something?\"\n\n\"Not exactly,\" Felix said. \"The horse lost its footing on Reindeer Pass; you know where that is?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's about four miles from here.\" Sally considered a nighttime drive in the rain. \"That must have been frightful.\"\n\n\"The trail's wide enough, but it was too dark to see.\" As Sally and Felix talked, she noticed Lee and Chi wandered away from the carriage, giving them privacy. \"Once the horse lost her footing, I did the best I could to keep control of the coach.\"\n\n\"Well, just the thought of it gives me goosebumps.\" Sally embraced herself, rubbing her arms. \"But it's still in working order?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What about your horse? Can she stay here a few days to heal?\"\n\n\"I'll make sure of it,\" Felix said. \"I'll come through again tomorrow. We have three horses here with the company, don't we?\"\n\n\"Yes, but if you're pressed for one, I've got two horses to loan you until you come back through again.\"\n\n\"Well, I do appreciate that.\"\n\n\"Are you sure you don't need any sleep?\" Sally asked. \"You look exhausted.\"\n\n\"Truthfully, ma'am I am dead on my feet,\" Felix said. Felix had eyes like the winter sky, gray with hints of gold. Sally liked standing that close to him most days. But after her encounter with Peterson, entertaining any thoughts about a man left a heavy cold knot in her belly.\n\nInstead of getting lost in his eyes, Sally turned away, still saddened by the prospects of what she had to do later. Peterson and the others remained inside. She didn't know if they had joined Griffith in the dining room or remained in bed, still experiencing the katzenjammer from last night.\n\nSally wanted to spend more time with Felix but ran out of things to say. She had lost her joy, and soon she'd lose her dignity in order to save Woodland. \"I'll leave you to your work, Mr. Allen.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said. As Sally turned from him, Felix added, \"Mrs. Laners, I am sorry for your loss.\"\n\nSally faced him again. Her brow furrowed as she squinted at him. \"My loss?\" she repeated.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, earlier when you loaned me your husband's clothes, you talked about him like he was no longer here,\" Felix said. \"I never saw him around whenever I passed through. It wasn't for me to ask, so I never brought it up.\"\n\nSally felt a resurgence of tears burning to get out. It was too much to bear, and when they flowed, Felix faced her directly.\n\n\"I am sorry, ma'am, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings,\" he said. Felix motioned like he wanted to reach out and touch Sally, but unlike Peterson, he was a gentleman. \"I shouldn't have said anything. I'll get Mr. Griffith, and we'll get on the road again.\"\n\n\"You don't have to run away,\" Sally said. She sniffled, sat on the carriage footstep, and dropped her chin into her hands. They were far enough from the main house that she didn't need to worry about prying eyes on them. \"I'm not upset about what you said.\"\n\n\"Oh, alright,\" Felix said hesitantly.\n\nSally sighed and looked up at him. \"Can I tell you something?\"\n\n\"Of course, Mrs\u2014\"\n\n\"Please, call me Sally. Every time I hear Mrs. Laners, it reminds me that I married a man who wasn't committed to me or raising his son,\" she said. \"That sounds harsh, I know. But I don't know what to do. Mr. Laners isn't dead. Or maybe his is, I don't know. He left us a long time ago. William was four when Morris gave up on us.\"\n\nFelix stood very still listening to her.\n\n\"I married him because we were young and stupid. But when I got pregnant with William, I knew I wanted to build a future for him.\" She wiped her eyes and ran her finger under her nose before wiping her hand on the dress. \"I built this place, Mr. Allen. I put all my time and money and all my love into Woodland. This is what I think the future could be,\" she said. \"I want to make a life for William that will make him proud. I want him to know Woodland will remain long after I'm gone from this earth.\"\n\n\"You've done a fine job here, Mrs. I mean, Sally. My passengers love coming through here,\" he said.\n\n\"I know; I know this place has a lot more potential.\"\n\n\"Those men from the railroad,\" Felix said, pointing at the inn. \"They're here to use Woodland as a water stop, aren't they?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, that was the plan anyway.\"\n\n\"It isn't now?\"\n\n\"No, not now,\" she said. Sally thought the tears had subsided, but the agony of the moment continued to rub her raw. \"Now, they're threatening to find another route between Marysville and Sacramento.\"\n\n\"Threatening?\" Felix asked, showing that he paid attention to her. \"How are they threatening you?\"\n\n'Well, maybe that's not the right word \u2014 no, yes. Yes, it's the right word. Mr. Peterson, one of those men intends to use the fact that Morris isn't around here anymore to see about claiming the property from the government.\" Sally used men like it was a cuss word.\n\n\"How can he do that; it's in your name, isn't it? The land belongs to you,\" he said.\n\n\"No, not exactly,\" Sally said, shaking her head. \"The land is in Morris' name. He's on the deed. Most of the money spent buying this acreage came out of my pocket. But see, since I'm a woman, even if I was technically a widow, I don't have any rights to the property.\"\n\n\"How is that legal?\" Felix asked. \"I don't know a lot about the law, but that seems unfair.\"\n\n\"It is unfair. I hate it. I hate that I am a woman, and I can't own property. It doesn't matter how much time and effort I put into this place. I think Mr. Peterson knows that Morris isn't around anymore.\"\n\n\"Does he think your husband died?\"\n\n\"No, I've been playing cat and mouse with them. For all I know, they might be inside right now thinking I'm out here talking to Morris instead of you,\" she said. Sally stomped her boots in the mud, squeezing her fists. She growled in frustration. \"The worst of this is that if Morris ever came back here and the railroad did eventually lay tracks through Woodland, he'd get all of it. He'd get to keep it.\"\n\nFelix remained quiet for a long time. Sally did her best to compose herself, twisting her fists against her eyes, pushing down any more tears.\n\n\"I can't imagine an honorable man leaving you and William, Sally. Any man who turns their back on a woman doesn't deserve to live as far as I'm concerned.\" Felix took a breath, lifting his head like he had more to say.\n\nSally looked up at him still sitting on the iron footplate. She didn't care if her dress got dirty. After Peterson had mauled her, Sally considered scrubbing herself with lye soap and burning the dress.\n\n\"My mother raised me alone,\" Felix said. \"She never brought up my father. I never knew the man. I think my mother is one of the greatest people I know. She encouraged me to start working for the Overland Stage Company. I don't think I'd be where I am now without her support.\" Felix smiled at Sally with sincerity. \"You don't need a man to live your life the way you want it. My mother never needed her husband. I missed out on having a father, sure. But I know she did everything to make up for it. I'd never give up on a child or a woman like you. Your husband is a fool.\"\n\nFelix turned away from Sally when she looked at him again. His face turned crimson.\n\n\"Thank you, Felix. That means a lot to me.\" Sally stood from the footstep, pulled at the waistband of her skirt, straightening it. \"I don't know if I can change their minds about Woodland if they find out Morris isn't here. I don't know if I can stop them if the railroad decides to undermine me when they find out I'm alone here.\"\n\n\"Well, you said you don't have any legal rights to the property, but Mr. Laners still does,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"If your husband is alive, he still technically owns the property. The railroad can't purchase the land from the government if your husband's name is on the deed. They can't buy it without his say so.\"\n\n\"But Morris isn't around. I don't think he's coming back here,\" Sally said.\n\n\"That doesn't mean they can buy the land. Your husband still owns it. Until he returns or \u2014 and sorry for saying \u2014 until his body shows up, you can say anything you want about him. You can tell the railroad men that he traveled to New York on business. You can tell them that he's got business abroad. They don't need to know he's not coming back here. As long as they think he's alive somewhere, they can't take your land.\"\n\n\"No, but what's the point?\" Sally asked. \"The railroad's not going to wait forever to put down a line between Sacramento and Marysville.\"\n\n\"That is true. But you will still have Woodland. The mail will still come through here. I'll still bring passengers through with the Overland Stage Company,\" Felix said, smiling, trying to cheer up Sally. \"Not everyone can afford a train ticket. Not everyone wants to take the train. You'll still get guests coming through here.\"\n\nSally did something that was unexpected even for her. She reached out and gently pressed her palm against Felix's face. He had helped her reach a conclusion, but it would take time to build up the courage to do what was needed.\n\n\"I need to see to my guests,\" she said. \"Thank you for your kind words, Felix. It meant more to me than you realize. I need to talk to William about his father, and I think with everything that's happening, now isn't the best time, but I've put it off for so long, it's never a good time.\"\n\n\"I'll walk with you. I need to see if Mr. Griffith is ready to go.\"\n\n\"I'll have Mr. Chang get others to help with the horses.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sally.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nIt was amazing what a decent meal and hot coffee did for Felix. It had revitalized him by the look. But Sally suspected her company did more for him than the amenities. After a few minutes alone with Felix, Sally thought he could beat his arms fast enough to fly to Vallejo. He had an air about him that was intensely lively. It had affected her mood too.\n\nShe opened up to him \u2014 more than she'd ever opened to Morris. She spoke to him like they knew each other forever. Felix listened to her talk about the railroad, and her missing husband gave Sally the strength to carry on, with or without the railroad and the man she'd married.\n\nThey walked together like pleasant acquaintances. It was only Mr. Griffith in the dining room. He had a leather satchel over his shirt, attached to him with a tight belt that went over his shoulder. There wasn't any movement upstairs. It was still quite early \u2014 too early for men who overindulged the night before. It gave Sally some peace of mind knowing they'd feel the wrath of the bottle when they finally got up.\n\nBy the look of the extra empty plates on the table, Griffith had eaten enough to feed three grown men. He sipped the coffee as Felix arrived with Sally.\n\n\"Ah, Mr. Allen, is everything up to your standards on the carriage?\" Griffith asked. He sat back and suppressed a belch with a linen napkin.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Felix said.\n\nSally saw Griffith looking her over like she was part of the menu, something he'd missed for dessert. She sidestepped to stand slightly behind Felix.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, as much as I cannot tolerate the Chinamen, I must commend you on a wonderful establishment here. The bathhouse was extraordinary. Surprisingly, the atmosphere is enjoyable. I see you manage to keep them out of the main rooms,\" Griffith said.\n\nSally gave the man a lift of her chin. \"Thank you for noticing our attempts at bringing civilization to this rural setting. Tell me, Mr. Griffith, did you enjoy your meal?\" she asked.\n\n\"Oh, yes, ma'am,\" he said, standing away from the table and pulling at the waistband of his clean trousers. \"It was some of the best eggs, ham, and biscuits I've ever eaten. You are a wonderful cook.\"\n\n\"I'll let the cooks know,\" Sally said and called down the hallway behind her. Jung and Chang stood by the open door at the end of the hall. They overheard most conversations in the dining hall without getting involved. \"Mrs. Jung.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mrs. Laners.\" Jung looked directly at Sally without acknowledging Griffith.\n\n\"Mr. Griffith enjoyed your breakfast this morning. Would you mind letting Mrs. Chang know? And if possible, could you put something together for Mr. Allen to take with him on the road. He has a long way to travel today.\"\n\nJung disappeared from view, and Sally held back the smile from the look on Griffith's face realizing that he had insulted the cooks.\n\n\"Did Mr. Allen tell you our destination?\" Griffith asked. His face changed from surprise to suspicion.\n\n\"No, sir, only that you had an appointment to keep, and it would take some time to reach your end,\" Sally said. She had managed to step around Felix and stood beside him as she addressed Griffith. \"I will settle up your account, Mr. Griffith.\" Sally glanced at Felix knowingly. They had shared secrets, and it mattered to her.\n\nWhen it was time for Felix and Griffith to depart, Sally escorted them out to the carriage. Griffith climbed inside while Felix checked the harnesses once more and rubbed the horses' muzzles before climbing into the driver's box.\n\n\"Thank you for everything,\" Felix said.\n\nSally handed him a small handmade grass basket. \"It feels like the ladies put the whole pantry inside this,\" Sally said, handing it up to Felix.\n\nHis fingers brushed against hers as he accepted the container. She looked up at his handsome face with the firm jawline, stubble on his chin. His eyes looked like winter lakes, reflecting the overcast sky.\n\n\"It's a shame William isn't up to see you off. He will be disappointed that he missed your visit,\" Sally said.\n\n\"Well, I'll be back through here soon enough. I'll make sure to see him when I do.\"\n\n\"He will like that immensely.\" She grinned at him, feeling her face flush with warmth. \"Thank you for letting me share something important with you,\" Sally said. She kept her voice low in case Griffith got close to the leather curtains over the windows in the stagecoach.\n\n\"I believe everything will work out,\" Felix said.\n\n\"You know, after talking to you, hearing it from another perspective, I believe you're right. I don't need the railroad through here to keep Woodland open. I've made a home here for William and me. I am happy with the success I've had with the help from many people who can't find a place in most cities.\" Sally shook her head. \"I grew up around these people. Without Mr. and Mrs. Chang, I wouldn't have half of what you see here. Without their dedication, I wouldn't have a home. I don't want anything to happen to them. I worry that if the railroad comes through now, they'll push out the Chinese who found homes here too.\"\n\n\"Are we leaving soon, Mr. Allen?\" Griffith called when he pushed open the heavy curtain. He gave Sally another once over as if committing her to memory.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix said. He pulled the handbrake release.\n\n\"And you got my steamer trunk from the bathhouse?\" Griffith called as Felix flexed the straps against the horses' backs.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix said from the driver's seat as the stagecoach rolled away from Sally.\n\n\"And there's nothing of mine left back at the inn?\" Griffith's voice trailed after the coach as it passed under the welcoming sign to the compound and turned south.\n\nSally waited until the very last sound rattling chain and gravel under the wagon wheels disappeared under the morning songbirds in the outlining trees. She turned back to the Laners Inn and looked at the building with new insight. Before speaking to Felix, before his perspective, Sally had come to terms. Convinced she had to give herself over to Peterson in order to save the travel lodge and Woodland, Sally began preparing for the inevitable.\n\nNow, she felt rejuvenated. It didn't matter if she never saw Morris again. He turned his back on William. Sally didn't care about her happiness, but a boy without a father sometimes grew to be a miserable man. She could instill the family values needed to make William as reputable and responsible as Felix.\n\nHis admission and admiration for a mother without a father was enlightening and further encouraged Sally that she continued to do right by William, teaching him how to be a strong man with a good head on his shoulders.\n\nInside, her guests began to descend the stairwells. She saw each of the men did their best to appear jovial in her presence. But Sally saw they still suffered from the rice wine and the katzenjammer that chased them wasn't kind in its pursuit. Sally got mild satisfaction at their pasty faces and baggy eyes.\n\n\"Gentlemen, please have a seat in the dining room. I will have some breakfast and coffee brought out to you,\" Sally said. She did her best to ignore Peterson. He was the last man down the stairs. The smugness on his face was as prevalent as the tonic he used to slick back his hair. \"I believe the ladies have some home remedies that will help with any discomfort you experience from the celebration you had last night.\"\n\n\"That was splendid rice wine,\" McCoy said. \"I would most certainly enjoy taking a bottle of it back with me once we're finished here.\"\n\n\"I'll see what I can do,\" Sally said. \"It could be rather expensive. The rice comes imported.\"\n\n\"I am willing to pay what's expected,\" he said. McCoy settled in a seat at the freshly made dining table.\n\nSally didn't take any profits on trading goods her laborers made for the guests. If McCoy wanted another bottle, she'd make sure the winemaker got the earnings.\n\nQuinn, Russell, and Peterson all sat down at the table. Peterson continued to read Sally. She did her best to avoid eye contact.\n\n\"Tell me, Mrs. Laners, was that your husband we heard outside this morning?\" Peterson asked. \"Was he on his way somewhere?\"\n\n\"Was it?\" Quinn asked, perking his head at the question. \"Oh my, I hope he didn't go far. We absolutely need to talk about the property.\"\n\n\"I have the accounts for you, gentlemen. I'll show you the ledgers if you're interested,\" Sally said. It was essential to keep up appearances, but she had made up her mind. \"I believe my husband should have no objections to your interest in the daily traveler list and the revenue.\"\n\nSally decided to continue with the present course because the longer the four men stayed on the property, the more she earned from them. Even if the railroad wasn't going to use Woodland, Sally had no qualms about using the railroad for their money.\n\n\"That would help with our decisions,\" Quinn said. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Is there any way to have someone show us the limits of the property?\" Russell asked. \"We'd like to get surveys done, and we'll be working on the roadways checking the terrain for elevation and leveling.\"\n\n\"I will see if someone wants to show you around. Please understand, gentlemen, that my laborers earn a daily wage here. It is in their interest to help you as much as possible, but they need compensation.\"\n\nQuinn and McCoy exchanged looks. \"I see no reason why we can't accommodate them.\"\n\n\"I can add their wages to your expense account if that helps. I'll keep track of their hours and bill you fairly. I assume the railroad has several employees earning a decent wage. We're rural, but we must order supplies to come to Woodland.\"\n\n\"Whatever is reasonable,\" Quinn said. He seemed more concerned about the state of his skull than talking business.\n\nSally nodded and stepped back so Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Jung could bring out more of their delicious breakfast.\n\n\"If you excuse me, gentlemen, I have some personal business to attend.\"\n\nAs Sally reached the archway to the dining room, Peterson asked, \"When do you expect your husband to return, Mrs. Laners? Do you think he may dine with us later when we've returned from our work?\"\n\nSally smiled sweetly at him. \"I suspect that anything is possible, Mr. Peterson,\" she said and went upstairs.\n\nWilliam's empty bed and nightshirt on the floor showed Sally that he had got up and changed his clothes. She needed to talk to him about spying on her with Peterson. Sally needed to explain the situation, and she intended to have a lengthy discussion about Morris. William needed to understand that even without a father involved in his life, he could grow up to be a good man.\n\nDownstairs, Sally opened the side room door across from the kitchen. The small table she shared with William didn't have any dirty dishes.\n\nSally went into the kitchen. \"Did William eat this morning?\"\n\n\"We have not seen your son this morning,\" Chang said.\n\nSally went out the back door and checked the outhouses. She checked the bathhouse, knowing William needed a bath last night. Sally often had to use all her powers of persuasion as a mother to convince William that getting clean was the only way to stay healthy. Of course, it took twice as long to get William out of the bath once he realized there was a whole world inside the tub with hot water and bubbles. The empty bathhouse smelled damp and clean, but William's clothes weren't on the floor.\n\nSally wandered out to the stables. She checked the stalls and asked Lee and Chi if they saw William. Chi brought the pretend whip to Sally that William had from yesterday. He picked it up once he got out of bed, but leaving it in the livery wasn't like him. But William got distracted easily.\n\n\"I think he's mad at me,\" she said.\n\n\"Boys sometimes need time alone,\" Chi said.\n\n\"I know. I just intended to talk with him.\"\n\n\"Mr. Don and Mr. Dang went up to the pond this morning,\" Lee said. \"Mr. William might go up there with them.\"\n\n\"Yes, he loves the water. Thank you for tending to Mr. Allen's horse.\"\n\n\"Of course, Mrs. Laners,\" he said with a modest bow.\n\nSally turned from them and wandered back to the inn. The overcast morning broke, and the sun eventually showed through to the compound, drying the property. Sally saw several sets of footprints in the mud and wheel tracks from the stagecoach.\n\nAmong them were signs of tiny feet. William's little boots had vast strides in the soil leading from the inn. He had run through the compound that morning without stopping after the rain stopped, between the time William saw her with Peterson and after Felix left.\n\nIt was time to explain grown-up things to William. He saw a man put his hands on his mother in an unbecoming manner. William needed to understand that Peterson did something that Sally wanted. She needed to raise a son that knew better than think he had a right to touch a woman without her approval.\n\nSally knew William probably felt betrayed by her because she spent time with a man that wasn't his father. Sally sighed. She had more chores and lots of things to say to her son. Finding a balance in her daily routine took patience that wore on Sally like the smell of pork grease." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nFresh horses and a new perspective with the help of lovely Sally Laners revitalized Felix after a long night of heavy rain and dealing with the pretentious Lyle Griffith. The man had made a show of climbing into the stagecoach when they left Woodland. But the moment Felix drove far enough from the location, Griffith insisted on sitting in the driver's box again.\n\nIt wasn't as intimate this time because they didn't have to huddle together because of the rain and leather skirt over the box. But spending even a little time with the woman inspired Felix.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners is an attractive woman,\" Griffith said from the messenger seat on the driver's box. The man had Felix pull off the road to leave the coach seating and sat beside Felix again. He found the grass basket under the driver's box. Filled with goodies from the kitchen Sally had packed for Felix, Griffith considered it an added amenity for the trip south. \"Mr. Laners is a fortunate man. He has an attractive wife, and she serves some purpose other than tending to his needs. In my experience, most women can do one or the other, but rarely both.\"\n\nGriffith went through the biscuits and sliced honey-basted ham and smoked bacon. There was sliced bread and steamed fried potstickers. Felix had eaten the delicious pastry dumplings with pork and cabbage before at the inn, but the extra helpings Mrs. Jung added to the basket went into Griffith instead of Felix. The courier licked his fingers and continued prodding through the food items.\n\nFelix had a waterskin tucked behind his bench to protect from Griffith. He wouldn't give up his water for the rude and greedy man. Felix felt what they had experienced together the night before might have carried over to a new day, but Griffith had shown his continued disregard for others as soon as he got on solid ground again.\n\n\"Have you ever met Mr. Laners?\" Griffith asked, trying to make conversation since Felix hadn't mentioned anything about stealing the food.\n\n\"No,\" he said. The road ahead had puddles and ruts from previous trips. It was a forested area with oak and low brush that covered the sides. The mist filled gaps in the space between low bushes and rock croppings.\n\n\"Is there anything ahead like we experienced last night?\" Griffith asked with a mouthful. \"The road leading into Woodland was steep and troublesome.\"\n\n\"No. It's relatively level. We've got a few hills but no cliffs or banks.\"\n\n\"That's good.\" Griffith belched and dropped the basket under the bench. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief from his coat pocket and folded it before putting it away again. \"Last night was not something I want to repeat anytime soon. If there were a train that passed through Marysville, I wouldn't waste my time taking an overland coach.\"\n\nFelix knew Old Ephraim would have put Griffith in his place. The old man wouldn't let a man like Griffith ride up front, but Felix believed sometimes it was better to tolerate a passenger than risk tarnishing the stagecoach's reputation combating disrespect with discourtesy.\n\nAs the day wound on, Felix felt that any solidarity he expected of Griffith wasn't going to carry with the man. Whatever plans Griffith had mentioned the night before, offering employment advancement, didn't carry over into a new day. If Griffith had any persuasion with the company, Felix considered losing his employment instead of gaining a promotion.\n\nBefore Felix worried too much about the future with Overland Stage Company, he caught sight of four riders ahead. He suspected they were the riders from Woodland. They took up posts on the trail ahead of them.\n\n\"What are they doing?\" Griffith asked as he watched the four men begin turning their mounts in the direction of the coach.\n\nFelix watched the men's faces and hands as much as he could from the distance. Two of them had rifles in saddle sleeves. All four of them had sidearms. When Felix saw one of them draw the gun from the sheath, he grabbed the whip and cracked it over the horses. The snap sounded like a gunshot.\n\nThe animals sparked into a frantic gallop, kicking up dust and grit over the front of the coach. They headed right for the men on the road ahead.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Griffith asked. He clung to the rails, bracing his feet against the front wall. \"You'll run them over.\"\n\n\"They want us to stop,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Then stop.\"\n\n\"They're not going to be friendly about it,\" he said, snapping the whip again. He flicked his wrist while still holding the reins. The loop in the leather braid ran the length of the whip until it reached the tip and cracked loud over the horses' ears.\n\nThe first gunshot wasn't as loud as the end of Felix's whip. The bullet slammed into the coach wall between him and Griffith.\n\n\"Good God. They're shooting at us.\"\n\n\"Yes, they are,\" Felix said, gritting his teeth, driving the horses faster. Another shot whizzed by on the right. Another bullet ricocheted off the corner of the coach. Felix focused on the road beyond the four men. He thought about the chickens that liked scratching for gravel in the pathway of the coaches. They always waited until the last minute before scurrying out of the way. He hoped the riders knew about the chickens. Felix wasn't turning away from the straight road ahead.\n\n\"Turn around.\" Griffith grabbed Felix's arm. \"Turn around, don't go toward them.\"\n\nWithout thinking, trying to keep control of the horses, Felix pulled his arm free of Griffith's grip and banged his elbow into the man's face. Griffith yelled, cupping his face in both hands, pressed against the corner of the bench, as far from Felix's arm as he could get.\n\n\"See that shotgun under the seat,\" Felix said, concentrating on the riders. \"Grab it and cock it for me.\"\n\nGriffith had a hard time keeping his balance on the bumping road as the coach drew closer to the highwaymen at high speed. They continued shooting high and wide. It wasn't what they expected of Felix, and it caused the would-be robbers confusion. Felix hoped their aiming didn't improve while on horseback. So far they had attempted to shoot Felix and Griffith. If they shot at the horses, it was all over.\n\nFumbling under the bench with one hand while gripping the wall with the other, Griffith finally got the messenger shotgun. When the wagon wheel slammed against a rut in the road, muddy water splashed over them. Griffith's hands scrambled to catch the shotgun before it tumbled out of the driver's box. A bullet smashed the wooden barrier at waist height; an inch higher was a gutshot. Griffith yelped like a scared child.\n\nThe speeding stagecoach barreled down on the men, the wagon wheels bouncing and skipping in the mud. The rear end swayed. Four men looked bewildered. The trail didn't allow for the carriage to maneuver around them. It was impossible to turn away without risking tipping over or turn around, as Griffith had suggested.\n\nIt was the perfect place on the lonely road between Woodland and Dixon, where four robbers thought they'd stop the carriage. The next coach stop was the boomtown. Felix didn't want to admit it to himself, but it was no accident they intended to stop him in the wooded area. They didn't cover their faces, which meant the highwaymen weren't concerned if Felix got a closer look at them.\n\nThe horses gained speed, closing the distance, frothing and grunting. The riders' horses got spooked with the gunshots and whip cracks, making it impossible for the men to aim. None of them had sense enough to climb off their mounts to shoot, giving Felix the advantage\n\n\"You're going to get us killed,\" Griffith shouted. He tried pointing the gun at the group.\n\n\"Don't do that,\" Felix shouted over the rattling coach and galloping horses. Felix grabbed the barrel before the man squeezed the trigger.\"We're too far away,\" he said. Felix had to manage the reins and the shotgun. He couldn't crack the whip and hold the gun. He had to put down one item.\n\nFelix tucked the shotgun under his thigh. He leaned forward and whipped between the horses, close to their ears. Bred to drive hard and pull weight, the animals were unstoppable without proper control.\n\nA divot in the road caused the wagon to bounce, and the rear end left the ground. Both Felix and Griffith left the bench, the shotgun rattling against the wood before he snagged it again. Using his left hand, the horses turned, veering slightly, still running forward but too close to the trees along the left roadside, and the wagon wheels rolled over the uneven ground. The coach dipped and swayed.\n\n\"Look out,\" Griffith said. Tree branches crashed against the top and side of the carriage as he cowered on the bench. A branch broke off the rail on the roof, and green leaves rained down on them.\n\nThe whip caught a branch and snapped back against Felix's shoulder, turning his wrist and pulling the horses to the right, veering so much the stagecoach tipped, riding on two wheels. It shuddered and weaved, slamming down again on four wheels.\n\nAhead the four men stopped shooting. They had to get their mounts off the road and out of the way. Blinders on coach horses significantly limited their view. They saw ahead but not far. Mostly, horses saw the ground before them. They weren't looking at the other horses and riders. They followed the sound of the whip and the gunfire noise.\n\nThe carriage bucked and shuddered when the wheels hit another rut. Behind Felix, he heard something inside the carriage. It sounded like a muffled, high-pitched screaming. The wagon wheels growled on the hard-packed ground through the wooded area. He couldn't focus on two things; if a rabbit fell under the wheels, they screeched.\n\nOne of the highwaymen managed to get his horse off the roadway. The animal had to leap over shoulder-high bushes. Once to the side, he pulled at the rifle and leveled it again. Felix snapped the whip several times. The horses picked up more speed, and the rifleman's mount bucked its head at the sound before he got a shot off. The bullet shattered a lantern on the side of the coach.\n\n\"Hold on,\" Felix said. He pulled the reins, retrieved the shotgun, and pointed it at the nearest rider. The man saw the mouth of two barrels pointed at him and tried getting his horse to move.\n\nThe buckshot spread wasn't enough to kill him at that range, but it felt like hornet stings against the rider and the horse. The animal reared up, throwing the rider. Felix threw the shotgun at the second rider. It had no reload and worked better as a blunt object that struck his face, knocking the robber backward against his saddle. He lost his balance but recovered moments before the right horse shouldered against his mount. The animal fell backward, squealing.\n\nThe fourth man had managed to get his horse turned south and galloped ahead of them, running away from the oncoming carriage. He couldn't turn around to get a clear shot, as Felix continued racing the horses forward.\n\nHe heard muffled sounds from the back that didn't sound like a steamer trunk bouncing around in the boot or an unfortunate rabbit.\n\nGriffith had leaned over the side of the carriage, looking back at the other riders as they recovered. He faced Felix again. \"I believe one of those men is Mr. Kelly.\"\n\n\"What? You recognized him?\"\n\n\"I think so.\"\n\nFelix concentrated on running down the lone rider. But the horse had youth and one passenger. It picked up speed, increasing the distance between them. His horses towed a bulk weight that continued weaving on the roadway.\n\n\"Did you tell Raymond Kelly you were carrying blank certifications, Mr. Griffith?\" Felix asked, managing to drive, whip, and shout at the same time. He stood on the platform and wedged his boots against the gap between the boards to keep himself upright. The whip cracked several times.\n\n\"No, of course not,\" Griffith said quickly, and then added, \"I may have, perhaps, but Mr. Kelly is a driver. Why would he do this?\"\n\n\"You can ask him when they catch us. But I think since you know him, they don't plan to let us live.\"\n\n\"Are they going to rob us?\" Griffith asked in a high shocked voice.\n\n\"They're going to rob you,\" Felix shouted.\n\nThe rider ahead of the stagecoach pulled to the right, finding a gap in the trees to veer off the roadway. He faced Felix, shouldering the rifle. Felix put both sets of reins in his left hand and leaned hard to the right. The carriage rolled close to the roadside as Felix snapped the whip.\n\nThe end of the whip sliced the man's chest, knocking the rifle from his grip and unseating him from the saddle. The horse bolted into the woods.\n\nBehind them, Felix saw over the top of the roof. Three men on horseback pursued them. One of them managed to get a shot that struck the rear, and Felix heard an unmistakable scream. It was high and short, like a surprised yelp from a child. It wasn't a rabbit caught under the carriage. Felix realized what had happened.\n\n\"Oh no, no, no, no,\" he said. \"Lyle, take the reins.\" Felix jammed the whip in its holder.\n\n\"What?\" His voice was a high shrill as he tried holding the leather restraints.\n\n\"Take the damned reins!\" Felix pushed two sets of straps into the man's hands. Griffith sat in rigid fear in the driver's box. \"Just hold on and don't try to pull to the left or right.\"\n\nMore gunshots, bullets struck the wood frame on the carriage.\n\n\"Where the devil are you going?\" Griffith shouted.\n\nFelix didn't answer, concentrating on his task. He leaned to the right side, looking back. It was Raymond Kelly to the right. Felix knew the man, but seeing him directly made Felix fiercely angry. Kelly's pistol shot caught a tree trunk as the stagecoach sailed by it. Felix took the moment Kelly had to cock the gun again to grab the side of the carriage. He pulled himself around and clung to the outside, grabbing for the door handle.\n\nGriffith must have been watching too closely, leaning too much to the right. The wagon wheels caught the roadside gravel and rocks. As Felix got inside the carriage, a tree caught the door, snapping it off the hinges.\n\nFelix pulled the back cushion away from the forward-facing seat. He pounded his fist on the boot wall.\n\n\"William, is that you?\" he shouted.\n\nThere wasn't an answer. A bullet tore through the leather curtain and into the cabin front wall. Felix kept his head low and pounded again.\n\n\"William,\" he shouted.\n\n\"Mr. Allen?\" A small voice called from inside the carriage boot.\n\n\"Goddamn it,\" Felix hissed. He dug his fingers against the framework on the carriage. It was superior craftsmanship, impossible to separate. Mr. Henderson expected no less than the best wood and metal. He couldn't get to William from the inside.\n\nFelix lifted his head and parted the leather curtains enough to see Kelly riding close to the rear. His horse's muzzle almost touched the boot. Felix got close to the wall separating him from William.\n\n\"Is the steamer trunk in there?\" Felix shouted.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I need you to push it out of the carriage.\"\n\n\"It's not mine,\" William said. \"I'll get in trouble.\"\n\n\"William Laners, you will do what you're told,\" Felix scolded. He poured authority into his voice. \"Get that trunk out of there.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" his little voice said.\n\nFelix looked through the curtain again. He saw Kelly gaining on them. The one rider took up the spot behind Kelly. Far behind them, the fourth man got his horse onto the road again. He was several yards behind and didn't pose a threat to them yet. The last rider that got buckshot to the face and chest was nowhere near them.\n\nFelix moved to the front wall, pounding his fist, and screamed at Griffith, \"Get your ass moving. They're coming for you.\" He returned to the rear and pounded on the boot wall. \"William, get that trunk out of the boot, now!\"\n\n\"Got it,\" he yelled.\n\nFelix rose, looking through the curtains as the steamer trunk emerged from the rear of the carriage like the stagecoach had shit it out. It slammed against the ground in front of Kelly, and the man managed to get the horse to jump it.\n\nThe rider behind him or the horse didn't see the trunk until it tumbled and cracked open. The horse stepped into the broken wood and fell forward, screaming and rolling. Felix saw the rider catapulted forward over the top of the horse before he landed face-first, and the horse's back and the saddle landed on top of him.\n\nThe carriage began to weave, cavitating with the sway. The stagecoach had limitations when it came to sharp corners. Felix tumbled around inside the cabin.\n\n\"Hold on,\" he shouted to William.\n\nFelix rolled and crawled to the side to see forward. That's when he saw the wooded area gave way to open prairie on both sides. \"Shit,\" he hissed.\n\nFelix checked behind him. Kelly and another rider galloped forward. The coach was close enough to Kelly's face to see the hatred and determination.\n\nFelix got close to the boot again. He shouted to William, \"Stay down. Get yourself wedged inside. If it gets bumpy, do your best to hold on. Can you do that, William?\"\n\nThe boy didn't answer immediately, sol Felix slammed his fist against the wall.\n\n\"I'll try,\" William said weakly.\n\nFelix took a deep breath. He didn't hesitate as he went to the gap where there was once a door. He grabbed the top railing and put his boot against the through brace to haul himself forward to the driver's seat again.\n\nGriffith yelped as he saw Felix emerge from the right side of the carriage.\n\n\"Good job, Mr. Griffith,\" Felix said, retrieving the reins. The man had tangled them together. It was impossible to unravel, so Felix had to improvise, using left and right motions to make the horses keep moving forward. He looked behind him and didn't see Kelly. Over the top of the carriage, Felix saw the other rider catching up fast.\n\nKelly came on fast to the left, using the blind spot in the carriage, blocking Felix's view. When the pistol shot rang out, Griffith jumped in the seat, and Felix turned to him.\n\nThe man had paled and slumped. He looked at Felix with pleading eyes. his hands clinging to his front, clutching the satchel against him. The man's head lolled, tipping him away off the front edge. Felix grabbed Griffith's jacket collar, keeping the man upright.\n\nBlood seeped from the corner of Griffith's mouth. He tried pulling on the leather case over his chest, but his fingers went slack, and his head dangled on his neck. Griffith's eyes stared at Felix, but the life in them had drained away.\n\nDistracted by the man's death, Felix lost sight of Kelly again. He saw another wagon ahead of them in the distance. It was several hundred yards away and coming at them at an even pace. It was the mail coach. Two riders and hopefully heavily armed, they saw the robbers attacking the stagecoach. Felix saw the messenger pointing at the overland coach.\n\nFelix snapped the reins and reached for the whip. William screamed from the boot of the carriage. Felix stood up, looking over the roof. If Kelly intended to climb aboard, William had startled him. But the boy gave himself away, and Kelly grabbed William by the arm.\n\nThe mail coach got closer. All he needed was a few more yards. Felix twisted on the seat, standing up on the bench beside Griffith's dead body. He let out the reins. The horses' snorts and wheezing told Felix they had reached their limit. He needed a few more yards to get cover from the mail drivers.\n\nFelix stood up on the bench beside Griffith's body. He stepped backward, watching the road ahead. He got his left boot on the roof and then the right, pulling his left hand behind him and facing the rear. With his best aim and the full extent of the whip, Felix lashed out.\n\nThe end of the whip larruped Kelly's left arm, but the man had a hold of William with a handhold around the boy's skinny arm. As the horse slowed and turned away from the second crack of the whip, William came free of the boot.\n\nGriffith's body fell out of the driver's seat. It pitched and rolled along the roadside. Kelly halted the horse beside the fallen body.\n\nScreaming and kicking, Kelly had the boy draped over the saddle. Felix turned toward the mail coach again. They were too far away to get around the stagecoach. Something crackled under Felix. There was a sound like a giant oak tree snapping in half. The through brace fractured. The front right wagon wheel came loose and folded under the carriage, pitching it to the right and throwing Felix off the roof. He let go of the reins and the whip. The ground met him on his face and shoulder. Behind him, the wagon crumbled and folded, broken in half as the horses continued forward. Felix hit his head, and everything went dark." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Felix woke to the thunder of hoofbeats inside his skull and a boot prodding him. A few feet from where he lay in the tall grass and wet mud, the remains of an Overland Stagecoach embedded itself in the ground.\n\n\"He's alive,\" the mail driver said standing over Felix. \"We need to get going.\"\n\n\"We can't leave him there, Mr. Watts,\" a concerned voice said.\n\nOnce his vision cleared and he attempted to move, Felix saw the mail coach driver and the messenger with the shotgun. The young man looked more scared than seasoned. Unlike the driver, he acted surprised by the entire incident.\n\n\"Well, I ain't staying here, kid. And he ain't riding back with us.\" Watts dug into his pocket as Felix sat up, swaying a little because there were a lot of horses running around inside his skull. Watts looked at his pocket watch. \"I don't got a lot of time.\" He chewed and spat tobacco juice.\n\n\"What should we do?\" the boy asked.\n\n\"We'll get him up. Go fetch one of those carriage horses. Not that one, it's lame. Unhitch them and tie that one off. They can get a better look at its leg later,\" Watt said. He raised his voice, and Felix flinched. \"Go fetch that saddle off the dead horse back there.\"\n\n\"But there's a dead man under it.\"\n\n\"Well, if he's dead, he can't hurt you.\"\n\nFelix saw the blurry figure run down the road toward the large brown furry mound near the shrapnel, once a medium-sized steamer trunk.\n\n\"Hey, fellow, what were you hauling?\" Watts asked. He stood back, watching Felix with indifference.\n\n\"Just a man and\u2014\" Felix remembered William. \"The boy,\" he said gasping, trying to get to his feet. Watts watched him but didn't offer a hand. Instead, the mail driver glanced at his pocket watch again. \"Did you see the boy?\"\n\n\"Well, I sure saw a lot, but I don't know what it was all about,\" Watts said. \"Was there anyone else?\"\n\n\"Four riders,\" Felix said. \"I counted four men. Where's William?\"\n\n\"Is that your boy,\" Watts asked. \"William, you said?\"\n\n\"Yes, where is he?\" Felix still couldn't see straight enough to walk. He felt nauseous when he took a few steps toward the wreckage. He used the overturned carriage to brace and keep standing.\n\n\"Well, one of them pulled a case off that dead man over there,\" Watts said, pointing. \"He don't look like no messenger.\"\n\n\"No, he was my passenger.\" Felix saw Griffith lying in a twisted mess on the roadside. \"Where's William?\"\n\n\"After that fellow got the case, he hauled your boy up and rode north again.\" Watts waited a second before adding, \"You said four riders. I only counted three.\"\n\n\"The fourth is north about a mile ahead,\" Felix said, remembering the rider with the buckshot.\n\n\"Well, sir, you got a hell of a mess here. Me and the boy will keep an eye out for anyone else. I got to warn you, if we see someone, we'll shoot first.\"\n\n\"Understood,\" Felix said. He ran a hand over his sweaty face. \"I need to find William.\"\n\n\"We can't help,\" Watts said. \"The mail comes first. They weren't messing with us, so I got no quarrel with them. But I mean what I said about shooting anyone that comes near the mail coach.\" He looked to the messenger securing the dead man's saddle to the uninjured carriage horse. \"Well, come on, boy. Get your ass up in that box and get your eyes open. I don't want you back out of that again.\"\n\n\"Are you going to be alright, mister?\" the messenger asked, climbing onto the mail coach. \"There's a man back there that's hurt real bad.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Felix asked. He limped away from the coach.\n\n\"He's back beyond the dead horse and fellow under him.\" The messenger shook his head. \"I ain't never saw nothing like that before.\"\n\n\"Well, you ain't been around long enough. Wait until it happens to the mail.\" Watts climbed into the driver's seat beside his messenger. He eased the skittish horses forward. They smelled death, and one of their own in the road ahead made it hard for Watts to drive them around it.\n\nFelix limped around the dead horse and rider. He bent over, almost falling to retrieve a pistol. He cocked it and carried it with him.\n\n\"You got to help me,\" the man said. It wasn't Kelly, and Felix didn't recognize him up close.\n\nHe pointed the gun at the man lying on the ground. His horse had run off, but by the look of him, he wasn't going anywhere. Blood had pooled on his shirt. He clung to his leg and chest.\n\n\"Where's Kelly going?\" Felix asked. He listened as the man mumbled through swollen lips.\n\nThe mail coach drew up level in the road with Felix. \"We'll let them know you're out here when we get to Woodland.\"\n\n\"You're taking him with you.\"\n\n\"The hell we are \u2014 okay, well shit.\" Watts had a change of heart the moment Felix pointed the Colt pistol at him. \"Damn it, boy, alright, get him in the back. We'll drop him off at Woodland.\" He spat on the ground.\n\nWatts cussed and shook his head as he helped heave the robber off the ground and into the back of the mail carriage. It wasn't made for people. The closed box had no windows.\n\nFelix stood by, watching. Watts slammed the door and locked it. \"Get your ass in that box, boy.\" He didn't care Felix had a gun anymore. \"I don't take passengers. You're lucky I got a soft spot for your boy, mister.\"\n\n\"Tell Sally about William,\" Felix said. \"Tell them I'm going after them. They're headed up the East Ridge. Watch out for the other one back there.\"\n\n\"You're a damned fool chasing after them. I hope whatever that fellow had in his luggage is worth it.\"\n\n\"I'm going after William,\" Felix said. \"I don't give a shit about the certificates.\" The setting sun cast a red glow across the landscape." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nThe day grew long, and Sally began to worry deeply about William. Sometimes he spent an entire day wandering the edges of the property, hunting for adventure, or playing by the pond. Sally didn't worry so much about William because a boy needed time alone, and the migrant Chinese laborers in the area wouldn't let anything happen to him.\n\nA few hours could go by before Sally saw him playing on the wagon by the barn or running around the roadway. Then she'd see him by the paddocks. Sometimes he sat with the stablemen while they whittled or smoked their pipes. But after midday, when he didn't come back to the inn for lunch, Sally began walking parts of the property that she didn't usually see often. She went to the pond, where the ducks swam away from her.\n\nSally walked the footpaths that meandered around the acreage. She followed the well-worn lane that led to the Chinese immigrants' campsite. The immigrants greeted her with smiles, slight bows, and skeptical glances. It had been a long time since Sally ventured that far from the main property. The transient migrants had created a small society within the boundaries of her land. She found an organized tent city with cooking fires, goats, donkeys, and more than thirty men and women watching her with apprehension.\n\nShe understood their uneasiness. Chinese laborers were cheap and plentiful, according to most enterprising businessmen. But once they served their usefulness, often the migrants got pushed out of many towns. Men wanted their laborers, but they didn't want to keep the Chinese in town.\n\nSally didn't recognize any of them. One by one, she asked about William. She called his name. She wanted to know if they saw her child. If they understood English, it was impossible to read them. None of them spoke to her directly.\n\nWhen Sally got back to the compound, she rallied the others around her. \"We need to find William right now,\" she said. \"Look everywhere. I need someone to go back to the campsite and talk to them. Please, we need to find William.\"\n\nIn the back of her mind, Sally seeded the faraway idea that William had absconded, just like his father. It took hold and spread through her. The cold fear needled her. Seeing her with Peterson had scarred William enough to run away. She knew it. Sally did her best to keep the idea from plaguing her. But William's absence only made her regret not explaining more to him when he saw her with Peterson.\n\nTime crawled by, and Sally lost focus on everything except finding William. As sunset cast long shadows over the grounds, she had spent hours searching and calling and crying. He wasn't on the property. Running away was out of the question. They had counted the horses in the pens. It was impossible to think that he'd go beyond the parameter of the property. He never did it before.\n\nIt was after dark when the railroad men returned to the compound with their survey equipment. They saw the confusion and panic. The laborers continued their frantic searches. Sally shunned Peterson completely and met Quinn and Russell when they dismounted.\n\n\"Have you seen William?\" she asked. Her hands ached from knotting her fists and wringing her hands all day. \"Did he go out with you?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am,\" McCoy said. \"We've been on the north ridge most of the day. We didn't see your little fellow.\"\n\n\"Maybe he's with his father,\" Peterson said.\n\nThe man had smugness about him, a chilly tone that came with negotiation earlier that day. Sally read it clearly. Peterson thought she had orchestrated the entire ploy to keep her out of his bedroom that night. Sally ignored the apparent insult.\n\n\"Well, we'd be happy to help you look around the property,\" Quinn said as he dismounted.\n\nSally started to explain they had searched everywhere already, but Chang stared at the road leading south. She stood beside him and waited. The distant rattle of chains and the galloping of hooves made Sally more anxious. She had hoped someone saw William or gave him a ride back to the compound. It was likely the afternoon mail coach. Sally hoped it was Felix returning early and bringing William home with him.\n\nThe mail coach pulled into the quarter, wheels kicking up dirt, horses frothing. Sally lost faith the moment she saw the driver. The mail carrier's name was Brian Watts, a punctual man, short on social skills, and always in a hurry. She saw the grave expression on Watts' bearded face when the yard lantern lights illuminated him.\n\nWatts' mail coach messenger remained on the driver's seat, watching the people moving around him and the carriage with purpose. The young man wasn't twenty years and looked frightened. He had one job, secure the mail and parcels. Sally never saw the young man dismount before that day.\n\nWatts climbed off the small two-horse coach and approached Sally. There was blood on his shirt sleeves; Sally saw it in the light. Watts chewed tobacco plugs, scooped the black sludge from his mouth, flicked it over the gravel, and spat before biting off another hunk. He was uncharacteristically quiet. But Sally knew by the look that Watts saw something out of the ordinary.\n\nChang and the other stablemen removed the horses from the mail coach to get fresh horses for the drive north to Marysville.\n\n\"Where's my boy?\" she whispered, knowing in her heart that Watts knew what had happened to William. His hands rubbed together. The thick skin sounded like sandpaper.\n\n\"Out with it, man!\" McCoy demanded.\n\n\"They got bushwhacked about five miles south of here,\" Watts said. He spoke through the fresh gob of chewing tobacco in his mouth. After he let out a black stream through his teeth, he added, \"They overturned the stagecoach. There is more than one man dead. Your husband got one of the ponies from the coach and went after the boy.\" Watts delivered it like it was an article from a newspaper. If it shocked him, it didn't show. He thumbed toward the road. \"I was coming out of Dixon when I saw it.\"\n\n\"Where's William?\" Sally asked again. She heard snatches of what he said. It was hard for her to hear over the others talking around them once they heard the news. The hammering heart pulsed in her ears. Watts said something about her husband and William, but things began to unravel around her. Sally's knees buckled, and before she slipped to the ground, Russell and Quinn caught her by the arms, keeping her upright.\n\n\"Well, they got the boy,\" Watts said matter-of-factually. \"Is that your boy's name? William. Your husband took a blow to the head. He was making some sense. He was broken up about those bastards making off with the boy. He was too shook up about losing the boy to come back with us. He wanted us to let you know he went after them.\"\n\nThe messenger climbed off the driver's box. He shifted the short-barrel shotgun in his grip.\n\n\"We got one survivor,\" he said. \"The others are dead. There's a dead horse in the road back there,\" the messenger said, shaking his head. \"Your husband managed to fight them off for probably two miles, maybe more.\" He stared at Sally but looked through her like he relived something. Sally saw the horror on his face. \"I ain't never saw nothing like that before.\"\n\n\"They got William?\" Sally asked. \"Who are they?\"\n\n\"We don't rightly know for sure,\" Watts said. He looked at the others watching him. \"But that bastard in the back of the coach there might know his mates. I only took him because your husband said to bring him back here. And he pointed a gun at me to do it.\" He spat black tobacco juice on the dirt between the men's feet. The refined railroad men drew away from the black splotch. \"I told him. If it didn't happen on the mail coach, it ain't our problem. You need to get that asshole out of the back before we head up to Marysville. I'll let the marshal know what happened down here.\"\n\n\"What does he want with a little boy?\" McCoy asked.\n\n\"How the hell should I know?\" Watts snapped. \"Like I said, if it don't involve the mail, it ain't our problem. I got to report all this, and your husband pulled a gun on me.\" Watts exchanged looks between the others. \"Given the circumstances, I might let that go.\"\n\nMcCoy and the others went to the back of the coach led by the messenger. Sally remained facing Watts, swaying slightly, dizzy and confused. The stablemen trotted out two horses and began harnessing them to the mail carriage.\n\n\"Do you know any of the dead men's names?\" McCoy asked.\n\n\"How the hell should I know that?\" Watts said coldly. \"It ain't my problem.\" He pointed to the coach. \"That there is the only thing I care about. If it happened to the mail, well then, I might know more than I do. I got a schedule to keep.\" He pulled the pocket watch from a trouser pocket. \"Right now, I'm still seventeen minutes late in Marysville if we don't leave soon. You got that bastard out of the back?\"\n\n\"They took him into the hotel,\" Russell said.\n\n\"If he bled over any of my mail, I will be pissed.\" He motioned to the messenger. \"Come on, boy; get your ass on that coach.\" Watts wandered away from the group.\n\nSally felt nauseous. In all the commotion, she had ignored Peterson. Now he came into focus. His eyes bore into her like a man caught in the act of betraying his conscience and Sally's moral ambiguity.\n\n\"What was Mrs. Laners husband's name?\" Peterson asked, shouting over the discussion between McCoy and Quinn.\n\nWatts climbed into the driver's seat and spat off the front corner. He tested the reins in his hands. \"Ain't you a bright one,\" Watts said. \"Didn't you just say his name?\"\n\n\"You know what I mean, man. What name did he give you?\"\n\n\"All I know is him mentioning Griffin or Griffith,\" Watts said.\n\n\"It was Griffith,\" the messenger said. \"Your husband said something about him carrying some certificates or stocks.\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's right. Griffith.\"\n\n\"What about him?\" McCoy asked, taking notice of Peterson's interest.\n\n\"Dead,\" Watts said and spat again. \"He got shot on the road. His body's still with the coach and the last horse. It's a hell of a mess. And we got to get this mail through to Marysville. We're behind schedule.\" He flicked the reins, slapping the horses' flanks with the straps, getting them ready to run.\n\nSally stepped away from Peterson, not wanting to think about anything except finding William. Her head swam with ideas. She needed to get a horse saddled. Chang and Lee had already moved through the others, keeping the horses ready for the railroad men.\n\n\"What do we do?\" McCoy asked. \"We should go out there. Mr. Laners needs our help.\"\n\n\"It's not our business,\" Peterson said.\n\n\"We are here as representatives of the California Pacific Railroad,\" McCoy said. \"I will not besmirch the reputation of this company because we failed to act. Mr. Peterson and Mr. Russell can stay here to watch over the highwayman until the marshals arrive. Mr. Quinn, will you ride with me?\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Quinn said. \"We should take more weapons.\" He looked at Sally. \"Do you have a rifle or two we can use, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Yes, I do. But I'm going with you,\" she said.\n\n\"It's best if you stay here. In case your husband returns with the boy. We'll see to the carriage and the body. We'll try following your husband's trail if he's left any clues.\"\n\n\"That's assuming the boy's not already dead,\" Peterson said.\n\nSally abhorred violence, but sometimes, it took violence to get satisfaction. She didn't think, only reacted. All those years of laboring for the perfection of Woodland built up her endurance and strength. When she turned, swinging her right fist until it connected, it felt like punching a fleshly wall. Peterson went down, flat on his back, knocked out cold. The only noise in all of Woodland was the sound of the mail coach driver laughing from the driver's seat.\n\n\"Seeing that right there was worth being late into Marysville,\" Watts said, still hooting with laughter. He spat tobacco juice from the bench. The carriage jolted when the horses bucked and galloped away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nSally had done her share of doctoring over the years for several people. Somehow, when there wasn't an official doctor available, it fell to the establishment's proprietor to make sure something got done when it came to wounds. Injuries happened at Woodland.\n\nThe seriously wounded people always came to Sally. If they were too hurt to move, someone fetched her. She suspected it had to do with accountability. If someone died on the property, Sally had to know about it. Fortunately, with the increasing transient population of Chinese immigrants, an Eastern doctor was never far from Woodland.\n\nBut that night, Sally wasn't thinking about helping someone else. The only thing on her mind was William. Somehow, he had managed to stow away on Felix's stagecoach. And after everything that happened, with the robbery, murder, and kidnapping of her child, Sally felt a glimmer of hope after hearing Watts. Her husband went after William.\n\n\"Mr. Lee, please go find someone familiar with medicines in the camps,\" Sally said once they got the seriously wounded stranger inside. She rolled up her sleeves and repositioned her hair as they moved the wounded man. Sally removed the hair sticks and coiled the braid to fasten tighter and free from her face.\n\nThe railroad men took the stranger through the lobby and into the dining room. It was the only place downstairs with a large table and open space to work.\n\n\"Ladies, please start boiling water and collect as many lanterns as we can use,\" Sally said. \"Gentlemen, let's get his clothes off.\n\nWhen the men moved the stranger, he drifted in and out of consciousness. McCoy and Russell looked awkward at the request. Peterson didn't follow the others inside. Sally disregarded the man when he continued to disrespect her and the property. She ignored the pain in her knuckles.\n\n\"Is that really necessary?\" Quinn asked.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Quinn.\" Sally moved one of the lanterns closer to the man on the dining table. \"Get his boots off instead of standing there.\"\n\nThree men gingerly removed the stranger's boots, shirt, and trousers. He wore an unwashed union suit under his upper clothing. The other men went as far as the long undergarments. They were collectively embarrassed but moved back when Sally, Mrs. Jung, and Mrs. Chang began washing the man's face, neck, and hands.\n\n\"Can you hear me?\" Sally asked. She saw the gash on his cheek, another on his scalp. His breathing was shallow and sounded wet like he breathed through the liquid.\n\n\"He looks young, no more than twenty years,\" McCoy said.\n\n\"He's an assessory to murder,\" Quinn said. \"Should one of us go after the marshal?\"\n\n\"Mr. Watts will report it,\" Sally said. \"We'll see the marshal before dawn.\" When the man's eyelids fluttered, Sally slapped his face. \"What is your name?\"\n\n\"Kent,\" he whispered. \"Please, help me.\"\n\n\"We're doing our best,\" she said.\n\nMrs. Chang and Ms. Jung continued cleaning the visible wounds. Sally knew there was more damage under the garments and his skin. Sally had dabbed the blood on his mouth, but his lips and gums continued to seep pink blood. She suspected it wasn't coming from inside his mouth but much further down.\n\nSally had ulterior motives for keeping him alive. She had pushed down all the gut-wrenching fear about losing William for the moment. She had to stay focused on the best way to help the stranger survive. Keeping Kent alive long enough for him to tell her why they took her son was the only reason. Once she learned where they took him, she could let the law or God have him; it made no difference.\n\nAn old Chinese man with a walking stick arrived at the doorway to the kitchen. His words needed very little interpretation because Lee had explained the situation before he got there. He had a kind face and shriveled skin. Lee and Mrs. Jung helped him into the dining room. Lee put a leather doctor's kit on the table by Kent's waist.\n\n\"Should he be examining that young man?\" McCoy asked.\n\nSally felt a flare of anger. \"Why? Is it because he's Chinese? I happen to know they know a lot more about medicine than most of the snake oil salesmen that wander through these parts. Let him have time to assess him.\" She turned to Lee. \"I want to know the moment Mr. Kent can talk. He is not allowed to die until I know what they did with William. Is that understood?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am,\" Lee said. He bowed along with Chang and Jung.\n\nShe left the dining room. McCoy, Quinn, and Russell followed her back through the lobby and out onto the veranda.\n\n\"Where is Mr. Peterson?\" Quinn asked. \"I haven't seen him since \u2014 well since we brought that man inside the hotel.\" Quinn shared a look with McCoy. They had witnessed what it meant to face off with Sally. Neither man wanted to repeat it.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, that man took one of the horses and a lantern,\" a stableman said. He pointed to the road heading south.\n\n\"Mr. Peterson is going after them,\" McCoy said. \"We should rally together and do the same.\" He gave Sally a grim face. \"My apologies for your missing son, Mrs. Laners,\" he said. \"It was a good thing your husband happened to be nearby when it occurred. You are surprisingly reserved.\"\n\n\"No, Mr. McCoy, I am not. I want to scream and rent the hair from my head. But I know becoming hysterical in a moment of crisis will not help matters,\" she said and exhaled roughly. \"We need to wait for Mr. Kent's recovery before doing anything rash. It is quite dark out there. Mr. Peterson left because I humiliated him, I am well aware. But he is on a fool's errand going out there in the dark. He doesn't know the area. He doesn't know the terrain. Before morning, Mr. Peterson will be more lost than William and\u2014\" Sally stopped herself from saying 'Felix.'\n\n\"You are an extraordinary woman, Mrs. Laners,\" McCoy said. \"You have much reserve. While it is not the appropriate time, I wanted you to know that Mr. Quinn, Mr. Russell, and myself believe Woodland would make the perfect water stop for the train. You and your husband built quite an enterprise here. We will be recommending Woodland.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. McCoy. But right now, I can't think about anything except my son,\" Sally said.\n\n\"I understand,\" McCoy said. He took Sally's hand in both of his. \"We will see to justice here, no matter the outcome.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, the man is awake,\" Mrs. Jung said from the doorway.\n\nKent was dying. Everyone in the dining room knew it. He wouldn't live long enough to stand trial. He likely wouldn't last until morning. The Chinese medicine man had helped ease the man's pain and cleaned the wounds.\n\n\"He is at peace now,\" Mrs. Chang said, having not left Kent's side.\n\n\"Mr. Kent, where is my son?\" Sally asked. But in fashion, her needs were second to the men in the room. McCoy took over, questioning the robber.\n\n\"Why did you try to rob the coach?\" he asked. Russell and Quinn stepped in front of her when they entered the dining hall, forcing Sally to walk around the other side of the table. She stood with Chang and Jung.\n\n\"He told us it would make us all rich,\" Kent said. His voice slurred, his eyes had a dreamy look as he gazed out at everyone.\n\n\"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"Ray knew about the man from the mine,\" Kent said.\n\n\"Was there gold on the coach?\" Quinn asked.\n\nKent coughed and shook his head slightly, eyes closed. \"He said it was better than gold.\"\n\n\"Who is Raymond?\" McCoy asked.\n\n\"Ray Kelly,\" Kent said. Sally heard the slurred words. She knew the name.\n\n\"Raymond Kelly works for the Overland Stage Company,\" she said. \"He comes through here on Mondays and Fridays.\"\n\n\"So, we know it's the driver with the stagecoach,\" Russell said.\n\n\"Where is my son,\" Sally asked.\n\nShe stepped to the side of the table and peered down on the man who had bled over her large table. They had dressed his wounds and made him comfortable. When Sally took Kent's hand, it startled him, looking at her with the overhead lantern shining down on her shoulders. It was as if he didn't see her before that moment.\n\n\"Are you an angel?\" Kent whispered.\n\n\"I want to know what happened to my son, Mr. Kent. Your friend, Ray Kelly, took my son. Where were you supposed to find Ray if you got separated?\" she asked softly. Sally wasn't playing into Kent's vision of her. But Sally would utilize anything that helped her find William.\n\nKent swallowed and smacked his lips. Sally got him a mug and tipped it up to his lips. When the ceramic mug came away with pink water, she knew he bled somewhere on his insides. \"We were going to meet up at the black rocks.\"\n\nSally nodded. \"Black Rock caves?\" she asked.\n\nKent nodded. \"Ray said we were to meet him there.\" He whimpered and cried some as Sally held his hand.\n\n\"Do you know where that is?\" McCoy asked. His voice was loud and jarring. Kent blanched at the sound of it. Sally didn't want to undo the connection she just established with the dying man.\n\n\"Mr. McCoy, I am doing my best,\" she said. \"If you would kindly shut up, I think Mr. Kent will give us more.\" She faced him again, still holding his hand. \"You know it will be alright, Mr. Kent. You can tell me.\"\n\n\"I'm real scared,\" he said. \"I don't want to die.\"\n\nMrs. Chang stepped forward beside Sally and whispered in her ear. \"There is more medicine here.\" Chang pressed the small glass vial into her hand. \"No more than three drops.\" The Chinese woman grew leery of white men, especially from the railroad. Administering medicine to another white man wasn't something she was prepared to do.\n\nSally uncorked the vial and poured the contents into the water cup. She pressed it to Kent's lips and tipped it up, holding his head gently. He swallowed and coughed. She gave the cup back to Chang.\n\n\"What was in that tincture?\" McCoy asked. \"What did you give him?\"\n\n\"Something to ease his pains more,\" Sally said. \"Now, Mr. Kent, what did you take from Mr. Griffith?\"\n\n\"We don't need to know what was stolen,\" McCoy said. \"And I don't think you had no business giving him more of that Chinese concoction. He needs a genuine doctor.\"\n\n\"Kent, please, what did Ray want from Mr. Griffith?\" she asked, ignoring McCoy and the others. \"What was more valuable than gold?\"\n\n\"He says it was certificates of some sort. They were going to make us all rich.\" Kent's face went slack, and his eyes turned from Sally. She carefully put his head down on the rolled linen used as a pillow. It had blood and sweat stains on it.\n\n\"What kind of document is worth more than gold?\" McCoy asked.\n\n\"Banknotes,\" Russell said. \"Perhaps Mr. Griffith had a sum of banknotes with him.\"\n\n\"Does the mine issue currency?\" Sally asked. \"Mr. Kent said they came from the mine.\"\n\n\"Certificate?\" Russell repeated, shaking his head slightly. \"Is it possible Mr. Griffith carried Wells Fargo Mining stock certificates?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's possible,\" Quinn said. \"But they aren't worth anything except to the person they are issued. Unless they are blank, they would be worth thousands.\"\n\n\"I don't care about all that,\" Sally responded. \"I only want my son back.\"\n\n\"Do you know the location?\" McCoy asked. Do you know Black Rock?\"\n\n\"Not well, I've heard of it,\" she said. Sally saw Kent lying very still on the table. They wouldn't get anything from him anymore. \"It's a place about fifteen miles from here. There are caves.\"\n\nSally turned from the men. She needed to stop wasting time. Before she got to the stairwell leading upstairs, McCoy caught her arm. \"Mrs. Laners, I am under the impression you've kept the location from us. You need to wait here. We will go assist your husband in retrieving the child.\"\n\nSally rolled her arm out of McCoy's grasp. \"I'm not going to wait here while other men do what I can do without them.\"\n\n\"You will be of service by tending to that man's needs,\" he said.\n\n\"That man isn't going to see daylight again. Mr. McCoy, do not assume because I am a woman that I am incapable of going out there to find my son.\" Sally wanted to say more but feared she'd insult the man too much. She didn't know him. But McCoy and the others \u2014 excluding Peterson \u2014 were decent people. \"I appreciate your help, but I am coming with you.\"\n\n\"Your husband is actively finding your son,\" McCoy said.\n\n\"My husband is\u2014\" Sally stopped. She drew in a deep breath and held it until the frustration subsided. \"I need to go. I know someone who can find the place.\" Quinn and Russell stood in the hallway listening. She glanced at them. \"The Indians considered it a holy place. The Chinese go there to pick mushrooms. I don't use those mushrooms when cooking. They make strange things happen to the mind. I'll change. I won't stop you from following me.\"\n\nSally left the men in the hallway downstairs, exchanged her petticoats and dress for a pair of her husband's old trousers, shirt, and belt. She needed freedom to move. Horses only got so far in the wilderness quickly. She hoped someone from the migrant campsite knew how to reach the location. Sally couldn't stop thinking about Felix going after William. There was nothing in it for him. He pursued the valuable certificates. He wasn't after Kelly to rescue William. Felix went after Kelly to save his job." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nRiding in the dark on a horse not too used to a saddle and without blinders was an eye-opening experience with a headache that felt like every hoofbeat happened inside his head. It had all fallen to Felix. If he had died during the attack, no one would think twice about it. If the authorities learned about Raymond Kelly and his gang robbing the stagecoach, Felix was another victim, like Lyle Griffith.\n\nBut since Felix had lived through the ordeal, the lawmen would question him and suspect him. If they thought Felix led Griffith into the ambush intentionally, they'd put him on trial and let the jury sort it out. Felix didn't like his chances.\n\nHe wasn't a lawman and didn't know much about the law, but his mother was an honest woman who made honest wages. She instilled the importance of integrity. Felix had learned the rules of the road, the loyalty Oath. It repeated in his head as he kept as much focus as possible.\n\n\"I do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while an employee of the Overland Stagecoach Company, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language, that I will drink no intoxicating liquors, that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employers, so help me God.\"\n\nIt wasn't something he cast off immediately. Felix believed in the Oath. Old Ephraim was a sour bastard, but he believed in the Oath. He had learned to live by a set of rules that were easy to follow. Often, Felix knew of men who gave up their $150 monthly salary with the company because they failed to follow a few simple rules.\n\nWhen it came to Raymond Kelly, Felix knew the man had intended another driver to take the fall. After the robbery and the murder of Griffith, Felix let his mind wander over the situation.\n\nFelix knew the man had set him up to fail as he rode after Kelly, stealing shotgun cartridges left for the messenger gun. Kelly knew that if he took the weapon, Felix wouldn't have ridden without it. But taking the shells meant Felix had a firearm and one-shot chambered. It was a calculated risk that got one of his accomplices shot. But the lawmen wouldn't stop at going after Kelly. He could make claims that Felix was in on it. It wasn't his usual route. Even Charlie Reese was suspect of the robbery for putting Felix back on the road.\n\nFelix didn't want to leave his integrity in the hands of the law. If he died trying to make a good on something terrible, his mother would know he died an honest man.\n\nRiding in the dark was dangerous for both horse and rider. The horse wasn't used to the saddle, but Felix weighed a lot less than the stagecoach, which sometimes got up to a ton and a half with passengers and cargo. Free of the harnesses, the horse had renewed energies. But the uneven terrain and cloudy night made it difficult to see. The gait changed from a trot to a walk as it got later.\n\nFelix followed the natural flow of the landscape. He wasn't sure if Kelly had a predetermined rendezvous point or intended to ride until the horses gave out from under them. He searched for signs of life, campfire, or the scent of smoke in the wind. When he happened upon the saddled horse without a rider, Felix stopped and dismounted.\n\n\"Easy, girl,\" he said quietly. Felix draped the reins for both animals over a branch without tying them up. Well-behaved horses didn't need securing. He checked the saddle, his hands coming away wet. The slick across his palms looked like black ink. There was a rifle sleeve without a rifle, and that made Felix nervous.\n\nInstead of climbing back into the saddle, he decided to continue forward on foot. The dense foliage and mountainous topography ebb and flow allowed him to move freely without running into trees or ground obstructions. He stopped periodically, listening.\n\nThe horse he encountered had come back from the direction, leading him to believe it lost a rider and followed the scent back to where it started. But it was impossible to know how long ago it had lost its rider.\n\nFelix saw the flash of gunpowder as the bullet smashed the outcropping near his head when he turned the corner. He dropped to the ground, barely able to break his fall, and remained hidden, unmoving. Rock chips kicked against his cheek, but Felix managed to keep his breath quiet.\n\nHe heard the distinct four clicks of the cocking mechanism on the pistol. There was a long moment of no sound. Felix knew the gunfire echo thinned out through the nighttime surroundings like a conspicuous noise familiar to anyone who handled a weapon. He suspected others heard it through the hills.\n\nHis hand found a stick in the grass. Carefully, quietly, Felix pulled it from the tangle and threw it as far as possible. When it hit the brush of the treeline, another gunshot showed Felix the shooter's location. He backed up, keeping close to the ground. He needed to get behind the gunman who set up a spot to the right, overlooking the available open area where anyone with a horse would ride through.\n\nFelix didn't think about the rider without a horse. The rider didn't willingly give up the horse. Something had happened, and the gunman made the best of the dire situation. It was a long and quiet maneuver that eventually rewarded Felix with the sight of a figure recumbent in the bushes. The figure had a pistol, not a rifle. The gun barrel continued to point forward, away from Felix as he managed to get to a higher elevation than the shooter. He found a large rock and heaved it out and away.\n\nThe rock crashed in the wooded area, and the gunman fired. Felix jumped and ran downhill, tackling the man before he could finish cocking the pistol. He dropped heavily onto the man's back before he could turn or get up. It wasn't much of a fight. Felix knocked the gun from the man's grip, punched the man's face, and the body went slack.\n\nFelix scrambled for the fallen pistol. He lifted the heavy gun and pointed it at the groaning stranger. It took an effort to pull back the hammer. The stranger had given up fighting or fleeing. By the look of him in the dark, the same inky substance that covered Felix's hands from the saddle coated the man's upper body. Felix saw red impact marks on the man's cheek, chin, and neck.\n\n\"You might as well shoot me here,\" he said, rasping. \"I ain't going to jail.\"\n\n\"Where's Raymond Kelly going?\" Felix asked. It was the man he had shot with the shotgun.\n\n\"I ain't telling you shit, kid.\"\n\nFelix meant to aim wide. In the dark, limbs looked like grassy lumps. When he squeezed the trigger, the man's screams were high-pitched. They traveled far in the night. The screaming echoed off the hills and drifted through the valley.\n\n\"You shot me,\" he said eventually, holding his lower leg, rocking in the tall grass. His pale face showed blatant shock. \"You shot me.\"\n\n\"You said you weren't going to jail,\" Felix said. He hadn't meant to shoot the man, only scare him, but he couldn't take it back. \"Where's Raymond going?\"\n\n\"We were to get to Black Rock,\" he said through his grunts and groans. \"You got to help me.\"\n\nFelix stood up, letting the gun hang at his side. \"Take off the gun belt.\"\n\n\"Are you going to help me?\" It was an effort because the stranger did it one-handed, keeping his other hand on his left ankle where Felix shot him.\n\n\"You tried to kill me. You murdered a man trying to do his job. And you destroyed one of my stagecoaches. You're lucky I don't shoot you in the heart for what you did,\" Felix said.\n\nOnce the stranger handed over the gun belt, Felix walked away from him. He pushed the gun barrel into his pocket to use both hands for buckling the belt. Once he secured it, Felix transferred the pistol from his pocket to the holster.\n\n\"You're on your own, mister,\" Felix said. \"I don't have time to get you back. I'm not going to take you with me. Your shooting probably got Raymond spooked.\" Felix leaned closer to the man's face and pointed the finger at him. \"If Raymond does anything to that boy, I will come back here and put a bullet in your skull.\"\n\nFelix didn't need validation for his threat. The stranger cringed from the warning. Felix left him wounded and bleeding and returned to the horses. Quickly undoing the robber's saddle from the horse, Felix removed the bit from the horse's mouth but left on the bridle. He turned the horse back in the direction of the road and swatted its rump. It trotted off into the dark.\n\nHe pulled the pistol and walked the other horse past where the man continued tending to his newly wounded leg. Felix didn't care if the man bled to death. There was a boy's life at stake." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nThere was no denying the sound of gunfire at night. Sally spent enough time at Woodland to gauge the distance. Whoever did the shooting was still five to ten miles away.\n\n\"That sounded close,\" McCoy said from the saddled horse. He wasn't used to riding. It was in his bounce. Sally didn't have time to teach him tips. She couldn't stop thinking about her son out there somewhere, a victim.\n\n\"Are you sure William got on the coach with your husband?\" Russell asked.\n\nHe wasn't much better of a rider than McCoy but had managed to hold the reins one-handed while lifting the bull's eye railroad lantern high enough to show the tall grass and hillocks before them.\n\n\"Yes, I know he was on the coach.\" It was a simple idea that Sally needed to believe. \"William isn't an outspoken or unruly boy. It isn't like him to leave the property alone.\"\n\n\"So, he went with your husband without your permission?\" Quinn asked. He carried a lantern and rode side by side with Sally. Out of the three city men, he was better than the others.\n\nSally didn't talk, only clenched her teeth as she let the horse follow the path without directions. What was she to say that they needed to hear? It wasn't a lie if she said nothing at all to correct them.\n\nWhen they had reached the overturned coach, they found the dead men, the dead horse, and the lame horse that had remained close to the road. Sally didn't want to spend any time with the deceased. She needed to find her son. When the others wanted to wait until morning, Sally got back on her horse and rode off in the direction that split from the road and followed the treeline up the hillside.\n\nShe had a general idea of where to find Black Rock. The gunfire narrowed down the location. Sally kept the images of her dead son at bay by thinking that Felix went to rescue him. It was out of the question; she knew it. But it kept her believing that William was alive, even if he wasn't safe. Before McCoy and Quinn followed her, they made plans.\n\n\"Mr. Russell, I want you to stay here with the carriage and Mr. Griffith's body. Get a fire started; keep it burning to help us find our way back. If anyone comes along the road, let them know what's happened.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. McCoy.\" Russell had dismounted and set about the tasks.\n\nSally got a few hundred yards from the others before the lanterns caught up to her again.\n\n\"You are a brave woman, Mrs. Laners,\" Quinn said. He had a good head on his shoulders and paid attention. McCoy was quick to judge, but that was the folly of a man in charge above his station.\n\n\"There is nothing a mother won't do for her child, Mr. Quinn.\" She didn't want to talk about it. Sally wanted to find her son and to hell with the rest of the business with Woodland and the railroad.\n\n\"Your husband is a fortunate man,\" he said.\n\nSally glanced at the man. It wasn't meant as a distraction. It was a compliment that made her feel womanly, even in the time of danger. She had no reply for him, only focusing on the blanket of darkness that blended with the overcast sky. Behind them, McCoy rode in a manner that made his horse snort as the man bounced in the saddle.\n\n\"Mr. Peterson mentioned a few times to us that your husband was aloof or had disappeared altogether,\" Quinn said. \"He's under some impression that your husband wasn't avoiding us. He thinks the man wasn't around at all.\"\n\n\"I had a similar conversation with Mr. Peterson. I made it clear to him I didn't care if the railroad comes through Woodland or not,\" she said. Sally glanced back at McCoy, doing his best to hold the lantern and the reins.\n\nShe sighed with exasperation, pulled the leads, and the horse slowed until she was parallel with McCoy. Sally opened her hand for the lantern. Reluctantly, McCoy gave it to her.\n\n\"Please keep up, Mr. McCoy. If you fall behind, follow the lights.\" She pressed her heels into the horse's flanks, and it galloped ahead again.\n\nEven Quinn had trouble keeping up with her. As the trees pushed against the fields and the rocks began to rise higher than the horses, they heard the calling.\n\n\"That sounds like someone needs help,\" Quinn said.\n\nThey came upon a man crawling through the long dewy grass back toward the roadway. He looked like a woodland spirit, wriggling out of the earth when the bull's eye flashed over him. He reached for Sally's horse as the beast bore down on him. The animal reared back when Sally saw the man at the same time as the horse.\n\n\"Please, help me,\" he called. Unable to stand up, the man had dragged himself over the ground.\n\nSally dismounted but wasn't in a hurry to save him. She remained out of reach whenever he raised a hand to her. McCoy and Quinn went to aid him.\n\n\"He's been shot,\" Quinn said. \"What's your name?\" He slipped off the horse and ran to the stranger's side.\n\n\"It's Tucker,\" the man said. Quinn pulled a bandana from his pocket to wrap around the wounded ankle.\n\nSally walked up to Tucker and glared at him. \"Where's my son?\" Sally asked. If she had a gun in her hand, she knew where she'd point it.\n\n\"How does this man know where your son is?\" McCoy asked. He and Quinn got the man in a position on the soil that kept the pressure off his leg. McCoy held one lantern aloft. The other light sat on the ground near Tucker.\n\n\"He could be a victim from the coach,\" Quinn said.\n\n\"He's one of the thieves,\" Sally said coldly. \"He's one of the riders I saw before the coach arrived at Woodland. She leaned forward and screamed at him. \"Where's my son?\"\n\n\"He's got him,\" Tucker said, recoiling from Sally.\n\nQuinn stopped trying to mend the man's ankle. He shared a look with McCoy.\n\n\"Who?\" Sally asked. She didn't hesitate to kick his wounded leg, and the man bellowed in agony. \"Who took my son?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Laners\u2014\" McCoy stopped talking when Sally's fiery glare cast on him instead of the robber.\n\n\"It was Ray,\" the man said through the groans. \"I told him to leave the boy. I swear.\" Tucker put pressure on his leg. Sally saw the bullet hole through the seeping blood. The man's hands had crimson stains from trying to stem the flow.\n\n\"Where's he going?\" Sally asked. She moved her boot back, ready to kick again.\n\n\"I told the boy's father,\" Tucker said. \"He shot me. He shot me, and I told him.\"\n\n\"Where?\" Sally asked again through gritted teeth.\n\n\"Ray's going up to Black Rock,\" he said, trying to move away from the potential kick. \"I never wanted to take the kid, just the papers. I told the boy's father the same thing. He shot me anyway.\"\n\nSally stepped away from the stranger, went to the horse, and mounted it.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" McCoy asked, standing when Sally pulled the horse so it faced deeper into the ravine.\n\n\"You know where I'm going, Mr. McCoy,\" Sally said. She heeled the horse, prompting it forward. Sally heard McCoy and Quinn talk over each other.\n\n\"We can't leave him,\" McCoy said.\n\n\"Please don't leave me,\" Tucker begged.\n\n\"Well, we can't let Mrs. Laners go off alone,\" Quinn said. \"You should stay here with him. Get back to the road with Mr. Russell. I'll take the rifle and the lantern.\"\n\nSally let the horse find its way into the dark until Quinn caught up to her. \"Mrs. Laners, perhaps it would be a good idea to allow your husband to track down William,\" he said mildly, his tone remaining subtle.\n\n\"Do you have children, Mr. Quinn?\" she asked. Sally intended to go forward alone, but Quinn accompanying her gave Sally some support.\n\n\"No, ma'am,\" he said, settling into a single-file ride behind Sally. He held the lantern high enough to cast light ahead and around them. \"I know if I had a child, I would be as fiercely protective of him as you and your husband.\"\n\nSally held back from speaking. She breathed deep, taking in the nighttime mist that settled through the trees and thickets. As much as she wanted to believe Felix intended to save William, Sally learned not to rely on anyone but herself." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nThe topography of the area changed from trees and soil to gravel and lichen-covered rocks at that elevation. The horse stumbled a few times, forcing Felix to dismount and lead the animal forward. He suspected the robbers had intended on a more direct route to Black Rock. The area wasn't popular, but stagecoach drivers and locals knew about the caves and the plateau lookouts. Prospectors had no luck digging around in the limestone grottos.\n\nWhen Felix heard the snort of a horse not far off from his tail, he released the horse's reins and slipped away, climbing the outcropping and jagged shelves to the right. A rider approached. The figure on its back was alone. Felix didn't see William clinging to the rider or the horse, but darkness was deceiving.\n\nThe rider got to an area that gave Felix the advantage. He rushed forward and leaped, tucking his head and shouldering the man's torso. No matter what, he knew it would hurt. Felix hoped he didn't break anything in the act of knocking the man from the horse's back, taking him by surprise.\n\nThe horse jumped and kicked, galloping off, spooking Felix's horse too. Felix got an elbow shot to the gut from the man he'd dismounted. But Felix managed to get the stranger's face pushed into the ground, using all his weight and a forearm against his neck. Felix drove his knee up between the man's legs.\n\nThe man yielded, going limp under Felix, the rifle spinning away during the attack. Felix had his pistol pulled and pressed against the base of the man's head. He didn't see a gun belt, only the rifle. The lack of a weapon made Felix think he'd attacked the wrong person.\n\n\"State your business,\" he whispered in the man's ear. The barrel of the Colt against his skull spoke loudly.\n\n\"Please, don't kill me.\" The tall grass and face full of dirt muffled the man's voice. \"I'm with the railroad.\"\n\n\"You're a long way from the tracks, mister.\" Felix got off the man, stepping to the side, away from attempting to trip him with flaying legs.\n\nThe man turned and sat up, spitting grit from his teeth. \"You're the boy's father,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm not a father, as far as I know,\" Felix said. \"What are you doing here?\"\n\nThere was a shift in the man's demeanor as if he'd heard something alarming. He lifted his empty hands. \"I'm not looking for trouble.\"\n\n\"You're not with the highwaymen,\" Felix said. He holstered the pistol and picked up the rifle. It was a Remington lever-action. It was a newer rifle that still smelled like oil.\n\n\"You're not Mr. Laners,\" the man said. They regarded each other in the ambient darkness.\n\n\"You know Sally Laners?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, standing and brushing off the dead leaves from his sleeves. \"I'm Eddie Peterson. I'm with California Pacific Railroad. We're with\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't give a damn about that right now, Mr. Peterson.\" Felix handed the rifle back to the man and began walking forward.\n\n\"Where are you going?\"\n\n\"I'm going after Raymond Kelly. The bastard robbed my coach. He killed one of my passengers, and he's got some stock things that will make him rich.\"\n\nPeterson caught up to Felix, limping behind him, trying to keep pace. \"You're not William's father?\"\n\nFelix stopped. He faced Peterson. The man held the rifle in front of him like a shield. \"I'm not his father. But he got on my coach. That means I'm responsible for him.\" Felix began walking again.\n\nPeterson caught up again. \"Do you know where Mr. Kelly's going?\" he asked.\n\n\"Raymond's a coach driver. He has sense enough to keep fresh horses somewhere away from the robbery,\" Felix said. He glanced back at Peterson. \"There's an old Indian place in the hills called Black Rock. It's not easy to get to this way, up the mountainside. But Ray probably meant to come at it south of the ridge.\" He gestured to the shadowy cliffs. \"It's a flat run off the mountain from the southwest of Black Rock. That's where I'm going.\"\n\n\"I'll come with you.\"\n\n\"You know how to use that gun?\" Felix asked. \"It doesn't look like it's been fired before. Did you bring extra ammunition?\"\n\nPeterson paused at the question. He stood still while Felix kept going. After a few seconds, he got close again, sucking air through his teeth while limping.\n\n\"I can help,\" he said.\n\n\"I suppose the mining company will have a reward recovering those stocks,\" Felix said. \"You're welcome to it as long as you stay out of my way.\"\n\n\"What about the boy?\" Peterson asked.\n\n\"If Ray does anything to William, I'll kill him faster than I intended to do anyway.\"\n\nThe angle of the ground steepened. As Felix continued forward, he used two hands, gripping the limestone crags for handholds. Peterson fell behind, unable to keep pace and use both hands free for support. The progress slowed for Felix, but he wasn't waiting for Peterson.\n\nThe pitch seemed too steep for Ray if he kept the boy with him. An adventurous child could scramble up the upward gradient without much fuss \u2014 a man carrying a rifle and a pouch needed to take his time or risk losing his balance.\n\nBehind him, with each footstep, Felix heard Peterson's rifle smacking and dragging on the stone surface, making too much noise. He exhaled and paused, getting a look around. They had climbed a significant way above the treeline. Below was the dark canopy of leafy branches. Behind them, maybe a mile, Felix saw lantern lights through the tree limbs.\n\nWhen Peterson caught up to where Felix leaned against the rock face, he pointed.\n\n\"That would be Mr. McCoy and the others. I'll bet,\" Peterson said. \"I left Woodland shortly after they recovered one of the robbers.\"\n\n\"Did he have buckshot to the chest and face?\" Felix asked.\n\n\"Yes, how did you know?\"\n\n\"I gave it to him.\" He opened his hand to Peterson. When the man reached for it, Felix slapped away his hand. \"Give me the rifle.\"\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" Peterson said. \"I'm not going unarmed.\"\n\n\"You don't need to go at all. Stay here. Wait for the others. If we can see those lights, so can Ray,\" Felix said. \"He'll think he's got more than enough time to get to Black Rock and get his horses. I don't think he'll wait for any of the other robbers. But your friends back there might give me the advantage over Ray.\"\n\n\"What's your name, friend?\" Peterson asked.\n\n\"Felix Allen. I work for Overland Stagecoach, just like Ray. I got more to lose if people think I got anything to do with Ray killing and robbing Mr. Griffith. I had nothing to do with it,\" Felix said.\n\n\"What about the boy? What is Mrs. Laners' son to you?\"\n\n\"He got in the coach. He was in the wrong place. I like Sally. I don't want to see anything happen to William.\" He started climbing again since Peterson didn't give up the rifle. \"If you're going to follow me, Mr. Peterson, you need to keep that steel off the rocks because it rings out like a bell every time it slaps down.\"\n\nThey climbed along the slope in relative quiet, their boots scraping on the loose limestone. Hand over hand, Felix made his way to what looked like a relatively flat top. Felix figured they were a few hundred yards from the location if he had calculated the landmark right. It was impossible to know where Raymond had horses waiting. It was hard to determine precisely where Raymond might leave horses. Felix hadn't visited the location before that night, but he knew about the landmarks and the caves. Onyx chunks in the limestone made up the namesake.\n\nThe Indians once considered it a holy place. Gold prospectors judged the location a waste of their time. Locals went to the place infrequently. It was a good place for a rendezvous for Raymond because it was unlikely anyone got around to visiting the area that early in the year.\n\n\"Wait, listen,\" he said, stopping before they reached the top of the rise.\n\nPeterson's boot broke off a hunk of brittle limestone. It rattled and rang out, tumbling down into the brush several feet below them.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said. \"What did you hear?\"\n\nIt was impossible to be sure after all the racket. Felix thought he heard the sound of a small animal yelping. It might have been a fox in the distance or a small, scared boy at the hands of a desperate man. But Peterson's blunder made too much noise. The sound ceased.\n\n\"Never mind,\" Felix whispered. \"You need to keep quiet.\"\n\nHe reached the top of the shelf, climbed up to lay flat, and reached down for Peterson. The man reluctantly gave up the rifle. Felix set it on the rocks beside him and reached down again, helping the railroad man to the shelf.\n\n\"Keep quiet,\" Felix whispered. He pointed to the distance. \"That's Black Rock there.\"\n\nIt looked like every other part of the mountainside, except for the distinct shape with a large single upright block of stone that jutted away from the rest of the uniform sidewalls. In daylight, it was visible for miles. Closer up, the onyx chunks sparkled in the sunlight.\n\n\"Where's the robber?\" Peterson asked. He crouched beside Felix on the ledge.\n\n\"I don't know. I thought I heard\u2014\"\n\n\"Let me go,\" a small voice called from the dark.\n\n\"That's\u2014\"\n\nFelix swung his fist against Peterson's shoulder to get him to stop talking. He pressed his finger against his lips, glaring at Peterson. The man acted offended by Felix striking him. He was a liability, but two against one \u2014 if Raymond didn't have anyone else waiting with the horses \u2014 was a lot better than going alone.\n\nHe couldn't see Raymond or William. They crept forward, staying low, trying to keep their boots from grinding on the loose stone. William's whimpering shrilled off the sheer walls without vegetation. Felix moved faster than Peterson. He stopped and motioned for Peterson to go right, closer to the mountain wall. If the man's boots made more noise again, it kept Felix out of the line of fire if Raymond shot at the noise.\n\nHe moved ahead and to the left of Peterson. The sparse vegetation on the limestone shelf made him vulnerable to attack. He sped along the ledge toward an extensive collection of boulders. Ahead, he heard the whimpering from William.\n\n\"Keep moving,\" Raymond hissed. His voice snaked around the bare rock, driving it along the shelf toward Felix.\n\nFelix still couldn't see them. He saw shadows and darkness. The mountain melded with the sky. He paused, moving forward, wiping the sweat from his eyes while leaning against the natural cover. All he needed was an exact location. Why did Raymond keep William with him? What was the point?\n\nHe glanced in Peterson's direction. The man had made it to the mountain wall. It had a better cover but a slower pace. It was the perfect place for the railroad man with a wounded leg and no sense about tracking a dangerous and unpredictable man.\n\nFelix slunk around the outcropping and sprinted ahead to the next boulders for cover. He saw the break between the distant hillside and cloudy sky. The features of the landscape changed, allowing more ambient light to illuminate the area. He saw Raymond with William. As soon as he saw the man, he understood why he kept William close at hand." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nSally had no trouble giving up the horse to climb the slope. She didn't wait for Quinn, but the man refused to relinquish the lantern. He hesitated for several minutes, a growing distance between them before setting the lantern on a stack of flat rocks. He let the horse go about its way and started climbing up behind Sally.\n\n\"How far is it?\" Quinn asked.\n\n\"It's about a half-mile, I think from here.\" Sally gestured to the nighttime forest and mountainside wall. Out of breath and feeling guilty for stopping, Sally pushed forward.\n\nShe slipped, lost her footing, and before sliding on her rump down the slope, Quinn caught her arm. Sally's leg scraped on the jagged limestone before she got handholds again; she stopped falling.\n\n\"Do you have a hold,\" he asked before releasing her elbow.\n\nShe nodded, clenching her jaw muscles.\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Quinn,\" she said. It took more of an effort to inch her way forward. The fire on her calf muscle and thigh made her want to scream. Instead, Sally let tears fall down her cheeks. They cooled her flesh in the nighttime air.\n\n\"You are a remarkable woman, Mrs. Laners.\" Quinn continued forward, keeping close to Sally.\n\nHer arms and leg muscles ached with each passing step forward, but there was no giving up. She wouldn't allow herself to fall again. William needed his mother. Praising her stubbornness had no bearing on Sally. She wasn't trying to impress Quinn.\n\nThey reached a section of slope that leveled out for several yards. In the dark, it was impossible to see whether or not Felix or her boy had crossed the same path.\n\n\"I believe if it wasn't for the boy this would all be a fool's errand,\" Quinn said.\n\nHis words forced Sally to stop once they reached the flat terrain. She bent forward, out of breath. Sally pressed her hand against her thigh. The trouser leg tore open where the rocks sliced her leg. It bled but not profusely.\n\n\"You think this is a mistake, Mr. Quinn? You're welcome to go back to Woodland,\" she said, ready to keep hiking.\n\n\"No, that's not what I meant, Mrs. Laners.\" He kneeled on the ground to catch his breath. \"The mining company that issued the stock certificates has each of them registered,\" he said.\n\n\"Does that matter?\"\n\n\"Well, yes, it does, at least it will.\" He waited a moment, listening. Sally did the same, standing up straight, peering out to the dark rocks and skyway. \"You see, each of the certificates has a numerical order. Much in the same way banknotes work. It is very clever.\"\n\n\"You're not making sense, Mr. Quinn.\"\n\n\"I meant no disrespect about finding your boy. All I meant was the fact that the mine stocks can't be cashed if the issuing mine sends the sequential order to all banks,\" he said. \"We are living in the modern age, Mrs. Laners. Excuse me for saying, but those stocks are worth more for wiping your backside than any dollar amount the robbers put on them.\"\n\n\"Will that happen?\"\n\n\"It will now. People died, Mrs. Laners. They took your child and the bounty. The sensationalism once this reaches the rest of the public will make it a crime thwart by machinery,\" he said. \"Telegrams will go out as soon as the marshals arrive. The crime involved the California Pacific Railroad, Mrs. Laners. We will not rest until the thieves are brought to justice.\"\n\n\"With all due respect, Mr. Quinn, Woodland doesn't fall under the railroad purview.\" Sally stood up straight and began walking again. She refused to limp, instead using the pain of her leg to drive her forward.\n\n\"Woodland will be a whistle-stop, Mrs. Laners. After this dreadful business, people will want to ride the train only to see the location. People are fickle about carnage,\" Quinn said. He walked behind her as they stayed on the raised ground as far as they could.\n\n\"I don't care about that anymore, Mr. Quinn. All I care about is William.\"\n\n\"And your husband,\" he added.\n\nSally stopped walking and turned to him. In the dark, he looked younger. His eyes were two dark pools in the overcast night. But the cloud began to break up; slivers of starlight began threading through.\n\n\"You care about your husband, I am sure,\" he said.\n\n\"Mr. Quinn, I think there's something you should know\u2014\"\n\nThere was the sound of heavy rock rolling downhill. A gunshot rang out in the distance. A child's high-pitched scream cut through the dark and tore a hole into Sally's soul. She faltered as she attempted to run forward, her legs rejecting her attempts to gain ground and speed.\n\nQuinn caught Sally's elbow again, this time to help her move forward at speed. William's cries continued, incoherent shouting that made it hard to understand his words at that distance.\n\nThey had to keep climbing, slithering their way higher along the steep slope, using the limestone wall as a brace to inch forward. Sally cursed under her breath, swallowing the agony. Her heart hurt at the sound of her helpless son. Some words drifted over the treetops.\n\n\"Help me,\" came through clear enough to give Sally the strength to keep going.\n\n\"Good Lord,\" Quinn said. \"What is that?\" He pointed, forcing Sally to stop moving forward long enough to see in the dark. There was something several hundred yards ahead. At a higher elevation, a figure dangled over the ledge. The dark form against the gray-black limestone cliff made Sally's stomach lurch. She gasped and pushed on, not wanting to see it, only wanting to get there before the body fell." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\nFelix heard something ahead of him in the dark. He stopped scuttling along the rock face, listening. A stone skidded across flat rock.\n\n\"Stop,\" he whispered.\n\nA few feet behind him, Peterson paused. He had the rifle in his left hand while using his right to grab the crevices. They had climbed higher diagonally. He was still too far away from the neck overhang that Felix managed to grip and holdfast, steadying himself.\n\n\"Please, let me go,\" William pouted. \"I won't tell, honest.\"\n\n\"Shut up, help me,\" Raymond said.\n\nFelix heard their voices but couldn't see them. They were around the other side of the wide spur. He got as close to the overhang above his head and reached up with both hands now, holding. Years of driving horses gave Felix the upper body strength needed to lift his body up. It took effort to keep from flailing his legs. He didn't want to dislodge any rocks. He was eight feet higher than the ledge where he left Peterson. Felix belly-crawled along the high shelf and peered over the precipice.\n\nBelow and to the right, he saw Raymond using William as a crutch. He didn't put any pressure on his left leg. Somewhere between taking William from the stagecoach and the climb to Black Rock, Raymond hurt his leg.\n\nWilliam got under Raymond's left arm, helping the man inch forward to the last yards where the ridge gave way to a gentle saddle where he had four horses waiting.\n\n\"hat's happening,\" Peterson whispered. \"Help me up.\"\n\nFelix drew the pistol from the gun belt, pointed it at Raymond. It was too risky cocking the gun. The flat rocks helped bounce sound around. Peterson was too close to the overhang for his words to reach Raymond.\n\nFelix put down the pistol. He could risk hitting William. They were too far away. There weren't enough fissures in the cloud cover to lighten up the terrain. How far apart was the gap between where Felix laid flat and the plateau? How far was the fall if he missed?\n\n\"Please, let me go,\" William said.\n\nRaymond had a hold of William's shoulder. The boy supported the man's weight, but Raymond didn't let go. Felix slithered along the landing. He looked down at Peterson. The man's fingertips groped the ledge near Felix's face.\n\n\"Stop squirming,\" Felix said. \"Hand me the rifle.\"\n\nPeterson's left hand rose and stopped. The Remington remained suspended just out of reach.\n\n\"What are you going to do?\" he asked instead of handing it over to Felix.\n\n\"I'm going to help you up,\" he whispered. \"Hurry, he'd almost got to the horses. Don't kick loose those rocks under the ledge.\"\n\nPeterson handed up the rifle. Felix put it on the rock face next to him, and Peterson had both hands free to grab the ledge. As he began pulling himself up, Felix reached over the side and hooked his arms around Peterson's back and armpits. He needed to get a hold of the man's belt to use as a hoist.\n\nPeterson struggled to get higher. He couldn't get his elbow over the protrusion. His arms trembled with the weight of his body, the way his lower half swung in the air making his legs kick. Before Felix could tell him to stop, something dislodged under the outcrop, and a large section of limestone broke free of the wall.\n\n\"Shit,\" Felix hissed. He let go of Peterson's arms. The man dangled in the air.\n\nAs Felix lifted his head, turning around to see how far Raymond got, he heard the tremendous crash from the rocks tumbling down the cliff wall below Felix. Raymond turned, pushing away William and going for his pistol all in the same movement. Felix saw William staggering, arms pin-wheeling. He got too close to the edge, his feet suddenly losing the ground below.\n\nWilliam squealed as he fell against the shelf before the momentum carried him over the cliff. Raymond fired his pistol at Felix, the bullet ricocheting off the rock wall over Felix's shoulder. Raymond stumbled away, cocking the pistol again for another shot.\n\nFelix saw William's hands clawing at the ledge where he'd disappeared. His screams for help made Felix's body cold with fear. When he sprinted to the gap, Felix lost all sense of himself, hurtling over the precipice to the lower shelf where William had gone over the ledge.\n\nFelix landed on his feet, skidded, and went forward. His hands slapped the hard stone, and his chin banged against the surface. The force of the jump, the momentum drove him forward, and he reached for William.\n\nThe boy's fingers gripped the lip of the rock, but seconds before Felix snatched him, the boy's fingers came free and disappeared. There was an abrupt scream that cut short as Felix scrambled to the ledge. He peered over the ridge into the darkness below.\n\nA bullet ripped up stone inches from his face. Felix rolled, twisted, and his legs and torso went over the side, following William down into the dark.\n\n\"Damn it, Ray, stop shooting at me,\" Felix shouted. He locked his arms tight with his face near his sore knuckles, looking over the top of the ledge.\n\nHanging over the cliff face, feet dangling in the dark, Felix didn't know what was below him. He lost sight of William. His ears rang from the gunfire too close to his head. He'd lost Sally's son. Felix knew he'd rather face death than look at the broken woman again.\n\nBoots scraped along the gravel as Raymond Kelly got closer to where Felix hung over the ledge. Felix peered up at the night sky as clouds began pulling apart like gray fleece. He saw Raymond's head and shoulders lope into view. The unmistakable dark shape of the gun still pointed at Felix.\n\n\"Is that Felix Allen over that ledge?\" Raymond asked.\n\n\"What the hell are you doing, Ray? You're a driver. You're not a crook,\" Felix said. His arms still had strength enough to hold tight, but with William below him somewhere, Felix didn't see a point anymore.\n\n\"You still think this job is worth all the aggravation and backbreaking labor?\" Raymond asked. He had Griffith's satchel over his arm.\n\n\"You got everyone else killed for nothing but worthless paper.\"\n\n\"It ain't worthless,\" Raymond said. The pistol hung from his grip, not pointing at Felix anymore. His free hand squeezed the leather pouch. \"Mr. Griffith told me these certifications are worth maybe millions.\"\n\n\"They're certificates, you idiot. And the mine will know you stole them. They have numbers on them when they're issued. You won't cash one of them before the law breaths down your neck.\" His grip loosened. His arms trembled from the duration. Felix didn't have long before he couldn't hold on much longer. He didn't have the strength to pull himself up again.\n\nThe realization began to form on Raymond's face as Felix relaxed his arms enough to let his body hang lower. There was a grim satisfaction seeing the former stagecoach driver realize that a lot of men died for nothing. He'd hang on the end of a rope longer than Felix hung from the edge of a cliff.\n\n\"That ain't true,\" Raymond said. He lifted the pistol, aiming again.\n\nFelix had made up his mind to let go than give Raymond another senseless killing. It made no difference to the court how Felix died. The law would blame Raymond no matter what.\n\nWhen the gunshot rang out, startling Felix, he opened his eyes to see Raymond staggering above him. The pistol clattered to the stone. Both hands went to his left side before he got too close to the edge and tumbled over a few yards to Felix's left. Raymond didn't make a sound falling. It was a few long seconds before Felix heard the crunch and crash of tree limbs and body parts.\n\n\"Felix!\" It was Peterson.\n\n\"Still here,\" he said, breathing through his teeth, holding on for a few more seconds.\n\nThe cramping of his fingers felt like hammer blows against his nails. The fingers gave up before Felix's will. He didn't have enough breath in his body to scream; instead, sucking in air on the way down.\n\n\"Felix!\"\n\nHis stomach flopped as his hands flailed, clawing at the rock wall. Seconds ticked by, and suddenly, surprisingly, his feet slammed against the ground. The momentum drove Felix to his hands and knees, and he felt the tall soft grass growing on the outcropping. He saw the outline of the small shelf. It wasn't very big, but big enough for two landing from the twelve to fifteen-foot drop.\n\n\"Mister, are you alright?\" a tiny voice said.\n\nFelix saw William with his back against the wall and his arms wrapped around his knees. His eyes were wide saucers staring back at Felix.\n\n\"I'm scared; I want to go home,\" William said.\n\nFelix crawled across the grass shelf and sat back, groaning in pain. He leaned his head against the wall beside William.\n\n\"I'm scared too,\" Felix whispered.\n\n\"How do we get down?\"\n\n\"Right now, I don't think you need to worry about that,\" Felix said. He wrapped his arm around William's shoulder. The boy trembled, pressing against Felix's side. Felix ignored his body aches to embrace the child. \"We can sit here for a while.\"\n\nHe stared out over the treetops and the valley. The clouds continued to thin out as the sky opened, showing the flickering distant star lights behind the thinning gray storm clouds.\n\n\"Did that man fall?\" William asked.\n\n\"Don't think about it,\" Felix said. He didn't want to think about it. \"Did you break any bones?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" William said. \"I sure am sorry for getting on the coach. I didn't mean all that to happen.\"\n\n\"It's not your fault, William. Even if you weren't there, they intended to do harm,\" Felix said. He waited a little bit, reliving the events in his head, before adding, \"I think you saved my life.\"\n\n\"Really, how?\"\n\n\"Well, I couldn't get that steamer trunk out of the boot. You did that,\" Felix said.\n\n\"Hello down there,\" Peterson called from above.\n\nThey looked up. Felix saw a shadow of a head looking over the edge.\n\n\"Is the boy safe?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" William said. \"I'm here.\"\n\n\"Oh, thank God,\" Peterson said breathlessly. \"Sit there for a bit. We'll have to get some rope.\"\n\n\"Take your time, Mr. Peterson. William and I plan to sit here the rest of the night and watch the sunrise.\" Felix felt surging joy inside, knowing he'd witness the reunion between mother and son.\n\n\"Can I stay up?\" William asked excitedly.\n\n\"After all you went through, I don't think your mother would mind one bit.\"\n\n\"I am thirsty,\" William said.\n\n\"Me too,\" Felix said and then called up to Peterson. \"See if you can bring us a canteen, Mr. Peterson. You've got two thirsty men down here on this ledge.\"\n\n\"Of course, Mr. Allen,\" Peterson said.\n\nAfter a few minutes, when the excitement wore off, and the crickets far below on the forest floor began to sing, William said, \"Mister Allen, I don't think I want to be a stagecoach driver anymore.\"\n\n\"Neither do I,\" Felix said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nThe overwhelming joy in Sally's heart at embracing her son again gave her strength to face an unknown future. She hadn't brought up Morris, but Quinn had a suspicion about Felix. She didn't know if anyone exchanged names. Even Peterson seemed indifferent about the subterfuge Sally had perpetuated before the stagecoach robbery.\n\nThe sun had already shone strongly on half the valley floor by the time the marshals and the railroad men got Felix and William off the overhang below the ledge near Black Rock. In the daylight, Sally saw how little space the two of them had on the extension.\n\nFirst, they pulled William up, and then Felix. While Sally embraced her son, Peterson, Quinn, and McCoy shook hands with Felix. The conversations about the crime went on around Sally while she and William walked the small pathway leading away from Black Rock. Raymond Kelly's horses went back to Woodland. They recovered Raymond's body. Wrapped in white linen, they intended to ship it back to Marysville. For the time being, the laborers built pine boxes for the dead and filled them with sawdust, so the bodies kept for the trip north.\n\nThe marshals accepted the free meals before transporting the bodies. Their sole survivor from the coach robbery had a lot to confess. He seemed remarkably grateful for being alive.\n\nSally got her lodgers settled in for the night. William had had a bath and dinner. She put him to bed, and he snored soundly from the cot in their room. Sally didn't want to leave him alone again but felt it was necessary to spend time with the man who brought William back to her.\n\nShe found Felix outside, sitting in a chair on the veranda next to Peterson. The two of them had been talking quietly before Sally stepped outside. Felix moved to stand up in her presence. She found it charming but unnecessary.\n\n\"Is the boy settled in, Mrs. Laners?\" Peterson asked. He had a cheroot pinched between his fingers. The man stood up and scratched a match on the porch support.\n\n\"Yes, thank you,\" Sally said as she sat on the stoop with her feet on the steps. Felix sat down again in the chair. He groaned with the movement.\n\nHe took a hot bath in line with the others. He had scratches on his cheek and hands. He needed a shave, but Felix was a handsome young man with eyes for Sally that made her feel wanted out of respect, not lust.\n\n\"He's a brave young man,\" Felix said.\n\n\"You both are very brave,\" Sally said.\n\nFelix glanced at Peterson. \"He's a better shot than me,\" he said.\n\n\"You knew I'd get to that ledge,\" he said, puffing on the cheroot. \"I didn't have any faith in it.\"\n\n\"Well, it's done; that's all that matters.\"\n\nThe three of them were quiet on the porch as the stablemen finished up in the horse barn. Some laborers walked by the inn on their way back to the campsite, and Sally waved to them. They bowed to her slightly in passing.\n\n\"Mrs. Laners, you run an exceptional business here,\" Peterson said. She braced for him to mention something about her husband. Instead, he stepped off the porch and paced some in the grass along the flagstone walkway.\n\nVoices and laughing sounded before McCoy and Quinn walked through the door, joining them outside. They carried a bottle of rice wine and two tumblers. They had consumed half the bottle between them. Quinn offered Peterson and Felix wine, both declined.\n\n\"Mr. Russell decided to retire early. I think the excitement overwhelmed him,\" McCoy said. \"I believe I will put this down in my memoirs one day. It has been a splendid time.\"\n\nSally didn't feel like celebrating. She rejoiced in the return of her son unharmed, but people had died. The stagecoach thieves still committed a crime, even if they didn't get away with it.\n\n\"Did anyone get the name of the last robber?\" McCoy asked.\n\n\"It will be in the newspapers,\" Quinn said.\n\n\"I suspect people will flock to Woodland once the news story gets out.\" He smiled at Sally.\n\nShe obliged him with a modest smile before glancing at Felix. She saw a faraway look on his face too. He had lost a passenger. Even if it wasn't his fault, it was bad luck for the stagecoach company. People embellished stories; it was their nature. Sally saw a man coming to terms with an uncertain future.\n\n\"Mr. Laners, you have the most extraordinary wife, did you know that?\" McCoy said. \"I believe having you and Mrs. Laners managing the water stop for the train in Woodland will turn this place into a thriving community.\" He sipped the Shaoxing wine in his glass.\n\nSally felt flush with embarrassment. McCoy had directed the compliment at Felix, but Felix didn't realize it. She saw Peterson musing over the mistaken identity. Somehow, it had got all around McCoy, even Quinn kept tight-lipped. She waited for one of the two men to make the correction.\n\nFelix finally came out of the middle distance to look at McCoy. \"Excuse me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Your wife, Mr. Laners, I have never met a more extraordinary young woman,\" McCoy said. He lifted a half-empty glass to Felix before tipping it back to finish it off. \"We will have the preliminary contracts for you to sign in the morning. Mr. Quinn and Mr. Russell can offer a down payment on the contract. We intend to get a water tower up before Union Pacific sends their surveyors up here.\" He shook his finger at Felix. \"This heroism in saving your son will get their attention.\"\n\n\"My son?\" Felix repeated. He glanced at Peterson and looked at Sally.\n\nShe closed her eyes, expecting the ruse to finally rub off.\n\n\"Your son, Mr. Laners, is a fine young man who has a fascinating mother and a brave father,\" Peterson said. He turned the cheroot in his fingers, staring at the glowing ember instead of looking at Felix or Sally. \"Woodland will be a legacy for him. It will be something to make him proud.\"\n\nSally felt a surge of pride. Quinn gave her a modest smile, gulped the wine, took the bottle from McCoy, and refilled his glass.\n\nPeterson puffed on the thin cigar. He walked to the porch and around Sally as she stood up to let the man back inside. He smiled lightly at her and went through the door.\n\n\"Is there any other surveying needed, Mr. Quinn?\" McCoy asked. \"After all this sordid business, I lost my place.\"\n\n\"Nothing pressing,\" Quinn said. \"We can send people out later once they get the tracks down.\" He looked at Felix and then at Sally. \"We'll have the paperwork for you to sign in the morning. If you're still interested in doing business with California Pacific Railroad, it won't be a problem.\"\n\n\"Of course, they want to do business with us, Mr. Quinn. We will make them very wealthy,\" McCoy said. He drank down the wine in his glass. Quinn kept the bottle when McCoy reached for it again.\n\n\"I believe we should let these good people settle in for the evening,\" Quinn said. \"Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Laners.\" He walked around Sally and through the door.\n\nMcCoy was last to go inside, leaving Sally and Felix alone on the porch. Sally sat on the stoop again. She shivered with a chill in the air and a long day behind her.\n\nFelix stared out across the compound. Sally watched his profile for a long time before he finally turned to her and asked, \"Can you explain to me what's going on?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nFelix and Sally strolled out to the stables while she gave him details of her life that seemed impossible. Once she finished her tale, Felix never wanted to meet her husband. Why would a man like Morris give up on a woman that had so much to offer? Sally was out of breath and teary-eyed.\n\nFelix sat on a straw bale and looked at his hands as he rubbed them together. He had so much left to do. He had to send word about the coach. He needed to go back to Stockton and see Mr. Henderson. He had obligations. Of all the people Felix knew in life, Sally was the other person who understood what it meant to keep commitments.\n\n\"So, Mr. Peterson and Mr. Quinn know I am not your husband?\" he asked.\n\n\"It seems they kept the deception intact for Mr. McCoy,\" Sally said. \"I don't want you to succumb to trickery because of me.\"\n\n\"Is it against the law?\"\n\n\"I think it crosses some legal boundaries. If they want you to sign your name to the contracts, it is forgery,\" Sally said. She kicked at the dirt floor in the stables.\n\nThey had a single lantern burning near the door. The rest of the horse barn had deep shades and large brown eyes staring at them from inside the stalls. The horses had listened patiently to Sally's dilemma without judgment. She had remained standing or pacing, obviously nervous about the whole affair.\n\nWhat was at stake? If they presented him the contract, and he signed the paperwork, was he any better than Raymond Kelly and his gang?\n\n\"You have reservations, understandably,\" Sally said when Felix had nothing to say for a long time.\n\n\"I don't know what to say, honestly. This all seemed so outlandish. I don't know how I can put a name on an agreement and leave here,\" he said.\n\n\"I don't expect you to stay. Morris had his fill of me and this place in very little time. All I've ever wanted was to give a strong future for William. He deserves something after a father that wanted nothing to do with him.\"\n\n\"My mother did everything to make sure I had choices growing up. She supported me when I started working for Mr. Henderson's factory.\" Felix considered if his mother faced the same hardships as Sally, would she have the fortitude to keep going \u2014 of course, she would. \"How long do you need me to stay here?\" he asked.\n\n\"You don't need to stay here, Mr. Allen. If you want to leave the moment the ink is dry, I will not stop you,\" Sally said. \"Frankly, I am shocked that Mr. Peterson agreed to use you as a fabrication. But given the circumstances, I believe we can come to some financial arrangement.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Well, if you agree to the ploy, I can compensate you with funds taken from the travelers. I can start an account with you,\" she said. \"You'll receive payment for guests staying at the inn. There're the costs involved with the mail contracts and the horse boarding for the stagecoach company. It could be a very lucrative enterprise for you.\"\n\nFelix frowned, shaking his head. \"I don't understand; why would you pay me?\"\n\n\"You deserve a percentage of Woodland commerce,\" Sally said. \"I can't expect you to sign an agreement for no compensation. After what happened to you, will you still keep your employment with Overland Stagecoach?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said. \"I need to talk to Mr. Henderson.\"\n\n\"Well, I can ask Mr. McCoy to postpone signing the contracts with the railroad,\" Sally said. \"He'll consider it a challenge to his offer. It might increase the amount he wants to pay for use of the property if he thinks I'll go with Union Pacific.\"\n\n\"Why would you wait?\" he asked. \"Isn't this everything you wanted?\"\n\nSally took a few steps toward Felix. He remained seated on the straw bale until she moved. Face to face, she looked up at him. Felix saw the prominent turquoise eyes and the gingerbread-colored hair. She got close enough to touch, but Felix didn't think the contract between them had anything to do with putting his hands on Sally.\n\n\"Mr. Allen, there is nothing more important in this world to me than William. He told me what you did for him. He told me how you saved him.\"\n\n\"I don't think I was much of a hero for your son,\" he said. The boy had gone over the ledge, down into the dark. If the mantle wasn't under the plateau, neither of them would have made it back.\n\n\"Well, regardless how you feel, William got an opportunity to see someone face incredible odds and not give up. All I ever wanted was for him to get a chance in life. You gave him back to me. I am forever in your debt, and you've got a friend for life in William if you want it.\" Sally turned from Felix.\n\nHe held back the urge to snatch her wrist. He wanted to kiss her, but it all seemed wrong to him. How could he expect anything more from her?\n\n\"I need to check on my son, Mr. Allen. Whatever you decide, I'll understand,\" she said. \"Please don't feel obligated. I don't want your guilt to make you bitter. Once you leave Woodland, I'd like William to know you'll pass through here again in the future.\"\n\n\"I intend to see him from time to time,\" Felix said. He meant it. He just didn't know how or when it could happen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nStockton had expanded in the years since Felix left his mother's home. She had contracted someone to build a white picket fence around the property. Pastures and forests once surrounded the meandering roads on the outskirts of Stockton. Single-family homes sprouted around his mother's property.\n\nFelix slipped from the saddle and looped the reins around the fence post before walking through the front gate. When he reached the porch, the front door swung open.\n\nHis mother had a smile and open arms for Felix. He embraced her and followed his mother into the house.\n\n\"You look thin,\" she said. \"Are you eating enough?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\"\n\n\"Take off your boots. You can wash up. I'll fix you something to eat.\" It had always been that way with his mother. It came naturally to her. It wasn't a second thought; it just happened. She took care of Felix, and he always knew if it weren't for her, he'd have nothing.\n\nFelix sat on the door side stool and slipped off his boots without delay. He followed her through the house to the kitchen. There was a small breakfast table in the kitchen where his mother placed a teacup and a plate in front of him. She had sliced cornbread and preserves with a bowl of cream.\n\n\"Mr. Stevens brings fresh milk every day to the houses out here. It is quite convenient,\" she said. His mother poured two cups of tea before sitting with Felix. She pushed the bowl in front of him. \"Please, eat something. You're wasting away on me.\"\n\n\"I need to talk to you about something,\" he said finally.\n\nFelix went over all the details in his head once he had left Woodland. Weeks passed since his departure. There wasn't an hour in the days that followed that Sally and William weren't on his mind. He dreamed about Sally's lips. And he had nightmares about losing William off the cliff.\n\nFor the next two hours, Felix went through the details of his life that focused on Woodland's events. His mother refilled their teacups. Felix finished the cornbread, preserves with cream.\n\n\"Did you talk to Mr. Henderson about the theft?\" she asked.\n\n\"I saw him at the factory. I saw Elmer too. He's still there.\"\n\n\"What did Mr. Henderson say about the business with Mr. Kelly? He doesn't think you're involved, does he?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, he knows I did nothing wrong.\"\n\n\"You saved his company, is what you did. He should be giving you a medal.\"\n\nFelix laughed. \"I don't think the stagecoach company gives out medals.\"\n\n\"Well, he's not terminating you, is he?\"\n\n\"No, but I resigned from the company.\"\n\n\"I don't understand; does this have to do with that woman in Woodland?\" It sounded defensive. Before Felix responded, his mother patted his knuckles. \"I meant no disrespect. I see you care for her and her son.\"\n\n\"Part of my reasoning has to do with Woodland,\" he admitted. \"But the fact of the matter is, I am no good as a driver for Mr. Henderson. Even if he intended to keep me, once word got out that a passenger died on my watch, it taints the company.\"\n\n\"But it's not your fault. You weren't involved with the robbery.\"\n\n\"No, but a man died, several men, in fact. I did my part, but sometimes people want to believe one thing over another. It's easier for the company to save face without me being there than making excuses for my presence if I continued as a driver.\"\n\n\"Well, you intended to run the company one day. Will that happen now?\"\n\n\"No, Mother, I resigned.\"\n\n\"What will you do now?\" she asked in a mild panic.\n\nIt was his turn to pat her knuckles. \"I will make do.\"\n\n\"Are you going back to Woodland?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I didn't tell you all of the railroad business.\" Then Felix spent the next half hour explaining the details of forging another man's name on the contract with the railroad.\n\nHis mother listened. On a few occasions, she opened her mouth, ready to interrupt. Instead, she waited until he had his say about it.\n\n\"You did what you thought was right,\" she said.\n\nHe nodded. He had a few things to say about integrity. His mother didn't need to hear it. She had taught it to him.\n\n\"I'm worried someone will discover the deception,\" he said.\n\nHis mother laughed. \"You always had a noble heart, young man. Seems to me, you saved a young mother and her child from losing the chance of a lifetime. This woman knows what you sacrificed to save her. You broke the law, but you're not the only one. You have more than one accomplice. Both Mr. Peterson and Mr. Quinn know what you did meant more to this woman than letting the railroad come in and claim the property. Women don't have the same rights as men when it comes to property.\" She pressed her index finger against the tabletop. \"You should know that. I live in a house with your name on the deed because I can't put my name on it.\"\n\n\"You're not mad?\" he asked. \"I feel sick to my stomach signing those papers. Even with Mr. Quinn and Mr. Peterson's knowing, it doesn't change how I feel inside. I question whether I'm no better than Raymond Kelly and his men.\"\n\n\"Don't you dare put yourself in their shoes,\" his mother said. \"They chose to commit crimes. You chose to save a family. I am proud of you, Felix. You show me that you've grown into a responsible man. I am not worried about you resigning from your employment. I know you will find something that suits you.\" Her eyebrows rose. \"What is stopping you from returning to Woodland?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" he asked.\n\n\"You should go back to Woodland. You spoke very highly of this woman and her boy. I know they are missing you since you left them.\"\n\n\"Sally's got a lot to do with the inn and the property.\"\n\n\"And here you are, sitting with your mother instead of back with her helping with the business,\" she said. \"You are a fine young man, Felix. But sometimes, I think you miss the whole part about having a little fun in life.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nSally spent the rest of the summer preparing Woodland for another winter. By the end of September, the laborers had another stable built. They had expanded the edges of the property next to the road. A courier passed through Woodland with the permanent contracts for Sally.\n\nCalifornia Pacific Railroad's official offer for exclusive rights to the property far exceeded Sally's expectations. She didn't need to run the inn anymore based on the leasing rights to the property. The railroad sent a labor crew down to Woodland to build the water tower. Many of the Chinese immigrants on the property earned extra income helping with the construction.\n\nWilliam came back to Sally a little older and wiser. He had lost some of his childhood at the hands of the robbers. Sally suspected that he missed Felix but decided not to talk to him about it because she knew he missed him too.\n\nThe Overland Stagecoach Company had a new driver passing through Woodland. He was a hothead with a sharp tongue. His rudeness toward the passengers and the Chinese laborers at Woodland made it difficult for Sally to put up with his attitude. Since Felix left the route, she had to deal with the aftermath of the man's visits. His bitterness boiled over into the compound and made lasting marks.\n\nThen came the day when he talked out of turn to William. It happened at a moment when Sally had collected eggs from the hatchery. She saw William wandering near the gold-trimmed stagecoach. He carried the makeshift whip that Felix gave to him.\n\nSally saw William touching the carriage with the end of the whip. He got close to the boot, nowhere near the two horses or the front. Felix had taught William to respect the horses. But the new driver for Overland decided to ensure William never forgot who was in charge of the coach.\n\n\"Hey, boy, get away from the coach,\" he shouted. Sally watched the interaction from near the stables. She wasn't close enough to stop the man from snatching the homemade whip from William's hands. He snapped it over his leg and threw it to the ground.\n\nSally put down the eggs she carried in an apron and marched to the stagecoach. \"What's the matter with you?\" she asked. \"He wasn't hurting anything.\"\n\n\"That whip he had might spook my horses.\" He stared at Sally. There was a glimmer in his beady little eyes. \"You want me to teach that boy some manners, or do you want me to take you upstairs in that hotel and teach you some manners?\"\n\nAghast by the insult, Sally regretted putting down the eggs now that she wanted something to throw at the driver. \"How dare you talk to me like that,\" she said. \"Do you know who I am? I am in charge of Woodland. You have no right coming here and causing mischief. I will speak to Mr. Henderson about you.\"\n\nHe appeared amused, not intimidated, approaching Sally with a swagger. He wore a gun belt and a sidearm. His palm pressed against the handle of the pistol. \"You think you got something to say about how I do my job, lady? I don't give a shit who you think you are. No one does anything to my stagecoach. I make the rules on the coach. If I don't like a passenger, they're gone.\" He snapped his fingers. \"You see that whip hanging there? That's a real man's whip. I can use that on the horses or your boy's backside. It makes no difference to me.\" His fingers dragged over his chin as he looked Sally up and down. \"Maybe you'd like me to use it on you.\"\n\n\"I'd like you to leave. I will send a telegram to Mr. Henderson about your behavior,\" Sally said.\n\nShe did her best to stand up to him. He wasn't muscular or tall, having an average build with small hands and a weak chin. He seemed like the kind of man who got pushed around a lot growing up. And now that he had a prestigious job, it was his turn to start pushing back.\n\n\"You can do what you like, lady. But I am here to stay.\" As if to prove his point, the driver grabbed the whip from the holder near the shotgun case on the driver's box.\n\nHe cracked the whip in the air, the startled horses bucking at the sound. He had set the hand brake on the coach. Three passengers traveling south from Marysville stepped outside when they heard the whip. William slipped behind Sally, watching the driver.\n\n\"You're not getting rid of me, lady. I am here for as long as I want.\" He wiggled his finger at Sally as many of her laborers began appearing from various parts of the building and property. A whip snap sounded like gunfire. It drew people out of curiosity. The more people he saw, the more he cracked the whip.\n\nThe horses had blinders on, so they couldn't see. They were conditioned to respond to the whip. They wanted to run, but the brake on the stagecoach held it. The horses whinnied and reared up. Their frantic movements jarred the carriage, pulling it some.\n\nThe driver turned to the horses and larruped one across the flank. The splay ends of the whip flayed open the horse's haunches, causing it to scream and buck.\n\n\"No,\" William shouted and broke away from Sally. She grabbed for him, but he was too fast. \"Stop it.\" He grabbed for the whip, but the driver had agility and height against William.\n\nHe pushed William away, causing him to fall.\n\n\"Stop it,\" Sally yelled. She ran forward. The driver flicked his wrist, directing the end of the whip to strike the ground near William's face and hands. The boy yelped and rolled. \"How dare you.\"\n\nWhen Sally slapped the man's face, he froze. It wasn't out of humiliation or embarrassment; Sally saw a storm brew behind his dull brown eyes.\n\nChang, Lee, and four of the stablemen rushed to assist William and stand with Sally.\n\n\"What's this?\" he asked smirking. \"Are your Chinamen going to fight your battles? They come near me, and I will slice them open faster than I whip my horses. If I think they're getting in my way, it won't be the whip I'll use on them.\" He pulled the pistol from the holster but didn't point it at anyone.\n\nSally got William behind her, holding him out of the way. \"What's wrong with you? You got everyone scared here. We've got to switch out that horse and dress its wound now.\"\n\n\"Your filthy Chinamen ain't touching my horses. You're looking for a reason for me to shoot them, ain't you?\"\n\n\"You can't do this,\" she said on the verge of tears.\n\n\"Who's going to stop me? Your runt kid?\" he asked. \"What about his whore mother; are you going to stop me?\"\n\n\"I'll do it,\" a voice said behind him.\n\nAs the driver turned, he lifted the pistol. He hadn't anticipated someone walking around the front of the carriage and the horses to get on his backside. When he faced the newcomer, the solid haymaker right cross connected with the man's jaw, Sally heard a crunch as the man's boots left the ground. He landed on his shoulders. The pistol dropped from his grip, and a boot kicked it across the compound.\n\nWhen he attempted to recover, reaching for the whip's handle, a boot clomped down on his wrist. The driver bellowed.\n\nFelix leaned forward, putting his weight on the foot, pinning his wrist to the ground. \"Now, how about you apologize to William and Mrs. Laners?\"\n\nThe driver's eyes rolled in his head, still stunned from the punch on the jaw. He grumbled and shook his head. Felix kneeled down, putting all his weight onto the man's wrist. He couldn't pull away. If he tried striking Felix, he'd get another bash on the head.\n\n\"Apologize,\" Felix said, gritting his teeth, turning his boot against the arm.\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"You're sorry what?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Good, now apologize to William.\"\n\n\"Hell\u2014\" What started with cussing ended in screams of pain. \"I'm sorry, I'm sorry.\"\n\nFelix stood up and backed off. The man sat up, cradling his arm.\n\n\"This is what's going to happen,\" Felix said. \"You're leaving here, right now, on foot. You're not going to beat the horses anymore. You're not driving the stagecoach. How dare you do that to a child or disrespect a woman like that.\"\n\n\"You can't take my coach; I'll have the marshals after you. These passengers will tell everyone what you did.\" He got to his feet, still holding his arm and eyeballing the pistol on the ground.\n\n\"Don't worry about the passengers. I'll make sure they get to their next destination,\" Felix said. \"Mr. Chang, Mr. Lee, will you please see to the care of these horses? Let's get both of them switched out now they're spooked.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Allen.\" They walked around the driver to coax the horses away from the area, pulling the coach toward the stables.\n\nThere was a change in the man's face, and Sally saw it as clear as a cloud pulling away from the sun. William squeezed her hand, standing beside her, grinning at Felix.\n\nThe driver had lost his gun and the whip. Felix stood with the whip at his feet while the pistol remained on the ground a few yards from the driver.\n\n\"You get back to Marysville or Dixon; I don't care what direction you go,\" Felix said. \"You send a telegram to Mr. Henderson. Let him know that you were down in Woodland causing trouble for Mrs. Laners and her workers. If he decides to keep you on as a driver, you're not to come through here anymore. Is that understood?\"\n\n\"You can't threaten me. I work for the stagecoach.\"\n\n\"You don't represent the company's best interest. You're an asshole. The world has enough of them. Mr. Henderson already had his fill of them before you came along.\"\n\nWilliam giggled at the insult. The driver leered at him.\n\n\"You can start walking now,\" Felix said.\n\nThe driver waited. He looked around at the passengers watching with amusement. He stared at Sally for a long time. The driver looked to the ground. In a split-second decision, he turned on his toes and ran for the pistol.\n\n\"Don't you do it,\" Felix shouted.\n\nAs the driver dove to the ground and grabbed the gun, the whip expertly bit into the back of his hand. Felix managed to get another strike that kicked away the pistol more before the driver bawled. He lifted the damaged and trembling hand.\n\nFelix stood up, the whip in hand. \"See, you shouldn't have done that. Now someone's got to tend to your wound.\"\n\n\"I'll go to the marshals,\" he said. He tucked his hand under his arm. \"You'll be sorry.\" The driver ran from the compound, headed south toward Dixon, Sacramento, and Vallejo.\n\n\"I'm sorry about all that,\" he said.\n\nSally didn't spend every day waiting on a man to save her. She managed to get by without a man in her life. Felix's surprise appearance made her giddy and excited. She launched herself at him, throwing her arms around his neck.\n\nHesitantly, Felix's hands went around her shoulders, embracing her. He squeezed her tight and breathed deep. When they broke the hug, Sally saw William smiling gleefully up at Felix.\n\nWithout further hesitation, Felix handed the whip to William. He retrieved the pistol and unloaded the cartridges, putting the bullets in his trouser pockets.\n\n\"I am sorry you had to witness that, folks,\" Felix said. \"That man has no business driving your carriage. I will make sure you get to your destination, hopefully still on time.\" He looked at Sally. \"Where are they going?\" He handed the unloaded pistol to Sally.\n\n\"North to Marysville,\" she said, feeling tears at the corners of her eyes. She held the gun pointed at the earth.\n\nFelix slapped his hands together and rubbed them. \"Alright, folks, as soon as Mr. Chang and Mr. Lee finish up with the horses, I will be your driver for the rest of the trip to Marysville. My name is Felix Allen.\"\n\nMurmuring and excited chatter happened with the passengers. Once he introduced himself to the group, they immediately warmed up to him. Newspaper articles all over the California Territory circulated the stories of how Felix Allen had saved the gold mine millions of dollars and rescued William from the Kelly Gang. Sally had clippings of the various newspapers. Every one of them embellished the facts.\n\nIt was good for business. People traveled to Woodland just to meet Sally and see where it all started. Felix had left the area, quit driving for Overland Stagecoach, and Sally didn't know if she'd ever see him again. Now, his sudden return cost the stagecoach company another driver.\n\n\"I'll take the coach to Marysville and come back later tonight,\" he said and added, \"I promise.\"\n\nSally grinned and sniffled. She nodded and said, \"Alright.\"\n\n\"I don't see us having any trouble along the way, but I might need a messenger to sit upfront with me,\" he said. \"I wonder if it would be alright to bring William along to help keep an eye out for me.\"\n\nSally saw William's face light up. He clung to the whip Felix handed to him. She saw him nod vigorously at the question.\n\n\"We'll need something to eat,\" Felix said. \"And you'll need a coat for the road. Have someone help you get around. We need to get these folks to their homes.\" William ran to the front door and disappeared inside.\n\nChang and Lee led the fresh horses hitched to the stagecoach back across the compound. Felix dug into his pocket and scooped out the bullets. He handed them to Sally.\n\n\"I don't expect him to come back. But keep that in case,\" he said, whispering in her ear. Before he turned away from her, Felix kissed her cheek gently. He addressed the passengers. \"Alright, folks, if you want to find your place aboard the carriage, we should make good time.\"\n\nWilliam returned with a small grass basket and a wool coat. Felix held the basket as William climbed into the driver's seat, and Felix handed the basket up to him to secure.\n\nThe passengers got inside and closed the door. Sally saw a few women watching Felix with more than admiration in their gazes. He turned from them without interest and looked at Sally.\n\n\"I'm coming back here,\" he said.\n\n\"I know that. I wouldn't let you take William if I thought otherwise.\"\n\n\"I am coming back to stay if you want me.\"\n\nSally heard giggling from the carriage. She did her best to ignore it, but she wanted to giggle and twirl. It had to wait until Felix left with the passengers. She didn't know how to respond to his statement.\n\n\"I know you don't need a man around to take care of you, Sally. I don't want to be someone who tells you how to live your life. But I do want to be a part of it if you'll have me,\" he said.\n\nMore hushed whispering erupted from the carriage. Sally stared up at William, watching his mother interacting with a man that wasn't his father. Since William returned to Woodland, he didn't talk about Morris. Whenever William had something to say about a man, it had something to do with Felix.\n\nFelix walked to where Lee and Chang stood. He shook both their hands. \"I'll be back later tonight with William, gentlemen. I don't think that driver's coming back here. But I gave Sally a gun. She knows how to use it, I'm sure. Please don't hesitate to help if you need to,\" he said.\n\nThey bowed slightly to Felix. \"Yes, Mr. Allen.\"\n\nFelix checked the boot, secured the leather curtains. He checked the door handle on the carriage, climbed into the driver's seat, and placed the whip into its cradle.\n\n\"Alright folks, here we go,\" Felix said. He shook the reins against the horses' back and whistled loudly through his teeth. The carriage pulled away.\n\nSally saw William leaning over the side of the stagecoach, waving to her. She waved back. The rest of the laborers in the vicinity waved to William in the driver's box.\n\nWhen the carriage was well out of sight, and she couldn't hear the rattling of chains or clopping of hooves on the gravel, Sally sat down on the front stoop. Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Jung stood in the doorway, watching her. Lee and Chang stood near the inn, waiting for her to speak.\n\nNo one needed orders. She saw happy faces waiting to hear her speak. \"I don't know what you expect me to say,\" she said finally. \"I didn't know he intended to come back.\"\n\n\"William will be fine with Mr. Allen.\" Chang said like it needed saying. Maybe Sally just needed to hear it.\n\n\"I think we will all be fine with Mr. Allen around.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Later that night, when Felix returned, he rode on horseback with William between his arms in the saddle. The boy was asleep, sitting up. He needed Felix to carry him inside and upstairs. Sally managed to get William out of his boots and clothes before covering him.\n\nShe faced Felix, waiting in the doorway, watching her tenderly. As Sally went to the doorway to let William sleep, her hand brushed against Felix's fingers; he took her hand gently. He paused, giving Sally plenty of time if she needed to pull away. Instead, Sally got closer to Felix. She hadn't been that close to a man in a very long time. She felt it in her knees.\n\n\"You didn't think I intended on coming back; I bet,\" Felix whispered.\n\n\"The thought never crossed my mind.\"\n\n\"I had to tie up a few loose ends.\"\n\n\"You don't have to explain yourself to me,\" she said. \"You don't owe me any explanations.\"\n\n\"I think I do,\" he said. His fingers untangled from Sally's hand, and she felt his arm around her waist, holding her.\n\nIf it wasn't for his strength or the wall to brace against, Sally thought she might fall over. He looked into her eyes.\n\n\"It turns out that the mining company appreciated the return of the blank stocks. Mr. Peterson sent a telegram to the marshals and the mine about the reward,\" he said. \"The mine offered me a thousand shares of stock.\"\n\n\"Is that a lot?\" she asked. \"I don't know if that has value.\"\n\nFelix smiled and shrugged. \"Me either; that's why I sold them to a banker for $500.\"\n\n\"That's a lot of money,\" she said.\n\n\"I thought so too.\" They stood very close together in the narrow upstairs hallway, and Sally closed the bedroom door. \"Mrs. Laners, I am in a bit of a dilemma, and I would like your advice.\"\n\n\"Alright, I will do my best.\" Sally didn't know what to do with her free hand now, so her fingers rose to caress Felix's chest. She turned slightly, pressing into his embrace.\n\n\"You see, I met a wonderful woman, but it turns out that she's married to another man,\" he said. \"She has a charming son, but the boy's father isn't around. Now, I consider myself an honorable man. I want to ask for this woman's hand in marriage, but the law says she must end one marriage before she begins another.\"\n\nSally nodded slowly, considerately. \"Yes, that is a quandary.\"\n\n\"I am willing to wait for as long as I must in order to ask for her hand.\"\n\nShe waited a while to speak again. Her fingers found their way between the hem and buttons and touched bare skin beneath the shirt.\n\n\"This woman likely spent many years considering that very situation. She never expected to find someone again,\" Sally said. \"Now, in the eyes of the law, we can't marry. But according to me and you and a few witnesses from California Pacific Railroad, we've committed fraud for the sake of saving Woodland. I think if this woman wants you, there are ways to allow it that won't jeopardize your honorability.\"\n\nHer head turned slightly as she spoke. Her whispers got softer as her lips moved closer to Felix's mouth. She felt his stubble tickle her lips.\n\n\"How does she do that?\" Felix asked.\n\nSally held her breath, feeling his words run through her body. She closed her eyes and felt his heartbeat through her fingertips against his chest.\n\n\"I don't know,\" Sally said. \"I don't care. I want him to stop talking and kiss me.\" They kissed, lightly, testing, playfully.\n\n\"I would like to take a bath and scrub off this road dust,\" Felix whispered.\n\n\"There's a lock on the bathhouse door. I think you might need some company,\" she said and led Felix downstairs to begin the rest of their lives together." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Dawn Comes Early.txt", + "author": "Margaret Brownley", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\nArizona Territory 1895\n\n\"Cactus Paaaaaaaaaatch!\"\n\nWhistle piercing the air, the wheels of the Southern Pacific ground against the metal rails, jerking passengers back and forth before coming to a screeching stop.\n\nKate Tenney was the only traveler to rise from her seat. Ignoring the curious gazes of the mostly male passengers, she walked along the narrow aisle and down the steps to the deserted open-air station. Steam puffed across the wooden platform like a hissing dragon. She clutched at her skirt with one damp hand and shaded her brow against the bright noon sun with the other.\n\nThe steamer trunk filled with her precious belongings landed with a thud by her side. It had been delivered by the dark-skinned, uniformed porter who then grabbed hold of the handrail and swung his bulky frame back onto the train. He leaned out just far enough to signal the engineer with a wave of his hand and to afford Kate one last pitying look before vanishing inside. He wasn't the first to take pity on her, but if things worked out as she hoped, he would most certainly be the last.\n\nThe train slithered away, picking up speed until all that remained of the Tucson-bound express was the sound of a distant whistle and a line of black curling smoke.\n\nHands on her waist, Kate glanced around with a growing sense of dismay. This couldn't be Cactus Patch. Please don't let it be so. Never in all her twenty-nine years had she imagined such a desolate place.\n\nFinding the nearby baggage room, ticket counter, and telegraph office empty, she turned a complete circle, squinting against the sun's white glare. Other than the cluster of sand-colored buildings in the distance, the flat, arid land stretched all the way to the purple-hued mountains on the horizon with only an occasional cactus to break the monotony in between. Heat waves shimmered from the desert floor and sweat trickled down her temples.\n\nShe removed her feathered hat and wiped away the dampness on her forehead with the back of her hand. The hat was more fashionable than practical and had to be tilted in an unappealing way before it offered any real protection from the sun, but the last thing she needed was freckles or a red nose. She was determined to look presentable, if not altogether professional. Her future depended on it.\n\nShe pulled a tattered telegram from the pocket of her blue traveling suit. It had taken six days to travel to Arizona Territory from Boston, and she longed for a bath and cool drink.\n\nThe telegram clearly stated that a ranch hand would pick her up. It was signed by Miss Eleanor Walker, owner of the Last Chance Ranch. The advertisement for a professional woman to be \"heiress\" to a cattle ranch had stoked Kate's imagination. She responded partly out of curiosity, but also out of desperation. She needed work, but more than that she wanted the respectability that came with owning land.\n\nShe sighed and tucked the telegram back into her pocket. So where was her driver? Where, for that matter, was anyone? The town\u2014if indeed it was a town\u2014showed no sign of life. She couldn't even make out a horse or carriage. Had someone played a trick on her? Was this, in actuality, a ghost town?\n\nShuddering, she shook away the thought, but riding herd on her imagination was not so easy. What if she had to spend the night stranded in this deserted place? Or was attacked by Indians, bandits, or a pack of hungry, snarling wolves?\n\nShe groaned. Her vivid imagination never failed to make a bad situation worse. It was a writer's curse, and the only solution was a course of action that would keep her mind from going off on one of its flights of fancy.\n\nSpotting a rope coiled on the platform, she gathered it in hand and tied it to a handle of her trunk. She wasn't about to leave her clothes and precious books unattended, though she couldn't imagine who would steal them.\n\nShe yanked the trunk off the wooden platform, stirring up a cloud of dust, and started toward town. Dragging the trunk was like dragging a dead mule. She moistened her cracked lips, but grit filled her nose and mouth. Her eyes burned and her throat was parched.\n\nThe going was slow. At that rate she would be lucky to reach town before dusk.\n\nShe stopped from time to time to catch her breath, but the closer she got to Cactus Patch, the harder it was to control her overactive mind.\n\nIt wasn't much of a town. Indeed, by Boston's standard it was little more than a whistle-stop. Adobe false-front buildings lined the narrow dirt road, with only a narrow wooden boardwalk separating the two. The sun directly overhead failed to cast so much as a shadow, let alone a spot of shade.\n\nShe passed several buildings, the scraping sound of her trunk breaking the silence. According to the handwritten signs in the windows, all businesses were closed, even the barbershop, gunsmith, and Cactus Patch Gazette. A breeze had picked up and a tumbleweed rolled down the middle of the street. The wind felt like the gush of a hot furnace bringing no relief. A loose shutter on a two-story building banged like a slow-beating drum. A saloon's batwing doors moved and squeaked.\n\nThe town looked abandoned but oddly, she felt the weight of a thousand eyes upon her. Her imagination playing tricks on her, no doubt. Had to be. Still...\n\n\"Hello,\" she called. The word felt like a rock in her dry mouth. She cleared her throat and tried again, this time louder. \"Anyone there?\"\n\nShe came to a side street and breathed in relief. Horses were tied to wooden rails, their tails swishing back and forth like pendulums measuring the passing of time. A buckboard wagon was parked on the side of the street along with a buggy.\n\nNever did she think to see a more welcome sight. Horses and wagons meant people. This apparently was the heart of town. It had a bank, a hotel, and a sign that read Marshal\u2014but all appeared to be deserted. At the far end of the street stood a windmill and water tank. Anticipating the feel of cool water in her dry mouth, she quickened her step.\n\n\"Hello,\" she called again, but her call was met with silence. She narrowed her gaze to the doors of the Blue Rooster Saloon. Where was everyone? Had she miscounted the days? Was this in reality the Sabbath instead of Tuesday like she supposed?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "\"Shhh.\" Bessie Adams hunkered behind a pickle barrel in Green's General Merchandise Store. A shadow inched its way across the floor indicating someone outside walking past the store window. The shadow stilled and Bessie's heart thudded.\n\nFinger to her lips, she signaled for her sister not to move. Lula-Belle peered from behind the potbellied stove, her rounded, fear-stricken eyes staring from a well-worn face.\n\nBessie's joints ached from kneeling on the hardwood floor. At age sixty she was too old for such calisthenics. Was it too much to ask that a woman come to town to do her weekly marketing without having to fear for her life?\n\nAs the town's resident outlaw, Cactus Joe had long worn out his welcome. Now he stood outside the shop, and only a pane of glass and a barrel of pickles separated her from him. It was enough to give a person heart failure.\n\nIf only she hadn't worn her flowery skirt and yellow shirtwaist. It would be easier to hide an elephant amid the store's adobe walls than her brightly colored garments.\n\nAt the first round of gunfire, Mr. Green had bolted the door and locked himself into the stockroom in back with absolutely no regard for the safety of his customers. Bessie hadn't seen hide nor hair of the store owner since. Just wait till she got her hands on the scoundrel. It would serve him right if she took her business elsewhere.\n\nThe doorknob jiggled and Bessie's stomach lurched. Gaze riveted on the dark form standing outside the door, she looked around for a weapon but the tools were kept at the back of the store. Only dry goods, sewing notions, and groceries were displayed in front. She eyed the bin of onions and potatoes but settled instead on a can of VanCamp's beans on a nearby shelf. It wasn't much of a weapon, but it was the closest at hand. Let the outlaw raise one finger toward her or her sister and she wouldn't be responsible for her actions. She lifted her gaze to the ceiling. God forgive her.\n\nSomething caught her eye and she practically fainted. The peacock feather on Lula-Belle's ridiculous hat waved like an engineer trying to stop a train. Bessie reached across the aisle and snatched her sister's hat off her head.\n\n\"Ouch!\" Lula-Belle hissed, glaring at her. She grabbed the hat in Bessie's hand, and the two struggled for a moment before the boater shot up and caught on a ceiling hook used to hang meat.\n\n\"Now look what you've done!\" Lula-Belle rubbed her head, her tightly wound curls bobbing up and down like tiny springs. \"That hurt,\" she mouthed.\n\n\"A bullet will hurt more,\" Bessie mouthed back.\n\nThe doorknob jiggled again and Bessie ducked out of sight. Despite her frazzled nerves, she thought up a plan. Unfortunately, the plan required her sister's cooperation\u2014never a good thing.\n\nMercy, it was the same old story. Nothing would get done if it wasn't for her. Her husband, Sam, would starve to death if she wasn't around to feed him. As for her two grown nephews, their lack of domestic skills was the least of it. Neither one of them had the slightest idea how to find a wife. This meant she had no choice but to put her considerable matchmaking skills to work yet again. Now it looked as if she would even have to do the marshal's job and catch Cactus Joe herself.\n\nHeart pounding, she forced herself to calm down. It was no time to panic. Lula-Belle would panic enough for both of them. \"I'll hide on the other side,\" she whispered, pointing to the cracker barrel. \"When he comes inside you distract him. Make a lot of noise.\"\n\nLula-Belle's already-pale face turned as white as the shawl around her shoulders. \"What... what are you going to do?\"\n\n\"While he's looking at you, I'll sneak up behind him and hit him over the head.\" She held up the can of beans. \"I'll hold him down while you get the marshal.\"\n\nLula-Belle stared at the tin can in Bessie's hand, her face suffused with doubt. \"I don't think...\"\n\nThe sound of breaking glass sent Bessie scurrying across the floor on hands and knees and ducking behind the cracker barrel. She grimaced. Her knees and back would never be the same. Too late she realized her sister had followed her and was now hunkered down by her side.\n\n\"You were supposed to stay on the other side.\"\n\n\"You didn't tell me that,\" Lula-Belle argued.\n\nBessie rolled her eyes and tried to think how to salvage the situation. The cracker barrel wasn't wide enough to provide adequate protection for both of them. Before she could think of a solution, the door flew open and Lula-Belle grabbed her arm.\n\nCactus Joe stepped inside the shop, glass crunching beneath his boots. Holding his gun aloft, he was dressed in his customary black trousers and shirt. He had dark, greasy-looking hair, a thin mustache, and an eye patch. It was the patch that saved them as he obviously couldn't see to his left.\n\nIt was now or never. After prying Lula-Belle's fingers from her arm, Bessie shot up quick as a jack-in-the-box and threw the beans hard. The can sailed past the outlaw, knocked over a stack of Log Cabin syrup cans, and bounced off the wall before ricocheting back to hit Cactus Joe on the shoulder.\n\nStartled, the bandit fired his gun. The bullet whizzed straight up to the ceiling whereupon Lula-Belle's prized hat fell atop his head.\n\nBlinded by feathers, Cactus Joe yelped and danced around the store, knocking over canned and soft goods alike in an effort to rid himself of the felt confection.\n\nLula-Belle let out a bloodcurdling scream. \"Save the hat!\"\n\nJust as the outlaw freed himself, a woman stepped into the shop\u2014a stranger.\n\nLooking straight at Bessie, she said, \"Thank goodness. I thought I heard a gun\u2014\" She spotted Cactus Joe and froze, her rounded eyes riveted on his weapon.\n\nCactus Joe swung around, grabbed the stranger with one arm, and dragged her outside.\n\n\"Quick, lock the door,\" Bessie yelled, even though the broken glass wouldn't keep out a fly. At the sound of gunfire, she and her sister dived behind the counter, cracking their heads together in their haste to hide. Never in all her born days did Bessie pray so hard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Kate's captor dragged her along the deserted boardwalk. \"Let me go!\" she cried. Her ears still ringing from the deafening report, she hit him hard with her fist and kicked him in the shin.\n\n\"Ow, that hurt.\" Sounding annoyed, he jerked her back and waved his gun.\n\nShe gasped. This is my imagination. Please, please, let it be so. Only it wasn't. His fingers digging into the flesh of her arm convinced her of that. She glared up at him and shuddered. The formidable black-clad figure glared with one good eye. He had a thin, slightly crooked mustache, shoulder-length black hair, and pockmarked skin.\n\nHe pointed the gun at some distant target and fired again. Kate flinched. The man shot at the trunk she'd left in the middle of the dirt-packed street, and her clothes and books were now scattered on the ground.\n\n\"You didn't have to do that,\" she cried. \"You didn't have to shoot my trunk.\"\n\n\"It's this blasted eye patch,\" he muttered. He sounded almost apologetic, but the steel-like grip on her arm remained. \"Can't see worth a plugged nickel. I was actually aiming for that saloon.\"\n\nAnother shot sounded, this time from a distance away. A chip of wood flew off a nearby sign. Fearing that the distant shooter would fire again, she screamed, \"Help, help!\"\n\nThe outlaw yanked her closer, slamming her against his chest. \"Shut up.\"\n\n\"Let her go, Cactus Joe,\" someone called from atop the Golden Star Saloon.\n\n\"Come and get her, Marshal,\" her captor hollered back. He fired another shot, this time aiming at the roof.\n\nMercy. If she was writing this scene, her heroine would have a weapon in her boot and the courage to use it, but at the moment she lacked both. Since her high-button shoes contained nothing more than two sore feet, the man named Cactus Joe had little to fear from her.\n\nPointing his gun at the saloon, he moved backward to the opposite side of the street, pulling her with him. He reeked of whiskey, tobacco, and sweat. Fear knotted inside her. Her body shook so hard that at first she thought the jingling sound was her rattling bones instead of his spurs.\n\nHe walked faster now, dragging her along with him.\n\n\"You... you have no right to make me a party to your n-nefarious ways,\" she stammered.\n\n\"I hate to disappoint you, lady, but we ain't goin' to no party.\"\n\nHe forced her down an alley and behind the buildings toward two horses. No\u2014one horse. Her eyes were playing tricks on her. She felt dizzy, faint, her legs weightless. Her head began to swim and she swayed. With a muttered curse the outlaw shoved her away. She fell forward, hitting the ground hard.\n\nMomentarily stunned, she fought her way through the thickening fog. Confusion surrounded her. Running feet. Shouts. The pounding of horses' hooves. She raised herself up on both hands but was blinded by the sun.\n\nShe had no idea how long she lay there, unable to move. Finally a shadow swept over her, mercifully blocking out the relentless dazzling light.\n\n\"Ma'am?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nThe woman wasn't injured as far as Luke Adams could tell, but she was definitely dry as a bone. He helped her to her feet, but she started to crumble to the ground again. One hand behind her back, he slid an arm beneath her legs and lifted her off the ground with a quick swoop. She felt light, almost weightless in his arms, as he carried her into his blacksmith shop.\n\nHis wolf dog, Homer, greeted him at the door, tail between his legs. Part Mexican gray wolf, the dog had pointed ears and long legs and tail. Homer had dived for cover during the initial round of gunfire and that's where he'd pretty much stayed. Now he regarded Luke as if seeking reassurance, the dim light turning his amber eyes almost yellow.\n\n\"It's all right, boy. She's not going to hurt you.\"\n\nA quick glance toward the darkened forge told him his younger brother, Michael, had taken off the moment Luke stepped outside. His brother hadn't completed the simplest task Luke had assigned him. The unopened can of Neatsfoot oil meant the leather bellows had not been lubricated. Michael hadn't even calked the wood to keep the bellows from losing pressure.\n\nLuke shook his head. The boy would be the death of him yet. Twenty years old and his brother still acted like a kid, taking no responsibility for himself or anything else. Biting back annoyance, Luke eased the woman onto the wooden workbench. First things first. He'd deal with Michael later.\n\nHe held her up with one arm while pushing away a broken wagon wheel with the other. He then laid her down gently, cushioning her head with a folded leather apron.\n\nHe gave her a quick once-over, his lips pursed in an appreciative though silent whistle.\n\nEven with her alarmingly pale skin, she was a pretty woman. Mighty pretty. Her oval face came to a dainty point beneath a soft-curving mouth. She had a perfectly straight nose, lush eyelashes that swept across soft rounded cheekbones, and a smooth forehead.\n\nPulling his gaze away from her arresting features, he glanced down the length of her slender figure. Still no sign of injuries. Quickly drawing his attention back to her face, he was alarmed by her shallow breathing. He wasn't a doctor, but he knew heat sickness when he saw it. He also knew he needed to cool her down, quick.\n\nTugging at the ribbons beneath her chin, he removed the hatpin from the felt crown of her hat. In his haste, he dislodged the pins holding her bun in place and a cascade of damp blond curls fell across his bench.\n\nHe held her upward so as to remove her capelike jacket. Working her arms out of the sleeves, he tossed it aside. Fumbling with the tiny pearl buttons at her throat, he undid the top of her bodice and eased her down again. Now to cool her off.\n\nIn his haste to reach the water pump, he kicked a newly minted horseshoe across the floor, and Homer dived beneath the workbench.\n\nSome protector. \"Chicken.\"\n\nThe dog responded with a halfhearted bark and Luke chuckled. \"You sound like a burro with a bad cold.\"\n\nQuickly priming the pump, he filled a clean drinking glass and metal basin.\n\nSetting both on the workbench next to the woman's side, he soaked a cloth and trickled water along her forehead. Pushing her golden hair away from her face, he dabbed the cloth across her pale, smooth skin.\n\nWorried that she still hadn't responded, he dumped the basin of water onto her chest, soaking her lace-trimmed shirtwaist. Her eyes fluttered for a moment and she moaned.\n\n\"There you go,\" he said in relief. Cooling her down was only the first step. He now had to get water into her, pronto.\n\nHe slid his arm beneath her neck and lifted her head. He raised the glass to her lips and she took a sip.\n\n\"Come on,\" he urged. This time her lashes flew up, revealing eyes the same color as her bright blue jacket that he'd tossed aside. She drank a little\u2014nowhere near enough\u2014but he didn't want to force too much down at first.\n\nA quick glance into her eyes was like diving into a pool of cool water. Yep. She was mighty pretty. Something stirred inside.\n\nHer very presence made the blackened walls of his shop seem less dingy and dark. It was as if the second floor of the building had suddenly blown off, letting in streams of bright sunlight to the first floor.\n\nOther than his two aunts, women didn't generally step foot in his establishment. Certainly no one dressed as fancy as this one. Her garments told him she was from back east somewhere, Boston maybe, or New York. One of those big cities.\n\nSo what was a lady like her doing in a place like Cactus Patch? The town had settled down in the last few years, but the recent discovery of silver in the nearby mountains had stirred things up again, bringing all sorts of travelers to town.\n\nHe made her drink little sips at a time. After she'd emptied the glass, he hastened to refill it. She drank the second and third glass with little prodding. She murmured something and he leaned closer.\n\n\"Brandon,\" she said, looking straight at him. A shadow of a smile touched her lips. \"Brandon.\"\n\nHe was still wondering who Brandon was when she shook her head and blinked. \"Are... are you real?\"\n\nHe pulled back. No one had ever asked him that before. She appeared lucid but looks could be deceiving. \"Yep, I'm real,\" he said for want of another answer. \"How do you feel?\"\n\nShe frowned for a moment before answering. \"My... my head... I feel discombobulated.\"\n\nHe scratched his head. Discom\u2014what? Sounded like something a man hanging from a gallows might say. \"I reckon too much sun will do that to you.\"\n\nHe left her side to refill her glass. She cried out and he swung around, spilling water all over his leather apron. \"Ma'am?\"\n\nShe sat upright, eyes rounded. Color had returned to her face and her cheeks flamed red.\n\nShe clutched the gap at her neckline like she was protecting a bank vault or cash box. Yep, she was an easterner, all right.\n\n\"My clothes are wet.\"\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am. Had to cool you down fast.\"\n\nHer gaze darted around before settling on him. \"Thank you. I'm sorry to be so much trouble.\"\n\n\"No trouble, ma'am.\" Truth was he felt sorry for her. She looked scared half out of her wits. Not that he could blame her. She had probably never before encountered the likes of Cactus Joe. Welcome to Arizona, lady.\n\n\"Name's Luke Adams, but you can call me Luke.\" He gestured toward his gray-white dog. \"That there is Homer.\"\n\nUpon hearing his name, the wolf dog flicked his ears but his head remained on crossed paws. The woman let down her guard just enough to give Luke the faintest smile, but she still protected her neckline.\n\n\"Homer, after the Greek philosopher and poet?\" She pronounced his dog's name as Homah.\n\n\"I don't know nothin' about a Greek philosopher,\" he said. \"I call him Homer 'cause he can find his way home no matter where he's at. I was once lost in the desert but Homer got me back safely.\" He paused for a moment. \"You haven't told me your name.\"\n\nShe observed him through lowered lashes. \"Miss Tenney. Miss Kate Tenney.\" She glanced toward the door as if measuring the distance before turning her gaze back to him, her face shadowed with wary regard.\n\n\"Mighty pleased to meet you, Miss Tenney,\" he said, as gently as his deep baritone voice would allow. \"You gave me a scare there. It might not be a bad idea to check in with Doc Masterson.\"\n\n\"Th-That won't be necessary,\" she stammered. She moistened her trembling lips. \"I feel much improved. Thank you. I'm most grateful for your help.\" She studied him with rounded eyes before adding, \"That man shot my trunk and my belongings are scattered all over the street.\"\n\nHe couldn't help but sympathize. He only wished she'd stop looking at him like something that should be locked up or buried. Not that he blamed her. After what she'd gone through it was only natural she would distrust him. Still, it bothered him, took him back to another time and place. He was only twelve when his childhood friend had drowned in the rain-swollen Gila River. \"Trust me,\" Luke had yelled, tossing his friend a rope. But Jamie hadn't trusted Luke enough to let go of the tree trunk and grab hold of the lifeline.\n\nSurprised to find himself suddenly face-to-face with a memory he'd sooner forget, he shook his head. Not the same thing. Miss Tenney wasn't drowning and the only lifeline he offered was water and sympathy. Still, he had the strangest feeling that the lady was caught up in floodwaters of another kind. Startled by the image, he shook his head. It wasn't like him to have such dark thoughts. The argument with his brother that morning must have upset him more than he knew.\n\n\"M-My belongings...\"\n\n\"I'll get your things,\" he said, hoping that if he left her alone for a moment she would settle down a mite, relax even. \"Give you a chance to rest a bit.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nThe strength of her voice surprised him. She still looked fragile but nothing, apparently, was wrong with her lungs. \"No need to fret yourself, ma'am. I've already seen a lady's\"\u2014what do women call those things?\u2014\"under-riggin's.\"\n\nShe gave him an unflinching stare. \"Please accept my apologies.\" She took a deep breath. \"It's been a horrendous day. And then to be assailed by that abominable man... I'm sure you can understand that... that I'm not quite myself.\"\n\nThat explained why she had mistaken him for someone else. That Brandon fellow sure was a lucky guy, though not particularly smart. No man in his right mind would allow a lady like Miss Tenney to travel to Arizona Territory by herself.\n\n\"There were two women in the mercantile,\" she said. \"They weren't hurt, but they must be terribly upset.\"\n\n\"If they're locals they'll get over it.\" Since Miss Tenney still looked anxious or nervous or both, he added, \"If it makes you feel any better I don't think Cactus Joe meant to do you any harm, ma'am. He just wanted to use you to escape.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"He had a gun. He could have dragged me away, kept me hostage, and had his way with me. He could have used me for his reprehensible purposes, or left me in the desert without food or water. I could have ended up dead or... or worse.\"\n\nHe planted his hands on hips, not sure what to say. What could be worse than death? Whatever it was he didn't want to know.\n\n\"That man's as slippery as a greased hog, that's for sure,\" he said at last. \"But he's more of a nuisance than a threat. Maybe this time his luck will run out and the marshal will capture him.\"\n\nIf he was a betting man he'd put his money on Cactus Joe. The desert favored outlaws, and most local lawmen knew little if anything about tracking criminals through rugged terrain. Some, like Marshal Morris, didn't even try. Not like John Slaughter, former sheriff of Cochise County, known as the meanest good guy who ever lived. The man brought law and order to the area during his two terms. What a pity he'd retired.\n\nMiss Tenney pinned up her hair and reached for her hat. \"The man should be incarcerated for the rest of his life.\"\n\n\"Here in Arizona Territory, the worse that can happen to him is a good hangin'.\"\n\nShe gave him an odd look. \"Yes, well...\"\n\n\"I'll go and get your things.\" He backed toward the door. \"If there's anything else you need, just holler.\"\n\n\"Wait. There is one more thing. Could you tell me how to get to the Last Chance Ranch?\"\n\n\"Last Chance\u2014\"\n\nHe should have known. A parade of women had passed through Cactus Patch in recent months, hoping to be chosen as Eleanor Walker's heiress in the unlikely event she should die. So far none of the applicants had lasted more than a few days\u2014a week tops. Ranching was hard work. Judging by Miss Tenney's lily-white hands and delicate frame, she knew little if anything about manual labor. He gave her maybe twenty-four hours before the old lady sent her packing as she had the others.\n\n\"So you're another one,\" he said. The idea of women traipsing across the country in hopes of convincing an old lady to turn over her spread to them struck him as odd, maybe even distasteful.\n\nShe looked momentarily confused. \"Another what?\"\n\n\"Another woman who thinks runnin' a cattle ranch is as easy as making a pie.\"\n\nShe stiffened as if donning a suit of invisible armor. \"I know that ranching is hard work.\"\n\nHard didn't even begin to describe it, but he wasn't about to argue with her. Cactus Joe was no match for what awaited her on that ranch. \"Is Miss Walker expectin' you?\"\n\n\"She is. Someone was supposed to pick me up from the train station.\"\n\n\"Most everyone took off when the shootin' began,\" he said. \"That probably includes your driver.\"\n\nShe tilted her head. \"But not you.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"I have work to do.\" He indicated a wagon with a missing wheel. It belonged to Old Travis, a local farmer who couldn't afford to be without his only means of driving produce to the market for very long. \"Like I said, Cactus Joe is a nuisance but not much else.\"\n\nShe looked unconvinced. \"If that's true, then where is everyone? Except for the two women I told you about, the town looks deserted.\"\n\n\"Around here folks jump at the chance not to work on a hot day. Whenever Cactus Joe comes to town it's kinda like a holiday.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"I never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. Does... does he come to town often?\"\n\n\"Often enough to wear out his welcome,\" he said.\n\nShe gave her head a slight toss, buttoned her shirtwaist, and put on her hat. Her bodice was still wet and the feathers on her hat drooped, but she sure did look businesslike all of a sudden.\n\n\"How do I arrange transportation to the ranch?\" she asked.\n\n\"Normally I would tell you to rent a rig from the livery, but Hopper\u2014that's the owner\u2014took off when he heard the first shot. I'm sure someone will come and get you. Eventually. Meanwhile, you can stay at the hotel.\" No sooner had he said it than he changed his mind. The hotel was no place for a lady, especially one as pretty as this one.\n\n\"Tell you what. I'll drive you to the ranch myself.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of you to offer, but I don't want to cause you further inconvenience,\" she said.\n\n\"You won't. My wagon's out back. All I have to do is hitch my horse to it and we can be on our way.\" If his lazy, good-for-nothing brother hadn't taken off, Luke would have made him drive her to the ranch.\n\nShe shivered. \"You don't think we'll run into that awful man, do you?\"\n\n\"Cactus Joe?\" He shook his head. \"He's probably in the next county by now, if not the next territory.\"\n\nA shadow of relief crossed her face. \"Thank you. I appreciate your kindness.\"\n\n\"It's my pleasure, ma'am.\" The moment he grabbed his leather hat, Homer lifted his head, ears forward. \"Come on, boy. Let's give the lady some privacy.\"\n\nHomer jumped to his feet, wagging his tail, but made no move toward the door.\n\n\"The dog's a chicken,\" he said, and Miss Tenney laughed. It was a tight little sound, but it was still the nicest sound he'd heard in a week of Sundays. He clapped his hands twice and this time Homer followed him outside.\n\nThe sun dazzled him as he walked up the alley, but no more than the sight that greeted him when he turned the corner and spotted the lady's fancy under-riggin's strewn upon the dirt-packed road." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nShe stared into Brandon's velvet brown eyes and her heart gave a wild flutter...\"You saved me, you saved me...\"\n\nKate chased away the words running through her head. The man sitting on the wagon seat next to her had blue eyes, not brown, though he certainly was every bit as handsome as Brandon, the hero in her latest novel. Mr. Adams had a rugged square face, an indented chin, and a straight, narrow nose. Brown hair curled from beneath his leather hat, and a wayward lock swept across his forehead.\n\nHe had wide shoulders that tapered down to a trim waist. The rolled-up sleeves of his boiled shirt revealed the full length of his powerful arms.\n\nEven more disconcerting than his likeness to her fictional character was the womanly way he made her feel each time he turned his blue eyes in her direction. Between her encounter with the outlaw and her imminent meeting with Miss Walker, she didn't need Luke Adams to add to her anxiety. But add he did.\n\nThe air practically sizzled with the strength and virility of him. Much to her alarm her racing pulse brought a flush to her face. She could not, would not trust him, not for a single moment. No man could be trusted. Not even one as handsome and seemingly kindhearted as Mr. Luke Adams.\n\nThe wagon jolted over a rut in the road and her arm inadvertently rubbed against his. Inching as close to the outer edge of the seat as possible, she measured the distance between them and it was still alarmingly close.\n\nAs much as possible she kept her gaze straight ahead. The long, narrow road seemed to stretch to the horizon. \"Are you sure we won't run into that horrible man?\"\n\n\"Cactus Joe? I doubt it. If you ask me the man's short a hat size or two but he's harmless. Not like the Texas Kid or the Tucson Kid. Drat, he's not even like Billy the Kid. Now those are outlaws.\"\n\nHis assurances did little to calm her nerves. Apparently the only bandits he took seriously were the ones belonging to a society of human goats.\n\nSeemingly oblivious to her anxiety, he whistled softly but she didn't recognize the tune. He sat tall and straight, his shoulders wide, his hands firm on the reins. From time to time he pointed out various landmarks. He was extremely knowledgeable and described the history of the territory going all the way back to Spanish rule.\n\nHe indicated a building with a tall steeple and small cemetery. \"That's the church. We don't have a regular preacher, but a circuit rider whizzes through every other week or so.\"\n\nHomer trotted a short distance ahead, sniffing the ground like a hound trailing a fox.\n\nAbout a mile or two out of town, Mr. Adams pointed to a small adobe house with a corrugated steel gable roof. \"My Aunt Bessie and Uncle Sam live there,\" he said with obvious fondness. Homer stopped in front of the house and barked.\n\n\"Not now, boy,\" he said. \"We'll pop in for a visit on the way back.\" For Kate's benefit he added, \"Homer has a fondness for gingersnaps and Aunt Bessie makes the best.\"\n\nAbout a mile farther down the road he tossed a nod toward another house almost identical to the first. \"Aunt Lula-Belle and Uncle Murphy live there.\"\n\n\"How many relatives do you have?\" she asked.\n\n\"Not many. I have a brother named Michael and another aunt who lives in Tucson. That's about it. I was born in Texas, but my parents died when I was eleven. My pa was killed in an Indian uprising and my ma died soon after, in childbirth.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry,\" Kate said.\n\n\"I went to live with my aunt and uncle in Houston, but when a second smithy came to town my uncle decided Texas was gettin' too crowded, so we moved here.\"\n\nA smile broke through her guarded countenance.\n\nHe grinned back at her. \"What's so funny?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you how many blacksmiths are in Boston. At least a dozen or more.\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"Don't sound like there's enough room between the hammer and the anvil with that many people.\"\n\nShe couldn't imagine Luke Adams on the crowded streets of Boston. He was definitely a man who needed wide-open spaces.\n\n\"What do residents do here?\" she asked. Boston with its libraries, museums, and theaters offered a rich cultural life she thoroughly enjoyed.\n\nHe gave her a cockeyed look. \"What do we do?\"\n\n\"For entertainment?\" she said to clarify.\n\n\"There're more than a dozen saloons in town. I reckon that's about as entertainin' as it gets around here.\"\n\nAt first she thought he was joking, but he looked perfectly serious. She bit her lip and said nothing. She didn't know what to say.\n\nHe glanced at her. \"I prefer it out here in the desert.\"\n\n\"There's nothing out here.\"\n\n\"It'll grow on you.\" After a while he said, \"In the Bible God used the desert to test men.\"\n\nShe fanned herself furiously with her hand. \"Is that what he's doing now? Testing us?\"\n\n\"Could be.\" He clicked his tongue and his horse picked up speed. \"Could be.\"\n\nHe stopped from time to time to offer the dog a drink. He also insisted Kate drink from his canteen, wiping the top with a clean bandanna before handing it to her.\n\nThey drove through what seemed like miles of high desert, ringed by steep-cliff mesas and littered with angry black rocks pitted with holes.\n\n\"Volcanic rock,\" he explained.\n\nThe rocks looked as inhospitable as the rest of the land, and she shuddered. \"Everything looks so dry.\"\n\n\"We don't get a lot of rain out here,\" he said. \"About ten, twelve inches a year if we're lucky. June and July are our rainy months.\"\n\nBoston got at least four times that much rain. \"Anyone saving for a rainy day around here could probably get rich.\"\n\n\"He'd be more likely to be robbed,\" he said.\n\nShe blew out her breath. Never had she met anyone with a more casual regard for crime. \"How much longer?\" she asked. She didn't mean to sound impatient or ungrateful, but the air was still warm and her body ached with weariness. The drive seemed interminable.\n\nHe guided the buckboard through a wire gap fence. \"Here she is,\" he announced as one might introduce royalty. \"The Last Chance Ranch. You won't find a better ranch in all of Cochise County.\"\n\nShe hadn't known what to expect, but certainly not this. A tumbleweed rested against a rock, but no sign. Just a barbed wire fence and more arid, flat desert dotted with rocks black as coal. The gate leading to the ranch was so different from anything she'd imagined, she would have laughed out loud had she had the energy.\n\n\"How ostentatious,\" she said in jest.\n\nHe glanced at her and frowned. Obviously, the man lacked a sense of humor. What a pity.\n\n\"Do you know the owner?\" she asked, anxious to fill in the sudden awkward silence.\n\n\"Miss Walker?\" He shrugged his massive shoulders. \"I reckon everyone knows her,\" he said. \"At least well enough to stay out of her way.\"\n\nIt wasn't what she wanted to hear. \"Are you implying the woman is difficult?\"\n\n\"I'm not implyin' anything, ma'am. I'm statin' it as fact. She's more like a runaway locomotive coming straight at you.\"\n\nThe picture he drew in her mind only added to her anxiety. It worried her that he used such strong words for the lady ranch owner, but described Cactus Joe as a mere nuisance. Could Miss Walker really be that bad?\n\nIn an effort to calm her nerves she rearranged her hat, wiggling the hatpin in place, and straightened her travel suit jacket. Her shirtwaist was now dry, but her skirt was wrinkled and covered in dust and smudged with train cinders. She neither looked nor felt her best.\n\nShe craned her neck looking for a ranch house or something\u2014anything. Nothing stirred. Even the muted horse hooves and rattling buckboard failed to disturb the stark panorama that stretched all the way to the mountains.\n\nShe had taken him at his word when he said they had reached the ranch. So where was it? Maybe once she sighted civilization\u2014if there was such a thing out here\u2014the butterflies in her stomach would settle down.\n\n\"I thought you said this was the Last Chance.\"\n\n\"It is, ma'am, acres of deeded property surrounded by thousands of acres of free range. The ranch house is just a mile or so up the road.\"\n\n\"A mile?\"\n\nHe glanced at her. \"The entire area covers around two hundred and fifty square miles.\"\n\nShe stared at him, openmouthed. \"That much?\" Westerners sure did think a lot bigger than their eastern counterparts.\n\nShe already doubted the wisdom of coming to Cactus Patch, and the size of the ranch only added to her apprehension. Had she not been so hot and exhausted she would have been tempted to ask Mr. Adams to turn the wagon around and drive back to town and... go where? As forbidding and inhospitable as this land was, she had no desire to return to Boston and the terrible memories left behind.\n\nShe shook her thoughts away. \"So where are the cattle?\"\n\nHe pointed to the right. \"Over there.\"\n\nShading her eyes against the midafternoon sun, she followed his pointing finger. The air shimmered with heat and the landscape was blurred. At first she didn't see anything but saguaro cacti rising from the desert floor. Some of the cacti stood twenty feet high, arms branching out from a rounded pole\u2014a strange plant, indeed.\n\nFinally she spotted little black dots of grazing cattle next to a body of water. She hadn't expected to see a lake in the middle of the desert and the sight offered a measure of comfort, however tenuous.\n\nSpying the cattle too, Homer barked as if in greeting and raced ahead of the wagon.\n\n\"What I would give to dive into that lake,\" she said, fanning herself with her hand.\n\nHe grinned at her. \"I wouldn't advise it, ma'am. That's a mirage. All that's out there is sand, rattlers, and burro grass.\"\n\nShe blinked. \"It certainly looks real.\"\n\n\"The desert is deceivin'.\" He glanced at her. \"You just never know what you're gonna find.\"\n\n\"What about that up ahead? Is that a mirage too?\" She pointed to a carpet of green that offered a pleasing contrast to the miles of arid land they'd passed.\n\n\"Nope, that's real. Two hundred acres of alfalfa and red-top clover. Up ahead is the ranch house.\" He clicked his tongue and flapped the reins, and his horse picked up speed.\n\nAt the first building they reached, he brought the wagon to a stop and set the brake. Jumping from his seat he hurried to Kate's side. Hands around her waist, he lifted her to the ground as if she were weightless.\n\nHis horse drank from the water trough next to the largest windmill Kate had ever seen. The sucker rods made a swishing noise as they rose and fell in the well casing. The metal teeth of the gears scraped and grated as the windmill drew water from the depths of the earth.\n\nHomer stuck his long nose in the trough and drank with loud lapping sounds. Mr. Adams filled his canteen directly from the wooden tank that no animal could reach and handed it to her. Next to the hot air, the water tasted cool and sweet.\n\n\"Miss Tenney, I want you to meet your new friend, Adam,\" he said, introducing her to the windmill.\n\nShe tilted her head back to look up. \"I didn't know windmills had names.\"\n\n\"There're more than fifty windmills on this here property and they all have names. If one gets into trouble you just yell out its name and everyone knows where to go. This here was the first windmill on the ranch.\"\n\n\"Is Adam named after your family?\" she asked.\n\nHe laughed. \"Nope, the first man in the Bible gets that honor. We had nothin' to do with it.\"\n\n\"It's huge.\" At least twenty feet wide, it was much larger than any windmill in Boston.\n\nHe nodded. \"It has to be. It's pullin' water from hundreds of feet down. We don't get much rain so we have to depend on wind for water.\"\n\n\"I always liked Longfellow's 'Windmill.' I can't remember the words exactly, but he wrote that the windmill faced the wind as bravely as a man meets his foe.\"\n\n\"Never heard of a Longfellow windmill. Most of the ones around here were made by the Wolcott Union Windmill Company.\"\n\n\"Oh, but Longfellow's not a... a very well-known company.\"\n\n\"Probably why I never heard of it.\"\n\n\"Yes... well.\" She raised her voice. \"I'm pleased to meet you, Adam.\"\n\nIn response, the spinning sails turned toward the wind with a creaking sound. Homer, wanting to play, barked and wagged his fluffy tail.\n\n\"Come on, we're almost at the ranch house,\" Mr. Adams said.\n\nShe stopped to run her hand along his horse's slick neck. It was a reddish horse with white markings. \"What's his name?\" she asked.\n\n\"Bacon.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I wrote an essay on Bacon in college.\"\n\n\"Seems like a strange subject to write about,\" he said.\n\n\"A strange... oh.\" She blushed. \"I was referring to Sir Francis Bacon, the English philosopher.\"\n\nHis mouth quirked but only briefly. \"Named him Bacon because that's what he looks like.\" He raised an inquiring eyebrow. \"Do you easterners name animals after philosophers?\"\n\n\"Not always,\" she said, and because she wanted to return to their earlier rapport added, \"Neither do we name our animals after breakfast fare.\"\n\nHis serious expression disappeared, but the smile she hoped for failed to materialize. \"Come on, we better get you to the ranch house.\"\n\nHe walked by her without another word and climbed into the driver's seat. Had she offended him or had she only imagined his sudden curt manner? She watched him warily as she took her seat by his side.\n\nNot that his abrupt change of mood surprised her. Men were unpredictable. It was part of their nature. One moment they could seem all friendly and kind, and the next... She shuddered and pushed the thought away but remained circumspect. If she'd learned nothing else in her twenty-nine years, it was never to let down her guard where men were concerned.\n\nFrom early childhood people had drifted out of her life, never to return. Her father walked out on her and Mama when she was only five, but others had deserted her as well, including her grandfather, who had disapproved of her mother's fondness for alcohol and men. For that reason Kate had conditioned herself not to get too close to anyone, so she'd never had many friends.\n\nProtecting herself had come with a price, of course, requiring her to trade hurt for loneliness, but it was the best she could do. Between the harsh desert land and the uncertainties that lay ahead she welcomed the blacksmith's acquaintance, however tenuous.\n\nAfter passing a horse corral, large barn, bunkhouse, and various outbuildings, Mr. Adams pulled up in front of a two-story U-shaped adobe ranch house with a low-hip tile roof. The covered porch was supported by wooden columns and ran the length of the house. It provided the only shade Kate had seen since arriving in town, a pleasing sight.\n\nA brick courtyard was hugged on three sides by the house and protected in front by a low adobe wall. An ornate metal gate stood open and looked surprisingly inviting.\n\nMr. Adams helped her down from the wagon, his work-hardened hands strangely comforting around her small waist. Nonetheless, she moved away the moment her feet touched ground and stared at the ranch house. It was larger than she'd imagined, larger even than the grand houses in Boston's south end, and perfectly maintained.\n\nShe brushed off her skirt, threw back her shoulders, and swallowed hard to brace herself. She hadn't come all this way to let a few quivering nerves get the best of her.\n\nMr. Adams leaned against the wagon with folded arms. \"I can take you back to town now, ma'am. It would save you from havin' to hitch a ride back tomorrow or the next day.\"\n\nIt took her a moment to understand his meaning. \"Are you saying that I'm not going to make it here?\"\n\n\"None of the others have. The longest anyone stayed was a week, but that woman was a workhorse.\"\n\nIrritated that he so easily assumed she'd fail without knowing anything about her, she tossed back her head. He wasn't the first man to underestimate her, but if she had anything to say about it, he would be the last.\n\n\"I won't be needing a ride back to town, but thank you for your concern.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Suit yourself, ma'am.\" He nodded his head toward the back of the wagon. \"I'll bring in your trunk.\"\n\nSomething in his voice reminded her that he had been obliged to pick her intimate garments off the street. Blushing, she turned quickly to hide her face and walked to the open gate.\n\nKnowing he watched, she moved with quick, confident steps that belied her shaking knees, tightly clenched stomach, and dry mouth. Reaching the oversized carved wood door, she tugged on the bellpull with damp hands and glanced back. He stood where she left him, doubt written all over his handsome square face. Gritting her teeth, she gave the bellpull another tug.\n\nFrom deep inside came the sound of chimes, and after a short wait, a Mexican girl flung open the door.\n\n\"I'm Kate Tenney,\" Kate said by way of introduction. \"Miss Walker is expecting me.\"\n\n\"My name Rosita,\" the girl replied in halting English. Kate guessed that she was probably in her late teens. She wore a gray dress and white apron, her black hair tucked beneath a white ruffled cap. \"Miz Walker back soon. Hurry, hurry.\" She motioned Kate inside and slammed the door shut.\n\n\"Flies,\" she explained.\n\n\"Oh.\" Relieved at not having to face the ranch owner immediately, Kate glanced around the large entry hall, which was as cool as it was dim. Adobe brick walls, partly covered by a colorful Indian rug, rose from a red tile floor. The house smelled of furniture polish, old wood, brass, and just a hint of freshly baked bread. The bread reminded Kate that she hadn't had a bite to eat since breakfast, and her stomach growled.\n\nA sweeping staircase led to the second floor, and Rosita was halfway up before Kate realized she was expected to follow.\n\nUpon reaching the second-floor landing she couldn't resist glancing over the polished wood banister to the huge foyer below. Mr. Adams had not yet brought in her trunk. Was he really so certain that she wouldn't last? That she would quit before she'd even begun?\n\nSomething\u2014a movement, perhaps a shadow\u2014made her lean forward for a better look, but all remained still. Whoever it was had quickly stepped out of sight. No doubt a curious resident or employee.\n\nRosita led her down a long narrow hall past a small room with a toilet but no tub.\n\nShe opened a door toward the end of the hall and motioned Kate inside. The room was light and airy and surprisingly cool. A four-poster bed piled high with pillows and spread with a colorful quilt promised a good night's sleep, the first since leaving Boston. A mahogany lift-top desk stood in a corner next to a tall wardrobe. An oak washstand containing a porcelain basin and water pitcher was centered on the wall opposite the bed, next to a freestanding gilded mirror. The town, ranch, and surrounding area fell far short of her expectations, but the room was everything she could hope for and more.\n\n\"When you ready Se\u00f1orita Walker meet you downstairs.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kate said. \"Is there a bath\u2014\"\n\nThe rest of her sentence was met by a closed door. Pulling off her jacket she stepped through the glass door that led to the balcony. Shaded by an overhang, the balcony stretched the length of the building, providing a panoramic view of the ranch and distant mountains.\n\nShe grabbed hold of the iron railing, surprised to spot Mr. Adams already driving away, his dog sitting in the seat she had moments before occupied. She had assumed he would bring her trunk upstairs himself.\n\nDisappointed that he'd left before she had a chance to thank him, she watched until only a cloud of dust made by his wagon wheels was visible. Loneliness descended upon her like nightfall and she shuddered. The view outside her window looked every bit as forlorn as her future.\n\nSomeone knocked on the door and she hurried to open it. A slender Mexican man dressed in white shirt and pants carried her trunk inside and set it on the floor.\n\n\"Jos\u00e9,\" he said with a grin, pointing to himself. She wondered if this was the person spying on her earlier.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Jos\u00e9. Thank you for bringing my trunk.\" When he made no move to leave, she added, \"I need to unpack my things.\"\n\n\"Better wait to talk to Miss Walker. The last one vamoosed before she unpacked.\" He grinned and left.\n\nRefusing to be discouraged and anxious to change out of her traveling clothes, she knelt on the floor and opened her trunk. The instant the lid sprung up, her mouth dropped open and she sat back on her heels. Not only had Mr. Adams fetched her belongings off the street, he had neatly folded every last garment.\n\nShe picked up a corset and pair of lacy bloomers and held them to her bosom. She imagined his large, capable hands on the satiny fabric and delicate lace. A strange warm and worrisome current flowed through her.\n\nShaken, she stood and quickly stuffed her garments in a drawer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Little more than an hour later, Kate walked downstairs mustering every bit of confidence she could manage. After vigorously sponging off dust and train soot, she'd changed into a plain but stylish brown skirt and tailored shirtwaist, then pinned her hair securely into a neat bun. Her appearance would pass muster for a job interview in Boston, but what was acceptable attire for being interrogated as a possible heiress?\n\nRosita greeted her at the foot of the stairs and showed her to a sitting room. \"Wait here.\"\n\nThe housekeeper left and Kate walked through the open archway, her footsteps bouncing off the clay tile floor. Outside, the house had looked larger than it actually was, probably because of its clean, sweeping lines.\n\nThe room had none of the overblown fussiness of Boston parlors. A steer head with wide horns hung over the stone fireplace and seemed to gaze at her as if she were an unwelcome intruder. The walls were adorned with Indian rugs, the bold geometrical designs woven in vivid red and bright turquoise wools. The furniture, which included leather chairs and a matching davenport, was spare but substantial, more intimidating than inviting. Dark wood beams crossed the ceiling.\n\nBeyond a second archway was a dining room with a polished table that could easily seat twelve. Two paneled doors stood open, revealing an office complete with a large oak desk and filing cabinets. The typing machine centered on the desk surprised her. She'd sold her own typewriter to pay for travel expenses. Though she had no further use for such a machine, already she missed it.\n\nOne parlor wall was covered with shelves holding leather-bound books. She ran her fingers along the rigid spines hoping to find a Twain, Bront\u00eb, or even a James, but every book was about cattle or the cattle business and she couldn't help but feel disappointed.\n\nIt wasn't that long ago that writing was her life, but after her last book was banned for \"immoral content,\" her publisher quickly and firmly showed her the door. Immoral, indeed! Boston's Watch and Ward Society deemed her love story a detriment to society and accused her of putting wanton ideas into the heads of young readers. Maybe she did go a bit overboard in taking two pages to describe a kiss, but for the most part the society's critiques were unfair and unfounded.\n\nBooks had helped her through an unstable and unhappy childhood. Now as then, she looked for a means of escape. She was so engrossed in reading the titles that she failed to notice the open coffin partly hidden by a potted cactus until she practically bumped into it. The body of a pale-faced man sporting a waxed mustache and dressed in a dark suit lay in the satin-lined interior, a coin on each eye, hands folded across his middle.\n\nStartled, she jumped back, hand on her chest. \"Oh dear!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nThe lips of the dying man moved and Brandon leaned closer. \"For God and country,\" the man said before taking his very last breath.\n\nKate gaped at the dead man, the pungent smell of formaldehyde making her eyes water. Nerves taut, she jumped when a cheery voice sounded from behind.\n\n\"I see you met my ex-husband, Ralph.\"\n\nKate whirled about to face the tall, stately woman with steady gray eyes standing in the doorway. Kate stared at her speechless. Not only did the woman's cavalier attitude regarding the dead man stun Kate, but never had she heard anyone so boldly admit to a failed marriage. Certainly not to a stranger. In Boston a divorce was considered shocking, if not altogether scandalous.\n\n\"Burying him on the ranch is more than he deserves, but no one else will claim him,\" the woman continued. \"So what is one to do?\"\n\nNot sure whether she was expected to answer the question or simply offer condolences, Kate inched away from the corpse with a murmured, \"I'm sorry.\"\n\nIgnoring Kate's commiseration, the woman introduced herself. \"I'm Eleanor Walker. Owner of this ranch.\"\n\nDressed in a divided skirt, heavy boots, and a man's plaid shirt, she wore her gray hair pulled into a tight bun with not a single loose strand. Her wide-brimmed hat dangled between her shoulder blades, the stampede string around her neck. The huge room seemed to shrink in response to her commanding presence.\n\n\"You must be Kate.\" She held out her hand and Kate shook it. The woman's grip was as firm as a man's. \"Or do you prefer I call you Miss Tenney?\" She spoke in a brisk no-nonsense manner, her gray eyes seeming to penetrate rather than regard.\n\n\"Kate will do.\"\n\n\"Very well, and you may call me Miss Walker.\"\n\nIt struck Kate as strange to call a previously married woman miss, but she would of course comply.\n\n\"Do sit down,\" her hostess said. \"I trust you found your accommodations satisfactory.\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you. My room is lovely.\" Miss Walker was every bit as intimidating as Cactus Joe, even without a weapon.\n\nMiss Walker took a seat and Kate sat down on a chair opposite. She held her knees together, hands tightly clasped on her lap. Keenly aware that others had come before her and failed, she met Miss Walker's probing stare with chin held high.\n\nAs if on cue, Rosita appeared carrying a silver tray with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses. She set the tray on the low table and looked at Miss Walker as if waiting for permission to pour. The younger woman's quiet, demure manner offered a striking contrast next to Miss Walker's broad movements and deep, vibrant voice, both of which would have been frowned upon in more civilized social circles.\n\n\"Thank you, Rosita,\" Miss Walker said. She waved the young woman away and filled both glasses herself. She handed one to Kate.\n\n\"Thank you.\" The lemonade was both cold and sweet and Kate gulped it down\u2014something she would normally not do in polite company, but then she'd never been so thirsty nor so nervous. Miss Walker made no mention of her ill manners. Instead, she refilled Kate's glass without comment.\n\nSetting the pitcher on the tray, the ranch owner sat back. \"I heard you had a little excitement in town.\"\n\nA little? \"The man grabbed me and shot at my trunk,\" Kate said, shuddering at the memory. When this failed to draw any kind of sympathetic response, she added, \"I'm lucky to be alive.\"\n\n\"Aren't we all?\" Miss Walker glanced at the coffin. \"Or at least some of us are.\" She fell silent for a moment before adding, \"I apologize that no one was at the station to greet you. When my driver heard that Cactus Joe was up to his old tricks, he turned around and came back.\"\n\n\"I don't blame him,\" Kate said. \"Mr. Adams was good enough to give me a ride.\"\n\n\"Then I am in his debt.\" Miss Walker took a sip of her own lemonade before setting the glass on the tray, ice clinking. She looked Kate up and down, her expression registering neither approval nor disapproval.\n\n\"You stated in your letter that you were a professional woman familiar with ranching.\"\n\n\"Yes...\" Kate had rehearsed this interview in front of a looking glass numerous times, but Miss Walker was even more intimidating than Kate's former editor, Mr. Conner, and everything she'd practiced went out of her head.\n\n\"You wrote that you're a college-educated woman, but I'm not clear as to your profession.\"\n\n\"I'm a writer.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do write lovely letters.\"\n\n\"A professional writer,\" she said to clarify, though it was no longer entirely accurate. After the scathing review of her last book and its subsequent ban in Boston, she was currently unemployed.\n\n\"I've published several novels under my pseudonym, K. Mattson.\" She hesitated. \"Some people have a rather jaundiced eye toward certain... literary endeavors.\" Especially when they involve affairs of the heart. \"For that reason I prefer to keep my former occupation confidential.\"\n\nMiss Walker's gaze sharpened. \"Are you saying that you write... wrote potboilers?\"\n\nThe question was pointed enough to raise the dead, but a quick glance at the coffin assured Kate that it hadn't.\n\n\"I prefer to call them novels,\" Kate explained. \"Dime novels.\"\n\nThe woman had looked unflappable until that moment. Now she looked downright appalled. \"And you think writing these... dime novels makes you knowledgeable about running a ranch?\"\n\n\"Most of my stories take place on a cattle ranch,\" Kate explained. \"That's because I... grew up listening to tales about the West. I enjoyed hearing the stories one man told about working on the King Ranch in Texas. He helped drive cattle to Kansas.\"\n\nWhat she failed to say, didn't want to say, was that the stories were told by tramps gathered around a bonfire behind the apartment where she lived with her mama. Some were war veterans, others failed gold miners\u2014all were society dropouts. As a child, she liked to climb out onto the roof and hide behind the chimney to listen. Their lively stories fired Kate's imagination like nothing else ever did.\n\n\"You heard these tales in Boston?\" Miss Walker made it sound like Boston was located somewhere in the Boer Republics rather than the States. \"I hope you don't believe everything you heard. It's my experience that most people have no idea about life in the West. As for cattle drives...\" She made a dismissing gesture. \"Long and costly drives have gone the way of hoop skirts. Now we simply drive the cattle a short distance to the Willcox stockades and train depot.\"\n\n\"I know ranching has changed, but it was those stories that inspired me to write my books.\"\n\n\"So why aren't you writing?\" Miss Walker asked.\n\n\"It's difficult for a woman to earn her living by writing,\" Kate said. At least that much was true. \"That's why I'm here.\"\n\nAfter her publisher refused to publish more of her books, she applied for a job at both the Boston Evening Globe and Traveler, but no one was willing to hire a disgraced writer.\n\nAnxious to prove her competence, Kate hastened to add, \"I'm quite good at bookkeeping and budgeting and\u2014\"\n\nMiss Walker interrupted her with a wave of her hand. \"We'll get to all that. First things first. We're in the middle of calving season and it will soon be April. How are you at calving and branding?\"\n\nKate blinked. Branding. It never occurred to her that she would actually have to work with the animals. \"Don't you employ cowhands to do that?\"\n\n\"Of course I do. But how do you expect to know if the job is done right if you don't know how to do it yourself?\"\n\nKate moistened her lips. \"I've never actually worked with cattle but like I told you, I do know a little something about the workings of a ranch.\"\n\nMiss Walker frowned. \"The only way to learn ranching is through tenacity and hands-on experience. You can't learn ranching secondhand. Nor can you learn it from books.\" She waved toward her extensive library. \"But even experience isn't enough if you don't have a real passion for the land. It must be in your blood. Do you have anything that qualifies you to run a ranch?\"\n\n\"I... I believe so.\"\n\n\"Believe, Miss Tenney, or know?\"\n\nMiss Tenney. If the sudden formality hadn't already convinced Kate that she was about to be dismissed, the railroad watch Miss Walker pulled out of her pocket most certainly did.\n\n\"I'm extremely tenacious,\" Kate said, determined to rise to the challenge. She would never have survived her childhood had she not been strong-willed.\n\n\"I'm a fast learner and I'm trustworthy. I'm also honest and hardworking.\" She continued to recite her qualities as one might recite a list of groceries to a clerk in a mercantile store, but nothing she said pried the skeptical look off Miss Walker's face.\n\nMiss Walker stared at her watch for a moment before pocketing it. \"This is all very well and good and you do write a persuasive letter. But so far you've failed to convince me that a privileged upbringing such as yours qualifies you for ranching.\"\n\nKate jumped to her feet. \"Privileged! Privileged? I've worked for everything I have. I earned my education by scrubbing floors, cleaning privies, and\u2014\"\n\nMortified, she covered her mouth with her hand. All her weeks of careful planning had been wasted in one careless, unguarded moment.\n\nExpecting Miss Walker to order her out of the house, she was surprised when the woman gestured for her to sit down.\n\n\"I see there's more to you than meets the eye,\" Miss Walker said, and this time her face reflected the first signs of approval. \"That's good. I don't know if mucking out stables is comparable to cleaning privies, but we'll know soon enough. We can't let you around cattle until we get the city smell off you, and nothing accomplishes that faster than a good mucking. I'll also ask Ruckus to find a horse for you. You do ride, of course?\"\n\n\"Yes, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Excellent. What about work clothes?\"\n\nKate glanced down at her skirt. These were her work clothes. \"I'm afraid these are all I have.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Miss Walker tapped her chin with her finger. \"You're about my size. Not quite as tall but I think I have some garments that will fit. I'll have Rosita bring them to your room.\"\n\nMiss Walker rubbed her hands together. She had large calloused hands the color of leather. It was hard to know how old she was. She had a timeless quality that seemed to make age irrelevant. Her lively eyes, more blue now than gray, watched from a well-lined and well-tanned face, but her body was as supple as that of a young girl.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, Eleanor said, \"I'm sixty-five years old. That's young for a saguaro, which can live for 150 years, but as far as I know no ranch owner could last that long. Nor would anyone want to.\"\n\nHer actual age surprised Kate. In Boston, people\u2014especially women\u2014tended to look old in their forties.\n\n\"You do understand that if I decide to make you my heiress you will be required to sign a document stating that you will forever remain single.\"\n\n\"Yes, you explained that quite thoroughly in your letter.\"\n\nMiss Walker regarded her with narrowed eyes. \"You're young and attractive. Why would you agree to forego marriage? Do you not wish to raise a family?\"\n\n\"It's a bit late for that, I'm afraid. I'm twenty-nine.\" Far past the marrying age deemed proper by Boston society.\n\nThe older woman rolled her eyes. \"Ancient,\" she said, her voice edged with irony.\n\nKate folded her hands on her lap and debated how much or how little to say. She sensed the ranch owner would see right through the vague answers she had prepared.\n\n\"Back in the States an educated woman is thought to be a liability in the home.\" Some critics had even gone so far as to say that educated women were not \"real\" women, and therefore incapable of loving a man, let alone bearing his children.\n\n\"You won't find things any different outside the States, I'm afraid,\" Miss Walker said. \"Some men around here don't know what to do with a woman who has an intelligent thought of her own. And that includes you, Ralph,\" she added, addressing the dead man.\n\n\"But that's the least of it,\" the ranch owner continued. \"You will work hard, harder than you've ever worked in your life. You and the land must become one. Its pulse will be your pulse, its heart yours. It will require everything you have to give\u2014and then some. No man alive can compete with such a demanding lover.\"\n\nKate flushed. Never had she heard anyone refer to land as a lover. In Boston most men were happy with a mere couple of acres, just enough to raise a milk cow or two and cultivate a vegetable garden.\n\n\"I'm not afraid of hard work,\" she said, hiding her soft hands in the folds of her skirt. She often put in twelve or more hours a day working on her stories. True, it wasn't physical labor, but writing a book was hard work and, at times, even grueling.\n\n\"If that does indeed turn out to be true, you'll be greatly rewarded for your efforts. Nothing in this world is permanent except for land. It will always be there for you. The question is, will you always be here for the ranch? If things go wrong\u2014as they always do\u2014will you walk away? Abandon ship, so to speak?\"\n\n\"I'm fully prepared to prove myself worthy of your trust and generosity,\" Kate said. She would do anything\u2014crawl to the ends of the world if necessary\u2014for stability and permanence in her life. \"I'll work hard and learn everything I can about ranching. I'll... I'll do whatever you ask of me.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Miss Walker studied her with cool appraisal. \"You have three months... no, let's make it four. That will take you to the end of our busiest season. During that time I will expect you to prove your sincerity and capability in learning the business. I will, of course, pay you a minimum salary. If you manage to last until the end of the trial period in July, you will then be required to sign a document that, among other things, will forbid you to marry. Do you have any questions?\"\n\nUp until that moment the whole idea had seemed so far-fetched Kate hardly considered the enormity of becoming a ranch owner. In Boston, property owners enjoyed more respect and privilege than non\u2014property owners. It was a class distinction evident even during her school years. Though she despised being treated as a second-rate citizen she never thought property ownership possible. She still couldn't believe it.\n\n\"No questions,\" she murmured. No doubt later she'd think up plenty, but for now her mind was filled with the sheer wonder of it all.\n\n\"Very well. You have a hundred and twenty days to convince me of your trustworthiness, after which I shall then teach you the business side of ranching. In five years, if I deem you're ready, I will turn the ranch over to you. However, the deed shall remain in my name until the day I die, at which time the ranch will be yours and yours alone.\"\n\n\"That is exceedingly generous,\" Kate said. She still couldn't believe such good fortune. Her mama often said that nothing good ever happened to their kind because God favored the rich, but maybe, just maybe, she was wrong. Maybe God did on occasion favor the less fortunate.\n\n\"I'm not being generous, simply practical. Speaking of which, supper will be served at six in the dining room.\" Miss Walker indicated the adjacent room. \"But you look exhausted, so it might be best if I have Rosita bring a tray to your room. I'll also ask her to heat water for your bath.\" She set her glass on the tray and stood.\n\n\"Breakfast is served between four and five. It's essential that we get the work done early before the heat kicks in. I'll see you in the morning.\" Without another word, she crossed the room, turning at the doorway.\n\n\"In case you were wondering, I don't plan on meeting my maker anytime soon. Until that day, the spinster pact is binding. Marry and you forfeit everything.\"\n\nWith that she hastened from the room, leaving Kate alone with only poor dead Ralph for company." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nA weaker or gentler woman would have swooned upon finding herself the recipient of such good fortune. But now that her destiny was secured, she had no use for feminine wiles.\n\nKate couldn't believe her luck. Just think, one day all this could be hers. Granted, the arid desert ranch was a far cry from the lush, tree-filled property she dreamed of owning, but land was land.\n\nShe had just finished arranging the last of her books on the back of the desk when a knock sounded at the door.\n\nIt was Rosita carrying her supper on a tray.\n\nKate stared at the large dinner plate piled high with generous portions of roast beef, gravy, mashed potatoes, and green beans.\n\n\"It's so much,\" she said. It would feed a family of four with enough left over for seconds.\n\n\"You must eat to be strong,\" Rosita said. She brushed past Kate and set the tray on the desk. \"Steer strong.\" She lifted her arm and squeezed a muscle, and stared at Kate's slender frame. \"Workers no be weak.\"\n\n\"I don't plan on carrying a steer or even wrestling with one,\" Kate said.\n\n\"That's what last se\u00f1orita said.\" The housekeeper walked out of the room, leaving the door ajar, and Kate sat at her desk to eat. The meal was delicious, the meat so tender she could practically cut it with a fork. Though she hadn't eaten since morning, she could only finish half of what was on the plate. Even that was twice as much as she normally ate.\n\nRosita lugged a tin washtub into the room containing a stack of clothing, a pair of well-worn boots, and a wide-brimmed hat. She set the clothing on the bed and left, returning moments later with a kettle of hot water.\n\n\"Could you tell me who else lives here in the ranch house?\" Kate asked, curious about the rooms she passed on the way to her own.\n\n\"You and Miss Walker,\" Rosita replied.\n\n\"That's all?\" Kate asked, surprised.\n\n\"Me and my brother Jos\u00e9 live downstairs,\" Rosita said. \"Sometimes se\u00f1ores come to buy cattle and Miss Walker let them stay overnight.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nBefore Kate could ask any more questions, Rosita left the room, then made several trips back and forth before putting a clean towel and a bar of lye soap next to the bath.\n\n\"Ready,\" she announced.\n\n\"But there's not enough water,\" Kate said. Barely three inches covered the bottom of the tin tub.\n\n\"Water valuable,\" Rosita said. \"More valuable than silver or copper. Tonight you guest, you get three inches. Next time you get two.\" She turned to leave, muttering beneath her breath, \"If there is next time.\"\n\nAlone again, Kate undressed and stepped into the tub, determined to make the most of what little water she had. She washed her hair and scrubbed herself from head to toe until her normally white skin was pink. She then reached for the pitcher of fresh water on her sink and rinsed away the soap.\n\nLater she stood on the dark balcony brushing her damp hair and braiding it into a single plait down her back. It was a moonless night but the sky was bright with stars. The only visible light on land came from the window of the bunkhouse.\n\nThe wind had died down and the land lay still, though by no means silent. A coyote howled from the distance, calling its pack. In response a chorus of lowing cattle rumbled from within a fenced pen. Not to be outdone, a horse nickered from an adjacent corral and dogs barked. Then all was quiet. Disturbingly so.\n\nKate missed the city, missed the sound of clopping hooves on cobblestones, the clanging bells of horse-drawn streetcars, the mournful toot of a distant foghorn. She even missed the cries of peddlers selling their wares and the rumbling of wagon wheels. Would she ever get used to the relative silence of this strange new land?\n\nA sudden burst of laughter rippled through the night air, followed by the whiney sound of a fiddle. The gaiety of cowhands in the bunkhouse offered a stark contrast to the silence of the main house. She cast an anxious glance at the glass doors that led to other rooms, but all were dark.\n\nLoneliness was not new to her and had dogged her all through childhood. Thinking her mother loose, neighbors treated Kate like an outcast, refusing to let their children play with her. Even in school she was considered an outsider\u2014a nobody. Her family owned no property and therefore had no status in life.\n\nA strange yearning for which she had no name rose up inside. Sighing, she withdrew from the balcony and sat at the desk. She opened her leather-bound notebook and dipped her pen into the inkwell.\n\nThe scratching sound of her pen against paper soothed and comforted her as she wrote.\n\nHidden in the darkness, Brandon hunkered beneath the window and watched her. She stood perfectly still but he could sense her distress, sense her loneliness, and he longed to go to her, but to do so would put her life in danger...\n\nShe stared down at what she had written before ripping the page from her notebook. Balling it, she tossed the paper into the wastepaper basket next to the desk. After the fiasco with her last book, her career as a writer was over. The respect she'd hoped to gain from the literary world eluded her, but that no longer mattered.\n\nShe stood to look at herself in the mirror, extending her hand as if greeting a rich cattle buyer from the east. \"How do you do. I'm Miss Tenney, owner of the Last Chance Ranch.\"\n\nShe smiled. She liked the sound of that. If only those judgmental neighbors and snobbish classmates could see her now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "She woke to the sound of a crowing rooster and buried her head under her pillow. Moments later she reluctantly rolled out of bed to the tinny hammering of the mechanical alarm clock. Yawning, she quickly dressed in Miss Walker's divided skirt and a plain white shirtwaist. The denim skirt was a tad too long but the peg-heeled boots were a perfect fit, though they took a little getting used to.\n\nThe dining room empty, she helped herself to coffee and bacon, eggs, biscuits, and gravy from the buffet. Worried that she might be late, she hardly tasted her food as she gobbled it down.\n\nShe had barely opened the front door before Rosita chased her outside, shaking a feather duster at her. \"Hurry, flies.\" Kate stumbled onto the porch, the door slamming behind her.\n\nOutside the sky was silver with streaks of yellow, pink, and red. The sun had yet to rise and it was surprisingly cold. Never had she experienced such a wide temperature swing between day and night as she did here in the desert. She should have donned a wrap.\n\nWith no one around, she circled the ranch house to the back, wanting to explore. A rooster eyed her from its perch on a white wooden fence before throwing back its head and letting out a loud crow.\n\nA screened-in area directly behind the house held a clothesline strung with pieces of drying meat. A series of small boxy buildings were located off the southernmost U of the main house, which she guessed contained the kitchen and maybe even Jos\u00e9's and Rosita's quarters. One building was a washhouse, complete with large metal tubs, ironing tables, and sadirons. She followed a well-worn dirt path to an icehouse. A short distance away was a granary and a smokehouse with stone chimney.\n\nA vegetable garden spread between the buildings like a carpet, a scarecrow rising from its midst. She walked over for a closer look. A series of irrigation ditches crisscrossed the garden and the soil looked wet. Little signs read Lettuce, Carrots, Peas, and Onions.\n\nImpressed with everything she had seen so far, she turned to watch two men lift caged chickens and a goat into the back of a wagon. The goat butted its head against a wooden side. The chickens clucked furiously, feathers flying about like snow flurries. A third man appeared from behind a barn leading a steer by a rope. Kate had never seen such a huge beast. It took both men to tie the animal to the back of the wagon. Once the animals were secured, the men drove off pulling the steer behind.\n\nJos\u00e9 walked out of the milk house carrying a bucket in both hands. Seeing her, he frowned and shook his head. \"You better hurry,\" he said. He tossed a nod toward the front of the house. \"Late not good.\"\n\nNervous about meeting the others, she ignored his warning. \"You have milk cows too?\" she asked, glancing at the milk sloshing over the sides of the buckets.\n\nHe grinned. \"Last ranch I worked at had no milk cows. We had beef but no milk. Se\u00f1orita Walker has everything.\"\n\n\"Where are they taking those animals?\" she asked, pointing to the back of the departing wagon.\n\nJos\u00e9 put his finger to his lips. \"That secret,\" he said.\n\n\"Why can't you tell me?\" she asked.\n\n\"Se\u00f1orita Walker said no tell. Now go. You be late.\"\n\nThis time she ran, her feet wobbling in her unfamiliar boots. Chickens clucked and scattered out of her path as she made her way to the front of the house and hurried to the main barn. The hem of her divided skirt flapped against her boots with a slapping sound.\n\nShe rounded a corner of the main barn and was surprised to see a group of men standing in a circle. All had lean, well-muscled frames, their faces weathered from countless hours in the saddle beneath the hot Arizona sun. All but one wore dark pants rolled at the cuffs, unbuttoned vests, and bright red bandannas. The sleeves of the collarless shirts were rolled up and held in place with twisted wire garters.\n\nGun holsters looped with cartridges sagged loosely down each man's side. Each wore peg-heeled boots similar to hers, but with silver spurs.\n\nOne of the men motioned to her and she hurried over to the circle.\n\nHe lifted his hat in greeting. \"You must be Miss Tennis,\" he drawled.\n\n\"Tenney,\" she said.\n\n\"They call me Ruckus.\" A crooked nose matched his crooked grin and his horseshoe mustache drooped below his chin.\n\n\"That's 'cause he raises the roof with his snoring,\" one man added. \"Been that way ever since he met up with a fist coming the other way.\"\n\nHis comment was followed by a round of laughter. It seemed like a jovial group, and Kate found herself relaxing for the first time since arriving in Cactus Patch.\n\n\"That there is Stretch,\" Ruckus said, pointing to the tallest man of the lot.\n\nStretch raised a hand in greeting, his tan hat contrasting with his dark eyes, black curly hair, and pencil-thin mustache.\n\n\"Don't take anythin' he says seriously as his tales are as tall as he is.\" Ruckus pointed to the man next to Stretch. \"And that funny-looking man behind the bush is Feedbag.\"\n\nThe \"bush\" was a square black beard that did indeed look like it belonged on a horse's muzzle.\n\n\"Howdy, ma'am,\" Feedbag said in a froggy croak, followed by a well-aimed stream of tobacco.\n\nRuckus went around the circle introducing each man in turn by his \"barn\" name. The names provided an astute, even comical description of the men, making them easy to remember. Wishbone's legs curved outward from the knee down. Moose's ears stood out like the handles of a sugar bowl. Upbeat grinned at her, his white teeth flashing against his ebony skin.\n\nMexican Pete whipped off his straw hat and bowed. \"Se\u00f1orita.\" While the other men were beltless, he wore a red sash tied around his middle.\n\nThe man in the odd short pants was called Dook. Since he spoke with a thick British accent, Kate assumed his name was the western version of Duke.\n\nThe last man Ruckus introduced was the ranch foreman named O.T., short for Old Timer. The man was probably in his forties, but he was clearly the oldest of the bunch. He stood straight as a soldier, his gaze never seeming to settle on any one person or thing, yet Kate was certain he missed nothing.\n\n\"Listen up, men,\" O.T. said. \"In case you haven't noticed, Miss Tenney here is what you call a lady. Put a lid on your can of cuss words and keep it there. Is that clear?\"\n\nFeedbag lifted his hat and ran a finger though his jet-black hair. \"How long we gotta watch our language this time?\"\n\n\"For as long as she's here,\" O.T. replied.\n\n\"Ah, shucks,\" Feedbag groaned, putting his hat back on. \"She could be here as long as a day or two.\"\n\n\"Don't forget one lasted as long as a week,\" one of the other men added.\n\nWishbone nodded. \"Yeah, and I can't work as fast when I have to watch what comes out of my mouth.\"\n\n\"That's your problem,\" O.T. said. He removed his hat and held it to his chest. \"And since you're the one with the problem, you can do the honors.\"\n\nMuch to Kate's surprise, the men all took off their hats and bowed their heads in prayer. Head lowered, she allowed her gaze to travel from man to man. The last thing she expected to see was a bunch of rough men praying.\n\nWishbone held his hat in both hands. \"God, the Father, thank you for your many blessings and don't forgit to send rain. And if you ain't sendin' rain to us, don't go sendin' it to no other ranches neither.\"\n\nKate covered her mouth with the tips of her fingers. She'd never heard anyone speak to God with such informality. It was nothing like the stuffy, drawn-out prayers she was forced to endure while attending Miss Newcomb's Academy for Young Women.\n\nAn \"amen\" chorus went around the circle and the men stomped away in different directions.\n\nRuckus remained, regarding her with a frown. \"You all right, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm fine.\" And because he continued to study her, she added, \"He prayed for rain.\"\n\nHe arched his eyebrows as if surprised by the comment. \"Every day. That's part of our job. Part of your job too.\"\n\nHer gaze wandered across the dry land. \"It looks like your prayers haven't been answered in a while.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Sometimes God answers our prayers slow as wet gunpowder, but sooner or later he gets around to it.\" Ruckus made a face. \"Some chuckleheaded politicians don't wanna wait on God. One got a crazy notion to explode dynamite over Texas to make rain. Nine thousand dollars went up in smoke just like that.\" He snapped his fingers to demonstrate. \"They shot the feathers off a bunch of startled birds but they didn't make no rain. Only the Forever Man can do that.\"\n\n\"The Forever Man?\" she asked.\n\nHe grinned. \"We all have our barn names. So why not God?\" He signaled the end of the conversation with a nod of his head. \"The boss lady says I'm to make a rancher out of you.\" He looked her up and down and shook his head, his mustache seeming to droop another notch lower. \"I reckon we'll see a whole lotta rain before I succeed.\" He turned and walked away. \"Time to get to work.\"\n\nNot knowing what else to do, she followed him. He spoke slowly, drawing out each word like one would draw out a sigh, but he walked with quick, long strides and it was all she could do to keep up.\n\nHe led her to the side of the barn. \"Mexican or Western?\" he asked.\n\nShe glanced at his profile. Was he joking? Mexican? With her blond hair? \"I'm American,\" she said with more than a little patriotic pride. \"Born and raised in Boston.\"\n\n\"God, give me strength,\" he muttered. He yanked a door open and led her into a dim room. \"I'm talkin' about saddles.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" she said, cheeks flaming. Biting her lower lip she glanced around. Never had she seen so many saddles in one place.\n\nHe pushed his hat to the back of his head and regarded her as he might a wayward child. \"You do ride, right?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. She took riding lessons at Miss Newcomb's Academy, though she never was much good at it. Living in Boston with its hansom cabs and horse-drawn streetcars made horseback riding a luxury more than a necessity.\n\n\"So what saddle did you use?\" He rolled his eyes. \"Don't tell me it was English.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" she said. Miss Newcomb would never approve such a thing. \"It was sidesaddle.\"\n\nHis eyes popped open. \"Are you telling me you ain't been on a real saddle?\"\n\nHer heart sank. \"I... I...\" Miss Newcomb had strictly forbidden anyone to do anything as gauche or unladylike as to ride astride. \"I'm afraid not.\"\n\n\"Does the boss lady know this?\"\n\n\"We never discussed the saddle,\" she said, quickly adding, \"but I'm a fast learner. I learned to type in less than two weeks and I could recite Tennyson's 'Ulysses' from memory after only two days.\"\n\nDoubt settled in every crevice of his face, even the pockmark at the corner of his eye.\n\n\"Far as I know, neither one of them skills will matter much to a horse. Won't matter much to the cattle either.\"\n\nHe pulled a clean red bandanna from a box and tossed it to her. \"Wear it at all times. Next to a hat it's the most useful article of clothin' you'll ever own.\"\n\n\"Does it come in any other color?\" she asked, tying it around her neck.\n\n\"I reckon you can have any color you want long as it's red. If you git shot you don't want the other fella seeing blood. Puts you at a disadvantage.\"\n\nHer mouth fell open. If she got shot? She studied his face for some sign of humor but he looked serious as a monk.\n\nHe walked over to an iron saddle stand. \"This here is what I call a real saddle,\" he said, stabbing it with his finger. \"If you know what's good for you, you best get to know it like you know the back of your hand.\" He patted the saddle before continuing. \"First thing you do is move everythin' out of the way.\"\n\nHe demonstrated by folding the cinches and breast collar on top of the saddle. Naming each part as he worked, he hooked the right stirrup over the horn. He tossed her a colorful blanket before lifting the saddle with both hands and starting for the door.\n\nShe followed him to a brown gelding that stood far taller than any of the Morgan horses she'd ridden back in Boston.\n\nThe horse pricked his ears at the sight of the saddle, forefoot stomping.\n\n\"This here is Decker,\" Ruckus said.\n\n\"After the English author, Thomas Dekker?\" she asked.\n\nRuckus looked at her cockeyed. \"Decker because it's the bottom of the deck as far as workhorses go. It's the smallest horse we have and also the slowest.\"\n\nShe gulped. This was the smallest horse?\n\nRuckus chuckled. \"Don't look so worried. He's also pretty gentle. Just let him know who's boss and you'll be fine.\" He nodded toward the blanket in her hand.\n\nTaking her cue she placed the blanket onto the gelding's back and ran her hand along his long slick neck.\n\n\"First you place the saddle gently on the horse like so,\" Ruckus drawled. \"Don't thump it down or you'll startle him. Tighten up the front cinch first. Next you lower all the trimmin's, making sure everything hangs down nice and neat.\"\n\nHe dropped the cinches and breast collar in place. He then showed her how to lace the latigo through the cinch ring. \"You gotta make sure the back cinch is buckled over the belly, like so.\"\n\nWhen the horse was saddled, he demonstrated how to take the saddle off. \"Now you try it,\" he said.\n\n\"You want me to saddle the horse?\" she asked.\n\n\"I don't see anythin' else around here needs saddling,\" he said. \"Do you?\"\n\nIgnoring his comment she bent to pick up the saddle. It was heavier than she imagined, weighing at least thirty or forty pounds. It took every bit of strength she had to lift it high enough to place on the horse's back. After that it was a series of missteps and errors, but she finally got all the straps connected.\n\n\"I reckon you're as ready as you're ever gonna be,\" he muttered. \"Just remember God forgives.\" He waved his outstretched hand side to side like a rocking boat. \"Horses not so much.\" He patted Decker's rump. \"Time to ride. The thing to remember is not to spook him. Let yourself into the saddle nice and easy.\" He mounted and dismounted the horse himself before handing her the reins.\n\nKate braced herself with a deep breath. The horse blew through its velvety nose but otherwise looked calm enough. She held the reins tight in her left hand and grabbed the cantle with her right. Shoving her left foot into the stirrup, she bounced off her right foot.\n\n\"Nice and easy,\" Ruckus repeated.\n\nShe bounced up and down several times without leaving the ground. Finally, Ruckus put his hand on her behind. Of all the...\n\nFinding herself suddenly astride the enormous animal, she grabbed the reins tightly, heart pounding, and was afraid to breathe. Seated upon a horse clothespin-style didn't seem natural.\n\n\"Get down and try again,\" Ruckus said.\n\nGetting off the horse wasn't any easier than getting on, but she was determined to prove she could do it. Once both feet were on the ground she sprang up and down to give herself momentum. Ruckus moved toward her. In her haste to keep him from touching her again, she bounced up with such force she settled into the saddle with a thud.\n\nStartled, Decker arched his back, kicked up his back legs, and took off running.\n\n\"Ohhhhhhhhhhh,\" she cried. Her hat flew off and she flopped around in the saddle like a rag doll, gripping on to the reins for dear life. \"He-e-e-elp!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nEleanor stared at the white pine coffin, her divided skirt flapping against the top of her boots in the early morning breeze. The first warm rays of the sun trickled down the mountain like melted butter over freshly baked rolls. Though this was her favorite time of day, she never grew tired of watching the ever-changing colors of the desert as the sun journeyed across the sky.\n\nThe only sound breaking the silence was O.T. digging her ex-husband's grave. His real name was Chip Mason, but she called him O.T. like the others did. He'd worked at the ranch for fifteen years, a record. Working on a cattle ranch was hard work and most cowmen didn't last for more than seven or eight years, ten tops.\n\nAt age twenty O.T. had managed to escape a Texas hanging for killing a man, which to this day he claimed was self-defense. For some reason Eleanor believed him. She'd given him a chance to prove himself by working hard and staying out of trouble, and he had done exactly that many times over.\n\nA compact man with a weathered, clean-shaven face, he was the best wrangler who ever worked at the ranch. He never met a challenge he didn't like, and she had a corral of former wild horses to prove it. More than one rancher tried to steal him away by offering higher wages, but fortunately O.T. was more loyal than ambitious. Or maybe he was just grateful that she had given him a job when he was down on his luck.\n\nEven at age thirty-five O.T.'s movements were quick and strong, whether dealing with horses or cowboys or, in this case, digging a grave. Alternating between slamming the spade of his shovel into the ground and tossing soil over his shoulder, he worked steadily. Even so, it seemed to take forever to dig through the hard, arid ground.\n\nWhile he worked, Eleanor glanced at the weathered crosses that marked the graves of her parents, Harold and Mary Walker. But it was the smaller cross that gave her pause and brought a lump to her throat. After all these years it still hurt. Drat!\n\nShe'd battled droughts, floods, Indians, rustlers, and cattle fever without so much as a blink of the eye. Only four years ago she lost nearly half her cattle in that terrible drought. Five years before that she was forced to rebuild the ranch house and outbuildings after the original ones were destroyed in the '87 earthquake and subsequent fire.\n\nOh yes, she'd seen and done it all. So why, then, did the sight of the little white cross tear her apart after all this time? It was Ralph's fault for making her come to the little cemetery\u2014a place she tried to avoid except on rare occasions.\n\nIrritated that a man to whom she owed nothing, let alone a decent burial, had imposed his death upon her, she impatiently tapped her foot. She had work to do, cattle that needed tending, calves to pull, books to balance, fences to repair.\n\nShe also had to oversee the training of that new woman, though she didn't hold much hope that any of it would pay off. A writer. Great guns, what would be next?\n\nSo far six women had answered her advertisement, each progressively worse than the one before. First there was the teacher\u2014what was her name\u2014Marcy something, who fainted at the mere sight of a scorpion. Then the Irish girl who broke out in hives the moment she got near a horse. Of course none were as bad as the woman she found rolling in the hay with one of the cowpunchers.\n\nStill, something about this latest candidate intrigued her. Kate Tenney let down her guard for only a moment, but Eleanor saw a little bit of herself in the flashing blue eyes and combative stance. The woman had secrets, no doubt, but she also had backbone.\n\nA cloud of dust signaled a visitor and her thoughts scattered like frightened cattle. Who would travel way out here at this ungodly hour of the morning?\n\nThe horseman drew near and she folded her arms across her chest. She should have known. It was Wells Fargo banker Robert Stackman. On her more amicable days she considered him a friend and confidant. This was not one of those days.\n\nHe dismounted and staked his horse to a metal spike. A tall man in his early sixties, his sharp, analytical mind was hidden behind a calm, unhurried exterior. If his impeccable dark trousers, white shirt, vest, and bow tie didn't instill confidence in his banking clients, his mild, confident manner certainly did. He pulled off his black felt hat, revealing a full head of silver hair as neatly trimmed as his mustache and goatee.\n\n\"What are you doing here, Robert?\" she asked, pretending not to know. \"Is it the first of the month already?\" Forced to take out a loan to rebuild following the earthquake, she'd gone from being relatively debt-free to owing a great deal of money, all on the whim of nature.\n\n\"I thought you might like company.\" He nodded toward the casket. \"It's not every day that one buries a husband.\"\n\n\"Ex,\" she said. \"And I wouldn't have to bury him had he not been so inconsiderate as to die on my property.\" Even in death the man caused her trouble. \"How did you know?\"\n\n\"Doc Masterson came into the bank yesterday.\"\n\nHer lips puckered with annoyance. Apparently the death of an ex-spouse did not rate doctor/patient confidentiality.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"I thought you and your ex weren't on speaking terms.\"\n\n\"We weren't,\" she said. She hadn't seen Ralph since the divorce some twenty years earlier. To say that she was shocked when he showed up on her doorstep would be an understatement. She hardly recognized him. He was once the most handsome man in all of Arizona Territory, but time had not been kind to him. He'd worn his years like a soldier wore his battle wounds. He'd looked old, bent over\u2014a mere shadow of his former dashing self.\n\n\"He came to apologize.\" Arizona Territory followed the Mexican \"Community of Acquests and Gains\" law, dividing property equally between husband and wife. Following their divorce, he'd made her buy his half at twice the amount it was worth. It was the second time she'd been forced to purchase her own property. The first time was when the United States acquired the land from Mexico and refused to acknowledge the original deed. It took her years to repay the first loan but even longer to repay the second because of the '70s depression.\n\nHer ex-husband's apology when it finally did come was too little, too late, and she ordered him off her property. Only he never got any farther than the bottom of her verandah steps before he dropped down, dead.\n\n\"Did you forgive him?\" Robert asked.\n\n\"My word!\" she exclaimed, hands on her chest. \"What would ever make you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"I figure something must have caused his heart to stop,\" he replied.\n\nShe gave her head a righteous nod. \"Rest assured I'm completely blameless for his death.\"\n\n\"What a pity. It would have done you good to practice a little forgiveness.\" He reached into his saddlebags and pulled out a well-worn Bible. \"Do you mind if I do the honors?\"\n\n\"Oh really, Robert. Must we?\"\n\n\"Everyone deserves a proper burial.\"\n\nShe supposed he was right. In any case he didn't wait for her approval before he began to read the Twenty-Third Psalm. \"The LORD is my shepherd...\"\n\nNo sooner had he finished the psalm and started on the \"Our Father\" when the galloping sound of a horse's hooves and a woman's high-pitched screams pierced the air.\n\n\"Heeee-lp!\"\n\nEleanor spun around just in time to see Decker race by, his rider holding on with both hands and flopping around like wash on a windy day.\n\nIrritated by the intrusion, Eleanor threw up her hands. Could the girl not even control an old nag? \"For goodness' sakes, O.T. Do something.\"\n\nBut already her foreman had thrown down his shovel and was running toward his own horse. With one smooth move he swung into the saddle. \"Gid-up!\" he shouted, and horse and rider leaped forward.\n\nRobert stared after him, his eyes rounded. \"Good gracious, who is that woman?\"\n\nEleanor shook her head. Whatever had made her believe that someone who wrote purple prose could learn ranching? \"Her name is Kate Tenney, and I do believe I made a dreadful mistake.\"\n\nKate and the horse parted company before O.T. could reach her. The horse went north and Kate went south. Landing on top of a prickly pear cactus, she screamed bloody murder.\n\nRobert groaned, \"That poor girl!\"\n\nEleanor thought of the unpleasant task ahead and sighed. Cactus run-ins were not that unusual, especially for greenies unfamiliar with the desert. Normally, the job of plucking out barbs was left to one of the ranch hands. She could well imagine how her men would love putting their hands on the likes of Kate Tenney. Eleanor would allow nothing of the sort to happen, of course, which meant she had no choice but to take on the tedious task herself.\n\n\"Robert, finish your prayer and whatever else you think befitting a funeral while I fetch my medical kit. Just don't sing. You'll scare the cattle.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "The door to Kate's room flew open without as much as a knock. Miss Walker breezed in all businesslike carrying a small basket.\n\nGasping, Kate held a towel in front of her naked body with one hand and wiped away her tears with the other. She pranced from foot to foot but nothing relieved the burning, itching, and agonizing sting. Her entire backside all the way down to her knees felt like it was on fire. A glance in the mirror earlier had revealed red welts as ugly as they were painful.\n\nInitially, Miss Walker had pulled the longer thorns from her arms and legs. She then ordered Kate to her room to undress. Now the ranch owner lifted a large needle out of her basket and wielded it in the air. \"Bend over.\"\n\nKate stared at the needle but didn't move.\n\n\"Oh, for goodness' sakes, forget your modesty. You can't remove the thorns by yourself. If I see something I haven't seen before I'll throw a boot at it.\"\n\nFace ablaze, Kate turned. As humiliating as it was to stand in front of the ranch owner stark naked, she would do anything to stop the pain. She let the towel drop and leaned over the back of her wooden desk chair.\n\nMiss Walker immediately got to work. She picked what thorns she could by hand and dug out others with the sewing needle.\n\nTears rolled down Kate's cheeks, and despite her best efforts to hold her tongue she couldn't help but cry out on occasion, \"Ouch!\"\n\n\"Do keep still,\" Miss Walker ordered, her voice lacking any sort of sympathy or compassion.\n\n\"It hurts.\"\n\n\"Of course it hurts. They don't call it the devil's tongue for nothing.\" Miss Walker lifted her voice. \"Rosita! What's taking so long?\"\n\nThe bedroom door flung open, and Rosita scurried across the room and handed a small basin to Miss Walker. Her eyes grew wide as she glanced at Kate's bare bottom. She then turned and hurried from the room as if running away from a contagious disease.\n\n\"This will get the hairy spines out,\" Miss Walker explained, pouring something that felt wet and cold on her back and legs.\n\n\"What horrible plants. What terrible, horrible plants,\" Kate wailed.\n\n\"If you think this is bad, wait till you meet up with a jumping cholla,\" Miss Walker said. \"I swear that thing can jump out and grab you as you pass by.\"\n\nKate groaned at the thought. Jumping plants? What would be next?\n\n\"In any case, the prickly pear is a useful plant,\" Miss Walker continued. Having finished plastering Kate's back and arms with some sort of paste, she walked to the washstand and poured water from the pitcher into the basin. \"The juice has many medicinal qualities and Indians use it to purify water. The fruit is quite good, actually. A few prickly spines seem like a small price to pay for such a useful plant, wouldn't you say?\" She washed and dried her hands.\n\nFor an answer Kate moaned. The glue on her back began to harden and her skin felt taut, but the coolness had relieved some of the itching, or at least made it bearable.\n\nAfter several moments, Miss Walker peeled off the glue and tossed the papery strips into the wastebasket. She then proceeded to apply a poultice to Kate's skin.\n\n\"This is an old family recipe made from dried bread crumbs and sweet oil,\" she explained. After she had completed the task, she said, \"That should do it. It'll feel uncomfortable for a day or two, but I think we got them all.\"\n\nKate grabbed the towel and held it up in front of her. \"Thank you,\" she murmured. Now that the worst was over, she feared Miss Walker would tell her to pack her bags and leave.\n\nInstead, Miss Walker gathered up her supplies and started for the door. \"Get dressed. There's work to be done. We've got to get ready to start pulling calves.\" With that she was gone, leaving only the sound of her footsteps fading away.\n\nKate stared at the closed door. That's it? Get to work? No time off to recover? She frowned. And what an odd term, pulling calves. What could it possibly mean? How does one pull a calf?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nBrandon scooped a pitchfork of straw and tossed it into the wheelbarrow with one easy move. He had mucked out all thirty-five horse stalls in less than two hours. She greeted him with a smile and fell into his arms. He smelled like the sun and rain all rolled into one...\n\nHorse dung! That's what she smelled like. It was in her nose and hair and even her mouth. It seeped into her pores like water in a hole, along with the horsey smell of soggy hay and stinky urine.\n\nHer body still sore from yesterday's horrid ride, her muscles ached as she swung the last pitchfork of soiled hay into the wheelbarrow. Her skin still felt prickly from the cactus needles. Though the burning had all but disappeared, her embarrassment at having to bend over naked in front of Miss Walker remained.\n\nThe relatively tame horseback rides she'd endured at college were nothing compared to the kind of riding expected on the ranch. Certainly she'd never been on a horse as large or fast as that gelding, Decker. Ruckus said it was old and slow. A racehorse should be that slow!\n\nShe collapsed against the wooden side of the stable. Two days felt like two years.\n\nAs usual, whenever she stopped working Ruckus appeared as if able to see through the walls that divided the stalls. He glanced around and pulled out his pocket watch. \"Forty-six minutes,\" he announced in his gravelly voice.\n\n\"That's good, isn't it?\" she asked, although at the moment she was too hot to care. It had been one mishap after another. Why hadn't Ruckus told her to remove the horse before cleaning the stall? And how was she supposed to know to turn the wheelbarrow in the direction you wanted to go before filling it?\n\n\"God created the world in only seven days. That was good,\" he said, and not even his drawl could hide the sarcasm. \"At the rate you're going you won't have the rest of the stalls mucked out until next month sometime.\"\n\n\"The rest? You mean I have to clean them all?\"\n\nHat tilted over his forehead, he scratched the back of his neck. \"Yep,\" he said cheerfully. \"All thirty-four of them.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Luke Adams hunted through his scrap pile. The waist-high mound was made up mostly of discarded horseshoes, old nails, worn-out gun barrels, and other scraps of metal. Railroads had lowered the cost of transporting iron in recent years, but he enjoyed the challenge of twisting and turning old iron into something new.\n\nEvery door latch, windmill rod\u2014even Doc Masterson's scalpels\u2014had once been forged exclusively in his shop, first by his uncle and then by him.\n\nUncle Sam was fond of saying that the blacksmith was the heart and soul of the community. He and the town's former preacher had some lively disagreements over that one.\n\nThings had changed in recent years and not necessarily for the better. Everything from kitchen utensils to farm tools could now be ordered through Montgomery Ward's catalog. The quality wasn't as good, but the novelty of ordering through a catalog and waiting for its arrival took precedence over workmanship. It was this lack of craft that had turned Adams Blacksmithing into little more than a fix-it shop. He no longer made tools; he repaired them.\n\nFinding a piece of metal he wanted, he returned to his workbench.\n\nHomer let out a bark, tail wagging. He put his nose to the crack beneath the door and sniffed.\n\n\"What is it, boy?\" Luke asked. \"Do we have company?\"\n\nJust then his two aunts walked in. Aunt Bessie stopped to pet Homer, whose entire rear end followed his tail in greeting.\n\n\"How is my nephew treating you?\" she said in an unnaturally high voice reserved for babies, animals, and anyone she deemed hard of hearing.\n\nShe straightened and glanced around. She was a hefty woman with birdlike legs and arms. Her bow-shaped mouth pursed thoughtfully upon a stack of three chins, her features drawing together in a knowing frown.\n\n\"Where's Michael?\"\n\n\"Running an errand,\" Luke said. He hated lying, but if he told her that his brother was up to his old tricks it would only worry her.\n\nAunt Bessie's eyes sharpened as if she picked up some signal he gave off without knowing. \"Fighting again, eh?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that.\"\n\n\"You didn't have to.\" She wagged her finger. \"The trouble with you two is you don't talk to each other.\"\n\n\"We talk,\" Luke muttered, \"but the moment he hears the word work he runs the other way.\"\n\nAunt Bessie heaved her ample bosom and stared at him with haughty rebuke. \"There's nothing wrong with your brother that a good wife won't fix.\"\n\nLuke clamped his jaw tight. According to his aunt, a wife was the cure-all for everything from gout to heart failure.\n\nSensing she was gearing up to deliver one of her oft-repeated lectures on brotherly love and family obligations, he quickly changed the subject.\n\n\"So what brings you two to town?\" Despite his aunts' obsession with finding him a wife, he was glad to see them.\n\n\"You tell him.\" Aunt Lula-Belle nudged her older sister. \"It was your idea.\"\n\nThe shorter of the two, she was as thin as Aunt Bessie was wide, her snowy hair wound in tight springy curls. Her red frilly hat sat atop her head like a cherry on a mound of whipped cream.\n\n\"Oh, all right,\" Aunt Bessie said, speaking in her normal throaty voice that made him suspect she still smoked cheroots on occasion even though she had promised to stop.\n\nHer habit of putting her nose where it didn't belong would try a saint, and Luke was anything but one. She meant well, of course, even though she did delve a little too deeply into his personal affairs. They both did, though Aunt Lula-Belle was more of an accomplice than an instigator.\n\nAunt Bessie cleared her throat. \"Remember the woman we met on the day that Cactus Joe tried to rob the mercantile?\" she asked.\n\nLuke grimaced at the memory. He hadn't known his aunts were in town during the attempted holdup until two days later. It was bad enough that they interfered in his life, but he still shuddered to think they tried to take on an outlaw.\n\n\"The day my hat was ruined,\" Aunt Lula-Belle added with a woeful sigh.\n\nAunt Bessie rolled her eyes. \"Would you stop complaining about your hat? Losing it was the best thing that happened to you since Murphy gave up playing the fiddle.\"\n\nAunt Bessie turned her attention back to Luke. \"I'm talking about the woman you saved.\"\n\nThat wasn't exactly accurate, but Luke let it slip by. Instead, he leaned against his workbench, arms crossed. \"What about her?\"\n\nWas she still in town? It had been nearly two weeks. That meant she had lasted longer than any of the others. That was a surprise. A big surprise.\n\nAunt Bessie's hand fluttered to her chest. \"You won't believe this, but she took the trouble to find out our names and wrote a lovely note inquiring as to our well-being. Wasn't that thoughtful of her?\"\n\n\"Yes, it was.\" He still remembered how she looked sitting on this very workbench, all soft and pretty and more than anything, vulnerable. Of course she seemed more scared than vulnerable when they reached the ranch house, though she did her best to hide it. Not that he blamed her. Facing Cactus Joe and Miss Walker on the same day was enough to scare anyone.\n\n\"And so we were thinking\"\u2014she glanced at Aunt Lula-Belle\u2014\"that maybe we should get to know her better. Perhaps invite her to supper. And of course we think you should be there too. I'm sure she would love to see you again.\"\n\nSo that was the reason for their visit. He should have known they were up to their usual matchmaking tricks. \"I don't think that's a good idea,\" he said.\n\nAunt Bessie feigned a wounded look. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"We have nothing in common. We don't even speak the same language,\" he said.\n\nAunt Bessie's mouth turned down in disappointment. \"I don't remember her being foreign.\" She looked to her sister for confirmation. \"Do you suppose she had someone write the note she sent us?\"\n\nAunt Lula-Belle looked as perplexed as her sister. \"She didn't look foreign either.\"\n\n\"Yes, but we only saw her for a moment before Cactus Joe dragged her outside,\" Aunt Bessie said.\n\n\"She's not a foreigner,\" Luke said. Last he heard Boston wasn't a foreign country. \"She's one of those book-learning women who talks over your head.\"\n\nHe was a plain and simple man and he didn't need no ten-dollar words to say what he had to say. Nor did he go around naming things after Greek philosophers.\n\n\"Like Louise?\" Aunt Bessie asked, her voice edged with dislike.\n\n\"No, not like her,\" he said gruffly. Louise had run off to Chicago to attend one of those fancy schools. It hurt like crazy when she wrote to tell him she was betrothed to a professor. He cared for Louise, had wanted to marry her. Miss Tenney was little more than a stranger. Not the same thing at all.\n\nRegretting his harshly spoken words, he leaned over and pecked Aunt Bessie on her crinkly cheek. He would always be grateful to her for taking care of him and his brother just as she promised her dying sister she would. She and Uncle Sam treated him and Michael like their own. Apparently, in his aunt's mind at least, finding wives for them was part of her responsibility to her deceased sister, and she had no intention of resting until she had fulfilled that obligation.\n\n\"I've got to get to work.\" He hated to rush them out the door, but orders were backed up and since Michael had taken off again, he was on his own. He really did need to hire an assistant. \"See you Sunday.\"\n\nEach Sunday after church he had dinner with his two aunts and uncles. \"Maybe I'll ask Miss Chase to join us,\" he added, hoping that would please them.\n\nAunt Bessie's smile did not reach her eyes. \"That would be wonderful, dear,\" she said, sounding more distracted than happy at the prospect of seeing him with the schoolmaster's daughter.\n\nHe watched them go with a fond sigh. He supposed listening to Miss Chase rattle on incessantly, as she tended to do, was a small price to pay to appease his two meddling aunts." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\n\"Shoot at your own peril,\" the ruffian yelled. \"Curses on you!\" Brandon yelled back. Bang, bang, bang!\n\nRuckus was a slave driver. That was the only way to describe him. Every day he greeted Kate with that mournful face of his.\n\n\"You're still here, eh?\" he asked, as if he'd expected her to sneak away in the dead of night.\n\nThat morning, after his usual greeting, he made her saddle up. \"Today we're riding the range. Since you haven't fallen off your horse for three days, it's time you did some real ridin'.\"\n\nShe greeted this news with both jubilation and dismay. Her legs were so sore she'd barely made it down the stairs that morning. Her arms throbbed and her tailbone ached. Even her bruises had bruises. Already her hands were calloused, the nails broken to the quick.\n\nThe thought of getting on her horse filled her with dread. On the other hand, Ruckus wasn't big on praise. Letting her ride out on the range was about as close to a compliment as she was likely to get from him, and she intended to prove herself worthy\u2014if it killed her.\n\nShe filled her lungs with crisp air and mounted, grimacing against the pain that spread from her inner thighs all the way down to her ankles.\n\nWith grim determination she pressed her legs against the sides of her horse and followed Ruckus out of the corral. Stretch, Moose, and Mexican Pete waited a short distance away. None of the three looked happy to see her, Moose least of all.\n\n\"Why do we have to take her?\" he asked, his lip turned up. \"All she does is slow us down and make a mess of things.\"\n\nKate gritted her teeth. She hated the way they talked about her as if she weren't there.\n\n\"I'm only doin' what the boss lady says,\" Ruckus said. \"Now quit your yappin' and move it.\"\n\nMoose cast a frown in her direction, pulled his hat as low as his ears would allow, and rode off.\n\nKate patted her horse. \"Come on, Decker. Let's show them.\" She kicked her heels into the horse's sides and followed the four men who rode in a straight line, one after another.\n\nOddly enough, the past intruded less when she was in a saddle. Perhaps it was because nothing about the desert reminded her of Boston and all that had happened there.\n\nAs they rode, Stretch spun a tale of a man who fell in the Grand Canyon wearing rubber boots. \"He kept bouncing up and down for days. They finally had to shoot him to keep him from starving to death.\"\n\nThis brought guffaws from the other three men and a chuckle from Kate. The stories told by the hoboes outside her childhood window were never as amusing as Stretch's.\n\n\"You ought to be a writer,\" she called to him.\n\nStretch glanced over his shoulder. \"Nah. Writers are for people who read. My stories are for everyone.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but it's sure a lot easier to close a book than turn off your ears,\" Ruckus moaned, and Moose laughed.\n\n\"Stay behind me,\" Ruckus ordered when her horse wandered off the tracks made by the others. \"We don't want to disturb no more grass than necessary. And keep your eyes peeled lest you see somethin' strange.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" she called. There wasn't much out here but cactus and sage. What little grass there was didn't seem worth protecting.\n\n\"Injured or sick cattle,\" he said. \"Fire. Rustlers. Broken fences.\" He pointed to a rabbit hole. \"Everything out here lives in a hole. So, Goldilocks, watch where you're riding.\"\n\nShe had grown used to his calling her Goldilocks but still grappled with the rather odd ways westerners expressed themselves. She still felt uncomfortable calling Miss Walker the boss lady, though Ruckus insisted it was a sign of respect.\n\n\"If she was male, we'd call her old man,\" he'd said. \"That's what-cha get for bein' the biggest toad in the pond.\"\n\nShe learned that a hat was a lid unless you were from south of the border and then it was a sombrero. A cowboy's rope was a lariat not a lasso, one being the noun and the other a verb. It was Arizony and New Mex, though the men seemed to have too much respect for Texas to call it anything other than its rightful name.\n\nIt wasn't just the language of the West that confounded her; the desert that seemed so barren from afar actually teemed with life. Nothing was as it seemed at first glance. Sage that looked purple from a distance was actually gray. Rocks that seemed dull from afar glittered with fool's gold up close. Wildflowers grew in abundance, and what appeared to be endless flatland was actually filled with rocky gullies, rough gulches, and dry riverbeds.\n\nThe desert was like a painting whose beauty could only be uncovered upon close observation, and a thrill raced through her with each new discovery.\n\nThey rode through wild mesquite and prickly scrub brush. Ruckus had loaned her a pair of chaps to wear, but they were heavy and uncomfortable so she'd left them behind. Now she wished she hadn't.\n\nRange mustangs looked up when they rode by, then calmly resumed grazing. \"What beautiful animals,\" she called to Ruckus.\n\nGrazing cattle lifted broad white faces, jaws making circular movements as they chewed. Up close the cattle, even with their short legs, looked so much larger than Kate ever imagined.\n\nHowever, the animals she found most amazing were prairie dogs, which seemed to be everywhere. They stood up on hind legs and made funny little barking sounds, and she couldn't help but laugh at their antics.\n\nEqually amusing were the roadrunners that raced frantically across the desert floor, their legs but a blur beneath their fast-moving bodies.\n\nRuckus slapped his rope against his chaps to chase a couple of cattle out of a gulch, his movements deliberate and unrushed. The steers scrambled up the incline with low moos.\n\n\"The quickest way to move a steer is slow,\" he explained. \"Otherwise it'll take off in the wrong direction.\" After a while he added, \"I reckon that's why the Forever Man sometimes takes his time answerin' prayers. He wants to make sure we ain't gonna run off and get lost once we get what we want.\"\n\nHaving no experience with answered prayers, Kate guided her horse around a prairie dog mound and said nothing.\n\nRuckus veered off in another direction and stopped to examine the remains of a campfire. He didn't look happy and Kate wondered if it meant trouble.\n\nShe was so busy watching him she didn't notice that her horse had strayed away from the trail left by the others. By the time she heard the rattling sound it was too late. Decker reared back on his hind legs, pawing the air with a loud whinny, and Kate hit the ground.\n\n\"Oomph!\"\n\nRuckus galloped up, pistol in hand, and shot the snake with a single bullet. \"You all right?\" he asked, looking down from astride his horse.\n\n\"I'm f-fine,\" she stammered with a wary glance at the lifeless snake. No doubt she had another batch of fresh bruises, but the rattler could no longer harm her. Moose's sneer made her face burn with humiliation.\n\nRuckus holstered his gun, rested his arms on his pommel, and stared at her.\n\nShe glared back at him. \"Why are you looking at me like that?\"\n\nHe tilted his hat away from his face. \"I plumb don't know why God brought you here, but I reckon if he wanted you to be a rancher he'd have built you so you could stay in a saddle.\" He shook his head and blew out his breath. \"If you can't even ride a horse\u2014\"\n\n\"I can ride a horse,\" she yelled. \"I just can't ride that horse.\" Decker was like every other male she ever knew\u2014one moment gentle and the next wild and unpredictable.\n\n\"Fallin' off of Decker makes as much sense as fallin' out of a rockin' chair. If you can't ride an old nag, how do you expect to ride a cuttin' horse?\"\n\nShe had no idea what a cutting horse was, but it sure didn't sound too appealing.\n\nMexican Pete and Stretch rode back at the sound of gunfire and laughed upon seeing her on the ground.\n\nMouth clamped shut in annoyance, she stood and brushed herself off. She looked around for her hat, shuddering anew at the sight of the dead snake. Spotting Miss Walker on her horse a distance away, Kate's heart sank. No doubt the woman saw her hit the ground. Again.\n\nMoose rode up with her horse in tow. He didn't laugh. Instead, his lips puckered with exasperation.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, taking Decker by the reins and ignoring Moose's reproachful expression. He shook his head and rode off without a word.\n\nShe glared after him before mounting her horse. This time she kept her eyes on the trail in front of her, careful not to stray away from the tracks left by the others.\n\nShe caught up to the men watering their horses by a windmill. Ruckus stood in the skimpy shade of the stiltlike tower, hands on his waist.\n\n\"We just oiled it last month and listen to it. Sounds like a bunch of rattling chains.\"\n\nKate listened but it didn't sound any different from any of the other windmills they had passed.\n\nRuckus lifted an oilcan off his saddle. \"Who's going up this time?\" he called.\n\nWhile Stretch, Moose, and Mexican Pete argued among themselves, Kate quickly made up her mind. Before any of the others volunteered, she snatched the oilcan from Ruckus, slung it over her shoulder, and started up the ladder.\n\nRuckus yelled after her, \"What in blazes do you think you're doin'? Git down from there. You hear me? Now!\"\n\nIgnoring him, she kept going. Teeth gritted against the sting of calloused hands on wooden rungs, she climbed. She would show Miss Walker, Moose, and the others she could do a man's job. She would show them all. Grim determination blocked out all other thoughts as she clambered up, leaving the desert floor below. It seemed to take forever, but she kept climbing and Ruckus kept yelling for her to get down.\n\nBy the time she reached the platform she was gasping for air. Much to her surprise, a cheer rose from below. Mexican Pete waved his hat and Stretch called out, \"Hee-haw!\" Even Moose had a wide grin on his face.\n\nTaking a moment to catch her breath, she glanced around for the rope used to tie down the windmill blades. She'd watched cowhands oil other windmills and knew what to do\u2014at least she hoped she did. What she hadn't anticipated was just how far away the ground looked from twenty feet up." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nEleanor stood a distance away from the windmill they called Job and surveyed the land. Her land.\n\nShe knew every square mile of it like she knew her own mind. Every crevice, every valley, every cactus and hill were etched into her memory like carvings in a rock. She trusted the men who worked for her, of course, but she trusted her instincts more. She was often the first to spot a broken fence or an ailing steer. She knew which of her fifty odd windmills needed oil even before the grind of dry gears brought her men on the run. She knew exactly how many gallons of water each pumped in an hour.\n\nShe also knew her workers and their capabilities. Knew her best riders. Knew who to depend on in the face of catastrophe like the earthquake of '87 and the torrential flash floods of '82. Knew who to trust with numbers and figures, even money.\n\nWhat she didn't know was what to think of the woman named Kate Tenney. Oh, she knew a broad range of things about her. Kate was a writer, but apparently not a very successful one. She was educated, had gone to a very good school, but instead of teaching or choosing a similar profession she opted for mucking out stables and fighting with cacti.\n\nThat Tenney girl had tenacity all right. Eleanor knew that much. It had only been three weeks\u2014a record\u2014but still she hung on, albeit by a fine thread by the looks of her. Granted, Eleanor had instructed her men to pile it on but never had she expected them to make the woman climb twenty feet up a windmill to oil it, for goodness' sakes. Even Eleanor had never scaled a windmill. She wasn't afraid of much, but she disliked heights.\n\nShe had planned to question the woman one night at supper, but so far Kate had resisted joining her in the dining room. Instead, the woman dragged herself up the stairs at the end of each workday and wasn't heard from until morning.\n\nNow, Eleanor shaded her eyes against the sun. Kate had made it all the way onto the platform, her slender figure barely visible from this distance. What in heaven's name was Ruckus thinking? More than one ranch hand had been injured by a windmill. One had fallen off a ladder and suffered back injuries. Another had his right arm chewed up by the expansive blades.\n\nThe air was still, but the wind could start up at any moment. If Kate failed to tie down the huge blades before oiling the gears, the smallest gust of wind could cause her to be knocked to the ground.\n\nEleanor held her breath until Kate waved to the men below, signaling that the blades had been properly stabilized.\n\nThis particular windmill had been nothing but trouble since Eleanor purchased it. She had replaced the old wooden windmills with new steel ones following the terrible '91\u2014'92 drought after she had lost nearly half her cattle. It had been one thing after another ever since, which is why Ruckus called this particular troublesome one Job, after some fellow in the Bible.\n\nWooden windmills were so much easier to repair, but the newer steel ones required the services of Adams Blacksmithing. Not only was that an added expense, but it meant the windmill was out of service for a day or two while Luke Adams fixed it. However, Eleanor's biggest complaint about steel mills was the constant need for lubrication.\n\nThe sound of a horse's hooves drew Eleanor's attention away from the windmill.\n\nRobert Stackman rode up on his bay and greeted her with a lift of his straw hat. Dressed in striped trousers, his one concession to the heat was the absence of a jacket, though he still wore a buttoned vest. His stark white shirt had a fashionable high collar better suited for cooler weather.\n\n\"Eleanor.\" He dismounted and tied his horse to a stake next to Eleanor's roan. \"Your foreman told me I'd find you here.\"\n\nShe took her eyes off Kate just long enough to give him a sideways glance. They were a good five miles from the ranch house. \"What is so urgent?\" she asked. \"It's not the first of the month, is it?\"\n\nHe grinned at her. \"Not quite. It's April tenth. I came to wish you a happy birthday.\"\n\nShe groaned. It seemed like the time between birthdays grew shorter each year. It was one of the drawbacks of aging.\n\n\"Let me think. How old are you?\" he continued, knowing full well it was a sensitive subject with her. \"Forty-eight? Fifty?\"\n\n\"You know very well I'm sixty-six. Five years older than you.\" What a nuisance it was, growing older. Not that she felt her age, of course, or at least not that she was willing to admit. Still, there was something about birthdays that made one take stock and reflect, even if the last thing she wanted to do was think of the past. It was hard enough thinking of the future, which was shrinking at an alarming pace.\n\n\"I hope you're not holding our age difference against me,\" he said.\n\n\"You make it hard not to,\" she replied. He wore his years well. Too well.\n\n\"Shall we get on with it, then?\"\n\n\"Oh, Robert. Must we?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"It's your birthday.\"\n\nHe picked out a clear sandy spot and knelt on one knee. He pulled off his hat and held it to his chest. Most men his age would be at least half bald, but not him. His silver hair was just as full and lush as that of a much younger man.\n\nShe rolled her eyes and glanced at the windmill, but the ranch hands all had their backs toward them and were focused on Kate high above their heads. Still, someone might turn and look their way.\n\nEleanor gazed down at Robert. \"Must you be so dramatic?\"\n\n\"It's my proposal. I can be as dramatic as I please.\"\n\n\"Very well. If you insist.\"\n\nHe cleared his throat and his pale blue eyes held hers. \"Will you, Eleanor Walker, do me the honor of becoming my wife?\"\n\nEach year on her birthday he proposed marriage, and each year she turned him down\u2014and for good reason. Both her father and ex-husband had put the ranch in jeopardy. Her father had mortgaged it to pay off his gambling debts. However much she was tempted to marry Robert, she would never do so. Arizona Territory community property laws would make Robert half owner of her ranch. Her painful divorce taught her the folly of shared ownership and she had no intention of making the same mistake twice.\n\n\"How long have we been doing this, Robert?\"\n\n\"Fourteen, fifteen years,\" he said. \"But like I've told you many times through those years, I'm a patient man.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure that patient is the right word,\" she said. \"In any case, the answer is no.\" No surprises there.\n\nRobert was nothing if not a shrewd businessman. Landownership meant profit to him, nothing more. He was a banker through and through. He had no ardor for land, no passion for anything but cold, hard cash. He knew nothing about ranching. Had never stayed up all night with a sick cow or rescued a lost calf. He had no feeling for cattle except how much per pound they would bring at market.\n\nIf he thought it financially wise to do so, he would sell his half of the ranch in a flash. Not only would that break her heart, it would make her hate him. Turning down his proposal had as much to do with preserving their friendship as protecting her property.\n\nHer answer hung between them for several moments before he rose and brushed the sand off his trouser leg. \"Same time, same place next year.\"\n\n\"Same answer.\"\n\nHe replaced his hat, his eyes shadowed by the yellow straw brim.\n\n\"Just thought I'd save you the effort,\" she said. It couldn't be pleasant being turned down as much as he had been.\n\n\"A lot can happen in a year. Who knows? You might even believe me when I tell you that the cattle business is past its prime.\"\n\n\"People will always eat beef,\" she said. \"And mine is the best.\" Hereford beef with its fatty marbling was certainly more tender and tasty than the leaner longhorn beeves, which is why most Texas cattlemen had made the switch in recent years.\n\n\"I can't argue with you there.\" He grabbed the reins of his horse and mounted. \"Happy birthday, Eleanor,\" he said, touching a finger to the brim of his hat.\n\nNo sooner had Robert ridden away than Ruckus came galloping up on his horse.\n\n\"Job's workin' again. Just needed some oil, is all,\" he said.\n\n\"Excellent.\" Keeping the fifty-some windmills in good working order was a full-time job. \"But really, Ruckus? Sending Miss Tenney to do the task? You know how dangerous it is even for experienced men.\"\n\n\"I had no say in the matter,\" he said. \"She took it upon herself to climb it.\"\n\nEleanor raised her eyebrows. \"A brave one, isn't she?\"\n\n\"Foolhardy, more like it,\" Ruckus growled.\n\nShe didn't blame him for being irritated. The qualities Ruckus looked for in a new ranch hand were not the same as required in an heiress. Still, she trusted his judgment.\n\n\"It's been what? Three weeks. She's lasted a lot longer than any of the others. Do you think she's got a feel for the land?\"\n\n\"She feels the land, all right. Every blasted time she falls off her horse.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Oh yes, the woman had tenacity. The question was, would it be enough? \"Tell Miss Tenney I shall expect her for dinner at six.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Make certain she understands that it's an order.\" She sniffed. \"I think it's time I got to know her better, don't you?\"\n\n\"I'll tell her.\"\n\nEleanor watched him ride away. Her motive for wanting Kate to join her for dinner had to do with ranch business, nothing more. It had absolutely nothing to do with her birthday and not wanting to eat dinner alone yet again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nBrandon pointed two guns at Miss Hattie's tormentor. \"Touch a hair of her head and you'll answer to me.\"\n\nThe man of ill fame backed away and the grateful woman sprang up with frenzied joy. \"My hero.\"\n\nOf all the foolhardy, idiotic, stupid\"\u2014Ruckus sputtered so much he could hardly get the words out\u2014\"dumb things to do.\"\n\nKate stood outside the barn while he ranted and raved, his crooked nose practically in her face.\n\nHe had been at it for the last several minutes and she figured sooner or later he would run out of steam. He'd waited until they returned to the ranch and they were alone to voice his displeasure, first at climbing the windmill, then for almost shooting him in the foot with a shotgun. Now he grabbed the weapon out of her hands and slid it onto his saddle.\n\nShe stood facing him, fists at her sides. Nothing she did satisfied him, and she had just about had enough. Her body ached and she was tired to the bone. All she wanted was to crawl into bed and sleep for forty-eight hours straight.\n\nHe tossed her a rope. \"It's time you earned your keep.\"\n\nRed flashed before her eyes. What did he think she'd been trying to do?\n\nShe threw the rope on the ground and crossed her arms. \"I'm tired and I don't want to do any more!\"\n\nRuckus leaned so close that had his nose been less crooked it would have collided with hers. \"By the time I get back you better be able to nail that fence post with that there rope,\" he said brusquely. He turned and stalked away, then stopped. \"The boss lady expects you for dinner tonight.\" He glanced at her over his shoulder with knitted brow. \"And if you know what's good for you, you better tighten your fiddle strings. Right now you look like something the cat's dragged in and that ain't gonna score no points with Miz Walker.\" Shaking his head, he walked away.\n\nWatching his retreating back, she chewed on her bottom lip and felt a sinking feeling. Why now, after all this time, did the ranch owner want to have dinner with her? Was it to send her packing?\n\nThe day had gone from bad to worse. How she regretted lashing out at Ruckus. True, he demanded much from her, but sometimes she had the distinct feeling he was secretly on her side. Of course that was before she nearly shot him in the foot.\n\nStill, he was her only ally. If anyone could convince Miss Walker to let her stay, it was Ruckus. Somehow she had to find a way to get back in his good graces.\n\nShe snatched up the rope and heaved a sigh. She had practiced for a week solid and the only thing she'd managed to nail was thin air.\n\nDetermined not to let a length of rope get the best of her, she tied her lariat loop exactly as Ruckus had taught her. She then coiled the rope and swung the noose overhead, eyes on the fence post not ten feet in front of her. Somehow the free end of the rope got tangled around her foot and she lost control of the noose. Instead of landing on the fence post as she planned, it dropped over the head of her grazing horse.\n\nStartled, Decker glanced around with frenzied eyes, kicked up his heels, and bounded around the pasture, dragging her on the ground behind him.\n\n\"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!\" He pulled her halfway around the corral before her foot broke free of the rope and she let go. Sprawled belly-down in the mud, she gasped for air.\n\n\"I have to say, ma'am, that was some mighty fancy roping.\"\n\nStartled by the male voice, she lifted her head. Luke Adams sat on his horse staring down at her from the other side of the fence.\n\nEmbarrassed to be seen like that she was momentarily tongue-tied, which only added to her dismay. She had suffered more indignities than she could imagine, but having Mr. Adams of all people see her sprawled on the ground was the worst indignity of all.\n\n\"I never saw anyone lasso a horse backward like that.\" When she made no reply, his forehead creased in concern. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nNo, she was not all right. She was covered in mud and felt like a fool. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She sat up and, holding her arms out, stared down at her muddied clothes.\n\n\"I quit!\"\n\n\"I didn't figure you as a quitter.\" His mouth twitched with amusement. \"I figured you'd get fired, but I didn't figure you'd quit.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"You thought I'd get fired?\"\n\nHe dismounted and tied his horse to the fence. Telling Homer to stay, he then climbed over the wooden barrier and knelt by her side. Pulling the bandanna from around his neck, he leaned toward her.\n\nShe jerked back so quickly mud splashed all over his trousers. Before she had a chance to apologize, he splashed her back and laughed.\n\n\"So you think this is funny, do you?\" She picked up a handful of dirt, but before she could throw it at him, he waved his bandanna in surrender.\n\n\"I give up,\" he said, his eyes filled with humor.\n\n\"Chicken.\" She tossed the dirt down and brushed her hands together.\n\nHe gave her a lopsided grin that made her heart turn over. \"You'd better smile when you say that.\"\n\nShe was smiling. She couldn't help it. \"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to mess up your clothes. I've had a hard morning. It's been one disaster after another.\"\n\n\"It can't be all that bad. It looks to me like you're gainin' ground,\" he said, referring to her mud-covered clothes.\n\nLaughing at his joke, she shook her head. \"I don't know that Ruckus sees it that way.\"\n\nShe tilted her head to the side. \"I never got a chance to thank you for your kindness on the day I arrived.\" She had meant to write him a note, but for some reason could never figure out quite what to say.\n\n\"No need to thank me, ma'am. I reckon anyone would have done the same.\"\n\nHe moved closer and she tensed, her playful mood evaporating as quickly as a soap bubble.\n\nHis forehead creased in a frown. \"I'm not going to hurt you, if that's what you're worried about.\"\n\n\"I know that,\" she said. It was a lie, of course. She knew nothing of the sort. Every man she'd ever known had given her reason not to trust him, the sole exceptions being fictional men, the ones she'd written about\u2014men who sprang from her imagination or maybe from the depths of her heart.\n\nHe dabbed her nose gently before moving his cloth down to her chin. The nearness of him made her heart pound and she closed her eyes. Perhaps if she didn't look at him, his presence wouldn't seem so overwhelming.\n\nWrong. She could still feel his nearness, sense his gaze on her, and breathe in his essence. His gentle touch sent currents of warmth through her. Worse, he made her feel things she didn't want to feel. She'd vowed never to be like her mother, never to depend on a man, never to be ruled by love, and she meant to keep that pledge. To do otherwise would jeopardize any chance of proving herself a worthy heiress to the ranch.\n\nMiss Walker's advertisement in the newspaper, shortly after her publisher dropped her, couldn't have come at a better time. Whether it was serendipity or just plain luck, Kate didn't know, but she was convinced her problems were over. If she could prove to Miss Walker she was capable of learning the ranching business, her future was secure. She wouldn't have to depend on anyone but herself. Nor would she ever again have to watch a man walk out of her life, tossing her aside like yesterday's newspaper. She would win the respect of all who knew her and never again be made to feel inferior.\n\nHe completed the task and she opened her eyes. \"Thank you.\"\n\nHe studied her. \"You aren't really gonna quit, are you?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" she said, though after today the choice may no longer be hers to make.\n\n\"There you go,\" he said, standing.\n\nHe offered her his hand and she let him pull her to her feet. To refuse his help would be rude, especially since he had shown her such kindness.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she asked, pulling her hand out of his as one would pull away from a fire.\n\n\"Had to deliver a bunch of new horseshoes. They go through them like penny candy around here.\"\n\nAware of how awful she must look, she backed away. \"I... I better go and change.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Like I said, that was some mighty fancy roping.\"\n\nHe held her gaze and much to her dismay she felt herself blush. With a quick farewell she whirled around and marched to the ranch house. Only when she had reached the security of the porch did she dare look back.\n\nLuke Adams hadn't moved from where she'd left him, his face shaded by his hat. She couldn't say for sure, but she had the feeling that he was still watching her, and the very thought made her already-pounding heart beat that much faster." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Later that afternoon, Kate dipped her hand into the tank and splashed water on her heated face. It felt cool and refreshing. Her body was still sore from her unfortunate roping accident earlier in the day. Now she ducked in the shade of the windmill to take a break.\n\nLaughter drifted from the direction of the ranch house. Some of the other ranch hands were relaxing on the verandah. Mexican Pete leaned against a post, arms folded, straw hat shading his face. Stretch was telling one of his tall tales, this one about the winter he spent on a cattle ranch in Montana.\n\n\"It was so cold that your words froze soon as they left your mouth. It took two weeks for the words to thaw out enough to be heard.\" This brought more laughter.\n\nHow she longed to join them and sit in the shade away from the heat, but she didn't dare. Feedbag, Wishbone, and the others considered her an outsider and, for that reason, she knew they would not welcome her company. Sighing, she splashed more water on her face. Just wait till I'm the boss lady. They won't be so eager to discount me then!\n\nShe walked around the barn looking for Ruckus. Normally, she would ask for a longer break, but she was already in his bad graces and didn't want to rile him any more than she already had.\n\nRuckus rounded the corner. \"Where's Decker?\"\n\n\"In the barnyard,\" she replied.\n\nHis lips puckered as they tended to do whenever she called something by the wrong name. \"After you brush the chicken feathers off your horse, have Luke check his shoes.\"\n\nShe grimaced. \"I meant corral. Decker is in the corral.\"\n\nHe spun around and walked away and she hurried to get her horse. A short while later she led Decker around the barn to where Luke and Ruckus stood talking.\n\nRuckus was discussing a paint horse that had been giving him trouble all week. \"Normally, he's so gentle I could stake him to a hatpin and he would stay put. Lately he's so ornery he practically bucked off my whiskers.\"\n\nLuke examined the horse's hoof, shaking his head. Obviously he didn't like what he saw. Not wishing to interrupt their conversation she stopped and waited.\n\n\"I'm not much in favor of cold-shoeing,\" Luke said. \"It made sense during the War Between the States. Time and equipment were limited back then, but this is peacetime.\" He ran his finger along the outer edge of the horse's hoof. \"You can't get as good a fit. That's why your horse keeps throwin' a shoe. See this? This should be smooth and it's not.\"\n\n\"I knew that greenhorn farrier didn't know what he was doin'. The horses just didn't cotton to him. Soon as they saw him comin' they took off on the run, leaving their shadows twenty minutes behind. All he done is make the horses ornery.\"\n\nLuke set the hoof down gently and straightened to stroke the horse's neck. The black-and-white horse had refused to let anyone ride him in recent days but seemed to welcome Luke's touch. \"I reckon you'd be ornery, too, if you were wearing ill-fitting boots.\"\n\n\"O.T. sent him packing and now we don't have a farrier. The job's yours if you want it.\" He pointed to the open door of the ranch's blacksmith shop. \"As you can see we're fully equipped and the boss lady pays well.\"\n\nKate held her breath. Luke working here? At the ranch? Finding the prospect vaguely disturbing, she waited for Luke's reply, but before he had a chance to respond, Ruckus motioned for her to join them.\n\nLuke greeted her with a smile. \"Your horse givin' you trouble too?\" he asked. He said nothing about their earlier encounter, but his eyes sent a private message.\n\n\"I suspect it's the other way around,\" Ruckus muttered.\n\n\"Let's take a look.\" After running his hand along Decker's flank, Luke lifted a back leg and rested it upon his leather-aproned knee to examine it. She marveled that a man able to bend iron was capable of such a gentle touch.\n\n\"Got a loose shoe here,\" he said. Locking the horse's leg between his knees, Luke pulled a rasp from his apron pocket and began working on the clinches. Decker twisted his head to look behind him, ears straight up, but didn't move.\n\nRuckus watched for a moment before nodding in approval. \"We'll talk later. Let me know what you decide.\" He walked away, leaving her alone with Luke.\n\n\"Did... did I do that?\" she asked. \"The loose shoe?\"\n\n\"I doubt it. Nails come out. It happens.\" He glanced at her. \"You know what they say. For want of a nail the shoe was lost...\"\n\nRecognizing the childhood ditty, she joined in: \"For want of a shoe the horse was lost.\"\n\nHis mouth spread into a lazy grin. \"For want of a horse the rider was lost.\"\n\nShe tried to think of the next line. \"The kingdom was lost?\" she asked.\n\n\"Battle,\" he said. \"For want of a rider the battle was lost.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" she said, feeling as if she was losing some sort of battle herself. She studied him while he worked. \"Thank you for not mentioning my earlier mishap in the corral.\"\n\nLuke glanced up at her, his eyes warm with humor. \"I still think that was a mighty fine rope trick. I reckon Buffalo Bill could use someone like you in his Wild West show.\"\n\nThe idea was so absurd she couldn't help but laugh. \"I'll keep that in mind.\"\n\nFor a moment they stared at each other and her heart fluttered. His gaze settled on her mouth and warmth rushed to her cheeks. As if to suddenly catch himself, he bent his head down and continued working on Decker's shoe with firm but careful movements.\n\nShaken, she was unable to find her voice. What was the matter with her? One smile from him and all good intentions flew out the window.\n\n\"You're lucky your horse isn't lame,\" he said, his voice husky. \"I'll replace all four shoes.\"\n\nShe swallowed hard. \"Is that why he keeps throwing me off? Because of his shoes?\"\n\n\"Hard to tell. There's no injury that I can see. Looks like we caught it in time.\"\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"Ruckus said that when a rider eats gravel it's seldom the horse's fault.\"\n\nLuke glanced up at her. \"That's true most times. Except when the rider is a lady. Then it's always the horse's fault.\"\n\n\"It would be just my luck to have a misogynistic horse,\" she said lightly.\n\nHis square jaw tensed and some unreadable emotion flashed in his eyes. Without a word he straightened, walked to the workbench, and exchanged the rasp for a long-handled pull-off.\n\nDid she imagine the sudden chill in the air? Or had she simply imagined their earlier rapport as they recited that silly rhyme? \"I heard Ruckus ask you to work here. Do... do you plan to accept his offer?\"\n\n\"'Fraid not.\" He checked one front foot and then the other before returning to the one he started working on. \"People in town depend on me. If I worked here at the ranch I'd have to close my shop. Can't do both.\"\n\nKate let out her breath, surprised at the mixed feelings of disappointment and relief that surged through her.\n\n\"I'll trim him up and give him new shoes and he'll be rarin' to go. Shouldn't take more than an hour.\"\n\n\"There's no hurry,\" she said. Still sore from the morning's spills, she looked forward to keeping both feet on the ground for a while. How she longed to take the afternoon off and sit in the shade with a nice cold drink. The thought burst like a bubble the moment Ruckus rounded the corner of the barn and beckoned to her.\n\n\"Come on, Goldilocks, let's get to work,\" he called.\n\nShe gave an inward groan. Would the day never end? And why didn't the heat bother Ruckus like it bothered the rest of them?\n\nShe thanked Luke and followed Ruckus to the barn." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nBrandon stole a glance at her sweet countenance. The slight stain of tears upon her cheeks added to her innocent beauty and stole his heart.\n\nThe day before, Kate had helped clean the calving barn, and now the scent of fresh hay tickled her nose. A loud moo greeted them as they stepped inside and rounded a corner. A pregnant cow in obvious distress was strapped inside a chute. Restlessly stomping her hooves, the bovine bellowed and thrashed from side to side trying to pull free from her restraints.\n\nRuckus led the way to the back of the cow. \"This lady's ready and you're gonna learn how to pull a calf.\"\n\nKate's eyes widened. She never dreamed the term was meant literally. For all the stories she'd heard about working on a ranch, never once had she heard about delivering calves.\n\nRuckus wrapped twine around the cow's tail and tied it to her neck. After rolling up his sleeves he picked up a bucket of clean water and splashed it onto the cow's backside.\n\n\"You're about to witness God's work at his finest,\" he said, lowering the empty bucket to the ground.\n\nKate clamped her mouth shut and said nothing. If it was God's work, then why was the cow in such terrible pain? She pushed the thought away and rolled up her sleeves.\n\nThe cow's deep bellows were almost constant. Her hide rippled from head to tail with strained muscles.\n\nRuckus nodded. \"She's pushing. If we're lucky, she'll complete the job herself.\"\n\nHe talked to the cow in soothing tones. He was equally at ease no matter what he was doing, whether chasing a steer, calming a cow about to give birth, or reciting the Bible.\n\n\"How long have you worked on the ranch, Ruckus?\"\n\n\"I've been here 'bout nine, ten years,\" he said. \"Prior to that I drifted from ranch to ranch, which was hard on the family. Most ranches can't afford to hire people year-round. When the boss lady offered me a permanent job I grabbed it. She gave my wife and me a place to live and a way to make an honest livin'.\"\n\n\"You're married?\" That was a surprise. In all the time she'd worked at the ranch, Ruckus had never spoken of his private life and she simply assumed he had none.\n\n\"Yep, goin' on twenty years.\"\n\n\"That long?\" Her voice rose in surprise.\n\nHe studied her for a moment before replying. \"I don't know how it is where you came from, but out here for better or worse means for good.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker's marriage wasn't for good,\" she said.\n\nHe shrugged. \"Miss Walker ain't like normal folks.\"\n\nShe bit her lip. No argument there. \"So where is your wife?\"\n\n\"We live in a cabin on the northern part of the property. That's where us married folks live. The good Lord blessed us with three children, two sons and a daughter. One's in law school and another's studying to be a preacher.\" He chuckled. \"A preacher. Imagine that? Soon as he finishes seminary he plans to come back and preach right here in Cactus Patch. After hearing me preach to him all these years, he's gonna make me sit in church every week so he can return the favor.\"\n\nKate laughed. \"What about your daughter?\"\n\nHe flashed a fatherly smile. \"Our daughter got hitched and she and her husband started their own ranch west of Tucson.\"\n\nHe was obviously proud of his family and she couldn't help but envy his offspring. Could they possibly know how lucky they were to have such a caring father?\n\n\"And you've been happy all these years?\" she asked. \"Some people might even say this is godforsaken land.\"\n\nRuckus's eyebrows rose as if the thought were inconceivable. \"And they would be wrong.\" He pointed at the pen. \"What do you see?\"\n\nShe followed his finger. \"I see a miserable cow.\"\n\n\"What I see is God's amazing handiwork. Man has figured out how to build trains and send messages through wires, but there ain't no man on earth figured out how to turn grass into milk.\"\n\n\"I never thought about it that way,\" she said.\n\nRuckus's faith in an almighty God never failed to amaze her. Growing up, she'd never attended church. Her mama seldom mentioned God except in a drunken stupor and that was to curse, not worship him. So Kate had a hard time believing in the loving and caring God Ruckus so often talked about. She wanted to, oh, how she wanted to. She just didn't know how to make herself believe that God could be as good or trustworthy as Ruckus insisted.\n\n\"Get ready,\" Ruckus said. \"You're about to witness more of God's handiwork.\"\n\nOne hoof popped out and Kate gasped in delight. Just as quickly another hoof showed.\n\nRuckus grinned. \"Two front legs. See that?\" He pointed to the hoof. \"The soles are pointing down. Pointing any other way and we're in a heap o' trouble. Today, we're in luck.\"\n\nNo sooner had he said it than the young cow popped free, dropping upon the pile of clean straw. Ruckus quickly grabbed the not-so-little calf by its hind legs and dragged it to a clean bed of straw.\n\nFearing the calf was dead or had been injured in the fall, Kate fell to her knees by its side.\n\n\"Come on, little fella, you can do it.\" She patted the calf's wet hide. \"Breathe!\"\n\nRuckus pushed a strand of straw into the calf's nostrils. \"This helps the calf cough up anythin' plugging up its breathing tube,\" he explained. It worked. The calf made a funny sound and opened its eyes.\n\nKate exhaled with relief, her own eyes moist with tears. \"It's alive.\"\n\nRuckus's grin practically reached his ears. He looked like a proud rooster and Kate couldn't help but laugh. He scooped the calf in his arms, his body bent backward to accommodate the weight, and laid it down on a pile of fresh hay in front of its mother.\n\n\"Whooeee. That baby gotta weigh at least a hundred pounds.\" He stepped back and wiped off his hands with a clean towel.\n\nThe cow stared at the calf before nuzzling it with her nose and, finally, licking it clean with gentle strokes of her large gray and pink tongue.\n\n\"That... that was incredible,\" Kate said. All the weeks of torturous work were forgotten in the wonder of the moment. She was exhausted, but she couldn't take her eyes off the little calf. She felt some odd sense of maternal pride when later the little fellow struggled up on wobbly legs and probed its mother's udder with its mouth.\n\n\"Do you normally help with the birthing?\" In all her ranch stories, never once had she written a birthing scene. \"I thought cattle had their babies naturally out on the range.\"\n\n\"They do most times,\" he said. \"But this one lost a calf last year and had been acting strange for a couple of days. We decided to bring her in.\"\n\n\"How do you know her history?\" she asked.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"All the cattle look alike. How do you know this one lost a calf?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"A cattleman ain't worth his salt if he don't know his cattle,\" he said. \"We only have to keep track of a thousand or so cattle, whereas God the Father has to keep track of millions of his people. Kind of makes you feel humble just thinkin' about it.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker owns a thousand head of cattle?\" she asked. She hadn't seen more than a few cattle at any one time.\n\n\"Yep. Used to be two thousand but that was before the drought. It's getting harder. More ranchers are fighting for grazin' rights on public land and there's only so much grass to go around.\" He shrugged. \"But, God willing, we'll get the numbers up again. Done it before and we'll do it again.\"\n\nShe never met a man like Ruckus, a man so comfortable with his faith that it seemed as much a part of him as his crooked nose and relaxed, easy manner.\n\n\"Are we finished here?\" She was anxious to clean up. More than that, she didn't want to hear any more references to God the Father. The very word father turned her blood cold. The term Forever Man didn't help much either. Nothing was forever, except perhaps land.\n\n\"For now. One down and only fifty-five more calves to go.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open and he laughed at her expression. She followed him outside and together they washed in a wooden barrel.\n\n\"Don't worry. The boss lady figured out that if we feed the cattle at night, they're more likely to drop their calves durin' the day. Since we switched feedin' times, we've gotten a whole lot more shut-eye.\" He studied her. \"Speakin' of the boss lady, it's late. You better go and get ready for supper.\"\n\nIn all the excitement Kate had almost forgotten that she'd been summoned by the ranch owner. \"I hope she's not going to send me packing,\" she said, rinsing off the soap lather. \"If that's what she plans to do, I'd rather she tell me now and get it over with.\"\n\nRuckus lifted a bushy brow. \"If she was gonna send you packin', she'd have told me first.\" He wiped his hands dry and then tossed her the towel. \"That's not why she invited you to have supper with her. She just wants to get to know you better. Can't blame her for that.\"\n\nKate hoped Ruckus was right. Miss Walker did make her nervous. She'd lost count of the number of times she caught Miss Walker watching from a distance. Kate was certain the woman could see more than humanly possible. Would anyone else have noticed that feeding times affected birthing? She doubted it, and it was Miss Walker's uncanny insight that worried Kate.\n\nShe finished drying her hands and hung the towel up on a hook to dry.\n\n\"I reckon you don't much like the boss lady.\"\n\nWhat Ruckus said was true, but she hadn't wanted to admit it even to herself.\n\n\"I don't really know her,\" Kate said, hedging.\n\nRuckus chuckled. \"See that cactus over there?\" He pointed to a barrel cactus that grew by the side of the barn. \"Outside it's covered in thorns. Inside it's all soft and mushy.\"\n\nShe arched an eyebrow. \"Are you saying that Miss Walker has a soft spot somewhere?\"\n\nIt didn't seem possible.\n\n\"I'm saying that nothing is what it seems. Some people think God is harsh and cruel. That's 'cause they don't take the time to get to know him.\"\n\nShe let her gaze wander across the land all the way to the distant mountains. Even as she watched, the colors, shapes, and shadows of the desert shifted and changed, blended and blurred\u2014a canvas at the whim of an artist's brush.\n\n\"Have supper and make it your business to get to know the boss lady. You may be surprised.\"\n\n\"I hope you're right.\" She started for the ranch house, then stopped. \"Ruckus, about what happened earlier. I didn't mean to give you a bad time and I had no intention of shooting you.\"\n\n\"I ain't got no idea what you're talkin' about,\" he said. He shooed her away with a wave of his hands. \"Go!\"\n\nShe stared at him a moment, wishing she could be more like him. Ruckus saw only the good in people, saw only the good in God. She saw the good but looked for the bad. It was a survival skill that had served her well in the past and kept her from making mistakes she would later regret.\n\nShe turned with a sigh and headed for the ranch house. Ruckus was right about a lot of things. She hoped he was right about Miss Walker." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nThe villain banged on the door. She was doomed, doomed, doomed! Just when she thought her life over she heard Brandon call to her from outside. She ran to the balcony, hands clasped to her chest. \"Quick, my love,\" he beckoned. \"Jump and I shall catch you.\"\n\nKate groaned at the balcony scene in her head. Shakespeare would surely turn over in his grave. Not that it mattered. Right now all she could think about was how exhausted she was, how every muscle in her body ached.\n\nHer calloused hands were sore and it took a hard scrubbing to rid her fingernails of dirt. Still, she was on shaky ground. Disobeying Miss Walker's order\u2014and Ruckus had made a point of telling her it was, indeed, an order\u2014would be a mistake.\n\nEach day spent at the ranch had been tough, but this day had been especially difficult. Even so she felt a sense of exhilaration never before experienced. Not even her dread of having supper with Miss Walker could dampen her spirits. All the days and weeks of hard work were forgotten in light of watching the birth of a single baby cow.\n\nSmiling at the memory of the little fellow struggling to its feet, she brushed her hair and wound the unruly locks on top of her head, letting curls cascade down her back.\n\nShe stared in the mirror and hardly recognized herself. She wore a blue skirt and white shirtwaist but, oddly enough, after wearing the divided skirts and shirts provided by Miss Walker these past couple of weeks, her own clothes felt awkward and confining. She'd lost weight, which was hard to believe. All that manual labor gave her a ravenous appetite, and she ate nearly as much as the ranch hands.\n\nThough she took care never to go outside without her wide-brimmed hat, it kept flying off. Consequently, her skin had lost its paleness and her pink cheeks glowed beneath a golden-brown tan. The Arizona sun had a unifying effect as it was almost impossible to tell Mexicans and whites apart from skin color alone. Only her hair gave her away. Having turned a few shades lighter, it was now more sunshine yellow than honey.\n\nNo one in Boston would recognize her. Certainly no one at Miss Newcomb's Academy for Young Women. With this thought came an onslaught of memories. She'd only been sixteen when the school hired her to clean the premises. The pay was small but it provided for her and her mama's few meager needs. More importantly it opened doors that she never knew existed.\n\nThe college held classes in social skills, morals, piano, and oil painting, but she had no interest in such feminine pursuits. Instead, she timed her chores so she could listen to lectures on science, history, and philosophy. As she polished brass railings and scrubbed floors, a whole new world opened up to her. It was two years before she grew brave enough to slip one of her short stories onto the English instructor Mr. Abbott's desk.\n\nA short time later she was called into the school office. She naturally feared she'd lost her job. Instead, the headmistress offered her the opportunity to attend classes, based on Mr. Abbott's recommendation, providing of course she didn't let her duties slip. And she didn't. It took her six years to do what most women did in four, but at last she graduated and it felt as if she'd conquered the world. People came and went but an education was forever. No one could take that away from her.\n\nWithin six months of earning her diploma, she sold her first novel. She didn't get much money, but sales increased with each subsequent book and eventually she was able to purchase a Remington typing machine and rent an apartment with heat. By then her mama's lungs had deteriorated and she'd died soon after, but she lived her last few months in relative comfort, and for that Kate was grateful.\n\nIf only she hadn't written that last book. Her editor wanted to call the book The Hay Dilemma instead of Miss Hattie's Dilemma. The term grass was given to works of minor value, which is why Walt Whitman titled his controversial book of poetry Leaves of Grass, which he meant as a pun. The word hay was her editor's way of saying her work was less than trivial.\n\nStill, nothing prepared her for what happened once the book was published. She'd written a simple love story, revealing the inner longings of a woman's heart. The Watch and Ward Society didn't see it that way. Instead, they read between the lines and banned her book on immoral grounds. No one could have been more shocked than she was.\n\nPushing the memories away, she stared at her image. What did Luke see when he looked at her? Startled by the unbidden thought, Kate ripped open the door and hurried out to the balcony. Trembling, she ran her hands up and down her arms, wishing the sudden pounding of her heart would stop. Mustn't think of Luke. The ranch\u2014that was all she could think about. All she wanted to think about.\n\nThe sun dipped beneath the horizon in a blaze of red and orange, taking the heat of the day with it. Never had she witnessed such magnificent sunsets. It was the thing she liked best about the desert. That and the wide-open spaces.\n\nAlong with the thought came another. What if Miss Walker sent her packing? The thought nearly crushed her. Where would she go? What would she do? How would she support herself? With the banning of her latest book, she doubted she could even get a tutoring job. She had an education, but what good was it if no one would hire her? She'd put her stock in her education only to find that it deserted her when she most needed it.\n\nShe tried to recall what Miss Walker had said on that first day. \"Nothing in this world is permanent except for land. It will always be there for you.\" Kate sighed. The question was, would it be there for her after tonight?\n\nA knock on her bedroom door chased away her thoughts.\n\n\"Miss Tenney, supper is served,\" Rosita called.\n\n\"I'm coming,\" Kate replied, stepping into her room and closing the balcony door. Pulling herself together, she mentally donned her protective armor and took one last look in the mirror. No one could ever guess her poverty-ridden background and failures by appearances alone, and she meant to keep it that way.\n\nWith a bracing breath she exited her room and walked unhurriedly downstairs to the dining room, determined to prove to Miss Walker once and for all that she was serious about ranching." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Eleanor Walker sat at the end of the dining table and greeted Kate with a businesslike nod.\n\n\"There you are.\" She pointed to the only other place setting on the opposite end of the long polished oak table and waited for Kate to be seated before ringing a bell.\n\nKate clasped her hands tight in her lap. It never occurred to her there would only be two of them dining. She was more convinced than ever that Miss Walker planned to dismiss her. Ruckus insisted not, but what if he was wrong? She fought the panic that began to rise.\n\nRosita appeared and Kate forced herself to breathe.\n\n\"We're ready,\" Eleanor said.\n\nRosita vanished again, and Eleanor picked up her linen napkin, flapped it open, and settled it on her lap. \"So have you fully recovered from your unfortunate brush with the Devil's Tongue?\"\n\n\"Yes, thank you,\" Kate replied, hoping that her flaming cheeks were hidden by the flickering candlelight. The sheer size of the table intimidated her, and she had the strangest feeling she was on stage and expected to perform.\n\nSoft and mushy? Hardly. Miss Walker's rigid exterior looked as formidable as Boston's Deer Island Prison and just as difficult to penetrate.\n\n\"Excellent.\" After a beat she said, \"I commend you for climbing Job. Those new steel windmills are more trouble than they're worth. I much prefer the older wooden models. Now I'm going to have to hire a full-time windmiller just to take care of them.\" She gave a sigh of disgust before leveling her gray eyes on Kate. \"Obviously, you have no fear of heights.\"\n\n\"I believe everyone fears heights.\" The truth was she had been terrified.\n\n\"Hmmm. So tell me, what else did you do today?\"\n\n\"Ruckus and I helped deliver a calf.\" Kate smiled at the memory.\n\n\"Ah. I trust all went well.\"\n\nKate nodded. \"Yes, perfect.\" She didn't want to think about her shooting or lariat mishaps. She'd learned to ride a horse and she was determined to learn the other skills too.\n\n\"Good. We've lost more calves this year than we've gained. If we don't get some rain soon, I fear things will get worse.\"\n\nRosita entered the dining room pushing a cart and set a dinner plate in front of Kate piled high with beef, gravy, potatoes, and string beans. The menu varied little from day to day, but the food was always cooked to perfection. Instead of bemoaning the size of the portions as she once did, she now welcomed it. She was famished.\n\nMiss Walker spread butter on a hot roll. \"So, tell me, what do you think of ranching?\"\n\nKate placed the linen napkin on her lap. The meat was still sizzling and it smelled delicious.\n\n\"Speak up, girl. Don't be shy.\"\n\n\"The work is rather arduous,\" she said, choosing her words with care. She stole a glance at the older woman while cutting her meat. \"But I don't think there's anything else I'd rather do.\"\n\nMiss Walker studied her. \"You've lasted for three weeks.\" She laid her butter knife across her bread plate. \"That's longer than any of the others.\"\n\n\"Ruckus is a good teacher,\" Kate replied. \"I've learned a lot from him.\"\n\n\"I daresay you have a lot more to learn.\"\n\n\"I can't wait,\" Kate said. She was especially eager to learn the business side of ranching, but it would probably be awhile before Miss Walker trusted her with the books.\n\nThe ranch owner measured her for a moment. \"Tell me about your family. Are your parents still alive?\"\n\nKate's mouth went dry. The question caught her off guard and she immediately marshaled her defenses. Miss Walker didn't strike her as someone to ask questions out of idle curiosity. For this reason Kate gave her answer full consideration. She could easily have concocted a story about her family, but writing fiction was one thing, lying quite another.\n\n\"My mother died three years ago,\" she said in a clipped voice.\n\n\"And your father?\"\n\n\"He left when I was five.\"\n\nKate expected a word of sympathy\u2014at the least a look of pity\u2014but none came. Instead, Miss Walker shrugged and said, \"He probably did you a kindness.\"\n\nKate stared at her, momentarily speechless. The woman was even more coldhearted than she'd thought. Mushy, indeed! Not knowing how to respond, Kate concentrated on her meal.\n\n\"I've never tasted such tender meat,\" she said after several bites. \"Is it your beef?\"\n\n\"I wouldn't eat any other,\" Miss Walker replied. \"I don't like the way the other ranchers around here raise cattle. Some of them are too lazy to move their herds around and allow them to overgraze down to the nubs. That means the cattle are taking in more sand than nutrition. You can't get a good steak from a gritty diet.\"\n\n\"You've been ranching a long time,\" Kate said.\n\n\"My family came here in the '50s. I remember when Tucson was but a mud village and Tombstone a canvas city.\"\n\n\"I had no idea cattle ranches had been around that long in the territory.\"\n\n\"The Spanish established cattle ranches long before white men came, but the Indians pretty much ran them off. My family was on the way to the California gold mines when our wagon wheel broke. That was way back when this was still part of New Mexico Territory.\"\n\n\"Your whole family was going to California?\" Kate had heard that the lure of gold pulled men away, but she thought women and children had stayed home.\n\n\"Mother refused to be a California widow. She also didn't trust that my father would come home.\"\n\nKate's hand tightened around her fork. She understood all too well how a woman might distrust a man.\n\n\"My father got a job with a Mexican hauling company, but by the time we'd saved enough money to continue our journey, the California gold rush was over\u2014so we stayed.\" Between bites Miss Walker continued.\n\n\"We started out with a little land and a small adobe hut, and my mother planted vegetables and raised chickens. One day she found an injured Englishman on her property taking a small herd of cattle to California. Mother nursed him back to health. To show his gratitude he gave her one of his steers, which he claimed was sired by a bull belonging to Queen Victoria. He told her to slaughter it to feed her family, but Mother was too smart for that. Instead, she decided to go into the cattle business.\"\n\n\"With only one cow?\"\n\n\"Steer,\" Miss Walker said. \"Ah, but you see it had royal blood. Of course every Englishman claims nobility either for himself or his livestock. I guess it's some sort of status symbol like the Mayflower. With the number of people claiming ancestors aboard, it's a wonder the ship didn't sink before it left the harbor.\"\n\nKate laughed, and for the first time since entering the dining room felt herself relaxing. If Miss Walker had intended to fire her, surely she would have done so by now.\n\n\"By the time my father was killed in an Indian attack, we had a hundred cattle,\" Miss Walker continued. \"Some we bought from a Mexican rancher. Most were feral steer left over from the Spanish.\"\n\nKate lowered her fork. \"Your father was killed by Indians?\"\n\n\"That was Mother's version. He actually drank himself to death.\"\n\nKate's mouth dropped open, but she quickly smacked her lips together. People in Boston were so much more circumspect than they were out here in the West. Never would such words as drunk be heard in polite company.\n\nShe searched for something to say to break the sudden silence that made the elongated table seem even longer.\n\n\"It's rather remarkable that she would think to start a cattle ranch here in the desert,\" she said at last.\n\n\"Mother could make pie out of thin air. Come to think of it, I believe she did. But enough about the past. Right now I'm concerned about the present. We'll soon be ready for spring roundup. There's something invigorating about putting my brand on a new generation of cattle.\"\n\n\"Isn't... isn't that painful?\"\n\n\"Oh, posh. Spoken like a true greenhorn. A cattle's hide is many times thicker than human skin. Trust me, any pain is minimal.\"\n\nKate bit her lip and looked away. It seemed like everything she'd written about cattle and ranch life had been incorrect. Perhaps her last book had been banned for the wrong reason.\n\nShe yawned and quickly drew her napkin to her mouth, hoping Miss Walker had not noticed.\n\n\"I hope it's not the company,\" Miss Walker said in her usual forthright way.\n\n\"Oh no! I... I can't tell you how much I'm enjoying this.\" She smiled. \"What better way to celebrate a birth?\"\n\nMiss Walker stiffened. \"How did you know it was my birthday?\" Her brusque voice snapped through the air like a whip. \"No one knows that except for my banker.\"\n\n\"I... I didn't know,\" Kate stammered. Had she said something wrong? \"I was referring to the calf we delivered.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Miss Walker tapped her fingers on the table. \"Now that you know, I trust you'll keep the knowledge to yourself.\"\n\n\"If that's what you wish.\" Kate hesitated before holding her glass aloft. Surely Miss Walker wouldn't fire her for showing common courtesy. \"Happy birthday.\"\n\nMiss Walker failed to lift her glass in return but she did give a curt nod. \"Do you have any questions regarding ranching?\"\n\nKate set her glass down and hesitated. Dare she push her luck? \"I haven't had a day off since my arrival.\"\n\n\"You want a day off? Goodness, girl, this is a cattle ranch\u2014not a girls' school. This is our busiest month. No one gets time off except to go to church and even that's hardly possible during calving season.\"\n\n\"I won't be long. I just need to purchase some toiletries.\"\n\nBefore Miss Walker could reply, O.T. entered the dining room. He glanced at Kate before turning his attention to Miss Walker. \"Sorry to bother you, ma'am, but I need to have a word with you. It's most urgent.\"\n\nMiss Walker pushed her chair back and stood. \"Of course it's urgent. I wouldn't expect you to enter the house wearing spurs unless it was urgent.\" To Kate she said, \"When I come back we'll have dessert.\"\n\nWith that she ushered O.T. out of the dining room and into her office, closing the door.\n\nCurious, Kate stared at the door and yawned. Whatever the urgent business was, she hoped it didn't take long. All she wanted to do was climb into bed and go to sleep.\n\nThe flickering light of the candle only added to her drowsiness. Muffled voices carried into the dining room from behind the closed door of Miss Walker's office, but Kate couldn't make out what was said. She yawned and shook her head in an effort to stay awake. Maybe if she laid her head down for just a moment...\n\nHe carried her upstairs in his arms and laid her gently on the bed, covering her with a blanket. \"Sleep tight, my love,\" he whispered. \"Sleep tight.\"\n\nEven in her dreamlike state she knew it wasn't Brandon. The man who filled the pages of her books and occupied her dreams now had another man's face." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nEleanor leaned against her desk, arms crossed. \"Are you sure about this?\"\n\nO.T. nodded. \"That's a big drop from the number of calves branded last year.\"\n\nYes, she had noticed that, no question. Her ranch averaged sixty new calves per hundred cattle. If what O.T. said was true, this year the same number of cattle would produce closer to forty calves and that meant a big drop financially when it came marketing time.\n\n\"We had less rain this year than last.\" Less rain meant less grass. Though it wasn't just lack of water that was the problem. There was a limit to the number of cattle the land could support, but some ranchers insisted upon overstocking the range. Even the Tombstone Stock Growers had called for a halt in importing more cattle.\n\n\"We've still managed to maintain the herd's weight,\" O.T. argued. \"Drillin' that new well on the south side helped. Besides, the count doesn't match up.\"\n\n\"So what do you think the problem is?\" Eleanor asked.\n\n\"I doubt there're any less calves. I think someone already branded them. Our men only counted the unbranded ones.\"\n\nEleanor touched her forehead. \"Not again.\" Five years ago a quarter of their calves had been rustled from beneath their very noses.\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am, but I think the Dunne gang is back.\"\n\nEleanor grimaced. The gang had a unique way of operating, which is why it took so long to nail them. They hair-branded calves with the Last Chance brand to prevent them from being counted. Since the iron burned through the hair and not the hide, the rustlers could afford to wait until the calves were weaned before cutting them out of the herd. By then, the hair had grown out and the unbranded calves were easy to spot. No one had been the wiser\u2014at least not at first.\n\nNow, O.T. made it his business to count pregnant cattle and record the number along with live births. If he said the Dunne gang was back, Eleanor had every reason to believe he was right.\n\n\"So how do you wish to handle this?\" she asked.\n\n\"We need to inform the marshal. We've got some time before the calves are weaned, but the sooner he knows the better. I just hate having to give up one of my hands to ride into town right now.\"\n\n\"You don't have to. I'll send Miss Tenney instead.\" The girl wanted a day off and now she would get it.\n\n\"That'll be a help,\" O.T. said. \"Sorry to bother you during supper, but I thought you'd want to know.\" He turned to leave.\n\n\"O.T.\" Hand on the doorknob, he looked back at her. \"Be careful out there,\" she said. \"Don't try to take the law into your own hands.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I sure won't, ma'am.\"\n\nAfter he left, Eleanor remained where she was. Calving season always came with a new set of challenges, but cattle rustling was the worst. It had caused more headaches through the years than all that Indian trouble put together.\n\nThe Texas Cattlemen's Association had clamped down on cattle rustling in the Lone Star State. Unfortunately, all that did was drive the rustlers out of Texas and into New Mexico and Arizona territories.\n\nArizona had its own cattle association, of course, but it was neither as strong nor as organized as the one in Texas. She blamed that partly on the marshal. Morris had been in town for three years and crime had gone up, not down. Outlaws like Cactus Joe pretty much had the run of the town. Informing the marshal of this latest threat was the right thing to do, but she had little faith it would do any good.\n\nRecalling with a start that she had left Kate waiting in the dining room, she sighed. The girl had spirit and tenacity, but none of that would do a bit of good if she didn't learn the ranching business.\n\nTwenty-nine. The girl was twenty-nine years old. Not much older than Eleanor's daughter would have been had she lived. Rebecca had been blonde and blue-eyed too. Was that why Eleanor had been more accepting of Kate's lack of horsemanship? Shown her more tolerance than she'd given the others? Because of the resemblance to her long-dead daughter?\n\nIf that were true, then either Kate Tenney was the answer to a prayer\u2014or a cruel twist of fate.\n\n\"What better way to celebrate a birth?\"\n\nHmmm. Well, why not? The cat's out of the bag, as they say. May as well make the most of it.\n\nShe turned off the fringed parlor lamp in her office and walked down the hall to the kitchen. Bo Spencer, the cook, was putting the finishing touches on one of his marvelous angel cakes. He stood six feet tall, had black kinky hair and skin the color of dark oak.\n\nA former slave, Bo had been with the ranch for ten years now, after she found him trying to steal a horse. He claimed he was returning it after it wandered off, but she didn't believe him. When she ordered him off her property at gunpoint, he sneaked into the ranch house kitchen instead and prepared the best meal she'd ever tasted. No one cooked a steak or roast beef as good as he did.\n\n\"Do you still believe I'm guilty?\" he'd asked at the time.\n\nWhat cooking had to do with his guilt or innocence she couldn't imagine, but she liked his gall. The whole thing was so ridiculous she laughed and hired him on the spot, and never once had she regretted it. Not even when he introduced her to grits, which tasted like mushy cornbread.\n\nNow he looked up. \"Ready for dessert, Miz Walker?\"\n\n\"Yes, we are.\" She turned to leave but thought of something. \"Bo, would you mind putting a candle on the cake?\"\n\nBo's syrupy brown eyes regarded her from beneath his floppy white hat. \"A candle?\"\n\n\"Yes. A lit one.\"\n\n\"It someone's birthday?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes, as a matter of fact it is. Miss Tenney helped deliver her first calf today.\"\n\nShe walked from the kitchen to the dining room and stopped in the doorway. Kate was sound asleep, her blond head resting on the table.\n\nEleanor stepped back into the kitchen, surprised and irritated at the disappointment that washed over her. \"Never mind, Bo. Forget the dessert. I'm going to bed.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nShe was ruined! Her character had suffered a blemish. Never again would Brandon believe she had purity of soul.\n\nKate was horrified. How could she have fallen asleep at the table? How rude. How humiliating. How absolutely inexcusable.\n\nShe might have slept in the dining room all night had Rosita not wakened her. Oh, what must Miss Walker think?\n\nThat morning she hurriedly dressed and rushed downstairs at a little after 4:00 a.m. to apologize, but she never got a chance. Miss Walker's place setting was cleared, which meant she'd already left the house. According to Jos\u00e9 it had something to do with the calf count.\n\nKate slapped her hand on her forehead and groaned. Four a.m. and already she was late. What was wrong with these people?\n\nShe shook her fist. \"Would the world end if we slept in until, say, five o'clock? Do they not know that the early worm gets eaten?\" That would be the first thing she'd change when she took over the ranch.\n\nSensing she wasn't alone, she turned. Rosita stood in the doorway staring at her with rounded eyes.\n\n\"Miss Walker said to give this to you.\" Rosita hurried across the room and thrust a single sheet of paper into Kate's hand. She then quickly ran from the room before Kate could thank her for waking her the night before.\n\nShe scanned the bold handwriting. It read, You are to drive into town and inform the marshal that the Dunne gang has returned and are up to their old tricks. It was signed Eleanor Walker.\n\nA fluttery feeling shot through her. It would do her a world of good to spend a day in town and give her sore body much-needed time to recover.\n\nAnticipating the hours ahead, she joined Ruckus and the other men for morning prayer at exactly 5:00 a.m. Today, there was none of the usual jostling and bantering between the men, just silence and somber faces. Even Upbeat wasn't his usual cheerful self.\n\n\"Let's pray,\" Ruckus said. \"Dear heavenly Father, hear our prayer. Send rain and help us catch those connivin' scoundrels. Amen.\"\n\nShe kept her head lowered but her eyes open. Conniving scoundrels? She marveled at how Ruckus talked to God much like he might talk to a friend. And who was this gang that seemed to have everyone up in arms? Outlaws, no doubt. Whatever dastardly deed they were guilty of must be bad for Miss Walker to send her into town.\n\nWhile O.T. gave the men their instructions for the day, she hastened toward the barn to check on the calf she'd helped deliver.\n\n\"Hey, little fella,\" Kate said, kneeling in the hay. The calf's hair was dry and fluffed out and it was definitely steadier on its feet.\n\nThe mother cow bawled and started toward her. Kate scrambled backward spiderlike. Heart pounding, she jumped up and slammed the gate closed, locking mother and baby inside the cow stall. She always thought of cattle as placid but this one looked fierce. Even now the cow seemed to glare at her.\n\n\"Just 'cause she's a mother is no reason to think she's a lady,\" Ruckus said from behind her.\n\n\"She tried to attack me,\" Kate said, shuddering. \"She could have injured me. Maimed me. She could have broken my bones or... or even killed me.\"\n\nRuckus shrugged. \"The last thing you want to do is get in the way of a cow protectin' its young.\"\n\nShe brushed the hay off her divided skirt. Protecting its young. The words rattled inside her head like marbles in a bag. An animal knew instinctively to protect its young? How was that possible? Why wasn't the same true of humans? Why hadn't Mama known to protect her? The unbidden thought shook her to the core and a lump rose in her throat.\n\n\"A mother can pick her calf out of a whole herd,\" Ruckus continued, shaking his head. \"And they say cattle are dumb.\"\n\nThe cow nuzzled her young, seeming to push it away from the two of them.\n\nRuckus grinned. \"The Good Book says God cares for us folks like a mama cares for her babe.\"\n\nKate glanced at his profile. The man seemed to know a Bible verse for every occasion. This one, however, was ill chosen. If God's care was anywhere near like her mama's, Kate wanted no part of it.\n\nKeeping her thoughts to herself she asked, \"May I name him?\"\n\nRuckus made a face. \"Never name an animal you plan to eat.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. \"I'm not planning\u2014\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but someone is. Come on,\" Ruckus said impatiently, as if suddenly realizing the time. \"The boss lady said you're goin' into town. While you're there, I need you to take a broken windmill part to the smithy for repairs.\"\n\nShe hadn't planned on stopping at the blacksmith shop and was unprepared for the odd combination of anticipation and dread that assailed her. It made no sense. Confused, she lowered her gaze to hide her reddened cheeks.\n\n\"Also, I need you to stop at the post office. I'm expectin' a letter from my son.\"\n\n\"I'd be happy to, Ruckus.\"\n\nHe gave a nod. \"We'll get some riding in before you leave.\"\n\nKate groaned. Ruckus insisted she learn to ride a cutting horse, and that was a whole different experience than riding Decker. She was still sore from her workout three days earlier.\n\n\"Next week we start roundup and you plumb better stay in the saddle 'cause you're gonna be dealin' with a whole bunch of protective mothers.\"\n\nShe followed him outside to the horses he'd already saddled. \"Tell me about the Dunne gang.\"\n\n\"There ain't much to tell. They're a bunch of no-good cattle rustlers. They hair-brand our heifers before we get to them.\"\n\n\"What's a hair brand?\" she asked.\n\n\"The brandin' iron only burns through the hair. It looks real enough from a distance. We figure we already branded it, so it don't get counted. Unless you're a-lookin' for it you might not notice. The brand soon grows out. That makes it easy for the culprits to cut the calves out of the herd and take off with 'em.\"\n\nHe checked her saddle, then stepped aside. \"Come on. You're gonna have to leave for town soon. We best not waste any more time.\"\n\nThe horse's name was Bullet, which did nothing for Kate's confidence. Bullets were fast and deadly. Nevertheless, she shoved her booted foot in the stirrup and mounted.\n\n\"Now that you know how to fall off your horse, you're gonna learn how to ride him.\"\n\n\"I do know how to ride him,\" she said. \"I only fell off once last time.\"\n\n\"Congratulations. You're the only one I know able to fall off a standin' horse. You ain't gonna be much help if you can't ride faster than a lame cow.\" He blew out his breath. \"Okay, remember what I told you. Your horse is trained to make sudden stops and hard turns. Relax. Let your horse do the work. Otherwise he'll unseat you sure as shootin'.\" Without another word he mounted his own horse and galloped off.\n\nKate braced herself and held the reins tight. \"All right now, you and I have an understanding. Remember?\" The horse's ears twitched and his tail swished. \"Good boy.\" She mounted and pressed her heels gently into the horse's sides. \"Giddi-up!\"\n\nWith the speed of a bullet, her horse took off running, leaving her in the dust." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nShe raced along the dark, dismal road with great urgency, her horse's hooves thundering through the cold, still night. Brandon would know how to handle the villains, if only she could reach him in time...\n\nThe ride to Cactus Patch was uneventful and monotonous with no sign of the outlaws\u2014and for that Kate was grateful. The sky was clear blue with not a cloud in sight, for all the good Ruckus and his praying did.\n\nStill sore from her early morning spill, she wasn't enjoying the rutted dirt road. Dressed in her own clothes\u2014a blue skirt and white shirtwaist trimmed with lace and tied at the neck with a blue ribbon\u2014she'd decided against wearing her fussy feathered hat that offered little if any protection from the sun. Instead, she wore the wide-brimmed felt hat provided for her, and of which she had grown quite fond.\n\nIt was after ten by the time she reached town, but already Main Street bustled with horses, carts, and wagons. It looked and felt entirely different from the day she first stepped off the train. She slowed as she neared Luke's shop. The metal sign hanging over the door creaked as it swayed in the breeze. The sign read Adams Blacksmith Shop. The smaller print beneath a metal horseshoe promised Quality Workmanship.\n\nThough she didn't see the owner, her pulse quickened and her sun-heated face grew another notch warmer. She sucked in her breath. All right, so he was amiable, attractive, and had a devastating smile\u2014so what? Her mama often said those were the most dangerous kind. Now Kate knew why. No matter. Her future was the ranch and she had no intention of letting herself get sidetracked.\n\nShe drove right by the blacksmith shop with little more than a glance and pulled up in front of the marshal's office.\n\nDeputy Marshal Morris looked up from behind his desk when she walked through the door. A craggy-faced man with scraggly black hair and mustache, he sat back in his chair, hands interlocked on his rounded belly, and frowned.\n\n\"My name is Kate Tenney and\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped her with the palm of his hand. \"I know who you are.\" His eyes narrowed. \"You're the new Walker girl. The one who let Cactus Joe get away.\"\n\nShe was momentarily speechless. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, but the bluntness of his tone and manner surprised her more than his accusation. Would she ever get used to such plain talk?\n\nObviously the marshal didn't fully understand the circumstances. \"He had a gun. I could have been shot or kidnapped or... or...\"\n\nHe waved both hands at her. \"Cactus Joe couldn't shoot a chicken coop if he was standin' inside.\"\n\n\"He shot my trunk,\" she said. \"My clothes and books could have been ruined.\"\n\n\"That'll teach you to go barreling through town when I'm trying to uphold the law. I'da had him if it wasn't for your meddlin'.\"\n\nKate bristled. Meddling? Meddling! The nerve of him. \"First of all, I had just set foot in town and had no way of knowing a robbery was in progress.\" She leveled an indignant glare at him. \"I certainly was not meddling.\"\n\nHe grunted and continued to stare at her like it was all her fault. \"So why are you here now?\"\n\nShe was so incensed by his unfair accusations she'd almost forgotten her reason for coming. \"I'm here on behalf of Miss Walker. The Dunne gang is back.\"\n\nThe marshal rubbed his forehead. \"I thought we'd seen the last of 'em. How do you know they're back?\"\n\n\"Some of the cattle have been hair-branded,\" she replied.\n\nHe nodded. \"It has the markings of the Dunnes but that don't mean it's them.\"\n\n\"I'm only conveying Miss Walker's message.\"\n\nHe blew out his breath. \"All right, I'll round up some boys and we'll take a ride out there. Have a look around.\" He didn't sound all that eager to ride out to the ranch. \"Probably won't find anything.\"\n\n\"I'll tell Miss Walker to expect you,\" she said, her voice cool. Meddling, indeed! She turned to leave. Hand on the doorknob, she glanced back at him. \"I do apologize for any part I might have played in Cactus Joe's escape, but I am surprised he got away. He didn't have that much of a head start.\"\n\n\"Oh, I coulda caught him if I put my mind to it. But anyone caught outside of town has to be hauled all the way to Tombstone.\"\n\n\"Why Tombstone? What's wrong with this jail?\" she asked, staring at the small empty cell behind his desk.\n\n\"After the last jailbreak, the county sheriff checked it out and said it was as flimsy as a paper bandbox. Said it wasn't strong enough to keep a dead man from escapin', let alone a criminal. Said anyone captured outside of town was under county jurisdiction and had to be taken to Tombstone.\"\n\n\"How many jailbreaks have you had?\" she asked.\n\n\"A dozen or so, but you can't go by the numbers. Some folks got themselves arrested just so they could see how long it took 'em to break out. The record is three hours and seventeen minutes.\"\n\n\"I see,\" she said, though in reality she didn't. People in Cactus Patch certainly had an apathetic regard for lawlessness.\n\n\"Now that Luke fixed the lock and reinforced the window bars the jail is sound as a cash box, but that don't make no difference to the sheriff.\" Hands behind his head, he leaned back and plopped his feet on the desk like he had nothing to do and all day to do it in.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"What time shall I tell Miss Walker to expect you?\"\n\nHe looked puzzled. \"What time? Oh, that's right. The Dunne gang.\"\n\nIt was obvious the marshal had no intention of riding out to the ranch, and that was a problem. Miss Walker had given her a simple task\u2014a test, no doubt\u2014and Kate couldn't afford to fail.\n\nShe turned toward the marshal and tried to think how she would write this scene for a book. Brandon would plant his feet firmly in front of the marshal's desk, look that marshal square in the face, and take no guff.\n\nPositioning herself exactly as she pictured her protagonist doing, she hung her thumbs from the waist of her skirt and lowered her voice a full octave. \"Actually, there's reason to believe it's not the Dunne gang after all.\" She glanced around as if to check for eavesdroppers before continuing. \"There's some speculation that it might be the... Arizona Kid.\" Did such a person even exist?\n\nApparently the marshal thought so. His eyes widened and he snapped to attention like a soldier awaiting orders. He rose to his feet as soon as his boots hit the floor. \"This is serious.\"\n\nSurprised and even encouraged by the change that came over him, she gave an enthusiastic nod. \"Yes, I believe it is.\"\n\n\"Capturing the Arizona Kid would make the journey to Tombstone worthwhile. The sheriff might even recommend me as town marshal of Tucson or even Phoenix where the real action is. Don't you worry none, ma'am. I'll ride out to the ranch soon as I kin get a posse together.\"\n\nKate thanked him and left, barely able to keep a straight face. Outside his office, she laughed and was still laughing when she crossed the street to the post office to inquire about Ruckus's mail.\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am,\" the postmaster said. The sign on the counter read Jeb Parker. An older man with a conclave chest and a goatee, he shook his grizzled head. \"No mail.\" His pallid skin seemed out of place in Arizona. Apparently the man never stepped foot outdoors.\n\nRuckus seemed anxious to hear from his son and she hated to disappoint him. \"Would you mind checking again?\" she asked.\n\nThe postmaster gave an impatient shrug to indicate he did indeed mind, but he nonetheless flipped through a stack of mail for a second time.\n\n\"Nope. Same as before.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said.\n\nLeaving the post office, she bumped into a stoop-shouldered man with a long beard.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said, but the man ignored her apology. Instead, he brusquely brushed past her and limped toward the post office counter.\n\nShe'd only gotten a glimpse of his face, but he seemed strangely familiar. Odd. She was almost positive she had not met the man. Stranger still was the way the fine hairs on her arms stood up.\n\nPushing the thought away, she quickly grabbed the broken windmill tailbone from her wagon and crossed the dirt-packed street to the blacksmith shop. The sooner she finished ranch business, the sooner she could take care of her own.\n\nThe side door was ajar and she elbowed it all the way open. Surprised and more than a little annoyed to find her knees shaking, she called, \"Mr. Adams?\"\n\nThe shop was empty. A fire in the forge made her hesitate before crossing to the workbench. Fire made her nervous, even after all these years. The flame of a candle or the striking of a match brought back memories she'd sooner forget.\n\nOnly eight at the time, she had been locked out of the apartment while her mama entertained a man. She fell asleep curled into a ball in the hallway outside the door, only to be awakened by her mother's cries for help. The sound of pounding fists through the thin walls sent chills through Kate's small body. Knowing from experience that none of the other residents would interfere, she reached into the pocket of her frock and pulled out the matches kept there. All it took was one strike and a piece of loose wallpaper caught fire. No one was hurt in the inferno\u2014and she saved her mama from further harm\u2014but the flimsy wood building had burned to the ground.\n\nShaking away visions of the past, she laid the windmill parts on the workbench and dug into her drawstring purse for paper and pencil to leave a note.\n\nA sharp, angry voice from outside startled her. It came from the side of the building. \"Last night was the last time I'm bailing you out of jail. Do you hear me?\" She recognized the deep baritone voice at once as belonging to Luke Adams.\n\nAnother male voice replied, \"Don't do me any favors!\"\n\n\"Either you take that job at the Last Chance or you're on your own. You won't get another penny from me.\"\n\nThe argument escalated, and not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, Kate looked around for a means of escape, but the two quarrelling men blocked both the carriage and side door, trapping her inside.\n\nShe dropped her pencil and stooped to pick it up, accidently knocking against the workbench. Something fell to the floor with a loud clank. Startled, she practically jumped out of her skin and sent the lantern flying. Kerosene splashed into the burning forge and sparks shot out, turning the pine chips on the hearth into flames. In a flash, the blaze spread across the floor devouring all the wood shavings in its path.\n\nKate stared at the flames in horror. Transported to another time, another fire, she froze, her body seemingly encased in steel.\n\nThe door banged open and Luke bolted inside. He ripped off his leather apron and threw it down on the floor, smothering the flames. He then stamped out the remaining sparks with his booted foot.\n\nHe whirled to face her. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nShe nodded. The moment the fire was out the past lost its grip on her, but she was horrified by what she'd nearly done. \"Please forgive me. I never meant to start a f-fire,\" she stammered, close to tears. \"Your building could have burned down. The whole town could have gone up in flames, people could have been hurt and\u2014\"\n\nHe held up both hands. \"Whoa. Let's not make this any worse than it was. No real damage was done.\"\n\nShe blew out her breath in relief, though she still felt bad. Now he would know she overheard the argument.\n\nHomer appeared at her side, tail wagging. Grateful for a reason not to have to look at the man, she stooped to run her hand through the dog's soft fur. Homer nudged her with his cold nose and licked her hand.\n\nFinally, she straightened. \"I was about to leave you a note.\"\n\nWhite teeth flashed against his bronzed skin. \"You must have been usin' some mighty heated words.\"\n\nDisarmed by the humorous twinkle in his eyes, she smiled back at him. She couldn't help it. \"So were you,\" she said, surprising herself with Arizona-type boldness.\n\nHis face grew somber and, hoping to lighten the mood again, she added, \"Though I wasn't anywhere near as cantankerous.\"\n\n\"That was my brother you heard me arguing with.\" His frown contradicted his concerned voice. \"The boy's headed for a whole peck of trouble. He has a job here if he wants it, but he'd rather gamble and rest a boot on a brass rail than do an honest day's work.\"\n\nNot having any siblings of her own, she could only imagine what it was like to have a troubled one. \"It must be difficult dealing with insubordination, especially with a family member.\"\n\nHe frowned and scratched his head as if trying to figure her out. \"I don't know what's it gonna take to straighten him out.\" He studied her. \"I see you decided not to quit after all.\"\n\nShe smiled at the memory of the two of them sitting in the mud. \"I guess I'm too obstinate to quit. I also like the ranch too much to give up.\"\n\nHe studied her but said nothing. \"How's Decker? He still givin' you trouble?\"\n\n\"Not so much anymore. My main problem is learning to ride a cutting horse.\"\n\n\"Ruckus hired anyone yet to take care of the shoeing and windmills?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He's still looking.\"\n\n\"Glad to hear that. I want my brother to go out there and talk to him about it. Would be good for him. Keep him out of trouble in town.\" He picked up the two pieces of tailbone she'd set on his workbench and held them together. \"Zechariah,\" he said.\n\n\"I beg your pardon.\"\n\n\"This is from the Zechariah windmill.\" He glanced at her. \"Just like the prophet, this windmill can predict the future, or at least a coming storm.\"\n\nShe tilted her head. She was an educated woman with a college degree. She knew Shakespeare's plays inside and out, and had studied the works of ancient philosophers\u2014none of which did her any good on the ranch. The one book she had little or no knowledge of was the Bible. Yet Ruckus constantly referred to scripture, if not altogether quoting it, and she was embarrassed by her ignorance.\n\n\"The Last Chance has more than fifty windmills. Can you really look at a single piece of metal and determine its source?\"\n\nHe shrugged like it was nothing. \"I notch each piece so I know where it belongs. Kind of like marking the ear of a steer.\" He grabbed a broom and swept up the ashes. He was obviously a man who liked order. \"If you hang around for a while I'll have old Zac here ready in no time.\"\n\n\"I do need to stop at the general store,\" she said.\n\n\"It'll be ready by the time you're done with your errands.\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"I hope things work out with your brother.\"\n\nHe looked up from his sweeping. \"Me too.\"\n\nHer gaze locked with his. \"About the fire...\"\n\nHe stood the broom on end in the corner. \"No harm done. I had no use for those wood chips.\" He turned to face her.\n\nPulse skittering, she looked away. It sickened her to think he'd found her staring at the fire unable to move. What must he think of her? And what did it matter what he thought?\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"I'll... I'll be back shortly,\" she said.\n\nShe didn't expect him to follow her outside, but he did. She walked away as quickly as she could without running, but no amount of distance could erase the worrisome hold he had over her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "The air still scented with her sweet fragrance, Luke watched her cross the street. Once she left his shop she walked toward the general merchandise store with quick, confident strides. He was taken with the way she moved, the way her hips swayed gracefully from side to side, the way she swung her arms. He liked pretty much everything about her looks.\n\nHe'd never seen anyone look so scared of fire. It was a good thing she hadn't been around in '87, the year an earthquake shook the area. The fire that followed the temblor pretty much destroyed everything in its path, including the Last Chance Ranch and most of the town.\n\nHowever, it wasn't Kate's fear of fire that worried him. It was the way she stiffened whenever he came near. At times he swore he saw mistrust in her eyes. What had he done to make her so wary of him? Was it because he had seen her under-riggin's? Was that it?\n\nOr was he simply imagining it? He wasn't good at picking up on other people's feelings. Aunt Bessie complained that a body would have to fall down dead before Luke knew anything was wrong. So why this sudden awareness? Why did he weigh Kate Tenney's every nuance as if each sigh or quick smile held some special meaning?\n\nWhatever the reason, it bothered him. It bothered him a lot. He had no personal interest in her. Couldn't. She was an educated woman and he was a simple smithy with little book learning. So why waste so much time thinking about someone altogether in another class? It made no sense." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nBessie grabbed her sister by her knitted shawl and yanked her back inside the general store.\n\n\"What's the matter?\"\n\n\"Shh.\" Bessie hastened to the window and ducked behind a display of Log Cabin syrup, as if the slender stack could hide her generous proportions.\n\n\"Look over there. What do you see?\"\n\n\"Oh dear, it's not Cactus Joe again is it?\"\n\n\"No, no, thank heavens,\" Bessie assured her.\n\nLula-Belle craned her neck to look out the wavy paned window. Shorter than her sister, she rose on tiptoe. \"I see our nephew.\"\n\nBessie folded her arms across her ample bosom and nodded in satisfaction. \"And what is he doing?\"\n\n\"He's standing outside his shop doing nothing.\"\n\nBessie threw up her arms. Could her sister bury her head any deeper in the sand? How could she not understand the meaning of this momentous occasion? It's what the family hoped would happen.\n\n\"He's watching that woman,\" Bessie said, trying not to let her irritation with her sister show.\n\n\"What woman?\"\n\nJust then, the door of the shop opened to a chorus of jingling bells and Kate Tenney stepped inside and walked right by them. Since Bessie and her sister were now hunkered behind two large sacks of flour and a barrel of pickles, she obviously didn't see them.\n\n\"That woman,\" Aunt Bessie whispered, barely able to contain her delight. \"She's the one that Cactus Joe grabbed, remember?\"\n\nShe should have known. Luke was interested. All that talk about the woman not being his type and not speaking his language\u2014hogwash, all of it.\n\nLula-Belle whispered back, \"Why do you suppose he was watching her?\"\n\n\"Why do you think?\" Bessie said. Mercy. Did she have to spell out everything? \"He's sweet on her.\"\n\nIt was about time the poor boy found a wife. The good Lord said it wasn't right for a man to be alone and, at age thirty, Luke had been alone long enough. A firm believer in order, she couldn't set to work looking for a wife for Michael until after his older brother, Luke, was married or, at the very least, betrothed.\n\n\"But he said\u2014\"\n\n\"I know very well what he said, but actions speak louder than words.\" Bessie straightened and moseyed on over to the counter where Miss Tenney stood waiting for Mr. Green to fill her order.\n\nShe was pretty all right, even if a mite too thin. Some good home cooking would take care of that. Her blond hair was gathered into a tight bun beneath her wide-brimmed hat. Delicate brows arched over long-lashed blue eyes. Her plain blue skirt and lace-trimmed waistcoat emphasized a small waist, narrow hips, and a pleasing bosom. Of course Luke was interested. A man would have to be blind not to be.\n\nMr. Green returned with several bars of Pears soap and added them to the growing pile on the counter. \"Anything else?\" he asked, addressing the woman.\n\n\"I'd also like a box of bonbons,\" she said. \"Those are my favorite.\"\n\n\"They're everyone's favorite,\" Mr. Green said, reaching for a box of the foil-covered chocolates. He was a compact man whose spectacles magnified his eyes to twice their normal size. He reminded Bessie of a lizard, and his unfortunate habit of sticking his tongue in and out of his mouth did nothing to dispel that notion.\n\nHis pointy nose twitched as he began punching numbers into the National Brass cash register, a new addition to his shop and one that met with Bessie's disapproval. What a crying shame that people were too lazy to add things up in their heads like the good Lord intended.\n\n\"Do you want me to add these to Miss Walker's account, Miss Tenney?\" he asked.\n\n\"No, I'll pay for them myself,\" Miss Tenney said, digging into her drawstring purse.\n\nAunt Bessie exchanged a glance with her sister. Miss Walker's name never failed to strike a chord of curiosity in Bessie even when her nephew wasn't involved. The ranch owner's antics were legendary, which made her the main topic of conversation at any and all town gatherings.\n\nLula-Belle whispered, \"Do you suppose she's one of Miss Walker's relatives?\"\n\nBessie rolled her eyes. Her sister was hopeless. \"Miss Walker doesn't have any relatives.\" At least none that she was willing to acknowledge. Supposedly she had a brother, but according to rumors the two were on bad terms and hadn't spoken in years.\n\nImagine the nerve of the woman advertising for an heiress. Heiresses were born, not made. Everyone knew that. Of course, it was nothing more than you'd expect from a divorced woman who walked, talked, and\u2014mercy\u2014even dressed like a man.\n\nBessie didn't mean to be forward or nosy\u2014heavens, not that. But with her nephew's future on the line, this was no time to restrain herself.\n\n\"Excuse me, I'm not sure you remember me, but we met briefly a short while ago.\"\n\nMiss Tenney nodded. \"Oh yes. The day of the holdup.\" Her gaze darted from Bessie to Lula-Belle. \"I remember both of you.\" The woman smiled, revealing straight white teeth. \"How lovely to meet you again. This time under less trying circumstances.\"\n\nThe woman had a cultured voice and spoke with a Boston accent. Obviously she was a lady, a real lady. No wonder Luke was put off at first. In Cactus Patch, ladies were few and far between.\n\nNo matter. Where men were concerned, appearances trumped character faults, and this particular woman was pretty enough to overcome any number of negative qualities she might have, even faults involving uppity language. Of that Bessie was certain or Luke wouldn't have been caught staring.\n\n\"I can't tell you how relieved we are that Cactus Joe brought you no harm.\" Bessie inched closer. How fortunate that she chose today of all days to wear her best navy blue going-to-town skirt and shirtwaist. \"Thank you for your kind note. That was very thoughtful of you, Miss Tenney.\"\n\n\"Please, call me Kate.\"\n\n\"Kate it is.\" Bessie smiled. She liked that Kate was friendly and not stuck-up like other easterners who drifted through town from time to time and didn't seem to have a nice thing to say about Cactus Patch or even Arizona. \"I believe you know my nephew Luke.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Adams gave me a ride to the ranch my first day here.\"\n\nBessie gave a motherly nod of approval. \"It was the least he could do after your unfortunate encounter with that dreadful outlaw. I can't tell you how lovely it is to see you again.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is,\" Lula-Belle said. \"Especially since Luke\u2014\"\n\nBessie poked her sister with her elbow.\n\n\"What my sister was about to say was that our nephew has spoken highly of you.\"\n\nThe beginning of a smile tipped the corner of Kate's pretty pink mouth. \"I'm grateful to him for his kindness to me.\"\n\nBessie grinned. Gratitude was good. At least it was a place to start. \"That's our Luke. Always willing to lend a helping hand. So how do you like running a ranch?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm a long way from doing that,\" Kate replied. \"I have much to learn.\"\n\nBessie felt a surge of hope. \"Is there a possibility you won't be able to learn the ranching business?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll learn,\" Kate said. \"It's just that I had no idea how much work went into caring for cows... eh... cattle. But I do so love it there. Have you been to the ranch?\"\n\n\"Not recently,\" Bessie said.\n\n\"You must come. The cactus are all in bloom and we have these lovely little calves running around. We're getting ready for roundup and...\"\n\nWhile Kate babbled on Bessie tried to hide her impatience. It wasn't normal for a woman to carry on so about a bunch of cattle.\n\n\"I imagine it would be difficult for a woman to be both a rancher and a wife,\" Bessie said when she could get a word in edgewise. She hated to be so brash, but how else could she learn what she needed to know?\n\nKate looked momentarily confused by the sudden change of subject. \"I imagine so, but I have no intention of getting married.\"\n\n\"So how long do you expect to remain unmarried?\" Bessie asked.\n\n\"I don't plan on ever getting married,\" Kate replied.\n\nBessie blinked. \"Really?\"\n\n\"I only have a hundred days left to prove myself to Miss Walker's satisfaction. After that, my one and only concern will be the ranch.\"\n\nA hundred days? Bessie did some mental calculations. That would take them to the end of July.\n\nBessie sidled up a notch closer, friend to friend. \"If you ask me, it's a crying shame that a woman as pretty as yourself should... deprive some poor man of a wife.\"\n\n\"Running a ranch is a full-time job,\" Kate said. \"I'm afraid a man would find me wanting as a wife.\"\n\n\"Running a ranch didn't stop old man Thomson over at the Lazy T from getting married,\" Lula-Belle said.\n\n\"I couldn't get married even if I wanted to. Miss Walker forbids it,\" Kate explained. \"That's one of her requirements.\"\n\nBessie had never heard anything so ridiculous in her life. \"Staying single isn't so bad, I suppose, as long as it's your choice and no one else's.\"\n\nKate glanced at her but remained silent, which was annoying to say the least. On the other hand, Bessie had to give the girl credit for loyalty. Most people jumped at the chance to gossip or otherwise say something unpleasant about the owner of the Last Chance Ranch.\n\nMr. Green finished packing Kate's order. \"I'll help you carry your purchases to your wagon, ma'am.\" He walked around the counter, lifted the wooden crate, and started for the door.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Kate said. \"That is very kind of you.\" She turned from the counter. \"It was nice seeing you both again. Good day.\" She then followed Mr. Green outside.\n\nBessie stood staring after her. She couldn't believe Kate planned to stay single just to appease Miss Walker. It made Bessie sick just thinking about it. Not only was the girl a looker, her speech was so polished a person could skate on it. What an utter waste. Bessie couldn't imagine anything worse than staying single. She was willing to bet that the good Lord wasn't all that in favor of it either.\n\nBessie tapped a finger to her chin. \"Do you think she'd make a good match for Luke?\"\n\nLula-Belle studied the label on a can of peaches. \"The only thing that girl is interested in is the ranch.\"\n\nIt certainly appeared that way, but Bessie wasn't willing to give up so easily. Marriageable women were few and far between and she had two nephews in dire need of wives. What a pity that she only had a hundred days in which to work. Still, a lot could happen in that short time. If she played her cards right, Luke and Kate might even fall hopelessly in love.\n\nHumming the tune of the \"Yankee Wedding March,\" Bessie rushed her sister through her shopping and dragged her out of the store. No time to waste. A hundred days!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Nearly a week later Kate followed Ruckus's mule-drawn wagon out to the southeast corner of the ranch. Ruckus insisted she ride her horse for practice rather than ride in the wagon with him. The wagon was loaded with fencing supplies, cattle remedies, and salt licks.\n\nShe and Decker had formed an understanding\u2014or at least she hoped so. She would refrain from hopping, bouncing, kicking his sides, or roping him, and he would refrain from bucking, kicking, taking off at a run, and otherwise trying to unseat her.\n\nRuckus brought the wagon to a halt. He pointed to the barbed wire fence running the length of the property. \"We're moving the herd out of open range for brandin'. The first thing any self-respectin' steer will do is walk the fence to check out its new paddock. It's up to us to make certain no side of beef leaks through the bobbed wire.\"\n\nKate was eager to get started. Fixing fences didn't sound that hard. After mucking out stables, cleaning the barn, and learning to ride, she looked forward to doing something that didn't involve dirty hay or falling off a horse.\n\nRuckus hopped to the ground and pointed to a gap in the barbed wire. \"See that there?\" He tossed her gloves and donned a pair himself before leaning over the back of the wagon to snip off a piece of baling wire with fencing pliers. He then showed her how to fix the fence by wrapping wire around a nail to tighten it.\n\n\"That should do it.\" He stepped back. \"There's something satisfyin' about mendin' fences. Don't much matter if it's the wire type or the human type.\"\n\n\"What? No Bible verse?\" she teased.\n\nHe grinned. \"How about this? God says if you're holdin' a grudge you plumb better get over it or you'll be as sad as a tick-fevered dogie.\"\n\nShe grinned back. \"I didn't know God spoke western-like.\"\n\n\"God speaks all languages and he don't just use words.\" He cocked an eyebrow. \"Anyone you need to forgive, Goldilocks?\"\n\nShe thought about the father who deserted her, the mother who neglected her and clamped down on her jaw. \"No, no one,\" she said through gritted teeth.\n\n\"Hmm. Guess you can call yourself lucky then. Come on, let's get to work.\"\n\nHe let her fix the next gap they found. Tongue between her lips, she twisted the wire tight as she could. She was all thumbs at first, but it didn't take long to get the hang of it.\n\nA cloud of dust signaled a horse heading in their direction, but Ruckus was able to identify the rider as Feedbag long before he reached them. \"Looks like trouble.\"\n\n\"We found a band of sheep in the northern section,\" Feedbag called upon reaching them. \"That's why our beeves refuse to go there.\"\n\nRuckus muttered beneath his breath, then immediately lifted his hand up to the sky in apology. \"Sorry, God, but you know the trouble those four-legged underwears cause.\"\n\nAs if to concur, Feedbag spit out a stream of tobacco juice.\n\nKate looked from one grim face to the other. \"What kind of trouble?\" In Boston sheep were valued for their wool.\n\n\"There ain't nothing left when they leave,\" Feedbag growled. \"They eat the grass to the roots, dig up the dirt with their sharp hooves, and leave a terrible stench. No self-respectin' steer would be caught dead on the same range as a hoofed locust.\"\n\n\"Can't blame 'em. Can't blame 'em a bit,\" Ruckus said.\n\n\"The others are pretty riled up. If Stretch and Wishbone have their way, that herder will be tradin' in his woolies for a wooden overcoat.\"\n\nRuckus glanced at Kate and hesitated.\n\n\"You go. I'll finish here,\" she said. She didn't want anyone dying on her account, even if he was a sheepherder.\n\nRuckus dropped the roll of wire and pliers in the back of the wagon. \"I'll need your horse. You can drive the wagon.\" She nodded and he quickly mounted Decker.\n\n\"Watch out for snakes and other fiends.\" He touched his hat and he and Feedbag rode away.\n\nOther fiends? She glanced around. Her imaginative mind kicked into high gear. What if she ran into Cactus Joe? Or rustlers? Or rattlers? What then?\n\nShe scanned the ground for reptiles and jumping cacti before looking the short, thick-headed mule square in the face. His name was Gus. \"It's just you and me.\"\n\nThe animal wiggled his long, pointed ears and let out a loud hee-haw.\n\nShe climbed onto the wagon seat and grabbed hold of the reins. \"Giddi-up.\" Nothing. \"Come on, Gus, go!\" The mule stayed put and, if anything, looked even more stubborn.\n\n\"I guess we're going to have to do this the hard way.\" She climbed out of the wagon, grabbed hold of the bridle, and pulled. When that didn't work, she straddled the wagon tongue and pushed the mule from behind, keeping her head away from his swishing tail. Still, the mule didn't move.\n\nHands on her waist, she debated what to do next. She was almost out of drinking water so she couldn't stay there. Who knew when Ruckus would return?\n\nThe closest windmill was only about a quarter of a mile away. She decided to walk to it, fixing any needed repairs along the way. Her mind made up, she snipped off a length of wire, grabbed the pliers and canteen, and began walking. A slight breeze helped cool her down but it was still hot.\n\nA short distance from the windmill she spotted a gap in the fence. She slid down a slope and crossed over a dry gully before reaching the barbed barrier. She measured off a piece of wire and wound it around the post like Ruckus showed her. She was in luck. The gap was small and required little effort to repair. Satisfied that the wire would hold, she climbed back up the incline and headed for the windmill.\n\nA strange snorting sound startled her. She stopped in her tracks and glanced over her shoulder. A wild boar stood not more than twenty feet away. It was a strange-looking animal with salt-and-pepper hair, short skinny legs, and small beady eyes that stared at her from above a piglike snout.\n\nKate took a step forward. The boar didn't move. Encouraged, she took another step.\n\nThis time the animal bent its head, tusks pointed like daggers. For a moment it didn't move, then all of a sudden it grunted, wiggled its ears\u2014and charged.\n\nKate dropped everything and ran." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nWas there a woman in the world so devoted as to sacrifice herself to save the man she loved? Yes, there was but one. She would swim the deepest sea or climb the greatest heights to save Brandon, for her love for him was matchless.\n\nShe barely managed to grab hold of the windmill ladder and pull herself up before the hog lunged, missing her leg by inches.\n\nShe scrambled halfway up the windmill before she dared look down. The animal grunted and rammed the ladder with its tusks ten, twenty, thirty times and showed no signs of stopping. The ladder shook so hard Kate feared it would break. The wind picked up and the windmill blades turned faster. Climbing onto the platform was out of the question. She had no choice but to stay where she was.\n\n\"Go away,\" she yelled. \"Shoo!\" She pulled off a glove with her teeth and tossed it at the hog, but the battering of the ladder continued.\n\nKate leaned her forehead against a rung, closed her eyes, and held on tight. God, please make it go away. Surprised to find herself praying, she bit down on her lower lip. It wasn't like her to turn to God as the first response to trouble. If she hung around Ruckus much longer she wouldn't recognize herself.\n\nShe glanced at the sky. Even if by some miracle God did answer prayers, she doubted he would bother with hers.\n\nShe peered downward. The wild hog had stopped butting its head against the ladder but still hadn't left. Instead, it rooted around the base of the ladder, grunting. She threw down her other glove to no avail.\n\nShuddering, she forced herself to think, but that only gave her imagination full rein. What if the hog remained there all night? Or she fainted from dehydration? What if the dreadful beast battered the ladder until it broke? Every possible scenario raced through her mind, each more frightening than the previous one.\n\nAfter crying herself to sleep for the first sixteen years of her life, she'd vowed never to shed another tear. Any failings to adhere to her vow had been due to physical pain, not emotional. But today she was hot and scared and tired and confused and...\n\nBrandon heard the woman's cry for help and urged his horse to go faster. Ahead a windmill rose high above the ground, the tail turning toward the wind. At last he spotted her halfway up the tower, her long curls tumbling from beneath her felt hat. On the ground below was the meanest-looking critter this side of the Gila River. He pulled out his gun and fired. Bang, bang, bang!\n\nDismounting, he looked up at the woman still clinging to the ladder. \"You can come down now,\" he said. \"It's safe.\"\n\nKate blinked. Surely she was hearing things. That wasn't Brandon's voice; it was...\n\nHer eyelids flew up and she peered at the ground. Ruckus stood at the bottom of the ladder beckoning to her. \"You can come down now,\" he repeated.\n\nShe almost collapsed with relief. She couldn't believe her eyes! God did answer prayers!\n\n\"Am I ever glad to see you,\" she cried. Legs trembling, she slowly descended the ladder.\n\nRuckus laughed. \"Now that's what I call being high on the hog.\"\n\nShe stepped off the lower rung of the ladder and glared at him, hands at her waist. \"It's not funny. That... that beast tried to attack me. If you hadn't come along I could have been eaten alive. Or died of thirst. Or been carried away by vultures or...\"\n\n\"I don't think vultures generally carry folks away. Least not that I heard.\"\n\n\"There's a first time for everything,\" she said with a stubborn nod of her head.\n\n\"Come along,\" he said. \"I think you've had enough fence mending for today.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Later that afternoon she walked out of the barn and bumped into Luke\u2014literally. The impact made her drop the rope she was carrying and they both stooped to pick it up, their hands meeting on the braided twine.\n\nShe pulled her hand away and quickly rose. He gave her a quizzical look before gathering the rope, coiling it, and handing it back to her.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said.\n\nHe grinned. \"Heard about your run-in this morning.\"\n\n\"Everyone in Cochise County has heard about my run-in with that hog,\" she muttered. The ranch hands hadn't stopped joshing her since she returned to the ranch. She bumped against Luke's arm and she quickly lengthened the distance between them.\n\n\"It was a javelina,\" he said, as if that made a difference. He stared at her with a puzzled frown. \"Do I make you nervous?\"\n\nThe question surprised her. \"No, of course not. Why do you ask?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"You always act like I'm gonna grab you and kiss you.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. \"The... the thought never occurred to me.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" He looked genuinely perplexed. \"Why not?\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"Why... not?\" Did he really expect her to answer such an outrageous question?\n\n\"The thought occurred to me. I just wonder why it never occurred to you,\" he said.\n\nHe thought about kissing her? That meant she hadn't imagined the heated glances that passed between them. They had been real. Her heart thudded against her ribs. Her mouth went dry.\n\n\"I... I can assure you I'm not the kind of woman who goes around thinking such things.\" Her voice sounded haughty even to her own ears, but it couldn't be helped. There could be no misunderstanding between them.\n\n\"I'm mighty sorry to hear that, ma'am. Mighty sorry.\"\n\nShe straightened her shirt. \"Yes, well...\"\n\n\"If you don't think about kissing me, then I guess there's no reason for you to be so jumpy around me. 'Less you're worried about makin' that Brandon fellow jealous.\"\n\nShe stared at him for a moment before recovering from her surprise. \"How... how do you know about Brandon?\"\n\n\"That day you arrived and I carried you into my shop. You were half out of your wits and you mistook me for Brandon. Is he a beau or something?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"He's... nobody. I made him up for one of my stories. He doesn't exist.\"\n\nLuke scratched his head. \"You made him up?\"\n\n\"It's what writers do,\" she said. \"Haven't you ever made up anyone? Even as a child? An imaginary playmate, perhaps?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am. I figure the world's crowded enough without makin' up people.\"\n\n\"Yes, well...\"\n\n\"So if this Brandon fella doesn't exist, and you don't think about kissing me, I reckon that means you have no reason to be nervous around me, right?\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said.\n\nHe hesitated and she feared he would pursue the subject. \"I'm not much of a reader but I sure would like to read somethin' you wrote. Maybe somethin' with that Brandon fella.\"\n\nRelieved to talk about something else, she said, \"I'm afraid it wouldn't be to your liking.\" Secretly, it pleased her that he'd asked.\n\n\"Because it's literary?\" he asked, his voice oddly distant and taut.\n\nShe laughed. \"Not according to my critics.\"\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. \"It's a good thing critics weren't around when God created the world.\"\n\n\"I agree.\" Her gaze bounced off his lips and she felt her cheeks grow warm. Why did he have to mention kissing? Glancing past him she spotted Miss Walker watching from a distance.\n\n\"I... I better get back to work.\" She turned and walked away as fast as she could without running, but it was a long time before she could breathe normally again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Luke beat the red-hot metal with a hammer, the sound ringing in his ears. Twe-rink, twe-rink, twank. Blacksmithing was physically demanding work and normally he welcomed the manual labor required to shape iron into something usable. Today no amount of pounding relieved his tension. Nor did it get his mind off Kate Tenney.\n\nFlipping the metal over with his tongs he tapped the end. Behind him the forge burned brightly and the mechanical fan emitted a steady hum. Homer was outside but kept poking his nose through the open door as if sensing his master's ill temper.\n\nA vision of blue eyes came to mind and Luke pounded harder. She didn't think about kissing him\u2014least that's what she said. Could've fooled him. He never could figure out the way a woman's mind worked, but she sure did look like she wanted to be kissed.\n\nShe also said her writing wouldn't be to his liking. Why didn't she just come out and say what she really meant? He didn't have enough book learning to understand what she wrote.\n\nHe pounded harder still.\n\nNot that he cared. It was probably some scholarly tome filled with ten-dollar words that only college professors and Greek scholars could understand.\n\nThis time he pounded so hard that pieces of hot iron flew off his anvil." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nMany a form bit the dust and a gasp of horror rose to her lips. Then, thinking that Brandon was among the wounded, she fell back in a dead faint.\n\nKate sat on her horse watching what looked like sheer chaos. It was the first day of branding and Ruckus didn't mince words. \"Once the action begins, stay out of the way!\"\n\nIt wasn't what Kate wanted to hear. \"How am I going to learn if I don't practice?\"\n\nRuckus made a face. \"Practicin' brandin' makes as much sense as practicin' for a hangin'. You either do it or you don't.\"\n\nThe air vibrated with expectation. Men on horses, some from neighboring ranches, waited for the signal to start. Ruckus called some of the older men \"use-ta wases.\" The younger men he called green hands.\n\nO.T. and Miss Walker had their heads together, their expressions serious.\n\n\"What are they waiting for?\" Kate had to lift her voice to be heard above the bawling calves separated from their mothers.\n\nRuckus pointed to the north where dark clouds rolled over distant mountains. Already a few clouds had broken away from the pack to blot out the overhead sun.\n\n\"They're worried about rain. You can't brand a wet calf. Not if you want to read the brand.\"\n\n\"You've been praying too hard, Ruckus,\" she called.\n\nFeedbag and Upbeat laughed and Ruckus chuckled.\n\n\"Next time I'll be more specific about the timing.\"\n\nStretch said, \"At least it's not as hot as it was last year at this time. It was so hot, the hens laid hard-boiled eggs.\"\n\nKate shook her head and grinned. Stretch never ran out of tall tales.\n\nO.T. and Miss Walker moved away from each other and mounted their horses.\n\n\"Is it time to start?\" Kate asked.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Ruckus said. \"The boss lady gets to down the first calf. It's a Last Chance tradition.\"\n\nKate could feel the tension in the air as all eyes remained on the boss lady.\n\nMiss Walker sat tall in her saddle. From a distance she looked like one of the cowhands, giving no clue to gender or age. She rode her roan around the corral once before racing to the center, rope coiled over her head. Arm circling, she whipped her rope through the air with amazing speed and force, catching a calf by both hind feet. Twisting her lariat around the horn of her saddle, Miss Walker dragged the bawling calf up to the blazing bonfire.\n\nKate's mouth dropped open in admiration. \"I never would have believed that a sexagenarian could do such a thing.\"\n\nFeedbag's eyes widened. \"The boss lady's a sex...?\" He sputtered and his face got all red. He glanced at Miss Walker with awe. \"I always knew she was a force to be reckoned with.\"\n\n\"Oh, I didn't mean...\"\n\nA loud bawling drowned out the rest of her sentence. The roped calf struggled fiercely, its cries answered by its anxious mother on the opposite side of the fence.\n\nOne of the cowpunchers looked between the calf's legs and yelled, \"Bull!\"\n\nThe red-hot branding iron was pressed into the animal's side, leaving a distinctive mark only three inches high. \"That smells awful,\" she cried, waving her hand in front of her nose.\n\nRuckus grinned. \"That's what we call branding smoke. You'll get used to it.\"\n\nIt was all done in a blink of the eye.\n\nShe leaned over her saddle horn. \"The brand is so small. I can hardly read it.\"\n\n\"By the time the little fella's full-grown, it'll be a foot high,\" Ruckus explained. \"We used to brand the entire side of a steer, but then we got complaints from leather makers. I guess there was no call for Last Chance boots or saddles.\"\n\nWishbone was the tally keeper. He made a mark on his tally sheet and called out, \"One calf.\"\n\nThe instant Miss Walker's honorary calf had been counted and let go, O.T. yelled, \"Let's get rolling.\" He waved his hat over his head. \"Last year we branded three hundred calves in four hours. Let's see what we can do this year.\"\n\n\"Here we go,\" Ruckus called. \"Go!\"\n\nKate was mesmerized by the thunderous mass of horns and hooves in front of her. The smell of hot branding irons, sweaty horseflesh, heated cowhide, and dust made it hard to breathe, and her eyes watered. The air rang with bleating calves, bellowing steer, and exuberant shouts of men.\n\nAt first it seemed like chaos but, like everything in the desert, nothing was as it seemed. Branding required precision and timing\u2014like a carefully choreographed dance.\n\nFeedbag ran by her on foot. He threw his right arm around a steer's neck and seized the animal's left horn with his left hand. The beast ran and Feedbag's legs touched the ground in flying leaps\u2014and at one point his legs even flew straight out. It looked like the steer was about to claim victory when at last the animal lost its balance and fell on its side.\n\nFeedbag was the only bulldogger of the bunch. The other ranch hands preferred to rope the calves from atop their horses.\n\nAfter nearly three hours, Ruckus called out to her, \"Let's see what you can do.\"\n\nSurprised, Kate sucked in her breath. She had practiced for days, but roping a single calf in an otherwise empty corral was a whole lot different from working in a chaotic pen of thundering horses, panicked calves, and shouting men. Still, she was too caught up in the excitement not to try. Just as long as she didn't fall off her horse.\n\nShe tied the end of her rope to the horn of her saddle, just as Ruckus had taught her. Failing to do so could result in the loss of a thumb. Picking out her target she pressed her heels into her horse's sides and took off. Lariat circling overhead, she timed her toss but still came up empty. She yanked the rope back and tried again.\n\nOn the fourth or fifth\u2014or maybe it was the tenth or twelfth\u2014try she caught a calf by a hind leg, or heel as Ruckus called it.\n\n\"I did it!\" she yelled in astonishment.\n\n\"Ride your rope!\" Ruckus yelled back, the urgency in his voice telling her there was no time for celebration.\n\nShe rode toward the calf, taking the slack out of the rope so that Ruckus could wrestle the struggling critter to the ground, pin it on its back, and wrap the calf's legs with pigging rope.\n\nRuckus looked up at her. \"I'd never thought to hear myself say this, but congratulations. You're now officially one of the boys.\"\n\nShe grinned back at him, surprised at how good those words made her feel. After weeks of hard work her efforts had finally begun to pay off. She might just make it as a rancher after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Bessie barged into Lula-Belle's house without so much as a knock on the door. Mercy, she didn't have time for such amenities, not this of all days.\n\nShe found Lula-Belle in the kitchen pulling a pie out of the oven. Bessie threw up her hands in disgust. On a day that was clearly about to break ninety degrees even with the threat of rain, the woman was not only baking, she wore a knitted wool shawl. It made Bessie hot just looking at her.\n\n\"What are you doing here so early?\" Lula-Belle asked, though it was well past noon. She set the pie on the counter to cool. \"What is it? Are you ill? Is something wrong with Sam?\"\n\n\"No, nothing is wrong with Sam. At least nothing that can't be fixed.\"\n\nLula-Belle ran her hands down her gingham apron and frowned. \"Are you sure? It's not his heart, is it?\"\n\nBessie touched her head and groaned. \"Mercy, why do you always think the worst?\"\n\nLula-Belle took Bessie by the arm and dragged her out of the kitchen and made her sit. \"If it's not Sam, who is it? Do tell me.\" Lula-Belle sank onto the cushion by her side.\n\nBessie lowered her voice, though it was not necessary since they were the only two in the house. \"Two weeks ago I bumped into Jos\u00e9 in town and he told me the most amazing thing.\" She glanced around to make sure they were still alone. \"He overheard Kate Tenney say that she once wrote dime novels.\"\n\nA houseboy at the ranch, Jos\u00e9 provided an endless source of juicy gossip, but none quite as delicious as this latest tidbit.\n\nLula-Belle sat back and looked confused or, at the very least, unimpressed. \"Kate is a writer?\"\n\n\"Apparently not a successful one. However, I thought it my duty to read one of her books. You know, to see what kind of woman she really is. Picking out a wife for Luke is too important to go by appearances alone. Fortunately, I was lucky to get hold of the one banned in Boston.\"\n\nLula-Belle gasped. \"Her books were banned?\" Eyes rounded, she covered her open mouth with her fingertips.\n\n\"Only in Boston,\" Bessie assured her. \"You know how prudish they are there.\"\n\nLula-Belle's eyes practically popped out of her head. \"You read a banned potboiler?\"\n\nHer sister's shocked expression came as no surprise. It was a well-known fact that no decent Christian woman would read such trash.\n\n\"It was my duty,\" Bessie explained. She looked toward heaven. \"God forgive me, but there's nothing I wouldn't do for Luke. Michael too.\"\n\nShe pulled a paperback book out of her pocketbook. Miss Hattie's Dilemma was written across the cover in big bold letters.\n\nLula-Belle leaned back as if the mere presence of the book could corrupt her fine sensibilities.\n\nBessie riffled through the book until she found the right page. \"Listen to this.\"\n\n\"Oh my stars,\" Lula-Belle gasped. Her springy curls were practically doing handstands. \"You're not going to read it aloud.\"\n\nBessie gave her a stern look. \"Only the good part.\" She cleared her voice and began to read like she was auditioning for a part in a play. \"'Brandon took her in his arms and captured her trembling lips. Ripples of desire shot through her body and'\"\u2014Bessie paused for effect\u2014\"'curled her toes.'\" She snapped the book shut. It was hard to believe that the mere mention of something as commonplace as toes could cause an entire book to be banned.\n\nLula-Belle obviously was not of the same mind. Indeed, she couldn't have looked more incredulous had Bessie sprouted orange and black spots and turned into a gila monster.\n\n\"Now I ask you. Did Murphy ever make your toes curl during a kiss?\"\n\nLula-Belle's face turned scarlet and her hand fluttered nervously to her lap. \"For goodness' sakes, Bessie, what are you talking about? Curling toes?\"\n\nBessie gave a self-righteous nod. \"I thought so.\"\n\n\"I'm not even sure I want my toes to curl. I'm ticklish. Besides, what has this got to do with Luke and Kate Tenney? Are you saying that she's not the right woman for him?\"\n\n\"Oh, she's the right woman for him, all right.\" Bessie waved the book as if it were absolute proof. \"Make no mistake about that, but I'm not talking about Luke or even Michael.\"\n\n\"Then what are you talking about?\"\n\n\"Us. You and me. It's time we lit a fire under our husbands. There's got to be more to life than loose skin and bald heads. Just because passion hadn't been invented when we were young is no reason we can't enjoy it now. Why should the young have all the fun?\"\n\nLula-Belle made a funny choking sound. \"Passion was invented?\"\n\n\"Of course it was. How else can you explain its sudden appearance? Did you ever hear about it when we were young?\"\n\n\"No, but... but who would invent such a thing?\"\n\n\"How am I supposed to know? Howe, Edison, Bell... What difference does it make? If they can send words through miles of high-strung wires who's to say what else they can do?\"\n\n\"Oh my!\" Lula-Belle pressed her fingertips against her mouth again. \"Maybe we should stay away from the telegraph.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. A little passion would do you a world of good. Maybe then you wouldn't need to wear that tiresome shawl all the time.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Bessie. This don't sound right to me. Sam and Murphy are set in their ways. They're not gonna take kindly to having to worry about our toes.\"\n\n\"Oh, they'll worry about them all right. We'll make certain of that.\" She stabbed Miss Hattie's Dilemma with her finger. \"We have this to guide us. It tells us everything we need to know about capturing a man's heart. For example\"\u2014she thumbed through the book\u2014\"on page ninety-nine it says, 'She brushed her hair until it shone and it fell down her back in glorious waves.'\"\n\nBessie peered at her sister's tight corkscrew curls and grimaced. \"Never mind that. There are other ways we can make ourselves appear more attractive.\"\n\n\"What you're planning on doing don't sound normal. There's a reason why men's hair and women's assets fall when they reach a certain age. God don't want us worrying about our toes in our twilight years.\"\n\n\"Poppycock. Why do you think God invented night? It's so we older folks can enjoy the benefits of youth without seeing how awful we look.\" Bessie closed the potboiler and stood. \"According to this book, perfume and satin unmentionables will do the trick. Green's General Store won't have what we need, so we'll have to order from Montgomery Ward.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Bessie. I don't want anyone to think I'm one of those... you know... painted ladies.\"\n\nBessie rolled her eyes. \"You should be so lucky.\" She argued with her sister for the better part of an hour, but Lula-Belle refused to even consider changing her ways.\n\nAt last Bessie threw up her hands in disgust. If Lula-Belle chose to live a passionless life, that was her business. Bessie had no intention of letting her sister hold her back. She stood and took her leave. If she hurried, she could mail in her order to Montgomery Ward before the post office closed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nWhat could they possibly do to her should she dare set foot in their den? Take advantage of her helplessness? Surely not!\n\nKate stood on the verandah of the ranch house, too wound up to sleep. Already Miss Walker and the house staff had retired for the night and the house was dark. It had been an exhausting but satisfying week. O.T. had been right about the Dunne gang. Some calves had been hair-branded, but Ruckus ordered everyone to \"pick 'em out and brand 'em right.\" And that's what they'd done.\n\nNow that the Last Chance \"LC\" brand had been seared into every calf's hide, the rustlers' plan had been halted, if not altogether stopped. No thanks to the marshal, who nosed around but lost interest upon discovering it was the Dunne gang and not the \"Arizona Kid\" responsible for the misdeeds.\n\nTime had gone fast and already it was May. Kate couldn't believe that nearly six weeks had shot by since she'd first arrived on the ranch. She'd actually helped with the branding, though the other ranch hands had lassoed dozens if not hundreds of calves to her scant one.\n\nShe gazed at the sky, the stars hidden by clouds. The air felt thick with the promise of rain. She still felt a rosy glow from roping her first calf. The ranch that had once seemed so bleak was now filled with endless possibilities and, for the first time ever, her future seemed bright. Maybe Ruckus would make a rancher out of her yet.\n\nLaughter exploded from the bunkhouse. The men were in good spirits. No doubt Stretch was regaling them with another tall tale.\n\nKate envied the camaraderie they shared, and though she tried her best to fit in she longed for female companionship. Of course, that didn't mean she was anxious to join Miss Walker again for supper anytime soon. The woman made her nervous. Kate couldn't begin to guess what thoughts prevailed behind Miss Walker's steady gray eyes.\n\n\"You're one of the boys.\"\n\nShe smiled at the memory. She left the verandah and hurried through the darkened courtyard to the bunkhouse. A flash of lightning pranced along the distant mountains, but still no rain.\n\nThe bunkhouse door ajar, the ranch hands were gathered around a long wooden table, all eyes on Stretch who sat at the head.\n\nMexican Pete held both hands to his chest, a lovesick expression on his broad face. He acted like Romeo declaring his love to Juliet. His antics were met with jovial laughter.\n\n\"Read more,\" Feedbag begged.\n\nStretch looked down at the book in his hands. \"It gets better. Listen to this. 'Her lips quivered with anticipation as Brandon brushed a gentle kiss along her forehead.'\"\n\nRecognizing her own writing, Kate's mouth dropped open and heat flooded her face. How did they get hold of her book? She would have left right then and there had the Englishman Dook not tossed a nod in her direction, signaling her presence to the others.\n\nStretch fell silent and all eyes turned toward the door where she stood. No one moved or said a word. You're one of the boys.\n\nShe threw back her shoulders and forced a smile. If she really was one of the boys then she best start acting like it. She marched over to Stretch and took the book out of his hand.\n\n\"Allow me.\"\n\nShe opened the book to the first page and began to read. If they wanted a K. Matson book, she would give them one. Only she would read the book from the very beginning. Random paragraphs sounded absurd when taken out of context. Let them laugh if they must, but at least they would do it to her face and not behind her back.\n\nAnd so she read.\n\nNo one moved, although Feedbag tittered at one point. She lifted her gaze and he immediately sank lower in his chair, the face behind his squared black beard all serious.\n\nMexican Pete's brown eyes grew bigger as she read. Several times he stopped her to ask the meaning of a word.\n\n\"What does remuneration mean?\" he asked at one point.\n\n\"It means payment for work done,\" she explained, pausing only long enough to answer his question.\n\nWishbone sat with hands clasped on the table, head bent. Next to her Stretch was hunched over. The new man they called Greenie leaned against the doorjamb that separated the sleeping quarters from the living space and quietly smoked a cheroot. He looked slightly familiar but Kate couldn't place him.\n\n\"I say that's bloody marvelous,\" Dook exclaimed at one point. Another time he yelled out, \"Rubbish!\"\n\nIgnoring his outbursts Kate kept reading. \"'Miss Hattie was in a quandary. She didn't know whether to give her heart to the dashing Brandon or to stay true to the dull but safe Mr. Booker.'\"\n\nStretch thumped the table with his fist. \"To Brandon!\"\n\nWishbone shook his head. \"That's ridiculous. Brandon sounds like a saint or somethin'. No man worth his salt is that good.\"\n\n\"Speak for yourself,\" Stretch said.\n\nWishbone glared at him, his steer horn mustache twitching. \"So what are you? God's gift to women?\"\n\nStretch leaned his body over the table. \"Are you saying I ain't?\"\n\nFearing a fight was about to erupt, Kate cleared her throat. \"Gentlemen.\" The instant she had their attention she continued to read and didn't stop until she reached chapter five.\n\n\"I think that's all for tonight,\" she said, and the men groaned.\n\nFeedbag frowned. \"But we don't know who the lady will snag.\"\n\n\"Or what happened to the gold,\" added Wishbone.\n\nShe'd hoped to make them pay for making fun of her writing. Consequently, she was surprised\u2014shocked really\u2014by their interest in the story. She bit back a smile. Normally, most males wouldn't be caught dead reading a love story. Instead, these rough-and-tumble men were practically begging for more.\n\nIf she wasn't so tired she might have been tempted to keep reading, but it was late and dawn came early.\n\n\"That's for another time,\" she said, rising. \"Good night, gentlemen.\"\n\nBook in hand, she walked out of the bunkhouse and headed toward the ranch house. A drop of rain fell on her forehead and she quickened her pace.\n\n\"I like your writing.\"\n\nStartled by the male voice, she turned. The owner of the voice was silhouetted by the light from the open door of the bunkhouse, and she knew from his unkempt shoulder-length hair it was the new man, Greenie.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said. \"Do... do I know you from somewhere?\"\n\nHe moved toward her, stopping a few feet away. \"Name's Michael. Michael Adams.\"\n\nNow she knew why he looked familiar. \"You're Luke's brother.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but don't hold that against me.\"\n\nShe'd heard Luke and his brother argue, and the rancor in Michael's voice told her that the two were still at odds with one another.\n\nHe struck a match on the heel of his boot. The flame flared briefly over his whiskered face as he lit his cheroot. He took a generous puff on the slim cigar before removing it from his mouth.\n\n\"You best watch where you're walking,\" he said. \"Never know if a rattler is waiting in ambush.\"\n\nShe brushed his smoke away from her face and turned her gaze downward, though it was too dark to see the ground.\n\n\"Are you a permanent hire?\" she asked.\n\n\"Where work is concerned I'm what you might call a drifter,\" he said. \"They hired me as a cattle guard and I'll do it until I can't stand the boredom any longer.\"\n\n\"I see. By the way, my name is Kate Tenney.\"\n\n\"I know who you are.\"\n\nThe nearby windmill squeaked and the tail turned to follow the wind. Another drop of water fell, this time on her arm. It looked like Ruckus's prayers were about to be answered.\n\n\"I gotta go,\" he said. \"Get me some shut-eye.\"\n\nHe turned and she called after him, \"What is the best way to walk back to the ranch house? I don't want to step on... anything.\"\n\nHe continued walking. \"You could make a lot of noise. Let 'em know you're coming.\"\n\nShe stared after him. He walked and even sounded like his brother, which did nothing for her peace of mind. The last thing she needed was a daily reminder of Luke.\n\nA lot of noise. She could do that. She clapped her hands and stomped her feet as she headed for the ranch house. Something moved in the courtyard\u2014a shadow big enough to be human.\n\nShe stopped. \"Hello. Anyone there?\"\n\nSilence greeted her, but she sensed someone hiding in the dark. The fine hairs on her arms stood up and she shivered. Here I go again, imagining things. Still, just to be on the safe side, she flew up the steps and into the house, slamming the door behind her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nHe gasped in horror. \"You write dime novels?\" the stranger asked.\n\n\"Certainly not!\" she replied with cool regard. \"Can't you see that the cover price is clearly marked twenty-five cents?\"\n\nTwo days later Kate joined the circle of men outside the barn.\n\nIt had rained solid since Thursday night and the ground was still wet, puddles of water dotting the area. Work on the ranch had come to a standstill except for watching for flash floods and checking the herd. Now the sky was clear and the air smelled fresh.\n\nStretch, Feedbag, Mexican Pete, and all the other ranch hands grinned at her like they shared some sort of secret. At the men's insistence she had finished reading her book to them the night before. The men had taken bets as to which man the heroine would marry at the end, Brandon or Mr. Booker. Feedbag had put his money on Mr. Booker and didn't take kindly to having to pay out a week's salary to those wise enough to bet on Brandon.\n\nO.T. arrived and the good-natured teasing stopped, but not soon enough. O.T. walked around the circle, looking each person square in the face. \"Must be a reason why you're all in such a jovial mood at this hour. Something I need to know?\"\n\nAll eyes turned to Kate. Taking the hint, O.T. walked up to her. \"Goldilocks?\"\n\nKate tried to think what to say. She wasn't about to admit to reading the cowhands a dime novel. O.T. looked about to press her but Michael Adams joined the circle, late, and the foreman was immediately distracted.\n\nLuke's brother looked like he hadn't slept a wink. Even in the dim light of dawn, his eyes looked glazed and his clothes rumpled. His tan Stetson failed to hide his unkempt hair. Today he looked nothing like his brother.\n\n\"Look what we have here,\" O.T. said. \"Sleeping Beauty.\" He walked up to Michael and barked in his face. \"Is there something about 5:00 a.m. that you don't understand?\"\n\nMichael gave a sheepish grin. \"Nope.\" Belatedly he added, \"Sir.\"\n\n\"Good.\" O.T. backed away. \"Ruckus, it's all yours.\"\n\n\"Let's pray.\" Ruckus lowered his head. \"Dear heavenly Father, hear our prayer. Thank you for the rain. If you ain't too busy, we can use more.\"\n\nAt that moment the sun rose over the distant mountains revealing a carpet of grass that spread outward from the horse corral for as far as the eye could see.\n\n\"Look at that!\" Kate squealed in amazement.\n\nRuckus laughed at her enthusiasm. \"Just takes a little rain.\"\n\n\"But it's only been a couple of days.\" One short rainstorm and the dry land had turned into a luminous carpet of green. Even the nearby barrel cactus looked fuller as if bursting with pride.\n\n\"Grass roots grow close to the surface,\" Ruckus explained. \"The desert is probably the most efficient place on earth. It don't waste nothin'.\"\n\nKate rubbed her nose. \"What's that funny smell?\" It was a strong musty odor, stronger even than the smell of cattle.\n\n\"What you smell is the creosote bush,\" Ruckus said. \"You'll smell them after every rain. You best be careful of those bushes. That's where rattlers like to hide.\" He turned, his arm held high. \"Come, men, let's get to work.\"\n\nThe circle broke up, the others took off in different directions, and Kate grabbed a pitchfork leaning against the barn. She could hear Ruckus yelling before she even entered the building. Curious as to who got his dander up so early in the morning, she peered through the door and spotted Luke's brother, Michael.\n\nRuckus continued in a loud voice, \"How many times have you heard me say to lock the gates? Do you have any idea how many hours it'll take to round up those horses? We might never get them all rounded up. If I didn't like your brother so much I would have sent your hide the way of the wind long ago. This is the very last straw.\"\n\nKate stepped inside the barn. \"I left the gate open,\" she said, lifting her voice to be heard.\n\nRuckus spun around. \"You did that?\" His voice was every bit as disbelieving as his expression.\n\n\"I... I'm sorry.\"\n\nRuckus opened his mouth to say something, changed his mind, and stormed past her.\n\nKate regretted the lie, but she didn't know how else to keep him from firing Luke's brother. She turned and walked outside. Michael caught up with her, but she was in no mood to talk to him. She tried to ignore him, but he stayed by her side.\n\n\"Why did you do that?\" he asked. \"Why did you take the blame for me?\"\n\nShe kept walking. \"I didn't do it for you. I did it for your brother who is concerned about you.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said.\n\nShe spun around to face him. He looked every bit as sincere as he sounded. \"You're welcome.\" She tilted her head. \"You do know what you did was pretty serious, right?\"\n\n\"I know.\" Hands at his waist he stared at the ground a moment before settling his gaze on her. \"I guess I'm not cut out to be a ranch hand.\"\n\n\"So what are you cut out for?\" she asked.\n\nHe blew out his breath and drew a line in the ground with the toe of his boot. \"I want to be a writer like you.\" He looked up and in a quieter voice added, \"Not quite like you. I mean I don't want to write about that man and woman stuff.\"\n\n\"So what do you write?\" she asked.\n\n\"Adventure stories,\" he replied. \"Like Treasure Island.\"\n\n\"You want to write about pirates?\"\n\n\"Not just pirates. I want to write about explorers and inventors and people doin' amazin' things.\" His eyes shone as he spoke and she couldn't help but smile at his enthusiasm.\n\n\"So what's stopping you?\" she asked.\n\nThe question seemed to surprise him. \"I haven't got me a fancy education. Not like you.\"\n\n\"You don't need a fancy education,\" she said. \"You just need to write.\"\n\n\"I've been doing that.\" He gave her a sheepish look. \"I spend most of my nights writing. If I'd gotten more sleep I probably wouldn't have forgotten to close the gate.\"\n\nShe couldn't help but sympathize. She'd had her share of absentmindedness when working on a book. \"Does your brother know you want to be a writer?\" she asked.\n\n\"He knows.\" He shrugged. \"Luke knows how to make things out of iron. He don't cotton to making things out of words.\"\n\n\"Hammering out words is not so different from pounding out iron,\" she said. Sometimes the words came easy, but more often than not a writer had to work at them.\n\n\"I don't think Luke sees it that way.\" He cleared his throat. \"I was wondering, ma'am, if you'd be kind enough to look at something I wrote?\"\n\nFlattered by what he asked of her, she nonetheless hesitated. \"You do know I'm not writing anymore.\"\n\nHe looked surprised. \"If I could write like you I would never give up.\"\n\n\"I'm not that good.\" Since working at the ranch she now cringed at the errors she'd made. In one of her books she described a herd of bulls. In another, she had her heroine feed her horse straw. Then there was that lariat/lasso mix-up. Even now she had to think which one was the noun.\n\n\"You're good,\" he said. \"And I'm not just sayin' that to be nice or anything.\"\n\nHe sounded so earnest she couldn't help but smile. \"I'd be honored to read your work.\"\n\nHe looked pleased and then skeptical. \"Are you sure it won't be too much trouble? I'm not much of a speller and my punctuation gave my old teacher Miss Gimble conniptions.\"\n\nHe cited more reasons why she might not wish to help him, but never mentioned what she suspected was the real one. Each word on a page was like a little window opening up the secrets of a writer's heart. Writing was the easy part. The hard part was releasing it to the prying eyes of others.\n\n\"... and I'm not sure the ending is right and you may not even like that kind of story and...\"\n\nHead askance, she waited for him to either pause for breath or run out of excuses. \"Are you finished?\" she asked at last.\n\n\"Eh. I think so.\"\n\n\"Good. I'll read your writing. But right now we better get to work before we're both in trouble.\"\n\nHe grinned, gave a nod, and, clutching his hat to his chest, took off running. Envying his exuberance, she couldn't help but smile as she headed for the tack room. Her encounter with Luke's brother got her thinking.\n\nAs much as she enjoyed writing, she got more satisfaction from working on the ranch. She loved riding the range and racing the wind. Nothing pleased her as much as the wide-open spaces and the feeling of camaraderie when herding cattle with the other cowpunchers. She loved the idea that one day the Last Chance Ranch would be hers, and her mind fairly danced with new ideas on how she would run it.\n\nMiss Walker's aloof managing style was not what she envisioned for herself. She dreamed of filling the ranch house with guests. She might even extend an invitation to that annoying classmate of hers who looked down her nose at anyone not owning property.\n\nOn Declaration Day and the Fourth of July she would plan picnics. At Christmas she would invite ranch workers and their families to the main house for roast beef and all the trimmings.\n\nAh, yes. When Miss Kate Tenney took over the Last Chance Ranch, things would be different.\n\nRuckus called to her from atop his horse. \"We got a fire over yonder. Stay here and start muckin' out the stables.\" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to the north. A column of smoke spiraled from the ground to the sky.\n\nHe took off after Stretch, Feedbag, and the rest of the ranch hands. No sooner had he ridden away than Miss Walker mounted her horse and chased after them. Hands on her waist, Kate watched her. She envied the ease with which Miss Walker and her horse moved as one.\n\nSighing, Kate stared at the black smoke in the distance. A fire? After all that rain? It didn't seem possible but smoke didn't lie.\n\nShe chewed on her bottom lip. What if they didn't put it out in time? What if it burned a path to the ranch house? Or even started a stampede? It might even burn all the way to town and... Worried now, she headed for the tack room for her saddle. The stables could wait. Her job was putting out the fire with the rest of them, and as the future owner of the Last Chance Ranch, that's what she intended to do.\n\nThe thought terrified her, but it was high time she faced her foe\u2014just like the windmill faced the wind in Longfellow's poem. Ruckus had said she was one of the men\u2014and she intended to prove him right. With grim determination she ran the rest of the way.\n\nThe tack room was dark except for a stream of sunlight from the single window.\n\nA strange feeling came over her. Goose bumps traveled along her arms and she almost lost her nerve. Berating herself, she balled her hands and gritted her teeth, determined to conquer her fear of fire.\n\nShe reached for her saddle. Something\u2014a sound. She spun around and gasped.\n\nThe outlaw Cactus Joe stood behind her, blocking the door, a wide grin on his swarthy face. \"We meet again.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nWhen Luke opened for business that morning, Uncle Sam was waiting outside the shop. Homer greeted Luke's uncle with wagging tail.\n\n\"Hello, boy.\" Uncle Sam leaned sideways to pet the dog so as not to bend his bad back.\n\nLuke eyed him with more than a little concern. Not only was it unusual for Uncle Sam to drive into town this early since his retirement, his face looked drawn as if he'd not been sleeping well.\n\nLuke thought the world of the man. Everything Luke knew about the blacksmithing trade he learned from his uncle. It was a bittersweet day when Uncle Sam turned over the business to him. Said he wanted to try his hand at wood carving, but Luke knew his uncle simply couldn't adjust to the changing times. He considered ready-made tools, door hinges, and other household necessities an affront to his blacksmithing skills, and had even gone so far as to ban mail-order catalogs from his household.\n\n\"What brings you here so early?\" Luke asked. \"Is Aunt Bessie all right?\"\n\nUncle Sam straightened. \"Depends what you mean by all right.\" He pointed to the mug in Luke's hand. \"You don't happen to have any more Arbuckle's, do you?\"\n\n\"Upstairs. I'll get you some.\"\n\nLuke returned from his upstairs dwelling a few moments later with a steaming cup of coffee. Uncle Sam had his hand on the anvil.\n\n\"I remember the day I found this meteor,\" he said. \"A couple nights earlier we saw this light streak across the sky and some of us boys decided to hunt for it. It took me three days but I found it. You ain't gonna find a better anvil than this, not anywhere.\"\n\nLuke handed his uncle the cup of the steaming brew and listened patiently to the story that had been told perhaps a hundred, two hundred times through the years. He knew his uncle would eventually get around to telling him the real reason for his early morning visit and he was willing to wait. It was the least he could do for the man who had treated him more like a son than a nephew and had even given him his name.\n\nUncle Sam blew on the hot coffee and took a sip. \"Just what I needed,\" he said. He glanced at the broken handle of a water pump. \"They don't make things like they used to, do they?\"\n\n\"'Fraid not.\"\n\nHis uncle studied the miniature windmill centered on Luke's workbench. \"How's it coming along?\" Luke and his uncle had been discussing a new design for windmills.\n\n\"I still can't figure out how to make it flexible enough to lower to the ground, and strong enough to hold up to the wind.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" His uncle glanced around the shop. He offered no thoughts on how to get around the wind problem, which further convinced Luke something was not right.\n\n\"Do you know of anyone other than a blacksmith who works with the four elements\u2014fire, air, earth, and water?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Glassblowers maybe?\" Luke said. Where was his uncle heading with this?\n\nAbruptly Uncle Sam got to the point. \"Have you seen your Aunt Bessie recently?\"\n\n\"A couple of days ago. Why?\"\n\n\"How did she seem to you?\"\n\nLuke shrugged. \"She seemed fine.\" Her usual meddling self. \"Why? Is something wrong?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Somethin's gotten into her and it ain't right.\"\n\nAlarmed, Luke set his coffee mug on his workbench. \"What do you mean? Is she sickly?\"\n\n\"No, nothin' like that. It's just that all of a sudden she's very demandin'. Affectionate-wise, I mean. Why, the other night she insisted I peck her on the cheek for no good reason.\"\n\nLuke didn't know what to say. It wasn't like his uncle to talk about personal matters. \"Is that a bad thing?\"\n\n\"That's what I don't know.\" Uncle Sam lowered his voice. \"When an animal changes its habits, it means somethin's not right. You never know what it means with a woman.\" He took another sip of his coffee. \"She even dresses different. What do you call that slippery fabric?\"\n\nLuke scratched his head. \"I don't know. Silk? Satin?\"\n\n\"Satin, that's it. When she walks, her nightshirt sounds like rustling grass. I thought someone had left the front door open. But that's the least of it. The other night she was so slippery she plumb slid right out of bed. A body could get herself kilt wearin' that stuff.\"\n\n\"It sure don't sound like her,\" Luke said slowly. \"So what do you figure is going on?\"\n\nUncle Sam considered the question for a moment. \"Years ago, when me and your aunt first got hitched, I saw this real purty Mexican woman in Tucson. I didn't mess up or anything, but I was tempted. I prayed to God like I never prayed before to lead me from that temptation, and he did.\"\n\n\"You done the right thing.\"\n\n\"I know, but I couldn't stop feeling guilty. So I went out and bought your aunt the best frying pan money could buy. I'm tellin' you, Luke, temptation is bad, but guilt is worse. So here's what I'm thinkin'. Your aunt feels guilty about something. Do you suppose she's got her eye on someone else?\"\n\nLuke's eyes widened. \"Aunt Bessie?\"\n\n\"I'm thinkin' it might be Jeb Parker.\"\n\nLuke couldn't believe his uncle was serious. Far as he knew his aunt didn't even like the postmaster. \"You're wrong.\"\n\n\"I'm not so sure 'bout that. She's always coming up with reasons to order from that snake oil catalog even though she knows how I feel about it.\"\n\nLuke blinked. \"Aunt Bessie's ordering from Montgomery Ward?\"\n\nUncle Sam nodded. \"Hard to believe, ain't it? She don't know that I know. The way I figure it, it gives her an excuse to keep going to the post office. Do you think that's what she's up to? Do you think she's got her sights set on Parker?\"\n\nLuke shook his head. \"Aunt Bessie is a fine Christian woman. She would never look at another man.\"\n\n\"Stranger things have happened. The thing is, I don't know what to do about it.\"\n\nLuke ran his fingers through his hair. For the life of him he couldn't imagine his aunt interested in anyone else. His uncle was mistaken. Had to be. \"Maybe you should spruce yourself up a bit. Show her your good side.\"\n\nTruth be told his uncle wore his clothes until they practically fell off him. He'd still be wearing the same boots he wore in the War Between the States had his aunt not put her foot down and insisted he buy another pair.\n\n\"You figure that would help?\"\n\n\"Couldn't hurt,\" Luke said, though he was a fine one to give advice. He much preferred his old clothes to new.\n\nHis uncle ran his hands over his bristly chin. \"Maybe I'll stop at the barber for a haircut and shave on the way home.\"\n\n\"Good idea. Have you thought about giving her a geegaw?\" Luke didn't know a lot about women, but he knew they liked flowers and trinkets and such.\n\n\"A present? You mean like it's her birthday or somethin'?\"\n\n\"I don't know of any law that says gift giving is only for special occasions.\"\n\nHis uncle thought for a moment. \"Maybe you're right. Maybe a gift would get her mind off Parker. I bet she'd like a saucepan to go along with that frying pan I bought her.\" He set his coffee mug down. \"I can't tell you how much I appreciate our little talk.\"\n\n\"Glad to help,\" Luke said. He rested an arm around his uncle's shoulder and walked him outside. \"You take care of yourself, you hear?\"\n\nUncle Sam nodded. \"See you Sunday?\"\n\n\"You know you will.\"\n\n\"I'm sure Aunt Bessie will whip up something good in that new saucepan I plan to give her.\"\n\n\"Can't wait,\" Luke said.\n\nThe sound of a galloping horse made both men turn.\n\nMichael thundered up on a heaving pinto waving his hat and yelling, \"Miss Tenney has been kidnapped!\"\n\nLuke's blood turned cold. \"What are you talking about?\"\n\nMichael battled his horse in a circle. \"Cactus Joe has Miss Tenney.\" He jammed his heels into his horse's sides and took off hollering for volunteers to search for her.\n\nNo sooner had Michael taken off than Luke was on the run. Whistling to Homer, he raced to the livery for his horse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\n\"Stay away from her, you scoundrel!\"\n\n\"Curses!\" The bandit's hand flew to his side to grab his weapon but Brandon was quicker. With a single bullet to the chest the outlaw met his doom.\n\nKate battled her way through the fog. What happened? Where was she? Her head ached and nothing made sense. Was she dreaming? Maybe this was her imagination. Or simply a scene from one of her books?\n\nHer eyelids heavy as lead, she blinked against the glowing light. She tried to move but her arms and legs felt as if they were shackled.\n\nShe opened her eyes again, but it took several tries before she could keep them open long enough to take in her surroundings. Hands and feet bound, she occupied a cot in a corner of a small, windowless adobe brick cabin. An apple-bellied stove stood in the center of the room. A plain wood table and two ladder-back chairs took up what little space was left.\n\nShe realized suddenly that she wasn't alone. The man she recognized as Cactus Joe sat watching her with his one good eye.\n\nFear knotted inside, but she refused to look away or let him know how scared she was. She pressed an elbow against the narrow cot and forced herself into a sitting position.\n\nHe sat between her and the only door in the place, his chair balancing on the back two legs.\n\n\"What...?\" Her mouth was so dry she could barely form the words. Moistening her lips she tried again. \"What do you want?\"\n\nA slow grin inched across his face. \"At last she awakes.\" Lowering the front legs of his chair to the floor he rose to his feet, his bulky form seeming to fill the room.\n\nNerves tensed, she flattened her back against the rough surface of the adobe brick wall.\n\n\"Let me go,\" she pleaded. \"I have to help put out a fire.\"\n\nHis grin widened. \"There is no fire. I just created some smoke to get everyone out of the way.\" He made a face. \"I took a chance they'd leave you behind. Now don't go looking at me like that.\" He sounded offended. \"You and me, we're friends.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"You kidnapped me and tied me up!\"\n\n\"I only do that to people I like.\" He waved his hand. \"Sorry I can't offer you better accommodations. Crime doesn't pay much but at least you get to work your own hours.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"What do you want with me?\"\n\n\"I've been tryin' for years to get people around here to take me seriously. But no, they think I'm a joke. The marshal chases me a mile out of town and gives up. He doesn't even bother forming a posse. The way this town treats its criminals, it don't deserve none.\"\n\nHis one good eye watered and Kate stared at him, not sure what to think. Was the man crying?\n\n\"When you think of outlaws, what name comes to mind?\" He sniffed. \"Not Cactus Joe. Oh no. It's Jesse James.\" He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose. \"The man is dead but he still gets all the respect. That's where you come in. You're gonna help me get some of what he has. I want respect too.\"\n\nBrushing away a single tear that rolled down his cheek he stuffed his handkerchief back in his pocket. He picked up a book from the table and she immediately recognized it as her own. She groaned inwardly. Did everyone in Cactus Patch own her book?\n\n\"Miss Hattie's Dilemma,\" he read aloud. He studied the cover of a man and woman in an embrace. The man was supposed to be Brandon, though the cartoon rendition bore no resemblance to the man she envisioned.\n\n\"Not bad. But I need a title that's a bit more catchy. I read your story from beginning to end. Every page. And you know what? You ain't half bad. None of them other books have heart. Not like yours. You're even better than that fellow Dickens.\"\n\nShe gaped at him. Dickens? The man obviously didn't know anything about literature. Critics had torn her stories apart and called her last book a \"hapless piece of flapdoodle.\" The highest praise her editor ever paid her was to say that her stories were \"interesting.\"\n\nSuch criticism was especially painful since the only reason she became a writer was to earn respect. Unfortunately, writing earned her no such esteem. In Boston, people were judged by their circumstances and hers were found wanting. Those who knew her never saw her as anything more than the daughter of a deserting father and an alcoholic mother. Her classmates still referred to her as \"the girl who cleaned latrines to pay her way.\" It was as if her diploma had less value, somehow, because of what she had to do to get it.\n\nIt was just her luck that one of the few people outside of a few bored cowhands to appreciate her writing talent was an outlaw.\n\n\"How... how did you know I was a writer?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"People talk and I listen.\" He pulled off his eye patch and tossed it into a box with others. He then lifted off his mustache and black wig and her mouth dropped open. He was completely bald, his head as shiny as a newly laid egg. He looked like a completely different man.\n\n\"The day you and I bumped into each other at the post office was the day your book arrived in the mail.\"\n\n\"Bumped into\u2014\" She thought back to how her hair had stood on end. No wonder. \"The bearded old man I ran into that day. That was you.\" She was willing to bet it was also him in the courtyard the other night.\n\nHe nodded and tossed her book on the table. He then reached for a stack of dime novels by several other authors, holding them up one by one. \"Kit Carson. Wild Bill Hickok.\" He scoffed. \"What's good for Kit and Bill is good enough for Cactus Joe.\"\n\nWith a sweep of his arm, he brushed the books off the table and they scattered upon the dirt floor.\n\n\"That's why you're here. You're gonna write a book about me.\"\n\nShe shook her head. Luke said the man was short a couple of hat sizes and apparently he was right. \"I've given up writing. I'm a rancher now.\"\n\n\"That's plain loco. Why would anyone in their right mind trade books for beeves?\"\n\n\"It's none of your business why.\" She didn't owe him an explanation.\n\nHe shrugged and pointed to a Remington writing machine on the table. \"I take it you know how to use one of those.\"\n\n\"I do but\u2014\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" He rubbed his hands together. \"You're gonna write about the life and times of Cactus Joe\u2014the Master of Disguise.\" He pulled a lethal-looking knife from his waist and moved toward the cot.\n\nThinking he meant to do her harm, she cried out, \"I'll write your s-story!\"\n\nHe grinned. \"As if you got a choice.\" He cut the ropes off her feet and hands. Replacing the knife at his waist, he gestured toward the table. \"Have a seat and we'll get to work.\"\n\nWhen she didn't move, he whipped the gun out of his holster and blew in the barrel before pointing it in her direction.\n\nSince his vision was no longer hampered by his eye patch, she figured she better do as she was told. For now. Who knew what kind of shot he was when using both eyes?\n\nSwallowing hard, she slid off the tick mattress and he smiled with approval. \"Good. Now set your carcass in that chair and do what I tell you.\"\n\nHer legs stiff, she felt slightly woozy. The room spun around and she reached for the table to steady herself.\n\n\"Chloroform will do that to you,\" he said.\n\n\"You chloroformed me?\" she gasped.\n\n\"Now don't get yourself all in a snit. You'll be good as new when it wears off. At least that's what the bottle says.\" He pulled out the chair and gestured with his arm. \"I'll get you some coffee.\"\n\nHolding on to the chairs she circled the table to avoid contact with him and sat in front of the typing machine. He holstered his gun and handed her a sheet of paper. He then poured coffee from the pot on the stove and set the chipped cup next to the typewriter.\n\nSitting opposite her, he poured himself a shot of whiskey. He lifted his glass, swallowed the contents in one gulp, and wiped his mouth with the back of his arm.\n\nShe took a sip of the strong, cold brew and immediately wished she hadn't. Never had she tasted anything so bitter. Hands shaking, she set the cup down with a clatter. \"Do you have any water?\"\n\nHe handed her a canteen of water and she wiped off the top before raising it to her lips.\n\nAfter quenching her thirst, she fed a sheet of paper into the machine and rested her fingers on the keyboard.\n\n\"What are you waiting for?\" he demanded.\n\n\"I... I don't know what to type.\" She'd never written a book about an outlaw. Her stories were fantasy and held no resemblance to real life. She wrote about true love.\n\n\"Don't you normally start by writing 'Chapter One'?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course.\" She could type moderately fast with a minimum of errors, but today her trembling fingers made it necessary to go slow or risk hitting the wrong keys.\n\nHe stood and walked behind her to peer over her shoulder. After she finally managed to get the two words centered on the page, he nodded and rubbed his hands together. \"Excellent.\"\n\nHe paced back and forth. While he considered how to start his story, her gaze darted around the cabin. The walls were bare except for a Pears year calendar hanging from a nail. A few dates were circled in black ink.\n\nShe had little hope of anyone coming to her rescue. Since she hadn't taken her clothes Miss Walker would know something was wrong, but that's all she would know. That meant Kate was on her own. Keeping her wits about her might be the only chance she had of escape.\n\nCactus Joe stopped pacing. \"I guess the best way to start is at the beginning. How about this? Joseph Smith Landers was born in Kentucky in 1850.\" He stopped and glared at her. \"Why ain't you typing?\"\n\n\"That's... boring.\" A man intent upon having his story told probably had a high opinion of himself. If she was right, then perhaps she could use his overblown ego to her advantage. First she would have to earn his trust. Let him think she was on his side.\n\n\"There's nothing boring about being born,\" he said, sounding peeved.\n\n\"It's just that readers want excitement. They want adventure.\" She forced a smile. \"I suspect you're just the one to give it to them.\"\n\nHer ploy seemed to work because he looked pleased and his chest puffed out. \"You're right.\" He rubbed his whiskered chin. \"So where should I start?\"\n\nShe pretended to give the matter careful consideration. \"Perhaps you should start with your first holdup. Why you became an outlaw.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" He resumed pacing. After several moments he began again. \"I held up my first stage at the age of ten.\"\n\nShe typed half the sentence before pausing. \"No one will believe you were ten when you held up your first stage.\" Even fiction had to be plausible.\n\nHe thought a moment. \"You're right. The truth is I was only eight when I held up my first stage.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Eight?\"\n\nHe splayed his hands. \"What can I say? My poor mama was sick and we needed money for food and medicine. I pretended that I had fallen off a horse and broke my leg.\" He laughed at the memory. \"You should have seen the look on the driver's face when he stopped to help me and I pulled out a gun.\"\n\nEight years old. It was hard to believe. She set to work typing and the more he talked the more her imagination took flight. Her fingers flew over the keyboard as if having a mind of their own.\n\nLittle Joe held the gun steady in both hands. His heart pounded with fear and sweat poured down his back. If the driver figured out the gun was empty, Joe would never get his hands on the money box, and his poor mama would not get the medical care she so desperately needed.\n\nWords poured out of her like water from a pump. She forgot she was writing under duress, forgot, even, that she was held captive. She had no idea how much she had missed the exhilarating feeling that came with creative flow, but it was more than that. Much about Cactus Joe's early life paralleled her own experiences. His father deserted the family, forcing him to take over as breadwinner at a very young age, and the inner pain she'd carried around for so long now found a place to light.\n\nHour after hour Cactus Joe dictated his story and she typed. She typed until she was no longer certain whose story she wrote, his or hers.\n\nHis language was crude and his thoughts fragmented, but there was something compelling about a young boy's determination to save his sick mother\u2014just as she had tried to save her own. Though she had no pity for the man, her heart ached for the child.\n\nFrom time to time he peered over her shoulder to read what she wrote. \"Yes, yes,\" he'd shout with glee. Or, \"Wait till they read about that!\"\n\nThe cabin had no windows and it grew hot and stuffy. Sweat beaded her forehead and her shirtwaist stuck to her back, but the stack of typed pages kept growing.\n\nIn the past, when she wrote her own books, she held back for fear of giving away too much of herself. But in telling Joe's story she could tell her own without holding back. As a consequence, she wrote like she had never before written, wrote even better than she knew how to write.\n\nHow such a thing was possible she didn't know and didn't care. At that moment all that mattered was getting the words out and releasing her pain. Oh yes, and earning Cactus Joe's trust." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nEleanor stood next to the horse corral while O.T. gave her a rundown on the search efforts. He finished with a frustrated shrug.\n\nFoot resting on the weathered fence, he pressed down his hat to keep the wind from blowing it off. \"Sorry, Miz Walker, but me and the boys will keep lookin'. All hands and the cook are on the task.\"\n\n\"How could this have happened?\" she fumed. Five days. Five days Kate had been gone, and nothing. The wind softened her voice, but not the frustration and worry. She'd asked herself that very same question countless times since Kate disappeared. She now asked it of her foreman. \"How could we have fallen for such a ruse?\"\n\nThere was no fire. The smoke had been created from saltpeter and sugar. It was an old but effective trick that succeeded in getting Eleanor and her men away from the ranch.\n\nHad Ruckus not found that eye patch in the tack room, they might never have known what happened to Kate. Several saddles had been turned over and it looked like the girl had put up quite a fight.\n\n\"I dunno, Miz Walker. That man is sneaky as they come.\"\n\n\"Sneaky, yes, but he's never been more than a nuisance.\" Postmaster Parker was more of a crook than Cactus Joe. \"The marshal has never considered him a serious threat.\" No one had, for that matter.\n\n\"I dunno what to say, Miz Walker.\"\n\nEleanor sighed. She was used to trouble. Running a ranch meant dealing with trials and tribulations. Thieves had been stealing Last Chance cattle for years, but this was different. This was personal. Losing Kate was like losing her daughter all over again.\n\nPoor girl. She must be scared out of her wits. That is, if she was still... Eleanor quickly banished the thought. No sense thinking the worst. Not yet.\n\nFollowing Kate's run-in with the javelina, Eleanor had issued an order that Kate was not to be left alone on the range. The desert was a dangerous place for even the most experienced cowhand, but it could be deadly for a greenhorn like Kate.\n\nIt never occurred to Eleanor that the real danger lay closer to home\u2014in the tack room of all places. She scanned the distance, turning to take in all four directions. With the high mountains, hidden canyons, abandoned mines\u2014not to mention the Mexican border and vast desert\u2014Eleanor didn't hold much hope that Kate would be found.\n\n\"Where is he keeping her?\" And for what purpose? So far they'd received no ransom note\u2014nothing!\n\nO.T. lowered his foot and grabbed the reins of his horse. He was obviously exhausted, dark shadows skirting his watery eyes, but he looked no worse than Eleanor felt.\n\n\"I don't know, Miz Walker. Me and the boys are doin' everything possible to find her.\"\n\n\"What about the marshal? What is he doing?\" What does that man ever do about anything?\n\n\"He's searching like the rest of us. Everyone in town is helping.\"\n\n\"Everyone?\"\n\n\"Even the church ladies. They've been providing meals for the searchers. And the widow White made a generous donation to up the reward for capturing Cactus Joe.\"\n\n\"That old gossip Mrs. White did that?\"\n\n\"That she did, ma'am. That she did.\"\n\nEleanor pursed her lips. It was hard to believe. She hadn't spoken to the woman in a good twenty years. Not since Mrs. White led the boycott of Last Chance beef following Eleanor's divorce. Eleanor hadn't stepped foot in the church since and only went into Cactus Patch on rare occasions, preferring to conduct her business in the county seat of Tombstone.\n\nThe wind picked up and Adam's spinning blades clanked and creaked. Eleanor didn't like the sound of it because it signaled trouble. June was the start of monsoon season, and the strong wind was a sure sign that one was on the way. Even the horses in the corral seemed to sense it. One bay kept nodding his head and pawing the ground, and the newly broken pinto paced nervously.\n\nAs if she needed further proof of an impending storm, a funnel of reddish-brown sand rose from the distant desert floor.\n\nA dust storm, or Arizona duster as the locals called them, would slow down the search, if not altogether bring it to a halt. Still, there was no beating the weather. All one could hope for was to outlast it.\n\n\"Find her,\" Eleanor snapped.\n\nO.T. nodded. \"I'll do my best.\"\n\nHe mounted his horse and rode away, lowering his head against the wind. Her divided skirt whipping her legs, Eleanor tightened the rawhide straps beneath her chin. Then she closed her eyes and prayed.\n\nIt had been a long time since she'd turned to God. Not since she sat at her young daughter's bedside. God hadn't seen fit to answer her prayers then. Why this time should be any different she didn't know, but what else was there to do but pray?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "During the day, Cactus Joe made Kate work nonstop on his story. She typed until her hands ached and her eyes grew weary. She typed until her brain turned to mush. She was exhausted and the body that once ached from too much exercise now ached from lack of it. Her irritability increased and she was less cautious around her captor and more confrontational.\n\n\"I'm not writing that,\" she said, her voice as irritable as she felt. It had been five days and she'd had enough. She wanted to go home in the worst possible way. Though she'd only been in Arizona for a short while the ranch felt more like home than Boston ever did.\n\nShe pushed away from the typewriter and folded her arms across her chest. \"It makes you sound like a victim.\"\n\n\"I am a victim.\"\n\n\"You're a thief, a crook, and a kidnapper!\"\n\n\"That's what makes me interestin'.\" He pulled out his six-shooter as he did on such occasions and brandished it. \"Now write.\"\n\nThe gun no longer scared her. He wasn't likely to do her harm until after she had finished writing his story. As far as she could tell, she wasn't even halfway through.\n\nNonetheless she set to work again and the steady tap, tap, tap of the typewriter keys accompanied his voice. From time to time he ranted about other outlaws\u2014or rather one specific outlaw.\n\n\"Jesse James!\" He practically spit out the man's name. \"He needed a gang to do what I do alone.\"\n\nKate raised an eyebrow but said nothing. They worked for hours on end stopping only to eat. He served her three meals a day and the menu of cheese, beef jerky, and crackers never varied.\n\nHe watched her like a hawk. Every morning he stepped outside to allow her time to attend to her ablutions in private while he guarded the door. At night, he tied her to the cot and stretched out on the floor in front of the door.\n\nHe seemed interested only in her writing ability, and never took advantage of her physically. Oddly enough, she no longer feared him. His overblown opinion of himself made her laugh. He took offense but she couldn't help it. By his own admission he'd never hurt anyone, and his most successful holdup was for a little less than thirty dollars.\n\n\"It's not the money. It's the thought that counts,\" he hastened to explain.\n\nKate clamped her mouth shut. What he said may be true for most things, but he would never be compared to Jesse James unless he thought a whole lot bigger. Of course, she had no intention of saying as much.\n\nThe few times she was unable to keep her opinions to herself they argued, but mostly he talked about his life and she wrote.\n\nAt night she stared up at the dark ceiling unable to sleep, trying to think of a plan to escape. At such times the memory of Luke would come unbidden.\n\n\"Do you think I'm going to grab you and kiss you?\"\n\nSuch recollections only made her ordeal that much harder to bear and she quickly turned her thoughts in another direction. Better to use her time to think of a way to outsmart her captor than to waste it with foolish memories.\n\nShe was allowed outside only to use the privy. At such times, Cactus Joe stood guard, gun in hand. Not that escape was possible. It wasn't. Except for a small barn where Cactus Joe kept his horse and wagon and a windmill that provided water, his adobe hut was surrounded by flat desert land, with no place to hide.\n\nShe didn't often turn to God. Instead, whenever she was in trouble her fertile mind concocted possible scenarios that would work in a book but seldom in real life. But by the fifth night of her captivity she was desperate enough to try anything, even prayer.\n\nDear God, the Father. Send rain. She wondered if she would ever be able to start a prayer without repeating Ruckus's refrain. Tears slid down her cheeks as she thought of him and the others. What they must think of her, taking off like that.\n\nOnce again she turned to prayer, but this time it was her words, not Ruckus's, she sent to heaven. God, Ruckus said you care about your people. If that's true, I need your help. I really, really want to go home.\n\nEven as she pleaded with God, she doubted it did any good. God had deserted her long ago, just like her father. Just like her mother. Just like Luke would if she gave him the chance.\n\nAnd that she would never do.\n\nBut not the ranch. The ranch would always be there for her.\n\nOn the morning of the sixth day she awoke from an uneasy sleep to the sound of the howling wind. It had blown all night long and at times she feared it would rip off the roof.\n\nOn occasion Cactus Joe peered outside but quickly slammed the door shut. Sand filtered through cracks and soon even the keys of the typewriter felt gritty.\n\n\"I need to use the privy,\" she said after a couple of hours of working nonstop.\n\nCactus Joe made a face. \"I'm not going outside in this weather.\"\n\n\"And I'm not writing until you do.\"\n\nHe pulled out his gun. \"You'll do what I say.\"\n\nShe glared at him and read aloud as she typed. \"'Cactus Joe is an ugly mean outlaw who can't even steal gold from a dead man's purse!'\"\n\nShe pulled out the paper and tossed it at him. That was a far cry from how he wanted to be portrayed. Predictably, her ploy worked, for though he glared at her, hand on his gun, he relented.\n\n\"Have it your way. But you better not keep me waiting long in this weather or I'll drag you out of the privy by your hair.\"\n\nSwitching the gun from his right to his left hand, he reached behind his back for the door handle. The door flew open and slammed against the wall with a bang, ripping the calendar off the wall.\n\nHead lowered against the wind and grinding sand, Kate ducked outside before Cactus Joe could change his mind.\n\nThe wind practically knocked her off her feet, the sand nearly blinding her. She held a hand in front of her watery eyes and squinted between her fingers. It was impossible to see more than a foot in front of her. She glanced around, but Cactus Joe had vanished behind a thick cloud of churning sand.\n\nArms held out in front, she stumbled forward blindly and hit the ground on all fours. She tried standing, but the wind forced her to crawl on hands and knees. She could hardly breathe. Grit entered her mouth and nose and lashed at her flesh. She pulled the bandanna from around her neck and covered the lower part of her face. She still couldn't see, but at least now she could breathe without swallowing sand. The wind at her back, she lost all sense of direction. Where was Cactus Joe? Behind her? In front of her? Where for that matter was the cabin? Please, God, help me.\n\nWas she crawling in circles? Was that Cactus Joe calling her? It was hard to tell over the loud whooshing sound of the wind.\n\nIf things weren't bad enough her imagination took flight and she began to imagine the worst. What if she was buried alive? What if all that was ever found of her was bleached white bones? Torn between escape and the safety of the cabin, she mindlessly and frantically crawled.\n\nShe forced herself to concentrate. Mustn't stop. Got to keep going. Her knees and palms stung and her eyes burned. Right hand, left knee. Must keep going.\n\nTime and place held no meaning. She crawled for hours, or was it minutes? She couldn't be sure. She crawled for miles, or was it only a few feet? Any moment Cactus Joe could pluck her out of the grinding sand. The thought surged through her like fire, urging her onward, ever onward.\n\nWas that someone calling her name? Was she dreaming? Was that Brandon? And why did he sound like... Luke?\n\nShe moved blindly ahead, heart pounding, mouth dry as cotton. Right hand, left knee... got to keep going. Panting breathlessly, she crawled on hands and knees until she could crawl no more." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nLuke set out again the instant the wind died down. Desert sandstorms generally lasted only a short time, but this one had started the day before and had blown all night.\n\nThe air still smelled of dust and the sky showed more gray than blue. Visibility was still poor, but at least he could see for a good twenty feet or more\u2014a blessing. He narrowed his eyes to see the moving dot up ahead that was Homer.\n\nHe'd searched for days, ever since his brother first broke the news of Kate's disappearance. Even when the wind started and the sand whipped around like bits of metal, he searched. He'd checked every mine shaft, deserted cabin, and old Spanish ruin he could find and so far, nothing. Any tracks that Cactus Joe might have left had long been covered by shifting sands.\n\nWhere is she, Lord? Where is she?\n\nVisions of her hampered his search. He imagined her in the distance waving to him, calling to him, beckoning him, and he kept chasing down ghosts. Exhaustion affected his thinking, his vision, his hearing.\n\nThe only real sleep he'd had was last night during the height of the sandstorm when visibility was zero, but even then he'd only gotten an hour or two of shut-eye. His body ached from the hours in the saddle and although he didn't normally carry a gun, he carried one now. He'd borrowed the weapon from Uncle Murphy. He hoped to God he wouldn't have to use it, but he felt better having it.\n\nHe wasn't a vengeful man, not by any means. He was more likely to turn the other cheek than fight back\u2014except for when family was involved. For that reason he was completely unprepared for the anger\u2014the absolute outrage\u2014that coiled inside like a snake ready to strike. If Cactus Joe hurt a single hair on Kate's head, Luke wouldn't be responsible for his actions. God help him.\n\nHe told himself he would feel no different had someone else been kidnapped\u2014a stranger even. He told himself that the searing pain in his chest was nothing more than natural concern he would feel for anyone. He told himself a lot of nonsense during the long hours in the saddle. Finally he had no choice but to acknowledge the corn. He felt something for Kate\u2014some kind of hankering. Didn't know what exactly. Wasn't love. Couldn't be love. A man like him and an educated woman like her.\n\nShe didn't even belong in Cactus Patch\u2014and certainly not on a ranch. Eventually she'd figure that out for herself. She would then go back to Boston, go back to her books and Greek philosophers. Go back where she belonged. The thought drove through him like a knife. He reined in his horse and took a moment to calm himself. Mustn't think about Kate leaving. The only thing that mattered was finding her.\n\nHomer let out a series of short barks. Leveling his gaze toward the dog he could see no sign of a cabin or shack. Homer had probably found another prairie dog town or tortoise hole. Or perhaps a dead steer. They'd passed several already that morning, all done in by sand suffocation.\n\nHomer's barks grew more intense, and Luke yanked his bandanna away from his mouth and whistled. Normally Homer would come running upon hearing Luke's call but not today. Instead, he continued to bark.\n\nSpotting something ahead, Luke urged his horse into a gallop.\n\nThe odd shape turned out to be an overturned wagon probably left behind by some hapless traveler. Since Homer kept barking and wagging his tail, Luke slid off his horse to have a look, hand on the weapon by his side.\n\nHe spotted a boot beneath the partly buried wagon. Heart pounding, he quickly flipped over the wagon, not knowing what he would find until he saw a flash of blond hair.\n\n\"Kate!\" He dropped to his knees and shook her.\n\nShe groaned and her lashes fluttered, and he let out a cry of relief. Praise God she was alive. Had it not been for Homer he might well have missed her. After a moment, big blue eyes peered at him from over a red bandanna and he thought never to see a more beautiful sight.\n\n\"Luke? Is that you?\" She sat up, her back against a wagon wheel, and gazed at him in disbelief.\n\nHe grinned. \"It's me.\" Her voice was hoarse but nothing had ever sounded sweeter to his ears. At least this time she didn't call him the name of that imaginary fellow, Brandon.\n\nHe removed her bandanna and, after fetching his canteen from his saddle, dropped down on one knee to hold it to her parched lips. Though the wagon provided shade, heat rose from the desert floor.\n\nShe drank thirstily before pushing the canteen away. Homer was suddenly all over her, licking her face and hands.\n\n\"Down, boy,\" Luke ordered. Homer sat, panting, his wagging tail whipping up a cloud of sand.\n\nLuke searched Kate's face for some clue as to her condition. He still couldn't believe he found her. It was nothing short of a miracle.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked. Her hands and face were reddened by the sand and wind, but otherwise he could see no signs of injury.\n\nHer mouth curved slightly. \"Now I am.\"\n\nHe smiled back at her and he thought his chest would burst with relief. His prayers had been answered. God was good.\n\n\"He didn't hurt you, did he?\" He couldn't bear the thought of the man putting his grubby hands on her.\n\n\"No,\" she whispered. \"He didn't hurt me.\"\n\n\"Why did he take you? I don't understand.\"\n\n\"He wanted me to write the story of his life,\" she said. \"Somehow he found out I was a writer.\"\n\n\"That's it?\" he asked, astonished. \"That's the reason he kidnapped you?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"That's it.\"\n\nLuke shook his head. \"I was so worried.\" Half out of his mind more like it. \"The entire town has been searchin'.\"\n\n\"How... how did you know Cactus Joe kidnapped me?\"\n\n\"They found an eye patch in the saddle room.\" He grinned. \"From what I heard you put up quite a fight.\"\n\n\"For all the good it did me.\" She stared at him from pools of liquid blue. \"I can't believe it's you. I thought I'd never see you or the ranch again,\" she whispered. \"I thought I would be buried alive. Or hopelessly lost. Or mauled by a pack of tarantulas or\u2014\"\n\nHe laughed. \"I don't think tarantulas travel in packs.\"\n\n\"It's not funny,\" she said. \"I could have been attacked by a band of javelinas.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I don't know what's worse. The things that happen to you or the things you think might happen.\"\n\nShe gave him a sheepish look. \"It's a writer's curse.\"\n\n\"Ah, that explains it.\" He poured a little water on his bandanna. \"You have sand on your nose.\"\n\nShe flinched when he touched her but whether from pain or something else he didn't know. She said Cactus Joe hadn't harmed her and he hoped to God that was true. The thought of her being hurt or compromised in some way filled him with horror.\n\nKnees in the sand, he dabbed her face gently while gazing into her eyes. Now, as always, he could see sadness in their depths and he wondered what it would take to make that sadness go away.\n\n\"I don't have a very good way with words. If Michael was here he'd know what to say. I just want you to know I'm not gonna hurt you,\" he said.\n\nShe studied him, a thoughtful shadow at her brow. \"I'd say you have a very good way with words.\"\n\nHe knew it wasn't true, but he liked that she said it. Ever so gently he ran his bandanna over her brow, nose, and cheeks in an effort to soothe her sand-burned skin and clean off the tiny grains of sand. He felt her tremble beneath his touch, but she didn't move away and for that he was grateful.\n\n\"There you go,\" he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.\n\nHer lashes flew up and she smiled. \"Thank you.\" Then all at once her eyes filled with tears. \"I'm sorry... It's just I thought I was lost and no one would find me.\"\n\nSomething tugged in his chest and a lump rose in his throat. The need to protect her was like a fire burning deep inside. \"It's all right,\" he said. He ran a knuckle down her damp cheek. When she offered no resistance he wrapped a protective arm around her and cradled her. \"You forgot about Homer. His nose can sniff out a pretty woman anywhere.\"\n\nHearing his name, Homer barked and wagged his tail, and Kate laughed even as tears rolled down her face.\n\nLuke smoothed her hair away from her face. Hugging her close, he sat and rocked her, murmuring sweet words of comfort in her ear. She buried her head against his chest and sobbed quietly, her tears leaving a damp spot on his shirt.\n\nHe worked with steel and iron and knew the strength that each required. This tender, gentle side of him was something new, requiring strength of another kind.\n\nGradually her sobs subsided and she peered up at him, the first glimmers of trust shimmering in the depths of her eyes.\n\n\"You're safe now,\" he whispered. He tightened his hold and she clung to him like she was never going to let him go." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nOffering her hand to Brandon, she fervently prayed that her power of duplicity was such that she could hide her all-consuming passion.\n\nNo one had ever held Kate the way Luke held her.\n\nHe was gentle, soft-spoken, and kind, his concern for her sincere. He was all the things she never thought she'd see in a man. All the things she'd dared not hope for. All the things that, at the moment, she so desperately needed.\n\nCradled in his arms, she lifted a hand to his face, absorbing the sweet essence of his flesh against her open palm. His gaze met hers and a warm shiver flowed through her. Words escaped her but none were needed. Tension left her body, and for the first time in her life she felt she could completely and wholeheartedly trust a man, that she could trust this man.\n\nHis steady gaze bored into her as if he sensed she had given him permission to proceed, to claim more of her heart.\n\nHe pressed his lips tenderly on her forehead. It felt so good to be kissed by him, held by him. Oddly enough, she felt safe. More than that, she felt cherished\u2014respected\u2014and no one had ever made her feel that way.\n\nShe lifted her chin and his gaze settled on her lips. He hesitated before covering her mouth with his own. Even with his lips pressed against hers she hesitated to kiss him back. Startled, she realized how little she'd given of herself to people through the years. How that must have frustrated him, frustrated others. Cheated her readers, even. How would it feel to give her heart fully and completely to someone without fear of being hurt or disappointed?\n\nShyly at first, she worked her hands up his chest and around his neck. He gazed at her tenderly and waited, allowing her to set the pace. His patience broke through her last reserve and she rose up to kiss him full on the lips.\n\nWith a soft groan he crushed her against his chest. Nothing had prepared her for the taste, the feel, and the heat of him. Nothing she had written in her books could compare.\n\n\"Love isn't kind. Men can't be trusted.\"\n\nDesperate to shut out the echoes of the past, she gave herself freely to the full pleasure of his kiss. He pulled back, his eyes warm with approval, before reclaiming her lips. Soft currents rushed through her, chased by the chilling words she tried so hard to forget.\n\n\"No man is forever. He will use you and discard you like yesterday's newspaper.\"\n\nGo away, go away, go away. But her mama's words welled up from the past, clamoring in her head. Mocking her. \"Nothing good happens to people like us.\"\n\nShe tore away from him with a choking sob. He looked all at once worried, puzzled, and concerned. \"Kate?\"\n\nShe tried to speak but her voice caught in her throat. Her tears veiled his face but not the pain in his eyes. His kisses were more wonderful than anything she ever could have imagined. But rather than satisfy, he made her want more and this made her cry harder. There could never be more.\n\n\"I can't,\" she whispered. \"I can't do this.\" I won't. She knew what she wanted and it wasn't Luke. Her future was the ranch and she refused to settle for anything less.\n\nHe stared at her, his face a mask of confusion. Sensing his master's bewilderment, Homer barked and the tension snapped.\n\nShe pulled away and brushed off her skirt with shaking hands. She then palmed away her tears. \"Would you mind taking me home?\"\n\n\"Look at me, Kate. Please.\"\n\nLooking at him was out of the question. She needed to put as much distance between them as possible. She must forget his kisses, forget being in his arms. What she couldn't forget\u2014must never again forget\u2014was that no man could be trusted. Not even a man like Luke Adams." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "It was late, but Kate was too wound up to sleep. Instead, she stood on the balcony off her room and stared at what seemed like an endless night. The scent of cattle was especially potent\u2014or maybe it was simply that her nose hadn't yet adjusted to being back at the ranch.\n\nRuckus had been the first to rush out to greet her the moment she and Luke rode up on his horse, but the others, even Wishbone and Stretch, hadn't been far behind. Ruckus, of course, couldn't let the occasion pass without reciting from the Bible.\n\n\"I'm gonna have to start callin' you Moses,\" he said. \"Even though you didn't roam the desert for no forty years.\"\n\n\"It felt like it,\" she said.\n\nBo made his special cactus pie to celebrate the occasion, and Rosita filled her bath with three inches of water instead of the usual two. Miss Walker didn't say much, but she insisted that Kate take the following day off.\n\nO.T. gave strict instructions that Kate was to be watched at all times until Cactus Joe's capture. Kate wasn't allowed to leave the house without an escort.\n\nThe excitement of returning to the ranch had nothing to do with her inability to sleep. It was Luke, pure and simple, and she didn't know what to do about it.\n\nIt had been hours since he kissed her, almost a full day, and yet her lips still burned with the memory, and her body still ached with the need he had awakened.\n\nHis kisses had been tender, his touch gentle, and so different from anything she had known, even in her imagination.\n\nNever before had she allowed herself to be tempted by a man. Having an education helped, for many men shied away from a woman with a college degree. Writing helped, too, for she could live vicariously through her characters without opening herself up to harm.\n\n\"I'm not a fancy man. I don't have a way with words.\"\n\nOh, but what a way he had with his lips, his touch. She squeezed her eyes shut. Mustn't think of that, mustn't think of his kisses. He was a man, which meant nothing about him was permanent. He could walk away and never look back, just like the others. The only difference was she had no intention of giving him the chance." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Kate was late for breakfast and so she was surprised to find Miss Walker sitting at the dining room table. Usually by this time, the ranch owner was already in the saddle checking out her cattle or windmills or fences or the hundred and one little details that cropped up on any given day.\n\n\"I'm sorry... I slept in.\"\n\nMiss Walker waved away her apology. \"I told you to take the day off.\"\n\nKate went to the buffet and poured herself a cup of coffee. She then took her place at the opposite end of the table.\n\nMiss Walker regarded her with analytical eyes. \"Has your unfortunate experience with Cactus Joe changed your mind about the ranch?\"\n\nThe question surprised her. \"No, of course not,\" she said, alarmed. What would ever make Miss Walker think such a thing?\n\n\"And you still wish to proceed as planned?\" Miss Walker asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Kate replied. \"Nothing has changed.\" She hesitated a beat before asking, \"You're not... having second thoughts about me, are you?\"\n\n\"I've had second thoughts about you from the moment you arrived at the ranch,\" Miss Walker said in her usual forthright manner. \"But this isn't about what I think. Now that you've been kidnapped I wouldn't blame you for wanting to return to Boston.\"\n\n\"I have no intention of returning to Boston,\" Kate said. Arizona was her home and she meant to stay.\n\nMiss Walker's eyebrows rose. \"Even though Cactus Joe is still out there God knows where?\"\n\n\"He doesn't frighten me. He simply wanted me to write his biography.\"\n\n\"He kidnapped you to write?\" Miss Walker sat back in her chair. \"That's all he wanted?\"\n\nBefore Kate could answer Rosita appeared. \"Marshal Morris is here. He wishes to speak to Se\u00f1orita Tenney.\"\n\nMiss Walker made a face. \"For all the good it will do. The man couldn't find a bull in a chicken coop,\" she muttered. In a louder voice she said, \"Show him in.\"\n\nThe marshal walked into the room a moment later, hat in hand. He greeted Miss Walker with a respectful nod of his head. \"I'm sorry to bother you so early, ma'am, but I need to ask Miss Tenney a few questions.\"\n\nA shadow of annoyance crossed Miss Walker's face. \"Can't this wait? Miss Tenney has had a terrible ordeal.\"\n\n\"It won't take long,\" he assured her.\n\n\"It's all right,\" Kate said, though she was touched by Miss Walker's concern for her welfare.\n\nMiss Walker gestured toward the buffet. \"Then pour yourself some coffee and have a seat.\"\n\n\"Much obliged but I've had my belly wash for the day.\" He sat on a chair and set his hat on the table. He wasted no time on formalities. \"Where exactly did Cactus Joe keep you captive?\"\n\n\"All I can tell you is that it was an adobe hut. It had no windows and only one door and a flat roof. There was a windmill outside and a privy.\" She glanced at Miss Walker, who listened attentively. \"I can't think of anything else.\"\n\nThe marshal cleared his voice and looked away. \"Did... he hurt you?\"\n\n\"He chloroformed me,\" she replied. \"But otherwise, no. He didn't compromise me in any way.\"\n\nThe marshal nodded as if relieved. \"How far away would you say the hut is?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I have no memory of how I got there. As I told you, he chloroformed me.\"\n\nThe marshal studied her. \"What about when you escaped?\"\n\n\"The wind was blowing and visibility was low. I could barely see my hand in front of my face. I'm sorry.\"\n\nThe marshal scratched the back of his head. \"You spent more than five days with him. What did you do all that time?\"\n\nShe moistened her lower lip. \"I wrote.\"\n\n\"Wrote?\"\n\nMiss Walker drummed her fingers on the table and regarded the marshal with a look of impatience. \"Miss Tenney is a writer. Cactus Joe kidnapped her to write his biography.\"\n\nThe marshal's eyes widened in disbelief. \"That's all? I came all the way out here and that's all the man wanted? To have his biography written?\"\n\nKate frowned. Apparently the marshal didn't care that she had been kept against her will. \"That's not all. He... he tied me up. Fed me horrible food.\"\n\nThe marshal scratched his neck. \"You said you were writing his biography. Do you know anything about him? His real name? Where he's from?\"\n\nShe quickly filled him in on the few actual details she knew about the man. \"He calls himself the master of disguise.\"\n\n\"So you think he comes to town in one of his disguises?\" the marshal asked.\n\n\"He's actually bald and clean shaven and there's nothing wrong with his eye. If he came to town looking like that or dressed in one of his other disguises, no one would ever guess his true identity. In fact, I saw him at the post office dressed as an old man. I didn't know at the time it was him. I suspect he may have been spying on me at the ranch. The night I was reading to the... eh, the night I was reading.\"\n\nThe marshal stroked his chin. \"It's hard to believe he's been under our noses all this time.\"\n\nHe looked so doubtful that Kate added, \"How else would he have known I was a writer?\"\n\nMiss Walker nodded in agreement. \"How, indeed?\"\n\nThe marshal frowned. \"What else did he tell you?\"\n\n\"I suspect most of what he told me was exaggerated, if not altogether untrue. He has a very high opinion of himself.\"\n\nMiss Walker scoffed. \"Which only proves he's a dreadful judge of character.\"\n\nThe marshal reached for his hat. \"It doesn't look like any real harm was done.\"\n\nKate stared at him, incredulous. \"Aren't you going to do something? Track him down? Form a posse?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"It's a big desert out there.\"\n\nKate's temper flared. \"The man is dangerous. Evil. He had a gun and a knife and he threatened to use them. He likens himself to the bandit Jesse James.\" On and on she went, making Cactus Joe sound worse than he actually was.\n\nNothing she said seemed to convince the marshal to take her kidnapping seriously. Seething, she glared at him, but then an idea occurred to her. The marshal had at least one thing in common with Cactus Joe\u2014his ego.\n\nElbows on the table she rested her chin on folded hands. \"When I finish Cactus Joe's story I will naturally devote a full chapter to the man who brings him to justice.\" She gave the marshal a meaningful look. \"I hope that man is you.\"\n\nHer ploy seemed to work because suddenly he seemed more interested. \"Well now, ma'am. That would be mighty nice of you.\" He donned his hat. \"I'll get a posse together and we'll see what we can find. I'll let you know if I have good news.\"\n\n\"We won't hold our breaths, Marshal,\" Miss Walker muttered.\n\nSeeming not to hear Miss Walker, he leaned toward Kate. \"Just be sure you spell my name right. That's Morris with two r's.\"\n\nHe left and Kate rested her hands on her lap. A posse. She smiled. Cactus Joe would be so pleased.\n\nMiss Walker cast a probing look Kate's way. \"You have no idea how I've tried to make the marshal do something besides sit on his endgate.\" She shrugged and took a sip of coffee, setting the cup down with a clatter. \"Hmm.\" She rose and walked to the doorway and stopped, her back to Kate. \"Never thought I'd say this, but someone with the imagination of a fiction writer might be just what this ranch needs to take it into the next century.\" With that she was gone, her hurried footsteps fading away.\n\nFor the longest while Kate didn't move except to smile. At last she had earned Miss Walker's approval, maybe even her respect. It's what she wanted. It's what she'd worked for all these weeks. The Last Chance Ranch was her chance for a long and happy future, and she had no intention of letting anyone or anything ruin it for her.\n\nAnd that went double for Luke Adams." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nWith solidity of strength acquired from weeks of drudgery, she banished Brandon from her life, if not her heart.\n\nA week later Kate paused outside the blacksmith shop. Luke had ridden out to the ranch several times to see her, but each time she was either on the range or had Rosita send him away with apologies.\n\nShe wasn't certain she was ready to see him even now, but she couldn't keep avoiding him. Still, she had just about made up her mind to leave when Homer appeared by her side. She stooped to pet him and he licked her cheek. She drew back and laughed.\n\nFollowing Miss Walker's orders, Ruckus had driven her to town. He waited for her now in his parked wagon across the street. She was grateful for his protection, but she regretted not having time alone. Even on the ranch she was constantly watched and guarded.\n\nShe no longer feared Cactus Joe, but she wouldn't put it past him to kidnap her again to finish his book. She glanced in both directions. A man crossing the street was similar in height to Cactus Joe, but when he looked her way she realized it was the owner of the mercantile store, Mr. Green. Another figure gave her pause, this one a Mexican with a limp, but a glimpse of the man's broad face convinced her it was not Cactus Joe.\n\nShe walked into the blacksmith shop. She felt guilty for keeping Ruckus waiting. The sooner she finished what she had come to do, the sooner they could return to the ranch.\n\nThe clanging sound of iron upon iron greeted her as she stepped into the shop, her gaze freezing upon Luke's long, lean form. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow beneath his brown leather apron. Each downward swing of his arm was swift and powerful. The anvil rang with the heavy blows of his hammer, sending sparks darting about like little fireflies.\n\nHomer brushed against her, reminding her with a start why she had come. \"Luke?\"\n\nArm frozen over his head, he glanced over his shoulder and his mouth curved upward. He gave the piece of steel he was working on one final whack before setting his hammer down and turning to face her.\n\n\"I didn't mean to disturb you,\" she said, feeling oddly out of breath.\n\n\"Your timing is perfect. I'm done here.\" He picked up a towel and wiped the sweat off his forehead. \"I stopped by yesterday, but Rosita said you were out on the range.\"\n\nShe nodded and took a deep breath, an uneasy silence filling the air. \"Your aunts came to see me and brought my favorite bonbons.\" A steady parade of well-wishers had streamed to the ranch to see how she was.\n\nKate was touched, even though Miss Walker insisted everyone was just being nosy. Kate couldn't imagine people stopping what they were doing in Boston just to check on a neighbor, especially if they lived a distance away.\n\nHe tossed the towel on the workbench. \"Leave it to my two aunts.\"\n\nHer gaze fell upon a miniature windmill on his workbench. \"What a lovely windmill,\" she exclaimed. \"It's perfect.\" She leaned in for a closer look. \"It looks so real. Is it a toy?\"\n\nHer interest seemed to please him. \"Not a toy, a working model. I'm trying to design one that can be oiled from the ground.\" He demonstrated and the top of the windmill tilted downward.\n\n\"That's amazing.\" The fine craftsmanship took her breath away. \"Just think of all the time that will save. The lives and limbs. When will it be ready to market?\"\n\n\"Whoa! That's gonna be awhile. It's too flimsy. It won't stand up to the wind. I'm working on another design.\"\n\nShe met his gaze and yet more silence stretched between them. She felt oddly shy, awkward, like a schoolgirl talking to a boy alone for the first time.\n\n\"About last week. What happened...\" She spoke slowly, pronouncing each word carefully as if learning to speak a foreign language. \"You saved my life.\" She never would have been able to find her way back to the ranch by herself. \"I don't know how to thank you.\"\n\n\"No need to thank me.\" White teeth flashed against his tanned skin. \"Come, I have something to show you.\" He motioned her out the door and around back.\n\nHomer raced ahead and waited for them in front of the small wooden shed attached to the back of Luke's shop.\n\nLuke patted Homer. \"What do you say, boy?\" he asked in a conspirator's voice. \"Is it okay if I show Kate what you have?\"\n\nHomer barked.\n\n\"I think that's a yes. Come on.\" He grabbed her hand and pulled her inside before she could protest.\n\nIt took a moment before her eyes adjusted to the dim light. A collie lay in a corner nursing three tiny pups.\n\n\"Ohhhh, they're adorable,\" she said softly.\n\nAs if agreeing, Homer barked twice. \"Woof, woof.\"\n\nLuke laughed. \"Have you ever seen such a proud pa?\" He dropped onto his haunches and scooped up the smallest pup in a single hand. Even as the young canine was held aloft, he made little sucking sounds. Luke rose to his feet and placed the pup in her arms.\n\nThe puppy was so young he hadn't yet opened his eyes. \"He feels so soft.\" She glanced at Luke with a broad smile and found him watching her with a smile of his own.\n\n\"Soon as he's weaned he's yours, if you want him.\"\n\nKate's mouth dropped open. \"Mine?\" She'd never owned a dog or any animal, for that matter, and didn't know what to say.\n\n\"His name is Locker.\"\n\nShe held the puppy in front of her with both hands, his curling tail dangling between her wrists. \"Locker?\"\n\n\"After John Locke. Some philosopher Michael told me about.\"\n\nHer eyes met his and she felt a well of emotion rise inside. She handed the puppy back to him and practically stumbled out of the shed. Once outside, she quickened her pace.\n\nChasing her down, he grabbed her by the arm and swung her around. \"Why did you take off like that?\"\n\n\"You don't have to do that, Luke.\"\n\nHe looked genuinely puzzled. \"Do what? What don't I have to do?\"\n\n\"Name dogs after philosophers.\"\n\n\"I thought you'd be pleased.\"\n\n\"You don't have to please me!\" She shook her head and remembered her original reason for coming. \"I'm afraid I led you on and I didn't mean to.\"\n\nA muscle tightened at his jaw and his gaze sharpened. \"Led me on, how?\"\n\n\"I was upset when you found me. I wasn't myself. Even so, that does not justify\"\u2014she couldn't say kiss because that sounded far too intimate\u2014\"what we did, and for that, I apologize.\"\n\n\"Are you saying you're sorry you kissed me?\" he asked, his voice curt.\n\nShe sucked in her breath. \"There's no room in my life for anything but the ranch.\"\n\nKissing Luke had been surprisingly pleasant but that was because she had been half out of her mind when he found her. The soft, caressing kisses she wrote about were a figment of her imagination. They promised love everlasting, and no such thing existed between a man and a woman in real life. Men weren't dependable. Kisses held no meaning. Love wasn't kind. She wanted no part of it except for the fantasies she weaved and the stories she once wrote.\n\n\"The ranch.\" His lip curled upward. \"It's always the ranch. Nothing else matters to you.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Luke.\" She counted on Miss Walker's spinster pact to protect her from all future heartache and disappointment. She'd had enough of both to last a lifetime. Unfortunately, she hadn't counted on meeting a man like Luke. A man so intent on pleasing her, he'd resorted to naming a dog after some historical figure he'd probably never heard of.\n\n\"I don't know what else to say...\" She wanted to erase the pain on his face, the disbelief in his eyes, but she didn't know how. \"I have obligations and responsibilities and\u2014\"\n\n\"Drat, Kate!\" His voice snapped through the air like a whip. \"Whenever you feel cornered you hide behind some fancy words. Say what you mean plain and simple.\"\n\n\"All right,\" she yelled back, more angry at herself than at him. She never should have let him kiss her, but her biggest failing was kissing him back. \"I want you to forget we ever met!\"\n\nHis hard eyes bore down on her. \"Is that what you want? Really?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered, flinching inwardly at the sharp pain that sliced through her.\n\nHe took a step back, a closed look on his face. \"Then consider it done.\"\n\nThe finality of his words affected her like a slamming door. It was what she wanted, of course. She only wished he hadn't made it so difficult. She quickly turned away and practically ran all the way to the wagon where Ruckus waited for her.\n\nClimbing onto the wagon seat, she swallowed the lump in her throat and kept her head down.\n\nRuckus acted like he didn't notice, but he'd have to be blind not to know she was upset. \"Mind if we stop at the post office?\" he asked. \"Expecting a letter from my son.\"\n\nShe swiped at a tear. \"I don't mind.\" She folded her arms and stared straight ahead, blowing a wayward tendril from her face. It was done. She did what she had to do. From this moment forward nothing or no one would be allowed to distract her from the ranch.\n\n\"I'm ready for a faster horse,\" she said. \"Decker's too slow.\"\n\nRuckus glanced at her from the corner of his eyes but said nothing.\n\n\"I also want to carry my own weapon. I'm ready to go full hog as a rancher,\" she said, using a term Ruckus often used. If she was going to be a rancher she might as well start talking like one. \"And spurs. I want spurs.\"\n\nRuckus moved his jaw up and down like a cow chewing its cud. \"Nothing wrong with that,\" he said at last. \"As long as you ain't chasing after no wind.\"\n\nForgetting to hide her face she stared at him. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\nHe pulled up in front of the post office, reached into his pocket, and drew out a small Bible. \"Look it up yourself,\" he said. \"Ecclesiastes chapters 1 and 2. By the way. It's yours. The Bible. I reckon you'll be needin' it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Hands at his waist, feet apart, Luke watched the wagon carrying Kate roll down the street.\n\nGood riddance! What did he need a woman like that for, anyway? Her and her fancy schooling. What did he have to offer someone like that?\n\nSo she wanted him to forget that they'd ever met, did she? That's exactly what he intended to do\u2014God give him strength.\n\nDrat! Life had been so simple before she came to town. Now he acted like a plain fool. Didn't sleep. Didn't eat. All he could do was think about the memory of her sweet lips on his. No more!\n\nHe spun around and walked into his shop with Homer at his heel. He had work to do and no time to think about Kate. He picked up a piece of iron and set it down again. He grabbed a wagon wheel and tossed it aside. Who was he kidding?\n\nHe couldn't work. He couldn't even look at his workbench without remembering her lying there, looking at him with her big blue eyes.\n\nThose same eyes had often been guarded when they looked at him, but not on the day he held her in his arms and kissed her. Then he saw longing\u2014at least for a while\u2014and it was a longing that matched his own. She'd pushed him away in the desert, but he hadn't taken it seriously. She'd just come through a difficult ordeal. Any woman would react similarly after being kidnapped\u2014or so he thought. Today, he knew better. She wanted no part of him.\n\nWith a sweep of his arm he sent his carefully constructed windmill flying, and poor Homer seeking cover.\n\nIt was his own fault. He'd known from the start that she wasn't the woman for him. He was a blacksmith plain and simple. She was a college-educated woman, a writer. It was plumb crazy to think she would be interested in someone like him.\n\nNo matter. He'd made a mistake and it wouldn't happen again. He had simple needs and they certainly didn't include the likes of Miss Kate Tenney." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Bessie sat in the seat next to her husband, Sam. It occurred to her how handsome he looked dressed in his dark pants, boiled white shirt, and spiffy bow tie. It was hard to believe they'd been married nearly forty years. He'd brought her to Arizona Territory as a young bride shortly after the area had been taken over by the United States. In all that time, she'd never felt as insecure about their marriage as she did today.\n\nHe was up to something, she knew it. She could feel it in her bones.\n\nIt was the fourth Sunday in June, which meant the circuit preacher was in town. In honor of the occasion she and the other churchgoers dressed to the tees in their Sunday go-to-meeting best and, for the most part, were occupied with pious thoughts.\n\nCactus Patch had a proper church with a skyscraping steeple, large wooden cross, and stained glass windows. What they didn't have was a full-time preacher, though heaven knew they could use one. Since Reverend Johns ran away with the offering five years earlier, they had to make do with a saddlebag preacher who rode into town every other Sunday spreading the Word as one might spread flower seeds, hoping that one or two would take root.\n\nSam parked behind a long line of wagons and buckboards. Before Bessie had time to leave her seat, he lowered himself to the ground with the enthusiasm\u2014if not vitality\u2014of a much younger man. He then shuffled around their dapple gray horse and appeared at her side. A crooked grin made its way from ear to ear as he offered his hand for assistance.\n\nHe hadn't shown her that much courtesy when they were courting. Oh yes, he was up to something, all right, and she intended to find out exactly what it was. Keeping her suspicions to herself, she let him assist her to the ground. He surprised her by offering his bent elbow, and she slipped her arm through his.\n\nUpon seeing her sister, she waved. \"Sam, save me a seat. I'll be there in a minute.\" She broke loose from him and hurried to greet Lula-Belle and her husband, Murphy.\n\nShe grabbed her sister's arm. \"I need to talk to you. In private. You don't mind, do you, Murphy? It'll only take a short while.\"\n\nMurphy shrugged. A compact man with bushy eyebrows, sideburns, and mustache, he hung his thumbs from his suspenders and gave the kind of resigned look husbands were prone to give on such occasions.\n\n\"I'll go on ahead,\" he said.\n\nBessie waited for Murphy to walk away before pulling Lula-Belle aside. \"Sam's up to something.\"\n\nLula-Belle stared at her from behind an outlandish veiled hat topped with an oversized black ostrich feather. Since the ostrich farm opened in Phoenix, almost everyone could afford the previously rare feathers, which in Bessie's opinion was a detriment to good taste.\n\nHad it not been for Lula-Belle's white woolen shawl, onlookers might have mistaken her floral print dress and feathered hat for an overgrown flower box. Bessie quickly banished the uncharitable image from her mind. This was Sunday and she was in church. Pious thoughts, pious thoughts.\n\n\"What do you mean he's up to something?\"\n\n\"He bought me a saucepan to go with the frying pan he gave me forty years ago. Don't ask me how he was able to find one to match after all this time.\"\n\nHe bought the first pan out of guilt. Oh yes, she saw him gape at that young Mexican woman, saw the way his gaze followed her every move. He didn't know she saw\u2014he was too busy lollygagging. Forgiving and dutiful wife that she was, she'd not uttered a word about the incident until now.\n\nLula-Belle inclined her head. \"Isn't that nice?\"\n\n\"Nice?\" Bessie glanced around and lowered her voice. \"There's nothing nice about it. I think he's interested in someone else.\"\n\nLula-Belle's mouth dropped open. \"No!\"\n\nBessie forced herself to put on a brave front. \"Why else would he buy me a saucepan?\"\n\n\"I have to admit that does sound rather... odd. But we're talking about Sam. He wouldn't part with his old army boots until you put your foot down. Even with the War Between the States over for thirty years.\"\n\nBessie tapped her foot. \"What does that have to do with my pots and pans?\"\n\n\"I'm just saying that Sam prefers old things to new.\" Lula-Belle patted her on the arm. \"So you haven't a thing to worry about.\"\n\nBessie only wished it was that simple. \"I'm telling you he's up to something, and I intend to find out who she is!\" And then I'll kill her.\n\nShocked that she would consider such a thing in church of all places, she rolled her eyes to the cross overhead. Pious thoughts, pious thoughts.\n\n\"Find out who who is?\"\n\n\"Mercy, Lula-Belle. Who do you think I'm talking about? The other woman, of course.\" She tapped her chin with the tip of her finger. \"We haven't had a social event since Christmas. Maybe it's time we had another one.\"\n\nLula-Belle pulled a lace handkerchief from a mutton-legged sleeve. \"You think Sam's interested in another woman and you're going to throw a party?\"\n\n\"Not a party. A barn dance. And I will invite every woman in town. You'll let me use your barn, won't you?\" Lula-Belle's barn was larger than the one she and Sam had, and seldom used. \"Knowing Sam, he'll give himself away and I'll know exactly what he's been up to.\"\n\n\"I don't know, Bess.\" Lula-Belle dabbed at her nose with a corner of her handkerchief and shook her head, the feather and flowers on her hat bopping up and down. \"I don't have a good feeling about this.\"\n\n\"Oh, butter corn! You never have a good feeling about anything. Trust me, this is a brilliant plan.\"\n\nUpon spotting Miss Tenney walking up the steps of the church with Ruckus and his wife, Bessie nudged her sister and gave her head a slight toss. How pretty Kate Tenney looked in her rust-colored skirt and matching cape. She wore a fashionable flat hat adorned with flowers and ribbons but, thankfully, no ostrich feathers.\n\n\"That poor, poor girl. Can you imagine being held captive all that time? Yet here she is in church already.\" No whimpering or feeling sorry for herself. If Bessie didn't already know that Miss Tenney was the right woman for Luke, she knew it now.\n\n\"Where else would she be? It's Sunday,\" Lula-Belle said, tucking her handkerchief into her sleeve.\n\nBessie rolled her eyes. How could anyone be so utterly thickheaded? Oh dear, here I go again. Pious thoughts, pious thoughts.\n\n\"Getting back to the barn dance...\" Something suddenly occurred to her and a smile inched across her face. Nothing was more satisfying than killing two birds with a single well-aimed stone. \"I will, of course, invite Miss Tenney.\"\n\nLula-Belle gasped. \"You think Sam's interested in Miss Tenney?\"\n\nBessie threw up her hands. Her sister was absolutely hopeless. \"Miss Tenney I'm inviting for Luke.\"\n\nThe organ let out a deep, solemn call to worship and Lula-Belle tugged on her arm. \"Come on, we'll be late.\"\n\nShe shuffled away, but Bessie didn't move. Of all the ridiculous ideas. Sam and Miss Tenney? Why, the woman was young enough to be his daughter. And everyone knew Sam preferred the old to the new.\n\nShe frowned. At least that's what she'd always thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Moments later Bessie took her place in the church pew between her sister and Sam. It was a good choice, not too far in front, not too far back. Best of all, it allowed her to keep an eye on Miss Tenney, who, either by choice or good fortune, sat directly across the aisle from Luke.\n\nThe choir director stood in front of the congregation. \"Please rise.\"\n\nThe organ groaned, voices lifted, and Luke glanced across the aisle.\n\nBessie elbowed her sister and nodded her head toward the couple. \"He's looking at her.\"\n\nLula-Belle lifted her head to stare over her hymnal at their nephew, her voice cracking as she reached for a high note.\n\nThe hymn ended and the last gasping organ chord faded away. Feet shuffled as churchgoers took their seats, and Bessie glanced at her husband. He looked straight ahead without so much as a wandering eye, which only fueled her suspicions that much more. A restless man by nature, Sam wasn't usually so attentive. He generally fidgeted and let his gaze wander during worship.\n\nThe preacher took his place behind the lectern. Dressed in black trousers and a long duster, open to reveal a white shirt and string tie, his top hat rose above a ruddy square face.\n\n\"I'm sure you've all heard of the daring Frenchman known the world over as Charles Blondin,\" he began, his voice booming.\n\nNext to Bessie, Murphy folded his arms and muttered an unholy word beneath his breath.\n\nHer sister jabbed her husband with her elbow and gave him a stern look.\n\nLooking properly chastised, Murphy muttered, \"Another Blondin analogy.\"\n\nThe preacher continued, \"He walked across the Niagara Falls on a tightrope not once, not twice, but many times. He even walked blindfolded. During one crossing he carried a stove on his back. He stopped halfway across the chasm to make breakfast for himself, much to the amazement of onlookers.\"\n\nMiss Tenney looked across the aisle at Luke and the two exchanged a quick glance before turning their heads to face the front of the church.\n\nBessie glanced at Sam, but his gaze remained glued upon the preacher. Any suspicion that Miss Tenney might possibly be the woman who had turned Sam's head was immediately put to rest.\n\nThe preacher continued to drone on about the amazing Blondin, during which time Luke glanced at Miss Tenney at least a half dozen times.\n\nBessie knew this because she counted. Obviously, the two were meant for each other. All they needed was a little shove in the right direction\u2014and a barn dance seemed like the perfect place to plan some strategic moves.\n\nShe glanced up at Sam. She wasn't above shoving him too\u2014over a cliff, if necessary. God forgive her. Pious thoughts, pious thoughts.\n\nThe preacher paused, indicating he was about to get to the point of his story, and a collective sigh rippled through the congregation.\n\n\"When Blondin asked the Prince of Wales if he could carry him across the Niagara Falls on his back, the prince declined. Even though Blondin had proven his ability to successfully cross the falls numerous times, the prince did not trust him.\" The preacher paused for effect and in a softer voice asked, \"Who would you trust enough to carry you over the falls? Your wife? Your husband?\"\n\nBessie glanced at Sam, whose gaze locked with hers. Sucking in her breath, she quickly pulled her gaze away and stared straight ahead.\n\nThe preacher closed the Bible and stared out over the congregation. \"Or would you put your trust in God?\"\n\nIn the past, Bessie would have answered that query with a resounding yes. It would never occur to her not to trust God. But knowing her husband was interested in someone else changed everything. Her entire life had been turned upside down and she no longer knew whom to trust. Her marriage on the line, she now questioned everyone and everything. As much as she hated to admit it, she even questioned the heavenly Father. Pious thoughts, pious thoughts." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Kate had a difficult time relating to the preacher's sermon. Trust God? She didn't trust anyone, let alone God. Knowing that Luke sat only a few feet away, she couldn't even trust herself.\n\nI won't look at him, I won't.\n\nBut she did look\u2014but only because she sensed him looking at her. She heaved a sigh and focused her eyes directly in front of her.\n\n\"Who do you trust?\" the preacher asked again.\n\nNot Luke, not anyone.\n\nShe hadn't wanted to come to church today, but Ruckus insisted it would do her a world of good. \"You can't let Cactus Joe turn you into a hermit. Me and the boys will watch out for you. Don't you worry none about that.\"\n\nAs good as his word, he stuck by her side. He made Wishbone and Feedbag sit in the pew behind her. Stretch sat in front, blocking the view of the altar from anyone unfortunate enough to sit behind him.\n\nShe wouldn't be a bit surprised to find Cactus Joe in church dressed in one of his disguises. Would she be able to pick him out? She glanced over her shoulder to study the row of faces behind her. In so doing she inadvertently met Luke's eyes. Heart skipping a beat, she quickly averted her eyes. An infant wailed and was immediately carried outside. The owner of the general merchandise store, Mr. Green, sat with his arms crossed, nose on his chest, snoring.\n\nRuckus patted her on the arm, drawing her gaze from the back of the church to the pulpit. His concern touched her. Before coming to Cactus Patch, she'd never known anyone to worry about her welfare. Not even her mother had done that.\n\nIn many ways Ruckus was an enigma. He'd rant at her or any other ranch hand who earned his disfavor, but he was never cruel or unkind. His wife, Sylvia, seemed genuinely fond of him. A pleasant woman with a full-rounded figure and dimpled smile, she held her husband's hand and gazed at him on occasion with loving eyes. Never had Kate known a couple so devoted to each other and who had stayed together so long. Did Sylvia worry about Ruckus taking off? Abandoning her? Tossing her aside like an empty tin can?\n\nPushing her thoughts away, she concentrated on the sermon.\n\nThe ranch. That was all she wanted, needed. She loved working there, loved seeing the cattle thrive. Ruckus suggested she was chasing the wind but he was wrong. She chased after a dream that would one day become reality.\n\nMiss Kate Tenney, owner of the Last Chance Ranch. She liked the sound of that. Liked knowing that no one would ever look down on her again.\n\nShe smiled. With this thought firmly in place she managed to ignore Luke for the remainder of the sermon, but it took a whole lot of effort on her part\u2014and maybe a little help from above." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Chapter 27\n\nSince her estrangement from Brandon her misery was consummate, and she struggled against the depths of despair with every bit of obstinacy she possessed.\n\nThree days later Kate found an envelope on her desk addressed to her. Inside was an invitation to a summer barn dance. The purpose of the dance was to raise reward money for the capture of Cactus Joe. A handwritten note at the bottom of the card read, Dear Miss Tenney, We do so hope you can attend. It was signed Aunt Bessie.\n\nAunt? No one in Boston would dare sign an invitation to a mere acquaintance with such informality. Kate tossed the invitation aside. It was a worthy cause and Cactus Joe would be so pleased. The town finally took him seriously as an outlaw, though she doubted anyone would compare him to Jesse James.\n\nShe had no intention of going to the dance, of course. No doubt Luke would attend and the less she saw of him the better. Still, the dance did stir the muse. She couldn't help it. Since her kidnapping, she had not been able to stop writing. It wasn't that she had a compelling need to resume her writing career. Nothing could be further from the truth.\n\nRather, in writing Cactus Joe's story, she had inadvertently tapped into her own. Though she had never been able to write about her inner pain, she found she could easily write about his. In writing about Cactus Joe's deserting father, she was able to pour her own anger into each sentence.\n\n\"How odd that an absent parent could create both a void and a presence in one's life,\" she wrote. \"Neither of which was possible to escape.\"\n\nSitting at the typewriter in Cactus Joe's cabin had lit a fire in her and sometimes, like now, it felt like the words in her head would consume her if she didn't put them on paper. She lived for the moment she could sneak away from her chores to jot down a note or two. At the end of each day she escaped to her room to spread her notes across her bed and plan her night's work.\n\nAnxious to get started she opened the door to her room and strained her ears. Miss Walker's muted voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs. Though Kate couldn't make out the words, she knew it was Miss Walker's habit to give last-minute instructions to the staff before retiring.\n\nHeart racing with excitement, Kate closed the door. Soon the household would retire for the night, leaving her free to sit at the desk in Miss Walker's office and type her story on the Remington writing machine.\n\nHer body still ached from long hours on horseback, but her creative mind overcame any physical exhaustion. And it would only be for a short time. Once she had completed Cactus Joe's story and put her own demons to rest, she would hang up her pen for good and concentrate solely on the ranch. For now, however, she enjoyed the process of putting words on paper and gained great satisfaction from watching a scant few pages grow into a hundred or more.\n\nImpatient to get started, she sat at the desk in her own room and dipped her pen into the inkwell. He gazed at her from across the crowded room and it was as if no one else existed. The fiddlers played a romantic melody and Luke started toward her...\n\nShe stared at what she had written. Luke? Where did that come from? She dipped the nib of her pen into the ink and scratched out Luke and wrote Cactus Joe. She then read what she wrote and grimaced. Cactus Joe was not a romantic character by any means.\n\nAfter jabbing the pen into its holder, she ripped the page from her notebook and scrunched it into a ball. Tossing it across the room, she watched it bounce off the wall before falling to the floor. That's when she noticed that someone had slipped something beneath her door.\n\nShe hurried across the room to see what it was. Several pages were clipped together and it appeared to be a story. Clutching the manuscript in her hand, she shot out of her room and ran down the hall to the stairwell just in time to see the front door close below.\n\nShe hurried down the stairs and rushed outside. \"Michael!\" She could barely make out his dark form, but she sensed she had his attention. \"I can't wait to read what you wrote.\"\n\n\"You don't have to if you don't want,\" he said.\n\n\"I want to,\" she said. \"I do...\"\n\n\"I'm no good at spelling and I never figured out the difference between a colon and semicolon.\"\n\n\"I'll help you with those.\"\n\n\"You will?\"\n\nShe couldn't make out his face in the dark, but she could hear the pleasure in his voice.\n\n\"Yes, but only if your story has merit.\"\n\n\"How will you know that?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll know,\" she said. \"Readers always know such things.\" She thought for a moment. \"I'll read your story, Michael, on one condition. No more being late in the morning or leaving a gate open or neglecting to put in an honest day's work.\"\n\n\"That's three conditions.\"\n\nShe grinned. \"I know you can count. Now let's see if you can write.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Eleanor stood in the shadows of the dining room, listening. It was nearly eleven and the only sound that broke the late-night silence was the peck, peck, pecking of the typewriter. How the girl managed to stay up till all hours typing and still do her chores was nothing short of a miracle.\n\nEleanor let out a sigh of envy. Ah, the energy of youth...\n\nShe leaned against the wall, eyes closed, and prayed. She hadn't prayed in years and now here she was, turning to God for a second time in less than a week. Keep this under your hat, God. I don't want my men to think I'm growing soft in my old age, but just between you and me, I'm mighty glad that you brought Kate back. You did good. Real good.\n\nAfter Kate had disappeared, Robert had accused Eleanor of using the girl to replace her long-dead daughter. She'd brushed away his concerns as a bunch of hogwash, but now she wondered if he might be right. When Kate disappeared, it felt like losing Rebecca all over again.\n\nNow she had another worry. If the passionate pounding of typewriter keys was any indication, Kate's heart and soul did not belong to the ranch, no matter how much she insisted that they did. The ranch demanded one's all, and nothing must be allowed to interfere. Not marriage, not family, and certainly not such frivolous pastimes as writing.\n\nSomething had to be done and done fast. The future of the ranch depended on it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Luke stared at his aunt's invitation, not sure what to make of it. \"Hmm.\"\n\nKate's kidnapping had been the main topic of conversation for days and the town was in an uproar. Guards had been posted outside the schoolhouse and women were never left unescorted. Some townspeople had even gone so far as to have Luke make bolts for doors that had never been locked.\n\nAs much as he approved of his aunt's fund-raising idea, Luke doubted crime fighting was her true motivation. The question was, what was she really up to? Did it have anything to do with his uncle's suspicion that she was interested in Postmaster Parker?\n\nAt first Luke had dismissed his uncle's concerns. The idea that his aunt would look at another man seemed too ridiculous to consider. But the tension between his aunt and uncle at last Sunday's dinner worried him. Now he didn't know what to think.\n\nLuke folded the invitation and shoved it into his shirt pocket. He felt a fierce need to protect his family. On the night of the dance he'd keep an eye on things, make sure that Parker stayed away from his aunt.\n\nHe wondered if Kate would attend. He was pretty sure she would. Since the funds raised would help capture her kidnapper, it didn't seem likely that she would stay away.\n\nThe last thought raised his spirits. He didn't want it to, but it did. No matter how hard he tried not to think about her, he couldn't help himself. Trying to forget Kate was like bending steel with bare hands.\n\nHe wanted to see her again. Had actually ridden out to the Last Chance again to talk to her, but she was out on the range and he never did find her. The ranch. It was all about the ranch with her. Still, he hadn't imagined the way she kissed him or the way she looked at him in church.\n\n\"You want to see me?\"\n\nLuke had been so deep in thought he hadn't known his brother had entered the shop until he spoke.\n\nHomer greeted Michael with a wagging tail and eagerly took the piece of dried meat from his hand.\n\n\"What have I done this time?\" Michael looked worse than usual, his clothes and hair unkempt, his chin covered with a scraggly beard. He looked like he hadn't slept in a month of Sundays.\n\n\"Nothing,\" Luke said. If anything he was pleased that Michael had managed to hold on to his ranch job as long as he had. Maybe there was hope for him yet. \"How are things going at the ranch?\" He really wanted to ask about Kate, but he didn't want to rouse Michael's suspicions.\n\nMichael shrugged. \"Okay, I guess.\"\n\n\"Do you like working there?\"\n\n\"There're worse places to work.\" Even before Michael's gaze flitted around the shop, his meaning was clear. He was never meant to be a smithy and Luke regretted making him his assistant, but at the time it seemed like the wise thing to do.\n\nPrior to working at the ranch, Michael couldn't hold down a job or stay out of trouble for more than a day or two at a time. Luke had hoped that by teaching Michael the blacksmithing trade his brother would settle down. Instead, Michael fought him the entire two years he worked at the shop. Was still fighting him.\n\n\"You've been at the ranch several weeks now. That's gotta be some kind of record.\"\n\nMichael shrugged. \"After a while even cattle tend to grow on you.\"\n\nLuke grinned. \"Never figured you as a rancher.\"\n\n\"Steer can be as stubborn as iron, but they aren't nowhere near as dull.\"\n\n\"I made a mistake,\" Luke said quietly. \"I should never have made you work here against your will.\"\n\nThe blacksmith shop meant the world to him. From the time he first started helping Uncle Sam at the tender age of twelve he hadn't wanted to do anything else. He naturally assumed his feelings would run in the family and Michael would feel the same way.\n\n\"The problem is I need to ask a favor of you,\" Luke said.\n\nA look of curiosity crossed Michael's face. \"A favor?\"\n\n\"I need help with some of the horseshoeing and windmill repairs at the ranch.\"\n\n\"Ah, gee, Luke. You know that's not what I want to do.\"\n\n\"It'll only be for a short while. Miss Walker is still looking to hire someone. Meanwhile, I can't keep up with the work here and there too.\"\n\nMichael made a face. \"I'll think about it.\"\n\n\"I really need your help\u2014\"\n\n\"I said I'd think about it!\" He turned to leave but Luke called to him.\n\n\"Wait.\"\n\nHands at his waist, Michael turned away from the door. Head down, he toed the metal shavings on the floor, letting his jingling spurs fill the silence. If his refusal to look Luke square in the eye wasn't clear enough, his stance certainly was. Michael had no intention of lending a helping hand.\n\nLuke fought the frustration rising inside. His aunt's words echoed in his head. \"You just don't speak his language, is all.\"\n\n\"I know you've always wanted to be a writer. You have a way with words. I swear you could make a pump believe it's a windmill.\" As a child, Michael never had trouble expressing himself, whereas Luke tended to get tongue-tied. It was only in recent years that Michael had stopped talking or at least saying anything that made sense.\n\nMichael looked up. \"You're just saying that. You don't mean it.\"\n\n\"Since when have you heard me say something I don't mean?\"\n\nMichael said nothing and Luke sucked in his breath. \"I wonder if you would mind givin' me a list of words to work on. You know, so I can improve the way I express myself and all.\"\n\nMichael shifted his weight from one foot to the other, disbelief flitting across his face. \"You want to improve your vocabulary?\"\n\n\"Not a whole lot.\" Nothing irked Luke more than people who sounded like a walking Webster's. \"Just... a little something to decorate what I say.\"\n\nMichael narrowed his eyes. \"Why now? You never cared about such things before.\"\n\n\"No special reason.\" Luke wasn't about to tell his brother that he wanted to impress Kate with his newfound way with words. Maybe if he polished up his language a bit, she would stop pushing him away. His aunt's barn dance couldn't have come at a better time.\n\nMichael scratched behind his ear. \"What kind of words are you interested in?\"\n\nLuke wiped his arm over his sweaty forehead. Here came the tricky part. \"How can I express my... affection? To... say... Homer?\" No sooner had he said it than he knew how ridiculous that sounded. Michael's eyes rounded in disbelief. \"Just toss him a bone. He'll understand.\"\n\n\"Okay, forget Homer. Aunt Bessie and Uncle Sam are going through a rough patch right now. How can I tell them how much I\"\u2014he cleared his throat\u2014\"care for them without... eh... coming right out and saying it? You know how emotional Aunt Bessie gets.\"\n\nMichael rubbed his temples with both hands. \"You could say your heart pullulates with affection.\"\n\n\"That's good, that's good. Wait, let me write that down.\" He quickly searched for his writing tablet and pencil. \"How do you spell it?\"\n\nMichael frowned. \"Are you serious? I'm joking.\"\n\n\"No, no, that's good. Really it is.\"\n\nShaking his head, Michael spelled the word and Luke scribbled it into his notebook. \"Now give me a word for bold or brazen.\"\n\n\"Audacious?\"\n\n\"There you go.\" Luke wrote the word down in big bold print and underlined it. \"What about when something causes you pain?\"\n\n\"You mean like inflicted?\"\n\n\"Now there's a word.\" He added it to his notes. Michael fed him several more words and he wrote them down, spelling them as best as he could. \"You've been a big help.\"\n\nMichael quirked an eyebrow. Lifting his Stetson he raked his fingers through his hair and set his hat back in place. \"I'll help out with the horseshoeing and repairs.\"\n\nLuke wasn't sure he'd heard right. \"You will?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"What made you change your mind?\" Luke asked. He still couldn't believe his brother was serious about helping out.\n\n\"You've not been acting like yourself lately. I should have known your think box was addled when you insisted on naming that dog after a Greek philosopher.\"\n\nLuke cringed at the memory. Naming the dog Locker was a mistake. All it did was push Kate further away. \"I just wanted to be different,\" he muttered. \"When Mrs. Stanton calls for her dog Rover, five dogs come running.\"\n\n\"That still don't explain why you're suddenly worried about your vocabulary. You know what I think? I think you're even more overworked than you know.\"\n\nLuke wasn't about to argue with him. Just so long as Michael agreed to take over some of the blacksmithing chores, let him think what he wanted. \"I'll be mighty grateful for your help. It won't be for long.\"\n\nMichael gave him a strange look before turning to leave. He stopped and glanced at Luke from the doorway. \"You better get some rest.\"\n\n\"I feel fine,\" Luke said. He stared at the list of words long after Michael had left. What was he doing? Maybe Michael was right. Maybe he was more overworked than he knew.\n\nHis feelings for Kate were real. To dress them up in fancy words was like putting a top hat on a cowboy. It didn't set right. He needed no fancy words to tell Kate Tenney how he felt. Crumbling the paper into a ball he tossed it into the burning forge." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Chapter 28\n\nTwo hectic blotches suffused her pale cheeks at the memory of Brandon's arms. It was an act of sheer folly to attend that dance. \"Spare me from this pain,\" she lamented, but her forlorn prayer went unanswered.\n\nKate had initially turned down Ruckus's invitation to ride to the barn dance with him and his wife. She had no interest in socials or dances, but Ruckus insisted she make an appearance.\n\n\"Luke's aunt is doing this out of concern for you. And even if she weren't, it won't do for the future ranch owner to act all unfriendly-like,\" he'd chided her.\n\nHe was too loyal to criticize Miss Walker openly, but Kate got the distinct impression he disapproved of the ranch owner's lack of interest in community affairs.\n\n\"When I take over the ranch things will be a lot different,\" she said. She had plans, big plans.\n\nRuckus grinned. \"I reckon they will be at that.\"\n\nNow Kate sat on the buckboard seat between Ruckus and his wife, Sylvia. Kate couldn't remember ever feeling this nervous. She dreaded coming face-to-face with Luke. What could she say to him? Would he even talk to her? \"Ohhhhhhh...\"\n\nShe hadn't known she'd groaned out loud until Sylvia patted her arm. She wore a lilac flower dress and a knitted purple shawl, her little bow mouth pursed with worry.\n\n\"Are you all right, dear?\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, I'm fine, thank you.\" And because Sylvia kept looking at her, she turned to Ruckus. \"You promised that if I attended the social you would tell me why Miss Walker refuses to come to town.\"\n\nRuckus heaved a sigh. \"It's a long story, but it had to do with her divorce. From what I gather it created quite a stir in town.\"\n\n\"A dreadful scandal,\" Sylvia said. \"The women in my quilting bee talked about it just last week.\"\n\nRuckus continued, \"A group of church ladies refused to purchase Last Chance meat. Said it was tainted by the divorce, of all things. 'Course some of those same women criticized her during the war when she sold beef to both Confederate and Union armies, but she took the tainted meat thing more personal. You can say what you want about the boss lady, but you better not criticize her beef. Simple as that.\"\n\n\"Did you know her husband?\" Kate asked.\n\n\"Ralph? Nah. He was before my time. From what I've heard, he wasn't no cattle rancher. He owned a silver mine, but when that ran dry, he tried to talk Miz Walker into moving to Colorado but she wouldn't hear none of it. When their little daughter died, supposedly that was the beginnin' of the end. I heard tell that to hide her grief the boss lady buried herself in ranch work. That didn't set too well with her husband.\"\n\n\"How did her daughter die?\"\n\n\"Smallpox. Rebecca was only five years old when it happened. From what I heard tell, she was the prettiest little thing you ever did see.\"\n\n\"Mrs. White said she was the most precious child,\" Sylvia added. \"It near broke everyone's heart to put that sweet little thing to rest.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker used to keep a colored daguerreotype on her desk. I remember she had blond hair and big blue eyes.\" He glanced at Kate. \"Just like you.\" He shook his head. \"I gather from others that Miss Walker was never the same after buryin' her little girl.\"\n\nIt never occurred to Kate that someone as self-possessed as Miss Walker could be hiding a broken heart. Was that what Ruckus had been trying to tell her when he said Miss Walker had a soft center, just like a cactus?\n\nIt was a little past seven by the time they pulled up in front of the barn. It was still light, but the sun was setting in a blazing red sky and the air buzzed with excitement. Ruckus parked behind a long line of wagons, shays, and carriages.\n\n\"Here we are, ladies,\" he said. \"I've always wanted to walk into a dance with a pretty girl on each arm.\"\n\nSylvia laughed and tapped her husband fondly on the shoulder with her folded fan.\n\nThe high whine of fiddles greeted them as they walked into the barn arm in arm. The warm summer air was filled with the smell of sweet hay and the flowery fragrance of cologne.\n\nKerosene lanterns hung from hooks, casting a warm yellow glow over the guests. Red, white, and blue streamers dangled from the rafters, and the wooden barn floor had been dusted with corn starch for dancing.\n\nLuke's Aunt Bessie practically tripped over herself in her hurry to join them, her sister dog-paddling behind her. Kate stared at Bessie's shocking low-cut purple gown with big puffy sleeves and a small train.\n\n\"Oh, I'm so glad you could make it,\" Aunt Bessie gushed with warm approval.\n\nCompared to the ginghams and calicos of the other female guests, Kate felt overdressed. Her circular rust-colored skirt fell from her waist in graceful folds. Neither her fitted shirtwaist nor her ruffled leg-o'-mutton sleeves would pass muster in a Boston parlor, let alone a social, but both were much too frilly for Cactus Patch.\n\nHowever, considering Bessie's gown, Kate stopped worrying about being overdressed.\n\nRuckus's mild-mannered wife stared in astonishment. \"My, my, Bessie, you look...\" Eyes rounded, she raked Luke's aunt up and down. \"Lovely,\" she managed finally, with puckered lips.\n\nBessie looked pleased. Apparently she hadn't noticed the pinched expression that accompanied Sylvia's compliment. \"Why, thank you, Sylvia.\"\n\n\"She looks like a big purple plum,\" Aunt Lula-Belle muttered, patting down her own plain brown frock.\n\nAunt Bessie either didn't hear the remark or chose to ignore it. Instead, she motioned them toward the tables against the back wall laden with all manner of cakes and pastries.\n\n\"Help yourselves to refreshments. The lemonade is nice and cold.\" Aunt Bessie rolled her eyes. \"Mercy, would you believe I paid two cents a pound for ice?\"\n\n\"Shocking,\" one of the women exclaimed. \"I remember when Mr. Hargrove first opened up his ice plant. The price was only half a cent.\"\n\n\"Those days are long gone,\" Ruckus said before making a beeline for the punch bowl. Aunt Bessie introduced Kate to some of the other guests. After rattling off the names of several women and pointing to each one in turn, she said, \"I want you to meet our guest of honor.\"\n\nStartled to learn she was more than just an invited guest, Kate nonetheless managed a polite nod. \"I'm pleased to meet all of you.\"\n\n\"Ah, you're the writer who was abducted,\" the woman who had been introduced as Mrs. Turnbull exclaimed. \"How exciting!\" A mousy woman with sallow skin, she clapped her hands as if applauding some great achievement or honor.\n\nNone of the other women seemed to share her enthusiasm. Instead, they stared at Kate with open curiosity. The youngest, a woman introduced as Charity Chase, eyed Kate's apparel, her mouth drawn in a straight line. Brown hair twisted into a coil and held in place with a jeweled comb, Miss Chase brushed a finger against the fringe of bangs on her forehead as if to point out that she alone was in style.\n\nThe widow White, an older woman, raised a lorgnette to her eye and scanned Kate from head to toe. She wore a ready-made bun that might have matched her red locks years ago but bore no resemblance to the current color of her age-faded hair.\n\nMrs. White lowered her eyepiece. \"You're Miss Walker's new heiress,\" she said, and Kate detected surprise in her voice.\n\n\"That still hasn't been decided,\" Kate said.\n\n\"Oh, there's Luke,\" Aunt Lula-Belle said, effectively stopping further discussion about the ranch.\n\nAs if she had announced the appearance of Governor Hughes, active supporter of women's suffrage and temperance, all women, young and old, turned to look with equal admiration.\n\nKate's knees threatened to buckle beneath her and she started to panic. What if she fainted or said something foolish or\u2014\n\n\"Over here,\" Aunt Bessie called in a high-pitched voice, waving to him.\n\nLuke flashed a brilliant smile and headed their way, ducking beneath a dangling paper streamer. Taller than practically any other man, except for Stretch, he was a commanding presence. Kate tried not to stare, but she couldn't seem to help herself.\n\nHis black trousers and boiled white shirt barely contained his muscular physique as he made his way from one end of the barn to the other.\n\nHe greeted each of them in turn, and Kate wondered if it was only her imagination that his gaze seemed to linger on her longer than it had the others. Oh, please don't let it be true.\n\nHe pecked both aunts on the cheek, and it was easy to see how much they adored him.\n\nHe looked Aunt Bessie up and down and grinned. \"I hardly recognized you.\"\n\nAunt Bessie patted her nephew on the cheek. \"Do you like it?\"\n\n\"How could I not?\" he said, wrapping his arms around her. Hugging his aunt close, he peered over her head at Kate and winked.\n\nKate's already-heated face flared another notch hotter, and she quickly looked away.\n\nAunt Lula-Belle pulled her woolen shawl closer to her body, her face registering disapproval of her sister's low-cut neckline. \"You better stay away from the door or you'll catch your death of cold.\"\n\n\"Lands' sakes, Lula-Belle. You act like we live in the arctic instead of a desert.\" Aunt Bessie pulled out of Luke's arms and craned her neck to peer around the room, fanning herself furiously.\n\n\"Who are you looking for?\" Luke asked.\n\n\"Eh... Michael. Have you seen him?\"\n\n\"He'll be here,\" Luke said. \"I've never known Michael to miss out on a good time.\"\n\nMiss Chase laughed a little louder than the comment called for. A pretty woman with big green eyes and a tiny waist, she shamelessly pushed her way between Aunt Bessie and Luke.\n\nThe fiddles started playing and couples moved to the center of the barn.\n\nMiss Chase cozied up to Luke and cast a disapproving glance at the awkward couples on the dance floor. \"Why don't we show them how to do it?\"\n\nLuke smiled and offered her his bent elbow. She giggled as he led her away.\n\nAunt Bessie stared after them with a frown. \"In my day no woman would think of asking a man to dance with her.\"\n\nLula-Belle leaned over and whispered in Kate's ear, \"That was before they invented passion.\"\n\nKate smiled politely, not sure she'd heard right.\n\nTwo older men joined them and Aunt Bessie introduced the taller of the two as her husband, Sam, the other as Lula-Belle's husband, Murphy.\n\nSam inclined his silver head. \"Would you excuse us? I would like to take my purty missus for a whirl.\" Aunt Bessie gave her husband a rather odd look before she took his offered hand.\n\nLula-Belle and Murphy followed their lead. This left Kate on the sidelines next to the row of matronly chaperones seated by the barn's back wall. The ladies obviously took their task seriously. Sitting on the edge of their ladder-back chairs they looked ready to pounce at the first sign of impropriety between the openly flirting singles.\n\nKate watched the dance floor with equal attentiveness, but for a different reason. She wouldn't put it past Cactus Joe to don one of his disguises and make an appearance. No doubt he would be delighted to know that this shindig had been planned for his benefit\u2014or rather his capture. Not even Jesse James had warranted such a grand affair.\n\nThe marshal wandered over. \"Miss Tenney,\" he said, touching his hat with his finger.\n\n\"Marshal.\"\n\n\"I was kind of hoping Cactus Joe would show his face tonight,\" Morris said.\n\n\"I don't see him,\" Kate replied.\n\nThe marshal glanced around. \"We'll get him.\" He took his leave with a tip of his hat. \"Just remember two r's.\"\n\n\"Two... oh, you mean your name in the book. I'll remember.\"\n\nHe headed for the refreshments and Kate scanned the crowd yet again. Finding no sign of Cactus Joe, she relaxed, her foot keeping time to the music. The only dance she'd attended previously was during the last year of school just before graduation. It had been a formal affair with none of tonight's boot-stomping gaiety. Here in Arizona whatever you couldn't do well you did loud, and that went double for musicians. The fiddles screeched and harmonicas whined, but no one seemed to care.\n\nAunt Lula-Belle's husband, Murphy, danced with the grace of a bear fighting off a swarm of bees. Sam and Aunt Bessie simply stood in the same spot, swaying back and forth like the pendulum of a clock, but with less regularity.\n\nStretch bopped by with a pretty redheaded girl in his arms. He practically doubled over to accommodate his short partner and was obviously telling one of his tall tales.\n\n\"It was so windy that the hen laid the same egg three times.\"\n\nA few of the other ranch hands shuffled by, feet going every which way, some leading their partners, others being led. Feedbag danced like a man on a bucking horse.\n\nThe widow White stared at the dance floor through her lorgnette, holding on to the tortoiseshell handle with a delicately posed gloved hand, her magnified gaze riveted upon Luke and Miss Chase.\n\nKate followed her gaze, hands curling into fists by her sides. Not that it mattered who Luke danced with. Of course it didn't matter. He could dance with whomever he pleased. It was Miss Chase who irritated her. Never had she witnessed such unseemly behavior from a woman. Why, her laughter could be heard even above the whiny music.\n\nThe woman wasn't only brazen, she was downright shameless. Luke wasn't that funny. And did he have to look like he was enjoying himself so much? Why didn't the chaperones do something?\n\n\"Looks like something's got your dander up,\" Michael said by her side.\n\n\"What?\" She had been so engrossed in what was going on in plain sight of God and everyone that she hadn't seen Luke's brother enter the barn.\n\n\"You look like you're ready to stretch someone's neck.\"\n\nEmbarrassed to be caught staring at Luke and his dance partner, she pulled her gaze away from the couple and focused on Michael. He had shaved and combed his hair, but instead of wearing his Sunday best like the other men, he wore his usual blue denim pants, checkered shirt, and mule-ear boots.\n\n\"I didn't expect to see you here,\" she said. Michael didn't strike her as the social type, no matter what Luke said. He kept pretty much to himself at the ranch and she thought of him as a loner.\n\n\"Gotta do something to relieve the boredom. Been busy shoeing horses and they aren't much company.\"\n\nFrom the dance floor came the sound of Miss Chase's laugh and Michael narrowed his gaze in her direction, his face grim.\n\nKate studied him. \"I read your story and really liked it.\"\n\nHis head swiveled in her direction, his eyes wide. \"Really?\" His astonished expression gradually faded into wariness. \"You're not just saying that?\"\n\n\"I mean it, Michael.\" His story of a young crippled boy and his dog traveling around the world brought a tear to her eye. \"You're a very talented writer.\"\n\nMichael turned red, but he looked pleased. \"That means a lot. Coming from you.\"\n\n\"I made a few suggestions and corrected spelling and grammar, but those things are easy to fix. The writing itself... Michael, it's beautiful. I think you should send it to the Saturday Evening Post.\"\n\nShe'd sold a few stories to the magazine through the years. Founded in 1821, the Post was reportedly in dire financial straits, but it still paid writers more than most publications and was a good place to start.\n\nMichael's face lit up like a bonfire. Grinning, he grabbed her by the waist and brazenly kissed her on the cheek. By the time she recovered from the shock, he had already pulled away.\n\nAll eight chaperones sat staring at them. Michael either didn't notice or didn't care. Instead, he indicated the dance floor with a nod of his head.\n\n\"Do you think I can pull Miss Chase away from my brother?\"\n\nShe glanced at him askew. \"I know you can write, but can you dance?\"\n\n\"Not very well.\"\n\n\"Then you should fit right in.\"\n\nMiss Chase's constant laughter had the same effect on Kate as fingernails on a blackboard. Gritting her teeth, she gave Michael a shove. \"What are you waiting for?\"\n\nSmoothing down the sides of his hair with both hands, he stalked away, looking a whole lot more self-confident than he ever looked with cattle. Moments later Miss Chase had a new dance partner, and judging by her pouty mouth she was none too pleased about it.\n\nLuke made a beeline for Kate. She looked around for a means of escape, but he blocked her way.\n\n\"Dance with me.\" He held out his hand and waited. His determined stance made it clear that turning him down was not an option. He cocked his head to the side. \"Don't worry. I'm not going to grab you and kiss you.\"\n\nHer mouth snapped shut. She didn't want to dance with him, didn't want to be that close, but with Aunt Bessie staring at them and the chaperones looking on, denying his request would only create a spectacle. Nevertheless, she hesitated before placing her hand in his. Just don't let my legs buckle.\n\nTheir last encounter was very much on her mind and, judging by his serious expression, it was very much on his mind too. The kiss she had tried so hard to forget now seemed to stretch between them as if no time had passed since his lips touched hers.\n\nHe led her to the center of the barn, and she forced herself to breathe. It was only a dance. She was just being silly. She had nothing to fear from Luke Adams.\n\nHand on her waist, he waited a beat before pulling her close. She rested a palm on his shoulder and his eyes darkened as he held her gaze. He led her around the floor, his two-step even more graceful than it had looked from a distance. Nothing else seemed to exist. Not the music and certainly not the other couples.\n\nThe world was suddenly all about him\u2014the breadth and scent of him, the nearness, warmth, and scope of him. She tried to concentrate on the other couples, but nothing banished the hold he had over her.\n\nIn spite of her best intentions, she soon relaxed and enjoyed herself. For now, she just wanted to embrace the moment and pretend it was simply a scene in one of her books.\n\nHe twirled her smoothly around the dance floor, in and out of the other couples like ribbons around a maypole. For a man so strong and powerful, he was surprisingly light on his feet.\n\nHer own feet so buoyant they barely touched the floor, she felt weightless and grounded all at the same time. It was as if she and Luke now shared a common breath. But how was that possible? How could two hearts beat as one?\n\n\"You look mighty pretty,\" he said, his rich, smooth voice a sweet melody in her ear.\n\nAny protagonist worth her salt would think of something charming or witty to say in response, but all she could manage was a murmured, \"Thank you.\" She quickly added, \"It's a lovely party.\"\n\nHe nodded in agreement. \"My aunt knows how to show people a good time.\" After a moment he said, \"I looked for you after church Sunday, but you'd already left.\"\n\nHer heart took an unexpected lurch. He had looked for her? \"It's a b-busy time at the ranch,\" she stammered. \"We had to rush back.\"\n\nHis gaze sharpened and heat rose up her neck to her face. Desperate to change the subject, she said, \"How are the puppies?\"\n\nHis infectious smile melted away her defenses and she grinned back at him. \"Growing by leaps and bounds,\" he said. \"You should feel honored. Homer allows very few people near his pups.\"\n\nShe didn't want to think about a dog protecting its family. That only brought back painful memories of her childhood and how no one thought to protect her. Her mind scrambled for a way to fill in the sudden silence.\n\n\"Your brother looks like he's having a good time.\" When Luke made no comment she added, \"Ruckus is pleased with the way he shoes horses. He even fixed one of the windmills.\"\n\n\"He doesn't much like smithing, but he's got a knack for it,\" Luke said. \"He's been a real help.\"\n\nOn safer ground now, she spoke freely. \"He's a gifted writer.\"\n\n\"Writing don't seem like a very good way to make a living,\" Luke said.\n\nHis comment came as no surprise. Luke worked with iron and steel, tangibles that could be molded by heat and shaped by an anvil. Words could be shaped, too, but not with fire or hammer. A writer's skill was so much more subtle, requiring prudent choices and careful arrangement of sentences and ideas.\n\n\"I can think of several writers who would disagree with you,\" she said. Robert Louis Stevenson and Stephen Crane came to mind, as did Mark Twain. She never thought to come close to that kind of success. Few women authors ever did.\n\n\"Do you really think he's that good?\" As if to make sure they were talking about the same person, he added, \"Michael?\"\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nHe pulled her a tad closer, his breath in her hair sending warm shivers racing down her spine. She closed her eyes and, for several turns around the dance floor, unspoken words seemed to flow between them as meaningful as if they'd been given voice.\n\nThe fiddlers finished their lively tune and immediately launched into a mournful song about lost love. Some couples left the dance floor, but she and Luke kept dancing, although at a slower pace.\n\nHe looked deep into her eyes. \"What you said... about not seein' each other.\"\n\nShe swallowed hard. \"I can't think about anything but the ranch.\" She then went on at great length about the ranch and all that she'd learned in recent weeks. \"I don't know anything about the business side yet, but Miss Walker is expecting some eastern buyers next month and said I can sit in on the meeting.\"\n\nHe listened intently with knitted brow. \"Does the ranch really mean that much to you?\"\n\nHis question was not too surprising. Most men had a hard time understanding why a woman might wish to pursue a profession. \"Of course it does.\"\n\n\"Why?\" He studied her. \"Why take on that much responsibility? It's hard work even for a man.\"\n\nIt was hard, harder than she'd ever thought possible. \"Miss Walker seems to manage.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker doesn't strike me as a very happy woman.\"\n\nShe'd once held a similar opinion, but that was before she came to know the woman. \"I don't think she sees it that way. The ranch is her life.\"\n\nHe rested his chin on her head and she swallowed the lump that suddenly rose to her throat. How did he always manage to do this to her? To confuse her and make her question her own heart?\n\nBy the time he drew back to look at her, she'd regained control enough to smile up at him.\n\n\"And is it yours?\" he asked, looking straight at her. \"The ranch? Is it your life?\"\n\nShe refused to look away. \"It is,\" she said. Land was forever, and at this point in her life, she needed something that was lasting. Something she could count on.\n\nHe studied her for a moment. \"I aim to make you change your mind.\"\n\n\"Not possible.\" Just don't look at me like that. Stop tempting and confusing me. Stop making me wish things were different. Stop being you.\n\n\"Maybe not, but I have to try. It's gonna be in my language, not yours.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"My language?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I never had much schooling. There was no school in Cactus Patch when we moved here from Texas. My aunt tried to get me to practice readin', but I was more interested in hangin' out with my uncle at the shop. I'm not much good with fancy words.\"\n\n\"I don't imagine you have much need for fancy words in your line of work.\"\n\nThe music stopped and so did they. \"My line of work?\"\n\nConfused by his sudden withdrawal, arms to his sides, she explained, \"I don't imagine that linguistics is required for blacksmithing.\"\n\n\"Drat, Kate, why do you always make everything so difficult? I'm trying to tell you that I... I... fancy you.\"\n\n\"I don't think we should\u2014\"\n\nHer words were cut off by a high-pitched squeal and the sudden appearance of Miss Chase, who shamelessly grabbed Luke's arm. \"Come on, Lukey, they're playing my favorite song.\"\n\nSure enough, the fiddlers played again and couples poured back onto the dance floor like ants at a picnic.\n\n\"'Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay!' is your favorite song?\" Kate asked. As much as she tried to sound pleasant, her voice was thin with dislike.\n\nMiss Chase's smile failed to reach her eyes. \"Better that than the 'Spinster Polka.'\"\n\nShe walked off with Luke, and once again Kate was left to keep company with the chaperones." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Chapter 29\n\nEleanor sat on the porch of the ranch house at dusk enjoying the end of another long day. Nighthawks swooped overhead on outspread wings, weaving invisible patterns in the near-dark sky. Bats flitted around a nearby saguaro, drinking sweet nectar from its night-blooming flowers.\n\nStars winked as if privy to earth's innermost secrets. A full moon cast a silvery light across the desert floor. A horse whinnied from a nearby corral, setting off a chorus of barks from restless cow dogs.\n\nNearly everyone had gone to the barn dance and Eleanor enjoyed the solitude. She could sit outside to her heart's content without O.T. or Ruckus suggesting she needed a wrap or risked catching her death of cold. In the desert, no less.\n\nThe sound of rumbling wheels made her groan. Surely the dance wasn't over this early? A shay drove up to the ranch house and she touched a hand to her forehead. It was Robert. She should have known.\n\nCertain he couldn't see her in the dark, she waited until he'd walked up the verandah steps before revealing herself. \"It's not my birthday. Nor is it the first of the month.\"\n\nShe couldn't make out much more than his form, but she sensed him searching for her in the shadows.\n\n\"I came to escort you to the social,\" he said, moving toward her. Light from the window angled upon him. His silver hair was neatly combed to the side, his mustache waxed. He wore a three-piece suit and dark bow tie as befitting a banker. The cane tucked beneath his arm was more for appearance than need, and it made him look even more distinguished than usual, more debonair. If she were in mind for a love interest\u2014which of course she wasn't\u2014Robert would fit the bill quite nicely.\n\n\"You've known me how many years now? Twenty?\" she asked. \"And you thought I would consider going to a barn dance?\"\n\n\"Since the money collected will go toward a reward for capturing Miss Tenney's kidnapper, I thought you might let down your hair just this once.\"\n\n\"I rather like my hair the way it is, thank you very much. Besides, I sent a check. Money is a very handy implement for avoiding social obligations. You might try it sometime.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"You don't think a banker knows that? For your information, I've already made a generous donation to the cause.\"\n\nShe rocked back and forth. \"In any case, I'm sure Rebecca will do the ranch proud.\"\n\n\"Rebecca?\"\n\nShe stilled. \"What?\"\n\n\"You said Rebecca.\"\n\nDrat! Knowing Robert, he would read all sorts of things into a simple slip of the tongue. \"I meant Miss Tenney, of course.\"\n\nHe fell silent for a minute. \"May I ask you something?\"\n\nShe let out a sigh. \"When have you ever needed my approval?\"\n\nHis finger followed the line of his mustache. \"Are you looking for an heiress or a daughter?\"\n\nEleanor stiffened. \"For goodness' sakes, Robert. You know my only interest is the ranch and its future.\"\n\n\"You referred to Miss Tenney as Rebecca. Your daughter's been dead for a good many years.\"\n\nShe grimaced. It wasn't in her nature to think of the past, but lately it seemed it was all that she did. Worse, she even questioned some of the choices she had made, though she didn't regret fighting for the ranch. Never that. Even so, thoughts of her daughter had sent her to the attic to scrounge in the dust for the daguerreotypes stored there, along with Rebecca's clothes and toys.\n\nShe had long come to terms with the death of her only child, which made constant thoughts of her recently even more puzzling. Perhaps it was because of the sudden and unexpected death of Rebecca's father. Or maybe it was simply that Kate had similar coloring and was almost the same age Rebecca would have been had she lived.\n\n\"I'm an old lady,\" she said slowly. \"Can you not excuse a mental hiccup or two on occasion?\"\n\nHe laughed. \"You old? You can still ride circles around any of your ranch hands.\"\n\nShe wasn't sure that was true anymore, but it was nice that he still thought so.\n\n\"I can also still fire a mean shot,\" she said.\n\nAt least that part was accurate. Learning to shoot had been a dire necessity during the early years when Apaches still ran rampant and liked nothing better than to raid isolated ranches, hers included.\n\n\"Is that a warning?\" he asked.\n\n\"Only if you continue to harp on the subject of my daughter.\"\n\n\"Very well. I'll not mention her again.\" He paused for a moment. \"On one condition.\"\n\n\"Oh dear. You aren't going to propose marriage again, are you?\"\n\n\"I have no reason to believe that you've changed your mind about marrying me. But I am going to ask you to dance with me.\"\n\n\"I'm not leaving the ranch.\"\n\n\"You don't have to. We can dance right here to the music of the stars.\"\n\n\"Oh, Robert. You're such a romantic.\"\n\nShe almost turned his offer down but changed her mind. Something about the night made her feel that life was slipping away. Or maybe she simply took pity on him for driving all the way out here for nothing.\n\n\"Oh, what can it hurt?\" she said, rising to her feet. \"Just don't step on my toes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "I fancy you.\n\nThe words were still running through Kate's head while she crossed to the back of the barn to join Ruckus by the punch bowl.\n\nLadle in hand, he greeted her with a nod of his head. \"Want some punch?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I just want to ask you something. People back east express themselves differently than they do here.\"\n\nRuckus dumped a ladleful of punch into a glass. \"I reckon so.\"\n\n\"Here in Arizona, if someone uses the word fancy, what exactly does it mean?\"\n\nRuckus arched an eyebrow. \"What does it mean?\"\n\nShe blushed. It did seem like a rather foolish question. \"In Boston the word is used as an adjective to describe something ornamental such as a fancy dress. It's also an unflattering term for a loose woman. Sometimes it means simply that you like someone. As a friend, perhaps. Or that you want something. You could say that you fancy that hat, for example.\"\n\nLadle frozen in midair, Ruckus stared at her like she'd taken leave of her senses. \"Far as I know fancy means the same here.\"\n\n\"That's... that's what I thought. I just wanted to make certain.\"\n\nSmelling smoke, she glanced around and spotted a smoldering cigar butt next to a bale of hay. A flame shot up like an enormous tongue licking one side of the bundle. Without thinking Kate grabbed the punch bowl and dumped punch on the hay. The splash of liquid extinguished the fire and sent chunks of ice skidding across the floor.\n\n\"Oh dear, dear, dear.\" Aunt Bessie rushed up to the refreshment table, the train of her dress sweeping back and forth with a whishing sound. She stared at the charred bale.\n\n\"I'm sorry I made a mess,\" Kate said. Gratified that for once she'd acted quickly and without fear in the face of fire, she set the empty bowl on the table. Even Ruckus looked impressed by her quick action. Strangely enough, after all that she'd gone through these last few weeks, a simple little fire no longer terrified her.\n\n\"Nonsense. You saved the day.\" Picking up her train before a trickle of liquid reached it, Aunt Bessie gave an anxious glance around the barn, but few guests seemed to have noticed the near disaster. The musicians kept playing and couples continued to dance and Aunt Bessie let out a sigh of relief.\n\nMrs. White came rushing over. \"I'll take care of it,\" she said, and immediately set to work mopping up the floor with a rag.\n\nAunt Bessie thanked her and turned to Kate. \"Would you mind walking to the house and helping me fetch more ice?\"\n\n\"I'd be happy to,\" Kate replied, grateful for a reason to escape the festivities. She followed the older woman outside and along a narrow path toward the small adobe house, a full moon lighting their way. She took in a breath of fresh air, hoping to clear her head.\n\nAunt Bessie stopped halfway between the barn and house to point to a couple a short distance away. \"That's the marshal and Miss Watson. I've been nagging him for months to get to know her better and it looks as if he's finally taken my advice.\" With a sigh of satisfaction she continued along the path to the back entryway. \"I'm so glad you could come tonight,\" she said, holding the door for Kate.\n\n\"It was very kind of you to go to all this trouble,\" Kate said.\n\n\"It was no trouble. I just hope the reward helps put Cactus Joe behind bars where he belongs.\"\n\nThey entered a small but tidy kitchen. A lit parlor lamp on the kitchen table cast a yellow glow over the cabinets and clay-tiled floor.\n\n\"Now where does Lula-Belle keep the ice pick? Ah, there it is.\" Aunt Bessie reached across the counter for the long pointed spike and metal bowl and opened the top of the wood icebox. Stabbing the frozen block with the pick, she chipped away.\n\n\"Would you like me to do that for you?\" Kate asked.\n\n\"No, that's quite all right. I just wanted the company.\" She glanced over her shoulder. \"I hope you don't take anything Miss Chase says to heart.\"\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"She's got her sights set on Luke, but she's all wrong for him. She's far too flighty and Luke is more serious-minded. You know what I mean?\"\n\nKate didn't want to talk about Luke but couldn't think of another subject. \"I believe so.\"\n\n\"Marriage is hard enough without marrying the wrong person. He needs someone like you.\"\n\nIrked by the woman's interfering ways, Kate bit back her annoyance. Aunt Bessie no doubt meant well. \"I hope I haven't given you the wrong impression. I'm committed to the ranch and that leaves no room for... marriage.\"\n\n\"What a pity.\" Aunt Bessie gave the ice a hard jab. \"Trust me, the ranch will do nothing for your toes.\"\n\n\"My toes?\" Goodness! Had everyone in Cactus Patch read her book? Her cheeks flared and she waved her hand in front of her face to cool herself down. \"I know you're just being kind but\u2014\"\n\n\"Nonsense. Kindness has nothing to do with it. I'm simply being practical. I've been married for forty years and know a good match when I see it. You and Luke are perfect for each other.\"\n\nA chip of ice flew onto Kate's shirtwaist and she brushed it off. \"Forty years is a long time. Were you ever concerned that your husband would... desert you?\"\n\nAunt Bessie's hand froze in midair and she spun around to face Kate. The ghastly white color of her face made her purple dress look even more garish. \"What do you mean by that? Did... did you hear something?\"\n\nStartled by the woman's reaction Kate quickly explained, \"I didn't mean to imply... It's just that my father left when I was very young. It's hard for me to trust... anyone. A man.\"\n\nAunt Bessie's face softened even as it registered relief. \"You poor, poor child. No wonder... But if you're thinking that Luke would take off, you couldn't be more wrong. Why, he's as faithful as an old hound. And trustworthy too. He's the only one in town knows how to open every safe, even the one at the bank. That's because those mail-order safes never work right and Luke has had to repair them all. But no one worries about their money because Luke is an honest, upstanding Christian.\"\n\nAunt Bessie turned back to the icebox and continued stabbing at the frozen block. She talked nonstop about the couples she had matched over the years. \"Twenty-three couples,\" she said with a note of pride. \"And in all that time I only made one error. Although I still think the marriage would have worked had she not shot her husband.\"\n\nKate listened politely, or at least tried to, but her mind kept wandering to something Aunt Bessie had said earlier. \"Faithful as an old hound. And trustworthy. Honest.\" Hadn't she once used words to that effect to describe Brandon, the hero in her novel? Was it possible for a real flesh-and-blood man to possess such qualities? If only that were true..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Luke led Miss Chase around the dance floor but he was hardly aware of her. He was as polite and friendly as he knew how, but she wasn't the one he wanted in his arms. He counted the moments until the music stopped and he could take his leave.\n\nHe'd told Kate how he felt and she stared at him like... like he'd said nothing, like he hadn't poured out his heart.\n\nMiss Chase's constant chatter and high-pitched laughter ground on his nerves, but that was the least of it.\n\nWhat a fool to think he had a chance with someone like Kate. A college-educated woman. A writer. She'd done everything in her power to push him away, to tell him she wasn't interested. And yet... at times she looked at him with those big blue eyes and he swore she felt what he felt, wanted what he wanted. Fancied him every bit as much as he fancied her.\n\n\"So what do you think, Lukey?\" Miss Chase said with a flirtatious smile.\n\nHe bit back his irritation. \"What do I think about what?\"\n\nShe pushed her lips out in a pout. \"What is wrong with you tonight? You seem so... distant.\"\n\n\"Sorry. I have a lot on my mind.\" But even as he apologized to Miss Chase, his gaze swept from one end of the barn to the other. Where was Kate? Had she left? Skedaddled?\n\n\"You two-timing, double-crossing, bullheaded rat!\"\n\nStartled by his uncle's angry voice, Luke pulled his arms away from his dance partner and spun around. \"What the...\"\n\nUncle Sam and the postmaster, Jeb Parker, stood glaring at each other in the middle of the dance floor, fists clenched.\n\nWithout so much as taking his leave, Luke left his dance partner's side and hurried to his uncle.\n\n\"You ain't got no right to make such accusations,\" the postmaster said. A pasty-faced man with a long, lean face anchored by a goatee, he towered over Uncle Sam's five-foot-five height by a good six inches. If height didn't intimidate his uncle, the look on Parker's face should have.\n\n\"I got every right in the world,\" his uncle said, showing no sign of backing down.\n\n\"Oh yeah?\"\n\n\"Yeah!\"\n\nThe music stopped and all eyes turned to the two men.\n\nParker pulled back his fist and Luke quickly stepped in front of his uncle. Things were out of hand and he meant to put a stop to it.\n\n\"Now see here, both of\u2014\"\n\nParker's fist shot out in a high arc, catching Luke on the jaw and snapping his head back. Ears buzzing from the blow, Luke saw stars. He didn't want to fight, but the older man kept coming, his hand shooting toward Luke's throat.\n\nLuke grabbed Parker's arm before it reached its target and twisted it around his back.\n\n\"Calm down,\" Luke cajoled.\n\nHe released Parker\u2014big mistake. The man came at Luke with both arms flailing. Luke ducked the first blow, but the second one bounced off his nose.\n\nSomehow Luke managed to wrap his arms around Parker, pinning his fists to his sides. Parker kicked Luke in the shins and the two fell to the floor, Parker's contorted face inches away from his.\n\nMichael surprised Luke by rushing to his defense. Unfortunately, this signaled others to join in the fray. Fists flew in every direction and grunts and groans filled the air. Some men were gallant enough to escort their dance partners to safety before throwing a punch. Most, however, chose to let the women fend for themselves.\n\nUncle Sam grabbed hold of Parker's leg and tried to drag him away from Luke. He might have succeeded had Aunt Bessie not intervened. She grabbed Uncle Sam by the ear and pulled him out of harm's way with a thorough tongue-lashing.\n\n\"Shame on you, Samuel!\" she scolded. \"You're nothing but an old fool.\"\n\nBy the time Marshal Morris was able to instill order, chairs and tables had been overturned, and some combatants had even taken the fight outside.\n\nThe marshal grabbed Luke by the collar. \"You're going to jail. All of you!\"\n\nLuke staggered to his feet, hand on his sore jaw. That's when he saw Kate watching, disapproval written all over her face. He wanted to go to her, explain, but the marshal had already handcuffed him to Parker and was leading the two of them away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Chapter 30\n\nBessie's feet were killing her. She wanted to go home in the worst possible way and kick off her toe-pinching shoes. The dance had ended abruptly and all because of that unfortunate fight. If only she hadn't left the barn to fetch more ice from the house. All she wanted was to talk to Kate alone and now look what happened.\n\nIt was as much the marshal's fault as it was her own. Had he not been outside with Miss Watson he could have stepped in before things got out of hand.\n\nWhat was Luke thinking? Getting his uncle involved in a fight, of all things. Sam could have been seriously hurt. And where was the fool man? How long could it possibly take to bail their nephew out of jail?\n\nShe should have accepted Murphy's offer to drive her home. But no, thoughtful woman that she was, she stayed to apologize to the last departing guests and make certain her sister's barn was left as she found it.\n\nWhat a dreadful mess, food and decorations scattered everywhere. It took forever to clean it up.\n\nShe groaned. Not only did her feet hurt but also her head. What she wouldn't give for a cheroot. If only she hadn't promised Luke to give up her smoking habit. Sometimes a woman needed to blow off steam or, in this case, smoke. God forgive her.\n\nShe swiped a strand of hair away from her face. The night had not been a complete disaster, but close enough. She'd collected a healthy amount of reward money. No complaints there. Surely it would only be a matter of time before Cactus Joe was captured and put under lock and key. But she failed miserably in her plan to bring Kate and Luke together, thanks to that flirtatious hussy Miss Chase.\n\nLuke getting into a fight didn't help. Not only did Kate look positively devastated, she took off like her hair was on fire. Bessie shook with irritation. Just wait till she got her hands on her errant nephew.\n\nJust as upsetting, she had failed to identify the other woman and she had no one to blame but herself. She never should have gone to all the bother of looking so absolutely marvelous, for it only defeated her purposes. Instead of looking at the other woman, Sam hadn't been able to take his eyes off her all night. Had she not been so intent on finding out the name of his love interest, Bessie would have enjoyed his undivided attention.\n\nThe purple taffeta dress brought out all her best features. Although, to be perfectly honest, she doubted the dress color was responsible for Sam's admiring glances as much as the plunging neckline.\n\nThe youthful pink glow of her skin was no doubt caused by her tight, pinching corset, but it had been worth every excruciating moment just to see the look on Sam's face when he first caught sight of her.\n\nSam certainly wasn't himself. He acted as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Of course, wearing a new shirt and bow tie probably explained some of his discomfort, but not all. He'd even donned those brown leather boots she had given him last Christmas and that he claimed hurt his feet.\n\nIf his odd behavior in recent weeks hadn't already roused her suspicions, the way he doted on her at the dance surely would have. Waiting on her hand and foot. Plying her with glasses of lemonade and plates piled high with all her favorite desserts.\n\nHe hadn't even waited on her all those years ago when she broke her leg. Such solicitous behavior could only be a sign of guilt. Had to be. No other explanation made sense.\n\nMercy, did her heart ever pound when he took her in his arms on the dance floor. It gave her goose bumps just to think about it. Normally, nothing would please her more, but not now. Not with his motives in question.\n\nSo who was she? Certainly not widow White. Sam would never act as gauche as to eye a woman whose husband had been in the grave for a mere six months.\n\nBut who else was there? Certainly not that awful Mrs. Spinnaker who couldn't say a kind word about anyone. One by one she considered every woman she could think of and came up empty.\n\nShe couldn't imagine it was any of the numerous women she knew at church or her quilting bee. None could match her in housekeeping skills, and certainly not in cooking.\n\nThat meant it had to be someone younger, and this scared the life out of her. There simply was no way she could compete with youth. Not even in her purple gown." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "It was after two in the morning and still Kate couldn't sleep. The bedding tied in hopeless knots from all the twisting and turning, she finally gave up. She climbed out of bed and paced the floor. She was consumed with thoughts of Luke\u2014the two sides of him\u2014the gentle, caring side that almost had her fooled, the dark, angry side confirming her opinion that no man could be trusted.\n\nHe may be faithful as an old dog, but obviously he had another side. Picking on an old man like that. What was he thinking? The postmaster could have been seriously injured.\n\nSickened by the memory of Luke fighting, his nose bloodied and face dark, she flung herself across the bed. Her stomach churned in protest as she traveled back in time to another night, another fight\u2014the night she started a fire to save her mama from the pounding of brutal fists.\n\nAs much as she hated comparing Luke to the men in her past, experience taught her that it was man's nature to be violent. Luke's dark side didn't surprise her, but it was still a crushing blow. She wanted so much to believe he was unlike other men, to know that the gentleness and concern he'd shown her were real and not merely a guise covering a sinister nature.\n\nShe hated to admit it even to herself, but she'd been so close\u2014so very close\u2014to believing in him, trusting him. What a fool! What an utter, utter fool. Had she not learned anything in all her years? A handsome man tells her he fancies her and she practically loses her head. What was wrong with her?\n\nHer heart belonged to the ranch. It was what she'd wanted and worked for these last couple of months. It was in her blood and she was convinced it was what she was born to do.\n\nSo why the confusion? Why did Luke affect her so?\n\nShe grabbed a pillow off the bed and tossed it across the room. Going to that dance had been a mistake. Any and all future social invitations would be politely but firmly declined. Certainly she would never allow herself to be in Luke's arms again.\n\nThe moment she finished Cactus Joe's book, she would hang up her pen, this time for good. Writing his story was like lifting a rock and seeing her childhood with new clarity. His mother's illness made her realize that her own mother had been ill, too, not of the flesh, but of the spirit. It was easier to stay angry at a weak person, but when illness was involved\u2014even one exacerbated by alcohol\u2014feelings became more complicated. She no longer knew how she felt about her mother.\n\nThat's why completing Cactus Joe's story was so important to her\u2014she didn't know what she would discover next about her own past. Would it help her understand why her father left? Why her mother drank? Help her come to terms with her parents' flaws, maybe even to the point of forgiveness? Maybe not, but at least it gave her a place to dump her bottled-up feelings.\n\nThe ranch required every bit of energy she had and then some. Her painful past had become a distraction and she needed to put it to rest. It was time to wipe the slate clean. Her future depended on it. Perhaps taming the past would even help to resolve her confusion over Luke.\n\nWith this thought in mind, she quietly left her room. Creeping downstairs, she felt her way in the dark. She wouldn't write for long, just an hour or so. She couldn't sleep anyway, so what could it hurt? A rush of excitement raced through her as she anticipated the thrill of running her fingers over the Remington typing machine again and writing another chapter.\n\nHaving reconstructed the chapters written at Cactus Joe's cabin she would now have to depend on her creative skills to write the rest. That meant digging deeper into her own childhood. Perhaps even uncovering long-buried memories.\n\nReaching Miss Walker's office, she lit the parlor lamp and turned to the desk.\n\nThe typewriter was gone! Shocked, she stood perfectly still for several moments before bursting into tears and running back to her room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Luke groaned. It wasn't a hangover, but it sure did feel like one. Or at least what he imagined a hangover felt like. His head pounded, his jaw was sore, and one eye was swollen shut. Even Homer couldn't bring him out of his misery, though the poor dog did everything but dance on his hind legs trying to get Luke's attention.\n\n\"Woof!\"\n\n\"You're a dog of few words. Let's keep it that way.\"\n\n\"Woof, woof!\"\n\n\"Okay, I get the message,\" Luke said at last. Homer could be such a nuisance at times. He rose from his stool and reached for the jar of jerky. He tossed a piece on the floor. Homer barked and wouldn't stop until Luke tossed him another piece. Satisfied at last, the dog picked up both pieces and ran outside, presumably to share the meat with his lady friend.\n\nAlone, Luke surveyed the work stacked up on his workbench. What he needed was a day off. He needed to go back to bed. Maybe this time he'd actually sleep. Then again, maybe not.\n\nFor some reason everyone blamed him for the fight. Certainly his aunt did. If spending half the night in jail wasn't bad enough, he'd had to listen to her read him the riot act. Aunt Bessie had apparently gone to the house to fetch something and had missed the start of the fight. She had no idea what started it and he had no intention of saying anything about his uncle's suspicions. Not yet, anyway.\n\nThen there was Kate. He would never forget the look on her face as the marshal dragged him away. Obviously she blamed him. The memory didn't just make his head throb\u2014it felt ready to explode." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "A sad-looking group gathered at dawn that Monday for the usual morning prayer. O.T. and Ruckus were the only two men not sporting a black eye or bruised chin.\n\nRuckus whipped off his hat and held it to his chest. \"Dear heavenly Father, send rain.\"\n\nThe others took off, although with less energy than usual, and Kate fell in step by Ruckus's side. \"Rain? Is that all you ever think about?\"\n\nShe was in a bad mood and didn't care who knew it. She'd had little if any sleep, but that wasn't the only reason for her ill temper. For two days she had tried to talk to Miss Walker about the missing typewriter, but the woman had been impossible to track down.\n\n\"What about your men? Don't they deserve a prayer?\"\n\nRuckus stopped in his tracks, his eyes wide with surprise. \"I did pray for them. I always pray for them.\"\n\n\"You prayed for rain,\" she argued. \"Same as always.\" Oh, she really was in a foul mood.\n\nFortunately, Ruckus didn't seem to take offense. \"Rain is just another word for blessings,\" he said. \"It grows, it quenches, and it heals.\"\n\n\"You talk in riddles,\" she snapped.\n\nHe laughed at her expression. \"Us western folks are easy to understand. You ought to know that by now. We may not always say what we mean but we always mean what we say.\"\n\nWhen she failed to appreciate his humor, he eyed her from beneath a creased forehead. \"What's the matter with you today? You look madder than a wet rooster.\"\n\nShe bit her lip and sighed. She felt guilty for taking out her bad mood on him. \"I could use some of God's blessings myself right now.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and those horses could use some fresh hay. Nothing cures what ails you faster than work. Now get to work.\" He gave her a cockeyed look. \"So what are you waiting for?\"\n\n\"A Bible quote,\" she said.\n\n\"I gave you one. Exodus 5:18. It says get to work.\"\n\nKate groaned. She should have known. Ruckus really did have a Bible verse for every occasion.\n\nDuring the next hour she helped unload two wagons of hay. Although still early, it was already blazing hot and her clothes clung to her body. After the empty wagons left to be reloaded, she walked over to the windmill and drenched herself with water.\n\nSomeone rode up on a black-and-white pinto, an Indian. Her heart pounding nervously, she glanced around. Ruckus had disappeared into the barn. Though he was still within earshot, she would have felt a whole lot better had he been visible. Since her kidnapping, strangers made her nervous, even ones she knew couldn't possibly be Cactus Joe in disguise.\n\nThe Indian reared his horse in front of her and lifted an arm, palm outward, to show her he meant no harm. He pointed to the water tank and she nodded.\n\nHe slid off the bare back of the pinto, and while the horse drank from the trough, he cupped his hands and helped himself to water from the tank.\n\nNever having met an Indian face-to-face, she couldn't help but stare. He seemed normal and nothing like the savages she'd read about in Boston's newspaper. Nor was he like the wild tomahawk-wielding Indians she'd written about in her novels who wore breechcloths and war paint and said \"How.\"\n\nDressed in an odd combination of Indian and white man's clothes, he wore moccasins, Levi pants, and a poncho-style shirt. Dark skin stretched over high cheekbones, his black glossy hair arranged in a figure eight bun with a colorful band across his forehead.\n\nHe wiped his mouth dry with the back of his hand and regarded her with intelligent brown eyes. She guessed he was in his late twenties or early thirties.\n\n\"I came to see Miss Walker,\" he said. He spoke good English, pronouncing each word precisely.\n\n\"Miss Walker is out on the range,\" she said. \"May I help you?\"\n\n\"Tell her Sky Runner send gratitude.\" Hand on his chest he inclined his head slightly as he spoke.\n\nSky Runner. Did Indians have barn names too? And how did he come to be called such an intriguing name? \"You want to thank her?\"\n\nHe gave a single nod of his head. \"She give family two goats, chickens, and milk cow.\" He stuck out his chest as if showing off a medal. \"Now we have farm.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker did that?\"\n\nHe nodded again and thumped his broad chest with his fist. \"You tell her Sky Runner heart big with gratitude.\"\n\n\"I'll tell her,\" Kate promised.\n\nThanking her, he mounted his horse and rode away so quickly, his horse's hooves barely seemed to touch the ground.\n\nRuckus walked out of the barn, pitchfork in hand. \"We have company?\" he called.\n\n\"Yes,\" she hollered back as she hurried across the yard to join him. \"Do you know a man named Sky Runner?\"\n\nRuckus stood his pitchfork against the wall. \"Yep. He's part Navajo. Lives north of here. Was that him?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Did you know that Miss Walker helped him start a farm?\"\n\n\"'Course I knew it. I helped ready the animals myself.\" He studied her. \"Don't look so surprised.\"\n\n\"It just seems like a kind thing to do.\"\n\n\"The boss lady does a lot of kind things. Not too many people know it. That's how she wants it.\"\n\nKate recalled the steer and other animals carted away her first day at the ranch. Now she knew why Jos\u00e9 had been so secretive.\n\n\"Every year the boss lady picks out a family or two to help. She gave my daughter a heifer for a wedding present. That's so my daughter and her new husband could start their own ranch. It's a Last Chance tradition and goes way back to when Miz Walker's ma received a steer from an Englishman.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker told me about that. She said her mother saved the man's life.\"\n\n\"That's what I heard. One heifer and now look what we have.\" He gestured with his arm. \"Like the Good Book says, cast your bread upon the waters and it'll come galloping back with a whole gang.\"\n\nKate laughed, her earlier bad mood forgotten. \"I expect it's a whole lot easier to cast bread than a steer.\"\n\nHis mouth twisted wryly. \"I reckon you'll find out once you take over the ranch.\"\n\nOnce she took over? Was that a vote of confidence? Sure did sound that way.\n\nShe stared out over the land. She could no longer see Sky Runner, but the mirage of a lake shimmered in the distance.\n\n\"Nothing is what it seems,\" she said. Miss Walker certainly wasn't. Nor, for that matter, was Luke. He seemed honest and kind, but she now knew he also had another side.\n\n\"That's the way God planned it,\" Ruckus said. \"It forces us to give the world\u2014and each other\u2014a closer look-see.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Chapter 31\n\nFive days after the barn dance, Bessie found a box on the kitchen table. It was a plain white box wrapped with a red ribbon and tied with a big fat bow. A card read, A good old gal if there ever was one. Always, Sam.\n\nOld gal? Is that what he thought of her? And why was he giving her a present? Her birthday and Christmas were still months away. That could only mean one thing. Sam was still acting out of guilt.\n\nShe quickly pulled off the ribbon and opened the box. It was a pudding pan that matched the skillet and saucepan that Sam had previously given her. Tears sprang to her eyes. After the dance, she had almost convinced herself that Sam had lost interest in the other woman, but this latest enamelware gift proved her wrong.\n\nMercy, what would be next? A matching teakettle? Anger soon replaced her hurt. After giving Sam the best years of her life, this was how he treated her.\n\nShe slammed the pan back into the box, walked into the kitchen, gathered up her skillet and saucepan, and dropped the whole kit and caboodle into the trash. Brushing her hands together, she threw back her shoulders. She would not play second fiddle to some husband-stealing tramp. She had her pride. Granted, she didn't have much left at this point, but what little she did have she intended to keep.\n\nShe stormed through the house and into the bedroom. Pulling a battered valise out of the closet, she stuffed it full of her old clothes. She left her new satin unmentionables behind, for all the good they'd done her.\n\nShe would not spend another moment under the same roof with that two-timing husband of hers.\n\nIn no time at all, she finished packing and harnessed the horse to the wagon. Lula-Belle pulled up in her buggy just as Bessie drove away.\n\n\"Where are you going?\" Lula-Belle called.\n\n\"I'm leaving Sam. I'm going to Marion's.\" Their older widowed sister lived in Tucson.\n\nLula-Belle's eyes grew as wide as the discarded pudding pan, but Bessie had no time to argue with her or spell everything out.\n\nJust then Sam returned from his daily walk. He called to her but Bessie drove right by him like he didn't exist.\n\nShe followed the stagecoach road to Tucson, which cut through miles of desert. She would have to spend the night at Mescal, of course, and maybe even a night at Wilmot. She would also have to telegraph Marion to let her know she was coming.\n\nIt was hot, but Bessie was too angry and hurt to give it much mind. Forty years she'd given that man. Forty of the best years of her life. She had washed and cleaned and cooked for him. Laughed at his dreadful jokes. Listened to his endless war stories. Picked up after him. And what did she have to show for it? A pudding pan!\n\nSo deep were her thoughts that it took her awhile to notice she was being followed. Thinking it was her fool sister, she slowed down, but after spotting Sam in the driver's seat of her sister's buggy, Bessie slapped the reins against her horse's rump, forcing the startled animal to pick up speed.\n\nA few miles later she glanced back, but Sam was still on her tail. \"Gid-up!\" she yelled. She had nothing to say to him, and at that moment she didn't care if she ever saw him again. God help her.\n\nThe road rose over a hill, twisting and turning around outcrops of huge boulders. She didn't chance looking back until she reached the summit. Sam had apparently given up the chase for there was no sign of him. She rested her horse in the shade and let him drink from a natural spring. She dipped her handkerchief in the water and mopped the sweat off her forehead.\n\nHa! Give up, did he? He chased her long enough to appease his conscience, but he obviously had no intention or interest in catching up with her. Not that she cared. Of course she didn't care. Why would she? After the way he treated her. Still, the least he could have done was try a little harder to catch her. After all the years she'd given him, he could have acted like he didn't want her to leave.\n\nShe hoisted her skirt and climbed on the rocks to view the road below. In the far distance the eastbound train from Tucson looked like a metal snake, but there was no sign of Sam. Strange. If he wasn't on the way home and he wasn't on the road behind her, then where in tarnation was he?\n\nWorried now, she walked back until she could see the road leading up to where she stood. Nothing. Heart pounding, she ran to her wagon, turned it around, and started back down to the valley below. She then spotted a spinning wheel off the side of the road.\n\nCrying out in alarm, she yanked on the hand brake of her wagon and jumped to the ground. Sam was sprawled in a ditch a few feet from the overturned buggy. Lula-Belle's horse, Jordan, was on his side, squirming. Spotting Bessie, he let out a frantic whinny.\n\nIgnoring the horse, Bessie slid down the embankment and rushed to Sam's side.\n\n\"Are you all right?\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"It's just my leg. Take care of Jordan.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\" Torn between seeing to Sam and helping the horse, Bessie tried to think what to do.\n\n\"I'm fine.\" Sam sounded more annoyed at himself than hurt. \"I should have watched where I was going.\"\n\nShe gave Sam's leg a worried look before scampering toward the distressed animal. \"You're all right,\" she said soothingly, stroking Jordan's neck.\n\nOnce she got the gelding to calm down, she unbuckled the back strap and undid the traces. She moved slowly so as not to startle the fallen animal.\n\n\"Be careful,\" Sam called. \"I don't want you getting yourself hurt.\"\n\nTouched by his concern, she stepped back as the horse struggled to his feet. This was the dangerous part. The horse could easily stomp on her with flailing hooves. His eyes looked wild, but fortunately he showed no sign of injury. She led him out of the ditch and tied him to the overturned wagon before returning to Sam's side.\n\n\"Let me look at your leg.\"\n\n\"It's just a twisted ankle,\" he said.\n\nShe shook her head. \"You're an old fool.\"\n\nHe stared at her from beneath knitted eyebrows. \"I'm a fool? What about you? You're the one who's all hung up on that Parker fella.\"\n\nBessie sat back on her heels. \"What are you talkin' about? What about Parker?\"\n\n\"Don't look so innocent,\" he charged. \"I know you've been seeing him on the sly.\"\n\nShocked by his accusation, it took her a moment to gather her thoughts. \"Is that what the fight was about?\"\n\nSam had refused to tell her what caused the fight that ruined the dance, and her annoying nephew was equally closemouthed.\n\n\"I couldn't help myself. Knowing that you and him was dilly dallying behind my back made me see red.\"\n\nBessie's temper snapped. How dare he try to wiggle out of this one by placing the blame on her! \"Don't you go accusin' me of fooling around when you're the one lollygagging with some other woman.\"\n\nSam's eyes widened in astonishment. \"What are you talkin' about? Lollygagging?\"\n\n\"You don't think I know why you bought me that pudding pan? It's to ease your guilty conscience, that's why. Just like you bought that skillet forty years ago after making eyes at that Mexican woman.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"You knew about that?\"\n\n\"Yes, I knew about that.\"\n\n\"I was a young fool back then. But I swear to you I've never looked at another woman since.\" He shook his head. \"And I sure didn't expect you to go lookin' at another man.\"\n\nBessie stared at him. He actually seemed to believe his own ridiculous accusations. \"Why in the world would you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"You're the one who's been acting all strange. Wearing those slippery undergarments and fancy dresses cut down to your knees.\"\n\n\"I did that for you. I... eh... have it on good authority that men like silky things.\" She didn't want to admit she'd read one of Kate's dime novels.\n\n\"For me? You mean you and Parker ain't\u2014\"\n\n\"Can't stand the man. Why, the last time I mailed a letter, he tried to overcharge me.\"\n\nA smile as wide as the Grand Canyon suffused Sam's face. \"I can't tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that. I don't need you to wear no fancy garments. I like you just the way you are. I love you, Bessie Sue, and there's no other woman I'd rather be with.\"\n\n\"You... you still love me,\" she stammered. \"After all this time?\"\n\n\"Of course I love you. Do you think I'd waste my money on pots and pans if I didn't?\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Tears sprang to her eyes and his face turned all buttery.\n\n\"Come here,\" he said and held out his arms. She melted next to him and he groaned in pain. \"Are you all right?\" she asked anxiously.\n\n\"I'm fine,\" he said. \"Just be careful of my shoulder and leg and arms and...\"\n\nShe leaned over and kissed him square on the mouth. Fortunately there was nothing wrong with his lips. Not one single thing.\n\nMercy. Her body didn't just tingle. It shivered and quivered like Lula-Belle's homemade jelly, all the way down to her very toes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Chapter 32\n\nLuke was pleasantly surprised to find Aunt Bessie and Uncle Sam acting like a couple of lovebirds on Sunday. Good news for them, bad news for him.\n\nNow that his aunt had worked out her problems with Uncle Sam, she obviously planned to devote all her energy to finding wives for her nephews. Since Michael wasn't able to get away from the ranch because of some windmill problem, she apparently intended to zero in on Luke. No sooner had the five of them, including both aunts and uncles, sat down to noon dinner than she started.\n\n\"So have you seen Miss Tenney since the barn dance?\" she asked, reaching for a bowl of fluffy white potatoes.\n\n\"No, I haven't,\" Luke replied, surprised at the sharpness of his voice. He stabbed at a piece of roast beef and passed the platter to Uncle Murphy. He hadn't meant to snap at his aunt. For all her meddling, she meant well. By way of apology he gave her a sheepish smile.\n\n\"I'm happy to see the two of you are getting along,\" he said in an effort to get her mind off Kate.\n\nIt had cost his uncle a swollen ankle, cracked rib, dislocated shoulder, and some mean-looking bruises, but he claimed it was a small price to pay for saving his marriage.\n\nAunt Lula-Belle scooped a mound of potatoes onto her plate and passed the dish to Luke. \"It was that book that started all the trouble.\"\n\nAunt Bessie gave her sister a meaningful look. \"Now, Lula-Belle\u2014\"\n\nLula-Belle glared back at her. \"Well, it was.\"\n\nLuke shoveled up a spoonful of potatoes and looked from one aunt to the other. \"What book?\"\n\nLula-Belle ignored her sister's warning. \"The book that Miss Tenney wrote. Bessie read it.\" She stuck up her nose and shuddered in distaste. \"Every... single... word.\"\n\nLuke's hand froze halfway to his plate. He had no idea Aunt Bessie read anything Kate had written. Since when had his aunt been interested in philosophy? Luke could hardly contain his curiosity. Not only was he anxious to hear more about Kate's books, he also wanted to know what was behind the dagger looks flying back and forth between his two aunts.\n\nHe turned his gaze to Aunt Bessie. \"I... I thought she wrote for Greeks or monks or something.\"\n\n\"Oh no,\" Aunt Bessie exclaimed, glaring at her sister. \"The book is in English.\"\n\nAunt Lula-Belle leaned forward, her tight curls bouncing up and down like little metal springs. \"And you won't find Miss Tenney's book in a monastery. At least I hope not. Any monk reading such goings-on would be shocked into breaking his vow of silence. She writes dime novels.\"\n\nLuke stared at his aunt in astonishment. Dime novels? Kate was so reluctant to talk about her writing, he assumed she wrote literary stuff. It never occurred to him that she wrote what some people called cheap fiction. Still couldn't believe it.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" he asked.\n\n\"Quite sure,\" Lula-Belle said. She lowered her voice and glanced around as if checking for eavesdroppers. \"And one of them was banned in Boston.\"\n\nHis eyes widened. \"Did you say banned?\"\n\nLula-Belle gave a righteous nod. \"Yes, banned. For being morally decadent.\" She gestured toward her sister. \"Tell him, Bessie.\"\n\nBessie threw up her hands. \"Mercy, what difference does it make? The poor girl was probably only trying to support herself. She's not writing them now. As for being morally decadent\u2014that's a bunch of hogwash.\" She leveled her gaze at Luke. \"If someone doesn't do something, she'll throw her life away on a ranch. Is that what you want?\"\n\n\"It's her choice,\" Luke muttered. Suddenly aware he still held the serving spoon, he jammed it back into the potatoes and passed the bowl to Uncle Murphy.\n\nHe couldn't get over the fact that Kate wrote dime novels. He never would have guessed it. Not with all that talk about Greek philosophers.\n\nOf course he'd never read one of them himself, but others, including his aunt, called the books trash. And wasn't Bill Sawyer's boy Davey recently expelled from school for reading one?\n\n\"So what do you think, Luke?\" Aunt Bessie asked.\n\nSnapping out of his thoughts, Luke looked up. \"I'm sorry...\"\n\n\"I said, do you think Miss Tenney should waste her life on a ranch?\"\n\nSam rolled his eyes and adjusted the arm still in a sling. \"Drat, Bessie. Why do you keep harping on this? What the girl does is nobody's business. Pass the butter.\"\n\nLula-Belle wrinkled her nose and tugged on her shawl. \"Of course it's our business. Any lady friend of Luke's is our business.\"\n\nSam took the butter dish from Lula-Belle with his one good arm. \"Miss Tenney is your lady friend?\"\n\nLuke felt heat rise up his neck. \"Not the way Aunt Lula-Belle means,\" Luke stammered. Since both aunts and uncles were staring at him, he added, \"She's a college-educated woman and I'm... I'm just a smithy.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Uncle Sam said. \"There's no such thing as just a smithy.\"\n\n\"And no woman is really educated until she marries,\" Aunt Bessie added.\n\n\"Now, Bessie, don't push the boy,\" Uncle Sam said.\n\n\"Somebody's got to,\" Aunt Bessie said. \"Just because she uses big words is no reason not to follow your heart.\"\n\nUncle Murphy, who usually didn't speak while eating, made a guttural sound. \"Big words are a waste of everybody's time. It takes longer to say 'em and longer to hear 'em.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Aunt Lula-Belle said. \"Just because you can talk like Webster's dictionary doesn't mean you should.\"\n\nAunt Bessie poured gravy over her roast beef but she looked at Luke. \"Fortunately for us, God gave love a language of its own and it's a language known by every heart.\"\n\nShe slammed the gravy bowl on the table, splashing the tablecloth with brown spots, and much to Luke's relief, the conversation turned to Utah's recent statehood. Arizona was one of only two territories on the continental US\u2014excluding Indian Territory\u2014that was not a state, and it was a sore point with his uncles.\n\n\"They say we have to become Americanized before we can become a state. What in tarnation is that supposed to mean?\" Uncle Murphy grumbled.\n\n\"For one thing it means we can't use silver as our legal currency,\" Sam explained. \"The US insists we use gold and I don't see that happenin'.\"\n\nFor the most part Luke ignored the discussion. The shock of learning that Kate wrote dime novels had worn off, only to be replaced by perhaps an even more surprising thought. If she did, indeed, write what were commonly called potboilers, she might even be broad-minded enough to give a lowly smithy like himself a chance. If only he could figure out how to break down the barriers between them.\n\nHe could see her in his head as clearly as if she were in the same room with him. Without realizing it he had memorized her every feature, memorized the way her lashes curled, the pretty shape of her full mouth that tasted as good as it looked, memorized even the way her nose turned slightly upward.\n\nHe only wished he could forget the horrified look in her eyes following the fight at the dance. The closed expression when he last tried to talk to her.\n\nHe was a simple man. He didn't really understand how women thought or how that man and woman stuff was supposed to work. But there was one thing he did know; he sure had made a mess out of things, and if he didn't think of something fast, he would lose Kate for good." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Kate awoke with a nervous knot in her stomach. It was hard to believe that four months had passed so quickly.\n\nIt was still dark overhead when she stepped onto the balcony, but dawn had broken and a thin silver line marked the eastern horizon.\n\nToday was the day she would officially become the heiress to the Last Chance Ranch. A thrill of excitement shot through her. Of course she still had much to learn, but one day this would all be hers. Now when she gazed across the desert, she no longer saw barren land. She saw ruggedness, endurance, vastness. Everything from the smallest insect to the largest plant knew to protect itself from the harsh land, and for that reason, she saw herself.\n\nShe had a long way to go, but she was determined to secure her future as a respectable cattlewoman. Never again would she be looked upon with pity.\n\n\"You and the land must become one. Its pulse will be your pulse, its heart yours. It will require everything you have to give\u2014and then some. No man alive can compete with such a demanding lover.\"\n\nShe smiled. At last she understood the power of those words. To think she'd almost thrown it away on Luke Adams. \"Trust me,\" he'd said, but it wasn't him she didn't trust as much as her own traitorous heart. She couldn't deny her attraction to him, and like a foolish schoolgirl she'd been tempted to give in to her feelings. But like the mighty saguaro, she stood firm even while bending. And once she signed the spinster pact, she would never again be tempted by a man, not even one as handsome as Luke. She counted on it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Luke looked up from his workbench as his brother walked into the shop, then did a double take. He dropped his hammer onto the workbench and turned, arms folded across his middle.\n\nIt was Michael, all right, though he never would have guessed it from appearances. Michael's normal scraggly beard was gone and his hair was neatly combed. And was that a shine on his well-worn boots?\n\nYep, it was Michael all right. Though if it hadn't been for the ever-present pencil sticking out of his shirt pocket, Luke would have sworn it was a stranger.\n\n\"You look mighty spiffy today,\" Luke said. He scratched the back of his head, not sure what to make of his brother. \"I heard Miss Walker hired someone to help out with windmill maintenance.\"\n\nMichael nodded. \"Yep, but Miss Walker won't let anyone shoe her horses but me.\"\n\nLuke nodded. \"I don't blame her.\" He'd taught Michael well in that regard.\n\n\"Miss Tenney said if I worked hard at the ranch and minded my p's and q's, she would help me with my writing.\"\n\nLuke let his arms drop to his sides. \"Yes, I know. She told me.\"\n\n\"She likes my writing and thinks I have talent.\"\n\nLuke felt a twist of guilt. He couldn't remember a time that Michael didn't carry a notebook with him. He was always scribbling away, even as a kid. And if he wasn't writing, his head was in a book.\n\nLuke had once sneaked a peek at something Michael had written\u2014a poem. With only a rudimentary reading ability, Luke couldn't make hide or tail out of what it said. If Kate thought his little brother had talent, who was he to argue with her? Sooner or later Michael would figure out the futility of trying to earn a living from writing. Maybe then he'd have a more favorable regard for blacksmithing.\n\n\"So what brings you to town?\" Luke asked. \"Aren't you supposed to be working?\"\n\n\"O.T. gave me the morning off.\" Michael laid a book on the workbench. \"For you.\"\n\nSurprised that his brother would give him a book, Luke glanced at the thick tome. \"Webster's International Dictionary of the English Language?\"\n\nMichael shrugged. \"You said you wanted to improve your vocabulary.\" He stuck his hand in his trouser pocket and pulled out a pendant on a gold chain. \"Would you have time to repair this? The clasp is broken.\"\n\nLuke took the pendant from Michael's outstretched hand and examined it. \"This was Ma's.\" It was a platinum lace pendant that held a single white pearl.\n\nMichael nodded. \"I want to give it to Miss Tenney.\"\n\nLuke narrowed his eyes. Ma had died in childbirth, so naturally Michael had no memory of her. Still, Michael's plan to give away something of Ma's surprised him.\n\n\"Why?\" Surely Luke wasn't thinking of courting Kate. He stared at his brother in alarm, the thought crushing him like a boulder.\n\n\"It's a big day for her. Today she becomes the official heiress to the Last Chance Ranch.\"\n\n\"Already?\" Had it really been four months since Kate came to town?\n\n\"That's right. She's gonna sign the papers this afternoon. I heard the boss lady is going to make her sign some sort of pact not to get married.\"\n\nLuke took a quick breath. This was the first he'd heard of such a thing. He shook his head in disbelief. He knew Miss Walker well enough to know she'd insist upon the signing of a legal agreement before turning her property over to Kate. But a contract not to get married? What sense did that make?\n\n\"Me and the boys planned a get-together for her and I thought it would be nice to give her a little something. You know, to show how much I appreciate her help with my writing and...\"\n\nMichael said more, but Luke had traveled back in time to the memory of Kate's sweet lips.\n\n\"God gave love a language of its own and it's a language known by every heart.\" That was easy for Aunt Bessie to say, but when he poured out his heart to Kate and told her he fancied her, it didn't do him the least bit of good.\n\n\"So what do you say? Can you fix it?\"\n\nLuke blinked. \"What?\"\n\nMichael gave him an odd look. \"The necklace. Can you fix it?\"\n\nLuke stared down at the chain in his hand. \"I have to fix it,\" he said. He didn't know how or even if he could, but he had to find a way. Or die trying." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Chapter 33\n\n\"It's not safe, you must go,\" she whispered with feverish haste. Seemingly oblivious to the dangers that could befall him, he kissed her soundly on the lips before slipping away into the wretched darkness.\n\nKate was shocked when Luke galloped up on his horse. He was the last person she expected to see\u2014wanted to see. She had stepped outside to get some fresh air before facing Miss Walker and all those legal papers. Already the banker had arrived to serve as witness, along with a man she guessed was Miss Walker's lawyer.\n\nLuke dismounted, wrapped the reins around a hitching post, and strode up to her like a soldier marching to war. He looked serious, but no less handsome, and her stomach fluttered nervously even as she protested his presence. She had nothing more to say to him.\n\n\"W-What are you doing here?\" she stammered. Hadn't she made her position clear?\n\nHe pushed his leather hat back, a strand of brown hair sweeping across his forehead. \"Michael said you were about to sign papers forbidding you to marry.\"\n\nHearing the words from him made them sound so final. Her breath caught in her throat but she managed to nod.\n\n\"Why?\" He frowned. \"Why would you do such a thing? Why would you throw away your life like that?\" He moved closer and she backed away.\n\n\"I'm not throwing away my life. I love it here.\" And she'd worked hard to get to this point. \"And one day this will all be mine.\"\n\nHe continued to advance and she moved back, matching him step by step in an odd sort of dance. \"You still didn't answer my question. Why would you do such a thing?\"\n\nHe backed her all the way to the side of the barn, allowing her no room to escape, and panic gushed inside. \"I told you.\"\n\nHe stopped inches away from her. \"I've heard a lot of dumb things in my life, but this has got to be the dumbest.\"\n\n\"It's not dumb.\" She lifted her chin in defiance. \"Running a ranch is an honorable profession.\"\n\n\"So is teaching or writing.\" In a quieter voice he added, \"So is marriage.\"\n\nHer stomach clenched tight. \"Marriage?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Most women want to get married. Why don't you?\"\n\n\"Why is that any of your concern?\" she asked. \"Will you tell me that?\"\n\nHe looked genuinely puzzled. \"I just hate to see someone throw their life away on a piece of land.\"\n\n\"This is not just a piece of land. It's the history of a family and I'll be part of it. I'll be helping to create a legacy.\"\n\nHe studied her. \"I can't believe you would settle for so little.\"\n\nLittle? Her temper snapped. \"You know nothing about me or what I want.\"\n\n\"I know you're a writer,\" he said.\n\n\"The last book I wrote was banned. Did you know that? Banned!\"\n\n\"So you decided to become a rancher and sign some stupid pact not to get married?\" He scratched his head. \"That don't make a lick of sense.\"\n\n\"It doesn't have to make sense. It's what I want to do.\"\n\nA muscle quivered at his jaw. \"Why, Kate? Tell me why.\" He grabbed her by the arm and she pulled away.\n\n\"Don't touch me. You're... you're just like the others. I thought you were different but you're not.\" Lashing out at him was the only way she knew to make him leave her alone. \"You're cruel and hurtful and\u2014\"\n\nHe stepped back as if she'd slapped him. \"What have I done to make you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"At the dance. The fight with old man Parker.\"\n\nA sheepish expression crept across his face. He placed his hands at his waist. \"I feel bad about that. Parker and my uncle started to argue...\" He shook his head. \"When it comes to protecting family, I don't always see straight.\"\n\nShe bit her lip. \"You were protecting your uncle?\"\n\n\"It was what you might call a misunderstandin'. I just wanted to keep Parker from sharpenin' his horns on my uncle. I can fight and shoot a gun with the best of them, but most of the time I'm as harmless as a bee in butter. What happened at the dance...\" He shrugged. \"You can't hold that against me.\"\n\nDefenses weakening, she tightened her hands into fists by her sides. \"It's not just the dance.\" For some reason it seemed necessary to make him understand why the ranch was the only life she wanted, held the only future she could trust.\n\n\"My father left when I was five and after that, every man walked out on my mama and me.\"\n\n\"I'm not your pa,\" he said, as if a simple statement would set everything right. \"I'm not those other men.\"\n\nShe took a sharp intake of air. She wanted so much to believe him. She wanted to believe in goodness and kindness and love everlasting, but how could she? The only real happiness she'd ever known had been here on the ranch. She could now ride a horse almost as well as the cowpokes and had grown to love the desert's stark beauty. There was no place else she would rather live. So why did Luke always make her question her own motives and desires?\n\n\"Goldilocks!\"\n\nShe glanced at the ranch house. Ruckus beckoned from the verandah and Kate fought for resolve. Land was her future. It offered her permanence, and that was something she'd never known. Marriage offered no such security, and neither did Luke.\n\nShe gazed at his handsome face and could hardly breathe. He was like other men, he was. She had to believe that, because to believe otherwise could put her future in jeopardy.\n\n\"I've got to go.\" She turned to leave, but Luke caught her by the wrist, his fingers pressed firmly into her flesh. She lifted her gaze to his beseeching eyes and she felt her last bit of control slip away.\n\n\"I'm asking you... pleading with you not to sign those papers.\"\n\n\"Goldilocks!\"\n\nShe couldn't speak, couldn't think. She was pulled in two different directions. Luke could never give her the security she needed, so why did she feel tempted by him? Had he not stepped back at that moment, his face grim, she might have altogether caved in\u2014and that would have been a terrible mistake.\n\n\"Kate, the truth is... I have a hankering for you.\"\n\n\"A... hankering?\"\n\nHe frowned. \"I guess there's no choice but to spell it out. I love you, Kate Tenney, and I plumb don't know how to say it any clearer than that.\"\n\nShe shook her head and backed away from him. His words were like a slap in the face. Love was not what she wanted to hear. Love isn't gentle. Love isn't kind. Love isn't lasting. He held out his hand and she backed away more.\n\n\"If you turn away now, that will be the end, I swear.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she whispered. Hurt glittered in his eyes, but nothing could be done about that. He'd soon forget her. Maybe by tomorrow or sometime next week. That's how men were. Here today, gone tomorrow.\n\n\"Kate?\"\n\nHand on her hat, she turned and ran. She was one signature away from a bright and happy future. It was what she wanted. It was what she'd hoped for and prayed for and worked for these past few months. So why did it feel like she was running away?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Chapter 34\n\nEverything in order?\" Eleanor asked.\n\nShe sat behind her desk peering through her spectacles at her lawyer, Jesse Barker. Her doctor insisted she wear them for close work, but they were more trouble than they were worth. She pulled the glasses off and tossed them aside.\n\nBarker stuck his quizzing glass in his right eye and riffled through the document in his hand. \"Yes. All she has to do is sign on the dotted line.\"\n\nHer lawyer's ill-chosen plaid suit and dated handlebar mustache hid a brilliant legal mind, and Eleanor trusted him implicitly with her affairs. He had an office in Tombstone between Tough Nut and Allen Streets and claimed to try more cases in the town's many saloons than the stately courthouse.\n\n\"I think you're making a big mistake,\" Robert said. \"Turning this property over to a woman who can barely stay in a saddle makes no sense.\" Robert leaned against the wall, arms crossed in front, handsome as ever.\n\n\"O.T. and Ruckus say she has potential,\" Eleanor said. Both men did, however, express reservations regarding Kate's tendency to daydream. A problem, indeed. Working with cattle demanded one's full and undivided attention. But the girl had tenacity, and Eleanor was convinced that proper training would overcome her less desirable traits.\n\n\"Actually, she reminds me a little of myself.\"\n\nThe truth was\u2014and she hadn't even admitted this to Robert\u2014she was tired. Tired of fighting. Tired of trying to stay ahead of the competition. Ever since Geronimo's surrender nine years earlier, an alarming influx of settlers had flocked to the area. Cattle ranches had popped up like grass in the rain. Some were small and some, like the Three C Company with its thirty thousand heads of cattle, enormous. All infringing on the Last Chance financially and physically, using up precious resources.\n\nWhat the Last Chance needed was young blood to carry it into the next century. Eleanor needed someone to bounce ideas off and do the heavy lifting, under her watchful eye, of course. She needed someone with the tenacity of a desert flower, willing to fight the battles, meet the challenges, and stay progressive. Someone with the imagination of a writer. Oh yes. She needed Kate.\n\n\"There will never be anyone like you,\" Robert said.\n\n\"I had to learn and she'll learn too.\"\n\n\"You could sell this property and be set for life,\" he persisted.\n\nShe regarded him from beneath raised eyebrows. \"And then what?\"\n\n\"You could travel. You live in Arizona Territory and you've never even seen the Grand Canyon.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"At my age I try to avoid anything that resembles a hole in the ground.\"\n\n\"Ah, but there's always Paris,\" he said, his eyes aglow with teasing lights.\n\nEleanor grimaced. \"Robert, you have no sense of posterity. My mother started this ranch and she made me promise to pass it on to my children.\" Her gaze dropped to the drawer where she kept a daguerreotype of her long-deceased daughter. \"Unfortunately, that was not meant to be. Miss Tenney is the next best thing.\"\n\n\"You have a brother. Surely he has a family? Wouldn't it make more sense to leave the ranch to one of your nieces or nephews? I know a Pinkerton detective who would be happy to track down your family.\"\n\nEleanor planted the palms of both hands on her forehead. \"Stop right there. I have no desire to see my brother or his family.\" Stephen was just as much a ne'er-do-well as their father, and she had no intention of tracking him down after all these years. \"I have my heiress.\"\n\nRobert scoffed. \"Since you insist Miss Tenney not marry, who will inherit the ranch from her?\"\n\nShe pointed to the papers in her lawyer's hand. \"It's all written out. She will do what I have done. She will find a suitable candidate as her replacement.\"\n\n\"There may not be a ranch by then,\" he said.\n\n\"Nonsense. People will always eat beef. It's in their blood.\"\n\n\"Yes, but even the Babbitts have diversified.\"\n\nEleanor rolled her eyes. The so-called cattle barons of northern Arizona had invested in mercantile stores, of all things. \"That's because they don't know what they're doing. Anyone foolish enough to run sheep and cattle on the same spread has no business calling himself a rancher.\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but even you have to admit the cattle business is on the decline. The railroad has made cattle drives obsolete. Now everyone thinks he's a rancher. Too much competition has lowered the prices. I don't need to tell you this.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is harder today.\" The depression of '93 hadn't helped. \"But I've survived worse times.\"\n\nIt made her head swim just to think about it. The Last Chance had survived the hardest of times, but that was only because she went after business with no thought of politics or popular opinion. She sold to both the Union and Confederate armies, even though others condemned her and called her a traitor.\n\nNow she held a lucrative contract with the US government to supply meat to Indians and forts. True, she lost business last year when Fort Bowie was abandoned, but that was only one market. Others were bound to take its place.\n\nFortunately, the range wars of Pleasant Valley hadn't affected her. The biggest threat was the recent surge of eastern speculators. Of course, rustlers were a constant worry, but there was talk about organizing a group of lawmen similar to the Texas Rangers. If the Arizona Rangers became reality, then livestock thieves would no doubt go the way of cattle drives.\n\nOh yes, the ranch had survived despite the worst possible circumstances, and she was convinced that with her know-how and Kate's imagination, Last Chance would continue to thrive.\n\nFor several moments Robert said nothing. Instead, he stared out the window. Finally, he said, \"Selling the ranch now would be your wisest course of action.\" He turned to face the lawyer. \"Don't you agree, Barker?\"\n\nBefore Barker could answer, a knock came at the door.\n\n\"I believe this is the wisest course of action,\" Eleanor said beneath her breath. She lifted her voice. \"Come in.\" She glanced at her railroad watch. It was 4:00 p.m. on the nose. She considered Kate's promptness a good sign.\n\nKate entered looking grim, maybe even worried. Excellent. That could only mean that she understood the seriousness of what she was about to sign.\n\nEleanor quickly made the introductions. \"This is Mr. Barker, my lawyer. And Mr. Stackman, my banker. I'm sure you'll get to know both of them quite well in the years ahead.\"\n\nKate offered first Mr. Barker and then Mr. Stackman her hand. Robert, ever the gentlemen, raised her hand to his mouth. \"A pleasure.\"\n\nEleanor pointed to the empty chair in front of her desk. \"Do sit.\" She was anxious to get the formalities over with as quickly as possible.\n\nKate ran her hands down her sides and stared at the thick document on the desk. Not that Eleanor could blame her. It took Eleanor less than five minutes to lay out the provisions she wanted in the contract, but nearly fifty pages for her lawyer to turn them into legal terms.\n\n\"It won't bite you,\" Eleanor said lightly, in an effort to put her at ease. \"It's just my lawyer's way of trying to justify his outrageous stipend.\"\n\nShe made a face at Robert, signaling him to drop the dark look and be happy for her.\n\nRobert refused to comply and his expression only grew grimmer.\n\nKate took her seat in front of the desk and folded her hands on her lap.\n\n\"Mr. Barker, would you be kind enough to go over the documents with Miss Tenney?\" Eleanor said.\n\nThe lawyer obliged, his monotone voice seeming to hum on forever.\n\nEleanor impatiently tapped her fingers. All the therefores and thereons gave her a headache. Who talked like that?\n\n\"Do you have any questions?\" Mr. Barker asked at last.\n\nKate shook her head and then changed her mind. \"I do have one question.\" She looked directly at Eleanor. \"I noticed that the typewriter has been moved.\"\n\nEleanor sat back in her chair, annoyed. She was about to turn over her ranch and all the girl could worry about was the typewriter? She glanced up at Robert, whose \"I told you so\" look annoyed her even more.\n\n\"It was just taking up space and I hardly had occasion to use it,\" she said in a voice meant to discourage further discussion of the matter.\n\n\"Would you have an objection to my ordering one of my own?\" Kate persisted.\n\nEleanor leveled Kate with a cold stare. \"I have no objection as long as it doesn't interfere with ranch business.\"\n\n\"It won't,\" Kate assured her.\n\n\"Very well, then. Let's get on with it.\" Eleanor gestured for her lawyer to proceed.\n\nBarker unfolded the document and spread it on the desk in front of her. \"I'll need both your signatures.\"\n\nAnxious to get the tiresome business over with, Eleanor reached for her pen and dipped the nib into the inkwell. She signed the document with a flourish and blew the ink dry. She then handed the pen to Kate.\n\nKate took it in hand and waited until Barker had positioned the contract in front of her.\n\nShe touched the pen to paper and Eleanor held her breath and waited." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Kate stared at her name typed neatly on the document in front of her. With a mark of her pen she would eventually become known as Miss Katherine Tenney, ranch owner, landowner. Boss lady. Who would have ever thought such a thing possible?\n\n\"I have a hankering for you.\"\n\nHer hand shook. This was what she wanted. She wanted the permanence and the respectability that only land could offer her.\n\n\"I love you, Kate Tenney, and I plumb don't know how to say it any clearer than that.\"\n\nShe tightened her grip on the pen and it was as if her fingers cut off her breathing.\n\n\"Is something the matter?\" the lawyer asked. \"Some clause you don't understand?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No.\" She pressed the nib of the pen onto the dotted line, but some invisible force prevented her from writing.\n\n\"Yes.\" She blinked back tears as she met Miss Walker's gray eyes. \"I... I thought I was ready to do this. I want to do it but...\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Miss Walker said, her voice taut.\n\nKate stuck the pen in the penholder, laid her hands on her lap, and willed herself to stop shaking. \"You've been very kind to me. Everyone has been and I love it here, I do. But... you once told me that I would have to give heart and soul to the ranch and I'm not sure I can do that. I want to, I do, but... I'm not sure that I can.\" A strained silence stretched across the room and no one moved.\n\nShe leaned forward, beseeching her. \"Could I have more time to think about it? Another week. Another month?\"\n\n\"What makes you think you'll feel different then?\" Miss Walker asked.\n\n\"I... I don't know how I'll feel. All I know is that it wouldn't be fair to you to sign this contract until I know for certain I can fulfill your expectations.\"\n\nFor several moments no one spoke. Finally, Miss Walker pulled a checkbook out of her desk drawer, opened it, and began writing. \"I appreciate your honesty, but it would be better for all concerned if you leave, effective immediately.\" She tore out a check and handed it to her.\n\n\"This is what I owe you. Consider our business complete.\"\n\nKate's mouth dropped open. She'd never expected Miss Walker to dismiss her so quickly or so coldly and completely.\n\n\"But... but...\"\n\nMiss Walker replaced her checkbook in the drawer and slammed it shut. \"There's nothing more to be said.\"\n\nStunned, Kate took the check and ran out of the office." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "For several moments after Kate fled the office, no one moved. Then Barker riffled through the document as if the reason for Kate's sudden departure were hidden among its many pages.\n\nRobert was the first to speak. \"You were rather rough on the girl, don't you think?\"\n\n\"Rough?\"\n\n\"All she did was ask for more time,\" Robert said.\n\nEleanor wished it was as simple as that. She'd tried to ignore the warning signs. The way Kate and Adams eyed each other. How Luke never gave up looking for her when she was kidnapped. How they gazed at each other the day he brought her back to the ranch. The number of times he'd come looking for her since.\n\nGiving Kate more time wouldn't change a thing. Eleanor was as certain of that as she was her own name. It would only make the inevitable parting more painful than it already was. She couldn't stop the hurt. The best she could do was not to prolong it. Experience had taught her to cut her losses\u2014much like one hacked off a painful limb\u2014and get on with it. That's what she intended to do.\n\n\"If she has to think about it, then she's not the right person for the job,\" Eleanor said.\n\nRobert stroked his mustache. \"It's a big decision.\"\n\n\"And she's had four months to make it.\"\n\nRobert glanced at the lawyer before turning back to Eleanor. \"May I make a suggestion?\"\n\nEleanor stood. \"No, you may not.\" Let Robert think what he would. What was done was done.\n\nShe walked to the door, but before leaving the room she added, \"And the Grand Canyon is definitely out of the question.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Kate reached town less than an hour later. She tied her horse to the hitching post in front of Luke's blacksmith shop and took a deep breath to brace herself. She hated letting Miss Walker down, but how could she do otherwise, feeling the way she did? Did she love Luke? Was that it? Was that the source of her confusion? The reason for throwing away the chance of a lifetime?\n\nShe didn't know. She had no experience with romantic love. Had never before allowed herself to get close enough to a man to lose her heart. Still, this couldn't be love. Wasn't love supposed to make you feel giddy and silly and act like a fool? This thing with Luke had sneaked up on tiptoe and buried itself so deep inside, she hadn't even suspected it was there\u2014until now.\n\nThe sound of Luke's laughter brought her out of her reverie. She turned the corner of his shop and stopped upon seeing him with Miss Chase, their heads so close as to nearly touch. Locker was curled up in the woman's arms, tail wagging.\n\nKate drew back so as not to be seen. She didn't know what hurt more, having to disappoint Miss Walker or seeing Miss Chase with the dog Luke said was hers.\n\n\"Oh, Lukey,\" Miss Chase squealed in her high-pitched voice. \"Are you sure it's all right for me to take him home?\"\n\n\"Just as soon as he's old enough to wean.\"\n\nShe squealed again. \"I can't wait.\"\n\nLocker squirmed in her arms and licked her face and Miss Chase succumbed to giggles.\n\nLuke laughed. \"It looks like he feels the same.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lukey, you are the kindest man I've ever known.\"\n\nKate couldn't hear what Luke said next, but whatever it was put a smile on Miss Chase's face.\n\nA sharp pain unlike anything Kate had ever known sliced through her. Obviously, Luke had already put her out of his mind. No surprises there. What did surprise her\u2014shocked her\u2014was how quickly he did it. It had only been a couple of hours and already he'd found another to take her place.\n\nKate drew back, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. Never had she felt so wretched in her life. She'd given up everything\u2014given up the ranch\u2014only to find out she'd been right about men all along. Right about Luke.\n\nShe wasn't certain of her own heart before coming here, but she knew it now\u2014and knew that it was breaking." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Chapter 35\n\nWeeks passed and never had more miserable ones darkened Miss Hattie's soul. Her health became so delicate that others feared for her life.\n\nThe first thing Kate noticed about Boston was the closed-in feeling. After the wide-open spaces of Arizona Territory, the narrow streets and tall brick buildings made her feel both trapped and claustrophobic. The stomach-wrenching odors didn't help much either. The stench of sewage mingled with the smell of coal, dyes, whiskey, and fish. The hot August sun baked horse manure onto cobblestone streets and flies buzzed around in a frenzy.\n\nShe couldn't quite explain it, but the ranch smells seemed so much sweeter somehow, earthier. Even with all those cattle.\n\nBoston even sounded different. Instead of creaking windmills and the soothing sounds of rustling grass and lowing cattle, her ears were blasted by peddlers blowing fish horns to attract customers and yelling, \"Here comes the fishmaaaan, bring out your dishpaaaan.\"\n\nWagon wheels and horses' hooves clamored across uneven brick roads and church bells rang from tall towers. She felt as if she was being accosted from every direction. After leaving the new Union train station she hurried down Canal Street toward Haymarket Square. She passed taverns and boardinghouses, auction halls and warehouses. The sights and sounds of a city she'd known all her life now seemed foreign and she felt like a stranger in a strange new land.\n\nLike Lieutenant Philip Nolan in The Man Without a Country, she felt adrift. She was born and raised in Boston, but her heart was in Cactus Patch. Refusing to sign Miss Walker's papers was the right thing to do. She now knew why; she was hopelessly in love with Luke Adams.\n\nShe hated letting Miss Walker down, of course, but loving Luke meant she could not give her heart to the Last Chance. The old lady deserved better. The ranch required it.\n\nKate grimaced. Pain that started in her chest now spread throughout her body. She'd done the right thing, but oh, how it hurt. It hurt so much she could hardly breathe. She missed the ranch, missed the ranch hands, especially Ruckus. She even missed her horse, Decker. But no one left a bigger hole in her heart than Luke. She'd cried on the train all the way to Boston, and though her tears were spent, her anguish remained.\n\nIt was hot, but unlike the dry heat of Arizona, it was muggy, and this sapped what little energy remained after traveling. She'd barely walked a couple of blocks from the station before the heat and humidity took its toll. She pulled her steamer trunk out of the way of passersby and sat on top of it, sweat pouring down her face.\n\nShe wished now she'd taken a hansom cab, but what little money she had left after train fare would have to last until she found employment.\n\nPeople scurried by, giving her no heed. Nannies pushing prams, bankers and merchants hurrying about their business. No one seemed to notice her save beggars thrusting tin cans in her face.\n\nShe started down the sidewalk again and crossed the street, dodging shays, cabriolets, horsecars, bicycles, and omnibuses. Her trunk bumped along the cobblestones and scraped against the curb.\n\nFinally she reached her destination, but even that looked less appealing than it had four months earlier. Had the city really changed that much in such a short time\u2014or had she?\n\nThe five-story brick building was just off Richmond Street where she'd lived before traveling to Arizona. It was located in a less desirable part of town and lacked an elevator, but it had an indoor privy and rent was cheaper than the Working Girls Home on Union Park Street.\n\nThe owner of the building was Mrs. Potter, a sixty-year-old widow who walked with a cane and smelled like unbaked dough. She opened the door to Kate's knock and peered at her from beneath a mop of white hair.\n\n\"Oh, it's you again.\"\n\nKate smiled politely. \"By any chance is my old apartment still available?\"\n\n\"No, but the one next to it is.\"\n\n\"I'll take it,\" Kate said. Digging into her drawstring bag, she pulled out enough coins for a month's rent and placed them into the palm of the woman's arthritic hand.\n\nMrs. Potter dropped the coins into the pocket of her grimy apron. \"How long you staying this time?\"\n\n\"I don't know yet,\" Kate said. If her plans worked out and her old publisher accepted her new book, she would then be able to afford a better apartment. It wouldn't be easy to convince Mr. Conner to publish another one of her books, but she had to try. If worse came to worst, she would travel to New York and try one of the publishers there.\n\nMrs. Potter lifted a key off a nail and handed it to her. \"This is the last time I'm renting to you. I can't have people moving in and out on a whim. And don't you forget no men visitors and no alcohol.\"\n\n\"I won't forget,\" Kate said.\n\n\"See that you don't.\"\n\nThe door slammed shut and Kate heaved a sigh.\n\nThe room was on the third floor at the end of a long, dark, and musty-smelling hall. The apartment was small, dingy, and so dim it took Kate's eyes several moments to focus. Identical to her old place, the room was furnished with a sagging upholstered chair, table, lumpy bed, and small wardrobe. The kitchen was an L-shaped space with a kerosene cookstove, icebox, and running water. The plumbing didn't work in the winter months when the pipes froze. During each cold spell she would have to walk down three flights of stairs to fetch water from the old well in back or settle for a bucket of snow.\n\nCrossing to the single window, Kate yanked open the curtains, lifted the sill, and breathed in the putrid air. Even her imagination couldn't carry her away from the realities outside.\n\nTraffic sounds rose from the busy street and sun streamed through the open window, but nothing chased away the gloom. She tried to concentrate on her plans. She needed a typewriter but couldn't afford one. What little money was left after paying for train fare and rent would have to do for a couple of months.\n\nPerhaps Mr. Taylor, founder and publisher of the Boston Globe, would let her borrow one of his typewriters. He had published several of her articles and seemed affable enough. Though the Globe put the banning of her book on the front page, the paper was more critical of censorship than her writing.\n\nIf all else failed, she could use the typewriter at the library. That would mean having to work during library hours, and that she didn't want to do. She did her best work in the still of night and working in public was too distracting. Mr. Taylor was definitely her best bet.\n\nBelow her window a boy called to his dog and she immediately thought of Homer. Before she knew it memories of Cactus Patch flashed in her mind. It all seemed like a dream. But not Luke; he seemed all too real. She pictured him so clearly, she could imagine him standing in the room with her. Tears chased away the vision but not the loneliness or the terrible crushing pain that threatened to consume her.\n\nArms crossed in front, she moved her hands up and down the sleeves of her shirtwaist to ward off a sudden chill. Little by little warmth crept back into her flesh, but nothing could be done for the bleakness of her heart and soul." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Chapter 36\n\nBessie wasn't one to interfere in other people's business unless, of course, she had good reason. And if a heartbroken nephew wasn't reason enough to get involved, then what in heaven's name was?\n\nLuke had been in such a miserable state since Kate Tenney left town that even the annoying Miss Chase had given up on him. Now the brazen girl was zeroing in on Michael, which didn't please Bessie one whit. Of course, now that the Saturday Evening Post had accepted one of Michael's short stories, every unmarried woman in town had set her sights on him. Michael was turning out to be quite the celebrity.\n\nArms folded across her middle, Bessie gave a self-righteous nod. Yes, she was right to come today. She had every right to interfere in Luke's affairs. The rate Michael was going, he would find a wife before his older brother, and how would that look?\n\nHer mistake was dragging Lula-Belle to town with her. Her sister wasn't happy about it, but she nonetheless insisted upon driving. Thank goodness Luke had been able to repair the buggy after Sam ran it off the road.\n\nNow Lula-Belle held on to the reins of her slow-moving horse like one might hold on to the back of a speeding train. \"I still don't understand why we have to go to town today. You know Monday is my wash day.\"\n\nBessie sat on the seat next to her and fanned herself. It was the end of October but it still felt like July, and though it wasn't yet noon already it was hot. \"Would the world come to an end if you did your laundry on Tuesday? Or, heaven forbid, Wednesday?\"\n\n\"I've always done my wash on Monday,\" Lula-Belle said.\n\nBessie rolled her eyes but held her tongue. The last thing she wanted was to get into a spat over soiled laundry. They didn't speak again until Lula-Belle pulled up in front of their nephew's blacksmith shop.\n\n\"Let me do the talking,\" Bessie warned, climbing down from the buggy. She straightened her hat and marched inside.\n\nLuke greeted them with a smile, but Bessie wasn't fooled. Not one iota.\n\n\"What brings you two to town on a Monday?\" he asked.\n\nBessie saw no reason to beat around the bush. \"We're worried about you.\"\n\n\"Me?\" He looked from one to the other. \"Why?\"\n\n\"You know why.\" Even today he had dark shadows under his eyes. Obviously, he wasn't sleeping well. He had also lost weight. \"You hardly said a word at Sunday's dinner. Nor did you touch your meal.\" If anything, he became more somber and distant with each passing week.\n\n\"You didn't even taste one of my sourdough biscuits,\" Lula-Belle added, sounding offended.\n\nHe inclined his head. \"I apologize to you both. I have a lot on my mind lately.\" He waved a hand at a miniature windmill he'd been working on for months. As far as Bessie could tell it looked no different from the last time she saw it weeks ago.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Bessie exclaimed. \"You have only one thing on your mind, and you know it. And that's Kate Tenney.\"\n\nAnnoyance flashed across his face and his lips puckered. \"I don't want to talk about her.\"\n\n\"Good. Because that means you won't interrupt what I have to say.\"\n\n\"She doesn't like to be interrupted,\" Lula-Belle added. \"Why, I remember that time when\u2014\"\n\nBessie poked her elbow into Lula-Belle's side. It was no time for one of her sister's long-winded stories. \"Anyone can see that you're miserable.\"\n\n\"So what am I supposed to do about it?\" he asked, his voice curt. \"She knows how I feel but she left anyway. She didn't even bother sayin' good-bye.\"\n\n\"That's a good sign,\" Bessie said.\n\nLula-Belle glanced at her. \"It is?\"\n\nExasperated, Bessie threw up her hands. Didn't her sister know anything? \"Of course it is. Good-bye is, well, good-bye.\" Okay, so maybe she was grasping at straws, but she didn't have a whole lot to work with. \"If she didn't say good-bye, that means it's not final.\"\n\nLuke grimaced as if in pain. \"It felt final to me. I told her how I felt and she still left.\"\n\nShe gave him her best motherly look. \"That's because you don't know how women think. Just because a man says he loves her doesn't mean she believes him.\"\n\n\"I believed it when Murphy told me he loved me,\" Lula-Belle said.\n\nBessie scoffed. \"You believed me when I told you the moon was made of green cheese.\"\n\nShe turned back to her nephew and heaved a sigh. If love and marriage were left to the male population, civilization would have ended with Adam and Eve. \"So how did you tell her that you loved her?\"\n\nHe frowned. \"How did I tell her? I just blurted it right out.\"\n\nBessie felt a sinking feeling inside. \"No, no, no. That would never do. Women want to be courted.\"\n\n\"I did court her. I told her I had a fancy for her. Then I told her I had a hankering for her. Then I zeroed in for the kill and told her I loved her. If that's not courtin' I don't know what is.\"\n\nBessie threw up her arms in exasperation. \"No wonder she left.\"\n\nLuke frowned. \"You think I should have come right out and asked her to pair up with me?\"\n\nBessie rolled her eyes. \"No, no, no!\" Where, oh where had she gone so wrong? \"You only mention pairings if you plan on building an ark.\"\n\nThe frown lines deepened between his eyebrows. \"Are you sayin' I shoulda played my hand closer to the chest?\"\n\nBessie rolled her eyes. Men! \"What I'm trying to say is that a woman doesn't just want words, she wants proof. She wants to see that you love her with her own two eyes.\"\n\nLuke rubbed his chin. \"It's kind of hard to prove anything when she's in Boston and I'm here.\"\n\n\"Yes, that is a problem,\" Bessie agreed. Now they were getting somewhere.\n\nLula-Belle sniffed. \"That's why they have trains.\"\n\nBessie glanced at her sister in surprise. Maybe she wasn't so dense after all.\n\n\"Lula-Belle's right.\" Personally, she would never do anything so foolhardy as to travel on two thin metal rails. The sheer speed of a train terrified her. Nonetheless, she had no qualms about encouraging Luke to travel on one. She'd agree to let him go to the moon if she thought it would get him a wife.\n\n\"You must definitely go to Boston. No woman can resist a man willing to put life and limb on the line to chase after her.\" Recalling how Sam had chased her halfway to Tucson\u2014practically killing himself in the process\u2014Bessie smiled and added, \"Trust me, I speak from experience. And I'll tell you another thing...\"\n\nWhile she expressed her considerable thoughts on the subject, Luke didn't say a word. Arms folded, forehead creased, he stared at her in stone-faced silence and didn't move a muscle.\n\nBessie threw in every reason she could think of why Luke should go after the girl, but nothing she said seemed to penetrate his thick head. Stubborn, that's what he was. Just like Sam.\n\nShe paused for breath and that's when Luke finally spoke up.\n\n\"You think I should? You think I should go to Boston?\"\n\nPraise the Lord, Luke wasn't so pigheaded after all. \"Absolutely,\" Bessie said.\n\n\"But only if you truly love her,\" Lula-Belle said.\n\n\"And are willing to show her how much,\" Bessie added." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Where is she?\n\nIt was a question that had run through Luke's head since Kate left all those months ago. Now it was followed by yet another question: How do I find her?\n\nTraveling to Boston had taken seven days, three trains, and a whole lot of praying. It would have taken a day less had he not missed his connection in Chicago because of a snowstorm. As hard as it had been to travel to Boston, that was the least of it. Finding Kate in the desert after that terrible sandstorm had been a breeze compared to trying to find her in this ugly, crowded city. He didn't even know where to begin.\n\nBoston confounded him with its narrow streets, tall buildings, and hordes of people. Where was everyone going? And why were they all in such a big hurry? Dodging traffic was worse than trying to outrun a cattle stampede. And cold. Never had he known such frigid weather. His teeth hadn't stopped chattering since he arrived.\n\nHe'd checked every hotel and boardinghouse he could find, but no one by the name of Kate Tenney was registered. He closed his eyes. Think. Think. Where would she be?\n\nWalking around aimlessly, he found himself on the notorious Anne Street, which locals called the Black Sea. Hellhole would be a more accurate name. Any sort of vice could be purchased for a price. Brothels and taverns lined the street, reaching into a dark, dismal maze of alleyways. After one woman with a painted face and low-cut gown beckoned him from a doorway, he decided he needed a map.\n\nHe must have been half out of his mind to come to this strange city. It wasn't like him to act without careful planning. A blacksmith had to be prepared. Everything from a nail to farm equipment required a detailed plan. How could finding the woman he loved require any less?\n\nHe wasn't even certain it was possible to find someone in a place like this. Finding a needle in a haystack would be easier. What was he thinking? That she would be waiting for him at the train station?\n\nHe plumb better think of something fast. He couldn't keep running in circles. Where would someone like Kate Tenney spend her time? A bookstore. He pumped his fist. Of course. Why didn't he think of that before?\n\nHe found one two blocks away. The sign read Antiquarian, but newer books were displayed behind the dusty glass window. A riot of bells greeted him as he walked through the door. It smelled of old leather and dust. The proprietor looked up from behind a counter, spectacles balanced on the tip of his nose. The man's shoulder-length white hair and beard would be better suited to St. Nicholas's red attire than the frock coat he wore.\n\n\"May I help you?\" he asked in a hushed voice.\n\nNot sure why the man was whispering, Luke nonetheless followed his lead. \"I'm looking for someone. Her name is Kate Tenney. She's a writer.\"\n\nThe man stroked his beard. \"The only Kate I know is Kate Chopin.\" He picked up a volume. \"I have a copy of her book Bayou Folk. It's her best book yet.\"\n\nLuke shook his head. \"Her name is Tenney,\" he said, forgetting to whisper.\n\n\"Shh.\" The bookstore owner pointed to a table in back where two men sat reading. \"She doesn't go by a pseudonym, does she?\" he said, his voice low.\n\n\"A pseudonym?\"\n\n\"Some writers write under an assumed name. Women writers often choose male names.\"\n\nLuke blew out his breath. Aunt Bessie never mentioned\u2014what did the owner call it?\u2014a pseudonym. \"She's a... friend of mine and she writes dime novels. That's all I know. One of them was banned.\"\n\nHe wished now he knew more about Kate's writing. Books and literature were out of his realm. After leaving Texas, he had no formal education. Even under Aunt Bessie's patient tutorage, he never much improved his reading skills. Not like Michael, who always had his head in a book. Still, he felt guilty. Maybe if he'd shown more interest in Kate's writing, he'd have a better idea how to find her.\n\nThe shopkeeper made a face. \"Lots of books have been banned. The Watch and Ward Society hasn't the slightest idea what it's doing. If it was left up to that stuffy group, the Bible would be banned.\" Obviously it was a sore subject with the store owner.\n\nFrustrated, Luke thanked the man and started for the door. He stopped. \"Where would a college-educated woman spend her time?\" he asked, keeping his voice low.\n\nWith open curiosity the proprietor's gaze traveled down the length of him, lingering on his wrinkled trousers and well-worn boots. No doubt the bookstore owner wondered what a man like Luke wanted with a woman clearly out of his realm.\n\n\"Libraries, maybe. You might try the circulation library on Washington. There's also one at Cornhill Square and another on Hanover.\" He reeled off several more.\n\n\"How... how many libraries does Boston have?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Fifty\u2014a hundred. That's counting libraries in insane asylums, hospitals, and prisons. Your friend is probably not in any of those.\"\n\n\"I don't reckon so.\"\n\nThe shopkeeper continued, \"There's the Athenaeum, of course, but I doubt she's there. It used to charge an annual membership fee of ten dollars, but then it sold shares and now only proprietors can use it. Is your friend a proprietor?\"\n\nLuke frowned. \"I have no idea.\" He didn't even know what a library proprietor was.\n\n\"Then there are church libraries, reading rooms, universities. She won't be allowed in the Masonic reading room, but you might try the YWCA library. It's for women only so they probably won't let you in, but you can inquire at the front desk.\"\n\nBy the time the bookstore owner got through listing every possible literary establishment, Luke's head was spinning. How did people have so much time to read?\n\nHe thanked the proprietor for a second time and left. He stood on the sidewalk outside, shivering against the cold, and glanced up and down the busy street. He checked his map and started toward Cornhill Square.\n\nWhat if by some chance he found her? What then? What could he say that he hadn't already said? How could he convince her to go back to Cactus Patch with him? How could he prove his love for Kate?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Three days later he still hadn't found her. He'd inquired at libraries, reading rooms, and bookstores to no avail. Feeling helpless as a cow in quicksand, he prayed, God, I can use some help here. How about a little push in the right direction? If that don't do it, feel free to lay me on an anvil and give me a good hammering.\n\nThe proprietor of the last bookstore he'd inquired at directed him to the reading room of a Presbyterian church. Spotting the old brick church on the opposite side of the street, he crossed over, dodging traffic and causing one carriage driver to curse him out. No sooner had he reached the sidewalk than the church sign over the wood-paneled doors caught his eye.\n\nThe sign read, \"I will never leave you or forsake you.\"\n\nHe recalled Kate telling him about her pa. He thought back to his own childhood and the confusing months following his parents' deaths. A parent dying wasn't the same as being deserted by one, but to an eleven-year-old it still felt like abandonment, foolish as it seemed. Kate's pa didn't die\u2014he walked out on her. That was a whole lot worse.\n\n\"I will never leave you or forsake you.\"\n\nWhat was it that his aunt had once said? Something about God giving love a language of its own.\n\n\"I will never leave you or forsake you.\"\n\nA feeling of triumph flooded through him. It was as if an iron bar had been lifted from his shoulders and the very heavens had opened up to smile on him. It was as if the earth itself had stopped spinning. At long last he had his answer. He knew what to do.\n\nHe might never get the hang of what his aunt called the language of love. He could barely manage the English language. But one thing he knew for sure: he now had the key to Kate's heart. All he had to do was find her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Chapter 37\n\nThe placard announced a $500 reward for the capture and delivery of the itinerant woman. She was to be delivered unharmed to the undersigned\u2014a man so desperate to find her he would gladly sail the seven seas.\n\nKate stepped out of the mercantile, a book on the life and times of Jesse James tucked beneath her arm. Perhaps the newly purchased tome would help her understand Cactus Joe's obsession with the outlaw. Maybe then she could finish the last chapter of her book in time to meet her deadline.\n\nIt had snowed again the night before and the skies were steely gray, the streets wet and slippery. As much as she hated Boston winters, snow did tend to blur the line between rich and poor. A pure white blanket of snow covered the rooftops of South Slope Beacon Hill mansions and west-end immigrant flophouses alike, showing no favoritism.\n\nKate shivered, her breath escaping in a long white plume. She had given her winter clothes away to a charity when she left for Arizona and she could not afford to replace them. She did, however, splurge on a muff and she gratefully sank her hands into the hand warmer's furry depths. Anxious to get back to her apartment before it started to snow again, she picked up speed, taking care to avoid the patches of ice that dotted the sidewalk.\n\nA handbill on the post office door near city hall caught her eye but she ignored it. Not until she noticed the outside of buildings and doors fairly plastered with them did curiosity get the best of her. She stopped and flattened the curled edges of a handbill with her hand.\n\nSomeone had written \"I ain't going nowear now or ever\" in big, bold letters. It was signed simply \"Luke.\" Below the signature was a drawing of a horseshoe. Her heart skipped a beat.\n\nStunned, she dropped her package. Was her mind playing tricks on her? Had her overactive imagination finally gone too far? Was it a mirage? She shook her head. This wasn't Arizona, it was Boston and there no mistaking the big, bold print. Was this her Luke?\n\nShaken, she reread the sign and traced her finger over the carefully drawn horseshoe, which was identical to the sign over Luke's shop. That sign promised quality. Was this a promise too? \"I ain't going nowear now or ever.\"\n\nThe letters were so straight and perfectly spaced that at first she thought the signs had been professionally printed. Upon closer examination she realized they were handwritten. The writer had obviously taken great pains to write them.\n\nShe recalled the care with which Luke checked a horse's hooves and the detailed construction of the miniature windmill. It wasn't hard to imagine Luke bent over a handbill, forming each letter just so.\n\nA pedestrian bumped into her. Jolted to her senses, she retrieved her package, brushed off the snow, and continued along the sidewalk, slowly at first. Fate had played a cruel trick on her. Nothing more.\n\nShe crossed Washington Street on the way to her apartment, but the handbill continued to haunt her. Was she losing her mind? Had she lost the ability to know fact from fiction?\n\n\"I ain't going nowear now or ever.\"\n\nShe was still questioning her sanity when she spotted another handbill, this one on a gaslight post. Farther up the street an identical sign was posted on the outside of a church bookstore. Another was hung in front of the antiquarian bookstore and still another on the door of a Methodist reading room.\n\nNo, no, it couldn't be. Still, Bostonians didn't talk that way. \"I ain't going nowear now or ever.\" This time the voice was so loud and clear it was as if the speaker stood right behind her. She spun around only to find herself surrounded by strangers. She shook her head. She was losing her mind. Or was she?\n\nHand shaking, she ripped off the next flyer she found and glanced up and down the sidewalk. Luke was here? In Boston? Was that even possible? No, no, it wasn't. He would never travel all the way from Cactus Patch. Would he? The very thought made her heart thump, her pulse race, and her mouth go dry.\n\nShe spotted another flyer a short distance away, this one tacked to a gate. Farther ahead one hung from a watchmaker's sign. Faster, faster she ran, slipping and sliding at times on icy patches. She pulled down handbills left and right posted all along Washington Street. Ten, twenty, thirty... she stopped counting at a hundred.\n\nTears rolled down her cheeks. \"Luke!\" He'd told her he loved her, but she hadn't wanted to hear it\u2014was afraid to hear it. His promise to stay changed everything\u2014or could if she let it. Loving Luke was the easy part; trusting him was a whole different story. It meant embracing life with the grace of a woman instead of the grief of a child. It meant letting go of the past and grabbing hold of the future. It meant facing the wind head-on. She knew what she wanted to do. What she didn't know was if she could.\n\nShe turned a full circle, shouting his name. Where was he? She called to a store clerk sweeping the step of his shoemaker shop. \"Did you see the man who posted this handbill?\"\n\nThe man shook his head and quickly disappeared inside.\n\nShe traveled the length of Washington from the Cathedral of the Holy Cross all the way to the Grand Opera House, then doubled back. Several times she thought she saw Luke, but each time it turned out to be a stranger who looked nothing like him.\n\nUsing money she could ill afford, she stepped on a horse-drawn street car that carried her to hotels and boardinghouses on the outer edges of town. She even stopped to inquire at the elegant Vendome that charged an outrageous four-fifty a night for a room, but Luke was nowhere to be found.\n\nBy the end of the day, all she had to show for her efforts was a stack of handbills tacked to the walls of her apartment.\n\nAnguish welled up inside and tears rolled down her cheeks. Falling to her knees on the threadbare carpet, she hugged herself, rocking back and forth, sobs rising from the bottom of the deepest, darkest corner of her soul. She cried for the little girl who watched her father walk out the door, never to return. She cried for the disgusted grandfather who, upon turning his back on his daughter, turned his back on her. She cried for a mother who'd been absent in spirit, if not in body.\n\nBut mostly she cried for Luke. Of all the things he could have said, telling her he would never leave was the one thing she could not ignore.\n\nBy the time her tears were spent, she was too exhausted to pick herself off the floor.\n\nGod, tell me what to do. Lead my feet in the direction you wish me to go. Take my hand and show me. Send rain..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Eleanor stood staring at the tiny cross at her feet. She found herself at the grave a lot lately, but she refused to admit it had anything to do with Kate and the need to bury that which might have been.\n\nRobert found her in that uncanny way he had of finding her at such times. Grateful for the company, she nonetheless greeted him with a frown.\n\n\"It's not the first of the month already, is it?\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"As it turns out, it is, or will be tomorrow.\" When she made no reply, he added, \"It's almost January. Can you believe it? Eighteen ninety-six.\"\n\n\"No, I can't.\" Another year gone. Economically speaking, '95 was a good year. Despite little rain, her cattle were fat and healthy, and she'd been able to get a fair amount for them at market. Not as much as she'd hoped, of course, but enough.\n\n\"She's been gone for five months,\" he said.\n\nEleanor blinked. \"Who's been gone?\"\n\nHe arched a brow. \"Why, Miss Tenney, of course.\"\n\n\"Oh, really? I hadn't noticed.\"\n\nFor several moments they stood staring down at the little grave without speaking. Finally, Robert broke the silence.\n\n\"What do you plan to do about the ranch?\"\n\n\"Didn't I tell you? I may have found my heiress. I haven't written back to her yet, but her letter looks promising. She's from Kansas.\"\n\n\"Ah. At least that's closer to cattle country than Boston.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Yes, indeed. I think that's a good sign, don't you?\"\n\n\"You just never know about these things, do you?\"\n\nGood old Robert. No matter how much they might disagree, in the end he was always there for her. \"Why don't you stay for supper and I'll read you her letter.\"\n\nHe bowed. \"I accept your invitation. That will give me a chance to show you some literature I picked up on Paris.\"\n\nShe threw back her head and laughed. \"Oh, Robert, will you ever give up? I've never met anyone so mule-headed in my life.\"\n\n\"I guess that makes us two of a kind.\" Grinning, he offered her his bent elbow. \"Shall we?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Kate walked between the gravestones, frozen brown grass crunching beneath her feet.\n\nThe cemetery looked especially bleak this time of year. It was the end of February and the ground was still covered with snow. The branches of bare trees, dark against the steel gray skies, showed no signs of spring.\n\nHer woolen cloak offered little protection against the stiff wind that nipped at her nose and made her teeth chatter.\n\nHer mother's resting place was on a hill behind a gray-stone church overlooking the bay. \"Elizabeth Anne Tenney\" was carved into the headstone in block letters. Her mother died of consumption at the age of thirty-nine. She died a bitter woman, old and worn-out long before her time.\n\nThings weren't what they seemed and Ruckus called that a blessing. \"It makes us give the world\u2014and each other\u2014a closer look-see.\"\n\nShe wasn't sure how much of a blessing it was, but she now saw her mother for perhaps the first time. Children protected their parents even if it meant living in denial, and Kate had spent a lifetime making excuses for hers. At times she blamed herself for her father leaving and even the circumstances of her mother's wretched existence.\n\nHer mother had been given to rants of temper and drunken stupors. Even cattle knew to protect their young. Even Homer. But not Elizabeth Tenney.\n\n\"Nothing good ever happens to our kind.\" Her mother repeated those words as often as others might sing a lullaby and Kate believed them. Why wouldn't she? All she had to do was look and see that God favored the rich. But that was before she left for Arizona, before a whole town rallied around her following her kidnapping, before she met an old lady willing to turn over her ranch to a near stranger. Before she met Luke.\n\nFor the first time in her life, she knew how it felt to be protected and cared for, and it scared the life out of her. The only permanent thing she'd ever known was death and abandonment. Through the years she'd lost everyone and everything she'd ever cared about. Anything good that happened to her was discounted as only temporary.\n\n\"I came to say good-bye, Mama.\" She leaned against the wind to lay a stem of winterberries on the concrete slab. No flowers could be found at this time of year and she was lucky to find a branch covered with red berries\u2014red for forgiveness.\n\nShe straightened, and in so doing, she felt a heavy weight lift from her shoulders. She wasn't ready to forgive\u2014not yet\u2014but if acceptance was the first step, then she was well on her way.\n\n\"You were wrong, Mama,\" she said. \"Good things do happen to people like us.\" And maybe, just maybe, some things did last forever, even love.\n\nRuckus certainly thought so, and if he were there now, he'd probably recite scripture with words to that effect. Thoughts of Ruckus brought a smile to her face.\n\nShe shoved her hands in her muff and gazed at a steamer sitting in the frigid waters of the distant harbor. The icy wind blew off the bay, whipping her hair around her head and snapping at her skirt. She inhaled until her lungs felt ready to explode. She then walked into the wind and followed the path down the hill\u2014as bravely as a woman in love." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Chapter 38\n\nWith a grim laugh the bushwhacker wrapped his cloak around him. \"No one will ever get the best of me.\"\n\nMiss Hattie bounded forward and pulled off the man's false beard. \"This man is an imposter!\" she cried.\n\nEactus Paaaaaaaaaatch!\"\n\nKate rose from her seat and rushed down the aisle even before the train had come to a complete stop. The moment the door opened she sprang past the dark-skinned porter and raced down the steps to the platform. There she stopped, clutching a small package in her hand. Not only did the reality of the full desert sun hit her but also the enormity of what she was about to do.\n\nIt had been raining when she left Boston, and after months of gloomy skies and bone-chilling temperatures, she welcomed the desert warmth. She took a deep breath, relishing the fragrance of sunbaked sand.\n\nFeet firmly planted upon the platform, she felt her knees tremble. It was all she could do to keep from getting back on the train. But she had come too far to turn back now.\n\nHad it not been for the success of her new book, she could not have afforded the trip back to Arizona. The early reviews had been glowing, and Boston's Corner Bookstore had sold out all copies the very first day.\n\nThe best news was that her book was recommended reading for truant boys, and she knew at least two youths who vowed to follow the straight and narrow after reading the sad but true story of Cactus Joe and his wicked ways.\n\nBehind her came the thud of her trunk on the platform, but she didn't bother to retrieve it. Nothing in her trunk mattered as much as what was in her heart. Besides, there was no time to waste.\n\nShe'd finally figured out what the circles on Cactus Joe's calendar meant, and the closed telegraph office confirmed her suspicions.\n\nShe picked up her skirt and ran so fast that she almost stumbled over her feet. Sweat poured down her face and still she ran.\n\nShe stopped when she reached the outermost edge of the town. The street was deserted. Not a soul was in sight, but she wasn't fooled.\n\n\"Cactus Joe! I know you're here.\"\n\nNothing.\n\nShe ambled forward, cautious at first, but gradually picking up speed. She passed the barber, newspaper, and assay office. \"Cactus Joe!\"\n\nAt last a dark form stepped from the batwing doors of the Silver Moon Saloon, stopping her in her tracks. Her heart thudded and her mouth went dry, but she held her ground. This time she had a secret weapon.\n\nCactus Joe stood legs apart, gun in one hand and what looked like a sock in the other, probably holding stolen loot. As usual he was dressed in black with a patch over one eye and a pencil-thin mustache she now knew was false.\n\n\"Looky who's here,\" he drawled. \"The writer who got away. Now you're gonna help me get away. Escaping is a whole lot harder now that there's a reward for my capture.\"\n\n\"I thought you'd be pleased,\" she said. \"All that attention.\"\n\n\"Rewards don't make legends,\" he said. \"Once I'm captured I'll be yesterday's news.\" He tilted his head. \"I'm curious. How did you know you'd find me here?\"\n\n\"Jesse James,\" she said. \"I read a book about him. That's when I realized that the dates circled on your calendar corresponded to his robberies and other events in his life.\"\n\nCactus Joe frowned. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I first came to town on March twentieth. It just so happened that on that very same day in 1869, Jesse James stole fourteen thousand dollars from a bank in Kentucky. I can't remember the exact dates of your other holdups, but I'm willing to bet they match Jesse's.\"\n\n\"Very good,\" he said. \"And today?\"\n\n\"Today is April third,\" she said. \"Jesse James died fourteen years ago today. I didn't think you'd let the day pass without doing something in remembrance.\"\n\n\"I'm impressed,\" Cactus Joe said.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"It's all your fault, you know. Had you completed my book, I would have given up my life of crime for good.\"\n\n\"It's never too late.\" She held up her hand so he could see the package. \"I have something for you.\"\n\nShe tossed the package through the air and it landed at his feet, stirring up a small cloud of dust.\n\nHe glanced down at it but made no move to pick it up. \"Is this a trick?\"\n\n\"Open it,\" she said.\n\n\"It better not be a trick.\" He stuffed the sock into his shirt but kept his hand on his six-shooter. He leaned over and picked up the package. He blew away the dust, and biting through the string with his teeth, he tore away the brown paper wrap.\n\nHe stared at the book in his hand with a wide grin. \"Will you look at that?\"\n\nThe title read Cactus Joe: Master of Disguise. She'd counted on his considerable ego to work in her favor and she wasn't disappointed. He was so enamored with the book he failed to notice the marshal sneaking up behind him.\n\n\"Drop the gun and put your hands over your head,\" Marshal Morris said, jabbing the serious end of his Peacemaker into Cactus Joe's back.\n\nCactus Joe did as he was told. He dropped his weapon\u2014but not the book.\n\nKate smiled. This was exactly how she wrote the scene at the end of the book. Fiction had turned into reality. \"I spelled your name correctly,\" she called. \"Morris with two r's.\"\n\nThe marshal grinned. \"Wait till the sheriff hears about this. Looks like I'll be gittin' a new assignment and you a handsome reward.\"\n\nShe didn't need any reward and didn't feel right taking it. Maybe Aunt Bessie would know how to put the reward money to good use.\n\nThe marshal confiscated the bulging sock and gave Cactus Joe a shove. \"Move!\"\n\nCactus Joe's outlaw days were over, but judging by the big smile on his swarthy face, he was too captivated by his book to care.\n\n\"Listen to this,\" he said and proceeded to read out loud. \"'No man has ever gotten the best of Cactus Joe, certainly no lawman.'\" He nodded in approval, ignoring the irony. \"'All he needs is a peg leg and parrot and he could easily pass as Long John Silver.'\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Yes, yes,\" he boomed. \"Even Robert Louis Stevenson couldn't have said it better. I always wanted to be a pirate and rule the seven seas.\"\n\n\"That's too bad,\" the marshal said. \"'Cause the only thing you're gonna rule is a seven-by-seven jail cell.\"\n\nBoth prisoner and lawman disappeared into the marshal's office and the door slammed shut, cutting off the sound of Cactus Joe's guffaws.\n\nKate couldn't help but laugh herself. Now for the rest of her plan..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Luke set his bellows down. \"What is it, boy? What do you want?\"\n\nHomer had been pacing back and forth for the last half hour or so. Now he scratched the floor by the door, cocked his head, and whimpered.\n\n\"You want to go out, eh? I guess that means it's safe.\" The gunfire he'd heard earlier had brought back more painful memories. It was during one of Cactus Joe's robberies that Kate first came to town. Memories of her flashed through his mind. He recalled how she felt in his arms as he whirled her about the dance floor, the feel of her lips on his. It seemed like only yesterday that he had carried her to his workbench, yet it seemed like a million years ago.\n\nThey say time healed all wounds, but it had been eight months since she left and it still hurt. It didn't seem possible that anything could hurt so much without an actual wound. If anything, the pain in his chest had grown worse, not better. It was all he could do to get through each day, let alone the long, lonely nights. Going to Boston had been a mistake. It only gave him false hope.\n\nHe could take iron and pound it into any shape he desired, but changing a woman's heart\u2014that he couldn't do. No matter how much he wanted to he couldn't make Kate come back. Couldn't make her love him like he loved her.\n\nHomer gave an impatient bark and Luke pulled off his leather apron and tossed it aside. He knew from experience that any reprieve from his painful memories would be short-lived. Might as well enjoy it while he could.\n\nHe donned a shirt, wiped his hands on a towel, and mopped his forehead. His gaze fell on the dictionary Michael had given him, now dog-eared from use. Each morning Luke picked out a word to memorize, hoping beyond hope that if Kate ever did come back he would be ready.\n\nToday's word was interminable, meaning never-ending. Like his loneliness. Like the love he felt for Kate. Like the awful hurt that wouldn't go away.\n\nHe opened the door a crack and, seeing Mr. Green across the way, walked outside.\n\n\"Any news?\" Luke called.\n\n\"Cactus Joe is in jail,\" Mr. Green called back.\n\nThat was a surprise. Maybe the marshal wasn't as incompetent as everyone thought. Or maybe the reward money had done what it was supposed to do. Luke glanced down at Homer. \"You knew that, didn't you?\"\n\nEars pricked, Homer cocked his head, tail sweeping back and forth.\n\n\"Come on, we'll take a walk. It'll do us both good.\" He reached inside to pluck his hat from a hook and placed it on his head. The monsoon winds of summer were still a couple of months away, but a rain shower had passed through the night before. It was what Uncle Murphy called a six incher\u2014one drop every six inches\u2014but even a little moisture was better than none.\n\nLuke started one way, but Homer refused to follow.\n\nLuke turned and faced his dog, hands on his waist. \"What's wrong with you?\"\n\nHomer walked a few steps in the other direction and sat, waiting for Luke to follow.\n\nLuke scratched his head. \"We always go this way. Why do you want to walk through town?\"\n\n\"Woof!\"\n\nLuke shrugged. \"I guess that's reason enough.\"\n\nWord of Cactus Joe's capture began to spread, and Postmaster Parker ran up and down shouting the news. Fortunately, Parker held no ill feelings toward Luke or his uncle. The three of them had actually shared a good belly laugh over the whole affair.\n\nDoors of the various businesses sprang open and shopkeepers and proprietors stepped outside to make sure they'd heard the news right.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Harry the barber called. \"Cactus Joe is in jail?\"\n\n\"Heard it with me own two ears,\" Parker called back.\n\nLuke continued along Main with Homer by his side. He passed a handbill flapping on a post but didn't pay any attention to it until he noticed the town practically plastered with them.\n\nCurious, he stopped at the next post and smoothed down the edges of the flyer so he could read it. \"I don't aim on going anywhere either.\"\n\nShaking his head, he continued walking. A similar handbill hung from every post and every window and every door. His feet slowed. No, it couldn't be Kate's writing. She would use some decorative word. Besides, that wasn't how you spelled anywear, was it? Kate would never misspell a word.\n\nHe turned the corner and stopped. Was that...? It looked like... No, it couldn't be. His eyes were playing tricks on him. It wouldn't be the first time. He'd chased many a woman down the streets of Boston thinking it was Kate, only to find it was someone else.\n\nNext to him Homer barked and wagged his tail.\n\nHe stared at Homer. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Woof!\"\n\nLuke didn't need any more convincing. He bolted forward. \"Kate!\"\n\nThe closer he got, the more beautiful she looked. The best part of all, she held a sign that read, \"I'm here to stay.\"\n\nHe stopped a few feet in front of her, stopped short of taking her into his arms. Was he dreaming? Was this a mirage? A figment of his imagination? If he reached out to her, would she vanish like she had so many times before?\n\nShe searched his face. \"Is that you?\" she whispered.\n\nEven now, even as she spoke, he was afraid to believe she was real. \"It's me.\"\n\nShe dropped her sign and threw her shoulders back as he had seen her do whenever she had something important on her mind. \"I love you, Luke Adams. I loved you since the first day we met, but my contumacious heart kept me from knowing my own mind.\"\n\nHis quick intake of breath sounded like a gasp. He cleared the distance between them, taking her hands in his. She was real. He could feel the softness of her flesh, smell the sweetness of her fragrance. He'd look up contumacious later, but he sure didn't need no dictionary to define the word love. Nor had a word ever filled him with more joy.\n\n\"Does... does that mean you trust that I'm not gonna walk away or desert you?\" he asked, his voice a hoarse whisper. Even now, with the sweet-sounding word love still ringing in his ears, he was afraid to believe any of this was real.\n\nShe moistened her lips and looked up at him through tear-filled eyes. \"I don't know, Luke. I'm trying. All I know is that I'm going to cherish every day we have together, no matter how many or how few.\"\n\nHer honesty touched him, though it wasn't what he wanted to hear. He'd made a promise to be there for her, always\u2014and he would die before breaking that vow. In return he wanted to know she trusted him, trusted in their future together.\n\nThe fact that she couldn't or wouldn't near broke his heart. Still, she was here and that was a start. He still had work to do\u2014they both did\u2014but a lot of good stuff could be forged from this thing called love. With God's help, maybe even trust.\n\nThis time he swept her in his arms and much to his delight she locked herself in his embrace\u2014as if never to let him go." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Kate had dreamt about this moment for weeks and imagined every possible scenario. What if he had married Miss Chase? Or no longer wanted anything to do with her?\n\nWhat if Luke had never been to Boston? What if a stranger had written those handbills? What if God had another plan for her altogether that did not involve Luke? There had been no end to what she imagined could go wrong. But the moment he took her in his arms all her worries vanished.\n\n\"I love you, Kate Tenney,\" he whispered. \"And I swear I'm not goin' anywhere. Not unless you're by my side.\"\n\nShe stared up at him and the tenderness of his expression took her breath away. \"Oh, Luke, I love you and want you and...\" There was so much she wanted to say that words floated out like bubbles in the wind, but none could adequately express how she felt. \"And fancy you and...\"\n\nShe would have said more\u2014a lot more\u2014but his lips got in the way, searing a path all the way to her soul. At that moment, she was willing to believe anything\u2014even that love could last a lifetime.\n\nHe pulled away, but only slightly. \"Can you substantiate your declarations?\" he asked.\n\n\"Substan\u2014\" She threw back her head and laughed. \"Why, Luke Adams, I do believe you've been hanging around Webster.\"\n\nAs if to agree, Homer barked, but neither one paid him the least bit of attention.\n\nBrandon and the brave, true, and kindhearted Miss Hattie were joined together in holy matrimony. The author joins her many faithful readers in wishing this young, deserving couple much good fortune and wedded bliss. Long may they live!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "", + "author": "Embassie Susberry", + "genres": [ + "Salis House Plantation 3" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Keturah Mary Hollis spent an inordinate amount of time debating things\u2014usually with herself\u2014and after going back and forth, she had finally settled on the word that described Logan Feldan. Unhinged. That single word explained everything a body needed to know about the man in a nutshell. From where Keturah stood atop the hill, she could tell that Master Logan was tall, with a head full of black hair, slim, and young. She could also tell that he was maybe more than a little bit insane cause he was covered in the blood of the slave he had just beat to death with the whip in his hand. Zeb's crime had been to runaway whilst Master Logan was still looking for his precious Annie. Logan had dragged Zeb back to Salis\u2014literally\u2014and then sent for every slave that worked Salis Plantation. From where Keturah stood, she could make out the house slaves, dressed in their aprons, caps, and whatnot below, she saw the children and the elderly in the back, there were the ones who worked in the mines, and the ones who worked with the salt wells. And then there was her group, the ones who picked the cotton. All the overseers were present and so was Master William, Master Logan's brother. Everyone was there, everyone accounted for to see this display of uncontrollable rage.\n\n\"Take this as a message,\" Logan yelled, his voice carrying out loud and clear across the open field. There was no other sound. It was as if nature itself held its breath to see what he would do next. \"Of exactly what will happen to you should you choose to run away.\"\n\n\"Girl, this man is crazy,\" Ophelia told Keturah through clenched teeth. Her hand was on her stomach and Keturah wasn't sure if Ophelia was experiencing stomach pain or emotional pain.\n\n\"Yes.\" Keturah had little to no dealings with the family that owned her. The Feldans were quite removed from her little world. For one, if a Feldan came out to her neck of the woods, it was typically Richard Feldan, coming to check on either the planting or the harvest of the cotton. For ten months of the year, he left the cotton fields in the capable hands of McGovern, the overseer. But Richard Feldan was dead. He had been dead coming on three weeks. Now his sons, William and Logan, ran the plantation. And while Richard had been nothing to get excited about, Keturah was beginning to see that his sons were something else entirely... something that did not quite bode well for her future.\n\n\"If you leave,\" Logan yelled, pointing the bloody whip towards Zeb's body which now hung awkwardly from the whipping post, \"You only come back one way.\"\n\n\"Crazy fool,\" Ophelia repeated under her breath. The words were flippant, but the emotion was not. It had been hard\u2014watching Zeb die under Logan's hand and then watch Logan continue to flay the man open even though breath had long since left his body, but Keturah would not let herself look away. She didn't know Zeb, had never seen the man before today, but she would honor him by watching his murder. He deserved to be seen. He deserved to be mourned. And oh, how she prayed that he had known Jesus before he left this world. \"No wonder Annie ran.\"\n\nAnnie. Keturah had seen her. Once. From afar. Annie had been the head cook of Salis, young and strikingly beautiful. So beautiful she had you wondering what God was doing making you so ugly when he could do that. Not that Keturah thought that she was ugly, but compared to Annie, most women were. Annie had been Logan's paramour. And apparently none too happy with the job. Nigh unto three weeks ago, the day Master Richard was to be buried, she had run off. With her children. And, if rumors were to be believed, with Prince.\n\n\"Still cain't believe she ran off with that Prince, though. Cain't think of a colder man to make your bed with, but I guess if you have to choose between mean or crazy may as well go with mean.\"\n\nPrince. The steward of Salis Plantation. Most folks hated Prince. Negro and white alike. Because he was a strange in-between. In more ways than one. The son of Master Richard and a house slave, Prince had been allowed more freedom, more authority, and more education than any other slave on Salis. And he had not used such gifts kindly. She had not interacted with him much, but if forced to describe the man, she would say he was cold, ruthless, and incredibly selfish. And yet, she would forever be grateful to Prince and she wished him the best. She sent up a prayer now for him and his Annie, that they would find peace and joy and love and happiness far, far away from here.\n\n\"Since y'all have so much time here, so much energy, I think we might have to cut rations,\" Logan was saying. Even from where she was standing, Keturah noticed how the overseers behind him switched weight from one foot to the next. Master William was staring hard at the ground. She was pretty sure she had seen him raise a handkerchief to his mouth while Logan was whipping Zeb. Master William had inherited most of Salis Plantation and the slaves thereof. Master Logan had been given money... if the rumor mill was to be believed. But it was clear this day who the real master of Salis was. Keturah found herself patting the center of her chest where she kept her small book of Psalms sewed into her chemise. King David knew the kind of man Logan was. Yea, in heart ye work wickedness; ye weigh the violence of your hands in the earth. If King David had been there, he would have called for Logan's blood. Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest this shall be the portion of their cup. Sometimes, Keturah wished she lived in the days where you could deal with your enemy on equal footing instead of in this time and place where all she could do was pray that God dealt with her enemies. Sorry, Lord, she prayed, tapping her chest again, but it's true. Logan said more\u2014which Keturah found herself tuning out\u2014and then dismissed them, claiming he still wanted a full day's work from everyone.\n\n\"I miss Massa Richard,\" Lee, Ophelia's younger brother said mournfully, bumping into Keturah as they made their five-mile trek back to the cotton fields. He always claimed he couldn't see her cause she was so small. She had long since stopped responding to this statement. She wasn't completely unaware. She knew it was his way of flirting with her. But she had lost her heart a long time ago to a man she loved more than anything. Whenever she married\u2014and she did plan on marrying in spite of everything\u2014it would be to a man who, if she could not love, she would at least respect and who would hopefully, respect her as well. She liked Lee. She did not respect him. Thus, she did not respond to his flirtation.\n\n\"Don't we all,\" Ophelia said grimly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "\"You still goin' out, Keturah?\" Essie asked even though Keturah was clearly wrapping her shawl around herself.\n\n\"Yes,\" Keturah said simply and reached for the door.\n\n\"Ain't you tired?\" This came from Essie's daughter, Tandy. Thanks to that meeting out in the fields with Logan, they had picked cotton well past the setting of the sun. Keturah would not deny that she was tired. But she had never let exhaustion stop her from what she wanted before.\n\n\"Yes, Tandy, I'm tired. I left some marigold on the table for your blisters,\" Keturah said and left the small cabin, closing the door behind her. Keturah shared her cabin with Essie and her four children. Essie's husband lived and worked on a different plantation. Keturah did not understand the purpose of such a marriage, but she supposed it wasn't her place to judge. Either way, Keturah lived in the small cabin with his family and he did not.\n\nShe had lived her whole life sharing a small space with a lot of people. But it had been different when that space was shared with her mama and papa and younger brothers. Now, she shared it with another family and despite their numbers, she was lonely. For seven years she had been lonely. So lonely, loneliness itself had become a strange kind of companion. It has been so long since she had truly connected with another person that she wasn't even sure she ever wanted or needed to do so again. And oddly enough, she never felt lonelier than when she was in the house with Essie's family. Nice as Essie and her children were, they had none of them taken to her too well. They thought her strange. She had done very little to change their opinion. With a shake of her head, she shook off those thoughts. No sense in wasting her mind on folks she hoped to never see again in this life. If all went well tonight, she might be leaving Salis soon. Her feet took her several cabins down to Ophelia's cabin.\n\nThe door was opened by Kitch, Ophelia's oldest son, a boy of about thirteen. \"Hey, Keturah,\" the boy said, opening the door wider and letting her in. Ophelia's cabin was always warm and welcoming, and that evening was no different. There was a small fire going in the fireplace and Ophelia's husband, Coffey, was sitting at the table whittling. Her other children were on the floor, playing and talking and laughing. Keturah could not remember the last time she had laughed, but even if she never laughed again, she loved the sound of it. Ophelia's home reminded Keturah the most of her own home.\n\n\"Shut the door, Kitch,\" Coffey said quietly, eyeing Keturah. He didn't like her much. It was the only downfall of her and Ophelia's tepid friendship. Keturah turned to Ophelia, but her friend wouldn't meet her eyes. Keturah knew what that meant. She reached into the small pocket of her dress anyway and set the mint leaves she had picked earlier in front of Ophelia. If her stomach was upset that would soothe the ache. \"I know why you're here, Keturah,\" Coffey continued. \"The answer is no.\"\n\nYesterday, the answer had been maybe. Apparently, Logan's lesson had touched a nerve. Of course, with Coffey, most times the answer was no. She had wanted to teach him and Ophelia and the children to read. The answer had been no. Keturah had then waited for Coffey to leave the house and again asked Ophelia if she wanted to learn. Ophelia's look had been one of longing, but she out and out refused to go against Coffey. Neither she nor the children needed to learn how to read. That was for the white man, she had told Keturah. Keturah wished a man she had married would tell her she couldn't learn to read. If she didn't take it from the white man, she wasn't going to take it from him. The whole incident had put a slight damper on what could have been a true friendship. But they still tried and so here she was.\n\nKeturah went and took the seat opposite of Coffey. The only way to change Ophelia's mind was to change her husband's. This was why Keturah's husband, when she married, would be older and past the days where he felt the need to prove his manhood by being willfully ignorant. Even Leo, her beloved, had had his moments. \"Coffey,\" she began gently, \"Logan is leavin' for South Carolina for a family gatherin' in two weeks' time. When we run, he won't even be here. I overheard McGovern say so the other day.\" McGovern had been mentioning it to one of the other overseers and had sounded like he couldn't wait for Logan to go. None of the overseers appeared to like Logan much. And that smelled of trouble to Keturah. It was only a matter of time before Logan replaced his father's workers with his friends. And anyone who was a friend of Logan Feldan would not be a friend of theirs.\n\nBut Coffey was already shaking his head. \"Nope. Nuh uh. We not goin'.\"\n\n\"So, you're goin' to stay here? Knowin' that if Logan doesn't work you to death, William is liable to sell you to get out of his gamblin' debts? That's a risk you want to take for you and your family?\"\n\n\"What do you know about family?\" Coffey countered, his dark eyes glittering. He was maybe ten years older than her and even Keturah could admit that he was handsome. But what did looks really matter in the scheme of things? What mattered was that he didn't like her. She had asked Ophelia once if he had ever given her a reason. Ophelia had ducked her head in that way she did when she was embarrassed and admitted that Coffey thought Keturah was trouble. Her? Trouble. She had never been trouble a day in her life. But she focused on his words now.\n\n\"I had a family. I am not impervious to your situation, Coffey.\" Coffey stared at her and then shook his head in disbelief. She had used the wrong words. She always used the wrong words. What had Papa told her time and time again? You'll never be an orator, Keturah Mary. But she kept going. \"It's why I'm insistin' that we run. Had my family run, my parents and my brothers and me, would not have been sold away from each other. I don't want that for you and Ophelia.\"\n\n\"The answer is no. I am not goin' to be killed like Zeb was.\"\n\n\"We would be more careful than Zeb was.\"\n\n\"Zeb run off and it was just him. You cain't be more careful than that! Ophelia and I got four young'uns. Four! You ain't got no babies of your own that's why you don't understand.\"\n\nShe did not need to have children to know that their loss could and would be unbearable. That any loss of someone you loved could be unbearable. Her parents had died shortly after their separation. That had been painful. Theophilus and Abigail Hollis had been her whole world and the earth seemed smaller without them in it. And then their deaths had been followed by her brothers: Lawrence, Hamilton, and Sylvester. That had been painful. And she had thought her heart had been ripped out and stomped on, when Leo was sold so far south, they knew they would never see each other again. Seven years later, she still ached from all of the loss. Coffey was always so quick to fling her spinster state and lack of blood relatives in her face when he wanted to win an argument, but they were just shields he used to hide his own fears.\n\n\"I think every person on this plantation, married or not, mother or not, knows what you risk, Coffey.\"\n\n\"You too much, Keturah. I done said what I said and I ain't gone say no more.\"\n\nToo much. It was how she had been described all of her life. Too straightforward, too aggressive, too logical, too unfeeling. Sometimes you just too much, Keturah. Her mama had told her that more times than she could count. Sometimes Mama had said it with a smile on her face, sometimes with exasperation. But in the end, Keturah understood, she was just a person who would always be out of place.\n\nKeturah stood up. When Coffey got in this mood, there was no changing his mind. She stood behind the chair that she had been sitting in, placing her hands on the wooden headrest. \"Well, I understand your position and I will argue no longer, but I will not stay here. I have made up my mind,\" she told Coffey, though her words for Ophelia. \"One day you will look up, and I will be gone.\"\n\n\"You gone be on that whippin' post is where you gone be,\" Coffey muttered under his breath.\n\n\"As always, Coffey, it has been a pleasure,\" Keturah said, giving him a brittle smile. He always had to have the last words, no matter how unkind they might be. \"It's late, I'll see y'all in the mornin',\" Keturah said and didn't even look at Ophelia on her way out. What was the point?\n\nKeturah walked out of their cabin and kept walking. So long as she stayed within sight of the slave cabins, she was fine. McGovern wasn't a man too big on curfew, though that might change now that Logan was in charge. But she wasn't ready to go back to her own cabin and Coffey's words danced in her head. Oh, not his insults, his refusal to let his family go. Because she believed it was time to go. The urge to leave had started a month or so ago. And it hadn't gone away. If anything, it had gotten stronger. Sometimes she woke up in the morning, anxious, because she was still there. But she didn't want to leave by herself. She didn't know where to go or what to do when she got wherever it was she needed to be. And there was safety in having someone to rely on. A line from one of her favorite psalms entered her thoughts, It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man. Keturah sighed. And wasn't that the story of her life? Everyone she had ever loved, through no fault of their own, had been unreliable. In this life, she only had herself and the Lord. When my father and mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.\n\nShe would be fine. At the end of the day, she was always just fine. So focused was she on her thoughts that she almost missed the whistle. But she had heard it. She came to an abrupt stop. Turned around.\n\nBehind her, a tall, lanky, slave looped his way towards her. The darkness of the night revealed no clue as to who he was. But that whistle...\n\n\"Keturah Mary Hollis, I declare, you are a fast one.\"\n\nKeturah swallowed. Blinked, but the young man in front of her didn't disappear. The words were her papa's. You know you're a fast one, Keturah Mary. He always said it after lessons. He also whistled. A lot. He had a whistle for leaving the house and a whistle for coming home. A whistle when he was content and a whistle for when he was sad. A whistle for danger and a whistle for safety. And a whistle for when he wanted to call his children home without yelling. That was the one that had stopped her in her tracks.\n\nKeturah didn't move and soon the space between her and the slave was nary a foot. He placed his hands on his waist, looking down at her and eyeing her as much as she eyed him. \"Do I know you?\" she asked, finally.\n\n\"Well, I hope so, Tura. I've travelled a ways to come and get you.\"\n\n\"Let me rephrase my question. What is your name?\"\n\nThe boy\u2014because Keturah could see now that tall as he was, he was still growing\u2014cracked a smile. He looked away for a second. \"Sylvester, Keturah. My name is Sylvester. Hollis. I'm your brother.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"I'm your brother,\" Manny said succinctly.\n\n\"For a while there I wasn't sure, Manny. I'm so glad you cleared that confusion up,\" Sam, Manny's identical twin, was sitting right next to Manny on the couch. They were both staring down at Sam's new baby, Manny's nephew, Philip Jessamy Day.\n\n\"I just think that if you really loved and honored me, you should have named my nephew after me,\" Manny said as he moved Philip Jessamy to the crook of his arm. He tugged on the blanket that covered the lower half of the baby's face. Philip Jessamy was the cutest thing he had ever seen in his life. And he loved him more than he thought he could ever love another person besides his twin. Sam and Philip Jessamy were the only blood family he had.\n\n\"Why would I do that? I didn't even name him after myself.\"\n\nManny ignored that. \"What kind of name is Philip Jessamy anyway?\"\n\n\"It's a name Laura and I liked. Philip is in the Bible\u2014,\"\n\n\"Never mind. Sorry I asked,\" Manny said, cutting his brother off because it amused him to do so.\n\n\"We wanted a name that had no past, only a future.\"\n\nIn Manny's arms, Philip Jessamy turned his head from side to side, opening his small mouth and yawning. Manny's arms tightened around the baby. He could not remember ever holding such a small person before. He was half terrified he would break the baby, but he wasn't hardly going to let Sam become an expert on children and the like by himself. They learned everything together. It was a rule. \"He looks like me.\"\n\n\"I mean,\" Gid said, interrupting from his place on the couch across the room, \"isn't that kind of a given?\"\n\n\"Why are you still up? Don't you have to go to bed?\"\n\nManny lived in the biggest house he had ever lived in, in his life. It was a one-story home that had five bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a dining room, and a parlor room. One bedroom belonged to his brother Sam and his wife, Laura. One room belonged to Laura's father Amos and her oldest brother Benjamin. Another room was shared between her youngest brothers, Solomon and Gideon, there was a room just for Philip Jessamy, and the last room was his. They had probably overdone it on the rooms, Sam had confided to Manny. Having spent most of their lives in small cabins on plantations had heavily influenced the layout of the home. Laura had insisted on a separate living space and parlor as she had seen when she worked in the Big House. Sam had wanted the bedrooms. He wanted his house to have the space to be filled with family and friends. But he still wanted the luxury of closing the door and walking away. So, here they were.\n\nManny loved this house. He figured he should start thinking on moving out, on getting his own house and his own land and setting up his own family, but he had been in no hurry to do so. At least not until now. Not until he held his nephew and wished he had his own son. It was a peculiar feeling. He had always been a person who lived in the moment, who focused on the here and now... which was an easy thing to do when you had lived your whole life based on the whims of another. But here he was, thinking about the future.\n\nGid, a thirteen-year-old boy who was getting taller and broader by the day, sent a smirk in Manny's direction and flashed a book in his direction. \"Sol went to sleep. I didn't want to keep him up with my readin'.\"\n\n\"Speakin' of sleep, don't you need to go to bed?\" Sam asked Manny, his hands out, reaching for his son. They were mirror images of each other, him and his brother. Some twins managed to look less alike as they grew older. Manny had seen this. But he and Sam didn't seem to have that problem. They still looked the exact same. They were both about six feet tall, slender but no longer as thin as they used to be. Eating solid meals three times a day did that to a body. They had the same dark brown eyes, black hair, skin that was neither dark brown nor light brown and, well, quite frankly they were good-looking. Manny knew it even if Sam didn't.\n\n\"If that's your way of sayin' you're tired, you go on to sleep. I'll stay up with Philip just a bit longer.\"\n\nSam shook his head. \"Jessamy. That's what we're goin' to call him, I think. And Laura's not goin' to be able to sleep without the baby next to her and I don't think she needs to be gettin' out of the bed too much just yet. Let me take him to her.\"\n\nManny rolled his eyes to the heavens. Last time he checked, women gave birth in the fields one day and went on picking tobacco plants the next. Laura had given birth three days ago. She was fine. In fact, he was almost certain that was her, making her way down the hall.\n\nSam stood up when he realized it. \"Laura, honey, you should be restin',\" he said, meeting her in the doorway of the parlor room. Manny's sister-in-law was an interesting woman. She was the kind of woman a man didn't quite notice at first. It stood to reason, of course, that Sam would. She was of average height with no striking features and no curves that caught a man's eye. Though Manny would not deny that she was the sort of woman that grew on you. There was a gracefulness to her manner that was distinctly feminine. And she was one sharp cookie. That still didn't make it easy to release Sam to this woman. Maybe in about ten years he would be at peace with the situation. Then again, if she kept giving him nephews and nieces, it might happen sooner rather than later.\n\n\"I'm alright, Sam,\" Laura said, smiling at his brother. \"I've come to get my baby. I think he's hungry.\"\n\nManny looked down at the little guy in his arms. He was starting to wiggle more and his mouth was opening and closing. With a sigh, he stood up and slowly handed Philip Jessamy to Laura.\n\n\"Thank you, Manny,\" she said, her eyes already on her son. \"Don't stay up too late now, Gid. You know Papa is gonna have you up bright and early at the smithy.\" With that, Sam, Laura, and the baby disappeared down the hall.\n\n\"When are you goin' to move out?\"\n\nManny turned and glared at Gid. \"When are you?\"\n\n\"I'm still young!\"\n\n\"So am I,\" Manny said, spearing the boy with a look.\n\n\"You're the same age as Sam and he's married to my sister. Don't you think it's time you got married? There are some girls around here like\u2014,\"\n\n\"When I want a child's advice on how to make adult decisions, I will be sure and come to you,\" Manny said before making a face at Gid and walking out of the room. He liked Laura's family. He liked her pa, a big barrel of a blacksmith named Amos, and he liked her brothers. There was Benji, who was only a few years younger than himself and easy to tease. Sol, who was more serious than a boy of fifteen ought to be, and Gid, who had somehow managed to hold onto his innocence and naivet\u00e9 in spite of spending twelve years of his life as a slave. So, he wasn't much bothered by Gid's words. Besides, he couldn't stand thin-skinned people and didn't consider himself to be one. Nevertheless, he still found himself considering the boy's words as he made his way to the kitchen to get a basin of water and then head to his room.\n\nHis room was small. It had a single bed, a chifferobe, a small closet, and a desk and chair. Laura had made him a small throw rug to cover the wood floor... so his feet wouldn't touch cold in the mornings. She was thoughtful in that way. Even he would admit it. Manny cleaned himself up quickly and dressed for bed, though he didn't crawl under the covers just yet.\n\nHe took a seat at his desk, lit the second candle in his room, and sat for a minute. He was still getting used to living without Sam being just over his shoulder. There had been a lot of changes since Sam got married. For one, he had never slept alone a day of his life until his brother got married. They still lived together, and they worked together. Sam was still his closest confident and his best friend in the whole world, but he was not quite Sam's... which was why he was still not thrilled about his sister-in-law, no matter how kind and thoughtful she was. But maybe Gid was right. Maybe he needed to go out and find him his own wife to confide in and do life with. Except he had never met a woman in his life who didn't drive him up a wall after a week or so.\n\nManny lifted the top of his desk and pulled out a few things: his Bible, his journal, a dictionary, a pen, and some ink. They were more thoughtful gifts from his new sister. Well. The journal and the dictionary were, at any rate. She said it might help with his penmanship if he wrote a little bit every day. His writing was awful. That was the plumb truth. But he had only just learned to read in the past six months or so. It stood to reason that it would take some time before his writing looked like more than chicken scratch. Then, there was the dictionary. He had bought it himself, but Laura had suggested it as a way to learn new words. He flipped through it every day. Then there was his Bible. Sam had bought it for him. At first, Manny had used it solely for the purpose of learning to read. But somewhere along the line, it had gotten real for him. And it had come to the point where he just plain liked to spend time with Jesus every night. Not that he had ever told his brother that. His relationship with God was between him and God. He saw no reason to go advertising the fact. He also might be acting a bit small as well. If Sam could have his secrets, then he would have his.\n\nHe laid out everything perfectly on his desk and flipped to where he had read last in his Bible. \"What do you think about me gettin' married, Lord?\" Manny asked God aloud. Manny was a talker. That was just the plain truth. And since he didn't have Sam to chatter at about everything and nothing, he often talked aloud, though quietly, to the Lord. Manny had found God to be a very good listener. He read his two chapters, wrote a bit about his day, blew out the candles, and went to sleep.\n\nThe next morning, Manny was up early. He always woke up early. He had tried sleeping in once. It had felt perfectly sinful\u2014even for him. But early as he was, he was not the first one in the kitchen. Not even the second one.\n\n\"Make the coffee, Manny?\" Sam asked from his spot in front of the stove. Manny could see and smell that Sam had already cracked several eggs into the pan before him and even had some bacon frying.\n\n\"Sure. Mornin' Amos,\" Manny said to the other man in the room.\n\nAmos was sitting at the kitchen table, paper in hand, and grandbaby on shoulder. Manny paused to smile at Jessamy who blinked back at him. No wonder Sam was up already. Jessamy looked wide awake.\n\n\"Mornin,' Manny,\" Amos mumbled lost in the words of the paper.\n\n\"Anythin' good in there?\" Manny asked as he scooped coffee grounds into a pot and set it on the stove to heat up. For someone who had never tasted it until last year, he and his brother had gotten awful used to it. Manny couldn't hardly get a start on his morning without a cup. He had liked it with cream and sugar until Sly Hollis told him real men drank coffee barefooted. He would never admit such a thing to that annoying kid, but he had been drinking his coffee black ever since.\n\n\"More stuff comin' out of Kansas,\" Amos said with a deep sigh. \"Lookin' like Buchanan gonna be the next President with the way the wind is blowin'.\"\n\nManny didn't even want to hear anymore. He hated reading about politics, hated the way people argued for and against slavery as if they were disagreeing about the best drapes to hang up in the window instead of playing with folks' lives. But he read the papers anyway. Ignorance never did a body any favors.\n\n\"Hey.\" The voice was Laura's and she stood in the doorway dressed, but clearly tired.\n\n\"I'm makin' you breakfast, woman. What are you doin' up?\" Sam asked his wife. Laura smiled at him and they shared a look. And Manny felt a sharp pain of jealousy. He didn't know if he was jealous that Sam had another person he could speak to without using words or jealous that Sam was married in general. He looked down at the coffee pot in his hand. Maybe he did need to move out. He poured his cup of coffee and fixed his plate of food while Sam and Laura chatted behind him. When he finally took a seat at the table his sister-in-law was gone.\n\n\"You headed to Riverside?\" Sam asked Manny, taking a seat across from him.\n\n\"Yeah.\" Arrow Creek, where they lived, didn't receive mail or packages of any kind. Manny and Sam owned a general store, Day's Mercantile. If they needed to pick up an order for the store or send off a letter, they had to drive into Riverside to do it. Sometimes he and Sam went to Riverside together. Sometimes Manny went and took one of Laura's brothers along for the trip or Sam did.\n\n\"I was thinkin' we could ask the boys to open the store. That way I could go with you.\"\n\nManny shook his head. \"No. You go on and open the store.\" He wasn't good company right now and in his mood his brother would be able to sniff out why in a second. The very last thing he needed was Sam's pity. Or worse, his empathy. Sam would be kind and thoughtful as he always was, but the conversation would end with neither of them happy and Sam sharing even less with Manny about his own thoughts and his new family. It was a new thing, this loneliness that was constantly creeping up. Sometimes Manny really hated that they had met Laura and her family.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Sam asked, looking confused. When given a choice, they always preferred each other's company. Not so much anymore, Manny thought bitterly. For a second, he felt a pang of regret. Sorry, Lord. I need to fix my attitude, but I can't if he's there.\n\n\"I'm sure. You know we sell more if one of us is there anyway,\" Manny said and winked at his twin in an effort to hide his true emotions. Sam sent him a familiar look of censure and rolled his eyes before digging into his breakfast.\n\nThe three of them ate quietly and were soon joined by the youngest males in the family. Amos slipped off first, headed for the smithy. Benji and Sol were right behind. Sam delivered Jessamy to Laura and then headed out. \"Take someone with you, Manny,\" his older brother ordered before walking out of the door. He didn't even pause. Because Manny always took someone with him.\n\n\"You takin' someone with you?\" Gid asked eagerly, swiping the last piece of bacon. He was the only person left to take and he would do anything to not go to the smithy.\n\nThere was safety in numbers, there was no denying that. But Manny needed time to think, to get away. Usually he found peace in the presence of others. There was something about communicating with others that just took his mind off of whatever was bothering him. But he needed to be alone. Riverside was only a few hours away. He ought to be able to get there and back without any trouble.\n\n\"My revolver,\" Manny said, patting the gun belt at his waist. He had spent more time than he could count making sure he knew how to use it too.\n\n\"I can come.\"\n\n\"I know you can,\" Manny said as he stood up. He patted Gid on the shoulder as he passed him. \"Amos has that big order in though, right? You go on and help your pa. I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"And they'll need someone to come and check on Laura in the afternoon. I'll be fine,\" Manny said as he headed to his room to get his hat. \"Ain't nothin' gonna happen to me.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Her brother?\n\n\"Sylvester? I thought you were dead,\" she said, staring up at him and trying to make out his features. It was just too plain dark to see what he really looked like; to tell if he resembled Mama or Papa.\n\n\"I thought you were dead. Come on. Let's walk. We'll look less odd that way,\" he said, grabbing her arm and forcing her to move in the direction she had originally been going in. There was strength and command in his grip. This self-assured young man was her youngest brother, Sylvester? And how was he here right now?\n\nShe pulled her arm out of his grip, though she kept on walking. \"Where did you come from? You don't work here, do you?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sly said with a shake of his head.\n\n\"You said,\" she started, thinking about his words. \"You said you travelled a ways to come find me?\"\n\n\"It's a long story, Tura. And one I'm hopin' to tell you far away from here. I don't live in Virginia. I came here to get you. I need to know if you're willin' to run.\"\n\n\"Run? Away?\" Keturah could hardly think. She, who spent hours and hours deliberating things, couldn't form a single thought. One minute, she was the last Hollis on the face of the earth and the next, her brother was standing before her. And now he was talking about running away. As though it were as easy as breathing.\n\n\"Yes, Tura,\" Sly said patiently. \"I've come to get you so that we can go to freedom.\" He said the last words quietly, barely above a whisper.\n\n\"When?\" She was surprised the question even came out. What was happening?\n\n\"Now. Tomorrow. Whenever you're ready.\"\n\n\"I'm ready,\" she said quickly. And wasn't she though? Lord? What was happening? \"I could leave right now,\" she said with a humorless laugh.\n\n\"Then let's go, sister,\" he said, pulling her off the trail they were on and in the direction of the woods to their left.\n\n\"Sly!\" She dug her heels into the ground, forcing him to stop. Was he crazy? They were just going to leave? There wasn't going to be any kind of planning?\n\n\"Hush. There'll be someone comin' around in about a minute.\"\n\n\"Sly!\"\n\nHe let go of her arm. \"You have to go back? Say good-bye? Pack up your things? I can wait.\"\n\nShe thought on all of that. Shook her head slowly. She touched her chest where her book of Psalms was sewed into her chemise. Everything she needed, she had. \"No.\"\n\n\"No?\" he asked confused. \"I was just kiddin' when I said now. I figured you must have somethin'... someone...\"\n\nKeturah shook her head. \"I have nothin' and no one.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute, weren't you gettin' married\u2014,\"\n\n\"I have nothin' and no one.\"\n\nHe stilled for a moment. \"Well, you have me.\" His words seemed to stop time for a moment as she took them in. \"You want to leave now? Whatever you need, food, clothin'. I can get you that.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, making a quick decision. She never made quick decisions.\n\n\"Then, let's go.\"\n\nHer brother led her into the woods, saying nothing. This was the wildest thing she had ever done in her life. What was she thinking? She didn't know Sly. It had been years since she had seen him, and she was just going to wander off and risk her life without finding out anything? You have me. His words floated back to her.\n\nIt had been a long time since she had had anybody, and it was those three words that were compelling her to move now. In front of her, Sly came to a stop. Whistled. A whistle was returned. \"Sly?\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he said gently. \"We'll talk, Tura. I promise. Just not right now.\" Sly turned as footsteps and then horses came into view. \"You ride, sis?\"\n\n\"No. You do?\" she asked as he climbed onto one of the horses.\n\n\"Tura, this is Jamie Knox,\" Sly said, nodding in the direction of the person\u2014another boy\u2014who had arrived with the horses. Sly held his hand out before her. \"Come on, girl. We ain't got a minute to waste.\"\n\nIt didn't feel real. None of it. She felt like she was in a dream. But if it was a dream, she didn't want to wake up. Lord, let this be real. And if it's real, let this be the right decision. She couldn't believe she hadn't prayed about this and yet here she was. She gave her brother her hand and he pulled her up. Her dress rode up her legs, revealing her ankles. She would have been more embarrassed if it hadn't been so dark outside.\n\n\"No more talkin' now. Alright?\"\n\n\"Alright,\" she whispered back as she wrapped her arms around his thin waist.\n\nAnd then they were off, flying down a road she hadn't even known existed.\n\nThey rode for hours. It had not taken long for a dull pain to set up in her thighs, but she said nothing. For by thee I have run through a troop; and by my God have I leaped over a wall. That's how she felt, like they were fleeing their enemies and God was making a way. She supposed, in many ways, they were doing just that.\n\nShe was tired, she knew she was tired, but there was not a moment to be missed. In what would have taken her hours to cover, they flew over the terrain in minutes, leaving Salis Plantation somewhere behind in the distance. As the sun began to rise in the sky, Sly slowed his pace significantly, leading them to a farmhouse.\n\nTalking over his shoulder, he said, \"They work the railroad. We'll stay here and catch up on some sleep before leavin' tonight. Horses need rest too.\"\n\nJamie Knox slid off his horse and then came around to Sly's. He held his arms out and helped her down from the horse. The boy was more than a bit odd looking with his long, black hair parted down the center and braided in two braids that hung almost to his waist. He looked to be half Indian. He wore a loose shirt, fitted pants, and... was that a gun belt?\n\nShe turned to look at Sly and noticed in the dim light of the morning that he was wearing very similar clothing. And he too had on a gun belt. Having worn old, handed-down clothes all her life, she could tell that their attire was newer, tailored to fit their bodies. She had so many questions.\n\n\"Knox, can you handle the horses? I want to get Keturah settled,\" Sly said and then grabbed her arm as he was want to do, not even waiting for Jamie Knox to answer.\n\nSly led her right to the back door of the farmhouse and knocked three times. She hoped, she prayed, he knew what he was doing.\n\nThe door opened to reveal an older, tall, white man. He saw Sly and waved them in. \"Hey, Caesar. Didn't know you was in these parts.\"\n\n\"Didn't know I would be in these parts. Can we use your attic and rest up?\"\n\n\"Sure can. I'll bring y'all up some food too.\"\n\nKeturah was sure she stood their staring like a statute. Caesar? Food? White folks? But she said nothing as the owner of the house led them up several flights of stairs to a small, dark, hot, but clean attic. \"Knox is here. When you see him, send him up, please,\" Caesar whispered to the man.\n\n\"Will do,\" the man said before disappearing back down the stairs.\n\nKeturah looked around the attic, taking the room in. There was a tiny window at the top that was letting in one long, pillar of light, highlighting the specks of dust in the air. In the corners of the attic were blankets and a few stacks of hay, but that was all.\n\n\"I'm sure you've got questions.\"\n\n\"I've got so many questions,\" Keturah admitted turning to face Sly. \"Come stand in the light and let me look at you.\"\n\nSlowly, hesitantly, almost bashfully, Sly came to stand just in front of the window. If her memory served her correctly, her brother would be about sixteen now. And he may not have talked like it, but he surely looked like it. His face was thin and he had a few hairs on his chin. Some of the youthfulness in his looks were gone, but she could still see the small boy who had flitted around the cabin at night, unable to ever keep still. They had never been close. She was eight years older than him. With such an age gap, some older sisters would have become almost like second mothers to their younger siblings. She had not. Sylvester had had a perfectly good mama in their own.\n\nSylvester, in his younger years, had been the very opposite of her. She could not understand his restless movements and his need for constant chatter. He could not understand why she always found such solace in quietness. In their small cabin, they had merely tolerated each other. It didn't mean she loved him less, that she hadn't felt his alleged death keenly. It was just that they had simply never quite understood each other and both of them had been content to avoid the other. And now here they were, the oldest and the youngest of the Hollis children, bound by blood and an unusual history. In his face, she could see a bit of both of their parents in him and it brought tears to her eyes. \"You look like them.\" He had Papa's jawline and his lanky form, but his eyes, mouth, and nose were Mama's.\n\n\"You look like pa.\" She hadn't seen her own face in years. But she had always been told she resembled her papa. Even though she was short like her mama.\n\nThey stared at each other for a second longer before he moved and reached for the nearest stack of hay. \"Sit down. Tell me what happened since I saw you last.\"\n\n\"How did you even know where to find me?\"\n\n\"I ran into a runaway by the name of Prince,\" he said as he tossed one stack after another near the light. \"Asked him if he knew of a slave named, Keturah.\"\n\n\"Prince?\" Of all the answers she had expected that hadn't been one of them. She touched her chest, where the book of Psalms rested.\n\n\"What do you have there?\" he asked, pointing at her hand. He missed nothing, this brother of hers.\n\n\"My book of Psalms. Prince gave it to me. Was he with Annie?\"\n\n\"You mean the most beautiful woman I've ever seen on the face of this earth? Sure was. They had the young'uns too.\"\n\nShe took a step back, blinked. So many questions. \"Where are they?\"\n\nSly shook his head slowly. \"Safe, but a tad bit... swampy.\"\n\nWhat did that even mean? Before she could ask, he spoke again.\n\n\"Come on,\" he said, motioning at the hay. \"Sit. You tell your story first and then I'll tell mine. Got it?\"\n\nShe stared at him for a second before nodding. The attic door opened. Jamie Knox entered the room carrying a tray of food and drinks.\n\n\"After we eat though. I swear I could eat a whole horse.\"\n\nKeturah ate her meal quickly, drank the water that was in the cup and then set it all aside. \"Last I saw you was on the auction block in Kentucky. I was sold to a family in Virginia with Mama. Papa was sold separately, and you and the boys were sent to Tennessee.\"\n\n\"Didn't stay there long,\" Sly interrupted, picking at his food even though he had claimed to be so hungry. \"Was sold to Mississippi soon thereafter.\"\n\n\"Mississippi?\" Keturah shook her head, incredulous. Then how had he gotten here? But she didn't ask. \"Anyway, we was all sick when we were sold. Or at least everyone else was.\" Maybe Sly hadn't been.\n\n\"No,\" Sly said, staring at his plate. \"I was sick too.\"\n\n\"Papa had injured himself a week before, remember?\" Their papa had been a talented carpenter, travelling wide and far on behalf of their first master making and fixing things. There had been an accident, Keturah didn't even like to think of it now. He had cut himself with one of his sharp tools, sliced his palm almost right down the middle. Infection had set in immediately, but he had been getting better. She had made him a poultice every night up until the auction. And then he caught typhoid. He died within a week, alone on his new plantation. When she had inquired about her brothers, she had been informed that they had all died the following week. Her new master at that time had been livid and threatening her old master with a lawsuit. Except that their old master died of typhoid too. Mama had followed shortly thereafter. She told him all of this. \"I thought I was going to die and I probably would have, but for some strange reason I was sold to Salis Plantation, sick as I was. Master Richard hired a doctor and I was allowed time to recover.\"\n\n\"That's what Prince said.\"\n\n\"Yes. Prince... is an interestin' person.\" Disparaging words would never pass her lips when it came to Prince. But. She was not unaware of his flaws.\n\nThere was a flash of a grin on Sly's face. \"He surely is.\"\n\n\"He noticed I could read and gave me my book,\" she said, tapping her chest again, where the book lay. In her delusional state, fever high with illness, Prince had stood over her bed, pen and paper in hand and asked her for her name. She had responded with, \"Why is light given to a man whose way is hid and whom God hath hedge in? For my sighin' cometh before I eat, and my roarin's are poured out like waters. For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.\" In her most maudlin state, she was prone to quoting poetry. Something she had inherited from Papa.\n\nPrince had leveled her with a look. \"I asked you for a name.\"\n\n\"Keturah Mary Hollis,\" she had said through dry, cracked lips. \"I was born on January 1, 1832. Why died I not from the womb? Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?\"\n\n\"Idiot woman. If you plan on living much longer you had better stop quoting from the book of Job.\"\n\nShe had cried then. Sobbed really, because at that moment she knew herself to be all alone in the world. \"For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest.\"\n\nHe had brought her the book of Psalms the next day and told her if she got caught with it, he would deny ever seeing it let alone giving it to her. It had given her a new lease on life. She, who had grown up with a cache of books hidden under their slave cabin and a father who could quote Shakespeare from memory had been terrified of spending the rest of her years alone, picking cotton, and living a life of dumbness. When she got better, she sewed a pocket into every single one of her chemises and she carried the book with her everywhere.\n\n\"I've been at Salis ever since.\"\n\n\"Was Leo sold the same day as us?\"\n\n\"You remember him?\"\n\nSly ducked his head. \"I liked Leo. And I may have spied on y'all a time or two.\" He had been nine when she had last seen him and she, a girl of seventeen. It seemed a lifetime ago. She was not surprised that he had liked Leo. Leo had been everything she was not: kind, warm, friendly, full of joy. Now that he mentioned it, she did remember Leo playing often with her brothers.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said with a nod. \"He was sold. Sent to work sugarcane in the deep south. We never married,\" she said, though he had to know that now.\n\nSly cleared his throat. \"I was sold with Laurie and Ham to a family in Tennessee. Wasn't there a day before I was given to a son-in-law who lived in Mississippi. I was sick with typhoid along the way but somehow, God only knows how, I not only lived, I made it down south. I lived there three years before gettin' in a fight with my master's son and runnin' out west. I ran into Jamie's family,\" Sly said, nodding in the quiet boy's direction. \"They took me in.\"\n\nHis words were ready and quick and she could tell he didn't want to say much more. Siblings they might be, but it would take some time before they became each other's confidant.\n\n\"I've got a house in Arrow Creek, Oklahoma. Indian Territory. That's where we're headed.\"\n\n\"Who is Caesar?\" she asked. She had heard of a Caesar, a former slave who led runaways to freedom. She had never in her wildest dreams thought it might be her own brother. But it fit.\n\n\"Men at some time are masters of their fates,\" Sly said slowly, staring at the plate in front of him.\n\n\"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings,\" she said, finishing his quote. It was from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Papa's favorite play.\n\nSly raised his shoulders in a small shrug. \"Learned some things out west and decided to come back and see if I could help a few folks. Anyway,\" he said, looking at her now, brushing away the past. If she recalled correctly, he had never cared for the evenings when Papa had insisted on their presenting memorized passages to one another. She, of course, had loved it. \"I'm glad I found you.\"\n\nKeturah sat with her shoulders straight and her hands clasped in her lap, thinking. She was tired. In a moment or so, she would probably close her eyes and be dead to the world for a few hours. \"You're more like Papa than I thought,\" she said finally, meeting her brother's gaze. Sly winced.\n\nHe and Papa had never quite taken to each other. She remembered that now. Oil and water, Mama had always said with a sigh, usually right after Papa had given Sly a thrashing for saying or doing something Papa hadn't liked. For the most part, very few things had made Papa become fully present in the moment long enough to interact or even discipline his children. But Sly had had a gift for saying or stumbling into exactly one of those things. Sly had probably gotten the most whippings of them all. Papa had lived in the past and wanted all of them to live there too. Keturah hadn't minded it. It was only in the past that she was ever seen by Papa. Laurie and Ham had tolerated it. Sly had hated it. \"You know what I mean.\"\n\nHe nodded slowly. \"I do. I do know what you mean.\" He set his plate aside. \"Those blankets in the corner are clean. Go on and lay down. We've got a long night ahead of us.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Manny spent most of the time on the way to Riverside in quiet, contemplative prayer. It was a new thing for him, being alone. And he was learning to mostly enjoy it. Of course, it helped that he was never truly alone.\n\n\"Lord, I've got to get past this,\" he prayed aloud, no one listening to him but God and his two horses. They may have shared the same womb and spent every single day of their lives together, but he and Sam had not always been as close as they were now. There had been a time where they had kept secrets from each other, roamed the earth alone, and sometimes got into blistering fights. It wasn't until they were sold together to a different plantation, away from their mama, that they had become dependent on each other. Practically inseparable. They had needed each other to survive. But they were no longer in a constant state of survival. Sam seemed to have adjusted to their new situation easily enough. Manny was struggling. Who was he if he was not the brother that kept them on point? There was a part of him that was afraid that without that role to play, he had no real purpose in life. And so he found himself clinging to his brother ever the more tightly.\n\nThese thoughts circled in Manny's head as he caught sight of Riverside. Riverside was a town Manny had been to more than a few times. It was getting so he knew a good deal of people there.\n\n\"Mornin', Sam,\" an older white man called to him as he pulled his wagon up to the general store. The store received all the mail and any packages they ordered. To make sure there would be no issues with their mail, Manny and Sam always paid the owner, Mr. Otis Brewster, extra.\n\n\"Mornin', Mr. McCally,\" Manny said as he pulled his horses to a stop. Everyone's first reaction to seeing him was to always see Sam. It wasn't worth the effort to correct them.\n\n\"Go on around the back, Sam. I'll tell Otis you're here.\" They might be living in Indian Territory, but some things in life did not change, like being ordered around by random white men and having to take care of business in the back. These were not thoughts that Manny had ever really entertained when he was a slave. For one, he had been a slave. For two, he was only now becoming aware of his own value, his own personhood, especially since he had started reading his Bible on a daily basis. It was a dangerous book. Put all kinds of crazy thoughts in a man's head.\n\nManny drove the wagon around to the back of the store and Otis and one of his sons were already there waiting for him.\n\n\"Mornin', Sam.\"\n\n\"Manny,\" Manny corrected as he pulled the wagon to a stop. He hopped down from the wagon, eyeing the stacked boxes that appeared to be theirs. He began to go down his mental list of all he expected to pick up that morning. \"Thanks for holdin' our purchases for us.\"\n\n\"Got your mail, too.\" There was something in Otis's voice that made Manny stop counting his wares. Otis, a large white man who was near about Amos's age was frowning. \"You read some strange stuff.\"\n\nManny noticed the papers in Otis's hands. He supposed it was a good thing Benji and Sam's schooling books came wrapped and covered. He was sure Otis would have something to say if he saw what the two of them were trying to learn. But as for the newspapers, they ordered a lot of different papers for their store. It wouldn't do to run into a hole and hide. Least that's what Amos said. So, they got news from everywhere. And the papers always sold quickly. They were usually a week or so behind on the news, but that didn't matter to folks who still wanted to know what was going on.\n\nOtis slowly handed Manny one bundled, stack of papers and then a second. The second group was thinner and clearly the group he had a problem with. Manny recognized the Kansas Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State. Manny looked down at the papers for a second before meeting Otis's gaze. \"Kansas ain't that far away,\" he said simply.\n\nOtis grunted, looked away. \"Trouble in them parts. I like you, Sam. It's best you stay away from all that nonsense.\" People always wanted to warn Sam away from trouble, Manny thought, swallowing a sigh. Guess it was fine if he got thrown to the wolves. He mentally winced, regretting that thought in an instant. Sorry, Lord, guess I'm not done praying on the matter. \"Don't even read about it,\" Otis ordered, bringing Manny back to the present.\n\nBecause not reading about it would make it go away.\n\n\"I appreciate your advice,\" Manny said because he didn't want to offend the man. But no one, white or Negro, was going to tell him what he could and could not learn anymore.\n\nOtis's eyes narrowed for a second. \"Didn't you say you was, Manny?\"\n\n\"I did.\"\n\nOtis sniffed but said nothing more.\n\n\"I've got some letters that need to go out,\" Manny said and Otis took them slowly, looking to see where they were going cause the old man was nosy as all get out. They didn't have many folks to write to, but Sam had started exchanging letters with some minister at Wilberforce University. They wrote to each other often.\n\nOtis slipped the letters into the pocket of his apron, gave Manny a nod, and went back into the store.\n\nManny tossed the papers onto the bench of the wagon and got to loading the boxes of goods onto the back of his wagon. Otis did not seem to have a problem with the fact that Sam and Manny also ran a store. But it was probably because they ordered a great many goods from him. The day they figured out how to get around Riverside would be the day this fragile relationship crumbled. Maybe. The man did seem to really like Sam.\n\nSometimes Manny lingered a bit when he was in Riverside. He liked to walk down the main road and take in what was new and what wasn't; to compare the town to Arrow Creek and see what they could do to make Arrow Creek better. And there were Negroes who lived and worked in Riverside. It was always nice to sit and catch up if there was time. But that worked best when he had someone else with him to keep an eye on the wagon. So, he didn't stay long and before he knew it, he was headed back home.\n\nLife in Arrow Creek was easy. It was so easy, Manny found himself in a constant state of waiting for the other shoe to drop. When he had mentioned it to Sam, Sam had told him, \"sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.\" Sometimes Manny wasn't sure if he should be in awe of his brother's faith or if he should deck the man.\n\nHe was contemplating this, praying about this, because one of them had to bring it before God, when he heard two shots in the distance. Several miles away, birds fluttered into the sky, breaking the stillness of the afternoon. Manny slowed the wagon down for a second, bringing his horses to a stop and listened. He looked behind him. No one was on the road. He looked before him. Again, the road was empty. Nothing. Probably hunters.\n\nWith a gentle slap of the reins, his horses started down the road again, but Manny pushed his foot back, touching the shotgun that was under his bench and then brought his hand to his revolver, making sure it was there. It wasn't that he was afraid. But Sly was always talking about paying attention to your surroundings out here and that a man could never be too careful. His pride made him not want to ask the boy too many questions, but wisdom made him listen whenever Sly spoke. It had been Sly's idea to keep the shotgun hidden under the wagon bench. Sam had been hesitant, but Manny had insisted.\n\nWhen ten minutes went past and Manny neither heard nor saw anything strange, he returned to his quiet prayers. And it was only because he was so quiet that he heard it. He brought his horses to a stop again. Only silence greeted him. Just when he was about to snap the reins, he heard the sound that had made him stop in the first place. A moan.\n\nHe was not a curious man. Satisfying one's curiosity created more problems than it solved, but he looked around. There appeared to be no one there. He heard the moan again.\n\nHe would just take a peek, he decided, and jumped down from the wagon. \"You stay here,\" he told the horses. Thanks to Gideon they were named, Cain and Abel. His horse was Cain and Sam's was Abel. Sam had not been keen on the names so of course he had argued that there was nothing wrong with them. And now he was annoyed every time he called to the horses so he rarely said their names aloud. \"I'll be back,\" he told them as if they cared and grabbed the shotgun. It was a more accurate gun than the one he had at his waist. Walking quietly, he drifted away from the road and into the knee-deep grass at a slow pace, following the grunts and sounds the person was making. And then he saw him.\n\nIt was a white man, lying on his side, blood pouring out of his stomach. The man did not see Manny, but Manny watched the man try and pull himself along, releasing a loud exhale of pain. Manny could see from the trail of blood behind him that the man had come a fair way. Looking around, Manny checked to see if there was anyone else out there with them, but it appeared that whoever had done the shooting had long since gone. They hadn't killed this man dead, but by the looks of it, he wasn't too far off.\n\nAnd that left Manny with a dilemma. Reveal himself? Or keep on going? The very last thing he wanted in the world was to involve himself in white man's troubles. He had plenty troubles of his own. With that thought, he headed back for his wagon, but didn't get too far. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell among the thieves? The thought was so unlike him that he knew it to be the Lord.\n\n\"You ask too much, Lord,\" Manny whispered aloud. \"I'm not Sam, I'm Manny,\" he told God in case God too got them confused. But Manny felt in his bones that to continue where he was headed was the wrong way to go. It was only slightly less painful to turn back. \"You don't understand, Lord. Why do I have to help these people? They never helped me.\" Nevertheless, he walked over to the man, who both saw and heard him this time.\n\nManny crouched down in front of him, ignoring the intense blue eyes that were peering at him. The man's wounds were worse than Manny had thought. He was not hours from death. He was minutes. He's dead, Lord. What is the point? He at least had the good grace to pray his prayer silently.\n\n\"Papers,\" the man said, breathing heavy. \"Tied to my leg.\"\n\nManny looked at him. Noticed that the fella was young, only a bit older than Manny himself and dressed like Sly often dressed with buckskin and tan clothing. He had a gun belt on his waist.\n\n\"Not fast enough,\" he said, catching Manny's gaze. His words were breathy, wheezing out. The man's fingers twitched and Manny noticed that he was pointing to his leg.\n\nManny reached for the man's pants and pulled them up. Tied to his calf were a bunch of papers. A wet, bloody hand clamped around Manny's wrist and he almost jerked the man off. \"Deliver. Rhett. Promise? No one else.\"\n\nHe may have been dying, but his eyes were clear and intense. And Manny had no desire to make a single promise about anything to anyone. More blood spilled out from the man's insides and Manny fought the urge to pull back. It was disturbing. This was disturbing. And he couldn't stop the prayer that formed in his mind. Lord, help this man.\n\n\"I'll see what I can do,\" Manny said surprised by the calmness of his voice. He had seen white men string up slaves, killing them for small infractions. He had seen white men whip his own brother, more times than he wanted to count. He had seen white men touch and stare at his mama in ways that had stirred up a hatred so fierce inside him that he wasn't sure at times that even God could completely erase the emotion. And yet, here he was, more shaken than he would have thought he would be at seeing a white man die.\n\n\"No. Promise,\" the dying man said stubbornly.\n\n\"You don't know me from Adam, my word may be worth nothin'.\"\n\n\"Came back,\" the man said with a sigh and Manny realized that he had known he was there moments before. \"Promise.\" This time the sigh was deeper and before Manny could promise anything, the man's grip on Manny's wrist slackened and the man fell onto his back. Dead.\n\nManny didn't know how long he sat out there, staring at nothing, thinking. \"Lord, what on earth have you gotten me into? Friends don't do things like this to each other,\" Manny muttered as he pulled a jackknife out his pocket and sliced the string that tied the papers to the dead man's leg. Manny caught the documents and slid them into the top of his pants.\n\nWith a sigh, he stood up and went back to the wagon. Thank the Lord, they had just ordered shovels." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Keturah woke up disoriented.\n\n\"Hey,\" the voice was soft and somewhat familiar. She felt a hand on her shoulder. \"It's time to go, Tura.\"\n\nKeturah pushed herself up, slowly remembering where she was and all that had taken place in the last day or so.\n\n\"I've got you some clothes. Pants and a shirt and a hat. And some shoes. We'll get you some dresses when we make it to Oklahoma. For now, it's best you travel as a man.\" She nodded as she sat up, reaching for the clothes in her brother's hands. \"Knox and I will be downstairs. You come on down when you're ready.\"\n\nThey travelled by horseback for several days, staying at different folks' houses during the daytime. Sometimes they stayed in attics, sometimes in cellars or barns. And yet, despite the many hours she spent in her brother's company, he never said much. And neither did Jamie Knox. She hadn't pushed it because staying up all night and sleeping in the day had her more than a little muddled. But after the fourth day of traveling, she wasn't as tired when they reached the barn of a friend of Sly's.\n\n\"Knox, handle the horses. I'll be back. Stay with him, Tura.\"\n\nKeturah waited for the barn doors to slam shut before she spoke to Knox. \"You always let him order you around like that?\"\n\nKnox, who had just lifted the saddle from his horse, flicked his dark gaze to her before raising his eyebrows. Having spent so much time in his company, she could see that the boy before her would probably grow into quite the handsome man. He was also very quiet, did whatever Sly ordered, and seemed to have a great fondness for horses. \"No,\" he finally said.\n\n\"Do you need help?\" she asked as she watched him brush down his horse. \"I can brush the other one.\"\n\n\"You can't hardly reach Octavius and he's a mustang.\"\n\n\"Octavius?\" she asked as she reached out and touched her brother's horse. The horse swung its face around to look at her and she took a startled step back. She may have been riding the thing for the past few days but that didn't mean she was entirely comfortable with it.\n\n\"I never know where Sly finds these names. His dog is Casca,\" Knox said from behind her.\n\nKeturah recognized the names. \"He has a dog?\"\n\n\"And a house and some land.\" These were more words coming out of Knox's mouth than she had heard since she met him.\n\n\"I think I know why Sly helps slaves runaway.\"\n\n\"Oh, you do, do you?\" Knox asked, his voice low.\n\nShe turned to look at him, but he wasn't looking at her. He was focused on getting his own horse nice and comfortable for their stay.\n\n\"I thought I did,\" she said slowly. \"But you could tell me why if you want.\"\n\nKnox scoffed. \"Move out the way,\" he said and gently pushed her back. She watched as he began to brush down Octavius.\n\n\"Why do you help slaves?\"\n\nHe didn't answer right away, but she was willing to wait. \"I have no love for slavers,\" he said, eventually. \"And while slavery has touched my life some, I'm not out here cause I've got some burnin' need to help folks. I'm here because of Sly. I owe him a favor.\"\n\n\"You two have been doin' this for years.\" That is, if the stories about Caesar were to be believed.\n\n\"It's a very big favor.\"\n\nKeturah thought on that for a second. \"Are you sayin' you're not friends?\"\n\nKnox glanced over at her for a second before grabbing some feed for Octavius. \"What is friendship really?\"\n\n\"Now,\" Sly said from behind her. She almost jumped out of her skin as she turned around. \"If you have Knox gettin' all philosophical, then he must like you indeed.\"\n\n\"I didn't even hear you,\" Keturah said, looking up at her younger brother.\n\nHe raised one eyebrow before tapping a finger on her nose. \"You weren't supposed to. Stop grillin' my friend. It's been some years, but it's all comin' back to me now.\"\n\n\"What's all comin' back to you?\"\n\n\"You never could leave well enough alone.\"\n\n\"Me bein' curious about you and Knox is not me bein' nosy,\" Keturah said, frowning at him.\n\n\"Sure,\" Sly said, a wide grin on his face. \"Loft's clean. Go on and get some sleep.\"\n\n\"You always say that when you don't want to talk anymore.\"\n\n\"Well now,\" Sly said, reaching out and touching Octavius. \"Then you best go on.\"\n\nKeturah stared at him for a second. Was he really not going to say anymore? After a few minutes, she realized that he wasn't. With a sigh, she climbed the ladder and went up to the loft.\n\nSeveral days later Keturah learned they were at the edge of Kentucky.\n\n\"Can you smell it?\" Sly asked no one in particular as he inhaled deeply. Keturah, riding double with Sly, tried to look around him, to see what it was he was smelling.\n\n\"We crossin' with Tanner?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Crazy fool.\"\n\n\"Smart fool.\"\n\n\"I don't think those two words go together.\"\n\nSly and Knox rarely spoke to each other and so when they did, she didn't interrupt. She wanted to learn as much about the two of them as she could. And yet, she knew well enough to know they never spoke aloud unless they didn't mind her hearing. She didn't quite know how to feel about that. She stifled a yawn, holding her hand over her mouth. They had been riding all night and from the way the stars seemed to be winking out above, the sun was on its way up.\n\nShe felt Sly's hand pat hers. \"It's 'bout to be a long day, sister. Once we cross the Mississippi, ain't no reason to be sleepin' in the day. Got to get yourself acclimated to the ways of the world again.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"We'll rest a bit but we gonna keep on goin'. Home ain't too far away.\"\n\n\"Knox said you have your own house and your own land?\"\n\n\"Got a house in Arrow Creek and a few acres out past it.\"\n\n\"How?\" The question had been nibbling at the back of her mind since she first heard of it.\n\n\"Can do just about anythin' with a strawman, Tura. But make no mistake, the land and the house are mine. We're goin' to cross the Mississippi, take Knox to his people, get Casca, and go home. Then you can ask me all those questions that're spinnin' around in your mind and I can think on whether or not I want to answer.\"\n\nIt happened just as he said. They loaded Octavius and Knox's horse, which she learned was called Fifer, onto a flat piece of wood and a man named Tanner ferried them all across the Mississippi.\n\nThe earth is the Lord's and everything in it. She had always known her world was small. But it was one thing to know that and another thing to see it. How great is your goodness which you have stored up for those who fear you. She could never have imagined in a million years that one day she would be crossing the Mississippi. She didn't know what freedom looked like, but she was getting more and more excited about it. That was for sure. Praise to the Lord, for he showed his wonderful love to me. All through the rest of the day, different lines from different Psalms floated through her mind making her eager about her unknown future.\n\nThey rode several days to Knox's family's home. She thought they might stay and visit with his family, but they didn't. She got glimpses of several children waving from the doorway, but they didn't approach. Sly stayed long enough to collect his dog, a large animal of indiscriminate breeding, and then they were headed to his home.\n\nThey reached his house just as the moon reached high into the sky. She could tell even in the dim light that it was a simple, plain log cabin. And it wasn't a whole lot bigger than a slave cabin. It was flat on the ground so there was no raised porch, though wood extended several feet out allowing for a chair or two if you wanted to take in some air or if you wanted to scrape the mud off your feet before you went inside.\n\n\"Go on in. Matches are on the bookcase. I'll put Octavius up and feed Casca.\"\n\nHaving spent too many days on a horse, she no longer needed help climbing down. She swung her leg over and jumped. Behind her, her brother rode off and she made her way to the house. Did he just leave the house like this and come back to no critters being inside? She pushed open the door and stood in the doorway, taking in Sly's house. In the darkness, she could see that there was a table and two chairs, a stove, a fireplace, a small bookcase, and a couch. There wasn't much else, but she could tell it was slightly bigger than she had thought. She walked over to the bookcase, running her hands across the top until she found the box of matches. She looked around for a lantern and found one on a small table next to the stove. She lit the candle inside and had a better look at the house. It was fairly plain on the inside... if not for the bookcase, there would be no evidence that anyone lived there. Carrying the lantern, she walked down a short hallway and pushed open the door on her right. There was a bedroom with a made-up bed and a chifferobe. She left the room and went to the door on her left. Another bedroom. It matched the one on the right. And that was it. That was the whole house.\n\nThe front door opened. Sly entered carrying a stack of wood. \"You could have lit another lantern. I'm not short on candles.\"\n\n\"I love it,\" Keturah said softly, raising the lantern so she could see the ceiling. \"Your house.\"\n\nHe was crouched down in front of the fireplace, lighting a fire. \"Our house,\" he said. She couldn't stop the smile from blossoming across her face. Sly turned and for a second he stared at her before returning to the fire. \"What?\"\n\n\"I do believe that's the first time you've smiled.\"\n\n\"I want to make curtains, for the windows,\" she said, waving her hands in their direction. \"And a rug for the floor.\"\n\n\"Figure in the mornin', I'll get my chickens and my cow from my neighbors. They keep an eye on the place. I sent word I was comin' back so I know the sheets are clean. Told them I was bringin' my sister who ain't have nothin'. If I know Mrs. Lacey, she's got you some clean clothes in the drawers. Your room is on the left by the way.\"\n\nKeturah touched her chest, where her book of Psalms sat and blinked back tears. \"Can I wash up?\"\n\n\"Got a pump and outhouse out back. I'll show you. And a cellar. I'll fix somethin' cause I'm hungry and you get cleaned up. Sound good?\"\n\n\"Sounds perfect.\"\n\nKeturah woke the next morning so happy she could have screamed. Instead, she hugged her pillow and prayed. I waited patiently for the Lord, he turned to me and heard my cry. She didn't linger in the bed though she bounced once, loving the sound of the spring beneath her. She had never slept in a real bed a day in her life. It wasn't exactly comfortable yet, but she would get used to it.\n\nThere was a knock on her door. Her door! She had her own room. Her own space. She heard the sound of a pail of water hit the ground. \"Tura?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"There's a lady in town, Mrs. Day, she's a seamstress. I was thinkin' if you want, we can go and see her so you can have some clothes that fit.\"\n\nThe clothes Mrs. Lacy had left Keturah were for a woman at least six or seven inches longer than Keturah. She was practically drowning in her nightgown. She couldn't imagine wearing the dress that was hanging in the closet. \"Yes, I'd like that.\" She could wear the dress she had had on when she left Salis. It was tucked somewhere in one of Sly's bags. But even if it did fit better, she never wanted to see that thing again unless it was cut up into pieces to be used as a rag.\n\nGrabbing the pail Sly had placed on the other side of her door, she washed up, dressed, and left the room. Sly wasn't in the house\u2014she could see him walking around outside through the window\u2014but there was a pail of milk and some eggs and bacon on the table. She got the message loud and clear. But she didn't care. Because her brother had come and got her and given her a house of her own. Of their own.\n\nShe whipped breakfast up quick before Sly came stomping into the house. His shirt sleeves were rolled up revealing slightly wet arms. \"You should take your shoes off so you don't track mud and dirt.\"\n\n\"I think I'll just wait until you clean the floor first,\" her brother said, coming over to cabinets near her and grabbing some plates. He smelled like soap... which was nice compared to what he had been smelling like for the past few days.\n\n\"We're safe here, though?\"\n\n\"Plenty safe. From slavery at least,\" he said as he sat down. \"Folks'll be folks, though. Figure I'll teach you how to shoot and whatnot. I'll introduce you to the neighbors and show you how things are done.\"\n\n\"You sound like you're leavin',\" Keturah said as she set a plate of food on the table. She could feel her heart racing and she wasn't sure why. Sly looked up at her for a second before looking away. Her heart sank.\n\n\"That's cause I am.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Day's Mercantile was one of the few two-story buildings in Arrow Creek. They used the first floor for the store and the second floor for nothing. It was a lot of work to stow their wares above them. They didn't order that much in bulk and they had gotten the hang of ordering the things that people needed so that stock rarely just sat on the shelves. For now, the second floor was a wide and empty space that only held a small bed that Manny sometimes used for an afternoon nap when it was Sam's turn to work behind the counter. Sam and Manny went back and forth about what to do with it, but with no real seriousness. There had been no question when Sam's house had been built as to where Manny would live. There was a large part of Manny that was pleased that his twin assumed they would stay together forever. But they had this extra space. Manny found himself thinking about it more and more often. He didn't want land. Those days of working under the hot sun were long past for him.\n\nManny brought the wagon around to the back of the store and saw that Sam already had the door open ready for him.\n\n\"You didn't take anybody with you,\" Sam said, accusation in his voice as Manny pulled the wagon to a stop. His brother was leaning against the doorway, hands folded across his chest, wearing a white apron to keep dirt and things from his clothes.\n\n\"What are you talkin' about? The Lord was with me, wasn't He?\" He said the words flippantly, as he always did when he talked about God with his brother.\n\n\"Manny, that's not funny,\" Sam muttered as he slowly made his way to the wagon. \"What if you got hurt? Who would know? How could they go get help?\"\n\nManny said nothing and just let Sam fuss. It wasn't often his brother rambled and apparently, he had a lot to get off his chest. Sam grabbed a big box, still talking, and went inside the store.\n\nManny looked to the back of the wagon where he had stored the dead man's papers and clothes and things and then eyed the store. There used to be a time that there wouldn't have even been a question, he would have told Sam everything right away, but things were different now. And Manny wasn't necessarily thinking about Laura. At least not in that way. His brother was settled, married, and a pa now. He had a home and a profession\u2014more than one really. Sam didn't need the headache of dealing with a dead white man and his promises. And if this came back to haunt them in some way, it was better that only Manny deal with the fallout. There was canvas on the floor of the wagon and Manny tossed it over the dead man's things. He would think on what to do about that later. For now, he had a store to run.\n\nTogether, Manny and Sam unloaded the wagon though Manny was careful to gather the dead man's things and hide them in a corner of their storage room before Sam saw them.\n\n\"You go on home,\" Manny told Sam as he pulled out some paper and a pencil. \"I'll check and make sure we received everythin' we ordered.\"\n\n\"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"You have to get ready for tomorrow, don't you?\" Tomorrow was Sunday. And as of right now, the only preacher in Arrow Creek was Sam. \"Unless it was a slow day?\" On slow days, Sam usually pulled his Bible out on the counter and studied for his sermon. But Manny doubted it was a slow day, Saturdays were their busiest days of the week.\n\nSam shook his head. \"Not a slow day at all. Several families passin' through. White and Negro. Think we might make a tidy profit this month.\" There were some months when they only barely broke even. But, they had not only started figuring out what to buy and what not to buy but who to extend credit to and who to demand pay from right away.\n\n\"That's good. Go study. I'll close up here.\"\n\n\"If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were tryin' to get rid of me.\" The words were said lightly, but Manny heard some truth in them. Sam was not oblivious to the tension between them.\n\nManny turned, met his brother's eyes. \"Never, Sam. Never. You're the only brother I've got.\" No matter his own personal issues, there was nothing that could ever happen, nothing that could ever be said that would allow Manny to walk away from Sam.\n\n\"Listen, Manny\u2014,\"\n\nSensing that the conversation was about to get more serious than Manny wanted it to go, he interrupted.\n\n\"Otis didn't like you orderin' them papers from Kansas.\"\n\n\"Otis can eat my hat,\" Sam said, making a face.\n\nManny smiled. Everyone always thought he was the rebellious brother. Sam just hid it better. \"We'll talk more after supper. Go home. You've got another job to do and I don't.\"\n\nSam's sigh was loud, but Manny knew he had won. \"Be home in time for supper.\"\n\n\"Course.\"\n\n\"I mean it, Manny. I'll send Gideon to come get you if you're too long.\"\n\nManny waved a hand behind him. \"I said I'll be there.\" A bell tinkled a few feet away. \"Let me go deal with the customer. Take the wagon with you.\"\n\nManny didn't wait for a response as he walked out of the storage room and to the store counter\n\n\"There you are, Reverend Day,\" Mrs. Miller said, her words gushing. Mrs. Miller and her husband ran the laundry just a few doors down. Really, the truth of the matter was that Mrs. Miller and two of her daughters ran the laundry while Mr. Miller could usually be found playing board games outside of anyone's store except his own. Mr. and Mrs. Miller had run away from their slave owner years and years ago, coming out west to live. From what Manny understood, their family had moved all around the area, Arkansas, Kansas, different parts of Indian Territory, before finally setting here in Arrow Creek. They had good business cause quite a few folks passed through and upon seeing the laundry would pay for their clothes to be washed. There were also quite a few men with no womenfolk who were regular customers.\n\n\"Are you sure I'm Reverend Day?\" Manny asked Mrs. Miller as the hefty woman came to the counter.\n\n\"Of course I'm sure,\" the woman snapped and then eyed Manny suspiciously. With a huff, she looked away. \"You're Manny. Reverend Day never plays the games you play.\"\n\n\"What games?\" Manny teased.\n\nMrs. Miller rolled her eyes, but he could see by the twitch of her lips that she was amused. \"I need sugar,\" she finally said. \"And flour and salt and...\"\n\nManny fetched Mrs. Miller's items, put them on her credit, and then carried everything out to her wagon.\n\nWhen he got back to the store it was filled with the Lacey sisters. The oldest was Viola Lacey, then Esther Lacey, Caroline Lacey, and Fanny Lacey. They were not as pretty as they thought they were. But what they lacked in beauty they made up for in confidence.\n\n\"Afternoon, Mr. Day,\" Viola said, a sway to her movements. If they had been back on a plantation where his only possible form of amusement was different flirtations, he may have been taken in by that sway. As it was, there were other things he could do with his time and he fully believed that even if he hadn't dedicated his life to the Lord, he still would rather read a book than be bothered by Viola Lacey.\n\n\"Where were you today, Manny?\" Viola asked, leaning against the counter so that he could have full view of her assets should he so desire. She was a good girl. But young single men were fairly limited out here. She, and her sisters, had set their sights on him and he had been very careful to keep out of their crosshairs. It wasn't just that they weren't particularly good looking. It was that Manny liked a good chase. The harder, the better.\n\nThe Lacey sisters lived with their parents, Bristo and Susan Lacey, and their two younger brothers, Reuben and Junious Lacey. Bristo ran the livery stable and was a hard worker and good friend to Amos. The family had been here awhile, one of the first settlers at Arrow Creek. Sam had told Manny that Bristo and Susan had been slaves at one time, but that they had been able to buy their freedom. Even still, life hadn't been so good as free Negroes in slave states and somehow Sly Hollis had run into them and convinced them that living out west would be better for their family. Bristo always said it was one of the best decisions he had ever made. But. Most likely Viola and her sisters had never been slaves\u2014and that was good thing. But he had been a slave and for all intents and purposes, still was. He may have only had a few more years than them but in so many ways he felt decades older. He couldn't imagine spending life with a woman who didn't understand where he had come from. And what did that say about him that he wanted a woman who was probably as damaged as he was?\n\n\"Mama gave me a list,\" Viola said, placing a small sheet of paper in front of him. \"Her writin' is a bit bad, I might need your help readin' it.\"\n\nManny picked up the small sheet of paper. It could be his thinking was wrong. Hadn't he just been asking God if he should be getting married? And here were four options standing right here in front of him. He glanced at all of them one more time, his heart sinking. Not these ones, Lord.\n\n\"Now Viola, you know your mama got a good hand. Just cause you cain't read\u2014,\"\n\n\"I can read!\" Viola said, reaching for the paper that Manny now held higher than she could reach.\n\n\"Now Miss Viola, God don't like lyin' especially to a man what looks just like the reverend himself.\"\n\nOne of the girls laughed, Esther. \"How do you figure that? And where were you earlier today?\" The question asked again. She was shorter than her sister, but not by much. She had a nice figure, but she favored Bristo just a tad too much. \"We came by lookin' for you.\"\n\n\"Sam wasn't here?\" Manny asked, stepping away from the counter. Some of the things Mrs. Lacey needed were right there at his fingertips. A bag of flour, a bag of sugar...\n\n\"Yes, but it's not the same with Reverend Sam,\" Caroline said. Caroline and Fanny were just too young for him. In fact, he was pretty sure Fanny was the same age as Sol.\n\n\"You give me back my list, Manny Day!\" Viola pouted, though there was a tiny smile that tugged on her lips.\n\nHe handed it back to her. \"Go on, then, Viola, get the rest of the stuff on that list. Be careful you don't hurt your eyes now.\" She made sure to roll them at him.\n\n\"And for the record, I was up in Riverside.\"\n\n\"We like Reverend Sam,\" Fanny said, piping up, a grin on her face. \"But he ain't you.\"\n\n\"Kinda ugly, isn't he?\"\n\nFanny giggled. \"He's not! He's kind and sweet\u2014,\"\n\n\"Not as sweet as me?\"\n\n\"You ain't sweet, Manny Day. Your like drinkin' a spoonful of vinegar,\" Esther said, flirting with him.\n\nThis was going on far, far longer than he wanted it to. \"I sure am and y'all better hurry for I go tell Bristo y'all tryin' to hunt me down.\" They squealed, fussed at him, but left the store shortly thereafter.\n\nNot many more folks came by the store for the rest of the evening and Manny was able to sort out their goods before locking up everything and heading home for supper.\n\n\"You'll never believe who came by today while y'all were out,\" Laura said as she set a plate of piping hot mashed potatoes on the long, kitchen table. Everyone else was gathered around it, ready to eat. Manny had stolen Jessamy from his brother and was rocking the boy gently in his arms.\n\n\"Who?\" Amos asked, reaching for the platter of food that was closest to him. He had already blessed the meal.\n\n\"Sly.\"\n\n\"Oh, yay!\" Gid said happily, his hands raised. \"Sly's back in town.\" Gid danced a bit in his seat, waving his empty fork around.\n\nSly. If anyone knew what to do about that dead man it was that kid, Manny thought, as he fixed the blanket that was wrapped around Jess. Sly hadn't been expected back for at least another few months. This was perfect, maybe God wanted Sly to handle this.\n\n\"And you'll never guess who he brought with him when he came by,\" Laura said, taking her seat.\n\n\"What did he come by for?\" Sam asked, watching Laura, still totally captivated by his wife. Manny, on the other hand, was tired of all this guessing and wished she would just come on with it. But he knew better than to say anything. Sam was mostly gentle as a lamb, but he turned into quite the lion if he thought Manny was being mean to Laura. Which was ridiculous. Laura had four brothers, she could handle herself and she never took Manny's comments seriously. But still, Manny only snipped at Laura when he knew Sam was not around. For the record, she snipped right back.\n\n\"Well, that's just it. He brought his sister by and asked if I could make her some clothes.\"\n\n\"His sister!\" Benji exclaimed, eyebrows raised. He wasn't too keen on the Lacey girls either. They weren't the only single girls in Arrow Creek, but they were the only single girls of age that lived in town. All the rest were working hard on their family farms. Made courting a bit difficult.\n\n\"I didn't know Sly had a sister.\" Trust Gid to say what everyone else was thinking.\n\n\"Well, he does. And her name is Keturah. And you'll never guess how he found her!\"\n\n\"How 'bout you just tell us then?\" Benji said, sending Laura a pointed a look. Well, thank God, he wasn't the only person getting annoyed. Laura wrinkled her nose in Benji's direction. Manny glanced over at Sam. Sam didn't mind when her own family teased her but let him say something...\n\n\"Was she lost?\" Gid asked, confused.\n\n\"They were separated, sold apart. She said her brother was helpin' another slave runaway and that slave knew her. Isn't that somethin'?\"\n\n\"Well, how old is she?\" Benji asked. Manny caught Sol's eyes and shook his head.\n\nSol grinned.\n\n\"She may be older than me,\" Laura said slowly.\n\nBenji's shoulder sank a bit and this time Manny couldn't hide his amusement. \"Boy, you 'bout as subtle as the snake in the Garden of Eden.\" Manny wasn't the least bit interested in a sister of Sly Hollis. She was probably just as tall, rail thin, and if she was anything like her brother, irritating. For a second, he pictured Sly as a woman and shuddered. Maybe he needed to be more specific with God about the kind of woman he wanted to marry.\n\n\"Is she nice? Is she like Sly?\" Gid asked, cutting his food into small pieces.\n\n\"She seemed nice,\" Laura said, thinking. \"But a bit wary.\" And weren't they all when they first got to Arrow Creek?\n\n\"He's truly blessed he found her,\" Sam said, his voice low. Manny didn't have to look at his brother to know he was thinking about their mama. It had been twelve or thirteen years since they had last seen her and they didn't know if she had been sold east, west, or south. It made him sick sometimes to think of it. And... he had never told Sam but he had long since forgotten what she looked like. Jess turned in his arms and his small movements brought Manny back to the present. It never did anyone good to visit the past.\n\n\"I know. And he knows it too. He was fairly beamin' with pride when he introduced the two of us.\"\n\nManny tuned out the rest of the conversation as he ate dinner one-handed on account of his nephew and plotted out how to catch Sly alone after church." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "\"I know what you need to preach on this mornin',\" Manny told Sam as they walked together to the church. It was a relatively small building, the church. And a complete labor of love. The seven of them had lived in small shacks for months when they first arrived in Arrow Creek because Sam had been insistent that they build the Lord's house first. To say he had ribbed his brother every day on that one would be the understatement of the century. They had both been at their whit's end upon its completion. Manny felt bad about it now, but they had never been the type to apologize to each other. He hoped that in helping his brother every Sunday, Sam knew how sorry he was for some of his thoughtless words.\n\nLike most churches, it was a white building with a steeple. It had solid wood floors, glass windows, and finely crafted pews. At first, Sam would sneak over to the church to clean it every Sunday morning, but now they had enough parishioners that families took turns on Saturdays. Still, Sam and Manny always got to church on Sunday morning before everyone else to make sure it was in top shape. Sam did it to honor God and while Manny fully believed in honoring God, he did it cause the building meant so much to Sam.\n\nManny and Sam climbed the steps of the church, the first people to enter the small building that morning. \"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"Hear me out. You never preach on the good stuff,\" Manny said, elbowing his brother. \"The murder, the incest, the\u2014,\"\n\nSam elbowed him back, but there was a grin on his face. \"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"You know, the juicy bits of the Bible. You be puttin' me to sleep, brother.\" That wasn't true and Sam knew it.\n\n\"Yeah, yeah,\" Sam said and walked past Manny to get the broom out of the closet to wipe at nonexistent dust. The Wilder family had come in yesterday to clean the place and it looked it.\n\nAn hour or so later, the church was filled and the singing was going forth. They had no piano or any of the like. Just the sound of their own voices. Sam had asked Mrs. Miller, a singer in her own right, to put together three or four hymns every Sunday for them to sing and they were on the second song now. Manny stood in the very back of the church like he always did. He never missed a sermon his brother delivered but he wasn't about to sit in the front row and stare at him neither.\n\n\"Hold on! Keep your hand on that plow and hold on!\" It amazed Manny, that the room was filled with dozens of Negroes from places all over and they almost all of them knew the same songs. \"If you wanna get to Heaven, let me tell you how, just keep your hand on the Gospel plow.\"\n\nIt was such a slave song. A song he had sang many a times when he was out in the field working tobacco plants. He hadn't much liked the words back then, hadn't had much faith in them. But now... when he thought about how if God hadn't given him a brother with such strong faith, he would at this moment be out in the fields working sunup to sundown with no future ahead of him...\n\n\"You alright?\" the man next to him asked him quietly. He realized he hadn't been swaying with the rhythm of the music for the past five minutes and his grip on his Bible was tight.\n\n\"I need a minute,\" he said quickly and then walked out the door. He walked around to the back the church, crouched down, and cried." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "There was a gentle tapping on her bedroom door. \"Sister? You ready for church, yet?\"\n\nSly called her everything on God's earth except Keturah. But that ran with her memories of him. He couldn't say her full name as a young'un and she had always been either Tura or sister. It helped, of course, that she was his only sister.\n\n\"I'll be just one minute more,\" she called out and pushed another pin into the bun she had crafted atop her head. She wished for a mirror so she could see if it was straight. For now, she just relied on the touch of her hands. She also wished she could see herself fully dressed. Mrs. Day, the seamstress Sly had taken her to the day before, had helped her out more than she could wish. Mrs. Day had already had a number of readymade underthings and for the first time in her life she had her own clothes... and they were new. She had chemises, gloves, stockings, drawers, crinoline, and petticoats. Mrs. Day was only able to get two garments fit to her size\u2014which was more than she could have hoped in such a short time. Keturah now had on a blue dress that had beautiful lace in the front and a pattern of navy blue birds. She found she couldn't stop running her fingers across it. The sleeves of the dress were long despite the summer heat. Unfortunately, Mrs. Day had said dryly, women must be fully covered unless they were goin' to a ball. But the sleeves were loose and so it wasn't so bad. She even slipped on matching dark gloves, just because she could.\n\nShe had been up for hours making sure she had everything on just right. Mrs. Day had shown her how all the trimmings worked and told her that while it may take some time at first, eventually she would be able to dress without giving it another thought. Keturah didn't care. She wasn't the least bit frustrated. For the first time in her life, she felt like a lady. Not a slave. But a lady, a woman in her own right. She wished her parents could see her now, especially Papa.\n\nStanding on her tiptoes, she reached up and grabbed her bonnet off the top of her chifferobe and left her room. Sly was in the front of the house, talking to Casca and dressed in a nice black suit. He had admitted that he had hired Mrs. Day to make it. She was the absolute best in these parts, he had told her. More than one white family in Riverside made the trek to Arrow Creek for a dress made by Laura Day.\n\nSly looked up and smiled wide. \"You look right fine, sister.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Sylvester. You look very handsome yourself.\"\n\nHe gave her a shrug and reached for his Bible. \"You ready to try out that saddle again?\"\n\nSly had bought her a lady's saddle\u2014which was very different than the one she had gotten used to on their trip out here\u2014and her own horse yesterday while she was at Mrs. Day's house. She could hardly believe it. Her brother wasn't hardly a man yet and tossing money around like he was rich as Croesus.\n\n\"I don't have much to spend my earnin's on, that's all,\" he had said when she stared at the horse he had bought.\n\n\"I don't know how to ride by myself.\" They had ridden double the whole way there.\n\n\"I aim to teach you before I leave. What do you want to name her?\"\n\n\"You live in town. What do I need a horse for?\"\n\n\"No sense in allowin' yourself to be leg shackled to Arrow Creek. What if you have a hankerin' for some fresh air? I was thinkin' you could name the horse, Portia.\" Another name from Julius Caesar.\n\n\"After a woman who killed herself for no good reason? No, thanks. Titania.\"\n\nSly had shaken his head. \"She don't rightly look like a Titania, but I'm not goin' to argue with you.\"\n\nTitania was rather small. And not nearly as flashy as Octavius. Her thoughts must have shown on her face because Sly said, \"You don't know how to ride all that well, you've got to learn with Titania. And I have to teach you how to take care of her.\"\n\nIt had been a whole ordeal. They had spent hours and hours until Keturah had had quite enough with horses. She had been tempted to tell Sly that some trusted in chariots and others in horses, but she remembered the name of the Lord. Nevertheless, Keturah now knew how to take care of a horse and she could stay on the saddle even if she hated it. Sly was convinced that the more she did it, the easier it would become. He probably wasn't wrong, but when he left, she was fairly certain that she would just let Titania out to pasture and walk wherever she needed to go.\n\n\"I can't ride sidesaddle in this dress,\" she said, sending Sly a warning look. She knew Sly well enough now that he wouldn't let something like the proper dress get in the way of his riding a horse. But he just smiled.\n\n\"C'mon. We can just walk,\" he said and held out his elbow. She slipped her arm through his and together they made their way to the church, pausing only to allow Sly to point out different stores and different ones' homes. \"You'll know most all of these folks before you know it.\"\n\nShe squeezed his arm in response. She knew he was trying to comfort her, but she would much prefer that he stayed. She found her hand straying to her familiar book of Psalms... which was still tucked in her chemise. She felt naked without the weight of the book against her chest. My soul wait thou only upon God, for my expectation is from Him.\n\nShe needed to keep her focus on the Lord, then she wouldn't be disappointed. The church itself was simple and plain and yet somehow lovely. \"Are you sure only Negroes attend?\"\n\n\"Yep,\" Sly said, leaning down. \"White folks stay to the north and east of us. You've got the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole scattered all around.\"\n\n\"Which tribe is Jamie from?\"\n\n\"Knox is Creek. Least his mama is.\"\n\n\"His daddy is Negro?\"\n\n\"Yes. Aaron came over with the Trail of Tears. His daddy was owned by the Creek and bought his freedom. Then he married Lila. They have a whole passel of young'uns. Knox is one of ten.\"\n\n\"Indians have a lot of slaves?\"\n\n\"They have a fair share. Some of 'em let their slaves come to services.\"\n\n\"Does it bother you?\"\n\n\"Course it does. It's a bit different, bein' owned by an Indian than a white man, but a slave is a slave is a slave.\" He sighed. \"But at least they're not too keen on the Fugitive Slave Act. They not hardly 'bout to turn you in. There's always a bad seed, but you know what I mean. And the Creek consider you to be Creek if your mama was Creek. It's complicated, sister. That's for sure.\"\n\n\"You ever help slaves here escape?\"\n\nSly sent her a look. \"I decided a long time ago I cain't do everythin' and I cain't help everybody.\"\n\nKeturah squeezed his arm in understanding. \"And you live here.\"\n\n\"And I live here. It'd be a bit of a problem. But I try and help where I can.\"\n\nShe knew enough about Sly to know that was true.\n\n\"Anyway, after service, I'm gonna teach you how to shoot a gun.\" Keturah swallowed a sigh. It wasn't that she didn't want to learn. It was just another reminder that she had to take care of herself. \"It's plenty safe here in Arrow Creek, and I've asked the Laceys to look after you. But still, you should always be prepared.\"\n\nAs they approached the church, Keturah watched as several families, laughing and talking, walked up the steps, entering the building. Some of them were dressed like her, in a simple version of the latest fashion. Some were dressed in clothing far more worn. All seemed happy to be there. \"This here our church?\" she asked, even though she knew the answer to the question. But still...\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Sly said, almost preening. \"It's a Negro town, Tura. Everythin' you see around here is owned by us.\" He patted her arm which was still tucked through his. \"See, it ain't gonna be so bad, me leavin'.\" She wasn't so sure about that, but it did change things a bit. Sly had told her the town was run by Negroes, but it was one thing to hear that and another to see it.\n\nSly escorted her into the church just as the first song was starting. It took a minute for Keturah to join in with the singing. Everything about the church was just so nice. It didn't have the stained-glass windows that she had seen in white churches, but it had windows, clear and bright. The floor was a beautiful wood, clean and smooth. The pews looked new and shiny. Now, if only the reverend could preach. Although even he couldn't, she would find herself right here every Sunday morning.\n\n\"Mornin', Sly.\" Someone whispered as they entered a pew.\n\n\"You back, Sly?\"\n\n\"Sly, who is that with you?\"\n\n\"My sister,\" Sly whispered back, a wide grin on his face.\n\nThe people in front of them, the ones who had been questioning Sly, were a young couple about the same age as Keturah. Keturah noticed that the wife was belly full, due any time. The woman sent Keturah a small smile and a wave. Keturah returned the gesture. Sly elbowed her in excitement as though to indicate that she was now making friends to spend time with in his absence. She kept her gaze forward so he couldn't see her roll her eyes.\n\nThey sang several songs and then an older man got up and made a few announcements: someone had recently moved to town, someone was ailing, there'd be a potluck soon, so on and so forth. The offering plate was passed around and Keturah wished she had a coin to put in it. Sly had told her he would be leaving her some money in case of emergency and that he had good credit with most every store in town, but Keturah had spent her whole life working and never earned a cent for it. She wanted her own money, she realized, as she sat there. She wanted to be dependent on no man.\n\nThen, the reverend got up to preach. He was young. And more than that, he was handsome. Keturah was sure that more than one fan that fluttered in the small church had more to do with the man's looks than the heat in the building. And she wasn't mad neither.\n\n\"For those of you who have Bibles, let's turn to the book of John,\" the reverend said, his deep voice, soothing and calm.\n\n\"What is his name?\" Keturah asked Sly as her brother turned the pages of his Bible. She needed to get her own. It would be the first thing she bought when she started making her own money.\n\n\"Reverend Samuel Day.\"\n\nReverend Samuel Day. He presented his message in a very kind, thoughtful and clear way that not only showed that he spent time between the pages of the Bible on a regular basis but that he had also probably spent a lot of time watching other preachers. There was not a lot of shouting and fussing as some preachers did on plantations to distract from their own lack of knowledge. If anything, Reverend Day knew what he was talking about, and left his people excited for more.\n\nShe had expected the service to last for hours. But he didn't preach too long. Before she knew it, she was back on her feet for the last song of the service. She looked around the church again, noticing the families and the happy children, the smiles and the lack of tension and she felt... overwhelmed. \"I need to take some air,\" she whispered to Sly and slid out of the pew before he could say anymore.\n\nShe walked out of the building and down the church steps, inhaling deeply. She hadn't cried in years, didn't see the point in such a silly exercise. She had learned years ago that tears changed nothing and only left you with an aching head. But she felt tears in her eyes now. She sniffed and pressed the tips of her fingers to the top of her head. It didn't feel real. None of this felt real. She felt like she was having the best dream of her life and would wake up any second now back at Salis. Stuck. Her hand found its way to her chest. He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord.\n\nShe needed to move, walk away some of this anxiety that ran through her. Behind her, the parishioners continued to sing, working their way through the second verse of an old hymn. She walked around the church, feeling very much like a character out of a novel with each step of her feet and sway of her skirt. A week or so ago, she was walking around barefoot in a dress that was one step from being used to scrub the floors. She felt like Joseph. One day in the prison house, the next day, second in command of Egypt. I will bless the Lord at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.\n\nShe had made it almost around the church when she saw a man sitting on an overturned box that was close enough to the church that he could hear everything going on inside. His head, though covered with a hat, was bowed, as though in prayer. She paused, took a step back, not wanting to interrupt him, but he must have heard her because he looked up.\n\nShe blinked at him, once, twice. Reverend Samuel Day?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "He couldn't make his way back to the service. He knew his eyes were red and he must have sniffed for half of Sam's sermon. The very last thing he wanted to do was invite questions, and those folks in church knew how to get into a man's business. Even if it was out of kindness. He rubbed at his cheek and hoped he no longer looked like he had spent the last hour or so weeping. The last time he had cried so hard, he and Sam were being sold away from their mama. He had no doubt that Sam had noticed his absence. He needed to come up with a reason as to why he wasn't able to sit in church this morning, cause Sam would surely be asking. He bowed his head to pray one last time before he got up when he heard a footstep.\n\nHe looked up to see a woman about five feet away from him. A rather short woman, dressed in a dark blue gown, her face mostly hidden by the bonnet on her head. He knew enough to know that the style of dress she was wearing was a bit nicer than the average runaway slave. That's what happened when you lived with the best seamstress in town.\n\nThe woman took a step back, instinctively placing a hand on her stomach. \"Reverend Day?\"\n\nAw. She was new.\n\nWith his thumb he pointed behind him to the church. \"He's still inside.\" Manny stood up, reaching down for the crate he had borrowed.\n\n\"Are you two brothers?\"\n\n\"No. God in all His randomness made us two look exactly alike,\" he drawled. Now, where had he gotten this crate from?\n\nThe woman hummed for a second. \"I suppose you're one of those people who think they're funny.\"\n\nManny turned and eyed the small woman who now had her face lifted enough that he could make out her features. She was maybe a shade darker than him with rounded cheeks, full lips, a short, button nose, and dark slanted eyes. And the look in those eyes sent his heart racing. Sassy. Exactly the kind of woman he had always liked. Her figure wasn't so bad either. It was sometimes hard to tell what a woman really looked like when she wore all those contraptions under her skirt. But he liked what he could see of this one.\n\n\"I think I'm absolutely hilarious.\"\n\n\"You're twins.\"\n\n\"That is what they tell me.\"\n\nShe scoffed, looking away, her hands at her sides. She was completely unimpressed. He bit his lip to keep from grinning. She finally looked back at him, her face clear of any emotion. Who was this woman? Where had she come from? He hoped she was here to stay. \"Do you always attend services outside of the church?\"\n\n\"Only when I'm overcome with emotion. I don't like people to see me cry,\" he said, meeting her dark gaze. Sometimes, the very thing you wanted to hide could be hidden in truth.\n\nClasping her hands in front of her, she shook her head, annoyed. There was an... elegance to her movements that reminded him a bit of Laura. He wondered if she had ever been a slave. She looked as though she had never bowed her head for anyone. They both heard when the song being sung in the church stopped. Manny looked at the building for a second, knowing his brother was about to give the benediction.\n\n\"Well,\" the woman a few feet from him said. He turned to look at her. \"This is the part where I'm supposed to say it's been a pleasure.\" For a woman, her voice was low, husky, measured. He could listen to it all day. And what had she just said now? He had never heard a phrase turned that way. She must have been born free. Not even Laura talked that fancy and she had lived with white folks most of her life. \"But that would be a lie.\"\n\nExcept that there was a definite southern drawl in her speech. She sounded almost as though she were from Kentucky. And Manny knew Kentucky. Had spent more time there than he would have liked to think.\n\n\"If you'll excuse me, I'm sure my brother is wonderin' where I have gotten off to.\"\n\n\"What's your name?\" The question slipped out before he could process it, but of a sudden, he desperately wanted to know. More than that he wanted to make sure it was only her brother waiting on her and not a husband. He cast a quick glance to her fingers and saw no ring. But that didn't exactly mean much. A lot of Negroes could hardly afford land, let alone jewelry... though this woman looked like she wouldn't take anything less than gold on her hand.\n\n\"My name is Keturah Hollis.\"\n\n\"Hollis?\" Manny felt his eyes grow wide. \"Good gracious. Don't tell me you're Sly's sister.\" Every thought he had been thinking about her stilled in his mind. Not the kid's sister.\n\nShe lifted her face, her small nose raised in the air. \"I am. Have you heard of my brother?\" There was that sassy look again, she had heard the horror in his voice.\n\nManny placed his hands on his waist, shaking his head. He would be drawn to Sly's sister. He thought about all Laura had said about her at the supper table the night before. \"Where've you been all this time?\"\n\nShe raised one single eyebrow, but still answered. \"Pickin' cotton on a plantation in Virginia. Have a good day Mr... Day,\" she said and at a quick pace, she turned and went the other way around the church.\n\nPicking cotton? That small, graceful woman who sounded like she ate books for breakfast? There was a story there. Manny kicked at a rock on the ground. He should leave well enough alone. Sure, she was pretty and feisty, just like he liked a woman. But she was Sly's sister. He had no doubts nothing got past her. If they spent any time together she would quickly learn that there was a lot he was still learning himself and he had never been a man who could abide being viewed as an idiot. And yet more than that, he had been around long enough to know that if he let her, Keturah Hollis was the kind a woman who could break his heart." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"Did you see Sly's sister?\" Benji asked everyone at the table. They had just sat down for supper. Manny had spent most of the afternoon after service trying painfully to get through some stupid book of poems by a man called Walt Whitman. He hated poetry, he had decided. None of it made a lick of sense. Why on earth a man needed to write on for so long on nature or his feelings when a simple sentence would do the thing was just beyond him. Eventually, he had given up and pulled out Israel Potter. It took him a long time to get through a chapter sometimes cause he always had to keep his dictionary near. But at least it was a story and it was going somewhere.\n\nSam had spent the afternoon praying and ministering to folks after the service. Amos had gone visiting. Manny didn't know where Benji had gone off too and Sol and Gid had helped Laura prepare the evening meal and keep an eye on Jessamy.\n\nGid made a face at Benji. \"How could we miss her? She was the only new person at service today.\"\n\n\"She's real pretty,\" Benji said, a dreamy smile on his face. That girl would chew him up and eat him up for dinner, Manny thought as he bit into his chicken.\n\n\"I talked to her,\" Sam said, a grin on his face as he took in Benji's expression. \"She's... not like any person I've ever met.\"\n\n\"What did she say?\" Manny asked. Cause he knew she had said something.\n\n\"It wasn't what she said. It was how she said it. I got the definite impression that I was bein' measured in some way and she hadn't quite decided if I passed muster or not.\"\n\n\"She's a smart one,\" Laura added. \"I was able to talk to her some more too. She puts me in mind of Miss Martha, well read and well spoken\u2014especially for a slave. And the thing is, she was not a house slave. She picked cotton.\"\n\n\"She don't sound like no cotton picker I ever met,\" Sam said, shaking his head as he speared a few beans onto his fork.\n\n\"I tried to ask her 'bout that,\" Laura said, spooning some potatoes. \"But she wasn't very forthcomin'. I'll admit that my first thought when I met her was that she was nothin' like Sly\u2014,\"\n\n\"She kind of does look like him,\" Gid interrupted.\n\n\"Yes, but she's not warm like him,\" Laura responded, making a rounded gesture with her hand. \"Not to say that she's unkind or any such thing, but there's an almost natural kindness that comes right out of Sly.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Manny said, interrupting. \"What you deem as natural kindness is naturally annoyin'.\" Everyone at the table grinned, well aware of Manny and Sly's relationship.\n\n\"Anyway,\" Laura said with a laugh. \"The thing is, Sly never says any more than he wants to. Think on it. You can ask him anythin' and if he doesn't want to answer, he'll grin and make a joke, but he won't answer. Keturah is like that. Except she won't grin or make a joke. She'll just politely decline to respond.\"\n\n\"They play their cards close to their chest is what you're sayin',\" Sam said, a thoughtful expression on his face.\n\n\"Yes. Think on it. We've known Sly for a minute now, but we didn't even know he had a sister to begin with. He says nothin' 'bout his past. I bet you, she'll be a hard nut to crack.\"\n\n\"Her past might not be that pleasant,\" Amos said, his voice deep as the ocean. \"Sly's neither.\" Amos's words were a bit sobering. Because he was right, what they may be hiding was deep pain and hurts\u2014and nobody had a right to hear those.\n\n\"Yeah, but how come he only just rescued his own sister?\" Gid asked Laura, as always, missing the tension in the air.\n\nLaura shook her head. \"I have no idea. I wanted to ask, but I could tell Keturah didn't want to speak on it. Papa's right. We have no clue what those two have been through. It's probably best we leave it alone unless or until they want to share.\"\n\nAfter supper, Manny grabbed his hat and walked outside.\n\n\"Where you headed?\" Sam asked, following him out onto the porch. It was a question Manny didn't want to answer because it would only lead to more questions. But, fortunately, Sam wasn't done yet. \"What happened at church today? How come you left before I got up?\"\n\n\"I was so overcome by the lyrics in one of the songs I had to flee the buildin' so no one would see me cryin' my heart out.\" He made sure his tone was flat and that his eyes met his brother's. Sam's eyes narrowed, an expression of confusion on his face. They knew each other well enough to know when the other was lying and when the other was telling the truth. But Manny had deliberately given the truth in an odd way.\n\n\"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"Sam! Can you come here for a second?\"\n\nManny slapped Sam's arm. \"Go. Your wife needs you. We'll talk later,\" he said, hoping desperately that they wouldn't. Twin or not. Some things a man liked to keep to himself.\n\nFirst, Manny headed to the store, then he went to Sly's house. Sly didn't live far enough away to warrant a horse, so Manny walked and sang a bit under his breath as he made his way to the small, fenced-in property. Most times, when he passed Sly's house, it was dark and empty unless it was being rented out to some passerby. Now, as he pushed open the small gate of the fence, he could see lights flickering in the small home and the shadows of two people. Sly's dog barked loudly and the front door was open before Manny was within a foot of it.\n\n\"Look what the cat dragged in,\" Sly said, his words coming out lazy and slow. Taller than Manny and skinny as a beanpole, the kid leaned against the doorway, arms folded across his thin chest.\n\n\"I know you ain't talkin' 'bout me,\" Manny said, sliding his booted feet across Sly's flat, wooden porch. For someone who didn't own his first pair of shoes until about a year ago, he loved the sound his boots made against a wood floor. \"Thought you wasn't gonna be back for months.\"\n\nSly straightened, spread his hands. \"Life has a way of frustratin' the most laid out of plans. Come on inside and meet my sister.\" Sly was a master at hiding his emotions but even Manny could pick up the pride in his voice. \"You ate yet?\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Manny said, taking his hat off upon entering the small dwelling. In all the time he had known Sly, he had never been in his house. It was small, but clean and had only simple furnishings. But the house was warm, and he smelled a fruit pie. Cherry, to be exact.\n\nKeturah stood in front of small, round kitchen table, cutting into the pie. She had the same dress on she had had on earlier, but her bonnet was gone. Her hair was black and even though it was pulled into a bun, he could tell it was long. She speared him with a suspicious look. Manny grinned wide. Did she think he was there for her?\n\nSly, missing nothing as usual, turned to look at him. Manny ignored the question on his face and set the bag he was carrying onto the floor. \"I have not had dessert, however.\"\n\n\"You met my sister?\" Sly asked, never one for just letting go.\n\n\"When I went for a walk at the end of service, I ran into him,\" Keturah said, placing a slice of pie on first one plate and then the next. She went over to a cabinet and grabbed another plate. \"For a second, I thought he was Reverend Day.\"\n\nSly hooted as he went to grab another chair from the other side of the room and slid it under the table. He motioned for Manny to sit. \"They look the same, but you cain't get the two of them confused.\" Sly took his seat and turned slightly to face Manny. He pointed his fork at him. \"Were you rude to my big sister?\"\n\nManny placed a hand over his heart. \"If anybody was rude, it was her.\"\n\nSly laughed again. \"I bet she was.\"\n\nKeturah took the seat opposite Manny, again, sending him an unfriendly look. But she said nothing in her defense.\n\n\"Keturah, let me tell you how I met Sam and Manny Day.\"\n\nManny made quick work of the delicious pie as Sly rattled off the quick story of how he ran into Manny and Sam in Ohio.\n\n\"You're from Kentucky?\" Keturah asked, as she neatly ate the slice of pie in front of her.\n\n\"For all intents and purposes.\" They had spent the first ten years of their life in eastern Virginia before being sold west. \"I hear Kentucky in your voice.\"\n\n\"We was born there,\" Sly said, interrupting the conversation. Were they? He had not realized that Sly too was from Kentucky. Sly sounded a bit like he was from all over.\n\n\"I though you worked cotton in Virginia?\" Manny asked, eyeing Keturah.\n\n\"Sold. Like most folks,\" she said, sending him a look that said he should have worked that out already. Which was true. If he had thought about it, it was the only possible answer.\n\nThis time, Manny turned to Sly, curious about where he had been sold.\n\nSly waved a hand. \"Long story. How come you here?\"\n\n\"I think we should take a walk, you and me,\" Manny said, standing up. Much as he liked Sly's sister, he didn't want to talk about the dead man and his papers in front of her.\n\nSly's eyebrows raised high to the ceiling. \"Alright then. Let me grab my hat.\"\n\nManny didn't waste time, soon as they were out of the house, he told Sly the whole of it. It was getting awful dark outside, but he still opened the bag he had stuffed the man's papers into and held a few up for Sly to see. \"I tried to read some of it, but honestly, some of the words were beyond me.\" Even the few he had looked up in his dictionary. He understood that there was a deed and a will. He knew all about wills. And once he realized what it was he had taken off the dead man's leg, he hadn't been too interested in finding out much more.\n\nNext to him, Sly lit up a cheroot. The smoky, sweet, familiar scent filled Manny's nostrils.\n\n\"Aren't you too young for that?\"\n\n\"You my daddy?\" Manny sighed in exasperation. \"Then, shut up.\"\n\n\"Well?\" Manny asked impatient. No one could get his goat quite like the kid could.\n\n\"Cain't think with you talkin'.\"\n\n\"Your sister know you smoke?\"\n\n\"I wish my sister would tell me what I could and couldn't do. Now, you gone stop talkin' or what?\"\n\nManny said nothing. They were at the very edge of Sly's property. Sly had one foot on the lower railing of his fence while the top half of his body leaned over it. Manny rested his back against the fence, waiting for what he hoped was wisdom. Sly was deceptive that way, young in years, old in experience.\n\n\"I'm not goin' to be in town for long.\" The words were not at all what Manny was expecting to hear.\n\n\"Okay?\"\n\n\"I plan on talkin' to your brother and Mrs. Day but just in case I don't get around to it, can you ask them to keep an eye on my sister while I'm gone?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Manny snapped. What did that have to do with his problem?\n\nSly pulled the thin, black cheroot out of his mouth, blowing smoke. Holding the thing between two fingers on his left hand, he said, \"You ain't told Sam, have you?\"\n\nManny exhaled. \"Sam's got a lot on his plate.\"\n\n\"I always figured you two shared everythin'.\"\n\n\"Well, we don't,\" Manny snapped again. He refused to feel guilty for not telling Sam. How many times had Sam kept things from him to protect him? Well, it was Manny's turn.\n\nSly said nothing, just inhaled and exhaled on his cheroot a few times more. Finally, he spoke again. \"Your problem isn't who the man was or what he was doin'. Forget all that.\"\n\n\"He made me promise.\"\n\n\"Did you promise?\" Sly asked the question, but they both knew the answer.\n\nStill, Manny said it. \"He died before I could.\"\n\n\"Selfish, I think, of a white man to ask a Negro to get involved in killin' business. Forget about him and his papers. That's not your problem.\"\n\n\"What's my problem?\"\n\n\"Your problem is that you better make darn sure that whoever killed him don't come lookin' for you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "They were gone a long time. Long enough for Keturah to wash all the dishes and scour Sly's small bookcase. She found herself drawn to the lone Shakespeare on his shelf, Julius Caesar. She was sitting at the kitchen table, in the middle of Act One, when Sly entered the cabin. Alone.\n\n\"What was that about?\" She made sure to keep any sound of interest out of her voice. She didn't want to know what the reverend's handsome twin brother was up to. And yet there she was, curious.\n\nSly exhaled, shaking his head as he hung up his hat on a hook. \"It is plum amazin' how some folks get drawn into things.\"\n\nIt was not an answer. She was beginning to realize her brother was very good at not answering. But she considered his words. \"He's in trouble?\"\n\n\"Not like you're thinkin',\" Sly said, making a face at her. He walked past her, and she smelled something smoky and sweet lingering in the air. Tobacco. He was a bit young to be smoking but she knew how well that would not go over if she said something.\n\n\"What's that you have in your hand?\" He nodded at the book she was gripping to her chest. And now he was changing the subject. Lord, would she ever get to know this brother of hers? She didn't know him well enough to push, especially since he was leaving soon, so she let the topic go. She shouldn't be interested in Manny Day anyway. With those looks of his and that charm that oozed out of every grin, who knew what he had gotten himself drawn into.\n\nPerhaps it wasn't fair to judge him so early in their acquaintance. But she had survived this long based off of her quick judgments. Quick judgments told her who was safe to talk to and when, which overseer might have a kindness and which one most likely had a meanness, which words might earn her a slap and which ones wouldn't, which people she could trust and which ones would turn her in. She was not always afforded the luxury of taking the time to figure someone else out. Her quick judgment told her that Manny Day was a man who presented a face to the world that hid a different person behind it. People hid their true selves for a variety of reasons; Keturah didn't need to hear any of them to know that those kinds of people were best avoided. \"It's Julius Caesar.\"\n\nSly raised one eyebrow before taking a seat before the small fire that was crackling in the fireplace.\n\n\"You read it often?\" she asked when he said nothing. She watched him kick off his boots, spread his long arms out over the top of the couch, and stare into the fire, his jaw tight. She wondered what he was seeing.\n\n\"Never.\" His voice was low, hard.\n\nShe had so many things she wanted to ask, so many things she wanted to talk about, but a part of her was afraid that the more she tried to forge a relationship between them, the longer he would keep away. But still, at least for this, she knew some of the story. She walked over and sat down next to him.\n\n\"Then why did you buy it?\"\n\nFor a moment he said nothing, and just when she thought he would never answer, he turned and looked at her, meeting her gaze full on. \"It's the first book I bought when I had the money to do so. I bought it out of sentimentalism and knew it was the wrong decision the moment I walked out of the store. I keep it as a reminder to never let my past dictate my future again.\" He turned back to the fire, his expression, angry, fierce. Stubborn.\n\n\"So does that mean no Shakespeare is allowed in the house?\" she asked, keeping her voice light.\n\nSly huffed. \"I don't care what you read, Keturah Mary, just don't expect me to take any walks with you down memory lane. You might want to get to bed,\" he said, shutting down the conversation. \"I'll be wakin' you up early for shootin' practice. I leave in four days.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Four days later, true to his word, Sly was up before the sun, coming in and out of the house as he prepared Octavius to leave for wherever he was going. Casca, his faithful dog, followed quietly behind with each trip, his face down as though he knew what all of this meant.\n\nKeturah stood at the stove scrambling eggs for his breakfast. She was used to rising while it was still dark. She didn't think she could ever sleep in long enough for the sun itself to wake her.\n\nSly stomped into the house again, grabbing the cup of coffee she had poured him and drinking a fast gulp as though it wasn't hot as could be. He set the cup down with a sigh. \"I don't know how long I'm gonna be gone. That's the honest truth, sister.\"\n\nKeturah scooped the eggs out of the pan, grabbed the piece of bread she had toasted and set his plate of breakfast on the table. She could feel him staring at her, but she couldn't make eye contact.\n\nThe past two days had been interesting. She had both been proud and exasperated with Sly. Proud, because Sly knew how to live here and he was a good teacher, gentle and kind. Exasperated, because he had tried to cram information into her that had clearly taken him years to learn\u2014in only a matter of days.\n\n\"You'll be fine,\" he said, sitting down.\n\n\"I've got bacon,\" she said and added the plate of meat to the table.\n\n\"You're not eatin'.\"\n\n\"Not really used to eatin' this early.\"\n\nAt Salis, she had usually stuffed her pockets with bread in the morning, cheese too if they had it, and ate it when the sun got a bit higher in the sky.\n\nBehind her, Sly made quick work of his breakfast. \"Thanks for cookin'. You sure didn't have to.\"\n\n\"I didn't mind,\" she said as she placed the dirty pots into the sink basin.\n\nSly's exhale was loud. \"You'll be fine. I've talked to the Laceys and the Millers and the Altans and the Days. They're goin' to keep an eye on you. I hope I can be back in a few months, but I can't make you no promise. I've already done made too many as it is.\" He paused. \"A man is nothin' if he don't abide by his word.\"\n\nShe didn't disagree with him, but where on earth had he picked up such a notion?\n\n\"Don't be mad, Tura. I'll be back.\"\n\n\"You don't get to tell me how to feel.\"\n\nShe heard him pick up his coffee cup, drink some, and set it down. \"I suppose that is true. When I come back though, you'll be sorry that I'm always underfoot.\"\n\nIt was the way he said it that made her turn and look at him. He didn't quite meet her gaze. Her brother wanted to stay home and be settled about as much as a cat wanted to swim. And that's when she knew. She couldn't keep her hopes of belonging and togetherness pinned on him. He had rescued her, but it wasn't so that they could be family again. Even if, maybe he didn't quite realize that yet. She sighed, picked up her dishtowel and then set it down. O Lord, how long... I am weary with my groaning. For a second, she wanted to cry, but then she remembered the rest of the Psalm. The Lord hath heard my supplication; the Lord will receive my prayer.\n\nHow many times had the Lord heard her prayers and answered them? Not always in the way she wanted, but always answered. And did he not respond to the most important request? The one for freedom? And with a brother, no less. He might not be aching to know her as badly as she wanted to know him, but he was here and alive when she had thought him long since dead. And for that, God was good. Even in this.\n\nShe put a smile on her face that she didn't quite feel and walked over to Sly. Reaching out, she squeezed his shoulder. \"You be careful, little brother.\"\n\n\"Always am, sister. Always am.\"\n\nThe house was lonely without him, Keturah thought, as she sat at the table in silence. For the first time in her life that she could ever remember, she had nothing to do. Nothing. And there was no one to tell her what she should do. She was... free. Absolutely free. And she didn't know what to do with herself. She looked around the small house. She did want to spruce it up with a rug and some curtains. Maybe even add a vase of flowers. She stood up and walked outside. Casca looked up from his place on the porch as though hoping it was Sly pushing the door open and then laid his head back down when he saw it was only her. Casca was a big dog, almost to her waist when standing. They had kept their distance from each other when Sly was there, now they would have to deal with one another a bit more. She had not grown up with dogs and usually when she thought of them, she thought of the danger and pain they caused when they hunted down her kind.\n\nWith an exhale, she looked around the fenced land that belonged to her brother. There was a lovely spot for a vegetable garden, she thought as she took in the plot of land. Sly was gone so much that other than his chickens and his few cows\u2014which he usually left with the Laceys\u2014he had little in the way of food. He had had to purchase just about everything that first morning.\n\nHer brother had left her some money for emergencies but told her his credit was good at the general store for anything that might come up. And was that how she was going to live the rest of her life? Living off her younger brother? She could work. Lord knew she could work. But what would she do? It was a rather pleasant problem to have.\n\nShe went back into the house and grabbed an empty basket and her straw hat. She had one hat and one bonnet. She also only had two outfits. There was the blue gown she had worn to church and the one she currently had on\u2014a white blouse and a dark green skirt. She would take a walk around the town and see what was what. Then, she would stop by Mrs. Day's house and see if she could pick up any other dresses from the talented seamstress.\n\nShe didn't get very far before she realized she had a problem.\n\n\"No, Casca. Stay,\" she told the large dog as it squeezed its way through the gate opening to her side. \"Go back inside. Now. Go,\" she said, clapping her hands and making shooing motions. Casca stood silently, staring at her. What if the dog got lost? What if it got run over by a wagon or something? Sly would not be happy. \"Guard the house and the chickens,\" she fussed.\n\n\"Mornin', Miss Hollis.\" Keturah turned to see an older man meandering by slowly. It was Mr. Lacey. \"Casca always runs errands with Sly. You'll be hard pressed to keep him at the house if you're leavin' it.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Keturah said, looking down at the big dog. Lovely. She had neither the time nor the energy to fight with this dog. \"Then let's go, Casca.\"\n\nKeturah had walked through the town before with Sly, but this time she moved at no quick pace and began to make note of what was where. She tried to place faces and names with several of the establishments but gave up after a while. Quite a few people were making their way to and from different places of business and calling out various greetings to her along the way. She might not know them, but they knew her.\n\nWhen she spotted the store, Day's Mercantile, she picked up her pace. In front of the store, a thin brown boy sat on the sidewalk with two older men sitting in chairs behind him. The boy had a newspaper in his hand. \"On May 21, 1856,\" the boy started. She paused only for a second. In many ways, Arrow Creek was almost like a fantasy. There was no one demanding to know where she was going, no one looking at her like she didn't belong, and there were brown boys reading. Out loud. Not quite the Promised Land. But close. She marched up the few stairs to the store and Casca, as though used to coming to this building, found a spot under a bench and made himself comfortable.\n\nThe mercantile door was propped open and Keturah entered, looking around. She had not come here with Sly. He had picked up all of their merchandise and brought it back to the house. The store was wide and open and filled with six or seven long rows of shelves in the center with shelving along the walls. The mercantile seemed to sell everything from food staples to various forms of clothing. To her left, she noticed the counter. Lined across the top were different glass jars filled with sweets.\n\n\"Good mornin', Miss Hollis.\" The voice came from a corner in the room and she walked past several of the rows of shelves to see who had spoken. It was the way he said it, the way his eyes lacked that teasing quality that she knew.\n\n\"Good mornin', Reverend Day.\"\n\nThe reverend sent her a shy smile as though he were slightly embarrassed by the title.\n\n\"Mornin,' Miss Hollis. Can I help you find anythin'?\"\n\n\"Sam! What are you doin' back there?\" The voice interrupting them was so familiar it could only belong to his twin.\n\n\"Stockin' the shelves,\" Reverend Day called out, his voice dry as he leaned down and took some things out of the box in front of him, setting them on a shelf. They were bonnets, in different shapes and sizes. And just think, with her brother's money, she could buy herself another one.\n\nFootsteps to her left caught her attention and Manny came around the corner. He sent her a grin when he caught sight of her. She sent him quick, polite smile. His grin grew wider. She turned back to his brother who was fortunately very much focused on stacking the bonnets correctly.\n\n\"Reverend, do you sell seeds here? I was thinkin' of startin' a vegetable garden.\"\n\n\"You're a little late in the season but we got a few things,\" Manny answered from behind her. He walked over to his brother and it was something to see, both of them standing there together looking just the same. Good thing she wasn't a woman easily moved by a man's looks. \"Come on, I'll show you where we keep the seeds.\"\n\nKeturah watched him mutter something to the reverend and they shared a quick laugh. Manny then turned and walked further down the aisle. He paused at the end, looked at her. Right. The seeds. She walked to where he stood. In front of him were several rows of small packages of seeds. Leaning over so that they were only a few inches apart, he rattled off the different types. \"Here we have green beans, tomatoes, squash. Got some okra, peas, onions, and greens.\"\n\n\"Do you really have to stand so close?\" She could smell him. It wasn't a bad smell. But still. She could smell him.\n\n\"Oh, I'm sorry. I just thought I would help a customer. Are you always this rude?\"\n\n\"Well, I don't need your help. I can read, you know. And no, I'm not always this rude. I'm not rude!\"\n\n\"I did know you could read. But can you reach the seeds?\" He asked making a motion towards the ones on the very top shelf. No. She could not reach those seeds. \"And yes, yes you are rude. But don't worry, my brother went to the back to get more stuff for the shelves. He didn't hear a word you said.\" He winked at her, grabbed several bags of seeds from the top shelf and tossed them onto a shelf she could reach.\n\nKeturah cut her eyes at him, more embarrassed than even she could believe. In the space of a few seconds, she had completely forgotten all about Reverend Day. But it wasn't like she was going to let him know that. She opened her mouth to speak, but someone else spoke before she could.\n\n\"There you are, Manny!\" A young, female voice called out from the front of the store. Keturah turned to see a very pretty, very curvy, young girl at the front of the store. An elderly, dark-skinned woman stood next to her.\n\nThe old woman waved a handkerchief in Manny's direction. \"Couldn't come to town without gettin' some sugar.\"\n\n\"Granny Newman, are you bein' fresh with me?\" Manny teased back. Keturah watched as he went over and gave the old woman a large hug and grinned at the younger woman. \"Mornin,' Miss Holly.\"\n\nKeturah turned back to the seeds in front of her. Not sure why for some reason, she felt profoundly disappointed. Without thinking too hard, she grabbed several bags of seeds and made her way to the counter where Manny was still talking with Granny and Holly Newman.\n\n\"I've come to get me some sarsaparilla for my joints,\" Granny was telling Manny.\n\n\"Well, you know we've got some. I always tell Sam not to forget Granny's sarsaparilla.\"\n\n\"I don't know if any juniper grows around here,\" Keturah found herself saying as she placed her seeds on the counter. \"But in case you need somethin' else besides sarsaparilla, juniper can not only be ingested, it can be applied to your joints as well if they're swollen.\"\n\nGranny Newman looked at her, a confused expression on her face.\n\n\"My name is Keturah Hollis. You might know my brother, Sylvester.\"\n\n\"Sly!\" Holly said, grinning as she elbowed her granny. \"We all love Sly around here.\"\n\nGranny Newman's expression cleared, and she smiled wide, revealing several gaps where teeth were missing in her mouth. \"Oh, that Sly. He's a good one. You say try juniper for swellin'?\"\n\n\"Juniper can be used for a number of things, but swellin' in the joints is one of them. Pregnant women probably shouldn't take it... ,\" Keturah's voice died off. As usual, she spoke too much.\n\nGranny Newman threw her head back and laughed. \"Girl, my birthin' days are surely behind me.\" Her laughter brought a reluctant grin to Keturah's face.\n\n\"If you get your hands on some, don't take too much. A little goes a long way.\"\n\nThe old woman eyeballed her. \"You know medicine girl?\"\n\nKeturah shook her head. \"No. Just familiar with some herbs.\"\n\n\"Will this be all?\" Manny asked. At some point in the conversation, he had made his way around the counter. Looking at him made her lose her smile.\n\n\"Can you put these seeds on my brother's credit, Mr. Day? I'll leave so you can help these ladies.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "She was mad at him. Manny didn't know much about Keturah Hollis, but he knew enough about women to know when one was put out. And there was something about the way she had said his last name that let him know she was put out. He couldn't wait to find out the reason why.\n\n\"She's a lot shorter than Sly,\" Holly said when Keturah left the store.\n\n\"That happens sometimes in families. One baby will just steal all the height. Now come on and help us, Manny!\"\n\nManny was at the store all day handling most of the customers. Sam had never said a word, but Manny knew his brother preferred not to deal with people most days. For a reverend, he could be mighty anti-social sometimes. But, whenever, Manny did find a quiet moment to think, his thoughts almost always drifted to the meeting he had had with Sly.\n\n\"Play stupid,\" the boy had advised, his cheroot burning between his fingers. With his other hand, he tapped Manny's chest. \"They ask you a question, you just a dumb nigga. Cain't read, cain't write.\" Sly had turned away, shrugged. \"I mean, some of that might be true...\"\n\n\"You really ain't as funny as you think you are. But I understand.\" He had played dumb most of his life. He could play dumb real good. \"You really think they gone come here lookin' for me?\"\n\nSly hadn't answered right away. After a long exhale, he said, \"Always best to be over prepared than under prepared. They'll come here and stick out like a sore thumb. But they've killed a man once for these papers. And a white man at that. Don't think they'll think twice about shootin' a nigger.\"\n\n\"I understand playin' dumb. I don't understand the part where playin' dumb keeps me from gettin' killed.\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Sly said as he leaned against the fence. \"Assumin' they weren't supposed to just kill the messenger? We know the dead white man wanted you to take the papers. So, the papers themselves are important. They're probably hired guys because they didn't think to check the body for the papers. To them, the papers were not as important as stoppin' the dead guy from gettin' to wherever he was goin'. Are you with me?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Worst case scenario here, alright? So, they get back to whoever hired them and they realize that yes, they stopped the right man but no, they did not grab the papers. They're sent back to look for the papers except low and behold, man is gone and there's a fresh grave.\"\n\nManny closed his eyes. Exhaled. \"I shouldn't have buried him.\"\n\n\"Probably not. But I would have done the same thing. They check the body and they find nothin'. Literally nothin' cause you took the dead man's clothes too.\" Manny sighed again. He had thought he might need them in case he decided to do something with the papers the dead man had essentially given him, and clothes said a lot about a person. He had buried the man in his underwear. \"Now, they know someone has those papers. So, play dumb. What papers? What dead man? I just run this here sto' for money.\"\n\n\"You think they're goin' to come to us?\"\n\n\"Unless the Indians get 'em, they gone come. They know they killed the man between Riverside and Arrow Creek. Ain't too much other activity round these here parts.\"\n\nManny felt sick. And for the first time in a long time, afraid.\n\nNext to him, Sly had smoked quietly for a few minutes. \"I doubt worst case scenario is goin' to happen, Manny. I really, really do. Chances are, killin' the messenger achieved all their goals. But if you find yourself in dire straits, and I do mean dire, contact Knox's family. White men ain't supposed to be runnin' around here anyway.\"\n\nSly's words had not been what he had wanted to hear. \"Lord, why you get me in this?\" Manny prayed under his breath. But he couldn't wait for an answer, because another customer walked in.\n\nHe didn't think about it again until he was sitting at supper eating his meal slowly and debating if now was the time to tell his brother or never. And unfortunately, he was leaning towards never. He watched as Sam lifted Jessamy, kissed his cheek and laughed as he bounced the baby gently. Sam was too happy, too content, too at peace with his wife and new baby and he did not need the added stress of Manny's problem. Because Manny knew what would happen if he told his brother. Sam would tell Laura and the two of them would jump in with both feet as if they didn't already have enough on their plate.\n\n\"What's on your mind, Manny?\" Gid asked. The boy was sitting next to him. \"You've been pushin' your beans around on your plate all evenin' and you know you like your beans.\"\n\nManny elbowed the boy in the side.\n\n\"You see that article in the paper?\" Amos asked, his voice gruff as he reached for his glass of water.\n\nSam's face sobered. \"The one about Lawrence, Kansas?\"\n\n\"What happened in Lawrence, Kansas?\" Gid asked. He tried to put one of his bony elbows in Manny's side, but Manny moved and the boy about fell over.\n\n\"A mob of folks\u2014slavery folks\u2014went into Lawrence and wrecked and burned the hotel and newspaper to wipe out abolitionist. Three days later, some man named John Brown killed five men from the slavery side. It's a right mess,\" Amos said, shaking his head.\n\n\"John Brown a free-soiler or an abolitionist?\" Manny asked, eating a bit of his food. \"Cause they two different things.\"\n\n\"Does it matter which?\" Sam asked, sounding frustrated. \"The man killed five people.\"\n\n\"Yeah it does. Free-soilers want Kansas to be Negro free. Abolitionists want slaves to be free. Different things, Sam.\"\n\n\"So, you're sayin' if John Brown is an abolitionist, you what? Support him?\"\n\nThis was the kind of conversation they would have typically had alone. But fine, since his brother wanted to include Laura's family. \"That's exactly what I'm sayin'.\"\n\nSam shook his head. \"Abolitionists will never win by killin'.\"\n\n\"I think you're wrong, Sam. I think killin' is the only way to get through to slavers.\"\n\n\"Civil war,\" Amos said, interrupting their disagreement.\n\n\"The South will never willingly give up their slaves. Fact of life,\" Manny said, pointing his fork at his brother.\n\n\"We could pray\u2014,\"\n\nManny shook his head. \"Prayin' time done passed, Sam.\"\n\nSam scoffed. \"How can you say somethin' like that?\"\n\nManny dropped his fork, pointing a finger at Sam. \"There comes a time when a thing like justice takes place. How many slaves done died Sam cause of slavery? How many?\" Sam said nothing, his jaw tight. \"What's that the Bible says?\" Manny asked, snapping his fingers to help him remember. \"Oh right, to everything there is a season. We done lived out our season of pain. Some people still livin' it out. And most of these white folks just sat back and did nothin'. I say it's the white man's turn. Let them die.\"\n\nManny didn't stay at the supper table much longer. He excused himself and went to sit out on the porch. There were two rocking chairs out there and he sat in one, moving gently back and forth watching the sun slowly make its way down. There were times when he was overwhelmed by the goodness of God, like on Sunday. And there were times, when he was absolutely furious with God. This was one of those times.\n\nHe heard the door open behind him and watched as Sam took the other rocker next to his. In Sam's arms was his nephew.\n\n\"If you come out here to preach at me, I don't want to hear it.\"\n\n\"Ain't come out here to preach at you,\" Sam snapped back angrily.\n\n\"I'm not goin' to apologize neither.\"\n\n\"Did I ask you to?\"\n\nThey rocked, in sync, in silence while Manny blinked back tears of anger. Lord, if you love me so much, then why? He knew from conversations with Sam the reason why bad things happened. They lived in a fallen world and God have given man choice and some men chose to be evil. But still. Manny stared at the glorious orange, red, and yellow sunset spread out before him. It was a big, big world out there and he would never understand it all.\n\nNext to him, Sam rocked slowly while Jessamy held a conversation with no one. Manny could not explain it, but as the sun disappeared and the stars began to wink into existence, the sound of Sam's chair and Jessamy's baby noises gradually began to rob of him of his anger.\n\n\"When did that start?\" Manny asked, sending a pointed look at his nephew.\n\n\"I don't know. I think he's gonna be a real big talker. Like his uncle.\"\n\nFor a long moment, they said nothing, only listened to Jessamy's baby noises, a reminder that in the midst of everything, God had still been good.\n\nThey probably would have stayed out there all night if Laura hadn't come out on the porch. \"Sam, I'm sorry to interrupt but you did promise the Carsons that you would come by and pray.\" She had on a shawl and had a basket in hand. It probably held food and stuff for Jessamy.\n\nSam sat up straight, bringing any and all rocking to a stop. \"I sure did.\" He said the words slowly, hesitantly.\n\n\"Go,\" Manny said, waving him off.\n\n\"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"I'm fine, Sam. I am. Go.\" And he was. He didn't know how, what, why, but something about just sitting with his brother and nephew had brought him a measure of peace. And he realized that with his outburst at supper, his brother probably still thought him a heathen. It was probably for the best. Sorry, Lord that I don't always represent you as well as I should, Manny prayed silently.\n\n\"We won't be long,\" Laura said apologetically.\n\n\"My brother can pray a house down, Laura.\"\n\nHis sister-in-law laughed. \"This is true. I don't know how long will be.\"\n\nSam made a face at both of them and Manny laughed as Sam and Laura, with the baby, started their walk towards the Carsons. They were still in sight when Amos came walking out the house. \"Gone visit with Elroy.\"\n\n\"Tell the family I said hello.\"\n\nAmos was still in sight when the door opened yet again. \"They're gone. What you doin' starin' into the darkness like you don't know whether to scratch your watch or wind your butt? Come on!\"\n\nThey had a thing, Manny, Benji, Sol, and Gid. And it went like this, when Amos, Sam, and Laura were out the house, they had to do something that wasn't necessarily on the approved list of good behavior. This meant they had smoked out back, played poker, shared a bottle of whiskey, and when all else failed, made music. Manny went along with at first because it was amusing.\n\n\"We don't want to invite Sam?\"\n\n\"Sam is a wonderful brother-in-law,\" Benji had stated, not quite making eye contact.\n\n\"I couldn't ask for a better man to marry my sister,\" Gid had said, spreading his hands.\n\n\"I got no complaints about Sam,\" Sol had said definitively.\n\n\"But he's like a wet blanket?\" Manny had asked, biting his lip to keep from grinning.\n\n\"I mean, it's like livin' with a saint!\" This from Benji.\n\n\"Why the reverend got to be our brother-in-law?\" Gid had moaned.\n\n\"We ain't never gonna have any fun if Sam is around,\" Sol had said, shaking his head dejectedly.\n\nManny had rolled his eyes to the heavens all the while laughing. Sam was not as bad as they were making him out to be. In fact, he would have been thrilled to join them in some of their endeavors. But he understood. They would keep Sam out of it. And they had. And now it had gone on so long that if Sam ever found out about it, he would be deeply offended.\n\n\"What are we doin' tonight?\" Manny asked, entering the house. He always let the boys decide. This was their thing. And he rarely put his foot down. He figured it was better if they got out all their wild notions out when he was around to rein them in than when he wasn't.\n\n\"Just music.\"\n\nAll of them were good and tired of slave songs. Tired of singing about one day entering the Promised Land, etc., etc., etc. So, they wrote their own music. Sol played the guitar and he was actually getting good. Benji had some small drums. Gid played the fiddle. When everyone was home, they practiced separately and more often than not, only played hymns. It wasn't until everyone else was gone\u2014like now\u2014that they played together.\n\n\"Let's do that song we done last time,\" Sol said, running his fingers over his guitar and making sure the thing was tuned. Manny had noticed that every time they played like this, Sol got better. The boy had a good ear for notes. Amos had once asked him to play at church, but if Sol could have turned white, he would have. And that had been the end of that. Gid wanted to eventually play his fiddle at church but he wasn't quite that good yet and he didn't want to play in front of an audience until he was absolute perfection. His words, not Manny's. No one asked Benji to play the drums.\n\n\"I think I remember the lyrics.\"\n\n\"I hope so, you wrote 'em,\" Gid said, bringing the fiddle up to his neck.\n\nThat was his job, to write and sing the lyrics. More often than not, his lyrics were terrible. But he had so much fun.\n\nThey started the music.\n\n\"I rode my horse to Oklahoma,\" Manny sang. \"I loved that horse, but it had a real bad aroma.\"\n\nNext to him, Gid laughed, messing up his fiddle playing.\n\n\"I told myself that it was time I was gonna... have to sell it so I could marry my girl, Mona.\"\n\nThey laughed and played for about an hour before calling it a night though Manny was still up when first Amos came home and then Sam, Laura, and the baby.\n\n\"How's the Carson family doin'?\"\n\nSam sighed, lingering in the parlor room while Laura disappeared to their room with Jessamy. \"Mr. Carson is feelin' poorly again. I prayed with him, but is it bad that I sorely wish there was a doctor? Then, at least I would know how to pray. But, just gone have to trust God.\"\n\n\"Yeah... ,\"\n\n\"Say, while I was there, I heard the craziest thing. Mr. Carson's nephew ran up to Riverside just yesterday. Two men held up the livery there and not for money. They were askin' about a dead man or somethin' strange. Gonna have to be more careful I guess.\"\n\nManny hummed in response... and closed his eyes tightly when his brother left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Keturah was up bright and early the next morning. She fed the animals and released the cows and Titania, the horse, to wander Sly's small plot of land while she cleaned out their stalls. She started on her vegetable garden and in the midst of preparing it, decided she would have to go back to the store to see what herbs they had and whatever they didn't have, see what she could order. She wanted some sage, pennyroyal, rosemary, mint, witch hazel... her list grew longer and longer as she moved from row to row. But that didn't bother her none. If anything, it made her all the more excited. She was putting down roots. She worked until the early morning sun was high in the sky and then went back into the house. She had met Mrs. Day while she was out and about the day before and they had agreed to meet up this afternoon. After a quick wash, she was back out of the door with Casca at her heels.\n\nReverend and Mrs. Day's house was a one-story, white wooden frame home with a generous porch. There was clear evidence of love of the home from the flowers growing just past the porch to the yellow curtains that fluttered in the open window. This was what she wanted to do with her brother's home.\n\nMrs. Day opened the door before she could even knock, baby Jessamy in her hands. \"Come in, come in,\" she said, holding the door open so Keturah could enter. \"Go on to the parlor room in the back. I have everythin' set up.\"\n\nKeturah had been inside the house before for her fitting so she quickly made her way to the small but inviting parlor room. As before, there was a mannequin in the center of the room with a gown on. Several baskets filled with cloth and lace were tossed on the rug. The couches were moved back against the wall to allow for more room and there were several gowns spread across them. Keturah bit her lip to keep from smiling. They were probably all for her. In the corner of the room, a sheet had been hung up so that Keturah could change behind it. There were also bookshelves along the wall and she found herself drawn to the spines of the novels before her.\n\n\"Alright,\" Mrs. Day said, entering the room at a determined pace. She pulled the doors shut behind her and released the dark blue curtains that had been tied down the center of the glass doors. \"This way if the boys come home, they'll know I have a customer and that they cannot enter without knockin'. Jess is down for a nap, but I should be able to hear if he cries.\"\n\n\"I'm not goin' to close the window curtains until you try on the dresses. But what do you think, Keturah?\" Mrs. Day asked as she lifted the gowns from the couches. There was elegance to the way that Mrs. Day moved and walked that Keturah found herself subconsciously mimicking as she made her way to stand next to her.\n\n\"They're lovely.\"\n\nMrs. Day laughed. \"You haven't even really looked at them.\"\n\n\"And I don't have to, Mrs. Day, to know they're lovely.\" Which was true. The two dresses she had already were the nicest things she had ever seen or owned. And each dress had fit her perfectly.\n\n\"Please, call me Laura,\" Laura said with another laugh as she slung a dress over her arm.\n\n\"My brother tells me you even make clothes for the white people in the next town over.\" The words came out sounding like an accusation, even to Keturah's ears and she winced. That was not the sentiment she had wanted to convey.\n\nLaura took a step back, not out of offense, but surprise.\n\n\"I didn't mean to sound rude\u2014,\"\n\n\"Someone has to make the money around here,\" Laura said, shooting her a conspiratory look. \"At least in the beginnin', it took a while for Sam and Manny's store to take off and for Papa to get his smithy goin'. I take orders through my husband's shop though I slowed down a bit because of the baby. Now, I've got a couple skirts, a couple blouses, a few dresses...\"\n\nIn that moment, Keturah appreciated the woman more than she would have thought. Now, if only she could be lighthearted and express the same.\n\nLaura then walked over to the few windows in the room, releasing the dark curtains that hung on the sides and pulling them together, clipping them tight so no outside light was in the room. The room was a shroud of darkness. A few seconds later she lit two lanterns so that they could at least see each other. \"Let's get you dressed and then I'll open the curtains and see if I need to make any changes. I have the curtain set up...\"\n\n\"I don't need a curtain.\" Keturah had lived the past few years of her life with little to no privacy. She wasn't hardly about to be shy now. And besides, she was able to keep on most of her clothes anyway. Laura helped her put on the first outfit. And then went to open the windows so they could get a better view of the fit. It was a dark green gown that had three layers in the skirt. It was the loveliest thing Keturah had ever worn.\n\n\"Oh! I forgot my mirror,\" Laura said as she tied back the curtains. Then she moved one of the bookshelves and pulled out a long glass mirror. Setting it against the shelving, Keturah walked over to see herself. She looked... pretty. Feminine in a way that she had never considered herself before. Laura was taller than her and she placed her hands on Keturah's shoulders. \"You stand well. So many times I have to tell my ladies to stand tall and not slouch over.\"\n\n\"Papa always insisted on good posture,\" Keturah said softly, still taken with the sight of herself. His words drifted back to her. Sit up straight! We're not animals, no matter how much they mean us to be.\n\n\"When it gets colder, I can make you a jacket to go over it.\"\n\nKeturah took a step back, looking away and swallowing her emotion. \"It's so nice, I can't imagine coverin' it up.\"\n\n\"Oh, it does get cold here, believe it or not. I think it works for a church dress, yes?\"\n\nThey tried on two more dresses and then Keturah put her blouse back on so she could try the skirts. Laura was walking around her, checking the hem when there was a knock on the door.\n\n\"Hold on. I'll just be a minute,\" Laura said, walking over to the door. \"What?\"\n\nThere was a male voice. \"Come to get lunch, Laura.\"\n\n\"There's plenty food in the larder, Benji. Just put somethin' together.\" In the distance, Jessamy wailed. \"Oh, for cryin' out loud,\" Laura muttered and left the room, leaving the parlor door open.\n\nA young man\u2014Benji, Keturah assumed\u2014stood there. He was tall, dark-skinned, and slender though a bit broad. And when he smiled at her, she could see he was handsome. He only favored his sister a little... when he smiled.\n\nHe took a step forward, hand out. \"Hi, I'm Benjamin Altan, Laura's brother.\"\n\n\"Keturah Hollis,\" she said, shaking his hand.\n\n\"I know,\" he said quickly and then looked away for a second, shy.\n\n\"Benji, what are you doin?\" a voice called from down the hall just before a door slammed shut. For some strange reason, her heartrate picked up.\n\nBenjamin (Benji?) rolled his eyes. \"Gettin' lunch. Why are you here, Manny?\"\n\n\"But the kitchen is that way,\" Manny said, coming up to the parlor. He paused, looked in the room. When their eyes met, he sent her an exaggerated surprise face. He placed a hand on his heart. \"Keturah Hollis? In my house?\"\n\n\"She's clearly here to get clothes from Laura,\" Benji said dryly. He rolled his eyes again. \"I'll be right back, Miss Hollis. I've got to get lunch for my pa and brothers.\"\n\nManny waited until Benji's footsteps were no longer heard before he spoke again. \"You were angry with me when you left the store the other day,\" Manny said, leaning against the doorway. He looked like he was going nowhere fast.\n\n\"Why would I be angry with you?\" She asked, taking a step forward and meeting his laughing gaze. She felt more than a little emboldened dressed as she was in her new clothes. She clasped her hands before her. \"I don't know you from Adam.\"\n\n\"That's what I want to know,\" he said, spreading his hands before him.\n\n\"Listen. Manny. It is Manny, right?\" she asked even though she knew the answer. He scoffed. \"At the end of the day, does it really matter?\"\n\n\"It matters if you don't like me.\"\n\n\"Do you have to be liked? It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidences in princes.\"\n\nManny blinked at her, a strange expression on his face. She couldn't tell if he was amused, confused, or surprised. \"What?\"\n\n\"Only the Lord's opinion matters.\"\n\n\"No, I got that part.\"\n\n\"It's from Psalms,\" she said slowly. \"Most of them were written by David, only one of the greatest men ever born.\"\n\n\"The same one who slept with his friend's wife and then had that friend killed? That David?\"\n\nKeturah opened her mouth and then closed it. \"I don't really dwell on that part of his story.\"\n\nManny laughed. And almost, almost she smiled. She loved King David, but sometimes he broke her heart. \"Keturah, tell me the truth,\" he said, leaning forward. \"What did I do to upset you?\"\n\n\"I just forgot for a moment.\"\n\n\"Forgot what?\"\n\n\"That you're the kind of man who is one way with some people and another with others.\"\n\nManny blinked at her once, looked away as though she might be talking about someone else in the room and then turned back to her. He blinked again. \"Me?\" he said, pointing to himself.\n\n\"Oh, who else do you see in this room?\"\n\n\"When I entered, I thought it was just me and you but I'm lookin' for the other person who has told you all about me since you don't know me from Adam.\"\n\nShe raised her hands in defeat. With any other person she would have been embarrassed. For some strange reason with him she felt merely amused. \"Fair enough. But you asked.\"\n\n\"I did ask. And you answered. Would you like my opinion on you?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\n\"Doesn't matter. I'm gonna give it anyway. I think that you've spent the last few years on the cotton plantation bein' the smartest person in the room.\"\n\nKeturah's hands found their way to her waist. \"Wasn't really in a room.\"\n\n\"And now,\" Manny continued as though she hadn't interrupted him. \"You've encountered someone who might be smarter than you.\"\n\nKeturah shook her head in disbelief. \"And are you sayin' that's you?\"\n\nManny shrugged as though he couldn't help it. \"It is, what it is.\"\n\nOf all the ridiculous things to say. \"Listen, here\u2014,\"\n\n\"Manny! I made you and Sam's lunch,\" Benji called out from somewhere in the house. They both got quiet as he stomped back into the parlor, handing Manny a pail. \"That's why you're here, right?\"\n\nManny pressed his lips together for a second and she knew he was trying not to laugh. After a moment, he reached out and took the pail, his face solemn. \"Thank you, Benji.\" When he turned to look at her to say good-bye, his eyes were twinkling. \"Have a good day, Keturah Hollis. I look forward to talkin' to you again.\"\n\n\"I can't get him to go back to sleep,\" Laura said, as Manny walked out of the room and out of the house. Everything felt suddenly deflated. She had always enjoyed a rousing debate. She was kind of sad that they had been interrupted just when it was getting good. \"Benji, why are you still here?\"\n\nBenji frowned at his sister, told Keturah good-bye, and left the house.\n\n\"Do you mind holdin' Jess for a second? Let me check the length of this skirt so you can go on about your day.\"\n\nKeturah took the baby, a small little boy who yawned in her arms and then cooed. She lifted him a bit, smelling his sweet baby scent as Laura tucked and pulled on her skirt.\n\n\"You know I was thinkin' about startin' a sewin' circle for the ladies in town. Thought it would be a good time to catch up and help each other out. Maybe pray for each other if we need to, that sort of thing. Would you come, if I did?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" She didn't think she would have much to contribute. When it came to friendship with other women\u2014well, with most folks in general\u2014she had a real knack for sticking her foot in her mouth, but she would still come anyway. It would give her a reason to leave the house.\n\n\"Good. I'm goin' to announce it this Sunday at service.\"\n\nIn the distance, they heard someone knocking on the door. \"I promise you will leave this house soon,\" Laura said with a sigh as she left the parlor once again. Keturah heard the door open and then the voice of a girl talking. She bounced little Jess in her arms, humming. She liked babies. She sometimes even liked children. Her opinion still didn't change. She wanted only one child and that was so she could have someone else to pour her energy into.\n\n\"I'm not goin' to stay long, Mrs. Day. Ma just wanted me to return your basket.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't you worry about that none, Livy. Tell your mama Sam and I are prayin' for your pa.\"\n\nLaura walked into the parlor room with an empty basket, a young girl was behind her. \"Oh, you're Miss Hollis, Sly's sister,\" the girl said, her face lit up. Looked like Sly had an admirer.\n\n\"Yes, I am. And you are?\"\n\n\"Olivia Carson. I've just come to return Mrs. Day's basket. She and Reverend Day came by yesterday to pray for my pa. He's doin' ill.\"\n\n\"What's wrong?\" Keturah asked, rocking little Jess.\n\n\"We don't rightly know. Fever. Chills. And here it is hot as can be outside.\"\n\n\"What's he been takin'?\"\n\n\"Willow bark tea.\"\n\n\"Is he contagious?\"\n\n\"Con-what?\"\n\n\"It is catchin'?\"\n\n\"No. Ma thought it might be but he's been like this for near a week and no one's caught anythin'. Miss Hollis, our cabin so small if you sneeze in one room, the person in the next room feels a breeze.\"\n\n\"Have you tried\u2014,\"\n\n\"You want to come on by and take a look at him? We're plum desperate.\"\n\n\"I'm not a doctor,\" Keturah said gently. There was just entirely too much hope written in the girl's eyes.\n\n\"Course not. But Granny Newman done already come by and looked at pa and she gave him that willow bark and it did help some. Maybe you can come by and bring somethin' else.\"\n\nKeturah glanced over at Laura, hoping she could explain to the girl why that didn't make any sense.\n\nLaura shrugged. \"Worth a try maybe?\"\n\n\"Alright,\" Keturah said slowly. \"Then let's go have a look at your pa.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Mr. Carson's nephew was an idiot.\n\nManny held up a hand. \"Hold up, now, Waylon. If they held up the livery and only two folks was in it and you wasn't one of them, how come you know what they said?\"\n\n\"You ain't been listenin' to me!\" Waylon Sanders exclaimed. Waylon was a few years younger than Manny, short, always moving, and got excited about just about anything. Manny considered himself to be a man of infinite patience. Waylon had the unique ability of making his long fuse of patience shrivel up quickly.\n\n\"I have been listenin' to you,\" Manny said slowly, careful not to lean too far across the counter. If he got any closer to Waylon, he would choke him. \"You said, you went to Riverside, went to the livery, left the livery, and then saw what happened.\"\n\n\"No,\" Waylon said, shaking his head. \"This is what happened. I took the wagon up to Riverside cause Uncle Boone asked me to. He may be feelin' poorly, but he surely is forever tellin' me and the boys what to do. He sent me to Riverside to pick up our order of wood. You know Mr. Lacey thinkin' on expandin' his livery and\u2014,\"\n\n\"Waylon,\" Manny snapped, his voice low and irritated.\n\nWaylon wrinkled his nose at Manny. \"You sure ain't nothin' like the reverend, Manny. I ain't never seen such an example of Jacob and Esau in my life.\"\n\nIf Manny hadn't wanted to hear what happened so bad, he would have tossed Waylon out of his store himself. Waylon's words had unexpectedly touched upon a wound that was currently bleeding and it was all he could do not to lash out. He bit down on his tongue, folded his arms over his chest and waited. If he said another word right now, Waylon would know he was the evil twin.\n\n\"Anyway, I rode out there, got the wood\u2014and if that didn't take forever, I don't know what would\u2014then I stopped and talked to Mrs. Maybelle Woods\u2014she works out there cookin' and cleanin'. That's how come we only see her at service on Sunday. She told me all about her children, Julep and Zelda and Francis and Grady. They surely are getting' big. Shame about their daddy.\"\n\nLord, give me strength, Manny prayed.\n\n\"Then I made my way to Mr. Otis store. I didn't go there cause I don't like this here store. I just got a little peckish. You know how that happens sometimes. So, I went into the store to see if they had any kind of jerky and they did. After I bought the jerky, Mr. Otis asked me to go out back and sweep cause Percy had spilled coffee beans all over outside, plum busted the bag right open, he did. So, I grabbed a broom and went to sweepin'.\"\n\n\"He offer to pay you?\" Manny asked, genuinely curious.\n\n\"Course not! A good, Christian man don't always be thinkin' 'bout gettin' paid,\" Waylon said, making sure to frown at Manny. \"When you got a kindness in you, you do as unto the Lord. Reverend preached on that last Sunday.\"\n\n\"No, he didn't.\" His brother had preached on Jesus' last words to his disciples before he went to the cross.\n\n\"How you know? You was sweatin' like a sinner at church on Sunday and then you lit out of there like lightenin' was goin' to fall and strike you dead. I seen you.\"\n\nManny sighed and said nothing as he pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyes.\n\n\"Anyway, there I was, out there doin' my Christian duty.\"\n\n\"Workin' for white folks for free,\" Manny couldn't resist the dig.\n\n\"We done all worked for white folks for free. You too. Don't know why you gettin' so high in the sky about it. Reverend Day done already said y'all picked tobacky back in Kentucky. Work don't get much harder than that. Unless you in the deep south pickin' cotton or workin' the sugar cane, of course.\"\n\nWas he ever going to hear what happened?\n\nThe door to the store opened revealing Jeremiah Carson, Boone Carson's son and Waylon's younger cousin. \"Waylon, what is takin' so long?\"\n\n\"Manny wanted to hear my story 'bout what happened at the livery.\"\n\n\"Lord, have mercy we gone be here all day,\" Jeremiah said with a sigh.\n\nWaylon sent him a frown. \"I done told you 'bout sayin' the Lord's name in vain.\"\n\n\"What makes you think that was in vain?\"\n\n\"So, you were sweepin' up the coffee beans... ,\" Manny said, doing his level best to keep his frustration out his voice.\n\n\"There I was, sweepin' up the coffee beans and you know how the store be right next to the livery. Not like Arrow Creek where the livery down the road.\"\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" Jeremiah said, leaning against the counter.\n\n\"Now, see. There you go again.\"\n\n\"Jeremiah! Shut up!\" Manny snapped. Jeremiah, a friend of Gid's, did not take offense. He smiled and looked away, careful not to let Waylon see him.\n\n\"Anyway, I was sweepin' when I see two men enter the livery. Strange lookin' fellows. Not from around here.\"\n\n\"How you know?\" Manny asked.\n\nWaylon thought on it for a second, then snapped his finger. \"I know! Cause I heard 'em talkin' to each other. They didn't sound like they was from these parts.\"\n\n\"None of us are from these parts,\" Jeremiah muttered under his breath.\n\nWaylon sent his cousin a dirty look. \"I know strangers, and these was strangers. They didn't know the town. Anyway, they went in the livery and no one was in there but Hank Tanner and his oldest boy, Wordell.\"\n\n\"How you know? You was sweepin' the porch.\"\n\n\"I wandered over to the livery. Wanted to see what these strangers wanted. The back wall of the barn had a hole in it the size of a pecan. I peeked through. That's how come I know. They didn't pull out their gun right away. First, they asked if Hank had come across any stray horses. Turns out he did. Said some palmetto horse had wandered into town a few days ago. Hank had took the horse in and if no one came to claim it, he was aimin' to sell it in a week or so. The men asked to see the horse, claimed it was theirs. But they were a might suspicious. Hank Tanner thought so too and asked them to prove it. That's when they pulled out a gun. They asked for the saddle and any saddle bags that might have been on the horse. Hank gave it to them. They cut open that beautiful saddle with a knife, just plain hacked at it. They poured out the saddle bags but nothin' was in 'em 'cept moldy food. Then, they turned to Hank and asked if there was anythin' else in them bags. The bags belonged to some dead man named, Emerson Yates. A friend of theirs. They said Emerson Yates had something of value that belonged to them. And I'm tellin' you as sure as shootin' I knew they was lyin' and Hank knew they was lyin' but Hank said he ain't even go through the bag. Then one of them men jabbed his gun into Wordell's stomach and said, 'don't lie to me, old man'. And then Hank admitted there had been some money and he had took it. But they didn't even want the money. It was the strangest robbery I ever seen.\"\n\n\"It don't sound like they robbed Hank at all.\"\n\n\"They took the horse,\" Waylon declared. He slapped the counter, palm down. \"And then I went back to the store. I did not want them to see me at all.\"\n\n\"You finished?\" Jeremiah asked. He was eyein' the peppermint tin on the counter. Manny moved it out of his way and Jeremiah sent him a dirty look.\n\n\"Yep. That's all that happened. But it was frightenin' for a minute or so. Specially when they whipped out they guns so fast and\u2014,\"\n\n\"Alright, let's go,\" Jeremiah said and pushed his cousin out the door of the store.\n\nIn the silence of the store around him, Manny sat down hard on the stool behind him. He set his elbows on the counter, his hands under his chin. Sly had been right. They had messed up by just killing the man. They were looking for the papers now.\n\nThe door opened sending the little bell above it tinkling. And in walked Sam. And Keturah.\n\n\"I'm sure we have licorice,\" Sam was saying as he held the door open for her.\n\n\"Good. If it's what I think it is, then licorice will help. Ginger tea or fennel may help as well along with some raw honey,\" Keturah was saying. She was wearing a different skirt now than the one she had been wearing earlier back at the house.\n\nManny sat up. \"What's goin' on?\"\n\n\"I went to pray with Boone Carson and while I was there, Keturah came and looked the man over. She thinks what he has is easily curable.\"\n\n\"I don't know about curable,\" Keturah said, sounding slightly embarrassed. \"But I think with a few changes to what he is ingestin' the fever might dissipate.\"\n\nIngesting. Dissipate. It was all Manny could do not to write the words down on a sheet of paper so he could look them up in his dictionary later when he got home.\n\n\"How do you know so much about healin'?\" Sam asked as he headed down one of the aisles looking for something. Keturah followed. So, of course, Manny got himself up and followed too. He wanted to know the answer.\n\n\"I don't know that much really. But my family was owned by an apothecary... a druggist is what they're sometimes called. Which is ironic when you consider that he, his family, and most of mine died of typhoid,\" Keturah was saying as she lifted several small glass bottles off a shelf. \"May I open one?\"\n\nApothecary? Druggist? Manny didn't even know what that was.\n\n\"Sure,\" Sam said. Looking over her head he sent Manny an excited look. And also a look that said that Keturah was a bit odd. Manny agreed. Every word that came out of her mouth was strange. But for him, also strangely fascinating.\n\nManny watched as Keturah opened a bottle, sniffed and then poured out a drop on her finger to taste. \"What is that?\"\n\n\"It's that tonic we bought. Mrs. Smith's um...\"\n\n\"Elixirs,\" Keturah said as she made a face and topped the bottle. \"It's just morphine. It'll ease the pain, mask the symptoms, and solve exactly no problems.\"\n\nManny and Sam's eyes met again. Sam's grin was wide. All he was seeing was a woman who would be a huge asset to Arrow Creek.\n\n\"Do you have any herbs?\"\n\n\"Not that many,\" Manny answered. \"You should write a list and we can order some.\"\n\nFor a second, Keturah froze, then her brown eyes met his, blinking. \"I haven't written anythin' in years. I'm not sure I even remember how to.\"\n\n\"My writin's fairly terrible but it'll get the job done,\" Manny said, careful to keep his gaze on the ground. So, there was something Keturah Hollis couldn't do. And he could. Imagine that.\n\n\"There's plenty plants and such out near Arrow Creek itself. I don't know if you want to take a look around and see if you can find anythin' you can use.\"\n\n\"I can use?\" Keturah asked, sending Sam a confused look. \"I'm not a doctor or a nurse or anythin' like that. I just worked for one.\"\n\n\"You probably know more than we know,\" Sam said quickly, hands on his waist. He gave a decisive nod. \"Have you been out to the creek before? Someone should take you there, let you have a look around.\"\n\nKeturah started to speak and then said nothing, her eyes narrowing.\n\n\"It's a real nice creek, Keturah. With lots of plants,\" Sam said, rocking on the back of his heels. Manny caught his brother's eye and made a face. Sam sent a responsive expression back.\n\nKeturah's exhale was loud. \"Alright, Reverend Day. I'll go have a look.\"\n\n\"I can take you,\" Manny said slowly. \"Sam's been out of the shop all day. I think it's my turn.\" And he needed to think about something other than the fact that a possible countdown on his life had just started." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "\"Is that your horse?\" Manny asked politely as he stood on the other side of Sly's fenced-in land. His own horse stood next to him, nudging him every few seconds, ready to move on. Keturah had just brought her small horse out of the barn and now stood there, staring at it.\n\n\"That is what Sly told me,\" she said before sending Manny a bemused look. The look reminded him of his sister-in-law when she had first learned to ride.\n\nIt was one thing to learn how to ride when you were young. It was another to take on the task when you were grown. \"Do you need help gettin' on?\"\n\n\"Sly said I need to learn how to do this myself.\" Her words and her face were reluctantly determined. It was then he noticed that she had walked the horse over to a tree stump. Raising her leg, still covered by long skirts, she slipped her foot into the closest stirrup... and then paused, realizing she should have gotten on the stump first.\n\n\"Well,\" Manny said, pulling himself over the fence. \"You're not by yourself.\" Not giving her a chance to think about it too deeply, he placed his hands on her waist and lifted her the rest of the way onto the horse. He opened the gate of the fence and after a second or two, she prodded the horse forward. He had almost shut the gate when Casca slipped through it.\n\n\"The dog follows me everywhere.\"\n\n\"He follows Sly too.\"\n\nManny had no opinion about dogs one way or the other, but he knew Amos hated them fiercely. Out here, in a small town in Indian Territory, he could see how they might be a benefit though. Especially to a woman living alone. He climbed onto his own horse.\n\n\"How long have you been ridin'?\"\n\nManny huffed, thinking. \"Near about ten months or so?\"\n\n\"You make it look natural.\"\n\n\"Didn't especially care for it much at the beginnin' but you get used to it.\"\n\n\"What's your horse's name?\" She asked after a minute or so.\n\n\"Horse,\" Manny said with a laugh. \"Cain,\" he said after a reluctant moment.\n\n\"Please, please don't tell me the reverend's horse is named Abel.\"\n\nManny scratched at the back of his neck. \"Maybe.\"\n\n\"That's horrible. Whose idea was that?\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\" It hadn't been his idea, but he had certainly fought for it.\n\n\"And here you are, the one that's supposed to be smarter than me.\" She rolled her eyes as they made their way out of town. \"It's just a horse. I'm sure if you change its name it won't get mad at you.\"\n\nHe had barely talked to this woman, but it still didn't stop him from cutting his eyes at her. \"Thank you, Keturah, I didn't know that.\"\n\n\"Surely there are another pair of brothers in the Bible\u2014if it's brothers you must have\u2014to name your horses after.\"\n\n\"Yes, I understand. Thank you for explainin' that to me.\"\n\n\"For example, there's James and John. Simon Peter and Andrew. Oh, I know, didn't Jacob have 12 sons? Let's see there was Reuben\u2014,\"\n\n\"You're doin' this on purpose, aren't you? Tryin' to get my goat.\"\n\nKeturah, who had been staring straight ahead, glanced over at him, her eyes dancing with laughter even as her facial expression remained stoic. \"Is it workin'? And please explain to me why if you hate the horse's name, you've said nothin'? Could it be that you're tryin' to hide somethin'?\"\n\n\"I'm not tryin' to hide anythin',\" he said even though he felt his color rising. \"I mean, listen, I just like to keep things personal.\"\n\n\"Hmmm, you lie to yourself too.\"\n\nManny scoffed. \"I never lie to myself and I rarely lie to others. The truth is more than sufficient. Just because I don't want to share with the world all my thoughts like some people out here doesn't make me a suspicious character.\"\n\nThey snipped at each other, back and forth until they had left the town behind and reached the meadow. It should have been an irritating ride. Manny should have been annoyed, but Keturah never took a swipe that didn't hold some truth to it and he found himself more interested than not in what would come out of her mouth next.\n\nArrow Creek itself was a very small creek that ran off a much larger river, but the part that ran through their town was shaped like an arrowhead, or so Sly said. And Sam was right, there were loads and loads of plants and flowers and whatnot surrounding it.\n\n\"Can we stop?\" Keturah asked, her gaze on the ground before them.\n\n\"Sure,\" Manny said, slowing his horse down. \"We haven't reached the creek yet.\"\n\n\"I know, but dandelions are fairly useful,\" she said, eyeing the ground. He got off his horse and went to help her down. He liked the way her waist felt in his hands, but he didn't let his fingers linger. Not that he could if he wanted to; she set off like a pistol, forgetting all about her horse. Casca chased after her. Manny grabbed the reins of his horse and hers and walked over to where she was crouching down before a weed.\n\nHanging off her shoulder was a bag that he just now noticed. She opened it and pulled out a damp handkerchief. \"I figure I can transplant some of what I see to my garden at home,\" she said and then pulled out a small shovel. Manny got on his knees next to her.\n\n\"Don't need that,\" he said, his fingers digging into the dirt to carefully uproot the tangled roots of the plant.\n\n\"You've done this before?\"\n\n\"With tobacco plants... way back when.\" When the plant was uprooted, he handed it to her and watched as she gently folded it into the napkin. \"You worked for a doctor?\"\n\n\"Not really sure if apothecarist are considered doctors. It wasn't too clear to me and I couldn't exactly ask, but yes, I worked for a man who called himself a doctor. Just cleanin' and cookin' mostly with my Mama. We kept house for Doc Platt. I learned how to read early on and got used to glancin' at Doc Platt's books or listenin' to him talk to his patients. Mostly cause I thought I could help at home if someone got sick or somethin'. Doc Platt might have known some healin', but he wasn't hardly the kindest of men.\"\n\nHe decided not to ask any questions about that. He knew enough about unkind men to last a lifetime.\n\n\"Your family died of sickness?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said as she crawled a few feet over to another plant. He followed. \"My parents and two of my brothers. I thought Sly had died from it too. And all these years, he was alive,\" she said softly, shaking her head.\n\n\"How many years ago was this?\"\n\nShe sighed, running her fingers over the petals of whatever flower was in front of her. \"Seven, I want to say.\"\n\nShe had spent seven years on a cotton plantation without any family... and he was beginning to think without any real friends. Sure, she was sharing with him, but he was picking up on that same guardedness that Laura had mentioned. \"Can you get this one?\" She pointed to a plant on her right.\n\nManny scooted next to her, close enough he could smell her scent. He wondered what she would do if he kissed her. Wondered if she had ever been kissed. And then he shook his head. Whatever she was thinking about right now it wasn't kissing him. But still...\n\n\"You ain't ever marry?\" She was old enough to have married. Now that he thought on it, she could also have a few children. There was a lot he didn't know about this small woman next to him.\n\n\"He was sold away before we could,\" she said as she carefully enfolded the plant Manny had dug up into another damp handkerchief. It was the way she said it.\n\n\"You loved him?\"\n\n\"I love him still. Very much.\" Of course she loved him still. He didn't know why he felt a sharp stab of jealousy. \"Assumin' of course that he's still alive.\"\n\n\"Do you know where he was sent?\"\n\n\"I have no idea,\" she said and for a second she looked completely stricken. Then her expression cleared. \"It doesn't matter. We promised not to look for each other.\"\n\nManny knew all about those kinds of promises. Didn't make the hurt go away though.\n\n\"But I'll love him until the day that I die,\" she said softly, as though she didn't even notice he was there anymore. And really, she probably didn't.\n\nManny sighed, his exhale sounding rough to his own ears. He would fall for a woman in love with the living dead." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Reverend Day had been right. There was an abundance of plant life out here. It would take her days to get a sample of everything. And the nice thing was\u2014she had the days.\n\n\"I suppose he was perfect,\" Manny said.\n\nKeturah looked over at him, confused for a second. Then she remembered what they were talking about. \"No. But he was kind and thoughtful and friendly\u2014,\"\n\n\"The opposite of you, huh?\"\n\nShe should have been offended, but she almost smiled as her eyes flicked over to him. He shrugged as though he just couldn't help the words that came out of his mouth. \"It's amazin' how you think you know me.\"\n\n\"Hmm, the feelin' is mutual. Here,\" Manny said, gently handing her the yarrow plant. Yarrow was good for the blood. There were several other plants out here that she had no familiarity with whatsoever. But she still wanted them anyway. O Lord, what a variety of things you have made! In wisdom you have made them all.\n\n\"Are there any others you would like?\"\n\nManny's voice was low, calming. It was probably one of the reasons she had told him more than she had told Ophelia in all the years she had known the woman. The other reason being that he seemed like he actually wanted to know. It had been a long time since someone had wanted to know about her.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said and pointed to a patch of bright orange flowers. If she wasn't mistaken, it was milkweed.\n\nCasca, bounding through the grass, gave chase to some butterflies while Keturah and Manny made their way closer to the creek. She could not only smell the water in the air, she could hear it. Next to her, Manny was silent.\n\n\"Is it just you and the reverend?\"\n\n\"You can call him, Sam. Are you askin' 'bout family?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then, yes. Just me and Sam. And Laura and Jessamy now, I guess.\" After a moment he spoke again. \"I never knew my pa and Mama was sold away from us when we were young.\"\n\nHe was quiet as he crouched down and dug up the milkweed for her. She found herself staring at his profile. He seemed serious, focused and not at all like the man she had been encountering for the past few days. But the topic they had been discussing had been rather serious. Talking about Leo always made her sad. She imagined that thinking about his mama must make him sad as well. It was probably best to change the subject... and to something that might bring back that spark to his eyes.\n\n\"I knew a pair of twins growin' up. Several actually, but you put me in mind of a particular set.\"\n\nNext to her, Manny snorted. \"This should be interestin',\" he muttered under his breath. Keturah got down on her knees so that she and Manny were almost eye to eye.\n\n\"Twin girls. Nieces of the doctor that owned us and the pair of them were nasty little things.\"\n\n\"I'm sure this is goin' somewhere.\"\n\n\"Of course,\" Keturah said, looking away because she didn't want to smile. \"Their names were Rose and Lily and when I say nasty, they weren't nasty to me. They would just play these awful games on other girls, pretending to be the other when they wanted gossip, one would purposefully act dumb while the other would act smart. But really at the core, they were both smart. Most twins I've ever met were usually very much the same.\"\n\n\"Is there a question there?\" His voice had that teasing quality back to it and she had no doubts he and the reverend had played their own little twin games.\n\n\"There's a couple of questions there. Your mama named you Samuel and Manny?\"\n\nManny turned and levelled her with a look. \"Manning is my name.\"\n\n\"Your mama named you Samuel and Manning?\"\n\nManny's gaze was narrow and the expression on his face disgruntled. \"So what if she did?\"\n\nKeturah stared at him, thought for a second. \"But she didn't.\"\n\n\"How would you know?\"\n\n\"Because you keep answerin' my question with a question. She did not name you Samuel and Manning.\"\n\nManny exhaled and shook his head. \"No. She didn't.\"\n\nWhen he said nothing more, she picked up a small stick on the ground and poked him. The level of familiarity she felt with this man was outstanding. Was it possible she, Keturah Hollis, was making a friend?\n\n\"Samuel and Emmanuel,\" he admitted with another sigh.\n\n\"I'm actually surprised that you told me.\"\n\n\"I don't make a habit to lie. In fact, I rarely tell a lie,\" he said, pointing a finger at her.\n\n\"So you've said. Smart and perfect. How have you managed to escape the parson's knot all these years?\"\n\nManny smirked at her. \"It has been very difficult. All these brains, this face, this body... ,\"\n\nKeturah tossed the little stick at him, fighting the urge to smile. \"Emmanuel\u2014,\"\n\n\"My name is Manning Lucas Day.\" He met her gaze, his eyes no longer teasing, but serious. She nodded, understanding. He would not be teased about this. Manny looked away. \"Lucas in honor of my mama cause her name is Lucilla, Lucy for short. But as for Manning... it was very dramatic. Like Naomi in the Bible... call me Mara,\" he said with a humorless laugh. \"Mama used to say, when I was little, every time I entered the cabin, 'look, God is with us.' We would go to bed at night and if it was a particularly cold night and we all shared a pallet, mama would place me between her and Sam and say, 'Sam, God is with us.\" He paused, not meeting her gaze, his jaw clenching. \"And after we were sold, I couldn't stand to hear it. My name. Been called Manning ever since. Emmanuel was left back in Virginia somewhere.\"\n\nKeturah uprooted a piece of grass, splitting it down the middle. So much for making things lighthearted. But, in for a penny, in for a pound. \"Because you lost your faith?\"\n\n\"Not sure I ever had it to begin with.\"\n\n\"But you have it now? You do, don't you? You're constantly bringin' up the Bible. I suppose it could be because your brother's a reverend and you're forced to listen to the stories all the time, but you don't strike me as someone who is willin' to be forced to anythin'.\"\n\nManny stared at her, looked away, and then stared at her again as though she had said the sky was green and the grass was blue.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Nothin',\" he said, but the look in his eyes was one of wariness.\n\n\"I'm observant,\" she snapped, irritated with herself for saying something in the first place. Because now she had the irrational need to defend her observations. \"You said you rarely lie. You've said it twice now. You really did run out of the church on Sunday because you were overcome by the goodness of God. And that, sir, is not the move of a man who has no faith.\"\n\nManny raised a finger. \"I did not run. That would have caused a disturbance,\" his voice was light, but he wouldn't meet her gaze. She was right.\n\n\"Anyway, my point is, twins are rarely so different from each other. Sam couldn't have a relationship with God without it influencin' you in some way.\"\n\nManny rolled his eyes. \"And you know this because you've met one set of twins.\"\n\nKeturah shrugged. True. \"But am I wrong?\"\n\nIt was his turn to throw a small stick at her. But he didn't seem mad or annoyed, so she did what she always did. She pushed.\n\n\"And yet you still do not want to be Emmanuel?\" She could understand a little boy's pain and hurt at God for losing his mama. But he wasn't a little boy anymore.\n\nShe watched him scratch at his jaw. \"You don't ask the easy questions, do you?\" he said with a sigh. \"My faith in God is new. Very new. And that's all I'm gonna say about that.\"\n\nAnd that's when she knew. It was this faith of his that he was trying to hide. And how odd was that? Most people were the reverse, trying to come off better than they actually were on the inside.\n\n\"I just want you to know that turnabout is fair play.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"You know all my secrets, I'm gonna have to learn yours.\"\n\nKeturah spread her hands. She wasn't the least bit anxious. \"I'm an open book.\"\n\n\"Uh huh. Now, come on. I know you want to keep me all to yourself, but I do have to go back to the store today before nightfall.\"\n\nThey didn't stay out near the creek much longer. Manny escorted her and Casca home where she made a quick lunch and then replanted some of the flowers that they had uprooted.\n\n\"Miss Hollis?\"\n\nKeturah turned from the ground she was working to see Olivia Carson standing on the other side of the fence. Setting her garden hoe against the back of the house, she walked over to the fence. \"Afternoon, Livy.\"\n\n\"Afternoon, ma'am. I just come by cause my pa said to tell you that the licorice and new tea he been drinkin' has been makin' him feel all the thing.\"\n\n\"Oh, that's good,\" Keturah said, slapping the back of one hand against the palm of her other. So, she had been right.\n\n\"It's only been a couple hours mind, but already his eyes seem brighter. Ma was almost in tears. You should come by.\"\n\n\"Oh... no,\" Keturah said politely. She had not the least desire to be a in a sick room standing around with different folks. Once she knew what was wrong with a body and how you might fix it, there was nothing else for her to do.\n\n\"Anyhow, Mama sent you these,\" Livy said, holding up a basket of goods. Keturah saw beets, peas, turnips, rhubarb, and radishes.\n\n\"Oh, I couldn't... ,\"\n\n\"As a thank you,\" Livy said, swinging the basket towards her so quick, she had no option but to grab the thing.\n\n\"It's only been a few hours.\"\n\n\"You haven't seen the change in my pa. We got us a passel of hope now. Reverend was prayin' that the Lord would show us if it was an easy fix for his body and it's lookin' like it was. See you at service on Sunday, Miss Hollis.\"\n\nThe girl was gone just as quick as she appeared and Keturah now had plenty to eat for days." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "The next week went by slow, but slow in a good way. Keturah spent most of the time getting her garden and her house in order and reading the different books on her brother's shelves. He had an assorted taste.\n\nOn Sunday\u2014it was her third Sunday in Arrow Creek and her second one alone\u2014Keturah got up extra early to make sure she looked extra nice in one of her new dresses. Unfortunately, she still didn't have a mirror, so she had no clue what she actually looked like\u2014only that her gown was pink. It was a color she had thought she would never wear for it was so feminine and light and she had never been allowed to be any of those things. But she remembered that she had liked the way she had looked when she had tried it on at Laura's house. She would have to order a mirror from the store tomorrow. She hadn't been back since the day she and Manny went out to pick plants at Arrow Creek.\n\nShe had so enjoyed his company. It wasn't often she found someone who not only didn't mind her pushing but pushed back. A part of her was afraid that when they met again, they wouldn't get on as well as they had before. With a shake of her head, she returned her thoughts back to the matter at hand. Church.\n\nInstead of a bonnet, she pinned a decorative hat on top of her hair and left the house with her brother's Bible. She had tried to insist that he take it when he left, but he told her he had several small copies of different books of the Bible that he took with him on his trips. They were easier to carry he had said, a large grin on his face as he slid a copy of the book of Luke into a pocket of his pants.\n\nShe didn't even bother to fuss as Casca followed her off of their lot and onto the road. \"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handwork,\" she recited to herself as she walked along. It was a beautiful day. Another one of those days that didn't quite feel real. How could she\u2014a slave\u2014be wearing new clothes and going to church like a free person? She was almost afraid to pinch herself. Here she was, doubting God's goodness. Again. I will remember the works of the Lord: surely I will remember thy wonders of old. God was good. In spite of everything, hadn't he always been so? She needed to stop feeling like at any moment things were going to change\u2014and not for the best.\n\n\"Good mornin', Keturah.\"\n\nKeturah turned to see Esther Lacey moving quickly towards her. \"My family left me this mornin' cause I wasn't feelin' too well. I've been meanin' to come by and speak with you. Livy says you know everythin' there is to know about easin' aches and fevers and chills\u2014,\"\n\n\"I hope she didn't really say that,\" Keturah said quickly. She had helped one person. One. That did not make her an expert of any kind.\n\n\"Why yes, yes she did. Anyway, it's my woman's time and I was wonderin'...\"\n\n\"I've just planted some yarrow in my garden. That'll help some but Esther I'm not a doctor!\"\n\n\"Course not!\" the young woman said as though the thought had never crossed her mind. Maybe it hadn't. \"When does Sly come back?\"\n\nThe two of them chatted about Sly until the church building came into view. \"Excuse me, Keturah. I best hurry. Papa and Mama sit right in the front.\" Taking long strides, Esther quickly passed Keturah and ran into the church building.\n\nKeturah entered the church just as a woman she now recognized as Mrs. Miller went to stand in the front. \"This mornin', we bout to go to glory,\" she said and then started belting out, Down by the Riverside.\n\nNot really wanting to be noticed walking down the center aisle, Keturah slipped into the nearest pew. \"I'm gonna lay down my burden, down by the riverside, down by the riverside, down by the riverside,\" Keturah sang alongside everyone else. Next to her was a very good baritone and when she looked to her right, Manny winked at her. He would sit in the back, wouldn't he? But she was more than a little glad to see him. She tried not to stand too close to him, but when a family of six arrived late, Manny moved over so that they were almost shoulder to shoulder. Finally, Mr. Altan came to stand in front to pray and everyone sat down.\n\n\"Got a few announcements here this mornin',\" the tall, broad man said. Amos Altan, Laura's pa, was a handsome man. His skin was dark, his voice was deep as the ocean, and he looked like he could carry the weight of the world on those broad shoulders of his. \"My daughter's startin' a sewin' circle this week for the womenfolk.\"\n\n\"Man, that sounds borin',\" Manny muttered from next to her.\n\n\"I don't think you were invited.\"\n\n\"How will I live?\" he asked dramatically. She pressed her lips together, unwilling to smile at his histrionics.\n\n\"Mr. Miller is here today and he's doin' just fine. Let's give the Lord a handclap,\" Mr. Altan said, and everyone in the church clapped.\n\n\"Uh oh, girl. Folks gone be knockin' on your door,\" Manny said out of the side of his mouth.\n\n\"You think so?\" Keturah asked alarmed.\n\n\"Haven't they been already? I hope you chargin' them. Don't ever do nothin' for free,\" Manny advised, not even looking at her.\n\nWell, she had been looking for a way to make money, hadn't she? It wasn't a horrible idea.\n\n\"Like... become the town's apothecarist?\"\n\n\"I don't what that is, but sure.\"\n\nAn apothecarist. If she had the right books, perhaps she could be a help. Most medical books were written in Latin. This she remembered. But Doc Platt had had that one book that she had read over and over again. And yet, she liked helping people without any of that pressure of making a mistake. \"No, I don't think I want to do that.\"\n\n\"Is it really up to you? Have you asked God about it?\" He asked, his voice just barely above a whisper as Mr. Altan took up the offering.\n\nShe turned to look at Manny, but his face was straight as though he were completely focused on the church happenings instead of interfering in her business. She could not remember the last time someone had asked if her she had talked to God about something. In fact, she was pretty sure that had never happened. But he wasn't wrong. The psalmist's words flashed through her mind, thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.\n\nManny tilted his head slightly. \"You should probably stop lookin' at me like that. People will start to get ideas that you fancy me.\" He paused. \"Which considerin' how good lookin' I am is probably not too far off the mark.\"\n\nKeturah turned her face quickly to the front. She could feel her cheeks burning. \"Oh, for heaven's sake.\"\n\n\"Shh, my brother's about to talk.\"\n\nShe sent him an annoyed look, but as Sam bowed his head to pray over the offering, she bowed her own and sent up a prayer. Lord, is that what you want me to do? Be an apothecarist?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Manny was used to sitting in service by himself, which was admittedly, a personal decision. He could sit on the front row if he wanted to, next to his sister-in-law and her family, but he liked sitting in the back. Church felt different in the back. But there was something to be said for sitting next to a person you knew too. Especially when they were young, pretty, and smelled as nice as Keturah did.\n\n\"I can flip my own pages, thank you,\" she hissed at him as he reached over and turned to the book of Haggai. It wasn't that she wasn't going to find it eventually, it was that he so liked seeing that look in her eye when he annoyed her. And he knew turning the pages in her Bible annoyed her. He had gotten no less than three frustrated looks since Sam's sermon had started. If he was a hundred percent sure that he was really upsetting her he would have stopped after the first time. As it stood, there was a sixty percent chance they would be doing this again next Sunday.\n\n\"If we could all bow our heads for the benediction...\"\n\nManny watched as Laura stood, a fussy Jessamy in her arms, and turned to walk to the back of the church.\n\nManny leaned over. \"I'm pretty sure Laura's plannin' on invitin' you over for supper today. Come. I've got somethin' for you.\"\n\nHe did. And he couldn't wait to give it to her. He had gone back and forth about the gift when he had grabbed the thing off the store's shelves the day before and had even waffled about it this morning. But now, he couldn't wait to give her what he had. He was like that sometimes. He had spent so much of his life unable to give anybody anything that when they had celebrated birthdays and even Christmas the year before, he had been unable to wait around for the day itself. He had to give the present away almost as soon as he purchased it.\n\nKeturah's lips flattened and she sent him yet another annoyed look. For some reason, his heart raced. She was in love with another man, he told himself. She might like him as a person, but it didn't mean that she in anyway thought of him as he thought of her. But still... his heart raced. He didn't wait to hear her response, instead he crossed over her and met his sister-in-law at the doors of the church. \"I'll take him,\" he said. Laura shot him a grateful look and instead of going back to the front, slid into the last pew next to Keturah. Look at that, planned beautifully.\n\nPushing the doors open, he took his nephew out into the beautiful, sunshiny day and Jessamy took a moment to stop his whimpering to blink at the sun. Manny brought the baby to his face and pressed his lips against his soft, round cheeks.\n\n\"It's goin' to be a good day today, Philip Jessamy. Just you wait.\"\n\nAs he had hoped, Laura convinced Keturah to come to supper. The two of them holed up in the kitchen as soon Keturah arrived while Manny was in the living room with his brother and Laura's family.\n\n\"Did you see this?\" Amos asked, pointing at the newspaper in his hand. Manny wasn't sure who he was asking. Yesterday, Junious Lacey had run up to Riverside running an errand for his pa and brought back the latest papers to Arrow Creek. Amos had bought one off of him.\n\n\"Pa, how can we have seen it? You have the only paper in your hand,\" Gid said politely even though he looked on the verge of rolling his eyes.\n\n\"It says here that the Republican Senator Charles Sumner was beat almost to death by another congressman's cousin.\"\n\n\"Uh, politics,\" Gid said, a scowl on his face. \"None of that makes any sense to me.\"\n\n\"Well, it better start makin' sense. They arguin' about our lives, fool,\" Benji said, trying to sound like he knew a thing or two about politics. Manny was pretty sure his comprehension of it all was on the same level as Gid's.\n\nManny glanced over at Sam\u2014who was sitting next to him\u2014so they could laugh at the two brothers. But Sam was holding Jessamy and staring off into space somewhere. Manny reached over and slapped his brother's thigh. Sam jumped. \"What?\"\n\n\"What are you thinkin' about?\" They lived in the same house, they worked together every day. And the gulf between them had never been wider. What was happening to them? Manny missed Sam.\n\nSam stared at him for a second before rolling his eyes.\n\n\"Excuse me?\" Sam was the oldest twin. That was a fact. But what was also a fact was that Manny was the one that laid down the law. Most of the time.\n\nSam held up a finger. \"Don't. Do not fuss at me. I know you're hidin' somethin',\" his brother hissed. \"And I'm goin' to find out what it is.\"\n\nWas that it? Manny thought about the dead man's things, now tucked in the back of his closet in his room. Was it keeping that secret that was making them lose touch with each other?\n\nAmos's voice caught Manny's attention for a second. \"I've explained this to you,\" Amos said patiently across the room to his youngest son. \"The government is divided into three parts\u2014,\"\n\n\"I know that part, Pa!\"\n\nManny scooted over to Sam so that they sat shoulder to shoulder. \"I am hidin' somethin' from you,\" Manny told his brother. Because honesty was always the best policy when there was someone in your life who could pick apart your lies. \"You'll just have to wait to find out.\" Sam's eyes narrowed. \"Now. Is that what was really on your mind?\" He hated this, he hated that they had gotten to this odd point where they didn't tell each other everything there was to tell. And Sam had no right to get frustrated when he was the one who had started it all.\n\n\"I'll tell you when you tell me what's on your mind.\"\n\n\"Sam, I'm not doin' this with you.\"\n\n\"I'm not doin' this with you, either, Manny.\" Arguing with Sam was sometimes like arguing with himself. Pointless.\n\n\"Sam, you're the minister of this town. You just finished preachin' an hour ago. I'm goin' to need you to act more mature. Your attitude is annoyin' me.\"\n\n\"My attitude is annoyin' you?!\" Sam asked, having the nerve to sound incredulous.\n\n\"What is it exactly that you think I'm hidin' from you? And let's just get somethin' clear here. If anyone has secrets between us, it's you.\"\n\n\"Why, cause I'm married?\"\n\n\"I'm not doin' this with you right now, brother.\" What had started off as a simple question was now making Manny more than a little angry.\n\nAmos's voice cut through their disagreement. \"And so, Charles Sumner, a senator of Massachusetts was beat with a cane by Preston Brooks, one of the South Carolina senator's cousin.\"\n\n\"What is this important, Pa?\"\n\n\"Because they were arguin' over slavery.\"\n\n\"Talk is cheap,\" Manny said, switching conversations. \"Unless folks start dyin' over slavery, nothin' is changin'.\"\n\nSam leaned forward. \"Any more news comin' out of Kansas?\"\n\n\"Not since John Brown hacked those men to death at the Pottawatomie Creek settlement.\"\n\n\"There's your dyin', Manny. Are you happy?\"\n\nHe was going to choke Sam.\n\n\"Well, it sounds like supper is gonna be interestin',\" Laura said, entering the living room. \"Food's ready. Let's eat.\"\n\nAn hour or so later, Manny was walking Keturah home, Casca trotting behind them at a slow pace. The sun was slowly lowering itself, but it was still there, peeking over their shoulder. Benji had wanted to walk Keturah home, but Manny had offered before he could. He had seen the wounded look Benji had sent him. He was not in the least bit threatened by Benji as a suitor and he loved the boy enough not to purposely cut him out. He would have to apologize when he got back, but he wasn't done yet with Keturah Hollis.\n\n\"You were strangely quiet at supper.\"\n\n\"Oh, you know me so well?\" Manny teased, but she was right, he had been quiet at supper. He was never quite at peace if he wasn't at peace with his brother. They were going to have to talk and Manny wasn't sure what it was they were going to have to talk about. There was that issue with that dead man he had buried, but chances were Sam was going to bring up the hole that had started forming between them with the start of his marriage. Manny did not want to discuss Sam's marriage.\n\n\"It does feel like we've known each other for years, doesn't it?\" Keturah said, rubbing her arms.\n\n\"I have that effect on people.\"\n\nKeturah snorted. \"Were you upset about somethin'?\"\n\n\"Got in a small argument with my brother.\"\n\n\"Really? Sam seems difficult to argue with.\"\n\n\"Not that difficult.\"\n\n\"At least you can argue. I hardly know what to say around Sly. He was this big,\" she said, motioning to the center of her chest, \"the last time I saw him. We pretty much danced around each other the whole time he was here.\"\n\n\"And then he was gone fast.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said slowly, sounding slightly miserable. \"He was gone very fast.\"\n\nIt looked like it was time for his gift. Reaching behind him, he pulled out the book he had tucked away and handed it to her.\n\nShe stopped walking as she took it. He watched as she flipped the pages. She stared up at him, surprised. \"The pages are blank,\" she told him as though he didn't know that already. \"There's nothin' here.\"\n\n\"It's a journal. You've got to write in it.\" Reaching for his other side, he pulled out his own journal. \"Can't learn how to write if you don't practice. See,\" he said, flipping to the first page of his own book. \"My handwritin' was pretty terrible when I first started and it ain't exactly the greatest now, but at least it's decipherable,\" he said and flipped towards the other end of his journal. \"I write most everyday even if I only have a little to say.\" He turned several pages so she could see the different dates.\n\n\"Dear Lord,\" she began, her fingers tracing his words.\n\nHe snatched his journal back. \"I didn't say read it. I'm just showin' how you can see the improvement. Over time.\"\n\n\"They're prayers?\"\n\n\"They're journal entries. But I felt silly just writin', so I picked a reader. You can pick any reader you want. It's your book. I didn't buy a pen or ink. I know for a fact your brother writes and that he just bought both recently. If you can't find it, then you come on by the store and we'll get you one.\"\n\nKeturah took the book and held it to her chest and Manny knew he had bought the right thing. \"Thank you,\" she said, her dark eyes searching his. \"Thank you.\"\n\nAfter seeing her to her door, he could have flown home if he wanted to. Instead, he walked slowly back through town, taking the long way home. He would choose to court a woman who wouldn't make it easy, but hopefully he had eased the road a bit in his direction. Also, he hoped the book helped her. They were entering this stage of life with some heavy handicaps, they had to help each other when they could.\n\nIt seemed like a good time to pray so he took a few minutes to not only pray for him and for Sam but for the town and the store. He was just passing the mercantile when he saw something that made him come to a stop. Someone was stomping down the sidewalk towards his store with purpose. The brim of their hat was low and a shotgun lay ready in one hand. It wasn't just that it was Sunday and all the stores were closed, most everyone home and resting. It was that the man walking down towards his store wasn't Negro, but white." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "It was the day of the first sewing circle of Arrow Creek. Keturah, sitting between Mrs. Grace Carson and Esther Lacey, reached into her basket for the shirt she was mending for Sly. He had left behind a number of clothes that needed repairs. He had admitted, when he was home, that while he could patch a hole and repair a seam, sometimes he was so busy he just left it with the Millers to take care of. She had told him she would go through all of his clothing while he was gone and make sure they were in tip top shape. So, there she was with a whole basketful of his shirts.\n\n\"It doesn't even feel right, us havin' a sewin' circle,\" Esther said with a giggle. \"I used to wait on girls who went to sewin' circles and whatnot.\"\n\n\"I don't know why we can't have our own sewin' circle,\" Holly said from across Keturah. Next to her was Granny Newman and the other Lacey girls. There were women to the right and left of Keturah, and while she had seen several of them in town or at church, she only knew a few by name.\n\n\"I didn't say we couldn't. Don't go puttin' words in my mouth Holly Newman!\" Esther said the words, low and quiet so that they were covered by some of the other conversations in the room. Keturah wasn't sure if Holly had heard all of Esther's words but she heard enough to make a face at the girl.\n\n\"Well, what do you think, Keturah?\" Holly asked. \"Can't we have our own sewin' circle?\"\n\nKeturah glanced over at Holly. \"I think if we compare ourselves to white women, we'll always be lackin'.\" All the conversations that seemed to be happening around them slowly went silent. \"All I'm sayin' is they set the rules and can change them at any time. We'll always look like we're playin' pretend.\" Everyone was listening and by the looks on their faces she should just stop talking. Now. \"I just think we shouldn't try to imitate white women. We'll never succeed. We should come up with our own traditions and customs.\" And now she had just insulted her host. It was a gift, she decided, the ability to wield the wrong words with such accuracy. Still, she straightened her shoulders and she made her face expressionless so no one could guess what she was thinking. She clenched her knee to keep her hand from moving to her chest. It is God that girdeth me with strength and maketh my way perfect.\n\n\"Keturah isn't wrong,\" Laura said from her spot in the circle and everyone turned to look at the reverend's wife. Keturah, on the other hand, felt like she could sink into the floor. She was supposed to pass through the doors unnoticed and here she was in the very spotlight. \"All that I have to understand about bein' free is from what I've seen servin' in the Big House. But part of the reason why I've started this circle is so that we can come together and teach each other. All of us have somethin' to offer whether we served in a house or worked outside in the fields. God created us with talents and gifts and now is the time to use them. I have counted twenty-one free families that live in and around Arrow Creek. We're growin'. And by the way, thank you so much for comin'. If your households are anythin' like mine, you've got more to do than you can shake a stick at, so I appreciate it.\"\n\n\"This is far more important,\" one of the women to Keturah's right said. She was heavy with child, due any day now. \"My family's dirty clothes can wait another day.\"\n\n\"Amen!\" And the women around Keturah laughed, breaking any lingering tension.\n\n\"When I first came to Arrow Creek, there was nary a woman in town and now there's all of us,\" Laura said, spreading her arms. \"I just feel like in this here room is wisdom and knowledge that we can all share with each other. I'm hopin' that we can use this time to pray and ask for guidance as needed.\"\n\n\"I'm definitely goin' to need some help with this baby,\" another woman Keturah didn't know said, as she rubbed her full belly. Taking a minute to count, Keturah realized that there were five women in their circle that were expecting. Two looked like they would go soon but the others weren't far behind. \"Granny, you goin' to be there for me?\"\n\n\"Course I am chile,\" Granny Newman said, her hands moving with her knitting. \"I don't miss no babies.\"\n\n\"I know I can use advice too. Without my mama here to help with Jessamy, it has been a little difficult,\" Laura admitted to the room.\n\n\"I think we have a wealth of knowledge in this room, like Laura done said. We may not be able to hardly read and write, but we done worked hard all our lives,\" Granny said with a definitive nod. \"Was born in North Carolina and sold to a plantation in Kentucky and then later to Mississippi. Lost a man and several babies. I may not know 'rithmatic but I know a thing or two about life.\"\n\n\"I worked from 'cain't see to cain't see' in the rice fields of South Carolina before I was sold to Louisiana,\" Grace Lacey said softly. \"Met my husband there and we run off. Wasn't easy. Fact to business it was the hardest thing I ever done. Sometimes I wake in the night terrified I'm still runnin'.\"\n\nHer words brought silence to the room, everyone lost in their own thoughts of how they escaped slavery.\n\n\"My husband and I bought ourselves,\" one of the pregnant women said softly. \"It was hard. It was so hard. The games our massa would play... we had to leave everyone else behind.\" For a second the woman shuddered. \"My name is Lila by the way for those who don't know me. Joe and I just got here less than four weeks ago. We heard there might be land out west and all we know is farmin'.\"\n\nAfter Lila spoke, the woman next to her introduced herself and shared a bit of her story. Keturah realized that this day would not end without her saying something about herself. But that fact didn't bother her as much as it might have. This was her town. Her home now. Sharing about herself felt like just another root she was sinking into the soil and God willing, would never be uprooted again.\n\nThat evening, after supper was eaten and the dishes washed and put away, Keturah sat at the kitchen table with two books in front of her. One was Julius Caesar. She had tried to read it, but she found that it hurt too much to see the familiar words, for in them she heard her papa's voice. And that was a wound she was not ready to inspect. The other book was the blank one that Manny had given her. Although it was no longer entirely blank. She had found Sly's fountain pen and ink and through a little bit of trial and error and an ink stain or two, she had figured out how to work it. Then she had spent an hour writing her name over and over and then the names of her parents, her brothers. Leo. Leo who had never thought her too much, but always thought she was just enough. Leo who had never tried to change her but had had enough patience to let her change on her own. Leo, who made every day and moment of life brighter just because he was in it. If only they could have been sold together. Then, Sly could have led them both to freedom. Instead she was free and he was stuck, trapped in a nightmare.\n\nWith a shuddered breath, she sat back in her chair. Dwelling on the past never did a body any favors. She had been bitter and so very angry when she was sold to Salis. To be honest, while she had been grateful for the book of Psalms that Prince had given her, she had also wished he had given her just about any other book to read. But it was through the Psalms that she learned that life wasn't about her. It wasn't about her wants and her desires though that wasn't to say that God would not fulfill those. Life, she had learned the hard way, was about trusting God and fulfilling His purpose and plans. It was then, that you found peace and joy and contentment. A Psalm fluttered through her mind: my flesh and my heart faileth: but God is strength of my heart, and my portion forever... and even though she hadn't wanted to, she had learned to believe that.\n\nLost as she was in her thoughts, when Casca started barking outside, she jumped in her seat. Standing quickly, she went to the door and opened it. Casca, on his feet, barked several more times as a young man looped his way towards them, carrying a lantern. Keturah went back in the house and grabbed her own lantern before returning to the door.\n\n\"Ma'am. Miss Hollis?\" the young man said, coming to a stop a few feet away from her and Casca. She raised the lantern, but she still didn't recognize the man standing there. \"My name is Joe and my wife Lila is having a baby. She went into labor some hours ago and Granny Newman asked me to come and get you.\"\n\n\"Me? Keturah Hollis? She sent you here for me?\" Keturah couldn't stop from repeating herself. Keturah didn't know much about being in the family way. In fact, the little she knew about healing didn't help pregnant women at all. Fact to business was, most plants she liked to use for aches and pains were bad for babies.\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. You. Keturah Hollis. She said you come on and hurry. Please,\" the man said, begging.\n\n\"Alright,\" she said slowly. It must be real bad if Granny was sending for her. She didn't think there was any danger to pregnant women in ingesting peppermint or ginger and she had both from the store, though in candied form and not in plant form. Still, they could calm a stomach. She wasn't sure about a pregnant stomach, but it couldn't hurt.\n\n\"Good. Do you have a horse, ma'am? I'll get it saddled,\" he said before she could tell him about Titania. \"I live aways away and you don't want to be walkin' in the dark if you don't have to.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "The house Joe and Lila lived in was small and it was all lit up.\n\n\"I'll put your horse up. Go on and go in the house. They're waitin' on you.\"\n\nKeturah was still not sure why on earth they would be waiting on her. Nevertheless, she climbed down from the horse, almost tripped over Casca\u2014who had followed them\u2014and went to the small house. She didn't get a chance to knock on the door before it swung open, revealing Holly.\n\n\"Granny she's here,\" Holly said even as she beckoned Keturah inside. The first thing Keturah noticed was the heat. Despite the warmth of the summer air, the fireplace was blazing. Then she noticed an odd odor in the room before setting her sights on the large bed that held Lila. Dressed in just a white shift, the young woman looked to be struggling to breathe, struggling to move, struggling to live.\n\nGranny Newman stood at the foot of the bed, between Lila's legs. Keturah watched as she tossed a filthy rag into a bucket. \"Holly, wipe Lila down. Keturah, let's talk outside the cabin,\" the old woman said, her voice brooking no nonsense.\n\nKeturah went back outside and Granny Newman came out shortly thereafter, slamming the door shut.\n\nAfter inhaling and exhaling a few times, Granny turned to her, her arms folded over her chest. \"You're wonderin' why I sent for you.\"\n\n\"I am,\" Keturah said, nodding slowly. \"I did bring some peppermint and ginger. I didn't have any cattail or sage but those might help with stomach pains as well. I also like to use\u2014,\"\n\n\"You have knowledge about healin'.\" Granny said, cutting her off. Gone was the little old lady who knitted at sewing circle and before her stood a woman who had fought many battles. Some she had lost, most she had won.\n\n\"I have knowledge about different properties of plants,\" Keturah corrected. Spreading her hands out, she took a step closer to the old woman. \"That's a horse of another color.\" How many times did she have to explain that suggesting a plant to eat or take in your tea did not a doctor make?\n\n\"You've never helped with birthin' a baby?\"\n\n\"No ma'am.\" Keturah shook her head. No one had ever asked her to help with birthing a baby. And quite frankly, she was glad of that. The whole process seemed distressing in the extreme.\n\n\"Well, we need you.\"\n\nKeturah shook her head, her thoughts spinning. Need her for what? Delivering babies? The devil was a lie. \"I've never been married and I've never given birth.\" Every midwife Keturah had ever known had either been a wife or mother. Usually both. \"Granny,\" she said slowly since Granny did not appear to be hearing her. \"All I do is recommend different plants to drink and eat for an upset stomach and maybe for a fever. I don't sit at bedsides, I don't comfort people, I don't cut on people, I don't sew up people, I don't touch blood, and I don't touch other things that come out of people besides blood.\" Basically, all the things that involved birthing babies. She advised and then she left. And she liked it that way.\n\nThey were standing next to the window, light pouring through, and so Keturah saw when Granny raised an eyebrow. \"You kinda old to have never had a baby.\"\n\nKeturah threw her hands in the air for a second. \"No baby. No man.\" She took a step back, hoping these two things absolved her from helping with Lila and any other pregnant woman. But most everyone's standards, she wasn't a lady, she certainly wasn't genteel, but even at Salis they never picked an unmarried, childless woman to train for such a position.\n\n\"Keturah, I'm gettin' old. I'm not gettin' no younger and I've been prayin' that the Lord would send me someone to train. I think he sent you.\"\n\n\"What about Holly?\" Keturah asked, pointing at the door. \"Why can't you train, Holly?\"\n\n\"Cause Holly ain't got the right temperament for it. She be on the floor cryin' and hollerin' right alongside the mamas.\"\n\n\"I don't have\u2014,\"\n\n\"Yes, you do. Bein' a midwife is mostly easy once you get the gist of it. But sometimes there are some hard decisions a body has to make. You can make 'em.\"\n\nKeturah shook her head, bewildered. \"You don't know me, Granny. You can't say somethin' like that.\"\n\n\"No,\" the woman said, nodding. \"I don't know you. But I know you get bothered when others are in pain. I know you have a desire to help those that you can, friends and strangers alike. I know that you've been through some hard times and can shoulder a few more. And I know that I'm not goin' to just be teachin' you, but that you'll be teachin' me.\"\n\nKeturah looked away, her hands fisted at her sides. Who said she could shoulder more pain? What about her said that she was willing to walk through the fire for someone else's sake? She never had before.\n\n\"You've got a gift and when God gives a gift, He expects you to use it.\"\n\nWhat gift? She could memorize passages of things and she could match plants with illnesses. None of those things were particularly special. What was it that Granny was seeing in her that she didn't see?\n\nBut Granny wasn't done. \"When he calls you to use it, know it's gonna be hard. He never calls us to easy things, Keturah. That's why I picked you. Birthin' babies will be the most challengin' thing you ever do in your life but if you let it, it will also be the most rewardin'. Lila, is fine in there. She's fine. I sent for you cause I thought it would be a good time to start your trainin'. Prove me right, Keturah. Prove to me that you've got the mettle to do this.\" With one last sharp look, Granny Newman went back into the house.\n\nShe left the door open, leaving Keturah standing there, deciding what to do." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "\"And so then, I said, God don't like ugly, Viola Lacey,\" Waylon told Manny for the third time in as many minutes.\n\n\"That's not even in the Bible,\" Manny snapped, annoyed. Why did this always happen to him? Why was Sam never the one behind the counter when Waylon came by the store? Manny's patience was already incredibly thin when it came to the man but combined with his lack of sleep and his worry about the future, he was minutes from tossing the man out the door.\n\n\"How you know? I bet you ain't never read it. Who you think you are? The Reverend?\" Waylon asked, and then slapped his knee like it was the funniest comment in the world.\n\nManny leaned across the store counter. \"Would you like to really know what I think, Waylon?\"\n\nManny felt a hand clamp onto his shoulder. And then pressure. Sam. \"Afternoon, Waylon. What brings you in here? I hope it's not gossip.\"\n\n\"Of course not, Reverend Day. I would never... ,\"\n\nManny exchanged a quick look with Sam before leaving his brother at the counter and disappearing into the storage room. He moved to stand behind some boxes, making sure he was clear out the way of anybody's eyesight and then crouched down, praying the same prayer he had been praying for the last few days. The one that God was failing to answer. \"Lord, what do I do?\"\n\nHis mind went back to two days ago... and the reason he found himself constantly in prayer.\n\n\"Sam. That you?\" the white man had called out, rifle in hand as he stomped his way down the sidewalk.\n\nManny had crossed the road, quickly jumping onto the wooden plats of the walkway and coming to a stop in front of the store. He wouldn't respond as to who he was until he saw who he was talking to.\n\n\"Sam, it's me. Virgil Watts. Otis's son.\"\n\nThe last part, Manny didn't need. In the dim light of the evening, he recognized him. \"Manny.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I'm Manny, not Sam.\"\n\n\"Oh. Alright. Listen, you'll never guess what's happened. Can we talk in the store?\"\n\nManny touched the pocket in his pants, felt his keys. \"I'll open it.\" It was probably best their conversation was inside anyway.\n\nUnlocking the door, he motioned for Virgil to go in first and then shut the door behind them. Manny went around to the counter and lit the only lantern they had in the front of the store. It wasn't all that common for them to work after dark. Those days were long since behind them.\n\n\"What's happened?\" Manny asked, placing the flat of his hands onto the counter before him.\n\nVirgil set his shotgun in a corner and swung a bag over his shoulder. \"I come to get some tobacco. We were robbed. Yesterday, these two men come into the store. I wasn't there, mind you, but Pa and Percy were. Percy said the men had Missouri accents. What a Missouri man is doin' in Oklahoma Territory, I'll never know. Wait, did you hear what happened with Hank Tanner at the livery?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Manny said simply.\n\n\"It was the same two men. Pa and Hank compared notes. Both men are tall, but one of 'em has an ugly scar that runs down his cheek, Percy said. The scarred one has dark black hair and brown eyes. The other one is a redhead with blue eyes and lots of freckles. Percy said they are in their thirties or thereabouts. Just lettin' you know in case you come across them. It is plum terrible that we don't have a sheriff in these parts, Sam.\"\n\nThe very last thing Riverside needed was a sheriff. He might take it in his head to enforce the Fugitive Slave law or something. But all Manny said was, \"Yep.\"\n\n\"Anyway, Percy said the two men entered when no one else was in the store but him and Pa. They demanded that Pa tell them who had come passin' through the store a couple of weeks ago.\"\n\n\"That could be anybody,\" Manny said, his mouth dropping open slightly.\n\nVirgil tilted his head from side to side. \"It's actually less folks than you think. Let's face it, Sam. The land's not that great to farm out here. If you're not too careful you might upset the Indians, and no one wants to upset them. Most folks live in town to make money off any travelers passin' through, red, white, or Negro. And then, on top of that, they only wanted the names of travelers to the south of Riverside. It only came down to three people.\"\n\nManny resisted the urge to bring his hands to his face. He had never heard worse news.\n\n\"So, Pa gave them the names.\"\n\n\"He did what?!\"\n\nVirgil sent Manny an affronted look. \"They had guns! What else was he gonna do?\"\n\n\"I think I was there,\" Manny said with an exhale. Though, he didn't think. He knew. The tips of his fingers were white against the counter.\n\n\"Yeah, Pa actually forgot you were there.\"\n\nManny felt a rush of relief so real, he almost laughed.\n\n\"But he did tell them that south of us was really only a Negro town called Arrow Creek so who knows what those men might do. They left shortly thereafter but not before stealin' all our tobacco. Pa sent me here to buy up yours. We ain't payin' full price neither. It came through our store first anyway.\"\n\nManny had neither the time nor the energy to argue with Virgil Watts. At a discounted price, he sold what tobacco they had to the man as quick as he could and ushered Virgil out the store.\n\nManny, still crouched down in the back of the store, stood up slowly. He placed his hands on his waist and shook his head. Had he brought trouble to Arrow Creek? The last thing a town filled with runaway slaves needed was trouble. But, he thought back to that day and he distinctly recalled the Lord telling him to go back, to speak to that man, Emerson Yates. \"Lord, I need some guidance here, I don't know what to do,\" he prayed softly. The only thing that had been coming to his mind for the past few days was that he needed to brush off his skills with his gun. It had been ages since he had practiced shooting. He just wasn't sure if that was God or fear talking.\n\n\"Manny?\"\n\nManny stepped from behind the boxes to see Sam.\n\n\"Got rid of Waylon for you,\" Sam said, a rueful expression on his face. \"I thought you were gonna lay him flat out.\"\n\n\"I thought I was too. I think that every time I see him.\"\n\nSam laughed and then paused. \"Say, Manny, has somethin' been on your mind lately? You've seemed a bit stressed.\"\n\n\"We'll talk later,\" Manny said quickly before Sam could say more. \"I promised Amos I would personally deliver that order of iron or metal or whatever that heavy stuff is in that box. Help me put it in the wagon?\"\n\nFor a second, Sam just stared at him and Manny read every emotion that flitted across his brother's face: confusion, frustration, hurt. He would deal with Sam later. But now was not the time. With a short exhale, Sam moved his hands to his waist. \"Bring the wagon around and I'll help you move it.\"\n\nAmos's smithy was shaped almost like a small barn though it was far from that on the inside. The wooden building had a dirt floor, a large brick fireplace in the center of it, and anvils and tables and even a cabinet or two scattered throughout. Hanging from beams crisscrossing above their heads were horseshoes and other metal things that either Amos or Benji had made. The doors of the building were open wide to allow for a cool breeze to blow through the place every so often, and so Amos and Benji saw when he pulled up.\n\n\"Mornin' Manny,\" Amos said. They had been living together long enough that Amos could tell him and Sam apart with no problem. Amos was Sam's father-in-law, and in many ways, he had become like an actual father to Sam. It was a relationship that Manny recognized that Sam needed. As for himself, the days of longing for a father had long gone by the wayside years ago. He needed someone else telling him what to do like he needed a stone in his boot. He was very satisfied with the good Lord as his father. And quite frankly, the good Lord was full of enough guidance and commands that he couldn't imagine adding another person on top of that.\n\n\"Hey, Amos,\" Manny said as he pulled the wagon to a stop. He noticed that Benji said nothing, just continued to hammer at whatever he was working on.\n\nAmos pulled on some chain that was hanging from the ceiling and the furnace made an answering noise. The smithy was an interesting place. While the store was being built, Manny had spent some time walking around the smithy and asking a million questions. Unfortunately, his guides had been Gid and Sol at the time and neither of them had much knowledge or experience with the smithy. Now, in the very back of the building, he saw Sol sweeping in the corner. Amos had no desire to train either Sol or Gid as blacksmiths as neither one of them had shown the least bit interest in making it their profession. But there wasn't much else for them to do in Arrow Creek. Most everyone they knew who had a trade had more than enough relatives to pass the trade onto. For now, Amos prayed on it.\n\nManny climbed down from the wagon and walked around to the back to lower the flap. Amos met him there. \"Can I climb up and make sure they sent me what I asked for?\"\n\n\"Course you can.\" Knowing that might take a minute, Manny walked further into the smithy to have a look around. Sol gave him a small wave. Benji continued hammering away at whatever he was working on.\n\n\"He's mad at you,\" Sol said helpfully, sweeping dirt back and forth as he made his way close to Manny. \"He thinks you're tryin' to steal Keturah Hollis away from him.\"\n\n\"Sol, you shut up!\" Benji said, turning on the younger boy. Manny had forgotten all about how sweet Benji was on Keturah. And Benji was a sensitive one. He didn't take jokes made at his expense well and every little offense was personal. It didn't mean Manny didn't mess with him every and now then, but he wasn't unaware of who he was dealing with.\n\nManny raised his hands to his chest, palms in the air. Innocence was always the best defense. And he lived with Benji. He wasn't in the mood to deal with sullen looks and loaded silences... and the boy could do both in spades. \"I can explain.\" Both Benji and Sol stared at him with rapt attention. \"Now, y'all remember how it was when we first got here and there were things we didn't know?\" Sol and Benji nodded in unison. \"Well, there are some things that Keturah doesn't know. There was an item she needed from the store and I didn't want to embarrass her by presentin' it in front of everybody. So, I asked to walk her home. She's made no indication that she fancies me, Benji.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" the young man said, dropping his eyes and biting his lip in embarrassment.\n\n\"If you can woo her, go on and try. With my blessin',\" Manny said kindly. He didn't think Benji had snowball's chance in July of wooing Keturah Hollis.\n\nSol gave his brother a gentle push. \"See, Manny's always been fair with us. You should have trusted him.\"\n\nManny tried not to wince. After all he was in fact trying to woo Keturah himself. He just wasn't about to act like a dog in the manger. He didn't want a woman who didn't want him and if Keturah was partial to Benji in any way he wasn't going to try and interfere with that. At the same time, he knew women well enough to know when they fancied a fella and from what he had seen at Sunday supper, Keturah barely noticed that Benji existed.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Manny,\" Benji said, shrugging. A sheepish smile crossed his lips.\n\n\"Boys come on help me get this down,\" Amos called from the entrance, apparently happy with his order.\n\n\"Where's Gid?\" Manny hadn't seen him anywhere.\n\n\"Where is Gid?\" Sol asked, annoyed. \"I ask that question every day and I rarely have an answer.\"\n\n\"We should do another music night,\" Benji said, cutting Sol off. \"I heard Laura tell Sam this mornin' that they might go visit with Joe and Lila and their new baby. I'm gonna try and get Pa to go visit Mr. Lacey.\"\n\nManny, walking backwards towards the wagon, clasped his hands together. \"Y'all know I love me some music. I will be there,\" he said. As though he had something else to do with his time in the evenings. And it would take his mind off of the little situation that was trying to hang over his head like a cloud. Lord, why won't you just answer me! God's silence on the matter was starting to make him a bit anxious.\n\nAnd that anxiety stayed with him as he helped unload the wagon with the boys and Amos and even as he headed back. It really had been too long since he had fired his weapon. He was turning the wagon at the corner on the road when he caught sight of Keturah taking determined strides down the sidewalk, Casca at her side.\n\nHe pulled the wagon to a stop. \"Miss Hollis!\" She stopped and looked over at him, a question in her eyes. \"Ever been target shootin'?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Why exactly had she agreed to go target shooting with Manny? It was the thought that kept being repeated over and over in Keturah's head as she, on Titania, followed Manny to wherever it was that they were going.\n\nShe had been headed to the store to see if she could order a book on midwifery. She wasn't completely sold on taking up this profession and while she had no doubts that Granny knew what she was doing, she wasn't sure she trusted the old woman to tell her the truth of exactly what it was she getting into.\n\nThe night before had been enlightening... and not necessarily in a good way.\n\n\"This is my birthin' bag,\" Granny had said when she finally entered Joe and Lila's small cabin. Granny had held up an old, cracked, leather valise. She opened it and then indicated for Keturah to look inside. \"I've got scissors for cuttin', oil for stretchin', sutures for sewin'\u2014,\"\n\n\"Cuttin' what? Sewin' what?\" Keturah had asked even as she cringed. She had some ideas as to what Granny was talking about, but she was hoping that her ideas were wrong.\n\n\"Cain't afford to hold your nose in the air when it comes to birthin' babies, Keturah. Very little about this is pretty.\"\n\nKeturah's response was to press her lips together. Tightly. She had never been under the delusion that this would be a walk in the park. That still didn't mean she was ready for specific details. And she still wasn't convinced that this was what God wanted her to do\u2014no matter what Granny said\u2014but she had decided that she could humor the woman for one birth.\n\nBut Granny hadn't come to play. She tossed all kinds of information at her.\n\n\"Bein' a midwife doesn't start at the labor. A good midwife starts well before, preparin' the mama...\"\n\n\"A woman's body already knows what to do, yo job is to walk the mama through it...\"\n\n\"You shouldn't have to stick your hand in there unless there's a problem. One time I went to a birthin' for a woman who had had ten children. Girl, her womb was so large, I had to stick my hand in there and find where the baby was floatin' at. That one had so much room, he didn't want to come out at all... ,\"\n\n\"Job ain't done after the baby born. Cain't forget the afterbirth.\"\n\nThe night had been both long and short and at the end of it, Granny had told her that a woman named Ida was due any day now and next time it would be her turn to do all the hard work.\n\nKeturah still wasn't sure what she thought about that statement.\n\n\"Do you know where we are?\" Manny asked as he climbed down from his horse.\n\nKeturah looked across the expanse of land before her, taking in the grass and the various patches of dandelions and ragweed and foxtail throughout. If she had known the types of plants that would be growing out here, she would have brought a bag and some damp cloth to carry some back to her own garden. But she thought back to Manny's question, noting that not five feet away from them was a fence. \"No,\" she said, shaking her head. \"But I haven't exactly gone explorin'.\"\n\n\"Your brother's land. He brought me out here to teach me how to shoot. Figured it's not trespassin' if I have his sister with me,\" Manny said, smiling broadly. He walked over to Titania, his arms raised, helping her down.\n\nOnce on the ground, Keturah took another glance around the land. It was wide and beautiful and completely untouched. \"How much is his?\"\n\n\"Hundreds of acres. Sam and I helped him put up the fence a few months ago.\"\n\n\"How could he buy all this? He's not even reached his majority.\"\n\n\"Strawman. He knows a lot of people, your brother. What he wants done, gets done. Government carved out different parts of Oklahoma and passed it around to different Indian tribes. Arrow Creek was never given out to anyone. Sly arranged for this parcel to belong to him. He's a character, that Sly.\"\n\nShe heard the double entendre. Folding her hands over her chest, she asked, \"You don't like him?\"\n\n\"I have the greatest respect for Sylvester Hollis.\"\n\n\"But you don't like him?\" Most everyone in town were free with their admiration of Sly. He could do no wrong.\n\nManny stuck his hands in his pocket, shrugging. \"I think Sly is one of the smartest people I'll ever have the luxury of meetin'. He's also a know-it-all who I personally enjoy irritatin'. I assure you the feelin' is mutual.\"\n\nKeturah snorted, but a felt a little pride in Sly all the same. \"I wish I had my own opinion of Sylvester. Before this year, the Sly I kept in memory was practically a baby.\"\n\n\"What was he like?\" Manny asked as they both slowly made their way toward the fence, leaving the horses to eat the grass around them while Casca chased after something in the distance.\n\n\"Stubborn,\" Keturah said, shaking her head at the memory. \"But happy stubborn. He was never one for forcin' a fight or a debate or anythin'. But he always had an opinion and it was usually firm. Even as a youngster. He um... ,\" It had been so long since she let herself think of those years, but she found herself wanting to talk about it. A little. \"He was a talker, too. He could talk about anythin' and nothin'. And yet, he knew how to just be by himself. We had two brothers between us and those two were closer in age. It wasn't unusual for them to sneak off if they had free time and leave Sly. But that never bothered Sly much. He got along with everybody... except maybe Papa. Bein' slaves... slavery leaves a lot of people broken and Papa was broken.\" The last word was a whisper. She didn't like to think about her Papa too much. \"They didn't get on, Papa and Sly. They were oil and water. That's what I remember. Now, Sly\u2014from what little I saw of him\u2014is a bit more closed off than when he was a boy. But to be fair, we were never really close. Not like you and Sam.\"\n\nManny leaned against the fence, his back against the wooden railing. \"Sam and I are close,\" he said softly. \"Love my brother more than I love myself. He's like a real part of me, like an extra limb. There are mornin's I wake up and it's not right if I don't hear his voice.\" Manny tilted his head to the side, his lips twisting in wry amusement. \"On those mornin's it's always the same for him. We don't even think about it, just meet out on the front porch sometimes and take in the sunrise.\" Manny glanced over at her. \"I know part of it is cause we're twins and we've been together since the beginnin'. But some of it is cause all we had was each other. Or let me say, all I had was him. Sam had the Lord. I think if we had been sold apart from each other, he would have been fine, but I would have been paralyzed.\"\n\n\"You think he would have been fine?\" Keturah asked. With a relationship like that, she couldn't see it. She still wasn't over the loss of her parents and her brothers and Leo. Seven years later she sometimes still felt like she was walking around with a gaping wound. And close as she had been to all of them, she didn't think any of her relationships quite matched the feelings that twins must have for each other.\n\n\"I think so. In all those years we were in Kentucky, he learned to rely on God. I learned to rely on him. And now... ,\" he let his words die out and sent her a small, humorless smile. \"Things are changin', let's just leave it at that.\"\n\nFor some time, there was nothing but the sound of wind rustling the leaves of trees nearby and Casca barking not too far away. Birds fluttered above their heads, headed to some mysterious location. Keturah walked over to the fence, next to Manny, mimicking his position. Weren't they supposed to be practicing their shooting? But it wasn't as if she had come out here to really shoot in the first place. This was what? Only the third or fourth time she had met this man? She felt like she could talk to him forever. About anything. And it wasn't that they agreed on everything. It was just that it was all so easy.\n\n\"I helped Granny deliver Lila's baby's last night. Sort of.\"\n\nA look of surprise crossed Manny's face. \"You're a midwife?\"\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\nManny laughed. \"They got you girl, didn't they?\"\n\nKeturah sent him a rueful look. \"Granny wants me to be a midwife. She says she's trainin' me.\" She couldn't stop her nose from wrinkling. \"She says I have a gift from God and if it's from God, then not only do I need to use it, it's not goin' to be easy.\"\n\n\"Not what you want?\"\n\nShe sent him a look that made him laugh. \"The birth was... it was somethin' else,\" she said softly, casting her mind back to the night before. \"Seein' the baby be born was not so bad, but everythin' up until that point?\" Keturah shuddered and Manny laughed again.\n\n\"I saw a calf bein' born before. It looked messy.\"\n\n\"It's just as messy with a human baby. I only wanted to have one child before I saw all of that and now, I know I only want to have one child.\n\nManny's eyebrows raised to the sky. \"So, you are plannin' on marryin' one day?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, nodding. \"But I'm not lookin' for romance. I can do without all of that again. I figure I can find an older, mature man and still be happy.\"\n\n\"Older and mature?\" Manny asked, staring at her as though she were odd. But she was used to the look. And because the look in his eye didn't feel malicious, she wasn't bothered by it.\n\n\"You know, someone like Amos.\"\n\n\"Amos?!\" Manny's voice sounded strangled. \"Amos could be my father.\"\n\n\"I'm just sayin', he's older and set in his ways and already has all the children he probably wants\u2014,\"\n\n\"Amos!\" Manny repeated. He stared at her in disbelief. She refused to feel self-conscious about her choice.\n\n\"He's a very handsome man.\"\n\n\"He could be your father. I can't believe you want to marry an old man.\"\n\n\"Amos isn't old! I didn't say I wanted to marry an old man. I said I wanted to marry an older, more mature man who would have less demands on my time and affection.\"\n\n\"Wow,\" Manny said, shaking his head. \"Just... wow.\"\n\n\"Don't get mad just because I know exactly what I want.\"\n\n\"But do you?\" Manny asked. He shook his head again in disbelief.\n\nTurning the tables on him, she said, \"Are you plannin' to get married? You want everyone to think you're some kind of heathen so I'm not sure what kind of woman you're tryin' to attract.\" The expression on Manny's face could only be described as shock. \"What? Do you think you'll explain to her that you've secretly been a believer all this time and she will magically believe you? This is, of course, assumin' you want to marry a woman of faith. I mean, I guess it's possible it'll all work out, you're good-lookin' enough that someone will take you.\"\n\nManny's lips were pressed tightly together, and he shook his head. \"I'm good-lookin' enough that someone will take me,\" he repeated the words in disbelief. \"Girl, you need to go ahead and admit I'm the best thing you've ever seen. The list for who will take me is long.\"\n\nKeturah's eyes rolled so hard it almost hurt.\n\nNext to her he laughed softy. \"Alright. You make a point. To be fair, I wasn't givin' marriage much thought until recently.\"\n\n\"How recently?\"\n\n\"About the time I met you?\"\n\nKeturah made a face. \"Don't flirt with me, Manny. That's not what we do.\" The words came out more biting than she intended. The flirting, the teasing, she had done all of that with Leo. She didn't want to do that with another man.\n\nShe felt the intensity of Manny's gaze and she found herself practically counting the yellow leaves of the dandelion at her foot.\n\n\"Alright then,\" he said, after a moment. He stuck his hands in his pockets. \"Explain to me the real problem with bein' a midwife.\"\n\nKeturah exhaled slowly. This. This was why she had come out here with him. Because she had spent years of her life keeping her thoughts and concerns contained and it was so nice to share them with someone who wanted to listen. And who didn't get frustrated with her. \"It's... a huge responsibility, it's... ,\"\n\n\"A forced intimacy,\" Manny said, finishing her statement. \"A forced connection.\"\n\nThat was not quite what she was going to say. But now that she thought on it, he wasn't wrong. And now she needed to have a bit of a debate. With herself. To figure out what the real problem was.\n\n\"Maybe. Listen. Are we gonna to shoot somethin' or what?\"\n\n\"Done talkin'?\" Manny asked, a grin on his face again.\n\n\"For the moment. Of course, the floor is always open for you to share your dark and deepest secrets.\" She made sure to wave a hand towards the empty field before them. Manny clapped his hands together. \"Let's shoot.\"\n\nKeturah walked over to Titania where her gun and some bullets were tucked into her saddlebag.\n\n\"You shoot like your brother?\"\n\n\"I've never really seen Sly shoot. He mostly stood next to me and gave instructions.\" He had been stern and focused and almost entirely humorless about the whole thing. And he had winced at least five times. She had counted.\n\n\"I've not seen that many men shootin' for the sake of shootin' but your brother\u2014and if you tell him this I'll deny I ever said a thing\u2014is the best at shootin' anythin'. Movin' targets, faraway targets, anythin'. So,\" he said, his grin teasing. \"How good are you?\"\n\n\"Good enough to wipe that grin off your face,\" she countered, knowing full well she was only tolerable. Sly had ended their lesson by saying that the chest was a large target and that was all she needed to hit anyway. \"What's our mark?\"\n\n\"Just that group of trees over there.\" He pointed to somewhere over the fence.\n\n\"Why are you out here practicin' your shootin' by the way?\" The question had only come to her just now.\n\nManny's open expression shuttered close. \"It's a long and complicated story.\"\n\nWell. At least he didn't lie to her. She wondered if it had anything to do with his meeting with Sly that one time. What had Sly said? It was plum amazin' how some folks got drawn into things. She knew Manny now well enough to know that whatever it was, it probably wasn't something nefarious. She hoped. \"Let me know if you ever want to talk about it. You let me ramble on, and I am willin' to do the same.\"\n\nManny glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. \"Thank you.\"\n\nShe opened her mouth to say more when she heard the sound of pounding hooves behind them. Both she and Manny turned. They didn't move as the man on the horse came closer and closer. She didn't recognize him, but Manny didn't look too worried.\n\nThe man pulled his horse to a stop a few feet away from them. \"Lacey said he saw you come out this way. Are you Keturah? The midwife?\"\n\nThe midwife? She was not a midwife. Surely it took more than attending one birth to attain such a title.\n\n\"That's Barnabas Lee. His wife Ida was very heavy with child last I saw,\" Manny told Keturah out of the side of his mouth. After a moment, Manny cleared his throat. In a louder voice, he said, \"This is Keturah Hollis.\"\n\nShe turned to look at him feeling slightly betrayed.\n\n\"Well, it's true!\" he said defensively. \"I'm not sayin' you have to go but you're still Keturah Hollis.\"\n\n\"Miss Hollis, can you come with me?\" Barnabas Lee said, his voice pleading. \"My wife Ida is havin' our baby and Granny says she needs you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Keturah looked terrified. There was no other word for it.\n\n\"There are two midwives in the Bible,\" he murmured to her.\n\n\"What?\" she asked, blinking at him.\n\n\"You're probably largely unfamiliar with that story seein' as how you only read the book of Psalms.\"\n\nKeturah straightened, lifting her small nose in the air. Fear gone and that all-knowing look taking its place. \"I'll have you to know that now that I have access to the entire Bible, I have been readin' more than the book of Psalms.\"\n\n\"After you deliver this baby go read the beginnin' of the book of Exodus. Learn you some proper midwivin'.\"\n\nThe look she sent him was one of great annoyance, but at least she didn't look afraid anymore. He helped her onto Titania and slapped the horse's backside after she had gotten comfortable. He whistled loudly, clapped his hands. \"Come on, Casca. Your mistress is leavin'.\" The dog came bounding fast from wherever it had been lolling about and caught up quickly with Keturah and Barnabas.\n\nManny went over to his own horse and pulled out his shotgun. With Keturah there, he had been planning to only practice with his revolver but now he may as well put some work into it. He loaded the weapon, thinking on her and her words. As he had suspected, the more he got to know her, the more he liked her. And while she seemed to like him, it didn't appear to be in the same way. He cocked his weapon, aimed, fired. Well, it wasn't as if he didn't already have a lot on his plate as is." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Manny returned to the store a few hours later to see Sam walking up and down the aisles with paper and pencil, taking inventory.\n\n\"It's time to go back to Riverside,\" Manny said as he took his place behind the counter.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Sam muttered as he stared hard at something on the paper before him.\n\n\"We should have a couple of orders waitin' for us there.\"\n\n\"Yeah. I'll go in the mornin'.\"\n\n\"I can go,\" Manny said. He began to carefully rearrange the different things on the store's counter, avoiding Sam's stare. \"I don't mind.\"\n\nThe door to the store opened before Sam could give his reply. Sauntering into the store with grins on their faces were the Lacey girls. The grins were a bit hesitant though, they weren't sure if he was Sam.\n\n\"I hope you girls have been readin' your Bibles today,\" Manny said carefully, making sure his voice was deep and his tone serious.\n\nThe four of them snapped to, their grins gone. \"Yes, Reverend Day,\" Viola said, her tone serious. \"Mama doesn't let a day go by without us readin' God's Word.\"\n\nManny flicked his eyes to his brother who watched them all from across the store. Sam shook his head slowly, clearly annoyed with Manny. He never found this as amusing as Manny did. And well, he was already none too happy with Manny.\n\n\"That's good to know, Viola,\" Sam said, causing all four of the girls' heads to swivel to the back of the store. Caroline turned back and made a face at Manny. \"Tell your mama, I look forward to seein' her on Sunday.\" Sam turned back to face the items on the shelves, no longer interested in the conversation.\n\nViola, Esther, Caroline, and Fanny turned to Manny. He gave a very elaborate shrug. \"How could I resist?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "The next morning, Manny was hooking Cain and Abel up to the wagon when Sam came outside dressed for the shop. His brother looked exhausted and that was no surprise. In the middle of the night, Old Man Clancy, a free man who had bought himself out of freedom but was old as dirt, had sent for Sam. His plot of land was a good ten miles south of Arrow Creek. The old man had come to service every Sunday that Sam had started preaching and when he found himself at death's door had sent one of his friends to fetch Sam to come pray. Sam had only come back a few hours ago. Old Man Clancy was dead, and Sam was tired. The life of a reverend, Manny had come to see, was almost that akin to a doctor.\n\n\"I should be comin' with you,\" Sam said, rubbing his eyes and yawning so widely Manny heard his jaw snap.\n\n\"You're tired. Go to the store, sit behind the counter, and catnap until customers come in.\"\n\nSam rubbed at his eyes again. \"I'd tell you to take someone, but you've been uncommonly stubborn these past few weeks.\"\n\nManny had thought on taking someone\u2014like Gid\u2014but what if he did by some token run into danger? The very last thing he would want to do was get that boy involved.\n\n\"I'll be fine, Sam.\"\n\n\"Mmm hmm,\" Sam said, his lips thin. Sam stuck his hands in his pants pockets, rocking back slightly on his heels. Manny was lucky to have a brother who didn't push, but mostly listened. If the shoe were on the other foot, he would not have moved until Sam told him exactly what was going on. That said, he had about three more days before Sam exploded. And he would need every single one of them. He still didn't know what he would tell his brother.\n\nManny climbed into the wagon, slapped the reins, and was on his way. He didn't get very far.\n\n\"Hey!\" The voice was Gid's. \"Wait for me!\"\n\nManny brought the wagon to a stop just a few feet from their house. Gid was running with a floppy hat on his head, a basket on his arm, and a fishing rod in hand. Manny leaned over, extended his hand, and pulled Gid up onto the wagon seat next to him.\n\n\"Your pa know where you goin'?\"\n\n\"As a matter of fact, he does,\" Gid said, wrinkling his nose in Manny's direction. Manny got the horses going again. \"Sister was wishin' we had more for supper than just chicken tonight and I volunteered to go fishin' for us all.\"\n\n\"Hard work.\"\n\nGid's voice was grave when he answered. \"Somebody has to do it.\" Then the boy laughed at himself. \"Sol might come and join me if I'm not back by noon.\"\n\n\"Every time I look up, you're gettin' out of work.\"\n\n\"Am not. You be tryin' to get out of work too.\"\n\n\"Course I do. How you think I know what you're up to?\"\n\nGid shook his head, laughing again.\n\nManny couldn't imagine what it must be like to be so carefree. He hoped his nephew would one day experience skipping chores for a lazy day of fishing.\n\n\"We had fun last night, didn't we?\"\n\n\"We sure did.\" They had worked on some more melodies and lyrics.\n\n\"I've been tryin' and tryin' to think what else we could do on one of our men's nights and I cain't think of nothin'. We done tried gamblin', drinkin'\u2014,\"\n\n\"Um, not quite,\" Manny said quickly. He could only begin to imagine how Amos would react if he heard their activities described in such a way.\n\n\"Ain't much else left... 'cept maybe women.\"\n\n\"I draw the line there, son,\" Manny said, elbowing Gid in his side. Not that they exactly had a place in town where a fella could just talk to a girl. Riverside had a saloon and even had the occasional Negro girl working there, but even if such things didn't go against Manny's faith, there was no way on God's green earth he would take the boys there.\n\nBut all Gid did was smile some more. \"Benji's all hung up on Keturah Hollis and I think he should give up now.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Manny asked, sitting up. \"How come?\"\n\n\"Cause I can tell she's older than him\u2014and I'm not talkin' 'bout age.\"\n\n\"How very insightful of you.\"\n\n\"You like her too. Don't think I didn't catch that. Keturah is awful pretty.\"\n\n\"Alright now, Gid\u2014,\"\n\n\"And I think Sol's got a hankerin' for Livy Carson. I don't know why. That girl never shuts up.\"\n\n\"Livy Carson?\" Manny repeated. \"Tell him the last thing he wants is to be kin to Waylon Sanders.\"\n\nNext to him Gid shook with laughter. \"I sure will.\"\n\nThey rode the next ten minutes ribbing each other until Gid had to get off or miss the creek entirely. \"You be careful out there now. I expect a whole passel of fish at supper tonight.\"\n\n\"And you're gonna get it!\" The boy ran off towards his destination, barefoot and happy. And still young enough to reclaim parts of his childhood.\n\nManny drove on.\n\nIn the few weeks since Manny had been to Riverside, nothing had changed. Everything looked the same. Manny wasn't sure why he expected it to be different. He drove past Mr. McCally and went around to the back of the store where Perry, Otis's son was waiting with his goods.\n\n\"Pa's inside dealin' with a customer,\" Perry told him when Manny pulled the wagon to a stop. \"Here's your mail and your papers.\" Perry handed him the same. Manny tossed all of it onto the wagon seat. In Perry's hand was another sheet of paper. \"I think this is all you ordered, right?\"\n\nManny took the paper from him, recognizing his brother's handwriting. \"Yes.\"\n\nTogether, Manny and Perry began loading up the wagon with the boxes of goods. All the while, Manny debated whether to ask Perry about the gunmen who had robbed them of their tobacco or to leave things be. Finally, when they got down to the last box, Manny reluctantly spoke. \"Your brother came by the store and told me what happened with you and your pa and those gunmen.\"\n\nPerry shot Manny a look of frustration, but Manny could tell that it wasn't aimed at him. \"It's all about this man named Emerson Yates. He done disappeared. Probably crossed the wrong Indian and ended up six feet under. Now we've got all kinds of folks comin' out the woodwork tryin' to find some papers the man had with him when he died.\"\n\n\"All kinds of folks?\" Manny asked, happy when his voice came out nonchalant.\n\n\"Yes. First the men what robbed pa and took our tobacco. Then two other men came down claimin' to be the dead man's kin. Except both men's last names are Battles. Both claimed the other was lyin'. But I don't care. Pa don't care. We're done with all of it.\"\n\n\"Battles? I thought the dead man's name was Yates?\" His mind felt like water... and he was swimming through it slowly.\n\n\"Exactly! Supposedly Yates is like a cousin or somethin'. He run off with paperwork that has to do with some big inheritance.\" Perry leaned in close to Manny, his breath smelling like whatever he had eaten for his afternoon meal. \"They both mentioned some relative dyin' and leavin' land and money. Emerson Yates ran off with the paperwork. Why? I would like to know. Their story has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Virgil figures the real deal is whoever finds the paperwork first gets the land and the money.\" Perry leaned back, spreading his hands wide before him. \"And Virgil suspects that it's Kansas land. Those folks done gone crazy up there. Virgil and Pa says we just gonna stay out of it. The last thing we need is John Brown comin' down here killin' us.\"\n\nFrom what Manny could put together about John Brown, the man had more than enough problems of his own and was hardly concerned about family infighting. But he understood Perry's point. From what Amos had read at supper the night before, things had gotten even hotter north of them.\n\nPerry must have read his mind because he said, \"You heard about the Battle of Black Jack, right?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"It's probably in them papers you came to collect. Pa says civil war is on the horizon.\"\n\nManny said nothing. In his mind, civil war was a good thing. They needed to settle this slave business once and for all. He paid his account with Perry but couldn't help asking the man one last question. \"The Battles' men. What do they look like?\"\n\n\"One is old. Older than Pa. Head full of mostly white hair with a white mustache. The other one is young and blonde. Blue eyed, 'bout my age, Pa said.\" Perry's eyes hardened for a second. \"One of 'em hired those thieves what threatened Hank and Wordell and stole our tobacco. Both denied it. I'd force 'em to talk if I could, but Pa said leave it.\"\n\nManny nodded, acknowledging his answer and then climbed back into his wagon. After deliberating, after praying, after stopping to eat a quick lunch and read about the Battle of Black Jack in one of the papers he had just purchased, Manny came to the realization that he could no longer afford to dig his head in the sand and hope that everyone and everything connected to Emerson Yates would somehow disappear.\n\nThe Battles' men, whoever they were, weren't hardly going to stop just because time was rolling by. One of them had already had Emerson Yates killed. When a man was passionate about a thing, it didn't matter who got in his way. After supper that night he would gather up Emerson Yates' things and take them back to the store. It was time he went through them so that when they came, he would be ready." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\"I ain't call you to deliver the baby, she ain't ready yet,\" Granny told Keturah the moment she stepped foot into the house.\n\n\"I'm not!?!\" Ida screeched, stopping her walk across the home to tightly grip the back of one of the chairs she was about to pass.\n\n\"No, you're not,\" Granny said, shooting Ida a look of annoyance. \"Your pains ain't close enough and now I'm out here with all the time in the world. Keturah and I will be back.\" Granny reached for her shawl. \"We gone go for a walk. We won't be far.\"\n\nKeturah walked back outside and Granny followed. \"Where's your bag at?\"\n\n\"My bag?\"\n\n\"Every midwife has a bag.\" Granny scolded as she began to pick up her pace, moving faster than a woman her age should have been able to move. Keturah had to hop a little to catch up. \"Where's your bag at girl?\" the old woman repeated.\n\n\"I'm not a midwife yet... ,\" she started but didn't finish when Granny sent her a sharp look. \"Besides, I wasn't even home when Mr. Lee came lookin' for me. I was out.\" Why she felt like she had to defend herself was beyond her. But Granny's stare put her in mind of the look her own mama would send her when she had done wrong.\n\n\"Where was you?\"\n\n\"Um... ,\" she didn't want to admit that she had been out alone with Manny Day. Granny slowed down long enough to stare her down. \"Went out for target practice with Manny Day.\"\n\nGranny's eyebrows rose to her hairline. \"Well now, I can't say I saw that one comin'.\"\n\n\"There's nothin' to see comin'.\"\n\n\"Known Manny 'bout six mounts now. Never known him to go anywhere alone with a woman.\"\n\n\"We just like to talk.\" That sounded bad even to her.\n\n\"Uh huh. Anyway, a midwife always keeps her bag on her. Like the good book says you gotta be ready in season and out of season. At least when you for sure know a baby might be droppin' at any second. What are you supposed to have in your bag?\" Granny asked, quizzing her.\n\n\"Oil, scissors.\" Keturah touched two of her fingers on the opposite hand and then moved to the third. \"Um...\"\n\n\"Soap. Don't forget soap. If your hands are clean it helps with keepin' away childbed fever. Don't ask me why. I learned that from a white doctor not five years ago. I ain't had a mama get childbed fever since. Use the soapy water for the scissors too. What are the scissors for?\"\n\n\"Cuttin' the cord.\"\n\n\"Oil?\"\n\n\"For... stretchin'.\"\n\n\"I once helped a woman deliver a baby that did a lot of peepin'. His head was in, his head was out. He did that for nigh unto two hours. I had to rub the mama down with that oil regularly, so she didn't tear. You don't want no tearin'. That's bad business. Remember a woman's body knows how to have a baby, but you still have to be there to tell her when to push and when not to push. Got it?\"\n\nShe did not have it. She wasn't sure she had anything, but she nodded. \"I think so.\"\n\n\"Make sure the oil's warm. Nobody wants anythin' cold down there.\" Keturah couldn't help the face she made and in return she received one of Granny's annoyed looks.\n\n\"Bein' a midwife is helpin' nature do what is natural.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Keturah said, but she was still grimacing.\n\n\"Why do you help others?\"\n\n\"Ma'am?\"\n\n\"Why do you go to the trouble of learnin' 'bout plants and then tellin' others what you know. Why?\"\n\nKeturah exhaled, thinking for a second. \"I don't like the idea of folks' bein' in pain when there's maybe an easy fix. I believe that it honors God to use what He's made to help us,\" Keturah said, giving a little shrug. Everything had a purpose. Everything.\n\nFor a second, Granny's eyes softened. \"Everythin' on your body has a purpose. And you will never see it more than when a woman labors to bring life into the world. It's not all pleasant. I'm not goin' to lie to you. But it's just as rewardin.\" Then Granny's eyes narrowed, and she picked up speed. They were back to the lesson at hand. \"Always make sure there's warm water on hand, cloths to clean the mama and the baby. Bring your own cloths. Clean them well before and after a birth. Can't trust that every house you enter knows how to keep themselves clean. That should be it, at least for the necessary items. You may be called out early like we was today, so bring along some knittin' or somethin' to keep you busy. Maybe a blanket so's you can take a nap. We might be up for all hours of the night with Ida. Get rest when you can get rest.\"\n\nGranny turned and Keturah turned alongside her, desperately wishing she had brought the book Manny had given her so she could take notes. As it was, she repeated Granny's instructions to herself quietly.\n\n\"Midwives serve as confessors. You know that?\"\n\n\"Confessors?\"\n\n\"For unmarried women. It was a thing with white folks. I done delivered Negro babies and white babies. Only at white births was this an issue,\" Granny paused. \"For the most part. Occasionally it was important for Negro women too. The idea is that when a woman is most in pain she won't lie. If she's unmarried and calls out a man's name, he's clearly the father. Iffen they was white, the man had to marry her.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Keturah asked, raising her eyebrows.\n\nGranny sent her a knowing look. \"Girl, that nonsense is foolish, but I said all that to say sometimes you will be told information that you hadn't planned on receivin'. Unless it's life or death, keep your mouth shut. Stay out of folks' bedsheets.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Keturah said, feeling her face warm. She wanted little to do with other folks' bedsheets.\n\n\"Now, right for I ran away, there was somethin' new comin' down the line. Ether and chloroform. Ever heard of it?\"\n\n\"No ma'am.\"\n\n\"It's stuff used to help a woman not be in pain while she gives birth. I never got around to learnin' much about it. But you can iffen you wish. Just so you know, some hesitate to use it cause of the curse of Eve.\"\n\n\"Curse of Eve?\"\n\n\"Women are meant to feel the pain of childbirth or whatever,\" Granny said, rolling her eyes. \"Sounds like men talk. I been meanin' to ask Reverend Day 'bout that. I think it's nonsense. I do hesitate though because a woman has to be able to push. I once went to deliver a white baby and the mama had drank enough laudanum to choke a horse. She couldn't feel nothin'. Didn't want to push at all. That was a hard birth.\"\n\nKeturah blinked. \"It seems like every birth is different.\" She had been hoping that once she learned the right way, that would be it.\n\n\"Every birth is different. 'Bout as different as every woman involved. Let me tell you right now, there ain't no right or wrong way to give birth. A woman can give birth anyway that's best for her. She can be on her hands and knees, she can be on her back, she can give birth on her side, she can be standin', leanin', whatever works for her. Got it?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Keturah said, trying not feel overwhelmed.\n\n\"Don't get all worried and whatnot on me. I'm here, ain't I? I've got some time left, child.\" Right. Keturah exhaled. And she had yet to agree to be the midwife! Or so she told herself. It was beginning to look like it was too late to make a decision cause it had already been made. \"Just so you know, you deliverin' Ida's baby. Only so much talk can do. Gonna have to jump in and get it done. I wish I could hurry the girl up, but I have learned you cain't rush these kinds of things. Used to be a midwife I knew who tried to speed things along by using ergot... ergot... ,\"\n\n\"Ergot fungi?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"That should only be used after the baby is born,\" Keturah said, squinting her eyes as she remembered the properties of the plant. \"To use it before the birth increases the chances of the baby bein' born stillborn.\"\n\nGranny hummed. They were circling back to the house now. \"I didn't know that. Guess it's a good thing I never used it. How did you know that?\"\n\n\"Was owned by a druggist. I remember him sayin' that.\" Keturah had soaked in every word that left Doc Platt's mouth whether he was talking to himself, to a client, or consulting with a physician. \"I never could reason out as to why you would use it after the birth though.\"\n\n\"Probably for the afterbirth. Most times it comes right out. But sometimes you have to wait on it. Sounds to me like ergot fungi might be helpful in them times.\"\n\n\"Most herbs shouldn't be used on women expectin' babies other than somethin' like ginger or peppermint,\" Keturah added.\n\n\"Good. Then I'm not missin' much.\" Granny's easy acceptance of Keturah's knowledge made her respect for the midwife increase. And she already respected the woman. \"When the baby is born, always check the baby. Always. Once, I delivered a baby that was blue. Blue nails, blue mouth, blue toes. The cord had wrapped clear around the baby's neck, took some maneuverin' to get her out of the womb.\"\n\nThat did not sound pleasant, but Keturah made sure this time her expression was blank.\n\n\"But when I ran my hands over her small body, I saw a flutter in her chest, so what did I do next?\"\n\n\"Um... ,\" Keturah thought for a second.\n\n\"What's she need if she's blue?\"\n\n\"Air. You gave her air.\"\n\n\"I sure did. I blew into that baby's mouth until she figured out how to breath herself. She was fine. If I hadn't looked at her though, if I had merely passed her on, it might have been too late. Another time, a baby was born blue because he was choking. He had been in the womb too long and the baby's bowels had moved.\"\n\n\"The baby was chokin' on his on... stuff?\"\n\n\"Yep. Had to stick my finger in his mouth and pull it out. Always check the baby. Some folks like to hold the baby upside down and give 'em a good shake or a slap on the bottom. I don't know that it takes all that, but it doesn't hurt 'em. Come on, let's go on inside. We've talked enough about birthin'. It's time for you to start seein' what it looks like.\"\n\nMore than a day later, Keturah was standing between Ida's legs, looking at a small head of dark hair. Granny had made her do it all, the oiling, the cleaning, the coaching. All of it. Holding Ida's hand, she had walked the length of the house back and forth so many times, she was sure she would be walking it in her sleep that night.\n\n\"I've got to push!\" Ida yelled. Together, Granny and Keturah had rammed the bed against the wall and Ida was partially leaned up against it to relieve back pain. Granny stood next to Ida, gripping her hand. She had meant it when she said Keturah would be delivering this baby.\n\n\"Alright,\" Keturah said, shakily. \"Deep breath,\" she said though she wasn't sure if the comment was for her or for Ida. And then Ida pushed, and the head popped out. Keturah saw the baby's shoulders caught inside. She didn't know if she should reach in and help or wait. But she didn't have to make a decision because a second later, the shoulders passed through. Using a clean cloth, Keturah pulled the baby the rest of the way out. In her arms, the wet, slimy little boy took a deep breath and wailed. Granny came along side and cut the cord, severing the baby from the womb. Blood spurted everywhere and Keturah flinched, not expecting it.\n\n\"Cover it with the towel,\" Granny ordered.\n\nKeturah didn't know if she meant the baby or the other half of the cord. And she wasn't going to ask. Killing two birds with one stone, she grabbed the nearest towel and wrapped the lower half of the baby. While Granny took over, she gently rocked the little boy, calming him down. \"I'll clean him up,\" she volunteered, so she didn't have to deal with the afterbirth or the mama. Throughout the whole experience, she had been waiting for some kind of 'ah ha' moment. Some moment where the heavens opened and the Lord said, this is the job for you. Except she wasn't sold on midwivin' before she got started and she wasn't sold on it now. And yet, now that the foundation was laid, she couldn't ever see herself completely walking away. Not if she could help someone in need. Maybe for that reason, Granny had chosen the right person after all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "The night was warm and the moon was full in the sky but she still would have noticed that someone was in the mercantile because of the glow of light she saw through the window. She pulled on Titania's reins, bringing the horse to a stop.\n\n\"Somethin' wrong, Miss Hollis?\" Albert Newman asked. He was one of Granny's grandchildren. Granny had asked him to escort her home and then come back and get her.\n\n\"I can make the rest of my way home, Albert,\" Keturah said, eyeing the mercantile. What if she was wrong? What if it wasn't Manny in there but his brother the reverend? That would be embarrassing.\n\n\"Granny told me to take you straight home!\" the young man said emphatically, clearly unwilling to disobey his Granny. And that was fine and all, but she didn't want to go straight home and neither did she want her business spread around the town.\n\n\"My home is not that far, you go on. You're gonna be up all night escortin' first me and then your granny.\"\n\n\"But\u2014,\"\n\n\"I've got Casca with me.\" And she did. The dog had been a faithful companion all day. \"Go on, you have a long night ahead of you. I've taken care of myself all these years, I think I can handle tonight. Tell your Granny that if she asks.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" the young man mumbled after a moment. He turned his horse around and disappeared into the night.\n\nKeturah slid off Titania and walked the horse over to the store. She tied the horse's reins to the nearest post and climbed onto the sidewalk, Casca moved to walk alongside her. She had to give it to Sly, he had picked a devoted dog.\n\nShe went to the store and knocked. \"Lord, please don't let it be Sam,\" she muttered under her breath. When no one came to the door right away, she knocked again, this time louder. A few seconds went by and then the door opened. Her shoulders fell with relief at the sight of Manny.\n\nShe couldn't even stop the smile that spread across her face. \"What are you doin' here so late at night?\" she asked, taking him in. He looked different. And it took her a few seconds to realize why. He wasn't quite disheveled. He had no hat on, but of course he was inside. He didn't have his usual vest on, just a plain white shirt which was unbuttoned at the top revealing brown skin and dark hair. She looked away quickly because for some reason, her eyes wanted to linger longer than they should have. But, she realized after a moment, it wasn't his dress that made him look different, it was his looks. He looked haggard and she thought, a bit discouraged. \"What's wrong?\"\n\nManny exhaled, not quite meeting her eyes. \"What are you doin' out here this late?\" He was clearly avoiding her question.\n\n\"I just finished deliverin' Ida's baby. What are you doin' here?\"\n\n\"It took that long? It's been like two days!\"\n\nMore like a day and a half, but who was counting? \"Manny, what's going on?\"\n\nWhen he glanced at her, his gaze was shuttered and she felt her heart sink. \"You should probably go on home, Keturah.\"\n\n\"So, I can tell you when somethin' is botherin' me, but you can't do the same?\" she heard the sharpness in her own voice. But was that not what friendship was? A giving and a taking? A trusting and a sharing? Because that was what she had thought they were... friends.\n\nShe saw him wince. \"It's just somethin' I need to handle on my own.\"\n\nHer smile, when she smiled, was brittle. She had thought... but it didn't matter what she thought. Her hand found its place at her chest, her fingers brushing the spine under her blouse. O Lord, thou has searched me and known me, thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off, thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether.\n\n\"Well,\" Keturah said, taking a step back and almost tripping over Casca. \"Have a good evenin'.\"\n\nShe hoped he heard the words she didn't say. Have a good life." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Manny didn't need a single soul to tell him that if he let Keturah Hollis walk off the sidewalk, he was letting her walk out of his life. The woman could not hide her emotions for nothing. And if it was one thing he was beginning to realize, it was that Keturah gave out her trust once and once only. And then after that, all bets were off. He reached out and grabbed her arm, stalling her movement. \"You want to know, then come on inside,\" he said, pulling her towards him.\n\nShe jerked her arm out of his, miffed. But she still entered the store. Casca, apparently sensing his mistress's mood, followed behind her instead of taking his usual place outside under the bench. When she was inside, he pushed the door closed, locking it. He didn't exactly want anybody else coming in. \"I'm set up in the storage room,\" he said, motioning for her to go behind the counter.\n\n\"Manny... ,\" she started as she turned to face him. The store was dark, but he could tell she was starting to have second thoughts about pushing him. Well, it was too late. She wanted to know, so she would know.\n\n\"It's easier to tell it if I can show you some things.\"\n\n\"You don't have to tell me,\" she said stiffly, her nose raised in the air like it always was when she was annoyed.\n\n\"Oh, please, Keturah,\" he said, rolling his eyes. He surely did if he wanted to have any hope of them staying friends. \"Go on,\" he urged. She pushed open the small swinging door that separated the counter from the rest of the store and went into the storage room. He and Casca were right behind.\n\n\"How did you know I was in here?\"\n\n\"The lantern,\" she said, pointing to the lamp on the floor. Manny had pushed all the boxes and things against the wall creating empty floor space for him to spread out Emerson Yates' papers and personal effects. He had been going through the documents with his dictionary beside him, trying to get a grasp of exactly what it was he had when he heard knocking on the door of the store.\n\nTossing a disgruntled look at the light, he went over to the windows, thanked God that his sister-in-law had made curtains, and pulled them closed. The last thing he needed was another visitor that night.\n\n\"What is all of this?\" Keturah asked, circling the lantern and the papers.\n\n\"A mess is what it is. I've unknowingly got myself in some trouble,\" Manny said with a sigh, more than a little frustrated. \"And I'm tryin' to figure out how to get out of it.\"\n\nKeturah took a seat on the floor, her skirts spreading out like a small rug around her. Taking her cue, Casca laid down next to her. Manny walked over and sat on the floor close enough to Keturah that they were shoulder to shoulder, his legs spread out before him. Manny had spent countless hours in the storage room with his brother, but the room had never felt small and intimate the way it did now with Keturah. He felt like he would tell her anything if she asked him.\n\n\"A few weeks ago, I went to Riverside to pick up our packages and mail... ,\" he began, telling her all of it and leaving none of it out.\n\nWhen he was done talking, he looked at her waiting for a response.\n\n\"And you haven't done anythin'? I'm just askin' to make sure.\"\n\n\"If you must know, I was hopin' it would all go away. I hate dealin' with other people's problems,\" he muttered. Keturah let out a small snort. \"It's a bit of a failin' of mine.\"\n\n\"Is it? Well there could be worse failin's... like bein' too interferin'.\"\n\n\"How kind of you.\" His tone was dry.\n\nShe looked taken aback. \"What? No. Kind people are the worst.\"\n\nManny sent her a look. Mostly because he couldn't believe that he had found someone else in the world who thought that too. Kind people stressed him out. Like Sam had back in Kentucky. Like he still occasionally did when he just simply had to insert himself into someone else's problems. \"Keturah.\"\n\n\"Seriously, I can't tell you how many debates I would start with another person only to have someone jump in and say let's keep the peace,\" she said in exasperation as she smoothed out the wrinkles on her skirt. \"It never had anythin' to do with not keepin' the peace. I just like a good argument. One that makes you learn. Kind people never can read the room. They're too busy worryin' about other folks' feelin's,\" she said, making a face. Manny couldn't help but laugh.\n\n\"It's probably my greatest flaw,\" she said quietly. \"I want to be kind, but I don't always know how to show it.\"\n\nManny pulled one of his legs towards him, circling it with his hands. \"I think you're kinder than you let on. You don't have to share your knowledge of plants with other people. You don't have to learn how to be a midwife. Besides, we didn't grow up in a kind world. Maybe in a perfect world your kindness would shine like a beacon in the sky.\"\n\n\"Ha,\" she said softly.\n\nHe smiled, but he continued. \"You became who you had to be to survive... to survive loss and pain and sometimes unimaginable sights. And I guess I did too, and now I'm tryin' to learn to live... ,\" he paused, swallowing the rock that had suddenly appeared in his throat. \"Now, I'm tryin' to learn to live how God would want me to live and it's a difficult thing. My brother wouldn't have hesitated, you know, in helpin' Emerson Yates complete whatever mission he was on. He's like that, Sam. Sam always shows the love of God first and thinks about himself second.\"\n\nHe felt Keturah looking at him. \"You sound so proud of him.\"\n\n\"I am. I told you. I love him more than I love myself.\"\n\n\"Why do I think he doesn't know anythin' about this?\"\n\n\"Cause he doesn't. He's got a life now with his boy and Laura. This is my issue.\"\n\n\"If he loves you half as much as you love him, I think he'd want to know.\"\n\n\"I know he'd want to know. Eventually, I'm goin' to have to tell him and I can promise you, he's gonna be very hurt.\" Manny glanced over at her. \"It's another reason why I'm puttin' it off.\" Sam rarely took offense to anything, but when he did...\"I'll tell him. One day.\" No sense in rushing what was already going to be a not-so-fun time.\n\nWhen she spoke next, her words surprised him. \"Has Sly ever talked about our father?\"\n\n\"No,\" Manny said, more than a bit confused, but he wasn't hardly about to change the subject. He turned slightly to face her. \"Your brother's like a vault when it comes to his past.\"\n\n\"For what it's worth, he's like that with me too. I had hoped that by livin' together we would be forced to know each other but... anyway,\" she said softly, and Manny could see that Sly's leaving had hurt her deeply and he wished he knew how to contact the boy so he could tell him that there was someone who needed him right here.\n\n\"My father was not born a slave. His family hadn't been slaves for at least two generations,\" she said, staring at the lamp before them. \"He was born up north in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended the African Free School in New York and studied literature there. He hoped to one day become a professor, but his father was a carpenter and his father's father was a carpenter and he reluctantly learned the trade as well.\"\n\nShe paused, gathering her thoughts. But Manny's mind was spinning.\n\n\"It gets a bit complicated, he fell in with some wrong friends or something.' He never talked about it much, but his 'friends' turned out to be slavers.\"\n\n\"They kidnapped him and sold him down south,\" Manny said, finishing the story and wincing. He could not imagine going back to being a slave. But it must have been a nightmare for a man who had never experienced that life before.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said nodding. \"He, a man who had never been a slave, was now made one. I think he tried to run away once, but my father, Papa, was always more bookish and... ,\" she shook her head. \"He hated slavery, as you can imagine. He was a very bitter and unhappy man all the years I knew him. But I loved him very much anyway.\"\n\nTragic. The whole thing sounded tragic. But it explained why she talked the way she talked and seemed to have a bit more knowing than the average slave. \"Your mama?\"\n\n\"Mama was born a slave. Had been a slave all her life. She said Papa arrived with Doc Platt, lost and filled with despair. But there was somethin' about him that made her want to help him. Eventually they married and had the four of us. Papa was used for his carpenter skills. More often than not, he was loaned to this plantation and that for work, especially since our owner was a druggist and other than a small plot of land, not really a farmer. Papa was an investment to him and he used him often. But Papa was fairly skilled and sometimes he made money on the side. He always used it to purchase books through a free man he knew.\"\n\n\"He didn't try and buy himself?\" Not that that would have necessarily worked. Since he had a trade, his value might have been greater than any little money he could have made.\n\nKeturah shook her head. \"I don't know. I only know what I know because Mama told me. He never talked about his past. Never. We knew better than to ask him about it. But I do wish I could go back and ask anyway. Mama said there was a lot she thought he kept from her. The only thing he ever found any real joy in doin' was teachin'. It's not illegal for slaves to read, Manny. It's illegal to teach slaves to read and Papa took great joy in teachin' slaves to read wherever he was sent. There was a certain amount of freedom he found between the pages of a book and he wanted to spread that everywhere he went. Sometimes he was paid in food, clothes, coins, if they had it. Favors. But if they had nothin' to offer him, he still taught anyway. I was always so proud of him, proud of the way he defied the system one person at a time. And in spite of everythin', he's always been my hero.\" Keturah pulled her knees to her chest, staring at the wall before her. \"I don't think he was Sly's. But I don't truly know my brother's mind on the matter.\"\n\n\"And then things changed?\" Manny asked, leaning up against one of the large boxes behind him.\n\n\"Doc Platt had a job offer up north he was plannin' on takin'. He didn't need slaves goin' with him. So he sold all of those he owned. Except there had been an outbreak of typhoid in the area. We all caught it, Doc Platt included. Papa had injured himself a week or so prior and even though he had been slowly recovering, with the combination of everythin', he died first. Laurie and Ham died next. Then Mama. Sly was sold to the Deep South and I was sold to Salis Plantation.\"\n\nManny sat up, straightening. \"Salis Plantation? In Virginia?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, eyeing him. \"Have you heard of it?\"\n\n\"Laura's from there. Her and Amos, Benji, Sol, and Gid. That's where they come from.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Keturah asked, blinking.\n\n\"Laura was a house slave. A seamstress.\"\n\n\"And Amos was the blacksmith,\" she said softly, her eyes closing, remembering something.\n\n\"Benji, his apprentice. Sol and Gid worked in the coal mines.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Keturah said, raising a hand to her cheek, almost dazed. \"What are the chances?\" The question was asked, quietly, softly, almost to herself.\n\nManny didn't know about chances. He figured God must be in this somewhere.\n\nShe shook her head, clearing her thoughts. \"The reason I brought up my father is because it's like you said, you have to learn to survive. Everyone does. Papa didn't. Not really. He was a broken man, Manny,\" she said quietly. \"A kind one who couldn't deal with the cards life had dealt him. He felt so lonely, I think. And isolated in spite of havin' us. Sam is kind too, but maybe he could afford to be that way because he had you.\"\n\nAnd this woman claimed she wasn't kind. He wasn't sure he believed her theory, but it was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to him. With any other woman he would not have hesitated, but with this one, he very slowly reached over and linked their fingers together. He felt Keturah's small movement of surprise, but he counted it a success when she didn't move her hand out of his. Looking down, he noted that her fingers were small compared to his long ones. And just when she seemed to get comfortable, he brought the back of her hand up to his mouth and kissed it.\n\nShe snatched her hand out of his. \"Manny!\" she hissed, rubbing her hand where his lips had touched it. She looked around the room as though someone else other than the dog might have seen it. \"Keep your lips to yourself, please,\" she said stiffly, and he could hear the blush in her voice.\n\n\"My way of sayin' thank you,\" he said nonchalantly. He just wanted to make sure that she didn't take on any notions that he would be some kind of replacement brother.\n\n\"Please feel free to use your words next time!\" He could tell she was not as annoyed as her words implied. \"After you read the papers what's next?\" she asked, clearly changing the subject.\n\nWhat was next? He didn't know. If he had known, he would have done it by now. Without looking at her, he responded, \"Fastin'? I hear that's a good way to get God's attention cause I don't know what to do next.\"\n\nKeturah was quiet for a moment. \"I'm not sayin' you can't still fast, but do you know what King David would do?\"\n\nManny turned to her, rolled his eyes, more for show than anything else. \"Please tell me. I wait with bated breath.\"\n\nKeturah made a face back before saying, \"He would praise the Lord. He would remind himself how big God is compared to his situation. I don't suppose you play an instrument.\"\n\nPraise the Lord? A year ago, if a woman had told him he needed to praise the Lord he would have run fast in the opposite direction. Now, he had to clasp his hands together to keep from hugging her. \"No,\" Manny said, a slow grin spreading across his face. \"But I know someone who does.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "It was taking forever to wash the morning and afternoon dishes and she had no one to blame but herself. She couldn't stop thinking about Manny and how aware she had been of him the night before. Aware of Manny in a way she hadn't been of another human being since Leo and that was more than a little frightening. It probably had to do with that silly kiss he placed on the back of her hand. No one had ever, ever done that before. It was such a chivalric gesture; an act that would have been performed in one of Papa's books. Not something that was done to a woman born a slave. Trust Manny to somehow slip past her defenses.\n\nShe couldn't help but compare Leo to Manny. Leo had been handsome to her but had not been a particularly handsome man. Manny, on the other hand, had the kind of looks very few women would disagree with. And for all her talk the night before about kind people\u2014and they did have their moments\u2014it was the very trait that had drawn her to Leo in the first place.\n\nShe, who had spent her whole life feeling like she didn't quite fit in, had been deeply moved by the way Leo had always included her in things, had always listened to her as though her opinion mattered. And he had been that way with all those around them. Everyone loved Leo. And then there was Manny. She knew him to be warm and in spite of his teasing, kind. But she also knew well enough to know those weren't traits he revealed to everyone. She had begun to learn that he had an interesting reputation around town. It wasn't a bad one. It was just that he was always compared to Sam and when compared to the reverend, he was always the one found lacking.\n\nHaving deliberated with herself all morning and gone through her list of Manny's advantages and disadvantages, she had reached one conclusion: at the end of the day, given enough time, she could love Manny. She could. But there were two problems with that: she didn't want to let Leo go and if she did take a chance on Manny and if for some reason she and Manny were ever parted, it would shatter her heart in a way worse than losing Leo did. She didn't know how she knew that, but she did. Having been shattered before, and barely surviving that, she had no desire to place herself in such a position again. For those reasons, she was quite content to leave things as they were.\n\nShe took her hands out of the water that was cooling off fast. She had washed the last dish minutes ago.\n\nShe needed to think about something else. She needed to take some time and write down in her journal everything that Granny had explained to her the day before. Then she needed to run to the store and order books on herbs and healing and midwifery. And, she suddenly remembered, she needed to purchase a bag and all the midwife equipment Granny said she needed. Grabbing the basin of dirty water, she went outside to pour it in the grass. She was giving the basin one last shake when Casca started barking.\n\nKeturah turned to see Laura\u2014dressed elegantly in a dark green gown and a matching bonnet\u2014standing at the gate. In her hand was a basket. \"Can I come in?\" Laura asked, pointing at the lock on the gate.\n\n\"Of course,\" Keturah said. \"Casca, hush.\" Laura reached over the fence, unlocked it and shut it behind her.\n\nKeturah went inside, replaced the basin, and quickly cleaned her things off the table just in time for Laura's appearance in the doorway.\n\n\"No Jessamy today?\"\n\nLaura laughed, setting her basket on the table and untying her bonnet. \"No. I left him with his Uncle Gideon. I have hopes that I can be away from the house for a few hours without any incidents.\" Laura took a seat and Keturah followed. \"You're probably wonderin' why I've come?\"\n\n\"A little, but I'm glad you're here,\" Keturah stood up, remembering her manners. \"Are you thirsty? Hungry? I baked a pie yesterday.\"\n\n\"Eat food that I didn't prepare? I would love to, Keturah,\" Laura said, grinning. Keturah went to the cupboard to take out both her pie and some plates. \"This mornin' Manny told me that you were at Salis.\"\n\nOh, right.\n\nKeturah half-turned, still cutting into the pie. \"I worked in the cotton fields, several miles away from the main plantation. Manny said that you worked at Salis House.\"\n\n\"I did,\" Laura said, fiddling with the basket in front of her. \"It's too bad we couldn't have known each other before.\"\n\n\"Did you leave family and friends when you left?\" Keturah asked, setting a plate in front of Laura.\n\n\"A brother. And my best friend.\"\n\nKeturah grabbed her own plate and sat down. \"I wish I could give you news, but I knew next to no one who worked at Salis House. I only ever saw the place from a distance.\"\n\nLaura moved her basket onto the floor. \"Sometimes I'm not sure if it's best to forget Salis altogether or not. When my husband left Kentucky, somehow he had managed to not forge any relationships besides the one he had with Manny. He doesn't miss anyone. He still prays for those he thought well of, but it's not the same as me.\"\n\n\"I probably have more in common with your husband and Manny,\" Keturah admitted, slicing into her pie. She had given little thought to Ophelia and Coffey and those she had left back at Salis. But she wondered if Laura knew Master Richard had died? And did it even matter at all? She wondered if Laura knew Prince or Annie and if it would be gossiping if she told her that they had run off together? She wondered if Laura knew that Logan Feldan was completely mad? And just when she began to ask, Laura shook her head.\n\n\"Well, honestly there's no point in talkin' about it. That's our past and I think it's best to leave it there.\"\n\nKeturah nodded to herself as she ate a forkful of pie. Laura was right. Whatever was going on at Salis no longer mattered to them anymore. Maybe one day, after they knew each other well, they could rehash it. As it was, talking about Salis might bring up sore points that Laura may not want to think about.\n\n\"What we need to discuss is our future and I have heard through the grapevine that you are our new midwife,\" Laura said, but by the raise of her eyebrows, Keturah could tell that she was asking.\n\n\"Granny more or less didn't give me a choice,\" Keturah said dryly.\n\n\"Granny delivered Jessamy,\" Laura said, shaking her head, lost in the memory. \"I wish my mama could have been there, but Granny made the experience as calmin' as it could be. You hear about women dyin' in childbirth and it's like... ,\"\n\nKeturah couldn't even imagine.\n\n\"Sam and I prayed every night together before Jess was born but in that moment of feelin' like you're bein' ripped in two... I was just glad Granny was there to tell me everythin' I was goin' through was normal,\" Laura said with a laugh.\n\n\"For what it's worth, it's pretty scary on the other end,\" Keturah said, pointing her fork in Laura's direction.\n\n\"Oh,\" Laura said, giving her a look. \"My best friend at Salis had two babies and I wasn't there for the whole birthin' but the parts I saw... ,\" Laura shook her head. \"You're a stronger person than I am, Keturah.\"\n\nKeturah tilted her head, thinking as she split the last piece of pie on her plate in half. \"I doubt it, Laura. Manny reminded me of Shiphrah and Puah in the Bible and... what?\"\n\nLaura's mouth had dropped slightly open. \"Manny? Manny, my brother-in-law? Not Sam, my husband?\"\n\nFor a second, Keturah closed her eyes. She had forgotten that to everyone except her, Manny was an unsaved heathen. \"Not Sam. Manny,\" she said slowly. She didn't know how she was going to walk this back. \"It's not that hard to tell them apart.\"\n\nLaura blinked at her, staring. \"I don't think they're hard to tell apart,\" she said finally. \"But most everyone in town still does.\"\n\n\"Most everyone in town probably hasn't taken the time to really talk to them.\" Keturah tilted her head to the other side. \"Though to be fair, I haven't really spoken to your husband much. I just know it's Manny by his expressions. And the way he looks at me.\"\n\n\"How does he look at you?\" Laura asked carefully, not making eye contact as she speared a cherry with her fork.\n\nLovely, Keturah thought. She had just walked into yet another trap. This is why, she scolded her heart, you don't need friends. Except that her heart never listened. It was forever trying to make connections despite the constant and consistent evidence that if she could say the wrong thing, she would. \"Oh, you know how Manny is.\" It was her turn not to make eye contact.\n\n\"I do know how Manny is,\" Laura said, her voice sounding odd. \"Y'all talk?\"\n\nWas the room getting hot? Or was it just her? \"He doesn't talk to you?\"\n\n\"Manny talks constantly. He has an opinion about everythin',\" Laura said with a little snort.\n\n\"I could see that,\" Keturah said, biting her lip.\n\n\"Only thing is, the person he talks to constantly is Sam. He's unafraid of sharin' his opinion, but I've only ever seen him run at the mouth to his brother.\" Laura was looking at her now with an expression of wonder. \"And he talks to you about the Bible?\"\n\nShe was going to kill Manny. What was the right thing to do here? Tell the truth and be a bad friend? Or lie? She was beginning to get a headache.\n\n\"I didn't think he even opened the book,\" Laura muttered.\n\n\"Why wouldn't he?\" Keturah asked, defensive. The words were out of her mouth before she thought about it. \"His faith is just as strong as Sam's.\"\n\nLaura stared at her as though Keturah had said something completely off the wall. Then she set her palms down on the table. \"It is clear to me that I have been so busy with my new child that I have neglected my brother-in-law.\" Laura leaned in closer. \"Does he read his Bible every day? Please. Tell me more.\"\n\nKeturah shook her head. She was going to be in so much trouble. Here she had been worrying about his possible romantic overtures and now he probably wouldn't talk to her again. The pain in her heart was sharp. \"I don't want to say anymore.\"\n\nLaura leaned back in her chair. \"Fair enough, Keturah. Fair enough.\" She reached down for her basket. \"You're not the only person I'm visitin' today while I've got Gid watchin' the baby and I've got some deliveries to make.\" Laura stood up and Keturah did as well. Keturah watched as Laura tied her bonnet back on. \"But if you see my brother-in-law before me, please let him know that we will be havin' a talk.\"\n\nAnd with that, Laura swished out the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "After a drawn out supper, when the sun was well on its way down\u2014just like Manny had insisted\u2014Keturah and Casca slowly made their way to Laura's house. She had been dreading this moment all day. But she was not a woman who shied away from her responsibilities, no matter how hard they were. That didn't mean she wasn't going to try to butter Manny up. Keturah had made molasses cookies and carried them in the basket on her wrist.\n\n\"Keturah Hollis.\" She turned at the sound of her name.\n\nManny stood a few feet down the road. His hands were on his waist and he was staring her down. \"I thought I told you I was comin' to get you when the sun was almost down?\"\n\n\"I've got legs, don't I? I can walk,\" she argued because that was unfortunately her nature.\n\n\"Do you have legs, Keturah? A man can't see a thing in that cage of a dress you're wearin'.\"\n\nKeturah levelled him with a look. Or tried to. Manny was hard to level. \"I'm not even goin' to dignify that with a response.\" Manny took a step closer, smelling of soap and a hint of citrus that was more than a little pleasant to the nose. Well, there was no time like the present. The words formed quickly and came out of her mouth even faster. \"Your sister-in-law came by for a visit today. I may have accidently told her you weren't a godless heathen. I'm sorry. I baked cookies,\" she said, raising the basket in her hand.\n\nManny reared back in surprise. \"What?\"\n\nKeturah, held her hands up in surrender. Still she found herself saying, \"Is this not the most ridiculous secret in the world to keep? What is wrong with you that you don't want people to think well of you? I'm on my way, right now, this moment, to your house to praise the Lord and we're meetin' in the dark like it's some kind of nasty assignation.\"\n\nFor a moment, there was just silence between them. Her heart was racing. She hadn't used the right words. What kind of apology was that? \"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anythin'. You're my only friend and you never judge me and I shouldn't judge you even though you're one of the oddest people I've ever met and I've messed everythin' up as usual\u2014,\"\n\n\"Whoa,\" Manny said, holding up a hand. \"Please. Let me think.\"\n\nShe waited. Holding her basket in one hand, she touched her chest with the other. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want...\n\n\"Well,\" Manny finally said. \"It was gonna get out eventually. Come on, the boys are waitin' for us. And I don't know what that word means that you said after nasty, but I will be lookin' it up. Also, there is no way, I'm odder than you. Not after this conversation. That is a fact.\" And with that, he shoved his hands in his pockets and started walking.\n\nShe didn't move. \"That's it?\" she asked, amazed how calm the words sounded when they left her mouth. She was almost in tears. \"You're not angry?\"\n\nManny turned, sending her a wounded look. \"I'm a man of infinite patience, Keturah. I rarely get angry.\"\n\n\"I was only tryin' to defend you, you know,\" she said quietly, not quite able to be teased yet. \"I don't like when people say bad things about my friends.\"\n\nManny, staring at the ground, kicked at a rock. Then he walked over to her and slowly placed his arms around her, pulling her to his chest. She leaned against him, soaking him in. She didn't know how long they stood like that, not saying anything.\n\n\"I trust you. Yes?\" he murmured against her ear. She sniffed, blinking back tears. They were still friends. And more than that, he still seemed to like her. \"Let's go praise the Lord.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "His immediate reaction to Keturah's confession had been frustration. He had thought theirs was a friendship that kept one another's secrets. He did not open up about her to anyone and he expected the same from her. But then he considered her words, considered just how ridiculous\u2014as she had said\u2014his secret was. It was ridiculous. And it was a secret that he kept in anger, not because it would actually hurt or offend anyone. And then he had looked at her, really looked at her, standing there, small and shaking like a leaf, waiting for him to deliver an unfavorable verdict. Their friendship meant much to her. And he realized in that moment, it meant much to him. And just when he had reconciled himself to the idea that he would waste no more time thinking on it, she had said that last bit, about defending him. No one came to his defense except Sam. No one. There was nothing she could ever say or do now that would make him walk away from her.\n\nBut, his meeting with his brother was going to happen a bit sooner than he thought. Like probably that night. He cast his mind back to a few hours ago to the exchange he had had with his sister-in-law in the hallway just before supper.\n\n\"Man?\" She had been heading to the kitchen and he had been heading to his room to change his shirt.\n\n\"Laura?\"\n\nWhen she hadn't responded right away, he had paused, turned to look at her. She had been eyeing him with suspicion.\n\n\"What?\" They might live in the same house and see each other every day but it wasn't like they had deep conversations. He certainly didn't want to start now.\n\n\"I'm probably oversteppin',\" she had said, taking a step closer to him, her fingers tapping against the sides of her skirt.\n\n\"Probably,\" he said with an exhale, not the least bit excited to hear whatever it was that was going to come out of her mouth.\n\n\"I think that you should talk to Sam.\" She held up a hand as though to ward off a negative response. \"Just talk to him. He's worried about you and I think it would ease his mind a bit if you spoke to him.\"\n\nShe wasn't wrong to be worried about him getting upset. His relationship with his brother was nobody's business except his and Sam's. But. He recognized where she was coming from and so his voice was only a little cool when he replied. \"I speak to Sam every day, Laura.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean,\" she said, her voice unusually sharp. She stared him down in that hallway, her fingers now still. For a second she glanced around, making sure no one was close to hear their conversation. \"You're keepin' secrets. He suspects it. I know it. You're a grown man\u2014,\"\n\n\"Sure am, Laura.\" Manny said, his words having more than a little bite to them. What was it exactly that she thought she knew?\n\n\"And Manny, I would not push this except that everythin' you do and say and don't do and say plays on my husband's mind. I know it does. He can't be happy and at peace if you aren't happy and at peace. I'm beggin' you to fix this.\" Then she had sent him a haughty look. \"Pray about it.\"\n\nAt the time, he had thought she was being purposefully annoying. Now, he could see that she had been challenging him.\n\n\"Hello!\" Gid said from the door. He had it open and in his hand was his fiddle.\n\n\"Oh! You play?\" Keturah asked, lifting her skirts to climb up the porch steps.\n\n\"Yes ma'am! Come on in, we've been waitin' for you.\"\n\n\"I brought cookies,\" she said, holding up the basket in her hand. For the first time that evening, she sounded happy. He liked her happy. He wanted to spend the rest of his life making her happy. But for now, now that they had gotten through a possible rough spot in their relationship, he was content to take it one day at a time.\n\nManny snapped his fingers, getting everyone's attention, when he only wanted the attention of one. \"Stay on the porch, Casca.\" Most times the dog did stay on the porch, but you never knew. Amos wouldn't be happy to see him there, but he really wouldn't be happy to know the dog was in the house. Amos had a history with dogs. And most of it involved them hunting him.\n\n\"Oh, sorry,\" Keturah said. \"I'm so used to him followin' me around when I'm not at home that I didn't think.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about it,\" Gid said kindly. \"Pa just don't like dogs is all.\"\n\nKeturah followed Gid into the house and Manny followed right behind. Set up in the parlor was Benji and his small drums and Sol and his guitar. He had met with them earlier that day and together, the four of them had conspired to get Sam, Laura, and Amos out the house. It had been easier than Manny had thought it would be. They had, however, been left with baby Jess. Manny walked over to the cradle now to pick up his nephew.\n\n\"You keep pickin' him up,\" Sol warned. \"He'll be spoiled.\"\n\n\"Too late for that,\" Manny said, kissing the boy's small cheeks.\n\n\"My grandma back in Salis used to say, 'play with a dog and it'll kiss you in the mouth, play with a child and it'll sass you in\u2014,\"\n\n\"Oh, shut up,\" Gid interrupted, rolling his eyes. \"I feel sorry for your children already and you don't even have none. Now are we gonna play or what?\"\n\n\"What song would you like us to play, Miss Hollis?\" Benji asked, an earnest expression on his face.\n\nGood gracious. Manny had forgotten all about that.\n\n\"Please, call me Keturah,\" she said as she undid the ribbon on her bonnet, taking the thing off. \"Praise music.\"\n\n\"You mean slave music?\" Gid said with a sigh.\n\n\"Slave music?\" Keturah repeated as she set her basket of cookies down on a table and took a seat on the couch opposite of the musicians in the room. Manny took a seat next to her, Jess sprawled in his lap. \"You mean our music? Music written by our people for our people? That music?\"\n\nGid shrugged. \"I guess.\"\n\n\"You mean that music that we sing on Sunday easy as pie even though some of us are from Virginia and some from Mississippi and some from Tennessee?\"\n\n\"Manny don't like that kind of music either,\" Gid said, suddenly looking at him.\n\nManny blinked at him once. \"Thank you. Gideon.\"\n\n\"Always happy to help, Manny.\"\n\n\"What kind of music do you like?\" Keturah asked, surprise clear in her voice as she turned to him.\n\n\"We just write our own music,\" Manny said with a shrug. \"Slave music takes me back to Kentucky sometimes and I don't always feel like goin' there.\"\n\n\"You write your own music? This I have to hear after we give God some praise. As for the naysayers in this room, I would remind you that most of slave music ain't about y'all at all.\" She took a breath and sang out, \"I love the Lord; he heard my cry.\"\n\n\"It would be a psalm,\" he muttered under his breath. She elbowed him, but kept on singing. \"And pitied every groan.\"\n\nManny joined in for the next line. \"Long as I live and troubles rise, I'll hasten to his throne.\"\n\nSol and Gid, familiar with the song as well, began to pluck out chords to match their voices. Drums weren't needed for the song and Benji sang as well.\n\nManny closed his eyes, focusing on the words. \"I'll hasten to his throne.\" They were having this session to help take his mind off his worries with regards to Emerson Yates and Manny hoped that God would provide some kind of obvious next step. Keturah hadn't been wrong. Manny had pulled out his Bible that morning and noticed that quite a few battles in the Bible had started with singing praises to the Lord. Why not this one? Because he certainly was in a battle, even if the other side didn't know about him yet.\n\nKeturah then transitioned to a different song. \"Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand, I'm tired, I'm weak, I'm lone, but through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light, take my hand precious Lord, lead me home.\"\n\nKeturah stood up, lost in her own praise of the Lord. She didn't see him, she didn't see the boys, she saw only Jesus. And it was one of the most beautiful things, Manny had ever seen.\n\nIt was a bit of a task to get him back to focusing on Jesus himself, but he did.\n\nThey must have sung five or six songs before they stopped. Manny was no closer to knowing the answer to his problem, but he felt a great deal more at peace about the situation as a whole.\n\n\"May I hold him?\" Keturah asked, hands extended.\n\nManny handed her Jess, watching as she rocked the boy gently in her arms. \"Ha, he looks like you. I can really see it now.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Manny said with a laugh.\n\n\"Can we eat some of your cookies, Keturah?\" Gid asked as he laid his fiddle in its box.\n\n\"May you,\" she corrected, her eyes on the baby. \"And yes, you may.\"\n\n\"I'm gonna get me some milk,\" the boy said, leaving the room.\n\n\"Sol, you play that thing so beautifully I can't believe I've never heard you play at church,\" Keturah said.\n\n\"Oh, I don't like to play in public, ma'am,\" Sol said, ducking his head shyly.\n\n\"God didn't give you that gift for you to keep it to yourself,\" Keturah said, her eyes still on the baby. \"And if God's in it, you better believe it's not goin' to be easy otherwise you wouldn't need to rely on him.\" The words were a strange echo of what she had told him Granny had said to her.\n\n\"Listen to Keturah,\" Manny said sternly, shaking a finger at Sol who was staring at her wide-eyed. \"She knows things.\"\n\n\"Manny, I will throw that pretty pillow on the couch at you,\" she said, even as she made faces at Jess.\n\nAfter everyone had had a cookie, including Keturah, she said, \"Now, y'all have to play me your own music.\" Still holding Jess, she took a seat on the couch next to him.\n\n\"You have to prepare to be amazed,\" Manny said solemnly. Noticing that Jess was now asleep, he took the baby from Keturah and placed him in his cradle.\n\nKeturah made a shocked expression and pointed at her face. \"Like this?\"\n\n\"Just like that.\"\n\nIn front of them, Gid and Sol laughed while Benji shook his head slowly.\n\n\"Start it boys,\" Manny said and their own song began. \"I rode my horse to Oklahoma. I loved that horse, but it had a real bad aroma.\"\n\n\"What on earth?\" Keturah asked, from next to him looking completely startled.\n\n\"I told myself that it was time I was gonna; have to sell it so I could marry my girl, Mona.\"\n\nNext to him, Keturah did something he had never seen or heard her do. She laughed. At first it was a small sound, like a snort. But then the small noise repeated itself and her shoulders shook with the effort it took to contain them. But with each new lyric she laughed harder until she could no longer contain herself and it was such a beautiful, freeing sound that he couldn't quite sing anymore because he was laughing with her. And that's why it took him so long to notice Amos, his brother, and his sister-in-law standing in the doorway of the parlor.\n\n\"Aw,\" Gid said, abruptly stopping his fiddle. \"We've been caught!\"\n\nBut Manny barely heard his words because of the look of hurt on Sam's face. Manny watched as Sam's eyes took in everyone in the room before landing on him. Sam speared Manny with an angry look before he marched down the hall in a huff. Laura stomped a foot, getting Manny's attention. She made sure to shoot him a look of irritation before she too left the room. No doubt, to comfort Sam.\n\n\"Don't tell me,\" Keturah said, sniffing and wiping her eyes as she stood up. She had literally laughed until she cried. \"He doesn't know about this music thing either.\" Manny didn't answer, he merely glanced at her. Keturah circled her face with her finger. \"This is me judgin' you. Mr. Altan, would you or one of your sons be so kind as to escort me home?\" she asked politely.\n\n\"Benji?\"\n\n\"Certainly, Keturah.\"\n\nManny barely noticed anything else going on around him. With an exhale, he left the parlor room and walked down the hall to Sam's room. Behind the door, he heard voices but knocked anyway. For a moment there was silence and then the door opened. Sam. To anyone else, his expression would have been blank, but Manny saw a bucket load of emotions. \"Let's talk.\" He looked past Sam to see Laura standing behind him. Listening. \"My room.\"\n\nIn spite of the bed and even the chair in his room, they both sat on the floor, shoulder to shoulder against the wall. Manny kicked off his boots and stockings so his feet were bare like his brother's.\n\n\"Y'all make music together?\" Sam asked, sounding incredulous. That was where he wanted to start?\n\n\"Yeah. Sometimes. The boys like to try different things so sometimes when you and Laura and Amos are gone, we try.\"\n\n\"Try what?\"\n\n\"They wanted to try smokin', and you know I don't like the taste of tobacco, but I might have ordered some cheroots for them to try.\"\n\n\"Manny... ,\"\n\n\"We might have tried some whiskey.\"\n\n\"Manny! These are my wife's little brothers!\"\n\nManny turned to face Sam, raised a finger. \"And this is why you weren't invited. I mean, think about it, Sam. Better they try this with me than alone.\"\n\n\"Better they don't do it at all!\"\n\n\"Well, we're not all perfect like you are,\" Manny said flippantly, trying to lighten the mood. If anyone knew Sam wasn't perfect, it was him.\n\nBut Sam wasn't having it. \"Shut up,\" Sam snapped, again more hurt than angry. \"You're supposed to have my back.\" Manny closed his eyes, wincing. He was right. \"We always have each other's back.\"\n\n\"You're right, I should have told you. It wasn't supposed to be a thing. We did it once and then twice and then it turned into somethin' that was just ours.\" Sam said nothing, just pulled his knees to his chest, staring straight ahead. \"We started makin' music, just goofin' around.\"\n\n\"You're mad that I'm married. That's why you left me out.\"\n\nManny winced again. Because unfortunately it was true. \"Yeah, I guess I am. I didn't want to be. I want you to be happy, I mean that. I just think that for a long time, I needed you more than you needed me and\u2014,\"\n\nSam made a noise and then turned to stare at him for a long moment before returning his gaze to the wall. \"That is not true.\"\n\n\"It is true and you know it. You had your faith in God to get you through tough times. All I had was you. And I'm learnin' to let go, it's just takin' longer than I would like.\"\n\nNext to him, Sam shook his head. \"I'll grant you that each day was easier because I had God but why you think I don't need you, is beyond me. Of the two of us, you're the one would be fine on your own. You've always been the independent one. I've always been just happy to be along for the ride.\" Sam's words were almost bitter.\n\nManny felt his jaw tighten and his nostrils flare. He didn't know what his brother had to be bitter about.\n\n\"What did I say just now that upset you?\" Sam asked. He straightened his legs out so he could get a better look at Manny.\n\n\"It's nothin'.\"\n\n\"I thought we were here to come clean with each other? If we're not, I'll leave and we can keep on pretendin' that all is well between us.\"\n\n\"It's stupid.\"\n\n\"I'm literally the one person on this earth who will still put up with you even when you're stupid.\"\n\n\"Just the one person, huh?\" Delay, delay, delay. It was Manny's favorite tactic.\n\n\"Oh, we're gonna talk about Keturah, so you go ahead and put a pin in that thought. But what did I say just now that made you angry?\"\n\nIt really was a stupid thing which was why he had avoided bringing it up to Sam all these years. But Sam wasn't in the mood to let it go. \"Remember what Mama told you, last time we saw her?\"\n\nSam blinked slowly. He hadn't been expecting that. \"Every word.\"\n\n\"Remember she told you not to come lookin' for her?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sam said, his voice a bit guarded.\n\n\"What did she tell me?\"\n\nThere was silence for a few seconds. \"She said, 'Don't you let him come back. You ain't the oldest, but you keep an eye on him.\" Sam turned to face him, his back no longer against the wall. \"All these years that has been botherin' you and didn't say a word?\"\n\n\"It took a while to bother me.\"\n\n\"What...?\"\n\n\"She knew I wouldn't come back to look for her. She knew I was that selfish of a person,\" Manny said, his words harsh and unfortunately bringing tears to his eyes. \"She knew. It's always been me first.\"\n\nSam's mouth dropped open in disbelief. \"Manny, that sounds like the devil. Get out of here with that nonsense. Only thing Mama knew was that of the two of us, you would make sure we survived. And guess what? We did. I'm not sure I could have left Kentucky if I didn't have you there keepin' me focused on the future. You know how I am, I'm always lookin' at the past.\"\n\nHis words should not have felt like the balm that they were. For all the years this had been weighing on his mind, the pain should not have been that easy to fix. But still, Manny knew that the part of him that was broken, felt like it was finally being put back together. \"You don't feel burdened by me, then?\"\n\n\"No,\" Sam said emphatically. \"Never. We have our own strengths just like we have our own failures. It doesn't make us better than the other,\" he said, cutting to the heart of the matter. \"Just different. And honestly, are we not enough alike as it is? I really can't believe you want to be like me.\"\n\n\"I think you're gettin' ahead of yourself, I never said I wanted to be like you,\" Manny said with a roll of his eyes. \"I just hate the thought of...\" He wasn't quite sure how to put it in words without sounding ridiculous. But when you were a twin, sometimes you didn't have to.\n\nSam gave a nod in understanding. \"You're not just my brother, you know. You're my best friend.\" Manny raised an eyebrow. And Sam's smile was rueful. \"Fine. Laura is too. But it's different with you.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Manny said, and he did know. Because now he had this thing with Keturah.\n\n\"Keturah?\" Sam asked, whispering her name.\n\nManny shrugged, not quite meeting his brother's gaze. \"She's in love with someone else. A slave sold down south.\"\n\nSam winced. \"Well, you know you can talk to me about it anytime.\"\n\n\"Yeah... I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n'But you talk to her?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"That's good. I can't remember you ever really talkin' to those other girls.\"\n\n\"Wasn't that many girls, Sam.\" Sam had married the first girl to really catch his eye. His opinion on the matter didn't count.\n\n\"Seemed like that many girls. Every time I looked up someone was smilin' at me, thinkin' I was you. Remember what's-her-face tried to kiss me?\"\n\n\"She knew it was you,\" Manny said, reluctantly grinning. \"I'm convinced.\"\n\n\"Or some girl was always yellin' at me. That happened more than I could count too.\"\n\n\"You a lie,\" Manny said, but at this point, they were both laughing. And it felt good. Lord, but he had missed this. And by the look in Sam's eyes, he had too.\n\nSam reached forward, touched his knee. \"If you want to talk about Keturah, I'm here. I know a thing or two about women now.\"\n\n\"You married one woman and now you know all women.\"\n\nSam spread his hands, palms up. \"I'm just sayin' I can help. I'm beginnin' to understand their moods and stuff.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I don't want to hear about Laura's moods.\"\n\n\"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"I told her my name,\" Manny said, slightly changing the subject. And also, he wanted his brother to know how serious he felt about Keturah. \"The one Mama gave me.\"\n\nSam rubbed the side of his jaw. \"Huh. You thinkin' about goin' back... ,\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"You know,\" his brother said hesitantly, and Manny knew what he was going to say before he said it. His brother was ever the preacher. \"God really is with us, Manny.\"\n\n\"I know that Sam,\" Manny said, meeting Sam's eyes. Sam opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again. \"Alright? I know that. But I'm not Emmanuel. That boy died years ago. Let's leave him in the past.\"\n\nNot taking his eyes off him, Sam nodded. \"Alright, Manny.\" Trust his brother to understand enough not to make a big deal of it. Even if he had been praying for him to accept Christ all these years.\n\n\"Now, there's somethin' else I need to tell you,\" Manny said quietly even though it was just them two in the room. Sam scooted closer and Manny told him all about Emerson Yates. \"I thought I could handle it on my own.\"\n\nSam shrugged his shoulders. \"So what if you can handle it on your own? You don't have to. That's what I'm here for.\" Sam slapped Manny's knee. \"Stop actin' like since I got married, we cain't be brothers no more.\"\n\n\"It's not that. I'm tryin' to protect you. You've done that to me before.\"\n\nSam huffed, folded his arms over his chest. \"I had good reasons for that.\"\n\n\"I've got good reasons. You're married. You're a pa now. You've got the store and the church. You don't think you have enough on your plate without worryin' about my problems?\"\n\nSam shook his head. \"Put yourself in my shoes. If a year or so down the line somethin' comes up and let's say you're married. Do you want me to keep whatever happens to myself? At least let me pray on it with you, Manny. Fast or somethin'.\"\n\n\"I thought about fastin'. Keturah thought we should praise the Lord instead. That's what we were doin' before you came home,\" Manny said, looking at the floor, unable to meet his brother's gaze until he got all the words out of his mouth. It was hard, admitting just how deep his faith went to his brother. It made the secret feel even worse.\n\nSam blinked at him a few times, looking like if there was the smallest breeze in the room, it'd knock him over like a feather. Manny could see all kinds of words rolling through his brother's mind. Finally, Sam settled on, \"I think I'm gonna have to talk to this girl.\"\n\n\"What? No, Sam. I told you how things are.\" Sam made a noncommittal sound. Then he smirked. \"Sam!\" It would be just like Sam to say something idiotic. Kind and well-meaning, but idiotic.\n\nSam smiled, but then his expression grew serious. \"Sly really say if things get bad tell the Indians?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Good gracious. They haven't come here yet, right?\"\n\n\"I really think it's only a matter of time.\"\n\n\"Then I guess we better be ready.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Keturah walked to her house infinitely lighter than when she left it. She had never heard anything as ridiculous as Manny's lyrics. And she couldn't remember the last time she had laughed. Then was our mouth filled with laughter and our tongue with singing. She had done both and she wanted to do them again. And she knew with Manny she would. She was curious though, about what he and Sam must be talking discussing, even now.\n\n\"Miss Hollis? Keturah?\"\n\nBenji Altan's voice almost made her leap in fright. \"I forgot you were there,\" she said quickly. Lost in her thoughts as she was, she had tuned out Casca's soft footprints next to her and Benji's heavy ones. \"I'm sorry. How rude of me.\"\n\n\"Oh no, it's fine, Keturah,\" Benji said, shoving his hands in his pockets. \"Um, Keturah, I've been meanin' to talk to you for a while now anyway. We've just been so busy at the smithy there never seems like there's any time in the day.\"\n\nKeturah took a moment to look the young man over as best she could in the dim light. He was tall. Taller than Manny and several heads taller than her. She only came up to him about mid-chest. His skin was a beautiful deep brown, he had a full beard, and his chest was starting to broaden like his father's. She could see nothing wrong with him physically. \"Did you eat somethin' that was disagreeable? Do you have an achin' head? Swollen joints? Maybe\u2014,\"\n\n\"Keturah,\" Benji said, holding his hands up in surrender. A smile was on his face and his teeth shined bright in the evening light. \"You really are some kind of medicine woman. I'm not sick. Ain't nothin' wrong. I was wantin' to talk to you to see if you'd be interested in maybe takin' a walk one evenin'. Like, you know, courtin',\" he said shyly.\n\nKeturah looked away. She had not seen that one coming and she was usually pretty good at shutting things down before they started. She considered Benji for a second. In many ways, Benji reminded Keturah of Leo. He had that same gentleness and he loved his God and his family. He seemed hard-working and patient. The girl she had been in Kentucky might have been interested. The woman she had become at Salis was not. And for the first time in her life she wondered if she and Leo would have had a happy marriage. But that thought was neither here nor there. As to Benji, she was a fair piece older than him in more than just age.\n\n\"Benji,\" she said his name firmly, \"Let me just say that you seem like a nice young man, but I honestly don't think you and I would get on.\"\n\n\"Keturah\u2014,\"\n\n\"I think you're very kind and sweet and you deserve a young woman who is equally so.\"\n\n\"I think you're kind and sweet, ma'am.\"\n\nKeturah's lips twisted to the side. She was no such thing and never had been. She was judgmental, often critical, even more often rude, and patience was simply not one of her virtues. And if he didn't see it now, he would be in for a rude awakening later. \"That's very kind of you to say, but it's not true.\" They were coming up on her home so Keturah reached out and touched Benji's arm, bringing the young man to a stop. \"I'm too old for you, Benji. You would be wise to cast your eyes elsewhere. But thank you, for the honor of lookin' my way,\" she said and walked on to her house, Casca at her side." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "She was at Day's Mercantile almost as soon as it opened. She needed her bag and tools for midwifing... she also wanted to ask Manny what happened between him and Sam. She was being nosy for sure, but Manny was her friend, wasn't he? She thought that had been made clear the night before. Friends told friends the important things. And they still needed to come up with a plan for when, if, those men came by. She had already started putting something together.\n\nWhen she entered the store, leaving Casca outside, no one was at the counter and it appeared that no one else was doing any shopping that morning. Walking up and down the aisles, Keturah found a small leather bag that looked similar to Granny's. She found oil and cloth and scissors and soap. She also saw a bottle of carbolic acid. It did the work of soap but if a body used it too much it could burn your skin. She hesitated for a second but grabbed it anyway.\n\nShe stopped in the herb aisle to see if there was anything else she wanted to grow in her garden and by the time she made it back to the counter someone was standing there. She felt her heart sink for a moment. Sam. She didn't know how she knew because he looked just like Manny, sitting at the stool behind the counter and reading. He had not yet even opened his mouth or glanced her way, but she knew.\n\nBefore she could make it to the counter though, another man rushed into the store. Short and skinny, she only sort of recognized him.\n\n\"Manny, are you never not at the counter? Does the Reverend have to do all the heavy liftin'?\"\n\nWhen Sam flicked his gaze from his reading to the man in front of him, for a second, with that hard look in his eyes, she thought she had gotten it wrong.\n\n\"Manny is out today makin' some deliveries, Waylon,\" Sam said, his voice cool on his brother's behalf. \"How can I help you?\"\n\n\"Oh, I am sorry, Reverend, but you know how your brother is, always so unhelpful.\"\n\n\"I beg your pardon, but that simply isn't true,\" Keturah said, interrupting. She walked up to the counter, her hands full. Sam reached forward, taking some of the things she was carrying and spreading them out before him. \"I have found Manny to be very helpful. Good mornin', Reverend Day.\" She added the last of her soon to be purchases onto the surface.\n\n\"Mornin', Keturah,\" Sam said, sending her a shy smile. It was a look she had never seen on Manny's face. How bizarre. \"You've been here this whole time? I didn't even hear you come in.\"\n\n\"Not that long.\" Keturah turned to Waylon and nodded. \"He was here at the counter first. I can wait.\"\n\n\"Waylon won't mind if I ring you up first.\"\n\n\"I sure don't,\" Waylon said from the left of her. \"But ma'am,\" he said, sounding smug. \"It is a fact that Manny is helpful to all the womenfolk. Like you, they probably thinkin' he's like his brother or somethin' when he ain't. I know the real Manny.\"\n\nThis was one of those rare moments that she knew ahead of time that if she opened her mouth something ugly would come out. So, she said nothing. To him at least. Turning her body slightly so she didn't have to view this Waylon, she said, \"Reverend if you could please tally up my purchases and add them to my brother's tab, I would appreciate it.\" Sam's expression was grave as he nodded, but there was humor in his eyes. \"There are a number of books I was hopin' I could order as well.\"\n\nSam cleared his throat, reaching for a pencil. \"Of course, Keturah. Waylon, why don't you have a look around, this may take a minute.\"\n\n\"I'm just sayin'\u2014,\"\n\n\"We done heard what you had to say, Waylon. And really if you have such strong negative feelin's about my brother, I suggest you make your purchases elsewhere. I understand Riverside has a nice store as well.\"\n\n\"Reverend\u2014,\"\n\n\"I really don't recommend that you insult him to my face ever again.\" Sam's voice broke no argument. He quietly continued, \"Miss Hollis don't have all day. Let me get her on out of here.\"\n\nWaylon huffed and then walked out of the store.\n\nSam didn't say anything as he wrote small numbers on a piece of paper, giving her time to think. \"Did you and Manny, um, talk last night?\" she asked, feeling strangely at ease with this man she had spoken very little too. It was probably because he had Manny's face.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said slowly, his pencil stopping. He looked at her, his eyes searching for something she didn't know. \"I think we're finally on the same page.\" Sam leaned forward an inch, tapping the pencil against the counter. \"He told me about your praise session last night and the reason for it. He said it was your idea.\"\n\nKeturah shrugged. \"It's just somethin' I got from the book of Psalms. Truthfully, he knows more about the Bible than I do.\"\n\n\"We were owned by a reverend when we were little,\" Sam said, again tallying up her purchases. \"We heard a lot of Bible stories growin' up.\" He paused. 'That's not to say that he doesn't read it regularly on his own now, though. And Manny's always been partial to the stories.\"\n\n\"I always liked the poetry,\" she admitted.\n\n\"Poetry?\"\n\n\"Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon.\" They had been her favorite long before she was given the book of Psalms.\n\nSam tapped his pencil against his jaw. \"I guess they are poetry books. I never thought of them like that. You know Manny buys poetry books. I couldn't figure out why since he seemed to struggle so much with it. Now, I think it's cause of the music thing he does with my brothers-in-law.\"\n\n\"His lyrics were... interestin'.\" She couldn't help but smile.\n\nSam leaned forward. \"I haven't heard them yet.\"\n\n\"You're in for a real treat.\" Sam laughed. And she was glad she had made him laugh. She wanted this man to like her. \"Anyway, I spend a lot of time in those books and Manny makes me want to read more,\" Keturah said, reaching for her new bag. The bag her brother had just bought. Trust her to get another job that didn't pay. \"He challenges me to think differently and that's why I think we're friends,\" Keturah admitted honestly.\n\n\"He challenges me too, Keturah,\" Sam said, a grin on his face and laughter in his voice. \"All the time.\" He reached for another sheet of paper. \"Let's order them books you were talkin' about. We've got a few companies that we work with.\"\n\n\"Oh, right,\" Keturah said, reaching into the pocket of her skirt. \"One I know is an actual book. The other I'm just guessin' on,\" she said as she told him the name of the book Doc Platt had had in his office and then asked for the latest medical book on midwifery.\n\n\"I heard you're the new midwife.\"\n\n\"I'm askin' for a book on how to do it, that's just how new I am.\"\n\nSam smiled but just wrote down the books. \"Might take a couple of weeks.\"\n\n\"No matter. At least their comin'. Can we add some more herbs?\"\n\n\"Whatever you want.\"\n\nAfter reading her order back to her and making sure it was correct, Sam asked if there was anything else she needed. \"You said Manny mentioned the whole thing with um...\"\n\n\"The man he came across, Emerson Yates?\"\n\n\"Yes. Him. I have some ideas. Maybe you and Laura and Manny can come by this evenin' after supper and we can talk about them.\"\n\nSam nodded, his eyes doing that searching thing again and Keturah wondered what it was he was looking for. \"Yes, that would be good. We'll be there. Thank you, Keturah.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" she said, embarrassment suddenly hitting her. Here she was talking to this man and monopolizing his time as though he had nothing else to do but talk to her.\n\nFor a second, when she glanced at him, he looked like he had something else to say, but then he just smiled. \"See you tonight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "They came just before closing. Manny had only recently returned from making deliveries to some of the farmers that lived way out. They didn't always make deliveries but if someone's order was taking up too much space and they were taking too long to come out, sometimes Manny or Sam would take it out to the owner. Or if a customer's bill was getting to be a bit a long, then sometimes Manny stopped by to explain in private that their credit to the store was about to dry up. Sam couldn't do it\u2014not when it came to money. If he heard the wrong sob story, then there was a good chance he and Manny would be out of some cash. Manny hadn't heard a sob story in his life that made him willing to walk away from his hard-earned dues. There was already a system in place for folks who worked for free.\n\n\"Saw Keturah today,\" Sam told him when he walked into the store. His brother was supposed to be tallying up their figures, but Manny saw the book he was reading at the bottom of the paperwork. Who did he think he was fooling exactly?\n\n\"Yeah? What was she here for?\" Manny came to stand alongside his brother. He moved the tallying paper out of his brother's way, flattening his hand against the face of the page Sam had been studying before giving Sam a look. They had, of course, never had any real schooling of any kind. But it was coming quite clear to Manny that Sam would have been a very distracted student. He would have been a lazy one but that was neither here nor there.\n\n\"Midwife stuff, I think,\" Sam said, pushing Manny's hand aside. \"She ordered some books and herbs. I may have begged her to marry you and quick.\"\n\n\"You're a dirty liar, Sam.\" Manny picked up the tallying paper, looking it over to see how far Sam had gotten. As he had thought, not far.\n\nNext to him, his brother laughed. \"I'm gonna admit that I haven't given much thought to Keturah Hollis, but I did today. She's a straight shooter, Manny. She's not goin' to put up with your nonsense.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Manny said, shaking his head and grinning. \"That's why I like her.\"\n\n\"I told her you had a thing for poetry.\"\n\nManny closed his eyes for a second. Sam was clearly not the man to have at your back when you were trying to court a woman. \"Why would you say that?\"\n\nSam shrugged. \"She mentioned poetry first. I thought she might like to know that you read it too.\"\n\n\"I hate poetry, Sam.\" Manny reached for the nearest newspaper and opened it, scanning the headlines\n\n\"I know. Why do you keep readin' it?\"\n\n\"Words. I'm tryin' to learn more words. And most songs are poems. I needed some new lyrics for the songs I write with the boys.\"\n\nSam hummed to himself. \"That's what I thought you'd say.\"\n\n\"They're not very good, my lyrics, hence the poems.\"\n\n\"I think Keturah described them as interestin'.\"\n\nManny smiled for a second, thinking about her laughter. \"Readin' all that poetry hasn't done me a lick of good. Nobody talks or sings like them poems. I'm tellin' you, I done bought the last poetry book I'm ever goin' to buy.\" Manny shook a finger at Sam. \"You stop lookin' at me like that. You heard us yesterday.\"\n\n\"That's what I walked in on? Y'all gonna have to do that for me tonight. I've got to hear this. I wasn't payin' attention.\"\n\n\"Cause you got all caught up in your feelin's. You ain't got to hear nothin',\" Manny muttered even though he knew he would probably end up singing the same stupid song for his brother to hear. It felt good to talk to his brother like this. He hadn't realized just how much he had pulled back in anger and jealousy.\n\n\"Keturah invited us to her house tonight.\"\n\n\"Us?\"\n\n\"You, me, and Laura.\" That should not have made his grin grow any wider but it did.\n\n\"Did she say what for?\"\n\nThe front door burst open and both of them turned to face it. A small Negro child stood there, breathin' heavy. Manny was ninety percent sure the child was a Carson. \"White men comin' to town. Pa said to warn ya. Got to go,\" the boy said and ran right back out.\n\nManny and Sam exchanged one quick look. Manny ran around the counter while Sam lifted himself over it. Running over to the windows, they looked out. The men looked like the ones Virgil and even Waylon had described. Both of the men were tall. One had long dark hair that brushed his shoulders and a puckered scar that ran down his cheek. The other one's hat hid the color of his hair, but Manny saw the freckles and knew him to be the redheaded man. And they looked mean. That must have been why Mr. Carson was sending his son door to door. Cause it wasn't that unusual that white men came to town. But... well... if it was one thing all of them knew well, it was a mean white man.\n\nThey didn't talk to each other because they had already talked the night before. Manny went to the back of the store while Sam stayed in the front.\n\nSeconds later, the door of the mercantile was pushed open. One of them, the freckled one, reached behind him and locked the door. Manny could see that both of them were facing Sam, the guns on their waist shiny and evident.\n\nManny reached behind the shelving where he had placed his shotgun that morning and grabbed it.\n\n\"I understand one of you niggers came up to Riverside some weeks ago for supplies. The one that did that here?\" The dark-haired man spoke. His voice was deep and gruff and smoke laden.\n\n\"May I ask why?\" Sam asked politely, facing the two men. His expression was carefully blank.\n\n\"We just want to ask some questions, see if maybe he came across a dead man or somethin' and thought he was easy pickin's.\"\n\n\"Dead man?\"\n\n\"Look, we just want to know who would have picked up a delivery that day. We got a missin' dead man. Somebody buried him. And if you don't help us out, I'm sure I can find me a runaway or two out here to return.\"\n\nTheir arrogance, the threat... righteous anger fell on Manny and he cocked the shotgun. Both men turned around. \"You and what army?\"\n\nThe men stiffened, anger on their faces. \"Now, you listen\u2014,\"\n\n\"No,\" Manny said, angrier than he had been in a minute. \"You listen. Let's say you're right, let's say we know the person who buried the missin' dead man, what right do you have to that man's stuff? Why shouldn't we just put it all in the mail and send it to the closest government office and let them sort it all out? We've heard about you two, about how you've made threats to the people at Riverside and how you even stole from their general store. You're not welcome here and unless you provide me with proof otherwise, we won't be helpin' you.\" There was a part of Manny that was quaking in his boots. He had never, in all his natural born days, talked to a white man like he was talking to these ones now. But he wasn't the same man he had been a year or so ago. The anger, the promised retaliation in their eyes didn't scare him quite so much. \"Now, I recommend you unlock that door and get yourself right on out of town.\"\n\nThey turned slowly towards the counter where Sam was, another shotgun now resting under his fingers.\n\n\"Don't think I cain't find you.\" This came from the shorter, freckled one. He pointed an angry finger at Manny.\n\n\"Of course not.\"\n\n\"I can burn this whole town down.\"\n\n\"Why wouldn't you?\"\n\nNeither man, nor Sam for that matter, appreciated his humor. \"Do you have Yates' things or not?\" the scarred man asked angrily.\n\n\"Let me just say that we might know someone who does.\" Manny had been thinking on how he would answer that question for quite some time. While he wasn't ready to toss his own name in the ring, to a degree, he was done waiting and hiding. \"At least they have the papers right now, but you know,\" Manny said with a shrug. \"Things have a way of gettin' lost.\"\n\nThe two men exchanged a long look before unlocking the door and leaving.\n\nManny didn't breathe again until he no longer heard the sound of their footsteps." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Sly's house looked almost completely different from the last time Manny was in there. There was a rug on the floor, curtains in the windows, a vase of flowers on the bookcase, some kind of cloth decoration on the table, and the couch had a colorful blanket thrown across the back of it. But it smelled the same. Keturah had made another cherry pie. He saw that there were four small plates and four cups on the table.\n\n\"Come in, come in,\" Keturah said, waving him, Sam and Laura in. Laura was carrying Jess in her arms. They didn't know how long they would be and so Laura hadn't wanted to leave him. \"Please take a seat.\"\n\n\"This is Sly's house?\" Sam asked, looking around surprised. Manny saw Laura elbow him in the side.\n\n\"It didn't look quite like this when he brought me here,\" Keturah said, a smile on her face.\n\nIt was comfortable, warm, and homey. And Manny took a seat before he thought about that too much.\n\n\"Let me help,\" Laura said, placing Jess in Sam's arms as she went to cut the pie.\n\n\"I'll pour the tea. It's chamomile. It'll help you sleep better tonight,\" Keturah said as she poured some into the empty cup in front of Manny.\n\n\"I sleep just fine, Keturah,\" Manny said, eying the stuff.\n\n\"And now you'll sleep better. Would you like some, Reverend?\"\n\n\"Oh, he gets asked,\" Manny muttered under his breath, reaching for a cup of the stuff. He brought it to his nose, sniffed it, and felt his nose wrinkle.\n\n\"It tastes better with honey, I think.\" Keturah filled Sam's cup, Laura's, and then hers. She took a seat and then passed him a small glass container. The honey.\n\n\"Miss Martha used to drink a cup of tea every night before bed,\" Laura said, setting plates of pie on the table.\n\n\"Is it time for tales from Salis House again?\" Manny scooped a small spoonful of the sweet, sticky, honey into his tea and passed the container to his brother. Sam had made the same exact face as him when he smelled it too.\n\n\"Oh, Manny, you are always such a delight to be around,\" Laura said through gritted teeth as she reclaimed her seat.\n\n\"Did you bring everythin'?\" Keturah asked, ignoring their exchange. Manny pointed to the bag he had left by the door. \"Alright, first let me just say that we can get rid of our problem by simply handin' over the papers. Nobody here is a threat to the Yates' family or the Battles' family or whoever. We can't testify in court and no one believes we can read much anyway.\"\n\n\"Thought about that,\" Manny said, raising the cup of tea so he could smell it one more time. \"If I hadn't felt the hand of God on my shoulder that day I wouldn't have gone back. And if I hadn't gone back, then those... men would have gotten what they were lookin' for. All I can think is that, that's not what we're supposed to do.\" He took a sip of the stuff. Nasty. He put his cup down and went to get the bag, pulling things out.\n\n\"You kept the man's clothes?\" Laura asked as Manny pulled out the filthy, bloody shirt and pants he had taken off of Emerson Yates.\n\n\"Buried him in his underwear.\"\n\nLaura held out her hand and he handed them to her. He showed everyone the man's pistols but didn't take them out the bag. To Sam, he handed him different personal items that had been on Yates' person and to Keturah, he handed her half of the papers.\n\nThe room was quiet for some time, the only sounds being the scrape of a fork against the plate, someone sipping Keturah's tea, or the movement of different papers and objects on the table.\n\n\"Ah ha!\" Laura said, pulling apart a seam in Yates' shirt, revealing more papers.\n\n\"Ridiculous,\" Manny said, shaking his head as Laura added to their pile of stuff to go through. Keturah reached for the papers, reading them.\n\n\"Do we know where he was goin'? Does it even matter?\"\n\n\"Right below us is Texas.\"\n\n\"Also right below us are the Chickasaw,\" Sam offered, inspecting Yates' watch.\n\n\"I can't say I know where he was headed, but it appears Mr. Emerson Yates was in fact related to the Battles.\" Keturah said, laying the new papers flat on the table. \"It's several letters to him from his loving cousin, B. Battles asking him to look into a matter of delicacy. I assume it's all this,\" Keturah said, waving her hand at the table before them.\n\n\"All I can tell you is that his clothes were relatively new and well made. I think I've found the only secret pocket that he had though.\" Laura sat back in her chair, shrugging.\n\n\"Does the relationship matter?\" Sam asked, gently rocking Jess.\n\n\"Let me just say I don't care who is related to who or where anyone was goin'. What I care about is deliverin' these papers to the right person,\" Manny said flatly.\n\n\"We've got a will and a deed,\" Keturah said, touching the papers Manny had given her. \"The will belonged to Jeremiah Battles so I think it's fair to say that anyone with that last name is gonna be worried about these documents. He's a slave owner and it looks like he owned land in Kansas.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Sam said, biting his lip. \"You said Perry and his kin thought it had to do with all that fightin' up north.\"\n\n\"Papa says every inch of ground is important in Kansas,\" Laura added.\n\n\"I'm goin' out on a limb here,\" Sam said, sitting back in his chair. \"But chances are one of the Battles is a border ruffian\u2014one of those pro-slavery fellas\u2014and the other is a free-soiler.\"\n\n\"The deed is made out to Everett Battles and to be presented to him upon Jeremiah's death.\" Keturah raised said deed in the air.\n\nManny straightened. \"That has to be the right guy. Has to. Yates made me promise to deliver the documents to Rhett. Everett.\"\n\n\"I thought about that,\" Keturah said, now picking up the will. \"A lot of money was left to a Barrett Battles.\"\n\n\"Either one could be a Rhett,\" Laura said, shaking her head. \"Lord a mercy.\"\n\nManny pressed his face into his hands. \"I'm so tired of white people problems.\"\n\n\"If Everett Battles is a border ruffian, do we tear up the deed?\" Keturah asked no one in particular. \"Emerson Yates hid the letters from B. Battles... Barrett Battles. Chances are Barrett is Rhett. Right?\"\n\nSam ran a hand over the top of his head. \"I can't think that tearin' up the deed would be right. Either way they're comin' back and we have to be on our guard.\" Sam handed Jess to Laura and reached down for a book. A Bible. So typical of Sam, Manny thought. \"I was readin' in Psalms this mornin' and I came across Psalms 91.\"\n\nManny saw Keturah brighten a bit as though she knew what was coming next.\n\n\"I think we need to pray about protection and there's this wonderful prayer that's already written.\" Sam took a moment to read the whole thing aloud. \"A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee. What does this tell us? It tells us that storms come. Life isn't easy. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. But God always provides a way out. God says 'because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver him: I will set him on high because he hath known my name.'\"\n\nHis brother's faith would never not amaze him. No matter what he did, no matter what challenge Sam faced, he always found his strength and his courage in the word of God.\n\n\"I don't believe storms come from God, but I do believe He uses them to teach us things often about ourselves or sometimes as a vehicle to move us forward. When He spoke to Manny, He began orchestratin' somethin' and that's what we need to figure out,\" Sam was saying. \"There's somethin' else goin' on here that we're missin' and once we find that out, we'll have solved the whole thing.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Keturah arrived at Laura's house for another sewing circle a few minutes early. At least she thought she was early. She did not have a watch, but Sly had a small clock in his living room that she used to keep track of the hours in the day. She should have been ten minutes early, but from the cracked front door and the sound of women's laughter, she was late.\n\n\"Casca, stay here,\" she said softly even though she didn't need to. Casca was already making himself comfortable on the porch.\n\nThe front door opened before Keturah could reach for it.\n\n\"Oh, good you're here,\" Laura said, with a wide-eyed look. She didn't step back so Keturah could come in, she stepped out. \"Apparently, the ladies in Riverside heard about our circle and all came out here together in the same wagon. There's at least ten of them!\" Laura whispered. She looked far more stressed than Keturah had ever seen her.\n\nKeturah reached out a hand, touching her wrist. \"What's the problem?\"\n\n\"I don't know if I have enough food. Is there even enough room in my house?\" Laura asked, overwhelmed.\n\n\"Here,\" Keturah said, handing her, her basket of sewing. She turned Laura around and pushed her towards the door. \"You entertain, I'll run on home. I just baked a pound cake this mornin'.\"\n\n\"This mornin'?\" Laura asked, turning back.\n\n\"Do you know how many years I've gone without hardly a lick of sugar? I think I'll bake every day if I'm so inclined. I left it coolin' on my counter. We'll have enough food and everythin' will be fine. You'll see. You don't have to do or say much, you have the esteem of every woman here.\"\n\n\"You think so?\" Laura asked, stunned. And Keturah was surprised. Laura made things like hosting and friendship seem easy. It just went to show you never knew what was going on in a person's mind.\n\n\"I know so. Ever since the moment I met you, I've wanted to be just like you. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Go on. I'll take care of it.\"\n\nKeturah turned and walked off the porch, Casca following. A wagon pulled up with the Newman women.\n\n\"Keturah, where you goin'?\" Granny asked.\n\n\"Have to run home for somethin'. I'll be back.\"\n\n\"Good. Cause we got to talk.\"\n\nOf course they did. Since she was headed home, she would grab her birthin' bag too.\n\nBy the time Keturah made it back to Laura's house there was not even a place to sit. Laura's front room was filled with all kinds of women. Young women, old women, short women, tall women. Well-dressed women and women dressed poorly. But no matter what walk of life they were coming from, they all seemed happy as they caught up with one another, laughing and enjoying this time of female bonding. Laura made her way over to Keturah, taking the cake out of her hands. \"Manny's room is the second door on the right. Grab the chair out of there. He won't mind you goin' in, I'm sure of it.\" She said the last part quietly. \"We won't start till you get back.\"\n\nKeturah followed Laura's instructions to Manny's room. She knocked first, even though she was fairly certain he was at the store. When she got no response, she pushed the door open. She knew she was only there to get the chair but she couldn't help but stop and observe. And what she observed was that he lived simply. His room reminded her of Sly's house before she moved in. It was neat, clean, and filled with the basics. There was almost nothing personal in it. If not for his scent which lingered in the air, she would question as to whether this truly was his room. As she reached for the chair that was tucked under his desk, she saw a stack of books. If she had the time, she would have loved to see what it was he was reading, but she didn't. She grabbed the chair and went to rejoin the ladies in the other room.\n\n\"Are you Keturah? The woman who knows herbs and such?\" a woman Keturah had never seen before asked the question as she found an empty spot.\n\n\"Yes, I'm that Keturah.\" She swallowed a sigh. It wasn't that she didn't want to help. It was that there was just so much she didn't know. She didn't feel qualified for the position everyone seemed to want to grant her. She wasn't sure she could bear it if her advice ever made someone worse off. It was a lot easier to help when folks didn't expect much. She took her seat and Laura handed down her sewing basket.\n\nBut the lady who had spoken wasn't finished. \"Oh, good. We don't have any kind of help up at Riverside. There's a white doctor but not only will he not treat Negroes, he's a complete quack. Even the white folks steer clear of him unless they dyin'.\"\n\n\"What happened to Martha Tilsey?\" Granny asked from her spot in the room. \"She's always been helpful.\"\n\n\"Went back east with her family,\" one of the other Riverside women said. \"There's no longer a midwife in our town. We are all on our own up there.\"\n\n\"Aw, but we're never alone,\" Laura said, entering the conversation. She raised a finger. \"And on that note, let's pray.\"\n\nAfter the sewing circle, Keturah lingered a few minutes, answering all manner of questions from which herbs were best for fevers and headaches to which herbs were best for hair growth and skincare. The women from Riverside could not make the sewing circle every week and so they seemed to be trying to gather as much of her knowledge as they could right then and there. But eventually, they had to leave.\n\nWhen they were gone, Granny looped her thin arm through Keturah's. \"Can I come over for a visit?\"\n\n\"You surely can.\"\n\n\"Holly, Grace, Lizzie, I'm gonna be at Keturah's. Come get me in an hour or so.\"\n\nWith that, the two of them made their way slowly to Keturah's house. \"Did you count how many women is expectin'?\"\n\n\"Four in Arrow Creek, and from what I could tell about five in Riverside.\"\n\n\"Riverside has an issue and it's not rightly our concern. They are two hours away by horseback. Two hours can make a big difference in an emergency.\"\n\n\"Why do Negro women live in Riverside? It's a white town, right?\"\n\n\"Money. If you didn't have Sly, you would have to work for your livin'. Quite a few women in Riverside ain't got a man so they take care of themselves by cleanin' for white folks and cookin' for 'em too. You know how it goes. They don't make much, but it puts a roof over they head and clothes on they body.\"\n\n\"If most of them are single... ,\" Keturah's words died off.\n\n\"Chile, in our line of work we will see everythin'. Some of it will break your heart. But, not all them girls single, some of them have husbands and menfolk what work for the white man too. But let me tell you somethin', married or not, long as you got man and woman, you gonna get babies. Don't matter the color, or the religion, or the politics. Man, woman, baby. I want to help the women in Riverside, but I'm gettin' old. These bones ain't meant to be racin' across the territory like I ain't got to walk straight when I get down off the wagon. So, that leaves you.\"\n\n\"In order to help them, I would have to plan ahead of time.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Granny said, nodding. \"You would have to plan as to how you gonna get out there and get back. You would have to plan as to when each baby was due or not due. Might have to stay out there for days. It's a lot of work to be a midwife to two towns and that is a fact. I'm not gonna put that kind of pressure on you. There are enough women in Riverside that they can deliver a baby between them. Now when's our next baby due?\"\n\nKeturah thought for a minute and then shook her head. \"I just don't know, Granny.\" At least not for a good month, that much she knew. She hoped it was enough time for her to get her hands on those midwifing books she had ordered so she could attend her next birthing with some more knowledge in her head. This hands-on learning was a bit much for her.\n\n\"And that's why you're gonna start makin' home visits. Get to know your ladies, make sure they know what to eat and what not to eat... when they should send for you and when they shouldn't.\"\n\n\"Can you tell how far along a woman is?\"\n\n\"By lookin'?\" Granny shook her head. \"No, indeed. Not unless the baby has dropped.\"\n\nThey reached the fence of Keturah's land. Keturah opened the gate, ushering both Casca and Granny into the yard. When the two women were inside the house, Granny set her basket on the table and started emptying it out. \"This here is your payment from Ida's husband for the delivery of his baby boy.\"\n\n\"Payment?\" Keturah asked in amazement. She walked around to see the fresh produce. There was squash, beans, cabbage, carrots, peas... a number of things that wouldn't come from her garden in quite some time.\n\n\"We get paid,\" Granny said, her eyes wrinkling in amusement. \"Sometimes. Mostly in produce and food staples. Every now and then in coin. Always demand payment up front and hope the family can meet it. If they can't?\" Granny shrugged. \"Well, you tried. Now, let's talk about blood. Every birthin' starts with blood. When you first arrive\u2014,\"\n\n\"Hold on, Granny.\" Keturah ran to her room, fetching her journal from the lampstand next to her bed along with a pencil. \"Let me write it all down.\"\n\n\"Chile, I cain't hardly read nothin' and I still done birthed I don't know how many babies.\"\n\n\"Please, Granny, if I see it, I've got it,\" Keturah said, tapping her head. \"When I first arrive...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Keturah arrived at her first pregnancy visit the next week. The woman was named Carilee and Keturah was fairly certain she had seen her at church a few times. Carilee lived on a farm just outside of Arrow Creek and so Keturah had stopped by the Laceys to ask if Mr. Lacey would draw her out some directions. He very happily did so and so here she was, out at the farm of Carilee. The land out here was very different than that of Virginia. She had noticed it a bit before, but it couldn't be more obvious now. Carilee's land was dry, certainly not very green and a bit sorry looking... and so was the house that sat in the distance.\n\nGranny's words from their last meeting returned to her. \"Farmin' out here ain't no picnic, Keturah. There's a reason the white folks gave it to the Indians. Most folks out on the farms cain't afford no wood. They houses be built with sod. Soddy's they be called.\"\n\nGranny hadn't been wrong. The house Keturah was looking at now was most definitely a soddy. Keturah slid off her horse, leaving her midwife bag still tied to the saddle. She walked the rest of the way to the house, Casca at her side.\n\nShe didn't get far before the door opened and three small children ran out. Granny had told her all about Carilee. This would be Carilee's sixth baby. Should make for an easy delivery and Carilee knew all what to expect. The visit was more or less for Keturah.\n\n\"Hello,\" Keturah said, waving at the children. Two of them waved back, one of them stared. \"Is your mama home?\"\n\n\"I'm here.\" A woman called out. She was tall, stout, dark-skinned, and very pregnant. \"You Keturah Hollis?\"\n\nIt amazed Keturah how much word got around. Back at Salis, news had spread like a wildfire but that had made sense, they lived in close conditions and they worked together sunup to sundown. Here, quite a few folks were further spread out.\n\n\"Yes ma'am. Are you Carilee?\" Granny couldn't remember if Carilee and her husband even had a surname or not.\n\n\"Sure am. Come on inside. I done made some corncake and Ishmael just fetched us some milk,\" Carilee said, nodding at one of the small boys. He didn't look like he could form sentences lets alone milk a cow, but it was what it was.\n\nThere was a nearby tree, thin and tipping, but Keturah tied Titania's reins around it nevertheless and grabbed her bag. \"Casca, you stay out here,\" she said and marched past the children who had started forming a little half circle around the dog. Setting her shoulders and hoping she remembered all she needed to ask, she entered the soddy. There was almost instant darkness despite the two small holes that let in light. And it smelled... earthy. It wasn't a completely unfamiliar scent. Some slave cabins in Salis didn't have wood floors, they had dirt floors. This house reminded her of them even though the smell was magnified by about ten times.\n\nCarilee walked over to the single table in the room. In the center of it was the plate of corncake. The milk was already in two small tin cups.\n\n\"Carilee,\" Keturah said, taking a seat. \"I'm gonna admit my ignorance. I've only delivered one baby.\"\n\n\"Had any of your own?\"\n\n\"None.\"\n\n\"You are ignorant, aren't you,\" Carilee murmured and Keturah couldn't tell if the woman was joking or not. Carilee took a seat and then ripped a piece off the corncake, eating most of it in one bite.\n\nKeturah reached for her bag and took out her journal. \"May I ask what's your full name?\"\n\n\"Carilee Freeman.\"\n\n\"And your husband's name?\"\n\n\"Basil Freeman. What's it matter what his name is?\"\n\n\"It doesn't, I just like to keep good records,\" Keturah said, writing. \"How many children do you have?\"\n\n\"I been pregnant near about eight times. Lost two of 'em before their time was up.\"\n\n\"Do you know how far along you are?\"\n\n\"Figure the baby is due in 'bout two months.\"\n\nKeturah wrote that down. \"Your last woman's time was when?\" Keturah asked and then did the math to make sure everything lined up. She set her pencil down and met Carilee's eyes. \"I'm sure you already know what to eat or not eat. And you know more about birthin' than me. But still, you have any questions?\"\n\nCarilee had no questions. Keturah reached for her bag and took out two small wrapped sheets of paper.\n\n\"I'm goin' to leave you with some ginger and peppermint. Steep them in hot water and drink like tea. They're both good for an upset stomach. Granny says eat plenty of yams if you can get your hands on them. They're good for digestion.\" Granny had explained to Keturah that pregnant women often struggled with passing their bowels.\n\nCarilee's response to her words and her small tea packets was to simply press her lips together. Keturah made quick work of her own corncake and milk and then she was back on Titania.\n\nCarilee wasn't the only pregnant woman out in the area and Keturah stopped at Mitzy Hart's home. Like Carilee, Mitzy too lived in a soddy. Also like Carilee, Mitzy already had a number of children, but unlike Carilee, she had a bit further to go before her baby came. She was a mite friendlier than Carilee and Keturah found herself staying much longer than she had planned. She was about a mile from Mitzy's house when she realized she didn't know where she was. Sliding off Titania, she grabbed her journal out of her bag. Casca ran a short distance, barking at something.\n\n\"Alright, Titania and Casca,\" Keturah said even though neither the horse nor the dog were paying her any mind. She looked at the quick map Mr. Lacey had sketched on a blank page that morning. \"We've got to get back home.\" Mr. Lacey's squiggles, which had made sense hours ago, no longer did. But she wasn't worried. She closed her journal and slipped it back into her bag. When in doubt, follow the Arrow Creek River, Mr. Lacey had said. And she knew where the river was. It would take her a bit longer to get home but get home she would. And that was fine enough for her. Walking next to the river would also give her a chance to scout out any other plants native to Oklahoma which might be helpful to the body. But she wouldn't stop and linger, the sun was already making its way down. And it was one thing to hear the yip of a coyote from the safety of her house, it was quite another to be outside exposed to the elements.\n\nSometime later\u2014she didn't know quite how far away she was from town but she knew she was getting closer\u2014she began to smell the familiar scent of roasting meat. Her stomach growled in hunger in response. Mitzy too had offered her some corncake, but it now seemed a thing of the distant past. Keturah brought Titania to a halt before climbing down from the horse. Arrow Creek River was lined with thin trees all alongside it. Keturah had been riding in the open pasture thus far. Whoever was cooking was hidden amongst the trees somewhere. \"You stay here,\" she told Titania. There was no sense in telling that to Casca. The dog was already sniffing at her feet. She didn't know who else was out here but she hoped they might tell her where she was and how much further she had to go.\n\nShe only made it a few feet into the trees when she realized she had made a mistake. There was a deliberate snap of a twig and then the pungent smell of tobacco. She turned around quickly as two white men stepped into view." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "The boy entered the store slowly, as though it wasn't something he often did. Dressed in dark pants that stopped just at his ankles, a beige shirt, brown vest, and a floppy straw hat, Manny watched from the counter as the boy stood still, taking everything in. And then, in a quick movement, the boy turned to face Manny.\n\n\"I don't think I've seen you before.\" Manny said, flipping another page of the newspaper in front of him. It was a slow day. Sam was in the back studying for his Sunday sermon while Manny manned the front counter and read through the different newspapers, getting caught up on the world around them.\n\nThe boy eyed him for a second and then took a single step forward. \"That's because you haven't.\"\n\nManny hummed. If the boy was new, his family could be new. Or he could be a runaway. \"How can I help you?\" It was best to err on the side of caution. Manny didn't want to spook the boy into leaving. If he was a runaway.\n\nThe boy didn't answer right away instead his dark gaze swept the counter, lingering over the sweets that rested there.\n\nHe was a shade or so lighter than Manny, short and thin, though not in a starved way. More in a growing kind of way. He had to have about nine years, Manny thought. Maybe ten.\n\n\"I brung a letter for the owner of the store,\" the boy finally said, reaching into the pocket of his vest. He pulled out a folded, yellow sheet of paper. He flapped it once. \"You know where I can find him?\n\n\"I sure do,\" Manny said, holding his hand out.\n\nThe boy raised one eyebrow, looking Manny up and down. \"You tellin' me you own this store?\"\n\n\"Boy, this is a Negro town. Yes, I own this store.\"\n\n\"But can you read?\" The boy countered with.\n\n\"Yes, I can read,\" Manny said, exasperated. He waved him forward. \"I tell you what, you give me that letter and I'll let you pick out a sweet.\"\n\nIf he thought his words would spur the boy on faster, he was wrong. The boy shot him another suspicious look... and then eyed one of the jars of candy with fierce longing. Manny knew that look and it made his heart ache.\n\n\"What's your name and who are your people?\"\n\n\"Paul. Ain't got no people.\"\n\n\"No parents?\"\n\n\"Course I got those. Everybody's got those.\"\n\n\"Parents are usually considered your people.\"\n\n\"Not when you a slave they ain't,\" the boy argued before sending him a look that said that Manny should have known that already.\n\n\"You a slave?\"\n\n\"Said I was, didn't I?\"\n\nManny couldn't remember if he had ever been that snippy as a child... well actually, he probably had been with other Negroes. He looked the boy over again. Paul was not wearing the clothes of a slave owned by Indians... which meant he was owned by a white man. And where was this white man, Manny wondered. His fingers were beginning to itch for that letter.\n\n\"Paul, you gonna give me that letter or not? In two seconds, I'm gonna rescind my offer and you ain't gettin' no sweets.\"\n\nPaul shot him a frown, but then hurried over to the counter and set the letter down. \"You sure you're the owner?\"\n\n\"I'm sure. Which sweet you want?\"\n\n\"Can I have more than two seconds? I need to think.\"\n\n\"Take all the time you need,\" Manny said, picking up the letter and unfolding it. The writing was fancy and neat with lots of loops and things, but Manny could follow it.\n\nTo the owner of the mercantile in Arrow Creek, it has come to my attention that you might be aware of the person who is holding certain documents that were found upon my deceased cousin Emerson Yates' body. Those papers are of great importance to myself and my family. As you may or may not be aware, a relative of mine, Barret Battles, also wishes to get his hands on these papers. I tell you in truth, he is not a good man. I ask now that you name a time and place for me to meet with you regarding the matter. Please know that should you help me in this endeavor you will be richly rewarded. B. Battles \"Um, this one,\" Paul said, his voice pulling Manny's attention away from the letter. Paul was touching one finger to the jar of caramels.\n\nManny reached over and took off the top. Paul stuck his thin hand in there, a wide grin on his face. \"I'm supposed to wait for a response.\"\n\n\"Sam!\" Manny called without moving. Behind him, he heard shuffling and then a gasp. It was from Paul whose eyes were wide and grew wider as Sam came to stand next to Manny. Manny glanced over at his brother. He noticed for the first time that day that they were dressed exactly alike. They tried not to do that but sometimes it couldn't be helped.\n\nPaul pointed at Sam, but spoke to Manny, excitement in his voice. \"He has your face! You have the same face!\"\n\nNext to him Sam laughed. \"Ain't never seen twins before?\"\n\n\"I have!\" Paul said indignantly as though he had never been animated a few seconds ago. \"I just didn't expect it is all.\"\n\n\"Read this,\" Manny said, handing the letter to his brother. \"Does this not look remarkably like the letters that Yates had hid on his person?\"\n\nNext to him, Sam peered at the writing and especially at the signature. They had read the letters from B. Battles to Emerson. The letters had seemed very familial, discussing people and events Manny had no reference too. But there had also been mention of Jeremiah Battles, his strange ways, and B. Battles' hopes for inheritance.\n\n\"B. Battles,\" Sam said softly. \"Is it Barrett then?\"\n\n\"No,\" Paul said flatly, clearly listening. \"Massa Brett wrote that letter.\"\n\nBoth Sam and Manny stared at him for a second.\n\nPaul popped the candy in his mouth, stepped up close to the counter and placed his elbows on it, waiting.\n\n\"Everett, Barrett, Brett, ridiculous,\" Sam said, rolling his eyes.\n\n\"How did you learn to read?\" Paul asked as he leaned forward, folding his arms beneath him.\n\n\"My wife taught me and I taught him,\" Sam told the boy before turning to Manny. \"Write the letter and\u2014,\" Sam stopped talking when he realized Paul was hanging onto every word that was coming out of his mouth. Manny tilted his head towards the storage room. Sam nodded.\n\nThey moved away from the counter to keep out of hearing range but remained close enough so that they could keep an eye on Paul who was now eyeing the other jars of candy with longing.\n\n\"I think you need to meet him.\" Sam handed Manny the letter. \"Let me say that again, I think we need to meet him.\"\n\n\"I think that chances are good he's the right Rhett we're supposed to hand the papers too.\"\n\nSam pressed his lips together, thinking. \"You're probably not wrong but you don't have to set the meetin' for right away.\"\n\n\"I'm not. I'm thinkin' we do some lookin' around ourselves.\" Manny nodded at Paul. \"And I know just the person to help us out.\"\n\n\"You think he knows if Brett Battles is the right one?\" Sam asked, eyebrows raised.\n\n\"He's one of Brett Battles' slaves. If nothin' else, he can lead us to the ones who do know somethin'. Think on it, Sam. Your wife knows or knew everythin' there was to know about those folks she worked for. There's got to be someone like that who is owned by this Brett fellow. I just don't want to go to this meetin' blind.\"\n\nSam nodded. \"Makes sense.\"\n\n\"You write the letter.\"\n\n\"Why me?\"\n\n\"Your handwritin' is better than mine.\" His brother also routinely wrote to smart people. Hopefully, some of their writin' had rubbed off on him. \"Make the meetin' for next Saturday outside the church at Riverside.\"\n\n\"Where is the boy from?\"\n\n\"Good question. Paul!\" Paul shot up from where he was crouched in front of the peppermints. \"Where did you come from?\"\n\n\"Walked from Riverside.\"\n\n\"You walked? By yourself?\" Sam asked, incredulous. Manny had figured from the dirt on the boy's feet that he had walked. He had hoped though, that Paul had come with someone.\n\nPaul nodded. \"Massa Brett told me where to go. Mama had me up bright and early and on my way.\"\n\n\"I don't like this guy,\" Sam muttered to Manny. \"Who lets a child walk for hours on end in unknown territory?\"\n\n\"Someone who doesn't view him as a child. I'll take him back to Riverside but first I'll swing by the house and give him Gid's old shoes. Laura was gonna give 'em away at church tomorrow, right?\"\n\n\"Yep. That's a good idea.\"\n\nManny pushed away from the wall he was leaning against and went to the counter, he opened the jar of peppermints. \"Take one.\"\n\n\"Really?!\" Paul slipped his hand in and took the one closest to the top. \"Thanks, mister. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Manny Day.\"\n\n\"What's your brother's name?\"\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\n\"Manny and Sam?\" There was skepticism in his voice.\n\n\"Sam and Manny. You hungry? Thirsty?\"\n\n\"Do you have a letter for me? Massa Brett wants me back before nightfall.\"\n\n\"Sam's writin' it. I'll take you back. We'll go on my horse, faster that way.\"\n\nPaul thought about this for a minute, the peppermint melting in his hand. \"Alright. That'll make my mama happy. She was none too happy with Massa Brett last night.\"\n\n\"It can be dangerous out here.\"\n\n\"That's what she said.\"\n\n\"Come on. I'm gonna run you to my house for some lemonade and a sandwich. Then we'll come back and get the letter.\"\n\n\"How come you didn't write the letter? Can you read and not write?\"\n\n\"Sam writes better than me.\"\n\n\"And that's another thing. Whoever heard of twins without matchin' names? I know some twins. You know what their names were?\"\n\n\"No,\" Manny said as he grabbed his hat. All this time he had thought he was a talker. Paul was a talker.\n\n\"Their names were Saul and Paul.\"\n\n\"You a twin?\"\n\n\"It wasn't me. It was another Paul. I'm not a twin. But you see what I'm sayin' right? I knew some twins named David and Jonathan. The names have to match,\" Paul told Manny's back as they exited the store. \"Sam and Manny don't match.\"\n\n\"I guess you'll have to complain to my mama, then.\"\n\nPaul hummed. \"Maybe she didn't know any better.\"\n\nIt took an hour to get to the house, feed Paul, and get the letter. \"He's adorable,\" Laura murmured to Manny and Sam as they stepped out onto the porch. Sam had finished the letter and come home shortly thereafter, closing up the store for a minute.\n\nTo Manny's surprise, Paul had been fairly quiet and very polite upon entering his home. \"All this yours? Oh, that's somethin',\" the boy had said, sticking his hands in his pockets and taking everything in. Instead of a sandwich, Laura had filled him with biscuits, ham, gravy, cookies and lemonade. Paul had been in raptures. But Laura could not, not give him the best. In Paul she saw her brothers. In Paul, Manny saw him and Sam. At his age, they would have been over the moon to not only see Negroes living so fine but to share in some of that fineness.\n\n\"Be safe,\" Sam said quietly.\n\n\"What's that you read the other day? A thousand shall fall at thy side and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.\" Manny had found himself thinking on those verses more often than naught.\n\nSam rubbed the lower half of his jaw and looked away for a second. \"Alright, then,\" he said after a moment.\n\n\"Do I have to wear shoes?\" Paul called from his spot near the fence. He was running his small hand all over Cain, petting the horse like they were old friends. Laura had made him wash his feet and had helped him into a pair of Gid's stockings and Gid's old boots.\n\n\"Yes. You might not need them every day, but if you ever need them, you'll be happy you have them. See y'all,\" Manny said, walking down the stairs.\n\n\"Stay overnight if you need to,\" Sam called.\n\nManny raised a hand in acknowledgement. Then, he lifted Paul onto the horse and climbed up after him.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Paul said, sticking out his hands to brace himself.\n\n\"First time on a horse?\"\n\n\"No. My pa can ride. But it's been a minute,\" the boy admitted.\n\nTaking the reins, Manny kicked the horses's side and they were off. \"You got any brothers and sisters?\" He asked the question after Paul was silent for a few minutes.\n\n\"No. Yes.\"\n\n\"Which one is it then?\"\n\n\"Mama and Papa had other children before me. And now it's just me.\"\n\n\"Died or sold?\"\n\n\"Sold. I don't remember them at all. It's possible I was born after they were sold.\"\n\n\"Possible, huh?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Mama and Papa don't talk about them much even though we pray for them every night.\"\n\n\"I'm sure they could use your prayers.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"Tell me about Brett Battles.\"\n\n\"What about him?\"\n\n\"Good master? Bad one?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" The boy shrugged. \"What's good? What's bad? He's better than Massa Jeremiah.\"\n\nJeremiah Battles. Manny knew that name. \"Jeremiah Battles is dead, right?\"\n\nPaul turned to send him a sharp look before facing the front. \"How did you know that?\"\n\n\"I just do. Is he dead or not?\"\n\n\"Dead as a doornail. We was owned by Jeremiah Battles and now we owned by his grandson, Brett Battles... even though we've always lived with Brett Battles.\" Manny thought on that for a second. Brett was a grandson. \"Massa Jeremiah gave us officially, Mama said, to Massa Brett before he died. Mama always says we could have it worse. We could have been given to Massa Jeremiah's brother, Barrett.\" Well, then. The boy did know something of the matter.\n\n\"Why's Barrett worse?\"\n\nIn front of him, Paul thin shoulders rose and fell. \"Don't know.\"\n\n\"Is Barrett young or old?\"\n\n\"Old.\"\n\n\"Old like me or like a grandpa old?\"\n\n\"Older than you. Grandpa old. His hair is white.\"\n\n\"And Brett is young?\"\n\n\"He's like you. Younger than Mama and Papa.\"\n\n\"What's your parents do?\"\n\n\"Mama takes care of Miss Virginia\u2014we call her Miss Ginny\u2014Massa Brett's wife. Mama helps with the cookin' and the cleanin' and the ironin'. Papa works with the horses and does whatever Massa Brett says needs doin'. I do what Mama and Papa tell me too.\"\n\n\"Brett own any other slaves?\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. Plenty of 'em. We from Kansas but then Massa Brett said he had some important things to take care of so he made us come out here with him. He only brung Mama and Papa and me to come along with him and Miss Ginny. He would have come with just Papa but Miss Ginny insisted on comin' so me and Mama had to come too.\"\n\n\"What's your parents' names?\"\n\n\"Papa's name is Frank. Frances. Mama calls me Paul Frances sometimes. And Mama's name is Etta Lou.\"\n\nManny continued to ask questions but his mind was on Frank and Etta Lou and what he hoped they could tell him about Brett and Barrett Battles." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Keturah knew who they were the instant they stepped from behind the trees. One was scarred with dark hair and the other was freckled with red hair\u2014just as Manny had described.\n\n\"Well, what do we have here?\" the redhead asked, eyeing Keturah in a lewd way. She took a step back almost slipping when her foot rolled across a fallen branch. For a second, she didn't see them and she wasn't in Arrow Creek. No, she was back at Salis with Logan Feldan and the punishment for her behavior was going to be swift and brutal.\n\n\"This whole town is ridiculous. Niggers runnin' businesses. Negresses dressed like white women,\" the black-haired man said derisively before spitting onto the grown.\n\nNext to Keturah, Casca growled. And the sound of it pulled her out of her past. Casca. Thank God for the dog. She opened her eyes not realizing that she had closed them. Before her, about five feet away and standing between her and her escape were the two men. She had literally nothing on her person. Why hadn't she thought to bring the gun Sly left her? She had let herself get far too comfortable in Arrow Creek.\n\n\"I will shoot that dog,\" the freckled man said even though he didn't have a gun in his hand or one holstered at his waist. She could see the small fire going behind the freckled one, and food cooking over it. They must have been setting up for the evening when she wandered into their camp. Wonderful.\n\nCasca growled again. Barked.\n\n\"If you'll excuse me,\" Keturah said, reaching for her skirts and proud of the way her voice didn't quite waver. \"I will be on my way.\"\n\n\"Now, listen here, girl. You ain't leavin' until I say you can leave,\" the dark-haired man said, and spit again.\n\n\"I don't know what reason you could possibly have to detain me,\" she said. Had she been on Salis, she would have been more careful to sound dumb. But she wasn't on Salis. She was in Arrow Creek. And she was not the one who did not belong here. The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?\n\nThe words passed through her mind, so quickly, so forcefully that she almost pointed a finger at the men and declared the Psalm aloud. It wasn't that she was any less afraid, but she was more determined than ever that she was walking out of this forest just the same as she had walked in.\n\n\"I don't see why we can't have a little fun before we burn that nigger town down,\" the freckled man told the dark-haired man\u2014as though she had said nothing at all.\n\n\"We cain't burn the whole place down, we got to get that\u2014,\" the dark-haired man stopped talking. \"Where do you think you're goin'?\"\n\nDid he think she was just going to stand around and listen to them argue? \"Home. Have a nice evenin',\" she said and making a wide loop, started back for Titania.\n\n\"Girl!\" The dark-haired man took a large step closer to her and Casca bristled, growled, and snapped his jaws, forcing the man to take a step back. \"Lenny, I swan if you don't go and get that shotgun...\"\n\n\"Miss Hollis that you?\" Keturah did not recognize the voice, but she did recognize the sound of a gun being cocked. \"You come on now, Miss Hollis. It's gettin' late.\"\n\nTaking a step into the clearing was Gideon Altan. He looked young and a bit small compared to the white men standing between them, but he looked fierce. And he stood tall, with his pistol aimed not at anyone in particular. He held Titania's reins. \"Miss Hollis.\"\n\nShe didn't wait for him to say her name a fourth time, she lifted her skirts and started walking. But then the man closest to her, the dark-haired one, lunged out and grabbed her arm, squeezing tight. He didn't have it for long. Casca was on him in seconds. She ran to Gideon and Titania.\n\n\"Call him off! Call him off now! Get my gun, don't just stand there!\"\n\nWhen she was on the horse, she called out. \"Casca! Come on. Let go!\" Casca's growl was deep, but then she was at Titania's side. Keturah glanced out to see the dark-haired clutching a bloodied arm. He started swearing and swearing loudly.\n\n\"Y'all have a nice day, now,\" Gid said, pulling himself up onto the horse behind Keturah. He slipped the gun into the side pocket of his pants and reaching around her, Gid took the reins and kicked Titania's sides. And then they were off. Casca running at their heels.\n\nThey didn't slow down until the buildings of Arrow Creek were literally in sight.\n\n\"Oh, Gideon!\"\n\n\"Miss Hollis, that was right scary. It surely was.\"\n\nKeturah placed a hand over her heart, touching the cover of the book of Psalms that lay against it. Never again. She was never again leaving Arrow Creek.\n\n\"I think it's best you come to my house and eat supper there. You probably don't have anythin' prepared anyway.\"\n\n\"That's a good idea, Gid,\" she said, her eyes closed in prayer. She didn't really want to be alone right now anyway.\n\nWith that, Gid made a clucking noise, steering Titania towards his house.\n\nWhen they reached the front of the house, Sol came pouring out but skidded to a stop at the sight of Keturah. \"Gid,\" he said slowly. \"You are in for a world of hurt. Papa is goin' to tan your hide.\"\n\n\"I think I can speak for myself,\" Amos said from behind Sol, moving him out the way. Amos's voice was low and serious when he spoke again. \"Son, you had better explain yourself.\"\n\n\"Pa, I was on my way home when I caught sight of two white men. I'll explain everythin', I promise.\"\n\n\"He saved me, Mr. Altan,\" Keturah said, sliding down from Titania. \"It's my fault he's late.\"\n\n\"It isn't, Miss Hollis. I was supposed to head back long before I saw you. I'll take your horse to the barn and see that Casca is fed too. Come on and help me, Sol,\" Gid said, still on the horse.\n\nAmos Altan had his arms folded over his chest and a frown on his face but he didn't say anything. Just gave Sol a nod to go. Keturah walked up the stairs and Amos moved to help her up the last two. She didn't know what she looked like, but she felt as shaky as newborn calf.\n\n\"What was he talkin' about?\"\n\n\"Keturah, is that you?\" Laura called from the doorway.\n\n\"Come in. And tell us all what's happened.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "They talked about everything all through supper. And even though Amos, Gid, Sol, Benji, Laura, and Sam were kind and reassuring, it was Manny she kept trying hard not to look for. Sam had told her when she sat down to eat that Manny had run up to Riverside and might be back late that night, but he also might bed down there. She had been hoping to see him.\n\nWhen the meal was over, Keturah got up to help Laura clear the dishes. She felt better now and safe there, in the midst of Manny's family.\n\n\"You should stay the night. If only for your peace of mind,\" Laura told her as she poured the hot water she had had heating on the stove into the sink basin.\n\n\"Thank you, but I think I want to go home.\" She needed to unwind, to think, to pray. But there was something to what Laura was saying. Maybe she would let Casca sleep in the house with her.\n\n\"You could always take Sol and Gid with you,\" Sam said from the table. He hadn't moved and neither had Amos or the rest of the boys.\n\n\"Yes, we will come and stay at your house,\" Gid said quickly.\n\nKeturah turned from the sink and sent the boy a smile. He grinned back. He had been fishing just a few feet down the river and heard the men talking about the reign of terror they were going to inflict on the town to make Manny or Sam talk. Gid had been determined to stay and hear any and all details when of course, Keturah had stumbled into the mix.\n\n\"I'm glad you stumbled into them,\" Amos said, giving her a nod. \"Who knows what would have happened if they caught sight of him.\" He had glared at his son then. And Gid had looked abashed. For a second.\n\n\"But I had a gun\u2014,\"\n\n\"My gun,\" Amos said, his voice steely. \"And I don't recall givin' you permission to take it. You're on thin ice, Gideon. Not another word.\"\n\nKeturah had no doubts that he now wanted to stay at her house if only to escape a lecture or punishment from his father.\n\nBut, she liked that idea.\n\n\"If it's alright with you, Mr. Altan, I would like to take Sol and Gid with me for the night.\"\n\n\"That's fine,\" Amos said with a nod. \"And they'll be on their best behavior.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir!\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"I think,\" Sam said, clearing his throat. The kitchen went quiet. \"I know Manny ain't one for gettin' other folks in his business, but I do think we ought to share some of the story with the town. If someone is thinkin' on burnin' us out or anythin' like that we should all of us be on the alert.\"\n\n\"It's not a bad idea,\" Amos said.\n\n\"Pa, Casca tore that man's arm up. I don't think he could burn the town down now if he wanted to,\" Gid offered.\n\n\"Still,\" Sam said, straightening. \"It wouldn't hurt to set up some kind of system anyway. If they're determined enough, Casca maybe only delayed their plans. I think I might go and tell a few neighbors.\"\n\n\"What happens if someone sees them?\" Sol asked. \"It's not like we can put them in a jail or anythin'.\"\n\n\"We can keep them from attackin' the town and that's just gonna have to be enough for now,\" Sam said, standing. \"I won't be long.\" He left the room.\n\n\"I'll come with you, Sam\" Benji called out after a second. He had been quiet through most of supper, but thankfully didn't seem to have taken her refusal too hard for he had been just as kind as always.\n\nKeturah helped Laura do the dishes while Gid and Sol prepared a bag for the night. Then the three of them, Titania, and Casca made their way to her house.\n\nThe boys stayed outside to take care of the animals while she headed to the house to get ready for bed. She made only one stop and that was to crouch down and give Casca a thankful rub. The dog leaned into her for a second and she hugged him to her side. As long as she was doing this midwife thing, she would need him. And that was another thing, was she going to keep doing this midwife thing?\n\nShe had started preparing herself for difficult births, the travelling, the long hours, the uncomfortable sights and smells, but she hadn't considered her own safety in travelling to and from different places. Most of the time she would probably have the spouse or a brother or a son escorting her back and forth but that might not always be the case. Like today. Did that mean she needed to carry a gun around always and work on becoming far more proficient? She just didn't know.\n\nWhile the boys were outside, she got ready for bed.\n\n\"Miss Hollis?\" Gid called upon entering.\n\n\"Gid,\" she said, coming out of her bedroom. \"You and Sol can sleep in Sly's room.\"\n\n\"No, that's alright, ma'am. We'll bed down in front of the fireplace. We're here to keep watch.\"\n\nNext to Gid, Sol rolled his eyes.\n\n\"Are you sure?\" Keturah asked, pointing at the empty bedroom.\n\n\"Yes ma'am. We take our job seriously.\"\n\n\"Then let me get you some blankets.\"\n\nWhen they were good and settled for the night, Keturah went back to her room and pulled Sly's Bible off her nightstand. She didn't know when it had happened, but she had started to become certain that being a midwife was the direction that God was sending her in. But she no longer felt safe doing this job. And yet just because there was a hiccup in the road didn't mean he wanted her to get off it. It meant she needed to find a way around it. And so she spent much of the night in prayer until she felt a measure of peace." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\"Didn't expect you to still be up,\" Manny said as he walked his horse up to the house. Sitting on the front porch with a Bible in hand and a lantern on the small table next to his rocking chair was Sam.\n\n\"Knew you was comin' back,\" Sam said from his spot on the porch. He got up, set his Bible aside, grabbed the lantern, and climbed down the steps, clearly coming with Manny to put the horse up in the small barn in the back.\n\n\"It's a full moon, I could see just fine,\" Manny said defensively.\n\n\"Uh huh. How was it out there?\" Sam asked alongside him. \"Learn anythin' new?\"\n\n\"Not really.\"\n\nManny had thought he knew most of Riverside until he took Paul home.\n\n\"Massa Brett paid a man to rent his house and the man took the money and skedaddled,\" Paul said, pointing to a two-story wooden frame house.\n\nWhen Manny came to Riverside, he typically stayed to the main road where the stores and businesses were. They looked to be in a more residential part of town.\n\n\"Describe your parents for me.\"\n\n\"Ma is just the best ma in the whole world. You cain't get any better.\"\n\nManny huffed. Well, he had asked for it.\n\n\"Pa is... well, Ma says he done had some rough times. He is a quiet man, but I am mighty partial to him.\"\n\nPaul didn't get to say much more than that because the front door of the house opened, revealing a small, thin, dark-skinned woman. She was dressed in blue with a white apron and her hair was covered in a red and white checkered head wrap.\n\n\"Paul Frances!\"\n\n\"Mama!\"\n\nPaul almost fell off the horse in his haste to get down.\n\n\"Careful, Paul,\" Manny warned as he helped the boy reach the ground. Paul's mama was already at the bottom of the steps waiting.\n\n\"I wasn't expectin' you back for hours!\" Paul's mama grabbed him and pulled him tight against her body.\n\nPaul pulled away. \"Manny brung me back. He took me to his house and I had cookies and lemonade. And look, Mama. He gave me shoes,\" Paul said, showing the footwear to his mama.\n\nAt his name, Paul's mama let Paul go and looked up. Manny got down from his horse and walked over to the woman, holding out his hand. The woman looked at it for a second before glancing up at him. She was not young, Manny noticed, but also not old. Maybe around Amos's age. Maybe. Most slave women that reached that age had the grey hair and the lined faces to prove it. This one didn't. Her age was in her eyes and in the way she carried herself. \"Hello,\" she said, reaching for Paul's shoulders. She moved Paul so that he stood between them.\n\n\"Ma'am,\" Manny said. The woman flinched and he dropped his hand when he realized she wouldn't shake it. \"My name is Manny Day. I own the store that Mr. Battles sent the letter to. I brought Paul home because I wanted to make sure he got back in one piece.\"\n\n\"Sounds to me like you did more than bring my son home in one piece. Paul, go on to the barn and tell your pa that you're home. He's been worried,\" the woman said, giving Paul a fond look.\n\nPaul sent Manny a quick grin before running off. The woman turned, watching him leave.\n\n\"Paul said your name was Etta Lou?\" Manny asked in an effort to get the woman's attention.\n\n\"Yes,\" the woman said, turning back to him. She folded her arms over her chest. \"Did you need to speak with Massa Brett?\"\n\n\"No, actually, I wanted to talk to you, ma'am.\" It was the second time he had referred to her as ma'am. And just like the first time, she flinched at the word.\n\n\"I've got to get back inside, Mr... Day,\" she said, her eyes searching his face for... something. He tried to keep his expression blank, hoped he looked trustworthy. Really, Sam should be the one asking questions. They might have the same face but people always felt more comfortable around Sam. \"I do thank you for doin' my boy a kindness, but I can't afford to be lingerin' out here.\"\n\n\"May I ask you just one question, Etta Lou?\"\n\nEtta Lou looked around for a second, checking to see if anyone else was outside. Finally, she met his gaze. \"Alright.\"\n\n\"What do you know about the will and deed from Jeremiah Battles?\" If it was a big enough issue that Brett Battles had moved to Riverside for the time being, then surely his slaves knew about it. Surely, they knew what was important and what was not. He had not been a house slave, but the way Laura made it sound, not a thing happened to the white folks she worked for that she herself didn't know about.\n\nFor a second, Etta Lou's eyes went wide with surprise and then she pressed her lips together. She knew something. \"I don't know much,\" she said slowly. \"I\u2014,\"\n\n\"Lou?\" the voice was deep and masculine and Manny turned to see a tall, slender, light-skinned man coming from around the side of the house. Paul stood next to him, happy. The man had high cheekbones, full lips, curly brown hair, and light eyes. It explained Paul's lighter complexion compared to his mama's darker skin tone. The man looked none too pleased to see Manny.\n\n\"Frank, this is the man what brought Paul home. Frank is Paul's pa,\" Etta Lou told Manny before walking over to her husband. Frank though, was still staring at Manny. And none too friendly. This man was definitely Amos's age. There was grey in the hair on his face and a bit of a hard look in his eyes. Manny thought on Paul's words, 'he done had some rough times.' Truer words had never been spoken. Etta Lou continued talking, \"He had a few questions about Massa Brett.\"\n\nFrank looked down at his wife, his expression softening for a moment. Then it hardened when he looked back up at Manny. \"We cain't help you. We appreciate you bringin' the boy home and for all the kindness you showed him. But we stay out of white folks' business. You should to.\"\n\nManny took several steps forward, not in the least bit deterred. He understood Frank and where he was coming from. And he said so. \"I understand, Frank. I'm askin' only cause I've been pulled into somethin' I didn't want to get involved in. I've got to make a decision and I want to make the right one. I think you and your wife could help me.\"\n\nFrank eyed Manny for a second. \"You free?\"\n\n\"All intents and purposes.\"\n\nFrank let out a humorless laugh. Then he pointed to his family. \"We ain't free. No intents and purposes about that. I'm sorry but we cain't help you.\"\n\nManny would have pushed for more except in the distance he heard the sound of a carriage and by the looks on Frank, Etta Lou, and Paul's faces, it was a familiar carriage.\n\n\"We've got to go,\" Etta Lou said, dragging Paul to the back of the house.\n\nFrank, walking backwards towards the barn, gave Manny a nod. \"We thank you kindly. Sorry we couldn't be more help.\"\n\nManny hadn't exactly wanted to linger around and meet Brett Battles in person so he had gotten back on his horse and went into town to see if he could find any answers.\n\n\"What did you find out?\" Sam asked, pulling Manny out of his thoughts.\n\n\"Both Brett and Barrett are stayin' in Riverside,\" Manny told Sam as he brushed down his horse. \"Opposite ends of town. Folks in Riverside are amused.\"\n\n\"Brett doesn't sound like any kind of picnic if his own slaves are so unwillin' to talk,\" Sam said with a sigh as he scooped fresh hay into the stall.\n\n\"That's the thing, though,\" Manny said, stopping what he was doing to meet his brother's gaze. \"Barrett Battles doesn't sound all that great either. I'm at a loss, Sam. If they're both wicked men, why would God have me step into this mess?\"\n\nSam exhaled. \"Manny, I wish I had the answer. While you were gone though, there was an incident.\"\n\nManny, done with his horse, grabbed the lantern from where it was hanging and started for the house, Sam at his side. He listened as Sam related to him what had happened with Keturah.\n\nOnly one thing stuck out to him. \"Did he hurt Keturah?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Sam said quickly. \"I think he grabbed her, but the dog got him good. Or so Gid said.\"\n\n\"And Gid's with her now?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Him and Sol.\"\n\n\"If he hurt her, I might have to go back to Riverside,\" Manny said, his voice hard.\n\n\"Well,\" Sam said in that calm reverend voice of his. \"Maybe you ought to pray on that first. You know, before you risk suicide. She's fine. I don't like what happened. I know you don't like what happened. But our options are few here.\"\n\n\"And the town?\" he asked this question because if he thought too hard on Sam's words he would hurt somebody.\n\n\"Fine. Everyone's on board with keepin' watch.\"\n\n\"There's no sheriff in Riverside but even if there was, I would have grave doubts about the man lockin' up anyone who might threaten us.\"\n\n\"Same.\"\n\nManny exhaled. He was tired. So very tired of it all. \"I think I need to go lay down.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" It was one word, but he heard Sam's frustration in it as well. \"It's not easy,\" his brother said quietly. \"Wantin' so badly to take matters in your hands when all you can do is put matters into God's.\"\n\nAnd wasn't that the truth? They reached the front door of the house. \"You have time to work on your sermon?\"\n\n\"I have plenty to talk about in my sermon.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Manny woke early enough the next morning that he was the first person in the kitchen. He got the fire going in the stove and the coffee pot bubbling.\n\n\"Hey Manny, been outside for eggs and milk yet?\" Benji asked, dipping his head into the kitchen.\n\n\"I was on my way.\"\n\n\"I can grab it. Say, Manny,\" Benji said slowly, filling the doorway. It was only a matter of time before he was as big as his pa. \"I just wanted to say that I asked Keturah if I could court her, but she said no,\" the boy said shyly. He shrugged, not quite meeting Manny's gaze. \"I don't know if you like her like that, but I just want you to know I wouldn't be bothered none if you tried to court her too.\"\n\nManny kept his gaze on the boiling coffee pot. \"Thanks, Benji. I appreciate that.\"\n\nWhen Benji left the room, Manny shook his head. He had forgotten all about Benji and his liking Keturah. Manny took a minute to thank God that nothing had come of that.\n\n\"Mornin', Manny,\" Amos said, lumbering into the kitchen.\n\n\"Mornin', Amos,\" Manny said as he began reaching for pots and pans. He'd scramble up some eggs and fry some bacon.\n\n\"Give me a second,\" Laura said, entering the kitchen in a long robe. She handed a wide-awake Jess to her pa. \"I'm gonna change and I'll start on biscuits. Sam is in the room studyin' still.\" She said this last bit to Manny who nodded in understanding.\n\n\"Listen, Manny,\" Amos said, coming alongside him while he gently rocked his grandson. \"I've been meanin' to talk to you.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Manny said, moving the pots from the stove to the table. If Laura was making biscuits, there was no hurry on the eggs.\n\n\"I wanted to thank you for spendin' time with my boys. They told me about y'all singin' and how you do different things with them. That means a lot to me, your takin' time to let them bother you.\"\n\nManny turned to Amos, coffee pot in hand. \"Oh, Amos I don't mind. And they don't bother me. I need them as much they need me sometimes.\" He hadn't realized the truth of that until just then. But he had needed them to keep him out of trouble just like he kept them out of trouble.\n\n\"Still, they think highly of you and I'm glad that if they don't confide in me, they have you. You're a good man, Manny, just want you to know that,\" Amos said, reaching for a coffee cup.\n\nFor a moment, Manny didn't move. And then when Amos held out his empty cup, he poured his coffee in it. \"Thank you, Amos.\"\n\n\"Hello the house!\" Manny heard Gid yell. He set the coffee pot down and stepped out the kitchen. In the foyer was Gid and Sol.\n\n\"We forgot today was Sunday,\" Sol said, shaking his head at himself. \"Didn't pack church clothes.\"\n\n\"I hope you're makin' enough breakfast for me,\" Gid said, making his way down the hall. \"We told Miss Hollis not to worry about fixin' us anythin'.\"\n\nManny went back into the kitchen to pour his own coffee cup. This was good. He would go to Keturah and get the story himself about what happened and if one of those men had hurt her, then he would be making another trip up to Riverside. He had thought and prayed on it and he was just fine with telling Barrett Battles or Brett Battles or Everett Battles or whoever Battles, exactly what he thought about them." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Keturah opened the door to her house, dressed in her blue gown, Bible in hand, and ready to go to church when she noticed Manny in her garden. Casca lay on the porch, watching.\n\n\"He doesn't bark at me anymore,\" Manny said, leaning against the hoe in his hand. He was dressed in a black suit with a white shirt, a black hat was tilted to the side on his head. Standing in there in the morning light, he looked so handsome.\n\nKeturah shut the door to her house and stepped off the flat wooden porch onto the ground. \"What are you doin' to my garden?\"\n\n\"Weedin' it. It was in terrible shape, Keturah Hollis.\" And indeed there were small patches of dirt on the knees of his pants.\n\n\"Manny,\" she said simply. She was glad to see him. And for some reason, seeing him working in her garden made her so happy she could cry.\n\n\"Gid told me about your day yesterday.\" Manny walked over to her, setting the hoe against the house. He was staring at her as he came closer. His voice soft, he asked, \"Did he hurt you?\"\n\nKeturah shook her head. \"He just grabbed my arm.\"\n\n\"Let me see,\" he said, holding a hand out.\n\nSlipping her Bible under one arm, she slid the long sleeve of her gown up. Just above the elbow was a purple bruise. \"It's nothin'. I've always bruised easily.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry you know that about yourself.\" He said the words gently as he lightly touched the bruise. The tips of his fingers sent a tingle of attraction down her body; the likes she hadn't felt since Leo last held her in his arms. \"I'm gonna go to Riverside,\" he said, his voice hard.\n\n\"No,\" Keturah said, stepping even closer to Manny. She placed a hand on his chest. \"Don't,\" she said, meeting his brown gaze. \"Don't do that. Not for me.\"\n\nManny's smile was slow in coming. \"I'd do anythin' for you. Don't you know that already? Come on, we'll be late for service.\"\n\nHe slipped her hand through his and arm in arm, they walked to church. Casca trotting slowly behind them.\n\n\"Breathe,\" Manny told her as they came upon the familiar white building.\n\n\"What?\" Keturah asked.\n\n\"You haven't breathed since we left the house.\" This was partly true. She didn't know what she was doing with him. His intentions were becoming unmistakably clear. As for hers... in so many ways this was not what she wanted.\n\n\"Keturah, look,\" he murmured as he leaned down. She looked up at him and he nodded towards an elderly man who was making his way slowly up the stairs of the church. \"That's Old Man Jacob. His wife, Erma, died a few months ago. Isn't he just your type?\"\n\nAnd just like that her fear of the future was gone. She flashed her eyes at him and he laughed.\n\nHis laughter was cut off by the sound of horse hooves pounding against the ground in the distance. \"Stay here,\" he commanded, leaving the churchyard to see what was what. And he wasn't the only person, everyone else still gathered in front of the church moved to see who was coming into town so fast. Keturah lifted her skirts and followed. A Negro man on horseback came to a quick stop in front of the gathering crowd, pulling on the reins of his horse.\n\n\"I need a midwife. I heard there was one in this town,\" the man said, his eyes searching different ones as though the title of midwife was hanging over a person's head.\n\nEveryone turned to the church where at the top of the steps was Granny. Somehow, the woman looked a whole lot older than the last time Keturah had seen her a few days ago. Granny turned to her and so did everyone else, including Manny.\n\n\"These bones ain't what they used to be,\" Granny said softly. She tilted her head in Keturah's direction, making the decision hers. Except there wasn't really a choice, was there? She had been two exactly two births and met with Granny only a handful of times. And now she was the midwife?\n\n\"I'll come with you if you want,\" Manny offered, his voice low enough that only she heard him.\n\n\"Alright,\" she said, meeting his gaze. \"We have to go back so I can change clothes and get my bag and Titania.\"\n\nThe ride to Riverside was stressful. In her mind, she kept going over all the details she had learned at Granny's hand. She couldn't forget to ask about blood loss and the baby's movement as soon as she got there. She needed to time the contractions. She needed to massage the belly after the baby and the afterbirth were delivered. There were so many thoughts fighting for space in her heard that the only two things that calmed her were Manny's presence and the Psalms. From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.\n\nAnd just when she was finally gathering a measure of peace, she learned a detail that upended everything.\n\n\"White folks live here,\" Manny growled at the man, Peter, who had come to get her. They were outside of a two-story, wood-framed, yellow-painted house.\n\nThe man had the good sense to look sheepish. \"I had to find someone.\"\n\nIt wasn't that there was a greater value on white babies over Negro babies, at least not in her mind, but if something went wrong there was a greater chance of her being punished in some way.\n\nManny, still on his horse, looked down at Peter who was already on the ground and headed for the small barn behind the house. \"We're goin' back.\"\n\n\"You can't!\" Peter said, coming to a stop. He turned around looking absolutely stricken. Before he could say another word, the front door of the house opened, revealing a small Negro woman.\n\n\"Etta Lou?\" Manny asked as the woman came out to the porch.\n\n\"Miss Cornelia is a friend of my Miss Ginny. She sent me here to help,\" the woman said, coming down the stairs at a rapid pace. She paused in front of Manny's horse, staring at him. She said no more as her dark gaze took in his face. Keturah was at a loss as to who this woman was. She was fairly certain she was not one of the women who had come from Riverside for the sewing circle.\n\n\"Ma'am?\" Manny sounded as confused as Keturah felt.\n\n\"Etta Lou?\" Peter asked, concerned.\n\n\"Right,\" Etta Lou said to herself. She turned to Keturah and Keturah could see that her hands were shaking. \"It's pretty bad in there. I hope you're the midwife cause we need you some awful.\"\n\nManny reached over, placing a hard hand on Keturah's arm. He didn't speak until her eyes met his. \"You don't have to do this, Keturah. I will take you right back home.\"\n\nKeturah closed her eyes, swallowed. Her heart was racing. But either she was a midwife or she wasn't. She swung her leg over the side of the horse.\n\nManny got down from his and came around to help her. His hands lingered on her waist. \"You've got this,\" he said, leaning down to touch the top of his forehead to hers. \"I'll be here for as long it takes, prayin'.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Manny,\" Keturah whispered. He reached up and grabbed her bag, handing it to her. They exchanged one last look and then she followed Etta Lou into the house.\n\nThey were stopped almost as soon as they entered.\n\n\"Is it the midwife?\" a young white man asked, stepping out of what looked to be an office.\n\n\"Yes, Mr. Jackson, this here Keturah from Arrow Creek,\" Etta Lou said, reaching out to touch Keturah's arm. They were about the same height, Keturah realized.\n\n\"Oh, thank God,\" the man said, shaking his head.\n\nAnother white man came out of the office. \"Etta's gonna help you girl. Whatever you need,\" the man said with a nod.\n\n\"Of course, Massa Brett,\" Etta Lou said and then she pulled Keturah towards the stairs. Keturah could hear low moaning up ahead.\n\n\"How long has she been in labor?\" Keturah asked the woman next to her.\n\n\"I think her labor started very early this mornin'. The midwife in Riverside moved back to Missouri a few weeks ago,\" Etta Lou said as they climbed the stairs. \"Mr. Jackson was hopin' to take Miss Cornelia there before the baby was born, but as you can see they waited too long.\"\n\n\"Blood loss?\" Keturah asked when they reached the top of the stairs.\n\n\"I don't think it's been much but I'm not sure what's normal. I barely remember birthin' my own babies,\" Etta Lou said with a quick laugh. \"Didn't want to remember, truth be told. How many babies have you delivered, if you don't mind my askin'?\"\n\n\"By myself? One,\" Keturah said and pushed open the door to the room that clearly held the pregnant woman.\n\nThe bedroom was small with a large bed in the center, a desk, and a chifferobe. And sitting up in that bed was a white woman, large with child, her long blond hair sweaty and matted against her forehead. She had been at this a long time. Next to her, holding one of her hands was a young dark-skinned girl who looked like she would rather be anywhere but there.\n\n\"Are you the midwife?\" Cornelia asked before letting out a low moan.\n\n\"Yes.\" Keturah set her bag on the desk. \"Etta Lou, I'm gonna need some water. Preferably in two different containers.\"\n\n\"I'm on it,\" Etta Lou said and left the room.\n\n\"When was the last time you had somethin' to drink?\" Keturah asked Cornelia who was panting.\n\n\"I have had nothin' all mornin'.\"\n\n\"What's your name?\" Keturah asked the girl, standing next to Cornelia.\n\n\"Alice, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Alice, go make Miss Cornelia some tea and put lots of honey in it.\" In a flash, the girl was gone, quick as can be.\n\n\"Have you relieved yourself at all?\"\n\n\"Not in hours.\"\n\n\"Then come on, let's go.\"\n\n\"You want me to get up?\"\n\n\"Yes. Walkin' and movin' is good for a delivery.\"\n\nKeturah took Alice's place and helped Cornelia stand up. Cornelia squeezed her hand tight as a contraction hit. \"How often do they come?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" the woman moaned.\n\n\"Any blood loss?\"\n\n\"Just a little.\"\n\n\"When's the last time the baby moved?\"\n\n\"He's movin' now,\" Cornelia said. Keturah walked Cornelia over to the bedpan, holding the woman up as she squatted to relieve herself. \"Ooh,\" Cornelia moaned again.\n\nKeturah took in the bed and the messy sheets and wished she had asked Alice where some clean ones were.\n\nWhen Cornelia was done, Keturah led her back to the bed. \"Pull your chemise up, I'm gonna clean my hands and see how far along you are down there.\" Keturah went to her bag. She had soap but no water yet so she pulled out her small bottle of carbolic acid and doused her hands. She would have to be careful not to use so much of it. She grabbed her small vial of olive oil and went back to Cornelia. Making quick work of the exam and cleaning her hands right after, Keturah knew they had hours to go yet.\n\n\"Got the tea ma'am,\" Alice said, entering the room with a tray. She set it on the desk next to Keturah's bag.\n\n\"I'll give Miss Cornelia the tea. Alice, you get a brush and put Miss Cornelia's hair into a neat braid.\"\n\n\"Sip slowly,\" Keturah said, handing Cornelia the cup.\n\n\"How much longer?\" the woman asked before bringing the tea to her mouth.\n\n\"A few hours yet.\"\n\n\"Hours?!\"\n\n\"Some women labor for a whole day. I don't see that happenin' with you, Miss Cornelia. Now drink your tea and then we're gonna get up and walk a bit. It's good for the contractions.\" Keturah was amazed at how calm and commanding she sounded. On the inside, she felt so scattered. But if one thing went off script there was a good chance Cornelia wouldn't be the only woman looking crazy before the night was over with." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Manny reluctantly followed Peter to the barn, taking both his horse and Keturah's. In silence, he got the horses settled in. The only birthing he had ever attended had been Laura's. It had been extremely stressful. Not only had he been worried about his sister-in-law, but Sam's pacing had driven him nearly crazy. That whole process had taken almost an entire day. He had no clue how long this one would take. He needed to find something to do with himself. He had a few coins in his pocket, he could always run over to Otis's store and see what books he had on his shelves.\n\n\"You cain't stay mad forever,\" Peter said. There was almost a whine to his voice.\n\n\"Try me,\" Manny replied. He was not angry anymore. But Peter didn't need to know that. Slave though Peter may be, he should have told them the mother was white.\n\n\"Hello?\" The voice was Etta Lou's. The small woman entered the barn carefully as though unsure of her welcome. \"Manny, can you help me? I need two pails of water heated and carried into the house.\"\n\nHe did not work here. He did not know these people. He did not want to know these people. Peter was clearly the slave that was assigned to this people. Nevertheless, after making sure the horses were secure, he left the barn and followed Etta Lou to the kitchen behind the house. He was sure the water was for Keturah and her midwifing. For that reason, he would do this thing.\n\n\"I wanted to say,\" she began, her voice quiet as they reached the building. \"That Frank and I talked with Paul a bit more and we're willin' to help you if you still want the help.\"\n\nEtta Lou pushed open the kitchen door, revealing a small room with a stove, a table, a pump, baskets, foodstuffs, and a large fireplace... which already had a small fire burning. The place was hot, but Manny kept on his suit jacket and hat. He didn't feel comfortable enough to start undressing. \"Keturah said I need to get two pails of hot water,\" Etta Lou said, pointing to said pails that hung against the wall.\n\nManny reached up and handed her both of them. She walked over to the kitchen pump and began pumping away.\n\n\"I could still use the help,\" Manny said, referring to her offer. He wondered what it was that Paul had said that had changed their minds but decided against asking. It didn't matter anyway. She didn't respond at first, focused on the pumping. When the first pail was full, he took it and carried it over to the fire, setting it on a metal grate above the flames. \"What are you doin' here, by the way?\"\n\n\"Massa Brett loaned me to the Jacksons durin' this time. He wants me to learn as much as I can for Miss Ginny's delivery.\" Etta Lou started pumping water into the second empty pail. \"Frank will be by soon. He's been with Massa Brett since he was a boy. They never too far apart.\"\n\nManny did not give one hoot about Brett and Frank in the general sense. \"What can you tell me about the will and the deed?\"\n\n\"I can't tell you much. I meant that when I said it. It's Frank who will know the details. I just know Massa Jeremiah was plumb cuckoo crazy. He hid those documents, made it like a treasure hunt or somethin'. Then they was found. Then they disappeared again,\" Etta Lou said with a huff, done pumping.\n\nManny made his way over to her and grabbed the second pail of water, taking it over to the fire to heat up.\n\n\"We here cause Massa Brett think the papers here. Here, bein' Indian Territory.\"\n\n\"Did he hire anyone to find them?\" Manny asked. Was Brett the one responsible for the death of Emerson Yates?\n\n\"Oh, yes.\"\n\n\"Two men?\"\n\nEtta Lou shook her head. \"I don't know. I just know he was waitin' on news and I don't know if he received it from them or not but we was told to pack our bags and get to movin'. Been here a few weeks now.\"\n\nAgain, nothing confirmed. Manny was so, so tired of this. He was not cut out for this line of work. He leaned against the bricks of the fireplace, watching the water not boil.\n\nEtta Lou came to stand on the other side of the fireplace, the fire separating them. He felt her looking at him again and he wondered what she was thinking. \"Paul said you own a general store?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"With your twin brother?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"Is Keturah your wife?\"\n\nManny's gaze flicked from the pail to the small woman standing in front of him. \"No ma'am.\"\n\n\"Are you plannin' on makin' her your wife?\"\n\n\"If she'll have me.\"\n\n\"Is your brother married? Paul mentioned a woman named Laura and a baby.\"\n\n\"Yes. Sam is married and he's got a son.\"\n\nEtta Lou nodded, her gaze now on the pails above the fire. \"That's good. Families growin' is always a good thing.\"\n\nManny waited for the inevitable questions about his parents but surprisingly Etta Lou said nothing more.\n\nIn front of them, the first pail of water began to make small bubbles. How hot was this water supposed to get anyway?\n\n\"Paul says you and your brother can read?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"Huh. That's somethin'. I wish you could teach Paul to read.\"\n\nManny looked down at Etta Lou again. Was that what this was all about? A teacher for her boy? That was dangerous talk coming from a slave. And yet...\n\n\"You don't want to learn?\"\n\nEtta Lou shrugged. \"It's probably too late for me. I have almost forty years I think.\"\n\n\"You don't look it.\"\n\nEtta Lou laughed, and he wasn't sure why but the sound of it brought a reluctant smile to his own face. Seeing his smile, she grinned at him for a second and it lit her whole face up. She was a beautiful woman. How strange he only noticed that now. \"I certainly feel it. I can promise you that.\"\n\n\"I just learned to read last year,\" Manny said, folding his arms over his chest. \"Sam and me both. His wife taught us.\"\n\n\"You're runaways aren't you?\"\n\nHe shouldn't have answered the question, but he found himself nodding. There was something about Etta Lou that reminded Manny of the slave women he had left back in Kentucky. There was a familiarity there that was making him grow more relaxed. \"Yeah.\"\n\n\"When I was younger,\" Etta Lou said softly, \"I thought about runnin' and then I got older and thought about runnin' and I never felt no peace on it. But now, I think about it every day.\"\n\nThe second pot began to bubble and the first one started hissing. They were probably hot enough. Keturah wasn't cooking. Grabbing the nearest pieces of cloth, Manny took both pails off the fire.\n\n\"Runnin' ain't easy, Etta Lou, but I have found it to be worth it. Show me where to take these?\"\n\nManny wasn't in the house for long. He almost poked his head in the room to check on Keturah and then quickly changed his mind once he heard moaning and groaning and other weird noises coming from behind the door.\n\n\"I've got this,\" Etta Lou said, sending him an amused smile. He transferred the pails to her, slowly. \"You go on down to the barn. Frank ought to be there by now. He'll tell you what it is you want to know.\"\n\nManny didn't need to be told twice. He walked out of the house and straight to the barn where, lo and behold, Frank was chatting with Peter. He stopped talking when he caught sight of Manny. He wasn't angry like last time. In fact, Manny thought, his expression was fairly blank, hiding all of his emotions.\n\n\"Well, I guess I'll head on out then,\" Peter said, but Frank didn't acknowledge his farewell. Peter knew better than to talk to Manny. Frank kept staring at Manny and Manny stared back. What on earth had Paul told them? Frank didn't look away until they both heard the sound of the barn door close.\n\n\"Etta Lou said you would help me.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Frank said simply. \"Come on and sit,\" the tall man said, pointing to two stacks of hay. Frank sat on one, Manny sat down next to him on the other. \"What is it you want to know?\" Frank stretched his long legs out, leaning forward a bit to touch his knees.\n\nDeciding to be upfront, Manny said, \"I'm gonna tell you a story. Alright?\"\n\nFrank eyed him. \"Alright.\"\n\nManny told his story starting with finding Emerson Yates on the road and ending it with the two men who had bothered Keturah and threatened to burn the town down.\n\nAll this Frank listened to without any change to his expression. \"Why do you care so much?\" the man finally asked.\n\n\"That's the thing. I don't care. I just, for some reason, feel like God cares. So, here I am. Take that for what it's worth.\"\n\nFrank hummed, then met Manny's gaze. \"If you're expectin' me to tell you that one man is better than the other than I can't. They're different. But essentially the same.\"\n\nManny closed his eyes for a second, disappointment welling up. He had been relying on the fact that one of the men must somehow deserve the inheritance over the other. Well. So much for that. Manny lifted his hat up, running his hand over the top of his hair. He tried not to feel defeated. Lord, why then am I here?\n\n\"Jeremiah Battles died childless and unmarried but wealthy. He had two brothers, Everett and Barrett.\" Sounded like twins, but Manny was not going to ask. \"Everett died last year leavin' one son, Massa Brett. I don't understand the legal stuff but anythin' left for Everett belongs to Brett, I think,\" Frank said, with a wave of his hand. \"I know Massa Brett is not happy about the will and Barrett wasn't happy about the deed. Did Massa Brett hire those men? Unlikely because he hired his cousin on his mama's side to handle the issue.\"\n\n\"Emerson Yates.\"\n\n\"Emerson Yates,\" Frank said, nodding.\n\nManny had one last possible reason as to why God had him involved. \"You say you're from Kansas, is maybe one man a free-soiler... ,\" he stopped talking as Frank shook his head.\n\n\"Both slave owners. Both hate free-soilers and abolitionists and anythin' that might be hinder the growth of slavery. Only one way they vote in Kansas. That land mentioned in that deed is goin' to a slave owner or slave owner.\"\n\nWell, that was it then. He had been wrong. He must not have heard from God after all. He had gotten his brother involved in this, and even the whole town was at risk now because of him. Manny leaned forward, elbows on his knees, exhaling.\n\n\"Life has a way of surprisin' you,\" Frank said, his voice low but still causing Manny to startle. For a second, he had forgotten all about the man.\n\n\"I've been owned by Massa Brett all my life. I've known my Lou almost all my life. We fell in love young, jumped the broom young. Only thing was, I was owned by one man and she was owned by another. But we didn't think too much on that at the time. When you're young sometimes you don't think too hard on the future and we should have thought on it.\"\n\nManny forced himself to listen to the man's story. It was that or fall on his knees in frustration.\n\n\"Didn't expect Massa Brett's family to move but move they did. Left my Lou and our children. Eight years I lived without that woman.\"\n\n\"Eight?\" Manny repeated, his eyebrows raised in amazement.\n\n\"Eight,\" Frank said with a nod. \"Longest years of my life. Then Lou was sold from her master and Massa Everett bought her. But she wasn't hardly the same. She came without the children.\" Frank said nothing for a minute, lost in his thoughts. He cleared his throat. \"I have found life to be a series of highs and lows. Of strange bittersweet moments. I have my wife back, but our children... ,\"\n\nFrank shook his head unable to speak. And in that moment Manny's problems seemed small indeed. So, what if he was wrong? The world hadn't ended. He still had Sam, Jess, Laura, the rest of the Altan family... and Keturah. Aside from his mama, he wasn't separated from anyone he loved.\n\nFrank continued, his voice a whisper now. \"We didn't want any more children, Lou and me, but man makes plans and God laughs. We had Paul. He's been a real blessin' and a true balm in Gilead.\"\n\n\"My problem is small,\" Manny said quietly, his hands clasped together.\n\nFrank turned to face him. \"That's not why I told you that.\"\n\n\"Then why did you?\"\n\nFrank shook his head, shrugged. \"As I said, life is a series of highs and lows, peppered with bittersweet moments. If you trust God, you'll have more highs than lows. I have found that to be true.\" There was a tiny smile playing on Frank's lips. \"I have found that to be true,\" Frank said, repeating the words again. He nudged Manny as though they were now friends. \"We're gonna be here for hours. Tell me about yourself. I know you a runaway. I want to hear all the details.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "\"Alright Miss Cornelia, push,\" Keturah told the woman. They were at the end of the bed, Cornelia squatting and holding tight to the banister as a contraction hit her. Alice stood on Cornelia's other side in case the woman needed more support. Etta Lou was on her knees next to Keturah with a blanket, ready to take the baby when it came out. And the baby was coming out.\n\n\"Exhale,\" Keturah said. \"Don't push!\" If she pushed now, Cornelia risked tearing. Keturah adjusted the baby's shoulders. \"Push, now. Push!\" And in seconds, out plopped a little girl\u2014caught by Etta Lou.\n\n\"Oh my goodness,\" Etta Lou said, looking down at the screaming child.\n\n\"Let me cut the cord,\" Keturah said, reaching behind her for her scissors. She cut the cord, clipped it, and returned her focus back to Cornelia for the afterbirth. It didn't take long to follow.\n\n\"Alice, get Miss Cornelia cleaned up, please.\" Keturah wiped up the mess on the floor, cleaned her hands, and then changed the bedding. Keturah massaged Cornelia's womb as she had seen Granny do, making sure all was well and then Etta Lou brought over a cleaned and dressed little girl.\n\n\"Alice, you can fetch Mr. Jackson when you can.\" Keturah went over to one of the pails and cleaned her hands yet again.\n\n\"That was an experience I could certainly do without repeatin',\" Etta Lou murmured to her. Cornelia was much taken with her new baby and paying them no mind.\n\n\"I think that too. Every time,\" Keturah said, cleaning her scissors. \"I don't even know what time of day it is.\"\n\n\"Time for supper. You and Manny should stay and eat with us.\"\n\nKeturah thought on that for a second. She was tired. So tired. And she wanted desperately to go home. If they stayed for supper, they may as well stay the night.\n\n\"I'll talk to Manny, but I think we might head on back to Arrow Creek.\"\n\nEtta Lou nodded as though she had expected that answer. \"He must be real sweet on you, bringin' you out here.\"\n\nKeturah felt her face warm as she dug around in her bag. \"I suppose. Mostly we're friends.\"\n\n\"Best marriages start that way.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I want to marry him,\" Keturah admitted aloud.\n\n\"Oh?\" Etta Lou raised an eyebrow.\n\n\"He's... I was in love once,\" Keturah started. She couldn't finish.\n\nEtta Lou was quiet. \"If you don't love Manny than you're right, you shouldn't marry him. But if it's just fear holdin' you back, than they've won. You've let the men who once owned you cripple you for life.\"\n\nBut it wasn't as easy as just fear.\n\nThe door behind them opened and both of them turned to see Cornelia's husband walk into the room.\n\n\"Nelly?\"\n\n\"We have us a baby girl, Drew!\"\n\nMr. Jackson turned to Keturah. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"You're welcome. That'll be five dollars.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "The next day, Keturah had two afternoon visitors. The first was Granny.\n\n\"It sound like you done everythin' right,\" Granny told her, sipping some tea and nibbling on the cookies Keturah had baked that morning.\n\n\"Yes, but Granny, I realized somethin' yesterday, I don't know what I should do if there is a lot of blood.\"\n\nWith her journal open and her pencil ready, Keturah jotted down notes as Granny repeated the different reasons for blood loss and what that meant for the midwife. Granny stayed a good hour before one of her grandsons came to get her. Keturah did her level best to make the most of that time, asking all sorts of questions. She felt slightly more confident when Granny was gone, but only slightly.\n\nShe was in the middle of getting supper started and thinking on Etta Lou's words from the day before when Casca barked, indicating another visitor. Keturah went to the door to see Laura coming through the gate. She waved a hand and Keturah returned the gesture. \"Come on in!\"\n\nWhen Laura was situated at the kitchen table, a cup of tea in front of her and Keturah opposite of her, she said, \"I've come here for a couple of reasons. Reason number one, there's gonna be a potluck in a few weeks after services. We've been puttin' it off and puttin' it off, but now is the time. Sam thinks it might help to have everyone aware that we might need to put some new measures in place to protect the town. I'm here to ask you what you can bring.\"\n\n\"Are you goin' from house to house and door to door?\" Keturah asked.\n\n\"I am,\" Laura said with a sigh as she brought her cup up to her mouth.\n\n\"I can help.\"\n\n\"Would you?\" Laura asked hopefully. She held out a hand. \"I didn't come here to ask for help.\"\n\n\"I know. I don't mind. And I'll see what everyone else is bringin' and bring whatever might be missin'.\"\n\n\"It's only the ladies in town I need to talk to. I spoke with the farmin' families after services yesterday as best I could. I have a list. Don't let me leave without givin' it to you. Now, that aside, I really came to talk about the delivery yesterday and my pa.\"\n\n\"Your pa?\"\n\n\"Apparently, he hasn't been visitin' his friend Mr. Elroy,\" Laura said, making a face. \"He's been visitin' the Widow Claremont.\"\n\n\"Who is the Widow Claremont?\" Keturah asked, wracking her brain for a face.\n\n\"She lived out on one of the farms a few months ago with her daughter and now she's in town,\" Laura said with an irritated huff. \"I tried to explain to my husband why I wasn't too keen on all of this and you know what he said? He said Pa must be lonely. How can he be lonely when he lives with four of his children, his grandchild, his son-in-law and his son-in-law's brother? Anyway, I needed a second opinion. A female opinion.\"\n\n\"And you want mine?\" Keturah asked, more than a little touched. People often needed her, they rarely wanted her.\n\n\"Keturah,\" Laura said, lifting her hands off the table. \"I'm the kind of person who follows others easily. It's a horrible flaw to have. And so I find that I'm drawn to people who know their own minds. Like the brother I left at Salis, and my husband... and you. I knew we were meant to be friends the moment you said white folks' opinions don't matter,\" Laura said, her eyes twinkling.\n\n\"That's not what I said,\" Keturah said, unable to stop her smile.\n\n\"It's what you meant. And more than that you're right. The only person's opinion we should be after is God's.\"\n\nThey talked for a good hour, Keturah enjoying herself more than she would have ever thought. But after she ate and the animals were taken care of and she was in her nightclothes before the small fire burning in the fireplace, she pulled out Etta Lou's words again. Was it fear holding her back? Did she love Manny? Could she love Manny and still love Leo? They were questions she didn't have the answer to and so she prayed for wisdom and went to sleep. Or would have but there was another baby that needed to be delivered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Almost a full day later, Keturah returned home tired in soul and in spirit. It was late. She needed to start supper... she hadn't eaten all day. But instead she took a seat at her table and stared at nothing. She had spent the last few hours in prayer and now she had nothing. She was completely spent. There was no word of encouragement, no Psalm that came to mind. It was like this sometimes with her. She wanted to crawl into bed, pull the covers over her head, and never get out.\n\nA quick rapping at the door pulled her out of her dark thoughts. Casca hadn't barked which meant that it was probably Manny. She didn't want to talk to him. She didn't want to talk to anyone. She didn't know what would come out of her mouth and in this mood, it was always best that she said nothing. Nevertheless, after he knocked some more and called her name through the door, she went and opened it.\n\n\"I heard,\" he said, his arms on either side of the doorway. His face held an expression of concern.\n\n\"That I lost the baby?\" The words came out just barely above a whisper. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"You didn't lose the baby. It's my understandin' that the baby was dead when it came out.\"\n\nKeturah shook her head, tears in her eyes, unable to speak. He hadn't seen the little girl. How perfectly formed she was, how almost full of life she was. How blue her fingertips and her mouth had been. How hard Keturah had tried to breathe life into the child.\n\n\"Oh, Keturah,\" he said gently, pushing his way into the house, shutting the door behind him.\n\nKeturah took several steps back, creating space between them. \"If Granny had been there, she wouldn't have died.\"\n\n\"Oh, is Granny Jesus? You don't know that. It sounds to me like the baby would have died with Granny or with you.\"\n\n\"You don't understand. I've delivered two babies. I... my knowledge is small. If I knew more\u2014,\"\n\nManny took his hat off, tossing it onto her kitchen table. \"Alright, Keturah. Maybe you're right. Maybe if you knew more, things would have changed. But you don't and we can't go back in time. You did the best you could and that's all anyone can ever ask.\"\n\nKeturah turned away, wiping at her tears. She did not feel the least bit comforted. This was not messing up figures or hurting someone's feelings. This was literally life and death. \"I didn't want to do this. I never wanted to do this. To be responsible for other people's lives. I can barely be responsible for my own.\"\n\nManny walked towards her. He placed his hands on her arms, forcing her to look at him. \"Life and death is not in your hands.\" Manny sighed, shaking his head slightly. \"Every purpose God has given man on this earth has had to do with influencin' or helpin' others. I can see that clear as day every time I open the Bible. As much as you might want to, you can't live life apart from others.\"\n\n\"You say that to me when you've chosen to hide behind some cavalier identity so you can stay uninvolved,\" Keturah said, flinging the words at him.\n\nFor a minute, Manny stared at her. \"You're right. I'm not practicin' what I'm preachin'. You're supposed to be better than me,\" he teased. But she wasn't laughing. Manny exhaled. \"I'm just sayin' if you're called by God... then what you do for Him is in His hands.\"\n\n\"But am I? Called by God?\" More tears fell and she pulled away from Manny and walked over to the kitchen table to grab a cloth napkin to wipe her eyes.\n\n\"Everyone is. Are you called to be a midwife? I don't know. I can't answer that. But for what my opinion is worth, this town needs you.\"\n\n\"Granny\u2014,\"\n\n\"Is old. And tired. She's put in her years.\"\n\n\"She could still train another woman.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Manny said, his hands on his waist as he stared at her. \"She could, Keturah. But I think she picked you for a reason and I think you know that.\" He exhaled loudly, rubbing the back of his neck.\n\nKeturah sniffed. She wasn't so sure, and God was being silent right now. Of course, she wasn't exactly in the space to listen. \"Are you hungry?\"\n\nHe looked up, a hint of amusement on his face. \"I'm fine. You sit down. I'll make you some tea. I've never done it before, but I think I can manage.\"\n\nKeturah took a seat, watching as he put some water to boil and grabbed two cups. He sat down, placing one in front of her and one in front of him. \"You're angry.\"\n\nShe wiped at her face again when a stray tear fell. \"How can you tell?\"\n\n\"Because I recognize it. So, tell me everythin' you're angry about.\"\n\nKeturah shook her head, staring at the empty cup. It was best not to say anything.\n\n\"You'll never get past it if you don't release it.\"\n\nShe eyed him for a second. \"You release your anger?\"\n\n\"Yes, more often than not at Sam. The benefits of havin' a twin is knowin' that no matter what you say or do, he's still there. At least mine is.\" Manny motioned toward himself. \"So, hit me. There's nothin' you could say that would scare me away.\"\n\nKeturah looked down, overwhelmed by his offer. And if she had any doubts in her mind, they were gone. Somehow, she had managed to fall in love with this man. In her heart she reached for Leo. He was still there, but the light was dim. A tear fell that had nothing to do with the stillborn baby she delivered. Oh, Leo, my love. Another tear fell as she let him go.\n\n\"I am angry,\" she said after a moment. \"But more than that I'm afraid. I don't think I realized that until recently. I don't like not havin' control, not knowin' what is comin' next,\" she sniffed. \"So, I do everythin' I can too control what I can by learnin' and,\" she swallowed the next few words. Choosing her own spouse, deciding how many children she would have if and when the time came, guarding herself carefully so as to not grow too attached. \"And,\" she continued, \"I thought that I was doin' everythin' that I needed to do to learn how to be a midwife. To make sure there were no deaths or injuries or illnesses because I was there. I know, I'm not God, but... ,\"\n\nWhen Manny didn't say anything, she looked away from her empty cup to his face. He had been looking away too, and for a second their eyes met. \"I don't have the answers. I wish I did. All I know is that when I chose to give my life to Jesus, I chose to choose faith every time. Every time. And life sometimes makes no sense. And for those times I have no answers.\" She knew he was thinking about the issue with the Battles' family. He did not like what he had found out the other day. \"But once you've met God, actually met God, even when bad times and disappointments come, I have found that you cannot so easily dismiss Him. In those moments, sometimes it's soothin' to have someone there to just sit with you and listen.\" With that, he stood up and took the hot water off the stove.\n\nKeturah got up to show him how to fix the tea and together they returned back to the table. And for some time, neither one of them said anything, just sipped their respective cups sharing silence. And he was right. She still felt tired and a bit hung out to dry\u2014but she didn't feel alone. \"How long are you plannin' on bein' here?\"\n\n\"How long do you need me?\"\n\nAlmost, almost she said forever. But. It was supper time\u2014past supper time really\u2014and she was beginning to feel better. \"I'm better now.\"\n\n\"Are you?\" He asked quietly, his eyes searching.\n\n\"I am.\" And to show him that she was, she stood up. He followed suit, grabbing his hat.\n\n\"That's my second cup of that stuff and it's just as nasty as it was the first time.\"\n\n\"It's good for you,\" she said, walking behind him to the door. \"Manny?\"\n\n\"Yes?\" He asked, turning back to face her.\n\nHe was so much taller than her that she had to grab his vest, pull him down, and stand on the tips of her toes to kiss him. After a second, she realized he was not kissing her back. She pulled away. The expression on his face was kind, gentle.\n\nFor a second she felt a pang of embarrassment; that she had presumed too much. But no, this man was not subtle. He liked her. \"Keturah, don't look at me like that. I want to kiss you. I've wanted to kiss you almost from the day I met you. But, think, your emotions are still high. I don't want you to kiss me today and tomorrow act like you wish you hadn't.\"\n\n\"I won't,\" she said, still clutching his vest.\n\n\"Keturah.\"\n\n\"Manny.\"\n\n\"If you're sure...\"\n\n\"I'm very sure.\"\n\nHe smiled before he enfolded her in his arms and pressed his lips against hers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "\"I think I need to hire the Carsons to put up some walls upstairs,\" Manny told Sam the next morning at the store. No one was in the store but the two of them, so even though Manny was at the counter, tallying up figures and Sam was restocking the shelves, he had no problems yelling across the mercantile.\n\n\"That is somehow not surprisin',\" Sam answered, stepping between two aisles so he could see Manny.\n\n\"Yeah,\" Manny said, tapping his pencil against the counter. Keturah liked him. She liked him a lot if he based things off that kiss she gave him the day before. Finally. Which meant he needed to start thinking about finding himself a place to live. And he had decided on the second floor of the store. It was large enough that they could have a living space, a kitchen, and several rooms. He did not want land. There was room enough behind the store that he could set up space for a garden for Keturah and maybe a chicken coop. He would gladly pay to keep his and Keturah's horses at the livery at night. He somehow didn't think Keturah would mind.\n\nSam walked over to the counter, swinging his arms and snapping his fingers, more relaxed than Manny could ever remember seeing him.\n\nThey had had a talk when he got back from Riverside about what to do with Jeremiah Battles' will and the deed. It had happened before he had heard the news about Keturah and the stillborn baby.\n\n\"Sam, I would have sworn that God himself told me to go back to Emerson Yates. You know how I am. You know I wouldn't have gotten involved on my own.\" He had been pacing the front porch that night while Sam sat at the very edge of the rocker, his hands clasped together as he took in Manny's information.\n\n\"What about that has you upset?\"\n\n\"It was for nothin'!\" Manny hissed, coming to an angry stop. \"Nothin'! Except, now it's another weight on your shoulder and the town has to worry about two men who might burn it down.\" In the dim light of the evening, Sam's face altered slightly, and Manny didn't miss it. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"Those two men\u2014we should probably name them\u2014anyway, they were spotted by one of the Lacey boys.\"\n\n\"Doin' what?\" Manny asked, his hands on his waist.\n\n\"Junious said they were just walkin' around.\"\n\n\"Like they were gettin' the lay of the land?\"\n\nSam shrugged. \"I don't know, Manny. But probably.\"\n\nManny threw his hands in the air. \"See? I missed it. It must not have been God. I can't see Him, on purpose, bringin' trouble to us. I did that, all by myself.\" He was a failure at this Christian business.\n\n\"Manny, I'm not as convinced as you are that it was for nothin'. Sure, there's a good chance we'll never know why God got us involved.\"\n\n\"Me.\"\n\n\"Us. And as frustratin' as that might be, it's okay. We're just a patch on the quilt of life, Manny. You don't see the big picture, but God does. And I believe that when you obey Him, He honors that. Arrow Creek needs security. These men won't be the first or the last white men who think that this town does not need to exist. Maybe this is God's way of preparin' us for the future. You think of that? Besides, if not for this incident we would still be mad at each other. I can't believe you hid your faith from me. As your brother, I think you're an idiot. As your reverend, it's completely unwise. Bein' open keeps you accountable. Believe it or not there have been times when I've been angry and upset and probably wanted to cuss some fierce\u2014,\"\n\n\"Never say it's true, Sam,\" Manny said flatly.\n\n\"Shut up. Anyway, do you know what kept me from actin' that way? You. Knowin' that I was an example of Christ to you. If everyone thinks you're wild, no one will hold you up to God's standards.\"\n\n\"I'm not completely unaware of that.\"\n\nA light dawned in Sam's eyes. \"You didn't want to be held up?\"\n\n\"Nope.\" Manny came and sat in the rocker next to his brother. \"Bein' a believer means gettin' involved and I didn't want to be forced to get involved.\"\n\n\"So, God made you help some white people. Some\u2014from the looks of it\u2014completely undeservin' ones too.\"\n\n\"Apparently,\" Manny muttered. And then he laughed. And then his brother laughed. And even though he didn't understand what was going on, he knew he would be fine. And the next time he thought God was pushing him to do something, he would do it still. Even if he was completely unsure of how everything would turn out.\n\nAnd so there he was in the store, completely relaxed even though in a few days he had to return to Riverside with the papers. He had decided to give them to Brett Battles. He was most likely the one who Emerson Yates had been referring to anyway. And at least Brett hadn't hired murderers. Yet.\n\n\"I should probably order a stove. They can take forever to get out here.\"\n\n\"Already done,\" Sam said, taking Manny's paper from him and looking over the numbers.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I ordered it the day after you first mentioned Keturah.\" Manny reached over and punched Sam lightly in the shoulder. Sam looked at him, smiled. \"Go on and say it. I'm the best brother in the world.\"\n\n\"You are the best brother in the world,\" Manny said, again humbled by Sam. He really needed to think of something nice to do for his brother. Before he could think on it much though, the door to the store opened. Frank walked in.\n\n\"Frank? What brings you out here?\" Frank said nothing, his eyes darting between Sam and Manny for a second. Sometimes it was irritating being a twin. \"Frank, this is Sam, my brother. Sam, this is Frank, Paul's pa.\"\n\nSam straightened from where he was leaning and held out a hand. After a moment, Frank crossed the room and shook it. \"Nice to meet you, Frank. Manny's told me a lot about your family. How are Paul and Etta Lou?\"\n\nFrank stared at Sam a second longer before looking at Manny and then back at Sam again. \"They're fine,\" he said, taking his hand out of Sam's grip. Frank turned back to Manny. \"Came to fetch Keturah. It's Miss Ginny's time.\"\n\nManny exhaled. Course it was. He was sure Keturah was better today than she was yesterday. Didn't mean she wanted to go through the whole process of delivering another baby yet again. \"I'll come with you to get her.\"\n\n\"I was hopin' you might.\"\n\nManny reached behind him for his hat which was hanging on a hook.\n\n\"Stay the night if you need to,\" Sam ordered. Rare were the moments that Manny actually felt younger than Sam. But they did exist.\n\n\"Alright, Sam.\"\n\nManny did make a stop at his house to run in and grab some things. If this birth was anything like the last, he preferred to have a book to read.\n\n\"This is y'alls house?\" Frank asked from the top of his horse. He seemed distinctly unhurried. Manny had asked him about it and Frank had just shrugged and said babies take a long time.\n\n\"Sam's house,\" Manny said, running up the stairs of the porch. \"I won't be but a second.\" He paused at the door. \"You want to come in and wait?\"\n\n\"Sure,\" Frank said. He was off his horse in a minute, tying the reins to the fence. Manny held the door open for the man but started down the hall.\n\n\"You can wait in the livin' room. I'll hurry.\"\n\n\"Manny?\" Laura asked, stepping out the parlor. By the hanging drapes on the doors, he could see she had a client.\n\n\"Frank's here to get Keturah. I'm goin' up with them to Riverside so I'm gonna grab a few things.\"\n\n\"I'll be prayin',\" Laura murmured. She looked past Manny, caught sight of Frank, who was still lingering in the hallway and waved.\n\nManny didn't wait around. He went to his room, grabbed a bag, two books and clothes to stay overnight even as he hoped he wouldn't need them. Then he mustered Frank out of the house\u2014which was harder than it should have been\u2014got his own horse and led them to Keturah's house.\n\nKeturah was in the garden and saw them before they got down from their horses. He saw her shoulders fall in resignation, but she set her hoe aside and went in the house to get her things.\n\nHe realized in that moment that he had known she would come. That no matter what she had said the day before, if someone needed her, she would come. It was just who she was." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "The ride to Riverside was long but not quiet. Manny's first impression of Frank was that he was a silent, taciturn man. Manny was wrong. Frank kept up a steady conversation the whole time.\n\n\"I think he likes you,\" Keturah whispered in Manny's ear as he helped her down from the horse. The sun was starting to begin its descent. Why was this birthing stuff always happening around supper time? He had grabbed books and clothes, but he hadn't grabbed any food. It was going to be a long night.\n\n\"I think he has no friends,\" Manny replied. That was his conclusion. The man clearly had a lot on his mind and no one to share it with. Why he had deemed Manny a recipient of this information, he did not know. But Manny now knew that Frank was originally from Maryland. That he was not a mulatto as most people assumed, but his mama had been. That he had been with Brett Battles almost as long as he could remember and no, the two of them were not related. On and on the man had talked, reminding Manny of his son, Paul.\n\n\"Honestly, his conversation kept me from panickin'. He has a soothin' voice. Like you,\" Keturah said, reaching for her bag.\n\n\"Is it just me or is he distinctly not worried? Peter practically ran his horse into the ground. Frank is actin' like we've been headin' to a picnic.\"\n\n\"Hey Manny,\" Paul called out, waving enthusiastically from the opening of the barn. Frank was riding his horse straight into the building, pausing only to reach down and touch the top of Paul's head.\n\nKeturah tapped Manny's arm. \"Go spend some time with your new friends. I'm gonna go in the house and see what's what.\"\n\nManny reached out, stopping her movement. \"You alright?\"\n\n\"Got to get back on the horse, right?\" Keturah said lightly, not quite meeting his gaze.\n\n\"Keturah,\" he said, touching her shoulder.\n\nShe exhaled. \"If I'm goin' to be the midwife, I have to do this. Whether I feel like it or not.\"\n\n\"Hello, Keturah. Manny.\" It was Etta Lou. She was coming from around the back of the house. These people were really starting to get on Manny's nerves. \"It seems like forever since we've seen you.\"\n\nIt didn't feel like that to Manny. He stepped away from Keturah and grabbed his horse's reins and Titania's reins so he could put the horses up. \"How are you, Etta Lou?\"\n\nDressed in green with her red and white checkered head wrap, Etta Lou smiled. \"Good, Manny.\"\n\n\"Come on, Manny!\" Paul said, almost jumping up and down.\n\nEtta Lou walked over to Keturah slipping her arm through hers as though they were longtime friends. They started down a stone walkway to the back of the house. \"You go on, Emmanuel. He's been waitin' for you all day.\"\n\nManny took a step forward and then paused. \"What did you call me?\"\n\nEtta Lou, who was just to the side of him turned around, a confused look on her face. But Keturah had stopped and was staring at the woman.\n\nLetting go of the horses' reins, he walked over to Etta Lou and he didn't know what the expression on his face was, but he saw that as he got closer, her own grew more serious. The shade from the house made everything darker. Without thinking, he grabbed her arm and pulled her into one of the few patches of light on the grass so that he could have a good look at her. Placing a hand under her chin he tilted her face up. They didn't look like her, he realized. They were closer to her in coloring, but they looked like Frank. How had he missed that?\n\n\"Manny?\" Etta Lou whispered. Tears gathered in her dark eyelashes as she smiled at him.\n\n\"Mama.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "She could not believe it. Miracles happened. Her being in Indian Territory instead of working the cotton plantation in Salis was proof enough of that. But this...\n\nThe expression on Manny's face as he looked down at Etta Lou was a mixture of pain, disbelief, and hope.\n\n\"Papa, what\u2014,\"\n\nKeturah looked over to the barn where Paul stood confused as Frank's hand covered his mouth. Frank. How could she have missed it? Even from where she stood, she saw it now. Manny hadn't just stumbled across one parent. He had stumbled across two.\n\nThe back door of the house swung open. \"Is that you? The midwife?\" the man she recognized as Brett Battles asked as he came out to the porch of the house.\n\n\"Yes,\" Keturah said. The one word so filled with emotion it struggled to exit. She cleared her throat. \"Yes, that's me.\"\n\n\"Come on, then. Etta Lou?\"\n\nEtta Lou took a step back from Manny very slowly, not taking her eyes off of him.\n\n\"Etta Lou? Girl, you hear me call you?\"\n\nKeturah had forgotten that slavery made no time and gave no space for the important moments. Like a mother and son being reunited after at least a decade.\n\nEven from where Keturah stood, she could see that Manny's grip on his mama's arm was tight.\n\n\"It's okay, baby,\" Etta Lou said softly. Manny looked stricken as though if he let her go now, she would be gone again forever. \"I'm not goin' anywhere right now. Go on to the barn with your pa and your brother. We'll talk. I promise.\" She pulled away from Manny then and when she reached for Keturah's arm, Keturah gave it.\n\n\"'Bout time, Etta Lou, what do you think you're doin'?\" Brett fussed as they entered the house together. \"You know it's Ginny's time. For goodness sake, stop thinkin' about yourself.\"\n\nEtta Lou said nothing, just led Keturah up the stairs.\n\n\"I don't need you in the room,\" Keturah said quietly. \"If you can sneak back down, by all means, do so.\"\n\nWhen Etta Lou glanced over at her, her eyes were red and tear-filled. She shook her head. \"You haven't met Miss Ginny.\" She sniffed. \"We did send for you a bit early though, hopin' to spend a few extra minutes with our boy.\"\n\nEtta Lou's voice cracked on her last word.\n\n\"Why didn't you say anythin'?\"\n\n\"For what purpose? We're slaves. Manny and Sam aren't. And we're not from here. Before the month is out, we'll be a hundred miles away. It was just good to see him. We couldn't think of a way to get Sam out here.\"\n\nBefore Keturah could say a word\u2014and she had a lot of words to say\u2014the door to their right opened. It was Alice.\n\n\"You again?\"\n\n\"I didn't want to be here,\" Alice said with a huff. \"I'm sho glad you here, though.\" Alice peered at Etta Lou. \"What's wrong with you?\"\n\n\"Nothin' for you to worry about,\" Keturah said, butting in. She let go of Etta Lou's arm, entering the room that was so similar to Cornelia's room that Keturah felt like she had taken a step back in time. Except that this time the woman had brown hair and while clearly in labor, not at the point Cornelia had been in.\n\n\"Oh, thank God,\" Ginny said, her hand on her belly. \"It took you forever to get here,\" the woman snapped.\n\nIt that moment, it was hard to differentiate between an annoyed woman in labor or an annoyed mistress of slaves.\n\nKeturah didn't think on it too hard cause something caught her eye. Blood. And lots of it. \"How long have you been bleedin'?\"\n\n\"All day. Not all at once,\" Ginny answered, breathing heavy.\n\nKeturah went to the desk in the room and set down her bag. Lord, give me strength, she prayed quietly. Her hand found its way to her chest, to her book of Psalms. God is our strength and refuge, a very present help in trouble.\n\n\"Are you gonna need some water?\" Etta Lou asked, coming alongside her.\n\n\"Yes, Etta Lou, would you get it?\"\n\n\"Call me Lu or Lucy. If I go down, I won't come back up. Alice, go get some water,\" Lucy ordered.\n\nThere was already a small pitcher of water and Keturah washed her hands. It was different this time than last time, she told herself. Last time everything had seemed fine right up until the moment of delivery. Feeling like she was about to enter a fight, Keturah straightened her shoulders, focused on the now, and went over to Ginny.\n\n\"Are you in any pain?\" With that much blood loss, and from all that Granny had explained to her, it was a good chance the placenta might have separated from the womb... or something like that. If there was some kind of separation, the mama was usually in some serious pain. \"Other than the contractions?\" Keturah clarified as she touched Ginny's belly. The belly was hard.\n\n\"No,\" Ginny said.\n\n\"Last time you felt the baby move?\"\n\n\"Um,\" Ginny said, humming, \"I don't know, but not that long.\"\n\n\"Alright, I need to examine you.\"\n\n\"Etta Lou? Come hold my hand,\" Ginny demanded, waving her arm about. Lucy walked over and took the woman's hand, standing quietly and looking away. Her mind was clearly on other things and Keturah didn't blame her. Keturah made quick work of the examination. Ginny's body was not yet ready to push out a baby... and here she was steadily bleeding. Keturah didn't quite know what to do for certain. Lord, if this woman dies, she began to pray, and then stopped. Sometimes her own words didn't cut it. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.\n\n\"Let's lift her up. You're gonna have to stay in the bed, Miss Ginny, until it's time for you to push. I can't let you lose any more blood.\"\n\nBetween the two of them, Keturah and Lucy changed the sheets on the bed and elevated the lower half of Ginny's body. Alice came up with two large, full pails of water and Keturah cleaned her hands and tools again. And then they waited. There was so much Keturah wanted to talk to Manny's mama about but with Alice and Ginny in the room listening, her conversation was stilted.\n\n\"When did you know?\" she asked the woman.\n\n\"Paul,\" Lucy said quietly from her place next to Ginny. \"He told us Manny had a twin. A brother named Sam. Couldn't be another set of twins with those names. I've looked for them in the faces of every man I've come across who's about their age. I saw Frank in Manny, but I wasn't sure. Not 'til Paul told us about Sam.\"\n\n\"Please,\" Ginny moaned. \"Please stop talkin'.\"\n\nThe night seemed to last forever, waiting for Ginny to have the baby. Keturah was sure she dozed off for a half hour or so. And then it happened.\n\n\"Walk.\"\n\n\"Walk? I'll bleed,\" Ginny snapped.\n\n\"You'll also have the baby faster. Come on, you can do it,\" Keturah said. Not giving the woman a chance to say more, she grabbed one arm and Lucy grabbed the other. Together, they hauled Ginny out of the bed. \"You'll feel better, movin' makes the contractions easier to bear.\"\n\n\"How many babies have you had?\" Lucy asked from the other side of Ginny.\n\n\"None,\" Keturah said.\n\n\"None?\" Lucy repeated in surprise.\n\n\"Did you think I had children stowed away somewhere?\" Keturah asked as they helped Ginny move about the room.\n\n\"I did. Most midwives do.\"\n\n\"Stop talkin',\" Ginny growled, her voice almost an octave deeper. They were close now. Keturah had begun to notice that right before the baby came, the mama started sounding a bit different. They paced back and forth and up and down the room, little droplets of blood following. Alice tried to get them up as quick as they fell, but it was an exercise in futility. And then Ginny stopped. In moments, the woman bore down, delivering both her son and the placenta.\n\n\"Go,\" Keturah told Lucy. \"Alice and I will clean up.\"\n\n\"We will?!\"\n\nKeturah ignored Alice and nodded at Lucy. Lucy nodded back and disappeared out of the room.\n\nIn her arms, the baby wailed and Keturah looked down at the angry, wrinkly, bloody newborn. New life in her hands." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "He knew now why God had had him go back to Emerson Yates. Manny felt like he wanted to crawl out of his skin. He was sitting in the barn with Paul and Frank. He had been sitting in the barn with Paul and Frank for what felt like hours, but he had no way of actually knowing if that was true.\n\nFrank, who had been talking to him almost nonstop earlier, had become almost mute since the reveal. There was still the odd moment where he stopped cleaning or repairing something and Manny would feel the weight of his stare, but otherwise, they had not talked. And Manny didn't know what to say to him. In his mind, Frank had never been a part of his life. He wasn't sure what to make of the man now.\n\n\"Can you teach me another letter, Manny?\" Paul asked, handing Manny a large stick he had found. They had been going over the first few letters of the alphabet for a while now. From what Manny could tell, Paul still didn't know they were brothers. Brothers. It was surreal to think that there was someone else in the world other than Sam who held that title. Sam. There was a part of him that wanted to race back to Arrow Creek right now to fetch Sam. He would know how to navigate all these new relationships. But there was another part of him that couldn't bear to leave without his mama.\n\n\"Here,\" Manny said, leaning forward, writing the letter E into the dirt of the barn floor. \"This is E. The fifth letter.\"\n\n\"A, B, C, D, E!\" Paul took the stick from Manny, making little E's in the dirt next to his larger E. \"Like your name, Manny. Emmanuel. Samuel and Emmanuel, Mama said.\"\n\nManny did not respond. Paul's words made him grip the haystack he was sitting on in an effort to keep himself from running into the house if only to catch a passing glimpse of his mama. There was a creak and then the barn doors opened. Paul tossed fresh hay over the letters he was writing and then hid himself in a stall.\n\n\"Frank?\" the voice came from the barn door opening. It was Brett Battles. \"Frank, come into the house for a second. I need you to do somethin' for me.\"\n\nWithout a word, Frank, who had been shoveling fresh hay into one of the stalls, left the barn. Paul waited for the barn door to close and then came to take a seat on the haystack next to Manny. After a second, he dug into Manny's side with his bony elbow. \"Guess what?\"\n\n\"What?\" Manny asked, tugging on the boy's arm so it was no longer digging into the soft parts of his side.\n\n\"I was listenin' to Mama and Papa talkin' the other night.\" Paul's words were solemn and his eyes large as he stared up at Manny.\n\n\"Are you supposed to be doin' that?\"\n\n\"No. Don't tell or Papa might tan my hide.\" Staring down at his little brother, Manny noted that Paul was mostly a lighter version of Mama. \"You'll never guess what I heard,\" Paul whispered as he looked past Manny to make sure their pa didn't come back inside.\n\n\"I think I can.\"\n\n\"No, you can't. Mama and Papa? They lost some babies before I was born. Remember I told you that? They were twins!\"\n\n\"I know, Paul,\" Manny said gently. \"Me and Sam.\"\n\nBoth of Paul's eyebrows raised to the top of his head. \"You know then? Are you them? You and Sam?\"\n\n\"Yes, Paul. We're them.\"\n\nPaul drew back, a look of wonder in his eyes. \"Oh my goodness. You're my big brother.\"\n\n\"I guess I am.\"\n\nPaul dropped the writing stick in his hand and looped his little arm through Manny's, resting his head against Manny's shoulder. \"I've got a brother. I've got a brother,\" he sang.\n\n\"Two of them.\"\n\n\"Yep. Sam too. And guess what, Manny?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I'm an uncle too.\"\n\n\"I guess you are,\" Manny said, not able to even think about that at the moment.\n\nPaul straightened and then reached for his stick. \"Can you spell my name?\"\n\nThey worked on Paul's name until the barn door opened up again revealing Frank. In his hand were several bowls of food.\n\n\"Oh, good! I'm hungry, Pa,\" Paul said, hurrying over to Frank to grab a bowl.\n\nManny stood up and took the bowl Frank handed him. In the midst of everything, he had forgotten about his hunger. It returned with a vengeance.\n\n\"Figured you both might be hungry,\" Frank said, his voice low as he took a seat on the haystack Paul had been using. Manny sat down and made quick work of whatever kind of stew was in the bowl.\n\n\"What is it that you do?\" Manny asked, genuinely curious.\n\n\"Everythin',\" Frank said, looking down into his bowl.\n\n\"You can ride,\" Manny said, just realizing that fact.\n\n\"I can do most anythin' Massa Brett can do except read. Whatever he needs, I do. I cook, I clean, I take care of the horses.\"\n\n\"House slave then?\"\n\n\"Yes. Never worked in the fields a day in my life.\" They were so different, he and Frank.\n\nFrank cleared his throat, changing the subject. \"Your mama and me,\" he began quietly. \"We weren't sure if it was worth it to tell you. It's not like we could run because he would know where we run to.\"\n\n\"We could buy you,\" Manny said after a moment, his food now settling like a rock in his stomach. They had to figure this out, he and Sam. He simply could not imagine being separated from his mama yet again.\n\n\"If I thought that was a possibility, I woulda brought it up. He's not sellin' me or your mama this side of Kansas.\" Frank tilted his head, thinking. \"But maybe Paul.\"\n\n\"I don't care about the details, you should have told me from the moment you suspected. What did Paul say, by the way, that made you know?\"\n\n\"Just that you had a twin named Sam. If we had known that in the beginnin' things would have gone differently.\"\n\nSpeaking of which...\"I have to go get Sam.\"\n\n\"Your mama would really like that. She won't hardly dare to believe y'all still favor each other so much.\"\n\nManny had forgotten that Frank had met Sam.\n\n\"I just need to talk to Mama first,\" Manny said. He just needed to hold her. Why hadn't he hugged her when he could?\n\nThe labor took hours. Frank sent a very unwilling Paul to bed and then stayed seated next to Manny, whittling. Manny tried to read the book he had brought from home but he quite simply could not focus on the words on the pages. Every now and then, he asked Frank a question.\n\n\"How long y'all been out west?\"\n\nFrank hummed, pausing the movement of his knife. \"Came out about year or so ago.\" It sounded like roughly around the time he and Sam had come out west. \"You never did say why you and Sam chose to go west.\"\n\nThey chatted off and on, making hesitant strides at getting to know each other when the barn door opened, revealing his mama.\n\nManny stood up. \"Mama.\"\n\nHer wide grin spread across her face and she ran into his arms. He wrapped her tight, lifting her in the air. \"Oh, Manny,\" she said and then her voice broke and she sobbed against his chest. Manny lowered her to the ground, still unwilling to let her go. \"You've become a man and I've missed it all. You and Sam, I've missed everythin',\" she said, crying so hard it sounded like she couldn't breathe. Manny blinked back his own tears as he waded through memories. Dozens and dozens of them that he had spent years trying to forget. Her scent, her laughter. The way she sounded when she had scolded him and Sam and when she had prayed with him and Sam. The small moments of her brushing his hair or wiping crumbs from his chin. Lord, how he had missed her.\n\n\"Mama, we spent over ten years pickin' tobacco. I promise you, you didn't miss much.\"\n\nBut his words provided little comfort.\n\nManny felt a hand on his shoulder and then Frank was opposite him, hugging his Mama from behind. \"He's here now, Lucy. At least we have now.\"\n\nIn his arms, he felt his mama nod and sniff and Manny remembered that he did carry a handkerchief. He pulled it out of his pocket and handed it to her.\n\n\"Oh, my!\" she said, laughing as she wiped her tears. \"I was so impressed with your manners when we first met.\n\n\"Courtesy of my sister-in-law. She runs a tight ship.\" At least she did with her brothers. All of her fussing at them had rubbed off on him.\n\n\"She sounds real smart.\"\n\n\"She is,\" Manny said. He took several steps back until the back of his legs touched the haystacks. \"Come on and sit down, Mama.\"\n\n\"Let me sit between you and your pa,\" she said and did just that.\n\nWhen everyone was settled, Manny didn't know what to say next. \"Etta Lou?\"\n\nHis mama sent him a pained expression. \"The plantation I was sent to had a Lucy already so they renamed me Etta. I hate that name.\"\n\n\"Oh. God forbid more than one Lucy.\"\n\n\"Exactly. I'm a grandma now?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Sam's a father. Philip Jessamy. A tiny little thing, he's only a few months old.\"\n\nHe watched his mama wipe her eyes as more tears fell. \"He works with you at the store?\"\n\n\"Yes. He's the reverend of Arrow Creek too.\"\n\n\"No?!\" His mama said, a smile taking up her face. She met Manny's eyes, grinnin' widely. \"That fits our Sam, doesn't it?\"\n\n\"You could say that again.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"What's wrong with the name Emmanuel?\"\n\n\"I don't use it anymore,\" Manny said, reluctantly shrugging. \"But you can call me that if you want.\"\n\n\"God is with us, I'm so convinced of it,\" she said, patting both his knee and Frank's. Frank sat next to Mama, his arms folded tightly over his chest and his jaw clenched. But he said nothing.\n\nManny wanted to stay, he wanted to soak up his mama's presence like a sponge, but he would have no peace if he did. \"I have to leave, Mama.\"\n\n\"And get Sam?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's awful dark out,\" Frank said, leaning forward.\n\n\"I'll be fine. I'll be extra careful, but I've got to go get my brother. Tell Keturah for me?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" his mama said, swallowing. Their imminent separation already making her weepy again. \"I hate to see you leave,\" she said her voice muffled by the handkerchief.\n\nManny wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in for a hug. He leaned down and kissed to the top of her head. \"But I'm comin' back, Mama.\"\n\nManny was careful. But he also moved fast. It helped that the night wasn't completely pitch black. He didn't keep a watch, but he was sure he made it home in record time. He didn't bother to put his horse up, just leaped off of it and ran up the porch stairs. All the lights were out and everyone was sleeping. He quietly made his way down the hall and to his brother's room, tapping lightly on the door.\n\n\"Manny?\" Sam asked, coming to the door half sleep, blinking, rubbing his eyes, and in his underwear. \"I can't believe you didn't just stay in Riverside. Stubbornness is not a virtue.\"\n\n\"Sam.\" His brother stopped talking. Stopped moving. \"I've found Mama.\"\n\nThey left at first light. Manny had remembered that it was, in fact, the agreed upon day to meet with Brett Battles and so he had grabbed all of Emerson Yates' things including the will and deed. He and Sam also cleared out their safe and left with promises of additional funds from Amos if they needed it. Brett Battles had to sell them their parents and Paul. There was no other option.\n\nThe meeting wasn't taking place until the afternoon, so Manny led Sam straight to the barn. The door was already open and their mama stood at the entrance, waiting. Manny could see her smile as they rode up.\n\nSam reached over, his hand an iron grip on Manny's arm. \"That's Mama, Manny. I can't believe you didn't recognize her.\" This was maybe the fifth time he had said that.\n\n\"Oh, you would have, would you? Go on, describe her for me.\"\n\nSam didn't bother to answer. He climbed off his horse and took long strides to meet their mama halfway. When he hugged her, he picked her up too, just like Manny had done.\n\n\"Need help with the horses?\" The offer came from his other side. Frank.\n\n\"Sure.\"\n\nThey didn't get far. Sam stopped talking hurriedly at Mama\u2014who was once again in tears\u2014to speak to Frank. \"Mornin',\" Sam said, nodding at him.\n\nFrank nodded back. \"Good to see you again, Sam.\"\n\nFor a second Sam hesitated and then he took a step forward and hugged Frank. It was so Sam, Manny rolled his eyes. But Frank very slowly reached up, gripping Sam to him. They had decided together to call the man, pa. It wasn't as though it were any fault of Frank's that they had grown up without a father. And so even though they didn't feel the relationship with Frank like they did with their mama, they would nevertheless honor the relationship. But Manny couldn't bring himself to be first\u2014and he knew Frank better than Sam.\n\nSam and Frank clapped each other on the back, eyeing each other just a little bit warily. Mama stared on, her hands on her chest.\n\n\"These horses would like to go into the barn. I too,\" Manny said, interrupting the moment, \"Would like to go into the barn.\"\n\nMama scoffed. \"Oh, Manny.\" Sam and Frank laughed.\n\nIn the barn, Sam and Mama found a corner to talk in while Manny and Frank got the horses settled. \"I'm probably not goin' to hug you,\" Manny told Frank even though he was trying to work up the courage to do just that.\n\nFrank glanced over at Manny but didn't say anything.\n\n\"Me and Sam. We're not the same.\"\n\n\"You don't say,\" Frank said dryly. \"Sam liked to be held. I remember that. You didn't. We could only hold you when you were sleep.\" Manny stopped brushing down his horse and stared at his pa. \"It's true,\" Frank said, shrugging. \"You were always the more adventurous of the two. Sam was a lazy baby. Lucy and I knew if one of y'all was cryin' it was probably you cause you had been up to no good while Sam just sat there and watched.\"\n\n\"How long were you around?\"\n\nFrank tilted his head, thinking. \"Y'all were walkin'. Talkin' just a bit though it didn't make a lick of sense.\" A smile crossed Frank's face. \"You two would argue in a language only the two of you would understand. That was always funny. They were very serious arguments.\"\n\nThe barn door opened. \"Pa? Massa Brett is surely lookin' for you.\" Paul entered the barn and grinned wide when he saw both Sam and Manny.\n\n\"Well, then I better get on,\" Frank said with a sigh.\n\n\"Wait,\" Mama said, waving towards herself. She had one arm around Sam's waist and Sam was beaming. \"Let's hug. All of us. Don't make that face, Manny. Get over here.\"\n\nIn seconds, the five of them stood together. Manny was between Frank and Mama on one side and Sam was opposite him. Paul stood in the middle of them all. \"I think this is the happiest moment of my life,\" his mama said softly. In some ways, it was all too much for Manny. He would have to think on it, really think on it later. They stayed like that for a minute, but not a second longer, conscious of the fact that their time was not their own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "\"You let me do all the talkin',\" Sam said as they made their way to the church in Riverside. \"I'm the calm one.\" He sounded anything but calm.\n\n\"Sam, this is my problem. I think I can handle it. You're not even supposed to be here.\" Truly, Manny was arguing with his brother just for the sake of arguing. If anyone could win Brett Battles over it was his brother. Manny thought back to what Frank had shared with him. He purely loved arguing with Sam. Apparently, he always had.\n\n\"Manny, there is no... isn't that Frank?\"\n\nFrank stood against the stairs of the church and gave a wave. \"He's inside waitin' for you,\" Frank said as they approached. In his hand was his whittling knife and some wood. Manny imagined that he probably spent a lot of his time waiting. Frank reached out and slapped Manny's arm, then Sam's. \"Go on. I'll be out here.\"\n\nManny exchanged a quick glance with Sam and knew they were thinking the same thing. In times of stress and anxiety, other than God, they relied entirely on each other. It was odd to have another person there, encouraging them.\n\nSam pulled the church door open, walking in and Manny followed behind. Standing in front of the altar and dressed in black was Brett Battles. Young, slim, with fair skin and fair hair, he turned around and looked a bit surprised to see them.\n\n\"Mr. Battles, my brother and I are goin' to cut to the chase,\" Sam said quietly. \"We have what you've been lookin' for.\"\n\nBrett Battles moved down the aisle of the church, coming to a stop just a few pews away. He was an inch or so shorter than them. He pointed in their direction as though unsure which one to actually talk to. \"You two have been at my house. I've seen you before. I thought it was only one of you.\"\n\n\"Yes, about that,\" Sam said, slowly. \"You promised an award. We would like your slaves, Frank, Etta Lou, and Paul.\"\n\nBrett Battles blinked. Once. Twice. \"Let me see the documents.\"\n\nSam glanced away. \"You have to understand our position, Mr. Battles. There is nothin' and no way to enforce what you agreed to. Provide us with free papers and we'll provide you with the documents.\n\nBrett bristled. \"How do I know you have them?\"\n\nSam handed Brett the bag that held the personal belongings of Emerson Yates. Brett took it slowly, his jaw tight, his nostrils flaring as he pulled out Yates' clothes, taking in the blood stains. He pulled out Yates' watch and pistols, belt and shoes. For a long moment, he didn't say anything. \"I see I will have to deal with my uncle,\" he said more to himself than to them. With a large exhale, he looked up, staring first Manny and then at Sam. \"Alright. That's fair. You want your reward. I'll give you one. You can have Paul. You cannot have Frank or Etta Lou.\"\n\n\"We'll take Paul,\" Sam said calmly, ready to negotiate. \"But we're willin' to buy Frank and Etta Lou.\"\n\nBrett pressed his lips together. \"Frank is not for sale. Ever. Etta Lou is not for sale on this side of Kansas. Ginny needs her to get home. I... ,\" Brett shook his head. \"Why do you even want them?\"\n\nManny and Sam had gone back and forth over this. To tell the truth was to possibly raise the price on their parents. Neither one of them believed that Brett might be moved with compassion should he hear their story.\n\n\"We've got some history with them,\" Sam said after a moment. It the answer they had decided on. \"Knew them back out east.\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Brett said, rubbing his chin. And in that moment, Manny knew. An eerie calm settled over him. \"Look, I'm not sellin' Frank. But write to me when I get my wife and I settled back in Kansas and I'll think on sellin' Etta Lou.\"\n\n\"You'll think on... ,\" Sam slammed a fist onto the top of the wooden pew next to him. \"This is not a game! This is people's lives!\"\n\nBrett took a step back, raising an eyebrow at Sam's outburst.\n\nManny reached over and squeezed Sam's shoulder before meeting Brett's gaze. Brett wasn't going to sell Frank and Mama. It didn't matter what they said. Frank had been right.\n\n\"Listen,\" Brett said with a wave of his hand. \"I can give you some money. I do appreciate you keepin' my cousin's things. This will go a long way in provin' Uncle Barrett's guilt.\"\n\nGive them money. Manny felt slightly nauseous. He spoke next because he knew Sam couldn't \"The day you leave for Kansas, my brother and I will be here. We will give you the will and deed and you'll give us Paul's free papers.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a deal to me.\"\n\nThey made plans to stay in Riverside until their parents left for Kansas. Sam ran into Bristo Lacey in town and wrote two letters. One to Amos and one to his wife. Sam asked Amos if Sol, Gid, or Benji could run the store while they were in Riverside and if Amos could fill in for him in the pulpit while he was away. Manny didn't know what he wrote to Laura but he had some idea of it when he said his goodbyes to Keturah.\n\nThey met in a stall in the barn. She had stayed a few days extra with Ginny Battles to make sure all was well and make an extra ten dollars besides. She had also made herself scarce so he could spend time with his parents. Now, Bristo was going to give her a ride back to Arrow Creek. They only had a few minutes before she had to leave.\n\n\"What are you thinkin'? I don't know what's on your mind,\" Keturah said, standing before him in a white blouse and dark skirt, her hair covered by the straw hat on her head. With both hands, she gripped the handle of her midwifing bag tightly as she stared coolly up at him. Anyone else looking at her might see a woman that didn't look like she actually cared about anything or anyone else. But Manny finally saw what it was in her that made Granny pick her to be the next midwife. There was something about the way she lifted her head and met your eyes that was calming. Something about her confidence and her lack of emotion that calmed one's own panic. At least it did his.\n\n\"I don't know what's on my mind, Keturah. And I cannot afford to figure it out. I'm takin' everythin' as it comes.\" And that was the truth. If he worried, if he stressed, he wouldn't be able to enjoy these moments with his mama and Frank. And he could hardly pray. He had prayed this prayer before\u2014the one where he begged God to keep his family together\u2014and he was having a hard time at the thought of praying it again.\n\nKeturah nodded and closed the gap between them. One of her hands touched the middle button on his vest. \"I will go home and I will pray for you. And I don't mean that in some cursory way. I mean that in a weaponizin' way. I will sharpen my sword or put bullets in my gun or however you describe it. Many are the afflictions of the righteous but the Lord delivereth him out of them all. That's it, that's the word I have for you. And when you come back home, we'll sit on my porch and drink tea until you're ready to talk. Until you're ready to pray.\" She tried to take a step back, but Manny stopped her, holding her in place.\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said simply and then kissed her.\n\n\"I do hope this means you two are jumpin' the broom, Emmanuel,\" his mama teased from somewhere in the barn. Manny hadn't heard her come in. He brushed his lips against Keturah's warm cheek and smiled at his mama.\n\n\"I hope so,\" Manny said and released Keturah. He watched as Keturah walked over to his mama and they hugged each other tightly. He hadn't even realized that they had connected so.\n\nHis mama hummed. \"Take care of my boy.\"\n\n\"I will.\" He heard Keturah say. She pulled back. \"Bye, Mrs. Day.\"\n\nHis mama laughed lightly. \"I guess I am Mrs. Day.\"\n\n\"You don't have to be, Mama,\" Manny said, walking over to them.\n\n\"How can your pa and I be anythin' else?\" she demanded.\n\nManny walked Keturah to Bristo's wagon where Sam was handing the man his letters. \"Any more babies decide to make an entrance in this world, please take Sol or Gid with you.\"\n\n\"I will,\" she said and gave him a tight hug. Then she was gone.\n\nManny and Sam spent the next few weeks soaking up all the time that they could with their parents. Neither Frank nor their mama had been surprised by Brett's decision. \"This is for the best,\" his mama kept saying even as she got teary-eyed looking at Paul.\n\nThe time should not have flown by, but it did. And before Manny knew it, he had Paul's free papers and Brett had the will and the deed.\n\nThe five of them stood outside the house next to the already packed wagons in silence. His parents looked older. His mama had a few more lines on her face and there was more gray in Frank's beard. They had a familiar stoic look that Manny had seen on the faces of more slaves than he could count. Only Paul cried, silent, flowing tears. Manny could not even glance his way.\n\nFinally, Frank cleared his throat. \"This was a good thing. All my sons free? Can't ask for more than that.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Mama said, a hand to her throat. \"Paul, listen to your brothers. Sam, Manny, take care of each other.\"\n\n\"Always, Mama,\" he and Sam said in unison. He couldn't stop his own grimace. His mama caught sight and smiled a bittersweet smile.\n\n\"Frank! Etta Lou!\"\n\nFrank stuffed his hands in his pockets, his jaw tight, his gaze on the ground. And Manny found that it wasn't all that difficult to reach out and grab the man. Hugging his pa, he said, \"This isn't the end, Pa. Alright?\"\n\n\"You always were stubborn,\" Frank whispered in his ear. Manny felt his father's arms on his back. They squeezed each other once and then Manny moved to hug his mama while Sam took his place in front of Frank.\n\nHe hugged her tight, inhaling the scent that was uniquely hers. \"Love you, Mama.\"\n\n\"Love you too, Emmanuel.\" The words were just a hush. She was trying not to cry.\n\nSam and Manny took a step back to let their parents whisper last minute things to Paul. And then Sam lifted a distraught Paul, carrying him like he did his own son and they walked to their horses.\n\n\"Sam\u2014,\"\n\n\"This isn't it,\" Sam said, his voice low and hard. \"We didn't come this far to end like this.\"\n\n\"That's what I was gonna say.\" Keturah's verse\u2014which he had been thinking about off and on since she left\u2014flitted through his mind. The Lord delivereth them out of them all.\n\nThis was not the end." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "The church potluck was well on its way to being a success. Sitting on the blanket Laura had set up, Keturah played pickup sticks with Paul. Casca lay on the grass next to them watching the game intently as though he might join in at any moment.\n\n\"You're a lot better at this than I thought you would be,\" Paul said, staring at the pile of straw. They spent a lot of time together, her and Paul. She had become his unofficial schoolteacher. Every morning he came by and they went over his letters together. He was very open, curious, sweet, and sometimes a very stubborn little boy. In a lot of ways he was unlike Manny and Sam, but Keturah thought, that was most likely because his experience as a slave had been relatively tame in comparison up until recent events. He was struggling very much without his parents. It had been almost exactly one month since they had been separated.\n\n\"Paul, there's some children over there playin' all manner of games,\" Manny said, stretched out next to her. \"You should go play with them.\"\n\n\"Don't wanna.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, I think I'm pullin' out my big brother card.\"\n\nPaul flicked his eyes from the straw pile to his big brother. \"You're always pullin' out the big brother card.\"\n\n\"Cause I know what's best for you. Go on. They'll let you play. I paid them in peppermints.\"\n\nPaul huffed dramatically, but he slowly got up and made his way over to the children who were running around and chasing each other. Casca's eyes followed him as he left but the dog didn't move.\n\n\"He still wettin' the bed?\"\n\n\"You mean wettin' the floor. I don't let that boy sleep with me.\"\n\nNevertheless, she knew he shared a room with Paul. Paul told her. He told her a lot. Manny said it was on account of her reminding Paul of Lucy. They were both short, he would tease. But Keturah thought it was just because that was who Paul was.\n\n\"He's fine durin' the day, but it hits him hard at night,\" Manny told her quietly.\n\nShe fought the urge to look at him, to ask him if it hit him hard at night. He still couldn't bring himself to talk about it much other than to say that he was still believing God that somehow his parents would make it to Arrow Creek. If God had me stop for a dead man just to see my mama again, I don't doubt He can't make a way for us to be a family again. Most evenings Manny came by and brought Paul. Paul would run and play games with Casca while the two of them sat and drank tea on the porch. Sometimes they prayed together, sometimes they studied the Bible together, and sometimes they just enjoyed the silence together. She had not lived, truly lived, with another person in so many years. But she was thinking she was ready to live with Manny. And Paul if he came. But she didn't bring up marriage. She knew he had a lot on his mind.\n\nShe, on the other hand, was a bit more free. She had delivered exactly one baby since Ginny Battles' baby and that was in Riverside. The family there, a Negro family, had paid her in coins and between them, the Jackson baby, and the Battles' baby, she was fairly set financially\u2014at least for a few months. It felt nice not to use her brother's money. In the meantime and in between time, her book on plants and their healing uses as well as her book on midwifery had come in. She studied both and met with Granny once a week to discuss different things. She was finally beginning to believe that she could do this.\n\n\"And I think it's made him hesitant to make friends. He clings very tightly to me or Sam,\" Manny continued \"You saw how he was just now.\"\n\n\"I understand him completely. I was pretty much the same way. Still am sometimes,\" Keturah admitted, turning to look at this man who she had never been reticent with. A shadow fell over them.\n\n\"There you are, Manny,\" Waylon Sanders said, taking a seat on their blanket as though he had been invited.\n\n\"You've got to be kiddin' me,\" Manny muttered under his breath.\n\n\"Manny, you done heard about the system Uncle Boone done set up?\n\nBefore the two men Barrett Battles had hired disappeared, they had tried to set fire to the Lacey's livery, but Mr. Miller had caught sight of them on one of his evening walks. The fire had been put out quickly and with little damage to the Lacey's business. They had thrown rocks at the church's windows, but the youngest Carson boy had caught them and raised the alarm before all of the windows were damaged. They had held one of the Newman women up at gunpoint and tried to rob her but her husband had come home in time and chased them off with his own gun.\n\nEven though it now appeared they were gone for good, it had made everyone in the town a bit nervous that they didn't have some kind of system for security in place. They had all decided that the potluck would be a good time to gather together to figure out what safety measures they could put in place for Arrow Creek.\n\n\"Yes,\" Manny answered, nodding. Boone Carson had created all kinds of trip wires and booby traps up to set up around his business after he closed his doors for the night. Manny had a feeling though, that the only people who would be setting them off was his own family. They weren't exactly at war. \"We're not leavin' this picnic until we talk on different safety measures.\"\n\nWaylon patted his waist. \"I've been practicin' with my gun. No one is gonna get past me.\"\n\n\"I feel so much safer now,\" Manny said. Keturah didn't dare look at him or she would laugh.\n\n\"You need to start practicin'. Anyone could come for your store next.\"\n\n\"It is a concern.\"\n\n\"Manny?\" Keturah turned to see Sam standing just a few feet away with a group of men.\n\n\"Oh, that's probably the meetin'. We better go,\" Waylon said, standing up.\n\n\"Ain't nobody call his name,\" Manny muttered as he stood slowly. \"After that meetin' I got somethin' I want to show you. Don't leave,\" he said, pointing at her.\n\nAs though she would go home without him walking her there. \"I'll be here.\"\n\n\"There you are,\" Viola Lacey said as she came to sit down next to Keturah, her sister Esther following. There had been a part of Keturah that was afraid that when the baby she had delivered in Arrow Creek had been stillborn that she might be shunned to a degree; that folks might think she was some kind of fraud. But that had not been the case. Nothing had changed. The women who were pregnant still sought her out if they had questions and they fully expected her to be there when their time came. She had mentioned her worries to Laura.\n\n\"You exude confidence, Keturah. If that baby died, we know the baby didn't die because of anythin' you did or didn't do.\"\n\n\"How can you know that?\"\n\n\"I don't. But you make me feel that way. Should Sam and I have another baby, I feel just as comfortable sendin' for you as sendin' for Granny. I know you're goin' to do everythin' you know to do to make sure both the baby and I are fine. Some people might say you aren't the friendliest of women, but you're trustworthy. I trust you. The women of Arrow Creek trust you. That's your gift, Keturah. You're so strongly convinced of what you believe, of what you do, that you bring peace in the midst of a storm.\"\n\nKeturah wasn't so sure she believed that. But there seemed to be some truth to it. There were constant knocks on her door for medical advice. Very few for chats by the fireside, but that was fine with Keturah. The thought of more than a few friends brought her great anxiety anyway.\n\nShe chatted with the Lacey sisters and later with the Newmans. Laura dropped baby Jess off and Keturah held him 'til he fell asleep. Paul stopped by after every game to rubdown Casca and tell her who won and who lost. And she was content.\n\n\"Keturah?\" Manny walked up to the edge of her blanket. She had just finished talking with a woman in the early stages of her pregnancy and she looked up at Manny, baby Jess still in her arms. \"I wanted to show you somethin'. Remember?\"\n\n\"Right,\" she said, looking around for Laura or Sam.\n\n\"Give me the baby. Pack up. We probably won't come back.\"\n\n\"Should I get Paul?\"\n\n\"No. I talked to him already. He's supposed to walk home with Sam.\" Manny leaned down and took Jess. He left and she folded up Laura's blanket and cleaned up their spot. Casca stood up, ready to go.\n\nManny returned baby-less and together they walked towards town. \"How did the meetin' go?\"\n\n\"You could've come. If Waylon was there, you certainly should have been there. Granny was.\"\n\n\"I saw.\" From her place on the blanket, it had been a rather large gathering.\n\n\"We created a patrollin' schedule, came up with the rudiments of a fire brigade. Amos is gonna make a bell for the church that we can ring in case of alarm. That sort of thing.\"\n\n\"You sound frustrated.\"\n\n\"The ideas are sound, but say we ever have a problem like this again. How do we stop bandits if they're bound and determined?\"\n\nKeturah understood. They didn't have a way of arresting folks or bringing them to justice.\n\n\"But forget all that,\" Manny said as they came to a stop in front of the store.\n\n\"Are you goin' to buy me somethin'?\"\n\n\"No,\" he said, sending her a smirk. \"I'm goin' to show you somethin', like I said. Come on, let's go around back.\"\n\nShe was curious now. She had never had any reason to go to the back of the store. When they got there, he pointed to the stairwell. \"There's two ways to get upstairs. This way or through the store. We'll go up this way, and come down from the inside.\" He motioned for her to go up and she did so. The upstairs landing opened to a small balcony. There were two chairs and a small table there. There were also several wooden, empty dirt plots tethered to the railing. Manny came to stand behind her, his hands on her shoulders. He pointed in the distance. \"See that fenced-in land? It's about a quarter of an acre. Perfect for a good size garden.\"\n\nShe felt a grin growing on her face, but she didn't say anything. He stepped back and went to open the door to the second floor. \"Come on.\"\n\nShe stepped into a finished kitchen. His reason for not raising the topic of marriage became clear as she took in what all looked to be new. There was a stove, cabinetry, a table, and a sink basin. Across the room was a living space with several couches, long and short, and a brick fireplace. There were large glass windows that she had no doubt, looked over the street.\n\nShe looked up at Manny who was staring at her. \"This is lovely.\"\n\n\"The rest isn't quite finished. Just two bedrooms and the bathin' room. But Mr. Carson said the rest of the walls will be up in a few weeks.\"\n\n\"I like it.\"\n\n\"It's not really land. And it's above the store, so there's always that drawback.\"\n\n\"It's a really good space.\"\n\n\"I don't have indoor plumbin'. I forgot to show you the pump, but it's not far from the steps. Water will have to be constantly carried up and down the stairs.\"\n\n\"I've never had indoor plumbin'.\"\n\n\"But my brother and I have been talkin' with some of the men in town. One of the Wilder men once helped his slave owner develop a water heatin' system. He thinks he can duplicate here.\"\n\n\"I love it. Manny. Just like I love you.\" And she did, love this man who pushed her until she dropped her barriers and then still liked her afterwards anyway.\n\nManny exhaled, his shoulders dropping. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"About this place or that I love you?\"\n\n\"Both?\" he said with a shaky laugh. \"I don't want land and cows and horses. I can afford to pay the Lacey boys to deliver milk every mornin' and to keep our horses at their livery. We'll probably have to have a chicken coop though.\"\n\n\"Believe me, Manny, that's fine,\" she said, enunciating the words clearly. The garden was all she wanted when it came to nature. She didn't know what else she needed to say to get this man to propose. If he didn't hurry up, she might ask the question herself.\n\n\"And a new family arrived in town last week. Butchers.\"\n\n\"I love the idea of livin' in town.\"\n\n\"Oh, I didn't even show you the best part,\" Manny said, ushering her down the hallway of the flat. She didn't need to see anymore to know that she could make this their home. But, he was excited so she followed.\n\nHe stopped at the first room, opening the door. It was a large bedroom, bigger than the one she had at Sly's house. There was a large bed, a wide dresser, and at the window was a small table with two chairs.\n\n\"There's a closet, so no chifferobe.\"\n\n\"I like this,\" she said quietly, taking it all in. She felt like she was saying the same thing over and over but she couldn't think of another way to say that she was ready to live in this place.\n\n\"I hoped you would.\" He grabbed her hand, pulling her out of the bedroom and to the room on the left. Placed against one wall was a large bathtub. \"My brother said to get it. He said women like bathin' like he's some kind of expert or somethin'.\"\n\nKeturah turned to Manny, her hands on her cheeks. \"I've never had a bath before.\"\n\nHis gaze softened. \"Well, you can have one now. I'll bring the water up myself. Me or Paul. I think he might live here with us, with me, I mean.\"\n\nHe had it right the first time, but she didn't correct him as she took in the mirror, the counters, and another sink basin.\n\nAgain, he pulled her into the hallway and there she saw one more room and the emptiness of the rest of the floor. \"There will be a closet for laundry and maybe two more rooms. One for the one child we'll be havin' and one for maybe a small library or a parlor room.\"\n\nKeturah laughed, blinking back tears. \"Can you ask me to marry you now, please?\"\n\n\"Your brother\u2014,\"\n\n\"Could come back tomorrow or next year. I'm not thinkin' about Sly.\" It was the truth. She loved Sly, or at least the idea of him. But she didn't know Sly. Hadn't known him in years. He couldn't tell her how to live any more than she could tell him.\n\n\"I love you Keturah Mary Hollis. Will you marry me?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Two months later\n\nThe store was dead. So dead, Manny was fighting the urge to go upstairs and spend the rest of the day with Keturah. They had married exactly one week after she agreed to have him. He liked knowing that unless she was out on one of her midwifing trips, she was upstairs making their house a home. The place had transformed almost overnight when she had moved in. There were rugs and blankets, window curtains and vases of flowers. Casca spent most of his time laying outside on the balcony, but followed Keturah every morning to the small garden in back of the house. Casca was a good dog, and at Paul's insistence, Manny let him sleep in the apartment by the fireplace every night. Manny was home in a way he never thought he would be.\n\nIt didn't mean he didn't miss Sam. Sometimes the day just didn't feel right until his brother walked through the door of the store. And he knew Sam felt the same way because arrived at work far earlier than he needed to be most days. With Manny living above the store, Sam could take his time coming to work if he wanted to. But he didn't. As for Paul, Arrow Creek had started its very first school year. School took place in the church, and the teacher was currently Holly Newman. Only problem was she was looking to marry a man in Riverside soon. They would have to find a replacement already. But Paul liked school and he was finally starting to find his rhythm. He lived with Manny and Keturah, but visited with Sam and Laura often enough. Amos was getting ready to move out with Benji, Sol, and Gid into a house of his own. He was getting married soon and so there would be room for Paul in Sam's house. But Manny liked having Paul around. And Sam had admitted that he and Laura were looking forward to the house just holding his own small family.\n\nIt wasn't quite perfect though. There was still a big hole in the shape of his parents. He and his brothers came together once a week to pray for their parents; that God would make a way out of no way. In spite of the fact that they had seen no evidence and had no knowledge of how Frank and their mama were doing, they still believed that something would change. He and Sam had been discussing the merits of making a trip out to Kansas to see them; to see if Brett actually meant it when he said he might sell their mama. Of course it meant leaving Frank all alone. It was just an ugly situation. On top of that, they were still runaways, and Kansas was a hotbed for bounty hunters right now.\n\nManny flipped a page in the magazine before him. He was supposed to be finding new things to add to their order sheet, but he was pretty sure he hadn't noticed a thing on the previous page. Sam was in the back supposedly doing inventory, but the last time Manny had caught sight of Sam, he was studying his Bible and preparing for his sermon on the Sunday coming. Sam wouldn't do this forever. They hadn't talked about it and as soon as Paul became of age, Sam would probably step down as his business partner. Thankfully, Paul had a good nine or ten years before that would happen.\n\nOutside, Manny heard a wagon come to a stop in front of the store. \"Sam,\" he called back, not moving an inch. \"We might have customers.\"\n\nIt took a minute, but then the door was pushed open. \"Afternoon,\" Manny said without looking up. For a second, a laundry washing thingy caught his eye. He wondered if Keturah would want it. He had found it to be a good thing for the store to be married to Keturah. He always asked her opinion first before he bought something that was geared towards a lady. He also made sure to rib Sam about not asking Laura's opinion... in Laura's presence of course.\n\n\"Can I have four peppermints and four caramels?\"\n\n\"Sure can,\" Manny said, straightening. He tossed the magazine aside so he could pay attention. He looked, blinked, looked again. The man standing in front of him was unlike any Negro man Manny had ever seen before. The man was about his age and height and slender. He was a shade or so lighter than Frank. His eyes were a strange mix of dark green, gold, and brown and his black beard was perfectly trimmed. He was dressed like he had stepped right off the pages of one of the latest fashion magazines that Laura subscribed too with his long black dress coat, snow white shirt, colored vest and fitted tan pants. He looked out of place because he looked as though he should have been in one of those fancy cities like New York or something instead of in Indian Territory. What was he doing here?\n\nHe could not stop himself from asking, \"Are you just passin' through?\"\n\n\"I don't think so. It depends,\" the man said, his voice cultured in a way Manny had only ever heard in passing. Manny noticed that the man had gloves in hand. Gloves! There was no snow on the ground. But what was that he said? He didn't think he was passing through?\n\n\"On what?\" The man dropped several coins on the counter.\n\n\"If I can find my family. I was told my sister lives in this town.\"\n\nManny took the coins and opened the cashier. It was a new purchase. The store had been doing fairly well lately. Manny eyed the man once more. He didn't look to be related to a single person Manny knew. Nevertheless, he said, \"I think I know everyone in this town. What's her name? I'll tell you if she's here.\"\n\n\"I was hoping you would. Sly sent me here specifically.\"\n\nManny straightened. Sly! Was Sly was back in town? The first place he would probably go to was his house... where Keturah didn't live anymore. \"Sly's in town?\" He asked just to make certain.\n\n\"Yes. He brought me, my wife, and my sons out here.\" Impatience began to creep into the man's tone.\n\n\"Hold on,\" Manny said, standing. \"Stay right there. I'll help you, but hold on.\" Manny took several steps back to the storage room opening. \"Sam, you've got to come out here. Sly is back in town. I've got to go.\"\n\n\"Give me a sec,\" Sam muttered, lost somewhere in his thoughts.\n\nManny went back to the counter. \"Who're you lookin' for again?\" he asked, even though his mind was on Sly. Should he run up and tell Keturah? Or should he speak to Sly first? He had no illusions that Sly would be happy.\n\n\"My sister's name is Laura.\"\n\nEvery thought flew out of Manny's mind and he stared at the man standing before him.\n\n\"Did you just say your sister's name is Laura?\" This came from Sam. Manny hadn't even noticed that he had come to the counter.\n\nManny was also ninety percent sure he knew who this man was now. Standing before him was the mythical Prince from Salis. And he had always thought Laura oversold the man, now he was beginning to think she undersold him. Because before him did not stand a former slave. Couldn't be.\n\n\"Yes, do you know her?\" Prince's almost green eyes were piercing as he stared at Sam. The man was growing more irritated by the minute. Oh, how Manny wished he could see the reunion between him and Laura, but he had his own reunion to deal with.\n\n\"Are you Prince?\" Manny asked, just to be sure.\n\n\"I am,\" Prince said, turning to him, just his neck, not his body. He was almost more elegant than Laura.\n\nManny looked over at Sam who looked at him. \"Look at God, Manny.\" And he saw in Sam's eyes that he wasn't just referencing Prince and Laura's impending reunion but theirs with their parents.\n\n\"Did you hear me say otherwise?\" Manny turned to Prince, holding his hand out. \"I've got to go, Prince. But we're brothers.\" Sort of. \"My brother over there is married to your sister. I'll see you around.\"\n\nHe didn't think, he grabbed his hat and ran out of the store, pausing only slightly when he caught sight of the most stunning woman he had ever seen, sitting in the wagon that must belong to Prince. She was so striking, she almost didn't seem real. He hoped this was the wife Prince had been referring to because that face could create problems if not. \"Ma'am,\" he said, tipping his hat at her. Over the rim of the wagon, two boys peered at him. They were so fair that if not for the woman in the wagon, he would have thought them white. There was a story here. Too bad he didn't have time to sniff it out. \"Boys,\" he tipped his hat again and both of them smiled back and waved.\n\n\"Have a good day,\" the woman called.\n\nManny gave her a nod and then hurried down the sidewalk to Sly's home. He found Sly standing in the middle of his land, hands on his waist, looking at the house. Manny knew what he saw. An empty barn, an empty house, an empty yard.\n\n\"Sly.\" With his back to him, Sly looked almost full grown. He had on a black hat and a long brown duster.\n\n\"Manny, what is this?\" Sly asked, turning around so slowly Manny heard the ground grinding where the heel of his boot dug in. \"Where is my sister? And why is it that I now have the sudden inklin' that you know the answers to all my questions?\"\n\nThe kid looked older. Every time Manny saw him, he seemed to grow another inch. His jawline was firming up and there appeared to be more hair peppered on his chin.\n\n\"Surely not all of them, Sly,\" Manny said, pushing open the gate.\n\n\"I don't see my dog. I don't see my cows.\"\n\n\"The cows are at the Laceys. The dog is at my house.\"\n\nSly's look was hard and unforgiving. Manny cleared the space between them so there was only about the distance of a foot separating them. Up close, Sly was only an inch or so taller than him. \"Explain yourself.\"\n\nHe was the adult here. And last time he checked, Keturah was of age. But still, he had to purposefully straighten his shoulders and meet Sly's dark eyes. \"Married your sister nigh unto two months ago.\"\n\nSly flinched. \"Thought you would say that.\" His words were strangely bitter.\n\n\"Is it me you object to or her gettin' married?\"\n\nSly scoffed, glared at him. \"Both.\"\n\n\"Was she supposed to wait around for you?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" The boy said belligerently and in that moment, he reminded Manny of Paul.\n\n\"We've got a bedroom set up for you at the house.\"\n\n\"Don't want to go to your house,\" Sly said gruffly, looking at the ground. \"Got my own house.\"\n\n\"You gonna hurt your sister's feelin's even more bein' silly?\"\n\nSly glanced at him. \"I ain't hurt her feelin's.\" The words were said defiantly. But then he shrugged. \"Not that much anyway.\"\n\n\"Stop actin' like a child,\" Manny snapped. The look in Sly's eyes turned even icier. Manny had a feeling that rare was the person who told Sly what to do. He didn't care. They were kin now. Sly would have to deal with it. \"We live above the store. You've got a room, you can take a bath, Keturah will fix you a big dinner with a pie. Or you can stay out here by yourself and be miserable. The decision is yours.\"\n\nSly's mouth twisted to the side and he looked away, anger in his jaw. \"You leave your horse with the Lacey's?\" he finally asked.\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"Tell Keturah I'll be there in a few.\"\n\nManny went back to the store, which was unsurprisingly closed. Using the inside stairs, he went to see Keturah.\n\nShe was at the stove, peeling potatoes for supper. She turned and smiled when she saw him. \"Hey, you,\" she said, leaning out a bit. Manny kicked his boots off and went over and kissed his wife. Once. Twice. Three times. She elbowed him. \"I've got to get these potatoes on.\"\n\n\"Your brother's back in town.\"\n\nKeturah pulled away, her hands no longer moving as she looked up at him. \"What?\"\n\n\"I spoke to him. He's none too happy but he's gonna stay with us.\"\n\n\"He's not happy? He's been gone almost six months!\" Keturah turned back to face the kitchen counter, taking her anger out on the potato in her hand. Manny placed his hands on her shoulder and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. \"It'll be just fine. You'll see.\"\n\nHe spoke too soon. He realized this at supper. The Hollis family was a proud one.\n\n\"Do you always make cherry pie?\" Sly asked, digging a resentful fork into the dessert in front of him as he did not make eye contact with his sister.\n\nPaul had been silent most of the meal, his eyes darting from one Hollis to the next. Manny was pretty sure he was enjoying himself. Manny, on the other hand, wanted to fuss at the both of them. But he kept his mouth shut. For now.\n\n\"Perhaps if you could have been bothered to stay longer than five minutes, you would know the answer to that,\" Keturah said with a smile on her face that was no more genuine than the teeth in Mr. Miller's mouth.\n\nSly did not respond to her dig. He merely exhaled. Loudly. And that was the thing. The more his wife tried to rile the boy, the more he dug in with silence. The night probably would have gone on like that for hours except that there was a knock on the door.\n\nManny went and opened it. It was two young guys from town dropping by to see if Sly wanted to catch up.\n\nSly shoveled the rest of his pie into his mouth and stood up. \"Thank you for supper, sister,\" he said, avoiding her eyes. \"Nice to meet you, Paul. Manny. I'll be back. I won't be out too late.\" He grabbed his hat, snapped his fingers for Casca to follow, and was gone in minutes.\n\n\"I did not run him out of this house,\" Keturah said succinctly, holding her knife and fork so tight, Manny could see the veins in the back of her hand.\n\nNext to her Paul hummed. \"Well. You kinda did.\"\n\nManny, back in his seat, kicked Paul's ankle and the boy yelped before sending him a look of outrage. \"You don't have to comment on everythin'. Go on and fetch a pail of water from downstairs.\"\n\nPaul opened his mouth to protest, met Manny's eyes for a second, and then left. When the door shut behind him, Keturah exhaled, releasing her utensils. They clattered against her plate.\n\n\"I don't know if you know this but you married an expert in siblin' relationships.\"\n\n\"Not an expert,\" she teased back but he could see her heart was not in it. She looked like she could cry at any moment. And he could see that his guess was right when she gave a little sniff.\n\n\"Let him go.\" He said the words gently, but she still flinched. He wished there was an easy fix to all of her problems; that with a wave of his hand he could make life simple. But he couldn't. \"Some slaves wear their scars on their body and some on their soul.\" It was easy to miss if you didn't look for it. Sly seemed so together, so confident, that it wasn't until this afternoon that Manny realized he wore his hurts in a different way. And despite all the people he helped and encountered, he wore them alone. \"I think you can guess which one Sly is. You're gonna have to let him come to you.\"\n\n\"And you know this how?\" she asked genuinely curious.\n\n\"Because of Sam. Sam let me figure things out on my own. I'm not sayin' he didn't talk about the Lord often, he did. I'm not sayin' he didn't pray for me everyday, he did. But he didn't push, he just let me know he was always there. And so I came to the Lord at my own pace. I think it's gonna take Sly a minute to learn what a family is again. He ain't had one in a long time. Be there, pray for him, but there's no sense in pushin'. You'll just push him away.\"\n\nKeturah sighed and sat back in her chair. \"That's very disappointin'.\"\n\nIt was. You spent so many years praying to see a person again, and then when you did, you still expected everything to be as it was before. But it wasn't. \"You know, Ma and Frank? When I see them again\u2014and hopefully it'll be on this side of heaven and not in glory\u2014it won't magically erase the years. We'll still have to deal with all that time we've lost and it's gonna take us a minute to find our footin'. Things won't ever be the way they should have been,\" he said softly. He had realized that in the short time he had spent with his pa and ma. There were layers of their relationship that were gone and some they would get back and others they wouldn't.\n\n\"It's like you just want it to go back to the way it was,\" Keturah said, sniffing again though no tears fell. \"I just want him to be little Sly who used to annoy me all the time and... I'm realizin' that's not goin' to happen.\"\n\nReunion did not mean reconciliation and it was a hard pill to swallow. But there was hope. Manny firmly believed that. \"You know what the best part is?\"\n\n\"There's somethin' good in this?\"\n\n\"He said he was comin' back, didn't he?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "\"I wish I could work at the store,\" Paul said for the fourth time that morning.\n\n\"Well you can't, so hurry up and finish your breakfast so you're not late for school,\" Keturah told him. She was in the process of packing a basket of goods. Last night, when Sly had come home, he had mentioned two names she hadn't heard in months: Prince and Annie. They were staying with Laura unexpectedly so Keturah had got up early that morning to do some baking. And she wasn't the only early riser in the family.\n\nManny and Sly ate a slow, quiet breakfast, each apparently lost in their own thoughts while she mixed flour and eggs on the counter next to them.\n\nAfter finishing his coffee, Manny stood up. \"Left my good hat in the room,\" he had said, purposefully bumping into her as he left the kitchen.\n\n\"I can wash the dishes,\" Sly said, watching them through narrowed eyes from his spot at the kitchen table.\n\n\"I appreciate that, Sylvester,\" she said politely.\n\n\"What's the matter with you?\" he spat out. Finally, he was ready to talk. For a second, she remembered Manny's words about not pushing. But only for a second.\n\n\"The matter with me?\" she asked, pointing to herself. \"You just waltz back in town like it's nothin' that you were gone so long. Six months, Sly. Six months!\" Six months ago, she wouldn't have said anything. Six months ago, she was afraid to scare away the only family she might ever have. She wasn't afraid anymore.\n\n\"I know how long I was gone, and it wasn't long enough for you to up and get married to the first man who made eyes at you.\"\n\n\"Don't!\" she said, raising a finger. \"Don't you dare bring my husband into this. This is between you and me and the fact that you act like you don't have a family. You do, Sylvester. A letter would have been nice.\" Sly's blink was long and slow and she saw embarrassment creeping up his face. She kept going. \"I don't hear from you. I don't know if you're alive or dead. You barely said a word to me the last time we were together, and I'm supposed to what? Twiddle my thumbs and wait for you? No.\" She flung the last word at him. \"We're a family, Sylvester. Whether you want us to be or not. Do better!\" She turned and saw Manny leaning against the hallway entrance.\n\nHer husband straightened. Cleared his throat. \"Don't let me interrupt.\"\n\n\"We're done,\" she said, giving the both of them her back as she reached for another bowl. There was a part of her that despaired that she would ever learn to talk kindly. There was another part of her that didn't care.\n\n\"It'll be fine,\" Manny whispered in her ear as he came to hug her from behind.\n\n\"I'll do better next time,\" she said, leaning against the man who always seemed to understand her. Patience. Like Manny had said, she just needed to have patience and not push Sly. But it was oh so hard not to demand that he act like they were family.\n\nManny laughed and kissed her cheek. \"He probably needed to hear that,\" he whispered. With another kiss, he stole one of the biscuits she had set aside for Paul and headed to the door.\n\n\"Thanks for breakfast, Tura,\" Sly said with a sigh from his spot at the kitchen table. She hoped he could see just how well she and Manny got on and how much they loved each other. He pushed back from the table and followed Manny out the door. She guessed he wasn't going to do the dishes.\n\nKeturah added the last baked good to her basket just as Paul finished his biscuit. \"I don't know why I have to go to school.\" Keturah stopped what she was doing to give Paul a stern look. He raised a hand as though to stem off her anger. \"Miss Newman don't seem to know all that much. I mean she knows the alphabet and some book learnin' and then she gets all tangled up after. Yesterday, she told Gid to stop askin' questions. Fact to business was, she didn't know the answer.\"\n\nHe probably wasn't wrong. But she wasn't going to admit that. \"Young man, Holly Newman knows more than you and that's good enough for me. Get your slate and your lunch pail. Come on.\"\n\nThey walked most of the way together but split as he headed in the direction of the church and she headed to Sam and Laura's house.\n\nShe knocked on the door and heard the pitter, patter of little feet. \"Papa, it's the door!\" And then the door opened, revealing Prince. Slightly thinner, slightly browner, his jaw was covered by a dark beard, but there was no mistaking those sharp, hazel eyes.\n\n\"Hello, Prince.\" He was dressed as impeccably as ever and he should have looked out of place, and yet somehow, he didn't.\n\n\"Keturah Hollis.\" His lips twitched. \"Your brother said he found you.\"\n\n\"Yes. And I have you to thank,\" she said and held up the basket she was carrying. \"Did you marry Annie?\"\n\n\"I did.\" He raised an eyebrow in question.\n\n\"It's what everyone believed when you left. That you and Annie had fallen in love and run off together.\"\n\nA pained expression crossed his face and she couldn't help but smile. Trust Prince to be annoyed at the idea of coming across as a romantic. Prince shook his head slowly. \"No. It was not like that.\"\n\n\"Hello!\"\n\nKeturah look down to see a fair-skinned boy with a head full of dark hair and bright hazel eyes staring up at her. \"Hello.\"\n\n\"This is Venture. Annie's son. My son now.\" One of Logan Feldan's offspring was what he didn't say. He didn't have to. The boy had his natural father's features.\n\n\"Welcome to Arrow Creek, Venture.\"\n\n\"Thank you, ma'am. Noble went to school with Uncle Gideon,\" The boy said politely. His expression was very serious as he talked to her. With a name like Venture, she could only assume that Noble was his brother.\n\n\"Venture how about we let Miss Hollis come inside.\"\n\n\"Mrs. Day, actually,\" Keturah said, entering the house. \"I'm married to Sam's twin.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Prince sounded thoughtful as he closed the door behind her.\n\n\"I thought I heard the door open.\" Laura stepped into the hall. \"Oh, Keturah, you didn't have to bring anythin'. This is my brother, Keturah. Prince. The one I told you about.\"\n\n\"We know each other,\" Prince told his sister.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"I think Prince knew every slave at Salis on some level,\" Keturah said dryly. She reached into her pocket, taking out the book of Psalms Prince had given her years and\n\nyears ago. She turned it to the first page where he had written, I'll be the last person to tell you God won't give you more than you can bear, but you're still alive. So live. Prince of Salis.\n\nNext to her Prince laughed. \"I forgot I wrote that.\"\n\nKeturah closed the book with a snap. \"For this, I thank you, it got me through some difficult times.\"\n\n\"See he wasn't all bad,\" a voice said from behind Laura. Annie. It was definitely Annie. You didn't forget a face like that.\n\n\"Hello, Annie. We've never met, but I saw you once,\" Keturah said, holding out a hand. \"Yours is a face I think I'll always remember.\"\n\nAnnie rolled her eyes to the heavens before shaking Keturah's hand. \"Tell me about it.\"\n\n\"I can't believe you knew Annie and Prince all this time and we never talked about it. Did you know they ran away?\" Laura asked, a look of frustration on her face.\n\n\"Yes,\" Keturah said with a laugh.\n\n\"She also knew Richard was dead,\" Prince said, pointing at Keturah.\n\n\"I didn't hear about anythin' because I didn't want to dwell on the past!\" Laura said defensively.\n\n\"Willful ignorance is never the answer. I, for one, want very much to know the state Salis was in when you left. Sit, Keturah. Tell me everything.\"\n\nThe next morning, Keturah, Manny, Sly, and Paul were eating breakfast when there was a knock on the door. There was a baby in need of delivery in Riverside.\n\n\"And they came to get you?\" Sly asked, dumbfounded.\n\n\"She's the town midwife,\" Paul said, looking at Sly as though he were odd for not knowing that.\n\nBut Sly looked completely baffled. \"It's true, Sylvester.\"\n\n\"You've been really busy while I was gone.\"\n\nManny had wanted to escort her, but just when he was about to leave for the livery to get their horses, several wagons showed up filled with white folks trying to make their way west. With Sam not there yet, he was needed at the store. She left with the expectant father, but Manny gave him a stern talking to. One of the Carson men would be headed to Riverside that day, Manny knew, and so if the baby was born by then she would ride back with them. If not, Manny would come and get her. She also knew by the gleam in her husband's eye that by the time she got back, there would be a system in place for her trips to Riverside.\n\nThe baby came quick, arriving only a few hours after she got to the town. But it was long enough that the father offered her several pounds of salted pork. She took it. The Carson family was still in town when she went looking for them and so she took a seat in the flat of their wagon bed next to her wrapped up pork. She pulled out a book, a new medical text on midwifery, and read it as the Carsons handled the last few details of their business transactions.\n\n\"Keturah? Keturah is that you?\"\n\nKeturah looked over the top of her book to see a white woman waving a handkerchief in her direction. Next to her was a woman in the latter stages of pregnancy.\n\n\"It is you! Keturah delivered my precious Isabelle, Rosie. She was wonderful. Keturah, come meet my friend, Rosemary.\" It was always a bit odd if you lingered in Riverside. In Arrow Creek, Keturah felt like a whole person. Like her own person. In Riverside... not so much.\n\nKeturah set her book down and hopped down off the back of the wagon. She knew who had flagged her down now. It was Cornelia Jackson. Slim, and dressed fine in a yellow dress and matching bonnet, she looked remarkably different from the sweaty, pained woman she had been months ago.\n\n\"Miz Cornelia, Miz Rosemary,\" Keturah said, exchanging nods with the women.\n\n\"She knows what she's doin'. I'm tellin' you, Rosie. Just make sure that when your pains start you send for her right away. Where can her servants find you?\" This last part was directed to Keturah.\n\n\"I live above Day's Mercantile.\"\n\n\"She delivered Virginia Battle's little boy, too. I would tell you to write to her, but I heard she's movin' back east now that Brett has finally died. Who knows when a letter will reach her?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Miz Cornelia,\" Keturah said, interrupting. \"Did you say Mr. Brett Battles died?\"\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Cornelia said, giving Keturah a look that said gossiping was about to ensue. \"Brett was shot in the Battle of Osawatomie back in August. He survived, or so they thought. He died of pneumonia they say a week ago, but my husband says he never recovered from his bullet wound. It was that nasty John Brown that did it.\"\n\nShe had read about that, about the Battle of Osawatomie, just another fight between border ruffians and free-soilers. Other than the obvious, she hadn't given it another thought.\n\n\"Five dollars, right?\"\n\n\"I'm sorry?\"\n\n\"That's how much you charge for a birthin'?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am. Five dollars,\" she said quickly as a sudden desire to get home hit her. She didn't know what it meant that Brett Battles was dead, but it meant something." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "\"It means three possible things,\" Prince said at supper that night. With the exception of Sly, they were gathered at Sam and Laura's table with all of Laura's family. Well, technically two tables. Sol, Gid, Paul, Noble, and Venture were at one table; the rest of them at another. \"She takes them back east with her, he's left them to someone else, or they're headed for the auction block.\"\n\n\"I like none of those options,\" Sam said, peering at Prince. His anxiety was in his fisted hands on the table.\n\nNext to her, Manny fairly vibrated with energy though he hadn't moved in the past few minutes.\n\nPrince, on the other hand, was completely unbothered. \"When does Sly come back?\" He cut his meat into several small pieces, making eye contact with no one.\n\n\"I think tomorrow, why?\" Manny asked. Sly had left for an overnight trip to visit with some of his Indian friends. He had told them he wouldn't be gone long. Keturah glanced over at Manny. His grip on his fork was so tight, she was sure he was doing himself an injury.\n\n\"We'll head up to Kansas. Him and me. Everyone will assume I'm a trusted steward of some wealthy slave owner and I will buy your parents back.\" The room went silent. \"With your money, of course,\" Prince said, lightly. \"I'll bring extra though.\"\n\n\"How much money did you steal from Salis, Prince?\" The question came from Gideon.\n\n\"Please, never use the words 'steal' and my name in the same sentence. If I have to dip into my funds, we'll consider it a wedding gift and rent. But you can be assured I won't leave Kansas without them.\" Hope, so painful, blossomed in her chest. Oh, she had always hoped they would figure out something. But now that something had legs to it.\n\n\"I'm not sure how we could ever repay you,\" Manny said, looking stunned. Sam sat straight as an arrow in his seat, his expression mirroring Manny's. Paul, at the children's table, had his hands to his mouth and his eyes were watery.\n\nPrince raised his glass. \"Oh, I'm sure I'll think of a few things.\" His words made Keturah think of how Manny had described him the other day. Prince might look soft, dress soft, talk soft, but something about Prince screamed predator. \"Now. Please explain to me why, instead of your mail coming directly to Arrow Creek, it goes through a white store in a white town. Because that is a problem.\"\n\nKeturah let all of her frustrations with Sly go when he came back. After he had returned home and heard the plan, he gave one nod, asked for something to eat and was ready to head out again. She wondered if she would ever know her younger brother, but it didn't matter. She was so incredibly grateful for him.\n\nSly and Prince were gone one week exactly. The whole week they fasted, and by they, Keturah meant every person in Arrow Creek. The fast was only supposed to be done by the Day family, but the Laceys learned of it and the Millers and the Carsons and it spread like wildfire. Manny was so touched when he learned of it that he held her that night and cried.\n\nAnd so, after all of that, no one was surprised the day that Sly, Prince, Frank and Lucy rode into town." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nNine years later\n\nThe war was over. It was the only thing on people's lips.\n\n\"I'll name him Abraham Lincoln Brownin',\" the new mama said as she stared into the face of her baby boy.\n\nIt was not a name Keturah would have picked but it was not her child to name. As far as births go, it had been a relatively easy birth, little blood and no complications. Not at all like the time when she had given birth. Twins were always a bit of a problem, Granny had once told her. But something wasn't quite right in her womb and they didn't know it until labor had started. Thanks to the grace of God, she and the babies had been fine. But it had been clear to both Keturah and Granny that there would be no more children after that.\n\nShe had been completely distraught upon learning the same.\n\n\"Why are you so upset?\" Manny had asked, holding her the day after the babies had been born. It had been hard, so hard to tell him she could give him no more children. She had hardly been able to get the words out before she had started crying.\n\n\"It's my fault,\" she had whispered against his chest, unable to meet his eyes. \"I kept sayin' I only wanted one baby and now I can't have anymore.\" It wasn't that she suddenly had an urge to have a large family. But she had always thought the choice of having a big or small family would be hers and that had been taken out of her hands.\n\n\"Plenty women say stuff like that and end up with ten babies. Besides, we don't have one baby, Keturah, we have two. A boy and a girl. It doesn't get more perfect than that,\" he said gently, rubbing her back.\n\n\"You don't want more children?\"\n\n\"Keturah Mary, believe me when I say I'm fine. I was worried there, for a minute, that I would lose you. Even if it were an option, I would rather we didn't have any more children if we have to go through somethin' like that again. But if you want more, well, we both know God is bigger than anythin' we see or hear. If we're meant to have more, we'll have more.\"\n\nBut it had been eight years since Emmanuel\u2014called Little Man\u2014and Eleanor\u2014called Ellie\u2014had been born and there had been no more. And when she considered Laura and her five children and Annie and her six, she was just fine with that.\n\n\"My husband is outside waitin' for me,\" Keturah told the mama who wasn't paying her any mind. She was clean, her tools were clean, her bag was packed, and the family had paid her almost as soon as they learned they were expecting. She took no time to linger.\n\nManny was out by the familiy's barn talking to the new father. The latest newspaper was tucked under his arm and he was waving his arms around explaining something. Everyone had a theory about the future. Keturah heard more on the topic than she wanted. Neither Manny, nor Sam, nor Paul, nor Frank could get enough of the details. And they weren't alone. The store was always crowded now and mostly with people gathered there just to talk and learn.\n\nThe town was growing. Somewhere around the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, a steady trickle of people had started making their way to Arrow Creek. It wasn't overwhelming, but it was enough that her midwifery business had a constant flow. There were times she wished Granny were still alive to at the very least, talk things over with. And she missed the old woman who had become like family to her. But she persevered. And sometimes, if Manny was in the right mood, he would put up with some of the nastier details of different birthings. She trusted him to say nothing about it to anyone.\n\nThe store was run by Manny, Frank, and Paul now. Frank and Paul had bought Sam out years ago so that Sam could devote his time to the ministry. Frank, Paul, and Lucy lived in a small house right behind the store. It was an easy thing for Frank and Paul to fill in for Manny when he went with her on her deliveries and it was an easy thing for Manny and her to take Little Man and Ellie to their Pawpaw and Mawmaw's house if they knew they were going to be gone for hours.\n\nThe men caught sight of her and stopped talking.\n\n\"You can go on in now, Washington. Your wife and little Abraham Lincoln are doin' just fine.\"\n\nThe father beamed, slapped Manny on the arm, and rushed past her.\n\n\"Abraham Lincoln?\" Manny made a face.\n\n\"I have a feelin' he won't be the first or the last Abraham Lincoln I deliver,\" Keturah said as she took the last few steps towards Manny. He opened his free arm and she walked into his side, squeezing him tight for a minute.\n\n\"Tired, love?\"\n\n\"A bit. But a little energized too.\" She often was after a successful birth. She pointed to his paper. \"Do you feel free now?\"\n\n\"I do feel... ,\" he said slowly as they started walking towards their horses that were already saddled and waiting. When the baby had been born, she had poked her head out the door and told him it wouldn't be much longer. \"Like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. No more fear of bounty hunters or sheriffs. I can go anywhere I want without papers. The world will be a different place for Little Man and Ellie.\"\n\nIt was already a different place for the twins. Prince, who was now called Prentiss Fielding, had taken charge of the schooling for Arrow Creek. Her children were already beginning to surpass her in their knowledge of the world.\n\n\"I forgot,\" Manny said when they reached the horses. He reached into the pocket of his vest and pulled out an unopened letter. \"From Sly,\" he said, handing it to her.\n\nSly. He was not exactly a soldier, but he was definitely out east doing something with the War. He wrote now... and often. And though they had had tiny moments where they connected, moments where they felt like brother and sister, he was as much a mystery to her now as he had been when he had first appeared at Salis that day long ago. That said, he was a wonderful uncle. He adored Little Man and Ellie and they, him. Half the time she thought he came to town just to see how they had grown.\n\n\"You think he'll be by for a visit soon?\" Manny asked, lifting her onto Titania.\n\n\"I hope so. Now that the War is over... and slavery is over, surely he can at least roam a bit closer to home.\" They had long since given up the idea that he would ever settle down. Keturah was fairly certain that the longest time he had spent in Arrow Creek without leaving was two months.\n\nManny got on his own horse and they made their way slowly down the road. \"Tonight is music night.\"\n\nArrow Creek now had a town hall building. They used it for gatherings and meetings, for dances and for music. Manny still sang songs with Gid, Sol, and Benji. They had gotten to be the musical group. And it was fun to get dressed up and see him perform. The four of them sang fun country songs, songs they made up, and then ended the night with spirituals. Most everyone came.\n\n\"It'll be nice,\" Keturah said, feeling lighthearted already. \"What were you talkin' about with Washington so intently?\"\n\n\"He thinks that everythin' is goin' to be, not exactly easy, but fine, now that Negroes can't be slaves,\" Manny said slowly, his eyes on his saddle. His tone was grim. \"I just don't. I think some folks ain't gonna just let us be.\"\n\nKeturah didn't either. She had no clue what might be coming down the line and that made her more than a bit nervous. But they had learned some things in the past nine years. \"Well, come rain or sun, high water or no water, guess we're just gonna have to use our faith.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Waiting for Morning.txt", + "author": "Margaret Brownley", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "HEIRESS WANTED\n\nLooking for hard-working, professional woman of good character and pleasant disposition willing to learn the ranching business in Arizona Territory. Must be single and prepared to remain so now and forevermore." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\nDobson Creek, Colorado\n\nApril 1896\n\nSomething was wrong. Molly Hatfield felt it in her bones. She cast an anxious glance around Big Jim's Saloon. A couple of regulars were already passed out; others sat staring into amber drinks. It was one o'clock in the afternoon, a time when most men were at the mines.\n\nOn this cold April day, icy wind blew off the snow-covered peaks and the batwing doors squeaked in protest. Sawdust raced across the tobacco-stained floor, clinging to wooden chair legs and the soles of dusty boots.\n\nShaking away her uneasiness, Molly turned back to the burly owner standing behind the bar. If he detected anything out of the ordinary, he kept it to himself. He didn't even seem to notice the lace tucked in her bodice for modesty. He insisted his \"girls\" dress in costume at all times, including face paint, even when not working.\n\nA stogie clamped between his yellow teeth, he squinted down his bulbous nose and counted out each pitiful coin as if doing her a favor.\n\nHer lips puckered with irritation. What pleasure could he get from making her beg for her weekly wage? Or did he simply enjoy the power he held over his dance hall girls? The truth was Molly needed him more than he needed her.\n\n\"Please hurry.\" Why the sudden need for haste she didn't know, but she was anxious to get back to her fourteen-year-old wheelchairbound brother. Not wanting to bring one so young to the saloon, she'd left him waiting in the lobby of the King Hotel, out of the cold. She'd done it before and he'd always been safe there. Still...\n\nBig Jim's bushy black eyebrows met in an upside-down V, but any effort to pick up speed was negligible.\n\nFrom outside came the dreaded sound of pistol shots\u2014six loud blasts in rapid succession, snapping through the air like an angry whip.\n\nMolly sucked in her breath and Jim's head jerked back, hands frozen over the till. Six gunshots meant fire and fire meant trouble.\n\nThinking fast, she scooped the money from the bar without waiting for the full count and darted out of the saloon.\n\nPeople screamed and raced by, practically knocking her over. While pocketing her precious coins she dropped one, but to dive for it would be sheer folly. She would be trampled to death.\n\n\"Fire, fire!\" someone shouted as if the gunshots hadn't already sounded the alarm.\n\n\"Where's the fire?\" she cried. Please, God, don't let it be the hotel. Not the hotel.\n\n\"The King!\" someone yelled.\n\nDear God!\n\nHeart pounding, Molly swam against the stream of people. Swallowing the metallic taste filling her mouth, she lashed out, \"Let me through. Let me through!\"\n\nShe plowed headlong into the oncoming crowd with windmilling arms. She'd failed to save her brother once but\u2014please, God\u2014not this time. Don't let me fail him this time.\n\nHorses whinnied and pulled at traces. Dogs barked. A steer barreled down the street followed by several frenzied goats. A man shoved bills into the hands of a wagon owner and signaled for several children to pile inside.\n\nBillows of dark smoke loomed over the red light district, turning gray skies almost black. Pushed by biting, raw winds, the fire quickly leaped jackrabbit-style along Benson Avenue with a fierce roar, gobbling up the wood-framed buildings that made up the heart of town. The clanging of bells and pounding of horses' hooves signaled the arrival of the shiny new fire engine, the mayor's pride and joy. Several men dragged an old pumper up the street, its heavy iron wheels skidding on the icy road.\n\nMine whistles shrieked in the distance and already miners poured into the street with buckets and shovels.\n\n\"Let me through,\" Molly cried. Smoke burned her eyes. Her vision blurred. \"My brother is at the hotel. Will somebody please help?\"\n\n\"Good luck, lady,\" a man yelled out.\n\nA drunk stood in the doorway of the drugstore laughing his fool head off.\n\nThe closer she got to the hotel, the thicker the smoke. Molly pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and covered her mouth. A man dressed in a canvas coat waved her back with a stick of dynamite.\n\n\"Ya better run, lassie.\"\n\nAlready, the dynamiters were getting ready to blow up houses and businesses around the hotel in an attempt to stop the fire.\n\nHer way blocked by vehicles, Molly nearly panicked until the pumper truck moved just enough to let her squeeze by. Crunching her skirt in sweaty palms, she darted past the dynamiter. A wagon shot out of an alley in front of her and she leaped aside. It missed her by an inch, splashing her blue taffeta skirt with mud.\n\nFarther down the road a large pox-scarred man stopped her. \"If you don't plan on meetin' your Maker today, you better get a move on, ma'am.\"\n\nMr. Wright, the owner of the hardware store, fired a shotgun into the air. \"You're not blowing up my place,\" he yelled, seemingly oblivious to the flames already devouring the roof of his establishment.\n\nWhile the two men argued, Molly dodged around them. Fire equipment blocked the street in front of the hotel. Flames shot from second-floor windows and long, fiery tongues licked the sky.\n\nIcy fingers of fear gripped her but she pressed on, dodging falling timbers and bright sparks. A fireman with a blackened face squirted a thin stream of water onto the burning building. A stream of spit would have been more useful.\n\nA dynamite blast from across the street sent a faro table crashing to the ground mere inches away, splintering into pieces.\n\nShe grabbed the fireman's arm with trembling hands. \"My brother! Have you seen him?\" She shouted to be heard above the explosions, screams, and roar of angry flames. \"He's in a wheelchair.\"\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am. Ain't seen no wheelchair.\"\n\n\"Please, he may still be in there,\" she cried.\n\nThe fireman shook his head. \"I've got me a wife and seven kids. I ain't goin' in there. The roof's about to cave in.\"\n\nShe spun around and stopped Mr. and Mrs. Merrick, who were pulling a wooden trunk. The man was one of Big Jim's regulars, his wife a staunch church member. \"Help me\u2014my brother is in that building.\"\n\nThe woman shoved Molly away from her husband, a spiteful look on her face. \"Get out of the way, you harlot.\"\n\nMolly stumbled back to catch her footing. Staring at the flames in horror, she screamed, \"No, no, no!\" Something welled up inside, something bigger, stronger, and more urgent than fear. He can't die. He mustn't die. She wouldn't let him die.\n\nShooting past the startled fireman, she ran so fast she hardly knew what she was doing.\n\n\"Hey, you can't go in there!\" he shouted.\n\nShe dashed beneath the overhang and darted through the door of the hotel. The ceiling and walls were ablaze, the smoke so thick it blinded her. Dropping on hands and knees, she held her head close to the floor. Throat closed in protest, she gasped for air, eyes burning.\n\n\"Donnnnnnnnnnny!\"\n\nThe roar of the fire and crackling wood drowned out her voice and she yelled again and again. Where had she left him? Think. The fireplace.\n\nShe reached the stairs. She'd gone too far. Panicked, she spun around on all fours.\n\nWhere was it? Where was the fireplace? She scrambled around the floor spider-like until spotting the wheels of her brother's chair. \"Donny!\"\n\nA massive wooden beam plunged from the ceiling, missing the wheelchair by inches. Sparks flew onto her skirt. She brushed them off and scooted forward, mindless of the hot embers beneath her palms. Above the roar of flames came the explosive sound of dynamite.\n\n\"I'm here!\" she gasped.\n\nHer brother was slumped over, head on his chest. Scrambling to her feet, she grabbed the push handle and steered the wheelchair blindly through the smoke-filled inferno. It was by sheer determination that she found the door. She exited the hotel, coughing. They barely made it out in time before a thunderous roar announced the collapse of the second floor.\n\nShe barreled forward. The wheels wobbled, the chair shook. It was like pushing a mule uphill, but she didn't dare pause until they were a safe distance from the burning buildings. Forced to catch her breath, she sank to her knees in front of her brother and grabbed his hands.\n\n\"Donny,\" she rasped. She stroked his ash-covered face, her blistered hands leaving a trail of blood.\n\nHe looked at her with watery eyes. \"I... I was so scared.\"\n\n\"You're safe now,\" she managed, her voice ragged.\n\n\"I didn't think you'd come\u2014\" He coughed so hard she feared he would hack up his insides. \"I thought\u2014\"\n\nShe grabbed the canteen from his chair and forced water down his throat. \"I'm here now. It would take a whole lot more than a fire to keep me away.\" A blast of dynamite made her jump to her feet.\n\n\"You're gonna have to move, ma'am,\" a fireman shouted.\n\n\"We're going, we're going.\" She pushed the chair a few inches when the front wheel sank into the mud. Grunting, she yanked at the chair, muscles straining, but it wouldn't budge.\n\nWiping sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand, she picked up a smoking timber, stuck the heated end in the mud, and shoved it under the front wheel. She gave it a mighty shove and the wheel broke free.\n\nDodging wagons, fire equipment, frantic horses, people, and dogs, she kept going until at last they reached their canvas home, one of dozens that dotted the area outside of town where most of the miners lived. She filled a glass from the bucket of well water and handed it to her brother, then poured a glass for herself.\n\nA cracked marble-top washstand, two cots, and a table and chairs were pushed to the side to make a space for walking. A cookstove filled a corner. Their prized possession was the spinet piano carted around Cape Horn by their mother all the way from Ireland. A tightly strung rope served a dual purpose, providing a place to hang clothes and a small measure of privacy.\n\nThe tent was patched and the canvas badly stained, but unlike the expensive homes on Strathern Avenue, their humble dwelling remained intact. At least for now. But if the wind changed...\n\nNo, no, mustn't think about what might happen or could happen. Donny was safe. That's all that mattered, though she feared for his lungs.\n\nDynamite blasts in the distance kept her on edge but she tried not to show it.\n\nDonny wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. \"They're g-ggetting closer.\"\n\n\"It just sounds that way,\" she said, hoping he didn't notice her shaking hands. No sense them both worrying. \"Let's get you cleaned up.\"\n\nIt was just the two of them. Their papa had died three years earlier from miner's consumption, but never before had she felt as alone as she did at that moment. Even God seemed a distance away, though she prayed.\n\nTrembling, she stoked up the fire in the oven with more vigor than it required and put water on to boil. Donny's chest rose and fell with each wheezing breath and she hoped the steam would help him.\n\nShe reached for his medicine. Careful to pour only three drops on a handkerchief, she held it to his nose. Within seconds his breathing improved. She covered him with a blanket and wrapped her blistered hands in a wet cloth.\n\nIf Donny so much as suspected how very close she was to panicking, it would frighten him even more and make his asthma worse. For him, she had to be brave.\n\nShe shivered. It was cold\u2014so cold\u2014and the flapping of the canvas walls indicated a worrisome wind change.\n\nThe thunderous sound of hooves followed by shouts made her mouth go dry. She ripped open the canvas flap and froze; a wall of orange flames was heading straight for the tent they called home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nArizona Territory\u2014three weeks later\n\nnever could Molly imagine a more sorrowful excuse for a horse. No amount of whip cracking made the swayback dapple go one whit faster. Patience spent, she swiped a wayward strand of hair from her face.\n\n\"He walks like he's wearing hobbles,\" she muttered.\n\nHer brother sat on the wagon seat next to her in stony-faced silence. No surprises there. Donny had hardly spoken a word since they'd left Colorado. Punishing her, no doubt, for dragging him to this godforsaken desert. Well, she had news for him; she didn't want to be here either.\n\nCertainly she didn't want to be on this lonely dirt road fighting with a belly-dragging horse in eighty-degree heat. But with Dobson Creek in ashes, it wasn't like she had a lot of choices.\n\nHer brother depended on her to be strong and she hadn't let him down. She had done such a good job of convincing Donny that things would work out, he didn't know how scared she had been. How scared she still was.\n\nShe wasn't about to let a dumb-fool horse get the best of her now. \"Gid-up!\"\n\nThe weathered old buckboard lumbered along, creaking and groaning as if each turn of the wheel would be its last. At that rate it would take a month of Sundays before they reached the Last Chance Ranch\u2014if there was such a thing. There better be because it certainly was her last chance.\n\nShe was tired and hot and hungry and probably lost. Definitely lost. \"Do you see anything?\" she asked with considerably less hope than when she'd last asked the question. \"A ranch or sign?\" Anything but cacti, sand, endless blue skies, and the tail end of a stubborn mule-horse. Nothing seemed to move, not even the occasional lizard sunbathing on a rock.\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\nShe shot a glance at her brother's rigid profile showing beneath the stiff brim of his flat cap. They shared similar raven hair, upturned noses, and emerald-green eyes\u2014all inherited from their Dublinborn mama. Donny's stubborn expression was entirely his own.\n\n\"I hope your disposition improves before we reach the ranch. No one's going to hire me if you're rude or unpleasant.\"\n\nGod knew she needed the work, if you could call what Miss Walker offered a job. Heiress to a cattle ranch? She still couldn't get over the absurdity of it or the desperation that brought her here.\n\nEven if the strange offer was legitimate, what chance did she have of proving to the owner she was capable of learning the cattle business? Especially with a wheelchair-bound brother in tow, a boy with weak lungs to boot. Why, oh why, hadn't she been more forthright in her telegram and told the ranch owner that she had an invalid brother? It wasn't her intention to be secretive, but experience had taught her to tread with care.\n\nHer anxiety increased with every cactus they passed. The desert might be good for bad lungs, but it didn't look good for anything else.\n\nThe livery stable owner had said to follow the road. So where was the ranch? Where, for that matter, was anything?\n\n\"Whoa.\" The horse went from barely moving to completely stopped. She reached for her canteen and offered it to her brother. \"Here. Be careful. That's all the water we have left.\"\n\nHe took the canteen without so much as a glance her way. After a quick swallow, he handed it back, wiping his lips with his shirtsleeve.\n\nShe took a sip before recapping the top, a drop of precious water falling upon her purple frock\u2014one of the few she'd been able to save before escaping the fire. The heat and dust had taken their toll, but there was little she could do about it. She straightened her leg o'mutton sleeves and checked the hatpin holding her fancy plumed hat that matched her dress. She debated the wisdom of applying more complexion powder to her heated face and decided against it, though she couldn't resist dabbing more rouge onto her parched lips.\n\nThe smell of smoke seemed to cling to her body and no amount of scrubbing had dissipated the acrid stench. She sprayed toilet water behind her ear\u2014a temporary solution at best. The stench of burning wood and even burning flesh would soon come back to haunt her.\n\nA strange rumbling in the distance broke the silence. She dropped her mirror into her drawstring purse and glanced around. \"What is that odd noise?\"\n\nHer brother shifted the best he could in his seat and looked over his shoulder. \"Sounds like a mining trolley.\"\n\n\"There are no mines out here.\" In the mountains maybe, but certainly not in this flat, barren land.\n\nThe noise grew louder, followed by a loud blast. Startled, Molly ducked. \"Quick. Put your head down. Someone's shooting at us!\"\n\nShe reached behind the seat for the double barrel shotgun and haversack and slid down to the floorboards. Her brother, unable to move his legs, slid his torso sideways until his head was hidden by the back of the seat.\n\n\"They want to rob us,\" he said, his eyes wide. \"Arizona is full of highwaymen. Horrible men who rob you and leave you in the desert to die. I read about them.\"\n\n\"Now's a fine time to tell me.\" Dropping to her knees, she slid two cartridges into the weapon. \"Stay down\u2014and pray!\"\n\nHer father's shotgun was the only thing of his she'd been able to save from the fire. Fortunately, he'd taught her how to use it. The air exploded with more gunfire and she hunkered even lower. Pushing the barrel of her weapon along the top of the seat, she took aim, the long plume of her hat bobbing up and down.\n\nSomething roared straight at them. Since it was stirring up so much dust, she couldn't make out what it might be. Why hadn't someone in town warned her of road thieves?\n\nAnother shot rang out, this one loud enough to pass as cannon fire. Something shiny emerged from the cloud of dust. The sun bounced off the barrels of two weapons, practically blinding her. What kind of an outlaw was this? Panicking, she pulled the trigger.\n\nHer warning shot worked; the strange rumbling noise stopped. She fired again to let the road agents know she meant business and quickly reloaded. A long, uneasy silence followed. The sulfurous odor of gunpowder slowly faded away, along with the blue haze.\n\nHeart thumping, she held her breath. Had... had she shot someone?\n\n\"Do you see them?\" Donny whispered at last. \"Do you see the bandits?\"\n\n\"N-No,\" she stammered, her voice barely audible. \"I can't see anything.\"\n\n\"Hello there,\" a man called and she jumped.\n\nGulping, Molly straightened to peer around the seat at the man waving a white handkerchief. Was it a trick?\n\nSlowly she stood, knees shaking. The serious end of her weapon pointed at the stranger's chest, she kept her finger on the trigger. \"Don't move.\"\n\nThe man jammed his handkerchief in his pocket and glared at her. \"What in blazes do you think you're doing? You could have killed me.\" His Texas drawl did nothing to hide his anger.\n\nIgnoring her warning, he bent next to a high-wheeled carriage and ran his hand along the front like someone might check for a wound. What appeared to be \"weapons\" at first were in reality two shiny carriage lanterns. There was no sign of a horse or mule and she couldn't imagine how he got there\u2014or what had caused that ungodly blast and rumbling sound.\n\nHe turned to face her, hands on his hips. \"Now look what you've done.\" He indicated the front of his rig where she assumed her bullet hit. \"Why did you shoot at me?\"\n\n\"Why did you shoot at us?\" she stormed.\n\nHe looked momentarily baffled. \"I wasn't shooting at you.\" He pulled off his hat and ran the back of his arm over his forehead. A tall man, six feet or more, he wore dark pants and a white shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows. \"My motor backfired.\"\n\nMotor? She cast a puzzled glance at the dusty black phaeton parked half off the road.\n\nNext to her, Donny sat upright. \"He's driving a horseless carriage,\" he whispered, his eyes rounded. \"I read about those in my science magazine.\"\n\nHorseless...? She'd never thought such a thing possible. \"What... what do you want?\" she called.\n\n\"I want you to put your weapon down,\" he replied. He sauntered to the side of her buckboard, holding his arms out as if to prove he had no intention of harming her. \"I'm a doctor and I'm heading to the LC Ranch. One of the cowhands has taken ill.\"\n\nLC. Last Chance. \"I'm heading there too,\" she said. He certainly didn't look like any doctor she'd ever met. For one thing he couldn't be a day over thirty. Up close he was even more handsome than he looked from a distance, but that didn't give him any right to go around scaring people.\n\nThe man pushed his hat back. A swath of dark brown hair with reddish highlights fell across his forehead. He gave her a once-over\u2014 a very thorough once-over with the bluest eyes imaginable, and also the boldest.\n\nAs a dance hall girl she had grown accustomed to men's leering gazes. It was part of the job and, for the most part, she'd learned to disregard them. Indeed, she'd developed a hard shell for protection.\n\nIt was hard to ignore the doctor, though. Not only was he handsome, his sharp assessing gaze seemed to go beyond the surface. She feared her carefully constructed fa\u00e7ade was in terrible danger of melting away like face paint in the sun.\n\n\"Doctor Caleb Fairbanks at your service.\" He gave a slight bow. He'd dropped his angry tone, but it was his crooked grin that made her lower her weapon. \"I guess we had ourselves what you might call a misunderstanding.\"\n\n\"I'm Molly Hatfield and this is my brother, Donny.\" She moistened her lips\u2014a mistake as it only drew his gaze to her mouth. She lifted her chin, hoping he wouldn't notice her blush. \"You nearly scared the life out of us.\"\n\n\"I have to say, ma'am, the feeling was mutual.\" He sounded sincere and not at all threatening.\n\n\"I\u2014I apologize for what I did to your...\" Her gaze drifted to his vehicle. Horseless? She swung her gaze back to the man's square face. \"But if you go around making loud popping sounds, you can expect to be shot at.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind. Apology accepted, but I'm afraid you'll find Bertha less forgiving.\"\n\nShe glanced around but didn't see anyone else. \"Bertha?\"\n\n\"My motor buggy.\"\n\nShe stared at the vehicle, not sure what to make of it or its tall owner. \"You mentioned the LC Ranch. How far is it?\" she asked.\n\nHe tossed a nod westward. \"Just a couple miles up the road. Keep going. You'll see a sign.\" He glanced at her brother before leveling his gaze back to her with a tip of his hat. \"I'd best get a move on.\" He gave her a broad wink before walking away.\n\nHer mouth dropped open. Of all the nerve! Even the miners of Dobson Creek with all their rough talk and leering looks were never so outrageous as to wink.\n\nHer brother stared at her burning face with reproach. As if the doctor's blatant gesture was her fault.\n\n\"What?\" she snapped.\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\nSighing, she stored the rifle and grabbed the reins.\n\nThe doctor wound his buggy like a mechanical toy, mounted the seat, and drove by them, the motor huffing and puffing. A previously unnoticed dog sat on the seat next to the driver, barking. The horn made a loud Ah-ooh-ga sound and the brazen doctor lifted his hat as he passed.\n\nThe strange vehicle took off with astonishing speed, spitting and sputtering like an arthritic man about to take his last breath, and vanished down the road in a cloud of dust." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nDr. Caleb Fairbanks was still smiling when he reached the LC Ranch. Never could he have imagined meeting up with the likes of Miss Hatfield practically in the middle of nowhere. She fairly dazzled in that bright purple frock and ridiculous feathered hat, but it was her sparkling green eyes that left the biggest impression. Those and her pretty round face and nicely shaped mouth.\n\nHe only wished she hadn't shot two holes in his prized automobile. Perhaps the smithy in town could fix it. Anyone driving these machines spent a great deal of time on repairs, and the sooner he got on friendly terms with the owner of the blacksmith shop, the better.\n\nMiss Hatfield was right. If he didn't get the problem fixed, an unfriendly bullet might very well hit him next time instead of Bertha.\n\nJust as he pulled up in front of the adobe ranch house, his motor backfired again. He switched off the engine. The auto shuddered and gave a final gasp before altogether dying.\n\n\"I guess this is it,\" he said. His little dog, Magic, tilted his head, one pendent ear cocked, and gazed at him with dark brown eyes, his fluffy tail curled over his back.\n\nThe two-story adobe house with its red tile roof, courtyard, and wraparound verandah was the largest building Caleb had seen since arriving in Cactus Patch. The outbuildings, barn, corrals, and twenty-foot windmill were as well maintained as the house.\n\nA horseman galloped up to Caleb's vehicle and dismounted. \"Who are you and what is this... this... what gives you the right to bring this rattletrap on my property?\"\n\nMuch to Caleb's surprise, it wasn't a man but a woman dressed in a split riding skirt, masculine shirt, Stetson, and boots. He'd been warned about Miss Walker, owner of the ranch, but nothing had prepared him for her militant demeanor.\n\n\"It's a horseless carriage, ma'am, and I'm Dr. Fairbanks.\" He pointed at his dog. \"Stay.\"\n\nThe woman quickly wrapped the reins onto the hitching post and turned. She regarded him from a well-worn face, hands planted firmly on her hips. Wisps of gray hair showed beneath her hat. \"What happened to Doc Masterson?\"\n\n\"He's retired, ma'am. I'm taking his place.\"\n\nHer eyebrows shot up. \"Retired? That's ridiculous. The man can't be more than sixty years old. What's he going to do with himself?\" The way she carried on, one might think the man was but a babe-in-arms.\n\n\"He never told me. Just said he wanted to go back home to Kansas.\"\n\nDespite her advanced age, which he guessed to be somewhere in the midsixties, she stood perfectly tall and straight, easily reaching his shoulders in height. She displayed none of the round shoulders or stiff joints he'd observed in many women her age.\n\n\"You don't look old enough to be a doctor,\" she said, her voice sharp as a snapping whip.\n\nIt was a comment he'd heard countless times before. A doctor's ability was often judged on the basis of a gray or balding head. So far neither his medical degree nor experience had resulted in a single strand of silver, and his chestnut hair remained as full as ever.\n\n\"I'll be thirty-one come November,\" he said.\n\nMiss Walker glared at him like a schoolmarm scolding a pupil. \"Have you ever had arthritis or gout? Or even a pain in your sacroiliac?\"\n\n\"No, ma'am, can't say that I have.\"\n\nHer lip curled. \"Then how do you expect to treat such conditions?\"\n\n\"The same way a person like yourself knows how to deliver a calf without giving birth to one,\" he drawled. He meant no disrespect but he didn't know how else to answer her.\n\n\"I see.\" She looked him up and down. Was that reluctant approval in her gaze or wishful thinking on his part? \"Do yourself a favor, young man. Get a horse.\"\n\nCaleb slapped Bertha's shiny side. \"This is like having two horses, ma'am.\"\n\n\"It's noisy and smelly and I won't have such a thing on my property.\" She whirled around and walked away. \"What are you waiting for? We're wasting time. Show me what you can do.\"\n\nCaleb grabbed his leather bag from the seat of his vehicle, gave his dog another order to stay, and ran to catch up with the ranch owner. Not only did she dress and talk like a man, she walked as quickly as one too.\n\nShe led him into the barn. The smell of fresh hay offered a pleasant contrast to Bertha's odor of oil and burning rubber.\n\nShe stopped in front of a stall that held a red roan. \"This is Baxter.\"\n\nCaleb was momentarily speechless. Obviously the woman meant it when she said to get a horse.\n\n\"I'm afraid purchasing a horse at this time is out of the question, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Purchasing!\" She narrowed her eyes. \"This is my horse and there's something wrong with him. I summoned Dr. Masterson to tell me what it is.\"\n\nCaleb rubbed his chin. It seemed like a day for misunderstandings. \"I... I fear there's been a mistake. I'm a medical doctor. I treat humans.\"\n\n\"If you are indeed what you say you are, then you treat infections and disease. This animal is suffering from one, if not both.\"\n\nCaleb could see that. The horse looked at them with dull eyes, nostrils flared. He also appeared to be trembling.\n\n\"He's not eating and he's been lying down,\" she added.\n\nJust then one of the cowhands joined them. Miss Walker introduced Caleb in a no-nonsense voice. \"Fairchild, meet Ruckus.\"\n\n\"That's Fairbanks,\" Caleb said, shaking the man's hand. \"Doctor Fairbanks.\"\n\n\"This man claims to be a doctor, though he's only thirty,\" Miss Walker added.\n\n\"The same age as the Lord was when he started ministering,\" Caleb said.\n\nRuckus grinned. Obviously, he was used to the cantankerous ranch owner. Caleb guessed from the man's strong grip that he was somewhere in his midforties, though his craggy face and leathery skin made him look older. He had a horseshoe mustache and a crooked nose, most likely the result of someone's misplaced fist.\n\n\"What happened to Doc Masterson?\" Ruckus asked.\n\n\"Retired,\" Miss Walker said. \"Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?\"\n\nRuckus shrugged. \"I reckon more people would retire if they lived long enough, but out here if a bullet don't get you the weather likely will.\"\n\nCaleb hoped the ranch hand talked in jest, though nothing in his demeanor suggested it.\n\nMiss Walker ran her hand along her horse's neck. \"Well? Don't just stand there. Do something.\"\n\nCaleb set his bag on the ground away from the horse and opened it. Dr. Masterson had warned him about the old lady and told him to get on her good side. He wondered if such a thing existed. Out of habit he reached for his stethoscope, then thought better of it.\n\n\"Let's have a look.\"\n\nHe ran his hands along the roan's sweaty flanks. A horse's pulse is normally slower than a human's, but Baxter's pulse was elevated.\n\nRuckus hooked his thumbs onto his gun belt. \"You won't find anything. No founder, no nothin'.\"\n\nThat's what Caleb was afraid of. Carpeted with a thick layer of fresh straw, the stall was spotless with plenty of hay and water. This was a well-cared-for horse and his caretakers weren't likely to let a common disorder slip by without notice. Whatever ailed the gelding was probably something uncommon.\n\nHe'd doctored many animals in his youth and once considered going into veterinary medicine. He soon learned, however, that working with animals took a great deal of guesswork. He much preferred working with patients able to voice complaints and describe symptoms.\n\nHe flexed each leg and examined each hoof, watching Baxter's reaction. Nothing.\n\nHe checked the horse from one end to the other. None of the animals he worked with in the past had anything seriously wrong with them, and he hoped the same was true for Baxter. It wouldn't look good if the first patient he treated upon arriving in Cactus Patch should die.\n\nMiss Walker watched him with observant gray eyes, measuring his every move and no doubt comparing him to Dr. Masterson.\n\nOne by one Caleb dismissed the possible diseases that came to mind. The best he could do was make an educated guess based on a slight, almost imperceptible swelling of the lymph nodes around the neck and a watery discharge from the nose.\n\n\"I think your horse has the early stages of strangles,\" he said.\n\n\"That's not possible,\" Miss Walker exclaimed. \"None of the other horses are infected.\"\n\n\"What about the new horses?\" Caleb asked. He'd passed a corral of wild mustangs.\n\n\"We keep the new horses isolated from our regular ones,\" Ruckus said.\n\n\"Then I don't know what to tell you.\" Caleb snapped the lid of his black case shut and straightened. \"We'll know for sure in a couple of days.\" If he was right, abscesses would probably form and rupture, after which the horse would feel immeasurably better.\n\n\"Meanwhile, I suggest you keep him away from the others. Keep buckets and any equipment isolated. The bacteria can be carried from one stall to another on boots or clothing. I suggest you assign one person as his caretaker until we know for sure what we're dealing with.\"\n\n\"If indeed it is strangles, how serious is it?\" Miss Walker asked, her voice edged with skepticism.\n\n\"With care, most horses recover. As long as he doesn't develop a secondary infection like pneumonia, he should be fine. Meanwhile, watch your other horses for early signs of infection. The sooner you isolate them, the better your chances of keeping the disease from spreading.\"\n\nRuckus pushed his hat to the back of his head. \"Well, I'll be. Never considered strangles.\"\n\nCaleb picked up his black case. \"It's not the first thing that comes to mind.\"\n\nMiss Walker ran her hand along her horse's side. \"We're still not sure that's the correct diagnosis.\"\n\n\"We'll know soon enough. I'll stop by in a day or two and check on him,\" Caleb said.\n\n\"That's good of you,\" Miss Walker said. It was the first thawing Caleb had heard in the woman's voice, but her suspicious regard of him was still evident in her gray eyes.\n\nCaleb recalled the shotgun-bearing woman he'd met en route. He was used to dealing with strong and opinionated women like his sister, Lucy, back in Texas, but these Arizona ladies were a whole different breed.\n\n\"We're mighty obliged to you, Doctor,\" Ruckus said.\n\n\"Glad to be of service. Is there somewhere I can wash my hands?\"\n\n\"There's a barrel outside,\" Ruckus said. He closed the stall door and led Caleb to a barrel of water outside.\n\nCaleb scrubbed his hands, bid the man good-bye, and strolled to his car. He glanced around but didn't see any sign of Miss Hatfield's buckboard. That meant she was still on the way to the ranch and he was bound to pass her on the way back to town. He smiled at the thought.\n\nHe just hoped the fetching woman in purple wouldn't come at him with that confounded shotgun again.\n\nHe gave the L-shaped crank on the front bumper a good turn. Bertha coughed and wheezed and snorted like an angry bull before finally spluttering to life. Caleb then mounted the high leather seat behind the steering column. Magic greeted him with wagging tail and Caleb scratched him behind an ear before pulling away from the ranch house.\n\nThe blare of his brass bulb horn sent chickens scattering to the sides of the road. A cattle dog barked and ran the length of the fence that contained him. Magic barked back.\n\n\"It's all right, boy.\"\n\nTo the right a mustang circled a corral, mane flying and tail held high.\n\nCaleb steered the chugging car around a rough patch in the road. So that was Miss Walker. Her message had urged the doctor to drop everything and hurry to the ranch. No wonder Doc Masterson was so eager for Caleb to respond. He should have suspected something was amiss. If she was an example of the type of patient to expect in Cactus Patch, who could blame the old doctor for retiring?\n\nStill, Caleb liked the area, liked the mountains and canyons and ever-changing colors of the desert. He even liked the weather. It was every bit as hot as Texas but without the humidity, though he heard that would change during the monsoon rains.\n\nA herd of broad-beamed Herefords blocked the road ahead and Caleb pulled out the clutch and applied the brake, stopping in plenty of time. The cattle mooed as they ambled along, guided by mounted cowboys. A steer gave the auto an anxious glance and one calf stopped to stare but his mother pushed him along.\n\nIt took several moments before the last straggler cleared the road to join the large milling herd that seemed to stretch for miles. Resisting the urge to honk his horn, Caleb thanked the men with a wave of his hand.\n\nCaleb drove slowly so as not to startle the cattle. Bertha gurgled, then backfired, not once but twice.\n\nMagic gave a playful bark and Caleb glanced over his shoulder. The cattle that moments ago appeared so placid now stomped around in confusion, heads thrown back, mouths open, their loud bellows heard even over the rumbling motor.\n\nDrat! Heart thumping, Caleb slammed his foot against the gas pedal and took off ahead of the stampeding cattle." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nMolly stopped the wagon and set the brake, more out of habit than need. The horse didn't go fast enough to need a brake. She pulled a handkerchief out of her sleeve and mopped her face before handing the near-empty canteen to Donny.\n\nThe sign clearly read Last Chance, but where was the ranch? The desolate, inhospitable terrain hadn't changed one iota since she'd left the town.\n\nShe moistened her parched lips. Even the plume on her stylish hat drooped and she batted it away from her face. She wished she'd been able to save a more practical hat from the fire, but her panicky state at the time had not allowed for discernment. It seemed more important to grab Donny's medicine and belongings. She'd only managed to save a couple of her own frocks, none appropriate for ranch work or, for that matter, even street wear.\n\nShe shaded her eyes against the glaring white sun and surveyed the road ahead. Who in their right mind would live in such a desolate area?\n\n\"How much farther?\" Donny asked in a thin voice.\n\nGod only knows\u2014but she didn't want to worry him. \"I'm sure we're almost there.\"\n\nShe pulled a pocket watch out of her purse. It was a little after three o'clock. She wished she'd gotten an earlier start. The train had rolled into town that morning, but by the time she'd hired a driver to help her transport Donny and her few belongings from the station, had a bite to eat, and rented a rig, it was nearly two before she got started.\n\nSomething caught her attention.\n\n\"Oh, look. Straight ahead.\" She narrowed her eyes on the distant horizon. A dust cloud. \"Do you suppose the doctor's coming back this way?\" The thought wasn't altogether unpleasant. \"Maybe he can tell us how much farther we have to go.\"\n\nA low rumbling sound like thunder seemed to rise up from the very earth. The horse lifted his ears and stomped the ground. It was the most energy the animal had shown since leaving town. The mare hadn't seemed that anxious when the doctor's vehicle made those ghastly blasts or even when she'd fired her shotgun.\n\nDonny craned his neck. \"I don't think that's the doctor,\" he said with a worried frown.\n\nShe batted a drooping plume from her face and craned her neck. \"What do you think it is?\"\n\nThe dust rose like a wall, spreading out on both sides of the road as far as the eyes could see. The rumbling sound grew louder and the buckboard began to shake.\n\n\"Oh no!\" Hands on her chest, she stared in horror. A long line of running cattle turned like a school of fish and headed straight for them.\n\n\"Get down!\" she screamed, as if safety was simply a matter of ducking. She released the brake and grabbed the reins. \"Gid-up!\"\n\nDonny scooted down the best he could, the last bit of color draining from his face. \"Cattle can run twenty miles an hour. We can't outrun them.\"\n\n\"I know that!\" The old mare couldn't even outrun a tortoise. She forced the horse into a U-turn until the back of the wagon faced the stampeding cattle. The wagon offered little protection, but it was the best she could do.\n\nShotgun and haversack in hand, she climbed over the seat and hunkered behind the valise and wheelchair. No bullet could halt the thunderous hooves, but maybe she could make them veer off course. Loading and aiming her shotgun, she fired two shots.\n\n\"Look. There's the doctor!\" Donny shouted.\n\nShe quickly reloaded. \"I told you to stay down!\"\n\nThrough the churning dust, she could barely make out the horseless carriage leading the stampede. The vehicle weaved from one side of the road to the other, the frenzied cattle practically on its tail.\n\nFairbanks drove straight at the buckboard. Molly froze and Donny cried out.\n\nJust when she thought the doctor would plow into them, he stopped just a hair short, wheels screeching. He then spun his vehicle sideways across the road. Gears grinding, he drove the horseless carriage back and forth, shielding the buckboard and honking his horn. The vehicle rammed from one edge of the road to the other, backfiring. Smoke poured from its wheels.\n\nMolly watched in horror, unable to move.\n\nThe doctor's tactic worked, for at the last possible moment the herd split in two. Half of the cloven-hoofed beasts ran to the right of them, the other half to the left. The heated hides and clashing horns stampeded past on either side, rocking the buckboard like a boat in choppy seas.\n\nThe churning, choking dust cut visibility to zero and the deafening roar of pounding hooves seemed to go on forever. The horse whinnied and tried to pull free of its traces, but the brake held and the wagon moved only a few inches forward.\n\nFinally the last of the cattle ran by and the rumble of frantic hooves gradually faded in the distance with only a few stragglers and men on horseback bringing up the rear.\n\nMolly lowered her weapon and let out a long, harrowing breath. \"Th-They're gone,\" she said, wetting her dry lips. She stood her weapon on the butt end and made her way back to the driver's seat.\n\n\"Donny, are you all right?\"\n\nDonny lifted his head. Wheezing, he gasped for air and nodded.\n\n\"Everything okay?\" a male voice called. The doctor stood next to the buckboard, his previously white shirt now gray, sweat streaking his dust-covered face. His eyes looked even bluer, peering at her with grave concern.\n\n\"I\u2014I think so.\" She brushed off her dress and coughed. Nothing could be done for the dangling plume of her lopsided hat. \"Thank you.\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks slapped his own hat against his thigh, a futile effort in the dust-filled air. \"Sorry about that,\" he said. \"You aren't the only ones spooked by Bertha.\"\n\n\"You did that?\" she choked out. \"You caused the cattle to stampede?\" Not waiting for him to answer she ranted, \"You could have gotten us all killed!\"\n\nThe doctor had the good grace to look remorseful. \"The lady definitely needs work.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open before she realized he was referring to his horseless carriage.\n\nHe placed his hat on his head. \"And now that you've shot more bullets into Bertha, so do the front and sides.\"\n\nShe folded her arms and glared at him. For the trouble he and his ridiculous vehicle caused, he deserved considerably more than a few bullet holes.\n\nHe shifted his gaze to Donny and frowned. \"Is your brother all right?\"\n\n\"Other than being scared half out of his wits, he's fine,\" she said, her voice cool. She had no intention of discussing her brother's condition with this annoying, incompetent man. If his unfortunate choice of a vehicle was any indication of his medical skill, she'd best keep Donny away from him. She'd dealt with enough snakeoil doctors back in Colorado to last a lifetime.\n\n\"You'd better give him a drink,\" he said.\n\nDonny held his canteen upside down. \"We're out of water.\"\n\nMolly gave herself a mental kick for not preparing better. \"I had no idea it would take so long to drive to the ranch.\"\n\nThe doctor's gaze sharpened. \"I have extra.\" After fetching a canteen from the front seat of his vehicle, he handed it to Donny. \"Drink this. It'll help.\"\n\nDonny took several gulps before handing the canteen back. He still wheezed.\n\n\"How much farther?\" she asked. If she didn't get to the Last Chance soon, she would scream.\n\n\"Just a mile up the road,\" Dr. Fairbanks replied. He tossed a nod toward Donny. \"I have some medicine in my bag that might help his bellows.\"\n\nBellows! He made it sound like Donny was some sort of a machine. \"Thank you for your concern, but what my brother needs is rest. If you would kindly move your... vehicle, we'll be on our way.\"\n\nShe didn't mean to sound ungrateful, but she had spent a good portion of her wages on doctors. None offered any hope of his ever walking, but all promised to cure asthma. One doctor had advised Donny to take up smoking as a way to build up the lungs. Another suggested Donny wear a muskrat pelt with the fur next to his chest. Oh yes, she had every reason not to trust a member of the medical profession.\n\n\"Very well,\" he said. This time he didn't wink. He simply turned and walked with long strides to his horseless carriage.\n\nHe took hold of the handle in front and cranked, jumping out of the way when the vehicle roared to life. He then climbed into the driver's seat next to his barking dog and backed away until the road was clear, allowing her room to turn the wagon around. The doctor honked his horn as she drove by, but she didn't bother to wave.\n\nHe had caused her quite enough problems, thank you very much, and she was happy to see the last of him. Right now her main concern was for Donny.\n\n\"Let's sing,\" she said. It was the last thing she wanted to do. Her mouth was dry, her throat parched, and she was bone-tired, but singing never failed to relax Donny and calm his breathing. \"Hush, little baby, don't you cry...\"\n\nDonny made a face. \"Ah, gee. That's for infants.\" He brightened. \"Let's sing 'Old Man Harrington.'\"\n\n\"No, absolutely not.\"\n\n\"Ah, come on, Molly. That's your best song. You know everyone laughs when you sing it.\"\n\nShe tossed him a stern look. \"It's not a proper song for a young man to sing and I never want to hear you mention it again.\"\n\n\"How about this one, then?\" Donny could barely get the words out between his ragged breaths. \"This one makes people laugh too. O-O-Old man Bill Whit-ey, f-f-fell in a beer keg. What so\u2014\"\n\n\"Donald Thomas Hatfield!\"\n\nDonny tried to laugh but instead he coughed. She nonetheless gave him her best \"motherly\" look, but she couldn't remain annoyed at him for long. He was right\u2014it did make people laugh. The song was set to the same English drinking tune as the popular \"Star Spangled Banner.\" Once, during a saloon fight, angry fists gave way to loud guffaws when she stood on a table and sang it. Even so, she didn't want her brother singing about drinking.\n\nDonny could be irritating at times, but she loved him dearly. It was her fault he couldn't walk. Somehow, some way she had to make it up to him\u2014if it took the rest of her life.\n\nSpotting a windmill ahead, she snapped the reins, but the horse lumbered forward at the same slow speed. Never had she seen such an enormous windmill; its slow-turning blades spanned a good twenty feet. She pulled up alongside it, letting the horse drink from the trough while she dipped her empty canteen into the wooden tank out of the animal's reach. While Donny drank his fill, she spotted a red-roofed ranch house a short distance away.\n\n\"There it is,\" she said with false cheerfulness. Everything looked so... big. The sky, the size of the ranch, the house. She only wished she didn't have the feeling that her troubles had also grown in size." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nNo sooner had Molly pulled up in front of the two-story adobe ranch house than a tall thin man with a skinny moustache walked up to her buckboard to greet her.\n\n\"Name's Stretch,\" he said, tipping his hat and revealing a mass of black curly hair. \"Kin I help you?\"\n\n\"I'm here to see Miss Walker,\" Molly replied, trying to look as dignified as a droopy plumed hat and dusty purple dance hall gown would allow.\n\n\"Miss Walker ain't here right now. We had ourselves some cattle trouble.\" His gaze followed the swinging plume of her hat. \"You ain't one a those women lookin' to be the boss lady's heiress, are you?\"\n\nHis skeptical look did nothing for her self-confidence. \"I should wait and discuss my business with Miss Walker.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Suit yourself.\"\n\n\"Would you mind helping me with my brother's wheelchair?\" The chair was awkward and heavy and she would never manage to lift it out of the back of the buckboard by herself. \"Also, if you would be kind enough to help my brother out of the wagon, I'd be ever so grateful.\" She also needed help with her valise, but she didn't want to overwhelm the man with her demands.\n\nStretch glanced at Donny, then stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled. He waved to the cowpoke sitting on a wooden fence. \"Feedbag! Come here a minute.\"\n\nThe man called Feedbag hurried over. He had a black square beard that did indeed look like it belonged on the muzzle of a horse. The spurs on his boots made a strange noise when he walked and he wore bat-winged chaps.\n\n\"Grab that side,\" Stretch said, pointing to the wheelchair. Feedbag cast a curious look at Molly before walking to the back of the wagon. Together he and Stretch grabbed the wheelchair, heaved it over the side of the buckboard, and set it on the ground.\n\nJust then a horseman galloped toward them at full speed. It wasn't until the rider dismounted that Molly realized it was a woman dressed in a divided brown skirt and man's plaid shirt. Her gray hair in a bun, she wore a wide-brimmed Stetson and red kerchief.\n\nStretch whispered, \"That's Miss Walker.\"\n\nMolly withered inside. The woman looked even more intimidating than she sounded in her telegram. Molly swallowed hard and forced herself to meet the woman's steady gaze without flinching. \"I'm Molly Hatfield and\u2014\"\n\n\"I know who you are, but who is that?\" She indicated Donny, still seated in the buckboard.\n\n\"My brother and\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't recall any mention of a brother in your telegram. Furthermore, you are three days late. Anyone without regard for time has no business on a ranch.\"\n\nStretch bobbed his head and the two men lifted the wheelchair back into the wagon with a thud.\n\nMolly hadn't expected to be dismissed so abruptly and without so much as an interview. After all she'd been through these last few weeks, she wasn't about to go without a fight.\n\n\"Our train was late and that made us miss our connection. I explained all that in my latest telegram.\"\n\nThe two men reached for the wheelchair and heaved it over the side of the wagon and back onto the ground.\n\n\"If you sent a second telegram, it's probably in town waiting for one of my boys to pick it up. The telegram I did receive said nothing about your brother. Had it done so, I would have saved you the trouble of a trip.\"\n\nWarmth crept up Molly's face. She regretted withholding information, but at the time she hadn't known what else to do. \"I apologize, but I had to bring him with me. I'm the only family he has and I'm responsible for his care.\"\n\n\"And I'm responsible for two thousand head of cattle.\"\n\n\"Yes, and my brother and I had occasion to meet some of them on the way here. We were almost trampled to death.\"\n\nMiss Walker cocked an eyebrow but offered no apology for her cattle's poor behavior. \"That is precisely why I need someone reliable and trustworthy. If your appearance is any indication, you not only lack those necessary virtues, you also lack judgment and good sense.\"\n\nMolly was used to being judged solely on appearances. The socalled Christian women in Dobson Creek wouldn't even talk to her or her brother. A woman's virtue was not only determined by behavior but also by the color of her dress. Since Molly wore bright colors and worked at a saloon, her reputation suffered on both accounts.\n\n\"I assure you I am reliable and trustworthy. I've supported myself and my brother for the last four years and there aren't many women who can make such a claim.\" She was only seventeen when her father died, leaving her with no visible means of support. Her looks and voice were her only assets and she used both to good advantage. \"That alone should prove I'm reliable. As for my clothes, there wasn't time to save but a few of our belongings. You probably heard about the terrible fire in Dobson Creek.\"\n\nMiss Walker gave no indication of having heard the news. \"I'm sorry that you traveled all this distance for nothing. If you hurry, you can reach town before dark and catch the morning train.\" She turned and stalked away and the wheelchair was promptly returned to the wagon.\n\nMolly held her arms by her sides, fists tight. And go where? She and Donny had no family, no home, no money\u2014nothing. Still, she'd rather live in a cave than deal with such a coldhearted woman.\n\nShe turned back to the wagon, her mind racing. Surely she could get a job at one of the saloons in town. Judging by the wailing sounds she heard while passing through Cactus Patch, they could use a singer like her. Not only did she have no intention of working for the ranch owner, she'd had her fill of cattle, thank you very much!\n\nOne look at her brother stopped her in her tracks. His face was gray and his lips blue and he didn't breathe as much as gasp for air.\n\nA protective surge shot through her. It was no time to think of her wounded pride. She swung around and called after the ranch owner, \"That's it? You're sending me away just like that?\"\n\nMiss Walker turned, her cold gray eyes leveled on Molly. It was obvious she was not used to being challenged.\n\n\"Have you the slightest idea what it takes to be a rancher? It takes tenacity and hard work. This land will demand everything you have to give and then some. It means sleepless nights and endless days. It means fighting droughts, flash floods, cattle rustlers, and unstable markets. It means doing the impossible on a regular basis. What have you ever done to make me think you can succeed against such odds?\"\n\nWhat had she done? What had she done! \"I ran into a burning building to save my brother when no one else would,\" she replied.\n\n\"I commend you, but that hardly qualifies you to run a ranch.\"\n\nMolly's heart squeezed and she thought fast. Her brother's welfare depended on her. \"I was a dance hall girl in Dobson Creek,\" she said with a resolute nod.\n\nA look of disbelief suffused Miss Walker's face. \"A dance hall girl? You mean you sang and\u2014\"\n\n\"Danced,\" Molly said. That was all she did, which was why she got so little pay.\n\nMiss Walker heaved herself to her full height. \"And how does singing and... dancing prove that you have the tenacity for ranching?\"\n\nMolly forced herself to breathe. \"I worked at the saloon for four years and\"\u2014she glanced at the two men listening, their expressions eager with interest\u2014\"and I still managed to keep my virtue.\" It was true, no matter what those old gossips said.\n\nMiss Walker stared at her for a moment before laughing, her head thrown back like the lid of a coffeepot. Even Stretch and Feedbag joined in.\n\n\"That's a good one,\" Feedbag said, punctuating his guffaws by slapping his thigh.\n\nMolly couldn't tell by Miss Walker's amusement if she'd scored any points. The two men, however, must have thought things had turned in her favor, for they reached into the wagon for the wheelchair.\n\nMiss Walker stopped laughing, but her dubious expression didn't give Molly much hope. \"How old are you?\" she asked, her voice abrupt.\n\n\"Twenty-one.\"\n\n\"You do know from my telegram that I would require you to sign a document forbidding marriage.\"\n\nStretch and Feedbag held the wheelchair between them, waiting for Molly's reply.\n\n\"I do.\"\n\nMiss Walker arched a brow. \"You strike me as a woman who is\"\u2014she raked her gaze up and down the length of Molly's form\u2014\"appealing to men, virtue or no virtue. You certainly dress provocatively enough. So why would you agree to sign a document forbidding you to marry?\"\n\nMolly had no trouble answering that question. \"A woman caring for a crippled brother has no chance of landing a husband. The moment a man finds out about Donny, he runs the other way.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Miss Walker glanced at Donny before turning her gaze back to Molly. \"And I assume you know this for a fact?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am. I've had twenty-two marriage proposals in all. Soon as I told them about Donny, every last man took off like a mule with his tail on fire. Didn't matter if they were young or old, none of them wanted the added responsibility.\"\n\nMiss Walker pursed her lips and thought for a moment. \"Your loyalty to your brother is commendable.\"\n\n\"I'll be equally loyal to you and the ranch. All I ask is that you give me a chance.\"\n\nMiss Walker scrutinized her. \"How do you propose to take care of your brother and keep up your duties?\"\n\n\"Donny only needs help getting in and out of bed. He's quite capable of taking care of himself throughout the day.\" That wasn't true\u2014God forgive her\u2014but she didn't dare reveal the full extent of Donny's needed care. At least not yet.\n\nDonny nodded in agreement and Molly felt a tug of her heartstrings. Though he was very much against coming to the ranch, no one would ever guess it by his beseeching expression.\n\nMiss Walker studied Donny for a moment and brushed a wayward strand of hair away from her face. \"I'll probably regret this, but I'll let you stay.\"\n\n\"Thank you, I\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want thanks\u2014I want blood and sweat.\" The ranch owner's gaze slid the length of Molly like a dressmaker measuring for clothes. \"I generally give candidates a set time period to prove themselves. I'll give you till mid-September to show me you're as capable of learning the ranching business as you are at protecting your virtue.\"\n\nOne of the men laughed but Miss Walker ignored him. \"If by some... miracle... you succeed, we'll discuss the terms of our agreement. Until that time you'll be paid less than the normal salary to make up for your brother's room and board.\"\n\nThe wheelchair landed on the ground with a thud and both men brushed their hands together. Stretch grabbed the valise and set it next to the chair.\n\nMiss Walker hadn't seemed to notice the wheelchair rising up and down like a barometer in changing weather. \"I feel it fair to warn you that only one previous candidate lasted for more than a week. Most barely made it through the first couple of days.\"\n\nMolly refused to be discouraged. She knew nothing about cattle, but life on a ranch couldn't be any harder than living in a mining town.\n\nMiss Walker's gaze settled on Molly's velvet slippers, now covered in dust. \"Do you have anything remotely similar to ranch attire?\"\n\nMolly glanced down at her gown. It was the most fashionable one she owned, but next to the ranch owner's practical garb it looked downright dowdy. \"I'm afraid most of my clothes were lost in the fire.\"\n\n\"I'll see what I can rustle up. Meanwhile, your room is waiting. I'll have my housekeeper prepare a room for your brother.\" She glanced at Stretch. \"See that the horse and wagon are returned to the livery stable.\" With that Miss Walker strode toward the ranch house, her jingling spurs sounding like a death knell." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Molly waited for the two ranch hands to lift Donny into his wheelchair. The man named Stretch pushed the wheelchair through the courtyard and he and Feedbag hauled it onto the shaded verandah and into the house. A young Mexican woman greeted them, eyeing Molly up and down.\n\n\"My name is Molly.\" She pronounced each word precisely. She guessed the housekeeper was somewhere in her teens.\n\n\"Rosita,\" the woman replied, pointing to herself.\n\nRelieved that the woman seemed to understand English, a dozen questions leaped to mind, but they could wait till later. She turned to the two men.\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Glad to help,\" Stretch said. He and Feedbag left and Molly took in her surroundings. The entry hall opened to a large spacious room.\n\nCompared to their tent home, the house was quite grand with its red tile floor, stone fireplace, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. A stuffed steer head hung over the mantel and Indian rugs adorned the adobe walls.\n\nDonny gazed longingly at the overstuffed bookshelves.\n\n\"This way,\" Rosita said. She started down a small hallway and then waited for Molly to follow with the wheelchair. Though the doorway was wider than average, the chair caught on the jamb, leaving a dent in the wood. Molly wiggled the chair back and forth until she was able to push it through.\n\nDonny's room was in the same wing as the kitchen. It was a small room, obviously meant to be used by a cook or housekeeper. A single window faced the front of the house, shaded by the roof overhang. There were no stairs to worry about and for that Molly was grateful.\n\nAfter settling Donny in his room and giving him his medicine, Molly followed the Mexican housekeeper upstairs to the second floor. The woman led the way to the end of the hall. Molly's room was considerably larger than Donny's and opened onto a lovely balcony that stretched the length of the house.\n\nThe cheerful room was furnished with a single bed, chest of drawers, washstand, and desk. Molly ran her hand across the bed, absorbing the smooth softness of the quilt. She couldn't imagine sleeping in such luxury.\n\nMolly's spirits rose for the first time since the fire. Suddenly aware that the housekeeper stood staring at her, Molly smiled.\n\n\"Have you worked here long?\"\n\nRosita gave a curt nod. \"Long enough.\" Her formal manner and stiff voice seemed designed to discourage unnecessary conversation. She pointed to the garments on the bed. \"Miss Walker sent clothes. I'll fetch hot bath.\"\n\nA hot bath? That was a luxury Molly hadn't counted on. Back home she managed to heat water for a bath with hot rocks, but if she was in a hurry, she settled for the cold stream that ran outside their tent.\n\nEven more amazing were the indoor privies, one near Donny's room and the other just down the hall from hers. She imagined this was how kings lived, not ranchers.\n\n\"A bath would be most\u2014\"\n\nThe housekeeper left the room, slamming the door shut with a bang and leaving Molly's sentence half-finished.\n\nMolly shrugged. No matter. She glanced around, unable to believe her good luck. She touched the walls, the floor, the door leading to the balcony. She never thought to live in a house with plaster walls, wooden floors, and glass doors and windows. Strangest of all was having a room to herself. A blanket strung across the tent from a rope was the only privacy she'd ever known. She wasn't sure she liked being so far away from Donny, though. What if he needed her in the middle of the night? Or his asthma grew worse?\n\nPushing her worries away, she opened her valise and lifted out a scarlet frock.\n\nEven as a child she insisted upon wearing bright clothes and refused to wear the sedate hues her mother favored. Her father flinched whenever he saw her coming, raising his hands in front of his face as if to ward off a bright light.\n\n\"You look like a peacock,\" he'd say fondly. Or \"Put a star on top and you'd pass as a Christmas tree.\" But he always sided with her whenever her mother complained, calling her his little sunshine.\n\n\"When a man spends his days in a mine, he welcomes a bit of color,\" he'd say.\n\n\"I can understand a bit of color,\" her mother would reply, \"but does she have to wear all the colors at once?\"\n\nWhat neither parent had known, had no way of knowing, was that her flashy clothes, and later her makeup and hearty voice, had all been cultivated to protect her brother. No one stared at him with pitying eyes when she was around. No one stared at him at all. People were too busy staring at her.\n\nIt had been hard at first. By nature she was reserved\u2014shy. But she'd soon found out that if you pretended to be someone else long enough, you eventually forgot who you were. It was for the best, really. As Donny's protector and caretaker, she didn't have time to be anything else." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nCactus Patch buzzed with news of Miss Walker's newest \"heiress,\" and that infuriated Bessie Adams. She'd practically knocked herself out these past few weeks planning her nephew's wedding and not a single person she'd encountered in town mentioned it\u2014not one. Not even the customers gathered in Mr. Green's mercantile early that Wednesday morning.\n\nIncensed, Bessie strolled down an aisle checking out the produce, basket on her arm. Now that the nice new doctor was boarding with her and Sam, the list of needed groceries had almost doubled, but her mind was on her nephew's upcoming nuptials.\n\nThe wedding of Luke Adams to Kate Tenney would be the event of the decade. The town had never known anything like it. Every lamppost, every wooden sign, every door on Main Street had been decorated with large white ribbon bows. Bessie spent hours writing invitations, planning the food, overseeing the bride's dress, and explaining to her thickheaded nephew and groom-to-be why all this fuss was necessary.\n\nIt wasn't every day that a man got married. Seeing Luke properly wed fulfilled the promise made on her sister's deathbed to care for her two orphaned boys.\n\nBessie picked up a head of lettuce and gave it an expert squeeze. Mr. Green called over to her.\n\n\"What do you say, Bessie? Wanna bet?\" He shook a cardboard box of money. \"How long do you think Miz Walker's latest heiress will last this time?\"\n\n\"I'll give her forty-eight hours,\" Harvey Trotter said. A farmer by trade, he wore overalls and a large straw hat the same color as his sun-streaked hair. Puffing on his stogie, he plopped a coin on the counter and Mr. Green wrote down the amount.\n\nBessie grimaced in disapproval. Trotter had a wife and six children and could ill afford such folly.\n\nSaloon owner Randy Sprocket made a face. Thumbs hooked around his suspenders, he shook his head. \"Nah. She's got a brother in a wheelchair. She ain't gonna last a day.\"\n\n\"Did you say wheelchair?\" Hargrove was the owner of the local ice plant and Bessie never saw him when he wasn't dressed for winter. Today he wore a heavy flannel shirt. In this heat!\n\n\"Saw him with my own two eyes,\" Sprocket said. \"She paid the Miller twins money to lift him and his wheelchair into a wagon at the livery.\"\n\n\"In that case, I change my mind,\" the ice man said. \"I'm only giving her till noon.\"\n\nMr. Green noted the change on his tally and called over to Bessie. \"Come on, Bess. Winner takes all. What do you bet?\"\n\nBessie sniffed and placed a firm head of lettuce in her basket, which brought a nod of approval from farmer Trotter. \"I'm not a gambler.\" The nerve of him suggesting such a thing to a fine Christian woman like herself.\n\n\"Anyone who's married is a gambler,\" Hargrove said. \"Since you're the town matchmaker, that not only makes you a gambler but a dealer as well.\"\n\nThis brought a frown to Bessie's face and a round of laughter from the others. Bessie's temper snapped and she squeezed a tomato until it practically turned to ketchup. In all her sixty-something years she had not so much as touched a deck of cards.\n\n\"The whole idea of advertising for an heiress is ridiculous,\" she scoffed, shaking her head. \"Even Mr. Vanderbilt with all his money didn't have such an abundance of heirs.\" Before his death Cornelius Vanderbilt was considered the richest man in America.\n\nShe'd lost count of how many women had traveled to Cactus Patch in answer to Miss Walker's advertisement. The way some of them carried on, you'd think they'd been offered husbands instead of cattle.\n\nOne by one those women had left\u2014all except Kate Tenney, but that was only because Bessie made Luke chase the girl all the way to Boston. Had she not put her foot down and talked some sense into him, her nephew would have let a perfectly good woman slip away.\n\n\"It's a crying shame that none of you have anything better to do with yourselves than throw away your money,\" she said, reaching for a box of her favorite chocolate bonbons. The problem with the men in this town was that they drank and gambled too much.\n\n\"Ah, come on, Bessie. What could it hurt?\" Green urged.\n\nBessie was tempted, God forgive her. \"What if you're all wrong and no one wins?\"\n\n\"Then we'll donate the money to the church.\"\n\nBessie hesitated. No one had been right in the past about how long a girl would last at the ranch. Why, even she was convinced Kate wouldn't survive twenty-four hours and the poor girl lasted a full four months. But if this current \"heiress\" had a brother in a wheelchair... hmm. The church could use the money and... She caught herself in the nick of time.\n\n\"Gambling is wrong, no matter what,\" she said with a toss of her head. At least someone in this town knew how to resist temptation.\n\nTrotter chomped down on his stogie and hooked his thumbs around his overall straps. \"Are you telling us that you have no opinion?\" He looked incredulous.\n\n\"She has an opinion on everything else,\" Green said.\n\nAll four men stared at her and Bessie cleared her throat. \"Of course I have an opinion. I think the woman will surprise us all and last... two months.\" Any woman traveling all this way with a brother in a wheelchair had to have some starch in her.\n\nThis brought a round of laughter from the others.\n\n\"I tell you what,\" Hargrove said with a magnanimous air. \"I'll put in for Bessie.\" He tossed a shiny coin on the counter. \"Put her down for two months.\"\n\nNot to be outdone, the others slapped coins onto the counter on Bessie's behalf.\n\nSmiling to herself, Bessie continued her shopping. Even if by some miracle she won what was now a healthy pot of dough, no one could accuse her of gambling." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Molly grabbed the pot of coffee and yawned. She couldn't help it. She'd hardly slept from worrying about Donny. Several times during the night she'd lit the oil lantern and tiptoed through the quiet house to his room. Only upon hearing his steady breathing could she relax enough to creep back to her own bed.\n\nDonny wasn't the only reason she couldn't sleep. A night cough that started during the fire kept her awake and none of the usual remedies worked. Her throat still felt parched.\n\nIt was more than just lack of sleep that had her yawning. It was getting up at four in the morning and having to be ready to work at five.\n\nShe lifted the lids off the covered metal pans arranged on the buffet in the formal dining room. No one else was around and the long table for twelve looked anything but inviting.\n\nThe flapjacks, scrambled eggs, and bacon smelled good, but who could eat at such an ungodly hour? It was all she could do to force the strong bitter brew down her throat before she headed out the door.\n\nTo make matters worse, outside it was cold as a well-digger's knees. Her baggy shirt offered little protection from the chill, even with its long sleeves.\n\nThe sun had yet to rise and the sky was dull as tarnished silver. Following the sound of male voices, she turned the corner of the barn and a group of men turned to gape at her. One man gave a low whistle. Another's eyebrows disappeared beneath the brim of his high-crown hat.\n\nOne cowpoke's eyes practically bulged out of his weathered face. He scratched his temple, frowned, and cleared his throat. \"They call me Ruckus.\"\n\n\"Pleased to meet you. My name is Molly Hatfield and I'm Miss\u2014\"\n\n\"I know who you are.\" He turned to the other men, all still gaping at her. \"This here is Miss Walker's new heiress. Name's Miss Hatfield. Same rules apply as before. No cussing in the lady's presence.\"\n\nThe men whistled, clapped, and whooped until a man pointed his pistol at the sky and fired. A hawk took off from atop the barn, horses whinnied, and a cattle dog barked in the distance, but the men all fell silent.\n\nRuckus walked around the circle saying each man's name out loud. The man who'd shot the pistol was O.T. \"That there is Stretch,\" he said, indicating the man she'd met the day before. He was the tallest of the bunch. \"I reckon you won't disremember him.\"\n\nStretch tipped his hat. \"And I ain't likely to disremember her.\"\n\nWishbone swept off his hat when he was introduced, his legs so bowed he looked like he was sitting on an invisible horse. Mexican Pete kicked Wishbone in the behind, sending him sprawling to the ground. It was a jovial group and reminded Molly of Saturday night at Big Jim's Saloon when everyone was in a festive mood and ready to have a good time after a week's hard labor.\n\nRuckus then surprised Molly by leading the group in prayer. Molly followed Ruckus's lead and lowered her head respectfully. The last time she'd prayed in a group was three years ago when that awful cave-in trapped several miners. The entire town had turned out to hold vigil and pray\u2014for all the good it did them. The fact that these cowhands thought to start the day with prayer was unsettling to say the least. Was ranch work so dangerous that they needed to pray every day?\n\nAfter the others walked away, Ruckus explained her duties. \"Me and the boys have some branding to do, but you ain't up to that yet.\"\n\nHe sent her to the horse corral to meet with a man named Brodie, who barely bothered looking up when she introduced herself. Instead, he kept his gaze on a large black horse bucking around in a circle, kicking up its hind legs.\n\nThe horse trainer was a compact man, his long sandy hair tied at the base of his neck with a piece of rawhide. A scraggly beard covered the lower half of his face while sharp, observant brown eyes commanded the upper. She guessed him to be in his late twenties or early thirties.\n\n\"What do you know about horses?\" he asked in a voice made gravelly by tobacco.\n\n\"I know how to ride.\" She tossed a nod at the mustang. \"What's the matter with him?\"\n\n\"Not a thing.\" Brodie spit out a stream of brown juice. \"That's the first time he's been saddled. His name's Lightning.\"\n\nLightning raced toward the fence and Brodie snapped his whip. That stopped the horse from jumping but not from running.\n\nA Mexican cowhand walked by. \"Muy mala,\" he called out. Very bad.\n\n\"Not bad,\" Brodie called back. \"Just spirited.\" The Mexican shrugged and kept going.\n\nLightning slowed as he made the turn and headed toward them. Brodie slapped his whip against the ground and the horse gave a double hock kick and picked up speed.\n\nBrodie nodded toward the animal. \"His nature is to run when confronted with something new. He's gotta learn that runnin' will do him no good. I'm his last chance. He don't make it with me, he don't make it with no one.\"\n\nHe tossed her a pair of buckskin gauntlets and handed her a second whip. \"Stand over there by that gate and make sure he don't escape.\"\n\nSlipping her hands into the leathery softness, Molly crossed to the gate. The horse stopped running, pawed the ground, and turned in a circle as if chasing his tail. The saddle remained secure.\n\n\"Yee-ow,\" Brodie yelled. Lightning ran by him and Brodie responded by cracking the whip against the horse's heels. He then chased after the horse, popping his whip each time Lightning tried to climb a fence with his powerful legs.\n\nThe horse ran to the far end of the corral and jumped. Smashing into the corral fence he fell, landing on his side with a thump and stirring up a cloud of dust.\n\nMolly stared in wide-eyed horror over gloved fingertips. The man with his yelling and cracking whip obviously didn't know what he was doing.\n\nLightning stretched his front legs, pushed out his head, and struggled upright. The horse looked groggy and uncertain.\n\nBrodie grabbed the halter rope and tied Lightning to the fence outside the corral.\n\n\"You're lucky he didn't break his neck,\" she charged, not bothering to hide her anger.\n\n\"Or break the neck of a rider,\" Brodie said, his demeanor calm. \"Let's hope he learned his lesson.\"\n\nLesson? She frowned. \"What would have happened had he jumped over the fence without falling?\"\n\n\"I would have made him fall,\" Brodie said simply. \"What he doesn't learn on his own I've got to teach him. That's my job. A ranch can't run without well-trained horses.\" He tossed a nod toward the open desert. \"You never know what you might encounter out there. Could be a rattler. Could be a raging bull, a wolf, or a bandit. A cowboy's life depends on how his horse reacts to adversity.\" He snapped the ground with his whip. \"Let's get to work.\"\n\nMolly spent the rest of the morning learning how to turn a wild horse into a tame one. Brodie was a patient teacher, his movements efficient but never hurried. Now that she understood the reason behind his methods, she realized he was firm but never harsh or cruel.\n\n\"I learned to train horses in Mexico,\" he explained as they took a midmorning break in the shade of the windmill. He dipped a metal cup into the water tank and drank it down in one gulp. Wiping his whiskered chin with the back of his hand, he continued.\n\n\"Mexicans are the best riders. They don't treat horses like pets. A horse is a cowboy's partner and it's all serious.\"\n\n\"Would it be okay if I ride one of those?\" she asked, pointing to a row of saddled horses tied outside the corral. She was a good rider and anxious to check out the ranch.\n\n\"Not unless you got yourself a hole ready. I ain't got time to dig no grave.\" He laughed at her expression before explaining, \"Ain't none of them ever been ridden. They're gettin' used to saddles and learning how to stand quietly. What you see is a bunch of horses learning patience.\" He gave her a cockeyed glance. \"I reckon that's a virtue you know nothing about.\"\n\n\"I know about patience,\" she said. \"And what I know, I don't much like.\"\n\nShe stared at the next corral over. A black colt held his head to the ground. Keeping his forelegs in place, he moved his back legs sideways in a circle. He then lifted his head and bounded to the other side. What a strange horse.\n\nBrodie followed her gaze. \"He's blind,\" he said simply.\n\nMolly frowned. The horse looked so carefree, so vibrant and full of life, it was hard to imagine that anything was wrong with him. \"But he looks so... happy.\"\n\n\"Reckon he don't know any better. Soon as he weans, we're gonna have to let him go. He won't be any good around here.\"\n\nA surge of protectiveness shot through her. \"Let him go? You mean set him free? But he won't survive.\"\n\nBrodie shrugged. \"Not my problem. Not yours either. Our job is to train horses to work. If they can't do the job, they're no good to us.\"\n\nMolly continued to watch the young horse. How she envied the little fellow's exuberance. Or maybe it was his ignorance she envied, for he had yet to learn that physical handicaps were often met with cruelty and disdain.\n\nSensing Brodie watching her, she pulled her gaze away from the colt. \"How long have you been training horses?\"\n\n\"Since I was knee-high to a jackrabbit,\" he said.\n\n\"They respect you,\" she said. \"They watch you like a teacher.\"\n\n\"They're watching me like a prisoner watches a guard. I'm keeping them from freedom. They figured out my weaknesses long before I figured out theirs. They've already figured out yours.\"\n\n\"What weak\u2014\" But already he'd turned his back and walked away.\n\nThe morning passed quickly and a distant bell sounded.\n\n\"Lunch,\" Brodie called from a distance.\n\nShe gaped at him. Already? It wasn't possible. Her heart thudded. Donny. She raced to the ranch house as quickly as her unfamiliar pegheeled boots would allow.\n\nHow could she have forgotten to get her brother out of bed?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nHe ran through the grass, the wind in his hair, the sun in his face. He kept running and running as if never to stop. He didn't know what he was running to or even from, but he had to keep running because...\n\nDonny woke with a start. Fighting to hold on to the dream as long as possible, he didn't dare move. But the sweet smell of grass and the wind in his hair soon faded away like popping bubbles, along with the rest of his dream. Only the memory of running remained.\n\nEvery night it was the same dream. Every morning he woke to the reality of his life. He couldn't walk, let alone run. He could barely manage to put on his own shirt.\n\nA clanging sound in the distance made him glance at the mechanical clock next to his bed. Noon. He couldn't believe it. No wonder his stomach growled.\n\nWhere was Molly? It wasn't like her to keep him waiting so long. Had something happened to her? The thought sent cold chills down his spine. The Dobson Creek fire made him realize like never before how much he depended on his sister. Without her he couldn't survive.\n\nHad Molly been injured? Was that why she was so late? What if she never returned? Heart thumping, he hung his head over the side of his bed and dangled his arms, his fingertips barely reaching the floor. Slowly he eased his shoulders over the edge of the mattress. He placed the palms of his hands on the floor. Tears of frustration sprang to his eyes and sweat trickled down his forehead.\n\nBlinking away the moisture, he measured the distance to his wheelchair. It looked like a mile away, though the room was only a few feet wide. He tried pulling himself forward using his arms, but it was no good. He wasn't strong enough. Feeling helpless as a slug, he gasped for breath.\n\nHe'd die rather than let Molly know how much he hated his life, hated being crippled, hated having to depend on her to get him out of bed in the morning and put him there at night. He hated the pitying looks from others\u2014if they bothered looking at him at all.\n\nIf only he could escape that dream. Dreaming about running only made his reality that much worse. Sometimes, like today, he wished he were dead.\n\nHe was still half on, half off the bed when Molly burst through the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "\"Drat!\" Eleanor Walker rested her hands on the pommel of her saddle and stared at the barbed wire fence that someone had cut. The problem was worse than she thought.\n\nRobert Stackman rode his gelding beside her roan. He was both her banker and friend, but he would be more if she would let him. Each year on her birthday he proposed marriage; each year she turned him down.\n\nThe ranch couldn't survive such a partnership. Robert was too practical, too money-oriented. He understood finances, not cattle. To him, profits were much more important than legacies. He never sat up all night nursing a horse or delivering a calf. He knew nothing about the soul of a ranch or its heart.\n\nShe knew from painful experience that such differences would ruin a marriage and for this reason she chose to settle for friendship\u2014 nothing more. But it was a friendship she deeply valued.\n\n\"What did I tell you?\" she said.\n\nThe grazing cattle by her windmill were not her own. She dug the wells and other cattlemen reaped the benefits. The sheer number of beeves from neighboring ranches worried her. An even greater concern was the eastern investor who wanted to finance a cattle company in the area. The man knew nothing about cattle and even less about conserving land.\n\nRobert's horse whickered and pawed the ground. \"Whoa, boy.\" A firm square jaw, crinkly blue eyes, and proud turn of head hinted at the good-looking man he must have been in his youth. At age sixty-two he was now more distinguished than handsome and his lush black hair had long since turned silver.\n\n\"I agree, it's a problem,\" he said.\n\n\"And it's about to get worse.\"\n\nShe thought she'd seen and done it all, but this latest onslaught of ranch companies and overgrazed ranges was something new. Three and four times the number of cattle than an acre could sustain had flooded the area in recent months. So far there had been no problems because of the record amount of rain in the past year, but sure as the day was long, another drought was around the corner. Less rain meant less vegetation, resulting in thinner cattle and lower market prices.\n\nShe narrowed her eyes. \"If Mr. Hamshank has his way, the land won't be good for anything.\" For two cents she would gladly tell the man what he could do with his cattle company.\n\n\"I believe his name is Mr. Hampshire,\" Robert said.\n\n\"Hamshank, Hampshire, what difference does it make? The man's an idiot.\" Eleanor tried not to let her anger get the best of her, but how could she not?\n\nIt wasn't just a ranch, it was her life\u2014had been for more than forty years ever since her family's wagon broke down on this very spot on the way to the California gold mines.\n\n\"Did I ever tell you about the Englishman?\" she asked.\n\n\"The one your mother nursed back to health and who returned the favor with a heifer?\"\n\nShe nodded. Her mother had considered that young cow her last chance to save her family from poverty's door. From those humble beginnings grew one of the largest and most successful cattle ranches in all of Arizona Territory.\n\n\"That same Englishman also gave us a book of Shakespeare. I never met an Englishman who didn't carry the bard with him, did you?\"\n\nRobert shrugged. \"What a pity your mother didn't start a library rather than a cattle ranch. It would have saved you a lot of heartache.\"\n\nShe laughed. Only Robert would think books preferable to cattle. She grew serious again. \"Something has to be done to stop Hampshire,\" she said. The question was what?\n\n\"You can't stop progress, Eleanor.\"\n\n\"Progress? You call this progress? The railroad was progress.\" Before the rails arrived, she had been forced to drive her cattle all the way to Kansas. \"The telegram was progress. This... this is madness.\"\n\n\"I told you what I think, Eleanor. I think you should sell.\"\n\n\"You know I can't do that, Robert.\" If only her daughter had lived. It had been more than thirty years since little Rebecca died at the age of five, but the least memory of her still hurt. If anything, it hurt even more with each passing year. Not only had she buried a daughter but very possibly the future of her ranch and certainly her family's legacy.\n\n\"I could get you a fair price. That is, if we act now,\" Robert said. \"I know someone who might be interested in the ranch house.\"\n\n\"And for good reason,\" she snapped. The ranch house was fairly new, built after the, '87 earthquake and subsequent fire destroyed the old ranch house and most of the outbuildings.\n\n\"We can subdivide the rest of the land,\" he added.\n\n\"I'm not selling and I'm certainly not dividing the land.\"\n\nRobert was too much of a gentleman to show impatience or exasperation, but she sensed his disapproval. \"You said it yourself,\" he reminded her. \"Something must be done. I'm offering you the most practical solutions.\"\n\n\"You're offering no solutions at all.\" What she needed was fresh blood and new ideas to meet the challenges the ranch now faced. She had good men working for her, but day-to-day chores consumed their time and energy. What she lacked was someone with vision and foresight, someone who could help her take the ranch into the twentieth century. So far none of the women who'd answered her advertisement had worked out and it was too soon to know if Molly would.\n\n\"So what do you plan to do?\" he asked.\n\n\"Fight them,\" she said. \"I asked my lawyer to arrange a meeting with Mr. Hampshire. I hope you'll be there.\"\n\nHe arched an eyebrow. \"What do you expect to accomplish? To talk him out of it, just like that?\"\n\n\"I know it won't be easy.\"\n\n\"An understatement if I ever heard one.\" He stroked his goatee. \"You can't keep running this ranch forever,\" he said. \"Even Doc Masterson had the good sense to retire.\"\n\nEleanor gripped the bridle reins tighter. Nothing irritated her more than a reminder of her advancing years. \"You know I'm trying to find someone to take over.\"\n\nNo doubt this latest woman, Molly, would soon go the way of the others. Eleanor sighed. She had to be out of her mind to let a dance hall girl and her brother hang around even for a short while. She should have sent them back to town the day they arrived. If only the boy didn't have so much trouble breathing.\n\n\"Each one who has applied has been progressively worse,\" he said.\n\n\"I had high hopes for Kate Tenney.\" Had indeed been ready to sign papers making her the official heiress. If only the girl hadn't fallen for the town smithy. Eleanor shook her head just thinking about it. Hard to believe that a woman as smart as Kate would settle for something as dull as marriage.\n\nEleanor shifted in her saddle. It would take years to train her replacement. As Robert liked to remind her, at age sixty-six she no longer had time on her side.\n\nCould this latest girl with her ill-conceived clothing, brassy demeanor, and sickly brother be her last chance to save the ranch? The very thought made her head spin.\n\nAs if to concur with her doubts, a steer let out a bellow followed by a loud mournful moo that sounded like an emphatic no.\n\nMy thoughts exactly." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nMolly was breathless with excitement and even finding Donny half off the bed earlier had failed to quell her enthusiasm.\n\nNow he sat wolfing down his midday meal, his plate piled high with meat, potatoes, and gravy. It wasn't a meal\u2014it was a feast.\n\nHe preferred to take his meals in his room rather than the formal dining room. Molly suspected he felt intimidated by Miss Walker, but learning to live with the brusque ranch owner was a small price to pay for a chance to live in such a wondrous place.\n\n\"Oh, Donny, I just know this is going to work out.\" She loved working with the horses and couldn't believe how quickly the morning had flown by. \"Did you ever imagine a finer home?\"\n\nDonny's fork stilled. \"Does this mean I'll never have to go to an insane asylum?\" Such institutions housed not only mental patients but the crippled and deformed.\n\nMolly sat on the bed and stared him straight in the eye. \"We've already discussed this.\"\n\n\"But Dr. Weinberg said\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't care what that bag of wind said. As long as I have a breath left in me, you will never have to live in that horrid place.\" She squeezed his hand. \"I mean that, Donny.\"\n\nHe studied her with eyes far too old for his years. \"What if you get married and your husband hates me and\u2014\"\n\n\"Donny, if I stay here I can't get married.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"I'll have to sign a document forbidding it. It's one of Miss Walker's stipulations. So you see? You have nothing to worry about. It's you and me together, forever. Now eat up.\" She glanced at the mechanical clock. \"Oh no!\" She was already ten minutes late getting back to work. \"I've got to go. I'll be back in two hours. I promise!\"\n\nWith that she dashed from the room, hoping Brodie hadn't noticed the time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Whenever Caleb drove through town, curious bystanders gawked at him. Today was no different. The moment he rumbled down Main Street in his horseless buggy, men, women, and children poured out of stores and businesses to get a better look at his amazing gasoline machine. Indeed, they almost seemed to crawl out from under the boardwalk.\n\nAs if enjoying the attention, Bertha backfired\u2014not once but twice. The loud booms echoed through the town like cannon fire.\n\nThe doctor's office was situated on Main between the Silver Moon Saloon and the Cactus Patch Gazette, directly across from the hotel. The only sign left of its former tenant was the neatly printed wording on the door that read Dr. Masterson.\n\nThe patient room was furnished with a leather examination table, sink, water pump, and a cabinet filled with carefully marked vials. Saws, knives, scalpels, scissors, clamps, and other surgical tools were arranged neatly on a tray. The W. Watson and Sons compound microscope occupied a metal table.\n\nThe room had two doors, one leading to the waiting room and one leading to a small office in back. The office had a desk and two chairs and an impressive library filled with medical books and periodicals.\n\nCaleb sat at the desk, the swivel chair squeaking under his weight, and glanced at his newly hung diploma on the wall. He couldn't remember when he didn't want to be a doctor, and what better time than now? The medical profession was just beginning to emerge from the dark ages.\n\nMost people called the West the new frontier, but medicine was the true frontier. With the discovery that germs caused disease, and the subsequent development of vaccinations for cholera and diphtheria, Caleb envisioned the day that disease would be a thing of the past.\n\nBut that wasn't all. Recently he'd read an article about a new form of photography that could penetrate flesh and expose bones to the human eye. It was hard to imagine anything so amazing.\n\nIt wasn't that long ago that a medical diploma could be obtained with only three months' schooling and no clinical experience. It was only six years ago that the National Association of Medical Colleges officially established a three-year curriculum and clinical training requirements. Unfortunately, poor schools still existed and it was almost impossible for a patient to know if a doctor had received proper training. The field was still filled with quacks and charlatans who continued to spread their ignorance and harm people's lives.\n\nCaleb had attended Harvard Medical School, one of the best schools of medicine in the country. Even so, he felt ill-equipped to take on the responsibility of providing medical care for an entire town. Medical knowledge had doubled since the War Between the States, but the human body, for the most part, remained a mystery. Some things, like blood transfusions, were still hit and miss. Caleb was convinced there were more elements in blood not yet discovered or understood.\n\nThe bells on the front door jingled, disturbing his reverie. Magic woke from his nap and looked up as if to say, Well, what are you waiting for?\n\nCaleb rose, smoothed his hair down, and stepped into the waiting room. A woman and a boy of about five or six sat waiting for him.\n\n\"Good morning,\" he said. \"I'm Dr. Fairbanks.\"\n\n\"I'm Mrs. Trotter and this is my son Jimmy. You must be the new doctor.\"\n\n\"Yes, I am.\"\n\nShe was a thin, bird-like woman with work-hardened hands. The bags under her hazel eyes made her look older than her years, which he guessed was somewhere in the mid-to late thirties.\n\n\"How can I help you today?\"\n\n\"There's something not right with Jimmy and I don't know what it is,\" Mrs. Trotter explained. Jimmy was a rail-thin child with skinny legs and arms and a gaunt face that seemed too small to support his mop of unruly brown hair. A good wind could blow him away.\n\n\"Come in and we'll take a look.\" He held the door open for mother and child and led them into the examination room. Magic took one look at them before flopping down to resume his nap.\n\n\"You can sit on my special bench,\" Caleb said, pointing to the leather-covered table.\n\nJimmy stepped on the footstool and seated himself on the edge of the table, his skinny legs dangling over the side. His mother sat on a ladder-back chair and Caleb lowered himself onto a stool. \"You said something's not right,\" he probed.\n\nMrs. Trotter nodded. Her salt-and-pepper hair was swept into an untidy bun beneath her bonnet as if she had pinned it up in haste. She was dressed in a no-nonsense gray skirt and plain white shirtwaist that had seen better days.\n\n\"He complains of stomachaches and hardly eats. He can't even get through his daily chores.\"\n\n\"How long has he been this way?\" Caleb asked.\n\n\"Since the first of the year.\"\n\nCaleb arched an eyebrow. \"So he's been like this for several months?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"His father says he's just lazy.\"\n\nIt was the kind of response Caleb had come to expect from paternal parents. An illness was often viewed as an indictment against a man's ability to care for his family and consequently discounted or ignored. \"Do you have other children?\"\n\n\"Six altogether, including Jimmy.\"\n\n\"Do any of your other children show similar symptoms?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No, they're healthy as horses.\"\n\nCaleb turned to the boy. \"Take off your shirt and we'll have a look.\" The boy glanced at his mother for permission before stuffing a silver foil ball between his legs and reaching for his buttons.\n\n\"How old are you, Jimmy?\"\n\n\"Eight.\"\n\nCaleb had guessed wrong. The boy was clearly undersized for his age. \"You said he doesn't eat.\"\n\n\"Not when his stomach hurts,\" Mrs. Trotter replied.\n\nJimmy slid his suspenders down his arms and took off his shirt. Caleb noted several bruises on the boy's chest. \"How often does your stomach hurt, Jimmy?\"\n\n\"Most every day,\" Jimmy said. He stared down at the floor as if admitting to some misdeed.\n\nCaleb reached for his stethoscope, slipped the ivory ear bits in place, and lifted the bell-shaped chest piece to Jimmy's bone-thin torso. Jimmy pulled back, eyes wide.\n\n\"It won't hurt you,\" Caleb said. \"It's called a stethoscope and it helps me hear what's going on inside.\" Dr. Masterson, like many older doctors, still used the percussion method of examination, which involved tapping the chest and listening for sounds.\n\nJimmy relaxed but kept his eyes on the chest piece. His lungs sounded fine but his heartbeat was weak. The boy's skin was pale but clear except for the bruises. His temperature was normal.\n\n\"Any fever?\"\n\nMrs. Trotter shook her head. \"No.\"\n\n\"Make two fists for me.\" Caleb held out his hands to demonstrate.\n\nJimmy followed Caleb's lead.\n\nCaleb checked the boy's reflexes and looked in his ears and throat. \"Did you know that your heart is a muscle and it's the same size as both your fists?\"\n\nJimmy's eyes widened as he looked down at his hands.\n\nCaleb smiled at the boy's expression. \"I bet you don't know the strongest muscle in the body.\"\n\nJimmy looked up. He had his mother's hazel eyes, only his were ringed with fatigue instead of worry. \"The heart?\"\n\n\"It's the tongue. But I wouldn't try picking up a rock with it.\"\n\nJimmy fingered his tongue.\n\n\"Say red leather, yellow leather,\" Caleb said.\n\n\"Red leather, yellow leather.\"\n\n\"Now say it fast.\"\n\n\"Red leather, lellow feather.\" Jimmy laughed. \"Red flether, bellow\u2014\n\nEven Mrs. Trotter laughed at her son's attempt to say the tonguetwister. Caleb was willing to bet the woman hadn't laughed much in recent months.\n\nWhile Jimmy was occupied with trying to get the words right, Caleb pricked the boy's finger, took a blood sample, and reached for a bandage. Jimmy hardly seemed to notice.\n\n\"You can put your shirt back on.\" Caleb pulled off his stethoscope.\n\nAll kinds of possibilities ran through Caleb's head. Some, like cancer, were serious, others not so much. It wasn't the first time he'd seen a child with similar complaints. One of his instructors at medical school gave a lecture on the \"mystery\" illness that seemed to run rampant in city slums. So what was this illness and why was it suddenly affecting so many children?\n\nJimmy's lack of dental or skeletal problems ruled out the possibility of rickets. Nonetheless, he questioned Mrs. Trotter on her family's diet.\n\n\"I have a vegetable garden,\" she said. \"We raise chickens and goats, so our children also get plenty of meat and milk.\"\n\n\"What does he do in his spare time?\" Caleb asked.\n\n\"He doesn't have much spare time.\" She smiled fondly at her son. \"I make him practice readin' and writin' every day. And he still has chores. Mostly he sleeps. He seems tired all the time.\"\n\nCaleb tapped his chin and considered other possibilities. A number of diseases could cause exhaustion and swollen lymph nodes. Could be a low-grade infection or allergy. Mrs. Trotter said her other children were healthy, but as Lucretius pointed out in the first century BC, what was food to one might be poison to another.\n\n\"What do you think, Doctor?\" Mrs. Trotter's voice and demeanor pleaded for good news.\n\n\"The bruises and pale skin suggest anemia. That means his white blood count is probably high. Anemia can be a symptom of many things.\"\n\nShe knitted her brow. \"Like what, exactly?\"\n\n\"Uh... allergies. Infections.\" He cited other possibilities. \"I'd like to run some tests.\"\n\nMrs. Trotter looked him square in the face. \"Dr. Fairbanks, I may not be what you call an educated woman, but I know when someone's beating around the bush. I reckon there's not much ground left around that bush about now.\" As if to brace herself for the bad news to come, she straightened her shoulders and raised her chin. \"Doctor?\"\n\nHe glanced at Jimmy playing with his foil ball. \"Why don't you wait in the other room while I talk to your mother?\" He glanced at Magic asleep in the corner. \"You can take my dog with you.\"\n\nJimmy slid off the examining table, clapped his hands to get Magic's attention, and left the room with the dog at his heels.\n\nCaleb blew out his breath and sat forward, hands folded on the desk. Would he ever get used to delivering bad news? \"There is a... condition called leukemia. I'm not saying that's what your son has, but we have to consider it.\"\n\n\"Is this...\"\n\n\"Leukemia.\"\n\n\"Is this... leukemia serious?\"\n\nHe sat back, as if distancing himself from her would make what he said any easier. \"I'm afraid it is.\"\n\nShe took a sharp intake of air but otherwise remained motionless. After giving her a moment to gather her thoughts, he continued, \"Leukemia is a cancer of the blood cells. I'm not fully convinced that's what we're dealing with, but like I said we have to consider it.\"\n\nHer shoulders sagged and her lips trembled. His words had sunk in. \"How... how contagious is it?\"\n\n\"It's not. Or at least not that we know of.\"\n\nShe studied him from beneath tightly drawn brows. \"If it's not contagious, how would he have gotten such a thing?\"\n\n\"It's hard to say,\" he said. \"We know a lot more about diseases than we did even a few years ago, but we still have a lot to learn.\"\n\n\"In other words, you don't know.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid not. Like I said, it's just one possibility. Meanwhile, I'll give you a tonic to help replace any nutrients he might be missing. Just to make certain, we don't want to overlook the possibility of an allergy. It would help if you keep a diary of everything he eats and drinks. Also, list any of his symptoms and the time of day he experiences them.\"\n\nA doctor was only as good as his detective skills. He stood and reached into the cabinet for a bottle of cod liver oil and handed it to her as a measure against scurvy and rickets. No one knew why cod liver oil worked, but it did.\n\nShe sat perfectly still for a moment, as if she needed time to brace herself before moving. Finally she stood. \"I'll bring him back next week.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow,\" he said. \"I want to see him tomorrow.\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"My husband and I... we can't afford any luxuries.\"\n\n\"This is not a luxury.\" The Trotters weren't alone in their thinking. Shelter, food, and clothing were all many families could afford. \"We'll work something out,\" he assured her. \"The most important thing right now is that Jimmy gets all the care we can give him.\"\n\nShe stared at him for a moment before turning to leave. She walked to the door as if in a trance. \"Tomorrow.\"\n\nMoments later Caleb stood at the window facing the street and watched Mrs. Trotter and her son drive away in a horse and wagon. It wasn't even noon and already he felt inadequate. He'd been warned at medical school not to get emotionally involved with his patients, but how could he not?\n\nWith a heavy sigh he lifted his gaze to the expanse of blue sky. Heavenly Father, Jimmy needs help\u2014bad. We both do." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nMolly stood, whip in hand, and tried to focus. She had been at the ranch for only a week and already she was exhausted.\n\n\"Watch it!\" Brodie yelled. \"Don't let him jump.\"\n\nDespite her best efforts the horse headed for the fence, but Brodie managed to turn him at the very last minute. Brodie threw down his whip.\n\n\"What's the matter with you, girl? I told you not to let him jump.\"\n\nMolly bit back tears. She was like a butterfly afraid to light. She was forever racing between the horse corrals, barn, range, and house. Her days had no form or structure and time was but a blur.\n\nIt was muck out the stables and check on Donny; exercise the horses and check on Donny; track down a stray steer and check on Donny. Every bone in her body ached, and today she was late taking Donny his lunch, yet again.\n\nLater that afternoon while the other ranch hands took a muchneeded respite from the hot sun, she searched for Rosita. She found the Mexican housekeeper at last in the washhouse in back. The girl moved about like a shadow, hardly making a sound. Today she stood ironing sheets, a dreamy expression on her face and her mind clearly miles away.\n\nNoticing Molly, she jumped and looked momentarily confused, like one awakened from a deep sleep. \"You want something, se\u00f1orita?\"\n\n\"Yes, I need a favor,\" Molly said. \"Do you mind?\"\n\nRosita shook her head, though the brown eyes regarding Molly from beneath a starched white cap clearly said otherwise.\n\n\"I wonder if you would be so kind as to check on my brother during the day while I'm working?\" Molly hadn't wanted to ask anyone for help but she didn't know what else to do. How ridiculous to think she could manage both taking care of Donny and ranch chores by herself.\n\nRosita set one iron down and reached for another on the iron stove. \"I work for Se\u00f1orita Walker. Big house.\"\n\n\"Yes, I realize you have much to do, but what I ask won't take long. I'll pay you for your services.\"\n\nRosita shook her head. \"No time.\"\n\n\"But I'm only asking for a few minutes a day, at most,\" Molly persisted. \"I just want you to check on him on occasion and, if need be, to move his chair to another spot so he doesn't have to sit in the same place all day.\"\n\n\"No time,\" Rosita repeated. She sprinkled the bedsheet with lavender water and pushed the heavy iron back and forth. Wispy fingers of steam curled ghost-like from the sheet she pressed.\n\nMolly left the washhouse close to tears, praying all the while that Brodie hadn't noticed her absence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Caleb drove out to the ranch to check on Miss Walker's horse. The place appeared deserted save for Miss Hatfield's brother sitting on the porch in his wheelchair. He was either asleep or reading, hard to tell which.\n\n\"Come on, boy.\" He lifted Magic out of the vehicle and set him on the ground.\n\nThe steps leading up to the shaded verandah squeaked beneath Caleb's weight and Donny looked up with a start, his book falling off his lap. His eyes were the same green as his sister's but without the sparkle.\n\n\"Sorry to startle you. It's Donald, right?\"\n\n\"Donny.\"\n\nCaleb bent to retrieve the book and set it on the table by the youth's side. It was a book on celestial science.\n\n\"Do you remember me?\"\n\n\"You're the doctor,\" Donny said, his voice flat, his face expressionless. The boy obviously suffered melancholy, which almost always translated to careless dress or poor hygiene. Neither was true for Donny. His black trousers and boiled shirt were spotlessly clean, his hair neatly trimmed\u2014all signs of a conscientious caretaker.\n\n\"I hope you don't start another stampede.\"\n\nCaleb cracked a smile. \"You and me both.\" He'd been meaning to check into the backfiring but hadn't found the time. He'd have to talk to the smithy about fixing the flywheel and bullet holes.\n\nDonny shifted in his chair and the wheels emitted a squeak. Magic barked playfully and pawed the rims, trying to get them to squeak again. Donny trailed his hand along Magic's back where the long hair parted and fell on either side of his body. Normally the dog's face was hidden, but Aunt Bessie had brushed his hair out of his eyes and tied it with a blue ribbon.\n\n\"What's your dog's name?\"\n\n\"Magic.\"\n\n\"What's magical about him?\" Donny asked.\n\n\"Nothing that I know of. He was named after the street he was born on.\"\n\n\"Good thing he wasn't born on Cemetery Street,\" Donny said.\n\nCaleb laughed. The boy had a sense of humor.\n\nDonny tossed a nod at the carriage parked in front. \"Did you build it yourself?\"\n\nCaleb nodded. \"With help from a friend's father. He owns a bicycle shop in Boston where I went to school.\"\n\nA spark of interest flared in the youth's face. \"Was it hard to build?\"\n\n\"Took us five years to get it right. We built it over the shop on the second floor. It was the only space available.\" He had worked part time in the shop to cover medical school expenses and the cost of motor parts. \"We had a hard time getting Bertha to the ground floor to test it.\"\n\n\"How did you manage?\" Donny asked.\n\n\"We finally stood her on her tail end and lowered her down in the elevator.\"\n\nDonny flashed a grin. \"That must have been something to see.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was.\" Caleb's gaze shifted to the corrals and barn in the distance. \"Where is everyone?\" By everyone he meant Donny's sister, but he didn't want to ask about her outright.\n\n\"Dunno. They took off a couple of hours ago. Haven't seen them since. Wish they'd get back. I'm tired of sitting out here.\"\n\nCaleb glanced at the front door, which couldn't have been more than ten or fifteen feet away. \"I'll help you inside if you like.\"\n\nDonny's expression grew solemn again. \"My sister doesn't want me to move without her. Last time I did, I fell out of my chair and couldn't get back in.\"\n\nCaleb frowned. While at the Boston School of Medicine he'd worked with paraplegic Civil War veterans. Some gave in to their affliction, replacing missing limbs with bitterness and anger. Others rose above their injuries and went on to raise families and own successful businesses. Donny wasn't missing a limb, but he was definitely missing out on life.\n\nSomething caught Donny's attention. \"Look at that horse. He's at it again.\"\n\nCaleb followed Donny's pointed finger. In the far corral a black colt rocked back and forth like a child's rocking horse.\n\n\"I named him Orbit,\" Donny explained. \"That's 'cause he has this funny habit of putting his head to the ground and circling his body around like a planet orbiting the sun.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a good name for him.\" Caleb leaned against a post, arms crossed. Magic gave up on the chair and flopped down by his side. \"What's wrong with your legs?\"\n\n\"They don't work,\" Donny mumbled, his gaze dropping to his lap.\n\n\"I can see that.\" Caleb waited, but when the youth offered no further explanation, he asked, \"How did it happen? Were you born that way?\"\n\nDonny looked up. \"I fell out of my carriage as an infant.\"\n\nCaleb sucked in his breath. So the boy had been crippled nearly all his life. \"Do you mind if I take a look?\"\n\nDonny's eyes narrowed. \"Why would you want to do that?\"\n\nCaleb shrugged. \"A funny thing about us doctors. We tend to have a fascination with the human body. I won't hurt you, I promise.\"\n\nDonny studied him for a moment before giving a reluctant nod. Caleb lowered himself to one knee in front of the wheelchair. \"I'm going to take off your shoes and roll up your trousers.\" When Donny showed no objection, Caleb reached for a foot.\n\nHe pulled off one shoe and set it aside before working on the other. \"Did you know that if your blood vessels were laid end to end, they could travel around the earth twice?\"\n\nDonny stared at him as if trying to figure him out, then said, \"Did you know that a quarter moon and half moon are the same?\"\n\nEncouraged that the boy chose to participate in his little game, Caleb glanced up at him. \"How can that be?\" Caleb wiggled Donny's shoe off.\n\n\"The quarter tells how much of the lunar month has passed and the half is how much moon is visible,\" Donny explained.\n\nCaleb couldn't help but be intrigued. Obviously there was nothing wrong with the kid's mind. \"Interesting.\"\n\n\"You can see more stars here than in Dobson Creek,\" Donny said, warming to his subject. \"There are no trees getting in the way. You can see even more stars with a telescope.\"\n\n\"So I've heard.\" Caleb lifted a limp leg and flexed the youth's foot. \"I heard about the fire. Is that what brought you and your sister to Cactus Patch?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\nSensing Donny's reluctance to talk about the fire, Caleb quickly changed the subject. \"Did you know the foot has more bones than any other part of the body?\"\n\nThe dark look left Donny's face and he fired back a question of his own. \"Did you know that if the sun blew up five minutes ago we wouldn't know it for another three minutes?\"\n\nCaleb responded just as rapidly, \"Did you know that babies are born without kneecaps?\"\n\nAfter several moments of batting interesting and sometimes even amazing facts back and forth, Caleb squeezed Donny's ankle. \"Any feeling here?\"\n\n\"Sometimes it tingles,\" Donny said.\n\n\"What about here?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nCaleb checked the length of the leg all the way to the hip. \"Any pain?\"\n\n\"Sometimes. Mostly at night.\"\n\nHe replaced Donny's shoes and tied the laces. The boy appeared to have a partial lumbar spinal injury with some leg contraction.\n\n\"I can help you.\"\n\nDoubt clouded Donny's face. \"Help me how? Can you make me walk again?\"\n\n\"No, I can't do that.\" Caleb sat back on his heels. \"I wish I could, but I can't. No one can do that.\"\n\nDonny gripped the arms of his chair and leaned forward. \"Then how are you gonna help me?\"\n\n\"I can help you strengthen your muscles. That will make you more independent. I can teach you how to get in and out of bed by yourself. Use the facilities without help. Get in and out of your chair.\"\n\nDonny's mouth twisted in disgust. \"What good will that do? I'll still be crippled.\"\n\nCaleb stood. \"Only if you want to be.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\" Donny's eyes grew moist, but he was either too stubborn or too proud to give in to tears and glowered instead.\n\n\"You can choose to be a cripple or you can choose to be someone who just happens to have legs that don't work.\" Caleb hated to be tough on the boy, but mollycoddling would do him no favors.\n\nDonny's face turned red and his nose flared. \"What do you know? Have you ever been crippled?\"\n\n\"No.\" Caleb studied him. Obviously he'd hit a nerve. \"I've worked with patients with similar problems.\"\n\n\"That don't mean nothing! You've never had to sit in a chair all day. Or had to wait for your sister to dress you. Or been laughed at. You have no idea how awful that is.\"\n\nCaleb rubbed the back of his neck. \"You're right. I don't know what it's like to sit in a chair all day. But people laugh at me all the time for driving a motor buggy.\"\n\n\"That's not the same thing.\"\n\nHumor failing, Caleb turned serious. \"You're right. I have no idea what you're going through, but I do know this\u2014you don't have much of a life. With God's help, I can change that.\"\n\nDonny's lip curled and he suddenly looked older than his years. \"Without my legs I can't do nothin'.\"\n\n\"What do you want to do?\"\n\nDonny waved away the question. \"There's nothing I can do. Don't you understand?\" His fingers curled around the arms of his chair and he seemed to deflate, his body shrinking. \"I never got to run like the other kids or attend school. My sister taught me how to read and how to add and subtract.\"\n\nSo Molly wasn't only his caretaker, but also his teacher. \"Let's suppose you can do anything you wanted. What would it be?\"\n\nDonny stared into space at something only he could see. \"I keep having this dream.\"\n\nCaleb waited a moment before prompting him. \"Tell me about your dream.\"\n\nDonny wrinkled his nose. \"It's dumb.\"\n\n\"Dreams aren't dumb. Sometimes that's how God talks to us.\"\n\nDonny studied him, his face filled with doubt. \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Says so in the Bible. That's how God talked to Abraham, Daniel, and Solomon, to name a few. He even talked to Mary and Joseph in dreams.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but those were important people,\" Donny said.\n\n\"In God's eyes, we're all important.\" Caleb tilted his head. \"So tell me about your dream.\"\n\n\"In my dream I'm running.\" Donny's head bobbed slightly as if he was reliving it. After a while he added, \"The wind is in my face and my hair is blowing.\" He reached for his book and flung it the length of the verandah. Magic lifted his head and stared at the book before resuming his nap.\n\n\"Why would God make me dream about something I can't do?\" Donny asked. \"Will you tell me that?\"\n\n\"God sometimes uses dreams to warn of danger. That's how Joseph knew to flee to Egypt. God also uses dreams to reveal His plans for us. I dreamed about being a doctor long before I became one.\" After a slight pause he added, \"Sometimes God uses dreams to encourage us. That's what He did with Gideon.\"\n\nDonny folded his arms and stuck out his lips. \"Maybe God's warning me against listening to you.\"\n\n\"Or maybe He's showing you what would happen if you do.\"\n\n\"That's dumb.\" Donny's voice broke. \"I can't run. I can't even walk.\"\n\nCaleb grabbed the arms of the wheelchair, leaning forward until he was practically nose to nose with the boy. \"You can do anything you want to do. You want to feel the wind in your face?\" With a quick movement, he spun the wheelchair around. It was an older model with three metal wheels. The newer chairs had rubber tires and push rims for mobility, but this one lacked any such conveniences.\n\nGrabbing hold of the hand bar, he tilted the chair onto the single wheel in back and steered it down the verandah steps, thumpity-thump. Magic jumped up, ready to play, and bounded down the steps after them.\n\n\"What are you doing?\" Donny yelled, gripping the sides of his chair. \"Stop!\"\n\nIgnoring him, Caleb pushed the chair around the courtyard, picking up speed as they circled the fountain.\n\nDonny's initial cries of alarm soon gave way to laughter. It was a tight little laugh at first that gradually turned into delighted guffaws.\n\n\"More, more,\" he shouted.\n\nGrinning, Caleb spun him around, changed directions, and bolted forward, pushing the chair faster. \"Brrrooooooooom,\" he yelled, imitating the sound of a motor. Magic ran after them, barking.\n\n\"Whee,\" Donny cried, hair flying around his head. \"It's just like my dream!\"\n\nCaleb swirled the chair around in a complete circle, and this time Donny howled with glee." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Molly raced across the desert as fast as her horse could carry her. I'm coming, Donny. Hold on. It was a beautiful warm day, the air crystal clear. Prairie dogs popped back into their holes as she raced by. Roadrunners scurried to get out of her way. A turkey vulture circled overhead. Hurry, hurry. Had to keep going. Couldn't stop.\n\nTaking care of Donny and working on the ranch was harder than she ever imagined. She was never at the right place at the right time. Whenever Ruckus or O.T. or Brodie needed her help with the horses or cattle, she was with Donny. Likewise, whenever Donny wanted her, she was either riding the range or knee-deep in muck.\n\nPoor Donny sometimes had to wait for hours before she could take him to the privy or move him to another location. He never complained, at least not verbally, but she sensed his anger and resentment increasing daily and this only added to her guilt.\n\nShe must have been out of her mind to think she could work on the ranch and still care for her brother. She wasn't even certain that the desert air was any more beneficial to Donny's lungs than Colorado's thin, dry air had been. Donny's wheezing spells seemed to be getting worse, not better, and it had done nothing to help her own nighttime cough left over from the fires.\n\nNearing the ranch house, she spotted the doctor's automobile parked in front and alarm shot through her. Whenever the doctor came to check on Miss Walker's horse, he parked by the barn. Was something the matter with Donny?\n\nGalloping up to the open gate, her jaw dropped. The doctor ran around the courtyard at full speed, pushing her brother's wheelchair, the little fluffy dog yipping at his heels. Yelling at the top of his lungs, Dr. Fairbanks made funny rumbling sounds. Had he gone mad?\n\nShe opened her mouth to protest but nothing came out. Instead, her thoughts whirled back in time to the day she stood watching in horror as her baby brother's carriage rolled down a hill. She was only eight at the time, but she remembered that day as if it were only yesterday.\n\nShaking the memory away, she yelled for the doctor to stop, but all the whooping, barking, laughing, and rattling of the wheelchair drowned out her voice.\n\nShe rode her horse into the courtyard. \"Stop!\" she shouted. \"Do you hear me? Stop!\"\n\nCaleb halted the wheelchair and Donny's laughter faded away. All three males including the dog stared up at her.\n\nShe slid out of her saddle and wrapped the reins around the hitching post. Turning to face the doctor, she planted her hands at her waist. \"What is the matter with you? He... he could have fallen.\" Even with the best of conditions the chair wasn't all that stable and had tipped over several times in the past.\n\nDr. Fairbanks frowned. \"We were just having fun.\"\n\nShe glared up at him. He was even taller than she remembered and she was forced to lean her head back to meet his gaze. His poor judgment only confirmed her earlier opinion of his ability as a doctor. \"At the risk of further injury?\"\n\nThe doctor stepped away from the wheelchair. \"It's true that your brother's well-being is endangered, but it's not from having fun.\"\n\n\"The only danger to my brother is you.\" If starting a stampede wasn't bad enough, now this. Donny let out a long, hacking cough. Worried, she hurried to his side. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nHis face scarlet, veins standing out on his neck, he didn't answer.\n\n\"Come on, I'll take you to your room.\" Grabbing the push handle, she wheeled him to the steps and stopped. Three steps. Only three steps led to the verandah, but they looked as formidable as a prison wall. Nothing made mountains out of molehills faster than a wheelchair.\n\nWithout a word, Dr. Fairbanks laid his hand on hers. \"Let me.\"\n\nHis touch sent warm currents up her arm. Cheeks flaring, she let go of the wheelchair and stepped aside. With seemingly little effort, he turned the chair around, tilted it, and pulled it up the steps on its tiny back wheel with an ease Molly could only envy.\n\nShe followed behind. Reaching for the pitcher on the table, she poured a glass of water and handed it to her brother. He took a sip and his coughed improved, but his chest rose and fell at an alarming rate.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said to the doctor, her voice cool. \"I can manage from here.\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks touched her arm, drawing her gaze to his. \"I want to help. Your brother's condition will continue to deteriorate without medical intervention.\"\n\nOverly aware of his touch, she moved away. \"You know nothing about my brother's condition.\" Or history.\n\nIt had been a tough morning and she had no desire to argue. Everything she did that morning, from chasing calves to repairing fences, had met with criticism. She wasn't about to stand still while Dr. Caleb Fairbanks found fault with the way she cared for her brother.\n\n\"I know enough,\" he said. \"I know that your brother has a partial lumbar spinal injury.\"\n\n\"If you know that much, then you must know his prognosis.\"\n\n\"Yes, but I can still help him if you'll let me.\"\n\nShe inhaled. She wanted to believe him, to believe that what he said was true. But there had been too many medical disappointments in the past. Too many broken promises. Too many times she'd seen her brother's hopes dashed, had her own spirit crushed. Right now it was all she could do to get through each day.\n\n\"I appreciate your concern but\u2014\"\n\nThe doctor pressed on. \"We know a lot more today about such injuries, much more than we knew even a few years ago. I've witnessed some amazing results following manual therapy and\u2014\"\n\n\"The last doctor who suggested manual therapy wanted to whip his legs with a willow stick.\" The memory alone made her shudder.\n\n\"I would never hurt your brother.\"\n\nSomething in his voice\u2014perhaps sincerity\u2014made her study him. He really did have a kind face, a pleasant, open expression. She couldn't imagine him hurting anyone.\n\n\"Can you make him walk again?\" she asked. \"Can you do that?\"\n\n\"No. I can't do that.\"\n\nIt wasn't what she wanted to hear, but at least he spoke the truth. Perhaps she had misjudged him. He was nothing like the charlatans in Dobson Creek who promised cures.\n\n\"Thank you for your honesty,\" she said and she meant it. \"But my brother has been through a lot these past few weeks. I don't know if you heard about the Dobson Creek fire.\" Donny still suffered nightmares from the fire. They both did. He didn't need the added stress of working with a doctor. Especially when there was no reason to believe that any sort of therapy would help.\n\n\"I heard about it,\" the doctor said. \"About your brother\u2014\"\n\n\"My mind's made up.\" Was it his gentle tone or compassionate expression that made her perilously close to breaking down? \"We have nothing more to discuss.\"\n\nNot wanting to make a fool of herself, she gave the wheelchair an abrupt turn and pushed her brother into the house. \"Good day, Doctor.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nCome on, boy.\" Caleb lifted Magic out of the car and set him on the ground and together they walked into the blacksmith shop. They were greeted by a growling wolf-dog baring his teeth. Magic didn't know enough to be intimidated or even step back. Instead he perked his ears and gave a single bark in greeting.\n\nThe owner, a tall clean-shaven man dressed in a leather apron, greeted Caleb with a nod of his head. \"That's enough, Homer.\" The wolf-dog stopped growling, but his golden-eyed gaze remained on the small pooch.\n\n\"I'm Dr. Fairbanks,\" Caleb said. \"I'm staying with your aunt and uncle.\"\n\nThe smithy set his hammer on his workbench, wiped his hands on a rag, and walked toward Caleb with an extended arm. \"Been meaning to stop by and welcome you. Aunt Bessie told me she had taken in a boarder. Call me Luke. That there is Homer,\" he said, indicating the dog sniffing out Magic. The tails of both dogs wagged like two trainmen signaling one another.\n\nCaleb shook Luke's hand before petting the larger dog. \"Call me Caleb. That there is Magic.\"\n\n\"Pleased to know you.\" Luke glanced at the ball of fluff that was weaving in and out of Homer's legs. \"How do you like livin' with my aunt and uncle?\"\n\n\"Couldn't be happier. Your aunt is a terrific cook.\"\n\nLuke grinned. \"That she is. She also tends to interfere in everybody's business, and that means she's gonna meddle aplenty in yours.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid she'll be sorely disappointed. I don't have any business worth meddling into.\"\n\n\"Trust me, my aunt will find business that you didn't even know you had. You're safe for a while 'cause I'm getting married in a couple of weeks. Aunt Bessie's up to her brow in wedding preparations. Never knew taking a wife required so much fuss.\"\n\n\"Congratulations,\" Caleb said. \"Married men seem to have less medical complaints than bachelors\u2014along with less money.\"\n\nLuke grinned. \"I guess you gotta take the good with the bad. What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"I've been trying to get over here for days but my patients keep me hopping. Do you know anything about horseless carriages?\"\n\nLuke leaned against his workbench, arms folded. \"Can't say that I do. Yours is the first one I've ever seen. You think they'll ever replace horses?\"\n\n\"Money alone says they will. It's cheaper to run an automobile than to feed a horse, and parts can be replaced. A horseless buggy can outlast several horses, and if it breaks down you don't have to shoot it.\"\n\nThis brought a hearty laugh from the smithy. Pleased at finding an appreciative audience, Caleb continued, \"That's not all. It's got a two-horse power engine and can go fifteen miles an hour providing the road is smooth and I'm going downhill.\"\n\nLuke gave a low whistle. \"I reckon that can make a big difference between life and death in a medical emergency.\"\n\nCaleb nodded. \"It sure can. The problem is, it tends to backfire and I don't know how to stop it. People hearing it think it's gunfire. I've already been shot at twice since arriving in town.\" A vision of a certain green-eyed beauty came to mind, which almost made him lose his train of thought. \"The marshal just threatened to put me in jail for disturbing the peace. Would you look at it and tell me what you think?\"\n\n\"I'll look, but like I said, I don't know nothin' about 'em.\" Luke followed Caleb outside.\n\nIn the short time that Caleb had been in the shop, someone had attached a big satin bow to the rear. He couldn't help but laugh. The entire town was practically covered in them.\n\n\"I'm afraid if I stand still for too long, your aunt will attach a bow to me,\" Caleb joked.\n\n\"There's no stopping Aunt Bessie,\" Luke said with obvious fondness. He walked around Bertha, checking her out from top to bottom. \"That's a mighty good-looking piece of equipment, even without the bow. Why did you choose a gasoline engine over steam?\"\n\n\"It's more economical to run,\" Caleb explained. \"And there's less chance of fire. You can also start it quicker.\" It would take almost a half hour to heat water sufficiently to start a steam engine. A doctor on call couldn't afford to waste that amount of time.\n\n\"So when does it backfire?\" Luke asked.\n\n\"Sometimes when I'm cranking it up. Other times it backfires for no good reason. Mostly when I stop.\"\n\nLuke stepped back. \"Crank her up and let's see what we have.\"\n\nCaleb slid the L-shaped pipe into the hole in front and turned it with all five fingers on one side of the handle for safety. The sparking device ignited with a bang, throwing the crank backward. Caleb was able to pull his hand back in time\u2014but barely.\n\nHands on his waist, Luke shook his head. \"Whoo-eee. That flywheel sure does live up to its name.\" He lifted his voice to be heard over the loud rumbling sound.\n\nCaleb rubbed his wrist. \"It's a wonder I haven't lost an arm.\"\n\nBertha backfired and Luke jumped. Homer lowered his tail and darted through the open door of his owner's establishment. A woman coming out of Green's merchandise store dropped her basket of groceries and fled inside.\n\nMagic pawed Caleb's trouser leg, ready for a ride, and Caleb lifted him into the back of the car.\n\nLuke seemed oblivious to anything but the problem at hand. Dropping to his knees, he peered into the crankshaft opening. He struck Caleb as a man who did everything with careful consideration.\n\nLuke waved his hand, indicating he was finished, and Caleb turned off the engine. \"So what do you think?\"\n\n\"Sounds like too much fuel's getting into the sparking device.\" Elbow resting on his arm, Luke stroked his chin. \"If we can figure out how to control the fuel, it should solve the problem.\"\n\nCaleb nodded. \"I'd sure appreciate anything you can do.\"\n\n\"I can also make a brace to keep the crank from kicking back. Probably won't keep you from gettin' shot, but it'll save you from a broken arm or two.\"\n\n\"I guess that's better than nothing,\" Caleb said. \"Can you do anything about those bullet holes?\"\n\n\"I'll see what I can do. I've got some orders ahead of you that I have to finish today. I can work on it tomorrow. Meanwhile, I'll figure out how to make a brace to keep the flywheel stable.\"\n\nCaleb thanked him and bent in front of Bertha. A woman gasped and he looked up to see an audience staring at him. \"It's perfectly safe,\" he assured the crowd. \"Nothing to be afraid of. Now stand back.\" He waved his arm. \"Stand waaay back.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Cactus Patch had a problem, which meant that Bessie Adams had a problem. Now that the nice doctor was staying at her house, she actually had two problems. For sure as the sky was blue the dear man needed a wife, but with the long hours he worked, he'd never find one on his own.\n\nIt was up to Bessie to find him the right woman, and that she had every intention of doing, after her nephew's wedding. First things first.\n\n\"I think you're making a big deal out of nothing,\" her sister, Lula-Belle, said that Tuesday morning after Bessie poured out her heart around the kitchen table. She was younger than Bessie by two years, but you'd never know it by her old-fashioned thinking. The drab clothes and tight corkscrew curls Lula-Belle favored didn't just assert prudery but a closed mind as well. The only concession Lula-Belle made to fashion was her ridiculous feathered hats.\n\n\"Nothing?\" Bessie threw up her hands. She had just explained that the town's drinking problems could ruin Kate's and Luke's wedding, and all her sister could say was nothing?\n\nLula-Belle's mouth puckered. \"I don't see what business it is of yours what men do with their time.\"\n\nBessie reached for the pitcher of lemonade. \"Do you want Harvey Winkleman to pass out at the piano like he did at Roy Trumble's funeral?\" Mercy. With all the inebriated men at the funeral, it was a miracle the undertaker didn't bury the wrong person.\n\n\"There's nothing you can do about it,\" Lula-Belle said.\n\n\"Nonsense. There's plenty I can do.\" Bessie filled Lula-Belle's glass. \"I'm going to insist that every saloon close the night before the wedding. That way, not only will our singer and pianist be sober, but the guests will be too.\"\n\nLula-Belle's eyes opened wide. \"How in heaven's name do you plan to do that?\"\n\n\"I don't know yet, but I'll figure out a way.\"\n\nLula-Belle's springy curls bounced all over her shaking head. \"Every time you get a bee in your bonnet, something goes wrong.\"\n\nBessie filled her own glass. \"That's not true.\"\n\n\"Isn't it? What about the time you decided we needed to make our husbands take notice of us? When you started getting all fancied up, Sam thought you were sweet on another man and it almost broke up your marriage.\"\n\n\"This is different.\" Bessie set the pitcher down. \"This isn't about me. It's about our nephew's wedding.\"\n\nLula-Belle reached for her glass. \"I have a bad feeling about this.\"\n\n\"Oh butterball. You have a bad feeling about everything.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Molly hesitated in front of Donny's door, her heart heavy. Popping a lemon drop in her mouth to soothe her scratchy throat, she braced herself with a deep breath and knocked.\n\n\"Come in.\" His muffled voice sounded a mile away.\n\nHe lay faceup on the bed where she'd left him hours earlier. He didn't even bother to look at her when she entered the room. Instead he continued to stare at the ceiling, his face bathed in the yellow light of the kerosene lamp.\n\n\"Are you still angry with me?\"\n\nDonny said nothing and the silence was like a wall between them.\n\nShe sat on the edge of the bed and the springs squeaked beneath her weight. It hurt to stand but it even hurt to sit, and she rubbed her back. Never had she worked as hard as she had these last two weeks. She longed to collapse in bed but not before making peace with her brother.\n\nDonny turned his head, his eyes dull as tarnished copper. \"Why won't you let the doctor help me?\"\n\nShe inhaled. \"Donny, you mean the world to me. If I lost you...\" Nightmares of the fire continued to plague her. In her dreams she hadn't been able to reach him and she continued to wake every night in a cold sweat. \"Dr. Fairbanks had no right to jeopardize your safety.\"\n\n\"He looks at me like a real person.\"\n\n\"You are a real person.\"\n\n\"Then stop looking at me like I'm some poor helpless child!\"\n\nShe withered beneath his hostile look. \"That's not how I think of you. It's not, Donny. Honest.\"\n\nHe stared at her but said nothing, and suddenly he didn't look like the boy she'd known so well\u2014the boy she loved and cared for. Instead he looked like a stranger.\n\nShe'd noticed the physical changes\u2014the chin stubble. The way his trousers barely reached midcalf. Then there was all that voicecracking as he changed from tenor to baritone. She had become an expert at averting her eyes when she dressed him, looking away at just the right moment when he bathed. But this went far beyond bodily changes. It was as if he was about to cross some invisible line and leave her behind.\n\n\"You're smart and bright...\" She reached for a dog-eared journal. \"You have to be to understand this.\" Donny enjoyed reading his science magazines aloud and explaining the technical terms to her. \"Read to me.\"\n\n\"I don't want to read.\"\n\n\"Then I'll read to you.\" She flipped through the pages. \"'It has long been imagined that the phenomenon of comet's tails is in some way due to a solar electrical repulsion.'\" She looked up. \"This makes my head want to explode.\"\n\n\"It's better than those sappy dime novels you read.\" He hugged himself and made a loud kissing sound to imitate a lurid cover.\n\n\"They're not sappy... Besides,\" she added with more than a little regret, \"I'm too busy to read.\" The key to their future was the ranch. She could no longer waste time reading about true love. Such things existed only in books.\n\nShe tossed the journal on the bedside table and turned off the lamp.\n\n\"Molly.\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"When Dr. Fairbanks pushed me around the courtyard, it felt like I had legs.\"\n\nShe gripped the door handle and tried to breathe. The doctor had no right to interfere and had only made things worse. When she was only ten, a wealthy woman had invited her and the other miners' children to a grand house for Christmas dinner. Molly had never known people lived in such luxury, and the experience made it harder than ever to go back to the tent she called home. Sometimes ignorance really was bliss.\n\n\"Good night,\" she whispered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nIt was a hot Sunday morning but a slight breeze made the heat bearable and kept the flies away. Nearly three weeks had passed since Molly and Donny had arrived at the ranch, and it was hard to believe it was the middle of June already. Brodie said that July was the beginning of monsoon season, marked by high temperatures, wind, and rain, but for now the skies were clear.\n\nOnce she settled Donny on the verandah, Molly stood by his side and stretched, filling her lungs with fresh air.\n\nAfter nonstop training of horses, rounding up cattle, and cleaning stables, things had finally settled down. The boss lady had left the previous day for Tombstone for a meeting about range rights and wouldn't be back until day after tomorrow.\n\nMolly always knew when Miss Walker was gone. The cowboys behaved more leisurely, their usual stoic faces giving way to laughter as they joked among themselves. Even the horses seemed more relaxed, grazing peacefully... all except the little horse Donny called Orbit. The colt continued his strange habit of stepping sideways with his hind legs, his body circling around his lowered head. She still didn't know why he did it but she enjoyed watching him.\n\nLaughing at Orbit's antics, she lifted her face to the sun, her eyes closed.\n\nIf she was lucky enough to inherit the ranch, this was how she would run it. She'd want the cowboys to call her Molly, not Miss Hatfield, and no one would have to wait for her to leave the ranch to take a day off from all but necessary chores. She shook the thought away. What good was it to dream? If the last couple of weeks were any indication, her chances of becoming Miss Walker's heiress were nil. Even Brodie said as much. Without the ranch she'd have nowhere to turn, no place to go.\n\nHer gaze roamed over the land that, in a very short time, she'd come to love. She still couldn't get over the wide-open spaces. The vivid blue stretched from the yellows and pinks of the early morning sunrise all the way to the reds and oranges of the setting sun.\n\nShe no longer missed Dobson Creek, and that surprised her. She didn't even miss the amazing variety of songbirds or the wild asters, lupines, and Indian paintbrushes that grew there. The desert flowers were so much more colorful and interesting. The blooms of the oddly shaped saguaros opened only after dark, and the waxy white and yellow flowers filled the night air with sweet fragrance. She especially liked the bright red ocotillo flowers.\n\nGod, this is the only real home we've ever known. Please don't let me mess it up. Whether or not God was listening or even cared, talking to Him was still a habit and brought her a measure of comfort.\n\nHer prayer fell away with a sigh and she regarded her brother's sullen expression. \"What do you want to do today?\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" Donny muttered.\n\n\"We could play checkers.\" That never failed to cheer him, probably because she always let him win. \"Or we could read to each other.\"\n\n\"I told you I don't want to do anything.\"\n\nShe chewed on her bottom lip. It seemed a pity to waste a whole day doing nothing. Earlier Ruckus had invited her to go to church with him and his wife, but she had declined. That was the last place she wanted to go.\n\nShe turned toward the house but a faint rumble made her stop. Dr. Fairbanks.\n\nA strange fluttery feeling rushed through her. What was he doing here? He didn't generally check on Miss Walker's horse on a Sunday.\n\nLike a protective mother, her first thought was to take Donny inside away from the doctor's prying eyes. She would have done exactly that had her brother not brightened and waved his arms to gain the doctor's attention.\n\nStunned by the sudden change in Donny, she swung her gaze to the road. Dr. Fairbanks pulled up in front of the house amid a cloud of smoke. The auto coughed and sputtered before finally falling quiet.\n\n\"Miss Hatfield. Donny,\" he called, waving. He jumped to the ground and bounded through the gate and courtyard and up the verandah steps, his dog at his heels. Appearing to be in jovial spirits, he tipped his hat and ruffled Donny's hair, making her brother grin.\n\nMolly stooped to pet the fluffy ball greeting her with wagging tail.\n\n\"He's adorable,\" she said and laughed when the little dog tried to lick her face. It wasn't the kind of dog she'd expect a tall masculine man like the doctor to own. \"What's his name?\"\n\n\"Magic,\" Dr. Fairbanks said. \"And before you say anything, I didn't name him. In fact, I didn't even choose him. He chose me.\"\n\n\"Come here, boy,\" Donny called and Magic sprinted toward his chair.\n\nMolly straightened. \"He chose you?\"\n\n\"Actually, I think he chose Bertha. I originally planned to drive all the way to Cactus Patch, so I stopped to purchase gasoline. When I wasn't looking, Magic somehow managed to climb into the car and curl up in the backseat. I didn't discover him there until twenty miles later. I turned around and drove all the way back to find his owner.\"\n\nMolly studied the doctor with interest. Not many men would bother driving twenty miles to return a lost dog.\n\nThe doctor continued, \"Unfortunately, Magic's owner had joined the Lord a week prior.\"\n\n\"So you decided to keep him.\"\n\nHe regarded her with clear, observant eyes. \"It was more like he decided to keep me.\"\n\nShe glanced at her brother, who held Magic on his lap. \"I guess that makes you a kept man.\"\n\n\"I've been called a lot worse.\" The corner of the doctor's mouth quirked upward. \"I hoped I'd find you here. I came to offer you both a ride to church.\"\n\nIt was the second invitation to church that day, but coming from the doctor it was even less welcome. Not only was the man a menace, he was unpredictable.\n\n\"You put my brother in danger, not once but twice. What makes you think I would go anywhere with you?\"\n\nCertainly not church. It had been years since she stepped foot in one. Not since her father's funeral. The elders explained that the presence of a dance hall girl would upset the delicate sensibilities of the town's \"respectable citizens.\" For that reason, she was made to stand outside and peer through the open doorway with her brother. After the funeral she never went back.\n\n\"I came to apologize for my reckless behavior and am willing to be forgiven,\" the doctor said.\n\nShe might have been more ready to forgive had it not been for the twinkle in his eyes.\n\n\"Your idea of apologizing leaves a lot to be desired,\" she said. \"And no, I will not go to church with you.\" God she might trust; church she did not.\n\n\"I originally intended to invite you both for an afternoon drive.\" Caleb flashed a devastating grin, teeth white next to his sun-bronzed skin. \"I figured you'd say no to me, ma'am, but I didn't think you'd say no to the Lord.\"\n\n\"So now you presume to know how I think.\" She couldn't make up her mind whether to be annoyed or amused.\n\n\"If I'm wrong, I apologize.\" He tilted his head. \"If not, your chariot awaits.\" He bowed from the waist. \"And this charming and admittedly annoying driver is at your service.\"\n\nShe tried to maintain a cool demeanor but she had a hard time keeping a straight face. \"Your modesty overwhelms me,\" she said. Why did she always feel like she was on the verge of losing control in his presence?\n\nHis grin widened. \"I'll have to be more careful in the future. Did you know that modesty ruins more kidneys than whiskey?\"\n\nDonny gazed up at the doctor, his eyes bright with admiration. \"And did you know that the moon has caused more insanity than syphilis?\"\n\nMolly's mouth dropped open. \"Donny! We mustn't talk of such things.\"\n\nDonny didn't look the least bit chagrined. \"It's true.\"\n\n\"I believe it is, but your sister is right. Such talk should be left to doctors, moral reformers, and rumormongers.\" Caleb gave Donny's shoulder an affectionate squeeze and turned his attention to Molly. \"About church... it's not every Sunday that the circuit preacher is in town.\"\n\n\"Sorry, not interested, but thank you anyway.\" She turned toward the house.\n\n\"I am.\"\n\nHer brother's voice stopped her in her tracks. She stared at him in astonishment. \"You never wanted to go to church before.\"\n\nHe glanced at the doctor. \"I do now.\"\n\nShe leaned over the wheelchair and lowered her voice. \"Remember what happened last time we went to church?\"\n\n\"He'll protect us,\" Donny whispered back.\n\nShe caught her breath. Not only did Donny's faith in the doctor surprise her, but it was woefully misplaced.\n\n\"So what's the verdict?\" Dr. Fairbanks asked.\n\nShe straightened. \"Perhaps another time.\" She started toward the door again but Donny grabbed her skirt, beseeching her. They stared at each other for a moment before he released her.\n\n\"You don't have to come if you don't want to,\" he said.\n\nShe could hardly believe her ears. He was dismissing her? Just like that?\n\nShe met the doctor's gaze. His serious expression could not hide the warm light of triumph in his eyes. He had her over a barrel and he knew it.\n\n\"Your brother will be perfectly safe with me if you choose not to come.\" When she made no reply he added, \"You can trust me.\"\n\nTrust this man with Donny? How could she? At the moment she was having trouble trusting herself with him. The man could charm the bark off a tree.\n\n\"I'll go to church with you,\" she said. \"I... just need to change.\" Her divided skirt and man's shirt would hardly pass muster in polite company, let alone church.\n\nShe dashed inside and up the stairs before realizing she was shaking. Her nerves were due to the prospect of walking into a church after she swore never to set foot in one again, and had nothing\u2014absolutely nothing\u2014to do with the kindhearted doctor.\n\nIf only she didn't feel that she was about to travel down an unfamiliar and maybe even a dangerous path." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nThe vehicle jiggled, shimmied, and bounced down the bumpy road and it was all Molly could do to hang on or risk being tossed in the air.\n\nHorseless carriage indeed! A bone-shaking monster was more like it. Why, oh why, had she agreed to ride in this dreadful, awful thing?\n\nShe gripped the side until her knuckles turned white, but nothing could prevent her teeth from rattling. But that wasn't the worst of it. Engine smoke stung her eyes and her throat closed in protest. The sickly reek of gasoline fumes and burning rubber made her want to gag. Ear-splitting vibrations pounded her head.\n\nNone of it seemed to bother her brother sitting in the backseat holding Magic in his arms. His smile reached from ear to ear.\n\nMolly was just about to fling herself over the side when, mercifully, they pulled up to the church. Dr. Fairbanks parked behind a row of carriages, drawing curious stares from people standing outside. The engine made a strange choking sound before convulsing to a stop.\n\nMolly slumped against the seat, fanning herself with her hand. Her stomach churned but whether from motion sickness or anxiety, she couldn't say. Probably both.\n\nIt was a surprisingly large church given the size of the town. The high adobe steeple looked like hands lifted in prayer. Stainedglass windows circled the building and a tidy cemetery spread out like a board game in back, the gravestones staggered like chessmen.\n\nThe doctor jumped to the ground and hurried around the front of the vehicle to her side. \"See? Nothing to worry about. I got you both here safe and sound.\"\n\nThe quirk of his mouth told her he was enjoying himself at her expense. He held out his hand to help her from the buggy.\n\nShe took her time before placing her hand in his. \"That... was the worst ride I've... ever... had,\" she huffed.\n\nHe leaned forward to whisper in her ear, his breath sending warm and surprisingly pleasant shivers down her spine. \"Don't let Bertha hear you say that. You'll hurt her feelings.\"\n\nShe lowered her foot to the ground and, distracted by his nearness, lost her balance. His large hands nearly circled her narrow waist as he lifted her the rest of the way down, holding her in his arms until she gained her footing.\n\nBefore she had time to recover from the ride\u2014or maybe even his touch\u2014he had already reached for the wheelchair tied to the back.\n\nStraightening her tilted blue hat that matched her bright blue frock, she swallowed hard in an effort to brace herself for the inevitable stares. Already a crowd gathered around them, but much to her surprise no one seemed to notice either her or Donny. Men, women, children\u2014 everyone\u2014all gawked at the motor buggy.\n\n\"I say, old chap, how fast does it go?\" asked a man with a British accent and dressed in a pin-striped suit and derby hat.\n\n\"Fifteen miles an hour on good roads,\" the doctor replied as he transported Donny from the backseat of the auto to the wheelchair. Molly envied the ease with which he was able to move her brother so quickly and smoothly while she had to struggle, more now than when he was younger.\n\nA white-haired man discounted the claim with a wave of his hand. \"A horse can go that fast.\"\n\n\"Indefinitely?\" Dr. Fairbanks asked.\n\n\"Of course not,\" the man admitted.\n\n\"I can go that speed for as long as the fuel lasts. Ten, twelve hours, it doesn't matter.\" His statement was met with a murmur of amazement.\n\nA white-haired matron examined Bertha through a tortoiseshell lorgnette. \"Unbelievable.\"\n\nA man held a hearing horn to the side of the auto as if he expected it to say something. \"Incredible.\"\n\nDr. Fairbanks pushed Donny's wheelchair away from the crowd. An older woman, dressed in a plum-colored gown better suited to someone half her age, broke away from a knot of people standing off to the side and hurried to greet them.\n\n\"There you are,\" she said to the doctor. She clapped her hands together and her triple chins shook like a stack of books about to topple over. Her felt sugar-bowl hat was surprisingly plain with none of the feathers or froufrou of other women's hats.\n\n\"I heard you leave the house early and I thought you had a medical emergency.\" Her gaze swept Molly up and down, curiosity carved into every buttery line of her pleasant face.\n\n\"Mrs. Adams, I want you to meet Miss Hatfield and her brother, Donny.\"\n\nMrs. Adams extended a bejeweled hand. \"Pleased to meet you.\" She nodded at Donny. \"You too, young man. But please, everyone calls me Aunt Bessie.\"\n\n\"She insists upon being called aunt whether or not you're related to her,\" Dr. Fairbanks explained in an aside.\n\nMolly shook the woman's hand. \"Please call me Molly.\"\n\nAunt Bessie was one of the few people who looked Donny in the eye. That alone would have been enough to earn Molly's approval if the woman's brightly colored dress hadn't already done so.\n\n\"Dr. Fairbanks was good enough to give us a ride to church,\" Molly said politely.\n\n\"Dr. Fairbanks is what his patients call him. You are obviously a friend and should call him by his given name, Caleb.\"\n\nMolly blushed. \"Well, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Molly,\" Caleb said, obviously approving the use of first names, \"is staying at the ranch.\"\n\n\"Oh, so you're the one,\" Aunt Bessie exclaimed. \"I heard Miss Walker had another heiress. That makes how many now?\" She looked to Caleb for an answer but he simply shrugged.\n\n\"Don't ask me, I'm new in town,\" Caleb said.\n\n\"It's at least eight or nine,\" Aunt Bessie said in a chatty tone that suggested she had much to say on the subject. \"Most didn't last but a day or two. Except for Kate Tenney, now betrothed to my nephew. You must meet her. I'm sure you two will have a lot to talk about.\"\n\n\"I'd like that,\" Molly said, though she had little time to socialize.\n\n\"She's a writer, you know,\" Aunt Bessie continued, lowering her voice to a conspirator's whisper. \"She writes dime novels. You'll love the one that was banned in Boston.\"\n\nMolly tried to suppress a giggle but couldn't. She'd never expected to meet anyone quite like the older woman, certainly not in church.\n\nIn a louder voice Aunt Bessie said, \"You must come to the wedding. Your brother too. I'll send you an invitation.\"\n\nMolly had no intention of attending the wedding, but Aunt Bessie was so warm and friendly she couldn't bring herself to decline, at least not to her face. Better to drop her a polite note later. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Come along or all the good seats will be taken.\" Aunt Bessie slipped an arm through Molly's and whispered, \"You must tell me your secret for such lovely pink cheeks and red lips. Is it beet juice?\"\n\n\"Carmine,\" Molly whispered back.\n\nAunt Bessie blinked. \"Really? But it looks so natural.\"\n\n\"You have to brush it on with a light hand,\" Molly explained. Until recently, only actresses and prostitutes openly wore face paint. Respectable women wishing to obtain \"natural beauty\" were forced to kiss red crepe paper, pinch cheeks, and use burnt hair pins to darken lashes on the sly.\n\nBut that was gradually changing. Women in the workforce or living in large cities such as Denver shunned the pale skin that had been popular for most of the century. They openly wore rouge and tinted zinc oxide face powder, much to the disapproval of their elders. A woman could even purchase bust cream to enhance her figure.\n\n\"Where can I purchase carmine?\" Aunt Bessie asked.\n\nMolly was surprised by the question. Only young women painted. Surely Aunt Bessie wasn't serious about doing something that many still considered scandalous. \"Montgomery Ward now carries cosmetics,\" Molly whispered back.\n\nAunt Bessie's eyes grew round as a child's on Christmas morn. \"I had no idea you could order such things by mail. Whatever will they think of next?\"\n\nThey entered the church and Aunt Bessie hurried off to join her husband while Molly followed Caleb.\n\n\"I really like her,\" Molly said. If only more church people were as down-to-earth and friendly.\n\nHe grinned. \"She does tend to grow on you, doesn't she?\"\n\nWhispered voices spoken behind gloved hands floated to her in bits and pieces.\n\n\"Who is that?\"\n\n\"... looks like a harlot.\"\n\n\"The nerve... in a house of worship no less.\"\n\nIf Caleb hadn't already parked her brother's wheelchair next to a wall out of the way of traffic, she would have left right then and there. Instead she followed him and took her place at the end of the pew between Caleb and Donny.\n\nThe horseless carriage no longer a diversion, she and Donny were clearly the center of attention. All around them people whispered and stared, just like they did at the church back home.\n\nThe wheelchair never failed to solicit attention, but what would she have done without it? When she was fourteen and Donny six, she played hooky from school to travel to Denver. There she met with a doctor known for miracle cures\u2014some of the miners swore by him. That doctor studied Donny's medical records but gave her no hope. He did, however, offer her the use of a chair with wheels that had belonged to his deceased grandfather. She hadn't even known that such a chair existed and was ecstatic.\n\nPeople stared at her as she pushed that chair through the streets of Denver to the stage depot. At first the Concord driver refused to allow the chair on the crowded coach. But she insisted and he finally relented after she greased his palm with a gold coin. For most of the journey, she hung out the window to keep her eye on the chair rattling and jostling in back of the coach with each rut of the road.\n\nAs she feared, the chair eventually fell off and she banged on the roof with pounding fists until the driver stopped. By the time she'd retrieved it, the stage had left her behind. She was forced to walk the remaining five miles pushing the chair uphill all the way.\n\nSheer hope got her up that mountainside. She was so certain that the chair would make a difference in Donny's life she would have swum across the ocean to get it to him. But after their first outing, it was two years before he agreed to sit in the chair again. He didn't like people gawking at him.\n\nShe couldn't blame him. Whenever she saw someone staring at him, it nearly broke her heart. She hated for people to judge him flawed when in reality he was only flawed physically. He had a sharp and inquiring mind and a good heart, but few people ever bothered to see beyond his useless legs.\n\nThe woman sitting on the pew in front of them kept glancing back at Donny. Irritated, Molly didn't even bother to lower her voice. \"What do you think you're staring at?\" Subtlety never worked with rude people.\n\nThe woman's mouth dropped open and she quickly swung her head around to face the front of the church, the feathers on her hat vibrating with what Molly hoped was humiliation. \"Well, I never!\"\n\nCaleb laid a hand on Molly's lap, startling her. \"She doesn't mean anything by it,\" he whispered in her ear. \"She's just curious.\"\n\nShe pushed his hand away but only because she feared its heat would burn a hole through the fabric of her skirt. \"Curious my...\" Molly bit down on her lips.\n\nThe piano music stopped and an inebriated man weaved his way across the altar. He was hatless, and if that wasn't disturbing enough, his uncombed hair fell about his head like scattered feathers. Equally shocking, he was shoeless and one big toe poked through a hole in his black woolen sock. He'd obviously entered the church by mistake.\n\n\"Why don't the ushers remove him?\" she whispered.\n\n\"I guess they want to hear what Reverend Bland has to say.\"\n\nShe blinked. \"That's the preacher?\"\n\nCaleb hushed her with a finger to his mouth and she fell silent.\n\nReverend Bland slumped onto the podium. \"Wel... wel... wel... come,\" he slurred.\n\nThe congregation stirred uneasily and whispered among themselves.\n\nCaleb's gaze remained riveted upon the preacher. \"Someone better grab him before he falls.\"\n\nNo sooner had he spoken than Reverend Bland swayed like a tree in the wind. \"Lest us bray.\"\n\nCaleb jumped up and hurried to the altar, catching the preacher just in time. Ruckus joined him and the two of them carted him away.\n\n\"What are we going to do now?\" someone asked.\n\n\"Who's gonna preach?\" asked another.\n\nA man rose in front. Minus one leg, he walked to the pulpit on crutches. He was a tall slender man with ebony skin, kinky black hair, and a soulful face.\n\n\"As many of you know, my name's Washington. Jacob Washington. I'm not an ordained minister and I don't know how to preach,\" he said. \"But I can tell you how God worked in my life.\"\n\nHe spoke in a calm, smooth voice that would normally encourage sleep, but the congregation listened with rapt attention.\n\nHe told how at the age of fifteen he was brought to America as a slave. \"I ran away but they caught me and cut off my leg so I couldn't run again. But that didn't stop me. Nothing could do that because I had God on my side.\"\n\nMolly glanced at her brother, who seemed completely captivated by the man and all that he uttered.\n\nCaleb returned while the ushers took up the collection. \"Is Reverend Bland all right?\" she whispered.\n\n\"He will be. We took him to the infirmary to sleep it off.\"\n\n\"There's an infirmary in town?\" she asked.\n\n\"It's actually a hotel room that's reserved for medical emergencies.\"\n\nWhile the collection plate made its rounds, Mr. Washington sang. His voice was smooth as velvet, yet so haunting that it sent goose bumps down Molly's spine. \"Swing low, sweet chariot... coming for to carry me home...\"\n\nOh, if only she could sing like that.\n\nHer brother gripped the arms of his chair, his knuckles white. \"Is something the matter?\" she whispered.\n\nDonny looked at her. \"He only has one leg. But I hardly noticed.\"\n\n\"Sometimes I don't notice yours either,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes, you do. You always notice.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath and Caleb laid his hand on hers. \"You okay?\"\n\nNo, she was not okay. She felt the walls of the church closing in on her and she wanted to leave. \"What you said about helping my brother,\" she whispered. \"Did you mean it?\"\n\nCaleb's gaze met hers. \"I can't make him walk again,\" he said, \"but I can help him become more independent.\"\n\nShe pressed her lips together and blinked back a tear. Dare she believe him? Dare she chance more disappointment and discouragement?\n\nA respectful silence followed Mr. Washington's song. He accepted the collection from the ushers and addressed the congregation.\n\n\"That beautiful hymn you just heard was originally meant as a secret code. It was how we black folks announced the arrival of 'conductors' to escort us slaves to the North. We had codes for everything disguised in hymns. When an attempt at freedom failed... when we had to regroup spiritually... when one of our brothers made it to the holy land... there was a hymn for every occurrence. We passed on good news and bad while singing God's praises.\n\n\"The Underground Railroad freed me from a plantation down south, but it is God that frees our hearts and souls.\" He lifted the collection basket aloft. \"I'm living proof that all things are possible with God.\"\n\nShe glanced at Donny's profile. \"You always notice.\" His words pierced her heart even as she thought about them. She leaned toward Caleb and whispered, \"If... if I agree to let you help my brother... when will you be able to start working with him?\"\n\nCaleb leaned forward to glance at Donny. \"The work has already begun,\" he whispered back." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "That night Caleb found Reverend Bland sitting on the edge of the bed in the hotel room used as the infirmary. Elbows on his lap, the preacher held his head and rocked back and forth, moaning in despair.\n\nCaleb approached the bed and the preacher glanced up. Tears rolled down his florid cheeks but he didn't speak.\n\nCaleb sat by his side and waited for the man to calm down. No sense trying to talk to him in his current state.\n\nThe preacher was the first patient to use the room since Caleb had taken over Dr. Masterson's practice. Caleb paid a hotel maid extra to boil the sheets and put fresh straw in the mattress. The walls and ceiling had been disinfected with carbolic acid and the sweet smell still lingered in the air even though the windows had been kept open.\n\nCaleb dreamed of the day he could build a small hospital or clinic in town. Right now his main concern was the anguished man by his side.\n\nA good twenty minutes passed before Reverend Bland uttered his first words. \"How could I have been so foolish?\"\n\nCaleb felt sorry for the man. He knew how to help the preacher physically, but pain that came from a tortured soul was beyond medical capabilities.\n\n\"My daughter...\" Reverend Bland sobbed out the words and fell silent.\n\n\"What about your daughter?\" Caleb pressed gently.\n\nFor an answer the preacher reached into his pocket, pulled out a crumbled telegram, and thrust it into Caleb's hand.\n\nCaleb carefully spread the crinkled yellow paper across his lap. It appeared to be from Bland's wife and read, in part, that their daughter Elizabeth had died from smallpox.\n\nA heavy weight settled in Caleb's chest. \"I'm sorry.\" They were perhaps the most ineffective words in the English language, but he couldn't think of anything else to say.\n\n\"I wasn't even there to send my little girl to heaven with a good-bye kiss,\" the preacher lamented. \"Or to comfort my wife.\" A sob escaped him before he continued. \"Instead of praying for my daughter's soul, I drank myself to oblivion. Will God ever forgive me?\"\n\nThe question surprised Caleb. As a doctor he had many doubts. He doubted his own abilities and sometimes even doubted the effectiveness of the medicine he dispensed. But wasn't a preacher supposed to be secure in his faith? Wasn't that a requisite for the job?\n\n\"Forgiveness is the wonder of God's grace,\" Caleb said. \"Isn't that what you preach?\"\n\n\"It's nice to know that someone pays attention to what I preach.\" Reverend Bland studied Caleb with bloodshot eyes. \"I'm not worried about God, I'm worried about them.\" He tossed a nod toward the window and staggered to his feet.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Caleb said. \"You're not going anywhere yet.\"\n\n\"I have to apologize. I need to go to every family and ask for forgiveness.\"\n\nCaleb studied the man. Physically he was a mess, but he was in worse shape mentally. \"All right, but I drive.\"\n\nReverend Bland squinted. \"You're going to make me ride in that rattletrap of yours?\"\n\nCaleb nodded. \"Trust me. Nothing cures a hangover faster than a ride in a horseless carriage.\" He grinned. \"Consider it penance.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nEleanor Walker glared across the oak table. Eastern investor Mason Hampshire sat directly opposite her, his head wreathed with smoke from his pipe. He was surrounded on both sides by a motley group of men. Those unable to find a seat leaned against the wall.\n\nThe number of people he brought along for support amused Eleanor. Obviously he considered her a formidable foe\u2014and rightfully so.\n\nShe only wished she didn't have to travel to Tombstone to show him just how formidable she could be when the welfare of her ranch was threatened. Tombstone was the county seat and that meant the town took on an air of importance it didn't deserve. It didn't even allow weapons within city limits, which was preposterous. What could be more useful in settling land disputes than the presence of a firearm? She felt naked without one by her side.\n\nThe only woman in a room of more than a dozen men, she alone knew how to raise cattle. Mr. Hampshire was a fraud, his only goal greed. The easterners in their silk shirts, single-breasted vests, and frock coats mopped their brows with silk handkerchiefs and loosened ascot ties. Their soft, bloated bodies were better suited for the plush velvet settees of Victorian parlors than hard leather western saddles.\n\nThe room was hot and stuffy and filled with the blue haze of smoke. Meant to be used by a lawyer conferring with a single client, the office wasn't large enough to air mob grievances.\n\nRobert sat by her side, thoughtfully stroking his goatee. Though she and her banker friend didn't always see eye to eye, he never failed to take her side when it most mattered. Publicly, at least, they were of one mind. For that reason she was grateful that he had agreed to accompany her to Tombstone, if for no other reason but to give his support.\n\nHer lawyer, Jesse Barker, sat at the head of the table. Since he'd agreed to let the battling foes air their differences in his office, he maintained the right to lead the meeting.\n\nHe banged a gavel on the table though it was totally unnecessary. No one had said a word since shuffling into the room. He stuck a quizzing glass in his right eye and proceeded to read the document in hand. His plaid suit and handlebar mustache were better suited to a Barnum and Bailey sideshow, but his ability to turn even the most elementary phrase into legal folderol never failed to amaze.\n\nAfter completing his opening remarks, he pulled the quizzing glass away and glanced around the table. \"Who would like to begin?\"\n\nHampshire stood. \"I will,\" he said, speaking in a New England accent. A robust, clean-shaven man with small beady eyes and hair plastered down with bay rum, he looked like a gambler on a winning streak. His gold watch chain spanned the front of his shiny vest from right pocket to left, looping through a buttonhole halfway between. He could command his men with a look or a snap of the fingers. Such was his authority that even the Arizona soil knew not to stray onto the polished toes of his spatted boots.\n\nSomeone pushed a document in front of him and he began to speak. \"I plan to purchase several smaller ranches and combine them into one company. This will accommodate\"\u2014he glanced at the paperwork in front of him\u2014\"twenty thousand head of cattle. Though not as large as the C Company up north, it's an ambitious plan and I resent Miss Walker's claim that it would ruin the land. I see no justification for it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a doddering fool.\" He took his seat.\n\nBarker turned to Eleanor. \"Miss Walker. Would you care to respond?\"\n\n\"Of course I'll respond. That's why I'm here.\" Eleanor stood. She didn't need any prompt or document to say what she had to say. \"This is not Montana or Wyoming, where it takes only forty acres to raise a single head of cattle. This is Arizona\u2014a desert. Thanks to the ranches you referred to, the land is already overstocked, allowing little more than five acres per cow.\"\n\n\"And what would be a more reasonable number?\" one of Mason Hampshire's associates asked.\n\nEleanor shot him a cold stare. \"Ideally, I'd say sixty-five acres per cattle head. Fifty acres at the very least.\"\n\n\"Nonsense!\" Hampshire thundered, banging his fist on the table.\n\n\"How do you expect anyone to make a profit?\" someone shouted from the back of the room.\n\n\"You're not trying to make a profit,\" Eleanor said coolly, refusing to lose her composure. \"You're trying to get rich while ruining the land for everyone else.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous.\" A bald-headed man shot to his feet and pumped his fist in the air. \"There's plenty of grass for everyone.\"\n\n\"That's only because we've had more rain than usual this past year,\" Eleanor argued. \"I lost more than half my cattle in the last drought. Every rancher around here did. We all stand to lose many times that in the next drought if this overgrazing continues.\"\n\nEveryone started talking at once. The lawyer pounded his gavel several times before restoring peace. \"Let me clearly state the issue here so there's no misunderstanding what's at stake,\" he said, as if there could be any question. He then proceeded to complicate matters with a barrage of legal terms, turning overgrazing the land into a twenty-minute discourse punctuated with therefores and wherebys.\n\nThe moment he paused for breath everyone began talking at once.\n\n\"One at a time,\" he shouted with a bang of his gavel. \"Miss Walker?\"\n\nEleanor waited until she had everyone's attention before beginning. \"I propose that before any decision is made, we form a cattle owners' association similar to the Cattle Raisers Association in Texas and invite every interested party to join.\"\n\nSince organizing, Texan cattlemen had done an outstanding job stopping cattle rustling in the Lone Star state. A similar organization was clearly needed in Arizona Territory.\n\n\"If we all work together,\" she continued, \"I'm certain we can come to some sort of agreement on how to raise cattle, stop cattle rustling, and protect the land.\"\n\nShe sat and glanced at Robert, who inclined his silver head. \"I can't see you joining an association,\" he whispered.\n\nShe gave a slight shrug and said nothing. Forming an association such as she proposed would take time, perhaps even months, and she counted on that. Maybe by then the eastern investors would turn their sights elsewhere.\n\n\"I think a cattle association is a splendid idea,\" Barker said. Judging by her opponent's face, he didn't share the lawyer's enthusiasm for her idea. \"I suggest we adjourn for lunch and discuss it further this afternoon.\"\n\n\"I suggest we adjourn permanently,\" Hampshire said.\n\nEleanor was inclined to agree. The meeting was a waste of time, with neither side willing to budge.\n\nBarker glared at him. \"Unless you wish to pay for my time, you'll show up after lunch.\"\n\nHampshire made no reply. Instead he stood and walked out of the room, followed by his men.\n\n\"What do you think?\" she asked Robert as they left the lawyer's office.\n\n\"I think you're fighting a losing battle,\" he replied.\n\nShe arched an eyebrow. \"Is that your idea of supporting me?\"\n\n\"You wouldn't ask my opinion if you didn't want the truth.\"\n\nHe was right, of course. She trusted Ruckus and O.T. and even that new man, Brodie, but they were more inclined to tell her what she wanted to hear. \"So what do you think I should do?\"\n\n\"I don't know that there's anything you can do. You're waging a war against greed and I'm not sure that's a war you can win.\"\n\n\"If I don't win, the loser will be the land itself. If it's a war they want, it's a war they'll get.\"\n\nRobert gave her a sideways glance. \"I think you should sell the ranch.\"\n\nShe shook her head. She'd sooner set fire to the ranch than sell it. \"After everything I've been through these last forty years, do you honestly think I'd give up the ranch because of a greedy investor? Besides, I have a new girl to consider.\" To be honest, she should have let Molly go by now, but something held Eleanor back. Maybe she felt sorry for her. Or her brother. Good heavens! Could she be growing soft in her old age? Surely not!\n\n\"You can't blame me for trying.\" He crooked his elbow and she slipped her arm through his. Together they strolled along Allen toward Fourth Street.\n\nHe picked up the conversation. \"It's not just eastern investors you're battling, it's changing times. I'm not sure that you're willing to be swept along with the tide.\"\n\n\"Some change is good,\" she said. \"If it wasn't for the railroad, we'd still be making those long, weary cattle drives to Kansas.\"\n\n\"I suspect railroads will be the least of it. The new doctor in town is convinced that hooves are in danger of being replaced by rubber tires.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. No one in his right mind would choose rubber over steak.\"\n\nHe chuckled. \"I was talking about horses,\" he said. \"Speaking of steak, I could use a good sirloin about now. I have it on the best authority that the Can Can serves only the finest meat.\"\n\nEleanor smiled. She wouldn't think of eating anywhere that didn't serve Last Chance beef.\n\nThey reached the Can Can on the corner of Fourth. A billboard outside read \"Fresh oysters and game in season.\" Humph. She would have to talk to the manager about advertising oysters over her beef.\n\nSeemingly unaware of her annoyance, Robert held the door open for her. Eleanor stepped inside. Hampshire and his cronies were seated at a corner table, each nose buried in a bill of fare.\n\n\"Would you rather we eat elsewhere?\" Robert asked.\n\n\"Certainly not,\" Eleanor said. \"If we're lucky, my presence will ruin his appetite.\"\n\n\"It's your appetite I'm worried about,\" Robert said.\n\n\"Good, because I'm famished.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nMolly wasn't an expert on horses, but even she knew this particular mustang was special. Its silky hide was pure black, and at fifteen and a half hands he stood taller than most other mustangs. He ran with lightning speed around the corral, hooves barely touching the ground, mane flowing, tail high. The steed practically breathed fire.\n\nBrodie had been trying to capture him for months and made no attempt to hide his pride at success. \"And I didn't resort to no creasing,\" he said. He had no patience for mustangers who shot horses in the neck. If done right, it would stun them without causing serious injury, but Brodie was still against it, insisting that \"creasing should be outlawed.\"\n\nMolly agreed. \"So how did you catch him?\"\n\nHe glanced at her. \"How do you think I caught him? I walked him down. Didn't let him stop for a second. Most horses can be walked down in several hours, but not this fella. Took me two days and two nights. By then he was so tired he practically begged me to capture him.\"\n\nShe couldn't imagine the stallion begging. Nor could she imagine anyone walking that length of time. Brodie was one tough bird.\n\n\"Watch his every move,\" Brodie said. \"Every shift of the eye, twitch of the ear, flip of the tail means something.\"\n\nMolly watched, but either the signs were too subtle to be seen at the horse's current speed or nonexistent. She switched the whip from her right hand to the left.\n\n\"Keep him going!\" Brodie shouted.\n\nHeart pounding, Molly snapped her whip and it whizzed through the air before hitting the ground. The horse circled past her with pounding hooves, his breath scalding the air.\n\n\"That's the way!\"\n\nThe horse circled back. Molly readied her whip but it slipped from her gloved hand. She made a grab for it but the horse saw his chance and took it. Instead of making the turn, he plunged straight at her, ears pinned back, teeth bared.\n\nMolly froze, legs rigid, mouth dry.\n\nBrodie threw himself between her and the maddened horse, his whip snapping through the air. The horse reared back, its powerful hooves missing her by inches.\n\nBrodie grabbed hold of the mustang's lead rope and tied him to the fence.\n\nShaken, Molly ran her gloved hands down the sides of her split skirt to still her shaking body. Her heart was pounding so hard she could barely breathe. \"I... I'm sorry.\"\n\nBrodie whirled around to face her, his face red. \"Sorry? What good is that gonna do?\" Brodie threw down his whip. \"If the boss lady makes you her new heiress, she won't be needing me.\" He stalked away.\n\nShe watched him walk away, tears scorching her eyes. She felt terrible. But it wasn't just the horse, it was everything. Exhaustion dogged her day and night. Every bone in her body ached and her hands were so sore she could hardly hold her hairbrush, let alone the whip. Even wearing gloves didn't help.\n\nCaring for her brother and keeping up with the ranch work was harder than she ever imagined.\n\nSwiping away a wayward tear, she marched to the windmill. She tossed her gloves aside and plunged her hands into the depths of the barrel, then splashed cold water on her face.\n\nThat's it. She'd had enough! Tomorrow she would ride into town and try to talk a saloon owner into hiring her. Then she'd quit this impossible job. The decision brought no relief. The thought of spending her nights in smoke-filled saloons with a bunch of inebriated men sickened her.\n\nShe leaned against the fence and prayed. God, help me, hold me, tell me what You want me to do. Send me a sign.\n\nShe squeezed her eyes tight. She always felt better when she sang. If only she could remember the words to the hymn Mr. Washington sang in church. Something about a chariot...\n\nSighing, she hummed \"Little Brown Jug.\" The cheerful little drinking song was mild compared to some songs she knew. Still... she opened her eyes to make sure no one could hear her.\n\n\"Ha, ha, ha, you and me, little brown jug, don't I love thee!\" Normally singing made her feel better but not today. She still had a night cough and her voice sounded like she'd swallowed a mouthful of pebbles. What saloon owner would hire her now?\n\nA poke in the back startled her. Swinging around, she found herself face-to-face with the little blind colt Donny had named Orbit.\n\n\"Hello there,\" she said, reaching over the fence to stroke his velvety soft nose. He bobbed his head up and down and pawed the ground as if to approve.\n\nNo one could tell by looking into his eyes that he was blind. He looked physically normal, and if it hadn't been for his odd behavior at times, she would never have guessed he was different in any way.\n\n\"You must have heard me singing,\" she said.\n\nThis little black horse had reached out to her and she felt an immediate kinship with him.\n\nThe colt's mother stood across the way watching. After a while she flipped her tail and whinnied. Orbit swung around, kicked up his back heels, and joyfully bounded toward the anxious mare.\n\nSomething Brodie said echoed in her mind. \"Horses can teach us a whole lot more than we can teach them.\"\n\nShe would never forget her terror when that stallion had raced toward her. Now she knew how it felt to have one's legs fail. Was that how Donny felt during the fire? Or even on a daily basis?\n\nRegret washed over her. Only that morning she had yelled at him for dawdling. Was that the lesson she was meant to learn from the wild stallion? To be more patient?\n\nAnd the colt\u2014 Is this the sign I prayed for? What am I to learn from this little blind horse? Please, God, help me understand..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "On Tuesday afternoon, Caleb drove to the ranch and found Donny in his room, reading.\n\n\"Ah, there you are,\" he said cheerfully, knocking on the halfopen door. Magic didn't wait for an invitation. Already the dog had weaseled his way onto Donny's lap, his pink tongue all over Donny's face. The drawn curtains at the single window let in little light, but enough to see that Donny enjoyed the attention.\n\n\"Not good to read in the dark,\" Caleb said. Crossing to the window, he yanked open the curtains and the bright light pushed the gloom to the walls. He raised the heavy sash to let in fresh air before returning to Donny's side. He lifted Magic off Donny's lap and the dog curled up on the floor for a nap, tuckered out, no doubt, from all that face-licking.\n\n\"Did your sister tell you that I'd like to work with you? That is, if you'll let me.\"\n\nDonny eyed him with a wary look. \"She said something.\"\n\nSomething? That didn't sound too promising. \"Good. We'll start slowly.\" He pulled a chair in front of Donny's and sat.\n\nDonny leveled Caleb with dark, glittering eyes. \"What good will it do? I'm helpless,\" he grumbled. \"Can't you see?\"\n\nCaleb studied him. What had happened since Sunday to put Donny on the defensive? \"You're not helpless. You need help. That's a big difference. Everyone needs help. God made us that way to keep us connected to one another.\"\n\nThe youth glowered at him. \"You don't need help.\"\n\n\"As a doctor, I probably need more help than anyone. I need help from other doctors, from scientists, from medicine, but mostly from God.\"\n\nDonny folded his arms and frowned. \"It's not the same thing.\"\n\n\"We can sit arguing about it or we can get to work. Your choice.\"\n\nDonny obviously didn't know what to make of him, and that was good. Kept him off balance and less resistant. \"Have it your way.\"\n\nDonny sat limp as a rag doll as Caleb examined him from head to toe. As expected, Donny had a very limited range of motion in his legs, but it was his undeveloped chest and arm muscles that worried Caleb most. Until Donny built up those muscles, he would never be able to care for himself. But first he had to gain the boy's trust.\n\n\"Tell me about yourself. What do you like to do? Where do you like to go?\"\n\nDonny made a rude sound with his lips. \"I can't do anything or go anywhere. I'm crippled.\"\n\n\"You're not crippled. Your legs don't work,\" Caleb said matterof-factly, as if they were talking about something as mundane as the weather. \"You just have to learn to do things a bit differently.\" He glanced at the stack of science books on the bedside table. Most of them had to do with astronomy.\n\n\"You don't need legs to study the sky. Or be an astronomer and discover another planet.\" Both hands on Donny's right foot, he flexed it up and down. \"You can do anything you want with your hands, and your brain can take you anywhere you want to go.\"\n\nDonny glared at him, his face red. \"You're nothing but a snake oil doctor. Just like my sister said you were!\"\n\n\"Molly said that, did she?\" A memory of flashing green eyes and a pretty pink mouth came to mind, but he quickly shrugged it away. \"So tell me, what's the hardest part of being in a wheelchair?\"\n\n\"People acting as if I'm not there,\" he said, staring down at his pale legs.\n\n\"I'd hate that too,\" Caleb said.\n\n\"Actually, I hate it more when people do stare at me. They don't do it much,\" Donny said. \"They mostly stare at my sister.\"\n\nCaleb nodded. That Molly was something, all right. Even he couldn't help but stare at her. Just thinking about their first encounter made him smile. He was lucky she shot Bertha instead of him. Suddenly aware that Donny was giving him an odd look, Caleb cleared his throat.\n\nHe quickly finished his examination and handed Donny a piece of pipe ten inches in length. Donny seemed embarrassed about his legs. For that reason Caleb decided to work on his arms first so he would be less self-conscious.\n\n\"Raise it over your head like this.\" He demonstrated before handing Donny the pipe. \"It'll build up the muscles in your arms and shoulders.\"\n\n\"I'm not doing that. I can't!\" Donny threw the pipe down. Magic lifted his head off his paws and watched the lead bar roll across the tile floor.\n\nDonny's body shook but whether from anger, frustration, or fear it was hard to say.\n\nCaleb waited for Donny to calm down. Fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes passed and neither spoke. A breeze wafted through the windows, filling the room with a hint of sage. The curtains fluttered like the wings of a butterfly, but Donny remained motionless.\n\nFinally, Caleb stood, picked the iron pipe off the floor, and set it next to the stack of books.\n\n\"Okay, you have a choice to make. Either you work with me or you don't. If you choose not to, then the chair you're sitting in will be your prison. If you work with me, that same chair will be your friend and will help you do whatever you want to do.\"\n\n\"I don't want to do anything.\"\n\n\"Not even go to the observatory in Flagstaff?\"\n\nDefiance crossed Donny's face. \"How am I going to get there, eh?\" He narrowed his eyes. \"Tell me that.\"\n\n\"I plan on traveling to Flagstaff myself one day, but I'm not taking any prisoners.\"\n\nDonny's face stilled but he said nothing and Caleb gathered his black leather case and headed for the door.\n\n\"Before you go...\"\n\nHand on the doorknob, Caleb waited.\n\n\"Close the curtains.\"\n\nCaleb released the doorknob and crossed to the window. \"I still come to the ranch from time to time to check on Miss Walker's horse.\" It was no longer necessary, but he enjoyed the ride to the ranch and didn't want to consider that Molly was the real attraction. \"If you change your mind, open the curtains and I'll know. If I see the curtains closed, I won't bother you.\"\n\nHe walked out of the room, shutting the door softly behind him. Okay, God, don't hold back. Step in whenever You're ready and help me here." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nEleanor stomped into the house and hurried toward her office.\n\nSurprised to find the crippled boy in the main room trying to reach for a hefty tome in her extensive library, she reached over his head for the book and handed it to him. \"I'm afraid you'll find that dull reading. It's all about cattle.\"\n\n\"Cattle are pretty interesting,\" he replied. \"I read all the books on the lower shelf.\"\n\nThat was a surprise. To her knowledge, no one had ever touched her books\u2014certainly none of the many hopefuls who had answered her advertisement for an heiress.\n\n\"Have you now?\"\n\nHis forehead wrinkled as if he feared he had done something wrong. \"Did... did you know that eight pair of boots can be made from a single cowhide?\"\n\nEleanor pulled off her leather gloves. \"Good for a boot maker to know.\"\n\n\"And a single steer produces a hundred pounds of fat. That's a lot of candles.\"\n\n\"Is there a point to all this?\"\n\nHe gnawed on his lower lip. \"Meat doesn't even make up half of a steer's weight.\"\n\nEleanor slapped her gloves into the palm of her hand. \"As far as I know, no one has figured out how to raise boneless cattle.\"\n\n\"According to what I read, the beef industry is expected to decline in the twentieth century.\"\n\nThe boy was losing her interest fast. \"Now you sound like my banker.\"\n\n\"Yes, but there are other ways to make money,\" he said eagerly. \"Beef tallow is already used for lubricating locomotives, and soon the fat will be used to make medicine and fuel, even glue and lady's paint.\" The boy studied her with eyes the same green color as his sister's. \"It doesn't seem fair that you do all the work and someone else makes most of the profit.\"\n\n\"What happens after I sell my cattle is of no concern to me.\"\n\n\"It would be if you owned a meat packing house,\" he said.\n\nThe suggestion surprised her. During all the hours she'd spent discussing this very subject with Robert and her foreman, no one ever suggested the idea of the ranch owning its own packing house. She wasn't certain of the practicality or even if it was something to consider at her age, but she was impressed that one so young came up with the idea.\n\n\"What's your name?\" Her abruptness of voice sent a shadow of worry across his face. If she wasn't so old she might consider working on her curt manner of speaking, but why bother at this late date? People eventually got used to her ways and no doubt this boy would too.\n\n\"My name is Donald but everyone calls me Donny.\"\n\n\"Donald it shall be. My main problem at the moment is other ranchers overstocking the land. That's what I have to think about.\"\n\n\"I'll think about it too.\"\n\nShe arched an eyebrow. \"Will you now? Very well then. I'll let you get on with your thinking.\" She started toward her office.\n\n\"If you could look down from the sky, cattle would look like stars,\" he called after her.\n\nShe stopped at the threshold, hand on the door frame, and looked over her shoulder. \"Stars?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"You'd have to look at the earth from way up in the sky. Higher than a hawk.\"\n\n\"I imagine so.\"\n\n\"You might even be able to pick out a constellation, like the big dipper. But not if the cattle are all crammed together.\"\n\nEleanor arched a brow. \"Yes, I can see where that might be a problem.\"\n\n\"Cattle should be spaced like stars. According to my calculations, one steer per sixty acres should last through a drought.\"\n\nEleanor laughed. Something about the boy was most appealing. \"Surely you're not asking for a job?\"\n\nHe practically shook with enthusiasm. \"I'm good with figures, especially the ones with dollar signs. I even know how to calculate the distance to the sun.\"\n\n\"I'm sure some people will find that information most useful.\" She hesitated.\n\n\"If your sister works out\"\u2014doubtful at best\u2014\"perhaps we can find something for you to do.\"\n\nAn eager look brightened his face. \"I'd... I'd like that. I'd like that a lot.\"\n\n\"Very well then.\" She walked into her office and closed the door. Cattle are like stars? Constellations? She shook her head. The idea wasn't any crazier than promising a wheelchair-bound boy a job.\n\nHampshire had called her a doddering fool. Good heavens. Perhaps he was right." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Donny stared at the door long after Eleanor had shut herself in her office. A job on the ranch? He couldn't believe it. But Miss Walker didn't seem like the kind of person to say something she didn't mean.\n\nHe told the truth. He was good at numbers but only because he'd read that mathematics was a necessary skill for astronomers. Back in Dobson Creek he spent sleepless nights staring at the canvas ceiling, multiplying and dividing numbers in his head.\n\nThe first of every month he made his sister take him to the general store to purchase the latest science journal. He was able to teach himself basic trigonometry and calculus from the astronomical graphs printed inside. But that was when he still believed that it was only a matter of time before he would get up and walk.\n\nHe stopped believing in miracles the day his father died. Molly wasn't allowed in the church and he would always remember sitting outside in the cold while a pitiful small group of miners paid their respects.\n\nWhether it was the reality of his father's death or the cruelty of other people, he didn't know, but his dream of becoming an astronomer no longer seemed possible.\n\nNow his mind spun with exciting new possibilities. Never once had he considered working on a ranch.\n\nThe doc's voice sounded in his head. \"You can do anything you want to do.\"\n\nWas that true?\n\nDare he imagine himself working in the ranch office while his sister chased cattle and trained horses? Would Miss Walker trust him enough to pay the bills and make the money last until the next shipment of cattle sold? Would Molly then look at him differently\u2014 not just like her poor baby brother but like a man?\n\nRosita walked into the room, feather duster in hand. Seeing him, she backed away. She always tried to avoid him, but she wasn't alone in that regard. Both Rosita and her brother, Jose, treated him like he had the plague or something.\n\n\"Wait!\" he called. \"Don't go. I'm not going to ask you to come near. I just want you to... open the curtains in my room. Would you do that for me? Please.\"\n\nRosita nodded. She backed all the way out of the room before she turned and fled." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "That night Molly knocked on her brother's bedroom door. It was time to get him ready for bed, but she also wanted to talk to him. She didn't anticipate any difficulty in telling Donny her decision to find a saloon job. The hard part would come tomorrow when she tried to talk a saloon owner into hiring her. They'd want to hear her sing, naturally, and no matter how many hard candies she sucked, her voice still sounded froggy.\n\nBut that wasn't the only problem. Most proprietors didn't want her to just sing, they wanted her to entertain men in other ways. Sinful ways. She would rather starve to death than prostitute herself, but she couldn't let Donny go hungry. Never in a million years could she let him do without necessities. Oh, God, please don't let it come to that.\n\n\"Donny, I need to talk to you.\" She sat on the edge of his bed. \"What are you reading?\"\n\nHe held up the book so she could see the cover. \"Beef Bonanza: How to Get Rich on the Plains by Gen. James S. Brisbin.\"\n\nShe made a face. She couldn't imagine anything duller.\n\n\"Wouldn't hurt you to read it,\" he said.\n\nShe stifled a yawn. She was so tired she could hardly keep her eyes open. And there wasn't a bone in her body that didn't hurt.\n\n\"Why this sudden interest in cattle?\"\n\n\"Miss Walker said if you worked out, she might be able to find a job for me.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"A job?\"\n\nDonny frowned. \"You don't have to look so surprised. I'm not a dunce. I'm good with numbers.\"\n\n\"I know you are, Donny. I didn't mean it that way.\" She tried to remember when she last saw Donny this excited. If only she didn't have to tell him their days on the ranch might be numbered. Surprised to see the curtains open, she walked over to the window to close them, stalling for time. A flash of lightning danced across the darkened sky, followed by a low rumbling.\n\n\"Leave them open,\" he said.\n\nHis request surprised her. Normally he kept the curtains closed day and night. \"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Dr. Fairbanks said if I changed my mind and wanted him to help me, all I had to do was open the curtains.\"\n\n\"You want to work with him?\" She couldn't believe this sudden change. Donny had been so against accepting the doctor's help.\n\n\"I like the doctor. He's funny.\"\n\n\"Funny?\" She could think of many ways to describe Caleb, but funny was not one of them. Tall, handsome, and... She quickly banished the thought.\n\n\"How do you mean, funny?\" she asked.\n\n\"He drives a motor buggy and is always asking questions about the human body. I never know the answers, but he can't answer my questions either.\"\n\n\"Your questions?\"\n\n\"About the stars and planets. He didn't even know the composition of the sun.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I bet he knows it now.\"\n\nHe nodded and grinned. \"Leaving the curtains open is a secret code like the songs the slaves used to sing.\" His brows drew together. \"I don't know if the doctor can help me, though.\"\n\n\"I have a feeling that if anyone can help you, it's Dr. Fairbanks.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"What did you want to talk about? You said you wanted to talk to me.\"\n\nA crash of thunder made her jump. \"Oh... uh... it's not important. Let's get you ready for bed.\" She took the book out of his hand.\n\nA half hour later she tucked him in and left the room, her mind racing. Donny working for Miss Walker? Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined anything like that.\n\nBut what if Miss Walker asked her to leave the ranch? After what happened earlier with the wild mustang, that was entirely possible.\n\nShe hurried down the hall, determined to talk to Brodie\u2014beg him on hands and knees if necessary. Somehow she had to make him give her one more chance\u2014for Donny's sake.\n\nShe opened the front door. It was raining hard and already a river of mud and water separated the ranch house from the bunkhouse and barn. Her talk with Brodie would have to wait." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Caleb almost missed the open curtains. For the better part of a week he'd checked Donny's window as he whizzed by and the curtains were always closed. He wasn't even sure they were open today. Maybe the breeze had simply blown them apart.\n\nSince his horseless carriage could not go in reverse, he swung a wide circle. Careful to avoid the puddles left from last night's rainstorm, he pulled up in front of the ranch house for a closer look. Now that he had stopped the car, he realized there was no movement in the air. The wind that greeted the dawn had died down, leaving no question in his mind: the curtains were open. Wide open." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nMolly shifted in the saddle and took in her surroundings. She'd never before ridden out this far on the range. Had no idea that the Last Chance spread across such a wide area. Nor had she seen so many cattle at once since the day of the stampede.\n\nShe was still in Brodie's bad graces and it was a relief to take a break from his dark accusatory expressions. He had reluctantly agreed to give her another chance, but she had yet to prove she deserved it.\n\nSince the incident with the stallion, she'd been relegated to cleaning stalls and grooming horses instead of training them. She didn't complain and had a lot to be grateful for now that Donny had agreed to let Caleb work with him.\n\nWith this thought she allowed herself to relax. She popped a lemon drop in her mouth to soothe her raw throat.\n\nShe rode at the tail end of a line of riders trailing each other single file to protect the valuable grass as much as possible. Behind her, Ruckus drove a wagon filled with fence-mending equipment and salt licks.\n\nIt was July fourth\u2014Independence Day. In years past, Dobson Creek had celebrated the holiday with great fanfare, and it was a shock to learn that it was business as usual on the ranch. Donny would be disappointed. He loved watching the parade, but mostly he liked the poppers, pinwheels, and double-headers that lit up the night skies.\n\nHow quickly time passed. It had been a little more than five weeks since she arrived at the ranch and the fire was now a distant though no less unpleasant memory.\n\nMiss Walker took the lead today, followed by Stretch and Feedbag.\n\nIt was hard to believe it had rained last night. The ground looked bone dry but the cacti were fuller and the camphor-like odor of the creosote plant tickled Molly's nose. Nothing was prettier than the desert in bloom. Red, white, and yellow flowers dotted every cactus. Prairie dogs yipped and wild mustangs lifted their heads in wary watchfulness. How she wished Donny could see them!\n\nMaybe one of the ranch hands would bring him out here, though she hesitated to ask. For the most part, the others avoided her brother.\n\nDonny seemed to like the doctor and his asthma had greatly improved. More than that, he seemed happier and less frustrated. She still hadn't noticed any improvement in mobility, even though Donny did breathing and arm exercises every day.\n\nCaleb said it would take time\u2014but how much time? She grew more impatient with each passing day. How much longer could she keep up with both her ranch duties and care of her brother? How much longer, Lord?\n\nUp ahead, Miss Walker and the ranch hands stopped. Stretch pulled out his gun and fired. Two wolves ran off. Shuddering, Molly urged her horse forward.\n\nSome fifty or more dead cattle were scattered across the landscape. Molly stared at the carcasses in horror.\n\nRuckus jumped from the wagon and sauntered over to the nearest bovine already covered in flies. \"Lightning got 'em,\" he announced.\n\n\"Let's hope that's the extent of the damage,\" Miss Walker said, and Molly marveled that the ranch owner could sound so calm. \"Bury them. We don't want them attracting more wolves.\"\n\nRuckus nodded and hurried to move the wagon closer to the scene.\n\nMiss Walker glanced at Molly. \"You come with me,\" she said in her usual clipped voice.\n\nMolly didn't want to dig a bunch of graves, but riding alone with Miss Walker was hardly a welcome alternative. The woman was as intimidating as a charging bull.\n\nMiss Walker rode by her side. \"Your brother requires a lot more care than you implied when we first spoke.\"\n\nMolly's heart thudded. Did Miss Walker intend to dismiss her? A short time ago she might have felt a sense of relief had the ranch owner sent her packing, but not now. Not with Donny having his heart set on working at the ranch.\n\n\"Caleb... Dr. Fairbanks is helping him to become more independent.\" If Miss Walker thought it odd that Molly used the doctor's given name, she kept it to herself.\n\n\"Brodie told me about the incident with the stallion.\"\n\nMolly's hands tightened on the reins and her horse snorted. She forced herself to relax. \"I... I assure you nothing like that will ever happen again.\"\n\nMiss Walker studied her. Molly's stomach knotted and she shriveled under the withering glare. Had it been possible to disappear into a hole, she would have gladly done so.\n\n\"You could have been killed.\" The ranch owner pressed her heels into her horse's side and galloped off.\n\nMolly watched her, not knowing what to think. Was that concern for her safety or simply a statement of fact? It was hard to know.\n\nMiss Walked stopped a short distance away and Molly eased her horse alongside her. A line of cattle headed for a water trough by an enormous windmill. Not one steer had the familiar LC brand. Someone had cut the fence so that the cattle had free access to the ranch's water supply.\n\nSeveral mustangs grazed nearby. One horse lay in the grass, body swollen and heaving in distress.\n\nNext to her Miss Walker sat rigid in her saddle, her expression hidden beneath the shade of her wide-brimmed hat. \"Now I know how my horse got strangles.\"\n\nSo far Baxter remained an isolated case, probably because Miss Walker had ordered her men to scrub every water and feeding trough on the property to prevent spreading the infection.\n\nThe air had grown uncommonly still all of a sudden, the huge windmill blades frozen as if painted onto the cloudless sky. It was as if nature held its breath waiting to see what Miss Walker would do or say next. The wait was short.\n\nShe pulled out her Colt and carefully aimed a shot at the base of the horse's ear, putting it out of its misery. The other horses took off running and the cattle scattered, bawling.\n\nMiss Walker slid her weapon back into her holster.\n\nEars ringing from the pistol's report, Molly looked away from the unfortunate animal. \"What do you plan on doing with those claim jumpers?\"\n\n\"Claim jumpers!\" The phrase hung between them so long Molly was certain she had said something wrong.\n\nFinger to the brim, Miss Walker pushed her hat back. \"Hmm. Never heard it put that way but that's a good name for them.\" After a moment she added, \"If I knew what to do I'd have done it already.\" She leveled gray eyes at Molly. \"What do they do about claim jumpers in Dobson Creek?\"\n\n\"You mean other than lynching them?\"\n\nMiss Walker gave a hollow laugh. \"Don't tempt me.\"\n\nThe touch of humor in Miss Walker's voice surprised Molly. Encouraged, she explained, \"One man got rid of a bunch of lowly claim jumpers by salting the property several miles downstream.\"\n\n\"Salting?\"\n\n\"He sprinkled gold dust around the ground and threw in a couple of nuggets for good measure. Then he started a rumor in town that he'd found the mother lode. I'm telling you, those rascals took off like a bunch of rabid wolves to make a claim.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" Miss Walker's thoughtful gaze had none of the earlier rancor and Molly felt encouraged. A bellowing sound drew their attention to the distant fence through which a broad white face appeared. The bovine wasn't interested in them. Instead her attention was focused on a shaking bush. A young brown and white calf emerged from the shrub and bounded on spindly legs toward his mother.\n\nAfter the two reunited, Miss Walker said, \"I do believe you solved my problem.\" She quirked a thin gray brow. \"Come on, we've got work to do.\" She turned her horse and raced back to where the men were busy digging a mass grave, and it was all Molly could do to keep up with her.\n\n\"Stop what you're doing!\" Miss Walker rode up to Ruckus. \"I want you to take a couple of those corpses and put them as close to the Bennett ranch as possible. Make certain there are no visible burn marks. Stretch? Where's Stretch?\"\n\n\"I'm here, ma'am.\" Stretch pressed the spade of his shovel into the soil with his boot and leaned on the handle.\n\n\"Ride into town and let it be known that cattle are dying at the Last Chance Ranch due to disease. That should make them think twice before cutting my fence.\"\n\nThe men looked at each other and Ruckus rubbed his chin. \"It could backfire,\" he said.\n\nMiss Walker snapped a look in his direction. \"Backfire how?\"\n\n\"If buyers get wind that our cattle are diseased, they'll be less likely to purchase our beef.\"\n\nMiss Walker considered this for a moment. \"If we have to keep fighting for grass and water, our cattle will be too emaciated to sell.\"\n\nMuch discussion followed, but in the end, the ranch hands agreed the possible rewards were greater than the risks.\n\nThe brim of his Stetson pulled low, Stretch scratched the back of his head. \"What disease do you have in mind, ma'am?\"\n\n\"How about tick fever?\" Feedbag said.\n\n\"Foot and mouth disease?\" Stretch added.\n\n\"Gold fever?\" Molly suggested, half-jokingly.\n\nThat got the men's attention. \"The cattle died of gold fever?\" Feedbag shook his head. \"Never heard of such a thing.\"\n\n\"That's because no such thing exists,\" Miss Walker said. She thought for a moment. \"The investors won't know what they're dealing with and that could be a good thing.\"\n\nFeedbag shook his head. \"They'll never go for it.\"\n\nStretch shrugged. \"They might. Least for a while. That will give us time to repair the fences and come up with another plan.\"\n\n\"Very well,\" Miss Walker said. \"Gold fever it is.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nCaleb turned his car down Main Street and blinked. Despite the early morning hour, a long line of people crowded the boardwalk from one end of the street to the other. It wasn't until he pulled up to his office that he realized the line began at his door. \"What in blazes?\"\n\nHe turned off the motor and the inevitable backfire rendered the crowd silent. Something about the cool morning air made Bertha want to get in the last word.\n\nA horse neighed and tried to pull away from the hitching post. Magic barked and wagged his tail and waited for Caleb's command.\n\n\"Come on, boy.\" He climbed out of the motor buggy and lifted Magic to the ground. The moment Caleb stepped up to the front of the line, everyone began talking at once. Something about gold fever...\n\nUnable to make heads or tails out of their babble, Caleb waved his arms. \"Quiet! One at a time.\" He pointed to the owner of the mercantile store. \"Suppose you tell me what's got folks all riled up.\"\n\nMr. Green assumed an air of importance, his spectacles riding the tip of his nose. \"There's an epidemic of gold fever, and me and the others want to get ourselves one of them shots so we don't get it too.\"\n\nCaleb rubbed a hand across the back of his neck. Gold fever or its equivalent was probably the oldest disease known to mankind, the main symptom being greed, but it was the first he'd heard of it being a medical problem.\n\n\"If you want a cure for gold fever, you're in the wrong place,\" he said, lifting his voice to be heard at the far end of the line. \"Church has a better cure than I do.\"\n\n\"We ain't talking about that kind of gold fever,\" another man yelled out. \"We're talking about the kind that kills animals.\"\n\nMr. Green nodded. \"Hundreds of Last Chance cattle have died.\"\n\nThat was news to Caleb. He was at the ranch yesterday working with Donny and no one mentioned a word to him about dead cattle.\n\n\"Yeah,\" someone yelled. \"And we don't want to catch it.\" He rolled up the sleeve of his shirt. \"So we're ready to be evaporated.\"\n\nThe crowd murmured agreement.\n\n\"I think you mean vaccinated,\" Caleb said, shaking his head. The very same people who refused to be vaccinated for small pox or malaria now demanded to be vaccinated for a disease that, as far as he knew, didn't physically exist.\n\n\"You can't catch a disease from steer unless you eat the meat.\"\n\n\"You catch chicken pox from chickens,\" someone argued.\n\n\"Not true,\" Caleb said, but everyone started talking at once again and drowned him out. Some people still didn't believe that germs caused infection, nor understood that viruses and bacteria led to disease. Almost every new discovery in the medical field was met with skepticism and resistance, even among some doctors and scientists.\n\n\"Quiet!\" He waited until he had their attention. \"I'll check this out and if there is any danger to you and your families, I will let you know.\"\n\nHe stepped into his office amid a chorus of protests and after Magic skittered inside, slammed the door shut." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Molly stood as far away from the mare as the horse stall allowed and didn't move. This was the first Brodie had allowed her to work with horses since the day she froze in front of the stallion. Her job was to get the horse used to being around people, nothing more.\n\nThe paint stared at her for maybe two or three minutes before turning her head away with a swish of her tail. Molly took another step closer and the horse regarded her again. Her ears flickered and she pawed the ground.\n\nTraining a wild horse required infinite patience, and that had never been Molly's strong suit. Whenever she showed impatience as a child, her father would always say, \"All in God's time, child, all in God's time.\" It was his stock answer for everything.\n\n\"When will we live in a real house?\" she'd asked him, weary of the tent they called home.\n\n\"All in God's time.\"\n\n\"When will Mama get well?\"\n\n\"All in God's time.\"\n\nGod's time wasn't her time and after her mother's death, she wondered if such a thing even existed. It irritated her that her father accepted no responsibility for what happened or didn't happen. Instead of saving his hard-earned money for a house, he spent it foolishly at saloons and gambling halls, leaving them precious little to live on.\n\nShe tried to learn patience\u2014prayed almost daily to accept her lot in life without complaint. But her annoyance grew along with exhaustion.\n\nWhen Donny dawdled over the wash sink or took forever to brush his teeth, it was hard not to snap at him. Her body ached so much that she was sorely tempted at times to leave him in his wheelchair rather than battle him into bed.\n\nCaleb insisted Donny had made progress, but in what way? He required constant care and still couldn't do anything much for himself. If anything, he seemed more helpless with each passing day... or perhaps she simply expected more of him.\n\nShe shook her thoughts away but the guilt remained, shrouding her like a second skin. She could walk and Donny could not. She could run and dance and jump and hop, but Donny could not. She squeezed her eyes tight. Nothing she wanted, nothing she wished for, was more important than caring for Donny and making certain he always had a home.\n\nSighing, she took another step closer to the mare. Predictably, the animal lifted its head and gazed at her.\n\n\"Talk to her,\" Brodie had instructed. \"Let her get used to your voice.\"\n\nAnd so she sang, her voice barely more than a whisper. Stopping to clear her throat, she dug in her pocket for a lemon drop and popped it in her mouth. After a couple of minutes she tried again. This time her voice sounded smoother.\n\nShe sang just as she did each morning for Orbit. \"Ha, ha, ha, you and me, little brown horse, don't I love thee!\" Lately she'd started changing some of the words to the saloon songs to make them less bawdy, and she wondered why she hadn't thought to do so before.\n\nShe sang softly at first so as not to strain her voice or startle the mare. She ventured a dance step or two. The horse continued to graze on hay, paying her no mind. Encouraged, she took a couple of side steps, sashayed her hips, kicked up her leg, and turned. \"Ha, ha, ha, you and me...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Caleb walked toward the stables looking for Molly. Surely she could explain the rumors in town. Donny knew nothing about dead cattle or gold fever.\n\nCaleb hated to admit it but the stables drew him like a magnet, and every chance he got, he went there. He enjoyed making Molly happy. It didn't take much. The least bit of encouragement he offered on her brother's progress made her eyes sparkle and brought a beautiful wide smile to her face.\n\nHe'd exaggerated Donny's progress, God forgive him, but he couldn't help it. Molly looked so forlorn at times, so downhearted and worried. How could he possibly tell her the truth? How could he let her know that Donny's progress was slow if not altogether nonexistent?\n\nHe heard the voice before he saw the singer but knew immediately that it belonged to Molly. Her voice sounded smoky but no less sweet. He'd never heard the song sung with so much passion and enthusiasm.\n\n\"Ha, ha, ha...\"\n\nGrinning, he walked with quiet steps until he spotted her inside the stall. Not only was she singing but dancing and his grin widened. Hands on her waist, she moved with easy grace, shaking her shoulders and swaying her hips. Her red shirtwaist was as bright as the flower of an ocotillo. Wisps of hair had worked loose from her braided bun. \"The Little Brown Jug\" never sounded so good\u2014or looked so tempting.\n\nShe finished her song and he clapped. She spun around, her green eyes as dark as the disapproval on her face. He wasn't sure what he'd done wrong, but she came charging at him like a raging bull.\n\nShe let herself out of the horse stall and swung around to face him. \"Don't ever do that again while I'm training a horse.\"\n\n\"That's what you were doing? Training a horse?\" They sure did do things different out here in Arizona Territory. \"I think the horse can manage the steps but I'm not sure about the shoulder movements.\"\n\nShe stared at him for a full moment before bursting into laughter. \"Everyone has trouble with the shoulder movements,\" she said.\n\nHe grinned back at her. \"I knew you were a singer, but I didn't know you were also a dancer.\"\n\nShe arched a fine eyebrow. \"How did you know I was a singer?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Small town.\"\n\nHer face softened. \"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have yelled. Teaching that paint to get used to my voice is part of her training.\"\n\n\"Lucky horse,\" he said.\n\nHer pretty pink cheeks grew a shade darker. Aware that he stared, he said, \"I heard that you had some trouble out here.\"\n\nShe looked confused. \"Trouble?\"\n\n\"With the cattle. Something about thousands dying of... gold fever.\" He tilted his head. \"I thought that particular affliction was unique to us humans.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Thousands, eh? So our plan worked.\"\n\n\"Plan?\"\n\nShe studied him. \"Swear you won't breathe a word of this to anyone.\"\n\n\"Anything you say to me will be treated in the strictest of confidence.\"\n\n\"Even though I'm not your patient?\" she asked.\n\n\"Your brother is.\"\n\nShe seemed satisfied with his answer and quickly explained about the ranch's dispute with eastern investors. \"Miss Walker is against a big cattle company moving in. The ones already here keep cutting our fences and using our water. She thinks that's why Baxter got sick.\"\n\n\"She could be right.\" None of the other ranchers had complained about sick horses, but that wasn't too surprising. Illness could ruin a ranch's reputation and hurt cattle sales. For that reason, ranchers often didn't speak up until a problem got out of hand. Miss Walker was the exception.\n\n\"When we found fifty steers killed by lightning, we decided to spread the rumor that they died from disease. We hoped it would stop the other ranchers from trespassing.\"\n\n\"Did your plan work?\" he asked.\n\n\"It has so far. We haven't found a cut fence in a week.\" She angled her head as she looked up at him. \"How did you hear about it?\"\n\n\"From a long line of people waiting in front of my office demanding a vaccination against gold fever.\"\n\nHer eyes sparkled like an emerald sea. \"Wait till Miss Walker hears about that.\" She glanced toward the ranch house. \"How is Donny doing?\"\n\n\"He's making progress.\" He inhaled. There he went again, but he couldn't seem to help it. If only he could change the way her brother regarded himself. Instead of focusing on what he could do or was capable of doing, Donny saw only his disabilities.\n\nInstead of the smile he hoped for, a flash of impatience flitted across her face.\n\n\"You say that every time,\" she said.\n\n\"Have you noticed no improvement?\"\n\nShe thought for a moment. \"Not really. Except maybe his breathing. He's not wheezing as much.\"\n\n\"Ah, you see? Progress. Once we complete therapy, his breathing will improve even more. I'm convinced of it.\"\n\n\"Are you saying that strengthening his muscles will improve his asthma?\" she asked.\n\nOn more familiar ground, he elaborated. \"We don't know what causes asthma but we have a pretty good idea what triggers it. I've noticed in some of my patients that anxiety or worry or even stress can cause breathing difficulties.\"\n\n\"Is that why coming to Arizona seemed to affect his breathing?\"\n\n\"Possibly. A new environment uncertainty about the future... any of those things can cause his bronchial tubes to tense.\"\n\nShe bit her lower lip. \"I don't mean to sound ungrateful or impatient. It's just that... others have promised miracles and nothing worked.\"\n\nHer words stabbed at his conscience. Was that what he was doing? Promising something he could not deliver? \"I'm not in the business of miracles. I leave such wonders to God. But I am a big believer in the human spirit. Your brother's a fine lad with a good mind. Don't underestimate him.\"\n\n\"Is that what you think I'm doing?\"\n\nHe nodded toward the horse stall. \"What do you see when you look at that horse?\"\n\n\"What do I see? I see a fine animal with a strong spirit. I see a great deal of potential. But what has this got to do with my brother?\"\n\n\"Do you know what I see when I look at that horse? I see an animal with spindly legs and complicated intestines that should have been extinct thousands of years ago.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. \"That's... ridiculous.\"\n\n\"Not any more ridiculous than looking at Donny and seeing only his imperfect legs.\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" she snapped. \"That's not all I see.\"\n\nHe reached for her hands. \"Molly, look at me. People act how they're expected to act.\"\n\nShe pulled away. \"I don't expect him to act helpless!\"\n\n\"He's not helpless, Molly. He's scared.\"\n\n\"Scared?\" She grew still. \"Of what?\"\n\n\"Of losing you.\"\n\n\"That's ridiculous!\"\n\n\"Is it?\" He studied her. He'd committed to helping Donny, but perhaps Molly had a greater need. Caring for Donny under the best of circumstances would be difficult enough for anyone, but she had a full-time job. On a ranch, no less. Though she tried her best to hide her worry and fatigue, he could see what it was doing to her. Such a heavy burden would tax the hardiest of men.\n\n\"What would happen if you lived a normal life?\" He trod on dangerous ground and already he felt her resistance. Whenever he got too personal, she either pulled away or put a wall between them. Even so, someone had to step in before she destroyed herself.\n\nAnd then he took the biggest chance of all. \"If you were to, say... marry?\"\n\nIf the question surprised her, she gave no indication. \"That's not going to happen,\" she said without hesitation, as if she had thought long and hard on the subject.\n\nHe stared at her, incredulous. \"How can you be so certain?\" A beautiful woman like you?\n\n\"Marriage means children and I couldn't handle another child.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Donny's not a child.\"\n\n\"You know what I mean. Even my mother\u2014\" She looked away, but not before he saw the pain in her eyes, the tremor of her lips, the clenching of her fists.\n\nA protective surge rushed through him. He wanted to reach out to her. He wanted to take her in his arms and hold her and make the pain go away. \"What about your mother?\" he asked gently.\n\nIt took her a moment to lift her gaze to his, the pain no longer visible. But he had seen and he knew.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Nothing. It doesn't matter. I just meant that Donny needs a lot of care.\"\n\nSometimes unspoken words were the loudest, and he heard Molly's loud and clear. Her mother was so overwhelmed with caring for her son she neglected her daughter.\n\n\"And you plan to throw your life away because of him?\" As a doctor he tried never to sound critical or disapproving, but today professional discipline failed him and both had crept into his voice.\n\nHer eyes widened and she took a step back. \"I'm not throwing my life away. This is the first real home Donny and I ever had.\" At the sound of galloping hooves outside, Molly lowered her voice. \"If I can secure Donny's future at this ranch, he'll never have to go into one of those horrid asylums.\"\n\nMiss Walker marched into the barn in full riding gear, spurs jangling. \"There you are, Doctor. Did Miss Hatfield tell you that we think we know how Baxter got infected?\"\n\nCaleb pulled his gaze away from Molly and turned to the ranch owner. \"Yes, she did.\"\n\n\"How much longer must I keep him quarantined?\"\n\n\"I think we can safely say there's no danger of him infecting your other horses.\" The diagnosis had been proven correct and abscesses had formed as predicted. They popped on their own and almost immediately the horse showed improvement. For safety's sake, he'd insisted they keep Baxter isolated for a couple of weeks.\n\n\"I'll take one last look at him if you like,\" he said.\n\n\"Come along, then.\" Miss Walker strode toward Baxter's stall with long hurried strides, but Caleb was hesitant to follow.\n\nHe lowered his voice to a near whisper. \"Molly, I know you care for your brother but\u2014\"\n\n\"You better not keep Miss Walker waiting.\" She let herself back into the stall and closed the gate between them. She stared at him for a moment before turning away.\n\nThere was so much more he wanted to say to her if only she would let him. \"Molly...\"\n\nMiss Walker called to him. \"Well? Are you coming?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Long after Caleb left and the sound of his auto had faded away, Molly stood inside the stall thinking about what he said. As if sensing a change in her, the paint stared at her with wary regard and refused to let her get too close.\n\nMolly tried to sing but it was no use. Her heart wasn't in it.\n\n\"What would happen if you lived a normal life? If you were, say... to marry?\"\n\nStop it! she screamed silently, but it was no use. Caleb's words kept bouncing around in her head, seeming to resonate from the very barn walls until she feared she was losing her mind.\n\nShe clenched her fists. How dare him! How dare Caleb make her want things she had no business wanting. This might not be a normal life but it was her life\u2014and it was the only one she deserved." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nMolly couldn't stop coughing. The cough that started during the Dobson Creek fire had grown progressively worse. At first she only coughed at night, but the hot, dry monsoon winds that tore across the desert set her to coughing for most of the day. A dark haze of sand and dust filled the air and she made Donny sit inside all day\u2014something he hated to do.\n\nHer throat was sore and her chest hurt and she worried about Donny catching her cough.\n\nIt wasn't the initial illness she worried about as much as the asthma attack that inevitably followed even the slightest infection.\n\nThe cough was annoying for another reason. If the clanking windmill and banging barn door didn't distract the horses enough, Molly's hacking spells put them on edge.\n\nBrodie didn't say anything about her cough, but he made no effort to hide his displeasure at her being late. He disapproved of the number of times she sneaked away to care for her brother and he made no bones about it. Today was no different.\n\n\"Now that you're back maybe we can git some work done.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry I'm late but Donny\u2014\"\n\n\"The only thing I'm interested in is these here horses,\" he retorted. He tugged on his rawhide hat, kicked a small rock with his scuffed boot, and ambled away.\n\nShe heaved a sigh and followed him into the corral. How could a man with infinite patience for horses have so little tolerance for people?\n\nWhirlwinds of sand raced by and a new horse Brodie called Blackie kicked up his hind legs and bolted around the corral in a frenzy. It was all Brodie could do to contain him. Keeping one eye on the battle between horse and man, Molly worked with a more placid, though head-shy, mare named Starburst.\n\nIt was a day for distractions. When the wind finally died down and the horses grew calm, Caleb arrived to work with Donny. His motor buggy backfired, sending the horses into another panic. Orbit didn't help matters. Hearing Caleb's auto, Orbit hoofed the fence and whinnied loudly until his friend Magic joined him. Nuzzling each other, the dog and horse then took off running side by side.\n\nMolly laughed at the two animal friends, bringing a sharp glance from Brodie.\n\nSighing, she gently slid a bridle over Starburst's face and waited for the mare to lower her head before slipping the bit in her mouth and buckling the straps. Starburst took the bit well for the first time, but when Molly coughed, the startled mare took off running with her nose up in the air.\n\n\"She'll learn that it's more comfortable with her nose down,\" Brodie called.\n\nMolly had learned a lot about horses in her short time on the ranch. Each teaching method had to be adjusted according to the personality of the horse. Lightning was a runner, Blaze a kicker, and Starburst easily spooked. The new pinto was docile for the most part but was given to sudden outbursts of energy when least expected. Then there was Blackie who was as unpredictable as the weather.\n\nHer favorite horse, though, was Orbit. Each morning she stood by the fence and sang to him and he never failed to come galloping up to her. His antics made her smile, but it was his unfettered joy for life that she liked best.\n\nThe mare soon grew tired and stopped running. Molly hacked through another coughing spell and the skittish horse took off again.\n\n\"You gotta do something about that frog,\" Brodie grumbled.\n\n\"I'm trying,\" she said. Rosita had plied her with honey and some sort of cactus juice that tasted sour but felt soothing to her throat.\n\n\"Better let the doc have a look.\" He tossed a nod in the direction of the ranch house just as Caleb emerged from the courtyard. Molly was surprised to see him leave so soon. His session with Donny had lasted for a mere twenty minutes. Her brother had been in a bad mood at lunchtime, which was why she was late. Was he still being difficult?\n\n\"I don't need a doctor.\" She'd purposely avoided Caleb since their meeting in the barn. His nearness distracted and confused her and she needed her full wits to get through each day.\n\n\"Let him decide.\" Before she could protest, Brodie waved until he got Caleb's attention.\n\n\"I told you I don't need\u2014\" But it was too late. Caleb tossed something into his auto and jogged over to where they stood.\n\nHe greeted them both and glanced at the horses. \"Is there a problem?\"\n\n\"Nope,\" Brodie said. \"At least not with the horses. But Molly here is having some throat trouble.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" Caleb's glance sharpened as he studied her.\n\nMolly glared at Brodie who shrugged and walked away. She cleared her voice. \"It's just a little cough.\"\n\n\"It doesn't hurt to take a look.\" Caleb motioned toward the ranch house. \"We better go inside.\"\n\nShe started to argue but changed her mind. With a shrug she marched to the house, pulling off her gloves as she walked. Moments later she settled upon a leather chair in the large room. Just being out of the dust-filled air made it easier to breathe and already she felt better.\n\nDonny was in his room and Miss Walker was out on the range. There was no sign of either Rosita or Jose. It was just her and Caleb.\n\n\"How long have you had the cough?\" he asked. Though he acted completely professional, she felt oddly shy in front of him. She wasn't used to talking about herself to a doctor or anyone else. It was always about Donny.\n\n\"Since the fire.\"\n\nHe bent over her, probing her neck with his fingers. His touch sent warm shivers racing through her, his large hands surprisingly gentle.\n\n\"Open and say ah,\" he said.\n\nShe did as he asked and he peered inside her mouth. He was so close she could smell the faint scent of gasoline and the stronger fragrance of bay rum and leather.\n\nHis gaze met hers for an instant. \"Does it hurt when you swallow?\"\n\n\"A little,\" she admitted.\n\nHe pulled out his stethoscope and hesitated. Lines deepened on his brow and he cleared his throat. \"I need to check your lungs.\"\n\nWarmth rushed to her cheeks and she gave herself a mental shake. It was only a medical examination\u2014nothing more.\n\n\"Would you mind unbuttoning the top buttons?\" he asked.\n\nShe nodded and fumbled with a shaking hand. Slowly she unbuttoned two buttons, exposing her upper chest. He waited for her to complete the task before moving closer. She swallowed hard and lifted her chin, determined not to let him know how much his nearness affected her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Caleb pressed the chest piece against the ivory skin below her neck. She didn't flinch or even blush like most of his other female patients. For some odd reason, that made his job even more difficult.\n\nBeneath her shirtwaist she wore an eyelet-trimmed camisole embroidered with tiny blue flowers. He sucked in his breath and looked away.\n\nMoving the chest piece, his hand accidentally brushed against her bosom. A soft gasp escaped her and her gaze met his.\n\n\"Sorry,\" he said. In his haste to set her mind at ease, his voice sounded harsh. Ragged.\n\nShe lowered her lids and her dark lashes swept her cheekbones. She said nothing, but his ear pieces picked up the quickening of heartbeats.\n\nExamining a woman was never easy. Caleb's college professors taught that protecting a woman's modesty was of utmost importance, even more important than her health. Caleb didn't agree, but he was nonetheless obliged to examine women fully dressed and deliver babies blind, keeping a mother's modesty intact while he fumbled beneath a blanket.\n\nBut no woman had been as hard to examine as Molly\u2014not because she was fully dressed but because she made him feel less of a physician and more of a man. Never before had he been so conscious of where he put the chest piece or placed his hands as he was at that moment.\n\nHe tried concentrating solely on the patient but it was the woman who commanded his attention. He observed things about her not previously noticed or detected\u2014things not relevant to a medical examination.\n\nHer eyes were an ever-changing sea turning from light to dark green seemingly on a whim. Today they looked like polished jade with little flecks of gold in their depths. One fine brow was arched a tad higher than the other. Her nose turned slightly upward like the corners of her mouth. The dimples on her cheeks looked even more intriguing up close.\n\n\"Did you know that lungs are the only organs in the body that can float in water?\" He normally asked trivia questions to relax patients or divert their attention. In this case, it was the physician who needed calming and distracting.\n\nHer gaze lifted to his and her dimples deepened. \"I'm sure that information will come in useful one day.\"\n\nHe grinned back at her. Her faint fragrance engulfed him and he envisioned himself in a field of lilacs. Instead of lowering her gaze she looked at him with bold regard, two circles of pink on her cheeks.\n\n\"Cough for me.\"\n\nShe did what he asked and he drew back, pulling the stethoscope away and stuffing it back in his bag. \"You have a bronchial infection. It doesn't sound too serious.\" He reached into the depths of his bag and pulled out a brown vial. \"Take this two times a day.\"\n\nShe took the glass bottle from him. Their fingers touched briefly before she quickly pulled away. \"What happens if I don't take it?\"\n\n\"You'll either get better or you won't.\"\n\nShe gave a girlish giggle and he recalled the graceful way she danced that day in the barn, could almost hear the musical sound of her voice. Finding himself staring, he quickly averted his gaze and stooped to pick up his leather bag.\n\n\"Thank you.\" She followed him to the entry hall and he turned so suddenly to face her, she bumped into him. His hand shot out to steady her, his fingers curling around her elbow.\n\n\"Sorry,\" she said, stepping away from him.\n\nHis hand dropped to his side. \"It was my fault.\" Lost again in the depths of her green eyes, he gave himself a mental shake.\n\n\"Uh... if there's no improvement in a day or two, let me know.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"How... how was your session with Donny?\" Her voice softened when she said her brother's name but a shadow of worry settled on her forehead. It was all he could do not to chase it away with a touch of his hand.\n\n\"It went very well.\" It wasn't exactly a lie but neither was it accurate. They had a setback today\u2014nothing to be concerned about\u2014or at least that's what he hoped. Donny had refused to get into his chair by himself. Maybe tomorrow.\n\n\"You didn't work with him as long as you usually do,\" she said.\n\n\"I... have to get back to town.\" Fearing she may have picked up his hesitation, he quickly added, \"I'll try to make up the time tomorrow.\"\n\nHer face lit up with a smile and something stirred inside, something sweet and tender and dear. Moments passed and still they stared at each other. She was the first to recover or at least look away. \"I best not keep you any longer.\"\n\nHe didn't want to leave but there really was no reason to stay. \"Get some rest.\" With that he turned and hurried out the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Still shaken from her encounter with Caleb, Molly stood by the fence watching Orbit. Something was wrong. Normally the colt was in constant movement. Never before had she seen him stand so still. His mother stood a short distance away, seemingly unconcerned about her offspring's odd behavior.\n\nThe brilliant orange sun was low in the western sky, casting purple shadows over the desert. The wind had died down but the distant mountains were still hidden behind a haze of dust.\n\nOrbit wandered slowly over to his mother, but instead of letting him nurse, she pushed him away with a jab of her nose.\n\nMolly's mouth dropped open. What was going on?\n\nShe waved her arm, motioning Brodie over to the fence. Brodie finished unsaddling his horse before joining her.\n\n\"I just saw Orbit's mother push him away. She won't let him nurse.\"\n\nBrodie didn't seem surprised. He leaned on the fence and gazed at the two horses in the distance just as the mare forced the young horse away a second time.\n\nBrodie pushed his hat back. \"Looks like she's tired of taking care of him.\"\n\n\"You mean she can turn on him, just like that?\" Could nature really be that cruel?\n\n\"He's more dependent on his mother than most foals. Guess you might say he's out-stayed his welcome.\"\n\nOnce again Orbit tried to approach the mare. This time she nipped him and Orbit ran away with a high-pitched whinny.\n\nMolly gripped the fence. \"We've got to do something before she hurts him.\"\n\n\"Better get him out of there.\" Brodie walked away.\n\n\"Wait,\" she called. \"What do I do then?\"\n\n\"Wean him,\" Brodie called back. \"Teach him how to take care of himself.\"\n\nMolly stared after him. How in the world was she supposed to do that?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nMolly was very much on Caleb's mind when he drove to the ranch a few days later. He wanted to help her but didn't know how. One thing was clear: She couldn't keep up her frantic pace very much longer. Something had to give.\n\nHe looked for her as he pulled in front of the ranch house and turned off the engine. The loud boom from Bertha's tailpipe bounced like a cannon fire. Horses whinnied and a squawking chicken took off in a flurry of feathers. Magic placed his front paws on the dash and barked. There was no sign of Molly and he frowned. Today was Wednesday and that was the day she worked with the horses. He knew her schedule like he knew his own.\n\nHis office hours were nine to two, which left afternoons free to work with Donny unless there was an emergency. A rash of late-night medical calls, mostly women delivering babies plus an unexpected death, had interfered with his sleep for almost a week. Two nights previous, he'd nodded off while driving and had nearly run Bertha into a ditch.\n\nThough some older citizens still regarded him with suspicion, he had enough patients to keep him busy, many with lung conditions. The prevalence of breathing problems puzzled him until Matt Corrigan, editor of the Cactus Patch Gazette, explained that most had the condition prior to moving to the territory.\n\n\"Everyone knows that the desert is good for what ails you,\" Corrigan said. \"It's a regular sanitarium.\"\n\nNot all patients flourished in the desert. Little Jimmy didn't. Nor did Miss Whitehead, a hypochondriac whose long and lengthy \"organ recitals\" were every bit as tiresome as a recital of Gray's Anatomy.\n\nBut his most challenging patient by far was Donny. Caleb had known working with Donny wouldn't be easy, but it turned out to be far more difficult than he imagined. It wasn't just the problem of getting muscles that hadn't been worked in years, if ever, to move. The real difficulty was getting Donny to see past his disability, and he had reached a plateau.\n\nToday Donny's stubborn expression came within minutes of Caleb's arrival.\n\nWithout a word, Caleb attempted to lift Donny out of his chair. \"Let go of me,\" Donny said. \"What are you doing?\" He struggled but his weak muscles were no match for Caleb.\n\nCaleb set Donny on the floor and rolled him over, facedown. Donny wasn't even strong enough to raise himself on his arms. All he could do was turn his head and look up at him in confusion and maybe even fear. He looked as helpless as an upside-down desert tortoise.\n\n\"Wait till I tell my sister!\"\n\n\"I'll tell her myself and save you the trouble.\" Caleb felt sorry for the youth but he knew of no other way to break through Donny's resistance. \"Let me see you get into your chair.\"\n\n\"I can't. You know I can't.\"\n\nCaleb sat on his haunches next to Donny's side. \"You can learn.\"\n\nMagic rolled on his back next to Donny, paws in the air. It wasn't often that someone was on the floor at his level and he meant to make the most of it.\n\n\"See? Even Magic agrees that you can learn.\" Magic's antics usually made Donny laugh, but not today. \"Getting into your chair by yourself is an important step. Eventually you'll be able to dress without help and use the privy in private. You'll be able to do a great many things.\"\n\n\"I can't! Don't you understand? I'm crippled!\" Head down, he slammed his fists against the floor and his face turned red.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\"\n\nAt the sound of Molly's voice, Caleb stood to find Molly glaring at him, her green eyes smoldering with fury.\n\n\"This is part of his training and\u2014\"\n\n\"Pick him up. Now!\" She waited in seething silence until Caleb had returned Donny to his chair. \"I wish to speak to you outside,\" she said, her tone leaving no room for argument. She stormed from the room.\n\nCaleb squeezed Donny's shoulder. \"Think about what I said.\" He glanced at Magic curled up by the wheelchair and left the room, hoping to quell the confrontation with Molly he knew awaited him. Somehow he had to make her understand his methods. Each step forward was followed by two steps back, but he had no intention of giving up and he didn't want her to give up either.\n\nShe stood on the verandah, hands on her hips, looking ready to fight him tooth and nail. Normally she wore a man's shirt but today a yellow shirtwaist topped her divided skirt. The bright color offered a startling contrast to the dark look on her face. He could almost feel sparks flying out of her. Anger had never looked so enticing.\n\n\"How dare you treat my brother like an animal!\" she fumed.\n\nCaleb drew back in surprise. \"Is that what you think I'm doing?\"\n\n\"What else can I think? You said you would help him. You said he had improved. From what I can see, all you've done is make matters worse!\"\n\n\"All right, I admit it. I haven't been completely honest with you about his progress, but I will help him. I am helping him. We're close to a breakthrough.\"\n\n\"Making my brother lie helpless on the floor is no breakthrough.\"\n\n\"That's just it, Molly. Your brother is helpless.\"\n\n\"You don't need to tell me that,\" she snapped.\n\n\"What I'm trying to say is that he doesn't have to be.\"\n\n\"Your services are no longer required,\" she said, her voice edged in ice. \"I think it would be better if you just leave.\" She turned but he grabbed her by the wrist and drew her close.\n\n\"What are you afraid of, Molly? Are you afraid that if your brother becomes more self-sufficient he won't need you? Is that why you keep him confined?\"\n\nColor drained from her face and she pulled her arm away. \"How dare you! You know nothing about me or my brother.\"\n\n\"I know enough,\" he said. \"I know you treat him like a child and\u2014\"\n\nSomething seemed to snap inside her and she came at him with flying fists. He caught her by both arms. Her thick dark lashes flew up and they stared at each other, her flesh soft and smooth beneath his touch.\n\nHe felt a stirring inside. He wanted to bury his head in her wealth of dark hair, to follow her sweet, warm breath to its source. God help him!\n\nSomething like a flame passed between them and she shuddered as if she felt it too. The moment passed and she pulled away.\n\n\"Send me your bill,\" she said, surprising him with her calm, controlled voice. Had she not felt what he felt?\n\n\"I don't want your money.\"\n\n\"Then we have no further business.\" She raced into the house. Magic barely had time to scoot outside before she slammed the door shut.\n\nCaleb stared at the space she no longer occupied. Molly was gone but he could still smell her fragrance, still remember the unexpected thrill that shot through him just before she pulled free of his grasp.\n\nNow I've done it. It wasn't the first time he'd lost a patient for lack of tact. But none of the patients he'd lost in the past bothered him more than losing Donny. He hated to admit it, but losing Molly was what he regretted most." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Donny sat on the verandah where Molly had left him earlier that day. Gaze focused on the corral in the distance, he squinted against the bright afternoon sun. A black mustang ran from one end of the corral to the other, tail high and mane flowing. Molly stood with rope in hand, forcing the horse to keep running.\n\nThe horse's name was Lightning because he tried to run away from every new experience.\n\n\"We have to teach it that running away is not the answer,\" Molly explained when Donny had questioned her.\n\nHe secretly wished the horse would run away and take him along. He almost imagined himself seated high above the pounding hooves. He often thought of the day the doctor pushed him around the courtyard. It was almost as if he were running, as if his wheels had become legs and his flapping arms had become wings. Running might not help Lightning, but it would be the answer to Donny's prayers.\n\nHe reached into the side of his chair and pulled out the iron pipe he kept there. The doctor said that if he built up his arms and chest muscles, he would take him to the Flagstaff observatory. Though the doctor now stayed away, Donny meant him to keep his promise. So day after day he pumped the iron up and down. Even at night when sleep escaped him, he lay in bed and worked with the pipe, raising his arms to the ceiling.\n\nIt hurt, though\u2014it hurt a lot. Sometimes his muscles and shoulders felt so sore he could hardly sleep.\n\nBoth hands on the pipe, he lifted it over his head, counting each up-and-down movement. Today he made it all the way to eight before his muscles began to burn.\n\nTucking the pipe back into the seat, he breathed out and held his breath. The doctor said he needed to build up his lung capacity, and that might help his asthma. The breathing exercises were harder to do than the physical ones and so far the longest he could hold his breath was only a few seconds.\n\nDonny reached his arms over the chair arms and grabbed hold of the wheels. In the past, he'd not been strong enough to move the wheelchair himself, but now he managed to move it a couple of inches along the verandah's wooden boards.\n\nSweating, he rested a moment and waited until he caught his breath before trying again. He pressed down on the wheels with everything he had. This time his chair caught on a loose board. He jerked his torso back and forth.\n\n\"Come on, come on.\" The chair suddenly lunged forward, picking up speed as it rolled toward the steps.\n\nHe fumbled with the wheels. \"Stop,\" he gasped. \"Stop!\"\n\nThe front wheel hit the top step with a bump. The chair tilted, pitching him forward. He sailed over the steps and hit the ground hard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Molly stifled a yawn. She'd spent the last two nights sleeping in Orbit's stall trying to calm him. The first night away from his mother Orbit paced all night, his loud whinnies keeping the cowhands awake and upsetting the other horses.\n\nShe held up her hand. Orbit poked at the hay in her palm. \"Come on, you can do it. It's good. Yum, yum.\"\n\nThis time, instead of pulling away, Orbit took the hay in his mouth.\n\nMolly grinned. \"See? I told you it was good to eat.\" While the horse chewed, Molly reached for another handful of hay.\n\nRuckus ran into the stables, shouting, \"Molly, quick, you're needed at the house.\"\n\n\"Why? What's wrong?\" she gasped, but Ruckus had vanished as quickly as he'd come. Dropping the hay, she shot out of the stall, slammed the gate shut, and ran. A group of cowboys were gathered in front of the verandah. Alarmed by the overturned wheelchair, a cold knot of fear caught in her throat.\n\nHeart beating madly, she pushed through the circle of cowhands. \"What happened, what\u2014\"\n\nDonny lay sprawled on the ground. His eyes were open but he looked deathly white. She dropped to her knees by his side. \"Donny, speak to me. Oh, God.\"\n\n\"Looks like he fell down the steps,\" Stretch said. \"We found him all laid out like Sunday's going-to-meeting suit.\"\n\nShe leaned closer. \"Tell me where it hurts.\"\n\nDonny turned his head toward her. \"Molly, I flew. I flew through the air like a bird.\"\n\nShe checked his head, neck, and back, but he didn't seem to be injured.\n\n\"Would you like us to take him to his room, ma'am?\" Stretch asked.\n\n\"Yes, please.\"\n\nStretch knuckled Wishbone on the arm. \"Give me a hand.\"\n\nStretch lifted Donny under the arms, Wishbone grabbed his feet, and they carried Donny up the steps and into the house.\n\n\"I flew like an eagle,\" Donny called.\n\nNext to her, Brodie turned the wheelchair upright. \"Where do you want me to put it?\"\n\n\"On the verandah will be fine,\" she said.\n\nHe stood looking at the ground, rubbing the back of his neck beneath his ponytail. \"He's gonna be all right,\" he said, and after a moment's hesitation added, \"He's tough like his sister.\"\n\nIt was the first civil word he'd spoken to her since the day she'd frozen in front of the stallion.\n\n\"Thank you, Brodie.\" She hurried up the steps and into the house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Caleb sat at the table in the small but tidy kitchen eating breakfast, Aunt Bessie in the chair opposite. She wore a blue and white flannelette wrapper with a drawstring waist, but it wasn't her apparel that grabbed his attention. It was her face. Something about it looked...\n\nPaint.\n\nCatching himself staring, he lowered his gaze to his plate. \"You make the best cackleberries I've ever eaten.\" He mopped up the yellow yolk with a piece of fresh-baked bread.\n\n\"Why, thank you, Caleb.\" Aunt Bessie smoothed her wrapper.\n\nSomething in her voice caught his attention. Obviously she had something on her mind. \"Everything all right?\"\n\n\"Not entirely. As you know, my nephew is getting married next week.\"\n\n\"It's the talk of the town,\" Caleb assured her, knowing she would be pleased.\n\nShe gave him a quick smile that faded into a frown. \"I don't know if you've noticed, but Cactus Patch has a serious alcohol problem.\"\n\nIndeed, he had noticed. Hardly a morning went by that he wasn't greeted by a steady stream of men wanting relief from hangovers. A doctor could almost build a practice solely on treating town drunks.\n\n\"I'm afraid it's a problem in most western towns,\" he said. Boredom, economic problems, and loneliness were all contributing factors.\n\nAunt Bessie let out a sigh. \"Not only do I have to worry about the preacher staying sober but my singer and pianist as well. Somehow I have to find a way to keep the three of them sober.\"\n\n\"I don't think you have to worry about Reverend Bland.\"\n\n\"Maybe so, but keeping the other two sober is like trying to rub the V off a liberty head nickel. Is there anything you can do to cure them of drinking?\"\n\n\"You mean like a vaccination?\" Had she not looked so serious he might have laughed, but he didn't want to hurt her feelings. Some people had a strange idea about what vaccinations could do. One man had even asked him to vaccinate a wife addicted to ordering from the Montgomery Ward catalog. \"I'm afraid not.\"\n\nAunt Bessie pushed a gray strand of hair behind her ear and cleared her throat. \"Are you planning to bring Molly to the wedding?\"\n\nHis heart thumped. \"I hadn't thought about it.\"\n\n\"What a lovely girl.\" She gave him a motherly smile. \"A pity that she's got her heart set on becoming Miss Walker's heiress.\" Her lips puckered as if the very thought was distasteful.\n\n\"I'm aware of Molly's plans.\"\n\n\"And did you also know that Miss Walker forbids anyone inheriting the ranch to marry?\"\n\nHis fork froze in midair. \"Forbids?\"\n\n\"Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous in your life? It goes against nature. Why, the good Lord must be shaking in His boots at such nonsense.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're right.\" Caleb placed his fork on his plate and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. \"What would happen if Moll... Miss Hatfield... were to marry?\"\n\n\"She would lose her rights to the ranch. It's all legal, even though it goes against God's will. I hear Miss Walker doesn't do anything without her lawyer.\"\n\nCaleb sat perfectly still. Why would anyone\u2014especially someone like Molly\u2014agree to such a thing?\n\nDonny! Practically everything she did was for her brother, including forfeiting any sort of happiness for herself.\n\nAunt Bessie leaned toward him as if sensing she'd lost his attention. \"It's probably for the best. I don't know that she would make any man a good wife. I heard that she was a dance hall girl back in Dobson Creek.\"\n\nHe knew she was a singer but a dance hall girl? It would certainly explain a lot about her, including her choice of attire and the graceful way she moved. He still warmed to the memory of her singing and dancing in the barn.\n\n\"I take it you don't think a dance hall girl would make a good wife?\"\n\n\"Mercy! Don't get me wrong. I believe in keeping an open mind, but you don't want to open it so far as to come unhinged.\"\n\n\"I should say not,\" he said lightly.\n\n\"Why, even Luke's fianc\u00e9e had a questionable background, but I never held that against her. It seems to go with the times, doesn't it? Backgrounds just aren't what they used to be.\"\n\n\"I have a hard time believing Miss Tenney led a less than spotless life.\" The few times he'd run into the blacksmith's fianc\u00e9e, she'd looked like a lady. Spoke like one too.\n\n\"Looks can be deceiving. You'd never know by looking at her that she writes dime novels, and one was even banned in Boston. Still, I told myself open mind, open mind. But a dance hall girl...\" She shook her head.\n\n\"Just exactly what kind of wife does your... open mind think I need?\" he asked, curious.\n\n\"A fine doctor like you needs a good, upright Christian woman,\" she said.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" he agreed, preferably one with green eyes. Startled by the unbidden thought, he dropped his fork and reached for his coffee cup.\n\nAunt Bessie continued, \"She has to be kind and considerate and willing to let you put your patients' needs before her own.\"\n\nHe took a sip of the hot brew. \"Nothing less would do,\" he murmured. And she must have the voice of an angel. Yet another memory of Molly singing flashed in his head.\n\n\"Fortunately, I happen to know a couple of young women who fit the bill. If you like, I'd be happy to invite one or even both to Sunday dinner.\"\n\nCaleb stood and cleared his plate, setting it in the sink. \"That's very kind of you, but a bit premature. I'm not ready to take a wife.\" That much was true, but since Aunt Bessie looked about to argue the point, he quickly grabbed a Meat Fibrine Dog Cake and walked outside to feed Magic.\n\nMolly was nothing more than a distraction. Pretty as a picture, she was, with the voice of an angel, but a distraction nonetheless. If he told himself that enough times, he might even come to believe it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nMolly let herself into the doctor's office, setting off a jangle of merry bells.\n\n\"I'll be right with you,\" Caleb called from behind a half-open door.\n\nShe swallowed hard and sat on one of the chairs lining one wall. Just being in his office made her feel... what? Nervous? Anxious? Confused?\n\nShe'd thought long and hard about making this trip but didn't know what else to do. Caleb was the only doctor in town.\n\nStill shaken by Donny's accident, she blamed Caleb for filling his head with all those crazy notions. Thank God he hadn't been seriously injured when his wheelchair flew down the steps, but there had been other incidents just as worrisome. Only that morning she found him on the bedroom floor. She was a nervous wreck worrying about what her brother would do next.\n\nThe door sprang all the way open and Caleb filled the doorway. He seemed to sap the very air out of the room with his presence and suddenly she couldn't breathe.\n\nHis hair was mussed and he looked tired, as if he'd been up all night. Faint lines lightly etched his normally smooth face and his shirt and trousers were wrinkled as if he'd slept in them.\n\nHe looked surprised to see her. \"Molly. Is everything all right?\"\n\nShe stood with a casualness she didn't feel. Somehow he always made her feel like a confused schoolgirl who didn't know her own mind. She dug her fingers into the velvet fringe handbag and fought for control. The handbag didn't go with her divided skirt, checkered shirt, and wide-brimmed hat, but it was the only one she owned.\n\n\"No, it's not all right.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"Come inside.\" He stepped aside to let her into the examination room and then led her into his office. Magic greeted her with wagging tail and she stooped to pet him.\n\n\"Have a seat.\"\n\nShe straightened and decided to remain standing. \"I won't take up much of your time.\" Perhaps if she remained standing she could keep her wits about her.\n\n\"How is your cough?\"\n\n\"Much improved, thank you.\" She cleared her throat. \"I... I apologize for my... behavior the other day... about Donny. You did what you thought best.\"\n\nCaleb sat on the edge of his desk, arms folded across his broad chest. \"So did you.\"\n\n\"At least we're in accord about something,\" she said.\n\n\"We both want what's best for your brother. We just have different ideas on how to achieve it.\" He studied her and her cheeks grew warm under his scrutiny. \"Since you're here, may I assume that you're having second thoughts about dismissing me?\"\n\n\"You assume incorrectly.\" She sounded unbearably prim even to her own ears.\n\n\"What a pity. So why are you here?\"\n\n\"I'm here because I ran out of Donny's asthma medicine.\"\n\nHe dropped his relaxed easy manner and assumed an air of professionalism. \"What do you usually give him?\"\n\n\"Nitrate of Amyl.\"\n\nHe grimaced. \"That's a dangerous drug.\" He rose to reach into a high cabinet. \"Try this,\" he said, closing the cabinet door. \"It's safer and just as effective.\" He handed her a small bottle labeled Vial of Lobelia. \"How is Donny otherwise?\"\n\nShe slipped the medication into her handbag. \"He's fine now, no thanks to you.\"\n\n\"What did I do?\"\n\n\"You put all those fancy ideas into his head. Now he thinks he can fly.\"\n\nCaleb's eyebrows rose. \"Fly?\"\n\n\"Just the other day he took a tumble from the verandah. He could have been seriously injured. Fortunately, he didn't suffer more than a few bumps and bruises. And this morning\"\u2014she shuddered at the memory\u2014\"this morning I found him on the floor of his room.\"\n\n\"And you think I had something to do with all this?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"He's not been the same since you worked with him. He's more moody and difficult to handle. You put all those ideas into his head.\"\n\nCaleb shook his head. \"I didn't put them there. Becoming more independent is part of growing up.\"\n\n\"If he injures himself he won't have a chance to grow up.\"\n\nHe reached for both her hands, and warm shivers shot up her arms.\n\n\"Molly, I want to help.\"\n\nHer breath caught in her chest and she couldn't think, let alone speak.\n\nHe stared down at her calloused palms before meeting her gaze. Feeling self-conscious, she pulled her hands away.\n\n\"Let me work with him,\" he said. \"I can teach him safe ways to move.\"\n\nSomething in his eyes made her hesitate. He looked at her more like a friend than a doctor, and this only added to her turmoil. \"He's the only family I have,\" she whispered at last. \"If anything happens to him...\"\n\n\"I'll do my best to make sure nothing does.\"\n\n\"I don't know...\"\n\n\"I'm not promising miracles, but I can help him. From what you say, I've already helped. Admit it.\"\n\n\"Maybe. I don't know.\" She shook her head. \"I used to trust Donny to stay where I put him, but no more.\"\n\nHe folded his arms. \"That's not necessarily a bad thing.\"\n\nWanting to believe what he said was true, her resistance crumbled. \"I can't pay much.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Seeing Donny improve will be payment enough.\"\n\n\"And you won't treat him like an animal.\"\n\n\"Never did, never will.\"\n\n\"I don't want him on the floor,\" she said.\n\nHis jaw tightened. \"If I'm to help your brother, I have to do it my way. If you question my methods or limit the way I do things, then nothing will get accomplished. I'll work your brother hard, and I expect him to give me everything he's got in return. If my expectations seem harsh, it's only for Donny's own good.\"\n\nOddly enough Brodie expressed a similar opinion about training horses. Brodie's methods seemed harsh at times, but he got results. Still, she wasn't sure she had the stomach for what Caleb proposed.\n\n\"If I agree to your... conditions, will you agree to mine?\"\n\nCaleb slid off the desk, standing tall in front of her, but she did not back down. \"Probably not,\" he said, \"but go on.\"\n\n\"You will work with Donny only in my presence.\" Tough training methods might work on horses, but her brother required a gentler approach.\n\n\"Absolutely not.\"\n\n\"He's my brother.\"\n\n\"I'm his doctor.\"\n\n\"Only if I say so!\"\n\nThey stood practically toe to toe. If she wasn't so much shorter, their noses would have touched.\n\n\"Sorry. I can't work under your conditions,\" he said.\n\nSurprised at his unwillingness to meet her demands, she refused to back down. \"Then we have no further business.\"\n\nHis expression changed, like the closing of a door. \"The medicine I gave you should help with the asthma. Have him drink tea. Don't know what it is exactly, but there's something in tea that seems to help asthmatics.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, slipping the strings of her handbag over her wrist. The room was small, but the two of them seemed miles apart and she regretted it more than she could say.\n\nShe looked away from his steady gaze and turned.\n\nShe let herself out but stood for several moments on the boardwalk in front of his office. She was shaking, but whether from disappointment or something else, she didn't know. Loud voices wafted from the saloon across the way, followed by a gunshot. The marshal practically sprang out of his office and raced across the street.\n\nShuddering, Molly walked around a drunken man sprawled facedown in the dirt. She'd grown accustomed to such sights in Dobson Creek and never given it much thought. Today the man's self-imposed helplessness filled her with disgust." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nBessie hunkered beneath a corner table at the Desert Rose Saloon and put a finger to her mouth. \"Shh.\" She motioned her sister closer.\n\nLula-Belle rolled her eyes but crawled to Bessie's side, bumping her head on the table's underside.\n\nBessie had chosen this particular spot to hide because the table was occupied by Hank Gristle, slumped in the chair passed out cold. Since the man didn't look to be much company, she figured others would avoid his table. So far she was proved right.\n\n\"This is the most ridiculous thing you've ever come up with,\" Lula-Belle whispered, rubbing her head. \"And that's saying a lot.\"\n\n\"Quit your bellyaching,\" Bessie said. \"It's for a good cause.\" She'd do anything for her two nephews. \"I want Luke's wedding to be perfect.\"\n\nAnd she meant to see that it was. Bessie knew from the moment she'd set eyes on Kate Tenney that she was the right woman for her nephew. Luke tended to be thickheaded at times, just like her husband, Sam. For that reason it took a great deal of persuasion on Bessie's part to bring him and Kate together, but it was worth every anxious moment she'd gone through. She'd promised her dying sister all those years ago to take care of her two boys and that's what she'd done. Was still doing, although Michael, the youngest of the two brothers, still required work.\n\nLike all the saloons in town, the Desert Rose Saloon was long and narrow. Since taxes were based on lot frontage, not length, some saloons were little more than a door wide and a hundred or more feet long.\n\nThe smell of whiskey and cactus wine permeated the air and the blue haze of smoke burned her eyes. She was covered in sawdust and her knees, back, and chair warmer hurt like crazy. What a person had to go through just to put on a decent wedding!\n\nIt was early yet and the saloon was only half full. Others would soon arrive. It was a rare night that every saloon in town wasn't packed to the gills. Miners, cowboys, husbands, fathers, Christians, and non-Christians\u2014pretty much every man in town showed up sooner or later.\n\nFortunately, that didn't include her husband, Sam, or Lula-Belle's husband, Murphy, but only because they couldn't keep their eyes open much pass seven p.m. It appeared that the only cure for alcohol was old age.\n\nShe glanced around the room at men in various stages of stupor and was sickened. \"What a crying shame they can't figure out a better use of their time,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I was just thinking the same about us,\" Lula-Belle whispered back.\n\nLittle Jimmy Trotter's father, Harvey, sat in a corner next to a halfempty whiskey bottle. A farmer by trade, he wore a plaid shirt under denim overalls. The same sun that burned his skin dark brown had bleached his hair pale yellow.\n\nBessie shook her head. The man finds out his son has some sort of blood cancer and instead of turning to the Lord he turns to booze.\n\nIt didn't help that Reverend Bland drank himself silly following the death of his little girl. Some men used the preacher's lapse as an excuse to justify their own disgraceful behavior.\n\n\"Okay, now that you dragged me in here, what are you planning to do?\" Lula-Belle asked in a hushed voice.\n\nThat was just it; Bessie didn't have a plan. Never before having stepped foot in a saloon, she hadn't the faintest idea how to convince the owner to close his doors on the eve of the wedding.\n\nShe glanced outside, wondering if they should just leave. Then she saw something that lifted her spirits. That new woman, Molly Hatfield, just walked past the saloon. Now if that wasn't an answer to prayer, nothing was.\n\n\"Stay here.\"\n\nBefore Lula-Belle had a chance to protest, Bessie crawled out from under the table and hurried outside. \"Molly!\"\n\nMolly turned and greeted her with a smile. \"Why, Mrs.\u2014\"\n\n\"Aunt Bessie.\"\n\n\"Aunt Bessie, how nice to see you.\"\n\nLula-Belle came barreling out of the saloon like she was being chased by wolves. \"How dare you take off and leave me in there by myself!\" Upon spotting Molly, she tried to gather her dignity but it was too late.\n\nMolly looked from one to the other. \"You were in the saloon?\"\n\nBessie saw no point in denying it. \"Yes, we were, but it was for a good cause.\" She lowered her voice. \"Since you were once, eh... worked in a saloon... I wonder if you would be kind enough to assist us?\"\n\n\"Yes, of course,\" Molly said, curiosity written all over her face. \"How can I help?\"\n\nBessie quickly explained the problem. \"So you see, if something isn't done, the wedding will be ruined.\"\n\n\"Oh, I hope not,\" Molly said. \"How do you plan to get your singer and piano player to stay sober?\"\n\n\"That's just it,\" Bessie said. \"I don't have a plan. I was hoping you would help us come up with one.\"\n\n\"Have you talked with them and explained...\"\n\n\"That's a great idea. Come with me.\" Aunt Bessie grabbed Molly's arm and practically dragged her to the batwing doors. \"Aren't you coming, Lula-Belle?\"\n\n\"You got Molly, you don't need me.\" Lula-Belle hobbled away, rocking side to side like a child's hobby horse.\n\nBessie led Molly inside and ducked beneath the table, motioning Molly to join her. Molly looked momentarily startled but she nonetheless dropped down on all fours and scrambled beneath the table, earning Bessie's approval.\n\n\"Panhandle is the town piano player and he's due any moment,\" Bessie explained, keeping her voice low. \"He rides into town the same time every day.\"\n\nShe arranged her bulky form until she could clearly see the bar by peering between Hank's legs. She poked Molly with her elbow. \"There he is.\"\n\nMolly, on hands and knees, stared at him.\n\nBessie whispered, \"He can only play when he's sober.\" Right now he was so drunk he couldn't hit the ground with his hat in three tries. \"If Panhandle is here, Winkleman can't be far behind. He agreed to sing at the wedding.\" He and Panhandle were thicker than feathers in a pillow. \"Winkleman has a lovely smooth voice\u2014that is, when he's not three sheets to the wind.\"\n\nPanhandle bow-legged his way across the room, bellied up to the bar, and lifted a shabby boot onto the shiny brass foot rail. Randy Sprocket, the saloon keeper, placed a shot glass on the polished bar and reached for a bottle of whiskey.\n\nMolly moved her head until it practically touched Bessie's. \"Okay, here's what you do.\"\n\nShe whispered her plan. \"Is that clear?\"\n\nBessie nodded. Mercy. The girl wasn't just pretty, she also had a good head on her shoulders. Still, what she proposed was a bit more daring than Bessie was prepared for. \"You have to come with me.\"\n\nMolly nodded. \"Just let me know when you're ready.\"\n\nBessie gathered her wits about her and braced herself with a deep breath. \"Now.\"\n\nShe struggled to her feet like a newborn colt, her creaking bones hollering in protest. In her anxiety to reach the bar, she accidentally knocked Gristle off his chair. Gasping, she dropped by his side. A few blurry-eyed men glanced at her but were too far gone to concern themselves with a woman who may or may not have killed a man.\n\nFrantic, Bessie checked Gristle's pulse and head. Sprawled on the floor he continued to snore away, seeming none the worse for wear.\n\n\"I think he's okay,\" Molly said.\n\nBlowing out her breath, Bessie stood, brushed the sawdust off her skirt, stepped around Gristle, and sauntered over to Panhandle with as much dignity and authority as she could muster. Molly was right behind her and the two of them surrounded the man at the bar like two determined bookends.\n\nA painting of a naked woman hung on the wall behind the bar, looming over the bottles of liquor arranged on a shelf. Averting her eyes, Bessie gave her head a determined toss. She would match her purple gown and carefully applied carmine and complexion powder with the bare-skinned woman in the portrait any day.\n\nMolly signaled with a slight nod of the head that Bessie was to speak first. \"Hello, Panhandle.\"\n\nClearly smitten with Molly, Panhandle managed to pull his gaze away from her long enough to give Bessie a quick glance. \"Bessie.\"\n\nHe was one of the few men in town who didn't bother covering up his pox marks with a beard. He liked to brag that he had as many pox marks on his face as the piano had keys. Bessie suspected that before his face was disfigured by disease he had been a handsome man. Nothing about his appearance suggested he was a piano player, except perhaps his long tapered fingers.\n\nHe downed his whiskey in one quick swallow. He then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. \"Does your\"\u2014he struggled to find the word\u2014\"m-mister know you're here?\" he slurred.\n\nMolly answered his question with a question. \"Does your missus know you're here?\"\n\nHe caught the saloon keeper's attention with a wagging finger and pointed to his empty glass. \"Where... where else would I be?\"\n\n\"Home with your family,\" Bessie said. He had three children but he and his wife had lost two to diphtheria. He hadn't been the same since.\n\nSprocket slung a dirty rag over his shoulder, picked up a halfempty bottle, and filled Panhandle's glass.\n\nPanhandle gulped down his drink and the bartender immediately replenished it. \"That's ex-exactly where you thould be.\"\n\n\"For your information, I have an equal right to be here,\" Bessie said. \"We both do,\" she said, indicating Molly.\n\nPanhandle laughed in her face, squinting through unfocused eyes. \"The only way you're ever gonna get equal rights, Bess, is to thacrifice some.\"\n\n\"I'm not much for sacrificing,\" Bessie admitted.\n\n\"I'm sure that Mr... eh... Panhandle isn't much for sacrifice himself,\" Molly said.\n\nPanhandle turned his head toward Molly. \"What makes you say that?\"\n\n\"A discerning man like yourself would demand only the best,\" Molly explained with a flutter of eyelashes. \"Which is why we're surprised that you would patronize this particular saloon.\"\n\nPanhandle lifted his glass. \"Why wouldn't I? It has the highest p-poker thakes in town.\"\n\nMolly shrugged. \"That's fine if you don't mind drinking watereddown whiskey.\"\n\nPanhandle stared at the amber liquid in his glass, his face turning an alarming shade of red. \"Watered?\"\n\n\"I thought you knew,\" Bessie said, emulating Molly's calm demeanor the best she could by pretending to study a fingernail. Mercy, her heart pounded to beat the band and Molly looked cool as a block of ice. How did she do that?\n\nPanhandle frowned. He then took a sip of his drink, swooshed it around in his mouth, and slammed the glass onto the bar. \"You're right.\"\n\nBessie glanced up at the tin ceiling and feigned a look of childlike innocence. Molly's idea worked! It was amazing how a mere suggestion could sway a man's opinion about almost anything. God forgive her and Molly the lie, but it was for a good cause.\n\nPanhandle pulled away from the bar. \"It's the last thime I thum in here.\" He staggered away without paying.\n\n\"Hey, where you going?\" the saloon keeper called. \"You owe me.\"\n\n\"I don't owe you nothin',\" Panhandle slurred. \"These two ladies here sed you're messin' with the kick. Gonna get me thum good thuff.\"\n\nSprocket slammed the bottle on the counter and glared at Bessie and Molly. \"Why'd you tell him that? This whiskey is pure as gold.\"\n\n\"Fool's gold you mean,\" Molly said, staring him straight in the face.\n\nSprocket got all red and looked guilty as a two-timing husband. Bessie was taken aback. The whiskey was watered down, but how in the world did Molly know that?\n\n\"What do you want?\" Sprocket demanded. \"Money?\"\n\n\"Tell him, Aunt Bessie,\" Molly said.\n\nBessie went to put her foot on the brass foot railing and accidentally turned over a spittoon. Sidestepping the spilled tobacco juice, she leaned on the bar, hands clasped beneath her neatly stacked chins. \"My nephew is getting married next Saturday.\"\n\nThe saloon keeper wiped the bar with a dirty rag, purposely knocking against Bessie's arm. \"You're losing your touch, Bessie. The wedding hasn't yet been declared a national holiday.\"\n\nBessie gave him a closed-mouth smile. \"I'm working on it.\"\n\nSprocket shook his head. \"I think the heat addled your think box.\" He glanced at Molly. \"Yours too.\"\n\nBessie pulled her arms off the bar, all pretenses gone. \"And your whiskey is watered down.\"\n\n\"But it's not too late to make amends,\" Molly added.\n\nHe squinted. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\nMolly leaned forward. \"It means that you will stop cheating your customers and... you will close by three p.m. Friday and stay closed until after Saturday's wedding ceremony.\"\n\nThe saloon keeper's hooked beak practically met Molly's dainty upturned nose. Despite his menacing look, Molly didn't seem the least bit intimidated.\n\n\"Let me get this straight. You want me to lose a whole day's business just because of a blasted wedding?\"\n\n\"You already lost one customer's business,\" Molly said.\n\n\"For your information, I've got expenses to pay. We have more than eight hundred residents in this town. That means the saloon tax is now fifty dollars a quarter\u2014double what it was only a few years ago.\"\n\nBessie had no sympathy for the man. He and the other saloon owners in town had wrecked more families than all the loose women put together.\n\nMolly didn't look sympathetic either. She looked downright determined\u2014Bessie's kind of woman.\n\n\"Men are fussy about their whiskey,\" Molly said, clearly an expert in such matters. \"If they suspect that you're charging full price for watered whiskey, you'll end up closing your doors permanently.\"\n\nTom Mason set his glass on the bar next to Molly with a leer in her direction. He was as tall as he was wide, his legs and arms as round and firm as tree trunks. A known troublemaker, hardly a day went by that the marshal didn't have to lock him up for disturbing the peace. \"What's that you said?\"\n\n\"Don't pay any attention to her,\" Sprocket muttered. \"You can't believe anything an old gossip says.\"\n\n\"It's only gossip if it's not true,\" Bessie argued. She then repeated Molly's claim for Mason's benefit.\n\n\"Why, you\u2014\" Mason grabbed hold of Sprocket's shirt and dragged him over the counter in one swift move.\n\nThis gave the other customers an excuse to rise to their feet and start swinging. Quick as a flash, fists flew every which way. Chairs whizzed across the room. Tables overturned. Cards, chips, and glasses crashed to the floor. A bullet hit the naked woman where no sun should shine and the painting crashed to the floor.\n\nNodding approval at the woman's demise, Bessie ducked and weaved her way around the brawling men, but before she could escape, a man grabbed her.\n\n\"Let me go!\" she yelled, hitting him with her fists.\n\nOut of the corner of her eye she saw Molly climb up on the bar. What in the world? As quickly as it started, the fight ended. It took Bessie a moment to know why. Molly was singing. Not only was she belting out a bawdy drinking song, she was swinging her shapely hips in a way that... well, she was swinging her shapely hips.\n\nThe man holding Bessie became so engrossed he seemed to have forgotten her. She pulled away and he made no move to stop her.\n\nBessie was no expert on dance hall girls, heavens, no! But unless she missed her guess, Molly wasn't half bad and even the saloon keeper looked enamored.\n\nThe men tapped their feet and clapped their hands. When Molly finished singing she let one of the men help her to the floor.\n\nShe stood a chair upright and leaned over the bar. \"Do we have a deal?\" she asked in a loud husky voice.\n\nThe saloon keeper waved his dirty rag in surrender. \"Okay, okay, you win. I'll close Friday at six.\"\n\n\"Three,\" Molly said.\n\n\"Five.\"\n\nThey settled on four.\n\nBessie couldn't believe it. \"We did it,\" she all but crowed after leaving the saloon. She lifted her hand in the air and Molly's hand touched hers with a resounding clap.\n\n\"We were lucky.\" Molly brushed the sawdust off her skirt. \"But we could have gotten ourselves killed.\"\n\n\"Yes, but it was for a good cause.\" Bessie started down the boardwalk just as the marshal came running up the street\u2014late to the party as usual. \"Come along, Molly.\"\n\nMolly hurried to catch up to her. \"Where are we going?\"\n\n\"Where do you think?\" Bessie replied. She couldn't resist sashaying Molly-style as she ambled along the boardwalk. \"To the Golden Eagle Saloon. I'm not about to let one little bar fight stop me. Get ready to sing and, eh... swing those hips.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\nMolly didn't want to go to the wedding. She didn't even know the \"happy couple,\" as everyone referred to them. She'd never met the groom and had caught a glimpse of the bride for only a brief moment.\n\nBut it wasn't just the wedding, it was the church. Just the memory of being forced to stand outside during her father's funeral filled her with rage. And the few times she'd stepped foot in the Cactus Patch church confirmed her opinion: churchgoers were a bunch of hypocrites! Sorry, God, but it's true.\n\nThere were exceptions, of course, Aunt Bessie being one. But even her friendly smile couldn't make up for all the judgmental glares from other worshippers. Still, she had no intention of letting Aunt Bessie down, not after their mutual escapades and knowing how much the wedding meant to her.\n\nNever had Molly seen so much fuss over a wedding. The way the ranch hands talked about the nuptials was unnatural. If a miner ever went to a wedding, he was either the groom or dragged there at gunpoint\u2014sometimes both. It struck her as odd that the ranch hands looked forward to the event and couldn't stop talking about the bride-to-be.\n\n\"That Kate was really somethin',\" Ruckus said. \"I never saw anyone have so much trouble stayin' on a horse.\"\n\nHe wasn't the only one enamored with the woman named Kate. Stretch told about the time she read them a novel. \"A love story,\" he said, without embarrassment. \"And she writ every word herself.\"\n\nEven Wishbone got into the act. \"Remember the time she climbed the windmill?\"\n\n\"And the time she was chased by a javelina,\" one of the other ranch hands added.\n\nMolly was tired of all the talk about the wonderful, divine Kate. \"Why isn't Miss Walker going to the wedding?\"\n\nRuckus shook his head. \"I don't think the boss lady will ever forgive her for givin' up the ranch for marriage.\"\n\n\"She doesn't have to worry about me runnin' off and marrying.\" Since singing at the Cactus Patch saloons, she'd worked even harder to learn ranching and could now ride and rope with the best of them. She didn't want to go back to being a dance hall girl\u2014she couldn't. All those leering men. All those horrible drunks. She shuddered. It was the ranch or nothing. Had to be.\n\nNothing could stop her now. Not even her silly schoolgirl crush on the handsome and charming Caleb Fairbanks." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Ruckus insisted that he and his wife, Sylvia, drive her and Donny to the church. She debated on what to wear and settled on her yellow dress with puffed sleeves. The modest neckline made up for the bright\u2014 some might even say bold\u2014color. People would stare. They always did, but it was better they stare at her than Donny. Protecting her brother was all that mattered. It was uppermost in her mind practically every waking moment.\n\nDonny wore his dark pants and white shirt and a tie made from rattlesnake skin that Ruckus loaned him.\n\nPeople were milling outside the church when they arrived, greeting friends and sharing news. All talk stopped when Molly stepped down from the buckboard. She didn't recognize any of the men staring at her, but they certainly seemed to know her. A few men winked and tried to talk to her but were yanked back by glaring wives. Molly glared back. If it hadn't been for her and Aunt Bessie, most of these men would have been in no condition to attend the wedding. This was the thanks she got.\n\nCactus Patch churchgoers were every bit as narrow-minded as they had been back home in Dobson Creek and she wanted no part of them.\n\nSeething, Molly held her head high and walked past the crowd, drawing attention away from her brother with an ease that only came with practice. Her feigned poise deserted her the moment she spotted Caleb.\n\nHeart skipping a beat, she met his gaze with a hesitant look, the last encounter in his office a sword hanging over their heads. Had he heard how she and Aunt Bessie forced the saloons to close down? Not that it mattered. Of course it didn't.\n\nHe tipped his hat politely, keeping his thoughts hidden behind hooded eyes. She walked by him with a slight nod that belied her churning emotions.\n\nA short while later she tossed a glance over her shoulder to find him still watching her. Cheeks flaring, she quickly followed Ruckus and the wheelchair into the vestibule." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Bessie had arrived at the church early that day. There was little left to do except rearrange a basket of flowers, straighten a bow, and drape a satin ribbon over the piano. The church had never looked so lovely. Dressed to the nines in her very best green taffeta frock, face deftly painted, she bustled up the aisle in a swish of swirling, rustling skirts.\n\nThe door flew open and her sister rushed into the chapel like a hen chased by a fox, feathers and tightly wound curls all aflutter. \"Bessie, you won't believe the news. Mr. Winkleman is dead!\"\n\nBessie gasped. \"Are you sure?\"\n\nLula-Belle gave an indignant nod. \"Of course I'm sure. Heard it with my own two ears.\"\n\n\"But that's not possible,\" Bessie wailed. \"I just talked to him yesterday. Told him what I wanted him to sing.\"\n\n\"From what I hear, dying doesn't take all that long,\" Lula-Belle said in a hushed voice. \"You can do it in less than a day. An hour if necessary.\"\n\nWinkleman dead? It was shocking but not all that surprising. Something about weddings gave him cold feet. He'd left a bride at the altar not once but twice, but never did Bessie imagine he would go to such extremes to avoid a wedding not his own.\n\nHer husband, Sam, opened the door just wide enough to stick his head through. \"Are we ready?\" he asked.\n\n\"Not yet,\" Bessie said, waving him away. She spun around to face her sister. \"How did he die?\"\n\n\"According to Mr. Green, Mr. Winkleman died of sobriety.\" Lula-Belle spoke in a hushed voice, one generally saved for funerals, hangovers, and sleeping babies.\n\n\"That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. How is it possible for a man to die from not drinking?\"\n\n\"Mr. Green said that sobriety was hard on the heart and even harder on the family.\"\n\nBessie made a face. \"So is planning a wedding, but you don't see me kicking the bucket.\"\n\nLula-Belle's brow creased like a folded fan. \"Mr. Green blames you for insisting the saloons close last night.\"\n\n\"Mr. Green blames me for Governor Hughes's removal.\" Just because she supported the governor's prohibition stance was no reason to think she had anything to do with his political troubles.\n\nDetermined not to let Winkleman's demise ruin the wedding, Bessie paced back and forth. \"We'll just have to do the best we can without him. As long as we still have a piano player...\"\n\n\"Eh.\"\n\nBessie stopped pacing. \"Go on, get it out. What is it?\"\n\n\"Mr. Green isn't the only one to blame you for Mr. Winkleman's death. Panhandle does too.\"\n\nBessie made a face. \"I don't care who he blames as long as he plays the piano.\"\n\nLula-Belle threw up her hands. \"That's just it. He refuses to attend the wedding. That leaves you without a piano player or a singer.\"\n\nBessie pressed a palm on her forehead. \"Wait till I get my hands on Panhandle. Just wait!\"\n\nSam peeked around the open door and again she waved him away. She traced a path up and down the aisle of the still-empty church, wringing her hands and bemoaning her misfortune. Sam's voice could be heard placating impatient guests.\n\nWhat a fine kettle of fish! What did she ever do to deserve this? No wedding could proceed without music. Why, oh why, didn't things ever work out as planned?\n\n\"What about Mr. Washington?\"\n\n\"He went to Flagstaff on business.\" Lula-Belle stared at the oak door, her eyes wide with dismay. \"What are you going to do?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I'm thinking. I'm thinking.\"\n\nLula-Belle straightened her outlandish feathered hat. \"Well, think faster. The guests are growing restless.\"\n\nBessie suddenly brightened. \"Molly!\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Molly sings.\"\n\nLula-Belle looked horrified. \"The dance hall girl?\"\n\n\"If you can sing in a saloon, you can sing anywhere.\" She started up the aisle. \"Close your mouth and come along.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nThe moment the church doors flew open, guests streamed inside the sanctuary, pushing past Donny's wheelchair as if it didn't exist.\n\n\"Watch where you're going!\" Molly snapped. \"Of all the rude\u2014\" It nearby broke her heart to see her brother treated like a piece of furniture.\n\nAfter everyone else had entered the church and the way was clear, Ruckus pushed Donny's wheelchair inside. Molly followed behind, aware that all eyes were on her.\n\nThe church was crowded with practically every seat taken, but Ruckus located an empty pew in back with room for the wheelchair. It was hot and Ruckus's wife handed Molly a fan, which helped a little. After getting Donny settled, Ruckus left to escort the bride down the aisle.\n\nCaleb sat several rows in front, his broad shoulders practically touching the guests seated on either side of him, and it was all Molly could do to keep from staring at him.\n\nJust then Aunt Bessie burst through the door and ran up the aisle, her face so flushed it looked like a bad case of sunburn. Her bright green dress was better suited for a woman half her age and made her generous figure look even more rounded. Her gaze traveled from pew to pew, hat to hat, stopping when it got to Molly. She then threaded her way along one row of seated guests to Molly's side.\n\n\"I need your help,\" she whispered. \"I need you to sing.\"\n\nMolly wouldn't have been more surprised had she been asked to stand in for the preacher. \"But... I don't know any... wedding songs.\" She didn't even know any Christian songs for that matter.\n\n\"That's all right. Just sing something romantic,\" Aunt Bessie said. \"But don't wiggle your hips.\"\n\n\"But... but...\"\n\nBessie looked around. \"You don't by chance play the piano, do you?\"\n\n\"No, I'm sorry\u2014\"\n\n\"I do,\" Donny said, raising his hand shoulder high.\n\n\"Shh,\" Molly cautioned but already too late.\n\nAunt Bessie practically danced with joy.\n\nMolly shot Donny a warning glance before quickly trying to save them both from embarrassment. \"He can't read music. He can only play a few songs by ear.\" None of which were appropriate for a wedding.\n\n\"That's quite all right,\" Aunt Bessie assured her. \"Beggars can't be choosers, can they?\" She gave a thin little laugh before growing serious. \"You're an answer to my prayers. Both you and your brother. Come, come.\"\n\nAunt Bessie hurried away and stood in front of the altar. She clapped her hands to get everyone's attention. \"As you may know, Mr. Winkleman is no longer with us. May God bless his soul. And our piano player... is indisposed.\"\n\nAn uncharitable female voice floated up from the back of the church. \"Hammered, more like it.\"\n\n\"I say we should close all saloons permanently,\" another woman stated.\n\nA loud murmur concurred. Things were clearly out of control and Molly felt sorry for Aunt Bessie.\n\nBessie lifted her voice to be heard over the clamoring crowd. \"Please, we'll talk about that later. Right now we have a wedding to think about, and Miss Hatfield and her brother have graciously volunteered to help out.\"\n\nNo sooner had Aunt Bessie made the announcement than all eyes turned in Molly's direction. One woman looked appalled and another glared at her grinning husband.\n\nAunt Bessie moved the piano stool to make room for Donny's wheelchair. \"Come, come. Don't be shy. We're already late getting started.\"\n\nMolly's heart fluttered and she felt a sinking feeling inside. She was hardly the answer to anyone's prayer. But since Stretch had already wheeled Donny to the piano, nothing could be done but to make the best of things.\n\nMolly walked up the aisle and took her place by Donny's side, flushing from the weight of a hundred gazes. She felt out of place. Singing in front of a bunch of intoxicated miners was one thing; singing to a staid and sober group of churchgoers was entirely something else.\n\nShe leaned over the piano. \"I wish you hadn't volunteered!\" she whispered.\n\nDonny looked confused. \"I didn't want you singing by yourself,\" he whispered back.\n\nMolly felt a tug inside and her anger melted away. Her brother had been trying to protect her.\n\nAunt Bessie lifted her hand, indicating it was time to begin. \"We're ready,\" she called, her voice shrill with excitement.\n\nMolly's brain raced. Donny didn't know how to read music so the hymnal on the piano stand was of no use. Unfortunately, his limited range ruled out anything resembling appropriate wedding or church music. The least offensive song he knew, perhaps, was \"John Brown's Body.\" Why, oh why, hadn't she paid more attention to his musical education?\n\nPanic rose inside. \"I don't know what to sing,\" she said beneath her breath.\n\n\"How about this?\" He played several notes and Molly's knees practically buckled. \"Not that one!\"\n\nHe continued to play the prelude. \"That's my favorite,\" he argued. \"And everyone loves the way you sing it.\"\n\nHe was right: it was her most requested song, but it was never meant to be sung in church.\n\nForcing a smile for the benefit of the wedding guests, she stood by the piano, her mind scrambling. What's another word for drink?\n\nShe opened her mouth to sing, \"Think, think, think...\" The piano was almost as out of tune as the one she sang to nightly at Big Jim's.\n\n\"Old Ben Harrington could do nothing but think...\"\n\nAunt Bessie looked confused, as did some of the female wedding guests. No doubt they wondered why thinking caused Ben to stumble and fall. Most of the men, however, recognized the ditty and some even laughed out loud, much to the annoyance of the women by their sides.\n\nDonny played with great gusto, his fingers rippling over the yellow keys as easily as leaves blowing in the wind. He hit plenty of wrong notes, but since the piano was out of tune anyway, it didn't much matter.\n\nShe sang all four painful stanzas, substituting any word that might be deemed offensive. \"So he threw out his frisky pug,\" she sang, instead of whiskey jug. \"And old Ben Harrington never thank again.\" Thought; she meant to say that he never thought again.\n\nAfter Molly finished the song, an uneasy silence filled the church. Aunt Bessie's smile was forced. Even the feathers on Aunt Lula-Belle's hat were frozen in place.\n\nFinally someone clapped, the hollow sound of palm against palm bouncing off the rafters. It took Molly a moment to determine her appreciative audience of one was Caleb. A warm flush crept up her neck. Others followed his lead, though the male guests were remarkably more enthusiastic than the women.\n\nReverend Bland, who had been standing by the wall, coughed and took his place in front of the altar. He looked remarkably different than the last time Molly had seen him. His pants were neatly pressed, as was his frock coat. One would never guess by appearances that he'd been any less than a respectable preacher.\n\nHe was followed to the altar by a nice-looking man in a dark suit who was obviously the groom. The preacher stared at Molly for a moment before turning his gaze to the back of the church.\n\nAunt Bessie signaled with a nod of her head that it was time for the bride to make her appearance.\n\n\"Play 'Poker, Whiskey, and Women,'\" Molly whispered. It was another drinking song but at least it was a march. She only hoped no one recognized the tune. As soon as Donny started playing, the guests rose and faced the back. The door flew open and Kate Tenney, looking absolutely radiant in a simple ivory gown, walked down the aisle with Ruckus by her side, her steps in perfect sync to the drinking song.\n\nThe bride's fitted bodice gave way to delicately puffed sleeves. The skirt flared from the waist to the hem. Her blond hair was brushed away from her face, falling down her back in a cluster of curls secured by a silk tulle veil decorated with white ribbon bows.\n\nShe took her place by her handsome groom, greeting him with a beautiful smile so filled with love it gave Molly goose bumps. She recalled seeing her parents exchange a similar look, and though she'd been too young at the time to know what it meant, she'd never forgotten. But that was before Donny's accident, before her family was ripped apart.\n\nThe bride and groom turned to face the preacher.\n\n\"Dearly beloved...\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "After the vows were exchanged, guests streamed outside to another tinny encore of \"Poker, Whiskey, and Women.\" When the church was nearly empty, Molly leaned toward her brother.\n\n\"I hope you're satisfied. Now we're the laughingstocks of Cactus Patch.\"\n\nDonny's puzzled expression looked genuine. \"Everyone looked so hot and miserable before the wedding. I thought it would make them laugh. It would have, too, if you hadn't changed the words. It didn't make any sense the way you sang it.\"\n\n\"This is a church and\u2014\"\n\n\"Ben Harrington was a thinker, eh?\"\n\nShe whirled at the sound of a male voice to find Caleb behind her, a gleam of humor in his eyes. She should have known that he wouldn't let the song pass without comment.\n\n\"My brother knows only a limited number of songs,\" she said stiffly.\n\n\"Ah, but he plays them so well.\" He gazed at Donny. \"You didn't tell me you could play the piano.\" He swung his gaze back to her. \"Music talent runs in the family.\"\n\nTo hide her reddening cheeks, she moved toward Donny.\n\n\"Allow me,\" Caleb said. He gripped the handlebar on the back of the wheelchair, pulled it away from the piano, and pushed it up the aisle.\n\n\"I must say, you two know how to make a solemn occasion... interesting. I don't think I ever enjoyed a wedding more.\"\n\nShe fell in step by his side and glanced at him askew. As far as she could tell, he wasn't just being nice; he meant what he said. \"I hope Aunt Bessie wasn't upset.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"The only thing she cares about is adding a new notch to her matchmaking belt.\"\n\nRuckus and his wife stood in line outside the church, waiting to wish the bride and groom well. One woman stepped out of the church and walked a wide circle to avoid Molly. She gave Donny a pitying glance but he didn't seem to notice. He was too busy plying Caleb with questions.\n\n\"Do you know how many parts there are in a piano?\"\n\n\"I haven't the slightest idea,\" Caleb said, his humor-filled eyes on Molly.\n\n\"More than twelve hundred. And do you know a piano's real name?\"\n\n\"Pianoforte,\" Caleb said, and both he and Donny laughed as if sharing some sort of private joke. How did Caleb do that? How did he always manage to make Donny laugh?\n\nAunt Bessie bustled over to them, her sister, Lula-Belle, padding behind like a faithful dog. \"Thank you for saving the day,\" Aunt Bessie said graciously. \"I don't think I've heard such a... uh, lively tune played on that old piano.\"\n\n\"If it was a funeral it would have awakened the dead,\" Lula-Belle muttered.\n\n\"It's the first time I've been in church when everyone was wide awake,\" Bessie said, glowering at her sister. She patted Molly on the arm. \"And it wasn't only because the guests were sober. You really do have a lovely voice, dear. Everyone enjoyed hearing you sing.\"\n\n\"Especially the men,\" Lula-Belle added, the outlandish feathers on her hat seeming to vibrate with disapproval.\n\nBessie frowned at her sister and pulled Molly aside. \"How do I look?\" She waved her hand in front of her painted face.\n\n\"You look beautiful.\"\n\nAunt Bessie looked pleased. \"Isn't it amazing how a little paint can make a woman look so natural?\"\n\nMolly laughed and the two sisters tottered off to greet the other guests just as Ruckus wandered over.\n\n\"Are you ready to go?\" he asked. \"Bessie has planned cake and punch back at her house, and I thought we could get an early start before the stampede.\"\n\nAware that Caleb was watching her, Molly hesitated. A man started toward her but his wife jerked him away. She was used to being treated as an outcast, but for some reason it hurt more here in Cactus Patch than it ever did in Dobson Creek. She wanted to go back to the ranch in the worst possible way, but it hardly seemed fair to Ruckus and his wife to spoil their fun.\n\nCaleb stepped forward. \"Why don't you go on ahead? Molly wishes to return to the ranch and I'll be happy to drive her and her brother there.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. She didn't know what she resented more: Caleb's ability to read her thoughts or the way he took charge.\n\nCaleb met her startled gaze with a look of satisfaction. \"Thanks to last night's closing of saloons, the fine citizens of our town seem to be experiencing a streak of good health. If this keeps up I'll be able to work with Donny both today and tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Tomorrow?\" she asked with innocent sweetness. \"You plan to work on the Sabbath?\"\n\n\"I believe God makes allowances for doctors,\" he said without missing a beat.\n\nRuckus looked from Caleb to Molly as if sensing the undercurrents that flowed between them. \"Are you sure you want to miss the party?\"\n\n\"It's for the best,\" she said, meeting Caleb's amused smile with a frown.\n\n\"Very well.\" Ruckus turned to his wife. \"Come along, my dear.\" Ruckus and Sylvia headed for their buckboard and other guests followed suit.\n\n\"Thank you for giving me an excuse to avoid the reception,\" Caleb said with a slight bow. He walked behind Donny and pushed the chair down the church path. \"I was never one for parties. I only came to the wedding because Aunt Bessie insisted.\"\n\nMolly fell in step by Caleb's side. \"Glad to be of help,\" she said for Donny's benefit. Beneath her breath she added, \"How dare you make decisions for me.\"\n\n\"Are you saying you wanted to go to the reception?\" he asked.\n\n\"That's not the point and you know it. Furthermore, you're not working with Donny.\"\n\n\"I believe he has something to say about that,\" he whispered back.\n\n\"I'm his sister!\"\n\n\"And I'm the only doctor in town. That makes me his doctor. But of course, you'll have to give me full rein. That's my one and only condition.\"\n\n\"I have no intention\u2014\"\n\n\"Do we get to ride in Bertha?\" Donny asked, seeming oblivious to the argument raging behind him.\n\nCaleb gave her a knowing smile. \"Bertha it is. Unless your sister objects.\"\n\nHe put her on the spot and he knew it. \"What exactly do you mean by full rein?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"I knew you'd see the light.\"\n\n\"I never said\u2014\"\n\nBefore she could finish her denial, he bolted ahead, the wheelchair rattling and bouncing and Donny laughing all the way.\n\nMolly watched with conflicting emotions. She wasn't one to give in, especially on matters that concerned her brother, but something told her that this was one fight she couldn't win. And maybe, oddly enough, she didn't even want to try." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Molly stood outside her brother's bedroom door, hands clenched. Donny's frustrated protests coming from within made her want to scream.\n\nSeveral times she raised her hand to knock and put a stop to the session. Each time she decided against it. Before starting the session Caleb had made her promise to give him full rein and not interfere, but it was harder than she thought.\n\n\"I'm not doing that!\" Donny yelled. \"I can't.\"\n\nCaleb's voice remained calm and patient. \"Can't or won't?\"\n\nShe couldn't make out what Donny said next and the silence that followed was almost as unbearable as the protests.\n\nSomething hit the door with a thud and she jumped back. The door flew open and Caleb stared at her a moment before brushing past her.\n\n\"Donny?\" she whispered, rushing into the room. \"What's going on? What's the matter?\"\n\nDonny refused to look at her. \"Go away.\"\n\n\"Donny, talk to me. Tell me what happened.\"\n\n\"I said go away!\"\n\nShe left the room to chase after Caleb, but she reached the road just in time to see the tail end of his auto disappear in a cloud of dust." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nMolly circled the corral astride a horse named Midnight under Brodie's watchful eye. Midnight was a black horse with a star-shaped white spot on his forehead and had one white leg.\n\nShe tried to ignore Caleb's vehicle parked in front of the ranch house. It had been nearly a week since Caleb stormed out of the house. She never thought to see him again but she was wrong. He was back the very next day and every day since, schedule permitting. He had even driven her and Donny to church Sunday.\n\nShe didn't ask for Donny's progress report, and neither Caleb nor Donny volunteered one. It was better that way. Avoiding the subject meant less chance of half-truths leading to false hope.\n\nStill, she watched for signs of improvement. She couldn't help herself. Did Donny seem stronger or was that wishful thinking? Did he seem happier, more content, less given to mood swings?\n\nBrodie's voice was like a knife cutting through her thoughts. \"Keep the circle small. Don't let him pivot.\"\n\nHow to turn was one of the first lessons a horse had to learn. Another important lesson was how to back up correctly.\n\nThe horse's natural inclination was to turn to the left and Molly had to train him to turn to the right.\n\n\"Watch his head,\" Brodie called. The horse's head had to be tilted with the nose slightly to the outside. \"Keep the reins low.\"\n\nMolly rode the horse at an easy pace, alternating between a slow trot and walk until Midnight turned smoothly with little prodding.\n\n\"Not bad,\" Brodie said as she dismounted. \"Not bad at all. Never thought I'd live to say this, but you have a way with horses.\"\n\nThe unexpected compliment made her smile. \"I have a good teacher,\" she said.\n\nBrodie ran a hand along the horse's neck. \"Too bad you're so distracted. If Miss Walker is crazy enough to make you her heiress, you better figure out what to do about your brother. You can't take care of him and run a ranch.\"\n\nUnable to deny the truth of Brodie's statement, she said nothing.\n\nBrodie grabbed hold of Midnight's reins. \"I think he's had enough for today. Tomorrow we'll teach him how to back up.\"\n\nBrodie led the horse away and she leaned her back against the fence, elbows resting on the top slat. In the distance the red tile roof of the ranch house glistened in the hot afternoon sun. Yellow rays glanced off Caleb's motor buggy. Caleb had not left yet. That had to be a good sign. If Caleb succeeded in doing what he said he would do, life would be so much easier. But that was a very big if.\n\nPushing her thoughts away, she walked to the fence to watch Orbit and Magic play. The two friends never failed to make her smile. Today Orbit came bounding toward her even before she had a chance to sing, Magic nipping at his heels." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Donny sat in his chair gasping for air. He hadn't been able to crawl to his chair or anywhere close to it, but he had made progress.\n\n\"I moved,\" he gasped.\n\nDoc Fairbanks nodded. \"Yes, you did.\"\n\nIt took Donny several moments to catch his breath. \"You promised to take me to Flagstaff.\"\n\nThe doctor shook his head. \"You're not ready yet. It took you forty minutes to move a couple of inches. You gotta do better than that. You also have to learn to dress yourself and manage the privy. When we travel to Flagstaff, I'm not waiting on you.\"\n\n\"I don't want you waiting on me.\" Donny folded his arms across his chest. There was no pleasing the man. \"Tomorrow I'll move a foot, maybe even farther.\"\n\n\"A foot won't get you in the chair.\"\n\n\"A foot is as good as a mile when you're a\u2014\"\n\nDoc raised a dark eyebrow and waited.\n\nDonny bit his lip to stifle a grin. \"You thought I was going to say cripple, didn't you?\"\n\n\"Were you?\"\n\n\"What I was about to say is when you're under the thumb of a slave-driving, ninny-hammering, know-it-all doctor!\"\n\nDoc Fairbanks thought for a moment, then shrugged. \"I can't say that's a better choice of words, but it will do. For now.\" He tossed a nod at the door. \"How about some fresh air? It'll help you breathe better. It might even improve your disposition.\"\n\n\"Fresh air is your remedy for everything.\" The doc hardly ever walked into a room without flinging open a window.\n\n\"Fresh air and sunshine are God's greatest healing gifts.\" Without waiting for an answer Fairbanks pushed him through the house and outside, settling him in a shady spot on the verandah. \"See you tomorrow.\"\n\n\"Don't remind me,\" Donny said, though secretly he looked forward to it. The doctor made him work hard but Donny liked him. Liked him a lot. He liked the company and the way the doc treated him like a real person. He even liked stumping Fairbanks with questions. The doctor knew a lot about science and the human body, but he didn't know much about astronomy or cattle.\n\nHe watched Caleb walk to his car. He admired the way the doc carried himself, his shoulders back and head held high, his easy stride. That's how Donny would walk if he could. Even now, he straightened his back and held his head aloft to imitate the doctor.\n\nYou could tell a lot by the way people walked. Some people judged others by their profession or how they dressed, but Donny judged people by the way they walked. Miss Walker didn't walk as much as march, her boots hammering the floor like a carpenter with a stubborn nail. Rosita scurried around like a scared little mouse. Stretch bopped his head back and forth like a long-necked bird, and Feedbag's feet splayed out at ninety-degree angles.\n\nMolly didn't walk as much as glide. Or at least she did when she wasn't worried about him. Then she walked as if she carried a weight on her shoulders. She tried to hide it, but he wasn't fooled. He knew he was a burden.\n\nShe didn't look like she was carrying a load now. The moment she spotted the doctor she waved, her feet barely touching the ground as she hurried toward Bertha, a bright smile on her face. Donny almost expected her to jump in the air like Orbit.\n\nWatching her, he frowned. It didn't look like his sister but it was. No mistaking that. But why did she look so different?\n\nDoc Fairbanks turned to face her and the two talked. Donny couldn't make out what they said, but something in the way they stood and looked at each other caught his attention. It was as if some invisible thread bound them together with a single knot.\n\nSquinting, Donny leaned forward for a better look. The doc and his sister laughed and there was something... but what?\n\nIt took him a moment to figure it out. Caleb liked his sister and she liked him back. Donny gripped the arms of his chair. Why had it taken him so long to see what was as clear as the nose on his face? Now he knew why the doctor worked him so hard. The sooner Donny became independent, the sooner the doc could steal Molly away.\n\nA cold sweat broke out on Donny's forehead. He swallowed hard but already his breathing had become labored. A doctor in Dobson Creek had advised Molly to put him in an institution. For weeks Donny had nightmares about such a place. Even now, his body grew cold just thinking about it. Molly promised him she would never put him away, but what if she fell in love and got married? What then?\n\nHe mustn't let that happen. He mustn't let anyone take his sister away. Not even the funny and kind Doc Fairbanks." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Molly led Caleb to the far corral and called to Orbit. Both Orbit and Magic came running. Caleb talked soothingly to the young horse and petted him gently before taking his head in both hands. He studied first one eye and then the other. Magic watched with every bit of anxiety that Molly felt.\n\n\"What do you think? Is it moon blindness?\" She'd heard of the disease but had no real knowledge of what it was.\n\nAfter a moment Caleb released the horse. \"It's not moon sickness,\" he said. \"And it's not cataracts. It looks like both retinas are detached.\"\n\n\"Can anything be done?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'm afraid not. It's a congenital problem.\" He gave her a look of apology. \"I'm sorry, Molly. I wish I had better news for you.\"\n\n\"I wish you did too.\"\n\nMagic barked and Caleb lifted him over the fence. The horse and dog chased each other around the corral. No one would ever guess by appearances alone that the little fellow lived in a world of darkness.\n\nShe rested her folded hands on the fence. \"Is he in any pain?\"\n\n\"No, he's not.\"\n\nRelief washed over her. She couldn't stand to think Orbit was hurting in any way. \"What's going to happen to him?\"\n\nCaleb turned to face her, his back to the fence, his dark brows slanted. \"It's hard to say. I guess it will depend on Miss Walker.\"\n\nThat's exactly what Molly feared. The ranch woman wasn't about to keep a horse that didn't earn its keep and Orbit couldn't survive in the wild. A shiver ran through her and Caleb touched her arm.\n\n\"Are you okay?\"\n\nShe nodded, her skin tingling beneath his hand. \"I... I better let you get back to town.\"\n\nHe released her arm but the warmth of his touch remained. \"I'm sorry I can't do more.\"\n\nShe smiled up at him and his gaze held hers. \"You're doing enough already.\" When he made no reply, she added, \"Thank you.\"\n\nHe gave her a smile that sent her pulse racing. \"Donny did good today. We're making progress.\"\n\n\"You aren't just saying that, are you? So I won't worry?\"\n\n\"I'm not just saying it. I swear.\"\n\nShe chewed on her lip. \"He still needs a great deal of help.\"\n\n\"Be patient,\" he said. \"Miracles take awhile.\"\n\nShe sighed. Her father always said that everything happened in God's time. What about her time? Why couldn't things happen faster? Why did she always have to wait?\n\n\"I would feel better if you'd let me pay you for your efforts.\" At least if she paid him she would have some control. If nothing else she would have more say in the matter. \"I can't afford much, but I do draw a small salary from Miss Walker.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I don't want your money.\"\n\n\"Why not? What do you get out of this? Coming here day after day.\" Surely he had better things to do, other patients requiring care.\n\n\"When I was in medical school I met many war veterans in wheelchairs from both the North and South. Most had spent their lives in institutions or soldiers' homes. I remember one man in particular. His name was Ben Watson. He was a brilliant man, a mathematician, forced to spend a lifetime in a crowded soldiers' home, his mind wasted. By the time I met Mr. Watson it was too late to do anything for him, but it's not too late for Donny.\"\n\nShe sucked in her breath, wishing she could believe what he said was true.\n\n\"I better get back to town,\" he said.\n\nShe nodded, though she hated to see him go.\n\nHe whistled and Magic came running. He reached for the dog, lifting him over the fence and onto the ground. By the time she and Caleb reached the car, Magic was already in the front seat. The dog's ability to climb into the high-framed vehicle by himself never failed to amaze her.\n\nMolly stepped back while Caleb cranked. The car roared to life, shaking like dice in a gambler's hand.\n\nHe heaved himself into the driver's seat. \"Molly, don't worry,\" he said, lifting his voice to be heard. \"A man walks in many ways. Your brother hasn't yet found his way of walking but he will.\"\n\nMolly watched him drive away. Please, God, let him be right. Please help my brother find his way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Eleanor stood by the fence watching Molly teach a horse to back. It wasn't something horses liked to do, but this one followed Molly's commands without hesitation.\n\n\"Back,\" Molly called, popping the horse on the chest with a rope. She backed the horse through a muddy puddle, all the way to the fence.\n\nBrodie stood next to Eleanor. \"She's good. She started out bad but caught on real quick. Has a real knack with the horses, she does.\"\n\nEleanor was well aware of the girl's natural abilities, but running a ranch required more than simply having a way with horses. \"I need someone who can devote herself fully to the ranch. She can't do that and care for her brother.\"\n\n\"I worry about that too. But she's determined. I'll give her that much.\"\n\nDetermination was good but it only went so far. If she hadn't felt so sorry for the girl and her brother, Eleanor would have sent them packing long ago.\n\nShe grimaced at the thought. It wasn't like her to feel sorry for anyone\u2014not where the ranch was concerned. Could this new softer side be yet another symptom of advancing age?\n\n\"Determination never ran a ranch,\" she said, her voice curt. Where the ranch was concerned, divided loyalties never worked. It was all or nothing.\n\n\"No, ma'am, I reckon not.\"\n\nA thriving ranch was living proof that choices made in the past\u2014 some of them painful and demanding great personal sacrifice\u2014had been worth every drop of blood and sweat shed through the years. The ranch gave her life meaning. Without it, all would be for naught... her life an utter waste.\n\nEleanor spun around and walked away. Molly was the eighth woman to answer her advertisement for an heiress\u2014or was it the ninth? Surely there had to be someone out there who could take over the ranch should\u2014heaven forbid\u2014something happen to her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Caleb blinked and rubbed his forehead. It was late, almost midnight. Medical books were piled high on his desk. He'd spent the last several hours skimming through the thick tomes searching for information on leukemia.\n\nMagic, curled on the floor in front of the desk, looked up from time to time as if to say, Hey, it's past my bedtime. Getting no response, the dog laid his head down on crossed paws and watched Caleb with soulful eyes.\n\nCaleb ran his finger down the page. Europeans named it \"weisses blut.\" White blood. No known cure existed for the disease.\n\nA combination of arsenic trioxide and potassium bicarbonate, called \"Fowler's Solution,\" brought red blood count back to normal, but it was only a temporary reprieve. Once treatment stopped, the white blood count soared again. Long-term use of the drug led to arsenic poisoning. In this case the cure, however temporary, really was worse than the disease.\n\nHeart heavy, he turned off the gas lamp. Tomorrow he would send a telegraph to his professor in Boston and ask for the latest research on the disease.\n\nHis old mentor often said that God heals but doctors get the credit. Caleb had seen his share of miracles. Every doctor honest enough to admit it had seen miraculous cures. But it was the nonmiracles that puzzled him, when God chose not to intervene. Those were the times that made him question his ability as a doctor and as a man of faith.\n\nMagic padded after him through the waiting room and outside. The cool night air barely penetrated Caleb's dark mood.\n\nBanjo music drifted down Main from one of the saloons. Raucous laughter rolled out of another. Despite Aunt Bessie's best efforts, saloon owners refused to stay closed on Sundays and still sold alcohol to youths.\n\nSeveral drunks staggered along the boardwalk singing a tuneless song. Earlier, gunfire had sent the marshal racing to the far end of town.\n\nA woman Caleb recognized as the barber's wife waltzed into a saloon and reappeared moments later, dragging her husband out by the ear.\n\nA drunk lay on the boardwalk, snoring soundly and reeking of whiskey.\n\nCaleb wasn't a drinking man, but at the moment he envied the man his oblivion." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nDonny fed Orbit a fresh garden carrot. Earlier Molly had tied Orbit to the verandah railing so that Donny could talk to him, and the little black horse was good company.\n\n\"You like that, eh?\"\n\nThe horse's head bobbed up and down. He then poked his nose around looking for more.\n\n\"That's enough for you today.\"\n\nDonny ran his hand along the horse's neck and sighed. The horse's future was in as much jeopardy as his own. He could still picture his sister and Doc together, the way they laughed and looked at each other. The way his sister fairly danced when she walked.\n\nIt scared him. It scared him so much he could hardly breathe. If she married, she would put him away and he would never see her again. He'd rather die than live in an asylum and lose the only family he had left.\n\nBut what could he do about it? Stop working with the doctor? He hated the idea of not seeing Doc Fairbanks. He looked forward to their sessions. The doctor made him work hard, but already Donny felt the difference in his arms and shoulders.\n\nStill, he loved Molly more than anything else in the world. He had no choice. He must stop the doctor from coming to the ranch or risk losing her.\n\nDonny rehearsed what to say and how to say it. He didn't want to hurt the doctor's feelings or seem ungrateful.\n\nThe moment he heard Bertha in the distance, he practiced his speech. It's not fair to take you away from your other patients. Donny grimaced. Doc Fairbanks would never believe his sudden concern for others.\n\nI'm not doing any more exercises. They hurt too much. No, he had used that too many times in the past and it never worked. The doctor simply shrugged and made him work harder.\n\nThink, think. I can't continue working with you because... because...\n\nWhen Doc's automobile pulled up in front, Donny almost panicked. Nothing he could think to say seemed right.\n\nDoc Fairbanks jogged up to the verandah. \"Sorry I'm late.\" He bounded up the steps. \"Let's get to work.\"\n\n\"I'm not working. I'm done.\"\n\n\"Done, eh?\" Doc Fairbanks petted Orbit. The little horse whinnied and moved his head from side to side. He turned to Donny. \"What do you say we go for a drive? I'll even let you steer.\"\n\nSurprised, Donny gaped at him. Expecting an argument, he was caught off guard. Steer? Did he say steer? \"Are... are you serious?\"\n\nDoc Fairbanks studied him with intense eyes and Donny felt like he was under a microscope. \"It looks like you could use some sunshine and fresh air.\"\n\nHesitating, Donny's mind whirled. Was this a trick to get closer to Molly? \"I'm crippled.\" It was his standard answer for everything.\n\n\"You steer with your hands, not your feet. I'll work the brakes and gas pedal. All you have to do is stay on the road.\"\n\nIt was an irresistible offer, and though everything inside him shouted no, his nodding head said yes.\n\nMoments later Donny was situated in the driver's seat, his hand on the steering column. Caleb cranked the motor and leaped into the passenger seat.\n\n\"A couple of things,\" Caleb shouted over the engine noise. \"Don't oversteer. It's also common courtesy to assist any horse and buggy you run off the road. Understood?\"\n\n\"How do I assist anyone if I can't walk?\"\n\n\"As long as you can talk, you can assist, and if you can't assist, offer an apology for the inconvenience you caused.\" Doc glanced around to make sure the way was clear. \"Just remember, the motor provides the power but the driver\u2014that would be you\u2014provides the brains. Ready?\"\n\n\"Ready!\" Donny's heart raced with excitement. Mouth dry, he grasped the steering shaft with a shaking hand. Magic barked from the backseat as if to announce he was ready too.\n\nDoc arranged himself so that he could reach the gas pedal. \"Here we go!\"\n\nThe car lurched forward, throwing Donny back against his seat. It was harder to steer than it looked. The car veered either left or right with every bump in the road and it was all Donny could do to stay on the road.\n\nOne hand on the dash, the doc stared straight ahead. \"I haven't been so nervous since performing my first surgery.\"\n\nDonny brushed the sweat off his forehead with his free arm. \"I don't know what you're nervous about,\" he yelled back. \"I'm the one driving.\"\n\nDoc laughed. \"Hold on,\" he shouted. He gave the engine more gas and Bertha picked up speed.\n\nDonny couldn't remember ever having more fun. \"Faster!\" he cried. \"I want to go faster.\"\n\nOn the road ahead he spotted Molly on horseback. She moved to the side of the road to let them pass. Both he and the doctor waved as they drove by and her jaw dropped.\n\nDonny laughed. He'd hate to be in the doctor's shoes when Molly got hold of him. Knowing his sister, she would probably ban him from coming to the ranch.\n\nThe thought tickled him to the core. He couldn't have planned things more perfectly had he tried." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Gripping the reins of her horse, Molly spun her head around to stare at the departing vehicle. She could have sworn\u2014 No, it couldn't have been. She was seeing things. A desert mirage! Still, it sure did look like Donny was driving.\n\nShe kept her gaze focused on the departing vehicle. It suddenly veered off the road and sped across the rough terrain, rocking up and down like a boat in stormy seas. Heart in her throat, Molly watched, not knowing what to do.\n\nThe motor buggy barely missed a haying machine but drove straight into a wall of newly mowed hay before stopping. Bales of hay tumbled down, burying the occupants.\n\n\"Gid-up!\" Urging her horse into a full run, Molly's pulse raced as fast as Starburst's flying hooves.\n\nCaleb was already out of the vehicle by the time she arrived and greeted her with a boyish grin. \"He's fine. He's not hurt.\" He lifted a bale from the backseat and tossed it away.\n\n\"No thanks to you!\" She slid off her horse and rushed to Donny's side.\n\nDonny sat in the driver's seat holding Magic and laughing. The little dog licked his face and this made Donny laugh harder.\n\nThinking her brother in shock, she gently shook him. \"Donny, it's all right.\"\n\n\"Did you see me, did you see me? I was driving!\"\n\nShe lifted Magic out of Donny's arms and set him on the ground. \"Yes, yes, I did see but\u2014\"\n\n\"I was driving,\" he shouted again as if she hadn't heard him the first time. He fingered the dashboard like a mother touching a newborn baby.\n\nShe curled her fingers into balls and glared at Caleb's back.\n\n\"Now look what you've done.\"\n\nHe tossed another bale of hay away before turning to face her. \"What I've done?\"\n\n\"He's hysterical,\" she sputtered.\n\n\"He's happy.\"\n\n\"He could have been injured or\u2014\"\n\n\"But he wasn't. He oversteered. It's easy to do. I've done it myself. Next time he'll do better. Won't you, buddy?\"\n\nThe warm way he addressed her brother drained away her anger. \"There won't be a next time. It's... it's too dangerous. Kindly take him back to the ranch. And you steer.\"\n\nShe had forgotten to stake her horse in her eagerness to get to Donny, and Starburst had wandered a short distance away to where a clump of grass bravely pressed through the dry cracked ground.\n\nCaleb followed her, waiting to resume the argument until they were out of Donny's earshot. \"Would you prefer that he spend the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair? Why don't you just put him in an institution like an injured war veteran? He'll be really safe then.\"\n\n\"I don't need to put him anywhere. I can keep him safe here on the ranch. If you would stop interfering and stop\u2014\" She walked up to Starburst and grabbed her rein. And stop making me believe you can help Donny.\n\n\"Stop what?\" Caleb asked. \"Stop treating him like a real person?\"\n\n\"Stop thinking you know everything about my brother and me. You know nothing about us. If you did, you wouldn't\u2014\"\n\n\"Wouldn't what? What wouldn't I do, Molly?\"\n\nYou wouldn't want anything to do with me. Out loud she said, \"Just leave us alone.\" Tears burned her eyes but she refused to give in to them.\n\n\"Molly, don't.\" He pulled her into his arms. \"Trust me,\" he whispered into her hair. He held her close, stroking her back.\n\nTwisting in his arms, she sought to break free, but he only tightened his hold. \"Trust me,\" he repeated.\n\nWhether it was his warm embrace or gentle plea she didn't know, but all at once her resistance drained away. She laid her head in the hollow of his shoulder and clutched the sleeve of his shirt. She trusted him and that was part of the problem. What she didn't trust were the feelings he stirred inside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Donny rested his head on the back of the seat, his fingers still wrapped around the steering column. He still couldn't believe it. He actually steered a horseless carriage. He needed practice. Still...\n\nHe gazed up at the sky and imagined himself in all sorts of places. The Grand Canyon and the Flagstaff observatory... the big cities he'd read about... the oceans, both the Pacific and the Atlantic. He'd always wanted to see an ocean.\n\nAll too soon the visions in his head popped like soap bubbles. He would never see those places and the sooner he accepted his fate the better.\n\nBrushing straw away from his pants, he glanced around.\n\nMolly's horse grazed a short distance away but he couldn't see either her or the doc. Eyes narrowed against the bright sun, he scanned the desert until a movement caught his attention. He'd mistaken Doc for a cactus.\n\nHe leaned forward for a better look and his heart stood still. Was that Molly? In the doctor's arms? Donny wiggled around in the seat and shaded his eyes against the sun. It was Molly all right. No question.\n\nDonny's chest felt as if someone had tied a rope around him. His throat closed and he gasped for air.\n\nHe'd been tricked. The doctor took him driving for one reason and one reason alone: to get closer to Molly. That's all the doctor cared about. He wanted Molly all to himself.\n\nWell, it wasn't going to happen. Nothing meant more to Donny than his sister. Not the horseless buggy and not even the Flagstaff observatory. His sister was his world and he had no intention of letting the doctor take her away. Not now, not ever.\n\nHe wrapped his hand around the rubber ball and blew the horn as hard as he could." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "That night Molly tossed Donny's nightshirt on the bed. He was obviously still angry with her, but that was no excuse for his childish behavior. Exhausted after a hard day's work, she was in no mood for games.\n\n\"You could at least help by taking off your shirt.\" He'd done nothing since arriving back at the ranch but sit in his chair limp as a rag doll.\n\n\"I am helping you.\"\n\n\"No, you're not. A wooden statue would be more help.\" She tried to calm down. Arguing with him never got her anywhere. \"I know you're disappointed because I forbade you to drive again. But it's for your own good. You could have been hurt.\"\n\nDonny folded his arms across his chest. \"I didn't want to steer it. Doc Fairbanks made me.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\" It wasn't like Donny to place blame on others. \"It didn't look like you protested too much.\"\n\n\"I don't want to ride in his old car and I don't want to work with him anymore.\"\n\nShe sank down on his bed and leveled her gaze at him. \"Donny, he's helping you. He says you're making progress.\"\n\n\"No, I'm not. He just wants you to think that so that he can\u2014\"\n\nShe quirked a brow. \"What, Donny, what does he want me to think?\"\n\n\"Never mind. Nothing.\" He looked away.\n\nShe reached for his arm but he pulled back. Too tired to fight him, she stood. \"All right, have it your way. Sleep in your clothes. See if I care.\"\n\nShe left the room and he didn't try to stop her. She hated leaving him in his chair all night, but she could no longer move him without his cooperation. When he was a child she could lift him in her arms and carry him. Those days were long gone. She stood in the hall hoping he'd call her back, but minutes passed without a single sound coming from his room.\n\nShe headed for the stairs when the unmistakable clatter of Caleb's auto buggy made her heart skip a beat." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nWhat was Caleb doing here this time of night? She had nothing more to say to him. But now that he was here, he could jolly well deal with Donny!\n\nFearing the bell would disturb Miss Walker, she hurried to the front door and ripped it open before Caleb had a chance to ring.\n\n\"Hello, Molly,\" he said. In the dim light he looked serious. His eyes reflected light from the gas lamp and his gaze bored into her like burning coals.\n\nShe glared at him. \"It's late and thanks to you my brother won't let me put him to bed. Now you can deal with him.\"\n\nShe kept her voice loud enough to be heard over the idling motor car yet not so loud as to disturb the other residents. Miss Walker had been working in her office since supper, and Rosita and Jose had already retired for the night.\n\nHis jaw tightened. \"We'll deal with him later. Right now, you and I need to talk.\"\n\n\"We have nothing left to\u2014\"\n\nHe stepped forward. With a single swoop he lifted her off her feet, tossed her over his shoulder, and carried her down the steps and through the courtyard.\n\nShock quickly yielded to fury. \"Let me go,\" she raged. \"How dare you!\" She pounded her fists against his back but he kept moving. \"Put me down!\"\n\nHe dumped her unceremoniously into the back of the carriage. Before she could make her escape, the auto took off, throwing her against the seat.\n\n\"Stop!\" she ordered. They hit a rut in the road and Molly's entire body left the seat before bouncing back down. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\nCaleb ignored her and kept driving, his head outlined by the flickering carriage lights. Overhead stars shimmered in the black velvet sky as if doing some sort of wild dance. A trembling full moon had risen over the mountains, casting a silvery glow on the desert floor.\n\nThe car shook and rattled and Molly feared it would split in two. Fumes burned her eyes and the smell of burning rubber filled her nose. \"If you don't stop I'll... I'll jump.\"\n\nShe swung at his shoulder just as the car hit a bump in the road. Missing her target, she fell back, breathing hard.\n\nShe peered over the side at the ground whizzing by them and changed her mind about jumping. She was furious with Caleb, but not furious enough to risk life or limb. Instead, she flung her body back against the seat in a fit of pique. She cried out whenever they hit a rough patch of road, but mostly she seethed in silence.\n\nThe cool night air blew in her face, a welcome relief after the heat of the day. Hair pins worked free from her bun and loose hair whipped around her head.\n\nAt long last Bertha came to a rolling stop. It was about time. She didn't even wait for Caleb to turn off the motor before climbing out of the car. Legs shaking, her boots sank into soft ground. She didn't know where she was and didn't care. She'd walk home if it took her all night.\n\n\"Mooooooo.\"\n\nStartled, she jumped, her back pressed against the side of the car. Now she knew why Caleb had stopped. Cattle blocked the road, but she'd been too upset to notice until now.\n\n\"Don't turn off the motor,\" she cried.\n\nNo sooner were the words out of her mouth than the car rumbled and coughed, then stalled of its own accord. She met Caleb's gaze and she knew by the horrified look on his face that he feared a backfire too.\n\nShe held her breath until her chest felt ready to explode. One minute. Two. Bertha didn't make a sound and the cattle stayed calm. Molly slumped against the auto, hand on her chest to still her pounding heart.\n\nGrinning, Caleb scrambled over the side to join her.\n\n\"It looks like we're stuck here for a while,\" he said cheerfully. Cattle milled around them in every direction, the air filled with the smell of heated hides.\n\nHe leaned against his vehicle, arms folded. \"I guess this is as good a place as any to talk.\"\n\nShe glared up at him. The glow of the carriage lights lit his face and his eyes shone like polished gems.\n\n\"I have nothing to say to you.\"\n\n\"Shh. Keep your voice down,\" he cautioned. \"We don't want to spook our friends here.\"\n\n\"It wouldn't be the first time you started a stampede,\" she replied, though she was careful to keep her voice low.\n\n\"And I'm going to do my best not to start another,\" he said.\n\n\"That gives me small comfort, seeing that we may be stuck here all night,\" she hissed beneath her breath.\n\n\"Look on the bright side. You're stuck with me.\"\n\nShe bit back the retort springing to her lips. She didn't want to argue. Not here and not with him.\n\nSeveral moments of silence passed, punctuated by low moos and shuffling hooves. Curious beeves stopped to check the stillflickering carriage lanterns before moving away.\n\nCaleb finally spoke. \"Molly, I can't work with your brother unless you're honest with me.\"\n\n\"He doesn't want to work with you.\"\n\n\"All right, I can accept that. I think he's making a big mistake, but if that's what he wants I'll respect his wishes. Right now, I'm concerned about you. There's something you're not telling me and I want to know what it is.\"\n\nHis gentle gaze seemed to reach into her very soul. Instinctively, she lowered her lashes, blocking out his probing eyes and protecting her long-held secret. Something Brodie said came to mind. \"You gotta teach a horse to use his instincts to take care of himself.\" That's what she wanted to do\u2014and her instincts told her to run. Only she couldn't. She was hedged in on all sides by cattle.\n\nHe brushed away a strand of her hair and ran a knuckle tenderly up the side of her face. The gentleness of his touch wrapped around her like a warm blanket. She prayed for strength even as she felt herself growing weak. How did he always manage to do this? Confuse her to the point that she didn't even know her own mind.\n\n\"I apologize,\" he said. He looked and sounded sincere and the last of her defenses melted away. \"I should have talked to you before taking Donny for a ride. I wasn't thinking. I have a patient who is growing more sickly every day and I guess I was looking for an escape.\"\n\n\"Oh, Caleb, I'm so sorry.\" She studied his face. \"Do you want to talk about it?\"\n\n\"All I can tell you is that my patient is a child and\"\u2014his voice broke\u2014\"it doesn't look good.\"\n\nThe sadness in his voice touched her deeply. She pressed her hand against his face. \"Why does God let these things happen?\" She wanted to believe in a good and caring God, but at times like this it was so very, very hard.\n\nCaleb covered her hand with his. \"I guess God wants to see what we're made of, and right now I feel like I'm made of straw.\"\n\n\"That's not true, Caleb. You're one of the strongest men I've ever met. Certainly you're the kindest and most generous.\" Their gazes locked and it seemed like nothing existed but the two of them. \"You give so much of your time caring for others\u2014helping Donny. Yet you ask for nothing in return.\"\n\n\"Don't make me out to be a saint,\" he said. \"I do want something in return, more than any man has the right to ask. I want to see your brother live a full and happy life. I want to look into a worried mother's eyes and tell her that her child will be all right. I want to lift a drunk out of a gutter and cure his pain.\" He fell silent for a moment before adding, \"I want you and me to be more than just friends.\"\n\nHer senses jolted as if hot water had suddenly poured through her veins. Speechless, she pulled her hand away. Not even the bellowing of a dozen calves drowned out the sound of her pounding heart.\n\nHe lowered his voice. \"But that's not what you want, is it?\"\n\nHer mouth went dry. \"No. No, it's not.\" She spoke the truth. Of course it was the truth. Why, then, did it feel like such a lie?\n\n\"Because of Donny.\"\n\nIt was a statement, not a question, but still she nodded. \"He's in the wheelchair because of me.\" She didn't want to tell him what happened that long-ago day, didn't want to tell anyone, but she had to make him understand why they could never be more than friends.\n\n\"Go on,\" he said gently.\n\n\"I...\" Her eyes filled with tears. \"I'm responsible for his accident. Isn't that enough? I did that to him.\"\n\nShe searched his face, certain to find the same condemnation observed so often on her mother's face. Instead he pulled her into his arms and held her close. Something broke loose inside and the barriers around her heart crumbled away. The needy child within felt comfort in his arms, the needy woman felt protected. Head on his chest, she breathed in his fragrance, absorbing his very essence. The spicy scent of bay rum aftershave filled her head, chasing away the smell of heated hides and burning rubber.\n\n\"How, Molly? How are you responsible?\" he murmured in her ear. When she didn't answer, he added, \"Sometimes it helps to talk. To let it all out.\"\n\n\"I\u2014I was pushing his carriage and it got away from me.\" She spoke slowly because turning the horrible memories into words brought almost unbearable pain. \"It rolled down the hill and I could do nothing\"\u2014her voice broke in a sob and he tightened his hold\u2014 \"nothing to stop it.\"\n\n\"You couldn't have been but a child,\" Caleb said quietly. He lifted her chin and gazed into her face, his eyebrows raised inquiringly. \"How old were you?\"\n\nA shiver of awareness ran through her. \"I was eight. Old enough to know better.\"\n\nHis eyes widened beneath his arched brows. \"Molly, you were a child.\"\n\nShe stiffened. \"Don't,\" she whispered. \"Don't try to make it sound like I'm blameless. I should have known better. I should have protected him. Instead, I stopped to look at a doll in a store window and...\"\n\nShe forced herself to breathe but she couldn't stop the tears or even the words. A dam had burst open and words tumbled out of her mouth so fast she could hardly keep up.\n\n\"It was cold that day. It was about to snow. I remember because I wore a thin dress. I had taken off my coat to cover Donny.\" It was a week before Christmas, and she'd stopped to admire a decorated tree in a store window, only to be mesmerized by a doll beneath a pine branch.\n\nThe porcelain doll had a rosy-cheeked face, a delicate bow-like mouth, and blue eyes that appeared to follow her wherever she moved. It was dressed in a cotton dress and high-button shoes with a big straw hat atop a head full of honey curls. She had never seen a doll more beautiful or lifelike.\n\nAs she talked, memories assailed her until she could no longer keep up with her thoughts. The doll. The carriage rolling away. The horror. \"I screamed and a stranger ran after it.\"\n\nCaleb's gaze never wavered from her face, not even when a calf brushed against them with its tail. He pushed tendrils of hair away from her forehead and murmured soothing words in her ear.\n\n\"It's all right. Let it out.\"\n\nIn her mind's eye she could see that long-ago day. Some of the details were vague but not Donny's limp body. She could see him so clearly it was as if everything that happened played out before her eyes again.\n\n\"Donny lay sprawled on the ground. He never made a sound. I tried to get to him but a crowd had gathered and I couldn't get through. I... I was certain he was dead.\"\n\nHe lay in a coma for several days and no one knew if he would live. Her father never blamed her but her mother certainly did. Her mother had waited years to bear a son but she hadn't bargained on becoming a nursemaid.\n\nNo longer did her mother tuck her in bed at night or brush her hair or help with her stitchery. She no longer existed in her mother's eyes. Molly had begged for forgiveness, even on her mother's deathbed, but none ever came.\n\nMolly could hardly blame her. Not only did the accident change Donny's life, it changed all their lives. Her parents' marriage suffered as well. Mama and Papa argued over Donny's care and her father stayed away days at a time. Donny's accident was like a hatchet splitting the family apart.\n\nWhen her tears were spent, Caleb held her face between his hands and gazed into her eyes. He brushed his mouth against her forehead and kissed the tip of her nose. She trembled at the sweetness of his lips against her flesh, at the tenderness in his eyes, but nothing prepared her for the moment he kissed her fully on the mouth.\n\nBlood pounded through her veins. His mouth demanded a response in kind and she earnestly kissed him back. Rising on tiptoes, she flung her arms around his neck. He pulled her closer still and it seemed as if their very hearts embraced.\n\nAt that moment, nothing seemed to exist outside the circle of his arms, not the lowing cattle nor the silvery moon stealing a silent path across the sky. Not even Donny.\n\nWhen he lifted his mouth away, disappointment flooded through her. \"How many cattle does Miss Walker own?\" he asked, his hot breath mingling with hers.\n\nAn odd question under the circumstances but she replied, \"Nearly two thousand.\"\n\nHe gave her a crooked smile and her heart practically flipped. \"Excellent.\" Once again his kisses blocked out everything except for the exquisite sensations.\n\nIn between kisses they talked. He told her about his dream of one day opening a clinic. \"And I want one of those machines that take pictures of the bones,\" he said.\n\nShe couldn't imagine such a thing possible, but she shared his enthusiasm. She told him about Dobson Creek and how she came to sing at Big Jim's. \"When Papa took ill and could no longer work at the mines, Big Jim was the only one who would hire me. He was Pa's friend and I think he did it as a favor. I didn't even know I could sing until I took the job.\"\n\n\"You have a beautiful voice, Molly,\" he said. \"I wish you'd consider singing at church. We need a singer like you. I'm sure you could learn some hymns.\"\n\nSing at church? Normally she would have laughed at the idea, but not tonight. Tonight anything seemed possible\u2014even photographing patients' bones and singing in a choir.\n\nIt was after midnight when the last steer moved away and Caleb was able to take her home. She sat in the front seat and this time hardly noticed the bumpy ride. She floated on air. Neither of them spoke during the drive back to the ranch house. Talking over Bertha was never easy. Tonight it was impossible because she was too busy reliving the memory of Caleb's embrace.\n\nHis kisses were nothing like the stolen kisses of miners' sons or the occasional slobbering kiss of some drunk who unexpectedly grabbed her at Big Jim's. Nothing about Caleb was what she had come to expect from a man.\n\nParking a distance from the ranch house to avoid disturbing the residents, Caleb walked her to the verandah. His eyes shone like jewels in the moonlight, his hand at her waist felt warm and reassuring.\n\nAll too soon they reached the front door. \"Good night,\" she whispered, but before she could enter the house he pulled her back and swung her around in his arms once again. He leaned forward to kiss her good night and she quickly closed the distance between them.\n\nAnd then she heard it, a voice calling from the open window of Donny's bedroom. \"Mol-ly.\"\n\nIn the blink of an eye, the magic vanished. In a single heartbeat, sanity returned and reality slapped her in the face.\n\nShe pulled out of Caleb's arms and turned to the door.\n\n\"Wait,\" he called softly. \"When can I see you again?\"\n\nShe stopped at the threshold, her back toward him. Such a simple question, yet it held a world of meaning. He didn't want to see her again; he wanted to hold her again, kiss her again, and she wanted him to do all those things.\n\n\"Molly!\" Donny's voice was like thunder in her ears and she feared he would wake the others.\n\nShe couldn't see Caleb's face and he couldn't see hers. Couldn't see how much she hurt. Couldn't see her dying inside.\n\n\"We can't. Not like this.\" Somehow she found the strength to step inside and close the door. Somehow she managed to keep her tears at bay as she felt her way through the darkened hall to Donny's room. Somehow she managed to walk into her brother's room when all she wanted was to rush back into Caleb's arms.\n\n\"What... what took... you so long?\" Donny gasped between wheezy breaths. \"I've been calling you.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" She felt her way across the room. The lamp had burned out. Fumbling in the dark, she ran her fingers across the bedside table until she found the safety matches. She refueled the lamp and lit it with trembling fingers.\n\nDonny was still in his chair where she'd left him. Even in the yellow glow his lips looked blue. She reached for his medicine and spilled some on the floor as she counted out the prescribed number of drops. She held the handkerchief to his face, and as he breathed in the soothing fumes she willed the pounding of her heart to cease.\n\nHe pushed her hand away, breathing a bit more easily. \"I heard... Bertha.\" He looked up at her, his face filled with accusations, and she quickly turned her back so he couldn't see her face.\n\n\"Yes, Dr. Fairbanks and I... were talking.\"\n\n\"But it's late,\" he said.\n\n\"Yes, so we need to get you to bed so we can both get some sleep.\"\n\n\"Are you sick? Is that why the doc was here so late?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes. If heartsickness was a disease, then yes, she was ill. \"No,\" she said. \"I'm well.\"\n\nAfter settling Donny in bed, she tiptoed quietly up the stairs to her room. It was no use trying to sleep. Instead she stood on the balcony, gazing at the moonlit landscape.\n\nShe felt different, not at all like herself. It was as if someone had reached inside and rearranged every organ in her body. Outside, nothing had changed; she was still responsible for her brother's care, but with one major difference.\n\nShe always knew the sacrifices she would have to make to ensure Donny's future, the biggest being any sort of a normal life for herself. It was a sacrifice she'd been willing to make. Had no qualms about making.\n\nUntil now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Chapter 27\n\nDuring the next week Molly tried her best to avoid Caleb. It was easier that way. His presence only confused her, made her want things she had no business wanting. Made her ache inside.\n\nRiding always cleared her mind and she talked Brodie into letting her take an appaloosa for its first ride outside the corral. The horse's name was Big Spot. A mild-mannered horse, he was brown all over except for a white spot that looked like someone had splashed whitewash on his back.\n\nBrodie cautioned her to take it slow and not try anything fancy. \"You gotta watch these well-mannered horses, especially when they insist upon letting you go over a fence first.\"\n\nBig Spot did no such thing and Molly put the horse through his paces with no trouble. She took her time heading back to the ranch. It was hot but a slight breeze cooled her flushed face.\n\nSpotting Caleb sitting atop the corral fence waiting for her, she reined in the horse abruptly. Apparently he had no intention of giving up. Avoiding him only postponed the inevitable. Bracing herself with a deep breath, she pressed her legs against Big Spot's sides and the horse trotted toward the barn.\n\nCaleb waited for her to unsaddle the horse and lead him to pasture before pulling away from the fence. He stopped behind her, his shadow closing the distance between them.\n\n\"You've been avoiding me.\"\n\nShe pretended to play with the gate catch and said nothing. In the adjacent corral, Orbit hung his head over the fence to nuzzle Magic. Orbit whickered, Magic barked, and the two took off, romping alongside the fence. Even as she watched she felt the heat of Caleb's gaze.\n\n\"And now you won't even look at me,\" he said at last.\n\nShe turned to face him. Big mistake. \"About the other night. You were right. It did help to talk to someone.\" To talk to you.\n\n\"I'll always be here to listen, if that's what you want.\"\n\nIt wasn't what she wanted, but it was all she could have. Silence stretched between them before she trusted herself to speak enough to change the subject. \"How... how is the little patient you told me about?\"\n\nHe grimaced as if in pain and she longed to hold him as he held her on that memorable moonlit night.\n\n\"Not well.\"\n\nStudying him, she thought of all the negative prognoses she'd received on Donny's condition. She felt sure that Caleb would never be distant and cold to his patients as Donny's doctors had seemed to her. Yet how could a doctor survive otherwise?\n\n\"I'm praying for him,\" she said. \"And I'm praying for you too.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Right now I can use all the prayers I can get.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"You're a good friend, Caleb. I never told anyone else what happened. Only you.\"\n\nA muscle quivered at his jaw but thankfully he kept his distance. \"That's a big burden to carry around.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is. I\u2014\" She glanced around. Where was Brodie when she needed him? \"I better get back to work.\"\n\n\"Are we not going to talk about it?\" He took a step forward. \"Are we not going to talk about what happened the other night?\"\n\nShe backed away. She didn't want to think about the other night, but the truth was she hadn't been able to think of anything else. \"Nothing can come of it. I have Donny to think about.\"\n\n\"And I have a new practice.\"\n\n\"I guess that's the answer, then.\" She looked away. \"Neither of us can afford to be distracted.\"\n\n\"Drat, Molly! Why are you making things so difficult?\"\n\nShe stared up at him. \"You're the one making things difficult. My life is the ranch now and I can't think of anything else.\"\n\nHe grabbed her by the wrist, startling her. \"Because I can't give you what you have here?\"\n\n\"This ranch is Donny's security. He'll never want for a thing. He'll always have a home.\"\n\n\"He'll always have a home with me.\" Caleb released her. \"You both will. That is, if you will have me.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"You... you can't mean that.\"\n\n\"I mean it,\" he said.\n\nMomentarily speechless, she shook her head. \"You have no idea what you're saying. After my brother's accident my parents... it broke them apart. Things were never the same between them.\"\n\nMany were the nights she huddled beneath a blanket and tried to drown out their angry voices. \"The strain of caring for Donny was too much for them. It's too much for most everyone. That's why so many people like Donny end up in asylums or begging on the street.\"\n\n\"Molly,\" he said, gently but firmly, as if to draw her thoughts out of the pocket of hurt she carried inside. \"I'm a doctor. I know what I'm getting myself into.\"\n\n\"Do you? Do you really know? You see Donny a few hours a week. That's not the same as living with him day in and day out.\"\n\n\"Then let me learn firsthand what it's like to live with him.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nHe laid his hands on her shoulders. \"Let him come and stay with me. Give me a week to see what it's really like.\"\n\nStunned by this proposal, she had a hard time finding her voice. \"That's... a ridiculous idea. You could never... your work as a doctor...\"\n\n\"If I can't manage for a week, then I have no right to ask for anything more.\"\n\nShe shook her head and he dropped his arms to his sides.\n\n\"Unless,\" he said, \"there's another reason you won't let me help. The other night... you said you would never forgive yourself.\"\n\n\"How can I?\"\n\n\"So you're punishing yourself by pushing me away.\"\n\n\"That's not true.\" She wasn't punishing herself, was she? There he went again, confusing her, making her doubt her own motives. \"It's all about Donny,\" she whispered. \"It will always be about Donny.\"\n\nThat was only half of it; she wanted to protect Caleb as much as Donny, protect the fragile stirrings of love she felt for this man.\n\nShe'd watched her parents' affection shrivel up and die. She saw what it did to her father, the nights he stumbled home and collapsed in an alcoholic stupor. Saw what it did to her mother, the bitterness and withdrawal. Looking back at her parents, she saw the future, saw what would happen if she and Caleb were to marry. It nearly broke her heart. She couldn't do that to him. To the two of them. Wouldn't.\n\nHe stepped back, his expression hard as stone. \"I can tear down most of the barriers you keep putting between us. But your guilt... I don't know that I can fight that. I don't know that any man can.\"\n\nHe spun around and walked away. She watched him go until blinded by tears." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Chapter 28\n\nMolly kneeled in front of the wheelchair and pulled off Donny's shoe, her mind a thousand miles away. \"He'll always have a home with me. You both will.\"\n\n\"Molly!\"\n\nShe jumped. \"Why are you yelling?\" She started on his other shoe.\n\nDonny gave her an accusatory look. \"Because you're not listening to me.\"\n\n\"I am listening to you.\" She stood and rustled through a bureau drawer for his nightclothes. \"You asked me...\" Her mind drew a blank.\n\n\"Told you so,\" he said, frowning. He repeated the question. \"Why are Hereford cattle more profitable than Longhorns?\"\n\n\"Because they have shorter horns,\" she said, purposely giving him a wrong answer.\n\nHe made a face. \"Come on, Molly. You gotta learn this stuff.\"\n\nShe flung his nightclothes on the bed and sat, arms folded. \"I don't want to know about cattle. I hate them. They're smelly and dumb, and I'd much rather work with horses.\" She dreaded riding the range and rounding up cattle, hated even the thought of branding them.\n\nDonny frowned. \"You better not let Miss Walker hear you say that.\" He inched his wheelchair closer to her. \"When you take over the ranch I'll help you, Molly, I promise.\"\n\n\"When I take over?\" He made it sound so simple. \"And how do you propose to help me?\"\n\n\"You're terrible with numbers, so I'll handle the books. I'll also negotiate with cattle buyers. All you'll have to do is tell the ranch hands what to do.\"\n\nHis enthusiasm made her smile. Never had she known him to sound so positive about the future and it did her heart good. \"You have it all planned, don't you?\"\n\nHe tapped his finger on his book. \"Now will you settle down and learn this stuff?\"\n\nShe stretched out on the bed and raised herself on her elbow. \"Hereford cattle are more profitable because they mature earlier than Longhorns.\" Instead of satisfying him, her answer only seemed to encourage his questions and he continued to bombard her until her head felt ready to explode." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Caleb drove out to the old Madison place to check on a patient. Madison was a miner and sulfuric acid seeping from a silver mine had eaten away the flesh on his leg. After applying fresh bandages, Caleb headed for the Trotter place.\n\nJimmy and his family lived on a small farm a couple of miles north of town. He pulled in front of one of the few wood-framed houses in the area, scattering chickens in every direction, and turned off the motor. One of the Trotter girls walked out of the red barn carrying a bucket. She stopped in front of Bertha and stared at Caleb before hurrying to the house.\n\nJimmy's father threw down his hoe and sauntered over to where Caleb parked. A grizzled man in denim overalls, his sunbaked flesh was carved by wind and sand. He spit out a wad of chewing tobacco before placing a calloused hand on Bertha's frame and leaning over to look Caleb square in the face.\n\n\"The wife said Jimmy has some sort of cancer.\"\n\nCaleb recoiled inwardly at the man's stale breath, a combination of tobacco and whiskey. \"It's called leukemia and I'll do everything possible\u2014\"\n\n\"Jimmy's my only boy.\" Trotter pointed a finger at Caleb's nose. \"Don't let anything happen to him, you hear!\" He spun around and walked away.\n\nCaleb watched until he vanished into the barn. Was that a plea from a worried father or a covert threat? It was hard to know. He jumped to the ground, grabbed his black case from the back of the car, and hastened to the house. Mrs. Trotter stood at the door waiting for him.\n\nThe front room was small and sparsely furnished with only a sagging leather divan and a cot stacked with folded clothes. Books were piled neatly in a corner and a hat rack stood guard by the door.\n\nJimmy looked less pale\u2014a good sign. It indicated the medicine was working, but he still seemed lethargic and alarmingly thin.\n\nMrs. Trotter hovered nearby as Caleb examined him, wringing her hands. \"He won't eat.\"\n\n\"Do you like ice cream?\" Caleb asked.\n\nJimmy nodded.\n\n\"Miss Lily's has the best ice cream you ever tasted.\" Miss Lily ran the caf\u00e9 located in the hotel. \"Have your mother take you there and eat as much as you want.\" He glanced up at Mrs. Trotter. \"The treat's on me.\"\n\nMoments later Mrs. Trotter walked him to the door. \"Thank you.\"\n\nCaleb nodded. \"I mean it about the ice cream. See if you can get some fat on those bones. The tonic should take care of nutrition.\"\n\nShe followed him outside. \"Doctor...\" She hesitated. \"My husband... he's not taking this well. The day he found out about Jimmy's illness, he drove to town and got drunk. The marshal has brought him home twice since.\"\n\nCaleb glanced at Trotter hoeing the ground with the same intent a man might use in digging a grave. \"Would you like me to ask Reverend Bland to talk to him?\"\n\nMrs. Trotter shook her head. \"Harvey and the Lord haven't seen eye to eye for a good many years. Not since his pa was killed in that awful war. If that wasn't bad enough, his ma and two brothers died from malaria. I'm afraid he's given up on God altogether.\"\n\n\"That doesn't mean God has given up on him.\"\n\n\"But if he can't even pray\u2014\"\n\nCaleb patted her on the arm. \"Then it's up to us to pray for him.\"\n\nShe looked up at him with liquid eyes. \"Thank you, Doctor.\"\n\nCaleb walked to his car with a troubled mind and a heavy heart. It wasn't just his conversation with Mrs. Trotter that had him worried. It was a nagging feeling that refused to go away.\n\nSomething didn't set right. Jimmy's lack of fever... was that it? Everyone reacted differently to disease, but everything he read listed fever as a symptom of leukemia. What if his diagnosis was wrong? What if it was something else?\n\nHe drove back to town so slowly that he stalled out twice. The second time he sat in the car, thinking. The wind had picked up and whirlwinds of sand cut across the desert floor and turned the sky gray. Magic held his face to the wind, fur ruffled and ears pinned back.\n\nCaleb drummed his fingers upon the dash. What kind of a doctor was he? He couldn't do much for Jimmy and he certainly didn't know how to help the boy's parents. If Mr. Trotter's sudden drinking binges were any indication, Jimmy's illness had already taken a toll on the family.\n\n\"After my brother's accident, my parents... it broke them apart.\"\n\nMolly insisted that Donny would come between the two of them. Now that he could see firsthand how illness affected a family, he better understood her concerns.\n\nWhy did adversity bring some families closer and split others apart? It was a question very much on his mind as he drove the rest of the way to town." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Molly was surprised\u2014shocked, really\u2014when Caleb showed up that morning to drive her and Donny to church as if nothing had happened between them. It had been nearly two weeks since they last spoke.\n\nHe grinned and her heart did a flip-flop. \"Caleb\u2014\"\n\nHe held up his hand. \"Are you coming with me or not?\"\n\nIt was the last place she wanted to go, but before she could reply, he brushed past her, hat in hand.\n\n\"Where's Donny?\"\n\n\"In there,\" she said, pointing to the large room where she'd left Donny moments earlier.\n\nCaleb greeted her brother with a smile. \"I came to take you and your sister to church.\"\n\nDonny didn't even bother to look up from his book. \"I'm not going.\"\n\nCaleb glanced at Molly as if to ask what happened.\n\n\"Donny, don't be rude.\" Embarrassed, she spread her hands in apology. \"I'm sorry. Donny has been in the worst possible mood lately and I have no idea why. I'm afraid you traveled all this way for nothing.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't say that.\" Caleb's gaze clung to hers and her pulse skittered. \"I'm sure Donny won't mind staying home alone. We'll be back by noon.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"I\u2014\"\n\n\"You'll feel better, trust me,\" he coaxed.\n\nNo, she wouldn't. Church always made her feel like an outsider. She'd much rather worship God away from prying eyes. Still, escaping her brother's ill humor\u2014if only for a couple of hours\u2014 was tempting.\n\n\"Just... give me a few minutes.\" Avoiding Donny's gaze, she left the room. She paused at the bottom of the stairs and wiped damp hands alongside her divided skirt. It was church that made her feel jittery\u2014nothing more. But even the thought of all those people staring and whispering didn't spoil her eagerness at spending time with Caleb. With girlish anticipation she took the stairs two at a time.\n\nShe flung open the wardrobe in her room and pulled out the brightest, most attention-getting frock she owned. With a start she caught herself.\n\nIt would just be her and Caleb. No need to worry about protecting Donny from prying eyes. Today she could be herself. She hung the dress back onto its wooden peg and chose the blue one. Giving it a critical eye, she reached for her sewing scissors and snipped off the froufrou. Without all the ruches the dress looked more sedate\u2014or at least as sedate as the bright blue color allowed. Next she worked on the hat, pulling feathers off the upturned brim and leaving only a single bow on the crown.\n\nAfter dressing, she reached for her face powder, but a quick glance in the mirror told her it was unnecessary. The prospect of spending time with Caleb had put a flush on her face and a sparkle in her eyes. No paint was necessary." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Church that Sunday was standing room only. Molly had never seen so many people in attendance. Caleb found a place for them to stand by a stained-glass window, next to Lula-Belle.\n\nMolly greeted the older woman. \"What's going on?\"\n\nLula-Belle glowered, her springy curls shaking along with the feathers of her hat. \"My sister is at it again. She got the saloons to close last night and the saloon keepers agreed to stay closed until after church. Thanks to Bessie's meddling way, I can't even find a place to sit. When she gets something in her fool head, there's no stopping her.\"\n\nCaleb leaned sideways to whisper in Molly's ear. \"What you see are a bunch of sober men praying that the saloons will be open by the time church is over.\"\n\nMolly giggled, which only made Lula-Belle frown more. Composing herself she said, \"I can't believe the saloon owners agreed to Aunt Bessie's demands.\" Nothing like that would ever happen in Dobson Creek. Even after the fire, men lined up in front of makeshift saloons. The town was in ruins but whiskey remained king. \"It was hard enough getting them to close on the eve of the wedding.\"\n\nLula-Belle tossed her head with a huff. \"It didn't help that you two were in cahoots.\"\n\n\"I did give her a few pointers,\" Molly admitted.\n\nCaleb nudged her with his elbow. \"A few, eh?\"\n\n\"More than a few,\" Lula-Belle said. \"Thanks to you, my sister now looks like a loose woman with all that paint she wears.\"\n\n\"I think she looks quite lovely.\" Molly had grown quite fond of the woman. Aunt Bessie was one of the few people who treated Donny like a real person.\n\n\"You would,\" Lula-Belle muttered. She moved away, pushing past others standing by the wall, and took her place on the opposite side.\n\nMolly watched her go. It was hard to believe she and Aunt Bessie were related. \"She should be happy her sister is wearing commercial paint rather than homemade. I knew some girls in Dobson Creek who got sick from using paint made from zinc oxide, mercury, and lead.\"\n\nCaleb frowned. \"Mercury and lead are dangerous, but a combination can be lethal.\"\n\nShe knew that now. \"One of the dance hall girls died. No one knew why. She just got anemic and complained about headaches.\"\n\nCaleb's eyes sharpened. \"How did you know she died from face paint?\"\n\n\"I didn't. Not at first. Even the doctors didn't know what killed her. Then I read a newspaper article warning women about the dangers of homemade cosmetics. It described symptoms similar to what my friend had and I just assumed\u2014\"\n\n\"What kind of symptoms?\" Caleb asked.\n\nHis brusque, abrupt question surprised her. \"She got very pale and thin and\u2014\"\n\nCaleb stopped her with a hand to her arm. \"I'll be back.\"\n\n\"Where are you going?\" she asked, but already he'd left her side and was weaving his way to the door. She stared after him, not sure what she'd said wrong." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Caleb rushed from the church to his office. The town looked deserted. It seemed strange to see the hitching posts in front of the saloons empty.\n\nMagic jumped up to greet him. \"Down, boy.\"\n\nOne by one he pulled books off the shelves, flipping through the pages until he found the table of contents.\n\nCould Jimmy have mercury poisoning? Mercury, or quicksilver as it was sometimes called, was the only known metal that liquefied at room temperatures. If that was the culprit, how could an eightyear-old become exposed? His father was a farmer, not a hatter or gold refiner, professions known to create a high level of mercury poisoning.\n\nWhat about lead?\n\nHe thumbed through the tomes, running his finger down pages until he found what he sought.\n\nOne line jumped up at him: \"Lead or its salts can often be taken into the system unawares.\" The article went on to explain the danger of lead pipes or reservoirs. Lead could also be ingested through paint, or preserved vegetables and fruits that came in contact with the soldered joints of tin cans.\n\nThe symptoms included headaches, anemia, and stomach complaints. Lead poisoning was known since Roman times. Some even thought it was the bottom of the mystery disease that affected so many inner-city children.\n\nHe left the book open on his desk and paced back and forth, hands behind his back. Could Jimmy have lead poisoning? He had all the symptoms. Still, how did an eightyear-old boy ingest lead? And why didn't the other family members show similar signs?\n\nHe shook his head. He was grasping at straws, looking for a ray of hope for Jimmy's parents.\n\nStill, the boy's symptoms were more consistent with lead poisoning than leukemia.\n\nWhat could Jimmy be doing differently than other family members? Something... it had to be something\u2014but what? All he knew was that time was running out. God help him!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "Chapter 29\n\nCaleb returned just as Reverend Bland gave the closing prayer. Molly glanced at him before lowering her head. Even now his nearness made her heart beat faster, and she ached at the memory of being in his arms.\n\nGod, lead me from temptation. Make me strong so that I might do right by my brother. Help me be patient and less resentful. Please, God, help me.\n\nAfter the benediction they left the church and a small boy rushed up to them.\n\n\"Hello, Doc Fairbanks.\"\n\nCaleb tugged on the boy's cap with a broad smile. \"Hi, Jimmy.\" He glanced at Molly. \"Jimmy, I want you to meet my friend, Miss Hatfield.\"\n\nMolly smiled at the child. \"Pleased to meet you, Jimmy.\"\n\nThe boy grinned. He was a thin child with stick-like legs, his big blue eyes seeming almost too large for his gaunt face.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you too.\" He then wandered off to join a group of older boys.\n\nCaleb's gaze followed Jimmy, his face grim.\n\n\"He's the one, isn't he?\" she asked. \"The patient that has you so worried.\"\n\nCaleb turned to her. \"Yes, he is.\"\n\n\"I'm glad you're his doctor. You'll do right by him. I know you will.\"\n\nA middle-aged woman cornered Caleb with a laundry list of medical complaints. The woman rattled on nonstop and Molly marveled at Caleb's patience.\n\n\"And at night I get this pain right here.\" The woman pointed to her right hip. \"And in the morning...\"\n\nBored with the woman's complaints, Molly glanced around. Spotting the former slave Mr. Washington, she hurried to catch up with him. \"Mr. Washington, may I speak with you?\"\n\nThe black man worked his crutches around until he faced her. \"What can I do for you, ma'am?\"\n\n\"I wonder if you would be so kind as to write down the words to the hymn you sang in church a few weeks ago?\"\n\nMr. Washington thought a moment. \"You mean 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'?\"\n\n\"Yes, that's the one. You sang it beautifully.\"\n\n\"Why, thank you, ma'am.\" His crutches tucked beneath both armpits, he pulled a pencil and notepad from his pocket and started writing. He explained each phrase as he wrote. \"Swing low meant come and get us. Sweet chariot was code for the Underground Railroad. Jordan was the Mississippi River and the angels referred to the workers who helped us escape.\"\n\nMolly was deeply moved. \"It's such a haunting tune.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Are you a singer?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said with a slight hesitation.\n\nHe glanced up but kept writing. \"Reverend Bland asked me to organize a choir. We could use more singers. Would you care to join us?\"\n\nShe stared at him. A saloon girl in the church choir? She could well imagine what the congregation would have to say about that. \"Oh no. I'm not that kind of singer.\"\n\n\"What kind of singer are you?\" he asked.\n\n\"I meant... I'm not trained,\" she said, so as not to embarrass him. Had he known her background, he would never have asked her. \"I've never had singing lessons.\"\n\n\"And I never went to school but that don't mean I can't read and write.\" Mr. Washington's white teeth flashed against his ebony skin. \"The Bible says to make a joyful noise unto the Lord. It don't say nothing about singing lessons.\" He tore a page from his notebook and handed it to her.\n\n\"Thank you.\" She folded the paper and tucked it into her handbag.\n\n\"I hope you reconsider,\" he said.\n\nBefore Molly could respond, quarreling voices cut through the low murmurs of churchgoers.\n\nShe turned just in time to see an older boy punch Jimmy in the arm. Jimmy retaliated with a spitball. The silver wad caught the sunlight as it whizzed through the air and hit an older man on the forehead.\n\nThe man grabbed Jimmy by the collar and cursed him out with a thorough tongue-lashing. He raised his cane and Molly bolted forward. Rushing in front of Jimmy, she protected him with her body.\n\n\"Don't you dare hit him,\" she stormed. \"What is wrong with you?\"\n\nThe man reared back in surprise and lowered his cane. He was a short man with no neck and a face full of pockmarks. \"He spit at me!\"\n\n\"It was an accident.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, he's lucky I don't flog his ears.\"\n\n\"You're the one who's lucky, sir!\" Her body shook with rage. \"If you touch one hair on his head I'll\u2014\" She was just getting warmed up when Caleb grabbed her by the arm and pulled her away.\n\nShe swung around to face him. \"Why did you do that?\"\n\nFor answer, he gave his head a slight nod to the right and left. Molly glanced around to find more than a dozen people staring at her, including Reverend Bland. Apparently no one had witnessed the start of the fight, but judging by the shocked expressions, she alone shouldered the blame for the end. She was used to people\u2014 especially church people\u2014judging her unfavorably, but she felt bad for involving Caleb.\n\nAfter making certain Jimmy was safe, she allowed Caleb to steer her toward his horseless carriage and away from the disapproving glares.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said, still shaking. \"I didn't mean to embarrass you. Your reputation\u2014\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"I don't care about my reputation\u2014I'm concerned about you.\"\n\n\"And I'm concerned about the boy,\" she shot back. \"He's just a child. It was an accident.\"\n\nCaleb stood directly in front of her, his stern face shaded by the brim of his hat.\n\n\"It was an accident,\" he said slowly. \"Just like Donny's carriage tipping over was an accident.\"\n\nShe swallowed the gasp that rose to her mouth, the tightness in her chest making it hard to breathe. Of all the things he could have said, bringing up Donny's accident was the worst. She had trusted him and now he was throwing that trust back in her face.\n\n\"Why are you bringing that up now?\"\n\n\"Because you were a child yourself when it happened,\" he said. \"In fact, you were the same age as Jimmy is now.\"\n\n\"Jimmy is eight?\" It didn't seem possible that she had ever been that young or that vulnerable. As Donny's sister she always felt older than her years. \"I\u2014I don't want to talk about it.\"\n\n\"I think we should.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"How can you compare Jimmy's little misdeed to what happened to Donny?\" She turned to climb into Bertha, but Caleb stopped her, his hand encircling her arm.\n\n\"You were eight. A child. You needed protection, not blame.\"\n\nProtection. The word nestled inside her, bringing a lump to her throat. No one had ever said such a thing to her. They stared at each other for several moments before he released her arm and stepped back.\n\nHe walked away to crank the car. She felt bad for arguing with him. He'd only tried to make her feel better, and it was obvious the sick boy weighed heavily on his mind. Moments later he took his place on the seat next to her. Hand on the steering column, he stared straight ahead.\n\nShe laid a hand on his arm. \"You're a good man.\" The rumbling vehicle made her voice quiver\u2014or was her trembling heart to blame? \"And a good doctor.\"\n\nHe covered her hand with his own and held her gaze. \"You're a fine woman, Molly Hatfield. A beautiful one. You're good and kind and probably the most selfless person I've ever met. I just wish you could look in the mirror and see what I see.\"\n\nFor a split second she caught a glimpse of the woman he described\u2014and it shocked her. Shocked her so much that she pulled her hand away and closed her eyes.\n\nShe wanted to be that woman. She wanted to be good and kind and selfless, but she was none of those things. Sometimes she was angry and resentful. On one shameful occasion, she even wished her brother had never been born. Why couldn't Caleb look at her and see her for who she really was? That would make it so much easier for both of them.\n\nShe opened her eyes to see Jimmy scramble into the back of his family's wagon with his sisters.\n\nCaleb watched him too. \"There's a chance he doesn't have leukemia.\"\n\nMolly's mouth dropped. \"Oh, Caleb, that's an answer to prayer.\" His dark expression made her frown. \"If not leukemia, then what?\"\n\nHe met her gaze. \"What you said in church got me thinking. He may have lead poisoning.\"\n\n\"Lead...\" Her spirits plunged. \"But how?\"\n\n\"That's what I'm trying to figure out.\"\n\nShe pressed her lips together. Their combined worry pushed away the tension between them, but not the physical awareness. His every move and gesture seemed significant in some way and she could hardly draw her gaze away from him. \"Will he be all right?\"\n\n\"It depends on how long it takes me to find the source of lead.\"\n\nShe let the statement hang for a moment before she spoke. \"And if you don't find it?\"\n\nThe question stretched between them like a bridge neither wanted to cross.\n\n\"I have to find it,\" he said at last. He released the brake and Bertha rolled forward. \"There's no other choice.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Eleanor Walker rode up to the ranch house, surprised to find her banker friend, Robert, waiting on the verandah. She tethered her horse to the hitching post and hurried to join him. As much as she\n\ncherished their friendship, she hated the way her heart leaped whenever she saw him. She was too old for such nonsense. Today, as always, she covered her feelings with a brusque, no-nonsense manner.\n\n\"Don't tell me it's the first of the month already,\" she said. Thanks to that unfortunate earthquake and fire of '87, which forced her to rebuild, she owed her soul to his bank.\n\nRobert pulled off his bowler and ran a hand over his head, as if his silver hair would be so brash as to become mussed. \"Not according to my calendar,\" he said with an amicable smile.\n\n\"So what brings you here in the heat of the day?\" She opened the front door and called to Rosita. \"Kindly bring my guest some lemonade.\"\n\nShe closed the door and sat in a rocker. Robert sat opposite her, balancing his straw hat on his knee.\n\n\"I have good news for you, but I can't take any of the credit.\"\n\n\"I could use a little good news.\" She pulled off her gloves and tossed them into an empty chair. The morning had seen nothing but problems, ranging from a broken windmill to having to put an injured steer out of its misery.\n\nRosita appeared and set a tray with a pitcher of lemonade and two glasses on a small wicker table. \"Thank you, Rosita.\"\n\nThe girl afforded the banker a quick smile before hurrying away. Eleanor poured Robert a glass of lemonade. \"So what is this good news?\"\n\n\"Mr. Hampshire has decided to put his idea of forming a cattle company on hold, perhaps even permanently.\"\n\nEleanor stopped pouring. \"You can't be serious.\"\n\nHe leaned over to take the glass out of her hand and took a long sip before answering.\n\n\"I'm completely serious.\"\n\nShe set the pitcher down and leaned back in her chair. \"What made him finally see the light?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Apparently he traveled to Cactus Patch on Saturday night and didn't like what he saw. The saloons were closed and the town deserted. Just this morning he came into the bank and told me he'd changed his mind. He no longer had need for a loan.\"\n\n\"I don't believe it.\"\n\nRobert raised his right hand. \"It's true, every word. He said that a town unable to maintain its saloons is no place to do business.\"\n\n\"He's right,\" Eleanor said. The saloons provided most of the revenue to run the town. Without them, Cactus Patch would soon become a ghost town. \"Why were they closed?\"\n\n\"That's where it gets interesting,\" Robert said, obviously enjoying himself. \"It seems that the womenfolk are on some sort of temperance kick.\"\n\nEleanor rolled her eyes. Arguments in favor of temperance dated all the way back to the Puritans. With much of government revenue derived from liquor and saloon taxes, Eleanor didn't see much hope of the temperance movement taking hold unless women got the right to vote. If the U.S. Brewers' Association had its way, that was never going to happen, despite the efforts of the Anti-Saloon League.\n\n\"It sounds like my troubles are over,\" Eleanor said. Or at least some of them.\n\n\"You can thank your new heiress.\"\n\nEleanor arched an eyebrow. \"Molly? What has she got to do with it?\"\n\n\"Apparently she and Bessie Adams were in cahoots. I understand that Molly came up with some sort of plan and it worked. You do know that Miss Hatfield was once a dance hall girl.\"\n\nEleanor gave a brusque nod. \"I'm quite aware of Molly's former profession.\"\n\n\"This won't sit right with you, but I'm afraid you will forever be in Miss Hatfield's debt for ending your cattle problems, at least for the time being.\"\n\n\"Not entirely,\" she said. \"There are still ranches I'm concerned about.\" The other ranchers soon figured out that gold fever was a ploy and just that morning she found her fence cut again.\n\n\"Yes, but you won't have to worry about a cattle company and the thousands of cattle Mr. Hampshire planned on stocking.\"\n\n\"Rest assured, Molly has my complete gratitude.\"\n\nHe set his glass on the tray with a chuckle, then rose and donned his hat. \"I'm sorry to rush off like this, but I have to get back to town.\"\n\nShe hated to see him go, but she would rather die than admit it. \"So soon?\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\nShe stood, wrapped her arm around his, and walked him to his horse and buggy. \"You're a good friend, Robert, and you'd make a great husband.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"That's what I keep telling you, but you keep turning me down.\"\n\n\"You know what I think, Robert? I think you should be grateful that I'm an old fool.\"\n\n\"If you're an old fool, what does that make me?\"\n\nShe smiled up at him. \"A dear old fool.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "That night Molly stared at herself in the mirror and, without her usual paint, hardly recognized the woman reflected back. Tonight her face was scrubbed clean and her wet hair hung down her back to her waist.\n\nNothing stood between her and the mirror except for voices of the past.\n\nThe loudest voice of all was her mother's. \"You wicked, wicked girl! Look what you've done to your brother. All because of you he'll never walk again\u2014ever!\"\n\nOther voices filled her head, childish voices of boys and girls who attended school with her. \"Molly, dolly, near killed her brother. If you don't watch out she'll kill her mother.\"\n\nBut there was another voice too, a new one. \"If only you could look in the mirror and see what I see.\"\n\nShe recalled the feel of Caleb's mouth on hers, the approval in his eyes as he gazed at her, and a warm shiver rushed through her.\n\nHe once asked what she saw when she looked at a horse. Her answer was so different from his that at first she was shocked. But maybe people saw only what they wanted to see, were conditioned to see. For good or bad, Caleb saw things in her that no one else had ever seen.\n\nHe even saw her in the little boy Jimmy. \"He's eight. The same age you were at the time of Donny's accident.\"\n\nThe same age she was when she gave up the dreams she had for herself. She swiped at the tear that trickled down her cheek. He's too young, God. Eight is much too young to die.\n\nIf she knew nothing else, she knew that much." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Donny sat up in bed still as a mouse, listening. Voices floated into his room from other parts of the house. Jose and his sister laughed, Rosita's soft giggle almost as timid as her walk. Bo, the cook, yelled about somebody messing up his kitchen. Miss Walker's firm, almost militant, footsteps pounded across the tile floor followed by the slamming of her office door.\n\nLast night, while Miss Walker and the others slept, he'd wheeled his chair out of his room and into the parlor. For weeks he'd practiced easing himself out of bed and onto the floor like Doc Fairbanks had taught him. From there he'd belly-crawled to his chair and pulled himself up. He then wheeled himself from his room to the house's main room, spinning himself around until he got dizzy. In his mind he was running and he could almost feel the wind in his hair.\n\nOne night he crashed into a table, knocking the parlor lamp on the floor. The broken lamp puzzled Rosita and Jose, but no one suspected him.\n\nHe was more careful after that. It wouldn't do to let Molly know what he was capable of doing. He always dreamed of being independent, but that was before he knew that his sister had feelings for the doctor. Now fear of losing her consumed him.\n\nAny guilt he might feel for standing between Molly and the doctor was quickly dismissed. Molly liked the ranch. Or at least she liked working with the horses and she was gradually learning about cattle. Donny made certain of that. Soon she'd get over her feelings for the doctor. He'd make certain of that too.\n\nMeanwhile, he had to find ways of keeping them apart. Letting her go to church alone with the doctor had been a mistake and he wouldn't let it happen again. It would only be for a couple more weeks. Once Molly signed Miss Walker's papers forbidding her to marry, Donny could relax. Never again would he have to worry about a man stealing her away from him. Or putting him in an institution. He counted on it.\n\nAt long last the house settled down. Nonetheless, he waited until after nine before beginning the short but torturous journey from the bed to his chair.\n\nHeaving himself into the seat, he waited a moment to catch his breath before pressing down on the wheels and rolling across the room. He opened the door and listened, surprised to hear low voices. He recognized Molly's voice at once, but who was the other? Dr. Fairbanks!\n\nDonny froze. What was the doctor doing here so late? And why hadn't he heard Bertha? Sometimes the doctor parked a distance away so as not to disturb the animals or upset Miss Walker. Is that what he'd done tonight?\n\n\"Molly, you've got to tell Donny. He has the right to know.\"\n\nDonny stiffened, waiting for Molly's reply, but either none came or Molly's voice was too soft for him to hear.\n\nDonny strained his ears, but it was no use. Molly and the doctor had stepped outside. Hands shaking, Donny closed the door to his room.\n\nMolly was getting married. That's what she didn't want to tell him. She and the doctor were getting married! Even now they were probably talking about putting him away in one of those horrid institutions.\n\nCold sweat broke out on his forehead. He could hardly breathe. His worst nightmare was about to come true." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Chapter 30\n\nMolly threw up her hands. \"Donny, you've got to help me. I can't move you without your help. I'd sooner dress a lamppost.\"\n\nDonny stuck out his lower lip. \"I don't want to sit in my chair.\"\n\n\"You can't stay in bed all day.\"\n\n\"Why not?\" He made a face at her. \"What difference does it make if I stay in bed or sit in my chair?\"\n\nMolly sighed. \"It's not good for you to lie around.\" Weary of Donny's increasing bad moods, she sat on the edge of the bed. \"Now what's wrong?\"\n\n\"What's wrong with you?\" His contorted face made him look older than his years. \"You keep pushing me to do things I don't want to do.\"\n\nShe threw his clean shirt down and stood. \"I never ask you to do anything that's not for your own good.\"\n\n\"It's not for my good, it's for yours!\"\n\nHands at her waist, she glared at him. Already her temples ached. It was too early to argue, but she could hardly ignore him when he was this upset. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\nHe stared at her with accusing eyes. \"You just want to get rid of me so that you can marry the doctor.\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. \"Whatever made you... Donny, I would never get rid of you and I'm not getting married. Why would you even think such a thing?\"\n\n\"Quit lying to me. I heard you and the doc talking.\"\n\n\"You heard us?\"\n\n\"The other night.\"\n\nMolly's thoughts scattered. \"I don't know what you mean. What did you hear?\"\n\n\"I heard Doc Fairbanks say I had the right to know.\"\n\nShe pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. This was the moment she'd always dreaded, the moment she'd prayed would never come. \"What you heard\u2014it's not what you think.\"\n\n\"Then what is it?\" His eyes narrowed. \"What don't I know?\"\n\nShe stared at him. Caleb was right. Donny was no longer a child and had the right to know the truth of his injury. \"Something... I should have told you long ago.\"\n\nDonny's brows drew together. \"Tell me now!\"\n\n\"After you get in your chair.\" Perhaps by the time he was dressed, the right words would come to her. Just don't let him hate me.\n\n\"Promise?\"\n\n\"Promise.\" Brodie had gone to Tombstone for supplies and she was in charge until his return. Today she could be a little late and no one would be the wiser.\n\nDonny cooperated fully. Neither spoke, but he watched her face as if searching for clues. She helped him through his morning ablutions and for once he gave her no argument.\n\nWhen he was fully dressed, he gripped the arms of the chair and leaned forward. \"You said you would tell me.\"\n\n\"Let's go outside.\" It was hot and stuffy in the room and she desperately needed fresh air. She pushed him through the house and onto the shaded verandah.\n\nIn the distance, Orbit did his crazy circling. The colt kept stopping to look at the fence where she normally sat and sang to him each morning. She was wrong. Someone did notice she was late.\n\nShe drew her gaze away from Orbit to find Donny watching her, his forehead shadowed with questions.\n\nShe lowered herself on a wicker chair and cleared her voice but the huskiness remained. \"Caleb and I were talking about your accident. When you fell out of your carriage. That's what you heard.\" She blew out her breath. Not knowing where else to start, she started at the beginning. \"The day of your accident Mama wasn't feeling well, so I took you for a walk.\"\n\nShe went to great lengths to describe the Christmas tree in the shop window. The porcelain doll, gray cloudy skies, and snowmuddied street were just as clear to her now as they had been on that long ago day. She'd never talked about Donny's accident except to Caleb. Maybe that's why it still hurt so much, why the memories had not diminished.\n\nAfter her father died she recalled every detail of his last hours on earth with chilling accuracy. She repeated them over and over in her mind, as if careful attention to specifics would make his death seem more real. Particulars didn't help then and they didn't help now.\n\nDonny sat perfectly still without uttering a sound.\n\n\"It was my fault. I... should never have taken my eyes off you and for that I will never forgive myself.\"\n\n\"Is that the only reason you take care of me? Because it was your fault?\"\n\nThe question cut through her but no more so than the accusations in his eyes. \"I take care of you because you're my brother and I love you.\"\n\n\"More than you love the doctor?\"\n\nHer mouth dropped open. Love? \"Donny... I...\" She started to deny it but the words wouldn't come. Was he right? She knew she had feelings for Caleb but had simply brushed them off as a schoolgirl crush. Never had she allowed herself to call her feelings love.\n\nIs that why the memory of his kisses still lingered? Why her heart skipped a beat the moment she heard Bertha's motor in the distance?\n\nHe glared at her. \"You can't say it, can you? You can't say you love me more.\"\n\n\"I love you,\" she said in a choked voice. \"You're my brother. You mean the world to me.\"\n\n\"But you love the doctor more!\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\nThe vehemence of her voice made him lean back but suspicion remained on his face. \"The only reason you take care of me is because you feel guilty.\"\n\n\"I do feel guilty,\" she admitted. \"I would give anything to change what happened, but that has nothing to do with my feelings for you. I hope we can live here forever.\" She'd worked hard\u2014harder than she'd ever worked in her life\u2014trying to prove to Miss Walker she had what it took to run a ranch. \"You'd like that, right?\"\n\n\"You don't want to live here. You want to get married and put me away.\"\n\n\"Donny, listen to me.\" She reached for his hands but he pulled back.\n\n\"Go away. Leave me alone. I hate you.\"\n\nHis words ripped through her. \"You can't mean that.\"\n\n\"Go!\"\n\nIt was no use trying to talk to him when he was like this. She turned and stumbled down the steps, her mind in a whirl. \"You love the doctor more.\" Was Donny right about her being in love with Caleb? Was that why he affected her so?\n\nShe shook the thought away. Even if it was true, nothing could be done about it. She wanted the ranch for Donny and the only way that was possible was to sign the agreement forbidding marriage.\n\n\"I hate you.\"\n\nDonny didn't mean it. Couldn't mean it. He was upset. They both were. Later they would talk and everything would go back to the way it was. God, please let it be so." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Long after the argument with his sister, Donny sat on the verandah watching her work with horses. He felt bad for the things he said. He didn't hate her, he could never hate her. Nor could he blame her for his accident. He was just so afraid of losing her he hadn't been able to think straight.\n\nMolly put a bay through its paces. Astride the horse she circled the corral much as Donny's thoughts circled in his head. She promised to sign those papers and that meant they could live on the ranch forever. Never again would he have to worry about losing Molly and facing the world alone.\n\nMaybe when Molly took over as the full owner, she'd let him build an observatory on the property with a real telescope. He envisioned astronomers trekking to the Last Chance to view an eclipse, comet, or other heavenly spectacle. What discussions they would have. And how he would amaze them with his knowledge!\n\nHe was so engrossed in his thoughts it took him awhile to realize something was wrong with Orbit. The black horse whinnied, teeth white against black lips. He stood on his hind legs, pawing the air with frantic hooves. He then dropped down on all fours, ran back and forth, and then rose again on his hind legs.\n\nDonny narrowed his eyes against the glaring sun. It looked like Orbit was trying to escape. But why? And where was Molly? He swung his gaze from one end of the corral to the other. The horse that moments earlier had carried Molly now galloped around without a rider.\n\nAlarmed, he craned his neck and quickly scanned the ground. Something blue caught his eye. Molly! She was lying on the ground and didn't move.\n\n\"Help,\" Donny cried. Sweat broke out on his forehead. Orbit wasn't trying to escape. Somehow he sensed that Molly was in trouble and was trying to get to her.\n\n\"Help, someone, help!\" He yelled as loud as he could but no one was around to hear his frantic cries.\n\nHis chest squeezed tight and he could hardly breathe. He wiped his damp palms on his trousers and grabbed the chair wheels. Frantic, he forced his chair to the steps. Even in his panic, he knew he could never reach her. And even if he could reach her, he couldn't help. Not in a million years. No matter how much he wanted to or how much he tried, he couldn't help her. Never had he felt so helpless, so utterly, utterly helpless.\n\nHe whirled about, searching for something, anything. He pounded on the door with his fists. No one answered, which meant that Rosita was either upstairs or out back. He turned the knob and pushed the door open, yelling at the top of his lungs. Still no one.\n\nThe doorbell. It could be heard everywhere, even out back. He got as close as he could to the rope, but it was out of reach. Gasping, he stretched his body as much as he could, his arm rigid. His fingers touched the rope, making it swing back and forth. Bracing himself, he tried again and again.\n\nWith a mighty lunge he stretched high enough to get a handhold on the rope. He tugged it and chimes sounded inside the house.\n\nNothing.\n\nHe fought against panic and gave the rope another brisk pull. This time the door sprang all the way open and Rosita stepped outside.\n\n\"Get help!\" he gasped. \"My sister is hurt.\"\n\nRosita vanished inside, reappearing moments later with her brother.\n\n\"Molly!\" Donny pointed to the corral, and Jose leaped off the verandah and took off at a run.\n\nDonny watched, helpless in his chair, and he did something he didn't normally do. He prayed. God, don't punish me for the awful things I said to her. Please, please, please don't take my sister away. I'll do better, I will, I promise." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Chapter 31\n\nIt was almost eleven p.m. when Caleb crossed the street to the hotel to check on Molly.\n\nNo one was at the desk as he strolled through the deserted lobby. He took the stairs two at a time and hurried to the infirmary at the end of the hall, floorboards creaking beneath his feet.\n\nHe opened the door. A kerosene lamp bathed the room in soft yellow light. Donny sat in his wheelchair snoring like a freight train.\n\nThe poor kid refused to leave his sister's side. By the looks of things, he hadn't even touched the bowl of stew and biscuits from Miss Lily's Caf\u00e9.\n\nMolly still drifted in and out of consciousness, but the swelling on her head had gone down and that was a good sign. For a while, it looked like he was going to have to bore a hole in her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain, but trepanning was no longer necessary, thank God. Now all he could do was wait and pray.\n\nHe sat on the chair by her side, found her wrist, and checked her pulse. It was still below normal. He held her hand in both of his and wished he could smooth away the calluses on her palm, smooth away everything that brought her heartache or pain.\n\nShe looked pale but no less beautiful to him. Silky soft hair spread in disarray across the pillow. Thick, long lashes brushed against gently rounded cheeks. The curve of her pretty pink mouth brought back the memory of her kisses. He felt a tug in his heart. God, make her well again. Bring her back to me.\n\nHe often prayed by a patient's side, part of his job as a doctor. This time he asked for more than just healing; he asked God to bring her back to him.\n\nShaken by how close he'd been to losing her, he covered her hand with his own and sat perfectly still. From the moment Ruckus had driven her helter-skelter to town and helped him carry her to the hotel, he had acted and thought like a physician. He had examined her, monitored her breathing, dribbled water down her throat, measured the swelling of her head, and prayed.\n\nBut now he didn't talk to God as a doctor. Rather he prayed like a man in love.\n\nHe didn't know how long he sat by her side, but the stiffness of his body told him it had been awhile. Low on fuel, the lamp sputtered and the light began to fade. Somewhere around midnight it went out altogether, casting the room in darkness.\n\nAt one a.m., a half-moon shone through the open window, bathing the room in blue light.\n\nRowdy laughter, shouts, and occasional gunshots rose from the street below. Caleb closed the window but it did little to mute the sounds.\n\nIt seemed that things had gotten worse, not better, since the saloons agreed to close on alternate Saturday nights. It was as if the town's roughnecks decided to party harder on the nights the saloons remained open.\n\nEarlier he spotted Harvey Trotter stumbling from the Golden Eagle. Caleb was no closer to solving the mystery of Jimmy's illness, and his heart ached anew for the man's hurting family.\n\nSomeone fired a round of bullets and Donny stirred and called out in his sleep. \"Fire! Fire!\" The kid was having a nightmare.\n\nCaleb stepped away from the window and went to him. He shook him gently and Donny stiffened beneath his touch and his eyes flew open.\n\n\"There's no fire.\" Caleb nodded toward the window. \"Just some rowdies.\"\n\nDonny blinked and looked around as if trying to make sense of his surroundings. \"Is my sister\u2014?\"\n\n\"She'll be fine.\" Caleb picked up a chair, carried it to Donny's side, and sat.\n\nDonny glanced at the bed. \"She still won't wake up.\"\n\n\"She's not asleep, Donny. She's drifting in and out of unconsciousness. It's the brain's way of healing.\"\n\n\"How long will she be like this?\" Donny asked.\n\n\"There's really no way of telling,\" Caleb said. He didn't want to worry Donny, but neither did he want to lie.\n\nDonny sniffled and his tears looked like silver pearls in the dim, moonlit room. \"I said some awful things to her. I told her I hated her and that's not true. I could never hate her.\"\n\nCaleb handed him a clean handkerchief. \"She knows that, Donny.\"\n\n\"How can you be sure?\"\n\n\"I know your sister. We all say hurtful things from time to time, things we don't mean. Fortunately, love is forgiving and your sister loves you very much.\"\n\nDonny wiped his eyes and blew his nose. \"I don't blame her for my accident. I don't.\"\n\n\"You know about that?\" Caleb asked.\n\nDonny nodded. \"She told me it was her fault and that's when I said those awful things.\"\n\nCaleb rubbed his throbbing brow. Molly must have been upset after the argument. Perhaps that accounted for her accident.\n\nDonny's body shook with sobs. \"I\u2014I sh-should have told her not to w-work at the ranch. She was only doing it for me. She was tired and her hands were sore and she doesn't even like cattle... and... I should have told her I loved her.\"\n\nCaleb groaned. That makes two of us. \"You can still tell her that when she wakes up.\"\n\n\"P-Promise?\" Donny pleaded.\n\n\"Promise.\" Caleb grimaced. He had no right to promise things he had no control over.\n\n\"I couldn't even get to her. I couldn't help her,\" Donny murmured. \"I couldn't do anything. I'm as useless as a worm.\"\n\n\"That's not true, Donny. You got help for your sister.\"\n\n\"But what would have happened had I not reached the doorbell? She could have been lying in the dirt for hours. What if Jose and Rosita were out back and didn't hear me ring? What if I'm here in this room all alone and something happens to her?\"\n\n\"It's a waste of time to worry about what could have happened or might happen. You did what had to be done. That's all any of us can do.\" Donny looked so distressed Caleb felt sorry for him. \"Come on, I'll take you to Aunt Bessie's house. She said you could stay with her while your sister is recuperating.\"\n\nDonny shook his head. \"I want to stay here with Molly.\"\n\nCaleb started to argue but changed his mind. \"All right. Just for tonight.\"\n\nHe found an empty room across the hall. Without bothering to remove the bedding, he grabbed the mattress and carried it back to Molly's room and placed it on the floor. He straightened the sheets and blanket and lifted Donny from his chair to the bed.\n\n\"There you go,\" Caleb said. \"Get some sleep. I'll keep watch.\"\n\nDonny settled for the night, Caleb sat by Molly's side, waiting for morning." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Eleanor sat on the buggy seat by Robert's side, staring at the horse pulling them. What a nuisance.\n\n\"Couldn't you have just given Molly my regards?\" she asked, not for the first time. Did Robert always have to be such a gentleman? He insisted she travel to Cactus Patch and see for herself how Molly was doing. Eleanor hadn't been to town for some years, not since those busybody church women boycotted her beef following her divorce. From that time on she conducted her business in Tombstone.\n\n\"Miss Hatfield is under your employ.\"\n\nEleanor rolled her eyes. \"Don't remind me.\" Nothing had worked out as planned, certainly nothing involving the ranch. If only her one and only child hadn't died. Thirty years\u2014more than a quarter of a century\u2014and still it hurt. Nothing that happened since\u2014not the Indian trouble, not the divorce, not even the earthquake and fire that destroyed her ranch\u2014had been as difficult as losing her only child.\n\nShe had no patience for sentimentality or weakness of character. For that reason she considered grief her greatest flaw.\n\n\"How long before Molly can return to the ranch?\"\n\nRobert took his eyes off the road just long enough to give her a puzzled glance. \"A week or two.\"\n\n\"Hmm.\"\n\n\"I thought you said you didn't think she'd work out.\"\n\nEleanor sighed. \"She'd work out just fine if she didn't have to worry about her brother. That's why I have a proposition for her.\"\n\n\"You mean other than insisting she not marry?\"\n\n\"Marriage complicates things, especially for a woman.\" She knew from painful experience that no man was willing to play second fiddle to anything, let alone a ranch. \"I'm going to propose that we hire a full-time caretaker for her brother.\"\n\nRobert pursed his lips. \"I do believe that's the wisest decision you've ever made,\" he said, his voice warm with approval. \"Are you sure you're feeling all right? That doesn't sound like something you'd think up.\"\n\nEleanor kept her gaze focused ahead. \"When you're my age, you have to\"\u2014she couldn't bring herself to use that dreadful word compromise\u2014\"meet people halfway.\"\n\nHe tossed her a dubious look. \"If you're as poor at judging distances as you've been in the past, she'll be lucky if you meet her a tenth of the way.\" He clicked his tongue and the horse picked up speed.\n\nThe town had grown considerably since Eleanor was last there, though it was nowhere near as large as Tombstone. Robert pulled up in front of the hotel and set the brake.\n\n\"I need to pop into the bank, but I'll go up with you first if you wish,\" he said.\n\nEleanor waved away the offer. \"Is that your way of saying you don't trust me to be on my good behavior?\"\n\nHis mouth quirked. \"I know how impatient you are around human frailty.\"\n\n\"You take care of the bank and I'll take care of... human frailty.\" She climbed out of the wagon and marched into the hotel. The sooner she got it over with, the sooner she could return to the ranch.\n\nThe desk clerk directed Eleanor to the infirmary upstairs. Eleanor gave the door a tap before entering. The room was dimly lit and a slight breeze wafted through the open window.\n\nMolly's brother was asleep but his eyes flew open the minute she stepped into the room. \"Miss Walker.\"\n\n\"Donald.\" She glanced at Molly and lowered her voice. \"I came to see your sister.\"\n\n\"She keeps drifting in and out of sleep. Doc Fairbanks says that's the way the brain heals.\"\n\n\"I guess that's good, then.\"\n\nDonny nodded. \"He said she has a concussion but he doesn't think there's anything more seriously wrong.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\" Now what? Eleanor knew what to do with a sick steer or injured horse, but a human? She hadn't even known what to do when her daughter was so ill all those years ago.\n\n\"Tell your sister that I came to see her and... and I'll talk to her when she's recovered.\" She turned and let herself out of the room. Robert said it was her duty to visit Molly and so her duty was done.\n\nShe'd barely made it to the stairwell when the boy called to her. \"Miss Walker.\"\n\nShe turned and waited for him to work his wheelchair through the narrow doorway. He banged against the door frame, muttering beneath his breath. At last he succeeded in turning the chair sideways and easing himself into the hall. Working his wheels with his hands, he rolled within a few feet from where she stood.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked. \"Speak up.\"\n\nIn the dim light of the hotel hall, his eyes looked like pools of green water. \"I want to work for you.\"\n\nShe arched her eyebrows.\n\n\"Like I told you, I'm good with numbers.\"\n\n\"I believe I made it clear that my offer was contingent on your sister's ability to learn the ranching business.\" She turned toward the stairs.\n\n\"I like your ranch,\" he said, stopping her in her tracks. \"I've read practically all your books and I know all about cattle.\"\n\nShe regarded him over her shoulder. \"Do you, now?\"\n\n\"I know that Hereford cattle were first brought to this country by Henry Clay. I also know that bulls can't see the color red so it's not true that it makes them angry.\" He quickly listed several other facts, some involving cattle heritage, weight, and habits. \"Cattle also have amazing memories.\"\n\nResting a hand on the newel, she let him rattle on. Mercy, could she be any more accommodating? Visiting the injured. Stepping foot in a town she loathed. Feeling sorry for a young man who obviously didn't need her sympathy. Was all this insipid behavior a sign of old age?\n\n\"I also know that cows are the only mammals that pee backwards,\" he added.\n\nEleanor laughed; she couldn't help it. She was impressed not only with his knowledge but his obvious enthusiasm and interest. She doubted that any of her cowhands knew as much about cattle or their history.\n\n\"And I have more ideas on how to make the ranch more profitable,\" he continued. \"Do you want to hear them?\"\n\nNo, she did not want to hear them. She wanted to go home. Still, there was something about the earnest face that touched a chord. He was a handsome lad, with the same green eyes as his sister. What a pity the boy couldn't walk. She could use someone like him.\n\n\"Perhaps another time,\" she said.\n\n\"So what do you say? Can I work for you?\" he asked.\n\n\"We'll... discuss it after your sister has recovered,\" she said. Before he had another chance to plead his case, she started down the stairs. \"Good day.\"\n\nOutside, Robert stood by his buggy waiting for her. \"Take me to the post office,\" she said. \"Maybe there'll be a letter from someone interested in learning the ranch business.\"\n\nA look of horror crossed Robert's face. \"You didn't...\" He glanced up at the hotel as if expecting to see someone jump from a second-story window.\n\n\"You'll be pleased to know that I didn't even talk to Molly,\" she said. \"She wasn't awake.\"\n\nA combination of concern and relief suffused Robert's face before he frowned. \"And you decided to dismiss the girl just like that?\"\n\n\"Let's just say I'm keeping my options open.\"\n\n\"That's a switch,\" he said.\n\n\"Not as much as you might think,\" she said with a determined toss of her head. \"Would you be kind enough to draft a bank note from my account to pay for Molly's medical expenses?\"\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. \"You're paying her medical bills?\"\n\n\"Yes, and add extra to cover any other expenses she and her brother might incur during her recovery.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" Robert studied her from beneath the brim of his straw hat. \"What happens if Molly doesn't return to the ranch and no one else steps forward? What then?\"\n\nShe took a deep breath. \"Then I suppose I'd have to take your advice and sell.\"\n\n\"I never thought to hear you say such a thing.\"\n\n\"What choice do I have?\" she asked. \"I may even have to break down and marry you.\"\n\nHe grinned and offered her his arm. \"Now that's what I call meeting someone halfway,\" he said with a nod of approval.\n\n\"Only halfway?\" She glanced at him as they started toward the post office. \"And you accuse me of being a bad judge of distance.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Chapter 32\n\nMolly opened her eyes. The sky looked strange: brown, odd\u2014hairline cracks veering off in all directions. The \"sky\" was actually a dirty, cracked ceiling. She was in a strange room in a strange bed. Something made her turn her head, a shadow\u2014a presence.\n\nThat's when she saw him, Caleb, kneeling by her bedside. Hands clasped, head lowered to the mattress in prayer, he looked like a man pleading for his life. Never had she seen anyone pray with such intensity.\n\nNot wanting to intrude on his privacy, she turned her head toward the wall. The room grew dark. A wave of nausea washed over her and her moment of clarity was gone.\n\nA distant voice cut through the fog. \"You're awake.\"\n\nShe blinked. Gradually the ringing in her head subsided and her vision cleared.\n\nWith some effort his name fell from her parched lips. \"Caleb.\"\n\nThe moment she spoke, the lines of worry left his face. He leaned over and squeezed her hand. \"Take it easy.\"\n\nHer mind whirled in confusion. \"What... what happened? Where am I?\" And why was her mouth stuffed with cotton? \"The fire\u2014\"\n\nCaleb squeezed her hand tighter. \"You're not in Dobson Creek. You're in Cactus Patch, Arizona, and you were thrown from a horse.\" Visions flashed through her head. Fire, smoke. Then a horse. She held on to the last memory. She could almost feel the pounding of horse's hooves beneath her\u2014then nothing.\n\n\"Can you say your name?\" he asked.\n\nHer mind turned over slowly. \"Molly... Ann... Hatfield.\"\n\n\"Molly Ann,\" he said and smiled.\n\nShe tried to smile back but her mouth refused to cooperate. \"Molly.\"\n\n\"Molly,\" he said in a quieter voice. He indicated the room with a slight toss of his head. \"This is what we call the infirmary.\"\n\nIt took a moment for his words to sink in. She glanced around the room. \"Donny!\" Her brother... must get to him. She struggled to sit up but Caleb held her down, his hands lingering on her shoulders long after she'd grown still.\n\n\"Donny's fine,\" he said, releasing her. \"He's staying at Aunt Bessie's house.\"\n\n\"You... you're taking care of him?\"\n\n\"Actually, he's taking care of me. Aunt Bessie has taken a liking to him and that means she's spending less time worrying about me. Donny's helping her write letters to get support for prohibition.\"\n\nShe laid a hand on her forehead. That couldn't be right. Donny was interested in science, not... not prohibition.\n\nCaleb grinned. \"Donny is giving Aunt Bessie a thorough education in outer space and she, in turn, is teaching him about what she calls 'dens of iniquity.'\"\n\nShe tried to smile but her face felt like it was about to crack. She could well imagine the conversations between the two. She tried to sit up but a sharp pain shot through her rib cage and she groaned.\n\n\"Careful. You're still bruised, but as far as I can tell, nothing is broken.\" He helped her sit up. Plumping her pillow, he arranged it behind her and she leaned back.\n\nSomething popped into her head. \"Sandstorm. That's the name of the new bay. I remember putting him through his paces.\"\n\n\"Anything else you remember?\"\n\nShe shook her head. Arranging the sheet, she realized she wore only her chemise. Someone had undressed her. Caleb? Blushing, she glanced at him pouring water from a pitcher, but nothing in his expression gave her pause.\n\n\"Here you go.\" He handed her a glass. His hand touched hers and he quickly drew away. His air of professionalism made it easier to maintain her distance. He was the doctor, she the patient. If only she didn't remember the night he was so much more...\n\nShe took a long sip before handing the glass back to him. \"Thank you.\"\n\n\"I'll go downstairs to Miss Lily's and get you something to eat. Her soup will cure just about anything.\"\n\nHer lips softened into a smile, but her mouth still felt parched. \"How can I ever repay you for your kindness?\"\n\n\"Seeing you smile is enough,\" he said. His gentle expression was anything but professional and a warm glow inched along the length of her, soothing her injuries like a healing salve.\n\nShe lowered her gaze and picked a ball of lint off the blanket. \"How long have I been here?\" It hurt to breathe but the huskiness in her voice had as much to do with emotion as pain. Donny was all right and for that she was grateful, but taking care of him was a demanding job. Caleb and Aunt Bessie were bound to grow weary.\n\n\"Since yesterday.\"\n\nShe touched her forehead. She could not believe it. She remembered being carried, remembered someone dabbing a cool sponge on her head, but after that, nothing.\n\n\"You have a concussion but the swelling has subsided.\"\n\n\"How long do I have to stay here?\" She was anxious to check on her brother and return to the ranch.\n\n\"Another day or two. You'll be sore for a while. Do you think you can walk? The privy is down the hall.\"\n\nShe nodded and he helped her don a dressing gown. He held each sleeve until she slipped an arm into the silky lengths. He then tied the gown around her waist. Never had she known such tenderness or concern for her well-being.\n\n\"I borrowed this from Aunt Bessie,\" he explained.\n\nShe slid out of bed and the room started spinning. Caleb grabbed her. \"Steady,\" he said, holding her until her head cleared.\n\nShe blinked. A riot of brightly colored blossoms spilled from baskets and vases, filling the air with sweet fragrance. She'd never seen so many flowers in one place. \"What is all this?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid the church members got a little carried away,\" he said.\n\n\"Church?\" She stared all around her, stunned. \"They... they did all this? For me?\"\n\n\"Wait till you see what else they did,\" he said and groaned. \"We have enough chicken pot pies to last six months.\"\n\nShe swallowed the lump in her throat but couldn't stop the tears.\n\nHe slipped his arm around her waist. \"Are you all right?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she whispered. \"I'm more than all right.\"\n\n\"That's what I like to hear.\" He walked her ever so slowly out of the infirmary. When they reached their destination at the end of the hall, he asked, \"Do you think you can manage?\"\n\nNodding, she shuffled into the tiny room and closed the door. She glanced into the mirror and shuddered. Her face was white and her hair tumbled down her back in unruly curls. Light-headed, she splashed cold water on her face and immediately felt better.\n\nMoments later she stepped out of the room and swooned.\n\n\"Whoa,\" he said, wrapping her in his arms. The short trip back to the infirmary exhausted her and she sank gratefully into bed.\n\n\"Better get some sleep.\"\n\nHe said more but her eyelids fluttered shut and the sound of his voice faded away. Was that his lips on her forehead? Did he kiss her or had she only imagined it?\n\nWhen next she woke, he handed her a cup of chicken soup. \"Drink up,\" he said. At the moment he was every inch the doctor. She must have been mistaken about the kiss, and a shiver of disappointment raced through her.\n\nShe took a sip. The soup tasted good and it went down with little effort. Caleb took the empty cup from her. \"Just what the doctor ordered. If you're a good girl and follow my orders, I'll even get you some of Miss Lily's famous ice cream.\"\n\nHe set the cup on the table, stared out of the window for several moments, and then sat next to her bed. He looked so serious that she immediately clenched her stomach. She twisted her body around until she faced him.\n\n\"Caleb, what is it?\" Were her injuries worse than he originally led her to believe?\n\nHis steady gaze never left her face. \"Unless I'm diagnosing or prescribing something, I'm not very good at expressing myself.\"\n\nShe studied him, not sure what she heard in his voice. He sounded so unlike himself with none of his usual confidence. \"Must be a doctor's curse.\"\n\nHe rewarded her with a brief smile. \"You scared me,\" he said. \"I thought I'd lost you.\"\n\nShe held her breath. This wasn't the doctor speaking. Nor were the eyes gazing at her doctor's eyes. \"Caleb\u2014\"\n\nHe leaned forward. Elbows on his knees, he rubbed his palms together. \"I told God that if He brought you back to me I'd never want for anything more.\"\n\nShe took a deep breath, letting her hand drop to the side. \"Don't,\" she whispered.\n\n\"I know, I know. This isn't the time or place, but I thought I'd never get a chance to tell you how I feel. The truth is... I love you. I've loved you from the moment I first saw you wearing that ridiculous purple hat and pointing a shotgun at me.\"\n\nShe stared at him, unable to speak. Love. He said love.\n\n\"Tell me you feel the same.\" He lowered his voice but not the intensity.\n\nDenial flew to her lips but went no further. \"I... I...\" Raw hurt flashed on his face and she could no longer hold back. \"I love you too.\"\n\nA wide grin flashed across his face. \"My dear, sweet Molly. I can't tell you how happy that makes me.\" He reached for her hand but she pulled away.\n\n\"This doesn't change anything,\" she whispered in a broken voice.\n\nHis jaw tightened. \"Because of your brother.\"\n\n\"Because of what he will do to us. Because of what he did to my own parents, to our family. I'm sure Jimmy's parents must feel the strain of his illness. How could they not?\"\n\n\"It's not the same thing. Donny's not ill and he's in no danger of dying.\"\n\n\"But he requires much care.\"\n\n\"Molly, you can't sacrifice your life for his.\"\n\n\"Nor can you, Caleb. The town needs you and you need a wife who puts your needs first.\" Despair almost cut off her breathing but she forced herself to continue. \"I can't be that woman.\"\n\nHe started to say something but a knock sounded and his face darkened with annoyance. The door opened just far enough for Aunt Bessie to poke her head into the room.\n\n\"May we come in?\"\n\nCaleb leaped to his feet but his blue eyes bored into Molly. \"Yes, come in. Molly's awake.\"\n\nThe door opened all the way and Aunt Bessie bustled into the room, followed by her slower-paced sister, Lula-Belle.\n\n\"We won't stay long,\" Aunt Bessie gushed. She stopped. \"All these flowers. It looks like a funeral.\" Her glance volleyed between Molly and Caleb as if she sensed the tension between them.\n\n\"I asked these ladies to bring you fresh clothes,\" Caleb explained, his voice hollow.\n\nMolly smiled at the two older women. \"That was very thoughtful.\"\n\n\"We also brought you a little gift.\" Aunt Bessie laid a box on Molly's lap. The box was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a big red bow.\n\nMolly fingered the satin ribbon. \"Thank you, but you've done enough already. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you taking care of my brother.\"\n\n\"Nonsense. Tell her, Lula-Belle. Tell her how much I enjoy Donny.\"\n\nLula-Belle set a pile of freshly laundered clothes on the foot of Molly's bed, the feathers on her hat snapping in the air like flags at sea. \"You can thank your lucky stars that he's only fourteen or she'd have him married off by now.\"\n\nMolly's gaze settled on Caleb, whose dark eyes never left her face. His back ramrod straight, he looked distant.\n\nIt took enormous effort to shift her gaze back to Aunt Bessie. Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined Donny having any sort of normal life. Certainly not one that included marriage.\n\n\"He won't be fourteen forever,\" Aunt Bessie said, as if age were the only consideration. \"I can't wait to tell him that you're awake. He's been so worried.\"\n\n\"How's he doing, really?\" Molly asked.\n\n\"Unless I miss my guess, he's busy beating Sam at chess.\"\n\n\"I didn't even know he could play chess,\" Molly said. Between working and caring for him, she barely had enough time to teach him the necessary skills of reading and writing. Little time had been left for fun except for an occasional game of checkers.\n\nLula-Belle rolled her eyes. \"You're lucky Bessie doesn't teach the boy to gamble.\"\n\n\"Oh, for goodness' sakes, Lula-Belle. Just because I won a bet doesn't mean I gambled.\"\n\nCaleb raised his eyebrows. \"You won a bet?\"\n\nAunt Bessie got all flustered. \"Not exactly. Some of the men in town were betting on how long\"\u2014she gave Molly a sheepish glance\u2014 \"you would last as Miss Walker's heiress. Most didn't think you'd last more than\u2014never mind that. I said you'd last more than two months and won even though I didn't put a single penny in the pot.\"\n\n\"It still sounds like gambling to me,\" Lula-Belle insisted with a stubborn look.\n\n\"Well, it's not!\" Aunt Bessie gave a self-righteous nod. \"It's not gambling if you plan to use the money for the Lord's work.\" She indicated the box on Molly's lap. \"Open it.\"\n\nMolly slid the ribbon off and tore away the paper. \"Oh, bonbons!\" she exclaimed.\n\nAunt Bessie beamed. \"They're my favorite.\"\n\nMolly took the lid off and pulled out a foil-covered chocolate.\n\nCaleb watched with knitted brow. \"I don't think you should be eating sweets yet.\" He looked and sounded every bit a doctor.\n\nAunt Bessie elbowed him. \"I guess you haven't heard. Bonbons are not just your ordinary sweets. They're good for whatever ails you.\" She leaned over and helped herself to a chocolate treat.\n\nMolly offered one to Caleb but he declined. Glad to have something to do besides avoid Caleb's gaze, she carefully peeled away the foil and tossed it toward the wastebasket and missed. Caleb stooped to pick it up.\n\nShe took a tiny bite of the luscious confectionary, letting the chocolate melt in her mouth. \"Hmm,\" she said, smacking her lips. \"I do believe they're my favorite too.\"\n\nAunt Bessie looked pleased and turned to Caleb. \"Are you sure you don't want one?\"\n\nCaleb stood looking at the foil wrapper in his hand. \"I've gotta go,\" he said in an abrupt voice. He grabbed his hat from atop the chest of drawers and literally ran out of the room.\n\nMolly stared at the door. Oh, Caleb. If only things could be different...\n\nAunt Bessie gave a knowing nod. \"A lovers' quarrel, eh?\"\n\nMolly felt her cheeks grow warm. She wasn't about to admit to Aunt Bessie or anyone else what she and Caleb had discussed. \"No, it was... nothing like that.\"\n\n\"We should go.\" Lula-Belle stood and gave her sister a meaningful look. \"We don't want to tire Miss Hatfield.\"\n\nAunt Bessie looked about to answer but thought better of it. \"Very well. But we'll be back.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Chapter 33\n\nThrottle wide open, Caleb raced along the bumpy dirt road toward the Trotter farm. \"I love you too.\" He pushed the thought away only to have another take its place: \"I can't be that woman.\"\n\nDrat! He couldn't think about that. Not now. He had a patient, a very sick little boy who needed his full attention.\n\nWheels spinning, he turned onto the Trotter property and parked. As if to protest Caleb's heavy-footed driving, Bertha backfired and Magic barked in response.\n\nIn the distance Mrs. Trotter hung wash on the clothesline strung between the house and barn.\n\n\"Stay,\" he said, pointing at Magic. He jumped out of his car and sprinted across the yard.\n\nMrs. Trotter greeted him with a wary frown. \"Dr. Fairbanks.\" Her hand froze on a half-hung pair of trousers. She looked tired and pale as the bedsheet flapping in the breeze.\n\n\"I didn't expect to see you.\" Her lips trembled. \"I hope you aren't bringing more bad news.\"\n\n\"On the contrary. I believe I may have misdiagnosed Jimmy's illness.\"\n\nShe let go of the newly washed trousers and they hung precariously from a single clothespin before dropping to the ground. She didn't seem to notice. \"I'm not sure what you mean.\"\n\n\"I don't think he has leukemia. I think he has lead poisoning.\"\n\nShe stared at him, her face suffused with confusion. \"But how\u2014\"\n\n\"I have reason to believe there's lead in that foil ball he carries around with him. If that's true, it could be what's making him sick.\"\n\n\"The foil ball? The one made from bonbon wrappers?\" She stared at him in disbelief. \"But how is that possible? Wouldn't other people get sick from eating those sweets?\"\n\n\"Most people discard the wrappers and they don't make spitballs out of them.\"\n\nMiss Trotter made a face. \"I've scolded him for that filthy habit but he persists.\" She placed her hand on her forehead as if to calm her thoughts. \"You... you really think that's what's wrong with him?\"\n\n\"We'll know for sure soon enough. I'd like to talk to him. Is he home?\"\n\nShe nodded toward the house. \"Inside.\" Leaving her basket of wash behind, she led the way, calling to Jimmy the moment they reached the front porch.\n\nCaleb followed her into the house. Mrs. Trotter opened a door leading to another room in back. \"Jimmy!\"\n\nJimmy appeared rubbing his eyes. It was midafternoon but he was still dressed in his nightshirt. It was obvious he'd been sleeping.\n\n\"Hello, Jimmy,\" Caleb said.\n\nJimmy gave him a squinty-eyed look. \"Hello, Dr. Fairbanks.\"\n\nCaleb bent over, hands on his thighs. \"I wonder if you would be kind enough to fetch me your foil ball.\"\n\nJimmy glanced at his mother as if to check her reaction before turning back to Caleb. \"Why do you want it?\"\n\n\"I'll explain when you bring it to me.\"\n\nJimmy left the room and Caleb straightened.\n\nMrs. Trotter wrung her hands together, lines of worry on her face. \"May I offer you something, Dr. Fairbanks? Some lemonade?\"\n\n\"No, thank you.\" Caleb was too wound up to eat or drink. What a day it had been. First Molly had opened her eyes and told him she loved him. Now this. God, don't let me be wrong about what's causing Jimmy's problem.\n\nJimmy reappeared and handed Caleb the foil ball. It was at least six inches round. \"You must have eaten a lot of sweets to make a ball this size.\"\n\n\"I didn't eat them all,\" Jimmy said. \"I collect foil from other kids.\"\n\nCaleb examined the crushed foil. The ball smelled of chocolate. \"Why? What do you plan to do with it?\"\n\n\"I'm making a ball just like the ones on my trade cards,\" Jimmy replied with obvious pride.\n\n\"Trade cards?\" Caleb looked to Mrs. Trotter for explanation.\n\n\"His uncle used to play for the Cincinnati Red Stockings and every Christmas he sends the children baseball trade cards.\" She shrugged. \"I'm afraid he's filled Jimmy's head with all kinds of fanciful tales.\"\n\n\"The ball has to be at least nine inches round,\" Jimmy explained, his usual dull eyes almost as shiny as the foil sphere in Caleb's hands. \"Otherwise it's not a baseball. Soon as it's big enough, I'm going to make me a baseball bat.\"\n\n\"I see.\" Caleb hated to spoil the boy's fun but it couldn't be helped. \"The problem is, I believe there's something in the foil that's making you sick.\"\n\nJimmy gave the ball in Caleb's hand a dubious glance. \"Is that what makes my stomach hurt?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid so. That means you can't play with foil or make spitballs anymore.\"\n\n\"But if I don't have a ball, I can't play baseball.\" Jimmy's lip quivered and his eyes grew moist.\n\n\"I'll make a deal with you, Jimmy,\" Caleb said. \"You promise to stay away from foil and I'll buy you the best baseball I can find.\"\n\nJimmy's face brightened. \"Really?\"\n\nCaleb smiled. Jimmy's health problems were far from over, but with God's help, he would recover. \"Really. Now go and wash your hands. And be sure to use lots of soap and water.\"\n\nJimmy turned to leave the room, but his mother stopped him and hugged him tight, tears rolling down her cheeks. He wriggled free and she called to her other children. Almost instantly five more freckled faces peered anxiously at their crying mother.\n\n\"Quick!\" Mrs. Trotter said, motioning to her oldest girl. \"Go get your pa. Tell him we have good news.\" She turned to her youngest. \"Jimmy, wash your hands good now, you hear?\"\n\nCaleb stuffed the foil ball into his black bag for testing and pulled out a vial of Iodide of Potassium. \"Give him a few drops every four hours.\" Jimmy's mother took the vial from him and slipped it into her apron pocket.\n\nHarvey Trotter stomped into the house and tossed his straw hat onto the hat rack. \"What's all the racket?\"\n\nMrs. Trotter grasped her husband's sleeve. \"Dr. Fairbanks thinks that Jimmy might not have leukemia after all.\"\n\nHarvey turned to Caleb, his sunbaked face suffused with hope. \"Is this true?\"\n\nCaleb nodded. \"I believe he has lead poisoning.\" He quickly explained about the foil ball. \"Lead poisoning is serious but I think we caught it before it damaged any vital organs.\"\n\nHarvey beamed from ear to ear. He looked completely different from the tortured man Caleb had spotted entering a saloon the day before.\n\n\"Well, I'll be.\" He pumped Caleb's hand like the handle of a dry well. \"We're mighty obliged to you, Doctor.\"\n\nMrs. Trotter clasped her hands to her chest. \"Praise the Lord.\"\n\nHarvey looked at Jimmy, who had just returned to the room. He threw his arms around the boy. \"Praise the Lord.\"\n\nHe then hugged his wife, and all six children huddled around their ma and pa." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Caleb drove away from the Trotter farm grinning. The blazing sun barely held its own against the warm glow radiating from inside him. \"Whoopie!\" One hand on the wheel, he pumped the other in the air. Thank You, thank You, God!\n\nJimmy's problems were far from over. If Caleb's latest diagnosis was correct\u2014and he had every reason to believe that it was\u2014the boy would still have to be monitored carefully. There could be lingering effects, but he had a good chance of living a full life.\n\nCaleb needed this good news. Only God knew how much. He needed a reminder as to why he became a doctor in the first place. He'd lost three patients during the past week: one from a gunshot wound, another from a rattlesnake bite, and one an infant. It was the kind of week that brought a man to his knees and made him question his very reason for being.\n\n\"The town needs you and you need a wife who puts your needs first.\"\n\nEven the bumpy road couldn't distract him from the pain that accompanied thoughts of Molly. He recalled the night they stood in the moonlight surrounded by cattle. He shared his dreams for the future and she made him believe that even building a clinic was possible. If she was by his side.\n\n\"That woman can't be me.\"\n\nHe jammed his foot hard against the gas pedal and Bertha sped up. She bounced and spewed and rattled and roared, but not enough to shake away his troubled thoughts." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Chapter 34\n\nMolly walked around the hotel room touching the bright bouquets and reading the messages attached to each one. So many kind words, so many said prayers. Such an outpouring of love.\n\nThe Bible said not to judge but that's exactly what she'd done. After being banned from her father's funeral, she wanted no part of church or its people. Would never have attended Cactus Patch Church had Caleb not insisted. And even then she'd attended with a closed heart instead of open arms. A few misguided deacons had kept her away physically on that long-ago day, but she never should have turned away spiritually.\n\nGod, forgive me. She wiped away her tears and continued reading the cards.\n\nMany names she didn't recognize, but one she did. Or rather she recognized the stunted handwriting. Mr. Washington had written down the lyrics to a song he'd written for his newly organized choir.\n\nThe first stanza read, \"Put God first and everything will be all right. Put God first and you'll never know another night. Put God first...\"\n\nShe set the card down. Simple for you to say, Mr. Washington. For as long as she could remember, her first thought upon waking was Donny. He was her last thought at night.\n\nBrodie said unlearning a horse was harder than training it. The same was true of people.\n\nCaleb burst through the door, startling her. \"You're up.\" Before she could say anything he added, \"I have good new. I was right about Jimmy.\" He lifted the box of bonbons from the bedside table and shook it. \"Has lead poisoning.\"\n\nConfused, she stared at him. That didn't seem like good news to her. She already knew someone who died of lead poisoning. \"Is he going to \u2014\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"It'll take awhile for him to recover and the lead may have lingering effects, but I believe we caught it in time.\"\n\n\"Oh, Caleb. How wonderful! His family must be so relieved.\" She clasped her hands together. \"But how does a child get lead poisoning?\"\n\n\"It was these.\" He tossed the empty confection box into the wastebasket. \"Jimmy saved the foil and even made spitballs out of it.\"\n\nShe touched a hand to her forehead. \"That day in church, he spit a wad of foil at that old man.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Watching you peel away that foil made me think of it and I did some research. I sent a sample to a colleague in Boston for testing, but I'm willing to bet it'll come back positive for lead.\" He grinned. \"Just think, had you not been thrown from a horse, I might never have figured out what caused Jimmy's illness.\"\n\nMolly's mind whirled. \"Aunt Bessie deserves the credit, not me.\" The dear lady's gift turned out to be more valuable than gold. Molly couldn't believe the way things worked out\u2014amazing. God's work? She smiled at how easily God's name came to mind. Perhaps putting God first wouldn't be as hard as she thought.\n\n\"It seems like a day of discovery,\" she said, her voice soft.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I've been reading my get-well messages.\"\n\n\"Words of wisdom, no doubt.\" He held her gaze. Unspoken words seemed to hang between them as if strung upon an invisible rope.\n\n\"Caleb, what you said...\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I know that Donny is your main concern and I had no right to put you on the spot while you're recuperating. As a doctor I should have known better than to upset you. I apologize. It... it won't happen again.\" He pulled a watch out of his vest pocket. \"I have a patient to see in\"\u2014he pressed the clasp and the cover sprang open\u2014\"exactly ten minutes.\" Closing the watch case, he slid it back into his pocket and turned to leave.\n\n\"Wait!\" she called. He spun around to face her, his expression closed\u2014a stranger's. \"I\u2014I\u2014\" He looked so withdrawn\u2014professional, cold even. He looked nothing like the man who had declared his love for her.\n\nThe words she wanted to say died before reaching her lips. \"I need a bath.\"\n\n\"I'll tell the clerk at the front desk.\" He hesitated. \"Miss Walker covered the cost of this room with enough money left for expenses until you recover.\"\n\n\"Miss Walker did that? But why?\"\n\n\"One of the advantages of being her heiress, no doubt,\" he said, his voice curt.\n\nHe walked out of the room, closing the door behind him. She wondered if she only imagined him pausing outside the door before walking away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "Molly lay in bed and stared at the sunbeam pouring in the infirmary windows. She'd spent a long, sleepless night and greeted the morning with more than a little relief.\n\nCaleb's words kept running through her head. \"I love you. I've loved you from the moment I first saw you wearing that ridiculous purple hat and pointing a shotgun at me.\"\n\nWhen had she first known she loved him? For some reason it felt as if she'd loved him all her life. She'd fought her feelings, denied them, pretended they didn't exist.\n\nPut God first and everything will be all right.\n\nEven her feelings for Caleb?\n\nShe closed her eyes and poured her heart out to the Lord. She'd been wrong about so many, many things. She judged all churches cold and judgmental like the one in Dobson Creek and she'd been wrong. She was also wrong\u2014perhaps even arrogant\u2014to think she knew what was best for Donny and that she could take care of him without help. But her worst mistake of all was putting God last and not asking Him to guide the way.\n\nFalling in love with Caleb? Was that wrong too?\n\nShe jumped out of bed, hurriedly dressed, and battled her curls into a tidy bun. A loud chugging sound announced Caleb's arrival in town. She raced to the window and her heart leaped with joy. Bertha backfired and she laughed. Caleb glanced her way and she lifted her arm to wave, but he quickly dashed into his office, Magic at his heels. Had he seen her? She didn't think so.\n\nShe turned from the window and the room began to spin. Better get a bite to eat. She had no intention of falling on her face when she told Caleb her decision to follow her heart.\n\nAfter eating her fill of flapjacks and nervously gulping down two cups of coffee in Miss Lily's Caf\u00e9, she felt better except for the butterflies in her stomach.\n\nOutside the sun was hot and the sky bright. A horse and wagon was parked in front of Caleb's office and a wave of disappointment washed over her. Already he was with a patient. Never mind. She would sit in the waiting room until he was free\u2014even if it took all day.\n\nJust as she reached his office the door swung open and a woman stepped outside with a young boy Molly immediately recognized.\n\n\"Hello, Jimmy,\" Molly said. She then introduced herself to Jimmy's mother. \"Dr. Fairbanks told me the good news.\"\n\nMrs. Trotter smiled. \"I don't know how I'll ever be able to thank him.\" She gazed lovingly at her son. \"You can go to Mr. Green's. I'll meet you there. And remember, no bonbons.\"\n\nJimmy gave a whoop and headed for the mercantile store.\n\n\"Dr. Fairbanks told Jimmy to order a baseball and he would pay for it,\" Mrs. Trotter explained.\n\n\"That's very kind of him,\" Molly said. Trust Caleb to know exactly what the boy needed. \"I'm so happy for you and your family.\"\n\n\"We're very blessed. You have no idea how hard it is to care for a sick child. It affects the whole family, you know what I mean?\"\n\n\"I believe I do,\" Molly said.\n\n\"And Dr. Fairbanks! I tell you that man is a wonder. Did you know that he was up all night at the Randall ranch delivering a baby? The poor man doesn't sleep. Thank God he doesn't have the responsibility of home and family.\"\n\nMolly's heart sank. \"I guess that would be a problem.\"\n\nMrs. Trotter nodded. \"Yes, indeed. Dr. Masterson always said a physician either cared for a wife and children or cared for his patients. He couldn't do both.\"\n\nJimmy called to his mom.\n\n\"I better let you go,\" Molly said.\n\n\"It was lovely meeting you.\" With a quick wave of her hand, Mrs. Trotter hurried along the boardwalk toward Green's Mercantile.\n\nMolly turned to stare at Caleb's door and her spirits sank. \"You have no idea how hard it is to care for a sick child.\"\n\nDonny wasn't sick but he needed a great deal of care, and she knew all too well what that could do to a family.\n\nAn older man with a cane brushed past her and opened the door to the doctor's office, a jangling of bells announcing his arrival. He waited for her to enter ahead of him but she shook her head, backed away, and turned. Without a backward glance she walked to the livery stables as fast as her still-woozy head would allow." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "Chapter 35\n\nEleanor sat in the rocking chair on the verandah enjoying the warm night air when Brodie joined her.\n\n\"I heard she's back,\" he said. He leaned one shoulder against a post and rolled a cigarette.\n\nEleanor stopped rocking. She never thought to see Molly again. Certainly not at the ranch. It would seem that she underestimated the girl. \"She's back.\"\n\nHe licked the paper. \"The first thing she did was get back on Sandstorm. Not many people would do that after eating dust like she did.\"\n\nThe girl had spunk, all right. No question. \"This is not a horse ranch. If she plans to stay she's going to have to learn about cattle.\"\n\nBrodie stuck his cigarette in his mouth, swiped a match on the sole of his boot, and lit it. The smell of tobacco smoke wafted in the air. \"What do you want me to do with Orbit?\"\n\n\"Orbit?\"\n\n\"The blind horse.\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" The horse would never survive the wilderness, so releasing it was out of the question. Nor could they sell it. \"Do you know anyone who might be willing to take him?\" It was a long shot. What rancher would take on the expense of a horse that didn't earn its keep?\n\n\"Nope, no one.\"\n\nEleanor let out a sigh. \"Let me think about it.\"\n\nBrodie moved away from the steps and headed toward the bunkhouse. \"Maybe we should just shoot it,\" he called over his shoulder.\n\nBut Eleanor's thoughts had already drifted away from the horse and settled back on Molly. All of a sudden the girl looked promising. Eleanor would never have guessed it, but it was true. Maybe, just maybe, she had found her heir." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "Donny sat by the open window of his room, his body frozen in horror.\n\nShoot it! They're going to shoot Orbit!\n\nHe gripped the arms of his wheelchair, sweat dripping into his eyes. Brushing the back of his hand across his damp forehead, he tried to think.\n\nHis thoughts scrambled. Somehow he had to save Orbit, but how? It took him the best part of an hour, but he came up with a plan\u2014a daring plan.\n\nMolly had already retired for the night, but he waited until he heard Miss Walker climb the stairs to her room. He waited until the bunkhouse lights were out and the distant howling of wolves and moos of cattle were all that broke the silence of the night.\n\nHe grabbed the blanket off the bed and tucked it around his waist. He then flattened the feather pillow across his lap.\n\nEver so quietly he wheeled himself through the darkened house. A third-quarter moon slanted a white beam through the windows of the main room, allowing just enough light to see.\n\nHe opened the front door and wiggled his chair onto the verandah. He stopped to catch his breath. After closing the door he slowly approached the top of the steps. His heart thumped and sweat broke out on the back of his neck.\n\nHe arranged the pillow in front of his chest and face and almost decided not to go through with his plan. \"Maybe we should just shoot it.\"\n\nWith grim determination he filled his lungs with air, reached for his wheels, and spun them forward.\n\nThe chair shot off the verandah. Missing the steps the chair hit the ground with a thud and tipped over. Donny was thrown facedown in the dirt. The pillow and blanket softened the blow, but even so he was dazed and out of breath.\n\nDoc Fairbanks's voice sounded in his head. \"Breathe. Force those lungs open.\"\n\nHe waited until his breathing was almost normal before reaching for the overturned wheelchair. Stretching full-length, he lifted the chair with one hand and tried pushing it upright. It took several tries before he succeeded.\n\nGritting his teeth, he propelled himself with his elbows and eased himself around until he faced his chair square on. He then worked his way forward on his belly. He grunted and groaned but kept plowing his elbows into the dirt, dragging his lifeless legs behind.\n\nGrabbing hold of the footrest, he rested for a moment. Doc's voice sounded in his head, telling him where to put his arms, how to breathe. Inch by painful inch he made his way into the seat of his chair, turning his torso around until he sat square.\n\n\"Whoopie!\" Startled by his own voice, he covered his mouth with his hand and froze, hoping no one had heard. He did it! He made it all the way outside and down the steps by himself. The rest should be easy.\n\nOnly it wasn't. It was difficult to wheel his chair over soft ground and several times his wheels sank into a rut, almost toppling him over.\n\nBy the time he reached the barn he was drenched with sweat, his shirt sticking to his back. He wiped his wet hands on his trousers before rolling inside. The barn smelled of heated horseflesh and hay. The moon shone through the hatch of the hayloft and he wheeled toward the beam of light.\n\n\"Orbit,\" he called softly, though it was doubtful that anyone could hear him inside the barn.\n\nHe rolled past each stall. Several horses stirred and one nickered. Orbit was in the end stall. His head hung over the gate bobbing up and down.\n\n\"It's me.\" He held out his hand and Orbit tickled his palm with his velvety soft nose. \"I won't let them hurt you. I won't!\" Donny swallowed the lump in his throat. If only there was another way. \"Are you ready?\"\n\nHe wasn't even sure he was ready. He slid his hand along the gate until he found the latch. It lifted easily. He rolled back, pulling the gate with him. The stall opened and Donny rolled away.\n\n\"Come on, boy.\" Orbit walked ever so slowly from the stall and Donny guided the horse out of the barn with his voice. \"That's it. Keep going.\" He didn't stop until he'd rolled a good fifteen or twenty feet away from the barn. The horse stopped behind him. \"Go. Go on.\"\n\nOrbit cocked an ear but didn't move. His coat shone in the moonlight like one of Molly's shiny dresses. He swished his tail and lowered his head as if searching for Donny's hand.\n\n\"You can't stay here. It's not safe. You need to find your pack.\" Horses had a keen sense of smell and hearing, and he knew from careful watching that Orbit's were greater than most. He counted on them to guide the horse to safety. \"Go!\"\n\nStill the horse stayed. Donny turned his chair around. \"You don't give me any choice.\" He slapped Orbit's side and the colt bounded off.\n\nNo sooner had the horse's hooves faded away than a wolf howled in the distance. Shivering, Donny turned toward the ranch house and forced his wheelchair over the uneven ground. A couple of times he had to stop and work his way out of a rut, but he finally made it back to the verandah\u2014and stopped.\n\nHe forgot about the steps. Going down was one thing, but going up was altogether something else. Spotting the pillow on the ground where he'd left it, he threw himself forward and landed on top of it. He hit his elbow hard and tears sprang to his eyes. \"Ow.\"\n\nCalm down, calm down, calm down. Gotta breathe. He went through the exercises Doc had taught him, forcing cool night air into his lungs. He then belly-crawled to the steps. He was out of breath and beginning to wheeze but he kept going. Hands on the bottom step, he tried pulling himself up, but without the use of his elbows he couldn't get enough traction. He tried again and again until at last he fell back on the ground, exhausted." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "Molly awoke to banging on her bedroom door. Before she made it out of bed, the door sprang open and Miss Walker's voice floated across the dark room. \"Molly, your brother needs you.\"\n\nMolly's feet hit the floor before the words were barely out of Miss Walker's mouth. Grabbing her dressing gown, she shoved her arms into the sleeves as she ran. \"What's wrong with him?\"\n\n\"He may be hurt. He's outside.\"\n\n\"Outside?\" Molly sprinted along the hall on bare feet, then raced down the stairs and out the front door. A couple of cowhands gathered in a circle.\n\nMolly flew down the verandah steps and dropped by Donny's side. The sky was still dark but the light from Stretch's lantern bathed Donny in a yellow glow. Dry blood stained the elbows of his dust-covered shirt, but she could find no other injuries.\n\n\"What happened?\" she cried.\n\n\"Now don't go gettin' all riled up,\" Ruckus said. \"I don't see no broken bones. Far as I can tell he's got no serious injuries. Just some skinned knees and elbows is all.\"\n\nShe turned back to her brother. \"What are you doing out here?\" She brushed the hair away from his face. \"How did you get outside?\"\n\n\"I did just what Doc Fairbanks taught me to do. I got back in my chair by myself.\"\n\nDonny grabbed her arm. \"I had to let him go, Molly. I couldn't let them shoot him.\"\n\n\"The boy ain't been makin' much sense,\" Feedbag said. \"I fear he's what you call delirious.\"\n\nShe studied her brother's face. He didn't look delirious but he did look different\u2014older somehow. \"Who did you let go?\"\n\n\"Orbit.\"\n\nShe pulled back. He was confused. \"Orbit's in the barn. I put him there last night.\"\n\nDonny shook his head. \"No, he's not. I let him go.\"\n\nShe stared at him. \"But... that means you made it all the way to the barn.\"\n\n\"I did. I had to. Brodie was going to shoot him.\"\n\nMolly looked up at Brodie. \"Is that true?\"\n\nBrodie gave a sheepish shrug. \"He must have overheard me talking to Miss Walker. I was just joshing. Miss Walker would never let anyone harm a perfectly healthy animal even if he is blind as a bat.\"\n\n\"He might not be perfectly healthy for long,\" Stretch said. \"A little blind horse ain't gonna survive very long out there.\"\n\nDonny's eyes rounded in horror. \"But... but... I thought he would find his way back to his pack.\"\n\nStretch shook his head. \"He ain't got no pack. He was born and raised right here on the ranch. He don't know anythin' else.\"\n\n\"He'll be all right,\" Feedbag said. \"Long as he don't fall in no canyon or meet up with no wolves\u2014\"\n\nDonny gave a strangled cry and his fingers dug into Molly's arm. \"You gotta find him.\"\n\n\"I will, Donny, I promise, but first we've got to get you inside. Would someone please go and fetch Dr. Fairbanks?\"\n\n\"Miss Walker already sent Wishbone into town,\" Ruckus said. \"With the doc's newfangled machine he should be here in an hour or so.\"\n\nDonny's eyes filled with tears. \"I don't need a doctor.\" His fingers dug deeper. \"You gotta find Orbit. If anything happens to him...\"\n\nMolly squeezed his hand. \"We'll find him. I promise.\" She stood and addressed Stretch. \"Would you mind carrying my brother to his room?\"\n\n\"What about Orbit?\" Donny cried.\n\nBrodie lifted his hat and raked his hair away from his face. \"Since I'm the culprit that caused the trouble in the first place, I guess it's up to me to make things right. Soon as the sun comes up I'll look for the horse.\" He swung around and stalked to the barn.\n\nMolly moved out of the way to let Stretch and Feedbag pick Donny up off the ground.\n\n\"But what if Brodie doesn't find him?\" Donny called as the men carried him into the house. \"What if it's too late?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "An hour later Molly stood at the foot of Donny's bed watching Caleb wrap gauze around Donny's elbows and knees.\n\n\"Scissors,\" he said, holding out his hand. Molly quickly found a pair of scissors in his black case and handed them to him. Their fingers touched and she quickly pulled her hand away. It took longer to wrestle her gaze from his.\n\nCaleb snipped the length of gauze and attached it with adhesive. \"Looks like you gave your funny bone a wallop.\"\n\n\"I don't know what's funny about a funny bone,\" Donny muttered.\n\n\"Then you probably won't see anything humorous about the humerus bone either.\" Despite Caleb's best efforts he was unable to get Donny's mind off Orbit.\n\n\"How could I have been so stupid?\" Donny moaned. \"All I did is put Orbit in danger.\"\n\nMolly's heart went out to him. \"You didn't mean any harm, Donny. It was an accident. You thought you were doing what was best.\"\n\n\"Your sister's right,\" Caleb said. \"We all make mistakes. I recently made a very bad one that could have caused a little boy to die. Sometimes God gives us second chances to set things right.\"\n\nMolly nodded. \"And sometimes third, fourth, and fifth chances.\" She looked directly at Donny. \"We all make mistakes. My biggest mistake was treating you like an invalid when clearly you're not.\"\n\nDonny gave her a beseeching look. \"If you don't look for Orbit, you'll be making another mistake. Brodie won't find him, I know he won't.\"\n\nCaleb tossed his supplies back into his leather bag. \"Brodie's an expert in catching horses.\"\n\n\"Yes, but Orbit always goes on the far side of the corral whenever Brodie comes near.\"\n\n\"That's not true,\" Molly said. Was it? Come to think of it, she never did see Brodie and Orbit together.\n\nDonny nodded, his eyes serious. \"Molly, I'm right. I know I am. Orbit won't go to Brodie, but he'll come to you and he'll come to Magic.\"\n\nCaleb glanced at her before turning back to Donny. \"Your sister and I will go and look for him on one condition. You stay put until we get back. I'm almost out of bandages.\"\n\n\"I won't leave my room. I promise.\" Donny waved them away. \"Go! Hurry!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "Chapter 36\n\nMagic sat on Molly's lap while Caleb drove. Nose in the air, the dog's pendent ears were pinned back by the wind.\n\n\"I think he knows that Orbit might be in trouble,\" she said, her voice loud enough to be heard over the rumbling motor.\n\nCaleb nodded. \"That dog knows more than what's good for him.\"\n\nSomething moved ahead and Molly craned her neck. \"Wait, I saw something.\"\n\nAs if to concur, Magic barked. Caleb came to a rolling stop and a black cow and calf emerged from the brush onto the road in front of them.\n\nMolly blew a strand of hair away from her face and sighed. They'd been looking for hours and nothing. She had no idea that the Last Chance covered such an enormous area. The ranch spread mostly north and south, with the east backing to free range. The south was bound by canyons, the north by hills. The property line to the east was fenced to keep out maverick horses and stray cattle. Unless someone had recently cut the fence again or the gate was open, Orbit couldn't have reached free range. That meant he was still somewhere on the ranch, but the rugged terrain to the south gave her little consolation.\n\nThey veered off the cattle trail and the auto bounced up and down and side to side.\n\nCaleb stopped the car. A high granite wall rose directly ahead of them. \"We can't go much farther,\" he said.\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder. \"Maybe we should double back. We could have missed him.\"\n\nHe looked almost as frustrated as she felt. \"We should have come on horseback. The motor is likely to scare him.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"No. He's used to the sound of the motor. Whenever you drive up he runs to the fence to wait for Magic. That's why\u2014\"\n\nHis gaze sharpened. \"Why what, Molly?\"\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"Orbit would have heard the motor unless he was injured or\u2014\"\n\nHe reached for her hand. \"Or out of earshot.\"\n\n\"He has very sensitive ears,\" she said.\n\nMagic jumped up, paws on the dash, and barked.\n\nCaleb groaned and released her hand. \"All right, all right.\" He climbed out of the vehicle and reached for Magic. \"There you go,\" he said, setting the dog down. Magic sniffed the ground, following some invisible trail around cacti and scrub brush.\n\n\"Probably a prairie dog or rabbit,\" Caleb said.\n\nMolly shuddered. \"I just hope it's not a rattler.\"\n\n\"Rattlers are too smart to be out in this heat.\" He mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. \"You'll only find them out at night.\"\n\nShe climbed out of the car to stretch her legs. The sun was straight overhead and her stomach reminded her that she hadn't eaten all day.\n\nCaleb handed her a canteen, and she drank her fill of lukewarm water before giving it back to him.\n\nHe tossed the canteen into the backseat. \"Don't look so worried. We'll find Orbit.\"\n\nShe forced a smile. \"I hope you're right.\"\n\n\"I am. Doctors are always right.\" He grinned. \"Except when they're not.\" He glanced around. \"I don't see Magic.\"\n\nShe shaded her eyes against the sun and scanned the area. \"Over there!\"\n\nHe followed her finger and shook his head. Magic had his nose to the ground, his hind legs circling around. \"Crazy dog.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Just like...\" She drew in her breath. \"Orbit was here!\"\n\nNo sooner were the words out of her mouth than they both raced to Magic's side. Caleb dropped to his haunches and inspected the ground. \"You're right.\" His finger traced a circle of hoofprints.\n\n\"Those tracks belong to Orbit,\" she said. She couldn't imagine any other horse sidestepping in a circle. She kneeled by Magic, petting him. \"Where is he? Where's Orbit?\"\n\nMagic barked and started toward the canyon wall. He stopped and looked back as if to say, Well, are you going to follow me or aren't you?\n\nCaleb rose. \"Let's go!\"\n\nBy the time Molly had gathered Magic in her arms and climbed back in the car, Caleb had already started the motor and was in the driver's seat.\n\nThe terrain was rough, forcing Caleb to drive at a snail's pace. Even so they bounced up and down like a rubber ball. They reached an outcrop of rocks.\n\n\"I don't see anything,\" Molly said. Magic sniffed the air and whimpered. \"That way.\" She pointed to the right.\n\nCaleb drove until they reached open desert and stopped.\n\nMagic bounded off Molly's lap and onto Caleb's. He strained to hang his head outside the auto, whimpering and barking.\n\n\"Go back,\" she said.\n\nCaleb shook his head. \"There was nothing there.\"\n\nShe brushed hair away from her face. \"Try telling that to Magic.\"\n\nCaleb handed the dog over to her. He then made a wide U-turn and headed back the same way they had come. Magic stiffened in her arms.\n\n\"Stop!\"\n\nCaleb slammed on the brakes. \"What?\"\n\n\"I think I saw a way through.\"\n\nCaleb swung the car around in a circle.\n\n\"There!\" Shadows falling across the rock had previously hidden the opening from view. Bertha barely made it between the twin mound-shaped buttes. Granite walls surrounded them, rising from the desert floor in jagged peaks.\n\nMolly sat forward. \"Over there!\"\n\nCaleb steered the car in the direction she pointed. It was Orbit, all right, standing on hind legs, front hooves frantically pawing the air.\n\nMagic barked and tried to get out of the car, but Molly held tight. Something moved in the tall grass in front of the panicked horse. Wolves. No less than six of them were closing in on the helpless colt.\n\n\"Oh no!\" Molly cried.\n\n\"Don't let go of Magic,\" Caleb shouted.\n\nMagic had no intention of going anywhere. Instead he cowered on her lap, his body shaking.\n\nOne wolf leaped through the air. Orbit's hoof caught the wolf by the neck, throwing the animal against a rock. They were too far away to see if the wolf was dead or merely stunned. That left five wolves.\n\nMolly pumped her fist. \"Good for you, Orbit.\" The horse was blind but far from helpless. Neither, as it turned out, was her brother.\n\nOne wolf let out a menacing howl and a cold shiver shot down Molly's spine. If only she'd thought to bring her shotgun.\n\nCaleb inched the car forward to within twenty feet of the animals and blew his horn. Ah-ooh-ga. The wolves glanced back, teeth bared, then continued to advance toward Orbit.\n\nMolly handed Magic over to Caleb and jumped from the vehicle. She grabbed a rock and threw it at the nearest wolf. The wild canine stared at her, its amber gaze boring into her like a branding iron. She threw another rock and this time the wolf moved away, but another\u2014 probably the leader\u2014slithered toward her. He looked thin and mangy but no less threatening.\n\n\"Get in!\" Caleb shouted.\n\nMolly tossed one last rock before heaving herself into the vehicle. Caleb slammed his foot against the gas pedal. Bertha lurched forward, trembled, and stalled.\n\nCaleb pounded the dash with his fist.\" Blast it!\" The car shuddered and backfired, once, twice\u2014three times! The loud booms echoed through the canyon like cannon fire and the wolves ran.\n\nHe burst out laughing. \"Yahoo!\"\n\nHand on her pounding chest, Molly gasped. \"Th-Thank God for Bertha.\" She picked Magic up off the floor where he'd dived for cover and rubbed her nose in his fur. The poor dog was still shaking. \"Your friend is okay.\"\n\nOrbit whinnied and Magic leaped out of her arms, paws on the dash, and whined.\n\nThe colt lowered his front legs and stood motionless as if afraid to move. \"Orbit, it's safe,\" she called. \"Come on.\"\n\nShe scrambled out of the car and, after making certain no wolves lurked nearby, set Magic on the ground. The dog sprinted forward with a joyful bark and raced through the dry grass to the colt's side. Orbit lowered his head and the two friends touched noses.\n\nCaleb turned the flywheel and Bertha leaped to life. \"Hurry, Molly. Those wolves aren't going to stay away for long.\"\n\n\"Come on, Magic.\" Molly clapped her hands. The dog raced back to the car. Orbit nodded his head several times, then cautiously walked toward them, stopping every couple of feet to sniff the air.\n\nThe moment Orbit reached them Molly thrust out her hand and the horse buried his nose in her palm. The poor horse was trembling, his coat covered in dust and sweat.\n\nMolly ran her hand along Orbit's forehead, moving his forelock aside. \"You're safe now, little fellow.\"\n\nCaleb reached for the rope in back. \"Let's get out of here.\"\n\n\"We won't need that,\" Molly said. \"Orbit will follow us. Just don't drive too fast.\" A trickle of blood ran down Orbit's left hind leg. \"Oh no, he's hurt.\"\n\n\"Looks like one of the wolves caught him with a claw,\" Caleb said. \"I'll clean it up later. Come on. We gotta get out of here.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Wasting no time, they left the hidden area behind. Caleb drove extra slow for Orbit's sake. Even so, they bounced over ruts and gullies.\n\nMolly held on tight. She was still shaken from the ordeal, but no amount of jostling, heat, or hunger could dampen her spirits. What a day it had been. Donny making it all the way to the barn by himself. Orbit fighting off wolves.\n\nFollowing her brother's accident, she'd vowed to protect and care for him always. What an impossible task she'd set for herself. No matter how determined, how watchful, how absolutely vigilant she was, it would never be enough. Only Donny could protect Donny. The rest was up to God.\n\nMagic whimpered and barked and her thoughts scattered like seeds in the wind. \"I think he needs to go,\" she said.\n\n\"Again?\" He tossed a nod toward the windmill ahead. \"I'll stop there so we can all get a drink.\"\n\nCaleb pulled up alongside the high stilts. The towering blades cast a spot of welcome shade over them. Molly climbed out of the car and called Orbit. While the horse drank, Caleb held Magic up to the trough. Magic lapped noisily, his ears dragging in the water.\n\nAfter Orbit had his fill, he nuzzled his nose in her hand and nodded his head up and down as he did each morning to greet her. She laughed. \"You want me to sing, eh?\"\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"Swing low, sweet chariot.\" \"Come down from above.\" She sang softly at first, but her voice gradually grew louder, as did Mr. Washington's voice in her head. What in my life needs God's help? What secret code is buried in my heart? What chains do I need Him to remove? \"Coming for to carry me home.\" Help me to reach my true love.\n\nShe finished the song and Caleb joined her. \"That's the saddest song I've ever heard you sing.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Not sad, hopeful,\" she said. \"It's a song filled with hope.\"\n\nHe took a step forward and cupped her elbow. \"You're shaking. You're not still scared, are you?\"\n\nShe stepped out of his reach but only to think more clearly. \"I guess in a way I am. A little.\" She was about to make a big change in her life and that alone was scary.\n\n\"I realized I've been wrong about a lot of things. About the church. Donny.\" After a short hesitation she added, \"God.\"\n\nHe lifted a brow. \"God?\"\n\n\"I never really saw Him working in my life. Losing almost everything in the fire. Spotting Miss Walker's advertisement. Coming to Cactus Patch. Even my accident. I thought that it was all by happenstance. Now I realize God was working in my life all along, but I was just too blind to see it.\"\n\n\"We all tend to be blind at times,\" he said.\n\n\"Not you. You never saw Donny as crippled.\"\n\n\"Sometimes it's easier to see things more clearly when you're standing a distance away.\" He studied her. \"Is that why you moved away from me just now? So you can see me more clearly?\"\n\n\"I always saw you clearly,\" she said softly.\n\nHe tilted his head. \"So where do we go from here?\"\n\nWe. He said we. She exhaled. She ran her hands up and down her arms. She no longer trembled out of fear but rather anticipation, hope, and, more than anything, love.\n\n\"I don't know what the future holds. I leave that in God's hands. What I do know is that I love you with all my heart, and if you still want this stubborn woman...\"\n\n\"Molly,\" he said, grabbing her by the arms. \"Molly Hatfield... are... are you saying what I think you're saying?\"\n\nShe nodded.\n\nWith a cry of joy he pulled her close. Laughing, she buried her head against his chest.\n\n\"Is that a yes?\" she asked. \"Does this mean you still want me?\"\n\n\"Oh, Molly, how can you even ask me that? I want you, I love you, I need you... I...\" Tightening his hold, he murmured the sweetest, most beautiful words in her ears, his warm breath showering down like gentle rain. \"I know that Donny will always come first but...\"\n\nShe lifted her head and touched a finger to his lips. \"Not anymore. Thanks to you, Donny will do just fine. He doesn't need a nursemaid and he certainly doesn't need an overprotective sister.\"\n\nCaleb gazed at her with such tenderness she was afraid to breathe. Please, God, if this is just a dream, don't let me wake up. Ever!\n\n\"You've made me the happiest man alive.\" He showered her with kisses, and the sweet tenderness of his lips made her tremble with pleasure. He kissed her again and again, each time his lips becoming more demanding, but then she had some demands of her own to make.\n\nThey might have stayed locked in each other's arms forever had Magic not barked and Orbit whinnied as if to say, Hey, you two. Let's go home." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "Chapter 37\n\nEleanor sat at her desk staring at the contract clause forbidding her \"heiress\" to marry. Robert criticized her for including such a stipulation, but it was there for good reason. Marriage complicated matters. It diminished a woman's abilities, diverted her attention, and inevitably broke her heart. Married men could run a ranch; married women could not.\n\nA knock sounded at the door. \"Come in.\"\n\nThe door opened and Molly stuck in her head. \"We found Orbit.\"\n\nEleanor barely bothered to look up. \"It's about time. Now maybe we can get some work done.\"\n\n\"Do you have a moment?\" Molly asked.\n\nEleanor sat back in her chair, pen in hand. \"Come in.\"\n\nMolly walked into the room and closed the door. Dressed in divided skirt, checkered shirt, and wide-brimmmed hat, Molly looked nothing like the girl Eleanor had first set eyes on all those weeks ago. It wasn't only the clothes that made the difference; she no longer seemed to carry the world on her shoulders, and the glow on her face had nothing to do with paint. Obviously ranch work agreed with her and this gave Eleanor a measure of satisfaction.\n\nMolly moistened her lips. \"I apologize for the disruption this morning and for taking the men away from their duties.\"\n\n\"See that it doesn't happen again.\" Eleanor folded her hands on the desk. \"I guess this is as good a time as any to discuss your brother. I decided to hire him a nursemaid.\" Convinced that the girl would welcome the news, Eleanor was surprised to see Molly frown.\n\n\"Why... why would you do such a thing?\"\n\nEleanor shrugged. \"My banker friend told me that I have you to thank for chasing away that awful man Hampshire. It's the least I can do to show my appreciation.\"\n\n\"That's very kind of you but Donny doesn't need a nursemaid.\"\n\nEleanor discounted Molly's objection with a wave of a hand. \"He might not, but you do. The ranch needs your full attention, and the only way that will happen is if someone else takes care of him.\"\n\nMolly stepped away from the door and stood directly in front of the desk. \"Donny made it all the way to the barn by himself.\"\n\nEleanor tossed her pen on the desk. \"Am I supposed to applaud him for letting one of my horses free?\"\n\n\"He only did it because he thought Orbit's life was in danger. He shouldn't have let him go, but it was still a great accomplishment.\" Hands planted on the edge of the desk, Molly leaned forward, her face earnest. \"During the Dobson Creek fire he didn't even try to save himself and he could have died. I never thought to see the day when he could get in and out of his chair by himself.\"\n\n\"He still needs help,\" Eleanor said briskly. She glanced down at the contract in front of her. Molly's name was typed neatly at the top of the page. Was it too soon to have the girl sign it? Perhaps then Molly would more readily accept Eleanor's proposal.\n\nMolly straightened. \"I love your ranch. It gave Donny and me our first real home. I don't know how I can ever thank you. You are truly the kindest and most generous person I've ever met.\"\n\n\"Oh dear.\" Eleanor lifted her hand to her forehead. \"I do believe those were the exact same words my husband said before he walked out.\"\n\nMolly's face softened. Good heavens, don't let that be pity. Eleanor despised pity, especially when it was directed at her.\n\n\"I... I'm leaving the ranch,\" Molly said.\n\n\"Leav\u2014\" Eleanor quickly recovered. She glanced down at the contract on her desk. \"I was about to suggest that. Since... you turned down my offer for a nursemaid, there are no other options.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Molly said, and she sounded like she really meant it. \"I didn't mean to put you to so much trouble.\"\n\n\"No trouble. I've had to let a lot of people go in my time.\" Foolish girl. She had no idea what she was throwing away. \"So what do you plan to do? Pursue your... singing career?\" Eleanor couldn't imagine anyone choosing to work in a saloon over running a ranch but stranger things had happened. Kate Tenney marrying the blacksmith was a good example.\n\nMolly hesitated. \"No, it's not that. I'm in love with someone.\"\n\nEleanor hadn't expected this. \"With whom?\" she snapped. It better not be one of my ranch hands!\n\n\"Dr. Fairbanks. I plan to help him in his office. He needs a nurse assistant. It will make things a little easier for him. I'm not trained, but I'm a fast learner and there's nothing I wouldn't do for him. We love each other.\"\n\nEleanor felt like she'd been kicked by a mule. As if the doctor with his noisy rattletrap hadn't caused enough trouble. \"Love is like that horse you call Orbit,\" she said brusquely. \"It's blind and won't get you anywhere.\"\n\n\"I believe love will take me wherever I want to go,\" Molly said.\n\nEleanor rubbed her temples. What was wrong with today's youth, believing such nonsense? In her day women married mostly for convenience\u2014seldom for love. They married for security. The ranch offered all the security anyone could want, making such marriages unnecessary.\n\n\"I'm so very, very sorry, Miss Walker. I really wanted to do right by you. The money you loaned us... I'll repay every penny.\"\n\n\"The money wasn't for you,\" Eleanor said, her voice taut. \"It was for Donald.\"\n\nMolly's eyes widened. \"Why would you give my brother money?\"\n\nEleanor studied her a moment before answering. \"Do you know that cows pee backwards?\"\n\nMolly frowned. \"Pardon me?\"\n\nEleanor gave a knowing nod. Molly's leaving the ranch really was for the best. The girl had no feel for cattle. Horses maybe, but not cattle, the lifeline of the ranch.\n\n\"Your brother knows a great many things. I suspect he also knows enough not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Now get out of here. I've got a ranch to run.\"\n\nMolly looked about to say something but changed her mind. She quietly slipped out of the room, giving Eleanor one last questioning glance before closing the door.\n\nEleanor picked up the contract, glanced at it a moment, then ripped it up.\n\nShe stared at the empty space Molly left behind. Drat! She would miss the girl. As much as she hated to admit it, she'd even grown fond of Donald.\n\nLove. What a thief. It sneaked up where it wasn't wanted and grabbed the best and brightest. Only the old and wise knew how to avoid Cupid's clever traps.\n\nIf Robert were here, he'd no doubt try to talk her into selling the ranch again.\n\nRobert. What a dear, sweet man. He'd proposed numerous times but never once had he uttered the word love. A good thing. A very good thing. Because even an old hand like her couldn't protect her heart forever." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Donny hadn't stopped grinning since Caleb broke the good news of Orbit's rescue. His smile grew even wider when Caleb pushed him out to the corral to see for himself.\n\n\"Why is he wearing a bandage?\" Donny asked.\n\n\"One of the wolves swiped at him, but don't worry. It's nothing serious.\" Molly had groomed the horse while Caleb attended to the wound.\n\nDonny stroked Orbit's sleek neck. \"I heard you had quite an adventure.\"\n\nMagic barked as if to concur, and Donny leaned over to scratch him behind a furry ear.\n\n\"What's going to happen to Orbit, Doc?\"\n\n\"I don't know. I guess that's up to Miss Walker.\" Caleb straightened. \"Right now I want to talk to you man to man.\"\n\n\"Does this have anything to do with the Flagstaff observatory?\"\n\nCaleb frowned. \"Why would you think that?\"\n\nDonny folded his arms. \"You promised to take me if I could get into my wheelchair by myself.\"\n\nCaleb tapped his chin. \"Hmm. I did, didn't I?\"\n\nThe sun in his face, Donny squinted up at him with one eye closed. The early stages of a moustache made him look older than his years. \"Well?\"\n\n\"We'll discuss that later. Right now I want to talk to you about something else.\" Caleb touched a finger to the brim and pushed back his hat.\n\nDonny looked at him askew, curiosity written all over his face. \"It sounds serious.\"\n\n\"It is serious.\" Caleb stepped aside so Donny wouldn't have to look into the sun. \"I want you to know that as long as I live, you will never have to go into a sanitarium. You'll always have a home.\"\n\nDonny stared up at him. \"Why are you telling me this?\"\n\n\"I want to marry your sister. And since you're the man of the house, I'm asking your permission.\"\n\nDonny drew his brows together but said nothing.\n\nThinking Donny didn't understand the full nature of the proposal, Caleb added, \"Marriage will make the three of us a family\u2014all living under the same roof.\"\n\n\"You mean it will always be the three of us?\" Donny asked.\n\n\"I can't guarantee the number. It might one day be four, or five, or six of us.\" Caleb waited for this to sink in. \"Well?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking,\" Donny said.\n\n\"Think faster. Your sister's coming.\"\n\n\"Okay, I give you my permission on one condition. You promise to take me to Flagstaff.\"\n\n\"I promise.\"\n\nDonny nodded. \"And you let me drive Bertha.\"\n\n\"That's two conditions.\"\n\n\"And you buy me a telescope and name the first boy after me.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nDonny wasn't finished. \"And most importantly, you find a home for Orbit.\"\n\nCaleb lifted his hat and scratched his head. \"You drive a hard bargain.\"\n\nDonny grinned. \"What do you expect? She's my sister.\"\n\nCaleb spotted Molly running toward them and he grinned. She lost her hat but kept running. Her shiny raven hair came unpinned but she kept running. Her face was flushed with heat but she kept running.\n\nShe didn't stop until she was locked securely in his arms." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nMolly had just finished hanging the last pair of trousers on the clothesline when Caleb sneaked up behind her, grabbed her by the waist, and spun her around. They stood in the yard of their new home, a small but comfortable fourroom adobe with a red tile roof and whitewashed fence. Designed to accommodate Donny's wheelchair, the house had extra-wide doorways and a ramp leading to the front porch.\n\n\"What do you say, Mrs. Fairbanks?\" Caleb asked. \"Are you ready for a delayed honeymoon?\"\n\nHer heart leaped with joy. \"Do you mean it?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"My doctor friend from Boston arrived and agreed to take over my practice while I'm gone.\"\n\n\"Oh, Caleb, that's wonderful.\"\n\n\"If he likes it, he'll stay and help me with the clinic.\"\n\nShe flung her arms around his neck. \"He'll love it here. I know he will.\"\n\nCaleb grinned. \"Do you think Donny can handle the clerical work for two doctors?\"\n\n\"Try and stop him.\"\n\nThe last several months had been a whirlwind of activity. Between helping Caleb with his patients and supervising the building of their house, Molly hardly had time to breathe. Aunt Bessie had naturally insisted upon handling the wedding plans. Big satin bows had popped up everywhere, along with the usual disgruntled saloon keepers. Things got so out of hand that the marshal issued a one-year moratorium on weddings.\n\nShe smiled up at him. \"You haven't told me where we're going.\"\n\n\"We're taking the train to Flagstaff.\" His gaze was warm with humor. \"I understand you can look through the observatory telescope and see more stars than it's possible to count.\"\n\n\"Donny will be so pleased.\" Her voice was drowned out by Magic's bark and the clatter of wheels.\n\n\"I'm afraid we can't spend more than a couple of days away,\" Caleb said. \"Soon as we get back we start building.\"\n\n\"I can't be away too long anyway. The choir is about to start rehearsals for Easter.\" She laughed. She still couldn't believe she sang in the church choir.\n\nShe pulled out of Caleb's arms and waved as Orbit walked by, pulling Donny in a cart. Magic cheerfully led the way, steering the black colt safely down the road with little yipping sounds, though the bells on his collar made barking unnecessary.\n\nIt was Caleb's idea to purchase the colt for Donny's fifteenth birthday. Jimmy Trotter's father donated the cart in payment for Caleb's medical services.\n\n\"What about Magic and Orbit?\" she asked.\n\nCaleb's arms tightened around her waist. \"Aunt Bessie agreed to take care of them while we're gone.\"\n\nMolly smiled. Never had she known such happiness as she'd known these last few months. Brodie said lessons could be learned from horses. Orbit taught her that God had a plan for everything\u2014 even a little blind horse and a wheelchair-bound youth.\n\nMaybe God even had a plan for the Last Chance Ranch. Miss Walker had another \"heiress\" and Brodie said she looked promising. Molly prayed it was true.\n\n\"Come on,\" Caleb whispered in her hair. \"Let's tell Donny to pack his things. We're going to Flagstaff.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Calico Spy.txt", + "author": "Margaret Brownley", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\nCalico, Kansas\n\n1880\n\nKatie Madison tied the black satin ribbon at her neckline and frowned. The lopsided bow wouldn't do. She yanked the ribbon loose and tried again. Today she was all thumbs, and everything that could go wrong, did. Already she'd broken a shoelace, snagged a stocking, and torn the hem of her dress.\n\nJust as she finished tying the bow for the third time the bedroom door flew open and her roommate's brunette head popped inside. \"Katie! Hurry or you'll be late.\"\n\n\"I'm trying, I'm trying.\"\n\nMary-Lou's green eyes narrowed, and her Southern drawl grew more pronounced. \"Pickens has a burr in his saddle. Said if you don't hurry he'll have your head!\"\n\nKatie's stomach knotted. She was already in trouble with the restaurant manager. \"I'll be there in a minute.\"\n\n\"A minute might be too late.\" The door slammed shut, and Mary-Lou's footsteps echoed down the hall as she yelled for the other Harvey girls to make haste. \"Y'all better hurry now, you hear?\"\n\nKatie whirled about for one last look in the mirror and hardly recognized the image reflected back. The black dress with its high collar, starched white apron, and black shoes and stockings made her look more like a nun than one of Pinkerton's most successful female detectives.\n\nEven her unruly red hair had been forced to conform to Fred Harvey's strict regulations. Parted in the middle, it was pulled back in a knot and fashioned with the mandatory net. The rigid hairdo did nothing for her, appearance-wise. All it did was make her eyes look too big and her freckles stand out like brown polka dots.\n\nWrinkling her nose, she turned away from the mirror. It was a good thing she'd chosen to be a detective as she had neither the looks nor housekeeping skills needed for landing a husband.\n\nNot that she was complaining; two Harvey girls had been found dead, and it was her job to find the killer. The assignment of a lifetime had landed in her lap.\n\nWorking undercover was never easy, but so far this particular disguise was proving to be the hardest one yet, even harder than last year's job as a circus performer. At least here she didn't have to hobnob with lions, and for that she was grateful. All she had to deal with now was a possibly deranged killer.\n\nPausing at the door, she checked that her leg holster and gun were secured beneath her skirt. The pocket seams had been ripped open for easy retrieval. Hand on the doorknob, she braced herself with a quick prayer. God knows, she needed all the help she could get.\n\nLeaving the room, she raced along the hall and sped down the stairs. Just as she reached the bottom tread the heel of her shoe caught on the runner. Arms and legs flailing, she hit the floor facedown, and the wind whooshed out of her like juice from a squashed tomato.\n\nMomentarily stunned, she didn't move. Not till noticing the polished black shoes planted in front of her did she gather her wits. Looking up, she groaned.\n\nThe manager, Mr. Pickens, glared down at her, hands on his waist. A large, imposing man, he looked about to pop the buttons on his overworked vest. Judging by his red face and quivering mustache, his patience was equally tested.\n\n\"Miss Madison. You're late!\"\n\nHer mouth fell open. Was that all he cared about? No concern for her welfare? No thought that she had injured herself?\n\n\"Well, are you going to lie there all night?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\" She scrambled to her feet and smoothed her apron.\n\nHis eyebrows dipped into a V. \"Shoulders straight, head back, and for the love of Henry, smile! I want to see some choppers.\" He spread his thin lips to demonstrate but did a better impersonation of a growling dog than a friendly waitress. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" she said. \"Choppers.\"\n\n\"Tonight you're the drink girl. Do you think you can handle that?\"\n\nPlastering a smile on her face, she nodded. How hard could it be to pour tea?\n\nHe gave her a dubious look that did nothing for her self-confidence. \"We'll soon see. Follow me.\"\n\nHe led her to the formal dining room where tables were already set for the supper crowd. The room was decorated in shades of brown and tan. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooked the railroad tracks. Beyond, fields of tall grass and wildflowers spread a colorful counterpane beneath a copper sky.\n\nThe restaurant was shorthanded, and she had been handed a uniform the moment she stepped off the morning train. After that she'd hardly had time to catch her breath. So many rules and regulations to remember. No notepads or pencils were allowed. That meant she was expected to memorize the menu. She was also instructed to radiate good cheer to even the most difficult of patrons.\n\nHer chances of lasting through the night didn't look promising, and that was a worry. The investigation depended on her keeping her job as a waitress. No one at the restaurant knew her legal name or real purpose for being there. As far as anyone knew, she was simply a farm girl who traveled all the way from Madison, Wisconsin, looking for adventure and a better life.\n\nPickens quickly pointed out the silver coffee urns and teapots. He stared at her with buttonhole eyes. \"You do know the cup code, right?\"\n\n\"Uh.\" There was a code for cups?\n\n\"Cup in the saucer means coffee.\" He demonstrated as he spoke. \"A flipped cup against the saucer is for iced tea. A cup next to the saucer\u2014milk. Is that clear?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir, next to the saucer.\"\n\n\"As for hot tea,\" he continued, and her heart sank. \"The cup will be flipped upon the saucer.\" He then explained how to tell if the customer wanted black, green, or orange pekoe tea by the direction of the cup handle. \"Any questions?\"\n\nShe had plenty, but he didn't look in any mood to answer them, so she shook her head no.\n\nSatisfied that she had donned the proper attitude or at least a Harvey-worthy smile, he turned. Giving three quick claps, he called the workers front and center. \"All right, ladies, take your stations!\"\n\n\"Don't be nervous,\" her roommate, Mary-Lou, said as they strode side by side to the back of the room.\n\nEasier said than done. Katie stopped to stare at the cups on the table. She'd come face-to-face with some of the most ornery outlaws in the country, and she wasn't about to let a china cup intimidate her. On second thought, maybe just a little. Did the cup handle facing right mean green tea or pekoe?\n\nAlready her cheeks ached from smiling, but that was the least of it. Her collar itched, and the stiff starched apron felt like a plate of armor.\n\nAs if to guess her rising dismay, Mary-Lou said, \"You'll like it here once you get used to it. You just have to work fast, be polite, and smile.\"\n\n\"Nothing to it,\" Katie muttered. She only hoped she had enough energy left at the end of the workday for sleuthing.\n\nA loud gong announced the imminent arrival of the five-twenty-five. Windows rattled, and the crystals on the chandelier did a crazy dance as the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe train rumbled into the station. With a blare of the whistle, it came to a clanging stop in front of the restaurant.\n\nMoments later, the door flew open and travelers filed into the dining room like a trail of weary ants. Only thirty minutes was allowed for meals before the train took off again. The Harvey House restaurants took pride in the fact that no one had ever been late boarding a train because of inept service.\n\nKatie planted a smile on her face and a prayer in her heart. God, please don't let me be the one to break that record." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nSheriff Branch Whitman looked up just as the door to his office flew open. A cultured but no less commanding voice shot inside.\n\n\"Sheriff! I need a word with you!\"\n\nBranch lifted his feet off the desk and planted his well-worn boots squarely on the floor. He recognized his fastidiously dressed visitor at once, though they'd never been formally introduced.\n\n\"What can I do for you, Mr. Harvey?\"\n\nThe renowned restaurateur stabbed the floor with his gold-tipped cane. He was somewhere in his midthirties, but his meticulous dark suit and Vandyke beard made him appear older.\n\n\"You dare to ask a question like that!\" Harvey pushed the door shut and gazed at Branch with sharp, watchful eyes. \"You know as well as I that someone is killing off Harvey girls.\" His British accent grew more pronounced with each word. Even his bow tie seemed to quiver with emotion. \"And what, may I ask, are you doing about it?\"\n\nBranch slanted his head toward the chair in front of his desk. \"Have a seat and\u2014\"\n\n\"I don't want a seat. I want to know what has been done to find the killer!\"\n\nBranch indicated the stack of files in front of him with a wave of his hand. \"I can assure you that I'm doing everything in my power\u2014\"\n\n\"Balderdash!\"\n\nHarvey's impatience was no worse than Branch's own. The killings had turned into one of the most puzzling crimes he'd ever worked on. Despite weeks of investigation, he still didn't have a single suspect. Given the nature of the town, that was odd.\n\nIf a youth took a fancy to a pretty girl, or a married man so much as thought about straying, the locals knew about it. Somehow folks even knew that a young one was on the way before the expectant mother. Yet two young women had been murdered, and no one saw or heard a thing.\n\n\"I can assure you,\" he said, \"that the person or persons responsible will be brought to justice.\"\n\nBefore Branch took over as sheriff three years ago, Calico was, by all accounts, the roughest, toughest, and wildest place in all of Kansas, rivaled only by Dodge City. But he'd single-handedly changed all that, and it was now a right decent town\u2014or was before the two recent murders.\n\nHarvey's eyes glittered. \"It's been six weeks since Priscilla's death.\" Priscilla was the first woman to die. Less than three weeks later, the girl named Ginger was found dead in an alleyway.\n\n\"These things take time.\"\n\nHarvey straightened a WANTED poster on the wall with the tip of his cane. The man was as fastidious with his surroundings as he was in dress and speech. No doubt he took issue with the stack of folders and papers strewn haphazardly across Branch's desk.\n\n\"Too much time if you ask me. So what have you got so far?\"\n\n\"Right now, nothing.\" Branch's jaw clenched. He suspected the killer was a Harvey employee, but he wasn't ready to reveal that information. Not yet. He couldn't take the chance of word getting out that the crime was an inside job.\n\n\"This is no less than what I expected from local authorities.\" Harvey leaned on his cane, and his eyes hardened. \"That's why I hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Your services will no longer be needed.\"\n\nBranch glared at him. Services? Harvey acted like he was firing one of his employees. \"What happens in this town is my responsibility, and any outsiders\u2014\"\n\n\"Will report to me!\" Harvey snapped his mouth shut and leaned over his cane as if to challenge Branch to disagree.\n\n\"Now wait just a minute.\"\n\nHarvey's expression darkened. \"No, you wait. We've wasted enough time and now a second girl is dead.\"\n\n\"And I will find her killer\u2014both their killers.\" He didn't know Priscilla all that well, but Ginger was his favorite waitress. She'd often brought his evening meal to the office if she knew he was working late. Since he refused to adhere to Harvey's unreasonable regulations\u2014particularly the no coat, no service rule in the main dining room\u2014she did him no small favor.\n\n\"I'll have something to report to you soon.\" He sounded more certain than he felt. Each day that passed made finding the killer that much more difficult. Trails grew cold. Clues were lost. Memories faded. Even more worrisome was the possibility that the killer would strike again.\n\n\"Not soon enough.\" Harvey swung his cane under one arm and pulled his watch out of his vest pocket. \"I'm sure the detective has arrived by now. If not on the morning or noon train, then on the five-twenty-five.\" He flipped the case open with his thumb. \"I trust you'll give him your full cooperation.\"\n\nBranch stiffened. Over his dead body. \"Now see here\u2014\" The last thing he needed was some inept detective running loose in his town. Last time the Pinkerton operatives were involved in one of his cases they let the bad guys escape and almost got him killed. And look at the mess they made with the James gang. They could deny it all they wanted, but everyone knew the Pinkertons blew up the outlaws' house, killing Frank and Jesse's young half brother. No surprise there. The Pinkertons were known for their bullying tactics and underhanded methods, none of which Branch would tolerate.\n\nHarvey replaced his watch and tipped his bowler. \"Have a good day, Sheriff.\" He left with less fanfare than when he arrived.\n\nBranch pounded his fist on the desk. \"Dash it all!\" The town was his responsibility\u2014no one else's. The very thought of an undercover detective sneaking around like a mole in the ground set his teeth on edge.\n\nCame in on today's train, did he? If the Pink was like most other passengers, he'd appreciate a good meal. Was probably at the Harvey House restaurant chowing down at that very moment. That was as good a place as any to intercept him. He pulled out his watch. He'd have to hurry if he wanted to reach the restaurant before the train left the station.\n\nDecision made, he shot to his feet and plucked his Stetson off the wall.\n\nOne thing was certain. The man better enjoy his meal because if Branch had his way, the detective would be back on that train before he could say cock robin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nThe woman glared at Katie. \"You gave my son hot coffee!\" The notch on her front tooth pegged her as a seamstress who bit off thread rather than cutting it with scissors.\n\nKatie looked down at the pudgy face of a two-year-old and whisked his cup away. \"Oops, sorry.\"\n\n\"I ordered iced tea,\" the man Katie pegged as a banjo player groused. She guessed his profession based on the callus on the side of his right thumb. \"You gave me hot tea.\"\n\n\"Milk? You gave me milk?\" This from a gray-haired woman who stared at her cup with the same look of horror one might regard a rattler. Hands and neck dripping with jewels, she acted like a rich widow used to having servants answer her every whim.\n\nBy the time Katie straightened out the drinks, she was ready to call it a night, though none of the other girls seemed so inclined. Instead they darted around tables like lively balls in a game of bagatelle.\n\nTo outward appearances the smooth flow of dishes, which came and went with nary a spoken word, seemed like magic. In actuality, it was all part of a carefully orchestrated plan.\n\nThe train porter had taken travelers' food orders at the last stop and telegraphed the restaurant. This allowed cooks to prepare meals in advance. Supper was seventy-five cents and after each passenger paid, he or she was directed to the table where soup or salad waited.\n\nWhile the diners worked on the first course, Katie followed Mary-Lou into the kitchen to refill her coffeepot.\n\nPraying that the night would soon end, she spread her mouth in what she hoped would pass as a smile. A Harvey girl must never look dowdy, frowzy, or tired, even if her feet were killing her or her thoughts less than charitable.\n\nOn the way back to the dining room she bumped into the dark-haired waitress named Tully. \"Why you...\" Tully snapped her mouth shut and threw her shoulders back in an attempt to regain a positive, upbeat appearance. She might have succeeded had it not been for the Long Island (Rhode Island?) hen on her tray drowning in coffee.\n\n\"You'll pay for this,\" she muttered under her breath. With a smile that was more lethal than friendly, she did a dainty pirouette and returned the drowning hen to the kitchen.\n\nKatie stiffened at the sound of her name. She turned and found Mr. Pickens practically breathing down her throat.\n\n\"Miss Madison! A word with you. Now!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "After Pickens finished chastising her for working too slow, Katie straightened out the beverage mess and returned an empty teapot to the counter in back of the room.\n\nThe ten-minute warning for boarding the train had sounded, but time had never passed more slowly. Katie wasn't certain she could hold out for another minute, let alone ten.\n\nTully whispered something to her roommate. Tully was tall and willowy with skin as smooth as honey. Katie envied the woman's ability to look graceful in the rigid uniform, while she felt awkward and out of place. But then, that was how she'd always felt, even back home.\n\nThe shadow of growing up in a family of beautiful women seemed to follow her wherever she went. Her four sisters all took after their mother in looks and had landed successful and well-respected husbands. Katie had the unenviable distinction of being both the black sheep of the family and the ugly duckling.\n\nTully's voice brought her out of her reverie. \"Why not let the new girl do it?\"\n\n\"Do what?\" Katie asked, keeping her tone neutral. Alienating the others would only make her investigation more difficult.\n\nTully pointed to the tall, lean man who had just walked into the dining room. Katie guessed from the badge on his vest that it was Sheriff Whitman. That was a surprise. Everything she heard about the man indicated he was an old crank, set in his ways and unwilling to listen to reason or work with Pinkerton detectives.\n\nIn contrast, this man was somewhere in his early to midthirties and didn't look like any crank she'd ever met. He wasn't bad to look at, either. Not bad at all.\n\n\"No one is allowed to eat in the dining room without wearing a coat,\" Tully explained. \"You need to escort him over to the coatrack to borrow one.\"\n\n\"Even the sheriff is required to wear one?\" Katie asked. She knew that such rules applied to the hoity-toity restaurants in some of the large cities, but here in Kansas?\n\n\"Harvey rules,\" Tully said with a smile that seemed a tad too sweet for Katie's peace of mind.\n\n\"I'll see what I can do.\"\n\n\"You better,\" Tully said, \"if you want to keep your job.\" It sounded like a warning.\n\nKatie set her mouth in a determined smile and threaded her way through the dining room toward the sheriff. She was an expert in putting men in jail. How hard could it be to put a man in a coat?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nBranch scanned the crowded dining room. No sign of Harvey. Good. The last thing he wanted was another encounter with the Englishman.\n\nHe was here for one purpose and one purpose alone: to pick out the Pinkerton detective in time to escort him onto the train before it took off again.\n\nThree possible suspects immediately caught his attention. One was a young man in a checkered coat with the eager look of a detective on his first case. Another was an older man whose interest in the attractive waitresses was probably personal but could just as easily be professional. A third man was doing a bad job of pretending to read a newspaper. Instead, his gaze kept darting around the room as if he was either looking for someone or suspected that someone might be looking for him.\n\nBranch was just about to mosey over to the newspaper guy when he spotted a young woman barreling toward him like a missionary targeting a possible convert. Since he didn't recognize her, she had to be new. So they sent a greenhorn to do the job, did they? This should be interesting.\n\nShe greeted him with a smile\u2014and no Harvey girl smile was prettier. Hers was as wide as the Kansas prairie. But something about her didn't add up. Even as she tried to conform he sensed her resistance, sensed her sizing him up like a general planning an attack.\n\n\"Sheriff.\" She was a wee bit of a thing, barely reaching his shoulders. Never had so much feminine charm been packed into such a small package. Her big blue eyes almost seemed too large for her delicate features. A thin veil of freckles bridged her nicely shaped nose. The dazzling red hair didn't seem to belong in the rigid knot at the back of her head. Instead, it looked like it should fall down her back as free as the wind.\n\nThe smooth, graceful movements of her slender hips seemed to challenge the rigid confines of the black-and-white uniform. Yep, she was a looker all right. Not the conventional type by any means, but that's what made her stand out from the others. Where did Harvey find these girls?\n\nHe held his hat in his hand and nodded politely. \"Howdy, ma'am,\" he drawled. \"Guess you're new 'round here.\" Must have been hired to take Ginger's place, but he didn't want to say as much.\n\nShe nodded. \"My name's Miss Madison.\" She lifted her voice to be heard over the buzz of chatter and clank of dishes. \"Miss Katie Madison.\"\n\n\"Mighty pleased to meet you, Miss Madison. Sheriff Whitman here, but my friends just call me plain ol' Sheriff.\"\n\n\"And your enemies, Sheriff? What do they call you?\"\n\n\"There're some things I'd rather not say in the company of a lady such as yourself.\"\n\nSomething like annoyance crossed her face, though he couldn't imagine what he'd said to offend her.\n\n\"If you'll step over to that rack, I'll help you pick out a dinner coat.\" Her calm, casual voice seemed at odds with her sharp-eyed regard.\n\n\"Don't have much use for dinner coats,\" he said. \"Same for neck chokers.\" Why any man would submit to wearing a tie was beyond his comprehension.\n\nHer smile faded, and she glanced over her shoulder where the other three Harvey girls watched, along with their boss, Pickens.\n\nShe turned back to him, and he could see the wheels spinning in that pretty head of hers. \"What a pity,\" she said. \"A handsome man like you.\"\n\n\"The other girls tried flattery, too. It didn't work for them, either.\"\n\nShe lowered her head and glanced up at him through a fringe of lush lashes. Eleven. She had eleven tiny sun dots on her nose. Startled to find himself counting freckles, of all things, he drew his gaze to her pretty eyes, which looked blue as the wildflowers that grew alongside the railroad tracks. Chiding himself for being so easily distracted, he glanced at the newspaper guy.\n\n\"If you'll excuse me, ma'am\u2014\"\n\n\"I really need this job,\" she said. \"And if I don't get you into one of those coats I could be fired.\"\n\nSomething in her voice made him hesitate. \"That seems a bit drastic. Far as I know, none of the other girls lost their jobs because of me.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid I'm not in my boss's good graces at the moment.\" Her cheeks grew a pretty rose color. \"I messed up the drink orders something awful and drowned a Rhode Island hen.\"\n\n\"You did that?\" he said, feigning shock.\n\nHer brow furrowed. \"It might have been a Long Island hen.\"\n\n\"That's even worse,\" he said lightly, hoping to tease another one of her brilliant smiles from her.\n\nShe hesitated a moment as if trying to decide if he was joking. \"So, please. Will you help me?\"\n\nHe was so caught up with the hen business\u2014or maybe it was the intriguing way her eyes flashed as she talked\u2014that he momentarily forgot what she wanted him to do.\n\n\"So will you?\" she pleaded when he failed to respond. \"Wear a coat?\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" Opposed to wearing a dinner coat on general principle, he grimaced at the thought.\n\nUnfortunately, he was also opposed to turning his back on damsels in distress. The look of dismay on her face meant the job was important to her. No surprise there. Until Harvey and his restaurants came along, few legitimate jobs existed for women, especially in this town. The work was hard and expectations high, but the job allowed a woman to earn a fair living and still stay in God's good graces.\n\nHe followed her worried glance to the back of the room. Pickens was no friend of his, which meant cultivating one in Miss Madison might not be such a bad idea. Especially since his investigation into the Harvey girl murders was going to the dogs faster than a flock of fleas.\n\n\"What do I get if I put on one of them there straitjackets?\"\n\nShe laughed, a musical sound that was as infectious as it was pleasant to hear. \"A straitjacket will earn you a second helping of pie.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Well, ma'am, I don't suppose I can turn down an offer like that.\"\n\nRelief flickered across her face. \"I don't suppose you can,\" she said. \"Follow me and I'll set you up.\"\n\nWith a rueful glance at the three suspected Pink detectives, he followed her.\n\nShe led him over to a rack where a dozen or so coats hung. Quickly riffling through them, she settled on a black frock coat that would have been right at home at a funeral, preferably on the guest of honor.\n\nShe met his gaze with a look of apology. \"I'm afraid this is the closest we have to your size.\"\n\nShe held the coat up for him with a beseeching smile. As much as he wanted to, he didn't have it in him to deny her request. Swallowing his protests, he turned and slipped his arms through the sleeves. The coat barely fit his wide shoulders and stuck out over his holstered guns.\n\nShe covered her mouth and her eyes rounded in dismay as she watched him try to button it. The sleeves hit him at least six inches above the wrists.\n\n\"I can see why you're opposed to wearing a coat.\"\n\n\"Straitjacket,\" he said. \"Let's hope I don't need to make a quick draw.\" He could hardly move his arms, let alone reach for his guns.\n\nHer eyes softened as she studied him, allowing a glimpse into their very depths. \"Thank you for helping me.\" He had a feeling she wanted to say more. But after a quick glance around, she fell silent.\n\nHe lowered his head next to hers, and a sweet lilac fragrance filled his head. \"Perhaps you can do me a favor,\" he said, his voice low. \"I'm looking for a man. Don't know his name. Don't know what he looks like. All I know is that he's a stranger in town.\"\n\n\"As you can see, Sheriff, we have a whole room full of strangers,\" she said.\n\n\"Yes, but this one plans to hang around.\"\n\n\"I see.\" She tilted her head to the side. \"I'm new myself, but I'll ask the other girls if they know of any recent arrivals.\"\n\n\"Appreciate that, ma'am.\"\n\nA blast of the train whistle created a flurry of activity. Passengers grabbed their few belongings and rose from their seats, chair legs scraping the wooden floor. The throng of diners streamed outside, some holding small children by the hand. Soon the buzz of excited voices faded behind the closed door, and only Branch and the restaurant workers remained.\n\nHe peered out the window and watched as all three men pegged as possible Pinkerton detectives boarded the train.\n\nBlast it. That could mean only one thing. The detective had arrived earlier and was already checked in at the hotel.\n\nHe whirled about and practically bumped into Miss Madison. \"Sorry, I have to go,\" he said, wiggling out of the coat like a moth from a cocoon.\n\n\"But your pie\u2014\"\n\n\"Another time.\" He really wanted to stick around if for no other reason than to get to know the pretty waitress better, which struck him as odd. Since his wife's death he hadn't really noticed other women. Work, church, and parenting his seven-year-old son took up all his time, and that was how he wanted it. Opening up his heart meant having to accept the possibility of loss again, and that he could never do. Once was enough.\n\nMore than enough.\n\nHe shoved the coat into her hands and, with a doff of his hat, quickly left the restaurant." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nThat night after the Harvey House was closed for business, Katie ate a late supper with the other three Harvey girls. They sat at a long wooden table set aside for employees just off the kitchen. Tully and Mary-Lou were all atwitter over the restaurant owner's unexpected visit earlier that day.\n\nDubbed Transcontinental Fred, Mr. Harvey had single-handedly made rail travel more bearable by providing fine food and good service for weary Kansas travelers. Rumor had it that he planned to build his train station restaurants all the way to California.\n\n\"He's so handsome,\" the girl named Abigail exclaimed with a sigh. \"And so tall.\"\n\n\"He's also terribly married,\" Tully said.\n\n\"Yes, but don't you just love the way he speaks?\" Mary-Lou imitated his English accent which, given her Southern lilt, was no easy task: \"How dare you call them waitresses. I won't have it. They're Harvey girls.\"\n\nThat brought a round of laughter from the others.\n\nKatie's interest in the man was strictly out of curiosity. Most of the renowned people she'd had occasion to meet were bank robbers, counterfeiters, or con artists, not legitimate businessmen like Mr. Harvey. So that alone made him a novelty.\n\nAfter the evening meal had been cleared away, the stations left spotless, and the tables set for breakfast, the Harvey girls clambered upstairs to their rooms.\n\nNever had Katie known such luxurious surroundings. Her job as a detective required her to spend much of her time in cheesy, flea-ridden hotels. The last one she'd stayed in caught fire in the middle of the night, obliging her to stand outside in her nightclothes while the two-story building burned to the ground, taking her few belongings with it.\n\nBut the room she shared with Mary-Lou was fit for a queen. It was decorated with floral wallpaper, lush wine-red carpet, brocaded draperies, and fine oak furniture. Each of them had their own beds with thick mattresses, soft pillows, and satiny quilts.\n\nShe threw herself facedown on the bed, letting her feet dangle over the end, and it felt like she had landed on a cloud. \"Whoopee!\"\n\nMary-Lou laughed. \"You'll never be able to sleep in a regular bed again.\"\n\nKatie turned on her side. Leaning on her elbow, she rested her head on her hand. Recalling the demise of the young woman who had formerly occupied this very bed, she quickly apologized.\n\n\"I'm sorry. How thoughtless of me.\" No visual reminders of Mary-Lou's previous roommate remained, but somehow her presence could be felt. Probably because Katie had committed to memory the Pinkerton file on the latest victim. The woman was only nineteen, which made her death seem all the more tragic.\n\nFacing the mirror, Mary-Lou drew the hairbrush through her hair. She wore a white linen nightgown that reached all the way to her bare toes, and her long brunette tresses hung to her waist in lush waves.\n\nWhat Katie wouldn't give to have hair the color of Mary-Lou's. She would even settle for her roommate's smooth, creamy complexion that knew no freckles. Or even her delicately shaped mouth and perfect teeth. Katie felt an unwelcomed surge of envy.\n\nThe Bible warned against such feelings as it indicated a lack of gratitude and appreciation for how God had made her, but she couldn't help herself. Would it have ruined some divine plan if God had given her, say, blond hair or brown?\n\nIrritated by such distracting thoughts, she forced herself to concentrate on the reason she had been sent to the Harvey House, which wasn't to feel sorry for herself.\n\n\"You must miss your former roommate,\" she said.\n\n\"I miss her something awful.\" Mary-Lou worked the brush through the length of her hair. \"She was like a sister to me.\"\n\nIt was the opening Katie had hoped for. \"Do you know who would have done such an awful thing?\"\n\n\"I can't imagine.\" Mary-Lou set her hairbrush down on the dressing table and turned. \"Everyone liked her.\"\n\n\"What about the other woman, Priscilla? Did everyone like her, too?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. She was one of the nicest people you'd ever hope to meet.\"\n\nIt wasn't what Katie wanted to hear. Nothing she hated more than a well-liked murder victim with no enemies. And here she had two. It made her job that much more difficult.\n\nShe let the silence stretch between them before asking the next question. Show too much curiosity and she could blow her cover. \"Did Ginger have a beau?\"\n\nHusbands and beaus were always suspects in such murder cases\u2014often for good reason.\n\nMary-Lou finished braiding her hair into a single plait before answering. \"She took a fancy to a local railroad worker. His name is Charley. She wanted to marry him but, of course, we Harvey girls aren't allowed to wed.\"\n\nAfter a moment she continued. \"They were saving up enough money so she could quit her job.\" She sighed. \"He waited for her outside every Friday night after lights were out. Ginger would sneak out to be with him.\"\n\nKatie stiffened. \"Sneak out? You can do that?\"\n\n\"Sneaking out isn't the problem. Sneaking back in is. She bribed one of the cooks into letting her borrow his key.\"\n\nKatie made a mental note of this information. That explained why the bodies were found outside the house. That had puzzled her at first, mainly because the house was supposedly locked up tight as a fiddle at night and the girls not allowed out past curfew.\n\nHer investigation now became more complicated because it meant that the killer could be an outsider and not a Harvey House employee as originally thought.\n\n\"Her beau must have taken her death hard.\"\n\n\"Hard doesn't begin to describe it.\" Mary-Lou reached for a blue ribbon and wrapped it around the end of her braid. \"Poor man. He wept like a baby at her funeral. He still waits for her at night.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\nMary-Lou tied the ribbon in a bow and tossed the braid over her shoulder. \"Every once in a while I see him standing under the lamppost after curfew watching the house. It's as if he still expects her to join him.\"\n\nKatie could think of another possibility. It wasn't unusual for criminals to return to the scene of the crime. Maybe this Charley fellow was feeling guilty. Maybe that's why he returned to the house. She didn't want to think he was looking for a new victim.\n\n\"What about Priscilla? Did she have a beau, too?\"\n\nBefore Mary-Lou could answer, the door flew open and the dorm matron, Miss Thatcher, walked in. \"Lights out, ladies,\" she snapped.\n\nFrom what Katie had heard from the others, the woman ran the house like a general at war. She lacked the proper uniform, but no general's scowl could compare.\n\nStick thin with a long, pointed nose, straight mouth, and what looked like a perpetual frown, she was apparently one of the few employees not required to smile.\n\nRegarding Katie with an icy stare that sent chills spiraling through her, Miss Thatcher picked up, with thumb and forefinger, the white apron carelessly tossed on a chair.\n\n\"Is this yours, Miss Madison?\"\n\nKatie swung her feet onto the floor and sat upright on the bed. \"Yes, ma'am. I was just about to take care of that.\" Dirty clothes were to be placed in the hamper in the hall. The laundry was sent to Newton, Kansas, to be washed, but each girl was responsible for ironing and starching her own uniform.\n\nMiss Thatcher let the apron drop like one might release a dead rat. Her gaze settled on Katie. \"You're still in your uniform.\"\n\nFeeling like a schoolgirl caught stealing, Katie rose to her feet. \"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\n\"You do know the rules of the house.\"\n\nShe wasn't sure which rule Miss Thatcher referred to as there were so many, but to be on the safe side she threw her shoulders back and smiled. That failed to lessen the scowl on Miss Thatcher's face. If anything, it made it worse.\n\n\"Do I amuse you, Miss Madison?\"\n\n\"No, Miss Thatcher.\"\n\n\"Then take that silly grin off your face.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\"\n\nThe dorm matron's dark eyebrows drew together. \"For your insubordination, you will report to kitchen duty at five a.m. Do I make myself clear?\"\n\nInsubordination? Katie glanced at her roommate, who shrugged. Since she was pretty sure that making a face would not earn her any favors, she kept her expression composed.\n\n\"Yes, Miss Thatcher.\"\n\nWithout another word, the woman turned off the brass kerosene lamp, throwing the room into darkness. She stopped in the doorway, her figure outlined in the soft glow from the hallway light. The way her ears stood out made her head look like a sugar bowl.\n\n\"Good night, ladies.\" With that she swept out of the room with a rustle of silk, the door closing with a quiet but no less commanding click.\n\n\"What a witch,\" Katie said, plopping down on her bed to pull off her shoes and stockings.\n\nGirlish giggles rose from Mary-Lou's side of the room.\n\n\"What's so funny?\"\n\n\"You.\" Mary-Lou burst into another round of laughter. \"Your first day here and already you're in trouble with Mr. Pickens and Miss Thatcher. It takes most girls at least a week to accomplish that feat.\"\n\nKatie hadn't meant to antagonize anyone. Certainly not the dorm matron. The woman probably knew more about the girls in her care than anyone else.\n\nKatie grimaced. Somehow she would have to find a way to get back in the woman's good graces. The manager's, too.\n\nFor Mary-Lou's benefit, she breathed out an audible sigh. \"I tend to get off on a bad foot at times.\" Perhaps her roommate could give her some pointers on how best to handle Miss Thatcher.\n\n\"You can't say that about the sheriff,\" Mary-Lou said.\n\n\"What do you mean?\" The memory of the lawman's intriguing dark eyes and crooked smile surprised her with its intensity.\n\n\"No one, and I do mean no one, ever persuaded Sheriff Whitman to wear a coat. You're the first.\"\n\nFor some unknown reason, that brought a smile to Katie's face\u2014the first heartfelt smile since arriving in town." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nAs much as Katie enjoyed the soft, luxurious bed, the stress of starting a new job in an unfamiliar place kept her tossing and turning.\n\nNow as always when she couldn't sleep, she turned to the Lord. God, don't let me mess up this job. You know how my mouth gets away from me and I say things I shouldn't. You have my permission to bang me on the head if I don't curtail my tongue. And please forgive my envious heart. I'm sure You had a good reason for giving me hair the color of a rooster's comb, and maybe one day You'll let me know what that reason is.\n\nShe ended her prayer with a sigh but was no closer to falling asleep than before. As much as she needed the rest, everything she'd seen and heard since arriving in Calico kept running through her head. A surreptitious look or hasty conversation might or might not mean much, but no detective could afford to discount anything.\n\nSomehow she had to find a way to talk to the sheriff in private. She only hoped her boss had exaggerated Whitman's dislike of Pinkerton operatives. He was nothing like what she'd expected. A man willing to help out a poor waitress he'd only just met couldn't be all that difficult to deal with, could he?\n\nShe'd considered identifying herself earlier, but too many people were present. She didn't want to take a chance on blowing her cover.\n\nThe memory of the sheriff in that too-small coat made her giggle, and she quickly covered her mouth so as not to waken Mary-Lou.\n\nTurning over, she pounded the pillow with her fist and closed her eyes. Startled by the vision of the sheriff's handsome square face, she flopped on her back and stared at the ceiling.\n\nReading faces was a necessary part of her job, and she was better at it than many of her colleagues. The sheriff had strong features\u2014a sign of integrity. Though he seemed outgoing and friendly enough, she'd nonetheless sensed his reserve. It was as if he'd purposely held part of himself back, the part that most intrigued her.\n\nThe thought made her groan. Homing in on a criminal's deepest secrets was her job. Prying into the sheriff's private life was absolutely off-limits, no matter how much she was tempted. Her Pinkerton boss expected results, and he expected them fast. She had no time to lose, and working with the sheriff might save her precious time.\n\nHe knew things about the victims and crime scenes that were not in the Pinkerton report. That made him a valuable resource.\n\nShe turned to her side. \"Report to kitchen duty at 5:00 a.m.\" What time was it now? It seemed like she'd been twisting and turning all night.\n\nShe reached for the mechanical clock on the bedside table. Quietly she slipped out of bed and tiptoed to the window. Between the full moon and gas streetlight there was just enough light filtering through the lace curtains for her to read the hands on the clock. Much to her surprise, it was only a little after eleven.\n\nSomeone had described insomnia as twisting and turning all night for an hour, but this was ridiculous.\n\nNudging the curtain aside, she gazed down at the moonlit street, and a movement caught her eye. A man stood next to the lamppost gazing up at the house. She quickly drew back. Was that the dead girl's beau, Charley? She glanced outside again.\n\nThere was only one way to find out. Dropping the curtain in place, she felt in the dark for her clothes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Branch picked the stranger out the moment he walked into the Silver Spur Saloon. The detective sat at a table by his lonesome. Probably trying to familiarize himself with the town before starting his investigation.\n\nHe definitely acted like a Pinkerton detective. No question. Not only was the man new in town, he huddled over his drink as if trying to make himself small and invisible.\n\nIf Branch wasn't so incensed at the thought of having to deal with the private detective, he might have laughed. The man in his Monkey Ward clothes\u2014new denim pants, shirt, and boots\u2014stood out like a sore thumb. And that wasn't even mentioning the barely creased hat.\n\nIf the Pinkerton agency insisted upon sending its city-slicker detectives here, the least they could do was learn how to dress them properly. Most of the cowboys and railroad workers in town hadn't seen a pair of new trousers or boots for a dozen or so years, not since Andrew Johnson was in office.\n\nBranch had expected the detective to check in at the hotel or, at the very least, Miss Grayson's Room and Board that day, but he'd done neither. Puzzled, Branch did a methodical search of saloons, and the Silver Spur was the fourth one he'd visited that night.\n\nThe place was in full swing. Old man Taylor played a lively tune on the mouth organ, which he blew with great diligence. Along one side of the saloon a faro game was in progress.\n\nBranch walked up to the stranger's table, pulled out a chair, and sat.\n\nMonkey Suit looked up, revealing an ugly man with pockmarked skin, broken nose, and small, beady eyes. If it was possible to scare a criminal into going straight, that was the face to do it.\n\nBranch wasted no time on introductions. \"I know who you are and what you're doing here.\"\n\nThe words were barely out if his mouth before the man tossed his drink at Branch and took off running.\n\nOn his feet in a flash, Branch gave chase. The Pinkerton detectives might not know how to dress, but they sure did know how to run\u2014his opinion of the organization went up a begrudging notch.\n\nShouldering his way through the crowd, Branch rushed through the swinging doors. He looked left, right, and straight ahead before spotting the man halfway down the street already.\n\n\"Stop!\" he yelled.\n\nThe man ran fast as cannon fire, and Branch had a hard time keeping up. For the love of Pete, how was it possible to run that fast in a new pair of boots? Much as he hated to think it, maybe it was time to get him some of that there Monkey Ward leather." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nKatie let herself outside, careful not to make a sound. The front of the restaurant faced the railroad tracks, and the back faced Front and Main. Charley stood on the street side.\n\nAfter wedging a wooden spoon in the doorframe to keep the door from closing and locking, she ran along the alley. Mindful that the bodies had been found here, she kept her hand on her gun and her senses alert. The alley separated the restaurant from the baggage room, ticket booth, and waiting room. In light of the recent crimes every shadow suggested danger.\n\nThe scent of cattle from the nearby stockades made her nose pucker. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, but otherwise all was quiet. She reached Front Street, but Charley was gone.\n\nDisappointed, she turned back to the house but then changed her mind. She couldn't sleep, so maybe a brisk walk would do her a world of good. If nothing else, it would give her a chance to get the lay of the land. She certainly wouldn't have time during the day. Sticking the gun in her waist for easy retrieval, she crossed Front to Main and stepped onto the boardwalk.\n\nMany Kansas towns had grown in leaps and bounds in recent years due to the long cattle drives, but the railway was making such drives unnecessary. Some small towns had already suffered economic hardship as a result, but not Calico. By all appearances, it seemed to be thriving.\n\nWalking quickly, she passed rows of shops and businesses built from brick and native limestone. A large general store took up one corner, the Calico Bank another. A barber, gunsmith, saddle shop, seamstress, bakery, and bookstore stretched along Main Street in orderly fashion.\n\nA doctor shared an office with an undertaker, which seemed like a conflict of interest.\n\nShe reached the sheriff's office, and her pace slowed. Though the lights were off, a black horse was tethered in front. The horse nickered softly and pawed the ground.\n\n\"What do I get if I put on one of them there straitjackets?\"\n\nHis voice sounded so clear and distinct in her head that for a moment she imagined she'd heard the real thing. Startled by the pleasant shiver that ran down her spine, she quickly moved away.\n\nAt least now she knew where the sheriff's office was located. A dim light shone through the window of the Calico Gazette next door. A bespectacled man was bent over a long table, painstakingly placing type onto a metal-framed stick.\n\nShe was just about to return to the Harvey House when the sound of running feet stopped her. She turned but not soon enough to step out of the way. A man barreled into her and knocked her down.\n\nLanding on her fanny, she yelled, \"What do you think you're doing?\"\n\nThe man kept running without as much as a backward glance.\n\n\"Of all the\u2014\"\n\nA second man suddenly bounded around the corner. Before she could pull in her legs he tripped over her foot and fell facedown on the wood plank sidewalk in front of her. His hat landed several feet away.\n\nKatie gasped, and her hand flew to the gun at her waist. \"Are... are you all right?\" she squeaked out.\n\nThe man pushed himself upright on his hands, the badge on his vest winking in the street light.\n\n\"Sheriff?\" She pulled her hand away from her waist.\n\nHe squinted at her. \"It's me, all right.\" He climbed to his feet and his full six-foot-something height towered over her. \"You're the new Harvey girl. Miss Katie Madison.\"\n\nFor some reason it pleased her that he remembered her name. A ripple of awareness reached all the way to her toes. \"The coat girl,\" she said and smiled.\n\nOne corner of his mouth lifted upward. \"Fancy meeting you here.\"\n\n\"I was just about to say the same thing,\" she said.\n\nHe frowned. \"What happened? Why are you sitting there? Don't they let you sit at the house?\"\n\nShe gave her head an indignant toss. \"I was knocked down by a very rude man.\"\n\nHis jaw hardened. \"I'm afraid I'm to blame for that.\" He took hold of her hand and pulled her to her feet with one easy swoop.\n\nConcern suffused his face as he looked her up and down. Had she only imagined that his gaze lingered longer than necessary on her tiny waist and soft, rounded hips?\n\n\"He didn't hurt you, did he?\"\n\nThe smell of alcohol was overwhelming, and she pulled her hand away. The odor brought back too many unhappy memories of the past. \"No,\" she snapped. \"He didn't hurt me.\"\n\nHe inclined his head as if puzzled by her abrupt reply. \"That still doesn't explain what you're doing out at this time of night.\" Bending, he scooped up his hat. \"Don't you Harvey girls have a curfew?\"\n\nShe glanced at him askew. \"Are you going to report me?\"\n\nThe glow from the gas streetlight turned his eyes into two golden stars. \"No, but it will cost you another piece of pie.\"\n\nShe studied him. He might smell like a whiskey barrel, but he sure didn't look inebriated. Didn't act like it, either. \"You strike a hard bargain.\"\n\nThe corner of his mouth inched upward. \"Those are the only bargains worth strikin'.\"\n\nThough she'd resolved not to be distracted by his masculine good looks, his crooked smile kept getting in the way.\n\nNoticing the dark wet spot, she pointed. \"Your vest.\"\n\nHis hand flew to his chest. \"We have our friend to thank for this.\" He inclined his head in the direction of the vanished runner.\n\nNow that she knew its source, she was no longer put off by the strong alcohol smell. Overhead, the big full moon looked as large and round as a Harvey House pie, reminding her of their deal.\n\n\"So what is your pleasure?\" she asked. \"Apple, mince, raisin, or coconut cream?\" There was a fifth choice, but she struggled to think beneath the intensity of his gaze, and her mind went blank.\n\n\"Yes to all,\" he said, and she laughed. \"I'll be happy to pay to have a whole pie delivered to my office,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm sure that can be arranged.\" He had no way of knowing it, but delivering food to his office could turn out to be a blessing. It would allow them to exchange information without arousing suspicion. It would also give her a legitimate excuse for leaving the Harvey House during daylight hours.\n\nShe swiped at a strand of loose hair. Convinced she looked a fright, she lowered her lashes and tried to decide how best to announce her true identity.\n\n\"So are you going to tell me or not?\" he asked.\n\nShe looked up. \"Tell you?\"\n\n\"What you're doing out here so late?\"\n\n\"Oh, that.\" She weighed her answer and decided to stick with the truth\u2014part of it, anyway. \"I couldn't sleep. It seems like you keep late hours, too.\"\n\n\"Not by choice.\" He slanted his head. \"I apologize for the man's ill manners, but it's no more than can be expected.\"\n\n\"You know him?\" she asked.\n\n\"No, but I will. I have reason to believe he's a Pinkerton detective.\"\n\n\"A Pink\u2014\" She stared at him. Far as she knew, she was the only one sent here to work on the Harvey girl killings. Of course, someone from one of the other offices could be here working on another case.\n\nHe nodded. \"Yes, and it's been my experience they think nothing of breaking the law for their own nefarious purposes.\"\n\nHis harsh tone left her momentarily speechless. The Pinkerton agency had received much in the way of criticism in recent years. She couldn't argue with him there. But nefarious? That was a new one. Unfortunately, some detectives did use questionable tactics to get their man. But most, like herself, were law-abiding citizens who had helped capture some of the country's toughest and most notorious criminals.\n\n\"I take it you don't much care for Pinkerton detectives,\" she said, choosing her words with care. Better find out his true feelings before revealing too much information.\n\nHe placed his hat on his head and adjusted the brim. \"That's putting it mildly.\"\n\nWhat a pity he felt that way; and to think she had looked forward to working with him. \"Why do you suppose he's in town?\" Since he brought the subject up first, she felt comfortable pursuing it.\n\n\"Your boss sent him,\" he said.\n\n\"M\u2014my boss?\" she stammered.\n\n\"Mr. Harvey came to my office to tell me to expect a Pinkerton on today's train.\"\n\nOh, that boss. \"I would think you would welcome the help.\" She didn't mean to sound critical, but she couldn't help it.\n\nThe Pinkerton National Detective Agency had resources not available to local lawmen. Not only did the arm of the agency have a long reach, the Pinkerton files contained an astounding amount of information on many known criminals in the country. Instead of complaining, the sheriff should be thanking the Lord for his good fortune in working with such a well-run organization.\n\n\"It can't be easy tracking down outlaws way out here,\" she said. Most small towns couldn't afford the money or manpower to chase down criminals much beyond town limits.\n\n\"Nothing's easy, but I'd sooner work with a snake than work with a Pink.\"\n\nHis biting words made her cringe inside. He sure didn't mince words. Still, she sensed that had she been a man he would have stated his opinion even more strongly. So everything she'd heard about Sheriff Whitman was true. What would he say if he knew he had two detectives in town? Better not break the news to him until after she contacted St. Louis headquarters. Her boss didn't like his female employees working alone without local backup, but maybe he would make an exception in this case. Especially if a second operative was nearby.\n\nShe gestured over her shoulder. \"I better get back before I'm missed.\"\n\n\"Allow me to see you home.\"\n\nShe eyed him thoughtfully. \"Don't you have a detective to catch?\"\n\n\"He'll wait till tomorrow.\" He shrugged. \"It's a small town. No one can hide from me for long.\"\n\nThat's what she was afraid of. \"I\u2014I hate to take you out of your way.\"\n\n\"Actually, you're not. I live on Front Street just up the road from Harvey's. If you don't mind, I need to pick up my horse on the way.\"\n\n\"Is that the black one in front of your office?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Name's Midnight.\" He crooked his elbow. \"Shall we?\"\n\nDespite his disagreeable stance in regard to the company she worked for, he had a way about him that was irresistible. His smile alone could melt the hide off a steer.\n\nShe slipped her arm through his, not because she thought she needed protection, but because of the role she played. Dark night. Strange town. Recent murders. Under those circumstances any Harvey girl would welcome the sheriff's presence. Turning down his offer might seem odd if not altogether suspicious.\n\nUpon reaching his office, she pulled her arm away.\n\n\"Here he is,\" he said, untying the horse from the hitching post.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Midnight.\" She ran her hand along the gelding's smooth nose.\n\nThey started along the deserted street toward the restaurant. He led his horse by the reins as they walked.\n\n\"From now on I insist you stay inside after dark. Least till I catch the killer and we know the town is safe again.\"\n\n\"Is that an order, Sheriff?\" she asked.\n\n\"Nope. Just plain good advice. Same advice I gave all the Harvey girls. Even Ginger.\"\n\nHis words hung between them like a funeral wreath, and a cold shiver ran down her spine.\n\nIn contrast, the restaurant's brick building loomed in front of them as big and happy as some of its regular customers. The slogan FRED HARVEY MEALS ALL THE WAY was painted onto the side of a covered wagon.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she said, stifling a yawn. It had been a long, hard day. Sleep. She needed sleep.\n\nThe sheriff perused the imposing two-story building with a rueful look. \"How do you propose to get back in? Through a window or down the chimney?\"\n\nShe smiled mysteriously. \"I have my ways.\"\n\nHe leveled his gaze on her. \"New in town and already you know all the ins and outs, do you?\"\n\n\"Not all of them,\" she said with meaning. \"But I will. Good night, Sheriff.\"\n\nShe hurried down the alleyway, stopping once to look over her shoulder. He had mounted his steed, and, outlined against the moonlit sky, horse and man melded into one.\n\nHe seemed trustworthy enough. Not that she could or would trust him. Not completely, anyway.\n\nPutting her trust in men had gotten her nothing but heartache. First, her father had let her down with his drinking. Then Nathan Cole, the man she had loved and hoped to wed. He'd led her to believe he cared for her. He'd escorted her to dances, took her on hay rides, and made her laugh. But it turned out he'd only used her to get to her sister Belle, whom he eventually married.\n\nSwallowing the rocklike lump in her throat, she ran around the building and pushed against the dining room door. Much to her relief, the wooden spoon she'd jammed in the sill was still in place, and the door swung open to her touch.\n\nShe felt her way through the dark dining room, moving silently from chair to chair. A soft scraping sound made her reach for her gun. She froze in place and waited.\n\n\"Anyone there?\" she called.\n\nWhen no one answered, she quickly exited the dining room and took the stairs two at a time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nThere ought to be a law against starting work at 5:00 a.m. Having precious little sleep, Katie stifled a yawn as she made her way down the stairs, through the still-dark dining room to the brightly lit kitchen.\n\nNever had she seen such a place. Harvey had spared no expense in making his restaurant as modern and efficient as possible, complete with running water, gas lighting, gleaming wood cabinets, and soapstone counters.\n\nThe chef greeted her with a pointed look at the clock on the wall. She was five minutes late.\n\nHis name was Chef Gass\u00e9e\u2014an unfortunate name for a cook, no matter how elegant he pronounced it. He was a high-strung man with a pencil-thin mustache and tea-strainer nose. His healthy crop of curly black hair was topped by a white linen toque, the height and pleats giving it the appearance of a Roman column.\n\nHe pointed in the direction of the plucking station where a dozen or more chickens waited to be undressed. Small rounded heads hung over the side of the counter, the beady eyes all staring at her.\n\nStomach churning, Katie looked away. She pretended to be a farm girl, but in reality she had been born and bred in the city. She was used to buying her tin goods from a grocer and meat from a butcher. Criminals she could handle, dead animals... not so much.\n\nHow does one say \"I don't pluck chickens\" in French?\n\nThe chef took a hen by the feet and dipped it into a large pot of boiling water. After a few seconds, he lifted the fowl out of the pot and tugged on a feather. Not satisfied with the ease by which the feather came out, he dunked the bird into the water again. He then flung the dripping chicken onto the counter and gestured for her to get to work.\n\nShe cleared her throat and shook her head. \"Me\"\u2014she pointed to herself\u2014\"no pluck chickens!\" She waved her hand sideways in what she hoped was a universal gesture for the word no.\n\n\"Well,\" he said, arms folded. Only it sounded like vell. \"Le poisson.\" He pronounced the word poison, pwasson.\n\n\"Yes, yes, oui, oui. Chicken... uh... poison. Pwasson.\"\n\nHe pointed to another table\u2014this one filled with dead fish waiting to be scaled and gutted. The staring eyes and gaping mouths made the chickens look almost friendly in comparison.\n\n\"No, no.\" She gasped. \"Pwasson,\" she said, careful to pronounce it the French way. Fish are poison.\n\n\"Oui, oui.\" He gestured wildly and confused her by nodding. His toque teetered back and forth like a tree that couldn't decide which way to topple.\n\nHe handed her a knife that could, in a pinch, pass as a saber. \"Le poisson!\"\n\nHis scowling expression told her he meant business and no amount of pleading would make him change his mind. Taking the knife in hand, she clenched her teeth and turned to face the silver-scaled corpses. Zeroing in on the largest, she afforded the creature that same fish-eye stare it gave her.\n\nHere goes nothing. Holding the handle of the knife with both hands, she raised it over her head. At the count of three she brought the blade down, and it hit the body hard. The fish popped up, head still attached, and zoomed across the room. It plopped tail first into a pan on the stove, splattering grease everywhere. Flames shot up like orange streamers dancing in the wind.\n\nGasping, Katie sprang into action. She grabbed the pan of water off the chicken table and tossed it onto the blaze. The instant the water hit the stovetop it burst into an inferno. Orange flames scaled the wall and lunged at the ceiling like fiery swords.\n\nLetting out a howl that sounded more animal than human, Chef Gassy yelled something in his mother tongue that needed no translation.\n\nFist pumping the air, he chased her around the counter twice before deciding that his efforts would be better spent putting out the fire. Cursing in French, he tossed an entire five-pound bag of salt on the stove and whacked the wall with a dish towel.\n\nThe moment the flames died and it looked like things were in control, Katie made a hasty retreat. She ducked out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs to her room.\n\nGee whillikens! There had to be an easier way to earn a living." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nSheriff Branch Whitman sat at the kitchen table drinking his morning coffee. He was still annoyed at himself for letting that detective get away last night. No matter. The man couldn't stay hidden for long.\n\nHis thoughts were interrupted by the voice of his seven-year-old son. Andy was talking to the housekeeper. Hard to believe that the boy was about to turn eight. It seemed like only yesterday that Branch had dug through the rubble left by a deadly tornado and found the newborn infant stuffed in a cast-iron stove, umbilical cord still attached.\n\nThe thought brought a wave of memories crashing down on him. Even now, after all this time, he couldn't forget the horror of that long-ago day. There'd been tornados since, of course, but none as powerful. No one could live in Kansas for long without seeing the destructive force of a twister. But the one in '72 was the granddaddy of them all.\n\nThirty seconds and his life had changed forever.\n\nThe cyclone pretty much destroyed the town, along with several farms. His house was spared, and had his wife been home where she belonged, her life would have been spared, as well.\n\nA midwife by trade, Hannah Whitman insisted upon working even after their marriage. Call him old-fashioned, but he hadn't wanted her to work. A man's job was to support his wife, and her insistence upon working made him feel like a failure in that regard. But that wasn't the only reason he'd wanted her to quit. Hardly a week went by when someone hadn't banged on their door in the middle of the night wanting her services, and he'd worried about her safety.\n\nShe was at the Clayborn farm delivering Dorothy Clayborn's firstborn when the tornado struck. The only one to survive was the infant. Somehow Hannah had the presence of mind to place the newborn babe inside the cast-iron oven before the tornado hit. The entire house had collapsed around it. The baby's frantic cries had let Branch and the other rescue workers know where to dig. They found his wife's body draped over the stove.\n\nHannah had saved the child's life, and it seemed only right that he keep the boy and raise him as his own. In all the confusion following the twister, no one questioned his right to do so. And why would they? The baby's mother was dead. His father had died months before the tornado. Far as he knew, the boy had no other relatives.\n\nIt seemed that Hannah had wanted to give him the son in death that she could not give him when she was alive. Her final gift to him. In return, he loved and cared for the boy as if he were his own flesh and blood.\n\nHis housekeeper, Miss Chloe, walked into the room, and his thoughts scattered like feathers in the wind.\n\n\"Law sakes, Sheriff,\" she began, white teeth flashing against her dark skin. \"That boy of yours will be the death of me yet.\" She always called him Sheriff even though he'd asked her to call him Branch.\n\nSheriff was a whole lot better than master, which is what she called him all those years ago when he first hired her to help with the baby. Having grown up on a Georgia cotton plantation, she wasn't used to being treated like a member of the family. But she sure did learn and now thought nothing about giving him a piece of her mind should the occasion call for it.\n\n\"What's he doing now?\" he asked.\n\n\"Says he doesn't need to go to no school. Says he knows everything.\" She laughed that big belly laugh of hers, and her brown eyes shone with humor. \"Lawdy, don't we wish we could all say that?\"\n\nIn a way, Branch envied the boy. It had been a long time since he thought he knew it all. He was... what? Seven or eight at the time, and that was way back when his mother was alive and the world still made sense.\n\n\"I'll talk to him.\"\n\n\"Nah.\" Her face grew serious. She wore a red kerchief over her kinky black hair and a bright floral dress that circled her full figure like a lampshade. \"You got other things on your mind. I'll set him straight. Don't you worry none about that.\"\n\nAndy walked into the room looking all spiffy for school. Smelled good, too. He wore knee-high trousers with red suspenders, long black socks, and a blue-and-white-striped shirt. Somehow Miss Chloe had even managed to corral the boy's stubborn cowlick.\n\nCurbing the impulse to ruffle Andy's hair as he was prone to do, Branch gave him a stern look. \"You're not giving Miss Chloe a hard time, are you, Son?\"\n\n\"No, sir.\"\n\n\"Good. See that you don't.\" Softening his tone, he asked, \"Have you had your breakfast?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"Humph.\" Miss Chloe folded her arms across her ample bosom. \"You call that breakfast? A half a sausage and a spoonful of eggs. That's not enough to feed a hummingbird.\"\n\nAndy's picky eating habits were a bone of contention with his housekeeper, who considered any food left on a plate an affront to her cooking.\n\nBranch pulled the watch out of his vest pocket and flipped the case open with his thumb. \"You better get a move on or you'll be late for school.\"\n\nAndy reached for his books on the table, held together with a leather strap. \"Bye, Pa. Bye, Miss Chloe.\" With that he ran outside, slamming the door shut behind him.\n\nMiss Chloe poured herself a cup of coffee. \"That's some boy you got there.\"\n\nBranch smiled. \"You won't get any argument from me there.\"\n\n\"Want some breakfast?\"\n\n\"No, I'll get something in town.\" He gulped down the last of his coffee. He was anxious to track down that annoying Pink detective. The man deserved to spend the day behind bars. Assaulting a sheriff. Knocking a woman off her feet. No less than two days in jail would be sufficient. Make that three.\n\nThe thought brought another one, equally disturbing, though far more pleasant. The vision that came to mind of Miss Madison sitting on the boardwalk made the corners of his mouth twitch.\n\nCome to think of it, she never did tell him what she was doing out so late. In light of the Harvey House killings, traipsing about at night was a fool thing to do.\n\nShe was new in town, so it seemed unlikely she was meeting a beau. And why did he have the feeling that there was more to her than met the eye?\n\nThe last thought brought back a flood of memories. She sure didn't look like a Harvey girl last night. Not with her hair falling down her back and skirt in disarray, allowing a tantalizing glimpse of lace petticoats beneath the hem.\n\nGood thing her English employer was nowhere around. No doubt he would have sent her packing. Fred Harvey kept his female employees on a tight rein. Miss Madison didn't strike him as one who could be easily controlled. It would be interesting to see how long she lasted.\n\nSnapping his mouth shut, he carried his cup and saucer to the sink.\n\n\"Andy's birthday is only a couple of weeks away,\" Miss Chloe said. \"Do you want me to plan something special?\"\n\n\"Yeah, we need to do something,\" he said. \"Maybe the three of us can have dinner at the Harvey House.\" The thought popping out of nowhere surprised him. It obviously surprised Miss Chloe, too.\n\n\"You got a problem with my cooking?\" she asked, sounding insulted.\n\n\"I like your cooking just fine.\" No one could fry chicken better than she could, and her corn bread was out of this world. \"I just thought you'd appreciate a night off.\"\n\n\"Well, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather spend my time off with my husband.\"\n\n\"He's welcome to come.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but after putting in a full day at the shop there's nothing he likes better than to stay home and put his feet up on the hassock.\"\n\nBranch nodded. Miss Chloe was so much a part of his and Andy's life that sometimes he forgot she had a home of her own. Her husband was the local blacksmith, and they had raised three strapping sons.\n\nWhenever Branch worked late or was called out of town on county business, Miss Chloe simply took his son home with her and bedded him down. She lived a stone's throw away, so Andy was never that far away and felt as much at home at her house as he did in his own.\n\n\"Take the night off,\" he said. Come to think of it, Andy might like eating in a restaurant for a change. A new experience like that might do wonders for the boy's appetite. The idea had nothing to do with the new waitress in town\u2014not a thing.\n\nHe grabbed his hat and headed for the door. \"Got to get to work.\" If he was lucky, he'd catch that Pink detective before he caused any more trouble.\n\n\"Will you be home for supper?\" she called after him.\n\nHe almost said no, but he'd missed a couple of meals with Andy already that week. \"Count on it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"Phew!\" Mary-Lou held her nose. \"Don't know what smells worse, the horrid smoke or the smell of burned fish,\" she said. They had finished serving breakfast to the locals and were now waiting for the morning train to arrive.\n\n\"Le poisson,\" Katie said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Le poisson. That's how you say 'fish' in French.\"\n\n\"I didn't know you could speak French.\" Mary-Lou looked impressed.\n\nKatie shrugged. \"You'd be amazed what you can learn at five in the morning.\"\n\nOkay, maybe she panicked a bit upon seeing flames shoot up from the iron cookstove. Any emergency that didn't require the use of a gun tended to floor her. Outlaws she could handle. But grease fires? Not so much. How was she to know that throwing water on one would make it worse? Homemaking was not her strong suit; catching bad guys was.\n\nIf having the manager and dorm matron breathing down her back wasn't worrisome enough, her name was now mud to a certain temperamental French chef.\n\nA series of sneezes preceded the entry of the man who had been introduced to her the night before as Stanley Culpepper, the Harvey House bookkeeper. Sneezing into his handkerchief, he took his place at the table by the door, his eyes and nose red. He handled all restaurant finances, which included collecting meal money from customers, paying vendors, and writing employee paychecks.\n\n\"Hay fever's killing me,\" he muttered to no one in particular and sneezed again.\n\nHis shoe\u2014polish\u2014dyed hair offered a startling contrast to skin as white as a newly peeled potato. Next to the leather-faced railroad workers and cattlemen, he looked like he'd just emerged from a cave. His John Wilkes Booth\u2014type mustache seemed almost too thick for his face and his nose too short.\n\nFrayed cuffs told her he wasn't married, but the bruises on his knuckles puzzled her. Had he been in a fight?\n\n\"Good morning, ladies,\" Mr. Pickens said, drawing Katie's attention away from Culpepper's hands.\n\nThe manager perused the dining room, his gaze flicking from table to table. He pulled out a measuring stick and checked that the silverware at one table was placed the same distance from the edge. Dishes had to be correctly positioned, the two birds on the Blue Willow bread plates at precisely twelve o'clock.\n\nSatisfied that all was in order, he then turned his attention to the four girls who stood like wooden ducks at a carnival waiting to be knocked over.\n\nIt was the second inspection of the day, and Mary-Lou assured her there were more to come. The first one had been done by the dorm matron, who wiped their faces with a damp sponge to make certain no one wore face paint.\n\n\"Miss Madison! Is that a spot I see?\" Pickens pointed to her apron.\n\nShe looked down. \"It's just a speck of water, sir.\" The starched aprons had to be spotlessly clean at all times, and already she'd changed hers twice that morning. The starched fabric seemed to attract the least bit of dust or moisture.\n\nPickens stared at her like a bug to be squashed.\n\nRefusing to be intimidated, she lifted her chin. \"It will dry.\"\n\n\"Yes, it will, Miss Madison. But not on you.\" He pointed to the kitchen. \"You have twenty-nine seconds to change into a fresh one.\"\n\n\"But\u2014\"\n\n\"Twenty-eight seconds!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nBranch swung the door of the empty cell open to let the man named Woody Baker walk in.\n\nA grizzled man in his sixties, Woody had a wooden leg, a toothless smile, and a scar on his forehead. He probably wouldn't be alive if it wasn't for Branch arresting him with clocklike regularity for loitering. The town had no ordinance against lounging by public buildings, but jail was the only way of keeping him from starving or, during winter months, even freezing to death.\n\nThe widow Bisbee provided the jail food for a stipend. The meals weren't fancy, but they were nourishing and the cot reasonably comfortable. A couple of days of food and rest and Woody would be good to go again. That is, until next time.\n\nAfter getting Woody settled, Branch sat at his desk, his chair squeaking beneath his weight. So far he'd failed to find the detective. The man was as slippery as a wet bar of soap. But not for long. Every saloon and businessman in town had been told to be on the lookout. It was just a matter of time. Meanwhile, he might as well work on the Harvey case.\n\nThough he had his notes memorized, he went over each handwritten notation in the thick Harvey file word for word. Had he missed something? Overlooked an inconsistency? Failed to put two and two together?\n\nWeeks of investigation had failed to turn up a single suspect. With an audible groan, he scrubbed his hands over his face in frustration. He was no closer to finding the Harvey killer now than when he'd first begun the investigation.\n\nHe'd questioned everyone in town at least twice, and the railroad workers many times more. He'd gone over the victims' rooms with a fine-tooth comb and checked the background of each Harvey House employee for former criminal activity. He'd even cabled the French military police force gendarmerie asking for information on Chef Gass\u00e9e.\n\nAll he had to show for his work was a file full of worthless information.\n\nMuch as it went against his grain, maybe he should step back and let the Pink take over. See if the hired detective could do any better at solving the crimes. Two young women were dead, and as much as he hated to admit it, he was stymied. So far his prayers for God's help in arranging a break in the case had not been answered.\n\nOr at least not in the way he'd hoped. He pinched his forehead. Why did help, if that's what it was, have to come in the guise of an organization for which he held nothing but disdain? Was this God's idea of a joke?\n\nThe front door swung open, and he dropped his hands to his desk. The widow Mrs. Bracegirdle stepped into the office, cane first. He stood ready to help her to a chair if necessary. As if to guess his intent, she motioned for him to stay where he was.\n\nObstinate as a barn full of mules, she hadn't aged in thirty years. She looked eighty when he was knee-high to a milk stool, and she looked eighty now. Thin white hair framed a face as wrinkled as an old peach pit. Skin hung from beneath her chin and shook like a turkey's wattle when she spoke.\n\nStill, he had a soft spot for her. Not only had she given him candy when he was a youngster and remained his most avid supporter through the years, she was one of only two people in town who knew the truth about his son.\n\nAfter swearing her to secrecy all those years ago, he hadn't mentioned it since and neither had she. He'd hoped that somehow she'd forgotten and accepted Andy as his own flesh and blood, but that was probably only wishful thinking on his part.\n\nThe only other person who knew his secret was Reverend Bushwell. That was because everyone else who knew the truth had either left after that terrible tornado wreaked havoc in the town or had since passed away. At one point it looked as if the town would die with them. Then along came the railroad, bringing with it new families, new life, and a whole set of new problems.\n\nHe waited for Mrs. Bracegirdle to settle herself in the chair in front of his desk before seating himself. She leaned her cane next to her side and smoothed her purple skirt.\n\nHe knew Reverend Bushwell wouldn't reveal his secret and until recently hadn't worried about Mrs. Bracegirdle. Lately, though, she'd been given to strange hallucinations and wild imaginings. He never knew what she would come up with next.\n\nLast month, she claimed to have been abducted by a man on a white horse. The month prior, she claimed that she found a stranger in her bed. No one was there, of course, and he had a hard time convincing her of that, but he was beginning to see a pattern.\n\n\"Hi, Woody,\" she called to the man in jail. Everyone in town was on a first name basis with his resident prisoner.\n\nWoody rolled over on his cot. \"Howdy, Miz Bracegirdle.\"\n\n\"Who's been in your bed this time?\" Branch was teasing her, but one wouldn't know it by the serious look on her face.\n\n\"No one.\" She regarded him with faded blue eyes. \"The reason I'm here is that there's a strange noise coming from next door.\"\n\n\"From next door, do you mean the bank side or the barbershop?\" She lived on the second floor over her son's dry goods store.\n\n\"From the apartment over the bank,\" she said. \"And it keeps me awake at night.\"\n\n\"Sorry to hear that.\" Out of respect for her, he would have to check it out, of course. Just as he'd checked out the marmalade cat that screeched like a bad opera singer and interfered with her sleep. The animal's owner didn't take kindly to having her cat's tonal deficiencies compared to opera, saying no cat of hers would put on such airs.\n\n\"What kind of noise?\" Branch asked. \"Can you describe it?\"\n\n\"It's a tapping sound. And sometimes I hear a scraping. Occasionally there's a bang.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a ghost to me,\" Woody called from his cell.\n\nShe pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve and daintily dabbed her nose. \"Whatever it is, it's a nuisance. How's a body to sleep with that racket? That's what I want to know.\"\n\n\"How long has this been going on?\" The bank closed at 5:00 p.m. and didn't open until nine in the morning.\n\n\"For several weeks.\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows. \"And you're just getting around to telling me about it now?\"\n\n\"It stopped for a while but then started up again. The sound was particularly loud early Sunday morning.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's a church mouse,\" Woody called and laughed at his own joke.\n\nIgnoring him, Branch folded his arms across his chest. \"Okay, I'll check with the bank president and get back to you.\"\n\n\"That would be very nice.\" Today her eyes looked clear and focused. Maybe there really was something to her complaint.\n\n\"It looks like I'm not the only one who didn't get any sleep,\" she said.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"You look like you missed a few winks yourself.\"\n\nBranch raked his hair with his fingers. Looked that bad, did he? Small wonder. He hadn't had a good night's sleep since the first Harvey girl was found dead. Since he'd failed to find Priscilla's killer, he blamed himself for Ginger's death. If the killer wasn't found soon, he might kill again.\n\n\"Just working hard,\" he said.\n\nTucking her handkerchief into the sleeve of her dress, she reached for her cane with a gnarly hand and rose from her chair, bones creaking. \"You know what they say about all work and no play.\"\n\n\"Makes a man rich,\" Woody called.\n\n\"Don't I wish?\" Branch said and grinned.\n\nFearing she was about to get started on his nonexistent love life again, he stood and walked around his desk. Work and his son took up all his time. He didn't want to think about anything else.\n\nTaking her by the arm, he escorted her to the door. \"I'll let you know what I find out at the bank.\"\n\nJust as soon as he tracked down that Monkey Ward detective." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nKatie paused outside the kitchen door.\n\nSneaking away from the Harvey House was no easy task, especially during the morning hours. It had been two days since the fire, and Katie hadn't been able to escape Pickens's watchful eye. Today, however, he was nowhere in sight.\n\nThe timing couldn't be more perfect. Fortunately, Chef Gassy was busy yelling at the man hired to paint the smoke-stained wall and ceiling. Unfortunately, the painter dripped white paint into the chef's prized English pea soup.\n\n\"Balourd!\" Gassy yelled, and the man turned almost the same color as the newly painted wall.\n\nWhile the two were going at it tooth and nail, Katie snatched an entire apple pie and quickly ducked into the empty dining room and out the door.\n\nShe had no intention of revealing her true identity, but maybe if she kept her eyes and ears open she might learn something about the case from the sheriff. The trick was to ask the right questions without drawing suspicion. If she mentioned seeing a man in front of the Harvey House at night, she might be able to determine whether Ginger's beau was a suspect.\n\nWith a little luck she could conduct her business with the sheriff and return to the restaurant before anyone noticed her gone.\n\nIt was a warm spring day with not a cloud in the sky\u2014too nice to be confined inside.\n\nOn the other side of the railroad tracks, purple, blue, and orange wildflowers mingled with tall prairie grass. Today, no cattle smell tainted the air. The door to the telegraph office was open and the tap-tap-tapping of the telegraph key floated to her ears.\n\nWorking in such close proximity to the telegraph office was a bonus. It made communicating with her St. Louis bosses a breeze. All telegrams to headquarters were to be addressed to \"Aunt Hetty,\" every word carefully concealed behind a cryptic code. If the telegraph operator thought anything odd about the daily cables to her \"aunt,\" he kept it to himself.\n\nHolding the pie with both hands, she hurried down the alley and crossed the street to Main. The pastry was still warm to the touch, and the cinnamon smell made her mouth water. With a little luck maybe Chef Gassy wouldn't notice one of his newly baked pies missing.\n\nShe still wasn't sure how to handle the sheriff. They said that the way to a man's heart was through his stomach. She only hoped the pie did the trick\u2014though she doubted it would make him any less hostile toward Pinkerton detectives.\n\nSuddenly she saw something that stopped her in her tracks. The man who had so rudely knocked her down two nights earlier had just entered the Calico Bank. She'd recognize his ugly mug anywhere. The sheriff claimed he was a Pinkerton detective. If so, he was a master of disguise, because no one looking at him would ever guess his true profession.\n\nShe frowned. He better not be her \"protector,\" that's all she had to say. Or assigned to her case. Not that she'd ever worked on a murder case before. Her specialty was tracking down embezzlers, larcenists, and other so-called gentleman criminals. The most lethal weapon any of the previous offenders used was ink and pen.\n\nSo the Harvey girl killer wielded a knife. So what? She was ready for anything. More than ready. All she had to do was find the killer before the killer found her\u2014or before she did something dumb like burning down the Harvey House restaurant.\n\nCuriosity getting the best of her, she followed him inside.\n\nCustomers snaked up to the teller's cage, and the man was at the very end of the line. She took her place directly behind him.\n\nFirst she had to be certain of his identity, and there was only one way to tell if he truly was a Pinkerton operative. \"Would you mind holding this for me?\" she asked.\n\nHe looked startled but nonetheless took the pie plate from her. \"Smells good,\" he said, showing no signs of recognizing her as the woman he'd knocked off her feet. Hard to believe that with her blazing red hair, she could be so easily forgotten.\n\n\"Apple,\" she said. She pulled a lace handkerchief out of her sleeve and waved it like she had been taught to signal another operative in public.\n\nShe then tucked the handkerchief back into her sleeve and took the pie from him.\n\nRight on cue, he pulled out his own handkerchief and flicked it across his hand. She couldn't tell if he was signaling her back or wiping away pie filling.\n\n\"Are you from St. Louis?\" she whispered.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Kansas City.\"\n\nSince they were working out of different offices, that meant he was probably working on a different case. That was a relief. Had Pinkerton sent another operative it would have meant a lack of faith in her abilities.\n\n\"My name is Miss Madison.\" Operatives never used their real names when working on a case, not even with each other. \"What's your alias?\" You never asked a working detective his real name.\n\n\"They call me Scarface,\" he said.\n\nShe could see why. Not only was his face pitted with pockmarks, his nose had been broken and he had a nasty scar over one eye. Either he'd been run over by a train or had dealt with some mighty tough thugs.\n\n\"What are you here for?\" Since other bank customers had taken their place in line behind her she kept her voice low. \"Counterfeiting or larceny?\"\n\n\"Bank robbery,\" he replied, his voice hushed.\n\n\"I've worked a couple of those myself,\" she said.\n\nHe gave her an arched look. \"Is that so?\"\n\n\"A tough job. The last holdup nearly got me killed.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, you gotta be careful. The secret of success is good planning.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean.\" An undercover agent was required to invent a whole new history. She couldn't just say she hailed from Wisconsin and was the daughter of a cheese maker; she had to be that girl. She also had to know a lot about cheese.\n\n\"And of course, you have to have good timing,\" he added. \"Today is Friday, and that's always the best day to rob a bank. That's when the railroad workers get paid.\"\n\n\"Good to know,\" she said. She'd never worked in such close proximity to the railroad and had no idea how or when the workers got paid. She glanced at the line in front of them and most were older folks. None looked like bank robbers, but one never could tell, and Scarface seemed to know his business. Maybe he knew something she didn't.\n\n\"The problem with some robbers is that they wait too late,\" he continued. \"By noon, most all workers have cashed their checks, leaving the bank low on dough.\" He pulled out his watch. \"Ten forty. Like I said, timing is everything.\"\n\n\"Do you need help?\" she asked, keeping her voice low.\n\n\"Nah. I got it. I like working alone. Less chance of being noticed. But it's mighty nice of you to offer.\"\n\n\"That's what colleagues are for,\" she said. \"Just watch out for the sheriff. He doesn't have much regard for the likes of us.\"\n\n\"They never do,\" he said.\n\n\"Next,\" the teller called.\n\nKatie gestured with her head. \"That's you.\"\n\nHe turned to face the bank clerk. \"Watch and learn.\" He stepped toward the window and slid a piece of paper through the hole in the cage.\n\nShe furrowed her brow. Was that a note warning the teller that a robbery was about to take place? It seemed like a strange way to operate, but then she was no expert in bank holdups.\n\nThe thin male clerk suddenly got all jittery, and his eyebrows bounced up and down as if pulled by a puppeteer's strings.\n\nScarface glanced over his shoulder at her and winked. That's when she noticed the clerk stuffing money into a bag.\n\nGasping, she blinked in disbelief and almost dropped the pie. Scarface was robbing the bank!\n\nAfter her initial surprise, she forced herself to think. She'd confronted her share of bank robbers, of course, but never during an actual holdup. It was always days or weeks afterward following a thorough investigation and with law backup in tow.\n\nNow she was on her own.\n\nBalancing the still-warm pastry in one hand, she walked up to him and tapped him on the shoulder. The instant he turned his head, she hit him square in the face with the pie.\n\nNot only did this bring an uttered curse from her target but indignant protests from customers standing in line.\n\nOne woman clucked in disapproval. \"Of all the rude things.\"\n\n\"The nerve!\" muttered a man wearing a bowler.\n\nBy the time Scarface had recovered enough to wipe the buttery syrup out of his eyes Katie had already reached into her pocket for her weapon and held him at gunpoint.\n\nA heavyset woman at the counting desk screamed and flung a handful of money in the air. \"She's got a gun!\"\n\nChaos followed the announcement. People ran out of the bank, crashing into those running inside to see what all the commotion was about.\n\nScarface looked about to bolt, but a click of her gun relieved him of that notion. \"Wise decision,\" she said.\n\nGlobs of apples slid down the bank robber's face to his shirt and dripped to the floor. The messy syrup failed to hide his red-faced fury, but he did what he was told.\n\n\"If you had asked nicely, I would have split the money with you,\" he griped.\n\n\"A likely story,\" she said. \"Move!\" She gestured with her pointed gun. \"If you try anything, I won't hesitate to shoot.\"\n\nBefore they reached the door, the sheriff ran inside. He slid to a screeching stop in front of them, revolver in hand, his stance as wide as his shoulders. He took one look at Scarface, still covered with pie, and directed an inquiring gaze her way.\n\n\"Caught him holding up the bank,\" she explained.\n\nAstonishment crossed Whitman's face as he regarded the would-be thief dripping in syrup. \"You're a bank robber?\"\n\nScarface cursed. \"Announce it to the world, why don't you?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nBranch shoved Scarface into the empty jail cell next to Woody's and slammed the metal door shut with a bang.\n\nHe'd made the man wash before locking him up, but the cinnamon smell of apple pie still lingered. No complaints there. That was a whole lot better than how most of his prisoners smelled.\n\nWoody wrinkled his nose. \"What's he in for? Robbing a bakery?\"\n\n\"Nope. Bank.\"\n\nWoody pushed out his lips. \"You don't say.\" He frowned. \"With a mug like that he musta been sittin' in an outhouse when lightning struck.\"\n\nBranch hung his hat and keys on wall hooks and turned to Miss Madison. She sat on a chair by his desk, feet together and hands folded on her lap. He'd told her to sit and not move, and surprisingly she'd obeyed without a word.\n\n\"He says you're a bank robber, too.\"\n\nShe sure didn't look like any criminal he'd ever dragged into his office. If anything, she looked as prim and proper in her black-and-white uniform as a schoolmarm\u2014at least from the neck down. Above was a different story. The sun slanting through the windows turned her hair into red flames, an annoying reminder of how appealing those same copper locks looked in the moonlight.\n\nIrritated by the thought and more than a little miffed that he'd misjudged not just one person but two, he slid a hip onto the edge of the desk and regarded her with narrowed eyes. Was that what she was doing the other night? Casing the bank?\n\nBranch waited for her to either confirm or deny the accusation, but she remained silent. Was Scarface telling the truth? Hard to believe. Even so, he wasn't letting the lady out of his sight until he had some answers.\n\n\"Said you were riled that he got in line first to rob the bank.\"\n\nSomething flickered in the depths of her eyes, and he sensed an inner battle taking place. At last she leaned forward. \"It's worse than that,\" she whispered.\n\nHe lowered his voice to match hers in volume. \"Worse?\" Blast it all! She was accused of bank robbing. How could it be worse?\n\nShe held a hand at the side of her mouth like a woman about to impart the most tantalizing gossip. \"I'm a Pinkerton detective.\"\n\nHe reared back. Had she pulled out a knife and stabbed him, he wouldn't have been more surprised. Shocked, more like it. Stunned. \"You?\" he sputtered, forgetting to keep his voice low.\n\nWith a meaningful glance at the cells, she mutely reminded him that they weren't alone.\n\nThis time his voice was barely audible. \"But you're a\u2014\"\n\nShe visually challenged him to continue, but he thought better of it. He couldn't believe it. All this time he'd been looking for the detective and he\u2014she\u2014had been right under his very nose.\n\nShe pulled a badge out of her pocket and held it in such a way that only he could see it. The polished metal shield said Pinkerton, all right. Clear as day.\n\nHe studied her in total disbelief. Hard to believe. She sure didn't look like any detective he'd ever encountered. He leaned forward, his voice barely a rumble in his chest.\n\n\"Harvey indicated they were sending a male detective.\"\n\nShe met his gaze with bold regard. \"It's better for him not to know the details.\"\n\nBranch doubted Harvey would agree. The man ran a tight ship and would control the moon and the stars if such a thing were possible. \"And you think you're going to solve the Harvey girl killings?\"\n\nHer eyes flashed. \"I caught the bank robber, didn't I?\"\n\n\"Can't argue with you there, ma'am.\"\n\nHe drew back and rubbed his chin. What in the name of Sam Hill were the Pinkerton principals thinking? Two women were dead, so what did the detective agency do? It put another in harm's way. Now he felt obliged to look out for her welfare. As if he didn't have enough to worry about.\n\n\"I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but this is no job for a...\"\n\nShe bristled with indignation, and her nostrils flared.\n\n\"Amateur,\" he said for want of another word.\n\nHer eyes blazed with sparks of fire. \"You're quite right. Which is why the office sent me.\" Her whispered words lacked in volume but not in passion. \"I always catch my man.\"\n\nHe folded his arms across his chest. \"Do you, now?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said icily, \"and I have a record to prove it.\"\n\n\"And how many of them were killers?\"\n\nHer hesitation was so brief that had he blinked he might have missed it. \"What difference does it make?\"\n\n\"Aha!\" he said and then remembered to lower his voice. \"This is your first murder case, isn't it?\"\n\n\"I didn't say that.\"\n\n\"Isn't it?\"\n\nShe glowered, and her lips thinned. \"The same principle applies to all investigations regardless of the crime.\"\n\n\"Is that what your Pinkerton bosses led you to believe?\"\n\n\"It's true. And if you weren't so arrogant, you'd be happy for my help.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" He now leaned so close to her that their noses were mere inches apart. So close that he could see the gold flecks in her eyes. So close he could smell the delicate fragrance of her perfume. \"Why do I need your help?\"\n\nShe showed no sign of backing down or even wavering. \"We have resources. Mug shots. Criminal profiles. I've already sent headquarters descriptions of the Harvey House workers and regular customers.\" She sat back with a satisfied look on her face. \"I even sent a description of you.\"\n\nHe pulled back. \"Me?\"\n\n\"Everyone in town is a suspect, and that includes you.\"\n\nStaring at her from beneath raised eyebrows, he was momentarily at a loss for words. He didn't like being a suspect, but neither could he imagine anyone being so thorough.\n\n\"While you're on a wild-goose chase, I'm checking out real suspects,\" he said.\n\n\"A job that would be easier with Pinkerton help,\" she countered.\n\nThey glared at each other like two wild animals meeting over a slab of meat. \"Is that so?\"\n\nShe tossed her head. \"Yes, that's so. Allan Pinkerton is an expert on the criminal mind, and he's trained his sons well.\" Her glance flicked over the messy stack of files on his desk. \"You could learn a lot from them.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well I've seen some of their work and, lady, I'm not impressed.\"\n\n\"You should be. Their record for catching criminals can't be matched!\"\n\nSeeing no advantage to pursuing the argument, he changed the subject. \"So were you ever going to tell me who you were?\"\n\n\"I considered telling you the other night.\" She glared at him with reproachful eyes. \"But you talked me out of it.\"\n\n\"How'd I do that?\"\n\n\"I believe the snake did it. You know, the one you would rather work with. Or maybe it was the nefarious part.\"\n\nHe raked his fingers through his hair. \"I guess I came on kinda strong, didn't I?\"\n\nShe lifted her chin. \"Not as strong as some.\"\n\nHe sucked in his breath. The woman posed more problems than a roomful of wild dogs. He tossed a nod at a sign on the wall.\n\n\"We have an ordinance in this town preventing anyone from carrying firearms.\" Not that she needed a gun. Those big baby blues of hers would weaken even the most hardened criminal.\n\nHer gaze lit on the sign. The stubborn look on her face told him that if he had a mind to disarm her he'd have a battle on his hands. \"It says all men are to turn in their guns. It says nothing about women.\"\n\nDoggone it. She had him there. No matter. He wasn't about to confiscate her weapon. Not as long as she lived under the same roof as a possible killer.\n\n\"If I hear from anyone that you're carrying a gun, I'll be obliged to disarm you.\"\n\n\"I'll keep that in mind.\"\n\n\"See that you do.\" He lifted a finger in warning. \"I don't know what kind of investigation you plan to conduct, but it better not interfere with mine.\"\n\nShe leaned forward, and her eyes blazed. \"I plan a thorough and professional investigation, with or without your help.\"\n\n\"I don't work with Pinks.\"\n\nShe bopped her head. \"And I don't work with mule-headed sheriffs!\" She rose from her seat. \"Would that be all?\"\n\n\"For now.\" He slid off the desk, but for once his impressive height gave him no advantage. She didn't even give him the courtesy of looking cowed. Instead, she snapped her head and glared up at him\u2014a force to be reckoned with.\n\n\"I'm due back at the house,\" she said. \"I trust that you'll keep my identity secret.\"\n\nHe gave a curt nod. \"As a professional courtesy, your secret's safe with me. But I must warn you that I'll expect the same consideration from you.\"\n\nShe tilted her head. \"Meaning?\"\n\n\"Meaning that anything relevant to the case must be shared with me.\"\n\n\"I report to my Pinkerton boss. No one else.\" She turned to leave.\n\nHe stopped her with a hand to her wrist before she reached the door. \"Holding back information is an obstruction of justice,\" he hissed quietly.\n\nTheir gazes clashed like sparring swords. \"I'll keep that in mind.\"\n\n\"See that you do.\"\n\nShe glanced down at his hand still on her arm, and he released her. Nothing in her stance or expression suggested compliance. Something told him his job just got a whole lot tougher.\n\n\"Good day, Sheriff.\" This time she made no effort to lower her voice or hide her disdain. With a glance at the bank robber, she walked out of the office, the door slamming in her wake.\n\nHands curled by his side, he stared at the door long after she'd left.\n\n\"That's some woman,\" Woody called from his cell. \"I'd say she's got some snap in her garters. You should have just kissed her and been done with it.\"\n\nBranch spun around, muscles tense. Kiss the Pink detective? Not in a million years. Wasn't going to happen. He had enough trouble as it was.\n\n\"The thought never occurred to me.\"\n\nWoody shrugged and manually arranged his wooden leg onto the cot. \"Sure did look like it to me.\"\n\nScarface concurred. \"Looked like it to me, too.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nKatie was still shaking after she left the office. How dare the sheriff treat her like she was some\u2014what did he call it? Amateur!\n\nNot only was the man arrogant, he was stubborn as a bulldog's grip.\n\nHe had some nerve bossing her around like he had every right. Telling her what she could and could not do. Treating her like she was a child. Ha! Had it not been for her, Scarface would have robbed the bank and taken off before anyone knew what happened.\n\nBut did the sheriff give her credit? He did not. Oooooooh, he made her so mad! Just wait, Sheriff Whitman. We'll see who solves the Harvey House murder case. Then we'll know who the real amateur is." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "The next morning, Katie was assigned to work behind the horseshoe counter in what was called the breakfast room, though lunch was also served there.\n\nAbigail stood ready to train her. Most of the locals preferred eating in the less formal room as it didn't require men to wear coats. It was also less expensive than the dining room. Because of a shortage of personnel, the breakfast room was closed for supper.\n\nDespite its informality the same care and attention to detail were given to the decor. Mr. Harvey collected Indian art, and intricately woven Navajo rugs graced the walls next to shelves holding a variety of Indian pottery. Tall vases decorated with eagles and geometric shapes shared space with round hand-painted bowls.\n\nStill early, the restaurant was empty. The moment the train arrived, Abigail would move to the dining room, leaving Katie to fend for herself.\n\nAbigail pointed out the location of plates, cups, and silverware. A slender woman with brown hair and hazel eyes, she spoke in such a way as to not call attention to herself. She also had a habit of looking over her shoulder. Even as she instructed Katie, she kept a watchful eye on the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the railroad tracks.\n\nKatie set cups and saucers upon the polished wood counter as instructed, along with silverware and linen napkins. \"How long have you worked here?\" she asked.\n\n\"Almost two months,\" Abigail said with a wary glance. \"I arrived just after Priscilla...\" Her voice faded away.\n\n\"So you didn't know her.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"But you knew Ginger.\"\n\nAbigail gave an audible sigh. \"Yes, but only for a short time.\" She arranged salt, pepper, maple syrup, and sugar on the counter. \"I didn't know about Priscilla till I got here. Now that two girls\u2014\" Her gaze circled the room as if making certain they were still alone.\n\nMary-Lou's and Tully's voices drifted in from the dining room. Outside, the omnibus boy paced back and forth. At the first sound of the approaching train he would strike the dish-shaped brass gong with a fabric-covered ball attached to the end of a wooden stick, thus signaling its imminent arrival to the staff.\n\n\"I'm not sure I want to stay,\" Abigail finished at last.\n\nAbigail was older than the others, probably in her mid to late twenties. No white line appeared on her left hand, but her habit of rubbing the fourth digit with her thumb and forefinger indicated the recent removal of a wedding band.\n\nThe way she visually tensed with the arrival of each train implied she was running from someone or something. An abusive husband, perhaps? Either that or she was wanted by the law.\n\n\"Do you fear for your life?\" Katie asked.\n\nAbigail pursed her lips as if trying to decide how to answer. \"Don't you?\"\n\n\"Not really. Can't think of anyone who might want to see me dead except Chef Gassy.\"\n\nThe tension on Abigail's face morphed into a smile. \"Don't let him hear you call him that.\"\n\nKatie let the comfortable silence linger a moment before asking, \"Did you know Ginger had a beau?\"\n\nAbigail nodded. \"His name was Charley something. Seemed like a nice fellow.\"\n\n\"You don't suppose that he\u2014?\" A fork stilled in Abigail's hand. \"Charley? Oh no. He loved her.\"\n\nLots of men claimed to have loved the woman they killed. Thomas Horton, a man recently caught by Pinkerton detectives out of the Chicago office, was now serving a life sentence for killing not one, but two women he professed to love.\n\nKatie examined her nails in an effort not to seem overly interested. Harvey rules required daily manicures, and she was already three days behind.\n\n\"Any ideas who might have wanted to see her dead?\" Katie asked as if calmly inquiring about the weather.\n\n\"No, but\u2014\" Again Abigail glanced at the windows. \"The day she died she acted rather... strange.\"\n\n\"In what way, strange?\"\n\n\"She asked me to change stations with her. She seemed really upset.\"\n\nKatie frowned. \"Why would she do that? Change stations, I mean.\"\n\n\"I don't know. I thought at first that she and Charley had broken up. He usually sat at her table.\"\n\n\"Had they broken up?\"\n\n\"Not that I know of. I mean... he took her death really hard.\"\n\nKatie thought for a moment. \"Do you remember who was at her station that day?\"\n\n\"Not really. Most were travelers just passing through town.\"\n\nKatie hesitated. She was pushing her luck with so many questions, but so seldom did anyone talk openly about the victims she couldn't resist asking one more. \"I know Mary-Lou roomed with Ginger, but who did Priscilla room with?\"\n\n\"She roomed with Ginger, too. That is until\u2014\"\n\nTwo victims rooming together didn't necessarily mean much. No more than a half dozen or so girls worked at the restaurant at any one time, and that limited room combinations. Still, details that didn't seem important at first often turned out to be significant in the scheme of things.\n\nSensing that Abigail needed a friend, Katie chose her next words with care. \"When I asked if you feared for your life, I was really asking about your husband.\"\n\nAbigail froze, and the color drained from her face. \"What\u2014?\" She glanced around quickly and moved to Katie's side. \"What do you know about him? Has he asked about me?\"\n\n\"Whoa,\" Katie said. \"I never met the man.\"\n\nAbigail studied her as if trying to decide if she spoke the truth. She then slid her hand in the folds of her apron and moistened her lips. \"Please don't say anything. Married women aren't supposed to work here.\"\n\n\"I won't say a word,\" Katie promised. \"And I'll help in any way I can.\"\n\nAbigail shook her head. \"I... I don't need any help.\"\n\nKatie had hoped to make a friend of her but felt something like a door closing in her face. \"If you ever want to talk\u2014\"\n\nAbigail's lips quivered with unspoken words, but before she said anything the omnibus boy sounded the gong. The morning madness was about to begin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "That night Katie stood in the shadows outside the restaurant and stifled a yawn. Shaking the weariness away, she pulled the shawl around her shoulders against the cool night air and forced her droopy eyelids to stay open.\n\nIf Charley planned on making his nightly vigil, he better come soon before she fell asleep on her feet. Tired as an old gold miner, she could hardly manage to stay awake, let alone remain alert.\n\nWho would have guessed that restaurant work was such hard physical labor? Her feet hurt. Her back ached, and her eyes felt like two balls of lead.\n\nFortunately, she didn't have to wait long before spotting a shadowy figure making his way toward her.\n\nShe stayed hidden until the man took his usual place by the lamppost. She then stepped quietly out of the alley. He pulled his gaze away from the second-floor window as she approached.\n\nSun-bleached hair brushed against his collar. His deeply tanned skin was a testament to the hours spent working on the railroad. From a distance he looked older, more mature. Up close she could see he was only in his early twenties.\n\n\"Excuse me for intruding,\" she said, for the pain of grief was evident on his face as he gazed at the second-story window. \"Are you Charley?\" Working on the tracks had turned his muscles hard as stone, and the sleeves of his shirt bulged as if stuffed with paper.\n\n\"That's me,\" he said. \"Who are you?\"\n\n\"My name is Miss Katie Madison. I'm a new hire. I've noticed you standing here at night, and the other girls told me you were Ginger's friend.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"We planned to marry.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry for your loss,\" she said and hesitated. People in grief generally jumped at the chance to talk about a loved one. She hoped the same was true for Charley, but she had to tread lightly so as not to make him suspicious. \"The girls really miss her. Especially Mary-Lou.\"\n\nHis mustache quivered. \"They roomed together.\"\n\n\"Mary-Lou said everyone loved her.\" When he made no response, she added, \"She couldn't imagine anyone wanting to hurt Ginger.\"\n\nHis intake of breath told her she'd hit a nerve. \"It was all my fault,\" he said, his voice thick as mud.\n\nMomentarily surprised by the unexpected admission, she paused a moment before asking the next question. \"Why do you say that?\"\n\nHe glanced around as if to make certain they were alone. \"We were supposed to meet that night after the lights went out. Right here in our usual spot...\" He talked in a low, hesitant voice as if each word were hatched from a hard-shell egg.\n\n\"I was on a winning streak at faro. Time got away from me, and I showed up late. She wasn't here, so I figured she got tired of waiting and went inside. I hung around for a half hour or so in case she looked out the window. When she didn't, I left. I didn't know she was dead until the next day.\"\n\n\"I heard they found her in the alley,\" she said gently.\n\nAn anguished sob escaped him. \"To think I stood in this very spot while she lay\u2014\" He blew out his breath. \"Had I been here on time, Ginger might still be alive.\"\n\nShe patted him on the arm. \"You don't know that.\"\n\n\"I know!\" He thumped his chest with his fist. Startled by his sudden movement, she jumped back. In a quieter voice he added, \"I know.\"\n\nHe looked so anguished she felt sorry for him. \"You mustn't blame yourself.\" She glanced up at the bright moonlit sky and thought about her own losses. Her own guilt. She'd left the family business to become a detective, leaving her father to run his tailor shop alone.\n\nWhile she was away, he'd gone on a bender one snowy night and was thrown from his horse. Without anyone to help him, he died from exposure. Her sisters blamed her. She could still hear her oldest sister Belle's cruel words.\n\n\"It was your job to stay home and care for our father. But no, like a fool you insist upon running all over the country playing detective. No wonder Nathan chose me over you.\"\n\nMaybe Belle was right. Maybe she had shirked her responsibilities. Had she been home, she would have known her father was missing and gone searching for him.\n\nCharley's shoulders rose and fell in a shudder, bringing her back to the present.\n\n\"God wouldn't want you to blame yourself,\" she said as much for him as for herself.\n\n\"God? Why would He care? He didn't even care to help her.\"\n\n\"He cares,\" she whispered. \"He cares.\"\n\nHe looked about to argue but instead lifted his gaze to the dark window above.\n\nShe studied his profile. His grief seemed real, but that alone didn't exonerate him. It wasn't unusual for killers to show remorse for a crime.\n\n\"You said you waited here for a half hour the night Ginger died. Did you see or hear anything in all that time?\"\n\nIf her question struck him as more than just idle curiosity he didn't show it. He just kept staring up at that window. \"No, nothing.\"\n\nIn the silence that followed she considered how to pose the next question and finally just came out with it. \"Was there anything unusual about the crime scene? Something the sheriff might have overlooked?\" This took her into murky waters; the average person wouldn't ask such an indelicate question.\n\nIf he thought her question inappropriate he gave no clue. Instead he said, \"Other than the missing shoe, no.\"\n\n\"She was missing a shoe?\" Mr. Harvey had provided the Pinkerton agency with a report, but there was nothing in it about a missing shoe.\n\n\"Yeah. Found it myself. On the corner of Main and Sunflower. Lying in the mud. Recognized it soon as I saw it.\"\n\nShe glanced back at the alley. That was at least three blocks away from where her body was found. How did a woman lose a shoe? Two possibilities came to mind. One, she was killed elsewhere and dragged to the alley; two, she was running from someone or something.\n\n\"Do you know where she was killed?\"\n\n\"The sheriff said she was killed right there.\" He pointed to the side of the building. His answer corresponded to the Pinkerton report.\n\nShe glanced up at the open window of the bedroom she shared with Mary-Lou. The night Ginger died the temperature had been in the forties. Sounds are louder after dark, and would have been especially loud on a cold night.\n\n\"And no one heard her cry for help?\" she asked. Her roommate was a deep sleeper, but what about the others? Why had no one heard her scream?\n\n\"Far as I know, no one heard a thing.\"\n\n\"How do you suppose her shoe ended up somewhere else?\"\n\n\"The only thing I can figure is that she came looking for me at the Silver Spur Saloon. She knew that's where I play faro.\"\n\nIt made sense. Ginger might have gotten tired of waiting for Charley and decided to meet him in town. But something must have happened, something that made her run back to the Harvey House so fast as to lose a shoe.\n\nHe blinked and turned his gaze on her. \"Why are you so interested in this?\"\n\n\"It's just... I've heard so many nice things about her, I feel like I know her.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"You would have liked her,\" he said. He pulled his watch out of his pocket and held it to the light. \"It's late. I better go.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Nice meeting you.\"\n\n\"Nice meeting you, too.\" With that he shoved his watch into his pocket and walked away. She watched him cross the street and sighed. Guilt was a heavy load to bear.\n\nDid he kill his fianc\u00e9e? Her instincts told her no, but she wasn't ready to completely absolve him. At least not before checking out his story.\n\nShe was still contemplating the conversation when a male voice broke the silence. \"Are you out of your mind?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nJumping as if she'd been shot, Katie whirled about just as the sheriff stepped out from the shadows with Midnight behind him. The swish of her skirt matched the rush of blood to her face.\n\nHand on her chest, she gasped. \"You startled me.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well you're lucky that's all I did.\" He tethered his horse and turned to face her. \"I should have thrown you in jail when I had the chance. Looks like that's about the only way you're gonna stay out of trouble.\"\n\nShe glared at him. \"You have no right\u2014\"\n\n\"I have every right. If you insist upon meeting strange men in the dead of night, I not only have a right, I have an obligation. I sure don't aim to have another dead body on my watch.\"\n\nSeething, she knotted her hands. \"I don't need your protection. I'm quite capable of taking care of myself. I've been trained\u2014\"\n\n\"If this is how Pinkerton trains its employees, then its methods are worse than I thought.\"\n\n\"I don't have to listen to this.\" She spun around.\n\n\"So what's the verdict? Is Charley Reynolds guilty or not?\"\n\nThe question stopped her in her tracks, and she turned back to face him. If he thought he could mine her for information, he better think again. \"Why should I tell you?\" Even the shadows of night couldn't hide his disapproving frown. Nor could it hide his handsome square face or the challenge in his eyes.\n\n\"Ah, so you don't know.\" He practically crowed as he said it.\n\n\"He's not guilty,\" she snapped, not willing to be found remiss in his eyes.\n\nHe lifted an eyebrow and pushed his hat back a notch with the tip of his finger. \"And you decided this how?\"\n\n\"With deductive reasoning.\" Oddly, her earlier fatigue had lifted, and she suddenly felt wide awake. \"How did you decide his innocence?\"\n\nHe stiffened as if surprised by the question. \"What makes you think I did?\"\n\nShe managed to keep a triumphant smile from touching her lips. \"For one, he's not in jail.\"\n\n\"And for good reason,\" he said. \"He has an ironclad alibi.\"\n\n\"Such alibis are so rare I seldom take them seriously\u2014unless the alibi is death and there's a gravestone to prove it.\"\n\n\"You don't need a gravestone for this one.\"\n\nShe studied him. \"Would you care to elaborate?\"\n\n\"Not really, but since you insist. Witnesses say that Charley didn't leave the Silver Spur until almost eleven. Ginger's watch stopped at 10:26. That tells me the time of death was at least a half hour before Charley left.\"\n\n\"Witnesses aren't always reliable,\" she said. There were many reasons for this, poor eyesight and nervous tension being the top two. Most people, however, simply didn't pay close enough attention to what went on around them.\n\n\"Normally, I would agree with you, but not this time,\" he said.\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"I happened to be one of the witnesses. I saw Charley leave at eleven.\"\n\nShe arched her eyebrows. \"And there's no chance you might be mistaken?\"\n\n\"Mistaken? Me?\" he asked. \"Never.\"\n\nThe indignant look on his face made her laugh, and a suspicious softening of his mouth told her that somewhere in that thick head of his a sense of humor could be found. If she was willing to look for it, which she wasn't.\n\nShe mentally ticked off Charley's name from the list of suspects. \"Does this mean you're going to work with me?\"\n\n\"Oh, I'll work with you all right, ma'am.\" The tension eased from his stiff frame but not from his face. \"But not by choice.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"I'm trying to save your pretty neck.\"\n\nFor some reason the word pretty quickened her pulse, though she doubted he meant it in the conventional sense. \"Like I said, I don't need your protection.\"\n\n\"A killer is on the loose and here you are meeting strangers in the middle of the night.\"\n\n\"I thought we established that Charley was innocent.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you didn't know that when you met him.\"\n\nResentment welled up inside, and she fought to keep her temper. As a female detective she was used to others doubting her abilities, but somehow she resented it more coming from him.\n\n\"I don't need your protection,\" she snapped. With that she started for the alley. She could outride, outshoot, and outsmart most if not all of her male colleagues. She didn't need the sheriff watching out for her.\n\nHe grabbed her by the arm and swung her around. He was so close his warm breath fanned her face\u2014so close she feared he could hear the wild beating of her heart...\n\n\"Maybe you do and maybe you don't.\" Voice low in her ear, he pulled her a tad closer. \"Right now I'm of no mind to find out. So whether you like it or not, I'm watching out for you.\"\n\nHis gaze dropped to her lips before releasing her. No doubt he meant to intimidate her, but she had no intention of letting him.\n\nShe glared up at him. \"Don't do me any favors,\" she snapped. Turning, she walked away as quickly as her legs could carry her.\n\n\"Wouldn't think of it,\" he called, his voice bouncing off the brick walls.\n\nJust as she reached the end of the alley she spotted a movement in the shadows and gasped. Something... She opened her mouth to call to the sheriff, but a soft mew made her hold her tongue. Hand on her chest, she watched the cat streak away.\n\nShe snapped her mouth shut. Appalled that her first thought in the face of possible danger had been to summon the sheriff's help, she gave herself a mental kick and hurried away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Branch watched her move alongside the building, the moon turning her hair into bright orange flames. For some reason he even sensed her glancing back at him before vanishing around the corner, though he couldn't see her face.\n\nA female detective. He shook his head. Still hard to believe. What would be next? A female sheriff? What would possess a woman to take on such a difficult and thankless job?\n\nNow that he knew her true identity she seemed even smaller in stature. Even more vulnerable. Crime solving was a tough business even for a man. He'd been shot at more times than he cared to remember and once took a bullet to the shoulder.\n\nThe fool woman had no idea what she'd gotten herself into. He'd seen the bodies. The two victims never even had a chance to defend themselves.\n\nMiss Madison packed a small pocket gun, which, in his opinion, was just this side of a suicide special. It was suicide to depend on one, and suicide was about all they were good for.\n\nFind the killer. That's what he had to do. He also better keep his eye on the intriguing lady detective. A very close eye." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "The following morning, Katie slipped the silk hairnet over the twisted knot in back. The room she shared with Mary-Lou was located directly over the kitchen, which was why Chef Gassy's shrill voice could be heard coming through the open window.\n\nHardly a day went by when he didn't have a conniption about one thing or another.\n\nMary-Lou worked a black lisle stocking up her leg and attached it to her garter. \"Wonder what got him riled up this time.\"\n\nKatie glanced out the window just in time to see the iceman racing to his horse and wagon. The poor man practically flew into the driver's seat. He took off lickety-split, his wagon swaying from side to side as it swung around the corner and raced up Main.\n\nThings quieted down with the iceman's departure only to start up again as Katie and Mary-Lou reached the ground floor. As far as Katie could make out from the thick-accented rants, someone had either trampled on his pies or crumbled his ties. Hard to tell which.\n\nJust as Katie entered the kitchen a gray-striped cat shot past her. She recognized it as the same cat that had startled her the night before.\n\nFor some reason her presence only fueled the chef's anger. \"Look, look,\" he yelled, pointing to the row of pies on the cooling shelf. The rest he said in French, but Katie didn't need an interpreter to know that the whipped cream paw prints were the source of his fury.\n\n\"I ask you,\" he said, switching back to English. \"I ask you. How did cat get in? Doors locked. Windows locked. Still cat get in. Spook Cat!\"\n\nThe mystery of Spook Cat still hadn't been resolved by that afternoon. After a thorough search, Katie finally found the cat hiding in back of the cleaning supply closet.\n\nDropping down on her haunches, Katie held out her hand and talked softly. \"Well hello, there, Spook Cat. I wish you could tell me how you got inside.\"\n\nShe hadn't let the cat in, that was for sure. That meant someone had either entered or left the house after her. The question was who and why?\n\nGazing at her with amber eyes, the cat flipped its tail.\n\n\"If only you could talk.\"\n\nHer voice seemed to have a calming effect on him. At least he inched forward enough to allow her to stroke him on the head. But it took considerably longer before Spook Cat allowed her to pick him up and carry him outside.\n\nThe moment she set him down he sauntered away and disappeared around the side of the house, taking the answers to her questions with him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nKatie's favorite part of the day was the early-morning hour when the locals came for breakfast. The rail workers were the first to arrive, along with the local cattlemen. While everyone else paid seventy-five cents for meals, train personnel only had to pay a quarter. This didn't sit well with the cattlemen, and the two sides seldom socialized.\n\nMost of the trainmen were in their twenties and early thirties. They were a rowdy bunch who openly flirted with the Harvey girls and joked with the restaurant manager.\n\nGinger's beau, Charley, was never among the group, though Katie always looked for him.\n\n\"Why can't a locomotive sit down?\" one of the men yelled out.\n\n\"I give up,\" Pickens said with better humor than he ever showed his staff.\n\n\"Because he has a tender behind!\" This brought gales of laughter from his companions.\n\nTully rolled her eyes. \"If I hear that joke one more time I'll scream.\" She picked up a tray and walked toward the merry group with a full Harvey girl smile.\n\nNo sooner did the railroad workers and cattlemen leave than the local businessmen arrived. This was a more somber group who preferred reading newspapers to telling jokes.\n\nKatie was quick to learn their names and had sent descriptions to headquarters. So far none had a known criminal record. James Wilcox ran the local hardware store and Harry Foxx owned the hotel. Both were family men with churchgoing wives and a bunch of children.\n\nThe postmaster, Carl Swenson, was a widower. Newlywed Evan Hopkins owned the bookstore.\n\nHer favorite diner was the man known as Okie-Sam who always sat at the counter next to the cigar case. He, too, had red hair, though nowhere near as brash as hers. Teasing her about being a long lost relative separated at birth, he called her sis.\n\nHis friendly manner didn't get him off the hook. She still sent his description to headquarters, and according to the telegram back, no one matching his description had a criminal record. Of course, that didn't clear him completely. The Pinkerton criminal files were impressive but far from complete. At least they gave her a place to start.\n\nToday Okie-Sam slid onto the stool and greeted her with a nod. \"How's my favorite sis?\"\n\n\"If you don't stop calling me that, I'll have to start calling you brother.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Brother, huh? People will think I'm a monk or something.\"\n\n\"Not with your hair,\" she said. If the brassy red color wasn't bad enough, he made it even more noticeable by wearing it long and pulled back into a ponytail. His bushy red mustache and beard didn't help, either.\n\nShe slid a cup of coffee on the counter in front of him and tossed a nod at his newly bandaged hand. \"What happened to you?\"\n\nHe discounted her concern with a shrug. \"Cut it on some glass. The doc had to sew me up.\"\n\n\"That's too bad.\" She glanced at the clock. The train was due to arrive in a few minutes, which meant she had less time to devote to locals. \"Don't you have to work or something?\"\n\n\"Not me,\" he said. \"I'm what you might call independently wealthy, thanks to my royal family.\"\n\nShe eyed him with curiosity. His cheap trousers, stained shirt, unkempt hair, and shabby boots pegged him at the low end of the economic scale\u2014the very low end. \"You have royal blood?\"\n\n\"You could say that. My father is the king of spades and my mother the queen of hearts.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"You had me going there for a while. So you're a gambler.\" Judging by the poor condition of his clothes, not a very good one.\n\n\"Yes, but I only bet on a sure thing.\" He tossed a coin on the counter and winked. \"Right now I'm betting on your fine cackleberries and bacon.\"\n\n\"I'll have the same,\" Sheriff Whitman said, slipping onto the stool next to Okie-Sam.\n\nThe unexpected appearance of the sheriff put her in a state of confusion, and it took her a moment to recall what Okie-Sam had ordered. Fortunately, a whiff of bacon reminded her.\n\nShe called the orders to the kitchen and reached for a clean cup and saucer. Bracing herself with a deep breath, she placed it on the counter in front of the sheriff.\n\nWhitman tossed a nod at Okie-Sam's right hand. \"What happened there?\"\n\nKatie answered for him. \"He cut it on some glass.\"\n\nThe sheriff shrugged. \"Guess that messes up your game.\"\n\nElbow on the counter, Okie-Sam held up his bandaged hand and regarded it with a rueful stare. \"For a while.\"\n\nKatie filled the empty cup. \"Anything ever mess up your game, Sheriff?\"\n\nWhitman stared straight at her. \"Not for long.\"\n\nHe'd promised to keep her identity as an undercover detective secret, and she had no reason to doubt him. If only he didn't look at her with such disapproval. So was it the woman he disapproved of? Or the detective?\n\n\"I didn't know you were a gambler, Sheriff,\" Okie-Sam said.\n\nWhitman's gaze held hers. \"Depends on the stakes.\"\n\nOkie-Sam's gaze swung from the sheriff to her and back again as if he sensed the tension between them.\n\n\"One thing you'll never see me gambling on and that's marriage.\" Okie-Sam paused for a moment and chuckled. \"Nope. Ain't never gonna happen. Too dangerous.\"\n\nThe sheriff dropped a sugar cube into his cup and stirred. \"I can think of a whole lot of things more dangerous. Can't you, Miss Madison?\"\n\n\"More dangerous than marriage?\" she asked with an innocent air. \"Nope. Can't think of a thing.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "That night Katie waited until Mary-Lou was asleep before tiptoeing out of the room.\n\nShe closed the door softly and stood in the hallway straining her ears. It was only a little after eleven, and the gaslights lining the walls hissed and sputtered. When no other sounds broke the silence she made her way down the stairs, careful to walk on the side where the boards were less likely to creak. She had carefully mapped out the hall and stairs for loose boards.\n\nA thin strip of light glowed beneath the kitchen door. Someone was still working. She opened the door to find the assistant cook, Howie Howard. He claimed the reduplicated name traced back to his Welsh roots and was not the result of parents lacking in imagination.\n\nTonight she found him chopping onions, tears rolling down his cheeks.\n\n\"You're working late,\" she said.\n\nHowie looked up as she entered and saluted her with a raised knife. \"Always work late on Thursdays. Got to get things ready for the weekend.\" He was a thin, hatchet-nosed man with droopy eyes, crooked teeth, and high forehead. Like the other kitchen staff, he had small pea-size marks on the back of his hands and arms from the spattering of hot oil. He also had calluses on his right hand on the base of his fingers.\n\nHe certainly knew how to wield a knife. Chop, chop, chop and just that quickly an onion was reduced to tiny pieces.\n\nWatching the flash of the blade, Katie couldn't help but think of the way the two Harvey girls met their demise. Luckily she'd thought to attach her gun holster to her leg. She thrust her hand in her false pocket ready to draw if necessary.\n\n\"What are you doing up at this hour?\" He scooted the chopped pieces to the side with the blade of his knife and reached for another onion.\n\n\"Couldn't sleep.\" She waited for him to finish chopping. \"How do you like working with Chef Gass\u00e9e?\" she asked, taking care to pronounce the name in a suitable French way.\n\nHowie shrugged. \"He's all right. It gets pretty hectic in here at times and tempers flare.\"\n\nHe apparently had no intention of bad-mouthing his boss, and that was okay with her. It wasn't the chef she wanted to talk about.\n\n\"One of the other girls told me that Ginger used to sneak out at night to meet her beau. Did you know anything about that?\"\n\n\"I knew.\" His knife stilled midair. \"Sometimes I lent her my key to get back in. Now I wish I hadn't.\"\n\n\"Oh? Why is that?\"\n\n\"She might still be alive had I not helped her leave the house.\" He pointed the tip of his knife at her. \"So don't go getting any ideas. No more giving out my key. Anyone wanting to leave the house after curfew won't get any help from me.\"\n\nSo Charley wasn't the only one feeling guilt over Ginger's death. \"Has anyone else asked for help in leaving the house?\"\n\nHe resumed chopping. \"Not recently. After what happened, even I don't like leaving the house after dark.\"\n\nShe bit her lower lip. No sense asking for his key. \"The alley cat got inside and into the pies. Do you know how that could have happened? Did you let him in?\"\n\n\"Not me.\" He paused with narrowed eyes. \"Everything was locked up good and tight when I left. So don't go blaming me, you hear?\"\n\n\"I wasn't,\" she said. Touchy, aren't we? Mary-Lou told her that Howie rented a room at the boardinghouse on Fifth. \"What time did you leave last night?\" she asked.\n\nShe hadn't seen him when she left the house, nor when she returned, but he could have been in the cellar.\n\nHe chopped for a moment before answering. \"I finished the prep work around... I don't know. Nine or ten, maybe.\"\n\nIf what he said was true, then he left the house before she did.\n\nHe lifted his knife off the chopping board. \"How come you're asking all these questions? Did the chef put you up to this?\"\n\n\"The chef?\" she asked and frowned.\n\n\"Did he ask you to spy for him?\"\n\n\"No, of course not,\" she said. \"I'm just... curious about the cat.\"\n\nHe grunted and began chopping again. Did he believe her? Hard to know. She wanted to ask more questions, but since that would only make him more suspicious she decided against it.\n\n\"Good night.\" She left the kitchen and headed back to her room. If what he said was true, then someone else had opened the door last night after she had returned to the house. Either that or the cat had let himself in, and somehow she doubted that." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nKatie woke the next morning to the sound of the howling wind. It growled and snorted and scratched at the windows like an angry cat demanding entrance.\n\nThe wind lasted for the next two torturous days, making it hard to leave the premises. Dust filled the nose, the eyes, and mouth until even the food tasted like grit. But no one complained more than the bookkeeper, Mr. Culpepper, whose watery eyes looked like two red marbles.\n\n\"Can't see a blasted thing,\" he growled as he sat by the front door collecting money from diners. \"Can't tell my mother from a jackrabbit.\"\n\nEach time someone entered or left the restaurant, sand crept over the floor like an army of tiny ants. The wind kept blowing, and the omnibus boy wielded his broom. His name was Ken Montgomery, but everyone called him Buzz because he darted around like a bee. Of all the workers, he was the hardest to interview, mainly because he was always on the move.\n\nIn his mid to late twenties, he was in charge of the heavy cleaning. He complained about the railroad workers and local cowboys messing up his floors with their dirty boots or leaving grimy fingerprints on the brass doorknobs.\n\n\"I think this is it,\" Okie-Sam added between mouthfuls. \"Kansas is finally about to blow away.\"\n\nThe wind kept Katie inside but not the locals. The citizens of Calico struck Katie as a hardy bunch. They took a sort of civil pride in saying that Calico's summers blazed the hottest, the winters the coldest, the locusts the hungriest, and the wind the most torturous. Living with the whims of nature made them hold on to life with one hand and God with the other.\n\nBy the second day of relentless wind, Katie's patience was spent. She decided to embrace a Kansan's tough skin and venture outside. She was anxious to check the corner where Ginger's shoe was found. Not that she expected to find anything at this late date, but no stone must be left unturned during an investigation.\n\nHead bent against the wind, she protected her face with an upraised arm. The hem of her skirt flapped against her ankles, and strands of flame-colored hair escaped from beneath her bonnet. The town windmill spun and squealed like a pig caught in a trap.\n\nReaching her destination, she glanced around, shielding her eyes from the wind the best she could. The Calico Bank commanded one corner and a general store the other. Across the street was a lawyer's office and land assayer.\n\nAt ten thirty at night, all businesses would be shuttered and most of the residents in upstairs apartments already asleep. That meant if Ginger was in trouble she had two choices: run toward Saloon Row or return to the Harvey House. The restaurant was closer, but not by much. Why not run to the closest saloon where people were awake and more likely to help?\n\nShe was still pondering this as a gust of wind slammed into her. It lifted her bonnet clear off her head and carried it away. It would have blown her off her feet had it not been for two strong arms that materialized seemingly out of nowhere.\n\nA male voice shouted in her ear, but the gushing wind muted the words. Blinded by dust, she had no idea who he was or what he had said.\n\nWith a sturdy arm around her waist, her rescuer guided her into the bank, protecting her from the wind with his tall, straight form. Inside, he released her.\n\n\"Whew.\" She blinked her eyes and pushed the stray hair away from her face. \"Thank you\u2014\" She looked up and caught her breath. \"Sheriff!\"\n\nHer watery eyes did nothing to mute his powerful presence, and her knees threatened to buckle.\n\nHe inclined his head. \"We meet again.\" He hung his thumbs from his belt. \"What are you doing out in this weather?\"\n\nBefore answering she glanced around, but the only person present was the teller behind a cage counting money.\n\nShe and the sheriff faced each other. Standing close, they were like two bookends holding up a single slim volume. Nevertheless she kept her voice low. \"Pinkertons never sleep, nor do they let a little thing like the wind stop them.\"\n\nFor a split second she imagined seeing what looked like admiration in the dark depths of his eyes.\n\n\"So the shoe bothers you, does it?\"\n\nShe tilted her head back in surprise. \"How do you know?\"\n\n\"It bothers me, too.\"\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"Any theories?\" she asked.\n\n\"None that make sense. You?\"\n\nShe hesitated. Was he really asking her opinion? \"Maybe Ginger saw someone or something that frightened her, and ran.\"\n\n\"Perhaps. Or maybe the killer dropped the shoe to get us off track.\"\n\n\"Possibly. Or accidently dropped the shoe he meant to keep.\" A serial killer in Chicago kept a trophy of each of his victims\u2014a piece of jewelry. An article of clothing. \"Were any of Priscilla's personal belongings missing?\"\n\n\"Not that anyone noticed.\"\n\nThey tossed theories back and forth, their low voices creating an intimate bond that all but cut them off from the rest of the world.\n\nBut not from the wind; outside it continued to howl. The building creaked and groaned like the bones of an old man. But while nature rampaged beyond the walls, inside hearts began to thaw.\n\nSurprisingly, she enjoyed his company. She had no idea how much she needed that, needed to talk without watching her every word. Working undercover was like being mentally and emotionally chained. Seldom did she have the luxury of talking openly about a case, except to her Pinkerton colleagues. One had to always be on guard. One misstep\u2014one misspoken word\u2014and her cover could be compromised.\n\nOddly enough, she sensed a loneliness in him that matched her own. She also shared his frustration at the stalled investigation.\n\n\"Two women are dead and I haven't got a clue how to find the killer,\" he admitted, and she sensed his difficulty in doing so.\n\nShe commiserated with a shake of her head. \"Whenever I hit a wall my bosses tell me to go back to the beginning and start over as if it were a new case.\"\n\n\"Does it work?\" he asked with none of his usual condescension.\n\n\"Hasn't so far.\" She laughed, and he did, too.\n\nShe didn't think about the time or the restaurant until a sound from outside caught her attention. Not the wind. Something else. She perked up her ears. Was that church bells? It couldn't be. Not already.\n\n\"What time is it?\" she asked.\n\nHe reached into his vest pocket for his watch. \"Noon.\"\n\nShe gasped. \"Oh no!\" Where had the time gone? \"The train\u2014\" She had less than a half hour to get ready for the lunch crowd. She whirled about and headed for the door.\n\n\"Wait,\" he called after her.\n\nBut she didn't wait; no time. The door practically ripped from her hand as she dashed outside, skirt swirling. The wind at her back, she ran all the way to the Harvey House on winged feet and a prayer. Please, please, please don't let Pickens catch me!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nBranch headed straight for the bank first thing that Monday morning. The bank president had been out of town, so Branch had yet to talk to him about Mrs. Bracegirdle's complaint.\n\nCrossing the street, he sidestepped a pile of horse manure. The wind had finally stopped except for an occasional gust, but the sky was still murky gray from dust. Clay shingles, broken signs, and other debris littered the ground.\n\nHe waved to shopkeepers sweeping doorsteps and businessmen surveying the damage to roofs. Mrs. Bracegirdle's son was boarding up his shop's broken window.\n\nMiss Katie Madison was very much on his mind. He could still envision her standing in the middle of the street in the wind. Fool woman. Stubborn as a sore tooth. Slight as she was in frame, she was lucky she hadn't been blown away. Still, the memory of her bravely fighting the wind brought an unbidden smile to his face.\n\nMuch as he hated to admit it, her capabilities as a detective were impressive. Not only had she captured a bank robber, she'd given the case much thought and her theories and observation skills were equal to his own, if not better.\n\nThe woman might look fragile, but she knew how to handle herself in a pinch.\n\nThat didn't make him feel any better about her safety. If anything, it worried him more as she was likely to take chances. Until the killer was behind bars, every woman in town was at risk, and that went double for the Harvey girls\u2014real and make-believe.\n\nPushing his thoughts aside, he ducked beneath the loose wooden sign that swung back and forth on a broken chain, and strode into the bank. With only a quick glance at the line in front of the teller cage, he walked to the president's office and rapped on the oak door.\n\nMiles McPherson rose from his desk as Branch entered his office. A portly man with face-hugging sideburns, he made a funny hissing sound when he breathed.\n\nAs they shook hands, McPherson indicated a chair with a nod of his head. \"Have a seat.\" He waited for Branch to sit before lowering his bulky body behind his desk again.\n\n\"Glad you stopped by. Gives me a chance to thank you for your speedy action in nabbing that bank robber. Heard all about it.\"\n\n\"I didn't do anything,\" Branch said. \"You should be thanking Miss Madison.\"\n\n\"Miss Madison? Oh, you mean the waitress?\"\n\n\"Harvey girl,\" Branch said. \"She's the one who stopped the man.\" Her pie-in-the-face method was unconventional, but it did the trick. \"I just happened to arrive in time to finish the job.\"\n\nThe bank president waved his protests away. \"You're far too modest.\" He opened a wooden box and picked out a cigar. \"I'd offer you one, but I know you don't smoke. What a shame. Harvey stocks only the best. All the way from Cuba.\" He lowered the lid of the box. \"So tell me about this latest robber.\"\n\n\"Not much to tell. All I can say is that he won't be causing you any more trouble.\"\n\nMcPherson shook his head. \"I'm telling you, these bank robbers are getting more brazen every year. Ever since we changed over to a tamper-proof vault, the thieves simply walk up to the tellers and demand money like it's their God-given right.\" He rolled his cigar in his finger and sniffed. \"I don't know what the world is coming to.\"\n\nBranch nodded. \"Crime fighting is like trying to stop a sinking ship. No sooner do you plug up one hole than another one springs up.\"\n\nMcPherson clipped off the end of his cigar. \"Any suspects in the killings?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Nasty business, that.\"\n\n\"Yes, it is.\"\n\nThe banker stuck the cigar in his mouth and lit it with a match, rotating the tip into the flame. \"So what brings you here today?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Bracegirdle.\"\n\nGrimacing, the banker shook the match until the flame went out. \"Not her again. What is it this time? Tommy knockers?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. She claims she hears noises coming from the bank at night. They keep her awake.\"\n\nMcPherson removed his cigar from his mouth and blew out a ring of gray smoke. \"There's no one here at night.\"\n\n\"No one working late?\"\n\n\"Nope. The bank's locked up tighter than a spinster's virtue.\"\n\n\"What about the upstairs apartment? Who lives up there now?\"\n\n\"Nobody. I rented it out to a young couple a few weeks ago. They changed their mind before they even got the furniture moved in. Claimed the place was haunted.\"\n\n\"Haunted, huh? Mind if I have a look?\"\n\n\"Don't mind at all, but you're wasting your time. You won't find anything there.\"\n\n\"Regardless, I'm obliged to check out all complaints.\"\n\nMcPherson opened a drawer and tossed a brass key across the desk. \"Return it when you're done.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "The only way to reach the upstairs apartment was from the outside stairwell. Branch took the stairs two at a time. He paused in front of Mrs. Bracegirdle's door before turning to the empty apartment next to hers and inserting the key in the lock.\n\nA stale, musty smell greeted him as he walked into the dwelling. Translucent cloth window shades were half-drawn, and sun filtered through the grimy windowpanes.\n\nThe place was empty except for a rumpled carpet on the parlor floor and a lantern on the kitchen counter next to a box of matches. He checked all the cabinets and drawers and found only mouse droppings and a thin layer of dust. The kitchen sink contained a single tin cup.\n\nA banging from the direction of the bedroom alerted him, and he spun around. He checked the room and again found nothing. He turned to leave, but a thud from the window stopped him in his tracks.\n\nHe moved across the room, unlocked the window, and threw open the sash. Sticking his head outside, he immediately spotted the problem. One of the shutters had worked loose. The wooden flap creaked and rattled and slapped the building with every gust of wind.\n\nHe leaned over the sill and drew the shutters in place, hooking the latch.\n\nSatisfied that at least one problem had been solved, he locked the apartment and tapped on Mrs. Bracegirdle's door to tell her the news." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "A bloodcurdling scream snapped Katie out of a sound sleep. Instantly alert, she grabbed her gun from under the pillow and jumped out of bed. Racing across the room on bare feet, she reached the door before Mary-Lou.\n\nThe dorm matron rushed out of her room at the end of the hall, her flimsy white nightgown trailing behind her like the wings of an enormous moth. \"Who screamed?\"\n\n\"I think it came from Tully's room,\" Katie called over her shoulder. The pantry girl, Cissy, opened her door and stuck out her head. Seeing Katie and the others advance toward her, she quickly pulled back and slammed the door shut. The girl was as skittish as a newborn colt.\n\nKatie burst through Tully's bedroom door without knocking. \"What's wrong? What happened?\"\n\nMiss Thatcher and Mary-Lou crowded in the doorway behind her.\n\nA match flared in the dark, and the lamp lit up. \"It's just Tully,\" Abigail said. She blew out the match. \"She had a bad dream.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to the bed against the far wall where Tully sat looking pale and disoriented.\n\nLacking a pocket, Katie hid her gun in the cotton folds of her nightgown.\n\n\"Is that all?\" Miss Thatcher said, looking both annoyed and relieved. \"You practically scared us to death. We thought\u2014\"\n\nKatie waited for her to finish. The dorm matron looked different tonight with her dark hair flowing down her back. Sleep had wiped away years of bitterness normally engraved on her face, leaving behind a glimpse of the young and carefree girl she once was.\n\nMiss Thatcher gave her head a good shake as if to remind herself of her duties. \"Go back to bed, all of you.\" With that she turned and stomped from the room.\n\nMary-Lou lowered herself onto the edge of Tully's mattress. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nTully blew her nose in a handkerchief. \"I think so.\"\n\nTonight, her dark hair fell to her shoulders making her look younger than her twenty-two years. She glanced in turn at each of them. \"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you all. It's just... I keep seeing Ginger. It's like she's trying to tell me something.\" Without her usual cynical countenance, Tully looked surprisingly vulnerable.\n\nKatie moved closer to the bed. \"Maybe we should talk about it.\" The women had been reluctant to say much about either Ginger or Priscilla except on general terms.\n\n\"I don't think we should,\" Abigail said, rubbing her naked ring finger. \"I mean\u2014\" She looked at each of them in turn. \"I'm afraid that talking might make things worse. Sometimes it's best not to think of sad things.\"\n\n\"I disagree,\" Katie said. \"I think talking helps.\"\n\n\"Maybe she's right,\" Mary-Lou said, though she sounded dubious.\n\nTully frowned. \"What's there to talk about? I had a bad dream. Haven't you ever had a nightmare?\"\n\nKatie nodded. \"Yes, and I found it really does help to talk.\" When no more protests were voiced, she continued. \"What do you most remember about the first girl who died?\" If she could just get them talking about Priscilla, she might learn something of value. Sometimes people knew more than they realized.\n\nTully was the first to speak. \"Priscilla played the piano.\" She spoke slowly as if each word was an effort. \"But she had to sell her piano to help pay her father's debts. She was saving her money to purchase another one. The night she was killed...\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Katie said gently.\n\nTully inhaled and cleared her throat. \"One of our customers was entertaining out-of-town guests and asked Priscilla to play for them. After curfew, I snuck downstairs and unlocked the dining room door so she could get in, but she never came home.\" Tully dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief. \"I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to tell anyone she was missing for fear of getting her in trouble.\"\n\nTully's voice faded away, and Mary-Lou continued in her soft Southern lilt. \"They found her body the next morning out front by the railroad tracks.\"\n\nKatie listened intently, but neither Tully nor Mary-Lou told her anything that wasn't already in the Pinkerton file.\n\nThe conversation had a sobering effect on the four of them and a long silence followed.\n\n\"We're never going to know who killed her,\" Tully said at last. \"Ginger, either.\"\n\n\"Yes, we will,\" Katie said with more confidence than she felt. The other three girls looked at her all funny-like, and she quickly added, \"The sheriff is doing everything he can.\"\n\nTully made a face. \"He hasn't done anything yet.\"\n\n\"And probably won't,\" Abigail added.\n\n\"Why do you say that?\" Katie asked. She and the sheriff didn't always see eye to eye, but he seemed to take his job seriously and she had no reason to doubt his intent.\n\nAbigail folded her arms across her middle and tossed her head. \"Years ago in St. Louis, a good-time gal was found strangled. And you know what? They never found who did it. Far as I could tell no one even bothered looking. No one cared what happened to the likes of her. A man can do anything he wants to a woman and no one gives a fig!\"\n\nWith a slight gasp she covered her mouth with her hand as if she'd given away too much. Katie felt sorry for her. Abigail had left an unhappy marriage, but the fear, and maybe even the guilt remained, and that was taking a toll.\n\nMary-Lou was the first to break the awkward silence that followed Abigail's outburst. \"This isn't the same,\" she said gently. \"We're not one of those... women.\"\n\n\"There're those in town who think we are,\" Abigail argued. \"You know yourself how we've been shunned from certain social activities. We even get strange looks in church.\" A note of bitterness crept into her voice.\n\nKatie glanced at her roommate. \"Is that true?\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it is,\" Mary-Lou said. \"But they're wrong. We're good girls. Mr. Harvey would never hire anyone who wasn't.\"\n\nTully threw up her hands. \"I just wish we had time to do all the things we're accused of doing.\"\n\nAbigail gave her a playful punch in the arm. \"No you don't.\"\n\nMary-Lou shrugged. \"My mother said that the only people who live on the second floor are soiled doves. If she knew that's where I lived, she'd turn over in her grave.\"\n\nAbigail laughed. \"Does that mean that old lady Bracegirdle is a prostitute?\"\n\n\"And what about Reverend Bushwell?\" Tully asked.\n\nThe four of them burst out laughing, and the tension left the room. They chatted more, a lot more. Mary-Lou talked about living in Georgia. Tully opened up about her bitter childhood.\n\n\"My mother couldn't take care of me, so she gave me away to a New York foundling home. I was only eight when I was shipped to Kansas City on an orphan train. They dressed us up with silly ruffles and bows and made us sing so we would look more appealing.\"\n\nMary-Lou frowned. \"Oh, Tully, that's awful. Were you adopted?\"\n\n\"Yes, but the woman didn't like my New York accent.\" She shrugged in her usual sardonic way. \"So she whipped me and made me sleep in the barn with the animals.\"\n\nAbigail's eyes widened in horror. \"Didn't you tell anyone?\"\n\n\"What? And get whipped again?\" Tully laughed, but this time her laughter rang hollow.\n\nKatie leaned across the bed and squeezed her hand. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nA look of surprise crossed Tully's face but only for the instant it took for the usual devil-may-care mask to fall in place. But Katie had seen the hurt, and she knew.\n\nTully withdrew her hand. \"Now it's your turn.\"\n\nKatie frowned. \"What?\"\n\n\"You know all about us, but we know nothing about you,\" Tully said. \"What's your story?\"\n\nKatie had a story all right\u2014a simple one about growing up on a Wisconsin cheese farm. Not one word of it was true, of course, but part of a carefully designed disguise.\n\nWhile the others were open and honest with her, she couldn't return the favor. She hated lying, but the truth could jeopardize her investigation and maybe even put her life in danger. It was a reality she'd more or less learned to live with through the years, though not without guilt.\n\nStill, she couldn't bring herself to lie to Tully and the others. Not tonight. Not after Tully had bared heart and soul to the small group.\n\n\"Another time.\" Yawning, Katie stood and stretched. \"Right now we need to go back to bed. Morning will be here before we know it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nDuring her afternoon break, Katie left the restaurant and walked the three blocks to the office of the Calico Gazette. Though the wind had stopped two days prior, a slight breeze kept dust in the air, and the sun looked like a big copper button that had popped off someone's coat.\n\nThe editor looked up from his desk and gazed at her from beneath his green celluloid visor. He was a short man with a stubby mustache and ink-stained hands. A small sign on his desk read MR. CLOVIS READ.\n\nKatie introduced herself as the new Harvey House employee. \"Would it be all right if I go through the back issues of the paper?\" she asked. Most big-city newspapers kept back issues on hand, and she hoped the same was true for this town.\n\n\"It's about time someone did,\" he said, rising. \"Been keeping files for years, and you're the first to ask to see them. Any special month or year?\"\n\n\"Not really.\" She didn't want to reveal her real interest in looking through old newspapers. \"Since I'm new, I thought it would be a good way to get to know the town better.\"\n\n\"You came to the right place. Won't find better information anywhere than what you'll find here. That's because I won't print anything that's not accurate.\" Barely taking a breath, he continued.\n\n\"Got one of those fancy writing machines for the office, and you know what happened? Made my reporters too wordy. Would you believe that one reporter turned in five column inches just to describe a dogfight? Now I ask you\u2014who wants to muddle through a block that size to read such nonsense? The entire story of the creation can fit on a single front page. Anything short of that needs only two or three inches. Four, at the most.\"\n\nThe man kept up a constant stream of chatter as he led her to the back room. How such a talkative man could confine his written narrative to mere inches was a puzzle.\n\nHe waved his hand at the oak file cabinet. \"These are all the newspapers for the last five years. If you want to go back any further, you can look in the second drawer there. That includes papers that go all the way back to the great tornado of '72.\" He gave his head a rueful shake. \"That one took eleven column inches to report, but that was before my time.\"\n\n\"I heard something about that,\" she said. \"It must have been awful.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was. It's almost the eight-year anniversary, and I'm planning a special commemorative issue. It's part of the town's history.\" He pulled out the top drawer of a wooden cabinet. \"You probably should skip the articles about the Harvey girl killings. No sense getting yourself all worked up.\"\n\nResisting the urge to inquire as to how many inches Ginger and Priscilla had commanded, she asked, \"Do you think they'll ever solve the murders?\"\n\n\"Beats me.\" He shook his head. \"But I'll tell you somethin'. Putting a bunch of pretty girls under the same roof is just askin' for trouble.\"\n\n\"I imagine a man of your intelligence would have an idea or two as to who the killer might be,\" she said. Flattery\u2014deserved or otherwise\u2014was often a detective's best tool for encouraging confidential information.\n\n\"If you ask me, it's that French chef.\"\n\n\"Gassy? Uh... I mean Gass\u00e9e?\"\n\n\"That's the one. I heard him yelling at that girl Ginger the day before she died.\"\n\n\"The chef yells at everyone.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but not everyone is found dead the next day.\"\n\nHe had a point there. She glanced at the cabinet, and taking the hint, he backed away.\n\n\"If you need me, I'll be at my desk,\" he said.\n\n\"Thank you.\" After he left, she began flipping through newspapers, stopping now and again to read a headline or peruse an article.\n\nThe editor was right about one thing: the Calico Gazette wasn't much for verbiage. The death of both Harvey girls totaled no more than five column inches. The information was accurate but offered nothing in the way of new information.\n\nAnother dead end." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "As much as she wanted to solve the case, Katie wasn't anxious to end her stay at the Harvey House. A hotel was the closest she'd ever been to living under the same roof as a suspect, but it wasn't just the convenience that such an arrangement offered. Not since her sisters married and left home had she lived in such close proximity with other women.\n\nSince the Harvey girls shared so many of the same day-to-day experiences, she couldn't help but get involved in their lives. Whispering with Abigail, Mary-Lou, and even Tully behind Pickens's and even Miss Thatcher's backs was a temptation too delicious to pass up.\n\n\"Did you see that woman sneak the food left over at her table into her bag?\"\n\n\"And what about that cute peddler who couldn't take his eyes off Mary-Lou?\"\n\nThough she engaged in girlish chatter, she remained constantly on guard, and this took an emotional toll on her.\n\nSometimes she lay awake at night and wondered how it was possible to be surrounded by so many people and feel so completely and utterly lonely.\n\nToday, as the four of them stood ironing aprons, Tully told them about a man who popped the question. She made a face. \"Can you imagine me marrying a traveling salesman?\"\n\nKatie listened but didn't say a word. Tully garnered proposals like a gunfighter collected notches.\n\n\"You know what they say about us Harvey girls,\" Tully said, exchanging a cool iron for a hot one. \"Marriage proposals for the pretty ones take but a day. The less attractive ones have to wait three days.\" She looked straight at Katie. \"How many marriage proposals have you received?\"\n\n\"Me?\" Katie felt her face grow warm. She shook her head. \"None.\"\n\nMary-Lou as usual jumped to her defense. \"Give it time. She's new.\"\n\nAbigail lifted an apron off the ironing board and hung it on a wooden peg. Whenever talk turned to marriage, she normally remained silent or left the room. Such talk seemed to bring back unwanted memories of the life she had escaped.\n\nBut today she surprised Katie by saying, \"I think she's already spoken for.\"\n\n\"I am?\" Katie tightened her grip on the wooden handle of the sadiron. \"I don't know what you mean.\"\n\nAbigail lowered her voice. \"I'm talking about the sheriff, of course. I saw the way he looked at you this morning at breakfast.\"\n\n\"I didn't notice.\" Katie had been so busy juggling orders she'd hardly had time to give the sheriff more than a cursory glance. She lowered the iron to the bib of the apron, hoping for a change of topic.\n\nMuch to her dismay, Mary-Lou persisted. \"Maybe you should. He's nice to look at and always treats us with respect.\"\n\nKatie managed to pretend disinterest, but the apron she was ironing sure did take a beating. If it wasn't already flat it would have been. \"I guess he's okay.\"\n\nMary-Lou laughed. \"But only if you like handsome, tall men with dark dreamy eyes\u2014right?\"\n\nKatie's mind was still on the handsome part when suddenly Abigail cried out, \"Your apron!\"\n\n\"What?\" Katie lifted the iron and stared in horror at the brown scorch mark on the starched white bib. There was no help for the apron. Nor for her blazing cheeks." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "By the start of the third week, Katie had the restaurant routine down pat. The cup code? Now that was a different story. So was taking orders. Whose bright idea was it to make Harvey girls work without benefit of pen and paper?\n\nShe had better luck remembering the names of the locals. Some of her favorites included Bert the blacksmith, a large dark-skinned man with a robust smile and a ready joke. Reverend Bushwell had breakfast every day except Sundays and always spread good cheer along with a Bible quote or two.\n\nShe also knew all the cowboys by name. The names all corresponded with physical features, so memorizing them was a cinch. Tall Texas Joe and Big Foot Pete were her favorites and always good for a laugh. But as a whole the cattlemen were more closemouthed than the AT&SF trainmen, which probably meant they had more to hide.\n\nNot only were rail workers more verbal, they dealt out marriage proposals like faro dealers dealt out cards. Katie was taken aback the first time one proposed to her. She soon learned it was done in jest. In no time at all she found herself promised to a dozen or more men. For once she felt like the belle of the ball rather than a wallflower.\n\nThe unaccustomed attention amused her to no end. Her sisters should see her now. They wouldn't recognize their dull, redheaded, freckle-faced sister.\n\nLong-Shot was another favorite local. He'd run for every possible office in the county, including sheriff, and lost. Whenever he walked into the restaurant someone would invariably call out, \"Hey, Long-Shot. What are you running for next?\"\n\nLong-Shot never seemed to take offense. Instead, he'd throw out an answer such as dogcatcher or grave digger, and the place would explode with laughter.\n\nKatie envied his ability to laugh at himself. That was something she had never been able to do, but she was learning. Oh, yes, indeed she was. When the railroad workers teased her about her hair and freckles she gave back as good as she got.\n\nThey called her Red and Carrot-Top, and her freckles earned her the name Sprinkles. In return she called the workers such names as Ironman, Rails, and Groundhog.\n\nHer banter never failed to bring a roar of laughter from the men and an approving nod from Long-Shot. \"That's the way to do it,\" he'd always say. \"Don't let them get to you!\"\n\nNot only was she having fun, but joking around with the men gave her ample opportunity to interrogate them.\n\n\"Hey, Ironman, did you know Ginger?\"\n\nIronman was burly with a squinty face. The anchor tattooed on his arm and his sea leg swagger marked him as a former sailor. \"Charley's girl? Yeah, I knew her.\" He shook his head. \"Terrible thing.\"\n\n\"Charley said he was playing faro when she died,\" she said. \"He feels guilty.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well he should feel guilty. He cleared us all out that night. Left me with nothing more than a plugged nickel.\"\n\nLittle by little she learned the whereabouts of most of the regulars on the night Ginger died. Those with no alibi remained on her suspect list and their descriptions sent to Pinkerton headquarters.\n\nHer duties didn't allow for much free time. In between meals, the girls were expected to keep busy. That meant polishing silverware, a chore no one liked. It seemed like everything was silver: vases, coffee urns, pitchers, and cutlery.\n\n\"If you come to my wedding,\" Tully announced during a silver-cleaning ordeal, \"don't anyone give me silver.\"\n\nKatie didn't mind the cleaning and polishing as much as the others, for it gave her a chance to listen, observe, and think.\n\nSetting the tables was her big bugaboo. You couldn't just set a plate any old way. Oh, no. Each plate had to be placed an equal distance from the table's edge. The water glasses had to be a certain length away from the knives, and the starched napkins folded just so.\n\nCurrently, the restaurant employed only the four Harvey girls, including Katie, and was understaffed by half as four girls had quit after Ginger's death. At least three more women were due to arrive at the end of the month after completing a thirty-day training course. Katie avoided the monthlong training by using falsified references stating she was an experienced waitress.\n\nAside from the manager, bookkeeper, and omnibus boy, Chef Gassy had three cooks and a baker working under him. Two of the cooks were Mexican and could speak no English. Between the chef and his fractured English and the Spanish-speaking cooks, it was a wonder that the kitchen ran as smoothly as it did.\n\nThe ebony-skinned pantry girl attracted Katie's curiosity. Cissy never spoke, ate by herself, and quietly retired to her room at day's end. Katie's every attempt to be friendly had been rebuffed.\n\nThe only ones who lived on the premises were the Harvey girls, Cissy, and Miss Thatcher. Even local girls were required to stay in the dormitory. The other employees roomed at the nearby boardinghouse or in town.\n\nPretending she was looking for salt, Katie was finally able to corner Cissy in the kitchen making salad. She guessed the girl was in her early twenties. She wore her hair parted in the middle and pulled back like the Harvey girls, but her frizzy locks defied any effort on her part to be smoothed into a neat and tidy bun.\n\n\"How long have you worked here, Cissy?\" she asked.\n\nDeerlike eyes regarded her with suspicion. \"Six months.\"\n\n\"So you knew Priscilla and Ginger.\"\n\n\"Kind of.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, kind of?\"\n\n\"I never talked to them, and they never talked to me.\" With an air of dismissal she continued tearing lettuce leaves apart and tossing them into a bowl.\n\nRefusing to take the hint, Katie persisted. \"But you lived under the same roof. How could you not talk to each other?\"\n\nCissy cast a glance her way. \"Don'tcha know? I'm just the pantry girl.\"\n\n\"I'm sure it won't be long until you become a Harvey girl.\" Though the girl would have to improve her demeanor before that happened. Grammar, too. Mr. Harvey was a stickler for proper English.\n\nCissy shook her head and gave Katie a wistful look. \"Blackies like me ain't allowed to be Harvey girls. Them's the rules.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nLater that same day Katie stood at her station behind the counter, scanning the room. Had she not been so alert she might have missed Tully slipping a piece of paper to Buzz.\n\nA pretty girl, a handsome young man. It didn't take a genius to figure out what was going on, but at this point in the game Katie couldn't afford to overlook anything or anyone.\n\nShe waited for Buzz to take his place by the gong outside and quietly followed.\n\nAs rigid in countenance as he was in dress, he wore an immaculate white shirt and razor-creased trousers. His brown hair was neatly trimmed and nails perfectly manicured. Had he fallen into a tub of starch he couldn't have carried himself more rigid. He hardly seemed the type to resort to anything as messy as murder, but of course the possibility couldn't be discounted.\n\nPretending she had stepped outside for air, she leaned against a post and fanned herself with her hand. On the other side of the railroad tracks the prairie stretched out for as far as the eye could see. A gentle breeze turned the tall grass into a sea of waves but offered no relief from the heat.\n\nA sign on a wheelbarrow offered free rides to the hotel. It was meant as a joke, but one matronly traveler took it seriously and actually climbed into the handcart, much to the amusement of restaurant employees.\n\n\"It sure is hot,\" she said. Though May had only begun, the wooden thermometer outside read nearly eighty degrees.\n\nHe agreed with a nod. \"Looks like we're in for an early summer.\"\n\n\"Sure does.\" A strand of hair had escaped from her bun, and she brushed it away from her face. \"How long have you worked for Harvey?\"\n\n\"Since the restaurant opened nearly two years ago.\"\n\n\"So you knew both Priscilla and Ginger?\"\n\n\"Yeah, I knew them.\" He paused for a moment before adding, \"Prissy and I started working here about the same time. Mr. Harvey wanted an experienced waitress, so he transferred her from Florence.\"\n\n\"Sure is a shame what happened,\" she said. His expression remained neutral, and he made no attempt to comment. \"Any idea who might have wanted to harm them?\"\n\nHe let the question hang for a moment before answering. \"No, but\u2014\" He lowered his voice. \"There're some in town who would like nothing better than to see the restaurant fail.\"\n\n\"But why?\" Harvey had practically put the town on the map with his innovative approach to dining.\n\n\"It put Ma Gibson's restaurant out of business, and there are those who think the Harvey girls are setting a bad example for the community. Some even say they're serving more than just food and beverage here. Even my own pa thinks that and hasn't forgiven me for working here rather than the family business.\"\n\nKatie felt her spirits sink. If what he said was true, then the suspect pool just got a whole lot larger. \"I noticed that you and Tully seem close.\"\n\n\"Shh.\" He glanced around again as if to check for eavesdroppers. \"We plan on getting married.\"\n\nThat was a surprise, especially since Tully openly flirted with anyone in trousers, including the railroad workers.\n\n\"I thought it was against the rules for a Harvey girl to wed.\"\n\n\"Only for the length of a contract. After that, they're free to wed but can't work at the restaurant anymore. Don't tell anyone. Employees aren't allowed to get involved with one another, and we could both be fired.\"\n\n\"If you don't mind my asking, why are you working here?\" He couldn't be making that much money. Certainly not enough to support a wife.\n\n\"Mr. Harvey promised to make me the manager of one of his restaurants. He's opening a new one in Arkansas City, and he says it's mine if I keep my nose to the grindstone. That's why I'm here. I'm learning the ropes.\"\n\nThat made sense. He certainly seemed ambitious enough.\n\n\"Once I'm made manager,\" he continued, \"there'll be no need for Tully to work and we can get married.\" He frowned. \"You won't tell anyone, will you?\"\n\n\"I won't breathe a word,\" she said.\n\nFrom the far distance came the high-pitched wail of a train whistle. True to form, Buzz turned like a wooden soldier and struck the gong with his stick. The job might not require much in the way of skill, but he gave it all he had.\n\nThe dish-shaped gong was still vibrating when she turned and hurried back inside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "Katie was given a promotion of sorts, much to her surprise. Instead of working behind the counter, she was now allowed to work the tables. That meant having to deal with a more involved and complicated menu.\n\nThe gong had announced the arrival of the twelve-twenty-five, and Katie sighed with irritation at spotting the sheriff walk through the door. Since the day he rescued her from the wind, they had called a truce of sorts and were no longer at loggerheads.\n\nStill, she had a hard enough time serving a bunch of strangers under Pickens's critical eye without the sheriff's distracting presence. All he had to do was walk into the room and suddenly she couldn't think of anything else. Today was no different. She was so busy staring at him she almost poured the coffee in a diner's lap.\n\nHe paid his money and headed straight for her station. Lunch was served in the breakfast room, so no jackets were required. He greeted her with a crooked smile and touched the brim of his hat with his finger.\n\nHeat rose up her neck. \"These seats are taken,\" she said, her voice thick with swirling emotions.\n\nShe hoped he would take the hint and sit at another station, but no such luck. Instead, his gaze circled the table.\n\n\"Nine are taken,\" he said pulling out a chair. \"That leaves one chair empty.\"\n\nShe sidled up to him. \"Wouldn't you rather be served by one of the more experienced girls?\" she whispered in his ear.\n\n\"I'll take my chances with you,\" he said, and the tone of his voice made her draw in her breath. He glanced at the blackboard. \"I'll have the roast beef.\"\n\nWiping her damp hands on the side of her skirt, she backed away and took the other orders.\n\nThe kitchen was a beehive of activity. Everyone was shouting orders, and Chef Gassy and Howie Howard shoved plates of steaming food onto trays faster than you could say Abe Lincoln.\n\nKatie grabbed a tray marked number three and walked up to Mary-Lou. \"Tell me again where the blue mussels are from?\" She raised her voice to be heard above the noise. Why people cared one way or the other where food originated she couldn't imagine.\n\n\"You mean Blue Point oysters, and they come from Long Island,\" Mary-Lou shouted back. She reached for her own tray and started toward the breakfast room. Katie followed.\n\n\"And don't forget to say that the quail is sage fed, the turtles are from the Gulf of Mexico, and the whitefish came straight from the Great Lakes,\" Mary-Lou called over her shoulder.\n\nKatie sighed as the two parted company. And she thought the cup code was complicated.\n\nShe set the tray on a small tray table at her station and lifted a steaming plate. She purposely ignored the sheriff, but she could sense his gaze on her, and warmth crept up her neck.\n\n\"Wonderful choice,\" she said, setting the plate of oysters in front of a middle-aged woman who stared at the shellfish through a jeweled lorgnette like she was reading their fortunes.\n\n\"All the way from the Great Lakes,\" Katie added.\n\n\"But I thought Blue Points lived in salt water,\" the woman said.\n\n\"You must be thinking of their cousins,\" Katie said. A detective had to think quickly and so apparently did Harvey girls. She chanced a glance at the sheriff. He kept his head lowered but not enough to hide the upward curve of his mouth.\n\nTrain passengers were served first, and most locals knew not to drop in during certain hours. For that reason she purposely kept him waiting until everyone else had been served before placing the plate of roast beef before him. He should know better than to arrive during her busiest time.\n\nThough the other patrons were now on dessert, Katie's table was still working on the main dish. That's because the unpleasant man with the bald head and yellow teeth insisted he'd ordered chicken. His checkered coat pegged him as a traveling salesman. She couldn't imagine what wares he hawked. Probably coffins or something equally as dour.\n\n\"Eat the blasted fish,\" she muttered under her breath after unsuccessfully trying to reason with him. The only way he would get his right order was if she grabbed the chicken away from the woman who kept declaring her \"fish\" delicious.\n\nRemembering the number one rule of the house, however, she did smile, for all the good it did her. The unhappy diner scowled back. By the time the travelers rose from their seats to board the train, Katie was ready to call it a day.\n\nThe sheriff was the last to leave the table. He stood lazily, tugged on his hat, and leaned closer. \"It seems you're a better detective than you are a waitress,\" he said, his voice low in her ear. Reaching into his vest, he produced a manila folder. \"Thought you might like to see this.\"\n\nHe held it so she could read the name Harvey written on it. She stared at him with narrowed eyes, not knowing what to think. \"Does this mean we're partners?\"\n\n\"Depends,\" he said, his voice as noncommittal as his expression.\n\n\"On what?\"\n\n\"Whether you agree to do things my way.\"\n\n\"Over my dead\u2014\"\n\nHe stopped her with a shake of his finger. \"My town. My rules.\"\n\n\"You can take your rules and\u2014\"\n\nPickens called out. \"Meeting in the kitchen.\"\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder. \"I'll be right there.\" She turned back to the sheriff.\n\nHe arched an eyebrow. \"You were saying?\" He dangled the folder in front of her and made no effort to hide his look of triumph. He knew how badly she wanted that folder. What he didn't know was how far she would go to get it.\n\nWithout warning she snatched the folder out of his hands and ran. Racing out of the breakfast room, across the hall, and through the formal dining room, she ducked into the kitchen and peered through the open pass-through. He didn't see her, but she could see him. He hadn't moved from where she'd left him. Only his profile was visible, but it sure did look like a smile on his face. Now, wasn't that the oddest thing?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "During the afternoon lull Katie slipped outside. She found a shady spot next to the building where she couldn't be seen and opened the file.\n\nHandwritten notes contained details about the crime scene, the bodies, and timeline. Whitman's masculine writing was large and bold and easy to read. A list of people interviewed was included, along with notations of significant information. All restaurant workers had been questioned, even some who no longer worked there. Local diners had also been queried. So had the guests who attended the party where Priscilla played the piano.\n\nMissing from the information was his personal relationship with Ginger. Mary-Lou told her the two were on friendly terms and that Ginger often took supper to his office. Was there more to it than that?\n\nHis records were precise but contained nothing she didn't already know, and that worried her. Providing pointless, useless, or false information was an old spy tactic and one she'd used herself on occasion in an effort to earn someone's trust. Was that what Whitman had done?\n\nShe didn't want to think it, but he'd made it clear from the start that he had no intention of working with a Pinkerton operative. Then all of a sudden he handed her his file. She had every right to be suspicious.\n\nThe smile spotted on his face earlier might have had a more sinister meaning. Perhaps she'd been too hasty in disregarding him as a suspect.\n\nShe tucked the file behind her apron and returned to the restaurant. Sometimes she hated her job..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nAs Katie got ready for bed that night, she found a note pinned to her pillow. The note read simply I no who did it.\n\nKatie glanced across the room. Luckily Mary-Lou was so intent on counting brushstrokes, she didn't notice the note. Not a day went by that her roommate didn't give her hair the recommended hundred strokes. \"Forty-five, forty-six...\"\n\nKatie focused her attention back on the note. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to cut words out of a newspaper. That meant that same someone hadn't wanted to take a chance on being identified through handwriting.\n\nThat took the Harvey girls off the hook. They weren't allowed to write down orders, so the likeliness of her recognizing any of their handwriting was remote.\n\nChef Gassy jotted down everything in French, but his chicken scrawl would be recognizable even in English. The loudmouthed man hardly seemed like the type to sneak around. Even in her room she could track his every move by the banging of pots and pans or his raised voice from the floor below. Still, she couldn't discount him.\n\nNor could she discount Culpepper, who signed checks in block letters rather than Spencerian script, the standard writing style taught in schools.\n\nThe misspelled word suggested he or she had little education, but then that was true for almost everyone who worked there. Or possibly the note writer hadn't been able to find the word know. On the other hand, maybe the misspelled word was a deliberate attempt to confuse matters.\n\nWho could have left such a note? And why? Had someone seen through her disguise? But how? And more important, who?\n\nStill pondering these questions an hour later, she stared out the window of the dark room. She envied Mary-Lou's ability to fall asleep the minute her head hit the pillow. Katie couldn't have asked for a more accommodating roommate.\n\nShe was so deep in thought she almost missed the movement below her window. Someone was sneaking around the building.\n\nThe white ghostlike image wasn't Charley, that was for sure.\n\nShe pulled off her nightgown and quickly dressed in a skirt and shirtwaist kept handy for just such an emergency.\n\nThe door squeaked as she opened it, but Mary-Lou didn't move. Closing the door softly, Katie hurried along the hall and down the stairs. The kitchen was quiet, but not wanting to take a chance that someone might see her, she walked through the breakfast room and grabbed a spoon off one of the tables.\n\nAfter unlocking the main entrance, she stepped outside. Spook Cat greeted her with a mew and rubbed against her skirt as she stooped to insert the spoon in the threshold.\n\nEarlier she'd set out a bowl of milk, and the tom had lapped it up hungrily. Now, seeing that she had no such treat, he soon lost interest and strutted away with what seemed to Katie a disgusted grunt.\n\n\"Ha. So that's how you are?\" she muttered. \"Ingrate!\"\n\nStraightening, she glanced up and down the platform. The steel tracks gleamed in the moonlight like two knife blades coming to a point in the distance. The thought made her shudder. She pulled the door shut, and just as she'd hoped, the spoon kept it from closing all the way.\n\nShe pulled out her gun before walking the distance to the side of the building. The lingering smell of food grew stronger as she made her way along the alley. The yellow glow of a full moon poured down the side of the Harvey House like melted butter.\n\nSince working at the restaurant, everything seemed to have taken on a food-like quality.\n\nThe night air felt cool. Tugging the shawl tight around her shoulders with one hand, she held her gun with the other. Just as she reached the corner of the building an ironlike clamp encased her arm.\n\nStartled, she cried out." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "\"Shh. Do you want to wake the dead?\"\n\nShe recognized the hushed masculine voice at once. \"Sheriff!\" She yanked her hand away from his. \"You near scared the life out of me.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well try being on the business end of a gun.\" He pushed the barrel of her derringer sideways.\n\nShe pocketed her weapon but was reluctant to release her hold. Better keep up her guard until she knew the name of his game.\n\nThe brim of his hat shaded all but his mouth, which he held in a straight line. He looked dangerous, all right, in a masculine sort of way. He was, in fact, the most attractive man she'd ever met, which did nothing for her peace of mind and even less for her investigation.\n\n\"What do I have to do to convince you to stay inside at night?\" His voice sounded like gravel in her ear. \"You're putting your life on the line.\"\n\n\"What are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I asked first, but if you must know, there was some trouble in town. I was on my way home when I saw someone sneaking around. Thought I'd better check it out. I should have known it was you.\"\n\n\"It wasn't me. I saw someone, too.\" She released her gun and pulled her hand out of her pocket. \"From the bedroom window.\"\n\nThe heat of his body warded off the chill, and she loosened her wrap.\n\n\"It's kind of late to be window watching, isn't it?\" he asked.\n\n\"I was going over some things. Like the file you gave me.\"\n\n\"You mean the file you stole from me.\" He pushed his hat to the back of his head. \"Does that mean you agree to my terms?\"\n\nShe gave him an arched look. \"What terms are those?\"\n\n\"I don't want you running around at night by yourself.\"\n\n\"Is that a command or request, Sheriff?\"\n\n\"It's an order,\" he said, and before she could object he added, \"And we can drop the formalities. From now on you can call me Branch.\"\n\n\"Branch, huh? Never knew anyone by that name.\" Oddly enough it suited him. He was certainly sturdy as a tree, and his presence every bit as commanding.\n\n\"I guess that makes me one of a kind. What do I call you?\"\n\n\"Katie,\" she said.\n\n\"Is that your real name?\"\n\nStill not 100 percent certain she could trust him, she hesitated. \"My real name is Katherine Jones.\"\n\n\"Madison suits you better. Jones is too ordinary.\" Was that a compliment? She couldn't begin to guess, and she wasn't about to ask.\n\n\"So what have you found out so far?\" He had dropped his harsh tone, and his low voice was a pleasant rumble in her ear. A whiff of bay rum hair tonic tickled her nose\u2014a vast improvement over the stale cooking odors still lingering in the night air.\n\nConsidering that she'd only been in town a short while, the question was a bit premature. \"Not much,\" she said softly. She decided to keep the mysterious note found on her pillow to herself, at least for now.\n\n\"I'm not even certain that the killer is an insider.\" She paused for a moment, waiting for a reaction, and when none came, continued. \"One of the workers told me that some people object to the restaurant. It's possible that someone is trying to put the Harvey House out of business.\" According to a brief sentence in the Gazette, business at the restaurant had declined following both deaths.\n\n\"Anything's possible,\" he said. \"But I've pretty much reached a dead end in that regard.\"\n\nHe sounded discouraged and frustrated, but it could be an act to find out if she was holding anything back.\n\n\"Abigail told me that Ginger behaved in an odd manner on the day of her death.\"\n\nShe felt him stiffen. \"In what way?\"\n\n\"She asked to change stations and seemed worried. Maybe even scared.\"\n\n\"Hmm. Haven't heard that before.\"\n\n\"See? There is an advantage to working with a female detective.\" She expected him to object, but instead he surprised her with a chuckle.\n\n\"I'm sure you feel the same about working with me,\" he said.\n\n\"It has its good points,\" she admitted. Especially since she liked to keep her suspects where she could keep an eye on them. \"Anything I should know about the murder weapon?\"\n\n\"Only that the same knife was used on both women, and it didn't match the knives in the kitchen.\"\n\nThat would have been her next question.\n\nHe started to say something more but instead grabbed her by the arms. \"Shh.\"\n\nStartled, she fought to keep her composure. He was so close that if either of them moved she feared an even more intimate touch. Holding herself perfectly still was the only sane solution.\n\nHis fingers pressed into her flesh, and his warm, sweet breath fanned her face. Her nose edged higher as did the proximity of her lips to his. She could feel the power and strength of him, and that seemed to present more of a problem for her than the intruder. A gun would handle any outside danger, but she didn't know what to do about her wildly beating heart.\n\n\"Can you see who it is?\" he whispered.\n\nWho what is?\n\nThe jingling of keys snapped her back to reality. Someone was heading their way. The moon was practically overhead, leaving only a small dark spot in which to hide.\n\nHe pressed closer, and for a split second she imagined his lips in her hair. Her breath caught, and she didn't dare exhale for fear of bridging what little space remained between them.\n\nThe footsteps grew louder, and a white, shadowy figure emerged. At first Katie thought she saw a ghost but then recognized the dorm matron. Oddly enough, Miss Thatcher was wearing\u2014of all things\u2014her nightgown.\n\nThe woman paused in front of the kitchen door that opened from the alley. Could she see them? For a moment Katie feared that their presence was known, but then Miss Thatcher pushed against the door and vanished inside. The door shut with a soft clicking sound, but not before Spook Cat slithered inside. Aha! So that's how the tom gained entrance. At least one mystery had been solved.\n\n\"That was close,\" Branch whispered into her hair. He released her arms but made no effort to move away.\n\nHis nearness was doing strange things to her. Never could she remember standing next to a man without wishing she were someone else\u2014someone smarter, prettier, and less clumsy. Crazy as it seemed, tonight she imagined she was all those things and so much more.\n\n\"What do you suppose Miss Thatcher was doing out this late?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Maybe she has a lover.\"\n\nThe thought of the pinched-face spinster having a beau was hard to imagine, but in the silvery moonlight, anything seemed possible.\n\n\"What do you know about her?\" she asked.\n\n\"Only that she started work about a year ago,\" he said. He backed up just far enough that his head was now out of the shadows.\n\nShe stared up at him. Had she only imagined his lips brushing against her hair? Just the thought made her knees threaten to buckle. \"I'll see if I can find out anything more,\" she said, her voice hoarse.\n\nHe studied her a moment but she couldn't read his expression. \"You better get some shut-eye,\" he said. \"We both should.\"\n\nNodding, she said good night. Anxious to make her escape, she ran up the alley and around the corner of the building. The gaslight in front of the railroad station lit the way. Reaching the main entrance, she removed the spoon and slipped inside.\n\nIt took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dark and even longer for her to catch her breath. She couldn't decide what disconcerted her more: seeing Miss Thatcher outside in her nightgown or the thought of working with Branch.\n\nAt last she made her way to the dining room exit. Reaching the stairs, she paused at the bottom to listen. The only sound she could hear was the thump-thump-thumping of her still-pounding heart." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nThe note was very much on Katie's mind the next morning as she prepared her station for the breakfast rush. That and the unexpected encounter with Branch the night before.\n\nIrritated by the way he kept intruding upon her thoughts, she forced herself to focus on Miss Thatcher. What was she doing out that late at night? In her nightgown, no less.\n\nNone of the other girls knew much about her or her background. According to Mary-Lou, Miss Thatcher took over the job from a Miss Jenkins who left the house to wed.\n\n\"She takes her responsibilities seriously and seldom leaves the premises,\" Mary-Lou said as they stood waiting for the gong to sound that morning. \"She only leaves to go to church Sunday mornings.\"\n\n\"Does she have family in town?\" Katie asked.\n\n\"None that I know of.\" Mary-Lou gave her a questioning look. \"Why so interested in Miss Thatcher all of a sudden?\"\n\n\"No particular reason.\"\n\nShe studied her roommate. Did Mary-Lou leave the puzzling message on her pillow? She didn't think so, but she couldn't afford to trust anyone. Not at this stage of the investigation. She couldn't even trust Branch, which is why she didn't tell him about the note. Pinkerton policy\u2014trust no one until verification\u2014had proven to be worthy advice in the past, and she wasn't taking any chances." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "After the breakfast locals left, Katie ran upstairs to put on a fresh apron for the train crowd. The door to the dorm matron's room was ajar, and she paused in front of it.\n\nJust as she reached for the knob, the door suddenly flew open and Miss Thatcher stared at her like one might regard an unwelcome salesman.\n\n\"Do you want something?\"\n\n\"No, I... uh... saw your door ajar and was just about to close it.\"\n\n\"As you can see, I'm quite capable of closing my own door.\" She stepped into the hall and shut the door after her to illustrate. \"Run along now.\" She waved her hand like a harried parent chasing off a demanding child. \"I'm sure you have work to do.\"\n\nKatie nodded and scurried down the hall. Before entering her own room she glanced over her shoulder. The dorm matron hadn't moved and was watching her like a hawk spying a mouse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "That night Katie sat quietly in the dark breakfast room and waited.\n\nHer seat gave her ample cover while still allowing a full view of the hall and stairs. She couldn't see the clock but guessed it was close to midnight. A single gaslight in the kitchen was still lit, but the employees had left for the day.\n\nMaybe Miss Thatcher wouldn't leave the house tonight. Katie decided to give her another half hour or so to make an appearance\u2014no more. Waitressing was hard work, and if she didn't get some sleep she'd be dead on her feet in the morning during the breakfast rush. Pickens was already on her case for yawning during lunch.\n\nThe minutes passed slowly. Shadowing was a big part of her job, and the chore she least liked. On rare occasions it paid off handsomely, like the time a suspect led her to a warehouse of stolen art. But mostly surveillance resulted in hours of boredom and little else.\n\nShe'd just about given up the wait when a creak of a floorboard alerted her. Someone was coming down the stairs.\n\nThe soft jingle of keys told her it was Miss Thatcher, though she couldn't see more than a shadowy form pass by the breakfast room entrance. A flash of filmy white indicated the dorm matron had entered the dining room and was probably heading for the kitchen.\n\nKatie draped her blue knitted shawl over her head. Her blue skirt and shirtwaist provided the perfect combination for shadowing. Black was not a natural color in nature and stood out in the dark of night. Blue was much more suited for her purposes.\n\nOpening the glass door leading outside, she placed a spoon in the frame. There was no sign of Spook Cat tonight, but a still-full moon bathed the landscape in silvery light and glinted off the railroad tracks.\n\nEarlier she thought she heard gunshots in town, but now all was quiet.\n\nThe bright light was both a blessing and a curse. She could see everything, but then so could anyone else who might happen to be lurking around. Just don't let me bump into the sheriff again. Tonight she needed to keep her wits about her\u2014impossible to do whenever he was around.\n\nPeering around the corner into the alley, she waited until Miss Thatcher had reached the front of the house.\n\nWalking between the two brick buildings, Katie was careful to stay in the shadow of the baggage room. She paused briefly in the same exact spot that she and Branch stood the previous night. She could almost feel his breath in her hair and the pressure of his hands on her arms. A shiver ran through her. Not good. Not good at all.\n\nShaking away the memory, she continued along the length of the alley and spotted Miss Thatcher walking down the middle of the road.\n\nPulling back, Katie dropped on her haunches to peer around the corner\u2014one of the tricks taught at the Pinkerton detective school. People looked up, not down, and she was less likely to be seen close to the ground.\n\nThe lone figure was easy to spot. Miss Thatcher walked slowly but with purposeful steps, as if this particular path had been taken many times before. Again, it appeared she was wearing her nightgown. Filmy fabric flowed from her like spilled milk.\n\nKatie shook her head in disbelief. What was the woman thinking?\n\nEarlier the wind had kicked up and the dust made it hard to breathe, but tonight the air was still. Even nature seemed to hold its breath.\n\nLifting the corner of her shawl to her nose, Katie followed at a discreet distance. Some detectives covered their faces in mud so as not to be seen. She found a shawl just as effective, though nothing would adequately hide her in this bright moonlight. Her goose would be cooked should Miss Thatcher turn around, but she would just have to deal with that problem should the need arise.\n\nThe road came to a dead end ahead, but Miss Thatcher turned and crossed over the railroad tracks. Katie took cover beneath the shadow of the only tree in the area\u2014a large cottonwood.\n\nWhat was the woman doing? There was nothing here but empty fields. Could the dorm matron be meeting someone? In her nightgown?\n\nPresently, Miss Thatcher did something completely unexpected. She raised her arms over her head and swayed back and forth like a sapling in the wind. Katie shook her head and blinked. It soon became clear that the dorm matron was dancing. Her face floated over the ruffled neck of her nightgown like a second moon\u2014a plainer, less brilliant moon. Her eyes gleamed like polished stones. Her feet moved in a slow, dreamlike waltz. She held her arms in such a way as if dancing with a partner that only she could see. Her slender body seemed to move to the rhythm of some inner music.\n\nKatie's brain clicked. Of course. She should have known. Miss Thatcher was sleepwalking! That would certainly explain her attire. The thought was followed by another. If she danced in her sleep, what else was she capable of doing while in slumber?\n\nKatie tried to think of everything she'd heard or read about somnambulism, but it wasn't much. She did know that it had been blamed for many crimes, including violent ones. From Allan Pinkerton she'd learned about the strange case of French detective Robert Ledru. While investigating a crime, he'd discovered, much to his horror, that he had done the deadly deed himself while sound asleep.\n\nDid Miss Thatcher kill Priscilla and Ginger and not even know it? Hard as it was to believe, Katie couldn't discount the possibility. Proving such a thing would be difficult if not altogether impossible.\n\nAs suddenly as Miss Thatcher had started dancing she stopped. She then cut across the field toward the Harvey House. Instead of her usual military march, tonight her movements were slow, dreamlike, as if she were being pulled by an invisible rope.\n\nKatie followed a distance behind. She waited for Miss Thatcher to enter the house before running up the alley and around back.\n\nShe pushed against the dining room door, but it held tight. No, no, no! Please don't let it be true. Please don't let the door be locked.\n\nDropping down on hands and knees, she frantically felt on the ground and found the spoon. Someone had moved it from the doorframe. But who?\n\nA movement made her look up. Spook Cat peered at her from behind the glass door. She groaned. Dumb cat. \"Now look what you've done. See if I give you any more milk!\"\n\nJumping to her feet, she grabbed the handle and gave it a good shake. The cat took off, but the door remained firm.\n\nRunning around the house like a dog with a bone to bury, she checked every window and door. Never before had she encountered such a fortress. During her five years as a detective, she had broken into hotel rooms, offices, private homes, and even an insane asylum, but the restaurant was locked up tighter than a miser's purse. Every window was barred. Every lock burglar proof. Fred Harvey had spared no expense in installing the most up-to-date security measures.\n\nShe had no choice but to try and wake her roommate. She searched around for something to throw and carried a handful of gravel to the street side of the house. The first stone hit the bedroom window with a ping. She waited. When Mary-Lou failed to appear, Katie tossed another stone and then another. A whole handful of pebbles later, she gave up.\n\nJust her luck to have a roommate who slept like a rock in a well.\n\nPulling her shawl tight around her shoulders, she followed the narrow path between the two buildings. Her back against the brick wall, she slid to the ground.\n\nShe couldn't see the moon, but its silvery sheen made the narrow strip of sky overhead shine like satin ribbon.\n\nOkay, God, what am I supposed to do now?\n\nSighing, she hugged her knees to her chest and yawned. She was tired, so tired. Her lids drifted downward. She forced her eyes open with a shake of her head.\n\nGot to think. That's the only way she could stay awake. Go over the facts of the case, the clues. Soon enough her thoughts turned to the note on her pillow. Who would leave such a message?\n\nComing up with no plausible answer, her thoughts drifted and her eyelids felt heavy as lead. She shook her head, yawned, and patted herself on the cheeks, but none of it did any good. She tried humming, but that only helped for a while.\n\nTired... she was so utterly bone-weary tired...\n\nA shadowy form appeared at the end of the alley. Heart pounding, Katie reached for her gun. Much to her horror, the holster was empty. God, no. This can't be happening. She frantically checked her pockets, her waistband, the ground. Where was it?\n\nA glimpse of a moonlike face hovered over her followed by the glint of a knife. The blade flashed through the air, and Katie screamed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\nKatie, it's me!\"\n\nKatie battled her way through the sleep-induced fog. A dark form slowly came into focus. \"Sheriff? Branch? Is that you?\"\n\n\"It's me, all right.\" Kneeling next to her, he held her by the arms and shook her gently as if to bring her to full consciousness.\n\n\"W\u2014what happened?\" she stammered.\n\n\"That's what I want to know. You sure know how to scare a fellow.\" He sounded both angry and relieved, like a parent whose child had narrowly escaped injury after running in front of a racing horse. \"When I saw you here I thought\u2014\"\n\nShe drew in her breath.\n\nHis fingers pressed into her flesh. \"Are you okay?\" The concern in his voice added to her dismay. Controlling her emotions when they were at loggerheads was hard enough, but this new, gentler side of him made it altogether impossible.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said. \"I\u2014I must have fallen asleep.\" What an utterly foolish thing to do. She'd spent many a night shadowing suspects and had managed to stay awake and alert without any difficulty. But never before had her job required such physically demanding work. Anyone who made a living working in a restaurant deserved the deepest respect.\n\nHe released her. \"Well, you sure picked a funny place to get some shut-eye.\" The edge had returned to his voice, and that made it easier to control her emotions. \"What are you doing here, anyway?\"\n\n\"I got locked out.\"\n\n\"Locked out, eh? Well, you better figure out a way back inside before Miss Thatcher catches you.\"\n\n\"What time is it?\"\n\n\"A little after one.\"\n\nShe groaned. Howie Howard wouldn't report to work for at least another four or five hours. Branch must really think she was an amateur now.\n\nHe lifted his gaze to the dark building behind her and shook his head. \"You can't stay here.\" He shifted his weight. \"You better come back to the house with me.\"\n\nShe glanced at him askew. \"I\u2014I don't think that's a good idea.\"\n\n\"Why not? It's just up the road a piece. You'll be safe there.\"\n\n\"If my boss finds out I spent the night at a man's house, I'll lose my job.\"\n\n\"Oh?\" His eyebrows arched. \"And what boss is that? Pinkerton, Harvey, or me?\"\n\n\"You're not my boss.\"\n\n\"No, but I'm doing a better job of watching out for you than the others.\"\n\nShe didn't want him watching out for her. Yet the very thought sent warm currents rushing through her. In an effort to calm her confused emotions she blew a strand of hair away from her face. \"I was referring to Mr. Harvey.\"\n\nHe sat back on his heels. \"I'm sure a proper Englishman like him would insist you spend the night at the hotel.\"\n\nAs tempting as a hotel sounded, the better choice was to stay where she was and pray someone let her in before Pickens or Thatcher found her. \"I better wait for Howie. Maybe I can bribe him not to say anything.\"\n\nBranch moved to her side and leaned his back against the building, his shoulders brushing against hers.\n\n\"W\u2014what are you doing?\"\n\nHe stretched his legs along the length of hers and removed his hat. \"Settling down for the night. Can't let my partner in crime stay here by herself.\" He folded his arms in front and rested his head against the brick wall.\n\n\"Oh, now we're partners.\"\n\n\"For the time being.\"\n\n\"I never agreed to your conditions.\"\n\n\"You will tonight if you know what's good for you.\"\n\nShe eyed his profile. \"You should go. There's no sense us both losing sleep.\"\n\n\"Do you think I'll get any sleep knowing you're out here alone?\"\n\n\"I'm awake now and have my gun with me.\" Recalling her dream, she patted her pocket, the bulky feel giving her a measure of comfort.\n\n\"That makes two of us.\"\n\nShe blew out her cheeks. \"Are you serious? About staying?\"\n\n\"Yep.\"\n\n\"W\u2014would... would you stay if I were a man?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not.\" After a beat he added, \"Wouldn't be as much fun.\"\n\n\"Fun? You call this fun?\" She sighed and tugged her shawl tighter.\n\n\"It's not often I get to spend the night with a pretty woman.\"\n\nHeat rose up her neck, and she was grateful for the cover of night. No one had ever called her pretty. But then, he probably didn't mean it in the conventional sense. He was just being polite.\n\n\"Don't you have a wife waiting for you at home?\" she asked. He never mentioned one. Nor did he wear a wedding band, but neither did he have the needy or hastily put-together look of a bachelor.\n\n\"Not married,\" he said.\n\nHer heart gave a little lurch, though she had no idea why. So he wasn't married. It made no difference to her, either way.\n\nStill, it was hard to believe that such an attractive man hadn't been snatched up by some pretty miss.\n\n\"You still haven't told me what you're doing out here,\" he said, breaking the silence.\n\n\"Miss Thatcher left the house again tonight, and I followed her.\"\n\n\"Why so interested in her? Surely you don't think that she\u2014?\"\n\n\"I don't know what to think. But I do know one thing\u2014she's a sleepwalker.\"\n\n\"A sleepwalker?\" He shifted his weight, and his shoulder rubbed against hers. \"Is that what she was doing last night?\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure it was.\"\n\n\"Well, I'll be. So what does she do when she sleepwalks?\"\n\n\"She dances.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\nShe described Miss Thatcher dancing beneath the silvery moon.\n\nHe shook his head. \"Never knew anyone who walked in their sleep. Let alone danced.\"\n\n\"It's not all that rare.\" Recalling her nightmare, she shivered. \"Some people have even committed crimes in their sleep.\"\n\n\"You don't say.\"\n\n\"It's true.\" She then told him about a well-known case where a man got off on a murder charge because he claimed he was sleepwalking at the time. \"You don't suppose Miss Thatcher is the killer, do you?\"\n\nHe rubbed his chin. \"Based on the crime scene, I'm fairly convinced our killer is a man.\"\n\nMomentarily distracted by the pronoun our, she cleared her voice. \"There's more.\" If he was going to sit up all night with her, the least she could do to show her appreciation was to share information. She reached into her pocket for the small square of paper. \"I found this pinned to my pillow.\"\n\nHe took the paper from her and held it up. The moonlight had grown dimmer, the shadows darker. \"What does it say?\"\n\n\"It says, 'I know who did it.'\"\n\n\"Hmm. Why would anyone pin this to your pillow unless\u2014\"\n\n\"He or she knows I'm an operative.\" The thought had occurred to her, of course, and it worried her. \"Far as I know, you're the only one who knows my reason for being here. Harvey doesn't even know. He thinks the detective he hired is a male working on the outside.\"\n\n\"Then how do you explain the note?\"\n\n\"I can't.\"\n\nHe folded the paper. \"Do you mind if I keep this?\"\n\n\"I'm required to send everything to headquarters.\"\n\n\"I'll give it back. I just want a chance to study it in the light.\"\n\n\"It won't help much. The words were cut out of a newspaper. What I don't understand is why someone went to all the trouble to write it. It doesn't really say anything.\"\n\n\"If we knew the answer to that, we'd know who wrote it.\" He tucked the paper into his vest pocket.\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"The other girls told me that you and Ginger were friends.\"\n\n\"Guess you could say that.\" He fell silent for a moment. \"She knew how I hated wearing a dinner coat, so she'd bring supper to me whenever she knew I was working late. Her invalid mother lives in Iowa, so I'd give her a little extra to send home.\" He blew out a ragged breath. \"No one should die that young.\" His harsh tone grated on her ears. \"I won't rest till I bring the killer to justice.\"\n\nThe passion in his voice sent chills down her spine. She knew that kind of passion. Understood it. He meant every word, and a feeling of profound relief washed over her. Branch Whitman wasn't guilty of anything, except perhaps in his own mind.\n\n\"We'll find him,\" she said, surprised that her earlier doubts had disappeared. Somehow he made her believe that anything was possible, even cracking a puzzling case.\n\nThe darkness hid all but the soft glow of his eyes, and she sensed something like a silent pledge pass between them.\n\nFor the longest while neither spoke. No spoken words were needed.\n\nShe rested her head against the brick wall. \"It's so peaceful,\" she said, breaking the silence. It was hard to believe that two violent crimes had been committed in this very alley. She remembered thinking something similar upon visiting a battlefield years after the war had ended.\n\n\"Don't let the quiet fool you,\" he said, his voice soft as velvet in her ears. \"I had to break up a card game earlier when one of the men starting shooting. Even now, trouble's brewing somewhere in town. You can bet on it.\"\n\n\"How do you know?\" she asked.\n\n\"I have faith in human nature. That's how.\"\n\nHer laughter solicited a chuckle from him.\n\n\"Do you mind if I ask why you became a detective?\" He gazed into her eyes. \"Doesn't seem like a job a woman would cotton to.\"\n\n\"Actually, there's not much to tell. When I was in grade school, a friend gave me a book titled The Revelations of a Lady Detective. The name of the protagonist was Mrs. Pascal, and she was a widow left in financial ruin by her husband. She earned a living by solving crimes, and I was absolutely intrigued. I'd never heard of a lady detective, and I decided I wanted to be just like her. Without the widow part, of course.\"\n\nShe never thought she'd have the nerve to follow such a dream. Never really even took it seriously until Nathan Cole broke her heart by running off with her sister. But then she decided she had nothing to lose.\n\n\"Do you think me strange?\" she asked. Lord knows, her family certainly did, even after proving successful at her job.\n\n\"Strange, no,\" he said. \"Unusual maybe.\"\n\n\"My father had a fit when I told him what I wanted to do.\"\n\n\"I can imagine.\"\n\nActually that was an understatement. The truth was that her father threw her out of the house and told her not to come back until she had gained some sense. It wasn't long after that final argument that he had his accident and was found dead by the side of the road. Now, as always, the thought brought pangs of guilt.\n\n\"Not sure I'd want a daughter of mine chasing after criminals,\" he said.\n\n\"Would you feel the same if you had a son?\"\n\n\"I have a son and, yes, I feel exactly the same.\"\n\nHis having a son surprised her. \"How old is he?\" she asked. \"Your son.\"\n\n\"He'll soon be eight. His name is Andy.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't you be home with him?\"\n\n\"I had some out-of-town business to attend to. I knew I'd be late, so I asked my housekeeper to take Andy home with her. She treats him like family.\"\n\n\"You're lucky to have someone you can depend on,\" she said.\n\n\"No argument there. After my wife died, I prayed for someone to help me care for my son, and God sent an angel.\"\n\nNever had she known a man to talk so frankly about his faith, and her opinion of him went up another notch. \"Your wife... How did she die?\"\n\n\"Tornado,\" he said simply. \"In '72.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\" When he offered no other details, she changed the subject. \"Why did you become a lawman?\"\n\n\"Not much to tell. I actually ran a freight company. Was pretty good at it, too. But that was before the tornado. The town as we knew it no longer existed, and I took whatever work I could find. When we learned the train was coming to town, Reverend Bushwell talked me into running for sheriff.\"\n\n\"Any regrets?\" she asked.\n\n\"About being a lawman? Nope.\" He tilted his head to the side as he gazed at her. \"You? Any regrets about becoming an operative?\"\n\nRegrets? Some, but if given the same choice she would do it all over again. \"If I hadn't become a detective I don't know what I would have done.\"\n\n\"That's easy,\" he said. \"You'd be married with a passel of kids tugging on your apron strings.\"\n\nThe picture he drew in her mind was no different from what she had once envisioned for herself. She had been so certain that was God's plan for her, especially after falling in love with Nathan, but that turned out not to be true.\n\n\"I like my job,\" she said, \"but since the train has reached most major towns, it's getting harder.\"\n\n\"Harder how?\"\n\n\"Outlaws know we can move around quicker, and they're getting better at hiding their tracks.\"\n\nHe shifted his weight and crossed his ankles. \"I guess we just have to get better at what we do.\"\n\nShe sighed. Given the rudimentary tools of her trade, it appeared at times that criminals had the upper hand. \"What if we don't find the killer?\" It was the first time she expressed that worry out loud.\n\nHe covered her hand with his own, and a slow but steady warmth inched up her arm. \"If he's still in town, we'll find him,\" he said.\n\nHis confidence stoked her own. \"I just hope we do it before he kills again.\"\n\n\"We will,\" he whispered with a squeeze of her hand. \"We will.\"\n\nThat did a lot for her peace of mind but nothing for her heavy eyelids. She stifled a yawn.\n\n\"Hope it's not the company,\" he said in a low, soothing voice.\n\nYes, it was the company. For oddly, she felt safe and secure with him, like a baby in a cradle. Never had she felt like that with anyone. Not even Nathan.\n\nHe released her hand and drew her close, his embrace warm and inviting. The battle to stay awake was lost the moment her head landed on his strong, broad shoulder." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nBranch reached the cemetery early that morning and reined in his horse. \"Whoa, boy.\"\n\nA slight breeze blew across the prairie, and fluffy white clouds played hide-and-seek with a dazzlingly bright sun. He dismounted and tethered his horse to the weathered fence.\n\nRecent talk about Andy's birthday brought him here today. At least that's what he wanted to believe. He didn't want to think that spending the night with Katie\u2014holding her in his arms while she slept\u2014had anything to do with his sudden urge to visit his wife's grave.\n\nReaching Hannah's burial place, he dropped down on one knee and laid a single rose against the headstone. A white rose... her favorite.\n\nEight years she'd been gone. Sometimes it seemed like only yesterday. Today, it seemed like a lifetime ago.\n\nIn years past, he had only to kneel by Hannah's grave for a vision of her to come to mind. Lately, though, the vision had grown dimmer.\n\nToday, another image took her place, an image of pretty red hair, deep, expressive eyes, and a freckled, pert nose.\n\nHe shook his head in dismay. It wasn't right to stand at the grave of his wife while thinking of another woman. Not right at all. But he couldn't seem to help himself. Nor could he help recalling the feel of Katie's head on his shoulder. Or forget her sweet, delicate fragrance\u2014a cross between lilacs and freshly mowed grass\u2014and both tantalized his senses like springtime.\n\nHe rubbed his forehead. He was tired, and his body ached from sitting on the ground all night. The Harvey cook hadn't arrived at the house to bake the bread for breakfast until after 5:00 a.m.\n\nThe poor man practically had heart failure when Branch approached him in the wee hours of the morn.\n\nAfter Katie was safely inside, he'd ridden the short distance home but was only able to get three hours of shut-eye before his son woke him and the smell of freshly brewed coffee coaxed him out of bed.\n\nNo wonder he wasn't thinking straight. In his youth he could stay up all night and still put in a good day's work, but those days were long gone.\n\nA rabbit hopped past, bringing him out of his reverie. With a guilty start, he forced himself to focus on his wife's headstone.\n\nOur boy's doing good, Hannah. Real good. Such a handsome fella and smart as a whip. You'd be right proud of him.\n\nHe remained on his knee for several minutes before pushing to his feet. Hannah no longer felt close. Worse, he couldn't bring her face to mind. The loss of a loved one was never about one death, but many.\n\nToday, he had yet another loss to mourn.\n\nHe turned to leave, but something made him stop. Though it was still early, he wasn't the only one visiting the cemetery that day. Normally, he wouldn't have paid any heed to the stranger. Today he paid close attention to the man who stood in front of the grave of Andy's real mother.\n\nNormally, he wouldn't think of disturbing another mourner. People came here to grieve, not socialize, but he was tempted to ask the man what he was doing there. Why so much interest in the grave of a woman who died nearly eight years ago?\n\nStill curious about the stranger, he peered across the grave-studded grass from beneath the lowered brim of his hat. Minutes passed. The man remained in front of Dorothy Clayborn's grave site, so this was no passing interest.\n\nBut who?\n\nThe stranger finally donned his hat and stepped back. After a moment he walked away.\n\n\"Excuse me, sir!\"\n\nThe man turned and waited for Branch to catch up to him, an inquisitive expression on his face. He had a full-grown beard that made him look older from a distance than he actually was. In reality, he was probably closer to Branch's thirty-three years.\n\nHe looked vaguely familiar, mostly around the eyes, but Branch couldn't think where they might have met, if indeed, they had.\n\n\"I noticed you at that grave. I hope you don't mind my asking, but did you know her? Did you know Dorothy Clayborn?\"\n\nThe man took so long to answer that at first it appeared he wouldn't. Finally he gave a slight nod. \"I knew her,\" he said. \"She was my wife.\"\n\nShock shot through Branch like a bullet, and his jaw slackened. Hackles rose at the back of his neck, and suddenly he couldn't breathe. God, no! Don't let it be true." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "\"Gable?\" he asked hoarsely when at last he found his voice. It couldn't be. He was seeing things. Had to be. \"Gable Clayborn?\"\n\nThe man looked momentarily startled before recognition crossed his face. \"Branch? Is that you behind that sheriff's badge?\" As if to answer his own question, he broke out in a smile. Grabbing Branch's hand, he shook it like he was priming water from a pump. \"Well, what do you know? Guess you never thought to see me again.\"\n\nWithdrawing his hand, Branch's initial shock gave way to disbelief. \"No, never did,\" he managed between wooden lips. \"Dorothy said you were... dead.\"\n\nThe smile vanished. \"Dottie said that?\"\n\nBranch nodded. \"Said you died in an accident.\" Heard it with his own ears.\n\nGable sucked in his breath. \"You know what they say about a woman's fury.\"\n\nBranch felt his skin crawl. For eight years he'd thought this man\u2014Andy's true father\u2014dead. Never once in all that time had he imagined that Dorothy had lied. Why would she say he was dead when clearly he wasn't?\n\n\"Why'd you come back?\" Why now, after all this time?\n\n\"Didn't know about Dottie or the tornado. Had I known I would have come back sooner. Didn't know any of that until I arrived in town yesterday.\" He rubbed his hand across his bearded chin. \"Calico sure does look different. Hardly recognized it. Thought I came to the wrong place by mistake.\"\n\n\"We pretty much had to rebuild after the tornado,\" Branch said, his voice hollow.\n\nGable shook his head. \"Terrible thing.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was.\" Little did he know just how terrible.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" Gable asked. He then glanced at the distant grave with the single white rose. \"Hannah?\"\n\nBranch's jaw tightened. \"She died, too. Eleven people died that day.\"\n\n\"Sorry to hear that,\" Gable said.\n\nBranch didn't want his sympathy. Didn't want anything from him. Hannah would still be alive had she not left the house that stormy night to deliver this man's baby.\n\n\"Where you been all these years?\" Branch asked.\n\n\"Here and there,\" Gable said with a shrug. \"Done some mining. Montana, Utah. Got me some religion.\" He gave a self-conscious laugh. \"My preacher said I needed to come back and mend fences. That's why I'm here. Wanted to tell Dottie I was sorry for taking off on her like that.\"\n\n\"You deserted her?\" Is that why Dorothy said her husband was dead? Because she was too ashamed to admit that he'd simply walked off?\n\nGable shrugged as if it was of little consequence. \"I was young and didn't know any better. Guess I was just doing what my pappy did to me.\"\n\nGable's cavalier attitude infuriated Branch. He walked out on his expectant wife and then came back years later as if nothing had happened. What kind of man would do such a thing?\n\n\"Guess you won't be staying long now that you know about Dorothy.\"\n\n\"Haven't made any definite plans yet, but I've got some business to attend to before I leave town.\"\n\n\"What kind of business?\" Branch asked sharply. Any business of Gable's was suspect. The man didn't know the meaning of earning an honest living, and his get-rich schemes always led to stay-poor results.\n\n\"Some legal stuff.\" Gable scratched the side of his neck. \"Maybe you can help me. Do you know what happened to the infant?\"\n\nBranch stared at him. He wanted Gable gone. The sooner, the better. The blood pumping through his veins felt like ice water one moment and wildfire the next. \"What do you think happened?\"\n\n\"Yeah, well here's the thing. Before he died, Dottie's father set aside a substantial sum of money in trust for the child. If something happened to his grandchild, the money reverts to the living parent, which\"\u2014he cleared his voice\u2014\"is me. The problem is, I need proof of the child's death before I can claim the money.\"\n\nBranch felt his temper rise. The man just found out his wife was dead, and his first thought was for his own gain. No surprise there.\n\n\"Don't see how I can help,\" Branch said, hiding his contempt behind a neutral tone.\n\n\"I was hoping you'd know how I can get hold of proof of death.\"\n\nBranch frowned. \"Proof of death?\"\n\n\"Dottie was carrying our child, and I need something that says the infant died with her.\"\n\nBranch tightened his hands into fists by his side. Gable didn't know the baby arrived before the tornado hit, and Branch had no intention of setting him straight.\n\n\"Far as I know no official record exists,\" he said. Marriages and deaths were sometimes recorded at the county office, but not always. Following the chaos left by the tornado, he doubted any vital statistics made it into official records.\n\nA look of annoyance crossed Gable's face. \"Yeah, I'm sure you're right. But I was hoping I could get a doctor or someone to sign a statement. You know, saying what happened and all.\"\n\n\"'Fraid you're out of luck there. Dr. Harris died five years ago.\"\n\n\"Really? That's a shame.\" He cleared his throat. \"Maybe you can sign.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"It's got to be someone in authority. You're the sheriff. You knew Dottie. You knew she was carrying a child when she died. Who better than you to sign?\"\n\nBranch stiffened. Shock quickly gave way to fury. Suddenly it seemed like there wasn't enough air to breathe in the whole of Kansas. Sign a statement that Andy was dead? He could no sooner do that than deny God's existence.\n\n\"I can't talk about this right now.\" He nodded at his wife's grave. \"Gotta go. Got work to do.\" He turned and stalked away but not quick enough.\n\n\"Are you saying you won't help me?\" Gable called after him.\n\nBranch stopped midstep, his back ramrod straight and throat dry as kindling wood. Before him lay Dorothy's grave. Dorothy, Andy's real mother. Behind was the resting place of his wife, Hannah, who had in her own special way given Andy life, too.\n\nHe turned to the one man in the world he didn't want to face. Out of respect for the two deceased women, he kept his voice low but made no effort to hide his contempt. \"You left her. You left your wife.\" Not trusting himself to say more, he walked away with quick, angry steps.\n\nThis time Gable let him go without comment.\n\nMounting his horse, Branch gripped the reins until his fingers turned white. From atop his saddle he could still see Gable watching him, their gazes colliding like sabers over the graves of their wives.\n\nWhat a nightmare! One moment everything was fine and the next... It was like living through the tornado all over again.\n\nPressing his legs against his horse's side, Branch rode away. God, why did You let this happen? Why now, God, why now?\n\nWhere money was concerned Gable was like a hound dog. He wouldn't give up until he got what he came for. The only way to get rid of him was to sign the statement he asked for claiming Andy was dead. That meant the money would go to Andy's ne'er-do-well father. Dorothy would no doubt turn over in her grave.\n\nStill, he was tempted to do what Gable asked of him. Once the man had the money in hand, he would no doubt leave and never come back. Oh, yes, he was tempted.\n\nBut how in good conscience could he do such a thing? How in the name of Sam Hill could he not?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nKatie was assigned to work the counter that morning, and the first customer of the day was an old woman with a cane. She was a regular, but this was the first Katie had served her. The woman seemed to have difficulty seating herself on a stool.\n\n\"Would you be more comfortable at a table?\" Katie asked.\n\n\"That's all right, dearie. I like sitting here at the counter. If my Harry was alive today, this is where he would sit. And he'd want what I want.\"\n\n\"Starting with a cup of hot coffee, the stronger, the better. Am I right?\"\n\nThe woman laughed. She wore her age like a shawl, hugging her years to her with a frown and throwing them off with a smile. \"Indeed you are. How did you know?\"\n\n\"Only serious coffee drinkers sit at the counter.\" Katie hadn't been on the job long, but already she'd observed certain behavior patterns among some of the customers.\n\nThe widow stretched her hand across the counter. \"You can call me Mrs. Bracegirdle.\"\n\nKatie took the small, parched hand in her own and gave it a gentle shake before releasing it. \"My name is Katie.\"\n\n\"Nice meeting you, Katie.\"\n\n\"You, too. You're all dressed up. It must be a special occasion.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle's bright purple dress was an eye-opener, as was her matching boat-shaped hat. The feathers bowed with each nod of her head like actors on a stage.\n\nThe worn face caved in with a near toothless smile. \"Dearie, when you're my age, every day is special.\"\n\nKatie laughed as she turned to the coffee urn. After filling a cup, she placed it on the counter. \"You're here early.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle laid her cane on the empty stool next to her. \"Well, who can sleep with all that racket?\"\n\n\"Racket?\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle leaned over the counter and lowered her voice. \"There's this cat who sings opera. Rigoletto, I think, though I'm no expert. My husband and I traveled abroad before the war, and we saw several operas, but it's been years. All I can tell you is that the cat is a soprano.\"\n\n\"It's probably not a tomcat, then,\" Katie said.\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle laughed. \"Probably not.\"\n\nThe woman might be off her rocker, but Katie couldn't help but like her. \"We have a cat problem, too. His name is Spook Cat, and he sneaks in at night and eats pie. He also locked me out.\"\n\n\"Is that so? Hmm. Maybe we should get your cat and mine together.\"\n\n\"Only if your cat promises not to teach ours opera.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle's thin shoulders shook with girlish giggles and the feathers curtsied. She picked up the bill of fare and perused it. \"I told Branch about the cat, but I don't think he believes me.\"\n\nAt mention of Branch's name Katie's heart took an unexpected leap. Oh no you don't. You're not going to read more into last night than was there. Branch stayed with her simply because he didn't want another murder to solve. That was the reason. The only reason.\n\nThe thought did little to relieve her mind. Twice she'd fallen in love with men who didn't seem to know she was alive. One ended up with her best friend and the other married her more attractive sister. Not only did that bring her more heartache than she thought possible, it made her question her own worth. At least as a Pinkerton detective she was judged on merit and not appearances.\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle closed the menu. \"I think I'll have my usual flapjacks with sausage,\" she said.\n\nKatie called the order to the kitchen and turned back to her customer.\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle took a sip of her coffee, her rheumy eyes studying Katie. \"I've known him all his life, you know.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry. Who have you known?\"\n\n\"Why, Branch, of course.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" This time Katie's heart stayed in place, but her breath caught in her throat.\n\n\"Darling boy, he was. Always had a big smile. And so polite. Terrible thing what happened.\"\n\n\"What happened?\" Katie hated herself for asking, but her detective instincts wouldn't let a statement like that go unchallenged. Nor would her womanly curiosity.\n\n\"The tornado. Ripped this town in two and killed almost a dozen people, including Branch's wife.\"\n\n\"How awful,\" Katie murmured, not letting on that she knew about his wife. Better to let the old woman talk. Branch had seemed reluctant to go into details. Apparently, it still hurt.\n\n\"Awful doesn't begin to describe it. It happened in '70 or '71.\" She thought a moment. \"No, it has to be '72. Come to think of it, Friday will be the eight-year anniversary.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"My, where does the time go? I swear, when you get to be my age the days go by in twos and threes.\"\n\n\"What was his wife like?\" Katie asked, the question seeming to pop out of her.\n\n\"Hannah Whitman?\" The woman thought a moment. \"She was a real beauty, that one, and always had a kind word for everyone.\"\n\nKatie felt her spirits drop. Of course his wife had been a beauty. Would a man like Branch Whitman marry a woman who wasn't? She doubted it.\n\n\"Patches and logs,\" Chef Gassy yelled out from the window behind her, his accent turning the simple phrase into an unappetizing ashes and loo.\n\nKatie turned and lifted the plate of flapjacks and sausages from the pass-through. \"Here you go,\" she said, setting it in front of Mrs. Bracegirdle.\n\nThe woman reached for the syrup and continued the conversation without pause. \"He hasn't even looked at another woman since his wife died. If you ask me, it's a crying shame. A handsome man like that going to waste.\"\n\n\"He must have loved her very much,\" Katie said.\n\n\"Yes, he did. We all did.\"\n\nKatie wanted to hear more. A lot more. But the train rumbled into the station early, rattling dishes and windows and causing a flurry of activity around her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "Branch had planned to go straight to his office following his visit to the cemetery. Instead he rode his horse to the Calico Community Church.\n\nNever before had he felt it necessary to seek the Reverend Bushwell's counsel. Normally, he worked things out for himself, seeking God's help through prayer. That's how he'd gotten through Hannah's death. That's how he'd gotten through a lot of problems. But today God seemed far away, leaving him to feel like a drowning man about to go under for the third time.\n\nReverend Bushwell greeted him with outstretched hand. \"What brings you here today?\" An older man with long white sideburns, he peered through pince-nez eyeglasses with an inquiring look. \"Something serious, I see.\"\n\nBranch nodded as he shook the minister's hand. \"I'm afraid it is serious. Is this a good time?\"\n\n\"It's always a good time to see you. Come in, come in.\" He motioned Branch inside with a wave of his hand.\n\nBranch followed him into the cool interior of the church. They entered a small office and library located to the left of the narthex.\n\n\"Have a seat.\"\n\nBranch lowered his frame onto the indicated chair, and the leather cushion whooshed beneath his weight. Instead of taking his place behind the desk, Bushwell drew a chair next to Branch's and sat.\n\n\"So what's put that frown on your face? Andy okay?\"\n\n\"Andy's fine. At least for now.\"\n\nThe reverend's bushy eyebrows rose. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"Gable Clayborn is alive.\"\n\nBushwell sat back in his chair. \"What?\"\n\nBranch quickly told him about his early-morning encounter at the cemetery.\n\nThe reverend was momentarily speechless. Shaking his head, he finally spoke. \"But his wife said he'd been in an accident and died. Sat in that very chair you're sitting in and told me as much.\"\n\n\"She told me the same thing. Far as I know it's what she told everyone. She even donned widow's weeds.\" Branch felt a throbbing in his temple. Elbows on his lap, he rubbed his forehead with his fingers. \"The truth was, he ran out on her.\"\n\nThe preacher clucked his tongue. \"So what did he say when you told him about his son?\"\n\nBranch pulled his hands away from his face. \"That's just it. I didn't tell him. I can't.\"\n\nThe reverend's eyebrows inched upward. \"He'll find out soon enough.\"\n\n\"Only two people know the truth.\" He pinched his forehead with two fingers. It was only two people, wasn't it? So much confusion existed following the tornado, it still seemed like a blur. \"Far as I know you and Mrs. Bracegirdle are the only two who know. I trust you to keep a confidence. Not so sure about her. She hasn't been acting herself lately. Has all kinds of illusions. I don't know if she even remembers what happened back then. You've talked to her. What do you think?\"\n\nBushwell studied him. \"I think the bigger question is whether you can live with the secret knowing what you now know.\"\n\n\"It's not about me. It's about what's best for Andy.\"\n\nA skeptical look crossed the older man's face. \"The boy will be living a lie, too. Whether or not he knows it.\"\n\n\"The man doesn't deserve a son.\" He and Hannah had tried for three years to have a child, and no amount of praying had helped. Yet God saw fit to bless a scoundrel like Clayborn. It didn't seem right. \"He certainly doesn't deserve a son like Andy.\"\n\nThe reverend rubbed his hands together. \"What about the boy? Do you ever intend to tell him about his real parents?\"\n\n\"I planned on telling him when he was older. Now I'm not so sure that's a good idea.\"\n\n\"The truth always comes out in the end, and not always the way we want or expect.\"\n\n\"That's the chance I'll have to take.\" Branch blew out his breath. \"There's more.\" He explained about the trust. \"He wants me to sign a document that states the infant died with his mother. If I sign it, he'll get his hands on the money that rightfully belongs to Andy.\"\n\n\"And if you don't sign it?\"\n\n\"He'll probably ask for your signature. I'm afraid that will put you in an awkward position.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"The only way out is for me to do what he wants and sign the blasted thing.\"\n\n\"Can you live with that?\" the reverend asked.\n\n\"I don't see that I have a choice. With a little luck, Clayborn will leave and we'll never see him again.\"\n\n\"I can't tell you what to do,\" Bushwell said. \"But I can tell you what the Bible says about living in darkness. And that darkness almost always begins with a lie.\"\n\n\"I didn't know Clayborn was alive.\" Would he have done things any differently had he known? Probably not.\n\n\"You know now,\" Bushwell said. \"Signing that document would be signing your name to a falsehood. No one can have a relationship with God while living a lie.\"\n\n\"What you're asking me to do is choose between God and my son.\"\n\nThe reverend adjusted his glasses. \"Your situation reminds me of Abraham. Remember him? As proof of his faith, God asked him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.\"\n\n\"If God is testing me, then I'm afraid I'm no Abraham.\"\n\n\"We don't always know how deep our faith is until we're put to the test.\"\n\n\"So you're saying I need to tell Clayborn the truth.\"\n\n\"What I'm saying, Branch, is the only way out of this mess is to put your trust in the Lord.\"\n\nBranch left the church feeling more unsettled than ever. He wasn't sure he could trust anyone with the fate of his son. God included." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nThe breakfast rush over, Katie yawned as she finished cleaning her station. Culpepper sat at the end of the counter, tallying up the receipts from breakfast. Though the wind had stopped, his eyes were still watery and his nose cherry red. He couldn't have looked worse had he rolled in an onion patch, and she couldn't help but feel sorry for him.\n\nHer body still aching from the night spent in the alley, she drained the last of the coffee from the urn into a coffeepot. Fred Harvey insisted the coffee be made fresh before each meal.\n\nCatching a glimpse of herself in the silver urn, she held her breath. She was paler than usual from lack of sleep. Her pallor made her hair look more red, but her eyes were bright as two shiny gems.\n\nHow incredulous to think that Branch had stayed with her through the night. No one had ever done such a thing, not even when she was a child.\n\nAt age seven she became deathly ill with pneumonia. Her fever spiked, and if it hadn't been for her sisters forcing liquids down her throat, she might not have survived. She was stunned to learn later that though she was in danger of not making it through the night, her pa had gone as usual to his favorite saloon.\n\nNo wonder Branch's kind gesture had touched her like no other. But that's all it was: just a kind deed, and thinking it anything more was a waste of time.\n\nHer thoughts scattered at the sound of Culpepper's voice.\n\n\"Fifty-eight meals in thirty minutes,\" he announced with a thick, frog-like voice. He sounded a bit disappointed, but that was normal for him. The record was seventy-six meals, and he lived for the day that record was broken.\n\nKnowing the hard work involved, Katie hoped that day wouldn't come to pass until after she was long gone.\n\n\"More coffee?\" she asked. \"There's just a little bit left.\" She needed to empty the pot and make fresh.\n\nFor answer he held up his cup.\n\nAs she poured the coffee she couldn't help but notice his fingernails. Harvey rules demanded waitresses keep fingernails clean and trimmed. Apparently, the same rules didn't apply to male employees for his nails were black with... what? Ink, grease, dirt? Since he lived at the boardinghouse that seemed odd.\n\n\"Are you a gardener?\" she asked.\n\nHe set his cup down and reached for the sugar. \"What?\"\n\n\"I just asked if you like to garden.\"\n\n\"Not with my hay fever.\"\n\nShe considered other possibilities and finally decided it was probably shoe polish from dyeing his hair.\n\nA movement outside drew her attention to the window. A distinguished-looking man stood outside talking to the train master.\n\nHer mouth dropped open. Oh no! Setting the coffeepot down, she whirled about and ran all the way to the kitchen yelling, \"The British are coming!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "No sooner was the code for Mr. Harvey out of her mouth than the kitchen staff sprang into action.\n\nChef Gassy pulled a pitcher of orange juice out of the icebox and shoved it into her hands. \"Hide it!\"\n\nKatie turned quickly, and the beverage spilled all over her apron. Mr. Harvey insisted that orange juice be freshly squeezed as needed. Any found in the icebox was a clear violation of the rules, and heads would surely roll.\n\nBefore she had time to hide the evidence, Mr. Harvey strolled into the kitchen dressed to the nines in a dark suit and top hat. He walked with the elegance of the British, but his sharp gaze was as bold and alert as any detective on the scene of a crime.\n\nKatie froze in place. Dumping the juice into the sink was no longer an option. Fortunately, she stood behind a counter, allowing her to hold the pitcher out of sight, at least temporarily.\n\nHarvey doffed his hat. \"Good morning,\" he said in his clipped English accent and immediately set to work.\n\nHe wrapped a clean white handkerchief around his fingers and ran them along the cupboard doors and counters. He checked the icebox, oven, and smoker. As he worked, Katie moved clockwise around the kitchen counter, keeping herself hidden from the waist down.\n\nKatie had heard horror stories about past inspections. Tully said he once pulled a tablecloth off a table, sending dishes flying, simply because the silverware wasn't correctly aligned.\n\nMr. Harvey stepped past Cissy and walked into the pantry. In addition to her duties of making salad and sandwiches for the porter, engineer, and other train crew, Cissy was required to keep the pantry in order. Now as she stood twisting the corner of her apron she looked about to burst into tears. Hoping to ease the girl's mind, Katie smiled at her, but the girl failed to respond.\n\nMeanwhile, Katie was still stuck with the pitcher. The pantry offered a full view of the sink, so dumping the juice down the drain was out of the question.\n\nHer gaze lit on the large kettle of pea soup simmering on the stove. With no time to spare, she lifted the lid and poured the juice into the kettle. Ignoring the look of horror on Gassy's face, she quickly hid the empty pitcher in the oven, which Harvey had already inspected, and joined the other girls.\n\nMr. Harvey stepped out of the pantry. \"Well done,\" he said. Cissy, who looked like she'd been holding her breath, immediately burst into tears.\n\nWith a startled look, he handed her a clean linen handkerchief and moved away, his attention now on the line of employees.\n\nKatie's stomach knotted. She didn't have a chance to don a clean apron like the others, and the wet orange spot now seemed the size of Texas.\n\nHarvey spoke in a friendly tone as he stopped to talk to Tully. Mary-Lou would be next to undergo inspection and then Katie.\n\nJust as Harvey moved away from Mary-Lou, Chef Gassy stepped directly in front of Katie, hiding her spotted apron from view. \"Vould you care for some refreshment, Monsieur Harvey?\" he asked.\n\nHarvey sniffed the air. \"How about some of that English pea soup? It smells especially good today.\"\n\nKatie held her breath. Dear God, not the soup. Anything but the soup...\n\nIn his usual animated way, Chef Gassy tried his best to steer Harvey toward another choice, but Harvey's mind was made up. No one could talk him out of his favorite soup.\n\nGassy muttered something under his breath in his native tongue, but out loud he said, \"Very vell. Tully, escort Monsieur Harvey to the dining room.\"\n\n\"No need to bother,\" Mr. Harvey said. \"I'll eat right there.\" He moved to the table normally reserved for staff and pulled out a chair.\n\nThe chef's ploy worked inasmuch as Harvey seemed to have forgotten the inspection. But that offered small comfort to Katie. The owner was particular about the food, and she dreaded what he would do upon discovering his prize pea soup had been tampered with.\n\nMeanwhile, Katie pulled off her apron and donned a clean one while the other girls scampered to make him comfortable. Tully supplied him with silverware while Mary-Lou laid a neatly folded napkin by his side.\n\nLooking almost as green as the soup he spooned into a bowl, Chef Gassy glared at Katie.\n\nThe chef's demeanor caught Mary-Lou's attention, and she shot a questioning look at Katie.\n\nKatie held up her dirty apron and motioned to the soup pot.\n\nMary-Lou's mouth dropped open, and a look of horror crossed her face.\n\nChef Gassy set the bowl in front of Mr. Harvey and stepped back as if expecting the soup to explode.\n\n\"Ah, my favorite,\" Harvey said.\n\nThe Englishman picked up his spoon, and Katie's stomach clenched. Everyone watched as Mr. Harvey dipped the spoon into the soup, blew on it gently, and lifted it to his mouth.\n\nHe closed his eyes and smacked his lips. An eternity passed, or so it seemed, before his eyes opened and a puzzled expression fleeted across his face. He slanted his head, scooped up another spoonful, and again brought it to his mouth.\n\nFinally, he set his spoon down and drew the napkin to his lips. \"This is the best soup I ever tasted.\"\n\nAir rushed from Katie's lungs, and Chef Gassy broke into a grin that practically reached his ears. Winking at Katie, he wrung his hands together like a mad scientist conducting an experiment.\n\n\"It's a special recipe all the vay from France.\"\n\n\"Is that so?\" Mr. Harvey looked impressed. \"I never thought to say this, but the French certainly know how to make English pea soup.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nBranch didn't see hide nor hair of Gable for three days. Where he was staying Branch had no idea. He certainly wasn't at the hotel or boardinghouse. Maybe he'd left town. Now wouldn't that be an answer to his prayers?\n\nStill, it was with grave concern that he walked to the Harvey House dining room late that Friday afternoon with his young son by his side.\n\nThey were early, and he planned it that way. The train wasn't due in for another hour or more. He hoped that would work in his favor and the staff would allow him to celebrate his son's birthday without having to don a straitjacket.\n\nA quick glance around relieved his mind. No sign of Gable. The restaurant was empty except for employees still putting the finishing touches on tables already set with spotless white cloths and vases of fresh flowers.\n\nHis gaze immediately lit on Katie, talking to the others in back of the room.\n\nOddly enough, the mere sight of her made him forget his worries about Gable, and he relaxed for the first time in days. She looked every bit as soft and desirable today as she had the night he held her in his arms. He had a hard time taking his gaze off her.\n\nSpotting him, she broke away from the small group and hurried over to where he and Andy stood. She greeted him warmly, but her pretty smile was so intriguing he could only nod in response.\n\n\"And this must be Andy,\" she continued. Taking Andy's hand in hers, she gave it a gentle shake. \"How do you do? My name is Miss Katie.\" She released his son's hand and straightened. \"So what's the occasion?\"\n\nNormally shy in front of strangers, Andy looked almost as intrigued by the redheaded woman as Branch was. Like father, like son.\n\n\"It's my birthday,\" Andy said, grinning.\n\n\"Your birthday!\" Katie made it sound like the day should be declared a national holiday. \"Well, you've come to the right place to celebrate. How old are you, Andy?\"\n\n\"I'm eight.\"\n\n\"Oh my.\" She pressed her hands together. \"Such a big boy for eight.\"\n\nActually, Andy was small for his age, mainly because he was such a picky eater. He practically drove Miss Chloe up the wall with his poor eating habits.\n\nKatie tapped her finger on her chin as she studied him. \"An important occasion like this requires a certain dress. But not to worry. I have the perfect coat for you.\"\n\nBranch opened his mouth to protest when he realized she was addressing his son.\n\nShe led the boy over to the coatrack and pulled out the shortest coat there. \"It might be a tad big, but I think it will do.\"\n\nThe coat practically buried Andy. It reached his knees, and the sleeves were way too long, but he didn't seem to notice as he gazed into the mirror. Instead, a slow grin inched across his face.\n\nThe smile did Branch's heart good. Not only did the boy tend to be shy around strangers, he was serious minded with a lot of unfounded fears. Yet, here he was all smiles for a woman he'd only just met.\n\n\"Here, let me fix your sleeves.\" She rolled the cuffs to his elbows and straightened his collar. Branch was so busy watching his son's delighted face he failed to notice that her attention was now on him.\n\n\"It's your turn,\" she said, pulling another coat off a wooden peg.\n\n\"I'm not wearing\u2014\"\n\n\"But you have to, Pa,\" Andy said. \"It's my birthday.\"\n\nSomething flickered in the depths of Katie's eyes. \"You were saying?\"\n\nBranch hesitated. His choice was to stand up for male emancipation or give in like a lassoed calf.\n\nShe had him over a barrel, and he couldn't do a thing about it\u2014except to disappoint his son. That he would never do, especially on his birthday. Feigning good humor, Branch turned and slipped his arms through the sleeves of the coat she held up for him.\n\nThe coat was ridiculously small, and he stood like a scarecrow with his arms spread out.\n\nAndy giggled in delight. \"Mine's too big and yours is too little,\" he said. \"Isn't that funny?\"\n\n\"Hilarious,\" Branch muttered.\n\nKatie looked like she was trying to keep a straight face. \"I think you both look like codfish.\" As an aside to Andy she said, \"That's restaurant talk for a well-dressed diner.\"\n\n\"I feel more like a sardine packed in a can,\" Branch grumbled.\n\nThis time Andy laughed so loud the other three Harvey girls stopped what they were doing to stare.\n\n\"Come along and I'll show you to your table,\" Katie said, acting all businesslike for her coworkers' benefit. In a softer voice for Branch's ears only, she asked, \"Would you rather another waitress serve you?\"\n\n\"I think Andy would object to that.\"\n\n\"And you? Would you object?\"\n\nHis gaze met hers, and something snapped between\u2014a spark of lightning. \"Should I?\"\n\n\"Most definitely.\" She pulled out a chair and held it for Andy. She then handed out bills of fare, one for him and one for Andy.\n\n\"I'll have coffee,\" Branch said.\n\n\"One cup of joe coming up. And what about you, young man? Would you like some of our splendiferous moo juice?\"\n\nAndy frowned. \"What's moo juice?\"\n\n\"Why, it's milk, of course.\"\n\nAndy giggled, his shoulders shaking with delight. He was obviously having the time of his life.\n\n\"Tonight's special is twelve alive in a shell.\" She lowered her voice to a conspirator's whisper. \"Those are oysters, and they're not the friendly type.\" Louder she said, \"But I recommend Bossy in the bowl...\" Covering her mouth with her hand as if telling a secret, she interpreted. \"That's beef stew.\" She cited several other options.\n\nAndy hung on to her every word as she explained the meaning of the strange lingo.\n\nAt one point his eyes almost popped out of his head. \"Are those real bullets?\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Bullets are what we call baked beans.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me,\" Branch said.\n\nAndy's head bobbed up and down. \"I want some bullets, too.\"\n\n\"Two orders of beef on the hoof and bullets coming up,\" she said as she headed for the kitchen.\n\n\"And don't forget my moo juice,\" Andy called after her.\n\nBranch was so busy watching his son's bright face he failed to notice that someone else had entered the dining room.\n\n\"Fancy meeting you here.\"\n\nGable's voice sent chills down Branch's spine. Through sheer determination he was able to manage a polite nod. The man had shaved off his beard, and his hair was now neatly trimmed. His appearance was greatly improved, but then, so was his resemblance to Andy. They had the same color hair and similar brown eyes.\n\nIcy fingers clutched Branch's heart, and his muscles tightened. \"I thought you'd left town.\"\n\n\"Nope. Just checking out the old homestead. Nothing left of the place. The current owners have rebuilt. Dottie would have loved the new house.\"\n\nBranch clenched his hands tight. He had no patience with men who deserted their families. In his book, that meant Gable had no right talking about his wife's likes and dislikes. He had no right mentioning her name at all.\n\nGable's gaze fell on Andy. \"And who do we have here?\"\n\n\"This is my son, Andy.\" A knifelike pain shot through his middle as Gable leaned forward to shake Andy's hand.\n\n\"Your son, eh?\"\n\n\"It's my birthday,\" Andy said with a bright smile.\n\n\"Is that so? How old are you?\"\n\n\"I'm eight.\"\n\n\"Eight, huh? Well, happy birthday.\"\n\nIf Gable thought there was anything significant about Andy's age it didn't show. Instead he turned back to Branch. \"Didn't know you had a son.\"\n\nBranch masked his inner turmoil behind a cool, calm voice. \"I guess you didn't stick around long enough to find out.\"\n\n\"Guess not.\" Gable rubbed his chin. \"Do you mind if I join you?\"\n\nBranch clamped down on his jaw. He didn't want Gable anywhere near Andy. Didn't want him in the same town as Andy. But there really was no way to turn down his request without making a scene.\n\nHe gave a curt nod, but before Gable took a seat, Katie suddenly appeared and stopped him with a hand to his arm. \"I'm sorry, sir. These seats are reserved.\" Her smile satisfied Harvey's requirements but was far from the smile Branch had come to know.\n\nGable frowned. \"Reserved?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"The train will be in shortly. If you like, I can show you to another table.\"\n\n\"That's all right. I'll get something to eat at the hotel.\" He glanced at Branch. \"See you around.\" And just like that he left.\n\nBranch's body sagged against the back of his chair. Crazy as it sounded, he had a mind to hug Katie for sending Gable away. She couldn't possibly know what she'd done. Or how grateful he was. Still, he decided it best to say nothing. It would only make that curious mind of hers go to work, and that's the last thing he needed.\n\nKatie lifted a glass of milk from her tray and set it on the table in front of Andy. \"Moo juice for you,\" she said. \"And our very special beef on the hoof and bullets.\" She then set two plates on the table.\n\n\"Smells good,\" Branch said.\n\nAndy waited for Branch to give a quick blessing before picking up his glass. He took a big gulp then set to work on his meal.\n\nBranch was surprised to see Andy diving into his food with such enthusiasm. Miss Chloe should see him now. On second thought, maybe not. She would only take the boy's sudden interest in food as an affront to her cooking.\n\nKatie moved to Branch's side, and he caught a faint smell of perfume. It wasn't as strong as when he held her in his arms, but still pleasant. \"And a joe for you,\" she said. As she poured his coffee, she whispered, \"Getting rid of your unwanted guest was my way of thanking you for the other night.\"\n\nHe sat back to look at her. \"How did you know?\" he mouthed.\n\nBut already she had moved away and was fussing over Andy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Chapter 27\n\nThat night like clockwork Miss Thatcher left the house. It was after eleven. Watching from the dark shadows of the breakfast room, Katie counted to ten before racing up the stairs to the dorm matron's room.\n\nThe curtains fluttered in the soft breeze, allowing just enough gas streetlight into the room to locate the box of safety matches on the nightstand. After lighting the kerosene lamp, she glanced around.\n\nThe room was almost identical to the one she shared with Mary-Lou with one exception: it had only a single bed. Other than the rumpled blankets, the room seemed strangely vacant. Whereas the other bedrooms were decorated with photographs, vases of flowers, books, and other keepsakes, this room was as devoid of personality as its occupant.\n\nShe started her search with the large oak bureau, checking each drawer one by one. The expected corsets, bloomers, and stockings were folded and neatly stacked. She found nothing of a personal nature except clothes.\n\nNext she flung open the paneled wardrobe doors. Plain black and gray dresses hung from wooden pegs. A pair of high-button shoes stood side by side at the foot of the bureau, the pointed toes dating them back to the War between the States. On top, band boxes held an assortment of hats, most of them sadly out of style. The room's main purpose seemed to be storing articles from the past, much like a museum.\n\nShe closed the doors and crossed to the steamer trunk beneath the windowsill. The flat-top traveling chest was unlocked. She raised the lid, releasing the faint smell of cedar. Folded neatly inside was a wedding gown.\n\nThe unexpected find made her pause for a moment before reaching inside to touch the beautiful satin bodice. The top was embroidered with imitation pearls and edged in delicate lace. The skirt was full and meant to be worn over a hoopskirt. That dated the gown back to the war years.\n\nA vision of Miss Thatcher dancing beneath the moonlight flashed through her mind. Only this time it was a younger, happier bride she pictured, waltzing in the arms of a handsome groom.\n\nSo what happened? Why the dress and no husband? Why did Miss Thatcher's wedding never take place? Had her fianc\u00e9 died in the war like so many other young men? Possibly.\n\nKatie sighed. It seemed she had more in common with the strange dorm matron than she would have guessed. Dreams of her own wedding had never materialized, though she'd not been so close as to order a dress. God had made it clear that He had other plans for her life, and none involved husband and children, no matter how much she'd wished otherwise.\n\nWhy, oh why, did she always fall in love with men who could never love her back? Matthew Spacey had been the first. Then Nathan and now Branch...\n\nAlarmed by the unexpected thought, she gulped. She didn't mean Branch. She'd learned her lesson in the past and wouldn't make the same mistake again. He was still in love with his wife. Even if he wasn't, he would never fall for a graceless redheaded woman\u2014a Pinkerton detective, no less. No, falling in love with Branch was strictly out of the question.\n\nThe lamplight hissed and flickered, bringing her out of her reverie. She would have to hurry to finish her search before the lamp ran out of fuel or the room's inhabitant returned.\n\nShe reached into the trunk. Hidden among the satiny folds was what looked like a diary. She lifted the leather-bound book and examined it by the lamp's dim light. A tiny gold lock prevented her from skimming the pages.\n\nReturning the diary to the chest, she lowered the lid and stood. Hands at her waist, she glanced around the room before checking under the bed. Finding nothing of interest, she turned off the light and quickly left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "One day later, Branch walked into the breakfast room, and Katie's heart soared. It was early, and the railroad workers had yet to arrive.\n\nHe paused at the entrance, a newspaper tucked under his arm. His gaze swept the room before zeroing in on her and bringing a flush to her face.\n\nHe then made a beeline for the counter. No smiles today. Instead he looked serious as a signpost. He appeared not only disgruntled but tired. The fine lines in his forehead and around his eyes suggested he'd had little or no sleep.\n\nHe straddled a stool, and she pulled a clean cup and saucer out from under the counter. \"You're up and about early.\"\n\nHe laid the newspaper on the counter and reached into his vest pocket. \"You know what they say about the early bird.\" He slid something across the counter. It was the note found on her pillow. The note reminded her that she had yet to return the Harvey file to him.\n\nShe filled his cup and set it in front of him, puzzled by both his appearance and remote eyes. Instead of his usual open stance he sat hunched over as if to keep everything in\u2014or maybe everything out.\n\n\"Getting up early didn't do much for the worm,\" she said, hoping to tease a smile out of him. When none came, she picked up the note and slipped it into her pocket.\n\n\"In that case, I'll settle for the usual,\" he said. \"Apple pie.\"\n\nThinking he was kidding, she placed her hand at her waist. \"For breakfast?\" She was putting on a good show, and anyone watching would never guess how fast her heart was beating beneath her bibbed apron.\n\nHe shrugged. \"I believe in starting my day with dessert.\" His congenial voice hardly seemed to go with his guarded expression. \"And you owe me two pieces, remember?\"\n\n\"I remember,\" she said, and she filled his cup. Instead of pie, she'd served him and his son cake, complete with a candle.\n\nShe set the coffeepot down. \"Anything?\" she whispered, patting her pocket.\n\nHe shook his head. It was no more than she expected. Still, she couldn't help but feel disappointed.\n\nHe sipped his coffee as he watched her. \"The other night... How did you know to get rid of my unwanted company?\"\n\n\"Are you talking about Mr. Gable Jacob Clayborn?\"\n\nBranch set his cup down. \"Now looka there. The lady makes it her business to find out the man's full name.\" His eyes narrowed. \"How did you know he wasn't welcome at my table? Don't tell me your Pinkerton bosses taught you to read minds.\"\n\n\"A woman knows these things.\" She'd have to be blind not to have seen the look on Branch's face as the two men talked.\n\n\"Is that so?\" He took another sip of coffee, but his gaze remained on Katie. Oddly enough, it was as if only the two of them were in the restaurant. Every word and look they exchanged held multiple meanings.\n\n\"What else do you know about him?\"\n\nIt pleased her that he thought she knew more, and she accepted it as a compliment to her investigative skills. \"Mr. Gable is a widower and served time in prison for embezzlement.\"\n\nBranch jerked his hand away from his cup. \"Embezzlement?\"\n\nShe nodded. The Pinkerton agency collected newspaper articles from around the country for the sole purpose of keeping track of criminals. Names were then cross-referenced with crimes and filed away for easy retrieval. It wasn't a perfect system by any means as it depended on lawmen to send in relevant clippings, but it was better than nothing.\n\n\"Stole from a mine owner in Colorado.\" Since she had received a telegram from headquarters in answer to her query, she was able to cite the date and place of his birth, past employers, and last-known address, all retrieved from the newspaper files. The Pinkerton logo We never sleep proved to be true in more ways than one.\n\nShe doubted she told Branch any more than he already knew or suspected, but it gave her great pleasure to watch his eyebrows inch up in astonishment as she cited facts.\n\nHis surprised expression soon gave way to suspicion. \"Why would you bother checking up on him?\"\n\n\"The way you were acting, I thought perhaps he was a suspect in the Harvey case.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Nope. Not a suspect.\"\n\nHe pretty much confirmed what she'd already found out. Clayborn wasn't even in town when the killings took place. She waited for him to say more, and when he didn't, she asked, \"Anything else you wish to know about him?\"\n\n\"No, that will do,\" he said. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he corrected himself. \"Well, maybe one thing. Do you know anything that might make him unsuitable for certain activities? Marriage, for example?\"\n\nShe lifted an eyebrow. What an odd question. \"Only that he was working in Montana at the time of his wife's death. It's my guess he walked out on her.\"\n\nHe seemed to consider her answer a moment before asking his next question. \"What about children? Anything that would indicate he'd make an unsuitable parent?\"\n\nShe slanted her head. Far as she knew, Mr. Clayborn didn't have any children. So what was Branch really asking? And why? \"You don't think spending time in jail and desertion makes him unfit for parenthood?\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" he said. \"But given that criteria, half the men in the West would be rendered unfit.\"\n\n\"Only half?\"\n\nHe answered her question with a shrug. Something definitely didn't sit right with him.\n\nShe picked up a knife and sliced the pie. Fred Harvey insisted that pies be cut in fourths and not eighths like other restaurants. The piece filled the plate, oozing a buttery syrup along with a sweet cinnamon smell.\n\nHoping the pie would put him in a better mood, she pushed the plate toward him, and he reached for his fork.\n\n\"Looks good.\"\n\n\"I stayed up all night baking it,\" she replied.\n\n\"Did you now?\" He looked at her for a moment. Recalling the warmth of his arms and the strength of his shoulder, she averted her gaze.\n\n\"Sounds like you've been busy,\" he said. \"Anything else you can tell me?\"\n\nShe chanced another look at him. \"About Mr. Clayborn?\"\n\n\"About anything.\"\n\n\"That's all I can tell you, but I do have a question,\" she said. \"What's with you and Clayborn?\"\n\n\"Just some old business.\" His voice was curt, his look dark, his meaning clear. He was done talking about Clayborn and intent upon pushing her away.\n\n\"That covers a lot of territory,\" she said, refusing to take the hint.\n\nHe took a bite of pie, his manner as precise as a watchmaker. The barrier between them seemed formidable as a chasm too wide to cross.\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"Thank you,\" she said, thinking a change of subject might help.\n\nHe lowered his fork. \"For what?\"\n\n\"For staying with me the other night.\"\n\nHis tight expression relaxed but only for an instant. \"I hope you learned your lesson.\"\n\n\"What lesson would that be?\" she asked.\n\nHe dabbed his mouth with a napkin. \"If you persist in meeting strange men at night, and sleeping in alleys, you're just asking for trouble.\"\n\n\"Trouble is what I came here to find.\"\n\nBefore he could respond, Okie-Sam walked up and slapped him on the back. \"Morning, Sheriff.\"\n\n\"Morning.\"\n\nGreeting Katie with a tip of his floppy hat, Okie-Sam sat on a stool next to Branch and rested his injured hand on the counter. Today he wore his hair loose, and it fell to his shoulders like a stringy red curtain. \"Always good to see our local lawman hard at work. So how you doing?\"\n\nBranch tossed a nod at Okie-Sam's bandaged hand. \"Better than you.\"\n\nOkie-Sam shrugged and turned his attention to Katie. \"I'll have what the sheriff's having.\"\n\nNo sooner did she serve Okie-Sam his pie than the rest of the local regulars arrived, including Long-Shot.\n\nBut even as Katie served the others she couldn't shake the feeling that Branch was sitting on a keg of dynamite about ready to explode. Maybe they both were." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "Chapter 28\n\nBranch felt bad for pushing Katie away emotionally if not physically, but it was for her own good as well as his. Holding her in his arms\u2014watching her sleep\u2014made him realize how easily he could fall in love with her. He wouldn't allow himself to go that route. It would be disastrous.\n\nShe was used to excitement and adventure. A town like this would bore her to tears. Just like it had bored Hannah.\n\nThat's why his wife kept working even though he'd begged her to quit. How he'd hated her leaving the house at night, but she'd refused to let him accompany her. \"No sense us both staying up all night,\" she'd say.\n\nHe'd had good reason to worry. Predatory Indian bands still roamed Kansas back in the early seventies. The town had not been attacked, but that didn't stop him from worrying.\n\nOnce she'd been robbed. Another time she'd been chased in horse and buggy by a gang of hoodlums, and still she refused to quit. It was the one thing they'd argued about. Her job had been a thorn that pricked holes into an otherwise perfect marriage.\n\nHe was no less worried about Katie's habit of leaving the Harvey House at night, but that was the least of it. Hannah had dealt mainly with expectant mothers and nervous fathers. Katie's job required her to rub noses with murderers, robbers, and other social misfits.\n\nIf anything happened to her...\n\nNope. Wasn't traveling down that road again. Not with Katie. Not with any woman.\n\nStill, there was no denying that Katie was a distraction, and that was the last thing he needed. Not with Clayborn watching him like a vulture.\n\nDid Clayborn suspect something? Hard to know. For certain he couldn't be put off much longer. Nor, apparently, did he intend to leave town without getting what he came for. Branch had already warned his housekeeper to keep Andy away from Clayborn, though he didn't explain why.\n\nHe considered all his options and always came back to the same thing: Clayborn understood money. That's about all he understood.\n\nBranch did a mental check of his assets and grimaced. He couldn't afford to pay off a church mouse, let alone a money-hungry mongrel like Clayborn.\n\nThe tornado had wiped him out business-wise, and it had taken years to get back on his feet. Not till the last year could the town afford to pay him a decent wage.\n\nA bank loan? He discounted the idea as soon as he thought it. His house was already mortgaged to the hilt. It was the money he'd lived on while the town was being rebuilt.\n\nIt would have been easier had he left like the others, but that would have meant leaving Hannah, and that he could never do. Her grave held him to the town like the roots of a tree.\n\nBut staying to rebuild Calico had been a mistake. Not only had it taken a toll physically, emotionally, and financially, but had he moved elsewhere he might never have come face-to-face with Clayborn.\n\nHe grimaced. No sense thinking about what he should and shouldn't have done. Concentrate on the present. That's what he had to do. Figure out how to handle Clayborn.\n\nOne thing was certain; he was quickly running out of time. How he knew that he couldn't say. It was just something he felt in his bones, as if some inner clock were ticking.\n\nAs for Katie, he best stay away from her while he still could." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Pen and paper in hand, Katie slipped outside through the main restaurant entrance. She left the other girls eating lunch in the employee dining area off the kitchen. Employees had only a thirty-minute lunch break, and she meant to make the most of hers.\n\nThe weather had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Earlier the air had seemed almost too heavy to breathe. Now a brisk wind tugged at her skirt and cut through her shirtwaist, bringing with it the smell of rain. Clouds gathered on the distant horizon dark as thick smoke. Flashes of lightning zigzagged downward followed by the mutter of thunder.\n\nTornado weather, Mary-Lou had announced over breakfast. Katie had never experienced an actual tornado, but recalling the aftermath of a twister that hit a Nebraska town days before she'd arrived on assignment, a shiver coursed through her.\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle's words echoed in her head: \"Ripped this town in two and killed almost a dozen people, including Branch's wife.\"\n\nNow, as always, whenever Branch came to mind she lingered over the thought like a mother over a newborn. What an awful thing to lose a wife in such a horrible way. He was lucky his son survived, but it couldn't be easy raising a youngster alone.\n\nMaybe that's why he had been so protective of Andy. He certainly looked ready to fight off an army when Clayborn asked to join his table. Not that she could blame him, of course, knowing what she now knew of the man. Still, she couldn't shake the feeling there was more to the story. A whole lot more.\n\nThe memory of Branch's expression when she told him what she knew about Clayborn puzzled her. Even as he sought information from her it felt like he was slamming a door in her face.\n\nNot that it mattered. Okay, maybe a little, but that was all she was willing to concede. Actually, he'd done her a favor by forcing a distance between them. His efforts had served as a reminder that her real purpose was to find a killer. Losing her heart along the way was not an option.\n\nWith a determined nod, she glanced around for a place to sit. She should have brought a wrap, but not wanting to waste time going to her room, she headed for the bench outside the railroad baggage room. The building at her back helped shield her from the wind.\n\nIgnoring both the clouds on the horizon and the ones in her heart, she pulled her notebook out of her purse along with a nib pen and bottle of ink. She set her writing supplies on the bench by her side.\n\nFinding the time to write the daily reports required by the Pinkerton agency was always a challenge, but this particular assignment made the task even more difficult. Just being seen with pen and paper brought Pickens flying to her side to demand the reason.\n\nPinkerton procedures required all communications be sent in cipher. Timelines had to be accurate and dialogue written exactly as spoken.\n\nIt worried her that she didn't have a tangible new lead or clue to add to today's report. No matter how many times she went over the facts in the case, she always came up empty.\n\nThere were many reasons that someone might resort to murder. Unless they were dealing with an insane killer or in this case, sleepwalker, one of them would surely apply. Greed and money topped the list, but neither victim had anything of value. Murder was often a crime of passion, but nothing suggested love or obsession was involved.\n\nProtecting something or someone was another motive for murder. Did Ginger and Priscilla know something that put them in harm's way? A secret of some sort?\n\nThe wind suddenly grew stronger, rustling the pages of her notebook and lifting her skirt above her ankles. Just as she closed the writing tablet, a gust of wind ripped it out of her hands. Oh no!\n\nJumping to her feet, she chased after it. Her notes were written in code, but still, she couldn't take the chance on someone finding them.\n\nHopping off the platform, she ran along the train tracks, the wind at her back. The notebook blew against the water tower where she was able to retrieve it, but by then most of the pages had been ripped away.\n\nJust as she turned toward the Harvey House, she noticed a young boy chasing his hat. Something was vaguely familiar about him. She brushed her hair away from her face and narrowed her eyes.\n\n\"Andy?\" she called, the wind carrying her voice away. \"Andy! Is that you?\" This time she waved her arms to attract his attention.\n\nThe boy stopped running and waved back. By now the wind was blowing so hard he was having a hard time remaining on his feet.\n\nThe clouds had taken on a greenish tint, and without warning, hailstones fell, hitting the ground like locusts.\n\n\"Come!\" she yelled, gesturing wildly. \"Come with me.\"\n\nThe boy turned away, presumably to look for his hat, but it was gone. He started toward her, but the stinging wind knocked him to the ground.\n\nA gale-force rush of air roared in her ears and pushed her forward. \"Hold on!\" The words were snatched out of her mouth. Blinded by dust and debris and battered by hail, she was lucky to find the small, huddled body.\n\nShe lifted him into her arms and held him close. Fortunately, he was slightly built, but even so, she struggled to walk with the added weight. Arms around her neck, he buried his head against her chest, his slight frame shaking. His hair blew in her face, mingling with her own.\n\nBody bent, she moved forward, using the railroad tracks as her guide. Her eyes watered, blurring what little vision was left.\n\nA thunderous sound filled the air and shook the ground. No train was due, so what could it be? She stared at the dark wall ahead and froze. Much to her horror a herd of stampeding cattle headed their way." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Branch tethered his horse to the railing in front of the deserted cabin. It used to be the Connor place, but old man Connor died two years ago and it had been deserted ever since.\n\nOr maybe not. That's what he was here to find out. One of the local farmers stopped by his office that morning to report seeing lights in the old place. He'd asked Branch to check it out.\n\nThe wind had picked up quite a bit in the last few minutes, beating against him like angry fists. A gust blew so hard that the prairie grass lay flat as a carpet and the nearby cottonwoods threatened to break in two. A storm was definitely brewing. He just hoped it wouldn't turn into a tornado. This was the time of year for them.\n\nAnxious to get back to town, he took the steps leading up to the porch two at a time and pounded on the weathered wood door. Nothing.\n\nThe door sprang open with only a slight turn of the knob, thanks to the wind. \"Hello! Anyone here?\"\n\nHe stepped inside. The windows were covered with oil cloth, and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim light. The cabin smelled of chimney smoke and dust and, strangely enough, something else: danger.\n\nA quick glance around soon convinced him that the latter was merely a figment of his imagination. Or maybe it was simply the brewing storm that kept him on edge.\n\nThe cabin was lightly furnished with a scarred wooden table, chairs, sagging sofa, and woodstove.\n\nA bedroll was spread out on the wood plank floor next to a lantern and box of safety matches. He checked the kitchen. The counters were empty except for a rotting apple and ashtray full of cigar butts. In the sink was a tin cup.\n\nSomeone had been here, all right. Since the arrival of the train, it wasn't all that unusual for vagrants to make themselves at home in vacant cabins. Only last year Jeff Parker arrived home following a trip out of town only to find his house had been taken over by a family of drifters.\n\nA distant roar made him stiffen. No train was due at this hour, and it was too loud for thunder. God, no! He reached for the door, and it almost ripped out of his hands as he opened it. Squinting against the wind and the dust, his worst fears were confirmed: a dark spiral had touched the ground in the distance and was heading straight for town.\n\nFear twisted inside him like the blade of a knife, and the blood in his veins turned to ice. Andy!\n\nBending his body against the wind and fighting off the pelting hail, he ran for his horse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Chapter 29\n\nKatie miraculously reached the safety of the restaurant before the panicked cattle overtook them. She huddled next to the building, protecting Andy with her body, and waited for the frenzied herd to pass. Even the wind couldn't drown out the sound of clashing horns and pounding hooves.\n\nThe moment she thought it safe, she hustled Andy to the restaurant door.\n\nThe door flew open with only a slight twist of the handle, and she almost tripped as the wind pushed her inside.\n\nHeavy gusts blew through the open door, lifting napkins off the table and knocking over vases of flowers. Overhead, the chandelier swung back and forth, the prisms dancing like hollow bones.\n\nAndy clutched at her arm, his fingers white with pressure. \"Help me close the door,\" she shouted over the wind.\n\nReluctantly, he released his hold but stayed glued to her side. Together they battled the door shut.\n\nIt had grown noticeably darker, and the windows rattled with pounding hail and unrelenting wind.\n\nHer breath escaped in short pants, and it took a great deal of effort to find her voice. \"What were you doing out there? Where's your pa?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Andy looked close to tears. \"I couldn't find him. He's not in his office. I think he's at home.\"\n\n\"Why aren't you in school?\" Surely the schoolhouse had a storm shelter.\n\n\"Our teacher t\u2014told us to go into the c\u2014cellar, but I was worried about Pa.\"\n\nThe boy was visibly shaken. They both were. Hand on his shoulder, she forced a smile. \"Your pa will be fine.\" Dear God, make it so.\n\nSomething banged against the outside of the building, and Andy flew into her arms. \"Let's get away from old Dragon Breath.\" Hugging him tight, she moved as far away from the windows as possible.\n\n\"That's not a dragon,\" he said. \"That's the wind.\"\n\n\"Shh. Don't let the dragon hear you say that. He gets very upset if people don't give him his due.\"\n\nPickens popped his head into the dining room. \"Quick!\" he called, motioning frantically with his arm. \"In the cellar!\"\n\nShe grabbed Andy by the hand, and together they raced out of the dining room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "A musty smell greeted Katie's nose as she tried coaxing Andy down the stairs. Standing on the top tread, she held out her hand, but he refused to take it.\n\n\"I'm scared of the dark.\"\n\n\"What?\" She feigned surprise. Reasoning with him hadn't worked. It was time for a little make-believe. \"Afraid of muddy air?\"\n\nAn uncertain look crossed his face. \"And spiders, too.\"\n\n\"You're afraid of eight legs on the hoof?\"\n\nHis eyes widened, and a ghost of a smile touched his mouth. \"Spiders don't have hooves.\"\n\n\"They most certainly do. And I'll tell you something else. They don't like muddy air.\"\n\nAndy glanced down the cellar stairs. \"They don't?\"\n\n\"Nope. Can't see to spin their webs. So hurry before the dragon catches us.\" This time Andy took her offered hand. Casting a worried glance over his shoulder, he followed her down the stairs.\n\nA single candle provided the only light in the cellar, but it was enough to illuminate the pale faces of the other employees.\n\n\"Praise the Lord,\" Mary-Lou said. \"I was so worried. No one knew where you were.\"\n\nKatie sat Andy on a food crate and drew a wooden barrel next to him.\n\n\"And who is this?\" Tully asked.\n\n\"This is Andy. He's the sheriff's son.\"\n\nTully exchanged a meaningful glance with Abigail but said nothing.\n\nMary-Lou smiled. \"I remember now. You just celebrated your birthday, right?\"\n\nAndy nodded. \"I'm eight.\"\n\nChef Gassy leaned toward him, holding out a paper bag. \"Have some bonbons. All the vey from France.\"\n\nAndy stuck his hand in the bag and pulled out a foil-covered confection. Since the pea soup episode, Chef Gassy had gone out of his way to be pleasant to Katie. After offering her one as well, he turned to Miss Thatcher, who sat opposite him.\n\n\"Vould you care for one?\"\n\n\"No, thank you,\" Miss Thatcher said, clutching a book in her hands. Katie recognized the leather cover as the diary she'd found in the trunk with the wedding gown. Even in the dim light it looked like the spinster's face had turned a shade darker. Maybe she wasn't as oblivious to Chef Gassy's admiring glances as she led everyone to believe.\n\nGassy's interest in Miss Thatcher obviously didn't escape Tully's notice, either, and she whispered something in Abigail's ear. The two giggled, drawing a disapproving look from the dorm matron.\n\nThe air was rife with meaningful glances and stilted conversation. Buzz and Tully made an effort not to look at each other, but anyone with half a brain knew that something of an amorous nature passed between the two of them.\n\nOff to the side sat Culpepper, wheezing like a cat with a hair ball.\n\nPickens told about a tornado back in his home state of Nebraska. \"Plucked the feathers clear off the chickens,\" he said.\n\nBehind him the two cooks sat on either side of a whiskey barrel, playing cards while Howie Howard looked on.\n\nAfter Pickens finished telling his story, he climbed the stairs, cautiously opened the door leading to the kitchen, and vanished. A moment later he called the all clear sign and, one by one, they left the cellar.\n\nSomething fell out of Miss Thatcher's book, and Katie stooped to pick it up. It was a daguerreotype of a young man in an army uniform. He had a full, round face, dark hair, and sideburns. The seriousness of his dark sack coat and forage hat provided a striking contrast to the impish gaze he afforded the camera.\n\nBy the time Katie and Andy reached the top of the stairs, Miss Thatcher was nowhere in sight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "\"Gid-up!\" Branch shouted to his horse. He covered his mouth with a kerchief to keep from breathing in dust. His hat blew off, but the stampede string kept it from flying away. Instead it bobbed against his back like a loose shutter, the leather cord tugging at his neck.\n\nWind usually didn't bother Midnight, but then, the horse had never confronted a storm quite like this.\n\nSensing danger, Midnight crow-hopped. \"Come on, boy. Come on!\" Branch forced the horse in the direction of town. But even then his gait was choppy. A wooden crate blew across the road, pieces of wood flying in every direction. The horse bucked, and Branch held on with sheer willpower, but he was badly jolted.\n\nHe tugged hard on the reins, pulling Midnight's nose to his leg. The gelding moved around in a tight circle until Branch loosened his hold.\n\n\"That's it,\" he shouted over the wind. \"You can do it.\" He had to repeat the procedure several times before Midnight got the message and stopped trying to buck.\n\nThe closer they got to town the more dust and debris filled the air. Even with the kerchief covering his nose and mouth, he struggled to breathe. Pieces of a wooden fence flew by, along with roof shingles and someone's wash still attached to the clothesline.\n\nHorses ran by along with several steer and a goat. Rounding up escaped animals would be a big job.\n\nBy some quirk of nature, the twister changed course before reaching town, and the immediate danger appeared to be over. The funnel was still visible, but at least it was moving away, leaving behind pieces of broken fences, scattered farm equipment, and, inexplicably, an upright piano turned on its side.\n\nReaching the brick schoolhouse, he swung from his saddle and tethered his horse to the fence, tail end facing the wind. A tree had toppled, and its white roots crawled along the ground like thick fingers. The yard was littered with debris, but the school building remained intact. Praise the Lord.\n\nHe found the wooden door that led down to the storm shelter and banged on it. \"Miss Appleton! It's Sheriff Whitman. Everything all right down there?\"\n\nThe door lifted slightly, and he opened it the rest of the way. Miss Appleton stood on the ladder looking up at him, face pale as a wintry moon.\n\nHe never thought to see a more welcome sight. \"Everything okay?\" he asked again.\n\n\"Yes.\" She hesitated. \"Did Andy find you all right?\"\n\nHis heart thudded. \"Andy? Isn't he here?\"\n\nAlarm crossed her face. \"No. He took off. Said he had to find his pa. I tried to stop him but\u2014\"\n\nThe rest of her sentence fell behind as he raced for his horse." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "Chapter 30\n\nMoments later, Branch ran into the house shouting Andy's name. He found his housekeeper in the kitchen.\n\n\"He's not here,\" Miss Chloe said, her dark face creased like old parchment. \"Isn't he at school?\"\n\n\"No, I checked.\"\n\nHer eyes widened in alarm, and she grabbed hold of the counter as if to steady herself.\n\nHe frowned. \"What are you doing here? Your house\u2014\"\n\n\"My house is fine. Just making sure yours was, too.\"\n\n\"Go home. Andy could show up there.\"\n\nShe nodded and grabbed her purse.\n\nSpinning around, he left the house on the run. He leaped astride his horse and rode like a madman through town.\n\nPeople milled in a daze, hugging each other and assessing the damage to properties. The ground was covered with shards of broken glass and missing shingles. A wagon was upside down and part of a windmill had toppled. So far there was no report of injuries or deaths, but neither had anyone seen Andy.\n\nHe rode up one street and down the other, calling Andy's name. Where are you, Son? Was this God's punishment for failing to tell Clayborn the truth? God, surely not. You wouldn't be that cruel, would You? I'm the one to blame. Not Andy.\n\nHe raced his horse across the railroad tracks. Midnight's hooves pounded the ground as Branch's heart pounded his ribs. He rode full circle, and now the Harvey House restaurant loomed ahead of him. Maybe someone there had seen his son.\n\nKatie.\n\nA previously unnoticed woodshed had collapsed by the side of the road. What if Andy had sought shelter there? He slid out of his saddle and frantically pawed through the debris. The memory of digging through another pile of rubble and finding his wife draped over a stove filled him with unspeakable horror. Not again, Lord. Not again.\n\n\"Andy!\" he yelled. \"Do you hear me?\"\n\n\"Pa!\"\n\nHis heart stilled along with his hands. It took a moment to realize Andy's voice came from behind and not from under the collapsed structure.\n\nHe whirled about just as Andy flew into his arms, practically knocking him over. Hugging his son close, his vision blurred. Thank You, Lord. Thank You...\n\n\"I was scared,\" Andy said, head pressed against Branch's middle.\n\n\"I was scared, too, Son.\" Was that Andy trembling or him? \"But you're safe now. We all are.\"\n\nHe blinked away the burning sensation in his eyes and noticed Katie standing a short distance away.\n\nShe pushed a wayward strand of red hair behind her ear. \"I made him come inside with me until the danger passed.\" Her apron, normally spotless, was now smeared with dirt, and her bun had worked free, allowing red tendrils to curl around her face.\n\n\"Thank you.\" His voice hoarse, he cleared his throat and thanked her again. If words existed that could convey his gratitude, he had no idea what they were.\n\nGazing down at his son's upturned face, he said, \"Come on. Let's get you home.\" There was cleanup work to be done in the town, but judging by the way Andy clung to him, he needed his pa; they needed each other. The rest would have to wait.\n\nHe looked up to say something to Katie, but already she was heading back to the restaurant. \"Wait!\" he called.\n\nShe stopped and turned.\n\n\"Care to join us?\" For some reason he couldn't explain, he needed her every bit as much as Andy needed him. \"My house is just up the road a ways.\" When she hesitated he added, \"I have it on good authority I make a pretty good pot of coffee.\" It was a humble offering, but it was all he had to give at the moment.\n\nAndy looked up. \"Joe, Pa. Coffee is called joe.\"\n\nKatie pursed her lips, and Branch felt something stir inside. \"I make a good pot of joe.\" When she still hesitated, he persisted, \"So how about it? I'm sure your boss will make allowances given the circumstances.\"\n\n\"The restaurant is closed for the rest of the day,\" she said.\n\nHe frowned. \"Did you have much damage?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"Just some broken windows. I heard there's debris on the tracks, so trains have stopped running.\"\n\n\"Well, then?\" He arched his eyebrow. \"The invitation still holds.\"\n\n\"Pleeeeeease,\" his son said.\n\nAndy's plea brought a smile to her face, and Branch was surprised to find himself wishing the smile was for him.\n\n\"Very well,\" she said, and this time the smile was for him. His heart leaped with joy. \"Count me in for a cup of joe.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Chapter 31\n\nBranch lived in a brick house about a half mile up the road from the restaurant. The house had a small yard surrounded by a white picket fence, parts of which had blown away.\n\nRecalling his cool demeanor the last time they'd met, Katie was reluctant to accept his invitation. But this time he seemed genuinely grateful to her for protecting Andy, genuinely warm.\n\nBranch handed the reins of his horse to Andy. \"Take care of him, Son.\"\n\nAndy took the reins but hesitated with a glance at the sky.\n\nBranch placed a hand on the lad's shoulder. \"It's gone,\" he said. \"We're safe now.\"\n\nThe trust in Andy's eyes as he gazed up at his father made Katie's heart ache. It had been a long time since she'd had that much trust in anyone\u2014if ever.\n\nThe boy took the reins from his father and started for the barn. The horse was skittish but followed Andy with little resistance.\n\nShe followed Branch up to the porch, and he held the front door open for her.\n\nThe parlor was tastefully furnished with a walnut-framed horsehair settee, flanked by two wing chairs. A colorful rag rug graced the wood plank floor in front of the stone fireplace. A polished maple side table held a kerosene lamp.\n\nNext to a small writing desk, a shelf of books caught her eye, and she longed to run her fingers across the leather spines. Her current assignment didn't allow for much free time, and she barely had time to read her Bible, let alone a novel.\n\nExcept for a group of photographs arranged on the top of the upright piano, the room was free of the stifling clutter of homes on the East Coast.\n\nBranch hung his hat on the wooden hat rack next to the door and combed his mussed hair with his fingers. \"You can sit here,\" he said amicably. \"Or you can watch me make coffee. But I must warn you. Seeing me in the kitchen is not a pretty sight.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Since working at the restaurant I've come to feel very much at home in the kitchen.\" Odd but true. She once avoided the kitchen at all costs, leaving her sisters in charge of meals while she took on more masculine chores around the house.\n\n\"Very well, follow me.\" He led her into the next room and pulled out a ladder-back chair next to a wood trestle table and invited her to sit with a wave of his hand.\n\n\"Thank you.\" She suddenly felt self-conscious. She wasn't used to being waited on and had to curb the impulse to jump up and set the table.\n\nThe kitchen was small but efficient. An icebox stood in the corner next to a freestanding cupboard filled with gold-trimmed dishes.\n\nBranch immediately set to work grinding coffee beans and pumping water into the coffeepot.\n\nHer skin suddenly prickled with gooseflesh. Crossing her arms in front, she hugged herself.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked with a look of concern.\n\n\"I'm fine, thank you. Just a delayed reaction.\"\n\nHe studied her. \"Was that your first tornado?\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Yes.\" And she hoped it was her last.\n\n\"We were lucky.\" He set the pot on the stove and lit the flame. \"I thought for sure it was heading straight for town.\"\n\n\"Thank God it didn't.\"\n\nHe vanished into the other room and returned a moment later with a knitted shawl. He draped it gently over her shoulders, his hand brushing against the nape of her neck. Chills of another kind shot down her spine followed by a wave of warmth.\n\n\"How's that?\" he asked, stepping away from her.\n\n\"Much better, thank you.\" It would be better had he not left behind the tantalizing fragrance of bay rum hair tonic.\n\nHe reached for a plate of little cakes and placed them on the table along with two cups, saucers, and plates. She pressed her hands together. Nope, she would not rearrange the dishes to meet Harvey's standards, no matter how much she was tempted.\n\n\"Don't tell me you baked these,\" she said, helping herself to a cake.\n\n\"Not me. My housekeeper, Miss Chloe, keeps us in baked goods.\"\n\nShe bit into the chocolate confection and wiped a crumb off her mouth with her finger. \"They're delicious.\"\n\nHe handed her a napkin and sat. \"What you did for Andy... I'm mighty obliged.\"\n\nShe set the cake on her plate and wiped her fingers on the napkin. \"That's quite a boy you have there.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"That he is.\" A smile of fatherly pride curved the corners of his mouth. \"I'm afraid he's driving Miss Chloe crazy with all that restaurant talk you taught him. He won't touch milk or beans but can't get enough of moo juice and bullets.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"I'm sorry.\"\n\n\"Don't be.\" His smile was as warm as his voice, and suddenly she had no need of the shawl.\n\n\"Never thought I'd be slinging hash,\" she said, hoping he didn't notice her reddening face. \"With my job there's no telling what I'll be doing next.\"\n\n\"How long have you worked for Pinkerton?\" he asked.\n\n\"Five years.\"\n\nHe arched his brows. \"Ever meet the founder?\"\n\n\"Allan Pinkerton?\" She nodded. \"And I have to say he's the most unusual man I've ever met.\"\n\n\"Unusual how?\"\n\n\"He was the first to see the value of hiring female detectives.\" She only wished his sons had the same regard for women. Rumor had it that they wanted to disband the women's detective division. Fortunately, Allan Pinkerton would have none of it.\n\n\"I'm sure my wife would have approved of both of you.\"\n\nShe searched his face for signs of grief, but his expression remained as neutral as his voice. This gave her the courage to pursue the subject. \"Oh? In what way?\"\n\n\"She wanted to be a physician, but when her application to medical school was turned down, she became a midwife instead.\"\n\nKatie felt for his wife. Few women had been allowed to enroll in medical schools. Elizabeth Blackwell had earned a medical degree decades earlier, but the medical establishment was still reluctant to let women enter the field.\n\nEven as a detective Katie had to constantly prove herself. She'd helped capture some of America's most wanted criminals but still got less pay than male operatives. Even the new and inexperienced male detectives were compensated more handsomely than she was.\n\n\"I always thought midwifery a fine and noble profession,\" she said.\n\n\"Hannah certainly thought so. There was no keeping her away from a woman about to give birth. She said it was God's work.\"\n\n\"I think I would have liked your wife,\" she said.\n\nHis gaze met hers. \"She would have liked you, too.\"\n\n\"Why? Because I'm doing God's work?\"\n\nHis mouth quirked upward. \"I don't know about that, but Hannah would have approved a woman doing a man's job.\"\n\n\"But you don't.\"\n\nHe pursed his lips as if trying to decide how to form his next words. \"Yours is a dangerous job for anyone. Men included.\"\n\nShe couldn't argue with him there. \"Forgive me for asking, but how did your wife die? I know she died in the tornado, but\"\u2014she glanced up at the ceiling\u2014\"your house was left intact.\" According to a recent article in the newspaper, most of the town had been destroyed, but Branch's neighborhood had escaped all but some minor damage.\n\n\"She was out that night. Delivering a baby.\"\n\nKatie stared at him, confused. Had she heard him right? \"On the same day she gave birth?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Your son was born on the day of the tornado.\" The eight-year anniversary of the tornado had even been noted in the newspaper, with no less than three inches of space.\n\nColor drained from his face, but before he could speak the back door flew open and Andy ran into the kitchen.\n\nBranch jumped up to check on the coffee, and Katie sensed a change in the air, a change in him. Something like a winter chill had entered the room.\n\n\"Midnight all taken care of?\" she asked.\n\nAndy nodded.\n\nShe lowered her voice. \"How would you like a mud brick?\" she asked. \"That's restaurant talk for little chocolate cakes.\"\n\nAndy helped himself with a grin. Between bites he talked about everything that had happened to him that day, but even he couldn't fill the strained silence that stretched between her and his father.\n\nBranch stared at his son as if he were talking a foreign language. \"Dragon Breath?\"\n\nAndy laughed and explained.\n\nWhile his father seemed attentive enough, she sensed his mind was elsewhere. He was simply going through the motions.\n\nAs if suddenly remembering his manners, he made every effort to be a good host, but the earlier rapport was now but a memory.\n\nTaking her cue, she drank her coffee quickly and left. While passing through the parlor she stopped to gaze at the hand-colored daguerreotype on top of the piano.\n\nHannah Whitman had been a beautiful woman\u2014no question. Katie couldn't help but notice the wide-set eyes and delicate features. His wife resembled her older sister Belle, now married to the man Katie once loved. Surprisingly, the usual anger and resentment that rose inside whenever she thought of her sister failed to surface. It felt as if all the pain and grief of the past had happened to someone else.\n\nIs this what it's like to be healed, God? Or maybe it's forgiveness I feel. Certainly she no longer bore ill will toward her sister.\n\nPuzzled, yet pleased by the welcome discovery, she let herself out of the house. She couldn't get the conversation with Branch out of her mind. \"She was out that night. Delivering a baby.\"\n\nHow was that possible? What woman in her right mind would leave the house during a storm after just giving birth? Even more puzzling was Branch's response when she questioned him.\n\nShe glanced up at the angry clouds still hovering on the distant horizon and shivered. This time it was neither the cold nor delayed reaction that made her tremble. Instead, she felt a sense of foreboding." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Chapter 32\n\nThe restaurant was unusually quiet when Katie returned.\n\nA movement under the table caught her eye. \"Spook Cat! How did you get in? Better not let Chef Gassy catch you.\"\n\nThe cat meowed but made no movement toward her. The poor thing was trembling.\n\nShe walked into the kitchen. How strange to find the room deserted at this hour. Usually it hummed with activity. Finding a pitcher of milk in the icebox, she poured a few ounces into a dish and carried the bowl to the dining room. No sooner had she set it on the floor than the cat immediately lapped it up.\n\nCurious as to where everyone was, she took the stairs to the second floor. Experience had taught her that people bonded during a crisis or emergency. Protective barriers broke down when life was at its most fragile.\n\nA suspect once confessed to a robbery during a blizzard that had paralyzed St. Louis for days. Pinkerton detective Jeff Morley still boasted about a similar experience during the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 when an art forger, thinking the blaze was the wrath of God, confessed.\n\nIf anyone at the Harvey House was sufficiently traumatized enough to confess, gossip, or speculate, Katie wanted to be on hand.\n\nRecalling that Miss Thatcher's photograph was still in her pocket, she decided the dorm matron was a good place to start. She knocked on the door.\n\n\"Who is it?\"\n\n\"It's me, Katie.\" She waited for Miss Thatcher to tell her to go away, and when she didn't, she reached for the handle.\n\nMiss Thatcher sat at her desk, the diary open in front of her.\n\n\"You dropped this earlier in the cellar,\" Katie said, holding up the photograph.\n\n\"Oh!\" Miss Thatcher closed the leather journal and waved Katie over to her desk.\n\nKatie crossed the room and handed her the photograph. \"Is that a family member?\"\n\n\"Fam\u2014\" The dorm matron shook her head. \"It's a picture of my fianc\u00e9.\"\n\n\"You're engaged to be married?\"\n\n\"Was.\" The woman heaved a sigh. \"Matthew died during the war.\"\n\n\"I see.\" So she'd guessed right. The war had ended long ago, but Miss Thatcher looked as forlorn as if her fianc\u00e9 had died only yesterday. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\nKatie tried to visualize Miss Thatcher in her youth, before grief took its toll and the years left their mark. But the vision that came to mind was of her dancing in the moonlight.\n\n\"He was a handsome young man,\" Katie said.\n\nMiss Thatcher's lips curved in a half smile. \"He was indeed.\" She slid his photograph amid the pages of the diary.\n\n\"How did you two meet?\" Katie asked, fully expecting Miss Thatcher to order her out of the room. Instead the dorm matron seemed to welcome the opportunity to talk about the past.\n\n\"We met at a revival.\" She fell silent as if reliving the moment. \"I wasn't supposed to go,\" she said with girlish delight. \"My father forbade it. He said we could get all the religion we needed at our local church and didn't need a bunch of strangers putting ideas in our head. But I went anyway, and that's when I met Matthew.\"\n\nMiss Thatcher seemed to have forgotten Katie's presence, her voice too low and whispery to be meant for another's ear. Intrigued, Katie leaned forward so as not to miss a single word.\n\n\"One night I sneaked out to be with him, and we danced beneath a full moon.\" She laid her hand on the leather book on the desk as if the memories written inside needed protecting. \"That's when he proposed.\"\n\nKatie listened intently and didn't dare move for fear of bringing the dorm matron out of her reverie.\n\n\"And then the war came,\" Miss Thatcher continued in a dreamlike voice. \"He said he would only be gone for a short while. A couple of weeks at the most. Said he was going to 'whup those Yankees' and come straight home.\" She let out an audible sigh. \"So I planned our wedding.\"\n\nThe light dimmed in her eyes as the memory faded away. Suddenly seeming to recall Katie's presence, she cleared her voice. \"I'm sure you have other things to do beside listen to an old lady's ramblings.\"\n\n\"You're not an old lady,\" Katie said.\n\n\"I'll be thirty-eight next month.\"\n\nKatie thought of Chef Gassy and the way he looked at Miss Thatcher in the cellar. \"No one would think a thirty-eight-year-old man old. Or call him a spinster. Is there even a male word for old maid?\"\n\nMiss Thatcher surprised her by laughing. Without the usual dismal mask she looked surprisingly young and pretty. \"I don't believe there is.\"\n\nAs if to catch herself, Miss Thatcher composed her features and tucked a loose strand of hair back into the tight bun. \"I never expected my life to turn out this way. I was certain I would be married with a houseful of children by now. Not chaperoning a bunch of spoiled\u2014\" She cleared her voice. \"You know what I mean.\"\n\nKatie had hoped for just this kind of opening. \"Did you think Priscilla and Ginger spoiled?\"\n\nMiss Thatcher frowned. \"What kind of question is that? The poor women are dead. It doesn't matter what I thought.\"\n\n\"So you did think them spoiled.\"\n\n\"Well, now that you mention it... Not Ginger. But that Priscilla. Mercy. She was always sneaking out at night to be with her beau.\"\n\n\"She had a beau?\"\n\n\"Not just one, but many.\"\n\n\"Really?\" That was news to Katie. \"Like who?\"\n\n\"One night I saw her with Culpepper. They looked like they were having a lover's quarrel.\"\n\nThat was surprising. Culpepper hardly seemed the romantic type. Or at least as far as Katie could tell. She was no expert on men, but Culpepper kept pretty much to himself and didn't strike her as a womanizer. At least she'd never noticed him flirt with the Harvey girls like so many of the other men did. Of course, employee romances were against the rules. Still, if he had taken a liking to Priscilla, the man could be grieving her death. That would certainly explain his withdrawn demeanor.\n\n\"You don't think that he\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, no. I wasn't suggesting\u2014\" Miss Thatcher stood abruptly as if suddenly recalling her duties as a chaperone. She peered at Katie with narrowed eyes, her back ramrod straight. \"You will not say a word to anyone about what you heard here today. Do I make myself clear?\"\n\n\"Yes, Miss Thatcher. Not a word.\"\n\n\"Now go.\" As if to assure herself that she had regained her rightful position, she added, \"You look a disgrace. Your apron...\"\n\n\"I'll change.\" Katie quickly left the room, closing the door behind her.\n\nShe paused in the hall. Did Miss Thatcher kill the Harvey girls? She couldn't discount the possibility. Especially since at least one of them had given her trouble. The woman was an odd one to be sure, but somehow Katie couldn't help but think her bark was worse than her bite.\n\nWith this thought in mind, she scurried down the hall." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Chapter 33\n\nTwo days later, things had pretty much returned to normal at the restaurant. Some windows were still boarded, but the trains had started running again and the roads cleared of debris. Getting the restaurant back in shape had required a huge amount of work from everyone. Debris had to be hauled away from the property and the outside woodwork painted. Inside, everything was covered in sand and grit.\n\nKatie stifled a yawn as she took her place behind the counter to wait for the twelve-twenty-five train. Her feet were sore; her back ached. What she would give for more sleep.\n\nBranch strolled into the breakfast room and headed straight for her station.\n\nShe hadn't seen him since the day of the tornado. From what she'd heard, he'd been organizing cleanup crews and helping to round up stray animals. His bristled jaw told her he hadn't shaved, and he sure did look like he could use some sleep.\n\nOddly enough, his unkempt appearance gave him a dangerous edge that only added to his appeal. Strangely, her weariness lifted and even her aches and pains seemed to vanish at sight of him.\n\nWithout taking a seat, he leaned over the counter. \"We need to talk,\" he said without preamble, his heated breath fanning her face.\n\n\"Not now,\" she said with a glance at Pickens, who was looking their way. Buzz had already sounded the alarm, and the chandelier overhead jingled like sleigh bells as the train neared the station.\n\nPickens rushed over. \"Is there a problem, Sheriff?\"\n\nBranch tore his gaze away from her. \"No problem. Just thought I'd stop by and get me some of that English pea soup everyone's talking about.\"\n\nAt mention of the soup, Katie almost laughed out loud. Orange juice was now a permanent ingredient. The new and improved soup had even earned an inch in the newspaper. Chef Gassy swore restaurant employees to secrecy. No outsider must know what gave the soup its unique zesty taste. He, of course, took full credit for the new recipe.\n\nPickens lifted his pointed nose. \"We now refer to it as the chef's special.\"\n\nBranch shrugged. \"Well, whatever it's called, it's the talk of the town and I'll have some.\" He pushed away from the counter and sat at a table.\n\n\"Well?\" Pickens gave Katie the eagle eye. \"Are you going to stand there all day, or are you going to take the man's order?\"\n\nKatie wiped her damp hands on the side of her skirt and walked around the counter just as the door flew open and train passengers began streaming inside.\n\nThe dining room orders were taken in advance, but not in the breakfast room. Katie had a good memory for clues and anything pertaining to a criminal case, but a diner's order tended to go in one ear and out the other. However, she had discovered that if she talked up one specific dish and made it sound appealing, most if not all diners would order it. That sure did simplify things.\n\nToday she talked up the pea soup.\n\nAs she hoped, all seven passengers\u2014which included three men and four women\u2014followed Branch's example and ordered the chef's special.\n\nWhen she returned with their orders, she noticed one of the men at her table whip out a photograph and hand it to Branch. The man was in his mid to late thirties. Hair the color of muddy water was parted in the middle and slicked down with grease. His thin nose and mouth were separated by a skinny mustache.\n\nShe set the tray down on the tray stand and picked up a bowl of hot soup.\n\n\"Name's Sam Fletcher,\" the man was saying, \"and I need to find this woman.\"\n\nCurious, she peered over the man's shoulder and caught her breath. He was holding a photograph of Abigail.\n\nJust then Abigail walked into the breakfast room. Katie frantically waved her free hand to warn her and pointed to the man who she now suspected was Abigail's husband.\n\nHer suspicion was confirmed by the look of horror that crossed Abigail's face just before she whirled about and fled the room.\n\nKatie was so intent on warning Abigail that she forgot she was holding a bowl of soup until Fletcher jumped up with a curse.\n\nThick green broth ran down his arm and splashed across the photograph. He rubbed the picture against his trousers.\n\n\"You dumb dame!\" he roared. The room fell silent following his outburst, and all heads turned toward her table. \"Look what you've done.\"\n\n\"I\u2014I'm sorry, sir,\" she stammered. \"I'll get you a towel.\"\n\n\"Don't you come near me, you\u2014\" He drew back a fist as if to strike her.\n\nBranch jumped up and shot a hand to Fletcher's throat. With one swift movement, he pushed him away from Katie. \"There's no call for you to talk to her like that. It was an accident.\" He gave Fletcher a shove, and the man staggered backward against a chair.\n\nStill Fletcher refused to leave and continued to berate Katie. His curses were met with shocked gasps from the other diners, and one woman covered her young daughter's ears.\n\nBranch leaned toward Katie, his voice low in her ear. \"What would your Pinkerton bosses advise under such circumstances?\"\n\nShe'd told him he could learn a lot from her bosses, and apparently he'd not forgotten.\n\n\"To reason with him,\" she whispered back. \"And politely show him to the door.\"\n\nBranch nodded. \"Good idea.\" With that Branch stepped forward and threw his right fist into the startled man's face.\n\nFletcher flew back and hit the floor hard. Face purple, he glared up at Branch, hand on his bloodied nose. Branch yanked him to his feet, hauled him across the room, and tossed him out the door.\n\n\"The next time I see your ugly mug I'll lock you up.\" Slamming the door shut, he brushed his hands together and turned.\n\nApplause greeted him. He acknowledged the crowd with an upraised hand and sheepish grin before taking his seat again.\n\n\"Is that what you call polite?\" she murmured next to his ear.\n\n\"Absolutely,\" he said quietly, and she detected a touch of humor in his voice.\n\nA matronly woman at Katie's table lifted her eyepiece to her face. \"I must say, Sheriff, you certainly put that awful man in his place.\"\n\nThe diner next to her concurred. \"I just wish we didn't have to travel on the same train as him.\"\n\nKatie pasted on her most brilliant smile and hastened to pass out the remaining bowls of soup. She purposely engaged her diners in conversation and ignored Pickens, who looked ready to pounce on her at the first opportunity. Spilling soup on a diner was no less of a sin than eating a forbidden apple in the Garden of Eden.\n\nFletcher soon forgotten, the diners oohed and aahed as they ate, and everyone agreed that it was the best pea soup ever.\n\nJust as the travelers rose to board the train, Branch whispered in her ear. \"Meet me tonight.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "The whistle blew with a blast of steam. The cranks shifted, and the wheels turned. The train moved out of the station with a loud clank and gradually picked up speed.\n\n\"He's gone,\" Katie said from her place at the dining room window.\n\nAbigail stood behind her, craning her neck. \"Are... are you sure?\"\n\n\"Saw him climb aboard,\" Katie said.\n\nAbigail bit her lip. \"It doesn't matter. He won't rest till he finds me.\"\n\nMary-Lou cleared the dirty dishes off a nearby table. \"Who is he?\"\n\nAbigail hesitated before answering. \"My husband.\"\n\n\"You're married?\" Tully gasped, almost dropping a tray of dishes.\n\nKatie hushed her. \"You mustn't say a word.\" She glanced at Mary-Lou. \"Any of you.\"\n\n\"But being married is against the rules,\" Tully persisted, this time in a lower voice.\n\nKatie glared at her. Tully was the last person to talk about rules. \"Yes, and so is spousal abuse. The Bible clearly states that a man must treat his wife with love and respect.\" Even with all her father's faults, she never knew him to be physically abusive. He had been thoughtless, emotionally distant, and, at times, even uncaring, but never once did he raise his hand.\n\nMary-Lou cast a look of sympathy Abigail's way. \"I'm sorry. We didn't know.\"\n\nAbigail looked close to tears. \"I didn't want anyone to know.\"\n\n\"Maybe it's better this way,\" Katie said. \"Now we can all be on the lookout for him.\"\n\nAbigail shook her head. \"I can't stay here.\"\n\nKatie squeezed her hand. \"You can't keep running. You must remain strong. Men like that prey on weakness.\"\n\n\"I don't know if I have it in me to be strong.\" Abigail's lips quivered. \"He scares me, and I could be putting you all in harm's way.\" Tears flooded her eyes, and she let out a sob.\n\nTully discounted this concern with a wave of her hand. \"We already have a killer on the loose. What's another?\"\n\nKatie glared at her and shook her head. This was no time for jokes. The tension in the house felt almost palpable. Everyone seemed to be waiting for the next shoe to drop.\n\nMary-Lou filled in the strained silence. \"We won't let him hurt you or anyone else.\"\n\nAbigail dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. \"I don't know that you can stop him.\"\n\n\"You'd be amazed what we can do.\" Tully put her arm around Mary-Lou's shoulder, showing surprising empathy. Tully could be kindhearted at times, but only when her protective armor slipped.\n\n\"Don't you know?\" Tully asked. \"We're the Harvey girls!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "Chapter 34\n\nKatie waited for her roommate to fall asleep before slipping from beneath the covers and planting her bare feet on the floor. She quickly dressed in a blue skirt and matching shirtwaist set out in advance and then pulled on her shoes.\n\nNot wanting to fuss with her hair, she let it fall down her back in a single braid. Moistening her lips, she let herself out of the room and tiptoed quietly down the hall to the stairs.\n\nBranch was anxious to talk to her, and she had a pretty good idea it wasn't about the Harvey girl case.\n\nHe waited for her outside the dining room doors, his shadow falling across the glass as she fumbled with the lock. Heart pounding, she slipped outside and closed the door after her without bothering with the spoon-in-the-threshold trick.\n\n\"How are you getting back in?\" he asked.\n\n\"Through a side window.\" Earlier she had unlocked not one but two windows. No sense taking a chance on being locked out again.\n\n\"Another Pinkerton trick?\" he asked.\n\n\"Nope. Strictly my own.\"\n\nThey walked toward the bench outside the baggage room and sat.\n\nIt felt cool but not unpleasantly so. The night air seemed eerily still except for moths flitting around the gaslight globe. Overhead the stars glittered as brightly as Harvey's newly polished silver.\n\nBranch sat with his elbows on his lap and rubbed his hands between his knees. Sensing his unsettling thoughts, she decided to make it easy for him.\n\n\"He's not yours, is he? Andy. He's not your natural child.\"\n\nHis intake of breath only confirmed what she already knew. \"I messed up, didn't I? Telling you how Hannah died... If you figured it out, then\u2014\"\n\n\"You're worried that Clayborn might.\" It wasn't just a lucky guess; she had noticed the family resemblance when she saw them together at the restaurant, though it hadn't registered at the time. Andy and Clayborn had similar hair color and eyes.\n\n\"Yes, I'm worried. Now more than ever.\"\n\nShe let his statement hang for a moment before asking, \"How did you end up with his son?\"\n\nHe sat back as if bracing himself. \"It happened on the night of the tornado.\" His voice was low, hesitant, and at times hoarse as he described how his wife had gone to the Clayborn home to deliver Dorothy's baby.\n\nEven in the dim light she could see pain in the depths of his eyes as he related finding the newborn in the cast-iron oven. \"I keep telling myself that God wouldn't give me a gift like Andy only to take him away.\"\n\nShe rested her hand on his arm. \"God gives; He doesn't take.\" That's what her minister told her when she'd asked him why God had taken away the man she loved. For whatever reason, it had been easier to blame God than her sister or even the man who had dumped her, though in retrospect that made little sense.\n\n\"I used to believe that was true. But after I lost Hannah...\" He leaned back. \"Dorothy told everyone her husband was dead. It never occurred to me that she would lie about something like that.\"\n\n\"Why did she, do you suppose?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Pride, perhaps. I imagine it's not easy for a woman to admit her husband ran off.\"\n\n\"I guess not,\" she said, thinking of Abigail's plight. It had been hard for her to admit to having an abusive husband. Thank God times were changing. Since Fred Harvey opened up his restaurants, women now had a legitimate means by which to support themselves. Staying in an abusive or unhappy marriage was no longer the only option left to women.\n\nAn owl flew overhead, the flapping wings breaking the silence that had settled between them.\n\n\"It must have been hard. Raising a child by yourself.\" She remembered how difficult it had been for her father to raise his daughters after her mother's death. That's when he'd started drinking.\n\n\"It was hard. The town was in ruins. My wife was gone. My transport business thrived for as long as it took people to leave town and then died.\" His voice broke. \"Andy kept me going. I couldn't love him more if he were my own flesh and blood.\"\n\n\"Does Clayborn suspect Andy is his?\" People didn't always recognize themselves in others, and he might not have noticed the family resemblance.\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\n\"Why did he come back?\"\n\n\"He wants me to sign a statement that his child died with his mother.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Why?\"\n\n\"Dorothy's father left a substantial amount of money for his grandchild, and it's never been claimed.\"\n\n\"And your signature will help him claim the money.\"\n\n\"Andy's money,\" he said.\n\nWhat a mess. She couldn't help but sympathize. \"What do you think Clayborn would do if he knew his son was alive?\"\n\n\"No doubt he'd want to claim him but only because of the money. As Andy's father, he'd have full control.\"\n\n\"Have you talked to a lawyer?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, but I never legally adopted Andy. Never saw the need. That means I don't have much ground to stand on. The court almost always rules for the real parent.\"\n\n\"You are the real parent,\" she said. \"I don't care what the court says.\"\n\n\"Thank you for that.\" He covered her hand with his own. \"I didn't mean to get you involved.\"\n\n\"Isn't that what friends are for?\"\n\nThe corners of his mouth tugged upward. \"There aren't too many people I can talk to about this.\"\n\nShe moistened her lips. \"You can talk to God.\" Through all the trials and tribulations of the past, God had been the one constant in her life.\n\nHe nodded. \"Believe me, I have. So far He hasn't given me any answers.\"\n\n\"He will,\" she whispered. God had been oddly silent of late in her own life. Usually when working on a case she felt Him leading her, but not this time. His lack of help left her feeling adrift.\n\n\"You sound like Reverend Bushwell. He told me I just have to trust the Lord.\"\n\n\"Sounds like good advice.\"\n\nHe studied her. \"Would you?\" he asked. \"Trust God if Andy were your son?\"\n\nShe thought for a moment. \"I'd like to think I would.\"\n\nHe tilted his head. \"But?\"\n\nShe breathed a sigh. \"You never really know how strong your faith is until it's tested.\" Hers had been tested through the years but never like Branch's.\n\nHe moved his hand from hers, and for a moment neither of them spoke, both in their own private thoughts.\n\nShe ached to wipe away the frown at his forehead. Instead she smiled up at him. \"You'll do the right thing,\" she said.\n\nHis eyebrow lifted. \"How do you know I will?\"\n\n\"I have faith in human nature,\" she said. I have faith in you.\n\nHe laughed. \"Do you now?\"\n\n\"Yes and\u2014\"\n\nHe hushed her with a finger to his mouth and directed her attention to the alley.\n\nIt sounded like a door closing. \"Do you suppose that's Miss Thatcher?\" she whispered.\n\nShrugging, he left the bench and peered around the corner of the building. After a moment he gestured for her to join him in the alley.\n\nLike two mischievous children, they ran between the buildings. Spotting Miss Thatcher, they stopped. Tonight she floated ghostlike along the deserted street, her white nightgown billowing around her.\n\nShe had already crossed the tracks by the time they reached the protective cover of the cottonwood. The dorm matron's body swayed, pivoted, and twisted beneath the diamond-studded sky and soft, waning moon.\n\n\"Holy smokes,\" Branch murmured, his voice low in her ear. \"If I hadn't seen her with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it.\"\n\n\"I feel sorry for her in a way,\" Katie whispered. \"She's a prisoner of the past.\" Miss Thatcher had caught Chef Gassy's eye but hadn't even noticed. \"It's hard to reach for the future when you're still carrying the past in your hands.\"\n\n\"Is that what you think she's doing?\" he asked.\n\n\"Maybe that's what we're all doing,\" she said. \"To a certain extent.\"\n\n\"The past has a way of grabbing hold of you when you least expect it,\" he said after a while. \"Mine certainly has. I didn't even know Clayborn was alive. It feels like I've been ambushed by a ghost.\"\n\nShe gazed up at his profile. Even the dim light couldn't hide his anguished look. If only she could think of something to say to ease his pain.\n\nAfter a few moments, Miss Thatcher stopped dancing and drifted away like a lone cloud. Katie started to follow, but Branch stopped her with a hand to her wrist.\n\n\"Don't go.\" The low rumble in her ear made her pulse quicken. He swung her around, and just that quickly she was locked in the circle of his arms. \"May I have this dance?\"\n\nA tingle of excitement rushed through her. \"Here?\"\n\n\"I have it on good authority that it's the perfect place to dance,\" he said.\n\n\"I\u2014I'd like that.\" Suddenly she was having trouble breathing.\n\nTaking her by the hand, he led her to the open field. He pulled her close and pressed one hand against the small of her back. The light that had seemed too bright for trailing the dorm matron now seemed woefully dim. His face was clear enough, but the depths of his eyes remained hidden.\n\nHe led her in a slow, graceful waltz. Around and around they danced, the tall grass brushing against the hem of her skirt.\n\nFor such a large man, he was surprisingly light on his feet. At first she followed his lead like a puppet on a stick, gradually relaxing until his every movement\u2014even his breathing\u2014became her own.\n\nTheir heartbeats provided the tempo as they danced beneath a canopy of twinkling stars. The past, the future\u2014none of it existed. She closed her eyes and willed the present to last forever.\n\nSteps quickening, he whirled her about until at last they were both out of breath and forced to stop. Even then he didn't release her. Instead he held her close, both hands at her waist, his touch creating a circle of warmth that radiated upward.\n\n\"I wish you could see what the stars look like in your hair.\"\n\nHer heart sank. No one ever said anything nice about her hair.\n\n\"Don't talk about my hair,\" she said.\n\nHe tilted his head. \"Why not?\"\n\n\"Because I hate it and... never mind. I just don't want to talk about it.\"\n\nHis head drew back slightly, but his hands remained at her waist. \"You hate your hair?\"\n\n\"Don't sound so surprised. Anyone would.\"\n\n\"Not everyone,\" he said. Lifting a hand, he fingered her braid as if it were as precious as a baby bird. \"Do you know what your hair makes me think of?\"\n\n\"A red barn?\"\n\n\"The roses that grew at my grandparents' farm,\" he said softly.\n\nHer mouth parted, and something tugged at her heart. \"Roses?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"I spent some of the happiest days of my childhood on that farm.\"\n\nHis words crashed over her like ocean waves, washing away every hurtful thing that had ever been said to her. A lump formed in her throat.\n\nShe pulled away from his touch but only to control the emotions inside. \"You're the first person who ever said anything like that to me. Said anything nice about my hair...\"\n\n\"Really?\" He sounded genuinely surprised.\n\nShe nodded. \"Really. As for my freckles...\"\n\n\"I like freckles,\" he said. \"I like counting them. I especially like counting yours. You have exactly eleven on your nose and twenty-eight altogether.\"\n\nHer breath caught in her throat. He made her sound special. Beautiful, even. The knot of pain that she had carried inside for far too long melted away like the wax of a candle.\n\nHis hands slipped up her arms, and a shiver of awareness ripped through her. \"I didn't mean to make you cry.\"\n\nShe was crying? Oh, for the love of Kansas, she was crying. Over freckles and hair, no less. In the light of his problems, hers seemed silly. Childish, even.\n\n\"It's not your fault,\" she said, swiping away a tear.\n\n\"I was kind of hoping it was.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"You wanted to make me cry?\"\n\n\"Not cry exactly.\" He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and very gently dabbed at her tears. \"But you must know it's hard to get to know a woman who masquerades as a Harvey girl one minute and a detective the next. I never really know for sure which one I'm with.\"\n\n\"Right now I just want to be your friend,\" she said. His loneliness was almost as tangible to her as the gaping hole inside she could never seem to fill.\n\nHe replaced his handkerchief, his gaze never leaving hers. \"Do you mind if I ask a personal question?\"\n\nShe wasn't much for answering personal questions, but her curiosity got the best of her. \"If it's about my hair\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you ever been kissed?\"\n\nHad he punched her in the stomach she wouldn't have been more surprised. Of course she'd been kissed, not that she went around bragging about it. \"W\u2014what kind of question is that?\" she stammered.\n\n\"A relevant one.\"\n\n\"Relevant how?\"\n\nInstead of answering, he pulled her all the way into his arms. Startled, she pushed against his chest with both hands, but this only made him tighten his hold.\n\n\"Don't pull away,\" he whispered. \"I need you tonight. I need this. And I think you do, too.\" Crushing her in his arms, he brushed his mouth against her forehead before swooping down to capture her lips and even more of her heart.\n\nNever had she felt so beautiful and desirable as she felt at that moment. Never had she felt so wanted. She now knew that no matter how many times she'd been in another's arms in the past, she had never truly been held. Nor had she truly been kissed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Chapter 35\n\nKatie stood behind the restaurant counter the next day struggling with confused feelings. One moment she was happy\u2014thrilled, really\u2014that Branch had kissed her; the next moment appalled. If her Pinkerton bosses so much as suspected she'd acted so unprofessional she'd be fired on the spot.\n\nShe spent most of last night and all of this morning trying to banish Branch from her thoughts, but it was no use. His kisses had burned into the depths of her soul like a branding iron, leaving his mark.\n\nLand alive! A man complimented her hair and what did she do? She melted in his arms, that was what.\n\nOn the other hand, how could she not? The poor man was half out of his mind with worry. With the thought came a flash of understanding. Of course, that was it. She was just being kind and considerate. A true friend. Only a cold, heartless person would turn down a man's kisses under such circumstances.\n\nIf she could relieve his mind for a few minutes, what did it hurt? Except to make her want more... Not that anything more could happen between them. If she didn't come up with a suspect soon, her Pinkerton boss would pull her off the case and she'd be on the next eastbound train. Simple as that.\n\nThe thought sent her spirits spiraling downward. Funny how she had grown attached to the Harvey House in such short order. Odd as it seemed, there was a certain satisfaction in caring for weary travelers and sending them on their way with full tummies and happy smiles.\n\nIn contrast, tracking down bad guys made her feel more depressed than happy, but none more than her current assignment. Her next report to headquarters would be sadly lacking, indeed, but no more so than the last few reports.\n\nHer thoughts were interrupted by Culpepper, who walked into the room and promptly had a sneezing spell.\n\n\"Bless you,\" she called.\n\nHis hay fever, as he called it, was always worse in the morning. Today his eyes were red as beets, and he made a funny hissing sound when he breathed.\n\nHe settled behind the reception desk by the door to prepare for the arrival of the first customers.\n\nShe took him a cup of coffee. \"Maybe this will help.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" he said and sneezed into his handkerchief.\n\nAs she set the cup on the desk, she couldn't help but notice the calluses on his hands. How did a man sitting behind a desk all day end up with the hands of a laborer?\n\nMiss Thatcher had mentioned a possible lover's quarrel between Culpepper and Priscilla. If true, that raised more questions than answers. What would a young, beautiful woman see in a man like him? And how did Ginger fit into the picture?\n\nShe had queried him at length about both victims, but he gave no indication of a romantic attachment. She was just about to bring up Priscilla's name again when the chef interrupted her.\n\n\"Pssst.\" Chef Gassy motioned to her from the kitchen pass-through.\n\nShe was tempted to ignore him, but something in his manner suggested it was important. She left Culpepper and took her place behind the counter.\n\n\"What is it?\" she asked, peering through the glassless window.\n\nFor answer he slipped a handbill through the opening. Big, bold letters heralded a May dance. She lifted her gaze to find the chef watching her. He'd acted like her best friend since the pea soup episode, but surely he wasn't asking her to a dance.\n\n\"Uh...\" She didn't want to hurt his feelings, but neither did she want to encourage him.\n\n\"Do you zink she go vith me?\" he asked.\n\nShe blinked. \"Who?\"\n\n\"Miz Zathcher.\"\n\n\"Oh!\" Relief flooded through her. \"Have you asked her?\"\n\nHe held a finger to his mouth as he glanced over her shoulder at Culpepper. \"You ask her.\"\n\nKatie lowered her voice to a whisper. \"You want me to ask her for you?\"\n\nHe grinned. \"Merci beaucoup.\" He bowed. Thank you very much.\n\n\"Wait. I didn't say I would.\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Oui, oui.\" He moved away from the wall that separated them.\n\n\"I didn't say yes,\" she repeated, this time louder.\n\nHe did a little jig in the middle of the kitchen, and she couldn't help but laugh. His eyes shone like two black gems, and he pranced around as freely as a schoolboy. His toque flopped back and forth as if it couldn't make up its mind which way to fall.\n\nShe drew back and sighed. If this was what love did to a person, then she wanted some of it. Falling in love in the past had caused her more pain than happiness. Worse, she ended up berating God for not making her more lovable, like her sisters.\n\nBlinking back a burning sensation in her eyes, she studied the handbill. The dance would be held Saturday night. That was only a couple of days away. How in heaven's name was she supposed to persuade a stubborn dorm matron to go out with a temperamental chef? What an odd combination. If God meant for those two to be together, He sure did have a funny sense of humor.\n\n\"You owe me,\" she called.\n\nHe puckered his lips and threw her a kiss. She shook her head. Only a Frenchman could get away with such a bold gesture.\n\nA Frenchman and maybe even a certain handsome sheriff." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "That Saturday evening after the train had left and chores were completed, Katie met Mary-Lou, Tully, and Abigail in the hallway in front of Miss Thatcher's room.\n\nMary-Lou held a pretty blue gown over her arm. The dress had been borrowed from the daughter of one of their regular customers. Katie hoped it would fit, but it was hard to know for sure.\n\nAs the designated hair person, Tully carried a heated curling iron. Over her arm hung a muslin sack containing brush, comb, and a wide selection of clips and ribbons. Harvey girls weren't allowed to wear jewelry, but Abigail contributed a cameo on a blue velvet ribbon and a pair of seed pearl drop earbobs belonging to her grandmother.\n\nTully shook her head. \"This isn't going to work,\" she whispered.\n\n\"We won't know till we try,\" Mary-Lou whispered back.\n\n\"We could all be fired,\" Tully argued.\n\n\"If it works, maybe we'll get a bonus,\" Abigail said.\n\nTully rolled her eyes. \"Yeah, and maybe one day women will get to vote and run for office.\"\n\n\"Shh.\" Katie pressed her ear to the door. Tully had every reason to be wary. When Katie told Miss Thatcher about the chef's invitation, the dorm matron made it clear that she wanted nothing to do with him or the dance. But Chef Gassy pleaded with Katie not to give up. The poor man looked so heartbroken Katie couldn't say no.\n\n\"All right. On the count of three. One, two, three\u2014\"\n\nKatie flung the door open with such force that Miss Thatcher let out a cry of alarm. \"Surprise,\" Katie said, advancing toward her.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" Miss Thatcher rose from her desk, shaking with indignation. \"I told you I'm not going to a dance.\"\n\nIgnoring her protests, the four of them closed in on all sides like the drawstrings of a money bag and quickly got to work.\n\n\"We just want to see how you look in this dress,\" Katie said.\n\nWhile Katie unhooked her skirt Mary-Lou started on the mother-of-pearl buttons on her shirtwaist. No sooner had the skirt fallen in a fabric puddle on the floor than the real battle began.\n\n\"What do you think you're doing?\" Miss Thatcher squawked. She whacked at Mary-Lou's hands. \"Leave me alone this minute!\"\n\n\"You agreed to try it on,\" Katie said.\n\nMiss Thatcher gave her head an indignant toss. \"I agreed to no such thing!\"\n\n\"Really?\" Katie feigned a look of innocence. \"I would have sworn...\"\n\nMiss Thatcher glared at her. \"Just wait till Mr. Harvey hears about this. You'll all be fired. Do you hear me? Fired!\"\n\nWhile Katie and the dorm mother argued, Mary-Lou and Abigail worked quickly. Between the two of them, they managed to pull the dress over Miss Thatcher's head, and it slithered down the length of her, miraculously in one piece. The frock couldn't have fit more perfectly had it been made for her. Even the royal blue was flattering, the color turning Miss Thatcher's normally sallow skin to a lovely peach tone.\n\nThe neckline was modest but not prudish, revealing the dorm matron's long and graceful neck. The draped overskirt was caught in back by a bustle that gave Miss Thatcher's beanpole figure shape and substance. Lace-trimmed sleeves flared from her wrists, matching the lace at the slightly flared hem.\n\nMiss Thatcher was too busy wagging her tongue to notice. \"Never in all my born days have I seen such impertinence...\" On and on she went, threats flying out of her like bats from a cave.\n\nTully had a way with hair. Ignoring the dorm matron's rants and raves, Tully freed her tresses from their tight knot. Cautioning her to remain still or be burned, Tully coaxed the dorm matron's hair into a riot of curls with the hot iron.\n\nThe mass of chestnut ringlets was then pinned back to fall gracefully down to her shoulders. Tully left just enough tendrils loose to soften the angles of the dorm matron's face and hide her flyaway ears.\n\nAbigail tied the cameo around Miss Thatcher's neck and clipped on the earbobs. Ignoring the visual daggers cast her way, Katie turned the mahogany-framed cheval mirror around so Miss Thatcher could see herself.\n\n\"Now, remember, if you don't like it we'll undo everything,\" Katie said. If this didn't work, they could all be out of a job.\n\n\"This is an outrage,\" Miss Thatcher sputtered. \"This is\u2014\" Her gaze fell on the mirror and her eyes grew round as pie tins. Her mouth hung open as the last of her protests faded away.\n\nEncouraged, Katie smoothed a touch of forbidden carmine dye to Miss Thatcher's lips, and for once the dorm matron didn't protest.\n\nKatie and the others watched Miss Thatcher move her hands up and down the shiny fabric of her dress. She touched her hair and fingered the cameo. Outrage melted from her face, and a soft look of disbelief took its place.\n\nEven Katie was surprised by the transformation. \"You look pretty as a picture,\" she said, and she meant it. How could she not have noticed Miss Thatcher's pretty blue eyes? Or long eyelashes?\n\nNodding in agreement, Abigail clutched her hands to her chest. \"You look beautiful.\"\n\n\"Like an angel,\" Mary-Lou added.\n\nTully shook her head. \"By gummy, who would have thought it?\"\n\n\"I don't understand,\" Miss Thatcher whispered. \"Why are you doing this?\"\n\nKatie straightened the bustle at the back of Miss Thatcher's dress. \"It's our way of thanking you for all the care you've given us.\" Tully rolled her eyes but mercifully said nothing. \"And we thought you deserved to go to a dance.\"\n\nMiss Thatcher shook her head. \"I can't do that. Matthew\u2014\" She stopped and cleared her throat. \"I have work to do.\"\n\nKatie met the dorm matron's gaze in the mirror. \"I think we can turn our own lights out just this once. And the best way to honor Matthew's memory is to be the woman he fell in love with. I have a feeling that woman wouldn't have thought twice about going to a dance.\"\n\nMiss Thatcher lifted her chin. \"You're right. She wouldn't have.\"\n\nKatie nodded. \"Come. Chef Gass\u00e9e is downstairs,\" she said, pronouncing his name the proper French way.\n\nMiss Thatcher's cheeks turned a most becoming shade of pink. \"Well!\" She gave her head a slight toss. \"What are we waiting for?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Chapter 36\n\nBranch snapped the book shut and placed it on the table next to his son's bed. They would have to rise early for church. That meant the further adventures of Swiss Family Robinson would have to wait for another time.\n\n\"Say your prayers, Son.\" Sitting up in bed, Andy pressed his hands together and closed his eyes. \"God bless Pa and Miss Chloe and Miss Katie and...\"\n\nSince the tornado, Katie had become a regular addition to Andy's prayers. The boy was quite taken with her, and Branch couldn't blame him. Not even a little bit.\n\n\"Amen,\" Andy said and climbed beneath the covers.\n\nBranch tucked him in but was reluctant to leave the room. Clayborn was still in town, and Branch felt like he was teetering on the edge.\n\nNot only in his personal life, but professionally, as well. His investigation had hit a dead end, and his failure to bring the killer to justice was a heavy burden to bear. Sleep, if it came at all, offered little rest. Each morning he greeted the first light of dawn like a man waiting to be rescued at sea.\n\nMaybe this... this thing with Katie was just his way of holding on to something not tainted by the past. When he kissed her it was as if the world had suddenly grown brighter. As if the troubles that plagued him no longer existed. As if the topsy-turvy planet had returned to its axis. What to call such a feeling he had no idea. Or maybe he was just afraid to call it by its real name.\n\nAfter losing Hannah, he never thought he'd be interested in another woman. Work and Andy filled his life and that had been enough. It should be enough now. More than enough.\n\nAnd yet...\n\nHolding her in his arms felt like he'd been given a piece of heaven. And her lips... Her soft and yielding lips continued to haunt him. Kissing her had filled an aching need he hadn't even known he had. But, God forgive him, it had also triggered another need\u2014a deeper need\u2014the manly need to know her like he knew no other.\n\nWith a sigh he leaned over and kissed his son on the forehead.\n\n\"You can turn the light off,\" Andy said.\n\nBranch reared back. Andy always insisted he leave the light on until he fell asleep.\n\n\"I'm not afraid of muddy air anymore,\" Andy explained. \"Not afraid of eight legs on the hoof, either.\"\n\n\"You were afraid of two cattle running?\"\n\nAndy giggled. \"No, silly. Eight legs on the hoof are spiders.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" Branch grinned. \"Sounds like you've been talking to Miss Katie.\"\n\nHe turned off the lamp. If only the fear of losing his son could be resolved with a simple change of words.\n\n\"Put your trust in the Lord,\" Reverend Bushwell had said. Trust God? Could he? Dare he?\n\n\"Night, Son. Sleep tight.\"\n\nLeaving the room, he walked into the parlor and picked up the Bible. Sitting, he turned to the story of Abraham. Branch knew the story, or so he thought. God told Abraham to prove his faithfulness by sacrificing his son. What Branch hadn't known was that Abraham had not always been a man of faith. He'd made mistakes. Big mistakes. Eventually, Abraham learned the hard way that acting on his own and not trusting God only led to disaster.\n\nBranch closed the Bible with a heavy heart. Since losing Hannah he hadn't allowed himself to trust anyone or anything. He'd surrounded himself with a shield of indifference. That meant not getting close to anyone. He was friendly to all, but friends to none.\n\nMaybe that's the real reason he fought Katie so hard in the beginning. Somehow he knew that if anything could tear down his defenses it would be those big blue eyes of hers.\n\nNow he felt like everything he cared about was about to slip through his fingers. Again. Trust God? How could he with so much at stake? He didn't even know how to trust God. And that was the most troubling problem of all." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Tully insisted upon following the chef and Miss Thatcher to the dance. \"I still can't believe she agreed to go,\" she whispered as the four girls, including Katie, hurried along the boardwalk of Main.\n\nOverhead the stars popped out through wispy clouds like shiny buttons on a general's uniform.\n\nThe couple was only a half block ahead, so they treaded lightly and followed at a discreet distance. Keeping their giggles under wraps was the biggest challenge.\n\nThe dance hall was four blocks from the Harvey House, so Chef Gassy thought it easier to go on foot than bother with horse and carriage. He and Miss Thatcher walked side by side at a respectful distance. Close to the same height, they made a surprisingly handsome couple.\n\nSince Katie had no intention of letting the girls wander about after dark without protection, she agreed to join them, though secretly she longed for an early night and some much-needed sleep.\n\n\"I wish someone had asked me to the dance,\" Tully said.\n\nKnowing that such flippant talk was Tully's way of keeping her interest in Buzz under wraps, Katie said nothing.\n\nAbigail spoke up. \"With all the marriage proposals you get, I'm surprised no one did.\"\n\n\"It's because of our blasted curfews,\" Tully complained. \"Just when the fun begins, it's time to go home. It's a big pain, and most men don't want to bother.\"\n\nThe street in front of the dance hall was jammed with buggies and carriages. The screeching sound of fiddle music wafted from the open doors. Women dressed in colorful frocks were escorted inside by the town's most eligible bachelors.\n\nKatie searched for Branch among the glittery crowd, but she didn't see him or his horse. The memory of dancing with him beneath a star-studded sky filled her with such a sense of longing that she literally ached inside. She'd felt beautiful in his arms, desirable even, and no one had ever made her feel that way. Certainly not Nathan Cole.\n\nIs that how the chef made Miss Thatcher feel? His eyes certainly lit up when he saw her earlier, and he took as much care helping her into her wrap as he gave his pastry. Oh, God, please make it so. Miss Thatcher deserved some happiness.\n\nThey waited for the couple to enter the dance hall before turning back to the house. No longer worried about being overheard, Tully's voice rose but not her spirits.\n\n\"Next time there's a dance,\" she declared with a determined shake of the head, \"I'm going. With or without an escort.\"\n\nAs they passed the sheriff's office, Katie kept her gaze focused straight ahead, but that didn't stop her heart from beating in triple time.\n\nHer pace slowed as they reached the corner of Main and Sunflower, and she fell behind the others. This was the spot where Ginger lost her shoe, and it still puzzled her. Nagged her, more like it.\n\nStanding in the middle of the street, she visually followed the rooflines outlined against the black velvet sky. The shops and businesses located at street level were dark. Lights shone from the windows of second-story apartments where most of the shopkeepers lived. Mrs. Bracegirdle lived closest to the bank.\n\nBranch had interviewed every resident living on the street and had come up empty. No one heard or saw anything suspicious.\n\nMary-Lou and the others were almost a block away, their voices fading. Anxious to catch up, Katie's gaze traveled over the upper part of the buildings again, and a flash of light caught her eye. It came from the vacant apartment over the bank.\n\nThe two rectangular windows were dark now, and she could just make out the FOR RENT sign in the corner of one. Had she seen what she thought she saw? Or were her eyes simply playing tricks?\n\nMaybe she caught the reflection of the gas streetlamp from across the way. She backed up in an effort to test her theory, but the windows remained dark. Convinced she'd only imagined a light, she hurried to catch up to the others." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "Chapter 37\n\nThe town was still deserted when Branch arrived at his office early that Monday morning to find Clayborn waiting for him.\n\nBranch dismounted and tethered his horse to the hitching post next to Clayborn's brown gelding. He walked slowly, methodically, up the steps leading to the boardwalk. A walk to the gallows couldn't have taken more out of him.\n\nClayborn greeted him with a nod, his eyes dark and fathomless as two pieces of coal. He leaned against the building puffing on a cigarette, ankles crossed. Had he known the murderous thoughts going through Branch's head, he might have looked less casual and unconcerned.\n\nBranch nodded in return. \"What brings you here so bright and early?\" As if he didn't know.\n\nClayborn dropped the butt of his cigarette on the boardwalk and ground it out with the heel of his boot. \"Got a paper I need signed. Then I'll be on my way.\"\n\nStomach clenched, Branch unlocked the door. \"Does that mean you're leaving town?\"\n\nClayborn followed him inside. \"Nothing keeping me here.\"\n\nStepping inside his office, Branch methodically hung his hat on the wall hook instead of tossing it. The keys he threw on the desk.\n\nWoody and Scarface both looked up from their cots. Woody's gaze flitted from Branch to Clayborn and back again, but he said nothing.\n\nBranch sat at his desk, the chair groaning beneath his weight. \"Let's see what you got.\"\n\nClayborn reached into his trouser pocket for a folded piece of paper and handed it over.\n\nBranch unfolded the document. The letterhead read ALFRED L. ASHFORD, ATTORNEY AND COUNSELOR AT LAW. Branch didn't recognize the name, which meant Clayborn hadn't trusted the local lawyers to handle the matter. The man was careless in manners, dress, and integrity but wasn't taking any chances with the trust fund.\n\nBelow was a line for the signature and date. In between were two tersely written sentences declaring the Clayborn infant and its mother deceased.\n\nAll Branch had to do was sign his name on the line and his troubles would be over. His signature would keep Clayborn from taking Andy away.\n\n\"It's all nice and legal,\" Clayborn said, as if sensing his hesitation.\n\nThe letter didn't waste words. It included only date and place of death and stated there were no other living relatives.\n\nBranch stared at the document until his vision blurred and the ink seemed to dance across the page. He blinked to refocus and read the letter again.\n\nClayborn shuffled his feet. \"Is there a problem?\"\n\n\"No problem,\" Branch muttered. He reached for his fountain pen just as Reverend Bushwell's words came to mind.\n\n\"No one can have a relationship with God while living a lie.\"\n\nHis mouth twisted. Sorry, Reverend, but I'm no Abraham. He dipped the nib into the bottle of ink. This time Katie's voice echoed in his head, loud and clear. \"You'll do the right thing.\"\n\nHe grimaced, and the pen slipped out of his clammy hand. Wiping his damp palm on his vest, he picked the pen off the desk.\n\nIt wasn't often that he was scared, but he was today. Scared of losing Andy. Scared of losing the one thing that had kept him going these past eight years\u2014the son his wife had died saving.\n\nHe was also worried about what it would do to the boy to be uprooted from the only home he'd ever known. Would Clayborn desert him as he'd deserted Dorothy?\n\nBranch also feared losing his faith in God, imperfect as it was.\n\n\"I'm not afraid of muddy air anymore. Not afraid of eight legs on the hoof, either.\"\n\nBrave words from a brave little boy.\n\nA boy with a coward for a father.\n\nThe strong vibrant voice in his head left him reeling. Where had that come from? Surely not God...\n\nWhether it was or not he didn't know. He only knew that signing that paper would be a coward's way out, and Andy deserved a better father than that. A lot better.\n\nTossing the pen on his desk, he sat back in his chair. \"We're going to do this the right way.\"\n\n\"The right way?\" Clayborn frowned. \"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"It means that I'm not signing that paper. I'd be breaking the law if I did.\"\n\n\"Whatcha talkin' about?\"\n\nBranch leaned forward. \"Dorothy's infant didn't die in that tornado. He's alive, thanks to my wife.\"\n\n\"He?\" An incredulous look crossed Clayborn's face. \"I have a son?\"\n\nBranch clenched his hands. \"He's not your son. He's mine. And I'll fight you in every court of the land to prove it, if necessary.\"\n\nClayborn gaped at him, and only Woody's peg leg scraping across the cell floor broke the silence between them.\n\n\"Are you saying that the boy I saw you with\u2014\" He rubbed his chin, and his eyes grew wide as the implications sank in. \"You have no right\u2014\"\n\n\"I have every right.\" Branch half rose out of his chair. \"Eight years of being the only father he's ever known gives me that right. Now get out of here. It makes me sick just to look at your sorry mug.\"\n\nClayborn pointed a threatening finger. \"This isn't over, Whitman. It won't be over until I get what's rightfully mine.\" With that he whirled about and shot outside. The door slammed shut with a bang, and Branch's hat fell from the wall hook, along with the newly posted sign forbidding both men and women from carrying guns in town.\n\n\"Whoo-ee,\" Woody called out, holding on to the bars. \"That one's loaded to the muzzle. Better watch your back.\"\n\nScarface concurred with a nod. \"And don't forgit to keep an eye on your front side, too. I don't aim on stickin' around if they bring in another sheriff.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "The railroad workers were in especially good spirits that morning and lingered longer over breakfast than usual.\n\nSeated at the counter, Okie-Sam shot a glance at the noisy group. \"First of the month payday. They're always rowdier on payday.\" He folded his newspaper and flipped a coin onto the counter. \"Thanks, sis,\" he said and sauntered off.\n\nNo sooner had he left than Long-Shot walked through the door.\n\nOne of the railroad workers called out, \"Hey, Long-Shot! Whatcha running for next?\"\n\nLong-Shot tugged on his red suspenders and stuck out his chest. \"How about I run for the school board?\"\n\n\"How about you learn to read first?\"\n\nDuring the laughter that followed, Charley Reynolds arrived but sat by himself. He looked less forlorn today than he'd looked the night Katie questioned him outside the Harvey House.\n\nShe nudged Mary-Lou. \"Go take care of Charley. I'll take care of the others.\"\n\nKatie enjoyed bantering with the boys, as she called them, but they were a demanding bunch and kept the Harvey girls hopping.\n\nFinally they left, and Katie ducked behind the counter. She was anxious to talk to Mrs. Bracegirdle before the morning train arrived.\n\nSitting at the counter in her usual spot, the older woman greeted Katie with a smile and roll of the eyes. Today she wore a mauve skirt and shirtwaist with white hat and gloves. \"These young whippersnappers don't know funny from hay. You should have heard my Harry. He could read the train schedule and make you double over laughing.\"\n\n\"I wish I could have known your husband.\"\n\n\"I wish you could have, too.\" Her eyes crinkled. \"Right now you have to concentrate on finding your own man.\"\n\nKatie blushed. \"It's not that easy.\" It certainly hadn't been for her.\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle picked up the menu and perused it. \"Actually, finding the right man is not the problem. Recognizing him is the real challenge. You'd be surprised at what's right there under your very muzzle.\"\n\nRight now the only thing Katie hoped to find under her nose was a sign pointing to the killer. She glanced around the room. God, if there's a clue here, help me see it.\n\nTully was in deep conversation with a cattleman. Buzz watched them as he polished the brass door handles, a look of uncertainty on his face. Poor man had his hands full with Tully.\n\nCharley drained the last of his coffee. He said something to Mary-Lou, bringing a smile to her face, and left. Abigail refilled Long-Shot's cup and laughed at whatever he said. Next to the door Culpepper counted money.\n\nKatie sighed. If there was a clue here, she certainly couldn't see it. She filled a cup from the coffee urn and set the steaming brew in front of the old lady.\n\n\"I'll have the usual.\" Mrs. Bracegirdle folded the menu and set it aside. She always read the entire menu even though her order never varied.\n\nKatie smiled and called Mrs. Bracegirdle's order to the kitchen. Chef Gassy threw her a kiss before turning to the stove. Neither he nor Miss Thatcher mentioned the dance, but the dorm matron had been heard humming from time to time and just that morning failed to notice Tully was wearing face powder.\n\nAs for the chef, Katie swore she heard him whistling earlier when she stepped into the kitchen. He also failed to yell upon finding paw prints all over the chopping board. Instead, he surprised Katie by setting out a bowl of milk for Spook Cat.\n\nShe turned back to the counter. \"Has anyone rented the apartment over the bank?\" She spoke in a casual voice one might use to make small talk.\n\n\"No, and they won't, either.\"\n\nKatie frowned. \"Why do you say that?\"\n\n\"The last couple who rented it moved in and out in less than a day. It's that darn cat. It thinks it's Jenny Lind or something.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle added a dollop of cream to her coffee and stirred. \"I spoke to the dogcatcher, and he told me it's not his job to catch cats.\"\n\n\"Did you ever see a light in the apartment?\" Katie asked. \"You know, through the window?\"\n\n\"No lights. Just opera.\" Mrs. Bracegirdle blew on her coffee and took a sip before continuing. \"Like I told you before, Branch checked it out but didn't find anything but a banging shutter.\" She set her cup down and added more cream.\n\nKatie pondered this a moment before asking, \"Do you remember Ginger?\"\n\n\"Oh yes. Such a pretty little thing. She always served me breakfast. It's a terrible thing that happened to her. Priscilla, too.\"\n\n\"Did you know that Ginger's shoe was found in front of your place?\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle set her coffee cup down with a clink. \"My place?\"\n\n\"Actually, on the corner in front of the bank. I believe she might have lost it the night she died.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle pursed her lips. \"That's the first I heard of a shoe. How do you suppose it got there?\"\n\n\"That's a good question,\" Katie said.\n\n\"I'm telling you, there are some mighty strange things going on.\" Mrs. Bracegirdle leaned forward and lowered her voice. \"Did I tell you about the time I found a strange man in my bed?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Chapter 38\n\nKatie waited for Branch to unlock the apartment over the bank. A horse and wagon passed on the street below, stirring up dust. The door to Mrs. Bracegirdle's place remained shut.\n\n\"I'm worried about her,\" Katie whispered. How was it possible to sound so lucid even when talking about singing cats and strange men in her bed? \"I don't know that she should be living alone.\"\n\n\"Her son keeps a pretty good eye on her, but I'll talk to him.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Good idea.\"\n\nThe door opened with a creak of its leather hinges, and Branch gestured her inside.\n\n\"I don't know why I let you talk me into this,\" he said.\n\n\"I told you. I thought I saw a light.\"\n\nThey stood facing each other and a ripple of awareness rushed through her. Suddenly, she was in his arms again\u2014or so it seemed\u2014his lips on hers. The vision was so real it took her breath away.\n\nShaken, she turned away. Mrs. Bracegirdle wasn't the only one suffering from hallucinations. Time to concentrate on the investigation and not the man.\n\nShe might have done just that had he not stopped her with a hand to her wrist.\n\n\"The other night... ,\" he began, his voice thick with meaning. \"We should talk about it.\"\n\nShe looked back at him, and her barely contained emotions took another perilous leap. \"There's nothing to talk about,\" she whispered. \"You needed a friend and it was me.\"\n\nHe released her arm. \"Is that what you think?\"\n\nShe nodded and waited for him to object. No, no, she wanted him to say. The kiss meant much more than mere friendship. It meant the world to me. It meant I love you...\n\nHe said none of the words she longed to hear. Instead he stared at her long and hard before silently turning away.\n\nShe wanted to go to him. Lay her head on his chest and declare it all a lie. But fear prevented her from doing what her heart dictated. What if he rejected her like all the others? Her family. Nathan...\n\nShe'd managed to survive the rejections of her past, but she didn't think she could survive his. Already she had proof of that. The piercing pain in her chest could only come from a broken heart, pieces of which were lodged in her throat.\n\nSwallowing hard, she forced herself to look around. Work. That's what she must concentrate on. It saved her in the past and she prayed it would save her now.\n\nThe room was empty and as forlorn as the void inside her. Flecks of wallpaper dripped from the wall like the tears she was too proud\u2014or maybe even too stubborn\u2014to shed.\n\nClamping down on her thoughts, she focused on the golden beam of sunlight streaming through the windows. Oddly enough, the cardboard sign she'd seen the night before was now on the carpet. She picked it up and placed it on the windowsill facing out.\n\nSomething bothered her nose and she sneezed. \"What's that funny smell?\" She glanced at him. Had he heard the tremor in her voice? She hoped not. She cleared her throat. \"Smells like metal.\"\n\n\"Smells like dust to me,\" Branch said.\n\nAll three rooms were empty except for a lantern in the kitchen.\n\nBranch leaned against the kitchen doorframe with his arms crossed while she checked the cabinets and drawers. Even the light from the kitchen window failed to penetrate the darkness of his eyes.\n\n\"Satisfied?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she said, eyeing a tin cup in the kitchen sink. \"For now.\"\n\nShe wiped her damp hands on the side of her skirt. \"I just want to check the bedroom again,\" she murmured. There was nothing to check, but it allowed her an excuse to escape his scrutiny and get her rampaging emotions under control.\n\nMoments later, she found him in the parlor staring out the window. The window shade had been lifted all the way up. He looked like he was a million miles away. Standing behind him, she rose on tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. The window overlooked the street where Ginger had lost her shoe.\n\n\"Sorry to waste your time,\" she said.\n\nFor the longest while he said nothing, and she hesitated to break the silence. She wanted so much to touch him. To bring him back to the present. To bring him back to her. But it was hard enough just being in the same room with him.\n\nFinally he turned. \"He knows,\" he said, and the look of devastation on his face nearly tore her apart.\n\nShe drew in her breath. She didn't have to ask who or what. His expression told her all she needed to know. \"How?\"\n\n\"I told him.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"But why?\"\n\n\"I decided to take the pastor's advice and put my trust in God.\"\n\nShe bit her lip. \"That... that's good, isn't it?\"\n\n\"We'll know soon enough. Judge Hendricks arrives on the midday train. He agreed to postpone Scarface's trial and hold a custody hearing instead.\" He cleared his voice. \"I'd like you to be there. That is, if you can get off work.\"\n\n\"I'll try, but I'm not sure I can be of any help.\"\n\n\"You could say something nice about me to the judge. I'll need all the character witnesses I can get.\"\n\n\"I can do that.\" She wanted to kick herself for not realizing sooner that he was half out of his mind with worry. Here she was thinking about her own feelings, her own needs, while he feared losing his son.\n\n\"The hearing will be held at the hotel at two,\" he said and hesitated. \"I don't want to get you in trouble with Pickens.\"\n\nShe discounted his concern with a shake of her head. \"It doesn't matter. Working at the Harvey House has got me nowhere. I'd have done just as well staying at the hotel.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry, Katie. I know how much you want to find the killer. We both do.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"Right now let's concentrate on the hearing. We could both use some good news.\"\n\nA smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. \"If you're done here\u2014\"\n\n\"I am.\" Turning, she walked to the door. She prayed she had better luck convincing the judge that Branch deserved keeping his son than she had in tracking down a killer. God, please make it so..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "Chapter 39\n\nThe hearing was held on the second floor of the hotel in a room set aside for just that purpose. Katie slipped into the room quietly and sat in the back row next to newspaper editor Clovis Read. He nodded a greeting, pen and paper in hand.\n\nThe circuit judge was a barrel-shaped man with a sweeping mustache and sideburns so furry as to look like earmuffs. He sat at the front of the room facing them, his head ringed with cigar smoke. Wire-framed spectacles teetered on the tip of his nose as he perused his notes.\n\nNo sooner had Katie seated herself than Branch glanced over his shoulder. He winked before turning back to the man next to him, probably his lawyer. Reminding herself to breathe, she pressed her hands together on her lap.\n\nShe wouldn't even be here had Chef Gassy not helped her sneak away and promised to cover for her. Ever since Katie had convinced Miss Thatcher to go to the dance with him, it seemed there was nothing he wouldn't do for her.\n\nThe clock on the wall indicated it was after two. Still there was no sign of Clayborn. Did that mean he had changed his mind about seeking custody of his son? Oh, God, please make it so.\n\nThe judge pulled the watch out of his coat pocket and flipped the gold case open. \"We'll give Mr. Clayborn another few minutes before we get started.\"\n\nThe room was hot and airless, yet no one had thought to open the windows. In a front seat Reverend Bushwell swatted a fly away with his hat.\n\nThe judge clamped down on his cigar with his teeth as he dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief.\n\nA restless buzz filled the air like swarming bees. Next to her the newspaper editor doodled on his notepad.\n\nIf Clayborn failed to show, would the judge rule in Branch's favor through default? Now wouldn't that be an answer to prayer?\n\nJust then the door swung open, and all heads, including Katie's, swiveled toward the back of the room. Only it wasn't Clayborn. Instead, a dark-skinned woman ran into the room, obviously in distress.\n\n\"Andy's gone!\" she cried. \"Andy's gone.\" She then collapsed to her knees, sobbing.\n\nBranch shot out of his seat, ran to the back of the room, and stooped by her side. \"What do you mean, gone?\"\n\nThe woman could only manage one word, but it was enough. \"Clayborn.\"\n\nA collective gasp filled the makeshift courtroom, and Katie jumped to her feet.\n\n\"When?\" The blood drained from Branch's face. \"Tell me!\"\n\n\"Just a while ago,\" the woman said between sobs. \"Saw him snatch Andy and... and take off on his horse.\"\n\nBranch straightened, hands clenched by his side. \"Which way did he go?\"\n\n\"West. He was travelin' west.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Katie ran down the stairs, through the hotel lobby, and out the door. \"Wait!\" she called. \"Branch, wait!\"\n\nAlready astride his saddle, Branch circled his horse to face her.\n\n\"I'm going with you!\" she called.\n\n\"There's no time.\" He spun Midnight in the opposite direction and raced away.\n\nWhirling about, she spotted Reverend Bushwell walking out of the hotel. She rushed over to him and whispered in his ear.\n\n\"I'm a Pinkerton detective and I need your horse.\"\n\nHis eyes widened and his eyebrows shot up, but he nodded.\n\n\"Thank you!\" She quickly untied the minister's horse from the hitching post and jabbed her foot in the stirrup. Throwing her leg over the saddle, she'd barely settled astride before yelling, \"Gid-up!\"\n\nThe horse took off running.\n\nA mule-drawn wagon blocked the road ahead while a farmer unloaded his crops. Katie caught up to Branch just as the farmer cleared the road.\n\n\"Did you see Andy pass by?\" Branch called to the farmer.\n\nThe man's face was as dark and wrinkled as a prune. \"Nope. Can't say that I did.\" The farmer started to say more, but already Branch had taken off, Midnight's thunderous hooves pounding the dirt road. The minister's mare was smaller than Branch's gelding, and Katie had a hard time keeping up.\n\nDogs barked, and chickens flew to the tops of fences, scattering feathers.\n\nThey saw no sign of Clayborn, but still they kept going, past fields of wildflowers and tall grass. Past herds of cattle and horses. Past acres of wheat and knee-high corn.\n\nThey rode for a good half hour before Branch reined in his horse. He twisted in his saddle and pointed to the side of the road. \"That's Andy's!\" he yelled.\n\nShe pulled up alongside of him and followed his gaze to the abandoned shoe\u2014the first sign they were on the right trail. But that gave her little comfort. Between here and the cheerless prairie to the west was an abundance of hills and trees. Before Kansas became a state, this area flourished with outlaw hideouts. A person could get lost in those hills and never be found.\n\nBranch slipped from the saddle and snatched the shoe off the ground. He held it to his chest before sticking it into his saddlebag.\n\nJust as he mounted his horse, a gunshot ripped through the quiet, startling a flock of blackbirds. Squawking, the crows rose from the treetops, creating a swirling black cloud overhead. Branch raced away, clods of dirt flying from beneath his horse's pounding hooves.\n\nActing purely out of instinct, Katie spurred her mount and took off after him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Chapter 40\n\nBranch pressed his finger to his mouth. He and Katie lay on their stomachs side by side in a dry creek staring at the Connor cabin.\n\nBranch pulled out his Colt. Katie already had her weapon in hand, though Branch was hesitant to put the ridiculously small derringer in the same category as his own.\n\nHe took the derringer from her and replaced it with his own revolver. \"That's what I call a gun,\" he said, reaching into his holster for his second pistol. \"Cover me. I'm going in.\"\n\nShe grabbed his arm. Surprised by the strength of her grip, he looked down at her hand before meeting her gaze.\n\n\"Be careful,\" she whispered. The concern in her eyes filled him with longing, and he inhaled sharply. It had been a long time since anyone looked at him like that. Too long.\n\nHe sucked in his breath. He hadn't wanted her to come. Now he was glad to have her by his side\u2014a selfish thought. Still, it felt like she belonged there. But should anything happen to her... Oh, God, no! Squelching the thought, he squeezed her hand.\n\n\"What would your Pinkerton bosses do under these circumstances?\" he asked, hoping to tease the worried look from her face.\n\n\"They would try to negotiate with the hostage taker.\"\n\n\"Negotiate, eh?\" Gaze riveted on the cabin, he jumped up and left the gully on the run. He was halfway to the cabin when a voice called out.\n\n\"Pa!\"\n\nFor a split second he was confused by the still-closed cabin door. He then realized Andy's voice came from the woods, not the cabin. He spun around just as Andy broke away from Clayborn and ran.\n\n\"Pa!\"\n\nClayborn was right behind him. \"Come back here, you!\"\n\n\"Watch out!\" Katie screamed.\n\nBranch's gaze shot to the cabin. The door was open a crack, and the sun glinted against the muzzle of a rifle.\n\n\"Don't shoot!\" he yelled at the hidden gunman. He darted toward his son, but Clayborn reached him first and threw the startled boy down to the ground.\n\nThe sharp crack of a rifle was met with the heavy boom of a Colt pistol. Katie's blast did the trick, for the cabin door slammed shut.\n\nIt took only a second for Branch to reach his son's side, but it seemed like forever. Holstering his gun, he lifted Andy in his arms and ran into the woods for cover. He set Andy down in the middle of the thick grove of cottonwoods.\n\n\"It's okay, Son. It's okay.\" He didn't believe his own reassurances until he had checked Andy over from head to toe. Andy was still trembling, but there were no visible injuries. Oh, God! If anything had happened to him...\n\nAndy stared up at him with eyes that seemed too old for his tender years. \"I told that man I didn't want to go with him.\"\n\n\"I know, Andy. I know.\"\n\n\"I lost my shoe, Pa.\"\n\n\"I found it. It's in my saddlebags. We'll get it later. Right now you need to stay here.\"\n\nKatie joined them, weapon still in hand, and fell to her knees by his side. \"Is he all right?\"\n\n\"Seems like it.\" He glanced over his shoulder. The cabin showed no sign of life, and Clayborn hadn't moved since falling to the ground.\n\n\"Stay with Andy,\" he said.\n\nHe heard her intake of breath. \"Be careful.\"\n\nTouched once again by her concern for his welfare, he was tempted to take her in his arms. But the sound of galloping horse hooves made him leave her side and dash into the clearing." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "The horseman had a good head start, and Branch decided not to give chase. Was there only one gunman? The horse tied to a sapling was most likely Clayborn's, but he wasn't about to take a chance.\n\nWith an anxious glance at the cabin door, Branch knelt beside the fallen man and rolled him over onto his back. He'd been shot and his shirt was soaked with blood, but he was still breathing.\n\nHooking his arms beneath the injured man's armpits, he raised him to his feet. He grabbed hold of Clayborn's right arm and thrust him over his shoulder. Clayborn's head and arms trailed down his back.\n\nStaggering away from the cabin, Branch entered the grove of trees, choosing a place away from Andy and Katie. The boy was scared enough without seeing all that blood.\n\nHe laid Clayborn down in a soft patch of leaves.\n\nClayborn's eyes flickered open. \"Andy?\" he whispered. He wasn't breathing as much as panting. \"Is he...?\"\n\n\"He's fine,\" Branch said. He ripped Clayborn's shirt open and pressed a handkerchief against the wound on his chest in an effort to stop the flow of blood. \"You saved his life.\"\n\nThe whites of Clayborn's eyes showed, and his lids came down.\n\n\"Hold on,\" Branch said, slapping him gently on the cheeks.\n\nClayborn's eyes flickered open, and his mouth moved silently before he was finally able to find his voice. \"Done a lot of things I shouldn't have.\"\n\n\"Better save your strength till I get you in town.\"\n\nBut once started, Clayborn couldn't seem to stop. \"Took money that didn't belong to me. Cheated at cards. Drank too much.\" His voice was so faint Branch had to lower his head to hear. \"Shouldn't have left Dottie. Never should have done that. Maybe she'd still be alive if I'd stayed.\"\n\nBranch shook his head. The man had enough reasons to feel guilty, but Dorothy's death wasn't one of them. \"There was nothing you could have done. The tornado... There was nothing any of us could have done.\"\n\n\"Do you... think taking the bullet for... for Andy put me in good stead with G\u2014God?\"\n\n\"I'm sure it did,\" Branch said. His confession no doubt helped, too. \"God's grace knows no end.\"\n\n\"Take... take care of him.\"\n\n\"You have my word.\"\n\nClayborn studied him from beneath half-closed lids, his pale face etched with the gray of impending death. \"Dottie always said that special prayer when someone was sick or dying. Don't remember the words.\"\n\n\"Do you mean the Lord's Prayer?\" Clayborn gave a slight nod, and Branch began, \"Our Father...\" He recited the prayer from beginning to end. \"Amen.\"\n\n\"Amen,\" Clayborn whispered and coughed. He had a hard time catching his breath. \"What... what are you gonna tell Andy about me?\" he asked.\n\nBranch pulled the kerchief from around his neck and wiped away the trickle of blood from the corner of Clayborn's mouth. \"I'll tell him that in the end his father\u2014his real father\u2014gave himself to the Lord.\"\n\n\"That's good. Th\u2014that's real good.\" Clayborn's body shuddered once, and his head fell to the side.\n\nBranch checked Clayborn's pulse, but the vein told him only what he already knew." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Chapter 41\n\nWhere's Pa?\" Andy asked.\n\n\"He'll be here soon,\" Katie said. She craned her head around the trunk of a tree. Branch had disappeared in the woods with Clayborn and she hadn't seen him since.\n\nHer legs trembled and her mouth felt dry as old parchment paper. The bullet had missed Branch, and that was a miracle. If something had happened to him... to his son...\n\nThe thought almost brought her to her knees, and she quickly banished it. Mustn't think about that. Have to stay alert. Protect Andy. That's what she had to do. The boy had gone through a terrible ordeal. She must remain calm for his sake.\n\nThe cabin was hidden behind the trees. Was the gunman still inside? She thought she heard a horse gallop away earlier, but it could have been a trick.\n\nHer hand tightened around the Colt pistol.\n\nAndy was occupied with watching a spider dangle from a tree branch on a silver thread. \"I wasn't afraid, you know,\" he said. \"I pretended\u2014like you do.\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\" she asked.\n\n\"You know how you pretend that beans are bullets and the dark is just muddy air?\"\n\n\"And spiders are just\u2014\"\n\n\"Eight legs on a hoof.\" He giggled before growing serious. \"Well, I pretended that I was brave like Mr. Robinson.\"\n\n\"Who is Mr. Robinson?\"\n\n\"The father in Swiss Family Robinson.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes, of course. I remember reading that book many years ago. I wasn't much older than you are now.\"\n\nAndy abandoned the spider and picked up a stick. \"Do you ever pretend to be someone you're not?\" he asked.\n\nShe nodded. \"Sometimes.\"\n\nHe gazed at her with curiosity. \"Like who?\"\n\n\"Let me think.\" She thought about all the disguises donned as a detective through the years. Each one had stolen a piece of her until she'd hardly known who she was. Then she met Branch, and somehow he put her back together piece by piece like a jigsaw puzzle. He made her aware of the woman inside, a woman who needed to love and be loved. The woman God had meant her to be.\n\nAware suddenly that Andy was still waiting for an answer, she said, \"Once I pretended to be a pirate.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Next time someone tries to take me away I'll pretend I'm a pirate and make him walk the plank.\"\n\n\"What's all this talk about pirates?\" Branch stepped into the small clearing, and Katie's heart leaped with relief and something else. Something she was afraid to name but that felt as deep and wide as an ocean. Her first instinct was to throw herself into his arms. She might have done just that had Andy not beaten her to the punch.\n\n\"Pa!\"\n\nBranch lifted Andy off the ground and whirled him around before setting him down again.\n\nShe held out his pistol, grip first. He took it from her and shoved it in his holster. His gaze locked with hers.\n\n\"Sure you don't want it?\"\n\n\"Want it? I'm still trying to recover from firing it.\" The blood on his vest made her gasp, and she reached for his arm. \"You're hurt.\"\n\n\"Not me,\" he said with a meaningful glance.\n\nAndy waved his stick about like a sword. \"Miss Katie pretended to be a pirate.\"\n\nBranch put on a good show for his son, and no one could guess the ordeal he'd just come through.\n\n\"A lady pirate, eh?\" Branch afforded her a wink.\n\n\"Clayborn?\" she mouthed.\n\nHe answered her silent question with a shake of his head. That was one problem solved, but there was still the gunman to worry about.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, he said, \"The cabin's empty. Whoever fired that shot is gone.\" He slanted a nod at her blood-covered hand. \"Go wash off. We'll meet you at the horses. You and Andy can ride back to town while I finish up.\"\n\n\"I'll just be a minute,\" she said and started for the cabin.\n\nBehind her Branch called to his son, \"Come on, Pirate Pete.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "The cabin door creaked as she pressed against it. She stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her.\n\nThe cabin was built from adobe brick, and a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace commanded one wall. The room was sparsely furnished. She walked through to the kitchen and primed the pump at the sink until rusty water trickled from the spout.\n\nShe rinsed off her hands and, having no towel, dried them on her skirt. A cup on the counter caught her attention, and the nine o'clock position of the handle made her think of orange pekoe tea. The Harvey House code had now become so ingrained that \"reading\" cups seemed as natural to her as reading tea leaves was to a medium.\n\nShaking her head at the incongruity of thinking of cup codes at a time like this, she glanced around.\n\nExcept for the cup and a dirty ashtray, the counters were bare. A quick check of the kitchen cabinets revealed a stash of neatly stacked tinned goods. The gunman had stayed in the cabin for a while but would probably not come back. Who or what was he hiding from?\n\nOut of habit, she checked the bedroom. Rusty bed springs occupied one side of the room and an old chest of drawers the other. A window was open, and she leaned on the sill and peered outside. That must have been how the gunman made his escape.\n\nShe closed the window and returned to the front room. A bedroll was laid out flat and ashes piled up in the stone fireplace.\n\nSince Branch was waiting for her to take Andy back to town, she walked to the door. Hesitating, she glanced around the room again. A strange sensation came over her. A thought tiptoed on the outermost part of her mind like a forgotten name or half-remembered dream.\n\nTry as she might, she couldn't bring it to the fore. It continued to plague her as she walked outside to join Branch and Andy.\n\nSomething..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Chapter 42\n\nThe late-afternoon sun still felt warm as Katie rode back to town. Andy, seated behind her on the bay horse, held on tight, arms clamped around her waist as if to never let her go.\n\n\"We're almost home,\" she said.\n\nReverend Bushwell spotted them first. With a wave of his hand, he vanished inside the church, and seconds later church bells rang out the news of Andy's safe return. The pealing chimes brought people running from all directions to greet them.\n\nKatie tugged on the reins, and the minister helped Andy from the back of the horse.\n\nJust as Katie dismounted, Mary-Lou, Tully, and Abigail rushed up. \"Thank God you're okay,\" Mary-Lou cried, throwing her arms around her.\n\n\"I'm fine.\"\n\nMary-Lou released her, and Katie looked around in bewilderment. \"But what are you all doing here?\"\n\n\"We heard about what happened to the sheriff's son,\" Mary-Lou explained.\n\n\"And we came to the church to pray for his safe return,\" Abigail added.\n\nMiss Thatcher, Buzz, and Culpepper, along with at least half of the railroad workers, had turned out. Mrs. Bracegirdle stood leaning on her cane.\n\nEven Okie-Sam was there, a knapsack flung over his shoulder. He slid a hefty arm around her shoulders. \"Don't go scaring your brother like that, you hear?\" He withdrew his arm. \"If anyone hurt my sis...\" He pounded a fist into the palm of his hand. \"He'd have me to contend with.\"\n\nShe gave him a wan smile and tossed a nod at the canvas bag. \"Going somewhere?\"\n\n\"Just for a few days or so. My pa...\"\n\n\"Hope it's nothing serious,\" she said, but already he had turned away and her attention was caught up by the other well-wishers.\n\nKatie blinked away the burning in her eyes. Oddly enough, it felt like she was surrounded by family.\n\n\"What I don't understand is why you got involved,\" Tully said.\n\nMary-Lou frowned. \"Really, Tully. This isn't the time\u2014\"\n\nJust then Branch's housekeeper barreled up to them and Andy all but disappeared in her ample arms. \"Lawdy, I never prayed so hard in all my born days. Whatcha taking off on me like that fur, boy? I swear, I've turned two shades lighter. My husband won't recognize me.\"\n\n\"I didn't take off,\" Andy protested. \"That man stole me.\"\n\nThe housekeeper released him. \"Well, let's get you home where you belong.\" She hustled the boy away, her mouth flapping like a broken shutter. \"Looks like you could use some soap and water and...\"\n\nNo sooner had Andy and the housekeeper departed than the crowd began to disperse.\n\nMiss Thatcher gave her hands three sharp claps. \"Come along, girls. We have less than forty minutes until the five-twenty-five.\" She hustled them back to the restaurant like a drover herding his stock.\n\nMinutes later, Chef Gassy met them at the kitchen door. \"Hurry, hurry, the zain due in soon.\"\n\nWhile the others ran ahead, Katie stayed behind. Something snapped inside, and laughter bubbled out of her like water from a spring. Not mirthful laughter, but uncontrolled guffaws that brought tears to her eyes. Gassy stared at her as if she'd lost her mind, but she couldn't help it.\n\nAndy had been kidnapped, a man had died, and Gassy's only concern was the next meal. Crazy as that sounded, she found it comforting.\n\n\"I love you!\" she said through her tears and threw her arms around the startled man, knocking off his toque. And yes, it really did feel like she had come home.\n\nReleasing him, she dashed from the kitchen and...\n\nCrashed headlong into Pickens. Judging by his red face he was fit to be tied." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Andy fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow that night. Smiling to himself, Branch set the unread book on the table next to his bed. It had been a long, hard day for all of them.\n\nThank You, God. Thank You for bringing my boy back to me. And forgive me for ever doubting You.\n\nHe reached over to turn off the light and quietly left the room.\n\nIn the parlor, Miss Chloe looked up from the rocking chair where she sat reading the Bible.\n\n\"How come you're still here?\" he asked. \"It's late. You should be home.\" His housekeeper closed the Bible. Giving the leather cover a loving pat with a large, capable hand, she set it on the table. \"Wanted to make sure you and the boy had no need for me.\"\n\n\"Not tonight,\" he said and sat. He was too wound up to sleep. Maybe it would help to read for a while.\n\n\"You look like you fell off yer horse and was dragged to kingdom come,\" she said.\n\n\"Feel like it.\"\n\nMiss Chloe hauled herself out of the chair and gathered up her gloves and hat. She then hesitated.\n\n\"Something wrong?\" he asked.\n\n\"I feel bad about what happened. It's my job to take care of Andy, and I failed.\"\n\n\"You didn't fail.\" If anyone was to blame it was him. Fear of losing Andy had muddled his brain, and he'd handled the matter all wrong. He should have known Clayborn would pull a stunt like that. That's how he operated. Things got tough, the man took off.\n\nMiss Chloe arranged her hat on her head and pulled on her gloves. Even a five-minute walk to her house required a certain ritual. \"I promised Andy a treat in town if he done good on his schoolwork. He couldn't wait and ran ahead of me. I should have made him hold my hand.\"\n\n\"Andy's a big boy now.\" He hadn't realized how big and brave until today. He came out of the ordeal better than any of the adults involved, himself included. \"He doesn't need us holding his hand. He just needs us holding him in prayer.\"\n\n\"That I do, Sheriff. That I do.\" Her forehead creased. \"Just want you to know I've enjoyed workin' here. You're the best employer I ever did have.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"You're not thinking of quitting, are you?\" What would he do without her? What would Andy do?\n\n\"Not by choice,\" she said. \"But it's been my experience that a home has room for only one woman at a time.\"\n\nHe pinched his forehead. He must be more tired than he thought, for suddenly she was making no sense. \"What are you talking about? One woman.\"\n\n\"I saw how you look every time that boy of yours mentions Miss Katie's name.\" She gave her head an emphatic nod. \"I sure enough did.\"\n\nBranch moved his hand away from his face. Miss Chloe didn't know what she was talking about.\n\n\"Katie... Miss Madison was a big help today,\" he said. \"I'm grateful to her.\"\n\n\"I don't have much in the way of school learnin', but I know gratitude when I sees it and I know when a man sets his cap for a woman. I'd say you have it bad, real bad.\"\n\nHe stared at her. \"You better go home and get some shut-eye. That's crazy talk.\"\n\n\"All I'm sayin' is that when the time comes, there's no call to worry about lettin' me go. I'll be fine.\"\n\n\"Far as I'm concerned, you can work here till the cows come home,\" he said.\n\nHer teeth flashed white against her dark, glistening skin. \"Those cows might not be as far afield as you think.\" She headed for the door. \"Night, Sheriff.\"\n\n\"Night,\" he muttered as she let herself out. He reached for his book but, after rereading the same paragraph several times, finally gave up.\n\nWas Miss Chloe onto something? He couldn't deny his attraction to Katie. One look into that pretty round face and he'd felt strangely alive, like he'd been walking around all these years half-asleep. He liked her\u2014no denying that. Liked the way she walked and talked and even smiled.\n\nHe even liked working with her. He shuddered at what might have happened had she not been there to warn him of the rifle.\n\nHe couldn't make up his mind what affected him more: her strength or vulnerability. True, sometimes her willingness to put herself in danger made him want to wring her neck, but the other part\u2014the vulnerable part\u2014made him want to hold her. Hold her like he did the night they danced by the light of the moon. Hold her like he did that night in the alley.\n\nBut that didn't mean he'd set his cap for her. A lady detective, of all things. A Pinkerton detective.\n\nA small-county sheriff like him had nothing to offer a woman like her. She lived a life of excitement and adventure. No one in her right mind would give up a life like that, especially for a man whose idea of adventure was settling down with a good book.\n\nMiss Chloe was wrong. What he felt for Katie wasn't love. Couldn't be love. Because if it was, he was in a whole peck of trouble." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Katie stared at the paper in front of her, blank except for a spot of ink that had leaked from her pen. The house was quiet late that night. She sat at the kitchen table with only a lit candle by which to work.\n\nThe air hung thick with the smell of onions and wet cat fur. She'd let Spook Cat in earlier when a rain shower passed through town. After filling his belly with warm milk, the tom curled up by her feet.\n\nWithout the drops pitter-pattering on the windows to distract her, the blank sheet of paper seemed even more intimidating.\n\nTwo hours she'd sat there. It wasn't that she didn't know what to write. She knew exactly what had to be said. She'd failed in her duties. Two Harvey girls had lost their lives, and it looked like their killer would never be found.\n\nHer cover was blown. The reverend now knew her identity, and so did Pickens. Confiding in the manager was the only way she could stay at the restaurant after he'd fired her. She had done the unforgivable and had left the restaurant without a word. Such an offense deserved no second chances. Nor would he listen to her explanations. He'd simply said, \"You're fired. Pack your bags.\"\n\nShe either had to tell him the truth or leave on the next train. Her reasons for not wanting to leave were many. Branch...\n\nNo, mustn't go there. Branch had nothing to do with her not wanting to leave. Not a thing.\n\nHow dumb to think she could stay now that Pickens knew the truth. He'd promised to keep her secret, but whether she could trust him was another matter. Realistically, he was still a suspect. No one at the Harvey House had been cleared. Any one of them could be the killer, though she hated to think it. She'd grown fond of the place and the people who worked there, even Gassy, and that was part of the problem. She could no longer be objective.\n\nShe closed her eyes. God, why is it so hard for me to admit failure? It happened to the best of detectives. Even Allan Pinkerton had known defeat in his attempt to capture the James gang. The attempt had ended in disaster and resulted in the death of a child. It had happened long before she joined the company, but some of the older detectives told her that Allan had taken it hard. Some even suggested that he hadn't fully recovered from the fiasco.\n\nIs that what she had to look forward to? A lifetime of regret? Would she always be haunted by memories of Calico and everything that had happened here?\n\nHer muscles ached from sitting so long. Yawning, she decided to get some sleep. The report would have to wait till tomorrow.\n\nShe jabbed the pen back into the penholder and reached for the paper. Her hand froze. Was it just her imagination, or did the blob of ink on the otherwise blank sheet of paper look like a shoe?\n\nA woman's shoe.\n\nGinger's?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "Chapter 43\n\nOnly Branch and Reverend Bushwell were at the small cemetery on that windy day in late May. Branch insisted on Clayborn having a proper Christian burial, and though others had tried to talk him out of it, he held firm. The grave site he'd picked was as far away from Dorothy's and Hannah's as possible. God's grace was infinite, but Branch's forgiveness went only so far.\n\nTattered clouds drifted across a deep blue sky, and the wind cooled Branch's brow.\n\nThe minister performed the simple ceremony and closed with a prayer. After the casket was lowered into the ground, he placed a hand on Branch's shoulder.\n\n\"It's a kind thing you've done,\" he said.\n\nBranch arched an eyebrow. \"Kind? Had I handled things better, Clayborn would still be alive.\"\n\n\"You don't know that.\"\n\nHe heaved a sigh. \"I put my trust in God and look what happened.\"\n\n\"What happened is, you have Andy and he's now safely in your care. I'd say that was a pretty good deal. As for Clayborn...\" He looked down at the dull pine coffin. \"His relationship with God failed, not yours.\"\n\nBranch hadn't thought of it that way, and a weight lifted from his shoulders. \"Thank you, Reverend.\"\n\n\"No need to thank me. I speak the truth.\" After a moment he asked, \"Does the boy know it was his real father who kidnapped him?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but he will.\" So far few people in town knew the real story behind Andy's kidnapping, but that was bound to change. Better for Andy to hear the truth from him. \"When the time's right.\"\n\n\"Would that be his time or your time?\"\n\n\"God's time,\" Branch said. Telling Andy about his birth mother posed no real problem, but he would need some heavenly assistance in discussing Andy's biological father.\n\nThe two of them fell silent. The quiet was punctuated only by the sound of the grave digger's shovel scooping up soil and dumping it into the hole.\n\nAfter a while, Bushwell stepped back. \"Don't know about you but I could sure use a cup of coffee.\"\n\n\"Joe,\" Branch said without thinking. \"A cup of joe.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "Katie stood at Abigail's station and gazed about the dining room, empty except for Tully and Mary-Lou putting last-minute touches on the tables.\n\nSomething Abigail had said about Ginger was still on her mind. \"She asked me to change stations with her. She seemed really upset.\" Why would Ginger want to change stations? Both stations were similar except that this one had a better view of the front door. Was that the reason Ginger wanted to change?\n\nPickens entered the dining room with his trusty measuring tape and proceeded to work his way from table to table. Now that he knew her true identity his manner toward her had changed. He had been especially nice to her that day\u2014too nice\u2014even going so far as to ignore a poorly folded napkin at breakfast. Even now he greeted her with a pleasant smile.\n\n\"Looking good,\" he said, which coming from him was high praise.\n\nHis uncharacteristic behavior didn't escape Tully's notice. \"No favoritism there,\" she said with a flick of her head. With a huff, she picked up a tray and stalked away.\n\nThe gong signaled the twelve-twenty-five train, and the chandelier bounced about like hail on a tin roof. Katie hurried to the breakfast room and took her place behind the counter. Soon both dining rooms were full of travelers.\n\nAbigail leaned over the counter. \"I need help,\" she said. \"Could you take charge of the beverages?\"\n\nKatie placed an order of roast beef in front of one of the counter guests and nodded.\n\nShe quickly set pots of coffee and tea on a tray and carried it to Abigail's station. A quick glance at the cups told her that only one diner had ordered coffee. After filling his cup, she set the coffeepot on the tray stand and reached for one of the teapots. Like a gun going off in her head, a sudden memory came to the fore. Nine o'clock. Orange pekoe tea.\n\nStartled by the thought, she stood there holding the teapot. That was what had bothered her at the cabin.\n\nA bearded man held his cup aloft. \"I'll take some of that tea, miss.\"\n\nShaking off the sudden inertia that rendered her helpless, she forced a smile. \"Yes, of course.\" Her hand shook as she filled his cup. She quickly filled the other cups and moved away. That's when she noticed Branch at the counter.\n\nHer pulse quickened as she hurried to greet him. \"What are you doing here?\" She set the tray on the counter. He knew this was her busiest time.\n\n\"Had a bad morning,\" he said. \"Still no luck finding Clayborn's killer. Thought some of that pie you still owe me would hit the spot, along with a cup of your hottest and strongest.\"\n\nShe sympathized. Branch had the unenviable task of hunting down the man who shot Clayborn, but it couldn't be easy. Not after the trouble Clayborn had caused him.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, he added, \"When the time's right I want to be able to tell Andy that his father's killer was found and justice served.\"\n\nNodding, she reached for his cup and saucer and turned to fill it from the large silver coffee urn. She then set the cup of steaming brew on the counter in front of him, careful to turn the handle facing his right hand in the proper Harvey House style.\n\n\"What about that pie?\" he asked when she continued to stare at his cup.\n\nShe lifted her gaze. \"I'll give you a piece on one condition.\"\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\nShe glanced down at the cup again. She hated putting so much stock in a cup handle. Still...\n\n\"You agree to let me have another look at the apartment over the bank.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "Branch was waiting for her that night when she slipped out of the house after curfew. Beneath the dense canopy of stars the air was still and the town quiet.\n\nHe held up a key ring and jiggled it. \"Got the key from the bank president.\"\n\nShe let out her breath. \"Good.\"\n\n\"So what's this about?\" he asked as they walked around the building to Main.\n\n\"I just want to look around again,\" she said.\n\nHe glanced at her askew. \"Why do I get the feeling there's more to it than that?\"\n\n\"All right,\" she admitted. \"I think the man in the cabin who shot Clayborn was in that apartment.\"\n\n\"Whoa, Nellie!\" Stopping in his tracks, he turned to stare at her, pushing back his hat. \"Where did that come from?\"\n\nShe smiled mysteriously. \"I also don't believe Mrs. Bracegirdle is off her rocker.\"\n\nHe hung his thumbs from his belt. \"Sorry, but I don't see the connection.\"\n\n\"I'm not even sure there is a connection,\" she said. \"But some things don't add up. Ginger's shoe for one. I could never figure out why her shoe was found so far away from where she was found.\"\n\n\"Granted, that's a puzzle.\"\n\n\"Suppose I really did see a light over the bank. And what if Ginger saw one, too. It might have scared her, especially with all that talk about the place being haunted.\"\n\n\"Makes sense,\" he said. \"But what does any of this have to do with her death? Or even Clayborn's?\"\n\nShe started walking again, and he fell in step by her side. \"I'll get to Clayborn in a moment. First, let's focus on Ginger. What if she saw or heard something she wasn't supposed to?\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Questions like that kept detectives pacing the floor. \"We assumed she was killed in the alley. But what if she wasn't? What if she was killed right here?\" They had arrived at the bank, and she stopped in the middle of the street.\n\nHe stopped, too. \"I checked this area over thoroughly, but this is a busy part of town. By the time her shoe was found, the place had been pretty much compromised by wagon wheels and horses.\"\n\nShe glanced up. The windows over the bank looked dark and forbidding, and hair rose at her nape. An odd sensation put her on high alert, and she reached in her pocket for her gun.\n\nA soft light shone from behind the curtains of Mrs. Bracegirdle's apartment. Even at this late hour it looked like she was still awake.\n\n\"You still haven't told me how Clayborn fits into this.\"\n\n\"I'll tell you.\" She slanted her head toward the stairs. \"Inside.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "Chapter 44\n\nBranch inserted the key into the lock. Katie was acting especially mysterious tonight, even for her.\n\nThe door creaked open. He waited for Katie to step ahead of him before following. He quietly closed the door so as not to disturb Mrs. Bracegirdle.\n\nThe narrow shaft of light streaming through a dusty window turned Katie's hair into copper flames. Eyes bright, she surveyed the room like it was a museum filled with valuable pieces and not just empty space. The glint of metal drew his gaze to the gun in her hand.\n\n\"You like this, don't you?\" he asked.\n\nHer questioning eyes came to rest on him. \"Like what?\"\n\n\"This cloak-and-dagger stuff.\"\n\nShe slipped her gun into her pocket. \"I'd be in big trouble as a detective if I didn't.\"\n\nSomehow he'd hoped for a different answer. \"Ever think about doing something else?\"\n\nThe question seemed to surprise her. \"Like what?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Marriage. Kids.\"\n\nThe brightness left her face, and a protective surge welled up inside him. Now why did he have to mention marriage? Evidently it was a painful subject.\n\n\"I thought about it,\" she said, her voice soft. \"But it didn't work out.\" She turned abruptly and headed for the kitchen.\n\nHe gave her a moment of privacy before following. \"What are we looking for?\" he whispered.\n\n\"Why are you whispering?\" she asked.\n\n\"I have no idea.\" The kitchen was dark and the air stale.\n\nA match flared in her hand, and she held it over the sink. Standing behind her, he caught a pleasant whiff of perfume. It reminded him of the lilacs that grew in his grandmother's garden.\n\n\"See the tin cup.\" She was all business now, and he sensed her excitement as she pointed into the sink. \"The handle is pointing left in the nine o'clock position.\"\n\n\"I see that,\" he said. \"And the head of that dead fly there is lying at four o'clock,\" he teased.\n\nEven in the dim light he could see her face close, and he immediately regretted his flippant tone. \"Is that significant?\" he asked, hoping to make amends. \"The direction of the handle?\"\n\n\"Only that the cup was probably put there by a left-handed person.\"\n\n\"Sounds like a reasonable conclusion.\"\n\n\"There was a cup at the cabin with the handle pointing in the same direction.\"\n\nHe raised an eyebrow. Her observation skills put his to shame. \"So what you're saying is\u2014\"\n\n\"The same person could have left both cups.\"\n\nHe folded his arms. \"I thought you brought me out in the middle of the night because of Ginger's shoe.\"\n\n\"First things first.\" She blew out the match before it burned down to her fingers. \"Did you know that only ten percent of the population is left-handed?\"\n\n\"Don't tell me you believe all that nonsense about a left-handed person being the devil's playmate?\"\n\n\"Not me. Most criminals in the Pinkerton files are right-handed. I just think it's interesting to find two similar cups with left-pointing handles. Were you able to tell which hand the knifeman favored?\"\n\nHe dropped his arms to the side and stared at her. As much as he appreciated what she was trying to do, linking two possibly unrelated coffee cups to the crime sounded like a leap in logic.\n\n\"Our killer is right-handed,\" he said and frowned. \"Surely you didn't think there was a connection?\"\n\n\"Maybe not with the Harvey girls, but possibly with Clayborn. Whoever was in that cabin didn't want to be found.\"\n\n\"I noticed that,\" he said. She moved away from the sink, and he caught her by the arm. \"You're good,\" he said. \"I never noticed the cups.\"\n\nHe heard her intake of breath. \"Does this mean you've changed your mind about Pinkerton operatives?\"\n\n\"Absolutely not,\" he said. Only you.\n\nGazing into her eyes, he knew a moment of reason. Kissing her would only make matters worse. It would be one more thing to haunt him the rest of his days, just like the other moments they'd shared. But knowing that didn't make the struggle between mind and body, reason and insanity, any less difficult.\n\nStill, wisdom and good sense might have won had she not wrinkled her nose like she tended to do. Had she not slanted her head in that certain way and gazed at him with those big, bright, questioning eyes. Blue as the deepest ocean. Blue as the brightest sky. All at once rationale left him, rushing away like a speeding train.\n\nClosing the distance between them, he circled her slender waist with his hands. She stiffened at his touch, and a look of dismay flashed across her face before her body relaxed in surrender.\n\n\"We shouldn't do this,\" she said, her voice soft. But even as she protested she slid her hands up his chest. \"We're working.\"\n\n\"We're standing in an empty apartment.\"\n\n\"Working,\" she repeated, her arms draped around his neck.\n\nHe sucked in his breath, but he could no sooner pull away from her than jump off a cliff. His hands explored the contours of her back, and the warmth of her body beckoned to him. Her delicate, sweet fragrance teased his nose, and her sweet, warm breath was like a beacon guiding his mouth to hers.\n\nJust before his lips met hers a sound alerted him. \"Shh. I hear something,\" he whispered next to her silky skin.\n\nShe pulled out of his arms, and he immediately felt a void. Somehow she had taken something of him with her.\n\n\"I hear it, too.\"\n\nShe showed no sign of resenting the intrusion. Instead, she was all business as she pulled out her gun, ready for action. Evidently, his kisses were a poor substitute for the excitement of her job, but now was not the time to think about that.\n\n\"Sure you don't want my Colt?\" he asked, keeping his voice low.\n\n\"I'll stick with this.\" He felt her gaze on him. \"And if you laugh\u2014\"\n\n\"Wouldn't think of it.\"\n\nHe moved quietly into the front room, and she followed close behind. Beneath the carpet the floor creaked like a rickety old bridge.\n\n\"The superintendent should have the building checked for termites,\" she said, her voice hushed.\n\n\"My thoughts exactly.\"\n\n\"Get ready,\" he whispered, hand on the doorknob. \"One, two\u2014\" He yanked the door open and something flew out of the dark. The object hit the floor with a bang, missing him by mere inches. It looked like a stick of some sort.\n\nGrabbing hold of it, he reeled the attacker into the room.\n\n\"Mrs. Bracegirdle!\" He stared at her in horror. Only then did he realize he was holding on to her walking cane. Had he pulled her off her feet she could have been seriously hurt.\n\nHe holstered his gun. \"Confound it! What are you doing here?\"\n\nIn the dim light from the window, the older woman's face looked pale as a wintry moon. \"Branch!\" she gasped when she was finally able to find her voice. She pressed the tip of her cane onto the floor and held on to it with both hands. \"You nearly scared me into my grave!\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" He closed the door.\n\n\"Are you okay?\" Katie asked, her voice soft with concern.\n\n\"Other than having aged ten years in thirty seconds, I'm fine.\" Mrs. Bracegirdle glanced at Branch before turning her attention back to Katie. \"So what are you two doing here?\"\n\n\"I thought I saw a light up here the other night,\" Katie explained, \"and we were just checking it out.\"\n\nThe widow gave a self-righteous shake of her head. \"It's about time someone took me seriously.\"\n\n\"I do take you seriously.\" Branch felt bad for scaring her. \"But you still haven't told us what you're doing here.\"\n\n\"I heard someone coming up the stairs earlier. I decided to take matters into my own hands and find out once and for all what's going on here.\"\n\n\"All you heard was Katie and me.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle shifted her gaze from him to Katie and back again. \"You mean all this time the noise I heard was just the two of you making like a married couple?\"\n\nKatie's mouth dropped open. \"No, no!\" she hastened to explain. \"Just tonight. I mean\u2014\" She looked to Branch for help, but something made him angle his head to the side.\n\n\"Branch? What is it?\"\n\n\"Shh,\" he cautioned, finger to his mouth. He pressed his ear to the door. A footfall was followed by the sound of a key entering the lock.\n\nHe jerked back. \"Quick!\" he whispered. \"In the bedroom.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "The three of them barely had time to reach the next room when someone entered the apartment. Senses on high alert, Katie held her breath. Whoever entered the apartment had a key. The question was, why would anyone come here so late at night?\n\nBranch held the bedroom door open a crack and peered out with one eye.\n\n\"Can you tell who it is?\" Katie whispered.\n\n\"Too dark.\"\n\n\"Man or woman?\" Mrs. Bracegirdle asked.\n\n\"Can't tell that, either.\"\n\nFor several moments no one spoke. Creaking boards were followed by an odd thumping sound.\n\nPuzzled, Katie strained her ears. \"It sounds like he's moving furniture,\" she said, her voice low.\n\n\"In an empty room? That would be a trick,\" Branch whispered back.\n\nThe intruder sneezed, and Katie grabbed hold of Branch's arm. She would recognize that sneeze anywhere.\n\nBranch's hand rested on hers. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Culpepper,\" she whispered.\n\nHe glanced back at her. \"What?\"\n\n\"That's Stanley Culpepper. The restaurant's accountant.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\nFor answer Katie nodded. The three of them didn't move for several moments. The strange thumping sounds continued.\n\n\"What in the name of Sam Hill is he\u2014\"\n\nA high screech cut him off, and Mrs. Bracegirdle tugged on Katie's sleeve. \"That's the cat I told you about. The one who sings opera.\" She turned her ear to the door. \"Il Trovatore, if I'm not mistaken.\"\n\n\"I don't think it's a cat,\" Katie said. Neither was it opera. The high-pitched grinding noise sounded like metal grinding against metal.\n\nBranch whispered, \"How would your Pinkerton boss proceed at this point?\"\n\n\"He would caution us to wait and observe.\" With that Katie pulled out her pistol and darted out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Chapter 45\n\nA flickering light greeted Katie. Culpepper was facedown on the floor, head and shoulders in a hole. Wooden boards and the carpet had kept the hole hidden, and both had been moved aside.\n\nShe exchanged a glance with Branch before stepping over what looked like a log but was really the rolled-back carpet.\n\nBranch followed and nudged the man's leg with the toe of his boot. The grinding sound stopped, and Culpepper's head popped out of the hole. \"It's about time you\u2014\"\n\nSeeing Katie, he reached for his hammer. She pointed her gun at him and kicked the hammer aside. \"I wouldn't do that if I were you.\"\n\nCulpepper stared at the gun, and panic crossed his face. \"You! But you're nothing but a Harvey girl.\"\n\n\"And you're nothing but a thief and a killer.\"\n\nBranch grabbed Culpepper's hands and pulled them behind his back. \"And I'm the sheriff.\"\n\nAfter Branch snapped the handcuffs around Culpepper's wrists, Katie called to Mrs. Bracegirdle. \"It's safe to come out now.\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle entered the room cautiously, stabbing the floor with her cane. \"Would you folks mind telling me what's going on? What is Mr. Culpepper doing here?\"\n\nBranch nudged a chisel and hammer with his foot. \"I'd say by the look of things, he was trying to work his way to the bank vault below.\" Mrs. Bracegirdle inched forward and stared down the hole in disbelief. \"You mean that's what's been keeping me awake all this time?\"\n\n\"You try grinding through two feet of reinforced concrete,\" Culpepper said and then sneezed.\n\nKatie waved a hand in front of her nose. \"Maybe you don't have hay fever after all. Maybe it's all this dust.\" It also explained his battered hands and dirty nails. \"What I don't understand is why? You have a good job.\"\n\n\"You call working at the Harvey House a good job?\" Culpepper's eyes took on a feverish glow. \"Do you know how much money is down there? It would have made me a rich man and I'd never have to work again.\"\n\n\"Don't feel bad,\" Branch said. \"You won't have to work in jail, either.\"\n\nCulpepper sneezed again but said nothing.\n\n\"So why'd you do it?\" Katie asked. \"Why'd you kill Ginger and Priscilla?\"\n\nMrs. Bracegirdle gasped. \"He killed the Harvey girls?\"\n\n\"I didn't do it.\" Sweat beaded Culpepper's forehead. \"You can't pin their deaths on me.\"\n\nKatie studied the tools Culpepper had dropped. \"He's right-handed,\" she said. But that wasn't all. There were two sets of tools. Two hammers, two chisels.\n\n\"So who's your partner?\" Branch asked.\n\n\"Who says I have one?\"\n\n\"You better have one,\" Katie said. \"Otherwise you and you alone will be charged with a lot more than trying to rob a bank.\"\n\nCulpepper suddenly seemed to have trouble breathing. \"I didn't kill nobody,\" he said between gasps. \"You can't prove that I did.\"\n\n\"I think we can make a pretty good case,\" Branch said. \"Ginger found out what you were up to and you couldn't let her get away.\"\n\n\"So you chased her,\" Katie added. \"All the way back to the Harvey House where you killed her.\"\n\n\"You don't know nothing from Adam,\" Culpepper groused and sneezed.\n\n\"If you didn't do it, then your partner did.\" The edge to Branch's voice matched the dark look on his face.\n\n\"I told you. I don't have a partner.\"\n\nCulpepper stuck to his guns and no amount of questioning made him change his tune.\n\n\"I think I've heard enough for tonight,\" Branch said. He pushed Culpepper across the room and out the door.\n\nKatie let out a sigh and closed her eyes. Thank You, God. She'd prayed for a clue but never expected it to come in the form of a cup handle.\n\nA movement reminded her she wasn't alone. She opened her eyes and slipped her arm around the old lady's stooped back. \"Come on, let's get you home.\"\n\n\"Does this mean I'm no longer off my rocker?\" Mrs. Bracegirdle asked.\n\nKatie laughed. \"I never thought you were.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "Chapter 46\n\nPickens called everyone into the dining room following the morning rush, and all stood in a straight line, equal inches apart as customary.\n\nKatie had gone to the restaurant manager with her plan, and now she said a silent prayer that it worked. Was Pickens up to the task? She would know soon enough.\n\nHands behind his back, he paced before them with an air of such unbearable importance it was a wonder that the buttons didn't pop off his overworked shirt.\n\n\"Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.\"\n\n\"Maybe he's quitting,\" Mary-Lou whispered to Katie.\n\nKatie shook her head. \"Don't hold your breath.\" Though Pickens insisted that the line be perfectly straight, she inched forward where she could observe the others. Nothing was more revealing than an unguarded look.\n\nPickens cleared his throat. She had told him exactly what to say, but his arrogant bearing was clearly his own.\n\n\"Thanks to Katie here, the killer of our Harvey girls has been caught and is now behind bars.\"\n\nHis announcement drew gasps of surprise and appreciative applause.\n\n\"Praise God.\" Mary-Lou clutched her hands to her chest, and her eyes glistened with tears.\n\n\"Now we can all rest easy,\" Abigail said, her voice choked with emotion.\n\nTully, as usual, looked more suspicious than pleased. \"What did Katie have to do with it?\"\n\n\"Katie,\" Pickens began, \"is actually a Pinkerton operative.\"\n\nA stunned silence followed his announcement, and all eyes turned to her. Chef Gassy's mouth dropped open, and Howie Howard's peepers nearly popped out of his head. Miss Thatcher's hand flew to her mouth, and Buzz did a double take. The Mexican cooks looked at each other and shrugged.\n\n\"No entiendo,\" one murmured.\n\nCissy did understand but showed no surprise. Instead she kept her head lowered, as if the floor was of prime interest.\n\nTully rolled her eyes. \"I always knew there was something strange about you.\"\n\nMary-Lou shook her head in disbelief. \"You mean I've been rooming with a real live detective?\" She glanced around as if seeking confirmation from the others.\n\n\"But who was it?\" Abigail asked, rubbing her bare ring finger as she tended to whenever she was nervous, upset, or anxious. \"Who was the killer?\"\n\nThough she asked the question of Katie, Pickens answered. \"Why, Mr. Culpepper, of course,\" he said, as if he'd known it all along.\n\n\"Culpepper?\" Chef Gassy slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. \"But he vas one of us.\"\n\nPickens shook his head, and his jowls wobbled. \"Not anymore.\"\n\nAbigail glanced from left to right. \"Personally, I never cared much for the man,\"\n\nMiss Thatcher nodded in agreement. \"He was an odd one, all right.\"\n\n\"Look who's calling the kettle black,\" Tully said under her breath.\n\n\"How did you know it was Culpepper?\" Buzz asked.\n\nKatie quickly explained how she and Branch found him in the apartment over the bank.\n\n\"You mean he planned to rob it?\" Buzz shook his head. \"Incredible.\"\n\nEveryone started talking at once. Pickens silenced them. \"Quiet! Katie has something she wants to say.\"\n\nKatie stepped forward. \"It's important that no one reveals who I am.\" Asking a room full of people to keep a secret was like trying to sneak daylight past a rooster, but she had to try.\n\n\"What difference does it make?\" Tully asked. \"The killer's been caught.\"\n\n\"An undercover agent mustn't reveal his or her identity,\" Katie explained. Given the number of people passing through the restaurant daily, she could easily bump into someone who recognized her in the future. More than one agent's cover had been blown by some well-meaning acquaintance. \"Pinkerton rules.\"\n\nShe hoped the detective agency's rules commanded as much respect as Harvey's.\n\nPickens looked at his watch. \"The train's due in fifteen minutes.\"\n\n\"What about our checks?\" Tully asked. \"I mean now that Culpepper's gone.\"\n\n\"Your paychecks will be issued on Friday as usual,\" Pickens assured them. Noticing Katie out of line, he paused and glared at her until she stepped back. \"Buzz, you can handle the money at the door until we find a replacement for Culpepper.\" He clapped his hands, signaling the end of the meeting. \"Now back to work, all of you.\"\n\nKatie made a beeline for her station, and Mary-Lou hurried to catch up to her. \"You, too?\"\n\nKatie shrugged. \"The restaurant's understaffed. May as well make myself useful while I'm waiting for my next assignment.\"\n\nMary-Lou's face softened into a wistful smile. \"A Pinkerton detective. Wow. If I were you I'd never serve another meal.\"\n\n\"I thought you liked it here.\"\n\n\"I do. It's just that your life is so much more exciting.\"\n\nKatie smiled. She really liked Mary-Lou and would miss her. Miss all of them\u2014even Pickens. And the regulars\u2014she would miss them, too. Mrs. Bracegirdle, Okie-Sam, Long-Shot, the railroad workers and cattlemen.\n\nMostly she would miss Branch. Her heart felt heavy as a lead balloon. \"Trust me,\" she said. \"A detective's work is dull and tedious.\"\n\nA dubious look crossed Mary-Lou's face. \"If you say so.\" With a wave of her hand, she hastened away, and Katie strode to her own station.\n\nThe tables were set with every plate and piece of silverware in perfect alignment. What would her sisters say if they could see her now? Plain, undomesticated Katie now knew how to set a table that would put a Boston socialite to shame.\n\nOddly enough, her station behind the counter seemed as comfortable and familiar to her as an old pair of shoes, and her spirits dropped even more.\n\nHer job was complete except for writing the final report. Once she turned it in, she would be assigned to another case. The paperwork should have been completed by now.\n\nBut something held her back. True, she felt sorry for the other girls who were already overworked and would have to take up the slack when she left, but that wasn't the only reason she procrastinated. There were simply too many loose ends and unanswered questions for her peace of mind.\n\nCulpepper refused to implicate anyone else, but it was hard to believe he worked alone. Not only did the double set of tools suggest a partner, but Culpepper hardly seemed physically capable of pulling off such a labor-intensive job by himself. Not with his breathing problems.\n\nIt seemed that arresting Culpepper had raised more questions than it answered." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Branch walked through the door, and her thoughts scattered like little mice. Even the sun streaming through the windows appeared brighter with his presence.\n\nHe strolled across the room toward her with purposeful strides. Mouth drawn in a straight line, his eyes narrowed as if guarding a secret.\n\nShe chewed on her bottom lip. She thought she had memorized his every expression, but this one was new. \"Everything okay?\" she asked.\n\nHe slid onto a stool. \"I just wired the circuit judge. Hope to have the trial as soon as next week.\"\n\n\"That's good,\" she said and tried not to think of how close they had come to kissing yet a second time. Feeling warmth climb up her neck, she looked away. \"I\u2014I think I figured out why Ginger asked to change places with Abigail.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\nShe met his gaze, determined to think about the case. Nothing else. \"Something must have made her suspicious of Culpepper. Maybe she suspected he had something to do with Priscilla's death and decided to watch him. She could only do that from Abigail's station.\"\n\nBranch rubbed the back of his neck. \"If that's true, I wish she had come to me and not acted alone.\"\n\n\"Maybe she felt she needed proof or something.\"\n\n\"I guess we'll never know, will we?\"\n\n\"Guess not.\" She studied him, still puzzled by his serious expression. \"Were you able to get any more out of Culpepper?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"He still maintains he worked alone. I checked his room at the boardinghouse but couldn't find a knife. Nothing there to indicate a partner, either.\"\n\n\"Such loyalty between criminals is rare,\" she said. No one liked taking a rap by himself, not if someone else could be implicated.\n\n\"Give him a couple of days. He'll sing.\"\n\n\"And if he doesn't?\"\n\n\"We'll cross that bridge.\" He hesitated. \"How long do you plan on sticking around?\"\n\nShe swallowed the lump in her throat before meeting his gaze. She'd spent a restless night trying to convince herself that his kisses and near kisses meant nothing\u2014that he meant nothing. But in the light of day she saw her lies for what they were.\n\n\"A day or two. I'm waiting for my next assignment.\" Her voice drifted off.\n\nA muscle at his jaw quivered, but he said nothing. For the longest moment they locked eyes. Don't look at me like that, she wanted to scream. Don't make me want you more than I already do. Mercifully, their gazes slid away to the counter, the floor, the walls, the ceiling. Safer ground.\n\nShe cleared her voice. \"Anything else?\"\n\nHe drew in his breath. \"I decided to tell Andy tonight about his mother. Father, too, if he asks.\"\n\nThat wasn't what she'd wanted to hear, but it was foolish to think that the worry on his face was about her. About her leaving. \"That's probably a good idea.\"\n\n\"Just hope I know what to say when the time comes.\"\n\n\"Knowing you, you'll do just fine.\" Never had she known a more caring or loving father.\n\nHe gave her a sheepish smile. \"If that business with Clayborn taught me anything, I have to put my trust in God. Right now I'm trusting that He'll put the right words in my mouth.\"\n\n\"I'll pray for you,\" she said softly.\n\nHe nodded. \"I'm counting on it.\" He slanted his head, and a double line formed between his eyebrows. \"Did you ever have to tell someone something you dreaded?\" His voice was so low she had to lean forward to catch his words.\n\n\"No,\" she said softly. \"I never did.\" But that was about to change. For the one thing she dreaded more than anything in the world was telling Branch good-bye.\n\nHe opened his mouth to say something more, but just then the train pulled into the station and the tension between them snapped. Rising, he tapped the counter with his knuckle and left. But upon reaching the door, he took a long, hard look at her before ducking out through the crowd of newly arriving passengers." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "Chapter 47\n\nOnce upon a time,\" Branch began as Andy nestled by his side, \"there was this lady about to give birth.\" They sat in the parlor in front of a slow-burning fire, and his words were punctuated by crackling logs.\n\nAndy gave him a knowing look. \"This is a story about baby Jesus, isn't it?\"\n\n\"Not exactly. This lady's name wasn't Mary. It was Dorothy.\"\n\n\"Was Dorothy in Bethlehem, too?\"\n\nBranch chuckled. \"Actually, Dorothy lived right here in Calico. Just as the baby arrived a terrible tornado hit the town.\" His voice remained strong with only an occasional pause as he searched for the right words. He'd prayed long and hard before sitting down with his son, and so far God was doing a pretty good job of guiding him along.\n\nAndy giggled upon hearing that the baby had been put into an oven. \"Like Moses,\" he said.\n\nBranch arched an eyebrow. \"Moses was put in a basket.\"\n\n\"I know, but his mother wanted to save him. So she put him in the basket.\"\n\nBranch thought for a moment. \"You're right. His mother did want to save him. Just as Dorothy wanted to save her son.\"\n\nAndy listened with rapt attention as Branch continued. His eyes grew big and round as Branch described digging him out of the debris. Enough time had passed so that he could now relay the story without getting all choked up. Only an occasional catch interrupted the flow of words.\n\n\"I like that story,\" Andy said when Branch fell silent.\n\n\"That's just it, Son. It's not a story. Every word of it is true. That's how you came to be my son. I dug you out from underneath that house with these very hands.\" He held up both hands and turned them over.\n\nAndy frowned as if trying to make sense of it all. \"What happened to the lady who put me in the oven?\" he asked at last.\n\n\"She was my wife, and she died and went to heaven. That's her picture on the piano.\"\n\n\"Do you have a photograph of the other lady?\"\n\n\"The other lady was your mother. I'm sorry to say, I don't have a picture of her.\"\n\nAndy thought about this for a moment. \"Too bad there wasn't room in the oven for them, too.\"\n\nBranch hugged his son close. \"Yeah, too bad.\"\n\nAndy laid his head on Branch's chest. \"I wouldn't fit in the oven now.\"\n\n\"Nope. You sure wouldn't.\"\n\n\"Clarice just got a new mother.\" Clarice was one of Andy's schoolmates.\n\n\"So I heard.\" Branch was as surprised as anyone when old man Anderson remarried. Got himself one of those mail-order brides.\n\n\"Do you think I could get a new mother, too?\"\n\nThe question was like a knife to his heart. Or maybe the thought of Katie leaving was behind the stabbing pain.\n\nBranch stared at the red cinders in the fireplace and thought of moonlight and roses and sweet ruby lips. \"You'll have to talk to God about that.\"\n\n\"I want Miss Katie to be my ma.\"\n\nAnother twist of the knife. \"We can't always have what we want, Son.\" Even if one could, there was no guarantee of keeping it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Katie waited for Cissy to climb the stairs that night. The others were still downstairs eating supper, and so the second floor was deserted.\n\nCissy reached the landing and, upon spotting Katie, paused. Worry fleeted across her face... or maybe it was guilt.\n\n\"We need to talk,\" Katie said.\n\nCissy shoved her hands into her apron pockets. \"What... what about?\"\n\nKatie held up the note found on her pillow. \"This. You left it, didn't you? In my room.\"\n\nCissy glanced at the stairs as if to make certain they were still alone. Or maybe she was looking for a way to escape. \"How'd you know that?\"\n\nKatie hadn't known for certain until that moment. \"You were the only one who didn't seem surprised to learn my identity.\" She regarded the girl with narrowed eyes. \"How'd you know I was a detective?\"\n\n\"I didn't. I only knew that...\" Cissy's voice faded away.\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"I had a dream that someone would come and find the killer.\"\n\nKatie reared back. \"You had a dream?\"\n\nCissy nodded. \"And the person in my dream had red hair.\"\n\nKatie stared at her. The girl was kidding, right? But she sure did look serious. \"And you thought I was the one in your dream?\"\n\nCissy gave her a look of curiosity. \"You're the only one working here with red hair.\"\n\n\"Why didn't you tell me who the killer was instead of writing in riddles?\" They were just lucky Culpepper hadn't killed again. \"Had you told me from the start it was Culpepper, that would have saved us all a lot of trouble.\"\n\nThe girl looked confused or maybe just scared, but Katie was of no mind to let her off the hook. Instead, she wheeled about and headed for the stairs.\n\n\"Oh no, Miss Katie,\" Cissy called after her. \"The killer ain't him.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Chapter 48\n\nBranch couldn't believe how well his talk with Andy had gone. He still hadn't told him about his father. Andy didn't ask, and Branch didn't volunteer. But the questions were bound to come and when they did, he would, with God's help, be ready.\n\nHe was just about to lock up and hit the sack when a rap sounded at his door. A night visitor was never a good sign. It almost always spelled trouble, but the last person he expected to find on his doorstep this late was Katie.\n\nHis heart lurched at sight of her. Even in the dim light she looked soft and desirable. Beautiful. Had she come to say good-bye? The thought filled him with such anguish he clenched his hands by his side in an effort to maintain control.\n\nHe finally found his voice. \"Come in,\" he said hoarsely, before realizing she wasn't alone.\n\nThe two women stepped inside, and Katie introduced him to her companion. \"This is Cissy. She's the Harvey House pantry girl.\"\n\nThe dark-skinned girl stared at him, the brown irises of her eyes swimming in a sea of liquid white. He remembered seeing her after Ginger's death. Had even questioned her, but she denied knowing anything. He nodded at the girl before turning back to Katie.\n\n\"What's this about?\"\n\nFor answer Katie turned to Cissy. \"Tell him what you told me.\"\n\nLowering her gaze to the floor, the girl mumbled something. Branch leaned forward to catch the last of her words. Startled, he pulled back.\n\n\"Did she say Culpepper is not the killer?\"\n\nKatie nodded. \"That's exactly what she said.\"\n\n\"Then who?\"\n\n\"That's the problem. She doesn't know his name but thinks she might be able to identify him if she saw him again.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"How does she know it's not Culpepper?\"\n\n\"She saw the man who killed Ginger, and it wasn't Culpepper.\"\n\n\"Saw him?\"\n\n\"Her bedroom window overlooks the back of the house. She didn't see the actual murder, but she saw a man leave the alley around the time of Ginger's death.\"\n\nHe fixed his gaze on the girl. \"Why didn't you say something about this before now?\" He didn't mean to sound harsh, but neither did he have patience with people who held back information or claimed to see things they didn't.\n\nKatie touched his arm and beseeched him with a slight shake of her head. \"She's scared,\" she whispered.\n\nThe girl was shaking. Either she was scared of the killer or scared of him. Could she be telling the truth? Hard to know.\n\nKatie moved her hand away, and he shifted his gaze back to Cissy. \"The man you saw... Is he a restaurant customer?\"\n\nFor answer Cissy shrugged her shoulders, and he frowned.\n\n\"She's not allowed to leave the kitchen during restaurant hours,\" Katie explained.\n\n\"Can you describe him?\" Branch asked.\n\nCissy shook her head. \"I only saw his face for a second. He had a beard.\"\n\nBranch rubbed his chin. \"That narrows it down to ninety percent of the men in this town. What about his hair color?\"\n\nCissy's gaze dropped to the floor. \"It was too dark.\"\n\n\"She thinks she'll recognize him if she sees him again,\" Katie said. \"That's why we need your help.\"\n\n\"My help?\"\n\n\"I've arranged for her to work in the dining room tomorrow. If she recognizes anyone, she'll point him out to us.\"\n\nIt sounded like a wild-goose chase. Still, he'd bet his life that Culpepper didn't work alone, and he was willing to do anything to prove it. \"I'll be there.\"\n\nKatie nodded. \"Thank you.\"\n\nCissy walked outside, but Katie hesitated. She obviously had something else on her mind.\n\nHe slanted his head. \"Katie?\"\n\nShe lowered her voice to a whisper. \"I thought of something earlier. About the cups. Long-Shot is left-handed, and he was friendly with Culpepper. He also has a beard.\"\n\n\"Long\u2014\" He frowned. He'd known the man for several years and never noticed he was left-handed. Still, that didn't mean he was Culpepper's partner. The man was a loser, but a killer? \"You don't think\u2014?\"\n\n\"I don't know. We'll see if Cissy recognizes him.\" She turned and joined Cissy outside.\n\nHer gaze softened as she glanced back at him, and his heart responded with a jolt. \"You better get some shut-eye.\"\n\nHe nodded, though he doubted he'd sleep any better tonight than he had the other nights. \"Be careful.\"\n\nKatie hooked her arm around Cissy's and waved with her free hand.\n\nStepping onto the porch, he watched the two of them slip away into the folds of the night. \"If she recognizes anyone, she'll point him out to us.\"\n\nIt sounded like a simple enough plan. There really was no reason for him to worry. Or was there? He turned to the house. Long-Shot?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Chapter 49\n\nKatie met Cissy behind the counter that morning. It was early, and not even the locals had arrived yet. Dressed as a Harvey girl, the pantry girl looked every bit the part. She even had the smile down pat. She really was a pretty girl when she didn't look scared or insecure.\n\n\"Perfect,\" Katie said, clasping her hands to her chest.\n\nCissy's smile grew even wider. \"I dreamt about being a Harvey girl.\" Today she held her head high, and her eyes shone with newfound confidence.\n\nKatie smiled but didn't say anything. Cissy did a lot of dreaming, that was for sure.\n\nTully stopped in front of the counter. \"What's she doing here?\"\n\n\"I'm training her to take over for me,\" Katie said.\n\n\"That's ridiculous. Everyone knows that Mr. Harvey would never allow a blackie\u2014\" She broke off as Branch walked in the door. Tossing her head, she moved away.\n\nBranch greeted Katie with a finger to the brim of his hat. Instead of his usual place at the counter, he opted for a table with a full view of the room. Once seated, he opened up his newspaper.\n\nKatie filled a cup with coffee and set it on a tray. \"Here, take this to the sheriff.\" She handed the tray to Cissy. \"And don't forget to smile.\"\n\nThe locals started arriving just after seven. Buzz sat by the door collecting money. During each lull his gaze followed Tully. Katie sighed and dug her fingers into her palms. Tully had no idea how lucky she was. Buzz was smitten with her, but Tully hardly seemed to notice. Was she really so heartless as to taunt him? Or was there some deep-rooted reason why she so shamelessly flirted with all the other men?\n\nMaybe she was afraid of Buzz abandoning her as her mother had. Was that why she was so reluctant to commit to him and him alone?\n\nPickens snapped his fingers, bringing her out of her reverie, and she immediately set to work.\n\nChair legs scraped the floor as railroaders gathered around the tables. One of the men was telling a joke about two drunks who were walking upgrade on a railroad track and complaining about the banisters being too low.\n\nThe punch line brought uproarious laughter from his audience. Even Mrs. Bracegirdle chuckled as she took her usual place at the counter.\n\n\"I can't tell you how much better I slept last night without all that racket next door,\" she said.\n\nKatie smiled. The woman did indeed look more rested. Perhaps the lack of sleep had caused the occasional mental lapses. Katie certainly hoped it was true.\n\nCissy returned with an empty tray.\n\n\"Is this a new girl?\" Mrs. Bracegirdle asked.\n\n\"Yes, this is Cissy. Cissy, this is Mrs. Bracegirdle and she likes her coffee hot and strong.\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am.\" Cissy reached for a clean cup and saucer.\n\nShe was a fast learner and seemed to have no trouble keeping track of orders. Since she normally worked in the kitchen, she was familiar with the lingo and could yell out menu dishes like she'd been doing it all her life. Even Gassy looked impressed.\n\nSurprisingly, none of the locals objected at having a black girl work behind the counter, and this pleased Katie. Times, they were a-changing.\n\nKatie moved to Cissy's side. \"See anyone who looks like our man?\" she whispered.\n\nCissy's brown-eyed gaze swept the room. \"No, no one.\"\n\n\"What about that man over there?\" She inclined her head toward Long-Shot, who was joking with the railroad workers.\n\nWhen Cissy shook her head, Katie didn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved. She really liked Long-Shot but was hoping for a quick resolution.\n\nBranch left with the locals just before the train arrived. There was no reason for him to stick around for a bunch of strangers, but Katie hated to see him go.\n\n\"Now what?\" Cissy asked.\n\n\"Go work in the pantry and come back at noon. Oh, and don't forget to put on a fresh apron.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "The midday crowd came and went, and still Cissy recognized no one. Same for the supper hour.\n\nCissy helped Katie clear away the tables and set them for breakfast.\n\n\"Sorry.\" The girl looked so upset Katie felt sorry for her.\n\n\"Not your fault.\" Katie straightened a plate. \"We tried. That's all we can do. We'll give it another shot tomorrow.\"\n\nCissy bit her lip. \"You mean I get to be a Harvey girl for another day?\"\n\n\"Looks that way.\"\n\n\"Do you think Mr. Harvey will ever allow a blackie like me to be one for real?\"\n\nKatie hated to get the girl's hopes up, but neither did she want to discourage her. \"You never know. Not that long ago he hired only males.\" He soon discovered his mistake. Women were more dependable and didn't imbibe on the job. \"Maybe when I tell Mr. Harvey what a good job you did, he'll reconsider his policy.\"\n\nCissy smiled, though she didn't look all that convinced." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 90", + "text": "Cissy didn't recognize any of the locals the next day or even the following, but Katie wasn't ready to give up. Detective work could be so frustrating at times, but patience often paid off, and she was counting on that.\n\nOn the fourth day, following Branch's departure, Okie-Sam walked in and sat at the counter. Today, his hair looked more orange than red. \"How come so serious looking, sis?\" he asked.\n\nShe smiled. \"No reason.\" She filled his cup. \"Haven't seen you around for a while.\" Come to think of it, she hadn't seen him since the day Andy had been kidnapped.\n\n\"Just got back to town last night. Funeral.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Your father?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"His heart.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said.\n\n\"Yeah, well. You know what they say. No one leaves this world alive.\" After a beat he added, \"I'll have the usual.\"\n\nShe called his order of scrambled eggs and bacon to the kitchen. Abigail reached behind the counter for clean napkins. With a flick of her eyes, she indicated Katie's apron.\n\nKatie looked down and groaned. Somehow she had spilled syrup on her bib. \"Take over for me while I change, will you, Abigail?\"\n\n\"Will do.\"\n\nKatie ducked from behind the counter, crossed to the hall, and took the stairs two at a time. Reaching her room, she lifted the apron over her head. In her haste she knocked over a perfume bottle. The glass atomizer bounced against the wall and shattered.\n\nA sickly perfume smell wafted upward, but Katie hardly noticed. Her gaze was riveted on the shards of glass at her feet. Snatches of dialogue ran through her head, and she thought about those cups with the handles turned to the left.\n\n\"What happened to you?\" she'd asked Okie-Sam.\n\n\"Cut it on some glass.\"\n\nShe held her hands up. Right hand or left? Which hand had he cut? Right. She was pretty sure he'd injured the right hand. That would force him to use his left, even while drinking from a cup, wouldn't it?\n\nForcing herself to breathe, she checked the weapon in her pocket. Could this be it, God? Is this what You've been trying to tell me all this time? Heart pounding, she raced from the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 91", + "text": "Abigail and Okie-Sam were deep in conversation when Katie returned. Abigail leaned over the counter to stare at the watch in his hand.\n\n\"Pa was an honest man. Worked his fingers to the bone, he did. And you know what happened? His wife took off with a Bible salesman, people stole his cattle, and the bank foreclosed on his farm. All he had to his name on the day he died was this here cheap watch.\"\n\nKatie took her place next to Abigail and willed her heart to stop pounding. \"That must have made you angry,\" she said, watching his face.\n\nOkie-Sam slipped the watch into his shirt pocket and picked up his fork. \"Anger doesn't begin to describe how I feel.\" He stabbed at the bacon on his plate and lifted the fork to his mouth. She studied his hands. Today he wore no bandage, but a jagged red mark from a recently healed scar sliced across the top of his right hand. Could glass have made a wound like that? Or had he cut it while working his way to the bank vault?\n\n\"I can take it from here.\" Katie nudged Abigail away.\n\nAbigail gave her a puzzled look but didn't argue.\n\nKatie had no intention of doing anything rash or overplaying her hand. Okie-Sam suspected nothing, and she meant to keep it that way. Branch would make the arrest. No need to hurry.\n\nOkie-Sam watched as she made a fresh pot of coffee. \"Guess you had some excitement while I was gone,\" he said.\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder. \"Excitement?\"\n\n\"Heard they arrested the killer. Heard he worked here.\"\n\n\"You heard right,\" she said, as lightly as her ragged breath allowed. \"Guess we can all breathe easy now.\"\n\n\"Guess so.\" His eyes narrowed. \"What's the sheriff say?\"\n\n\"Say?\" she asked, feigning innocence. So he was probing for information. Was he worried about Culpepper implicating him?\n\n\"Is the case closed?\"\n\n\"Far as I know,\" she said. \"The circuit judge is due to arrive at the end of the week.\"\n\nHe finished the rest of his breakfast in silence then reached for his rawhide hat and set it atop his head. \"Any use for a cheap watch?\" he asked.\n\nShe shook her head. \"Since it's your father's, you should keep it.\"\n\n\"Guess I should at that.\" He swung around on the stool and stood. \"See you later, sis.\"\n\nShe considered trying to stall him but thought better of it. He might leave town now that his partner was behind bars, but that was the chance she'd have to take.\n\n\"You, too, brother.\"\n\nJust then Cissy walked in the breakfast room. She jerked to a stop, her face contorted in horror. \"That's him,\" she cried, pointing at Okie-Sam. \"That's the killer!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 92", + "text": "Chapter 50\n\nBranch walked into his office and, with a flip of his wrist, tossed his hat against the wall. He hit the wooden peg maybe once out of twenty-five tries, but today he was lucky. His hat held, but that was as far as his luck went.\n\nHe'd spent practically four days at the Harvey House and had nothing to show for his time except frustration. Cissy hadn't recognized any of the regulars. Not that he was surprised. He hadn't really expected anything from her.\n\nWoody had finished his breakfast and sat on his cot whittling on a piece of wood. Chips flew to the floor like chicken feed.\n\n\"Not a very friendly type,\" he complained. He slanted his head toward Culpepper, who lay on his cot facing the back wall, wheezing. The breakfast tray sat on the cell floor, untouched.\n\nScarface made a rude sound from the next cell over. \"You can say that again. I've known friendlier corpses. Bank robbers like him give the rest of us a bad name.\"\n\nIgnoring their gripes, Branch grabbed a chair and set it in front of Culpepper's cell. He wasn't much for making deals with prisoners. But if all else fails...\n\nHe straddled the chair and rested his arms on the back. Some lawmen were known to use physical or mental abuse to gain a confession, but Branch was against such methods.\n\n\"You admit to trying to rob the bank,\" he began.\n\nCulpepper turned over on his cot and glared at him with red eyes. \"I didn't admit to nothing.\"\n\n\"Not in so many words. But you find a man digging within the vicinity of a bank safe and well... I'm no whiz in math, but I know how to put two and two together.\"\n\nScarface shook his head in disgust. \"Why go to all that bother? That's what I want to know. It's easier to just walk up to the clerk and demand the money up front.\"\n\nCulpepper glared at Scarface. \"What do you know? You're in jail same as me.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but only because I had a run-in with a pie.\"\n\nBranch rubbed the back of his neck. Just hearing the word pie reminded him of Katie, and right now he had a job to do.\n\n\"Attempted bank robbery will get you at most... what? Six or seven years at Lansing.\" The Kansas state prison was originally called Petersburgh but underwent a name change a few years back.\n\n\"Four or five with good behavior,\" Woody called from his cell.\n\n\"Seven at the most,\" Scarface concurred.\n\n\"Ah, there you go.\" Branch let Culpepper chew on that for a moment before he continued. \"Murder? Now that's a whole different ball of wax. That'll buy you a prime piece of property in the criminal graveyard.\"\n\n\"Yeah, but only after they throw you a bow-tie party,\" Woody said.\n\nThis got a rise out of Culpepper. \"I didn't kill no girls, and you can't prove that I did. I'm innocent.\"\n\nBranch shrugged. \"Claiming to be innocent is one of the prerequisites of a good hanging. Never knew a condemned man claim otherwise.\"\n\nCulpepper glared at him but said nothing.\n\n\"Ow!\" Woody yelped and stuck his finger in his mouth.\n\n\"You okay?\" Branch called over to him.\n\n\"Yeah. Just cut myself. You don't happen to have somethin' I can wrap around this, do you?\"\n\nBranch stood and crossed to his desk. He reached into the top drawer for gauze, tape, scissors, and a bottle of iodine.\n\nHe handed the iodine through the bars. \"Put that on your wound.\"\n\nWoody did as instructed. \"Ouch, that hurts.\"\n\n\"Not as much as hanging from the gallows,\" Scarface said as if he were talking from experience.\n\nBranch cut a strip of tape and stuck it to a metal bar. \"Stick out your hand.\"\n\nWoody reached through the bars, and Branch applied gauze and tape. \"This is what I get for letting prisoners use a knife.\"\n\n\"I'm not a prisoner,\" Woody said. \"I'm the resident cell dweller. 'Sides, that knife's so dull, you could ride to town on it.\"\n\nBranch secured the bandage on Woody's hand. \"That should do it.\"\n\nWoody held up his hand to inspect the bandage. \"At least it's my left hand and not my right.\"\n\nBranch turned to replace the medical supplies. Stopping short of his desk, he whirled about. \"What did you say?\"\n\nSomething in his voice must have alerted Woody, because his forehead wrinkled. \"I was just saying I'm glad it's my left hand.\"\n\n\"That's what I thought you said.\" Dumping the gauze and other items on the desk, Branch grabbed his hat and shot out the door." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 93", + "text": "Cissy's screams brought an immediate reaction from Okie-Sam. Pouncing like a lion, he grabbed Tully and held a knife to her throat. For such a large, awkward man, he moved surprisingly fast.\n\nKatie reached for her gun but quickly changed her mind. Okie-Sam didn't know she was armed, and right now she intended to keep it that way.\n\nOthers ran into the room, including the entire kitchen staff. Gassy slid to a stop, and Howie Howard plowed into him. The Mexicans avoided the pileup but just barely. Chef Gassy righted himself, but he looked deathly pale, like he had just stepped off a storm-tossed boat.\n\nAbigail dropped a stack of napkins. Behind her, Mary-Lou's hand flew to her mouth.\n\n\"Do what he says,\" Katie said, though none of them looked in any condition to give Okie-Sam trouble.\n\nOnly Cissy's quiet sobs broke the silence. Katie was stunned by Okie-Sam's transformation. He looked nothing like the man who had called her sis. How could she have missed the vacant stare? The grim set of his mouth? The hateful expression?\n\nPickens was the last to walk into the room, voice first. \"Who screamed? Don't tell me it was another mouse. And why are all these napkins on the floor?\" Seeing Okie-Sam, he jerked back. \"What the\u2014\"\n\n\"Don't move.\" Okie-Sam's gaze darted around the room, but he held the knife steady at Tully's throat.\n\nKatie silently ran through everything she knew about dealing with hostage situations. She had to keep him talking. Make him think she was on his side.\n\n\"Okie-Sam just got back from burying his pa.\" She spoke in a natural, conversational voice. \"The poor man is half out of his mind with grief.\" She moved ever so slowly from around the counter. \"Tell them, Okie. Tell them how hard your poor daddy worked.\"\n\n\"He worked hard, all right. All his life. And you know what it got him?\"\n\n\"Tell them, brother. Tell them.\"\n\nAnd he did. He seemed all too eager to talk about his father's hardscrabble life, and she'd counted on that, though the knife never wavered from Tully's neck. As he droned on, the small but attentive audience remained rooted in place like a grove of dry oaks.\n\nTully's face was deathly white and her eyes wide with fear, but she didn't move.\n\nEver so slowly, Katie pulled out her gun and held her arm by her side, hiding her weapon beneath her apron. Despite its small size, derringers were lethal at close range. Still, with Tully in the way, firing a gun would be tricky no matter the distance.\n\nWithout warning, Buzz lunged at him. Gripping Tully with one arm around her neck, Okie-Sam sliced his knife through the air with his free hand, ripping the sleeve of Buzz's shirt.\n\nTully cried out, and Buzz fell back, holding his arm.\n\nOkie-Sam shouted to the others, \"Don't any of you move!\"\n\nKatie froze in place. The distraction allowed her to advance, but she was still four tables away. So close and yet so far.\n\nShe swallowed hard. \"Tell them about the watch. Tell them, Okie.\"\n\nOkie-Sam was breathing hard, and beads of perspiration dotted his forehead. \"I know what you're doin', but it won't work.\" He stepped back, pulling Tully with him.\n\nA movement beneath the table drew Katie's gaze downward. Spook Cat! Only the tip of his tail was visible beneath the white tablecloth, indicating he faced the right direction for her purposes. Do what I want you to do, cat, and I promise you all the pie you can eat.\n\nKatie gave the chair a good hard kick. The chair didn't touch Spook Cat, but it sure did scare him. Screeching like a barn owl, the tom shot out from under the table in a furry streak. Startled, Okie-Sam jumped back, and the knife flew out of his hand, along with something else. His hair. What turned out to be a red wig fell on the cat, and the animal raced around the room blindly, screeching all the way.\n\nTully pulled free and ran into Buzz's arms.\n\nOkie-Sam retrieved his knife, but it was too late. In the confusion, he failed to notice Branch had entered the restaurant and now stood directly behind him.\n\nBranch pointed his gun at Okie-Sam's now-bald head, and Katie pointed hers at his chest. Okie-Sam was bookended between two muzzles.\n\n\"Drop the knife,\" Branch said.\n\nThe knife fell to the floor with a clunk.\n\nWhile Pickens, Gassy, and the others watched slack jawed, Branch calmly snapped the handcuffs around Okie-Sam's wrists.\n\nOnly Tully's low murmurings broke the silence as she tended Buzz's wound. It didn't look like a bad cut, but one would never know it by the way Tully fussed over him like a mother hen. She had wrapped a clean napkin around his arm to stem the bleeding.\n\nBranch grabbed Okie-Sam by the arm. \"You're under arrest for the murder of Priscilla Adams, Ginger Watkins, and Gable Clayborn.\"\n\nMary-Lou gasped, Miss Thatcher fanned herself with her handkerchief, and Abigail swayed as if about to faint. Gassy crawled under a table where Spook Cat was hiding and pulled the wig off the poor tom's head.\n\nPickens's face puckered. \"Would someone tell me what's going on? I thought Culpepper was the killer.\"\n\nBranch shook his head. \"Nope. This is the culprit.\"\n\n\"Why did you do it?\" Katie asked, pocketing her gun. \"Why did you kill those girls?\"\n\nOkie-Sam's beady eyes bored into her. \"Wasn't my fault. Priscilla insisted we make her a partner. She wouldn't take no for an answer.\"\n\nKatie raised her eyebrows. So that's what Priscilla and Culpepper had argued about. \"And Ginger?\"\n\n\"She got it into her dumb head that Culpepper had something to do with Priscilla's death. She followed him up to the apartment, and when she saw what we were doing, she ran.\"\n\n\"And you ran after her,\" Katie said. Had Charley not discovered Ginger's shoe, they might never have thought to check the apartment over the bank. By the time anyone discovered the money missing, Culpepper and Okie-Sam would have been long gone.\n\nKatie felt like a load had lifted from her shoulders. At long last, the Harvey girl case was closed and they could all breathe easy.\n\nBranch looked at her with warm approval. \"I thought the pie-in-the-face thing was something. But the cat trick...\" He shook his head and grinned. \"That sure takes the cake.\"\n\nKatie felt a warm glow. \"What's this I hear? Praise for a Pinkerton detective?\"\n\nThe corners of his mouth lifted. \"You made a believer out of me.\" He jerked Okie-Sam toward the door.\n\nNo sooner had they left than the train slid into the station with a low, long whistle.\n\nThe train never failed to spur Pickens into action, and today was no different. He flapped his arms like a farmer chasing birds out of a newly planted field. \"To your stations, everyone. Now!\"\n\nTully looked about to argue, but Katie shook her head. \"Take care of him. I'll cover for you.\"\n\nTully nodded her thanks and led Buzz out of the room. She clearly loved him and no longer cared who knew it. Life-and-death situations almost always changed people, mostly for the good. It certainly opened up Tully's heart. Maybe now she and Buzz could start building a future together.\n\nKatie rushed to Tully's station. Suddenly the whole chain of events struck her as funny, and she giggled. No matter what happened around here the rule was business as usual. None of the passengers would have a clue as to what had just happened.\n\nMy stars, how I love this place!" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 94", + "text": "Chapter 51\n\nMary-Lou watched Katie through the bedroom mirror as she brushed her hair. \"I wish you didn't have to leave.\"\n\n\"I wish I didn't, either. But I have to be in Houston by Friday to start a new job.\"\n\n\"How exciting.\" Mary-Lou worked a knot out of a strand of hair. \"I so envy you.\"\n\nShe could have knocked Katie over with a feather. No one had ever envied her. She was the one who'd envied others. Her sisters...\"Don't say that.\"\n\n\"It's true.\"\n\nKatie blew a strand of hair away from her face. Not only had envy made her miserable, it separated her from her heavenly Father. Instead of thanking Him for giving her good health and a curious mind, she cursed her red hair. She might as well have come right out and said, \"God, You made a mistake.\"\n\n\"You have a wonderful life here.\"\n\n\"I know. It's just...\" Mary-Lou tossed down her hairbrush. \"Seeing how happy Miss Thatcher and Tully are makes me wonder if there will ever be someone special for me.\"\n\n\"Oh, Mary-Lou, you're the nicest and kindest person I know. The right man will come along. I'm sure God has someone special in mind for you. You just have to be patient.\"\n\n\"What about you? I thought maybe you and the sheriff...\"\n\nKatie shook her head. \"He loved his wife dearly, and I don't think there's room in his heart for anyone else.\"\n\n\"You can't be sure of that.\"\n\n\"Perhaps not, but I'm not sure I can trust a man again.\" She explained how the man she loved ran off with her sister.\n\n\"That's terrible,\" Mary-Lou gasped. \"You must have been heartbroken.\"\n\n\"I was. But now I realize God had other plans for me. If Nathan hadn't wed my sister, I would never have become a detective and we would never have met.\"\n\nMary-Lou frowned. \"How can you be so sure what God's plan is? I have a hard time figuring it out, myself.\"\n\n\"My minister back home said that God's plans fill us with hope for a bright future. That's how I felt when I applied for my job as a detective.\"\n\n\"I kind of felt that way when I was hired as a Harvey girl.\"\n\n\"See?\" She spread her hands. \"It's God's will.\" She didn't feel hopeful whenever the possibility of a future with Branch came to mind. Such thoughts always made her feel nervous and confused. Maybe even a little bit scared.\n\nA knock sounded at the door, and Tully poked her head in the room. \"The sheriff's downstairs. He asked for you, Katie.\"\n\nKatie's stomach knotted. There it was again: nerves and confusion. No hope there." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 95", + "text": "Katie spotted Branch through the glass doors, and her breath caught. She stepped around Spook Cat, stretched out on the floor enjoying the sun. The cat had been officially adopted by Chef Gassy and was allowed to roam freely, providing he stayed out of the pies.\n\nBranch greeted her with a grin, and her heart did a flip-flop. All that talk about not trusting another man went out of her head. Dear God, if there is the slightest chance that this man could love me...\n\n\"Thought you might like to know that Okie-Sam was found guilty and is on the way to the gallows as we speak.\" He paused for a moment. \"When the time's right I'll be able to tell Andy that justice was served.\"\n\nPressing her hands together, she took a deep breath. \"What a relief.\" After what Okie-Sam had done to those girls, hanging was probably too good for him. \"What about Culpepper?\"\n\n\"Heading to Lansing where he'll be locked up for a good many years.\"\n\nMusic to her ears. \"What I don't understand is why Culpepper kept quiet about Okie-Sam. Why take the blame for something he didn't do?\"\n\n\"I think I can answer that question,\" he said. \"The Calico Bank isn't the first bank they robbed or tried to rob, and both have aliases a mile long. They tried robbing a bank in Kansas City, but Culpepper was caught and Okie-Sam busted him free.\"\n\n\"And Culpepper was hoping that history would repeat itself,\" she said. \"Now we know why Pinkerton had no record of a redheaded criminal.\" Why anyone in his or her right mind would choose a red wig was beyond her. \"But Culpepper wasn't wearing a wig. Why didn't they have a file on him?\"\n\n\"Probably because he's really blond.\"\n\nShe slapped her forehead with the palm of her hand. \"The shoe polish. I should have known. And to think both men were under my very nose.\"\n\n\"Don't feel bad. They were under my nose, too. If it hadn't been for your crazy cup theory, they might have gotten away.\"\n\n\"I'm just glad it all worked out.\" A detective never knew how a case would break. But a cup code? That was a new one.\n\n\"It worked out all right. I'd say the two of us make mighty fine partners.\"\n\n\"Partners?\" She laughed. \"What happened to the man who preferred working alone?\"\n\nHis mouth curved in a sheepish smile. \"I guess you could say that a certain lady detective taught me a thing or two. See? Even an old dog like me can learn new tricks.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Old dog?\" Hardly.\n\nHe rubbed the back of his neck and cleared his throat. \"I've been thinking.\" He hesitated. \"How do you feel about making the partnership permanent?\"\n\nCatching her breath, she gaped at him. Something stirred inside\u2014an opening of a door. Warmth flowed through her like a summer breeze, sweeping away any lingering doubts. She had been afraid to admit to her feelings. Afraid to think that true love really existed. But looking into his open, honest face it suddenly seemed that loving him\u2014trusting him\u2014was the right thing to do.\n\nShaking with emotion, she could hardly get the words out. \"Are... are you saying\u2014\"\n\nHe nodded, his eyes filled with warm lights. \"Say yes, Katie. And you'll make me the happiest man alive.\"\n\nHer mind scrambled. She felt all at once weak and strong. Dazed and alert. One moment they were talking about criminals and the next making a future together.\n\n\"So what do you say?\" he prodded.\n\nShe struggled to find her voice. \"Th\u2014this is all happening so fast.\"\n\n\"Maybe this will help.\" He pulled something out of his pocket, and her mouth went dry. A ring? Her eyes stung, and she blinked. This wasn't just a dream. He was actually serious about marrying her. Joy bubbled up inside. Had this been God's plan all along? She certainly felt hopeful and happy and...\n\nHe held out his hand, and the sun glinted against the object in his open palm. Her jaw dropped, and her heart sank to her knees.\n\nIt wasn't a ring. It was...\n\n\"A badge?\" she said, her voice barely above a whisper. The shiny object winked in the sunlight as if enjoying a joke at her expense.\n\nHe nodded. \"An undersheriff's badge. The town's growing in leaps and bounds, and I'll need a lot of help. You know how lousy I am at paperwork. I talked to the mayor, and he approves.\"\n\nHe paused, and when she said nothing, a shadow of uncertainty crossed his face. \"It's not as exciting as your current job. The pay's lousy. So are the hours, but you and I would make a great team. We've already proven that.\"\n\nPulling her gaze away from the badge, she looked at him with burning eyes. \"You're offering me a j\u2014job?\" she stammered, feeling like the world's biggest fool.\n\nHis eyebrows rose. \"So what do you say?\"\n\n\"A job doing paperwork?\"\n\nHe frowned. \"I'm not doing a very good job of explaining myself, am I?\"\n\n\"Oh, but you are.\" She shook her head. \"You're doing an excellent job.\" Whirling about, she yanked open the restaurant door and dashed inside." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 96", + "text": "Chapter 52\n\nBranch tossed the badge on his desk and kicked his chair.\n\n\"Temper, temper,\" Woody called from his cell. He and Scarface sat facing each other through the bars of their cells playing cards. \"What's got you so riled up?\"\n\n\"Women!\"\n\n\"Would that be women in general?\" Woody asked, reaching into Scarface's cell to play a card. \"Or one in particular?\"\n\n\"I offered Katie a job, and she didn't even give me an answer. Instead she shot off like a cannonball.\"\n\n\"Katie?\" Woody drew a card and arranged it in his hand. \"Is that the pie-in-the-face gal you were hankering to kiss?\"\n\nScarface grimaced. \"Better watch it with that one. I wouldn't put it past her to charge the gates of hell with a bucket of ice water.\"\n\nBranch gripped the back of his chair. \"That's the one, all right.\"\n\n\"Your turn,\" Woody said to his cellmate. In a louder voice he said, \"Guess you don't know.\"\n\n\"Know what?\" Branch asked.\n\n\"She's actually a Pinkerton operative sent here to help solve the Harvey case. That's what that Culpepper fella told us.\"\n\nScarface made a rude sound with his mouth. \"I shoulda known from the git-go that the lady was a Pink.\"\n\n\"Yeah, and a good one at that,\" Branch muttered.\n\nScarface shook his head. \"It's getting so you can't trust anyone, anymore. Females included.\"\n\nWoody set his cards on his cot. \"Let me get this straight.\" He rose, straightened out his wooden leg, and hobbled to the front of his cell. \"You offered her a job?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" He couldn't think of any other way to keep her in town without getting hurt in the process. He wanted to keep her close but not too close. Keep her safe while protecting his heart.\n\nNot that he blamed her for turning him down. Compared to her Pinkerton job, his offer was almost laughable. If only...\n\nHe clenched his teeth. No sense going down that road. She would never give up her job. She was like Hannah in that regard. Why couldn't he fall in love with a more traditional woman? One who would be content just to be his wife?\n\n\"I offered her a job as undersheriff.\"\n\nWoody rolled his eyes. \"Congratulations. You just proved that it takes no brains to be a lawman.\"\n\n\"What's that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"It means you're dumb as a lamppost,\" Scarface said, throwing down his cards.\n\n\"I made a good offer,\" Branch said in his own defense. \"Do you know how many men would jump at an offer like that? Even you.\"\n\n\"Not me,\" Woody said. \"Not on your tintype. It's safer on this side of the bars than out there.\"\n\nScarface nodded. \"Yeah, and room and board is free.\"\n\nBranch pushed his chair against the desk with a bang. \"She acted like I'd told her to jump in front of a train or something.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised she didn't tell you to jump,\" Woody said.\n\nBranch frowned. \"You sure do know how to make a fella feel like a heel.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, it's no less than you deserve.\" Woody gripped the bars tight. \"Listen to me and listen good. I'm a busy man, so I'm only gonna say this once. She has a job, and it probably pays a whole lot more than what this here town can afford to pay. If you want her to stay, then you better figure out something she don't already have.\"\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\nWoody rolled his eyes. \"Now I gotta think for you, too?\" He lumbered back to his cot. \"Like I said, I'm a busy man. It's time to get me some shut-eye. Wake me when that fool head of yours figures out what to do with its brains.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 97", + "text": "\"A job! He offered me a job?\" Katie tossed a pair of bloomers into her carpetbag and bit down on her lip. \"He wants me to do paperwork?\" She groaned. Now she was talking to herself.\n\n\"What this town needs is a good undersheriff, and I think you're the right person for the job.\"\n\nThe memory shot through her like a bullet, tearing her apart. She imagined hearing a ripping sound from within\u2014some vital organ pulling away from its moorings.\n\nShe closed her eyes. Oh, God. Why do I always fall for the wrong man? I'm trying to accept Your will, but it's hard. It was in fact the hardest thing she ever had to do.\n\nThe door flew open, and Tully rushed into the room, scattering Katie's thoughts. \"Abigail's husband is here. You better come quick!\"\n\nSpringing into action, Katie raced from the room, reaching the dining area behind Tully. Abigail was nowhere in sight.\n\nSam Fletcher stood at a table showing a photograph to one of the train passengers. Katie recognized the passenger as Mr. Thumper, a Bible salesman who traveled through Calico regularly and knew all the girls by name.\n\nNodding, Mr. Thumper handed the photograph back and said something.\n\nAbigail's husband straightened and slipped the picture into his shirt pocket. He glanced around before taking his place at the counter. His slow, methodical movements indicated he was in no particular hurry. He would wait till after the midday crowd left.\n\nMary-Lou cast an anxious glance at Katie before handing him a bill of fare. Katie lifted her gaze to the clock. The clock indicated it was almost time for the train to leave. The train she was scheduled to leave town on...\n\nOutside, Buzz stood ready to strike the gong. Intent on telling Buzz to hold off, Katie started for the door, but it was too late. The gong sounded and right on cue, the diners rose like a choir ready to burst into song.\n\nBuzz held the door open with his one good arm and wished the passengers Godspeed as they streamed past him and onto the waiting train. His other arm was wrapped in a bandage and held in a sling.\n\nThe breakfast room was soon empty except for Abigail's husband and the regular staff. For several moments no one said a word. Buzz, sensing something was wrong, walked over to Tully. Silently she tossed a nod at the man on the stool. Mary-Lou looked close to tears.\n\nKatie stepped behind the counter. \"I'll have some of that berry pie,\" Fletcher said. His face was as white and puffy as unbaked dough, and his skinny mustache teetered up and down like a child's seesaw.\n\nKatie sliced a piece and carried the plate over to him. He grabbed her by the wrist, surprising her. His fingers pressed into her flesh like an iron clamp.\n\n\"I know Abby's here. I'm her husband, and I want to see her now.\"\n\nKatie glared at him. \"Take your hands off me.\"\n\nHe jerked her arm before releasing it and picked up his fork.\n\nShe rubbed her wrist. \"You better leave.\"\n\nHe took a bite of pie and chewed before answering. \"This a public place. That means I have the same right to be here as anyone else.\"\n\nKatie glared at him. \"Buzz, go fetch the sheriff.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary.\" All heads swung to the archway where Abigail stood, looking very much alone and vulnerable.\n\nHer husband dropped his fork and pushed his bulk off the stool. \"That's more like it. Get your things. We're going home.\"\n\nAbigail shook her head. \"I'm not going anywhere. This is my home now.\"\n\nKatie moved from behind the counter. The Pinkerton agency never worked on cases involving marital problems and for good reason. Most detectives would rather walk into a den of thieves than a domestic dispute.\n\nFletcher's eyes glittered, and the tension in the air was palpable. \"You're my wife, and you belong with me.\"\n\nAbigail lifted her chin. \"Not anymore. You'll be hearing from my lawyer. It's over, so you better just leave.\" Somehow she managed to put on a brave front, and only the most discerning eye would notice the slight tremor of her lips.\n\nFletcher took a step forward, his hands knotted into fists by his side. \"Who's gonna make me?\"\n\n\"I am,\" Katie said, stepping next to Abigail.\n\nHe snickered. \"You don't think I can take on the two of you?\"\n\n\"Make that three,\" Tully said, surprising Katie. Surprising Buzz, too, who quickly took his place by Tully's side.\n\n\"Th\u2014that's f\u2014five of us,\" Mary-Lou stammered, hastening across the room to stand next to Buzz.\n\nFletcher glowered at the small group. \"You better tell your four friends to move before someone gets hurt.\"\n\nPickens joined them, crowding in next to Mary-Lou. He crossed his arms in front of his ample chest and glared back at Fletcher. \"Make that five friends.\"\n\n\"Six!\" Chef Gassy squeezed between Tully and Buzz. He was followed by Howie Howard and the other kitchen staff, along with Miss Thatcher and even Cissy. What the group lacked in muscle they made up for in numbers.\n\nFletcher appeared confused or maybe bewildered. The pupils of his eyes shifted back and forth like little black marbles. \"You better make sure this is what you want, Abby. 'Cause when I walk out that door I ain't never coming back.\"\n\n\"Staying here with my friends is what I want,\" Abigail said, her voice now strong with conviction.\n\nSeeming to shrivel in defeat, Fletcher no longer appeared menacing. Instead, he looked about as harmless as an empty potato sack. Without another word, he stalked across the room and paused in front of the door. With one last glance at the group, he left the building.\n\nNo sooner had the door slammed shut behind him than Abigail burst into tears.\n\nKatie handed her a handkerchief and put an arm around her. \"It's over.\"\n\nAbigail's body shook beneath her touch, but for the first time since Katie had known her she didn't look afraid.\n\n\"I can't believe it.\" Abigail blew her nose. \"I never thought I'd have the nerve to stand up to him.\"\n\n\"But you did,\" Mary-Lou said. \"We're so proud of you.\"\n\nAbigail dabbed the tears away from her cheeks. \"I saw the way Katie stood up to Okie-Sam. I decided it was time to take a stand of my own. But... I couldn't have done it without all your help.\"\n\n\"You know what they say,\" Katie said. \"Two are better than one.\"\n\n\"And there were twelve of us,\" Mary-Lou said.\n\nChef Gassy lunged forward, thrusting a wooden spoon as if battling a dragon. \"He come back, he answer to great chef.\"\n\n\"I'm trembling in my shoes,\" Tully whispered.\n\nAbigail smiled through her tears.\n\nPickens clapped his hands. \"All right, men. Ladies. Back to work.\" He pointed his finger at Katie. \"You, too.\"\n\nKatie sighed. She'd missed her train. If she didn't know better, she'd think God didn't want her to leave. But what possible reason could He have for wanting her to stay?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 98", + "text": "Chapter 53\n\nThe dining room was packed that night, and everyone was in good spirits.\n\nEveryone except Katie. She played her role as a Harvey girl to the hilt, right down to a sparkling smile, but that didn't prevent her heart from aching.\n\nAbigail couldn't stop smiling, even when she was in the kitchen. \"Come here, I want to show you something,\" she whispered and led Katie to the dining room door. \"Look over there.\"\n\nKatie followed her finger to the coatrack where Mary-Lou was helping Charley Reynolds pick out a coat. The two of them were deep in conversation.\n\nAbigail sighed. \"I know it's too soon. Charley is still grieving the loss of Ginger. But Mary-Lou is the only one who can make him smile. Do you suppose...?\"\n\nKatie nodded. \"Oh, I do hope so. You must write and let me know how it all works out.\"\n\nPickens came up behind them and addressed Abigail. \"It's time for dessert.\"\n\nPromising to write, Abigail turned and hurried to the kitchen.\n\nPickens cleared his voice and ran a hand down his ample chest. \"Sure I can't talk you into staying?\" He looked as awkward as a young man asking a girl out to a dance. \"Thought maybe you might consider trading in your gun for a tray.\"\n\nKatie laughed. Only Pickens would think such a trade-off comparable. \"You've got three new girls. You don't need me.\"\n\nThe new Harvey girls had arrived on the morning train.\n\nPickens lifted his shoulders and splayed his hands. \"If you ever change your mind, you know where to find us.\"\n\nHis offer touched her deeply. \"Thank you.\"\n\nShe picked up her carpetbag. She wanted to board the train before the crowd. Earlier she had said her good-byes, and there was nothing left to do.\n\nShe turned, and one of the new girls bumped into her, tray first. The Rhode Island chicken took off in one direction and the Long Island oysters in another. A look of horror crossed the poor girl's face, and she looked as frantic as a mouse in a trap.\n\n\"It's okay.\" Katie set her carpetbag down and helped the girl scoop up the food. Her name was Suzanne, and she was a pretty blond with a Southern drawl. \"At least you didn't set the kitchen on fire like I did.\"\n\nThe girl looked up. She couldn't be more than eighteen or nineteen. \"You did that?\"\n\n\"Sure did.\"\n\n\"And you weren't fired?\"\n\n\"Nope.\"\n\n\"But Mr. Pickens looks so mean. And so does Miss Thatcher. And the chef...\"\n\n\"You can't always tell what people are like until you see into their hearts. Just wait. You'll be amazed. Meanwhile, just remember to keep smiling, no matter what.\" She spread her lips to demonstrate, and Suzanne smiled back. \"That's it. The right smile can hide anything.\"\n\nEven a broken heart." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 99", + "text": "The sun had dipped low in the afternoon sky by the time Branch raced back to town. He would have made it back a whole lot earlier had his horse not thrown a shoe.\n\nShadows stretched and yawned across his path as he galloped down Main. Midnight's flying hooves hammered the road, stirring up dust and curiosity.\n\nPedestrians turned to stare before dashing out of his way. Horses neighed and pawed the ground. Dogs barked.\n\nThe train was still in the station when he reached the Harvey House, and that was a relief. He quickly dismounted, tied his horse, and ran. God, don't let that be the whistle. But it was; he knew it was. Racing along the alleyway, his feet barely touched the ground. He took a flying leap onto the platform, but the train had already pulled away.\n\n\"Stop, stop!\" he yelled, waving his arms over his head, but it was no use.\n\nThe train quickly picked up speed as it rushed away from the setting sun. Soon only a speck remained, no bigger than a period at the end of a sentence.\n\nTurning, Branch surveyed the deserted platform, and his heart sank. Despair washed over him in angry waves. The train had taken his whole world with it, and he had no one to blame but himself.\n\nHe should have told Katie how he felt when he had the chance. Should have told her how much he loved her. Instead, like a coward, he'd held back out of fear of losing her like he'd lost Hannah. Like he'd lost almost everyone he'd ever loved. Had almost lost Andy.\n\nToo late he realized his heart was beyond protecting. He was already hooked. Already head over heels. Already past the point of no return.\n\nHe debated what to do. He couldn't go to the office. The last thing he needed was his know-it-all jail occupants telling him what he already knew. He was a dang fool. Nor was he in any condition to face Andy or Miss Chloe.\n\nHe stalked into the restaurant. Big mistake.\n\nEverything inside reminded him of Katie. The coatrack where first they'd met. \"If you'll step over to that rack, I'll help you pick out a dinner coat.\"\n\nThe table where he celebrated Andy's birthday. \"Would you rather another waitress serve you?\"\n\nThe counter. \"Anything ever mess up your game, Sheriff?\"\n\nCoffee. He needed coffee. Maybe that would clear his head. He staggered over to the counter, but even that offered no escape from the hundreds of memories that clawed at him.\n\nHe sat, elbows on the surface, and held his head in his hands. His misery cut him off from everything else like blinders.\n\n\"Looks like you could use a cup of joe, Sheriff.\"\n\nHe dropped his hands, not sure he'd heard right. He blinked. \"Katie?\" His heart practically leaped out of his chest. \"I... I thought you'd left.\"\n\nShe filled his cup. \"I almost did, but then I realized that there were too many unanswered questions.\" She peered at him through lowered lashes. \"A Pinkerton detective never rests until all the loose ends have been tied up.\"\n\nLoose ends? Unanswered questions? What was she talking about? The case was closed. But even if it wasn't, he didn't want to think about it. Not now, at least.\n\nHe inhaled. Never had she looked more beautiful than she did at that moment. Never had he felt at such a loss for words. \"Is that the only reason you're staying?\"\n\nHer eyes flashed. \"If you think I have any intention of accepting your job offer you better think again.\"\n\n\"I'm withdrawing the job offer.\"\n\nShe regarded him with wary eyes. \"Is that so?\"\n\n\"Yeah, that's so.\" He blew out his breath. God, don't let me mess this up. Not this time. \"I told my... uh... someone you'd turned down my offer. Know what he called me? Dumb as a lamppost.\"\n\n\"Did he now?\"\n\nHe nodded. \"Said you had a job. If I wanted you to stay I had to offer you something you don't already have.\"\n\nShe set the coffeepot down and smoothed her hands over her apron. \"Don't know what that could be. Got everything I need right here.\"\n\n\"But you don't have this.\" He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box. \"Traveled all the way to Topeka to purchase it.\" He lifted the lid. Hands shaking, he pulled out a slim gold band set with a mine-cut diamond.\n\nPlacing the box on the counter, he held up the ring until her pretty round face was framed by the gilded circle.\n\nHer eyes grew wide, softened, and slowly turned to liquid, and he heard her intake of breath.\n\nHe lowered the ring. \"And you don't have this.\" He thumped his chest. \"But if you'll let me, I'll give you all the love this ol' heart has to offer.\"\n\n\"Oh, Branch, I\u2014\"\n\n\"Wait. Hear me out.\" He wasn't one for putting his feelings into words, but he intended to give it his best shot. \"I tried not falling in love with you. Never worked so hard at anything in my life. But every time you looked at me a certain way or made me want to wring your neck, I was a goner.\" His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. \"I was afraid of loving you for fear of losing you. I know it sounds crazy\u2014\"\n\n\"Not to me.\" Her lips trembled, and her eyes filled with tears.\n\n\"I guess what I'm trying to say is that God tested my faith once, and now He's testing it again. I can't love you without trusting the future to Him. That's what I'm trying to do here. So what do you say?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 100", + "text": "Katie swallowed the lump in her throat, but even then she was having a hard time finding her voice. She'd told the new girl Suzanne that you couldn't always tell what people were like until you saw into their hearts. Right now the view into Branch's heart was spectacular, and her own heart was about to burst with joy and, more than anything, love.\n\n\"I love you, too,\" she whispered. She'd asked God why He had made her the way she was and at long last had her answer. God made her this way\u2014red hair, freckles, and all\u2014just so she could love and be loved by Branch.\n\nHe tilted his head. \"So? Does that mean you'll marry me?\"\n\n\"She says yes,\" Abigail said.\n\n\"Yes, she'll marry you,\" Mary-Lou called from where she was setting a table.\n\n\"She better,\" Tully added.\n\n\"Oui, oui,\" Chef Gassy said from the other side of the kitchen pass-through. \"N'est pas l'amour grandiose?\"\n\nEven the new girl Suzanne gave an enthusiastic smile.\n\nPickens threw up his arms. \"Hurry up and tell the man what he wants to hear. We got to get this place ready for tomorrow.\"\n\nAn eager look shone from Branch's eyes. \"One more yes and it'll be unanimous.\"\n\nKatie could hardly get the words out fast enough. \"In that case, I say... yes! Yes, Branch Whitman. I'll marry you!\"\n\nGrinning from ear to ear, he surprised her by leaping over the counter. Mercifully he landed on his feet. He reached for her hand and slipped the ring on her finger. Before she knew it, she was in his arms. He hugged her so tight that their hearts seemed to beat as one.\n\n\"I love you, Katie Madison Jones and soon to be Whitman. God willing, if we're blessed with children, I hope they all have your crazy red hair and cute freckled nose.\"\n\nThe love shining from his eyes took her breath away. \"I love you, too,\" she said with meaning, but no words could adequately express what was in her heart. \"And I hope those children you mentioned will all be as tall and handsome and as stubborn as you.\" Something occurred to her and she drew back. \"Andy...\"\n\n\"No worry there. He's already said he wanted you to be his mom.\"\n\nShe sighed with happiness, and fresh tears sprang to her eyes. Thank You, thank You, God.\n\n\"About those loose ends...\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"All the loose ends have been cleared up. Case closed.\"\n\n\"Well then...\" He inclined his head. \"What would your Pinkerton bosses suggest we do at a time like this?\"\n\nShe didn't even have to think up an answer. \"I believe they would say that no betrothal is valid without a kiss.\"\n\nHe grinned. \"That's one thing we can agree on.\"\n\nNo sooner had his mouth found hers than applause broke out. Pulling his head back, he groaned. The whole gang stood on the other side of the counter, and each and every one had a full Harvey smile, even Pickens.\n\nBranch whispered in her ear, \"What would your Pinkerton bosses say about one of their operatives making a public spectacle?\"\n\nShe grinned up at him. \"They would say, 'Miss Katie Madison Jones and soon to be Whitman, you're fired.'\"\n\n\"Hmm. Maybe the Pinkerton National Detective Agency isn't as bad as I thought.\" And with that he kissed her again." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 101", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "Petticoat Detective.txt", + "author": "Margaret Brownley", + "genres": [], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; And I knew it not.\n\nGenesis 28:16" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Chapter 1\n\n1883\n\nGoodman, Kansas\n\n\"Whoa!\"\n\nFormer Texas Ranger Tom Colton reined in his horse and stared at the sign hanging from the roof of the two-story brick structure: MISS LILLIAN'S PARLOR HOUSE AND FINE BOOTS. In the faint glow of a full moon the building stood tall, solid, and proper as an old church. Only the red light shimmering in a downstairs window suggested otherwise.\n\nHe fingered the letter in his vest pocket. Addressed to his brother Dave and signed simply \"Rose,\" the letter had brought him to this very address searching for answers.\n\nThe red light gave him pause. Perhaps coming here had been a mistake, but he'd traveled too far to turn back now. He hesitated for several moments before dismounting. Securing his horse to the hitching post, he stomped up the wooden steps to the porch. For once, God, let me be wrong about my brother.\n\nThe door opened to his knock, and a stout-figured woman peered at him from a painted face. Designed for a woman half her size, the bright blue gown and exaggerated bustle did her no favors, nor did hair piled on top of her head like frothy red frosting.\n\nHer appearance quelled any doubt as to the nature of the establishment, and his spirits dropped yet another notch. Dave, oh, Dave...\n\n\"Are you going to stand there all night, cowboy? Or are you going to tell me what you want?\" Her lilting Southern drawl seemed at odds with her sharp-eyed gaze.\n\nHe pulled off his wide-brim hat. \"Sorry to bother you, ma'am. Name's Tom, Tom Colton. I came to see Rose.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed. \"Don't believe I've seen you around these parts.\"\n\n\"I'm new in town.\"\n\nThe woman's gaze traveled the length of his six-foot frame like a worried mother scrutinizing a daughter's suitor. The gun belt sagging from his waist made her hesitate. She then glanced at his gelding tied out front next to one other.\n\nApparently his horse, Thunder, gave him a good recommendation because the woman stepped aside to let him in.\n\n\"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Colton. I'm Miss Lillian.\"\n\nHe wasn't especially pleased to meet her, but he gave a polite nod and glanced around the entry. Many were the times he'd stepped into a house of ill repute on official business back in his Ranger days. Even so, he'd never seen anything like this. Men's boots, women's boots, and boots that no rational person should ever have occasion to wear were arranged on every possible surface, from shelves to tables and even the floor. What's more, they were all for sale.\n\n\"You want to see Rose, eh?\" The proprietor closed and locked the door, her taffeta skirt rustling like autumn leaves. \"That'll be five dollars, but you'll have to wait.\"\n\nHe held his hat in his hand and shifted from one foot to the other. \"I only want to talk to her.\"\n\n\"Then it'll cost you ten. More if you're a lawman.\"\n\nHe hoped she was simply stating the rules of the house and not making a guess based on appearances. He'd left the Texas Rangers three years ago but still thought like one, and some even said, talked like one\u2014a blessing and curse on both accounts.\n\n\"That's a lot of money.\" He rubbed his chin. Whoever said talk was cheap hadn't met Miss Lillian.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Jawing is a lot of work.\"\n\nThe woman showed no curiosity as to his business with Rose. If anything, she seemed more interested in his scuffed boots.\n\nSlapping his hat on his head, he pulled his money clip from his vest pocket and peeled away a single bill. \"She knew my brother. His name was Dave Colton.\"\n\nThe madam stuffed the banknote into the shiny cloth purse at her waist. If the number of bulges was an indication, the woman had enough greenbacks in her purse to burn a wet barn.\n\n\"Sorry, but we don't make allowances for family members. Everyone pays the same.\"\n\nHe raised his eyebrows. \"I'm not asking for favors. I just want to ask her about my brother.\"\n\nShe tilted her head, and suspicion bled through her face paint. \"Are you sure you're not a lawman?\"\n\n\"I'm sure.\"\n\n\"Not that it matters, mind you. I run a respectable business here.\"\n\nHe glanced at a purple leather boot. \"I can see that, ma'am.\"\n\n\"I also insist that my girls protect our guests' privacy. You won't get much information out of Rose.\" She sniffed. \"Or anyone else for that matter.\"\n\nHe rubbed his chin. \"I'll keep that in mind.\"\n\n\"See that you do.\" She lowered her gaze to his feet. \"Got yourself some good-sized ant mashers there. Looks like you could use some new leather.\"\n\nHe followed her gaze downward. His dusty boots sure did look out of place on the red floral carpet. \"I'm rather partial to the boots I'm wearing, ma'am.\"\n\n\"Partiality killed the cat.\"\n\n\"I'm pretty sure that was curiosity,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled. \"So aren't you at least a little curious as to how your foot would feel in one of these?\" She picked a brown leather boot off a nearby counter and thrust it into his hands. \"It's amazing what a man with a hammer and a mouthful of wood pegs can do,\" she said. \"Had the Southern army worn boots like that, they might have won the war.\"\n\n\"Now there's a thought.\" He turned the boot over. It had a wide square toe and well-angled heel. He found no fault with the construction; his objection was with the effeminate red rose hand-tooled on the crown. Folks back home in Texas didn't cotton to people walking around duded out like a fancy barbed-wire drummer.\n\nHe handed the boot back to her. \"If I ever have occasion to go to war, I'll be sure to stop here first.\"\n\n\"You do that, Mr. Colton.\"\n\nShe set the boot upright on a shelf before leading him through the high-ceiling entryway to the parlor. A log burned in the fireplace, and orange flames lazily climbed the chimney. An upright piano commanded one corner of the room, and a hand-printed sign on the instrument read SINGING LESSONS, ONE FIFTY. He couldn't imagine anyone coming here for singing lessons, but then he wouldn't have thought to come here for footwear, either.\n\nIn the opposite corner stood a barber chair and a tray of shaving cream and brushes. A sign listed the cost of a shave and haircut. He pulled his hat down a notch to hide his collar-length hair. He didn't want Miss Lillian coming at him with scissors or razor.\n\nHe backed away from the barber chair and almost knocked a crystal ball off a small table in a darkened alcove. Not only was the room heavily furnished with upholstered hassocks, brocaded settees, and all manner of fuss and feathers, it was also booby-trapped.\n\nMiss Lillian watched him set the glass sphere on its wooden stand. \"Would you like me to read your fortune while you're waiting? I'll only charge you half price.\"\n\nHe drew his hand away. The woman was a regular jack-of-all-trades. \"If it's all the same to you, ma'am, I prefer not to know what the future holds. I like to be surprised.\"\n\n\"Very well.\" She pointed to a red settee. With a sweep of her gown, she stooped to pick up a black-and-white cat curled on a red upholstered hammock. Stroking the cat as she carried him in her arms, she paused beneath the archway and stared over one bare shoulder. \"Be careful, Mr. Colton. I see danger ahead for you.\"\n\n\"There goes my surprise,\" he said.\n\nAccepting his sales resistance with good grace, she shrugged and left the room.\n\nHe sat and a sickly sweet whiff of perfume rose from the faded upholstery. At least Miss Lillian didn't charge him to sit\u2014so far as he knew.\n\nThe clock on the marble mantel struck nine. It was a weeknight, which probably accounted for the quiet. He balanced his forearms on his knees and rubbed his hands together. Anxious to finish his business with Rose and return to his hotel room, he waited with growing impatience.\n\nThe crystal ball seemed to stare at him like a large, unblinking eye. Good thing he didn't believe in fortune-telling. Didn't worry much about danger, either.\n\nOkay, maybe a little..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "Someone was coming up the stairs.\n\nJennifer Layne, working undercover as Amy Gardner, glanced frantically at the row of closed doors and darted through the nearest one. She was in luck; the room was empty. Hands clutched to her chest to still her pounding heart, she pressed her back against the door, or at least as much as her bustle allowed. God, what did I get myself into this time?\n\nSqueezing her eyes shut, she waited, praying that the person in the hall wasn't a john. The sound of a floorboard signaled someone outside the door. She held her breath until the footsteps faded away. Her shoulders slumped, and her breath escaped in a single gasp of relief. That was close. Too close.\n\nShe strained her ears. A man's laughter sounded from one of the other rooms, but otherwise all was quiet. For now.\n\nShe moved away from the door. Catching sight of herself in the gilded framed mirror, her mouth dropped open. Frowning, she stuck out her tongue. It was her, all right, but with all that face paint it was hard to tell.\n\nTurning, she viewed herself from all angles. Ugh! She looked worse than she'd thought. Her bustle forced the skirt almost horizontal from the waist. Sideways, she looked like the front part of a horse, but it was the top of her dress that caused the most alarm. Covering her exposed neckline with crossed hands, she glanced about the room for a shawl, a cape, a newspaper\u2014anything with which to cover herself. Except for a brass bed, upholstered chair, desk, and more mirrors than a carnival, the room offered no help for modesty. She resisted the urge to pull a sheet off the bed and wrap herself in it.\n\nAs a Pinkerton operative, she'd worked undercover as a Southern belle, a heartbroken widow, a jilted schoolteacher, and even a secretary (though with terrible typing skills). But never before had she worked in a bordello or had to wear face paint. Her only hope was that she would get what she came for without having to defend her virtue.\n\nShe'd arrived at the brothel that afternoon, hoping to convince the proprietress that she was Rose's long-lost cousin. She never had a chance to share her well-rehearsed story. Thinking she was seeking work as a \"fancy lady,\" Miss Lillian took one look at her plain skirt and prudish white shirtwaist and dragged her into the house.\n\n\"What do you think I'm running here? A nunnery?\" the madam demanded.\n\nQuick to see the advantage of approaching the woman named Rose as a colleague, Jennifer-slash-Amy decided to play along, indeed, considered it fortunate to have fallen into what at the time seemed like the perfect disguise.\n\nShe would conduct her business and leave posthaste; at least that was the plan. Not once did she consider what such a pretext would entail until Miss Lillian ordered two women in corsets and bloomers to \"make her look decent.\"\n\nDecent, indeed! Her boss, Mr. Pinkerton, should see her now. On second thought, no he shouldn't! She prayed that no man would.\n\nWringing her hands, she paced the floor. The horrid corset felt like steel around her middle, and she could hardly manage an honest breath. Think, think. She was almost certain the room directly across from this one was Rose's. She would simply knock on the door. With a little luck, Rose would be alone and, if all went as planned, tell what she knew.\n\nShe could do this, had to do it. After botching her last assignment, she couldn't afford another failure. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency wouldn't stand for it. Mr. William Pinkerton, head of the western division, had been very clear on that account.\n\nThis time she would get it right if it killed her. After months of investigation, the trail to one of the most notorious criminals in the West led to this establishment. Guilty of fraud, theft, and murder, the Gunnysack Bandit had a hefty price on his head. He also had a gift for evading every lawman, bounty hunter, and detective on his trail.\n\nWe'll see how good you are at dodging a female detective, Mr. Gunny. The thought made her smile. For once her gender worked for and not against her. The room was proof that a female operative could go where angels\u2014and male counterparts\u2014feared to tread.\n\nShe lifted a foot onto a trunk and gathered up miles of taffeta fabric to check the derringer holstered to her thigh. The voluptuous skirt would prevent anything resembling a fast draw, but unless she bumped into a persistent male, her chances of needing a weapon were low. Probably. Hopefully.\n\nCertainly, the woman named Rose had no reason to pose a threat. Unless, of course, she was in cahoots with the bandit.\n\nAmy tightened the buckle of her holster attached to a silk-stockinged thigh just as the door flew open. Much to her horror, she found herself face-to-face with a tall, square-jawed man in a wide-brim hat. If his height wasn't bad enough, the determined look on his face was worse. This was a man who wasn't about to take no for an answer." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "Chapter 2\n\nTom Colton caught a glance of a shapely leg before the woman named Rose dropped her voluminous skirts. Rounded green eyes met his and her red-rouged lips formed a perfect O followed by an audible gasp.\n\nHe closed the door behind him. \"I apologize for startling you.\" He should have knocked, but Miss Lillian told him that Rose was expecting him and to just walk in.\n\nRose crossed her arms in front, an act that surprised him. How odd that a woman in her profession would worry about bare shoulders. Her attempt at modesty\u2014if that's what it was\u2014couldn't have been more misplaced. No amount of cover could hide her appeal or the intriguing way her gown molded against her slim feminine form.\n\nThe scarlet gown would look garish on most women, but it gave Rose's complexion a pearly pink glow. Honey-blond hair cascaded down her back in a riot of ringlets and long dark lashes ringed the eyes staring back at him.\n\nHis brother had made more bad choices than could be found on a ruffled shirt, but he knew how to pick his women, that's for certain and sure, at least appearance-wise.\n\nRose's mouth closed but the dismay in her eyes remained. It didn't seem possible, but the lady looked downright... what? Scared? Terrified?\n\nOf him?\n\nHe was tall and he was strong and many were the outlaws who had once feared him, but never had he known a woman to feel threatened by his presence. Perhaps she saw a family resemblance. She certainly looked like she saw a ghost. Except the only things he and Dave had in common were the same parents and similar height.\n\n\"Howdy-do, ma'am. My name is Tom. Tom Colton.\"\n\nNot so much as a shadow of recognition flickered across her painted face at mention of his name, but her crossed arms stayed stubbornly in place. Maybe clients were expected to follow a certain protocol.\n\nHaving no knowledge of the etiquette that such an establishment required, he clarified.\n\n\"I'm Dave Colton's brother.\"\n\nStill no response.\n\nConsidering the amorous tone of her letter to Dave, her lack of emotion struck him as odd. When the silence continued to stretch between them, he looked around. The only chair in the room was piled high with enough feminine under-riggings to make the most jaded man blush. That left only one place to sit.\n\nShe followed his gaze to the neatly made bed. \"Oh!\"\n\nHe frowned. She looked like she was having trouble breathing. Hand out, he stepped forward, but she backed away quicker than chain lightning. \"Are you all right, ma'am?\"\n\nShe gave a slow nod as if she couldn't make up her mind whether she was or wasn't. \"It's just that I'm not working tonight, Mr. Colton.\" She looked like she was trying to put up a brave front. \"If... if you would kindly leave...?\"\n\nNot working? His gaze traveled down her shiny taffeta gown before he zeroed in on her red-rouged lips. She could have fooled him. \"I'm afraid I can't do that, ma'am.\"\n\nHer eyes narrowed, and he detected a spark of combat in their sea-green depths. \"And why is that?\"\n\n\"I paid Miss Lillian ten dollars, and I mean to get my money's worth.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"There are other women\u2014\"\n\n\"But you're the one I came to see.\" The madam had assured him that Rose agreed to talk, if that's what he wanted, so why was she making it so difficult? What kind of game was she playing?\n\nShe glanced past him to the closed door as if measuring its distance. \"I want you to leave.\" She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. \"Now!\"\n\n\"Not till you tell me what you know about the Gunnysack Bandit.\" Surprise crossed her face at mention of the outlaw, followed by a look of curiosity. Ah, now they were getting somewhere.\n\n\"I'm waiting,\" he said.\n\n\"I have no knowledge of the man.\"\n\nAn out-and-out lie if he'd ever heard one. Frustration built up inside, and he punched a fist into his palm to relieve it.\n\nShe shrank clear back to the mirrored wall. Much to his dismay, he realized how his thoughtless action could be misinterpreted. He began again, this time in a gentler tone.\n\n\"Forgive me. I didn't mean to alarm you.\"\n\nShe studied him much as a cat studied a mouse. \"You didn't alarm me, Mr. Colton. Now if you would be so kind as to let yourself out\u2014\"\n\nHe pulled off his Stetson and raked his fingers through his hair. Things weren't going as he hoped, but he'd come too far to give up. \"I'm sorry. I can't do that.\" He replaced his hat and hung his thumbs from his holster. \"Not till you tell me what you know.\"\n\nThe stubbornness on her face matched the hands placed firmly on the deep valley of her neckline. \"I know nothing.\"\n\nHe narrowed his eyes. \"You do know that my brother is dead.\"\n\nShe looked genuinely confused, or maybe that was an act, too. \"I'm sorry about your brother, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Sorry? That's all you can say?\" Anger erupted in him like a blown cork. His brother loved this woman, and she was as cold and heartless as a fish. \"I'm not leaving, lady. Not till I get what I paid for.\"\n\nFury darkened her face. \"I'm warning you, Mr. Colton. If you don't leave, you'll be sorry!\"\n\nWas that a threat? He stared at her, but she turned slightly sideways, and, keeping one hand firmly on her chest, she dropped the other hand to her side. Had it not been for the mirror on the wall behind her, he wouldn't have given her strange behavior another thought. But the reflection showed her bunching up the fabric of her skirt. A nervous habit?\n\nHe pretended not to notice\u2014until the hem of her skirt raised high enough to reveal his second glimpse of her leg. Suddenly he had trouble recalling his purpose for being there.\n\nHe drew his gaze away from the mirror and cleared his throat. One moment she wanted him to leave. Now she was apparently trying to seduce him.\n\nIn no mood for such tactics, he decided to show her he meant business. \"I'm not leaving until I get what I came for and paid for,\" he said, his voice gruff. \"Now, either we do this civilly or not. Your choice.\" When she failed to respond he added, \"Let me know when you're ready.\"\n\nFor a moment neither spoke, but the lady's skirt kept inching upward. \"I'm ready,\" she replied.\n\nHe nodded. \"Now we're getting somewhere.\"\n\nThe hem of her skirt fell to the floor, and suddenly he was on the serious side of a double-barrel derringer. Blast it all!\n\nBerating himself for not suspecting she was armed, he drew in his breath. \"You better put that toy away before someone gets hurt.\"\n\nThe corners of her mouth tipped upward in a half smile. \"Make no mistake, Mr. Colton. I know how to use this gun, and I seldom miss.\"\n\nIt was amazing what a little iron in hand could do to one's self-confidence. All that remained of the reserved, modest woman he found when he walked in the room was the hand still strategically placed on her bodice.\n\nThere were perhaps a dozen ways to disarm someone with a gun. If Rose were a man, he wouldn't hesitate to use full force. Disarming a woman was a bit trickier because he didn't want to cause unnecessary harm or discomfort.\n\nStill, he was in no mood to let the woman get the best of him\u2014not when he'd traveled this far and had so much at stake. His mind made up, he stepped forward and grabbed her wrist. Her hand left her chest and caught him on the jaw so hard that his head snapped back.\n\nFor such a small package, she packed a good wallop. Still, she was no match for him. Okay, maybe a little.\n\nClenching her arm tight, he grabbed the barrel of the gun with his other hand. With a flick of his wrist, her derringer fell to the carpet. That alone might take the wind out of most people's sails, but not hers.\n\nShe dived for the gun, but he grabbed her around the waist and spun her in his arms. Fighting like a wildcat, she pounded on his chest with her fists.\n\n\"Hey! Stop that,\" he commanded. Never did he see a woman so fired up. \"I don't want to hurt you.\"\n\nA high-pitched scream filled the room. Rose stilled in his arms, and that was when he realized the scream hadn't come from her.\n\nHe released her, and in a flash, she scooped up her derringer and darted to the door. Together they ran into the hall where a couple of scantily clad women peered into a room. Nearby, a thin bald man hopped around, trying to put on his trousers. One woman slumped against a wall, sobbing.\n\nNext to her, a comatose Miss Lillian sprawled on the floor like a marlin on a ship's deck. Two women were trying to revive her with smelling salts.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" a redheaded woman clad in only a petticoat asked.\n\n\"It's... it's... Rose,\" a dark-skinned woman squeaked out.\n\nTom stared at her. Rose? Did he hear right? He pushed past the female residents and into the room on the other side of the hall. A woman in a blue gown lay on the floor. He didn't have to look twice to know she was past saving.\n\nIf this was Rose, then who in the name of Sam Hill was the green-eyed beauty with the iron-like fist?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Ignoring the chaos around her, Amy dropped to her knees in full detective mode and studied Rose's body. One thing she'd learned from experience was to pay close attention at crime scenes. Even the most minor details could turn out to be significant in solving a case.\n\nIt was clear by the blood in her hair that Rose had been hit over the head. The bloodied candlestick holder on the floor next to the body was apparently the murder weapon.\n\nEarlier, Amy had guessed Rose's age at thirty. Now she realized the woman was much younger, perhaps in her early twenties. How did such a pretty young woman end up in a place like this? How, for that matter, did any of them end up here?\n\nShe pushed the thought away and scanned the room from one end to the other. It was a mess. Clothes were strewn all over the floor, and a lamp lay on its side, kerosene dripping onto the carpet. Rose must have put up quite a fight during the last moments of her life.\n\nAmy gave Rose's hands a cursory glance. Other than the wound on her head, no other marks were evident.\n\nMr. Colton hunkered down on the opposite side of the corpse, his face grim. \"Now look what you've done.\" His low voice was meant for her ears only, along with the accusation in his eyes.\n\nShe lifted her chin. What an annoying man. \"What I've done?\"\n\n\"Had you told me from the start you weren't Rose\u2014\"\n\n\"You never asked me,\" she shot back.\n\nHe frowned in cold fury. \"You must have known I mistook you for someone else. Now, thanks to you, she's dead.\"\n\nHolding her gun by her side, she glared at him. \"You have your nerve blaming me!\"\n\nHe leaned over Rose's body, his nose practically in Amy's face. \"What do you know about the Gunnysack Bandit?\"\n\nShe seethed inwardly. The man was probably a bounty hunter or private detective interested in the reward. Amateur sleuths were the bane of professional detectives and always got in the way of an investigation.\n\n\"I told you I know nothing,\" she retorted. \"What did you want to talk to Rose about?\"\n\n\"It's none of your business,\" he said, his voice curt.\n\n\"Any time I'm accused of someone's death, it's my business,\" she sputtered.\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\nBoth their heads swiveled toward the throaty voice.\n\nMiss Lillian was on her feet, but just barely. It took three women to keep her from falling. Even with their help, she leaned back at a ninety degree angle with only the heels of her shoes on the floor. \"Would someone please fetch ole Tin Star?\" she said in a weak voice.\n\nAmy shot her accuser a fiery glance. \"I'm sure Mr. Colton would be happy to fetch the marshal for us.\" The sooner she got rid of him, the sooner she could concentrate on the crime scene. She also wanted to query the others while their memories were still fresh. Given the appearance of the room, someone must have heard something.\n\nA muscle tightened at Colton's jaw, but he rose. \"I'll be back.\" He made it sound like a threat, but before she could respond, he stomped from the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "Chapter 3\n\nThe following morning, Amy slipped quietly down the hall and stopped in front of Rose's room. She tried the brass knob but the door held firm. Having gotten little sleep, she stifled a yawn and tried to decide her next move.\n\nStolen money from Gunnysack's last holdup had been deposited into Rose's account. Was Rose in cahoots with the bandit or merely an innocent bystander? How Rose fit into the grand scheme of things might never be known, and that sure did put a damper on Amy's investigation. The worst thing that could happen to a detective was for a suspect or witness to turn up dead.\n\nDespite Amy's attempts to examine the crime scene the night before without arousing suspicion, she'd made little headway. The woman named Coral grew suspicious and, after chasing everyone out of Rose's room, stood guard waiting for the marshal.\n\nThe name of the guest seen in the hallway was Mr. Pepper, and his only interest had been making his escape. He was more interested in preserving his reputation than in helping solve a crime.\n\nBy the time Colton returned to the parlor house with the marshal and doctor in tow, Amy had still not uncovered any useful information. Marshal Flood immediately took over, forcing her to play the part of one of Miss Lillian's good-time girls. She answered the marshal's questions and looked appropriately saddened by Rose's demise. Ignoring Mr. Colton's icy glares was the hard part. The man had his nerve, blaming her for Rose's death.\n\nIn due order, the body was removed from the premises, and the marshal, doctor, and Colton departed. Since no one could sleep, Miss Lillian ordered one of her girls to make pots of hot tea.\n\nWhile the women sat forlornly in the parlor, Amy managed to sneak in a few questions, but the answers were worthless at best. No one heard anything, saw anything, suspected anything.\n\nThe person who interested her most was Colton. Was he a bounty hunter? The Gunnysack Bandit was wanted dead or alive. With a ten-thousand-dollar bounty, every criminal chaser in the country was on his trail.\n\nStill, Colton didn't seem to fit the part. The bounty hunters she'd had occasion to meet were rough and tough and often uncouth. Always in transit, they seldom worried about hygiene or appearances, and most sported long, shaggy beards and mustaches\u2014none of which applied to Mr. Colton. Not only was he clean shaven, he looked and smelled like he'd just made friendly with a bathhouse.\n\nSo what is your business, Mr. Colton? What did you want with Rose? And what do you know about the Gunnysack Bandit? Somehow she had to find out. Recalling their angry exchange, it wasn't something she relished, but so far Colton was her best bet for information.\n\nPushing her thoughts aside, she stooped to examine the doorknob. She had never had any luck picking locks, but she could try. Just as she pulled a hairpin from the back of her head, an ear-piercing scream sent chills down her spine.\n\nReaching in the false pocket of her skirt, she pulled out her gun and darted down the hall. In her haste, she practically stumbled down the stairs. Oh, God, please, not another body.\n\nThe scream grew louder as her slippers hit the ground floor. Mr. Beavers, the cat, streaked past her as she dashed into the parlor.\n\nShe practically fell over the back of an upholstered settee in her haste. Miss Lillian looked up from the piano, curved fingers poised above the ivory keys. Next to her a tall man with a pencil-thin mustache sent a gargling shrill note into the stratosphere before falling silent.\n\nMiss Lillian was the first to speak. \"Good heavens, child. What are you doing with that gun?\" She looked tired today, and even the thick coat of paint failed to hide her pallor. Amy wasn't the only one who got little or no sleep last night.\n\nAmy hid the weapon behind the folds of her skirt. \"I thought I heard a scream.\"\n\n\"A scream?\" Miss Lillian's eyes widened. \"I didn't hear a scream. Did you, Mr. Studebaker?\"\n\n\"No ma'am,\" he said. Considering the high-pitched volume he'd managed moments earlier, his speaking voice sounded surprisingly normal.\n\n\"You must be hearing things,\" Miss Lillian said, turning back to the piano.\n\nStudebaker stared down his long, thin nose at Amy, as if resenting the intrusion and straightened his bow tie. With his patent leather hair and carefully waxed mustache, he bore a striking resemblance to an embezzler she had recently helped put behind bars.\n\n\"My mistake,\" she said, backing up. No sooner had she left the room than a piano chord sounded, followed by what could only be described as a blaring foghorn.\n\nThe music abruptly stopped. \"Stand up straight and breathe!\" Miss Lillian ordered. \"Okay, again, one, two, three...\"\n\nSCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!\n\nAmy slipped her weapon through her false pocket and into the holster at her thigh. After the unfortunate incident with Mr. Colton the night before, she'd ripped open a seam in her skirt so she could more easily retrieve her weapon. She was still miffed for allowing the man to wrestle the gun from her hand. Something like that would never happen again. Not if she had anything to do about it.\n\nBut Mr. Colton wasn't the only reason she was riled. A murder had been committed beneath this very roof, and no one saw anything suspicious. The room was in terrible disarray, yet no one heard a thing. Either someone was lying or...\n\nSomehow she had to get into Rose's room. Where did Miss Lillian keep the keys?\n\nThe volume of Mr. Studebaker's voice increased, and Amy clapped her hands over her ears and looked up. Prisms of the crystal chandelier rattled like a bunch of old bones. A man caught in a bear trap couldn't sound worse.\n\nThat morning over breakfast, Miss Lillian had announced that no \"guests\" would be allowed for three days out of respect for Rose. Too bad the woman's regard for the deceased didn't extend to singing lessons.\n\n\"Breathe, breathe!\" Miss Lillian thundered.\n\nSCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH!\n\nFortunately, the man either ran out of breath or passed out, and blessed silence followed. With a sigh, Amy studied the door leading to Miss Lillian's office. Maybe the key to Rose's room was in there.\n\n\"Psst.\"\n\nAmy whirled about. One of the girls\u2014Coral\u2014stood next to the staircase, motioning to her.\n\n\"I want to show you something,\" she said, her voice hushed. She was a tall, slender woman with a broad nose and full lips. As was the fashion for dark-skinned women, her black hair had been straightened with a hot metal comb and piled on top of her head.\n\nMotioning with her hand, Coral led the way through the dining room and into the kitchen. A cookstove filled one wall and a tall icebox and baker's cabinet another.\n\nCoral reached under the counter and pulled out a Peacemaker.\n\nAmy slapped the barrel of the gun away. \"You mustn't point a gun like that!\"\n\nCoral pushed her lips out like a petulant child. \"You can't kill anyone with an unloaded weapon.\"\n\n\"Tell that to the man who was shot by one.\" The nonmusical assault began again in the next room, and Amy had to raise her voice to be heard. \"Where did you get that?\" It was obvious the woman didn't know beans about handling a firearm.\n\nCoral laid the gun on the counter. \"From Harry's Gun and Bakery Shoppe.\"\n\nAmy's eyebrows shot up. Guns and baked goods? And she thought a parlor house selling boots was odd. \"What do you plan to do with it?\"\n\nCoral looked about to burst into tears. \"After what happened to Rose...\" She pulled a white linen handkerchief out of a leg-of-mutton sleeve and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. \"A girl's got to protect herself.\" She tossed her head. \"I noticed you had a gun.\"\n\nAmy couldn't blame Coral for being scared, and she softened her voice. \"You'd do better with one like mine.\" She pulled out her derringer.\n\nCoral made a face. \"But that's so small.\"\n\n\"Trust me, it gets the job done, and it's easy to hide.\" She slipped the weapon back in place. \"I suggest you go back to Harry's baked gun store and exchange it for one you can handle.\"\n\nCoral frowned. \"If... if you think that's best.\"\n\n\"I do, but if you insist upon carrying a gun, you must learn to use it properly.\"\n\n\"Will you teach me?\" Coral asked.\n\nAmy hesitated. She had been sent to Kansas to do a job and didn't have time to give shooting lessons. Already she was behind in writing her report to headquarters. The principal wouldn't be happy that the Gunnysack Bandit investigation had come to a halt because of a funeral, but it wasn't her fault, and all might not be lost.\n\n\"Pleeeease?\"\n\nAmy didn't know how long she would be in town. Now that Rose was dead, there was no advantage in being a female detective. Mr. Pinkerton might decide to use her elsewhere and replace her with a male operative.\n\nCoral looked so upset Amy couldn't bring herself to say no. \"All right. I'll teach you.\"\n\nA look of relief fleeted across Coral's face. \"Thank you.\"\n\nAmy waited a beat before asking, \"How long have you... uh... lived here, Coral?\"\n\nCoral tucked her handkerchief back into her sleeve and regarded Amy with soulful brown eyes. \"Three years, two months, and twenty-one days.\"\n\nAmy considered her answer. How could people do that? Be so precise? \"And Rose?\"\n\nMr. Studebaker had started singing again, and Coral cupped her ear. \"What did you say?\"\n\nAmy lifted her voice to be heard above the racket coming from the parlor and the dishes rattling in the cabinet. \"HOW LONG HAD ROSE WORKED HERE?\"\n\nCoral shrugged. \"Longer than me.\" She sighed. \"Too bad she didn't leave as she planned.\"\n\n\"ROSE PLANNED ON LEAVING?\"\n\n\"Shh.\" Coral glanced at the doorway, and it was then that Amy realized the music had stopped. \"I don't think she wanted anyone to know.\"\n\n\"I guess it doesn't matter now, does it?\" Amy said softly.\n\n\"No, I guess it don't.\"\n\n\"Do you know why she was leaving?\" Amy asked.\n\n\"She never said.\" Coral shrugged. \"I guess she just didn't want to work here anymore.\"\n\nAmy couldn't imagine anyone wanting to work here. \"Do you know of anyone who wanted to harm her?\"\n\n\"No, no one.\"\n\nThe exchange had a sobering effect. For a moment, she and Coral were lost in thought. Mercifully, no sounds came from the parlor.\n\nAmy was the first to break the silence. \"Last night... Rose's room was a terrible mess. But you told the marshal you didn't hear anything.\"\n\n\"My room's at the end of the hall. But... some of our guests tend to get noisy on occasion. Even if I'd heard something, I wouldn't have thought much about it.\"\n\n\"I see.\" She had been in the room directly across from Rose's and hadn't heard a thing, not until the screams. But then again, she'd been occupied at the time. Had Mr. Colton not commanded all her attention, might she have been able to save Rose? It was hard to know and depressing to consider.\n\nCoral's eyes narrowed. \"Why you asking all these questions?\"\n\nAmy tried to look apologetic. \"I didn't mean to be nosy. I only met Rose the one time, and she struck me as a very nice person.\"\n\n\"She was okay, I guess.\"\n\nNot wanting to sound overly interested in Rose, Amy changed the subject. \"If you don't mind my asking... Have you thought about finding another line of work? Something safer?\" Something more in keeping with God's commandments.\n\nCoral laughed, but her painted face held no mirth. \"It looks like you're in the same boat as me, honey. If a white girl like you can't find respectable work, how do you expect a darky like me to find it?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Chapter 4\n\nLong after the others had retired to their rooms that night, Amy fought with the dormer window in the attic. Gritting her teeth, she pushed up on the window frame with the heels of her hands, and at last it grumbled open. The sound made her stop to listen.\n\nThe walls groaned and the eaves sighed, but she heard no voices or footsteps. Confident that she and the mice scampering behind the attic walls were the only ones awake, she stuck her head outside.\n\nCool night air nipped at her cheeks like a playful puppy. A full moon illuminated the worrisome pitch of the porch roof slanting away from the window. She turned her head to study the distance between the window and the large gnarly oak tree at the side of the house.\n\nNo more than eight feet away, the tree appeared sturdy enough for her purposes. In her youth she could outrun, outclimb, and outride her brothers. It wasn't for nothing that she earned the name tomboy. Normally she would welcome the challenge of climbing down the tree's twisted limbs.\n\nBut there was nothing normal about her current situation. Not the fancy, bright-colored gowns she was forced to wear with their flyaway sleeves and Grand Canyon necklines. And certainly not Miss Lillian who, since Rose's death, kept the outer doors locked night and day so no one could enter the house or leave without her knowledge.\n\nThe window offered the only way to circumvent Miss Lillian's guard. Upon arriving in town, she'd checked into the Grande Hotel and Bath House, and her clothes were still there. She'd searched for the skirt and shirtwaist worn the day she arrived at the parlor house but was told that any clothes deemed unsuitable by Miss Lillian's standards were relegated to the ragman.\n\nAmy had free use of the garments in her room, but some dresses started too late and others hardly started at all. Retrieving something more practical, not to mention more modest to wear, took top priority.\n\nTo allow free movement she was dressed in only a white silk camisole and petticoat, under which she wore silk drawers. She dropped her bundle of clothes outside the window to be donned once she reached the ground.\n\nShe was willing to do a lot of crazy things, but climbing down a tree in a long skirt and saddlebag bustle was not one of them. The bundle also held her report to headquarters. The post office was closed, of course, but she hoped to find an outside box in which to deposit mail.\n\nShe glanced at the ground below. It had been many years since she'd last climbed a tree, and though she'd done her share of chasing outlaws, most had been on flat land. But she could do it. Had to do it. She desperately needed something decent to wear.\n\nLord, just don't let me break my neck. There were many honorable things worth dying for, but modesty wasn't one of them.\n\nCareful preparation and planning were essential parts of undercover work, but since arriving in Goodman she'd been working on the fly, and that's how mistakes happened. But tonight she was ready for anything. More than ready.\n\nWith a bracing breath, she raised a leg over the windowsill, careful not to dislodge the gun holstered to her thigh. Ever so carefully, she stepped onto the shingled porch roof and worked her other leg free. Stars winked overhead as if daring her to proceed.\n\nPalms flat against the rough brick wall, she shuffled slowly sideways to the edge of the roof, forcing the bundle along the roofline with her foot as she moved. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked, but otherwise all was quiet.\n\nReaching the edge, she pushed the bundle of clothes over and watched it fall to the ground. Lifting her arms, she grabbed hold of the nearest tree branch. Torso twisting, she wrapped her other hand around the limb as well. It seemed sturdy enough. She didn't look forward to climbing back up after completing her errands in town, but she'd face that problem later.\n\nShe counted: One, two, three... Here goes nothing.\n\nShe swung her body forward and her feet landed on a lower limb. The bough dipped and creaked beneath her weight but held. So far, so good.\n\nStraddling the lower bough, she released the limb overhead and scooted toward the trunk where stronger limbs grew. The tree smelled old and dusty, and somewhere in the upper crown came the flutter of wings. She adjusted the holster at her thigh.\n\nA soft thump sounded from somewhere below. Stilling, she scanned the moon-dappled ground but saw nothing. Thinking it a rabbit or maybe even a fox, she worked her way down the gnarled branches. Leaves rustled and twigs snapped.\n\nHer petticoat snagged. Grimacing, she tugged gently before giving it a hard yank. The fabric pulled free with a ripping sound, exposing the leg of her bloomer drawers. She hated ruining perfectly good clothes, however useless, but it couldn't be helped.\n\nHugging a limb, she scanned the ground below and smiled. She'd managed the hardest part; the rest she could do blindfolded. Not bad for a twenty-seven-year-old woman.\n\nHolding on tight, she worked her body free until she dangled from both arms. The rough bark cut into the palms of her hands as she scrambled for a foothold.\n\nOne slipper fell off, followed by a muffled yelp from below. She held her breath. Someone stood beneath the tree\u2014a dark figure\u2014a man! Why was he sneaking around at night? Whoever he was, he could be dangerous. Could even be Rose's killer...\n\nSince she was hanging from both arms, it was impossible to reach for her weapon. A fine pickle! Before she could decide on a course of action, a cracking sound like gunfire rent the air. The branch snapped in two, and she dropped like a stone.\n\nHitting the ground with a jolt, she found herself entangled in legs and arms\u2014not all of them hers. Ready to fight tooth and nail, she lifted her head. Much to her horror, the intruder was flat on the ground with her on top and he was\u2014\n\n\"Mr. Colton!\"\n\nWith his head lifted, his nose practically met hers, and his eyes sparkled in the moonlight. \"We meet again.\"\n\nThey gazed at each other for a full moment before she regained her senses. Gasping, she pulled free from his arms and scrambled to her feet. A pain shot through her shoulder as she glared down at him.\n\n\"You near scared the life out of me!\" she sputtered.\n\nSitting up, he reached for his hat and slapped it on his head before standing. \"I have to say, ma'am, the feeling is mutual.\" His gaze shifted momentarily to the holstered gun showing beneath her torn petticoat. \"Sorry to catch you at an inopportune moment.\"\n\nFace blazing, she folded her arms across the front of her thin camisole. Considering that she had just extracted herself from a compromising position, her effort at modesty was futile at best. She worked her fingers against her sore shoulder and tried to calm her racing heart.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she snapped.\n\nHe tipped his hat back with a finger to the brim and hung his thumbs from his belt. \"I was about to ask you the same thing.\"\n\nMaintaining as much dignity as possible under the circumstances, she glared at him. \"I have every right to be here.\" Thank God she had resisted the urge to scrub the annoying makeup off her face. It made it easier to play her part.\n\n\"Can't argue with you there, ma'am. I just hope that the next time you decide to go out on a limb, you issue a warning. Being attacked by a lady's shoe is one thing. But when it comes with the whole kit and caboodle, that's something else.\" He stooped to retrieve her slipper and handed it to her. His fingers brushing against hers made her quickly pull away.\n\n\"I thought I was being attacked by a wildcat,\" he added. \"You're lucky I didn't shoot you.\"\n\nBalancing on one foot, she slipped the shoe on the other. \"It's late. I didn't think anyone was around.\"\n\nHis forehead creased. \"I was under the impression you ladies kept late hours.\" He glanced at the dark windows. \"My mistake.\"\n\n\"We're closed in memory of Rose.\" As much as she wanted to question him about the Gunnysack Bandit, she wasn't about to do it in her undergarments. \"So if you would kindly leave\u2014\"\n\nHe crossed his arms and leaned against the tree trunk. He looked like he was enjoying himself at her expense.\n\n\"Not till you tell me what you were doing in that tree.\" His gaze flickered down the length of her. \"Undressed.\"\n\n\"A gentleman wouldn't notice,\" she said primly. She glanced around. Fiddlesticks! Where was that bundle of clothes?\n\nHe laughed. \"Only if he was dead.\" His eyebrows rose to half-mast. \"So let me guess. You were on the way to meet a client. I didn't know you ladies made house calls.\"\n\n\"I dare say there's a lot you don't know,\" she huffed.\n\nHe thought for a moment. \"Actually, it's fortunate that you... uh... dropped by. Perhaps you could answer a few questions.\"\n\n\"It's not a good time, and even if it was, I have nothing to say to you.\" Anxious to escape, she tried to sidestep him, but he blocked her way.\n\n\"What should I call you? Miss...?\"\n\nShe considered whether to tell him her assumed surname but decided against it. \"Amy's fine.\" William Pinkerton assigned her the moniker. It was better than the name he gave her last time\u2014Charley. The rumor was that he liked to name his undercover agents after his pets. She just hoped that Amy wasn't a reptile.\n\n\"Amy,\" he said as if testing it out. \"I apologize for the other night.\" The amusement had left his eyes and his face was now serious. \"I honestly thought you were Rose. I had no right to blame you for what happened. I'm afraid we got off to a bad start.\"\n\nHis apology surprised her, and she studied his face. He sounded sincere, but that could be an act. Thinking him a \"guest\" the first time they met, she'd hardly noticed what a fine-looking man he was, though the golden moonlight didn't do him justice. His rugged, square face was anchored by an intriguing cleft in his chin. Though his eyes looked dark now, she seemed to remember they were the color of a deep blue sea.\n\nNevertheless, one of Miss Lillian's girls had told her not to judge a man's character by his looks. \"Handsome men often have the worst reputation,\" she'd said. Amy wouldn't know; most of the criminals she'd helped track down had faces that only a mother could love.\n\n\"I need to ask you about Rose,\" he said.\n\nShe studied him. Maybe the night wasn't a complete loss. If she played her cards right, he might reveal something useful. Of course, she'd feel a whole lot better if she wasn't standing in a torn petticoat and thin camisole, but it would be foolish to let an opportunity like this slip by. Having decided to put prudence before modesty, she nonetheless moved out of the moonlight and into the shadows.\n\n\"Why are you so interested in Rose?\" she asked.\n\nHe hesitated as if trying to decide how little or how much to say. \"I have my reasons.\"\n\nAnd she intended to find out exactly what those reasons were. \"It has something to do with your brother. You said his name was Dave, right? How did Rose know him?\"\n\nJust as he opened his mouth to say something, Miss Lillian came shooting around the corner. She wore a dressing gown tied at the waist, and her hair fell down her back in a single braid.\n\n\"What is the meaning of this?\" Looking and sounding like every one of her fifty-some years, she addressed her question to Mr. Colton, but her sharp eyes bored into Amy. If her strident voice wasn't bad enough, the moon turned her face a sickly yellow.\n\nAmy balled her hands by her side. Miss Lillian couldn't have picked a worse time to make an appearance. The night had gone from bad to worse.\n\nMr. Colton didn't seem the least bit intimidated by the woman. If anything, he looked more amused than perturbed. \"Miss... Amy was just explaining that your establishment is closed.\"\n\nThe madam gave a self-righteous sniff. \"As the sign on the door plainly states, we'll be closed until after the funeral.\"\n\nMr. Colton swept off his hat and held it to his chest. \"A fitting tribute, indeed.\"\n\nHis comment failing to win any favors, he replaced his hat. \"I won't keep you any longer. Good night, ladies.\"\n\nUnder his breath he added for Amy's ears alone, \"I hope to see more of you soon.\"\n\nHeat raced to her face. \"Don't hold your breath,\" she shot back.\n\nWith a flash of his perfect white teeth, he turned to leave.\n\n\"Not so fast, young man.\" Miss Lillian held out her hand. \"That'll be ten dollars.\"\n\nHe looked startled. \"Why so much?\"\n\n\"Off-hours,\" she said.\n\nAmy opened her mouth to protest but decided against it. His presence had caused her to be caught and kept her from doing what she'd set out to do. He deserved what he got.\n\nHe paid Miss Lillian without complaint and sauntered down the path, whistling. He let himself out the front gate to his tethered horse.\n\nAmy found her bundle of clothes in the bushes and hid them behind her back.\n\nAfter making certain the unwanted guest was leaving, Miss Lillian spun around to face her. \"Apparently you failed to read the rules of the house. Had you done so, you would know that meeting men outside is forbidden.\"\n\nSince the rules were plastered on every wall, every door, and every tabletop, ignoring them was impossible. Amy kept her head bowed in what she hoped passed as remorse. Like it or not, without Miss Lillian's goodwill she would not be able to complete her investigation.\n\n\"I apologize. It won't happen again.\"\n\n\"See that it doesn't.\" Looking unbearably self-righteous, Miss Lillian continued. \"I run a high-quality business that caters to the town's most discerning citizens. I won't have my girls flaunting their wares on the street like those horrid crib girls on Maple. Do you hear?\"\n\n\"Yes, ma'am, no flaunting wares,\" she said demurely, though she couldn't imagine what the low-cut gowns were meant to do except flaunt.\n\nApparently satisfied that Amy had shown appropriate remorse, Miss Lillian softened her tone. \"Since you're new, I'll let it pass this time. But nothing like this better happen again. Do I make myself clear?\"\n\n\"Yes, Miss Lillian. Perfectly clear.\"\n\n\"Then go.\" The madam flapped her arms like a farmer chasing a chicken. \"Hurry, hurry. We need our beauty rest.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "Tom stood next to his horse and watched the madam usher the woman he knew only as Amy into the house. A vision of pretty green eyes came to mind. Eyes that changed from meadow green to shades of jade on a whim.\n\nHe still recalled how she felt in his arms, and his shirt still held a hint of her sweet lilac fragrance\u2014a tangible reminder that played havoc with his senses.\n\nGod forgive me for thinking it, but she sure did look fetching in those fancy under-riggings. With her tiny waist, rounded hips, and soft ivory shoulders, she curved in and out in all the right places. The weapon clearly outlined beneath her petticoat offered a startling, though no less intriguing, contrast to all that feminine softness.\n\nIt sickened him to think that a pretty young woman would choose such a life... that any woman would. What had driven her to Miss Lillian's? Desperation? Of course, nothing about her struck him as desperate. Fought him like a wildcat, she did, so she obviously could take care of herself.\n\nSo why, then, was she in such a place as this? A place where even God might be tempted to hang His head in shame...\n\nHe sucked in his breath. He'd spent most of his life trying to figure out why people made the choices they did. He and his brother had had the same opportunities. The same home life, the same religious upbringing, but they couldn't have been more different had they been born on opposite sides of the planet.\n\nHe took some of the blame for that. His father died when Dave was knee-high to a mustang, leaving the two of them in the care of an invalid mother. Tom, being the oldest by three years, looked after his then six-year-old brother. At least he'd tried.\n\nThey'd attended the same one-room schoolhouse. Tom was a model student and he did his best to tutor Dave. But Dave had no interest in book learning; he was more interested in creating mischief to the point that he was always in danger of being expelled. And would have been had his teachers not felt sorry for the family.\n\nTom took the blame for some of Dave's pranks to save his brother's skin. That only made Dave more sullen and difficult to handle. Eventually he quit school and left home, upsetting their mother and sending her to an early grave.\n\nAt twenty, Tom followed his dream and joined the Texas Rangers. A year later, he heard that Dave was married and he felt encouraged. Nothing tames a man like a wife. Perhaps the worst was over. For five years, he never heard a word from Dave, had no idea where he was or even if he was still alive.\n\nThen one day, Tom tracked down a group of stage robbers who had terrorized the Panhandle for months, only to find the leader was his very own brother.\n\nIt nearly killed Tom to handcuff Dave and turn him over to local authorities. That's when he learned Dave's wife had died of smallpox, leaving him a widower with an infant son.\n\nWhile his brother was incarcerated, Tom cared for the boy. He fully expected Dave to return for his son when he left prison. That didn't happen; Dave served his time, but Tom had no idea what happened to him afterward. Not wanting to be in a position of having to arrest his brother a second time, Tom left the Rangers and started a small cattle ranch in the San Antonio Valley, taking Dave's son with him.\n\nThat's when Tom discovered he had a knack with horses. A gift, some called it. Horses weren't like people. Treat a horse well and the animal generally returned the favor.\n\nHe never thought to hear from his brother again, never wanted to. Almost hadn't opened the letter addressed to him in his brother's hand, when it finally came. He feared Dave would be coming for his son. For more than ten years, Tom had cared for the boy\u2014treated him like his own. He wasn't about to let the lad go without a fight.\n\nThe letter carried a Goodman, Kansas, postmark. When he finally cut through the wax seal, he read the letter with growing skepticism. His brother had written about finding God. Said he was ready to be a good father to Davey and wanted to make his boy proud. He was also engaged to be married to a woman named Rose. He asked if he could bring Rose to the ranch. Said his fianc\u00e9e had information about the Gunnysack Bandit and feared for her life.\n\nIt wasn't the first time his brother claimed to have turned over a new leaf. Nor was it the first time Dave had spun a cockamamie story about supposed danger.\n\nIgnoring the letter was the easy part; learning about the single bullet to his brother's head nearly tore him in two. Having to tell eleven-year-old Davey his father was dead was about as close to torture as Tom ever hoped to get.\n\nHe felt responsible. Dave had reached out for help, and he had let him down. Some brother he was\u2014some man.\n\nHis horse pawed the ground, bringing Tom out of his reverie.\n\n\"What's wrong, boy?\" For answer, the gelding bobbed his head up and down and nickered.\n\nAfter running his hand along his horse's slick neck, Tom untied the reins from the hitching post and jammed his foot into the stirrup. Astride the saddle, he glanced up at the windows of the tall brick house. The red lamp had been turned off, and in the dark of night the house gave no clue as to its real purpose.\n\nThe glass panes of the second floor glowed in the pale moonlight, and a curtain moved in an upstairs window. Someone was watching him. In the recesses of his mind came a vision of green eyes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Chapter 5\n\nIt rained that early April morning of Rose's funeral. Somehow that seemed fitting.\n\nIt had rained the day they buried Amy's father, and her mother said it was heaven crying. Her pa had started drinking heavily after his three-year-old daughter, Cissy, had disappeared in the middle of the night, never to be heard from again. Some said he literally drank himself to death.\n\nThe thought of heaven crying comforted her then as it comforted her now. God really did care about His lost sheep.\n\nThe madam led the way to the cemetery like a general marching to war. Umbrella held high to accommodate her unwieldy hat standing three stories and a basement tall, she looked neither left nor right.\n\nAll five women, including Amy, followed behind like ducks in a row. All sported large feathered hats to match their colorful gowns. All held umbrellas over their heads and wore kid gloves.\n\nThe rain was a blessing as it allowed for modesty. Amy wore a tiered shoulder cape over her emerald-green dress. Miss Lillian insisted that her \"girls\" never leave the house unless properly attired, coiffed, and painted\u2014a downright nuisance.\n\nObviously, Miss Lillian had never tried to climb through a window, run across a roof, and climb down a tree wearing such garments. Had she done so, she might have settled on a more conservative uniform.\n\nCertainly, she would have insisted on more substantial footwear. Anything would be an improvement over the dainty slippers she insisted her girls wear. No decent woman would be caught dead showing her ankles, and Amy felt naked without her high-button boots.\n\nThe memory of one of her slippers falling on top of Mr. Colton brought an unbidden smile to her face and a scowl from the woman named Coral.\n\nReminded of the solemn occasion, Amy snapped her mouth shut and tried to look appropriately somber. Rose's death had complicated her investigation, which now had to be conducted with care and sensitivity. Miss Lillian's girls weren't particularly friendly to one another. If anything, they regarded each other with suspicion and maybe even jealousy.\n\nStill, their grief for Rose seemed real, as did the fear for their own safety since her death.\n\nThe women paraded along the boardwalk in silence. Out of habit, Amy kept her gaze focused on the windows as they passed each establishment, not to admire the array of goods but to watch behind for followers. An operative could never be too careful.\n\nMen stepped out of the way and pretended not to notice them. Mothers with small children detoured across the street or ducked into shops as if the women's mere presence would corrupt little minds.\n\nAmy lowered her head in an effort to hide her blazing face. Posing as a strumpet at the parlor house was one thing, but here on the street she felt like a penny waiting for change. She sighed. Great guns! There had to be an easier way to make a living.\n\nA carriage slowed as it drove by. Pulled by two large black horses, the carriage was fitted with bright, shiny carriage lamps and rubber-tired wheels fitted with inner brass rims. Amy never expected to see such a fine carriage in a small prairie town. She caught only a glimpse of the passenger, a man in a tall top hat.\n\n\"Who is that?\" she asked Coral.\n\n\"That's Mr. Monahan.\" The dark look that crossed Coral's face made Amy shiver. \"He's got the dimes. He's so rich, he practically owns the town.\" As an afterthought, she added, \"He always asked for Rose.\"\n\nThis latest bit of news got Amy's attention. It also explained the way Coral glared at the carriage. \"Do you think he'll be at the funeral?\"\n\nCoral gave her a sideways glance. \"No respectable citizen would so much as admit to knowing Rose, let alone attend her funeral.\"\n\n\"Seems to me she should be pitied rather than censured. A young woman like that murdered...\"\n\nCoral's lip curled. \"You really don't know how things work, do you?\"\n\n\"I know how things work,\" Amy snapped. If growing up with a drunken father wasn't bad enough, her job as a Pinkerton required her to associate with society's worst criminals. Sometimes it was hard to remember that good, honest people actually did exist.\n\nThe group strolled pass Lloyd's Haberdashery and Insurance (we've got you covered) and Joe's Funeral Parlor and Lending Library (read where it's quiet). Despite the rain, a group of children circled the ice wagon parked in front of the hotel, clamoring for ice chips.\n\nAmy cast a longing look at the hotel. If only she could find a way to sneak inside and retrieve her own clothes.\n\nFrom the Grande Hotel and Bath House it was only a short distance to the church and the iron gates in back leading to the cemetery.\n\nThe rain had stopped, and a watery sun peeked from behind the clouds, touching the earth with fingers of golden light. But even with the change in weather, not one outsider attended the simple graveside service.\n\nRose was to be buried beyond the Christian area, behind a weathered fence reserved for criminals, vagrants, and other social undesirables. The young woman would be shunned even in death.\n\nThe stubble-bearded preacher who was probably in his mid-to late-fifties looked pleasant enough. He greeted Miss Lillian with a nod of his grizzled head.\n\n\"Are you going to give us a bad time, Reverend Matthews?\" the madam asked.\n\n\"No more than usual,\" he replied. Tall black hat askew, he patted down both pockets of his frock coat before locating the Book of Common Prayer.\n\nOut of habit, Amy scrutinized him as she mentally went down the Pinkerton checklist. Height: five foot eight. Eyes: hazel. Hair: mostly gray. He had the contented look of a married man, and if his generous girth was an indication, his wife knew her way around the kitchen.\n\nThe ridge on his nose meant he generally wore spectacles. Had he forgotten them? Lost them? Or were they broken?\n\nThough the circumstances were definitely awkward, he seemed as perfectly at ease around a bunch of sinners as he no doubt was in the company of the choir.\n\nHe checked all his pockets again. He gave up the search with a shrug and opened the prayer book. Amy added absentminded to her mental list.\n\nHe adjusted his arms to and fro until he found a comfortable position in which to read.\n\nAfter opening the ceremony with the reading of scripture and respectful prayer, he gave a short sermon sprinkled liberally with words like forgiveness and redemption.\n\nHis discourse had a sobering effect on the group, and they all stared at the plain pine coffin in silence.\n\nAs the preacher droned on, a movement on the Christian side of the fence caught Amy's attention. She recognized Mr. Colton's tall, straight form at once. Arms folded, he leaned against a towering gray tombstone, watching her. He acknowledged her gaze with a finger to the brim of his hat. Recalling the last time they'd met, her cheeks flared, and she cast her gaze downward.\n\nThe man had made a perfect nuisance of himself. While most of Miss Lillian's \"guests\" had accepted the temporary closing of the bordello in memory of Rose with good grace, he had not. Instead, he had appeared on the doorstep with annoying regularity and insisted upon talking to her.\n\nThough she longed to finish the conversation begun the night she fell out of the tree, Miss Lillian denied him entry. Amy didn't dare show her hand by going against the madam's wishes. Fortunately, he never gave up. Now here he was again. There had to be a reason he was so persistent. Her inquiries about him had mostly garnered blank looks from Miss Lillian's girls. So what is your game, Mr. Colton? And what exactly is your interest in the Gunnysack Bandit?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "Chapter 6\n\nThe preacher returned the Book of Common Prayer to his pocket. \"Would anyone like to say something on behalf of the deceased?\"\n\nNo one knew Rose's last name or even if she had a family, but the other women appeared eager to talk about her.\n\nThe blond woman named Polly went first. She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief and stuttered, \"R\u2014Rose was the k\u2014kindest person I ever met. She was p\u2014p\u2014popular with everyone.\"\n\nThe preacher cleared his throat and kept his gaze focused downward, his blunt-fingered hands held in prayer.\n\nPolly's eyes widened and she glanced around in a panic. \"I\u2014I meant she was p\u2014p\u2014popular with us girls.\"\n\nNext to her, Coral shook the water off her closed umbrella. Today she wore a bright gold frock that complemented her dark complexion if not her critical expression. \"You don't have to apologize for Rose.\"\n\n\"I w\u2014wasn't apologizing, Coral.\"\n\n\"Sounded like it to me.\"\n\nA moment of strained silence followed the exchange, and finally the preacher asked, \"Anyone else wish to say something?\"\n\n\"She had dreams. Big dreams.\" The words were spoken by the woman who called herself Buttercup, a name that said more about her generous girth than her orange-red hair.\n\nAfter a short pause Coral added, \"And she didn't want to be here.\"\n\n\"None of us want to be here.\" This came from a stick-thin woman with raven hair named Georgia. \"And I'm not talking about a cemetery.\" Her gaze flicked around the circle of mourners. \"Though certainly no one wants to be here, either.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to Miss Lillian, but she was too busy staring at the minister's shabby boots to pay heed to the women's laments.\n\nSilence followed as they watched two grave diggers lower the coffin and spade wet soil into the hole.\n\nThe service ended with a prayer and collective sigh. The minister asked if anyone needed his counsel, and when no one did, he bolted like a jackrabbit in tall grass. Folded umbrella raised over her head, Miss Lillian chased after him, presumably to try and sell him a pair of new boots.\n\nInstead of following Coral and the others out of the cemetery, Amy lingered in front of the newly dug grave, giving Mr. Colton ample time to catch up to her. She didn't want to appear obvious, but neither did she want to miss an opportunity to find out how he fit into the picture.\n\nHe tipped his hat in greeting. \"We meet again.\"\n\nRecalling their last encounter, warmth crept up her neck. \"Yes, what a surprise.\"\n\nHe gave her a crooked smile, and once again she was reminded what a handsome man he was. \"About the other night... I hope Miss Lillian didn't give you a bad time.\" He raised an eyebrow in query.\n\nNo, the bordello owner just watched her like a hawk, making it impossible to do much in the way of sleuthing. But she said none of this. Instead, she returned his smile with one in kind.\n\n\"I told her it was all your fault,\" she said.\n\nHe laughed. \"And no doubt she believed you.\"\n\nHis laughter made her smile, and for some reason she felt a surge of guilt. \"I'm sorry Miss Lillian made you pay.\"\n\n\"It was worth it just to see you fall out of that tree. I trust the man you planned on meeting wasn't too disappointed when you failed to show up.\"\n\nShe forced herself not to look away from his probing gaze. \"I made it up to him,\" she said, and immediately the light went out of his eyes.\n\nDisarmed by the disapproval on his face, she forced a deep breath. She didn't realize she'd allowed her hand to grow slack at her neckline until his gaze dropped to her open shoulder cape. She squeezed the closure so tight her fingers ached.\n\nHe pushed his hat back and studied her with quizzical eyes. \"Excuse me for asking Miss... Amy, but have you worked for Miss Lillian long?\"\n\nHer professional training kicked in, and she considered her answer carefully before responding. \"The night Rose died... that was my first time at Miss Lillian's,\" she said in a conspiratorial tone. Mr. Pinkerton insisted that the art of gaining information required skill and fortitude, but she often got better results by playing on a man's sympathy.\n\nHer ploy worked, or at least softened his expression. \"That explains it, then.\" He frowned. \"You looked scared enough to make the hair of a buffalo robe stand up.\"\n\nShe couldn't help but smile at the image he invoked. \"That bad, eh?\" Her smile failed to coax one in return.\n\n\"Have you been in the... business long?\" he asked.\n\n\"Awhile,\" she said, and the censure on his face couldn't be more pronounced. \"Obviously you don't approve.\"\n\nHe narrowed his gaze. \"There are other ways to make a living.\"\n\n\"Only if a woman wishes to live in poverty.\" She hated defending a profession she loathed, but she couldn't afford to blow her cover.\n\nHe cleared his throat and changed the subject. \"Do all the ladies carry firearms?\"\n\nShe frowned. \"Why do you ask?\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"Just curious.\"\n\n\"Had Rose been armed, she might still be alive,\" she said.\n\n\"Maybe. Maybe not.\" He stared at the new grave in silence. Studying his profile, she tried thinking of a way to bring up the Gunnysack Bandit without rousing suspicion.\n\n\"I would like to make you a proposition,\" he said.\n\n\"A... proposition?\" His disapproval of her profession apparently went only so far. This time she pulled her cape so tight she practically cut off her own breathing.\n\n\"I want to hire you to do a little spying for me.\"\n\nShe stared at him. Did he say what she thought he'd said? \"You want me to... spy?\"\n\n\"I have it on good authority that the man known as the Gunnysack Bandit is no stranger to the parlor house.\"\n\nHe had done her a favor in mentioning the outlaw's name, but she was careful not to react. \"You mentioned him previously.\" She gave herself a mental pat for showing only the slightest interest. Too bad she got so little credit for her acting abilities.\n\nColton's face darkened. \"Yes, and I'm anxious to find him. He's a conniving thief and a cold-blooded killer.\"\n\nHis description of the man matched the one in the Pinkerton file almost word for word. Nevertheless, she stayed in character and opened her eyes wide to feign shock. \"And you want me to spy on him? A thief and a killer?\"\n\n\"Even if we knew his identity, which we don't, I'd prefer that you didn't go anywhere near him. He's dangerous, but I doubt that after what he did to Rose he'll show his face at Miss Lillian's again. At least not for a while.\"\n\nThis time she didn't have to fake surprise. \"You think he killed Rose?\"\n\n\"I'll bet my boots on it.\"\n\nHis well-worn boots looked like they'd been trampled by a herd of cattle. Someone would have to be pretty desperate to take him up on his offer.\n\n\"As certain as that, Mr. Colton?\" she asked, her tone wry.\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\" Apparently, he didn't see the humor in his comment, and the hoped-for smile failed to materialize.\n\n\"How do you know this man... is responsible?\" There were only two guests at the house the night Rose died, and one of them was Mr. Colton. The other man was Mr. Pepper. Standing little more than five feet tall, he hardly fit the description of the Gunnysack Bandit.\n\n\"I have my ways.\" He glanced around and lowered his voice. \"I want you to talk to the others and find out if Rose mentioned him to anyone at the house. Perhaps even revealed his name... I'll pay for any information you can give me.\"\n\nShe weighed the pros and cons of his proposal. If either of the two Pinkerton brothers got wind that she was working for another, she would be fired on the spot. William and Robert demanded complete loyalty from employees, just as their founding father had done when he was still in full charge of the company. On the other hand, if Mr. Colton thought she was working for him, he would be more likely to share whatever knowledge he had with her.\n\n\"So what do you say?\" he prodded.\n\n\"If I decide to do this, how will I reach you?\" she asked, stalling for time. She'd received a telegram from headquarters with orders to continue investigating. That meant she had to find a way to remain at Miss Lillian's without compromising her morals\u2014a goal she hadn't the foggiest idea how to accomplish.\n\n\"I'm staying at the hotel.\" His brow furrowed. \"So is that a yes?\"\n\nHis staying at the hotel posed a complication. They could easily bump into each other whenever she went to her rented room. She moistened her rouged lips and immediately regretted drawing his attention to her mouth.\n\n\"I'll let you kn\u2014know,\" she stammered.\n\nHis gaze met hers. \"Fair enough.\" He seemed oblivious to the three matronly women standing a short distance away, watching them from the other side of the fence. \"But I'll expect an answer by four tomorrow afternoon. Agreed?\"\n\nThat didn't give her much time to figure out how to proceed with the investigation, but she nodded. \"Is that the only reason you came to today? To talk me into spying?\" she asked.\n\n\"That and\"\u2014he tossed a nod toward the fresh mound of dirt marking Rose's grave\u2014\"to pay my respects to my brother's fianc\u00e9e.\"\n\nHe doffed his Stetson and walked away. She hardly had time to recover from the surprising new information when the three women stepped through the gate separating the two cemeteries and advanced toward her.\n\nTheir gray skirts and long dark capes were more suited for a funeral than the bright colors worn by Miss Lillian's girls, but none of the women so much as glanced at the new grave.\n\nA barrel-shaped woman, whose size alone gave her the right to be the leader, moved closer. Her hips were so wide she looked like a carriage with the doors flung open, the bustle in back ready to receive passengers. Three neatly stacked chins competed with the ribbon holding her straw hat in place. Peering through spectacles that rested on the bridge of her pointed nose, she studied Amy like a surgeon about to cut open a patient.\n\n\"I'm Mrs. Givings, and we're from the church.\" She pointed toward the First Community Church that stood at the entrance of the cemetery. The other two women confirmed her statement with nods and stiff smiles.\n\n\"This is Mrs. Compton,\" she said, pointing to a tall, thin woman with jet-black hair and a pale white face. \"And this is Mrs. Albright.\"\n\nThe third church member, with her drab dress and sallow complexion, hardly suited her name, nor did the swift bucktoothed smile that failed to reach her eyes.\n\n\"I'm Amy, and I'm pleased to meet you,\" she said as politely as she could without encouraging further conversation.\n\nMrs. Givings folded her gloved hands, and her drawstring bag dangled from her thick wrist. \"I think you'll be happy to know that we've come to save you.\"\n\nAmy didn't want to be rude, but she couldn't keep her gaze away from Mr. Colton striding across the cemetery. He let himself out of the church gate and grabbed his horse's reins. Before mounting, he spoke to the horse as if asking permission to ride.\n\nEven in the saddle, he held his back straight and head high. Like a military man. Trained to be suspicious of everyone and everything, she couldn't help but wonder if his character matched his good looks.\n\nA clearing of a throat reminded her that she wasn't alone, and she turned her gaze back to the churchwomen. \"Excuse me, but did you say save?\"\n\nThree heads bobbed up and down like the springs of a wagon.\n\nAs if there could be any doubt as to her meaning, Mrs. Givings wagged a finger skyward. \"Save!\"\n\nAmy felt a sinking feeling. The last thing she needed was another sermon, no matter how well meaning. Reverend Matthews's discourse had been enough for one day, thank you very much, and she had work to do.\n\nAnxious to return to Miss Lillian's, she tried to think how to get rid of the pious-looking three without sounding rude or unkind. She needed to find out who knew of Rose's engagement and what, if anything, it had to do with the Gunnysack Bandit.\n\n\"Why, that's very thoughtful of you,\" she said, purposely pretending to misunderstand their meaning. \"I've never had bodyguards before. Do you all carry weapons?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Chapter 7\n\nAmy was anxious to talk to Miss Lillian in private, but the madam retired to her room upon returning home from the funeral and stayed there for the remainder of the day. No one else felt much like talking, which meant more wasted time. The only person downstairs was Beatrice, the housekeeper.\n\nAmy followed the housekeeper into the parlor. A thin woman somewhere in her late twenties, Beatrice flicked her feather duster from table to lamp to piano to floorboard.\n\nAmy cast a covetous glance at the maid's apparel. Had Miss Lillian mistaken her for a maid instead of a harlot she would now be wearing a plain gray dress with a starched white apron\u2014a much more practical uniform for her purposes.\n\n\"How long have you worked here, Beatrice?\"\n\nThe question seemed to surprise the woman, and her gaze darted around the room as if to check for eavesdroppers before answering. \"Three years.\"\n\n\"That's a long time.\"\n\nThe woman merely shrugged.\n\nClosemouthed people were a detective's bane, and this house was full of them. \"Then you must have known Rose quite well.\"\n\nBeatrice swiped the hand-painted glass lamp shade with her duster. \"I keep pretty much to myself.\"\n\nEncouraged that the woman could string more than two or three words together, Amy persisted. \"I noticed that you and the cook don't live here.\"\n\n\"I stay overnight only when I'm asked to work late.\" She glanced at the doorway. \"I have a room at Miss Trumble's Boarding House.\"\n\n\"But you must know the residents quite well.\" How could she not?\n\n\"Like I said, I keep to myself. What they do...\" Beatrice made the sign of the cross and shuddered. \"I clean the house. That's all.\"\n\nAmy sympathized with the woman's obvious discomfort. Staying at Miss Lillian's for these past three days had taken an emotional toll. For the first time since working as a Pinkerton operative she'd been tempted to quit before completing an assignment. She couldn't imagine working at such a place for three years.\n\n\"Could you at least tell me what Rose was like?\" Amy probed. It struck her as odd that neither the cook nor the housekeeper attended her funeral.\n\nBeatrice flicked her feather duster over the piano keys a second time. \"She was quiet but friendly.\"\n\n\"Did you know she was betrothed?\"\n\nBeatrice hesitated\u2014a sure sign she would either not answer the question or lie.\n\nNot wanting to give her a chance to do either, Amy quickly asked, \"Who told you?\"\n\n\"I don't know. One of the girls. I must have heard them talking or something.\"\n\nIf that was true, then the four women had lied when they claimed they didn't know Rose's plans. The question was, why? \"Had you met her fianc\u00e9?\"\n\nBeatrice lowered her gaze. \"I'm generally gone by the time most guests arrive.\"\n\nAmy tried to think how best to phrase her next question and decided to come right out with it. \"Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to cause Rose harm?\"\n\nBeatrice's brown eyes narrowed. \"Why are you asking all these questions?\"\n\n\"I don't mean to pry.\" That's exactly what she meant to do. \"I only met Rose the one time, and I just got back from her funeral. Naturally, I'm curious.\"\n\nThe answer seemed to satisfy Beatrice; at least she looked less suspicious. \"I don't know anyone who wanted to hurt her. Like I said, she was friendly. Now if you'll excuse me...\"\n\nThe woman seemed anxious to get on with her work. Amy let her go without further comment and watched her scamper away like a little mouse. The woman had secrets no doubt, but so, it seemed, did everyone else in that house." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "The following morning after breakfast Amy dressed in the blue calico skirt and white shirtwaist collected from her hotel room on the way home from yesterday's funeral. Without the face paint and fancy clothes, she felt more like herself. Maybe now she could get some real work done.\n\nShe hurried downstairs, determined to gain Miss Lillian's attention, but never got a chance for the house was a beehive of activity.\n\nA man by the name of Mr. Deering had delivered a wagonload of groceries. Three times a week he brought fresh fruits and vegetables to the house, along with steak, chicken, and cheese, but according to Polly, never without a battle. Today was no different, and a loud argument rose from the kitchen.\n\n\"I'm not paying that much for chicken!\" the cook yelled. Her outburst was followed by the clang of pots and pans.\n\nMr. Deering sounded more indignant than angry. \"Do you think I like charging this much?\"\n\nNo sooner had Miss Lillian rescued the hapless grocer and restored order than Miss Paisley, the local dressmaker, arrived loaded down with a trunk full of colorful silks, satins, and lace. Sporting women were expected to keep up appearances, and that meant maintaining five or more fancy gowns at all times.\n\nMiss Paisley's drab gray skirt and mousy-brown hair seemed at odds with the bold, outrageous gowns she designed. It was almost as if she purposely downplayed her own appearance so as not to compete with her colorful creations.\n\nHolding up various pieces of fabric and lace, she kept up a running commentary about the pros and cons of each. With her thick French accent, Amy had a difficult time understanding her.\n\nWhile the women all sat around the parlor, poring over fabric samples, Miss Paisley's hawkeyed gaze zeroed in on Amy.\n\nShe said something in French before switching to thick-accented English. \"What have ve here? Stand up, stand up.\"\n\nAmy waved her hand from side to side. \"No, that's all right. I'm just here to watch.\" She didn't know how long she would remain at the parlor house, and she doubted the Pinkerton brothers would relish paying for a ball gown.\n\n\"You're here to work,\" Miss Lillian said. \"Don't worry about the cost. I'll take it out of your salary.\"\n\n\"Oh, but\u2014\"\n\nMiss Lillian would hear none of what she tried to say, so Amy decided it was easier to play along than argue. At least until she had a chance to talk to the madam in private.\n\nMiss Paisley gazed at Amy's attire and muttered something that sounded alarmingly like \"Murder, murder.\"\n\n\"Amy is our newest resident,\" Miss Lillian explained with an apologetic air. Not only did the madam run a tight ship, she ran the language of iniquity through a moral sieve. Thus clients were called \"guests,\" working girls \"residents,\" and anything that happened behind closed doors, just plain old \"hospitality.\"\n\n\"Not to worry,\" Miss Paisley said, hands all aflutter. \"I have just the thing.\" She pulled a rose-colored swag of fabric from her trunk and draped it across Amy's chest. \"Parfait! The color\u2014how do you say\u2014completes your skin.\"\n\nShe said something else, but Amy couldn't make out what it was. She also chose not to correct the dressmaker's use of the word complete. \"She's asking what fabric you prefer,\" Georgia explained.\n\n\"She means other than calico,\" Coral added, staring at Amy's skirt with a roll of her eyes.\n\nButtercup laughed and Polly glared at her. \"Th\u2014there's nothing wrong with c\u2014calico... in the r\u2014right setting.\"\n\nSensing an argument about to follow, Amy hastily murmured, \"Taffeta.\" She was anxious for Miss Paisley to leave so she could get back to work. One of the residents had to know something about Rose's death, the Gunnysack Bandit, or both.\n\nHer choice earned Amy the first look of approval from the seamstress. \"Ah, oui. I do believe you're more the taffeta type. Do you want it in wild rose or strawberry? Or would you prefer another color?\"\n\n\"Uh... green.\"\n\nMiss Paisley couldn't have looked more appalled had Amy asked for zebra stripes. \"Plain green is for pheasants!\" she snapped.\n\n\"I think she means peasants,\" Georgia whispered.\n\n\"For Miss Lillian's ladies, only the most artful shades will do. With your coloring, I suggest jade or maybe even moss green.\"\n\nAmy had no intention of staying at the bordello long enough to warrant a gown, but the woman obviously wasn't going to leave her alone until she had made a selection. She picked out meadow green, which everyone in the room agreed went with her eyes.\n\n\"Good choice.\" Miss Paisley then directed her attention to the others.\n\nThe array of colors and fabrics from which to choose didn't seem to faze anyone else. After staring at herself in the mirror, Buttercup settled on a cornflower-blue silk, and Coral went with a burnt-almond taffeta. Polly couldn't make up her mind between shell pink or crushed roses, and Miss Lillian insisted she take both.\n\nWhile Polly, Georgia, and Buttercup had no objection to the type of necklines Miss Paisley suggested, Coral wanted hers lower.\n\n\"Give her an inch and she'll wear it,\" Georgia whispered.\n\nAmy covered her mouth to hide a giggle. Oddly enough, she and Georgia had developed an easy rapport. Under different circumstances they might have even become friends. But Amy couldn't afford the luxury of letting down her guard and getting close to anyone. Not while she was working.\n\nThinking Miss Paisley was done with her, Amy rose. This practically sent Miss Paisley into a tizzy. Rushing to her side, the dressmaker circled her waist with a measuring tape like a dog sniffing out a place to bury a bone. She examined Amy's plain shirtwaist and shook her head. The look on her face was one of pure horror.\n\n\"I think a cuirass bodice would suit you quite well. What do you think?\"\n\n\"I\u2014\" Amy didn't know a cuirass from a catfish. Never one to kowtow to fashion, she'd paid little attention to the latest styles, except for when undercover work required it. No-nonsense skirts and tailored shirtwaists were more her style and more practical for chasing suspects.\n\nSpeaking in her native tongue, Miss Paisley fiddled with the back. \"Do you want a butterfly or waterfall?\"\n\n\"Uh...\"\n\nAt last the ordeal was over, though Amy hadn't the slightest idea if she'd purchased a gown or a national park.\n\nMiss Paisley wrote Amy's measurements in her notebook. \"Your total is three hundred dollars.\"\n\nAmy's mouth dropped open. \"For... for one gown?\"\n\nThe dressmaker stiffened. \"You wanted a waterfall.\"\n\n\"Yes, but I didn't want to purchase Niagara.\" She could well imagine what William Pinkerton would say if she turned in a three-hundred-dollar bill for a dress. William already considered female operatives too expensive to maintain. This was part of the reason he wanted to do away with the women's detective division begun by his father. Father and son were still at loggerheads over the subject. Amy feared that if anything happened to the old man, her career would come to an end.\n\nMiss Lillian made an impatient gesture with her hand. \"I won't have us making all this fuss over money. People will think we're running a poorhouse.\"\n\nIt was two hours later before Miss Paisley finally packed up her samples and left. Amy tried to gain Miss Lillian's attention, but the madam waved her away.\n\n\"Georgia, take her upstairs and get her dressed properly. We can't have her insulting our guests with her plain clothes and dull appearance.\"\n\nAmy gazed down at her modest attire. Insulting? \"But I need to talk to you,\" she protested.\n\n\"First things first,\" Miss Lillian sniffed. \"And for goodness' sakes, do something about your walk. You'll catch more fish by wiggling the bait.\"\n\nTo demonstrate, she walked away swaying her hips from side to side like a pendulum." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Amy dreaded the beauty sessions almost as much as she dreaded being called on the Pinkerton carpet. Every pimple, every patch of red skin, every imperfection no matter how small was attacked with liberal doses of castor oil, glycerin, or vinegar.\n\nRaw potatoes were applied to eye bags and dark shadows. And though no one but Buttercup had even a hint of a double chin, all were required to sleep with chin straps.\n\nButtercup had been given the task of teaching Amy how to look and act like a proper lady of the night, while Coral, Georgia, and Polly watched from the sidelines.\n\n\"I've never known anyone with such green eyes,\" Buttercup said. She applied green paint to Amy's eyelids and stepped back. \"See how that brings out the color?\"\n\nAmy stared at herself in the mirror, and the first thing that popped into her mind was Jezebel from the Bible. \"It's rather... loud,\" she said. \"Perhaps a little less.\" A gallon less.\n\n\"Nonsense,\" Buttercup said. \"You look beautiful.\"\n\n\"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,\" Georgia said, grinning. She had blackened her teeth with charcoal. \"In the Labrador Islands, only women with black teeth are considered beautiful.\"\n\n\"Why not just paint her face blue like they do in Greenland?\" Coral asked.\n\n\"Or b\u2014bind her feet like those p\u2014poor women in China do?\" Polly hobbled around on tiptoes.\n\nThe women continued to make teasing comments. Ignoring them, Buttercup held up a porcelain container. \"You're all wrong. Beauty comes from within... a jar.\"\n\nLaughter followed her comment, but Amy was in no mood to join in. This was all a waste of time, and she needed to get to work.\n\n\"I don't know why we have to go through all this torture just for men,\" she muttered.\n\nAll four women stared at her. \"Is that w\u2014what you th\u2014think?\" Polly stammered.\n\nAmy was confused. \"What else would I think?\"\n\nCoral leaned so close Amy could smell the tobacco on her breath. \"Paint is a mask. It's how we keep men from getting too close. He's not looking at you. He's looking at a woman who doesn't exist.\"\n\nGeorgia concurred with a nod of her head. \"We don't paint for men. We paint to survive.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "Chapter 8\n\nBy the time Amy left Buttercup's room, her face felt ten times heavier. She didn't think she could survive another day in this horrid place. Never had she prayed so hard or so much as she had these last five days. God, please, let's get this job done fast, so I can leave.\n\nA steady stream of men followed Miss Paisley's departure, some to get haircuts and shaves, others to buy boots or to have fortunes read.\n\nMr. Studebaker was the only singing student, and for that Amy was grateful. Though the man's futile attempts to hit a high C made her head ache, she kept her expression immobile for fear the heavy coat of powder would crack if she so much as grimaced.\n\nDressed in a vibrant red gown and her hair caught up in a cluster of ringlets, she waited at the top of the stairs for the last man to leave. Mr. Studebaker stopped to inspect a black leather boot. Catching sight of her on the second-floor landing, he doffed his hat and left.\n\nAt last! How she longed to finish this assignment and sink her teeth into a case less nerve racking. After this, she'd gladly go undercover as a librarian or even a nun.\n\nJust as Amy reached the ground floor, Miss Lillian emerged from the parlor and stopped to straighten the merchandise.\n\nThe madam gave her a once-over and nodded approval. \"Much better.\" She moved a leather wader from one shelf to another.\n\n\"Why boots?\" Amy asked. It seemed like an odd thing to sell at a place like this.\n\nMiss Lillian pointed to the ROWDIES WILL BE BOOTED OUT sign on the wall. \"When the railroad came to town, the workers gave us a heap of trouble. So I put up that sign next to a pair of men's boots to show I meant business and wouldn't stand for any nonsense.\" She laughed. \"I sold that first pair and ordered another. Soon the boots were selling even before I got them out of the box.\"\n\n\"Sounds like someone's trying to tell you to give up the guest business,\" Amy said. God, probably. Hopefully.\n\n\"Then he or she would be telling me wrong. I couldn't keep up this place by boots alone. The taxes\u2014\" She rolled her eyes. \"Saloons and brothels pay for law and order in this town. Our taxes also built the new school building.\" She straightened another boot. \"People depend on the wages of sin more than they care to admit.\"\n\nKnowing that was true, Amy couldn't argue the point. \"How did you get into this... particular business?\"\n\n\"I was born and raised in a bordello. Not as nice as this one, mind you. But since I was the only child, the residents all doted on me. I didn't even know who my real mother was until I turned nine.\" Miss Lillian's voice took on an oddly impersonal tone, as if talking about someone else's childhood.\n\nMiss Lillian straightened a pair of hand-tooled boots. \"I guess you can say I was born into the business.\" A strained look crossed her face, but just as quickly it was gone and a tight smile took its place.\n\nBut Amy saw and she knew; beneath the fixed smile and Southern good manners, shielded by a barrier of heavy paint and perfume, beat a heart full of sadness and maybe even regret.\n\nWords of God's grace and mercy bubbled up inside her, and it was all she could do not to voice them. It almost killed her to keep quiet. She felt like Peter denying his Lord. Not that she had a choice. Her job required her to act a part, and that meant keeping her faith to herself. Just don't let me hear a rooster crow, God.\n\nAmy wasn't the only one acting a part; Miss Lillian was doing a pretty good job of it, herself. Hiding her main trade behind a myriad of respectable activities allowed her to pretend she was a successful and legitimate businesswoman.\n\nPeople lied to themselves all the time rather than face a painful truth. Amy's own father denied his drinking habit, but he wasn't alone. She once captured a train robber who gave half his ill-gotten gains to a church widows' fund to pay penance for his dastardly deeds. Claiming to be a philanthropist, he was shocked by his arrest and insisted that transferring money from a train safe into a poor widow's hand didn't make him a thief.\n\nHaving arranged the boots to her satisfaction, Miss Lillian raked Amy over with a critical eye. \"We're open for business tonight.\" With a swish of her gown, she headed for her office. \"I trust you'll be ready.\"\n\nAmy dashed after her. \"Wait! There's a problem!\"\n\nMiss Lillian paused at the threshold. \"Problem? Problem?\" Motioning Amy inside, the madam sat behind her desk and thumbed through a stack of mail. \"What are you talking about? What problem?\"\n\nAmy lowered herself onto the only other chair in the room, the bustle forcing her to perch on the edge of the seat. She chewed on her lip but stopped beneath the madam's critical stare.\n\nWith a flick of her wrist, Miss Lillian slit an envelope open. \"Well, get on with it. I haven't got all day.\"\n\nDespite the madam's impatience, Amy had good reason to hesitate. Mr. Pinkerton was adamant about operatives following the rules, which meant revealing her occupation was strictly forbidden. Entrusting even family members was grounds for dismissal. It made life difficult and long absences hard to explain. No beau willingly pursued a woman with the annoying habit of leaving town at a drop of a hat to bury yet another \"relative.\"\n\nBut this was an emergency. Without enlisting Miss Lillian's help, she was doomed to failure. She only hoped that what she was about to do didn't come back to haunt her.\n\n\"What I'm about to tell you must be kept in the strictest confidence.\" As if that wasn't clear enough, she added, \"No one else can know.\"\n\nMiss Lillian lifted her gaze from the letter in hand \"Good heavens, don't tell me you're a virgin.\"\n\nAmy drew back. Miss Lillian made chastity sound like a disease. \"It's worse than that,\" she said wryly. She reached over the back of the chair and nudged the door shut. Thus braced, she turned and lowered her voice.\n\n\"I'm a detective working undercover. I work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.\"\n\nMiss Lillian dropped her letter opener and sat back. Her carmine-rouged lips formed a perfect O, and her eyes looked ready to pop out of her head. \"But... but you're a woman!\"\n\n\"Yes, so I've heard.\" That was generally the first thing out of an outlaw's mouth whenever she whipped out her Pinkerton badge. One had even made the mistake of laughing in her face. He was probably still laughing, but since he was behind prison bars, she tried not to take it personally.\n\nMiss Lillian's startled expression faded. \"Are you looking for Rose's killer?\"\n\n\"Possibly,\" Amy said, though that wasn't her assignment. Her job was to track down the Gunnysack Bandit, but Miss Lillian would be more likely to help her if she thought it was about Rose.\n\n\"What else do you do? Don't tell me you track down philandering husbands?\"\n\nAmy shook her head. \"Mr. Pinkerton refuses to take on cases that involve matters of the heart.\" To put the madam's mind further at rest she added, \"Nor would he ever accept an assignment that would reflect poorly on a woman's reputation.\"\n\n\"How rare. A man with integrity.\"\n\nAmy smiled. Not everyone would agree. In years past, the Pinkerton agency had been criticized for what some considered questionable tactics.\n\n\"I hope whoever killed Rose hangs,\" Miss Lillian said, then lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. \"Is there money in that sort of thing? Detecting, I mean.\"\n\nIt wasn't a question Amy had expected. \"Why, yes, I do get paid.\" Compared to most jobs women held, she got paid rather handsomely, though nowhere near as much as her male counterparts.\n\n\"I didn't know that women could be detectives. Why didn't someone tell me this before?\" She sounded peeved. \"Detecting sounds like a whole lot more fun than giving singing lessons.\"\n\n\"It's also easier on the ears,\" Amy said.\n\n\"On the voice, too, I imagine.\"\n\nSeeing the cogs turn in Miss Lillian's head, Amy hastened to add, \"Yes, but the job can be tedious at times and quite boring.\" Amateur detectives often hindered investigations. She didn't want the madam getting any ideas. \"It's also dangerous.\"\n\n\"I imagine so. That's why you carry a gun, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, but fortunately I've never had occasion to use it.\" She prayed she never would.\n\nMiss Lillian pondered this a moment before asking, \"So what else are you detecting? You couldn't possibly have known in advance that Rose would be killed. So why are you really here?\"\n\nAlready having said more than she'd planned, Amy hesitated. \"We have reason to believe that the man known as the Gunnysack Bandit is one of your\"\u2014she almost said johns, a word Miss Lillian had banned\u2014\"guests.\"\n\nMiss Lillian gasped and her thin eyebrows practically disappeared into her frothy hairline. \"That awful outlaw? Why, that's impossible. I run a respectable business here. Why would you think such a thing?\"\n\n\"A few weeks back, Rose made a deposit at the bank that included stolen money.\"\n\nMiss Lillian's eyes widened. \"Are you saying that Rose had something to do with the Gunnysack Bandit?\"\n\n\"It's possible she didn't even know it. We were hoping she could tell us where she got the stolen bills.\" After a pause, she added, \"The truth is, I shouldn't even be telling you this.\"\n\n\"It's a good thing you did. Is that what you were doing outside the other night with Mr. Colton? Detecting?\"\n\nBlue eyes and a crooked smile flashed through Amy's mind and a warm, pleasant feeling crept up her neck. \"Yes.\"\n\n\"My word. You don't think that he\u2014\"\n\n\"I honestly don't know.\" She didn't want to believe that Colton was the bandit, but neither could she discount it. At this point of the investigation, everyone was suspect. Thinking she heard a sound, she jumped up and tore open the door. Mr. Beavers the cat scooted into the room and disappeared under the desk.\n\nShe closed the door but kept her hand on the brass knob. \"There were only two guests here the other night when Rose was killed\u2014Mr. Colton and one other.\"\n\n\"Mr. Pepper, owner of the Pepper Hardware and Medical Dispensary,\" Miss Lillian said.\n\n\"Mr. Colton was with me.\" At least part of the time.\n\n\"And Mr. Pepper was with Buttercup.\"\n\nButtercup had said as much to the marshal. \"Were the outside doors locked during this time? The back door, too?\"\n\n\"Oh yes, I always keep the doors locked at night. You can't be too safe these days. I once hired a bouncer, but he kept falling asleep while on duty.\"\n\n\"Who else has a key?\"\n\n\"Why, no one.\" She lifted the key chain from around her waist and jiggled it. \"I keep them with me at all times.\"\n\n\"So no one can come or go without your knowledge. Is that correct?\"\n\n\"Absolutely.\"\n\nAmy hesitated. \"When was the last time you saw Rose alive?\"\n\n\"I didn't actually see her. I spoke to her through the door. Told her Mr. Colton wanted to talk to her. She said to send him up.\"\n\nPrior to Mr. Colton entering the room, Amy remembered hearing someone in the hallway. She was fairly certain now that it had been Miss Lillian.\n\n\"Did Rose's voice sound normal?\"\n\nMiss Lillian was quiet a moment. \"Far as I could tell.\"\n\n\"How much time passed between sending Mr. Colton upstairs and discovering Rose's body?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Not long. A few minutes.\"\n\n\"Who found the body?\"\n\n\"I did. I have strict rules about preserving guest privacy. When I noticed Rose's door ajar, I went to close it. That's when I saw her on the floor.\"\n\nAmy chewed on her lip as a worrisome thought crossed her mind. Did Mr. Colton kill Rose? What if instead of entering the room across from Rose's in error as he claimed, he had been looking for a means of escape?\n\nIf he was Rose's killer, he could also be the Gunnysack Bandit. Standing more than six feet tall, he certainly fit the description physically, at least according to witness accounts.\n\nAs much as she hated to think Colton guilty of anything but an attractive smile, she couldn't ignore the possibility that he was the man she'd been sent to track down.\n\n\"Did you know that Rose planned on leaving?\"\n\n\"I'm not surprised. They all buck at the halter eventually. But most come back. It's a hard world out there.\"\n\n\"There's talk that Rose planned to marry.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Miss Lillian shrugged. \"Like I said, a hard world.\"\n\n\"Some would say this life is hard,\" Amy said.\n\n\"Some people might say the same about being a woman detective.\"\n\nAmy would be the first to admit her life was difficult. Her job made it impossible to marry or maintain a home of her own, but at least she could look God in the eye. She couldn't say this out loud, of course. She needed the madam's help. It wouldn't do to alienate her, so she abruptly changed the subject.\n\n\"I have a room at the hotel. If you would allow me to work here undercover, I'll be able to watch your guests. One of them could be the Gunnysack Bandit. I will, of course, need to come and go as I please.\"\n\nMiss Lillian considered her request for all of a minute. \"My girls might think it odd that you're not entertaining guests.\"\n\n\"That's why I need your help to cover for me. I also need access to your ledgers and client list.\" She indicated the key chain in Miss Lillian's hand. \"I noticed Rose's room was locked. I need to do a more thorough search of the crime scene.\"\n\n\"You can count on me to help in any way I can.\" Miss Lillian pulled a key off her key ring and handed it to Amy.\n\nAmy felt like a weight had lifted. Miss Lillian's willingness to help would make things a whole lot easier. \"Thank you. I'll return it as soon as I'm finished.\"\n\nMiss Lillian heaved a sigh. \"Rose didn't deserve to die like that.\" Her shoulders fell as did the corners of her mouth. \"To think it happened here under my very nose.\"\n\n\"No one blames you.\"\n\n\"I blame myself.\" Miss Lillian rubbed her forehead. \"It's my job to keep my girls safe.\"\n\n\"The best thing we can do for Rose right now is to find her killer.\" If Colton was right about the Gunnysack Bandit killing Rose, then catching him would give Rose the justice she deserved.\n\nMiss Lillian appeared cheered by the thought. \"I can't believe I'm working with a real live detective.\" She afforded Amy a brilliant smile. \"This is more exciting than reading a dime novel. Would I be entitled to the reward for the capture of the Gunnysack Bandit? I'll use it to do something in memory of Rose.\"\n\n\"We can discuss that with the marshal when the time comes,\" Amy said. \"But of course, if you speak out of turn\u2014\"\n\n\"No need to worry. Men used to want my affection.\" She paused for a moment as if thinking back on lost youth. \"Now all they want is my discretion. I reckon you could say I'm in the business of keeping secrets.\"\n\nAmy stood. \"I'm counting on it.\" Little did the madam know how much." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "Chapter 9\n\nTom Colton sat in the hotel lobby and pulled out his watch. It was half past four. The lady\u2014Amy\u2014was late. Or maybe she wasn't coming. He tucked his watch back into his vest pocket and waited. Now that Rose was gone, the green-eyed beauty was his best bet for finding the information needed to track down his brother's killer.\n\nAnother twenty minutes passed before he spotted her. Pausing at the entryway, she glanced around, her trim figure outlined by the bright afternoon sun. She was tall for a woman\u2014about five foot eight\u2014yet she carried her height with easy grace. Despite the unseasonal warmth of the day, she wore a prim and proper shoulder cape that would have done justice to a schoolmarm.\n\nHad the very idea of a woman selling her body not been so distasteful, he might have laughed. Some lady of the night. Obviously the woman was in the wrong profession.\n\nDespite her show of modesty, men gazed at her with covetous eyes. One man approached her, but she gave him the cold shoulder. She turned toward a young blond woman with a small child. For a moment it looked like she knew the young mother, but then she turned away.\n\nHe stood to make his presence known. Acknowledging him with a nod, she walked toward him with stiff dignity. No exaggerated hip swing, no fluttering eyelashes. No flirtatious moves. Just a walk, plain and simple, yet no less fetching.\n\n\"I didn't think you were coming,\" he said. Half expecting Miss Lillian to pounce on him and demand payment, he glanced toward the hotel door. No sign of the madam. His pocketbook was safe\u2014for now.\n\n\"Do you mind being seen in public with me?\" she asked, apparently misreading his intent.\n\nHe never much worried about what people thought. Being seen with her wasn't the problem; working with her was. He'd arrested his share of shady ladies in the past, but never before had he done business with one. Could he trust her?\n\n\"I reckon we could go to my room. That is, if you'd feel more comfortable.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"If we go to your room, I'll have to charge you.\"\n\n\"I just want to talk,\" he said.\n\nShe shrugged. \"Miss Lillian's rules.\"\n\n\"Then I'm all for sitting down here. If it's all the same to you, ma'am.\"\n\nFor answer, she lowered herself upon the upholstered chair across from him and occupied herself with what seemed like an excessive arranging of skirt and cape.\n\nThe memory of her tumbling out of a tree and into his arms flashed through his head. It was hard to reconcile this stiff, painted woman with the freewheeling, disheveled spirit seen that moonlit night.\n\nHe sat and waited until he had her full attention. \"Now that we're working together\u2014\"\n\n\"Working?\" She sat back. \"I haven't given you my answer. It could be no.\"\n\n\"No is not an answer. It's a retreat.\" He rubbed his jaw. \"I had you pegged as a fighter.\"\n\n\"I am a fighter, Mr. Colton. But I don't like fighting other people's battles.\"\n\nHe leaned forward. \"The man who killed Rose... He's still out there. I need your help before he kills again.\"\n\nShe studied him with wary regard. \"You said Rose was your brother's fianc\u00e9e. Miss Lillian was unable to confirm that.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Rose didn't want anyone to know.\"\n\n\"Or maybe you made it up.\"\n\n\"I've never been one for making up things.\" He arched his brows. \"Don't know why I'd start now.\" He reached inside his vest and drew out the letter addressed to his brother and signed by Rose. \"This was found on my brother's body.\"\n\nPulling off her gloves, she laid them across her lap all serious-like. Most painted ladies had little or no education, but Amy wasn't like most. Question was, could she read? He debated whether to read the letter aloud to prevent embarrassment, but she showed no hesitation in taking it from him. The thin paper crackled as she unfolded it.\n\nWhile she read, he studied her face, feature by feature. The other women working for Miss Lillian had hard faces and cynical eyes, but Amy's features still held the softness of youth. Had it not been for the face paint, he would never have guessed her profession.\n\nPursing scarlet lips, she refolded the letter and handed it back. \"The letter makes no mention of the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\nHe hadn't wanted to go into details, but obviously she wasn't going to work with him unless he came up with appropriate answers.\n\n\"My brother and I weren't close. In fact, I hadn't seen or heard from him in more than two years. Not since the day he left prison.\"\n\nShe raised her eyebrows. \"Your brother was in prison?\"\n\nHe gave a curt nod. \"He led a gang of stagecoach robbers.\" Cooperating with authorities had earned him an early release, and he only served half his time. \"He was lucky he didn't hang.\"\n\nThe searing pain in his chest took him by surprise. It still hurt, even now. \"Then out of the blue he contacted me and asked for my help. Said that his fianc\u00e9e, Rose, had accidentally discovered the identity of the Gunnysack Bandit and he lives here in Goodman. According to my brother, Rose feared for her life, and he wanted to bring her to the ranch. Guess he figured she'd be safe in Texas.\"\n\n\"Why didn't she go to the marshal?\"\n\nHe scratched his head. The woman was ignorant of her profession in more ways than one. \"Do you really think that the marshal would take a sporting lady seriously? Or even afford her protection?\"\n\nShe fixed him with a stony gaze, allowing him to peer unfettered into the mesmerizing sea-green depths of her eyes. It wasn't polite to stare, but he couldn't seem to help himself.\n\n\"He should. Part of his salary depends on the licensing fees and taxes Miss Lillian pays.\"\n\n\"The money assures that the marshal will leave the house alone and look the other way,\" he said evenly. \"Nothing more.\"\n\nShe cleared her throat. \"Is there any chance your brother misunderstood? About the Gunnysack Bandit living here in Goodman, I mean.\"\n\n\"Like Rose, he was murdered. No fuss, no bother, just a simple shot to the head. Been my experience that people shot that way either cheated at cards or knew too much. Where money was concerned, my brother liked a sure thing. That leaves cards out.\"\n\n\"Aren't you forgetting something, Mr. Colton?\" She moistened her lips. \"Rose was hit on the head.\" She didn't elaborate, but her meaning was clear; criminals seldom strayed from their method of operation. That wasn't exactly common knowledge. He stroked his chin. There was more to this woman than first met the eye, that was for sure and certain. Perhaps someone in her family was a lawman.\n\n\"A gunshot would have been heard by the other residents. Sometimes even creatures of habit have to improvise.\" When she didn't reply, he inclined his head. \"So what do you say? Will you help me?\"\n\n\"Help you how, exactly?\"\n\n\"Talk to the other women. Find out what they know. If Rose was suspicious of one of the men, maybe the others are, too. A list of regulars would help.\"\n\nShe rearranged her gloves on her lap. \"What's in it for me?\"\n\nHe afforded a quick smile. Well, look a there. Not only could the lady read, she had a head for business. So what in blazes was she doing at Miss Lillian's?\n\n\"Like I said, I'll pay you. I'll even help you find another line of work, if that's what you want.\" Here he went again, out to save the world. When was he going to learn?\n\nHer eyes flashed. \"And what line of work would that be, Mr. Colton? Scullery work?\"\n\n\"Honest work.\"\n\nHer green-eyed gaze wasn't any more revealing than her expression. All that paint made it hard to know what went on in that pretty head of hers. Most women were a mystery to him, but never more so than this one.\n\nShe put on her gloves, working each finger into the right spot with utmost care before standing. \"How do I reach you?\"\n\n\"I take that to mean you're not retreating.\" It was a statement rather than a question.\n\nThe corners of her mouth curved upward in a half smile. \"I discovered long ago that it never pays to turn one's back on either friend or foe.\"\n\n\"So what am I?\" he asked.\n\n\"That's to be determined. Meanwhile, I'm sure you'll understand my need to be cautious.\"\n\nHe studied her. Cautious? That wasn't how he would describe someone in her profession.\n\n\"I'm in room fourteen,\" he said. \"If I'm out, you can leave a message at the desk.\"\n\n\"I'll be in touch.\"\n\nHe watched her walk away with mixed feelings. The woman intrigued him and, yes, even puzzled him. Not in any sort of personal way, of course. Okay, maybe a little..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "Chapter 10\n\nFollowing the meeting with Colton, Amy returned to the parlor house, anxious to continue her investigation. She knew even before entering her room that someone had been there in her absence.\n\nThe intruder had no way of knowing about the lengths of thread she placed in the cracks of doors and drawers\u2014a Pinkerton trick that had served her well in the past. Once it had even saved her life by alerting her to the presence of someone wishing to do her harm.\n\nWeapon in hand, she cautiously entered her room. Coral and the others thought nothing of walking in unannounced to borrow facial creams or hair pomades, but the missing threads told a different story; every last one was missing, and that meant someone had done a methodical search but was careful to leave things intact.\n\nDid someone suspect she wasn't who she said she was? Fortunately, she kept nothing there that would reveal her identity. Still, she felt a sense of unease as she pulled off hat and gloves and reached in her pocket for the key to Rose's room.\n\nMoments later she let herself into the room across the hall.\n\nA stagnant smell greeted her, and a veil of death hung in the air like fine dust. It was a smell she'd become all too familiar with during her years as an operative.\n\nThe room hadn't been touched since the night Rose's body had been found. A dark stain marked the place where her corpse had lain. The kerosene had dried, but a faint odor lingered.\n\nStepping over the clothing strewn about the floor, she reached for the bureau and opened the drawers one by one. The top one was empty except for a scarf and a tintype of a man and woman\u2014an older couple. Rose's parents? The back of the picture held no markings or even a studio name, so there was no way of checking.\n\nShe replaced the tintype and searched the other drawers but found nothing of interest. She studied the mirrored tray. Only God knew what poisons lurked in the jars of facial creams and powder boxes scattered across the top of the bureau. Or in the iron rust washes that darkened the hair. More than one prostitute had died from lead or mercury poisoning. Not only were the cosmetics dangerous, they dried the skin and made it feel itchy.\n\nShe examined a vial of glycerin and picked up a bottle of perfume and sniffed. It had a citrusy smell that was more delicate in fragrance than the norm at Miss Lillian's. She poked at the burnt cork used to darken eyebrows.\n\nThe bureau held all the necessary tools of the trade but nothing personal except for the tintype. No letters or diaries. Mr. Colton had shown her a letter Rose had written to his brother, but where were his letters to her?\n\nSeveral books were scattered on the floor, all about birds. She stooped to pick one up and flipped through the dog-eared pages of illustrations and descriptions of every feathered species from the stately blue heron to the smallest hummingbird.\n\nShe set the book on the dresser and stared at the room with a sigh. No matter how much she tried to trust God, little doubts crept in on occasion, just as they were creeping now. What if she couldn't track down the Gunnysack Bandit? What if Pinkerton fired her? What would happen to her then?\n\nShaking her worrisome thoughts away, she turned slowly, surveying every nook and cranny. A detective was only as good as his or her observation skills. The firm's founder, Allan Pinkerton, believed this so strongly he chose for his logo an eye. The Pinkerton eye never slept, but neither did it merely \"see\": it observed and analyzed.\n\nAn open trunk caught her attention, and a closer look revealed that the lock was unbroken. It was almost identical to the one in Amy's room. Miss Lillian insisted that her girls keep personal belongings under lock and key at all times. Loose morals and sticky fingers went hand in hand.\n\nThe money box in the depths of the trunk was empty, as was the hand-carved jewelry case. Nothing of a personal nature was contained inside the trunk. Had Rose walked in on a robbery in progress? Was that why she was killed?\n\nAmy lifted the window shade, and golden sunlight fell onto the sill and spilled across the plush red carpet.\n\nFlocked scarlet wallpaper adorned the walls. The paper lay flat with no compromised seams to suggest hidden wall safes. A still painting of a green vase filled with pink roses hung slightly off center but revealed nothing behind.\n\nAfter examining the walls, she lowered her gaze to the bed. The mattress was crooked with the pillow at the foot instead of the head.\n\nDropping down on hands and knees, she peered beneath the bed. A man's gold fob chain was coiled next to a single satin slipper, but there was no way of telling how long it had been there. She reached for it and examined it carefully. A 14-karat yellow-gold chain was not something the average man could afford. Standing, she slipped it into her dressing gown pocket.\n\nAt first it bothered her that no one heard Rose struggling with her assailant. Now she knew why. No struggle had occurred, which explained the lack of defense marks on Rose's hands. The room was in disarray because someone had done a hasty but thorough search. The same person who had searched her room earlier that day?\n\nWith that question came another: Had the killer sneaked up on Rose, catching her unawares? But that made no sense. The room offered no place in which to hide. That suggested that Rose knew her killer. Perhaps had even let her assailant in.\n\nShe turned a circle once again, her gaze sweeping the room from top to bottom. One would expect a person to stop searching upon finding a lost or hidden object. Yet every portion of the room had been ransacked. Even the clothes in the tall wardrobe closet had been pulled from their hooks. Hats spilled from overturned band boxes; gloves, handkerchiefs, and stockings were scattered on the floor.\n\nTo catch a thief you had to think like one. What could the killer have been looking for? Anyone familiar with the bordello knew that anything personal or valuable was kept in the trunk. So the fact that the entire room had been ransacked was odd, unless the killer was a stranger. But that made no sense, either.\n\nThe killer had to have been someone Rose knew; someone who may even live beneath this very roof." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "Back in his Ranger days, Tom Colton found hanging out at saloons a good way to get the lay of the land and learn about the locals. Nothing loosened the tongue like tonsil paint, providing one didn't overindulge. So timing was everything. Arrive at a saloon too early and everyone was tongue-tied, too late and a person might find flying fists instead of loose lips.\n\nEach night that week, he'd visited a different saloon. So far his efforts had produced no useful information. Several people had known Dave\u2014had even hired him to do odd jobs. Except for the fact that his brother drank too much, most had nothing but good things to say about him.\n\nThe Idle Hands Saloon and Dance Hall was in full swing when Tom arrived. Someone was playing a frenzied tune on the fiddle, and several men were playing faro.\n\nSome saloons offered more than just alcohol. Some offered tea and coffee. If Tom was lucky, this one might even serve milk.\n\nTonight, luck smiled down on him. The poker-faced bartender slid a glass of cow juice across the bar without comment, and Tom let it sit. Milk offered two distinct advantages: it kept the mind clear and it got attention, usually from troublemakers. But then they were the ones with the most information.\n\nThe fiddler played a medley of frenzied tunes and voices grew louder. Tom stared at his milk, startled by the vision of green eyes that stared back. Drat! Now he was seeing things.\n\nTom's choice of a nonalcoholic drink caught the attention of various men, but none admitted to knowing Dave. He'd just about given up when a beefy man with tree-trunk legs and bulging arms bellied up to the bar. Two wings of greased black hair curled toward his ears. With his broken nose and flattened jaw, he looked meaner than a newly sheared sheep.\n\nHe set his glass next to Tom's and heaved a dusty boot on the brassfoot bar. \"Your mama wean you too young, boy?\"\n\nTom picked up his glass and took a sip. The milk was lukewarm and just this side of sour. \"Could be.\"\n\n\"You new 'round here?\"\n\n\"Yep,\" Tom said. \"You?\"\n\n\"Been here since the war. Name's Tanner, but everyone calls me Buckeye.\"\n\n\"Nice to meet you, Buckeye. You can call me Tom.\"\n\n\"What brings you to these parts, Tom?\"\n\n\"Looking for someone. Name's Dave Colton.\"\n\nBuckeye picked up his glass and tossed the liquid down his throat in a single gulp. He slammed the glass on the bar and wiped his hand across his mouth. \"You can stop looking.\"\n\nTom kept his gaze straight out in front of him where he could watch the man in the mirror behind the bar. Some troublemakers took offense if you looked them square in the eye. \"Why's that?\"\n\n\"Colton's dead. Took a piece of lead right here.\" He pointed to his temple. \"What did you want him for?\"\n\n\"Owed me money.\"\n\n\"Yeah, well, tough luck.\"\n\nAfter a while, Tom asked, \"How well did you know him?\"\n\n\"Who? Colton?\" Buckeye shrugged. \"We spent the night in the hoosegow together, so I guess you could say we were iron bar buddies.\" He shook his head. \"The man was knee-walkin' drunk that night. Babblin' like a newborn babe. Kept jawin' about the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\nTom raised his glass to his mouth and tried not to look overly interested. He took a sip and set the glass down with puckered lips. Next time he'd remember to ask the bartender how long the cow and milk had been divorced before placing his order.\n\n\"What did he say, exactly?\"\n\n\"Nothing that made sense at the time. Makes me sick to think about it.\"\n\n\"Think about what?\" Tom asked.\n\n\"The ten thousand dollars that slipped through my fingers.\"\n\nTom frowned. \"You loaned this Colton fella ten thousand dollars?\"\n\n\"Not me. Where do you think I'd get that kind of money?\" He lowered his voice. \"I'm talking about the reward for the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\n\" 'Fraid you lost me, there,\" Tom said.\n\n\"What I'm saying is that I finally figured out what Colton was babbling about the night we spent in jail. What he said was that he was the Gunnysack Bandit.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Chapter 11\n\nAmy knew she was in trouble the moment she stepped out of the mudroom door and into the backyard. Against her better judgment she'd agreed to meet Coral for a shooting lesson. Instead, all five women, including Miss Lillian, greeted her with firearms in hand.\n\nShe frowned. That's all she needed, a bunch of women running around with guns. Especially since one of them might very well be Rose's killer. \"What are you all doing here?\"\n\nMiss Lillian held her weapon straight out in front with both hands. \"Heard you were teaching Coral to shoot. Sounds like something we should all learn. So I had Harry Piker send over a weapon for each of us.\"\n\n\"Th\u2014that w\u2014way we'll be safe,\" Polly added, her hand shaking like a wet dog.\n\nAmy knew not to discount anyone as a suspect so early in the game, but it was hard to imagine nervous Polly wielding a candlestick holder. Coral with her snippy tongue and dark glances was still a consideration. Buttercup was certainly large enough to overpower Rose. Georgia was thin, but hardly a weakling. Then, of course, there was always Miss Lillian, but Amy doubted the madam would do anything that would harm her business.\n\n\"I can understand why you might want to protect yourselves.\" In light of Rose's death, Amy couldn't blame them for wanting to be armed. Still, she always thought firearm safety undervalued, but never more so than today.\n\n\"Of course we need to protect ourselves,\" Miss Lillian said. Little remained of the soft Southern drawl used on guests. Today, her voice had a steel-like edge. \"Wasn't that long ago that a woman felt safe in her own home, but those days are long gone.\"\n\n\"It's the railroad,\" Coral said. \"Nothing's been the same since the iron horse came to town.\"\n\nMiss Lillian nodded. \"Yes, but there's nothing we can do about it except learn to fend for ourselves. So let's get on with it, shall we? Before we all shoot each other.\"\n\nMiss Lillian had every reason for concern. It was obvious that Buttercup and Polly had no experience with weapons, and the others didn't fare much better.\n\n\"I can't believe I'm doing this,\" Georgia said with an anxious giggle.\n\nAmy blew a stray strand of hair away from her face. \"That makes two of us.\"\n\nPolly's gun dangled from her hand like it was a dead rat or something equally unpleasant. \"I've always been af\u2014fraid of g\u2014guns.\"\n\nCoral sneered. \"You're afraid of your own shadow.\"\n\nPolly tossed her head. \"Am n\u2014not.\" She glanced around as if looking for someone to agree with her and finding none, fell silent.\n\nTaking charge, Amy placed her hands on her hips. \"Muzzles down,\" she yelled, and all arms dropped to the side. \"Now keep them down until I tell you to raise them.\"\n\nGeorgia's gun fell out of her hand and she stooped to pick it up. \"It's so small,\" she said as if to apologize for her clumsiness.\n\n\"Don't let the size fool you.\" Amy walked back and forth in front of the women as she spoke. At nearly four inches long, derringers were stubby and lightweight. This made them the concealed weapon of choice. \"Booth shot Lincoln with one of these. Just don't try to shoot farther than ten feet away.\"\n\n\"How come you know so much about guns?\" Buttercup asked.\n\nCoral's eyes narrowed. \"I was wondering the same thing myself.\"\n\n\"My brothers taught me,\" Amy replied. At least that part was true. She wasn't about to tell them that she also graduated from the Pinkerton detective school at the top of her class.\n\nChanging the subject, she lectured them on gun safety. Eventually, their eyes glazed over, and she ran out of ways to postpone the inevitable.\n\nNow she would have to show them how to load and fire their weapons. God help them all.\n\nShe reached into her pocket and pulled her derringer from her thigh holster. Clouds hovered overhead, but the air was calm. Perfect for shooting.\n\n\"All right, men... uh... ladies. This is how you hold a weapon.\" She explained how the two-shot over-under pistol worked and showed them how to open the breach to load their weapons. \"Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to fire.\"\n\nEarlier, she'd salvaged three empty tin cans from the kitchen. Now she arranged them on the woodpile and walked back several paces. Raising her arm, she aimed, fired, and missed. Adjusting her aim, she fired again, and this time a can flew off the stack of wood.\n\n\"All right, on the count of three I want you all to aim at the woodpile. Keep your finger off the trigger. Don't shoot till I tell you.\"\n\nShe then stepped out of the line of fire\u2014or at least she hoped she did. \"Aim!\"\n\nThe women lifted their arms and pointed their guns directly at the target. \"The weapons are small but the kickback is\u2014\"\n\nJust then Tom Colton barreled around the corner of the house, shooting iron in hand. Before she could issue a warning, a startled Polly cried out and fired. The shot triggered a chain reaction, and the other four guns went off in rapid succession. Birds rose from the treetops with loud squawks and a flutter of frantic wings.\n\nFor a moment, none of the women moved. When the smoke cleared, the only sign of Colton was his hat on the ground.\n\nSnapping out of her shocked state, Amy ran to the woodpile with dread. \"Mr. Colton!\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "Tom had hit the ground hard and now lay spread eagle facedown. His hat had flown in one direction, his firearm in another.\n\nRaising himself on his arms, he spit the dirt from his mouth. Miraculously, he was still in one piece.\n\nAmy was the first to reach his side. She fell next to him in a cloud of shiny blue skirts, a horrified look on her face. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nAt sight of the gun in her hands, he raised his hands shoulder high. \"Yes, but only if you don't shoot.\"\n\nEyes rounded, she slipped her shooting iron into her pocket and was all over him like a mother hen. She brushed off his vest and, taking his handkerchief, wiped the dirt from his face.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.\n\n\"I heard gunfire and I thought you ladies were in trouble.\"\n\nHer hand stilled, and their gazes locked. \"You could have been killed.\"\n\n\"That's for sure and certain.\" Fearing he was about to be drawn into the depth of her eyes, he pulled his gaze away and glanced over the stack of wood. Five women peered back. \"What in the name of Sam Hill are they doing with guns?\"\n\n\"They're scared. They fear that whoever killed Rose might kill them.\"\n\n\"The way you ladies shoot, he needn't bother. You'll save him the trouble.\" Since it appeared he was in no imminent danger, he pushed to his feet.\n\nMiss Lillian glared at him as if he was the one in the wrong. \"You can't say you weren't warned, Mr. Colton.\" She sniffed. \"I told you danger lay ahead.\"\n\n\"Can't argue with you there, ma'am.\" He reached down for his hat and brushed it off. He then picked up his Peacemaker and jammed it into his holster.\n\n\"W\u2014we're learning to sh\u2014shoot,\" one woman stammered. The recoil had evidently hurt her hand. Holding her arm by the wrist, she shook it.\n\nThe woman in the bright yellow dress gave a nervous giggle. \"I feel so much safer now.\"\n\nTom slapped the hat on his head. \"Wish I could say the feeling was mutual.\"\n\n\"That's enough for today,\" Amy called. \"We'll practice more tomorrow.\"\n\nOne by one, the women headed for the house.\n\nMiss Lillian followed at the rear and paused by the back door. \"Would you care for some refreshment, Mr. Colton? Or perhaps you would allow me to read your fortune? On the house, of course. It's the least I can do for your... inconvenience.\"\n\nHe scratched his temple. The woman had an interesting way with words. \"No inconvenience, ma'am. I like being ambushed by a bunch of gun-toting women.\"\n\nAmy's laughter rippled through the air. Momentarily caught off guard by the musical sound, his gaze met hers, and he wondered not for the first time how she ended up in such a place. All too soon the laughter faded away, but the memory remained.\n\n\"Very well,\" Miss Lillian called. \"Coming, Amy?\"\n\n\"In a minute.\" In a softer voice, she asked, \"So what are you doing here?\"\n\n\"I waited for you at the hotel.\" He tilted his head. \"Thought you might have information for me by now. Perhaps the names of Rose's clients.\"\n\n\"Guests.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"They're called guests.\"\n\nHe pushed his hat back with a finger to his brim. \"If we're gonna work together, there's something you should know about me. I'm not much for beating around the bush. I'm what you might call a simple man. I like keeping things plain and uncomplicated, and that includes language.\"\n\n\"Does that go for women, too?\" she asked. \"The plain and uncomplicated part?\"\n\n\"It's been my experience that them's the best kind.\" He hung his thumbs from his gun belt. Not that Amy was in any way plain. Complicated, yes. Plain, no. \"So if it's all the same to you, ma'am, I'd appreciate it if you'd be straightforward with me. It'll make things a whole lot simpler.\"\n\n\"I'll get you the list you want. Is that straightforward enough?\"\n\n\"It'll do. For now.\"\n\nHer eyes met his. Today they were the color of freshly mowed grass. \"I really am sorry for what happened,\" she said. \"The guns\u2014that wasn't my idea.\"\n\nHe rubbed the back of his neck. \"Thank God for bad aims.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"And quick cowboys.\"\n\nEvery time she smiled it was as if some unseen signal passed between them, and today was no different. \"Why do I get the feeling that you don't belong here?\"\n\nThe smile vanished, and the light in her eyes seemed to dim. He wished he hadn't said anything, but he couldn't seem to help himself. She was throwing her life away. There had to be something he could say or do to make her see that.\n\n\"I'll be in touch.\" She started for the house, but he stopped her with a hand to her wrist.\n\n\"I'll be mighty obliged for any help you give me.\" The encounter with the man named Buckeye had shaken him more than he wanted to admit. If what he said about Dave was true, he didn't know how he would live with that. How he would break the news to Dave's son waiting back at the ranch.\n\nAware, suddenly, that the madam was still watching and looked like she was about to charge him good money, he released Amy's arm.\n\n\"I'll help you the best I can,\" she said in a hushed voice. \"Just as long as we keep it simple between us.\"\n\n\"In other words, keep my nose out of your business.\"\n\nShe gave him a half smile, but even that was a treat. \"We understand each other.\"\n\n\"I doubt it'll ever come to that, ma'am. The understanding part, I mean.\" Never in a million years would he understand a woman in her profession.\n\n\"Probably not. But it'll be fun trying.\"\n\n\"Now there's a thought,\" he said.\n\nShe walked away and, with a quick glance in his direction, vanished into the house.\n\nA noticeable chill filled the air and the trees began to sway. It was as if the sun had vanished with her. Sudden wind kicked up the musty smell of rain.\n\nAnnoyed with himself for letting the lady get to him, he made a dash for his horse tethered in front of the house. With a little luck, he'd make it back to his hotel before the storm." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "Peering down at the street from her bedroom window, Amy had mixed emotions as Tom Colton rode away on his shiny black horse. No sooner had he vanished from sight than a flash of lightning zigzagged across the sky followed by a sudden downpour.\n\nStreams of water raced down the windowpane as if to chase away her unbridled thoughts...\n\nWas Tom Colton the Gunnysack Bandit? The question had been very much on her mind these last couple of days. If the answer was yes, then perhaps the real reason he wanted her to spy was to find out what, if anything, the other women knew about him.\n\nThat business about his brother sounded true, but that could have been a ruse and the letter a forgery. The outlaw had terrorized Kansas for the past four years and had outwitted the country's smartest detectives and lawmen. Obviously he was no fool, and neither was Mr. Colton. The man could charm the gold out of a rock.\n\nSo was he or was he not the Gunnysack Bandit?\n\nShe didn't have the answer yet, but one thing was clear: she hoped to God he wasn't." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "Chapter 12\n\nThe next day Amy sat in her room at the Grande Hotel and Bath House. Maintaining a hotel room was a luxury, but it afforded her much-needed privacy.\n\nThe Pinkerton brothers would complain about the added expense, of course, but it couldn't be helped. Her chameleon-like ability to adapt to her surroundings generally served her well. But this... this was altogether something different. No other assignment had required her to stay in character around the clock, seven days a week. No other case had challenged her on so many levels. Perhaps the hardest part of all was the necessity of keeping her faith in God under wraps and not let it slip out in general conversation as it tended to do.\n\nShe also had a practical reason for maintaining a hotel room. As the new girl, she was given the least desirable room at the parlor house. That didn't bother her; the broken lock on her door did.\n\nCoral and the others thought nothing of walking in without knocking. She was in constant danger of being caught going over Miss Lillian's ledgers or writing her reports.\n\nHand on the back of her neck, she rolled her head to work out the kinks. Her report to headquarters was still missing the names of Miss Lillian's guests, so she opened the ledger.\n\nThe madam kept perfect records, and every transaction, whether for entertainment, singing lessons, boots, haircuts, or fortune-telling, was recorded in clear, precise handwriting.\n\nA total of forty-two transactions were recorded the week prior to Rose depositing stolen money into her bank deposit. Amy felt a surge of excitement as she studied the names of the men who had done business at Miss Lillian's, including the marshal who, according to the ledger, purchased a pair of leather boots.\n\nMiss Lillian paid her girls by check, but Polly explained that sometimes the men gave them a little something extra on the side. That meant Rose could have gotten the stolen banknotes directly from one of the guests. But which one? Not Tom Colton. He wasn't even at the bordello on the week in question. In fact, his name showed up only once, on the day of Rose's death.\n\nThe marshal's name posed a problem. Pinkerton operatives were required to introduce themselves to local lawmen, and she had planned to do so that very day. Not only was it a matter of courtesy but also of necessity. Obtaining the marshal's cooperation was part of the job.\n\nBut what if he was the Gunnysack Bandit? It wouldn't be the first time a lawman had turned to a life of crime. Politicians, lawyers, and doctors were also known to participate in illegal activities. And only last fall, a minister had robbed a train to build a church. A detective couldn't afford to discount anyone.\n\nShe copied the names onto her writing tablet to include with her report to headquarters. Reports were required to be accurate to the last detail and any dialogue recorded verbatim. Though she had to think hard to accurately record her conversations with Miss Lillian\u2014and that of the four working women\u2014Amy had no trouble recalling every word exchanged with Tom Colton.\n\n\"Does that go for women, too? The plain and uncomplicated part?\"\n\n\"It's been my experience that them's the best kind.\"\n\nThe memory of his voice was so clear it was almost as if he were in the room with her. She shook her head to clear her mind. Somehow she had to conquer whatever hold he had over her. She had a job to do. That meant she had no time for silly schoolgirl fantasies.\n\nForcing herself to concentrate on her report, she wrote until her fingers ached from gripping the pen.\n\nThe Pinkerton National Detective Agency had the world's largest collection of mug shots in its criminal database. So the first order of business was to see if any of the forty-two men had a criminal record. This required detailed descriptions, and Miss Lillian had been a big help in this regard.\n\nAmy reread what she had written and frowned. She may have gotten a bit carried away in describing Mr. Colton's eyes as peacock blue with flecks of gold. The French dressmaker's influence, no doubt.\n\nSatisfied that at last she was making headway, she wrote a separate list of the men for herself and one for Colton, though she had yet to decide whether to give it to him. Completing her tasks, she drew the draperies shut. She then pulled a dress, two skirts, and matching shirtwaists from her valise and tucked them into the carpetbag borrowed from Miss Lillian. Last, she added the ledger.\n\nShe cracked open the door and peered cautiously down the hall before stepping outside and turning the key. His room, number fourteen, was several doors away, and the very thought quickened her pulse. Attributing the sudden warmth rushing to her cheeks to a sudden bout of anxiety, she headed for the stairs.\n\nNo one would be surprised to see a woman of easy virtue at the hotel, but the last thing she needed was to bump into Mr. Colton. If he really was the Gunnysack Bandit, he might have hired her just to keep her under surveillance. She'd best watch her step around him until he had been thoroughly checked against the agency's vast file of known criminals.\n\nThe second-story landing was empty, but people milled around the lobby below.\n\nShe was halfway down the stairs before noticing Mr. Colton seated in the sitting area, reading a newspaper.\n\nDucking her head beneath the banister, she turned and raced up the stairs to the top landing. Was there another way out of the hotel? Perhaps a second set of stairs for domestic help?\n\n\"Bless my soul. Fancy meeting you here.\"\n\nShe glanced over her shoulder and her heart nearly stopped. The three church ladies stood beaming at her. Pushing her spectacles up her nose, Mrs. Givings was the first to speak.\n\n\"We are putting a Good Book in each of the empty rooms,\" she explained, pointing to a box filled to the brim with Bibles. \"We thought weary travelers might appreciate a comforting word.\"\n\n\"Yes, I'm sure they would,\" Amy said. She peered over the railing just as Mr. Colton rose and headed for the staircase. \"Let me help you.\"\n\nHolding her valise in one hand, she scooped several leather-bound Bibles from the cardboard box with the other. The three women's mouths dropped open.\n\n\"Oh, but that won't be necess\u2014\"\n\nNot giving Mrs. Givings a chance to finish, Amy sprinted down the hall, dropping a Bible as she fled. \"I'll go this way,\" she called.\n\nSpotting the top of Mr. Colton's wide-brim hat as he ascended the stairs, she panicked and ran through the first open door. An older man with a white mustache and beard was emptying his suitcase.\n\nHe took one look at her and licked his chops. \"Now that's what I call room service.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Chapter 13\n\nThe next day, Amy sat in her room and stared at the calendar. She couldn't believe she'd been at Miss Lillian's Parlor House for a week. The worst part was that she had precious little to show for it. She'd questioned the others at length, but no one had anything useful to say. Never had she met more closemouthed women. Her frustration grew with each passing hour.\n\nLiving at Miss Lillian's was an odd experience that clawed at Amy's conscience. It sickened her to see women spend so much time primping, flirting, and kowtowing to men. Most everything of an immoral nature was kept behind closed doors, of course, but that didn't make it any easier to bear. For her own peace of mind, she constantly reminded herself that she was there for the greater good. Her job was to catch a criminal, not to judge the way others lived their lives.\n\nIsn't that what the Bible said? \"Judge not.\" Easier said than done. Never before had she struggled so hard to be charitable. Harder still was holding her tongue.\n\nIt was all she could do not to shake Polly and the other women and make them see what they were doing was wrong and destructive. God had a better plan, if only they would put their trust in Him. She couldn't say that, of course, couldn't take a chance on blowing her cover. But it nearly killed her to keep quiet. It surely did feel like God was testing her.\n\nShe also felt guilty for enjoying the luxurious living conditions at Miss Lillian's. That she couldn't deny.\n\nThe madam had spared no expense in creating a pleasant environment for her \"girls.\" The flocked red wallpaper was from France, the ornate carpets from the Orient, and the crystal chandeliers had been shipped directly from Italy.\n\nIndoor plumbing was an extravagance that Amy had only heard about but had never personally experienced except in hotels. It was something she imagined that only kings and the very rich could afford. The highlight of her day was sinking into the footed porcelain tub with its gold-plated faucets and letting her cares float away. The hot, soapy water provided a soothing salve for the soul and cleared her mind.\n\nDuring nonworking hours, the atmosphere at the house became notably more relaxed. At times it seemed more like a women's school dormitory than a bordello. The low, smoky voices trained to capture a man's ear grew more natural and therefore more high pitched. Without layers of face paint, expressions appeared softer, but no less sad.\n\nEach woman was expected to keep her own room tidy and to attend to any necessary mending, but the wash was sent out to Soo's Chinese Laundry and Fine Tea on Third Street.\n\nWhen they weren't working, the women enjoyed parlor games. Only Polly and Georgia could read. Polly devoured dime novels like candy, but Georgia's reading tastes were more refined. Once, Amy caught her reading a book of love poems, which she hid behind her back. Sometimes Miss Lillian played the piano and Buttercup and Georgia joined her in song.\n\nOne afternoon Amy offered to play the piano for them, and though she was sorely out of practice, her command of the yellowed ivory keys brought oohs and aahs from the women.\n\n\"I had no idea you were so talented,\" Miss Lillian said. \"You must play for our guests.\"\n\nAmy shook her head. \"I haven't played in years.\" She was amazed that she still had the music memorized. Her old music teacher, Mrs. Jeremy, had been tough on her, and it had paid off.\n\n\"What's the name of the piece you played?\" Buttercup asked, pulling her gaze away from the wall mirror.\n\n\" 'F\u00fcr Elise.' It's by Beethoven. I'm afraid I hardly did it justice.\" Between the tuneless piano and wrong notes, the poor composer was probably turning over in his grave. She could almost hear Mrs. Jeremy's voice now. \"A cow could play with more grace!\"\n\n\"Some people think the real title is 'F\u00fcr Theresa,' but Beethoven had such poor handwriting no one can be certain.\"\n\n\"M\u2014maybe he c\u2014couldn't s\u2014say T\u2014T\u2014T\u2014,\" Polly stammered.\n\n\"Beethoven was deaf, not dumb,\" Coral said. To her credit, a look of horror crossed her face the moment the words left her mouth. \"I didn't mean that how it sounded.\"\n\nGeorgia broke the stiff silence that followed with a wistful sigh. \"He must have loved her very much to name a song after her.\"\n\nAmy expected Coral to make some disparaging comment about love or men or both, but she said nothing. Apparently she really did feel bad about her careless remark to Polly.\n\nGeorgia's sentiment did, however, have a sobering effect on the little group, and no one said much after that. It was times like this when the masks slipped off, giving a hint of the women behind them, a hint of the broken dreams and disillusionments that brought them here.\n\nAmy turned back to the piano and started playing again. From the deep recesses of her mind came a memory, came a voice. \"Pay Do-dah, Tenfer.\"\n\nHer little sister, Cissy, couldn't pronounce \"Jennifer,\" so she called her \"Tenfer\" instead. Do-dah was her name for the \"Camptown Races.\" Cissy had never learned to say Jennifer correctly because she disappeared at the age of three and was never heard from again.\n\nThe memory stabbed through Amy like a knife, and grief the size of a whale rose up and threatened to swallow her. Her hands crashed to the keys and the discordant tone resonated through the room.\n\nShaken by the feeling of loss and despair that suddenly overwhelmed her, she spun around on the piano stool to apologize. But the ringing dinner bell had everyone on their feet and heading for the dining room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "The noon meal was a grand occasion at Miss Lillian's. The table was set with fine damask linen, sterling silver cutlery, and bone china plates. Fresh flowers decorated the center of the table, their dainty, sweet fragrance a pleasant change from the heavy perfume that usually tainted the air.\n\nThe laughter and easy chatter that greeted Amy on her first day had, since Rose's death, been replaced with mostly sullen looks and reserved exchanges.\n\nNow that the women had firearms, they toted their reticules with them everywhere. Even Miss Lillian had grown attached to her drawstring bag and was never seen without it.\n\nThe madam sat at her usual place at the head of the table, but it was the empty chair that continued to draw sideways glances.\n\nThis didn't escape Miss Lillian's notice. \"I need to find someone to replace Rose,\" she announced while daintily cutting her meat.\n\nThis brought an outcry from Polly. \"H\u2014how could you even think of rep\u2014placing her. After she w\u2014w\u2014was\u2014\"\n\n\"The world doesn't stop because someone died,\" Coral said.\n\nButtercup gazed at her reflection in the silver serving spoon before helping herself to mashed potatoes. \"And it's been what? A little over a week,\" she said, her voice thick with sarcasm.\n\nCoral glared at her. \"Life goes on.\"\n\nPolly jumped to her feet and tossed her napkin at Coral. \"I don't know how you can b\u2014b\u2014be so h\u2014heartless.\" She grabbed her reticule and ran from the room.\n\nSilence thick as fog followed her departure. One by one, the women left the table. Amy purposely lingered over her meal until even Miss Lillian gave up and left the room.\n\nAmy then picked up her empty plate and carried it into the kitchen.\n\nThe cook's name was Coffey. She was a large woman with doe-like eyes and black frizzy hair. A former slave, she took great pride in her cooking skills and had no patience for picky eaters like Georgia. Seemingly unaware of Amy's presence, she muttered to herself.\n\n\"I'm a'tellin' you, that girl is gonna waste away to nothing. Mark my words. She'll be so skinny we won't even be able to find her body to bury her.\"\n\nAmy set her plate on the counter next to the sink. Coffey glanced at her, but her complaints continued uninterrupted: Buttercup took more than her fair share of helpings, Coral put salt on her food...\n\n\"Lawdy, you'd think the girl would taste the food first.\"\n\nAmy waited for Coffey to finish her diatribe. \"I need to ask you something, Coffey.\"\n\nCoffey shook her head. \"I'm not giving away my recipes, if that's what you have in mind.\"\n\n\"Actually, it has to do with Rose. Did you know that she was engaged to be married?\"\n\nCoffey's eyes narrowed. \"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"Her fianc\u00e9's brother. Does the name Dave Colton ring a bell?\"\n\nCoffey made a face. \"I remember him. He always stuffed his pockets with my macaroons. Had himself a healthy appetite but never looked you square in the eye. Know what I mean?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Amy said. Tom Colton certainly didn't have any trouble looking people in the eye\u2014looking her in the eye.\n\nCoffey scoffed. \"A man who can't look you in the eyes ain't to be trusted, and I told Rose as much. Now you're telling me she was gonna marry him!\"\n\n\"Did you notice anything different about her before she died?\"\n\n\"Whatcha talkin' about, girl?\" Coffey scrunched up her face. \"How, different?\"\n\n\"Did she seem nervous or worried or act strange in some way?\"\n\n\"Only in the morning.\" Coffey smacked her lips together. \"She was always the first one downstairs. Looked bright and shiny as a new penny, she did. Then one day she walked into the kitchen, took one smell of the coffee, and turned three shades of green.\"\n\nAmy stared at her. \"Rose was with child?\"\n\nCoffey frowned. \"Well, it sure wasn't my coffee making her sick.\"\n\nRose's pregnancy was a twist Amy hadn't counted on. \"Did you tell anyone about her condition?\"\n\n\"Now why would I go and do that? It was nobody's business but hers.\"\n\nThat was true only if it was Dave Colton's child. But what if it had been someone else's? Would that have provided a motivation for murder? \"Do you think the man she planned to wed was the father?\"\n\n\"Now how am I supposed to know that? Don't even know how she knew who the father was herself.\" Her features darkened beneath a veil of suspicion. \"Why you asking all these questions?\"\n\n\"No reason. I was just curious.\"\n\n\"Seems to me that nobody's business is everyone's curiosity. Now, scat. I've got work to do.\" Waving a flour-sack towel, she chased Amy out of the kitchen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "Chapter 14\n\nAmy was still mulling over her conversation with Coffey moments later when she climbed the stairs to the second floor. Muffled sobs made her stop in front of Polly's room. The poor girl sounded like she was crying her heart out.\n\nAmy knocked twice before entering the room.\n\nPolly lay facedown on the bed, nose buried in the pillow. Sobs shuddered through her body, and it sure did look like her heart was broken.\n\nAmy sat on the edge of the mattress, knocking a dime novel to the floor. \"Talk to me.\" When Polly made no response, Amy's mind suddenly flicked back in time, and she was sitting on her sister's bed. She blinked, but the vision of a young child refused to budge. She never knew what would transport her back to that terrible time when it seemed as if her private world had come to an end.\n\nSometimes it took no more than a certain word or sound for the memories to return. The other day it was walking into the hotel to meet Colton and seeing a woman with a young child. Now, it was the simple act of comforting a distraught woman\u2014a blond like her sister, Cissy.\n\nTracking down outlaws was now her job, but secretly it was Cissy for whom her heart searched. If her sister was still alive, she would now be eighteen, only a few years younger than Polly. But God, please, don't let her end up in a place like this.\n\nA movement on the bed chased her thoughts away, but she knew the reprieve was only temporary. The memories of Cissy and the night she disappeared were never gone for long.\n\nAmy pulled her hand away. Polly turned over and stared at her with watery red eyes.\n\n\"Where can I find a handkerchief?\" Amy asked.\n\n\"In the drawer.\"\n\nAmy crossed to the bureau and chose one from the neatly stacked pile in the top drawer and returned to the bed. Polly took it from her and dabbed at her paint-smeared cheeks.\n\n\"Anything I can do?\" Amy asked.\n\nPolly blew her nose. \"Not unless you can bring Rose b\u2014b\u2014back.\"\n\nAmy heaved a sigh. \"That would take a miracle.\" She'd stopped believing in miracles the night Cissy disappeared.\n\n\"I'm not expecting a miracle. I just w\u2014want to know wh\u2014who did it.\"\n\n\"I do, too.\" Amy knew from painful experience that nothing was worse than lingering questions. Why did this happen? What could I have done different? What happened to Cissy? Not knowing was sometimes worse than the actual loss.\n\n\"Everyone seems to agree that Rose had no enemies,\" Amy said gently. She didn't want to upset Polly any further, but in her current vulnerable state, she might be less reticent and more willing to answer questions.\n\nPolly started to say something but couldn't get past the first consonant b. She paused for a moment and tried again, this time choosing her words carefully. \"I c\u2014can't imagine anyone w\u2014wanting to harm her.\"\n\n\"You said you didn't know that she was engaged to be married.\"\n\nPolly sniffled. \"I didn't.\"\n\n\"Are you sure?\"\n\n\"I kn\u2014know th\u2014there was a man she liked. Whenever he left t\u2014town, she was m\u2014miserable until she received a l\u2014letter from him. His name was D\u2014Dan or Dave\u2014s\u2014something like th\u2014that. I met him a c\u2014couple of times.\"\n\nSo Colton did write to her. So what happened to the letters? Why were they not in her room? Had her killer taken them?\n\n\"Did he leave town often?\" Amy asked.\n\n\"T\u2014twice that I know of.\"\n\n\"Do you know why?\"\n\nPolly shook her head. \"R\u2014Rose never said.\"\n\n\"Did you know she was expecting a child?\"\n\nPolly's eyes widened. \"Are... are you s\u2014sure?\"\n\n\"Fairly sure.\" Though there didn't seem to be any doubt in Coffey's mind. \"Someone told me that one of Rose's clients was the Gunnysack Bandit. Did she ever mention that to you?\"\n\nPolly's hand flew to her mouth. \"Th\u2014that awful outlaw?\"\n\n\"It's what I heard. Did Rose ever say anything about being afraid of one of the johns?\"\n\nPolly shook her head. \"W\u2014we're not allowed to t\u2014t\u2014t\u2014... gossip about guests.\"\n\nIt was hard to believe that a group of women who lived and worked under the same roof adhered to such strict rules, but something was keeping them from talking.\n\n\"Can you think of anything that might help the marshal find Rose's killer?\"\n\n\"N\u2014no, nothing.\"\n\nAmy tried not to show her frustration. Never had she met a more reticent group of women. Prying information out of them was like chiseling rock.\n\n\"Did you notice a difference in Rose's behavior in recent weeks?\"\n\n\"Only that she was s\u2014sick.\" She glanced past Amy's shoulder at the closed door. \"We thought she was f\u2014f\u2014faking.\"\n\nAmy frowned. \"Why would you think that?\"\n\n\"She d\u2014didn't want to work here anymore.\"\n\n\"Why didn't she just leave?\" She had two good reasons to do so: one, she was getting married, and two, she was with child.\n\n\"I d\u2014don't know why.\"\n\nAmy let the words hang in the air for a moment before asking, \"Polly, what... brought you here?\"\n\nPolly's forehead creased like a folded fan. \"To G\u2014Goodman?\"\n\n\"To Miss Lillian's?\"\n\n\"N\u2014n\u2014no one else w\u2014would hire me.\"\n\nAmy frowned. \"Because you stutter?\"\n\nPolly nodded. \"Some p\u2014people think I'm dumb b\u2014because I can't always g\u2014get the words out.\"\n\n\"You're not dumb, Polly. My...\" Amy almost said minister. \"My friend told me that Moses had the same problem and yet he became a great leader.\"\n\n\"Women can't be l\u2014l\u2014leaders,\" Polly said. \"We c\u2014can't be anything.\"\n\n\"You're wrong,\" Amy said. \"God gave us the same abilities and talents as men.\"\n\n\"If th\u2014that's true, then why do men have all the p\u2014power?\"\n\n\"Because we gave it to them,\" Amy said." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "After leaving Polly's room, Amy walked to town, careful to steer clear of the hotel. She didn't want to bump into Colton and have to make excuses for not having the list he requested. Several times she thought she saw him and once even dashed into Adam's Barbershop and Tailor to avoid him. Peering out the window, she soon realized her error. Not only was the man in question not Mr. Colton, he didn't even look like him.\n\nThe barbershop owner lifted his gaze from his lathered client and waved his straight-edged razor at her. \"Get out,\" he bellowed. \"I'll not have you plying your trade in here.\"\n\nHe said a lot more, but Amy didn't stay around long enough to listen.\n\nSo far that morning she'd crossed eight names off the list, including Mr. Baxter's, who ran the livery and blacksmith shop. An older man, probably in his sixties, he walked with a limp. Witnesses had consistently described the Gunnysack Bandit as moving like a younger man with no obvious physical defects.\n\nThe outlaw performed his dastardly deeds with a sack over his head and only two small holes for eyes. No one could describe his face, but neither could anyone agree on his voice, except that it was male and sounded muffled.\n\nAccording to Miss Lillian, only fifteen of the forty-two men who had done business at the parlor house the week Rose deposited stolen money were similar in height to the Gunnysack Bandit. Still, Amy had to check each suspect herself. It never paid to leave anything to chance.\n\nSo far the only one matching the bandit's physical description was the rich man, Monahan, who lived outside of town in a sprawling two-story house with an iron deer in front.\n\nThe banker, Mr. Bennington, was short with a rounded belly that practically popped the buttons on his vest. But it wasn't just appearances that made a man suspect; witnesses were notoriously bad at descriptions. Other things had to be taken into consideration, other questions answered. Did the man live beyond his means? Travel abroad? Did he drink only the finest whiskey or smoke only the best Cuban cigars? How often did he gamble, and how high were the stakes? What about his livestock? Were his horses thoroughbred or mixed?\n\nThen there was his wife or mistress to consider. Did she sew her own clothes or favor French fashions? Did she do her own cooking and cleaning or depend on hired help? Even church tithing could provide clues. Some outlaws had been known to pay penance by giving vast sums to churches or charities.\n\nAmy stared at the list of names still to investigate and sighed. It didn't look like her work would be done anytime soon. That meant she was stuck at the parlor house for only God knew how long." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "Later that afternoon, Amy scurried downstairs anxious to speak to Miss Lillian. Having whittled the original forty-two suspects down to twenty-five, she still had questions she hoped the madam could answer.\n\nThe house was oddly quiet, but that was only because Georgia and the others had decided to visit Rose's grave. However, voices greeted her as she crossed from the stairs to the parlor.\n\nSeeing that Miss Lillian had a guest, she paused beneath the archway. \"I'm sorry. I didn't know you had a visitor.\"\n\n\"It's all right.\" Holding a teapot in one hand, Miss Lillian waved her into the room with the other. \"You remember Reverend Matthews, don't you? From the funeral?\"\n\nThe reverend stood. Today, he wore his spectacles, but his fob chain dangled, so either he'd misplaced or forgotten his watch. \"Ah, yes, you're the new girl.\"\n\nAmy didn't know what to say. A man of God having tea with a madam?\n\nHe chuckled as if enjoying a private joke. \"I know what you're thinking. But I can assure you, I'm here on the Lord's business.\"\n\n\"He's here to pick up his new boots,\" Miss Lillian said.\n\nThe reverend held out his foot to show off his new brown leather footwear.\n\n\"Very nice,\" Amy said.\n\nHe grinned like a schoolboy with a new slingshot. \"Did you know that God used shoes and feet in the Bible to show acceptance, humility, and deliverance?\" His eyes twinkled. \"So Miss Lillian is doing the Lord's work, too. Only she doesn't know it.\"\n\nMiss Lillian set the teapot down. \"Don't make me out to be a saint, Reverend. The last time I looked, the saints were all dead.\"\n\n\"You'll be happy to know you have little danger of receiving sainthood. I am, however, obliged to point out the dangers that lurk in the garden of evil. So many people fail to see the connection between pleasure and sin.\"\n\n\"Sit and finish your tea, Reverend,\" Miss Lillian said. \"Sermons and tea should never mix.\"\n\nHe bowed. \"Very well.\" He glanced at Amy. \"Would you care to join us?\"\n\nAmy's mind scrambled for an excuse. \"No, thank you. I\u2014\"\n\nA loud crash came from another part of the house, and Amy jumped. Mr. Beavers hopped off a hammock and vanished beneath a settee.\n\n\"What on earth...?\" Miss Lillian shot to her feet, and the three of them rushed from the room to investigate.\n\nA gaping hole was centered in the middle of the dining room window. Someone had thrown a brick. Amy flew to the window to peer outside, glass crunching beneath the soles of her shoes.\n\nSeeing no one, she pulled away. \"Quick, the key!\"\n\nMiss Lillian wasted precious moments unfastening the key from her waist. By the time Amy worked the complicated lock and dashed out the front door, the street was empty and the perpetuator nowhere in sight.\n\nJust to make certain, she raced to the gate and glanced as far as she could see in all directions. Whoever had thrown the brick was probably young. Certainly young enough to run fast.\n\nPocketing her gun, she returned to the house. The housekeeper, Beatrice, was already sweeping up the glass in the dining room, her thin mouth as tight as her bun.\n\n\"Did you see anyone?\" Miss Lillian asked.\n\nAmy shook her head and handed over the key. \"Have you any idea who would do such a thing?\"\n\nMiss Lillian shrugged. \"Roughly half the population of this town. There's not a woman out there who wouldn't like to see this place burn down.\"\n\nAmy doubted the brick thrower was a woman. No one wearing a skirt could run that fast.\n\nReverend Matthews held the brick up to the light as if it contained some secret message from God. \"Let's finish our tea,\" he said amicably. \"And I'll tell you what the Bible says about fallen bricks.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "Chapter 15\n\nThared, Tenfer. Monster tay me.\"\n\nAmy twisted and turned until her bedding tied up in knots. She flopped over on her back and stared at the ceiling. The house seemed especially restless tonight. Its studs groaned and joints creaked. Was it possible for a house to absorb the fears and worries of inhabitants? Or was it simply the ghosts of the past having a bad night?\n\nThe half moon peered through the open window, and lace curtains fluttered in the gentle breeze. Shadows danced across the room much like Cissy's last words danced in her head.\n\nThe sheriff believed that Cissy had wandered from the house in the middle of the night. \"Children do that all the time,\" he'd said.\n\nNow as then, she questioned his theory. Cissy woke up crying on that long-ago night and claimed a monster had tried to take her. Amy calmed her down and told her that it was just a bad dream. \"There's no such thing as a monster.\" But what if it hadn't been a nightmare? What if someone really had tried to snatch her sister out of her bed? The questions persisted now as they had done for years with no answers in sight.\n\nThough Amy was only twelve at the time, she blamed herself for not taking her sister seriously and investigating. Why hadn't she? And why, after all this time, did the memories still haunt her?\n\nTurning her back on the past, she glanced at the mechanical clock. Unable to read the face, she slid out of bed and carried the clock to the window. The silvery light of the half moon bathed the street, and the trees swayed gently. It was only after midnight, but she felt as if she'd been twisting and turning all night. A movement caught her eye. Another brick thrower?\n\nShe pressed her head against the glass pane and squinted. A stick-thin figure hurried through the gate. Unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, it sure did look like Georgia.\n\nThe woman vanished into the folds of the night. Where was she going at such a late hour? Did she have a lover?\n\nAmy grabbed a dressing gown and shoved her arms into the sleeves. It was filmy and, like all the parlor house garments, offered little in the way of modesty. It would have to do. She shoved her handgun into the pocket.\n\nOpening her door quietly, she stuck her head through the crack and peered into the hall. A gaslight on the wall hissed and sputtered, but otherwise all was quiet. Pulling the door shut behind her, she tiptoed past the other rooms to the stairs. Padding barefoot down the edge closest to the railing where the stairs were less likely to creak, she crossed the entry hall to the door. It was still bolted and locked on the inside.\n\nFeeling her way through the dark hall, she reached the kitchen. She ran her hand along the kitchen counter until she found the lantern. After lighting the wick, she searched the pantry and pushed against the well-stocked shelves in search of a hidden door. Nothing. She checked the windows in the mudroom, but all were locked and looked as if they hadn't been opened in years. The back door, too, was locked from the inside.\n\nSo how did Georgia escape?\n\nShe returned to the kitchen and decided to wait. Sooner or later Georgia would return. Please, God, let it be sooner. She was cold and in desperate need of sleep.\n\nIt wasn't more than twenty minutes later that footsteps alerted her. She turned off the light and ducked behind the counter in front of the icebox.\n\nA sudden movement by her side startled her. Mr. Beavers!\n\nThe cat rubbed against her with loud, rumbling purrs\u2014a fine time to be friendly. \"Go away,\" she whispered. She pushed against him, but that only made him purr louder.\n\nThe cellar door creaked open, and Amy held her breath. Mr. Beavers made enough noise for a choir.\n\nAmy peered around the counter. Georgia's dark form emerged, and the cellar door closed behind her with a muffled thud. She stood perfectly still, her raven hair gleaming in the light of the half moon.\n\nAmy debated whether to confront Georgia now or later and decided to wait. She was more likely to get the truth out of Georgia if she had more information.\n\nMr. Beavers's purrs now sounded like a chugging train. Georgia moved toward the counter. Amy gave the cat a good shove with both hands. Mr. Beavers protested with a loud meow before streaking away.\n\nGeorgia gasped as the cat ran past her. \"Dumb cat,\" she muttered. She pulled off her slippers and ever so quietly tiptoed away on stocking feet.\n\nAmy sat on the cold kitchen floor and leaned her back against a cupboard until the squeaking floorboards overhead told her Georgia was now upstairs.\n\nShe stood and walked to the cellar door. She had checked the cellar earlier in the week and found nothing of interest. Obviously, she'd missed something.\n\nThe dark hole of the underground room gaped before her, and her mouth went dry. She liked cellars almost as much as she liked rattlers\u2014especially in the still of night.\n\nTurning back to the kitchen, she relit the kerosene lantern and, holding it over her head, started down the stairs.\n\nThe cellar smelled musty, and dust tickled her nose. Cobwebs hung from raftered ceilings. Along the length of one wall stood a row of narrow windows. They were too high to reach and probably hadn't been opened since the house was built.\n\nShe moved the light across the rough brick walls. Old furniture was piled in one corner. A couple of trunks and a rocking chair clamored for space with a glass-paneled secretary and, inexplicably, a child's rocking horse. A folding screen stood in one corner, each panel painted with scenes of nature.\n\nShe stepped over a wicker basket and moved a panel. This time she saw something she had previously missed. The screen hid an alcove and stairs. At the top of the stairs a trapdoor opened to the back of the house.\n\nSo there was a way in and out of the old house without going through Miss Lillian. This could explain how Rose's killer managed to enter and leave without being seen. Georgia obviously was familiar with the hidden door, but how many of the other women knew about it? How many in town?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "The next morning after breakfast a horse-drawn wagon with CUBBY'S WINDOWS AND FINE LAMPS painted on the sides pulled in front of the house.\n\nWhile the man known only as Cubby replaced the broken dining room window, Amy walked out to the backyard to check the trapdoor from the outside.\n\nIt really did feel like spring. The temperature was somewhere in the low seventies, and fluffy clouds floated across an azure sky. Rays of golden sunlight filtered through the trees, and the warmth was a welcome change from the cool interior of the house.\n\nOvergrown bushes against the back of the house hid the cellar trapdoor. Unless someone was specifically looking for the entrance, it was almost impossible to find.\n\nShe walked the width and breadth of the yard. Old wizened trees prevented all but the most stubborn flowers from surviving. A rambling rosebush climbed up a leaning fence in an effort to reach the sun.\n\nThe house lacked neighbors but not wildlife. A jaybird squawked loudly as it chased a squirrel down a tree. A rabbit ran across her path and dived into a hole. From somewhere up above came the tap-tap-tapping of a woodpecker, but she couldn't locate it.\n\nButtercup walked into the yard, and her presence caused a sudden twitter of birds. It soon became apparent why when she dumped a pan of table scraps into a bird feeder.\n\nAmy joined her. Already, yellow-winged birds fluttered down to peck at pieces of suet. \"I've never seen so many different types of birds.\"\n\n\"That's because Rose put food out for them every day,\" Buttercup said. \"Now I do it in her memory.\"\n\n\"I noticed several bird books in Rose's room.\" Amy knew very little about birds and could only identify a few.\n\n\"She loved birds and sat for hours watching them. She even left little pieces of yarn outside for their nests.\"\n\nButtercup nudged Amy with an elbow and pointed upward. A large black-and-white bird sat on a window ledge, preening in front of a second-story window.\n\n\"He comes every morning to primp in front of the glass. Rose said he was a magpie.\"\n\nThe way the bird turned first one way and then the other made Amy laugh. \"He's a regular Beau Brummell.\"\n\nButtercup pulled her gaze away from the windowsill. \"A bow what?\"\n\n\"Brummell. He was a very fashionable man.\" Buttercup couldn't read and had little education. Regretting having mentioned someone known mostly through literature, Amy quickly changed the subject.\n\n\"It sounds like you really miss Rose.\"\n\nButtercup heaved a sigh and looked about to burst into tears. \"The others... they make fun of my weight. Rose never did. She was kind to me.\"\n\nAmy had so many questions she wanted to ask, but Buttercup suddenly pointed to the fence. \"Oh, look at the hummingbird,\" she said, smiling.\n\nAmy's gaze followed her pointed finger. Like a jeweled ball being tossed in a game of catch, the tiny bird flitted from blossom to blossom. It hovered in the air for a moment, its green wings but a blur, then darted away.\n\nThe smile vanished from Buttercup's face. Amy hated to return to such a depressing subject, but she so seldom had a chance to speak to any of the women alone.\n\n\"I need to ask you something. Did you know that Rose was with child?\"\n\nButtercup's eyes widened. \"No, but she wouldn't be the first who got herself in a family way.\"\n\n\"I suppose not. I heard she was seeing someone and it was serious. Dave or Dan somebody.\"\n\n\"Dave. I met him a couple of times. He wasn't like the others.\"\n\n\"How do you mean?\"\n\n\"I think he really cared for Rose. Brought her flowers and books and stuff.\" Buttercup sighed. \"It's too bad what happened.\"\n\n\"You mean when he was shot?\"\n\n\"That, too. But I'm talking about the argument they had just before he died. Right here in this yard.\"\n\n\"Do you know what they argued about?\" Amy asked.\n\n\"Something about him wanting her to go to Texas, but she said she wouldn't go without him. That's all I heard.\"\n\nSo the part about Dave asking for his brother's help was true. \"Rose must have been heartbroken when he died.\"\n\n\"She was heartbroken all right.\" Buttercup tossed a small piece of suet to a noisy blue jay perched on the woodpile. \"She didn't get out of bed for a week. Miss Lillian called the doctor, but it didn't help much. After a while, she did try to eat, but she wasn't the same.\"\n\n\"Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her?\"\n\nButtercup glanced at the house as if to make certain they were still alone. \"I think she was scared of someone. One of the guests.\"\n\n\"What makes you say that?\" Amy asked. Everyone else she'd questioned insisted that Rose had no enemies.\n\n\"The week before she died, she wouldn't sleep alone. She slept on the floor in my room.\"\n\n\"Did she tell you who she was afraid of?\"\n\n\"No, but...\" Buttercup gave the house another quick glance. \"I got the feeling it was Mr. Monahan.\"\n\nSince Monahan was at the top of her list of suspects, Amy wasn't surprised to hear his name. Coral said he was the richest man in town, and from what little Amy had been able to turn up on him, it appeared to be true. His house alone had cost more money than what most people in town saw in a lifetime.\n\n\"Why would she be afraid of him?\"\n\n\"I don't know, but one night I heard them arguing. The next day she stayed in her room.\"\n\n\"Did you hear what they were arguing about?\"\n\nButtercup shook her head. As if suddenly remembering the rule forbidding gossip, she backed away, pail in hand. \"I better go.\"\n\nAmy made no move to stop her. She needed time to think. She could understand why Rose might argue with her fianc\u00e9. But Mr. Monahan? Why would she argue with a guest?\n\nUnless... She considered a new theory: What if Monahan was the father of Rose's baby? Maybe Rose threatened to go public and Monahan refused to let that happen.\n\nIt made sense but was still only speculation. Even if she was right, solving Rose's murder wouldn't necessarily bring her any closer to tracking down the Gunnysack Bandit, and that's what she was paid to do.\n\nOne by one, the birds took flight until at last the bird feeder was deserted. She started toward the house, but something stopped her. A strange sensation came over her, and she shivered.\n\nShe glanced about the yard, but all was quiet. Even the magpie had taken flight. She scanned the widows. The draperies and shades were drawn shut.\n\nStill, unable to shake the feeling that someone was watching, she hurried to the house and banged on the back door until the cook let her in." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "Chapter 16\n\nHer conversation with Buttercup still very much on her mind, Amy hurried into town later that morning to mail her report to Pinkerton headquarters.\n\nShe walked quickly along the boardwalk, looking neither left nor right. She didn't want to see the disapproving stares or judgmental looks. It was bad enough having to feel their gazes.\n\nThough the sun was warm, her shoulder cape was securely fastened. Her bright purple gown set her apart from the \"respectable\" women whose modesty and morality were properly stated with drab gray or stoic black dresses. Amy would have had a better chance of blending in had she worn a pickle barrel.\n\nIt was now the middle of April. It didn't seem possible that she'd been living at Miss Lillian's Parlor House and Fine Boots for more than a week. She had precious little to show for her efforts. But then again, Rose's death caused the loss of valuable time. She had to move slowly so as not to rouse suspicion.\n\nA telegram waited for her. As always, it was coded and signed \"Octavo at Napthia,\" cipher for the Pinkerton principal. It was too soon to expect a report back on the list of suspects she'd sent. Nevertheless, the tersely worded dispatch telling her to keep investigating was disappointing. How was she supposed to do that without information?\n\nShe folded the telegram and slipped it into her cloth pocketbook. She then headed for Harry's Gun and Bakery Shoppe. The owner, Harry Piker, was a regular at Miss Lillian's. He was also one of the men on Amy's list of suspects.\n\nAn odd, though no less pleasant, smell greeted her as she entered the tiny shop. It was a combination of baked bread and pastry with just a hint of molten steel. An impressive assortment of rifles and shotguns was displayed on polished wood wall racks.\n\nAt the sound of jingling door bells, a stout man hobbled from the back room. Wiping his hands on a grimy apron, he grimaced with each step he took.\n\nA fringe of gray hair circled a glaring bald spot. Somewhere in his early fifties, his excessive weight and flaring gout suggested an insatiable sweet tooth. His age, shape, and thin hair reminded her of Sallie Wiseman, the notorious female bank robber. Amy had shadowed her for a month before they had enough evidence to put her behind bars.\n\nStanding behind the counter, Piker tossed an anxious glance at the door before shifting his gaze in her direction. \"What can I do for you?\"\n\nGuns were scattered on top of the glass counter in no particular order. She moved a Colt aside to get a better view of the pastries displayed on the shelves below.\n\n\"Are you the baker?\" she asked, perusing the variety of cakes, pies, and cookies.\n\n\"No, I'm the gunsmith. The wife handles the bakery. She stepped out for a moment.\"\n\n\"I'll take one of those,\" she said, pointing to a cherry-filled tart.\n\nHe slid the glass door open on his side of the counter and reached between the glass shelves. \"You new around here?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes. I work for Miss Lillian.\" When he failed to meet her gaze she added, \"I understand you're a regular client.\" She found him disgusting. He availed himself of Miss Lillian's \"hospitality\" and sold her five weapons but couldn't look Amy in the eye.\n\nHis jaw hardened and a vein stood out in his neck. \"Don't know whatcha talking about.\"\n\n\"My mistake.\" The man was a liar, but his appearance and poor health exonerated him; clearly he wasn't the Gunnysack Bandit.\n\nHe placed the pastry in a small box. \"That will be fifteen cents.\"\n\nAnxious to take her leave, she counted out the correct change, thanked him, and turned, package in hand. She reached the door just as it flew open, revealing a matronly woman wearing a shapeless floral dress.\n\nShe took one look at Amy and her face contorted into a hateful expression. She had a long, thin face with thick black eyebrows\u2014just like the outlaw known as Horse Face Freddie.\n\n\"What are you doing here?\" She addressed Amy but glared at Harry. \"I warned you to stay away from those horrible women!\" She made no effort to lower her voice, and passersby stopped to stare through the open doorway.\n\nHis face drained of color, Harry's mouth flapped open and shut like a dying fish before he was able to get his words out. \"She... she was only buying pastries, my love.\"\n\nAmy glared at him. He deserved his wife's wrath but, not wanting to make matters worse, she held up her purchase. \"That's all I was doing.\"\n\nHarry's wife snatched the box out of her hand and tossed it to the floor. \"Get out!\"\n\nThe woman shoved her on the shoulder and pushed her out the door. \"I won't have the likes of you eating my pastries!\" The small crowd gathered in front stepped back to let Amy pass.\n\nFace flaring, Amy hurried away, but this only seemed to incite the woman more. A string of obscenities followed her up the street. Amy had done nothing wrong, but her face burned in embarrassment.\n\nA beggar pawed her arm as she raced past him. Ignoring him, she hurried along the boardwalk, weaving around a baby carriage and barely avoiding the crates stacked in front of Max's General Mercantile and Flower Shoppe.\n\nSpotting the three church ladies passing out handbills ahead, she ducked into the hotel lobby and ran straight into a wall. It was only when the wall moved that she realized her mistake." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "\"Whoa!\" Colton steadied her with hands to her shoulders. \"Where you goin' in such a hurry? You came barreling in here like a cat with his tail afire.\"\n\nShe lifted her gaze upward, and his compelling eyes riveted her to the spot.\n\n\"I'm sorry... I...\" Surprised to find herself shaking, she glanced back, but no one had followed. She stepped away to gain her composure and put up her guard.\n\nHe dropped his hands to his sides and studied her with a look of concern. \"Are you all right, Amy?\"\n\n\"I'm fine,\" she said. His worried frown remained, and so she smiled. \"Just trying to dodge a bullet.\"\n\nThe corner of his mouth quirked upward. \"There seems to be a lot of that going around lately.\" He glanced over her head at the door. \"Come and sit for a spell. Looks like you might could use some refreshment.\" Ignoring the disapproving glance from the desk clerk, he took her by the arm and led her into the dining room.\n\nHe released her arm to pull out a chair for her. Pretending not to notice the polite gesture, she chose the opposite one. Even in public a detective couldn't afford to let his or her guard down. That meant sitting where she could keep an eye on the entrance.\n\nHe sat on the chair originally meant for her without comment but tossed a glance over his shoulder before picking up the bill of fare. Was he, too, worried about the proximity of the door to his back? If so, that made him either a criminal or lawman, although he didn't seem to fit in either shoe.\n\nWhy was that?\n\nIt was too early for the noon meal, but several tables were already occupied. Amy never sat in a public place without analyzing the people around her. Today, it took every bit of willpower she possessed to pull her gaze from Colton and focus on the other diners.\n\nTwo older men were having a serious conversation at a corner table. Judging by the way one stabbed the air with his fork, they were either discussing politics or religion. Few other subjects elicited such passion.\n\nAt another table, a young couple appeared to be having a lover's quarrel. The man looked cornered and on the defensive. That could only mean one thing: the woman was the wronged party.\n\nA man in an unfortunate checkered suit had followed them inside and was now seated at a corner table, facing the door. He obviously didn't belong in these parts; he was probably a salesman, but she hoped for his sake he wasn't selling men's suits.\n\n\"What would you like?\" Colton asked.\n\nShe met his gaze and tried to ignore her quickening pulse. \"I'm not hungry,\" she said.\n\nHe closed his menu and studied her. \"There's always room for ice cream. Let me guess... coffee, right?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"That's your favorite ice cream. Coffee.\"\n\nShe leaned back and regarded him with curiosity. \"How did you know?\" She loved coffee ice cream, but not every restaurant or ice cream parlor carried it.\n\nHe rubbed his jaw. \"I figured a woman with an iron-fist punch like yours wasn't the vanilla or strawberry type.\"\n\nShe couldn't help but laugh. \"You figured right,\" she said, though she didn't know whether to be flattered or alarmed by his ability to discern her preference in ice cream. \"Most men might have guessed chocolate.\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"Too conventional.\"\n\nShe was still trying to decide if he meant that as a compliment when a waiter appeared at their table. Colton ordered two dishes of coffee ice cream.\n\nHe then removed his hat and set it on an empty chair. A strand of brown hair fell across his forehead, giving him a boyish look. Wondering how it would feel to push the wayward strand back in place\u2014and run her fingers through his hair\u2014she twisted her fingers around the napkin on her lap.\n\nElbow on the table, Colton studied her over clasped hands. Feeling certain he could see through her disguise, she drew her gaze away from the intriguing cleft on his chin and rearranged the silverware.\n\n\"Do you always get it right?\" Head lowered, she peered at him through the fringe of her lashes. \"About the ice cream, I mean.\"\n\n\"Most times.\" He inclined his head toward a pinched-face woman complaining to the waiter in a loud voice. \"Lemon,\" he said. \"Definitely lemon.\"\n\nAmy covered her mouth to hide a giggle. \"What about him over there?\" She indicated the man in the checkered suit.\n\n\"Neapolitan,\" Colton said without hesitation.\n\nThis time she laughed out loud. She couldn't help it. He laughed, too, a deep chuckle that lit up his face with warm humor.\n\nAll too soon the light moment faded away, and his expression turned serious. \"What brings you to town?\" he asked.\n\n\"I needed to make a few purchases.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\nShe hesitated. God, please don't let him be the Gunnysack Bandit. A man who loves coffee ice cream and has such an attractive smile has to be one of the good guys.\n\n\"I have information that Rose... was with child.\"\n\nHe arched an eyebrow and sat back. Clearly that was news to him.\n\nShe gave him a moment to digest this before asking, \"Do you think your brother was the father?\"\n\nHe rubbed his chin. \"I don't know. Maybe.\"\n\n\"How did he meet Rose?\" she asked.\n\n\"Probably the same way most men meet... ladies like you.\"\n\nLadies like you. Normally, she would have been flattered by his remark. It meant she played her role if not perfect at least well enough to get the job done. Today, however, the words stabbed at her heart, as did the disapproval in his voice. She bit her lip to keep from telling him who she really was. Why it mattered what he thought of her she didn't know. She only knew that it did.\n\n\"What about the list of Miss Lillian's clients?\" he asked. \"Any luck there?\"\n\n\"I'm working on it.\" She wasn't about to turn anything over to him until headquarters either confirmed or denied his story. \"Tell me about your brother,\" she said, breaking the sudden strained silence.\n\nA shadow fleeted across his face, but after a moment he began. \"Dave was what you might call a maverick. His wild ways got worse after Pa died.\"\n\nDave's troubles started early with petty crime and that didn't surprise her. The Pinkerton detective agency found that most criminals started on the road to crime early in life, some as young as eight or nine.\n\nNothing, it seemed, was safe from Dave's pilfering hand, even the offering plate at church. Colton's disapproval of his brother's illegal activities alleviated her fears that he was the Gunnysack Bandit, and though questions remained, she felt profound relief.\n\n\"He gradually progressed to more lucrative hauls.\" He fell silent for a moment before adding, \"He was mad at the world. Nothing anyone said or did could get through to him.\"\n\nKnowing all too well how it felt to fail a sibling, she sympathized. \"It must have been difficult for you.\"\n\n\"Yes, it was, but nowhere near as difficult as the day I learned of his death. I arranged to have his body returned home by train, but my grandpappy refused to let me bury him in the family plot because of his criminal activities. Said Dave brought shame to the family name.\"\n\nCommiserating with a nod, she thought of Rose buried with society's outcasts.\n\n\"There's another reason why I want to prove Dave had changed his ways.\" He heaved a sigh. \"Dave has a son. He's eleven now, and I don't want him growing up thinking ill of his pa.\"\n\n\"I see.\" She tried to think of something to say that would ease his pained expression, something comforting, but God's words, not hers, came to mind. Voicing them would only blow her cover.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, he continued. \"He said he'd found the Lord. I prayed it wasn't just another one of his lies to get me to help him. Looks like maybe it was.\" After a moment he added, \"Nothing I hate worse than lies.\"\n\nHe was talking about his brother, of course, but a surge of guilt rushed through her. She was only doing her job, and lying was part of it. So why did it suddenly feel so wrong?\n\nThe waiter appeared and placed two bowls of ice cream on the table. During the interruption, she noticed the man in the checkered suit peering at them from behind his newspaper. His interest meant he probably wasn't a salesman.\n\nThen who? Another Pinkerton operative? None of the communications from headquarters mentioned reinforcements. If Mr. Pinkerton thought there was something to be gained, however, he wouldn't hesitate to send another detective or two.\n\nOnly one way to find out. Operatives had been taught to communicate with one another nonverbally. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, kept for just such a purpose. She waited for the man's head to pop out from behind his newspaper again. With a flip of her left wrist, she waved the handkerchief and waited. No answering signal.\n\nHe wasn't a Pinkerton operative, that much was certain. Perhaps he was just curious as to why a man would choose to entertain a harlot in public. That was a good question, and she swung her gaze back to her table companion.\n\n\"After you,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled, tucked her handkerchief back in her sleeve, and picked up her spoon. The last ice cream she'd tasted was in New Orleans. Unfortunately, hay used to insulate the ice had found its way into the frozen dessert, making it unpalatable. She proceeded with caution as she dug her spoon into the smooth round mound in her bowl and lifted it to her mouth. The sweet cool cream melted in her mouth with no bits of hay to spoil the flavor.\n\n\"Mmm. This is soooooo good.\"\n\nLooking pleased, Colton picked up his own spoon. They ate in silence for a few moments before he asked, \"Have any siblings?\"\n\n\"Several,\" she said in a tone she hoped would discourage further questions.\n\nHe studied her a moment but, apparently taking the hint, he returned to the subject of Dave. \"One of the hardest days of my life was the day I arrested him. My own brother...\"\n\nHer hand froze and she nearly dropped her spoon. \"You arrested him?\"\n\n\"As a Texas Ranger, I had no choice.\"\n\nHer eyes widened. \"You're a Texas Ranger?\"\n\n\"Was,\" he said, his voice taut.\n\nThat explained his military bearing. \"I pegged you as a rancher.\"\n\n\"Actually, you hit the peg on the head.\" He sat back and studied her. \"I left the Rangers and started my own ranch. A small one by Texas standards.\"\n\n\"A horse ranch,\" she said.\n\n\"Cattle.\"\n\n\"Really? I would have sworn you were into horses.\"\n\nHis eyebrows rose. \"What makes you say that?\"\n\nThe way he handled his horse was one clue, but she didn't want to let on that she had watched him from her bedroom window, not just once but twice. \"Your hands,\" she said.\n\nHe opened his hands and stared at his palms. They were large hands, strong, each finger long and tapered.\n\n\"Cowhands have rough hands,\" she explained. \"Horse wranglers wear gloves, which leave hands callus-free.\"\n\nHe gave her a crooked grin. \"You have me there. I got me some pretty good cattlemen to do the heavy lifting. Me? You're right. I'm more of a horse guy.\" He dropped his hands. \"Very observant. You should be a detective.\"\n\nHer bowl now empty, she set her spoon down. Now look what she'd done, almost given herself away. Just being around him made her want to be more like herself and less like someone else, and that was a worry.\n\n\"I don't imagine being a detective pays as well as my current job,\" she said. Her ploy worked; his face grew tight and his eyes flat. As if suddenly reminded of who she was, he seemed anxious to distance himself. He reached into his vest pocket for his money clip to pay the tab.\n\nShe slipped her cloth bag over her wrist. Oddly, she hated to see their time together come to an end. \"Thank you for the ice cream.\"\n\nColton nodded but failed to meet her gaze. \"My pleasure.\"\n\nShe sighed. Always the gentleman, even in the company of a woman he considered to be anything but a lady.\n\nHe pulled out his money clip. \"If you learn anything\u2014\"\n\nStanding, she nodded. \"Hotel, room fourteen.\"\n\nHe lifted his gaze and she smiled, but it was halfhearted at best. His \"ladies like you\" comment still stung.\n\nHe failed to return her smile, and her spirits dropped yet another notch. Puzzled by the way he affected her, she walked away, but with no less vigilance.\n\nShe ventured a quick glance at the man in the checkered suit. Surprise, surprise, his ice cream of choice was Neapolitan." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "Chapter 17\n\nThat Sunday morning Amy sat alone in her room. She'd hardly slept the night before, and exhaustion hung heavy in her limbs. Strange sounds woke her, and once she even thought she heard someone crying.\n\nShe rubbed her pounding temples. Of all the assignments she'd had through the years, this one was the toughest, and the strain was playing havoc with her nerves.\n\nNot only was she expected to act and dress in a way that went against her Christian beliefs, living at the bordello posed an endless set of challenges with no time off for church.\n\nMost criminals worked at night and slept late. So even on shadow duty she could usually sneak away for an hour or two to attend Sunday morning worship. But with Coral watching her every move, she couldn't take the chance. Then, too, there was always the possibility that even dressed in her own clothes someone in church would recognize her.\n\nSighing, she reached for her Bible and thumbed through the dog-eared pages. No sooner had she settled down to read than the door flew open. She hid the Bible in the folds of her skirt.\n\nIt was Buttercup. \"I'm out of hair pomade. May I use yours?\"\n\nAmy nodded and pointed to the dresser.\n\nButtercup glided into the room, dressed only in bloomers and laced corset. Her orange-red hair, normally twisted into an elaborate coronet with a fluff of bangs, hung down her back in tangled wet strands.\n\nShe stopped in front of Amy's chair, hands at her waist. \"What are you hiding?\"\n\n\"It's none of your business.\"\n\nButtercup reached for Amy's lap and the Bible flew to the floor. \"Now look what you've done,\" Amy snapped.\n\nButtercup stared at her like one might stare at a coiled rattler. \"Do you still believe in that?\" After a moment, she added, \"Believe in God?\"\n\nAmy picked the Bible off the floor and set it on the bedside table. She could deny who she was and from where she'd come. She could deny that the sun was yellow and the grass green. But when asked outright she suddenly realized she couldn't deny belief in her heavenly Father.\n\n\"Yes, I do.\" If admitting belief jeopardized the case, William Pinkerton would kill her. That is, if his brother Robert didn't do it first.\n\nWith an intake of breath, Buttercup lowered herself onto the edge of the bed. \"I used to believe in God.\" She shrugged as if it no longer mattered what she believed. The wretched look on her face said otherwise. \"That was a long time ago.\"\n\nAmy leaned forward. \"What happened to you?\" And when she got no response she prodded. \"What brought you to this place?\"\n\nButtercup's lids fluttered shut, covering her eyes with painted blue half circles.\n\n\"You can trust me,\" Amy urged. \"I won't say a word to the others. I promise.\"\n\nFor the longest while Buttercup didn't speak. At last she opened her eyes. \"When I was twelve, a gang of boys...\" Overcome with emotion, she could no longer get the words out. Tears mixed with black charcoal from her lashes trickled down her rounded cheeks.\n\nAmy handed her a clean handkerchief and sat on the bed next to her. \"You don't have to say any more.\" It seemed that all of life could be narrowed down to a single incident or memory. It was as if everyone had an inner compass, all pointing to one unforgettable moment in time and everything started and ended there\u2014a personal north.\n\nAmy's inner needle pointed to the disappearance of her sister. No matter how much time passed, the needle never moved away from that one traumatic loss, at least not permanently.\n\nButtercup dabbed her eyes. \"After what happened I was shunned, and no decent man would have me. No one wanted me.\" She paused for a moment before adding in a hushed voice, \"Not even my family.\"\n\n\"You're wrong about that. God still wants you.\" She pointed to the Bible. \"I was just reading about Rahab. Even though she was a prostitute, God used her to save two of His servants. So you see? Everyone has value in the Lord's eyes. That includes you, me, and everyone in this house.\"\n\nButtercup made a face. \"You think He's so great? Where was He when they... Where has He been since?\"\n\n\"He's been here,\" Amy whispered with meaning. Though God hadn't seen fit to answer her prayers about Cissy, she never doubted His existence. He was, in truth, the only constant in her life. She picked up the Bible and held it out to her. \"He's here. We just have to reach out to Him.\"\n\nButtercup pushed the Bible away, and her eyes flared with angry sparks. \"It hasn't done you any good. You're here, just like me. Just like the others. Where's your God now?\" Seeming to forget her reason for coming, she stormed out of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "First thing Monday morning, Tom stormed into the marshal's office. He didn't think much of Marshal Flood. Judging by the lawman's dark frown when Tom entered, the feeling was mutual. Even Flood's black mustache seemed to droop when Tom entered, but his garish cowhide boots with the tooled red roses remained planted firmly on top of the desk.\n\n\"I stopped by to see how the investigation is going,\" Tom said, keeping his tone civil.\n\nThe marshal indicated the stack of papers on his desk with a wave of his hand. \"Which one?\"\n\nTom took a seething breath. \"Have you even tried finding my brother's killer? Or Rose's?\"\n\nHe didn't like what went on at Miss Lillian's parlor, but those women deserved justice, and he hoped to God they got it.\n\n\"I'm a busy man.\" Flood dropped his feet to the floor and tossed a thumb toward the jail cells. \"Last night I made four arrests. This morning I got two reports of missing horses, plus a family altercation and a knife fight to deal with. I still haven't had a chance to check Reverend Matthews's report of vandalism at Miss Lillian's bed house and\u2014\"\n\nTom stiffened. \"They were vandalized?\" Amy hadn't mentioned trouble at the parlor house.\n\nFlood shrugged. \"No big deal. Someone threw a brick through the window is all. Not for the first time, I might add. If I didn't know better, I'd think that Miss Lillian owned stock in Cubby's Windows and Fine Lamps.\" He spread his hands. \"Like I said, I'm a busy man.\"\n\nIt was all Tom could do to hold his temper. \"And a prostitute's death is of small importance.\"\n\n\"Don't go putting words in my mouth. I'm doing all I can.\"\n\n\"Just as you're doing everything you can to find my brother's killer? You find his killer, you find Rose's. You'll also find the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\nThe mustache twitched, but the beady eyes didn't move. \"There's no proof of that.\"\n\nTom patted the pocket where he kept Rose's letter. The letter had been found on Dave's body, so Flood knew about it. Evidently it hadn't carried much weight. \"I have all the proof I need.\"\n\nThe marshal's eyes glittered. \"Yeah, well, you have your theory, boy. And I got mine.\"\n\n\"What is that supposed to mean?\"\n\n\"A list of robberies credited to the Gunnysack Bandit was found clutched in your brother's hand.\"\n\nTom stilled. This was news to him. He had been led to believe that everything found on Dave's body had been sent to the family. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"Makes me wonder what it was doing there.\"\n\nTom didn't like the implication. Didn't like it one bit. \"If you were doing your job, you wouldn't have to wonder.\"\n\n\"If you think you can do better...\"\n\nTom planted his hands on the desk and leaned forward. \"A grasshopper could do better!\" He turned and left the office, but once outside, his bravado deserted him.\n\nWhat was that list of robberies credited to the Gunnysack Bandit doing in Dave's hand? A knot tightened in Tom's chest. At first, he had discounted Buckeye's contention that Dave was the bandit, but things were starting to add up. Fortunately, his Ranger days had taught him to keep a clear and open mind and not go jumping to conclusions.\n\nThings looked bad, but his brother's name would be cleared once all the facts were known\u2014of that he had no doubt. Okay, maybe a little..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "Chapter 18\n\nIt was almost midnight by the time Amy ducked behind Miss Lillian's carriage house. Every night after the last \"guest\" had been sent home Georgia left the parlor house like clockwork. Maybe it had something to do with Rose or even the Gunnysack Bandit, maybe not. Either way, Amy intended to find out where the woman went and for what reason.\n\nThe glow of a thin crescent moon bleached the redbrick house white and turned the trees and bushes into soft sculptures. It's what Cissy used to call a fingernail moon. A rabbit sat perfectly still, its long ears pointed up like two arrows.\n\nThe air was cool, and Amy shivered beneath the knitted shawl. One by one, the upstairs lights turned off. Miss Lillian's room was the last to grow dark.\n\nA squeak of the cellar door signaled Georgia's presence, and the rabbit hopped away. Hidden behind tall bushes, the door would be easy to miss if a person didn't know where to look.\n\nAmy waited for Georgia to circle the house to the front before leaving her hiding place. She didn't want to lose her, but neither did she want to chance being caught following her.\n\nThough there were private residences farther down the block, some offering room and board, Miss Lillian's Parlor House stood alone, surrounded by empty fields and groves of trees, like a shunned child.\n\nAt first it looked like Georgia was heading for town, but then she made a sharp right onto Madison, a narrow dirt road lined with modest one-story brick residences. By the time Amy reached the corner, Georgia had already let herself into a fenced yard. Amy waited until Georgia reached the front porch and vanished inside before drawing near.\n\nIt was too dark to see much, but the broken gate and untrimmed bushes suggested the house was in ill repair.\n\nGeorgia was never gone for more than fifteen or twenty minutes. That was hardly time enough for a romantic rendezvous. So what was she doing here? Amy could think of only one way to find out.\n\nNot wanting to confront Georgia on the deserted street in the middle of the night\u2014especially since she now carried a gun\u2014Amy hurried back to Miss Lillian's. After letting herself into the house through the cellar door, she sat on the old rocking chair and waited. Since the cellar was her least favorite place in the house, she also prayed there were no spiders or mice or other creepy things waiting to attack.\n\nFortunately, she didn't have to wait long. The squeak of door hinges was followed by a muffled thud. Soft footsteps echoed from the wooden stairs.\n\nAmy waited for her to round the screen. \"Georgia?\" she whispered. \"It's me, Amy.\"\n\nGeorgia's dark form froze, and for a moment, she didn't speak. \"What... what are you doing here?\"\n\nAmy stood so as to be seen in the soft glow of the crescent moon shining through the narrow cellar windows. \"I was about to ask you the same thing.\"\n\n\"You can't say anything about this.\" Panic edged Georgia's voice. \"Please promise you won't tell Miss Lillian.\"\n\n\"I won't say a word.\" After a pause, Amy asked, \"Are you seeing someone? A man?\"\n\n\"It's not a man.\" Georgia's voice sound resigned.\n\n\"Then who?\"\n\nA whoosh of breath preceded Georgia's answer. \"My children.\"\n\n\"You have children?\" Amy had conjured up all kinds of possible explanations for Georgia's midnight wanderings, but never that.\n\n\"Two. A boy, nearly six, and a girl, four.\" Georgia paused for a moment before adding, \"My mother lives a couple of blocks away, and every night I stand by my children's beds and watch them sleep. I can't fall asleep myself until I've seen and touched them. They think an angel comes to visit each night.\" She gave a throaty laugh that held no mirth. \"Can you imagine? Me, an angel?\"\n\nAmy's heart went out to her. \"I had no idea, Georgia.\"\n\n\"I was once a respectable, married woman. Hard to imagine, isn't it? My husband was a gambler. He was caught cheating, and someone shot him.\"\n\n\"I'm so sorry, Georgia. It must have been awful for you.\"\n\n\"I can't begin to tell you.\" She took a ragged breath. \"He left me heavily in debt. I lost the house\u2014everything. My children, mother, and I were destitute. I took in wash, but no matter how hard I worked I could barely pay the rent, let alone put food on the table. One day I found my son eating the paper off the wall. He said he was hungry.\" She paused as if reliving the moment before adding, \"That was the day I knocked on Miss Lillian's door.\"\n\nAmy felt a surge of guilt for judging these women. For judging Georgia. Her own family hadn't been rich, but living on a farm they had never wanted for food. \"It must be hard to be away from your children.\"\n\n\"You have no idea. I can't bear for them to see me during daylight hours. To see the paint on my face and the horrid clothes I wear. That's why I only visit late at night when they're in bed and it's dark.\"\n\n\"Does anyone else know?\" Amy asked.\n\n\"No, only you.\"\n\nAmy didn't know what to say. She couldn't blame Georgia for wanting to care for her children. Her mistake had been that she knocked on the wrong door.\n\nThe last thought made Amy think of something. \"What about the cellar entrance? Does anyone else know about it? The guests?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" Georgia fell silent for a moment. \"You're thinking that's how Rose's killer got in, aren't you?\"\n\nThat was exactly what she was thinking. Because either the killer came in through the cellar door or was already in the house. That would make the female residents suspects, or even Mr. Pepper.\n\n\"Come on, we better get some sleep,\" Amy said.\n\nGeorgia hesitated. \"You won't tell anyone...\"\n\n\"Not a soul. Your secret's safe.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "The next morning, Amy took a chance on traveling to town dressed in a ladylike blue skirt and white shirtwaist, her face scrubbed clean and hair tucked beneath a plain bonnet. After what happened at the Gun and Bakery Shoppe, she realized her disguise worked both for and against her. Today she sought to be anonymous.\n\nDucking out of the parlor house unseen had been a challenge, but the effort was well worth it. She could now conduct her business without the usual stares. She prayed her luck would continue and she wouldn't meet up with anyone who knew her.\n\nThat turned out to be a futile hope. Much to her dismay, she bumped into Mr. Crocker, a regular parlor house guest, at the post office. He'd seen her at Miss Lillian's on numerous occasions, but today he appeared not to recognize her.\n\nHe tipped his hat politely and held the door open for her. \"Ma'am.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nHe might have been less gallant had he known his mop of brown curls and oily smile reminded her of Deadeye Pete, a man now on trial for murder.\n\nShe planned to drop her letter in the mailbox but at the last minute decided to hand it to the postmaster directly to see his reaction.\n\nHe didn't recognize her, either. Neither did Mr. Piker at the Gun and Bakery Shoppe. Nor did his wife. Not only did Mrs. Piker sell her a cherry tart, but she engaged her in a pleasant conversation about the weather.\n\nPeople apparently didn't look at prostitutes that closely, or maybe they just didn't see the person beneath the paint and fancy clothes. It was an extraordinary discovery, one she intended to use to full advantage.\n\nConfident now that she could conduct her business in town without the bother of having to dress in a way she abhorred, she hurried along the boardwalk toward the leather and candle shop, its owner on the suspect list.\n\nSuddenly, a body shot out of the Idle Hands Saloon and Dance Hall and sprawled facedown at her feet. Amy immediately recognized the checkered suit of the man in the hotel dining room.\n\nShe bent to shake him on the shoulder, wrinkling her nose against the strong smell of alcohol. \"Are you all right, sir?\"\n\nFor answer the man merely groaned. He then raised his torso off the wooden walk and squinted through unfocused red eyes. Climbing to his feet, he rubbed his jaw and spouted a slurred curse as he staggered away.\n\nShe was so intent in watching him she failed to notice Mr. Colton until he was only a few feet in front of her. He stopped; their eyes met and she heard his intake of breath.\n\n\"Amy?\"\n\nStartled, she shook her head and stepped off the boardwalk onto the dirt-packed road. No one else had recognized her. Why had he?\n\nDodging a horse and wagon, she hurried across the street, her heart beating as fast as her racing feet." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "Chapter 19\n\nAmy was still running by the time she reached Miss Lillian's. Hoping no one would see her, she rushed around back and lifted the cellar trapdoor. Closing it after her, she walked down the steps and stopped to catch her breath before moving through the dim underground room to the stairs leading to the kitchen.\n\nShe was in luck; Coffey hadn't started the noon meal yet and was nowhere to be seen.\n\nTiptoeing down the hall, she glanced in the parlor. The draperies were shut tight, and the candles were lit. A man Amy didn't recognize sat at a small round table opposite Miss Lillian. Both were staring into the crystal ball.\n\nThe man's pointy chin whiskers and hooked nose reminded her of the notorious outlaw J. C. Bitterman, who robbed thirty-seven stages before she'd trailed him to his boardinghouse where he was arrested.\n\n\"I see something,\" Miss Lillian said in a hushed tone. \"I see the letter M.\"\n\nThe man sat forward. \"M for money?\"\n\nShaking her head, Amy hurried up the stairs. How could anyone believe in such nonsense? Only God knew what the future held.\n\nShe didn't see Coral until she reached the second-floor landing.\n\nCoral looked her up and down, her chocolate-brown eyes narrowed in suspicion. \"Where have you been? And why are you dressed like a poor farmer's wife?\"\n\n\"I wasn't feeling well so I stepped outside for some air.\" She moved away from the stairs, but Coral blocked her way.\n\n\"Seems like you've been doing a lot of that lately.\"\n\n\"I don't see that it's any of your business what I do.\" She tried to dodge around her, but Coral refused to let her pass.\n\n\"I think it is.\"\n\nA door opened and Buttercup stepped into the hall. \"What's going on?\"\n\nCoral folded her arms. \"That's what I'd like to know.\"\n\nPolly's head popped out of her room. \"L\u2014leave her alone, C\u2014C\u2014Coral. She's still new.\"\n\n\"Yes, she is new.\" Coral's eyes narrowed. \"And, in fact, started work the very same day Rose was murdered.\"\n\n\"So what are you saying, Coral?\" Amy kept her voice deceptively calm. It was the same voice used to pacify union rioters. She sensed Coral could be a formidable foe, and that was the last thing she needed.\n\n\"I'm saying that it seems like a strange coincidence.\"\n\nButtercup's gaze swung from Coral to Amy. \"It does seem like that. And why are you dressed in those clothes?\"\n\nAll three women stared at her.\n\n\"As I told Coral, I wasn't feeling well and stepped outside to get some fresh air. And I did not kill Rose. I didn't even know her.\" Did they believe her? It was hard to tell. \"Now if you'll excuse me.\"\n\nShe walked past Coral. Moments later she stood in her room staring at herself in the mirror. Tom Colton had recognized her when no one else in town did. What a nuisance. From now on, she'd have to dress like a proper scarlet lady\u2014or risk having him guess the truth." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Tom sat in the hotel lobby. Tapping the arm of the chair, he watched the door. It was the third day straight he'd waited for Amy. If that wasn't bad enough, she had the annoying habit of popping up in his thoughts at the most inopportune times. He even imagined seeing her in town on occasion. One poor woman he'd mistaken for Amy had run from him like a scared rabbit without giving him a chance to apologize.\n\nHe grimaced and rubbed his forehead. He didn't even know Amy's full name. Not that it mattered; his only interest was business. He could never fall for such a woman. Not like his brother...\n\nDave, oh, Dave. He'd been in town for nearly three weeks, and what did he have to show for his efforts? Nothing! He was no closer to finding his brother's killer than he was when he first arrived. No closer to finding out if his brother really had turned over a new leaf. If anything, the opposite seemed to be true, and he had more questions than answers. That was the reason he wanted to see Amy. The only reason.\n\nWas she avoiding him on purpose? Or did she simply have nothing to report? Frustrated with his own lack of progress, he decided it was time for action. If Amy wouldn't come to him, he would go to her.\n\nOnly this time, he'd keep his eye out for bullets. Better make that both eyes." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "It was just after dark when he arrived at Miss Lillian's Parlor House and Fine Boots. A thin crescent moon seemingly mocked his presence as he tethered his horse and walked up the pathway to the porch. A new sign had been tacked onto the front door. SHOOTING LESSONS, TWO FIFTY.\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. Miss Lillian was at it again. The way these women wielded their firearms, she'd be advertising a funeral home next.\n\nHe rang the bell, and a tall dark-skinned woman, whose name he couldn't remember, opened the door.\n\nShe gave him a once-over before letting him in. A strange screech-owl sound greeted him as he followed her past the rampant display of boots for sale and into the parlor. Miss Lillian played the piano as she sang. The woman couldn't carry a tune in a corked jug, but that didn't stop her none. \"If you can't sing well, sing loud\" seemed to be her motto.\n\nAll the working women were present and seated upon ottomans amid clouds of colorful silk and taffeta skirts. The upholstered chairs was reserved for johns or, as Miss Lillian liked to call them, guests.\n\nSeveral men were scattered about the room holding glasses of alcohol and puffing on cigars or pipes. Some Tom recognized from town, but not all. One he even remembered seeing in church on Sunday. Trying not to let his dislike for the place show, his gaze lit on Amy.\n\nFor some reason, she stood out from the rest. Her eyes widened at the sight of him. Tonight she wore a dazzling green gown. Though the room was cool, she held a fan in such a way as to allow a tantalizing peek at a creamy white shoulder, while keeping the valley of her neckline hidden.\n\nCompared to the others, she looked as prim and proper as a preacher's wife at a prayer meeting. Given her attire, that was saying something.\n\nClearly, she was surprised to see him, but she looked away when he took the seat next to her.\n\nThe men came in various sizes and shapes and ranged in age from late twenties to early fifties. They all had one thing in common; they all sported shiny new boots, putting his old leather dogs to shame.\n\nMiss Lillian finished her song and scooted around on the piano bench to face them. Though her singing voice gave her much to be modest about, she accepted the thin applause with an air of entitlement.\n\nWith a wave of a jeweled hand, she brushed aside a red curl and pressed her hands together. \"Tonight, gentlemen, I have a treat for you. Amy has agreed to play 'For Eloise' by Mr. Lewd Wig Bay-toven.\"\n\nAmy rose amid a round of clapping hands. \"That's 'F\u00fcr Elise.' \" She smiled before adding, \"By Mr. Ludwig van Beethoven.\"\n\nIt was all Tom could do not to laugh out loud at Miss Lillian's gaffe. Instead, he cleared his throat and tried to look appropriately at ease.\n\nAmy seated herself on the piano stool and raised her hands to the keys. She looked perfectly composed and comfortable, as if the piano were but a mere extension of her.\n\nAlmost instantly, the lilting tune filled the air, and he listened with rapt attention.\n\nIt didn't seem possible that this was the same tuneless piano that moments earlier had sounded like a dying cow. Even the occasional wrong note didn't spoil the pleasing musical sound.\n\nThere were four other men in the room, and they all sat forward. Amy's playing seemed to draw them in like a magnet.\n\nAll too soon, she completed the piece. She stood and accepted the applause with a modest bow.\n\n\"Bravo!\" called out a bearded man who saluted her with his whiskey glass.\n\n\"Well done!\" cried another.\n\nThe bald-headed man directly across from Amy gave her a broad wink and patted the seat next to him. His complexion was as lumpy and pitted as a bad road, and his eyes bulged out like a toad's.\n\nTom felt a strange and totally unexpected protective surge rush through him. Where it came from, he had no idea. It was all he could do not to drag Amy away from the leering glances of the other men.\n\nHe balled his hands into fists to keep from acting on the impulse. What went on between these walls was none of his business. He wasn't out to save the world. All he wanted was to find his brother's killer.\n\nEither Amy didn't notice the gesturing man or chose to ignore him. Instead, she let Colton catch her eye. For a split second it seemed as if he and Amy were the only two in the room, but the feeling passed when she took her seat.\n\n\"Gentlemen, it's time to choose your partners,\" Miss Lillian announced.\n\nTom shot to his feet. \"I choose Amy.\"\n\nThe silence that followed suggested he'd acted out of turn. He glanced down at Amy, but she offered neither help nor encouragement. The guests weren't quite so neutral, and the bald-headed man's expression was downright hostile. If looks could kill, Tom would be gasping for his last breath. As it was, he felt compelled to loosen the bolo tie donned specially for the occasion.\n\nMiss Lillian's hands fluttered around all nervous-like. \"Amy is already spoken for.\"\n\n\"I believe this will speak louder.\" Tom reached into his vest pocket and slapped two bills on the low table. If he didn't watch out, Miss Lillian would send him to the poorhouse.\n\nJust as he thought, the madam wasn't about to turn down such a generous amount of money. She exchanged a meaningful and maybe even an apologetic glance with Amy before shrugging to signal the matter closed.\n\nHe frowned. Amy and the madam were evidently in cahoots. He wouldn't put it past them to have a plan to wring him dry.\n\nThe toad-eyed man protested, but Miss Lillian hooked an arm around his. \"Would you care to have your fortune told, Mr. Newhall, on the house?\"\n\nWhile the madam pacified him, the other women sprang into action and one by one led the other guests away with flirtatious chatter.\n\nTom expected at the least a little friendly banter from Amy. He did, after all, save her from toad man. What he got was an angry glare before she stomped out of the room and up the stairs ahead of him.\n\nHe had to hurry to keep up. Something told him he was in for a good tongue-lashing. Not that it worried him. Okay, maybe a little..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Chapter 20\n\nSlamming the bedroom door shut, Amy whirled around to face him. \"Why are you stalking me?\"\n\nHe drew back, but his innocent act didn't fool her one whit. \"Is that what you think I'm doing?\"\n\n\"Every time I turn around, you're there.\" She paced back and forth. Two of tonight's guests were on the suspect list. She and Miss Lillian had devised a plan that would have allowed her to engage each of them in conversation. Now, thanks to Colton, she'd missed her chance.\n\n\"You had no right to drag me away from the other guests!\"\n\n\"Is this the thanks I get for trying to save your virtue?\" He bit the words out between clenched teeth. \"Or rather, what's left of it?\"\n\n\"I don't need your help,\" she sputtered. It wasn't just his interference that worried her; it was the way his mere presence played havoc with her senses. She felt all at once disturbed and excited and, more than anything, confused. Whatever happened to the levelheaded woman who had helped put away some of the country's worst criminals?\n\n\"Ah, that's right. I forgot. The lady is armed.\" He availed himself of the only chair in the room and tossed his hat on the bed. \"Relax. All I want is information. We have a deal. Remember?\"\n\n\"I told you I'd be in touch if anything turned up.\"\n\n\"It's been three days,\" he said. \"The guilty look on your face when I walked in tonight tells me there's a cat in the bag, somewhere. So let's have it.\"\n\nShe was just about to order him out of her room when she decided against it. Maybe tonight wasn't entirely a lost cause. She stopped in front of him and forced herself to think like a proper detective.\n\n\"How do I know you didn't kill Rose?\"\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. \"Me?\" He shook his head in disbelief. \"I was with you, remember?\"\n\n\"You could have killed her before entering my room.\"\n\nHe pursed his lips. \"What motive would I have?\"\n\n\"Revenge. Perhaps you blame her for your brother's death.\"\n\n\"Makes sense.\" He nodded. \"Makes perfect sense. Only it's not true. I never set eyes on Rose until I saw her on the floor, dead. That's why I mistook you for her.\"\n\n\"That could have been an act.\"\n\n\"Or it could be true,\" he said. \"Ask Miss Lillian what time she sent me upstairs. Less than thirty seconds later I walked into your room.\"\n\nMiss Lillian had more or less confirmed the time line, but she wasn't ready to let him off the hook just yet. \"There's another way in and out of the house.\"\n\n\"Oh, you mean the cellar door?\"\n\nShe blinked. \"So you know about that.\"\n\n\"The night you were playing... kitty in a tree... I had just finished searching the grounds. That's when I found the trapdoor.\"\n\nRecalling how she had fallen into his arms that night, she blushed. Hoping he wouldn't notice her reddening cheeks, she practically barked out the next question. \"What were you searching for?\"\n\n\"Another way in and out of the house. There were only eight of us here the night Rose died, including Miss Lillian and one other... what do you call 'em... guests? I know I didn't do it, and I'm pretty sure you didn't, so that leaves six possible suspects.\"\n\n\"Mr. Pepper was with Buttercup.\"\n\nHe rubbed his upper lip. \"That still leaves four suspects.\"\n\n\"None of whom had a motive for killing her.\"\n\nHe shrugged. \"That remains to be seen. But I doubt that any of the ladies or even Mr. Pepper had the strength to do the deed. She put up quite a fight, and if you recall, I was unruffled when I walked into your room. So that leaves the possibility that an outsider entered the house through the trapdoor.\"\n\n\"There was no fight.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"Rose probably never knew what hit her. Someone snuck up from behind and hit her over the head. Her killer then searched the room. Does any of this sound familiar to you?\"\n\nA dark cloud fleeted across his face. \"I'm here for one thing and one thing alone\u2014to find my brother's killer! You can think what you want, but that's the unbridled truth.\"\n\nShe lowered herself onto the bed. \"The whole truth?\" she asked. For all she knew, he was still a Texas Ranger tracking down the Gunnysack Bandit. That would make him a competitor.\n\nHis eyes brimmed with emotion. \"I don't expect you to understand what it's like to lose a sibling.\"\n\nHer breath caught. \"I know very well what it's like,\" she snapped. Why do others assume theirs is the only pain?\n\nThe lines faded from his face. \"Amy?\" Before she knew it, he was on the bed next to her. \"What is it? Talk to me.\"\n\nMaybe it was his gentle tone. Or perhaps the way his gaze seemed to reach into her very soul. Whatever it was, she suddenly found herself telling him about her sister's disappearance. It was wrong to mention anything so personal, to reveal telling details about her past, but she couldn't help herself. It was as if an emotional volcano had erupted inside and she couldn't stop the flow.\n\nHe listened closely, intently, holding her gaze in the blue depths of his.\n\n\"I was twelve at the time, and Cissy was three.\" That fateful night had happened fifteen years ago, yet she remembered the details as if it was only yesterday.\n\n\"She and I shared a room. One night she cried out in her sleep, and when I went to her she told me that a monster was trying to take her.\" \"There's no such thing as a monster,\" she'd assured her. \"Hush, now. I won't let anything bad happen to you.\"\n\n\"I waited for her to fall asleep again before tiptoeing back to my own bed. The next morning she was gone and... was nowhere to be found.\" She'd cried an ocean for her lost sister and thought she had no more tears to shed, but her burning eyes told her otherwise.\n\n\"Some people believed she might have wandered outside. Bears and wolves had been known to carry away small animals in the area. No one said as much, but I knew the dangers. A child wouldn't have a chance against such a predator.\" Wouldn't have a chance against a monster, either.\n\n\"Do you think that's what happened?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't know what to believe.\" She dabbed at her eyes. \"Eventually, everyone stopped looking.\" But not her. She kept track of Cissy's age and imagined what she would look like as she got older. To this day Amy scrutinized every blond she met, each woman's face studied to the point that some people had accused her of staring.\n\n\"And you never heard from her again?\" he asked, breaking the sudden silence.\n\n\"Not a word.\"\n\nHe studied her. \"But you don't think she's dead.\"\n\nShe'd never really thought about it in those exact terms. Now that she did, she knew he was right. \"It's just a feeling I have. I can't explain it.\"\n\nIt was crazy. Everyone else believed Cissy was dead, even her own parents. People back home said Amy was foolish to live in the past. Her mother had been convinced it was the reason Amy hadn't married and feared she was doomed to spinsterhood. Her father had simply refused to mention his missing daughter's name, even on his deathbed. If only she could get Cissy's last words out of her mind, perhaps she could let the past go.\n\nColton's hand on hers stunned her out of her reverie. The gentle touch of his strong fingers surprised her.\n\nShe looked up at him, and the tenderness in his eyes nearly tore away the last of her defenses. Battling for control, she pulled her hand away, but nothing could be done for the tears.\n\n\"The worst part is not knowing what happened to her,\" she said. With death came a sense of closure, but there was no closure with Cissy. It was like living with an empty tomb.\n\nHe nodded. \"As a Texas Ranger, I saw firsthand what a missing person could do to a family.\"\n\nCupping her face tenderly, he brushed away her tears with his thumbs. No touch had ever affected her on such a deep level. It felt as if he'd reached into her heart and removed part of the pain.\n\n\"Thank you,\" she whispered. No gaze had ever made her feel more understood.\n\nHe released her physically, but his gaze never left her face. Sitting together on the bed they talked\u2014he about his brother, she about her sister.\n\nHe leaned against the headboard and stretched out his long legs, letting his feet hang off the edge of the mattress. She sat next to him, hugging her knees. Her taffeta skirt nestled against a trouser leg, forming an intimacy between them she didn't want to break.\n\nDespite their close proximity, she felt no threat\u2014at least not from him. But the niggling inside cautioned against the dangers of forming a bond, a warning she feared might have come too late.\n\n\"Aren't we a fine couple,\" she said, after he'd shared a humorous story about his brother; not all his memories were sad.\n\nHe flashed a crooked smile before his face grew serious. \"Have you thought about hiring a private detective to search for your sister?\" he asked. \"The Pinkerton agency might be a good place to start.\"\n\nHearing the name of her employer startled her, but she managed to keep from reacting. She'd already availed herself of the Pinkerton resources, of course, but he had no way of knowing that.\n\n\"I heard they're expensive,\" she said, hoping that would end the discussion.\n\n\"I'd be willing to help with expenses.\"\n\nShe stared at him, shocked. \"Why would you do such a thing?\"\n\n\"Maybe if you found your sister\u2014\" He grimaced. \"Amy, I hate seeing you in this place. This isn't what God wants for you. For anyone.\"\n\nIt was all she could do to breathe. It had been a long time since anyone had shown honest interest in her welfare, and she was touched beyond words.\n\n\"I should go,\" he said, apparently mistaking her silence for censure. He hesitated. \"You look like you could use some shut-eye.\"\n\nShe didn't want to sleep; she wanted him to stay. \"Wait,\" she said. Slipping off the bed, she dashed across the room and reached into the top bureau drawer for the handwritten list she'd made.\n\n\"Here're the names you wanted.\" He had no way of knowing it, but handing him that list was a sign of trust; any suspicion that he had something to do with Rose's death had been completely put to rest.\n\nStanding, he took the list from her. After a quick glance, he folded the paper in fours and tucked it into his pocket. \"Thank you. That's a big help.\"\n\nShe smiled. Only then did she realize how much lighter her cares seemed. She hadn't talked to anyone about her sister for years, and it had done her heart good to open up to him. If only she could share the rest and tell him the truth about her residence at Miss Lillian's.\n\nHe reached for his hat, and she felt an odd sense of disappointment. She didn't want the evening to end.\n\n\"You can't go yet,\" she said. It was all she could do not to bar the door to keep him there. Already she felt loneliness creeping into the room and sensed the ghosts of the past waiting to pounce.\n\nHe donned his hat and tugged on the brim. \"It's late.\"\n\n\"Not that late,\" she said. \"Miss Lillian will think I... didn't treat you right.\" It was actually the other girls who worried her. Coral was already suspicious.\n\nHe gazed at her for a long moment before slipping a hand around her waist and drawing her so close it was as if their hearts beat as one. He brushed his lips against hers, and when she offered no objection, he covered her mouth in a full but tender kiss.\n\nMelting next to him, she slipped her hands up the front of him and wrapped her arms around his neck. Thrilling to the sensations that rippled through her, she willingly returned his kiss, surprising herself by how much pleasure it gave her.\n\nAll too soon he let her go, and she felt like something vital had been ripped away, the part of her that was real, perhaps. The part of her that was most vulnerable. It took every bit of willpower she possessed to slip back into her role.\n\nHe looked equally shaken by what had transpired between them. Puzzled even. He stared at her for a long moment as if he sensed that the woman in front of him wasn't the one that he'd kissed.\n\n\"I'll tell Miss Lillian you treated me just fine,\" he said, his voice hoarse. With that he slipped out of the room.\n\nShe grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself. Now she'd done it. Told him about her personal life, told him about the loss of her sister. He had enough information to uncover her real identity if he bothered to check. If either William or Robert Pinkerton found out what she'd done, she would be fired on the spot.\n\nWhat was it about this house that brought back the past in such vivid detail? Was it that nothing about Miss Lillian's Parlor House was genuine? Certainly not the people who lived there. Even their smiles were false. It was as if this strange, phony world forced her to search within for something real, bringing long-forgotten memories of Cissy and the night she disappeared to the forefront.\n\nAs for Tom Colton...\n\nForcing herself to breathe, she turned and caught sight of her painted face in the mirror.\n\nThe reflection staring back looked nothing like her. The eye makeup was intact, as were the rouged cheeks and powdered nose. All she was willing to claim as her own were her lips, bare except for the burning memory of his.\n\nIt pained her to think that the woman he'd kissed\u2014or thought he'd kissed\u2014didn't even exist.\n\nPained her even more to wish that she did. For such a woman was likely to take such a kiss in stride and probably not give it a second thought." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Instead of heading back to his hotel, Colton rode his horse clear though town. He rode past the church and cemetery, past the train station and empty stockades, to the wide-open Kansas plains. It wasn't Texas. Didn't smell like Texas, didn't feel like Texas. Only the stars blazing overhead seemed familiar.\n\nMany were the times he'd ridden beneath the starry Lone Star sky, but never before had he felt like this. Like his whole insides were on fire.\n\nHe needed to think. Or maybe he just needed to get his head on straight. Maybe then he could put the memory of her tear-filled eyes and sweet tender lips to rest.\n\nHe shouldn't have kissed her. Big mistake. He had no right to criticize his brother's choice of women, not after tonight. Not after the way he felt when he took her in his arms. He'd meant to comfort her, that's all. Instead, his heart had pounded like a blacksmith's hammer against his anvil ribs.\n\nHis hands tightened around Thunder's reins, and he sucked in his breath.\n\nHe'd practically drowned in those big green eyes of hers. The concern in their depths when he spoke of his brother had filled a hole inside that he hadn't even known existed. Of course, none of it meant a thing. Not her sympathy and certainly not anything that fell from her lips. Services paid for, services rendered. Though heaven knows, he believed it was all real at the time. In the name of Sam Hill, what had he been thinking?\n\nMaybe he was just lonely. A strange town and all... He missed his ranch. Missed Davey, now more of a son than a nephew. He missed his cattle, his horses. But lately...\n\nMaybe it was time to settle down, get himself a wife. If he had someone waiting for him at home, he sure in blazes wouldn't be longing after a woman of easy virtue, no matter how pretty her eyes or soft her lips or sorrowful her tale.\n\nWith a sigh, he tugged on the reins and turned back to town. Sleep, he needed sleep. He'd been in town for nearly three weeks and had nothing to show for it. He'd hoped and prayed he would find his brother's killer. More than that, he'd hoped to prove to his grandpappy that Dave really had turned over a new leaf and deserved to be buried in the family plot. For young Davey's sake.\n\nBut his chances of finding out anything that would exonerate his brother looked about as promising as a summer drought.\n\nHe'd give himself one more week. Seven days. If he didn't find any new clues by then, he was out of there. Seven days, God. Surely You can keep me away from temptation's clutches for seven more days." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Chapter 21\n\nLong after Tom Colton had left her room, long after he'd mounted his horse and ridden away, long after her heart finally stopped pounding, Amy sat staring out of her bedroom window. He was a complication she hadn't counted on. A complication she didn't need.\n\nShe no longer thought him guilty of anything except good looks and charm, but that didn't let her off the hook. Not only had she broken the number one rule of an undercover agent by revealing personal information, but she'd also allowed herself to become distracted.\n\nIt had to be this house. Never had she felt so out of place, so utterly alone. Sometimes she wondered if even God dared to tread between the wanton walls.\n\nShe was so deep in thought she almost missed the man in the checkered suit lurking outside. Pressing her forehead against the glass pane, she followed his progress until he disappeared by the side of the house.\n\nShe dropped the curtain. It was time that she and Mr. Checkers got to know each other.\n\nMoments later, she let herself ever so quietly out of the cellar trapdoor. Earlier, a zephyr had blown across the Kansas plains, but tonight the air was still, and stars glittered like diamonds upon a black velvet sky. From the distance came the sound of a fiddle and what sounded like the baying of a wolf, but nothing from nearby.\n\nGun held by her side, she moved silently through the backyard and peered around the corner of the house.\n\nShe spotted Checkers before he saw her. Actually, it was the shadow of his hat that gave his location away behind the bushes. He appeared to be trying to look into one of the first-floor windows.\n\nGripping her gun, she moved in close. \"Who are you and what do you want?\"\n\nThe bushes rustled and his head popped out. She couldn't see much of his face save the whites of his eyes. \"Blimey! Is that a gun?\" he asked in a nasally British accent.\n\n\"Yes, and I know how to use it.\"\n\nHe lifted his hands shoulder high. \"Don't shoot.\"\n\n\"Give me one good reason why I shouldn't.\"\n\nHe sniffled. \"You'll mess up my suit.\"\n\n\"That would do you a favor.\" She lowered the gun to her side, and he dropped his hands.\n\nHe stepped out of the bushes and into the stream of light shining from the window. \"You near scared the living daylights out of me.\" He brushed himself off. \"You could have given me heart failure.\"\n\n\"That's what you get for sneaking around.\"\n\n\"I wasn't sneaking around. I'll have you know I'm working.\"\n\n\"Working?\"\n\nHe cleared his throat. \"I'm Winston Walker the third. I work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.\"\n\nNot only was the man a sneak, he was as shy of the truth as a goat was feathers. \"Try again.\"\n\nHe looked insulted. \"You don't believe me?\"\n\n\"Mr. Pinkerton strictly forbids operatives from using alcohol and foul language. I happen to know that you're guilty of both. He also frowns on peeping Toms.\"\n\n\"All right, all right. You got me. I don't work for the old bloke, and I don't much care for his sons. But I am a private detective.\"\n\nShe sighed. That's all she needed. Private sleuthhounds were as welcome as a swarm of bees. Most didn't have the slightest idea what they were doing and often had a negative impact on Pinkerton investigations. Shadowing was an art, requiring a person to be present but not noticed. Not only did his checkered suit stand out like a red flag, the clumsy use of a newspaper that day in the hotel pegged him as an amateur.\n\n\"What makes you such an expert on Pinkerton?\" he asked.\n\nShe fell back on the stock reply kept for such occasions. \"I have an uncle who works there.\"\n\n\"Talk about hard cheese.\" He made a face. \"Lately all I have is bad luck. Last year, I was this close\"\u2014he held his thumb and index finger a sliver apart\u2014\"to catching Jesse James and claiming the five-thousand-dollar reward. And what happens? He gets himself shot by one of his own men. The year before that, I was hot on Billy the Kid's trail when he was gunned down by a sheriff...\" On and on he went about lost rewards and glory. He was like an old fisherman grousing about the catches that got away.\n\n\"So what are you detecting now?\" she asked the moment she could get a word in edgewise.\n\nHe lifted his pointed nose and lowered his voice. \"I have it on good authority that the man known as the Gunnysack Bandit is from these parts.\"\n\n\"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"I'm not at liberty to reveal my sources, but I have reason to believe that the Pinkerton agency dispatched an operative here.\"\n\nShe stiffened. \"How do you know that?\" The only way he could know was if he bribed a Pinkerton employee. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be the first time that some blabbermouth clerk or secretary had betrayed the company's trust. Just wait till the principal hears about this!\n\n\"Like I told you, I'm a detective.\" He lowered his voice. \"And I know who it is. I can pick out a fellow sleuth a mile away, and I'm telling you, it's that Colton chap.\"\n\nIt was all Amy could do to keep from laughing out loud. \"You think he's a Pinkerton detective?\"\n\n\"Shh. He doesn't want anyone to know, of course. I shouldn't even be telling you. All that business about looking for his brother's killer is rubbish.\"\n\nThe man was dead wrong, but she decided to play along. \"So what are you doing here?\" Something suddenly occurred to her. \"Are you following me?\"\n\n\"Of course not.\" He threw up his hands. \"All right, I was following you. I need to ask you some questions.\"\n\nShe slipped her hand into her fake pocket and holstered her gun. The man was annoying but didn't strike her as dangerous. \"All right, but it will cost you.\"\n\nHe made a face. \"No one does anything for free anymore,\" he grumbled. In a louder voice, he said, \"Why would a Pink be interested in a... soiled dove such as yourself?\"\n\nShe folded her arms. His holier-than-thou attitude was more offensive than the derogatory term. \"I would think the reason was obvious.\"\n\n\"You're winding me up, right? Since when does a man ask a\"\u2014he cleared his voice\u2014\"a woman of easy virtue to dine?\"\n\nOkay, maybe he wasn't as inept as she thought. A good question deserves a good answer, but at the moment she would settle for a mediocre response\u2014if only she could think of one.\n\n\"You tell me. You're the detective.\"\n\n\"I believe he thinks you know something about the Gunnysack Bandit, and I aim to find out what it is.\"\n\n\"And how do you propose to do that?\"\n\nBefore he could answer, Miss Lillian came barreling around the corner like a runaway horse.\n\n\"Ha! I thought I heard voices.\" The madam stuck her hand out in front of the startled man. \"That'll be ten dollars.\"\n\nMr. Walker's-slash-Checkers's mouth dropped open.\n\nAmy couldn't help but smile; where money was concerned, Miss Lillian's timing was impeccable. \"I told you it would cost you,\" she said. \"Say one more word and the price will double.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "Max's General Mercantile and Flower Shoppe was crowded when Amy walked in the following morning. An odd combination of cinnamon, tobacco, and coffee tickled her nose. Tin cans were stacked neatly on shelves. Clusters of onions hung from the rafters, and reams of calico were piled high on a counter ready to be cut. A potbellied stove stood in the center of the store surrounded by barrels of pickles, molasses, and kerosene.\n\nThe store owner shoveled coffee beans into the red coffee grinder and turned the wheel. After grinding the beans, he scooped the grounds into a paper bag and handed it over the counter to a matronly woman with a walking cane.\n\nAmy was immediately drawn to the display of cut flowers. She picked up a bouquet of pink carnations wrapped in green paper. Raising the feathery blossoms to her nose, she watched the store owner behind the counter.\n\nMr. Maxwell was a frequent guest of Miss Lillian's and number ten on her suspect list.\n\nThe stolen banknote had been folded only twice when Rose deposited it, making it unlikely that it had passed through a third or fourth person. It was possible, of course, that a store customer had made a purchase with the bill and Mr. Maxwell had innocently passed it along. Possible, but given the almost pristine condition of the note, highly improbable.\n\nHe seemed friendly enough and greeted each customer with a smile and a joke. With his thick blond hair, parted in the middle and worn shoulder length, he reminded her of Hans Bergman, the notorious embezzler she'd tracked all the way to Canada.\n\nStanding nearly six feet tall, Maxwell fit the Gunnysack Bandit's description in height, but a thick German accent made it unlikely he was the right man. Not one robbery victim had mentioned an accent.\n\nStill, she was required to provide a complete description to headquarters on every possible suspect, so a closer look wouldn't hurt.\n\n\"Why, Mrs. Monahan. How nice to see you.\"\n\nThe female voice drew Amy's attention to two women standing next to a cracker barrel. It took no special talent to identify which one was married to the town's richest man.\n\nA willowy blond, Mrs. Monahan was younger than Amy expected, probably in her late twenties, early thirties. She wore a stylish brown walking suit that probably cost more than Amy's waterfall evening gown. The bodice was paneled with brown satin, and the collar and cuffs were edged with gold-beaded tulle. Her peaked crown hat was tastefully decorated with a nosegay of yellow flowers and tied beneath her chin with brown satin ribbons.\n\nWithout warning, Mrs. Monahan's gaze met hers, and Amy was struck by the look on her face. The woman's expression darkened with the shifting emotions of anger, hatred, and despair, but most prevalent was sadness, and Amy felt sorry for her. She was married to the richest, most powerful man in town and had everything money could buy... but not a faithful husband. No amount of money could buy that.\n\nUnable to meet the woman's gaze a moment longer, Amy turned and took her place in front of the counter behind a young mother with a small child. The little boy, dressed in a sailor suit, stared up at her. He had a round face, a fetching smile, and big brown eyes. She smiled back at him. She guessed he was around three, the same age as Cissy when she disappeared.\n\nHe tugged on his mother's skirt. \"I wike that pretty wady,\" he said, and Amy felt a pang. Cissy hadn't been able to pronounce the w sound either.\n\nHer smile widened. What he no doubt liked was her bright scarlet dress and ruby-red lips. Children were drawn to bright colors. \"I like you, too.\"\n\nHis mother turned and her face practically crumbled in horror. \"No, you don't, Jimmy. You don't like her. She's not a nice person.\" Leaving the items she intended to purchase on the counter, the woman yanked her son by the arm and practically dragged him out of the store.\n\nThe other customers in line stared at Amy. Odd as it seemed, the silence was deafening.\n\n\"May I help you?\" the store owner asked in a thick German accent. He held out his hand for her money with an impatient gesture, as if he was anxious to get rid of her.\n\nFace flaring, she paid for the flowers and left the shop without waiting for change." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Chapter 22\n\nWalking along Main Street, Amy couldn't get Mrs. Monahan out of her mind. Not only was her husband a regular parlor house guest, but he appeared to have had some sort of relationship with Rose, as well. It was the most obvious explanation for the argument overheard by Buttercup. Had it been a lover's quarrel? Or something more sinister?\n\nPerhaps Rose confronted him with her suspicions about his being the Gunnysack Bandit. If so, that would make him a suspect in her death.\n\nThough it was a warm spring day, her dark thoughts chased goose-flesh up and down her spine. It wasn't just Mrs. Monahan that had upset her. She was still shaken by the encounter with the woman and her little boy. Did one ever get used to being shunned? Probably not.\n\nHer steps faltered as she passed the Grande Hotel and Bath House. Crazy as it seemed, the essence of Mr. Colton's kiss still lingered. Not wanting to relive, yet again, the memory of being in his arms, she quickened her pace. It didn't mean a thing, that kiss. Not a thing.\n\nLittle that happened between the walls of Miss Lillian's Parlor House meant anything. The only things that seemed genuine were the sobs sometimes heard coming from the other rooms in the still of night and the nightmares that plagued her sleep.\n\nNo, his kiss hadn't been real, no matter how much she wished otherwise. It had cost him dearly to be with her, moneywise. So who could blame him for simply demanding a service he'd paid for? He would have been within his right to expect more. Thank God he didn't. He probably hadn't given the kiss a second thought, so why should she?\n\nSomeone touched her arm, and she jumped. It was the beggar who'd tried to gain her attention a time or two before. Recoiling at his unpleasant odor, she pulled away and walked past him. Several feet away, she stopped and turned, shocked by the realization that she had treated him much like the little boy's mother had treated her. Shunned him, more like it, as the town had shunned her.\n\nThis time she looked him square in the eyes.\n\nHis face was weathered, not by years, for he was still relatively young, perhaps in his late thirties, but by sadness. The hair framing his gaunt face fell to his shoulders in tangled strands. How many times had she passed him without noticing that he was a veteran of that awful war? How many times had she failed to see the man inside the weary shell?\n\nEven a person trained to be a private eye didn't always see what was right in front, clear as day. What else did she not see? God, what else?\n\nClutching the flowers in the circle of her arm, she pulled a banknote out of her purse. She held it outward as she walked toward him. He took it from her, his fingers curling around her offering like a man grabbing a lifeline.\n\n\"God bless you, ma'am,\" he said, and even his voice sounded old.\n\nShe smiled. \"You don't know how much I needed to hear that.\" Now more than ever she needed God's blessings.\n\n\"I know,\" he said, and he gave her a gap-toothed smile. \"I've been watching you, and I know.\"\n\nSurprised that he knew that about her\u2014and maybe even a little ashamed that a beggar had given her the respect she'd failed to give him, she thanked him and hurried away." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "The church cemetery was located at the edge of town. At times, Miss Lillian's Parlor House seemed stifling, and Amy was happy to escape, if only for a short while.\n\nShe reached the church and followed a gravel path to the cemetery in back, entering through the ornate wrought iron gate. Mentally, she ran through the remaining names on her list. She'd hoped to have something tangible to write in her report to headquarters by now, but so far she had more questions than answers.\n\nShe was so deep in thought that she failed to notice the woman hunched over a grave until she almost stumbled over her.\n\nThe woman looked up, and Amy's heart sank. It was the churchwoman, Mrs. Givings.\n\n\"Forgive me.\" Not only had she almost caused the woman physical harm, she had also interrupted a private moment, made obvious by the woman's red eyes.\n\nMrs. Givings struggled to her feet and pushed her spectacles up her nose. \"That's quite all right.\"\n\nAmy lowered her gaze to the inscription engraved on the tombstone.\n\n\"My daughter,\" Mrs. Givings explained. \"Smallpox.\"\n\nAmy's breath caught in her lungs. The little girl was only six years old when she died. \"I'm so sorry.\"\n\n\"Yes, so am I,\" Mrs. Givings replied.\n\nAmy's greatest fear was finding Cissy's name on a grave somewhere. \"How... how do you live with losing a daughter?\" It was hard enough living with the loss of a sister.\n\nThe question seemed to surprise the woman. Did she not think a harlot capable of feelings? Capable of compassion?\n\n\"It's not like I have a choice.\"\n\n\"I know, but it must be... difficult.\"\n\nMrs. Givings dabbed at her eye with a handkerchief. \"Only when I focus on the loss of my daughter. It doesn't hurt so much when I think about the glory of God's love and grace.\"\n\nAmy felt a surge of guilt. Not only had her sister's disappearance made her question God at times, but her job required her to make snap judgments about people, too, and she had judged Mrs. Givings a bit harsher than most. Today she realized her mistake. The woman wasn't the annoying Bible thumper she'd originally thought. She was simply a grieving mother holding on to God with both hands.\n\n\"You lost someone, too,\" Mrs. Givings said. It was a statement, not a question.\n\n\"Someone close. A family member.\"\n\nSuch an observation wasn't all that surprising. Sometimes Amy sensed loss in others, and had she bothered to look, she might have spotted it in Mrs. Givings. She often wondered if grief-stricken people sent out covert messages that could only be received by those going through similar losses.\n\n\"My sister.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry.\"\n\nThey stared down at the little grave, a \"fallen\" woman and a \"pillar of society\" standing side by side, bonded by grief and loss.\n\nAmy leaned over and laid the flowers in front of the gravestone.\n\nMrs. Givings looked surprised. \"That's very kind of you, but I'm sure that you meant them for your friend.\"\n\n\"That's all right. I'm sure my... friend would understand.\"\n\nSomeone called from a distance. It was one of the other churchwomen waving from afar. It looked like Mrs. Compton. Mrs. Givings waved back.\n\n\"I have to go. It's almost time for the church quilting bee.\" Sounding vaguely apologetic, she hesitated as if wanting to say more. Instead, she gave her daughter's grave one last glance before hurrying away.\n\nAmy watched until the two women vanished through the back door. The church with its tall steeple and stained glass windows seemed to beckon, and she was tempted to answer the call. She wouldn't, of course. Couldn't. Not dressed the way she was.\n\nNever had she felt like such an outsider. The social barrier that separated her from Mrs. Givings had lifted, but only for a moment. Now it was firmly back in place, making even the church off-limits.\n\nAs a tomboy growing up, she'd always felt different. She would much rather chase her brothers than play with dolls or learn domestic skills. The feeling of isolation grew worse through her teens. While her friends were down by the swimming hole or enjoying wild carriage rides, she was at the sheriff's office inquiring about her sister.\n\nBy the time she was twenty, most of her friends were already married, and some even had children. She was clearly regarded as unusual, if not altogether strange. But never had she felt like such an outsider as she did at that moment. Never had she felt so far away from God." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "Though it was only a little after the noon hour by the time she returned to the parlor house, already two horses were tied up in front. Amy recognized the brown gelding as belonging to Mr. Tully, a married man. Disgust turned her stomach, and she felt nauseous. People accused prostitutes of having no moral integrity, but what about the men who sought their services? Why weren't they held to the same standards? After living here she wondered if she could ever again trust a man\u2014any man\u2014even Tom Colton.\n\nAmy had hardly reached for the bell when the door flew open.\n\n\"You're back at last,\" Miss Lillian exclaimed. \"Come quickly.\" She motioned Amy inside and locked the door. \"Hurry, hurry.\" She led the way into her office with a swish of her purple silk gown.\n\nBracing herself for yet another lecture on how she walked or chewed off her lip rouge, Amy reluctantly followed.\n\nMiss Lillian reached across her desk for a brown leather book.\n\n\"Rose's diary,\" she announced with a triumphant gesture.\n\nAmy's mouth dropped open. \"Where did you find it?\" She had searched Rose's room and found nothing.\n\n\"Beatrice and I were getting the room ready for Rose's replacement, and we found it beneath a loose floorboard.\" She handed Amy the diary and tapped the leather cover with a jeweled finger. \"There's not much there of a personal nature, but perhaps you'll see something I missed.\"\n\nHeart leaping with excitement, Amy turned the book over. Had this been what Rose's killer had been looking for? Maybe this was the break for which she'd been praying.\n\nAmy started to leave then thought of something. \"You keep the front and back doors locked, but what about the cellar door?\"\n\nMiss Lillian looked confused. \"The cell\u2014? Oh, you mean the trapdoor. That's padlocked and hasn't been opened in years. Why do you ask?\"\n\n\"No reason.\" Thanking her, Amy left the parlor and hurried upstairs. She paused outside her closed door, hand on the brass knob. The threads placed in the cracks for security purposes were still there, but that's not what caused her to pause. She could no longer enter her room without thinking of Colton's kiss. The memory of being in his arms was so vivid she had to blink to make sure he was only a figment of her imagination.\n\nShaking away the vision, she flung the door open. For perhaps the hundredth time that day she reminded herself that his kiss was meaningless. She meant nothing to him, and certainly he meant nothing to her.\n\nHer job didn't allow for romance, a fact she found out the hard way from a Chicago businessman named Paul Devereux. She might have married him except for one thing: he had no patience for her habit of disappearing on a case for several weeks at a time. Eventually he found what he called a \"stay-at-home\" girl. It hurt. It hurt a lot.\n\nIn retrospect, it seemed like a small price to pay for the profession she loved. Her job provided everything she ever wanted: independence, a chance to travel, thrills, and adventure. Solving crimes also gave her a sense of closure that had been sorely missing from her life since Cissy's disappearance.\n\nShe didn't need a man. If anything, it would only complicate her life. Complicate his.\n\nStill, she couldn't help but wonder how it would feel to be kissed by Tom Colton under very different circumstances. To be kissed by him as if it really did mean something." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "Chapter 23\n\nReading Rose's journal was like reading the scattered thoughts of a twelve-year-old. Ink smears and crossed-out words dotted the pages.\n\nPoor spelling and lack of punctuation made the writing hard to read, at first, until she grew accustomed to Rose's style. But even then some words and even entire sentences remained a mystery.\n\nPoor handwriting could not be read; it had to be deciphered. A Pinkerton detective named Curt Cullins was considered an expert in the science of graphology, and she had learned much from him. He'd studied the penmanship of people from all walks of life. According to Cullins, physicians, politicians, and singers had the worst handwriting, ministers and lawyers the best.\n\nRose's sentences crowded together, suggesting she probably grew up poor. Such a person was inclined to use resources carefully, and that included paper.\n\nNothing of a sexual nature had found its way among the pages and almost nothing personal. She wrote about the terrible dust storms that had plagued the area and \"took the starch out of everything.\" She described the wind being so strong that visitors arrived \"hatless and with coattails over their heads.\"\n\nDave Colton was mentioned only once. \"D.C. asked me to marry him,\" she wrote, but oddly enough that was all.\n\nSeveral pages were missing, and only the ragged edges remained. Amy ran her fingers along the seam holding the diary together. Pieces of Rose's life torn away? If only a person could pick and choose which memories to keep and which to discard as easily as ripping pages from a diary.\n\nMonths passed between entries until about midway when accounts appeared weekly and sometimes even daily, but were even less personal. It wasn't a diary, after all; it was a record of birds, and one sentence stood out from all the rest: \"Birds fly because they have perfect faith.\"\n\nA harlot writing about faith? Rose, it seemed, was full of surprises.\n\nHummingbirds, sparrows, wrens, and owls filled the pages, along with rudimentary sketches.\n\nStuck between the pages was a piece of blank paper. Amy held it up to the light. It was straw paper, the kind favored by butchers. It was also similar to the paper used to disguise money at the First National Bank in St. Louis. Packets of currency had been replaced with straw paper that had been cut and packaged like the real thing. No one was the wiser until several days later, and by then the thief had probably fled the state.\n\nShe reached for her cloth purse and pulled out a dollar bill. The bill matched the size and shape of the straw paper exactly, and that couldn't be by chance. Was the Gunnysack Bandit behind the St. Louis Bank theft? As far as she knew, even Robert Pinkerton, who was very astute at such things, had not suspected the Gunnysack Bandit of that particular crime.\n\nShe put the paper aside to be included in her next report to headquarters and continued reading. The entry dated December read simply, \"Spotted Hummingbird and Waxwing in garden.\"\n\nAt the end of January Rose had written: \"D.C. promised we would leave as soon as he returned. Don't want him to go. Saw Waxwing.\"\n\nHow odd. Birds got equal billing with a planned trip.\n\nThe last entry in the journal was written on February 6. The rest of the pages were blank.\n\nWhy would Rose go to all the trouble to hide a journal mostly of birds beneath the floorboards? Even more puzzling, why did she stop journaling on that particular day, nearly two months before her death?\n\nUnless... She raced across the room and lifted her mattress. Flipping through the pages of the notebook hidden there, she found what she was looking for. There it was: February 6, the day Tom's brother's body was found. The empty pages of Rose's journal marked the day her world came to an end." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "Amy mailed a detailed report to Pinkerton the following morning, addressing the envelope to Aunt Carolyn at the prescribed post office box assigned to her. She also included the straw paper and described where and how she found it.\n\nA letter from \"Aunt Carolyn\" waited in her box. According to Mr. Pinkerton, Marshal Flood's record was clean, and she was to make contact. One problem solved.\n\nNone of the other names on her suspect list had criminal records, but the one name that commanded full attention was Tom Colton's. According to the Pinkerton report, he had, indeed, been a Texas Ranger until three years ago. The day his brother walked out of prison was the day Tom Colton resigned.\n\nSo far everything Colton had told her was true. Somehow she knew that, of course, but it was still a relief to have it confirmed by headquarters.\n\nShe folded the letter and stuffed it into her fabric drawstring purse to be destroyed later. Everything was written in cipher, but a Pinkerton operative could never be too careful.\n\nLeaving the post office, she turned toward the marshal's office. Without warning, Tom Colton suddenly appeared out of nowhere and fell in step by her side.\n\n\"Looking for me?\" he asked.\n\n\"Absolutely not.\" She slowed her pace, but only because his presence made her pulse skitter. It was annoying\u2014more than that, distracting\u2014the way his nearness affected her. \"I'm on my way to the marshal's.\"\n\n\"Why?\" The question popped out of him with the force of a bullet.\n\nShe had a ready answer. \"Miss Lillian is anxious to know if there's been any progress made into Rose's death.\"\n\n\"I can save you the trouble. There hasn't been.\"\n\n\"Thank you, but I think she'd prefer I hear it out of the horse's mouth.\"\n\n\"Have it your way, but I get first dibs on any new information you might have.\"\n\nShe stopped midstep, forcing him to swing around to face her. \"Why is that?\"\n\n\"I'm paying you. The marshal is not.\"\n\nShe lifted her chin in open defiance. \"I wouldn't be so certain of that.\" She hated having to throw her role as a loose woman in his face, but she needed to put a barrier between them. Maybe then she could free herself of the hold he had over her.\n\nHe stared at her long and hard. \"Why, Amy? Why are you working for that... that woman? You're bright and smart and pretty and... Blast it all!\" He leaned over her. \"Why are you throwing yourself away on a bunch of worthless men?\"\n\nShe gazed up at him, her body rigid. She'd asked each of Miss Lillian's girls that very same question; now it was asked of her. \"Why do you care what I do?\"\n\nHe reared back and a puzzled frown fleeted across his face. \"I don't know why,\" he said quietly. The words hung between them for a moment before he turned and walked away.\n\nYou don't care for me, she wanted to shout. You don't even know me! Instead, she called, \"We found Rose's journal.\" It wasn't much, the journal. It was nothing, really. But she needed to remind him that it was business between them\u2014nothing more. It could never be anything more.\n\nIt worked. At least he stopped walking. Holding his back to her for a moment as if bracing himself to face her, he then turned. \"Did you say journal?\" The remoteness in his eyes remained, but his voice held a note of hope.\n\nShe nodded. \"It was in her room beneath a floorboard.\"\n\n\"Does it... mention my brother?\"\n\n\"Yes, but it doesn't say much. I'm not sure you'll find it useful, but if you'd like to read it\u2014\"\n\n\"I would.\" He rubbed his chin as if trying to make a decision. \"I'll meet you at Miss Lillian's.\"\n\n\"No!\" The last place she wanted to meet him was in her room. Not after what happened the other night. Not after what passed between them today. \"I mean...\"\n\nThey locked gazes.\n\nHe was the first to break the silence. \"Just so you know, what happened the other night was a mistake. It won't happen again.\"\n\nIt was a mistake, as much for her as it was for him. Still, his words hurt. She didn't want them to. She didn't want to feel anything for him.\n\n\"You're right, it won't,\" she snapped. Her breath caught. \"Meet me at the house at three.\" She hurried away, but it felt as if she'd left a piece of her heart behind." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "Tom watched Amy walk away. He was tempted to trail the \"follow-me-lad\" streamers that floated enticingly from her feathered hat.\n\nEven from the back, her occupation defined her. The bright green dress practically screamed for attention, and men and women alike gave her a wide berth. She stood for everything he loathed, but it was sadness he felt. Sadness for her, sadness for women like her who sold their souls along with their bodies.\n\nAnd yet...\n\n\"Why do you care what I do?\"\n\n\"I don't know why.\"\n\nAll he did know was that when her eyes filled with tears she'd practically broken his heart. He also knew that when she kissed him it was like being kissed by an angel. She stirred something inside him that was new and exciting and, more than anything, worrisome. She was the kind of woman Dave would fall for, not him. God, please don't let me do anything so foolish." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Chapter 24\n\nMarshal Flood looked up from his desk and greeted Amy with a bland expression.\n\n\"If you came here to inquire about Rose, I'll tell you what I told Colton. There's nothing yet, and when there is, I'll let you know.\"\n\nNot a good start to what she had hoped would be a productive meeting. She gave her fan a coquettish flick. A little flattery generally went a long way.\n\n\"I don't doubt that for a moment, Marshal. Mr. Colton said you didn't care about solving a little old harlot's murder, but he doesn't know what he's talking about. The way you handled the investigation on the night we found her body was...\" Adequate at most. \"Brilliant.\"\n\n\"Well now.\" He rose from his seat, his face all red. Grabbing a spare chair from the corner, he set it in front of his desk. \"Why don't you sit for a spell?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"Why, thank you, Marshal.\" She seated herself with great aplomb and waited for him to return to his own chair.\n\n\"Could you at least tell me if you have any leads as to who killed Rose? I'd sleep a lot better knowing you were... hot on someone's trail.\"\n\n\"Sorry, ma'am. I don't have any good news to report yet.\" He hastened to add, \"But that don't mean I won't.\"\n\n\"Do you think it was the Gunnysack Bandit who killed her?\"\n\nHis hesitation was a sign he knew more than he was saying. \"Absolutely not, but...\" He pointed to a telegram on his desk. \"Pinkerton is sending an operative to town. Soon as he arrives I'll find out more.\"\n\nHe. She smiled. This was the fun part. She leaned over his desk so the prisoner behind the bars couldn't hear. \"That would be me,\" she said in a hushed voice. \"I'm that operative.\"\n\nFlood blinked and his eyes grew round as wagon wheels. \"You?\" He frowned. \"But you're...\" He cleared his voice. \"You're a woman.\"\n\nShe sat back. \"Yes, that has been brought to my attention.\" She went on to explain how she happened to be staying at Miss Lillian's Parlor House.\n\nHe shook his head. \"I never would have guessed. Why didn't you tell me before now?\"\n\n\"I had to wait for approval from headquarters.\" She smiled so he wouldn't take offense.\n\n\"In other words, you had to make sure I was one of the good guys.\"\n\nShe straightened the fabric of her skirt. \"One can never be too careful.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean.\" He lifted a wooden box, pulled out a cigar, and hesitated. \"Normally, I would offer a detective a cigar.\"\n\n\"Normally, a detective would take one,\" she said. \"But I'll pass.\"\n\nHe shut the lid and grunted. \"So what have you uncovered so far?\"\n\n\"Not much,\" she admitted. She wasn't ready to reveal her suspicions about Monahan. \"If the Gunnysack Bandit didn't kill Rose, who do you think did? Do you have any other suspects?\"\n\nHe bit off the end of his cigar and spat it into a brass spittoon. \"Like I told you, I don't have much. Lots of people in town don't approve of... uh... gentlemen's clubs. I guess you might say they were once a necessary evil. That was back when women were in short supply. But thanks in part to the railroad, those days are long gone.\"\n\nHe lit his cigar and took a puff before continuing. \"So, suspects? Yeah, I've got suspects. I'd say that half the women in this town would like to see harm come to Miss Lillian and her ilk. Why, just last year, I arrested an irate wife trying to burn the place down. You're living proof that it never pays to underestimate a woman.\"\n\nShe smiled. \"I heartily agree.\" It was her turn to hesitate. \"What about Mr. Colton? Do you trust him?\"\n\n\"I have no reason not to. His brother, now...\" He shook his head. \"That's a different story.\"\n\n\"You knew his brother?\"\n\n\"David Colton? Yeah, I knew him.\" He tossed a nod toward the row of jail cells. \"He spent many a night here, mostly for disturbing the peace.\"\n\nGiven Dave Colton's history, she supposed that wasn't all too surprising. Still, she knew how much Tom wanted to think his brother had changed his ways.\n\n\"But no real criminal activity?\" she asked\n\nFlood narrowed his eyes. \"I have my suspicions.\"\n\nElbows on the arms of her chair, she folded her hands in front. \"What does that mean, exactly?\"\n\nHe clamped his cigar between his teeth and shuffled through a stack of folders on his desk. He opened one and pulled out a sheet of wrinkled paper. \"Found this clutched in Colton's hand.\" He handed it to her.\n\nShe unfolded the paper and immediately recognized the list of banks and express offices held up by the Gunnysack Bandit. It even included the St. Louis Bank. The list was typed, and judging by the lack of errors and cross outs, it was typed by someone familiar with a writing machine.\n\nShe looked up. \"What was Dave Colton doing with a list like this?\"\n\n\"My question, exactly.\"\n\nShe studied the list again. Under the right circumstances it was possible to determine if a letter had been typed on a specific typewriter. Every machine had its own peculiarities, and irregularities of type and word spacing often provided important clues. Allan Pinkerton once testified in court that a ransom note had been written on a defendant's writing machine. The demand for money clearly showed on the ribbon.\n\nIn this particular case, there was a slight defect in the letter m and the top of the e was furred. Both imperfections were the result of normal wear. Matching the letters with the type bars would be an easy task, providing the correct typewriter could be found.\n\nShe handed the paper back. It probably hadn't even occurred to the marshal to check the typewriters in town. Allan Pinkerton was way ahead of local authorities in his crime-solving ways, and no small-town marshal was likely to catch up anytime soon.\n\n\"Where do you suppose he got that list?\" she asked.\n\n\"I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count.\"\n\n\"You think he typed up the list. But that would mean\u2014\"\n\n\"Dave Colton was the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\nShe stared at him. Nothing received from headquarters suggested such a thing. Could the marshal be right? She didn't want to believe it. God, please no! Not Dave. It would kill Tom!\n\nThe thought made her cringe, and she immediately pushed it away. She was a professional, and by George, she would act like one if it killed her. That meant keeping a clear and objective mind.\n\n\"Dave Colton could have found the list.\" Or maybe Rose stole it from one of the guests and gave it to him.\n\n\"If it was just the list, I would agree.\"\n\nShe stiffened. \"There's more?\"\n\nThe marshal took a puff of his cigar. \"Colton's been dead for nearly three months, and there hasn't been a single crime attributed to the Gunnysack Bandit since. He never went that long between robberies. A month maybe, but not three or even two.\"\n\nThe marshal was right about the timing. \"He killed a man during the last fiasco and was almost caught,\" she said. \"Maybe he's just laying low for a while.\"\n\n\"Oh, he's low all right.\" The marshal blew out a puff of smoke. \"Six feet under, to be exact.\"\n\nThe marshal's theory was not only surprising but disturbing. She tried keeping an open mind, but thoughts of Tom kept getting in the way.\n\n\"It makes no sense,\" she managed at last. \"Why would Dave Colton keep a list that placed him at the scene of the crimes?\"\n\n\"Some people like to keep track of their deeds. Kind of like notches on a gun or bedpost, if you know what I mean.\"\n\nAs much as she hated to admit it, the marshal had a point. Still, his theory contained holes.\n\n\"That doesn't explain who killed him or Rose.\"\n\nThe marshal discounted her comment with a wave of his hand. \"A man like David Colton makes a lot of enemies. As for Rose...\" He shrugged. \"I have no reason to think the two deaths are related. Her money box was empty, her jewelry gone. If it smells like robbery and looks like robbery, in my book it is a robbery. Her killer could be in Timbuktu for all I know. Case closed.\"\n\nShe glared at him. The cavalier way he dismissed Rose's killer infuriated her. All that business about looking into her death had meant nothing, and it was all she could do to control her anger.\n\n\"What about David Colton? Is that case closed, too?\"\n\n\"Not yet, but it will be. Just as soon as I send my report to your boss.\"\n\nShe leaned forward. \"If he really was the Gunnysack Bandit, why would he turn to his brother for help when he thought Rose's life was in danger?\"\n\n\"Who knows? Maybe he was trying to cover his tracks.\"\n\n\"Or maybe you're wrong about him.\"\n\n\"I wish that was true. 'Cause I sure don't want to break the news to Tom Colton.\" He took a puff of his cigar before removing it from his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. \"No sir, don't want to do that.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "She left the marshal's office, shaken. David Colton, the Gunnysack Bandit? She couldn't believe it. Didn't want to believe it.\n\n\"Why do you care what I do?\"\n\n\"I don't know why.\"\n\nThe memory filled her with despair. Operatives had been warned against letting personal feelings compromise an investigation. Crime solving must be based on evidence, not emotions. She'd always prided herself on the ability to remain professional at all costs. So why would this time be any different?\n\nNot wanting to risk bumping into Tom Colton again, she headed for the parlor house. She'd already gone over Miss Lillian's ledgers, but it had never occurred to her to check Dave Colton's visits against the dates of the Gunnysack Bandit's crimes. He couldn't be in two places at once. If he was with Rose, that would surely disprove the marshal's theory.\n\nShe turned the corner and spotted a group of about a dozen women gathered in front of the parlor house, several of them holding up signs. The word Repent was written in big bold letters on one sign, but that was one of the least offensive suggestions.\n\nThe Pinkerton agency had worked with various unions, and she'd learned from experience that the best way to deal with angry picketers was to remain calm. As she drew near, the chanting grew louder and fists pumped the air.\n\nSomeone called her an ugly name. A young woman cradling an infant in her arms yelled, \"Sinner!\"\n\nThe groups began closing ranks, and Amy reached for the latch on the gate. A matronly woman rammed into her, her walking cane raised high over her head. Amy managed to duck just in time, but the reprieve didn't last. Rough hands grabbed her by the waist and pulled her away from the gate.\n\nHate-filled faces pressed close, and dozens of hands pawed at her. She tried reaching for her gun, but someone pinned back her arms. Panic threatened. Even angry union picketers had not attacked her, at least not physically. These women looked like they were out for blood.\n\n\"Let me go,\" she cried. \"Please!\"\n\nThe mob ripped off her dress. Someone yanked her hat off her head and trampled it.\n\nOne woman slapped her across the face. \"That's for my Charlie!\"\n\n\"Stop, please, stop!\" she cried, but her pleas went unheeded. A fist to her stomach was followed by a punch in the eye. Tears blurred her vision.\n\nThen all at once her tormentors backed away. Her torn gown and petticoat were on the ground, but her holster was still attached to her bloomers. She pulled out her gun, but it was no longer needed.\n\nMrs. Givings stood a short distance away, glaring at Amy's attackers, hands at her waist. \"What's the matter with you?\" Trembling with righteous indignation, the churchwoman shook like a quaking aspen. \"Is this how good Christians behave?\" she sputtered. \"You should be ashamed of yourselves. All of you!\"\n\n\"She's one of them,\" someone shouted, and a couple of women joined in to defend their actions, but Mrs. Givings would have none of it.\n\n\"This is a sad day for our church,\" she said, her voice breaking. \"A very sad day.\"\n\nThe picketers hung their heads in shame, and one by one they left until only Mrs. Givings remained.\n\nAmy picked a piece of fabric off the ground and held it to her bosom. \"Thank you,\" she whispered.\n\nThe churchwoman dropped her hands to her side. \"I... never meant you any harm. I'm so sorry. Would... would you forgive us?\"\n\nThe woman looked so distressed that Amy felt sorry for her. \"I do,\" she whispered.\n\nMrs. Givings looked about to say more but the sharp report of a gun made her jump.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" she cried and quickly hobbled down the street, leaving a trail of hat feathers in her wake.\n\nAmy's gaze flew to the house. Miss Lillian stood on the porch, brandishing her weapon and looking unbearably pleased with herself. \"Not bad for an amateur, wouldn't you say?\" she called.\n\nAmy managed a wan smile. Hands on her sore stomach, she limped toward the porch. \"Not bad at all.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Miss Lillian led Amy into her office and ordered her to sit. Fussing over her mother hen\u2014style, she issued orders like a general ready for battle.\n\n\"Polly, fetch my medical supplies. Georgia, tell Coffey to bring a pot of tea. And Buttercup... Land o'goshen, where's that girl?\"\n\nButtercup stuck her head into the office. \"I'm here.\"\n\n\"Well, don't just stand there. Get Amy a dressing gown.\"\n\nNo sooner had Polly returned with a basket of bandages and other supplies than Miss Lillian attacked Amy's wounds with a wet sponge and salve. Buttercup returned with a blue silk dressing gown, which she draped around Amy's shoulders.\n\nThe women stood around gaping until Miss Lillian chased them out of the office and slammed the door shut. \"Mercy, you'd think they never saw a black eye before.\"\n\nNever had Amy known such attention, not even when she had measles and chickenpox as a child. Back on the farm, time and attention were devoted out of necessity to animals and crops, not children.\n\n\"You were lucky,\" Miss Lillian said. \"This group wasn't as bad as most.\"\n\nAmy didn't particularly feel lucky. She felt sore and miserable and more than a little humiliated. She had misjudged the situation and fallen into a trap. She should have been better prepared.\n\n\"And I thought my job was dangerous,\" she muttered.\n\n\"You don't know the least of it.\" Miss Lillian clucked her tongue. \"If anyone needs to repent, it's those women's husbands. They spend Saturday nights here and Sundays in church. Hypocrites, all of them.\"\n\nThe pressure of Miss Lillian's touch increased with her rising voice.\n\n\"Ouch.\"\n\n\"Sorry.\" Miss Lillian proceeded more gently but continued her tirade. \"If they must pick on someone, why not those dreadful cribs? Or better yet, that horrible pimp Mr. Fortune. There's nothing worse than a pi,\" she said, using the slang word for pimp. The gentle euphemisms used to describe her own affairs were never extended to the competition.\n\n\"Why is it worse for a man?\" Amy asked. She doubted God made allowances for gender.\n\n\"A man can do anything he wants, that's why. He can pursue any vocation. Start any business. Every bank is willing to give him a loan.\" She sighed. \"It's different for a woman. Our choices are limited, to say the least.\"\n\nMiss Lillian's voice held a wistfulness that surprised Amy. For a moment the mask had slipped, revealing a woman who had once been deeply hurt or disillusioned. Maybe both.\n\n\"I hope you don't mind my asking, but why have you never married?\"\n\nMiss Lillian's eyebrows shot up. \"Me?\"\n\n\"Yes, you. You're rich and powerful and attractive.\" In her younger days she might even have been considered a beauty. \"Seems like you could have had just about any man you set your cap for.\"\n\nMiss Lillian set the tube of salve on the desk and wiped her hands on a towel. \"Perhaps. But do you know how many married men cheat on their wives? There's not a man alive who can be trusted. Why would I want to put myself through that?\"\n\n\"There are good men out there. Men who are honest and committed to their families.\" At least Amy hoped there were, though lately she'd begun to question if that was true.\n\nMiss Lillian discounted the notion with a wave of a jeweled hand. \"You can't keep a good man good. When a man marries, he says adios to the single life and hello to adultery.\"\n\n\"That's not true.\"\n\n\"Isn't it? What do you think keeps me in business?\" Miss Lillian threw up her hands as if it didn't matter, but the sadness in her eyes betrayed her. \"Let's just say where men are concerned, I wouldn't trust a one of them. What good is marriage without trust?\" She gave Amy a scolding look. \"Don't tell me a bright woman like you believes otherwise.\"\n\nAmy thought of Tom Colton\u2014a man committed to redeeming his brother's reputation and finding his killer. Would he be just as committed to a woman? Before her stay at the parlor house she would never have asked that question. But that was before she knew how lightly some honest, hardworking, and even churchgoing men took their marriage vows.\n\n\"I hope you're wrong,\" she said with feeling. \"I hope that good Christian men really do exist.\" God, please let it be true.\n\n\"If I thought for one moment that such a man existed, I would\u2014\" Miss Lillian shook her head. \"Enough of this talk.\" She probed Amy's shoulder. \"I don't think you have any serious injuries, but I'll fetch Doc Graham if you like.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary.\" Amy worked her arms into the robe sleeves. \"Thank you.\"\n\nMiss Lillian looked pleased. \"I wanted to try out my shooting skills. Now I just have to put my new investigative skills to work.\"\n\n\"New\u2014\" Amy inhaled sharply, and a pain shot through her shoulder.\n\nMiss Lillian picked a dime novel off her desk. \"I've been doing some research on the subject. Did you know that tightrope walkers have wide feet?\"\n\nAmy shook her head. \"I can't say that I did.\"\n\n\"Said so in this book I'm reading. It's a detective story, and I've learned all kinds of interesting things about detecting. The killer left a footprint at the scene of the crime and the detective was able to determine it belonged to the tightrope walker because of the width of the foot.\"\n\nAmy didn't know what to say. The last thing she needed was for Miss Lillian to go around playing detective. She had enough trouble contending with that snoop hound Checkers. On the other hand, she needed Miss Lillian on her side.\n\n\"I'm hoping to get some ideas on how to investigate Rose's murder,\" Miss Lillian continued.\n\n\"I'm not sure that a dime novel offers the best advice.\"\n\n\"Maybe not.\" Miss Lillian set the book down. \"But we all have to start somewhere, now don't we?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "Chapter 25\n\nAny hope Amy had that Miss Lillian's ledger or Rose's journal would clear Colton's name soon proved futile. She had no idea where Tom's brother was during the crimes in question, but he sure wasn't at the parlor house.\n\nMaybe his landlady at the boardinghouse could shed some light as to his activities. Surely she would know if he'd left town for any extended length of time and what dates.\n\nAmy closed the ledger and decided to return it to the office. On the way back to her room she practically bumped into Buttercup and her \"guest.\"\n\nThe man needed no introduction. Even if his fine three-piece suit, black patent shoes, silk cravat, and top hat didn't give him away, Amy would have known this was Mr. Monahan, the town's richest man.\n\nAn extravagant lifestyle had done him no favors appearance-wise. His red, fleshy face revealed a fondness for alcohol, and his wide nose was seamed with purple vein threads.\n\nMr. Monahan tipped his hat and raked her over visually. Amy felt naked beneath his lusty gaze, and all she could think about was his young wife, no doubt sitting home alone waiting for him.\n\n\"You must be the new girl,\" he said with a surface charm that could probably wash off in the rain.\n\nKeeping her emotions in check, Amy dug her fingers into the ledger's leather cover.\n\n\"Yes, I am. My name's Amy.\"\n\n\"I look forward to getting to know you better, Amy.\" Neither his voice nor expression left a question as to his meaning.\n\nIt would be a cold day in Hades before that ever happened, but she managed a casual nod. \"I'd like that.\" About as much as she'd like keeping company with a rattlesnake. \"I also like your gold watch chain. Is it new?\"\n\nHis hand went to his fob. \"This? No, it was originally my grandfather's.\" He turned to his escort. \"Come along, my dear.\"\n\nButtercup led him down the hall with a forced smile. She glanced back at Amy with a look of woeful resignation before leading her \"guest\" into the room at the end of the hall.\n\nSo that was the infamous rich man of Goodman. He was the right height as the Gunnysack Bandit and probably the right age.\n\nAs a businessman, he likely also owned a typewriter or two, probably one of the few in town who did. She guessed the bank owned at least one and maybe the assay office. The mayor's office was also likely to have a typewriter, as were the three lawyers in town.\n\nOf all the possibilities, Mr. Monahan topped the list of suspects. Not only did he fit the bandit's description, but he lived high on the hog, too.\n\nJust where did the man get all his money?\n\nOn second thought, perhaps she would have to get to know the man better\u2014if not him, then his typewriter." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Later that afternoon, Amy sat staring out her bedroom window waiting for Colton. Grimacing, she rubbed her sore shoulder. Actually, her injuries were a blessing in disguise as they gave her a good excuse to wear the matching green silk shoulder cape over her gown. Polly had helped her cover her black eye with paint, and it hardly showed.\n\nSpotting Tom riding up to the parlor house, she dropped the curtain in place. She didn't want to look anxious.\n\nForcing herself to breathe, she grabbed Rose's journal. Moving as fast as her sore body allowed, she left her room. She walked gingerly down the stairs, reaching the door before Tom rang the bell.\n\n\"Amy,\" he said, tugging the brim of his hat. His eyes seemed to soften at the sight of her. Or was that wishful thinking on her part?\n\n\"What happened out there?\" he said, with a nod toward the debris left by the mob.\n\n\"Just some disgruntled ladies,\" she said.\n\nHis forehead creased. \"Is everything all right?\"\n\n\"Yes, everything's fine.\" Not wanting to discuss the matter further, she reached into her pocket. Before she could hand him Rose's journal, Coral entered the entry hall, voice first.\n\n\"Who's at the door?\"\n\nAmy shoved the journal back into her pocket. She'd hoped to send him on his way before anyone even knew he had been here, but already Coral was peering over her shoulder.\n\n\"Why, Mr. Colton,\" Coral cooed, all sweetness and light. \"What is your pleasure?\"\n\nCheeks flaring, Amy met his gaze. \"Mr. Colton came to...\" What? Her mind scrambled. Have his hair cut? A singing lesson? \"Have his fortune told.\"\n\n\"Oh.\" Coral sounded surprised. \"Well, what are you waiting for? Do let the gentleman in.\"\n\nAmy stepped away from the door. Tom pulled off his hat as he entered. There was something solid and upright about him, and she needed that, needed to believe that good, honorable men really did exist, especially after her disturbing conversation with Miss Lillian.\n\nShowering him with flirtatious smiles and batting eyelashes, Coral pushed her bare shoulder forward in a provocative pose, hand at her waist. \"You don't strike me as a man who has to worry about his fortune,\" she said in a syrupy sweet voice.\n\nTom grinned. Much to Amy's disappointment, he appeared to be enjoying himself. \"A man has to look ahead.\"\n\n\"Of course he does,\" Amy said, trying not to let her irritation show. \"There's not much future in the past.\"\n\nCoral flicked imaginary lint off his vest and gave him her most seductive smile. \"I'll fetch Miss Lillian.\"\n\n\"That won't be necessary,\" Amy said. \"I have the... gift.\" She slipped her uninjured arm through the crook of Colton's elbow, and together they walked into the parlor.\n\nHe played his part without question, and Amy could have kissed him on the spot\u2014figuratively speaking, of course. She would never actually initiate... Flustered by the thought, she released his arm.\n\nMuch to Amy's annoyance, Coral followed them. \"What makes you think you have the gift?\" she demanded.\n\n\"I'm the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,\" Amy said smoothly.\n\nCoral didn't respond, but the suspicious gleam remained in her eyes. She crossed her arms and plunked herself down on a settee.\n\nHaving no choice but to go through with the charade, Amy pointed to a chair in front of the crystal ball. \"Please be seated,\" she instructed Tom.\n\n\"Seventh daughter?\" he mouthed, his back toward Coral. He raised his eyebrows like a cat arching its back but did as directed.\n\nShe turned to draw the draperies against the afternoon sun. A pain shot down her arm as she raised it and she grimaced. Striking a safety match, she had to hold her hand to keep it from shaking as she lit the candles.\n\nAfter touching the flame to both candles, she blew out the match and ever so carefully took her seat at the table opposite him. Their knees touched, and she quickly pulled her legs in.\n\nHe watched her, head slanted and alert. \"Are you all right?\"\n\nShe rubbed her shoulder. \"Yes. I just pulled a muscle.\"\n\nHis eyes brimmed with concern. \"Perhaps you should see a doctor.\"\n\n\"I'm fine.\"\n\nHoping to divert his attention, she smoothed the black velvet cloth that covered the table. She'd watched Miss Lillian on numerous occasions and knew the ritual by heart. Maybe if she drew out the procedure long enough, Coral would grow bored and leave.\n\nThe crystal ball was five inches in diameter and stood on a wooden base. She struck a match to light the sage smudge stick.\n\n\"This is to cleanse the ball of any negative energy,\" she explained in a low voice.\n\nHis mouth twitched. \"Sure can't have that.\"\n\nShe was tempted to laugh. Never could she have imagined playing fortune-teller, but since Coral was watching, she maintained a serious demeanor.\n\nAs she smudged the ball, she stared deep into the crystal depths and tried to recall Miss Lillian's precise words as she went through the ritual.\n\n\"Relax, Mr. Colton, and focus.\" Miss Lillian had explained that the crystal ball picked up a client's subconscious thoughts, but all the crystal depths reflected at the moment was the soft glow of candlelight.\n\n\"I see two women in your future,\" she said at last, giving her voice a dreamlike quality.\n\n\"Two, uh? Well now. Which is the lucky one?\"\n\nKeeping her head lowered, she lifted her gaze to his. His mouth quirked with humor. Obviously, he was enjoying himself at her expense, and she couldn't help but tease him back.\n\n\"The one you don't marry.\"\n\nHis warm chuckle made her smile. Much to Amy's relief, Coral had finally given up the watch and left the room. Now, it was only the two of them.\n\n\"Is that it?\" he asked. \"Is that the extent of my fortune? I'll make some woman happy by not marrying her?\"\n\nShe smiled. \"If you want more, you're going to have to pay.\" With a glance toward the archway to make certain no eavesdroppers lurked, she reached into her pocket for Rose's journal.\n\n\"Here it is,\" she said, and his fingers brushed hers as he took it from her. The jolt of his touch made her heart skip a beat. \"I hope you like reading about birds.\"\n\n\"Birds?\"\n\n\"Rose was a bird-watcher, and she kept track of the birds she spotted, along with their habits. I don't know that there's anything useful.\" Certainly there was nothing to clear his brother's name.\n\nHe gave the leather book a cursory glance before slipping it into his pocket.\n\nThe marshal's accusations rang in her head: \"Dave Colton was the Gunnysack Bandit.\" No matter how many times she tried putting that disturbing thought out of her mind, it kept coming back.\n\nRubbing her hand against the smooth fabric of her dress, she moistened her lips. \"Please return it when you're finished.\" She had no further use for Rose's journal and wasn't even sure why she wanted it back.\n\n\"Will do.\" He hesitated. \"Is that all?\"\n\nNo, it wasn't all. My real name is Jennifer Layne, she wanted to say. And I'm not who you think I am.\n\n\"Not entirely.\" She hesitated. \"About your brother...\"\n\nHe stilled. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"As you know, I saw the marshal earlier.\" She forced herself to breathe, but it did little to calm her anxiety. \"Marshal Flood thinks your brother might have been... the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\nA muscle quivered at his jaw and a storm cloud of emotions darkened his face. \"Flood doesn't know what he's talking about,\" he said, his voice as taut as his expression.\n\nShe wanted to believe that was true, but the evidence was beginning to suggest otherwise. \"You said he'd been in trouble in the past, and no one's heard of the Gunnysack Bandit since your brother\u2014\"\n\n\"It makes no sense.\" He shook his head. \"Why would he ask for my help protecting Rose if he was the bandit?\"\n\nShe glanced down at the unblinking eye of the crystal ball and felt as if it mocked her. \"I don't have an answer for that.\"\n\n\"And that doesn't explain who killed him. And we know he didn't kill Rose.\"\n\nShe lifted her gaze to his. \"The marshal doesn't think the deaths are related.\"\n\nHe stood abruptly and his chair fell back. \"My brother was many things,\"\u2014his words were clipped and devoid of his earlier humor\u2014\"not all of them good, but he was not the Gunnysack Bandit.\" He tossed a gold coin on the table and stalked across the room.\n\n\"Wait!\"\n\nHe turned, his eyes ablaze. She couldn't be sure if he was angry at her or his brother. Probably both. People often hired the Pinkerton agency to investigate a family member, then threatened to sue the company when the information was not to their liking.\n\n\"I don't want your money.\"\n\n\"I hired you to spy for me, and that's what you did. Keep it.\" He spun around without a word and left the room.\n\nThe parlor suddenly felt empty. Cold. \"Which is the lucky one?\"\n\nShe'd teased him, of course, but that was only to keep from saying that she wanted the lucky one that he wed to be her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "Chapter 26\n\nGeorgia didn't come down to breakfast that Thursday morning, and the rest of them ate in silence.\n\nAmy was grateful for the quiet as it gave her time to plan her next move. She had spent the previous day checking every possible place in town that might have a typewriter. Dressed in a plain skirt and blouse, she pretended to look for a secretarial job and came up empty. Nobody was in the market to hire, and only two businesses had a typewriter\u2014a lawyer who had yet to take the machine out of the box, and the Monahan Express Company.\n\nIt was possible that someone in town owned a typewriter at home, but unlikely. Not only were the machines expensive, but a private individual would probably have no need for one.\n\nMiss Lillian folded her newspaper and tossed it aside in disgust. \"The theft of a saddlebag gets a full column and Rose's death merited no more than two sentences.\"\n\n\"Doesn't surprise me none,\" Coral said. \"Dirt is given more regard than the likes of us.\"\n\nHer words were punctuated by the angry clang of silverware.\n\nAfter several strained moments, Polly asked, \"W\u2014where's Georgia?\"\n\n\"She's not feeling well,\" Buttercup said as she poured syrup over the stack of hotcakes on her plate.\n\nCoral glared at Amy. \"There's been a lot of that going around lately.\"\n\nMiss Lillian set her coffee cup down. \"Perhaps we should fetch Doc Graham.\"\n\nAmy rose from her chair. \"I'll check on her.\" Grateful for an excuse to escape Coral's daggered looks, she threw her napkin on the table and hurried from the room before anyone could object.\n\nUpstairs, she tapped on Georgia's door. Receiving no answer, she turned the knob and pushed the door open. The shades were drawn against the bright morning sun and a dim gray light bathed the room.\n\n\"Georgia?\"\n\nThe mound beneath the covers was as still as a log. Amy closed the door behind her and crossed the room. \"Miss Lillian and the others are worried. Are you okay?\"\n\nGeorgia rolled over. Amy moved closer, and even in the dimly lit room she could see the tears. She dropped to her knees by the side of the bed and stroked Georgia's cheek.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" she asked. \"Are you ill?\"\n\nGeorgia wiped her wet cheeks with the palms of her hands. \"Today's my little boy's birthday,\" she whimpered. \"He's six years old.\" Fresh sobs wracked her body. \"Such a big boy. I just want to... hold him and wish him happy birthday. Is that so wrong?\"\n\nAmy shook her head. \"No, it's not wrong. It's what any mother would want.\"\n\n\"But not this mother.\" She smothered a sob. \"My son doesn't deserve a mother like me.\"\n\n\"Don't say that, Georgia. You love your children very much, and I'm sure they love you, too.\"\n\n\"They love the person I used to be.\" Georgia let out a long, harrowing sigh. \"That person no longer exists.\"\n\n\"I don't believe that, and you mustn't believe it either.\"\n\nGeorgia pulled a pillow in front of her and held it as one would hold a child. \"I used to be a good girl.\" Her voice trembled. \"Went to church every week and\u2014\" She gulped hard, but the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. \"Now I don't think God even knows I exist.\"\n\n\"Not only does God know, but He cares.\" Amy laid her hand on top of Georgia's. \"Talk to Him. Tell Him how you feel. He'll help you.\" She squeezed the small, pale hand tight. \"Do it for your sake as well as your children's.\"\n\nGeorgia pulled her hand away. \"You're a fine one to talk. You're no better off than I am.\"\n\nGeorgia's words stung, and Amy wanted to scream with frustration. There was so much she wanted to tell her about God's love, so much that needed to be said about God's grace, about His forgiveness and compassion. But saying it would only make her sound like a hypocrite.\n\n\"If I had children, I wouldn't be here,\" she said instead. If she had a family of her own, she wouldn't be here either. It was a startling thought and one she immediately banished. She loved her job; nothing else mattered to her. As long as she kept reminding herself of that, perhaps all these worrisome doubts and feelings of late would go away.\n\nGeorgia's forehead creased. \"What if they were hungry? What if you had no way of feeding them? What would you do then? Let them starve?\"\n\n\"No, I wouldn't do that but... There are people out there who can help you.\" Back home she would know where to send Georgia for help, but here she was a relative stranger and knew so few people. She thought for a moment, and something suddenly occurred to her.\n\n\"There's this churchwoman. Her name is Mrs. Givings, and she knows what it's like to be a mother. Go to her. She'll help you. I know she will.\"\n\n\"But that's the same as asking for charity.\" Georgia tossed the pillow away. \"That's only one step away from what I'm doing now.\"\n\nAmy drew Georgia's hands in her own and looked her straight in the eye. \"In the Bible, charity is just another word for love.\"\n\n\"I don't know\u2014\"\n\n\"Think about it, Georgia. You'll be with your children. Any charity you receive will only be temporary, until you get on your feet and find employment.\" A glimmer of hope flared in Georgia's eyes, but for only a second. \"Who would hire me? I don't have any skills.\"\n\n\"You can sing.\" Georgia's soprano voice had the same pitch and range as Allan Pinkerton's daughter, Joan\u2014a beautiful singer. \"If Miss Lillian can give singing lessons, I dare say so can you.\"\n\nGeorgia's eyes widened. \"That's the craziest thing I ever heard. I mean... I used to sing in the church choir but\u2014\"\n\nAmy pushed a strand of hair away from Georgia's forehead. \"Go and see your little boy. Make this a happy birthday for him.\"\n\nGeorgia shook her head. \"I can't. Those are the only clothes I own.\" With a quick movement of her head, she indicated the open wardrobe stuffed with gowns that no respectable woman would be caught dead wearing.\n\n\"I don't want my children knowing that their mother\u2014\" She stopped amid a fresh flood of tears.\n\n\"Stay here.\" Amy jumped to her feet. \"I'll be back.\"\n\nMoments later, she ran into her room and reached into her private trunk where she kept her own clothes hidden. She pulled out a yellow gingham dress. She shook it out and held it out in front to examine. It was a little wrinkled, but the color would complement Georgia's raven hair and olive skin.\n\nReturning to Georgia's room, Amy pulled off Georgia's covers. \"Come on, get up.\"\n\n\"What are you doing\u2014?\"\n\n\"Put this on.\" She tossed the dress at Georgia. \"Hurry, before someone comes.\"\n\nGeorgia pulled the dress away from her face and gazed up at Amy with questioning eyes.\n\n\"It's time to get ready for your little boy's birthday.\"\n\n\"You mean now?\"\n\nAmy smiled. \"Yes, now.\"\n\nGeorgia let out a soft gasp as she slid out of bed, clutching the dress. Fresh tears filled her eyes, and she tried to speak but the words remained on her trembling lips.\n\nAmy helped her out of her silk nightgown. Without all the bother of a corset, stockings, bustle, and paint, it took only seconds to get Georgia dressed, instead of the usual two hours or more.\n\nGeorgia was thinner than Amy and stood an inch or two taller. The waist was a bit loose and the hem fell to just below her ankles, but otherwise the dress fit fine.\n\n\"Hold still,\" Amy said. After fastening the last of the hooks and eyes, she spun Georgia around to face the beveled glass mirror.\n\nGeorgia stared at her own reflection as if staring at a stranger. Without her customary paint, she looked younger, prettier. Her lips appeared softer, her eyes less haunted.\n\nAmy tied the ribbon at Georgia's waist and studied her from every angle. \"A dress fit for a little boy's birthday.\" She tapped her chin. \"Let's see, what's a proper hairstyle for a proper lady?\"\n\nGeorgia smiled through her tears. \"Nothing too fancy.\"\n\nAmy reached for the silver-handled hairbrush on the dressing table and set to work. She brushed Georgia's long, thick mane till it shone and then twisted the glossy lengths into a ladylike bun.\n\nShe finished pinning the hair in place and met Georgia's gaze in the mirror. \"You look beautiful,\" she said, and she meant it. \"Your little boy will be so proud.\"\n\nGeorgia's cheeks reddened as she turned one way and then the other. \"I almost forgot what I looked like. Who I was...\" She met Amy's gaze in the mirror. \"I don't know how to thank you.\"\n\nAmy smiled and squeezed Georgia's hand. \"No need. Just give your son a big hug for me.\" She tossed a nod toward the door. Mr. Studebaker had started his singing lesson, and the thick walls offered little protection against the onslaught of high-pitched screeches.\n\n\"I'll see if the coast is clear.\"\n\nShe cracked the door open. A man she didn't recognize ran down the hall shirtless and coatless with trousers to match. She shut the door and turned.\n\n\"What is it?\" Georgia asked.\n\n\"Just one of the guests.\"\n\nGeorgia wrung her hands. \"Are... are you sure this will work? What if I run into someone? What if a guest sees me like this? Miss Lillian will have a fit.\"\n\n\"Trust me, no one will recognize you. Anyone looking at you will see only the woman you really are. The woman God meant you to be.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "Chapter 27\n\nGod, help me.\n\nTom's anguished prayer seemed to bounce from wall to wall of the empty church like a mustang trying to escape a corral. Was God even listening?\n\nTom's grandpappy often said that things never looked quite so hopeless when one was down on his prayer bones. Well, Tom had been on his prayer bones so long they were about to give out, and still he felt miserable. It didn't help that the stained glass window overhead depicted a picture of Cain and Abel. He understood too well the rage one brother could feel for another.\n\nHe could still hear Amy's voice as she broke the news about Dave. Could still see the sadness on her face as she repeated what the marshal had said. Faked\u2014all of it. Nothing about her was real, no matter how much he wanted to believe otherwise. She and his brother were two of a kind. Both knew how to play upon other people's emotions. The only difference was she did it for money.\n\nDave the Gunnysack Bandit? No, it can't be. God, tell me it's not true.\n\nA footfall echoed from behind and he rose.\n\nThe reverend stopped in his tracks. \"My apologies. I didn't know anyone was here.\" He started to leave.\n\n\"Wait. I came to see you,\" Tom said.\n\nThe minister turned. \"Well then...\" He hurried down the middle aisle toward the altar. Tom couldn't help but notice the shiny black boots with the garish rose. He'd seen a pair just like them at Miss Lillian's. But surely a preacher wouldn't\u2014\n\n\"You like them?\" the reverend asked, extending a foot.\n\n\"They're something, all right,\" Tom said.\n\n\"Bought and worn in the line of duty,\" the minister said good-naturedly and offered his hand. \"Name's Reverend Matthews.\"\n\n\"Tom Colton.\"\n\n\"Colton? You're not by any chance related to Dave Colton, are you?\"\n\nSurprised that the reverend knew Dave, Tom replied, \"He was my brother.\"\n\n\"Ah, I do see a bit of a family resemblance. Sorry to hear what happened. Such a waste. What can I do for you?\"\n\n\"Did you know my brother well?\"\n\nThe preacher nodded. \"Well enough. Used to sit in the very back pew as if he wasn't certain he belonged here. Know what I mean?\"\n\nTom's eyebrows rose. \"Dave came to church?\"\n\n\"Most every Sunday that he wasn't in the hoosegow or out of town. Then one week just before he died, I took the pulpit and looked out over the congregation and what did I see? The Colton fellow had moved down several rows toward the altar. It was the middle, right there.\" He pointed. \"I took that as a good sign.\"\n\nSomething tugged at Tom's insides. If Dave came to church, that had to mean he was a changed man. He couldn't have been guilty of the things the marshal said.\n\nThe minister continued. \"I talked to him after the service. He told me he'd done some things in the past he regretted. Said he asked for God's forgiveness and now wished to marry one of the parlor girls. Rose was her name, and he asked me to officiate.\"\n\n\"That must have put you on the spot.\"\n\n\"Not at all. It was my duty, of course, to ask if his future bride was a woman of faith. He said she was. So, my answer to him was then her faith will save her.\"\n\n\"So you agreed to marry them?\"\n\n\"I did. Dave was greatly relieved, but he was also in a hurry. He insisted that I marry them right away. I told him I needed to meet his young lady first. We agreed to meet at the church the following Friday, and he swore me to secrecy. The couple never arrived, and that's when I learned of Dave's death.\"\n\n\"Did my brother say why he was in such a hurry to wed? Or why it was necessary to keep it secret?\"\n\n\"No, but I assumed he was anxious to get Rose away from the parlor house. Couldn't blame him there.\" The minister shook his head. \"I was shocked when I heard the news of his death. I made several attempts to contact Rose, but she never responded. I understood from Dave that she didn't want anyone at the parlor house to know her plans, so I didn't attempt to contact her in person. I wish now that I had.\"\n\n\"I don't think it would have changed anything,\" Tom said.\n\n\"You never know.\"\n\n\"Did Dave say what things he'd done?\"\n\n\"No, and I couldn't tell you if he had. But I can tell you this much\u2014he deeply regretted hurting his family.\"\n\nWas that true? Or was the kind reverend only trying to make him feel better?\n\nMatthews laid a hand on Tom's shoulder. \"Would you like to join me in prayer?\"\n\nNot sure that God would be any more likely to answer two prayers than one, Tom nonetheless nodded and turned toward the altar.\n\nMoments later, he walked up the aisle of the church and paused by the middle pew. The vision of Dave sitting, head bowed, was so vivid he had to blink to make sure it wasn't real.\n\nHe left the church with a heavy heart. Had Dave fooled the reverend as he'd fooled others in the past? It was a question very much on his mind for the remainder of the day." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "The following morning, Amy woke to loud voices. She turned over, punched her pillow, and tried to go back to sleep, but the voices persisted. Having grown up with brothers, she wasn't used to the feminine squabbles and petty jealousies that were now part of her daily life.\n\nShe lifted her head from the pillow and glanced at the clock. It wasn't even seven. The high-pitched chatter grew louder and sounded more serious than a simple spat over someone hogging the bath.\n\nNo longer able to hold back her curiosity, she slid out of bed and padded to the door barefoot.\n\nMiss Lillian and the others were gathered in the hallway in front of Georgia's room.\n\nAmy covered her mouth. Oh no, not Georgia! Please, God, no! She flew down the hall expecting to see Georgia's body on the floor, but instead the room\u2014the bed\u2014was empty.\n\nAnd just that quickly a voice echoed from the past: \"Thared, Tenfer. Monster tay me.\"\n\nThe vision of Cissy's empty bed on that long-ago day seemed so real, Amy slumped against the door frame. It was all she could do to catch her breath.\n\nPolly touched her shoulder. \"Are you all r\u2014right?\"\n\nShaking away the fog of the past, Amy nodded. \"Yes... I...\" Everyone stared at her, and she gave herself a mental shake. \"What's the matter?\" she asked. \"What's all the fuss?\"\n\nPolly looked close to tears. \"Georgia's g\u2014g\u2014g\u2014\"\n\nButtercup clutched the neckline of her blue satin dressing gown. \"What Polly's trying to say is that Georgia's gone and didn't come home last night.\"\n\nCoral made a face. \"And she didn't tell anyone where she was going.\"\n\nA dozen questions raced through Amy's thoughts. Had Georgia decided not to return? Had she decided to stay with her children instead? Oh, please, God, let that be true!\n\n\"What do you think happened to her?\" Buttercup asked in the kind of hushed voice people saved for sickrooms and funerals.\n\n\"You don't s\u2014s\u2014suppose\u2014\" Polly fell silent, but she glanced down the hall to Rose's old room.\n\n\"I'm sure she's all right,\" Amy assured her. She didn't want to break Georgia's confidence, but neither did she want the others to worry.\n\nMiss Lillian looked especially distraught. Was she concerned about Georgia's well-being? Or simply annoyed that she'd lost yet another girl in such a short time?\n\n\"Now there's just the four of us,\" Buttercup said. \"That means we'll be... busy.\"\n\nCoral glared at Amy. \"Some of us.\"\n\nAmy pretended not to notice, but it worried her. Coral suspected something, and she wasn't the kind of person to keep it to herself.\n\nMiss Lillian wrung her hands. \"Perhaps we should notify ole Tin Star.\"\n\n\"What's the marshal gonna do?\" Coral snapped. \"He hasn't done anything to find Rose's killer. We could all be murdered in our beds and no one would care.\"\n\n\"God cares.\" Amy hadn't meant to say the words aloud, but they just bubbled out of her. The silence that followed couldn't have been more brittle had she announced she had a contagious disease.\n\n\"The stories we tell ourselves,\" Coral muttered as she walked away.\n\nMiss Lillian and the others left, too, scurrying away like frightened little mice.\n\nAmy watched them flee. It was hard to know what worried them more: Georgia's absence or God's presence." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "Chapter 28\n\nAt midnight, the street directly in front of the Monahan Express Company was relatively quiet. From a nearby saloon came the high tinny tune of a tightly wound banjo. Clapping hands and stomping feet were punctuated with bouts of raucous laughter.\n\nAmy took careful note of her surroundings. The marshal was convinced the Gunnysack Bandit was Tom's brother, and tonight she hoped to prove him wrong. Earlier that day, she had gone to Dave's boardinghouse and pretended to be his long-lost cousin. But the proprietor, a widow in her sixties, had little to offer. She had no idea what hours Dave had kept while living there. Though the man had been dead for a little less than three months, she hardly remembered him. Amy hoped her efforts tonight would prove more successful.\n\nHer plan was simple: break into the express office, check the keys on the typewriter or typewriters, and leave. She was by no means an expert in machines, but it shouldn't be hard to check the type bars. The most used letter in the English language, e, would no doubt show wear. She would be far more interested in comparing the letter m to the list found on Dave Colton's person. M for Monahan.\n\nDirectly across from the express office stood the Grande Hotel and Bath House. In front of the hotel's two-story building, a tethered horse nickered and pawed the ground. From the distance came the bark of a dog.\n\nShe pulled her gaze away from the hotel but not soon enough to stop unbidden memories from coming to the fore.\n\n\"Why do you care?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\"\n\nShe gave herself a mental shake. What Tom thought or didn't think was no concern of hers. None!\n\nFocusing her attention on the locked door, she pulled a hairpin from her hair. After straightening the metal wire, she jabbed one end into the keyhole. She wiggled it back and forth. Nothing. She pulled the hairpin out of the lock and reinserted it.\n\nShe had no business breaking into anyone's office. The marshal considered the case closed, and it was only a matter of time before she received orders to leave Kansas. Still, something didn't sit right. Too many unanswered questions remained for her peace of mind.\n\nShe didn't know where Monahan fit in, if indeed he did, but the more she heard about his wild spending sprees and high-stakes gambling, the more her suspicions grew. He was rich, and he was powerful, and he matched the height and agility of the Gunnysack Bandit. If that wasn't enough of a red flag, the watch chain found in Rose's room had to belong to him. It was too similar in design to the one he now wore.\n\nTrue, he could have lost it at any time, perhaps even days or week before Rose's death. But then why didn't the so-called thief find it upon searching her room? What self-respecting robber would leave a valuable gold chain behind?\n\nBlowing a strand of hair away from her face, Amy jammed the hairpin back into the keyhole for the third time.\n\nA gas lamppost cast a yellow glow across the door, so light wasn't a problem; her aching back was. Mr. Pinkerton would have a fit if he knew one of his operatives couldn't pick a simple door lock to save her soul.\n\nNot willing to admit defeat, she stuck her tongue between her teeth and wiggled the hairpin back and forth. There had to be a tumbler in the hole somewhere. Her instructor, Mr. Welby, at the Pinkerton detective school had made picking locks seem like child's play.\n\nA drunk staggered down the middle of the dirt road singing a ditty at the top of his lungs but paid her no heed.\n\nHaving no luck, Amy pulled the hairpin from the keyhole. Straightening, she rubbed her lower spine. Who knew that picking locks could be so physically demanding?\n\nThe pin was hopelessly bent out of shape. Dropping it into her drawstring purse, she tried to think. Why hadn't she thought to bring a piece of wire with her? Irritated at her own ineptness, she gave the door a good kick.\n\n\"Can I be of help, ma'am?\"\n\nStartled by the male voice, Amy spun around and gasped. She couldn't see his face, but there was no mistaking Tom Colton's tall, dark form.\n\nHe drew back in surprise. \"Amy? Is that you?\"\n\n\"Yes, it's me.\" Since she was bathed in gaslight, she could hardly deny it. She couldn't see his eyes but she felt his gaze.\n\n\"And the other day... that was you, too, wasn't it?\"\n\nShe clenched her hands by her side. \"It was me. These are my nonworking clothes. What are you doing here?\" Doesn't anyone in this town sleep?\n\n\"Well I'll be a possum's uncle.\" Hooking his thumbs over his belt, he shook his head. \"You should dress like that more often. It suits you.\"\n\nHis compliment made her blush. Confound it! No matter how much she fought her attraction to him, he always managed to blast through her defenses. \"How did you\u2014?\"\n\n\"I saw you from my hotel window. So what's the story?\"\n\n\"There is no story. You're paying me to spy, and that's what I'm doing.\"\n\nHe reared back. \"You're doing this for me?\"\n\n\"I'm certainly not doing it for my health.\"\n\n\"But I thought... You said that the marshal suspected my brother was the Gunnysack Bandit. I just assumed you did, too.\" He angled his head. \"I never asked you to break into anyone's office.\"\n\nShe gave herself a mental kick. Think. Think! \"I just have a feeling that we're on the wrong track. Call it woman's intuition.\"\n\nHe glanced up at the sign over the door. \"So how does Monahan fit into the scheme of things?\"\n\n\"That's what I hope to find out. You still haven't told me why you're here.\"\n\n\"It looks like I'm about to become a party\"\u2014he glanced at the door\u2014\"to a breakin.\"\n\nHe held out his hand. \"Do you have a hairpin?\"\n\nSince the one she'd been using was hopelessly bent out of shape she drew a fresh one from her bun. Her hair unraveled, and his gaze seemed to follow as it tumbled to her shoulders.\n\nBlushing, she stammered, \"I\u2014It's no good. It won't work.\"\n\nHe took the clasp and motioned her away from the door. \"Stand back.\" He pretended to roll up his shirtsleeves before dropping down on his haunches.\n\n\"I told you it won't\u2014\"\n\n\"Shh. I'm working.\"\n\nShe glanced around. Depending on another was humiliating enough, but somehow being caught by Colton, of all people, was worse. It seemed like every time they met she was in some sort of awkward predicament that forced her to lie. And the more she lied, the worse she felt.\n\n\"There you go!\" He straightened. With a flick of the wrist, he swung the door open.\n\nShe gritted her teeth. It took him less than twenty seconds. She started forward, but he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her close.\n\n\"Not till you tell me what we're doing here. What do you hope to find?\" The spicy fragrance of bay rum hair tonic tickled her nose.\n\nShe pulled away but only because she needed to keep her wits intact. \"I'll explain inside. I don't want to chance being seen by anyone else.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" With a wave of his hand he bowed. \"After you.\"\n\nThrowing her shoulders back, she marched past him and into the sparsely furnished office.\n\nOn the wall over the safe was a large painting of three ships on a stormy sea. Boxes and crates were piled against one wall, presumably waiting to be delivered.\n\nHe shut the door, creating an intimacy between them that made her feel all tingly inside.\n\nThe yellow gaslight slanting through the transom window illuminated his stern expression. They squared off like two opponents waiting for the other to make the first move.\n\n\"All right. Let's hear it,\" he said. \"What are we doing here? What's this feeling you have?\" Tonight he was hatless, and a lock of hair fell across his forehead, giving him a boyish look that seemed at odds with his tall, commanding form.\n\nShe tossed her head. \"I am here because Mr. Moneybags\u2014I mean, Mr. Monahan\u2014was one of Rose's guests.\"\n\n\"And?\"\n\n\"I found a watch fob under her bed, which I believe was his.\"\n\nHe considered this for a moment. \"Even if it's his, it proves nothing. He could have lost it at any time.\"\n\n\"That's true, but he does fit the general description of the Gunnysack Bandit, including his height.\"\n\n\"The same could be said for half the people in this town. My brother was six foot tall. So, for that matter, am I.\"\n\n\"Yes, but as far as I know\"\u2014she glanced down at his well-worn, dusty boots\u2014\"Mr. Monahan is the only one who owns several pairs of expensive patent leather shoes and silk suits. He also owns the best horses and carriages in the county. Have you ever wondered how he affords all that?\"\n\nElbow resting on his arm, he tapped his chin with his finger. \"So you don't think he comes by his wealth by honest means?\"\n\n\"Perhaps he did at one time. The train has made such express companies almost obsolete. Why would anyone pay to have a wagon deliver goods when the train is so much quicker, cheaper, and dependable?\"\n\n\"Good question.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"Now I've got one for you. How did you know Monahan fits the Gunnysack Bandit's description?\"\n\nShe groaned inwardly at her slip of the tongue. What was it about him that made her lower her guard and make careless mistakes?\n\nShe tried to think if his height was on the wanted posters and was certain it wasn't. \"Must have been something the marshal said. Or maybe Miss Lillian's crystal ball.\"\n\nHe surprised her by laughing. \"It seems I've been going about this all wrong. What else did her crystal ball tell you?\"\n\n\"You mean other than the fact that you'll make one poor woman perfectly miserable?\"\n\nHis white teeth flashed. \"Yes, other than that.\"\n\n\"It told me to watch out for a tall, dark\u2014\" She almost said handsome. \"Texan.\"\n\nHe grinned, and her heart did a flip-flop. \"Good advice. Anything else?\"\n\n\"That's all,\" she said. \"Did you get anywhere with Rose's journal?\"\n\n\"I was reading it just now and got distracted.\"\n\n\"Sorry. So what do you think?\"\n\n\"I think it's for the birds. My brother might have fared better had he had a beak and two wings. What kind of woman was this Rose, anyway?\"\n\n\"Watching birds might have given her hope. She believed birds flew because of perfect faith.\" She tilted her glance. \"Just like the faith you have in your brother.\"\n\nHe shook his head and grimaced. \"I'm a realist,\" he said bitterly. \"And facts are facts, so you won't be seeing me grow wings anytime soon.\"\n\n\"Maybe not, but he was lucky to have you,\" she said. \"Even if he didn't know it.\"\n\nHe hesitated. \"I apologize for the way I acted. I had no right to take it out on you. None of this is your fault.\"\n\n\"Apology accepted.\" Oddly enough, without face paint and fancy clothes, she felt naked in front of him. She had nothing to hide behind. No act to fall back upon. No face-saving way to make an escape.\n\nHe stepped closer and gently nudged a strand of hair away from her face. \"It means a lot to have you helping me, especially after what the marshal said.\"\n\nShe felt a surge of guilt. Her job\u2014her only job\u2014was tracking down the Gunnysack Bandit. Maybe the marshal was right, maybe not. Either way, she couldn't let emotions get in the way.\n\nShe stepped away from him. \"We better get to work.\"\n\n\"Not till you tell me what we're looking for,\" he said.\n\nShe moved to one of the desks. \"This.\" Pointing to the typewriter, she told him about the list the marshal found on his brother's body. \"I want to see if this is the machine it was typed on.\"\n\nHe tilted his brow in a quizzical frown. \"And you thought of this all by yourself?\"\n\n\"Is that so hard to believe?\" she asked, her voice edged with annoyance.\n\nHe grimaced. \"I didn't mean that how it sounded. I don't know that many people would have thought of that\u2014me included.\"\n\nRegretting her thoughtless retort, she worked a sheet of paper between the paper guides and rolled it into place. As a detective, she had to work harder than any man to prove herself, and sometimes she was oversensitive.\n\n\"Sorry I snapped at you. I'm not used to breaking into buildings,\" she said.\n\nHe lit a match and held her gaze for a moment before moving the flickering flame next to the typewriter, his arm brushing against her shoulder. \"That makes two of us.\"\n\nInhaling sharply, she fought to concentrate on the machine in front of her. It was a Sholes and Glidden typewriter with the popular QWERTY keyboard. She stroked several random keys before hitting the e and the m.\n\n\"It looks like you've done this before,\" he said.\n\n\"A couple of times,\" she said, without elaborating. She feared that after tonight she would have a hard time convincing him she was simply one of Miss Lillian's working girls.\n\n\"I never understood why the keys are all mixed up the way they are,\" he said, leaning his head closer to hers.\n\n\"I'll show you why.\" She typed a single word. \"See? The word typewriter can be typed by using the QWERTY line alone. It was designed that way for the convenience of typewriter salesmen. They can impress customers by how quickly they type the word.\"\n\nHis questioning gaze came to rest on hers. \"You're just full of information, aren't you?\"\n\n\"My uncle works at Remington,\" she said. The lie fell quickly from her lips, but the guilt that followed was like a slow burn on her conscience. Pinkerton detectives tended to have a lot of phantom aunts and uncles. It was part of the job, but that didn't make her feel any better.\n\nHe blew out the match and lit another, but his gaze never left her face.\n\nIgnoring him, she ripped the paper out of the roller and studied the type. The e was a bit furry, but the letter m was perfectly formed. \"The list wasn't typed on this machine,\" she said, her voice thin with disappointment. She folded the paper and put it in her pocket. \"Sorry.\"\n\n\"Not your fault.\" He shook the match and the flame went out. \"Like I said before, you should have been a detective.\"\n\nHer cheeks flared and she turned away. He halted her escape with a hand to her wrist.\n\n\"I really wanted the typewriter to match,\" he said, his voice husky. \"I didn't want to believe\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, Tom, I'm so sorry.\" She lifted her hand to his cheek and heard his intake of breath. \"I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"Nothing,\" he said. \"There's nothing to say. I just wish I knew how to tell his son.\"\n\n\"You'll find a way,\" she whispered. He had been such a comfort to her the night she told him about Cissy; she had no doubt he would be just as comforting to a child.\n\nHe circled her waist with both hands, and her knees weakened. Crushing her to him, he gazed at her intently before angling his mouth against hers.\n\nHer senses spun and waves of warm sensations rushed through her. Tossing caution to the wind, she flung her arms around his neck and, rising on tiptoes, kissed him back.\n\nAll too soon he pulled away. Confused and maybe even a little hurt, it took a moment to gain her bearings and realize he was trying to tell her something.\n\nWith a wave of his hand, he motioned toward the rattling doorknob, and she caught her breath. Finger pressed to his lips, he quietly moved to the window.\n\n\"It's a man wearing a checkered suit,\" he said in a hushed voice.\n\nShe groaned. The man she thought of as Mr. Checkers...\"He's a private detective,\" she said quietly. \"And he thinks you're a Pink.\"\n\nHe reared back. \"Why would he think such a thing?\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Probably because you act like one.\"\n\n\"I do?\"\n\nNot even a little bit. A detective had to blend in and not be noticed. Tom Colton's commanding presence would make him stand out among giants.\n\nThe doorknob clicked.\n\n\"I'll handle him.\" Colton signaled with his arm for her to hide, and she ducked behind a desk." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "Chapter 29\n\nColton could no longer see her, but he had trouble pulling his gaze away from the spot where moments earlier he'd held her in his arms. If only she knew how beautiful she looked tonight without her usual face paint, and golden curls falling down her back. Still, he was shocked by what had transpired between them\u2014yet again.\n\nHer determination to help prove his brother's innocence, even in light of such overwhelming odds, moved him deeply, and he would always be grateful to her.\n\nIf only she wasn't... If only she didn't...\n\nClamping down on his thoughts, he turned his attention to the door. A squeak of a rusty hinge preceded a gush of cold air. The detective entered the office and shut the door quietly. He then struck a safety match and held it upright.\n\nColton stepped out of the shadows, and the man jumped back with a yelp. The match flew out of his hands and landed on the floor.\n\nColton casually stepped on it with his boot to make sure it was out. \"Take it easy. I mean you no harm.\"\n\nThe man's Adam's apple bobbed up and down like a rubber ball. \"I say, old chap, you almost got yourself a knuckle sandwich.\" He spoke in a nasally voice with a clipped British accent.\n\nOld chap? Colton rubbed the back of his neck. \"Sorry I scared you, but one of the hazards of breaking into buildings is that you never know what you'll find. Do you do it often? Break in, I mean?\"\n\n\"Only when it's necessary.\" The detective ran a finger along his collar, and a sheen of perspiration peppered his forehead.\n\n\"That's good to hear. I'd hate to think it was a habit with you. So who are you, and what are you doing here?\"\n\nThe man looked like he resented the question but, nonetheless, politely doffed his bowler. \"My name is Winston Walker III, and I'm a private investigator.\" His British accent made him sound more pompous than he looked, and that was saying something.\n\n\"Who you working for?\"\n\n\"I'm not working for anyone at the moment. I'm here on my own behalf. As you surely must know, there's a handsome reward for the capture of the Gunnysack Bandit. I aim to claim it.\"\n\n\"That still doesn't explain what you're doing here.\"\n\n\"I told Miss Lillian I was looking for someone with the initials GB for the Gunnysack Bandit. She looked into her crystal ball and said the person in question could be found at X. So I put two and two together and came up with the Monahan Express Company. Get it? Express?\"\n\n\"Express starts with an E.\"\n\n\"I'm well aware of that,\" Walker sniffed. \"But I know what poor spellers you colonists are.\"\n\n\"So what did the crystal ball say you'd find here?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, that would have cost me another five dollars. I decided to take a chance and look for myself.\"\n\nColton shook his head. Some private eye. He probably couldn't find a cowbell in the toe of his sock. Certainly he didn't know that the marshal considered the case closed.\n\n\"I'm afraid you're out of luck. There's nothing here. I've searched the place.\"\n\nWalker frowned. \"Why would I take the word of a Pinkerton operative?\"\n\nIt was all Tom could do to keep from laughing. He'd met some pretty dumb detectives, but this one took the cake. \"If you don't believe me, look for yourself.\"\n\nWalker glanced around. \"Miss Lillian assured me that the crystal ball is never wrong.\"\n\n\"Maybe you're the one who got it wrong. X could mean a number of things. It could mean the Gunnysack Bandit has an X in his name. Like Dixon.\"\n\n\"Hmm, maybe you're right.\" Walker sounded doubtful.\n\n\"Of course I'm right. Come on, I'll see you out before we both get caught.\" He took the man by the arm and firmly steered him outside, shutting the door behind them.\n\nWalker pulled his arm away and straightened his bow tie. \"You never did say what you were doing here, Colton.\"\n\n\"Same crystal ball.\"\n\n\"Is that so? Well, may the best sleuthhound win.\" He doffed his bowler and started across the street toward the hotel. \"Pip-pip,\" he called over his shoulder.\n\nColton walked along the boardwalk. \"Same to you,\" he called back. Half walking and half running, he circled around the block. By the time he returned to the express office, there was no sign of Walker.\n\nHe hastened to the door and gave it a soft rap. Nothing. He knocked again, this time harder. \"Come on, come on. What's taking you so long?\"\n\nWhen Amy failed to answer, he felt in his vest pocket for the hairpin he'd used earlier and picked the lock. He walked inside calling her name. \"Amy, it's me. Your detective friend is gone, but he might come back.\"\n\nHe did a quick search, but there was no sign of her. The back window was open. He flew across the room and stuck his head outside. The alleyway was empty.\n\nHe pulled in and slammed the window shut. The office still carried her faint lilac scent. It was as if she were still standing by the desk, waiting to be taken into his arms.\n\nDave, oh, Dave. Now look what you've done. Brought me here and... He shook his head and blinked away the vision of her sweet, curving smile. He didn't want to think about the rest. Couldn't.\n\nFinding his brother's killer, that's what he was here for. That and proving the marshal was wrong\u2014dead wrong\u2014about Dave." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "Chapter 30\n\nAmy ran all the way back to the parlor house. Pausing by the front gate to catch her breath, she glanced around anxiously and squinted at every shadow. Since being attacked by the group of angry women, she took extra precautions.\n\nThe night air was cool, but her lips still burned with the memory of Tom's kiss. Somehow he had awakened a need in her that she hadn't known existed. A need to be held and kissed and...\n\nOh, God, how could this happen? Why did it happen?\n\nIf Tom knew how she'd lied to him, knew that the real reason for breaking into Monahan's had little to do with saving his brother's reputation, he'd never want to see her again. She did want to prove Dave's innocence, but not for the reasons Tom supposed.\n\nShamefully and maybe even selfishly, she wanted answers to all the questions that still remained. Who killed Rose? Who killed Tom's brother? How did Monahan fit into the picture? What, if anything, did any of this have to do with the Gunnysack Bandit?\n\nFinding answers was her lifeline. It gave her life purpose and meaning and helped her cope with her sister's mysterious disappearance. She might never know what happened to Cissy, but solving crimes offered a measure of closure\u2014at least temporarily\u2014until the next case and the one after that.\n\nShaking away her thoughts, she let herself through the gate. No horses were tethered in front\u2014not too surprising. Since Saturday was a workday, guests seldom stayed late on a Friday night.\n\nAfter Tom left the office with Mr. Checkers, she'd done a hasty search. The desk drawers revealed only the usual office supplies and a rotting apple. She found no receipts, no ledgers, nothing. Monahan either kept his records locked up in the safe or elsewhere. Finding only one typewriter was especially disappointing.\n\nThe reason she ran had nothing to do with the nosy detective and everything to do with Tom. She wanted so much\u2014was so terribly tempted\u2014to let him finish the kiss begun before Checkers arrived, but that would have been a mistake.\n\nStripped of her working-girl veneer, she was dangerously close to the real Jennifer Layne. It was getting harder to keep things from him and hold back the truth.\n\nA rabbit hopped out of the bushes, and she jumped, causing her worrisome thoughts to scatter like little field mice.\n\nCatching a movement out of the corner of her eye, she ducked behind a bush. It took a moment before she could pick out a black horse tethered in the vacant field next door between the trees. Odd.\n\nUnless...\n\nShe crept quietly along the side of the house. Back against the brick wall, she strained her ears. Was that a voice she heard? She dropped on all fours. People look up, not down, and she had less chance of being seen close to the ground.\n\nShe peered around the corner. The dark form of a man stood outside the cellar door. He was dressed in black, which made him easy to pick out. Many criminals made the mistake of wearing solid black, a color that doesn't appear naturally in nature. Dark blue or gray was a better choice for blending in at night.\n\nShe sat up and ever so quietly pulled off her boots. Stocking feet absorbed sounds better than leather soles. She felt on the ground until she found a rock to throw should she need to divert attention from herself.\n\nUsing the bushes against the house for cover, she moved slowly. The man wasn't alone. Someone was with him: a woman.\n\nThe muted baritone voice most likely belonged to Mr. Monahan, but the woman's voice was too soft to identify. She stood inside the cellar, which not only hid her identity but kept her voice muffled.\n\n\"I can't help that.\" The masculine voice crackled through the air like gunfire. \"It's over.\"\n\nAmy moved a tad closer. What's over? A twig snapped beneath her foot and she froze.\n\nThe woman said something, but the words weren't clear, only the force behind them. She and Monahan were arguing.\n\n\"I said it's over!\" he snapped. As if conscious of his surroundings, he lowered his voice and Amy missed the rest.\n\nShe pushed the branches aside. With a curse, the man moved away from the trapdoor. He advanced toward her, and she ducked. He stopped in front of the bush where she hid, but it was too dark to make out more than his hatless, dark form.\n\nShe froze in place and tightened her grip on the rock, ready to throw.\n\nThe pungent, sweet smell of tobacco smoke wafted through the air and relief flooded through her. He'd stopped to light a stogie.\n\nHe moved away, and her breath escaped with a whoosh. The cool night air soothed her burning lungs. Without bothering to retrieve her shoes, she ran to the cellar trapdoor. If she hurried she might still be able to catch the woman.\n\nAt the creak of a rusty hinge, she halted her steps. Straining her ears, she waited, but when no sound came from within she started down the stairs. It was pitch black in the cellar, but operatives had been trained not to depend on sight alone.\n\nShe sniffed the air. Each resident had her own brand of perfume. Coral's had a touch of bergamot and lemon. Buttercup wore rose water, and Polly's perfume smelled of lilacs. Tonight, none of these fragrances were evident, and only the musty smell of the cellar tickled her nose.\n\nMoving cautiously, she felt her way through the underground room with outstretched hands. She hit her shin on a piece of furniture and paused for a moment to gain her bearings.\n\nA soft thud made her reach for her gun. \"Who's there?\"\n\nSomething slammed against the side of her head and she sank to her knees." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "How long she lay unconscious on the cellar dirt floor she had no idea. It could have been minutes, maybe even hours.\n\nOnce she came out of her stupor, she remained perfectly still. Hearing no sounds, she sat up slowly. She fingered the bump above her ear and winced. She was lucky to be alive.\n\nSomething brushed against her leg and she jumped.\n\n\"Mee-ow.\"\n\nHand on her chest, she gasped with relief. \"Mr. Beavers! What are you doing here?\"\n\nThe cat rubbed his furry body against hers. She stroked his head before crawling around on hands and knees in an effort to locate her gun. She found it beneath the rocking chair.\n\nGripping the weapon, she stood. She felt lightheaded and waited for the feeling to pass before starting up the stairs.\n\nThe door to the kitchen opened to her touch. Mr. Beavers slipped past her and ran to his dish.\n\nHolstering her gun, she felt on the counter for matches. She lit the match and held it to the kitchen clock. It was a little after 1:30 a.m. That meant that she'd been unconscious for about ten minutes\u2014fifteen at the most. The only sound now was Mr. Beavers lapping up the last bit of cream in his dish.\n\nShaking away another wave of dizziness, she blew out the match and crept through the house to the stairs. All was quiet on the second floor as she tiptoed down the hall. Gaslight flickered and hissed from the wall sconces, providing more shadows than light.\n\nNot a sound came from any of the bedrooms. She walked past each door, careful to avoid any floorboards she knew squeaked. Light fanned out from beneath the doors of two rooms. Both Coral and Buttercup were still awake.\n\nSo which one clobbered her on the head? Of equal importance, which one was in cahoots with Monahan?\n\nCoral had been surly toward her in recent days and leery of her from the start. If she was working with Monahan, she'd have good reason to be suspicious of anyone\u2014and on guard.\n\nAnd what about Buttercup? She and Monahan had been together a few days earlier. Maybe they were plotting another heist\u2014or worse, planning another murder." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "\"Thared, Tenfer. Monster tay me.\"\n\nIt was the same old dream, but lately, it had been waking Amy up almost nightly.\n\nIt was as if someone was trying to tell her something. God? But that made no sense. Her sister's disappearance had nothing to do with the current case.\n\nShe stretched and yawned. She'd hardly slept all night, and when she wasn't dreaming about Cissy, she relived the dark, scary moments in the cellar. Just as alarming was the way the memory of Tom's kisses kept popping up.\n\nTurning over on her side, she grimaced. She had a king-sized headache and a bump the size of a goose egg just above her right ear. Just what she needed. It was all she could do to concentrate, let alone think about the case. Still, she had to try.\n\nCollecting clues was the easiest part of a detective's job, analyzing them correctly the hardest.\n\nWas Tom's brother really the Gunnysack Bandit? He apparently fit the description, and it would certainly explain the items found on his body. And what part, if any, did Monahan play in the scheme of things? Had he killed Rose, and if so, why? Or was the person who hit her over the head in the cellar the real killer?\n\nFrom her open window came the sharp report of a gun, followed by another and another.\n\nShe reached beneath her pillow for her derringer. Alert now, she jumped out of bed and ran into the hall.\n\nCoral moved cautiously toward the stairwell, holding her gun out in front. One by one, the doors of Polly's and Buttercup's rooms opened, and both women popped their heads out.\n\n\"I heard g\u2014g\u2014gunfire,\" Polly stammered.\n\n\"Me, too,\" Amy said. \"Stay here.\"\n\nCoral stared at her all funny-like. Was that surprise on Coral's face? Whoever assaulted her last night might have thought her dead. All three women were giving her odd looks. Or rather, they were staring at her plain flour-sack nightgown.\n\n\"What makes you the boss?\" Coral asked.\n\n\"I know how to use a gun and you don't.\" Ignoring her still pounding head, Amy descended the stairs holding on to the banister. Much to her annoyance, the other three women followed on her heels.\n\nCoffey stood behind the kitchen counter holding a rolling pin over her head. The housekeeper, Beatrice, stood behind the cook, her face drained of color.\n\n\"They come in here and that'll be the last thing they do,\" Coffey said, wielding the rolling pin.\n\n\"Who are 'they'?\" Amy asked.\n\n\"How am I supposed to know?\"\n\nHolding the others back with her free hand, Amy approached the mudroom. More gunfire. Cautiously, she cracked open the door and peered outside. \"For the love of\u2014\" She closed the door and pocketed her weapon.\n\n\"W\u2014what is it?\" Polly stammered.\n\nAmy turned to find three guns, a rolling pin, and a broom all aimed at her.\n\n\"Put your weapons away. It's just Miss Lillian practicing her shooting.\"\n\nCoffey frowned. \"What she want to do that for?\"\n\n\"M\u2014m\u2014maybe she just w\u2014wants to feel s\u2014safe,\" Polly stammered.\n\nButtercup giggled, and the housekeeper stood her broom in a corner.\n\nCoffey lowered her rolling pin. \"Lawdy, if we ain't got enough trouble as it iz.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "Later that same morning, Amy let herself out the front door and stopped on the porch to put on her gloves.\n\nA movement made her look up. A youth, probably in his midteens, stood on the other side of the fence. After a surreptitious glance up and down the street, he tossed a brick at the house and just missed a window.\n\nHe obviously hadn't noticed her, and his eyes widened in alarm when she leaped off the porch after him.\n\n\"Hey!\" she yelled, giving chase. He was young and he was fast. He also had the advantage of running in sensible trousers rather than a long skirt and three-story hat that made the lump on her head throb.\n\nShe had just about decided to give up when a white knight came to the rescue. Actually, it was a small white terrier wanting to play.\n\nThe little dog caught the brick thrower by a trouser leg. The boy hopped around on one foot trying to shake off the dog. By the time Amy reached them, the youth was on his back yelling for help.\n\nThe dog's owner whistled, and the white ball of fluff bounced away with joyful yips.\n\nThe boy tried to get up, but Amy stopped him with a foot to his chest. \"Oh, no you don't.\"\n\nHe lay flat on his back gazing up at her through strands of shaggy hair. Neither his bad skin nor peach fuzz took away from his boyish looks. He was probably no older than thirteen. Dressed in neatly patched overalls and a torn plaid shirt, his feet were bare, but whether by choice or necessity was hard to tell. She guessed the latter.\n\n\"What's your name?\" she asked.\n\n\"Scott.\"\n\n\"Scott what?\"\n\nHe glared up at her. \"Cunningham.\"\n\nShe recognized the name at once. Mr. Cunningham was a frequent guest at the parlor house. Now that she knew he had a son, her temper flared. She had no patience for any of the men who frequented the parlor house, but this man did it at the expense of his family.\n\nShe removed her foot, and the boy sat up. \"Why did you throw that brick?\"\n\n\" 'Cuz.\"\n\n\" 'Cuz isn't an answer.\"\n\n\"I hate you.\" The veins stood out on his neck. \"I hate all of you.\"\n\nThe anger in his voice made her catch her breath. \"Because... of your father?\" she asked gently.\n\nA suspicious sheen filled his eyes, but he was either too angry or too stubborn to let the tears fall. \" 'Cuz of what he's doing to Ma.\"\n\nFeeling sorry for the boy, she knelt at his side. \"Breaking windows won't change anything.\"\n\n\"What else can I do?\" He sat up and swiped the hair away from his eyes. \"Huh?\"\n\nShe laid a hand on the youth's bony shoulder. \"Have you talked to your father?\"\n\n\"He said it was none of my business what he did.\"\n\nHer own father had said something similar the day she'd begged him to stop drinking. If only parents knew how such actions hurt their offspring.\n\nShe pulled her hand away. \"This isn't the first time you've thrown a brick at the house, is it?\"\n\nHe didn't answer. He didn't need to; his guilty expression said it all.\n\n\"Scott, I wish I could change the way things are, but some things are bigger than you and me. Some things have to be left up to God.\"\n\nHis eyes flashed. \"Whatcha know about God?\"\n\n\"You'd be surprised,\" she said. \"I also know that breaking windows can get you in a lot of trouble. I'm sure that would cause your mother even more grief.\"\n\nA shadow of worry flickered across his face. \"Are you gonna report me to the marshal?\"\n\n\"Not this time.\" She pushed herself to her feet. \"But I will next time. Now go home.\"\n\nThe boy didn't wait for a second invitation. He jumped up and raced away as fast as his skinny legs allowed.\n\nWeariness and a sense of hopelessness washed over her. Never had an assignment affected her on so many different levels. She felt emotionally, physically, and even spiritually drained. Why was God making it so difficult for her? Why did He keep throwing all these challenges in her path?\n\nShe wanted to help the boy, but even if by some miracle she was able to talk Miss Lillian into banning Cunningham from the parlor house, what good would that do? He would probably take his business elsewhere.\n\nGod, there has to be a way.\n\nShe straightened her hat and was just about to head to town when she realized she was standing on the corner of Madison Street. Nothing could be done for Scott, but maybe she could do a little something for Georgia.\n\nShe checked inside the cloth purse still dangling from her wrist. She could spare a few coins\u2014enough to purchase a meal or two for Georgia's family. While in town she planned to wire headquarters for reimbursement of expenses before the case was officially closed. No doubt Robert Pinkerton would hassle her about the added expense of a hotel room, but she'd cross that bridge when she came to it.\n\nA lively game of catch was in progress in front of Georgia's house. Georgia tossed a red rubber ball to her son and laughed when he caught it. She looked nothing like the woman of old. It wasn't just the plain gingham dress that made the difference. It was the way she moved, like a ballet dancer gliding across a stage.\n\n\"There you go!\" she called cheerfully.\n\nThe little boy fumbled the ball and dropped it, and his sister chased after it. Both children had their mother's raven hair.\n\nGeorgia looked up just as Amy reached the gate, and her laughter died. A look of panic crossed her face. \"Billy, Mary-Sue, inside. Now!\"\n\nGeorgia's sudden change of mood seemed to confuse her children, but they obediently followed her to the porch.\n\n\"Can we play a game?\" Mary-Sue asked.\n\n\"Yes, inside.\" She hustled both children into the house with loving pats on their little behinds.\n\nShe then hurried down the porch steps and along the walkway to the fence.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" Amy said. \"I shouldn't have come.\" How thoughtless of her to approach the house dressed like a harlot in front of Georgia's children.\n\n\"Don't apologize. I'm glad you did.\"\n\nSeeing how happy Georgia looked lifted Amy's spirits. \"I just wanted to make sure you were all right.\"\n\nGeorgia nodded. \"I'm more than all right.\" Her eyes shone. \"I don't know how to thank you.\"\n\n\"No need to thank me.\" Amy held out her hand. \"Take this.\"\n\nGeorgia shook her head. \"Keep it. You've done enough already. Mrs. Givings has been a big help, and several church members have signed up for singing lessons.\"\n\nAmy withdrew her hand. \"Oh Georgia, that's wonderful news. I'm so happy for you. For your children.\"\n\nGeorgia hesitated. \"Mrs. Givings will help you, too.\"\n\nAmy inhaled. \"I can't talk about this right now.\" She pulled away from the gate.\n\n\"Please, Amy, promise me you'll think about it.\"\n\n\"I've got to go,\" Amy said, backing away.\n\n\"God forgave me, and He'll forgive you, too,\" Georgia called after her. \"I'll pray for you.\"\n\nAmy hurried away, but she couldn't help but smile to herself. Georgia had found her way back to God\u2014hallelujah!\n\nHow she longed to celebrate with Georgia like a real friend would. That, of course, was out of the question. Friendships required honesty, trust, and transparency\u2014all the things her clandestine activities prevented.\n\nIt never really bothered her before, but it bothered her now. It bothered her that she couldn't rejoice with Georgia. It bothered her even more that she couldn't act on her feelings for Tom.\n\nLove\u2014and yes, even friendship\u2014if it was ever to be hers, would have to wait." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "Chapter 31\n\nAfter leaving Georgia's house, Amy found a thick envelope waiting for her at the post office. She didn't open it until reaching the privacy of her hotel room.\n\nAs usual, the letter was written in cipher. The first sentence made her sink onto the edge of the bed. \"We have determined with just cause that David Colton was the Gunnysack Bandit.\" The letter went on in great detail describing the evidence against him. Not only did the banknotes found on the body prove to be part of the money stolen from the Hampton town bank, but the hotel registry also proved he was in town during the robbery.\n\nThe letter went on to declare the case officially closed. The information wasn't all that unexpected, but it was still disheartening. Tom would be devastated.\n\nThe letter ended with these worrisome words: \"Wait for further correspondence.\"\n\nAs if she didn't feel bad enough already, the last sentence hit her like a punch to the stomach. After completing one assignment, she was normally dispatched to another, but not this time. It wasn't just a lack of assignment that worried her. Nothing would please the Pinkerton brothers more than to do away with the Pinkerton Female Detective Bureau altogether.\n\nThey claimed that women cost more to maintain than males, but Amy suspected a deeper, more personal reason. According to rumors, the first female detective, Kate Warne, had been Allan's mistress up to the day she died, which was probably why Robert thought women were more of a hindrance and distraction than a help.\n\nNo doubt about it, Amy's future looked questionable. But she couldn't think about that right now. She had far more pressing concerns\u2014mainly Tom.\n\nShe tossed the file onto the desk and her Pinkerton badge fell to the floor. She picked up the tin shield and slid it underneath the file.\n\nShe then quickly changed into a dark blue skirt and eyelet shirtwaist. Free of constraining underwear, she took several deep breaths before scrubbing her face clean and brushing her hair into a sedate bun at the nape of her neck.\n\nFeeling more like herself, she gathered the discarded garments and put them into a carpetbag. Now all she had to do was return the clothes and tell Miss Lillian she would no longer be staying at the parlor house. Her job was done.\n\nThe hall was empty when she let herself out of her room. No sooner had she turned her back to lock the door than a voice sounded behind her.\n\n\"Amy?\"\n\nGlancing over her shoulder, her gaze clashed with Tom's. She fumbled with the key and her door flew open again. She was quick, but he was quicker.\n\nHe pushed his way into the room after her and slammed the door shut. \"Whose lock did you pick this time?\" he demanded.\n\nShe lifted her chin. \"For your information, I paid for this room.\"\n\nSeeming to fill the space with his presence, he gazed at her intently. \"What's going on?\"\n\n\"Nothing's going on. Now if you would kindly leave.\" She started for the door, but he stopped her with his hand on her arm.\n\n\"Why are you staying here?\"\n\nShe pulled her arm away. \"I'm leaving town.\"\n\nHe tilted his head. \"Why?\"\n\n\"I decided I don't want to work for Miss Lillian any longer.\"\n\nSomething flickered in the depth of his eyes. \"I never did think you belonged there. So what do you plan to do?\"\n\n\"I\u2014I don't know yet.\"\n\nHe tossed his hat on the desk and the file fell to the floor along with her Pinkerton badge. Before she could react, he bent to pick up the metal shield. Holding it in the palm of his hand, he stared at it for several seconds before lifting his head.\n\n\"What are you doing with this?\"\n\n\"I\u2014\"\n\nHis gaze sharpened, and his square jaw tensed visibly. \"Go on.\"\n\nShe hesitated. If she hadn't made a big enough mess of this whole investigation, she was about to put her career in even greater jeopardy than it already was. She just didn't have it in her to tell him yet another lie.\n\n\"I'm not who you think I am.\"\n\nHis eyebrows slanted in a frown. \"What does that mean?\"\n\n\"What it means is...\" She moistened her lips. \"My real name is Jennifer Layne, and I work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.\" Or at least she did. There was no way of telling what awaited her back at the home office now.\n\nHe reared back, a dumbfounded look on his face. \"That means that you're\u2014\"\n\nShe nodded. \"A Pinkerton operative. And if you say, 'But you're a woman,' I'll slug you.\"\n\nTo his credit, he didn't say that. He didn't say anything. He just stared at her in total disbelief.\n\nShe frowned. \"Say something.\"\n\nHe set the badge on the desk. \"I don't know what to say. So... all that business at Miss Lillian's was just an act?\"\n\n\"Not a very good one, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"I always thought that something wasn't right, but I never suspected this.\" He shook his head as if he still couldn't believe it.\n\n\"I was dispatched here to work on the Gunnysack Bandit case. Rose deposited stolen banknotes tied to one of his robberies into her personal account.\"\n\n\"That's a mighty big case for a... uh...\" She challenged him to continue with an arched brow, but he wisely changed course. \"How long have you worked for Pinkerton?\"\n\n\"Five years. And for your information, I've been instrumental in catching some well-known criminals.\" She named the most infamous outlaws she'd helped put behind bars, not to impress him\u2014okay, maybe a little\u2014but mostly to postpone having to tell him about the Pinkerton report.\n\nHis eyebrows inched upward as she spoke, and when she finished, he let out a low whistle. \"That's some record. Those outlaws would have given the Rangers a run for their money.\"\n\n\"Tell that to the Pinkerton brothers.\"\n\nHe studied her as if trying to reach into her thoughts. \"I've worked with a lot of private detectives, and I can usually spot them. But you...\" He shook his head. \"Does the marshal know?\" He frowned. \"You haven't told him, have you?\"\n\n\"I told him.\"\n\nHe hung his thumbs from his holster. \"What did he say?\"\n\n\"Pretty much what everyone says, and it all comes down to anatomy.\"\n\nHis eyes blazed with sudden anger. \"All that business about wanting to help me... That was a lie.\"\n\n\"It wasn't a lie. I really did want to help you.\"\n\n\"What about the story that you're leaving town?\" His face grew hard, as did his voice. \"Is that a lie, too?\"\n\n\"No, that's true. The agency is no longer working the case.\"\n\nHis gaze sharpened. \"Why not?\"\n\nShe hesitated.\n\n\"Why not?\" he repeated, louder this time.\n\nShe flinched at the tone of his voice. \"Your brother was in Hampton when the bank was robbed and the guard shot.\" Biting her lip, she looked away. \"The case is officially closed.\"\n\n\"Is that it?\" he asked, his voice cold and exact. \"Is that all they have?\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"The banknotes found on his body\"\u2014her voice wavered\u2014\"they matched the ones stolen from the Hampton bank.\"\n\n\"That proves nothing. They could have been planted.\"\n\nShe drew in her breath. \"Also, the handwriting on the note to the teller was similar to your brother's signature on the hotel register.\"\n\n\"Similar? Not a match?\"\n\n\"A person's handwriting changes under duress. Signing a guest register is less stressful than writing a holdup note. That could account for any inconsistencies.\"\n\nA muscle quivered at his jaw. \"Or someone could have forged Dave's handwriting.\"\n\nShe'd considered that possibility, but there was no way of proving it. Allan Pinkerton believed that handwriting and even the skin furrows of the fingers would eventually identify criminals, but right now graphology was still an imperfect art.\n\n\"It's not just the handwriting.\" She weighed his reaction before continuing. \"The agency believes Rose may have gotten the stolen notes from your brother.\"\n\n\"What about the rest?\" he demanded, his face dark.\n\n\"The rest?\"\n\n\"Somebody killed Dave. I'll bet my boots it's the same person who killed Rose.\"\n\n\"I've seen the report on your brother's death. There're no similarities. There's no proof that the two deaths are even related. Rose's death could have been a robbery.\"\n\n\"And Dave's? Was that a robbery, too? Is that why they found banknotes on his body?\"\n\n\"I wish I had more answers for you, but it was never my job to investigate his death or Rose's. I was assigned to track down the Gunnysack Bandit and turn him over to the marshal. That's all.\"\n\nHe breathed through gritted teeth. \"And all this time you let me think you were helping me.\"\n\n\"I didn't have a choice.\"\n\n\"You could have refused my offer to spy. Instead, you led me on.\"\n\nIf his anger wasn't hard enough to bear, the hurt in his eyes was like a knife to her heart. \"I really did want to help you.\"\n\n\"By using me?\"\n\n\"It wasn't like that.\" She reached for his arm, but he pulled away. \"Please, you must believe me.\"\n\n\"Believe you? After all the lies?\" He grabbed his hat and turned to the door.\n\n\"Wait,\" she pleaded. \"Don't go.\" She hated to leave things so strained between them.\n\nHe stilled, his back toward her. Did he hate her so much that he couldn't even look at her? \"There's nothing more to be said.\"\n\nShe clasped her hands together to steady herself. \"I'm not the enemy here, Tom. I was only doing my job.\"\n\nHe stared at her over his shoulder, his expression remote. \"You should be happy, then.\" He reached into his pocket for Rose's journal and tossed it onto the bed. \"Your job is done.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Tom stood in the hotel corridor outside her door. He tightened his hands into fists in an attempt to check his raw emotions. He always knew that Amy or Jennifer or whatever she called herself didn't belong at the parlor house. But never in a million years would he have guessed she was a Pinkerton detective.\n\nHe'd met Allan Pinkerton only once, but he would never forget it. He was a tough old bird with a thick Scottish brogue. His hard-nosed tactics had gotten him and his agency in a lot of trouble through the years. So it wasn't surprising that Amy would use any means available, including trickery, to reach her goals.\n\nStill, it pained him to discover he'd been duped by her. To find out she'd used him to prove his brother guilty.\n\nAs for Dave...\n\nIt wasn't the first time he'd been wrong about him, but this was the worst. If Dave really had been the Gunnysack Bandit, he wasn't just a thief, he was a killer.\n\nThank God his parents hadn't lived to see this day. He didn't even know how to tell his nephew. As for Grandpappy, he blamed Dave for making a mess of his life, and this latest was the final nail in that coffin.\n\nTom only wished he hadn't found out this way.\n\nLogically, he understood why Amy had to keep her identity secret. That didn't make him feel any less manipulated.\n\nThe truth was it hurt to high heaven, and that made no sense. He'd trusted her, told her things about his childhood he'd never told anyone else. And all that time she was working undercover to find evidence against his brother.\n\nWhat a fool he was. Not only did he fall for Dave's lies but her lies, as well. Nothing about her was real, not even the kisses she seemed so willing to return.\n\nThat last thought brought an instant, squeezing pain that shook him to the core. This thing with his brother had done a number on him, made him think things he had no business thinking. Made him wish he'd put his brother away for good when he had a chance. Had he done so, his brother might still be alive and Tom wouldn't be standing outside a hotel door like a crazy man." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "Chapter 32\n\nAmy stayed at the hotel that night but hardly slept. She kept hearing Tom's last harsh words in her head. And every time she closed her eyes she saw the expression on his face\u2014not the anger, the hurt.\n\nBy morning, not only was she a bundle of nervous energy, but she was also madder than blazes. None of this was her fault. She was only doing her job. How dare he blame her for his brother's actions!\n\nAfter waiting for the sun to fully rise, she stormed down the hotel hallway to room fourteen. Much to her surprise, the door was open and a Mexican maid was making the bed.\n\n\"Where is Mr. Colton?\" she asked.\n\nThe maid shrugged her shoulders and said something in Spanish.\n\nAmy left the room and scurried down the stairs to the reception desk. \"Room fourteen. When did Mr. Colton check out?\"\n\nThe desk clerk was an older man with stooped shoulders. \"About a half hour ago.\"\n\nShe glanced at the clock behind the desk. The morning train was scheduled to leave in less than ten minutes. If she hurried..." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "The train was just pulling out of the station when she arrived. She ran along the wooden platform and jumped off the edge. She raced along the graveled buffer next to the tracks. Spotting him through a smoky window, she frantically waved both arms to gain his attention.\n\nJust like that, she forgot her original intent for coming to the station. Forgot even her anger. Instead, a horrible realization took hold: she would never see him again. Never see his crooked smile. Never again hear his baritone voice or feel his amazing lips on hers.\n\nHe opened the window and stuck his head outside. \"What are you doing here?\" he demanded, his face dark as night. He was obviously still angry. Still hurt.\n\nShe shouted back, \"I want you to know that\u2014\" The train whistle blew, drowning out her voice.\n\nHe cupped his ear. \"What? What did you say?\"\n\n\"I said\u2014\" The train picked up speed, leaving her behind and out of breath. By the time she stopped running, her lungs felt ready to explode.\n\nGasping for air, she bent over, hands on her thighs, and watched until the train was but a dot on the horizon, leaving behind only a thread of blue smoke. \"I said I love you,\" she whispered, and with those few words came the tears." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "The following day, Amy found her next assignment waiting at the post office in a thick envelope. Normally such a dispatch would fill her with excitement and anticipation. Today she felt only depression. She read the detailed instructions through a cloud of gloom.\n\nShe was instructed to travel to Denver as a widow and strike up an acquaintance with a suspected counterfeiter who managed to foil even the Secret Service. A banknote was enclosed to cover hotel, traveling, and living expenses, plus money enough to purchase widow's weeds.\n\nAt least now she had something to do. Maybe once she settled into her new role she would forget Tom Colton. She counted on it." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Later that afternoon, she stopped at the parlor house to say good-bye to Miss Lillian and thank her for her help.\n\nSitting behind her desk, Miss Lillian tried to act nonchalant, but the suspicious sheen in her eyes gave her away. \"Does this mean my sleuthing days are over?\"\n\nAmy smiled. Strange as it seemed, she'd grown fond of the madam. \"I'm afraid so.\"\n\n\"Too bad. I believe I have a real knack for it.\" Miss Lillian heaved a sigh, and her face seemed to sag. \"What about Rose? Do you think they'll ever find her killer?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, the longer a crime goes unsolved, the less chance the perpetrator will be caught.\" Trails grew cold, memories faded, clues missed initially were forever lost.\n\nMiss Lillian grimaced. \"What does ole Tin Star say?\"\n\n\"The marshal's convinced Rose's killer left town.\" He was wrong, of course. She had checked, and no local citizens had left in recent weeks, and a stranger wouldn't know about the trapdoor. That meant the killer was still in Goodman.\n\nMiss Lillian's scarlet mouth thinned. \"Who do you think killed her?\"\n\n\"Most victims know their killers,\" Amy said. And it was probably the same person who knocked her out in the cellar. \"I think Rose knew hers.\"\n\nMiss Lillian nodded. \"I agree.\"\n\n\"I wish I could stay and work on Rose's case, but it's out of my hands.\" She was still haunted by Rose's death, perhaps because it happened under her very nose. She hated nothing more than loose ends, and the whole affair with the Gunnysack Bandit was rife with them.\n\nThe madam let out a sigh. \"What should I tell the others? They'll want to know why you left.\"\n\n\"Tell them I didn't work out.\" Coral certainly wouldn't be sorry to see her go.\n\n\"When are you leaving?\"\n\n\"On the morning train.\"\n\nMiss Lillian tucked a red strand of hair behind her ear. \"Would you like me to read your fortune so you know what lies ahead?\"\n\nAmy grinned. \"Thank you, but I think I'll leave the future in God's hands.\"\n\n\"Very well. I just hope you find what you're looking for.\"\n\nAmy wasn't sure she'd heard right. \"What I'm looking for? Oh, you mean my next assignment.\"\n\n\"I'm not talking about your work.\" Miss Lillian gave her a long, level look. \"Every night in your sleep you cry out for someone named Cissy. I hope you find her, whoever she is.\"\n\nAmy didn't know what to say. She knew the nightmares had returned but had no idea she cried out in her sleep. What is happening to me, God? Would You answer me that? And why do I feel like You're trying to tell me something?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 68", + "text": "She boarded the train dressed in a black skirt and tailored shirtwaist with a black band around her arm. Beneath the sedate black hat, her hair was pulled back into a shiny, smooth bun. On the ring finger of her left hand, she wore a simple gold band.\n\nThe woman named Amy no longer existed. By the time she reached her destination, Jennifer Layne would be transformed into the widow Mrs. Stephen Hoyt.\n\nAccording to the dossier Pinkerton sent on Ralph Cooper, not only was he a counterfeiter of the highest order, but he also had a soft spot for widows\u2014particularly those needing assistance with investing a late husband's estate.\n\nAs if sensing her need to escape, the train picked up speed, leaving the town behind in a cloud of dark smoke. Unfortunately, the memories traveled along with her, which made the current task that much harder. Prior to reaching Denver, she had to create a new history for herself and her dead \"husband.\" Not only did her fictional past have to sound believable, but it must also play on Mr. Cooper's sympathies.\n\nCreating an image in mind was easy. Her late make-believe husband was six feet tall, had dark hair, blue eyes, a square face, and crooked smile. The vision conjured just happened to be the spitting image of Tom Colton.\n\nSighing, she stared out the smoky window where the wide-open prairie sped by in a blur. She wiped the tears from her eyes with a gloved hand and blew her nose in her handkerchief.\n\nFortunately, the gray-haired man in the seat opposite didn't seem to notice her misery. He was too involved in his book.\n\nThe clickety-clack of the rails on the track made her head spin. Clickety-clack... lickety-lack... flickety... flack. She tried clearing her head but then thought of Tom, and just like that, the train changed its tune until it sounded like the very rails called his name. Tomety-Tom. Tomety-Tom.\n\nThe sound was broken only by the strident voice of the child sitting directly behind her. Not only did he talk excessively, but he kept kicking the back of her seat, too. Leaning into the aisle, she turned her head to ask him to please stop. Recognizing the young boy, she pulled back and faced the front of the train. Behind her sat the mother and child she encountered at Max's General Mercantile and Flower Shoppe.\n\nShe forced herself to calm down. No one would recognize her dressed in widow's weeds, her paint-free face pale from lack of sleep.\n\nStill, she couldn't afford to take a chance. Children tended to be perceptive, and the little boy might very well see through her guise. The last thing she needed was to create a scene.\n\nThe boy kept talking and kicking her seat, and Jennifer's head began to pound. He asked a dozen questions in his high-pitched voice.\n\n\"Play your game, Adam,\" his mother said in a weary tone.\n\n\"No pay dame.\"\n\n\"All right, then look out the window. Look at all the cows.\"\n\nThe cows kept the boy entertained for all of thirty seconds. \"Are ve there yet?\"\n\n\"No, we have a long way to go.\"\n\nThe questions continued, and finally Jennifer gave up trying to concentrate on her new assignment and let herself become lulled by the rhythmic movement of the train. Her eyes drifted downward.\n\nA male voice floated into her consciousness. \"Would your little boy like a sweet?\"\n\nThe boy's mother said, \"How kind of you to offer. Thank you. What do you say to the nice man?\"\n\n\"Tank you, monster.\"\n\nJennifer's eyes flew open. \"Monster tay me.\"\n\nThe man opposite her lowered his book and said something. She stared at him, not comprehending.\n\nHe spoke again. \"Are you all right, ma'am?\"\n\nThis time she nodded. \"Yes, thank you.\"\n\nHe went back to his book. Still shaken, she stared out the window. What if her sister hadn't said monster? What if she'd said something else?\n\nShe reached into her satchel for notebook and pencil. Hand shaking, she wrote down every word she could think of that remotely sounded like monster and circled two of them: minister and mister.\n\n\"Minister tay me.\"\n\n\"Mister tay me.\"\n\nNext she tackled the words tay me. What if Cissy hadn't been trying to say \"take me\"? What if tay me was actually something else? After several futile attempts to find similar-sounding words, she gave up and gazed out the window with unseeing eyes. Maybe she was going about this all wrong.\n\nShe wrote down the names of people who regularly visited the family farm\u2014at least the ones she could remember. Fifteen years had passed, so she had to think hard.\n\nShe could remember most but not all of the locals who purchased eggs, cream, or butter from her mother. She had a crush on the boy who delivered groceries, so his name quickly came to mind, but not so the names of the men who helped her father during harvest. The doctor's name was Davis, and the minister was Reverend Stafford. She listed the people known through church. Most had lived in the area all their lives.\n\nThis was crazy. Cissy had simply awakened from a bad dream. Children her age often had nightmares. The fact that she was missing the morning after was purely a coincidence.\n\nThe problem was, Allan Pinkerton didn't believe in coincidences and neither did she.\n\nShe stared at the names she'd written down. A three-year-old child wouldn't know that many people by name, only the ones she saw on a regular basis like their piano teacher, Mrs. Jeremy.\n\nShe froze. \"Monster tay me.\" Cissy pronounced the letter j like a t, and she often dropped the middle consonants.\n\nMister Jeremy.\n\nShe stared at the name written on her paper. No, no, it couldn't be true. Mrs. Jeremy had been her piano teacher and she would never... Mr. Jeremy would never...\n\nBut once the thought had worked its way into her consciousness, it refused to go away. Mrs. Jeremy's husband worked at the bank. He was a friend of the family and had been instrumental in helping her father save the farm during that terrible drought. He would often drive his wife to the farm for the weekly music lessons and stay to chat and sample her mother's cooking.\n\nHe and his wife never had children of their own, and Mrs. Jeremy doted on the Layne children. It soon became clear that she favored Cissy and always brought her sweets from Mr. Dorsey's Confectioners. Even at three, Cissy could pick out simple tunes on the piano by ear. Jennifer was an adequate player, but Mrs. Jeremy insisted that Cissy had \"the gift.\"\n\nJennifer never forgot the day Mrs. Jeremy announced they were moving away. Mr. Jeremy had been transferred out of state with his job.\n\nShe had been too young at the time to pay much attention to the reasons they were leaving, but the loss had seemed enormous, especially coming so soon after Cissy's disappearance. Jennifer had practically bawled her eyes out. Secretly, she always believed that the real reason they left was because Mrs. Jeremy missed Cissy.\n\nNever once had it occurred to Jennifer that there could be another reason.\n\nEven now, she didn't want to believe these sudden suspicions true. It was crazy.\n\nShe gazed at the passing scenery. The little boy behind her had finally fallen asleep. Without his high-pitched voice, there was nothing to divert her attention from the clickety-clack of the track that now sounded alarmingly like Jer-Jer-Jeremy." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 69", + "text": "Chapter 33\n\nSt. Louis, Missouri\n\nJennifer pulled the rented horse and buggy in front of the modest one-story clapboard house and set the brake. She pulled a piece of paper from her purse and checked the address.\n\nIt had taken only three weeks to track down her old music teacher. Fortunately, Allan Pinkerton was sympathetic to her plight and offered to help. The Pinkerton agency had operatives in practically every major city in the country and put them all on alert.\n\nThey soon received word from Detective Joseph White working on an embezzlement case in St. Louis. He checked the bank personnel files in town and discovered Mr. Jeremy had worked for the St. Louis Bank until his death nearly five years ago. His widow lived on the outskirts of St. Louis.\n\nJennifer studied the house. It sorely needed paint, but the garden was perfectly maintained and filled with birdhouses and feeders. Another bird lover like Rose.\n\nTo think her beloved music teacher capable of doing anything so awful as abducting her sister was crazy. Or was it?\n\nAs a detective she knew that people were inclined to see only what they wanted to see. A wife was often the last to know that her husband was cheating. Family members often expressed shock when a loved one was arrested for robbing a bank or stage, though the signs had all been there. But if Mr. and Mrs. Jeremy really had abducted her sister, she wasn't the only one who had turned a blind eye. So had her family, so had the town.\n\nWhy now, God? Why after all this time was she led to this place, this house? Why did it feel like a gale-force wind pushing her to face the past in a way she never could or would before? Coming here on what could very well be a wild goose chase meant she had to turn down a plum assignment, but it couldn't be helped. Once the theory of Cissy's abduction took root, she could hardly think of anything else.\n\nShe tucked the address back into her purse, surprised to find her hand shaking.\n\nIt had rained for three days solid, but now the clouds parted, revealing patches of clear blue sky. She lifted her gaze toward heaven and a stabbing pain shot through her chest. The clear azure sky was almost the same color as Tom's eyes. How she wished he were here with her now. Holding her hand. Telling her it was all right. She needed that. Needed to hear his reassuring voice.\n\nClimbing down from the buggy, she forced herself to count to ten. Thus braced, she walked through the sagging gate and followed the crooked brick path to the house. No outlaw had ever made her feel as nervous as she felt at that moment. Doubt gnawed at her, turning her insides into a knot. She could be wrong. Then what?\n\nShe felt woefully unprepared and was acting on pure emotion. That went against everything she'd been taught: a detective never acts without information, without facts.\n\nWhite's embezzling case had heated up, so he had provided only an address. She didn't even know if the Jeremys had a daughter. No detective worth his or her salt would act with so little information. Maybe someone in town or one of the neighbors could answer her questions.\n\nLosing her nerve, she turned to leave, but the sound of a piano stopped her. Could that be Mrs. Jeremy playing? Or was it one of her students?\n\nThe quick, lilting tune of \"F\u00fcr Elise\" brought back so many memories her knees threatened to buckle. Even now, after all these years, she could hear Mrs. Jeremy's voice. \"Sit up straight. Don't look at your hands. Count!\"\n\nAnd then, \"Cissy has the gift.\"\n\nThe music pulled her toward the porch as if by some strange magnetic force. Trembling, she stood in front of the weathered door, rooted in place. She had to force herself to breathe.\n\nShe should go. This was crazy! Mrs. Jeremy would no doubt want to know why she was there.\n\nI think you stole my sister, she'd say, and Mrs. Jeremy would... what?\n\nLaugh in her face. Ask her to leave. Stare at her as if she'd lost her mind.\n\nShe thought about praying but wasn't even sure what she hoped to find behind that closed door. Would finding Cissy be worse than not finding her?\n\nIt took every bit of courage she could muster to raise her hand and knock. The music stopped. Footsteps. The door flew open, revealing a pretty young woman dressed in a floral-printed frock.\n\n\"May I help you?\"\n\nJennifer felt as if her breath had been cut off. Was this Cissy? She couldn't be sure, and that alone horrified her. How could she not know her own sister?\n\nTrained to work under pressure, she fought to get her emotions under control. She pretended that this was a job, that she was working undercover. She mentally went down the same checklist used when sizing up a suspect.\n\nThe girl was probably in her late teens, so the age was right. Her eyes were greenish, almost turquoise, but her hair was darker than Cissy's had been and was now light brown with golden highlights. But hair tended to darken with age. Hers certainly had.\n\n\"May I help you?\" the girl repeated.\n\n\"I'm sorry to disturb you.\" She cleared her throat and began again, this time in a stronger voice. \"I'm looking for Mrs. Jeremy.\"\n\n\"That's my mother. I'm Charity Jeremy. Who shall I say is calling?\"\n\nJennifer's mind scrambled. Charity? \"Uh... Jennifer Layne.\" The girl showed no sign of recognition so she added, \"I\u2014I knew your mother in Illinois.\"\n\nThe young woman shook her head. \"You must be mistaken. My mother was never in Illinois.\"\n\n\"Who is it, child?\" a crinkly voice called from somewhere inside the house.\n\nCharity glanced over her shoulder. \"Someone to see you. She said she knew you.\"\n\n\"Well, don't be rude. Show her in.\"\n\nThe girl stepped aside, and Jennifer forced her leaden feet into the house. After the bright outdoor light, it took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim parlor. Finally she spotted an older woman sitting in an upholstered chair. She looked nothing like the strong, robust music teacher she remembered. This woman appeared small and frail, a shadow of her former self.\n\nFaded blue eyes peered from a well-lined face. She was dressed in a long housecoat and tendrils of white hair escaped from the confines of a frilly mobcap.\n\n\"Charity, get our guest some refreshment,\" she croaked. The girl left the room, and the older woman gave Jennifer her full attention.\n\n\"Are you from the church?\" she asked.\n\n\"The church?\"\n\n\"Reverend Whitcomb is always sending someone to pray with me. I don't know what sin he thinks I can commit confined to my chair.\"\n\n\"I'm not from the church.\" She glanced at the sheet of music on the piano: \"F\u00fcr Elise.\"\n\nThe woman followed her gaze. \"Do you play?\"\n\n\"Not very well.\"\n\n\"As you probably heard, my daughter plays beautifully. She's giving a concert next week. You should come. The proceeds support the Orphan Children's Fund.\"\n\n\"I don't expect to be in town that long.\"\n\nThe widow frowned. \"What did you say your name was?\"\n\n\"Jennifer. Jennifer Layne.\" When that got no reaction, she added, \"I'm sure you remember my parents, Cynthia and Howard Layne.\"\n\nThe woman stared at her for a moment, and then something strange happened. She began to shrivel up as if someone had taken the stuffing out of her. But it was the panic in her eyes that confirmed Jennifer's suspicions.\n\n\"I\u2014I don't know anyone by those names.\"\n\n\"You taught me to play piano.\" Jennifer fell silent as the full impact hit her, and it was all she could do to keep her wits about her. \"It's true, isn't it? That's Cissy. That's my sister.\"\n\nMrs. Jeremy gripped the arms of her chair and the color drained from her face. \"What... do you want?\" she croaked.\n\nRage unlike anything Jennifer had known exploded within. \"How... could you.\" She was breathing so hard she could hardly get the words out. \"How could you take her from us? You walked off with my sister as if she was of no more value than an umbrella!\"\n\nMrs. Jeremy started to deny it, but Jennifer grabbed her bony wrist. Her skin felt like parchment. The woman shrank back and stared at Jennifer's raised hand.\n\nHorrified at how close she was to striking the woman, Jennifer lowered her arm and released her. Shaken, she stammered, \"How... how could you?\"\n\n\"I... I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"Don't lie.\"\n\nThe woman's face crumbled and a ragged breath escaped. \"Please. You must understand. I couldn't have children of my own, and your mother... could barely care for the ones she had. So when my husband suggested that we... I agreed.\"\n\nJennifer shook her head, but the nightmare persisted. \"You had no right.\"\n\n\"We... we gave her a good life. You have to believe that. Better than your parents could have done. We sent her to the best schools and\u2014\"\n\nJennifer stared at her, incredulous. No matter how great the sin or bad the crime, people always tried to justify it. Just like Miss Lillian and her guests. Just like Coral and all the rest.\n\n\"Do you know what you did to my family? Have you any idea how we suffered?\" Nothing could justify that!\"\n\n\"I thought that after all this time... H\u2014how did you know?\"\n\n\"That night... Cissy cried out. She told me someone was trying to take her, but I misunderstood.\" The thought of Mr. Jeremy hiding in the dark while she comforted her sister filled her with horror. The worst part was her failure to figure out the clues she'd held all these years. For that she would always feel guilty.\n\n\"I'm sorry\u2014\"\n\nJennifer drew back. \"You're sorry? That's it? That's all you can say?\"\n\nMrs. Jeremy opened her mouth to say more, but a funny choking sound came out instead. Her eyes rolled back, and her head grew slack.\n\nShaking her, Jennifer called for Charity, the unfamiliar name like acid to her tongue.\n\nThe girl rushed into the room, carrying a tray. With a cry of alarm, she set the tray on the table and hurried to the old lady's side.\n\n\"It's all right, Mama, I'm here.\" She felt her mother's pulse, covered her with a quilt, and stroked her head like one would comfort a child.\n\nIt was obvious that she cared deeply for the woman, and each worried frown that crossed her beautiful young face was like a knife slashing into Jennifer's heart. Shivering, she ran her hands up and down her arms and swallowed the bile in her mouth.\n\n\"What's wrong with her?\" she asked in a hushed voice.\n\n\"She has these spells. Sometimes she doesn't even recognize me, her own daughter.\" As she worked to make the old lady comfortable, she glanced at Jennifer. \"You were lucky to arrive on a day when she was lucid.\"\n\nJennifer didn't know what to say, what to do. \"Should I fetch a doctor?\"\n\nCharity shook her head. \"There's nothing he can do for her. We just have to let her rest.\" She left her mother's side and poured lemonade into a glass. \"The doctor said she doesn't have much time left, but I hope she lasts for my wedding.\"\n\nJennifer took the offered glass. \"You're getting married?\" It seemed inconceivable that her baby sister was now all grown up. In her mind, she was still the roly-poly little girl of three who called her Tenfer and refused to eat peas.\n\nCharity smiled, and an inner light brightened her face. \"I haven't told anyone yet, not even Mama. The least bit of stress sends her into one of these spells.\"\n\n\"You think your marriage will cause her stress?\"\n\n\"I know it sounds crazy, but she's always been afraid of losing me. I think it's because I'm an only child.\"\n\nJennifer sipped her lemonade. The cool, bittersweet beverage did little to soothe her dry throat. How many times had she imagined this very scene? Imagined meeting Cissy for the first time after so many years? Imagined the two of them crying and laughing. Talking about the good times, the bad...\n\n\"I heard you playing the piano. Beethoven.\"\n\nCharity nodded and poured a glass of lemonade for herself. \" 'Bagatelle in A Minor,' \" she said, calling \"F\u00fcr Elise\" by its more formal name. \"I don't know why, but it's always been one of my favorites. Everyone plays it, but few play it well.\"\n\nI know why, Jennifer wanted to shout. I know why it's your favorite. It's because I played it for you when you were a little girl. You sat on my lap and placed your chubby little fingers on the yellowed keys and tried to imitate me." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 70", + "text": "Keeping her thoughts to herself, she said, \"I always had trouble with the middle part.\"\n\n\"It's all about the proper tempo.\" Charity talked about the technicalities of the piece like a true musician. \"Your fingers should rotate up and...\"\n\nQuestions churned in Jennifer's head, begging to be asked. Do you remember me? Do you remember the stories I used to tell you? The games we used to play? Do you remember that you named your doll Elise? Or how, on that long-ago night, you woke from a deep sleep and I tried to calm your fears?\n\nBut this wasn't the Cissy she knew. This wasn't the one whose diapers she'd changed and tears she'd wiped and hurts she'd soothed. This was a grown woman who evidently had no memory of her early childhood.\n\n\"I'm sorry, I'm boring you,\" Charity said.\n\n\"No, not at all,\" Jennifer hastened to assure her. \"I'm afraid that I'm one of those who play the piece poorly. I should practice.\"\n\n\"I'd be happy to help you.\"\n\n\"Thank you, that's very kind, but I won't be staying in St. Louis for much longer.\"\n\nCharity glanced at her mother. \"I should probably put her to bed.\"\n\n\"Yes, of course. I won't keep you.\" She placed her glass on the tray. \"Is he a good man?\" she asked. \"Your fianc\u00e9? Is he a Christian?\" Will he love you and cherish you and always be true? Or will he satisfy his needs in another woman's bed like so many men do?\n\n\"Oh yes,\" Charity said, and there was no question that she believed it with her whole heart and soul. \"He's a minister and one day plans to build his own church.\"\n\nJennifer envied her sister's faith in her fianc\u00e9 and prayed that it wasn't misplaced. \"I wish you every happiness,\" she said, bringing a smile to Charity's face.\n\nAll through her teens, Jennifer thought that finding her sister would fix her family's problems\u2014that her father would stop drinking and her mother stop mourning and her brothers stop running wild. Maybe it would have made a difference at one time, but not now. It was too late to save her parents. Her mother and father were both dead. As for her brothers, they were now married with families of their own, their wild days a distant memory.\n\nCharity walked her to the door. \"You said you knew my mother in Illinois.\"\n\nFeeling more numbed than angry, Jennifer gazed past her to the woman in the chair. Vacant eyes stared from a face as round and still as the moon.\n\n\"I... was mistaken. I never knew your mother at all.\"\n\nOutside the world looked different, somehow. Losing her sister had been her personal north guiding her every move. Knowing that her sister was safe and happy freed her from the chains locking her into the past.\n\nWas that God's plan all along? Was that the reason she ended up at Miss Lillian's? Not to solve the mystery of the Gunnysack Bandit but to unlock the mystery of her own past?\n\nThe ruby-throated hummingbird flitting around a red carnation seemed to think so. She would have sworn the bird nodded his shiny green head. The pastor of her church liked to say that God works in mysterious ways.\n\nThat was true, of course, but lately His ways seemed even more mysterious. She only hoped God had something more up His heavenly sleeve because she had no idea where to go from there.\n\nAfter turning down the Colorado assignment in order to track down her sister, she wasn't even certain she had a job left. Then there was Tom. Weeks had passed since she'd last seen him, but her misery was no less potent today than it had been when he left. She sighed. Her life was a complete mess.\n\nThe sun hung just above the horizon like a crystal ball shooting arrows of red and yellow across the sky. The hummingbird continued to flit from blossom to blossom. With its whirring green wings and ruby throat, it looked like a rainbow in flight.\n\n\"You're getting married?\" How was that possible? Her baby sister?\n\n\"I haven't told anyone yet.\"\n\nTwo thoughts churned in her head. They seemed totally unrelated but in some strange way connected. A sense of uneasiness came over her, but she couldn't define the source.\n\n\"I haven't told anyone yet.\"\n\nThe hummingbird hovered over a red blossom.\n\n\"I haven't told anyone yet.\"\n\nShe drove the rented horse and buggy back to town, the thought persisting. Something churned just outside her memory, but she couldn't for the life of her bring it to the forefront.\n\n\"I haven't told anyone yet.\"\n\nHummingbird." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 71", + "text": "Chapter 34\n\nTexas\n\nJennifer tugged on the reins and muttered, \"Where is it?\" The wagon rolled to a stop and the dapple gray horse nickered and flicked his tail as if protesting the delay.\n\nThe man at the stables told her to follow the road and it would lead straight to the Colton ranch. \"You can't miss it.\"\n\nSo far the land revealed nothing but sagebrush, dry ground, and an occasional cattle skull. If there was a ranch anywhere to be found out here, she would be inclined to eat her hat.\n\nShe mopped her damp forehead with a handkerchief. Though she'd passed mesquite trees at the start of her journey, she hadn't seen a spot of shade since. If the buzzards overhead and bright scorching sun weren't bad enough, the humid air weighed upon her like a wet blanket and her clothes stuck to her like glue.\n\nFeeling hot and tired and more than a bit lightheaded, she reached for the canteen. The few precious drops that remained did nothing to ease her thirst, and she tossed the flask aside.\n\nIf only it hadn't taken her all this time to figure out that Rose's journal wasn't about birds. Instead, it held the clue to the identity of the Gunnysack Bandit\u2014and it wasn't Tom's brother. Of that she was certain.\n\nThe incongruity of it amazed her. She had gone to St. Louis to find her sister and ended up solving not just one mystery but two.\n\nAnxious to reach Tom, she picked up the reins and, with a glance at the still circling vultures, urged the horse forward. Please, God, just let me live long enough to tell him the good news." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 72", + "text": "Tom stood by the fence, hands over the top railing, watching the black mustang circle the corral. It was June but felt like August. Last night's rainstorm left a blanket of hot, sticky air behind.\n\nThe steed with its thundering hooves, flying mane, and fiery breath looked no less wild today than when he was first brought to the ranch three months earlier.\n\nTwice already that morning, the animal tried clearing the fence. The first time he fell on his side, mouth open, eyes frantic, body arching until he was finally back on all fours.\n\nThe next time he looked about to jump, the horse trainer, Clint, snapped his whip down hard on the ground, and the mustang thought better of it.\n\nSure-footed as a mule, Clint Saunders moved fast and talked slow. It wouldn't be so bad if he were but a man of few words. Unfortunately, he liked to talk almost as much as he liked horses. Once he got going on one of his long-winded tales, all the glazed eyes and yawning in the world couldn't stop him.\n\nNow he sauntered over to Tom, his white hair held down by a floppy brimmed hat and tied at his neck with a piece of rawhide. \"I don't know, Tom. I've tamed my share of wild horses, but this one...\" He shook his head. \"This one's off his mental reservation. Never thought I'd say this about a horse, but he's an outlaw. Reminds me of the time\u2014\"\n\n\"Let him go.\"\n\nClint pulled off his hat and wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve. He pressed his hat back on, gray eyes narrowed. \"Never thought I'd hear those words come outta your mouth.\"\n\n\"Let him go.\"\n\nTom pulled away from the fence and started for the barn. It had been more than a month since he'd returned to the ranch, and he still didn't want to believe the things said about his brother.\n\nEven now, the thought sickened him. His brother the outlaw, his brother the killer.\n\nThe signs had all been there, but Tom hadn't wanted to believe them. He wanted to think there was a simple explanation for the stolen banknotes found in his brother's pocket and the neatly typed list of holdups. He wanted to believe what Reverend Matthews said was true, but that was only wishful thinking on his part. On the preacher's part, too, probably.\n\nPerhaps the most damaging evidence of all was the lack of holdups since his brother's death. His brother was a criminal, and it was time to let him go.\n\nThe problem was how to break the news to his young nephew. He couldn't hold back the truth much longer.\n\nHe lengthened his stride. Since returning home, he'd brushed off his nephew's questions with vague answers. That had to change.\n\nLike it or not, it was time to sit down with the boy and tell him the truth about his pa. He expected honesty from his nephew and the boy deserved the same consideration in return. Maybe then they could put this whole episode behind them and start afresh. God, don't let me fail my nephew like I failed Dave.\n\nWhat didn't make sense was the way he kept thinking of the woman he now knew had tricked him. God, what is wrong with me? Why can't I sleep? Eat? Why does everything remind me of her, even a wild horse that stubbornly refuses to be tamed?\n\nTo make matters worse, he imagined seeing her at that very moment as he walked toward the stables. Imagined seeing her wave, seeing those big beautiful eyes of hers that lit up a room as they lit up his heart. He blinked, but the vision stubbornly remained behind the shimmering heat. It was like looking at her through a dream. He stopped in his tracks. Or was it?\n\nAmy? Jennifer?\n\nWas it really her or were his eyes playing tricks again? His legs carried him forward without hesitation. This time the vision didn't fade away as it had so often in the past.\n\nHe ran to her and would have taken her in his arms had she not lashed into him.\n\n\"Tom Colton, you had no right blaming me for anything that happened. You know I couldn't reveal my real identity and...\" On and on she went, emphasizing her displeasure with finger pokes to his chest. \"You were a Texas Ranger. You have to know what it's like to work undercover.\" Green fire shot from her eyes. \"Furthermore...\"\n\nAt last she ran out of words, or maybe she just needed to take a breath. \"Are you finished?\" he asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" she shouted back. Then she did something completely unexpected; she fainted dead away. It was a miracle that he was able to catch her before she hit the ground.\n\nAlarmed, he lifted her into his arms. She was hot, dangerously hot.\n\n\"Clint! Take care of the lady's horse,\" he called.\n\n\"Will do, Boss.\"\n\nAnxious to get her out of the blistering sun, Tom carried her into the ranch house and to his bed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 73", + "text": "Jennifer opened her eyes and moaned. Battling through the fog, she tried making sense of her surroundings. Where am I?\n\nA voice sounded from a distance, but she couldn't make out the words. She blinked and gradually her vision cleared. A face... She inhaled. \"Tom?\"\n\n\"Well look a there, sleeping beauty is finally awake.\"\n\nWas that really him or was she dreaming? \"Where... where am I?\"\n\n\"You're in Texas.\"\n\nTexas. A whirlwind of disconnected thoughts spun in her head before the cotton disappeared completely. \"What... happened?\"\n\n\"Looks like the heat got you.\" He reached for a glass on the bedside table. \"Here, drink this.\" He slid an arm under her head and raised the glass to her lips. The water tasted cool and sweet.\n\nHe pulled the glass away and set it on the table.\n\nShe tried saying \"thank you,\" but her parched lips wouldn't cooperate.\n\nHe stood by the side of the bed, looking down on her. She couldn't tell by his expression whether he was still angry, but he sure didn't look like himself.\n\n\"So what do I call you?\" he asked. \"Jennifer or Amy?\"\n\n\"My name is Jennifer,\" she said.\n\nHe repeated her name after her as if trying it on for size. \"I brought your carpetbag in from your rig in case you want to change. Your shirt's all wet from when I tried to cool you down.\"\n\nShe struggled to sit up.\n\n\"Take it easy.\" His hand on her shoulder made her heart leap even in her weakened condition. Surprised by the unexpected jolt, she swayed before falling back onto the pillow.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" he asked, a shadow of alarm on his face.\n\nShe nodded. \"Just a bit woozy.\"\n\nHe waited for her dizziness to pass before straddling a chair by her side.\n\nShe felt an overwhelming need to touch him to see if he was real, to push the wayward strand of hair from his forehead, to run a finger over the intriguing cleft on his chin. Fearing she might still be dreaming, she looked away to see if the world around them was real.\n\nThe room was small. Furnished with a single bunk, wardrobe, and chair, it had Tom's partiality for simplicity written all over it. \"Your room?\"\n\nHe looked around as if seeing it for the first time. Or maybe he was simply seeing it through her eyes. \"Yep, it's mine. So, what brings you way out here? Other than to chew me out, I mean.\"\n\nNow she remembered. She'd been so overwhelmed at seeing him, all the frustrations, disappointments, and loneliness of the past few weeks spurted out of her like flames of fire.\n\n\"Way out here is right.\" A wan smile was all her parched mouth would allow, but it seemed to be enough to soften the worry lines on his face. \"They told me your ranch was only a mile or two out of town.\"\n\n\"That's Texas miles. If you want to go by how a crow flies, it's closer to ten.\"\n\nShe made a face. \"It felt like twenty.\" It was hard to know what was worse: the heat, humidity, dust, or horse-sized bugs.\n\nShe moistened her dry lips. So much had happened since she last saw him. She had so much to say, but between her parched throat and lightheadedness, she couldn't get the words out.\n\nFeeling a sudden urgency, she struggled to get out of bed. So much to do...\n\n\"Whoa,\" he said, hands on her shoulders. \"First things first. You'll never make it back to town before dark. That's for sure and certain. Better spend the night here.\"\n\nShe looked down at the bed, his bed.\n\nAs if to guess her thoughts, he added, \"I'll sleep in the bunkhouse.\" He hesitated. \"I wish I could offer you better accommodations, but I'm not used to having guests.\"\n\n\"Thank God for that.\"\n\nIt took him a moment to grasp her meaning. The corners of his mouth turned upward. It was hardly the smile she'd come to expect from him, but it was enough.\n\n\"Ah, yes. Miss Lillian and her 'guests.' \"\n\nShe studied him. \"Are... are you still angry that I lied to you about who I was?\"\n\n\"You did what you had to do. I'm just glad you aren't a... you know.\"\n\n\"Sporting lady?\"\n\nHe ran his hand across his chin. \"So what brings you to these parts?\"\n\nYou. You bring me to these parts. Aloud she said, \"I have news.\" She cleared her voice and started again, this time louder. \"The Gunnysack Bandit is still alive.\"\n\nHis expression grew tight as did his voice. \"What are you talking about? My brother\u2014\"\n\n\"No!\" She moved her hand toward him but fell short of touching him. \"Your brother tried to stop him. That's what he was doing in Hampton.\"\n\nHe stared at her, his mouth in a straight line. \"That makes no sense. The list of holdups, the banknotes\u2014\"\n\n\"Planted to make him look guilty. Just as the handwriting on the holdup note was made to look like your brother's work.\"\n\n\"If this is true...\" He raked his fingers through his hair. \"Then who? Why?\"\n\n\"I don't have all the answers yet. What I do know is that your brother didn't do the things they said. You have to believe that.\"\n\nA shadow of doubt hovered on his forehead. \"How do you know all this?\"\n\nShe laughed. She couldn't help herself. \"You won't believe this, but it was the birds.\"\n\nHis forehead creased. \"I better send one of the boys to fetch the doctor. The heat rattled your think box.\"\n\nShe shook her head. \"There's nothing wrong with my thinking. I'm serious. Did it ever occur to you why Rose went to so much trouble to hide her journal beneath the floorboards? A journal about birds?\"\n\nHis gaze remained on her face. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"She was keeping track of everything that happened at the parlor house using birds as a code.\" As a Pinkerton detective, she'd worked with many codes, though never one using birds.\n\nShe gave him a moment to process this information before continuing. \"Your brother was right; Rose figured out the identity of the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\n\"If that's true, why didn't she go to the marshal?\"\n\n\"You said it yourself. Who would believe one of Miss Lillian's girls? She told your brother instead. He then decided to follow the bandit to Hampton to gather proof. That's when Buttercup heard the two of them arguing. I think Rose was against his getting involved.\"\n\nThe doubt began to fade from Tom's face. \"But he went anyway.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I think he got the proof he was looking for but was unaware that the Gunnysack Bandit was onto him.\"\n\n\"So he made it look like Dave had robbed the bank and killed the guard.\"\n\n\"Exactly. Dave didn't know that his cover was blown, of course, and had no clue that the real bandit followed him back to town. I think Dave had the proof he needed to put Gunny behind bars. But after things turned violent and the guard was shot, he was worried about Rose's safety.\"\n\n\"So instead of going to the sheriff in Hampton, he rushed back to Goodman.\"\n\nShe nodded. \"I think once he knew that Rose was safe he would have gone straight to Flood.\"\n\n\"But he never got the chance.\" Tom gave his head a shake, an incredulous look on his face. \"And you base all this on a bunch of birds?\"\n\n\"Actually, it was the hummingbird. Rose wrote that there was a hummingbird in her room.\"\n\n\"So?\"\n\n\"The journal entry was dated December 20th.\"\n\nHe shrugged and splayed his hands. \"And?\"\n\n\"When's the last time you saw a hummingbird in December?\"\n\nHe shook his head. \"I'm a rancher, not a bird-watcher.\"\n\n\"For your information, hummingbirds fly to Mexico for the winter.\"\n\nHe thought for a moment. \"Okay, so what was she really saying?\"\n\n\"Someone was in her room, perhaps going through her things, the person she called Hummingbird. Her name for Georgia was Canary because she liked to sing. Buttercup can't pass a mirror without gazing in it, just like the magpie that lives behind the parlor house.\"\n\n\"Magpies look in mirrors?\"\n\n\"Windows.\" She wasn't able to figure out the rest. Who was the loon? Who was the mockingbird? Most important of all, who was Hummingbird?\n\nHe scratched his head. \"What does any of this have to do with the Gunnysack Bandit?\"\n\n\"Why, he's the waxwing, of course.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Cedar waxwings are called bandit birds because of their black masks. If you recall, she wrote that the waxwing accosted her in the yard.\"\n\n\"And the waxwing is?\"\n\n\"Who else but Monahan?\"\n\nHe thought a moment. \"I don't know. If what you say is true, how do you explain the lack of robberies since Dave's death?\"\n\n\"That puzzles me, too. Maybe it's because Monahan almost got caught during the last holdup and is running scared. Think about it. If the marshal and Pinkerton agency believe the Gunnysack Bandit dead, then he has nothing to worry about. The dogs are off his trail.\"\n\nHe rubbed the back of his neck. \"That's a pretty big if.\"\n\n\"Maybe,\" she said. \"But the pieces fit.\" Or at least some of them did. \"Don't forget, the reason I was sent to Goodman was because of stolen banknotes deposited in Rose's account.\" It was actually Allan Pinkerton who talked banks throughout Kansas into marking notes. He figured that eventually one of the marked notes would lead to the Gunnysack Bandit, but Dave beat him to the punch.\n\n\"Maybe the money found on your brother came from Rose.\" She paused for a moment. \"If Monahan knew that Dave suspected him that would be motivation enough to kill him. Rose, too.\"\n\nTom sat on the bed and covered her hand with his own. \"I'm much obliged for what you're doing. But something about this whole affair doesn't sit right. How did Monahan know my brother was onto him?\"\n\n\"He may have spotted him in Hampton during the holdup. Maybe your brother confronted him.\"\n\nHe rubbed his forehead with his free hand. \"It's possible. I don't know...\"\n\nShe gazed up at him. \"Tom, I'm right about your brother. I know I am. He was not the Gunnysack Bandit.\"\n\nHe studied her for a moment. \"What about Flood? What does he think?\"\n\n\"I haven't notified ole Tin... the marshal. I haven't even told my bosses.\"\n\nHe frowned. \"If you're right about Monahan, he's dangerous. He's already killed three people and could kill again.\"\n\nShe lifted her chin. \"You don't think I know that?\"\n\nHe drew his hand away. \"Now, don't go getting all riled up. I'd say the same if you were a man.\"\n\nShe doubted it, but she didn't want to argue. \"I thought you might like to be there when we clear your brother's name.\"\n\nHe gazed at her long and hard. \"How sure are you about this?\"\n\n\"Sure enough to bet your boots.\"\n\nHe arched a brow. \"That's sure and certain, eh?\"\n\nShe smiled. In truth, all she had was a theory, and that wasn't worth a plugged nickel in a court of law. It wasn't worth much as far as the agency was concerned, either. Allan Pinkerton demanded proof, not conjecture.\n\n\"So what do you say?\" she asked. \"Are you game?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 74", + "text": "Game? Colton didn't want to answer that question. Didn't want to think about it. He'd been wrong too many times about his brother.\n\nMore than anything he was worried about Jennifer's safety. Yes, it bothered him that she had such a dangerous job. So shoot him. Just her size alone put her at a disadvantage. She hardly came up to his shoulders, and a good wind would probably blow her away.\n\nHe had nothing against women in the workforce, not like some men he knew who thought a women's place was in front of a cookstove. But chasing down outlaws was not a job for a woman. There had been times in the past when he'd wondered if it was even a job for a man.\n\nShe laid a hand on his arm, and if that wasn't enough, she locked him in her green-eyed gaze. \"We can do this,\" she said, and something stirred inside him. \"Will you work with me?\"\n\nWhat he wanted to say was no. What he wanted was to keep her in Texas where she would be safe. Knowing how she felt about her job, he'd have a better chance of talking the hide off a mule.\n\nWas she right about Monahan? Tom didn't know. What he did know was that he had no intention of letting her find out alone. He just wished it didn't feel like he was about to jump into a snake pit.\n\nPushing his worries aside, he asked, \"What's the plan?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 75", + "text": "Chapter 35\n\nJennifer had just finished cooking breakfast when Tom's eleven-year-old nephew wandered into the kitchen. Tall for his age, he had sandy hair and big blue eyes. He looked and carried himself like his uncle.\n\nShe greeted him with a smile. \"You must be Davey.\"\n\n\"And you're Miss Layne. Uncle Tom said you were like a lady Ranger.\"\n\n\"Actually, I'm a detective.\"\n\nHe gazed at her with eyes too old for such a young face. \"I'm going to be a Texas Ranger, just like Uncle Tom was.\" He gave a determined nod and added, \"And I'm gonna find the man who killed my pa.\"\n\nSomething tugged at her insides, and she felt a maternal need to protect him. She knew all too well the frustrations and heartbreak that such a quest could bring. For his sake, she hoped she was right about Monahan. She didn't want Tom's nephew devoting his young life to looking for answers as she had done with her sister.\n\n\"I'm sorry about your father.\"\n\nHe studied her as if measuring her sincerity. \"Grandpappy said he was a bad man, but he wasn't. I know he wasn't.\" His intensity reminded her of the Cunningham boy whose frustration with his own father had led him to throw bricks.\n\n\"I believe you.\" She wanted to say more\u2014much more\u2014but all she had was a theory, and she didn't want to give the boy false hope. \"Well, Ranger Dave, you better sit for a spell and have yourself some grub.\"\n\nHe didn't need a second invite. The minute she set a plate of eggs and bacon on the table in front of him, he dived in with his fork.\n\nTom stomped into the house, and she caught a whiff of sunbaked earth before he shut the back door against the shimmering heat. \"Something sure does smell good,\" he said.\n\nShe greeted him with a smile. \"Good morning.\" The mere sight of him made her heart flutter. The way he affected her was a worry. As a detective she knew the importance of letting the clues speak for themselves and not to bend them to support a theory. She thought she could remain professional, but after seeing Tom again and meeting Dave's son, she feared she could no longer be objective.\n\nShe handed him a cup of coffee.\n\nHe blew on the steaming brew and took a sip. \"Hmm. Just how I like it.\" He set his cup on the table and ruffled Davey's hair before sitting, but his gaze remained on her.\n\n\"How'd you sleep?\" he asked.\n\nThe memory of spending the night in his bed\u2014even alone\u2014made her blush, and she turned to the stove to hide her reddening face. \"Like a log.\"\n\nFighting for composure, she arranged his breakfast on a plate and placed it in front of him.\n\nHe stared down at his food before lifting his gaze to hers. \"How did you know I like my eggs scrambled and my bacon burned to perfection?\"\n\n\"She's a detective,\" Davey said, and Tom laughed.\n\nGrinning, she placed her own plate on the table and sat on the chair opposite him. \"I also asked your friend Clint.\"\n\n\"I should have known.\" He glanced at Davey. \"You better get to your chores, son, before it gets any hotter out there.\"\n\nDavey stuck a piece of bacon in his mouth before jumping up. \"It was nice meeting you,\" he called as he dashed to the door.\n\n\"Nice meeting you, too,\" she called back.\n\nHe grabbed a hat off a peg on the wall and ran out of the house, banging the door shut behind him.\n\n\"That's quite a boy you have there,\" she said.\n\nTom nodded. \"He kind of grows on you, doesn't he?\"\n\n\"Said he wants to be a Texas Ranger like you.\"\n\n\"He'll make a good one, that's for sure and certain.\"\n\nShe hesitated. \"How much... does he know about his pa?\"\n\nTom grimaced. \"More than he should. His grandpappy isn't one to keep his thoughts to himself.\" He mopped his plate with a biscuit. \"I didn't know you were such a good cook.\"\n\n\"It looks like you could use some fattening up,\" she said. Tom had lost weight since she last saw him. Because of his brother? That was the obvious answer, but she couldn't help but hope that there might be yet another reason.\n\n\"You cook like that and I'll be as big as the side of the barn before you know it.\" He pushed his empty plate away. \"Much obliged.\"\n\nShe lowered her coffee cup. \"For what?\"\n\n\"For wanting to clear my brother's name\u2014clear Davey's pa's name.\"\n\nShe chewed on her lower lip. Clearing Dave's name might not be all that easy. The truth was, it might even be impossible, and she felt inadequate for the task. But she'd done a lot of praying, and miracles really did happen. Finding her sister was proof of that, even though it hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped.\n\n\"Something wrong?\" he asked, his voice gentle. \"Why the sudden grim look? You're not having second thoughts, are you? About Monahan?\"\n\nShe was having second thoughts\u2014third and fourth thoughts, too\u2014but that had nothing to do with her sudden gloom. \"I found my sister.\"\n\nHe set the coffee cup down. \"The one who disappeared? Where?\"\n\nShe filled him in on all that had happened during the past few weeks. It felt good to talk about it. To talk to him.\n\n\"What did your sister say when you told her who you were?\" he asked.\n\n\"I didn't tell her.\"\n\nHis eyebrows shot up. \"Why not?\"\n\nShe flattened her hands on her skirt. \"What good would it have done?\" The child she'd carried around in her heart all these years was now someone she didn't recognize. \"She's a woman now. She's also engaged to be married. Why ruin her happiness?\"\n\nFor an instant, his glance sharpened. \"But that means the woman who stole her gets off scot-free.\"\n\nShe thought about the expression on Mrs. Jeremy's face. The fear, the horror, the haggard face that looked far older than its years. \"God doesn't let anyone off scot-free.\"\n\nHer lack of malice surprised her. Finding out what had happened to her sister had given her incredible pain but also hope. God had closed the door on her past and opened a door to the future. Her sister was alive and well. Her prayers had been answered. It was time to move on.\n\nStill the tears came. She wasn't even aware of Tom leaving his chair until she was soundly locked in the comforting warmth of his arms.\n\n\"It's okay,\" he whispered, holding her close. \"Let it out.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said. She brushed her hand across his chest. \"I got your shirt all wet.\"\n\n\"Well, now, will you look a there?\" He pulled out a clean handkerchief and ever so tenderly dabbed her wet cheeks. His gaze fell on her lips, but before his mouth could follow the same path, she pulled away.\n\nDistractions, even the romantic kind, could be disastrous. She needed to keep a clear head for the task ahead. She needed to do it not just for her own sake but his, as well. Otherwise she might never prove his brother's innocence.\n\n\"How soon can we leave for Kansas?\" she asked, purposely keeping her voice free of emotion.\n\nHer sudden change of mood seemed to confound him, and his brows drew together in a frown. \"Soon as you're ready,\" he said, and hesitated. \"Your work as a detective... It means a lot to you.\" It was a statement more than a question.\n\n\"Yes, it does.\" She knew no other life, had no real home. Her stay at Miss Lillian's was the closest she'd come to any sort of routine or stability since leaving the farm at eighteen. It was almost impossible to spend time with her brothers and their families. It was a lonely life but ultimately satisfying\u2014or at least it was. Now she wasn't so sure." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 76", + "text": "Chapter 36\n\nAfter Tom and Jennifer stepped off the train in Goodman, they went straight to the marshal's office. Following their meeting with Flood, Tom headed for the hotel and Jennifer returned to Miss Lillian's to resume her role as Amy.\n\nForcing an outer calm that belied the knot of nerves inside, she dressed in the new green taffeta dress with the \"Niagara Falls\" bustle.\n\nThe tightly laced corset pinched her torso. If things went as planned, this would be the last time she'd have to put herself through such torture.\n\nBefore leaving her room, she struggled for a bracing breath. It was a Friday night in late June, and Miss Lillian expected a full house. So much depended on what happened during the next few hours, she couldn't afford to let her guard down. One misstep could ruin her carefully laid plans.\n\nPlanting a bag of banknotes at the express company was a brilliant idea, if she did say so herself. Monahan wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to steal from his own safe before the shipment was made, knowing he would never be caught.\n\nA package traveling across the country passed through dozens if not hundreds of hands. No one would be the wiser until the package reached its destination, and anyone along the way could have stolen the money inside and replaced it with the fake notes. It's what made express companies such a popular target for corrupt employees and a nightmare for lawmen. Her only hope was that Monahan fell for the trick.\n\nCoral, Polly, Buttercup, and Miss Lillian were already seated downstairs in the parlor when Amy entered. Candles flickered from silver holders. Summer had yet to arrive weatherwise, and a fire blazed merrily in the fireplace.\n\nButtercup was the first to spot her. \"I didn't know you were back.\"\n\nAll eyes turned in Amy's direction.\n\nCoral's expression darkened and she jumped to her feet. \"What is she doing here?\"\n\n\"I invited her to return,\" Miss Lillian said smoothly. She motioned to Amy. \"Come and have a seat.\"\n\n\"I always knew she was your favorite!\" Coral sputtered. Hands at her waist, she glared at Miss Lillian, her face twisted with jealousy. \"You let her get away with anything.\"\n\nA look of annoyance crossed Miss Lillian's face. \"I don't have time for this. Now hush up. Our guests are due to arrive at any moment.\"\n\n\"Guests. Guests?\" Coral spat out the words with contempt. \"We don't have guests. We have johns.\" She pointed a threatening finger at Miss Lillian. \"And you're not a hostess or even a businesswoman. You're nothing but a madam, and the only thing separating us from those horrid cribs is this house.\"\n\nAngry words shot out of Coral's mouth like poison darts. \"We're trash. All of us are nothing but trash!\" She turned away from Miss Lillian. \"Trash!\"\n\nButtercup stood in her way. \"Don't say that. It's not true\u2014\"\n\n\"Is that what your mirror told you?\" Coral asked. \"You vain little\u2014\"\n\n\"I'm not vain!\" Buttercup shouted and in a softer voice added, \"I look in the mirror to see if I'm still me.\"\n\nCoral opened her mouth to speak but instead flounced across the room, forcing Amy to fall back. A strained silence followed her departure. Buttercup held her hand over her mouth, and Polly looked close to tears. It was as if the ground had opened and spit their shameful secrets onto the parlor floor for all to see.\n\nMiss Lillian's face seemed to crumble and her ruby lips puckered. Not even the shiny red gown or thick coat of face powder could hide the pallor of her skin.\n\nAmy pressed her hands against her chest. God, this can't be happening! She needed Miss Lillian's help; so much depended on everything moving like clockwork. Now thanks to Coral, her carefully laid plans appeared to be ruined.\n\nThe door chimes rang and tension in the room grew tauter. All eyes turned to Miss Lillian.\n\nStanding, Miss Lillian threw her shoulders back and lifted her chin. \"Our guests have arrived,\" she announced. She may have been stripped of all pretenses, but for now the show must go on." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 77", + "text": "For the next couple of hours, all five women played their parts as if nothing had happened. Only the most discerning eye could have noticed the forced smiles and tense expressions. Coral had returned and moved about the room with her usual grace but never missed an opportunity to shoot a visual dagger at Amy.\n\nPolly noticed the dark, hateful glances. \"B\u2014b\u2014better watch your b\u2014b\u2014back,\" she whispered in Amy's ear.\n\nAmy nodded, but watching her back was the least of her worries. Tonight it was all about the plan. It was a deceptively simple one: catch Monahan in the act of robbing his own express company.\n\nThe plan wasn't foolproof; its success teetered on one of the seven deadly sins, namely, greed. She chanced a glance at Monahan, who looked perfectly relaxed. As usual he was dressed in a fine tailored suit, tan trousers, brown vest, and coat. She was no expert in fabric, but Miss Lillian told her his clothes were cut from only the finest Italian silks.\n\nGold rings glittered on several fingers as he mouthed his Partag\u00e1s cigar imported directly from Cuba. Even the smoke circling his head looked richer, fuller than the smoke from the hand-rolled cigarettes and cheaper cigars of the other guests.\n\nHe had the best that money could buy and owned half the town, maybe more. He didn't need for a thing, not a thing. Her only hope was that greed would get the best of him, and he would fall into her trap.\n\nStill, something bothered her, though she couldn't for the life of her think what it was. For some reason she kept recalling the night he stood outside the cellar door, the night someone had knocked her unconscious.\n\nShe studied each woman in turn, hoping to see a telling look, a conspiratorial wink, a whispered exchange. One of these women had been in the cellar that night. One of them had hit her over the head, and she was willing to guess that woman had been Coral.\n\nMiss Lillian played a lively ditty on the piano and Mr. Cunningham got up and danced a jig. This brought gales of laughter and applause from the others. Since Coral was watching her, Amy had no choice but to clap, though it sickened her. All she could think about was the man's son, Scott, and the desperation that drove the boy to throw bricks at the parlor house.\n\nMr. Studebaker announced he had some sort of throat trouble that prevented him from singing that night. Coral cooed with mock sympathy, which the silly man took for the real thing.\n\nA smile plastered on her face, Amy held her fan judiciously and willed herself not to keep looking at the long clock when Mr. Miller cornered her. The man had nothing of interest to say but insisted upon saying it, anyway.\n\nHis broad face and walrus-like mustache bore a striking resemblance to President Arthur, a man Mr. Miller soundly abhorred.\n\nShe glanced at Coral, who was engaged in what looked like an intimate conversation with Mr. Monahan. Amy would give anything to hear what the two discussed.\n\nPolly, as usual, didn't say much for fear of stuttering, but with her pretty blond hair and deep blue eyes, she didn't need to talk. Buttercup was bookended by two men vying for her attention. She looked bored but kept glancing in the nearby mirror and fiddling with her hair. None of her admirers seemed to notice her dull eyes or disinterested expression.\n\nHaving played the second of her two-song repertoire, Miss Lillian scooted around the piano stool and gave her jeweled hands several dainty claps.\n\n\"Amy has graciously agreed to read everyone's fortune tonight. On the house,\" she said, careful to use the words she and Amy had rehearsed earlier. \"Mr. Tully, you're first.\"\n\nMr. Tully stood and straightened his cravat. Built like a cracker barrel with skinny legs, he stabbed the floor with his cane. \"There's nothing like a good fortune.\"\n\nMiller gave a low-pitched snort. \"Yes, but with President Arthur in charge, good fortune will be hard to come by.\"\n\nAmy didn't want to have to go through the entire charade, but it would surely raise suspicion had she zeroed in on Monahan alone. Playing her part to a T, she slipped her arm through Mr. Tully's crooked elbow and led him out of the room and across the entryway to Miss Lillian's office. Having no need of his cane for mobility, he tucked it beneath his other arm.\n\n\"I'll pay you handsomely for a good fortune,\" he said.\n\nShe smiled. \"Why, Mr. Tully, you wouldn't be trying to bribe me now, would you?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 78", + "text": "The office had been prepared in advance. Candles were already lit and draperies drawn so as not to let in any moon or starlight. The desk was covered with a black velvet cloth and the crystal ball looked like a bubble ready to pop.\n\n\"Have a seat,\" she said in a quiet voice. She took her place behind the desk and peered into the shiny globe. Miss Lillian explained that the purpose of staring into a crystal ball was to reach a person's subconscious. Most people thought a fortune-teller's glass sphere foretold the future; such ignorance made some charlatans rich.\n\nThough her insides were tied in a knot, she forced herself to take her time. \"I see a woman crying. An older woman... with frilly curls and a mole.\"\n\nMr. Tully's gaze involuntarily landed on her chin, and she placed her finger on the exact spot.\n\nHe looked startled. \"That... that's my wife. Why is she crying?\"\n\n\"Shh.\" She stared into the ball and pretended to concentrate. \"Oh dear.\"\n\n\"Go on,\" he said, his voice anxious.\n\n\"She's holding a gun.\"\n\nHe drew back. \"Good heavens!\"\n\n\"Someone has... betrayed her.\"\n\n\"No!\"\n\n\"She doesn't think she has any reason to live. She raises the gun...\"\n\nJumping to his feet, he held out an arm like an overwrought actor in a bad play. \"Tell her no!\"\n\nAmy sat back. \"I'm sorry. I can't tell her anything. The vision is gone.\"\n\nFace pale as a winter moon, he stammered, \"D\u2014do you suppose that she...?\"\n\n\"The future is in your hands, Mr. Tully. Perhaps if you talked to her... Let her know you would never... betray her.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, of course.\" He backed toward the door. \"I'll go home and tell her that right away.\" He swung around and exited the office, leaving his fashionable cane behind in his haste. Amy laughed. \"You do that, Mr. Tully. And if you're smart, you'll stay home.\"\n\nA moment later, Miss Lillian poked her head in the office. \"Mr. Tully left in a hurry. Is everything all right?\"\n\n\"Everything is perfect,\" Amy said. \"Send in the next guest.\"\n\nOne by one, Amy read each man's fortune, careful not to rush the ritual. She told Mr. Webber what would happen if he continued ignoring his wife. No sooner had she finished the session than he hurried away to buy his wife her favorite sweets.\n\nShe \"read\" a bleak future for Mr. Cobble's mining company if he didn't stop overworking his employees. She \"foresaw\" a terrible illness if Mr. Sweeney refused to mend his ways and kept avoiding church.\n\nFor Scott's father, Mr. Cunningham, she poured it on especially thick. \"I see a boy. About twelve or thirteen...\"\n\n\"That must be my son.\"\n\nPretending not to hear him, she swayed slightly as if in a trance. \"His name begins with an S. Samuel, Steve. Scott.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" he thundered, \"Scott. That's him. That's my son.\"\n\nShe kept her gaze focused on the crystal ball. \"Oh dear. Oh my.\"\n\nHe gave an anxious gasp. \"What do you see? Tell me!\"\n\n\"I see... the sign of death.\"\n\nHis eyes widened in horror. \"Whose death? Not Scott's!\"\n\nEncouraged by the man's obvious concern for his son, she continued in a low monotone. \"Your family will be safe, providing you\u2014\"\n\n\"Go on, providing what?\"\n\n\"Ask God's forgiveness and change your ways.\"\n\n\"Change my ways?\" He looked mortified. \"You mean stop coming here?\"\n\n\"And similar places.\" She raised her head and looked him in the eyes. \"If you don't, sir, your family's safety will be in serious jeopardy.\"\n\nHe stood so quickly his chair slammed against the door. \"I'm much obliged to you for letting me know. I must go. My family needs me.\"\n\nHe quickly left the room.\n\n\"Yes!\" Amy banged on the desk. Praise the Lord!\n\nSo far, the evening had been an unexpected success. For that she was grateful, but she also felt deeply humbled. Words had popped out of her mouth from seemingly nowhere. Somehow she knew exactly what to say to each man, and she could think of only one explanation; while she was hoping to trap a killer, God had worked through her to change lives.\n\nHe really did work in mysterious ways\u2014and in a bordello, of all places. The thought filled her with unspeakable emotion.\n\nA knock sounded, and she immediately checked her neckline to make certain the lace tucked there for modesty's sake was in place.\n\n\"Come in.\"\n\nMr. Monahan entered the room and sat, placing his palms on the desk. \"So what does the future hold for me?\" His oily smile and mocking tone made it clear he didn't believe in such nonsense and was just playing along for the fun of it.\n\nShe lowered her gaze to the crystal ball, surprised to find her knees shaking. God, please help me make this work. For Tom's sake. For Davey's.\n\n\"I see... gold.\" She raised her gaze to his. \"Do you own a gold mine, Mr. Monahan?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, no.\" His eyes glittered as if she had just proven how ridiculous this whole business was. \"At the price of gold, I wish I did.\"\n\nAmy lowered her gaze to the crystal ball. \"I see...\" She held her hands to the ball without touching it. \"I see a ship. No, not just one. I see three ships on a stormy sea.\"\n\nShe sensed Monahan stiffening but she kept her gaze focused on the ball. \"I see a steel box.\" Not wanting to be too obvious, she avoided using the word safe. \"It holds great riches and it will make you very happy.\" She let him digest that for a moment before gasping in alarm. \"Oh dear. Should a ship arrive before midnight, peril awaits. After midnight, your treasure will be safe.\"\n\nShe relaxed as if letting the vision drain away. \"It looks like your ship is about to come in, Mr. Monahan.\"\n\nHe stood and tossed a gold coin on the desk. \"Since we live in Kansas, that would be an interesting trick.\"\n\nHe left the room, and she knotted her hands. Had she been too obvious? Too subtle? Most importantly, did he fall for it?\n\nThe last fortune she read was Mr. Studebaker's. \"Do I have a future as a singer?\" he asked, his voice still hoarse.\n\nShe kept her gaze fixated on the crystal ball. The man couldn't carry a tune in a basket, but since she wouldn't be around much longer to hear him, she saw no harm in offering encouragement. \"I see many notes in your future, Mr. Studebaker.\" Flat notes.\n\nThe news seemed to please him to no end. \"I knew it,\" he rasped. Despite his sore throat, he left the room humming." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 79", + "text": "No sooner had Studebaker left than Miss Lillian entered her office, wringing her hands. \"The guests are gone!\"\n\n\"Everyone?\"\n\n\"Everyone!\"\n\nAmy felt a rush of cautious optimism. The news was encouraging, but it didn't necessarily mean Monahan had taken the bait.\n\n\"What did you say to make everyone leave?\" Miss Lillian asked with a frown.\n\nAmy rose. \"I guess they were overwhelmed by my predictions.\"\n\nMiss Lillian's lips puckered with annoyance. \"Remind me not to let you play fortune-teller again. It's bad for business.\" She lit the lamp and covered the ball with a black cloth. \"Do you think the suspect fell for it?\"\n\nAmy wished she could answer that. It was hard to tell what went on behind Monahan's polished veneer. \"We'll know soon enough.\"\n\n\"You better get ready.\" Miss Lillian picked up the crystal ball. \"You don't want to keep Mr. Monahan waiting.\"\n\nAmy's jaw dropped. \"I never said it was him.\" She'd told Miss Lillian her plan but not the name of the suspect.\n\nA smiled inched across Miss Lillian's face, the first real smile Amy had seen all night. \"I've been practicing my detective skills. I figured there was a reason why you wanted to read the men's fortune in a particular order.\"\n\n\"I didn't want anyone to be suspicious.\" Amy glanced at the open door to make sure no eavesdroppers lurked in the entry hall.\n\n\"Don't look so worried. Discretion is my middle name. I know how to put two and two together and keep my mouth shut.\" She waved her hands. \"Now go and get ready. Detective Lillian will hold down the fort.\"\n\nGrateful that Miss Lillian had not let Coral's earlier outburst ruin the plan, Amy paused at the doorway. \"Coral was wrong. You are a good businesswoman. You're just in the wrong business.\"\n\nWithout waiting for a response she left, but not without peering into the parlor. Coral, Polly, and Buttercup sat in waiting silence, no doubt wondering where all the guests had gone. Detective Lillian better have a good explanation.\n\nYanking the taffeta skirt up to her knees, she rushed up the stairs two at a time." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 80", + "text": "Chapter 37\n\nAmy changed into a plain blue skirt and tailored shirtwaist. She stared at herself in the mirror. It was unusual to feel this nervous or anxious before an undercover operation, but then never had there been more at stake.\n\nIf she was wrong about Monahan or if she botched this up in some way, she could pretty much count on her career as a Pinkerton operative coming to an end.\n\nOddly enough, the thought wasn't quite as devastating as she expected. Finding her sister had changed her in surprising ways. She no longer felt quite as restless or driven. She wanted to catch Monahan, no question. But not because of career advancement; this time her goal was far more personal.\n\nNothing could bring Dave Colton back or change the past, but at least she could restore Tom's faith in him. Perhaps even more importantly, she could give a young boy a legacy of pride instead of shame.\n\nShe checked her derringer and slid it back into her leg holster. It was time and she was ready. At exactly ten minutes past ten o'clock, she opened the door and peered cautiously into the hall. Normally at this time on a Saturday night, the house bustled with activity. The silence felt odd, eerie, as if even the walls were afraid to breathe.\n\nHere we go, God. Here we go.\n\nThe downstairs appeared deserted. So far so good. Now if Miss Lillian just remembered to leave the front door unlocked. She didn't want to waste time using the trapdoor.\n\nShe descended the stairs quietly and glanced into the parlor. Much to her relief, the room was empty. The lamps were still lit and the sickly smell of perfume hung in the air, but all that remained of the fire was red embers.\n\nShe started for the door.\n\n\"Where do you think you're going?\"\n\nHalted by Coral's voice, Amy turned. \"Out for fresh air.\"\n\n\"Liar!\" Coral descended the stairs, and even the paint piled on her dark-skinned face couldn't hide her hateful expression. \"What did you say to drive all the guests away?\"\n\n\"All I did was read their fortunes.\"\n\n\"Don't lie to me. I knew there was something not right about you from the start.\"\n\nAmy's hands balled at her sides, but she maintained a calm demeanor. She didn't have time for an argument. \"I have nothing more to say, Coral.\"\n\n\"Well, I have plenty to say to you.\"\n\n\"What's going on?\" Buttercup appeared at the top of the stairs. Wearing a corset and bloomers, she stood braiding her hair into a single plait. Polly peered over her shoulder.\n\n\"Nothing's going on,\" Amy said.\n\nCoral advanced toward her. She was still dressed in her working clothes, and the taffeta rustled like dry leaves. \"It's not the first time you left the house at night.\"\n\nIf Coral had been the one with Monahan at the cellar door, she was a fine one to talk.\n\nThe quick pitter-patter of footsteps preceded Miss Lillian's arrival. Her gaze bounced between Amy and Coral. \"What's all the fuss?\"\n\n\"Coral objects to my going outside for air,\" Amy said.\n\nCoral's brown eyes flashed with dangerous lights. \"What I object to is your sneaking around and pretending to be something you're not. You might fool Miss Lillian, but you can't fool me.\" She turned to the others. \"Not only was Rose murdered the day Amy arrived, but somehow she got Georgia to leave. Then after disappearing for weeks without a word, she comes back and chases away all our guests.\"\n\nThe chimes of the tall clock rang out the quarter hour. Amy was anxious to get to town. She didn't want to miss seeing Monahan arrested. \"I don't have time for this.\" She reached for the doorknob, but Coral grabbed her by the wrist.\n\n\"You're not going anywhere until I get some answers.\"\n\nAmy tried pulling away, but Coral's grip tightened. \"Let go of me.\"\n\nCoral's nose was practically in Amy's face. \"Over my dead body.\"\n\nAmy glared at her. \"Be careful what you wish for.\"\n\n\"I declare to goodness!\" Miss Lillian clapped her hands. \"I won't have my girls acting like a bunch of alley cats,\" she said, but no amount of pleading would loosen Coral's grasp.\n\nAmy couldn't afford to wait another minute. She slipped her one free hand into her false pocket and pulled out her derringer.\n\nCoral fell back, her face a mask of astonishment. Amy muttered an apology, though she didn't feel particularly sorry. If Coral had hit her over the head in the cellar as suspected, a gun to the face was the least the woman deserved.\n\nWithout another word, Amy left the house and ran." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 81", + "text": "Amy was out of breath by the time she reached Main Street. A painful stitch shot from under her rib cage. Rubbing her side, she glanced around. Tethered horses lined the street. Lamps blazed from hotel windows, casting a patchwork of light onto the dirt road. Male voices and laughter wafted from the saloons. A banjo played a Stephen Foster tune to the sound of stomping feet.\n\n\"Psst.\"\n\nAmy swung around. Tom beckoned her from the alley next to the hotel almost directly across from the Monahan Express Company. Only his dark form was visible, but it was enough to quicken her pulse.\n\nShe ducked between the buildings where both Marshal Flood and Tom stood waiting for her. Light from the hotel windows turned the alley into a checkerboard of bright squares.\n\nTom pulled her to his side, and his nearness was both comforting and disturbing. \"I thought you'd never get here,\" he said, his voice hushed.\n\n\"I had a problem getting away,\" she said, trying to maintain a businesslike demeanor. \"Everything all set?\"\n\nFlood nodded. \"We got lucky. Crenshaw worked on the safe and had the combination in his files.\" Crenshaw was the town blacksmith.\n\nThat was lucky, but not too surprising. Blacksmiths were the first people operatives turned to when needing access to a safe or vault. That's because hinges and locks often required repairs, and blacksmiths were the only ones in town who could fix them. Oddly enough, few safe owners remembered to change combinations after repairs.\n\n\"Any sign of Monahan?\"\n\n\"None,\" the marshal replied, sounding peeved. \"And the longer I stand here, the more this whole things sounds like a wild goose chase.\"\n\n\"Did Monahan fall for it?\" Tom asked.\n\n\"I think so.\" She couldn't be sure. \"He gave no indication, but he did leave Miss Lillian's the moment I finished reading his fortune. I thought he might make a beeline to his office.\"\n\nTom shook his head. \"That would have been foolhardy. Too many people in town. Unless I miss my guess, he'll wait till after midnight, just like you told him.\"\n\nShe closed her eyes to block Tom from view, but that didn't make it any easier to concentrate. She could still feel the warmth of his body and hear his every breath. Then there was the intriguing combination of leather and bay rum that played havoc with her senses.\n\n\"You okay?\" he asked.\n\nShe opened her eyes and forced a smile. \"I think so.\"\n\nFlood made a grunting sound. \"This whole thing about Monahan... I'm still having a hard time believing it.\"\n\nThe marshal's doubts added to Amy's anxiety. What if she was wrong about Monahan? About Coral? Had her feelings for Tom compromised her judgment?\n\nShe felt Tom bristle by her side. \"I see something.\"\n\n\"It's too early,\" she whispered. \"Maybe he decided not to wait.\"\n\nShe dropped down on hands and knees and peered around a corner. A figure darted along the opposite boardwalk, but even the dark shadows couldn't hide the checkered suit.\n\n\"Oh no,\" she groaned. \"It's that private detective.\" That's all they needed.\n\n\"What's he doing here?\" Tom whispered.\n\n\"That's what I want to know.\" She left her hiding place and ever so quietly ran across the street and up the steps to the boardwalk. She found him paused in front of Harry's Gun and Bakery Shoppe, his back turned.\n\n\"Fancy meeting you here.\"\n\n\"Ahhhh!\" Had Checkers been touched by a cattle prod, he couldn't have jumped much higher. He swung around, hand on his chest. \"Blimey! You've got to stop sneaking up like that. You'll give me heart failure.\"\n\n\"Shh. Keep your voice down. Why are you here?\"\n\n\"Haven't the foggiest idea. I simply followed you.\"\n\nAmy palmed her forehead. She'd been so anxious to get to town she'd not taken the usual precautions to prevent being followed. Now, all she could do was make the best of it.\n\n\"Quick.\" She grabbed his arm and practically dragged him across the street to the alley.\n\nHe greeted Tom and Flood with a questioning glance and straightened his bow tie. \"I demand to know what's going on.\"\n\n\"What makes you think you're in a position to make demands?\" Flood asked.\n\n\"I'm a private investigator, that's what.\" He turned to Tom. \"I don't know why she's here, but you're working on a case, right?\"\n\nTom glanced at Amy. \"Well\u2014\"\n\n\"I knew it!\" Checkers practically jumped for joy. \"And it's got something to do with Monahan, right?\"\n\n\"Yes, well, we won't know till he shows up,\" Flood muttered.\n\n\"Shh,\" Tom cautioned. \"Someone's coming.\"\n\nMr. Checkers sniffled. \"I smell perfume.\" He held his finger under his nose but sneezed anyway. \"Ah-choo!\"\n\n\"Shh!\"\n\n\"I can't help it. Perfume bothers me.\"\n\nAmy peered out of the alley, and her mouth dropped open. Please, God, let me be seeing things. Only she wasn't. It was Miss Lillian\u2014no question. Following close behind were Coral, Buttercup, and Polly.\n\n\"Psst. Miss Lillian. Over here!\" Amy motioned with her hand.\n\nMiss Lillian turned her head in Amy's direction and waved. \"Oh, there you are.\"\n\nThe four women tottered daintily toward her, lifting their fancy skirts above the ankles. Miss Lillian reached the alley slightly out of breath.\n\n\"We didn't miss anything, did we?\"\n\n\"Unfortunately, no,\" Checkers said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief held to his nose.\n\nAmy pulled Miss Lillian into the alley where she couldn't be seen from the street. The madam looked momentarily startled but quickly recovered. The others pushed their way into the alley, forcing the marshal and Checkers to move back. The smell of perfume was almost overwhelming.\n\n\"What are you all doing here?\" Amy demanded.\n\nCoral pulled her shawl around her shoulders. \"Miss Lillian told us everything.\"\n\nAmy swung around to face the madam, hands at her waist. \"You had no right.\" Her hushed voice hardly did her anger justice. \"You promised.\"\n\n\"I had to tell them something,\" Miss Lillian sniffed and didn't sound the least bit sorry.\n\nAmy groaned and curled her hands by her sides. She squeezed past the others to reach Tom's side. \"Watch Coral,\" she whispered.\n\n\"Will do.\"\n\n\"I want so much for this to go right.\" For his sake, for young Davey's.\n\nHe squeezed her hand, but his reassuring smile failed to allay her worries. So far little had gone as planned, but Coral's presence was particularly worrisome. She could be working with Monahan, and if so, she might try warning him.\n\nButtercup pushed her way from the rear of the alley to Amy's side. \"I can't believe you're a detective.\"\n\nCheckers sneezed. \"What do you mean a detective?\" His gaze shot from Amy to Tom. \"Don't tell me you're both Pinks.\"\n\n\"No, only the lady,\" Marshal Flood said.\n\nAmy gritted her teeth. \"Why don't we just shout it from the rooftops?\"\n\nPolly patted her on the arm. \"W\u2014we just w\u2014want to h\u2014help.\"\n\n\"It's not like we have anything else to do,\" Coral said, \"since you chased all our guests away.\"\n\nMiss Lillian pushed Amy aside to peer out to the street. \"Oh dear. Where are they?\"\n\n\"Who's they?\" Tom asked.\n\n\"Why, Mrs. Givings and her friends. They were right behind us.\" Miss Lillian stuck her head out of the alley and waved. \"Yoo-hoo. Over here.\"\n\n\"Shh.\" Amy pulled her back. \"Do you want to wake the dead?\"\n\n\"Sorry.\"\n\nMrs. Givings, Mrs. Compton, and Mrs. Albright came running. \"There you are,\" Mrs. Givings said. \"We thought we'd lost you.\"\n\n\"It's getting rather crowded,\" Checkers complained from behind his handkerchief.\n\n\"Will you look at this?\" Mrs. Givings straightened her feathered hat. \"There are enough people here for a revival.\"\n\nFlood pushed a feather from her hat away from his face. \"Yeah, well don't get any ideas.\"\n\nMrs. Givings ignored him. \"Miss Lillian said you needed our prayers, and that's what we're here for.\" She craned her neck to address those at the back. \"So are we all ready to repent?\"\n\n\"Now, don't go getting on your high horse,\" Miss Lillian admonished. \"We're not here to repent. We're working on a case.\"\n\n\"What do you mean, a case?\" Mrs. Givings asked, sounding confused.\n\n\"We're here to nab an outlaw,\" Buttercup said and giggled.\n\nMr. Checkers groaned. \"There goes my reward. It's not bad enough that I lost out on the Jesse James reward, now this!\"\n\nMrs. Albright gave him a soothing pat on the back. \"There's only one reward that counts.\"\n\nAmy turned to Mrs. Givings. \"I know why they're here, but what are you ladies doing out at this time of night?\"\n\n\"One of our church members has a sick little girl,\" Mrs. Givings explained, \"and we were praying for her.\"\n\nAmy's breath caught. Georgia?\n\nAs if to read her mind Mrs. Givings leaned closer and whispered, \"Her daughter's fever broke and the doctor said she'll do just fine.\"\n\n\"That's good news,\" Amy whispered back with relief.\n\nCheckers let out a loud sneeze. Startled, Buttercup flew forward and her chest practically landed in Mrs. Givings's face.\n\nThe churchwoman cried out. \"Oh dear. If this gets back to the church, only God knows what it will do to my reputation.\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Miss Lillian said. \"You can only lose your reputation once, and after tonight, you won't have one to worry about.\"\n\n\"Do you have a gun?\" Buttercup asked, pulling out her own.\n\nMrs. Givings's mouth dropped open and her eyes widened behind her spectacles.\n\n\"No guns,\" the marshal said. \"I mean it. No guns!\" He confiscated Miss Lillian's gun first and demanded that Coral, Polly, and Buttercup give up their weapons, as well.\n\nHe turned to Amy. \"Pinkerton is no longer involved in the case. That means I'm in charge. Hand over the gun or I'll put you all in jail.\"\n\nAmy gritted her teeth, but she pulled out her gun and slapped it soundly into his open palm. The night just kept getting worse.\n\n\"It's okay,\" Tom whispered, his breath warm on her ear. \"I've got you covered.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 82", + "text": "Chapter 38\n\nThey waited.\n\nMidnight came and went and still they waited. The temperature dropped and tempers flared. The full moon was now directly overhead and the alley was almost as light as day.\n\nCoral snapped at Buttercup, \"You're standing on my foot.\"\n\n\"That's because your elbow is in my back,\" Buttercup complained.\n\nCheckers had stopped sneezing, but by that point he'd broken out in hives and his eyes watered.\n\n\"Maybe you ought to leave,\" Miss Lillian suggested.\n\n\"And let you get the reward?\" He rubbed his eyes with his handkerchief. \"Not on your tintype!\"\n\nAmy had lost patience long ago. \"Quiet, all of you,\" she rasped. So help her, if her carefully laid plans were ruined she would personally wring each and every one of their necks.\n\nStakeouts were a necessary part of an operative's job. She had done more than her share through the years but never under such difficult conditions.\n\n\"This is so exciting,\" Mrs. Givings whispered, after only thirty seconds of blessed silence. \"I still think we should use this opportunity to pray.\"\n\n\"Only if you promise to pray for a cup of hot tea,\" Buttercup said.\n\nMrs. Givings sniffed. \"I can think of a lot of things you need, and tea isn't one of them.\"\n\n\"Shh.\"\n\nThey waited.\n\n\"I wish something would happen,\" Miss Lillian complained after a while. \"We need our beauty rest.\"\n\n\"I'm hungry,\" Buttercup moaned.\n\nThey waited.\n\n\"W\u2014what is that noise?\" Polly asked.\n\n\"Sounds like crinkling paper,\" Checkers said, and all heads turned toward Buttercup.\n\n\"What? It's just a peppermint candy.\" She popped the sweet into her mouth and tossed the paper wrapper to the ground.\n\nTom laid a hand on Amy's shoulder. \"I see something.\"\n\n\"Quiet, everyone.\" Amy dropped to the ground and peered around the corner. She saw it, too. A shadow; someone moved stealthily along the boardwalk toward the express office. She expected Monahan to arrive on horseback, not on foot. Apparently he was taking extra precautions.\n\n\"When do we catch him?\" Miss Lillian whispered.\n\n\"Shh.\"\n\nFor several moments, no one said a word.\n\nTom reached for his firearm. \"I think he's inside.\"\n\nFlood pulled out his Peacemaker. \"No guns,\" he hissed.\n\n\"What do you call that?\" Coral asked.\n\n\"It's called 'I'm in charge.' \"\n\n\"This is so exciting,\" Buttercup said and tittered.\n\n\"Get off my foot,\" Coral said in a harsh voice.\n\nMinutes passed.\n\n\"What's taking so long?\" Miss Lillian asked.\n\n\"Robberies take time,\" Checkers said. \"Especially if you have to break into a safe.\"\n\n\"Doesn't he know his own combination?\" Coral asked.\n\nCheckers looked confused. \"Good point.\"\n\n\"I think he's coming out,\" Tom said.\n\nFlood moved to the head of the crowd. \"Okay, men... and ah... ladies. Stay put. I'll let you know when it's safe.\" Ducking low, he ran out of the alley. \"Put your hands up.\"\n\nA shot rang out, and the marshal doubled over like an empty purse.\n\nPolly screamed. Mrs. Givings gasped, and Miss Lillian swayed. Shouts filled the air as men began pouring out of the Golden Hind Saloon like frenzied ants.\n\nMonahan moved away, and Amy rushed to the marshal's side. \"Get him,\" she called to Tom, dropping to her knees. \"Get Monahan!\" A dark stain marked Flood's right shoulder. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it against his wound to stem the bleeding.\n\nFlood grimaced and said something, but his voice was lost in the scuffle that suddenly exploded around them as a fight broke out. Fists flew and the pounding of flesh was followed by grunts and groans.\n\nShe searched the mass of moving bodies, hoping to find a familiar face. \"We need a doctor!\" she called.\n\nCheckers barreled into one of the men headfirst, his arms windmilling. One clumsy punch from his opponent and he jackknifed to the ground. Miss Lillian jumped off the boardwalk onto someone's back and pounded him with her fists.\n\nStraining her neck, Amy searched for Tom, spotting him heading for the express office, gun drawn. A man took a flying leap and landed on Tom's back. Heart sinking, she watched the two fall to the ground.\n\nShe grabbed Flood's firearm. \"Sorry, Marshal, but the one in charge is the one who didn't take a bullet.\" She stood and glanced at the express office but couldn't find Tom amid the chaos. Nor was Monahan anywhere in sight. Stepping around two fighting men, she scrambled up the wooden steps to the boardwalk. Where was he?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 83", + "text": "Chapter 39\n\nCrouching low, Amy darted past Harry's Gun and Bakery Shoppe and paused at the corner. A sign overhead swayed back and forth in the soft breeze. Judging by the shouts and curses behind her, the brawl was still in full swing.\n\nCompared to her derringer, the colt Peacemaker weighed a ton, but she kept it aimed in front of her.\n\nA movement ahead made her stop short. Was that Monahan, or was the moonlight playing tricks on her? She jumped off the boardwalk and ran toward the church. The gate to the cemetery stood ajar.\n\nSenses alert, she moved cautiously along the side of the church, staying close to the bushes. The iron gate creaked to her touch. The slight wind rustled the trees. Shadows flitted across the gravestones and her spirits sank. Monahan could be anywhere.\n\nSomething hard suddenly rammed against the back of her head. \"Drop the gun.\"\n\nMouth dry, she laid the Peacemaker down on the ground and turned. For a moment she thought the moonlight was playing tricks on her. \"Mr. Studebaker?\"\n\nHe looked almost as surprised to see her as she was to see him, but the barrel of his gun never wavered. \"Amy?\"\n\nShe let out a sigh of relief. He had complained earlier of a sore throat, which is why she hadn't recognized his voice at first.\n\n\"You near scared the life out of me. I thought you were\u2014\" She caught a whiff of tobacco and a horrid realization washed over her. \"You're the waxwing!\"\n\nHe reared back, startled. \"What?\"\n\n\"The waxwing. It's a bird with a mask.\" Suddenly, all the missing pieces fell into place. It was Studebaker seen that night at the cellar door, not Monahan\u2014an easy mistake since both men were similar in height and weight and even sounded alike. Buttercup had made a similar mistake. The man she heard Rose arguing with was Studebaker, not Monahan.\n\n\"You're the Gunnysack Bandit!\" That's what had bothered her earlier in the parlor: Monahan's cigar had a distinct odor far different from what she'd recalled from that night.\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\" His voice grew harsher, as if his throat were lined with sand. \"Do I look like I'm wearing a gunnysack? What are you doing here, anyway?\"\n\n\"I'm a Pinkerton detective.\"\n\nAn incredulous look crossed his face. \"A Pink\u2014\" he croaked and stopped to clear his throat. \"But you're a\u2014\"\n\n\"A woman. I know.\" Outlaws could be so predictable at times. \"If you're not who I think you are, put down that gun.\"\n\nThe gun stayed firmly in place. \"You should have stuck with fortune-telling.\" He held up a jute sack. \"You said I had a lot of notes in my future, and here they are.\" He grinned. \"Banknotes.\"\n\nShe frowned. \"How did you know about the money?\"\n\n\"I heard you tell Monahan his ships were coming in. I've been in his office enough times to know about the painting on the wall.\"\n\nNot only did Studebaker have a loud singing voice when his throat wasn't acting up, he apparently had big ears, as well.\n\n\"You can't get away, you know. Not this time. You're going to pay for what you've done.\"\n\nAn evil smile inched across his face. \"That's where you're wrong. The Gunnysack Bandit is dead. Long may he rest in peace.\"\n\n\"That's what you wanted us to believe, and you almost got away with it.\" Had he not been so greedy and decided to rob again, he would have gotten away with it. \"You stole enough money through the years to make you a rich man.\"\n\n\"Very,\" he croaked.\n\n\"But you were almost caught during the last robbery, and you killed a bank guard. That's when you decided that maybe your luck was about to run out. So you decided to call it quits.\"\n\n\"Nothing like quitting when you're ahead.\" His voice grew rougher but he continued. \"All my life I've worked my fingers to the bone in jobs I hated. Now I get to do what I want to do.\"\n\n\"Like take singing lessons,\" she said. Something suddenly occurred to her. \"Only it wasn't voice lessons you were after. You were looking for something. Rose's journal, no doubt.\" Now she knew who had searched her room. \"You were also keeping your eye on the one person who knew you were the bandit.\"\n\nHe neither confirmed nor denied her allegations. \"It seems you have me at a disadvantage.\"\n\n\"You're the one with the gun.\"\n\n\"Yes, but you know a lot about me, and I know so little about you. Did you talk to\u2014?\"\n\n\"Rose?\" she asked. \"Dave Colton? Or someone else?\"\n\nHe waved his gun. \"No matter. They're both gone to the great by-and-by, and you're about to meet them there.\"\n\n\"You won't get away with it. Too many people know Monahan was robbed tonight.\"\n\n\"Yes, but they'll think that he did it. I made certain of that.\"\n\n\"Just like you made certain that Dave Colton was blamed for your crimes,\" she said. \"Is that why you killed him?\"\n\n\"I killed him because he knew too much and was about to turn me in. You can blame Rose for that. One night I had too much to drink, and I said things that made her suspicious. While I was passed out, she went through my belongings and found incriminating evidence\u2014a map of a bank and list of robberies. She showed them to her beau. That's when he started nosing around.\"\n\n\"So you had to kill him. But that still left Rose.\"\n\n\"She wasn't a problem. I told her that if she said a word to anyone, Dave Colton's kid would never see the light of day.\"\n\nAmy stared at him. Supposedly only Coffey knew about the baby prior to Rose's death. So how did Studebaker find out?\n\n\"You'd be amazed what a woman will do to protect a young one,\" he added.\n\nShe knew firsthand the sacrifices a woman would make to protect a child. Isn't that what she'd done in St. Louis when she'd walked away from Cissy? Protect her? Same as Georgia had done when she'd knocked on Miss Lillian's door.\n\nHe pointed his gun in the direction of the cemetery. \"Move, and don't try any funny business.\"\n\nJust as she started toward the iron gate, something whizzed by, missing her head by barely an inch. It struck the church wall hard and bounced back to hit Studebaker on the temple.\n\n\"Ow!\"\n\nAll at once a barrage of objects flew out of nowhere. He fought them off with frantic thrusts of his arms. Dodging low, Amy grabbed his wrist and they wrestled for the gun. She kneed him where it counted, and he loosened his hold.\n\n\"Drop the gun!\" Tom's voice was music to her ears.\n\nStill smarting from the low blow, Studebaker let his gun fall to the ground. Blood trickled from his forehead where he'd been hit by flying items.\n\n\"I thought you'd never get here,\" she said.\n\nTom moved into the moonlight. \"Sorry, I was what you might call occupied.\" He gave her a crooked grin.\n\nThe marshal hobbled up behind him, his arm in a makeshift sling. \"Here.\" He tossed a pair of handcuffs to Tom with his one good arm. Tom snapped them around Studebaker's wrists.\n\nMiss Lillian limped toward them followed by her girls and the three churchwomen, all in stocking feet.\n\n\"We got him!\" Miss Lillian cried.\n\nAmy handed the marshal his firearm and picked a velvet slipper off the ground. \"Shoes? You threw shoes?\"\n\nThe madam shrugged. \"The marshal said no guns.\"\n\nMrs. Givings giggled and glanced around. \"Anyone see a pair of high-button boots?\"\n\n\"Over here,\" Mrs. Albright called from behind a bush.\n\nTom holstered his gun and cupped Amy's elbow in his hand. \"You all right?\"\n\nShe grinned up at him. \"I'm fine. You?\"\n\nHe rubbed his jaw. \"Except for a couple of bruises, I couldn't be better.\" He picked up the gunnysack that Studebaker had dropped. \"Look a here.\" He held up a packet of banknotes.\n\nMrs. Givings clucked her tongue. \"Just think what the church could do with that much money.\"\n\nCheckers limped up looking bedraggled. His suit coat was torn and his bow tie askew. \"Does this mean I have to share the reward?\"\n\nCoral glared at him. \"What are you talking about, reward? I don't see any of your shoes here.\"\n\n\"I'll decide who gets the reward,\" Flood said.\n\nPolly walked up to the captive. \"I hope you hang for what you did to Rose.\" She shoved him on the chest. \"And even that will be too good for you.\"\n\nStudebaker glowered but said nothing.\n\nPolly stepped back and glanced at the others. \"Why are you all staring at me?\"\n\nAmy squeezed her arm. \"It's because you didn't stutter.\"\n\nPolly's hands flew to her mouth. \"I didn't, did I?\"\n\n\"No, you didn't,\" Buttercup said, and she threw her arms around her. Even Coral gave Polly a quick pat on the back.\n\n\"I'll take it from here,\" Flood said. He gave Amy a sheepish look. \"If you ever get tired of working for Pinkerton, I could use someone like you.\"\n\nIt was probably as close to a compliment as he was likely to give, but that was okay. They caught the Gunnysack Bandit, and Tom's brother was now off the hook. That was enough for her.\n\n\"You better have the doctor look at that shoulder of yours,\" Miss Lillian said.\n\nFlood nodded. \"I will, just as soon as Studebaker here is behind bars.\" It was probably the most civil conversation he and the madam ever exchanged.\n\nAmy helped the others find their shoes. She handed Coral a velvet slipper. \"Thank you for your help.\"\n\nCoral took the shoe without so much as a thank-you.\n\nButtercup hopped on one foot while she slipped on a satin slipper. \"We were glad to help.\"\n\n\"That's what sisters are for,\" Polly said. \"To help each other.\"\n\nAmy felt a lump form in her throat. She never thought to call anyone sister again, and now suddenly she had a pack of them. God sure did have a funny sense of humor.\n\nMoving away from the cemetery gate, the women formed a circle. Coral looked momentarily startled when Polly reached for her hand.\n\nSmiling, Amy stepped forward to join them. Grasping Mrs. Albright's hand on one side and Miss Lillian's on the other, she closed the circle.\n\n\"Oh dear,\" Mrs. Albright said. \"What would the church deacons say if they saw us now?\"\n\n\"Don't worry,\" Polly said. \"We're the sole of discretion.\" She laughed at her own joke.\n\nAmy's gaze traveled around the circle with a thankful heart. The show of solidarity was not only surprising but significant.\n\nReaching out to one another could very well be the first step to reaching out to God. For the first time since coming to Miss Lillian's Parlor House, Amy felt hope for the women who worked there.\n\n\"Any room for a brother?\" Tom asked.\n\nThe women laughed as he broke the link between Amy and Miss Lillian and took both their hands in his. For once, Miss Lillian didn't try to sell him anything.\n\nThe grasp of Tom's hand sent warm tremors up her arm. He winked at her and she smiled back.\n\nCheckers threw up his arms. \"Oh, why not?\" Sniffling, he took his place between Coral and Buttercup and sneezed.\n\n\"What about you, Tin Star,\" Miss Lillian called. \"Would you care to join us?\"\n\n\"I don't need no more family. I've enough troubles of me own,\" Marshal Flood grumbled. Holding his Peacemaker in one hand, he tossed a nod in the direction of the jailhouse and ordered his prisoner to move.\n\nAfter Flood hauled Studebaker away, Miss Lillian and Mrs. Givings left together, chatting away like two old friends. The others also drifted away, leaving Tom and Amy alone.\n\nUnexpectedly, he put his hands at her waist and spun her about. She threw back her head and laughed, releasing all the worry and tension of the last few hours.\n\nWith a grin as wide as Texas, he lowered her to the ground, but his hands remained on her waist. \"You did it.\"\n\nShe blushed. \"We all did it.\"\n\n\"Just so you know, I don't think of you as a sister.\"\n\nHis heated gaze held her still. \"And I don't think of you as a brother.\"\n\n\"I can't believe it's over,\" he said. \"To think that Studebaker is the Gunnysack Bandit and Dave\u2014\"\n\n\"Really did turn over a new leaf.\" She gave him a teasing look. \"I guess you could say it was a shoe-in.\"\n\nHe laughed. \"Well, look a there.\" His face grew serious and his gaze locked with hers. The promise of a kiss hung between them, but just as he was about to capture her lips with his own, a horseman rode by, and he released her.\n\n\"I can't wait till you break the news to your nephew,\" she said to relieve the sudden tension between them.\n\nHe nodded and cleared his throat. \"Now we can give his pa a proper burial in the family plot.\" He pulled a derringer out of his pocket. \"I think this is yours.\"\n\nShe took it from him and slid it into her own pocket. \"I\u2014I guess I should start back. It's late.\"\n\nHe hesitated. \"In my Ranger days, me and the boys celebrated whenever we captured a bad guy. So are you up for some coffee ice cream? I happen to know my way around the hotel kitchen.\"\n\nThe vision of him sneaking around the hotel kitchen in the middle of the night made her smile. \"I'm always up for ice cream,\" she said, \"but it's too soon to celebrate. Studebaker killed your brother, but he didn't kill Rose.\"\n\nHe frowned and drew back. \"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"Something he said.\"\n\nHis gaze sharpened. \"If he didn't kill her, then who did?\"\n\nShe raised up on her tiptoes and whispered in his ear, \"Hummingbird.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 84", + "text": "Chapter 40\n\nJennifer sat at the old piano in Miss Lillian's parlor and the rippling tune of \"F\u00fcr Elise\" filled the air. Her secret was out so there was no reason to pretend. Amy Gardner no longer existed.\n\nHer fingers moving lightly up and down the keys belied the heaviness in her heart. Memories of her sister accompanied each note.\n\nHer sister had explained that the trick to playing the piece correctly was to rotate the fingers up. That's not all her sister said.\n\n\"I haven't told anyone yet. Not even Mama.\"\n\nThere were many reasons why someone might want to keep news of an upcoming wedding secret. There were probably even more reasons to keep quiet about expecting a child, and Rose's baby was the one loose end that bothered her.\n\nA footstep sounded behind her. The mirror over the piano told her who had entered the room, but she forced herself to play the piece to the end. She then scooted on the stool until her back faced the piano.\n\nThe housekeeper's feather duster stilled. \"Want me to come back later?\" she asked, her expression bland beneath a starched cap.\n\n\"No, that's all right, Beatrice. I've finished practicing.\" She watched the woman work her way around the room, flicking her feather duster this way and that, like a hummingbird darting from flower to flower.\n\n\"I suppose you heard. Mr. Studebaker is in jail.\"\n\nShe couldn't see Beatrice's face, but her hand stilled for an instant before she continued dusting. \"So I heard.\"\n\n\"He confessed to everything except one thing... Rose's murder.\"\n\nBeatrice kept dusting.\n\n\"Isn't it strange how little things can nag at a person?\" Beatrice made no response so Jennifer continued. \"Take for example Rose's baby. No one but Coffey knew she was with child, and she swore she told no one else. So the question is, how did Studebaker find out?\"\n\nBeatrice glanced over her shoulder but said nothing, and Jennifer continued.\n\n\"My guess is that you found her journal one day while cleaning her room and read it.\"\n\nBeatrice's eyes narrowed. \"I would never do such a thing.\"\n\n\"Oh, but you would and you did. That's how you knew about the baby. I thought it was odd that Rose didn't write about being with child and hardly mentioned the man she hoped to marry. Then I remembered that some of the pages were missing from the journal. Pages you tore out.\"\n\nRose must have decided to write in code after she discovered pages of her diary missing. From that moment on, her unborn child was referred to as \"Chickadee.\" It was actually quite a clever ruse.\n\n\"Rose's journal contained her suspicions about Studebaker, and you saw this as an opportunity. You decided to feed Studebaker information, provided he pay you. That's how he knew Colton was onto him. It's also how he knew about Rose's baby.\"\n\nBeatrice kept dusting and Jennifer continued. \"It worked, but not for long. After the Hampton bank fiasco, Studebaker decided to call it quits. That meant no more money for you. That's when you decided to look for Rose's diary again. You hoped to use it to blackmail Studebaker into paying you more.\n\n\"So you sneaked into Rose's room. She caught you, and you hit her over the head.\"\n\nBeatrice swiped her feather duster over a tabletop.\n\n\"After killing Rose, you couldn't find the journal, at least not that night. It didn't show up until later when you were cleaning Rose's room. Miss Lillian was with you so you had no choice but to turn it over to her. What you didn't know at the time is that it wouldn't have done you any good. Rose wrote in code, and the birds represented real people. You were the hummingbird. You're also the person who hit me over the head in the cellar.\"\n\nShe should have known it was Beatrice by the lack of fragrance in the cellar that night. Beatrice and Coffey were the only two women in the house who didn't drench themselves with perfume\u2014and Coffey always smelled of onions and vanilla.\n\n\"The morning after you assaulted me I saw you in the kitchen, and you looked like you'd seen a ghost. I thought it was gunfire that scared you, but it wasn't, was it? It was seeing me.\"\n\nBeatrice spun around, her face an ugly mask. \"You can't prove any of this.\"\n\n\"I don't have to. As you know, Mr. Studebaker enjoys singing, and I can't tell you how much we've enjoyed his recent song.\"\n\n\"Why, that no good, double-crossing\u2014\"\n\nRealizing what she'd said, a panicked look crossed Beatrice's face. Dropping her feather duster she ran, but Tom and the marshal blocked her way. Standing next to the two men were Miss Lillian, Coral, Polly, and Buttercup. Each held a shoe over her head ready to throw.\n\nFlood unclipped the handcuffs from his belt and snapped them around Beatrice's wrists. \"I said no weapons.\"\n\nButtercup slipped her foot into her shoe. \"You said no guns.\"\n\nMiss Lillian glared at her housekeeper and looked about to clobber her with the heel of her shoe. \"I can't believe that you killed Rose.\"\n\n\"She killed her all right,\" Jennifer said. \"She's the one Rose called Hummingbird.\"\n\n\"Not any longer.\" Tom gave a grim nod. \"From now on she'll be known as jailbird.\"\n\n\"Are we done now?\" Flood asked. \"Or is there someone else I need to arrest?\"\n\n\"I think that'll do it,\" Jennifer said. \"For now.\"\n\nMiss Lillian's expression dropped along with her shoe. \"There must be someone else. Otherwise, what will I do with my newfound detective skills?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 85", + "text": "\"What I don't understand,\" Tom said later as Jennifer sat with him in the hotel dining room sharing a dish of coffee ice cream, \"is why Studebaker took singing lessons. It's obvious he can't sing. So what was he doing? Keeping an eye on Beatrice?\"\n\n\"Perhaps. But I also think he was worried that Rose might have confided her suspicions to someone else,\" she said. \"Dave was a problem and had to be stopped. Rose, too. Her death must have been a great relief to him.\"\n\n\"Except that still left Beatrice.\"\n\n\"Yes, but he must have known she killed Rose, so he had something to hold over her head.\"\n\n\"He could have just gotten rid of her like he did Dave,\" Tom said.\n\n\"Yes, but don't forget she was a housekeeper. Her death would have carried more weight than a mere harlot's and was bound to gain more attention. That's the last thing Studebaker wanted.\"\n\n\"And the typed note found on my brother?\"\n\n\"Typed on the typewriter found in Studebaker's home.\"\n\nTom blew out his breath. \"Thank God it's over. Now the town can rest easy.\"\n\nShe sighed. Funny, but it didn't feel like it was over. It felt like there was still work to be done\u2014God's work. \"I just wish\u2014\"\n\nHe studied her. \"Go on.\"\n\n\"I wish there was something I could do to persuade my adopted sisters to quit what they're doing and follow the Lord.\" Some madams managed to retire and go on to live respectable lives, but most good-time girls fell into poverty and despair. Some even took their own lives.\n\nTom studied her. \"People can't change unless they want to change.\"\n\nShe set her spoon down and dabbed her mouth with her napkin. \"That's just it. I believe they do want to change but don't know how. It's not easy for a woman to earn an honest living. Even secretary jobs are almost always held by men.\"\n\n\"So what's the answer?\" he asked.\n\n\"Education. But it may be too late for them. Coral and Buttercup don't even know how to read.\" She would never forget the joyful expressions on the women's faces the night they captured Studebaker. They even walked and talked with more confidence. Polly had mostly stopped stuttering, and on that glorious night her words had flowed like music.\n\nTom set his spoon down. \"Times are changing. More women are getting educated. There's even a female ranch owner in Texas.\"\n\n\"A ranch owner? How do you feel about that?\" People often resented women horning in on what was traditionally a man's job.\"\n\n\"Don't bother me none, long as her cattle don't bring in more than mine at market time.\"\n\n\"And women detectives?\" she couldn't help but ask. \"How do you feel about them?\"\n\nA faint twinkle glimmered in his eyes. \"I'm willing to admit that women detectives have a few advantages over a man. For one thing, men look terrible in skirts.\"\n\nShe laughed. \"Women are also more observant.\"\n\nHe quirked an eyebrow. \"How so?\"\n\nShe glanced around the dining room. No sign of Checkers, but the battling couple was at it again. \"He forgot her birthday,\" she said, indicating the intense man and woman three tables away.\n\n\"How do you know?\"\n\nShe smiled mysteriously. \"A woman knows these things. And look over there. That drummer is unable to convince his companion to buy his product. That's because he's totally incompetent as a salesman.\"\n\nTom followed her gaze. \"What makes you think that?\"\n\n\"He's eating fruit pie without ice cream.\"\n\n\"Ah.\" He nodded. \"A sure sign he couldn't sell water to a thirsty man.\"\n\nShe indicated another table with her spoon. \"See that man and woman over there? I'm telling you, it won't work. Love is supposed to suppress the appetite, but she's already on her third dish of ice cream.\"\n\n\"What about the other couple?\" he asked. \"My guess is that he wants to lasso in a partner, but he's not sure if the lady wants to be roped.\"\n\n\"What?\" Her gaze swung around the room. \"Where?\" Her eyes met his and she caught her breath. \"You don't mean... You're not\u2014\"\n\nHe leaned forward and took her hand in his. \"You once asked me why I cared. I didn't have the answer then, but I do now. The moment I saw Studebaker's gun pointed at you was the moment I knew how much you meant to me.\"\n\n\"I\u2014I don't know what to say,\" she stammered.\n\n\"Then I'll make it easy for you. Say you'll marry me, Jennifer.\"\n\nHer heart squeezed tight and it was all she could do to breathe. \"I don't think that's a good idea.\" She pulled her hand away and laid it on her lap. \"So much has happened.\"\n\n\"Your sister?\" He sat back and his eyes brimmed with concern.\n\n\"It's not just that.\" How could she make him understand what she was having trouble understanding herself?\n\nArms on the table, he leaned forward. \"I'm not saying we have to marry right now, today. We can wait till next week if you like.\"\n\nHe was joking, of course, but she wasn't in the mood to laugh. Better to just say it and get it out there. \"I can't marry you,\" she whispered hoarsely. \"Not today. Not next week. Not anytime.\"\n\nHer words hung between them for several painful moments before he spoke. \"That's it? That's all you have to say?\"\n\nShe swallowed the lump in her throat. \"You said you were a simple man.\"\n\n\"That's before I fell in love. Now things are more complicated.\"\n\nShe sat back. Love! He said love. Why did he have to say that? She pressed her hands together on her lap and tried to calm her rampaging emotions.\n\n\"Marrying you would mean...\"\n\n\"Giving up your job, I know.\" He held her gaze. \"I'll be honest with you. The ranch is a pretty poor substitute for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The only outlaws we have are the four-legged kind. Adventure is delivering a foal in the middle of the night and 'seeing the world' is what we call riding into town. The only thing I can give you is love. That's all this cowboy's got.\"\n\nHer heart lurched madly at the word love, and she wanted so much to say yes. Yes, she would marry him. Yes, she would give anything for the privilege of being his wife. But the words stuck in her throat.\n\nHe regarded her quizzically. \"I thought you might have feelings for me, too.\"\n\n\"Oh Tom, I do, I do.\"\n\nThe muscle at his jaw tightened. \"But your job means more.\"\n\n\"It's not my job,\" she said miserably. If only it were that simple. \"It's not that important to me anymore.\" Hard to believe but true. After finding Cissy, she no longer felt compelled to keep searching. Or maybe she was just tired of chasing around the country after criminals.\n\n\"Is it Davey?\" He knitted his brow. \"I have no right to ask you to raise another man's son, but I thought you liked him.\"\n\n\"I do like him. He's not the problem.\" During the short time she'd known him, the boy managed to carve out a place in her heart.\n\n\"Then it must be me,\" he persisted.\n\n\"No, Tom, it's me.\" Her voice broke as she tried to piece together her fractured thoughts. \"Staying at Miss Lillian's taught me some things about myself. I now know how important fidelity is to me. I don't think I could ever again trust a man, any man, to be faithful.\" She lowered her lashes. \"I would always wonder if...\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\nShe lifted her gaze to his. \"If you were cheating on me... If our marriage was built on lies and deceit, I don't know how I could live with that.\"\n\nHe looked at her long and hard. \"What you're saying is you don't trust me.\"\n\n\"Not just you, Tom. Any man. Miss Lillian said you can't keep a good man good.\"\n\n\"And you believed her?\"\n\n\"I saw it with my own eyes.\" Everything bad her father and brothers did she blamed on Cissy's disappearance, and that included her father's unfaithfulness to her mother. Not only did people try to justify their own bad behavior but also the bad behavior of others.\n\nShe was trembling now but forced herself to continue. \"Parlor house guests included family men\u2014husbands and fathers. Churchgoers. So-called pillars of the community.\"\n\n\"I would never cheat on you,\" he said, and the sincerity in his voice almost unraveled her resolve.\n\n\"You say that now. But what about five or ten years down the road? Will you still be faithful then?\"\n\n\"If you can't trust me, then trust my faith in God.\" His low, deep voice shimmered with intensity. \"I would never do anything to you that would go against God or His commandments.\"\n\nShe wanted to believe him. If only she hadn't glanced at the battling couple across the way. The woman had forgiven her man yet again, but the way he looked at the pretty girl at the next table indicated the couple's troubles were far from over. With this thought came unsettling memories.\n\nA woman slapping her on the face. \"That's for my Charlie!\"\n\nThe pain that caused a young boy to toss a brick through the parlor house window.\n\n\"You can't keep a good man good.\"\n\nShe turned her gaze back to Tom. \"I want to trust you, Tom, I do.\" Each spoken word felt like a rock that had to be pushed out. \"But I don't think I have it in me to trust any man.\" They were the hardest words she'd ever spoken but perhaps the most necessary.\n\nShe expected an argument: something, anything. None came, and they ate the rest of the ice cream in tense silence.\n\n\"Say something,\" she said at last.\n\n\"What do you want me to say?\" he asked, his voice clipped.\n\n\"How about 'I'll always be faithful to you no matter what'?\"\n\n\"Would you believe me?\" He tilted his head with a beseeching look. \"Would you?\"\n\n\"I don't know. Maybe.\" Tears sprang to her eyes. \"No.\"\n\nHe grimaced as if suddenly stabbed. \"That's what I thought.\" He signaled the waiter for the check. His eyes met hers, and the remoteness in their blue depths nearly broke her heart.\n\n\"I'm sorry,\" she said, her voice hoarse.\n\n\"Not as sorry as I am.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 86", + "text": "Chapter 41\n\nJennifer paced her hotel room. The walls felt like they were closing in. If something didn't happen soon she would scream. It had been a week\u2014seven long days!\u2014since she sent a telegram to Pinkerton requesting another assignment and still no word.\n\nWilliam Pinkerton wasn't happy when she turned down her last job to find her sister, and he made no bones about it. Nor did catching the Gunnysack Bandit earn her any favors with him. The agency was officially off the case and received neither money nor credit for the outlaw's capture.\n\nThe uncertainty of her job accounted for only part of her misery. She had to be out of her mind to turn down Tom's proposal. What was wrong with her? His being unfaithful in the future couldn't possibly be any more painful than the loneliness she experienced now. The worst part was his acceptance.\n\nHe could have tried to change her mind, fought for her, even. But no, he'd simply left town without saying good-bye. He said he loved her, but what kind of love gives up that easily?\n\nShe was right to turn him down. If only it didn't hurt so much...\n\nA tap sounded at the door, and her heart thudded. Tom? She threw the door open and it was all she could do not to let her disappointment well up in tears. It was Scott Cunningham, the boy who had thrown a brick through Miss Lillian's window, but he obviously didn't recognize her.\n\n\"A telegram for Miss Gardner,\" he said.\n\n\"I'm Miss Gardner.\" The use of her assumed name told her immediately it was from Pinkerton headquarters. She took the telegram from him and reached into her pocket for a coin. \"How's your father?\" Miss Lillian had said she hadn't seen hide or hair of Mr. Cunningham or any of the men since the night Jennifer read their fortunes. For some odd reason, the madam didn't seem all that upset about the sudden drop in business.\n\nIf Scott was surprised by the question, he didn't show it. \"He's okay. He and Ma are away on a trip. When they come back, me and him are going fishing,\" he said with none of his previous anger.\n\nShe smiled and handed him the coin. \"Hope you catch some big ones.\"\n\nShe closed the door and ripped open the telegram. She was being dispatched to Boston to shadow a man suspected of committing a series of bank robberies.\n\nNormally, starting a new assignment filled her with excitement, but today she felt nothing, only numbness. She didn't need a crystal ball to see that the future that once held so much promise now looked bleak.\n\nRelieved at having something to do\u2014a plan, a goal\u2014she lifted her carpetbag onto the bed and began stuffing it with her few belongings. If she hurried she could still catch the late train out of Goodman.\n\nShe was halfway through her packing when it hit her: she didn't want to go to Boston. She didn't want to track down yet another criminal. The thought of donning another disguise and pretending to be someone she wasn't sickened her. She wanted to be the woman reflected in Tom's eyes. That woman was real and honest and true, the woman God meant her to be.\n\nShe didn't know what she would do, but one thing was clear: her searching days were over.\n\nA loud knock startled her. Puzzled, she opened the door a crack. \"Miss Lillian!\"\n\nThe madam pushed her way into the room, glanced at the carpetbag, and reeled about in a cloud of red taffeta. The feathers on her hat shook like the feathers of an indignant hen. \"Thank goodness you haven't left town yet.\"\n\n\"I was just getting ready to.\"\n\n\"You can't go yet. Not until you do something about Mr. Colton.\"\n\nA stabbing pain ripped through her at the sound of Tom's name. \"What are you talking about? He's gone. He left town.\"\n\n\"Then who is that sitting in my parlor?\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Been sitting there day and night for five days. Said you ran him off and he's not leaving until you come to your senses.\"\n\nJennifer stared at her, not sure she'd heard right. \"I... I don't know what to say.\"\n\n\"Well you better figure it out because I'm at my rope's end. I can't get anything done with him there. You put a handsome man like that in a house full of hens and feathers are bound to fly.\"\n\nJennifer blinked. \"You're not saying that Coral and the others are\u2014\"\n\n\"You can't blame them for trying.\" Miss Lillian lifted a knowing eyebrow. \"You love him, and don't go saying you don't. It's written all over your face.\"\n\n\"Guess that's what I get for not wearing face paint.\"\n\nMiss Lillian made a gesture with her hand. \"Trust me, there's not enough paint in the world to hide the look on your face when I mentioned his name. So why are you being so muleheaded?\"\n\nJennifer threw up her hands. \"He didn't even fight for me. He just took off without a word.\"\n\n\"Didn't you hear what I just said? He's been fighting for you for five days with no end in sight.\" Miss Lillian regarded her like a wayward schoolgirl. \"You'd be a fool to let him go.\"\n\nJennifer ran her hands up and down her arms. \"You once said you couldn't keep a good man good.\"\n\nMiss Lillian looked her straight in the eye, and her expression softened. \"Is that what this is all about?\"\n\nJennifer nodded. \"After living at the parlor house, I don't know if I have it in me to trust a man. Any man.\"\n\n\"You can't trust just any man.\" Miss Lillian gave her head a vigorous nod. \"But you can trust Tom Colton. Mark my words.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 87", + "text": "Jennifer walked into the parlor, and it was just as Miss Lillian had described. Tom sat on a settee, arms folded. Not even his wrinkled clothes and whiskered chin robbed him of his good looks. Her heart leaped at the sight of him.\n\n\"Tom, what are you doing here? What's going on?\"\n\nHe pushed his hat back and leveled her with his gaze. \"You said you couldn't trust me, so I put myself in temptation's way to prove that either I'm the dumbest person alive or the most faithful. Take your pick.\"\n\n\"I vote for dumb,\" Coral said, glowering at Jennifer.\n\nButtercup pushed Coral away. \"Just because he didn't fall for your advances doesn't mean he's dumb.\" Hand on her chest, she gave a wistful smile. \"He loves her.\"\n\nCoral rolled her eyes and her mouth puckered in disgust. \"Like I said, dumb.\"\n\nJennifer gazed at Tom and couldn't believe what he'd done. \"You've been here for five days?\"\n\n\"And nights,\" Miss Lillian added.\n\nTom gave a sheepish look. \"I didn't know how else to prove that you're the only woman for me. The only woman I'll ever love and ever hope to be with.\"\n\nJennifer's eyes filled with tears. \"I\u2014I don't know what to say.\"\n\nMiss Lillian threw her hands up. \"Well, you better figure it out or I'm going to have to start charging him rent.\"\n\nAll eyes turned to Jennifer.\n\nAnd a cry of pure joy broke from her lips. \"Yes!\"\n\nAll gazes swung back to Tom. \"Yes? Does that mean\u2014?\"\n\n\"It means yes! Yes, I want to marry you.\" She closed the distance between them. \"It means yes, I want to be your wife.\" Somehow she ended up on his lap, her arms around his neck. \"It means yes, I love you.\"\n\nPolly and Buttercup clapped and Miss Lillian held out her hand. \"That will be five dollars, please.\"\n\n\"For what?\" Tom asked.\n\nShe pointed to the sign on the wall. \"Showing affection is not allowed in the parlor.\"\n\nTom reached into his pocket and placed two five-dollar bills in Miss Lillian's outstretched hand. \"Why so much?\" she asked, looking pleased.\n\nFor answer, Tom pulled Jennifer close and kissed her soundly, firmly, and oh-so-thoroughly on the lips." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 88", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nThe sound of hammering greeted Jennifer as she approached the parlor house on foot. A ladder leaned against the porch roof and a new sign hung from the eaves reading MISS LILLIAN'S PRIVATE DETECTIVE AGENCY AND FINE BOOTS.\n\nShe couldn't believe her eyes. What in the world...?\n\nThe door to the house flew open and Miss Lillian stepped onto the porch and waved. \"How do you like it?\"\n\n\"I'm dumbfounded.\" Amy hardly recognized Miss Lillian in the sedate gray skirt and white tailored shirtwaist. Her hair was still a ghastly red, but today it was confined in a ladylike bun that even Mrs. Givings and her friends would approve.\n\nJennifer let herself through the gate and started along the path. \"Does this mean you're no longer running a guesthouse?\"\n\n\"That's exactly what it means,\" Miss Lillian said. \"I decided to take my share of the reward money and start a new business in memory of Rose.\"\n\nThe news made Jennifer want to jump with joy. \"I'm sure that would have made her very happy.\"\n\n\"Yes, and sleuthhounding looks to be more profitable. I've already got several clients. Unlike your former boss, I don't have any trouble accepting jobs from suspicious wives.\" Miss Lillian lowered her voice. \"I have a feeling that with me and my detectives on the case we're going to start seeing a lot of good men in Goodman.\"\n\n\"Maybe there'll even be one for you,\" Jennifer teased.\n\n\"I doubt that, but I suppose anything's possible. Speaking of which, you're not going to believe this, but Monahan just hired me as his official fortune-teller.\"\n\n\"Monahan did that? But he doesn't even believe in fortune-telling.\" Jennifer still felt bad for suspecting him of being the Gunnysack Bandit. She now knew that he came by his wealth through prudent investments and a fortunate marriage.\n\n\"He does now. After you told him about the storm at sea, he sent a wire canceling a shipment of goods his wife ordered special for their new house. It was a good thing, too, on account of the hurricane.\"\n\nJennifer shook her head in disbelief. \"There was a hurricane?\"\n\n\"Yes, and the ship sank.\"\n\nJennifer couldn't believe her ears. \"Incredible!\"\n\nThe front door sprang open and Mrs. Givings stepped out of the house, followed by Buttercup and Polly.\n\nThe day just kept getting stranger. Jennifer leaned toward Miss Lillian and whispered, \"What is Mrs. Givings doing here?\"\n\n\"She's now working for me,\" Miss Lillian whispered back.\n\nJennifer drew back. \"Are you telling me that Mrs. Givings\u2014\"\n\n\"Detective Givings,\" the churchwoman said and giggled like a schoolgirl. \"Investigating is so much more exciting than quilting.\"\n\nPolly was all smiles as she turned to show off her new attire. \"I never thought I could be a real d\u2014detective.\" In her tailored blue high-collared dress she looked as proper as a schoolmarm. Her scrubbed, shiny face no longer looked sad, and with only an occasional stutter, she sounded more confident.\n\nButtercup nodded and beamed. Her navy-blue frock downplayed her weight and a light seemed to shine from within. \"Detective Betty-Lou at your service.\" She smiled and added, \"No mirror needed.\"\n\n\"Oh Buttercup. I mean Betty-Lou.\" Jennifer threw her arms around her. Instead of the usual heavy perfume, today Betty-Lou smelled as fresh as a spring garden.\n\nJennifer released her. \"What about Coral?\"\n\nBetty-Lou exchanged a glance with Polly. \"I'm afraid Coral isn't ready to change her ways.\"\n\nJennifer lifted her gaze to the second floor and a curtain moved in one of the windows. \"God's not ready to give up on her yet, and neither am I. Promise me that none of you will either.\"\n\n\"We'll save her yet,\" Mrs. Givings assured her. \"Don't you worry none, you hear?\"\n\nJust then Tom drove up in a rented horse and buggy. \"Better hurry,\" he called. \"We don't want to miss the train.\"\n\nAfter Jennifer embraced each woman in turn, Miss Lillian walked her to the gate. \"You caught yourself a good one, there,\" she said. \"Even though you never did master the fine art of walking.\"\n\nJennifer laughed. \"I have a feeling I'll be doing more riding on the ranch than walking.\"\n\nMiss Lillian patted her on the arm. \"I don't guess I can talk you into staying. Business is booming, and I could use a couple more good detectives.\"\n\n\"Thank you for the offer, but from now on I'm devoting myself to being a wife and mother.\" She gave Miss Lillian another hug before joining Tom in the buggy.\n\nShe took one last look at the old house as they pulled away. Everyone waved and wished them Godspeed. \"Hurry back!\"\n\n\"We will.\" Odd as it seemed, Jennifer felt like she was leaving home.\n\nTom laid a hand on her lap. \"Why so serious all of a sudden?\"\n\n\"I was just thinking how I came here to find an outlaw and ended up finding a whole new life instead.\" She snuggled close to him and laid her head on his shoulder. \"God sure does work in mysterious ways.\" He also showed up in the most unlikely places.\n\nSomething shiny caught her eye. \"Are those new boots?\" She leaned over for a better look. \"Is that a rose?\" She couldn't believe it. \"You let Miss Lillian talk you into buying new boots?\"\n\n\"Three pairs,\" he said.\n\n\"What!\"\n\nHe flashed a sheepish grin. \"I'm good, honey, but not that good. Five days of listening to Miss Lillian's sales pitches made hay out of this cowboy's resistance.\"\n\nShe threw back her head and laughed. \"I'm just surprised she didn't talk you into singing lessons.\"\n\n\"Eh.\"\n\n\"What? Oh no, don't tell me.\"\n\nFor answer he opened his mouth and serenaded her all the way to the train station." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 89", + "text": "" + } + ] + }, + { + "title": "", + "author": "Embassie Susberry", + "genres": [ + "Salis House Plantation 1" + ], + "tags": [], + "chapters": [ + { + "title": "Chapter 1", + "text": "" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 2", + "text": "Laura sat at the head of the old, worn, but well-smoothed table in the one room wooden house. The table was situated right in the center of the dwelling, taking up most of the space. From her spot, Laura sat directly in view of the front door. They wouldn't be able to miss her. One single candle, which Laura had borrowed from Salis House because no one would miss it, stood in front of her burning, casting an eerie glow around the small slave cabin, making small crackling noises, and spreading the foul, acrid smell of tallow in the air.\n\nA small cough startled her, reminding her that she wasn't supposed to just be sitting and thinking like she had all the time in the world. Using the low light, she leaned forward and made another stitch in the coarse shirt on her lap, attaching a small patch to the hole that Gideon had torn in his shirt carrying coal out of the mines. She didn't even hesitate when the needle slipped, stabbing the meaty center of her finger. Her fingers had long since grown callous from the piercing of needles. That's what happened when you were the head seamstress on the plantation. Sometimes she felt like her whole life had been about attaching one piece of fabric to another. And now with Missy Charlotte's wedding, the needles didn't just follow her throughout her day, they followed her even in her dreams. The light before her flickered as she turned the shirt at an angle so that she could see better. She needed to hurry if she was going to finish the patchwork before going back. Another small cough from up above filled the air.\n\nThey were awake. Of course, they were awake. It wasn't that unusual that she had come down from Salis House to fix supper for the boys now that mama was dead. It had been one of her many last requests. Don't you stay up in this here big house, girl. You best go down and take care of your brothers. You hear? Laura had heard. She came down at least once a week, fixed supper, darned clothes, cleaned house. Not that there was much to clean. Her brothers worked every day of the week. Even on the Lord's day, cause if you did, Massa Richard would pay you for working extra at Christmas. It meant they always had a ham of their very own for New Year's, though Papa always opened the house and shared with everyone. And there was always new clothes for her and the boys, though the fabric was cheap and\u2014before a good washing or two\u2014sometimes made you itch. Nothing like the silks and lace that Laura's fingers danced across day in and day out at Salis House. But it was sturdy and long lasting and really that was all that mattered. At any rate, evening time was the only time they were home and that usually meant they didn't have much time for doing anything other than eating and sleeping. So, there was always very little mess. No, it wasn't unusual that she had come down. What was unusual was that she stayed.\n\nLaura hadn't slept a night apart from Missy Adora since she was born near 'bout ten years ago. Sometimes, Missy Adora got awful hot at night and she always wanted Laura right there at the floor of her bed.\n\n\"Lolly, I need me some water.\" It was a request Laura had heard time and time again. And truly no bother.\n\nEven though Laura had only reached child-bearing age a few years ago, at times it felt like Missy Adora was her own sweet baby. And Laura hoped she was sleeping well tonight. She had wrestled for hours as to whether or not to tell Missy Adora she wasn't going to be in the House that night. If she told her, she would have to come up with a reason as to why she was staying the night at the cabin. And then it would be just like Missy Adora to mention it to Miss Martha or Miss Julia and well, Laura didn't want to deal with Miss Martha and Miss Julia. And so she had prayed, Dear Lord when Missy Adora go to sleep, let her stay asleep. Laura prayed it again in that moment, silently as she ran the needle and thread in and out of the shirt in haste. It wouldn't be the prettiest patch, but that didn't matter none anyway. No matter how many times Laura washed this brown shirt, it couldn't erase the coal stains that had seeped into it. No one would be able to even tell that she had sewn a different color patch onto it. She couldn't stop herself from making a small clucking sound of dismay with her tongue. Like Mama used to make, before she got sick.\n\nThe wood beneath one of her brothers creaked as he moved under his covers and Laura paused. She looked up quickly to the loft where Solomon and Gideon were each wrapped and stuffed in a blanket. Most times the boys fell asleep like a stone dropped in a river. They just hit the bed and was gone. But though they had told her good night an hour ago, she could tell by their breathing that sleep had long since travelled the way of the past. Laura exhaled, her hands moving faster, it would be hard enough to say what she had to say and now the boys would be wide awake to hear it.\n\nThe sound of low voices from outside the cabin reached Laura's ears. For a minute there, she had wondered if they was coming, though Sol and Gid had told her they usually made the two mile trek each night from the smithy to the house. In the summer time, when the sun didn't set so soon, Laura figured it wasn't so bad. But when it was cold and dark like this, she wondered how they could stand it. She heard Benji's voice and Papa's low answer. She sat up straighter, the shirt and patch, still in her lap. The door creaked open slowly, allowing her to see Benji first and then Papa. Both stopped at the sight of her sitting there. Laura noticed Benji tossing a quick glance at Papa. Benji was tall. Tall as Papa. But where Papa's shoulders filled the doorway of the cabin, Benji's only filled half. Skinny as a beanpole, Mama had always said. Not the man next to him though. A big bear of a man, was how Mama had always described him. Tall, strong, and hairy. That was Papa.\n\nLaura pointed to the plates on the small table that stood a few feet away from her, next to the fireplace. The food was probably cold by now since she hadn't kept the fire burning hot, but they were used to that. \"I fixed ya'll supper,\" Laura said quietly, pointing out the obvious and trying not to feel nervous. They was her own kin after all.\n\nNeither man moved from their spot in the cabin doorway, letting all manner of cool air fill the small space. Papa cleared his throat and finally took a step further into the room, pushing Benji a bit before shutting the door closed behind him.\n\n\"Why don't you tell us why you're here, Laura?\" His voice was quiet, but the deep bass bounced off the four walls of the cabin, making its presence known. His dark brown eyes were intense, penetrating. It had always been hard to meet Papa's eyes full on. Felt like he could see her center deep. Which was odd seeing as how she didn't know the man all that well at all.\n\nShe could feel the pause in Solomon and Gideon's breathing cause they had surely been wanting to know why she was still there too. \"Massa Richard gone sell Sol and Gid.\"\n\nPapa blinked and looked away. She heard soft moans from above and a loud, deep sigh exit Benji's mouth.\n\n\"You ever hear Massa say he gone sell you or your brothers you tell your Papa first thing, you hear?\"\n\n\"What he gone do?\" Laura felt the back of Mama's hand against her head before she could get her next sentence out. There she was, sick and weak, but Mama still had enough strength to rebuke her.\n\n\"Don't you worry none 'bout what he gone do. You tell your Papa first thing, you hear?\"\n\nAnother deathbed request. Well, she had done what mama said. She had told him first thing.\n\n\"When?\" Sol asked from up above, his head peeking out from over the top, no longer pretending to sleep. Gideon's head appeared next to him, and Laura could tell even in the dim light that his small fingers were gripping the ledge tightly.\n\n\"I heard tell just 'fore Easter. Costs done got high for Miss Charlotte's wedding. Slave auction for the highest price,\" Laura whispered even though there was no real reason to. \"I just found out today.\" Missy Adora had done left her doll, Baby Pru, downstairs. That's when Laura had heard Massa Richard talking to Massa William. They was gone sell some slaves to cover the expense of the wedding. He had compiled a list, he said, of all the male slaves between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Boys that young weren't necessarily a big help in the salt mines. But that didn't meant they wouldn't bring in a fine price elsewhere.\n\nWhen Massa Richard and Massa William left the room, Laura had slipped in, saw the list, saw the boys' names. Now here she was.\n\nLaura looked up at Papa.\n\nPapa walked over to the small table, grabbed his plate, and took a seat at the bigger table Laura was sitting at. Benji, after staring hard at Papa, did the same. Sol and Gid made their way down the ladder quick and came to stand at the table. Together, they all watched Papa take some bites of his cold bacon and cornbread.\n\nWell. She had been planning on staying the whole night cause she thought he might do something. Whatever it was Mama had been thinking he would do did not appear like it was going to happen. She started to stand.\n\n\"You can write girl?\"\n\nShe sat back down. Her papa looked over at her, his stare intense, fierce, as though by sheer willpower he could keep her in her chair.\n\n\"I can,\" Laura said softly. Somewhat. She had never written more than a quick word or two on Missy Adora's slate. Usually just her name over and over. Sometimes Mama's name.\n\n\"What you need to draw up some free papers?\"\n\nLaura stared at him. She could read a little. She could write a little. She didn't think she could draw up any free papers. But, no matter what Papa saw in her eyes, he just stared back with that intense gaze of his. She looked away, losing whatever battle they had been fighting. Sol and Gid were now standing shoulder to shoulder, the same size, just like tin soldiers even though they weren't even the same age. And just like soldiers, in spite of what they were discussing, there was very little emotion in their faces. No. The emotion was hidden in the tenseness of their shoulders, in the slight fisting of their hands. In the small light of hope in their eyes. She turned to look at her other brother, Benji. He wasn't even pretending to eat. Just staring hard at Papa and occasionally flicking his dark gaze at her. For whatever unknown reason, Laura had long sense discerned that Benji did not think very highly of her. The feeling was mutual. Though Laura wasn't sure exactly why.\n\n\"Papers for Sol and Gid?\" she finally asked. Because she felt like she had to say something.\n\n\"For all of us,\" he said and pointed at himself, Benji, Gid, Sol. Her. \"Less you plannin' on stayin' here,\" he said, as his eyes slid down to the plate before him. She watched as he helped himself to another bite as though what he had said wasn't like dropping a hive of bees on the center of the table. She exhaled, trying to ignore the weight of all of her brothers' stares.\n\nWhat he said was not entirely a surprise, because she had figured that if Papa did anything, it would be something like this. Running away, that is. Though to hear the actual words out loud set Laura's heart to racing. Because that was the question wasn't it? If Papa and the boys ran away, would she stay or would she go?\n\n\"You gotta come,\" Gid urged softly, moving from his soldier's position and leaning forward. His eyes were pleading, and Laura found her mouth opening slightly in surprise. They barely talked, they didn't spend more than a minute together day in and day out. But maybe she reminded him of Mama. Laura felt her gaze softening.\n\n\"No,\" Papa said his voice deep, cutting through her thoughts. He didn't want her to come? Laura winced, feeling his rejection somewhere deep. But as though he knew exactly what she was thinking, he kept on talking. \"I want you to come, Laura. But I ain't gonna make you do nothin'.\" He stood up, filling the space around him. \"Can you do the papers, Laura?\"\n\nWrite up free papers? The likes of which she had seen once before, in fancy writing she had never practiced, on paper she had never touched? Laura glanced at Sol and Gid. She had known them all her life, in the general sense. And she did care about them. She was here after all. But it was Mama's thoughts and feelings on the matter that made her say what she said next.\n\n\"I can do it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 3", + "text": "The hot, Kentucky sun wasn't even beating down too hard yet and Sam was already sweating. Calm down, Sam. Calm down, he repeated to himself as he dug his hands into the soil and slowly, carefully began to uproot the small tobacco plant he had planted only three weeks ago. If he damaged the roots at all, Molloy would take it right out of his hide.\n\nAnd as though thinking about him conjured him, Molloy, only a few feet away from Sam, spoke, \"Gonna have to move faster than that, Sam.\" This, Sam knew. Molloy exhaled, pulling his britches up to cover his girth. It was a completely useless movement. Sam knew and Molloy probably knew, it would only be a minute before the britches slipped down several inches again just under Molloy's gut. \"Sun's almost down now, Sam. You ain't gonna finish.\"\n\nSam stood up, little shoots of pain ricocheting up his back, but Sam ignored them. He was sure that he had dug up and replanted over a thousand of the little plants already that day, spending a good portion of his time with his back bent over. The continuous pain had long since stopped affecting him. Sam dug the heels of his feet into the ground to get traction and slipped only a little in the mud as he moved. It had rained the night before, making the conditions perfect for transplanting, but not so easy for moving fast. And Sam needed to move fast.\n\n\"Sam,\" Manny muttered when he reached him, but said nothing else as Sam dropped the seedling plant into the hole Manny had created. Manny pushed Sam away before Sam could finish replanting the roots. Instead, Manny gently pressed the plant into its new soil. Sam went back to his row for another plant to dig up.\n\n\"You don't finish this row, I'm going to whip you and that is a promise you can take to the bank, Sam. Not like that moon promise you made this mornin'.\"\n\nLord Jesus, Sam prayed, but otherwise he didn't think too long on Molloy's words, just dug his hand into the ground again, feeling for the small, tender stems of the plant. He wasted seconds trying to untangle the roots. Why some plants came up easy and others fought him, he just didn't know. But still he moved, even when the sun got so low in the sky, it was just an orange glow. The crack of a whip snapping in the air sounded. That was it. Time was up. Sam stared down the endless row of tobacco plants he had not yet finished transplanting.\n\n\"Sam,\" Manny groaned his name as he came alongside him. \"I told you not to say nothin'.\"\n\n\"Don't nobody go far,\" Molloy declared as some workers started edging towards their cabins. \"Sam here promised to do double his rows today and as you can tell he did not finish.\"\n\nNo. He hadn't. But he had come so close. The smallness of the last couple of rows mocked him. His back, already aching from spending most of the day parallel to the ground started aching in a different way, as though in anticipation for the licks that was coming.\n\n\"For costin' me time, he's gonna get his whippin' and you're goin' to watch. Sam, I do believe it is not a good year, heck a good few months, unless I'm whippin' you. Now you know where to go so get.\"\n\nSam didn't know what was worse: the wait for Molloy to finish checking up on everyone's planting, the pulling of his arms as they were tied to the metal ring fastened to the whipping tree, the humiliation of having his naked body bared to the world, the whistle of the whip as it flew across space, or the burn of the sting when it cut across his back.\n\nEvery single time he was whipped he considered all of these things. There was never a clear winner.\n\n\"Sam,\" Molloy said. Sam had already experienced the first two things: his arms were fastened to the ring and he didn't have a stitch of clothes on. He tried not to shudder as the cool wind danced across his naked body. He wasn't hot now. Sam could hear Molloy behind him, unraveling his whip. He could also hear the whispers of the others behind them. He wondered what they thought of him being whipped again. And then he told himself he didn't care. He had made his decision that morning knowing this was where he was most likely going to be at the end of the day. Didn't matter what any person thought about him. Only mattered what his God thought. Jesus, don't let it be too painful, he prayed. A senseless prayer really. It was going to be painful. All whippings were. It was a lesson Sam had been taught when he was knee high to a duck. The whip cracked behind him, reminding Sam about what was to come next. Sam swallowed convulsively. They were almost at the last two stages. \"I don't get why you're up there. You know better than to not finish your rows.\" But he had finished his rows. He just hadn't finished Big Dave's rows too. \"And yet here we are.\"\n\nDid Molloy have to give a speech each time? Couldn't he just\u2014\n\nSam's whole body flinched as the leather of the raw cow's hide cut across the skin of his back. And then he didn't think anymore beyond counting the licks that flew.\n\n\"Cut him down, Manny,\" Molloy said after the twentieth one. \"And ya'll get on out of here!\"\n\nEverything ached, his arms, his back, his buttocks. Even his chest and the whip hadn't come close to there at all.\n\n\"You're a fool,\" his brother said, as he cut the rope that tied Sam to the ring and then loosened the ties on his hand. When Sam stumbled, Manny wrapped an arm around his waist to keep him from falling.\n\n\"You always say that,\" Sam said, through deep, heavy breaths. Manny wasn't one for hugs. Neither was Sam for that matter, but Manny didn't move as Sam leaned against him and caught his breath.\n\nWhen Sam was able to stand up without fear of falling, Manny spoke again, \"Yeah, well, you always gettin' whipped for other people's doin's. And Molloy know that. That's how come he ain't never talk of sellin' you. Fool.\" Manny's words were hard, angry words, but he patiently helped Sam get dressed. \"Big Dave deserved to be whipped,\" he said finally as he walked and Sam limped the half a mile from the whipping tree to the one room cabin they shared with five others.\n\nOle Mose was out front already, cooking steadily over a fire. Men with families ate their women's cooking. Men without families, like Sam and Manny, ate ole Moses' cooking. Sam liked Ole Moses' cooking just fine, but he sure wished he knew what it was like to eat a woman's cooking. He hadn't eaten at a woman's table since he and Manny had been sold away from they mama almost ten years ago. Or was it eleven now? Sam told himself it didn't matter none at all, but he still found himself forever curious about things he wasn't supposed to be curious about.\n\n\"Hey, Sam,\" Ole Mose said, his eyes grave and darting up and down Sam's figure. Sam's limping, no doubt, made it obvious as to what had happened even to a man whose eyesight wasn't that sharp anymore. Ole Mose was old. He had been old when Sam and Manny had arrived way back when and he was old now. He didn't have a family and Sam had long since learned never to ask if had ever had a family.\n\nIt would be too much to say Ole Mose was like a father to Sam and Manny, but he wasn't nothing neither. Much as Sam and Manny had tried to keep their distance, Ole Mose had always seemed to be right there all up in they business. The old man was squatting now, though he still looked slightly hunched over, lasting evidence that he had always worked a tobacco farm. Sam watched as he picked up bowls and filled them to the brim with some kind of stew. Sam watched as different ones came up and grabbed their bowls.\n\n\"Hey, Mose,\" Sam finally responded when he got close to the cooking fire.\n\n\"You don't see me standin' here, Mose?\" Manny asked, spreading his hands. Him and Ole Mose had never really gotten along. Sam thought it was cause they was too much alike. Both stubborn old mules.\n\n\"I sure smell you.\"\n\nThe men lingering in front of the house hooted with laughter. The sound of it, so little heard, made Sam smile in spite of his discomfort. \"Made you some extra, Sam,\" Ole Mose said as the two brothers came to stand next to the big pot. \"Though I'm not sure why.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can eat,\" Sam said weakly. He was hungry. That was certain. Working sunup till sundown did that to a body. But he was more tired than anything. Eating meant taking time from sleeping. And he couldn't afford to be tired tomorrow. He was already going to have a devil of a day bending over with welts and open sores layered across his back.\n\n\"Don't be stupid,\" Manny warned. \"You give me his food. I'll make sure he eats it.\"\n\n\"Every bite,\" Old Mose said sternly, handing Manny two bowls. That was one way in which Old Mose and Manny were alike. They were always fussing at Sam about something.\n\n\"How Big Dave doin'?\" Sam asked as he walked over to the cabin and leaned against the wall, taking big, deep breaths.\n\n\"Same as this mornin'. His mama come by and say thank you. She done left you somethin' on your bed.\"\n\nManny muttered something unintelligible under his breath, but then he must have changed his mind cause he said loudly, \"Sam's not offerin' tomorrow. You tell Big Dave his problems are between him and Molloy and he best leave my brother out of it.\"\n\n\"Manny,\" Sam whispered in rebuke. He wanted to say more, to cut him off, but he felt like to say even three more words would be more than he could stand. Even now he felt himself slipping against the side of the house.\n\nManny's voice only got louder. \"You hear me! Ya'll leave him out of it! Take your own whippin's,\" Manny grumbled before using his elbow to nudge Sam into the dark, dank, smelly cabin. There was a reason their bunkmates were outside talking rather than spending time inside even though it was late. Sam made his way to his and Manny's spot which was really just straw covered with a coarse, thin, blanket. 'Cept this time there was something on it. Sam sat down hard on his straw bed. Breathed a few times and then reached for the unfamiliar object. He hadn't gotten a present from someone other than his brother in quite some time. He ran his hands down the fabric, marveling at the plushness and wondering where Big Dave's mama had gotten the cotton from to make such a thing. His long, thin fingers ran across the seams. He couldn't make out the color in the darkness of the cabin but it was either black or dark blue.\n\n\"It's a blanket,\" he said, holding it up as Manny squatted down next to him with the bowls of food.\n\n\"Oh good,\" Manny said, his voice held a mocking tinge to it. \"A blanket. And summer right around the corner.\"\n\n\"We'll be happy for it this winter and you know it.\" Cause Sam would share it. He and Manny shared everything.\n\n\"I still say you stupid,\" Manny said, handing him his bowl.\n\nSam took it, sniffed, and then took a bite. He couldn't tell if it was squirrel or possum. \"Big Dave would have died.\" That morning, fever had been raging through Big Dave's body. But Molloy hadn't cared. He never cared. You had to be missing a body part for him to care and even then it might not get you out work.\n\n\"Big Dave is probably still goin' to die. This is his third day with that fever. If he ain't lost it now, he ain't 'bout to lose it. You just put off what was comin',\" Manny hissed in irritation.\n\n\"I prayed on it\u2014,\"\n\n\"Fool talk.\"\n\n\"God gave me peace.\"\n\n\"He always does. Right 'fore you do somethin' stupid.\"\n\n\"I could take it. He couldn't,\" Sam said stubbornly. They had had this same argument before. Many times. So many times, sometimes Sam thought they said the words now just cause they had to.\n\n\"You still goin' to have to do them rows tomorrow.\"\n\n\"You gone help me.\"\n\n\"I am, am I? One day you gonna look for me and I ain't gonna be there. You betta stop makin' plans and expectin' me to follow.\"\n\n\"You'll always be there.\" And he would be and he knew it too. All they had was each other. And Jesus. Though whenever Sam said that, Manny would growl at him. They finished eating in peace and Sam handed Manny his empty bowl. \"You check today?\"\n\n\"Don't see the point in checkin'.\"\n\n\"But you check today?\"\n\n\"Yeah I checked and ain't nothin' changed. Caesar ain't come back,\" Manny said his voice clipped. Every footstep was a stomp as he left the cabin. But he had checked and that was the important thing. Sam turned himself and cautiously lay down on his stomach. He closed his eyes. He dreamed that he had checked and this time there had been change. This time Caesar, the conductor, had come back. This time he was going to take them with him and help them escape." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 4", + "text": "\"Why can't girls were breeches, Lolly?\"\n\n\"Raise your arms high, Missy Adora,\" Laura said as she slipped the gingham dress over Missy Adora and straightened it carefully, making sure it covered her pantalets.\n\n\"Lolly!\" It was a name Missy Adora had given her when she was young. Only Missy Adora called her Lolly.\n\n\"Cause them the rules. And you know better than to talk about men's clothing. Ain't proper,\" Laura said, pulling and tugging and making sure everything fit just right. Missy Adora was growing both longer and wider at the same time. How she did that, Laura just did not know. \"Sit down. Let me straighten your hair. You look like you got in a fight with a possum last night and lost.\"\n\nMissy Adora giggled as she plopped down on the pink cushion chair in front of her dressing table. She handed Laura her brush before Laura could reach for it. Laura had been doing the girl's hair since she had grown hair. With the tips of her fingers, Laura gently touched Missy Adora's cheeks, turning her face so that it faced the mirror. Laura paused, taking note of the familiar blue eyes, the long, curly dark blond hair, the small button nose, freckles dancing across the tops of her cheeks. It was a face Laura knew almost as well as her own. And if she left with Papa and the boys, it was a face she would never see again... whether or not they ever made it to freedom. Glancing in the mirror one more time, she noticed Missy Adora giving her the same thorough examination. And she wondered what caught her eye. Was it Laura's dark skin? The color of soil just kissed by the sun. Or her black hair pulled as tight as can be in a bun with still a few rebellious, stray curly hairs escaping on the side? Maybe it was her dark eyes or her dark lips? They could not look more different, but Missy Adora could not feel more like family. But could Laura stay? And never see her own blood again? She ran the brush through Missy Adora's hair quickly. Nothing got rid of distracting thoughts like work.\n\n\"Want me to read out loud this morning?\"\n\n\"Go on,\" Laura said, slowing down her brushstrokes as Missy Adora reached for the Bible she had been gifted when her maternal grandmother died.\n\n\"Where were we last time?\"\n\n\"We readin' the Psalms with the dates.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah,\" Missy Adora said, turning the silk pages of the Bible. Laura stared at the book hard, wishing she could run her own fingers down the leaves of the book.\n\n\"Go back, baby. You done went too far.\"\n\n\"Oh yeah.\" It was Missy Adora's favorite expression. She never liked to admit she didn't know something. \"Today is...\n\n\"March 20, 1855.\"\n\n\"Psalms 20, then,\" Missy Adora said definitively. \"'The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble; the name of the God of Jacob defend thee,\" Missy Adora read, not a one mistake in her words, Laura thought with pride. They had learned to read almost at the same time. Once Laura had got her mind wrapped around the alphabet she had encouraged Missy Adora to read every day, as much as possible, out loud and usually where Laura could see over her shoulder. Like she did now. Laura found her mouth moving along with the words. \"Some trusts in chariots and some in horses; but we will remember the name of the Lord our God.\"\n\n\"Are you done yet?\" Missy Adora asked and Laura quickly finished brushing her hair out and tied a ribbon in it.\n\n\"I am now. You go on down to breakfast. It smells like Annie done cooked the house down this mornin'.\"\n\n\"Mmm hmmm. Bacon.\"\n\n\"Biscuits.\"\n\n\"Grits.\"\n\n\"Girl, you cain't smell no grits.\"\n\nMissy Adora giggled, set the Bible on her dressing table, and ran out of the room. Laura hoped she slowed down when she reached the stairs. Miss Martha didn't cotton to no running in the house\u2014even if it was Missy Adora. A shame really, that the child had been born so late in Massa Richard's and Miss Annabelle's marriage. She didn't seem to fit in nowhere. 'Cept with Laura.\n\nLaura picked up Missy Adora's discarded nightgown folding it slowly, waiting for the sound of the little girl's footsteps to disappear. When she was sure she was gone, she reached for the Bible, flipped back to Psalms 20, and read it, every word for herself. She didn't rightly know why the Bible had words in it the likes that nobody ever used, but she supposed if a book was going to be different, it ought to be this one.\n\n\"Laura.\" Laura flipped the book closed and moved objects on Missy Adora's table careful to keep a steady hand even as her heart picked up its pace. \"There you are,\" Miss Martha said from the doorway, peeking in. \"Come see me after I take breakfast. Charlotte and I have changed the fabric for one of her morning dresses.\"\n\n\"Yes'm,\" Laura said and quickly put away Missy Adora's things even though Miss Martha was gone just as quick as she had come. But Laura had things she needed to do anyways and wasting time reading wasn't one of them. She made Missy Adora's bed quickly, grabbed a book off of Missy Adora's nightstand, and then moved quietly and swiftly down the stairs. She paused at the bottom, listening. She heard Massa Richard's low voice, Miss Martha's response, Miss Charlotte's laughter, Miss Julia's hissed whisper, Missy Adora's plaintive whine, and Massa Will's low rumble. They was all at breakfast. Laura exhaled, tugged on the collar of her deep blue calico dress, a cast off from Miss Charlotte long ago, and walked slowly to Massa Richard's office. A slow slave was about his or her business. A fast one was asking for trouble.\n\nMassa Richard's office had two glass doors that were partially covered by white curtains. Laura looked around and placed one hand on the door handle, the other hand holding Missy Adora's book in case she got caught. She held her breath, not wanting to make one sound as she turned the knob and heard the click. She waited again, and then pushed the door open.\n\nStepping into the room, Laura's nose was affronted with the smell of paper, ink, cigar smoke, and even a hint of spirits. Closing the door behind her just as quietly as she opened it, she took inventory of the room. Massa Richard's office had large windows on one side and a sofa tucked right under. Bookcases covered all the rest of the walls. Laura reckoned there were hundreds of them; old ones, new ones, ones written in English and even some in Greek. This she knew cause Missy Adora had showed her once, all the while giggling. Thick carpet was on the floor muting each step Laura took to the other side of the room where the desk and three chairs sat. There were two in front of the desk and one large chair behind the desk. Laura placed Missy Adora's book on the desk and then stooped low in front of Massa Richard's desk so no one could see her should they glance in one of the windows.\n\nShe tugged on the bottom drawer. Locked. She reached into the small pocket of her apron and pulled out two small pieces of metal her brother Benji had given her years ago, back when they got along fine. When you had a brother who knew how to make locks, chances were, he knew how to make keys too. Laura slipped the pieces into the tiny keyhole, heard a click, and pulled the drawer open. It was filled with papers. She slipped her lock picks back in her pocket, taking it all in. Laura had seen free papers. Once. A quick glance, when she saw a Negro man whip his out to show Mr. Hamden, the general store owner. She remembered the fancy writing and the large red mark. A seal, she had later learned. The seal was what had her really worried. She wondered if Papa knew about the seal. Laura herself had touched her first seal only weeks ago when Miss Martha handed her a letter to give to Massa Richard on account of her being too busy. The seal was red, circular, and raised off the paper. Laura flipped through Massa Richard's papers now, looking for a sheet that might have a seal.\n\nThen she heard a familiar click and stopped moving. She held her breath as the door opened.\n\n\"Laura?\" a familiar voice whispered.\n\nLaura exhaled. Loudly. It was just Annie.\n\nLaura peeked around the desk and saw her best friend in the whole world. Annie was standing in the center of the office, wearing an old, brown, calico dress made of some of the ugliest fabric Laura had ever seen in her life. But that still did nothing to detract from her beauty. Annie had warm, brown skin, large bright eyes, and hair that came out of her head already styled. When they were young, Laura used to grumble to Mama about the unfairness of it all. Why was Annie blessed with looking so beautiful when Laura was so forgettable? Because it had been quite clear even when they were young which one of them the boys favored on Sunday afternoons. Her mama had given her a sharp slap on the back of her head. Beauty ain't nothin' on a slave but a curse. You thank God everyday he ain't make you beautiful. Laura hadn't believed that and neither had she thanked God that she didn't have much in the way of looks. Until Annie gave birth to her first son, Noble.\n\n\"Laura, I saw you come in here,\" Annie said, placing her hands on her hips.\n\n\"Shh,\" Laura said from her spot on the floor where she was peeking around the large desk at her friend. Annie tossed her a look of confusion, but, after glancing over her shoulder, got down on the floor, and crawled behind the desk with her.\n\n\"What you doin'?\"\n\n\"Lookin' for free papers.\"\n\n\"Lookin' for free papers? Why you need...\" The light dimmed in Annie's eyes. \"You talked to Papa Bear?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laura said, unable to look Annie in the eye. Ain't no one talk more 'bout escaping than Annie when they was young. Her talk of escaping got quieter when Noble was born. It all but disappeared when Venture entered the world. Annie wanted to leave Salis House powerful bad. But she wouldn't leave without her sons. And they were so small still. And there was no forgetting that she could always wind up with a third child. Yes, Laura thanked God she wasn't beautiful, but her heart ached for Annie.\n\n\"When you leavin'?\"\n\nLaura ducked her head. \"Best you don't know. You know that.\" Laura paused. \"And I ain't too sure I'm goin' yet.\"\n\n\"If you stay here when you have a chance to go, by God, Laura, I'll kill you myself,\" Annie said, her voice serious.\n\n\"Annie...\"\n\n\"You got it good now. But you just wait 'til Missy Adora grows older. You just wait. And you'll have wished you run. What we lookin' for?\" Annie asked as she opened another drawer so hard it almost came out of the desk. Laura looked over at her friend, saw her jaw quivering, her eyes blinking. Because that was who Annie was. She would help a friend no matter what, even if it hurt her.\n\n\"How I'm supposed to leave you and Noble and Venture?\"\n\n\"Don't you worry 'bout us,\" she said with a small sniff. \"If I can't go, then I can't think of a better person to go.\"\n\n\"Annie,\" Laura said, her voice, her heart, breaking.\n\n\"I said, what we lookin' for?\" Laura had taught Annie her alphabet, and some book learning. But Annie couldn't read as well as Laura could.\n\n\"Papers with seals. A seal is\u2014,\"\n\nThe sound of a click filled the room. Someone else was entering the office. Laura sent Annie a questioning glance and Annie shook her head quickly. She didn't know who it could be. Both girls' eyes darted across the room. Laura saw a glass bottle of spirits on a small table stand behind them. She moved quickly and grabbed it.\n\nAnnie already ready, pulled a rag out of the confines of her apron. Laura had always been convinced that Annie hid the whole world within the pockets of her apron. Laura pulled the topper out as footsteps pressed against the carpet. She upturned the bottle and then heard a low, familiar drawl.\n\n\"If you pour that wine on the carpet I'll beat you myself, Laura,\" Prince said. He was standing on the other side of the desk, his hazel gaze taking in both Laura and Annie, his usual sneer forming on his face at the sight of them together. Laura sighed with relief and Annie fell back against the desk.\n\n\"Oh, thank God it's you,\" Annie whispered, fanning herself. She always claimed that she sweated extra hard whenever trouble was coming. Feeling the pools of wetness gather under her own arms, Laura guessed it was true for herself too. She put the topper back in the bottle and replaced it.\n\n\"Get up.\" Prince's voice was hard and merciless. But it always was. Laura stood up slowly, Annie next to her. Prince, a few years older than Laura, but the same age as Annie, was not much taller. A clear mulatto with his light eyes, light skin, and curly dark hair, he was Massa Richard's favorite slave and if rumors were to be believed, his son. Laura had once asked Mama about Prince's parentage and had been given so sharp a look she hadn't dared bring it up again. Some secrets died.\n\nAnd yet, noting the cut of his jaw and the sharpness of his nose, Laura had decided rumors were to be believed. Not only did Prince favor Massa Richard in all but his skin color, Massa Richard doted on Prince. He had taught Prince to read and write himself over the protests of first his wife, Miss Annabelle, then his sister, Miss Martha, and finally his sons, Massa Will and Massa Logan. He had taught Prince so well, Prince kept all of his records and worked with him day in and day out. Prince got extra rations, new clothes made from good cloth, and his own room in Salis House. Prince was also one of the biggest pains in Laura's backside. And Annie's. And anyone else alive and breathing at Salis House. Laura could think of no one who actually liked Prince.\n\nHe took great joy in catching her, Annie, and others in compromising situations. With glee he informed Massa Richard and Miss Martha about others' activities. Laura had gotten more than one slap from Miss Martha cause of Prince telling on her. He had no friends, no honor, no compassion, and very little kindness.\n\nBut still. Seeing him was a sight better than seeing Massa Richard and Massa Will. Because you could reason with Prince... especially if you had something he wanted or would want. Why, then he could be most amenable to anything. Laura's eyes flickered down to the open drawer at her feet. She could be here all day long looking for free papers and even if she found them she had great doubts that she could duplicate them. She just plain didn't have the knowhow. But Prince did." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 5", + "text": "Sam came to with a gasp, raising himself on his arms.\n\n\"Sunday,\" Manny muttered next to him and rolled over, taking Sam's new blanket with him and leaving Sam more than a bit cold and exposed to the chill of the morning. But it was a state that Sam was used to. He lowered himself slowly back onto the straw.\n\nHe thanked God that it was Sunday. And more than that, that Massa Charles believed in not working on the Lord's day no matter how good the soil or the harvest was. Sam had put in a full day's work yesterday, sweating profusely. His back had already been on fire from the whipping the day before and the constant bending over to transfer the tobacco plants from one place to the next, but when the salty rivers of sweat hit the burns it felt like being struck by lightning. Constantly. With an exhale, he pushed himself up.\n\n\"You need to rest,\" Manny murmured without even turning over, but he knew Sam. So he didn't say anything else as Sam slowly rocked on all fours, muffled a groan, and then shakily stood up. He exited the cabin, inhaling the fresh air deeply. Sometimes he didn't realize just how rank the cabin was until he went outside first thing in the morning. By the time he returned at night he was usually so tired he didn't care.\n\n\"Mornin' Sam,\" Ole Mose said, already sitting over the breakfast fire.\n\n\"Mornin', Mose,\" Sam said as he moved slowly, stretching and testing the muscles in his body. He didn't think he had much more than twenty years but sometimes he sure felt as old as Ole Mose looked.\n\n\"Headed to the church?\"\n\n\"You know it.\" But first he needed to make a trip to the outhouse and to the river out back. At least try not to go to the Lord's house stinking.\n\nThe church was five miles away and every Sunday, Sam made the early morning trek. Rain, sun, and even rare times, in the snow. Every Sunday. It was his only escape from the world in which he lived in, the only time he could sit for a few minutes and pretend like he was free. Manny thought it was the stupidest thing he could be doing. Sometimes Sam thought Manny was right. It did seem stupid at times to keep going to a place he wasn't really welcomed to, to hear about God who at times didn't always seem to be listening. But Sam knew it would be worse to give up. It would be worse to just accept that it was God's will that this was his lot in life. The five-mile trek was always a long one. And that morning it felt even longer as with each step he took his thoughts grew darker.\n\nThere was nothing he wanted more than his freedom. He had been dreaming about having his own since he first realized he didn't own a thing. Not even himself. And what was a man if he couldn't make his own decisions? If he couldn't choose his own path? He was nothing, less than a dog that followed a scent cause it caught his fancy. He also wanted a family. A wife of his own, children even. But he would die alone\u2014or with Manny\u2014first before he gave Massa Charles more slaves. He and Manny had decided that a long time ago. He wanted a second name. Wanted to be more than just Sam. He had already decided that when he was free he would go by Samuel. Sam stepped on a rock, stumbled. Erased his thoughts. For they were foolish thoughts. Thoughts that if he dwelled on too long would bring him near to tears. For there was nothing in his life that suggested that freedom was any nearer today than it was yesterday. He was powerful afraid he would die hunched and bent over, making food for the next batch of slaves like Old Mose with nothing to show for his life.\n\nBut still he walked on. He reached the church just as the sun was starting to make an appearance in the sky and Sam was happy for it. When he walked back it wouldn't be as cold. He paused for a minute taking in the newly white washed building with its large steeple. Unlike the church on the plantation he had been born on, this church was taken care of regularly and looked it. The woodwork on the railing was fancy and the stain-glassed windows shined with pride as Sam got closer. He walked around to a side door and slipped into the sanctuary quietly, his bare feet taking in the cold but well-sanded wood floor. When the door shut behind him, he slid down it, pulled his knees to his chest, and wrapped his hands around his legs.\n\n\"Yet now hear, O Jacob my servant; and Israel, whom I have chosen: Thus said the Lord that made thee, and formed thee from the womb...\" Reverend Carlisle had already started and he was reading from the Book of Isaiah. At least Sam thought so. He closed his eyes and listened, doing his best to hide small nuggets in his heart and in his mind as he had since he was a child. He and Manny and Mama had been owned by a reverend. When they wasn't working the fields, Reverend Baptiste would read to them from the Bible. All the time. Both he and Manny would listen quietly, but while he fell in love with the writer of the words, Manny began to bitterly resent Him. Sam could separate God from His earthly ministers. Manny could not. But it was God's words that had made both him and Manny realize that there could be more to life than the fruitless one they seemed to be living.\n\n\"Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I told thee from that time, and have declared it? Ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? Yea there is no God; I know not any.\"\n\nYes. It was Isaiah alright. Sam couldn't read a lick, but he had heard so much Bible reading he could tell a few books apart. Reverend Carlisle kept reading and Sam listened to the words of his God and how He was God and not to be limited to Sam's small-minded thinking. Sam couldn't see a way to freedom. And even if there was a way, what would he and Manny do? They only had one skill really and that was knowing everything there was to know about tobacco farming. Sam didn't think they had tobacco farms up north. And it wasn't like they could buy their own. They had barely a dollar to their name.\n\nThey had no other skills, and the only letters of the alphabet they could recognize were the letters 'a' and 'm' cause they were in both of their names. But it wasn't for Sam to be worrying about. If he was worrying, then he wasn't trusting. And the god who had created all the land in the world, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea was his God. And his God could do anything. Sam needed to focus on that. He spent the rest of his time in the church repeating the words that came out of Reverend Carlisle's mouth.\n\nThen Reverend Carlisle stopped. Sam stood up slowly, his back stiff and reached for the door knob. \"Bye Sam,\" Reverend Carlisle called out quietly.\n\nSam said nothing as he pulled the door shut behind him." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 6", + "text": "\"Sam, why we out here again?\" Manny asked even as he dug under the familiar roots of the tree. They were in the small forest on Massa Charles's land. Years ago, they had found a spot around a bent-over tulip tree that seemed perfect for burying things they hadn't wanted to share with others. Now they buried anything they thought they might like to take with them when their new life started.\n\n\"To add the blanket to our bag. You know why.\"\n\n\"I think we should keep the blanket,\" Manny said, frustration heavy in his voice.\n\n\"When we gotta run\u2014,\"\n\n\"You know somethin' I don't know?\" Manny asked, tossing Sam a look from the ground. \"And how come I'm the one diggin' anyway?\"\n\n\"Cause you know I need to stand for my back.\"\n\nManny grumbled but kept on digging until the stick in his hand, hit something solid: the old leather hunting bag they had found washed up on the edge of a stream years ago. It had a strap on it that was solid and fringes that always put Sam in mind of Injuns. It held their secret stash. Wasn't much in there. Just their nice shirts they had received at Christmas and one pair of pants for each of them. Some coins that came to just under a dollar, and then Sam's most prize possession: a Bible. They had found it years ago, just lying on the road. Sam liked to open it sometimes and touch the papers. He liked to find the letters in his name on the pages.\n\n\"We should be wearin' these shirts,\" Manny grumbled as he reached up and took the folded blanket from Sam. \"And these pants. And sleepin' in this blanket.\" The bag bulged with the addition of the blanket though they had wrapped up everything tight and small. Sam supposed it was good that they didn't have much more.\n\n\"You'll be glad we saved our nice things for when we is free.\" It was an old argument, like so many of their arguments were. But it was hard to argue about not using their nice things when life never changed.\n\n\"You always get this way when you come back from church.\"\n\n\"Hopeful?\"\n\n\"Idiotic.\"\n\n\"I was thinkin' we should go with Shepherd.\"\n\n\"We ain't no shepherds,\" Manny said as he began to rebury their things.\n\n\"I like being Samuel Shepherd. Manning Shepherd sounds good to.\"\n\n\"No. We can't read. It should be short so we can learn to recognize it.\" They might not be able to read, but they knew well enough when some words sounded longer than others.\n\n\"Like what?\"\n\n\"Like... Manning Fry or Manning Rim.\"\n\n\"Samuel Fry,\" Sam said slowly, trying it out. He ignored the small stab of fear that told him he would never get a chance to add another name. But he refused to think like that. His God had plans for him and they were greater than being a slave. He was going to live with expectation, and more than that, he was going to live with hope.\n\n\"I didn't say Fry.\"\n\n\"You just did.\"\n\n\"I said somethin' like Fry.\"\n\nManny stood up and stomped on the ground a bit, his toes leaving marks in the soil as he pressed down with his foot, returning their leather bag to its hole in the ground. \"Cora want you to come by.\"\n\nSam straightened. Smiled. \"She might have some of them molasses cookies.\"\n\n\"Get a big one.\"\n\n\"I always do.\" Cora didn't like Manny, but she liked Sam. And Sam shared everything with Manny.\n\n\"Molloy came by to.\"\n\n\"What he want?\" Sam asked, his shoulders falling.\n\n\"Don't know.\" Manny looked over at him. \"You gettin' all them whippin's makes things harder on us both.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Now, come on fore we miss the service.\" It wasn't the sermon that Manny didn't want to miss but the gathering. Sunday was the only time they all came together, men, women, and children. They heard preaching and then ate and sang and caught up. Usually with one of they overseers in the corner watching to make sure they didn't get up to too much trouble, but at least no one made them work.\n\n\"You go on. I'm goin' to go see what Molloy wants,\" Sam said. He saw his brother hesitate. \"You go on. I doubt I'm in trouble today, but if I am you'll know where to find me,\" Sam said, referring to the whipping post.\n\nManny's expression went flat. \"You ain't funny,\" he said, but he did turn and walk away.\n\nSam headed towards the barn which is where Molloy spent most of his Sundays. Horse racing was Molloy's secret passion and if he wasn't out in the fields with 'em, he was in the barn talking sweet to one of Massa Charles's horses.\n\n\"Hey, Manny,\" Abram, one of the slaves who dealt in horse flesh, said as Sam approached. He was leaning against the barn, chewing on something that had leaves on the end of it. Sam didn't know him well, though they were about the same age.\n\n\"Sam,\" Sam said, correcting. He guessed Abram didn't know him or Manny that well either. \"Mister Molloy in there?\" Sam always added the Mister when there was a chance that Molloy was in hearing distance.\n\n\"You know it.\" Abram didn't even bother to look at Sam as he passed. There were times Sam thought his lot in life wasn't so great. But he had realized that it was better to recognize that you was a slave and be unhappy than to think being a slave was the end all be all. Not that Sam had the first clue as to what was going on in Abram's head, but Abram had always seemed so content that Sam just had a feeling the man liked life just as it was. There was some people you met in life that was born a firecracker and you knew it. And then there were others that was born a plant and just grew where you put 'em. Sam was not going to grow where he was put.\n\nLeast that's what he told himself as he walked down the long length of the dimly lit barn.\n\n\"Eh, Sam,\" Molloy said from the other end of the barn. He waved Sam forward. \"Let's walk,\" he said and they exited the barn on the other side.\n\nSam watched as Molloy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pipe and a match. They kept on walking\u2014as to where, Sam had no clue\u2014while he lit the thing and started smoking.\n\nSam saw a fence in the distance and realized they were headed towards Massa Charles's horse farm. Behind the fence, a black horse ran fast, up and down its length as though declaring its presence to everyone watching.\n\nMolloy made a sound in the back of his throat and Sam glanced over at him. \"Look at that stallion. You see that horse? That's one fine horse,\" Molloy said, coming to a stop. Sam stopped too. He looked at the horse again and then back at Molloy. He knew how to feed a horse, how to clean up after a horse, and how to walk a horse. That was it. That was the extent of his knowledge. There was no way on this earth Molloy had him out here to do some work for the horses unless all of his stable hands were sick or dead. But Molloy seemed to be waiting for something.\n\n\"It's a fine horse,\" Sam said finally.\n\nMolloy took the pipe out of his mouth. \"He's won one race already this year. Not a big race, just a small one, but me and Charles are likin' his chances this year.\" Sam almost let out a sigh. Had Molloy decided he had to clean up after the horse or something?\n\n\"Good breedin' produces good horses. That's why, Sam,\" Molloy said, clasping a hand on Sam's shoulder as if they were good friends, as if Molloy hadn't beaten him many, many times. Sam kept his eyes averted, so that he didn't have to meet Molloy's gaze and he didn't have to view his large sweat stains either. \"I'm thinkin' it's time for you to breed.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 7", + "text": "Annie clasped her hands in front of her, all fear of being heard and in trouble gone. She gave Prince a wide smile filled with false joy. \"My day never starts until I see your face.\"\n\nPrince's full, pink lips twisted to the side. \"I'm so glad you're happy, Annie. I noticed you devouring several pieces of ham last night after supper and have been meaning to ask you for days, are you in anticipation of an interesting event?\" An interesting event. He meant was she with child. Laura exhaled, closing her eyes. Only Prince would say something so rude. And not only rude, but profoundly untrue. Everyone knew there was only one man responsible for Noble and Venture. And he was away up north studying the law and had been for nigh unto six months now. And Prince knew that too.\n\n\"Prince,\" Laura hissed as Annie's expression grew dark and angry, her nostrils flaring and her eyes narrowing. Laura knew if she didn't step in, Annie was liable to grab the nearest thing to her and beat Prince to death. Not that he didn't deserve it, but Laura needed him now. Preferably alive. \"Annie, you go on. They gone need you in the kitchen.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Prince said, with a nod towards the direction of the kitchen. \"You go on now. And while you going, you better think of how you can get on my good side. Would hate to tell Miss Martha you were on the floor in Master Richard's office when you got but one place to be and that's behind the stove.\"\n\nAnnie gave him a look that would have scorched a kinder man except Prince had long since stopped caring what others thought of him. She folded her arms over her chest, sent him another look of rage, and left the office. They would talk later. No doubt, most of it would be Laura talking Annie out of poisoning Prince when he came to the kitchen for his next meal.\n\n\"Why would you say somethin' so hateful?\" Laura asked when the office door closed behind Annie. One thing she could say about Prince's presence, no slave ever feared being in trouble when he was around. Massa Richard thought Prince could do no wrong, so if Prince was in the middle of things than there was nothing to get worried about.\n\nPrince, still staring at where Annie had stood, turned and faced Laura full on. \"What are you doing in here?\" And here it was. Her chance to do something so risky her palms were sweating and her stomach was clenching and unclenching. Was she going to risk it all and hope Prince had more than an ounce of goodness still left in him? \"I just want you to know,\" Prince continued, folding his arms over his chest. \"That now I fully expect a brand-new coat made of the finest fabric in a week.\" Prince always wanted her to make him clothes when she got into a sticky situation that only he could get her out of... or if he was the only one who had caught sight of her doing something dicey. It happened a lot more than Laura would have liked. Sometimes, she swore he followed her around the house watching to see if she was taking more food than she should or keeping the extra fabric scraps that Miss Martha had told her to toss just so she could make him some nice clothes. Cause Prince liked to look nice.\n\n\"Alright,\" Laura said sure to keep her tone placating even as her mind raced. How many sets of clothes would she have to make Prince to get him to make them free papers?\n\nPrince held up a finger. \"I'm not done yet. I liked the buttons you put on Master Richard's shirt. I want some just like it.\" He stated it as though she had access to gold buttons. Did she have access to good fabric? Yes. Shiny buttons... maybe. Cause they sure as shooting weren't going to be gold. Prince wearing gold buttons would catch even Master Richard's unmindful eye.\n\nHe tapped his chest again, as though to get her to focus on him. He clearly wanted her to beg. The negotiation process when it came to bribing him was the only time she ever saw Prince's eyes light up with excitement. When she exhaled loudly, he moved his hand up and down the center of his chest to indicate where the buttons should go. As if she didn't know that already.\n\n\"Master Richard, I saw Laura on the floor going through your papers... ,\" he began, not taking his eyes off of hers. Laura knew he only said her name cause he was hoping to work out some kind of separate deal with Annie. Annie was always required to bake him a pie of some sort. Prince loved his pies. Annie said it wasn't unusual for him to sit there and eat the whole thing in one sitting and not offer a single crumb to anyone.\n\n\"Alright,\" Laura said again, nodding. It would not be easy getting her hands on those buttons. But. She needed Prince. Prince hesitated for a second, his stare growing intense. And she knew it was cause she was not following the script of their play. They usually fought tooth and nail over the extent of his bribes. Not to mention his clothing choices. He might like to look nice but his taste had a tendency to run towards gaudy. Laura always reined him in\u2014especially if she had to procure the fabric and any extra attachments herself. Prince knew she couldn't pay for the things he asked... which meant that she... borrowed them for him. She didn't look at it as stealing, after all the material was going towards the health and welfare of one of the family's slaves. Though she knew Mama wouldn't have liked it. Not that Prince had been all that demanding when Mama was alive. Back then his requests had been small, because he had been slightly afraid of Mama. Mama was the only person Laura knew of that Prince had ever been afraid of. But Mama was dead now. He feared no one.\n\nAt any rate, Prince knew she didn't pay for most of what he asked for cause she rarely had more than a penny to her name, but he always managed to look the other way when Laura borrowed extra fabric if the fabric and frills were for him. On several occasions, he had ordered his own fabric knowing that Master Richard would be none the wiser. It was such a daring move, that Laura had almost feared for him for weeks. Laura saw his fingers tapping against the muscle of his arm. He was thinking. And that was not always a good thing. Then he walked around her slowly, making her feel like a rabbit being looked over by a wolf. He walked past her to the front of the desk, glanced down at where she and Annie had been crouched. But there was nothing to see, Laura had already closed the drawers that she and Annie had been rifling through.\n\n\"Why were you in here?\" He leaned in close behind her so that his lips almost touched her ear.\n\nLaura swallowed and sent a quick, thoroughly sincere prayer to the Lord. Here goes. \"I was lookin' for free papers,\" she whispered. She could not see him, but she could feel him recoil.\n\n\"Free papers?\" he asked in disbelief. \"For what?\"\n\n\"We... we thinkin' 'bout runnin'. I was gonna see if I could copy one.\"\n\nPrince moved in front of her, so quick and so quietly it was scary. Laura took a step back. His expression was dark. \"You can barely read or write and you're going to try... Laura, I've always known you were stupid, but this... I mean have you got rocks for brains or something?\"\n\n\"It makes sense to have them if you think about it. I have to try.\" Laura said, her voice just barely above a whisper. She knew her eyes were pleading with him, begging. And she hadn't even gotten to the hard part yet.\n\n\"Forget I asked,\" he said flatly. He took a step back as though to distance himself from her.\n\nBut Laura took a step forward. \"You know he's goin' to sell Sol and Gid.\"\n\n\"Were they on the list?\" Prince asked lightly. \"I didn't see.\" That was a lie. Nothing, absolutely not one sheet of paper left this office without Prince's knowhow. Laura didn't know how that was the case, but he knew everything there was to know about everything before it happened. But now was not the time to call him out on it.\n\n\"I can't let Massa Richard do that. We can't\u2014,\"\n\nPrince held up a finger. \"There is no we.\"\n\n\"Mama would have wanted you\u2014,\"\n\n\"Don't,\" Prince warned. \"Don't talk to me about Mama.\"\n\n\"If Mama had asked you\u2014,\"\n\n\"But you ain't Mama, now is you?\" Prince asked, his eyes blazing. The fact that his English had changed told her just how ruffled he was. Prince talked like Massa Richard. Always. \"I said, leave Mama out of this,\" he hissed.\n\n\"Sol and Gid your brothers too.\"\n\n\"No,\" Prince said, shaking his head in disbelief as though the notion had never crossed his mind before. He reached past her towards Massa Richard's desk, fiddling with stuff on it like he had a right to or something. \"You best get out of here 'fore Massa Richard come. And I still want my coat. Two coats now.\"\n\n\"You right, Prince. I probably can't make the free papers. But you can,\" Laura said, drawing on all of her strength as she stared at her oldest brother.\n\nPrince's flinch was a visible thing. \"No. Laura.\"\n\n\"Prince...\"\n\n\"If you get caught,\" Prince whisper-yelled. \"Who they gone come for? Me. That's who. Me.\"\n\n\"You can tell them I did it.\"\n\nPrince scoffed. \"No one would believe that. And if they did, it would be cause they figured I taught you how to read!\" He had taught her how to read. And write too. He had shared all his books with her up until he hadn't. One day he was her brother, the next day a stranger.\n\n\"Then we won't get caught.\"\n\nPrince's face grew dark. He turned his back to her, again arranging and rearranging the items on the desk. \"It's just that easy is it?\" His voice was mocking. \"This conversation is over, Laura. Don't you bring it up again.\"\n\n\"I'll make you some fancy breeches too.\" Laura could hear the whining in her voice.\n\n\"You say one more thing. Open your mouth, one more time. And I'm going to tell Master Richard on you. Now you get out of here.\" His voice was clear and firm, but she could see his hands shaking as he moved the ink jar from one spot to the next.\n\nBut if there was one thing Laura had learned with her brother it was that his words did not always match his actions. Which was why she had taken the risk in the first place. \"I need one for me and Papa, Benji, Sol, and Gid.\" Laura paused at the door. \"You can come with us too if you want,\" she said, though she believed a pig had a better chance of flying than of Prince leaving with them. She thought she was attached to the family and Salis. He lived and breathed them. He didn't say anything, didn't even look her way as she left Massa Richard's office." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 8", + "text": "\"You asked him to do what?\" Annie asked, as she rolled out the dough for a pie she was making. Laura stood in the hot kitchen, with three of Miss Charlotte's dresses hanging over her arm. It was just the two of them and little Venture in the kitchen. Venture sat in a corner on a very low stool attacking a plum with single-minded ferocity.\n\n\"What's he doin' here?\" Laura asked, nodding at Venture. Venture was two years old with black hair, freckles, hazel eyes, and pale skin. He was also the quietest child Laura had ever known. Only Noble, Annie's oldest, was as quiet. Sometimes, Laura wondered if it was because they had inherently known upon their birth that their mama hadn't exactly wanted them and they made up for it by being no trouble at all. Venture, feeling her eyes on him, gave her a small smile, revealing a cute dimple he had gotten from his mama, as he took another small bite from the plum. Laura winked at him. His smile grew wider. She adored Venture. And Noble. She had held them both in her arms hours after they were born. Leaving Missy Adora was going to be hard. Leaving Annie almost unbearable. Leaving Venture and Noble? She couldn't bring herself to think about it. She looked back at Annie unable to face his quiet, serious stare.\n\n\"He didn't want to go with Mama Essie or Ma Dovie today. He promised to be quiet and stay out of the way,\" Annie said, glancing over at Venture. Slave children weren't supposed to be in Salis House. But the kitchen wasn't technically in Salis House as it was a separate building and Annie had had the reins of it ever since Callie fell over dead one day. Sides, Annie was a fine cook. So long as she was discreet, meaning she kept the boys away from Miss Martha, Miss Julia, Missy Charlotte, and Missy Adora, all was well.\n\nLaura watched as Venture gave his mama a small smile and Annie's expression softened. Nevermind their begetting, Annie loved her boys. \"Don't you try changin' the subject. Tellin' Prince was just plain foolish,\" Annie said with a frown as she dusted the dough with flour.\n\n\"He's not goin' to tell.\"\n\n\"You think? He ain't never been kind so long as I've known him.\" Annie had only been at Salis for seven years. She had never known Prince when he was nice. \"He was tractable when ya'll mama was alive. How a woman as sweet and kind as yo mama gave birth to such a... one as he, I'll never know.\" Mama hadn't known either. Prince had driven her just plum crazy all the time. But he had been good to her. \"With her gone, ain't nothin' holdin' him back now,\" she said, shaking her head as she rolled out the dough one more time. \"I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him and that ain't very far.\"\n\n\"He's not goin' to tell,\" Laura said stubbornly. She had to believe it. Because the alternative...\n\n\"He already came up in here, demandin' an apple pie and a pecan pie. Like I ain't got nothin' else to do,\" she grumbled as she placed the dough into a baking pan. Taking a pot out of the hearth, she poured the mixture onto the dough.\n\nLaura inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of cinnamon and apples.\n\n\"Don't you worry about food none, okay,\" she said quietly, giving Laura a knowing look. Laura looked down at the clothes she was supposed to be repairing, feeling overwhelmed. That's what made Annie such a good friend. You never had to ask with her. She always offered.\n\n\"Thank you, Annie.\"\n\n\"When are you...?\"\n\nLaura shrugged. \"I don't know nothin' yet. Just what Papa asked me to do. We got until Easter and that'll be here in less than two weeks.\"\n\nAnnie's back was to Laura now, and Laura could see her shoulders rise and fall with every breath. \"I'll help anyway I can.\"\n\n\"I know you will,\" Laura said. She walked over and placed a hand on her friend's shoulder. Annie reached up and covered it with her own.\n\nLaura could see that she was crying and Laura started crying too. Sniffing she looked away and met the wide-eyes of Venture whose own lips started trembling. He didn't like to see his mama cry.\n\n\"If he tells on you, I'll kill him myself,\" Annie said, wiping her face. \"He'll eat this apple pie and die.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 9", + "text": "Sam stared at Molloy as though he could not have possibly heard him right. \"Me?\"\n\n\"You,\" Molloy said, one meaty finger poking him in the chest. \"You and Manny. You're both young and strong and I can't figure out for the life of me why you and he ain't come around askin' for a cabin of your own. Surely there must be some filly you've got your eye on?\"\n\nSam blinked. Careful to keep his expression as blank as could be. \"No, sir. Don't have no time for courtin' or for young'uns.\" There. Sam, keeping his eyes somewhere around the top button of Molloy's shirt, waited for his response.\n\n\"Now, Sam,\" Molloy said, squeezing his shoulder again, but this time with some force. \"Why would you need to be doin' any courtin'? I'm sure any of those fillies would be right ready to take you on.\" Sam felt his gaze narrow, but he said nothing. Molloy exhaled and took a step back. \"Let me tell you somethin' about horse breedin'. To produce a good foal you've got to have a sire and a dam of impeccable pedigree.\" Molloy opened one hand before Sam. \"Sam, you've got impeccable pedigree. You get more work done than almost anybody. Only time you ever in trouble, is when you tryin' to do somebody else's work too. Your brother, impeccable pedigree, though he's lazier than you. But I notice that when you fire him up, he gets things done. Now, you know Leathie's girls?\"\n\nSam nodded slowly as Molloy opened his second hand, more than a little afraid as to where this was going. He did know Leathie's girls. She had several of them though only two seemed old enough to jump the broom. One was Cora. The same one who always gave Sam any extra molasses cookies she made. Sam thought she was about his and Manny's age. Manny had called himself walking out with her a few months back. Only problem was he was also walking out with Lula on the Rawlins' plantation. When they found out about each other (cause they both showed up on a Sunday to be with him), they had turned on Manny. Sam had laughed about it for weeks. He wasn't laughing now.\n\n\"There's Cora. She's only about a year younger than you, Sam, and ripe as a peach.\" Sam felt his jaw clench. Sam didn't fancy Cora in the least bit, but that didn't mean he wanted to hear her talked about like this. \"And then there's Lizbeth.\"\n\n\"Lizbeth is too young,\" Sam said, cutting him off before he could say anything rude about her.\n\n\"Not that young,\" Molloy followed up quickly. \"Just think Sam, you could have one sister and your brother the other. Find foals from each of ya'll.\"\n\nSam's head started shaking before his mouth formed a word. \"No.\" When Molloy's eyes narrowed, he spoke again. \"Thanks. No, thank you, suh. Me and Manny just fine.\"\n\n\"I'm tellin' you, you're not fine,\" Molloy said flatly, all cajoling out of his voice.\n\n\"Suh?\"\n\n\"I already spoke with Cora and Lizabeth. Ya'll is jumpin' the broom or whatever it is you niggers do.\"\n\nSam stared at him, confused. \"Suh?\"\n\n\"By this time next year, Charles and I will be expectin' at least two more new slaves of fine stock. You hear?\" Molloy's voice was hard as he jabbed a finger at Sam. \"You best talk to your brother and get him in line. If he gives me any lip I'll string him up so fast he won't know what got him. And I won't go easy on him like I go on you. You hear?\"\n\n\"Yes. Suh,\" Sam said, his heart sinking all the way down to his stomach. This is what he got for lamenting about having a repetitive life.\n\n\"Unless you got some other gal you want? I don't rightly care.\"\n\n\"No. I mean, I hadn't thought about it, suh,\" Sam said, his words just barely above a whisper.\n\n\"Well, you think on it. Let me know by next Sunday. Massa Charles is thinkin' 'bout havin' a preacher come in and do the colored marriages. He's gonna do 'em all in one sweep. And you and Manny gone be one of 'em. Now get out of here. I got things to do.\"\n\nSam walked off in a complete daze, his mind racing so much, so quickly, he didn't notice Cora until she appeared right in front of him.\n\n\"Sam, what you thinkin' about?\"\n\nSam froze, staring at her. He supposed she was pretty, though he hadn't given her too much thought. Sam thought about women in a general sense, as in one day he would marry when he was free. He did not think of them in a literal sense. To walk down that road was to travel somewhere with no destination. At least as far as he was concerned. But looking at Cora now, he could see how Manny might be fascinated with the big-boned, shapely girl standing right in front of him.\n\n\"How come you here?\" Sam asked, looking around her. They were a ways away from the cabins and the meeting-house.\n\n\"I was lookin' for you. Manny said you had gone this way. Your brother is a ne'er do well.\" Sam stared at her. She folded her arms just under her ample bosom. \"I take it Molloy done talked to you?\"\n\n\"I ain't marryin' you, Cora,\" Sam said and made to walk around her. But she stuck out a hand, grabbing his arm.\n\n\"It's me or Lizabeth. And if I have to choose between you and Manny, I choose you. We'll get on just fine, Sam.\"\n\nBut Sam was already shaking his head and pulling his arm from her strong grip. \"Cora. I'm not marryin' you.\"\n\n\"Sam,\" she said, leaning in close. She was his height, so she didn't have to lean far. \"You ain't got no choice. I ain't got no choice. So what little choice I do have, I'm gone use. You and me'll get hitched and Manny and Lizabeth will get hitched. She still thinks he walks on air.\" Sam didn't say anything. \"You hear me, Sam?\" What was with everyone asking him that? Had he gone deaf recently and not noticed?\n\n\"Yes, I hear you. If I have to marry someone it'll be you,\" he said dryly and pulled his arm free from hers.\n\n\"You don't have to say it like that, Sam,\" she said, cutting her eyes at him, but he could see the hurt too. And it wasn't in Sam to ever hurt anyone.\n\n\"It ain't you, Cora,\" he said, meeting her gaze for a second. \"Ain't you.\"\n\nThey were silent for a moment. Then Cora spoke. \"Sam, you live like you expect this to just be a season in your life. Like one day you gone wake up somewhere free. You ain't goin' nowhere and the sooner you make peace with that the better.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 10", + "text": "\"What did he say?\" Manny's voice was quiet, serious as he walked slowly over to Sam and sat down next to him under their tree. Even though there was more than enough room, Manny squeezed himself in tight between the roots of the sapling and right under Sam, like he had always done when they were scared and little.\n\n\"What makes you think he said somethin'?\" Sam asked, not meeting his brother's gaze. If they made eye contact, there was no way Sam could hide his feelings or his thoughts. And he was having some thoughts.\n\n\"You didn't come back,\" Manny said flatly. \"You missed the service. And the meal. And Cora was sendin' me smug looks. Did she give you a molasses cookie or not?\" Sam exhaled. \"Cause I saw her bring some out so I know she made 'em.\"\n\n\"No molasses cookie.\" Sam uprooted a piece of grass and tossed it aside.\n\n\"He gone sell one of us?\" Manny's voice was barely above a whisper.\n\nSam pressed his lips together. \"Wants us to breed.\" Manny cringed next to him. \"Like horses,\" Sam said, and this time he did meet his brother's gaze. It was Manny's turn to press his lips together. \"It gets worse.\" Manny said nothing, just blinked a few times. \"Next week we supposed to jump the broom. With Leathie's daughters.\"\n\nManny's eyes darted to the side for a second. \"Daughters? Only Cora's of age.\"\n\n\"Apparently, Lizbeth's close enough.\"\n\nManny coughed. \"Thanks, but no thanks.\"\n\n\"Don't talk like that. Cora already said Lizbeth was gonna be yours.\"\n\nManny cringed again.\n\nA small smile tickled Sam's lips.\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"He did say you could pick another girl if you want.\"\n\n\"How kind of him,\" Manny said mockingly. Sam returned his gaze to the ground before him, uprooted another piece of grass. A cool breeze rattled the strands of grass before him, lifting the loose one he had just had in his hand for a second before dropping it. It wouldn't be cool for much longer. The nights were chilly, but the days were starting to heat up. Another hot, fierce summer in the tobacco fields was on its way. \"And how come he told you and not me?\"\n\n\"Cause I can get you to do anythin',\" Sam said dully. Manny didn't even respond. On the one hand, it should be obvious that brothers listened and valued each other. On the other hand, it was disconcerting to know that Molloy had realized that they were not only each other's weakness but that if there was a hierarchy between them, Sam ruled the roost. Most people always assumed it was Manny. And if Molloy knew that, then he had been watching them more closely then Sam had known. And that was not exactly a good thing.\n\n\"What are you thinkin'? Do we make like we're sick that day? Find somewhere else to be and get a whippin' later?\"\n\n\"That won't stop it. The preacher man is for us. Not for them. They don't care if we married or not so long as a baby is born a year from now.\"\n\nManny exhaled and pulled his knees to his chest. \"If we take on a wife, we won't ever leave.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"Cause you won't leave your wife.\"\n\n\"I know.\"\n\n\"For freedom, I would leave my wife.\" Sam grunted. Because it was all so true. Manny wanted freedom more than just about anything. \"I'd probably leave my children too. But I won't leave you.\"\n\n\"My mind is now at rest.\"\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\n\"Our wives could always run with us.\" The thought was new. They had never talked about running with their families. It just always seemed like escaping was hard enough with just them two. To add more seemed to be asking for trouble.\n\nManny grunted. \"Slow us down more like. And then get us caught.\" Well, it appeared that they were of the same mind then. Not surprisingly. \"Sam.\"\n\n\"We gonna run.\" Sam's words were more breath than noise, but he knew Manny heard him when he stiffened next to him.\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\n\"Ain't no better time than the present.\"\n\n\"Sam,\" Manny said again. His eyes were wide and blinking and he was sitting up straighter. \"I thought you wanted to wait until that man came through again. The one they told us about with the Ohio River and how they hang a quilt on the side to show they is in town...\"\n\nSam was slowly shaking his head. \"Don't have time for that.\"\n\nManny reached out, gripping Sam's arm so tight, Sam knew he would have bruises in the morning. Manny's breath was releasing in quick, short bursts, his heart racing a mile a minute. Sam knew this for a fact, cause his own heart was pounding just as fast. \"How we gone know where to go?\"\n\n\"Follow the Drinkin' Gourd. It's goin' to be a clear night tonight. Did you realize that?\"\n\n\"Tonight?\" Manny's voice was high, almost shrill.\n\n\"Ohio River is north of us. We follow the stars, cain't help but run right into it. Don't need no conductor to tell me that.\"\n\n\"I'm gone be sick,\" Manny said, releasing Sam's arm and getting on all fours with his face almost to the ground, though nothing came out.\n\nSam felt his brow wrinkle. \"You want to stay?\"\n\n\"No. I want to go so bad my stomach hurts. What's gone happen after we cross the Ohio? How we gone find a conductor? You know... like Caesar.\"\n\n\"Do I look like I've ever tried this before? I don't know.\" And there was the rub of it. They had no clue what happened on the other side of the Ohio River... which is why they had long ago agreed to wait for someone who did. Someone like Caesar, a man or a ghost some said who led slaves to freedom. But there was no Caesar.\n\nThey would be running with almost no money, very few clothes, and no food. What was that Reverend Carlisle had said only this morning? It felt almost like Sam's visit to the church had been days ago. So much had changed in little time. Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I told thee from that time, and have declared it? Ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? Yea there is no God.; I know not any. The verse had been in his mind ever since he had come to their tree to pray. He was just going to have to get those words deep in his heart. And now. Before things got scary on the other side of the Ohio. Cause sure as shooting they would.\n\n\"Oh my dear Lord in heaven. Sam.\"\n\n\"Manny.\"\n\n\"And we gone go tonight? That hardly gives us enough time to think.\"\n\n\"It's all we been thinkin' 'bout for years. We're rested and we can go to bed tonight on a full stomach. Ain't no better time.\" It was his job, as Sam the brother of Manny, to sound like he knew what he was talking 'bout.\n\n\"You just got whipped two days ago.\"\n\n\"Ain't no better time,\" Sam said stubbornly. Even if his back still gave him a few twinges of pain. But he had lived more than half of his life with some kind of ache or pain. It had never stopped him before. It wouldn't stop him now.\n\n\"Don't you need to pray or somethin'? What's God think on all this?\"\n\nTurning only his head, Sam gave him a look. \"Oh, now you want to know what God thinks?\"\n\n\"If I'm 'bout to risk my life, I would very much like to know what He thinks. If He tells you we gonna meet soon, I'm going to stay my Negro butt right here, thank you very much.\"\n\nSometimes Sam didn't think anything Manny said could surprise him. And then he said something like that. \"I've been prayin'.\"\n\n\"You gotta peace on it?\"\n\n\"Thought you didn't care 'bout my peace.\"\n\n\"You gotta peace on it?\" Manny repeated as though Sam hadn't said a thing.\n\n\"I gotta peace on it. This mornin', Reverend Carlisle was sayin'\u2014,\"\n\n\"That's fine enough for me,\" Manny said, cutting him off. \"I want to hear what he read about,\" Manny said quickly cause even though he wasn't always trusting the words in the Bible, he did like to know what it said. \"Later. Cause that's fine enough for me. Tonight. Good Lord. I think I'm gone be sick.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 11", + "text": "Laura didn't tell Papa and her brothers about her conversation with Prince. There was no sense in worrying them. Either Prince told or he didn't. Either he would help or he wouldn't. Instead she took care of Missy Adora, sewed up Prince's two new coats in between dresses for Missy Charlotte's wedding, and did what she could to get them ready for running... including borrowing cloth to make them cloaks since there was still a bit of a chill in the air. Miss Martha took inventory every five to six weeks. Whether Prince drafted the freedom papers or not, they would be gone by that time. There was no sense in being discreet now.\n\nWhen she had decided that she was running, she didn't know, though she knew it had a lot to do with what Annie would think about her if she stayed. And Mama. Stayed? To be a slave when there was a whole world out there? It was too bad that Laura had never had any desire whatsoever to see it.\n\n\"What do you think, Laura?\" Missy Charlotte asked yet again, as she raised a burgundy silk gown against her chest. Laura said nothing. She had learned a long time ago that for questions like these, Missy Charlotte didn't really want an answer. But. Laura thought it was perfect. It was why Laura had suggested the color to Miss Martha. With Missy Charlotte's dark hair and eyes, burgundy was the best color for the girl. Or young lady. They were the same age after all. \"Laura, can I tell you something?\" Missy Charlotte asked, her voice whispering as she turned to face Laura.\n\nLaura blinked slowly in response because with sewing needles in her mouth and her hands steadily moving, she couldn't speak aloud. And it kept her from doing what she wanted to do... which was roll her eyes. Missy Charlotte always had these urges to confess things. And they were always to Laura. She confessed to stealing a candy, kissing Pierce Lafayette, faking sick. Laura supposed it was cause she felt she had to tell someone and someone who couldn't say nothing was perfect.\n\n\"I don't think I want to marry Woodrow. But Papa... ,\" Missy Charlotte sighed, eyed herself in the mirror with the burgundy dress in hand and cheered up some. This, Laura knew already. Missy Charlotte could be about as fun as a fly at a picnic, but she wasn't no dummy. Woodrow was a dummy. Laura watched as Missy Charlotte's face fell again. \"You don't know what it's like, Laura, to live with all this pressure...\"\n\n\"Charlotte?\" Miss Martha was in the hall.\n\n\"Here,\" the girl said quickly and placed the gown in her hand on the back of one of the chairs in the room before slipping into the hallway. Laura heard Miss Martha and Missy Charlotte talking but ignored them. She had so many clothes to sew she could hardly think.\n\n\"Laura,\" Miss Martha said, entering the sewing room with all the command of a general. She would have made a fine soldier, Mama had always said. Laura looked up from the lace she was furiously adding to one of Missy Charlotte's dresses and saw Miss Martha in the doorway with a skinny, dark-skinned girl next to her. Laura stopped sewing and took the needles out of her mouth. \"This is Hagar. I'm borrowing her from Mrs. Harper. She's going to help you with your sewing for the next few weeks. You would be done now if Charlotte would stop changing her mind,\" Miss Martha said, her voice tired. She was the older sister of Massa Richard. Tall and robust, she had outlived two husbands and three children. When Missy Annabelle died, she had moved in to help Massa Richard take care of Massa William, Massa Logan, Missy Charlotte and Missy Adora. She was tough, but fair. Cause Laura remembered what unfair looked like. Unfair looked like Miss Annabelle. Unfair was high strung emotions that saw the boogeyman at every corner and made you pay. Laura was no friend of Miss Martha's that was for sure, but she didn't mind her. It was thoughts like these that reminded Laura why it would be a good thing to run. Sure everything was fine now. But who was to say what things would be like later.\n\n\"Now that she's here, hopefully we can get that trousseau done.\" Hopefully the girl didn't notice much and wasn't a tattler... after all, Laura couldn't blame all the delays on Missy Charlotte's inability to make a decision.\n\n\"Yes'm,\" Laura said quietly and Miss Martha left. The skinny girl, Hagar, didn't move from her spot. \"Come, child. You can measure out the length of this lace for me,\" she said kindly. Hagar, her expression blank, came over and, following Laura's instructions began to measure and cut the lace. \"Call me when you're done,\" Laura said and quietly left the room. She looked both ways, up and down the hall. She had barely seen Prince since that day in the office. It almost seemed as though he were hiding from her. Which would be highly unlikely for him. Prince ran from nothing. Certain no one was in the hall, Laura checked all of his regular haunts: Massa Richard's office, the closet just outside Miss Martha's bedroom where he always pretended to be taking inventory, but Laura knew instead he listened in on Miss Martha's conversations, the wine cellar where he hid when he wanted to be alone, even his small bedroom, though Laura almost never saw him in there.\n\nWhen she finally came to the conclusion that she wasn't going to catch him that day, she found him. In her sewing room.\n\n\"Where's the girl? Hagar?\" Laura asked, taking a small step into the room so as to not startle Prince. Prince was rifling through her sewing kit, touching things, and rearranging things like always.\n\n\"Sent her to get something to eat. We need to talk. Close the door.\"\n\nMiss Martha didn't like closed doors in Salis House. Specially if only slaves was in the room with the door closed. But if Prince thought it was fine, then it was fine. She closed the door behind her.\n\nHe turned around and they stared at each other for one silent moment. Then he reached into his vest and pulled out several folded sheets of paper. \"You get caught, I never wrote these.\"\n\n\"No,\" Laura said, her heart racing as she walked up to him and held out her hand.\n\nHe moved his hand up, just out of her reach. \"I mean it, Laura. I've already started leaving breadcrumbs for how you could have done this on your own. I will deny it and denounce you to your face.\"\n\nLaura drew her hand back, squared her shoulders. She didn't believe him. About denouncing her. He would, however, deny it and deny it loudly. \"I understand.\" He lowered his face, made sure to make eye contact with her before handing them to her. Laura didn't bother looking at them before folding them and slipping them down the front of her dress and into a pocket she had sewn into her chemise for purposes just like these. When it came to being sneaky and underhanded, she trusted her older brother. The papers were what he said they were.\n\nPrince, who had looked away when she started adjusting her dress, looked back at her, his hazel eyes cold and lacking any warmth. \"Leave in two days' time.\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Master Richard and Master Will will be gone and you know how Fitzhugh gets when they aren't around.\" Fitzhugh, the overseer, believed that when the cat was away, the mice played. Which meant he may or may not be sober if Massa Richard and Massa Will was gone.\n\nLaura gave one decisive nod. She would go down to the cabin tonight and tell Papa and the boys.\n\n\"Don't you ask Annie for any food and don't you tell her a thing.\"\n\n\"But-,\"\n\n\"Who are they going to go to first, Laura?\" Laura bit her bottom lip, thinking. \"You need food, I'll bring it. But leave Annie out of it. Miss Martha wants nothing more than to sell Noble and Venture from right under Annie. Don't give her a reason,\" Prince warned, staring down into Laura's sewing basket again. She watched him lean down, his fingers replacing her thimble with a spool of thread. She looked up and saw the way his jaw clenched and unclenched as though it were an effort to hold back more words.\n\n\"Annie\u2014,\"\n\n\"I've said all I'm going to say about Annie.\" His voice was clipped and his words were short.\n\nAny other day, Laura would have ignored his strange mood and pushed him some more, but he had already done more than she would have expected. She would leave him alone. \"I made your coats.\"\n\n\"I know. I saw them on my bed. Amos have a route mapped out?\"\n\nLaura shook her head slowly. \"I don't know.\"\n\nPrince nodded towards her chest. \"I folded one into your paper.\"\n\nLaura clasped her hands together. It was starting to feel real. Her leaving. His staying. \"Prince, you sure\u2014,\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" he said and with that he stepped around her and left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 12", + "text": "\"You told Prince?\" Benji asked, spoon hovering in the air, inches from his mouth. Laura watched as rice slid off the utensil and back onto his plate. \"That was a fool thing to do,\" he said before stuffing his face. Then he glanced over at Papa to make sure he agreed.\n\nLaura, sitting once again at the head of the table, too looked over at Papa to see what he thought. But first she straightened her shoulders and lifted her head. He had asked for her help and she had done what she thought best. When her gaze met Papa's, his eyes held that hint of amusement that always seemed to linger when he looked at her.\n\n\"If Prince was goin' to say somethin' he'd a said it by now.\" There was a time that Papa had known Prince just as well as Laura if not more so. He had jumped the broom with Mama when Prince was not even a year old. Prince had called Papa, papa for years. Until he didn't. He had slept in their cabin for years. Until he wouldn't. It had about broke Mama's heart. But he didn't come back. Benji barely remembered him while Sol and Gid only knew him by sight. Mama and Laura was the only ones who actually talked to him. And when she left, she would never talk to him again. She exhaled, her gaze on the table before her. She hadn't realized that she would miss Prince too. Even with all of his shady ways, he would always be the one who had patiently taught her her letters and where all the best hiding spots were in Salis House. Her throat tightened up for a second and she swallowed heavily to relieve the pain.\n\n\"You ask him to come?\" Papa asked, seeing into her like he always done.\n\nBenji scoffed. \"Ain't no way that pretty boy would dirty his fingers with the likes of us.\"\n\nLaura ignored him. \"I asked. He's not comin'.\"\n\n\"Did you think he would?\"\n\n\"That's enough, Benji,\" Papa said, before returning his gaze to his plate. \"He's still your kin.\"\n\n\"No kin of mine,\" Benji muttered, always having to have the last word.\n\n\"How come he won't come?\" Gideon asked, his voice small as he tapped his spoon against his empty plate. He always ate fast as though fearful someone else would eat off his plate if he didn't hurry. Course Laura had seen Sol and Benji do just that at times, so maybe he had the right of it.\n\n\"Cause he think he's free,\" Benji answered, looking down at his spoon. \"And he's in for one surefire of an awakenin'.\"\n\n\"He doesn't think he's free,\" Laura said sharply, eyeing Benji. Benji who thought he knew everything but had spent most of his life in the smithy hiding behind Papa. \"You don't know him. So leave it be.\"\n\nBenji looked over at her and rolled his eyes so she couldn't miss it.\n\n\"Enough,\" Papa said, his voice quiet. \"We're leavin' in two days, like Prince suggested.\"\n\n\"I made cloaks for everyone,\" Laura said tiredly. And she was tired. She was literally working to the bone. Her fingers were numb. \"Prince said he's goin' to sneak us out some food.\"\n\n\"Why not Annie?\" Solomon asked and then flushed. Laura could tell even with his dark skin. Like every other boy over the age of twelve, Sol was half in love with Annie. All she had to do was smile in his direction and he was stumbling over his feet. And he wasn't near as bad as Benji who couldn't hardly talk in her presence.\n\n\"Cause it's best to leave Annie out of this. She knows we're leavin' and that we're leavin' soon, but she doesn't need to know the details.\"\n\nGideon sighed. \"I'm goin' to miss Noble and Venture.\"\n\n\"We gonna miss a lot of folks,\" Papa said quietly. \"But we've got to make up our minds this is it. We're goin' all the way. No lookin' back,\" he said, making sure to meet the gaze of all of his children. Laura could only hold his gaze for a few seconds.\n\n\"Get the bag,\" Papa said with a nod to Sol. Sol left the table and went over the floor. He dug up several boards and then hefted an old, worn bag onto the table. It was Mama's bag. Without anyone telling him too, Sol emptied the bag onto the table. The first thing that fell out was soap, and then tooth powder, combs and brushes and a small sewing kit. There was a small knife, a set of matches, willow bark for tea, and a small bottle of whiskey. Their own, crude source for doctoring. Laura sent a quick prayer to the Lord that none of it would be necessary. Last to fall out was a small book of Psalms. Prince had got it for Mama a couple years back. Laura never did have any time to read through it herself cause when Mama was alive she kept it on her person always and when she died, Papa had taken it. Every now and then he would pull it out and have Laura read a Psalm or two. Papa reached for the small book and opened it. Nestled in its pages were more than a few dollars. But he ignored the bills and kept turning the pages until he found a small, folded sheet of paper. He handed it to Laura.\n\n\"Mama and I always was thinkin' about what our family should be called,\" he said, his voice gruff as Laura unfolded the little paper. \"She wrote down a couple of ideas there,\" he said, nodding at what Laura had in her hand.\n\n\"Smith,\" Laura said, reading the first one.\n\n\"Cause I'm a blacksmith, but not everyone in our family gone work in a smithy. What's the next one say?\"\n\n\"Salis.\"\n\n\"Cause we was all born here, but I think we should start over. Leave the past in the past,\" Papa said, once again, meeting all of their eyes. \"Next one.\"\n\n\"Guy,\" Laura read slowly.\n\n\"That be my daddy's name,\" Papa said slowly. \"He came from Africa himself,\" Papa said, biting his lip as though deciding if he wanted to say more about the man. Laura didn't know much about Papa Guy. He had died before Papa and Mama even married. But she knew his end hadn't been a happy one. Mama had always hushed her from asking questions. \"Read the last one.\"\n\n\"Altan.\"\n\n\"Mama found that one. She was in the store with Miss Annabelle and met a man from some... other country.\" Papa placed a hand on the table. \"The man told Miss Annabelle his name was Altan and it meant red dawn. I always remembered that cause 'red sky at night, sailors delight. Red sky in morning, sailor's warnin'.\"\n\n\"So, a red dawn is a bad thing?\" Gideon asked, leaning forward.\n\n\"It just means rain's a comin'. And I like that idea, of being a family where somethin' is always comin' down the line. You don't have to be afraid of it none cause rain is good thing. Rain brings life and the hope of tomorrow. It's a blessin' after a season of drought. And there's nothin' drier than bein' a slave. Can't grow for nothin'. But with rain,\" Papa said, shaking his head, a small smile playing on his lips. \"That's the one, Mama and I settled on. We ain't gone be Amos, Benjamin, Laura, Solomon and Gideon of Salis House no mo'. Leave that drought-thinkin' here with all the salt that soaked up the waters of our freedom. In two days' time we gone be Amos Altan, Benjamin Altan, Laura Altan, Solomon Altan and Gideon Altan. We're startin' a new day, a new beginnin', a red dawn.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 13", + "text": "Sam hadn't always had his eye on freedom and he certainly hadn't always thought that running away was the only way to get that freedom. As a boy, working on Reverend Baptiste's small farm with his brother and his mama, life had been just fine. They had had they own small house that Mama kept clean and in order when she wasn't over at the Reverend and Missy Sarah's house, cooking and cleaning and looking after they young'uns. Sam and Manny had done all the extra work, especially the outside work like cleaning the stables and fetching things. They had never had a father. Least not one Sam could ever remember. He had asked his mama once, but she had just hushed him. Now, a grown man, Sam figured either he was sold, or they was sold, or he had just plain run off. It didn't matter much the way of it, the fact of the matter was that he was gone.\n\nBut as a boy, Sam ain't think on freedom too much. He had food in his belly, a roof over his head, he and Manny and Mama was treated just fine. There was never any reason or any sense in thinking 'bout leaving. Least not for him. Manny had got bit by the freedom bug early on when Reverend Baptiste had first read them the story of Jonah and the whale. After the story was over, Manny wanted to know how come he had never been on a ship? Reverend Baptiste had said cause he was a slave and was always gone be a slave and there wasn't never going to be a ship for Manny. But anyone who knew Manny should have known better than to tell him what he wasn't gone do. Manny took that as a challenge and became obsessed with ships and sailing and the water. It wasn't a hard thing to do considering they could smell the Potomac outside they window every morning. Whenever they was sent to town to fetch something, Sam would always do the fetching so Manny could talk to the sailors. Manny would hear they stories, store them deep in his heart like Sam did the Word of God, and retell all he had heard in whispers to Sam at night.\n\nManny started to dream. Sam could have cared less about traveling and leaving. He liked life just the way it was. But if Manny wanted to leave, well, then they was going to think about leaving. They talked to they mama 'bout it and she had told them they would have to buy they own freedom first, so they started saving as much as they possibly could. A little here, a little there. They would take turns doing things for the white men in they town whenever they had extra time like shining shoes and fetching papers... anything to get an extra penny.\n\nThey hadn't saved much when Missy Sarah died. Reverend Baptiste, overcome with grief, decided to leave his flock in Virginia... decided to go back home to his family in Georgia... decided to sell his few slaves for the money they would bring. And life as Sam had known it became for the first time ever, uncertain.\n\nSam barely remembered the auction block. But what he did remember, he remembered in vivid details. The stench of unwashed bodies, acrid fear, and overwhelming grief that permeated the air. It was so bad, Sam would have sworn that for months afterwards that he tasted it on his tongue. His mama had held his and Manny's hands, praying all the while under her tongue. Reverend Baptiste had said he would try and sell them as a family, but Sam had felt his mama's distress in their small cabin every night leading up to the auction. They had, all three of them, slept in the bed together the week before: Mama, Manny, and Sam in the middle.\n\nThey were placed in a shed that day\u2014and it was only one day cause Sam and Manny had been sold the very first day\u2014and inspected like cattle. Mama more so than them. Some men had pulled open their mouths to look at their teeth or pinched their arms to see if they were weak, but most seemed to tell on sight that he and Manny were as healthy as could be. It was Mama, they poked and prodded at while Sam and Manny had to look away. He had always wondered what they saw when they took in the thin, small, woman that he had loved fiercely. It was the first time, Sam remembered ever being enraged. He had remembered wondering, when he had first heard the story of Samson, what must have gone through Samson's mind that he could kill so many people and keep on kicking. In that moment, Sam had known. Had he been strong enough he would have grabbed something himself and tore a hole through everybody. Instead, he pushed his anger down deep and tried to ignore what was happening around him. It was an exercise that Sam had now become all too familiar with, this feeling of being cutoff at the knees. What it felt like to stand tall, he just didn't know.\n\nBeing at that auction was a moment that lived on in Sam's nightmares in random flashes whenever he had the misfortune of not falling onto his cot exhausted. But mostly the events of that day were like something that had happened to someone else cause it was not a memory Sam liked to pull out and look at with any great detail.\n\nWhat he did remember was that he, Manny, and Mama were led to an auction block, and Sam remembered still, the faces of the white men smoking cigars, laughing, and drinking as they bid on him and his brother. At first, Sam had thought they had all been bought together. But when they was taken off the stand, and Mama was not, it became quite clear that someone else could and would buy her. And someone else had. When it was time to part, Sam remembered crying, though Manny had sobbed the hardest.\n\n\"You always been softer than you should be,\" his mama had said, brushing at his face and Manny's. If it was one thing Sam wished he could change from that day other than the obvious, it would be the crying. He had cried so hard his last sight of his mama was a blurry one. If he could go back, he wouldn't cry. He would just look at her, take her in so that more than a decade later he would be able to remember more than just how thin and small she was. \"I'm just glad,\" she had started, her own voice breaking. She had pulled them in for a hug, he and Manny each holding her tighter than can be. \"You two take care of each other, you hear? Best you can.\"\n\n\"Yes, Mama,\" they had both said.\n\n\"No fightin'. Don't ever look back for me. You make it to freedom, don't come lookin' for me,\" she had whispered hard in their ears. \"Especially you, Sam,\" she had said, wiping his face. \"I know you, you would come back.\" She turned to Manny. \"Don't you let him come back. You ain't the oldest, but you keep an eye on him. I know you feel weak, but when you be weak, then you be strong. Take care\u2014,\" she had never finished that sentence cause some white man had jerked her away out of they arms and they lives forever. \"Don't ever look back for me,\" she had called out one last time. And through his grief and his rage, the first seeds of running away were planted.\n\nAnd though the seeds took root, and though they started to grow over the years, it wasn't until Sam and Manny began hearing the hushed name of Caesar in the past year that they had begun making plans. Caesar was a Negro man wanted in twelve states they said. When he showed up, whole plantations were emptied, though Sam and Manny had a hard time believing that. But what they did believe was that he knew his way north, he had never been caught before, and he had never lost a passenger. Caesar had come through they town once before, but Sam and Manny had taken too much time deliberating. It was only when the quilt was gone from Miss Tenny's house that they knew they had made a mistake. They had checked every chance they could get for any sign of the famous conductor. But he had not come back. And now they were on their own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 14", + "text": "They had tried to sleep at least for a few hours. The Ohio River was a good two days away, maybe three. This Sam knew from overhearing conversations Molloy had had with other overseers. And that was if you had a horse to carry you. There was a good chance they would be getting no sleep until they reached that body of water, this Sam knew. So he had closed his eyes tightly and tried to will his body to relax. It never happened. And by the way Manny was breathing next to him, it hadn't happened for him either. And now it was time.\n\nHe felt Manny reach over and tap a finger lightly on his hand. It had always been their signal to pay attention. Sam didn't move as Manny quietly got up and walked out of the cabin as though he were going to the outhouse. When the door closed shut behind his brother, Sam lifted his body up, and slung their bag onto his stomach. They had slept on it\u2014or rather tried to sleep on it. Everything was in it except for the blanket. It was just too big. Manny had wrapped it tight and found some string. He was going to tie it across his back and they would hope for the best. If they lost it, they lost it.\n\nSam counted, far as he could which he didn't really think was all that far. So he did it again. And again. And then quietly stood up, bag in hand, and walked out of the cabin. When he got outside, he exhaled, placed a hand over his heart. This was nothing. If he was anxious now, how would he be hours from now when he knew Molloy and the paddy rollers and the dogs was after him?\n\n\"Sam.\" His name carried like a gentle whisper from the cabin next to him.\n\nHe had been in the midst of stepping down from the small porch when the sound of his name reached him and he almost fell over sideways. Which was silly. As of right now, he wasn't doing nothing wrong.\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\nSam turned and lowered his and Manny's freedom bag to the ground. If anyone caught sight of that, they might guess what he and his brother were up to in the middle of the night. Sam walked slowly over to the cabin nearest to the one he had called home for nigh unto ten years. Ole Mose sat on the porch, barely discernible dying embers sitting in the pipe he had in his hand. In the brightness of the night, they could see each other quite clearly.\n\n\"How you know it's me?\" Sam's voice was small, quiet.\n\nOle Mose grunted. \"Always know it's you Sam. Not that hard.\" They continued to stare at each other and Sam shifted a bit. Manny was going to be worried. And angry. He wouldn't like that Sam had told Ole Mose they was leaving. But the man had helped them when they first arrived in Kentucky. The least Sam could do was tell him they was leaving. Sam opened his mouth to speak, but Old Mose beat him to it. \"When I was a boy,\" Ole Mose said slowly, his voice gravelly and low. \"And I found out my ole Massa was gone sell me, I decided to take somethin' from 'im. If I was gone suffer, he was gone suffer too. And all these years I tole myself that when I made it to freedom it was gone be my nesting egg. Gone start me on my way. And here I am, twenty years later, still sittin' on it. I'm not gonna die, still sittin' on it.\" Ole Mose reached out a hand and Sam, out of reflex, took what he had. A small bag. It jangled. And the sound made Sam flinch even as he realized what he was holding. \"Twenty dollars. In gold. Buy you your own farm. Make that lazy brother of yours help you work it.\"\n\n\"Manny's not lazy,\" Sam said by rote cause he would defend his brother always. And Manny wasn't lazy. But when folks compared them, Manny always seemed the more idle of the two when in actuality he always did exactly what he was supposed to do. But none of that had anything to do with what Ole Mose had said. Twenty dollars? Had he said twenty dollars?\n\nA smile crossed the old man's lips. \"You a good man, Sam. Find you a good woman. Have your own. I would tell you to keep all that money to yourself, but I know you, Sam.\"\n\nSam again opened his mouth, closed it; his throat so tight with emotion he could barely speak. \"Twenty dollars?\" Sam's voice was high. The amount of the money just hitting him. This changed... everything. Sam suddenly felt like he was taller, stronger, braver. He wasn't free yet, but now he finally had something. Something of worth. This feeling... it must be what it was like to be born free. If... when he and Manny made it to the other side, the possibilities would be endless.\n\n\"My ole Massa searched for years for that money. Years. Well up until the day he died.\" Bitter humor tinged Ole Mose's voice.\n\n\"You coulda bought yoself. Freed yoself.\" Maybe not right away. But certainly after the man was dead. He and Manny would have done it in a second.\n\nOle Mose gave a half-shrug. \"Some people,\" he said slowly. \"Some people.\" He stopped again. \"I know I said I was thinkin' 'bout my freedom when I took that money, but that's not true. I...\" Ole Mose's chin quivered. \"Just take it, Sam. Do somethin' with it. And if God is good, and in spite of everythin' I know He is, I'll never see you again in this life.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 15", + "text": "They didn't sleep. And they didn't talk neither. The five of them, wearing their new cloaks, were sitting with their backs against the wall of the cabin house. Laura was sandwiched between Sol and Gid. Even though both boys were just about her height, both of them lay with their heads on her shoulders. She alternately moved her head from side to side touching them gently. They each had their own fraudulently drafted free papers, tucked in the pockets of their clothes. The papers. Laura had waited to look at them until she came to the cabin. When she had finally read them, she had been confused. The names on the papers were not their own. The owners on the paper were Massa Richard's cousins. But when she had told Papa, he had shaken his head and muttered that Prince was 'too smart for his own good'. She had handed each of her brother's the papers that seemed to be theirs. Gideon had beamed when he slid his papers into a slit in his pants and declared that having a sister who could sew was really just the best thing. He was a sweet boy. She was beginning to see that now.\n\nPapa and Benji were carrying their bags. Laura didn't know when Prince had found the time or how he had procured the food, but Sol and Gid said that the first thing they saw when they got back from working in the coal mine was a bag filled with bread, cheese, and meat. It was enough food to last them a week if they were careful. Papa and Benji had split the food and split the money and Laura pretended not to know that it was just in case they themselves were split up. Cause if they were split up...\n\nLaura bounced her thoughts to a different topic. Annie. Noble. Venture. She hadn't told Annie they were leaving, but she had gotten up early, leaving Missy Adora sleep in her room that morning. She had walked down to the slave quarters to Annie's cabin. She had helped Annie get her small boys dressed and fed that morning, holding their sweet, wiggling bodies against her as tightly as they would allow. And when Ma Dovie had come to collect the boys and walk them to Essie's cabin for watching, Annie had slipped her arm through Laura's and they had walked back to Salis House together. In silence. Laura felt a tear slide down her face. Annie was the closest thing to a sister she had ever had and Noble and Venture were almost like her own babies. She let out a shuddering sigh.\n\nMissy Adora had still been sleep when Laura slid back in her room. But soon they were reading the Psalm of the day and chatting like usual. At least Missy Adora was chatting. Laura wasn't able to say a word. Laura wasn't stupid. Theirs was not a relationship of equals. Not like what she had with Noble and Venture who she could hug and kiss anytime and pop them on their bottoms at other times. But she had known Missy Adora all her life and...\n\nShe needed something else to think about. Like Ma Dovie and Essie? Susan and Atlas? Charity, Faith, and Hope? Laura tapped the wall with the back of her head. Prince? Who had avoided her all day so that she hadn't had a chance to say goodbye? She shut that thought down right away.\n\n\"It's time.\" Papa's voice was barely a whisper, but they all got up. \"One at a time now. Slowly. A slow slave is 'bout they business. A fast one is in trouble.\" One by one they slipped out of the cabin, taking care to make sure they weren't seen.\n\nThey met up in the far pasture walking swiftly in the darkness. But it was not difficult. The sky was clear and the stars and moon were bright. They would enjoy it while they could, cause when they reached the end of Massa Richard's land, they would be heading straight for the forest.\n\nLaura tried not to think about all, about who, she was leaving behind, but all she had were her thoughts and she was so lost in them she almost missed the figure that was sitting on the fence.\n\n\"Lord a mercy,\" Papa said quietly, coming to a stop as the shape unraveled itself. Prince.\n\n\"Prince!\" Laura said and surged forward, past Papa, past her brothers, but then stopped at the scowl on Prince's face as his feet hit the ground. \"You comin'?\"\n\n\"I told you I wasn't.\"\n\n\"Then why...\"\n\n\"Patrollers. Coming from that way.\" Laura's heart sank. They were out already. It didn't matter none that Massa Richard and Massa Will was gone. \"Least that's what I heard. If you walk all the way down, it'll get dicey. Best to cross here.\"\n\nPapa, Benji, Sol, and Gid reached them in time to hear him. Papa let out a rough exhale, took a step forward, and placed a hand on Prince's shoulder. Laura couldn't stop her own wince when Prince flinched. Prince hated to be touched. By anyone. Except Mama.\n\n\"Son,\" Papa said and Prince flinched again. \"I was right outside the cabin when your mama brought you into this world; when she named you Prentiss and Massa Richard changed it to Prince as though you were some kind of... horse.\" Dog. That's what Papa used to mumble whenever he talked about Prince to Mama. \"You slept between us every night til you could walk.\" His voice was low, and Laura didn't have to see his face to know his gaze was piercing. She did shoot a glance at Prince. Prince was looking away, either unwilling or unable to meet Papa's gaze. \"I've always, always, considered you to be my firstborn,\" Papa said, his voice wavering slightly as his hand hesitantly reached up as though to touch Prince's hair, but then rejected the idea. His hand settled back down on Prince's stiff shoulder. \"When you find what you're lookin' for Prentiss, we'll be waitin'.\" Papa took a step back and then hefted his large body over the fence and disappeared on the other side of the road. Benji took one look at Prince, sniffed, and did the same. Prince rolled his eyes. Had the two of them ever been close before? For the first time, Laura wondered. Cause Prince had always seemed to belong just to her and Mama.\n\nSol took a step forward. \"Thanks for helpin' us, Prince.\"\n\nGideon reached out and pressed his hand against Prince's sleeve, ignoring the way Prince almost jerked back. \"I like you just fine.\" And then those two were gone.\n\nPrince folded his arms over his chest, his jaw clenched, his eyes on the ground. Finally, he looked up. \"What are you waiting for? You ain't got all night.\" Laura opened her mouth. \"I'm a tell you what I know Annie told you. If you're thinking about staying, you're a bigger fool than I thought.\"\n\n\"She didn't say that.\" Though she had said something similar. Laura took a step closer to her brother. \"You make a hole in the kitchen wall so you could listen in?\"\n\nPrince looked down at her with such an expression of disgust that if Laura didn't know any better she would think he would be appalled at being called out for being a sneak. When she didn't look away, his scowl turned into a smirk. \"Too obvious. Anyone could see me. I just know she would leave if she could. You go on. Life is good for you now, but there's no promise it will be in the future.\"\n\n\"I could just as easily say the same for you.\"\n\nPrince tilted his head to the side. \"Don't you worry about me. I can take care of myself.\"\n\nShe would never not worry about him. Even when he made her madder than a hornet she never forgot that he was her big brother. He was not her friend. He was not her confidant, and quite frankly, she didn't like him half the time. But after Mama died, he was the family member she loved the most. \"You don't have to. If you come with us.\"\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\n\"Mama said\u2014,\"\n\n\"Mama's dead,\" he said flatly. But Laura wasn't fooled into thinking that her death hadn't bothered him. She had found him sobbing in a corner the day Mama died. \"Stop living for a dead woman and live for yourself.\"\n\n\"Prince.\"\n\n\"Laura!\" he hissed, disentangling his arms and making his hands into fists. With a deep breath, he took a step forward and in a move, totally uncharacteristic of him, he placed his hands on the sides of her face. Tears slid down her cheeks and she could see them glistening in his own eyes. \"Go. And for goodness' sake, don't look back.\" And then he pulled her in for a very tight, very quick hug before pushing her toward the fence.\n\nShe stumbled for a second. \"Would you have let Sol and Gid be sold?\"\n\n\"Laura,\" he groaned quietly. Then he sighed. \"Yes.\" His answer hung in the air for a second. \"But I had already arranged for them to be sold to the Osbornes.\" Their neighbors. Good people as far as masters were concerned. \"Just. Go.\"\n\nLaura climbed over the fence. Paused. \"I love you, Prentiss.\" Laura hesitated for a quick second, unsure as to why she had used that name. She never called Prince, Prentiss.\n\nShe did not wait for his reply because she knew she wouldn't get one." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 16", + "text": "It became quite clear to Laura, after what felt like days of walking through the Virginia forest but was probably more like five or six hours, that Papa knew this land. Intimately. The paths they walked seemed clear of fallen trees and large rocks and just when thirst seemed like it would swallow her whole, he always knew where to stop and get refreshed. It was after the second time that they stopped that she realized it. Nothing about this was a surprise to him. And just how was that possible? And just how had Mama known that?\n\nShe tripped. Fell. Her wrists and knees taking most of her weight. Any other day she would have stayed down, got her breath back in her body. But today or that night rather, she stood back up and brushed at her skirts ignoring the shoots of pain because if she focused on her wrists or her knees, she might also start thinking about her toes. She was sure blisters had formed. Gideon, an hour or so back, had told her it would be better if she took her shoes off and walked barefoot like them, but Laura knew that wasn't so. She never walked around barefoot. Miss Martha hated the sight of toes. Especially slave toes. Laura had worn a pair of shoes every day of her life she could remember. Sturdy shoes. Not ones made of kid and silk like Missy Charlotte and Missy Adora, but black leather shoes that could last for years. At least Laura had once thought so. Now she wasn't so sure. But she still wouldn't take them off. It was far more startling to take them off and step on the grass or dip them in water. If she went barefoot now, it would take mere seconds for the ground to cut up her feet and she would be in a worse condition then. So she kept her shoes on and tried to ignore the wetness in her stockings that came not from sweat but from blood.\n\nThe sound of the familiar clear sound of a warbler made Laura stop and reach out for the tree nearest her. Warblers sang at night? But when she looked up, it was just Papa. Whistling.\n\n\"Yes?\" Benji's voice was low. Laura couldn't see him, but she knew he and the boys weren't that much far ahead.\n\n\"You know where to go?\" Papa's voice was quiet, just above a whisper.\n\n\"Yes,\" Benji said firmly as he stepped into viewing, Sol and Gid alongside him. It was a clear night, not a cloud in the sky. Laura had no problem making out Papa on her left and her brothers on her right.\n\n\"Take Gid and Sol and go.\" Laura stiffened, forced herself to stand up straight. She had kept up. She may have fallen a few times and she certainly didn't move as fast, but she had never stopped moving unless Papa stopped them.\n\nBenji slid his eyes over to Laura, saying nothing though his question was loud.\n\n\"We'll catch up. But you go on.\" Papa's voice broke no argument.\n\n\"Papa,\" Gid started, taking a step forward.\n\n\"Go.\"\n\nBenji sent her a look that was too familiar. And while Laura could take it from Prince, she never took it from Benji. She made a face back. Benji grabbed the backs of Gid and Sol's cloaks and the three of them took off in the night faster than Laura had ever seen them move before. Well. She had been holding them back.\n\n\"Come on,\" Papa said and motioned for her to move ahead of him.\n\nShame. Embarrassment. Frustration. Laura fought all of three of the emotions as she moved forward. If they were caught... if something happened... her fault.\n\n\"No shame,\" Papa said, reading her mind like he somehow always managed too. \"You wasn't raised for this. You was raised to be a lady.\"\n\n\"Not hardly,\" Laura spat out as she stomped forward and angrily swiped a hanging branch out of her face.\n\n\"It's hard for you now. But it'll be hard for us later. And we'll need you then. Just like you need us now. There's no shame in needin' others, baby girl.\"\n\nLaura gritted her teeth. He always had an answer. Always kind. Always patient. Always making Laura feel guilty about things she couldn't change. This man was a stranger and yet he acted like he knew her inside and out. \"Just tell me where to go. I'll find it by myself.\"\n\nPapa didn't respond and she wasn't sure he had even heard her when he finally said. \"Nothin' on this earth would make me leave my little girl.\"\n\nLaura grunted and said nothing as together they moved as quick as she could up the small path, Papa just behind her, catching her every time she tripped over something.\n\nWhen he reached out to grab her again, she started to pull her arm out of his grip. She had not almost fallen that time. \"Papa\u2014,\"\n\nInstead of loosening his grip, it tightened. The look on his face when she turned to speak, made her freeze. It was a look she had never seen on his face before. Fear. \"Listen,\" his voice was barely a whisper.\n\nBut she held her breath, didn't move. And then she heard it. The sound of barking. Dogs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 17", + "text": "\"How did you know about this place?\" Sam whispered to his brother. They were sitting with their backs against a wall in a cellar in the very back where light didn't reach. They had run for miles, and then walked swiftly for miles, and then when the stars started winking out of the sky, realized they needed to find a place to hide during the day. Two darkies travelling in the light of day without a pass would get them sent right back to Massa Charles.\n\n\"I remembered it. Molloy loaned me and Abram out to the Langfords three summers ago. Remember?\"\n\n\"Yeah.\"\n\n\"I caught sight of Mrs. Langford comin' out of here one time.\"\n\n\"Good thinkin', Manny.\"\n\n\"Still cain't believe Ole Mose gave you twenty dollars. Cain't hardly believe he even had twenty dollars,\" Manny muttered to himself. Sam had told him when he had caught up with him.\n\n\"Yeah, God's been good to us, Manny.\"\n\nManny grunted. \"If we at the Langfords, then we 'bout two day from the Ohio.\"\n\n\"Sounds about right,\" Sam said slowly. He was tired. Dead tired. But just thinking about the many miles they had left to close between them and the river Jordan sent his heart racing. And he had a hard time sleeping if his heart was racing.\n\n\"Two days. And then freedom,\" Manny said uncharacteristically optimistic. Because they had both seen and heard about slaves crossing the Ohio only to be returned. But Sam wasn't going to dwell on that. Manny closed his eyes and rested his head against Sam's shoulder. Snores followed in seconds. They had agreed to take shifts. Manny would sleep first shift and Sam second. Sam laid his own head back against the wall, yawning so wide it felt like his jaws snapped for a second. It had been a long night to be sure.\n\nSam cast his thoughts back to only hours earlier, running fast, pushing his body hard. Seemed like he had always pushed his body hard, but there was just something about knowing that this time it was for him and that made it all the while sweeter. He felt his body began to relax, his blood no longer humming. It seemed as good a time as any to pray, to seek God. If there was any time he could use direction it was now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 18", + "text": "Sam came awake quickly, but slowly, first unsure of where he was and then feeling a shoot of fear race down his spine. He was on the run. And he had fallen asleep. He sat up straight, looked down, Manny was curled around a bag of potatoes, still snoring. What had woken him?\n\n\"Alright, Mama,\" a small voice called from above. The cellar's covering jerked. For the second time. It was the first time that had awoken him. Sam placed a hand over his brother's mouth and shook him. When Manny turned startled eyes in his direction, he placed a finger over his own mouth, and then the cellar lid lifted. Manny scooted as far back as he could into a dark corner, pulling Sam alongside him. They both pulled their legs in, tucking them tight against themselves. In an effort to keep from moving, Sam dug his fingers into his calves.\n\nSam, who had been cool, almost cold a few moments ago, felt sweat beginning to emerge all over his body as the white girl walked slowly down the ladder, a basket swinging off of her arm. Had his breathing always been so loud? Sam switched between breathing out of his nose to out of his mouth, not certain which one was quieter. He felt Manny's iron grip on his arm, and knew his skin was bruising. But he didn't move. Don't see us. Lord, don't let her see us.\n\nThe girl hummed to herself as she ran her fingers along the jars of preserves tucked on the shelves of the cellar. Each note of whatever song she was thinking about was like a needle in his skin.\n\nJust make it stop, God. Lord, don't let her want anything over here, Lord Jesus.\n\nFinally, after what felt like hours, she made a sound of excitement, grabbed several jars of something, and headed back up the ladder.\n\nWhen the cellar door closed and they could hear her chattering voice begin to dim, Manny let out a rough breath. \"That was... that was... ,\"\n\nSam closed his eyes tight, his fingers still digging into his legs.\n\n\"Did you fall asleep?\" Manny asked, his voice stiff with accusation in the darkness.\n\n\"I didn't mean to.\" His voice was laced with tight apology. He could have gotten them both caught. Killed.\n\nManny yawned in response. \"The important thing is you woke up in time.\" Manny's hand gripped Sam's shoulder. \"Let it go. I'd rather be in this cellar knowin' you have my back than anyone else.\"\n\nSam's shoulders dropped. Manny could sure be a pain, but he always knew the right thing to say when Sam was upset.\n\n\"Your turn to sleep anyway.\" Manny stood up slowly, stretching and yawning again. \"I'm goin' to find us somethin' to eat.\"\n\nSam woke again, several hours later to Manny's gentle shoving. He blinked, his eyes adjusting to the dark. Before, little slivers of light had found cracks in the cellar door so that they weren't completely immersed in darkness. Now, Sam could barely see the hand in front of his face.\n\n\"Eat this. It's 'bout time to go,\" Manny said quietly, sliding a jar of something cool in Sam's hands. The top was already off and Sam could smell apples. He stuck his fingers in the jar, sinking his hands into the cold liquid and scooping the small pieces of apple out and into his mouth. He downed the jar fast and then drank the juice that was left in the jar. Manny had a second jar in his hand before his first one hit the ground. \"Do you want peppers or beans? Either way it might sit funny on your stomach, but we got maybe two days till we reach the river and we got to eat somethin'.\" Sam said nothing and reached for what looked like the green beans. \"There are some clouds, but the sky is still clear enough to see what we need to see.\"\n\n\"You checked?\" Sam asked around his bites of the beans.\n\n\"Yeah. I was careful though. Lights are out in the house. Hopefully everyone sleep out there.\"\n\nSam finished his quick meal of apples and green beans, which actually didn't feel too bad in his stomach. What felt bad was how much he had to pee.\n\n\"You ready, big brother?\"\n\n\"I'm ready,\" Sam said, standing slowly and stretching like he had seen Manny do. He reached down and grabbed their bag, started moving stuff around.\n\n\"What are you doin'?\"\n\n\"Stealin'...\"\n\n\"Boy, you sometimes is crazy. You bet not give them one thing. Not one! Sides, I worked here for them for free.\"\n\n\"They probably paid Massa Charles...\"\n\n\"Massa Charles work out here? He sweat out here? No. I did. Far as I'm concerned, all these jars mine,\" Manny hissed across the darkness of the cellar. He grabbed the rolled up blanket that they had not used and began to climb the ladder. Sam stuck his hand in his bag. It wasn't like he was going to give them much. He fingered a few of the coins he and Manny had managed to save up before Ole Mose had given them his money and he placed them in an empty spot on the shelf. He was no thief. Though the thought had him snorting. He supposed in some ways he was a thief. After all, he was stealing himself. He adjusted the bag so that it was out of his way, and then climbed the ladder and into the darkness.\n\nThey spent another night running. He should have been more tired, Sam thought, with the wind racing past his face. But there was something on the inside of him, that wouldn't let him rest. Thank the good Lord.\n\nThey spent the next morning on the ground of the forest, tucked under a tree. Manny had slipped a few more jars of preserves in Sam's bag, and they feasted on pickled squash. It was not Sam's favorite, but he wasn't hardly going to complain. And with all the energy they had lost running, it had actually tasted better than he had thought.\n\nWhen it got so dark, the only light was the sliver of moon in the sky, they slid from under the tree and ran again. When they began to smell the water in the air, Sam felt as though his heart just might burst.\n\n\"We close,\" Manny said excitedly, barely panting as he ran alongside him. Sam could see a flash of his teeth in the darkness.\n\nSam started to reply when he heard a familiar voice call out in the darkness.\n\n\"Sam! Manny! That you?\"\n\nSam came to a stop, his heart pounding so hard he almost placed a hand over it in case it tried to leave his chest.\n\n\"Oh my God,\" Manny said from next to him, coming to a stop.\n\nA few feet away, lantern in hand was Molloy, and several other men that Sam recognized as paddy rollers. Horses were standing quietly, nibbling on the grass before them. Sam's eyes darted over to the tents and the men sitting and drinking. He sniffed and smelled the scent of a fire just freshly put out. They had been waiting for them. All of that running with an eye over their shoulder and Molloy had been waiting for them.\n\n\"Sam, you come now, ain't nothin' goin' to happen but a lickin'. And it's one you surely deserve. Manny's just gone get a lickin' too. I promise you that.\" Molloy's promises meant nothing. They had never meant a thing to Sam before he had run, and they sure didn't mean a thing now.\n\n\"But if you don't come. I'm gone sell Manny so far down the river you'll never see him again. Don't you make us chase you now, boy.\" Molloy took a step closer to them, the lantern illuminating his sweaty figure in the distance. \"Sam. You come here now. I promise. I won't sell Manny.\"\n\nSam swallowed, his mouth laced with fear. No matter what, his brother came first. Always. His stomach clenched with tight pain.\n\n\"I'll never forgive you. All that talk about trustin' God and you just give in.\" Manny's voice was quiet, hard. And just what Sam needed. Only his eyes moved, touching his brother's. And then together they took off at a dead run.\n\nSam heard Molloy cursing in the distance, heard the gentle neighing of horses alerting Sam to the fact that the chase was about to get more difficult. \"Manny,\" Sam said, reassuring himself that no matter what happened they were in this together.\n\n\"We're not goin' back,\" Manny's voice was low, angry. Sam pushed harder.\n\n\"We can't outrun horses,\" Sam said, even as they flew past trees and hopped over downed branches. Sam had never, in his life moved so fast. He was fairly certain, he would never do so again.\n\n\"We don't have to,\" Manny said, sprinting even faster. Sam moved to catch up with his brother. And then, over the sounds of men yelling and horses running, Sam could hear it, the rushing sound of water. The Ohio.\n\nIt had been years since Sam and Manny had learned how to swim, but that didn't stop them as they plunged into the icy river, the cold literally snatching Sam's breath.\n\n\"You go in there, you'll drown,\" Molloy called out, stopping his horse at the river's edge.\n\nNeither Sam nor Manny responded as they waded deeper into the river, both ignoring the stinging needles of cold that pierced through their clothes and found their skin. Sam skidded a few inches, the rush of the current pushing him sideways.\n\n\"We can do it, Sam,\" Manny said just ahead of him, the water at his brother's neck now. There was a fierce determination in his brother's voice the likes of which Sam had never heard before. But they had spent their childhood swimming in the Potomac like fish, preparing for the day when Manny and Sam would take to the waters and become sailors. Until they learned that most sailors couldn't swim and it wasn't a skill needed for sailing. But they needed it now. Lord, how they needed it now. God had prepared them for this moment, years ago, Sam thought as the familiarity of moving in water began to come back. Sam kicked his legs out, swung his arms forward. He would win no races today, not like he had as a child. But that didn't matter, after all, today the race wasn't to the swift, he just needed to get to the other side.\n\n\"I know we can,\" Sam replied to his brother once he got his bearings, even as the current began to pull them further apart.\n\n\"Don't think you can hide in Ohio! I'll find you! There's nowhere you can go where I won't find you!\"\n\nSam barely heard Molloy as he braced himself to take a deep breath. \"Don't you worry about me. See you on the other side.\"\n\n\"You better,\" Manny called out, the current having carried him several feet further away. And then he disappeared under the water. And Sam followed.\n\nSam didn't know how long he took swimming that river. He was certain he had been carried quite a ways downstream from where they originally entered, but he knew Manny had been too, so he wasn't worried. The only important thing was that they made it to the other side. And then suddenly he was there. He didn't bother to walk out of the water. He crawled, cold, soaking wet, more tired than he had ever been in his entire life, but alive. And on the other side.\n\n\"Oh, thank God,\" he said, almost breathlessly.\n\n\"I wouldn't thank Him just yet,\" a quiet voice called from the darkness." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 19", + "text": "The stark terror that crossed Papa's face was so fleeting, so barely there, that for a moment, Laura wasn't sure she had even seen it.\n\n\"Run,\" Papa growled, his voice reaching far back in his throat and even before the single word was completed, he had taken off, Laura's arm tight in his grip. They moved over rocks, fallen trees, grown plants, and even an animal or two. Her thighs were burning as they moved uphill not slowing their pace in any way, climbing the hill as though they had done it every day.\n\nShe had thought she had moved fast before, but an unknown surge of energy hit her and she knew she was moving at a speed unlike any other. Forgotten were the aches and pains from a moment ago. She flew across the Virginia forest like a bird. It also helped that Papa had a hold of her. But he dropped her hand when they crossed a very small, very short bridge, confirming to Laura that Papa knew this land, knew exactly where they were. So why hadn't they run before when Mama was alive and Prince was more amenable?\n\nMaybe it was the fact that she been thinking too much, or maybe her speed had slowed down some. Either way, Laura found herself several feet behind Papa, barely catching sight of him as she ran behind him. She tripped over a log and it was enough to send her flying towards the ground. Hearing barking not too far away, she scrambled onto her knees and looked back. She could hardly swallow as she saw a couple of Massa Will's fine bloodhounds in the distance, their eyes glowing in the dim light making them look like demons that had just escaped from hell.\n\n\"Laura!\" Papa wasn't bothering to be quiet now.\n\n\"Go,\" Laura said, her voice low, weak, her eyes filling with tears. \"Go.\" The word was like a sob, but still she pushed herself to her feet. It didn't matter that it was a wasted venture. She was Phoebe's daughter. She wouldn't just lay there and let them catch her. She got to her feet, stumbling as she tried to get past her fear and get her feet to move. She would never outrun them now. \"Just leave me. Go,\" she said, even as she began to pick up speed. She could hardly see through the tears that fogged her eyes. She wasn't going to be responsible for Papa getting caught. Not if he could get away. If everyone got away except her it would be worth it. But she didn't know what would await her when they caught up to her. Would she be whipped? She had been slapped before. But she had never been whipped. Sold? Some body part of hers cut off? She fought the urge to vomit.\n\n\"Never,\" Papa said, appearing at her side right out of thin air. He grabbed her arm and jerked her forward. \"Run. And don't you look back.\"\n\n\"Papa,\" Laura whispered frantically, pausing. Was he... did he... she couldn't leave him. The thought of him going back to Salis and her making it to freedom just cause she wasn't fast enough was enough to make her want to find a hole somewhere to crawl up in and die. \"Papa.\"\n\n\"Go,\" he said and gave her a push. And then two of the dogs were on him. She heard growling and the sound of something tearing. The smell of iron, blood filled the air. She ran forward, grabbed a loose branch, but when she turned to help him, it was too late. The dogs were dead and Papa was standing, breathing hard, a bloody knife in his hand. \"Girl, if you don't get...\"\n\nLaura dropped the stick and ran. This time when Papa caught up with her and grabbed her arm, he didn't let go. They ran, Laura didn't know how far, to a stream where Papa stopped and dunked her in the deepest part before immersing himself. \"It'll slow them down a bit,\" he said as they dragged themselves to the other side of the small stream. \"But we still have to move fast. You can do this, Laura.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Laura growled. Even though she didn't know. But she wouldn't slow down. She didn't know what waited for her if she got caught, but whatever it was, it wasn't good. \"They're not goin' to catch us.\"\n\n\"No,\" Papa said, his voice sounding light. \"They not. Now move.\"\n\nAn hour later, Laura and Papa were being very quietly rushed into a space in a floor by a white man that Laura recognized as a minister from the next county over.\n\nThe space was small, and when the floor was replaced atop their heads. Dark. It smelled of unwashed bodies and dirt, but Laura wasn't hardly about to complain. It was safe. She was safe. And besides, her own odor was adding nothing to the space. Laura tried to move over to give Papa some room because surely he had to be feeling all kinds of discomfort, but there was nowhere to move.\n\n\"Laura? Sit this way,\" Papa said and helped her maneuver so she sat with her back against his chest. He stretched his legs out with a sigh that fanned her cheek.\n\n\"Where are the boys?\" Laura asked quietly.\n\n\"At a different safe house.\" He gave her shoulders a reassuring squeeze.\n\nLaura said nothing for a moment even though her mind was filled with questions, but when she opened her mouth, the only thing that came out was, \"You came back.\"\n\n\"Course I came back,\" Papa said simply. \"You think I was goin' to leave my baby girl?\" Laura didn't say what she was thinking, which was that she might be his by blood, but in many ways that mattered, she wasn't really his.\n\nBut he must have heard her silent thoughts. \"You're mine. My little girl. Me and my Phoebe's second baby.\" Cause he considered Prince to be the first. \"I still remember the day you were born like it was just yesterday. You came out so quiet Dovie had to slap your bottom twice. And a head full of hair! You my baby girl. You've always been my baby girl.\" Laura swallowed, looking down at her hands, her jaw clenched in an effort to hold back any emotion. Though why she felt like crying was beyond her. \"I know you was only close to Phoebe and Prince... I know it was hard to leave your brother. I know how close you two are.\"\n\n\"Not that close. He was barely even nice,\" Laura mumbled. And then shivered. Her clothes and her cloak had dried some in their walk to the house, but she was still damp. It was a miserable feeling. But still better than being caught by one of those dogs. \"But sometimes,\" she started quietly. \"Sometimes, he would do some very nice things.\"\n\n\"Like what?\" Papa asked quietly, running his hands up and down her arms in an effort to get her warmed.\n\n\"One time, I was cleanin' in Miss Martha's parlor room and knocked over a vase.\" She never should have been dusting in that room upset as she was at the time. Annie had just delivered Noble. She had refused to discuss his father during her pregnancy, no matter that Miss Martha kept pressing so that she could try and force Annie to marry. Laura had asked once, but Mama had told her to leave it alone. But when Noble came out with those green eyes and pale skin of his, it became quite clear to everyone at his birth, Mama, Laura, Ma Dovie, and even Prince who had arrived late with water they had sent for an hour ago, who the boy's father was. It had shaken up Laura good. So good, she hadn't been careful. \"No one heard it fall except Prince.\" Laura sniffed, remembering. \"I thought he would tell on me for sure, but he didn't. He went and got a bag and scooped up all the pieces. Told me not to say a word. The next day, Massa Richard horsewhipped Massa Logan for breakin' Miss Martha's vase.\" Papa's hands stopped. \"Somehow Prince had made it look like Massa Logan had broken it when he had come home... inebriated the night before.\" Laura said, recalling Miss Martha's words.\n\n\"How?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" Laura said with a small laugh. \"Prince has a way of gettin' things done just how he likes and it don't matter if you white or Negro.\"\n\n\"But he was able to get Massa Logan whipped?\" Papa asked. She could hear the awe in his voice.\n\n\"Yes. Prince hates Massa Logan. Almost more than Annie hates Massa Logan. Three times he's gotten Massa Logan real good.\"\n\n\"When was the next time?\"\n\n\"Less than a year later, Massa Logan fell down the stairs and broke his leg. He wasn't able to go to Europe with his cousins that summer.\"\n\n\"How you know that was Prince?\"\n\n\"I saw his face afterwards.\" Prince had not pushed him. Laura knew that because she had been standing on the stairs one floor above Massa Logan. Prince hadn't even left something on the stairs for Massa Logan to trip over. How Massa Logan fell down those stairs was a mystery to her, but that Prince had had a hand in it wasn't. The small, triumphant humorless grin on his face when he left his hidey hole on the second floor had told her that.\n\n\"And the third time?\"\n\n\"Massa Logan got caught stealin' from Massa Richard and Massa Richard had him whipped again,\" Laura said quickly. Annie and Laura had holed up in the kitchen snickering at random moments that day while Prince sat at the lone table and devoured the entire peach pie Annie had been forced to bribe him with cause he had caught Noble in the house. He had not been snickering. But there had been a... satisfied feeling in the air around him. His hatred for Massa Logan was the only thing Annie liked about Prince.\n\n\"That boy,\" Papa muttered, but there was a hint of pride in there too. \"He's a bit scary.\"\n\n\"Yeah.\" She didn't want to talk about Prince anymore. Didn't want to think about Annie. It hurt too much. \"Papa?\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"How come you know where you goin'?\"\n\n\"Caught that did you?\"\n\n\"Mmm hmm.\"\n\nPapa sighed again and since she was sitting so close to him, her body sank in with his. \"My pa came from Africa. 'Member that?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"He was sold to Massa Phineas, Massa Richard's father, soon as he got off the boat.\" When Papa said no more, she tapped a finger against his knee. \"He tried to escape five times. Twice he received the lash. His back,\" Papa sighed again. She felt him shake his head in sorrow. \"The third time they cut off his ear and then branded a letter on his face. An 'R' I think it was. He was a big man, and a hard worker. Massa Phineas wanted him out in them fields.\"\n\n\"What about grandmama?\"\n\n\"Mama was born at Salis House. She ain't never have a desire to leave. And I had two brothers die there. She ain't want to leave their bodies. She just... couldn't let go.\"\n\n\"But Papa Guy could?\"\n\n\"Wasn't nothin' he wanted more than to be free,\" Papa said simply. \"Fourth time he was whipped again. Fifth time... fifth time, he took me with him.\" Papa's voice was real quiet now, barely above a whisper. \"When they caught him that time... they had dogs too then. I just... they brought him home in pieces.\" Laura drew her knees to her chest, holding them tight, and blinking back tears. That could have been her. That could have been her. \"I hate dogs, Laura. Hate them.\"\n\n\"Did they punish you?\"\n\n\"A few lashes. Nothin' serious. I was still a boy. They placed all the blame on Pa.\"\n\n\"You came back for me.\"\n\n\"Course I did.\" Papa wrapped an arm around her shoulders, squeezed her tight. \"Course I did. For years, I was too scared to try and run again. But. I knew what freedom meant to my pa, so I learned the best ways to escape and tried to help those who was runnin'. Whenever I had to go up north for somethin' I walked these routes, got them branded in my mind. Kept my ears and eyes open in case I ever worked up the nerve to try again.\"\n\n\"But you didn't think you would?\"\n\n\"No. If Massa Richard had kept on botherin' Phoebe, then we would have gone. But after Prince was born, he left her alone.\" So. Massa Richard was Prince's father. Not that she hadn't thought so, but now she knew her dislike of him was justified. \"Then you were born, and Ben, Sol, and Gid. It didn't make sense to run with small children. Phoebe and I decided that we would only try it if we had too. One of you being sold fell under 'had too'.\"\n\n\"Was it hard?\" To try again.\n\n\"Yes. Me and God had us some words.\" He paused. \"Dogs got me first. And my pa kept runnin'. I understand why he did. Lord, when they caught him... but... I'll never leave my children. I know I ain't been the best papa to you but it's not cause I didn't want to.\" Laura had been placed with Missy Adora when she was seven. She had rarely had a reason to go back to the cabin after that. \"But everythin's gone change Laura. I promise you that. Everythin's gone change.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 20", + "text": "\"That was some impressive swimmin' you and the other fella did,\" the speaker said as Sam gaped up at him, trying to catch his breath. And still his heartbeat. He didn't think he had ever been more scared in his life. And that was saying something seeing as he had just swam away from Molloy.\n\nIt was a Negro man. No. A Negro boy, Sam realized as the speaker stood up from his squatting position. Thin and shorter than Sam and not yet shaving.\n\n\"You plannin' on layin' there all day or what?\"\n\nSam slowly climbed to his feet and felt for his bag. It was still there. Dripping water all down his leg. But still there. He turned and looked back, seeing lights on the other side of the shore in the distance. Molloy and his men.\n\n\"If they ain't got no boat, they ain't gone cross right now. But you still best make yoself scarce cause I can promise you they are a comin'.\"\n\nSam turned and looked down at the lanky boy talking to him. The boy had on what looked like a sea cap that he had seen sailors wearing growing up, a hat with a wide brim that provided shade from the sun as needed. Except, the more he looked at it, the more he saw that it was different. Not a sea cap then. The boy also had on a coat and a shirt and... a belt with a gun and bullets attached. Sam stared at the gun hard. He had never seen a Negro with a gun. And here this child was with one. He looked at the boy's feet. They were covered in some shoes Sam had never seen before. Looked like unfinished leather or something.\n\n\"You done?\" The boy, his hands now on his waist stared back at Sam. He might have been young, but his eyes were old. Whoever he was, he wouldn't be easily dismissed.\n\n\"I ain't never seen a Negro with a gun.\"\n\n\"I'm sure there's a lot of things you ain't seen. Come on. Let's find the other one.\"\n\nSam didn't know why he followed the boy except that the boy seemed to know exactly what he was doing and where he was going. And Sam needed to find Manny.\n\n\"My name is Sam,\" Sam said quietly filling the silence. It seemed the thing to do. But then as soon as Sam had spoken, he realized it was a mistake. From the way the boy moved almost soundlessly and stood only in shadows, Sam knew that now wasn't the time for pleasantries.\n\n\"Did I ask you for your name?\"\n\nSam bit his lip but didn't say anything as they made their way further down the shore line. And then there, walking slowly was Manny.\n\n\"Manny!\" Sam said in whispered excitement. He raised a hand so his brother could see him.\n\nManny raise a hand in reply and half ran to catch up with Sam and the boy. \"We did it, Sam,\" Manny said, his grin wide and big, even in the night. Sam reached out a hand and Manny ignored it, pulling him into a tight hug. They both laughed quietly.\n\n\"Grant it you got far, but you ain't did nothin' yet,\" the boy said, reminding Sam of his presence before taking something out of his pocket and dragging it across the side of his belt. Fire appeared in his hand at the tip of the match he had lit.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Manny asked as the boy held the flame up. His eyes went to Sam's face and then to Manny's and then back to Sam's and then back to Manny's. \"If you don't get that out of my face,\" Manny growled. The boy blinked once. Slowly. Before making sure to blow the smoke of the flame in Manny's direction. Manny's jaw tensed, but he said and did nothing.\n\n\"Come on. You're holdin' us up and mornin' is right around the corner,\" the boy finally said and turned away.\n\n\"Who...\"\n\nSam shrugged but started to follow. Manny grabbed his arm, stopping him.\n\n\"Who are you?\" Manny's question was harsh, demanding. The boy didn't seem to care.\n\n\"You don't get to know my name. But I am the person who is goin' to lead you to a safe place to stay the night if you don't keep slowin' me down.\"\n\n\"You're a conductor?\"\n\nThe boy ignored Manny, just kept on walking. Sam exchanged a quick look with his brother before following. It wasn't like they had a whole lot of other options.\n\n\"He has a gun,\" Manny whispered.\n\nSam just nodded. Maybe this was how free Negroes lived, with fancy hats and guns. He didn't know about them shoes though.\n\nThey walked quietly for a second before the boy stopped. Whistled in a way that imitated a familiar sounding bird. Then there was a whistle in response and another boy stepped out about the same age as the first boy. This one though...\n\n\"That's an Injun,\" Manny said slowly as the boy stepped further into the moonlight. Sam hadn't ever met an Injun before, but he had seen drawings of them. And even if he hadn't, the long, black hair and the deer skin pants clued him in.\n\n\"Let me guess,\" the Negro boy said slowly, turning to face Manny. \"You're the smart one.\"\n\nSam bit his lip again. He had never met a Negro with such confidence. And this one a boy. Manny huffed and brought his hands to his forehead. A clear sign he was trying to hold back words. It didn't work. \"I don't know who you are. I don't know where you're goin' and I'm not about to trust someone whose voice hasn't changed yet with my life and my brother's.\"\n\nSam closed his eyes. Prayed a quick prayer. Why couldn't Manny for once not be so quarrelsome? Sides, the boy might've been young, but his voice had changed. Manny had just said that to get a reaction. Sam watched several emotions cross the boy's face. Irritation. Annoyance. And then finally, reluctant humor. \"Fair enough.\" Without taking his eyes off of Manny's, the boy whistled again. This time the tune was different and this time several people stepped into view. All of them Negroes. All of them clearly slaves. Sam saw a man, a woman, two children and a baby on one side. And then two men and one woman on the other side. \"We crossed by boat. It was a whole heck of a lot easier. And now we're headed to a station. You're welcome to come. Or you can stay here. I don't care,\" the boy said.\n\nSam and Manny exchanged looks. It sounded right. But the boy could still be leading them right back to paddy rollers.\n\n\"He brung us this far,\" one of the men said, his voice low. \"From near abouts Lexington.\"\n\nThe boy turned away and started talking to his Indian companion, the words rolling off his tongue not at all familiar to Sam. Sam turned to Manny. \"What's our other option?\" Manny's lips twisted to the side.\n\n\"What's that gun for?\" Manny called out.\n\n\"Slaves who talk too much,\" the boy answered not missing a beat of his conversation with the Indian.\n\nManny shook his head. \"I don't like him.\"\n\n\"What's our other option?\" Sam asked again, making Manny meet his gaze.\n\n\"First sign of trouble, we leave.\"\n\n\"Fine.\"\n\n\"You two girls done talkin' yet?\" the boy asked, his hands on his waist.\n\n\"I'm a kill him,\" Manny muttered under his breath.\n\nSam sighed.\n\n\"Let's go.\"\n\nThey walked for miles, keeping to the dark and just off the side of the road. Not hurrying, but not stopping. It gave Sam plenty of time to look over the other escaped slaves. The family looked young. The man and woman didn't seem much older than Sam and the children were small. Sam wondered where they had come from and what had made them leave. Had they been about to be separated? Or just tired of being a slave? He glanced over at the other three adult slaves. They looked older. But it was hard to tell sometimes, the approximate age of a slave. Working sun up to sun down under harsh conditions was hard on a body. But the way the three of them seemed to walk in each other's space let Sam know they were close. They probably came from the same plantation. And they didn't seem to speak to anyone else except themselves. And whatever they said was said quietly. In fact, if anyone spoke, they spoke quietly. Sam noticed that even the baby was quiet.\n\n\"Laudanum,\" the boy with the gun said after the third time Sam looked over at the baby. \"Keeps 'em quiet.\"\n\n\"Where you from?\" Sam asked, hoping it was a question that would get an answer. He had always been very curious, but there was something about this boy...\n\n\"Indian Territory.\"\n\nSam should have figured that. \"You was born free?\"\n\n\"Why you so full of questions?\"\n\nSam quieted. Thought. \"Guess I want to know what to look for and what to look out for.\"\n\nThe boy said nothing. At first. \"Not born free. Escaped. As to what to look for and look out for... well that depends on where you're goin'.\"\n\n\"You mean like up north?\"\n\n\"Yep. North parts of America. Or Canada. Or out West like me.\"\n\n\"You're far from home aren't you?\"\n\n\"I surely am.\"\n\nSam waited for the boy to elaborate but he didn't. \"And you help slaves escape?\"\n\n\"We all got us a callin'.\"\n\n\"Where is yo mama?\" Manny asked, jumping into the conversation. Sam fought the urge to ream him one. Couldn't he tell when someone had to be won over with honey rather than vinegar? \"She know you out here?\"\n\nThe boy sighed deeply. \"My mama is where yo mama is.\"\n\n\"I don't know where my mama is,\" Manny said indignantly.\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nManny thought on that for a second. \"How much further we got to go?\"\n\nThe boy pointed to a sign in the distance. \"What's that sign say?\"\n\n\"I'm a slave, fool. I cain't read.\"\n\nThe boy let out a small huff of air. \"Not much further. Less than a mile.\"\n\n\"How did you learn how to read?\" Sam asked the boy when Manny was quiet for longer than two minutes.\n\n\"So many questions, so many questions,\" the boy muttered to himself.\n\nSam figured that was all the answer he was going to get. Especially when the Indian boy, who Sam had lost track of miles ago, took a step out from behind a tree and came to stand in front of the Negro boy. They exchanged rapid conversation mixed with hand signals before each giving the other a tense nod.\n\nThen the Negro boy waved everyone forward. \"Not all of ya'll can fit at the station I had picked out. We gone have to split you up. You five,\" the boy said, pointing to the quiet family. \"Go with my friend here,\" the boy said with a nod towards the Indian. \"I'll take the rest of ya'll this way,\" the boy said with a nod in the opposite direction. In moments, the Indian was gone and so was the small family leaving Sam, Manny, the boy, and the three older slaves.\n\n\"Where did you meet an Indian?\"\n\nFor once, Sam thought, Manny had asked a worthwhile question.\n\n\"Knox ain't no Indian. Least not full blooded,\" the boy said with a shake of his head. \"Idiots. I'm surrounded by idiots,\" he said just loud enough for only Manny and Sam to overhear. And that was when Sam realized it, the boy was enjoying himself.\n\n\"But\u2014,\"\n\n\"Use all the senses God gave you before you jump to conclusions,\" the boy said. He gave a nod towards Sam. \"There. That's some advice. You want to stay free, you cain't afford to be stupid.\"\n\nBut the boy had looked Indian. Or had he only looked like what Sam thought an Indian should look like? But together the two boys had spoken a language unfamiliar to Sam. But that didn't mean it was an Indian language.\n\nSam said nothing more as the boy quietly led them in the direction that he had indicated. They slowly climbed up a hill alongside the road. They had almost reached the top when the boy stopped, held up a hand.\n\n\"What\u2014,\"\n\nHe cut off Manny's voice with a sharp wave and then crouched down. Sam, Manny, and the three other escaping slaves got down.\n\n\"Listen,\" the boy said, and Sam closed his eyes. Listened. He heard men talking, low voices, horses neighing. But he saw no lights, nothing to indicate that people were there, just over the crest of the hill. If they had kept going, they eventually would have seen them, but the paddy rollers would have caught sight of them too. \"Bounty hunters,\" the boy said, his voice low, his face serious. Gone was the humor that had danced along his face just moments ago. The boy reached into his side and pulled out his gun, holding it like it was an extension of his arm. \"We need to get past them and we need a distraction,\" he said, not taking his eyes off of the area where it sounded like the bounty hunters were. \"If I know them, they're tucked right at the base of the bottom of the hill. We keep goin' that way, they're gonna catch us.\" Sam exchanged a quick glance with Manny. They weren't going to catch them. But an adversarial tension, so real and so thick was now amongst them. Sam watched the other three slaves exchanging quick glances and he knew if it came down to him and Manny verses them they would choose themselves. Sam couldn't hardly blame them for that kind of thinking. But it wasn't going to get them all to the station.\n\n\"Safety is that way,\" the boy said, pointing in a direction with his hand. \"You head in that direction, you'll pass three houses before you reach the station. It's a house with two lanterns lit. One upstairs and one downstairs. You knock on the door and tell them you're Caesar's package.\"\n\nCaesar? Sam shot a glance to Manny whose eyes were already wide with disbelief.\n\n\"They'll take you in and hide you. Got it? It's not even half a mile in that direction, you can't miss it. I'll stay and cause a disruption so they don't catch you.\"\n\n\"What happens if they catch you?\" Sam asked, quietly, not at all comfortable with leaving the boy out here with paddy rollers or bounty hunters or whatever the men were called who wanted to clap him back in chains... even if he did look like he could handle himself. Even if he was Caesar who had led so many slaves to freedom. Though Sam had doubts. Caesar had been rescuing slaves for at least two years and the boy looked already looked young. He couldn't imagine him two years ago.\n\n\"They won't,\" the boy said calmly and with a self-assurance Sam had never come across before. \"Ya'll need to go, now. Keep on walkin' in this direction, keep to the trees, but I'll make sure they don't see you.\"\n\n\"Would it be easier if you had help?\" Sam found himself asking, unsure why. Except it had never been in him not to help someone who was in trouble. Especially if someone might be in trouble on his behalf. And. He didn't trust the other escaped slaves not to do something to get him and Manny caught while they made it on to safety. The distraction needed to be big, so big that they weren't thinking about him and Manny.\n\n\"No,\" Manny said firmly. He clearly wasn't picking up on the tension. Or maybe he was.\n\nThe boy took his gaze off of the direction of bounty hunters and placed it on Sam. Surprise written in his eyes. \"It would.\"\n\n\"Then I'll stay. Manny, you go.\"\n\n\"Sam. You idiot,\" Manny hissed. It was the right thing to do, Sam thought. He felt that reassuring settling peace that God always gave him right before making a decision.\n\n\"We don't have time for arguments,\" the boy said, his voice low.\n\n\"Go. Manny. I got a peace on this.\" Manny growled low. \"Go on. And don't volunteer to stay. No sense in both of us bein' out here,\" Sam said and handed his brother his bag with all of their belongings. They had had this discussion before. There wasn't any point in having it again. When Sam had a peace about something, his mind was unmovable. Manny's mouth tightened.\n\n\"If he gets taken...\"\n\n\"He won't. Caesar has never lost cargo,\" the boy said confidently about presumably, himself.\n\n\"Caesar,\" Manny muttered bitterly, even as he began to move. \"I don't like you right now, Sam.\"\n\n\"Be careful, Manny,\" Sam whispered and shot his eyes toward the other slaves. Manny gave a slow blink. He knew then, that the other slaves were not to be trusted. They exchanged quick nods and then Manny and the other slaves were gone.\n\nWhen the boy and Sam were sure they were gone, the boy turned to Sam. \"Just how fast can you run, Sam?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 21", + "text": "They crossed the Ohio River in a boat.\n\n\"I've never seen water like this,\" Gid said softly as he dipped his fingers into the river, letting the current push them this way and that.\n\n\"You've never seen water period,\" Benji responded firmly. Laura and Papa had spent the night in that small cramped, stinky cellar. Or rather the morning. They had only, a few hours ago, reunited with Benji, Sol, and Gid at another house or station as Papa referred to it. Now, a quiet white man, who had mysteriously appeared at the tip of the Ohio River with a boat, was paddling at the back of the boat while Papa was paddling at the front, taking them to freedom. Freedom. Laura could hardly imagine it. In some ways, in many ways, she had always been freer than her brothers, than Papa. It was confusing to think about what would change, what wouldn't change.\n\n\"How could I have never seen water before, Benji? You need water to live!\" There was outrage in Gideon's low voice. Laura grunted. Apparently, it wasn't only her who found Benji to be more than an irritation. What had she done, she wondered, that God had given her not one but two brothers who thought they knew better than anyone else?\n\n\"Boys.\" Papa only said the one word, but there was much command in there. Be quiet. They weren't safe yet.\n\nLaura placed a hand on Gid's shoulder and squeezed before looking over the side of the boat. She too had never seen water quite like this. She had seen the Potomac. She had travelled with Missy Adora, Miss Charlotte, and Miss Martha up and down Virginia for family parties and shopping\u2014in carriages, in trains, and even on boats. But nothing like this. Never so low on the water like this. The wrong wave would send them all careening into the water and Laura didn't know about her brothers and Papa, but she couldn't swim a lick. A gust of wind hit her and she shivered and then caught a faint whiff of herself. She was still slightly damp from the night before, probably muddy, her feet had reached such levels of pain and squishiness that every step made her flinch, certainly she had sweated profusely... she wanted desperately out of these clothes. What she could do with a warm basin of water.\n\nThey made it to the other side with no problems.\n\n\"Be safe now,\" the white man said quietly, and using an oar, pushed himself back into the river once the five of them had gotten out. Laura looked over at Papa. She had underestimated him. Clearly. There was so much he had planned to get them here... to get them to wherever it is they were going.\n\n\"Where to now, Papa?\" Benji asked. That was the question. New York? Philadelphia? Canada? Laura exhaled a breath that formed into a small cloud. She couldn't imagine living in a place that was colder than this.\n\n\"A house with two lanterns. One in the top window and one in the bottom. We don't have to run, but ya'll do need to keep quiet. I got the directions right up here,\" Papa said, tapping his head.\n\n\"How much further?\" the question slipped out before Laura could catch it. But. Well. They already knew she was the weakest one on this journey.\n\n\"If you had ever left Salis House, you wouldn't be askin' that question,\" Benji muttered softly but just loud enough for her to hear.\n\n\"I have left Salis House, thank you very much. I've seen more of the world than you ever have or ever will,\" Laura snapped back. She was also very tired of him. He hadn't said a word to her once they met up again. Just made sure that every time their eyes met, she saw his look of disdain.\n\n\"Benjamin and Laura Altan.\" Papa's voice was hard.\n\n\"Sorry, Papa,\" Laura said quietly. Benji repeated the same.\n\nPapa eyed the both of them and then sighed. \"I think it's best that we split up. Paddy rollers still out here, too.\" Then he pulled them into the trees and went over the directions to the house several times. Laura did her best to focus, to close her eyes and picture the road, to open her eyes and search the sky for the drinking gourd and make out the North Star. She did her best to ignore the memory of being little and Prince telling her she had the worse sense of direction of anyone he had ever met after she had gotten lost taking a note from Massa Will to one of the salt mine overseers. On Salis Plantation.\n\n\"Benji, you and Laura will go east. Me and the boys will go west.\"\n\nLaura stopped looking at the sky to look at Papa. But his expression was unyielding. Benji said nothing, but she heard his foot slide across the dirt in front of him. \"I expect to see the both of you at the station. Be careful. Take your time. Ain't no rush.\" Laura puffed out her cheeks in frustration like Missy Adora was prone to doing, but said nothing. \"Let's go.\" Papa motioned to Sol and Gid. Gid turned back and gave Laura a look of pity before disappearing into the trees.\n\nBenji sighed, loud and clear. \"Come on. I bet you don't even know which way is east.\"\n\nLaura closed her eyes, exhaled, but followed Benji east. They paralleled the road, but moved slowly through the hilly woods.\n\n\"Can you move any faster?\" Benji's voice was quiet, stubborn.\n\n\"Obviously, not,\" Laura stated calmly. She could move faster, if there was the proper motivation. Like Papa being with them. \"Papa said we didn't have to hurry.\"\n\n\"That don't mean I want to be in these woods any longer than I got to.\" Neither did she. She was betting she wanted out of the woods more than he. He was probably used to the pungent scent of his body odor. Unfortunately, Laura was getting used to it too.\n\n\"How about you just focus on gettin' us there?\"\n\n\"You think you know everythin',\" he muttered under his breath as he stepped over a fallen tree.\n\n\"Do I know more than you? Yes.\"\n\nBenji stopped, turned, and stared at her. \"Why you even come?\"\n\nLaura blinked back the hurt of his question but met his gaze full-on. \"How is my comin' botherin' you?\"\n\n\"You're slowin' us down. You almost got Pa taken or killed.\"\n\n\"But that didn't happen, did it?\" Laura said, fighting down her own shame at the truth of his words.\n\n\"You had a good life at Salis.\"\n\n\"Obviously\u2014,\"\n\n\"Obviously,\" he mocked. He turned and kept going forward. \"You and Prince, livin' the good life up at the Big House while me and Pa and the boys worked our fingers to the bone.\"\n\n\"Please, Benji, tell me how you really feel...\" Laura muttered under her breath as she took her time climbing over fallen trees. Now that safety wasn't that far up ahead, she felt every muscle in her body that she had used running in the woods the night before.\n\n\"Don't know how you gone be any help up north. You ain't got no real skills.\" She was going to throw something at him. \"Least Annie could cook. What you gone do? Make me a pretty dress?\"\n\nLaura rolled her eyes, but didn't respond. Truth of the matter was, if they was moving to a big city, she was the only one with skills that would survive. But she just let him go on, complaining. He seemed to be in love with the sound of his own voice.\n\n\"And then you think that just cause you can read that you better than us. But guess what, Laura? I can read to. Mama taught us. She worked up at the Big House, but still found time to come be with us. But naw. You and Prince\u2014,\"\n\n\"Hush up,\" Laura said, slowing down.\n\n\"No. I won't hush up. You can't tell me\u2014,\"\n\n\"I hear someone.\"\n\nBenji hushed, and instantly crouched down low to the ground. Laura copied him. First, she heard nothing, and then she heard the sound that had caught her attention. The shaking of the reins on a horse. There was a cough, and low, quiet voices.\n\nLaura crawled forward so that she and Benji were just inches apart. He didn't move and she could see that he was holding his breath. Then he held up a hand, raising fingers slowly. He was counting. And then he stopped, shook his head.\n\nHe wrapped a strong hand around her arm and pulled her close, his lips on her ear. \"We gone have to go back. They done blocked off the route Pa gave me.\"\n\nLaura closed her eyes in frustration. It wasn't ideal. But it was better than being caught.\n\nAnd then one of the paddy rollers shouted. \"Hey! There one is! Get 'em boys!\"\n\nLaura leaned forward and watched in amazement as a man, he had to be an escaping slave, appeared from the other side of the woods, running across the open field toward them and disappearing into the woods just ahead of them.\n\n\"Why did he just do that?\" Benji asked from next to her. \"That has to be the dumbest thing I've ever seen.\"\n\n\"The horses! The horses!\"\n\nLaura stared as another Negro man on a horse took off down the road in the opposite direction, leading several other horses by their reins, behind him.\n\n\"Run,\" Benji said and stood up quickly, dragging Laura with him. Pushing aside pains, aches, and all-around uncomfortableness, Laura ran behind Benji in the direction of the house. No one saw them or paid them any mind. The paddy rollers were too busy either chasing the one slave or going after the horses. Then she heard a boom in the distance. A gunshot.\n\nBut they kept on running, her and Benji toward the house Papa promised was just past this hill.\n\n\"Get down!\" Laura heard an unfamiliar voice order and paused.\n\n\"Benji,\" she whispered and her brother stopped, throwing her a fierce look.\n\nBehind her, from the ground under a thickly fallen log, appeared a head. It was the slave who had started the raucous in the beginning. \"There's three of 'em there just over the ridge. Come,\" he said and waved them back. Laura looked to Benji who was staring hard at the man. And then the low hum of male voices filled the air and Laura saw a lantern light up a few feet away. She ran back to the slave. His arm was already out, and he pulled her into the hole and under the tree. She heard Benji scrambling in just behind her. It was a tight fit under the log and into the ground. She scooted in close, but apparently not close enough for she felt an arm wrap around her waist and pull her further in to make more room for Benji to fit. In seconds she was pressed up against an unfamiliar male chest. A chest that smelled like it could have used a bath days ago. She could only imagine what she smelled like to him.\n\n\"What\u2014,\"\n\n\"Shh,\" the slave told Benji. And Benji hushed as men spoke just above them.\n\nEven though there was no way that they could hear her breathing, Laura held her breath as the paddy rollers walked near their location.\n\n\"They was just here...\"\n\n\"Should have brought the dogs...\"\n\nThe hand on Laura's back slipped to her waist, tightening in a protective manner.\n\nAnother gunshot rang in the distance.\n\n\"What in the world...\"\n\n\"He could be anywhere, but the horses...\"\n\nLaura exhaled quietly as the men seemed to wander further and further away from where they were hidden. And then she heard nothing but the sound of her own breathing and that of her brother's and the other slave.\n\n\"Should I check?\" Benji whispered quietly.\n\n\"No. The boy I was with, the one who stole the horses, said he'll come to me when the coast is clear.\" The slave's voice was low, and deep. Laura couldn't tell how old he was.\n\n\"Ya'll did that on purpose? You runnin' across the fields?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Had to give the others a chance to make it.\" The words were very simply said, but Laura felt like she learned a world of information about the man holding her.\n\n\"You sure the boy you was with didn't caught?\" Benji asked after a moment.\n\n\"Not sure at all. But the boy seemed confident enough.\"\n\n\"The boy?\" Benji's questions kept coming though Laura wasn't sure why. The man had helped them when he hadn't needed to.\n\n\"He's a conductor for the railroad. He calls himself Caesar.\" Laura bit her lip to keep from making any noise. She had heard of someone named Caesar but only in snatches of conversations here and there. She didn't know much about him except that he was wanted dead or alive.\n\nBenji went silent for a moment. \"How many of ya'll is it?\n\n\"Three others and my brother.\" The man paused for a second, his hand lifting off Laura's waist. \"Is this your wife?\"\n\nLaura snorted softly while Benji said, \"Lord, no. My sister.\" The man's hand returned to her waist, but this time it was light and loose as if there was just no other place for it to go. \"I'm Sam. From Kentucky,\" the man said softly.\n\n\"I'm Benjamin. That's Laura. We from Salis House of Virginia.\"\n\nIn spite of the fact that she was partially underground and laying up next to a man she had never met, Laura found her eyes fluttering. She couldn't remember the last time she had laid on someone's chest. The up and down motion, and the small sound of a beating heart, was putting her to sleep.\n\n\"You talk much, Miss Laura?\"\n\n\"You don't have to call her that,\" Benji whispered. \"She's just Laura.\"\n\n\"I talk plenty,\" Laura said, her eyes closed.\n\n\"Where'd your brother and the others run off too?\" Benji asked, but then quieted when they heard some rustling from above. Laura became instantly alert, lifting her head off of Sam's chest.\n\n\"Shh,\" he whispered, and gently pushed her back down onto his chest as though she were a child. There was something so comforting in the gesture. Maybe he was old... around Papa's age. She would have shuddered except the moment called for stillness.\n\nAnd then there was a low voice. \"Sam?\"\n\n\"It's the boy,\" Sam whispered. Laura noted that he did not call the boy, Caesar. \"Yes,\" he said louder.\n\n\"Come on out. We ain't got much time, and we got to hurry.\" Benji crawled out first. \"Who are you?\" Caesar asked, sounding completely surprised.\n\nWhen she made to get out, Sam pushed her down gently and crawled over her. \"They was runnin', too.\"\n\n\"They? Well ain't this a busy night.\"\n\nSam reached back into the hole, and Laura grabbed his hand. He hauled her out from under the log easily, like she weighed nothing at all.\n\nShe looked at the man holding her hand, but his features were not clear in the dark. That said, she realized he was young. About Prince's age. And he was still holding her hand. She pulled away and ran her hands over her dirty, dirt-filled cloak.\n\n\"Come on.\"\n\nShe looked over at the speaker. Caesar. And she could see Sam had been right to call him a boy. She had assumed he would be older. But he wasn't. He was maybe a year or so younger than Benji.\n\n\"My pa gave us clear directions for a safe house,\" Benji said, shaking his head. \"Laura and me got to go there.\"\n\n\"Only one safe house in this direction,\" the boy said. \"So, we gone stand here all day and chit chat or actually make it to safety?\"\n\nThe four of them started out for the last little bit of the journey, Benji and Caesar up ahead while Sam matched his pace to Laura's. He didn't say anything, but if she seemed like she needed help climbing over something with her skirts, he would hold out a hand in silent offering. Laura had always prided herself on never being foolish. She took it. He didn't scold, he didn't advise, he didn't rush her, he was just there.\n\nAfter all of that, it didn't take long to get to the station. And before Laura knew it, they were standing at the house with the two lanterns. \"Wait here,\" Caesar whispered.\n\n\"I can come with,\" Benji offered.\n\n\"Or, you could wait here.\"\n\nThe boy didn't wait around to argue with Benji but ran towards the house. It was not a small house, but neither was it anywhere near the size of Salis House. He knocked three times on the front door, it opened and he went in.\n\n\"He's a bit um...\"\n\n\"Belligerent,\" Laura supplied with an exhale. Sleep was just a few feet away. Thank the good Lord in heaven.\n\n\"Belligerent?\" Sam repeated slowly, sounding confused.\n\n\"House slave,\" Benji muttered under his breath as though it were a disease and not a position. Laura made a face at him that he pretended not to see.\n\n\"Oh,\" Sam said, his one word filled with understanding.\n\nWhat he understood, Laura didn't know.\n\n\"You not a house slave?\" Sam asked Benji.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"He works in a smithy. He hardly out in the fields,\" Laura snapped back. Benji grunted.\n\n\"I was out in the fields,\" Sam said nonchalantly.\n\n\"Cotton?\" Benji asked quietly as though he knew. Laura rolled her eyes. Benji knew as much about cotton as she knew about speaking French.\n\n\"Tobacco.\"\n\nLaura turned to look at Sam. And it wasn't hard to do since he was standing barely a foot away from her. He was not quite as tall as Papa but taller than Benji. And he was slim, but not thin. He turned and looked at her. She could feel his silent question in the air and she scrambled for something to ask.\n\n\"You said you ran with your brother?\"\n\n\"Yes. He should be here already.\"\n\n\"We ran with our pa, and our brothers Sol and Gid. They should be here too.\" There Benji was, once again butting into a conversation.\n\nAnd just then the door opened, and Caesar waved them forward. They entered the home quickly. Laura could smell freshly baked bread and her stomach rumbled. A white man Laura had never seen before and his wife stood there in the darkness next to Caesar. And behind them was Papa.\n\n\"Laura. Benji,\" he said and Laura moved quickly past everyone to Papa's outstretched arms. She felt him press dry lips across the top of her forehead. If anyone had told her a week ago she would be hugging him, she would have laughed long and loudly. Now she didn't want to let go. \"Course ya'll would be the ones to run into trouble.\" He sounded amused, but Laura could hear the undercurrent of fear in his voice.\n\n\"We ran into Sam and Caesar,\" Benji offered.\n\n\"Sam?\"\n\n\"I'm Sam,\" Sam said quietly. He walked past the white couple, his eyes skittering towards them quickly and back and then past Caesar. He held out a hand and Papa shook it.\n\n\"Amos. This here is Mr. and Mrs. G,\" Papa told Laura and Benji while nodding at the white couple. \"They gone let us stay for the night.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" the wife said and motioned them further back into the house where a fire was burning low. They followed and with more light, Laura could see more of Sam. He had found a corner to stand in, his eyes darting occasionally to those around him and then to the floor. He was barefoot, his clothes were ragged and stained, his lower jaw was peppered with facial hair, and he could have used a bath. But that didn't change the fact that he was quite honestly one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. His skin was a few shades lighter than hers, his brown eyes encased with thick, black eyelashes, his lips were neither thin nor full and like most slaves who worked in the fields, slim though he was, muscles abounded. Laura wished Annie were there so they could swoon together. Because even Annie, who liked discussing boys about as much as she used to enjoy fanning Miss Martha in the afternoon heat, would probably take a moment to pause and appreciate his features.\n\n\"Sam!\" A low, worried voice called out from behind Laura. And then she realized that her first thought was incorrect. He was not one of the most handsome men she had ever seen. He was one of two. Twins." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 22", + "text": "Sam lifted his gaze off the wood floor, smile already on his face as Manny crossed the room towards him.\n\n\"Sam!\" Manny repeated, coming to his side and wrapping an arm around his neck. Sam returned to the gesture. \"Don't ever do that again,\" Manny whispered, his breath hot and angry in Sam's ear. It was a hollow threat because if Sam were ever in a situation like that again, he would do the same thing. And Manny knew it.\n\n\"Twins,\" the white woman said with a quick laugh.\n\nBoth Sam and Manny stiffened, looked away. To have a twin was to have that one obvious weakness. Neither he nor Manny liked to acknowledge it.\n\n\"Come,\" she said, with quick motions as she kicked aside a very large rug. The man, her husband, moved past her, reached down and placing his hands into a groove, lifted the floor. Sam could see the shadows of stairs leading to below.\n\n\"Been down there already. But I wanted to wait up here. Make sure you make it in,\" Manny said quietly.\n\n\"It's plenty room down there,\" Amos, Laura's pa said, his voice low and gravelly. Sam looked the huge man over. It didn't seem possible that the thin, slight, pretty woman he had found himself attached to for the past few hours came from him. And Laura was pretty. Even looking tired and travel weary, it had been hard for him to keep his eyes of the young woman. And there was something about the way she carried herself... Sam had never known a slave woman to walk with such grace. He could watch her move forever. If he had had any doubts about her being a house slave, the way she moved ended them. Not to mention that she was dressed better than he had ever seen a slave girl; she had shoes on her feet, her speech was more refined, and she held herself just... differently. Even differently than her brother Benji. He had felt her dark gaze studying him and he wondered what she saw. He knew he looked like an old, tired field hand today. It had bothered him none before he met her that his shirt had enough holes to be a net and that he had outgrown his pants a year or so ago leaving inches between the top of his feet and the bottom of his pants. He knew his face looked scruffy and that he probably smelled bad. But he was free now and that was all gone change.\n\n\"Here,\" the man said, handing Amos, Laura's pa, a lantern. \"You can light it when you get down there.\" He turned to Sam, Laura, and Benji. \"There's food and blankets aplenty.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Amos said and motioned for Laura to go down first.\n\n\"Wait,\" the wife said. All of them paused, looking at her. The woman's face filled with color, but she turned her gaze to Laura. \"You look wet.\" With her dark cloak, and dark dress, Laura did not look wet, though Sam had felt some dampness when he held her under that tree in the ground. What did that woman want? And then he wondered at his sudden possessiveness. He could not afford to be possessive, now more than ever before he had the threat of being caught and returned hanging over his head. But still, he watched her.\n\nLaura, who had been looking at the stairs, looked up at the woman quickly, her eyes not quite making eye contact. \"Yes,\" Laura said. Her voice was soft, and husky. It was another thing Sam had noticed about her. He liked her voice.\n\n\"I have an old dress you can change into.\" The woman was offering Laura a dress? Was it cause Laura was a house slave?\n\n\"I... ,\" Laura started.\n\n\"Come,\" the woman said and placed a hand on Laura's arm. He watched as Laura tossed a glance at her pa, and then let the woman lead her into a room with a closed door.\n\n\"Is that safe?\" Manny asked no one, his eyebrows raised. Then it wasn't just him who thought it was odd. Of course it was only Manny who was confused, so maybe it didn't count.\n\n\"Oh, don't worry about Laura,\" Benji, Laura's brother said from his right. He had been so focused on her hadn't even noticed the boy's approach. \"Laura can take care of herself around white folks,\" the boy said quietly. \"She'll be just fine.\" Sam leveled Benji with a look and the boy had the good grace to look away. There was no such thing as taking care of yourself out here.\n\n\"Manny, this is Benji, Laura's brother. Benji, my brother, Manny.\"\n\nManny gave a nod towards Benji who gave a nod back.\n\n\"Come on, Benji.\" Amos was already headed down the stairs, apparently also not worried about his daughter.\n\n\"Sam,\" called the boy who claimed to be Caesar. The boy was standing by the fireplace, his hands stretched out for warmth as comfortable in this house as a flea on a dog. \"Come talk to me for a minute.\"\n\nThe white man lowered the trap door after Amos and Benji went down and left the room leaving Sam, Caesar, and Manny alone. Sam walked to the fire, coming to stand next to Caesar. Manny right behind him.\n\nThe boy eyed Manny, indicating that he had not invited him over, but he spoke anyway, \"You did me a favor so I'm goin' to do you one,\" Caesar said as Sam and Manny drew in closer though he returned his gaze to the fire before him. \"You asked for advice. Here it is: you two should separate.\"\n\n\"Never.\" Manny's answer was quick and hard.\n\nSam placed his hands on his waist. No sense in talking when Manny had answered for them both.\n\n\"It's hard livin', being a runaway slave,\" the boy said, his voice low and quiet and filled with experience. \"You'll always be lookin' over your shoulder. Always. And if you marry and have children? Well, your children still be the property of the man who owned you. You free. And you not free. It'll be easier for you both if you split up because together you're memorable. The last thing you want to be when being hunted, is memorable. If the bounty hunters are lookin' for twins, then they path is easy.\"\n\nSam had thought on all this before. When you work in the fields all day, all you got is time and time to think. There was a part of him that was willing to leave Manny if it meant that Manny had a better chance of staying free. But they had taken his mama. And he had never had a daddy. He was too selfish to let them take his brother too. He would just have to trust God to protect them both. \"That's not goin' to happen.\" The door to the room that Laura had gone into opened. The white woman came out. Sam watched her walk past them into another room.\n\n\"I didn't think it would,\" the boy said with a sigh. \"But I had to try. Here's your second piece of advice: be very careful about where you choose to go from here. You can trust the 'G' family,\" Caesar said with a nod in the direction that the white man had gone in. \"Tomorrow. They gone ask you where you want to go. Up north or out east. Where was you thinkin'?\"\n\nSam exchanged a quick glance with Manny before speaking. \"We were thinkin' up north. Canada. We heard that's the only place to really be free.\"\n\nThe boy, Caesar, bit his lip, and nodded. \"It's not a bad plan. It's the best one if you gone go up north.\"\n\n\"Where else could we go?\" Manny asked, genuinely curious. \"We stay here in America, paddy rollers will hunt us all the time.\"\n\n\"It's a different kind of white folks up north and that is a fact. What isn't different is that they still don't like darkies. You go to New York or Philadelphia or even Canada, you still ain't nothin' but a darkie to them. Don't care what nobody say. Ain't no promise land. It's better than being a slave. But ain't glory.\"\n\n\"Figure ain't no place we could ever go where we ain't nothin' but darkies,\" Manny said quietly, for once taking Caesar seriously.\n\n\"That is a fact. But there is a place you can go where you ain't got to be reminded of that fact day in and day out.\"\n\n\"Indian territory,\" Sam said, staring hard at the boy. He almost missed when the white woman, carrying cloth and a heavy basin of water moved passed them again. It seemed like she was telling the truth then. Laura would be fine. Again he asked himself why it mattered. He didn't have neither the time nor the day to be thinking about a woman and chances were, after this night, he would never see her again. Sam returned his focus to Caesar. He wouldn't let himself get distracted again.\n\nCaesar nodded slowly. \"I'm not sayin' there ain't no bounty hunters in Indian Territory. There surely is. But most white men that go out there ain't thinkin' 'bout catchin' no darkies. And land is so bountiful, it's a lot harder if they try.\"\n\n\"Land might be bountiful, but so is Indians.\"\n\n\"Ever heard the phrase the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Naw, it ain't Indians you gone have to worry about. Listen. I ain't tryin' to tell you what to do, I'm just askin' you to carefully consider what freedom looks like to you. Is it livin' in towns so crowded you can hardly breathe? Surrounded by white folks who don't like slavery but also don't like you? Or havin' your own? All you need in Indian Territory is God, your honor, your gun, and your horse. I might have been born a slave, but I was also born a country boy too. Livin' up north ain't my idea of freedom. And it's too dang cold. Think on it, Sam,\" Caesar said, giving him a nod. \"Pray on it. What you decide tomorrow is one of the most important decisions of your life.\"\n\n\"Why does everyone think Sam is the only one who makes decisions around here?\" Manny asked, irritation in his voice.\n\n\"Third piece of advice,\" the boy said, ignoring Manny, even as a small smile tugged on his lips.\n\n\"If you go out west, specifically Oklahoma Territory, ask around for the town of Arrow Creek. And if you find yourself in trouble ask for Sly Hollis.\"\n\n\"Who is Sly Hollis?\" Manny asked with an exhale.\n\n\"Me. My name is Sylvester Remus Hollis. Everyone calls me, Sly.\"\n\n\"Oh, everyone knows you in Oklahoma? How old are you? Like ten?\"\n\n\"Fifteen, fool. How old are you?\" Manny opened his mouth, closed it. They figured they were just above twenty, but they weren't sure and Caesar, no, Sly, could see it. \"Oh, you don't know do you?\"\n\n\"I'm older than you,\" Manny said stubbornly, unwilling to let go of a fight he had already lost. Sam shook his head slightly in exasperation.\n\n\"And not a great deal smarter from what I can tell.\" Sly turned to Sam. \"Ask around for me or Jamie Knox. Knox is my friend, the one who looks Indian. Be careful. Don't trust just anyone, even if they are darkies. Not everyone is your friend, Sam. Keep him in check, Manny.\"\n\nSam exhaled and blinked. Sly did have his annoying moments. Sam hadn't survived all these years cause he knew nothing.\n\n\"My brother can take care of himself,\" Manny said simply. Sam did not believe for one second that Manny thought that was true. But no matter what, they always had each other's backs.\n\n\"If I said the sky was blue, you would say it was purple,\" Sly said, rolling his eyes Manny. \"I didn't mean no offense to Sam. I like Sam. I don't like you.\" And yet Sly's tone was light. He took a step away from the fire. \"Wish you two all the best.\"\n\n\"You not stayin'?\" Sam asked, his arms falling to his side. He could hear the alarm in his voice.\n\nSly shook his head, slowly. \"Got to meet up with Knox. Head back.\"\n\n\"You not really Caesar, are you?\" Manny asked, eyeing Sly.\n\nSly exhaled and then gave Sam a pitying look. \"You want to deal with this one all day on purpose? I'll have you to know I am Caesar. If it's one thing you can count on me for it's my word of honor. If I tell you a thing, it's true. You're one of the few lucky ones who know my actual name. I would appreciate it if you didn't tell anyone.\"\n\n\"Then where were you?\" Manny asked, no humor in his voice. \"We waited almost a year.\"\n\nSly's expression hardened. All lightness gone. \"I can't stay in one location too long. Where was I? Down south helpin' slaves cross the Mississippi.\" Sly shrugged. \"I can't be everywhere and I can't afford to stay in the same area all year long.\" Sly bit his lip, shrugged again. \"I am sorry.\"\n\n\"Nothin' to apologize for,\" Manny said quickly, biting his lip. \"Just wonderin'.\"\n\nSly reached for his hat that Sam only just now noticed was on a small table. He slowly, almost reverently, placed it on his head. \"Ya'll take care now,\" the boy said and left the room. Seconds later, they heard the front door of the house open and shut. Sylvester Remus Hollis, also known as Caesar, was gone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 23", + "text": "It was an answer to an unspoken prayer, Laura thought as she entered the dark room. She only walked a few steps in before the woman lit a candle, giving them a little something to see by. The windows were covered by heavy curtains, and Laura could understand not wanting to take any chances. Laura looked around her. It was an empty bedroom with a bed, a table, and a vanity. \"I'll get a basin of water. I'm sure if you're like any other woman I know, you desperately want to be clean.\"\n\n\"I do. Thank you,\" Laura said and the woman sent her a small smile. In the dim light, Laura could see that the woman was old, older than Miss Martha if one could tell age by the wrinkles that lined one's face. Her hair was hidden under a night cap and she wore a simple cream housedress that had seen better days but was in fairly good condition.\n\n\"There's another woman downstairs in the cellar. I offered her the same thing, but she wouldn't take me up on it,\" the woman said quietly. Laura almost winced. Almost. Getting clean was more important than her pride, however. \"I'll be back with the water and the dress. Then you can give me yours and we can get it washed and hangin' tonight.\"\n\n\"I can wash it myself,\" Laura said quickly. No white person had ever offered to help her do anything. And it would take more than an offer of water for Laura to be too trusting. Of course the woman was keeping her entire family safe from bounty hunters... but still, Laura would take care of herself as best she could.\n\n\"It's no bother, dear. I'll be just a minute.\"\n\nThe woman left, pulling the door to the bedroom shut right behind her. Laura exhaled, closed her eyes. Then she stepped out of her shoes feeling blessed relief. She pulled down her stockings. They were torn, bloodied, and disgusting. There was no saving them. She undid her cloak and set it across a chair. It too could use a good washing. She pulled her bag up and over her head and opened it. She had two extra dresses and three pairs of stockings though they had gotten wet in the dunking. But not as wet as what she was in the process of removing. They would do. She would not take this woman's clothes. She was a free woman now, not merchandise to be dressed. It was time to live like it. There was a gentle tapping on the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" Laura said. The woman pushed open the door, but looked to be struggling with the large basin of water. Laura hurried over and relieved her of it. Laura placed it on the table in the room. The woman came to stand next to her and placed two towels and a bar of soap. \"I have a dress I can change into.\"\n\nThe woman held up a simple calico dress. \"Are you sure? Most women who come through here only have the one. If you're worried that you're takin' somethin' of mine, don't be. We get a lot of donations from abolitionists around the country.\"\n\n\"I'm sure,\" Laura said and pulled out her wrinkled, slightly damp, plaid day dress with a wide white collar on the top. Another old dress of Missy Charlotte's that Laura had worked over to fit her. Laura had had five of them. More dresses than most slaves; a deep red one, a plaid one, a dark blue one, a black one, and a gray one. She had packed the red one and the plaid one and ran in the dark blue one. She had very happily left the black and gray dresses. She would never dress as a servant again. She wasn't so prideful as to say she would never work as one. No. There was a good chance she would be sewing for some woman whenever they ended up wherever Papa was leading them. But she wouldn't look like a servant and she certainly wouldn't dress like one.\n\n\"What a lovely dress.\"\n\nIt wasn't. Not really for the fabric was quite faded. But Laura had done her best to keep it in mint condition. \"Thank you,\" Laura said quietly. \"I've worked on it myself.\"\n\n\"A seamstress are you?\"\n\n\"Yes.\" Only every day of her life. Laura hesitated. The woman had been nothing but kind to her and her family. \"You've been very generous to me and my family. If you have somethin' you would like me to look at...\"\n\nA small smile lit across the woman's face. \"Well, I do have somethin'.\"\n\n\"Then bring it to me. As soon as I get changed I can work on it.\"\n\n\"But you must be tired.\" She was. But she could sew in her sleep.\n\n\"We came by boat and you're not that far from the river. I'll be fine. And it's the least I can do.\"\n\nThe woman gave her a serious look, her eyes, which Laura could see were gray, met Laura's. \"No, dear, it's the least I can do.\"\n\n\"You've been a help to me. To us. Please, let me help if I can.\"\n\nThe woman beamed and then left the room pulling the door behind her. Laura dipped her hand in the basin of water and sighed when she felt the heat touch her fingers. Still warm. She reached for the soap and brought it up to her nose. She was used to lye soap. Lye soap that either had no scent or sometimes had an offensive scent depending on who made it at Salis House. This bar of soap though... Laura gave it another sniff. Rose. It was something Missy Adora or Missy Charlotte would have used. And now her. One day she would only use scented soap too.\n\nShe made quick work of undressing, washing, and redressing. Then she did her best to wash the clothes she had worn the past day and a half. When those were rung out and off to the side, she undid her hair, brushed it out, and rebraided it. Laura only washed her hair every few weeks and she had washed it the morning before they left. But with all the sweating and the river water, she could tell it could already use another washing. But she didn't have time for that. She attached the pins in her hair, making her bun tight. Almost she felt like herself.\n\nThough she had on clean stockings, she wasn't yet ready to brave her shoes. There was a gentle knocking on the door again. The woman.\n\n\"Please come in,\" Laura said and went to the door.\n\n\"I would let you sleep in here, but sometimes the sheriff comes by and it has to look like we don't have anyone here,\" the woman said as she entered. Fabric draped her arm. \"But give me your clothes. I'll take care of them.\"\n\n\"I've already given them a quick wash,\" Laura said, exchanging her wet clothing for the woman's fabrics.\n\n\"I'm supposed to be makin' a dress for the church social. It's not turnin' out right.\"\n\n\"I can fix it,\" Laura whispered.\n\nThe woman stopped, eyed Laura. \"You're not much like the others we have.\"\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"You speak different and you're not as... afraid.\"\n\nLaura exhaled, ran her hands down the sides of her dress. \"I probably should be.\"\n\n\"No. I don't mean about runnin'. I mean... oh nevermind. I'm goin' to set your clothes with mine and then I'll be right back.\"\n\nLaura spent the next hour or so measuring, cutting, and draping, pausing only to eat some bread and cheese or whenever she heard voices outside the room. There was the chance that the sheriff still might come knocking on the door, so Laura had to be prepared to run for the cellar. But finally, the dress came together.\n\n\"It's not the best work I've ever done,\" Laura whispered. Without good lighting, it was hard to get perfect stitches.\n\n\"It's better than any other dress I own,\" the woman said, her voice slightly shaky as she ran her hands down the length of her gown. \"It's a nice thing to feel beautiful, isn't it?\"\n\n\"It sure is,\" Laura said, placing all of the sewing needles and thread she had used into the woman's sewing kit. She folded all of her clothes and things and put them back in her bag. She had hoped that airing them out would do them so good. \"I should head on down before Papa and the boys get worried.\"\n\n\"Come on,\" Mrs. G said without taking off her new dress. She opened the door and led Laura across the darkened hallway and to the room with the trap door. There was no one around. The woman pushed aside the carpet again and lifted the hook in the floor.\n\n\"Thank you again, ma'am,\" Laura said as she followed the steps below. The trap door closed quietly above her. But it wasn't dark. She could see light ahead, and then people. First, she saw the twins, Sam and was it Manny? They were sitting on the floor, talking quietly to each other. They both looked up when she took a step.\n\n\"Laura,\" Gid said, raising a hand. He was on the floor curled up next to Sol who was curled up next to Papa. Papa sat directly in front of her, a bunch of papers in his lap. Benji was on Papa's other side. Across from them were three Negros Laura didn't know. All of them looked to be asleep, though one of them, a man, opened his eyes for a second to look at her, before closing them. \"Come sit by me,\" Gid said and moved his bag which separated him from either Sam or Manny.\n\n\"Alright,\" Laura said quietly and walked to her brother. This cellar was clean and didn't look like it was used for food or supplies or anything other than hiding people. It was long and deep and there was plenty of room for stretching out a bit. Papa had a lantern lit next to him, but so did either Sam or Manny providing some dim light in a space that could probably get very dark.\n\nLaura plopped down next to Gid. \"You changed,\" he said, leaning close and giving her a big sniff. She felt the gaze of Sam or his brother next to her. But she didn't know what to do with that, so she ignored him. Them.\n\n\"I simply could not resist the temptation,\" Laura said quietly as she wrapped an arm around her youngest brother's shoulder and squeezed.\n\n\"Surprisin',\" Benji muttered loud enough for her to hear.\n\n\"Ben,\" Papa said, his voice low. Then he leaned across a snoring Sol and dropped the papers in her lap. \"Look at that.\"\n\nLaura unraveled the papers realizing that it was one paper. A map. \"What is it?\"\n\n\"Where we're goin'. Mr. G let me borrow it.\"\n\n\"Where are we goin'?\" Laura asked as she tried to make sense of it.\n\n\"West.\" Laura dropped the map. West? What was out west?\n\n\"Really?\" Sam or Manny asked from next to her. She turned to her right, but both of the men were looking at Papa.\n\n\"Yes.\" Papa answered.\n\n\"How come?\" The voice was low, familiar. It was Sam who was sitting next to her. She was sure of it.\n\n\"Way I figure it they'll be expectin' us to go north. Most runaways do. They won't be spendin' nearly as much time or money goin' out west to Indian Territory.\"\n\n\"Now that makes a lot of sense,\" the twin sitting furthest away from her said. She was wrong, that one was Sam. The one next to her must be Manny.\n\n\"I want land. I want open space. I'm a blacksmith. They'll need me more out west anyway. It's a risk, but I've been prayin' on it and I think that's where God wants my family.\"\n\nLaura stared at him, forgetting about the men next to her. Out. West. Where it wasn't even civilized." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 24", + "text": "What were the chances?\n\nSam turned and looked at Manny who was already looking at him. After Sly had left they had discussed the matter in great detail.\n\n\"Canada is safer,\" Manny had whispered to him after they had gotten settled in the room underground. The family that had taken them in had not been lying. There were blankets and plenty cheese, meat, and bread to go around. Sam hadn't even realized how hungry he was until he inhaled what was given. \"On a whole lot of levels. No paddy rollers to deal with.\"\n\n\"I agree,\" Sam said when he finally slowed down his eating. It was clear to him that Manny had already eaten cause he was just playing with the food in his hand.\n\n\"Goin' west would be foolish. We don't know about what's out west. Paddy rollers will be lookin' for us. And whoever heard of a Negro with a gun?\" Manny was saying all of the right things. But. Sam stuffed the last of his meal into his mouth and stared at his hands. His brother was not finished talking yet.\n\n\"Out west, the Indians might kill us. Now, in the all the years I have lived, in all the years I have contemplated my death, getting' killed by Indians was never one of the things I considered.\"\n\n\"You been thinkin' 'bout death?\"\n\n\"Sam. This is no time for your distractions,\" Manny had hissed. He had kept his voice low the entire time. \"You hearin' me?\"\n\n\"I'm hearin' you.\"\n\nHe was hearing his brother and while he might be looking calm on the outside, on the inside he was floundering. Go out west? He had never thought of such a thing. All of his hopes and dreams had been pinned on going up north. Course he had no clue what up north looked like. And if Sly was to be trusted, and Sam had no reason to doubt him, it might just be one disappointment after another. He leaned forward, pulling his knees to his chest and buried his face there. Lord God, grant us direction.\n\nBecause he had no direction. Running had been a spur of the moment thing. And now he didn't know what to do next.\n\n\"Are you really sleepin' right now?\"\n\n\"Manny,\" Sam growled.\n\n\"Oh. Are you prayin'? Tell God we lost.\" Sam sighed. \"I mean but if you think about it, we ain't city boys. All them people... and up north I hear it's a lot of white people. Now what I want to go live with a bunch of white people for?\"\n\n\"So you want to go west?\" Sam asked without raising his face from his knees.\n\n\"Cause a child no bigger than a mite told me to? No, indeed. We goin' to Canada like we always said we would.\" Sam waited. \"But I done heard it's real cold up there. Sam, you know I hate the cold. Course if the option is between bein' cold forever or bein' a slave forever. I take the cold.\"\n\nAnd on and on Manny went, talking enough for the both of them while Sam quietly prayed and watched Laura's family out of the corner of his eye. The other three slaves that Manny had left with were down there, but they were sleep or feigning sleep.\n\nBut Laura's family? The four of them were just as quietly whispering amongst themselves as he and Manny were. They looked like a family. Amos was clearly in charge, but by the way he placed a hand on one of the smaller boys or smiled at Benji, Sam could see that he was a loving parent. A deep, yearning rose up from inside of him, so heavy he had to blink back tears. It had been so long since he had been anyone's son. And he probably never would be again. He exhaled in an effort to get control of his emotions. He was a man full grown. The last thing he needed was a daddy. Or a mama. And at least he had Manny. Some folks didn't have nobody. But still he found himself glancing over at them again. All of them were barefoot. But all of them had the same kind of cloak as Laura had had. Their clothes didn't seem to have any holes in them. And they didn't look worn down. Used. He wondered what had happened that had made them want to run. If he recollected correctly, Amos worked a smithy. That was a nice job for a slave. Sometimes a smithy could make his own money on the side. The youngest boy leaned over, said something, and all four of them laughed. The only thing missing in the picture they presented was Laura. And a mama. And if their closeness was any indication, than the only reason there wasn't a mama was because she was dead.\n\n\"We cain't buy land up north, Sam,\" Manny said quietly, reminding Sam that he had bigger fish to fry than wondering about the family sitting a few feet away from him. \"It's probably all taken at this point. And all we is, is farmers.\"\n\nSam listened to his brother's chatter until the door above the stairs lifted and Laura had timidly walked into their midst.\n\n\"I see the allure.\"\n\n\"Hush.\"\n\nLaura had come to sit between him and her youngest brother. She smelled like sunshine and roses and looked even better and he was man enough to appreciate it in a distant sort of way. She had fallen into the category he put all pretty women. Nice looking, but not for him. He had returned his attention to his brother until he saw Amos hand her papers. She could read? The fascination was back. She wasn't like no slave he had ever met in his life. And then Amos had said they were going west. And now here Sam was, feeling thunderstruck.\n\nAmos started speaking again, and Sam turned to face him taking in another whiff of the roses on Laura's skin. He tried not to think about that. \"Ain't no jobs for Negros up north other than servin' white folks. Spent my whole life at the whim of a white man. Ain't gone do that as a free man.\"\n\n\"See!\" Manny hissed against Sam's other ear.\n\n\"Papa, how far west you talkin'?\"\n\nLaura's voice was low, but Sam could hear that hint of panic in it. He and Manny weren't the only ones unsure.\n\n\"Don't know for sure. I'm hopin' I'll know it when I see it, but definitely Indian Territory where paddy rollers less likely to go huntin'.\"\n\n\"It's far,\" Laura said and raised the paper, stretching it out. Sam could not help but lean in close to look at it. When she glanced over at him, he leaned back. \"No,\" she said and moved the paper so that it crossed both of their laps. \"It's a map,\" she said simply.\n\nSam had heard that word before but where?\n\n\"Treasure map?\" There was awe in Manny's voice. That's right. As boys they had heard stories of treasure maps. Pieces of paper that showed you were to go to find buried gold.\n\n\"Where are we?\" Laura muttered to herself, her finger making lines on the map. Sam turned to his brother, his eyes wide. Manny's were wider. They both turned to the map, even though they didn't understand a thing on it.\n\n\"Cincinnati is the biggest town closest to us,\" Amos said, his voice like gravel.\n\nSam watched as Laura stared hard at the paper for a second and then placed a finger somewhere near the center. \"I think I've found it.\"\n\n\"Now follow the river. See where it leads.\"\n\n\"The river?\"\n\n\"Steamboat is faster than walkin'.\"\n\nSam felt a pinch on his arm. He turned.\n\n\"Why didn't we think of that?\"\n\n\"Cause we don't know where we are,\" Sam hissed in frustration and turned back to the map. It didn't help. He didn't know what he was looking at or how any of it came together. And he felt a strong urge to throw something somewhere even though it wouldn't change the fact that he was an ignorant fool.\n\nBut still. He made himself watch as Laura's finger dragged from one point to the next. Even he could tell that going west meant going far.\n\n\"Can you read it?\" Laura's voice was quiet, low and Sam knew she was talking to him.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"This is where we are near abouts,\" she said softly, slowly pointing to a black dot on the map. \"Cincinnati, Ohio. This squiggly line is the river. The Ohio River. See it flows into the Mississippi. The Mississippi will take you out west.\"\n\n\"I think she think you stupid,\" Manny said, his breath hot in Sam's ear. He fought the desire to roll his eyes. In all the ways that mattered they were stupid. It would be an enormous undertaking to go to a land he didn't know, in a direction he wasn't familiar, with people he had no relation with, and completely unable to figure out anything on his own. They would be at the mercy of others, hoping and praying along the way that everyone they encountered would tell them the truth.\n\nSam leaned back, distancing himself from the map. It could be done. It would just be the hardest thing he had ever done before. He had lived his whole life letting someone else tell him what to do and where to go. Now he would have to learn how to make decisions on his own.\n\n\"Stop gettin' worked up. You act like we got places to go and people to see.\" Sam fought an urge to hit his brother.\n\n\"How we gone get on the steamboat?\" Laura asked Amos. Sam didn't move, but listened.\n\n\"Steamboats always hirin',\" Amos said and held out his hand. Laura folded the map and handed it to her pa. \"We'll hire on. It ain't gone be easy. Our life ain't gone be easy but we knew that long ago when we figured out we was slaves.\"\n\nLaura said nothing, though Sam could see that she was considering her pa's words. Finally, she nodded. \"It is, what it is.\"\n\n\"Can I lay on your lap, Laura?\" the boy next to Laura asked.\n\n\"Of course, Gid,\" she said and ran a hand up and down his shoulder as he got comfortable.\n\n\"Are you Sam?\" Laura asked, turning to face him.\n\nThe boy in her lap, Gid, sat up. \"I can't tell them apart either.\"\n\n\"Most people can't,\" Manny said from the other side of Sam.\n\n\"I'm Sam,\" Sam said, giving her a nod.\n\n\"Is he though?\" Manny dragged out slowly.\n\nGid snickered, his brown eyes darting between him and Manny probably looking for something to differentiate them by. But physically there was nothing. Except the scars on Sam's back. Manny had scars too, but Sam had more.\n\nHis gaze met Laura's and he could see that she too was eyeing the both of them.\n\n\"You two ever switch places?\" Gid asked, still blinking at them both.\n\n\"Only all the time,\" Manny said, before breaking off a piece of the bread in his hand and stuffing his face. And it was true. Especially when they were younger. There had been no reason to just be Sam when he could also be Manny.\n\n\"Not recently,\" Sam said slowly. First off, it was only something they could pull on folks who didn't know them. The more people knew them, the easier it was to tell them apart. Because Sam and Manny might look the same, but they didn't talk the same. That wasn't to say that Sam couldn't become Manny again if he wanted to. Or needed to. And vice versa. But there was just no good reason to switch places anymore.\n\n\"You know dem paddy rollers gone be on the river. How you aim to get there without them seein' you?\"\n\nThe question came from one of the three formerly silent slaves and it was aimed at Amos. It was one of the men who had been pretending to sleep, but it was clear he had been paying attention to every word. Sam noted that the other two were just as wide awake. His gaze flickered to Amos then cause it was a good question. Why wouldn't paddy rollers be looking for escaped slaves at steamboat ports?\n\nAmos stretched his legs out slowly. \"Don't aim to get there without them seein' us. We got us free papers.\"\n\nSam blinked. And then blinked again. He heard the slave who had asked that question make a humming sound. Then he felt a sharp elbow in his gut. And Manny's hot breath again.\n\n\"We stayin' with these people. They know what they doin'.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 25", + "text": "Steamboats sank. This, Laura knew. Cause she read the papers whenever she got a chance and had heard discussions of their sinking often amongst Massa Will and Massa Richard and even Miss Martha a time or two. Massa Will didn't even like to place their cotton or salt on steamboats that travelled along the Missouri. Massa Will said the Missouri ate boats. And if by chance the rivers didn't eat the boats, then the boats were busy exploding. And the stories she had heard about steamboat captains... they weren't nice to their own kind. How would they treat a bunch of Negros? And here was Papa talking about riding a steamboat as though they were merely going to take a Sunday afternoon picnic.\n\nSometimes I think you trust Miss Martha more than you trust your own papa. It was something Mama had told Laura more than once... and usually after Papa had just finished giving his opinion about something. She meant no disrespect, but just how could he judge a situation when he didn't exactly know what was going on? And as for Miss Martha? Well, Laura didn't always like her, but she was one of the smartest people Laura had ever encountered. Smarter even than Massa Richard and Massa Will truth be told. But not smarter than Prince.\n\nAnd yet. She had thought they would use the free papers in case a paddy roller caught them that wasn't from Salis House. She hadn't seen this far ahead. Hadn't considered they might need the papers for later. And now it was making sense as to why Prince had given them false names with the wrong owners' written on the documents. He had anticipated this. And so had Papa. Feeling eyes on her, Laura glanced up. Papa was staring at her, no doubt watching all of her thoughts as they ran through her mind.\n\n\"Papa\u2014,\"\n\nThe trap door above opened. The sound of the hinges creaking as it lifted cut off every conversation that was taking place around her. The man known as Mr. G came down the stairs slowly. Laura finally got a good look at him. He was older than his wife with his halo of white hair, but not too old for he stood upright, not stooping. His suit was not threadbare, but neither was it new. And the cut was decidedly old. Whoever these people were, they were not in the first stare of fashion. Not at all the kind of white people Laura had grown up surrounded by. She wondered for a moment why they were helping escaped slaves. Did they feel sorry for the slaves? For her? Because that was what she was whether she wanted to think about it or not. A slave. The very lowest of the low. Or did they feel that slavery was against God's law and so must be fought against in every way possible? And wasn't that the thing? When Missy Adora was little, Laura had spent most of her Sundays in the balcony of Reverend Gautier's church in case Missy Adora needed to be taken out. She had learned a lot up in that balcony... one of the things being that it seemed like you could use God's law to put you on either side of the fence of an argument. Laura had told Mama that once and suffered a smack to the backside while Prince later told her it was the smartest thing she had ever said. Either way, she had missed her chance to find out more about these people who had opened up their home to runaway slaves when she had left the room upstairs.\n\n\"I thought you would be able to stay the night and mornin' through, but it looks like if you plannin' on goin' to Canada you got to leave tonight or wait 'bout a week.\" His voice was gruff, but he met the gaze of all of them. And wasn't he in for a surprise? They weren't going to Canada.\n\n\"We gone go out west,\" Papa said softly, giving Mr. G that piercing look he often gave her.\n\n\"West.\" In the silence, the word seemed to bounce around the small space filling everyone's ears. The man straightened, stared at Papa a moment. Then nodded. Slowly. \"Alright. We can get you headed in that direction. But not tonight. May take a day or so.\"\n\n\"If you don't mind us stayin'...\"\n\nThe man shook his head. \"Not a problem. The wife and I don't mind. Is everyone goin' out west then?\"\n\n\"Not us,\" the man said who had asked Papa about getting caught at steamboat ports. He stood up and so did the other two slaves next to him. Or were they now all former slaves? At what point did that happen? Laura just did not know. There was just so much she did not know. Worryin' don't bring you nothin' but trouble. Mama had always said that. But Mama had never done this before, Mama had never been free.\n\n\"We goin' to Canada. Don't want to live our lives lookin' over our shoulder,\" the slave said, continuing his speech. He made sure his words were tossed in Papa's direction. Laura glanced over at Papa. His calm expression did not change. And that did not surprise her one bit. If there was one thing she knew about Papa, it was that he didn't give two hoots what anyone said or cared about him. Mama had always claimed it was cause he knew he had favor with Jesus and when you got favor with Jesus, you didn't care about man. Laura glanced at him again. She wondered if that was really true.\n\n\"We're headed west too.\" The words were said quietly, but with a firmness that held no doubts. Laura turned slowly to the right. For a moment, caught up as she was in her own circumstances, she had forgotten about the handsome brothers sitting next to her.\n\nThe words hadn't come from Sam. In fact, he was staring hard at his brother, Manny. Now, wait just a minute...\n\n\"Alright. I'll be back down in a few so we can hammer out the details. Let me get these three goin'.\"\n\nEveryone was quiet as the three slaves and Mr. G climbed up the stairs and left. The trap door slammed close with a thud.\n\n\"You're going west too?\" Gid asked, sleep completely forgotten as he stared at the men sitting next to her. He wasn't laying on her lap anymore, but he was leaning up against her. She wondered if he found comfort in her touch because he missed Mama and she was the next best thing or if he was always up under someone. As opposed to quiet, serious Sol who seemed to do his best to prove he was growing up. Sol was no longer sleeping, but watching everyone through tired eyes. Laura watched him now as he stared at the twin brothers. Feeling her gaze on him, he turned and sent her questioning glance. She shook her head slightly and smiled at him. He looked away, looking a bit unsure. They still had time to go before they would know each other well.\n\n\"A man has to have his land, his honor, and his gun,\" the one who was Manny said. His what? Laura let go of the thoughts about her family and turned her attention to him. A Negro was lucky if he had land, wasn't considered to be honorable or dishonorable, and they certainly couldn't own guns. She fought the urge to correct him. What abolitionist had been spilling seed into that ground? She noticed that even Sam was staring at him. Manny looked past him. \"Now, what's this about free papers?\"\n\nIt was Sam's turn to lean forward, looking past her and towards Papa. \"We don't think livin' up north is what's best for us, but I'll be honest, we cain't read and we don't know where we goin' or what we gone do when we get there. But we got a little money and we can pay our own way if you can help us get there.\"\n\nAnd they wanted to go out west? Course she had always heard going out west was a young man's inclination. She was not sure what that meant for her as the only woman 'bout to go on this here journey. But at least she could read. It was her turn to look at Papa. Papa was staring at Sam. Hard. \"It ain't gone be easy.\"\n\n\"Like you said. Life for our kind ain't ever been.\" Sam's voice was low and certain which seemed almost at odds with the way he had been looking at his brother only moments earlier. Laura looked around Sam at his brother. Manny had a small smile playing on his lips. Interesting. No, not interesting. She had more than enough on her plate. Thinking about the happenings between two brothers was a waste of her time. And yet...\n\n\"True enough,\" Papa finally said.\n\n\"You mind explainin' how you plan to get out west in them steamboats?\"\n\nPapa unraveled the map Prince had given them and this time laid it out on the floor so all of them could see. Prince had drawn a route straight up to Canada for them to follow. And wouldn't he be in for a shock when he learned they had gone west instead? If he ever learned that that is. Laura rubbed her chest in an effort to ease the tightness there. It was time to think on something else.\n\nManny and Sam moved to where the other slaves had been, across from Laura and Gid, and all seven of them gathered around Prince's map. \"The papers are just in case somethin' comes up.\" Laura didn't want to think about what that something could be. \"But I'm hopin' we can all hire on to a steamboat. I heard tell they always need help. It should take no more than 'bout eleven days\u2014cause of the stops\u2014to get us from here,\" he said, pointing at Cincinnati, \"to here.\" His finger was on Oklahoma. Laura knew her states and her territories. Missy Adora had spent all summer learning them. She felt another small pang in her chest. She would never spend another summer running around Salis with Missy Adora again. She didn't know why she missed the little girl. It was like Annie had said, Missy Adora was one day gonna grow old and when that happened she wasn't going to be thinking about Laura. But it was taking her heart a long minute to catch up with her brain. \"This here is Oklahoma, right Laura?\" Papa asked. Though he clearly knew the answer already.\n\nLaura felt the twins' gaze on her, but she licked her lips, leaned forward. \"Yes, Papa.\"\n\n\"My Laura can read real good.\" He pointed a finger at her though he was talking to Sam and Manny. \"She'll get us there.\"\n\nLaura looked up at him. Stared. Surely the man was joking. \"Papa.\"\n\n\"Ain't no one smarter.\"\n\n\"Prince is,\" Benji muttered. Course he would say that. Laura looked at him and made a face. He smiled back.\n\n\"I'm not so sure on that. Laura's here. Prince isn't.\"\n\n\"Who's Prince?\" Manny asked, dragging his gaze off of the map in front of him.\n\n\"My oldest brother,\" Laura said with a sigh. \"He didn't come with us.\"\n\n\"What do you know about steamboats?\" Papa asked quickly. His eyes and fingers still on the map.\n\n\"Only what I've read and heard.\" She ignored the quick glances from Sam and Manny.\n\n\"That's more'n what I know,\" Papa's voice was low, gentle. And now she knew what he was doing.\n\nWith a sigh, she let him distract her. \"They can be dangerous.\" Laura hesitated. \"Though the ones floatin' down the Mississippi seem to be the safest.\" If Prince were here, they would know anything and everything they wanted to know about steamboats. Prince knew everything about anything. But instead it was just her. And Laura only knew what she heard discussed and what she could glean in random, quiet moments. \"If you don't have money it's not the way to travel.\" Miss Martha had made that observation more than once.\n\n\"We can put up with anythin' for eleven days.\" Papa said. He turned towards Sam. \"When we get to Oklahoma, I'll set up a smithy, my own business. That's the short of it.\"\n\nLaura glanced between Papa and Sam and Manny. What was it about them that made Papa so willing to share information? He had never been one for loose talking in all the time that she had known him.\n\n\"It's more than what we got,\" Manny said, his eyes back on the map.\n\n\"How come you left?\" Sol asked the question, but Laura found it was one she wanted answered as well.\n\nManny and Sam exchanged looks before Manny spoke again. \"It was just time. That's all.\" That was not all. Laura looked over at Papa who was looking at the two young men, a thoughtful expression on his face.\n\n\"Were you goin' to be sold? They were goin' to sell me and Gid. That's how come we left,\" Sol volunteered.\n\n\"No,\" Sam said slowly. \"We wasn't gonna be sold.\" Sam looked up, meeting Laura's gaze for a second before returning to the map. \"Where's Kentucky? That's where we come from.\"\n\nLaura blinked, tried to meet Papa's gaze, but met Benji's instead. For once in their life they exchanged a look of understanding. So, they could be open and free with information but the twin brothers weren't?\n\nLaura's eyes dropped back down to the paper in front of her. \"What city?\" Laura asked. She placed a finger on Kentucky. When Sam told her the city, she then found it. \"You ran from here to here... that is, if you ran?\"\n\n\"Oh, we ran,\" Manny said with a decisive nod.\n\n\"How you get across the river?\" Benji asked, his voice suspicious. He would never have made it in Salis. He was just too obvious about everything.\n\nManny gave Benji a look, but Sam answered. \"We swam.\"\n\n\"You never did,\" Gid said, eyeing them both in awe and amazement. There was one person who wasn't suspicious of nothing.\n\n\"Hey,\" Manny said, pointing a finger at him. \"If we say it, it's true.\" And yet there was something in his voice that led one to believe that nothing that came out of his mouth was ever true. Laura's eyes narrowed as she took him in.\n\n\"We grew up on the Potomac. Learned to swim there as boys,\" Sam said quietly, his gaze still on the map. But by the gentle way he answered, she knew he too could pick up on some tension.\n\n\"Benji said you two worked a tobacco farm?\" Papa asked, his voice startling Laura for a second.\n\n\"Yeah. For too long,\" Manny drawled. Now that, Laura believed. There was a lightness to his voice that told her it was not only true, but that there had been something rather horrifying about it all. It was like that for some slaves. Laura may have been raised in Salis, but that didn't mean she didn't know some things. The brothers had had it rough. And they were just not going to be sharing everything. Fair enough. \"So, this is west. Which way is north?\"\n\n\"You see this symbol right here?\" Laura asked and pointed to the compass rose on the map. \"It's called a compass rose.\" She knew this because this too was part of Missy Adora's geography lessons and what Missy Adora learned, Laura learned. Because of Prince. When Missy Adora first started learning how to read, Prince had pulled her to the side, even knowing that he had already taught Laura some reading, and said, Don't be stupid and let that girl learn something you don't. It was advice she had taken to the heart. Which meant Laura knew a little bit about everything. She had been looking forward to Missy Adora getting a new tutor that fall. She had already composed a list of excuses to be in the same room with her as she learned.\n\n\"I've seen that before,\" Manny said quickly, lunging forward. \"Where did we see that, Sam?\"\n\nLaura glanced at Sam whose brow was furrowed, thinking. \"It's often on a compass. People who travel\u2014,\"\n\n\"That's it!\" Manny said, snapping his fingers. He turned to Sam. \"Remember that one sailor...\"\n\n\"North, south, east and west,\" Sam said, his fingers tracing the compass rose in the corner of the map. \"That's how you know.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laura said, sitting back on her legs. She could read the eagerness in their faces, their desire to know more about the world around them. She had seen it in different ones that Mama had taken the time to teach. Other than her brothers and Annie, Laura had never shared what she knew with anyone. Prince had cautioned her against it. Don't be a hero, Laura. Heroes die. Though to be honest, Laura had ignored Prince. Prince didn't believe in saving nobody's skin except his... usually. But since Mama had also told her not to, Laura had listened. When the time comes and you need to do big things, God will tell you. That time ain't now. And now Laura was curious as to just how she knew that. But it made no nevermind. This was different. Cause they was... kind of free. And yet when the trap door opened seconds later, Laura wasn't the only one who scurried away from the map and to the other side of the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 26", + "text": "When he first heard the groaning of the door as it opened from up above, Sam lurched for the map, folding it quickly. He would have stuffed it down his shirt, but Amos spoke.\n\n\"Here,\" Amos said, his voice low and light, and his hands held out. Sam tossed him the map before pressing his body against the wall.\n\nSam's heart was pounding fast, but he took several deep breaths to slow his breathing. His mind told him he had nothing to fear if Mr. G caught them reading or in his case trying to read, but all his body knew was to panic if there was a white man around and he was doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. Mr. G came down the stairs slowly and then took a seat on the second to last step with a huff. If he sensed the tension that his presence had added to the room, he ignored it. With a sigh, he looked across the room first at Amos, and then at Sam and Manny. \"Now, you say you want to go out west?\"\n\n\"Yes. By steamboat,\" Amos said quietly. It was a good plan. A much better one than the one Sam had thought would play out if they took Sly's suggestion and went west. Sam had pictured him and Manny travelling on foot by night, hiding in cellar after cellar until one day they looked up and was there. It seemed silly now that he had seen how far away the West truly was and how unprepared he and Manny were. Staying with Amos and his family seemed like the smartest thing to do. Sam only wished that he and Manny had something else to contribute to the trip besides extra bodies. He hadn't missed the look exchanged between Laura and Benji when he and Manny wouldn't talk about why they left. But admitting that Molloy and Massa Charles wanted to use them as breeding horses felt... shameful. Though he had no doubt it was something that had probably been done even at the plantation Amos and the others had come from. And then Manny, of course, was starting to be his usual, ornery self. Sam had to think of something... some useful reason for them to be glad to have him and Manny tag along.\n\nMr. G's low hum caught Sam's attention, pulling him from his thoughts. He watched as the man ran a hand over his face. \"Steamboats come through these parts fairly often. I know a few captains who would take on runaway slaves. In fact, I know such a man who is on his way here now from Pittsburgh.\" No one moved, but Sam could feel the alertness of everyone, even the younger boys, Sol and Gid. \"My wife's cousin of a cousin. He's a captain of a steamer. He's expected in a few days. He's not an abolitionist, but so long as you cause no trouble and are willin' to work, he'll take you on. He's done it for me before.\"\n\n\"But he'll know we're runaways?\" Manny asked, folding his arms over his chest. Sam heard what his brother was not saying... this captain could just as easily lead a paddy roller right to them just as soon as they got out west and then turn around and collect the bounty.\n\n\"If you was free you wouldn't need me to be a go-between. If I bring you to him, he'll know he has to be careful with how you get on the boat.\" Which made sense. But Sam wasn't used to trusting nobody but his brother and maybe the occasional fellow slave. But this...\n\n\"He'll expect you to work for your ride with no pay. That's why he'll take you on. The accommodations will be harsh. He may or may not provide a meal. But if I didn't think he would get you there, I wouldn't tell you. It's your choice to make though. Your lives to live. I'll take you to the nearest port in two days. You can decide if you want an introduction or not then.\"\n\nMr. G stood up, stretched. \"My wife or I will be down in a few hours with some more food to eat and in case you need to use the outhouse. Otherwise, have a good night. And don't forget. You can still change your mind if you like. Got rides constantly goin' to and from the north.\"\n\nWhen the door slammed shut behind him, Benji spoke into the silence. \"Well, Pa?\"\n\nWell, Pa. Sam fought the envy that question brought up on the inside of him. To know there was someone else he could rely on to make the big decisions would be such a relief. And yet, Sam had lived just about his whole life never making a single decision on his own. This was what it meant to be free. It meant making the hard decisions and letting the chips fall where they may. And the thing was, he didn't really have to be all that different from Benji at all. He didn't have a natural father. But he had a heavenly one.\n\nHe spoke before Amos could. \"Maybe we could pray on it? We don't know the steamboat captain, but God does.\"\n\nManny made a small noise in the back of his throat. Amos, who had been looking at his son, turned and looked at Sam for a second. When he spoke, his voice was gentle. \"I think that's a fine idea, Sam.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 27", + "text": "The steamboat was like any and every other steamboat Sam had seen in his life. Called the Thomas Paine, it was white with three stacked floors, each one a little bit smaller than the first.\n\n\"It looks like a cake,\" Laura said. She was standing next to Sam and now wearing the same solid blue dress and dark blue cloak she had been wearing the first night she met him. They had all changed. The G family had allowed for all of them to wash up and change into some different clothes if needed so that they didn't look like runaway slaves. Sam had on the change of clothes he had been saving for almost a year. A white shirt and blue pants. For the first time in ever he had a pair of shoes on. He and Manny had given Mr. G some money to purchase them. They fit. They didn't pinch. And yet, he felt like a part of his body couldn't breathe.\n\nBut he would get used to them. Free men didn't walk around barefoot less they was poor as Job's turkey. That was just the plain truth. He ran a hand over his head and hid a small smile. He had also shaved and cut his hair. The G family had lent them real honest to goodness soap and for the first time in his life, Sam had been tempted to steal. He loved the way he currently smelled. Sandalwood, Gid had called it. Every now and then there would be a breeze carrying the scent and Sam would realize it was coming from him. It smelled like freedom to Sam. Course everything that was new did. He didn't know how he could ever go back. Just the thought of it would probably break him. He shook his head, forced himself to think on something else. Manny, standing on the other side of him was wearing brown pants and a white shirt. He had not shaved though he had trimmed his beard. They were going to do their very best not to look identical.\n\n\"Not like any cake I've ever seen,\" Manny muttered. It was early morning, so early in the morning, the morning wasn't quite there yet as night hadn't quite left.\n\nThey were standing on the shores of the Ohio in the dim light. After much prayer, together, and alone, they had agreed to trust Mr. G's steamboat captain. If all went well, in minutes they would begin their journey out west. But Laura's family, with their free papers, were going to get on the boat at the port. He and Manny were going to take a smuggler's route... so to speak.\n\n\"You ready?\" Mr. G asked, coming alongside them. \"Mrs. G is going to take you five to the port. I'll take the twins.\"\n\nThere were no goodbyes, no exchanges of good luck. Sam didn't believe in luck anyway. He, Manny, and Mr. G watched as Laura, Amos, Benji, Gid, and Sol climbed into the back of Mrs. G's wagon and pulled off. Gid gave a little, hesitant wave which Sam returned. It made sense for them to split up. Too many people drew attention, but passing off phony free papers was gutsy. And they would have to show them, Sam was sure. It only made sense that paddy rollers would be waiting at the steamer.\n\n\"Come on, we got to meet the steamer for it gets to port.\" They were already at the edge of the bank, a small boat tied up to a rock and bobbing in the water awaited them. Mr. G climbed into the small boat that swayed and dipped into the water. The night before, Mr. G had signaled to the ship using the flash of lanterns in another conductor's window. He admitted that his friend the captain dipped in smuggling. He always stopped the steamer at night at a certain spot on the Ohio to see if anyone had goods... not runaway slaves exactly, but he would take them too. But the flashing lights must have worked, because here was the steamer, waiting on them.\n\nIt seemed like it took no time for their small boat to approach the Paine, as Mr. G called it. The steamer wasn't old or at least it didn't look old. Sam was no expert on boats, but he knew fresh paint when he saw it. In the dawn, he could see men working along the side, tossing glances their way. He prayed there just wouldn't be trouble. For there were so many ways this could go wrong. And yet, he knew in his heart that going north was not the way to go.\n\nThey were not the first to get on the boat. No, he and Manny and Mr. G had to wait for boats loaded down with boxes of stuff to be hauled up first. They were the only Negros though, planning on coming aboard.\n\n\"What you got there?\" a voice called out even as a rope ladder was flung down the side.\n\n\"Two workers,\" Mr. G replied.\n\n\"Two?\"\n\n\"I'll go up first,\" Manny said after giving Sam a quick nod and proceeded to do just that. Sam followed behind. The first thing he noticed were the men with guns patrolling the boat. Mr. G had told him about them. They were hired to make sure the boat wasn't attacked, to keep the peace if someone was looking to cause trouble... and to look the other way when Captain Leahy was doing business. But still, even though he only saw about five of them, it was enough to get his heart racing.\n\n\"Let's go talk. Follow me,\" a gruff voice on his right said. Sam turned to see a man in a dark pants, and a buttoned up jacket. A hat sat on his head. Captain Leahy, most likely. \"Tell the wife I said hi, G.\"\n\nWhen Sam turned around to say goodbye to the man who had got them this far, it was too late. Mr. G's boat was already more than halfway close to the Ohio shoreline.\n\nSam ignored the glances the other workers around him were tossing their way and followed the man down the deck of the steamboat. His nose was assaulted with the smell of animals, unwashed bodies, and something burning that Sam could not identify. The man led them to a small room no bigger than a closet. In fact, Sam thought with everything in there it probably was a closet.\n\n\"I'm Captain Leahy,\" the man said and lit a lantern. Sam took a moment to look the man over. Captain Leahy was shorter than Sam, had a beard of gray hair and slim of build. He had hard, blue eyes and Sam knew in a moment's glance this wasn't a man to disobey. \"Ya'll got experience with a boat?\"\n\n\"No, sir,\" Sam and Manny said softly, together.\n\n\"You will work the deck. You'll fire the boilers if needed, man the pumps, handle the cargo and supply the wood. Do us all a favor and stay out of trouble. Got it?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 28", + "text": "Getting on the boat was far easier than Laura had anticipated. After a long drive down to the port that had her so nervous she almost lost her breakfast, they had finally arrived at the Thomas Paine. The sun was just hitting the sky.\n\nWith quiet looks of courage exchanged, they had said goodbye to Mrs. G and headed down to the wharf. There was a bit of a line what with people and cargo getting on, but finally they reached the front of it.\n\n\"Papers,\" the young, bored white man had asked. He was standing in front of the plank that led to the steamer. On the side of him were two men who could be nothing but paddy rollers with their stern expressions and their holstered guns at their waist. Laura had silently handed him hers. He didn't look them over half as thoroughly as she expected and in moments she was on the steamer. Her and her whole family. All the work to get those papers for something that took less than a minute.\n\nThey had been told when they got aboard to ask for Captain Leahy and tell him that the G family had sent them. He had met them in a small room.\n\nCaptain Leahy had turned to Laura. \"Can you cook? Clean?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laura said softly.\n\n\"Good. You'll work with my head cook and work in the ladies' cabins as needed.\" Captain Leahy had turned to Sol and Gid. \"I'm in need of cabin boys. I'll show you who's in charge when we leave. You,\" he said, eying Papa. \"Will work in the boiler room. You will all have to sleep on deck. Ya'll have food?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Amos said, his voice low. Laura and Mrs. G had made sure they all left with something in their bags. Unless you paid for the privilege, steamboats did not provide meals and Captain Leahy did not provide meals for runaway slaves.\n\n\"Good.\"\n\nAnd now here she was on the Texas deck where Captain Leahy had told her to go. She had seen neither hide nor hair of Sam or Manny, but she was sure they were somewhere here, probably below with her brothers and Papa.\n\n\"This here is the kitchen. You sure you can cook? Cap'n Leahy like him some good food and he like good food served to his passengers.\"\n\nLaura stared at the older, Negro woman who reminded her of half the women she knew back at Salis House. The woman was cutting up potatoes and steadily dropping them in a pot of boiling water. She looked older than Mama had looked and was a stone or so heavier. Her hair was peppered with white and she had deep lines on her face. There were scars, that put Laura in mind of burns, that crawled up the woman's arms and Laura wondered if the woman was free, enslaved, or a runaway like her. But since Laura didn't want anyone asking her those questions, she wasn't hardly going to ask someone else.\n\n\"I can cook.\" She hadn't spent most of her childhood in the kitchen of Salis with Annie and learned nothing.\n\n\"Good. We be cookin' for the meals in the dining room and for folks what pay for it. Good thing you here cause we picked up more passengers today. You hear that?\" the woman said, holding up the hand with the cutting knife.\n\nLaura listened intently, heard the sound of men's voices and then the bang of something in the distance.\n\n\"They be raisin' the stage and pullin' up out of port.\" As soon as the woman finished speaking, the boat shuddered. Laura reached out, placing a hand on the nearest wall to steady herself. Then the sound of a whistle piercing filled the air.\n\n\"And we off.\"\n\nLaura gave a shaky sigh. Said a quick prayer to God to hide them from any and all paddy rollers.\n\n\"Pin that apron on,\" the woman said with a nod toward some folded aprons in a corner.\n\nLaura took off her cloak and bag and began pinning on the apron.\n\n\"We can share a room,\" the woman said. \"My room just over there. I'll have one of the boys bring an extra cot. Name's Nellie.\"\n\n\"Laura,\" Laura said, and then immediately wondered if she should have given Nellie a different name.\n\nLaura picked up her cloak and went to the door Nellie had pointed out. It was very small with a small bed and a dresser. She supposed they might be able to squeeze another cot in there if they worked really hard, but she wasn't hardly about to complain. The boys would be sleeping out in the open under the elements for the duration of the trip. She folded her cloak and set it on the end of Nellie's bed. Then she slid her bag of clothes and food under the bed.\n\n\"Laura, next time we enter a port you'll need to check on the lady passengers and make sure they have all they needs.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Laura said and came back into the kitchen.\n\n\"We got two other girls. Irish. Maureen and Emma. Right now, that's what they doin'. Helpin' the women folk get settled. Levi!\" Nellie called out, her hands steadily peeling the potatoes and dropping them in water. A small Negro boy, who had to be ten if he was a day, popped his head around the corner. \"Take Laura down to the deck. Show her where the chickens and pigs are kept. Laura, I need me two chickens. Wring their necks for you come up.\"\n\nRight. Laura had done that before, but now she remembered one of the many reasons why she preferred a sewing needle and cloth to working in the kitchen.\n\nThere were two doors in the kitchen. One that was clearly for servants use and the other that led to the dining room. Levi pushed through the second door and waved Laura forward. She paused upon entering the room. The floor was carpeted, the walls were gleaming, there were tables situated everywhere and a bar in a corner. It was small, cramped. And more than a bit gaudy for its space. But it was nice. Nicer than anything she had seen on the steamboat thus far.\n\n\"Dinin' room,\" Levi said, watching her take in all in. There were a few men sitting at the tables reading papers, but otherwise the room was empty. \"This ain't nothin' compared to when we turn it into a salon at night,\" the boy said with a quick raise of his brows.\n\nLevi kept walking and Laura followed him out another set of doors onto the deck.\n\n\"Cabins this way and that,\" the boy said, pointing first left and then right. They walked past several and Laura could see that most everyone had tiny rooms. She paused for a moment to look over the side of the railing. She could see people all up and down the decks below, steadily moving.\n\n\"That be the pilothouse,\" Levi said, pointing up to a small, box like room above them. \"No reason to be there.\"\n\nHe turned and kept on moving. This time down the stairs. They paused on the second deck. \"This here the hurricane deck. Not the second floor.\" He leaned in closer. \"Folks who ain't got much money stay here. They all stay in one big room. Women and men but we use curtains to separate them. We ain't got to clean those rooms other than a quick sweep. Texas deck,\" the boy said, pointing to the ceiling above them. \"Monied folk. Hurricane deck,\" he said, pointing to the wall next to him. \"Not so monied folk. Understand?\"\n\n\"Understand. Do they eat upstairs?\"\n\n\"No,\" the boy said, shaking his head. \"Meals are served four times a day in there too,\" he said, jerking a thumb behind him towards the large cabin. \"During the day, folks don't sleep in there. Now's not a good time to show you around in there cause it's always hectic after we leave a port. But, I'll show you a few things.\" She followed Levi down the deck. \"We do bring the meals though through this door,\" he said, rapping his knuckles on a skinny door. After the last meal, we put up a curtain and it becomes the men's cabins instead of the dining area.\"\n\nWell. That was odd, Laura thought. The setup was not unlike their own cabin at Salis House except they weren't strangers. No wonder Miss Martha said traveling steamboats was not for ladies.\n\n\"Some men pay extra for they own curtain so sometimes we have to pull out more.\" The boy stopped talking as several women passed by them talking.\n\n\"But we don't serve them?\"\n\nLevi made a face. \"They supposed to pay us for stuff like cleanin' sheets and extra meals, but if they tell you to fetch somethin'...\"\n\n\"Fetch.\"\n\n\"Right. Come on, let's go to the boiler deck.\"\n\nWhen they got to the bottom, Levi pulled her into a dark corner, tucked under the stairwell so that they were out of the way of those moving things on and off the Paine. \"This here a packet steamboat. Means we carry cargo and whatnot. It's a side-wheeler,\" the boy said, and leaning around her pointed to the large wheel on the side that was rapidly turning water over and over in a rhythmic fashion. \"They faster.\" Laura gave a nod as though she understood.\n\n\"You know a lot about steamboats?\"\n\n\"Miz Nellie my granny. We been travelin' with Captain Leahy for years. You learn a lot,\" the boy said with a decisive wave of his hand. She bet he did. They didn't move as men walked past them balancing wood on their shoulders. Laura looked around to see if there were any familiar faces around, but she saw none. \"Boiler room,\" he said as they passed a room that was hot and noisy. She didn't get a chance to peek in to see if Papa was there cause Levi was moving fast. \"C'mon.\"\n\nLaura followed Levi down the length of the boat, careful to hug the shadowy places and dark corners. She smelled the animals before she saw them. \"Pigs, cows, chickens,\" Levi said, pointing to the obvious as they approached the pens.\n\n\"Hey there, Levi,\" an older white man said as he slopped something into the pig pen.\n\n\"Miz Nellie need two chickens, Mr. Fernbach. She says to give 'em to her,\" Levi said, pointing a thumb in Laura's direction.\n\n\"Two chickens comin' right up,\" Mr. Fernbach said with a laugh.\n\n\"Move,\" someone said from behind Laura and she took a timid step closer to the pens, allowing the men to move past her. They had horses behind them, stamping and sniffing and leaving a trail of mess in their wake.\n\n\"Two chickens,\" Mr. Fernbach said, holding out two dead chickens by the feet. He had already done the hard work.\n\n\"Thank you,\" Laura said, taking them from him.\n\n\"You new?\"\n\n\"Yes. Just got on,\" she said slowly. There was no sense in denying it. Laura figured everyone had to know just about everyone on a boat this small.\n\n\"Welcome to the Paine then.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Laura said and looked around her\n\n\"If you looking for Levi, he's probably off somewhere on someone's errand. Boy never sits still.\"\n\nRight. Laura gave Mr. Fernbach a nod and then retraced her steps back to the stairs, up them, and to the kitchen next to the dining room.\n\n\"Get the chickens plucked, seasoned and roastin'. Then I need you to help me with breakfast before you go check on the lady passengers.\"\n\nLaura set the chickens on the table and then rolled up her sleeves. It was time to get to work." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 29", + "text": "\"Is there anythin' else you need?\" Laura asked the two young ladies as she finished helping them unpack. Yankees the both of them. At Salis House they had entertained a few Yankees before. She never could understand why they talked so fast.\n\n\"How many other women will be traveling with us?\" one of the girls asked. She was short, a few inches below Laura with brown hair and a plain face. Laura did her best to memorize it.\n\n\"Who cares about women, Daphne? How many other men will be riding with us?\" the other girl said with a giggle. She was blond... with an equally plain face. They were not beauties, but by the cut and style of their gowns, they were not poor either. Which should have been obvious. They had one of the few rooms set aside for women on the Texas deck.\n\n\"Sometimes, Lucinda you say just too much. What would Uncle Philip say if he heard you just now?\"\n\n\"Oh, don't speak to me about Papa. Well?\" the girl turned to Laura, expectation in her eyes. This Lucinda could be trouble if she wanted to be.\n\n\"I'm not sure how many are on the hurricane deck. We don't wait on those folks, but I believe there are nine other ladies on the Texas deck,\" Laura said, thinking back to what Miz Nellie had told her. \"And at least fifteen other men, though I can't say for certain since I'm not waitin' on any of 'em.\"\n\n\"Any of them single? Rich?\" Lucinda asked as she went to primp in front of the sole mirror in the room. The room was as tiny. There were two beds with trunks at the end, a vanity and a small closet. Bigger than Laura's shared room with Miz Nellie, but not by much.\n\n\"Lucinda!\" Daphne turned to Laura. It was becoming clear that she was the younger of the girls, but also the most level headed. Yep, that Lucinda was a problem. Thank the good Lord her days keepin' after girls were over. Now, all she had to do was keep after herself. What a thought. \"Thank you for helping us. Our maid, Grenada is here somewhere.\"\n\n\"She's probably with Aunt Crissy,\" Lucinda said, still touching up her hair.\n\n\"Either way, we shouldn't need your help too much on this boat,\" Daphne said firmly.\n\n\"But still come and check on us,\" Lucinda said quickly. \"Sometimes it takes forever for Grenada to get us both dressed.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Laura said with a quick nod, slipping into a familiar role.\n\n\"Can we walk around?\" this question came from Daphne.\n\n\"Yes ma'am, but you may want to stay up here on the cabin deck.\" Cabin deck. Texas deck. Did it matter what it was called, really?\n\n\"It probably isn't safe down there,\" the other girl said with excitement. Laura ignored their chatter, made sure everything was neat, and then left the room.\n\nOnto the next room. She was tired, but it was a familiar tiredness. She hadn't always worked this hard at Salis, but if the family ever hosted a summer party or event it wasn't unusual for Laura to be up at the crack of dawn waiting and assisting any and every one.\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\nShe turned at the sound of Gid's voice. He, Sol, and Levi were carrying buckets of water on each of their arms. She gave them a small wave and they gave her nods as they delivered them to different cabins in the men's section of the deck.\n\nShe returned her gaze to the door next to her. Tapped on it.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Hello, ma'am. I'm Laura. I work here on the Paine. I was just wonderin' if you needed any help.\"\n\nThe door opened revealing a very pretty redheaded woman. She was older than Missy Charlotte, but younger than Miss Martha. And tall. Very tall. She opened the door wider.\n\n\"You must be new.\" The woman eyed Laura from the top of her head to the toes of her feet.\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"There was another girl named Maureen who helped me before. Where is she?\"\n\nLaura had met the girl earlier. She was one of the Irish girls Miz Nellie had mentioned. Had Miss Martha been on board she would have had something to say about that. But the girls had ignored Laura and Laura had ignored them. So far, all was well.\n\n\"Maureen is in the kitchen helpin' Miz Nellie. I can get her if you want?\"\n\n\"No,\" the woman said quickly. \"I didn't care for the girl's attitude anyway. Fetch me a bowl of fresh, warm water. Then get that dress laundered for me,\" the woman said, pointing to a gown that was draped over a trunk. Laura assessed the blue and white silk moir\u00e9 taffeta evening gown. Then she looked at the woman. The woman gave her a haughty look, peering down at Laura over the top of her nose. \"I had to leave my maid, she was ill.\"\n\nLaura looked back at the gown. The woman was lying. That was clear as day to Laura, but what did she care if the woman had or didn't have a maid?\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"That's an expensive dress, you'll have to be careful when cleaning it.\"\n\n\"I'm familiar with silk taffeta, ma'am.\"\n\nLaura felt the woman assessing her slowly again. \"Perhaps you can come back before supper and help me dress?\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am.\"\n\n\"What's your name again?\"\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\n\"You can call me Mrs. Hartford. I am Lavinia Hartford,\" the woman said with a nod. The boat gave a small shudder causing Laura's foot to slip for a second. \"New Orleans can't get here fast enough,\" the woman muttered to herself. \"Lock the door behind you,\" Mrs. Hartford said, reaching for her door and trusting Laura to handle everything she had asked.\n\n\"Did you still want some fresh water, ma'am?\"\n\n\"Yes. I'll only be gone a minute,\" Mrs. Hartford replied and stepped out the room. The door clicked shut behind her.\n\nLaura exhaled and reached for the gown. It truly was a beautiful thing, but Laura could see a few stains on the front. She would have to ask Miz Nellie if she had any honey and gin on hand. That plus soap and hot water should remove the stains. She should probably get her hands on an iron too. Slinging it over her shoulder she paused when a piece of paper fell out. Habit made her not only pick it up but read it. It was a letter and none of the people or the sentiment meant anything to Laura at all, though Laura did note that as it was addressed to a Marianne and signed by a Thomas Andrew Carter. Neither name was of course, Mrs. Hartford's. But that wasn't what made Laura pause. No. It was the familiar stains that crept along the edges of the paper. Blood." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 30", + "text": "Sam was not going to deny that steamboats had always been a bit fascinating to him, but Manny's heart\u2014and thus in many ways his\u2014had always been for ships. Real ships. There was something about the large white sails, the massive decks, the intricately detailed figureheads that spoke of greatness. Steamboats not so much, Sam thought, especially as he watched a body slip quietly into the Ohio River. If only he had not come this direction.\n\nCaptain Leahy had assigned Sam to the position of deckhand and Manny as a roustabout. It was the first time ever that Sam had had a job that wasn't the same as his brother's.\n\n\"Sam,\" a young white man named Finn had come to get him from Captain Leahy's office. Sam hurried to follow behind him as he walked the length of the deck. \"You ain't really a deckhand. Captain Leahy got too much on his brain. Only whites are deckhands. All the Negroes are roustabouts. But I know what the Captain meant.\" Sam listened to this speech and said nothing. So long as he wasn't called slave, he didn't care what position he was given. \"You got three jobs,\" Finn said, holding up three fingers in front of him. \"Cleaning the deck, stowing the goods, and measuring the depths of the river. I'll teach you about the river tomorrow. Today, you're going to clean the deck,\" Finn said, a smug look on his face as they came to a stop before a closet. He reached in and handed Sam a shovel. Then he pointed down. Animal droppings.\n\nScooping manure off the deck of the steamboat was the easiest job Sam had ever done in his life. He moved quickly around the deck, pausing only when they first pulled into port to watch as the ramp was lowered and the ropes were pulled in, anchoring the steamboat to shore. He saw Benji, who gave him a wink and felt a small sense of relief that their papers had worked. While he cleaned the deck, he passed Benji and Manny carrying cargo on and off the steamboat making several trips, looking tired and sweaty while he felt like he was on a bit of a stroll. With animals coming on and off the deck, the manure pile seemed never ending. That was fine with Sam.\n\nHe had just finished what he thought might be his last lap around the deck with the shovel and was headed back to the closet to return it and get new orders when he heard a muffled argument. If there was one thing Sam had learned as a slave, it was that being around angry white men was probably not in your best interest. Sam looked behind him and before him and saw no one. Not even the men hired to keep the peace. Straining his ears, he could hear the distant sounds of men yelling and cursing... and the ramp coming up. Most everyone, it seemed, was helping to get the boat out of port. For a second, the argument got louder. Sam used the noise to slip behind several large boxes of cargo. Eventually they would go away and he would come back out. But he didn't want them to catch sight of him while they were angry.\n\n\"No, Baldwin. That was not what we agreed to!\" Sam peeked around the box and saw the speaker. He was a heavyweight white man dressed in a suit and talking to a thinner, leaner man also dressed in a suit. Passengers, most likely. Sam had made enough rounds on the steamboat to start to get a feel for how it worked. There were workers, there were sailors, and there were passengers. These were passengers.\n\n\"Vance,\" the thinner man said calmly. \"You're not thinking clearly.\" And Yankees to boot. Sam hadn't heard that accent in quite some time.\n\n\"Oh, yes I am. You and Jonas\u2014,\"\n\nClear as day, Sam watched as the man called Baldwin took a step forward, covered the mouth of Vance, wrap an arm around his neck and snap. The sound seemed to echo around them. Sam, feeling like he was breathing too loud, held his breath and looked around them. Was there no one else on board this boat? Minutes ago, he had felt surrounded. Now, it seemed like everyone was gone. He closed his eyes for a moment but opened them again when he heard another sound. Vance had slumped forward, his body hitting the railing. Baldwin muttered a curse before reaching down and grabbing several stones that were on deck\u2014Sam knew they were used to weigh different items down on the steamboat\u2014and stuffing them in Vance's pockets. Baldwin looked both ways for a second and then with another curse, slid Vance's body into the water so that there was barely a splash. And then Sam stumbled, hitting the cargo in front of him. The steamboat was leaving.\n\nHe held his breath as Baldwin looked around again, clearly alerted to the noise Sam had just made. But when the sound of cheers went up in the distance, Baldwin slipped away. Sam exhaled.\n\n\"Oh, Lord,\" Sam muttered and closed his eyes for a moment. Should he do something? Should he say anything at all? A slave's word was no word at all and opening his mouth would really only open the door for trouble. Jesus, I need me some wisdom here.\n\nBut this time when Sam inhaled, he smelled tobacco. He paused, and then very slowly turned to his right. Standing less than a foot away from him, deep in the shadows of the boat, was yet another tall, white man, smoking a cheroot.\n\n\"What did you see?\" the man's voice was low and intense, clipped and short. Another Yankee. Smoke wafted out of the man's mouth, hitting Sam in the face.\n\nNot a question Sam wanted to answer. And when that happened, it was always best to play dumb. \"Suh, I just here to clean.\" Sam raised the shovel and took several steps backward in an effort to create more distance between them.\n\n\"I'm in cabin eight on the Texas. You come to my room in one hour. You hear? And if you don't come, I'll find you. The boat's not that big. If I have to find you...\"\n\nSam gritted his teeth, but kept his face blank, his eyes down.\n\n\"You hear me, boy?\" the man asked slowly. Maybe the man did think Sam was slow on the uptake.\n\n\"Suh, I is a deckhand. Not s'pose to be up on the passenger deck without reason.\"\n\n\"Find a way. You hear me, boy?\"\n\n\"Yes, suh. I hears.\"\n\nAnd then the man disappeared. When he was gone, Sam leaned forward, tapping his head against one of the boxes. Lord, why this? Why now?\n\nShould he tell Manny? How dangerous was the man from cabin eight? Course he hadn't stopped the one man from killing the other. Sam exhaled again. All he could do was pray on the matter... and show up at cabin eight." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 31", + "text": "It had been easier than Sam thought it would be to slip away from his deckhand duties. There was a distinct lack of... watching. Any other day that would have given him a sense of relief. Today, though...\n\nLicking his lips, he stood before cabin eight. It was different up here, smaller, quieter, and fresher smelling.\n\nHe raised his fist and hesitantly knocked. The door swung open before he could finish the second knock.\n\nThe tall, white man who had been smoking down on the lower deck an hour ago stood before Sam.\n\n\"It had only just occurred to me that you might not recognize the number eight or know when an hour had passed.\"\n\nSam, keeping his eyes, on the man's third button said nothing. The less he said about anything, the less the man could use against him.\n\n\"Come in,\" the man said, holding the door open wider once he realized Sam was not going to speak.\n\nSam entered the cabin room and glanced around quickly. It was small and the man whose room he inhabited was a mess. Clothes were strewn on every surface. He heard the door click shut behind him.\n\n\"Listen, boy,\" the man said, coming around Sam so that they faced each other. The man was really only a few inches taller than Sam, but Sam did his best to hunch his shoulders, look smaller... be non-threatening. Though Sam kept his eyes down, he had seen that the man was maybe a few years older than Sam with black hair and a thin black mustache. Sam hadn't caught the color of his eyes and he didn't care to. \"I know you saw something but what I want to know is if you heard something?\"\n\nSam allowed his gaze to flicker to the man's for a second before returning to the floor.\n\nThe man sighed. Deeply. \"What's your name?\"\n\nSam pressed his lips together for a second. \"Sam.\"\n\n\"I'm Adam. Adam Ward. And I'm a Pinkerton. Do you know what that is?\" Sam said nothing. But no, in fact, he didn't know what that was. Nor did he give a rat's behind. \"I'm a detective. I investigate crimes. And currently I'm investigating Baldwin and Vance. Or I was investigating Vance, but Vance is now on the bottom of the Ohio. I did see that much.\"\n\nWell, excellent. What did Mr. Ward need him for then?\n\n\"You must be wondering why I asked you here?\" Adam Ward asked as he moved over to a suitcase. Sam watched as Mr. Ward pulled some papers out of his suitcase. \"It's very complicated Sam, but the short of it is this: Baldwin, Vance, and a woman named Mary Stiles, if that's her real name, robbed and murdered a wealthy man in Pittsburgh. I was hired to follow them, get proof, and have them arrested by the time the ship reaches New Orleans. Turns out this is a job a bit too big for one man. I'm going to need your help.\"\n\nSam allowed his gaze to meet Mr. Ward's for a second. He allowed him to see his answer. It was a flat-out no.\n\n\"It wouldn't be complicated. You would just be keeping an eye out on them, making sure they didn't jump ship. Stealing into their cabins every now and then to see if you could find anything incriminating.\"\n\nSam was already shaking his head before Mr. Ward had finished speaking. \"No, suh. I don't do none of that. I just here to work.\"\n\n\"Yes, and you'll be working for me. Or I'll send a telegram to my bounty hunter friend.\" Sam clenched his jaw, but said nothing. \"I saw you when you came on board with that other darkie. I'm pretty sure you're a runaway, but I know,\" Mr. Ward said, waving the papers in his hand. \"That several of the others on this boat are. Have to be. All these warrants,\" Mr. Ward said, waving the papers in his hand again. \"Were just made. Hot and fresh off the printer for slaves missing around Ohio. Ward looked down at the papers. \"Let's see, we've got Jack, the farm hand, Maria, the cook. There's Lem, a negro boy, Amos the blacksmith and his sons Benjamin, Solomon, Gideon,\" the man said as he flipped pages. \"And his daughter, a seamstress named... Laura. I don't have any with the name Sam. Yet.\"\n\nIt was all Sam could do to keep his expression neutral as a rock took form in his stomach. Adam Ward's eyes glittered as they moved from the papers in front of him to Sam's eyes. \"Sam, these slaves are worth a lot of money,\" Adam Ward said, his expression hard even as a smile touched his lips. \"Worth, I think, you helping me out with this case. Cause if you help me, I'll put these papers away and I won't look at them anymore. You don't help me, I'll be watching you and anyone else you talk to.\"\n\n\"Give me the papers.\" The words were out of Sam's mouth, before he could think about them.\n\nIt was Adam Ward's turn to blink. \"What?\"\n\n\"I would like to see the warrants.\"\n\nAdam stared at him for a second. And then handed him the papers. \"You can read them for yourself.\"\n\n\"No,\" Sam said flatly, folding them up and slipping them in his pocket. \"I can't. But I know someone who can.\"\n\nAdam Ward continued to stare at him. \"You're a lot brighter than you look.\"\n\nSam met his gaze, head-on, allowing the man to see his anger. Adam Ward blinked again. \"If this checks out, I'll be back.\"\n\nSam didn't give him a chance to say anything else. He opened the door and left the cabin.\n\nThis. This was bad. And he could not tell his brother. Because he knew what Manny's response would be. He would tell Sam that they would jump ship at the next port. Let the Virginia slaves handle their own problems. But. It wasn't in Sam to just leave.\n\nHe was walking so quickly, he almost didn't see Laura.\n\n\"Sam?\" She was carrying clothes, draped over her arm. Her hair was pinned up, her dress was dark, though she had on an apron. She looked like a proper house slave. \"What are you doin' up here?\"\n\n\"We need to talk. Somewhere quiet,\" Sam said, his voice low.\n\nShe looked around, gave a quick nod. \"Follow me,\" she said, and he followed her to the door of a cabin. She pulled out a key and unlocked it. It was a storage room. Or a laundry room. Or something. He watched as she set the dresses down on top of a growing pile. She lit a lantern, illuminating the room and then turned to face him. \"What is it?\"\n\nSam reached into his pocket and handed her the papers. \"What these say?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 32", + "text": "An uneasiness settled on Laura's shoulders as she took the papers from Sam. She had been feeling uneasy from the moment she first saw him. Was it cause Sam was on the passenger deck when she was sure he was supposed to be on the lower deck? Or was it cause the expression on Sam's face was grim. More grim than she had ever seen? Course the fact that he had papers didn't help.\n\nThough she took the papers from him, she kept her eyes on him all the while, hoping he would give something away, but other than his clenched jaw, his expression was blank, hiding his emotions.\n\nShe looked down at the sheets in her hand. Stared.\n\n\"Is that what I think it is?\" His voice was soft and he came to stand a few feet closer, as though he could read the writing on the pages.\n\n\"Where did you get this?\" she asked, her stomach dropping so quickly she placed a hand over it. At first the names and descriptions meant nothing. Then she saw something that made the air in her lungs whoosh out. There was a $200 reward for Papa. He was described in detail. Negro man, dark of color, six foot, three inches high, about a foot wide, almost forty years old. Blacksmith. She couldn't read no more. But she had too. She saw one for Benji, Sol, Gid. Herself. Worse and worse. And the bounties added together? Nigh unto a thousand dollars. It was all she could do not to fall apart.\n\n\"That's ya'll, ain't it?\"\n\n\"Where\u2014,\"\n\n\"White man who saw me and Manny get on the steamboat.\" Her stomach churned a bit. It had always been a risk, but still the irony of it all...\"He wants somethin' from me. Said if I don't help, he'll have ya'll arrested or anyone I talk to until he finds a warrant for me.\"\n\n\"A real nice fellow,\" Laura said, hearing the bitterness in her own voice. Why couldn't folks just leave them be?\n\nSam shrugged, looked away. \"Least we know who the enemy is.\"\n\nLaura stared down at the papers in front of her. \"I don't understand. What's he want from you? Can we even believe that if you do it, he'll not still have us all arrested? Cause he can take you and Manny in too without a warrant, you know.\" She looked up at Sam who was now pacing the small storage room, with his hands laced behind the back of his head.\n\n\"Said somethin' 'bout being a detective. Somethin'... I don't know. He's solvin' a murder...\" Sam shrugged and then turned to face her. \"He wants me to spy on the folks or somethin'.\" He exhaled. \"I saw a man kill another man,\" he said. Laura felt her eyes grow wide as he told her what had happened. \"Now, this here man wants my help.\" Laura swallowed the fear in her throat. \"And if you're askin' me if I trust him. I don't.\"\n\n\"Okay,\" she said, her mind racing. They would have to get off this boat at the next port. Somehow, someway.\n\n\"But,\" Sam said, his voice low. \"I do think he needs my help. He ain't likely to call in the warrants 'fore he gets it. It'll buy us some time.\"\n\n\"Us?\" Laura looked at him. They weren't a package deal. It would be easier for him and Manny to disappear than for her family to. He looked back, gave one quick nod.\n\n\"Us.\"\n\n\"You don't have to\u2014.\"\n\n\"Ain't in me to leave when someone needs help.\" Laura blinked back tears of frustration she hadn't realized were forming. She glanced down at the papers in her hand. \"Manny and I wouldn't have gotten this far without you. Without all of ya'll.\"\n\n\"We haven't exactly gotten that far, Sam.\" Yes, the steamboat moved quickly. Five miles an hour she overheard one of the passengers say this morning. But still. She had very little doubt that they were still somewhere in Ohio.\n\nSam shrugged again, stuck his hands in his pockets. It was gesture he made often to make it seem like he knew nothing. And she was beginning to quickly realize that wasn't the case. \"It's not like we got anybody else to teach us about life. Teach us how to read and whatnot.\" The last part he said with embarrassment. Laura huffed. He would learn how to read, with or without her family. This much she knew was true. Sam was... he was special. Even she could tell that and she barely knew him. And for a second she wondered what that detective had noticed about him. And she got angry.\n\n\"This man is threatenin' you, Sam. You should leave while you have the chance. There's nothin' in here about you. Or Manny. You've got time.\"\n\n\"I think,\" Sam said slowly, biting his lip. He still wouldn't meet her gaze. \"I think we should see how this plays out. The longer we on this ship, the farther we are from Kentucky. From Virginia. Take it one step at a time.\"\n\nLaura folded up the papers in her hand, handed them back to him. He took them slowly, as though she were handing him a poisonous snake. Which she supposed, they kind of were. \"I can't let you do that, Sam. I can't let you stay here a minute longer than you have to. We'll be alright. We'll figure somethin' out.\" They would. Laura had no doubt that the moment she told Papa about what she had seen, he would think of something.\n\n\"You're not lettin' me do anythin'.\" Sam's voice was low, hard. \"I'm choosin' to do this. Choosin' to stay.\"\n\n\"What would Manny say?\" Laura saw his wince. \"He would say leave us.\" She hadn't known them that long, but that much she had picked up on.\n\n\"There's no reason why Manny needs to know about this at all.\"\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\n\"I've made up my mind, Laura. We'll play it by ear. But as long as this boat is movin,' it's gettin' us all just one more step closer to freedom.\"\n\nLaura folded her arms over her chest, watching as Sam finally slipped the papers back into his pocket. She didn't see one thing he was getting out of this. Out of helping them all. \"Then let me help you. Whatever this man, this detective wants, you tell me.\"\n\n\"Laura\u2014,\" Sam said, a frown beginning to form on his handsome face.\n\n\"In fact, I think I should find out if he's even tellin' the truth about bein' a detective.\"\n\n\"And just how you gone do that?\"\n\n\"I'll slip into his room, go through his stuff.\" She still had her lock picks, there was no lock she couldn't break into.\n\n\"I can't let you\u2014,\"\n\n\"Let me?\" Laura asked softly. She saw him wince. There was no let anymore. \"You're not lettin' me do anythin'. If you're willin' to risk yourself, risk Manny for my family, then I'm goin' to help. Besides, Sam. This,\" she said, waving a hand around. \"Is what I'm good at.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Findin' out white folks' secrets. What you think we did in the Big House? Just cook and clean?\"\n\nSam eyed her for a second. Then said slowly, humor tugging at his lips for a moment, \"I suppose I did.\"\n\n\"Well, you supposed wrong. I learned from the best how to get information.\" Though she had been the one to teach Prince how to pick locks. He had complained the whole time about how low and criminal she was even as he made her show him again and again and again. He claimed that he was better at it now than her. She didn't believe him. Not even Benji was better than her. He may have taught her how it worked, but he had never had a chance to really practice.\n\n\"I'll find out what I can on this detective... what did you say his name was again?\"\n\n\"Adam. Adam Ward,\" Sam said slowly, reluctantly.\n\n\"Adam Ward. You leave him to me. And whatever thing he asks you to do, you tell me so I can help.\"\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\nThey stared at each other.\n\n\"We'll pray on it too.\" Laura said definitively. Sam blinked once. Slowly. It wasn't anything she had ever said to Prince. Prince would have rolled his eyes to high heaven. But she hadn't forgotten that Sam had wanted to pray about going west first. Odd as that had been, it had felt right. \"When life gets uncertain, you have to run to the one thing that is.\" Or so Mama had always said. She had never put it into practice before though. Life hadn't seemed all that uncertain. It did now. She held out her hands toward Sam. It was how she and Mama had always prayed, holding hands. Sam looked at her for a second and then at her hands. \"Hold them and hurry.\"\n\n\"Why would we hold\u2014,\"\n\nDidn't he know they didn't have time for this? Field hands, Laura thought with a shake of her hand. She grabbed his hands, felt how hard and calloused they were for a second. \"Dear Lord, grant us wisdom and knowledge as we deal with this Adam Ward. He is no good, Lord. Make it clear to us if we need to leave, show us what we need to do if we should stay. Let us have ears to hear and eyes to see your guidance. Protect Sam. Protect me. In Jesus' name. Amen.\" She released his hands, took a step back. Ignored the wideness of his eyes as he stared at her.\n\nWomen laughing outside the door broke his focus.\n\n\"I need to get back to Ward and give the papers back. See what he wants from me,\" Sam said quickly, quietly.\n\n\"And until I know that, I'll keep my eye on Adam Ward.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 33", + "text": "\"We're not movin',\" Laura stated, but really it was a question.\n\n\"No ma'am,\" Shadrach said. He was a big, hefty, dark skinned man, and the head cook for the evening. Laura had been on her feet all day. First she had cooked with Nellie for the morning and afternoon meals, then assisted all the female passengers in the cabin deck which essentially meant she ran errands and cleaned. Then she had laundered and ironed clothes, occasionally stopping to reattach a button or fix a seam. When Levi had caught sight of her, he had told her to grab something to eat when she could. It had been the only time that day that she had sat down. It had also been the second time she had seen Sol and Gid. They had been serving the noon meal in the dining hall. Both of them had beamed at the sight of her though there had been no time for conversation.\n\nBut she didn't slow down. She worked harder. Because she had to make herself indispensable for the duration of her time here. And she needed to make sure she knew everybody and everything that happened on this ship. Which was why she had volunteered to serve supper that night. She and Sam did not have a moment to waste.\n\n\"Must not be a full moon and Captain Leahy don't like to move when it's dark out. Might hit a snag and ain't nothin' worth a snag.\" Or he might be smuggling more goods on the ship was what the man didn't say. She couldn't hardly complain. It was how Sam and Manny had gotten on board after all.\n\nLaura hid a sigh. She wanted them to move. And move quickly. \"Do you know where we are?\"\n\n\"I can tell you we ain't hit the Mississippi yet. You'll know when we get to the Mississippi. Here,\" Shadrach said, placing several bowls of piping hot food on the tray next to Laura. \"You know how to set a table?\" he asked, giving her a critical eye.\n\n\"I told you I did,\" Laura said and hefted the tray. She had set more than one table when Salis House entertained.\n\nWalking backwards, she pushed through the kitchen door and turned. For a second, she paused, taking in the dining room. It was quite something for a boat with its plush carpet, dangling chandeliers, and painted wood ornament. The room had been changed, like Levi had told her it would be. Gone were the sparse tables and chairs from earlier in the day. Now, there were long elegant tables dressed with white tablecloths and silverware. Almost it felt like she was serving supper at Salis for the tables were filled with elegantly dressed passengers, laughing and talking. Laura saw the girls she had waited on earlier, Daphne and Lucinda. She saw Mrs. Lavinia Hartford fluttering her fan at a man next to her. She saw Paulina McRae who had nigh unto twenty bottles of perfume cause she didn't like to bathe and Virginia Potter who was increasing for the first time and very ill. Even now she looked a bit green. Diana Jameson whose dress Laura had had to almost remake cause the woman's wardrobe was old and she was getting bigger. She was already getting a feel for each and every woman on the Texas deck, but she knew very little about the men. She wondered which man seated at the table was the illustrious Adam Ward who had the temerity to blackmail them. Sam.\n\nThen she lifted the tray higher in her hand and stepped forward into the role of server. Keeping her ears attuned and her face expressionless, she listened in on every conversation, paying careful attention to the men and wishing she had asked Sam for some kind of description. She poured lemonade, she poured wine. She replaced silverware, she wiped up messes, and all the while she listened.\n\nShe was on her feet for almost an hour before she heard his name uttered.\n\n\"Why, Mr. Ward!\" a woman tittered in front of Laura as she refilled her glass. It was the heavily scented Paulina McRae.\n\nLaura looked across the table and saw a young, slender, handsome white man with a head full of black hair. In seconds, she had his face, his voice memorized. Good. She knew who he was. More importantly, she knew he was here.\n\nShe walked back to the kitchen, a bottle of wine in her hand.\n\n\"Shadrach, would it be alright if I called it a night?\" she asked, careful not to make eye contact.\n\n\"Girl, I told you, you didn't need to be down here no way!\" The cook said, though his voice was friendly. \"I thank you all the same. These other folks could use some of your gumption,\" he muttered, sending a look towards two other servers in the kitchen. They were two colored men who, she learned, only came to serve in the evenings. She wondered if either of them were on the papers in Adam Ward's room. But by the way they responded, with a roll of their eyes, they had been on this ship a lot longer than her.\n\n\"Have a good night,\" Laura said and slipped out the back door.\n\nCabin eight, she believed Sam had said.\n\nShe walked out onto the deck and moved to the railing. Taking just a moment, she stared into the deep, vast, dark, and endless sky. Distant, tiny stars winked at her in the distance. Lord God, she prayed, Creator of all of this. Keep us safe.\n\nShe then turned and walked to the male side of the boat. Counted down the doors. Found cabin eight. She placed a hand on it and found it locked. Just as she assumed it might be. She eyed the lock for a second and decided against using the lock picks in her pocket. She reached into her hair and pulled out a pin. Making sure no one was around, she jimmied the lock, heard it pop, and then pushed the door open.\n\nThe first thing that hit her was the smell. Tobacco. A very different brand than the one Massa Will smoked. She walked over to the small dresser where the lantern would be, and upon finding it, lit it. The room was a mess. Except, she realized a moment later, not really. She noted the clothes all in one corner. The personal items in another. His trunk at the foot of his bed. She got started there. The lock was not on. She got on her knees and lifted the top. There were more clothes, a shaving kit, books, she moved things around, reached for the bottom. A satchel. She opened it, flipped through the papers. She found the warrants that he had given Sam. Either he had extra copies or Sam had returned them. She found other warrants as well but mostly for white men. Then she found letters. All of them seemed personal in kind. She would come back, read them later if she had time. Blackmail worked two ways, Prince had always said though neither of them had ever had the courage to try it. And while she had no problems snooping, she figured blackmail had to be against God's law. With a sigh, she put them back. She didn't really want to know anything about this man anyway.\n\nShe replaced the lid when she found nothing about detective work. She went through his suitcase next, ran her hand against the lining of the case and found something that shouldn't be there. An extra seam. Running her fingers across the cloth she found where it opened. Aha. She pulled the papers out. It seemed he was some kind of detective. Pinkerton. She wished she had someone to ask. She slipped the papers back inside, smoothed down the fabric and closed the suitcase.\n\nAnd then the door opened." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 34", + "text": "\"Wait right here, Sam. I'll be right back,\" Finn said and slipped away into the darkness. There was no moon and barely a star in the sky. The clouds were heavy in the air and Sam wondered if that meant there would be a storm. He had always liked storms. Mostly. Heavy storms meant no working out in the fields. But then that meant that the next day they would be slipping and sliding in the mud. It was only fun for the first minute. Then it was just work.\n\nSam found a spot along the boat's railing that seemed empty. All around him, men were talking low, smoking, sleeping. When the wind blew through the boat, he shivered and wished he had had the sense to grab his bag with his food and blanket. But then again, if Finn needed him to do some more work, he wouldn't be sleeping any time soon anyway. He slid down against the railing, leaning his back against it. He wasn't hardly tired. Nothing he had done today added up to a day's labor on a tobacco farm. But. Now he had Adam Ward's words spinning around in his head. Thinking, he was beginning to realize, could be just as tiring as moving. And yet, he couldn't stop his brain from going back to when he returned the warrants to Adam Ward.\n\n\"You found someone to read them, then?\" Mr. Ward had asked after he took the papers from Sam.\n\n\"I did,\" Sam said slowly, looking around Mr. Ward's room. Nothing stood out to him. He wondered what or rather if anything would stand out to Laura. He didn't like the idea of her sneaking up here one bit. No matter what she said about doing so at... Salis House. If you asked Sam, them white folks up at Salis House seemed to let a lot get by under they noses. He didn't think that was the case for most slave owners.\n\n\"So, you see I wasn't lying?\"\n\n\"You weren't lyin' about the warrants,\" Sam replied, returning his gaze to the man before him. He watched as Mr. Ward opened his trunk and set the papers inside. He wondered what other papers the man kept in there.\n\nA small smile flew across Adam Ward's lips. \"But you think I might be lying about other things.\"\n\n\"I don't know you well enough to say.\" He made sure to keep his voice bland, neutral.\n\n\"Sam,\" Mr. Ward said, his dark gaze piercing. \"I think I've underestimated you. I don't know much about darkies. I didn't grow up with any. I'm no slave owner. I only know what I've heard.\" Sam said nothing, merely stared back.\n\nFinally, Mr. Ward sighed. \"Here's the deal, Sam. Three weeks ago, James Alexander Sherringhouse was murdered in his home. He lived alone except for the usual servants, a housekeeper, a butler, two maidservants, a cook, etc. Anyway. The robbers, before stabbing him fifteen times in his bed, managed to get access to his safe stealing thousands of dollars. It was a safe that few people knew about. Now, of course, they could have broken in and demanded that he tell them where it was, but you see, James Sherringhouse was paranoid. He kept two safes: an obvious one in his office and a hidden one in his bedroom closet. Both of them were robbed. To me, an obvious inside job. Especially since he was robbed on a night when the butler was visiting his brother and the maidservants were sick. Both of them. No one heard anything. All of the staff were more than helpful with supplying information. But as we began to look closely at the housekeeper, the butler, and the gardener, certain things didn't add up. Long story short, they weren't who they said they were. They realized we were on to them. I traced them to this boat. Baldwin was the butler. Vance the gardener. I haven't found Mary Stiles, the housekeeper. I have reason to believe she was wearing a disguise when she played the housekeeper. I've got no proof. Only suspicions.\"\n\n\"You know Baldwin killed Vance.\" Wasn't that enough? One white man killing another? Why did he need more proof?\n\n\"I do,\" Mr. Ward said with a slow nod. \"But that's not going to tell me anything about who killed Sherringhouse. And that is the prize I'm focusing on here. I'm doing all I can to keep an eye on Baldwin and trying to find out which woman is Mary Stiles. I can't do both. I need you to watch Baldwin. You know what he looks like. I need you to study him, take note of his habits. Where does he go? Who does he talk to? When we pull up to a port, I need you to make sure he doesn't get off this boat without me knowing. That's all I want you to do for me now. But the more I find out, the more I may need you.\"\n\nSam felt his lips twist to the side, his gaze on the wall nearest him. Follow a white man around a boat not much bigger than an acre. That wasn't so bad. Matter of fact it was too easy.\n\n\"Sam,\" Mr. Ward's voice said, harder now. \"You don't want to mess this up. You will regret it. I may not have a warrant on you, but I have no problem having you detained until I do find one.\"\n\nSam glanced at him for a second and then looked away. If it was one thing Sam knew, it was just how good white men felt when they tossed out their threats. Well. He would just have to talk to his God about this. That thought reminded him of Laura. Praying. For them. Other than his mama way back when, he had never had anyone pray with him, pray for him. And why had they held hands, exactly? He let go of his thoughts when he felt Mr. Ward's eyes on him.\n\nSam gave a quick nod, since Mr. Ward seemed to be waiting for an answer.\n\n\"I bet you don't even have a last name.\" Ward said it with a huff, a laugh. A dismissal.\n\n\"Not true,\" Sam said quickly, feeling more than a little annoyed. \"Rivers,\" he said, making it up on the spot. An easy thing to do since no matter what his last name was, it going to be pulled from thin air. \"Samuel Rivers.\"\n\n\"Rivers,\" Adam Ward said slowly as though he didn't believe him.\n\n\"That's what I said,\" Sam said, eyeing the man for a second, daring him to say something else on the matter.\n\nAdam Ward grunted. Let it go. \"I think we should meet up, once a day, just before noon to discuss. Alright, Sam?\" Mr. Ward said as though Sam were none too bright. Wanted him to do an important job, but still wanted to remind him he was less than a man. Slave or no, Sam was beginning to realize there was some things he might never be free of.\n\n\"Alright.\"\n\nAnd now here Sam was on the lower deck 'bout to get new orders from Finn. Way he figured it, Baldwin wasn't going nowhere what with them not moving and in the middle of the river. He'd take up keeping an eye on the man in the morning. That part didn't worry him. What did worry him was what Adam Ward would demand next. Cause Sam had no doubts something else would be coming down the line.\n\n\"There you is,\" Manny said and sat down with a huff next to Sam. \"I ain't seen you all day.\"\n\n\"Been workin',\" Sam said quietly. Amongst other things. There was no way he would tell Manny a thing about Adam Ward or what he had said. Though he supposed he would tell Laura. The thought made him feel skittish. It would require some trusting and Sam had never trusted anyone other than the man sitting beside him. And it wasn't cause Sam felt like most folks was untrustworthy. But when you started to trust folks, they had a way of starting to mean more than they ought. And Sam couldn't afford to have another person mean more than they ought. It hurt too much when you had to let them go.\n\n\"Me too.\" Manny stretched next to him. \"Everythin' hurts, but it's a different kind of hurt so it ain't so bad.\" Manny reached down and pulled his boots off. \"Whew wee, my feet stink. I know we supposed to wear shoes, but that is just somethin'.\"\n\n\"Uh huh.\"\n\n\"What you thinkin' on?\" Manny's voice was low, quiet, knowing as he set his boots aside and aired his toes... much to Sam's frustration.\n\nIf he was going to get away with keeping Manny out of the loop than he was going to have to do better at keeping his emotions under wrap. \"When we get out west, what we gonna do?\"\n\n\"Stop worryin' 'bout that Sam,\" Manny said a smile on his lips. Sam looked at him, really looked at him. He had never seen his brother so at peace. \"Ain't you the one who goes to God for everythin' with prayer? Ain't you prayed yet and got a peace?\"\n\n\"How 'bout for once you pray and get a peace.\"\n\n\"Nope. You do just fine, Sam.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" a familiar voice said. Sam watched as Benji came and sat down on his other side.\n\n\"Where did you go?\" Manny asked the boy. And Sam remembered that they worked together.\n\n\"See, Pa. He says it's hard work bein' in the boiler room, but he's used to the heat from the smithy. He's already sleep.\"\n\nBenji reached into his bag. \"Ya'll ate yet?\"\n\n\"Nope,\" Manny said and reached for his bag. It was another they had purchased back in Ohio. A second bag so they could both have one. Looked like Sam was the only one who had left his bag. He had found a little spot in the storage room. It was safe. But it wasn't here. \"Here,\" Manny said and tossed him some cold bread that had been baked by Mrs. G.\n\n\"I haven't seen none of my family other than Pa,\" Ben said after taking a few bites of his food.\n\n\"Saw your sister,\" Sam said before he could think.\n\n\"She up there servin' white folks?\" Benji asked, but there was a harsh tinge to his voice.\n\n\"Ain't that... what we all do?\" Manny asked him, leaning past Sam.\n\n\"Yeah, well it's different for her,\" Benji grumbled, his eyes on the food in his hand.\n\n\"You got a reason to be talkin' down your sister or you just jealous?\" Sam asked quietly. Cause Laura's work might be different than theirs, but last time he checked she was still working.\n\nHe felt both Manny and Benji's stares. He knew Manny was wondering why he gave two hoots about defending Laura, he didn't know what Benji thought.\n\n\"You don't understand,\" the boy finally said. \"She. They. You don't understand.\"\n\n\"Apparently not,\" Sam said with a sigh. Suddenly very tired. \"But I can tell you this much, that girl has been workin' hard and she don't say not one hard word about you.\" And if this business with Adam Ward continued, and Sam had no reason to think it wouldn't, she would really be working hard to protect Benji. To protect all of them.\n\nThere was an awkward silence, but Sam refused to say anything to lessen it.\n\n\"You don't know what it was like havin' family up at Salis House while me and Pa and my brothers worked from sunup to sundown. Then Laura would come home lookin' at us like we less than.\"\n\n\"Lookin'?\" Sam asked the word in such a way that Benji had to sense his disbelief.\n\n\"Yes! Lookin'! Maybe you had to be there,\" Benji sputtered, throwing out a hand in exasperation. \"My oldest brother was the worst. He just pretended we didn't exist, just cause his daddy was Massa Richard.\"\n\n\"Now, this is gettin' interestin',\" Manny said, leaning forward. \"Please. Tell me more.\" Sam elbowed him in the side while Benji threw him a murderous glance. \"What? I heard stuff like this happened in Big Houses, ain't never know nobody what lived it.\"\n\n\"Did she ever say somethin' to you?\" Sam asked, in attempt to get them back on target with the conversation.\n\n\"No,\" Benji said reluctantly, eyeing the piece of bread in his hand as though it had betrayed him.\n\n\"Then it's not your place to assign intents of the heart. You don't get to judge her for words unsaid. And even if she had said them, when you stand before God, he's gone look at your heart and how you dealt with the matter. He ain't gone be askin' no questions 'bout her.\"\n\n\"Sam talks to God regularly. He knows these things,\" Manny said, only half-joking. \"Even though he ain't never read the Good Book for himself.\" But Benji, no longer eating, said nothing. \"You know how to read?\" Manny asked, filling the silence. Unusually taking note of someone else's feelings, Sam thought.\n\n\"A little,\" Benji said quietly. \"I don't get a chance to read as much as Laura, but I know my letters. I can sound out words if needed.\" After a pause, he said, \"I can write my name, too. And it's long.\"\n\n\"Sound out?\" Manny repeated even though he was still chewing.\n\n\"Yeah. It's like a puzzle sometimes. You got to put all the words and their soundings together sometimes to get the big words to make sense.\"\n\n\"We know our letters,\" Manny said quickly.\n\n\"But do you know all of their sounds?\"\n\nSam listened as Benji went through each letter making the sound that it reflected. Sam quietly repeated Benji's words to himself.\n\n\"Sam?\" Finn said, appearing out of nowhere, now holding a lantern.\n\nSam hadn't even realized just how dark it had gotten until he saw that light. He stood up.\n\n\"We'll be right here, brother. When you're done,\" Manny said quietly.\n\nSam followed Finn to the familiar storage room.\n\n\"Hold this.\" Sam took the lantern as Finn pulled out what looked to be a basket. Except it was made of iron and not wood.\n\n\"This is a torch basket. We use it when and if we travel at night. We aren't travelin' at night now because we're ahead of schedule. There's no need to, but don't be surprised if the Captain decides we have to. If that happens, I'll send you for these. We fill them with oil-soaked scraps and then toss them over the side. Sometimes the firemen need them to see when they load the wood for fuel. Now watch me show you how this works. You have to be careful. The last thing we want is to set the whole boat on fire.\"\n\nSam leaned against the doorframe and watched as Finn showed him which scraps to use, where the oil was, and how to place it in the iron basket.\n\n\"You won't be alone doin' this. But you should still know how it works. Go ahead and get some sleep cause tomorrow we start all over again, cleanin' the deck and whatnot.\"\n\nSam grabbed his bag that he had tucked in a corner and headed back towards where he had left his brother and Benji. On the other side of the steamer.\n\nHe was just past the stairs when he saw the flicker of a light, then smelled the scent of tobacco. He wasn't sure what made him pause, but he did. It was Baldwin. And he was not alone." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 35", + "text": "The key to not being in trouble was to have no quick movements. She saw the gun first, and then the slim body of Adam Ward entered the room.\n\n\"What are you doing in here?\" he asked, his voice hard, his gun pointed at her. And his accent... he was a northerner. Not at all familiar with slaves then.\n\nShe looked down at the gun and then flicked her gaze at him. \"I was straightenin' but if that's the thanks I'm gonna get, I won't do it again.\"\n\nAdam Ward blinked, looked down at his own gun, and slipped it in the holster at his waist. \"I didn't expect anyone to be here.\"\n\n\"You did pay to be in first class, didn't you?\" Laura made sure her disdain for him was clear.\n\nHe flushed. \"I did.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you like to live in filth,\" she motioned towards his corner of dirty clothes. \"I certainly will not stop you,\" she made to move.\n\n\"No,\" he said, holding up a hand. \"Please. Continue. I've been on this boat a few days and... ,\"\n\n\"I've been a bit more concerned with the women, thought I could help out now. But I can leave.\"\n\n\"No,\" he said quickly. \"Only here to get some more cheroots. Got a poker game starting in the salon,\" he said offhandedly. Laura turned, giving him her back and began making up his bed. She heard him fiddling around in his suitcase.\n\n\"Are you in here every day?\"\n\n\"I can be, if you like,\" she said, tucking the corners of the sheets under the mattress.\n\n\"How about every other day?\"\n\n\"That works, too.\"\n\n\"You got a name?\"\n\nShe paused. He might recognize her name if she gave it. \"Lolly,\" she said finally. She had answered to it often enough. \"Would you like your clothes laundered and ironed?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said and then just like that, he was gone.\n\nShe exhaled. Loudly. She had just given herself more work. But it might be a good idea to have constant access to Adam Ward's room. She finished cleaning his room as promised, grabbed his dirty clothes, dropped them off in the laundry room, and finally went to get some sleep.\n\n\u2014-\n\nShe was up early the next morning and happy to feel the smooth rhythm of the boat moving again underneath her. Like Sam said, every day on the boat was one day further away from Virginia.\n\n\"Chop these,\" Miz Nellie said, setting a bunch of onions on the only empty table. Laura had changed into her patterned muslin again, and took a minute to pin on an apron. \"Them other girls handlin' the cabins this mornin'.\"\n\n\"After breakfast, I'll do the laundry if that's alright with you,\" Laura said as she went to get a knife.\n\nMiz Nellie stopped beating the dough in front of her, sizing up Laura. \"You used to hard work.\"\n\n\"I'm used to work,\" Laura corrected, but sent the older woman a small smile. She picked up the knife and started making quick work through the onions. She was glad when Miz Nellie didn't ask anymore questions.\n\nThe door to the dining hall opened revealing Sol and Gid.\n\n\"Laura!\" They said together and rushed in. Both of them were carrying shoes, a rag, and polish.\n\n\"We're cabin boys,\" Sol said quickly as they took a seat at the table where Laura was chopping the onions.\n\n\"We supposed to be polishin' shoes,\" Gid said, holding up somebody's boot. He wrinkled his nose, though she wasn't sure if it was from the smell or the job. \"How come you got to polish shoes if you only gone wear them again?\"\n\n\"Polish doesn't clean shoes,\" Laura corrected gently as she reached for another onion. \"If the shoe is made of leather, it makes the shoe last longer. And it makes it look nice.\" She ignored the quick glance Miz Nellie sent her way.\n\n\"Uh huh,\" Gid said, making a face. \"All I know is I almost cain't breathe no more cause of all this polish. I been polishin' all mornin'!\" But even though he complained, his eyes twinkled with what he wasn't saying. Spending his days polishing shoes was a lot better than spending his days digging up coal for the salt mines.\n\n\"You know these two heathens?\" Miz Nellie asked as she began to separate the dough, forming small biscuits.\n\n\"Laura's our sister,\" Sol said firmly.\n\n\"They came by yesterday and helped me out some,\" Miz Nellie said, sprinkling more flour on the dough. \"When you boys finish them boots, you come back and I'll give you some breakfast.\"\n\nHer brothers shared a wide grin before returning back to their jobs with renewed vigor.\n\n\"You seen Pa?\" Gid asked, rubbing his scrap of polish, hard over the shoes. Laura hid a wince. She had seen Prince polish Massa Richard's shoes. Delicate and gentle were the words that defined his movements.\n\n\"No.\" And wasn't that something? Once again, Laura was separated from Papa.\n\n\"We gone try and find him when we can,\" Sol said seriously. \"Him and Benji both.\"\n\n\"We got more time, Laura,\" Gid said, sending her a smile. And wasn't that the truth? Maybe she needed to make time to see Papa. Except that if anyone could figure out what she was up to with Adam Ward and the warrants, it was him. It might be best if she didn't seek him out. Unless she absolutely had too.\n\nThe kitchen door opened and one of the Irish girls, Maureen, peeked her head in. \"Miz Nellie, can you come out here for a second?\"\n\nWhen Miz Nellie was gone, Laura turned to her brothers. \"While ya'll runnin' around lookin' for Papa, stop and see if you can't help Sam and Manny.\"\n\n\"Help 'em with what?\" Sol asked suspiciously. Unlike Gid, she was beginning to realize that Sol didn't take things at face value.\n\n\"Help them learn their letters or even their numbers. They don't know as much you do.\"\n\n\"They can count,\" Sol countered, still eyeing her. Cause they had always been told to keep what they learned to the family. Less likely to get caught that way.\n\n\"But can they do maths?\"\n\n\"How come?\" Gid asked, his cute face curious. She fought an urge to squeeze his cheeks. He wasn't going to be little forever.\n\n\"Because. We need to look out for each other.\" And because Sam was keeping their bacon from being cooked.\n\n\"We may not have that much time,\" Sol said slowly. \"Learnin' ain't easy.\"\n\n\"Just try. Okay? And ask Papa if he needs anythin'.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 36", + "text": "Laura was in the laundry room, bent over a metal tub, and scrubbing somebody's shirt against the washboard when she heard knocking on the door.\n\n\"Come in,\" she said. She dropped the shirt in the water and ran the back of her hand against the top of her forehead, wiping away moisture. The heat from the water was making her sweat some fierce. She was tempted to prop the door open, but had already been told by Maureen and the other girl, Emma, that if Captain Leahy caught wind of it, he wouldn't be happy. Servants and their duties were not to be seen. So there she was, overheating in the small space. Fortunately, she would be able to hang some of the clothes outside on a clothesline to dry. She was very much looking forward to that.\n\n\"I wasn't sure if you would be in here or not,\" Sam said slowly as he pushed the door open wider.\n\n\"Come in, and shut the door,\" Laura said, reaching for a cup of cool water behind her. For a second she wondered what she looked like and then tossed that thought right out of her mind. What she looked like didn't matter at all.\n\nSam, on the other hand, somehow managed to look clean and neat even though he was wearing the same clothes he had worn yesterday. If she recollected correctly, he only had one other pair.\n\n\"You should look into purchasin' more cloth.\" The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. He frowned and shot her a confused look. \"You only have two pairs of clothes, right?\" Working like they did took a toll on clothes. Nothing gave you away faster than worn, holey clothes. At least in Laura's opinion.\n\nSam looked down for a second, wrapping his arms around himself. \"I saved the clothes I ran in.\"\n\nLaura thought back to what he was running in. \"You need more clothes. Your clothes won't last long. Buy some cloth and I'll make you a shirt and some pants.\" With three pairs of clothes, there would be a nice rotation.\n\nSam, tapping a finger against his bicep said, \"Need my money for more than clothes.\"\n\n\"The right fabric won't cost much and I won't charge you. How could I? Look at what you're doin' for us.\" He sent her a frown. \"I went to Adam Ward's room last night.\" His expression changed as he stared at her. If she didn't know any better she would say he was horrified. \"He is who he says he is. Some kind of detective. Workin' for Pinkerton. I only wish I had someone to ask about this Pinkerton.\"\n\n\"Did he... were you...\"\n\n\"Was I caught? Yes.\" Sam flinched. \"Don't worry, though, Sam,\" Laura said as she bent over the metal tub again and stuck her fingers back into the hot water. She would have to continue this conversation as she worked before the water had a chance to cool. \"He just thinks I was there to clean. I've arranged to clean his room every other day in case we need to go back in there. Now. What does Adam Ward want from you?\"\n\n\"Why?\"\n\n\"Why what?\"\n\n\"Why were you spyin',\" he said the last word quietly and shot a quick glance around the room as though to make sure someone else hadn't somehow appeared in there with them, \"on the white folks at Salis House?\"\n\nLaura eyed him for a second. \"Do you know why we ran?\"\n\n\"Cause your massa was goin' to sell Sol and Gid.\"\n\n\"Who you think found that out?\" He bit his bottom lip as understanding dawned. \"I like to know change is comin'.\"\n\n\"You ever get caught?\" Had she ever been caught? In a word: yes. And she had been soundly beaten with a broom, slapped across the face more times than she could count, yelled at and fussed at, forced to scrub all the chamber pots until she vomited from the smell. Miss Annabelle, when she had been alive, had even cut off all of her hair once as punishment. She had cried for days until Prince told her she was just as ugly with hair as without. Mama had had to break up that fight. But she had never stopped. She had only grown better. For the most part. Of course her punishment was nothing compared to an actual whipping. There was nothing more she hated than being forced to watch someone being whipped.\n\n\"Yes. I been caught. Why did you and Manny run?\"\n\nHis eyes darted away, and she read embarrassment in his face. His words were mumbled when they came out, but she still heard them. \"They wanted us to breed.\"\n\nShe had heard of this of course. Charity had been forced to breed on purpose when Miss Annabelle found herself increasing with Missy Adora. Miss Annabelle had wanted a wet-nurse who was also a house slave and Massa Richard wasn't in the mood to buy anymore slaves. She had always thought the men had it easy when it came to those things. But by the look on Sam's face, maybe not.\n\nShe took mercy on him. \"What did that Adam Ward want?\"\n\nSam exhaled, but then he told her the story about some old white man being murdered for his money and Adam Ward looking for proof. \"You just supposed to follow the man?\"\n\n\"Right now. But I wouldn't be surprised if he thinks of somethin' else.\" She heard the hesitation in his voice.\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\n\"Huh?\" he said and looked up, his face carefully blank. But it didn't fool her none.\n\n\"You don't get to throw yourself headlong into danger and I don't. We're in this together, Sam,\" Laura said quietly. But she meant it. She wouldn't let him take on the burden of her family, while they sat back and enjoyed the ride.\n\nSam sent her another look, but she wasn't too sure what it meant. \"Saw the man, Baldwin, last night, smokin' on the lower deck. He wasn't alone. There was a woman.\"\n\n\"Describe her,\" Laura said quickly as she ran the shirt in her hand up and down the washer.\n\n\"Can I help?\" he asked, his eyes dropping to her hands.\n\n\"No, Sam. You can't help,\" Laura said, exasperated. She pulled the shirt out of the water, hoped it was clean and went to hang it on the line behind her. She would wring it out later. When he was gone. \"Stay on topic.\" But he didn't listen. He came around to her side of the tub and rolled up his sleeves. \"It's not in me to not help.\"\n\n\"Sam,\" she said, censure in her voice as he reached for a dirty shirt and pressed it against the washboard. She watched him dunk it in the water.\n\nHe glanced up at her, a small grin on his face. \"Never really washed my clothes before. Just gave them a little twirl in the creek. This here is some hot water.\"\n\nLaura sighed. He was like her brothers all over again when she showed them how irons worked. It's always fun in the beginning. \"Well. Hot water cleans. You're doin' it wrong,\" she said, and slipped in front of him. Bending over, she reached down and grabbed his hands which were under water. \"Like this,\" she said gently, moving the shirt against the washboard until there was a distinct pace.\n\n\"All this bendin' reminds me of the farm.\"\n\n\"Waterin' and weedin'?\" They had kept a garden by the kitchens. More often than she had liked she had found herself out there turning over dirt and picking out weeds.\n\n\"No,\" in her ear, his voice was dry. Humorless. \"You have to plant the tobacco plants and then uproot 'em.\" He paused. \"You ever seen a tobacco seed? They small and you gotta plant 'em one way at first and then another way so that they roots have room to grow. Mindless but continuous work.\" She met his gaze then. Which was not hard to do since he was so close. His had a strong face, an appealing face with eyes so brown they were almost black. She had already been hot from the steam off the water, but now his body heat was making her hotter. She removed the shirt they had been scrubbing, giving her some space from him and then replaced it with another. This time, he got on his knees leaning over the bin. He was taller so it was easier for him, but still she mimicked his position, stretching forward as she showed him again how to get the shirt clean. \"Is this what you did all day?\" he asked.\n\n\"I sewed. And took care of Missy Adora, Massa Richard's youngest daughter, and just helped where needed. Sometimes launderin', sometimes cookin' with my best friend, Annie.\"\n\n\"Annie didn't run?\"\n\n\"She has children. Little ones.\" But maybe they should have tried. They hadn't even tried.\n\n\"That's got to be hard,\" he said, he was so close. \"Havin' young'uns.\"\n\n\"It's like you want them, but...\"\n\n\"You cain't promise 'em no better life than yours.\" And then suddenly she didn't notice the water anymore or the shirt. He was just plain too close. She stood up. He followed. But still there was no space between them as he gripped her arm.\n\n\"Laura.\" She felt his breath against her cheek. \"Be careful. Alright? I know you know more about this... sneakin' business than me. But just be careful.\" She gave a quick nod, unable at the moment to form words. She had thought him handsome, yes. But it was almost along the same lines as thinking a dress was beautiful. And because there was so much of the world he didn't know, she had, at some point, began to think of him as just another younger brother. But he wasn't her brother. \"I'm prayin'... for both of us in this matter. But still be careful. About Baldwin talkin' to that person, it was a woman. It was so dark I couldn't make out much what she looked like, but I did follow her to her cabin when she left him. She's in cabin twelve.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 37", + "text": "Sam closed the laundry room door behind him and then leaned back against it. Goodness. He reached for his own shirt, feathering it against his skin to cool off. It was mighty hot in there. He refused, absolutely refused to think about how soft her hands were under the water, and how small she was standing next to him, or how pleasant she smelled, even sweating in there. But he still found himself wishing he had any old excuse to go back in that room, to talk to her one more time. She had unsettled him, and he thought for a second that he had unsettled her.\n\nLaughter in the distance made him pull out of his thoughts about unsettling. He took a step forward. And then two. He needed to go to Adam Ward's room and speak to the man quickly. He still had deckhand duties below that he needed to accomplish.\n\nHe found his way to cabin eight and knocked softly on the door.\n\n\"Come in.\"\n\nSam pushed the door open and found Mr. Ward sitting at the desk in the room, scribbling something on the paper in front of him. A cheroot was smoking in the corner of the desk.\n\n\"Close the door.\"\n\nSam closed it behind him and went to stand next to the desk. Adam Ward said nothing as he finished dragging his pen across the paper. Sam watched as the letters formed effortlessly, one right after the other. The letters that Mr. Ward were writing looked different somehow than the letters he had seen in his own Bible, and Sam wondered why. He rocked back on his heels, again, overwhelmed with all the things he just did not know.\n\nMr. Ward set his pen down, leaned back, and grabbed another sheet of paper, fanning his inky wet scrawling. \"Any news for me?\"\n\n\"I saw Mr. Baldwin last night, smokin' on the lower deck. He was talkin' to a woman. I couldn't make out hide or hair of her in the dark, but I followed her to cabin twelve.\"\n\nAdam Ward looked at him then. \"Good job, Sam,\" he said, making Sam feel very much like a puppy.\n\nSam kept his gaze on the floor and bit back a sigh.\n\n\"I didn't actually expect you to have anything for me today. If you keep going the way you're going, we may solve this thing before we reach New Orleans.\" Sam said nothing. \"Of course,\" Mr. Ward drawled slowly. \"That might be in your best interest to wrap things up sooner rather later. I can't think why a runaway slave would take himself straight back into the south.\" Ward paused as though waiting for Sam to add something to this. He didn't. \"If you do have plans to get off early,\" Mr. Ward said, his voice getting harder. \"Then you had better hope that all on my end is resolved before then, because I will send off a telegram about those warrants.\"\n\nAnd there they were again. The threats.\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Sam said quietly with a nod, his hands now on his waist. \"If I can go back, suh, I have things I need to do.\"\n\n\"Yes. We'll reconvene tomorrow. Once I find out who is in room twelve, I may need you to search it for me.\"\n\nSam grunted. A Negro man in a white woman's bedroom. He had no doubts that if he was caught things would go very differently for him than they had for Laura.\n\nHe gave Mr. Ward one more nod acknowledging that he had heard him cause it wouldn't do for Mr. Ward to think he was insolent and went back down the stairs.\n\nHours later, Sam was making his third trip around the steamboat, mop in hand when he saw Gideon leaning against the railing and watching the boat cut across the river. He moved over to the boy, careful to mop the entire way.\n\n\"Don't lean out too far,\" he said and watched as the boy jerked back, startled. Then he sent him a shy smile.\n\n\"Hey, Sam.\"\n\n\"Gid.\"\n\nGid returned to his previous posture, arms on the rail, leaning over for a look. \"Isn't this nice, Sam? I mean, we got to work and all, but...\"\n\n\"They not so heavy-handed.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What are you two talkin' 'bout?\" Manny asked, coming up alongside Sam so that he was between his brother and Gid.\n\n\"How nice it is on the boat.\"\n\n\"What are you doin' down here anyway?\" Manny asked, reaching around Sam to place a hand on Gid's head, giving him a little shake. They never had any reason to spend time with young ones. Gid's presence was almost a treat.\n\n\"Went and saw Papa,\" the boy told Manny. \"Oh,\" he said, his eyes lighting up. \"What do ya'll know about math?\"\n\n\"Math?\" Sam asked, pausing in his mopping.\n\n\"You know like addin' numbers and takin' 'em away...\" Gid's voice trailed off as Sam and Manny stared at him. \"Nevermind.\" He waved his hand in the air. \"None of that's important.\"\n\n\"Wait a minute,\" Manny said, sounding indignant. \"What's this about takin' numbers away?\"\n\n\"Look. That's real hard stuff, alright? Mama barely knew what she was talkin' 'bout when she explained it to us and Prince taught her.\"\n\n\"We keep hearin' about this Prince,\" Manny muttered to no one in particular.\n\n\"Forget numbers,\" Gid said with a definitive nod.\n\n\"Are numbers somethin' other folks know about?\" Sam asked. Other folks being white folks.\n\n\"Yes. But. No one really uses numbers anyway. I don't think,\" Gid said, a frown appearing on his face.\n\nSam turned to look at Manny who was looking at him.\n\n\"I can teach you about other things like... when were you born?\" Sam and Manny eyed each other again. \"I didn't know either until I asked Prince. He told me I was born March 7, 1845. I just turned ten years old!\"\n\n\"Well, unfortunately, Prince is not here for us to ask,\" Manny's voice was dry.\n\n\"Do you know the year?\"\n\n\"We think we're around twenty-one,\" Sam said finally, no longer mopping. He knew they had been sold ten years ago. And he was pretty sure when they were sold, they were no bigger than Gid was now.\n\n\"Okay, let me do the math,\" Gid said, closing his eyes thinking.\n\n\"You're usin' it!\" Manny said, pointing at him. Gid's mouth twitched and then he gave them a sheepish smile.\n\n\"I guess I am. We'll say you were born, oh, 1834. Yes. 1834 plus 21 is 1855.\" Before Sam could figure out what the boy was talking about, he continued. \"What season were you born in?\"\n\n\"Winter,\" Manny said in annoyance as he folded his arms over his chest.\n\n\"Ooh, that's hard. Cause if you were born in December, that's one year. If you were born in January that's another.\"\n\n\"We know some months,\" Sam said quietly. \"I'm not sure we know them all in order.\"\n\n\"Where do these months come from?\" Manny asked.\n\nGid blinked several times. \"I don't know,\" he said with a shrug. \"I don't ask questions, I just learn. I can teach you the months, though. Did you want to be born in December, January, or February?\"\n\n\"New year, new life,\" Manny said decidedly. \"January.\"\n\n\"January it is. We'll just stay with 1834. Now, you have to pick a day. I think there's thirty-one days in January to choose from.\"\n\n\"Not every month has thirty-one days?\" Sam asked, staring at the boy.\n\n\"No. And don't ask me why. I don't ask questions\u2014,\"\n\n\"You just learn,\" Manny said with a roll of his eyes.\n\n\"Hey, I know a lot about time and changin' time. I can even tell time.\"\n\n\"We can tell time,\" Manny said belligerently.\n\n\"Because of the sun?\" Gid asked slowly, giving him a look that that just wasn't good enough. \"Or can you read the little hands on a clock?\"\n\nSam closed his eyes for a second. Then opened them. \"No. We can't read a clock.\"\n\n\"Clocks have hands?\" Manny muttered under his breath.\n\n\"Then there is still just so much I can teach you. Get comfortable. This might take a while. And don't ask me no 'why' questions. I didn't ask, ok? I just learn.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 38", + "text": "Following Baldwin around on the boat when he was supposed to be keeping to one deck of the Paine and doing whatever it was that Finn thought up next, was not easy. Sam had overheard two of the sailors talking and knew that they would be approaching Louisville, Kentucky before the day was over. The fact that they were still in Kentucky gave Sam slight anxiety. But he figured if he just stayed on the steamboat and kept his head down, he'd be fine. Captain Leahy, thankfully, employed a lot of Negroes.\n\nFinn had already given him the same task of sweeping up any and all manure dropped by animals getting on and off the Paine when they docked. And if stopping at this port was anything like the one in Cincinnati, hopefully everyone would be too busy to notice if Sam wasn't completely on top of his job. But the whole thing made him irritated. Sam had never been one to shirk his duties whether he felt like doing them or not. He didn't want to start now.\n\nHe was in the midst of sharing all of his thoughts and concerns with the Lord when Baldwin came down the steps. Sam stared at the man for a second and then looked away, returning to the job of cleaning the deck. Baldwin went to the same spot he had last night and lit a cheroot, careful to keep his gaze on the water. It was the same spot, Sam realized as he moved behind some cargo, from which he had killed Vance. Since the space was filled with so much freight, it was not a spot where a lot of people stopped to take in the view.\n\n\"Here they come!\" Someone called out. Sam looked past Baldwin towards the water. Like in Cincinnati, before they got to the official port in Louisville, some small boats were coming out to the Paine. Sam moved to help make room for more cargo, all the while keeping an eye on Baldwin who smoked from the railing, and making note of any new people coming aboard. There were about five. Two Negroes and three whites. Could be slaves weren't the only ones running.\n\n\"How long 'til we dock in Louisville?\" Sam heard Baldwin ask one of the sailors.\n\nBefore the sailor could answer the steam whistle sang, loud and clear.\n\n\"Ten minutes.\"\n\n\"How long will we be there?\"\n\n\"No longer than an hour. Captain wants to keep it moving while it's still daylight.\"\n\nBaldwin tossed what was left of his cheroot into the river and headed for the stairs.\n\nLooking both ways, Sam made sure all the cargo was secured and then followed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 39", + "text": "Whoever was in cabin number twelve was going to have to wait. Cabin number twelve was not one of the cabins that Laura was assigned to and she wasn't about to go and take on any extra work. Between cooking, serving, doing laundry, ironing, assisting different ladies, and now cleaning Adam Ward's room\u2014though that wouldn't start until tomorrow\u2014Laura felt she had more than enough on her plate.\n\nShe knocked on cabin number six. \"Come in,\" both of the girls said at the same time.\n\n\"Hello,\" Laura's greeting was quiet as she went straight to the small closet to hang up the dresses that they requested be ironed in time for supper that night.\n\n\"Hi, Laura. If we don't get off at Louisville today, when will we reach the next port?\" Daphne asked. She was lying on top of her bed, on her stomach, flipping through a magazine.\n\n\"Lyin' like that will not improve your posture,\" the gentle words of rebuke were out of Laura's mouth before she remembered who she was talking to.\n\nLucinda was sitting at the small vanity, pinning her own hair. Both she and Daphne turned their heads to look at her.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Laura said, closing her eyes for a second. \"Before I came here,\" she said slowly. \"I worked for a family... with daughters.\" Laura re-straightened the gown she was holding and looked away.\n\n\"Like a lady's maid,\" Daphne said in awe as she sat up. Even Lucinda stared at her.\n\n\"Just so.\" She had the skills of a trained lady's maid. But she did more work than them. This she knew thanks to Missy Charlotte. The girls exchanged quick looks which Laura ignored. She hoped she had not just given them a reason to have her in their room all the time. She was not their lady's maid after all.\n\n\"What do you mean not get off at Louisville?\" Lucinda finally asked, her question aimed at Daphne. Laura exhaled with relief and hung up the other dress in her hand. She closed the closet door and then found herself meeting Lucinda's gaze in the mirror. Lucinda made a disgruntled face. \"Our maid is with Aunt Crissy again.\" The girl pointed to her hair with a pout.\n\n\"Our maid?\" Daphne muttered, without lifting her eyes from the page of the magazine in front of her. Except now she was sitting up straight on the bed, her shoulders level.\n\nLucinda turned to face her with a huff. \"Don't think I won't tell Aunt Crissy if you don't stop being rude!\"\n\n\"I wasn't being rude, Cousin. I was just making a point.\" The girls shared icy, humorless grins. \"Anyway, Laura, do you know anything about the next port? Is Louisville the last major city before we reach Memphis?\"\n\n\"Does Evansville, Indiana count? We're about three days from there, though we'll hit one more port in Kentucky maybe tomorrow.\" At least that was what she had overheard. Just so long as they kept moving west.\n\n\"See,\" Lucinda said. She was back to facing the vanity. Laura coughed into her hand as Lucinda sprayed several mists of something flowery into the air. She also noticed that the vanity was filled with all kinds of cosmetics. Facial paste, rose water, almond oil, even pearl powder which Laura knew was more than a little expensive. Miss Martha had some that she pulled out every Christmas. Her own special indulgence.\n\n\"Do ya'll need anythin' else?\"\n\n\"No,\" the girls said in unison and Laura left their room. She went back to the laundry room for Mrs. Hartford's gown. Maureen and Emma were in there. Maureen was ironing while Emma was stitching a shirt. They quit talking upon Laura's entrance casting a few glances her way. She didn't blame them for their hesitation. She had never worked with white servants herself. Were servants the same everywhere? Or was their still some kind of hierarchy Laura was supposed to be following? And more importantly, did the two Irish girls know it? So many questions. It was better to just pretend the other didn't exist... which is what they had been doing for the past day and a half.\n\nLaura grabbed Mrs. Hartford's dress and gave it a shake. It was even more beautiful now cleaned and ironed.\n\n\"Oh, that's lovely,\" Maureen said softly as she set the iron back on top of the small stove to get hot. She was a dark haired girl, a bit plump, but pretty.\n\n\"Isn't it?\" Laura asked, giving her a small smile.\n\n\"You'll have to show me how you got the stains out. I didn't think it was possible,\" Emma said softly. Emma was thin, with blond hair, and a hard worker. She never seemed to stop moving.\n\n\"I would be happy too. It's a mix my mama showed me, a little honey, a little gin, hot water, some soap. And then you have to have a deft hand as you apply it.\"\n\n\"You've been a domestic for a long time then?\" Maureen asked as she reached behind her for the iron.\n\nLaura hesitated only for a second. \"Yes. If you'll excuse me, I'll go run this to Mrs. Hartford.\"\n\nLaura turned towards the door, but then stopped, turned back. \"A friend of mine who works on here needs something from the lady in cabin twelve... would you...\"\n\n\"Oh, that's Mrs. Dabney,\" Maureen said with a nod. \"She's been on here since the Paine left.\" Laura frowned. She couldn't recall a Mrs. Dabney. \"She's not exactly welcome in the dining room, but she's got the money for a cabin of her own. Captain Leahy's hardly going to say no,\" Maureen continued, seeing the expression on Laura's face.\n\n\"Miz Nellie says Mrs. Dabney is a painted woman,\" Emma said, stressing the last two words and raising her eyebrows. \"I'm fairly certain she's not even a Missus. Tell your friend to speak to her outside of her room. You never know what might be happening inside.\"\n\nLaura gave a brisk nod and left the laundry room. Mrs. Dabney being a painted woman neither confirmed nor denied that she was the missing Mary Stiles.\n\nLaura hummed softly to herself as she made her way to Mrs. Hartford's door. She knocked twice. \"It's Laura, ma'am.\" Laura had come by the night before to help Mrs. Hartford into a red, silk taffeta dress. It had been stunning. Missy Charlotte's gowns had always been soft colors like pink and yellow. Miss Martha said it was on account of the fact that she was still unmarried. Missy Charlotte had always complained that it was such an old-fashioned, un-American rule, but nevertheless had stayed with pastels. It had been easy though, to wave off any envy because she knew those colors wouldn't do much for her own skin. But that red... when Laura was finally settled in her free life that was the first extravagant thing she was going to do. She was going to make herself a red, silk, taffeta gown. Even if the only place she could wear it was at home. Maybe. There was a time that she would never have indulged such a fancy, but now? Now, she could dream a little.\n\n\"Come in.\"\n\nLaura entered the room to see Mrs. Hartford sashaying back and forth in front of the mirror. \"I've got to look my best for when I got into town,\" she said with a smile, though it was directed at the mirror and not at Laura.\n\n\"I've got your dress ma'am.\"\n\n\"Oh, excellent.\" Mrs. Hartford walked over to Laura, running her hands down the front. \"And you got out the stains too. It was clumsy of me to spill my wine.\"\n\nWine stains on the dress, blood stains on her letters. It was not the first time that Laura wondered if Sam had made a mistake with his numbers. Though to be fair, nine looked nothing like twelve. But could Mrs. Hartford have been going to cabin twelve simply to visit with Mrs. Dabney? They could be friends. There was really no way to know.\n\n\"I'll just hang this in your closet and be on my way,\" Laura said softly and moved around Mrs. Hartford.\n\n\"While you're in there can you grab me a parasol? I'm going to stand out on the deck and watch us pull into Louisville.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Laura said as she hung up the beautiful gown. She then reached around the side of the closet until her hands found the parasols. There were three of them. All new, Laura saw as she turned one in her hand this way and that. She knew this because the design was the latest thing from London. Missy Charlotte had begged for one for months. Their handles were ivory and there was gold banding. Well, it was no nevermind. Unless the woman was indeed Mrs. Stiles. Laura placed two of the parasols back, keeping her hand on the one that best matched Mrs. Hartford's dress.\n\n\"Oh, I don't know, Laura. Do you really think the blue one matches? I'm wearing pink and white.\"\n\n\"The seams are blue. The parasol will bring them out,\" Laura said quietly as she handed Mrs. Hartford the parasol.\n\n\"Ha. I didn't think of that.\"\n\n\"Anythin' else, ma'am?\"\n\n\"No. You've been a big help already. Come and dress me tonight.\"\n\nAfter checking in on all of the ladies assigned to her, the smelly Paulina, the sick Virginia, the ever growing Diana, Laura grabbed her simple afternoon meal of fresh bread, cheese, and meat and left the passenger deck. Out of sight. Out of mind. At least for a few minutes.\n\nWhen she got to the lower deck, she went in the opposite direction she had gone in before. She didn't get too far before she saw Papa and Benji standing together against the railing and talking. She made her way over, ripping the sandwich into two pieces as she got closer. It was ingrained in her to offer them whatever she had received in service. After all, she had a better chance of replacing it then they had of getting it at all.\n\n\"Hungry?\" Laura asked as she handed one piece of her sandwich to her brother and one piece to Papa.\n\nShe would just make sure that she was working that evening in the kitchen when supper was being prepared. It would be easy enough to get a taste of whatever Miz Nellie or Shadrach decided would be on the menu.\n\n\"See ya around, Papa,\" Benji said, and with one glance at her he walked off without saying a word. Even as his mouth moved from eating the food she had just given him. She took his place, next to Papa, leaning against the railing. He was sweaty, and looked hot in spite of the small bite of cold in the air. Laura hadn't even noticed it until this moment, now that she wasn't moving. Her body shivered.\n\n\"He'll get past it,\" Papa said, as he tossed the last bit of her sandwich in his mouth.\n\n\"I'm not sure what there is to get past,\" Laura said, closing her eyes and raising her face to the sun. She wasn't used to being out in the elements so much. Aside from leaving the Big House for the kitchen to eat and talk to Annie, and the occasional foray to hang laundry or work the kitchen gardens, she spent most of her time in the sewing room at Salis.\n\n\"He's strong. And a hard worker. And he'll probably work a smithy like me, but it wouldn't have been his first choice, had he had one. I wish he could have gotten some schoolin'. It was my only hesitation to goin' out west. There ain't no schools he can go to.\"\n\nLaura reached down and gripped the railing in front of her, pushing and pulling herself slowly against it. \"There are correspondence courses. And he doesn't have to stay out west. If it's ever safe enough, he could take a steamboat right back up north.\"\n\n\"That is a fact,\" Amos said slowly, his gaze on his own hands that gripped the railing before him. His hands were large, wide, dark, and scarred. It was hard to believe that those hands had cradled her as a baby. Laura had had this thought before, but for the first time she didn't look at it with skepticism. Instead she felt a little... pride. He had worked so hard to get them there. She would make sure that Adam Ward did not send off a single telegram. Somehow. Someway. Papa's shoulders rose and fell, his mind clearly on their conversation. \"I never heard of no correspondence courses though. That might be somethin' you could mention to him.\"\n\nLaura would have grunted except Miss Martha had instilled in Missy Charlotte and Missy Adora how unladylike it was to make such a noise. She thought about whether there was anything else to say about her brother but as Miss Martha always said, when you had nothing nice to say, change the subject. \"How is it? Feedin' the boiler?\n\n\"Hot, dirty work.\" Papa sent her a smile. \"Just like workin' the smithy.\"\n\nThe steam whistle blew behind them causing Laura to jump. \"We'll be pullin' up to Louisville soon. I'm gonna sit out the stop at the port in the boiler room. Hot as it may be in there, it's better than bein' sighted by a paddy roller and I'm too big a target to miss.\" Laura nodded quickly. Heard his hesitation. \"How is it? Up there? They workin' you too hard?\"\n\n\"No, sir. Cleanin' and cookin'.\" And detecting. \"Nothin' I'm not used to already.\"\n\nShe felt Papa's gaze on her and she was careful to keep her eyes out on the water before them. In the distance she could see the Louisville port. Like Papa it was probably best that she disappeared inside somewhere.\n\n\"It's my hope that this is the last time you ever have to wait on white folks, Laura.\"\n\n\"Just wait on ya'll?\" she asked, her voice teasing.\n\n\"Exactly,\" he said with a small smile. He began to take a few steps back.\n\n\"Be careful, Papa,\" Laura said even as she looked toward the stairs. The tug of the water pulled her once more and she found herself glancing out towards the river once more. This time she could see the reflection of the colors of different ones' clothing as they waited for the steamboat to pull in. It was time for her to disappear as well.\n\n\"Always. And you let me know if there's any trouble now. You hear?\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 40", + "text": "Sam found Mr. Ward in the dining hall. He had gone to Mr. Ward's room and knocked but gotten no answer. One of the white men walking the upper deck had seen Sam and told him that if he was looking for Mr. Ward to go to the dining hall. How the man had known Sam was looking for Mr. Ward was a bit disconcerting, but Sam had hesitated only for a minute. He didn't have time to waste. When the second bell whistled, he winced. He was supposed to be on the lower deck now. But he went on to the dining hall anyway and stopped dead in the doorway. He had never seen anything so fine in all his days. Taking one step into the room, he froze as his boots sank into the ground. Looking down he could see that below him there was carpet so thick and pretty, he didn't hardly want to take another step for fear of smearing something foul on it. But then something sparkling caught his eye, forcing him to look up. A thousand lights glistened above his head changing colors as they swayed with the rhythm of the boat. He blinked and his eyes drifted along the wall. The walls were lined with colored paper that seemed to shimmer with gold and he was almost sure that expensive metal was fashioned to the rafters.\n\n\"Can I help you?\" A white man asked. He was tending the bar, wiping it down.\n\n\"Uh, yes. I was lookin' for Mr. Adam Ward. I has a message for him.\"\n\nThe man nodded in a specific direction. Daylight it may have been but that didn't stop men from smoking, drinking, and playing cards. And there in the center of it all was Adam Ward. Sam watched as Mr. Ward laughed, threw his cards down, and raised his arms in delight. The men around him alternatively groaned or muttered under their breath.\n\n\"And that my dear southern friends, is how it's done,\" Adam said as he leaned forward pulling his cash winnings toward him. He did glance up for a second though and spotted Sam. He gave Sam a nod towards the door. Sam exhaled and headed back towards the exit. He really didn't have time for this. Just as the thought entered his mind, his eyes spotted a clock. He had seen them before. But since he had not understood how they worked, he had never really looked at them. Now, he saw the short hand and the long one that Gid had told him about. He watched as the long hand moved just a little bit. A minute had passed. The sound of a familiar click pulled his gaze from the clock. Without taking a step, his eyes darted to the table where Adam Ward now sat with his gun out and pointed at the man across from him. \"I'm not a cheater.\"\n\n\"I didn't say\u2014,\"\n\n\"Yes. You did. Apologize.\" Adam Ward's voice was hard and angry and broke no argument.\n\n\"I didn't mean no disrespect,\" the man finally said slowly.\n\n\"Yes, you did,\" Adam repeated, but uncocked his gun. Sam took that as an opportunity to leave the salon. How the man had time in the midst of an investigation to not only play cards but start trouble was a mystery to him. Then again, he had Sam doing all of his work. And wasn't that just the way of folks?\n\nHe wasn't waiting long before Mr. Ward came through the salon doors, counting his money and sliding it into one of his pockets. The expression on his face was pure joy. Apparently being called a cheater hadn't truly bothered him none. Sam didn't know him well enough to know if that was likely to be true or untrue at any rate. And quite frankly, he didn't care.\n\nThe steam engine whistled again and Sam looked over the railing behind him. They were pulling into port.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Baldwin is gettin' off here. I just thought you would like to know.\"\n\nMr. Ward swore under his breath. \"Thanks.\" And then he was gone.\n\nSam went down the steps to the lower deck at a quick pace, found his shovel, which he had tucked in a corner close by, and went to clean up after the animals.\n\nHe was distracted only once and that was when he passed the boiler room and caught sight of everything and everybody in there. All kinds of folks was moving about.\n\n\"Sam.\" The voice was deep. Familiar. Sam searched the room. Found him.\n\n\"Amos.\"\n\n\"Come and let me show you.\"\n\nSam took a step in the boiler room and Amos met him towards the back of it. He pointed to a few men who had nothing on but pants, sweat dripping down their backs. \"They stokin' the firebox,\" Amos explained, though Sam figured it out watching the men shoving coal into the fire. \"Every ten minutes, that fella,\" Amos said, pointing to a white man, \"opens the try cocks on the boilers. He lifts the valves and releases the steam. Got to be careful with these things, one wrong move and they'll explode.\" Sam said nothing as Amos, almost excitedly, explained how the entire steamboat worked.\n\n\"You learn all that in a couple of days?\"\n\n\"Son, I built things similar to these. Don't take much to learn how they work.\" Sam couldn't stop the sharp look he sent Amos. No one had called him son in years.\n\nSam returned his gaze to the boilers and the men working them, the pipes and valves, the knobs and cranks. It looked like just too much was going on. He turned and glanced at Amos. Watched the older man's gaze take it all in. \"You don't get to work 'em though do you?\"\n\n\"No indeed,\" Amos said, shaking his head slowly. \"I ain't never get to work a single thing I've ever built. I just keep steam in the boiler, shovelin' coal in when it's my turn.\" Sam returned his gaze back to the unusual dance of machinery before him. \"I'm glad you're here, Sam. I wanted to thank you.\"\n\n\"For what?\" Sam asked, genuinely confused.\n\n\"For bein' kind to my boys. They've got nothin' but good things to say 'bout you and your brother.\"\n\nSam thought on that for a second. \"Truth be told, Amos. I'm learnin' a lot from your boys. They know much more'n me and that's a fact.\"\n\n\"They know more'n me too,\" Amos said, pride filling his voice. \"But knowledge ain't all knowhow. Benji was tellin' me 'bout what you said about Laura. I 'preciate that. Been tellin' him for years, but my words ain't been no good.\"\n\nSam fought the urge to stare at the man again. \"Well. I'm glad I could help,\" he said finally. \"But I'm not sure how my words can beat those comin' from your own pa.\"\n\nAmos said nothing for a minute. And then, \"Was your pa sold?\"\n\nSam shrugged. \"Don't know. Never got around to askin' my ma before she was. Thanks for showin' me how it works,\" Sam said with a nod and left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 41", + "text": "They entered the Louisville port with no problems, and they left with no problems, which by the looks Sam exchanged with Manny and Benji on the sly, was nothing short of sweet relief. According to Finn, the next stop would be Owensboro, Kentucky. If they kept on moving all night, they would reach it by morning. All Sam knew was that Kentucky was one large state. Finn had indicated that they still had one more stop in Kentucky following this one. After a quick breakfast of hard bread and harder meat with Manny, Sam had slipped up the stairs. He figured since they would be arriving at Owensboro before his arranged time with Mr. Ward, he had better get their meeting over with sooner rather than later. He had no new information. The last he had seen of Baldwin had been the night before when he had been entering the dining hall for supper and it wasn't like Sam was gonna be invited in.\n\n\"Sam,\" he heard his name quietly whispered. Sam took his eyes off the ground and found Laura's. She was exiting a room and carrying towels. \"Do you have a minute?\" she asked and nodded towards the laundry room. Sam followed her inside, shutting the door behind him.\n\n\"Cabin number twelve belongs to a Mrs. Dabney,\" she said before the door was properly shut. \"I saw her for the first time this morning. According to Maureen and Emma, the Irish girls, Mrs. Dabney is a lady of the night.\" All of this Laura said as she dumped the towels into an already filled bucket of clothing and placed an iron on a small stove. Sam watched as she pulled a small table out and reached for some clothing.\n\n\"Lady of the night?\" Sam asked, his brows lowered.\n\nLaura looked over at him and stared. Sam fought the urge to duck his head. Whatever a 'lady of the night' was, most folks knew already. Except Sam. And probably Manny. \"You know, Sam. A lady of the night,\" she said, stressing the last word, her eyes pleading with him to not make her explain it further. For a moment he wrestled with his pride. Admit his ignorance... again? Or just tell Adam Ward and hope he understood the phrase? His pride won. He gave a quick nod and she sent him a relived smile. What exactly was a lady of the night?\n\n\"Anyways,\" she said with a wave of her hand before reaching behind her for the iron and placing a hand an inch away from it to see if it was hot. It wasn't. Sam watched her return it to the stove. \"There's another woman. Her name is Hartford. A redhead. There's somethin' very... odd about her. I just wanted to tell you in case she has somethin' to do with Baldwin.\"\n\nSam looked away, thinking. He hadn't seen any redheaded women with Baldwin, though to be fair, most white women wore them funny hats and he was more than a little disinclined to be peering at 'em enough to figure out what was underneath.\n\n\"I'll keep an eye out,\" he said with a nod. \"Anythin' else?\"\n\nHe saw her hesitate for a moment. \"Did you see my brothers any?\"\n\n\"Yeah. Gid was talkin' to us 'bout stuff like clocks and time. My brother and I fixed a date for our birthday.\" Sam was amazed at how calm and collected he sounded when he said that. When he and Manny had finally agreed on a date, the moment had brought tears to both of their eyes. And not necessarily happy ones. There was a new ache on the inside of him... one that longed to know the truth of the matter combined with the realization that that would never happen for him.\n\nPerhaps Laura did sense the underlying emotion because she gave him a gentle smile. One that made him feel about Gid's age. He fought against releasing a sigh. It wasn't as if her viewing him as a child made him any less a man. But that still didn't stop the fact that he very much wanted her respect.\n\n\"Is that all?\" He knew he sounded short. Abrupt.\n\nThe smile on her face wavered a bit. Then she gave a quick nod. \"Yes. I'll let you know if I hear or see anythin' else.\"\n\nWith another nod, Sam left the closet. He made the short walk to Adam Ward's room, but before he could raise a fist to knock on the door, he heard a familiar voice. Below.\n\nThis time, Sam did sigh. He turned back around and headed down the stairs. It appeared that Mr. Ward had been coming to him this time.\n\nHe made it to the bottom of the steps just in time to hear Adam Ward's voice get louder. Another voice, angrier, harder, returned a statement. Sam exhaled. Deeply. The man had managed to find himself entangled in yet another argument. Maybe they should get off this boat and try their chances with another steamer. Adam Ward seemed about as stable as gun powder.\n\nTurning the corner, Sam could see Mr. Ward yelling at a shorter man in front of him. Next to the short man was the man who had accused Mr. Ward of cheating at cards the day before. Sam walked past them quietly, his eyes only darting to the angry men for a few seconds before looking away. He noticed quickly that he wasn't the only one looking and trying not to look. Just about everyone working on the lower deck was starting to take notice of Mr. Ward and the shorter man's argument.\n\n\"Somehow, magically winnin' night after night...\"\n\n\"There's no magic too it. Can't help it if you don't know how to play the game.\" Ward's voice was tight and laced with frustration.\n\nAnd then the boat did something Sam had never felt it do before, it gave a sharp turn. He felt himself sliding to the left and reached out for a railing that he hadn't noticed before to steady himself. Boxes, half the height of Sam, but twice as large slid down the lower deck past him. When he looked up, he could see others grabbing whatever their hands could hold on to in an effort to keep steady.\n\n\"Snag in the water,\" a sailor called out. Grumbles filled the air, but no one seemed alarmed.\n\nBut of course, Sam had heard about these snags. Snags being trees and other debris that had fallen into the water but were still close enough to the surface to reach up from their watery graves to snag a hole into a passing steamboat.\n\n\"You can see it just over there,\" he heard another man say with excitement. Sam made his way to the front of the boat, staring hard into the water. He wanted to see. Was it a tree? A large rock? Something else entirely? The men who had been lingering, listening to Ward's argument came alongside him at the front railing. And then there it was: a long tree with erstwhile branches. All of them eyed the snag in quiet and awe as the captain steered them around it.\n\n\"Good thing it's a clear day,\" he heard someone mutter. Sam watched as several men hefted one of the boxes of goods, stacking it atop another. He didn't think that was a particularly good idea, but he said nothing as the boxes were moved closer to their original position, blocking Ward from Sam's sight.\n\n\"Good thing we have the Captain,\" another person said as they pushed more goods back into place. Then the voices drifted as they chased down the rest of the cargo that had gone sliding across the deck.\n\n\"Where we come from, you don't win a man's livelihood.\" The words drifted down towards Sam. The argument had not ended just cause the steamer had made a sharp turn. Sam let out a huff and shook his head from his spot behind the boxes. What kind of person, exactly, had he got himself tied to?\n\n\"Where I come from you don't play unless you can afford to,\" Ward countered.\n\nSam didn't hear the other man's response as the men who were feeding the boilers started calling out louder and louder orders on the other side of the steamer. Turning the thing was causing quite the ripple effect. He wondered how Amos was doing in that hot oven of a room.\n\nAnd just when he decided he was going to go himself and see the activity of the boiler room, the boat turned again, this time swinging right. It was all Sam could do to jump out of the way of the boxes headed in his direction.\n\nMen yelled. Animals either mooed, snorted, brayed, or yelped. Sam clung to a pole, dodging whatever cargo was not tied down to the deck. And still\u2014despite all that was going on\u2014he heard it. A splash.\n\nAs the steamer seemed to stabilize, Sam peeked around the box. He spotted the two men that Ward had been arguing with, but no Ward. He couldn't say what made him look in the water, but he did and saw a hand. Leaving his space in the shadows, Sam made his way to the railing, past the other men. And yes, there was Ward, trying to swim and getting further and further away.\n\nThey didn't make eye contact. Ward was too busy struggling and losing. Sam's grip on the railing was tight. He could walk away and Ward and all of his threats would be gone.\n\n\"Sam!\" the voice was familiar, almost frantic.\n\nSam tossed one quick look at his brother and dove overboard." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 42", + "text": "Laura stared, her hands gripping the railing of the steamboat tightly as Sam\u2014it couldn't be Sam\u2014dove into the water. She was out on the promenade deck, her, Gid, Sol, Maureen, and Emma.\n\n\"I think I'm going to be sick,\" she heard Maureen say from behind her. The comment wasn't surprising. Her face had already turned green from the first sharp turn.\n\n\"This is so much fun,\" Gid whispered from his place next to Laura. After the boat had swerved that first time, everyone who served on the upper deck had all come out, including Nellie and Shad, to see what was going on. Nellie and Shad had gone back in to finish cooking though a few minutes ago muttering something about snags. Laura was quickly beginning to realize there was a whole nother language out here on the steamboat. She didn't want to learn it.\n\n\"Man overboard!\" she heard called from below.\n\n\"Was that Sam?\" Sol asked as he came up on her other side. He stood on his tiptoes, leaning over to see.\n\nLaura didn't respond. Instead, she pulled away from the railing and headed down the steps. She reached the bottom in time to see Manny running past her.\n\n\"There's no way you'll catch him,\" a sailor was saying to Manny as Manny was pulling rope out of a closet.\n\n\"My brother can swim,\" he said, giving the rope one last tug.\n\n\"Tie it around somethin' that will float,\" Laura said, her eyes darting around the small room. \"That,\" she said, pointing to an empty wood shelf. \"Wood floats.\"\n\nManny stepped past her, jerked the shelf out of its place and tied a knot around the middle of the wood. Laura ran alongside him as he tossed it high and far into the water. It hit the water with a splash that was seen but not heard over the noise behind them.\n\nAnd even though it seemed somewhat close to Sam, it wasn't close enough. Sam was moving, but the steamer was moving faster. And something was slowing him down...\n\n\"Wait. Is he helpin' someone?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Manny growled. \"Some fool fell in the water so of course Sam had to jump in.\"\n\n\"He'll never make it.\" The same unhelpful man behind Manny repeated himself.\n\nLaura turned to frown at him, and saw that half the people on the steamer were right behind her. Glancing up above her head, she could see bodies pressed against the railing of the hurricane deck and the Texas deck watching Sam struggling to swim for the piece of wood and carry the man in the water.\n\nLaura turned back to look though she was almost afraid to. She couldn't bear it if they had to leave him. He was just starting to become her friend, she realized in that moment. She closed her eyes, prayed. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.\n\n\"He's got it!\" Someone yelled. Laura opened her eyes, saw Sam gripping the wood tightly as it dragged him and the person he carried, clear across the water. People whopped loudly from behind her.\n\nMen lined up to pull the rope and wood that Sam clung to into the boat. As they got closer, Laura watched in amazement as Ward's familiar figure took shape. He did not appear to be breathing.\n\n\"You fool,\" Manny's voice was low, and Laura was fairly certain only she and Sam heard him say it as he grabbed two fistfuls of Sam's shirt and helped him overboard. Ward, she could see out the corner of her eye, was being pulled up by some sailors.\n\n\"You know me,\" Sam said, breathing quick and deep. He looked tired and she noticed that he was very much leaning into his brother who now had an arm wrapped around his shoulders. Laura fought an unusual urge to reach out and touch him. As though that would do something.\n\n\"Can you make it up the stairs? We can have more privacy in the laundry room.\"\n\nBoth men turned to look at her, their eyes wide with surprise at her presence. \"I can get you a cup of somethin' warm upstairs. I'm sure you're cold.\"\n\n\"Where,\" Manny asked, eyeing her, \"Did you come from?\"\n\nBefore she could tell him that she had been there the whole time, someone\u2014several someones\u2014slapped Sam on the back, congratulating him on such a great swim.\n\nLaura took that moment to leave the lower level and run up the stairs.\n\n\"Oh, my goodness, Laura did you see that?!\" Gid was still straining his thin body over the rails where Laura had left him as though he might miss something else.\n\n\"I didn't think he would make it. Honest to goodness, I didn't,\" Sol said to no one in particular.\n\n\"Fun's over. Ya'll best get back to work, now.\"\n\n\"I could never have swum that fast,\" Gid muttered walking past her.\n\n\"You can't swim at all,\" Sol countered, following him.\n\nShe went first to the laundry room and saw that no one was there. Good. Then she ran into the steamboat kitchen.\n\n\"They say a man fell overboard and another man jumped in to save him?\" Nellie asked. She was cutting her daily quota of potatoes.\n\n\"Yes. Sam, one of the Negroes jumped in and saved a white man. Could I pour him a cup of coffee?\" Laura asked, pointing to the coffee pot that was kept warm on the stove. Laura knew Nellie changed it every other hour so that the coffee was kept as fresh as it could be.\n\n\"Aint' that somethin',\" Nellie said, shaking her head. \"Go on, but bring me my cup back.\"\n\nNot sure how Sam took his coffee, Laura poured in a little cream, a lot of sugar and gave it a quick stir before setting it on a saucer. \"I'll be back to help you in just a moment.\"\n\nShe made her way slowly to the laundry room, pausing only when the whistle blew. They had pretty much arrived at the next port. She figured in that moment that if Sam hadn't caught up with the ship he could have swam to shore and met them at Owensboro, but that was more than a little fraught with risk.\n\nShe kept going towards the laundry room and tapped gently.\n\n\"Um... we're here,\" Manny said, his voice, low and unsure. How she knew it was Manny and not Sam, she didn't know.\n\nShe pushed into the room where Sam now sat on a trunk still in his wet clothes. \"Didn't you have another set of clothes?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sam said slowly, eyeing the cup in her hand.\n\n\"Then why haven't you changed yet? The last thing you want is to take a chill and I imagine the water was cold,\" she scolded as she handed him the small glass saucer and cup. Sam took it slowly, carefully, as though he had never handled anything so breakable in his life. And it was quite possible that he hadn't.\n\n\"What is it?\" Manny asked brusquely.\n\n\"Coffee,\" Laura said slowly. Even Papa and Benji had had a cup of coffee. Prince drank a cup every morning while reading yesterday's newspaper, but Prince wasn't exactly a good measuring stick for most slaves.\n\n\"We've heard of coffee, thank you very much,\" Manny said before snatching the cup off the saucer and tasting it. He grimaced. \"It's hot and it tastes... bitter.\"\n\n\"I put in cream and sugar.\"\n\n\"Cream and sugar?\" Manny asked before raising it to his lips again.\n\n\"What are you doin'? That's not for you,\" Laura said when his second sip was particularly long.\n\n\"Here,\" Manny said, pushing the cup at Sam. \"It'll definitely warm you.\"\n\nSam took it slowly and raised it to his nose, smelling it. Then he took a small sip before also grimacing.\n\n\"An acquired taste, perhaps,\" Laura said with a small shrug, feeling more than a little embarrassed.\n\n\"Yes, but kind of nice,\" Sam said slowly, taking another sip.\n\n\"And addictive. Don't drink it all, brother.\"\n\n\"Maybe you should go get Sam somethin' dry to wear,\" Laura said, meeting Manny's gaze. \"He did, after all, almost just die.\"\n\n\"Sam, always, almost just dies,\" Manny said, giving her a look that told her Sam was exactly none of her business. \"But, since I was born to serve, literally, I will go back down and get Sam's dry clothes. Because I have nothin' better to do than serve. Obviously.\"\n\nManny went to the door and Laura could not stop the next sentence that came out of her mouth. \"Learn some new words?\" Manny stiffened. It was something Prince would have asked her had she repeated herself. With a huff, he opened up the door to the laundry room and left.\n\nA small snort caught her attention and she turned back to Sam who was smiling behind his coffee cup. He took another sip and set it and the saucer on the table next to him. Laura leaned over and looked in. There was still enough for Manny to get another swallow.\n\n\"I probably shouldn't have said that to your brother,\" Laura said softly, before raising her gaze to his.\n\n\"Manny'll respect you more if you say your piece than if you hold it in... he always dishes out more'n what most folks can take.\"\n\nA wry smile crossed Laura's lips. She could take. She watched him grip the edge of the trunk tightly as a shiver hit him. Walking past him, she went to a shelf and grabbed a towel. If she had to stay up and wash it later, then oh well. Coming up behind him, she wrapped the towel around his shoulders, leaning into him for just one moment before stepping away and turning to face him. His gaze was direct, almost piercing and for some reason her heart started racing. He really was one of the handsomest men of her acquaintance. And, apparently, the kindest as well.\n\n\"Why?\"\n\nHe didn't even have to ask her what she was talking about. \"Because I couldn't live with myself if I let him die when I could have saved him.\" His eyes dropped to the floor and his voice was quiet and sure though his grip on the trunk seemed to be turning the tips of his fingers white. \"I couldn't pray to my Jesus with confidence with that kind of stain on my soul.\"\n\nLaura stared at him, and she was sure he could feel the intensity of her gaze, but he did not look up. \"I've always considered myself to be a believer in Jesus, but I don't think I've ever seen faith lived out the way you do it.\"\n\nHis eyes flickered to hers then, a small smile tugging at his lips. \"Is it really faith if it doesn't call us to action?\"\n\nShe opened her mouth to reply but shut it when he continued. \"Before you paint me as a saint,\" he began, his eyes returning to the ground. \"My mama... she made us promise not to look for her when we was sold. She made us promise not to look back,\" he said simply, but even still she could hear a world of hurt in his words. \"I believe you reap what you sow and... if someone ever has or had the opportunity to help her, I pray that my actions... that somehow... that if I do a kindness for someone else, then they'll have done a kindness for her.\"\n\nLaura swallowed the emotion in her throat and blinked back the moisture in her eyes. \"Sam,\" she said quietly and when he looked up, she placed a hand on his face, cupping his cheek. He blinked once. \"Sam.\"\n\nThe laundry door opened and Manny stood in the entrance, a pile of clothes in his hand. His gaze narrowed and Laura realized that her hand was still on Sam's face.\n\n\"What. Is. This?\" he asked, one finger moving back and forth at the both of them.\n\nShe would ignore it. And she would ignore him, she decided. \"It's 'bout time you got back. I don't know what took you so long,\" she said quickly. She walked right past him and out the door, pulling it closed behind her. Then she leaned back against it and exhaled. Sam was... well she didn't know what he was. She straightened, ran a hand down her apron and headed off to the kitchen." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 43", + "text": "\"What was that?\" Manny asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder and pointing to the door behind him.\n\n\"Can I have my clothes?\" Sam asked even as he felt the blush rise up his neck and to his face. And why was he blushing exactly? He was a man full grown and Laura, a woman. And there had been nothing indecent. But she had touched him...\n\nManny tossed him his change of clothes and he caught them one handed. \"Where did you get that soft towel from?\" he asked, his voice mulish as he reached out and ran a hand across the cloth that Laura had draped around Sam. Manny shook his head and then reached for the coffee cup and drained the remains. \"Here I am, feelin' all kinds of sorry for you and you've got yourself a lady friend whose got all kind of reach...\"\n\n\"She's not my lady friend,\" Sam said, his voice gruff as he peeled off his wet clothes, shivering almost nonstop now. But maybe, just maybe, Laura wanted to be. She had touched him after all...\n\n\"Sam,\" Manny said definitively as he set the empty coffee cup on the small glass plate. \"We don't have time for womenfolk. We decided that a long time ago.\" Sam supposed they were to ignore the string of girls that Manny had tangled with back on the plantation.\n\n\"Do you hear me sayin' otherwise?\" Sam asked as he balled up his wet clothes in one hand. Looking around, he tossed them in a corner. He would come back and get them later tonight. Maybe he could wash them while Laura ironed or something. Her skin had been so soft...\n\n\"No,\" Manny admitted, but his eyes were still small. \"But you never, ever let women get that close to you. All I'm sayin',\" Manny said quickly, before Sam could say anything, \"is that I'm watchin' you.\"\n\n\"Well, when you put it like that,\" Sam said with a roll of his eyes as he motioned for his brother to leave the room.\n\nThey were at the top of the stairs, arguing about nothing, when Sol slid up alongside of them. \"Sam, that was somethin' else.\"\n\n\"Don't encourage him,\" Manny muttered.\n\n\"Mr. Ward told me to find you,\" Sol said, his gaze still on Sam. \"He's the man you saved. His room is just this way. I'll show you. I think he wants to thank you.\"\n\n\"Sam,\" Manny said, reaching out and gripping his arm tight. \"Whatever that white man gives you, you better take. Don't you be on that high road nonsense.\"\n\nSam exhaled, gave his brother a look, and followed Sol to Mr. Ward's room even though he could probably make it there in the dark.\n\n\"Thanks, Sol,\" Sam said and placed a hand on top of Sol's head for a moment before knocking on Mr. Ward's door.\n\n\"Who is it?\" Ward's voice sounded rough, like it had caught a lot of smoke instead of water.\n\n\"Me. Sam.\"\n\n\"Come in.\"\n\nSam entered the room but stayed very close to the door. Mr. Ward was sitting at the edge of his bed, gripping the bedframe rail. He looked like he had been in that position for quite some time. For a second, Sam was curious about what he was thinking, but then he wasn't. It made no nevermind to him.\n\nWard too had changed into dry clothes, but his hair was going in all kinds of directions making him look like a wet cat. His feet were bare. He looked younger. And tired.\n\n\"You didn't have to save me, Sam. But you did. And if anyone on this ship had reason to see me dead it would have been you. And I have to know why? Why did you jump in and save me?\"\n\nAvoiding answering that question, Sam sent Mr. Ward one of his. \"You don't know how to swim?\"\n\n\"Not at all. Where did you learn to swim?\"\n\n\"I spent my growin' years along the Potomac. Did those men push you in?\"\n\n\"No. Some cargo broke loose and pushed me. They could have helped though.\" His voice was wry. \"Instead they watched me fall.\" Ward's blue eyes focused in on Sam. \"But you, you of all people, jumped in and saved me. Why?\"\n\nThis time the question was hard and brook no argument. And Sam, trained since birth to obey, finally relented.\n\n\"Well, I supposed it's not really me you have to thank, but my God,\" Sam drawled out. There. Now maybe he would leave it be. Sam had saved him yes, but he didn't want this man getting any kind of ideas.\n\nA quizzical expression crossed Ward's. \"You mean... like Jesus?\"\n\n\"Any other god out there you servin'?\"\n\nWard stared at him for a moment and then blinked. \"You saved me cause of Jesus?\" His tone implied that Sam was more simple than he had realized.\n\nSam shifted, straightened. The steamboat whistle blew. \"If that's all, suh, I has to be goin'.\"\n\nWard, still staring at Sam, opened him mouth and then closed it. Then opened it again. \"I mean, Sam. I heard darkies were spiritual, but I've always wondered why. I mean you're slaves. And the men who keep you that way serve the same god.\"\n\n\"So they say.\"\n\nWard's eyebrows raised almost to his hairline. \"You don't think so?\"\n\n\"I believe people who serve Jesus, look like Jesus. And my faith is in Jesus, not in these people who claim to follow Him. That's what I think.\" It was more than what Sam had intended to say.\n\n\"Can you even read? I mean, how do you know who Jesus really is? Don't you go to their churches?\" Their being slaveholders, Sam realized. But he was done having this conversation.\n\nHe looked toward the wall. \"I needs to go, suh.\"\n\nWard huffed. \"Fine. We're done with the religious talk. But you saved my life, Sam. When no one else would. I wouldn't have just been left in Kentucky, I would have died. And I owe you.\"\n\n\"No, suh. God...\"\n\n\"Yeah,\" Ward said, standing, waving off his words. He walked up to Sam, close so that they were only a foot apart and Sam found his body growing tense as Ward held out a hand. He looked at the white man's hand and then into his eyes. \"I think you can call me Adam now, Sam.\" That would never happen, Sam thought, even though it was a nice thought. He might call him Adam in his head, but he would never call him Adam out loud. Adam dangled his hand in the air, waiting for Sam, apparently, to shake it. Sam didn't move.\n\nAdam sighed and ran said hand through his black hair. \"Look Sam. I'm not going to force you to help me anymore. But, if you do help me, maybe I can help you? I can teach you stuff you need to know for when you leave. It could be anything like reading and writing and stuff.\"\n\nSam kept his face blank. It wasn't an unkind offer, but between Sol, Gid, and Benjamin, he and Manny already had teachers.\n\n\"I need to go.\"\n\nAdam's thin lips pressed together in frustration. \"You'll see, Sam. I can help. Look, I want to give you something.\" Adam went over to his trunk and opened it. Sam watched him rifle through it, wondering what it was that Adam would produce. It turned out to be a hat. \"I know we're on the river, but I don't have a sea cap. I do have this railroad cap though,\" he said and tossed to Sam. Sam caught it instinctively, turning the dark blue cap in his hand. \"Free men wear hats, Sam.\" Sam raised his eyes to Adam. \"I can teach you how to be free.\"\n\nSam stared down at the hat before slowly putting it on. It fit like it was made for him and he wondered what he looked like. \"Woman from cabin number twelve is a... lady of the night.\"\n\nAdam blinked with the sudden change of subject. \"A prostitute? I wonder if Captain Leahy knows he's got one on the ship plying her trade.\"\n\nA prostitute! No wonder Laura had been so wary about the woman.\n\n\"Well, that's something. From what I know Mary Stiles was never a prostitute and with all the money she stole I doubt she would turn to the profession now.\"\n\nSam reached for the door.\n\n\"Don't forget what I said. I can help you.\"\n\nSam left the room." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 44", + "text": "\"A hat,\" Manny said slowly, eyeing Sam. \"You saved the man from drownin' and he gave you a hat?\"\n\n\"It's a nice hat,\" Gid offered. It was evening time. The sun was gone for the night, and all their labor wrapped up. Manny and Sam had their bedrolls out alongside Benji, Sol, and Gid. The latter two had decided it was better sleeping on the lower deck with them than on the upper deck by themselves. Amos, apparently, had to sleep near the hot boiler. \"I thought it made you look... different.\"\n\nFree, Sam thought. He had never noticed it before, but most men wore hats. Slaves didn't. Or at least he never had.\n\nManny huffed next to him. No doubt, he wanted a hat. But Sam was not sharing this time. \"Save a white man's life. Get a hat. Don't that just beat all?\"\n\n\"What's our next stop?\" Sam asked, hoping to change the subject.\n\n\"Indiana,\" Gid said with a sigh.\n\n\"We done with Kentucky?\" Manny asked.\n\n\"Nope. Back to Kentucky after Indiana, but that is the final and last stop of Kentucky,\" Gid said, raising his fists in the air in excitement.\n\n\"Least we're movin',\" Benji said, though his voice was a grumble.\n\n\"Ain't that the truth,\" an unfamiliar voice said, walking past them.\n\n\"Sam, this is Willie,\" Manny said as the man came and sat down alongside them. \"He got on at the last stop.\"\n\nWillie was a young, thin, dark-skinned man. He had former slave written all over him. Sam could see it in the way he walked, in the clothes he wore, in his small, quick glances. And now he suddenly wanted very much for Adam to teach him how to look free.\n\n\"You travelin' by yourself?\" Sam asked politely.\n\n\"Nope. Got my sister Birdie on here. She's up the stairs though.\" Willie leaned against the railing with a sigh. \"It's so good to be on this boat,\" he said quietly. \"Ya'll just don't know.\"\n\nSam and Manny exchanged a quick glance and Sam saw Laura's brothers do the same. And just when he thought the night was going to stay quiet, Willie opened his mouth and started singing. \"I'm just a poor, wayfarin' stranger. Travellin' through this world of woe.\" His voice was clear and strong and rang out all over the lower deck, completely belying his thin, scrawny frame. \"Where there's no sickness, toil, or danger, and that bright world to which I go. I'm goin' home to be with Jesus. I'm goin' home no more to roam. I'm just a poor wayfarin' stranger, a travellin' through this world of woe.\"\n\nThe lyrics were unfamiliar, but the sentiment was one Sam knew deep down in his bones. He had to blink when Willie started singing again, this time with a guitar that had struck up to accompany him.\n\n\"I know dark clouds will gather round me, I know my way is hard and steep... I'm goin' there to meet my mother, she said she'd meet me when I come. I'm just goin' over Jordan, I'm just goin' over home.\"\n\nThe last line had Sam swallowing hard. And by the large sniff next to him, coming from Gid, he could tell he wasn't the only one. He had long reconciled himself to the fact that he wouldn't see his mama again until heaven, but still, the thought hurt something fierce every now and then.\n\nCaught up in the words and the mood such as he was, Sam almost missed Baldwin and a woman talking in the corner. Excusing himself under the pretense of relieving himself, Sam walked towards them quietly and carefully. This time he was gonna see the woman. If it was the prostitute in room twelve, well, then there was nothing to say. But if it was Mary Stiles...\n\nAnd yet, careful as Sam was, even he heard the wood creak beneath his foot. Both Baldwin and the woman froze. The woman said something quickly and then turned to leave. In that moment, the moon seemed to shine bright, and while he couldn't see the woman's face. He could see her hair. It was red. Bright red." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 45", + "text": "\"And oh, my landsakes, I had never seen such a thing before!\"\n\nThe new girl, Birdie, talked a lot. Too much, in Laura's opinion. She reminded Laura of a girl at Salis named Verity who forever had something to say. Prince had always said that anyone who talked that much just plain couldn't be trusted. His scowl had always been fierce when Verity was within five feet of him. Even Mama would roll her eyes and sigh when Verity entered a room. And none of their feelings were over-exaggerated. Verity had gotten more than one person in trouble with Miss Martha cause she just talked too much. No one had been surprised when she had been sent to work in the salt mines after saying just one thing too much.\n\n\"What about you, Laura?\" Birdie asked. She was young. Younger than Laura and prettier. And she seemed kind. Maybe in another place or another time they could have been friends. But this simply wasn't the moment. Laura was of like mind with her brother. Slaves who talked too much weren't nothing but trouble. And it was clear as day Birdie had been a slave. It was in the way she bowed her head, her threadbare dress, her bare feet, the way she talked. She wasn't just a slave, she was a runaway. Laura would be kind. But Laura would be distant.\n\n\"No,\" Laura said carefully, slowly. \"I've never seen anythin' like the boiler room before either.\"\n\n\"Boiler room,\" the young woman mouthed to herself. \"I didn't know it was called that. That sound just 'bout made me jump out of my skin. One time, when I was a small girl...\"\n\nNellie, who was at the stove stirring a pot of soup, stopped and stared at the girl. Laura could tell that she too didn't understand all this chatter, but she didn't say anything cause Birdie worked hard. Laura had thought she could move fast in the kitchen. Birdie moved like she was born to it, as efficient if not more so than Annie. She had only been in there with them one day, and Nellie was already letting the girl stir and add stuff to the pots.\n\n\"Maybe you can show me 'round if we get us some free time?\" Birdie asked, tossing the question Laura's way.\n\nLaura's first reaction was a hard no. After all, what was there to show around? The steamboat only had three floors and each one was shorter than the last. But then she thought on what Sam had said, about faith being more than just a belief but an action. And for the first time ever, she wondered what Jesus would have her to do about Birdie. She always knew what Prince and Mama would do. They were her measuring stick for everything. Jesus was always somewhere there in the background.\n\n\"Maybe,\" Laura murmured, but she said it kindly. That much, she knew Jesus would have her do. She gave Nellie a nod and left the kitchen. The three of them had served breakfast together that morning, but now that Birdie was there, Nellie didn't need Laura in the kitchen to help prepare the afternoon meal. Laura walked down the small hallway to the laundry. Upon entering, she saw Maureen ironing and Emma sewing in the corner.\n\n\"Good day to you,\" Emma said softly, sending her a small smile. They were nice, Laura had decided. She returned the smile.\n\n\"Good mornin',\" Laura replied as she gathered the clothes needed for Daphne, Lucinda, Mrs. Hartford, Mrs. Jameson, Mrs. McRae. Mrs. Potter had gotten off and been replaced with Mrs. Bauner and her daughter Gerta. They were two of the strangest women Laura had ever seen with all their brown hair and old looking clothes. They didn't look like they could afford the Texas deck, but it made no nevermind. They had asked her to wash some skirts and she had. She reached for them now, pausing only for a moment at the sight of Sam's now clean and folded clothes in the corner. She had found them balled up and wet on the floor when she had come back the night before. She had washed them along with the towel and hung them to dry all night. She made a quick decision to bring them to him as soon as she was done waiting on the ladies. And with that thought, she was out of the door.\n\nShe grabbed dirty laundry, she helped ladies into dresses, she sewed up small tears. They entered the port in Evansville, Indiana, left it, and she was still on her feet.\n\n\"Settle an argument for us, Laura,\" Daphne said when Laura entered the room for the third time that day. Daphne was on her knees rifling through her trunk.\n\n\"Oh, leave Laura out of this,\" Lucinda said, sending Daphne a look of anger and something else... Laura stopped herself from shaking her head. Their disagreements were apparently worse than she had thought them. \"Help me out of this, Laura,\" Lucinda said and gave Laura her back. The two girls had gotten off in Indiana and gone for a walk. Now that the steamer was up and going again, they had decided on an afternoon nap. \"What's our next stop?\" Lucinda asked as Laura began undoing the many buttons down her back.\n\n\"I believe it's Mount Vernon, Indiana.\"\n\n\"And then Tennessee?\" Daphne asked, coming to her feet. She had several papers in her hand.\n\n\"And then Kentucky.\"\n\nDaphne made a face not unlike one Laura wanted to make. \"Mama says after the Indiana stop we'll really be stuck on the boat then. No stops for near upon three days!\"\n\n\"That's what I heard,\" Laura said, making quick work of Lucinda's stays.\n\n\"And we'll still be in Kentucky at the end,\" she said with a shake of her head. \"Now, tell me, Laura,\" Daphne said, holding out sketches. \"If you were trying to get someone's attention would you wear this dress or this dress?\"\n\n\"I told you I don't need anyone else's opinion! I think I'm grown enough to make up my own mind.\" Lucinda's words were said through clenched teeth.\n\n\"Fine,\" Daphne said and tossed the papers on her bed. \"You're right, with the way you dress, sometimes I forget how old you truly are.\"\n\nLucinda growled something under her breath as she stepped out of her garments. \"Come back and dress us for supper, Laura.\"\n\n\"Yes ma'am,\" Laura said and left the room. She heaved a loud sigh upon leaving. Then she went to her last patron, Mrs. Hartford.\n\nThe visit to Mrs. Hartford's room was uneventful and soon Laura found herself headed down to the lower deck with Sam's clothes tucked under her arm. It would be good to see him... even if she had seen him just yesterday. She reached the bottom of the steps when she heard her name.\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\nLaura turned at the sound of Benji's voice. He was standing in the opposite direction that she wished to turn. Sam probably wasn't on the boiler room side of the ship, but she walked over to him anyway.\n\n\"Pa was askin' 'bout you,\" Benji said when she got within a foot of him. As usual, his expression was surly and his words curt. \"You might want to remember you got a pa in between takin' care of all them fancy ladies.\"\n\nLaura, careful to keep her face blank, though she did mentally wince a bit, just stared at Benji for a moment until his eyes dropped. \"And a good afternoon to you too.\" She walked past him and headed to the boiler room.\n\nIt wasn't that she was avoiding Papa. It was just that she was used to doing without him. As she walked the few feet to where she assumed Papa must be, she found herself waving to the familiar faces of the crew. In some ways, it felt like she had been on the boat forever.\n\nShe found Papa sitting on the floor of the lower deck, his back against the wall that hid the boiler room.\n\n\"There's my girl,\" he said, his grin wide in his tired face.\n\nLaura walked over to him and crouched down. \"Are you hungry, Papa?\" she asked as she reached into her pocket where she had stuffed an extra bread roll. It had been for Sam. But really, Papa came first.\n\n\"Sit,\" he said as he took the roll from her.\n\nShe sat, placing her back against the wall and stretching out her legs before her.\n\n\"We 'bout to head to Missouri.\"\n\n\"I heard.\"\n\n\"Jest 'bout seven or eight more stops 'til we get where we're goin'.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Laura said as a cool breeze wafted over them. Though she no longer felt as awkward as she usually did in his presence, she didn't have anything to say.\n\n\"I think it's gonna be hard,\" he finally said, filling the silence.\n\n\"What's goin' to be hard?\"\n\n\"Bein' free,\" he said simply.\n\nLaura glanced over at his face, but he was staring straight ahead at the railing and the water before them. People were walking past at different paces, often stopping to talk to whomever they were passing.\n\n\"It's not easy makin' decisions all on your own, but I find that I am ready for the challenge.\"\n\nShe had never thought about it quite like that. Being free would present its own set of challenges. But she didn't quite feel free just yet. Not with Adam Ward in the background and knowing he could call for bounty hunters at any time.\n\n\"What's the one thing you've always wanted to do but couldn't?\" Papa's voice was wistful, almost young.\n\n\"I don't know...\" She hadn't thought about it truthfully... had never considered that she would ever do anything other than serve.\n\n\"Sleep in? That's what your mama would always say. She said she wanted one day when she could sleep in till noon like Miss Charlotte.\"\n\nLaura hummed, a smile tickling her lips. That sounded like Mama. Except she could never picture Mama sleeping in.\n\n\"Me? I just want my own. My own home, my own family. Somethin' no one can take from me,\" he said quietly.\n\n\"I want to wear a red ball gown.\" The words slipped out unhindered, surprising even Laura. And she felt foolish the moment she realized what she had said.\n\nPapa turned and looked at her then. \"Tired of seein' your makins on other folks?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said quickly, glancing away. Of all the things a free woman could want or do and she said the one thing that would probably never happen.\n\nHe reached over and patted her hand. \"No sense why it can't happen baby girl.\"\n\nLaura grunted.\n\n\"Dream big. And don't ever stop. The moment you've stopped is the moment they've really made a slave of you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 46", + "text": "After sitting with Papa for nigh unto a half hour, Laura began to feel silly at the thought of wondering around the boat looking for Sam. She would just give him his clothes later, she decided. Not to mention that she was probably needed back upstairs in the kitchen or in the laundry.\n\nAnd then she ran into Manny.\n\n\"Hello, Laura,\" he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his feet and looking for all the world like they had secrets to share. Which they didn't.\n\n\"Hello,\" a dark skinned, thin man said from next to Manny.\n\n\"Will, this is my good friend or should I say my brother's good friend, Laura. Laura, this is Will.\"\n\nLaura made sure that the look she gave Manny was withering, which of course made him grin broadly. \"If you'll excuse me, I'm needed upstairs.\"\n\n\"Don't go, Laura. Will, give me a minute,\" Manny said and Will walked past them, but not before shooting Laura an assessing look. She hadn't been looked at like that in quite some time. Not even by Sam and she and Sam... well...\n\nLaura tossed Sam's clothes at Manny so quickly, he jerked back, startled. \"Sam left those upstairs.\" She made to move for the stairs, but Manny moved just as quickly, taking a step and blocking her way.\n\nMaking sure they were making eye contact, Manny raised Sam's shirt to his nose. Sniffed. \"Smells like roses.\"\n\n\"It does not.\" The cleaning soap was not scented with roses.\n\n\"Listen. Laura,\" Manny said, his tone almost serious as he lowered his brother's clothes. \"My brother is a very nice person.\"\n\n\"I know that, Manny,\" Laura said and then made to move around him, but he moved to, continuing to block her exit.\n\n\"No. You don't understand. He's nice to everyone. He jumped in the water to save some white person he doesn't know.\" Well. How interesting. Sam hadn't shared anything about Adam Ward with his brother.\n\n\"Alright\u2014,\"\n\n\"Basically, what I'm sayin' is. You're nothin' special.\" Laura stopped, folded her arms over chest, stared at him. Manny shrugged as though to say that he couldn't be responsible for the truth.\n\n\"Lots of girls mistake his kindness for somethin' else. Just tryin' to help you out is all.\"\n\nLaura tilted her head back, raising her face to the sky. She was not going to give Manny whatfor.\n\n\"Manny. Get out of my way.\"\n\nHe slid to the side, letting her walk past him and just when she thought he was done, he spoke again. \"Because really, Laura, if it were somethin' more and you hurt him, you really wouldn't like the consequences.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 47", + "text": "\"Bright red hair?\" Adam repeated. They were in his room again. Adam was sitting at his desk, but facing Sam who stood before him, hat in hand, telling him all he had seen. \"Mrs. Hartford is a redhead,\" Adam said slowly to himself. Sam watched as Adam brought a hand up to his chin, rubbing the lower of half of his face and clearly thinking deeply.\n\nWell, good then. Seemed like Adam Ward had his answer. Sam slipped his hat on, shuffled his feet a bit. He slowly made his way to the door.\n\n\"Sam,\" Adam said and Sam turned around quickly, waiting to hear anything, everything he needed so he could be a free man. He watched as Adam went to his trunk, dug around a bit. Then he pulled out something shiny and metal. A gun. Sam instinctively took a step back.\n\nAdam glanced over at him, and then making sure Sam was watching, set the gun very slowly on his desk.\n\n\"Go ahead. Pick it up. It's empty.\"\n\nSam placed his hands on his waist, his eyes narrowing as they darted from the gun to Adam. He had expected some kind of a lesson or a word of advice. He didn't know what this was.\n\n\"Listen,\" Adam said, spreading his hands before him. \"Slaves can't touch guns, but free Negros can. With a permit. In the United States. But you're not a slave, Sam Rivers,\" Adam said slowly, still meeting Sam's gaze. \"And where you're going is a territory, if I'm right. Not a state. You're going to need a gun... out there in Indian Territory.\"\n\nSam swallowed, staring hard at the gun for a second. It shouldn't have been that hard to reach over and pick it up. For crying out loud, he had run away. But this... he took a slow step forward, his heart racing so hard he was sure Adam could hear it. And then he picked it up. It was both heavier and lighter than he expected. He remembered Sly with his gun and how at ease he had been at using it. That would be him, Sam decided. He was going to learn this thing too. He turned it slowly, taking it in. The butt of the gun appeared to be made of wood while the rest of it was made of metal.\n\n\"That right there is the best gun out. A Colt 1851 Navy. Six round .36 caliber. It's lighter than then the '47 and a near perfect sidearm. Here, let me show you.\"\n\nSam handed the gun to Adam. Adam did some maneuvering with it and opened it up so Sam could see its guts. \"See,\" Adam started, pointing at something. Sam listened intently as Adam explained to him the mechanics of the gun, tucking every word, every piece of instruction in his mind so he wouldn't forget. \"This is how you clean it.\"\n\nSam watched as Adam showed him how to dissemble the gun and pointed out where to check for fouling and powder in the chambers. Adam went to his trunk and pulled out a cloth. Sam watched him clean every piece of the Colt. Then, he put it back together and handed it to Sam.\n\nSam took it, hefting it in his hand again, pulling on all of his reserves to keep from smiling.\n\n\"I want you to keep it.\"\n\n\"Keep it?\" Sam said quickly, unable for once to hide the emotion in his voice.\n\n\"I've got another one. You keep this one, learn its insides and outs. If anyone sees you with it, tell them I asked you to keep my gun clean.\"\n\nDid that mean it was his? Or was it just a loan? Sam didn't care either way. He was holding a gun in his hand. He fought the urge to straighten out his arm and aim, just like he had seen white men do. Manny was gonna love this. He was going to forget all about the hat that Adam had given him. And Sam didn't care one lick that the gun was empty and for all intents and purposes useless. A gun. Sam, a slave, had a gun. It was a picture of himself he had never seen before. And now he would never be able to unsee it. Sam felt dizzy with the excitement of it all. Adam had been right. He could teach him how to be free.\n\n\"Sam?\" Sam glanced over at Adam who was eyeing him with a funny expression on his face. Sam quickly made his face blank.\n\n\"Where you're going,\" Adam said, still eyeing Sam curiously. \"You probably won't really need a six shooter. Six shooters are for killing men. And the last thing you need is to be killing men. You'll need a rifle or a shotgun. Their barrels are longer and better for accuracy and range. But I've got neither. Fact of the matter is, you've got to learn about guns and this is as a good a place as any to start. You don't have the right belt for the gun, but you've got a pocket?\"\n\nSam nodded and slipped the empty gun into the side pocket of his pants. He took the cleaning cloth and slipped it in the other pocket on the side of his pants. He was trying to be careful to keep his emotions in check, but all Adam had to do was look at Sam's shaking fingers to know how much the gun meant to him. Manny was going to just about pass out when he saw it. Sam wanted to run and find him now. He wasn't sure of anything Adam said after that, but Sam just gave him a nod and left his room.\n\nHe was almost to the top of the stairs when he remembered his clothes. Turning back around, he went to the laundry room, tapping on the door lightly.\n\n\"Come in!\" The voice was young, high-pitched and unfamiliar.\n\nSam took a step back. And then the door was opened by a girl younger than him and the color of peat soil. \"Hello,\" she said, blinking up at him with bright eyes and a small smile tugging on her lips.\n\n\"Is Laura here?\" Sam asked, ignoring the friendly gaze she was shooting him.\n\n\"No, but I can get her. I'm Birdie, by the way.\"\n\nSam gave her a quick nod, careful not to meet her gaze. \"You don't have to do that. I'll find her later.\"\n\n\"You'll find who later,\" he heard from behind him. Laura was standing just off to the side, her arms filled with clothes.\n\n\"Let me help you,\" Sam said, taking a step forward and easing her load.\n\n\"They're clothes, Sam. Hardly heavy,\" Laura said dryly but she didn't fight him.\n\n\"Is this your friend?\" Birdie asked Laura, a wide smile on her face. Before Laura could respond, the girl walked out the door. \"I'll give you two a minute. Never say that Birdie doesn't know when it's best for her to go!\"\n\nSam glanced over at Laura who was looking at him. Once they were in the laundry room and the door was closed, Laura made a face and said, \"I don't trust happy slaves.\"\n\nSam hummed. \"You sure she's a slave?\"\n\n\"Uh huh. Runaway.\" Like them. It was becoming quite clear to Sam that there was a distinct something about slaves. Something that surpassed even skin color. And he needed to shed it fast. \"Content slaves, yes. Happy ones, no.\"\n\n\"Manny would agree with you there.\" Manny said happy slaves were either too dumb to realize they were slaves or too plain close to the massa. It was a sentiment that Sam had found more often than not to be true.\n\nLaura sent him a look he didn't understand. \"Don't talk to me about Manny. Set those clothes over there for me, please.\"\n\nSam did as he was told, thinking. \"What did he do?\"\n\n\"You mean what did he say?\" Laura asked, her voice so light that Sam knew his brother had said something rude. Laura came alongside him, bending down and sorting the clothes into various piles. \"I gave your clothes to your brother this mornin'.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry about that,\" Sam said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. \"I meant to come and get them last night.\"\n\nShe stood up, arms filled with sheets. \"No worries, Sam.\"\n\n\"I didn't leave them here expectin' you to clean 'em.\"\n\n\"I know, Sam. If you had, I wouldn't have touched them,\" she said and shot him a wry smile as she tossed the sheets into another corner.\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\nLaura shrugged. \"It wasn't important.\" She made to move past him, but he reached out, grabbing her arm, and pulling her to a stop so that they were only inches apart. There was something about the woman that always made him want to shrink the space between them. His grip on her arm tightened, and though her gown was long sleeved he could tell she was slight, and soft... and somehow fragile. He had never thought of Negro women as fragile. Sturdy? Yes. Hard-working? Obviously. Robust? Definitely. They had to be. He could remember his own mother, slight as she was, lifting things bigger and heavier than him. He had never really thought of Negro women as feminine exactly. Not like white women who couldn't lift a flower without fainting dead.\n\nBut with his hand on her arm, he realized she was all of those things, fierce and tender, strong and elegant. He wished with a suddenness that he could court her as she deserved to be courted, however that was to be. Cause he was sure if there were any rules to courting, Laura knew them all. And he knew none of them. And well, even if he did, he didn't have a thing to offer her. Fact to business was, he could be captured at any time, finding himself a slave again in a tobacco field. With that thought, he let her go.\n\n\"What did he say?\" he repeated. He might not know all the ways to treat her as a lady, but he sure wasn't going to let his brother treat her as less than.\n\nLaura sent him a sly glance. But when she spoke next, it had nothing to do with his brother. \"Did you just finish meetin' with Mr. Ward?\"\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\n\"The day I can't handle Manny is the day I'll come to you.\" The look in her eyes told him that was a day that was never going to come. Well. He would just have to talk to his brother himself.\n\n\"Saw Baldwin talkin' to a woman with red hair last night so I told him that this mornin'.\" And that was when Sam remembered the gun. He reached for his pocket.\n\n\"A redhead?\" Laura asked, a frown on her face.\n\n\"I think he said it might be a woman called Mrs. Hart...\"\n\n\"Mrs. Hartford,\" Laura supplied, her arms now folded across her chest.\n\n\"Yes. Anyway, look what he gave me.\" Sam brandished the gun before her.\n\nHer eyes darted to his. \"Sam.\"\n\n\"Free men have guns,\" he said simply, even though he couldn't stop the smile from appearing on his face. \"It's got no bullets in it. You can touch it.\"\n\nLaura's eyes flickered to his once more before she slowly, tentatively took the gun from him. \"I've never touched a gun before.\"\n\n\"It was my first time too,\" Sam admitted.\n\n\"My brother Prince has. Massa Richard took him huntin' plenty of times,\" she said.\n\n\"This brother of yours sounds like somethin' else.\"\n\n\"Oh, he is,\" she said softly, a hint of longing in her voice.\n\nAnd Sam found himself mentally cursing slavery. Again. The evil beast that had taken his mama and Laura's, obviously, beloved brother. He couldn't imagine being parted from Manny. No matter how much of an idiot he was sometimes. Before he could stop himself, he placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing it gently. She looked over at him, meeting his gaze and though they said nothing, something was shared.\n\n\"Why did Mr. Ward give you the gun?\" she asked, breaking the tension. Sam removed his hand from her shoulder, leaving it loose at his side.\n\n\"He said that if I help him with Baldwin and that woman, he would teach me to be free. It's a part of that lesson.\"\n\n\"He's not threatenin' to turn us in to bounty hunters no more?\" Laura asked, sounding skeptical.\n\n\"I'm not sayin' I trust him. I don't. But I don't think he's plannin' on turnin' us in before he finds out what he needs to find out. Figure I may as well learn what I can from him. Ain't like no other white man volunteerin' to help.\"\n\nHe watched Laura bite her lower lip. \"And so he gave you a gun.\"\n\n\"And this hat,\" he said, tipping the brim of it to her.\n\n\"Huh. I'll admit it, Sam. I'm very curious about what he'll do next when we provide him proof that Mrs. Hartford is Mary Stiles.\"\n\n\"We?\" Sam asked, eyeing her.\n\n\"Yes. We. We're a team. You and I. And besides, it's my family whose bounties he's holdin'.\"\n\nSam rocked on the back of his feet, a sudden knot of fear tightening in his belly. \"You just be careful. I don't care how much you snuck in and out of white folks' rooms in that big house you worked in. This here is different. These white folks done already killed a white man.\"\n\n\"Don't worry about me, Sam,\" Laura said, grimacing as though only now realizing they were dealing with hardened killers. \"I'll be just as careful as you.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 48", + "text": "Threatened. Threatened! Laura still couldn't believe Manny had threatened her. But she couldn't even be angry, she thought as she pulled and tugged on Lucinda's stays in an effort to make the girl's waist smaller. It wasn't quite working. The girls had sent for her to help them get dressed for supper that night. Daphne was already dressed and just picking over ribbons to possibly add to her hair. Lucinda, as always, had needed the most help.\n\n\"Pink or blue?\" she heard Daphne ask Lucinda from behind her. Tuning out Lucinda's response, her thoughts went right back to Manny. And Sam. No, she couldn't be angry at Manny. Because she understood. There was something about Sam that inspired... fidelity. He was... genuine in a world that often seemed filled with actors. And she had never seen the likes before. At least not in a man. Not that she had much experience with men. She had always been so busy in Salis House that she had not been as free as other girls her age to start something with a boy. Which had been something of a mixed blessing. Like most girls her age she wanted a home of her own, with her own man and her own babies. At the same time, Laura hadn't known how she could do it all. Mama had barely managed it when she was alive and even then the family seemed divided with Papa, Benji, Sol, and Gid on one side and her, Prince, and Mama on the other.\n\nThen there was the added fact that Annie\u2014being her best friend and all\u2014would have rather pulled out her own teeth than try to get some male attention or even talk about male attention. And she couldn't forget Prince. There was nothing quite like the talk of romance to curl Prince's lip. But that hadn't stopped him from having an opinion. Prince, who had told her if she couldn't marry someone who was better off than she was, there wasn't any sense in marrying at all. For Prince, marrying up was a Negro who was free or a Negro with a trade. If he could read or write, well then, that was perfect. She knew what Prince would think about Sam, a field slave with no book learning and no trade. But she found that she didn't care. If she could ever have introduced the two of them to each other, she had a feeling Sam could hold his own just fine against her brother. And quite frankly, now that she thought about it, she didn't give one hoot what Prince thought of Sam.\n\nBut then her fingers slowed a bit as they traveled up the buttons of Lucinda's dress. Sam would never have taken in consideration of what everyone else thought. No. Instinctively, she knew only one opinion mattered when it came to Sam and that was God's. Did God think she should get married? What a thought; that the God who had created the whole earth would be concerned about Laura and her possible, future family. But how comforting it would be to know His thoughts on the matter. Not that there was anything to think about Sam. What she should be focused on was getting off this boat and making a future with her family in Oklahoma.\n\n\"Are you really wearing the silk?\" Daphne's voice held more than a little judgment in it.\n\n\"I wouldn't have had it made if I wasn't going to wear it,\" Lucinda said to her reflection as Laura carefully spread the rose-colored skirt of her gown over her crinoline petticoat.\n\n\"Hmph. Well, I know why you're really wearing it.\"\n\n\"Do tell,\" Lucinda said, her voice dry as she stared at herself in the mirror before them. Laura watched as she rolled her eyes.\n\n\"You're trying to get a husband.\"\n\n\"Aren't we all?\"\n\n\"Yes, but Mr. Cronwall\u2014,\"\n\nLucinda huffed. \"Don't you ever mind your own business?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\nLaura rolled her own eyes as the girls bickered and after helping Daphne tie a blue ribbon in her hair, she slipped out of the room.\n\nWithout running, but not quite walking either, Laura made her way to the kitchen to help with fixing and serving supper. The room was bustling with energy. Shad and Birdie were at the stove each managing two pans of food while Emma was chopping up vegetables with a skill that only accrued from having performed the same service for so long. Piping hot plates filled with meat were cooling on the side table. She grabbed an apron from a basket and pinned it on.\n\nThe door that connected the dining room to the kitchen swung open and Laura watched as several of the Negro servers loaded up a dumbwaiter with food and left to serve both on the Texas deck and on the Hurricane deck.\n\n\"Behind you,\" Shad said. Laura ducked out of the way as he placed a glazed and still sizzling ham in front of her. \"Slice it and plate it,\" he instructed and returned to his station at the stove. Laura grabbed two sharp knives and began the task of slicing the meat. Splatters of fat and juice hit her fingers and she fought the urge to grab a piece and taste it. Tasting was for later. When it was sliced to perfection, she didn't wait for anymore directions from Shad. She grabbed a heavy porcelain plate and transferred the sliced meat onto it. Then she lifted it and headed straight for the dining room. She paused for a second, taking in all of the people gathered at the long table. The ladies were decked out in all of their finery, most of which Laura had labored over that afternoon, ironing or repairing loose seams. There were ice blue gowns, red gowns, emerald gowns, violet gowns. Gowns made of silk, taffeta, linen. Very nice gowns. But nothing quite on the scale that compared to the ones Laura had sewn and seen in Salis House.\n\nA two-finger wave caught Laura's attention and she walked over to one of the waiters handing him the large plate of ham. In return, he handed her an empty bowl.\n\n\"We're out of butter beans,\" he said, his voice barely above a whisper. He was an older man, probably older than Papa. Laura had watched him serve before. He did it as though he had done it for years. He probably had.\n\nLaura gave him a nod and then did one sweep around the room with her eyes. She was there for a reason and it wasn't to compare gowns. She wanted to see all of the women who had red hair or some variation thereof. And unless they were sick, every woman on the Texas deck would be at supper. Mrs. Hartford had, of course, been the most obvious woman to fill the role since her hair was the color of a red-hot flame. But Sam hadn't been raised around white women and she didn't quite trust his judgment on the color red. Though to be fair, Sam had never said it was Mrs. Hartford. Adam Ward had. Which begged the question of what Adam Ward knew or thought he knew about Mrs. Hartford.\n\nTaking note of no less than five women who could have been considered to have red hair, Laura went back into the kitchen, refilled the butter bean bowl and returned to the dining room. This time, she made a more thorough inspection of the redheaded women. And that was when she realized how Adam Ward had come to his conclusion. Two of them were of an age that even Sam would have noted. These two ladies were either wearing some kind of hair piece or had hidden their gray hair with dye. The other two were married and had small children. This Laura knew from cleaning their cabins, doing their laundry, and just plain running into them on the upper deck. They were not hardly likely to be killing a man one day and shuffling a baby around the next. Only one redheaded woman sat at the table that was both relatively young and unattached: Mrs. Hartford.\n\nWalking over to another waiter and picking up an empty plate, she glanced around the table again and spotted Adam Ward talking quietly to the woman on his right. As always her mind followed his clothing first. He was a man dressed in the first stare of fashion, wearing something that even Prince would have admired. A detective? She had never heard of the like and she wondered where his money really came from. Walking slowly back to the kitchen, she noted Daphne laughing and Lucinda batting her eyes at a man at least thirty years her senior. She also caught sight of Baldwin, smiling and talking quietly to the woman on his right. He didn't look like a killer. But then again, a lot of men didn't.\n\nMaking her way back into the kitchen, she placed the empty platter that had once contained chicken onto the table.\n\n\"I'll refill it,\" Shad called out. \"I need to check on some things. You come over here and finish this dough. Emma, go on and get me another chicken. If we don't need it today, we'll use it tomorrow.\"\n\nIn seconds, the kitchen was empty except for Laura and Birdie, who stood over the stove cooking down fruit for the filling that would go into the pie dough Laura had started working.\n\n\"I've never cooked for so large a group of people before,\" Birdie began. Laura paused from rolling the dough and exhaled. \"Have you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" she said simply. And she had. Whenever there was a ball at Salis House, Annie had always recruited her for help in the kitchen.\n\n\"I also never had nobody to work with in the kitchen. It was always jest me. Massa, he had near 'bout ten slaves,\" Birdie said, sending Laura a sidelong glance as though ten slaves were a lot.\n\nSalis House had around two hundred slaves. There were more than ten slaves that served inside Salis House alone. But Laura said none of these things. The least said about Salis, the better.\n\n\"Did you buy your freedom, then?\" Laura asked, even though she already knew the answer to the question.\n\nBirdie flinched and returned her gaze back to the pot in front of her. She mumbled something under her breath and Laura didn't bother to try and decipher it. She had nothing against the girl, but talking about the past was just about one of the stupidest things a runaway could do.\n\n\"I come here with my brother, Will.\"\n\n\"I think I met him,\" Laura said in a conciliatory tone, feeling a little bit of guilt.\n\n\"He's tall and thin as a bean pole, but he sure can sing. You'd never guess it from the looks of him, though. You got any kin on board?\"\n\nLaura picked up the dough, sprinkling it with more flour before draping it over the pie pan. She hoped she was supposed to be adding more flour. She could never remember the small details. She had never had to before. Annie remembered them for her.\n\n\"Fillin'?\" Laura asked, ignoring Birdie's question though if the girl was on the steamer long enough it would soon become evident as to whom Laura was related to.\n\n\"That boy I saw you with, the real good-lookin' one. He your beau?\"\n\n\"Sam?\" Laura asked as Birdie handed her the pot of cooked cherries. They must have been preserves then. Laura did know that you didn't need to hardly touch fresh cherries.\n\n\"Is that his name?\" The girl had an expression on her face that made Laura blink a few times. It also made Laura feel less guilty about reminding Birdie that she was still a slave.\n\n\"Are you his woman, then?\"\n\n\"What's that bubblin' in that pot?\" Laura asked. The door swung open and Shad entered, cutting off their conversation, though not cutting off Birdie entirely cause the girl was still talking. Was she his woman? No. She wasn't, she thought as she began to lattice the dough. And further, Sam wasn't about to get any woman any time soon because he was focused on making it to Oklahoma first. And Manny wouldn't let him.\n\n\"Hurry up on them pies! I only have two cooked!\"\n\nLaura stayed in the kitchen until every dish was washed and put away. Though she was exhausted, she still found herself going out to the railing to look over the side of the steamer. Anything to feel a cool breeze. Her hair had sweated some fierce and no doubt smelled of everything they had cooked in that small kitchen. It would behoove her to get up early to wash it and pull it back into a tight bun. And it would have to be really, really early. She walked in the direction of the laundry room. Maureen had been the only one doing laundry that evening but she was a fast worker. If she had gotten through most of it, then maybe Laura could snatch a few extra minutes of sleep. But Laura didn't make it to the laundry room because standing outside of Mrs. Hartford's room was Mrs. Hartford and Baldwin." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 49", + "text": "\"Let me see it again,\" Manny's voice was demanding and entitled. Sam watched from his seat on the lower deck, a smirk on his face as Benji, very reluctantly, handed the gun back to Manny. It was evening time and they had all eaten their simple supper of bread and meat. Bread and meat, Manny and Benji had purchased when they actually left the steamer that afternoon when it stopped in Indiana. They had had no choice. Their food supply was quickly running out and it was cheaper to buy in town than to pay for a meal on the steamer. They had been quick and efficient, careful to get in town and back on the steamer in good time. Sam had asked Manny what Indiana was like, but Manny had just shrugged and rolled his eyes. And now here they were, sitting in the near dark on the unmoving steamer. Sam had been told that Captain Leahy was still waffling about whether to continue on in the dark. Until they moved, there was nothing for them to do. So, they had gathered together and Sam had pulled out Adam's gun.\n\n\"You ever seen the like, Pa?\"\n\nWhen Benji had caught sight of the gun, he had thought it was worth waking Amos up to see. Amos had agreed. He too had held the gun in his hand, hefting it slowly and turning it this way and that.\n\n\"Not up close... which is probably for the best,\" Amos said with a low, humorless laugh.\n\nManny opened the gun up for what had to be the hundredth time, revealing its six empty chambers. Again. \"So, you saved the man's life and he gave you a hat and the right to clean his gun.\" His voice was neutral as though he was still weighing whether a hat and a new chore was worth a man's life. Course the new chore was something no slave Sam had ever known, unless he was really trusted, had ever been given before.\n\n\"Sl\u2014Negros ain't supposed to touch guns,\" Gid said defensively. It was the six of them gathered together in a spot on the deck: Amos, Benji, Sol, Gid, Manny, and Sam. It felt odd including others in on information he had learned. He was used to whispering his knowledge to Manny over the tops of tobacco plants or deep in the night when they were sure no one else was listening. But this family\u2014the Altans\u2014Gid had told Sam just the other day, knew stuff that he didn't. And if it was one thing he and Manny understood it was the importance of learning all you can when you can. Besides, they were always introducing Sam and Manny to new things. It felt good to be able to show them something they hadn't seen before.\n\n\"They can if they have a permit,\" Sam said, sharing this new fact with them. He hadn't known free Negros could sometimes own a gun.\n\n\"Like some kind of pass?\" Benji asked, wrinkling his nose. \"Free Negroes need a pass sayin' they free, a pass sayin' they can work, a pass when they bowels move sayin' they can take a\u2014,\"\n\nAmos cuffed him on the back of his head. \"Watch yourself.\"\n\nManny snorted next to Sam, extending and contracting his arm with the gun in his hand, though low enough that only the six of them could see it. \"Maybe it's best we ain't goin' up north. No passes.\"\n\n\"Course if you can read and write, you can make your own passes,\" Benji said, his voice dry. Sam watched as the Altans exchanged quick glances. No doubt they were thinking of their own fake passes.\n\n\"Amos?\" Sam waited until the large man was looking at him. \"Between Benji, Gid, and Sol, Manny and I have been learning to read, tell time, and do math.\"\n\n\"Basic. Math,\" Gid said forcefully.\n\nSam smiled, but continued. \"Anythin' else you think we ought to be learnin'?\"\n\nAmos exhaled and pulled in one of his outstretched legs to his chest, wrapping his arms around it. It made him seem younger and Sam wondered for a moment just how many years Amos had seen. \"I'm not sure I'm the one to ask.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes,\" Manny said, rolling his empty hand in a loose circle. \"Laura is the one we need to ask, but she's not a man.\" His words came out quickly to cutoff any and all objections. But Sam levelled him with a look. A look Manny avoided. He could see that they were going to have to have a talk. \"What do we need to know as men?\"\n\n\"Are we men, though?\" Sol's voice was barely above a whisper, but they all heard it. More than that, they felt it... that hole on the inside that desired to be filled with respect. Sam felt his jaw clenching as he stared straight ahead. The boy didn't say much, but when he did...\n\nFinally, Amos spoke. \"Only thing that matters is what God thinks of us.\"\n\nBenji sighed. Gid and Sol hummed. Manny huffed. \"And the white man,\" he said lightly, though his voice held no humor. \"I'm glad God thinks I'm a man, but does it matter if no one else does too?\"\n\n\"What is a man, really?\" Sol threw out as he stretched out and leaned back on his arms.\n\n\"Would somebody shut this boy up?\" Benji muttered to himself.\n\n\"No,\" Amos said firmly. \"It's a good question. A man, I think, is someone who is fully grown and can take of his business.\"\n\n\"Guess we're all out then,\" Manny said dryly and Sam heard the note of grief in his words. None of them knew the first thing after all, about taking care of their own business. For good or for ill, they had all been taken care of.\n\n\"We're tryin'. That's the important thing,\" Amos countered. \"And one day, we will be handlin' our own business. And by business, I mean ownin' your own and takin' care of your family. I don't mean smart. I done met some real stupid white men. And last time I checked, they still counted as men.\"\n\nManny let out a little laugh, and then they were all laughing.\n\n\"Any ideas?\" Sam asked, reminding Amos of his original question. And then he wondered why, exactly, it mattered. Because he trusted Amos, he realized. And that part of him, that small, infinitesimal part of him that had always longed for a father, was starting to latch onto Amos. Which was fraught with its own problems. Problems he would think about later.\n\n\"Let me think on it some. But Laura really is the one to ask. I've only seen one side of white men. Laura's seen 'em all. She understands all the things you need to know to live in their world.\"\n\n\"Like not only ownin' a gun,\" Sol said quietly. \"But knowin' how to shoot it.\"\n\n\"She doesn't know how to shoot a gun,\" Benji said forcefully.\n\n\"I bet she knows more than you,\" Gid said, defending his sister.\n\n\"That's not what I meant!\" Sol said, sending both of his brothers a frown. \"I meant that the difference between a white man and Negro man is the how-to.\" He pointed at the gun that was still in Manny's hand. \"He can hold it, but he don't know how it works. Not really. It's things like that what makes us different.\"\n\n\"Maybe he'll teach you,\" Gid said, his eyes staring hard at the gun.\n\n\"What are you talkin' 'bout?\" Manny asked, his eyes too on the gun.\n\n\"Maybe the man, Mr. Ward, will teach Sam how to shoot the gun.\"\n\nThere was silence for a moment.\n\n\"He would never\u2014,\"\n\n\"Boy, you ain't got the sense God gave a goose.\"\n\n\"And where's he goin' to do that at exactly? All these white men on this boat just gone stand 'round and let a Negro shot a gun?\"\n\nIt was Sam's turn to eye the gun. And why couldn't Adam teach him how to shoot it? He had been letting Adam decide what to teach him, but what if he had his own ideas? Sam leaned his head back against the railing as the others talked. He would have to come across something valuable first to barter with. \"It's not a bad idea, Gideon,\" Sam said softly and the others quieted. \"Maybe I'll ask.\"\n\n\"You never will,\" Manny asked, his gaze fierce on Sam's. \"That's fool kind of talk, Sam. He might... don't you do that. You hear?\"\n\nMost white men probably would get offended, but...\n\n\"Sam.\" It was Finn's voice in the darkness. \"Captain's gonna keep on movin'. I need you to light the torch baskets.\"\n\nSam stood up, brushed off his backside. He wasn't the only one to stand. Amos did too. If they were moving, then Amos had to go back to feeding coal to the steamer. \"Keep an eye on the gun for me, Manny?\"\n\nManny grunted as though he was being put upon, but Sam also watched his grip on the gun's handle get a bit tighter.\n\nSam walked around the steamer, carefully placing oil-soaked scraps into the metal baskets that someone had already set up about the boat. Using the pocket tinderbox that Finn had given him, Sam got a small fire going in each basket, illuminating the deck and the water below. He felt the sudden, small jerk, heard the sound of things in the boiler room picking up, and soon felt the movement of the boat beneath his feet. The steamer was starting to become very familiar to him. But since he also felt like a fish in a barrel, he still couldn't wait to get off.\n\nAs he made his trek around the deck, Sam caught sight of Baldwin again, standing in his usual spot, smoking. But this time he was not talking to a woman but to an older man. Sam watched the two, steadily moving closer in hopes that he could hear their conversation. If he heard something real good, maybe Adam would teach him how to shoot. And wouldn't that surprise his brother?\n\nHe was almost within a foot of the two men, ducking and hiding behind large cargo and long pillars, when he heard his name whispered.\n\n\"Sam!\"\n\nSam glanced behind him quickly. It was Laura. And what was she doing down here anyway?\n\nHe turned, but not before tossing one more glance at Baldwin and the other man. They were still talking, neither one of them, apparently, having heard her. Laura was standing next to one of the torch baskets, rubbing her hands up and down her arms in an effort to ward off the cold. Her apron was gone, stray hairs of hers that had escaped the confines of her braids were swaying with the cool breeze of the night. She looked tired and done in. Yet here she was. Something must have happened.\n\n\"Somethin' the matter?\" He asked as he got closer to her, not that she looked upset or shaken in anyway. No. He would have to say that if anything, she looked determined. Looking around them, he caught a few glances from the men who had claimed sleeping spots on the lower deck. He grabbed her arm, pulling her in a bit closer so that their conversation wasn't overheard.\n\n\"I know what we have to do, next.\" By the way her lips were pursed, Sam knew exactly what she was talking about.\n\nLeaning in close, so that his lips were barely an inch from her ear, he jerked his thumb behind him. \"We could listen in on that conversation between Baldwin and that man.\"\n\nLaura, stood on her tiptoes, and moved a bit to look over his shoulder. \"He sure is a busy man. I swear I just saw him talkin' to Mrs. Hartford up above by the stairs.\"\n\n\"You sure?\" Sam asked, raising a brow. \"He's been there for a minute.\"\n\nLaura shrugged. \"I don't know how long he's been down here, but I do know he was talkin' to Mrs. Hartford. You go on and listen to their conversation if you can, but I'm goin' go to Mrs. Hartford's room tomorrow and search it so we can know for once and for all if she's Mary Stiles, tell Adam Ward, and be done with the man entirely.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 50", + "text": "Sam didn't seem none too pleased with her suggestion if the intense frown on his face was any indication. \"Why stop there,\" he said, his voice laced with uncharacteristic sarcasm. \"Why not run up to Baldwin's room right now, since we know he's done here and search it for whatever it is that Adam needs?\"\n\nIt wasn't a bad idea.\n\n\"That was not an actual suggestion!\" Sam's voice was low and fierce and his grip on Laura's arm tightened so much she feared the blood had stopped flowing.\n\n\"If I actually knew what I was lookin' for...\"\n\n\"Laura\u2014,\"\n\n\"I know what I would be lookin' for in Mrs. Hartford's room. Somethin' that would link her directly to Mary Stiles. Then Mr. Ward would at least have that information for certain. It's a good idea, Sam.\"\n\n\"It's a fool idea.\"\n\n\"You sound like Manny.\"\n\n\"I feel like him, too,\" Sam muttered under his breath before lifting his hat and running one hand over the top of his scalp. He replaced it with a sigh. In the dim lighting of the steamer, he looked tired. They didn't do the same kind of work at all, but they still spent most of their time working from sunup til sundown. And apparently, solving a mystery.\n\n\"Don't you want to be free of this?\" Laura asked as she reached out a hand, setting it on his arm.\n\n\"Not at the expense of anyone gettin' hurt.\"\n\n\"We don't have the luxury of makin' that kind of choice, Sam. We've got to solve this thing, the sooner the better.\"\n\nLaura watched as Sam's lips pressed together tightly, forming a thin line. \"When do you aim to search the woman's room?\"\n\nLaura closed her eyes for a moment, thinking. \"Durin' the noon meal.\"\n\n\"Then, I'll be there if I can. To watch your back.\"\n\n\"You don't have to\u2014,\"\n\n\"I know,\" he said quickly, cutting off the rest of her words. \"You've got a safety plan already hatched. Nevertheless, I'll be there. I'll have your back.\"\n\nLaura ignored the small thrill his words gave her. Because Manny was right. Had she been anyone else, Sam\u2014kind, compassionate, thoughtful Sam\u2014would have their back too.\n\n\"Meet me in the laundry room, then,\" she said and took a step back, removing her hand from his arm. It took him a few seconds longer to take his hand off her arm.\n\n\"Don't you do anythin' until then.\" His whisper was low and fervent.\n\n\"Alright, Sam. You have a good night.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 51", + "text": "\"I hear tell we gone be on this here boat for several days without stoppin'!\" Birdie declared to Laura. They were ensconced in the laundry room, Birdie repairing seams and sewing on buttons while Laura ironed out wrinkles on shirts, pants, and dresses. And listened to Birdie's chatter about nonsense.\n\n\"Yes. This mornin's stop was the last stop for a minute.\"\n\n\"Can you imagine? Why, if we crash into somethin' or if somethin' happens in the boiler room there won't be a single person to help us.\"\n\n\"We're not passin' any ports. It doesn't mean there's no people on land.\" Laura bit off the rest of her words. She was not going to be rude. Even if she desperately wanted to.\n\n\"I s'pose you right. You sure is smart, Laura. I was tellin' my brother, Will, that you know just about everythin' there is to know about anythin'. He was tellin' me how he spects he ought to meet you then.\"\n\nLaura had zero interest in talking to Birdie's brother, Will. If he was anything like his sister, her patience might meet its limit. But since Birdie seemed to be waiting for a response, Laura made a humming sound in the back of her throat. By the way Birdie's face lit up, that was all she needed.\n\n\"Can you read?\" Birdie asked. Laura raised the iron and set it on the stove. She stared the girl down for a full minute. Yes, they had told Sam and Manny they could read, but that was because there had been something there that told them they could be trusted. There was nothing there that indicated that Laura could trust Birdie. The girl had the good graces to look away. \"I was just thinkin' is all 'bout how nice it would be to know things.\" And this time Laura had the good grace to feel ashamed. When the girl put it like that... life had not been easy for Laura, but she could not imagine how odd it would feel without words. Without knowledge. Without knowhow.\n\nThe laundry door opened up and for a second Laura straightened, thinking it was Sam. But it wasn't. It was Maureen, her arms filled full with bedsheets. Besides, she told herself as she reached for the iron behind her. It wasn't yet noon.\n\n\"Laura, the girls in room six are looking for you,\" Maureen said in that sing song voice of hers. \"I'll finish the ironing if you want.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Laura said, setting the iron back on the stove. \"When I get back, I'll finish the washin'.\"\n\n\"It's just sheets in this pile,\" Maureen said, unusually chatty as she tossed the dirty laundry onto the ground. \"Do you know who's an odd duck? The man in room three. Never lets me in, just hands me his load like he's hiding a dead body in his room or something.\"\n\nLaura stared down at the shirt before her. What room was Baldwin in anyway? Perhaps... perhaps a quick search of his room would be just the thing. \"What man is in room three?\"\n\n\"Can't say I know his name. I'll tell you who else is strange. Mrs. Lacy. And Mrs. McRae with all her perfumes. And Mr. Barrons.\"\n\nLaura sighed and walked around the table she was using to iron the clothes. Maureen was right. There was more than one odd duck on this steamer.\n\n\"See you round, Laura!\" Birdie called to Laura's back. Laura paused, gave the girl a quick wave and left.\n\nBy the time Laura left an arguing Lucinda and Daphne again\u2014this time over the merits of marrying a man three times one's age\u2014it was time for the noon meal. And she didn't have to look at a clock to know it. The smells of roasting chickens and a glazed ham lingered in the air outside of the salon doors. The food to a degree was monotonous. But Shad and Miz Nellie knew how to turn a chicken and a ham. The other big clue that it was midday was that Birdie, Maureen, and Emma were gone. Hopefully, long enough for her to meet with Sam before they noticed him.\n\nIn an effort to make time go by faster, Laura began sorting the piles of wash so that when she came back, she would be able to move faster. It wasn't until she found herself returning to the same pile for the third time that she realized something. She was nervous. And she blamed Sam for all of his cautioning. She had been entering white folks' private domains since she was nigh unto a duck. Some things made her afraid. This was not one of them.\n\nThere was a gentle knocking on the door. Sam. She didn't wait for him to open it, but met him at the door. His eyes were hidden under the cap of his hat, but she could see the tension in his body from the way he stood firm with one hand gripping his other arm.\n\n\"You're makin' me nervous, Sam.\"\n\n\"You should be. Laura.\"\n\nShe stared up at him for a second. \"Trust me on this, Sam.\"\n\n\"I am. Doesn't mean I have to like it.\" He leaned in closer, smelling like sun, earth, and wind. Not an altogether unpleasant smell on Sam. \"If someone comes, I'll whistle. Like a warbler.\"\n\n\"It's alright, you know. If I get caught,\" Laura said, her gaze flicking to his. \"I can handle myself.\"\n\n\"Why should you if I'm here?\"\n\nShe saw his eyes now, deep brown, worried, and a bit flinty. It would be easy, too easy to rely on Sam. But theirs was a life of hard times and torn relationships. Until they made it off this boat and somewhere safe, she would do well to keep her distance from Sam. Even if he did look more handsome when he was fierce.\n\nHe took a step back, letting her pass. She moved calmly down the boat, not too quick, not too slow until she reached Mrs. Hartford's door. She raised a hand to knock, but then eyed Sam for a minute.\n\n\"I know how to look busy,\" he said as he pulled out what seemed to be torn ropes from his back pocket.\n\nLaura gave him a single nod before knocking on the door. When she got no response, she pressed an ear to it. Again, nothing. She tried the knob, but it was locked. She had thought it might be. She reached into the pocket of her apron, pulling out her lock pick.\n\n\"Laura!\" Sam's whisper behind her was both low and shocked. \"You house slaves got it so easy, you make it hard,\" she heard him mutter behind her.\n\nFor the first time she could remember, she sent him an annoyed look. \"I told you about this already. We. Need. Information.\"\n\n\"I suppose Prince taught you this too,\" Sam said, shaking his head in judgment. She rolled her eyes so he could see it. \"I'm just not sure this of God.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure the whole institution of slavery is of God. And yet here we are. And for the record,\" she hissed. \"Benji taught me. Now. Go. Away.\"\n\nField hands. They always thought they knew everything. Sam opened his mouth, closed it. His eyes darting to the side as though afraid someone would come up on them at any second. But what he didn't know was that Laura's ears had been trained to hear the first heeled footsteps several feet away. She wasn't worried. Yet.\n\nShe turned back to the lock. \"Not so easy,\" she muttered to herself. \"Bein' in the House comes with its own set of problems.\" Like Mama and Prince, Annie and her boys, and dozens of others who had not been quick enough to please Massa Richard and Miss Martha.\n\nThe door clicked and loosened. She slipped into the room before Sam could say another word, closing the door behind her. The small cabin was dark and smelled of the scented lavender water that Laura had come to associate with Mrs. Hartford. The bed was already made and tidy, evidence that Emma had already been in to clean.\n\nBut that didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was finding something that would directly link Mary Stiles to Lavinia Hartford. There was the obvious trunk in the middle of the room. Most folks kept what was important in their trunks not to mention that Laura had seen Mrs. Hartford's letters in there before. But, a woman with something to hide was not usually so obvious.\n\nShe went to the small chest of drawers first. She ran her hands along the bottom of the drawers both inside and out. Drawers had always been the first place Missy Charlotte hid her love letters from Mister Louis Dupree. There had been nothing to hide in Laura's estimation. Louis Dupree was a poor beau indeed. In spirit if not in pocket. There was nothing there. She went to the trunk next and found the letters she had seen previously. Opening the most recent one, she read quickly. Paused. And then read again. As before, she noted that neither the person who had written the letter nor the person to whom the letter was addressed was Lavinia Hartford.\n\nAlso, it became quite clear that Thomas Andrew Carter, the writer, was the brother of Marianne, the receiver. All very proper and nothing in them to indicate why someone would steal them. She skimmed all of the letters looking for the name Mary Stiles but didn't find it. It wasn't until she was on her tenth one when she realized that Mary Stiles itself could just be a pseudonym. With a long sigh, she replaced the letters and went to the closet. Surely there had to be something in this room that would help identify Mrs. Hartford.\n\nShe went into the closet which was slightly cluttered with parasols and hanging garments. There was nothing on the ground, but that didn't mean that there wouldn't be something up top. She pulled the lone chair into the closet and stood on it. And there was a box. It was locked and in need of a key. Laura slipped the thin pieces of metal into the small cavity and fiddled with it until she heard a small pop. She lifted the lid slowly. It was a jewelry box, but if the box was anything like Missy Charlotte's the first layer was just that\u2014the first. And sure enough there was something on the bottom... a sheet of paper. And when she read it, she knew. Mrs. Hartford was not Mary Stiles." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 52", + "text": "Hours later, Sam was once again cleaning the deck and still marveling over the absolute risks that Laura took. He supposed it might be different for a female slave than a male slave. Not easier, necessarily, just different. She had probably never been whipped, he decided. He knew Benji, Sol, and Amos had. Though Gid had not. It was probably why there was still such an innocence to the boy. Nothing like having yourself stripped and bared and beaten before the world to realize that life was filled with a lot of not-so-great-moments. It also did something to the spirit. He and Laura had continued their disagreement about sneaking around white folks rooms until Laura said that they would just have to agree to disagree. It wasn't that he thought Laura was entirely wrong. He understood. Knowledge was power. He did not understand all the planning to be so shifty. And yet, he was also beginning to see when dealing with Adam Ward that it paid to be a bit a shifty. If you knew how someone was going to react first, then you could better prepare yourself.\n\nHe could see he was annoying Laura, but honestly he had enjoyed the discussion. They did not have to agree on everything for him to still enjoy her presence. He moved around the deck slowly taking his time as he came up on the animal pen. Having spent most of his time inhaling fresh air from the other side of the steamer, the smell of enclosed pigs, chickens, cows, and horses, made his nose wrinkle. But he supposed that was what he was there for as he scooped up manure, moving it to the side.\n\n\"Hey, Sam.\"\n\nSam looked up from the floor he was cleaning to see Adam standing a few feet away, patting one of the horses with affection.\n\n\"I thought I saw Baldwin come down here,\" he said as he fed the black horse in front of him a piece of an apple, patting it gently.\n\n\"I haven't seen him,\" Sam said quietly, glancing around. But no one seemed to be paying them any attention as they went about their various duties on the steamer. Not to mention that the animals weren't just standing or sitting quietly. It was like a veritable symphony of honks, clucks, mooing, and snickers.\n\n\"Sam, come meet my horse, Rex,\" Adam said fondly. Sam would never understand how some men treated their animals with such affection. He walked over so that he was on the other side of Rex. \"This is a Morgan. Morgan horses are hardy, strong, and fast.\" Pride reigned in Adam's voice as he ran a hand down the horse's neck. Sam stared at the horse but said nothing as Adam began to slowly describe and point out the differences between his horse and the others in the pen next to it.\n\n\"Sam,\" Adam said after a moment. \"I get the feeling you know all this already.\" Sam shrugged, his face blank. He did not know everything there was to know about horses. But neither was he a complete idiot. Adam blinked at him a few times.\n\n\"Didn't know it was a Morgan,\" Sam finally said, careful only to meet Adam's eyes for a second before looking back at the ground.\n\n\"Well, can you ride?\"\n\nSam raised his head sharply. Shook his head once. \"Never been on a horse.\"\n\nAdam gave a decisive nod. \"When we stop in Paducah, Kentucky, we'll both get off. I'll take Rex and rent you a horse. A man who goes out west ought to know how to ride.\"\n\nSam felt several emotions warring through him. He hadn't realized it until that moment, but he very much did want to know how to ride. But more than that, he wanted to know how to shoot. And good gracious, how in the world were they still in Kentucky?\n\n\"Got somethin' for you,\" Sam said slowly, and then pulled out the small sheet of paper Laura had taken from Mrs. Hartford's room. She won't miss it, Laura had said. He handed it to Adam, and watched several expressions cross his face. \"Says she's an actress, up in New York. Hartford is her stage name. She was acting in some... play,\" Sam couldn't remember the name of it though it had been very familiar to Laura.\n\n\"As You Like It by Shakespeare,\" Adam said slowly, staring at the billing in almost disbelief. His eyes flickered to Sam's. \"Where did you get this? How did you get this?\"\n\nSam shrugged, careful to keep his eyes averted.\n\nFinally, Adam said, still staring at the sheet in his hand, \"I'm beginning to think I've underestimated you, Sam. Thought they said darkies weren't much smarter than puppies,\" Adam murmured to himself. Sam kept his flinched internalized. Most talk like that washed over him like water over a duck's back. But in that moment he realized he had thought Adam saw him as a bit more than a prop to hang one's coat. \"I mean,\" Adam continued, still talking to himself. \"There is the occasional smart one. Like Frederick Douglass. I heard him speak once.\"\n\nSam continued to keep his face neutral. Frederick Douglas? He had never heard of him. He would ask Laura and see if she knew who he was.\n\nAdam folded the small sheet of paper and stuck it in a small pocket in his vest. \"I thought you couldn't read?\"\n\nSam shrugged again. He couldn't read. Not really. But he was getting much better at recognizing letters and following along with words. He met with Gid every day to practice with the different words that were written on things throughout the steamer. He recognized the word 'property' now. One day though, soon, he would be able to read the newspaper cover to cover. For now, he was trusting entirely on Laura's mind. \"Mr. Ward,\" he said quickly. He had had a reason for giving him that paper. \"I would rather you taught me how to shoot than ride.\"\n\nAdam frowned. \"I was planning on doing both. When we get off the steamer.\" Sam bit his lip in an effort to stem the tide of emotion he felt rising in his chest. \"If you're free, I can give you some pointers now.\"\n\nSam didn't need to be told twice. He set the broom he was holding to the side. So long as he was with a white man, any white man, it was highly unlikely he would get taken to task. \"I've got some time.\"\n\nThey walked to the very front of the steamer, finding an empty spot against the rails. Sam looked down watching as the boat cut through the water. He had heard the sailors talking. When they finally reached the Mississippi\u2014and oh what a happy day that would be\u2014the river would get narrower. Sam couldn't wait to see that.\n\n\"Do you have the gun on you?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Sam said, reaching into the pocket in his trousers and producing the weapon. He handed it to Adam. But Adam took a step back, refusing to take it. \"Show me what you've learned so far. Dissemble it and put it back together.\" Sam did as requested in seconds. \"You have been practicing.\" Sam fought the urge to say, obviously. \"Sam, how did you get that billing on Mrs. Hartford?\" Sam looked away. \"Because I think I need to get into Baldwin's room and any particular skills you have...\"\n\nAdam's voice trailed off as Sam shook his head. \"Can't do that.\"\n\nAdam turned to face the water, though Sam felt him gazing at him out of the side of his eye. \"What if I break in? Could you keep watch?\"\n\nSam gave one quick nod.\n\n\"In fact, Baldwin never misses a meal.\" Adam pulled out a pocket watch, flipping it open and checking the time. Sam resisted the urge to ask if he could figure out the time. \"Supper will be in a few hours. Meet me outside his room just before,\" Adam said, going on to mention which room that was. Also,...\" Adam stopped talking once again, but this time it was because he was looking past Sam. Sam turned to his side and saw Manny standing one foot away, watching them with his arms folded across his chest. His expression was probably emotionless to Adam. But to Sam, there was a variety of emotions on his brother's face, the main one being sharp curiosity.\n\nManny, realizing that Adam was looking at him, walked up to Sam, so that they were inches apart and placed a hand on the railing. And waited.\n\n\"My brother, Manny,\" Sam said with a nod. Adam smiled a very slow smile.\n\n\"I didn't know you had a brother, Sam. I... you look... are you identical twins?\" The question was asked very hesitantly as though Adam were afraid to cause offense. Which was absolutely ridiculous considering everything he had ever said to Sam. \"And Sam, if you answer that question by shrugging at me, I swear I'm going to push you over the side of this boat myself.\"\n\nSam felt his brother tense next to him, and he moved his hand on the railing down so that his hand touched Manny's. It was a motion that did not go unnoticed by Adam. \"There is a just a lot I don't know,\" Adam said so quietly, Sam was certain he was talking to himself again. \"It's nice to meet you Manny Rivers. I'm Adam Ward.\"\n\nSam could not bring himself to make eye contact with Manny in that moment. He had forgotten that he had told Adam that his last name was Rivers.\n\n\"Mr. Ward,\" Manny finally said after a moment.\n\n\"I was just going through the motions here and teaching your brother how to aim and shoot a gun. When we get to our next stop, I aim to teach him how to fire a gun.\"\n\nThis time Sam did turn and quirk a brow at Manny. Manny just blinked back at him. Sam knew if he wanted to, he could knock his brother over with a feather right about now.\n\n\"Mind if I stay?\" Manny asked, leaning forward.\n\n\"Not at all.\"\n\nManny stayed during the whole demonstration, watching and listening as Adam explained how the gun worked, how a man should stand when aiming, and the best way to aim. After some time passed, Adam slapped a hand against Sam's shoulder. \"I've got to go. But I'll see you around. Maybe this evening,\" Adam said, meeting Sam's gaze. And Sam knew he was referring to sneaking around Baldwin's room.\n\nManny waited until Adam was clear away from them. \"Rivers? Rivers, Sam? I thought we were goin' to choose a second name together?\"\n\n\"He asked me what my full name was and we on a river and I could hear the water... ,\" Sam said, lifting his shoulders in an embarrassed shrug.\n\nHe felt Manny's intense stare, but ignored it. \"I guess I ought to be thankful you wasn't hearin' a bird cacaw. We could be Sam and Manny Warbler.\"\n\n\"It's not like it has to stay Rivers.\"\n\n\"Hey,\" Benji said, coming along Sam's other side, where Adam had been only moments before. \"What was goin' on with that fella?\"\n\n\"That's the man Sam rescued,\" Manny said, answering before Sam could. \"He was tryin' to teach Sam how to shoot without teachin' Sam how to shoot.\" The bottom of Benji's mouth dropped to his chest in disbelief. \"That's not even the crazy part. The crazy part is where Sam told him our last name was Rivers because he was hearing the river when Mr. Ward asked him his name.\"\n\nSam gave his brother a look while a slow smile crossed Benji's face. \"Could have been worse.\"\n\n\"And don't I know it!\"\n\n\"Let's see you come with a second name on the fly,\" Sam muttered.\n\n\"Surname,\" Benji said, correcting. \"Least that's the proper way to say or so Laura says,\" Benji muttered before clearing his throat. \"Pa made a big deal out of choosin' our last name, but I really don't think it matters much. 'Sides, you can always change it. Not like it's legal anyway,\" he said under his breath.\n\n\"I don't want to be Manny Rivers, Sam,\" Manny said succinctly. Sam rolled his eyes to the heavens.\n\n\"I had no clue, brother. I had no clue.\"\n\n\"I'm gonna choose our surname,\" he said, enunciating the last word. \"And it's not gonna be no river or no tree or no rock.\"\n\n\"Just make it short cause we cain't read.\"\n\nSam moved quickly to avoid Manny's bony elbow to his side while Benji laughed at the both of them.\n\n\"Benji,\" Sam said. Benji raised an eyebrow in question. \"Just what were you thinkin' exactly, teachin' your sister how to break into locks?\"\n\nA confused expression crossed Benji's face for a second before light dawned. \"I didn't realize she still remembered that.\"\n\n\"Was the all knowin' Laura breakin' into locks?\"\n\nSam ignored Manny. \"She told me today that you taught her that. She said it's a skill she used up at the big house all the time.\"\n\n\"It was?!\" Benji asked, looking surprised and more than a little prideful. Sam had known it would please the boy to know that his sister had valued his knowledge all this time.\n\n\"Yeah. Apparently, that's all they do all day in them big houses. Just break in and out of rooms.\"\n\n\"Politics, Papa said,\" Benji offered, slipping his hands into his pockets. \"He said Mama and them played politics but it was a dangerous game to play cause they didn't really have no power.\"\n\n\"What are we talkin' about?\" Manny asked, his eyes darting between Benji and Sam.\n\n\"Salis House and house slaves. You know, stuff that no longer matters cause we is free.\"\n\n\"Yes, we are. Free. Which is why I, the smart brother, have to think of a proper surname.\"\n\nWith a roll of his eyes, Sam left the two of them talking and went back to get the broom to finish cleaning up manure. He worked quietly on the first deck, took orders from Finn, and generally prayed quietly to himself. Mostly, he liked being on the steamer, but it didn't negate the fact that he was still in these United States. Thinking about it made the inside of his stomach twist with anxiety and he knew how the good Lord felt about having anxious thoughts when He was there to go before you. Thus, Sam spent a lot of time praying to change his worried reflections. Eventually he noticed the slow fall of the sun and the emptiness of the first deck. Supper time.\n\nSam grabbed a piece of stale bread and hard meat from his sack, stuffed it quickly in his mouth, and headed up the stairs to find Adam. But Adam was waiting for him, leaning against the railing, and looking out over the water just a few feet from Baldwin's room.\n\n\"Good,\" Adam said, his gaze still on the river. \"I just saw Baldwin pass by not ten minutes ago for supper. If I hurry, that should give us a good ten minutes in his room.\"\n\nSam gave a small nod, taking Adam's place on the railing as Adam took a few steps back and glanced around. Their part of the deck was completely empty. \"If he comes back, cause a ruckus.\" Sam hummed. Adam sighed. \"Or not. Just make sure I get out in time,\" Adam said, shaking his head.\n\nSam leaned further across the railing. This sneaking around business was just plain not for him and here he was on watch for the second time in one day. Cause a ruckus? And get himself thrown off the ship for sure. With Laura he could whistle cause he knew she would be listening for it. There was something about her sneaking that gave him a whole lot more faith.\n\nBehind him, he heard Adam knock gently at Baldwin's door. He turned for a second to see Adam pulling out similar small pieces of metal that Laura had had when all of a second the door swung open, and Baldwin stood there glaring at Adam." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 53", + "text": "They only had four stops left until they reached Arkansas. Laura shook her head slowly as she continued to knead the ball of dough in front of her for the supper meal. That was it, four stops. Only problem was the stops were days apart. They had their last stop in Kentucky tomorrow, then Missouri, two days on the river before they reached Tennessee. Then two more days after that for another stop. Then Arkansas. She had found a copy of the schedule when she had been cleaning Mr. Ward's room earlier that day.\n\nAfter leaving Mrs. Hartford's room and handing Sam that advertisement, she had gone right to Mr. Ward's room to clean and snoop because if Mrs. Hartford wasn't Mary Stiles that put them back to almost the beginning when they had nothing. And Laura didn't know how Adam Ward was when he had nothing. Sure and he was a whole lot nicer to Sam, but she didn't trust the man. Or rather, she trusted the first version of the man, not the second one. It had never been her experience that folks got nicer when the irons got hot. So, when she went to Adam Ward's room to clean, she also went to see if he had sent any telegrams.\n\nShe remade his bed, folded his clothes, straightened his things and went digging. She found the papers again with her and the boys and Papa's description. She went through the papers on his desk and saw that he had sent and received several telegrams. None of them had mentioned any slaves as far as she could tell. She had found a copy of the steamer's schedule copied in his own hand and marveled at the fact that they had still yet another week on the river. She had been in the middle of digging through his closet when his door had opened.\n\n\"Oh,\" Mr. Ward said slowly as Laura had stepped out of the closet. She watched his chest sink with relief and a small, tight smile cross his thin lips. \"I didn't realize you were in here.\"\n\n\"Your suits have been cleaned, Mr. Ward,\" Laura said slowly and distinctly, clasping her hands in front of her and ignoring the silent question in his words. Her heart was pounding fast, but she stilled her face and paid no attention to her emotions.\n\n\"Thank you, Lolly,\" Adam Ward said with a sigh as he took off his jacket and tossed it across the back of the lone chair in the room. It was a move he never would have made if she had been a white girl. But then, if she was a white girl, she would never have been there in the first place.\n\n\"Is there anythin' else you need, Mr. Ward?\" Laura asked, making sure her voice was low, soothing.\n\n\"No, Lolly.\" She started for the door. Her hand had just touched the knob when Adam Ward spoke again. \"Well, actually... Lolly, you're free right?\"\n\n\"Suh?\" She felt the blood in her body start pumping, the pace slowly picking up speed.\n\n\"I mean... can you read?\"\n\nShe turned her face so he could see the expression on it. She made her eyebrows furrow, made sure her eyes were cast down as though in shame. \"Read, suh?\" She saw his grimace out of the corner of his eye.\n\n\"I don't suppose you know a Negro man by the name of Sam? That's here on this steamer?\"\n\n\"I know, Sam. Suh.\" Her eyes were blank now as she blinked at him.\n\nHe grimaced again. \"Nevermind, Lolly. I\u2014nevermind.\"\n\nShe left his room with a roll of her eyes. What did he expect? That she would pour her heart out to him?\n\nShe had next gone to the laundry room to wash sheets before heading first to Mrs. Hartford's room and then to Lucinda and Daphne's room.\n\nMrs. Hartford had been waiting for her, sighing over her choice of dresses for the evening. \"Laura, you choose. You have such a good eye for color.\" Without hesitation, Laura had chosen a green taffeta gown. She helped Mrs. Hartford with her petticoat and corset before covering them with the evening dress. Mrs. Hartford stood before the mirror as Laura brushed and pulled and tucked to make the dress look just right.\n\n\"I can't wait until we arrive in New Orleans, Laura. I look so nice and it's all wasted. There's not a single man of interest on this boat.\" Laura said nothing as she continued to straighten out the dress. Her only thought was how much she wished Mrs. Hartford had been Mary Stiles. \"And then, well, Laura, I'm an actress,\" Mrs. Hartford said with a dejected sigh. Laura guided her to the chair in front of the vanity and quickly began to dress her hair. It would be nothing so elaborate as what she done for Missy Charlotte on more than one occasion, but it would do. \"And some men have a tendency to think that that must mean that I'm easy with my favors. Why one man\u2014I can barely remember his name\u2014but I told him I was not interested in his romantic favors. And then he came back the second day as though we hadn't talked at all the day before. I had to slap him! I told him if he didn't stay away I would talk to Captain Leahy personally.\"\n\nLaura paused in brushing off Mrs. Hartford's shoulders and mentally sighed. If they had only had this conversation a day earlier it would have saved her and Sam some time. She listened to Mrs. Hartford bare her complaints for another fifteen minutes before presenting her with gloves and a matching stole.\n\nThen she had raced down to Daphne and Lucinda's room, knocking as she pushed open the door. She came to a stop when she saw a black-haired woman standing in the center of the room.\n\n\"Oh, Laura, you gave me a fright,\" Daphne said, turning around. She reached up and pulled the black-haired wig off her head. \"Isn't this the most ridiculous thing?\" Laura stared. \"It's Lucinda's. She has a whole box filled with different color wigs. You would think she was balding. She's out for a stroll with Mr. Cronwall,\" Daphne said, wrinkling her nose. Laura took this to mean the old, rich man that Lucinda was trying to marry. Laura went to the closet for Daphne's evening dress as Daphne went to Lucinda's trunk and tossed the wig back inside. \"She said to tell you not to leave until she gets here cause she's still going to need your help.\"\n\nLaura had been stuck in that room with first Daphne and then Lucinda for well over an hour. And now, here she was, kneading bread for supper and wondering how she could find Sam. Alone. It would be easy enough to find him, but Manny might be with him or her own brothers. Though she supposed it wouldn't be so bad to visit with all of them. They just wouldn't be able to talk about Baldwin and Mary Stiles.\n\n\"I think that's good and ready,\" Birdie said, coming alongside her.\n\n\"Oh,\" Laura said and let Birdie take it from her so that the bread would have a chance to rise.\n\n\"You know the food on this here steamer ain't so bad, but I could sure go for a mess o' greens, right about now,\" Birdie said with a grin.\n\n\"Cooked with salt pork or some ham hock and some fresh corn bread on the side,\" Laura added as she began to flour her station again in anticipation of making a fresh batch of dough.\n\n\"Oh, my yes,\" Birdie said and they shared a smile and a laugh. \"You ever cooked up some ox tail stew?\"\n\n\"Every other Sunday when Mama was alive.\" Laura closed her eyes, remembering those few times when all of them\u2014except Prince\u2014had gotten together and enjoyed Sunday supper. The last time had been a year or so ago, but the sweetness of those memories made her ache.\n\n\"And a pot of black eyed peas on New Years'?\"\n\n\"With salt pork and onions after soakin' 'em over night? Yes, indeed.\" Laura was no great cook, but she knew good food like Annie's which always tasted like there was something extra in her pot that made you want to keep dipping. She wondered if Sam had ever had collard greens and ox tail stew, or a plate of black eyed peas. When they got off this steamer, when they got good and settled, she would cook for him. And for the first time the thought of seeing Sam in the future didn't feel so strange. Why wouldn't their families stick together in Oklahoma?\n\n\"Yes, chile,\" Birdie said with a laugh, pulling Laura back to their conversation. \"We not so different, me and you.\" Though she made a statement, Laura could see the question, the hesitance in her eyes.\n\nLaura sent her a small smile. Shook her head. \"No, we not so different.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 54", + "text": "She found them gathered in a spot on the lower deck, stretched out, and talking.\n\n\"Laura, is that you?\" Gid asked, straightening from laying his head on Benji's shoulder.\n\n\"Yes, it's me,\" Laura said as she took in Manny and Sam, sitting close together with Benji, Gid, and Sol sitting across from them. When she was a few feet away, music started not too far away from her causing her to startle.\n\n\"Oh, that's just Will and his friends,\" Gid said just as Will's tenor filled the air.\n\n\"The river is up and the channel is deep, the wind is steady and strong,\" Will sang out clear and soulful. Someone's fiddle filled the air, slowly accompanying his words.\n\n\"It's just singin,' don't let it scare you none,\" Manny called out.\n\nLaura shot him a look of exasperation as she took a seat next to Sol. She wrapped an arm around him and pulled him in for a short side hug. His arm went around her waist giving her a gentle squeeze.\n\n\"What are you doin' down here?\" Benji's voice was short and abrupt, his view on her visit quite clear.\n\n\"I, for one,\" Gid started before Laura could respond, \"am happy to see you.\" He said as though he didn't see her every day. He, Sol, and Levi were constantly running between floors running errands for passengers and sailors alike.\n\n\"Brought fresh bread,\" Laura said, reaching into the deep pockets of her apron. She would just ignore Benji's rudeness, like she did most days. She pulled out several rolls, handing two to Sol. \"Give that to Papa next time you see him.\" He was the only brother she trusted to actually do as he was told. He gave her a short nod and slipped the extra roll in one of his pockets before taking a small bite out of his own, savoring the flavor. \"Here,\" she said, handing one to Manny and Sam.\n\n\"Us too? Are we... does that make us... family?\" Manny's voice was filled with false sweetness.\n\n\"Man, shut it and be thankful,\" Sam said, his voice low. He gave Laura a nod. \"Thank you for thinkin' of us.\"\n\n\"So what do y'all usually talk about?\" Laura asked as she pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs. It was not a fitting position for a young lady. But her legs were covered and well...\n\n\"You,\" Manny said, his smile wolfish.\n\n\"Ignore him,\" Sam muttered over her brothers' small snorts.\n\n\"That man Sam saved is goin' to teach him how to shoot a gun,\" Sol offered, his voice serious as he continued to take tiny bites out of his roll.\n\nWithout thinking, Laura turned to Sam. \"Adam is goin' to teach you how to shoot?\" She had never heard of the like. Oh, Master Richard had taught Prince how to shoot but he had taught Prince how to read and do maths too.\n\n\"Whoa,\" Manny said, holding up one hand, his eyes now darting between her and Sam. In that moment she realized that whatever Manny was, no matter that he could barely read and probably couldn't write, he wasn't stupid. \"Adam?\"\n\nLaura winced as Sam placed a hand over his mouth, thinking.\n\nGid leaned forward. \"Yes, do tell us about... Adam.\"\n\n\"He's a detective,\" Sam said quietly.\n\n\"A what?\" Manny's voice was sharp, irritated, and was that hurt she heard there too?\n\n\"He solves mysteries. If someone is murdered or somethin' is stolen, he's hired to find out,\" Laura explained.\n\n\"Like a paddy roller?\"\n\n\"Paddy rollers are mostly for slaves, but the idea is the same,\" Laura said, her voice just barely above a whisper. \"'Cept detectives are for white folks.\"\n\n\"He's tryin' to find some bad... white person?\" Gid asked confusion in his voice.\n\n\"Somebody start from the beginnin' cause none of this is makin' a lick of sense.\" Manny's voice was harder now, his jaw tighter as he stared at Sam. Laura watched as Sam's whole chest sank with a sigh. When he finished telling them very quickly what he and Laura had been up to and why, the whole group of them fell silent.\n\nLaura, still holding her knees to her chest, noticed the tight anger in Manny's face and the stricken looks on her brothers' faces... and Sam hadn't even told them that it was only her family that Adam knew for certain were escaped slaves. Not Sam and Manny.\n\n\"Why are we still on this boat?\" Manny's question was quiet, but filled with emotion.\n\nBut Sam had been ready for the question because his response flew right off his tongue. \"Every day, every inch of water we go is one step further than from where we came. What's our other option? Escapin' by land? We'd be caught within a week.\"\n\n\"Every time we stop in a port, we're at risk,\" Manny countered.\n\n\"We're always at risk.\" It was the first time since Laura had met Sam that she heard anger in his voice. \"You may not like it, you may not want it, but at this point in our lives we've got nothin' to trust but God's leadin'. When he tells me to get off this boat, we'll get off this boat. Until then, we're stayin'.\"\n\nThere was trusting God and then there was trusting God. And Laura realized in that moment that she had never really trusted God. She had trusted her Mama, Prince, and everything she had ever been taught. And while she hadn't totally put God in a box and left him on a shelf, she had not exactly lived side by side with Him neither. Out of the side of her eye, she glanced at her brothers. Gid's mouth was still slightly open, Sol was staring hard at Sam, and Benji still had that stricken look from earlier... only now it was more pronounced.\n\n\"We'll help,\" Gid's voice seemed very high and childish in that moment. \"We'll help you help that detective guy.\"\n\n\"We'll have to be more vigilant,\" Benji said irritably. As though they weren't vigilant enough. Sometimes Laura felt she couldn't breathe from being so vigilant.\n\nManny huffed. Sam smiled humorlessly. \"Just be careful. If need be, we can get off this boat.\"\n\n\"Bein' careful,\" Sol said slowly, \"that's our whole life.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 55", + "text": "\"Alright, are you ready for your history lesson?\" Gid asked as he pulled himself up on the lower rung of the railing so that more than half of his body was leaning over the water.\n\nSam placed his hands under the boy's armpits, got a grasp, and pulled Gid from behind setting him back on the deck. \"Don't need you fallin' over,\" was all he said.\n\n\"Why do we need to know history?\" Manny asked, his response dry. But his responses had all been dry since last night when he had listened to Sam and Laura's explanation about Adam Ward. It wasn't the first time Manny had gone to bed really and truly angry with him, but it was one of the top five. He still wasn't technically talking to him.\n\n\"Foundation, blah, blah, blah. You know how I feel about questions,\" Gid said, turning to face them.\n\nThey didn't have much time, but Gid always tried to find some time to squeeze in a quick lesson about something. And Sam had learned there was always something to learn.\n\n\"Right. So. Yesterday, we talked about how the Indians were here first, the white man showed up and sent them packin'. After that happened, Americans got in a fight with the British.\"\n\n\"Who are the British?\" Sam asked quietly, though he didn't know why. There were so many names and explanations and divisions and unifications. He was pretty sure he wasn't retaining most of it.\n\n\"Other white folks. They talk funny and they live on the other side of the water. I know. One visited Salis House before and I had to feed his horse. Anyway... no... wait, Americans were British first or something. Listen, the white people here came from somewhere, ok? The white folks who settled here got in a fight with the ones settled in the old land.\"\n\n\"I know,\" Manny drawled, \"we not supposed to ask questions, we just supposed to learn, but I feel like we're missin' a few facts.\"\n\n\"Probably are,\" Gid said with a shrug and then made a face as though to ask Manny, now what was he going to do about it?\n\n\"Alright,\" Manny said after a few minutes of trying to stare the boy down and losing. \"The Americans got in a fight with the British.\"\n\n\"Twice. Americans won both times. Once in the 1700s and then again in the 1800s.\"\n\n\"We're in the 1800s,\" Sam said, his finger pointing down.\n\n\"Yes, we are. What year?\"\n\n\"1855,\" Sam replied, allowing a small smile to cross his face. He had known that fact before he had met the Altan family. He just hadn't quite known what it meant.\n\n\"Good,\" Gid said with a quick nod. \"This other fight was way back, like 1805 or 1810 or somethin' back then. Doesn't matter, British lost.\"\n\n\"What were they fightin' over?\"\n\n\"Freedom,\" Gid said, giving them both a look.\n\n\"From what?\" Manny asked, skepticism lacing his tone.\n\n\"Somethin' to do with taxes. But we don't have to worry about taxes cause we ain't free,\" Gid said, the last word just a puff of air.\n\n\"What do taxes do?\"\n\n\"That's tomorrow's lesson,\" Gid said quickly and Sam knew that probably meant he was going to ask Laura first.\n\nThe steamer whistle blew loud, the sound carrying to them quickly. Each of them had a place to go and it was not there trying to get a botched history lesson.\n\n\"Sam, when you go on land can you buy me a piece of candy? A peppermint stick? Or a caramel? Either one is fine. I'm not particular.\" Gid asked, handing him a small coin.\n\n\"Where did you get this?\" Sam asked, slipping the coin into his pocket with his other coins. He had been tasked with buying bread and meat for all of them.\n\n\"I got a tip!\" Gid's eyes danced with amusement and slight astonishment. \"Sol got one too. He's savin' his for both of us and I'm spendin' mine for both of us. We're like you two. We do everythin' together... 'cept we don't look the exact same.\"\n\n\"What's candy?\" Manny asked, leaning against the railing and smiling slightly at Gid's chatter. They had gotten tips before. A lifetime ago. Though they had never spent the money on anything. They had been saving. To buy themselves.\n\nGid, who had been backing away stopped and stared at the both of them.\n\n\"We've had candy before,\" Sam said quickly, feeling about as dumb as a bag of rocks. \"Remember that sweet stuff Reverend brung us that one time?\"\n\n\"Oh,\" Manny said, nodding, though Sam could see he didn't understand. \"Right. The sweet stuff.\" When Gid left, Manny turned to him. \"Molasses?\"\n\n\"Yeah. I think that's candy.\"\n\n\"That boy said peppermint. Caramel.\"\n\n\"At this point, is it really a surprise that the candy we had was different than the one he had?\"\n\n\"Good Lord we're ignorant, Sam.\"\n\nHe guessed his brother was talking to him now. \"We knew that already, Manny.\"\n\n\"Doesn't make the medicine any easier to swallow, brother. I mean, taxes, British, wars? All these things happenin' and we pickin' tobacco plants and runnin' around a farm like ignorant puppies.\"\n\n\"Sam!\" The voice was Adam's. He was only a few feet away and had Rex's reins in his hand.\n\n\"Gotta go,\" Sam said, tipping his hat at his brother.\n\n\"That no good\u2014,\"\n\nManny's opinion had greatly soured on Adam Ward. And he had been quite put out with Sam for saving him.\n\n\"If he gets back on this ship alone...\"\n\nSam walked away, quietly praying. Cause first off, he did not want to go back to bein' a slave. Gid might have been a poor teacher, and his learning might have been slow as molasses, but he could not go back to what he was. He would rather die first. It was a grim thought, but a true one. He would rather die. And secondly, his brother didn't make idle threats. If Adam came back on this ship without him, Manny would kill him. Didn't need book learning to know how to do that.\n\nSam walked over to Adam. It was the first he had seen of Adam since Baldwin had caught Adam trying to sneak into his room. With Sam pretending to be far, far away from the two men, Adam had claimed that he was there in hopes of inviting Baldwin to another poker game. Baldwin had merely stared at Adam before muttering something about not playing with men who couldn't swim with the sharks and then slammed the door in Adam's face. They had both agreed that it had not gone well. Sam had no clue what Adam was going to do now.\n\nAdam handed him Rex's reins. \"I want you to take him off the steamer. I'm going to rent another horse for you to ride and then we'll head out of town for some lessons. We've only got two hours though, so we have to make it quick.\" Sam said nothing as Adam gave him directions as to where to go when he got on land. And then Adam was gone.\n\nThe horse made a small sound, shaking his head from side to side and Sam reached up to pat him, hoping it would calm the animal. He had cleaned horses' stalls and fed them. He had a general understanding of how they worked, but he had never had a need to interact with one.\n\n\"Sam.\" The voice was deep and gravelly and could belong only to one man.\n\nSam turned. \"Amos.\" He gave the older man a quick nod as Amos came to stand next to him. The steamer jerked once, quick. They were in port.\n\n\"My boys told me about what you've been doin', tryin' to help that white man,\" Amos said simply. He didn't finish the rest of the story. He didn't need to. \"You should have told me.\" His tone didn't change, but Sam could hear the censure in his voice.\n\n\"We've all got enough worries. No sense in addin' to 'em.\"\n\nAmos bowed his head in acknowledgement. \"Nevertheless, that's a worry I would have liked to have known. Especially since my baby girl's involved.\"\n\nSam winced slightly at the rebuke, but didn't think it was justified. \"Fair enough, Amos. But if it's one thing I've learned about your baby girl it's that she makes her own decisions.\" This time, Amos winced.\n\nAnd Sam thought about what he had said. \"I just mean when it comes to stuff like that. I don't mean as a woman.\"\n\nAmos' head gave a sharp turn in his direction. And Sam knew that that had sounded even worse. \"I mean\u2014,\"\n\n\"I know what you mean,\" Amos said quickly.\n\nSam felt his face filling with color. How could Amos know what he meant? He didn't know what he meant.\n\nThe whistle blew again. \"The boys gave me some money to get ya'll some victuals.\"\n\n\"Stay focused out there, son.\" Sam felt a small bubble of... something rise in his chest that he immediately squelched. Just cause the man called him son, didn't mean he actually thought of Sam as a son. It was probably a slip of the tongue. After all, the man already had four sons.\n\nSam gave him a small nod and led Rex off the steamer. The first thing he noticed was that earth felt different after eating, sleeping, and walking around the steamer for nigh until eleven days. And he missed it. The river life was for somebody. That somebody wasn't him. But he and Rex didn't have a minute to waste on Sam's philosophizing, so he pulled his cap low over his eyes, tugged on the horse's reins, and made his way towards town. He didn't want to walk through it, necessarily, but he had to know where to buy the victuals at.\n\nHe felt a few stares, no doubt cause of the fine horse he was escorting, but he kept on moving past the stores, the smithy, the saloon, until he saw the town's church. It was where Adam had said they would meet.\n\nHe was already there with a brown horse.\n\n\"Let's switch,\" Adam said, tossing the brown horse's reins at Sam. \"You know how to get on?\" Adam asked as he pulled himself onto Rex's saddle.\n\n\"I've seen it done a few times,\" Sam said as he placed one foot into the stirrup and then slowly pulled himself up. He couldn't stop the small grin from escaping as he settled himself on the horse. He gripped the reins tightly as the horse beneath him moved slightly. It was... a very strange sensation. He wished his brother was there.\n\n\"Alright,\" Adam and Rex came over to him and Adam reached over, giving him instructions as to how to guide the horse. It was both a lot to take in and yet familiar. \"Just give her a gentle kick, Sam. We should get out of town.\" And with that Adam was off. Sam did as he was told, slapping his feet against the belly of the horse and was more than a little surprised when she actually moved.\n\n\"You sit in the saddle well, Sam. Breathe deep... move with the horse... keep sitting straight... ,\" Adam made continuous corrections as they moved further and further out of town. And Sam didn't mind one bit. He was riding a horse. He, Sam, born of Virginia, son of Lucilla, was riding a horse. He bit his lip hard to keep from grinning. \"We're going to pick up the pace a bit Sam. Watch.\"\n\nThey rode for quite some time, and Sam could feel the strange pull in his muscles that he sometimes got when he hadn't been using them for a while. Only this time they were in his thighs. But the small pain felt good. He wouldn't have traded it for anything.\n\nThey got to a small clearing and Sam watched as Adam dismounted from Rex. \"How did you know about this spot?\"\n\n\"Asked when I got that horse,\" Adam said with a nod towards the horse Sam was sitting on. Carefully, slowly, he dismounted, keeping in the forefront of his mind all the times he had ever seen someone else do it before. \"You brought the gun?\"\n\n\"Yes, sir,\" Sam said, stumbling a bit as he gave the horse a few thankful pats for going along with everything. Horse riding was something a man needed to get used to. But he could do it. Sam walked over to Adam who had pulled out a cartridge of bullets.\n\n\"We're just going to target the trees, today.\"\n\n\"Sounds good to me.\"\n\nAdam looked up from the bullets he was counting to look at Sam. Sam took a moment to make his face emotionless. Adam glanced away for a second before handing Sam the bullets. \"Load it up.\" Sam quickly pulled out the empty chambers and filled them. \"You don't have to do that, you know.\"\n\n\"Do what?\" Sam asked as he snapped the chambers back into the gun.\n\n\"Hide your expressions.\" Sam tilted his head to the side once. \"I already know you're far smarter than you pretend to be.\"\n\n\"Am I?\" Sam asked, his voice neutral\n\nAdam huffed. \"Find you a target.\"\n\n\"That tree,\" Sam said, pointing towards a tree that was ten feet away from him with his hand.\n\n\"Good job, pointing with your finger and not the gun.\"\n\n\"I've heard some things,\" Sam murmured, bouncing lightly on the back of his feet. If his face was going to be blank, then he guessed his body was going to carry his excitement.\n\n\"Sam, I have a feeling you hear a lot of things.\"\n\n\"Same,\" Sam said, feeling a bit brave in that moment. \"I have a feelin' you hear a lot of things too. Which is why I am at a loss as to why you haven't solved your mystery,\" Sam said and then without waiting for instruction, fired the gun at the tree. He didn't stop the grin that spread across his face when the bullet sank into it. It had been so fast; nothing, and then the kick of something in his hand and the echo of the gun firing filling his ears. He didn't even notice Adam staring at him for a full minute. \"Can I try again?\"\n\nAdam, still staring at him, blinked. \"Yes.\"\n\nThey were out there for just above an hour, or so Adam said when they mounted their horses and headed back to town. Sam dismounted a little less than half a mile before they reached town and left to buy food from the store while Adam left with Rex to return the horse he had rented.\n\nIt had been one of the best days of Sam's life. He was sure of it. Careful to keep his eyes lowered and his hat low, Sam walked into the mercantile. He knew better than to touch anything, but he made note of the bread and the jerky meat. He could really go for some fresh squirrel right about now, and if all went well, in less than a week, that would be an option. At least Laura had brought them some fresh bread the night before. It had tasted like nothing Sam could ever remember eating before. It had been sweet and filled with flavor. It had taken him almost two hours to eat it cause he had savored every tiny bite.\n\n\"You there, boy. What you need?\" the store owner called out after helping everyone else in the store. Sam pointed to the food items he needed.\n\n\"Do you have any candy? Peppermint or Caramel?\" He would get Gid's candy, but he would get him and Manny some too.\n\n\"You comin' in from off the steamer?\"\n\n\"Yes, suh,\" Sam said, keeping his eyes on the few coins in his hand.\n\n\"That's got to be some kind of livin',\" the man said as he picked up two jars. \"Got both. Peppermint and caramel.\" Gid's coin got him one of each so Sam gave the man another coin so he and his brother could share one of each. He was just finishing wrapping his food in the cloth he had brought when he heard a familiar voice behind him.\n\n\"You won't regret it, Mr. Cronwall. Railroads are the future. It's the next big thing connecting the West to the East.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you're right, Mr. Baldwin.\"\n\n\"I know I'm right. I've been in the railroad business for over ten years. Just you see, Mr. Cronwall. Your little investment is going to set you up for life.\"\n\n\"And you need the money now?\"\n\n\"Least before we get to New Orleans.\"\n\n\"Well, I keep a little something with me. Though not in my rooms. Not quite safe.\"\n\n\"Oh, don't I know it. You can't trust anybody these days. I keep my funds with Captain Leahy. He's got a special safe.\"\n\nSam, not wanting to linger exactly in the same state he was still running away from, grabbed his things, and slipped out the door as Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Cronwall placed several items for purchase before the store owner.\n\nInvestments. Railroads. Special safes. Sam was fairly certain he didn't understand all the nuances of what was just said, but he was also sure that he had some idea as to what was going down and whatever game was being played, Mr. Cronwall was 'bout to lose big." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 56", + "text": "\"I realize that you ain't no little girl, but Laura I would have liked to have known.\"\n\nPapa had, for the first time since they had gotten on the steamer, sought her out. She had been ironing and folding clothes when Gid came bursting in the laundry room telling her Papa had to speak to her right now. She had dropped what she was doing and rushed right to the boiler room. There had been no need to rush.\n\n\"There was already plenty to worry about.\" And there was nothing he could do about it. That was what she didn't say, but when he looked away, his jaw tight, she knew he had heard the unspoken words. But unlike before, it wasn't something that she meant. At least not unkindly.\n\n\"Papa\u2014,\"\n\n\"That's what he said.\"\n\n\"He?\"\n\n\"Sam.\"\n\n\"You talked to Sam?\" Why had her voice gone high like that? She looked away when she felt Papa's dark gaze settle on her face.\n\n\"I talk to Sam every now and then,\" his voice was quiet even though they were the only two people in the small boiler room. It was hot. The boiler might not have been going, but the heat it gave off filled the small room still. Because they were stopped in Kentucky, all of them as usual were keeping to enclosed places.\n\n\"Am I 'bout to lose you before I ever had you?\" He laughed, but there was no humor in his voice.\n\n\"Papa, Sam and I are not... anythin',\" Laura said slowly, feeling more than a little flushed.\n\n\"Yet.\" His voice was dry and matter of fact. \"Listen, Laura, you pay careful attention to that white man, that Alex\u2014,\"\n\n\"Adam. And I am. Every other day I go through his things.\"\n\n\"Alright. Stay sharp. Stay alert. We didn't get this far to have to go back now.\"\n\n\"Papa?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"I'm assumin' you've prayed on this. All of it... the escapin' and everythin'?\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, giving her a wary look.\n\n\"Then until the Lord tells us otherwise, sufficient for today is the evil thereof. We'll just pray that he provides us with a warnin' if need be and leave it at that.\" The words came out of her mouth, but really they were Sam's words. She felt Papa's gaze on her and she glanced up at him. She shrugged when he continued to stare. \"What?\"\n\n\"Nothin'. Sound like your mama, though,\" he said. His voice gruff with emotion. And when he wouldn't meet her eyes, she felt her own get blurry. \"You've always been very independent,\" he said, his voice sounding almost hoarse.\n\n\"No,\" Laura said with a shake of her head. \"I've always relied on others to do my thinkin' for me. Figured I would try to rely on God this time.\"\n\nLaura left the overheated boiler room a few minutes later but was waylaid before she reached the stairs by a familiar grip on her arm. \"Sam.\" She said his name with a smile before turning around.\n\n\"Not Sam.\" Manny said, pulling her under the stairs.\n\n\"What do you want?\" The question was rude, but it was Manny, so Laura did not care.\n\n\"I'm worried about Sam.\" There was no humor in Manny's voice.\n\nLaura felt her heart begin to race. \"Has somethin' happened?\"\n\nManny stopped talking, blinked at her.\n\n\"So, nothin' has happened then?\" Laura jerked her arm out of his hand. \"Don't you worry about Sam. I'm lookin' after him.\" She made for the stairs again, giving Manny her back.\n\n\"Laura.\" Manny's voice was quiet. Polite. She paused. \"For my brother, I am askin' that you be... you.\"\n\n\"Me?\"\n\n\"Know everythin' there is to know about everythin'.\"\n\n\"I am tryin',\" Laura said with a sigh. \"But we're really just goin' to have to trust God with all of this, Man.\"\n\n\"My name is Manny. And if I had wanted preachin' to, I would be talkin' to Sam.\"\n\nLaura turned to face him, wrinkled her nose. \"It's the only answer I have for you, Manny. I'll do my best. You can trust me on that. But I can't be everywhere at all times. 'Sides, Sam is many things, stupid ain't one of 'em.\"\n\nManny raised an eyebrow and Laura was struck anew by how handsome he was. How handsome Sam was. \"My brother is a... what's the word for a saint dyin'?\"\n\n\"Martyr?\" Laura said the word, slowly, unsure if that was what he was shooting for.\n\n\"That. That's what he is. Anythin' can happen when you live with a saint destined for saintliness. You don't know what it's like. You think it's easy bein' with Sam. Why, this one time\u2014,\" Manny cut off as singing filled the air.\n\n\"Crossin' over River Jordan,\" the words were sung strong and low. And familiar. \"Hey, Manny. Hey, Laura.\"\n\nIt was Will. He shot both Laura and Manny a brilliant smile of slightly yellow teeth.\n\nLaura gave him a small wave as he passed by them. \"I can't believe you're such good friends with a man who sings all the time.\"\n\n\"It is a surprise to me too. If I think about it too much, I have to fight the urge to strangle him. And then I want to say, 'let's see if you can sing now, Will.'\"\n\nLaura sighed. \"Manny.\"\n\n\"Keep an eye on him for me, Laura. If he looks to be preparin' to do somethin' stupid, come and get me.\"\n\nLaura couldn't help but point to herself. \"You trust me?\"\n\nManny looked away, scratching at his neck. \"I trust how you feel about him. I don't think it's real. But I think you think it's real.\"\n\n\"Bye. Man.\" She made sure to emphasize the shortened name.\n\n\"Have a good day now, Laura.\" It was the polite way he said it that made Laura grin widely and roll her eyes though she was careful not to let him see it.\n\nLaura returned to the laundry room leaving once and only once and that was when the steamer had started again headed, finally, towards Tennessee. She had gone to find one of her brothers, Sol this time, and made him make sure that Sam was back on the steamer. Sol had returned with half a piece of peppermint in his mouth.\n\n\"Sam bought you that?\" Laura had asked, nodding towards his mouth.\n\nSol slowly shook his head. And then nodded. \"Well, yes. But Gid and I gave him the coin for it.\"\n\n\"The money,\" Laura gently corrected. \"How much money?\"\n\nSol eyed her for a second. And then shrugged. She had tried to teach him and Gid the differences in coin money but it was a bit difficult when she only had access to pennies. It wasn't like it was safe to pull out anything bigger on the boat.\n\n\"We should have brung you a piece.\"\n\n\"Brought me a piece. And why should you? It's your money. Ya'll earned it.\"\n\n\"You're always bringin' us stuff, though,\" Sol had muttered.\n\n\"Sol.\" She had reached out, squeezed his shoulder. And then leaned down, whispering in his ear. \"I don't like peppermint.\" He had given her a look then. Shook his head as though she lied. \"I once stole a whole bowl full off of Master Richard's desk. Prince told on me and I got the beaten' of my life.\"\n\nSol's nose wrinkled then. \"Prince told?\" To be fair, Prince had caught her the same time as Master Richard. She had been about eight and he about eleven. He had tossed her into the fire in an effort to make himself look better compared to her. The little monster. Knowing that she would never see him again in this life had made her glamorize Prince, but there had been reasons why she spent most of her days avoiding him if she could. \"They string you up?\" His question was quiet, and a strain of fear ran through it.\n\n\"No. Miss Martha beat me with the broom.\" Until she couldn't get up if she tried. Mama had had to come and get her. \"I don't eat peppermint. Now or ever.\"\n\n\"Laura.\"\n\nLaura looked up now, dazed and confused and for a second lost in her memories. She blinked. She was in the laundry room. On the Thomas Paine. \"Birdie.\"\n\nBirdie entered the room with a pile of sheets. They did not wash everyone's bedsheets every day, but somehow the sheet washing never ended. Birdie started talking, filling the space with words that Laura was not paying any attention to. She shook her head slowly, letting go past bygones. Staying there would only leave her paralyzed in more ways than one. No. She needed to focus on the here and now. The long and short of it was, she needed to figure out who this Mary Stiles woman was. Sam couldn't do it. He didn't have access to white women the way she did. Lord, she prayed quietly, what would you do? But nothing came to her. All she knew was what Miss Martha would have done. And Miss Martha was the smartest woman Laura knew. Miss Martha would make a list of all the female passengers and go through their names one by one. She didn't know where she could get paper without stealing it. She didn't think it was stealing if she took from Salis House. But she did think it was stealing if she took from the passengers on the steamer. What to do?\n\n\"What's got you sighin' so deeply over there? Don't tell me,\" Birdie said quickly. \"It's Sam.\"\n\n\"Sam?\"\n\n\"He sure is somethin'. Him and his brother. I never know which one to look at whenever I'm with the both of them. Sam's got that jaw, but Manny looks so handsome with that beard. Though I would be lyin' if I didn't say Manny is a bit frightenin' sometimes. I never know if he's havin' a laugh at me or not.\"\n\n\"He probably is,\" Laura muttered under her breath.\n\n\"But that Sam.\" Birdie shook her head, a small smile on her face and Laura bit down on her tongue to keep from saying something cutting. She just couldn't win with the girl. \"He puts me in mind of a verse from the good book Miss Bessie used to quote to me. \"In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength. That verse makes me think of Sam. And you, Laura. You're both quiet and strong.\"\n\nLaura opened her mouth. Closed it. And settled on finally saying a very quiet, \"Thank you, Birdie, though I think it applies more to Sam than me.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said with a shake of her head. \"You too.\"\n\nLaura didn't believe that was true for one moment as it related to her. But as to Sam? Truer words had never been spoken. She stood up abruptly.\n\n\"I've got to go get several ladies dressed for supper.\"\n\nLaura left the laundry room, passed one of the staterooms, and paused. She couldn't write a list but she did know by now who was in what room. She could cross them off or leave them as a possibility that way. First thing tomorrow, she would take personal inventory. After all, a few ladies had left since she had first gotten on the steamer in Ohio and since been replaced. It couldn't be that hard to find a woman who had been on since at least Ohio and was essentially, alone. Mrs. Hartford was not the only one.\n\nWith that thought buoying her steps, Laura helped Mrs. Hartford dress for supper and then went to Daphne and Lucinda's room.\n\n\"Papa says the Compromise isn't going to work. He thinks we'll go to war before long.\"\n\n\"Papa this, Papa that. Don't you ever stop for one second and use the brain God gave you?\"\n\nFor once, the girls were bickering about something interesting, Laura thought as she went to their closet and pulled out the two dresses they had asked her to iron that morning.\n\n\"I also read the papers!\"\n\n\"I asked you to help me think of something smart to say at supper and you say to talk about slavery? Why not bring up religion too while I'm at it?\"\n\nDaphne sent Lucinda a cutting look that even Laura couldn't miss as she helped Lucinda step into her taffeta gown.\n\n\"If you don't want my opinion Lucinda Mary Stillwood, don't ask for it.\"\n\nLaura's fingers froze in the act of stringing up Lucinda's corset. No. It couldn't be that easy. But Lucinda had gotten on the boat in Ohio, same as Laura.\n\n\"Is something wrong, Laura?\" Lucinda asked. Or was she Mary? Mary Stiles.\n\n\"Nothin's wrong. Sorry, ma'am,\" she said, her fingers returning to the familiar pattern even as her brain continued racing.\n\nLucinda Mary Stillwood. Mary Stiles. Was it possible?" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 57", + "text": "\"How many times did he let you fire the gun?\" Sam and Manny were tucked in a corner of the steamer, sitting on the lower deck unraveling knots in a rope that might later be needed. And eating the caramel. It had been quite the burst of flavor in Sam's mouth: rich, creamy, sugary. This was what freedom tasted like. He couldn't wait to taste the peppermint.\n\n\"Too many times to count,\" Sam said unable to keep the grin off his face. \"He just kept loadin' it up until I was able to hit the target.\" The last target had been an empty bottle that Adam had produced from somewhere. It had taken a few shots and Sam couldn't deny that a powerful part of him was nervous about shooting in front of Adam; that part of him that was always slightly fearful that if he didn't do what he was supposed to do the way he was supposed to do it he would be strung up yet again. But then Adam had pulled out a small notebook and pencil and when Sam was certain his thoughts were elsewhere, his shooting had gotten better.\n\n\"Was it hard?\"\n\n\"At first. A bit. But then, not so hard.\" Like most things in life. Sam was sure that if he could practice regular-like, he would be a first-rate shooter. \"I'll teach you. When we make it to Oklahoma.\"\n\n\"Been thinkin' 'bout that.\" Sam said nothing, just moved the piece of caramel around in his mouth, savoring it. \"Don't want to farm, Sam. I don't want to bend over and be at the mercy of the hot sun. I don't.\" Manny's voice was quiet, but firm.\n\n\"Same. Though it might be different if it were our own farm.\"\n\nManny nodded slowly. \"It would be different. But. Benji was talkin' to me about his and Amos's smithy. And I... well... maybe we could open a store or somethin'? Folks always need stuff and we've got enough money to buy some land and build a place. This hard labor? That's for the birds, Sam.\"\n\n\"It's a fine idea, Manny.\" And it was. But the thought of never working out in the sun was almost too hard for Sam to contemplate. He would pull those thoughts out and think about them when it made sense too. Like when they were off the steamer. It shamed him a bit that he had a relationship with Jesus and could hardly dare to think good things about his future. It was one thing\u2014and it had been hard then\u2014when the future was just 'one day,' it was quite another when the future was almost within his grasp. Sam knew himself well enough to know when he falling into one of his moods where in spite of life happening around him, everything still looked dark. The candy melting in his mouth was starting to not taste as sweet. Lord, help my unbelief.\n\n\"When we learn to read better, we could order stock and no one would know we was Negro. So, they wouldn't deny us. That's what I was thinkin'. Specially if we learn to write.\" Sam just gave a small nod. Manny's words were small, tight and Sam realized it was hard too for him to think that big. \"I understand.\"\n\nManny gave him a small nod. They wouldn't talk about it no more. But at least they now had a bit of a plan. \"While you were out playin' around I did some serious thinkin'.\" Sam thought thinking about their future was serious thinking.\n\n\"'Bout?\"\n\n\"Our last name. We ain't gonna be no river, no lake, no grass.\"\n\n\"Yeah, I figured that one,\" Sam said dryly, rolling his eyes. Manny never just let anything go.\n\n\"Day.\"\n\n\"Day, what?\"\n\n\"That's our name. You're Samuel Day and I'm Manning Lucas Day.\" Day. As in a day in a week. It was very simple and practically meaningless. Which wasn't exactly a bad thing. He didn't love it, but Sam was not unaware that his recent actions had very much stressed his brother out. If Manny had found some relief in picking their last name, Sam wasn't about to fight him on it. Even if Day, in his mind, was just another thing like River. And since when did Manny have a third name?\n\n\"Lucas for mama? Cause her name is Lucilla?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Then I'm Samuel Lucian Day.\" He'd heard that name somewhere before: Lucian.\n\nManny stuck out a hand and they shook on it. And you would think a little thing like adding on to your name wouldn't have much of an effect. Except it did. Sam felt like he knew who he was now. He wasn't Sam from Kentucky of a tobacco farm. He was Samuel Lucian Day. And he even had a birthday. Then Manny stood up. \"I've got to go check on that cargo they just loaded. I heard tell they might move it around cause of its weight or somethin'. Mississippi gettin' smaller. We'll eat the peppermint candy tomorrow.\"\n\nSam gave his brother a quick nod and went back to the rope, tangled in his thoughts, which were darker than usual in spite of the fact that his future seemed like a good one. He unraveled three ropes before he realized what it was. He could lose it. All of it. In a split second. And be hauled right back to the never-ending tobacco plants. He recognized the thoughts for what they were: fear, anxiety, doubt... gifts from ole Satan himself. But he couldn't seem to shake them. Lord, help. The prayer didn't pass his lips but was no less poignant. He was now replaiting the ropes, paying no mind to the cuts inflicted on his fingers from the coarse fibers when Laura came and plopped down, right next to him. He watched as she pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around her legs. She didn't say anything right away, so he took the time to take her in as she gazed out over the water even as his fingers continued to work. Her dark hair was pulled back as it so often was though little curly tendrils that had escaped her pinning danced in the wind. She held herself straight, unmoving, and yet there was that natural grace there that had first caught Sam's eye.\n\nShe turned her head, faced him, her eyes searching his for something though he didn't know what.\n\n\"Birdie told me a Bible verse today that I think sums you up perfectly. Almost as if God was thinkin' 'bout you himself when he wrote the words.\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" Sam had to hear this. He wasn't sure what God thought about him. He knew in his mind that God loved him. He had sent his son to die for him. But it was a truth that he had to remind himself of often. There were days when it was an easy thing to remember and there were times like this when it was like holding a fish fresh out of the water.\n\n\"I can't remember the beginnin', but it said somethin' like in trust and quietness is your strength.\"\n\nSam felt himself deflate a little. Had it been anyone else, he would have known they were having fun at his expense, but the fact that it was Laura, made him think she didn't really know him at all. Which was even more disappointing. \"There's very little that's strong about me.\" His words came out with more bitterness than he thought he had in him. But it was the truth. Sure and he was physically strong, but he had learned a long time ago that strength, real strength had nothing to do with the physical.\n\n\"Sam.\" He felt Laura turn her body towards him quickly.\n\n\"A man likes to think that if there's a problem, he can fix it, if there's somethin' comin' at him and his, he can face it and... ,\" Sam licked his lips, swallowed. He made sure he met Laura's eyes though it was hard to put himself down before a woman whose admiration he wanted. \"I can't do any of those things for anyone that I love. I never have been.\" All he could do, all he had ever been able to do, was stand there. Like he had done when they took his mama away and that's all he would be able to do if they came for Manny. Or Laura.\n\nHe watched Laura blink a few times. \"I hear what you're sayin' but your faith in God in the midst of everythin' is the strongest thing I've ever seen in my life.\" Laura's eyes had taken on a sheen, but she didn't look away from him. \"And that is what makes you the strongest man I know.\"\n\n\"I have no control\u2014,\"\n\n\"Nobody does, Sam. They like to think they do, but they don't. Only God is in control. Where is this comin' from? Why are you, you of all people doubtin'?\"\n\nWhy was he doubting? Because everything he wanted was almost within his grasp. But Laura was right. He wasn't in control. He never would be.\n\n\"We just have to trust the one who is in control, Sam,\" her words were whispered and heartfelt. He wasn't the only person who felt like they were at the mercy of others. He raised his hand, cupped her cheek, and wiped the few tears that trickled down away. She sniffed, but didn't move back. Instead, she leaned into his hand. \"It's the hardest thing in this life, turnin' to God for direction, for answers, for safety. There's a psalm, I don't know which one, but it says He is our hiding place. We just have to believe He's our hiding place, Sam.\" Her voice broke then. Sam set aside the rope and pulled her into his arms, holding her tight. She wrapped her arms around his waist, her face buried in his chest. Sam leaned down touching the top of his head to hers.\n\nBut she wasn't finished yet. \"I mean Sam, think about all the times you've prayed, all the times you've felt assurances in your heart that you were goin' the right place and doin' the right thing. Could you have imagined yourself here even a month ago? It's... we've just got to trust. And you'll probably have to remind me of this conversation in a few days, but that's fine so long as when we're down, one of us lifts the other up.\"\n\nSam's arms around her tightened. He was so used to being alone in his walk of faith. He loved his brother with every fiber of his being. But it got exhausting sometimes, being the spiritually strong one. \"I think I needed to hear that,\" he said finally.\n\n\"Aw, Sam. You mean you're human?\" He heard laughter in her voice.\n\n\"I don't think I ever said I wasn't,\" he replied, feeling more than a little indignant. He was all too human.\n\nShe lifted her head off his chest, pulling back so she could see his eyes. This time she raised her hand to his face, sliding it down his jaw to the back of his neck, and his heart, which was already racing, picked up even more speed. \"You've always been pretty amazin' to me, Sam.\" Sam could hardly breathe, her words making him feel... like a man. They could have stayed like that forever, probably would have, if the steamer hadn't momentarily snagged on something tossing them a foot across the deck.\n\nMen started yelling, people started moving.\n\nSam stood up, reached down, and helped Laura stand. He didn't let her hand go even when she got her bearing. \"I better get back upstairs, but I wanted to tell you that. About the verse. I've been tryin' to hold onto those words all day so I wouldn't forget them. So I can look 'em up the next time I get my hands on a Bible.\"\n\n\"I've got one.\" The words came out quickly.\n\n\"You've got one what?\"\n\n\"I've got a Bible. Me and Manny. We found it, kept it.\"\n\nLaura gave him a look. \"All this time on this boat and you never said anythin'?\"\n\nSam shrugged, a small smile on his face. \"Not like we can read it. We just hold onto it. We're used to keepin' it a secret.\" Because boat or no boat, Negroes reading was a dangerous thing.\n\n\"You'll show it to me when we get off?\" Laura sounded exasperated, but there was a light in her eyes, and he noticed the slight twitching of her fingers where she hid her excitement.\n\nSam nodded, his smile growing. \"And you can read it to me.\"\n\n\"I'm goin' to find that Bible verse about the quiet strength.\"\n\n\"Sounds like Isaiah.\" She sent him another look. \"There was a reverend near the plantation I worked who read aloud from the Bible every Sunday morning for an hour. He was partial to Isaiah.\" Sam shrugged again. \"I could be wrong though.\" Though he thought he had heard those words before.\n\nLaura looked away for a second. This time she was smiling and then the smile left her face. She reached out, gripped his arm. \"There was somethin' else I came to tell you. I think I found Mary Stiles, but Sam I need more information so that we can confirm it.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 58", + "text": "\"Mary Stiles is Lucinda Stillwood?\"\n\nAdam said the words slowly, disbelieving. But apparently he knew who the woman was. Sam sure didn't.\n\n\"That's what I think,\" Sam said. He was in Adam's stateroom, his back against the wall while Adam sat at his desk next to Sam. \"And that's not all.\"\n\n\"There's more?\" Adam's eyes were wide and blinking.\n\n\"I heard Baldwin talkin' to that older man, that Mr. Cronwall.\" Sam told him quickly what he had overheard.\n\nAdam leaned back in his chair, ran a hand through his hair. \"Sam,\" Adam said with a slow exhale, before crossing his arms over his chest. \"How?\"\n\nSam pressed his lips together. \"I just told you. I overheard them talkin' in the store.\"\n\n\"I mean, about Lucinda... about...\"\n\n\"You have your secrets. I have mine.\" It was the boldest thing Sam had ever said to a white man. Sam was very limited in how he could protect Laura. But he could protect her in this way by leaving her name out of it and he would.\n\nAdam nodded thoughtfully. \"Toss those clothes off that chair and bring it over here so we can talk.\" Sam looked across the small room at the other wooden chair that was covered in jackets. He looked back at Adam. \"Yes, Sam. Sit. Let's talk. You and I need to talk.\"\n\nSam walked over to the chair, cleared it, and set it next to the desk. But he hadn't been the only one moving things. The desk was clean now, except for a stack of cards.\n\n\"Can you play?\" Adam asked, tapping the deck with his finger. Sam shook his head before glancing up at him once in question. \"I'm going to teach you how to play poker, Sam. I think you'd be good at it. You've already got the poker face down pat.\"\n\n\"Poker face?\" Sam asked as Adam lifted the deck of cards.\n\n\"An ability to hide your emotions. Poker is all about keeping your secrets to yourself and getting the other guy to talk first. There are four decks in a stack of cards...\"\n\nSam listened intently as Adam explained first the cards themselves, and then the game of poker.\n\n\"The first game won't be a real game. We'll just play so you get a feel for it,\" Adam said, slowly dealing the cards.\n\nAdam had been right, Sam thought, as he picked up his cards. There were things besides learning to read and write that made a body feel like a man. It was in the small things that you became a real person.\n\n\"What are we bettin'?\" Sam asked to show he had been paying attention. And also feeling largely uncomfortable, asking a white man a question.\n\n\"Nothing of value,\" Adam said as he opened the drawer of the desk and pulled out a few buttons. He placed several in front of Sam and then a few in front of himself. \"Wait, forgot something,\" Adam said and reached into his pocket. He pulled out what Sam recognized to be two thin cigarettes. Sam watched him clip both ends. \"I'm assuming you've never smoked before?\" Sam shook his head slowly as Adam pulled out a match, lit both, and handed one to Sam. He wasn't hardly going to deny the thing. \"Don't inhale. Just fill your mouth with smoke and blow it out. Get it burning on its own.\"\n\nIt took a few minutes, and Sam found himself coughing a few times, but then white smoke started rising from the other end of the cigarette. Like Adam's. \"Take it slow. Taste the tobacco. Savor it in your mouth.\"\n\nFor a second, Sam closed his eyes, taking his mind off of smoking to the flavor of the tobacco itself. He had nibbled on the tobacco plant, had gotten the scent of it on his clothes, on his fingers, felt it seeping into his skin. The earthy, grassy scent was one he had been familiar with for a long time. And for a second the taste in his mouth went sour. He would finish this cigarette, but he would never smoke again.\n\n\"Now, we can play,\" Adam said, setting his cigarette in a small tray and picking up his two cards. Sam did the same. They played in silence at first, Sam playing slowly, hesitantly. \"How old are you, Sam?\"\n\nSam looked up from his cards at Adam, but Adam's gaze stayed on the cards before him. \"Twenty-one.\" Give or take a year.\n\nAdam turned his head thoughtfully. \"I thought you were older. I'm twenty-four.\"\n\nSam pressed his lips together, pushed a button to the center of the table. He could care less how old Adam was. Not when there were far more interesting things to find out. \"Why are you doin' this alone?\"\n\nAdam looked at him then. \"You mean solving this case?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I had a partner. He was supposed to get on with me back in Ohio but got sick the night before. Ate something bad. I wasn't going to let that stop me.\" Adam dealt three cards. \"Do you have a family? I never thought to ask until I met your brother.\"\n\nSam said nothing for a minute, allowing silence to fill the room. Then, \"My brother is my family.\"\n\n\"Mother and father?\"\n\nSam felt his lips twist to the side. \"Never met my pa. Haven't seen my... mother in nigh unto ten years.\"\n\n\"What happened?\"\n\nWhat did Adam think happened? Sam kept his gaze directly on his cards. \"She was sold. You don't seem very good at this.\"\n\n\"Poker?\"\n\n\"Detectin'.\" He shouldn't have said it. But Adam shouldn't have brought up his mama. He saw Adam wince. \"You seem smarter is all and yet... ,\" he said, feeling a bit of anxiety at that sight of that wince.\n\n\"I'm finding out that just cause you can put two and two together doesn't mean you're good with people. And part of detecting is people. I thought I was going to get on this boat, be the best poker player, and learn all I need to know. Instead I had my... rear end handed to me on a silver platter and most folks step around me. It hasn't been pleasant. That's for sure. Someone is helping you, am I right?\"\n\nTo this question, Sam shrugged.\n\nAdam huffed out a laugh. Sam added another button to the pile. He rather liked this game.\n\n\"Oh, I've got something that'll break you. What is the difference between stabbing a man and killing a hog?\"\n\nSam flicked his gaze to Adam for a second, but said nothing.\n\n\"One is assaulting with intent to kill; the other is killing with intent to salt. Do you get it?\"\n\nThey played two more games that day. And a few more over the next couple days. Sam learned more than he wanted to about Adam. Adam was the youngest of three children, the only son. His father was an attorney. Adam had had to explain to Sam what an attorney was. Adam hoped to have a job that allowed him to travel and used his brain. Hence, the Pinkertons. Sam was also exposed to a series of jokes because Adam wanted to see him 'break character'. They were mostly not funny and Sam never laughed. That didn't stop Sam from sharing with Manny the few ones he remembered. Then, and only then did he allow himself to snicker a bit.\n\nSam lost most of the poker games they played though he was certain it was cause he lacked Adam's experience and not cause he couldn't play. But he won the game with the questions, cause while he never lied to Adam, he never told him anything that wasn't specific to a hundred slaves.\n\nMeanwhile, Adam had a conversation with Captain Leahy about the safes on the steamer and what they stored, explaining something of the situation to him. He started, as he called it, paying court to Lucinda Stillwood, and he and Sam made plans to try to breakin to Baldwin's room upon reaching Missouri. Except Baldwin didn't get off at Missouri.\n\n\"If I didn't have bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all.\" Sam ignored Adam's statement as he swept up manure in the horse pen. \"Why is he still on this steamer? Why?\"\n\nSam ignored Adam and continued on about his duties. In the past few days amidst their poker playing, Sam had learned Adam liked the sound of his own voice. Sam's was often not required. The steamer whistled.\n\n\"That's the return whistle. We're pulling out in ten minutes.\" Adam huffed, kicked at the small fence surrounding the pen. But Sam was more than a little relived that Baldwin hadn't gotten off the boat and sent the Lord a 'thank you' prayer. After all, he was supposed to be the one breaking into Baldwin's room this time while Adam made sure Baldwin was occupied in Missouri. He had agreed to it cause he was sure Adam would repay him by teaching him something else new. But since Baldwin never left the steamer for Missouri... well, Sam, wasn't hardly going to complain.\n\n\"Alright then. Change of plans. Here's what\u2014,\"\n\nAdam's voice suddenly cut off and Sam stopped sweeping, looked up.\n\n\"Sam?\" Adam's voice was low, calm. Something was wrong.\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"Who has keys to the closet where they keep the supplies? Finn?\" Adam asked. It didn't surprise Sam that Adam knew Finn. Life on a steamer was small. Everyone at least knew of everyone else.\n\n\"Mr. Finn. Mr. Clark. I think\u2014,\" it was Sam's turn to stop talking as Adam walked over to Finn, bumped into him, apologized and came back.\n\nSam started to ask what that was about when he heard loud shouting near the entrance of the steamer where they had lowered the gangplank.\n\n\"Sam, I need you to show me something in the closet.\"\n\nAdam's voice was cool, demanding, and the part of Sam that was used to instantly obeying started moving before his brain caught up. \"Mr. Ward,\" Sam said slowly as they made their way to the closet. Adam opened the door and motioned for Sam to go in first. \"What is it that you\u2014.\" The door slammed shut. Sam's heart started racing as he heard the key turning in the knob. \"Mr. Ward?\"\n\n\"Hide behind something, Sam. It's bounty hunters.\"\n\nThe words were like a dousing of ice water. Sam let go of the broom in his hand and knocked on the door. \"Mr. Ward,\" his voice was low, but fervent.\n\n\"No more knocking, Sam. I have to go find your brother.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ward.\" Sam reached for the door handle even though he had heard Adam lock it. He slammed the palm of his hand against the door. There was relief that Adam would find Manny, but Laura. His heart thudded painfully at the thought of her being taken back. Gid, Sol, Benji. Amos... they had become like family to him. Somewhere along the way, his heart had made room for them all.\n\nHe rattled the doorknob again and then stopped as he heard an unfamiliar voice call out a command to search the steamer.\n\nLord God. He was suddenly hot, sweat forming everywhere on his body. To keep messing with the door was to give himself away. And he would do it in a second if it meant that someone else would be saved by his efforts. But he had no way of knowing.\n\n\"There! That one!\"\n\nSam fought the urge to vomit. He would rather than die than go back. But he didn't see how he could keep on living if Manny was taken. Or Laura. His stomach flipped again, but he swallowed the rising bile and with it the notion of assistance. Biting his lip so hard he could taste blood, he hid himself in the far back behind a box, crouching down low, making sure no part of him could be seen should the door open. When you weak, then you be strong. His mama's words always came to him in his worst moments. He had never known what that really meant except maybe that when there was nothing else he could do, then there was strength in relying on God. In quietness and trust was his strength. He folded into himself, and held onto the words tight through the worst of the screams that followed." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 59", + "text": "\"So, this is where you spend your time?\" Benji's words and his face held his familiar sneer as he stood in the doorway of the laundry room. And Laura was just done with it. How dare he think he could belittle her just cause she spent most of her time indoors? She ate better, she was able to read more and learn more, but actually spending day in and day out with white folks was not without its own drawbacks.\n\n\"Why are you here?\" She made sure she let him know exactly how much she wished he would go away.\n\nBenji stepped further into the room when it became evident that no one else was in the laundry with her. Emma and Maureen were acting as maids. Birdie was in her usual spot in the kitchen talking and cooking with Nellie. Laura was in the laundry room repairing a hem on a red silk gown. And thinking about Sam. He had been rather busy for the past few days, holed up with Adam Ward.\n\nShe had even asked Manny about it. After giving her a dirty look, he had admitted that Adam was teaching Sam to play cards.\n\n\"Are you jealous?\" Laura had asked, genuinely curious.\n\nManny had blinked at her. \"Jealous? Of my brother? Why should I be? What he learns is what we learn. I do think he's playin' with fire with this Adam Ward. But what do I know? I've only been a slave to the white man my whole life.\"\n\nShe had walked away from the conversation smiling. Manny was irritating, but he sure could make life more colorful.\n\n\"Sol asked me to meet him here,\" Benji said, breaking Laura from her thoughts.\n\n\"Oh?\"\n\n\"He and Gid went to the mercantile this time. Pa thought it might be a bit safe since we out of Kentucky. They took their papers though. Just in case.\"\n\nAnd wasn't that a blessing? After this stop, they had but one more in Tennessee. The end was almost in sight. And then what? Setting up house with her brothers and Papa? Starting a whole new life? It didn't bear thinking upon.\n\n\"I don't know how you do it, always findin' the coziest jobs.\"\n\n\"Benjamin!\" Laura huffed out air, glaring at him from over the top of the dress. She would like to see him spend hours on end sewing until his eyes got tired and his fingers developed callouses from the points of the needles.\n\n\"Papa always talks like he cain't get on without you.\"\n\nLaura stopped sewing. \"It's nice to know that should somethin' happen, you would be happy to leave me behind.\"\n\nBenji stiffened. \"That's not what I said at all.\"\n\nThe door opened and they both froze. But it was only Sol. In his hand were two caramel candies. \"I bet ya'll thought I forgot about ya'll again, but I didn't,\" Sol said as he walked over first to Benji to hand him his piece and then to Laura.\n\nShe slipped the candy in the pocket of her apron \"Thanks, Sol. Where's Gid?\"\n\n\"Went to find Papa.\"\n\n\"I'm not sayin' I want you gone, I'm just sayin' you don't bring to the table nearly as much as you think you do. That's all.\"\n\nThis time, even Sol sent Benji a look of long-suffering.\n\n\"Your problem is not with me,\" Laura finally said. She flicked her gaze to the door. \"You can leave.\" Mama had always despaired that she and Benji had never gotten along. But it wasn't her fault. She had tried. He hadn't. Such was life.\n\nBenji's face hardened. \"You don't know what it's like, livin' up at Salis House while we work ourselves half to death. The things I've seen\u2014,\"\n\n\"I've heard about,\" Laura said, coming to her feet. She ignored the pained expression on Sol's face; the one that said he wished he could be anywhere but here.\n\n\"Just because my time at Salis was different doesn't make it any less painful. Who are you that you get to decide whose time as a slave was worse? Your experience has been nothin' like Sam's or Manny's who, I think we both agree, had it harder than the both of us and they don't complain near as much as you do. Get over yourself, Benjamin.\"\n\nInstead of Benji leaving, his eyes narrowed as though he were preparing to dig in. Except the sound of yelling from below reached their ears.\n\nBenji shot her a look before turning to open the door and peek out.\n\nLaura turned to Sol. Sol shrugged. \"He'll outgrow it. Least that's what Pa always says.\"\n\nThe door slammed shut and Laura looked up. There was stark terror on Benji's face. \"Paddy rollers.\"\n\nLaura dropped the dress in her hand. Swallowed. Looked around.\n\n\"We've got to hide.\"\n\n\"Gid. Pa,\" Sol said, making his way to the door.\n\n\"No,\" Benji said, grabbing his arm before he could reach it.\n\n\"Let me go,\" Sol said, trying to pull his arm out of Benji's grasp but failing. \"I've got to warn Pa and Gid.\"\n\n\"If we know, they know. Pa wouldn't want you to try.\"\n\nLaura ignored their exchange, her eyes swerving around the room and landing on the only closet in it. A closet would be the first place a paddy roller would look... unless they didn't know it was there. Laura ran to the door, opened it. It was filled with clean napkins and tablecloths.\n\n\"Can we all fit in there?\" Benji asked, he was right behind her and his grip tight on Sol's arm.\n\n\"Let. Me. Go.\" Sol's voice was a growl and with his other hand he tried to pick at Benji's fingers on his arm.\n\n\"The shelves\u2014,\"\n\n\"Hold him,\" Benji said, tossing Sol at her. She wrapped her arms around the boy's chest as tight as she could, holding him in place and ignoring the pain as he stomped on her foot.\n\n\"Sol, stop. Calm down.\" Laura made sure her voice was calm. Like Mama's was when Sol got worked up. It was a rare happening. But every now and then, things set him off. But unlike Mama, her calm speaking didn't work. He struggled in her arms.\n\n\"Papa. Gid.\"\n\nLaura swallowed. She couldn't think about them right now. If she did, she was sure she would pass out. Benji, after tugging on the shelves for a second, ripped them down and toss them out of the closet. He grabbed a kicking Sol, dragging him into the closet. \"Come on!\" he hissed when she didn't enter right away.\n\nBut she couldn't. Not yet. She ran back to the silk dress, folding it neatly then she fixed the shelving Benji had tossed aside, making it look like it had always been there. She reached into her other pocket and crouched down before the door of the linen closet.\n\n\"Laura!\"\n\n\"Be quiet!\"\n\nWith shaking hands, she unscrewed the door handle catching the knob on the outside. The door handle on the inside was loose, but still sticking. Then she slid into the closet and pulled the door behind her, enshrouding them in darkness. It was a temporary solution, one that might not even work, but she had to try. She clutched her stomach, bringing her knees to her chest in the small space. She felt Benji's shoulder in the small of her back, just behind her. He was holding Sol just in front of him.\n\n\"I need to get Pa. I need to get Gid,\" Sol's voice was strained.\n\nBenji reached down and swatted him hard on his thigh. \"You stop it. Right now. You want us to get caught?\"\n\nBut neither Benji's words nor his roughness got through to Sol. If anything, his words got louder.\n\n\"Sol!\" Benji's whisper was frantic. And then Sol kicked the wall. Benji swore. \"He's lost his mind.\"\n\n\"We'll have to sit on him, to keep him still,\" Laura said, scrambling to do just that.\n\n\"He won't stop,\" Benji said and placed a hand over Sol's mouth. When Benji swore again, she knew Sol had bit him. \"Sol!\" Benji hissed. \"Do you want us to get caught?\" Benji repeated. \"Do you want to go back?\"\n\nBut wherever Sol was, he was past words. \"Papa!\" He cried out.\n\n\"Here,\" she tossed Benji one of the cloths she was sitting on that had fallen when Benji removed the shelving. She didn't need to explain. In a rare moment of being on the same page, Benji took the cloth, a napkin, and stuffed part of it in Sol's mouth and used the remainder to wrap it around his face. Sol's words cutoff in a terrified silence. His frantic hands went to the cloth to remove it, but Benji had already tied a tight knot. In seconds, he had Sol flipped over onto his belly, sending Laura careening in the small space towards the door and then diving back onto Sol's moving feet. Bending his legs at the knee, she moved so that she was sitting next to Benji. Sol, in front of them, moved. She grabbed Sol's legs, to keep him from kicking the wall, held them pressed against her chest while Benji held Sol's arms and pushed the boy's chest into the floor of the closet so that he mimicked the position of a hog-tied pig. It could not have been comfortable for either of them. For the first time in a long time, she was grateful for Benji.\n\n\"I didn't want to hurt him,\" Benji said, his voice just above a whisper. They were sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sol's body shaking in front of them. She didn't respond, just turned and tucked her face into his shoulder. It wasn't just Sol who was shaking. After a moment, Benji leaned his head on top of hers. She felt wetness on her face and realized after a moment, that they were his tears. Then he straightened and she did the same. In the silence she had time to think. Sam, Papa, Gid, Manny.\n\nAnd then the laundry room door opened.\n\n\"They said she might be in here.\" The voice was loud, brash, Virginian.\n\nLaura felt Benji's body tense up next to hers. She took a breath, held it. Sol's feet in her hand stilled.\n\n\"Looks like no one is in here.\" A second voice called out.\n\n\"Is there any place to hide?\"\n\nOh, God. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Trust, trust. The prayer had no specific requests. No cohesive thoughts. Just words.\n\n\"You sure we ain't lookin' in the wrong place?\"\n\n\"They said she would be up here.\"\n\n\"Hey!\" The new voice sounded far away. \"I think I found her!\"\n\nThe sound of footsteps leaving the laundry room brought Laura such relief she was almost dizzy with it. And then she heard the scream.\n\n\"No! No!\"\n\nLaura recognized the screamer. Birdie.\n\n\"No! No!\"\n\nHer screams were loud and chilling. Sol started moving again fighting against her and Benji. The bounty hunters weren't there for them, but if they found three Negroes hiding in a closet, well...\n\n\"Look at that one! That one's runnin'. Get him!\"\n\nSol moaned beneath Laura and Benji.\n\n\"Girl, shut up!\" Laura heard the sound of flesh being hit. And then Birdie let out a keening sound, one Laura had heard only a few times, but was still familiar, deep down to her soul.\n\nLaura sniffed, her cheeks tingling as tears left their mark.\n\n\"Get him, I said. Get him!\"\n\nNext to her, Benji shifted, pressing his shoulder into her and that was why she felt his body jerk when they heard the gunshot fill the air.\n\nBirdie's screams filled the air once more.\n\nOh, God. Oh, God. She felt sick. Dizzy.\n\n\"Breathe,\" Benji's whisper was faint. \"Breathe, Laura.\" She inhaled so quickly she almost choked.\n\nBeneath her, Sol was making small, hiccupping noises, his chest rising and falling in quick spasms.\n\nThere was a splash. And then another gunshot.\n\n\"Got him!\"\n\nNext to her, Benji took in a ragged breath and Sol started to moan into the cloth again. They heard the men dragging a distraught Birdie off the steamer because the ship, in all of the happenings, also appeared to have gone eerily silent. Usually, there was always an undercurrent of voices talking and animals rattling. But now there appeared to be nothing. Laura heard when the paddy rollers left, she heard when the gangplank went up, and she heard when the boiler room got started going again.\n\nBut the three of them still didn't move until the sounds of the steamer started to become familiar again. And then Benji let Sol's arms go. He pushed open the linen closet door. Laura gently set Sol's legs down. Light filled the room. But, Sol didn't move.\n\n\"Sol,\" Benji shook Sol, but the boy still didn't move.\n\n\"Sol,\" Laura said, reaching for the handkerchief around his mouth. She removed it. It was soaked wet and she didn't know if the wetness was from his saliva or his tears. But still he didn't move. He was utterly silent now, even as he closed his mouth and swallowed. \"Sol, sweetheart.\" But as soon as the words left her mouth, Sol turned, faced them, and speared them both with a look of hatred before returning back to his place on the floor.\n\nBenji looked over at Laura and she looked at him. His face was covered in tear streaks, his eyes red. \"I'm not goin' to say sorry,\" his words were belligerent as he hauled up the angry Sol into his lap. Laura wrapped her arms around both her brothers, her silent tears melding with their own." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 60", + "text": "\"Sam?\" The voice was Adam's. Sam heard the closet door open slowly. \"They're gone now.\"\n\nThis, Sam knew. Trapped as he was, he felt like he had heard everything. He stood up slowly, not facing Adam and aware that he had only been in the closet for no more than ten minutes. It had felt like hours. He took his hat off, ran a hand over the top of his hair, and then replaced it.\n\n\"It wasn't Manny.\"\n\nThis, Sam also knew. He didn't know how he knew cause whoever the man was they killed had been silent. But he knew. \"Who was it?\" Sam's voice was hoarse from holding back all of his emotions because he wouldn't let himself cry. Aside from tears of pain when he was whipped, Sam didn't cry. Sam hadn't cried since he had lost his mama so long ago.\n\n\"Someone named Will, I think. The one they say was always singing at night.\"\n\nSam flinched. And yet felt an overwhelming sense of shame when he also felt relieved. \"They kill him?\" He asked, but he already knew the answer.\n\nAdam hesitated. \"Yeah,\" he said softly. Sam nodded. He had figured as much. He turned around slowly. \"You know I wouldn't have... I wouldn't have let them take you like that. I would have bought you first or something.\" Sam sighed, straightened his shirt, gave Adam a nod without meeting his gaze. \"I didn't know it was like that, Sam. That was the most awful thing I've ever seen.\" Sam nodded again. Will was lucky. His death had been quick. Which was probably why he had jumped in the river in the first place. Better than that then being flayed open. As for the woman screaming...\n\n\"The girl?\"\n\n\"His sister.\"\n\nSo, Birdie than. Sam closed his eyes for a second. Sighed. \"I need to get back to work, suh.\"\n\nHe felt Adam's gaze, but didn't look at him. Finally, Adam sighed. \"Fine. Alright. We'll talk later, Sam.\" And then Adam left.\n\nSam found his brother first when really he had an urge to run upstairs and find Laura. If they had gotten Birdie, he was mighty curious how they missed her. Manny was behind several crates, moving them in no order Sam could follow. \"Manny.\"\n\n\"Sam.\" Manny's voice was clipped as he stacked one box atop another. Sam waited for his brother to speak, but when Manny said nothing, he took one step back. If Manny needed time, he would give him time. \"And, where were you?\"\n\nHe didn't need time. \"Locked in the closet. By Adam Ward.\"\n\nManny's mouth opened and closed for a second. He held up a finger. \"I should have guessed that.\"\n\n\"Where were you?\"\n\n\"Hidin'. Right there. Where your friend Adam Ward shoved me. He stood right in front of me the whole time.\" Manny said, pointing to a spot that was behind several crates. \"I saw it all.\"\n\nSam paused, scratched at his face. They never knew what to say to each other in hard times. \"I'm sorry,\" Sam said slowly, \"'bout Will.\"\n\n\"Why should you be sorry? Why should anyone be sorry? It was my mistake,\" Manny said, restacking the same boxes. \"My mistake for makin' a friend. You know what happens to people you care 'bout, Sam? You lose 'em.\" Manny made a fist, tapped it against the cargo in front of him. \"You lose 'em,\" he repeated and leaned forward, touching his forehead to the box in front of him. Sam came alongside Manny so that his shoulder touched his brother's, but said nothing. Manny would find no peace until he said it all. Manny's voice got quiet, just above a whisper. \"There I was, in a corner, hidin' like a rat while Will was hunted like a possum. I said nothin', I did nothin', just prayed it wouldn't be me or you. When I think about it, Sam, sometimes, I just cain't breathe.\"\n\nSam pulled his hat off, twisting the thing in different directions. \"'Cept that you have to... keep on breathin' that is, for Will, for Mama, for everyone else we ever knew. We got to keep breathin'.\" Times like these he wished he could offer his brother the comfort of Jesus. But Sam knew well enough to mention Jesus right now might just spark a fire he wasn't in the mood to put out. Besides, his own spirit was a bit bruised. What he needed was to be around someone with some faith. Someone like Laura.\n\n\"What are you doin' with Laura?\"\n\n\"What?\" The mention of her name, just when he had been thinking about her had him jumping like a coon catching sight of a coon dog.\n\nManny straightened. Moved another box. \"You heard me, Sam. Should I be worried?\"\n\n\"Worried,\" Sam stretched out the word. \"About what?\n\nManny looked at him out the side of his eye. \"You take on a woman, Sam, you takin' on a whole host of worries. Losin' Will... Birdie... losin' Laura would be like losin' Mama all over again. There's a part of you that would never recover.\"\n\n\"And what if nothin' happens? What if I marry Laura and we live out a full life? Faith works both ways.\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Manny hissed, his eyes narrowed. \"'Cept I've never seen that happen. I've never seen no happy Negroes livin' a full life. I have seen families broken a part. Mama sold, daddy sold, children sold. So, forgive me if my believin' is only in one direction.\"\n\nSam swallowed, exhaled slowly, knowing his brother's anger was not directed at him. \"I don't have all the answers, Manny. All I know is it's not really livin' if every decision we make is rooted in fear.\" Sam didn't know where the words came from, but he felt the truth of them. \"We free, Manny. And part of bein' free is livin' free.\"\n\n\"Sam!\"\n\nSam turned at the sound of Laura's voice. She was making her way towards them in that graceful, determined walk of hers.\n\n\"That girl thinks she knows everythin', Sam. It'll be like bein' married to a... to a... I don't know what, but whatever it is, it ain't good.\"\n\nSam ignored him, slipped his hat back on, and moved forward to meet her. He reached out, grabbed her arm, and pulled her into a shadowy spot behind some cargo. He put his arm around her waist, tugging her close, and holding her tightly.\n\n\"Oh, Sam,\" she whispered, her breath warm against his neck as she reached up, placing her arms around his neck. Sam felt for the first time since the paddy rollers came on the ship, at peace. He gave her one more squeeze and then pulled away though his hands lingered at her waist. \"Did they see you?\"\n\n\"We hid in the closet in the laundry room,\" Laura said, her eyes searching his, still red from crying.\n\n\"We?\"\n\n\"Me, Benji, and Sol. Sol was... it was bad. We had to practically sit on him, he was so worried 'bout Papa and Gid.\"\n\n\"It's like that, for some people...\" He had seen that firsthand, people making poor, frantic decisions in times of stress that made no sense.\n\n\"Sam. Birdie...\"\n\nOne of his hands moved from her waist to her cheek, and he wished with everything in him that he could take her fear, her grief away. But only God could do that. \"I know...\"\n\n\"I wasn't very kind to her,\" her voice broke. \"And now she's gone.\"\n\nRubbing his thumb against the softness of her cheek, he made sure to meet her gaze. \"How you treated her had nothin' to do with what just happened.\"\n\n\"I could have been kinder,\" she said stubbornly, looking away.\n\n\"Then treat it as a lesson learned and move on.\"\n\nShe nodded, a tear sliding down her face. \"I was so scared. My prayer for you, for the boys... there weren't even words.\"\n\n\"Same. I just had to trust that God loves you more than I do.\" He blinked for a long second. He hadn't meant to say that. To admit out loud that he loved her. That was something he had hoped to keep to himself for a bit. He felt her hands fists into the sides of his shirt, her gaze bright and fierce on his. \"You love me, Sam?\"\n\n\"I do, Laura,\" he said softly, tugging her closer. \"I do.\"\n\n\"Oh. My. God.\" Manny's low voice was like thunder on a blue-sky day. Sam felt Laura stiffen in his arms, but he didn't let her let go.\n\n\"Manny, go away,\" Sam said, not even looking at his brother. He didn't know what it meant exactly that he loved Laura. He didn't know what his future held. He just knew she would be in it.\n\n\"I think that I should have been given a warnin' that this was more serious than it looked. I mean, Sam's makin' friends with white men, solvin' mysteries, and courtin' ladies. You think you know a person...\"\n\n\"Man.\" Sam's voice was hard. Tired.\n\n\"I'm just goin' to leave you two alone. Got work to do. This boat ride ain't free.\"\n\nLaura reached out, placing a hand on Manny's arm before he moved. \"I have no words about Will.\"\n\nManny shrugged off her hand, slipped his own into his pocket. \"It is what it is. Welcome to the family, Laura. By the way, our last name is Day.\"\n\n\"Change is hard for him,\" Sam said as he watched his brother walk away. \"But when he gets settled, he'll be just fine.\"\n\n\"Is there a change that's goin' to be made?\" Laura asked, her gaze fully on him.\n\n\"I hope so,\" he said, feeling more than a bit shy. He met her gaze though. \"I'd like to kiss you, but it'd only be fair to warn you, I ain't done it before.\" He felt his face warm. Manny had told him it took lots of practice and skill to be a good kisser. But Sam had never just wanted to try it for the sake of trying it. And so he had never done it.\n\n\"Aw,\" Laura said, her gaze darting away. \"Guess we're in the same boat, then.\"\n\nAnd with that, he leaned down and kissed her." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 61", + "text": "The next day, Sam was in the animal pens, cleaning manure and spreading fresh hay. And listening to Finn talk.\n\n\"I'm tellin' you, Sam, we're bout to enter Indian Territory. Folks be afeared of the boiler room explodin' but they don't be thinkin' bout the Injuns attackin'. Why I heard this one story...\"\n\nMost of Finn's words were drowned out by the sheet of rain that surrounded the steamboat. The day was warm, humid, wet, and it smelled bad. But Sam wasn't about to complain, the boat was moving and so long as it kept on moving, that was all that mattered.\n\n\"And then\u2014,\" thunder pounded and lightening cracked against the sky, and Sam paused taking it all in. It seemed fitting really, all the rain. The night before had been hard to get through. Neither he nor Manny nor the Altan men had much to say. Amos had even joined them, holding Gid under one arm and Sol under the other. And it had been a silent night. Without Will, and quite frankly the way in which Will left the boat, no one had felt inclined to make music.\n\nWith Amos there, Manny had been sure to nudge Sam several times to speak on Laura, but Sam hadn't. He would speak to Amos at a time of his choosing and not when Manny was there to listen in. After the third nudge, Sam had made sure to elbow Manny in the soft parts of his side eliciting a grunt from his brother. Manny had left him alone after that.\n\n\"Sam,\" Adam's voice pulled Sam out of his thoughts.\n\n\"Suh?\" Sam asked, straightening with the broom in his hand. Adam was dressed in his usual dark suit, leaning against one of the poles of the steamboat. He nodded toward an empty spot at the steamboat rail.\n\nSam set the broom aside and exited the cow pen. He followed Adam over to the wet railing.\n\nAdam didn't speak when he got close. Instead, he stared out at the rain. Sam folded his arms over his chest, rocked on the back of his feet. \"How are you doing?\" Sam raised an eyebrow. \"You know... with yesterday...\"\n\n\"Fine.\" Sam's voice was clipped, short.\n\nAdam sighed, pounded a fist against the railing in front of him. \"I need to get into Baldwin's room tonight. Can you keep watch again? This time I'll make sure he's out of the room.\"\n\nSam gave a quick nod.\n\n\"We'll meet up just before the supper bell.\"\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\nAdam sighed again, but left.\n\n\"What did he want this time?\" Manny asked as he sidled up to Sam.\n\n\"Where were you at?\"\n\n\"Does it matter?\" Sam rolled his eyes. If there was an easy way to answer, Manny always chose the hard way. Sam told him quickly what Adam had wanted. \"You've done this before?\"\n\n\"Yes. Adam thought the man was at supper but he wasn't. He's pretty slippery, Baldwin. Never where you expect him to be.\"\n\n\"Maybe he has a twin,\" Manny said, laughing to himself. \"Remember how we used to pretend to be one person?\"\n\n\"Till Molloy whipped us both,\" Sam said slowly. They had done it when they had first arrived in Kentucky. To protect themselves. What a failure that had been.\n\n\"Yeah, well it took him months to figure it out. Him and everybody else. Everyone always actin' like they can tell us apart. I'm tellin' you, Sam. If I wanted to, I could be you in a second. All nice and savin' people, and prayin'. And you could be me. It would be a hardship, you're not as funny as I am\u2014,\"\n\nSam left.\n\n\"Sam!\"\n\n\"Be right back,\" Sam hollered over his shoulder. He needed to find Adam before he reached the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 62", + "text": "\"Twins!\" Laura whispered to Sam. They were tucked in the shadow of the stairs on the second deck, leaning against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, watching it rain.\n\n\"Yes, Manny made me think of it,\" Sam said, a rueful smile on his lips. Really, all Laura wanted to do was kiss those lips. She didn't want to think about Baldwin or his murdering twin or Mary Stiles. \"When I left Adam, he was tryin' to figure out a way to lure the second one out.\"\n\nWould it be too forward if she asked him to hold her? They were planning to marry after all. At least that was what she thought they were planning to do. A man didn't talk about a future with a woman unless he was speaking of marriage. But they weren't married yet. She casted her mind back to Missy Charlotte's courting. Had there been any holding? Now that she thought on it, there hadn't been. Working in Salis House like she had done, she could barely remember if her own parents liked to be close. She had usually seen one without the other. She exhaled. Focused. \"Write a note.\"\n\n\"Hmm?\"\n\n\"Tell Adam to write a note to Baldwin and slip it under the door after the first one leaves. Make it from someone he wouldn't say no to.\" Sam frowned and then glanced at her out of the side of his eye. \"What? My brother did it once when he wanted access to a room. To this day, Miss Martha has no clue who wanted to meet her out in the barn just before supper.\"\n\nSam blinked a few times. \"You're a very... smart woman.\" Laura wasn't fooled. She was sure he wanted to use another word like sneaky or devious. But she would take smart.\n\n\"We all have our talents,\" Laura said, giving him a cheeky grin. And this time she couldn't resist. This time she turned towards him and placed both hands on his cheeks, framing his face. His hands drifted to her waist, making her smile.\n\n\"Hey, Laura... ,\" the sound of Gid's voice made her flinch. Laura looked away from Sam, saw her youngest brother standing there staring up at them like they were the most fascinating thing he had ever seen. She moved her hands from Sam's face to his shoulders. She noticed that while Sam's fingers on her waist twitched for a second, they didn't move. Didn't he know that Gid was going to tell everyone there was to tell that he had caught them together?\n\n\"Yes?\" She was surprised by how calm her voice sounded when she spoke.\n\n\"Nothin'.\" He still didn't move. Just blinked owlishly up at them.\n\nSam laughed, pressed a lingering kiss to Laura's cheek that made her close her eyes and forget about everything but him for a moment. \"I better go,\" he said and slipped away.\n\n\"Does Pa know\u2014,\"\n\n\"I'm gonna go tell him right now. You stay. Don't move.\"\n\n\"I have to move!\" Gid called to her back, but she ignored him.\n\nIf Papa was going to find out about her and Sam then it was going to come from her first. And that was exactly where she was headed when she saw Lucinda (Mary?) turn a corner on the hurricane deck. There was nothing wrong with Lucinda walking on the hurricane deck. Small as the boat was, most everyone found themselves on one floor or another regardless of where they bunked. No. It was the way she looked over her shoulder that had made Laura's hackles rise. Cause it reminded her of herself.\n\nWith a muffled groan, she gave up talking to Papa and followed Lucinda instead.\n\nWith another quick glance over her shoulder, Lucinda headed for the front of the ship. Laura followed quietly behind, ducking behind poles and hiding in shadows careful not to be spotted by the girl. If any of the other passengers caught sight of her, she would send a small smile and a wave. Let them think her strange so long as Lucinda didn't see her.\n\nShe trailed after Lucinda until Lucinda reached the railing of the ship. And that was when Laura noticed that she had something in her hand. A box? The girl took a step forward. And Laura stepped out of the darkness.\n\n\"Miss Lucinda?\"\n\nLucinda took a step back, so startled she clutched the box to her chest.\n\n\"Ma'am,\" Laura said quietly, pretending not to see the fright that lingered in the girl's face. \"Can I help you with somethin'?\" Laura asked and nodded towards the box.\n\n\"Oh, Laura,\" Lucinda said breathlessly as she looked down at the brown box in her hands. She spread a hand on the front. \"I was just getting rid of somethings...\"\n\n\"Ma'am, it's best not to toss things in the river. It can get caught in somethin', maybe even the wheel of the ship or wash up on shore.\" Lucinda's face blanched. \"I hear the Mississippi is mercurial. One day it's land, the next day it's river. If you're aimin' to get rid of it, I can toss it in the furnace in the boiler room. The fire is fierce in there.\"\n\nLucinda looked down at the box, her grip tight on it. Laura watched as the girl swallowed, but more than that, Laura saw what she had missed by not paying any attention. Lucinda was no girl. She was old. Not elderly, but not the girl Laura had initially thought her to be. She had to at least be in her thirties. Laura could see evidence of the pearl powder on the woman's face, the subtle eye paint, and the beeswax on the woman's lips. She had never cared to look so closely, but now Lucinda's age glared out at her. Whether the woman was Mary Stiles or not, she was hiding something.\n\nSlowly, so slowly, she handed the box to Laura. \"Yes. Burn it. That's a good idea. I'll come too and watch it.\"\n\nThink of something, think of something, Laura told herself. Careful to keep her gaze guileless and a little stupid, Laura said, \"Ma'am, it would be best if you didn't go down to the boiler room. It's not a place for a lady. There are lots of men around.\"\n\nLucinda huffed, her lower lip protruding in a pout. Then her face lightened. \"I'll watch you then.\"\n\n\"That sounds right fine,\" Laura said, her grip on the box tightening. She would just have to set it someplace in the boiler room until Lucinda was gone. Laura started for the stairs, feeling Lucinda's gaze right in the center of her back. She went down the flight and then glanced up. Lucinda was at the railing of the hurricane deck, still watching. Laura turned the corner and went to the boiler room. She felt the heat before she saw it.\n\nOne of the men who worked in the boiler room, a dark-skinned man, stepped out, saw her, and then called back to the room. \"It's one of yours, Amos!\"\n\nLaura sent the man a tight smile of thanks before dipping into the overheated room. She found a spot in the way back, careful not to get in anyone's way.\n\n\"Laura,\" Papa said, sending her a quick look just before shoveling coal into the large furnace. He set his shovel along the side and took several steps back, meeting her. \"Let's step out.\"\n\n\"I can't. I told one of the ladies I would burn this in the furnace for her,\" Laura said, even as she gripped the box tightly to her chest. \"But I'm not goin' to.\"\n\nPapa gave her a look. \"This have anythin' to do with that stuff you and Sam...\" Laura gave a small nod. \"Speakin' of Sam...\" Laura closed her eyes for a second. Gid had beat her down. \"He came and talked to me this mornin' bout the two of you,\" Papa said, averting his gaze.\n\nSweat began to form at the top of her forehead and started gathering under her arms. Laura wasn't entirely sure it was cause of where she was standing. \"He did?\"\n\n\"Said somethin' bout marryin' up with you one day.\" Papa's voice was gruff, he stared down at his hands.\n\n\"Yes.\" Laura bit the bottom of her lip. \"But I don't see us leavin' ya'll.\" She hadn't asked Sam. They hadn't quite talked that much about their future. But family was important to Sam. She didn't see him leaving her family behind either. \"You'll still have me.\"\n\nPapa huffed, placed his hands on his waist. \"He's a good man. I like Sam. I like Sam for you and if you're right, maybe there's still time for you and me to get on with each other.\"\n\nIt was Laura's turn to look away. She swallowed, her throat dry as dirt, \"I'd like that.\"\n\n\"You best get on out of here, now.\"\n\n\"Here,\" Laura said, handing him the box and taking the papers out. \"Toss this in the fire.\" It was one of Prince's rules. Never tell a complete lie to a white man or woman. At least part of it had to be true. \"Is there some place I can leave the rest?\" she asked as she rolled the papers up. She looked around for some string, found a strand of hemp that was hanging off a bag of partially opened coal, broke it off, and wrapped it tight around the bundle.\n\n\"Give it here.\"\n\nLaura handed the wrapped papers to Papa and watched as he tossed the empty box into the furnace. She stepped out of the hot room and glanced up. Sure enough Lucinda was still there. She spread her hands, to show that they were empty and Lucinda smiled.\n\nAn hour later she went back for the papers. With a quick nod at Papa, and after making sure he and all the other men were facing the boiler, she slipped the papers into a small garter she had attached to her upper calf. After fixing her skirts, she left the room, went up both flights of steps, and when she saw the laundry room was empty, she pulled out the papers and read them. Twice. If Prince were here, he would make copies. But there wasn't time for that. They were arriving in Tennessee soon and then the next stop was Arkansas. Adam needed to see the papers now. She rolled up the papers and kneeled on the floor to return the papers to her garter. Except she went flying instead, the papers slinging out across the room. The boat made a horrible, groaning noise beneath her as she scrambled forward to grab the papers. Were they sinking? Were they stuck?\n\nShe heard men's voices, yelling, fussing. She slipped the papers into her garter and left the laundry room.\n\nEmma ran towards her, coming up the stairs from the hurricane deck. \"We've run aground.\"\n\nLaura moved passed the girl and towards the railing. Men, like ants, scrambled below with poles in hand. Captain Leahy and several of the sailors were calling out orders and scrambling. Now was not the time to go to Sam. She would just have to go to Adam Ward herself.\n\n\"Man overboard!\"\n\nLaura ignored the chaos of the ship and headed towards Adam's room.\n\n\"I am not paying for another ship to tow us out. Get down there, now!\"\n\nFeeling like she was walking almost sideways, Laura made her way to the door. It was only when she got there that she realized that Adam too might be down there helping.\n\n\"Pump the bilge!\"\n\nShe knocked on Adam's door. There was no answer and his door was locked. Using her picks, she unlocked the door and entered. Reaching under her gown, she grabbed the papers and set them on his desk. She picked up a paperweight, set it on top. Her work was done here. It was up to Adam now." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 63", + "text": "Getting the steamer out of the sandbar or whatever it was, was more entertaining than it ought to have been. With every sailor, roustabout, and hired man on the boat helping, it didn't take too long to get them back into the water again.\n\n\"That's the Mississippi for you,\" Finn declared loudly. Several men agreed with him. \"Ain't a thing predictable about the ole girl.\"\n\nSam was just glad to hear the paddlewheel going again. He was not too keen on running aground in Tennessee.\n\n\"Sam!\"\n\nSam turned around to see Adam walking towards him, shaking some papers in his hand. \"Did you get these?\"\n\n\"Get what?\"\n\n\"These papers.\" Adam looked around, noticed he was drawing a crowd and pulled Sam over to the railing. \"I went to my room and found these on my desk. They're James Alexander Sherringhouse's papers. From his safe. The one that Mary Stiles and Henry Baldwin broke into. And if the papers are here on this boat than that means one or both of them are here on the boat.\"\n\n\"I thought we knew that already.\"\n\n\"Yes, but this is proof!\" Adam said excitedly. \"I knew it! They wouldn't listen to me, Sam. But I knew it. How did you get them?\"\n\n\"I didn't.\" It must have been Laura, Sam thought. That girl was something.\n\n\"But...\"\n\n\"Does it matter how they got there?\"\n\n\"Sort of,\" Adam said, sending him a look of expectation. When Sam said nothing, Adam sighed. \"Alright. Don't tell me. But I think you know how they got there. I also tweaked the plan a bit. I'm going to send a note to both Baldwin and Lucinda. See what happens when they meet each other on the ship.\"\n\n\"Durin' supper time?\"\n\n\"Yes. I want you to keep an eye on the Baldwin at the supper table. I'll follow the one who meets Lucinda. If for whatever reason, the Baldwin who goes to supper gets up and leaves, create a disturbance of some kind. Don't let him come to the lower deck. Understand?\"\n\nSam nodded slowly. Make a disturbance. He certainly understood, though he was still unsure of what that would actually look like.\n\n\"What if I'm wrong? What if it's not two of them?\"\n\nAdam shrugged. \"Then we'll still get Mary Stiles. That's how I'll address the note, to Mary. And don't forget, I saw Baldwin murder Vance whose body was recovered by the way.\"\n\n\"Oh.\"\n\n\"Yeah. Sent a telegram right after. Like you I don't have until New Orleans to wrap this thing up. I've got Pinkertons waiting for me in Tennessee.\"\n\nIt was the way he said it, that made Sam ask, \"In trouble?\"\n\n\"Not as much if I deliver the murderers.\" Adam slapped his arm. \"See you at supper.\"\n\nSam spent all day thinking about the kind of distraction he could create that wouldn't set other people into panic, cause him to be thrown off the ship or worse, and force Baldwin to stop what he was doing enough to care.\n\nIn the end, he finally resorted to talking to Gid and Sol. He didn't want to get Manny involved. And he figured the boys would have something safe to run with. Besides, the both of them had been working in service the entire time they had been on the steamer. He found them sitting on the hurricane deck polishing shoes. Crouching down he presented his problem to them.\n\n\"Pour somethin' on him,\" Gid said confidently as he wiped at a shoe. \"Then he'll have to go change.\"\n\n\"Oh, that is good,\" Sam said, trying to think of a way to pour something on a person whilst making it look like an accident.\n\n\"But what somethin' are you goin' to pour?\" Sol asked. His voice was light, quiet. He hadn't spoken much since Will's death and Birdie's taking. There was a new air of sadness about him that Sam just didn't like.\n\n\"Water's no good,\" Gid said, giving him a pointed look. \"Maybe... spirits?\"\n\n\"You could get Mr. Ward to get you some,\" Sol said softly, not looking up from the shoe he was working on.\n\n\"I knew I was right to talk to ya'll.\"\n\n\"I told Sol you were kissin' my sister.\" Gid said the words almost as though they were the lyrics to a song.\n\nSam let out a huff of laughter. \"Yes. Figure I'll marry her someday.\"\n\nSol stared at him for a long minute. \"We just got her back.\"\n\n\"You're lookin' at this the wrong way,\" Sam said, pushing Sol's shoulder with one finger. \"You're not losin' her. You're gainin' another brother. Two in fact.\"\n\n\"Oh, goody,\" Gid said with a roll of his eyes. Sol snorted, but smiled.\n\n\"You could ask the man for help with somethin',\" Sol said slowly. \"If he's nice, he'll help. If he's mean, he'll fuss. Either way, he'll be distracted.\"\n\n\"Good point.\"\n\nSam stayed with the boys until the evening whistle blew. Then he went to the Texas deck. He had told Finn that Adam had asked him to do him a favor and then run off before Finn could ask what the favor was exactly.\n\nOn the Texas deck, just a few feet away from the door to the dining hall, Sam worked on untangling rope. Using the brightness of the night sky, his fingers slowly made their way down the rope. Outside the door he could hear laughter and conversation. He could smell the roasted pork and vegetables from his spot and he felt his stomach cramp. He had eaten. But after near unto two weeks eatin' bread and meat, his body wanted something different. He found himself wondering if Laura was in there serving or in the laundry room working.\n\nHe had just decided that maybe he would risk it and go find Laura when the door to the dining hall opened revealing two men: the old man that Baldwin was always talking to and Baldwin himself.\n\nSam exhaled sharply. He had planned on slowing down one person. Not two.\n\n\"I'm sorry, Mr. Cronwall. I couldn't hear you in there.\"\n\n\"I think you heard me just fine, young man. I. Am. Not. Interested.\"\n\n\"Mr. Cronwall\u2014,\"\n\n\"I've heard you're a huckster!\"\n\n\"A... Mr. Cronwall, who would say...\"\n\n\"Miss Stillwood, said you are not to be trusted. She said\u2014,\"\n\n\"Miss Stillwood!\"\n\nSam was fairly certain he wasn't the only person who heard the betrayal in Baldwin's voice. Well, at least with this conversation going, Sam wouldn't have to worry about keeping the man from going down to the hurricane deck.\n\n\"Yes. Lucinda Stillwood said that you swindled her father out of all his money.\"\n\n\"And who is her father?\" Baldwin asked, bitterness in his voice.\n\n\"It doesn't matter. I had you investigated after that! That's right. I sent a telegram when we were in Missouri last and you are not linked to any kind of railroad.\"\n\n\"Mr. Cronwall\u2014,\"\n\n\"Please refrain from saying my name ever again!\"\n\nSam, no longer messing with the rope in his hand, watched as Mr. Cronwall reentered the dining hall. Baldwin stomped past Sam, not even noticing him. Since Baldwin was headed to his room and not to the hurricane deck, Sam neither said nor did a thing. Except follow. He watched Baldwin plod to his room, open the door, and slam it shut behind him.\n\nWell. Sam hoped Adam was getting something accomplished down below. He figured now was as good a time as any to go find Laura.\n\nSam made it almost to the laundry room when he heard pounding footsteps coming up from the hurricane deck. And then voices.\n\n\"You can't get away Baldwin.\" Adam. \"There's nowhere to run on a boat this size.\" So, he had been right. There were two of them.\n\n\"You're making a mistake,\" a woman's shrill voice called out. \"Release me right now or I'll tell the Captain!\"\n\n\"Please do, Miss Stiles.\"\n\nSam found a shadow against a wall and did his best to blend in. In minutes, the door to the dining room opened, diners pouring out to see what all the yelling was about.\n\n\"Stop that man,\" Adam called out. \"Baldwin. He's a murderer and a thief!\"\n\nSam heard gasps, saw people talking. None of them seemed inclined to stop the second Baldwin. Baldwin pushed past them until he ran into one of the hired guns Captain Leahy used to protect his goods. \"I've got him.\"\n\n\"What gives you the authority\u2014,\"\n\nSam tuned out the passenger's voices as Baldwin began to fight the hired gunman. He could see that at the bottom of the stairs, Mary Stiles or Lucinda Stillwood was being detained by one of the sailors down there.\n\n\"Lucinda Stillwood! What in heaven's name is going on?\" A woman called out.\n\n\"Aunt Crissy! It's all a horrible mistake!\"\n\nThe loud noises of more people yelling and fussing filled the air.\n\n\"Now, just what is going on!\" Captain Leahy joined the fray.\n\nSam felt like now was as good a time as any to go back down to the lower deck. He would just see Laura tomorrow. Only thing was, it didn't feel quite right. If his brother had been in trouble... Sam searched the crowd. It took a minute, but Sam knew what direction to look in. Baldwin, the one running from Adam, was now detained, on the ground and being trussed up like a pig. And just behind him was another Baldwin. But this one had a gun.\n\n\"Get down!\" Sam called. \"He's got a weapon!\"\n\nIt was just enough warning that Adam dodged the bullet aimed for him. More fighting, more tussling ensued and Sam slipped down the stairs." + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 64", + "text": "\"Sam.\" Sam could hear the smile in Adam's voice as he approached him. Sam was once again cleaning up the animal pens. He set his broom against the wall and walked to meet Adam against the nearest railing. He had only spoken to him briefly that morning. They would be arriving in Tennessee that day. Baldwin and Baldwin and Mary Stiles would be getting off... and so would Adam. \"I wanted to thank you. For yesterday.\"\n\n\"You're welcome,\" Sam said simply. He gave Adam a small nod.\n\n\"What was that, Sam? Was that not a shrug?\" Sam allowed himself to smile a little. \"A smile?\" Adam laughed. And then his face grew serious. \"Listen. Sam. I was thinking. If you tell me who your master is, I could buy you.\" Sam blinked. Looked away. \"Not like that, Sam.\" Adam said quickly. \"I would buy you and then set you free.\"\n\nSam pounded his fist lightly against the rail. \"Thank you. But no.\"\n\n\"Sam. Listen. We work well together. No one even suspected I had a partner. It was perfect. I mean, you have access to stuff and people I never would. Sam. I would pay you.\"\n\nSam bit his lip. Sighed. \"I appreciate the thought.\"\n\nAdam exhaled. \"I could set you free. Your future could be different, Sam.\"\n\n\"My future is not in your hands, Mr. Adam. But, thank you.\"\n\nAdam was silent as he placed his hands on his waist. \"What's keeping you from taking me up on the offer? Your brother? I could find a place for him too.\" Sam grunted. Hadn't he told the man no already? \"It can't be the money. I haven't told you how much yet. Is it the adventure? Is that why you're going out west? Indians are scary people, Sam. Less it's a woman and\u2014,\"\n\nSam had no clue what Adam saw in his face that led him to know there was a woman. Not that Laura was the sole reason he wouldn't take Adam's offer. Fact of the matter was he had already chosen the course of his life. And it wasn't being a detective with Adam Ward. He plain hated everything about all that business.\n\n\"There is a woman.\"\n\n\"Mr. Ward\u2014,\"\n\n\"Mr. Adam is fine. Tell me about this woman. Is she on the steamer?\"\n\n\"Mr. Adam\u2014,\"\n\n\"Are you married, Sam? Why did I never think to ask that?\"\n\n\"Not married.\"\n\n\"Are you looking to be?\"\n\n\"Mr. Adam\u2014,\"\n\n\"When are you planning on getting married? You should do it now with Captain Leahy. You go out there in Indian Territory, assuming she's going with you, and there won't be a preacher for miles. If you get married now, least it'll be legal.\"\n\nSam's lips parted to answer and then he closed them. \"Legal?\"\n\n\"Yes. A captain of a ship can marry a couple. It's almost more legal than a preacher. If you won't go with me, if you won't let me purchase your freedom, then let that be my gift to you Sam. I'll ask Captain Leahy to marry you, papers and everything. But not going to lie, Sam. We'll be in Tennessee before you know it. Better get the girl to agree and to do it quickly.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 65", + "text": "\"Marry you? Now?\" Laura's eyes were wide with disbelief, her arms folded over her chest. Sam had raced to the laundry room to find her. When he saw her working with the other girls, he had asked her to step out the room with him for a second.\n\n\"It'll be legal, Laura. On paper and everythin'. Like a real marriage. I know we haven't known each other that long, but we know the important things.\"\n\n\"We do know the important things,\" she said, her lips twisting to the side. \"Like I love you. And you love me.\"\n\n\"And we'll take care of each other,\" Sam said, reaching for her hand. She placed it slowly in his. \"I don't want a slave marriage, Laura. Not when there's a chance for the real thing.\"\n\nShe pressed her lips together for a second, thinking. Then she nodded slowly, meeting his gaze. \"There's no one else for me but you Sam.\"\n\nSam felt water gather in his eyes though he knew well enough not to let them fall. Taking both of her hands in his, sliding his fingers between hers he asked,\"Will you be my friend, my partner, and my wife, Laura Altan?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\nThe next person Sam talked to was Amos.\n\n\"What now?\" They were just outside the boiler room, standing against the nearest rail.\n\n\"He can make it legal. The captain.\"\n\nAmos swallowed hard, his Adam's apple dipping into his throat. He nodded. \"I understand. I... just wait here.\" Amos went into the boiler room for a second, came back out. He held out his hand and Sam opened his. A gold band dropped into it. \"Made it for my Phoebe. But she's not here now. She would want Laura to have it.\"\n\n\"I'll take care of her, I promise you that. And we don't aim to be leavin'. Family is important to both of us.\"\n\nAmos nodded, not meeting his gaze. \"Couldn't ask for a better man to become my son.\"\n\nSam cleared his throat, exhaling as he looked out on the river. \"Couldn't ask for a better man to be my father.\"\n\nSam talked to Manny last.\n\n\"Marriage? Now? I thought for sure I had a few months.\" They were tucked behind several large cargo in an effort to find some privacy.\n\n\"Manny.\"\n\n\"There's a part of me that hates the thought of you gettin' married.\"\n\n\"Manny\u2014,\"\n\n\"No,\" Manny said, holding up a hand. \"Let me finish. There's a bigger part of me that likes the thought of us expanding. And Laura would make a good sister. I realize that. And I want you to be happy.\" The last part was said quietly.\n\n\"I am happy. She makes me happy.\"\n\n\"Then that's all that matters, big brother.\" They shared a look, and then a grin.\n\n\"Thanks, Manny.\"\n\n\"Tell Laura I fully expect new clothes from here on out.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 66", + "text": "They married in the pilot house. Sam had never been in the room before. It was the highest spot on the steamer and overlooked everything. It was also tiny. The only people in the room were Sam, Laura, the captain, his firstmate, and Adam Ward.\n\n\"Ha. Lolly,\" Adam muttered when he first caught sight of Laura.\n\nSam sent her a curious look. Laura sent him a smile and a shrug. They said their vows quietly, stoically, repeating after Captain Leahy. The only break in Laura's composure was when Sam slipped the ring Amos had made onto her finger. They forewent the kiss, merely squeezing each other's hands at the end. They would save their affection for when they were alone.\n\nBut the best part, other than being announced Mr. and Mrs. Day was when they both signed their names on the marriage certificate to the surprise of everyone else in the room. Sam's attempt was rather clumsy but it wasn't an X and you could read it and that was all that mattered.\n\nAfter the impromptu wedding, with a copy of the wedding certificate still inky and wet in his hand, Sam pulled his wife under the stairs of the Texas deck and kissed her thoroughly. They didn't stay there long. The whistle blew loud below them announcing the entrance to the next port.\n\n\"We should get back to work,\" Laura said, breathing heavy, her face buried in his chest.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said, hugging her tightly back. He kissed the top of her head. \"Let's just watch the boat come in for a few minutes. And then we'll get back to it.\"\n\nHolding his wife's hand, Sam guided her to the railing where they could see people on the ground waving at the passengers on the deck.\n\n\"Sam?\" It was Adam. Sam half-turned as Adam came alongside him and Laura. Laura slid her arm around Sam's waist and he wrapped his around her shoulders. His wife's shoulders. He couldn't hardly believe it.\n\n\"I thought you said your name was Rivers,\" Adam said, grinning.\n\n\"At that time, I thought it was,\" Sam said dryly.\n\n\"And you're Laura,\" Adam said, eyeing Laura shrewdly. The look he sent Sam told him that he knew. He knew not only that Laura was one of the runaways listed on the wanted ads in his keeping but that she had helped him with Baldwin and Mary Stiles. \"Well, it is a pleasure to meet you officially Mrs. Day and I wish you all the best.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Ward. Samuel and I wish you the best as well,\" she said, her voice as succinct and graceful as any other educated woman's. Sam fairly beamed on the inside when he saw how taken aback Adam was at her response.\n\n\"I've got one last thing for you, Sam.\"\n\n\"You've done enough, Mr. Adam,\" Sam said, meeting his gaze. \"More than enough.\"\n\nAdam Ward stared at him. And then he unbuckled his gun belt. \"You saved my life when it would have been far easier to let me lose it. Don't look at it as a gift... think of it as an apology for having to deal with my headache.\" Sam took the gun belt from him slowly. \"You've already got the gun. Keep it.\" He stuck out his hand. \"Have a good life, Samuel Day.\"\n\nSam hesitated for a few minutes. Gradually, he took his hand off of Laura's shoulders and grabbed Adam's hand. Shook it once. \"Have a good life, Adam Ward.\"" + }, + { + "title": "Chapter 67", + "text": "Epilogue\n\nsix months later\n\nThey arrived at the mercantile together. Her and Sam, each on their own horse. The town was small and mostly white. They attracted a few stares, but no one said anything. It was the one thing she loved about living out west. No one ever said anything. Papa predicted that that might change but for now life was fairly easy going.\n\n\"You sure about this?\" Her husband asked as he got down from his horse. He seemed a natural rider to her. She had learned to ride. Some. But she felt like everyone else did it much better. Arrow Creek, Oklahoma was an interesting place. Laura was still learning to love it. So much of western living was outside of her comfort zone. She had not realized just how much she was used to town living and cobbled streets until they arrived in a town that was more mud than road and had more trees than houses.\n\nBut she could not complain. Every day with her husband, Papa, and her brothers was a blessing.\n\nSam raised his hands to her, helping her down from the horse. When she placed her feet on the ground, she smoothed down the blue and white striped gown she had just finished sewing the night before and touched the back of her matching bonnet, making sure it was in place. Then she looked up into Sam's laughing eyes. \"You look beautiful, Laura.\"\n\n\"Not as beautiful as you,\" she said, giving him a wink.\n\nSam laughed, but it was true. He was a beautiful man. He always had been and now that she was dressing him, you couldn't miss it. She had bought excellent black fabric for his pants and vest. He wore a white shirt underneath that finally and truly fit him. He also had on Adam Ward's gunbelt slung low on his hips. No one out here had ever said a thing to him about it.\n\nThey did not have abundance exactly. Sam and Manny had their mercantile up and running and Papa had his smithy going. Their only customers were the handful of Negroes who had lived there in Arrow Creek before they arrived and the few Negroes and Indians that passed in and out of town. But it was enough that they could now start affording extra things. She and Sam lived in a small shanty next door to Papa, the boys and Manny. But Laura did all the cooking, the cleaning, the washing, and the sewing for everyone. She joked often that she couldn't wait for one of them to get married.\n\n\"You've got the letter?\" Sam and Manny didn't run a postal service through their store just yet though they planned to in the future. For now, any and all letters had to be brought to the next town over.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"You think he'll come?\"\n\n\"No. But, I have to try.\"\n\nLaura stared at the letter addressed to her former master, Richard Feldan. Prince would see it. And he would know. She doubted he would come. But she had to try." + } + ] + } +] \ No newline at end of file